skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I firmly believe that your team should choose the right tool for the job, factoring in what the team is comfortable with. I would never tell a room of open source coders that they had to use .NET, and I sure wouldn't want to make the .NET folks learn anything new, either. ;)

Humour aside, the language of your question ("non-MS" and "some open-source language") implies that the decision to use anything except Microsoft stuff is the Other, and I just don't think that's a realistic baseline.

There's a world of excellent tools for different jobs, and we are so lucky because the cream gets to the top a lot faster now.

http://github.com/languages

We're not building on WebObjects and you're not working with VB.NET, either.
How much do you worry about Microsoft lock-in? And about them discontinuing tools you depend on?
I listen to podcasts. I find it very valuable.

I have a twiddler. I'd prefer to not use it when walking, although I prefer a normal keyboard when sitting in front of a computer.

I think that the best interface for working when walking would be speech recognition/spoken word. If I had a screen in my glasses I'd probably walk right into a tree.

Perhaps you could dictate to some kind of voice recognition on a mobile phone?
If You're So Incredible Rich, Why Aren't You Happy?
The Science of Success [2009]
Wait, what? Standard coding style is now somehow a bad thing? From your previous comments I can also see that you dislike debuggers? Doing things your way may work if you write small-scale applications, but when you have to work on a large-scale application with several other programmers, there is just no way that you can do that without some coding standards and IDE's debugging and refactoring capabilities. What I really want to say is, look, don't make it sound like all the programmers using IDEs are somehow worse because they use them - they have to maintain large codebases, and without IDEs to help them, they would really have a hard time doing their jobs.
I guess that's not surprising. It's more surprising to me that anyone allowed patenting of the human genome in the first place. How someone could equate "sequencing" with "inventing" boggles my mind. There are billions of examples of prior art walking around among us, for crying out loud! It's as if whoever "rediscovered" cuneiform writing should have been able to patent it...
Ask HN: Can We Decide Some Conventions Around Downvoting Comments?
Perhaps the best way is to ask why do or would you downvote someone?

I know many will probably say they don't care about their down or up votes, or karma more easily called, but it is human nature to see how you have done after putting some effort. I hope that not many of us in here speak - write - without thinking or feeling the righteousness in our opinion. Indeed I think that the reason why we do come here is for each other's opinions, not the facts, hardly the presentation of the facts, or opinions by some external website, but so as to read each others opinion and discussions.

Down voting harms that process. Each and every man has the right to their opinion however stupid it may be. Each and every man too has the right to disagree with such opinion in however reasonable way.

I think I should say again that we come, well I do at least come here for the comments and perspectives of others, that is opinions, and I do not think that down voting senselessly, freely as it may be, without any constrain whatever, is in any way healthy for the community and its participants.

Each opinion is worthy. However much wrong it may be, as long as it is held honestly.

But, perhaps more important is your opinion as to why do you or would you down vote a comment?
Previous discussion about BMC leaving Snoracle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547221

This move makes perfect sense since Joyent loves Solaris. (In fact, Joyent appears to be the only hip Web 2.0 cloud company that runs Solaris.)
Nice story. However, I think you are mistaken if you somehow believe this anecdote somehow disproves the idea that some people don't have the choice to make a living in any other way except through crap work, no matter how reluctant their decision is and no matter how much it cuts against their dreams. If we are to believe the statistics on small business failures then for every enterpreneur who succeeds like the woman you have described, there are dozens of others who fail. So I don't hold it against someone when they choose not to gamble with their livelihood for a slim chance of success.
I don't know if you talked with the mercurial guys before starting SourceQL, but it seems your work overlapped someone else's effort. Everyone could have finished the feature earlier and with better quality.

Next time, my suggestion is to announce what you are doing (to the project maintainers). Be part of the community instead of coming up with something "done" that none knows about.

