w3pm

Costco is free to pay their employees as high of wages as they'd like, no legislation required. This lobbying isn't out of their good will but a strategic play to hurt competitors that rely on lower wages. Such is politics.

Use the best tool for the job. Your advice is probably correct for whichever apps you've written in the past, but it's definitely not correct in the general case. Appropriate tools are highly dependent on what you're building. In my area of experience make has been more than adequate (crossplatform games and Erlang servers with rebar + make). Yes the syntax is arcane and ugly but it does a fine job.

"Pinterest, an online scrapbooking and social networking site with no revenue, became worth $1.5 billion in less than three years."

Does 'no revenue' qualify as a business model?

This was my first thought as well.

"... shortcut information for finding a particular object, such as a file system inode."

How do you guarantee that the client isn't handing you something malicious?

I don't want to hear about someone apologizing for an offensive Twitter post. Go ahead and keep downvoting me for expressing an opinion -- I'm sure I'm not the only one with similar feelings :)

--> To respond to the posts below: I think the original post is fine, I didn't make this comment there. Hearing about that is interesting and is a fine example of how easy it is for users with social capital to abuse it, a reminder we need. Seeing two threads containing blog posts of people apologizing? I'm not sure I actually care, I think my learning and interest ended after reading the original thread. Now we're firmly in noise territory.

Why is this on the front page of HN? Anyone read http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/trouble-with-social-news.h...?

Unfortunately, that article is spot-on. I want to be reading industry news, not someone's social gossip. Specifically, I want to read articles about optimizing Erlang, the latest developments in NoSQL databases, developer war stories, and changes in the funding landscape. I don't want to hear about someone apologizing for an offensive Twitter post.

I think we need a separate category called 'industry gossip' for this kind of drama.

True, and this is my biggest problem with writing optimized code in C -- it takes a lot of guessing and inspecting the generated assembler and understanding your particular platform to make sure you're ACTUALLY utilizing registers and cache like you intend.

If there were some way of expressing this intent through the language and have the compiler enforce it, that'd be fantastic :)

That said, there's really not a better solution to the problem than C, just pointing out that even C is often far less than ideal in this arena.

I'm definitely purchasing!

I've read the online version twice now and it's been an invaluable learning tool. I started with a very shaky understanding of functional programming and LYSE kept me engaged and learning the entire time. After reading and doing some experimenting, I have a solid enough foundation now to develop professional projects in Erlang. I think my only complaint would be the chapter on FSMs... a FSM is probably not the tool I would have used to solve the example problem ;)

Thanks again!

I think you're missing the joke. Most of these apps are some nth-derivative of those industries. Instead of "make me dinner" it's "an app to aggregate apps that help me find someone to make me dinner, plus social networking." At some point the value-add is so small it's truly a "first-world problem."

I am very close to donating! This describes exactly how I feel about the Silicon Valley publicized on HN. Surely there are plenty of start-ups solving real problems, hard problems -- what can we do to make sure those make the front-page more often? I guess all of the Instagrams getting acquired for hundreds of millions doesn't help.

If there were a visual programming environment that was actually faster, simpler, and more productive to use than typing, fine, I'm sure we'd all use it. I don't understand what his argument is. There ISN'T such an environment, so why is he arguing against the current state-of-the-art (text)?

I understand the idea of treating them like pixels, so if a fan dies or a NIC card dies, no problem, just stop using that Mini. But what about memory corruption or other issues that are more difficult to detect? Normally server hardware has things like ECC memory to prevent these issues, but in this case a Mini with bad RAM could intermittently corrupt data for some time before it's noticed (if ever).

Not everyone works on products requiring 24/7 support. We also take a mandatory 1.5 week company break around the December holidays -- it's fantastic!

Agreed. What I've seen happen is the company becomes destructively divided into two camps: Those who have a slightly too healthy work-life balance and take liberal amounts of vacation, and those who have a tendency towards work-aholism, take little vacation, and grow to resent the first group as a result.

What works much better is to just decide on what's an acceptable amount of vacation, say 3 weeks, and tell everyone that's what they get; take it or leave it.

If it's "REALLY EASY" and "cheaper & faster" to build an internet or mobile business that can potentially gain millions of users, this begs the question, is this valuable?

Every app or service which attains a million users reduces the impact and worth of attaining a million users on the next app or service.

Where is the value today?

There's a fixed amount of labor capital in the US. Who decides how it should be allocated? Let's pretend you believe we need to hire more teachers. Are you right? If you were the government, you'd wave your hands and make it so. But are you wasting labor on teachers we don't fully utilize? Perhaps we could have really benefited from additional plumbers. How can we know?

The only known way to answer those questions is by asking the capital markets. We all share the goal of best utilizing every citizen to raise our collective standard of living. More broadly, it is in everyone's best interest to efficiently use every type of scare capital resource we are afforded. Waste helps no one.

Now, the fact that the capital markets are distorted and borderline useless today is another discussion. Higher taxes won't solve that problem either.

Agreed. Mr. Buffet is free to donate as much of his 'tail wind' wealth as he chooses. But please, hands off of my wallet.

You misunderstand the context of efficiency. We're talking about efficiently allocating limited capital resources. This is done by 'prices.' The government by definition cannot efficiently allocate capital because there exists no market signal from capital consumers as to how the scarce resources should be best utilized. The government can only guess and spend.