skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear you but Fandalism (despite its name) isn't designed to help musicians connect with fans or make money.

Fandalism won't be good for that.

Rather, Fandalism is designed to be a community of musicians showing their chops to each other. Kind of like a big "Show HN" but for musicians. Or Dribbble.com or DeviantArt.com. Or ModelMayhem.com, sort of.

It may still be a failed strategy, but the strategy is different than what you surmised.

Here's my profile (I'm a drummer and sometimes ukulele player):
http://fandalism.com/pud
None of those examples actually answer his question, they just belittle it a bit, but the original question, and in fact all of those, are very valid.

I suspect the current hype about the Nest is due to two reasons: 1) Apple people made it, and Apple is newsworthy right now; 2) it doesn't look like other thermostats, it looks easy to use and unique. I think that right now the Nest's aesthetic is getting it traction, time will tell if that's enough to get it sales.
I don't have a diary, i use evernote in my iphone, i add the problems that i have encountered in my day, and later i see if it can be solved with technology...you'll think i'm a little bit crazier, but it helps you a lot to arrange your ideas...what type of location based app are you attempting to do, i'm working in something for ios, its going to be location based too!...
Isn't that the pitch for Intellectual Ventures?
Farewell Stack Exchange
Weirdly I had the exact opposite experience. There is simply no way that I've found to get Mac-like acceleration on Windows.

I've hated every Windows/Linux touchpad I've used, but I love the Mac trackpad. I am not a gamer, though.
yeah, those are some terrible domain names...not even worth the reg fee. Now, if it was something like rideshare.com it might be worth something.
Mostly true, with the exception of Safari on OS X. If you have Flash installed on a Mac, Safari runs it as an isolated separate 64-bit process. This was not built by Adobe though, it was built by Apple.
The web is basically a REST API, no? (I'm being a bit facetious.)
The legal system maintains strict rationality about this point, and judges will sometimes use this cleverly. In order to give a clear analogy, let's say that you get into an Internet Argument about how if the Ontological Argument for God worked, then we should be able to summon Perfect Doughnuts In Our Hands into existence just by imagining them. (I don't know, it's just an example.) Someone comes by and says, "aha, you're wrong! You were saying that doughnuts are the perfect baked foodstuff, when in fact they are inferior to muffins!"

It is a fully rational response to say "(a) I wasn't saying that, and don't require that, and (b) muffins suck, doughnuts for the win." If you can argue those two points, then either one would rebut the criticism. So too is the form "I didn't do that, and even if someone did do that, that's not illegal."

In this case, her lawyer is providing lots of different arguments why the original threat-to-sue makes no sense. First off, she didn't do it; second off, it wasn't registered at copyrighted at the time; third off, etc. ... and lastly, even if it was supposedly copyrighted, the Constitution did not give Congress the power to issue such copyrights.

The many defenses are very useful to judges, who can then be clever. If this case got appealed on the last ground to the Supreme Court, they might essentially say, "you've given us a thorny question of Constitutional law, but we're not going to answer it, because it's our determination that she didn't commit the offense and was not responsible for it simply due to leaving her wireless unencrypted." This has happened before, where the courts accept an appeal and then postpone a sweeping judgment to a case where it actually matters because they don't want to set a precedent one way or the other.
Real life has a filthy habit of failing to produce neat, satisfying dramatic arcs.
Congrats to the team! (I invested)
You should go, never know who/what you will run into.
Whenever someone presents or executes an idea, there's always some guy who shows up claiming to have had that idea first.

You managed to do it twice in the same post: kudos!
If you, me and anyone who's spent more than a few hours with Django split settings.py into multiple files (and heavily modify it), why is it still shipped as one monolithic file? Isn't the framework supposed to make our lives easier?

Splitting settings into multiple files is the least of my problems (nowadays it is not a problem at all).

The biggest problem I have with it is that it is global, which means I cannot safely modify it at runtime.
The actual protections are embodied in laws passed by congress. The claim here is that under the constitution, congress had no authority to pass those laws except insofar as they promote science and useful arts.
pud

great work. May I come with one suggestion.

The main problem in comparing with sites like dribbble and devian art is that you are dealing with two very different senses.

One of them you optimize i.e. you can learn to quickly read through hundreds of pictures in a matter of seconds.

With sound/music there is no way to optimize for faster listening. 10 seconds is going to take 10 seconds.

This means peoples browse frequency is going to be much lower.

So I had an idea.

Why not start with a time limit of say 10 seconds or maybe 16 bars or maybe even less. That way it forces the musician to really cherry pick what part they want to showcase.

If something gets upvoted that musician earns the right to have longer and longer sound samples.

