skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Git bots may not be that impressive right now. But imagine a future where an incredibly knowledgeable "programmer" is working with you on every project, doing lots of the busy work, and even code reviewing every commit you push. Except that programmer is a bot. This future is possible - but we need to encourage it, and not shut down the precursor at the first "sign of life".

If someone has a good track record of useful pull requests, would you mind if they contributed to your project?
Would you care if it was really easy for them to write that helpful code because they've crafted the ultimate development environment that practically writes the code for them? So why do you care if the editor actually writes all the code for them?

That's essentially what's happening when someone writes a bot and it makes a pull request.

Sure, it sucks if there are unhelpful bots or people spamming up a storm of pull requests. But the solution to this problem is not to ban all bots or all people - it's to develop a system that filters the helpful "entities" from the unhelpful ones. This might be hard in some fields like politics and education, but in software development this is tractable, right now.

I sincerely hope that this is what actually happens. This is one of the first steps towards a world where common vulnerabilities are a thing of the past because whenever one is committed, it is noticed and fixed by the "army of robots". When an API is deprecated, projects can be automatically transitioned to the new version by a helpful bot. Where slow code can be automatically analyzed and replaced.

There are details to be figured out, an ecosystem to be constructed, perhaps more granular rating systems to be made for code producing entities (human or bot). Because it's "easier" for a bot to send a pull request, the standard of helpfulness could perhaps be higher. Communication channels need to be built between coding entities, and spam detection will become more important. But simple blocking and a cumbersome opt-in system is not a good solution.

This might be a stopgap until better systems are built, but it is not something we should be content with.
When your motivations take form as massive visions that could fuck the world twice over, the only landing in your mind is how to keep it going for the next 10 years.

Landings per se are constructs of the market, not the entrepreneur. IMO obviously.
Easy way to create your own threaded commenting system with Django
True, but more than half of them voted for it.
A classic case of: "you can't outsource responsibility".
And if all they said was they were experiencing difficulties you'd see people complaining that they aren't giving any indication as to what the problem is.

The site is down because their provider is down. This is, as someone else stated, a fact. They told you that and that is really all they can do. They have to wait just the same as you do, for the same thing.

> This isn't Azure's fault.

Yes it is. The alternative is to pay more (a lot more) for projects to host all their own servers and storage and backups. That would be the end of a great many small to medium companies.
Your comments is true and in no way Facebooksspecific
People currently making $0/hr?
The next step is realizing that Hacker News is the same thing.
Give.

Time, money, advice, effort, compliments - whatever you have to give. After you've ticked your own achievements off you need to expand your goals. Nothing feels more rewarding than achieving something bigger than your own wants.

Something longer term, challenging & meaningful will give you direction, purpose and greater success than just money alone.
> I'm off to Vegas in the new year

Now I am depressed, and I do not even like Vegas.
Please, reveal to me the hidden complexity that makes all of those government actions okay.
What's the best country for a baby to be born in in 2013?
That's the point of the principle that two consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want in their own bedroom: that others may not approve for whatever reason. You believe (perhaps completely validly) that if someone chooses to work for minimum wage they are hurting themselves and possibly "all of society". This is exactly the same argument made by people who don't want people having whatever sexual relations they want in their own bedroom. You will point out that they are wrong and your points are right -- but that's the whole point! If we say "some things are not safe for two consenting adults to do in their own bedroom", then how is your opinion on what's safe any better than theirs? In both circumstances you are interfering with someone's private choices arguing that you are "saving" them from their own ignorance or circumstances. You differ only in the subset of allowable activities -- and thus dont really support the principle of the stance, but instead happen to be ok with a different set of controls. We don't allow people to do whatever they want in their bedroom because its safe, we do so because it is none of our business and we theoretically don't want a society where we need to go ask everyone's permission before doing things with your partner, regardless of what those things may be.

I'm not necessarily arguing for this (extreme) position, but I agree that it is disingenuous to argue that you stand for people's rights to do whatever they want in their bedroom, followed by listing things they can't do because you believe they hurt society. You can certainly have that position, and it is a valid position, but it is a different position.
Actually, that would make a lot of sense. If a bookstore ordered its special-order books from Amazon, it could get them shipped for free in two days (with Prime) and re-sell the book for list price, making a decent profit. Probably a lot faster than ordering the book from the publisher.
I've got several services (both consumer and commerical) running on Azure and right now I just see some issues with storage in the south. Web/Worker, VMs, Sql, etc. are running just fine it appears. Any pointers on where I should be looking for potential issues?
Poor, poor, nearly-forgotten NetBSD. I hope they have the same kind of response FreeBSD got. :-)
I use Facebook and it isn't making me depressed -at all-. If Facebook seriously is making you depressed then perhaps you really should simply use it to "keep up with the Joneses" or just deactivate your account entirely.

