skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is probably going to go against the grain a little, but I have some problems with GitHub.

Firstly and probably most obviously, their business is based almost in its entirity around a single third party open source tool, without which they would have nothing at all, and yet their site is not open source. I know they have every right, legally, to do this, but to me it seems .. exploitative.

I wouldn't even care, really - that's what it's all about, after all - but they're just so arrogant about it. Wanstrath especially. Just go look at the very latest post on his blog. The last sentence - "Welcome to distributed version control." is just so smug and really rubs me up the wrong way.

Maybe I'm an idiot for thinking that way, it's very probable, but something just feels wrong.

Secondly, the whole point of distributed version control is that it is distributed. Github is the antithesis of this! And it has real-world consequences, too - it's slow as hell. It's not Facebook for programmers, it's Geocities for programmers, and I for one can't wait until all those Github users learn how to set up their own repositories.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Github. It's nice looking and works fairly well, apart from the speed. They certain picked the right wave to jump on and it was very right place, right time. And I love git.

But Github can't last that long, IMO. Trying to force a distributed version control system into a "hub" is not sustainable. Many people, including myself, would never host the fruit of their labours on some free "social" site. And the web interface is better than gitweb but hardly light years ahead of everyone else.

I think it's just a matter of time before we see a proper distributed git community - a "git mesh", if you will. Obviously there are some pieces missing before that can occur, but I think it's inevitable. These "hubs" never last. Just try to name one that has.
I can't see the link to this anywhere, must be the age
from the title, i thought this was going to be about apple using its clout to bully others into doing its bidding. it's actually about former apple employees who took apple's seeds of greatness with them into other tech companies.
Watch Psych Episodes
Exactly. My first thought when reading the original question was: "Show him 'Wargames' and explain to him how it's not good to start a nuclear war!"

It's funny that this story starts with this similar point.
Srender: ERB-like templating plugin for jQuery based on Resig's original code
Am I the only one here who first read this as "Hacker News 2" and got all excited for a nanosecond imagining something like beta.news.yc.com with a new design and added features???
I've seen that kinda setup done nicely..

Daily automated DB Backup.
Daily automated DB restore to a seperate server. (Which also can kinda double as a hot spare as required.)
Help me decide which netbook to buy
If i recall correctly, the prosecution had its arm twisted on prosecuting this case.
22 points by pg 864 days ago | 16 comments | flag

Wait, I sense a disturbance in the Force:

2x365+1=731 < 864

What was HN doing 133 days before being born? And who are those mysterious elders with accounts "created:864 days ago"?
when I first saw the name I thought 'cool!'- I was thinking that this is a site that poor college kids can use to get together and split the price of a whole pizza or two (for more variety and meeting new ppl - along with a tool showing what everyone owes for the pizzas including tip)... I was a bit disappointed when this wasn't the case.

I may be missing something but I just don't see the point of this web app (as a super focused yelp) when the yelps of world already have tons of data and tons of users for this very thing
If there is one lesson that Apple has shown the world it is that simple, clean, cohesive, and usable UI is a very big selling point to a product. Physical product design is UI as well.
MAKE:television - Project Submission Page
The article mensions that the EU might force Microsoft to bundle multiple web browsers with there OS. I don't think this is reasonable. they should just keep up with their "anti-IE6" campaign.

on another note, swich to safari? I thought that depended on apple's hacked X. (can't be put onto windows)
Cool, django-compress looks similar to the sprockets-rails plugin. A few differences:

django-compress makes you define your source files and concatenation order in an array in a configuration file. Sprockets lets you define your dependencies with annotations in the source files themselves, meaning plugins can have their own dependencies and integrate themselves with your applicaton's build system.

Sprockets doesn't do minification yet.

Sprockets doesn't do CSS concatenation, either. But it does have an asset provisioning feature, where plugins can specify a collection of files (e.g. css, images) that should be copied into the document root. (Rails itself provides basic CSS and JS concatenation.)

It's nice to see other similar but independent implementations of the same idea.
I was throwing together a Techmeme for sports, and while compiling a list of sources, I ran into this same problem. As far as I know, there isn't enough sports content out there, which makes sense if you think about it.
Apache. Sometimes I think the GPL's purpose is to make the other licenses look good.
If you're going to focus on style, you should use "prompts the question" or "raises the question."

http://begthequestion.info/
I originally wrote Sprockets 1) as a replacement for Prototype's build system and 2) as a library that could be used within Rails. Just before releasing 1.0, I added a simple CGI wrapper around the library so we could use it in our marketing sites and so people could use it relatively easily without Rails.

