skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Charlie's Diary: Shaping the future
You can get a monthly XML extract for the English Wikipedia here:

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20120802/

Your choice whether to get the current snapshot or an archive of all edits from the beginning of time.

Amazing how 7zip can achieve 100-1 compression, so that all articles plus all edits are only 62 GB compressed.
IAC buys Felix for $30mil
The problem with Google is that it's mostly out of date.
Culture Clash
One thing I've learned from the Internet is that many people feel fine with citing their own opinion as fact. Especially when it comes to comparing electronic gizmos, college football teams and American trucks built between 1970 and 1990.
If Samsung didn't copy Apple, the best selling phone in the market would be worse.

A worse phone would still be the best selling?
We're aiming to make TaskUp.com the oen you'd use everyday, I hope you'll give it a try. What are the killer features that you see from Notational Velocity and Simplenote Sync?
We're working on providing multiple cloud storage backends in the future, it's a version 3/4 feature right now (2-3 months away).
As far as time spent to get this up and running, we've been working on this project for 2 months now, got some funding, and will be working to get out features that people actually want and use in the next few months, with several major features each month.
We will publish out development roadmap and give out users a chance to vote on the features they'd like to get developed, but you'll need an account for that :)

We're committed to making TaskUp the best damn task and project management app you've ever used because we've also used dozens of different systems over the years that either weren't flexible, simple, portable, extensible, or secure enough for our tastes. Your input in helping us craft this is very valuable to us!
Don't forget that plenty of people are a lot more productive with some kind of structure in place. No amount of 'skinny jeans wearing' gen Y'ers will change that fact.
A Nail and Coffin for Hulu - Big studios are still afraid of the Internet
>When OpenBSD replaced GNU libtool with a home grown perl version, it was so much faster I believe it literally cut days off machine time off a full ports build. For smaller packages, with tiny C files, running libtool.sh takes longer than running the compiler does. The majority of build time for some of those packages is still running configure, testing for things like <stdio.h>, which the package provides no workaround when missing. The OpenBSD project alone has spent years of machine time to running configure and libtool.

Sounds like the bazaar in action. I hope they succeed, but I know two gentoo projects that tried to do the same thing and were eventually abandoned as unworkable.

>As for doing its job well, the failure mode of configure "you can't build this" is abysmal. Just give me a fucking Makefile, I'll fix it myself. I love packages that come with Makefiles that don't work. I pop "-I/usr/local/include" into CFLAGS, run make again, and boom. Done. Trying to do the same with configure? Forget about it. --with-include-dir or whatever doesn't work, because it's really running some bogus test in the background which expects /bin/bash to exist and so on and so forth.

Sounds like you know make better than you know autoconf; I find it easier to fix autoconf problems on the rare occasions when they fail.
In my personal experience the Internet and technology changed way more from 92-02 than it did from 02-12. In '02 I had already had broadband for the past 3 years, and so did many of my non-technical friends. I even remember some of them having multiple computers in their home; a family computer, computers in the bedrooms, etc. Everybody used Internet Explorer 5 or 6, and those who were more technically savvy also used ad-aware (or something similar).

The biggest differences in my opinion (aside from smart phones) is the impact of social media and the abundance of streaming video/music that's available today. In '02 it seemed everyone used AIM or Hotmail with an obscure screen name. Now people are open with their real identities, and it's easy to find acquaintances through friend's "friends lists". Also we have Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, WatchESPN, etc, that just wasn't available 10 years ago.
White hat warns against iPhone spoofing bug
The Most Successful workplaces of the Future…
Gen Y is the wrong answer to the right question.

-Gen X
Coming in the next few weeks, we're testing out that functionality as we speak :)
Wow, nice find. Interesting (and damning) background.
Thanks! :) What did you like and didn't like about it?
Mars rover shoots rock with laser
Here is my list : http://www.zenmodeler.com/design-matters/books-recommandatio...
It's the books that struck me the most, I do not pretend it to be exhaustive.

I also strongly agree with @shock3naw: do a lot, read a little in between
CatB was an essay on a web page for years before the book of that name.
Task List apps occupy this interesting position in which, in the long run, it's easier for developers to build the thing (tweaking one or two costs/benefits) than for users to switch to using it.

Other things in this category include: web browsers, acne creams, computer mouses.
> The only way to prevent this, randomly sorting every unsorted collection you export, isn't feasible to reliably maintain.

It's feasible to maintain. But people might rely on it, too. As a random example (and easily avoidable example), quicksort works with random input, but 'breaks' for pre-sorted input.
Caution, there may be loads of inappropriate decisions, but, it doesn't mean all of them, even the most curious ones are. Highly misleading.

