skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an argument that people have been making and refuting almost since the dawn of the OSF and FSF. Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar addresses this: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-baz....

Essentially, the counterargument is that for popular projects (like the Linux kernel, Apache, etc.), the increased number of eyes on the code will catch more bugs, making up for the ability of attackers to read the code.

Referring to the WordPress worm in particular, Reynolds claims (second paragraph under The Problem) that it's not WordPress's fault that its software is buggy, it's Open Source's fault. That seems like claiming that it's not Pons and Fleischmann's fault that cold fusion didn't work, it's science's fault for encouraging them to publish their results. The real problem is that people run out-of-date versions of Internet-facing software.
Thanks for the feedback. Keys and RSS are next in the task queue.
This article really had little (if anything) to do with the capabilities of experienced business people, and more to do with how he (the writer) managed to balance a family life and his startups.
I've used GitX on and off, but I have yet to find a feature compelling enough to use the graphical interface over the command line.

The search feature is probably the most useful, but there's not much there that can't be hacked together in a five-line script.

Now, don't get me wrong. The work that has been put into this application is great, and has come a long way since I started using it (around the 0.6 release, I believe). For people who prefer a GUI interface, I don't think you can do much better on OSX. However, you haven't done anything to sell command-line users on it. If that's not your goal, then there's no problem. If it is, well, I haven't been convinced yet ;-).
It seems to me that it's consistently deprecated because it's harder than anything else visual artists do, and there's an objective measurement of how well it was done. I don't have a very high opinion of most art, you'll gather. :)
1. set noprocrast on HN

2. use a separate browser for Gmail

3. don't check emails automatically. Only if I think of it.

4. only read online news once during the day, at lunch, and use instapaper.com to defer articles that might take more than a few minutes to read.

5. the null default browser page is a great idea - but in the past I've taken it further, with a message asking if I'm browsing for work. I've also thought that a script displaying my current todo list or bug count, etc. would be a good default page.
> So?

That seemed to be your point.

> At the very least they amount to people doing due dilligence and making the best choice they can.

No, it doesn't mean that, especially not if they follow your reasoning which I don't doubt a lot of them do.

It also seems like you're still pushing the same point, that sales numbers mean a better product.

> Now you can argue all those people don't really know what they're doing, and you sit in a position of actually knowing they're making a mistake, but that's all so much posturing now, isn't it?

So... because these people are in a position to buy software, they must be making the correct choices? To question the meaning of the SQL server sales figures is posturing? That's some blind faith in "people who buy things".

Odds are most people who have purchased MSSQL did so because they are hooking it up to Exchange or IIS in a company that is all Microsoft from top to bottom. Is this such a horrible thing? No. Like they say, nobody was ever fired for buying Microsoft. Does any of this mean that Exchange or IIS or MSSQL are better than the alternatives? No, it just means they are the safe and easy choices for people who make software purchases.

> The point is, I'm providing stats, facts, information. It's great to be able to argue their relevance, because it's great to have something more than an unfounded opinion to base a discussion on.

You're providing irrelevant stats, facts, information, and offering up an unfounded opinion that "higher sales mean a better product".

> Which is my point.

It may have been your intent, but it was not your point, at least not the point you seem to keep trying to make.
Actually, all patent trolls can point to some implementation; namely, those who they license the patent to.

More importantly, "some manifestation" still does not address the "use" definitional problem: it a computer simulation sufficient? If the product is purely software, is pseudo-code sufficient manifestation? Is a prototype adequate manifestation? Can a company hire another company to build its prototype to spec (b/c under your definition, they cannot)? Is a subsidiary too divergent from the parent company, such that the research subsidiary cannot ask the manufacturing subsidiary to construct a working prototype? (subsidiaries are separate companies).

Why do we require the inventor to have the capacity to create the invention? Some of the most remarkable breakthroughs of the past century were created by people who didn't have the means to build their own invention. (For example, the inventor of the most efficient oil derricks in use in America during the early 20th century.

