skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re: Lesson #3. And where is Woz now? I would be reluctant to put forward that Woz was more important to Apple’s overall success than Jobs or vice versa. Truth is, they were both important and (assuming the author is suggesting Jobs was the 'business' guy and Woz was the 'programmer') Apple would not be what it is today if one or the other didn’t play a role.

One of the most important lessons I learned at my startup as a programmer is the value that commercial business people bring. Yes, we programmers are important at the beginning when the product is being developed, but once the business of the product gets going, the business people become very important.

Check out some of Steve Blank's posts on customer development vs. product development. In a recent slide presentation I flipped through, he states that most startups fail because of a lack of customer development (typically what 'business' people do), and not because of a lack of product development (which is typically what developers do). (And yes I realize that the programmer can possibly do both, but not as fast as two people who work well together can).

At the end of the day, both skill sets are required to make the startup successful, and for one to say he or she is more important than the other is like the fable I once heard about the eyes saying they were more important than the ears who thought they were more important than the hands who thought they were more important than the feet, etc. etc.

I know I will likely get seriously down voted for this type of comment on a programmer centric board, but the programmer 'divas' who think that the world would stop if it were not for their brilliance annoy the hell out of me. To those people I would say that you will get a lot further in the long run if you pool your skills with someone who brings to the table what you lack.
By the same token, a pen and paper day planner that you carry around also makes you a cyborg, as you are delegating part of your memory functions to it.
Construction of America's tallest building may move forward thanks to unions
Does anyone have an HTC and enjoy it? I use an IPhone but I've had to opportunity to use both the Droid and an HTC phone and I only liked the Droid. The HTC seemed super cheap, almost as if it were designed for kids.
the above reply was in response to what i read as a dismissive post about middle aged programmers in general.

it had nothing to do with my wage level. that is not something i have never cared about much, and the idea that the quote was "all about" wage seems somewhat odd to me.

maybe i misunderstood. i don't think so, but i would delete the post above and walk away if i could. i can't, so i am posting this qualification.

that's all from me on this thread.
Ooh, I love Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby so far. Thank you for recommending it!
I think the key point is nothing happens in the beginning with our great technical people. You will always need great business people in the end to drive the business (Google). But we're talking about startup programs where there is little capital and little time.
not really. I know a lot of people are becoming worried that the good he did in the early days of FSF is being negated by the current attitude.

I know I am concerned with his ongoing shift of attitude to anti-proprietary as opposed to pro-free. That's incredibly damaging.
The NYT 9th Annual "Year in Ideas"
Agreed 100%. Again, we are talking about startups in incubator programs. A team with three MBAs is a recipe for disaster in that scenario—or at least lesser odds of success.
Sorry, is this an (horrible) attempt at getting into my Google account?
Ahem.

"AT&T is a client and Verizon is not, he added."

So much for objectivity.
Livin’ la Vida Emacs
Regarding the last question: "what happens with yeti when you have polymorphism and mutable containers?"

In section:

http://linux.ee/~mzz/yeti/intro.html#type-declarations

"Variable (and argument) bindings are not polymorphic (it would make typesystem unsound), and therefore their type changes:"

For more details about this type unsoundness in ML, see the long version of "Relaxing the value restriction":

http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/preprint/file/RIMS1444.pdf
This seems like a poorly reasoned article to me.

I don't think anybody argues the point that AT&T has the fastest 3G network. You can have the fastest network. It can have slightly more signal bars. It can also be the one that drops calls the most. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Japanese communities don't always see things the way that others might:

"The remaining villagers have made a remarkable choice: Rather than try to come up with ways to lure new residents and keep the town alive, they have pretty much decided to let it disappear slowly, even as they do themselves.

Following the death of a 99-year-old woman, Mr. Irish proposed renting out her empty home. A younger couple had expressed interest, and Mr. Irish thought bringing in new blood could extend the village's life. The villagers balked. Newcomers, they said, could upset the delicate harmony of the close-knit community. Mr. Irish had no choice but to turn the disappointed couple away."
What do you think are some effective lifestyle changes for people with ADHD? When I was a child, my parents tried all sorts of things since they didn't want to medicate me: talk therapy, activities, spending more time on organization, dietary changes, etc. I don't think they were especially helpful, but I'm always interested in trying new things.

One thing that did work for me was changing jobs. I was working a pretty traditional programming job, then moved to go work on an automated trading desk. I was on medication before but never got around to finding a psychiatrist in my new city for quite a while. I was doing short projects where you could see an immediate P&L impact; if I had buggy code it needed to be fixed immediately since money was on the line; I had a lot to learn since the culture there just expects you to know things.