I rebuilt a messy WP blog (i18n hardcoding, dead code, etc) from scracth. Turns out the weirdest thing they did (perverting category/post system using additional metadata) .. they did it because of a weird bug the most important plugin they needed which was not open source anymore. Hit me right in the face.

As someone mentioned earlier, one has to explain everything in the system. The code is only the tip of the iceberg.
> an incredibly diverse collection of structures of all shapes and sizes, all working together to form an imperfect yet efficient system.

Efficient?
Ask HN: How do you recognise a good idea?
I'm interested to find out if anyone has any specific ways they pick their next project to work on.

I've got a handful of ideas and I tend to do a bit, get disheartened when I hit a roadblock, move on to a different idea and generally spin my wheels. I make SOME progress on all of them but lack focus to ship an idea properly. I feel like I put a lot of effort in but it is spread across many things which dilutes it.

I've decided I'm going start becoming more selective, cutting the list down, then sticking on one until I ship it.

What criteria do your ideas have to have before you feel it's worth starting?
It seems a bit odd that a generation of selfish free loving hippies are criticizing their spawn.

Folks, you created these princesses then you turned into unethical, money grubbing, conservative capitalists and left a generation of ill prepared people to take over.

Stop whining.
Or people saw him and he looked like an airport worker because of the high visibility jacket ?
I most certainly can think of some things that would qualify in my mind, but since we're talking about rather vague notions, why don't you go ahead and name some projects you think are good examples? You seem like a bright guy; I'm trying to understand your point of view better, and so far, you are failing to communicate it very well.
According to phkamp, iOS is a cathedral kind of project.

I was hoping someone would bring up OS X and how horrible its cathedral-born API became around 10.5, but I was born in '85 and therefore have no right to speak in this thread.
You mean the business-programmers that are called in to maintain (and refactor)the creative, anarchist mess creative, anarchist hackers created?
Did the headline change? The one I see now just says that it's 32 cores in a tiny box, not that it's one machine specifically.
Looks like He's putting his money where his mouth is: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
I enjoyed your post, but I also understand why people hated it. They hated it because you presented an idea that is completely at odds with the way many HN readers think. Then, rather than sitting back and watching the discussion you became offended and went on an aggressive warpath.

You didn’t even consider that what I wrote was meant as a complement to the fact that you are taking a view that no one else currently takes. An idea that has real merit and is worth discussion. You took my comment as an insult and wrote:

“But whatever blows your hair back buddy...”
End The Paperwork Madness With CRM — Review Of Salestrak
Disagree.

The bazaar model SUCKS at getting rid of cruft. New stuff gets added sure, but old dependencies never seem to go away. It's just accretion. The prevailing attitude is that "hard drive space is cheap."

This inevitable leads to calcification and the perpetuation of sub-par solutions, like auto-crap. It get used because "everything else uses it".
Heads up to the author. This site is pretty horribly broken on chrome for Android. The left menu bar is fixed width and I can't even scroll to see the text.
Mathematicians have much more convenient symbols and powerful notation than programmers. Yet they use text, too. Even wondered why?

Donald Knuth, who gives money to people who spot bugs in his code, even invented literate programming to mix prose explanation and code better. Is he an idiot?
Believe you can change
I didn't say it was factually incorrect, I said (implied, I guess) it was misleading. You're seriously saying you read that and understood it meant 8 (!) distinct machines on one board?
1) Looks very similar to http://www.orchestra.com/, which is a good thing IMHO. 2) What's missing from Orchestra is some analysis. Like, you have completed X number of tasks so far, basically to keep me motivated 3) Your app wouldn't let me delete any tasks. Chrome / Mac OS X Lion.
Warner Bros. Extends Digital Copy Expiration Date
And so what? To be honest, the statistic would say enough with only the overall column shown.

What do you think what is the outcome when the overall open source software used nearly halved?

I leave this as an exercise to the reader (Hint: the last version of Mac OS X contains less open source software then every version before, overall and in licenses).
There's an element to that article that is complaining about the process that Unix took to get to where it stands now. I feel the author needs to skim some books on evolution to see that there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach.

For instance, his example of Unix is not unlike any large organism who, through years of evolution, has many structures that are no longer needed (e.g. appendix) or structures that seem unnecessarily complex (e.g. recurrent laryngeal nerve) when our 20/20 hindsight can design a better solution.

I didn't find too much advice in the article, but I wish he had proposed something better. Even life can potentially create a mutant that contains no archaic structures in it, but it will only last if it passes a fitness test. Why doesn't he try rewriting some of the gnarled pieces of Unix code to make it better (like removing the need for autoconf)?
Trello has become our default work tool of choice. Have used Asana, but the drag and drop ease of Trello is what appeals to me. Also for kanban style workflows also check out blossom.io, great tool.
Has he told the story behind the dot? Better than this story IMHO.
It's interesting that a lot of people (myself included) think that Snow Leopard is a better OS than both Lion and Mountain Lion.
there was already some sort of expiration time - a session key from 2 months ago wasn't valid. Expiring the keys to coincide with aged/invalid sessions would have been 'good enough'.

