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"I would think that the real problem is Microsoft's unwillingness to become something completely new, something other than Windows and Office."

Inability, perhaps. Unwillingness? You're out of your mind.

Microsoft has had their fingers in smartphones, music players, search engines, touch computing, web mail, [you name it] for YEARS. And they are not just dabbling... they have poured billions into these areas, trying to come up with something that gains traction.

Microsoft doesn't make "the occasional try" at innovation, they are a veritable firehose of attempts to innovate. Microsoft Research is HUGE (and well respected within the research/academic community) and as I mentioned above they spend billions every year trying to develop new products and break into new markets.

The fact that Microsoft's efforts in this area have been largely unsuccessful over the past decade doesn't mean they aren't trying or aren't willing.

As far as I'm concerned, net neutrality is always relevant. Limewire is merely a client built upon the gnutella network. It did nothing to promote illegal filesharing and actually did about as much to discourage it as it could (through warnings, mandatory checkboxes, popups, etc.) short of monitoring traffic.

This ruling is really only one or two steps away from a court mandating that all ISPs monitor network traffic for unlicensed content and restrict it accordingly (since they are enabling piracy just as much as Limewire was).

I know Limewire has been around for a long time and all the cool kids moved on to other filesharing networks and technologies long ago, but I think this news is significant and troubling.

The fact that the music industry has managed to shut them down is just one more lost battle in the net neutrality war.

So? Microsoft has never charged for any version of IE.

The problem is you're not "simply mentioning Hacker News in the post title", you're running an experiment about the effects of mentioning Hacker News in the title. Unfortunately, your experiment has a few flaws.

First of all, others might upvote this post simply because they're intrigued by the experiment itself (or for any number of other reasons) and not because of what is or isn't in the title. Secondly, your sample size is one and there is no control group (that I know of).

If you're truly interested in studying this, might I suggest reviewing historical hacker news submissions and, after controlling for as many other effects as you can (author reputation, time of day, other keywords in title, etc.), measure the statistical impact of having the words "Hacker News" in a title. It might be a bit of work to gather, parse and analyze the data you need, but I'm sure the community would be interested.

The price levels of everything except for running an instance for an hour have dropped significantly since launch. This includes bandwidth (the pricing tiers used to be $0.18/$0.16/$0.13 per GB and have since fallen to $0.17/$0.13/$0.11 with the addition of a fourth tier at $0.10/GB), S3 storage & requests (used to be $0.15/GB for storage and $0.20/GB for requests, now is $0.12 - $0.15 for storage and $0.10 - $0.17 for requests), Simple Queue Service (the changes here are more complex but Amazon writes "Under the new plan, 76% of customers with bills greater than $1 would have received lower bills, saving an average of 71% each compared to their actual bill", so it's generally much cheaper), Simple DB storage (used to be $1.50 per GB-month, now is only $0.25 per GB-month), even the Cloudfront CDN has already gotten cheaper since its very recent launch date (the lowest priced tier used to be $0.09 per GB and they've since added tiers from 5 to 8 cents per GB).

So while you're right that the instance-hour cost has remained flat since the launch, the actual costs of using the AWS platform as a supercomputer or server farm has fallen dramatically.

I just happened upon your response and I can't tell if you realize how much you're twisting the facts to support your conclusions or not. I suspect you don't, so let me help illuminate where your argument goes wrong.

"Higher tax rates for the upper brackets don't lead to less taxes paid by the poor - they lead to more taxes paid by the poor."

You're confusing correlation (or, perhaps more accurately in this case, coincidence) with causation here. You correctly point out that "the fraction of tax revenue paid by the richest 1, 5, and 10% are much higher now than they were when the top tax rates were higher", but this obviously can only be the case because the income gap has widened. Despite paying lower marginal rates than they have through much of recent history, the richest 1, 5 and 10% of Americans now make so much compared to the other 90% of Americans that they still account for a larger share of revenue. If the income gap had remained stable or shrunk, the opposite would be the case. Now don't get me wrong... I'm certainly not anti-income gap and I have no agenda around redistributing wealth. I'm simply explaining why your statement is dead wrong.

What I do have an agenda around is making the tax burden distributed in the way that is best for society (and, thereby, individuals within that society, including myself). I feel that this involves heavily graduated taxation, despite the fact that I'm in that uppermost bracket. I'm not being selfish and looking for a handout and I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with making obscene amounts of money... I simply feel its better for society to impose higher taxes on those who can more easily afford it. Warren Buffett (and countless others) agree with me. You obviously don't, but that's no excuse to twist facts to support your agenda.

