skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. Yet is it wise to go talking about something stupid? I'm not sure. Big corps already know this. The Valley might be learning. In the big scheme of things this might not be a huge deal, but as this story is spinned, it might give the image that Zynga's revenue is 100% scam, when in fact it might be 10% of 20% scammy.

I have something stupid I did in my past. I don't talk about it for the same fear as having to take heat like this dude is taking. I've actually written about it a couple times only to delete the post minutes later.

Seeing this play out, I feel I made the right decision. Otherwise, you never know when a competitor of yours will find that lil post and try and spin a huge negative story out of something that happened years ago in my teens and is hardly relavant. This might be a good lesson for startup CEOs on controlling their mouths even at the risk of coming across as a suit.

Btw, another great example is to read up the MySpace story in the book Hacking MySpace. Their parent company was deep into spyware business and pretty much that is what helped pay the bills. It also almost killed the myspace acquisition.
On another note, one thing I think people should take away from this slide presentation is how to communicate your ideas so simply.

I find myself at a struggle many times to explain ideas or projects I am working on without going into detail or over-explaining/selling it.

I always try to remember "how would you explain this to a 5 year old or 5th grader" and try to come up with simple, almost child-like, drawings or visuals like in this slide.
I've found that the concept of anonymous functions is the biggest hurdle to get over -- closures seem to follow as a natural extension of that.

I explained this to someone recently in the context of event handlers in ActionScript/JavaScript, starting with the idea that when you do:

something.onclick = function(){...};

you're passing a function around just like it was any other value.

Then I moved to an artificial example of a 'magic function-making machine':

function giveMeAnAdder(baseNumber) {
return function (i) {
return baseNumber + i;
};
}

with a couple of examples of storing and using the functions that giveMeAnAdder returns.

Then I pointed out that, normally, local variables in a function disappear when the function returns, so how does my adder 'remember' what baseNumber is? And the answer is that the anonymous function is actually a bundle of a function body and the local context, and we call this a closure.
Stereoviews: 100 year old photography hacks
That's the same point I tried to make.
I claimed no superiority over Dustin Curtis in action or demeanor. And I'll stand behind that article I wrote about Ford. It's ludicrous for a company to sue their own fan base. And the second it was found out that was not the case, I started working with both Ford and Scott Monty to get their side of the story out within minutes. (Read the linked article for context.)
I usually go with a simple counter-generator as a first example:

function counterMaker(next) {
var value = next;
return function() { value++; return value }
}

var myCounter = counterMaker(42);
alert(myCounter());
alert(myCounter());
alert(myCounter());

I'm not sure it is necessary to explain what they are/how they work right at the start. An example like this is pretty clear that something "weird" is going on and if "Joe" is interested at all, questions should probably come up which can then be answered with more details. I think the "what to use them for" stuff is going to depend quite heavily on the environment, language, libraries, and product you're working on.

I usually find it's better to introduce a language idea to someone and let them try to find out where they might put it on their own - they may surprise you. If you're doing code reviews, you could use that as an opportunity to point out how something like a closure (or any other construct) might have improved a situation, or, at least, how it may have changed it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
Except the diagrams I saw didn't look like the other in-game circuits I saw. So, I'm still unsure if those are diagrams or in-game implementations. If you know, please tell me.
Open And Social Internet – What Does It Really Mean
Please shorten the title to

Excuse Me, But Where Did Google's Organic Search Results Go?
I am. I was actually assuming that Dustin would read that when I wrote it. (He's posted here before in response to linked articles.) It's OK if he knows I think his writing style makes him look like an ass. I suspect he won't care or more likely already knows it, he's not dumb. Most people that have been publishing anything online that's even remotely well read gets a thick skin or gives up fast.
I think some links are intended for the conversation they start here rather than the actual content itself, e.g. people have mentioned the OP has an app in the bundle that seems useful, MacHeist as a "marketing hack," etc. It might not be the best submission ever but I think it still falls within the boundaries of Hacker News.
Two things about these figures. The first is that you shouldn't believe any historical comparisons. Over the years the US definition of unemployment was revised multiple times, and each time it was revised it was to a methodology that gave lower numbers. Therefore you aren't comparing apples to apples when you compare current figures with, say, the recession in the early 80s.

The other thing to consider is that we aren't out of the woods yet economically. There are still a lot of credit issues out there. You can see http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-financial-crisis-rea... for a list of some of them. And continued jobless numbers are not about to help.
You're thinking about it from a business development standpoint in addition to a technical stand point.

