skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we have the knowledge? If who has?

Even with everyone alive today, the world's premier superpower (the USA) has recently let on that it can no longer make components of its current nuclear missile fleet.

http://www.domain-b.com/aero/mil_avi/miss_muni/20090310_trid...

All the replies saying "we'd know how to X" are ... optimistic.
On reading the replies, I suddenly remembered this: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/planning-fallac.html

My revised estimate for the time it would take to recreate all of history is approximately as long as it took the last time, plus a bit.
The one reason why Firefox is so slow: XUL.

Has anyone noticed that other browsers using Gecko as their rendering engine (Epiphany, Galeon, etc.) are much faster than Firefox? AFAIK, these browsers are built using native toolkits (GTK+ for both Epiphany and Galeon) of whatever platform they work on. Also, has anyone noticed how slow Songbird is? That's XUL for you.

I don't care about extensions. IMO, a web browser is supposed to let you view and interact with webpages, nothing more, nothing less. Leave the ad blocking, note taking, email checking, photo uploading, iTunes controlling to separate applications. How difficult is it for Mozilla to just wrap up Gecko in a Cocoa shell for the Mac, GTK+/Qt shell for Linux and whatever toolkit is used these days on Windows? Why build the UI using XUL?

I'm an Opera user, but I hate the way they've been piling on feature after feature into the browser. BitTorrent? Speed Dial? If they don't stop now, I'll switch to something leaner.
"a bunch of bits have been made illegal"

I strongly disagree with this idea that I've seen a few times, that somehow the law is irrationally and ridiculously making bits illegal whether in copyright or in pornography. Child pornography is illegal whether its printed on paper or stored as bits. That somehow it shouldn't be a crime just because of the fact that bits can be used to represent anything is a really bad argument.
If we can head towards magnets and wire, we could be on for an early boost from electricity and radio as an alterative to the entire postal service (much much easier than rebuilding all the roads and railway).

How much useful electricity can you get from a donkey walking round in a circle driving a generator instead of milling flour?

Cut ahead a few years, we can avoid the effort of roads entirely if we brush the ground flat and pick hovercraft and hot air balloons for longer distance matter movement.
Minerals wouldn't be hard. The existing artifacts lying around are better than the richest old ore deposits.

The most urgent work would be to make books or scrolls to write down the knowledge of the survivors before they get senile.
I think we need a "four stages of writing a blog post."

And I quote: "the best way to learn is to perseverate"
We use authorize.net ... authorize.net provides remotely stored credit cards (you just store a token). This is available through pretty much all auth.net resellers.

For some reason Braintree has gotten a lot of hype but offers nothing any better than the most lowly auth.net reseller.
The last time a similar topic came up at HN, it was the "what if you time travelled back to the past" question.

I didn't think of it in time for that thread, but I wanted to turn the question around: Looking back through history, if we wanted to spot a technologically advanced person appearing in the past and trying to create 'future' technology, what markers should we look for? (and ... has this happened?).
I was despairing about the lack of web devs here (is there one out there that doesn't depend on firebug?). Thanks for redeeming my faith.
I had been through this phase.
Since most of the 3rd party software is closed source I could not debug their code.
I ended up writing work-around code to circumvent the bugs in closed source 3rd party software. And the culprit here is MS Excel and VBA.
Precisely. Some people never seem to get past a certain skill level because they don't have the ambition to get pissed off and figure out how something really works.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=perseverate

In its context it's actually more meaningful than "persevere." Now if you're looking for an example of masturbatory diction, I go with his use of "exactitude."
How will Google make money if they roll out ABP for Chrome? It is same as Microsoft trying to make money by rolling out a Linux distro.
Thanks for the new word, though I still stand by my criticism.
I know one of the founders, and hold him in pretty high esteem. I haven't personally used Spreedly, but I know they make good stuff. They're also very accessible, and are hackers. If you have questions, just ping them and you'll get a real answer.
What is it you need? Maybe someone here knows somebody (or is that somebody).
Kvass | A Ukrainian drink that leads to funny situations
Voldemort is actually, really really cool and a good implementation of Dynamo (I'd suggest reading the Dynamo paper to see how it works).

Another good way of avoiding roundtripping to a SQL store of some sort, and it's associated slowness.
"install microsoft silverlight ↓"

well, no.
I don't claim to be a 10x programmer, rather I've thought a lot about productivity and programming. In my opinion it's better to develop deep knowledge of a few tools, than spending time learning and futzing with many tools. I've mostly developed this opinion from experience and a Philip Greenspun anecdote that I can't seem to find, that basically goes like "programmers like to grab a bunch of 'best of breed tools,' disappear into the server room to integrate them, only to emerge 2 years later to ask for a $2 million budget increase and another 2 years.
Randall Pays Verizon
I think its smart for Dell to move into the mobile business, but stick with what they do best, make the cheapest commodity phone on the market, have it run android, and profit off people replacing it every 6-12 months when it breaks.
Drum brakes? ...something i have always found interesting is what mistakes could we have avoided. Serious mistakes brought on by ignorance and pseudo-science, such as the act of bleeding to heal.
TrustCommerce.com is very fast (<2 sec.) and developer-friendly, and they run on open source systems if that's important to you.
I noticed wandering past a bookshop today he has a new title out...
http://www.amazon.com/Rides-Dread-Legion-Book-Demonwar/dp/00...

