skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The description of Scientific American is misleading. Sure, it's technically a "scientific publication," but it's actually a magazine aimed at the layman that you can find at checkout counters and airports -- not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that one would typically be associated with that term.

To put it in a better perspective, using Scientific American as a source for making decisions on the future of energy would be like using reprinted Associated Press articles to make decisions on US involvement in Libya.
I don't know about heavy equipment operators, but I know a welder without any sort of college education who easily clears 6 figures a year. If you know how to weld under water you can apparently make even more.
> Likewise, the incentives for IPv6 aren't there

Maybe IPv4 + hacks works still great in the US and in Europe, evolving nations (think: China, India, Brazil, ...) have lots of incentives to use IPv6.

Just because you have no incentives doesn't mean the rest of the world does not either.
The chess tactics server
Whatever new thing pops up, it needs to be severely moderated and it needs to charge for membership. Those things will maintain the quality. HN used to downvote comments that were fark/reddit like clever but mostly meaningless comments to oblivion. Just the other day I saw an entire pun thread on HN. The political posts also have been pretty terrible and utterly, circle-jerk style, one-sided.
i've never heard of him either, and i've been around long enough to not know, or care how long i've been around on nyc.

i personally find this sort of "farewell" ludicrously over-dramatic. to be sure, if i ever leave, i'll just leave, secure in the knowledge that nobody really gives a wit.
On the other side, is there a good "ELF.kext" or "Linux.kext" for running Linux programs on OSX?
Meta-comment:

Please don't post quotes using pre-formatted text. It forces the browser to use the full width. That, in turn, puts a horizontal scrollbar on my browser, so I have to scroll back-and-forth to read any of the comments.

I find it works much better to quote using asterisks. (We could also lobby pg for a BLOCKQUOTE feature)
Also worth a read, the Ars Technica Amiga history series:
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/07/a-history-of-th...

Also this interesting analysis :
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/06/shadow-of-the-16-...
Immutability and Blocks, Lambdas and Closures
Lousy use of space is something that turned me away from Windows from the start, and they are still wasting space. Worse though, it is harder to find alternatives that don't; even Mac OS X these days has more and more iTuneseque apps that fill a huge display without adding much. I think I was happiest with Window Maker on Linux or Solaris.
Wrong type of community for me personally. It's mostly designers and not enough interesting stuff from an engineering perspective. One too many HTML5 CSS3 show off links. I'm more interested in systems programming topics.
Thanks for the profound news flash. I'll be sure to write a blog entry the next time I fart.
The original motivation (from back in 2007) was threefold:

(1) BSD licensed, which was felt to be preferable to GCC (ie. GPL) for BSD developers.

(2) It's supposed to compile things 5-10 times faster than GCC.

(3) Very portable to new architectures; obviously a good thing for NetBSD which is ported to just about everything.

LLVM doesn't figure into this; perhaps it was unknown or not very capable back in 2007?

Source: http://marc.info/?l=netbsd-tech-toolchain&m=118961767521...
I think the best solution would be to make HN invite-only.
Realistically unless you have someone who is willing to spend 1,000+ hours per year making qualitative judgments about the quality of every active contributor, and who is then willing to go around being kind of an asshole, the community is eventually going to fall apart. And right now that's not going to happen, because there's no profit motive.

You could do something where you collect everyone's email address, and then give anyone willing to spend the time to be HN's curator the ability to send out 3 emails a year to the entire list that they could sell advertising against and promote their own projects. But short of that, I don't see anyone stepping up to put in the time and emotional labor required. The only other solution is to implement a paywall, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
You guys keep amazing me. Do you forget that nuclear plants produce tons of waste that has to be kept far away from any life form for thousands of years ? Do you know any written language or sign or whatever that is 10'000 years old and which human people can understand and use cautiously ?

Nuclear waste is going to be the worst legacy we give to our children and grandchildren. They will hate us for this.

And, even if the waste is going to give trouble (and to cost) people in the future, these same people handling our radioactive waste won't have any fuel left:

Toxic waste is forever, fuel is for 50 years. Doesn't that look dumb to you ?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Fuel_composit...
Can we change the title of the post to something that describes the matter better? "On Bushido, launch apps from github repo's" or something like that.
RiderOfGiraffes was certainly one of the top contributors to the site - and I'll miss him and his brilliant submissions.

Duplicate content simply comes with the territory of socially powered sites. If I look at the top 10 stories right now, I feel like it perfectly encapsulates Hackers: http://cl.ly/5iFy

This reminds me of a software project I made ages ago, and one of our initial goals was "seeing duplicate content on the web is lame, and we can solve that" what we realised after a number of months of building a reasonably elaborate Google Reader API powered service, was that the solution for users is to simply ensure there is other content to look at, case in point: having 50 or so stories on each Hacker News page. Since then, I have tried very hard to never over think why someone would use a service.

