skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Fourth: Related to point two really: A lot of you seem to have little actual ambition of making things better, I guess that is what happens if you grow up in a bazaar and never even experience a cathedral. I pity you.

I think people do want to make things better, but its happening much more decentralized, with small teams taking small safe steps on tools, libraries & frameworks.

Media, on-line banking, 3d printing, accessible hardware hacking, e-commerce sites, scientific/engineering software. The majority of these things are made by small teams plugging the best libraries and platforms out there together, where they already solves part of their software problem. Android, Cloud, Linux etc. It would be silly to say these were without ambition and don't contribute to the community.

(The average software devs Impact Factor may be diluted by the increasing number of people working with computers, but computers are so globally useful its inevitable. If good things are still getting made then who cares.)
In 3rd grade I built a transistor radio for the science fair. I remember being so proud that I built it, but my mom seemed to be way more proud of that meaningless blue ribbon.

That's the problem, I think. It seems too many parents encourage artificial achievement that can be quantified, like grades or ribbons, which keeps kids from truly exploring what they are capable of doing.
I think Torvalds does that play that role, but only for the Linux kernel. For user-space, which OP focuses on, there isn't one.
viaCycle (YC S12) Brings Shared Bikes to SF Powered by SMS and Voice
2004: 90mm pageviews @ $0.5 CPM ~ $50K per mnth in revenue.

2012: 1 Trillion pageviews @ $0.5 CPM ~ $500mm per mnth in revenue

* http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/index.html

* * Assuming full inventory
I have not seen Assange asking any promise to Swede. Ecuador did, Assange I don't think so. I think you nailed it though on what kind of guarantee he could hope for. I think he knows very well that's impossible to juridically formulate the kind of protection it would want to have. Therefore yersterday he didn't even formulate such request he took a higher stance (and even more improbable to succeed) by asking the US of stopping the FBI investigation.
Would you mind simply reading the thread? You are inventing an argument that does not exist. I did not make a value judgement, I corrected an erroneous statement. Nothing more.
> No court in Europe seems to view the situation that way.

So why does Ecuador see it that way? Are they stupid or easily fooled? Do they want to start political controversy? Some other conspiracy?
French press travel mug and a kettle, with fresh beans from my favorite Vermont roaster. It's not fancy and it's slightly annoying to clean unless you compost, but it is fast and easy when I'm rushing out the door. Unlike some other folks in the thread, I've found choice of beans to be the most important feature in delicious coffee.
I'm not saying he is innocent, but if he is, he has every reason to believe this is a politically-motivated frame-up. So, if he is innocent, why go to Sweden? Probably, even as an innocent person, the frame-up would succeed.

As such, his unwillingness to go hardly says anything about his guilt or non-guilt.
The probel with content marketing is finding new content
copying doesn't matter for consumers and improvising is better for innovation, both true facts. The point missed is that companies need to build unfair advantages to get benefits of their investments. Maybe the blind consumer does not care whether a company builds a great product or goes bankrupt, but preventing copying is one of the measures that lets a company remain competitive, and bring out more products for the long term good of the consumer.
I agree with you're sentiments, and if Disney had a habit of periodicity propagating the notion that open source software is dangerous I'd be right there with you. This situation, however, appears to be a single case of bad sitcom writing. "Just throw in some techno jargon and the word virus."
UNIX was originally written as pair-programming.

From http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/interview-with-ken-thomps... :

KT: I did the first of two or three versions of UNIX all alone.

Later, he emphasizes that they didn't even look at each others' code:

DDJ: Was there any concept of looking at each other's code or doing code reviews?

KT: [Shaking head] We were all pretty good coders.
I had the exact same thought - made me want to do a parody where I talk about getting up at 6am to contemplate the day, but all I end up doing is getting Apple Jacks for my three kids and snarf down coffee attempting to jack into the day.
Global Arms Trade 1992-2010 as Visualized by Google
I have no dog in this fight, I was just calling out the hyperbole on the ancestor comment.
Wooohoo!
Seems like you have the right attitude! Shipping a "crappy todo app" is more than many will manage, best of luck with releasing more and more projects in the future.
What if he really did commit rape, and Sweden really does just want to arrest him for that, and has no plans to extradite him? How would this situation look different to you?

> The Swedish government could guarantee that Assange wouldn't be extradited, but it would make them look bad in the eyes of the US and others.

And here's where you reveal that you did not read the article.
While commodities can't inflate like a fiat currency, the rate of change of supply for most commodities can respond to changing demand to at least some extent. For example, take fossil fuels: we've known about the potential of oil sands and fracking for a very long time, but nobody bothered with them because the price wasn't high enough to make it worthwhile to chase after those sources. Now that's changing, and the extra fuel that comes from exploiting them helps to keep the market price a bit more stable.

