skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is it because he eats toe cheese?

If that is your way of presenting the case that Stallman is perfectly sane it somehow falls short of the mark.

It's a bit like the defense councilor stating to the judge that the defendant may have a habit or two that is out of the ordinary but otherwise he's a perfectly normal human being.

Don't we all, you know, deep down inside.

I'm not sure of Stallmans' dietary habits but I would definitely count that one against him. I can't begin to fathom where you dug up this nugget of highly relevant information though, if you didn't just made it up.
The US auto industry was badly mismanaged; SUV craze, killing off electric vehicles or assuming they had no future. The unions can't run the company for you, management has to do it. The unions made sure the employees got paid enough to do their work. Whether or not it was the right work to do was up to management.

Also, banks and insurance companies got far larger loans than the US auto industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program#P...

The unions wanted to keep the auto workers employed and that's kind of hard to do when the companies go to shit (mainly because of management). It may sound anti-free-market to you, but then you have to consider the bansk got larger loans. How is that a free market? Why not just let them all fail?

So yeah, I would say the union works pretty well for auto industry workers. Unions never sit well with management because their business is to cut costs and maximize profit, employee welfare be damned.
Guide to help you make your pricing decision
At the beginning you're kinda was against the "make" test, because there is no such thing in jQuery, and now you practically offer the same thing, to test something that does exist in jQuery but doesn't in RighJS.

You should choose already what do you stand for.

But anyway, if you want to test it go ahead, you know where the code is. I suppose jQuery handles virtual selectors via JavaScript and therefore there will be no serious difference in performance. I even suspect that a single additional function in the filter method in RightJS will still work faster than several internal selectors in jQuery.
If you are interested in secure backups you may want to take a look at the Tahoe Least Authority File System (http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe), which has a much more useful security model than tarsnaps (for instance, you can share read-only access rights to a particular file with someone else). Tahoe is also entirely open source and the design is well documented, which in my view is two points up for Tahoe.
I dunno. What's the most well known Indian startup out there?

I can't tell. Slideshare comes to mind, but it was founded in CA with offices in Delhi. So maybe they do suck at marketing.
For the record, he didn't make it up. There's Youtube evidence.
I started programming when I was 21 (I had a bit in school, and some at work before that) but I really got started at 21. Am I as good as others that I interact with, especially those who started way before I did. My certain answer is No. But that only drives me to learn more and work harder.

I spend time reading about Algorithms and Lisp and SICP and what have you. I spend time reading a lot of open source code, and writing a lot (both at work and in my spare time). I engage in conversations with those who are way smarter and experienced than I (both in person, and online - BTW HN is a great resource) hoping to find that one nugget of information that I can use.

To answer your question - See if it really "takes" over you. See if you find a thrill in making a computer bend to your wishes. See if technology really "tickles" you. Programming is for the most part about figuring things out. And that involves figuring out why things don't work. Yes, there is that tingling excitement when what you wanted to happen happens, but a large part of programming is debugging and maintenance, reading documentation and exiting (and often pretty badly done) existing source code.

How long did it take for me to learn? I doubt I will ever be done. Programmers, at least the good ones are constantly learning. Books, blogs, online forums, in-person discussions and your own experiments.

I don't think there is an age limit to learning it, but my experience has been that for people like me, it's a struggle (YMMV). I know there are things I don't know, and discussions like those at HN are very humbling. I am constantly trying to "catch" up with those that have more experience, but that's not a bad thing. It keeps me on my toes.

My take on this - Dig in something that gets you going quickly. Someone suggested JavaScript, I would recommend something like Ruby or Clojure. Buy a book, fire up your text editor and start writing. You can soon upgrade to one of the classics like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to a get a good foundation, and take it from there.

[Update - Sorry, I did not realize how long that was. My apologies if that comes across as a rant, it's not. I hope it helps]
It's a fairly well-known bit of nastiness about RMS . I can't be bothered to Google it for you - mostly because I don't want to deal with the results (too early in the morning for me for those images in my head).
If I could start playing the violin at 22, learning programming at 24 is not even a question!!!
As others have pointed out, there is no age limit, and the learning never stops. But like anything else, you can take it as far as you want to go - just around the block or the rest of your life. Just start and see what happens. Even if you end up writing just the simplest "hello world" program and decide to never go any further, you will have learned something most people have no clue about and will at least begin to understand the potential of what is possible.
I imagine that given the context, they are talking about Tomboy[1] and F-Spot[2]. These run on the Mono platform, which is an implementation of C#. It has patent issues, and RMS has recommended[3] that Free Software projects do not write code that relies on Mono.

[1] www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/
[2] http://f-spot.org/Main_Page
[3] http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
redbus.in and makemytrip.com come to mind but again they are just an add-on nothing innovative.