I'm just talking about the technical approach. You've gained no new insight into what your business is supposed to be, you've just learned a hella wrong way of solving a technical problem. Now your thoughts are cluttered with the effort and you had to spend time unlearning the previous approach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal_Activity_%28film%29
Are you arguing that because one person made it, Primer is the greatest film of all time? If not, my point still stands, that people can work together and still create great art.
If you include discouraged workers (ie. people who aren't looking for work) the rate is actually 17.5%.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm
Unfortunately I found that foreign keys in my Rails migrations were a constant source of headaches. Moreover, I decided to migrate to Heroku during the project and had to re-write the foreign keys for Postgres instead of MySQL. What did I learn about customers in this process? Nothing.

While I agree with Mr. Dewalt's basic message,
identifying integrity constraints as something a "lean startup" shouldn't worry about for a production application containing his
customers data undermines his implicit claim of data management competency - experienced database developers know how to design and organize their schema so that details like dbms-specific foreign key implementation are trivial. When foreign keys cause you serious pain relative to your other data management problems it means you're doing
something wrong.

What he didn't learn about his customers in the hour at most it should have taken him to get the keys right (thus helping ensure his customers
data is not corrupted by application, framework or provider infrastructure bugs) pales in comparison to the lesson he will learn if their data is silently corrupted.
I think the appeal of finance is the intellectual leverage one gets there. If I am really bright and I can develop a profitable arbitrage trade in the marketplace I can turn it near instantly into millions of dollars (if I'm right, obviously the market does not give points for effort).

If I'm in a start up, which we would probably consider to be very high cleverness to reward leverage, it can take a long time and have lots of randomness to get the big payoff, e.g. Kiko.

Now, compare that to being an employee, where to get enormous payoff you have to climb the ladder into stock options land.

The article's point is that this is not how the world should be, but markets cause this by construction: If I'm stranded on an island with a bunch of Robinson Crusoes I'm going to try swapping coconuts for mangoes across the island before I start experimenting with cross breeding them.

From a welfare perspective it even makes sense to do the easy things first (trade) and the hard stuff next (R&D) because effort is more likely to be rewarded in the former than the latter.

One could also complain about how all the socially well connected are lobbyists instead of high school teachers and the beautiful are in pharmaceutical sales rather than portrait modeling. Sure it's sad, but also mostly inevitable.
U-6 is now at 17.5%. If unemployment continues to climb all next year is it still lagging or just an indication that our economy is a mess?

I'm voting total mess.
It's still a useful number as long as it's measured consistently.

Unfortunately it is not measured consistently over long periods of time.
Hubris was the best I could come up with. Dustin himself describes it as vitriolic below, which is better fit I think.
You plan to live indefinitely on $40K/year? Where I live, that's below poverty level for a family.
Now that I re-read what I wrote, it sounds like I am giving a wholesale green flag to Rails. Not so, I also dislike modifying or even extending core classes. It's something I don't like to do at all even on solo work, and the Birthday Paradox you mention has already bitten a friend of mine:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-04-0...

So while I was ranting a bit about the process vs. tools issue, I fundamentally agree with your concerns that programming Ruby in the style of Rails has issues.
Sales Lessons Worth Remembering
Basically, don't depend on a single charismatic CEO or salesperson to close the deal.
Anti Shoes,MBT Anti Shoes,Cheap Anti Shoes,Free Shipping
If the Closure "compiler" changes the behavior of a program, that means it's generating incorrect code. Can you give an example?
The idea is really nice, but I'm not sure it would work on the OP's Joe, who probably wouldn't even care about the hypothetical language and would regard the whole concept hypothetical, only for those who have way too much free time. (With WoW on the table, you don't have that luxury.)

I would take the route of first order functions -> anonymous functions -> closures, but I think it is really a lost cause for the typical 9-5 programmers.
I disagree strongly.

1) Legislation can change things significantly and effectively. It can also merely shovel things around. Both are possible and doggedly asserting that only one effect ever happens is just ridiculous.

2) Locks keep out thieves very well a lot of the time. They may not keep out every thief, but it keeps out most of them, most of the time.
Apple marketing tricks lock you in
Thanks, this looks like a good way to present it. Next time I'm in this position, I'll use this as my jumping off point for the discussion.
I am pretty sure many many founders, if not the startups necessarily, have very 'interesting' pasts.

