skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>However, in the past I’ve had the opposite experience: Trying to port software such as Apache, PHP or bacula to UNIX systems such as SGI IRIX, I always ended up writing a simple Makefile to compile the software instead of putting up with the multitude of autotools-fixing that would have been required. I reported one or two clear issues upstream and they have been fixed, but until the relevant fixes arrive at the projects (especially PHP came with an old version of autotools), some time will pass.

You know that you can replace config.guess and/or libtool with updated versions? Or run make -f Makefile.cvs to regenerate configure etc. from aclocal.m4?

And I would argue that the fact that you had the option of writing a Makefile is itself an advantage of autoconf, because it was written to generate Makefiles in exactly the kind of layering cruft that the OP is complaining about. A more "cathedrally" solution would probably have replaced Makefiles entirely, but by having autoconf generate them it makes it possible for people who know make to, in extremis, edit the generate files.

>As a counter-example, take i3-wm: it ships with a GNU Makefile (OK, multiple Makefiles in subdirectories, one for each tool) and compiles on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD.

Last time we had a post from the same guy I offered up two challenges: a) cross-compile the program for ARM, b) build the program on a version of SUA (the windows posix compatibility layer) that didn't even exist when the program was released. Both of these are things I can and have done trivially with autoconf-based builds; for most projects it requires no editing of files at all, just replacing config.guess with the latest version for challenge b. I'd be interested to see how building i3-wm was in those two cases (though not interested enough to go to the effort of actually doing it).
The ability to 'Google it' does not mean you have the ability to understand it. There is a difference between looking up Jeopardy facts and building a fundamental understanding of the subject and being able to discuss it, or build upon it to come up with new ideas.
What is the Purpose of Art?
And that is probably a good way to filter through the million monkeys.

But some topics would require entire books to present in a context free way, this is one of them, and I don't have the time and money to write that book, so you will have to make do with a column @ACM.

When I read something, and have the nagging feeling that there is context I'm missing, I go looking for that context, usually starting with "who the heck wrote this", rather than assume that the writer is a clueless bozo.

But whatever blows your hair back buddy...
If you have one single instance only, I'm not sure there is any point. But if you want your app to auto-scale upwards to add EC2 instances if the load increases, then the load balancer is necessary. It enables all your EC2 instances to be accessible via one public URL (as the elastic load balancer forwards requests on).

I set it up such that we always have at least 2 EC2 instances, in separate availability zones, so that, if one goes down, at least the other is likely to keep working. And then it auto-scales upwards from there, if the load gets high enough.

The load balancer is pretty much transparent as far as you the developer is concerned. You don't need to configure it - beanstalk does that - and it scales completely transparently (unlike the EC2 instances, for which you do need to define auto-scaling rules if you want that).

I may be missing some subtleties as I'm far from being an AWS expert... Just been picking bits up here and there through using beanstalk and a few of the other APIs for extra bits and bobs.
Indeed, the first "Free" UNIX was released in the early 90's. The UNIX fragmentation of the 80's doesn't really describe the Bazaar from C&B to me either.
I was shocked, after signing up for Prime's trial, how it instantly affected my buying. Nowadays, I rarely do items that don't have the Prime logo next to them. My friends are the same way. There is a big psychological component to it that sometimes overrides price outright. I can't explain it well. It is like in addition to knowing shipping will be free and quick, the Prime logo comforts a little bit. Like you trust the order more than if it is sold by FlyByNight LLC, regardless of whether or not it really is that company in the end.
If you take the assumption that Microsoft copied Apple, as this author has, I think the opposite conclusion can be drawn, that Apple very quickly lost in the marketplace and was circling the drain in 1997. There's a very real possibility that the iPhone will end up a marginal player within a few years, if Android maintains its trajectory.

In my opinion though, the big difference between Apple v Microsoft and Apple v Samsung is that Microsoft at least combined Apple's innovations with many innovations of their own, and Microsoft never tried to imitate Apple's trade dress.

You can't boil the Apple v Samsung conundrum down to a single paragraph, but I don't see much reason to defend Samsung -- all the serious innovation on the Android side is coming from Google, not Samsung. Samsung can make perfectly awesome devices without also spreading a bit of KIRF jelly on some products.
Coordinated attacks have always been possible on US soil and have been made even more so by the response to 9/11 (e.g. big group of people piled together in front of every security line). It's not a "very, very dangerous thing". There is always something that is vulnerable, and yet no one has exploited this yet. Has this world-wide cabal of highly advanced terrorists someone missed this vulnerability that I noticed the first time I flew after 9/11?