That way you will force the users to listen to more and upvote if they want to hear more.

Maybe that's a way to get some traction going.
Puppet is pretty cool. I recently used it to do provisioning in a Vagrant[1] VM to duplicate my development environment for other members of my team. I'll probably use it for production stuff soon, too.

[1] http://vagrantup.com/
I appreciate your sentiment, and I think 37signals does get more attention than they deserve on many occasions. However, the superior tone of your comment really rubs me the wrong way. Calling people who find value in something you don't doesn't immediately make them 'cultists'.
What you're speaking of doesn't sound like a very useful form of "freedom of speech." It's the right to criticize key government officials and other powerful people which is MOST important, because they wield so much power -- it's much less important to be able to publicly criticize your crazy neighbor Bob.
I was a bit disappointed when that ad turned into a Best Buy cellphone pitch, and not something, well, original. Cool ad regardless [edit: until the last 9 seconds]. It had a bit of the "Here's to the crazy ones" flavour, but ended with a "we don't make anything, but we resell everything" feel.

I was more impressed with the GE plantworker ads. Especially the Schenectady one.
It was previous mentioned twice on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549985 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551156 . The primary reddit thread is http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9a1v/im_woody_harrels... . It's also the 6th link when I do a Google search for "woody harrelson reddit".
> Only UTF-8 and UTF-32 are really big enough to hold the world's characters

So is GB18030.

Edit: and UTF-16, of course (just don't confuse it with UCS-2)
I do understand what you mean just fine. Except it doesn't work that way. If I have a critical bug fix in libA, I need it rolled out now. What's more, I need it rolled out across all other projects that use libA, immediately. And no, I don't want to work until all projects committed a change of their own.

Even more, I (or my team) are not the only ones working on libA. Others are too. So keeping changes in 'next' and pushing to master only on occasion doesn't help much. Yes, it keeps non-working patches out - but that's what local branches on your machine are for.

(I'm not even going to mention the issue of merge conflicts. If you work on a massive scale, the longer you stay in a branch, the more likely you are to get a merge conflict. There's easily the chance to go into a several weeks long merge hell. Pull from master, resolve conflicts, run local tests - oh wait, master is already updated by somebody else)
The way I see it though, you may develop and launch an app in 30 days, but just because you release the app doesn't mean you're done.

Sure you can build an app in 30 days, but if you walk away from it after 30 days hoping it will put money into your bank account, that's just... stupid.

But releasing an app in 30 days is likely smarter in most cases.
Well, I use Django since 0.95. Still, how long has it been since 0.9-1.0? 8 years?

Yes, I already use fabric for deployments.
Jeff's presence will be missed, but the man can't be faulted. His priority is his family, and he's sticking to his guns. Good for him -- seriously!

Honestly I had been on the fence about changing jobs until recently. I'm single and I realized that I haven't been on a date in a long time. Wolfram Alpha places it at about 3300 days (just over 9 years). I've made a good chunk of money, but all in all it's not worth the sacrifice of everything else I care about. I'd rather be at home trying to make video games and start dating again while I'm still (barely) in my 20s, so that's what I intend to do.
I'm pretty sure Firefox has run Flash in a separate process for some time now (so when Flash crashes, you get a stripy rectangle saying "oops, a plugin crashed" instead of your entire browser disappearing). I guess the news here is the extra-restrictive sandbox environment.
A few other commenters have suggested that they don't get a chance to get past "First, make it possible." to making things beautiful, then fast. The person writing the checks doesn't care if the implementation is horrible, as long as it works, etc.

Thing is, both points of view are correct, in different ways.

The kind of long development cycle Nathan alludes to here is not something a lot of people can do, but is one of the risks you can take / benefits you gain if you're your own boss. I wonder if it's more common in larger companies, who can afford to polish some projects before putting them into production? With a startup, it's more likely that there's one or two projects, and both are P1-CRITICAL.

For people wanting to explain it to a boss, I think it's best put in terms of technical debt[1]. This project will be expensive, but by spending more time/resources up front, there is a much lower cost to adding features or fixing bugs in the future; this includes getting new coders up to speed on the codebase, turnaround of critical features, etc. The cost is initial time to market - it will be longer before you see version 1 going out to people who can use it.

Taking on technical debt is a perfectly valid business decision under the right circumstances. If time-to-market is critical and you're planning on having enough money when it's successful to pay off that debt in the future, then maybe you want to throw out making it beautiful / performant just to get something in front of people.

Planned technical debt is a business decision. It's the folks who buy up front and ignore their debt that end up with problems, but that much is something we're all familiar with. One way or the other, that debt is paid eventually, whether with cash or time.