I think finding a line of work with a tight effort-reward loop and frequent, interesting challenges works wonders. Unfortunately for me, I got good quickly and have to work on larger projects now.
It doesn't matter if there are any shortcomings with the iPhone or not. ATT went into partnership with Apple over this and, if they can't handle what it delivers, they should have discovered this beforehand.
I hate PHP with a passion but I think it's worth knowing about and I think the claim that "knowing C" makes it easy to interpret a PHP program is not a good assessment. Further, just knowning C doesn't mean you'll know the semantics of webdev... which is what PHP is all about. You get domain knowledge along with the language.

I'm also convinced that in almost every case that Ruby and Python are just fine in place of Perl... except for text processing.

Perl's regexp engine is top notch and is an extremely key part of the language in ways it just isn't in Python or Ruby, especially after the release of Perl 5.10. I don't see another language that can touch Perl there yet (feel free to correct me because I'd be interested to learn).
Yeah, I understand and ultimately agree with you with respect to startup programs.

My rant stems from a general theme that seems to come across in comments on this site that business people and managers are idiots, and programmers are gods. I know that is not the point you were intending to make.
A hackathon for Parallel Haskell is this weekend. Here's what they're working on
Scepticism's limits: on climate data manipulation claims
I taught myself around age 25. I learned Perl and Java, and had a position within about 6-8 months. I was fortunate to have some connections in the industry, and found what was basically an apprenticeship under a programmer who was brilliant, and also self-taught.

As another commenter pointed out, curiosity is a critical part of being self-taught.
Lifecasting should change rude behavior like this in our lifetimes. Just consider, if there is 5-10% risk of someone being an a..hole/criminal almost directly ends up at Youtube, media or the police.

We can look forward to a polite society.

(I think this argument was from Steve Mann, but my memory might have bitrot.)
Surely, someone has asked people in other countries what their experiences are with their iPhones on their carriers. Given that the rest of the world is on GSM (Korea excluded), we should pretty well know whose fault it is.
I'd be interested what the results of a Bartle Test poll would be on HN.

I'm an ESKA, which has always left me in that odd group of players who has never been satisfied by the core mechanics any MMOG. Most MMOGs cater to As, with a bit of S and K. The Es seem to be mostly ignored, perhaps because they'll never be satisfied by your standard World of Warcraft-copycat grindfest.
Maybe. If you think about successful serial entrepreneurs or executives, they could easily leave the game and live on a tropical island. There are many reasons to stay, like having an interesting life or wanting to change the world, but I think most have an innate desire to win.

I doubt it's a positive trait overall, but some outliers manage to channel it into something productive.
Here is a list of features that Yeti has that are either not in Python or not in Algol. That is, none of these features is in both Algol-60 and Python:

* static typing

* discriminated unions

* first-class functions

* immutability by default

* pattern matching

These are all present in both Yeti and SML.

Yes, Yeti is not SML, but I think it's much closer to ML and Friends than it is to any other language family, even Haskell or Scala.
Couldn't stand all the typos.
Somebody is asleep at the wheel at nytimes. The video that they linked to for "there's a map for that" is awful.

Here is a better version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCbYTrYD5y8
This is my fond hope. I don't know if we're capable of that (yet?) as a species.
I'm an iPhone user in the Netherlands, locked into T-Mobile. I frequently experience dropped calls. I give T-Mobile the fault... hmmmm
Can you read? I didn't call it a pyramid scheme. I called it a pyramid.
That is true only if you don't use the magic functions!
iPhone user for 2 years, in the UK, on O2. Never had a single dropped call or issue.

I've been to the US several times, and each time I'm amazed at the unreliable nature of both mobile cellphone networks, and landlines :/ The infrastructure simply isn't there yet.
But they are repeating PG's views. And they're doing it out of context.
The cost of the second microphone can be substantial. The cost of the CPU power may not be. You can get a very long way in noise cancellation simply by placing the two mics near each other and subtracting the signal of one from the other. See the noise-canceling entry of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone#Application-specific... (the last paragraph in the "Application-specific designs).

You don't even need a CPU for that, you can do that with simple electronics. Noise-canceling headphones are freakishly complicated, directional (what is often meant by "noise canceling") microphones are possible with very simple designs.

I wish I could google up a piece on signal processing but my google search is getting dominated by things I can buy.
And it is true that most people don't.

I think both have their place.
I get not signal in the house of my parents, my girlfriend and the most part of the village I'm from (which is in the middle of the 'Randstad'). T-Mobile's network sucks.
Facebook | Pixie Mixi
It's also interesting to think about what programming and software would really look like in Smallman's world. Clearly quite a bit different than the world most of us frequent.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

The basic idea of dual microphones to filter background from signal is pretty common.
So it's a way to call Haskell from Ruby? Where does the Trojan horse come in? Presentations don't work so well with just the slides.
I've owned and used two HTC phones and liked both. However, they were extremely different from each other, so just saying do you like an HTC is very broad. From what you've said, I expect you might not like the G1 which is lightweight (though I personally love it because of the physical keyboard), but would feel very differently about the other HTC I owned because it has much more weight to it and feels more substantial.
Irrelevant? In the 1990s, AOL bought loads of great Web companies! They only went wrong by doing the merger with Time Warner.
Much Japanese property was trading at sky high prices during their property bubble.
Hmm, so we started down this road with the invention of writing . . .
How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology: a Hunch Report
When people forget to save a document and close the program, among the "ha ha I'm so superior" replies are a few people advocating unpopular niche systems which are nice enough to autosave.