I definitely do and it goes back to high school. But I make it a point not to post about it online primarily because not understanding the context, it can be spinned many ways. I don't mind talking about it offline when I have time to tell the whole story from my mouth.
I think it depends on the version of gcc; I tried compiling his function with 3.4.5 and it didn't look tail-call-optimized, but with -Os on 4.2.3 it did.
Rails borrows plenty from django and python at large. Merb's slices and Rails' engines were directly inspired by Django's apps. Rails is getting automatic escaping of strings in templates after Django showed it was a better default. Rack was directly inspired by WSGI. Rip is based on pip. Rails developers aren't "keeping blinders on." Exactly the opposite.
I'm not a US citizen; but I've attended various interest groups, but to be frank, most of the folks I've met aren't up to much. Far better are the contacts I've made while I've been speaking at conferences, and in that case, it's the speakers who are the contacts, not the plebs who attend.

But like I said, I'm fairly happy with my current job, so I feel no big pressure to integrate with the local scene.
Keroac wrote On The Road in a single take, but that doesn't mean most books aren't the result of people collaborating, and it doesn't make On The Road any better an artistic accomplishment.

If you want to liken Curtis to Keroac, that's a good comparison. Both make shallow things that appeal to you until your tastes have matured somewhat. I'm not going to say AA is Ulysses, meanwhile, but all of AA's competitors' sites were designed by commitee, too, and it worked great for them.
you beat me :(
How researchers can hack our senses -- and build a few new ones.
It's very true that the time series Unemployment does not count involuntary part time workers. However, the time series Involuntary Part Time Workers does count people who want to work more hours but can't.

The BLS tracks both these numbers.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t05.htm

I think half the criticism of the unemployment number is simply because people wish one number could explain everything, but unemployment does not.
Have you tried R?
Website conversion rate optimization – What and Why
You have painstakingly crafted a killer website, written ‘content’ worthy to be called the ‘king’, and effectively leveraged search engine marketing to drive a substantial amount of visitors to your website.
http://www.robopark.com/ they have some installations in the US. A great way to go as you can really cram cars into that thing (not to mention the security aspect). But cities are still nervous of what happens when the software goes down and hundreds of people can't get their cars. That's about the only downside.
It's always the developer's fault eh?

Marketing: We need these features now to close $1 mill deal
Dev: but... but... we can't implement them in 2 days... we need more time
Marketing: Go figure out something...

Marketing: Remember that Y features we asked last month? well, sorry, the customers decided to go with X...
Dev: Uh... Uh...

Perhaps once in a while we should switch side: hey management/marketing/sales/CEO, do whatever you need, without modifying our software, to close out deals and to grab huge market share... go figure out something...
This is my approach as well. JavaScript provides a very natural syntax for it, and the use case of "make me an event handler with some stuff baked into it" is extremely obvious and prevalent.
Unemployment does not tell you this, but discouraged workers does.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t13.htm

There are 808,000 such people (as of october), up from 484,000 in october 2008.
For beginners there is also an on-line book:

http://www.nltk.org/book
The problem here is that the devils are in the details.

Should you use small variable and function names because they are easier to type? Throw away all error-checking because without customers errors don't matter? Or as this article says, perhaps toss out FKs because they might be difficult to refactor?

Trying to make the argument that it's one way or the other is really taking a very complex decision and boiling it down to comic-book level. You need to do enough of The Right Thing in order to make it to your first value inflection point, not just whatever it takes to score a couple of dozen freebie users (although every user is awesome!) Without some idea of where you are in your startup process and what your next value point is, you can't make those kinds of decisions. They're weighted choices.

Look at it this way: assume that you hacked something together doing almost the "wrong" thing every time and ended up 2 months later with a couple of hundred freebie users. Perhaps a dozen or so are even paying for your code, say ten bucks a year. But guess what? Your income won't support the amount of maintenance you have to do on your sloppy code, and customer growth is inadequate to pay for anybody to help you out. Somehow the bills have to be paid, and instead of sales and growth you're spending a large portion of your time as "database garbage man"

So you're stuck with crappy code and not enough resources to maintain the customer base you currently have. It's called "getting upside down" in a project. Not a happy spot to be in. (And it can happen without the lean code problem)

The best scenario is where you make the conscious decision to do a few quality items even at the expense of customer growth for a few days or a week or two and then consciously make the decision not to do a bunch of other things because the hit is too much.

It's complicated.
This isn't the main bundle, and they've been known to give away small collections of apps before, e.g. the Giving Tree at Christmas time. They also give away a ton of free apps for participating in missions during the actual Macheist events, so free software from Macheist is certainly nothing new. They had a small event a week ago on Halloween as well, so I'd say they're just gearing up for some new big event (MH4?) or some holiday special and are using these apps to draw attention, stir up press, and get people coming back around to the site.
If the government imposed a small tax on stock purchases and other financial transactions, with the tax level rising according to the number of intermediaries and the amount of leverage, then working in an organization through which lots of money passes would not be such a lucrative career.

