skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most of the points in the article, but I'd point most of the blame on the rise of the Mobile Apps. Those who would have been the next generation of open source programmers are instead releasing closed source apps. Some of the reasons are the same as Zed points out (lower bar for 'making a company out of it') but some of the direction comes from the corporations backing the App Stores and selling the mobile devices.

For many common tasks, there are a plethora of Apps out there the do pretty much the same simple thing, in a mostly functional but considerably klunky manner. In the open source world, one of these would take the lead, incorporate the best features of the competitors, and then developers would pitch their efforts behind the winner increasing the lead even farther. Instead, every week there's a new closed-source work-alike.

It feels like a regression back to the pre-open-source days of shareware. Instead of a pooling of efforts, everyone is duplicating the work that's already been done. Instead of building a solid foundation, there's a glorification of throwing something together in an afternoon from "premade parts" and "stock libraries" --- perhaps they grow on trees --- and putting it out there for sale.

Android is considered the more open environment, but on my Linux based Android phone, I don't know if there are any open-source Apps that I use --- maybe the Camera is stock? In contrast, on my desktop (also Linux) I can't offhand think of any programs I use regularly that aren't open source (I guess Flash, if you count it as a program).

I don't think this is by accident. Why for example does Google have such a lousy closed-source email App? I feel certain a forked open-sourced version would be vastly improved within weeks, and anyone who didn't think so would still be free to use the original. Believe it or not, it's actually reasonably common practice to disassemble an App like this to byte code, and then try to patch this and reassemble it into a working App. (http://code.google.com/p/smali)

At one point I thought it was the phone companies that were setting this course, but now I'm not so sure. Microsoft tried to kill off open source through FUD and marketing, but surprisingly they didn't have the clout. But now Apple and Google might just kill it off by creating a thriving business for 99 cent Apps --- because who's going to release the source for a whole afternoon's work when someone might just steal it and put a closed-source version up on the App store and maybe become a millionaire?
I use it regularly as well, (calculator, calendar, weather, stocks, and iStat) but I agree with the previous poster than developer interest in dashboard widgets is pretty minimal these days. It would be great if I could run arbitrary iPhone apps in the dashboard alongside my widgets.

I think it makes sense for Apple as well, since the value proposition for iOS to developers is shaping into an argument that, yes, there are a lot of Android phones out there, but there are a huge number of iPod Touches, iPads - and perhaps now Macs - in the hands of customers that can run the same iOS apps.
I didn't believe it could possibly be that easy until I watched the video. Subsequently, I think they should add text to that effect near the video. After all the positive talk on HN, I was expecting something clever but was still surprised by the implementation (single line to paste in!).

I doubt I'm the only one who doesn't always jump to watch demo videos (unless referred by HN) or throw my URL into a strange form. For Ask HN's, I usually just check out the design and try and get a rough idea of the concept, FWIW.
Then why bother with a Facebook alternative?
An accurate title should be :

"AOL Inc. and several private-equity firms are exploring making an offer to buy Yahoo Inc."
In this case I really think the sum might end up being greater than the parts. I don't how them merging would be worse than both of them on their own. Yahoo has good engineering talent, AOL has some decent content. They feel complimentary to me.
Nah... I think just everything has already been invented, so there's no more need to start new projects... ;-)
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"Ramen profitable" would be the term for that :)
"I liked the miners when they were still underground. Now they are too mainstream" -- @Haydude

We can joke now, but the NPR coverage today had me moved. Good story, involves a Kansas company too, which devised the plan, officially named "Plan B" :-)
Or cookies. 4 kB is a lot of friends. Invalidate them every time someone adds a friend.

Both of these however make cache invalidation (in case of multiple browsers/computers) hard—nearly impossible even.
Maybe I missed it but is there any kind of offline support? Ie. What happens when update to server fails? Or it's completely up to the developer?
In fairness to the original posting, there are concrete examples of what you'd be doing (as their programming generalist) that I omitted in the original draft of the post:

"Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus."