I like the idea of distributing a PHP wrapper. I'll try to add one for the next release.

And there's no "ploy." Interesting theory, though.
It's spooky how obvious this is, yet how difficult it is to avoid personally, and how difficult to get other people at work to acknowledge it.

Surely, surely, surely, creating an environment where your employees can work should be worth focusing on?

It's also spooky how poor software is at managing this, or helping me manage it.

I want a meta-program that controls all other programs and has a big list of projects, such that I click one button and my computer goes into {project X} mode, another and it goes to {project Y} mode. This could include changing browser windows, reopening text files, ssh connections, help documents, bringing back window configurations, folders, anything at all computer wide.

And, key, it would mean the browser could crash and all the other project browsers wouldn't. I could reboot and minimal things would cause problems.

It would be like virtual desktops, but better. Or, like OS X virtual desktops, but for Windows.
Yeah, I read HN when I'm not really focused on work or other major tasks. So right now I have pandora open, google reader open, another blog open, and I have a to-do list in front of me. It not all that relaxing actually.
Not a big fan of the transparent background. Otherwise it's pretty cool.
Respectfully: no, it shouldn't. :) There's plenty of libraries that do this already. Sprockets solves a different problem.
Decades of research (not to mention common sense) indicate that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks.

Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1174696,00....
It's playing off of other "Mafias", notably the Stanford one and the PayPal one.
Boxee is under no obligation to pay local affiliates. Hulu clearly has the geolocation ability to make that happen, if they really wanted to. All that Boxee does is provide a specialized Web browser that happens to be more useful than Firefox when using a big-screen TV with your computer. They don't circumvent Hulu advertisements or anything else, and there is nothing preventing people from just using Firefox with their big-screen TV instead. The content providers are wrong in this issue, plain and simple.

For the last time, they need to stop treating everything new as a threat to their old revenue streams.
HN made me quit reading Reddit. Thanks HN!
New Service Shuurl.com not Playing Fair | TechJaws
Our Backup Strategy - Inexpensive NAS
App stores: WIll they kill developers' freedom?
Dear Mr. President: Buy open source
Dave Speers Interviews Founder of Comcast
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=-1

Oh right, not Python.
Sex-Based Roles Gave Modern Humans an Edge, Study Says
Business lessons from India's dabbawalas (99.9999% accuracy)
Great piece, I can relate to that. I was a USC business grad. After I graduated, my first job was a loan consultant and I sold life insurance on the side. Then after a couple years, I found that internet and coding was my true passion. So I took an internet related job (lower pay) with no coding experiences at all, I used my time during work to learn how to code. Then switched to different companies, aiming to learn what I wanted to learn. Basically, I got paid to learn. Not only that, I practice what I've learned at night by coding my own stuff. I prioritized and devoted most of my evenings and weekends on learning. That also means a lot of sacrifice.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if you know what you are truly passionate about, you'll find time and ways to pursue it. Prioritizing then comes easy.
Have a look at more from Dave: www.Phillypreneurs.com
They did have more general numbers, where a 50% cut is a 320% increase. As revenue increase the cuts work out as:

10% cut : 22% increase

25% cut : 159% increase

50% cut : 110% increase

75% cut : 293% increase
Have you looked at the subreddits? I spend a lot of time in /programming/ & I find that it has much better articles than HN. Or maybe it's just me, I'm more interested in code than startups.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/

The reddit RSS feed is also considerably better & I find that invaluable.
America has lost its curiosity
I can really relate to this and reading it sparked something inside me to write a response. I started writing a comment on his post, but it became so long that I turned it into a post on my own blog:

http://blog.raamdev.com/2009/02/19/the-pursuit-of-knowledge

My goal now is to continue living frugally so I can set aside a big enough bucket of money to get me through one year without work. Then, when the time is right, I’ll spend a year learning something of interest, possibly making small amounts of money on the side. When needed, I’ll start working and hopefully keep repeating this process. If something I do makes me tons of money, great. If not... well it’s not about the money.
very bottom of the main page. I have to admit, it wasn't obvious to me either when I first went looking for it.
Except one can also retire currency to shore up devaluation at a later date. You can't un-mine gold. Gold's value doesn't directly correlate to supply and demand or it would continuously go down in value. We're still pulling it out of the ground pretty regularly, and as far as I'm aware, nobody is putting it back.
That's pretty amazing. I wonder what happens to revenue in the weeks following the sale; do sales dry up completely, or do they stay strong as players recruit their friends, perhaps?
We'll actually be posting an opening for an intern at Carleton; we can definitely use a generalist like yourself. Our company, bandzoogle.com is based in Montreal, but we have employees in the UK and US. We're not really a "startup" anymore, but we can give you some experience in scaling a web app (we use S3/EC2). If you're interested, hit me up at chris[at]bandzoogle.com
Will Google be split?
I know about Arc. I'm half-joking about .NET, and I'm serious about the rest.
Good interview but looks like Blair Witch Project
SAP Acquires Coghead’s Technology As It Looks Towards The Cloud
Something this low quality shouldn’t even be on HN. It’s basically a combination of lies, misconceptions and personal opinion. A few points...

