skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a complete answer to your critique, and I don't have any experience working with stack-ranking, so I'm not sure the following is true. But: it seems like the worst problems of stack ranking might come from not having good people doing the ranking. In other words, it's a system that would be a complete disaster if used in a normal organization full of normal people. But Valve strives to be (and, I think it may be fairly said, is) neither. True?
Having used a variety of cloud servers (Slicehost before the RS acquisition as well as after) I would agree that the cloud offering from RS has a long way to go, both in terms of features and performance. You get way better performance from Linode (for less money last I checked) and tons more features from EC2 (as outlined in the article).

To me, the only good reasons to go with RS's cloud offerings are if you've already got dedicated machines with them (and want simplified billing, or integration via their hybrid hosting), or are planning to integrate heavily with their other cloud services (e.g. free network to cloudfiles)
Interesting, but I think we're talking about very different things. You're talking about engineering systems which manipulate people into doing things you think are good for them, and I'm talking about largely undoing the system's scope for such manipulation, by undoing the internal mechanisms by which such systems operate.

The other post currently at the top of HN is about the poster's fear that by pursuing entrepreneurial ambitions now they are setting themselves up for economic irrelevancy in a few years' time. The top comment in that thread is currently from an experienced programmer saying that he has almost never had the optimal skillset for any job market of the last three decades, yet never been unemployed. That's the kind of fear which turns someone into a cog, and the kind of thing you have to undo to live out pg's desiderata.
Here is another deleted question archive that's not over its quota: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-st...
The phrase "don't work too much" doesn't mean "don't do a lot of work today." It means don't let work take up your whole life. Starting a startup is the best way to do that, if you're suited to it. Note the word "compress" in the passage you quote.
What if, instead of asking for the domain, they had asked for $10,000, would you have paid? What about $1M? Where do you stop?

I sure hope that my registrar would never give in to anything like this, and would actually know how to defeat DDOS.
Nope. The journey is the destination.
Textastic Git support is currently in the works. No ETA, though.

http://feedback.textasticapp.com/topic/7628-support-for-vers...
Non-monetary (direct) compensation: Some entity gets famous doing something which they're not paid for, but parlays the fame into economic gain.

FOSS example of notoriety (non-monetary compensation) later resulting in money: GCC has some benchmarks that are better than vendor compilers. Companies that use GCC start paying to improve it. The thing is, GCC is pretty good, and deserves its good reputation.

However, the notion of "Open Source" itself has been subject to hype.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10295530-16.html

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2006/05/25/beyond_the_...

I think the marketing and dumbing down phenomenon has happened with languages. However, there, proprietary software also fares worse. You may have a point.
Look at part three of this series: http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2008/01/death-of-leve...

Considering this article is four years old, a lot of this didn't pan out. Spore failed to come remotely close to its hype, Borderlands' gun system turned out to be unpopular (too many guns were completely useless). Diablo 3 uses procedural dungeon generation, just as 1 and 2 did, but with plenty of predesigned set pieces scattered throughout.

The problem still seems to be that the set of things that you can generate on the fly and all result in something fun is fairly small. The other interesting thing is that we're seeing the opposite trend in terms of the growth of user-created content as a central game component (thanks Minecraft).

Procedural generation will certainly be used to keep games replayable (D3's dungeon and loot generation, L4D's director AI, etc), but to claim that it will replace designers in any way is silly.
If people started committing code and expanding Lua's stdlibs, would it be able to compete with Ruby/Python/Perl?
Node.js and Web Server Architecture Performance
I hope it goes big, it's awesome.
Why did you know these details? Were you also an objective underperformer that got PIP? How many CLs per month did you submit?
State of Data This Week - #95
Maybe the most widely known broken PRNG :)
I applaud the direction, but I do have one small nit to pick:

"there really hasn’t been much advance in car technology in the intervening 126 years"

You can drive all day every day for fifty years [1] and never use the biggest feature we've been researching for cars, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a breakthrough.

"Between 1970 and 2010, the number of fatalities decreased by 38% and the number of
injury crashes by 13%. In the same period, the number of vehicles and the distance
travelled more than doubled."

Many of those gains are due to the parade of safety technologies over the last several decades. Electronic stability control, airbags, crumple zones. If we go all the way back to Benz, then we should talk about seatbelts and shatter proof glass too.

Cars haven't exactly been stagnant, we've just had a subtler priority. Those safety advances will lay an important foundation, and hopefully be extended as we shoot for a "crash proof" personal flying vehicle.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2012/01/30/146075552/ups-driver-honored-f...

[2] http://www.internationaltransportforum.org/irtadpublic/pdf/1...
One thing I noticed: Could you link more prominently to the github page/repo of the project? One has to click the "watch" button to get there (which I didn't know before, so at least I learned something :D).

