skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was afraid that I wouldn't come up with any cool ideas to work on when I first started coding. It can be hard but once you get rid of some of your assumptions, you will see that there are loads of ideas floating around.

Here's what helped me:

1) Do not ever stop reading. Set up a few subscriptions to RSS feeds. Always have a few books that you find interested lying around. You'll see that these books will help you understand that finding an idea for a project is not the hard part.

2) Do not be afraid of inventing the wheel again. Some people say that this is unnecessary but in my experience this has helped me a lot.

Take static site generators for example. There are very good ones around but I still plan to write one. Just for the fun of it. You'll be amazed to see that reinventing the wheel is a great idea to get fresh ideas and improve your coding skills.

3) This has been said a lot, and it's great advice. Try to solve a problem that frustrates you. This can be anything. Don't like the way HN looks? Try to do a redesign on the side. You find that Youtube has a lot of clutter? Try another approach. You get the idea.

4) Read http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html and http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

5) Read other people's code. I'm by no means an experience programmer, but this is perhaps the single most important thing that I learned from Zed Shaw's excellent Learn Python the Hard Way. You'll be amazed at how much other people's project can inspire you.

7) Most of all, don't ever obsess about finding an idea. Recognize that ideas are important but the way you execute them are much more important.

I hope this helps :)
This week in #Scala (16/02/2013)
Stealing Open Source Projects' Names
As you may know, the game studio Illfonic made a dirty deal with Alientrap and bought the rights to a games title. There was no law violations of course. The problem was that the title was the name of an open source game which by the time was almost completely community developed. (You can read the full story here: http://www.xonotic.org/the-game/faq/#What_prompted_the_split_from_Nexuiz )

This is happening again.

The open source game Termulous is experience a similar situation now. There's a new game by the title Termulous 2 that is a remake of the game. But, the new version is neither open source, neither free nor even available to all the platforms the original game supported. The developers of original Termulous ain't happy.
Qusetion five: "What does the expression SCHAR_MAX == CHAR_MAX evaluate to?" should be undefined exactly because char type can be signed or unsigned (as admitted in the explanation). If the question is about specific ABIs, it should be stated in the question.
Can Tools Make Coding Too Easy?
probably you are too ambitious for your ideas ... just try to build the first thing that came to your mind ... doesn't matter if it already exists or if it seems silly at first sight.

for example a website to gather ideas for side-projects :)

my last two side-projects aren't not very special or solves any problems ... but i learned much just doing it ...

http://bohuco.net/blog/2013/02/my-january-sideprojects-what-...
Here in rural China (on and off ~11 years), honestly the most educated and worldly person I spoke to in the last week or so was an exotic dancer

Playboy has articles, eh? :)

Obviously they are two kinds of educations /smarts: street and book smart. I have a feeling (could be wrong) that people in those parts of the world, maybe due to pressure, just lock themselves in a room and study /memorize, "day and night."
If you don't have some project in mind that scratches an itch, I'll give you the same answer I give my peers and juniors: Do something different that builds your skills.

There's terabytes of open data, tools and tutorials available on the internet. Build a tool that scrapes the FCC database and allows people to research radio station call signs. Dig into some of the NASA archives, do some image processing. Check out the growing infestation of humans, chart it on maps with the help of US Census data. Build a local weather application. Get a cheap SDR USB radio and build a different GUI to control it. Find your bank/credit unions quarterly posts on their respective government agencies websites and plot how much money they make from fees vs margin. Build a calculator app with advance functions. Tailor it for small business like a roofing contractor. Do any project in a different programming language, then port it to a third. Work through the problems at Programming Praxis or SICP. Tweak a game through Lua or whatever tool kit they offer...
Sure. It's still pretty simple, but that's sorta the point.

The current website is the 4th iteration, i think, of the whole process. Started out with a simple spreadsheet and then used wxbanker, then migrated the same data model from wxbanker into a web app. And now modified that to add my own stuff. And I am still working on it and have ambitious ideas for it. But only work on it when I have free time or need inspiration.

There are still a few bugs from the last rewrite that I have yet to address but it's over at http://mywallet.codedemigod.com

The tech stack of the current iteration is Django + bootstrap + Postgres running on a linode VPS.
This week’s Heroku debacle
May I just say - the comments following this post are one of the finest examples of why the HN community is awesome I've ever seen.

The ingenuity, lateral thinking, and sincere desire to help someone you guys have never even met on display today are just mindblowing.
I think all good developers have their connotations and anecdotes for words like 'poorly-understood', 'gigantic', 'no unit tests', 'tangled build infrastructure', let alone '25 years of technical debt'.