(sorry if I got the wrong impression about your involvement, but by your story I could not be sure!)
Creating Cross Browser HTML5 Forms Now
Is the one-eyed man really King in the land of the blind?
I think this is almost by definition the case, since if you are not working in some field, the way you get an idea for an improvement for that field is by being a user of a product of that field (e.g. by driving a car), and therefore you lack the knowledge base to make truly fundamental changes. You will most likely come up with modifications to existing products you use (e.g. the intermittent wipers)

But that's OK. It's not only huge advances (like the design of a nuclear power plant, which no outsider to that field will ever be able to accomplish) that matter; our life is also improved by many small advances. The more a society enables such things, the better.
What are you going on about? If someone's choice is to sell soda to nerds on their lunch break or be unemployed, what are they gambling? Or do you mean the soda lady should have been more realistic and taken a job in the salt mines, because the snack business is too risky?
>> When someone says "you're too smart", or "you sound too smart" or "try to dumb yourself down", most of the time they're not really saying that you're too smart. They're saying "can the act."

Perhaps some people who use big words are putting on a show, but that's far from universal. Big words stay in our language because they convey subtly different meanings than their simpler synonyms. But there's a trade-off between being precise and being easily understood, and to get it right, you really need to know your audience. A lot of people hear "you sound too smart" because they're going over their audience's heads.

I get this a lot - I come from an articulate, educated family, and I was brought up using big words. I think in big words and long sentences. I read lots of books. So I have to consciously simply my sentence structure and my vocabulary around most people. It's not necessarily that they're "not smart." It's just that they're used to simpler words and structure.

It's almost as if we speak subtly different dialects. I have to do the work to translate, so that they don't have to. Most people haven't read many books, and don't think in big words. People usually talk to similar people, so they may not even have a mental concept for this translation. But they know and notice when someone's unusually hard to understand.

Now, if you use bigger words than your audience, and you're also subtly condescending (because you think you're smarter, e.g.), people often assume you're trying to "sound smart," even though you're actually bad at communication and lack self-awareness. The same thing happens when you use lots of jargon and acronyms, only that alienates an even wider group of people.

edit: formatting
Its multi-faceted issue, partly based on a cultural bias in the Valley of using Unix on the web. There are also lower barriers for developers to pick up lamp, rails, etc than the Microsoft stack, which feeds into it. Hosting is also somewhat cheaper on unix stacks, especially when you add SQL server, which may influence people's choice.

Having said this, I find the Microsoft platform dead simple, the tools best of breed, and the new MVC framework to have opened up the platform considerably.
Agreed. There is nothing to review but a concept here. I don't want to be jaded, but it's possible that you hacked this page together in an hour. To me, it feels like you are simply using Hacker News to draw some eyeballs to your site and generate some leads.

In my mind, you ultimately are hurting future folks who want serious reviews of their products from other hackers. Smart people who frequent Hacker News will get tired of doing these kinds of lead-generating "reviews" and won't up-vote them into the homepage.

My suggestion to others who want to use HN for feedback: you get one good shot at a review, so time it wisely.
Please forgive me my near-off-topic answer:

Sure there are users out there without JS. There are still some IE6 users out there. But in most cases you need just look at your target: If you build a SaaS service you probably focus on the early adopters, first movers or whatever you call them.

Old browser or obscure security settings are a niche. If your product focus on that niche - great, consider it in your technical setup.

After attending a horrible freelance project as a ruby/rails guy in 2009 I finally made a decision for all of my hopefully upcoming projects:

* focus on the early adopters who may understand your product without a big introduction. these people usually have the best and modern browsers available.

* optimize for Safari/Mac, Firefox and maybe Chrome

* optimize only for iPhone

* forget the rest until you have 100 paying customers. Then decide again. (100 is just a number, maybe 50, maybe 1000 — you decided)

BUT: If you know for sure, that most of your taget customers are using IE6/have no javascript support/whatever: Support it. But I doubt it.