Now I am thinking did we actually do a startup worth marketing?
The 4 types if MUD players
To which the pedestrian may counter, That is true but I am also disincentivizing drivers from driving in the future. My walking inconveniences their driving. Over time, my community of insubordinate pedestrians may significantly reduce the incentive to drive. It's uncool to drive in Portland Oregon because pedestrians and bicyclists have challenged and won over motorists.
Forgive my ignorance (I live in the rather land-locked city of Phoenix), but can you simply anchor a boat out in the water and leave it there?

Would you have to pay a monthly fee to the city or something like that?
Okay I've added it to the test.

Insert element bottom	48	131	169

Insert element on top	48	134	167

Don't know about the release notes, my test says 1.4 is slower than 1.3.2
C is not a bad language for humans. It's simple enough to be able to see how the machine will execute it but not low level enough that you have to manually manage everything, like assembly. It's not always the best choice, but for some things it is. It's also good to know so that you understand how how computers work instead of assuming that higher level languages are magical.
Steve ::shakes head:: it disturbs me that you just know this. I mean did you really search youtube for RMS eating toe cheese. Gross.

(alternatively i suppose it could have just popped up on google, but that makes this fact more disturbing for the internet as a whole.)
I started programming when I was 10, over a decade later I build software for a living and am still clueless about nerd culture. Being a dweeb is not required.
Dinosaurs broiled, not grilled
That is false. There are many software developers who well over 100k/y. Of course, they are generally very experienced professionals who are in high demand.
Here is my experience. I spent my 20s studying math. When I left grad school at 28 my first job was an introductory programming job. I previously had no interest in computers or programming. A year later I was able to get a much better programming job. Within 3 more years I had patches in the Perl core, a pretty good reputation on Perlmonks (a well-known programming forum), and was a decent programmer (though I had some pretty big gaps).

I am now 40 and am about to start a job at Google. I will always have a lot more to learn, but I'm pretty happy with how I've developed. So I think that 24 is not too late to start.

But you need to set reasonable expectations. You aren't going to start programming and in a month be the second coming of Ken Ritchie. If you take it seriously you should expect to see rapid improvement for several years. See http://norvig.com/21-days.html for more on that.
Such a service would be completely useless to me since I've "incriminated" myself 100 times over already with Google (I suspect most people are in my situation). Most likely won't make any difference if I start using such a service now.
Sorry for the aside, but how does one "buy out" of the Air force?
Designing a Reporting System
The Mono platform, upon which some parts of Gnome rely, is regarded by some as a patent minefield. There is too much Microsoft IP related to C# and the .NET framework (of which Mono is a partial implementation) for the GNU folks to feel comfortable.

The danger is that Microsoft has a long history of threatening companies that rely on free software that their products infringe a host of never disclosed patents. Novell, the single largest sponsor for Gnome, made an agreement with Microsoft that granted them immunity against patent lawsuits for their clients, but nobody else.

A couple months back they sued Tomtom for using that horrible kludge for supporting long file names on FAT. Microsoft patented this specific kludge.
I found the website a bit lacking in terms of information. It feels hastily done.
1. I think most early adopters will be technical people, and so they need to put up more technical specs. They need more real photos and/or video of the device. They have no track record, so asking users to buy their device based on a few photoshop pics is asking for too much.
2. Although Paypal is the de facto payment method these days, having Paypal only payment makes it look like they haven't taken the time out to set up a credit card payment system.
3. Besides a feedback email, there's no customer service telephone line or contact of any sort. Seeing as they are selling a consumer product it would make their customers feel at ease about their purchase if they knew there was someone within easy reach is something goes wrong.

That being said, it looks like a nice device. I can't wait to see it in action.
Since we are talking mostly about Mono, why not split Gnome in two parts, the Mono-free part, which I would be very comfortable to use, and the Microsoft-booby-trapped part that includes Mono and stuff that depends on it?
No, F-Spot, Tomboy, and Mono are all free software using Stallman's definition. And Gnome does not bundle any proprietary software. The issue is about favourably mentioning non-free software, such as VmWare, on the Gnome blog aggregator.
I've updated the screenshots, adding those two new tests. It actually increased the overall gap between RightJS and jQuery 8)
juju is on African word an it's normally associated with 'black' magic, hexes and stuff. It actually has a negative connotation in most African circles. So marketing it with the association to 'juju' in Africa would not be a good idea.
I would have liked to see it start earlier, say 1997 or so.
The Case for an AOL Renaissance
Kung fu grippe : Liking the Fitbit
It's funny.

Most of Europe is now democratic because extremists once fought off absolutist monarchies. The US is a democracy because a bunch of extremists convinced the people that this was the way to go.