Bitcoin, by virtue of having a pre-determined and constantly diminishing growth rate, doesn't even have that. Which makes it even less desirable a form of currency. It's like an instant deflationary spiral. Just add economy!
Wow, why would they block github? I hope nobody needs to code at your work place. That's almost as bad as blocking google.
I think one of the things I really appreciate about the Aeropress is the cleanup time. The plunger cleans the cylinder, everything else rinses with water in about 15 seconds.

I use Cafe Bustelo espresso grind (cheap!) and I get a pretty great cup in about 3-4 minutes. Grinding beans and cleaning the grinder became a turnoff for me.
Clever UI prototyping - android, iOs, win8(!?)
Orion != space gun. Actually read up on Orion as its a totally different concept, and those issues are dealt with.
Browser Wars: Chrome’s Success Visualized On A World Map
In your particular example, gnu.org, the source code is available at:

* http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/www

* http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/www/?root=www
The Correa government in Ecuador is part of an informal political bloc with Raul Castro's Cuban administration and Hugo Chavez' Venezuelan administration. That bloc is not particularly friendly towards the US.
The backdrop to the Assange case has been the upcoming presidential election in Ecuador, slated to be held just six months from now in February 2013. President Correa, who was first elected in 2007, will be seeking a second term under Ecuador's 2008 constitution.

Opinion polls published in the Ecuadorian media in 2012 have shown Correa with a commanding lead over his prospective opponents, largely because there is no consensus challenger. Polling from CMS in March showed Correa with just under 49% of the vote, more than 40 points ahead of the five included challengers, who polled between 1% and 9% each. Thiry percent of voters, however, said that they had not chosen a candidate to support. More recent polling has shown the emergence of Guillermo Lasso as the closest prospective candidate with 17% of the vote, while undecided voters fell to 17%. Correa held fast with 50% of the vote.

With a split field, Correa is practically guaranteed a win. Ecuadorian electoral law does not require the winning candidate to garner a majority of the popular vote; if a candidate receives at least 40% of the vote and is at least 10 points ahead of the next finisher, he or she wins in the first round.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/17/rafael-c...
> is it possible to become a decent programmer ...

No.

> ... and build a MVP in just six months?

Yes.
I wish more business guys would try to learn programming, so well done sir. But I do have a quibble with this statement:

> if you want to become a programmer, you have to be comfortable with having to learn new things constantly for the rest of your life".

In my experience, the quickest way to tell that someone is not cut out to be a programmer is when they complain about the amount of continual learning that is a requirement of the job. The only way you can become a great programmer is if you LOVE learning new things, and the prospect of there being a great wide expanse of things yet unlearned fills you with excitement instead of dread.

So I think beyond having to be comfortable with that process, it better be something innately necessary to you or you will get burned out on this job.
I get frustrated when people just paste generic answers so I'll help out by answering in more detail.

Basically, when you buy from UReach, the underlying technology is very different. I don't know what UReach runs for sure, but they're what we call BlackBox infrastructures. You have no idea what keeps this company up and running, and given that UReach's CTO is a former Director for the Members of Technical Staff at AT&T, and since UReach has been around forever, it's probably safe to say that they're not running FreeSWITCH as their core (More likely big iron hardware; which is antithetical to a SaaS service like this).

Profig will have a faster feature iteration time period because they're a smaller company, whereas it's much harder for UReach to dev new features. Also Profig has the added advantage of having a small core market: hosted PBX. They aren't (at least at this time) targeting providers; something UReach is doing actively.

TL;DR: Profig runs on a great core, and they don't have 10+ years of embedded stuff to work through so their pace of feature iteration will be higher.

Does that help answer the Question?
Apart from the flat rate how are you different from http://1dollarscan.com or http://www.bookscan.co.jp ?

You indicate that you only support PDF for now, do you plan to support other formats? If so, how will you handle previous orders like if I pay for a scan now, can I hope to obtain a MOBI version for my Kindle when you offer it?

I love the ability to order from Amazon and deliver it to you.

The price kinds of puts me of a bit, 12$ seems ok if I have for example a technical book but for a novel it seems really too high.
The ideas, the fear of competition, the day job and the naysayers
I'm not an expert, but here's what makes the most sense to me: at any given time, we are probably "at capacity" and our brains are constantly dumping out and/or compressing old information to make room for new information.
Win8 libraries worth the effort?
I have no data. The first part of that bit ("... majority wanted ...") was intended to be somewhat hyperbolic, but I would expect that a survey would show that heavy smartphone and tablet users tend to keep the Lion default, rather than switch it back to the traditional scroll behavior. Haven't actually done the survey, though. :)
Terrific job, thanks.
My oh my, this is fantastic, except I can see another wave of bootstrap plugins this time everyone trying to out-do each other with date pickers.
Let's not say it's unreliable. That doesn't really have much meaning without context: the reliability I expect from my car is much lower than the reliability I expect from a space probe.

