skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have been building bridges for a lot, lot longer than they have been building software.

Also, you can go on all you want about how to engineer quality stuff, but if you ignore the economics of the situation, you'll end up pricing yourself out of the market by an order of magnitude in many fields. For instance, the web or mobile phone stuff I have been working on lately: it's important that it mostly works, and is reasonably priced. The cost of making sure it never, ever has any downtime or ever fails would simply not be worth it to my customers and clients.
::: BRGOL :::
Cheap Package Design Tricks People Into Dropping Motorola Droid On Floor
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?
Cats are easy, Darpa should aspire to simulate a dog's brain.

http://images.google.com/images?start=0&q=far+side+what+...

Edit: OK, cheap humor is not rewarded on HN. Here's one for the downvoters:
http://images.google.com/images?q=beyond+the+far+side
Having used that system, I'm surprised that in 2009 most companies still don't have something as useful. Shocking really...
These are false:

- Schools are for teaching. If only for the simple reason that as we grow older we need the younger generation to support us. Therefore, the adults of today have a very strong incentive to educate the next generation.

- Humans are not completely selfish. I'm not buying the Ayn Rand philosophy that everything ultimately has a selfish foundation. In times of crisis people act irrationally against their own self interest to help others.

- We don't have masters. It's not that difficult to chose a route through life where you earn your money independently. If you put your life on auto-pilot you do end up working for a boss (not a bi-implication), and for most people that's a pretty good deal.

- We don't have a lot of control over our behavior, but we can train our self control. Routine is an extraordinarily powerful force. With routine you can overcome some of your natural flaws.

- Many parents care more about their children than their careers. Witness parents quitting their job and selling their house to pay for the kids medical expenses. Most parents simply want to have both a family and a career, but this doesn't mean the career is the #1 priority.
"There is no such thing as altruism. Everyone is ultimately only interested in their own pleasure. Even those who appear altruistic are doing so because it makes them feel good. No one actually cares about anyone else."

Caring is an emotion. Desiring good for someone else is an emotion. How do you know if you are feeling altruistic feelings? You feel them. Anyone who tells me that I don't feel something that I do is mistaken.

There is an argument that the author probably meant to make, but didn't, that my altruism probably evolved as a way to increase my gene's likelihood of survival. That would have been a more interesting point. But even so, saying that evolution makes my actions non-altruistic is like telling me that I'm not really in love because love is just a way of passing on genes. Love may have evolved to help me pass on my genes, but that doesn't mean that what I'm feeling isn't love. Altruism may have the consequence of helping my tribe and my offspring survive, but that doesn't mean it isn't altruism.
This is not a problem for Shakespeare's legacy, since high literature is not meant for only one particular demographic group. Pop music on the other hand is targeted primarily to young people of a particular time and place, which makes it transitory and eventually forgotten.
Inside Apple IPhone
> if you ignore the economics of the situation

The classic software development triangle.

"The iron triangle refers to the concept that of the three critical factors scope, cost, and time at least one must vary otherwise the quality of the work suffers. Nobody wants a poor quality system, otherwise why build it? Therefore the implication is that at least one of the three vertexes must be allowed to vary. The problem is that when you try to define the exact level of quality, the exact cost, the exact schedule, and the exact scope to be delivered you virtually guarantee failure because there is no room for a project team to maneuver.

Software development projects often fail because the organization sets unrealistic goals for the "iron triangle" of software development:

* Scope (what must be built)
* Schedule (when it must be built by)
* Resources (how much it must cost)"

http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/brokenTriangle.html
Can Hybrids Crack Quantum Computing?
Introduction to Bioinformatics
Hiding evidence of global cooling
New article series at catonmat: Detailed Summary of MIT's Linear Algebra
If not Michael Jackson, do you think any 20th century musician will have historical permanence?

He probably comes after the Beatles and Elvis, but after that, it gets harder to come up with musical performers who made a bigger global impact.
That makes the assumption that failure of the company is something that the notability of "something interesting" would be judged on...

Which in my experience is not the case: if it was interesting or unique people will write about it - and then it is notable.

(wikipedia is not really for recording primary information; that makes it a little useless)
UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files
Ironically, this specific notion of high culture has become the epitome of "What You Can't Say."
Well, let's see...

#5 - there is definitely an evolved moral compass. See "Game Theory and the Social Contract".

Pretty much all of the economics-related ones show a lack of understanding of modern economics. There's more to the failure of communism than that the leaders were power-hungry. And many economists would object to the statement that "workers" are being taken advantage of. It's certainly not true that the "lower rungs of the ladder" are inescapable.

