skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess "pretty boring" depends entirely on what you're looking for. There's plenty going on here, and many things I do can't be found together anywhere else (except maybe SF). So if you like French food and Broadway musicals, NYC is obviously better, but if you like rock climbing and Japanese art, Seattle is hard to beat.

While many other cities are certainly bigger and busier, Seattle has more of what is interesting to me. (Classic selection bias: obviously somebody living here by choice would feel that way!)

If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to try to answer.
Someone should do Paul Graham, so he can write a new lisp dialect to write another program to evolve another version of Paul Graham to write a new lisp dialect to write another program to evolve another version of Paul Graham to write a new lisp dialect to write another program to evolve another version of Paul Graham to write a new lisp dialect to...
So the christian god exists because the Sistene Chapel is pretty?
That's the half-silvered mirror solution (for full eye-contact teleconferencing). I was thinking of the other solution: the software-based one that corrects the images in terms of pupil-direction.
I work at a commercial software company, for which I've filed and been granted some patents. I do so even though the pittance my company provides as a "patent bonus" doesn't begin to compensate for the paperwork, writing, iterating with a lawyer, etc. involved in the process.

In principle, it's possible one of my patents will either defend my employer from litigation, or be a poker chip in some licensing deal in the future, but honestly the odds of that are small. My selfish reason for writing patents is that they provide a way of publicly recording my technical contributions. An alternative venue is academic publications, but that's inherently a crapshoot. Granted patents have your name on them, are freely available unlike a lot of CS journals, and usually provide better technical detail about the problem and solution than a typical 5-page academic CS paper.
The Seduction of Simple: Hidden Complexity
On the documentary side of things (all of which are available free/legally online):

1. "Code Rush", documentary about Netscape open sourcing Mozilla.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/

2. "Revolution OS" was a pretty interesting documentary on Linux and the free software movement.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&...

3. "Freedom Downtime", a documentary about Kevin Mitnick. There's also "Track Down", but that's more of a fictional portrayal loosely based on him.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6746139755329108302...
Maybe the best approach is to do as Ruby on Rails did -- do something real, and then create your tool/infrastructure around/in reaction to that (in Rails' case, it was Basecamp and subsequent applications, as well as contributions by other working practitioners -- not stuffy people sitting on committees writing specs instead of applications that people use).

So, in order to make a CMS, you ought to have some content to manage. Make your CMS really, really good at managing that particular collection of bits you care about so dearly without making things complicated. That seems like a good strategy to me. Yes? No?

To answer your question directly, if you think you can create some useful software that scratches your itch in a novel way (slightly novel is more than sufficient), by all means work on it, and post a follow up here so we can try it out! :)
Write the manual first.
In my mind, the highest achievement of the human species has got to be manned space flight, after that the internet (and all the engineering that goes with it), and then probably some of the larger public infrastructure projects (bridges/tunnels). All monuments to the pursuit of knowledge (and profit).

My biggest pet peeve has got to be the misattribution of human excellence to the divine. So many times "thank god" should really be "thanks to millions of man-years of trial and error, science and engineering, hard work, and lives lost figuring this stuff out" (I'm thinking miracle on the hudson, car crashes, lifesaving surgeries, etc.).
I don't think they were supposed to be doing anything in particular, they were just sort of a placeholder for the generic overfunded web startup during the peak of the bubble.
I'm not sure this is what he's getting at, but my first impression of California is that everyone (or maybe just everyone in tech) talks fast. I'm Irish-born, so maybe I'm correct.
More information! That's what the people want. They don't have enough numbers and facts being projected at them on a daily basis -- moar, moar!
I'm not sure why you were downvoted: "The great cathedrals...are...arguments for faith."
Previous commenters have demonstrated a recurrent theme, that the CMS problem is "huge" and "far from solved".

But what you must understand is that almost every use case you come across is a niche market. It's a huge number of medium-to-small problems with medium-to-small user sets. A medical school has different needs than a law school and a law firm has different needs yet again, as do hospitals, corporations, the GAO, the White House, etc, etc.

One huge value someone could add would be to develop bridges between the user databases. Right now we use Joomla, Wordpress, and MediaWiki. We are fortunate (sort of) in that we have a university's LDAP server to provide user authentication, we just fetch roles out of there, and we really only need logins for the Joomla app. But it would be great if someone could come up with an uber-site authentication system with plugins for the different CMS systems and authentication systems.

