skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
" OpenBSD simply does not have enough developers to influence the direction of projects like X.org, GNOME, or KDE. "

I, and several of my colleagues, have been running dozens of OpenBSD systems for about 10+ years. In particularly, OpenBSD had an elegant IPv6 Firewall/failover mechanism about 5 years before Cisco finally decided to port Active/Failover to their ASA platform - so we were forced through sheer necessity to deploy OpenBSD in what was otherwise an all Cisco shop. Further to that, OpenBSD's ability to track several hundred thousand shortlived UDP sessions state fully on inexpensive x86 systems saved us several 10s of thousands of dollars over the equivalent Cisco systems.

At one point, all of HPs internal infrastructure was transitioned off of the Cisco ASA onto OpenBSD firewalls - OpenBSD is reliable, and industrial.

Needless to say, I'm a fan of OpenBSD and consider it critical to the various infrastructures that we deploy.

I've never been tempted (nor, to my knowledge, have my colleagues) to even consider installing X-Windows on an OpenBSD system. So the entire thesis of this article is beyond silly to me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=gun.io+github+spam+whitespac...

gun.io, the outfit that spammed github repos with bogus pull requests with ads attached.
Damn pretty great, I played a Geometry Wars game together with some other people, no lag, no glitches the entire game. And a whole bunch of nice animations and effects.

This shows that at least for the arcade market, the web really has become a mature platform. Ofcourse, this game was cooperative, and chaos-y. It's not certain at all this kan be made feasible for competitive multiplayer with more strict rules.

Maybe that just means it's restricted to fun games ;)
I don't understand why so many people are criticizing twitter for trying to monetize here on HN. Twitter is not a startup anymore, they have real investors and have to earn real revenue, and thus they cut everything that can potentially affect that.

Is trying to be profitable now considered a bad thing? Is selling a startup to big company that will close it down the only exit strategy that HN praise?

I know that some people feel betrayed by twitter for cutting something that used to be free. But what should twitter do? Jeopardy its own business in order to make others happy? That's not how business works.

edit: s/that/they/
Hard to miss the alarmist undertone here. He seems much more confident about the effects of climate change (or is that global warming?) than the effects of politics and technology. Compare:

"Sea levels will have risen by at least one, and possibly more than ten metres worldwide."

"Fission: will be in widespread safe use or completely taboo."
Haskell ports of the OCaml implementations for "TAPL" by Benjamin Pierce
Please don't, isn't the whole idea of geometry wars that the difficulty comes from the visual chaos?

If everything was super clear the whole challenge of the game would be reduced..
OFFTOP: gatech sounds like georgia tech ;)
Thanks for that - we'll take that to heart on our next revision of our emails. :)
I though HN is the Lisp reincarnation of red it.
Micro-Consulting And Beyond: Improving systems of small-scale value exchange
Screwing up the technical interview - common mistakes
$4/year is obscenely cheap. In fact, you could probably charge an order of magnitude more.
The reason that they were successful is because of the developer ecosystem they created around their technology.

They simply can't just cut that off, that IS what they are. They are literally giving up the one thing that made them successful, perhaps they can glide on the success they have now, but eventually it will end badly for them.

As an outsider that doesn't use twitter and has never made a twitter app this seems obvious to me, I'm surprised it's not obvious to them.
We do have a user override for timezone, and we're using it to track how many mistakes we're getting from the browser - we were expecting it to be pretty hit & miss, but we've actually seen great success.

Good thought about being able to change when morning emails fire. The 7am is really a relic from when we first started, even before we had the rolling timezones - we were trying to hit a time that worked for west coasters & east coasters alike, and sure enough, we got a ton of overseas users way sooner than we thought, so out came the rolling timezones. :)
Cron's probably the wrong term to use there - the failures I usually see are on the code or environment side, and usually it's a PITA to try and refire missed cron events once you fix the bugs.
A dot chart would have been substantially better. I haven't seen that sort of visualization before. It's probably a mistake to try to show the relative size of each group in the same picture as the absolute size.
This is factually inaccurate. Plants are not built out of soil, they are built out of air and water, the contribution from the soil is comparatively minor. Especially if symbiotic mycorrhiza are in play in which case only a tiny handful of minerals and phosphorous is pulled from the ground. The great bulk of the mass of a tree is cellulose and lignin, and that comes straight out of photosynthesis and from atmospheric CO2 and ground water.
Sure, I get all that. But we're talking about 500 years hence. I just don't believe that the costs you're listing should be relevant in that time frame. If you have AI that is 500 years more advanced, you're effectively removing human involvement in things like mining raw materials, maintaining and building plants. No singularity required.

The cost of mining raw materials goes to zero if we can build a machine that can build other machines that can autonomously space mine.