I live in Brazil. I truly wish we had more extremists like those when we declared our independence and when we became a republic. In fact, I wish we had a stronger tradition of extremism.
My father-in-law was a mechanical engineer and manager. Never worked with software until he retired at age 62. He then taught himself how to program and built a sophisticated GIS system as a semi-hobby, semi-part-time consulting.
I assume you meant promotion; the term marketing usually includes product (design), price, placement (ie. distribution) and promotion.

Making marketing decisions is basically the same thing as making any decision: You need to determine your goal, identify barriers you need to overcome in order to reach that goal, and then execute.

The difference to technical decision is identifying the barriers. With technical problems, the relevant cause of the barrier, namely the object or software, is under your control and easy to alter. It's also easy to measure the effects of any change. Thus, identifying barriers is rather easy.

With promotional decisions, the cause of the barrier is basically the market, that is: some group of people. They are not under your control, altering their behavior is usually very hard, and measurement is an art form since you often don't know who they are. Therefore, identifying the relevant barriers is often a mix of experience, intuition, and guesswork.

Of course, there are lists of common barriers (ie. causes why people don't buy or buy elsewhere) and for each of them, there are common methods to overcome (or answer) these.

For example, a game is a typical experience good: you can only judge the value after having played (and payed for) the game. Thus, mistrust is a likely barrier to overcome. Typical answers are offering a trial, a demo or a guarantee, setting the price to zero, etc. -- the "low commitment" route. A different route could be using "high-reward" signals: promoting the (high) production costs, setting a rather high price, producing high-quality in-game videos, buying TV time for ads, offering trials to only selected journalists, etc.

As you can see from the example, money may be a necessary ingredient, sometimes lots of it. Thus, promotion is also a function of the price (or rather, the revenue model).

However, since you seem to go the "low commitment" route, already, your central problem will be "selection": Why play your game instead of one of the million others?

A common answer is "relating" or "bounding" -- appeal to something a target audience wants to be (or thinks it is). For example, Listerine's 'Always a bridesmaid, never a bride' appealed to what the audience wanted to be (namely someone's wife). Marlboro's 'Come to Marlboro country' appealed to freedom and independence. So, another ingredient is creativity, so to say.

If you have that, your promotion only needs to communicate this particular trait. The rest is finding out what people do, view or read who should be interested in this particular trait and go for it.

Then, you really just need time and effort to promote your product successfully.

Hope this helps.
Also is there anywhere to get free historical options prices?
Just added a link to Joel Spolsky's move and office redesign of Fogcreek. I see a serious overlap between work environment and concentration.
The Google Phone
Only thing that bugged me about this article was the way in which it doesn't distinguish between the making and selling of hardware. Google has been making servers since it started. It's server farms are part of it's competitive advantage.
Craigslist on eBay: "Untrustworthy"; eBay on Craigslist: "Amateurish"
I started to be serious about programming at 33. 6 months for me was enough to get started. Of course there is a difference between being able to program and being able to program well. The latter takes longer, potentially a lifetime depending on what you mean by "well".
Oh.. I know... It was the "booby-trapped" part that triggered the down-mod.

Let's then rephrase that: the parts that do not conflict with the GNU project charter and the parts that do and may, in the future, hurt Gnome in ways only Microsoft can control.

Because Gnome is not monolithic - it's a lot of technologies and products that are developed more or less together, but that can each stand on their own.
House aiming to restrict the powers of big banks and the Fed
I'm assuming you want to backtest the data for some automated trading system.

You can have a system that works very well with Yahoo data but not in the real world due to two reasons:

-data integrity

-survivorship bias

So to get good data you need to pay. It's imperative you have good data.

A couple sites:
Futures Data (free): http://www.tradingblox.com/tradingblox/free-historical-data....

Futures Data (paid): http://www.pinnacledata.com/

Stock Data (paid, highly recommended): http://www.premiumdata.net/

Stock Data (paid): http://www.csidata.com/

You can get forex data from oanda, fxcm, metatrader, ninjatrader.

You can also backtest on tradestation.

Also, tick data and OHLC data can affect your style-- if you're swing trading you need OHLC but if you're doing more short term, you need tick data.
So, all this is because someone likes VMWare?! Somehow I doubt it.
I'd have more respect if he didn't keep describing everything as "big time". Big time.
Lessons from My AlphaLab Experience
Child predators can attack your family through Google real time search? Moronic. Flagged.
It's not surprising business analysts know the marketing power of trolling.
It takes 10 years to master programming, but 24 is not too late at all. I know a lot of people that started in their twenties and now are good programmers.

