skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best way "in" as a newcomer is to have some knowledge that no one else has. In my case my first good answer (although it took months to get any rep at all) was an obscure bit of paypal sandbox knowledge. I actually came across the knowledge first, and since the problem I had hadn't been solved via StackOverflow I searched SO for the same problem I had been having and updated the old question with my new found solution.

That has since earned me 50 rep. This along with a few other bits took me to the 200 threshold which then gives 100 rep across all stackexchange sites. (Enough to upvote/comment.)

But the fact that "newbies" can't contribute what in all honestly is largely going to be misinformation or "me too" answers is also part of the genius, it gives real answers breathing room and keeps spam out.

My question asking has been less successful. I've asked 2 questions, one of which had no response whatsoever, and the other had an answer which answered the question in the community's mind but because I had been slack with my terminology didn't answer the issue I was really having.
As a new developer, stack overflow has been an invaluable resource. My boyfriend (who's been a developer for many years now) always tells me I don't know how nice I have it every time he sees me open stack overflow up to figure something out. "In my day... I had to walk to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways..." But although I don't know from personal experience how much harder things were pre- stack overflow - I can certainly appreciate it! It's taken a lot of the headache out of learning for me and is a great safety net when I'm unsure.
You can't buy "Likes" on Facebook, you can buy ads that prompt people to "Like" your page but you can't buy them outright. There are some cases where you can't really tell whether you're Liking a friend's "Like" or if you're also Liking what your friend Liked. I'm sure it confuses a lot of people since this whole phantom Like issue has come up frequently and reported by a lot of folks.
Well, in this case it is a binary thing. When you talk about this in an applied sense you're right, then it isn't a binary thing but when you talk about feasibility then it is black-or-white. You're either sure or it might as well be compromised.
I never said you were uniformed. Would you like to hit a UAV while flying in IFR conditions? Do you really think that hitting a solid object at 100+ kts will have zero impact on your aircraft? What if it goes right up the engine nacelle? Or through the windscreen? Or hits the control wire on your elevator?

Do you see my point? Not everyone with concerns about UAVs flying in close quarters with manned aircraft are fools. I'm not saying they can't coexist, I know they can. But we don't know the situation here. This is a one-sided argument from the UAV manufacturer.
> Intel customers who use Ubuntu will not see any regressions as we will simply continue to support XMir in the Intel driver as part of Ubuntu.

This is an issue only if you wish to use XMir outside of Ubuntu. Ubuntu controls their own ecosystem so they can just patch/compile/repackage their distribution as needed, like they do for many other packages (i.e. Mesa, xf86-video-ati, and xf86-video-nouveau). The core issue is that they wanted to push XMir support upstream so that other distros could use XMir.

Cryptic messages are making people draw their own conclusions as to what the issue is.

> We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream. - The Management [1]

> I've said it before, I'll say it again. You will not make your open source project better by pulling another open source project down. - Michael Hall [2]

I think we are not seeing the full discussion happen in public light and there is a lot of guess work happening.

[1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/com...

[2] https://plus.google.com/109919666334513536939/posts/QzAyr5fo...
I find it to be an enormous productivity help too. Almost always it's the best hit from Google on any programming problem that I have.

The one thing I've noticed is I've switched from being a contributor to a consumer of information. I'm not sure if it's selfishness, or just that the easy questions have all been answered. I wonder if this is part of any larger trend.
Musings about mentors
"Because I'm leaving at 5 unless there's a fire to put out."

-- slacker! You'd not get a job at Twitter anyway with this attitude.

just because they provide food doesn't make it a lifestyle.
The hotspot on my phone is named "$12.99 per minute". I get a chuckle every time I overhear someone in a public place bitching about how expensive the WiFi is...
You do not get paid a lot in a PhD program. Where I am the pay is barely enough for one person to live on. There is also the time commitment -- a lot of programs demand 60 or more hours per week from their students. The combination basically means that starting a family is impossible while you are a PhD student, unless you have a spouse who has a comfortable income / family money.
> Unless you are using unity, I don't see why a distribution should be called ubuntu based instead of debian based.

Because Ubuntu is more than Unity. I mean, by the "Unity or its not Ubuntu-based" standard you propose, Kubuntu (which is exactly Ubuntu -- sharing all the same repos -- with the KDE desktop and apps installed by default) wouldn't be an "Ubuntu-based distribution".