And don't think that your startup will have the same % amounts of browsers/settings like the big sites on the web. Also keep in mind that people need to be able and willing to spend money. I can imagine someone without javascript and cookies will never (be able to) enter her/his payment information over the web into a form.

They'll be very conservative and in my opinion it's not worth the time to try to "convert" them.

TL;DR

Try to focus the easiest reachable solution only.
Know your potential customer's setup.
Be selective.
How can you downvote comments? I only see an upvote arrow.
When I last worked at a start-up, our product was built on the MS stack, and saved significant cash by allowing MS to author a white paper detailing how our product leveraged the .NET Framework and SQL Server. We still paid out some of the cost of an MSDN subscription, but our membership status was increased thanks to our "partner" status.
Apologies in advance if this sounds harsh. I think you raise some good points about the HN community and general human feedback mechanisms.

I would vote to keep the meta-chatter on HN to a minimum. Let's focus on our discussions and posts, rather than on making a "community" with rules, regulations, and formal conventions.

If you want a self aware hive mind, reddit is a good place to look. I go there for that; I come to HN to focus entirely on the content.
Which Mongo lib are you using?
From the FAQ:

Why don't I see down arrows?

There are no down arrows on submissions.
They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold.

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Do You Know How Slow Your Web Page Is?
> the program can get swapped out to service data I/O

mlock() and friends can help for server applications.
Where the Greatest Opportunity Lies: Microsoft
Ask HN: Do you guys think these Q&A sites e.g. Quora, can survive Facebook?
I just saw the new Facebook wall UI and the Q&A integration is very neatly done (http://oothenigerian.com/new-facebook-wall-ui)

I am wondering if Quora and the likes(general Q&A sites) can compete with Facebook.

My experience is this. I tried launching a Q&A website using Qhub for a vertical of Nigerian living in the UK. When I put up a question and shared it on Facebook, I would get ALL the comments (about 10) on the link I shared and none on the site itself. It practically rendered the site useless.

So what are your thoughts?
Sometimes I want to move out to the country to get away from these types of risks. And to get away from the traffic, overcrowding, etc...
An action that would imply intelligence, I'd say.
Daniel, this comes off as an official Wufoo poll. Maybe I am different, but I thought the Wufoo guys were taking this poll.

Would have been to put your name on it in the intro.
This one:
http://github.com/samus/mongodb-csharp
Does anyone know when this snapshot was taken? With all the changes Facebook has made to their privacy settings recently, there have been times when previously private information was suddenly public and I've had to go in and change it back.

It would be nice to know if my "private" (though privacy on Facebook, and the internet as a whole, isn't a real thing) data is now available in torrent form due to Facebook's tweaking.

Is there an easy way to find your information in this torrent?
* I've also noticed that 9/10 people who keep their phone out and visible are basically wearing their iPhone as a fashion item rather than a functional device.*

I'd love to know how you're determining this. Does Swarovski offer a brooch-mount case or something?
I would like to have a new button that bans the user for life if they start a meta discussion about downvoting. It would be cool if this button somehow incorporated the unix "banner" command and piped the phrase "you suck" to the user's instant messenger client repeatedly, until they started to cry.
Imagine the conversation Apple had with AT&T if this is to be.. "Now the ipod,too?! gulp"
Not sure if I follow what your saying, but SharePoint is anything from http://www.ferrari.com to a million user intranet. There is a lot of development work going on these days using SharePoint as a platform.
I like low contrast at times, looks clean. Plus with this app the idea is that you are using it mostly in the command-line and via a twitter-stream.
You got the right impression about our involvement, but the wrong idea about the outcome.

When a professor asks you to do a semester project, you look for an area where work within your abilities can be done. This is what we came up with. We spent a few hours searching for similar projects and found nothing, and it would have been impractical to get in touch with every maintainer of every SCM to see if they were working on a feature like revsets.

