skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The success of StackOverflow was built on the backs of smart programmers who don't say anything unless they have something good to say. I've been to a few of the other StackExchange sites and the communities were not the same. Mostly the blind leading the blind.

StackExchange 2.0 is a weak attempt at still trying to replicate the unreplicateable (I know this is probably not a word). It will fail because few of these "new" sites will not pass muster during the beta phase.
I had basic cable (required for later parts) @ $50, "HD service" for $10 (OTA channels only) and another $10 for mandatory HD-DVR. I paid for additional HD channels like Discovery/History, but I forgot how much it was. When I dropped CATV/HD/DVR I saved roughly $80 per month. I figured I could just buy the boxed sets of my favorite shows on DVD for that price. (I haven't - I just torrent the shows and then delete them)
A) people are scared of asking for more

B) how much you can get isn't just a matter of programming skill. it also has to do with contacts and networking, which many people here are bad at
Not a fan of the SX family, but you have to give them credit for recognizing relatively early on that something wasn't working, and actually implementing the significant changes to try and make it better.
Thanks for the advice! And I like your company a lot.
I'm hoping ePub comes to replace many uses of PDF, like this. Having support in browsers makes sense, since it's basically HTML.
Containers vs. Hypervisors: Choosing the Best Virtualization Technology
Doesn't look like he's talking about it at the moment, but Stu over at ProLost (author of the great indie film manual "The DV Rebel's Guide") covers the DSLR-for-filmmaking subject a lot and has lots of good technical (and technique) info if you're into that sort of thing:

http://prolost.com/
As a practical matter, it will be a while before I jump to 3.0. I am almost entirely on Rails 2.3.5 and Ruby 1.9.1 and that is working for me. Really it is a tradeoff between working at 100% speed right now or spending some time migrating to better tools.
(karma farming)

same article:

"If it bleeds, it leads," however, and writers looking to drive ad impressions will try to fabricate a grudge match. Please don't let them.
Glad you liked it.

What I strongly dislike about HN is how such a high percentage of commentors feel that, because they are smart in a given topic, they can hold forth on any topic.

I'm tired of seeing people get the facts so wrong about Apple, Apple's history, the legality or precendents for 3.3.1, etc., etc., etc.

Not because I care. The truth doesn't care, it just goes on being true. But because it's a bunch of people who have no clue, arguing with other people who also have no clue. It's like a contest for who can make up the most shit.

There are tons of books that detail Apple's history. If you want to learn about Apple, read Accidental Empires, Apple Confidential 2.0, West of Eden, Insanely Great: Life and Times. There's the book Wozniak co-wrote, taht told his side of the story, and there are several books that focus on Jobs.

Gil Amelio even wrote a whine-ography called Firing Line. Sculley wrote one called, if you can believe it or not, Odyssey.

Apple didn't happen in Ancient Mesopotamia, it happened in the 1970s. There is massive amounts of documentation. There's absolutely no excuse to debating it in ignorance.

And there's tons to gain from studying Apple, because it's got a fascinating history and had an unbelievably enormous impact on what the tech world looks like today.

There are plenty of people on HN making the same stupid mistakes that nearly "killed" Apple as a successful company (regardless of how much cash they had).

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." - Twain
Merlin Mann is one of the people whose tweets were used without permission. He detailed his perspective in three blog posts:

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/508615417/regret
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511063886/tweets-are-not-no...
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/511314674/dollar-sign-paint...

This is a mann who gives away most of his life's work. He loves fair use and believes in sharing. However, when doing so, he believes that he has control over what of his work is shared and under what terms. Publishing a book and charging money for other people's work without their permission is emphatically not fair use.