#11 might be true, but it's not clear. Because at least some of our evolution occurred in a social setting, it may be that imposed abstinence for those just out of puberty does have some use. Maybe not, but it's certainly not clear either way. Similarly, #15 could have some evolutionary basis: consider that the dad wants his potential grandchildren to have the best chance at survival.

#16 is false, and certainly shows an immature viewpoint. At the very least, the writer is doing a bad job of differentiating between types of love, but I think it goes much more wrong than that.

#19 (biological destiny) is mostly true, but not entirely.

#18, about women's talent for symbol manipulation, is false as stated: on average men and women are about the same. However, men have a greater standard deviation, meaning that more men are at the high (and low) ends of the spectrum.
+1

Software engineering is still an immature field. Civil engineers have known how to build a bridge that won't fall down for about 2000 years. We still haven't figured out how to write software that doesn't break.
German government officials trying to ban Google Analytics
You are contradicting yourself: nobody thinks it's even remotely realistic to give assurances with 0 margin of error. Of course it's expensive, of course it's difficult. It is likewise unrealistic for traditional engineers to do so - everyone knows that buildings will eventually collapse.

However, we do need some quality assurance which is more reliable than "this piece of software passes all the tests which guided its development" - which is a nonsensical statement that somehow TDD fans hail as absolute truth. It'd improve our applications and it'd improve our skills. I can't see how it's a bad idea, unless taken to the extreme.
http://280atlas.com/ from the makers of the Cappuccino framework (currently available as a $20 beta) is definitely among the cream of the crop at the moment.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/ is not a general-purpose programming environment, but its in-browser IDE is certainly top-notch.
Firms channeling apps to TV
IMO one of the great things about exploratory programming is that you don't have to trust your life to your code. It may annoy a lot of users, but the trade off (in being able to explore/experiment) is worth it.
Both you and the Reddit poster are overlooking the obvious evolutionary explanation. To a father, a daughter's eggs are a precious reproductive resource. A daughter who squanders her reproductive potential on lower-status mates is diminishing her father's genetic legacy. (This doesn't hold for sons, because they have a virtually unlimited reproductive capacity.)
Bag Filters
Filters, Water & Instrumentation, Inc. (FWI) provides Filters and Water Purification Systems for industrial clients in New England
> There is no reason to believe that there is any such thing as a soul. We are machines made out of meat. All we are is snuffed out the instant the brain dies.

The soul is specifically metaphysical. Claiming it doesn't exists because there isn't physical evidence is missing the point in a very stupid way.

> There is no substantive difference between humans and other animals. We might possess more of certain things, like intelligence, but there is not one thing we have that they do not, not one thing we do that they do not.

For carefully selected definitions of what's substantive, sure. Also, PETA and WSPA would be a fraction of their size if it was actually true that you can't say that.

> People only behave prosocially out of fear. Remove threats of retribution, and they become as selfish as they can get away with.

Prosocially vs. selfish aren't opposites, so the statement is shaky. Also, that's a core tenet of big-government advocates, and last I checked, they're alive and kicking, so it's hardly a taboo.

> The public education system is a day-care center. It exists not to teach, but to free up both parents to work.

Not true. That may be the current state of the system, and according to free market advocates, it's the only state a public school system can have, but it's not its purpose.

> Our economic system is set up to reward those who invest at the expense of those who work. This is because it is controlled by the former. Our entire culture is designed around ways of making people work all their lives to create as much value as possible, then give that value to someone else without protest.

It was maybe partly true when Marx wrote it 150 years ago, but certainly isn't any more. People choose regular jobs over entrepreneurship because jobs are much easier and safer, not because the investing classes are holding them down.

> Yes, we have masters. They own the houses we live in, the companies that make everything we use, the jobs that employ us and provide us with the means to live, every single source we get information to make decisions from. They are a small class of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. No, it's not a conspiracy. They didn't need to agree on it. They just all acted in their own best interest, and it happened. No, you will never join this class of people. The odds are astronomical against it.

Related to the above. No, you might not join the class of masters, but you can certainly become your own master. But it's hard and it doesn't come with a 9-5 and a monthly paycheck.

---

Also, none of the points are particularly disturbing. They might ruin the mood at carefully selected dinner parties, but that's hardly difficult.
That is because engineering is about repeating the same old shit again and again, whereas software development is new each time you do it.
Probably a flash cookie. Browsers don't clean those out.
Let's see: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, john Coltrane... to name just a few that will be talked about and listened to 100 years from now....
I have what I can best describe as "tunnel" observance.

On a large scale I am fairly un-observant (it can take me weeks to notice, say, a new shop on the high street even if I walk past it daily).

However for minutiae I am a great observer. I can usually describe things in very great detail.