The cost of producing energy goes to zero if we can build machines that can build and maintain energy plants.

I would be surprised if much of this hadn't occurred within 200 years, let alone 500.
>> most similar projects don't seem to stick around very long ...

>> ... http://hckrnews.com/ is an exception I can recall)

Much improved way for me to quickly skim HN.

I would be sad if it disappeared.
If Twitter were a utility, I'd agree with your points. But it's not, and network effect on Twitter's scale is not "trivially reproducible."
I find this to be a questionable practice. When coding I like the idea of "trim whitespace from _my changes_ on save", but doing it globally within a file creates a lot of diffs and makes for convoluted commits. Having a +/- 75 lines when you fix a typo in a comment is annoying when doing a code review.

If everybody on the team uses SublimeText (or an equivalent vim extension) I think this is a good idea, but when you have some folks using TextMate or other editors that are notorious for leaving extra whitespace, I find it better just to live with it.
All writing would be presented in a dry, dull list format.
Look at the date. :-)
If you're following J3 and N3, then why not O3?

Or OCamLLVM? ;)
One thing to notice about this module is that it's spawning a sub-process out to imagemagic itself. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just pointing it out. There are also other modules that wrap the imagemagic libraries themselves and do not spawn sub-processes. Just be mindful about the different implementations.
I take your point, and with the benefit of hind legs it does sound a little like I'm venomously anti-safety/lycra, which was not my intention.

In fact I did have Lycra shorts on for this ride, always use lights at nights, and wear a helmet for most journeys I make. I've also frequently ridden clad head-to-toe in a certain stretchy fabric.

It's just for this particular outing I wanted to emphasise the fact that you don't need loads of special equipment to ride a bike - as I think this is a misconception that puts a lot of people off getting on a bike in the first place. The more cyclists there are on the road, the safer it becomes for all of us.

CycleLove has covered naked riders, pro riders, pregnant riders and slow riders... I don't really mind how people ride, so long as they enjoy it, and don't endanger other road users.
This Arc language mentioned in the comments should be a big thing right now.
Delicious Library had bookshelves before the iPhone was invented. This whole conversation around drawing pictures of objects silly.
An interesting read - though I wonder (like many people) how useful being able to rattle off a linked list implementation is, given that there will almost certainly be a library version available.

If the few minutes that it took to read this article is actually going to help people in an interview, then perhaps the interview method is wrong.
Your Attention Bought in an Instant
Amazon design patented the original kindle shape and then boasted about using it to prevent others from making kindle-compatible covers, in clear violation of design patent law.

Companies are using similar abuses of both patent systems.
Whoooa, that's a fairly crazy outing!
Tutorial: How to build your own peer-to-peer chat app (like Couple)
Plus, if we're being pedantic, most pirated movies shared online are re-encodes of their original source material.

Given the sheer number of variables involved in the encoding process, the odds of independent encodes being absolutely identical are extremely low.

It is trivial to determine from a screenshot whether it is taken from the source or a re-encode (i.e. whether it is from a legitimate source or not, assuming the source is the only authorized copy), and if you have a copy of the particular re-encode, to verify the exact provenance.
The article suggests OpenBSD lacks support for newer hardware. Not sure if that's true today, or in certain categories (graphics cards?).

But, credit where credit is due: Around 2005-6, I chose to run OpenBSD on my desktop computer at home because its support for wireless network interfaces was far and above better than Linux or any other open source OS. At that time, getting on my home network with Linux was a complete no-go, while OpenBSD worked flawlessly out of the box.

At that time there were several OpenBSD devs doing the hard, ugly work of reverse-engineering the crappy binary blobs that were accepted in mainstream Linux distros (and FreeBSD), and instead turning out reliable, open-source drivers.

Today I find Linux more practical to run on my laptop, but I really hope OpenBSD never goes anywhere. We need different approaches like theirs. (Actually, the non-availability of Flash was a big reason I switched back to Linux, and that's becoming less of an issue with HTML5...)
So, to be clear, both wikipedia and that paper are wrong?

I am not sure how your example does anything more than explain what you think should be. The relevant question is, "What is?".
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4772133 (104 comments).

The lwn article here is pretty vacuous.

edit: I'm happy to see some people in this thread already coming to OpenBSD's defense. It is really really fine software, built by a team of really smart people. If you haven't donated to the project, or at least bought one of their CD sets, please do. It does help.
Suitable in what sense? I certainly know lawyers who use dropbox.
I'm not sure I follow. Isn't the second wording less restrictive than the first? It suggests that social and 3rd party actions dissimilar to Follow, Reply, Retweet and Favorite are now allowed.
Right, the Linux community is very forgiving of noobs. [1]

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56599...
Show HN: Drinkups (my first iPhone app)
I think it's healthy and productive for a user base to complain about behavior of a company that affects them negatively. I don't hear anyone saying "screw Twitter for trying to earn money." Rather they are saying "Twitter is making itself a worse product."