My only worry with Hacker News is how much people jump on bandwagons such as the Color funding debate, and I just found myself shaking my head at peoples snide comments over peoples creations and accomplishments. On the flip side, every time I check Hacker News I am blown away by the community, such as this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400184
50 micron tall Reddit alien
Women of Color in Tech: How do we encourage them?
There are other options, in Quebec they have a couple of universities doing co-op programs where students work (paid) half time and go to school the other half, the schools find prospective employers and work out the duties the students need to perform. My cousin did this for his architect internship, this is a required part of his program, he needs two semesters like this to graduate. He had a positive experience and made a decent amount of money at the same time.

I took a different route, while in College (in the Florida) I worked full time for the university as a System Adminstrator/Software Developer. I gain 4 years of experience doing it and only pushed my graduation a year back or so. It was hard, work sometimes clashed with school but right after I graduated I had not trouble finding work (I decided to leave the University to explore new stuff, 4 years in one place can get boring :) ).

I would never take an unpaid internship because it's obvious that A) you don't learn anything filing papers all day B) it's obvious employers use this to get free labor even if they aren't supposed to, of course in the tech world we are lucky enough that self learners can quickly get jobs based on skills only. Not so in the other professions I guess.
Yeah, the username is not for without reason either: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2161692
Jerry Levin at Techstars
Perhaps he's too proud to accept charity from a stranger.

Offering to sell it to him for whatever he can comfortably pay (no matter how small) is both generous and respectful.

If he cannot afford even a penny, I'm happy to pay shipping as well...
How we migrated to AWS
Thanks for posting, as a newer HN user (8 months), i now have a deeper respect for the system and will try harder to keep quality here and only submit quality content.

generally, i follow HN on twitter, that provides me a nice flow of the good stuff. and i always know i can go comment and participate when something strikes me.
In the U.K the Conservative Part were auctioning internships in several prestigious organizations. One Crispin 'I make money' Odey offered a week internship at his Hedge Fund for £5,000.

Its quite common. Personally, I have used my own personal contacts to get work experience. But when you involve money into this matter you are just creating more of a gulf between the rich and poor.

It is extremely common across all the industries in London. Very unfair. Media/Journalism is the worst culprits of this.
I've been waiting forever for a damn extended taskbar for dual monitors. Multimon works OK, but I just don't see how a feature like this can be ignored for so long in a software company where (hopefully) tons of people use dual monitors internally.
Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.
Looks like a PHP site. I'm guessing they weren't using version control and were instead just editing the files over FTP.
You didn't say what OS, but I've been running versions of keepass on Windows from XP through Win 7 now for probably the last 4-5 years and haven't had it crash once.

Am now using it with Dropbox as my main password store on every windows box I own, plus android phones, and a few linux virtuals (via keepassX). All have been solid.

What bugs were you encountering, since you list that as a separate thing from crashing?
I find the Quora interface and usability to be kind of clunky and finicky. Their "walled garden" site rules are also a bit finicky. While it was interesting to poke around Quora a bit, I didn't perceive much value for myself.
Yeah, a one-time paywall is what has kept Metafilter and Something Awful going strong. Don't think pg et al. will ever pull that though.
I think downvoting isn't as easy as you think for a newbie. I only see a downvote button occasionally, and have to go into a individual comment link to flag it, and I have been here for a fair amount of time.
If you use the Firefox Gmail extension, watch out for the autosave drafts feature of Gmail, which will put a bunch of copies of your unfinished unencrypted email on Google's servers.
This only really applies to humanities students. Take a degree in the natural sciences, engineering, CS or mathematics and you may find that people are much more willing to part with money for your services.
...and 5. don't make lines of text too long. Traditional spacing of about 66 characters per line works pretty well
Newbies can't downvote. There's a karma hurdle to clear before you can downvote, over 200 - I've heard it scales so only the top n users can do so.
In most cases I'd agree with you - but I assume that in this case it's purely done for the sake of a rather excellent pun, which I rather enjoyed :D
Certainly, but the design of a web page should allow for those font-size changes. Generally when I read on a tablet it is a lot closer to my eyes than my laptop.
I'd love to see a filter button on this page as well. When I click on a "Show supported tags" button, it will let me know which tags are currently implemented in my browser, and hide those which are not
Can a Country Get 90 Percent of Its Power From Renewables?
If that turns out to be the case .. I wouldn't go so far as to say they deserved it, but my sympathy would definitely be pretty limited.
There is a karma threshold you have to be above in order to downvote. AFAIK, it's a fixed number. One suggestion I have seen (and made) is to make the threshold a function of the total karma on HN, effectively making it harder to downvote and effectively punishing non-participation in discussion by the removal of downvoting rights.
android market?
Acknowledgment of mediocrity is the big first step, and a culture of innovation and design will follow.