People are a great example: if you asked me (after walking past them) what someone was wearing I might struggle. But I would be able to clearly describe facial characteristics, hair style, eye colour, gait etc. in great detail.

I'm a bit of an introvert but I cant remember what I score on the Myers-Briggs.
The history of Western art, literature, and science in the post-ancient world possesses more than enough justification for anyone to call it "high" culture.

If you can't make value judgments about Mozart, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, that's simply a tragedy.

I strongly recommend Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life."

To take a direct shot at relativism: I think it's quite possible to justify the West over the last 500 years as the most productive era for art and science in all of human history up until now.
Emergency safety reviews on 1,800 bridges in a region of the UK recently because they got wet:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8372775.stm

Yes people know how to build bridges that don't collapse arbitrarily, and people know how to build software that doesn't crash arbitrarily - when it's simple enough and exposed to a limited range of inputs and is built on a solid foundation.

Most software changes as it's used - bridges don't. A bridge never falls down because a lorry drives onto it, then goes into suspend mode because the battery runs low, then when it wakes up the lorry has gone without driving off the end. A bridge never has a painter working on it who then has to make their changes live and accidentally makes one of the lanes invisible.

When you put too many concurrent requests into a web server nobody can use it and they are stuck, with a bridge it's an everyday traffic jam and people see it long in advance and know detours around it and gets on with their lives.

If bridges were as complex as software, would they still be as reliable?
I was just using a random example to highlight the idea he is probably wrong in portraying that as an accurate assessment.

Now we have 3 ideas - I'm inclined to agree yours has a lot of bearing.
"Why would someone give up 50% of potential revenue when they can use adsense for search and keep 100% of the payout."

Is it just some type of "modular business tactic"?

So instead of being an entrepreneur for years and building up links based on hard won personal experience, one would prefer to plug into a ready made solution? Just as one might prefer the ready made whitedotbox affiliate scheme to learning the innards of the adsense system?

I wonder if it is simply profiteering on the lack of skills/knowledge outside of "industry hubs". For instance I am based in an isolated rural community. What business networks exist are difficult to break into and often don't have the vision/drive/momentum that comes as standard for more metro/cosmopolitan communities. (although this seems like a gross over-generalisation, and my networking skills might just be a lot worse than I like to think!)
Twitter-based BNO News partners with MSNBC to launch news wire service
"...targeting users who jailbreak is also targeting the only people that pirate since you have to have a jailbroken phone to pirate."

Bingo. You'll end up with your Cydia-enhanced version sitting next to your pirated retail version side-by-side on the Cydia store. If you want to target "pirates" you can't use traditional sales methods - they are a totally different channel.
What to do when the difference between your competitor and you is 1 function.?
I've been working on a SaaS app recently. The problem I've stumbled upon is that I'm not sure if people would pay for this if my competitor, Yammer is very popular, whereas my app is still being developed.
Basically the only difference is 1 functionality and pricing(we're not an enterprise)

Workflo is an easy way to collaborate with your team using a micro blogging platform. Workflo works on a very similar principal to Twitter. Our competitors include Yammer, Presently and HashWork. In the status updates, we let you post todo's, attach files to your status-updates, and direct messaging(such as @name: do this).

With workflo, it's really easy to set a todo for your teammate, for instance: "@pg todo: Please see the applications for #ycombinator-project #next-friday" will set a todo for PG telling him to see the applications for the project with the name "YCombinator Project" by next Friday.

I'm not sure whether I should continue developing it if the only thing between us and Yammer is that extra functionality. I've gone totally crazy on this project, to that point in which I looked at Yammer's design and thought, well I believe ours should look like this.
Actually neither mass culture nor "high" (literary/artistic) culture is really defining Western civilization, their equivalents were/are shared by anything that could remotely be called a civilization. The defining characteristics of Western civ are individual liberty, capitalism (economic liberty), and especially science. Science itself could be called intellectual liberty, intellectualism bound not by class or bureaucracy, but controlled only by the reality it seeks to understand.
> So let me ask a related question. Would your trust your financial assets to your code? How much would you wager that your code is correct?

Anyone who runs a business that's based on code, whether it's as an ASP or consultant do this on a daily basis. I trust my code to make value for my client so my client will pay me so I can pay my rent.
Advertisers attempt to poison online conversations.
A small detail Teachout doesn't mention is that "Civilisation" was funded by the British taxpayer, meaning it was a product of the socialism WSJ readers despise so much.
> we do need some quality assurance which is more reliable than "this piece of software passes all the tests which guided its development"

We do not necessarily need even that. The web site for the little antique bookstore in downtown Padova really doesn't - it doesn't even handle money. They're happy to get something that mostly works and fix the rare bug that does come up when it's noticed. The software responsible for safely guiding a 747 full of people into an airport at night, on the other hand, probably does something more in terms of tests/QA/provable correctness/whatever else makes it safer, even if it makes it significantly more expensive.