No.... forget that, it wouldn't. It would have been better, but not good enough.

Having something that is an understandable identifier in the cookie is just bad. Crack the key, and when the identifier is 187644, and the next one two minutes later is 187663, you can pretty much guess how to take over accounts. Crack the key when the identifier is qo8GbwieYKK7d3hs92ujvn65CgD and you are pretty dead in the water without brute forcing. This is the point I was trying to make to them, and what I got back was variations on 'random isn't really random'. Somehow identifiers 187644 followed by 187645 seemed infinitely more secure than qo8GbwieYKK7d3hs92ujvn65CgD followed by 7f6Dhj23CNHS8927gfodop289jz because of an encryption key - that never got changed.

/rant off (hopefully)
Memory-efficient XML parser that yields Ruby objects
Obviously if the current best-selling phone was worse then it would not be the best-selling phone. I believe that his point is that without innovating (copying if you will) it probably wouldn't exist as it is today, or if at all, which would be a loss for the consumer.
Your Headlines Matter More Than Ever: 4 Easy Steps To Writing Great Ones
Nope. Care to enlighten?

(Regardless of what may have prompted its development, its use since around 1992 doesn't really discredit my point... It takes care of things for the user that FOSS doesn't deal with, or at least not in a portable way)
Fair enough. But a reader not familiar with this is going to wonder. (Maybe none, given that this is in the ACM Queue.)

Maybe the following edit?

"Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond's essay and subsequent book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001)..."

P.S. Done reading now. Enjoyed/appreciated your essay. Amongst other things, perhaps useful for the younger / newer to the technology generation to appreciate where this "configure soup" comes from.
There's a New York Times article from yesterday making the opposite case: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/technology/samsung-and-app...

The Times article makes the argument that, while Apple didn't stop innovating because Samsung was copying them, Samsung stopped innovating because producing cheap Apple knockoffs was easier than producing unique products with unique features. I don't know if I believe it, but Allworth's claim that copying doesn't hurt the market is certainly not a slam dunk.
http://appmuse.com/appmusing/finding-a-developer-for-your-ap...
I never claimed that the two were the same language. My claim was that you can take anything written in Java and pretty much directly translate it to Python.

The fact that there are things Java will flag as errors that a Python translation does not, does not change this fact.
I completely agree.

The handbook is brilliant, FreeBSD is the first non-windows OS I've ever installed. Back then I didn't have an internet connection and did everything with the Handbook alone.

Compared to ubuntu (or really most linux distros, or even PCBSD) it's of course much more complicated, but I really understood what I was doing and how stuff worked.

If you really want to understand how a un*x system works, I really recommand that you give it a try (I've heard similar testimonies from people installing Slackware as well, but FreeBSD's handbook is really stellar).

Beyond that, of course it's not Linux so the hardware support is sometimes sub-par, so I use Linux on the desktop these days. It's still my OS of choice for my servers tho and I wouldn't trade it for anything else.
I think a lot of people, especially around here, eschew college education in the computer sciences, because you can get a job without it and you can build a website without it, but I really think the decline of formal education in computer programming concepts has led to a lack of cathedral thinking.

Of course, I'm biased, because I have such a degree. However, when I compare what I build to what is built by a business school grad who thinks anyone can learn computers, so everyone should be taught business, I really cringe at loss of formality in the industry.

Needing to build a computer processor from AND and OR gates really drives the concepts home. Building an operating system in C++ really drives the concepts home and creates a framework for thinking about computer based problem solving that's lost in many of the systems I look at today.
A couple of remarks:

- As mentionned by others, I wouldn't pay for this data. It's not that it's not worth it, it's because I would only need it at the beginning of a project, which is rare enough to justify the monthly fee. That said, if I were a manager responsible for 10 ongoing projects at any time, I'd be very interested.

- About the pricing, the one thing that bothers me is that I have no idea what a "technology category" is, and how much do I actually need. I have no idea if 5 is enough or not. Maybe you explained this and I missed it. Maybe a demo would help picture what it is. It's up to you to figure it out, but as far as I'm concerned, I spent over 3 mins on the (otherwise very appealing) website and did not find the info.

That said, I think it's a good idea, and while I have no clue whether it's a profitable one (or how you should proceed to make it so), I think it's a really cool project capable of providing real value. Congrats and good luck for the launch.
Deocumentation: http://pyjnius.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
I can't say I know but, despite what was said above about PC-BSD, I've heard nothing but praise lately for it. If a desktop is what you are looking for, PC-BSD is FreeBSD and might be a great thing we've never used yet.
I think congratulating the kid would have had a positive impact. That is reason enough to do it.