Good grief.
Thanks for the comment, your advice shows great understanding of the space because I've come to many of those same conclusions only after time.

Indeed, I've found very few people to use custom Rewards, I may discontinue that. The in-game rewards will become more useful when Groups is developed, so you can compete your avatars.

I've come to deem Habits indeed as useful mostly with APIs, and have considered manual Habit entry as temporary until enough services utilize the API, after which I may discontinue manual Habit-entry.

RescueTime and Fitbit are definitely on the horizon, as well as PivotalTracker, Withings, Anki, and more (see http://goo.gl/beQtz)
Combination of exercise & creative projects. Determined to write up those blog posts I've had in draft form for quite a while.
Presumably something that's profitable but does not have mass appeal
Agreed wholeheartedly. As for Microsoft Word, I've always wanted a better interface to add and apply styles. It made so much sense, yet almost nobody I know used it to style their thesis. Oh the pain...
I think you can reject the friend request once and it won't recur?
I'd second this. I've found that VM's (especially Windows) run even more reliably than what I had on EC2 (sometimes the machines just got soooo slow on EC2 for no apparent reason)
Can't you explicitly reject those with the a click?
Right now I am looking at hundreds of projectiles bouncing around (cheaply, that is they are points) a tile based maze without any slowdown at all (Javascript). I'm sure Box2D does a lot of smart things, but in this case it just cannot beat simply doing one lookup into an array to see if the tile is solid or not. And that's all the world collision I need, since I intend enemy/player movement to be slower and less physic-y, they don't need to bounce off corners correctly or anything, sliding along them is just fine :P

I used Box2D it with C before and loved it, but with Javascript every bit of CPU I save I need for doing the game logic in my amateurish ways :) I'm a sucker for particles etc, and since I don't need accurate physics, it would just be throwing away resources I could use for stuff I do need (or rather want).
Time for a new Ad-Free Social Network alternative for Facebook
Exploring the Roots of an Emerging Planet-Spanning Mind
from the other direction, it looks like haxe [http://haxe.org] is planning on adding a java target. fantom [http://fantom.org] already does both java and js too. it's a pretty well-filled ecological niche.

also, if you like single-language stacks, give opa [http://opalang.org] a serious look. it's essentially based on ml, with a javascript skin, and offers strong static typing and easy integration of front-end and back-end code.
A Tour of Vector Representations
When the government reads your email in some underground bunker 2000 miles away, you don't know about it. When the government comes to confiscate your guns, you damn well do know about it.
Could someone explain the differences between FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD? (Not in detail, just so I get a general view what the different goals are.)
Don't project negative intentions on people, just accept that you aren't I their target audience, adjust the volume as iu did, and be happier.
Your goalposts are moving, and I've noticed that in myself.

I have freelancers I work with who tell me: "I'll just be fine when I've got 2 months of expenses in the bank". I tell them they probably won't, then they laugh, then eventually some of them see what I mean.

Sounds like you've got about 2 years of 'runway' in the bank - with no income and stable expenses, you could go for 2 years. I'm in a similar situation, and have found myself wanting less and less to spend any money. Some of that comes from simply remembering the effort it took to build up that amount, and then spending it literally in an instant on anything feels weird now. Yeah, I'd like a bigger TV (ours if 42" but 7 year old "ED" TV, not HD), but see little point in it as this one still works. Newer car? Yeah, would be nice - I can pay cash for a nice used car, but will probably hold on to this 8 year old one for another year or two.

The only things I'd like to buy, I want to pay cash for, and I'm still a long ways away (things like a private airplane, much larger house, etc). We do travel some - my wife will be going to Australia and I'll be going to Russia - buying those sorts of experiences with our families is one of the few things that we agree on spending money on. Outside of that, just continuing to pile up cash until there's a compelling case for spending it (or a true emergency need) is probably all you can do.
Using Rails ActiveAdmin and HABTM Together
Minor typo:

> The simplest way to donate is to sent money via Google Checkout or PayPal.

Should be "send money".
It is hard if you don't feel on par.
> hard facts seen in studies of other nations

give me one example of a time where gun violence went down after the government of a first world country imposed gun control
For some people, after looking at Scala a bit, being "watered" might be a good thing. Kotlin doesn't have as many syntax surprises as Scala does.

That being said, the one really cool feature Kotlin has that Scala doesn't is the ability to build strongly-typed builder DSLs:

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/Kotlin/Type-safe+Gro...