LDAP-----\......................../----Wordpress

gmail------\...................../-----Joomla

openID----->uber-auth>-------mediawiki

yahoo-----/.....................\-----generic for your-new-app

Joomla---/.........................\----.htaccess

one bridge, lots of plugins for both sides of the bridge.
I recall reading something from Carmack along the lines of "I find it horrrifying that I can't use my own ideas if someone else had the same idea first." It was a very succinct and insightful quote on a problem with patents, but now I can't find a source for the quote. Does anyone know what I'm reffering to?
Mission: Impossible (the first one, not so much the others)
It has been explained that this is just a way of implementing a fast lexical scanner. This is the kind of code that you don't come up with, it is a mechanical implementation of a state machine.
I think it's more of the design culture intersecting with the mainstream. E.g. the Bravo Channel Effect :-)
I agree, it is worth the long read.

"Let me make my own point of view clear - it is that the only position tenable from a viewpoint of strict empiricism is that the existence or non-existence of God are equally un-disprovable. Pointing to one or another scriptural absurdity iluustrates only that the man who wrote it long ago failed to understand matters properly; pointing out that many people still believe that absurdity, in the face of evidence to the contrary, proves only that there are still many simple and unsophisticated people. On the other hand, all the arguments customarily advanced by religious believers, such as the argument by design, are such as to be convincing only to people who already believe."
"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is -much- better than Triumph. Both are must-sees.
It seems to be mostly about patents. The H.264 patent pool contains hundreds of patents owned by 23 organizations. Many of them appear generic enough that any new codec would run a serious risk of infringing them. For example, one of H.264's major improvements over previous codecs is the use of arithmetic coding, and there's a patent in the pool concerning a "method and apparatus for binarization and arithmetic coding of a data value".

(Here's an interesting mini white paper about the codec patent situation: http://www.vcodex.com/videocodingpatents.html )

Worse, there's the possibility of submarine patents that are not included in the H.264 pool. Qualcomm has already attempted to sue Broadcom for making H.264-compliant products that allegedly infringed Qualcomm patents (which Qualcomm had not disclosed when H.264 was being developed). They lost the case, but the US Court of Appeals specifically limited the scope of those patents' unenforceability only to products which are covered by a H.264 license. That means Qualcomm is still free to sue for any independently developed non-H.264 codecs that might be similar enough.
He announced one too many times how much money he had made. To me this just screams "I didn't make very much money." Which I'm going to hazard a guess is the real reason he's shutting down.
I support many internal ASP.NET apps at Intel because our internal employee services applications started as classic asp/com on oracle db over 13 years ago. ASP.NET is really great if designed/written properly. Like others have said, once you are a .NET shop it's easy to find .NET talent. I'm currently working on our LMS which is Java/JBoss and I've learned to respect .NET, Java, LAMP, Rails and Python. I have web.py and django on my todo list for building some fun personal apps. Hope this helps give you perspective.
I like this, it gives a clear set of code with a simple non important purpose.

Neat.
Never thought of that, but yeah. He must have brought some of the first role to the second role.
This guy is not doing a fair review. He is just badmouthing the code without providing alternatives. The code doesn't look good, but a constructive review would be much more appreciated by everyone. By acting this way, he is just making a fool of himself.
We have the capacity to separately acknowledge the good bits of the past while re-evaluating which bits make sense for the present time. Criticizing religion today doesn't throw away whatever achievements it may have been the catalyst for in the past.
I downmodded him. Arguments for faith != God exists.

The quoted text has the opposite meaning, more like the Sistine Chapel exists because its creator(s) were inspired by God.

It's right there in fact: "the highest achievements of the human species have been motivated"

Plus, it is "arguments for faith than the disputations of theology", presented as a comparison, not justifying why people have faith.

Really, is my english that bad? I can't believe how someone could interpret this text the way Avshalom did.
I don't want to program in English...

"The horse rode past the barn fell."
In fact, in my wild dreams concerning this idea, there's also a part for real-world projects: people could indicate an interest in such or such technology, yes, but could also filter by location, or a real-world meetup could be suggested when it makes sense.

And indeed I'd like it to be a way for people unfamiliar with a technology, but curious about its basics, to meet people of complementary/similar skills.

I understand that the location feature wouldn't solve the "sit alone in the dark" problem in and by itself, though. We'll have to come up with ways to market the idea, that's very clear (perhaps by targeting some niches first?). But I believe there's a potential to it, since I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the situation, as you say.
I did most of my work from home for much of 2008 and there were times when I felt the way this guy did. It took me a while but eventually I realized how much I missed taking a lunch break with my coworkers and getting little comments and suggestions here and there (which occasionally made a big difference or saved me a lot of time). This year I'm making more of an effort to work outside my home even when that's not strictly necessary.
From the 'Hacker News' guidelines:

"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter. "

