skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You didn't read the next sentence. It is not inherently ads that are the problem, it is the fact from a company's perspective you have to cater to a) the advertisers who are paying you money vs b) your users who aren't.

Currently, I'm okay in paying $50 to get access to a great community of early adopters (lets admit, it is mostly tech people). I'm not naive to expect it won't change, but once killer apps start popping up on the ecosystem, more users will join which will bring back the value that the older social networks provided.
"Do you want to be the product (facebook, twitter) or the customer (app.net)?"

Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?
How do you get past writer's block?
> I doubt git would be nearly as popular without a really polished hosting site, though. Github is git's killer feature.

GitHub isn't polished. It just has engagement mechanisms like twitter does, that keep people coming back. When people say how much they like GitHub they're usually talking about the community or git, both of which GitHub takes way too much credit for.

> And there are other DVCSs. As it is, the main hosts for bzr and hg are clearly less slick and less popular than Github. But had Git not been there, it's quite plausible that someone would have built an equivalent site around another technology.

There were a lot of people moving to git from hg when GitHub came out. I think it was clear there was demand, and if not for GitHub other services would have sprung up to fill in the gap.
I assumed there would a justification along those lines. But it certainly helps no one to beat a dead horse like that in a submission with zero upvotes. If reposts really bother you that much then message PG to write up or commission an auto-repost suggester.
We got lucky. I got hired into a project that started out in research which had/has a very loose management. It's the only part of the org structure where shit flows uphill. That gave us quite a bit of leeway in terms of establishing a cross cutting team. We've since been transferred but so fair the culture seems to be holding.
Stuff that I miss:
* Add boards via mobile app (iOS)
* Spell check and active hyperlinks in card titles
* Color segregated commenting for multiple project users
* Native iPad app

I've mostly been using it to make to do lists for work, life stuff, and leisure activities and hobbies. I've only shared one board with another user, and the lack of clear origin of comments drove that person away.
I see your argument. Unless an employment contract stipulates specific work deliverables (even showing up, etc.) , it really is just a non-compete which might require the employee to pay the employer in the case of early termination by the employee.
This is missing the supports list for the Intel Compiler (which to my knowledge has a pretty good C++11 coverage).
> Then all software will be sold as beta.

That is what happens right now, only that they get away without labeling it that way. When beta software (known as such) is used in production environments, at least you can fire whoever made the decision to use it when it causes massive damage. But when a software vendor gets away with selling you a shrink-wrapped product that actually "does nothing" (as the legalese in the EULA claims), there's something very wrong.

> I've developed and sold small electronic devices before--regulatory compliance is a huge burden if you're only selling a few units.

Not a show-stopper then, thanks for proving my point. ;-)

> Whenever someone proposes regulatory solutions like this, I assume he has only worked for (or owns) established companies and has recently tried to start one himself.

Interesting assumption, out of the blue. I started my own (vc-funded) company in 2000 and am still working there as CEO. Now what was the ad-hominem-ish point you were making?

> It's not, that's the point

So why does software deserve special treatment, resulting in the buggy mess we have now?

> How many car companies are there?

Lots.

> Do you really want to live in a world where the software industry works like the car industry?

It would be great if software was as carefully crafted as typical cars. There's also plenty of humorous spins at that comparison out there (you don't have to drive cars with a completely different UI every 2 years) ...

> But there is a huge trade off--do you want to run a desktop graphics program that is designed by engineers at Boeing?

What exactly is so bad about engineers at Boeing that you expect me to answer with "no"? Is Microsoft a somehow much smaller, cooler and more flexible company than Boeing so I should feel like I'm getting a better deal now?

> I like the freedom of choice that I'm currently offered

Noone wants to take the freedom of choice away from you, just the freedom of vendors to sell junk ("no fitness for a particular purpose") disguised as software.
OpenWeatherMap - the free weather and meteo maps
Totally agree - as I said, it would be difficult to sustain a low calories diet on chocolate, simply because of the craving it induces.
Why would people pay to tell other people what they ate for lunch?
Adding to what Patrick said:

Your counterparty is usually evaluated on the delta he can generate from your published list prices, and virtually nothing else.

So, if you want to, you can game the system by extracting other concessions. For instance, you can create a SKU with a reduced price but for which support or updates are expensive; your counterparty gets to record achieving a discount, but you ultimately make more money out of the deal. Another common concession to wring out of these deals is commitments to future purchases.

You would only do this if you want to; that is, if you think the opportunity to come out ahead financially is real enough to play the game. If you just want to make the sale, say "no, in low volumes, our price is $4995; sorry". They'll buy.
Freelance dev market
Hi everyone,

I've been working for 5 years on oDesk.com. So far i am doing very well, but looks like i hit the limit: there is extremely little work (coding: Java, Actionscript, JS) priced over $35/h gross there, and while i am easily pitching customers on this kind of rates, i was unable to get anything more than that yet.