My idea would be to make a prominent "on github" link or link the big title to the repo.
The Parasol Programming Language, Robert Jervis. 1993
The link is an HTTPS link so that's not true. You merely have to trust every CA.
I interpret this more as, don't work to the point where it pushes other priorities out of your life. For me, I'm young and don't have a family, so starting a startup with some friends could be a tough, yet fun learning experience. Maybe for people in different circumstances, it takes over your life to the point that you lose sight of your relationships or faith.
This was done at Brown in 2000 (albeit in monochrome):

http://techhouse.brown.edu/bastille/

Woz even showed up to play it:

http://techhouse.brown.edu/bastille/photos/woz_play.jpg
Maybe I'm the one crazy luddite on HN (would not surprise me at all!), but I don't look forward to self-driving 300mph cars. The idea of trusting a computer system to keep me safe on open roads, in close proximity to other computer-controlled cars, sounds terrifying, not relaxing.

Yes, I love high-speed trains, because they're on a track, and while this obviously does not guarantee safety, it certainly makes it feel much safer to me.

Compare to air travel. Even with the meticulous maintenance and regulatory requirements, a significant fraction of the population is scared of flying (to some degree). Driverless cars are better in one aspect (operates at ground level), worse in others (proximity to other vehicles), just different in some ways (computer versus human pilot), and complete unknowns, so far, in others (regulation).

Even if the actual crash/injury/fatality rate of driverless cars is nil, how do you design a 300mph computer-controlled car to not be scary for passengers? I want it to work, as I recognize the advantages, but it seems like the social problems will be even tougher than the technical problems, and I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter.
First, a warning -- I read through the Ruby source code for this project and it does zero input validation and is subject to many glaring security vulnerabilities, including directory traversal attacks. If you run this code, be prepared to serve up your entire disk to the Internet -- read/write at that!

If you want a REST/JSON based HTTP file storage server, just run Riak. Or if you want HTTP but don't care about JSON, fire up a WebDAV server of your choice. Incidentally, both of those technologies are about as compatible with the S3 protocol as this so-called "OpenS3" project... which is to say, they're not at all.

If a 200-line Rack hack is what it takes to make HN then I need to start submitting more of the code I write...
Interesting code. Have you thought about automatically creating the models by using SHOW TABLES + DESCRIBE? Might save you some time.
I just don't see this as being a huge selling point.

The point isn't for someone to visit all of the worlds. One problem I experienced in Eve Online is that even with thousands of worlds, with a well populated MMO with powerful and well established factions, the new territories are gobbled up pretty quickly. I want to make sure there's always room to start building from scratch.

Im just saying that the games I adore the most are the ones with just even a few levels that thrilled me, likely because of the human genius that pored laboriously over every detail.

I aim to create a system where players can encounter such efforts, but generated by fellow players, not by a pool of devs.
A big problem is that the fears are not all irrational, either, at least not in all circumstances. For many people on HN, they might be, but on average we tend to have pretty marketable skills and middle-class backgrounds (with some exceptions). I think for a lot of people it's unfortunately the case that making yourself look as much like a shiny cog as possible really is the best strategy to making a decent living.

In sheer numbers, the largest path out of poverty is a pretty mundane one: find a stable middle-class job in a large company. There are more exciting rags-to-riches stories, but rags-to-decent-paycheck stories are a lot more numerous and high-probability. So, maximizing attractiveness to large companies is probably the highest-probability way out of poverty. And, large companies are large machines whose hiring processes usually aim to acquire new cogs that can be inserted into the machine as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
Search engines tend to place Wikipedia high for almost every relevant query. This happens despite the amount of useless crap on Wikipedia. Hell, how often is Yahoo Answers on the first page of results. "Noise" won't stop you from getting listed if you've got enough page rank.
Asana is nice and clean.
FWIW, PyPy is close to supporting 3.x (for x ~ 2 IIRC): http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2012/04/py3k-status-update-3.ht...
Like taco delivery.
That's definitely something what I don't want to do. Not that it's bad, or something.. just it defeats the purpose of this app. The goal is to have some skeleton or base to start your own stuff. There is no reason to make it so flexible so it'll generate all that stuff. Besides, as you can see, my app works with Mongo or MySQL DB by simply changing ONE SINGLE LINE of the code. Which is kinda cool, I think. No ORMs, no special "preparations". A little bit work on the model class, and you are done.

Besides, I mentioned that already, we all know we are going to change this code for our own needs. So it needs to be simple, straightforward and interchangeable. That was my goal.
2nd that!!! Create a small 100% javascript client side application and don't use any libraries or frameworks, and implement using MVC approach. Going thru an exercise like this will really help out when working with the frameworks and give you a nice background with Javascript. One of the things that can be a bit confusing for folks new to Javascript is how OO and Inheritance is done. I would recommend this book: Pro Javascript Design Patterns and http://howtonode.org/object-graphs this 3 part tutorial
I wrote about this topic on Quora a while back: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Amazon-EC2-compare-with-Racksp...

