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Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | lmkg: I, for one, agree that the pace of technological innovation has somewhat slowed down of recently. Compared to nuclear energy, television, the space race, the complete eradication of small pox, personal computers, test tube babies, and the internet, the last 10 years seem a little disappointing. Modern miracles li... |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | slvrspoon: i work with a hacker startup focused on impact of these issues and there is a ton of info there: http://www.givewell.net |
What are the good alternatives to Google Groups? | snitko: You should give ReSubj a try: http://resubj.com |
The best way to put technical skills to the greater good? | roundsquare: One software problem yo can try to solve: micro finance institutions are in dire need of good systems. Many of them run on excel and have a horrible time keeping track of data. If they need to generate a report, they often have someone doing it by hand and the data comes back jumbled up. This hurts thei... |
How do you organize your git branches? | zb: Using Stacked Git to maintain multiple patches is a useful alternative to keeping multiple branches for some workflows. Obviously it depends on what you're doing with them. |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | tungstenfurnace: Affluent people are aggressively hooked on entertainment and stress-based productivity, which has dampened creativity and optimism somewhat, imo.One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials science. |
Git Hosting | cellis: not sure if you've already checked them out, but projectlocker has free git hosting. |
Hacker News Los Angeles Meetup? | ApolloRising: I'm up for it |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | jodrellblank: I'm in bed typing on a triple radio, camera, touch, motion, sound and proximity sensitive phone so I can't easily get links for citations from the wotld's first distibuted volunteer enyclopedia, but I think I read there that Guinea worm infection is well on the way to being the next eradicated disease, wi... |
Simple, fast JavaScript Framework? | parasctr: use YUI 3.0. |
How do you keep track of your service ? | alanthonyc: I keep a personal wiki of all my projects. I just note everything down on there. |
How do you keep track of your service ? | dangrossman: Just memory. I have a desktop widget I whipped up in a few minutes to constantly poll load averages from all 6 servers.There are so many more important things to track when you run an app/service. |
When is the best time of day to post? | niyazpk: I assume you are asking about HN.1) The quality of the post and a good title is more important than the time you post.2) Luck is a more important factor than the time of the day. Just remember that if there are more visitors in the site, there are more new posts too. |
When is the best time of day to post? | swombat: From my experiments- As niyazpk mentions, quality is more important than timing. A poor article will always sink, and most of the time a great article (properly promoted) will rise. However...- To give your article the best chances, post in the european morning.Why?- The european crowds are generally more disc... |
Anybody here got use for micropayments? | spokey: I happen to be working on a micropayment strategy and implementation for my day job (we're content producers in this scenario) but we're US based.I am curious to know more about the micropayment problem your startup is solving.The technical issues--transactional processing, account management, integration with ... |
Why are there so many NoSQL databases? | kez: Thanks for all the comments; I have put together a brief summary: http://www.justkez.com/why-are-there-so-many-nosql-options/It's been very interesting reading the responses. |
How do you keep track of your service ? | ScottWhigham: I'm a Windows guy and we use OneNote. I suspect EverNote would be a good option too. |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | dazzawazza: It may not seem like a revolution but I think the micro loan model is a huge revolution. Not just because it lifts people from poverty and empowers.One of the most important things it does is show people in rich countries that poor people are both hard working and honest and are not in need of charity but a... |
Why I can't upvote on a comment? | ErrantX: I had this on occasion (one reason I now only upvote and downvote very rarely now) in the past - and know a large number of regulars have too.Im guessing the formula is just throwing a false positive; you will get it back in a few days.pg has never explicitly commented on what constitutes "abuse" in the mind o... |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | synnik: I haven't linked the page anywhere but here yet. I trust this community as a reasonable gauge of how people will react, and wanted to know whether or not you think people will have enough interest to make this happen.(see my comments on the 'what are you working on' thread for a little more info on the project ... |
Git Hosting | hopeless: I've just been trying out unfuddle and codebase. Looks like i'll go with codebase for the slightly more polished ui and faster pageloads. |
What are you working on? | david927: I've created a relational database that can horizontally scale and now I'm putting it to use. |
What would be a proper Boing ball demo for a current Amiga | rbanffy: No ideas?I know it's hard. Graphics and polygon count would not impress the PS3 generation, but what would? Real-time video interference? A new desktop-less webcam-captured gesture-oriented 3D environment? |
Anybody here got use for micropayments? | jdietrich: No. It's a solution in search of a problem. There are plenty of businesses that would like to receive micropayments, but time after time customers have rejected them. Even if you somehow created a system that was absolutely seamless and required zero effort on the part of the user, you'd still have to convin... |
Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade? | samstokes: Smartphones are transformative. They're already affecting popular culture and will do so even more as they become more widespread. (One simple example: arranging to meet a friend at a location new to one or both of you can be more spontaneous if you both have GPS-enabled local search.)I suspect most of the c... |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | davidw: Why not just use a cheap Linode (or slightly less cheap Slicehost if that's your thing)? |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | ichverstehe: There won't be a market. Yet. It will take a lot more momentum before it happens. Ruby has Heroku and Engine Yard. But the Ruby ecosystem is much larger. |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | covercash: So you want $20 and if you succeed in reaching your goal, you then want me to create art to display in your gallery. If that artwork sells, you then take a cut. If you don't succeed in reaching your goal, you keep my $20...Sounds risk free for you. |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | bengl: I was thinking along these lines as well. I was keen on Appjet and I think it would be great if that void were filled with something node.js-based. (Or maybe narwhal? Or both?) |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | mschy: Correct me if I'm missing something, but won't this require that you raise $700k or so, so you can pay the taxes, and then spend the $400k?That strikes me as... ambitious.Also, the whole thing seems much more 'help me out of my problem!' than 'let me do something cool for you!' I think if you want a good shot ... |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | michael_dorfman: I hate to be that guy, but this sounds crazy.Let me get this straight: You want 20,000 people to send you $20 each, and a postcard. You'll have an exhibition of these 20,000 postcards, and send the "artists" 60% of the sales price of whatever postcards you happen to sell. So, if someone picks my post... |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | brk: It's reasonable, it just seems improbable.You need $400,000, and you're going to take donations $20 at a time. That's 20,000 people. Let's even say 10,000 people (you have some cash of your own, some people will just give you free money).I think this is the sort of thing that you end up stuck in the middle. You... |
What would be a proper Boing ball demo for a current Amiga | slater: How about a realtime ray-traced version of multiple balls, with the viewpoint turning around the balls? |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | DanielStraight: Go to a doctor. Not the most exciting answer, but there's any number of sleep conditions you may have that a doctor can diagnose and treat. |
Funding Died. Is this a reasonable response? Any suggestions? | mahmud: I deleted several replies, and decided to go with the following:If this is your best/last idea, move on. Cut your loses short and find something else within your means. |
Requesting code sample from potential employer? | hga: Good idea! And for the right company, they'll be impressed that you're doing your due diligence on them.I haven't done exactly this (hey, I made some of my best (but most painful money) working on wretched code bases), but I've done this sort of thing when helping my company decide whether to partner with another... |
Does anybody know of a node.js hosting provider? | Klonoar: I've been running my Node.js instances on a shared hosting account at Webfaction. Extremely stable, very easy to set up, very cheap to maintain.It's where I test my builds of Luno, actually. (http://github.com/ryanmcgrath/luno) |
Requesting code sample from potential employer? | mahmud: You do that as a contractor, when you're asked to give a fixed quote for a maintenance job.For full time positions, it's reasonable to inquire about the engineering practices of the shop, code guidelines and similar, what freedoms you have to make spot decisions, etc. But asking for actual code is just silly. I... |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | michael_dorfman: APL |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | mbrubeck: Guy Steele knows a bit about language design (having co-invented Scheme and Fortress, worked on early implementations of TeX and TECO/Emacs, and helped write the specifications for Java, Common Lisp, ECMAScript, Fortran, and C). In Coders at Work he says,"There's this Huffman encoding problem. If you make so... |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | bdfh42: The language called MUMPS only uses single letter key words as I recall - but that way lies insanity. |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | JimboOmega: I don't know about your weight/diet, but if I wake up hungry, it's because I really skimped on dinner. Maybe your meal isn't big enough?When I used to wake up early, the general reason was because of medication I was taking - ironically to sleep (Ambien in this case). What medicines do you take? Do youIt... |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | frankus: I've had this problem in the past and continue to have it occasionally. I'm not usually thirsty and/or hungry, but usually my mind will wander and I'll start getting excited about some project I'm working on or (worse) start worrying about something that at 3 in the morning I can't begin to do anything about.H... |
How might the most compact programming language in the world look like? | pierrefar: Kinda related: there are various genomes that encode overlapping genes. This makes them very compact in that they take less physical space to achieve the same end result,In this analogy, the language is the genome (DNA or RNA) and the program is the set of proteins that make up the virus or whatnot.As far as... |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | Scott_MacGregor: When you work out your burning energy (calories) and losing water through sweat. 1. Try eating an extra healthy snack like a cup of yogurt and a piece of fruit before you go to bed every day, like a ritual even if you’re not hungry.
