skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art
Wow. People still use Perl?
By comparison, Reddit would be a "full-distraction." On HN I get very knowledgeable opinions and advice that are relevant to what I'm working on. That's the good half. The bad half is that reading HN doesn't get work done.
I think you're right that "what is the future of local news?" is the real question, rather than "what will replace newspapers?"

Working at a newspaper (online dept.), I think these organizations still haven't come to the realization that print isn't going to rebound (very much a "buggy whip" situation, as leed25d suggested). We see reports that show that newspapers' customer base is literally dying off. The younger generations don't have the same place in their lives for dead-tree news.

The economic downturn and advertising nosedive will decrease the available time window for newspapers to evolve. I think many will not make it. This could be a good thing. If there is a need for their services, something will appear to take their place (and eventually something with a viable business model). Startups will lead the way in innovation, and the smart newspapers that survived will learn to rapidly adopt what works (and hopefully cultivate a spirit of innovation themselves).

To be fair, I know a number of "traditional" journalists that have made the leap to Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc and have embraced these new forms to build flow, readership and conversation. I expect these folks to adapt and provide the professional expertise required for in-depth investigative journalism.
Look up the definition of an enterprise in your dictionary. A non-profit like Wikipedia is an enterprise. Therefore, Jimbo is a successful entrepreneur.
Graduate School in Humanities: Just Don't Go
Ruby, git, etc - is a very portable userland packages. It means they almost independed from an OS. It means you can focus on the quality of the OS, while fresh user tools can be easily backported from bleeding edge distros like Fedora.

I'm runing production servers which are 64-bit FC10 based systems onder the Xen 3.3 with kernels from CentOS.

Resent Fedora lacks support of 64bit dom0, but CentOS has it. xen-hypervisor I'm using is from FC11.

So, I have fresh developer tools along with latest Xen and very stable and well-tested kernel. It works pretty good.

Linux is like Lego, not like Windows.
Yes, because we only redirect people who are searching for porn, and those people aren't actually part of the community.
Does The Mainstream Care If Facebook Keeps Your Data?
Many git users say that the problem with learning git is to unlearn all the stuff you know about CVS or SVN, because git is just not the same. Now I understand what they're talking about.

Beacuse Eric Sink is a smart guy, but he doesn't understand git yet. He's still following the Subversion workflow. The secret is that "git commit" is not a sacred act. Don't be fooled by the words. When you do an "svn commit", the result is written in stone in some centralized repository where it can break everyone else's builds, now and forever. When you do a "git commit" the result sits on your machine. It goes nowhere. This is distributed version control -- a commit just changes your local repo, and if it doesn't work you just undo it. (Or, alternatively, make seven more commits in your efforts to fix it, then use the mighty "git rebase --interactive" to smash all of them together into a single, perfect commit. Then you pretend that it was correct all along. Nobody else will be the wiser. You'll look like a genius!)

So, if you want to pull half the hunks out of a previous commit, make a branch (you can make branches more easily than blinking -- this is git), pull out half the hunks, commit the result. Then compile and test. (If you like, you can probably use a post-commit hook to compile and test automatically.) If the tests pass, merge your experimental branch back into your development branch, then do the "git push" to the central repository. It is that push -- not any of your commits -- that is the point where you have to be sure that you're not breaking anything. And you can't use git's index to push files that have never been visible to your compiler and your tests.

UPDATE: I have yet to actually use them, but another one of Sink's commenters reminds me that git has pre-commit hooks that seem to solve his specific problem. Here's something I googled up on that subject:

http://www.nabble.com/git-pre-commit-hook--best-place-to-mak...

Again, I don't use such a thing, because I think it's kind of silly to insist that every local commit pass all tests. That's a recipe for failing to make enough local commits. I've been finding that it's better to make a commit every time you make any change that can be described in an English sentence. Then you have a little log of everything that you've done that you can rearrange with "git rebase -i" and turn into your final, pushable commits.
I responded to the other comment but I wanted to make one point on the article itself. I think a lot of the fear right now is based on the negative tone of the Obama administration and I think they’re doing the exact right thing. Mr. Resler (from the article) makes the same point by saying...

"It's not surprising that politicians exaggerate this," says Resler, who predicts "The tone of the message is going to start changing immediately; now that we have the stimulus in hand, you enhance it by saying positive things."

As someone who was too young to have a vested interest in the Reagan presidency it seems to me the reason for his success was largely that he made people feel good about themselves and their country. That made them feel good about life which in turn made them go out and buy things.

The Obama administration needs to create as terrible looking a crisis as possible right now because then the recovery is all the more euphoric which in turn makes people want to go out and buy all the more stuff.
The reason that founders cashing out on big rounds was never absurd, and will never be absurd (though market conditions may make it less common for a time) is that in many respects it aligns the interests of the founders with the investors.

