skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've got a couple of projects at SourceForge.net, and I have to agree with everyone else. It is slow, and it's interface has always been pretty clunky--dealing with tickets and the forums is pretty horrible. I wouldn't use it today.

For our newer stuff, we handle it internally...but we have a slightly odd situation of having a commercial branch and a GPL branch, and the commercial branch is private. Open Source hosting places don't make that easy.

If I were starting a new project today, I'd try both github and Google Code and see which one I liked better, and then I'd go with it. git is really cool for highly distributed projects, but unnecessary for most projects with only a few developers--there are still some benefits, but if the Google Code tools work better for you, then the revision control choice probably doesn't matter enough to make a difference.

For one company I worked for a few years ago, we ended up building out a code hosting platform based on trac, Subversion, Mailman, Virtualmin to manage it all on the backend and grant project owners their own web space, etc. (SciPy.org is the result, and several Open Source Python scientific computing projects are hosted there. It works pretty well, or did when I last dealt with it about three years ago.)

Generally, it's more important to actually get the code out there than how you do it. Documentation is the hard part of the equation, and it's more important than you'd think. Your code will not be adopted without at least good documentation for installing it and getting it running. People will put up with a lot once it's installed and doing something productive for them...but if the install doesn't work, you've lost them, and they'll very likely complain about your software to others.

Forking a major project like PHP is dangerous mojo. I don't blame you...whenever I work in PHP, I feel like someone is stabbing me in the eye every time I have to create an array by typing "array(1, 2, 3, 4)" or try to do anything even a little clever. Have you talked to the PHP folks about possible inclusion in PHP 6? I mean, I know their mental model for software development is deeply flawed, and maybe they won't be eager to incorporate such dramatic changes, but if you could avoid a fork and still get the code out there, it'd be a win. Worst case, you should remain on friendly terms with the parent project--do not fork in anger, as it's bad for everyone involved. Do what you can to insure your bugfixes go back into mainline and that you follow their code very closely so that compatibility is maintained except in the specific areas where you diverge.
Both Paul Graham and Wumi are off the mark.

You see, unpopular people are people who have not learned to play the game successfully. There are two competitions going on in schools:

1. Be as good as you can be socially
2. Be as good as you can be regarding intellectual development

Every student will want to have the maximum of both those things, but the problem is that most people tend to choose one path and then work to excel at it. The most popular kids are as likely to be just as successful as the most intelligent nerds. It takes a bit of skill from the other branch to land at the top of either branch, and so those at the top will usually be successful people.

The problem is that these two branches seem to be exclusive. To be intellectually at the top, you have to forgo a lot of the social activities that allow you develop the necessary skills to get to the top of social ladder. And to be socially at the top, you lack the time to study, so you fall behind intellectually.

This is not about school in general - it's about life. To develop a skill, you need to focus on the skill, and your social life drops correspondingly.

But there is this middle ground. The people who know how to strike that balance between the two paths. The ones who are aware of the social hierarchies, and who make sure they do not drop in value socially. The popular kids who spend enough time studying, that their scores still remain good enough for them to do what they want to do.

There are a LOT of people who belong to that middle ground. But you know what, they don't write articles on the internet, because they have nothing to complain about! They liked high school and ended up doing well there. A lot of them are doing way better than the nerds who complain about how unpopular they were.

High school was your first taste of business. In business you need to develop your product, but you also need to make your sales. You cannot concentrate on one exclusively and leave the other away. Both require equal time and are equally important.

That's what these nerds don't recognize. They think there is some conspiracy against them - no, you just did not understand the system well enough to play it properly. If you went back in time now, would you not be able to do it better?
Or do some hacking...
Celebrity Pics Now: Joanna Levesque
Hmm, that would seem to make them involuntary emigrants rather than involuntary immigrants, but I see what you mean.
Who says they're "waiting"? I would think "work that long" would be a more appropriate way to put it, as merely waiting won't get a company to an exit no matter how long you wait.

Anyway, the ones that wanted a quick exit have generally already had them, or given up and gone to work for someone else. There have been five or six YC exits, so far, and all of them count as "early cheap" exits (though most of them are now "rich" by some definition of rich, they were still merely high six to low eight figure exits)...the companies that are still in business and haven't been acquired after two or three years obviously have bigger plans. In the past couple of months, I've talked to three YC companies that have had acquisition offers but have turned them down.
Ask HN: What's up with this type of superannoying ads?
http://davidadewumi.com/2008/07/06/why-are-black-nerds-so-unpopular/

On this site and a lot of others, most often serious bloggers, there are really annoying ads.

Insetad of having them in a nice column on the side some #"#¤#¤ decided it is a good idea to have them pop up when point the mouse to a special word.