2. Your body seems to need more water to replenish what you sweat... |
I've got a sleep problem, I always wake up at night | crocowhile: You wake up thirsty and hungry in the middle of the night? Sorry for the silly question but are you having proper dinner at the proper time? |
Where to get data for a Web/iPhone app idea? | maxklein: Use Amazon Mechanical Turk. |
Requesting code sample from potential employer? | ShabbyDoo: Many times, I have been shown architectural diagrams that painted pretty pictures of what turned out to be disastrous codebases. In retrospect, there were other, non-technical "smells" that indicated that the sausage might not be so well made -- dumb developers, vague managers, production broken-ness, etc.I... |
iPhone app like BB messenger? | kyro: I've been searching for something like this for a long time and haven't found anything similar to BBM. I do use an app called WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp.com/) which gives you free text messaging capabilities via your 3G connection; so I can text to groups of my friends, and those over in the UK without being h... |
What makes things/memes "trend" on twitter? | kyro: For the Facebook bra color meme, I think the mysterious nature of it all helped give it momentum as many people didn't quite understand what was going, leading people to either post a color to mock the situation or ask around to find out what exactly was going on, and then posting a color to taunt others who were... |
Git Hosting | pjhyett: What about the plans at GitHub seems pricey? (Not trying to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious)edit: what sort of guarantee of privacy are you expecting as well? |
Open source software liability? | imgabe: I think most open source licenses specifically disclaim any liability for damages caused by faults in the software. |
Open source software liability? | clueless123: That is funny! you really think you can pass liability to someone like Sun or MS ? :)Small suggestion: Re-read your eula/terms etc .. |
Open source software liability? | jacquesm: I've yet to see a single case where a closed source software vendor accepted liability for data loss and / or security related issues.Do you have a documented case where you can show that a closed source software vendor was forced to cough up at least a sizable part of the damages sued for ?They all pretty mu... |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | jacquesm: First time was in '86 after working for a bank for a while and talking to my boss who laid out for me why I should go and do a thing on my own. Awesome guy (Thanks Eddy!).I sold that business and traveled for a while after that, freelancing whenever the money pit was at low tide.It was '93 last time I started... |
Coming soon pages worth it? | kyro: I'd say it's worth it. It won't take long. Try and do what you can to squeeze out some SEO juice, throw in Google analytics, and an email field; see if you get any hits or email addresses. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | dawie: Add a mail chimp form with: We will let you know when we launch.There is definitely some value with getting a page up. I think there is even a webapp that will do it for you. I forgot the name though. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | jasonlbaptiste: It's definitely worth it. You need to have something. I'd throw up a Wordpress install with a landing page theme that you modify. I saw a few on themeforest for $7. You should certainly start blogging around your industry as well. |
Coming soon pages worth it? | jacquesm: There are two sides to this:Yes, do it if there are already people operating in this space, the idea is already out in the open so you won't lose any 'window' by announcing your intentions.If not put a fake for sale sign on the domain so that you get an idea how many people are thinking about entering the spa... |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | alanthonyc: My experience, just for mulling over:I've worked in my industry now for over ten years. Over that time, I've made a pretty good living. Now, I've got enough in the bank that I can take time off without worrying about rent or any other basic necessities. I started on my webapp last year part time, but I'l... |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | pclark: I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be CEO of a startup |
Review my holiday project | webdance: I have to thank you so very, very much for this application. It is changing my life, no joke. I'm an adult with ADD and perfectionism. Everything I've ever succeeded at has been a last-minute adrenaline-filled fire drill. My hopes for this year are things that can be accomplished only through slow-and-steady ... |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | YuriNiyazov: I've worked in companies for other people; time and time again I would find myself in situations where some sort of decision had to be made; some sort of meeting would be called where I would say "my opinion is that we should do X", people above me would say "no, we should actually do Y", Y would be done, ... |
What made you decide to pursue a startup? | ddemchuk: No matter how high up you go in a company, you're always ultimately building out someone else's ideas. My happiness has a direct connection with seeing my own ideas come to fruition.The full process of coming up with an idea, planning and designing, grinding through all of the shit that comes along with actua... |