When people make mistakes and save them over the top, there among the smug laughter are a few people on the user's side reminiscing about long forgotten systems of old which have versioning filesystems by default so recovery is only a moment away.

I haven't seen any replies in this thread along those lines - everyone is putting it firmly on the system administrator or the user. Would it be so hard during an install for a program to say "and now enter an encryption password and an ssh server address where I can backup to nightly"? If it's so simple you can script it yourself in a few minutes, isn't it so simple that many/most systems should come with that themselves?

It's long past the time where "computer lost my data" "well you've only yourself to blame" should be considered an old fashioned attitude.
I don't know how much AT&T's network "rocks".

I have a blackberry bold and most calls get dropped at least once during my conversation (obviously this isn't true for calls that are <2-3 mins).

The 3G coverage is also dreadful. The phone will say "3g", but will time out when opening webpages with the blackberry's browser, using google maps, or trying to run the blackberry twitter app.

I get absolutely no service at my house. AT&T has been talking about a portable cell station that you can buy, then pay a monthly fee to use (wtf, at&t? You're going to offload traffic to my network connection at home, then charge me for the privilege of it?) for about a year now, but it hasn't materialized (if it has, I haven't seen it).

I live in Phoenix, which is a pretty large city. I would understand these things if I lived in a small town, but i don't. AT&T's coverage and their unwillingness to admit that there is a problem and that they are fixing it is unacceptable.
As far as I understand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics , the planner must be able to actively communicate to you before carrying it makes you a "cybernetic organism".
I quit Slashdot when I noticed that my local newspaper's website had the latest IT news FASTER than Slashdot.

And more relevant, too. Turns out I do not care at all about the latest SCO vs. Linux lawsuit.
Overstock CEO stalks critics on Facebook
Can you do a thread elsewhere about owning the restaurants? I'm fascinated by the food business.
I've been waiting for an Android phone without a physical keyboard. It needs a platform that's sleek and sexy to compete with the iPhone in the general consumer marketplace. People say they want a physical keyboard, but then they go out and buy 20 million iPhones.
I don't think programmers are really worth more as they age. Experience lets you add more value to a point (probably around 10 years), but lots of young programmers are equally if not more productive. Many are willfully ignorant of "business" concerns and make terrible managers.

It's not a scalable career for most people.

Making $200k+/yr is not especially hard in high cost of living markets, but it's also not a lot of money there. In New York, 22-year-old Analysts at Goldman make ~125k all-in and most live in crappy studio apartments.
Yes, I think more openness leads to better lives as Paul Buchheit opined recently. http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/11/open-as-in-water-fl...
There are a few Android phones without keyboards already (e.g. the HTC Hero, HTC Magic, and Samsung Galaxy) but I agree none of them has the build quality or polish of the iPhone.
Well, depending on what you want from it -- the curses UI and autocomplete implementation are very nice, but ipython has a lot of additional features that bpython isn't interested in implemented. I miss the ??function_name feature in ipython that shows the complete source code for a function or class, since the function header isn't always informative enough; I tend to use ipython's bash emulation pretty frequently too.
My multiple exobrains have been living in my bookshelf for a very long time!
Battery made of paper charges up
Indians are the backbone of the corporate software industry. They make the products and others do the branding and sales.

This happens with all the mass producing countries where labor is cheap; China has weak brands in every industry, and all their most successful products are sold under foreign brands. Japan, Korea and Taiwan used to be the same way. I say give China and India time, and pretty soon their works will develop their own cachet.
Zsh: The last shell you will ever need
Just delete your NYTimes cookie and then you won't have to subscribe.
The cooling effect is more possible and can also account for extinctions in the oceans as well. After the Krakatoa eruption for years the world had a cooler climate.
"And if some parts won't be touched with a 10-foot pole, why are they there anyway?"

Porting legacy windows apps that use those features, completeness and when did "because we can" stop being enough reason?
Now look at what fashionable girls do for dating : You meet someone in the bar, you Google his name, you ask your personal lawyer to count how much money he make..and then you choose if you go out a date with him. Google becomes our biggest obstacle of finding true love.