The problems that your manifestation requirement impose do nothing to actually fix the problem of patent trolls, and merely impose additional burdens upon inventors, thereby discouraging invention.

For a first-hand discussion of the inventor's dilemma, read/watch Flash of Genius.
You might want to fix the formatting a bit on it. I just check it on my laptop (1024x768 resolution) and with FireFox 3.5 maximized, it's cut off and won't let me scroll to read the second line. There's a web developer plugin for Firefox that will let you resize the browser to common resolutions so you can see how the site will look on various screen sizes (and let you tweak your CSS so it works on all of them).
Oh, I thought you were talking about programmers' habits in Haskell.
For reference's sake, Windows Web Server 2008 costs $469 and is likely the version of Windows you would use instead of Windows 7 to run IIS in production.
Nice name - I once had an idea for an accountability buddy web site for grad students, called 'e-advisor'. Basically you sign up and it sends you an email every so often asking about your progress. If you don't reply fast enough, it notifies your actual advisor that you're slacking.
Search torrentz.com from anywhere on the web
A ubiquity that lets you quickly and easily search torrentz.com
An alternate solution is to use http://searchyc.com and your favorite RSS reader e.g., http://rss.searchyc.com/searchyc?sort=by_date
True, but ...

"Half (maybe more) of the startups we fund don't need the money. And in fact the money is a only a small part of what YC does. The money we invest works more like financial aid in college: it ensures that the people who do need money can cover their living expenses while YC is happening. "

http://www.ycombinator.com/faq.html
next step would be some kind of color management system for web, which should afaik get rid of these kind of problems completely.

Maybe something like this:

<link rel="icc-profile" href="profile.icc" type="application/x-icc-profile" />

Which would allow color-proofed output on web. SVG afaik already supports ICC-profiles, maybe HTML could take some hints from there.

edit: Oh, apparently there is some work done towards this in CSS3, but I'm not sure of it's status
on second thought, I can't think of a good reason for that

Isn't it simply that if you know the structure in advance, you don't have to figure out what it is at runtime?

I agree that the tradeoff becomes moot if you can get both sides fast enough. The question is whether present-day hardware has gotten us to that point. That's why FluidDB is an interesting test case of whether a system supporting arbitrary flexibility can perform at scale. I assume Terry isn't being naive about this, which means he must be making some tradeoffs somewhere. The question I'd like the answer to is, what battles is he consciously not trying to fight (at a design level)? Terry Jones, if you're reading this, please speak up :)
Ted: A Leap From Space [video]
Just this morning I've set up a wiki for myself to help with this problem.

As ideas come in, I'll post them to the front page under "free floaters" (working on quicksilver action for that right now), then as they start to form or as I do research, I'll start fleshing out the pages for each idea.

I'm hoping the wiki aspect will also force me to look at how individual ideas might be related. I'm thinking of it conceptually as a mind map that changes with time.

I'm not sure if MediaWiki has the ability to view those relationships at a high level, but if not, I'll write something that does.
If you're more vulnerable by not changing the defaults, perhaps the defaults are wrong?
Stream Fusion for Haskell Arrays
I'd imagine that Snow Leopard makes various tweaks to the source assets to look better at 2.2 gamma. Changing your preferences will have the desired effect on web pages and such, but not necessarily on native controls and system UI.
The List of N Things
Installed infrastructure, latent knowledge and the small-batch aesthetic
I am currently working on a native iPhone reader for HN. The biggest pain point is the lack of data api's, so much of the work has been around building a service layer to provide interactions with all HN features. I will be supporting all HN features, so it's not just an rss reader. When I get it to a point for release, I'll post again on HN.
IIRC from the "Binary Translation Using Peephole Superoptimizers" presentation from OSDI 2008 (Google found a summary at http://eurosys.org/blog/?p=109), supercompilation is a brute force approach. Making it perform is, no doubt, challenging.
"back at work for another 4 or 5 hours until the wee hours of the morning."

