skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff. All of the papers you write get peer reviewed by your clique. You then make a point of reading what your clique produces and writing papers that cite theirs. Nobody outside the clique is likely to pay much attention to, or be able to easily understand, work done within the clique. Over time people do move between cliques, but this social structure is ubiquitous. Anyone who can't accept it doesn't remain in mathematics."

I think this is an exaggeration. Sure, much of mathematics and maybe most of mathematics today works like this, but it's the exceptions, in accordance with Sturgeon's Law, that are most interesting. The really good specialists tend to transcend little cliques, and sometimes entire fields. There are plenty of people who are respected outside the circle of their immediate coauthors, everybody (for some definition of "everybody" that is anyhow wider than a little clique) wants to read their papers, etc.

You could say that these are rare exceptions and >90% of working mathematicians are producing highly specialized papers that are interesting to maybe a dozen other people, that don't know much outside their narrow focus and don't really care, and so on. And you'd be right. But in programming, isn't it the case that >90% of programmers are chugging along in their Java or C# shops, writing some enterprisey horror or an internal corporate monstrosity, never caring enough to read Joel, nevermind Hacker News, or to improve their knowledge of the language they're using everyday, nevermind learn Haskell. The talented hackers are rare outliers. So what's different?

I do agree with some other thoughts in the article. Someone who wants to dabble in many things has their work cut out in the academic math culture. I left grad school because I couldn't hack a bloody-minded focus on working on my thesis and doing nothing else. I had other reasons to suspect I won't be staying around in academia. For one thing, I despise internal politics and petty squabbling, and what I saw when I looked at the power structure and battles more closely, being a graduate student, shocked and disgusted me. Even more importantly, I had grave doubts about ever being able to do really meaningful work rather than end up writing up small results in a little clique. I doubted I had it in me to become an exception I talked about above. I still regret not testing this more thoroughly by mustering the will-power to shut down everything else, finish the damn thesis and get the damn degree, even if I probably wouldn't end up in academia anyway.
it reads like submarine PR
News Corp would be able to go after these people with copyright infringement lawsuits, possibly naming Google as a co-defendant. Stopping this kind of infringement is a much more manageable task than stopping P2P file sharing, as these sites are dependent on Google/some other ad network making payments to them.
I agree that the pendulum today is too strongly on the side of patent trolls.

But have you seriously thought about what a world without patents would look like?

Actually, you can. Visit China. On Monday, the boss of a factory will give you a tour and shows you how they manufacture the iPod case exclusively for Apple. The next day, they offer you to manufacture the exact same design, just for you, for very cheap. IP? What IP?

Personally, I'm hoping for a middle ground. Not all patents are bad, but too many stupid patents is an abuse of the system.

(before you mod into oblivion, let me state that I have standing to discuss this issue, having been sued for patent infringment myself - I know the pain)
The Life and Times of AdMob, the early days
The study referenced in the article:

http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/4298
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this.

Looking at this site, I don't see much about this person. No resume, no examples of work, the contact form is broken. How do I know if I want to hire him? Even if I did know, how would I do it?

I, too, was laid off around April. For a couple days I just slept, then I spent every day coding. I added features to my hobby site ( http://yellownote.info ), I wrote a Rails plugin, taught myself Git, gave a presentation at a Rails user group. I got a job (at the company that hosted the user group) about a month later.

Even if it didn't help me find a job, doing all that made me a lot happier than just sitting around.

Why not write something handy and neat, and then say "I've been unemployed since April, if you found this useful, give me a couple bucks or look at my resume"?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=price+gold,+platinum
Could you elaborate on that? I've used both and the difference (apart from the naming) is too subtle for me (not trolling - honest question).
I've been following AdMob's progress since their launch, and am honestly a bit surprised that it took someone this long to acquire them. I thought you guys might enjoy reading the founder's old blog posts to see where it all started.

This post is particularly amusing: http://admob.blogspot.com/2006/01/wwgd.html

You'll notice, when looking at the early months of 2006, that AdMob attained significant growth almost immediately; sometimes things just work out.
What is intrinsic worth anyway, and what does it mean? Some, like Karl Marx, argued that the value of a product is based on how much labour you put into it. Not whether people want it or not.

What is interesting is how much you can trade something for. Now and in the future. The subjective theory of value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value

How much can you trade 11 US $100 bills for in 20 years? And how much for 1 ounce of gold?
Have you ever seen two lawyer argue over what "strictly necessary" means? One would claim that ad serving cookies are always "strictly necessary" to an online business, the other would argue that cookies are never "strictly necessary" because you can replicate most cookie functionality with a "?sessionid=12354" header in a GET request.
The "magic" versus "timesaving" differences of philosophy is a new way of putting it. It encapsulates a gut feeling I had about the two but hadn't put my finger on until now.