We used Mercurial for two reasons: it is distributed, and it has a great hook API. There was no traffic on the mailing list that would have hinted to us that revsets were on the way. As far as I can tell, Matt Mackall himself was just as uncommunicative as we were. The only place I can find revsets mentioned prior to their introduction in Mercurial 1.6 was a mailing list post where he announced them, fully baked and implemented. Can we be expected to be more involved with the community than the primary maintainer of the project?

Anyway, we never felt comfortable with sharing our work that had a nonzero probability of becoming vaporware. We only recently realized that the ideas themselves might be worth something to others, and this is our way of introducing ourselves to the community. I haven't rejoined the Mercurial mailing list yet simply because I have been busy with work and it keeps slipping my mind, but I do want to get plugged in with them.
I used to consider myself as a devoted .NET Developer, I've been using it since .NET 1.0, last time I developed something was with VS 2010 Ultimate, TFS, SQL Server, WPF and WCF.
I think I was happy with it.
What happened?
I accepted a Job as Ruby on Rails Developer and bought a MacBook Pro... big mistake, I don't want to use Windows or any MS stack anymore.
My advice: if you are a happy as a Windows developer, don't ever touch a Mac! :)
The most egregious example occurred in 2006. U.S. District Judge William Alsup found the D-L test to be a specific identification test and declared, grandiosely: “Despite the many hundreds of thousands of drug convictions in the criminal justice system in America, there has not been a single documented false-positive identification of marijuana or cocaine when the methods used by the SFPD [San Francisco Police Department] Crime Lab are applied by trained, competent analysts.”

I am surprised, as Judge Alsup has a good reputation in general...but an opinion is only as good as the quality of the data it's based on. The SFPD Drug Lab has turned out to be disastrously unreliable, and was shut down a couple of months ago. http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/ca/massullo_order.pdf If you are interested in reading about the conclusions of the judge who investigated the goings-on.
You mean like Mark Suppes does?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10385853
Thanks. I read the "Welcome" information linked at the top, but didn't find the FAQ until you made me aware of it. Perhaps it should be in a more prominent location for new users?
Varnish is a massive VM to network pipe, nothing 'sophisticated' happens to the data that it deals with.

If that were the case I wonder how well the model would hold up but it does what it does very well and there is as far as I have been able to determine no other program that comes close to the kind of throughput you can achieve with varnish.

Disclaimer: very happy varnish user here.
When I saw Basecamp as something that's a counterpoint to a 'pleasureable' example I felt like he was missing a vital point - emotional is relative.

To people who value tools that do their job and get out of the way, Basecamp beats Wufoo.
I'll never understand the trend toward bigger screens as a "feature". The reason I got an HTC Incredible was the 3.7" 480x800 display. Perfectly sized for that resolution, in my opinion. Why would I want a phone thats almost an inch bigger?

Also not to be a curmudgeon, as the front facing camera doesn't /bother/ me or anything, but I /never/ want anyone to know that I'm /capable/ of video calls.
Do you think that if a dentist comes up with an idea for a more efficient internal combustion engine, or comes up with the idea for intermittent windshield wipers, that the effort to validate or implement those two ideas is the same?

Validating small improvements to existing products is usually much easier than validating fundamental changes to how things are done.

(Even ignoring the fact that, when the idea comes from someone outside the field, if the idea is a fundamental change to how things are done, it has a much higher probability of being a crackpot case, than if the idea is a small modification to an existing product)
that screenshot is hilarious.
Non-destructive lockpicking is a sport these days; burglars would use bumping or other destructive technique like crowbar (with a much shorter path to success) since they won't care about the clean result. Maybe only relevant for spies/intelligence/other areas where you need to hide the fact that the lock has been picked.

And the fact that weak lock mechanisms are publicized encourages manufacturers to invent, it's all good.
Thanks! A big feature for existing users is that we also now offer the ability to have different header images on each page.