India has a history of terrorist attacks from islamic extremists (largely originating in pakistan). The US has no such history.
You understand how currencies work, right? On one end of the trade there is a person that buys and the other a person that sells.

Even if what you said were true (That bitcoin has mainly being flunctating upwards), then the people selling things in bitcoins are actually losing on the trade.

What do you think the result of that is going to be?

Goods sold in bitcoins are going to be really unstable and sellers are going to be disincetived in selling them (or they'll just charge a premium for them - making them more expensive than if you paid for them in dollars).

The point is, that a currency flunctating a lot, even if mainly upwards, is not a really good thing. From a speculator perspective, volatility is a great thing, but not for everyone else.
Keyword Research – The ultimate guide
I think this is a great idea. I also like vayable.com but that seems to be more about guides for locations.

There are plenty of expensive trek companies but what about lower cost adventures?

I think if the platform included teachers/coaches with skills to share, that would be awesome.

Like smaller adventures could be an afternoon learning parkour, gymnastics, breakdancing or an evening learning from a chef, expert fisherman or astrologist.

While I think it would be difficult to sustain a platform by offering once in a lifetime things (like Mt Everest) the list of above things could be once a month.

I'd be more interested in meeting up with reasonably local people that have awesome skills to teach me.

AirBnB has it's awesome castles and treehouses but I think it's bread & butter are lower cost sustainable transactions by volume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem comes to mind. Both efforts (cathedral and bazaar) have produced really useful software, but sometimes I have the feeling that the whole idea of "thinking about a problem" has been replaced by "hit the keyboard until something happens".
Choosing a Memorable, Secure Password
> I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?

Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l <recursion depth limit>" to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and whatever needed to display the pages in question. And if you want to only get the text pages/reject the images, the "-A" and/or "-R" options may be useful. Consult the man page and experiment.
musicforprogramming.net

and anything by chroma key/kevin moore
Consider that all the wonderful Christian ethics that you mention are a distillation of the ancient world's wisdom (all of theese guidelines had been stated by earlier philosophers). Where i see disagreement is in the notion that it all there has to be a reward (afterlife) and that there needs a deity to communicate them. I think it kind of turned the whole movement to utilitarianism.
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page

Not sure why dumps don't occur more often though.
First, it's actually not, because their architecture is focused on architecting a market, not a computing solution.

Second, just because there is one bad example of a cathedral, doesn't mean the cathedral model is bad.

Many years ago, a fella named Gettys (look him up!) wrote as part of sage advice for OSS philosophy:

"The only thing worse than generalizing from one example, is generalizing from no example at all."
Nitpick: jQuery exists to make the HTML DOM manageable, not JavaScipt the language. (There are libraries targeted at javascript the language, but you could make an argument that that's the point of all libraries for all languages...)

I find jQuery more analogous to tools like configure and autoconf. (in that they aren't actually needed for "modern", standards compliant browsers.) As an example: there are already many lightweight drop-in replacements that assume a sane browser to begin with.

CSS is remarkably hack-free and the resets are just to remove the default styling that browsers have built in. Obviously browsers need builtin styles otherwise all the old pre-css pages would stop working.

And why are you calling programming languages and web servers hackish? How is nginx hackish and apache not? How is Objective C hackish and C++ not? Why stop inventing new languages at assembly, c or c++?

Other than that I generally agree with the rest of your comment. I think if we ever get to some kind of technological singularity we'll almost certainly and just about by definition not understand how it works. And true/strong AI would definitely be a singularity. Even if we understood version 1 we would likely not be able to understand whatever it dreams up 5 seconds after we overclock it. And we will - moor's law and all that. ;)
Pitching and Closing: What You Need To Know Part 1
Combiform: A Revolutionary Console for Social Gaming
Turing-Tape Competition: test your problem-solving and programming abilities
Perhaps I did, it's hard for me to say, but I'd estimate my views on reality are pretty well average for a white, not-rich, not-poor, twenty-something in Scotland.

My intention wasn't to question why everyone didn't woop and holler at his "mundane achievement". The point, if any, I was trying to make was more that I, Alex, and perhaps others, can hold ourselves back from doing things we want to do for fear of failure and rejection. And that learning to get over that fear could be beneficial.

Indeed, if I had any idea that this post was going to end up on Hacker News, rather than just as an unread scrawl on my blog, written over coffee on a Monday morning, perhaps I wouldn't have had the guts to write it at all.

The closing thought about the high-five was less a question to the world, and more a thought to myself that had I been the one diving off the board, worrying about being rejected (consciously or subconsciously), that it would have been pretty awesome to 16-year old me if some random dude had given me a high-five.