I fidn this to be the most annoying from of ad ever.

It is very intrusive and makes me close the site immediately.

It makes some sites unreadable.

Is it the html so it is the site-designers fault or is it some sort of special ad-network?
Is it really just wearing the right clothes that makes you popular? Maybe the "nerds" are just fooling themselves, making excuses for their social ineptness?

What exactly defines nerd anyway? Not being able to talk straight to people? Doing weird things? But what is weird? Maybe building your own radio with nobody to talk to was weird, but what if you used your electronics skills to build fancy effects for your electric guitar and proceeded to rock the school?

Maybe it is rather the other way round: being unpopular causes nerdiness (in some lucky cases). I guess you can be smart and popular at the same time, but if you are not popular, it really frees a lot of time for thinking. And if you are lucky, you'll start thinking about something that comes in useful later on.
Yep. That's what I thought. Thanks. Surely, if someone did this, s/he could charge a little for it to all the other developers out there.
I don't see how you're disagreeing with pg (and I haven't read wumi's post). IIRC, Paul's essay also makes the argument that nerds would rather pursue their nerdy interests rather than abandon them in favor of investing more time/energy in being popular. I don't think nerds wish they were popular, they just wish everyone would leave them alone instead of hating and hassling them. Sure, they may wonder why they're unpopular, but once they understand that it's a tradeoff between nerdiness and popularity, they'd rather keep the nerdy interests. The painful part is that they might not come to understand this tradeoff until long after HS.
I don't think ethnicity has so little to do with it. In african american culture it seems, expression of peer disrespect is very powerful.
Focusing images with displays close to the eyes has always been an issue. My advisor, Thad Starner, has been wearing a heads up display that clips onto his glasses for 10+ years. His has the ability to move the image farther or closer so he can set it to appear where his eyes naturally focus.
Did you look at GeoNames? http://www.geonames.org/

It would require you to do some parsing to filter what you need but the info is there.
Thanks for the download.

Re: forking. I'm not really involved in PHP internals beyond keeping an eye on it, but there have been some really brilliant patches by a single guy that keep getting rejected because they're not of the "PHP mindset". Honestly, I think their mindset is a little f'd up. The namespaces in PHP 6(5.3) are ugly as hell.

We wouldn't be forking in anger, we'd just be posting the latest PHP with patches that make it useful. Use it if you want, that sort of thing.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback.
Would you happen to know what make/model your advisor uses?
I may be wrong about Linus "ambition". I don't see him as ambitious as these young generations that want to get rich quick.

He may have "hopes" as in "I hope Linux will become better" or whatnot, but certainly he doesn't have the hope of "Linux should run everywhere and anywhere".

I'm not saying anything in regards of Open Source.

My point is that non-Americans seems to be able to live in a "comfort zone" without having to join the startup movement and work like hell + eating cheap.
I have to disagree with your statement that many believes they have no choice. I thought the whole startups, small business, one-man business stuffs have been published like mad lately by the like of Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc., Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Washington Post, TechCrunch, etc.
Steve pavlina is clearly a geek (you may think what you want of his ideas; being married to a psychic is not a good sign of good judgment if you ask me); he wrote an extensice critic of organized religion here:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/10-reasons-you-shou...

I agree, and I think most geeks I know fall into the category of people who question bullshit often.
We've had a good experience with Clickatell, but only used them to send verification SMSs to our worldwide users.

In the US, a Clickatell SMS will come from their shortcode, which is perfectly fine. No need to pay big bucks for your own shortcode, like some SMS providers want you to believe.

If you need to receive SMS, it's a different story. You could get a UK number, which is much cheaper then a US shortcode, but might look weird to your US users.
As someone who does hiring of entry level people from time to time; making the effort and being enthusiastic has been the deal-sealer more than a few times.

Employers like to know if you're interested in the work or the paycheck. (At least your primary interest - everyone wants to get paid lots and lots of money, but for the real geeks like us; reading YC on a Sunday, we're in it because we love to hack.)
Neither. It's a snapshot of the website being linked to along with related keywords you may be interested it search for.

The annoying ads you're thinking of are contextual based links that are created automatically by the ad networks such as kontera.com
I've been doing that as well and it's a huge boon to productivity.
Jewish immigrants from the former USSR are extremely successful in the US, even though they weren't quite voluntary immigrants.
Very:
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Logging-In-en/brow...
I'm not sure where my post would lead you to suggest that there is no middle ground. In fact I mention that (partially) by virtue of being a good athlete, I happened to garner a fair amount of popularity. In fact, from your comments I'm not sure if you read what I wrote at all.

Really, if you've been to public high school in America (or, as I noted, several other countries), popularity is derived mostly from good looks/general attractiveness, athletic prowess, or popularity by association (whether your siblings or your best friends).

