skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One sells a collaborative business contact manager, a project tracker, and a personal information manager based on a popular web framework they created. They have a small number of employees, strong revenues, no funding, and apparently consistent operating profits. Their customer base is early-adopter small/medium business.

The other operates an extraordinarily popular social micro-publishing platform featured heavily in the mainstream media, which by capturing the attention of tens of millions of people has demonstrated enough potential long-term value to attract tens of millions of dollars of venture funding. It is staffed accordingly, and is pre-revenue.

One might succeed with a high-8-figures acquisition, or by operating for 10 more years and distributing 6-7 figure bonuses to key employees. The other might succeed with an 8-9 figure acquisition, or an IPO. Either strategy will make the company's key employees and their offspring financially secure.

Both have better-than-average chances at long-term success. Neither is a sure thing. One is more conservative than the other. The other has a higher upside.

Or, I'm sorry, were we talking about blogging personalities?
Perhaps if you need traits, you're doing it wrong. Does PHP really need all the added complexity of this? Does it really help solve the problem or did you just add a new maintenance nightmare?
!

My condolences.
Just a general comment; I see a lot of people really pissed that this latest financial crisis didn't cause a complete worldwide system meltdown and restructuring. They almost seem mad that things are starting to return to normal for a lot of Americans and no real mega-change happened.

I agree that we are far from 'out of the woods' and peoples attitudes about money need to change but aren't incremental, evolving changes better than a complete meltdown?
The level of attention whoreness? On second thought, probably not.
It's only a decision in the sense that each day I "decide" not to go to medical school, and so sacrifice some future earning potential. Inaction may have consequences, but that doesn't make it a decision. And by inaction I mean maintaining the status quo not literally doing nothing.

Inaction is always our default position: innocent until proven guilty. Your argument is tantamount to "consider the cost (amortized over the probability that he actually did it -- which we can't actually know) of letting this murderer go free!"
Zero to one? Brick isn't a terribly good structural material. It's basically inferior to concrete. People like bricks because they look nice.
Sort of like the folks who have been predicting the demise of Microsoft for years but that just isn't happening. (hint: it's called leverage and MS/USA have shit tons of it)
Great run down, but this part is inaccurate:

>They have a small number of employees, strong revenues, no funding, and apparently consistent operating profits.

Funding: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
I think it's the first time that I want to install vim to try it. As a Windows user, I always found NotePad++ and other text editor an easier choice but I can now see some powerfull utilities to vim now. Very clear article.
Don't get me wrong: I would absolutely prefer MSFT write a proper API to handle the necessary requests, rather than leave it to vendors to write drivers.

But in reality no API will cover every corner case. And if the choice is between vendors writing drivers to cover those situations, or Microsoft leaving a 'hole' in the API which allows arbitrary instructions to be passed through, I'll take vendor drivers every time.
Worth pointing out that fly ash is already widely used in the concrete industry for the same reasons - it's more environmentally friendly. Using it actually gives a building extra LEED points.

Fly ash can replace up to 50% of the cement needed in concrete - saying that 'there's no proof it will last' seems fairly ridiculous.
My team has recently started with a Friday Fun Day sort of thing - it's really not as bad as the article proclaims. Sure, it'd be better to have the day off, but that ain't gonna happen.

We just usually sit around, drink beer, snack, and watch movies on the expensive boardroom projector.

Generally speaking managers don't have the authority to let 10 people go home early - "Friday Fun Day" is a pretty good compromise.
Give me a break. Once you put ';' it cannot be consider as one line, otherwise, minified-jQuery is also a one line library.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.j...
question of degree not one of "action vs. non-action"

Not just of degree but of kind. Assuming anthropogenic global warming really _is_ a problem of nonzero severity, there's a vast array of actions that can be taken on a governmental level. These include:

carbon taxes

build more nuclear power plants

more funding for alternative energy research

cap and trade

giant mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight

more funding for clean coal research

kill half the population

ban electricity

build artificial trees for carbon sequestration

and so forth. They all have risks and rewards, costs and payoffs. We should not be entirely surprised that our elected leaders tend to prefer the ones (carbon taxes, cap and trade) which involve our elected leaders getting more money and more power.
But what if your competitor is behaving badly and doing well? As we learned from this mortgage crisis, people are all too happy to join in on the fun if it means they get rewards (McMansions) even if the path is wrong and leads to disaster eventually.
I feel silly for only recently discovering tabs in vim.