What I was surprised to see is the word 'resurrect'. As if they wanted to imply LibreOffice was dead.
LA-based Daqri is at the forefront of the Augmented Reality revolution
Definitely not the only difference between the languages.

There are too many differences to list here, but Google is your friend for this stuff. Read stuff from both camps.

Python is the first language I learned so it has a special place for me. But I am completely unbiased when I say that, syntactically Python is just loads better than Ruby. At least for me. I find Python code to be much more readable and better organized.
Running a Drobo NAS box with 10TB storage.

Not cheap, but extremely convenient. Chose the Drobo so I don't have to configure RAID stuff myself when messing around with the disks. A bit slow though (usually get around 60MB/s).

Previously I had all the disks in my desktop computer, which made it really heavy and inaccessible.
Ummm, where are you getting that node has C-class perf?
I have a friend who has been tinkering with a disruptive product for this market (backburnered whilst he works on other stuff). I'll point him to this subthread - thanks.
And the real problem is the non-uniformity of the load. If your 10M/mo request start concentrating around weekends, you've got a problem... Except you haven't, as your infrastructure is elastic, and this is the real bonus.

Also, I'd be very afraid to get accidentally hit by HN traffic if I'd host my own server.
There's Fastmail https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html by Opera Software
I don't think I implied anywhere that having fun meant being productive. I did imply however that having fun will make you more productive.
I thought it was "don't join an accelerator unless... you can be the best company there" which is also a bit silly in my opinion (I think she said "win it" at one stage).
World's Dumbest Rebrand?
And there are some VERY good reasons to invest in DevOps even for Wordpress.

I'd write a lengthy post on this subject right here, but I already did so elsewhere: http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2012/03/wpengine-review-after-1...

(And Patio11 wrote on the same topic a while ago, too: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-b... )
Another guy that doesn't charge his mobile phone to more than 90%. Excellent! And even though he didn't "rtfm" the car made it. At least this guy is a journalist.
It's doable.

Start by adding integration tests, then (try to) identify the core of the project and isolate that in its own sub-project in the repo. Add unit tests for the functions in the core and then split the remainder into parts that are peripheral and that could be removed/disabled. (say a spellchecker). Next up re-factor the core until you're happy with the state of affairs, but keep the interface the same. If there was no interface to the rest of the code then you'll need to define one and implement that as well as changing the peripheral code to use that interface. Then look at each peripheral piece and decide if it is worth saving, needs rebuilding or refactor it as well.

The basic trick is to reduce scope until a subsection of the work becomes tractable.

With a really large project this is a multi-year effort with a team of seasoned programmers, it's hard and it means that while you do it there will be no honoring feature requests. You need management buy-in, patience and perseverance but that goes for any large effort.

Building fresh and green stuff is obviously much more fun to do but taking an old codebase and making it nice is (to me, at least) just as rewarding.
I have used QEMU to develop and debug a hobby operating system kernel. GDB and QEMU makes things so much easier than making a floppy image and booting it on real hardware (like Linus worked on Linux kernel in the early 1990's).

Making a multiboot-compatible kernel image that you can boot with QEMU (and with real iron using GRUB) requires only a few dozen lines of assembly code and a simple linker script.
The "you" were addressed to RG, not your experience. I completely agree that scaling is one of the harder problems in computer science. Most people just run a stateless system and hope for the best, but this is a delicate matter and it is a hard problem.

The hard part being a customer or Heroku is that the problem might be on the other side of the fence. And how do you communicate that in a diplomatic way?

Personally my opinion is something along the lines of "If you use Ruby +rails in that configuration, then you deserve the problem".
Ah, the forgetfulness idea.

For me the focus is on social mobility, and not letting someone's past entrap them or constrain their future.

The question is more about what data can be used against you in the future, because even if data can be used for you let's start with an assumption that anyone looking is looking for something against you and not for you.

So how to destroy/hide the information that can be used against you?

It would be up to each individual to consider what they wanted to delete from their public record. Whether they think their Twitter is a net positive in their public record or not.

If they did, you'd expect them not to make Twitter forget even though they might still want Facebook and Last.FM forget things (music is an angle by which to judge someone, and perhaps you listened to a lot of stuff that suggests you were a stoner in your early 20s?).

The thing that interests me about this is everyone does things today, with little mind to the future. No-one knows where their life will lead and so they want to curate their past so as not to limit their future.

If we believe that people could be different in future, to have social mobility, to have the ability to better themselves... then the internet needs to forget so that people are not always judged by their past.
Automating everyday system routine with Fabric (Python)
The (possible) cost of removing DRM, as I said, is that the BBC currently makes money by selling the content it makes, both direct to consumers and the TV and DVD companies in other countries. If the BBC released all its content DRM-free, then this money might dry up.
Binio.py
Yes, that counts, but in the end it's also the performance of the actual browser that counts and keeps people as users.
Estonia Named First Computer-Based Math Education Country
Is it not more like you can't outsource customer support and product development, but you'd better outsource everything else if it's economically viable?