Instead, let's consider that everything ever built will fail under a certain set of conditions. Understanding a particular component's reliability means understanding all the things that are likely to go wrong over its lifetime and fixing some, and characterizing others. The many people working on different parts is an outcome of different concerns seeing different problems and applying solutions. These solutions are sometimes contradictory: a weak potentiometer shaft may be improved by using a particular alloy of steel instead of, say, aluminum. But now that alloy may make the part too heavy, or too expensive, or it may create problems for the bearing it has to sit in, etc.

What you see in the long development time isn't that something is necessarily "unreliable" it's that it takes that long to understand how it can fail and make it reliable enough to sustain the mission. This is already why engineers will tend to use tried and true parts: they already understand them completely.
This is a little like asking why Burma wasn't consulted in the extradition. The simple answer is: Ecuador simply isn't a party to this controversy, and so the way they see things isn't material.

Yes, I think the issue here is that Ecuador wants to start a political controversy. There is prima facie evidence, compelling and voluminous, that the principals Ecuador is "standing up for" in granting asylum are very much at odds with the principals Ecuador is itself governed by. Occam's Razor more or less demands that we look for motives other than press freedom principals.
I don't think there's much that Assange can do to guarantee that he won't be extradited to the US. Firstly, the claim that needing both the UK and Sweden to agree extradition is largely irrelevant. Even Assange's native government, Australia, has already stated that it has no objection to extradition, and the UK has previously agreed on extradition for its own citizens, as stated. In all likelihood, this would be a formality, the foreign office acting by proxy. So 1&x = x.

The necessary preconditions for extradition are that both torture and the death penalty are precluded. The latter is easily satisfied, and is often given to states that forbid extradition where the death penalty may be applied. [1]

Locking someone up for a long time is not torture, so these apparent defences are essentially weak and I would say immaterial, even if Assange has every interest in exaggerating them.

The US is not in a competition over access to Assange. It certainly wouldn't be sensible to request extradition before the outcome of the Swedish process becomes clear. The purported fact that an extradition request has not been made seems to me immaterial to either current or future intentions or discovery.

His native government won't protect him, the UK government in all likelihood won't, so it's down to Sweden. Whether he's convicted of any crime or not there, a properly formed extradition request that passes muster will be the US's to singularly decide I'd say.

As far as I can tell, Assange sees himself and Bradley Manning in a cell for a very long time. And most everyone will forget about them eventually.

[ 1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17037068 ]
It's touching that the author of this article thinks the only relevant points are the legal small print of the UK and Sweden. But if you think about it some more, you might realise that Assange chose the UK as his destination because he felt the public and the press would exert enough pressure on the government to shield him from any political manoeuvrings.

I propose a new metric for situations like this. Rate the likelihood that the suspect would commit this act (quite low in this case as it would be incredibly stupid given his circumstances and also not something he has a history of); the convenience the situation represents to his enemies (very high in this case, as it buys the US time to prepare their extradition case, or execute whatever agreement they have already with the Swedish government); and the ease with which his enemies could indeed set him up (easy in this case - word of two women and one co-operative prosecutor, no evidence required and no risk of alibi or counter-evidence). Now multiply these factors together and you have the Conspiracy Index of the situation.
I love the concept of branching which really take something great from (D)VCs to apply it to document reviewing. I always had trouble using word's revision system and having multiple people correcting/working on the same document at once. It will highly depend on how you handle the merge and if it's intuitive enough to use.

From you signup process, it seems like you only plan to develop these functionalities. Is it demo-ready yet? Or are these only mockups to ensure which functionality really matters to the users?

EDIT: minor correction, I think visualize is written with a Z but I'm not an english native-speaker so I could be wrong.
Apple Is Now the Most Valuable Company in History
Ultimately, I'd agree that Apple are being far too aggressive in this, but IMO the similarities go further than you describe. The Galaxy Ace [1] (I assume the court cases are at least in part about the Ace?) looks very similar to the iPhone and is practically the same size. My Ace is stored in an iPhone case, and it fits almost perfectly.

It also ships with a "Samsung Keypad" as the default input device. As far as I can tell, all this does is make the keyboard look more like the one on the iPhone. Compare the Samsung keyboard [2] with the iPhone keyboard [3].

As I said earlier, I personally think that Apple are pursuing this further than I would like, but in some cases it seems (to me at least) that the similarities are more than incidental.

[1] Example image: http://i.imgur.com/ZEW45.png

[2] Samsung keyboard: http://i.imgur.com/WxFt4.jpg

[3] iPhone keyboard: http://i.imgur.com/xSVdZ.jpg
Sure, I can elaborate.

The idea is that as a programmer, you have to have an intimate understanding of what is going on in order to make the machine do your bidding quickly and correctly.