This is meta-contrarian bullshit. As long as people don't feel entitled to other congratulating them, everything is fine.
Thank you for the link to his TED talk
Good day!

I'm going to list off a few things that I notice while browsing around your site.

- First off, your website looks really good. Congratulations!

- I don't think I understand what your product offers. From reading your website, I imagine something similar to Wikipedia (only about software development). Am I close? If so, I think you need to do a better job of communicating your value statement. If not, I think you need to work a little on explaining what you do and how you're different.

- My biggest criticism about your site is related to your slider. You have a lot of text on the first slide, but I think it changes to the next slide too fast. If I were you, I'd increase the delay.

- Personally, I always feel a little uneasy about including somewhat related quotes from famous people (unless of course, they're talking about your product). While social proof is undeniably important, I worry that somewhat related quotes devalue brands. If I were you, I'd test this (and blog about your results!)

- You should run a test on your pricing page. I suspect that the FAQs you have on the bottom will reduce your conversions, but that also would be an interesting test. If I were you, I'd remove all the FAQs (but add 'no contracts to sign' into your list of features).

- I'm concerned about word of mouth, (specifically conversations like this) --> "My pointy haired boss told us to write the app in Rails. He read about Rails on Hackerfly." Snark like this can be very expensive to extinguish. This concern could also be an amazing opportunity to build a community where engineers and managers can get together and have frank conversations about technology and working together.

Good luck with your product and sorry this isn't more detailed!

Greg
And, as someone mentioned in the comments, make sure you document functionality it should have. If you blindly say "I want an app that tracks your workouts" it leaves much ambiguity. You must say "I want an app that tracks runs, pushups and situps (times and amount), ability to sync between devices, graphs progress and lets you share it on Facebook" otherwise you'll end up with a screen with a text box.

Remember that in the future you will have to pay someone (same person or different) to revise code, add functionality, etc so having someone less experienced/cheaper WILL cost you more in the long run.
TIL: World record for throwing a cell phone is 110.96 yards
Agreed, with one caveat: even better than explanatory comments are explanatory method and variable names, when possible.

For example, you could have one 10-line method, interspersed with comments, or you could have a hierarchy of method calls, each with a name so clear that it needs no comments. The second method is less likely to get out of sync with what the code actually does, and it's more testable.

This the lesson that stuck with me most from Clean Code, which I highly recommend.
sweet! If you guys get those in consider me a customer. Looking forward to the updates.
Diversity is a problem? How?
Thanks, phkamp, for the best explanation I've seen for why I switched from Linux to OS X. I was employed in an IT job before 1990.
I read it and understood it was a lot of cores in a small box. I presumed they weren't actually one machine, yes; but I didn't feel the headline was trying to imply anything either way.
Are any of your ideas based around anything that you have a personal passion about? Are they based on hobbys are something you studied in school?

You are going to have your best chance at making it if you have a personal interest in it beyond just being a good idea for a business.

The startup I'm working on is based around musical instruments because that's the number one thing that I find interesting.

I'd suggest taking a good look at your list and seeing which of your ideas is most interesting to you outside of probable success in a general sense and see if you can move that forward. Or look for a totally new idea that is in your personal interest space. Cooking, reading, complex math equations, whatever that is.
That is not an insult in my book.

To me it means: If you're happy what you're doing, then who am I to tell you're wrong ?
I agree with you re: "cheering" a side, but I don't agreew ith your broad conclusion that Samsung is innovating through copying. Here's my counter for this entire argument: There's no reason to copy certain things: http://fatmixx.com/2010/12/07/samsungs-galaxy-tab-has-a-fami...

I also don't agree that Samsung "improved" upon Apple's work, at least not for the devices Apple is suing for. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the Note is not one of those devices.

Samsung is in a different category of copying from what you're describing, IMHO. That's why I'm OK with Apple suing them. I don't know if I like that Apple is suing them, but I'm not going to condemn them for it.
Those points on the tech aren't as important as the people issues. I have been through what you describe so often and so many times, very familiar situation
The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on Conan O'Brien:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ
And since then, nearly every major upgrade, feature request, etc. has been scheduled as "6 to 8 weeks" or occasionally some variant like "6 to 8 months"
> I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article,

I don't think the appeal to authority fallacy will fly here. We are all too smart for that.

You arguments should be evaluated for their coherence and, in the end, it really doesn't matter who you are or what you did if you are wrong.

To use your example, it doesn't matter if you are Von Braun himself. If you don't bring enough propellant for your descent engine, you'll still crash on the Moon.
Sad they didn't call it wp-obtvse.
https://github.com/NateW/obtvse