Especially when starting from scratch, learning RoR is kind of like "ooh, shiny, magic, wow!" and learning Django is like "so you do this, which does (this and this and this behind the scenes), then do this..". I love magic as much as the next gal, but not being able to fully grok RoR from the start was partly why I chose Django as well.
Stack Friendly Recursion
Perhaps, but that is not the reason for its current value.
Definitely (a). I learned a lot more in high school than I would have by skipping, but I learned almost nothing related to my intended profession (software engineer), and I felt very disconnected from the "real world" in high school. Personally, if high school had been a better learning experience, I may not have bothered with college. But I didn't feel prepared.
that's what SHE said
I doubt there is any such thing as "convention". Some words are pronounced phonetically and some as fragments of the words they were abbreviated or concatenated from; who's to say which is correct? People don't even apply their own pronunciation patterns consistently.
All Supreme Court cases from this term will be decided by June. The average time would probably be 3-4 months from when the case is argued (i.e., February or March), but it could be faster or slower.

The ruling will basically go into effect immediately, even if the Patent Office takes some time to make new rules.
What a conundrum! Dave Winer is ranting against Techcrunch, so is the enemy of my enemy my friend? I'm thinking odds are low: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/05/
Both the CLI CPAN module/tool itself and http://search.cpan.org/ are awesome to work with. I think every language should shamelessly copy them first, and try to improve upon them second.

It almost seems like Ruby/Python have been consciously reluctant to do so.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/faq/general/#django-app...
Court: federal trial rules prohibit reporter from live-Twittering a trial
it will probably be customizable not too long from now; i'd like a chance to test it out, see if it's good for organizing your thoughts; what does it look like on a mobile device?
Your fingernail clippings will turn to dust in fifty years. Refined gold is eternal, and universally valued.
True, I'm just saying it's always going to be useful.
I agree with that approach and use it myself. But from a project manager's standpoint it is useful to know which tasks are incomplete versus not even started. In a tool like MS Project I arbitrarily mark any started task as 10% complete to serve as a visual indicator that someone is actively working on it.
My grandfather was in the US Navy in WWII. When the officer came to tell them they were shipping out, no one in the room had made it past a 6th grade education. But when he said simply "Gentlemen, there is a time and a tide," everyone knew which play he was referring to, and what he meant by it. http://www.enotes.com/julius-caesar-text/act-iv-scene-iii?st... , in case you're wondering.
I don't know if they're quite the same, but if you like Alcest, I bet you'd enjoy Agalloch. The Mantle is really a beautiful album, though it has some BM vocals.

I think the new Pelican album, What We All Come to Need, is also pretty relaxing, and uses distorted guitars.
Shotguns and Rocking Chairs Don’t Work Over the Internet, Mr. Murdoch
I call shenanigans. His argument fails on two counts:

1) The value of gold IS its use as a value store. A currency, to be practical, needs to meet the following four characteristics: Be relatively scarce, be durable, be divisible, and be impossible to counterfeit. Nothing, in the past 6000 years, has even been found that beats gold on these four counts. That is why it has always been the king of currencies.

2) There are vastly more practical uses for gold today than there have ever been in the past 6000 years. Other than monetary, there have been no practical uses for gold in antiquity.
I make too much to get food stamps

Strange. I was "unemployed" for a few months, and the State of Illinois was happy to give me $1600 a month to do nothing. The $1600 was because I was previously in the highest income tier before "becoming unemployed".

(I didn't take their money, though, because I had already paid for flights to other countries and wouldn't have been around to cash the checks or make up some story about how I was looking for a job. But this person sounds like they could benefit.)
I kept looking for the "I am a web designer" or "I am a programmer" or "I am a mill worker". If he wants a job he should state his industry.
Sort of, except it has its problems:

http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2009/11/google-closure-im-...
I believe you are making the somewhat metaphysical error of applying your experiences and attendant worldview as a developer to everyone else's problems.

Who said this guy is capable of "writing" anything "neat," or producing any kind of online content? He is probably not. And the fact that he is not does not mean he is not employable in some capacity, just that he doesn't fit into the 2.0-ey electronic world that our demographic inhabits.
It would be interesting to see what gives developer better productivity in the long run: Closure or GWT?

I'm big fan of GWT myself, and one of the reasons is that it allows me to build bigger projects: my JS projects always reached maintainability problems sooner than GWT projects.
Is that really so bad, though? I know that I could get a knock-off of an iPod. But my iPod has guaranteed support from Apple, and it gives me a good feeling to know that I have the "real thing", and not a "fake". For that matter, I could also get a Zune, but I have standards. ;)

If your business model could be so easily undercut by competition, you're Doing It Wrong. People pay more for perceived status and soft values. And the people who are looking for knockoffs were probably never going to be your customers in the first place.