(edit: for blacks, this could and does include an affinity for hip-hop culture -- dancing, rapping, beat boxin, etc., and by good looks/attractiveness, per the article, I am inferring general outward appearance, i.e. clothes, shoes, fitted caps, etc.)

There's nothing to game about the system, if you're attractive, a great athlete, or have really popular friends, you in turn, will be popular.

I was at least one of those three things.

If you're not one of those three things, it's highly unlikely that you are (or were) very popular.

You're really just painting a broad brush when you say 'that's what these nerds don't recognize ...you just did not understand the system well enough to play it properly.'

Really? There's not a conspiracy at all -- in black culture, especially amongst the youth of today, intelligence is most often looked down upon and something generally avoided, to which much of what I wrote concerned.

I think you're confusing my reflection for complaints. (edit: I realize now you're just making a broad swipe at all nerd culture, apparently, and not actually rebutting my writing.)
You're mainly talking about the modern USA, not the modern West. And USA happens to be the most Christian of Western nations. In other Western countries, too, the state religion is roughly proportional to Christianity. UK, for example, is midway between USA and Sweden in both respects.

Unless state religion causes Christianity (unlikely, IMO), that leaves us with two possibilities: either Christianity causes state religion, or they are both just different faces of the same mentality. In either case, your assertion that "Christianity is now mostly harmless" is wrong.
I'd recommend github for source hosting. I've got multiple open source projects that I run or use that use github for scm and use lighthouseapp.com for ticketing. These are fairly large OSS projects with many many contributors and it works great. http://github.com/wycats/merb-core/tree/master and http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/tree/master as well as a bunch of other smaller oss projects.

Both github and Lighthouse will give free accounts to open source projects.
"Why pay foreigners when American wines are just as good."

A few reasons:

1. If I'm shopping for wine, and I don't see any producers I'm familiar with, I have a good tool for picking likely winners for imported wines: looking at the importer. I don't have a similar trick for domestic wines. Hints welcome!

2. Wines from different parts of the world can have pretty distinct characteristics, and I find it fun to try different things.

3. I've generally (though not always) had better luck finding cheap-and-good foreign wines than American wines.

4. I think there can be very good reasons to buy locally, but I also think a stronger global economy will have great benefits and I have no problem contributing to it.
I thought at first perhaps he did need it:

Bryan Carisone, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Raritan, N.J., “absolutely loves” his new GMC Denali XL, an extra-large sport utility vehicle...

Until I read the rest:

...with televisions built into the leather seats.
I imagine it is tough, but on the other hand, is it not only a couple of years (3 to 4 - then kids go to kindergarden and school)? Abandoning one's career might not be what is called for, merely taking a little break?
How disingenuous - not everything is going to have the same impact.
Although I resonate with your sentiment, I don't like to see families hurting by paying higher gas prices.

Say what you will about the state of the American mind, the bottom line is this: we drive big vehicles, gas prices aren't going down, we live month-to-month, eventually something has to give.
Privnote's developers are either stupid or malicious
Does your name not usually have an n in it? And is it not usually a girls name?

I read your article to the end. This black culture looking down on intelligence thing is not new or insightful. I've read about that lots of time on the internet. Black culture does not look down on intelligence. It looks down on nerdiness.

Let's imagine there is some really cool black guy - let's say the 50 cent of your high school. He does all the 'in' things and wears the right shoes etc. He also is consistently the best in the class. NOBODY would look down on him, rather, he'd be regarded with extreme awe. He'd be monster cool, and still effortlessly ace all exams.

Looking good is an easy way to be popular, but there are lots of terrible looking gangster like figures who are quite popular in high schools.

Being popular is about standing out in a manner that makes people want to follow you. There are many ways to do so, and each of those ways can be artificially created.

It's no god given thing.

I don't get what you're trying to say in your last sentence, but I never implied that pg was some superdork.
FriendFeed Follower Patterns
I prefer here comes another bubble
The Kripke metaphor is very appropriate in this context; it can be argued that he did most of his 'important' work at such an early age that he has yet to do anything to substantially eclipse it. Although, if I'm completely candid, I still don't understand most of his stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke
I don't understand the value of this library. For non-SSL static files, the usual techniques apply: long-term expires headers, gzip compression, combining multiple scripts, CDN, etc. For SSL content, IE7 and FF3 will use disk caching for static files if cache-control is public (FF2 requires a configuration change). Is there a use for this I'm missing?
I'd say that "of the PHP mindset" is quite possibly one of the worst insults you can give code.
There's an American Association of Wine Economists?!?

...I need to go and get a second degree.
I still have NT 4.0 install media around, and have even tossed it on an older box a few times to remember what it was like back in the days when Windows could be a decent developer OS.