Most of the pros and cons listed there still apply. In it's current form, Rackspace Cloud compute is little more than VPS with a few cloud features. However, the next gen Rackspace cloud platform will make significant improvements: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/nextgen/

For now, EC2 is a far superior compute platform in just about every way.
I'd rather be part of making things than attacking things. That's why I go BSD or MIT with my code.
يوم الأرض العالمي  
يوم الأرض العالمي

يوم, الأرض ,العالمي

http://video.qlbak.com/11293.html
GNU "Hello World" 2.8 released
It seems that they (Rackspace) are just about to launch something that might fix some of the issues that are being talked about: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/next-generation-rackspace-clou...
1) lua is not owned/marketed/pimped by any company

2) lua has no primary app domain/killer app. games to web to embedded to.. ?

3) lua is happy being itself. dosent try to "be the solution", its just a tool.
You're right, it doesn't matter. Life is absurd is death is the final word. Just live it however you want.. just don't toil 60 hours working for some company, that's the worst.
First Communication Sent via Neutrinos
That's essentially an Intel press release (follow the author link).

Anyway, I'm perfectly content to believe that Centrino and Intel's multimillion dollar marketing campaign for it really helped the growth of Wi-Fi. The parent post claimed the opposite: That the branding "hurt the market" for Wi-Fi, which seems absurd.
Free calls from UK Mobile to different destinations
IBNIZ: an audiovisual virtual machine and an esoteric programming language
I myself am a 'creator', but I would never think of no-script users as "leeches" or "bots". The web is not some gated community (nor should it ever turn into one), and everyone has the right to browse as they please. If they don't think the value added by my site's interactivity is worthwhile enough for them to enable their javascript, I'd much rather hear why, than present them with a snarky remark about the 'modern web'; that way I can at least try to improve the site's message so that future no-script users feel compelled to use the site as it's meant to be used.

I used to be a no-script user too for a time, and while I stopped using it because it became too inconvenient, I think it's everyone's prerogative to decide whether or not a site can track them or show them ads. It might be annoying for sites whose only means of monetization is ads, but again, the web is free and that's just the nature of the beast.
Also http://blinkenlights.net/
Dear Amazon Web Services,....
then plug to native code or to native memory if needed:

http://incubator.apache.org/directmemory/
http://blog.centuryminds.com/2007/11/weak-and-soft-reference...
Mentoring - As I see it
it's an easy exercise to show that the worst case runtime is the same as the average case

That should probably say the average case is the same as the best case.
OPEN: The History of Neon Signs
supernova glide (but just like with emacs and vim, you have to find your own)
wait, are you saying that lua isn't used in any major games, because I can find a list of at least twenty big games that lua is used in.

As far as marketing goes, I've never seen a company really stick its neck out and brag abput Lisp, but Lisp is somehow still used even today.

lastly, if you think that language designers seriously design languages with the attitude that their language will outdo every other language, I'll begin to question not only your intelligence, but also your credibility and sobriety.
Dream, relax, express, love, enjoy.
This implies that you advocate working very hard for what is essentially an early retirement.
pavel_lishin is right.

Had you changed your tone, submitted an issue, or as farslan suggested you could have taken an extra 5 minutes and submitted the changes yourself. If you had done that you would be a contributor to a great project, but unfortunately now you're just an ass.
According to that graphic, the FairTax taxes consumption, not income. A broad consumption tax is regressive pretty much by design, since poor people spend far more of their income, percentage-wise, on taxed goods than rich people do. I don't see the prebate making a significant dent in this. Yes, it will help to an extent, but you'll still have middle-class people paying far more taxes, as a percentage of their income, than wealthy people.

Cain's failure was basing so much of his plan on sales tax, which is basically impossible to make progressive.
MIT Hack page, with photos:

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2012/tetris/
I guess as Facebook deliberately designs the Like button to track this makes sense. Although maybe it will be ok as it will only track Facebook users, who will presumably have consented.

Facebook is legally an Irish company in Europe so cannot ignore this.
This article hits the big points quite well. We recently switched from Rackspace to EC2 for exactly these reasons.

A few more points:

• Amazon has a much larger network and you can use multiple availability zones.

• Amazon supports VPCs, allowing you to mix your cloud services with your old school servers.

• Amazon's CloudFront CDN allows you to use your own servers as a back end, not just static files.

• There are a wealth of third party tools available for Amazon that just aren't there (yet) for Rackspace.
As a person who is currently pretty much paralyzed by anxiety attacks I can vouch for the "don't work too much" part. Even though the cause of my distress was actually a mixture of work and fun. It sounds counterintuitive but doing stuff you like and being happy can actually be quite stressful.