Updated now.
I don't think it's unusual; it's very rare for job postings to say anything of substance about what the job/position really entails. From May to September, while I was looking for a job, I must've read a thousand or more of job descriptions, and none (OK, maybe a handful) would leave me confident that I knew what I'd be doing there, in case I got the job.

It was extremely frustrating and kind of scary to be in that state of uncertainty.
Whether or not he's an open science fan, that's no excuse for him to refuse to publish code when the paper is out.

You should point out that refusing to publish code is like being intentionally hazy about your experimental protocol.
Here's an alternative: http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.com/kraken-1.0/driver.html

I have to agree, that things like machine translated scheme and OS scheduling are not representative of real world applications. (Part of the V8 suite: http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v6/run.html - specifically Richards, and EarleyBoyer)
This appears to be what got them there: http://andreasgal.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/compartments/

Also worth noting, there is no longer a gigantic "NO" down at the bottom of the page. :)
There usually is a point where you're pushing so much down memcache's throat that the cycles spent pickling and unpickling data in python becomes significant.
exactly to what I am thinking.
>I’ve been looking for a junior java developer with about 3 years of experience who knows java and sql. That’s it.

Maybe that is the problem? Good programmers will never stick to just one tool. But if they know more than just Java, they'll expect to be paid more.
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Incidentally, we now serve about 24 million page views a month off 2 servers. (We serve images off www.)
Firefox 4 at least has scaled-down preview images in the Ctrl-Tab switcher - if you open questionable images in a background tab and switch to it with Ctrl-Tab, you ought to be able to get at least a little advance warning.
Another aspect that may contribute here is that more and more FOSS developers are doing it as full-time paid employees of big companies. When you move from intense, motivated programming to the conservative and meeting-full corporate environment, your productivity is bound the decrease.
Consider this though:

I have tried to explain (With limited success) to my colleagues in bioinformatics that not unit-testing your code is like using an instrument that hasn't been calibrated, and blindly trusting the results to be right.
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Good question.

Reasons for a Facebook alternative:

* While counting on your friends to not share your data is going to be dicey regardless, at least your data is not automatically going to be sold.
* Facebook changes it's interface and terms of service at it's discretion. You should be in charge of any changes to a sharing process.
* Facebook has the stated aim of forcing everyone on the net to use a single identity. This is a rather Orwellian position that we should avoid (goes with the problem of FB changing their interface and terms of service whenever they wish).
Care to share links to any of those handbooks?
90% of dentists are the best dentist.
No one wanting to touch your software because of a license is FTW how?
Criticism is fine, as long as it's respectful and constructive, which were two things that were in very short supply in Zed's Debian rant.

Also, Zed writes:

> I also don't make money on these systems, or I pay for them, and I contribute back extensively. So don't compare me to the likes of Meebo and Twitter.

Debian makes no money on its systems, and contributes back extensively too in many cases. So comparing it to the likes of Microsoft and asking for people to "attack" it was really uncalled for.
Typedefs & Linus
Some things are worth making a stretch for, and this is one of them. Take a personal loan from a bank, or put it on a credit card and just go. It's a far cry from going into hock for a plasma TV.

$500 may sound like a lot to a student, but for a hacker good enough to get accepted to this, you'll find it's pocket change out in the real world.

The connections you'll make alone will have a net present value of much more than a piddling $500, not to mention the other things you'll learn there.

Unless your mother is dying of cancer and you need every dollar to pay hospital bills or something, make the stretch and just go.
As a scientific programmer/data scientist at a university, I wish I could upvote this twice. I'll be forwarding this one around my lab.

Another issue well as code quality, transparency, reproducibility etc. is simply reuse. There's a lot of wasted effort in academia where people are constantly reimplementing simple things from scratch that do basically the same thing as their peers' code does.

Okay, this is true in other fields too, but in our field it's public money getting wasted.
Yes.