But: overwhelming part of the projects i do are total nonsense. Like, i did 4 very different clones of the infamous chatroulette, last 2 years after the original one (while even the original one failed to take off), i did stupid looking Flash games for which there are zillions clones around, etc. Only 'real' work i can remember doing in 5 years was some rather complex scrapers for a guy who is in sports betting business (sure they are making him a ton of money and were fun to implement as well), and some distributed network analysis software for a well-funded Valley startup. The rest was an obvious trash which was sure to get nowhere even before i started.

So i am thinking: if 80% of the customers are so dumb, and they pay $30-$35 per hour, they must be the poorest kind of clients to work for, so there must be a marketplace where i can get at least $50-$60 rates, just because i will be doing something with higher chances to bring profit to my customers, not so obvious trash? If so, how do i approach them, given i'm offshore (EU)? Or smart customers just avoid these sites and look for developers offline (which may sound like a good idea, i've seen the kind of pre-cooked spam 'cover letters' that are posted in dozens for every offer on oDesk and if i was a customer, i'd hate to get through them)?

So the question is, if freelance sites are a bottom of market (both in quality of developers and of customers, and therefore rates), then where is the middle tier and the top?
Does he explain away the correlation in Utah? It seemed a safe bet that Utah has the US's highest birth rate, given Mormonism there. A search confirmed it. (Sorry I'm lazy on video sources.)
An Impossible To Live Up To Hero: Chuck Sweeney
One interesting difference is that the $500,000 comes with nearly 8,000 paying customers. Venture funding doesn't usually come with a few thousand users!
How to edit PDF files
Such essays are always about concepts that cannot be precisely defined. That aside, I believe that it wasn't really simplicity that "worse" was associated with but easyness.

This distinction is well described by Rich Hickey (of Clojure fame) in his "simple made easy" talk. The key point is that simple-complex and easy-hard are two separate axes and that "easy" usually leads to "complex" (the case of x86, I believe) but you can invest some effort in shaping the environment so that "simple" can be "easy".
At the very least it means that I - as someone that values privacy - do not have to be in a necessarily antagonistic relationship with the company that provides the service.
This guy has incredible tact, and knows his audience well.

> Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation.

He even took care not to mention climate change, which I assume was in case the reader has a strong bias against it.
> Where's the evidence that suggests that millions of people care about this distinction enough to pay for it?

Where's the evidence that suggests millions of people have to join?
>But in this case that's almost completely wrong.

On the second line of linked article:

"This is a humorous observation"

(emphasis mine :) )
Or you could just install AdBlock.
The argument about privacy doesn't really makes sense either, it is still a private company/product.
Still fundamentally broken, in that it doesn't provide an option to receive these as email attachments.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/torvalds_github...

> Torvalds says he brought up his problems with GitHub’s creators, but “they didn’t think they mattered.”

This is the crux of the problem. GitHub spends a great deal of resources working on a mac app and a windows app, which aren't interesting to people who do things the UNIX way at all. Meanwhile support for a good git workflow falls by the wayside.

It would be a substantial improvement if you could just remove the Pull Requests tab, along with the Issues tab.
> Well, maybe. Let's remember that Twitter has more than a hundred million accounts, while App.net has ~7500; we have no evidence that the people feeling that are not just a small number of outliers, much like there always will be.

Does it matter if they don't get hundreds of millions of accounts, as long as the business is sustainable and users enjoy the service?
Not sure that's on purpose. The inner DIV is set to 106.08% width. Seems they are 106% funded.
Why not just use a VPN? especially on a LowEndBox and it will allow you to maintain it and be able to keep the security as much or as little. Then your wife will be able to also watch all her favourite tv shows on BBC and others.
App.net, like I need another bug tracker
Best Desktop Keyboards
Show HN: Painless, productive views on iOS with Formotion for RubyMotion
> Probably doing socket programming in C is easier than in Java

Actually... networked programming is really easy in Java.

You are right though the state of a lot of java libs is hilarious! Smalltalk seems really cool but I've never had a reason to devote time to it.
"Why would people pay to tell other people what they ate for lunch?"

Twitter and Facebook were fun when not everyone and their parents were on there. I'm hoping that the price tag keeps a lot of the people out who don't have anything of value to share. So far, from what I've seen on the alpha site, the conversations are way more interesting to me than most banter on Twitter. The higher limit of 256 characters helps too. I look forward to using App.net, whereas I find the Twitter experience increasingly frustrating.
NBC analyst's Mark Zuckerberg goof
From the numbers on the site, it works out to 90 seconds of Facebook per day.