Anyway, he writes well on the subject, I would recommend reading his perspective because he is someone who makes a living giving away most of his work and had thought a lot about what that means.
You may know it exists; that doesn't mean "we" know it exists. In particular, I didn't know it exists, and am grateful to the person who submitted the link.
If that was the case, they wouldn't be (a) creating huge barriers to creating new communities, and (b) tearing down sites that failed to attract a threshold amount of participation. It's clearly not simply a Google spam scheme.
I've heard (no article link) that the panel makers are pushing to standardize on 16:9 formats. They don't want to have two manufacturing processes for tvs and computer display screens.

It seems like a weak argument though, because there are more computer screen resolutions than there are "HD" resolutions.

edit: grammar.
I don't think it's primarily for anything. Apple doesn't ship any creative tools with OS X either. The iPad is what you think it is. I find it telling that geeks think it's primarily for consumption because they can't code in it- it's called tunnel-vision.
I'm really tired of political bias sipping into everything I read on topics not related to politics. It's such bad business too. Why would you make a snarky comment risking pissing 50% of your readers off, when you can simply contain yourself and stay on subject instead?
10 Simple Google Search Tricks
“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”

-- Oscar Wilde
Huh? They built StackOverflow too. From zero. Are you saying there aren't other communities of with good S/N ratios, or that SX2.0 won't be able to find them?
Those slides are incredibly dense and it's a little difficult to tell exactly what they mean. The OP's twitter stream has some good info though:

"facebook is carving out entire chunks from InnoDB to scale up concurrency: no deadlock detection, no read-ahead.."
http://twitter.com/igrigorik/status/12117662626

"myisam has single mutex, will fall down after 3+ cores try to access it concurrently. stick with innnodb"
http://twitter.com/igrigorik/status/12116958816
Yes, this does look like an appjet clone. Not to take anything away from this implementation, however, because it looks like the author didnt know of appjet.

Appjet had the same concept: server side js based on rhino, persistent js object store, etc.The concept, however, was a little bit rudimentary: one app consisted of one js "file". You had to write every possible interaction as functions within that file. It did have an interesting function call based templating mechanism, however, something like so:

print(DIV(
FORM({action:"/", method:"get"},
SPAN({style: "float: left;"}, "Show"),
INPUT( {name: "count", value: count, size: "2", className: "in_box"} ),
SPAN({style: "float: left;"}, "items"),
INPUT( {value: "Go", className: "in_box", size: "1", type: "submit"} ),
DIV({style: "clear: both;"})
)
));

Appjet the company had made the source available for download a while ago, and it seems like these folks have run with it:http://apps.jgate.de/
Actually it sounds more like they have completely changed their business plan.

Before: Provide communities and companies the software and hosting that enabled the creation of high-quality Q&A sites.

Now: Create a carefully cultivated garden of user-maintained Q&A sites with active communities and minimal overlap.

And that's fine of course, but it seems a little odd to judge the former was failing (after what, six months?) by using the goals of the second as a criteria for success.
> all of us will have the ability to capture the types of motion images that normally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

well, not really. You see, camera was never the expensive part. Not even Arri. For example good Cooke S4 lenses cost as much as a fine new Audi. Hell, even Fischer stand costs like a car, and having a good stand+lens is more important than camera itself. Not to mention good lighting, without which shot looks like crap. You can rent RED+S4 kit for about ~600€ per day though - add light, electricity etc.. and it is more cheaper than ever. But this "we can all do it a la panavision, without panavision" is BS IMO.

Not trying to be rude or anything, just trying to put some things into perspective. I do like the trend of cheap good cameras (like RED - which is borderline great), but camera is only one tiny part of the picture.
The fact that you are startled that I'd even be talking about Slicehost's response tells me that not enough attention is being paid to this.
Project Euler gets reposted every couple months. This is because new people keep discovering it, and it's really cool.

I don't mind the repost. It will sink off the front page again soon enough, and hopefully the discussion will be good this time.