It sounds bizarre, but open source software that is not quite good enough builds a much larger community that one where its 'all done'.
That's part of the answer, but not all. Telling me what tools you need me to use helps me determine if I'm qualified or not; but it doesn't tell me what I would be doing with those tools.

I'd rather solve interesting problems in a language I hated than solve boring problems in a language I loved.
There is no need, nor even a way, to "micromanage Java's garbage collector". Once the heap size approaches the limit, GC runs and it will free what can be freed. So as long as you design your data structures in a way so that they don't hold on to objects you don't need anymore, you should be fine.

Of course, in C(++) you can design much more memory-efficient data structures through pointer arithmetic. But that's independent of GC.
For the sake of argument, you could say it's about the right people "touching" your software, especially if you dual license it so that people who don't want the unpleasant AGPL terms pay some money for the benefits they're receiving.

After all, cloudkick doesn't seem to mind if some people don't touch it with a ten foot pole because of the price.

I think it's a tradeoff: with GPL style licenses, you risk excluding potentially valuable community members who use your code in their own proprietary applications, but may give something back. On the other hand, sometimes those people/companies give nothing back, and some people find that irritating.
Yes, but does any startup actually make the distinction between "ramen profitable" and "profitable" in their want ads? If so, props for honesty, but I'm not so sure about their business sense...
So is Scaled, and who wouldn't want to work with Burt Rutan?
>I believe, and you'll call me crazy, but the indicator for this second trend will be a focus on automated testing (not just unit testing) and operations cost at consumer internet companies. Right now I think maybe 5% or 10% of consumer internet companies even run one bit of test automation, hell automation at all. Look for this as an indicator that they've figured out automation reduces costs and increases agility.

http://saucelabs.com/ is a company I know of in this space, but their product SUCKS (on Ubuntu/Firefox at least) and they didn't respond to my complaint emails (or fulfill their promise to remind me to cancel my trial subscription before I had to start paying for it). If someone wants to do automated browser testing right that would be awesome.
About a month ago, Mozilla released their' "Kraken" benchmark suite, designed to better reflect what actual web-apps actually do:

http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2010/09/14/release-the-kraken/

It's not listed on arewefastyet.com, but apparently Firefox 4 handily beats Chrome and IE9:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/09/javascript_performan.html
Yes, I've been reading the other comments, and a distributed network would have some advantages, but also disadvantages, a strong analogy being email and smtp.

About the FB identity, that's also very attractive to developers, and Appleseed should solve it somehow: if a website uses FB for user logins it gets almost-instant sign-up, user photo, user name, email (if requested) and access to a whole list of friends.

That's a pretty powerful incentive for websites to get integrated with Facebook.
I handle over 50 million page views a month with a single server on a large (7.5GB RAM) EC2 instance. 2-3 MySQL queries per page view, no caching. It's hard to imagine not being able to cut Digg's infrastructure size by an order of magnitude with the right architecture and perhaps more RAM per box than whatever they're doing now.
I can totally vouch for the tshirts. They are by far my favorite startup tshirt. They even got me one in XXLT since I'm 6'6".
I don't think you've just told them something new. The problem is figuring out what 'something' is.
I don't think so, just geometric series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series
Interestingly, this is probably the first major mainstream news event I can say I've only followed online. I recall watching lots of other events strictly by staying glued to CNN: the beginning of the Gulf War, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11, perhaps most similar- the Quecreek Mine rescue.
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I think it might be a question of which double-speak speaks to you. The listing of languages is concrete in a sense, and says lots about the sort of culture they aspire to, but tells me nothing about the job. The other ads also say a lot about the culture you'd be working within.

Personally, I would care tremendously about what I am doing, and not just which tools I'd be allowed to use. The fact that you respond positively to it means that it's serving its purpose as an advertisement, but I'm not sure that means it's any more or less clear as to the job description.