Thus if your product is some kind of hosting (i.e. blog or image hosting), the reliability is your product, so you don't outsource sysops, but if you offer some project management software... Well it's almost certainly hosted so reliability is your product again and you better have your own sysops.

So the only viable conclusion seems like you limit your trust to the PaaS provider and have some plan for the rare case when they get screwed. Or you could bet on technology not requiring such monstrous resources as Rails and host your entire MegaCorp on a single server rack.
Fail fast.

I can perfectly well install, set up and maintain my own Ruby servers - but it takes time.

Alternatively, I can pay someone else to do that, and remove that timesink from the elapsed time between "start developing" and "find out how well we've achieved market fit".

I can always optimise later - move off Heroku, develop our own load balancing, all that stuff. Once I've got a working product/market fit, I probably will.

But doing that before I know if I'm going to chuck the entire infrastructure in the garbage and move on to idea #2 (and #3, and #4...), or indeed pivot so wildly that we'll have to reorganise all our server stuff anyway, is a waste of time. And time is valuable.
I was talking to a friend about "legacy code" the other day and I realised: the company that's going to put you out of business won't have any legacy code.

I think you need to have a really good excuse not to completely rebuild your product from scratch every now and again. Because if you don't, someone else will.
The journalist that did the "original" review was not able to charge his car to 100% I bet that when he charges everything else he understands how it works. It's just not good enough to write a review based on wrong assumptions, especially if you already have a history of not "liking" ev's.

Imagine getting up in the morning, you check your phone, 25% ohh well i am not going to talk a lot to day so says my crystal ball. How many would do that? The NY journalist did his first drive in the Tesla S, and decided to base his drive on his experience, which was zero. Normal people, and other reviewers knew better, better charge to the max when i am actually testing the limits of the car. Not the limits of the reviewers knowledge.

If he had done as he should he would still have been able to write all the negative parts, the drop over night the limits because of the cold etc. it might have been a worthwhile article, like this one.
Ask HN: What do you think about FWKs like ADF Mobile?
Why, no, certainly not. A scholar or a writer or an artist might be able to kiss a queen on the cheeks while having very low income.
Instagram, Pinterest, Square, Dropbox, Evernote, Yammer, Groupon, AirBnB, Gilt, LivingSocial, Nicira and Zynga

(Although depending on your criteria you might want to include Hulu, Vancl, Rovio and Wonga in that list too taking it to 16)

Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann previously founded MightyQuiz (YC W08).
MakeyMakey + USB OTG = Android Controller
From http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/data/ - "You are asked to read and agree to the terms in the HCP Data Use Agreement and provide some basic information about your research."

This seems pretty normal from my experience with research data sets. Note that this is being released to the scientific research community, not the public at large.
QEMU is configured at compile time (with arguments to ./configure). It does not make sense to make a one-size-fits-all binary.

Grabbing the source from git and compiling it takes only a moment anyway.
How to ruin a brilliant game/app through freemium greed
Well, I don't think infojobs has this kind of job offers. I prefer talking directly to an enterprise instead of using a HR intermediate.

Definitely I'll check the others.

Thanks =)
May want to check out lodash

https://github.com/bestiejs/lodash
So, this is the kid version of The Universal Business Adapter? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOqOxI0K_I
LibreOffice needs some UX/UI volunteers, bad.
Microsoft Could Earn Billions from Office for iOS
Foundation — Episode 27 w/ Hosain Rahman
they just need to focus on speed/performance thats the only thing missing on openoffice/libreoffice its slow... painfully slow!
> I think you need to have a really good excuse not to completely rebuild your product from scratch every now and again.

And I suppose we should also burn down factories and rebuild them every now and then.
Maybe they ought to call it Libre Universal Construction Kit instead.
PayMill. Is it really a clone of Stripe?
If you can manage it, take a year off to and go work in an unrelated field in an area that you're interested in. The ideas will fly out and quite literally smack you in the head on a weekly, if not daily basis.
Its a rocket company. Probably spent 2 billion acquiring those customers.
How to create a HTTP API with Erlang in 10 Minutes
Although the person used the colloquialism "No worries", there are distinct elements of non-native speaking. The sentences using the word may are particularly stilted, and the grammar is quite awkward at times.

I wonder if the goal here was for the 3G SIM.
OT, but I'm really curious what effect these two changes would have had on Twitter and Facebook!
If the factories are operating with giant iron cog wheels older than your grandmother, then maybe yes, we should.