What if you need sleep?
For some reason the airbrush has never been seen as a fine art tool - perhaps because it doesn't come in contact with the canvas or paper. I think SFphotoarts is dismissive not least because Blair is dismissive of photography as an art, arguing that it's a mere mechanical recording. Then again, if you click on the 'paintings' link it's odd (to me) that 90% of his work is militaria, a surprisngly narrow choice of subject.

Of course, while many things re impossible to photograph for one reason or another, visual effects artists and compositors specialize in making it credible - as someone with an interest in the latter, I find his airbrush approach extremely interesting.
Hackers and Caffeine
He outsourced the writing of Cool Tools years ago.
It is interesting that the Republican candidate (which he apparently backed) did not make it through last year despite all voodoo and magic.
Power Naps.

EDIT: And if you can, cook only twice a week, making enough for a few days. Setup coffee machine before going to sleep.
I'm no PHP hacker, nor (sadly) am I unfamiliar with ASP.NET. I was stuck at an "agile", highly "successful" .NET shop for 2 years.

Client-corporate-intranet-land is completely divorced from the realm of what is possible. That entire world enforces such silly requirements on you that, well, maybe it is better to use .NET.

But who wants to work in that kind of an environment?

Who wants to use the MS tools to manage their servers?!? I'll take Puppet and Monit, thanks.

Opportunity cost? I develop with a REPL right there in emacs, so I can see how the running dev-server code is working, able to instantly see the effects of what I'm doing. Once I've got it where I like it, I type a single line, and my tests run, and if they all passed the app deploys to staging.

Where's the room for opportunity costs?
Description, and what led me to submit this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809480
Take note of parent:

Yes, not only is the original article wrong but it's wholly ignorant of the debate that the parent references and so doesn't advance the discussion in any meaningful way - ie, the original article is deliberate or accidental FUD.
Positive thinking. Every hour of every day. My productivity increases greatly when I take a break and imagine beautiful things, funny things, myself and others enjoying success etc rather than reading news online or playing negative video games (for example).
I admit that I find this critique rather convoluted, but as far as I can tell, the primary criticism of Romer's proposal is that setting up such a "charter city" requires that an empoverished country cede some level of control to a powerful Western country. The author of this critique seems to think that this amounts to "Colonialism", and would be another example of powerful Western nations taking advantage of weaker third world countries.

There are several reasons why I think this allegation is wrong. First, as far as I can tell Romer wants to build his new charter cities where there are no cities now, not re-make (or assume control of) existing cities. This is land that, if populated at all, is sparsely populated and not developed. It is not particularly valuable now, so little of value would be given up by the host country.

Second, Romer is very explicit that no force is involved: "Charter cities would not rely on coercion, he insists, and no one would be forced to live in them." I suppose it would be a problem if such cities were used to export surplus population from powerful Western countries, except the birthrate is below replacement in most developed countries. I doubt that this would be an issue.

That brings me to why I think this is a good idea, or at least worth trying. One of the biggest differences between prosperous countries and poor countries (apart from their GDP) is what is often referred to as "intangible wealth." This encompasses many things, but it basically boils down to the value provided by stable, functional institutions and the rule of law. Two articles on this can be found at http://www.reason.com/news/show/120764.html and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119103046614343129.html, both discussing a 2007 study by the World Bank. The problem is that if you can't trust institutions, you can't grow an economy, and a lot of effort is channeled into unproductive tasks. If you can't trust the police, crime expands and legitimate business is hurt. If you can't trust a corrupt government not to seize/nationalize a profitable business what's the point in being an entrepreneur?

The central idea of the charter city plan is to establish a City where there is a reasonable amount of law-and-order, and to create institutions that can be trusted there. In other words, the goal is to inject a little bit of "Intangible" capital into the system. If this could be done, it might be possible to grow this seed of stability/organization which would allow the growth of such institutions in the third world nation, transforming it.