That is an enormous first step for an organization whose most prominent trait is arrogance. I'd like to see them come around, though, and provide some competition.
EDIT: And we're back! The hn-facing server should be able to stand up to a bit more of a beating now, and I've increased the background workers (cheating a bit, since normal bushido apps can't do that yet), so we should be able to tear through the queue much more quickly.

Edit: I've put in a different public server (outside of the normal rotation) for everyone to hit. It's a single box instead of the elastic cloud - so it'll be a bit slower launching for everyone trying it out, but it'll keep the normal sites we run going snappy.

Wow, big thanks to Jacques for such a kind article. He, and several other on hn, have been wonderfully helpful all along the development of Bushido.

If there are any questions feel free to post them here, and I'll do my best to keep up with answering them!

Feel free to shoot me an email at s@bushi.do with any questions or you're looking to get into the beta - be sure to mention hn :)

Oh, and here's a totally gratuitous video for everyone wondering wtf this is, and wondering to themselves, "how can I deploy ~20 apps in 2 minutes?": http://dl.dropbox.com/u/412963/bushido/bushido_hill.mov

I'll start collecting some of the questions here:

Q: It's stuck at 8%!
A: Yup. Bushido is self-hosting, because we want to have the same experience as our users. We give everyone 1 background worker for free - and we haven't needed to have more, up until now. We'll add this in later, but for now, just let it hang out for awhile, until the DelayedJob worker goes through the queue and gets to you :)

Q: What happens to my data?
A: All the DB data is kept, and backed up (currently it's daily, will go down to hourly), and can be exported any time. Data written to the file system isn't guaranteed to be there, unless it's written to RAILS_ROOT/permanent (or the rails 3 equivalent). If it is written there, it will be backed up on the same schedule as the DB data.

Q: Where is the application running?
A: The applications all run on our servers (the ones currently taking a bit of a beating). No need for you to do anything on your side.

Q: What is the end goal of the project?
A: Ah, well now, that'd be a bit boring if we just spilled it out right now :) Suffice to say, one-click/automated deployment is just the tip of where we're headed right now. Check out the developer beta if you want to find out more!
West Coast vs. East Coast: April Fools’ Day in Internet startup culture
I'm afraid that making HN invite-only would just create a more insular community, prone to inside jokes, self-referential memes, and an "us vs. them" mentality.
Please consider providing a rss or atom feed.
It's stuck at 8% (Inspecting url...).

There is no information about the project, what it needs in order to work, what kinds of applications it can run, etc.

I'd be very interested in all of that, I assume hitting the frontpage wasn't too healthy and might have overloaded something, so I'll try again in a few days.
"Unity is a radical departure, but no less so than GNOME 3.0, which has wisely been pushed back until later this year."

I was wondering where the article author got this idea. It seems as if he must have fallen for an April fool's joke (http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2011-04-gnome-3.0-resche...).

I compared Unity and Gnome Shell a couple of months ago. At that point there was no comparison; Unity felt like a hacked-together prototype, and Gnome Shell felt like a beta. That's a very short-term view of course.
I guess that varies by the user. For me, on Ubuntu there are generally only two applications I end up launching from the panel: terminal and a browser.

The other software I use are either communicational tools (IRC and instant messaging), launched from the messaging menu, and document-specific tools (openoffice. GIMP, inkscape, gedit) that I launch either from terminal or the file manager.

I don't know how well Unity supports this workflow, as the Maverick version of it was too slow to use. But I appreciate the extra vertical space given by the global menu
I didn't quite understand if you are the freelancer or if you are the non-tech founder looking for a tech co-founder. I'm a single non-tech founder of a startup looking for a tech co-founder and I've read a lot lately about how to connect. If you are like me, I can tell you what I've learned.
If it had been invite only I would never have been able to join HN or make the contributions that I have (minor though they may be). I just don't run in the same circles and don't have some other web presence (a blog for example) that might serve as credentials. Invite-only would put a real hard-limit on growth.

Is growth the key problem or is it something slightly different?
I used to use TinyGrab all the time, it was a pretty indispensable part of my workflow, which is why, after nearly a week of it being dead, I got fed up and wrote my own:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/651972/ScreenDuck-0.1a.zip

It's obviously very rough right now, but it actually works. Later on I'll write a website for it and put it up on screenduck.com.
Same thing happened here. It seems like an interesting idea but there are a whole bunch of questions I was left with, like what happens to my data, where is the application running, what is the end goal of the project, etc. In all fairness I didn't dig around to perhaps this is all explained somewhere on the site.
We deploy from a special deployment repository. This has a bunch of advantages: 1) You can revert to a known state. 2) You can see if anything has changed on individual servers using svn stat. 3) You have a history of what has changed on production.