Validity of software patents goes on trial today at Supreme Court. I'm hoping for the death penalty.
I gave him $20 for the ingenuity of producing a web site; it is clever enough to warrant it, and definitely represents action on his part, even if it's not action everyone necessarily countenances.
I don't think the post was about ink and paper, it was not even about news. It's was about the increasing influence of content owners and commoditization of aggregators and search engines. Finishing his sentence one could say that nothing stops Bing from going after top 500 bloggers and essentially offering them cash to opt out of Google index.

It can actually work: while the Internet is huge, the 80/20 principle still applies - 80% of the population are interested in 20% of the content. I bet that pulling just top 20 NFL/NCAA sites and blogs out of Google will noticeably boost Bing's audience. Heck, maybe even getting exclusive rights to index Wikipedia may do the trick.
It's open source. Start groking.

This basically just says Rails has a better user interface than Django (not necessarily something I agree with).

Django makes you feel like a power user because it forces you to learn more in order to use it?
This is an interesting idea. I think it has more chance of sinking Rupert then hurting Google at all, but I wouldn't say wouldn't certainty that it can't work. Maybe Google can be made to pay too, a precedent.

An extremely interesting consequence of success would be setting a price for indexing content. It wouldn't be a perfect price, but it would be a price.

*I think this is argued better in the video. It mentions Google paying for access to the Twitter feed, paying ofr content to index.
Does it provide any support for avoiding/detecting Javascript "memory leaks" which are easy to create with closures and anonymous functions?

That's what interests me the most.

The stuff they have here for annotating types (love the type expressions), equivalent of #define are major conveniences to ease development. And long overdue. So thanks, Google.
Karl Marx took the 'labor theory of value' argument from David Ricardo, who had taken it from Adam Smith, who had taken it from John Locke among others.

Alfred Marshall's 'marginalism' completely displaced the labor theory, insofar as the labor theory is incapable of producing a theory explaining prices. The labor theory is now only kept around by philosophy students and unreconstructed marxists.
CPAN's success, as with Debian's, is not due to the technical infrastructure but rather the social infrastructure. There are plenty of ways to make packages not work at all, it's just that the Perl people don't do that.

(If you have ever read the CPAN source code, you would be surprised it works at all. Don't get me started on the various incompatible build systems, and what happens when your module's build system depends on a newer version of the build system.)

Haskell's Cabal is the technical model to steal. Don't let modules execute their own code unless they actually need to. 99.9999% of modules do fine with some sort of declarative interface, rather than actual code to do those things.
Debian's 'synaptic'. Help and leverage it to other platforms, if needed. Less pain all around.
Reusing your code is just a fad that depends on personal taste. Real programmers cut-n-paste.

Don't get me started on tests, what a waste...
I looked over your book at some point and loved it. Thank you for writing this.

I prefer pyglet over PyGame. I wrote a tutorial for it in the style of your chapters 16-19. It's up at [1].

[1] http://www.steveasleep.com/pyglettutorial
I agree entirely. My impression was that he feels rails is too accessible and hence there are too many hacks using it.

He wanted to feel more like a hacker, and rails hid (of course by hide he means publishing the source code) too much of it's magic.

In fact, I think publishing an article on Rails v.s. Django and posting it to Hacker News stinks of SEO.
You can still have copyright protection without patents. Besides your example is specifically a physical device which isn't the kind of patent being talked about.
Every single WSJ article I have read over the last year has been a referral from news.ycombinator.com.

Now maybe people are Googling for those articles but I think what is going to happen is that the browser will end up aggregating the search across a variety of platforms.

Perhaps news sources, search, and browsers are organiztiong into a vertical market.
Javascript has too many layers to be comprehensible to new programmers. Do you see how many extra tokens you have in the second example? Not only that, but you have to open the page in the web browser, rather than 'run the program.'
The article seems to be just generalizations and hearsay.
eternity is a long time.
I have no idea what you're talking about, Silicon Valley and SF are filled to the brim with expensive and exotic cars. Cruise around Atherton and Los Altos hills or go to downtown PA or the nice parts of cupertino - Ferraris, Astons, Porsches, BMW, Lexus, etc, etc. Even as far as Santa Cruz I have seen plenty of people in their nice sports cars driving fast on 17 all the time.

This notion that "rich people aren't into cars" in northern california is absolutely laughable. Sure there are MORE nice cars in LA, but that's only because LA is a much larger metro area.

I've lived in both the bay and LA and I can tell that this game of "spot the differences" that so many people play are observations based on selection and confirmation bias. You're just looking for evidence that supports ideas you already have.

In my opinion SF and LA are pretty much the exact same culturally. People from SF just hate to admit it.
Here's a good site for looking at the Dow priced in gold: http://home.earthlink.net/~intelligentbear/com-dow-au.htm
In Microsoft v. Google? They'll both run out of upside long before they run out of money, that is to say, both can spend amounts of money unbounded by the actual quantity they have as other bounds kick in first.
Interesting how the people portrayed in the article look nothing like the hip cafe latte drinking types that are normally associated with designers.
It's a subtle but important difference.