So while I'd probably prefer being part of this mystery company to being a "Front-End Architect" in a cubicle, I still have no idea what the job would be and the ad doesn't offer enough specifics to make me excited in the abstract.
Math nitpick: an IQ of 120 is not "just a little above average". It's about the 90th percentile of IQ scores. (Assuming a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15.)
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What actually surprises me about this is just how much faster V8 was (and really, still is) compared to all of the others. It also looks like they're starting to hit a point of diminishing returns. Here's hoping they're not!
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Scientists sometimes do publish their software. An example: in Operations Research, the COIN-OR initiative (http://www.coin-or.org) is a growing set of (Open Source) tools for solving OR problems.

Also, in certain disciplines, not only papers, but also the software used to obtain the published result is peer reviewed. For instance, the journal Mathematical Programming Computation (http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~wcook/mpc/index.html) accepts papers accompanied by the software used by the authors, which is tested and reviewed by technical editors.
Inspiration logo designs | mameara | October 13th, 2010
26 Inspiration logo designs grabbed from various inspiration sites, to improve how you think about logo design.
I on the other hand love the touchpad. It taught me not to use the mouse anymore (and I was a hardcore mouse person before).
Some of my best brainstorming sessions turned out to be things that weren't technically "legal" but damn were they fun ... this article is oh so true. As a youn tech professional I know how true this can be and how refreshing a younger mind can be at times .... great article
Keep in mind that V8 is not only running in the browser, but has completely different usecases as well (see node.js).

That it's a javascript benchmark only means that.. it's used by google to finetune their code.. not created to compare javascript in browsers among several different browsers.
I agree that they are very tight-lipped about actual revenue streams, but I don't think that is their fault. I would guess that it is the record companies that want to keep such numbers secret. One of the guys who started Spotify previously did Tradedoubler, so they know something about on-line ads. While they haven't said much officially, they did comment that ad-sales were going quite well.

Regarding what musicians earn, the most interesting note is probably that the Swedish collection agency (STIM) said about half a year ago or more that Spotify is the number one digital earner for music in Sweden (passing iTunes for example).

As for the bandwidth, see the paper I linked in another comment for some interesting statistics on how much bandwidth is actually needed (tl;dr version, surprisingly little thanks to p2p and caches).
So why wasn't this true in the past?
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Both companies have had a rocky ride the past two decades. At least this merger makes more sense than the AOL Time Warner fiasco.
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OSX 10.7 Should be something more ambitious
This article makes absolutely no sense.

China was technologically more advanced once. As was the Middle East. The Mayans. We could go on listing 'peoples' who were at one point technologically advanced but are now way behind economically.

This is just mistaking the effect of accumulated capital for technology. This is just wrong on so many levels, so obviously wrong.
Which is probably as much driven by the fact that the air hasn't been updated in quite a while as it is by any facts. But who knows, it will be true at some point.
I get this kind of thing all the time from friends and family mainly, almost always it is someone who "just needs something basic" and "it shouldnt be a big deal" however, I am a perfectionist and everything is a big deal lol so inevitably i spend time on it making it perfect and they go on thinking that what I did it for is what those services cost. most of the time I feel I am simply doing a disservice to people who actually have to make their living designing sites, however at the same time I have a problem saying no and throwing together a website in a couple hours typically just gives me a break from whatever coding project i am currently working on ... I guess to each their own, but I dont mind this kind of thing as something to pass the time.

Although to share a recent favorite, my Dad owns a company in which he sells gate operators and automated entry systems and he had a client that wanted to be able to bill every month by how many times an individual went in and out of the site, after explaining a few options to him i decided it would be easiest just to write a batch file that dumped the transactions form the controller into a CSV and from the CSV into access which would then generate the reports for billing with memorized reports.

I told my dad that which he understood (barely) but when the job was given to another vendor he called dad to ask what software he needed to purchase to do this, when dad told him i was just going to write a batch file to do it he responded "Oh yeah, well I could do that but I really dont have the time, so ill just let zach do that if he wants to then, let me know what I owe ya"

lol dont you just love the guy that doesnt have enough time to use the switches in a batch file?

The nerve of some people...
I think OpenBSD has a similar culture:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=117270339530912