My problem instead starts to be how much time I can continue to do programming for work. I'm 32, it seems fair to me to continue for another 10 years, but should I switch at some point? My dream is to turn myself into a teacher around 45 opening a programming school, but probably children can learn faster just by internet than with an old teacher ;)
I hadn't considered the economic tradeoff involved in health care (I'm canadian, didn't occur to me). Obviously doctors shouldn't control your spending. Or politicians, for that matter.

Doctors obviously shouldn't have access to your wallet, but they SHOULD tell you without pussy-footing around, this will save your life, that is stupid and unnecessary, that one over there will kill you.

If you want to buy drugs without a doctor interjecting good sense, it really is a pharmacist you need.

And since libertarian governments are forged from pure unobtainium anyways, they might as well be competent. I think it's a smaller jump from here to qualified politicians than it is from here to politicians who don't meddle in people's lives.
on the 5% chance that Arrington's right about their financial situation, they're practically out of cash. And now they have to hire a legal defense.

If the tablet's software isn't 100% open-source and hackable, I'd be worried on the long-term support from Fusion Garage.
Here's a list of companies: http://levellers.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/no-profitable-unio...

Profitablility of a company is mainly tied to decisions made by management. A unionized company could be very well or badly run, depending on the management. It's the management that hires the workers and decide what they should be doing after all.

A union helps both the workers and the company because without the company, the workers (and the union) would no longer be needed. In the GM bailout, the UAW took some wage/benefits cuts so that GM wouldn't be completely down the shitter.

Not to mention the paternalistic relationship it implies. If I don't care for the terms of an employment contract, I won't work under it. If no business in my industry offers terms I consider favorable, I can start my own business. If that's impractical, or I'm unwilling to do it, I should change professions entirely.

Changing professions is sometimes impractical. What will you do and how will you live while you are training to join another profession?

Starting a business is difficult, you can ask all the people here how much work they have to put into it. What if you don't have the skills to manage a business or to market a product? Not only that, but where do you get the capital from? VCs? Banks? You have to beg them and do a song and dance to get any money from them. Then you have to keep doing that while you remain unprofitable so that the business keeps on running.

What if every employer offers contracts that are crappy in one way or another? What do you do then? Choose the lesser of a million evils? Why should you do that when you can bargain and possibly get a better contract?

A union is as paternalistic as the state or the corporation. So if you have no problem with those, groups of people co-operating to achieve something, then you shouldn't have a problem with a union. Maybe the word has a negative connotation for you, we can change that easily. Let's call it XYZ or some other word instead.
The truth is probably that, had they not squandered their relationship with Arrington, and TC had announced, joyously, that pre-orders were available today. It would have been a land-slide victory - possibly even with the price change.

Classic geek-in-business mistake. You can create the greatest product in the world, but without top-notch marketing, it's nothing.

They underestimated the relationship between TC readers and this product. They will learn how much Arrington really did do for the "Crunchpad".
...Google has enabled, as she states, strangers to enter our homes, to talk to our children via any links that a predator can use to get to someone, anonymously too!
This worries me. This worries me BIG TIME! I think that Google needs to maybe revist this new functionaliy, and re-think it’s rollout….and make a change to allow us to filter our own use of this tool…for us and for ours….
What do you think?

I think that the author is correct in that real-time results can easily lead to gaming the google search results even more than they are currently being gamed. However I think the all-caps, exclamation points, and child predators are a bit much.

The problem is that Google is struggling to remain relevant as the web moves increasingly to more dynamic content. Google was built on a system of ranking static content -- without some kind of metadata filtering the web was simply too much for people to understand back in 98. It's simply not enough to grab all the dynamic stuff you can out there and throw it at the users.

Google can't be just about data, even though that's what they want. It's much more important for them to rank data than simply collect it. That's what made them strong in the first place.
It's not going to be free. There's exchange data prices, etc.
For those looking for context, it looks like RMS jumped in on the discussion here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general...
Keep in mind that this is just one developer, and that the votes of at least 40 more are required. It is unlikely that GNOME will split from GNU.

After all, GNOME was formed as a Free alternative to KDE (back when KDE wasn't capital-F Free).
Who's talking about Mono? The GNU complaint is that some ex-GNOME developers are promoting proprietary software through GNOME channels. Another developer was offended by this complaint, and decided to troll the list.

Additionally, there's nothing "booby-trapped" about Mono. I don't contribute to Mono applications much any more, because I don't think it'll advance the Linux desktop as much as other stacks, but there's no danger in using Mono.

Based on Stallman's articles regarding Mono and Linux, he feels the same way -- it's safe as currently used, but not the best choice.
You appear to be asserting that it's unlikely this has ever happened because no reasonable, thoughtful person being attacked by a dog would, upon careful consideration, panic and struggle instinctively to get away from the dog.