skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all too common that scientists, and engineers in particular, consider society to be a machine that can be tinkered with, oiled, something that, through progress, can be made to run better.

As well articulated Einstein's observation is, it is hopelessly naïve, as well as ironic, considering his membership of a group that owes it's very existence today to large-scale heroism at command and killing under the cloak of war.
That's his point. Not only is is not a minimum viable treehouse, it's actually an enterprise treehouse, and his kids are playing in boxes and in the dirt because what they wanted was a scrappy 37signals-style treehouse.
Good metaphor for out-of-control software development. I especially like the conclusion that the end-user actually does not like the fancy features (the large size).
How is 'loose'/'lose' not on there?
Best site I've seen in months!!!

I need to print a few copies and hang them around the office ;)
100% agreed. I've participated with a startup/think tank recently (http://webecologyproject.org) and while we could have had offices- we didn't. It worked so much better for the most part.

Our downside to this was twofold however:

1) We choose our team poorly & it was too big. That isn't to say that these aren't all simply wonderful people, but for making a highly efficient machine- it was a hodge podge of people with various levels of interest, skills, experience and commitment. We crept up to 10-12 people quickly and since it wasn't a formalized business structure at first this seemed ok. We were however all in the same geographic location (Cambridge).

2) We had too many meetings, which people stopped attending and become ineffective. These became a time sink. People would defer conversation to the meetings instead of our internal email list (which for some conversations is the right thing to do), but then these became lengthy 4-5 hour meetings that stopped getting things done. Our coding slowed. Decisions stopped being made, interest was lost slowly.

These are points very specific to our group and I totally agree on holding off on office space until you MUST have it. Keeping costs down and excellent workflow up initially are a must. Just don't try it with 10 people and don't kill people with mandatory meetings. Use IRC or some other tool religiously.

If anything, look into a coworking space like Betahouse (http://betahouse.org) or New Work City.
""" If Linux was 90% of the PC market"""

Let's branch into another universe where everything is exactly the same as this one, except Linux (in the same state it's in now) is 90% of the PC market. But how can such a world exist except by ignoring the reasons that exist in our universe why Linux is not the OS for 90% of the PC market.

It's not a sensible "if". If Linux was forced onto 90% of computers early on, it would have been forced to be a lot more stable, backwards compatible and rigid than it is now. The webcams would work but the OS wouldn't be the Linux you know today.
Its notability is in that it existed well before Google's Go, and so latter would've been better off selecting a different name.
Its the most wonderful grammar site their is too be seen online!
Obscure languages are like art in someone's attic. It could be a Van Gogh, or a child's finger painting. Valid answers to your question include "To whom?" and "Not yet (if ever)."

Signed, an obscure language writer
Now those companies are in serious trouble.

It looks like I wasn't the only one to be offended by the 17 pages of post-purchase maze when ordering business cards on vistaprint. Those pages really hide the one "next" button and do everything in their power to make you accidentaly click on a myriad of junk offers.

Looks like Mike Arrington's crusade is gaining some friends and the US senate is getting involved. I'm curious to know if there is a link. Does a tech blogger have such influence? It looks like the senate stuff is based on older investigation. Nonetheless, it's scammers' season and it's good for us.
It's funny how McCabe appears to be upset.

This is the best thing that could have happened to popularize his research.
Well that's just my point. The only notoriety this language has is because of a naming clash, not for any legitimate technical merit.
You have to stop blaming your inability to get a good team together on living in the woods. There are lots of remote teams working together. People who have never met. Maybe there is another reason you can get a team together. If you keep blaming it on your geography, then you'll never figure out what you can change to get that team going.

Sure, yes, there may be a programmer deficit in the woods, but there's no programmer deficit around here. I work with people all over the country via phone, email, and internet.

To be honest with you, I would work with you, whether you were in the woods or not, if I trusted you. I don't trust you because I feel like you blame things for your problems without really trying to figure out how to overcome them. I read a lot of the stuff you write and it feels very angry to me.

Sometimes I agree with what you say and sometimes I don't. That's not the point. I work with a lot of people I disagree with all the time, but it feels to me like there is something missing in your awareness of reality. There's a gap there. I'm not sure where it comes from. Most people I work with, everyone I work with, myself included have these gaps. The problem with you is that you are hiding yours, even from yourself. You portray an image, here and on your blog of great understanding, but I don't know if that's true, because you seem to lack an understanding of free will and internal motivation.

You're picking it up a little better in this post. You own your ideas. You are responsible for their execution. In the past, it was almost as if you wanted to convince everyone that you are great and therefore your idea must be great and therefore, it's difficult for you to understand why no one would want to work with you. But what are you working on? Where is your work? That bit seems to be missing.