This plan is very likely very over-optimistic and there would doubtless be huge problems. However, if it worked, it would be a truly amazing hack: actually bringing a country or region of a country out of poverty.
Yeah rsync.net by far looks like the best functionality, but they are almost 10x more expensive than Amazon or Rackspace, $1.20/Gb/Mo vs. $0.15/Gb/Mo. For 20-30 gigs of photos and movies, that starts to add up.
Very nice, I had the same problem with a huge repo and had written off GitX, just updated and now it works!
Thanks, fixed that interface bug.
Any idea about performance, robustness, etc?
I can't seem to get an OH or O-H. Do I need ID? ;)
How far ahead is Bueno de Mesquita forecasting? Two years?
You seem to be leaning towards the idea that these list type articles are inferior to the essay format. When reading an article I consider the clarity with which the author has expressed himself to be most important - if he can express ideas more clearly in a list than otherwise then I am all for it.

I do tend to think this format is abused when people wish to write quick and dirty articles online though. For me, an article titled 'N things...' tends to be reason enough to ignore it in most cases.

Also, I will admit to preferring the essay format overall. You cannot lose yourself in a list like you can in a good essay regardless of how good the content is. An essay is more like a story which sucks you in.
To be perfectly honest, you got to ask my ex-wife about this..
I learned this the hard way unfortunately. Before starting a venture, make sure the foundation of your couple and family are strong. It takes a LOT of commitment, patience, energy just to get yourself started. Imagine that you have to invest as much on the personal level too (if not more). If you don't, your partner/wife will resent you. I know it's hard, but always try to balance things out. Time management is a key.

Edit: I am now where I wanted to be professionally, it took me more than a year of hard work, sleepless night juggling between a fulltime job, my ventures, and divorce documents.. I am 'successful', but no one to share it with :(
Very robust (SQLite, and it expects HTTP for transmission). Fairly performant, though not quite as fast as Git. I agree with the creator's take on this,

Fossil takes the philosophy of the tortoise: reliability is more important than raw speed. The developers of fossil see no merit in getting the wrong answer quickly.

http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/selfcheck.w...

The website also makes the bold claim on the homepage that

In over two years of operation, no work has ever been lost after having been committed to a Fossil repository.
Your logic is sound, but reasonable people can disagree. No operating system is designed to crash, certainly not advertised as doing so, yet all operating systems crash and these crashes sometimes result in serious monetary loss. But no one has ever won a verdict against an OS manufacturer for such losses (except for maybe like some defense contractor missile guidance OS or something. I'm clearly talking about Windows and Mac OS here.)
GitX is great, but I miss one important feature:
there seems to be no way to view the history of only a subdirectory, a specific file or a specific commit range, like gitk can:

gitk README.txt

gitk src/mycomponent

gitk experimental..stable-2-0
I think PG is missing something in his comparison of "list of N things" to "beginner" 5-paragraph essays: Cohesion matters.

Even if they cover the same points, a good essay is far more informative than a "list of N things" article / powerpoint presenation: An essay has to tie the points together, pointing out the connections and drawing conclusions. When I was in school, my English teachers often returned essays (but not mine!) to students with "a list is not an essay" (or similar words) written in red ink.

Sure, poorly written essays, in the limiting case, end up being simply a list of disconnected statements -- but students are asked to write essays in order to develop their ability to write cohesive essays, not in order to demonstrate their knowledge of the underlying facts, so PG's suggestion to 'let them write lists of n things like the pros, with numbers and no transitions or "conclusion"' utterly misses the point.
Having kids is a huge motivator to succeed.