By the way, if you're excited about Project Euler, you may like _Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers_.
Manual Deskterity from Microsoft Research
My last 2 work laptops have lost vertical pixels from the previous model. It's very frustrating when at least 80% of what I work on is in a vertical format.
Btw, I've had great experiences with Antlr (instead of Yacc) and can use Java/C/C# as targets, although you might have problems redesigning your grammars to be LL(*).
Yeah, it'd be like an electron colliding with a positron. The only thing that'd be left would be gamma rays.
Where the hell in the EU do you live that medical insurance cost 700 Euros a month??

I haven't payed medical insurance since starting to work (as the employers pay them here), but when I did the cost (for plain vanilla public medical insurance, which in Austria covers pretty much everything in my experience) was a bit over 20 Euros a month.
If quality is so important they need to get designers to look at their sites fast. StackOverflow is fine (especially as it's for programmers) but the original clone sites (the PC and Server ones) have terrible colour schemes that are both hard to interact with and simply reflect badly on the brand. Getting a UI expert or two to work on optimising the UI for non-programmers wouldn't go astray. Getting someone like Smashing Magazine or someone involved in a design-shard of StackExchange would be a good start.
How lavishly can you live without spending a dime?
While there aren't a whole lot of books about Lua, the official one (Ierusalimschy's _Programming in Lua_, 2nd ed., AKA, "the blue PiL") is excellent. That, the wiki, and mailing list archives (http://lua-users.org/) should pretty much cover things.

The reference manual is also helpful, particularly for the C API. It's available online, but I like having a printed copy. (I also find its brevity re-assuring.)

There's another book by that publisher that makes big red tree stumps, but I can't recommend it. (The _Lua Programming Gems_ has some good bits, though.)
OK - so there's another lesson I have to learn from you :-)

Please, publish a blog post series on each of the mistakes made, explaining each one and how not to fall into the trap. Explain why slicehost taking 48 hours to notify a customer before shutting down their machine is a big problem if it belongs in the list. I'll upvote every post once it hits HN.
Will somebody please forward this to the ACTA negotiators?
I think it would be much less anger if the collection was free. But why is that the real question?

If your blog quotes from and links to my blog, that's an endorsement, and I would probably be happy about it.

But if you print out my blog and sell it on Amazon, I would definitely be pissed off.

Some behavioral economists say that people operate in two modes: A "warm and fuzzy reciprocity" mode used with friends/family/neighbours/colleagues and a "coldly calculating market" mode used whenever there is money involved.

If you collect a few entertaining tweets and publish them on your blog, most people would probably consider it within the spirit of reciprocity - it's a shared resource with no specific owner.

But by selling the collection, you are breaking the implicit social contract that governs reciprocity and switching to market mode. In market mode I will obviously demand my fair share of the profits, and by not offering it you are breaking the social rules for market interaction as well. (See "thief" - exploiting other people's effort for profit and offering nothing in return.)

So yes, selling the book probably generates more anger than giving it away. But it's not much of a mystery why that is so, is it?
On2 Technologies (creator of VP8 codec)
I think this article is much better:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5289.html
I think they would stay at Google (in its current state). Google is getting big but is still not as big as Microsoft (political). Google has more data (I would imagine that is something search folks want more of). Google seems to be the best environment for top search engineers for a variety of reason. My guess is that the top search folks (along with others in the top of their field) get to choose where they work and what they get paid because they are at the top of their game. So if Microsoft is where they wanted to be they would already be here. If it is where they want to be and they are not shame on us for not recognizing that.
So, Weblogs Inc meets knowledge exchange. What I don't quite follow is why contributors would want to propose a Stack Exchange.

For example, imagine I'm a shoe cobbler. I may want to contribute to a Stack Exchange so that it positions me as an expert and drives more traffic to my business.

That's the point of Stack Overflow careers. I'm not sure how that works for shoe cobblers.
Didn't he lead the Autopilot GPL autonomous helicopter project ~8 years ago? A true hacker.
From the CrossFit Faq (http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/faq.html):
"The world's most successful athletes and coaches rely on exercise science the way deer hunters rely on the accordion."