It's entirely possible though that poor writing and or structure didn't do a good job of conveying my points. Next time I'll spend a bit more time planning :)
I think it's ambiguous, but the article probably meant shit-talking.
Bill Gates to develop a revolutionary nuclear reactor with Korea
Ottawa: Lessons from great Canadian urbanism
What should a series A funding process look like? Step 1: The introduction
In some ways, the airline industry is one of the most purely competitive industries we see. Most airline customers care about price above all other things. A $5 difference in price can make the difference between a person choosing airline A or airline B. While a company like TicketMaster will tack on convenience fees any time they think they can make an extra buck, the airlines are actively trying to avoid applying extra fees to their typical customer, because that typical customer will jump ship to another airline in an instant if they think they can get a better deal there.

In short, TicketMaster is charging "convenience fees" purely because they can, while airlines charge you for buying a ticket from a real person because competition makes them charge for what actually costs them money.
Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001)

Off by two?

Seriously, though, how do you get 13 out of that (unless calculating from when the author conceivably began working on the book per se)?

I'm starting to read the article; I found mildly disconcerting that the first sentence appears to make a mis-statement, but I don't expect that to foreshadow the meat of the message. (We'll see. :-)
To reply to point three, which is the only one not containing an ad hominem...

There exist several larger OSS projects, such as Apache, Boost, the Kernel, etc, which accept contributions but are also curated. Thus they represent sort of hybrid between cathedral and bazaar. People who use these projects know they are getting some (varying) standard of quality.

I think these sorts of projects -- often shepherded by some kind of noncommercial Foundation or Organization -- are the best way to get a mix of openness and quality going forward.
Interestingly, git just uses a makefile. no cmake/autoconf.
I am probably the only person here who learned to program in TeCO. It is indeed a Turing complete language. I'd done a few classes with Algol-60, Lisp, and PL/1, but there was an available PDP-11/05 at TMRC, and later an 11/03 at MITERS, and I started playing. A year later I'd written a significant body of code (none of which I remember at all), and flunked out of school.

Tech Model Railroad Club. Google it.
MIT Electronic Research Society. Sort of a prehistoric maker space.
nodding violently.
...or just use pen & paper and put the paper in your pocket. Stop wasting time on dainty todo lists and start building something ACTUALLY worth talking about.
We're not fans of paying several dollars per month for a task management service either.
Do 14-30 day free to paying trials work? That's out #1 plan for now.
We find the $9.99/year price point attractive, with $0.99/month it's not worth it and we'd rather give the service away for free. There are micro-payment processors out there but we're looking at overall cost and strategy when looking at pricing plans/feature set we'd like to make available at each price level, and really love the simplicity of Stripe for payments.
They are, however, not introducing, say, transaction taxes which would make such microsecond (or less) transactions financially unfeasible. Which would probably do a lot to both making financial markets more stable and predictable, and employing high-grade physics, mathematics, and IT talent into more socially rewarding tasks.
My feeling is like that of astrojams', though I wouldn't like to say what particular part of your upbringing or culture leads you to have such a (to me) weird desire to praise the mundane and unremarkable.

By your own observation, Alex succumbed to social pressure to overcome his fear of heights. He topped off the event with some damage-limiting self-deprecation. All of that's normal. It wasn't especially brave or ingenious or anything. Maybe now he's made the jump he'll be less worried about it next time. Maybe he won't.

Frankly, if you'd gone over and congratulated him, you'd either have embarrassed him (because his dive was so terrible that some well-meaning weirdo felt the need to encourage him) or weirded him out (because seriously, who goes around complimenting strangers?). In the meantime, you're lying (it's not like his dive was actually impressive) and fostering an environment where people get praised for every meagre personal triumph. Please don't do that.
Why don't you talk about a few current "Cathedrals" and how they're different from "Bazaars", that might help the discussion too.

The only example that jumps out at me is the original Unix, and I think you'll agree that comparing software from 30 years ago that does vastly less than ... pretty much anything out there these days is not an entirely fair, nor useful comparison.
It can't be fees for buying in person, since I'm being told that buying in person with no fees is how they can get away with advertising a the base price. As for the inconvenience of buying in person, that really doesn't seem to add up, but I suppose people really could prefer to spend an extra $60 over going to the venue in person to buy.
You are getting into side issues here instead of the user experience. And such Package Management did not exist when I had the 770 -- at least if you were getting Maemo apps outside of whatever "curation" Nokia might have been attempting at the time.
FTPM: A font manager built using Node.js and Google Web Fonts
Demo: http://vimeo.com/47778105

Github: https://github.com/heldr/ftpm
There is an iOS app called "Wiki Offline" which gives you a local copy of the English Wikipedia that has been compressed to around 3.5GB.
+1 agree with most of the above.
nice site though!
These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy.

eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.
>This letter was never sent

welp
Great link. Makes one anxious to see what's next.
You seem to use a simple search algorithm.
I searched for "battery", and only got results that had "battery" in the title.
So basically, you could just skip the whole process and make each word in the title a tag...