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For the users out there, Safari is a bitch on memory if you close it with any tabs open. MobileSafari keeps running in the background and the memory it eats up is huge. Documented this here http://www.trending.us/2009/01/10/quick-tip-to-save-a-lot-of...
Roosevelt and government spending during the great depression.
I think testing and getting feedback will always help those who want to improve their product. The key is knowing what to do with the feedback, whether you are a comedian or an entrepreneur, continual testing will always lead to the answers you need, even if they are the answers you don't want to hear.
I think in spoken English this is the case. However, using the more formal "one" in writing, even on a blog, is a good way to clear up any misunderstanding a reader might have. Though the use of "you" is more and more accepted in everyday situations, clearly the use of "you" instead of "one" caused some readers of this post some problems. In writing, one should try to be as clear as possible to get one's point across to the widest variety of readers, unless one is trying to obfuscate one's point on purpose.
This is a cause all hackers can get behind. Unless of course their site profits in selling access to these journals.

Even though I have access to these journals they might as well be worthless. The sites for searching are poorly constructed and terribly organized. Many times only an abstract is truly available and often is to vague to gain and understanding.

Google Scholar is a god-send though, my professors love it.
In this case is the original source the Youtube video? 99% of the time it is better to submit an embedded Youtube video than the original, especially with reasonable commentary. Have you read Youtube comments lately?
Ask HN: Do we need to have payroll in C-Corp ?
We are a small C-Corp with three shareholders, two of whom are non-residents. The question is: do we need to have (or obligated to have) a payroll to pay salary to our CEO who is also a shareholder and is resident, or can we avoid it and just pay out dividends ? The issue is that keeping payroll brings much hassle into tax filing procedures. Any suggessions on how to avoid payrolls ?
"Good tools for non technical people vs Flexibility"

Depending on the group of people using the installation I think this is huge. For user groups that include a big slice of non-technical people web interfaces still have a ways to go.

Lots of businesses have spent big rolls on CMS deployments only to continue farming out the maintenance of content to web techs because the interface "wasn't enough like Word."

Whichever companies develop platforms that Mom and Dad can use reliably will make a mint.
the part of Ghostbusters that strains my credulity is that in their universe there seem to be scientists who don't believe in ghosts. You'd think that the accumulated evidence would be pretty overwhelming by the 1980s!

Accumulated evidence has actually tended to slam into the brick wall of popularity contestance.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RiskandSafety.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=aaron+wildavsky

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress

http://www.google.com/search?q=john+mccarthy+sustainability

http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book

http://www.google.com/search?q=war+against+the+atom

http://jamesphogan.com/heretics
It always bugged me that they used HTML in the Antitrust title sequence to represent code.

As far as I could tell they weren't really doing any sort of web programming in the movie.
I am highly amused by how the first two comments on the page are, at the time of writing, "This is pure drivel," and "Brilliant writing," respectively.
Disqus now posting/pulling friendfeed comments
Free the Facts
His other other movie, Lord of War, was also pretty good. It does involve entrepreneurship. The Terminal, his other other other movie, was ok, but no hacking. I haven't seen his other other other other movie, S1m0ne.
It's clear from reading Carmack's sentence that he means affect (alter/disturb, in this case negatively so), not the verb form of effect/to cause. (Not that that justifies a grammar flame on HN, but it was at least an accurate flame.)
Yeah saw that. Went searching hopefully. Disappointment. Busy guy I guess. In the end though, I'd rather he be making cool stuff than messing around with patent nonsense, whatever side he's on.
Apple and Palm continue the high stakes game of patent hold ‘em
I hope someone amends the bill to also include:

- a mandatory 'flash', do it after the shot if
not artistically desired.
- periodic beeps while shooting video (use specific tones,
people can then sell software to mask them in the
resulting works, mostly.)
- periodic beeps while video chatting, the guy on the other
end could be recording.
- ALL cameras make a sound
- Include professional gear, especially the undercover
sort. Lots of people have their privacy invaded by
PIs and television news folks.
- Require a taser sort of effect on the speaker
grill while the shutter noise plays to prevent people
from masking it. (It will probably also need some sharp
spikes to protrude to keep people from simply putting
a piece of paper or tape over their finger to avoid the
shock.)

As long as we are at it, expand the bill to make ALL devices
be incapable of illegal use.
End of Perl?
Stephen Jay Gould also wrote brilliantly, but it didn't save him from Marxism. And so it goes with the eloquent Catholic who authored this article.
(I know I'm going to get downmodded to hell for this but it has to be said)

The reason why you're not closer to Angelina has a simple solution - you haven't yet hacked The Gibson.
That's a pretty serious failure of logical aptitude, especially on a site like this. The point isn't that "god exists" but that "Russia is Christian" because of aesthetics, a somewhat important material fact.
Well I take faith to mean "the belief in the existence of God." I doubt the comment intends to convince us simply that this belief exists (we know it does, and that many people hold it). An argument "for faith" is at the weakest something like "the belief in the existence of God is not an absurd one," and at the strongest "God does exist."
I'm not sure how you define a "solved problem." Do you have an example? When it comes to end-user software applications, I can't think of any problem that has been solved categorically (contact management, calendaring, browsers, word processing, spreadhseets).

