skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok. I'm happy that at least we're discussing opinions here.

Looks like the Chinese are going to develop off Cuba and the Russians have plans for the North Pole. You must feel we're in a pretty strong position to give up the cheap energy close-by and plan on a transition of unknown qualities and length. I mean, I'm all for the transition too, as I've pointed out, but to _manage_ the transition? Wow. It's a breathtaking position. As an example, our behavior over the last 30 years sounds like: hey look -- the world energy market isn't to our liking. Let's stop local energy production and transmission and then it'll transition to something better!

This "what is a pretty beach" or "what is a pretty sky' question is going to continue haunting us, and it's quite frankly the reason we've screwed the pooch so long by not building anything. For that reason, I am dubious that we can ever come to a national consensus. It's something the politicians have figured out that they can keep us fighting about.

I'd like to see several hundred nuclear power plants built over the next 30 years. I'd also like a pony. I'd like to see the fuel re-processed, like France does. If entrepreneurs want to continue work with wind and solar let's encourage them by offering prizes for measurable goals.
JungleDisk does easy online backups: http://jungledisk.com
I'm assuming getdropbox.com.
I'm not so sure, I think it would be worth voting up if it were properly sourced. Most intellectually curious people are fascinated by change, and as far as change goes you can't get much bigger than the end of the world.
Well if it wasn't then why would they be presenting it at DefCon?
Live video of HTC’s “Dream” Android phone?
I love the way he roasts the dying metaphors, spicing their remains with his own novel images:

...like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

...phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

...gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else...

...an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow,...

...give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
I don't think all those japanese using twitter cares about what Techcrunch has to say.
Don't forget to protect all of your AJAX calls, too, if they modify any backend state.
The Permission Problem: Patents and Anticommons
Why didn't I start a company in my dorm room and pocket millions before I turned 30?
Definitely not a good PR strategy if people seem to forget about the service. Especially people here. Not a good sign. Being public about issues or your service greatly helps the company and the people interested in that service.
I think tar sands and shale oil buy us out of the "classic" peak oil scare, which was that we had used up 50% of the world's oil and were headed for production decline. No, we've used up less than 30%... and can get much more, expensively and with massive cost to the environment.

I don't think an oil shortage is in the works just yet, but the era of cheap oil is gone.
A Conversation with Christos Papadimitriou
I just got my beta code a few weeks ago and discovered they still don't let you download the Linux client, so I'm currently waiting patiently. Is there any kind of timeline on that? They don't say much on the blog other than that a client exists, and I can't have it
[video] It is not me, it is you
http://startupblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/its-not-me-its-you/
If we're going to post political material to Hacker News at least make sure it's not biased. If I want conspiracy theories about "the neo-con grand strategy" I know exactly where to go... Reddit.
Simple can be fine, its unimportant trivia that the "bike shed" refers to. Complex != important necessarily.
It took me a couple of times through to grok your intention...but I agree, JavaScript is extremely underrepresented in almost every language popularity study I've seen. It's so pervasive that everybody needs to know it. We build systems management software, and I've had to learn JavaScript. It's definitely not becoming less important over time...the "View" in MVC is eventually going to be nothing but JavaScript (by some definition of "view" and some definition of "MVC"--probably technically more accurate to say that there will be an MVC, with a lightweight MC, in JavaScript and an MVC, with a lightweight data structure V, on the server and they'll communicate via JSON or something). Anyway, Yegge is sorta fruity on some things, but I think he was spot on when he called JavaScript the "Next Big Language". We're only a few years into development of a "library culture" in JavaScript, but it's already obvious, to me anyway, that the future of the UI for most applications is JavaScript.
The substance of the matter is that America has relatively small reserves of off-shore oil, which if fully tapped today would only make a minor difference in global oil prices, but has massive demand for oil (25% of global demand). Off-shore drilling is not remotely a solution to the coming oil crisis (crises?), and is being used as an emotional appeal in the current political climate purely for partisan advantage, rather than for concrete benefits (not that it doesn't potentially have some benefit, but its current supporters don't particularly care about them).

Current US energy policy, far from restricting fossil fuel companies, is hugely beneficial to them (even though it is highly regulatory), with a large array of subsidies and special breaks, not to mention political support.

It is unreasonable to demand that energy policy always bow to the “free market,” as that has repeatedly led to bad outcomes all over the world, by providing opportunities for manipulation, and ignoring substantial negative externalities (dead villagers, air pollution, oil spills, etc.).