Unfortunately, anything older than Win2k leaves you pretty much out of luck for mobile computing (power management, WiFi, and display switching) as well as most modern peripherals (USB support being notably lacking).

For even more retro fun, though, I recommend firing up a copy of Mac OS System 7 inside Basilisk II or SheepShaver -- even under emulation, it absolutely screams through day-to-day tasks.
I'm hosting some projects on my own box. It's a mix of svn and bzr repositories fronted by Trac.

Trac is awesome, but it doesn't really understand bzr branches and such, so linking to code from inside Trac is a little weird. If you'll be using DVCS, shop around for something more congruent.

Also, browsing a bzr repo from Trac is pretty slow.
Jesse Rudermann pointed out a nasty security concern on my blog: http://simonwillison.net/2008/Jul/4/quipt/#comments

Basically, if you have a single page anywhere on your domain that doesn't run the script, a malicious site could load up window.name with something nasty and then send the user to that page - if they then followed a link to a page that did execute the script the malicious code would be executed as an XSS attack.
Europe drafts law to disconnect suspected filesharers
Glad to see another black (and of nigerian descent to boot) hacker on News.YC.
How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction
I don't see a coherent argument here, which further suggests that it doesn't mean anything.

Our having a concept of infinity has no metaphysical significance. All our definitions are phrased negatively, by what it's not:

Infinite: That which has no limit. From the Latin 'infinitas', meaning 'unboundedness'.

Try and see if you can define infinity by what it is rather than what it isn't.
Ask YC: How do you feel about offline press/marketing for your startup?
As we try and focus more on customer acquisition and marketing (my cofounder is working on the product, dont worry!), I'd like to see what the HN community thinks about offline marketing?

Our core audience is the mainstream news reading public rather than early adopters or techies. As such, we're starting to reach out to mainstream journalists to try and get press coverage in their respective newspapers or local websites. Have people had success with this approach? I know Weebly has gotten some amazing mainstream press coverage - part of my inspiration was reading their blogposts about it.
To Beat the Heat, Learn to Sweat It Out
That seems an unwise choice...

"Bayesianity states that, when you die, Pierre-Simon Laplace examines every single event in your life [...]

Then Laplace takes every event in your life, and every probability you assigned to each event, and multiplies all the probabilities together. This is your Final Judgment - the probability you assigned to your life.

Those who follow Bayesianity strive all their lives to maximize their Final Judgment. This is the sole virtue of Bayesianity. The rest is just math.

One who follows Bayesianity will never assign a probability of 1.0 to anything. Assigning a probability of 1.0 to some outcome uses up all your probability mass. If you assign a probability of 1.0 to some outcome, and reality delivers a different answer, you must have assigned the actual outcome a probability of 0. This is Bayesianity's sole mortal sin. Zero times anything is zero. When Laplace multiplies together all the probabilities of your life, the combined probability will be zero. Your Final Judgment will be doodly-squat, zilch, nada, nil. No matter how rational your guesses during the rest of your life, you'll spend eternity next to some guy who believed in flying saucers and got all his information from the Weekly World News"

- http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/technical.html
Atheism is one version of nihilism unless some attempt is made to redefine the basic concepts. It sounds like you already have and it sounds very similar to what I embrace. I don't know where that leaves us, but it doesn't worry me either. I'm not trying to convert anyone. But I'm also very satisfied by my working model for God. You may choose a less-loaded term to describe where you derive a "life rich with meaning and spiritual satisfaction".
This is conjecture vs. (limited) life experience. My life experience says different than your conjecture, but of course I don't presume to say that all black culture is like my personal experience, although from what I've seen, heard, and read, it mostly is.
Ok, we have this now.
You are of course 100% correct. I was using the terms in their literal, non-traditional meanings so your clarification is appreciated. However, too often I've found the baggage of words like "agnostic" obscures the discussion more than it clarifies it.

Literally, "gnostic" and "agnostic" refer to what you claim, or do not claim, to know. Given the general muddle of terms--"agnostic", "agnostic theist", "agnostic atheist", etc--I tend to find it more helpful to separate out the terms into core meanings. I believe doing so more clearly displays the positions, as you can plot the Atheism <-> Theism axis against the Agnostic <-> Gnostic axis. I would argue that this separation of claims-of-knowledge vs claims-of-god(s) is clearer than the simple Atheist <-> Agnostic <-> Theist positioning.
I think getting some good online coverage can lead to traditional press coverage. However, that said, there are a lot of good strategies to get direct PR from traditional outlets. The bulk of it seems to be creating narratives that people can easily pick up on. I'd check out Full-Frontal PR as a good guidebook.