Rather than MVC (Models, View, Controller), Django uses MTV - Models, Templates and Views.

The M in both is pretty similar, and is typically an object representation of what is in the database.

Django differs from the more established MVC model. In Django-speak a view is a function that takes optional arguments, processes data on the model, and (typically) outsets key/value pairs of object. They key/value pairs get fed into the template. E.g. if you did had a URL /sales/by_country, then a view would be executed that would do a query that returned the sales by country in a pure python data-type (e.g. a list). All the presentation code, would be be done in a template.

In MVC, you have controllers that were the 'business logic' and views that were the 'presentation code'.

MVC is arguably more pure from a design perspective, MTV arguably fits more naturally with the way the web works.

This 'snakes and rubies' video starring DHH and the Django team is a good session that explores it in more detail. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2939556954580527226#)
Anybody have information on the details of the acquisition?

How many shares did that 6 million investment buy? Is the 30m buying price all cash or are there stocks/shares involved? Will Gizmo5 keep its current management? Are there incentives for key personnel to stay in place?

X buys Y is fairly superficial information here.
Well, maybe. Actually I probably agree. But here is the test.

If "real news" disappears from Google, will people switch to Bing. Bing works too. If it bothers people at all, they might switch.

No speculation about what the new generation cares about necessary. Trial by fire.
The CPAN works despite clunky code and competing implementations because the functional decomposition is sufficiently effective. (EUMM is some of the worst code in intent, design, and implementation I've ever read and used anyway.)
Anyone else read "God - a six thousand year-old bubble"
i wish they'd post screenshots of this stuff so i didn't have to download it just to see what the various ui elements looked like..
great answer, thx.
You miss the point. A specific case design is something completely different than patenting 'ways that stuff can be done'.

I really hope the EU does not introduce software patents. This is just the thing to stiffle innovation.
Zombie Bing Crosby crawls out of his grave and eats the brains of Google engineers.
Looking For Cheap Bookmark Printing Company
It's a shame you got down-voted due to snark, but you're spot-on.

MSM newspapers don't pull enough weight on the Internet for them to play the "take my ball and go home" card. Personally, the only newspaper I'd be disappointed to see leave Google's index is the New York Times, but not even that would force me to switch to Bing.

If your killer-feature is the indexing of a crusty, dying industry that fewer and fewer people see value in, you're not going to overtake a competitor that holds 70% of the market.
Can't bet on and should bet against are not the same thing.
Fred, this is an interesting post, but I have a bit of an off topic comment for you: I don't know if I'm missing a common font or what but I find your body copy font very difficult to read. On Firefox/Windows the kerning is all slightly off, so to my eye the words break in weird places. Also, the lime-green-on-white color for links is so low contrast that I had to highlight the text to read what it says. I tried MSIE/Windows just to see if it looks any better, and while it is better (I think MSIE is anti-aliasing the font), I still find it hard to read. Maybe it's just me.
Well, he's obviously capable of producing online content, he made this site after all. Even if he can't produce code to show off, he can produce something. If I were going to hire someone in whatever field he's in, I'd be looking for the unemployed guy with the blog about doing it as a hobby, not the unemployed guy asking for a dollar.
That's a specious distinction, even if I can understand their interpretation. It's just easier to say that:

1. Django Templates correspond to Rails Views (they both define how data is presented to the client). The biggest difference is that it's easier to include business logic in Rails Views because the Erb template language is as expressive as Ruby itself, while the Django template language is deliberately restrictive.

2. Django Views correspond to Rails Controllers (they both process requests). The biggest difference is that data is passed explicitely from a Django View to its Template, while data is passed implicitely from a Rails Controller to its View.
What about copper rounds, or uranium futures, or cell phone minutes? All seem to work nearly as well and have useful production purposes. I don't think gold is going anywhere for the reasons you cite, but there are alternatives today.
A few weeks ago I argued that language distribution platforms should be based on a distributed version control system (like Mercurial or Git) and have an user-friendly web-interface (like BitBucket or GitHub). Reputation (like the one found in StacOverflow) should also be a part of the platform. Anyhow, read more here if you are interested: http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19475
I think it's important to note where these frameworks come from. Rails started as a means to build a web app. Django started as a CMS for online newspapers.

I toyed with Django for a while before I moved to Rails. The main force driving me to Django first was that I already knew Python, whereas I'd never really used Ruby. I chose Rails over Django because of the magic. It seemed like I had to learn a lot more up front to get a web app working in Django, where I could get things working first in Rails while learning what the framework is doing over time.
Obecalp ("placebo" backwards) will be available for purchase from http://inventedbyamother.com/