Heck, Ubuntu Server, since it doesn't have a default DE at all, wouldn't be an "Ubuntu-based distribution", either.
Agreed about #3 especially. My wife and I both recently got NFC-capable phones and we can allegedly send photos and contacts back and forth, but there seem to be severe problems at both the basic communication level (it is extremely difficult to get the two devices to even make the NFC handshake because the NFC antennas need to be aligned so ridiculously precisely), and at the application level (once you actually manage to get them to beep and communicate, Windows Phone and Android apparently don't agree on content types or something, because you just get errors saying the content type isn't supported).

For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."
And this changed my life. Most of my programming skills have been improved from suggestions of people at stackoverflow only. it just make a programmer, a better programmer 1
It's outlined here: http://www.x.org/wiki/guide/concepts/#xisclientserver . In a nutshell, X "serves" the application to the (in- and output) devices.
StackOverflow remains not only my #1 resource, but the resource I give to people when tutoring them. I encourage using it not only as a helper for bugs, but also for questions like "how best to do X". The sooner they use StackOverflow for their programming issues, the sooner they start understanding what they're doing.

What really helped me out when I was first starting doing web development was that no matter the question, people had the same problem as me -- usually VERBATIM. I can't stress how nice it is to copy and paste something into Google and get back the answer.

On a final note, I encourage everyone to try to give back a little into StackOverflow. I've been going for about 2 years and have around 4 thousand reputation built up, mostly on Rails questions. But at the same time, I'm starting to notice that there are a lot of rookie answers (although this might be a Rails-specific issue)... and this is coming from someone who's still in college and not a full time web dev yet. If you're good, answer a few questions.
Yep. However, if you're trying to replicate something that's already built on top of an existing piece of software using the existing API's, I'd assume you wouldn't have to patch the platform just to build on top of it.

However, as tinco explained[0], it seems that there is no "standard graphics api" for linux, and the "link" between window servers and graphics drivers is hard coded. So you do in fact have to patch the video driver to provide support for a new window server (on Linux at least).
While I have much sympathy for Rich (way more than for Clojure), I find his talks to be extremely simple. He can talk hours about very basic and obvious things. Overall, at the end, I'm not getting much new from it.
>>Barren wastelands. Empty city blocks, fields of grass and weathered concrete, and the ruins of entire neighborhoods. Exactly what you see when you Google 'Detroit slums'.

Or if you have ever visited Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3:

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Tenpenny_Tower
Thanks for suggestion. All that info is below fold. Agree it would help show depth to move it up.
Gabe Newell: Linux is the future of gaming, new hardware coming soon
Here is their challenge: bmljZSBkZWNvZGluZyB5b3VuZyBwYWRhd2FuIFVzZSB5b3UgbXVzdCBsZWFybmVyIGZyZWUgdGlja2V0IGNvZGU6IEhBQ0taSUxMQQ==

Reward, a coupon code that you can apply for a free ticket to an angelhack hackathon.
I imagine that one of their main target use cases is collaboratively editing slide decks, or something similar. I recall when our company had some major event last year, our exec team had over a hundred iterations of their slide deck.

edit:
Their blog [1] notes that the reason is to let them focus on executing one well-defined thing WELL. Seems like a good idea.

If we’re going to achieve these goals, we need to be
super focused. Which is why our first version is
specific in its scope: Kivo 1.0 is an Office plugin
which works with PowerPoint on Windows.

Kivo guys: what a great presentation, and clear explanation of what you feel is lacking in the space.

1: http://kivo.com/blog/
That totally blows me away. What you see really isn't what you get, even if it looks just the same as before.
Online shopping: The pensioner who pioneered a home shopping revolution
I'm almost certain he writes the code using an outliner tool as well like was the case for the scripting language that shipped with frontier and the OPML editor so that probably makes it easier for him to manage. At least it will be easy to include into a project ;-)
You should expand the logic to allow the user to press buttons to change the "mode" of interviewer instantly. Say they start off with "Standard", and the voice utters the, "Tell me what your greatest weakness is?", etc.

Then the user presses the 7 key. This puts the interviewer in "ill mode", where they start coughing and wheezing a lot into the mouthpiece. The voice becomes nasal and garbled, and the interviewer takes up a lot of the interview complaining.

The user then presses *9 and puts the interviewer into bizarre mode. He suddenly says, "Just who do you think you are? This is my bat, my ball, and my field, and I make the rules when I have the bat. My bat." The interviewer than starts singing "Danny Boy" and then moaning, almost imperceptibly.
This only makes the Google Analytics dashboard unusable. It's not going to break sites that just use GA's tracking code.
I wrote a blog post about clocks and timers earlier: http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~cmccabe/blog_time_and_time_again...