I think a more interesting question is this: can a business be important, useful, and have a huge user base and yet be best suited to be a smaller company? Is it a problem with the current system that a company sometimes delivers less value to its customers as it gets bigger?
I agree with most of your comments, with the exception of your concerns about continued material scarcity and human longevity.

Regarding material scarcity, I think space mining becomes a lot more economically viable once you have not only extraordinarily cheap energy, but also super light, super strong materials. Ralph Merkle talks about a diamondoid space shuttle (composed of perfectly arranged carbon atoms) weighing a few hundred pounds and getting to orbit with only a hundred dollars worth of fuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKyf8fsH6w

Also, people have been talking about space elevators forever, once we crack economically viable carbon nanotube production, reducing the cost to orbit by something like 99%.

Most importantly, when people talk about molecular manufacturing and molecular assemblers, they never seem to see the other side of the coin - molecular disassemblers - essentially "just in time" goods. When you can assemble and disassemble atoms at will, you essentially have programmable matter, and therefore you can do much more with less material.

As I mentioned below, you could also make the case that highly realistic VR systems would drastically reduce our demand for materials. After all, who needs to buy an actual Porsche when they can just close their eyes and have an experience much better than the real thing.

Regarding longevity, it seems to me that this is a cognitive bias because of the audacity of the idea, similar to the widespread skepticism towards human flight a hundred years ago. The idea is just so outlandish, and goes against thousands of years of philosophical and theological thought on accepting the inevitability of death, that people (myself included) instinctively recoil from it.

Assuming a 500 year time span - or even a 100 year one - and assuming that humans have developed the capability to manipulate matter at will, can scan and monitor the human body at extraordinarily high fidelity, model and simulate the body in great detail, and can experiment and iterate on those experiments at light speed with the aid of AI and neural interfaces - the death of death seems inevitable.
> Oh a 15 year old, how cute.

> I don't mean to discourage you at all, just let the product speak and not your age.

C'mon, really?

I'm much more interested in the story of a 15-year old developer creating and publishing something, than I am in yet another node module.

> Imagine someone of 36 made this module and included his age.

Yes, that would probably be dumb. But 15 is not 36. Lots of people write programs at a young age. Not many publish them on the internet, at least historically. I was writing programs at that age, but I wasn't publishing them.

Heck, even just from the "hack the social system of hacker news by including age" angle this fits with many posts we see here regularly.
How is this throttling different than an admission that Verizon snoops all your traffic?

Perhaps they just pealize all traffic on certain well-known TCP ports? As a Slackware Linux user, I have used BitTorrent to get the latest release of Slackware a half a dozen times, but that's the extent of the Torrenting I've done. It's all legal, as near as I can tell, and I'd hate to get penalized for legal behavior.

How is Verizon protecting themselves against loosing customers and lawsuits over this?
Well, the question is how long OpenBSD will continue to survive without a modern desktop version. Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support over the last few years thanks primarily to its slow incursion of the desktop market. Can OpenBSD continue to live only as a server / router / network service operating system for the long term? I don't know.

And, even in the server market, it's falling behind in terms of support. The VPS market has gotten really big really quickly; the OpenBSD team has legitimate concerns about trying to run a "secure by default" operating system in a virtualized environment, but unfortunately that point of view has resulted in OpenBSD being completely unavailable on Linode, prgrmr, EC2, Slicehost/Rackspace, etc.

I have no idea if OpenBSD's installed user base is growing or shrinking overall. But, I expect that it's rapidly shrinking relative to the amount of support that Linux is currently enjoying, and that's going to lead to OpenBSD getting less and less upstream support, which is eventually going to strangle the project. The small OpenBSD development team simply won't have the resources to rewrite all of the big upstream packages. (And I'm not talking about Gnome here; OpenBSD already has its own httpd and its own smtpd, for example.)
Is there a technical reason for not using webgl frameworks such as Three.js ?
I think there's a chance for a compromise. A chance for journalists to have an engineer's quantitative veracity coupled with qualitative polish. I would cite Christopher Hitchens as an example.
Is there any reason why they can't cut out the distributors and then just raise the taxes? It's insane that we're still giving enormous amounts of free money to the alcohol cartels 80+ years later.
I think it's quite likely that within a couple of hundred years there will have been multiple changes that are completely beyond our current compression, that we couldn't even begin to speculate on. Nevertheless, I'll add my speculation to this rather interesting discussion:

The ease and volume of communication is bound to increase. Perhaps we communicate through technological telepathy, with anyone we want to. We share thoughts and senses with groups of people and solve problems by adding more brain power. The Mythical Man Month is no longer mythical. Learning and "news" become instant. Communication is probably faster than the speed of light.