There's no contradiction, and I wasn't talking about TDD. My point is merely that you have to consider the economics of these things, and software projects vary to the extremes in terms of their importance and impact on our lives.
It's a pet peeve of mine to see

cat [one-file] | less

`less` takes a file as an argument.

less [one-file]

only requires you to run one program, and I/O tends to be really slow.
They're dumping it because its crap and doesn't work with other libraries
Torrents for 8.0-RELEASE are now available: http://torrents.freebsd.org:8080/
This seems perfectly on-topic to me, and reminds me of one of pg's essays on a very similar subject:

http://paulgraham.com/cities.html
I think the criticisms I made of Modha's work (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948248) also apply to the Blue Brain project. However, I think the Blue Brain project is more likely to become interesting.
I'm curious, have you seen enough C++ to know the differences between 1990's C++ and 2000's C++, and really prefer 1990's C++ because "C++ guys don't like it"?
The only reason I phrased my comment as a dismissive ad hominem was because this guy is a troll. A couple dozen intentionally offensive opinions presented as fact do not make incisive social commentary, and presenting them with no further citation or defense is not a sincere presentation. I have no interest in sitting here and making some point-by-point rebuttal to the first 27 insulting things that came off the top of some guy's head.
You can also expose a file in a one-shot webserver using netcat:

cat somefile | nc -q1 -l -p8081
This rather famous online video

http://www.quirkology.com/USA/Video_ColourChangingTrick.shtm...

offers a good test of observation skills and some comments by an astute psychologist about why people don't always observe everything that is in their visual field to observe.
Emerging technologies to watch in 2010
In case you hadn't heard about Desert Bus before, here's what they're playing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_&_Teller%27s_Smoke_and...
Quantitative & Qualitative Twitter Analysis
Pretty much all of the ones that start with everyone behaves a certain way for a certain reason.

>>There is no such thing as altruism.
Just because the author has no sympathy doesn't mean everyone has no sympathy.

>>Humans are adults at puberty.
Humans are not physically adults at puberty. Brain development isn't complete until around 20.

>>People, being adults at puberty, are ready to have sex at puberty.
Depending on your definition of "ready" this one is not true. Capable yes. Ready for all of the consequences resulting from no.

>>Most of someone's personality is formed during their first four years of life. If they are abused or neglected during this time, they are fucked up permanently, and there is nothing anyone can do to help them.

The psychology papers I have read that state this belief say six, but that is neither here nor there. Traumatic events at any age leave permanent marks on people, see PTSD. Abuse at seven is just as bad psychologically as abuse at four.

>>Fathers being suspicious of their young daughters' boyfriends and dates is really just sexual jealousy.
Again author lacks human emotions, just sad really.

>>Love is not eternal.
Attend an 80 year old person's funeral and talk to the surviving spouse. Infatuation may not last beyond 3 years, but that isn't what I define as Love.

>>Parents care less about their children than they do about their careers
Maybe his parents but not everyone's.
Schools are for teaching. If only for the simple reason that as we grow older we need the younger generation to support us. Therefore, the adults of today have a very strong incentive to educate the next generation.

The majority of jobs required to provide the support (aka mostly manual labor) does not require a particularly high level of learning.

I don't necessarily agree with the original statement but I think that is just as flawed.

Perhaps a better idea is that the current school system is designed to pen in kids during the day so parents can get stuff done (yep, that's paraphrased from a pg essay btw before anyone calls me on it :)) with the idea they will learn something in the process?

In terms of your last point I dont think that's as good a rebuttal either because they are edge cases - where other factors (such as percieved moral requirements) force the issue. Consider it on a more day to day basis and it is quite possible (were you shipped off to a child minder due to parents jobs/careers etc? I know I was).

I disagree with the original point (again) but I think the real reason it is wrong is because putting a career before your children's immediate interest is not necessarily a case of caring less about them - because there could be longer term reasoning.
There's something about Scaled Composites' style that's so cool. I'm sure functional characteristics come first, but their planes seem to have an unmistakable style of their own. I'd love to hear about their design process and how much thought goes into the aesthetic or if it's a natural consequence of their materials and project constraints.
1. My primary target of ridicule on this one was the apparently arbitrary cutoff of "three years."

2. I'm not a parent, but what you just described is not at all what normal people would mean when using the words "sexual jealousy."

3. I personally think it speaks to a pretty unbelievable sense of privilege; there are a hell of a lot of jobs that don't support a reasonable standard of living for a family of four on one income.
Adsense for Google GeoCoupons
Also available in iTunes:

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/mit.edu....