:tabnew file

Opens up a new tab,

:tabn

Goes to the next tab, and

:tabp

Goes to the previous tab. Works great in both gui and non-gui mode.
I first heard about this several years ago from a CDN; their proxy was automatically rewriting the links so the Web developer didn't have to do anything. I've never seen it used in the open source world.
Another cringe-worthy moment from CSI NY: http://www.videosift.com/video/CSINY-creates-VB-GUI-to-track...
Convert Ruby to JavaScript
You're right; even as I typed it, I was thinking "I mean to say virtually no funding", but forgot to correct it.
I believe there are benefits to "clean"(er) energy
sources that will lead them to dominate, regardless of
environmental views or policy.

Ha!

It's important that big decisions are made on the basis of cost-benefit comparisons that use reason and real data. First-world foreign policy is directed towards pushing all of the world towards carbon reduction. This includes nations who have very poor people where cost of energy differences at the margins affect your ability to keep your family warm and fed. Carbon reduction puts barriers in front of the people of all nations, and should be justified by real reasons and not thumb in the air judgements.
They aren't helpful if the dig into a new site disturbing the archeology to get at the 'treasure'. This was a ploughed field - it was about as disturbed as you can get.
Full Stack ETag Support using Rack::Cache, Sinatra, and CouchDB
Amazingly, this is the first I've heard of fx/tx/Fx. How ridiculously awesome.
Flagged as... well, exactly the sort of article you might expect from the headline.
No, please stop cherry-picking my statements. I made a sentence consisting of two parts. Leaving out a key part is dishonest.

What I said was:

> Eh, no. I don't trust him because he's written anti-climate change before and doesn't give any sources for his claim that the data is basically fraudulent.

He's clearly a sceptic and that's his right. But I'll give you several points to consider:

a) The author has written a book (several even) where he disagrees with the international consensus about climate change. I'd wager a bet that they aren't all about how the data is missing. So either he's out looking for ways to disprove the theories (which is good) and finding a lot or he's just searching for stuff to hit people with, instead of trying to do serious science. I'm inclined to believe the latter, since the former would mean that a few hundred climatologists from around the world are blatantly ignoring clear evidence and the latter would only mean someone with political motives (or being stupid, corrupt or something like it, or any combination of said things).

b) He has written extensively about how climate change isn't true, but is only now trying to review the data of people that have found climate change to be happening. That's odd.

c) Yes, it makes a difference if he has written anti-climate change before. If he had written pro-climate change before and is now coming to the conclusion that the data can't be checked, his claims are a lot easier to believe because political motives can be ruled out.

It's the same when a climate change sceptic would review the data and find that it supports the conclusions. That would mean that it convinced a sceptic. That's a higher bar to pass than convincing a tree-hugger.

d) The title of the mentioned book is "Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know". "They don't want you to know"? He's apparently implying that there's a conspiracy to make people believe climate change exists. That does not give me a whole lot of confidence in his intellect or intentions.

All that makes me distrust the author. Which is fine, I don't need to trust the author to believe facts he reports, as long as there are sources. But he didn't supply any.

So I'm left with an article written by somebody I cannot trust to be intellectually honest about the climate debate and that doesn't contain sources. The only conclusion I can come to is that I cannot trust the "facts" reported in it.
Why Your 'App Engine Sucks' Post Sucks
Interesting. I know python and ruby. Now I'm wondering if it's worth my time to learn perl.
Yep.
Look at your plans through prospective customer's eyes.
Before launching.
I agree and I find that the people who are architecture astronauts as he refers to them, are very vocal and active on forums, twitter, and blogging.

I don't want to get into the whole testing debate, but I think you can read the whole article and remove the one point on testing and it still holds.
Here's what I have so far:

o=onelinebot;u=$o:one.$o;t=twitter.com;h=http://;alias a=alias;a w=while\ read;a c="curl -u$u -d";c track=$o ${h}stream.$t/track.json>t&tail -f t|w t;do echo $t|grep -Eo '"screen_name":"[[:alnum:]]+"'|cut -d\" -f4|w s;do c '' $h$t/friendships/create/$s.json?follow=true;done;done

It's two tweets (280 chars, down from 417) and it's not quite functional... This one will track "onelinebot" instead of "one line." It's basically the same as the original post, but with lots of nasty substitutions.

I figured I'd share, because I really need to get back to some other work - if you can get it working, please share.
I don't want to "win" anything. I just want people to use the right word for the right thing.

The word crime has very different connotations for me than the words civil suit do, and it really disturbs me when people substitute one for the other. Let's reserve the word crime for acts like rape and murder, please.
Nooooo all of the secrets of our vim cult revealed in one easy-to-read document! Vim is hard, people! Trust me. You're not smart enough to use it.