Anyway, I sense some pain in you. Some frustration. Some loneliness. That's not everyone else's fault though. There's a reason you choose to live in the woods. Right?
Really? I'd argue the opposite. I argued the opposite last year, when everybody said that Apple's focusing on the high end would crash them during the recession.

Apple focuses on quality, and charges decently for what they offer, I bought this computer a year ago, and it's still performing splendidly, and I expect it to continue for a long while. Meanwhile, the people I know who are looking for computers are thinking more and more about the low-end Macs, because while they're expensive, they're not computers you'll have to replace any time soon. If you only have a little money, you make sure it goes to something really good instead of to waste.

Apple's position is only tenuous if you think another company can make a better phone and price it more cheaply. I think neither will happen.
Seems that Google didn't well... 'Google' for 'go programming language' first.

This type of stuff happens. As per a thread suggestion on the issue tracker, they've already registered Golang.org and its redirecting to their site. For all we know, they are reworking the graphical and text assets right now to make this a full switch.
Personally I don't care. Unless I am writting a letter to the Queen, I will use lose/loose as I fancy, and I hope no one here will waste a braincell trying to figure out the difference between effect and affect.

Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.
I think that you care about facebook if you work for a web 2.0 company that needs users any way they can get it. I work for a local newspaper, and the value that we get from facebook is pretty small. Everyone who needs to know about our site knows it exists. Most of the community has accounts.

The only value we may get from facebook is allowing them to publish our events easily. However, their API and their walled garden make that less valuable.
It's in the FAQ somewhere. It's a standard practise I believe. You just need to email someone and they convert it, assuming you have the papers.
I suppose so, yes. It's been possible to do a "reasonable" flame effect since the nvidia 5900 at least [0], and there's been a lot of work on fluid dynamics (including fire [1]) since then.

[0] http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch06.html

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgoDypGMV50
> Correct grammar is for people who have too much time on their hands.

Or people who care about expressing themselves clearly.
Einstein was a great physicist. But try this test: if you saw this posted, without attribution, as a comment on Reddit about an article on Veterans' Day, would it seem out of place? (Except for the Edwardian idiom, obviously.)
I have to say that this is a good move. If your idea is really that good, but will only take 8 to 12 weeks to produce, there's a serious possibility that someone will copy your idea, or worse, a larger company that may already have some of the pieces built will beat you to the market and smash you with instant marketing opportunities.

If you are seriously going to go through with this, there is absolutely no point in inviting others to the table.

Professional football teams don't lend their playbook to their opponent before the game just so they know what's about to hit them. That's just foolish.
The way this thread is playing out about hardware is the way this page/this situation/this argument is playing out with OS-X/Linux.

"Just use modwifi 0.9.4.1 I don't see why it's a problem you can find it with Google in a few seconds"

"It's not just the wifi, it's all the software. The audio stack, the BSD underpinnings, the coherent feel over many apps. I'd gladly pay more for things to just work, but it's not even that, things just work /nicely/."
If you're that worried about 'giving the game away,' I'd be worried for you about barriers to entry for whatever market you're hoping to compete in. Otherwise, I've found that spreading the idea around vastly outweighs the cost of letting the 'wrong' people find out about the idea.

Of course, I haven't been burned in a major way before...
How much of the trouble can be avoided by getting a machine with linux preinstalled? Let someone else research drivers and do the testing.

I've had a great experience with the pangolin model from system76.com.
I never meant to suggest it wasn't exhibited at all. But if you've ever been the to states you'd get what I mean.
I wonder what would happen if there was an indefinite moratorium on the creation of new user accounts. I'm starting to see a lot of throwaway accounts being created solely for the purpose of trolling.

Beyond that, it seems like the overall quality of the newer users has been fairly low. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I can't think of any that have been created in the past, say, 200 days or so.

[Edit: See tptacek and mquander's responses below to see why this is a bad idea]
Are you complaining about choice? I just checked out their US site and it is pretty straight forward to search based on features etc.

I can understand finding faults with Nokia for not being able to compete effectively against iPhone. But then which other mobile maker is right now able to do that. iPhone is pretty much a new product category. And Apple gets consumers and software like few others.

But I cannot understand finding faults with the choice of phones Nokia provides.
It's also worth noting that besides downmodding, one can flag an individual comment by going to that comment's permanent link and clicking 'flag'.
fucken and fuckin are not always homophones. Often, the whole point of spelling them that way is to convey lazy or improper pronunciation.
Very cool to see these aspects of Erlang being used in real world practical developement tasks. I've felt that other functional programming languages tended to be focused more towards academia, but it seems like the design of Erlang lends itself well to concurrent problems.
Milgram's experiment, provided it is correct, demonstrates that people like to pretend they are not responsible for their own actions. This result is orthogonal to the question of who is responsible (not who we want to think is responsible) for the action.