Any scm would work just fine.
I was a bit confused when I first read about it. I'm sorry if I worded it a bit weird in the article.

My best guess is they broke something with how the TinyGrab client interacts with their internal API's. They did have backups, but it looks like it was deeper than that. That is my best guess.
perhaps greasemonkey is a good way to get it on the repo page itself
Quote: ‘(Stalin) exterminated an awful lot of non-Russians who had traditionally resisted the central Russian state’

Yes, he did but not because they were non-Russians and the Soviet Union was not a "central Russian state". Stalin’s power was centered in the power of the Communist Party that by design (and ideology) spanned all nationalities.

Quote: ‘The rise of the modern state enabled ideological mass-killing, but that just added another reason to all the other ones - ethnic, religious, colonial conquest, etc.’

Yes, exactly, "ideological mass-killing". Of course there was plenty of other killing all along but I am sure you’d agree that’s irrelevant to the thesis. I assume, of course, you were not trying to say that since people were killing each other before we should not try to understand the causes of 20th century atrocities.

So back to the obvious question:

Who developed the ideas of the ideologies that are at the root of ideological mass-killing?

Just consider your own words (and the ideas behind them). I don’t think you need reeducation. You went straight to the core, quite intuitively.
Hey there,

Yes, I put in some rate limiting for the launchers, and it appears to have gotten backed up a bit. I'll see what I can do, but we're in a private beta right now, so I'm more inclined to work on the stuff our regular users are bringing up and worry about hn-scale later :)

That said, shoot me an email, s@bushi.do, and I'll get you into the beta if you'd like, with access to the docs. Though honestly, so far the main support method has been through chat/im/email/skype with me or my cofounder, and we generally take notes from those conversations and turn that into docs.
Sliced bread is disgusting. I wonder how good this thing is then.
I have 420 karma, and I don't have the option to downvote, and I've been on HN for a while.
I got the ability recently at 500.
I'm in the Start-Up Chile program right now. I don't understand the thinking behind this post, since there are no restrictions on what you do after the program. But if you have any specific questions feel free to contact me via email. And if you're just getting cold feet don't worry about it. The program is great, and congratulations on getting in!
Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd which are the primary users for Quora.
I don't think Microsoft's developers are guilty of this. I have several good friends in there (we agree we are on "the Other Side of the Force") and I am sure they do their best to build great products and, sometimes, they do succeed (I don't give SQL Server the same harsh criticism I give Sharepoint - shrugs - or Exchange).

Unfortunately, it's not the tech guys who are running the company. What products get announced and how they are pitched is not up to them. And those who decide the roadmap don't care if a new technology is shipped or even if it's possible to deliver what they specified, as long as it helps them get their bonuses. There is a high correlation of what gets announced to current tech fashion. That indicates either that MS product roadmap is uncannily tuned into the IT zeitgeist (so that you can deliver stuff when fashion demands it) or that actual planning is shallower than would be needed to really be in that position.
> I'm from Germany and I'm supporting our move to 100% renewable electricity production by 2050 or earlier.

Do people in Norway whose natural environment you're altering on a grand scale by buying their renewable hydropower feel the same? Will they feel the same in 2050?
I remember loving to read Jean-Louis back in the heady days of Be. He still has a gift:

Chef Jobs, in one stroke of his whisk, got the tablet mayonnaise to take, after three decades of clotted failures by the best and the brightest in the computer industry, Apple included.
Lost me at "renowned".
comics = lolcats?
Doubt about studying PhD in Computer Science
I have already read this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452746. My situation is different. I am 35, have 7 years experience working for various corp clients as a software consultant in USA, mostly involved in Java/J2EE,Oracle based enterprise projects. I already have a MS degree, though my GPA is low( 3.0/4.0) from a not so great university in USA( not a top-50 ranked university).But I am not happy with type of work that I am doing. I am really interested to go for PhD, but do not know if after 5 or 6 years , by the time I finish,if I would get any good job offers as a post doc or as a research scientist in any of the premier labs or in academic institutes.Should I keep working in corp jobs or should I go for PhD.
Select a font that looks good on your targeted medium (e.g. a relatively low resolution screen).

People piss all over MS (and I've been in line, at times), but they did some good things with regard to screen fonts. And lo, someone conveniently "forgot" to close the barn door (until they'd escaped ;-).

http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdana

(There may be a better article, but it's been years since I would have last seen it.)