I also think it's funny that the simple 3-column example that took you 30 minutes to put together has exactly the same shortcomings that are discussed in the original article (for instance, try setting the background color of one of the sidebars or swapping their order in the markup without changing the CSS).

It's true that you can order the markup however you want and write the CSS to make it look right, but the key point is recognizing that (unless you position everything absolutely) there is still no true separation between the markup and the CSS (at least where layout is concerned). If they were truly independent, then it wouldn't matter what order the elements appeared in the markup... the CSS would lead them to render the same way on the screen every time.

It's worth pointing out that there is true independence between the markup and CSS where styling is concerned (and this is where CSS shines). If you style the background, font, opacity, whatever of a particular element and then move that element to a different location within the markup, the element will still look exactly the same (unless the new position in the DOM subjects it to other CSS rules that override the old ones).

I'm rambling a bit here, but all I'm really trying to say is that CSS has its place in the web development toolbox, but old-school tables often have the edge when looking for a layout that just works.

I agree with Joel here: Bob is being unfair. Here's what I heard Jeff and Joel say when I listened to their podcast:

Quality matters, but there are other things that also matter, such as actually getting working code written. Some of us (and I've personally struggled with this for a long time) have a hard time letting go of our quest for perfection and settling for shipping code that's imperfect but works. When Jeff says that "quality just doesn't matter that much," what I took this to mean is: quality matters, but it matters less than we sometimes feel like it does. And that doesn't mean he's condoning writing crappy code; he's simply saying that we tend to overvalue this abstract concept of quality and that can have a crippling effect on our productivity.

Joel focuses on dogmatic adherence to development methodologies/principles as an example, specifically testing. I got the impression that he thinks testing is great and it has its place in the software development ecosystem. It tends to increase software quality and there are certain types of software for which it is really, really important (Jeff mentions framework code as an example). That said, taken to an extreme, testing can get in the way of getting things done... getting working code written and out the door / live on the server / whatever. It can also get in the way of modifying working code, as intentional changes to the way that code works always breaks some percentage of your unit tests, just as a regression will. And while catching unintentional regressions is great (and one of the best reasons you should unit test), constantly having to rewrite your tests every time you change the behavior of an internal class can be a real drag on your productivity. And that can be bad.

The key is to avoid being overly dogmatic in your adherence to development principles. Instead, be pragmatic and find a balance. Test enough to ensure adequate quality (whatever that happens to be for your product), but no more. Otherwise you're just doing yourself (or your employer) a disservice.

Never confuse marginal rates with average rates.

I didn't... I clearly stated that those were the top marginal rates and further down in my comment, I noted the difference between what someone making 400K would pay marginally and on average.

When folks don't spend their money, they buy dumb.

I don't understand this comment at all... please explain.

If it's so patriotic [to pay taxes], why do you want to exclude people from it?

I, like Buffet, Gates and many others, believe that those of us who are in a position to pay 40% of our income and still live in extraordinary comfort should do so. Those who aren't in such a position shouldn't be expected to do so. I don't have rich parents and I started out relatively poor... if it wasn't for low tax rates when I was broke and not making much, it would have been much, much harder for me to make a success of myself. Now that I'm doing better, I'm happy to pay it forward to the next generation struggling to make something of themselves and make everyone in the country better off a result. Even from a purely selfish viewpoint, graduated tax brackets make sense.

One thing you can do about it is to tax a commodity that acts as a proxy for the negative externality in question. For example, we could tax fuel sources relative to the amount of pollution and/or greenhouse gases that are produced, on average, when they are burned. So coal would have a given tax rate and gas would have another and propane another... this would capture the environmental cost of consuming those fuels in the price.

Unfortunately, such a simple and effective solution is politically very unpopular, which is why we have yet to see it passed into law. People want to take care of the environment, as long as it doesn't cost them anything. Well, most people anyway.

Except for pollution the cheaper one really is better for the environment.

This is actually a great heuristic, but pollution is only part of the story. A more general (and correct) statement would be "excluding externalities (including pollution) the cheaper one really is better for the environment".

Externalities are basically costs or benefits (to society, the environment, etc.) that aren't reflected in the price paid for an item. One really important thing to note is that externalities extend far beyond pollution and can be both positive and negative.

Pollution is one of the more visible negative externalities that get discussed, but there are plenty of others (for example, driving a car involves a host of negative externalities in addition to pollution such as increased road congestion (longer commute times, more fuel burned in traffic, more accidents)).