That's why I would take the other comments in this thread with a grain of salt. True, nobody has solved content management -- BUT, the leading solutions have put in a ton of work to solve vast swaths of the problem space even if they haven't nailed the whole thing.

Wordpress, for example, while not the most architecturally elegant piece of software in the world, is an incredibly rich, powerful, and useable content management system. The plugin system enables a developer to extend the application in any number of directions, while the administrative toolset is sleek and sophisticated yet easy enough for hundreds of thousands of bloggers to use.

Okay, I didn't mean to turn this is into an ad for Wordpress (which I've used as a CMS on several projects, btw). My point is simply that your CMS would have to get very far advanced before it even reached the terrain where the problems that Wordpress has not solved lie.

I don't mean to discourage you in your project, but simply to point out the road might be more difficult than others make it appear. As a consolation here are a few areas that I haven't (in my own limited experience anyway) seen many CMSs nail effectively:

* Content versioning

* User commenting features (threaded commenting, ratings, user management/ownership of comments -- basically disqus's whole business is built on this lacking)

* Snippet management (tools to manage little copy snippets etc., not just pages/posts)

I'd be curious if anyone else had any specific features they felt were part of the "unsolved" problem set.
He writes:

"Let me make my own point of view clear - it is that the only position tenable from a viewpoint of strict empiricism is that the existence or non-existence of God are equally un-disprovable."

So then why, if God exists and created humans and made humans rational, should anyone believe that God exists? Was rationality something God intended only that humans overcome? Or did he intend for us to use it some of the time? Most of the time? Not at all? The existence of rationality poses the biggest explanatory challenge to someone who views the poster's two options as being equally probable yet chooses to believe in God anyway.
Ehm you don't really wonder why they "bother", do you?
See, this is the sort of thing he was talking about. Maybe it was sarcasm?
Free Home Building and Remodeling Updates
home building and remodeling,home remodeling contractors,remodeling construction,home building,home remodeling,remodeling,built ins,house design,building,home designing,supplies safe from theft,building plans,building,buying building plans,house plans,model homes,home improvement,safe home remodeling
What Data Crunchers Did for Obama
I'd change it a bit: The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of [the talent or] whoever is in charge [whichever is lower].
"Russia is Christian b/c of aesthetics" is one piece of evidence for the greater argument which is something like "these instances of inspiration demonstrate that faith in the existence of God is reasonable."
For laying out web sites, Fireworks is far superior to Photoshop. There's a drastic difference in methodologies. Fireworks thinks in shapes, Photoshop in pixels.
Where are all the "This doesn't belong on HN" comments? The article nothing to do with tech or startups.
>>> Somewhere along the lines you got really confused

>> It's possible to state your opinion without

>> questioning the competence of the person with

>> the opposing view.

> I've reread both your and my posts and I have

> absolutely no earthly idea how you decided _I_

> was the one with the condescending tone.

You violated the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
I'd say "got big first" is a slightly more accurate phrasing, but the gist is the same.
True, and I'm all for that kind of thinking in addition to common sense precautions. Maybe that was the case and there were huge signs and training manuals and off buttons all over the place but coderr's scenario sounds more likely.

My larger point is that failure analysis is complicated and full of red herrings. Simplifying it to "five whys" (or four, or six) only creates false security.
I was thinking of upgrading, but based on this thread I guess I'll be holding on to Fireworks 8 for now. I love Fireworks and I hope they find it in their hearts to fix it.
Hmmm... Interesting...
Seems like a prisoner's dilemma situation to me. If I was to patent, it would be to my benefit, but it would also hurt the 'other ' I was playing the game with (supposing he didn't patent).

I suppose Carmack's position paper would advertise to the world that he is in favor of no patents, thus in this 'multi-round' game he is providing others with the ability to collude with him to keep patents out of his field.
Notebooks now make up over 70 percent of Mac sales
I've been following the show since the pilot, and have been extremely impressed that it has developed a following enough to warrant a second season. I was initially worried it would get killed mid-season like so many other great geeky/sci-fi shows.
I'd rather publicly release need-driven, thought-out, polished projects. If I can't really find direction, I'd rather just finish it and catalogue it silently.
No the point is that faith is meritorious because of aesthetics.

That Russia is christian because of aesthetics, and aesthetics are an argument for the merit of faith implies that the christian faith is more meritorious than, paganism, judaism and islam because it's the prettiest.