Money has diminishing marginal utility, and most people would be just as happy (or unhappy) with $10m as they would with $50m. That's not true at all for VC firms or their limited partners. Twice the profit is roughly twice as good for them, in fact in the competitive industry, it might be more than twice as good. If everyone is getting 15% returns, the difference between 10% and 20% for a VC fund can be tremendous the next time they're out raising funds.

By allowing the founders to cash out, it gives them the cushion they need to swing for the fences, rather than trying to sell their company as soon as it will make them independently wealthy.
And they could hit the t key a little too soon also and end up with a demo video on using a sextant. The educational possibilities of typos are endless! Although, I wouldn't be surprised if sextant demo videos get caught in some web filter.
I agree. Every so often there's a post about something that can change my approach or direction to a problem I'm solving. Even if it's not relevant to what I'm doing, there's a wealth of information that's worth knowing. In a nutshell: HN is an extraordinarily good place for a tech entrepreneur to find out what he doesn't know.

However, in practice, I find it still takes a substantial amount of effort to filter the information I'm exposed to into something I can use in the near future. The amount of due diligence in figuring out if a certain technology (especially if it's new and if you lack experience with it) is a large enough barrier for me to usually continue on with what I'm doing. I simply don't have time to learn a new language every month, or learn how to migrate to new DB, or any infrastructural changes like that.[1] On the scale of things, I've prioritized "get stuff done" as #1, with "learn how to get better stuff done faster" as #2. HN is good at #2.

Like anything, HN is what you make of it. I personally love the fact that HN is so densely populated with the exactly the type of people whose opinions I actually respect (surprisingly rare for me), and who I'd like to network with. As a result of the amazing crowd here, I get to learn what I don't know at an astounding rate. From there I can leave it to my natural curiosity and ambition to fill it in.

Edit: [1] Another thing is, quite often people post things on HN merely seeking validation of what they're doing. So many blogs I read are about "Here's how I do something, and why you should, too. (And since I'm telling you to do it, it means I'm right)" which puts an even huger burden of due diligence on my shoulder. So I might have heard of xyz... but still don't know if it is worthwhile.
A few things. First, this is a global recession. I would not expect unemployment in the US to be as bad now as it was during the Great Depression simply because the US occupies a different place in the global economy today. In 1929, the US was the manufacturer and creditor of the world - a position China occupies today. I would expect the urban unemployment rate in China to reach the high teens, maybe higher. China is likely already technically in a recession (their 6.8% 4th quarter GDP growth is a mirage. It is calculated year-on-year, rather than annualized, seasonally adjusted quarter-on-quarter. Hence, their 4th quarter was more likely zero or negative, and the first quarter of this year will be worse). Japan's economy is falling off a cliff at -13%. And Europe is in awful shape too; Germany's exports have died, and Eastern Europe is already in a depression scenario with 10% contraction nearly across the board. The question is where is the demand going to come from? No one can export their way out of this mess. Many sovereign states could default as well - small European countries with large banking sectors relative to GDP are at huge risk - and social unrest will likely only get worse. This is bad.

Second, Japan achieved roughly 1% growth annually during its lost decade, and that was with spending hundreds of billions on stimulus programs. Without that spending, Japan likely would have had years of negative growth. That is not a hopeful model of where our economy is headed.
This dude mistakes socialism for the rich with capitalism.
I don't find this crisis scary at all. Either it gets resolved or it doesn't. There's nothing I can do about it and nobody out there who really understands how this whole global economy thing works, so how about we all just chill the hell out and stop worrying about it? That seems like the only rational plan to me. This "crisis" doesn't even cross my mind until I see yet another article about it on HN, and then I only worry about it because the topic is polluting the front page.
"obsession about only storing hashes, as if that's the primary critical issue with site security"

Can you point me to something I said that implies this is an obsession or that this is what I think the primary critical issue is with site security?

" password recoverability: if the user knows they can recover the password, they're more likely to use a more complex one"

Why would I as a user care at all if I could retrieve the actual value of a complex password -- and why would knowing I could recover it make me then choose a more complex one?

(The user should be given an option of resetting the password via a link sent by email. Sending passwords themselves over email is a great way to have it revealed for someone else to use later.)

"to use something like HTTP Digest Auth"

Good thing no one needs this mediocre authentication method if SSL is available.

The majority of people use the same passwords at different sites. So even if someone's cracked your database, it's still a good idea. Storing passwords in plaintext is a non-neighborly thing to do.
http://code.stanziq.com/strophe/ is probably a good start.
Obama talking about the economy did not make Lehman brothers fail. It did not make Bear Stearns fail. It did not make our entire financial sector load up on risky loans. It did not make mortgage originators and bankers give out mortgages and loans to people who shouldn't have gotten them. There are real structural problems in our economy. People are worried for good reason. This is not merely in people's heads.
A few small sites like Amazon and Slashdot still do.

http://jobs.perl.org/
"eJabberd does really weird things to us".