There are also plenty of positive externalities that often get ignored. Take windmills, solar panels and hybrid cars. The positive externalities associated with manufacturing these items include lower future manufacturing costs for such items (and lower prices and environmental costs as a result) and investment in R&D aimed at making electricity and/or transportation cheaper (both in terms of environmental and financial costs). So even though solar panels may currently be losing proposition environmentally, there are positive externalities that make buying solar panels today (and thereby moving the industry forward) a Good Thing for the environment.

I would highly recommend against just paying yourself just cost-of-living. A low salary and high dividend is a big-time audit flag for the IRS... if your salary AND your dividends are low, then there's no problem.

You state that your company is profitable. In this case, if you pay yourself a low salary and get audited, the IRS can (and will) retroactively adjust your salary to whatever THEY feel is reasonable and comparable for a CEO of a successful small company. Then you will owe back taxes, penalties and interest on whatever amount they determine you cheated them out of. The process isn't very democratic and getting audited is a HUGE pain, so I'd recommend going with something reasonable in the 100K range to avoid scrutiny.

If this guy actually sent that note to his employees (and I don't doubt that he did) he is absolutely a passive aggressive, condescending dick... couldn't have put it better myself. He's also a whiner and an idiot who obviously doesn't trouble himself with facts or history.

First of all, Dick (which is what I'll call the author, since I don't know his name) writes: If you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steamrolled the constitution, and will have changed its landscape forever.

Within the context of the article, Dick isn't referring to any actual steamrolling of the constitution that has taken place at the hands of the Bush administration (as long as there are terrorists out there... and there are always terrorists out there... it's apparently un-American to defend the Constitution, civil liberties, etc.). No, in the article, Dick is referring to changes in the tax code that the Obama administration has proposed (though they may not act on them for a year or two).

The funny thing is that Dick appears to believe that these tax hikes will be unprecedented. He believes they will streamroll the constitution and change its landscape forever. In fact, all Obama plans to do is return the top two tax rates to what they were in 2000 (and throughout most of the 90's). Taxes will still be lower than they were in 2000 because he plans to leave the other brackets (which are now at lower rates than they were in 2000) untouched. Even the wealthiest 1% of households (with an average income of $1.6 million per year) will pay less than they paid in '93-'00. So the idea that Obama's tax plan will streamroll the constitution and change its landscape forever is hogwash. His proposed taxes are lower than they were just 8 years ago and in any case, there is absolutely nothing unconstitutional about taxes. I've read the constitution; obviously this guy hasn't.

Even stronger evidence of the ridiculousness of this claim can be found if we look at history. Let's look at the top marginal Federal tax rates seen in recent history:

50% (1982-86) 70% (1965-85) 77% (1964) 91-92% (1946-63) 94% (1944-45)

Under Obama's plan, the highest marginal tax rate starts at an income of $357,700 (in 2008 dollars) and will only be 39.6%. And it's important to note that this is the marginal rate, not the average rate. Someone making $400,000 won't be paying 39.6% of her income to Uncle Sam, she'll be paying 31.6%, making the absurd assumption that she has no deductions. In reality, she'll almost certainly be paying less.

Finally, I'd just like to point out that two people with perhaps the highest tax burdens in the United States (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) both support Obama and his tax hikes. In fact, Buffet has said it's ridiculous how little tax he is expected to pay. I tend to agree, especially considering our budget deficit (not to mention our national debt). I for one would be happy to pay higher taxes... if I'm doing well, a large part of that success is owed to the country that provided me with my education and the infrastructure and opportunities to make a success of myself. I'd like to see that education and infrastructure get even better. I'd like to see poor kids get preventative health care. It may not be a popular sentiment, but I agree with Biden: paying taxes is patriotic.

Whether you'd like to believe it or not, there are a bunch of smart guys who still work for Microsoft. Some really smart computer scientists actually prefer a steady, high salary in a company that's treated them well for a decade over the chance to make it big or go bust trying.

I've never worked for Microsoft and I doubt I ever will, but I have interacted with some really smart folks who do.

All I'm really getting at is the fact that you dislike the business tactics, operating systems, office applications, or corporate culture of Microsoft doesn't mean you should assume they don't have anyone smart working for them.

Yeah, I figured. I just didn't want others coming away with the impression that C# is more concise than Haskell or Python. I mean, I love lambdas as much as the next C# programmer, but there is still a fair bit of clunky syntax to deal with when using C#'s great new features.

I hate to nitpick, but this isn't comparable to the author's code. You're including empty descriptions and your output string will begin with a newline. These seem like small details, but they make a big difference in the conciseness with which you can write the statement.