Google probably saved you from being manipulated by someone so cunning. Sheesh.
There are areas where I get great data service when nobody else is around. Then during peak hours data service is very slow or intermittent even though my signal strength stays the same. I'm not a telecom engineer, but it seems like they have too few towers for the number of subscribers in some areas or they don't have enough bandwidth in their backhaul.

Maybe both AT&T and the iPhone are bad, at least in my case.

When I travel to less populated cities, 3G data is always extremely fast; still I'd rather have a consistent 800 Kbps than 1500 when I'm lucky and 50 when I'm not.
Establishing our Following: Innovative new startup, website growth of 958%
I actually like my G1 better than my sister's Droid. The keyboard is better and I like the physical buttons rather than the touch ones for Menu, Back, & calls. The droid seemed slightly laggy when flipping screens, and I also like that the HTC only goes to landscape when you push out the screen.

I thought the same thing about the "feel" of the phone, at first, but 13 months later, the slider action and buttons and overall function of the phone are as good as when I bought it.

My next phone will hopefully be another HTC with a keyboard that runs Android 2.0 with no visible lagginess.
I've had exactly the same experience over here (Toronto, Canada, and also on Rogers' 3G network).

I can't remember having ever dropped a call on my iPhone 3G and the network is absolutely rock solid, and very very fast (using the Xtreme Labs speed test app, for example).

The logic of this article in compelling at first but doesn't stand up to evidence that the iPhone is quite good outside of AT&T.
Here's my anecdote. I'm an iPhone user in Canada o the Rogers network. My signal is very strong everywhere. I rarely see any less than a perfect signal, except when far away from metropolitan areas. Usually five bars, indoors and out. I may have had a dropped call over the last year, but I couldn't tell you when.

Last week I visited mountain view for Campfire One. In the three days I was there, I had two calls dropped on me. One of them was dropped while walkig around outside at the Googleplex. My signal often wavere between zero or two bars and five bars for no explicable reason. I would occasionally lose signal entirely inside buildings (my hotel room for one).

In my experience, a perfectly working iPhone in Canada becomes unreliable in California. Take from that what you will.
Http://www.imaios.com/en/e-Anatomy/Limbs/Planes-and-movements-Diagrams
He's not crazy, he's passionate about his cause, and whether you agree with him or not that passion has led to a lot of good. On the other hand advocating that someone should be "institutionalized" because you happen to disagree with their opinion is going quite a bit farther than Stallman goes.
This post reinforces that the use of dogs to control humans is disgusting.
Haven't heard much about them. The only ones that have gotten press are the G1 and Droid, both of which are bricks.

I'll have to check those out. I'm writing some Android software currently, but my phone is an iPhone. I would love to switch (or not switch, if iPhone starts allowing background processes).
Don't you mean they are mutually exclusive?
I think Samba enjoys some protection, at least on the EU, based on the interoperability requirements imposed on MS. Moving against it would be suicidal for Microsoft.

As for multimedia, I guess it's because the patents are not Microsoft's.

In any case, I think none is installed by default and most of multimedia stuff is not even on the default server. I am quite happy with whatever Nautilus calls "SSH" for quick stuff and NFS, because I learned it so long ago.
Getting lucky can significantly bolster your self-confidence and improve your chances. You also get to make some connections that can be reused.
An Introduction to the Z Shell
The Droid only looks like a brick in photos. When you play with one, turns out that it's about as thin as an iPhone 3G.

Now, the physical keyboard on it is crap, and I wouldn't buy one. But if they made a Droid with only the soft keyboard, I'd camp out.
I hope Wakemate can avoid these issues. I'm really looking forward to trying it.
Lucky for you 24 is the cutoff date from starting to learn programming. It has been scientifically proven that it is impossible to learn how to program past the age of 24.

Ok. I lie.

1. Select a language you would like to learn. Taking time to figure out which language to learn first shapes the way you will learn programming. Get advice from programmers. I would recommend one of three routes.

Route 1: (the low road) Learning languages like C/C++ or Java can be great for learning the base fundamentals. Then you can appreciate what fancy higher level languages do for you later.

Route 2: (the high road) Choose a language like Ruby or Python. These languages have a lot of magic and allow you to accomplish your goals in less lines of code. Higher level languages really make programming fun, IMHO.

Route 3: (the pretty road) If you are a visual learner, programming Flash's Action Script 3 or JavaScript would be a decent option. Learning Flash as a platform may be kind of distracting to accomplishing the goal of learning how to program, but it could be used as a visual way to learn programming.

2. Think of a project that will be fun. Don't set your sites too high.

3. Read a book or two first just to get some of the basics down. Don't get hung up with the drudgery of some of the contrived examples. Take what you learn as you learn it, and try to apply it to your project when possible.

(Personal Bias Alert! For your own sake, avoid PHP unless you want to learn some really bad habits. Also I would urge you to select an open source technology. Open source communities generally are more willing to help you learn from my past experience.)