A much more positive change would be to decouple the political system from financial dependence on coal, oil, natural gas, and biofuels/agriculture conglomerates, so that we can have a less tainted national debate on the subject.
"Developers are technically correct when they point out that the mall is private property, not the village square. According to a Gallup Poll in 1990, nearly three-quarters of shoppers surveyed believed the mall should keep out political activists, which is consistent with what we know of the average person's tolerance for commotion (especially when it interferes with shopping). And yet the fact is, the mall phenomenon took the place of the town square, the public zone."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2004/02/2...

Next time you browse in a bookstore, check out Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy" and "Call of the Mall"
People were able to defend posting Ron Paul stories to Proggit, because programmers were naturally interested in his policy positions (paraphrase).
Like Taleb says, you can pick pennies in front of a steamroller and hope you don't get bowled over.
How much karma do I need to downvote stories?
The problem with oil isn't that it comes from foreign sources -- the problem is that supply is running out.
This blog's headline lists the "End Times" as one of its author's interests. Reading a random paragraph somewhere in the middle, I note that he thinks France is a "major neo-con nation."

That makes it a parody, right?
I wouldn't worry about it until we hit Peak Coal.
Every huge success on the web...has been the result of being better and faster than the competitors.

100% true. You can take 10 years to build whatever you want, but you're going to have to learn to put in the hours if you really want something in the next 1-4 years. You hear about companies like PayPal doing an IPO in 4-5 years (and right after 9/11), but you don't realize that their engineering teams were pushed by Levchin, who works--and expects his team to work--15+ hour days and weekends. Intense? Yes. But most of those early PayPal engineers walked away with enough to buy their next house in cash and comfortably work on whatever else they wanted, like YouTube. The 2 engineers and the UI guy that did YouTube also probably brought with them the intense work ethic that allowed them to move as quickly as they did.

If you want a 1-4 year startup, then you're going to have to start making sacrifices. If not, other people out there are going to do it and you'll take the back seat, or spend 10 years creating what took someone else 2.
Denmark uses oil for cars. Coal for electricity. Denmark now gets a lot of offshore oil relative to the size of the country, that's why Denmark is a net exporter.
I'd say let's not post political stories at all. They tend to spark boring and finger-pointing discussions that go for the lowest common denominator.
By what year was Google a "huge success"? Do you realize that they started working on it in 1996? (the company wasn't formed until late 98)
Dutch paving stones clean air pollution
right, but it was in private beta for almost 3 years.
TrendsSpotting Handbook Of Online China
And it just looked, and felt, different to me: at the start, it was much less about retaining control of one’s company and much more about giving control to one’s users.

The great thing about Web 2.0 was that these things turned out to be synonymous: giving users a platform that encourages them to create high-quality content (rather than coming up with the content yourself) means that you can tap VCs for contacts and advice, rather than just money.
Right, "ten years" probably means "way longer than you think". Or maybe he does really mean about ten years.

Anyway, it's an interesting path to the ten years. Maybe you've just (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html) got a bad idea that's not worth hanging on for ten years as it'll always suck. Probably an early milestone is to get (http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html) ramen profitable. If you can't get there in n years, reboot (?)
Maybe (http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html) some comp sci phd angel/vc former founder will figure out the algorithm to optimize the ten years to reduce it by an order of magnitude.
I've been working on a symfony project for the last six months, and after it ends, I hope to never see it again. Over-engineered fits, but I also have issues with many of their choices. In the end, I would have built a better product in the time allotted using something else, even my own primitive codebase.

Having come to know it pretty damn well, I'd have trouble recommending it to anyone else.
Time to Vanquish the Mythical Man Month
If you want to look at a company like Google, at least mention that they're generating $16 billion in revenue a year. Yes, they took 10 years, but look at the power of their brand, all of the applications they've built and gotten into the marketplace, plus all of their revenue. They're also "the best place to work at" (so you know they're doing a lot more than just product development). Google isn't just a search company anymore, and that's not what they've been spending all of their time doing since 1996.

10 years? You better have something extremely impressive if you're given THAT much time.

How did this get so many votes up? Is the HN community getting soft or what? ;) (I can sense the massive downvotes on this response already)
Explosion in Toronto - Twitter is Where the News Happens
Desktop Linux Suckage: Introduction
Why isn't there a network type for WAPs that is encrypted but passwordless?
Can it be done without a man in the middle vulnerability?
Nicolas Sarkozy is a political ally of Georges Bush... and the neocon label suits it's political views pretty well actually.

That said, the alarming tone, and the lack of source (except about the war in Georgia, which was well documented before this post was published) tend to make me think that the author is either a big troll or is going through an access of paranoia...
I'm curious but what if you made the tank or whatever a more simple, trivial shape? Or does size matter? Hrm...
Also, if you plug that memory stick in a computer you don't own then that computer can read all the private keys you have on it... and possibly forward it to an attacker.
I looked at Symfony, CakePHP, and a few others (at time, Zend was not anywhere near production ready), and all just seemed like (a) overkill or (b) inadequate. In the final analysis, I wrote my own framework.