The author's C# example predated the release of LINQ, which makes the C# syntax much more like the Python's. The author's code:

string.Join("\n", mylist.ConvertAll<string>( delegate(Foo foo) { return foo.Description(); }).FindAll( delegate(string x) { return x != ""; }).ToArray());

can be rewritten as:

string.Join("\n", (from f in myList where f.Description() != "" select f.Description()).ToArray());

which is super-easy to read and understand. Maybe not as concise or pretty as Python or Haskell, but definitely a step in the right direction.

Others' comments that the author should consider F# are well founded, as it integrates seamlessly with other .NET-based code (such as C#) and is a pretty great language. However, it's worth noting that the post was written in 2006, well before F# was widely known about or distributed.

papa, this is off-topic, but your site's "ajax_updates_iframe" architecture needs some serious attention. As it stands now, each time it's updated (every few seconds) it creates a new entry in the browser's history (at least Firefox 3's... haven't tested others).

This totally mangles a user's history... after just a few minutes, every entry in my history was fanpop, which I was not at all happy about. I'm sure this upsets others too and there are ways around it (iframe within an iframe, for example, which doesn't affect history). Just FYI.

I'd argue that you can learn more from internalizing success, simply because I suspect the domain of things you can do wrong when starting a company is much larger than the domain of things you can do right.

If you fail and learn not to do some of the things that led to the failure, there are likely still many more things you have yet to learn that may lead you to fail in the future (assuming you don't repeat your mistakes). On the other hand, if you succeed and learn from it, then you can apply some of the things that contributed to your success to future endeavors.

I'd argue that this may be one reason you see so many serial entrepreneurs... reflecting on what contributed most to their successes allows them to achieve similar successes over and over.

I'm not suggesting learning from your failures isn't valuable... it absolutely is. I'm simply suggesting that learning from your successes may be more valuable.

I only posted this because when I read it, I thought it was asking whether Steve Jobs was a lisp hacker. Sadly, it's naught but a vapid discussion about whether he has a lisp.

this isn't evil. there's a very real chance that google will lose the suit if they take it all the way, so settling at least buys them the ability to go forward with their book indexing project and protects them from a potentially very large legal liability. it's not like google set out to strike an exclusive-right-to-copy deal.

I agree that it's very easy to "misspeak" in C++ or C. It's even easier to mislead or obfuscate what's going on (i.e. write correct code that others can't easily understand). So this sort of documentation is great and I applaud you for adopting it.

That said, the fact that such extensive documentation is necessary (or at the very least nice) suggests to me that you'd be better off using a cleaner, more powerful <http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html>; language that: (1) documents itself to some degree through more elegant syntax (2) takes care of low-level tasks that clutter and confuse otherwise clean code (resource allocation, memory management, etc.) and (3) requires less code to do the same thing, which means fewer lines to document.

There are a bunch of great languages out there that are far more powerful (in terms of abstraction) than C++ or C. Haskell, Lisp, ML, F#, to name just a few. You might consider checking some of these out if you haven't already.

Even in the case of a database that is only used by a single application, there are plenty of circumstances when it's better to interface with an abstract data model rather than the bare database schema.

One reason could be a desire to keep your database (somewhat or totally) normalized, while also being able to make queries against more natural (for the programmer) abstractions. It's rarely the case that all of a given user's information is stored in a single table (and for good reason... read up on normalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization) if you're not sure why), but it can sure save a lot of programmer time if your data model acts like it's all in a single table.

The case of multiple applications or systems talking to a single database isn't really all that different from a single application talking to a database, unless you only have one database call in your entire application. As soon as you're talking to the database in more than one spot in your code, unless you're careful, you start running into the brittleness/dependency issues described by the author.

Even if you're the only one working on a given application, in three months you'll have little chance of remembering every dependency created by every database interaction in your application. Abstracting things with a data model won't fix all of the issues addressed by the author of the article, but it sure does make it easier to address them.

Facebook does "attract people's attention", but it does far more than just that. Attracting attention is important to get users to make their first visit, but if Facebook doesn't provide something valuable, how do you explain the unbelievable amount of repeat traffic it sees?

I know dozens of non-tech-savvy people who visit Facebook every day. I know people who check Facebook more often than their e-mail. I certainly have issues with aspects of Facebook as well and everyone on this board probably has a list of things they'd change if they were in charge (I know I do), but Facebook's breakneck growth and absurdly high visitor loyalty show that they absolutely produce something of value.

Sadly, yes, unless your site is aimed solely at technologically savvy users. Or even technologically awake users.

Sad as it is, most sources indicate that IE still has 70-75% of the browser market share overall, and ~40% of IE users are still on IE6. So roughly 30% of the web browsing market is on IE6, which is a rather large subset to simply ignore.

Like it or not (and none of us do), the bulk of sites out there are stuck with supporting IE6 for the near future.