skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are some of my notes:

- It's hard to get a community going, and many of the sites what used SE couldn't do it.

- Joel says charging was an impediment.

- Building on someone else's platform is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Businesses that were built on SE will have to find a new platform (meta.stackexchange.com has some good threads on that.)

- Joel raised money, but isn't ready to announce from whom or how much.

- Only 20-40 SE sites had any significant traffic.
How's calling go from Python (and vice versa)? Did you have to roll something or is there something already available?

Python for UI and non-perf sensitive stuff and Go for the under-the-hood stuff seems like the perfect mix for my future pet projects(having not used Go yet; perhaps that will change).
"It's all about expectations with the iPad."

My thoughts exactly. Purely as a reading device, it will be fantastic for scientific papers which are usually in hard formatted PDFs. Reflowing them for a small e-ink device sucks and makes them hard to read. Having color is a huge bonus (10 shades of grey in a color coded graph is a royal pain). The iPad + the GoodReader app will let you take hundreds of papers and technical books with you. The fact that it has a pretty good web browser and email app with WiFi is an awesome bonus.
haha, nice
It may have been in the past, but now that the internet allows far fewer authors to spread their work much farther, I don't see it happening. But here's to hoping!
Haven't used it, but there's also OSQA, if you can run your own server. OSQA is Django-based, whereas Shapado has a hosted offering and is RubyOnRails-based.

They both appear to be close copies of StackExchange from a cursory look.
MobileSafari hasn't displayed http:// since its inception.
If there were an easy way to have a StackExchange site running alongside an old established forum it could really kick off. For example, I think the Ubuntu Forums would be dramatically better if I didn't have to wait through 8 pages of posts to find the best solution to a problem.
"running our own server is increasingly impossible"

Do tell... it seems quite easy and affordable to run your own server now. A VPS can be had for under $50 a month, and if you really need the whole machine, $200 would probably do it. What am I missing?
So let it be the browser's responsibility to try both with and without it. They'll either be the same, or one will be nonexistent or a not-found page; it's not like people put one site at www.x and another at x.
I've never needed a car, either, but I suspect things might change with a kid, even when living in the city. Though I'd prefer to stay car free. Time will tell.

Higher education is mostly free in Germany, too, but students still need to live somewhere and eat.

Savings rate might go down with family, too.

As I said, I have lived OK so far, too. I just don't feel it is possible to get very far in terms of financial independence and security being employed.
If I were the G.A.O., I'd be calculating income from taxing the "intellectual property" that the state protects.

(personally, I'd prefer settling numbers on this take, which does not require money changing hands: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252512 )
while i do agree with the thoughts leaner, smaller, modular is better.. one of my main issues with rails has always been upgrading from releases have always been a painful thing to do. It was much worse pre rails ~2 , but in general as a lean start up.. its just such a pain point, that I do wish for more stability, and better planning of deprecation of features.
Absolutely everyone is on Windows 7, but only because it is that much better and people upgraded on their own. A significant number of brave souls also dogfood pre-release Windows, Office, and many other products.

I personally avoid extra beta software like the plague, as MSIT volunteered us for dog-fooded Exchange. System crashes and document loss is not something I want to add on top of unreliable Email delivery, but a lot of people feel obligated to take the pain to help other product teams.

Oh, and it's official: I just quit :-) Really, I think Microsoft is a great company. However, at this stage in my life, I just need to do my own thing!
(Unless they're a physicist; then it's jargon.)
I agree with the sentiment on the thread that removing http:// is a UX bug. Copy & Paste in this case is paramount over UI simplification. Keep it simple... do not make it a configurable option and do not remove http://.
Just to expand a bit -- when I talk about modelling the complexity of human relationships I don't mean making friends, I mean how they try to turn the complicated ways we have of judging and trusting other people into a number.

You can do that on eBay, because the metric is really simple -- "did this user deliver, or did they rip you off?" But when it comes to judging the value of technical advice, it's much muddier.

We have thousands of years of experience at these sorts of judgements though, and can size people up in the blink of an eye. It's much more difficult online, but we're learning -- and numbers aren't really a part of it. Certainly not the morass of numbers of StackOverflow.
"We believe that if our platform creates value for a large number of users, we will have opportunities to make money."

That doesn't sound like a new business model, it sounds like wishful thinking.
On every Windows system I've used recently (XP and 7, I haven't touched Vista) I cannot seem to get fonts of all sizes looking decent.

If I turn "Standard" font smoothing on, Windows will antialias (normally) larger fonts so they look wonderful, but won't touch smaller fonts (I think the cutoff is around 12 or 13pt (probably configurable)). The smaller fonts look terrible as a result.

When I turn ClearType on Windows will use subpixel antialiasing on all fonts. The smaller fonts look great, but the subpixel antialiasing does almost nothing noticeable for larger ones. Messing with the ClearType tuner doesn't help. The larger fonts look awful and jagged as a result.