Actually - interesting that Amazon don't have it available for the next week - I saw it on the shelf in Australia.

Feist's newer work is still enjoyable - but it's no-where near the level of his earlier stuff.
So true:

> The nice thing about power distribution and generation was the math was absolutely trivial compared to the partial differential world of quantum physics. All the answers involve the square root of two. Most power systems math can be summed this way: take a really big number and multiply by the square root of two. You can use three sometimes, but only when things are totally out of control.
I can't find it and I may be mis-remembering, so I'll call it bullshit.
Anyone that cares can access the Internet at large in China. There's many http proxies that work quite fine. Most expats that care use a VPN tunnel to a service or corporate HQ. The rare person uses Tor but it's generally disfavored because it's unreliable and slow.

This is not the problem however. The vast majority of Chinese people in general don't really care about censorship. Far more due to language and culture than censorship the Internet is mostly an internal Chinese thing to Chinese for the purposes of entertainment, not information. Many view state censorship as doing its job to protect the majority from corrupt western influences.

But it seems most people in the west would like to prefer to imagine jackbooted thugs keeping the masses down through coercion and fear. The truth is rather worse, that of apathy, ignorance and a collectivist submission to authority.
with JavaScript libraries. Don't pull in a 100K library to get a couple of useful functions. Write them yourselves. Avoid getting caught in a maintenance trap.

While I agree with a lot of the rest, I'm not sure I understand this part... a 19k library (jQuery) that gives you a single DOM interface that fully takes advantage of JavaScript and works in every major browser is what will keep you out of the maintenance trap, not writing/maintaining that interop code yourself.
Two developers working on the same files at the same time is a suboptimal arrangement, and should it arise, actual communication outside of the VCS is necessary.

Git automates patchset management, not merging of rapidly diverging branches of the -same- code. With or without git, independent developers working on a set of patches for the same code will introduce genuine implementation conflicts that can not be merged without independent communication.

If, however, you should find yourself in this remarkably inefficient situation (ie, a commit war over simultaneously modified files), I recommend:

1) Speak to the other developer.

2) svn diff >saved.diff && svn up
OR
tar -cf ../svn.bak.tar . && svn up
I don't care that much either way about the re-design, however, it seems kind of dumb to tick off your users on purpose.

We are talking about basic usability here, not whether a luxury sports car that less than 1% of the population owns during their mid-life crisis has a trunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away
Indeed. Also 64-bit, which probably won't happen any time soon. JIT is hard enough on x86's awful, awful ISA.
well we now have proof that at least 31 idiots browse the site. what part of "hacker news" do people not understand? "hacker" presumably.
I'm confused by your first paragraph, because you seem to be agreeing with me semantically, but disagreeing syntactically. I think if you expand a little it will become clear to me. :-) BTW: Most users want features more than speed (otherwise it doesn't do what you want, but fast).

In your second paragraph, I think you're underestimating the power of a platform (which enables MS to make so much money BTW). It's an incredibly powerful competitive advantage. Remember monkeyboy: "developers, developers, developers".

I agree Adblock and Greasemonkey can be duplicated in negligible time (it took 7 iterations to get the latter's security model right, but that work is now already done) - but that's only 2 addons. How many man-hours to duplicate a comparable eco-system of addons? Secondly, Greasemonkey is itself a platform - how many man-hours to duplicate all the add-ons for that?

It's not enough that there's the ability to create the addons - they also have to be created, and that takes time, during which more addons are created and refined for Firefox... I'm not saying it's impossible to catch up, just that it an established platform is a powerful factor. BTW: Chrome isn't even released for Linux yet. It's fast, yes, but...