Edit: We are, of course, assuming the existence of some objective notion of "responsibility" here, which is a point that could be debated. That said, I think I'm going off topic now, so I'll be quiet.
The frustrating thing is that both viewpoints are valid, and there're people on both sides that don't seem to get that, and they're the only reason that people are getting into these arguments to begin with.
"But isn't that an issue with Skype?"

No. OS-X, Windows, iPhone and Android are sufficiently different that we can tell the Skype developers are putting a decent amount of effort into cross-platform compatibility.

That there is a Linux client shows they are also trying to do that with Linux.

Could they put more effort in and get a polished shiny Linux client? Maybe. Is it Skype's fault that Linux is bad enough to need this while at the same time not good enough to get a large enough userbase to make this worthwhile? Again, no.
invitation based systems work too
DDG is flattered by GOOG's imitation of Lockable Safe Search
I haven't been to one, but considering the guy who wrote the first clojure book and the language's creator are the two teaching it, hard to find a much better chance to gain mastery of the language here...
Fix the damn language. It's a serious bug in written English, which is basically a garbled bag of idiotic spellings that were much more flexible applied. Now that someone has marked time with a dictionary...we assume that spelling is never allowed to change again. txtrs say no.
This Wikipedia article was written today. There's links to a few publications, but no compiler, no homepage.

I'm not a big fan of Wikipedia's deletionists, but I hope they go after this page. Musing about something in a few research papers doesn't make it notable.
They're not homophones - lose is pronounced /lu:z/, and loose is pronounced /lu:s/.
A similar thing happened to me last fall. I wanted to switch to ubuntu, Installed it and found that the audio won't work.

After some google-fu, I found a setting described in ubuntu forums which made it work, but the sound from my laptop speaker kept playing even after plugging in the headphone jack :(.
I don't think it's strictly a homophone because they are pronounced differently. As far as typo/grammar mistakes though, it's one of the most common.
Wow, they sell a machine with non-functioning WiFi? Actually, I was planning to buy one of those Dell Lnux laptops; thanks for the heads-up.
I had a similar experience. I've now been running a new MacBook for three days and I am not going back to linux.

I couldn't believe it when I booted into Snow Leopard and zsh was already installed and configured. I'm sure my jaw actually dropped.

That's just one example. So much stuff on OS X just freaking works. It just works. I literally had my whole machine configured and working within around 2 hours. Most of that time was spent simply installing software, not configuring it.

</rant>
For me, it's this glass trackpad. No more carrying around mice! I picked up my mac primarily for that, but I've ended up doing the same thing the author did. The OS/X side of this computer just works. I need to boot up a VM and run Ubuntu 2-3 times a week, but the mac OS works all he time, and it's a (guilty) pleasure.
How do you clearly express the difference between homophones when speaking? It's obviously unnecessary for clear communication. Correct spelling is more generally used to convey educational status.
But you'll break backward compatibility. Also, there are too many different accents for any one-to-one mapping between spelling and pronunciation to work.
I read until the "turns out refit is not seamless on the MacBook". Sorry I did not read through the whole wall of text just to learn that somebody prefers Os X to Linux.
I'm mostly with you, although I think frequently the 'trolls' are just ignorant of the local customs, and will adjust their behavior if the norms are politely pointed out to them.

Perhaps it would be possible to fold (hide) the responses to negatively scored comments, so they aren't an interruption to the flow?

And is there a reason you suggest to 'just let the troll comments drop' rather than actively voting them down to the bottom of the page?
It's about trade-offs. Yes, there are issues with Linux; there have always been different various issues in any Linux distribution I've used since 1995 which is when I started.

But there are issues with Windows and OS X too. And that's where Linux's advantages kick in again. You'll always miss something from the other side of the fence. You'll have to weigh in, and some people weigh to Linux and some people don't.

I've never got too far with Windows. I ditched OS X after over two years of everyday use. Despite the uncertainty regarding hardware compatibility in Linux, I really like the way it, namely Debian and recently Ubuntu, gets rid of the _other_ problems so irritatingly present in other operating systems.

A Linux system is just too user friendly for users who aren't too system friendly.
It's okay, it's a verb phrase :).
Summary of all the MIT Introduction to Algorithms lectures
Says the man who lent his good name to the Manhattan Project. I saw a pretty detailed documentary about this, explaining how he was eventually persuaded that the dangers of Hitler getting the bomb first outweighed his initial reticence to promote the project. If Einstein had not signed the letter sent to FDR suggesting development of this weapon, FDR probably would not have taken it seriously, and the bombs would not have been available to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at least at that point in time.

I wonder if this quote came before or after the Manhattan Project.
pursue company itself? malice? insulting?