Even if you're in the unfortunate position of turning out software that sucks for people who don't care though, there's light at the end of the tunnel! The best thing about programming is that the more you do it the better you get at it. The faster you get at it. This means you can build refactoring into your projects and estimations without making a big hoo-hah (as it were) about it.

Open source projects are another outlet people have to scratch their perfectionist itch; if you start a project, you decide the timelines, features, level of polish, etc.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/paying-down-your-te...
Is it better for your "Instant Millionaire" to spend

a. 30 days or

b. 2+ months

...learning that his idea "turns out to be crap?"

It is better for the "legit hacker" to spend

a. 30 days or

b. 2+ months

...to learn that "there's a lot more to it than just building version 1?"

You seem to think that failure is an unexpected outcome of rapid development. In fact it is a key GOAL of rapid development.
An interesting snippet from the article:

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt's creator, discussed the notion of "time until death." All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can't spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game's cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

I think this is an interesting perspective. Personally, I don't calculate opportunity costs except at an intuitive level, and as a result I'm probably getting it wrong.
I feel like all of us owe a big thanks to Jeff. It's hard to imagine writing any code these days without Stackoverflow. It definitely made the web better for me, and I suspect, any other developer out there.
The Stack Exchange podcast will not be the same without Jeff.
Why would you want to modify settings at runtime? Not that I'm saying there's no good reason to, I just don't know.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this was uninteresting for the same reason that the Stack Exchange Podcast is uninteresting: it was just a guy talking about himself (SE Podcast occasionally has interesting shows, sooo much of it is just them ruminating about themselves, with a bunch of background racket). I didn't learn anything from this post, except that a Nerd Celebrity is leaving somewhere, with no technical information, no insight, nothing.
I think this is the right move for Jeff. It's good to see someone with such a high profile, putting family (and life in general) over working.
For those of you curious as to what the commercial is they are talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cavHNSZTyAg
Very few things have changed the face of programming as much as Stack Overflow did. I'm not sure that the Exchanges foray into other subjects will yield as successful products, but one can dream.

For fun, I even did a quick look at my Chrome history for last month: only 2 days had my not visiting StackOverflow.com.
Are you using UIGestureRecognizers or UITouch events?
I can't believe they have been here for just four years... I would take centuries to debug if it weren't for stack overflow...
I can only thank you for what you have done Jeff ;-).
Well i think at that age kids are more interested in playing games and things like that..You could show them how cool games are made, show them some of the programming that involves, the design of the characters, all that stuff...Put them some examples of video games like Angry birds, Plants Vs zombies, Fruit ninja and so on..kids of this age are more interested in smartphone games than console, so this could be good examples, they just don't know the magic behind those games...Maybe they could get motivated and start their own game someday...
Good luck!
Announcing Baardskeerder, an OCaml append-only B-treeish database
Isn't that bad for the consumer when a near duopoly buys the competitor?
I recommend evernote to record all my ideas, as I can record and sync them anywhere and most Ideas tend to be quick and I forget them alot.

From what I know about creativity, it can be nutured, and a keep step is recording ideas and exposure to new ideas.

Most of my ideas are hacks / projects.
My current count is 42, of which I have implemented 3. The other 39 are ones that I record until I feel like I have the know-how to implement them.
pud, the "f" in the logo reads as an "i" or "j" for me at first glance. Maybe you could tweak that a little bit?

What about a mode whereby you can randomly discover artists by queuing videos? I like the dribbble for musicians comparison.

( Nefarious Drumsticks! \m/ )
Counting bytes is the wrong thing to do (for old disks). If you count disk seeks (as you should), LSM trees are a lot better than B-trees, but it turns out you sacrifice more read performance than you should.

On SSDs, you do want to count bytes, and in this case, LSM trees do exhibit write amplification and it is a big deal. When your disks have a limited lifetime, even doing 3x the writes you need to hurts a lot.

(Not trying to spam, I just don't want to type the same thing twice, but) I explain this better here: http://www.tokutek.com/2011/10/write-optimization-myths-comp...
Exactly. Is he taking 6 months off to do nothing? How is he doing that? Did he cash out something during the last investment round? Retainer? Sell some SE stock? How's he paying the bills?
It's his personal blog, I'm not sure what rules you are applying on what he is allowed to post to it.

In any case, I thought there was content in there for everyone. Reflecting on what 'success' means, where your priorities ought to lie... it's all interesting stuff.
better a tab 'active' next to 'new'
I've never understood this complaint. If the author didn't want people to use his thing, he wouldn't have put it out on the internet and encouraged people to use it. Why do you feel the need to add rules and restrictions to something so trivial as sharing a few lines of code with anybody who wants to use them?