An exception is if Google can make Chrome plug-compatible with Firefox plugs-ins; and if a Chrome Greasemonkey can be made that is plug-compatible with Firefox Greasemonkey. From my fiddling around with these technologies, they both seem to be to be horrendously tied to Firefox specifics. They don't need to be, but they are. IMO, anyway. :-) NB: even firefox 2 and 3 aren't plug-compatible! :D

However, perhaps none of this matters, because (I think) few people use many add-ons beyond adblock. But I really don't know. Maybe they do? I guess Firefox's extensions page has stats, so it would be easily estimated. Oh well, why not some data? It's so much more fun to argue with facts to throw:

Adblock: 627,380 downloads weekly. That's well over 25 million pa. mmmm... the currently most popular plug-in is actually "Video DownloadHelper", at 701,065 weekly downloads. Here's the 20 most popular add-ons:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=&cat=a...
http://www.ccavenue.com/ for Indian customers
i've had collectively over 100K views by my presentations online, and ~10K downloads. for me, it's contributed significantly to the work that i do with startups.

note that my presos generally contain a lot of images, not ONLY a lot of text. but my point is that sometimes more, not less, is more. at least for async remote audience.

for people in the room, your live performance, not the slides, should be primary.

your mileage may vary.
"Zuckerberg is a real leader because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s going to do what he thinks is best for his business. I wish Silicon Valley had more like him."
Amazon Simple Pay Subscription has worked out very well for me. Startlingly easy site integration.

https://payments-sandbox.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business?sn=pa...

It's described as being in closed beta, but Amazon's friendly representative gave me access minutes after I emailed them.
I'm in San Fransisco...
Although a potentially good idea, a lot of its dynamics remain pretty vague. What can differentiate this hypothetical site from a Rentacoder/Elance type site? A more rigorous vetting process before you're allowed to become a contractor?
Ultimate destination to find the real-time hottest pages on the web for any topic -- entirely based on Twitter.
Agreed, and "notorious" has also lost its perjorative skew.
I don't know what this forum is and feel a bit like I'm intruding, but as you were exchanging banter on the philosophies of capitalism, my weary eyes fixed on the figure of 70k along with the word (somewhere) "teacher". I have been a teacher for 22 years, currently am going through a divorce from an abusive man who has only a fourth of the education I have but makes double what I'll ever hope to see. In addition, he is wiping me clean of the little bit I do make and every bit of retirement I've had. He's also giving me all of his debts - 30K - that were borrowed in MY name because he couldn't keep a job and we were going to lose our home. I am scared, alone, and utterly broke after giving 22 years of my life to teaching inner-city students. If you all have the time and money to chat about... well, time and money, then please help me. A co-worker in similar circumstances gave up and hanged herself last year. I have been considering the same. How can our society allow someone who has valued education and given everything to helping others live in a state of despair over where the next meal is coming from or where she is going to live? I don't qualify for Section 8 housing because I earn just a little too much, but they don't factor in even the MINIMUM payments on the 30K credit card debts that I must pay since I was foolish enough to put them in MY name to pay OUR bills during HIS unemployment. How about if you all talk about this kind of thing? I am not the only one going through something like this. I am intelligent, hard working, have 3 degrees, 2 little girls to feed, and have been completely wrecked and hung out to dry financially and live in a country with a legal system that so far has allowed it (because he can afford a better attorney). Could any of this useless chatter be applied toward helping someone like me who still has so much to offer as a middle school teacher but can't afford housing or food????? I have a huge sense of humor, but this is not a joke at all... I am desperate and don't even know any more where to turn for help. I've exhausted every resource. lllllll778899@yahoo.com
Hi there. We use Worldpay. Just a note - they ARE flexible on their rates after you have been with them a while. We reduced ours to 3.3% with just one phone call, so it might be worth you giving that a go
Are You Wasting Your Time On Twitter?
Don't get me wrong: Twitter is a great tool! But...
I like Wikipedia less and less. It contains lots of errors and copied content (the latter including stuff from my own site). To be fair there are people who take out material that is in breach of copyright, but what often then happens is they re-phrase the content (not usually very well).

Why not use Google to look for sources that are further upstream.

Wikipedia is good in some areas (especially geeky stuff in general), but outside those areas, I tend to avoid it.
"somewhat independent" is the crux of the problem. In a crash the only things going up are the correlations. The modelling behind mortgage securities assumed that defaults were uncorrelated based on the short time period they based them on. Now we know better.
6020 Insert Sim Card Ways
When You Are The Product
You're calling who a cult leader?
Not sure why you think I'm getting angry. I'm glad to be speaking with someone who is pretty knowledgeable about this topic. I just don't think you read between the lines :-) Have you read Tom Wolfe's "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers"? I have, and perhaps it's for this reason that whenever I see some sort of "Community Activist Organization" I immediately think of one type of organization.

It colors my thinking when I read something like this, talking about a $750 billion pledge for community development - http://www.housingfinance.com/ahf/articles/2004/March/Bank_m...

Or how about Phil Gramm speaking at the American Enterprise Institute (http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.1862,filter.all/transcript...):
"We ended up when the bubble finally broke with three different quotas. One quota was for below-average-income borrowers and that was a requirement that 56 percent of the loans bought by Freddie and Fannie had to conform to that guideline. The second quota had to do with the low-income individuals. These were individuals with 60 percent of the income of the census tract in which they lived, and by the time the bubble broke, that quota was 27 percent of all mortgages held by Freddie and Fannie had to fit within that quota. And the final quota that was set in proportional terms was geographically targeted principally at inner cities and depressed areas, and that was a quota that said 35 percent of all the loans held by Freddie and Fannie or purchased by them had to fall into that category."