On the flip side, homebrew framework development has become a larger project in recent years. Nowdays, you need to include in AJAX integration, slicker client UI, mobile phone accommodation, web services API, multimedia handling, etc.... And you're going to be reliant on 3rd party libraries that you need to research, choose, perhaps configure and upgrade at intervals.

Have used Rails for a few projects and it provided a constant stream of annoyances as anytime you attempted to do something that didn't quite fit into the DHH "vision", it was a hassle. Though I liked the DB migration setup in spite of the lock in to autoincrement integer keys.
There is a nice article on MVC<->MVC where you have your MVC server setup like rails or merb and you have an MVC in javascript as well. Good read: http://welcome.totheinter.net/tutorials/model-view-controlle...
"This is probably one of the biggest examples yet of how outdated and antiquated traditional news services are."

For a huge explosion, sure.

I'm not convinced the argument applies for anything more nuanced than "something go big boom".
Yes, really. Your statement was:

" Second, unless you do an audit of the source, there are no guarantees as to the security of the app itself. "

That applies to OpenSSH. Yes, you can trust it more as many other people use it. Are there guarantees (your words, not mine) as to its security? No.

With OpenSSH's recent fuckups, it's a good time to keep that in mind.
How viral is GPL?
Though I find the TIOBE index interesting, the error margins are huge.

The top 5 seem fairly accurate. Considering the error margins, you'll notice there's a massive drop-off after position 5. (#1 - 21%, #5 - 9% and #6 - 5%). You can safely forget about accuracy after that.

I am a little surprised at C#'s low rating.

JavaScript's position seem reasonable - not everyone is building web apps. I do a ton of JS development myself and we're using it to squeeze every last drop out of the browser. Recruitment efforts on our end for this tend to focus on keywords like C, Haskell, LISP, assembly. Most JS positions in the market are for DOM manipulation and AJAX responses. I keep my CV up-to-date, but don't emphasize the JS aspect.

The 10:1 ratio of JS to ActionScript seems a little off, but I guess that's because most job ads look for 'Flash Developer' as opposed to 'ActionScript Developer'.

Delphi is up? Uh, what? And PowerShell is in the top 20 - higher than bash/csh/ksh and even higher than Lua? (I know a lot of game developers - Lua is fairly big in that sector).

Don't take lists like this as a guideline for your personal development. They're an indication of the current state and an error-prone one at that.

That said...

I think you should all be reasonably comfortable with C, Java, C# and two of Ruby, Python or Perl. And then throw in one or more of OCaml, Scheme, LISP, Haskell, what have you.

Oh, and assembly of course. Pick an architecture but get down and dirty with the a malloc implementation or two.

In closing, language popularity doesn't mean much.
...or maybe Knol is just another Google Base?
Once you have a splash in the press it's stupid to not let the resulting potential users in. There, I said it - stupid. There are very many companies that have lost their only chance to sell me their products this way - they announce a product, I come over there, can't find the "buy now" button, turn around and leave. Their story will never be picked up by the same site again, because it's old news. I will never remember to come back. Bye-bye.
Many smaller startups probably have fear of customers. It's one thing to code, the other thing to deal with people. PG should write an article about this subject, this can easily be the biggest failure factor, ever.
I think you underestimate how difficult scaling is.

So, you want to offer 2GB of redundant storage over the internet to everyone. Well, first you're going to need 6-10GB for everyone to cover redundancy. You're also going to need an amazingly high amount of bandwidth to cover it - especially at the start because new users are the ones likely to decide "oh, I want to see how well this works so I'll just test upload download random things for a while" because of the novelty.

So, you assume that you can store 4TB per server at $1,000 per server assuming you're buying crappy white-box stuff - really scraping the efficiency barrel here. That means that for every 400 people, you have to spend a grand.

OK, so let's say that only 1 in 10 actually use the product, that's $1,000 for ever 4,000 people. Still not great. Most importantly though, your staff is only so large. You're not just allocating more space on S3 - you have to be installing and configuring these servers - oh, and let's not forget that rack space isn't cheap. Without bandwidth or power, rack space can go for $1,000 per month for around 40U.

So, let's say they just open it up and 100,000 people sign up for it - not unreasonable. It would require $25,000 to buy the hardware considering a 10% usage rate (people only actually storing 200MB rather than the 2GB limit). Above that, we're talking about installing 25,000 boxes into racks and configuring them all. Above that, they need to pay for electricity for all those boxen. Let's assume dirt cheap power at 4 cents per kWh and decently efficient servers drawing 200 watts (neither of which are going to be true in real life). That's $200/hr to keep those servers alive. Going monthly, we hit $144,000! Great way to blow through VC! Oh, bandwidth, how could we forget about that.