You simply can't accomplish this in Scala with the same elegance.
I think I'll pass. As I said, I already kinda have that in a history book written and printed by actual Nazis during their reign.
Not to imply he's an expert, but author seems to have more than a week's experience writing Haskell.
He linked to a blog post[1] from 2011 about writing the libguestfs bindings in several languages, including in Haskell. I'm unfamiliar with the library, but some googling seemed to imply it was >1kloc for the Haskell bindings, which probably took some time.

[1] http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/which-foreign-function-...
I tried to login with facebook but got the following error message "Cannot GET /auth/facebook" then, when trying to visit the homepage I got the error "Cannot GET /"

It seems to be working again but I think I triggered an error 500
Agree on sci-fi, but medical imaging has really been born in the last 30 years and may prove to be a game-changer in diagnosis and localized treatments over the next 70. Also, the invention of PCR techniques allow much better testing and drug development. So I think we'll look back 70 years from now and make the same claim about medicine.
The NY Times had a fairly good article on this issue, which I happened to bookmark in April 2011. The article is called "Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It’s Your Facebook Wall" [1], and the phenomena is described in the article as FOMO (fear of missing out) which "refers to the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram."

The OP seems like a manifestation of one aspect of this.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/business/10ping.html
> real time social web
all the major buzz words in one phrase!
for me theres too many missing shows for this to be useful. Just because I'm american I dislike the date formatting. The list by seasons should be in reverse order from the latest, because really isn't that what matters. Theres a lot of other resources for this, but I'd like to see it in a weekly type view, but again theres too many missing shows.
There's no point in calling it "government propaganda," as if it's some secret conspiracy or something. It's really not a secret. Children spend 12 or 13 years learning the government's version of its own history. Even on this thread, how many comments are verbatim talking points from public school curriculum? "The government gets its authority from the people (social contract)," "we have a voice in government," "government serves us," "the constitution limits the power of government," "the atomic bombs saved millions of American and Japanese lives," "the goal of the government's foreign policy is to spread and protect democracy," etc. How many people repeat these lines that have been hammered into their brains, and how many actually think about how meaningful and truthful they are?
The government hasn't killed tens of thousands of civilians with nuclear weapons since the founding of Facebook, so I think they're tied in that regard.
Your coping out. Put out your sources.
Normal Considered Harmful - Alan Kay talk
But look at how easy it was for Saddam to stay in power for decades despite a heavily armed populace.
Very well put. I agree. Freelancing is a much better word. After gaining many years of experience, then one will have the insight and ability to actually consult.
Actually an interesting idea - in this context Facebook's purchase of Face.com might seem prescient.

Separately - as data gets cheaper and video chat is further optimized, video chat over 3G/4G becomes more feasible. Probably our answer to this is in the countries that have abundant bandwidth? What do high schoolers in Korea/Scandinavia use for video chat?
https://vimeo.com/13179002 epic win, similar app?
Great, where do you get your data?
The metric "miles" isn't as useful as the time it takes for that help to actually arrive.
Because paying below minimal wage for other people's work harms the whole of society, and first and foremost the very person that agrees to work for you because he needs the money.

If he were harmed, why would he choose to accept my offer?

Lets consider a different regulation - ugly people can't have sex. This is because sex with an ugly person harms the whole of society, and first and foremost the very person that agrees to ugly sex because he/she can't get anyone better.

If ugly people weren't allowed to have sex, they would at least exercise/clean up/etc to the point of non-ugliness, a level of attractiveness considered somewhat fair by our society.

(The case that some people won't become more attractive, so he/she gets no sex is mostly BS. Even if that was the case, society is better off without ugly sexual partners.)
Open data is not a panacea
Deconstructing the `CAP theorem' for CM and DevOps
The person who figures out how to get teens to spend their free time learning instead of socializing is going to go down in history. The answer likely lies somewhere in the socializing, but I have no idea what it is.

And way to take advantage of the myriad of educational opportunities that exist online. I would have done anything for access to them when I was a kid; instead, I had to go to the (gasp) library.

I think we are going to see a growing intellectual gulf between the few that take advantage of these tools and the masses who don't. There are so many opportunities that can really give somebody a significant boost; a much greater boost than was offered to those of us who didn't have much more than books in the past. And I'm always encouraged when I see the kids who do take advantage of it.
Why isn't anyone building order fulfillment app/tool for Kickstarter campaigns
After looking at a bunch of kickstarter campaigns that got funded, the same trends seem to occur. Order fulfillment is really bad. Doing a quick google search, the only 'competition' I see is:

http://www.fulfillrite.com/Kickstarter-Order-Fulfillment.htm

and even then, I mean...
Examples of backers who would like their product

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/trygger/trygger-camera-case-iphone-4-4s-polarizing-filter/comments
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-portable-scann/comments
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hand/hand-stylus/comments
food for thought
Also, when listing episodes, the date "unknow" should be "unknown".