No really. This is useless.

Even if you assumed that 20% of the population uses 80% of the Facebook time, amongst that 20% you're at ~6 minutes per person per day.

Still useless. I spend at least that amount of time sitting on the toilet. More than twice that time waiting for public transit. I 'waste' 20 minutes every night lying in bed waiting to fall asleep. It takes me 5 minutes to make 'instant ramen'.

Ok, finally. Facebook claims 800 million users. Let's assume half of them are fake. That gives an overall average of just over half an hour per person per day. If we apply the 20/80 rule, the top 20% spend an average of 105 minutes on Facebook a day.

I guess that's a bit better.

The world spending 90 seconds a day on one task is... not really that ridiculous. I mean, I bet the world spends 90 seconds a day praying towards Mecca. (By rough math, it would require each Muslism in the world to spend roughly 10 minutes a day praying...).
Two reasons that's not going to happen:

(i) As annoying as the TSA is, it is strictly speaking probably Constitutional; what they are doing falls under the "administrative search" category of "reasonable" under the 4th Amendment: (a) applied uniformly to all passengers, (b) tailored to specific administrative needs (ie, keeping explosives and weapons off planes), and (c) in some defensible way limited or minimal. They are pushing it with the body scanners, but who knows. El Al relies heavily on profiling; profiled searches are by definition not administrative, since they're done on suspicion.

(ii) The TSA recruits people with advertisements on pizza boxes. El Al security personnel are trained (ie expensive) enough to do sophisticated subtextual behavior analysis while questioning people at length 1-on-1.
eLance.com. It's not that it's any better than oDesk or any of the others, but the FEEL of the process, environment and information layout gives employers more confidence in the developers. IMHO, the vast majority of freelance contracts are still given based on relationship and past experience with the developers, and NOT classified ad sites like rentacoder, elance, etc.

Most developers simply return to the site for the next job instead of working the employer for more contracts, probably because they feel that this is sales and introverts hate to do sales.
Another phenomena that exists in all companies, but that you really see in big ones, is secretiveness about how people are actually being rewarded. This has two purposes. The first is that it allows the company to reward certain employees (particularly top manager) while heading off jealousy among others. The second is that it allows them to lie to people about how well they are compensated versus others.
> That is stupid, no software vendor can harden consumer software meant to run on a desktop internet connected computer to the point that a large government agency can't find a vulnerability.

I don't buy this. If the vulnerability is in the OS or some other program, those parts are to blame. But it's perfectly possible to avoid the mistakes that are typically employed for such intrusions (usually they are in the OS anyway - you know, the OS with no warranty, no accountability, but a monopolist price). When they aren't, it was usually some mediocre C programmer's sloppy coding (there are safer languages for mediocre programmers). The whole point of such regulations would be to put some pressure on developers so they must choose proper tools, languages, methodologies to keep customers from harm, whereas now they simply do what they like with no consequences.
Most web-sites don't have ContentID - there are companies that scrape the web to find potentially infringing content and file DMCA complaints on content-owners' behalf. It's much cheaper to just hit Google and a big few like Youtube rather than customize a bot for every site that handles DMCA takedowns.
They could start by treating users like they own their projects. There is no way to remove the Pull Requests tab. This is, or at least would have been, trivial to implement. It stems out of the idea that users can't make decisions for themselves. You can listen to 5by5 podcasts 10 hours a week to convince yourself that this is the right way, but from a user empowerment perspective, it isn't.
Charlie Brooker: It's OK to shout at machines
Black & Decker DR260B 3/8-Inch 5.2 Amp Drill/Driver Reviews
I often think about software development in similar terms -- evolution versus intelligent design.

The weakness of evolution is that it takes millions of years, it's heavily dependent on initial conditions, there's lots of collateral damage, and most lines die out.

The weakness of intelligent design is that we're only so intelligent, which places a pretty low limit on the possible achievement. (And intelligence is generally regarded as close to a normal distribution, meaning that the smartest people can only handle a small multiple of the complexity of the average person).

Obviously, evolution and design need to be combined somewhat. The question is: how much of each, and at what times during a project? Do you spend 10% of the time quietly planning, 10% arguing with a small group of designers, and 80% trying things and trying to get feedback? Or is it more like 40%, 40%, and 20%? And how do you mix trying things with the designing things?
Wikileaks gets $37K in donations via Bitcoin
Another way to put this is that myopically optimizing for perfection along one axis may fatally de-optimize another.
broken link to his allegedly new "search" startup

http://www.jawaya.com/

of course, the article was dated Jan 2011
> A lot of people don't want to be the product and believe ...

It seems to me that the vast majority of people do not care and will just use whatever everyone else is using. If open-source, federated alternatives such as Identica do not have many users, then I don't understand how App.net can hope to get enough to matter.
Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable.