:-P
The article proposes a process for openness and Web publication of congressional draft legislation that I'm pretty sure is already followed by the Minnesota Legislature on its website.

http://www.leg.state.mn.us/

There should be no technical difficulty in doing this at all, if a large-population state has already been doing it for years, so the only barrier to Congress being equally open is cultural. Note that Minnesota has, officially, three "major" political parties and currently has divided state government, with the governor from one major party and the two houses of the state legislature controlled by another. If those competing politicians can get along well enough to publish current information on draft bills, Congress should too.
Pretty good! I'm glad he gets half.
Ah yes, CSI. I want to know where they got the magic zoom tool that allows them to do an infinite zoom on the crappiest CCTV image and "enhance" the image to bring out details that didn't exist in the original.
Easy start for new vim user. Full vim's power available.
Sure, most people hear radioactive, and think of Chernobyl, cancer, and Godzilla. In reality, radiation is everywhere, and it's a question of levels and risk. I doubt the radiation in bricks would compare to the exposure to radon in the typical house.
Deciding against globally orchestrated emissions programs -- which will have very real costs in terms of economic growth, which fuels increases in living standards, especially in countries where it isn't so high -- isn't denying climate changes

I cannot help observing that skepticism of environmental problems correlates strongly with economic certitude. Those argue most passionately that we have insufficient data about the climate are so totally confident in the predictions of economic ruin that they don't even bother to explain their reasoning.

Why this spurious equation of energy efficiency with a halt to economic development? The goal of the green movement is to increase the ratio of productivity to waste, particularly external waste (ie that affecting the commons). Your argument implies that economic development in poor countries must follow the same path that of the west during the industrial revolution, and that fossil fuels are the only coin that buys future prosperity.

If I'm wrong, and we don't take the decision, then we're much better equipped, both technologically and financially, to handle the situation in 20 years than we are today.

I've been following (but not crusading for) environmental issues for 20 years, longer if I include youthful awareness - for example, my uncle used to be an agricultural inspector who'd tackle farmers dumping manure into rivers. We have greatly enhanced our technology over the last 20 years, so why can we not put that expertise to work now, instead of waiting for some future panacea?

As for being in better future financial shape, you assume an inevitable upward trend, a future in which we will all be richer and have more disposable income, so we can afford to kick the can down the road. Only a few short years ago the bull market was hailed as a great economic success, this time it was different, the mistakes of the past would never be repeated, etc. The fact is that we are just as likely to experience a recession or other financial bust in the future as we are experiencing now. When the market is going up people procrastinate on distant necessities in favor of short-term profit. When the market is down such investments are called too risky. To believe that some future market will be so awash in capital as to render environmental improvement a trivial overhead is to subscribe to a form of socioeconomic teleology, not so different from belief in a technological singularity which will obviate all current problems as we become beings of pure energy or suchlike.
I tend to agree, but I'll fully admit, I'm a PHP hacker and I've been hacking in it since around 1999 or so. I didn't see this as much of a hack (read parts of the paper associated with it) as much as a way to do some cooler things in 5.3.

I consider myself a pretty good PHP programmer, but you're right, most of them out there don't deserve the title "programmer". I'm so disgusted by 99% of the open source PHP crap out there.

That said, I do look forward to learning new languages and new ways to develop on the web (what I really love doing).
I think Moonlight's DRM code is closed but the rest is open.
Then you'll love this, too. It's from Red Dwarf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU
Kind of a neat site design; large clickable quadrants to move between sections, that resize. I've never seen anything quite like it.

However, as for the editor itself, I prefer a "raw" vim. :)
Once one founder is no longer present it's very hard to claim the 50% is still valid.

True. But as cmos responded, this is why you vest equity. Ultimately, as macabre as it is, death is just an instance of the general case of a founder no longer contributing to the business.
Sure, I've read Mythical Man-Month too. But you can't give customers a deadline and not deliver 9+ months afterwards.
Except for the fact that global temperature is falling, not rising - dependent on how (and where) you measure it.

That's part of the problem. We don't know enough about how this highly complex climate system works to measure it consistently. Given the variation between the hottest and coldest places on earth are somewhere around 100 degrees celsius I have real problems with the term global warming as a whole. It's a series of interconnected problems with interconnected knock-on effects.
Android ROM Modder gets Cease and Desist from Google
The original site this article references times out for me.
This article brings up an issue I often face when looking at articles from sites like this. How do I know the slant of a news site I don't often read? I don't have a problem with a little bias, (in fact, bias is nearly impossible to eliminate imho) but I'd like to know how to approach the article in the first place. It is easier with sites like npr, cnn, foxnews, but it takes a little bit of googling to find out about many others.

How do you guys do it?
gt and gT in command mode also do next tab and previous tab
Most interesting thing was two links away and unrelated:

http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/New_new
Apple company culture in one license plate...
mistake is in ascribing motive to the lost dataset

Indeed. When you get down to it, the core of many political skeptics' arguments is: evil liberal scientists can't get real jobs so they cooked up 'climate change' to get endless government funding from honest taxpayers like you and me.