Describe the weird things, please. I'm about to deploy ejabberd for a production site, and I'm interested in your experience.
How do you incentivize a fixed set of users with little to gain and a lot to loose?
Basically, we set up reviews of away rotations as part of a med student site. Away rotations are 2-4 week "auditions" at hospital you're interested in going to. The dean wanted this feedback as a way to provide useful information to underclassmen trying to set up their own away rotations. With hundreds of hospitals to choose from, and extremely limited information in advance (often only the website or personal exposure to that city), it's kind of a crap shoot. So, to get high quality feedback, we went with locked down access and real names, so the reviews would carry social value. Problem is, even minimal clicks and monthly reminders, my classmates admit, in their words "I'm just too lazy".

How do would you reward something like this? Anyone have experience with something similar?
Office Live Team Adds New Web Templates
I believe the term is "debt". When you launch an app to the public, you're creating debt for yourself, forever.

Magnolia just managed to transfer the debt from time/work debt to "image" debt. In other words, now they just look really really bad but they don't have to maintain anything anymore.
Maybe you replied to my comment by mistake, but in case you meant to reply to my comment and not to somebody else's, a lack of liability for destroying data is not even close to the same thing as a copyright license.
You're changing your whole point here. In your first post you said...

"we now have a recession in the real economy and a banking crisis. This is a disastrous combination."

So what you were saying (in response to the original article) is that those factors made this the worst recession since the great depression. I didn't understand what you meant by your first point so I couldn't address it but I addressed your second point. So to have a discussion you should either (a) concede the point to me or (b) provide a counter point.

What you've done here was to clarify my Japan point and then move on to making a third point. The problem with that third point is that you're just saying the world is in a recession. But that wasn't the point of disagreement. No one disputes that.

The question is whether this recession is worse and the numbers you provided don't answer that question
When asking "what is in people's heads" the question is the scope of the disaster not whether there is a disaster at all. No one questions there's an economic crisis the question is it's scope which is where the Obama administration's stance becomes an issue.
The redirect he was suggesting wasn't to thwart 16-year-old boys from finding porn. It would be to make sure you don't accidentally stumble into something you don't want via a fat-fingered search query.
What language community tests the most?
Main's usually pretty useless for nontrivial apps. Usually some sort of internal/library framework structures the system.

These usually work well together:

1. Some way to cross-reference source files. e.g. ctags.

2. Source-code level documentation. Doxygen, javadoc, whatever you have.

3. Stack traces of the running app. Set breakpoints and get stack traces. If your tools will let you do this, get periodic stack traces (e.g. once every 10th of a second) for a while. Look at what the code's doing.

I just went through two systems totaling 1.5 million lines of code.

First hint: don't even think of going through all the code. Instead, figure out what's important to you, and start putting together a demand-paged map of what you need to know.

Second hint: get a paper notebook and start writing things down soon. You'll save yourself a lot of re-researching facts that way.
Sounds kinda like thefunded.com to me. In both cases, people want to share information without incurring the wrath of their authority figures. Maybe look there for inspiration?
Labor is a unique resource, I would not treat it the same way I would treat capital or any other resource especially since it is tied closely to social structures.
Something tells me that the people who run porn censoring groups won't follow your logic.
Windows Mobile for Windows Phones rolls out touchscreen, marketplace
Average Paid Dating Site subscriptions per user fall 25% in 6 months.
I'm especially interested in seeing if companies where the founders are allowed to cash out a bit up front actually do better and do better because they were allowed to cash out a bit. May take a while to get that data though.
All i want to say really is slippery slope. I never hoped on the Facebook thing, even though I get that email spam from people I know who are on it every now and then. My main gripe was you could never actually delete your account, and now the business reports on the founders sister showing data mining, and now the change of the TOS. They are bleeding money they don't have just to keep the lights on. People may enjoy it, but even in a digital world, I prefer a modicum of privacy.
I boosted my SAT scores 100 point with practice tests, by getting a sense of how the questions were written.
Peek: An Email device
Okay, here's how I see it, Justin:

You have forever tied the reputation and business of Justin.tv to porn. It doesn't matter if you host it or not, it doesn't matter if you warn users, you are forever associated with a market that millions of advertisers, investors, and users are adverse to. The TechCrunch porn article is already beginning to appear in search results - how long until any search for your website has articles about you and porn on it? And how long will casual users watch until they bounce?

It screams desperation because it isn't a business model, it's a stop-gap. The streaming video websites, including you, have yet to prove that you can make sustainable revenues that trump costs, which is the point of every business on the planet.