I'm going to stop beating a dead horse right now. It is really hard to provide what Dropbox is trying to do. It makes a TON of sense to start slowly in their case. This isn't like a social networking site where it matters how many of your friends are on nor does it have the luxury of storing very little data. Most importantly, unlike the Web 2.0 stuff out there, Dropbox's usefulness is harder to do. While many social apps are highly polished, Dropbox has a much higher technical barrier. Specifically, you need to buy a lot of iron to run it. This isn't something where you can use S3 (or a smal MogileFS cluster) to store/serve icons or some user photos. Do you think someone else is going to come along and compete with Dropbox? Sure, but not like they would with something like Twitter.
The venture deals that got away
"Current US energy policy, far from restricting fossil fuel companies, is hugely beneficial to them " Did I miss the part where you pointed out oil production in the U.S. has dropped to 1940s levels?

"The substance of the matter is that America has relatively small reserves of off-shore oil" Which 30 years of partisan bickering in Congress has failed to release to the market, along with the additional north shore finds. Along with more nuclear. Along with reprocessing spent fuel. I could go on. Did you point out that with the reduced elasticity of supply, those extra barrels could have had a major effect on world price stability?

The substance of the matter is that we have been shooting ourselves in the foot for over 30 years because poor countries are doing all the dirty work for us. We don't have to worry about environmental issues as long as it's the Saudis doing the pumping. Everybody can point fingers at each other and we can continue on our way. No energy bill was passed during all those administrations because both parties would rather have an issue than have a solution.

Our demand is about to get overtaken by China and India in the next twenty years, really no matter what we do. We are sitting in a bubble, arguing about what the world should be like. Meanwhile, the real world continues on. People continue to trade living in a dirty world for money, education, and prosperity. For every thousand dead from oil spills, another ten million live better lives (it's hyperbole, yes.). I wonder how foolish we look to them?
Web Privacy on the Radar in Congress
I'm saying we were idiots for not drilling for the oil thirty years ago, and we continue to be idiots by not drilling for it today. To do something not in your best interest is foolish and idiotic.

No. It is not the answer. I don't recall anybody saying it was. "We cannot drill our way out." Sounds good. But it's just a slogan. Get beyond it to realize that we have to use every tool in our arsenal, not give up on logic and common sense. 1 percent of something is something, not nothing. Little bits add up. I can probably find 10-1 percent differences that have been sitting on the table for decades. Easy.
The software process of open source is fascinating, but I think you can't overlook the fact that people are choosing to contribute and want to get something done. If you hired 100 developers and told them to contribute as needed would the outcome be as good as the big open source projects around? Most likely we'll never find out because management wants to control what gets done.
Syncplicity does too. I've been using them for a few months, very happy. http://www.syncplicity.com/
No, still an advertising company.
Your point is valid, but your math is wildly inaccurate.

> Above that, we're talking about installing 25,000 boxes into racks and configuring them all.

No, it would mean installing 25 boxes (100,000 people / 4,000 users per server = 25 servers). And that means your power estimate is off by x1000 as well.
Yes!

I attended that very session yesterday and almost fell asleep because it was so shallow. I expected a bit more in-depth technical talk, not a glossing over of basic objc/cocoa concepts and IDA Pro for Windows (maybe I was expecting too much and Hotchkies was right on target, given the miniscule number of folks who knew objc in the crowd).

I see the "journalist" just cherrypicked some marketable quotes, whoever it was must have been bored listening to the rest :)
Google was a huge success by the time it went out of beta. I think this was late 1999.

By 2004's IPO Google's success would be considered "the standard by which success will be defined for the next 20 years" type of huge success rather than merely another run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley $100M exit type of huge success.
There's a bit of a contradiction in this article. He says that programmers seem to be about 5 times as productive as they were in Fred Brook's day. If you reduce the size of a team by a factor of 5, you also reduce the communication overhead by a factor of 25. I do not see that this is accounted for in his reasoning.

Also, the truth of the majority of most FOSS projects is that the lion's share of the work is done by a minority of the contributors.
The key word in the sentence "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" is "late." - i.e. it's about adding developers in order to meet a preordained deadline. Open source just removed the deadline from the process.
The screen sharing component of Leopard is just plain old VNC that you can enable/disable on your own in Sharing prefs in System Preferences, so yes it should work with any VNC client for Windows or Linux.

The iChat integration I'm not so sure about either. But you don't need iChat to use screen sharing.
When smart people said in the past, Google will be Microsoft of the future, nobody believed it. I am sure, still not many will believe it. But it is a truth, which we can't deny in the future.
Agreed. Excellent points.