1. His Thomas Friendman example from "The World is Flat" uses a control group of one 5th grade teacher. If you can get more anecdotal than that I don’t know how

2. George W. Bush, for his many flaws, did push the space program extensively. He even tried to set a "Kennedy-esque" date for us to reach Mars.

3. If you look at science majors as a whole enrollment is still going up. Yes, traditional engineering has lost some of its appeal but whole new fields of study have opened up in bio-engineering

So basically all his factual points are lies and all his opinions are just that...opinions. On the other side you have a world that is still driven largely by American products and American innovations.
God I hate Flash on Mac. Burns up my CPU for watching a 3 minute video...
Or could it be that half a gig was just a figure he came up with to demonstrate the (ostensible) difficulty in doing a proper backup ?
SourceForge has been around for a pretty long time; not that I think they are a model of speed and prettiness, but they've certainly had (and still have) the staying power...
I know it's a joke - but how would that work anyway? You can't track something via WiFi - WiFi antennas provide no directional information (angle) so you can't triangulate, and I really doubt it's accurate enough to locate it by measuring distance via the speed of light.

A good joke should be realistic, well at least if it's directed at engineers.
googlesitemapgenerator
OK, canvas is less portable than Flash but canvas plus VML kludge is more portable than Flash. Maybe Google is using Flash for the performance.
I would like to make my point clear for this, I am saying that kids today aren't curious in the making of products and the technology and mathematics behind them. If you didn't get that, I'm sorry for wasting 2 minutes of your time.
Adsense Now Allows Font Customization
Video: Re-Creating Watchmen's Comic Book World
If education was a public class, then I couldn't imagine a worst interface than the American private sector; oh wait, yeah I can, our public sector.
America is 300M people. Generalizations on that scale are really hard.
please don't upvote such ahistorical nonsense. Even the most casual examination of historical records reveals this to be false.

In the early 1800s, Pierre Samuel Dupont, an influential French citizen who helped Thomas Jefferson negotiate for the Louisiana Purchase, came to America and surveyed education here. He found that most young Americans could read, write, and "cipher" (do arithmetic), and that Americans of all ages could and did read the Bible. He estimated that fewer than four Americans in a thousand were unable to write neatly and legibly.

people were fine before the advent of the nanny state in 1933.
Microsoft’s IE 8 Compatibility List
Where did he say mortgage? This guy has $2M in the bank.

The argument is that eliminating the rent expense ($2000/month or whatever) by spending $500k to buy a house outright is better than the tax-adjusted potential return on that $500k if invested.
Did you mean curiosity?

One thing Thomas mentioned in the book is that in order to build greater advancements, we first have to understand everything that happens with our current systems.

He is wrong. Firstly, because it implies that we could individually learn everything about a system that took many people to develop, and secondly because it implies those people from years ago could have learned all about that system and more - that they were vastly underachieving and that we wont.

We must be able to stand on the shoulders of giants, not just be taller than them.

If we can’t compete with intelligence, then the only thing we can compete with is wages, meaning they will go down

Or compete on other factors such as service level, locality, linguistics, friendliness, value added services, mediation, or any one of the dozens of other factors that go into making a business subjectively better than its competitors.
There's only a paradox if you look at self-education from a vocational / market perspective. I'd imagine most auto-didacts learn purely for the sake of curiosity and the sheer joy of it (eg. it feels good to play music well, even if only to yourself).

I have no problem spending the time / money learning something with no prospect of monetary gain in the future. Learning is an end in itself.
Web-based IDEs to become mainstream?
Personal Student Loans: Get A Partner For Higher Education
I gave this site a try and added pizza places that I like in Toronto, ON.

- I was disappointed that I couldn't add any comments, notes or tags (you could even display badges for top picks in categories like "cheap", "organic", "fast", "high end" on your map). It would have been cool to link to the boingboing.net article referencing Massimo pizza or to recommend my favorite types of pizza at each place.