It gets especially interesting when you start thinking about mutexes and condition variables with timeouts.
http://geany.org/
Surreptitiously Tampering with Computer Chips
The Crescendo of Music Tech
Yes, the distinction between discussion and expertise killed some of my enthusiasm as a contributor. In the end I decided to just enjoy the service as a user.
Well take a look what F2FS stands for: Flash-Friendly File System. It's designed around living on disks that aren't platters of spinning rust.

Few companies can call themselves an authority on NAND flash memory and Samsung is definitely at the top of that list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS
no no, it's not an issue of people actually caring how much you work. I agree that people aren't going to call you out or tell you to work more. It's more of a self-consciousness about taking breaks. People are much harder on themselves than they should be. We try to project an image that we are hardworking and that we don't waste any time at work.

If people were always looking over my shoulder I wouldn't be comfortable having HN open in a window/screen for half the day
We Are In Denial About Catastrophic Risks
Yeah, usenet used to be the place where you could get any question answered (though often accompanied by a flamewar). I think I may have actually stopped using usenet around the time I started using Stackoverflow.

(Really only 5 years? Unbelievable.)
Ok, that makes more sense (or at least explains why). I'm puzzled that there hasn't ever been anything done to make this less of a tangly mess; it seems like it'd be a huge step towards making linux a better platform to iron something like this out. However, that's probably just wishful thinking, as I have no idea what it'd take technically or politically to make that happen.
Perhaps there's a way to measure the maturity of software by looking at the age and upvote distributions for its posts on StackOverflow. The common questions get answered well and stick around for quite a while, usually helped along by edits. New projects with "easy questions" yet to be asked should have a decent new question velocity without any mega-answers.
Happens in meat space as well. We're quick to accept good things that happen as the status quo and become enraged at minor inconveniences. Someone didn't wait their turn at a 4-way intersection, rage! Waiters who check on you often are just doing their job and those who don't are getting a bad tip. Etc. I personally try to actively fight this instinct but wish positivity could become the norm. Would love advice on how to find that zen.
It won't be like Linux audio, because all Linux audio drivers are open source. If Intel can't get AMD and NVidia to support Wayland, and Canonical spoke the truth when they said that AMD and NVidia will support Mir, then what reason will people have to use Wayland? It will only work with Intel cards.

Intel is actively making a stand against Open Source. I know that's unlike them, but their stance just makes no sense from a free software perspective.

When you look at it from the perspective of Canonical enabling AMD and NVidia to cooperate with introducing a new graphics driver interface, a shadowy doubt is cast over Intel's motivations.
I'd love to attend AngelHack, they need more hackathon's in Ohio -- I'm 45 minutes from Cincy and there's a HUGE dev community here..
Andy Mueller-Maguhn is a long time member of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany, and a former spokesman. He is a specialist on surveillance, working in a journalistic capacity on the surveillance industry with his project wiki, buggedplanet.info. Andy works in cryptographic communications, and runs a company called Cryptophone, which markets secure voice communication devices to commercial clients.

http://www.cryptophone.de/en/company/
One of my favorite quotes from Rich Hickey:

"Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."

http://devopsu.com/blog/simplicity-is-key/
I don't think anyone believes it's a good idea. It's just that sometimes, in frustration, we say stupid things that we probably shouldn't. It's called being human. Our error rate, as a species, is fairly high. It runs even higher when we're under high load.
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article119980213/Frankreichs-M...

nb: Thales is also known for supplying tools the other end too...
Took me 3 seconds to solve lol.
Show HN: zen.jquery
They may not drive the traffic of Stackoverflow, but from what I've seen most of them are great sources of information for their particular topics. There are several other Stackexchanges I personally have found quite useful (ubuntu, tex, cooking, gaming, and homebrew mainly). I also enjoy just reading popular questions and answers from various sites as they can be quite interesting. Some examples:

http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/19941/one-foot-in-...

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1216/what-is-the-...

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75459/why-do-chim...

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17578/did-9-11-l...
Yea... we should definitely be considering teaching people how to utilize frameworks for languages they already know (PhoneGap, Blackberry OS, Appcelerator). We started with Android and iOS because at scale it's easier to find teachers for those than the others. It would be great if we could garner more support from PhoneGap, Appcelerator, Blackberry, etc
Isn't this also true in real life causes? E.g., I see many more political campaigns gain traction when they invoke the language of impending doom, illustrate a threat to a way of life, and call attention to something outrageous. I can hardly think of any successful cause that was carried on what I would consider positive messaging.

