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Stories from January 13, 2009
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1.Why I Hate Frameworks (joelonsoftware.com)
126 points by Jebdm on Jan 13, 2009 | 125 comments
2.Failure (possibleprobable.com)
93 points by comatose_kid on Jan 13, 2009 | 31 comments
3.Open-plan offices are making workers sick (news.com.au)
90 points by astrec on Jan 13, 2009 | 71 comments
4.The History of Python (python-history.blogspot.com)
65 points by bockris on Jan 13, 2009 | 11 comments
5.Posterous had an amazing growth spike in December (dustincurtis.com)
63 points by alaskamiller on Jan 13, 2009 | 24 comments
📚. Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla (worksinprogress.co)
18 min read | by worksinprogress.co | saved 7 days ago | archive
6.When the Education Bubble Finally Pops (jamtoday.org)
61 points by babyshake on Jan 13, 2009 | 45 comments
7.Happiness 101 (nytimes.com)
48 points by tansengming on Jan 13, 2009 | 25 comments
8.Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy” (byorgey.wordpress.com)
47 points by jlhamilton on Jan 13, 2009 | 11 comments
9.At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard (nytimes.com)
46 points by tokenadult on Jan 13, 2009 | 46 comments
10.Clojure is running in a live system in a big veterinarian hospital (groups.google.com)
46 points by sctb on Jan 13, 2009 | 21 comments
📚. Does the Bitter Lesson Have Limits? (dbreunig.com)
8 min read | by Drew Breunig | saved 217 days ago | archive
11.Ask HN: Review my startup txtful - get stuff done on the web by sending a text
43 points by thomatas on Jan 13, 2009 | 60 comments

On a related note, I saw this on reddit this morning: http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server...

What's sad is that I have no idea if this is a joke or not.

13.Ask HN: Best Micro Payment provider?
40 points by dell9000 on Jan 13, 2009 | 26 comments
14.Dominos Pizza Tracking in Real-time using Python (noflashlight.com)
38 points by frisco on Jan 13, 2009 | 14 comments

I see. Test on animals first and then on humans. :D
📚. Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas? (joelonsoftware.com)
5 min read | by Joel Spolsky | saved 159 days ago | archive

This is true. Fake review sites are one of the top categories of spam here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Jaheem12

(You have to turn on showdead in your profile to see spam.)

17.Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise signup page (37signals.com)
32 points by brm on Jan 13, 2009 | 11 comments
18.Buckminster Fuller's Universe (jackcheng.com)
32 points by brm on Jan 13, 2009 | 13 comments
19.The Hackers Manifesto (spoiledtechie.com)
32 points by spoiledtechie on Jan 13, 2009 | 29 comments

Lets see I can use Rails and build something or I can spend my time building something like Rails from scratch. Not a tough choice. The top ten percent probably don't reinvent the wheel when they don't have to. Do you write all your own libraries too? Maybe your situation doesn't fit the mold but your claims about efficiency and programming prowess are a bit absurd.
📚. Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools (educationdaly.us)
7 min read | by Tim Daly | saved 296 days ago | archive
21.The bullshit of outage language (37signals.com)
30 points by sant0sk1 on Jan 13, 2009 | 31 comments
22.[SF] Justin.tv is hiring talented network engineers to take us from 100 gbps to 1 tbps... (justin.tv)
on Jan 13, 2009
23.[SF] Want to work on a massive live video site? Justin.tv is hiring talented software engineers (justin.tv)
on Jan 13, 2009

"Only when you dip down into the mediocre masses do you need this help."

And what is wrong with that? Some of us aren't the programming gods you are. If it helps people why get so high and mighty about it? I know with your superior intellect us philistines might seem dumb to you, but maybe you should stop writing about how smart you are when you can't even spell "programmers" right.


Having taken online classes, I can say that they are no replacement for being in a classroom and having interaction with a teacher and classmates.

It would be a shame to see all education move online for purely cost reasons.

📚. 2025 letter (danwang.co)
57 min read | by Dan Wang | saved 54 days ago | archive
26.[SF] Justin.tv is hiring sys admins (justin.tv)
on Jan 13, 2009

As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones.

The article really seems to treat depressive, angry, and other emotions as "negative", when in fact these emotions are really just neutral.

It is completely positive and OK to be depressed when someone dies or angry when you've been hurt, and treating them as 100% "negative" emotions is one of the reasons people can get stuck in the cyclical downward thinking:

1. "I'm experiencing depressive emotions"

2. "Oh no! These are negative and bad emotions. Therefore I'm not happy!"

(Brain releases more depressive feelings based on these thoughts)

3. Start at step 1.

Instead of fearing oneself, it's much easier to understand that all feelings are simply feelings, in the same way that all thoughts are simply thoughts. This ties in very closely to mindfulness and not just reacting to your mind, but engaging it and choosing what to do with thoughts and feelings.

Edit: Just to clarify, this is not to say depressive thoughts are always positive, but to encourage others to be aware and engage their feelings from a neutral perspective, then decide what to do with them. That is the point of mindfulness.

28.Tweet by Snail Mail (tweetbysnailmail.com)
23 points by ivankirigin on Jan 13, 2009 | 31 comments

Yes! ... I actually work from home, but I went into the office for two weeks this past August to get to know the guys I work for. Their office is an open plan (one big room with a long E[ish]-shaped desk and people sitting at various points along the E).

Two main things I noticed:

1. Office distractions were MUCH harder for me to deal with than home distractions. Distractions at home are generally things I self impose and can control with will power (i.e., not playing with the cat, not turning on the TV, not getting a snack, etc.)... but in the office there was stuff going on all around me and no way to shut it out.

2. The guy sitting next to me was sick -- when I got back to my home office two weeks later, so was I. (Granted, travel could have been a factor here -- I live in the US and their offices are a 20 hour plane ride away in Australia.)

Oh, I hear the bug went around the entire office after I left, too.


The transmission of illnesses would be greatly reduced if companies gave decent sick time benefits. At my company, my sick time is rolled into my vacation time. If I am take off work for an illness, it counts against my vacation time.

I once was sick with mono for 4 weeks and went to work miserable everyday. I did almost nothing but sit and stare at my monitor all day.

📚. The happiest I’ve ever been (ben-mini.com)
4 min read | by Ben Wallace | saved 7 days ago | archive

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