Those political organs arguing most vociferously against action on climate change oppose any kind of public funding for science that isn't obviously defense-related.
This is how I've always handled it as well. There really is no better approach. To keep the legal stuff simple and the costs of acquiring the equity low, I hand out the equity when the founder joins (usually you can do this at a penny a share or whatever your corp allows that early in the game) and the shares have "reverse vesting" stipulations attached.
Bash socket programming with /dev/tcp
"one line" -- the most meaningless software metric to date.
The author focuses too heavily on a useless anti-PDF rant. Why is it a PDF? Because it's better than just sending us the Word file the PDF came from.

The PDF file also meets the exact requirements the author is complaining about: "You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress." I'm reading the document on my laptop and I can select and copy text from it. How much more "unrestricted digital access" can we get?

Sure, the PDF in question doesn't have in-document links to jump to parts. But it has delineated pages. Never underestimate how un-tech-savvy congresspeople currently are. They probably want one authoritative version of their document. For modifications, they probably say "the third paragraph on page 20" for ease of reference [1].

The author ideally wants every thing generated by a government to be handed over on a silken pillow in perfect Legislative DocBook markup with all meta data painstakingly entered and kept up to date. While demanding all information be free is a laudable goal, it would be better to spend effort implementing and backing such plans than screaming at people who don't have a clear path to fix their current shortcomings [2].

[1]: They could use section headings and then reference from there, but that incurs another lookup of "Go to the table of contents, find the page number, go to the page, find the reference" instead of "Turn to page, see reference."

[2]: If a clear path to fixing their current shortcomings does exist, please work with them instead of working at them.
It's probably best to read the comments on the post (which is a few years old), which sum it up: the /dev/tcp device may not be accessible, it probably shouldn't be enabled, and better mechanisms exist.
I also took the article to be about not 'over engineering' things.

The phrase is 'as simply as possible, but no simpler'.

If you have a simple design and a simple implementation, it will be easy to test by running it; and it will also be easy to reason about (and reasoning about your code is also a type of testing).

So the point about unit testing is not that it is a bad thing, or that you should never unit test anything...merely that it is (or ideally should be) non-critical.

If it is critical to your product that you unit test every little detail, you have probably taken a misstep at some point on the complexity scale.

You need unit tests when the code itself is no longer a good indicator of what it is attempting to do. At that point, the code becomes meaningless and the tests begin to stand in for the meaning that the code was supposed to convey. (Essentially, you are recreating Prolog along side your Java/C/whatever, without the benefits of declarative programming and only having to write the code once).

This would indicate that you are:
At the wrong level of abstraction (you didn't build enough foundation for your problem).
or
Solving the problem in the wrong way.
or
Dealing with a very complex problem that you haven't adequately broken down into sub-problems. (In this case, the unit tests end up standing in for sub-problems).

These are all related to not having enough state in your mind to deal with the intricacies of a problem.

Many times unit-tests do help with the development end of things, but doing them all of the time seems unreasonable.

I think the COM and Multi-Threading combination was mentioned as an example of wrong way or wrong level of abstraction. Pneumatic-power-nailers are nice, but many times all I need is a framing-hammer. (And in programming, sometimes you will go through with the pneumatic nailer on the first try, then realize that the framing hammer would have yielded a better solution, and re-do it with the framing hammer).
Songkick integrates Twitter to go realtime and preserve your gig tweets
I remember, but I'm not gonna balk at a long form Posner post. In philosophy of law I was made to read Posner's 'Problems of Jurisprudence'; easily the most challenging read of my admittedly convenient liberal arts education. Rewarding too. But then, if Posner thinks Keynes is a challenge to read...I appreciate his summary.
Almost everything in movies is cringe-worthy in its inaccuracy when you stop to study it.

Sex, violence, cars, money -- Hollywood plays fast and loose with anything that isn't sufficiently cool, exciting, convenient or desirable.
No offense but the first thing I thought was: what a terrible site design; large clickable quadrants to move between sections, that resize. I've never seen anything quite like it. :)
Your first point is semantic. I grant it, but I don't see that it changes anything. You still oppose carbon regulation, which is the issue at hand.

Your second is just a bizarre analogy. Yes, that's exactly what my argument is saying. But analogizing a decision of real world regulation (where we should be able to make a rational decision) to criminal justice (where we get tied up with the moral issues of unjust punishment, or "soft on crime" tolerance) is just weird. Are you trying to argue that "unjustly" regulating carbon is a violation of someone's basic human rights? Again, weird.