Once you realize that you've tarnished the reputation of Justin.tv forever and that it will create an artificial barrier to growth, it will be too late.

At least, that's how I see it.
Ask HN: Does it matter that 4K+ follower Twitterer uses HN for links (without attribution)?
http://twitter.com/jkrums

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%40jkrums+%2B+article

I noticed this a while ago. The guy who shot the TwitPic-seen-around-the-world (Flight 1549 on the Hudson) seems to siphon off some HN links and pass them off as his own 'deep web' finds. In his defense, he doesn't change the title - so he's not trying to hide it (totally).

I guess I'm a little annoyed that he is using HN as a tool to generate authority links (e.g. feed interesting articles to his twitter followers that will increase his twitter "network"), without participating in the conversation at all (maybe he is anonymous). Also, he is running the link through Adjix to track his referral count. Yes, there are many lurkers on HN (I used to be one).

On the other hand, by ambiguation of the source (HN), he is protecting us from an onslaught of News.YC new readers.

What do you think? I bring this up because I think the top Twitterers feel obligated to supply interesting links to content to their followers. As a full disclosure, my highest-point submission ever - 'Best Paper Airplane' was from a Guy Kawasaki tweet (I don't follow him - it came up in Summize).

Really, maybe I'm making much ado about tweets here. If no one responds to this (as I presume), I will have my answer (it does not matter).
Wouldn't such a confirmation be needed purely for legal reasons?
Games Like RuneScape
We list the 4 best Games Like RuneScape
Fireball in Texas Sky, Its Origin Unknown
Ask HN:  Best day in near future to launch?
I'm nearing a launch of my beloved project. Pessimism aside, let's assume that it will get picked up by blogs, submitted to social media sites, etc.

What would be the ideal weekday, or just date in the near future, for this to happen? Weekday vs. Weekend?

I'm not taking it too seriously right now, and I don't believe there's any chance of the launch going completely unnoticed, but I just want to maximize every last bit of publicity I can get out of launching.
Basically any note played on an analog instrument has a set of overtones of various frequencies. If these tones were played a bit louder, you would hear a chord rather than a single note.
Perl is dying. On OSX, with updates killing perl.
I couldn't agree more. If you don't have people that are interested in what they're doing and happy working with the other people that are also doing what they're doing, then you're going to have a weakest link scenario on your hands. The dead weight will be unhappy because they don't like what they're doing, and everyone else will be unhappy because they have to pull the dead weight (and the dead weight is complaining about being pulled!).
A great lesson for every saas service, and how a little bit of transparency goes a long way: http://www.transparentuptime.com/2009/02/magnolia-downtime-s...
>You have forever tied the reputation and business of Justin.tv to porn.

So sensational. What percentage of users are even aware of this feature?

>It screams desperation because it isn't a business model, it's a stop-gap.

That's a straw man argument. No one said it's a business model.

>Once you realize that you've tarnished the reputation of Justin.tv forever

Now that's hyperbole. While you're certainly entitled to your own opinion don't you think you're overreacting a little? What would your reaction be if they actually had porn on their site?
Where I work, we're constantly dealing with these sorts of cases

Is your user base the size of Facebook's?

There's a certain percentage of human beings who file insane lawsuits. The more users you have, the greater the odds that you will sample one of them. Become a large enough company, and you'll need an entire legal staff just to respond to each week's pile of new lawsuits.
It's not. Quantcast's direct measuring gives Perez 5.3m people a month.
What do you guys think of using patent applications as a measure of innovation? This seems common among researchers, and I can see why - it's easy to measure patents, whereas it's hard to track non-patented types of innovation (such as contributions to open source). But is this a case of looking for your keys under the lamp post because that's where the light is brightest?
If magenta ain't a color, then what does GR : COLOR=1 : PLOT 20,20 get you, hmmm?
Richard East ON ROI
Richard helps you in growing your business and success beyond your imagination.
>And you can't use git's index to push files that have never been visible to your compiler and your tests.

That's true w/in your scenario but a little misleading because it's not always true.

If you don't use the experimental branch, you can add and commit pieces of files, yet the tests will run not on what's committed but what's in your directory. So if you had

print password_to_the_admin_interface

for some reason, and then you comment that out/delete it and forget to add that part of the file, you test it and see that it's not printing the pass, but then you push and deploy and bad shit goes down.

Just clarifying so no one's like "I can't push code I didn't test! Git is so safe!" and then allows disaster to occur.
You might also consider using Facebook Connect. Check out http://www.brightkite.com/ as one example of a pretty nice login flow, there are more on our wiki @ http://tinyurl.com/6ybl44.
A flag?!
I'm going to hope that pun (porn and xxx being fat-fingered) was unintentional.