I started my business when I had one son. I was young and had no fear. Now I have 4, a mortgage, etc, so basically failure is not an option without major consequences. It keeps me hungry for success and doesn't slow me down in the slightest.
Dr. Richard Hipp, not Hibbs, BTW. He's also a member of the Tcl core team.
Try this:

gitx -- README.txt

Or in GitX itself, in the tree view (bottom button bar, most right thing), right-click on a file or directory, and select "history for file"
Then how do you view complex merge histories?
"Life" before you have children is very different than "life" afterward.
The biggest factor that Blank had in his favor was that he worked outside his home. If you are going the "garage route" like a lot of YC companies, then I think it is much harder - maybe impossible - especially when your children are young. An environment with your kids in it isn't particularly conducive to working, and young kids will want you to be engaged all the time. There's not a noprocrast setting on a two-year-old.
E, the secure distributed pure-object platform and p2p scripting language
U.S. Ranks 28th in Internet Speed Among Industrialized Nations
I remember Guy Kawasaki saying he tries to follow this list of N things tactic for all his speeches so that people don't have a problem of following him. They won't doze off.

Two other quick formats of writing essays:

1.

"The secrets of telling a story well are three:

i. How to end

ii. Where to begin

iii. What to leave out."

- Roy H. Williams.

In that order. Determine the end first. And you can take your readers on to a journey. Surprise and delight them by connecting seemingly unrelated stories. Malcolm Gladwell uses this format very well.

2.

Another format is answering 3 questions:

i. What is the problem?

ii. Why is it the problem?

iii. How to solve it?

Makes writing easier, quicker and more comprehensive.
Interesting press release about chlorophyllin, but natural compounds are already used as chemotherapeutic drugs, for example Taxol. Some drugs are wholly synthetic and others are found in natural sources. Whoop de do.
Poll: When is the last time your production server rebooted?
Just curious what the average uptime is for any production servers that the hacker news community works with.
0-24 hours ago
1-7 days ago
7-30 days ago
30-60 days ago
60-90 days ago
3-6 months ago
6 months to 1 year ago
1-2 years ago
even longer (please add comment with uptime)
A friend of mine was working in a lab, writing his thesis with 4 people who were either professors or doctors in electronics. He asked once - what is the most important thing you did for your success.

They all discussed it and agreed on this rule:

If you have 10 things to do, and you do them all in parallel, you will be done slower with ALL of them, than if you do them one after the other.

That's the biggest productivity hack - do things one after the other, and not all at once.
I like your record keeping idea. I'm going to try to that to make myself more accountable to myself.
Find the right level of simplicity and lock it frack'n down, someone thought of about 30 super-important fields to add to bugzilla, maybe one is used, but probably shouldn't be... just makes navigating dense, annoying and slow.
I'm going to slightly disagree with people here.

Using quantitative measurements to track developers is great. But not when done stupidly. Using only one measurement is dumb (ie, # of bugs alone, or lines of code, or number of checkins). And removing human participation is dumb too. You're a manager, not a spreadsheet.

But, using quantitative measurements along with human feedback, peer review, and other traditional measurements gives you an early warning setup, and a better way of tracking changes in behavior.

This then allows you to have discussions with an employee like "I'd like you to be more productive, it feels like you've been slacking a bit recently". Then, you have both visual clues (they're at the desk, not with HN open), and also graphical clues (hmm, your story points completed per week went up 10%, awesome).

It's another tool. Don't confuse it with the only tool.
Child-safety software sells kids' IM conversations to market-research companies
Essays are planned; papers are stream-of-consciousness. Readers can't follow the internal machinations of a particular writer's psyche; while you can have a revelatory essay, you still need to plan it.

My best example: Woolf reads like stream of consciousness, but she was a meticulous planner: she obsessed over every word - her daily output was a mere 75-150 words.
Comfort in Ambiguity
It works! Thanks... and again, great job :)
It didn't delete the latest backup on my drive. It told me that there's not enough space, but backup is still there.
git log --graph (as of git 1.6.3)

For some additional horsepower (not necessarily related to viewing merge histories), you can install Tig: http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/
I don't know-- I've eaten some pretty bad cheeseburgers at good restaurants.