Not something that would be included in the news coverage, but definitely a huge feature request :)
Carbonmade is built on the Microsoft stack: http://www.microsoft.com/web/inspiration/carbonmade.aspx.
Damn, I want cakes and ale now.
discussion on quora: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Facebook-creating-a-Q-A-product-...

... the first two answers are starkly different
It's the wrong way to measure real world impact. It just happens to be an incredibly easy way for tenure and hiring committees to make decisions. There are a ton of problems with it, many have been pointed out in this thread. One I haven't seen mentioned is that lit reviews cited disproportionately (especially in the sciences). Many of them aren't even read. Many journals limit the number of citations so authors cite one lit review rather than many separate studies.
Clickable link: http://oothenigerian.com/new-facebook-wall-ui
Smoking marijuana isn't the same as building a bomb. If I accidentally light a joint, the people in my immediate radius aren't blown to pieces (although they might choose to get blown).
I'm just going to start flagging these down voting questions from now on until they go away. I don't think they add anything to the community. Down vote something for any reason you like. It does not matter overall one bit. Maybe you're having a bad day and you want to take it out on someone. Maybe you find something wrong with their argument or their comment is off topic. Down vote away. I think there is a large enough community here where some version of "the right thing" happens and that is good enough. Same goes for flagging submissions.
Microsoft is pushing Sharepoint to non-developers as their main web platform. Then business analysts are forced to learn it, and eventually they want programmers to build on top of it. You program against Sharepoint as a matter of consequence, not choice.
Have you looked at NoRM?
and neural resources.
Yes, but when you are at Stanford you are then contributing your knowledge and skills to the Stanford research community. It doesn't matter whether you were at Stanford when you wrote the paper about curing cancer because a researcher at any institution will be teaching, writing, and contributing to them being a top research institution.
[Warning: heavy overgeneralization] People build their business on what they are familiar with, and ("modern") programming / hacking culture has its roots in the open source / unix world, while dos/windows userbase is more connected to gaming, demoscene genres.

Also, innovative people are inspired by innovative examples, and Microsoft (as today) isn't seen as such by many.
Khronos Group unveils OpenGL 4.1 at SIGGRAPH
Good Points. Up until recently I had trouble finding a good/cheap VPS that was comprable to a *nix price.

Yeah, the thing people also don't realize on this topic is you can use MS SQL Express - which is free - to avoid paying/licensing issues.

The limits are almost entirely around ui, ease of use type features, not performance or scalability. Aka, you don't get the fancy VisualStudio-esq UI so you can't do diagramming, or things that you want generally when you are developing. But you still get a barebones management tool that's better than most of the mySql variants I've played with.

For use on a webserver, yeah it's a solid option esp if you are already having to use MS SQL because of other business requirements by your client/company.
At least you had someone to call. Not everything in OSS can be fixed with a fork and patch.
GameStop buys Kongregate.com, removes "Beta" tag
If you're running on 32 bit architectures for your main servers you are just playing around and you don't need stuff like varnish.

If you're going to try to push multiple Gbps out of a single box the least you could do is put a bunch of ram in it and install a 64 bit OS. That's a lot more bang for the buck than installing multiple 32 bit boxes with only a bit of memory in each.
NZXT reveals their new flagship full tower case, the Phantom
The Grazr widget will stop functioning
Grazr was an awesome project that was too early for its time. Now might be the good time to revive this?
Duh! Good catch. Maybe it was just DSL, minus the A? I've gotten so used to the current acronym I didn't think about that. More like it was...I...I...godammit. (...wiki...) ISDN! DSL existed back then but I think ISDN was the only affordable consumer alternative to dialup in the UK at the time.
I think so far Quora has been successful because

a) It attracts a high calibre of domain experts
b) the questions are edited and curated by mods/others

This really helps with things like spelling, rephrasing and correctly categorizing the questions.

I don't see fb a direct threat to Quora. Perhaps an inevitable partnership/acquisition is down the road?