Then there's Countrywide (not a bank and hence not covered by CRA), which originated something like 20% of America's subprime mortgages (Countrywide did not hold on to these mortgages but sold them to banks). Here's a great 2007 NYTimes article about their wonderful lending practices: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/business/yourmoney/26count...
And a great presentation at Harvard by their CEO talking about the 600 billion he's pledging for "previously underserved Americans" - http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/publications/homeownership/M03-1...
The blogger says that Facebooks usibility goal is different than what users can see so their opinions are short sighted. Facebook is going through a design change in order to build new, non-user, growth. Facebook is becoming more usable for a different market, namely businesses. It isn't on purpose, it's a side-effect, or so the theory goes.

The analogy you refer to was fine. It made a point and was short.
Agile Software Development at BestBuy
> who happens to take a fancy to asm, security, arch, and abstracted programming languages.

...that means you are a 10x coder but would not like to claim yourself though.
>I knew name-dropping would help

Sadly, it doesn't just help; without it, no one would care at all. For all the pathos we showed in these threads on 'Where is the innovation?':

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522897
http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=H31Hs9elK4

the truth is, we don't care. We want innovation, but hard problems are... well... hard. I've been working on a project with the same goals as Viewpoint's for over 12 years, and getting attention or support has been almost impossible.
I think you would see a large drop in population before we were able to rebuild. Population growth only occurs when the technology can support it.

If we were starting over without any of the knowledge we have now, then it seems reasonable to assume that it would take roughly the same amount of time.

If we had history to look back on, then maybe we would be looking at a few hundred years instead of a few thousand.

I think the more interesting question is, if we had the knowledge of our past history to look back on, what would we do differently? Would we be more green from the start, for instance? A lot of the problems with adapting to green tech today isn't that the technology is necessarily so knew and unknown, it's that well-established infrastructures and systems are in place that are implemented on vastly different technologies and the cost/logistics of replacing them is prohibitive.
Linux One Wire File System
Ask HN: lighttpd or nginx for a low grade server?
I've been looking into lighttpd and nginx for a server with low memory. I'm somewhat familiar with lighttpd, but there is an online rumor that it has memory leaks. I'll serve mostly static pages and some FastCGI pages.
Any advice on which one to use would be greatly appreciated.

[Note: I moved here from Reddit and I don't think I'm going back there anymore. Reddit is becoming the new Digg]
I want the site to be far more centered around attracting high-quality programmers and gigs. I suspect the differences would be more social than technical, though I certainly don't envision imposing the sort of process constraints Rentacoder does.

My idea is to be the Hacker News of freelancing sites, while the others are Digg and reddit. I have no idea if I can pull it off - right now, I'm just wondering if there's any interest.
Claims like this bother me, whether about Ruby or Python. a programming language is simply that -- a language used to program computers. It doesn't have a personality. It has a distinct syntax, methods, etc. It is the community which gives it a personality, if any.
Have a look at mathopd: http://www.mathopd.org/. Very lightweight and stable/mature, and unlike lighttpd, an excellent security track record.
I didn't mean to imply that Ruby was difficult (though I could see how you might read my reply that way). I merely meant that Ruby embodies a certain philosophy of programming and programming languages, and, while _why is an extreme example, he is still a very accurate embodiment of the Ruby philosophy.
527 applications for TechStars this year
Matz would disagree with you:

"I believe people want to express themselves when they program. They don't want to fight with the language. Programming languages must feel natural to programmers. I tried to make people enjoy programming and concentrate on the fun and creative part of programming when they use Ruby."

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/29/ruby.ht...
If Google applied this to PageRank, they wouldn't have started.

In the beginning, Google was Ark A. Then it was Ark C. Now it's Ark B (tRatEotU - DNA)

But I have to admit, being able to precisely exactly quantify the beauty and usability of a design is irresistibly compelling to me. Especially when billions of dollars hinge on it (and you can measure them).
Why Apple Sucks
You have glanced the side of an interesting point: what comes out of data driven design is not art. Great design, the kind of work that people obsess over Apple for (at its best), cannot be made that way. Great design is art; it is expression; it is fundamentally opinionated.

It's not the only way to design a user interface, to be certain. But Doug isn't interested in working in that environment, because he thinks of himself as an artist, not a statistician.
Why did it get killed? It is certainly more interesting than a lot of the stuff that gets posted from TechCrunch. Poorly written or not, it's an interesting opinion.

I think WebKit is going to kill Gecko.
Urmu