Physical objects are only slightly constrained to their form and location. They can be transformed and moved almost as easily as energy can. Having something only requires thought and currency.
Yes, I go to Georgia Tech.
Hack.me
The problem isn't the monetization, the problem is the shutting down of services which arguably _made_ Twitter what it is.

I was late to the Twitter game and it's running continually on my machine, but the programmer in me screams "This is a monolithic service dressed up as a protocol!". What we need is a P2P protocol which does the same thing.
> Linux has been enjoying a remarkable growth of support over the last few years thanks primarily to its slow incursion of the desktop market.

Please provide a source for this.
The usability is awful. Too many graphics blend in together and the hot key choices are confusing.

However it's ridiculously smooth and ran great on a ~5 year old machine. The controls felt excellent.
One data point: the on-board Broadcom NICs (BCM 719) on HP DL360 Gen8 servers isn't supported in OpenBSD yet.
Business Administration, Psychology, Sociology, Organizational Management (like business), Criminal Justice (they do like this one), or even a generic AA, AS, AAS or BA in liberal arts would help.
The problem with 6 is that often the PDF of a research article is behind the paywall of the journal that published it. I agree that news organizations often do a horrible job of citing their sources for science coverage though; they could at least link to the journal's webpage for the abstract.
Learning to Love Volatility
> The bigger problem (IMHO) is going to be certain elements and metals that aren't so easily replaced. I agree with the author that getting certain elements from space is going to be economically tricky (rather than technologically tricky) compared to how cheap it is to pull stuff out of the ground.

I don't think this is a real issue. Expensive metals are recycled extremely efficiently even today. This is only going to get easier as we go on.

> You can recycle iron to a degree but a certain amount is lost through corrosion/rust. Rare earth elements are harder to replace.

Iron is the metal that least needs recycling. There are deposits for essentially unlimited amounts at prices not absurdly higher than the present market conditions. Also, should energy get cheaper, iron would be greatly substituted with aluminium in construction. (And the aluminium supplies of the surface of the earth are essentially infinite.)

The talk about REE is largely misguided. REE are not rare. There are exploitable deposits pretty much in every country that's larger than Luxembourg and has exposed rock. The world deposits are greatly larger than any reasonable use we have for them.

The reason REE is in the news is that extracting it is an extremely dirty process, and if you want to do it in a first-world country, you have to pay very much to clean up after you. China captured nearly all of the world production not because they have a large share of a limited resource, but because they allowed miners to dump their separation waste in rivers. This makes REE extraction cost a fraction what it would be if you had to rebury all those unwanted heavy metals, and so the Chinese mines so depressed the market price that all the non-subsidized mines elsewhere in the world shut down. As the Chinese started restricting exports (which is only shrewd of them, considering the massive societal cost they bear of the cheap production), the market price rose again and mines elsewhere started to open. The Mountain pass mine is now finally entering large-scale production, and will very soon make the US a net exporter of REE.
Linus is a dick. Theo is a dick. No argument from anyone there. That's the Linux kernel though, and I would argue that has the same problem of scaring off potential devs.

It's the wider community I'm talking about. Mailing lists, forums, etc. It is a pain in the ass to entertain dumb questions and give the same answers over and over, but it's how you turn noobs into developers.
Chrome Experiments: Google’s Coolest Service You’ve Never Heard Of
I agree with you, and that's how I see it working too. And the capitalist system won't work in that setup; it would naturally lead to a single person at the apex owning all the capital (self-reproducing capital => whoever has the best growth function dominates in inverse exponential time), and all the rest of us either being servants or information workers (since everything physical can trivially be done by machines).

Add in strong AI, and you remove the need for information workers; we'd all be servants in the employ of a single CEO at the apex; or servants to other servants; or prostitutes, or some other power relation not reproducible from machines because of wanting the authenticity of a person. I don't see such a state as stable (certainly not in a democracy), and if it existed tomorrow, there would be a revolution. But of course the transition will be gradual, so there won't be a revolution; but something post-capitalist, post-scarcity, will need to emerge to stop blood flowing.
The thing I notice about a lot of software/games/whathaveyou made by people <18 is that it basically fits my expectations ("Nice going kid! This looks meh. I'll reserve any critique as you're 15")

Looking at this module, had you not informed us otherwise, I would have not have guessed the person that made this was 15. It's impressive both in its focus and goals, and having no prior experience with IM/GM I'm now even more interested in using this as a pickaxe.

You should be proud of what you've done outside of the fact that you're 15 - it's really cool!

If you're looking for praise because of your age+abilities I would warn you that this praise is short-lived, and efforts to do so can backfire to the delight of douchey tech writers: http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...