- I had issues where the green marker pins would be placed in the wrong spot if I: shared a restaurant, typed in the name of another restaurant, and clicked OK. This happened twice (FF 3.0.6 on WinXP).

- I like the look and feel design of the site but I partially agree with some other posters here who ask what distinguishes your site from the mass market players like yelp. Being pizza-only makes using your site really easy to use, but I'm not sure if that's enough. My random brainstormed thought: Could you make recommending and searching for great pizza places into a game that's fun enough to pique the interest of a first time visitor?
I'm about to start doing this very thing. I've got enough money in the bank to last me for quite some time at my current burn rate. I'm planning a 6 month break to start learning guiter and piano, as well as surfing and working on a couple of my startup ideas and I guess I'll see how it goes from there. I haven't had a prolonged period of time where I have had no obligations in years and I'm not sure how long I can sustain such a break.

Anyway, I wish you luck in your own endeavor. It seems rare to find people that really want to have some quality in their life rather than just doing what they think is expected of them by society... well, maybe not here on HN, anyway.
Nice response post! Me too, I almost couldn't stop writing myself.
According to my recollection, there's less of the nuts-&-bolts-of-grammar and more about substance. E.g. Zinsser spends a lot of time arguing that you have to have a deep understanding of a subject, and be able to think well about it, to write well about it. Which ... sure, no doubt. But, um, not that helpful? (At least not to me at the time.)

It's been a long time, though, and the book apparently has many fans on this board who surely know it much better than I do. But no, less technical and more discursive than Strunk & White.
The law does not require disclosure of the collection of non personally identifying information. If it did, server logs would be illegal. Pinch analytics performs exactly the same function as Google analytics, and you don't agree to that on any of the websites you visit either.
Poorer countries' scientists rely on free online articles
We use ant to accomplish the same thing.
I totally agree. Why would I watch a video if I'm looking to navigate somewhere?

However, big brands might find creative ways to use them on search results. Check out the one for Pedigree (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=pedigree) This commercial first ran during the Super Bowl and is pretty funny. I'll bet certain campaigns could do well in search, prodding the user to dive into the ad experience more (i.e. hangintherejack.com)
I agree. I've never gone to any place on Yelp's recommendation that was disappointing or grossly out of step with what the general review consensus was.

So shenanigans or not, IMHO Yelp is still a valuable resource.

I too don't really see a problem with a clearly marked, "highlighted" review. If Yelp is dropping bad reviews in exchange for sponsorship (or worse, writing fake bad reviews), I would take issue.
If there is truth to this I'd say that it'd be because everyone's time is filled, and so much else is competing for our attention. There's no room to let your mind make itself up, look for its own missing pieces (of understanding).
...speaking of slow...
I just found out why my shell was so slow: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/11/08/update-g...
I invested in three multi-family properties (12 rental units total) and became a landlord at age 21, so I also haven't had a good stretch of freedom in years. The sub-prime fiasco made me lose all three of them last year (their values dropped by 70%!) and I'm filing for bankruptcy this year. But I'm actually very happy the way things turned out. I learned a TON being a landlord and it made me realize just how tied down owning property made me. I'm finally feeling freer than ever and I'm really looking forward to the future!

BTW, it's interesting that you're looking to start learning the guitar and the piano... I've recently become interested in learning them too! Good luck, and thanks!
Buying a house is important for reasons that are not financial at all. It simply feels good to know that you have basic shelter with no overheads to pay.

Also, basic things like a house are protected in many circumstances under bankruptcy provisions. This means that owning at least a modest place of your own can give you a platform of security for going about your life that you cannot get any other way.

It may not make a lot of sense on an accountant's balance sheet, but the psychological benefits of it are wonderful. Buying a modest house would be one of the first things I would do in this situation. Especially in a buyer's market like there is now.
Set aside some money in Kiva.com, it'll be the happiest investment you ever made.
The Top 20 Twitter Applications (According to Compete)
Cloud computing ascends the mainstream
Video is primarily for entertainment, text is for conveying information. At least on the net.

Newspapers don't seem to understand this - a lot of them are starting to have videoclips on their sites, apparently to grab marketshare from TV. It's much more expensive than writing an article, and it doesn't work. There are, of course exceptions: "nipslips", catastrophes and such call for video, but most news don't.
Brodsky asked not to be filmed.
Poll: How long do you expect to live?
Do you anticipate having a normal human lifespan, or do you expect to see radical life extension technologies before your time?
0 - 65 years
65 - 80 years
80 - 100 years
100 - 120 years
120 - 150 years
150 - 200 years
200 - 500 years
500 years or more