If I turn off font smoothing everything looks jagged and ugly, of course.

Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to make all size fonts (excluding tiny sizes like 6pt and below) look decent at the same time in any version of Windows?
I think it's possible people will get real work done on an iPad, but it just requires that they change some or many of their paradigms of production. Like any new tool, it may enable new forms of creation at the expense of some older ones, but that doesn't mean the older ones disappear.

> The iPad may well be - and probably is - the future of content consumption, web browsing, gaming, and perhaps television viewing. There's a difference between that though, and the future of computing.

I think this is a great point, and couldn't agree with you more. In the midst of media frenzies, where the echo chamber (including company marketting departments) starts throwing around terms without regard to the deeper implications of them, it can be easy to forget that "computing" is a lot of things. When someone is writing a novel in a nice word processor or emailing photos to a friend, that's part of computing. So is designing a video game, programming a utility software, and editting music. "Computing" is a lot of things, and it certainly doesn't just mean crunching numbers in a programmable calculator, as it used to way back in the day. I think that's a part of what's bothering people when the iPad is referred to as the future of computing: it implies that all the other stuff that the iPad omits isn't computing. But to say that the iPad has no place in the future of computing is to make the same mistake in reverse (you didn't say that, but a lot of people have made comments in that vein).

From my perspective, saying the iPad is the future of computing is no worse than saying that some new octo-core, power-guzzling chip is the future of computing, or that voice interface is the future of computing. That chip won't be so nice in a low-power netbook, and I wouldn't want to dictate my code to the computer when I could just type it. But all these technological innovations and products have a place in the ever-changing landscape that is computing. And by providing more devices that sit in different niches and excel at different things, with either broad capabilities or limited ones, we are succeeding in the goal of expanding what is possible within the sum total of activities that is "computing." As long as we keep doing that, we keep adding to that nebulous idea that is the future of computing.
20€ sounds amazing. I envy you for living in Vienna. It's a very nice city, and apparently much more efficient than Germany :-/
Yes it has. I remember the hiding of it being one of the changes in an iPhone OS update.
If you do that, the bank will notice a bunch of connections from the same IP for different usernames.

You could use a botnet to do the lookups, but that still makes the attack substantially more difficult.
Innovative (crazy?) Android barcode + alarm clock app (Free + Open Source)
Besides, the free lunch is almost over. People are getting tired of fart apps.

Fart apps never made Apple much money. Of the top 5 grossing apps on the iPhone right now, the prices are $15, free, $1, $900, $7. They are hardly "fart apps". The free one is a TV streamer with an in-app subscription service of $10/month. The $1 is the RedLaser barcode scanner. Of the top 50 apps, 11 cost <$1, and 12 cost >$10 [1]. Apple is actively pushing developers to make more of the latter.

1. I mean >= and <=, rounded to the nearest dollar. That is, $9.99 ~ $10.
I commonly use file:// and other protocols. How will it handle those?
The prefix is only removed from the "steady-state" display. It will still be there if you copy the URI from the address bar.

EDIT: Verified that copying works in the current nightly build, although there are some quirks pasting into rich text controls in some apps (like Pidgin).
Every URI scheme except http: is still displayed.

This includes https: as you can see in the screenshot: http://chromium.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=-277348...
Could they at least acknowledge the fact that they intentionally destroyed an adobe product for no real reason? I would be much more interested in hearing why they thought Flash CS5's export to IPhone capability shouldn't go to market rather than about how apple is "the good guy". The laundry list of things apple has done well were particularly infuriating. Take any company, no matter how destitute, and they could easily have marketers spin up a list such as this. Microsoft, Adobe, and Google have done at least as many things right over the years. In either case, they really skirted the issue at hand.

It is true that adobe literally said "Screw you apple". But sticks and stones can only do so much. Just consider what Apple threw their way. And we shouldn't forget all of the open source projects that have gone down because of Apple's lazy cannon ball.
Here, you can do it. http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/contact-us/your-comment

And there's a separate link to "Tell us how your life is affected by global trade - what it means for your job, your business, or your community." http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/share-your-story
My apologizes if that came off wrongly. It was intended as my observation of musicians who do not produce music solely as a hobby. Obviously most of the people I know come from a fairly technical background, while plenty of people still produce amazing music on a bargain store 8 track, there are lots of people who will complain about sound quality differences that a normal person could not pick out if their life depended on it.
Alas, then I remember wrong. Regardless Safari has done it for a while. If someone can find discussion of its removal I'll edit my original post.
Oh for goodness sakes, they just need to buy my company already so I can get a decent meal. It's not like they don't have an office across the street from me in the Town Center!
http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/
(1) It's cheaper for the manufacturer as others have stated.