Personally, I use Twitter mostly to talk to people in the fields I work in, namely hacking and journalism. I don't see how either of those communities will move to App.net wholesale. If you want me to pay money just to have a conversation with you, I'm probably going to decide to just not have the conversation.

Ads on Facebook and Twitter don't bother me. I won't be paying to get rid of them. I don't even use AdBlock to get rid of them for free (partially because I think it's unethical to do).
I'm sure it amuses you to know this site is blocked in Iran (by the government). Thanks, anyway!
There's Bob Noyce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_noyce

He wasn't a "computer scientist", per se, but he sure was active in the underlying hardware. Of course, this was an era when "computer scientist" often meant as much hardware as software. And once you start talking hardware layouts...

P.S. I see now that Greg is basically making the point:

Many computer scientists view everything as an optimization problem. People, work, politics, life, everything is a search (often of a dynamic space) to find a maximum near the global maximum... She is a computer scientist and appears to be leading like one. I suspect she views the company, people at the company, the products, even her own role, all as an optimization process, a search to find the most productive and most useful outcomes.

Well, the best "computer scientists" I recall were/are able to perceive that domain as distinct, or a subcategory, of being a human being involved in the world. While computational science is very useful, we are not to the point of reducing nor defining the human experience solely or primarily in its terms. (If nothing else, we aren't that smart and capable, yet.)
I am talking about my emotions, yes. All I can say, if you don't like it, is that I am sorry. But I don't believe one can have an entirely objective discussion on this topic which will arrive at an incontrovertible answer. Most tech inclined people (e.g. HN readership) are positively biased towards the space program. I am not, despite the fact that I fit the profile. I think it's science done for the wrong reasons. In addition, I don't like this guy and I expect to disagree with him and I can't change that.
No, he learned it from Paul Allen.
Recent decisions made by Twitter are all about optimizing the site for advertising revenues.

I don't think Twitter has any other choice because they chose the free path from the start. I highly doubt Twitter would suddenly switch to a premium/freemium model.

While Twitter has empowered revolutions, I think the quality of the community has degraded though.

I believe that if people pay for being part of a community, people would care to improve its quality. If something is free, people just won't take care of it.
AFAIK a CSS3 3D transform of 0,0,0 with preserve 3d should push the work to the GPU.
Works, but some programs will be orphaned, and thus won't be recompiled. Plus, this is an effort that could have been avoided through a more future-proof approach.
> In the future, you will be able to go online, fill out a questionnaire, and for a small monthly fee receive one of several pre-programmed diet and exercise programs, complete with local gyms that are part of the program and can help you perform your exercise requirements.

As opposed to present-day, where people have to join a gym, and then receive a programme?

> A local food store will also be part of the program, with a special aisle of diet food for you to buy from.

Eeugh, special diet food. Unless that "special aisle" is known as the "vegetable section".
Great article - wish the title was better so more people would read it here, particularly this:

> No doubt this chronic shortage of time goes some way to accounting for the stalled and inertial quality of culture in recent years. The neoliberal gambit was that the destruction of social security would have a dynamic effect on culture and the economy, liberating an entrepreneurial spirit that was inhibited by the red tape of bureaucratic social democratic institutions. The reality, however, is that innovation requires certain forms of stability. The disintegration of social democracy has had a dampening, rather than a dynamic, effect on culture in highly neoliberalized countries such as the UK. Fredric Jameson’s claims that late capitalist culture would be given over to pastiche and retrospection have turned out to be extraordinarily prophetic.
Shouldn't lines 217-221 have 12*3600 = 43200s instead of 86400? Because now it's a 24 hours watch. Fixed: http://codepen.io/anon/full/nieIh
> Isn't that self-evident? People post to Facebook and Twitter to be heard. Currently, they seem to post on App.net about App.net. That's not sustainable.

My first post on Twitter was "trying to figure out WTF Twitter is". I subsequently didn't post for six months. I wouldn't judge the platform on what's posted in the first 30 days of existence. As for sustainability, $500k in revenue is more than Twitter had for years.
I wont trust it a lot since it says torproject.org is not blocked anywhere in China http://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=torproject.org
I'm saying he probably didn't care that it would break in that case.
Is that why Lisps are so poorly thought of? They're designed around the idea of having a whole REPL all the time.
"We know that most of the code is written in C and that it comprises 2.5 Megalines of code, roughly[1]. One may wonder why it is possible to write such a complex system and have it work. This is the Erlang programmers view."

Contrast this with https://www.ohloh.net/p/erlang: "In a Nutshell, Erlang has had 7,332 commits made by 162 contributors representing 2,346,438 lines of code"

I'm not sure if those roughly 154kloc really make a difference...