It seems to me that the promise of some great outcome seems either/both unbelievable and easy to defer action toward. But negative outcomes are immediate and demand action now. Negatively-charged stories seem to press all the same buttons -- "can you believe this!?", "this must stop!", "they're at it again!"
Throwing another few boxes into your web app is significantly cheaper than hiring a GC engineer to rewrite the implementation.
IANAL, but the spirit seems to be "hey, here's this software, use it how you like, but if you distribute it (including building on it or bundling it in a product) please be kind enough to extend the same freedoms to those you give it to."

Using Concord on your site? Offer a link to the source. Modify it to work better with a framework? Offer that modification too. Build an entire product off of it? Well, be prepared to release the source to that product under GPL as well. If you don't like those terms, feel free to start from scratch and not freeload off the original authors who were kind enough to share source with you in the first place.

I don't understand how people can pay good money for things like game engines, then turn around and think that OSS doesn't have a price too, or get upset when they are asked to pay it. You just end up paying back to the community instead of into a company's coffers.
Wow! If this is as easy to use as shown in the video, then designing apps and prototyping them will be 10x more enjoyable. I can imagine this helping me be more creative as I am much faster drawing out my ideas in photoshop than storyboarding in xCode or writing html/css/js. (or using any of the other prototyping software I've used before...) Thanks for sharing!
I don't get much rep for answers. I get it for asking the right questions. My rep still isn't fantastic (a few hundred), but it's good enough to give a bounty when I need it.
>>> Many things herein are assertions with little corresponding argument, yet assertions which nevertheless to me seemed interesting enough to present for consideration in the hope that they might function as depth-soundings for future navigation

Doesn't it just say "I am going to fire off some claims without any evidence supporting it, but since the claims sound good somebody should go and check if they're true just in case"?
> Sure Ubuntu has a betteer installer

Highly debatable. "Most accessible" installer perhaps, but as far as I am concerned, Debian's netinst has yet to be beat. Style isn't exactly high on my list of priorities during installation, it's not like that is something I do to show off in coffee-shops.
Everybody has a cryptographic telephone in their pocket. The problems are the cryptography is weak, the endpoints are insecure and people underestimate the value of traffic analysis.

Even if the cryptography were perfect the endpoints could still be listened in on and the latter would still be a huge problem.

Mobile phone encryption only works for the phone-to-tower part. Obviously what Appelbaum is referring to is a phone that does end-to-end encryption (still leaking some info but at least the contents of your conversation should be mostly safe), but people that are not capable of making this distinction will be wary of radio intercepts rather than wholesale line tapping.

It would be a funny thing if you needed a key-signing party before you could start to call people on the phone but it may come to that yet.
Based on the pricing, the security leaks, and the technology, Linode strike me as one of the 'old' breed of hosting providers, who are trying, but struggling to keep up with newer companies.

I've got an account with Digital Ocean, and while they can be a little slow releasing kernel updates, they've been great so far. Good performance, great price, good support.
kind of reminds me of this guide to CRO but this one uses mostly external resources as opposed to an all-encompassing guide:

http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/microsites/guide-to-cro/

great work, super useful!
If we could just get stackoverflow results to push down w3schools results, life would be complete.
I wish Linux video would go the way of Linux audio.

Linux audio just works. There's a single userspace API (PulseAudio), a single kernel driver API (ALSA), and all the old nastiness of the '90s (ESD, aRts, OSS) is dead and gone.

In contrast, getting video to work properly involves figuring out what hardware you're running (nVidia? ATI/AMD? Intel? misc other?), then hunting down the drivers, installing them, rebooting, hoping the hardware gets detected correctly, and so on until the user gives up and settles for a half-broken system. I consider myself fairly skilled with Linux stuff, and I still can't figure out how to get my desktop to have both kernel modesetting and accelerated OpenGL at the same time.
This Entrepreneur Publicly Spanked America's Most Arrogant VCs
There have actually been many tries, Wayland being the most recent of them and now Mir. But because the earlier ones relied too much on the old X code, they were not succesful, and Wayland has not yet secured support from the graphics cards manufacturers (except Intel). Mir is promised to change all that, but we will have to see.
This sounds like a clever comment about Discourse.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/.
Sarcasm is a form of joking. Whether it was funny would depend on context. I know sarcasm often pops up in the midst of tense meetings at our company, and we certainly find it funny.
I think the editing features are great. There are plenty of questions where the right answer changes as technology evolves.
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