(2) Normal consumers don't like black bars. So they playback their increasingly-common 16:9 dvd/youtube/hulu content and complain that there are black bars at the top and bottom of their 16:10 or 4:3 screen, and feel like it's being "wasted," never mind that everything else you do on a computer (read web pages, edit documents) is done vertically and the extra lines help. Same reason why you see 4:3 content being played back stretched on 16:9 displays in coffee shops -- people would rather see a grossly distorted image than see black bars. Same reason you find really messed up in-between screen ratios being sold retail (stretch both 16:9 and 4:3, take the worst of both worlds but hey! no black bars). Personally, I'll take square pixels and correct aspect ratio with black bars any day.
Wow, timely reporting! Thank you.
Soldiers, Privateers, Mercenaries and Web Technology
If you have an auto-focusing lens, will it continually focus while you are recording video? That's the one thing that's held me back from upgrading. I badly want to combine my DSLR with my camcorder--I hate having to decide which one I'm going to carry with me.
Glad to see my thoughts come true!
http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/519276165/stack-exchange-is...

This is the best way to clean up the Q&A and Forums landscape.
ISTR you can't have CNAME on a domain name, which causes problems potentially with mail delivery. Everyone does it anyway...
Something standalone like github:fi would be pretty cool, thanks I'll keep that in mind.

I was planning on allowing providers to pull achievement data back out like you're suggesting (unless I misunderstood you) but I'd also like to have a centralized listing of achievements as well. It allows users to discover sites/service that their friends are using, which would drive new targeted traffic to those providers. I think users would be more willing to check out sites/services if they see that they're friends are using it. If a user is already using a particular service and sees that a friend of theirs just got an achievement, their natural urge to be competitive could drive them to check it out and get the achievement themselves.

It could also be useful for helping users decide things in marginal situations. Imagine a user is hungry but not yet motivated enough to do anything about it - seeing an achievement from a friend where they got 10 points for ordering a pizza online could help push that user in the direction of completing that achievement, and in doing so driving revenue for that provider.
Agreed. If you come in expecting an all-singing, all-dancing desktop/laptop/server replacement you'll be disappointed.

If you want a device to read PDFs, play some games, and browse the web it's fantastic.

iPad + GoodReader + 10 hour battery life is bliss.
How about removing it, but modifying the functionality of the copy action, so it appends the clipboard with http:// if the user has selected/copied the entire URL?

Personally, I have no qualms with http://, I just think this suits the best of both worlds: the future and the past.
I definitely agree with you that achievement systems could be usefully applied to the real world. I built a point system recently to manage my own life and have now become addicted to flossing. I submitted for a demo account but would love to talk to you more generally. tony@tonystubblebine.com

Also, are you Sean Huber of InquryApp?
Google gave me metafilter answers for my non-technical questions that were really excellent a few times; but I hadn't made that connection til your comment. Time to try it directly!

A SO site might perform well as a support channel for a software library product. I've used a mailing list in the past, but it's not as a good, in many ways. If it's free for commercial use, I might give this a go. It seems ideal to deliver support for an open-source software product - anyone done this?
> extreme expressiveness of C++

You probably mean that the boundary between meaningful C++ programs and typos is not very well defined?
Out of curiosity, was it really wiped and restored ? I thought the browser just might have tripped and lost track, being machine-gunned with (correct?) updates, thus showing a mostly blank sheet ...
You would hope so, but unfortunately you'd be wrong - a tiny fraction of the time, but still...
I think the Sony Z series looks pretty good, quite lightweight, good keyboard, good speed.
> [...] but in practice they produce faster executables [...]

C++ is faster than Fortran?
Facebook Currently Testing New “Questions” Product
500 lines is not a lot in C++. Or is it?
I'm a bit wary about the claim "able to communicate perfectly in German."

The brain can indeed abstract speech patterns away from the actual language spoken, and multi-linguists do this routinely (being one myself). However, I don't see how the girl could have been exposed to enough vocabulary before (or even during) the coma sufficient to speak "fluently."

Nevertheless, the article does suggest the girl was quite avid about the new language (absorbing TV and books outside of class), so perhaps the coma served as something of an incubation period for word retention and language skills that weren't quite together when the coma set in.

Recht merkwuerdig.
I'm a pretty big fan of Joel, Jeff, and Stackoverflow so I was really hoping for something other than what I got here. I was hoping to try using a stackexchange site for software support. Instead what I'm looking at seems very complicated and pretty much useless for all but the largest business applications. It may or may not work for personal interest sites but it seems like business users lose out in this scheme.

I wish them the best but this seems like a pretty bad idea. They can obviously change course and I hope they do. Fortunately it seems like shapado.com offers what I'm looking for.
IPhone App Finds Trees in NYC’s Concrete Jungle
Clipperz - online password manager
Exactly. Very well put.
I presume that you mean "copying" via Ctrl+C and not the X11 way of simply highlighting the text. The latter is known to be broken in Chrome.