Open source licenses only ever really serve to restrict what you can do with the thing. If you truly don't care what people do with the code you release, just release it. Like this guy did.
That's an interesting case to raise in a copyright context. How would have Warhol been treated in today's trademark and copyright law environment? It seems there wasn't a problem in 1964.

[1] http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/07/i-hear-you-like-tomato-...
Running Lua on Heroku
Warhol’s view is encapsulated in the quote ". . . a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed to canvas, become Art." - A quote from your link

I agree that "artistic value" may be a hard defense in court, but the paintings are not about soup. They are about us. The things that we create and our ideas on culture and society.

See Duchamp: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp]

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." - Marcel Duchamp
Have you even read the article? He is leaving so he can spend quality time with his wife & kids. And mearly the fact that he is leaving is big news (if you ware stabbing at why is this here).
You can criticize government officials. A form of protest can be anything from organized rally to famous Gandhian methodology of fasting. But society in general shuns anything that is below belt and dignity. Be it your neighbor or local political leader or your own uncle.
The argument advanced by plaintiff isn't merely that the work lacks artistic value but that the work is "obscene" under Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), which means that it is illegal to distribute said work for sale in or affecting interstate commerce under Title 18 USC § 1465 ("Transportation of obscene matters for sale or distribution") (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1465.shtml). Obscenity is still considered an exception to the protection of the First Amendment. (For clarification, I am not saying that obscenity should not be protected; I am merely reporting the current state of the law under Supreme Court jurisprudence.)
Only way of finding out (and it'd be flawed anyway) is to set up a site letting people log their dispute and amount at risk, maybe anonymous to the public but with moderators checking info a bit. And collate the responses to compare.
How to build your own Wall-e robot
Suffering-oriented programming rejects that you can effectively anticipate needs you don't currently have.

I do anticipate, however, I never do it in code. Rather, I find that just thinking through some scenarios helps me to see where the code might start evolving, and to make sure that that part of the code is isolated enough to change without having to change everything else, if the time ever comes.

(Perhaps Nathan includes this in his "make it beautiful" phase, but I felt it deserved to be made explicit. I've too often heard YAGNI used as an excuse to not even think about a problem, let alone code for it.)
What is this celebrity gossip channel?
I've been wondering why SoundCloud is so successful until I heard that they also host a lot of pirated music. I suspect they might be the MegaUpload of music. Don't know though...
The mouse has always felt 'different' to me on OSX. I think this explains half of it, the other part being that the hotspot pixel for the cursor isn't actually at the tip, but two pixels down.

http://lach.la/n/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Cursor.png
Introducing Bookle, an EPUB Reader for Mac OS X
Another interesting quote:

The games themselves aren't where the action happens; the strategy component is: when do you reach out into your social graph? When are you going to spam that list? How frequently are you gonna do that?

I'm thinking that these game mechanics can be very powerful - I'd love to see them employed in a non-farmville situation. I'm not a MMORPG gamer, but I'm guessing some of the social elements of MMORPG play are along these lines?
Apple seen partnering with existing cable operators for 'iTV' content
Whenever I saw vBulletin used for programming questions (the most common option before SO), my heart ached. vBulletin may be good software for discussions, but it sucked as a programming Q&A site.

I always wondered why we, programmers, do not have an amazing software to ask questions about our craft? Jeff gave us the answer in Stack Overflow and it was everything I would have hoped for. And then some. I love the fact that Stack Overflow (and sister sites) attracted experts in their field and following their answers, I learned a lot.

Thank you Jeff and I wish you all the best for your next adventure. :)
No New Gear till it stops.
I've decided not to buy any more electronic gear unless/until:

A) It replaces something that broke
B) I need it professionally and there are no alternatives that allow me to do my job.
C) I can be reasonably sure that the main component isn't human misery.

My actions aren't going to change anything, and the immediate effects will involve some discomfort (yes, yes, first world problems, most of my electronic goods are over 3 years old, and falling apart, but not quite dead), but I no longer feel like I have a choice in the matter, unless I'm willing to break my overarching policy of No Assholery. Well, to be frank, a little assholery, but only towards specific targets.

I'm tempted to put up a website, try and start a petition, or something. I don't think this will fly much, but I'm not going to stand idly by.

Is this a reasonable response to the working conditions in China? With family members regularly visiting the production lines as part of their job, I know it's not all FoxConn, and that the people there are genuinely grateful for the opportunity. Doesn't change the fact that they aren't being treated fairly.

I want no part of it. How about you?
Yes I would.

Most tech companies don't care about your paper...just what you can do!!

I'm sure Google would feel differently though