Please remember to take vacations and the like.
I recommend reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
It is classic cyber-punk about what happens socio-economically when damn near everything can be made by the 3D printer in the corner of your house, as long as you have the raw materials...and the software.
Another irony in his statement that I didn't want to comment on seeing how the C one got most people pissed off enough.
I'm sticking to my guns on this one. Had my comment contained personal insults or bad language or negativity, I would agree with you. Try reading that sentence in a standoffish tone with furrowed eyebrows while scoffing at the author. Now read it again in a neutral tone with one eyebrow raised which places no judgement on the person but full judgement on the work itself. I was aiming for the latter.

The bottom line is that these are glaring problems that a five year old could spot and, to most people, it's pretty obvious that if you're presenting something you should proof read it.
Yep, that's what's on the whiteboard :)
It is interesting that more games have not used this in re-release of older games. I can think off the top of my head 3 games that I want more content to extend the replay-ability.
-Mario-Kart with procedural generated race tracks after you beat all the levels and gain all the trophies.
-Multi-Player Halo. An option for one of the random games to have a procedural generated map. With a player vote at the end of the game. Top maps added to the rotation.
-Burnout paradise- Use the city generator to create random games. Again players vote at the end of the game. Top maps added to the rotation.
Bonus-Left for Dead and make it through the random city.
That seems correct: whether copyright law in principle covers copyright of APIs is a question of law rather than fact.
Furthermore, by the time its known to be a bubble by the masses its already too late. Competition becomes greater, risk rises exponentially.

This tech boom will harshly coincide with the ongoing currency crisis' around the World. It has certainly been one to watch. In my view this has the potential to be a real 1930's boom-bust cycle given how many industries are tied to the business model.

If you're really evil... er 'smart' you'll rake up the assets of the failures during the bust cycle at fire sale prices. That of course means having made better decision than others during said mania, which in my view is away from the tech boom altogether--ideally a diverse position in which you still supply a side of the industry. Or at the very least one in which you let others take the risks or facilitate a way out of the boom before the bust.
And, more importantly, the judge is far more well-versed with both the tech and the law side of things to be in a position to make a more-informed and accurate ruling on the matter.
Life in work/life balance
michaelochurch worked at Google for less than a year.
I'm not sure it's actually supposed to be surprising that the Judge came down on this side. The whole point of the Judge/Jury separation is that one gets to decide matters of law and the other matters of fact. Clearly whether or not the doctrine of copyright extends to the expression of an API is not a fact being contested here.

The more amusing bit is that the incriminating code snipped in Oracle's slides goes the other way: the code is in Java because Josh Bloch (the Google employee who checked it into Android) wrote it in the first place and gave it to Sun. So the same TimSort implementation got carried with him into Android. There may still be a copyright question if he actually assigned ownership to Sun, I guess. But suing the author over the use of open source code he gave you in another open source project is... yeah.
When I first saw the title of this essay, I thought I already knew what I was going to say...

Something about how my own todo this now has only one item on it, the single most important thing to do next. I gravitated to this based on the great quote by chess master Jose Capablanca:

[When asked how many moves ahead he looked while playing]: "Only one, but it's always the right one." (from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Ra%C3%BAl_Capablanca).

Then I read pg's essay and Bronnie Ware's blog post and realized that this post was less about work and more about life.

Then it hit me: My life's todo list still has only one item on it and always has:

"Always do the right thing."

I realize that this can be very hand wavy because the "right thing" means something different to everyone and even something different to me at different times. But still, it has been the perfect #1 for my todo list.

Several years ago, my mother, who lived 1000 miles away, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and could no longer use the phone. So I began flying back to Pittsburgh every other weekend to be with her. After a while, even this wasn't enough. So I moved to Pittsburgh to be with her every day.

People tried to say the right thing to me, but it never was right. They'd say things like, "I admire your doing this, but you really don't have to because she doesn't even know who you are," or "You may be making a sacrifice now, but in time you won't regret it; you'll have nothing to be sorry for." And I thought, "How sad. After all these years these people still don't get it. This isn't a sacrifice from me to her. It's a gift from her to me."

I'm a little uncomfortable distilling pg's and Bronnie Ware's five thoughts from down into one, but "Always do the right thing" just works for me. I just hope the others in my life find something that works as well for them.
Show HN: I built an app that scans your iTunes library for new releases
Ask HN: Stats about a concrete Twitter client?
I'm developing a Twitter client and I want to track stats of how many people use it, how many tweets are sent with it... Nothing complex, just two or three stats will be fine. Do you know of any app (web or desktop) like this?

I tried to create one myself, but I'm having problems with the Twitter API (doesn't seem to like source:X queries). Thanks!