I filed a bug for it that which was wontfixed: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=27972
Haven't spent much time around musicians, have you? Any reasonably serious musician will have a no compromises, no excuses approach to sound quality, and that includes paying top dollar for the absolute highest quality gear you can get. Thousands -- or even tens of thousands -- of dollars is not an uncommon asking price for a single piece of kit, like a speaker or a mixing desk (knobs only; no GUI bullshit; mixing is about listening and feeling, not pointing and clicking). If it's top quality then there will be musicians and sound engineers clamoring to pay. You may pay twice the price for a 1% increase in sound quality, but a serious musician can hear that 1%, and it will drive him nuts. You may think it's snobbish, but that's reality in the pro music world.
It works out a whole lot better during a lawsuit if you can point to something in your TOS or contracts that justifies your behavior.

A more important version of this occurs in the TOS of social websites. You really, really want language that shows your intent to deal harshly / report people who threaten others.
I love high resolution screens first and foremost. Any reasonable ratio will do.
This is probably more to do with the likelihood that it won't be available in all markets.
Yep, I can confirm that pasting http: URIs from the X11 "primary selection" is broken in the current Chromium nightly.
Sarcasm much?
Ugh, I run chromium nightlys and this change has caught me off guard, I really don't like it.
Yeah, Chrome is actually reasonably good about making copied URLs be valid URLs, backing out any display that was done to them in the URL-bar. Better than Firefox on this: for example, in the URL bar, both Chrome and Firefox display '%7c' as '|', which makes the URL invalid. But when you copy it out of the URL bar, Chrome turns it back into %7c, whereas FF doesn't.

The main odd UX issue is that you usually expect copying text to give you that same text in the clipboard, whereas in Chrome you get something magically changed.
The operative words being "everything we can." If they can't offer that, then they can't. It's a contingency guarantee, not a promise.
Still, when you look at how answers are ranked on Stack Overflow, it really seems to work. The top ranked answers really are the best... far more than on a traditional PHPBB type site.
Did you know that there is actually a Bolivian Navy?
What kind of problems did you have with 1.9.1? What was your deployment stack?
There's another use case, maybe it's just me, but at least once a week I need to insert a single "s" into the URL to go from the non-SSL to the SSL version of a page.

My proposed solution: go ahead and hide the http://, but when you click onto the address bar (and therefore want to edit the URL), show the http:// at that time.

This solves copy-paste issues, changing protocol issues, and probably others.

But I'm not sure where to make that suggestion on the Chromium issue tracker.
Well that would seriously increase http requests and dns lookups which slows down everything.
My proposed solution: If it ain't broke...
I have no idea what they are actually thinking but their new direction reminds me of the story of how black pearls became sought after. One aspect of this is that the StackExchange sites might end up with a reputation boost based on surviving the vetting process. Perhaps, by virtue of this survival, it will make people more inclined to trust the sites.

Trusted sources is a big problem on the web right now. There are a gazillion sources of information but it is increasing difficult to sift fact from opinion/fiction. Maybe this is their answer to this. Wolframalpha seems to be trying to address this as well but from a different approach.
Why Hope Isn't As Good As You Think It Is
I propose we go to Compuserve navigation.

Example: If you want google.com you type "go google" into the address bar and "Go CB" when you want a chat protocol.
I'm assuming you're making a reference to Jesse Schell's "10 points for brushing your teeth" talk (link below)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/gami...
Even better, but there seems to be tons of enthusiasm on the Chromium team for removing http. I'm just hoping they minimize the collateral damage.
Perhaps, but its inevitable that they'll improve, and the second they do, no one will want to subject themselves to this review process.
Me too. I suspect their goal is to form trusted Q&A sites. Their goal, I think, is to make the brand synonymous with trusted information on the internet.
Sounds like you have a great business plan. In the meantime, I think that the Stack Overflow model has proven itself among nerds, and I think that your assertion that nerds are weird in some way and need completely different software than the rest of the world is not backed up by any evidence.

I disagree that the software is irrelevant. Discussion groups that don't allow voting have no way to distinguish answers that the community thinks are good from answers that the community thinks are bad. Discussion groups that don't allow editing have no way to change answers as the world changes, so wrong answers stick around. Discussion groups without tags are forced to splinter communities into smaller and smaller fragments because they have no way of dealing with overlapping communities. Discussion groups without reputation systems are overrun with spam.

I can't think of anything I disagree with MORE than the concept that "the software is irrelevant." The software DEFINES how the community works with each other and is absolutely critical.
@yourabi I am, although I was on the clicker-training for humans kick ever since I got serious about training my dog. It didn't feel right that he had a scientifically supported system for behavior change while I had nothing.
Why It's So Hard to Cut the Federal Budget