But that mediocre Eclipse user I caricaturized does not have that understanding. He certainly knows how to get the job done for a certain set of tasks, but he does not know the details of how this is happening. Thus, he creates programs that follow "best practices", "conventions", "design patterns" and lots of automatically created wizard-boilerplate.

That might not be "bad code" mind you, but it almost certainly is not "great code", either. Thus, mediocre.
And then these people create libraries that are mediocre and try to use only libraries that they can understand and that are hence mediocre. A culture emerges that is very consistent, but also very mediocre.
Yes, I am. I was just pointing out something about Linux that was easier than I'd expected, not dissing OS X. If you read the last coupla years of my history, you'll note some bitter rants from me about how 2010's Linux hadn't improved nearly as much as I'd hoped since I moved to OS X in 2003. So, I'm often pleasantly surprised these days. :)
tweiss, by actually building the full-stack (front-end to back-end and deployment/ops), you've compressed the "out-of-comfort-zone" feeling all programmers eventually face from years to a few months. Bravo!
Actually there's much better, but none that are freely available. And it's still distribution-specific which is retarded.
We're dealing with a flood of TC and HN visitors and sign-ups, hence my response above. I was going to come back and expound a bit more, but thanks for the elaboration.
Great summary and how to apply it to your own life. I find this particularly relevant for entrepreneurs where you must either love the challenge of learning/failure or you will be miserable.
Brooks spends some time discussing these issues in the book, and I'm pretty much aligned with him:

Nobody belives in "a priori design" and I somehow doubt that anybody did. Brooks points out that the original publication of the "waterfall model" was meant as "how not to..." and people got that wrong.

But cathedrals are not about a priori design, they are about style, elegance, economy of means and coherency of design.

But my point in the piece is that the lost generation doesn't even know what a cathedral is in the first place, having grown up in the bazaar.
I find vector images to be a godsend when creating responsive web sites. They are easy to implement and 'future proof' your website so when the next iDevice comes out with twice the resolution as the current gen retina devices your icons will look just as crisp. Of course Bitmap images remain a pain in the bum.
The article not only contradicts what you just said (about Assange making demands), but links to other articles considering exactly those demands in detail. You're incorrect: Assange himself asserted that one (of presumably many) condition of his acceding to extradition is an undertaking that he not be extradited from Sweden to the US.
In a world where software is designed by cathedrals, there is no need for autoconf. You read the POSIX spec and write software that conforms to it.
Linux and Firefox code basis are messes.

Have you written any large projects that you've had to maintain over years, or worked with large teams, or handed off maintenance of a large project to others?
Best Buy Should Buy Consumer Electronic Startups
Very interesting read. It makes me wonder if it is all about access time and the complexity of the query, then to what extent could "Google everything" be able to outsource our brain space?
I think Munksgaard is supporting you, and that there are some problems with different languages.
Under what insane set of morals or laws is having sex with an unconscious person not considered rape?
"Coding uses a lot of thinking patterns that I hadn't really used since my math and statistics classes in college, and even back then not in this intensity"

And

"I guess my point is, that if you want to become a programmer, you have to be comfortable with having to learn new things constantly for the rest of your life."

So many conversations around "but I want to be a programmer, do I really need to learn math? Really, really?"

Yes, you do. But more disturbing than the resistance to learn math is the resistance to learn. Period.

What i like about the article is that, all though the writter admits there are some challenges, he does not whine about them, but instead he overcome them. Because of that, he has a good chance at succeeding in programming, or anything else for that matter.

Maybe not in 6 months... But he will get there
Read the whole comment: i said these are problems every long-running software project suffers from, regardless of being a cathedral or a bazaar.
We could invent a "new metric for situations like this" involving estimates of the "likelihood" that suspects would "commit the act" and estimates of "the convenience of the situation to the enemies of those suspects" and the "ease with which the suspect's enemies could set them up".

Or we could just have the rule of law.
Also notable, from the first article:

>In a l995 survey, Babson College Professor Paul Reynolds found that "10% of Americans between the ages of 25-34 are actively involved in creating a start-up company, a rate about three times as high as any other age group...it should help dispel once and for all the myth that today's youth are motivationally challenged."

I wonder what that figure is today.
A shameless knock off copies _everything_. A shameless rolex copies everything from a rolex. Rolex doesn't copy anything from their knockoffs. There has to be one way copying to classify a product as a knockoff. Instead, Apple has copied many features from android, so it's not a case of samsung / android being knockoff products. If anything, consumers have benefited from copying! Everyone complained about iOS notifications, then they copied android notifications. And consumers benefited. The fact that we are even having this discussion is nauseating. It's painfully obvious what the outcome should be in terms of what's best for consumers. A rich ecosystem which combines copying with innovation.
Inside the Grum Botnet