That's unless you're using something more sophisticated and I just didn't realize.
Build Agile Teams, Not Tools
"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error."

I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.
I still get a small thrill from stepping onto a particularly long escalator (eg the one at Angel tube station in London, which is the 3rd biggest in Western Europe), but then again, my partner often says I'm essentially a five year old trapped in an adult's body.
I'm really interested in learning more about FreeBSD as a server OS. I've been a Debian guy for a very long time and have only just recently started to force myself to play around with FreeBSD via an Amazon EC2 micro instance (free).

In other news, all of us on Mac's (OS X) are using quite a lot of FreeBSD =)
How does Pixar organize files?
The keyword for me is "desktop". I know FreeBSD might be a good server OS. My question is what features does FreeBSD bring forward for the desktop user in order to be a serious concurrent for Ubuntu, Fedora and the other desktop OS distros.(Does it have a better sound devices support ? better window/desktop manager ? Printer support ? Is it better suited for beginers/average experienced users ?)
> and Samsung couldn't even make the device decent.

That's your personal opinion, not the marketplace's opinion. Samsung smartphones are actually quite successful (they currently outsell the iPhone by a factor of ~2x according to latest financial results http://www.osnews.com/story/26228).
To be honest, I've seen kids doing better hack than that kid in the video using scratch... I don't think we are underestimating kids. If kids have natural talents to programming, then they will enjoy it. Don't push kids to do things just because it's cool to make it on their early resume.
If you use zsh, 'ztodo' is distributed with at least 4.3.11 or later. It's not a unified task list, but a per-directory task list.
The big feature for me is more a lack of one: it doesn't go shifting things under your feet. No pulseaudio, no udev, no pmount, no networkmanager. BSD is a lot better at keeping a coherent interface onto its system commands; if you've used it at any time in the last 30 years, you'll still know how to run a BSD system. A number of my ubuntu-using friends have actually given up on doing upgrades after repeated disasters; with freebsd I can upgrade in confidence that it won't break anything.

In terms of specific features, jails and ZFS are the ones that immediately come to mind. But if you want features FreeBSD is probably not the system for you; it's built with stability as a higher priority.
Work ON your business, not IN your business
There's 2 main reasons. 1, if the AZ that your single instance is running in dies completely, ELB can help fire up a new instance in another zone quickly without having to handle re-routing DNS, etc. 2 if you need extra capacity in a hurry (e.g. you just got linked from HN and 10,000 people sign up), you can add more instances without re-achitecting.

Whether it's worth paying for those capabilities is always up to you though.. :)
Interesting article, few tips for getting introduced to potential investors.
Brain's Switchboard Discovered
Fair, but I would describe them more as well-engineered skyscrapers. Or even simply good city planning. They're large structures designed around the idea of flexibility and growth from the outside. Ironically, both of these described platforms have orders of magnitude more functionality in their 'bazaar' app-stores than the foundation itself. The foundation enables the market to work, but in itself it is simply a very well-designed support system.

I guess you're saying that there's no reason UNIX should be different—that it has somehow become a disorganized mess of libraries and code re-use, and that it is broken.

I don't see this. Android and iOS are like brand new cities; Dubai and Abu Dhabi. UNIX is Paris. Perhaps you can make some updates to the city infrastructure, but in the end the streets are still cobblestone underneath, designed for horse carts and not cars. But you have the Notre Dame at the center (ironically, a cathedral), the architecture, tons of history, you have a thriving culture and countless people working and playing in this city every single day with great success. You can complain about it all you want, but there is a reason that people are fundamentally attracted to it.

I think you're right about a lot of things, but if you propose rebuilding Paris, well, you may have some opposition. I think you might want to build a new city, rather than trying to build over very old history with some ideal of the cathedral you think it should have been. And to use your examples again, that strategy has been very successful for Android and iOS.
Heh, corrected. Thanks.
The Troub(bb)le with Dribbble
The fact that you and others cannot even spot any more recent cathedrals is sort of my entire point here...