Nice site, I really like the clean design. I'll be using this in conjunction with TV Calendar (http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/).
How is this different from, say, a coffee shop saying "sorry, we're closed because the electricity went out"?
Reading about our positive technological advances makes me feel optimistic about our future. Go science!
When a server gets slow, log in and look at top or vmstat. There's a field called st that stands for steal time. If you're using a micro, you have higher peak CPU available, but lower baseline. We found they were notoriously bad about the average CPU we got and our default is now a small (we also moved to non-ebs backed instances for the primary drive for other reasons, which is unavailable on micros). If your steal time is high, you're over your CPU budget and it's time to look at a bigger instance.
If this was all it took, the slums and housing projects would be a lot emptier than they actually are.
Are you arguing that the intent behind the second amendment was not to keep the powers of the government in check or that it is no longer relevant in an age where peaceful rebellions have accomplished so much?
The the FSF have campaigned against Apple many times. For example: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ipad
Seconded. I'd love having access to an API.

Great job on the site.
As technoweenie said:

That was also a troll/spam bot that had no affiliation to Travis CI. Their GitHub integration has always been classy.
Sure, Apple couldn't grab the SMS streams, but the banks, pharmacies, etc, could offer an iMessage option to use in the place of SMS.
I guess the difference would be that there is usually only one electric company that can supply you with power.
There are people who are obviously just trying to have fun by posting whatever they can think of to Facebook, incessantly. I would agree that the more someone is posting, the less fun they're actually having... unless you consider posting stuff to be fun, in and of itself.

Nothing wrong with incessant posting... it might indeed be fun... but I think Facebook is not the best outlet for it. This will only become apparent years from now when these folks look at their friends who have little to no posting history, with envy.

I have friends who still have not joined Facebook. I admire them; and I expect to envy them in due course. They will be blissfully free from the annoyances every Facebook user wil be facing.
What is the next step? How do you translate what Hacker School does into something State University can do?

Some State Universities can explicitly accept and reject candidates on the basis of gender.

Some State Universities can let students pick their own projects and grade on effort.

But others have admissions criteria determined by law, and others must have final exams that are the same for each student.

In other words, how can Hacker School adapt higher-ed pedagogy to better accomodate women engineers?
I think I can guess the answer to this, but I've often wondered: are the ridiculous amounts of hours worked by salarymen genuinely due to the amount of work to be done, or is it a "face" thing, e.g. "if I'm the first one to leave, I'll look like I'm not committed to the company" which results in longer hours for everyone?
FreeBSD = includes kitchen sink

NetBSD = run on a toaster

OpenBSD = "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
FreeBSD focuses primarily on flexibility, NetBSD on portability, and OpenBSD on security. Or something. There is of course much overlap in the way their goals are accomplished.
Wright's Law: A Unique Teacher Imparts Real Life Lessons
There is also zigzag encoding, something Protocol Buffers (I believe) introduced for general usage. Thrift later copied it for the compact encoding.

It's pretty interesting.
Nobody ever said it's a problem. It's a different view of the world, that's all.
The FSF's attitude towards new technologies seems awfully reactionary (this is somewhat unsurprising when you remember that rms doesn't use a web browser; occasionally he emails interesting-sounding URLs to a service that emails them back to him in plain text, and he only checks email once a day).

Secure Boot where you can only run Microsoft-approved software is bad for software freedom, no question about it. Secure Boot as defined by the spec, where there is no requirement to have preloaded MS keys and where users explicitly can load their own keys, is absolutely _good_ for software freedom -- it makes the "evil maid" attack much, much harder. (The "evil maid" attack on full-disk encryption involves someone having access to your computer while it's off, and trojanning the bootloader and having it leak your disk password or the contents of the disk once your system boots. People naively expect full-disk encryption to stop this, but it's as easy as booting from a CD or thumbdrive. With secure boot, it involves physically opening the case and probably replacing chips.)

Let's make sure that Secure Boot stays good for software freedom, instead of throwing out the technology along with the policy, and leaving users with no defense against this sort of attack.
There's Amazon Fulfillment. You ship them your stock and they'll pick & ship all the orders. The orders don't have to come from Amazon.com, there's a web interface and API for sending the customers to ship to. What I don't know is if you can do that without listing the product in their marketplace at all.
Nicholas,

What do you think a family of 3 would need to pay for rent during Hacker School? (Assume the goal is to live as cheaply as possible, but to be in a safe area).
What exactly is special about that DSL? I'm pressed for time, but it seems like it would be trivial to reproduce in Scala.