(And if it remained lucrative, at least the government would be able to participate in the bounty that comes from skimming a few parts-per-thousand off the top of a very large cash flow.)
I have been in this position, and what I've found is that formal definitions don't make sense. You have to encounter an example that makes you sit up and realize that something is going on that you don't know.

Two examples where I tried to induce that kind of brain lock in Perl programmers are http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=34786 and http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=50132.
haha, this is great!

on a funny sidenote, can we see the VC "boogeyman" story where the 5th grader is "put in time out" as chairman of the board and replaced by a more experienced 8th grader?
So basically the author is saying that experience says foreign keys are good, but in practice foreign keys make development and switching data providers harder.

Seems like an experienced developer would have written a data access layer that wasn't so concerned about how the underlying data store managed foreign keys. Almost all senior level developers know that foreign keys are a performance inhibitor and plans for eventual denormalization of data.

I'm wondering if this person is actually an experience developer or not. He starts out saying one of the problems he solved would be to “figure out a way to speed up the data processing”, yet he doesn't understand how foreign keys play into this and had to work around normalization?

I also wonder exactly why it took so long to rewrite the application because of foreign keys. I've never migrated from mysql to postgres but if the process was so time consuming to warrant a blog post like this, I really question the amount of experience this individual really has.
> if I'm right, obviously the market does not give points for effort

But the market does give points for effort. How else do you explain the bonuses awarded to bankers who damaged the economy? They were rewarded despite their antisuccess.
When trying to convince my customers to do things the right way, I often tell them, "It's not how soon we get started, it's how soon we finish."

I'm stealing this. :)
If you search for "dentists london", there are no organic results above the fold (on my screen)!
We gave up our ability to directly monetize wealth 2 or 3 generations ago

?
I think, actually, that part of the reaction has to do not with Dustin's age but with Dustin himself. The guy's got an irritating ego that's built up a mild dislike in me. He does good work but not great work, and gets disproportionate praise for what he does. This whole series struck me as smug, but not wrong enough that I felt good criticizing him for it. I know I'm not the only person who felt that way.

On a low and ugly level, this thread validates those feelings. So I feel better about my wariness and feel more able to talk about it. Is that what the thread should be? Probably not. But that's what's happening and I also don't necesarily think that's a bad thing. Dustin's been asking to be smacked down for half a year, now, and it would have been in poor taste to smack him down in a thread that wasn't specifically critical of him. So arguably it's a little bit better that it's happening here in a more cathartic way, rather than coming in a thread that doesn't warrant such a response.

Not the most mature approach, but we're not the most mature community. Nothing wrong with that. You can be smart and educated and still feel the occasional need to be catty. As long as it's not too frequent, I view it as a healthy release.
This is why you have to look at the flip side when you hear a word like "recession". When people are losing money, someone is making it.

Recession is bad for many, but lines the pockets of others.

Conversely, there are people who lose money or aren't making as much money when the economy is doing well (for an in-your-face example, Walmart)

On another note, it does not necessary make me smile to see enrollment is increasing. I feel institutional learning has hurt a lot of the ingenuity and creativity in the U.S. and many don't take away the true value of post-secondary learning because they feel they have to go to college or will be left out.

The other side, it does make me smile because it is less competition for me when so many get wrapped up in an additional four years of education. -- My sentiments here by the way are supported by the evolution of education in our country. How so? It is accepted fact that the reason we made secondary school (high school) mandatory in the United States was to help us get out of the great depression and high unemployment by causing less competition in the work force for adults. When high school became mandatory it caused a lot of outrage, especially in the blue-collar communities where after 8th grade children would go to work and begin careers to help support their families.

I could go on, but there is some interesting food for thought.
I thought the iPhone didn't support those kind of barcodes due to physics based limitations of the camera/lens.

If they're doing something really clever to read these barcodes it makes some sense to not just give it away. The Apache licence does give them that option.
Closures are functions with state.

Your claim that Joe is a talented programmer isn't very persuasive. Edit: maybe I should say why. I have known many programmers of the 9-5 type who do a passable job, but are not interested in learning anything. It is as if they had a limited supply of energy for learning and used it up when they were getting started. This is a common type of working programmer and you made it sound like Joe might be one.
After a quick look through this seems like a good resource. The most important things are simply to 1) be part of the community, 2) listen to the community, 3) give the community responsibility.