The world of software is moving a lot faster than the physical world, so things can become outdated pretty quickly. Compare a 15 year old browser to a 15 year old factory.
It's not the only thing. The UX and UI itself is very 'old-school' and IMO very outdated.
It's like using Windows 3.11 instead of Windows XP, let alone Windows 7/8.
That doesn't mean they don't need structure in their daily work. If it wasn't for those kind of people, those who are neither entrepreneurs nor risk-averse worker drones, start-ups wouldn't be able to get any development staff because "less meaningful" usually pays better.
I agree, it's doable. You do need to put a lot more effort into coordination between team members than usual, because it's very easy for the developers (should I say the refactorers?) to step on each others' toes.
Australian govt desktop panel sees $27m saved
thats a bit broad - define meaningful work? - why is it more meaningful to go work at say a YC funded startup - than it is to go work for a larger corporation working in the same space? Lets face it - most startups dont make a huge "impact" - on anything other than the pockets of investors and founders - and that too in a small percentage of the successful cases that get overly romanticized!
I think that this scenario routinely happens at many companies. Only you don't hear public stories about it, because in the end what happens is the same for all software: continuous transition/refactoring. I know I've been working on many projects like in these conditions, though not of that size.

With more and more experience of that kind and by working on stinking code-bases, I've come to the conclusion that while in the past I could have thought that trashing the code and starting from scratch would help, now I would probably approach most problems by pushing new code in the form that I want and transition the rest as changes are required.

I had projects that I did myself with great design care, but after 5-6 years due to shifting requirements also started to look like you could have done a better job by starting from scratch again. Reality is, in retrospect all code is suboptimal.
> System footprint: win

Defined how?
What's evil is taking open hardware and closing it. There is nothing in their machine that is not a direct derivative of GPL-licensed reprap technology, and they give neither attribution nor source back. In addition, they are patenting technology developed openly. It's a pretty disgusting thing to do.
> There is no basis for this claim.

Sure there is. Consider https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36084 which is unfixed for many years now because of backwards compat issues with non-Web stuff on Mac that uses WebKit.

I can find you more examples if you'd like.

Sometimes WebKit is willing to break compat to make progress, but very often they are not. And if they were not competing with others, I fully expect them to be less willing to break compat: right now they mostly do it when the standards and other UAs force them to.
It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-count nouns) includes water, grain (in the sense of a quantity of grain, not lots of kinds of grains), sand, snow, etc. They are not inflected for the plural and do not take numbers - we say "three grains of sand" not "three sands". It's plausible for Lego to work the same way - so "ten pieces of lego", not "ten legos".

Perhaps in these oft-cited days of lego sets that are more like a few big pieces than lots of little pieces, people will start to think differently.
There's a middle ground: developers that need to be told what problem to work on, but who are smart enough to take it from there.

It's very useful to have a few of those on the team, because as a manager it allows you to ensure certain priorities are met, whilst giving those that thrive on freedom the space they need.

So, to answer your question: I'd rather have both.
He didn't define meaningful, because it's subjective and unique individual, so it might well be working for a larger corporation. His point was that the attitude around HN is to look for meaningful work as opposed to work that just pays the bills.
In reality, most web developers have no clue about what the standard says in edge cases, which is just fine: neither do most other people.

But the result is that it's very rare to find cases that are really developed "to standard".

Even worse, though, on mobile right now people aren't even trying to develop to standards. UA sniffing and locking out of non-WebKit UAs and use of -webkit-prefixed things even when standard alternatives are available is rampant and purposeful. And when you ask these people to develop to standards they just laugh at you.
Not only LibreOffice, this is somewhat a general sentiment I have about most Open Source Software. If I were a designer I'd love to be part of such an important project like this.

I don't get why designers are always doing stuff like redesigning website X for free, without being asked to, but miss great opportunities to be in the spotlight by participating in projects like GNome, KDE or the likes. There are many examples of good OSS projects that could use some UX/UI love, one that comes to mind right now is Moodle, for example.

Is it designers that don't like to participate in OSS? Are programmers making it harder for them to join these type of projects or is simply the fact that they don't bring to much excitement or challenge to the design community?
Are the LibreOffice and OpenOffice teams working completely independently? If not, it sounds like a lot of redundant effort is going to take place.
Chris Dodd Sounding Like A Broken Recording Industry
I hate to say this, but ... it's a wiki. Have you considered just adding a note to the page pointing out that it needs updating?

For example, I had no idea document.cookie got changed in HTML5, and I bet neither did anyone else involved.
In the real world, your route often isn't going to take you past one of Tesla's handful of Superchargers, and a lot of the other charging points are just too slow to be useful for anything but overnight charges.
> All Python has is- "Tab indent your code."

When we use APL, everything is one line long and code doesn't ever need indenting.