I hate to say this damages my perception of CrossFit.
Their new business model is more complicated than their previous business model. The five steps to citizenship seems like a weird concept. People that want to host a Q&A site like these don't want to be told they aren't good enough to have a top-level domain. Imagine wanting a blog and WordPress or Tumblr thought you undeserving of a top-level domain. Stack Exchange 2.0 has more steps to have a top-level domain site than the Chinese government has for it's citizens to acquire a domain. I'm sure there is a good Rails/PHP Q&A clone webapp.
People said the same thing about the iPod. Here, Google even has a handy graph of it:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=apple+microsoft+%22hi...
this link broken for anyone else? redirects me to

https://secure.news.ycombinator.com/registration/?rPage=logi...
Sounds like it to me too.

I never had to think too much about expenses as a (single, childless) programmer here in Vienna (which is not known for very good developer salaries).

Looking at other programmers here it seems my experience is not out of the ordinary.

Sounds like a very exceptional situation.
Groupon to Raise $250M at a $1.2B Valuation
Yes, it does; but it also can shoot video. I recently worked on a feature shot with a similar camera, and own one myself for the same reason.

Why use it this way? 3 reasons.

1. cost - it's dirt cheap compared to equivalent camcorders, and there is a very wide selection of lenses and accessories. Not as well optimized for the needs of moving pictures as other lenses (which have fewer glass elements but are easier to focus thanks to the way they are constructed) but nowhere near as expensive either. for perspective, a set of cine primes (fixed focal length lenses built for film use with industry-standard mounting connectors) can cost $250,000...or more. you can buy/rent and insure good quality still lenses for vastly less, and the disadvantages they impose are not all that serious.

2. Portability. a small indie film crew is 10 people and the camera is very obvious. A small crew shooting with a DSLR and an audio recorder can be as few as 3 people, which means you can shoot a scene in the middle of a busy street without attracting much attention. It is just so much more convenient, and saves even more money and time. the only downside to this is the ego sacrifice required to give up a big important-looking camera and the support staff required to babysit it. Instead you can just get a few of these things and shoot from multiple angles simultaneously which is an absolute godsend for editors, actors, producers, etc. Industry folk do love their high-tech gear but until recently things were at a pitch where the gear had to some extent become an end in itself and one had to spend a lot of money just to set it up every day before you photographed a single frame of the actual subject matter.

3. Light. These newer cameras have big sensors (the Canon 5DII in particular has a very large sensor for the available price) which means they can get a good-looking image with way less light than a typical pro video camera (and in turn that makes it easier to control the focus of the image). So you don't need truckloads full of lights...or the time to set the up...or all the noise of a generator to power them...or a bunch of grips to lift and carry them...and you don't have a forest of aluminum stands with lights and reflectors all over the set: which means you have a great deal more freedom in where you put the camera and how you move it around.

In short, they are awesome. There are some limitations, and some things you have to do differently in order to maintain image quality compared to other methods...but they are not that onerous and the cost savings are enormously worth it. I would never want to go back to the style of a big industrial set festooned with heavy equipment and crews. Small is beautiful.
PCubee: a Perspective-Corrected Handheld Cubic Display
Apple to developers: We're no longer suicidal
Breaking into someone else's machine is not an illegality on par with facilitating spam. It's crazy to me how inured we've all become to breakins. Breakins are a big deal.
I looked and looked, and my first thought was "He doesn't like Schoolhouse Rock? Schoolhouse Rock isn't political."

Then I noticed this from the start of the article, "Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing."

I have a hard time finding that to be anything but a casual and not very detailed analogy. Sarah Palin -> lots of ambition::the SO team -> lots of ambition. How is it snarky? (If anything, he's comparing himself and his team to Palin, so how snarky could it be.)

You're overanalyzing, I think.
Interesting. Thanks for the detailed response. When I rank about my current pain points in web development smarter error handling isn't very high on the list, so at least for the work I do this isn't a particularly strong selling point. I can imagine for some apps it might be more important though. The ease with which an Erlang stack could support Comet apps might be too.

