ghiotion

I don't get this article. The author compares 37signals to Southwest in their refusal to grant seating assignments, baggage transfer and in-flight meals. However, he makes a good argument that Southwest knew better than their customers what they wanted. They want amenities, but not at the expense of cheap airfare and on-time flights. Doesn't this prove that Southwest does, in fact, know what their customers want better than the customers know what they want? Can't you make the same claim about 37signals? It's like the old cliché: don't give the customer what they ask for, give them what they need.

No lisp? No arc? ;)

Seriously, that's really cool. I want to break it now.

django.

> Have you ever seen THX 1138?

I have. It's shocking to see Robert Duvall so young. I saw [Edit: not One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but To Kill a Mockingbird -- duh] recently and I couldn't believe he was Bo Bradley.

Anyway... I've found the people on here to be a bright group. Even when I post comments that get downvoted, I understand the reasons. Frankly, losing my karma doesn't bother me too much. As long as you can make your case intelligently, you'll be fine. For example, I made a comment defending spanking (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127794) which I knew wouldn't be a popular stance. However, my approach was measured and, even though the majority disagreed, the comment itself wasn't viciously downvoted. The internet tends to distort one's sense of humanity. The bulk of the people out there are reasonable, the existence of 4chan notwithstanding.

I think I understand where you're coming from and I agree with you that good software should be simple and easy to use/understand. And, I think HN is. At it's heart, it's simple software. My point was that the software doesn't stand in isolation; the community shapes and molds the behavior of the software. In a very real sense, the community is the software. HN lives (and dies) by how interesting the people who use it are.

> the system shouldn't require people poking around the blog to figure out what will work or not.

I don't agree with that. The Internet has allowed way to many folk's inner Id (i.e. Id, Ego, Superego) to run a muck. They see some snippet of something or other that offends their delicate sensibilities and they go apeshit in the comments. HN is based on what should be a simple idea: don't say anything in the comments that you wouldn't be willing to say to someone in person. There are variants on this theme: be thoughtful, don't be abrasive, [perhaps] keep your politics to yourself, etc. If someone gets riposted for their comments they ought to ask themselves, what am I doing wrong? Not, what's wrong with the community. If they're incapable of doing that, they probably don't belong here in the first place.

Oh man, if they could pull this off, that would be so great. It causes me physical pain to have to shell out $100's to VeriSign for certs.

This falls safely into the Uncanny Valley:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120425

http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings20...

Fair enough. However, I'm probably going to state what will be an unpopular opinion but one which is, I think, nevertheless true: spanking a child teaches a valuable lesson. I hardly ever do it, and I never do it as a punishment to be meted out later (as in, wait 'till your daddy gets home, then you're going to get it!). In the case where you've got a child who's prone to hit, I think it's reasonable to hit them back. Not with the same force, but it's a valuable lesson to learn that if you hit someone, you're going to get hit back. I don't want my kids to learn that they can physically intimate someone without consequence. Lacking that negative reinforcement, I _think_ you've got a bully in the making.

Man, just go with your gut. I've got two kids, 6 and 1.5 (both boys) and they're night and day different. The best advice is to listen to you instincts. You know your kids better than any one else. If it doesn't feel right, it ain't right.

One caveat: ignore any advice that says you shouldn't get your kids vaccinated. The science doesn't hold up and, even if it did, it ignores the concept of relative risk (i.e. you're statistically more likely to be maimed by an uncontrolled case of measles than to get Autism from the MMR vaccine).

Nope, I just reread it. It's as bad as I recall.

Man, based on the overall negative response this comment generated, perhaps I need to go back and reread the posting. I'm not above thinking that I'm never incorrect <-- that's a triple negative, for those that are counting.

For fuck's sake. Shouldn't I have received this as a forward of a forward of a forward of a forward (do I need to go on?) with the subject line CARPE DIEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Come on guys, aren't we better than this? Can't we transcend cliché?

I measure out my life in elevator rides to the 9th floor of the crappy office I work in. That's why I started taking the stairs. Nevertheless, +1 for an T.S. Eliot reference.

Oh man, if I could give out 10 points for a T.S. Eliot reference, I would. Much love to you. The Four Quartets rivals Hamlet in its intricacy and attention to the human condition. And, it's about 1/10 the size! What a bargain!

It's interesting there was so much antipathy towards the Vote-Up-If posts. I found them annoying, but I could live with them. Personally, what ruined reddit for me was Ron Paul, politics, and all the 911wasAnInsideJob folks. I could even live with the over-abundance of LOL cats and flicker links. But the overall nuttiness of the site simply turned me off.

Don't get me wrong, I like politics and I personally think Ron Paul has a lot going for him. But I didn't start reading the site for its political bent; I started reading it for the interesting links and the tech stuff. I'd simply like to get my political news elsewhere. With the bastardized reddit, I couldn't get away from politics, even with the introduction of sub-reddits.

Huh, is that true? I've found that if I can't sit and devote at least one hour uninterrupted, I'm totally useless at coding. Perhaps that's a restriction of the language I'm using (Java) and the overall suckiness of the apps I'm working on tho.

I've always meant to pick that up. Looks like google books has a decent online copy:

http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=godel+e...

I had a buddy of mine in highschool who used to bring that book with him every time we took LSD. Of course, he's now got his Ph.D. in physics from Purdue.

See, this is why I love this place so much. I'd never heard of Church Numerals before. From the wikipedia entry:

>Many students of mathematics are familiar with Gödel numbering members of a set; Church encoding is an equivalent operation defined on lambda abstractions instead of natural numbers.

Utter clarity. Or, at least as clear as the python code the original post points to :-)

I love this, but it's an awful lot of complexity to print '9' to stdout. The first time I ran it through a python interpreter, I thought I made a mistake.

My issue with rails is one of tone. There's something very off putting about the use of the word "evangelist" in the rails community. Everyone I've spoken to who uses rails gets this far-away, misty-eyed look when they talk about the framework. I love programming as much as the next guy, but there's nothing out there that inspires this kind of fanatical devotion in me.

>Of course, you'd have to know how to produce horoscopes

It's easy. Pull a bunch of random, vague shit out of your ass. I bet someone could write a wicked horoscope generator, kinda like the postmodern essay generators: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

I have no idea if this works as advertised, but those are some impressive looking metrics.

http://munin.ping.uio.no/ping.uio.no/vodka.ping.uio.no.html

Think I'm going to try installing this. I've got homegrown scripts to monitor a lot of this stuff and I've used nagios in the past. But it's pretty cool to see it all laid out like that.

I used to work for a small boutique testing/QA shop. They took this approach with almost all their internal documents. In order to get people to actually read and absorb new documents and/or presentations, they would deliberately salt the content with one falsehood. It was a very effective technique.

"Oh, I get it! I get jokes." -Homer Simpson

It's confusing, at best, to view yourself in opposition to another human being. You've had an account on here for 369 days and still are comfortable viewing yourself in terms of what you're not. I'm NOT Rupert Murdoch --- 'cause he SUCKS!

It just seems a little... silly.

convert everything to lisp?

Thanks, but you'll understand if I choose not to take my advice from someone who misappropriates Richard Stallman's initials as his user id. Looks like Linus is available. Any takers?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=linus

I was attempting to point out that this post has all the qualities of spam. It's vague, it uses symbol repitition ($$$), non-standard abbreviations (opp), and seems like a scam.

We're offering this $$$ opp, sell vi@gr@ from home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, why is this on the front page? I hate down arrows, but this post makes me desperately wish I had the option.