Are we in the same thread? The feedback was on the original idea. Because that's the only information we have on the company/founders.
okay, it's clearly not about PR - you haven't mentioned the name yet. but i'm still very curious, and at this point i don't think it would distract from the intention of this post.
That's impossible, we don't change enough of it to give a similar amount back. We could give back more (and we're trying to get there), but as you read in the article much of what we do is back porting.
Yes, back in the day the Unix desktop was OK for development, compared to alternatives like DOS. But then, the Unix vendors also had almost complete control of the hardware stack.

Seems that Alan Kay is right again: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware".
Here's a suggestion for a project to work on this upcoming holiday. Freeciv web client: http://code.google.com/p/freeciv-forever/
Migrate to a virtual Linux environment with Clonezilla
Now, I am very aware that the Linux Desktop is SO much better than it was even 5 years ago. We have eye candy up the wahzoo.

That was most definitely not the major issue 5 years ago. The issue 5 years ago was configuring hardware and god help you if you want to do some multimedia work on a stock linux distro.

Things are a ton better today. I don't remember the last time I had to manually edit an xorg.conf. But Linux has neither the standardized hardware of Apple nor the dominant market share of Windows to compel vendors to make their hardware work with linux.

Really the best you can do to get that level of compatibility is to get your Ubuntu laptop through Dell.
Unrelated to offices, but twice a year they fly everyone in for a weeklong retreat somewhere (not the main office, more like a resort, country house, etc)
Enough ads on that page? I could hardly find the content. Pathetic.
There's a huge problem with survivor's bias in business analysis. We tend to try to look at all the successful companies and figure out what they all do the same so we can all do it. Rarely does one look at the many more failed companies and look at what they did that the successful companies did not, so that it can be avoided.

A big part of that may be that it's much easier to pick a few successful companies to compare than to find a good sample of the many many more failed or mediocre businesses. Oh, and big names sell better.
My grampa always said he was 30 before he learned "damn yankee" was two words....

Hooray for the South?
Yes. Comments are noisy. Comments on troll posts are worthless and noisy.

Use your own best judgement. But please don't talk about adjusting the behavior of the guy who signs up as "shitcock" 15 minutes ago and channels 4chan onto the thread.
Agreed. However, a key goal of desktop Linux is to be sufficiently useful and easy that user-facing software will find an audience, and it becomes worth a developer's time to code for that platform.
This seems strange. I understand not volunteering the info, but if someone asks I don't see a problem with letting them know. You may not be asking for PR but you can always use it.
It's simple you use 's in "it's" ="it is" to mark the missing 'i' and you use the 's in eg. "the writer's article" to mark a missing 'e' from "writeres" the original possessive which disappeared sometime in late Saxon (6th century)

Although "its" is also possessive you don't use an apostrophe because that would confuse its with "it's"

Then if the word ends in an s the rules are different unless it's a name, then the rules are different again, unless it's a biblical name then the rules are different to the last rule, except for Moses and Jesus which are exceptions to this. Then of course there are always a few special cases - St James' park (footbal ground) but St James's park (park)

Of course if the word originally comes from another language then you have to use the rules from the language instead, well sometimes, say for French but not German or Dutch, actually only sometimes for Dutch depending.
Well, I'm in two minds. I've often disliked how Ubuntu, Mint, Gnome, Kde et al have attempted to ape Microsoft's and Apple's desktop experience with only a few new novel features in an attempt to gain mass acceptance, more often than not completely ignoring the fundamental philosophy of Unix, the philosophy that makes Unix-derivatives so great. Then again, it has made more desktop hardware manufacturers take notice of Linux, due to its increasing mass appeal, which has improved hardware support. At least there's enough diversity in the Unix eco-system for me to completely ignore the aforementioned for more novel systems, even though most of the effort seems to be going into aping Windows and OS X.
— Lisp compiler (ambitiously, an Arc/GOAL inspired dialect for games/multimedia, initially to target a Lua-like niche)

— TIGsource "Assemblee" game competition entry

— Client-side Javascript/canvas pixel art editor

— Playing with Adobe's Flex SDK

— Productivity application (as you may have guessed, it involves methods for keeping track of multiple parallel projects ;)

— Actual holiday stuff

— Clearing some of my backlog of video games I've been meaning to play. Top of the list is Uncharted 2.
nuclear plants takes a lot of time to build.

And a lot of oil to build.

And you can't put nuclear reactors in cars or planes.

And you can't make plastics and most industrial inputs out of nuclear energy.
Absolutely not worth it. People like Joel Spolsky, DHH, or the UX guy from Zappos, can be counted on not to put effort into figuring out how to post. Cutting expert casual commenters out of HN is a huge concession to the trolls.

I'm asking for us not to freak out about them, and just let the site do its job. Don't comment. Just mod down and, as was pointed out upthread, flag. Make it not worth it for them.