The area in which I'd really like to see some new ideas is the impedance mismatch between the DB, the business rules, and the HTML user interface. I feel like at least half my code in a typical web app is just glue to make all these layers behave consistently. Any platform that could make that more natural would be very attractive.
We did. :)
Beyond or beside Google: Week 1 - Teoma
"Dereferencing null pointers for fun and profit" would have been a great title.
This is one of my favorite things about Rails and the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. Removing features is viewed as a good thing. You might have to install a simple plugin but for all the users who don't need it that's a bit of code that they don't have to download, install, and run.
I don't know Wordpress too well. But does this mean that 23 people have upvoted this story, and no one has gone through the install process with a bogus title like "VH1 Rules"? If so, you're real troopers, folk of HN.
You do have to keep in mind that I'm talking specifically of my profession here, system administration.

First and foremost, these days, MS is neither free nor open source. This is a huge factor in the kind of startups that seem to be more frequent on HN.

They produced some really top-notch work for their clients, and shipped it all on the MS stack.

Did they then administer it?

Windows has been, traditionally, impractical (to the point of bordering on impossible) to administer remotely and in an automated fashion. Even the Mac has enough Unix under the covers that it can be integrated reasonably well into a Linux environment.

There's another issue of hardware efficiency (or bloat). Using a minimal, obsolete machine as a boot server, I can install a fully functional LAMP stack "image" on at least a couple dozen machines, in parallel, in under 7 minutes. I'd be interested in hearing the comparable Microsoft numbers.
I am going to go on a hiring spree for all of my ideas. It'll be a knock-down drag-out round robin tournament of start-ups. At the end of each week (month?) we have elimination.

Survivor: Silicon Valley
If you try to install you get this:

WordPress database error: [CREATE command denied to user 'mtv_wp_user'@'172.17.129.134' for table 'wp_style_terms']
CREATE TABLE wp_style_terms ( term_id bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment, name varchar(55) NOT NULL default '', slug varchar(200) NOT NULL default '', term_group bigint(10) NOT NULL default 0, PRIMARY KEY (term_id), UNIQUE KEY slug (slug) )

[and a ton of other such errors, probably a couple hundred]

And at the end:
Success!
WordPress has been installed. Were you expecting more steps? Sorry to disappoint.

Username	admin
Password	Ku$WV^CQFsAV

(Wordpress seems to have a funny definition of success)
You're right, his perspective is fascinating for several reasons:

1) He makes the argument that he has some natural right to control the entirety of his creative output. In the US (where he lives), this is not true, it has never been true, and we can all hope it will never be true. This statement, as an example, is complete nonsense: "I control every fucking syllable of anything I’ve ever done, regardless of whether I sell it or not." He has the copyright to some of the the work he's done, which is a completely different (and much less powerful) animal.

2) Except for the parts about him giving away most of his work, his posts could have been written by the PR departments of the RIAA or MPAA. He repeatedly talks about stealing, and the poor artist being hurt by the pirates, when no theft happened. Why doesn't he just talk about copyright infringement?

3) He talks about fair use and licensing, but the salient point is that he likely never had copyright on the tweets in the first place. If something is in the public domain, fair use and licensing never come into play.
The proposed solution reminds me a little bit of this:

http://thecollectivecontext.com/about/
That is indeed a serious oversight. I was not familiar with the site but a simple search for it returns a lot of sites linking to it.

This HackerNews post is actually the fifth result returned, I don't know for sure if that's because it's recent and Google is weighing it more heavily or because HN has so much googlejuice.
It doesn't scare me as a user - it scares me that yet another device encouraging passive consumerism may become immensely popular. It's sad to become used to hearing "I can't cook/sing/draw/dance/code/whatever" - I would rather live in a world where everyone is a producer of some sort, in a way that content and culture are not monopolised by Big Industry.

Maybe 'scary' was a bit strong - I'm not exactly trembling under my bed ... yet.