What are the best technologies you've worked with this year? | jeff444: Java libraries aren't as simple as the Python counterparts, agreed and I too just built a sudoku solver http://sudokusolver.info seems like everyone has built one of those... I wonder why? |
Coming soon pages worth it? | zb: Google Apps + Google AppEngine. Total cost: $0 (since you already have a domain). |
Is asking your friends to vote your HN postings to the front page ok? | araneae: The algorithm actually deals with this; if the same person keeps upvoting your posts it will no longer work after a while.So if you're using this strategy, save it for special occasions. |
Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | jacquesm: How are you going to identify those celebrities in the first place and how are you going to get them to play your game in a way that you are going to be allowed to 'associate' your name with theirs without paying up ? |
Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | jodrellblank: A high score board I can't get on no matter how hard I play or how often or how much I pay or how long I spend playing or how many people I recommend to? A game that I paid for which contains a bit I can't play and never will be able to play because of my social status?Why not rename the current score boa... |
Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you upto? | sunir: I'm working on Bibdex, online bibliography software for the community of scholars and scientists.http://www.bibdex.comLast weekend I was working hard to get it onto the production server. I've done that. The marketing website is good, and the blog is designed and functional.This weekend I am continuing down my l... |
Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you upto? | nostrademons: Compiler for a new programming language. Implemented in Haskell, compiles to LLVM.May go in to work and do some work stuff instead, though, since my project there's in a fairly exciting phase. |
Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | hkuo: I think there is definitely something to this. In the show Top Gear, we see celebrities competing for the fastest (or maybe most entertaining) lap time in their reasonably priced car. I love seeing how they will compare, even if, as an American, I don't quite know who all of them are.But what if Top Gear created ... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | docgnome: Some of us don't cut Apple any more slack. I am rather tired of the free pass they seem to get from others. They are probably worse than MS in terms of vendor lock-in but just don't have a large enough market share to bully people around. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | almost: There is usually at least one comment putting forward this idea for every story about Apple or Google and I wouldn't say it's particularly controversial. "we" are a collection of people, many of us with differing ideas on many subjects. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | zitterbewegung: I think people tend to associate slack with quality. If a product is better than the average then people will tend to give it more slack. But this isn't uniform to everyone. Not everyone will give a value greater than zero for the slack. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | MikeCapone: I think it's pretty clear why geeks tend to go easier on them: they make good products.When Google and Apple start making products that are on par with Microsoft products, I'm pretty sure they'll be just as reviled. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | csomar: This community is Anti-MS (not all, but many); so you'll find a lot here that hates Microsoft and loves Google. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | mechanical_fish: The word "monopoly" is often abused. Neither Apple nor Google have one. There are other phones than the iPhone. There are other MP3 players than the iPod. There are other computers than Macs. There are even other search engines than Google, as Microsoft will be happy to tell you.Things were different b... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | ThinkWriteMute: Eric Schmidt's dismissal of the notion that people have a right to privacy.Wow, started out with word twisting, now it's up to out right lying about what he said? That's impressive. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | blhack: Also Google's privacy invasions including Eric Schmidt's dismissal of the notion that people have a right to privacy.I'm sorry, but I understood his comment on this to mean "You can't put stuff on a server you don't own without...putting stuff on a server you don't own".I wouldn't lump Google in with Apple at a... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | gcaprio: Ironically, I just blogged about this, except with FB in the place of Google: http://blog.1530technologies.com/2009/12/where-is-the-disgus...I remain confident that a portion of the success of Google has come from the fact that they came along at the peak of anti-MS fever in the industry. People were yearning... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | drhowarddrfine: "Google's privacy invasions..."Could I have a list, with details, of these privacy invasions?"the shenanigans that Apple and Google have been pulling"Is that your opinion or fact? Were they mis-steps, mistakes or shenanigans?Are you bringing these popular topics up because you read about all this on for... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | GHFigs: This may surprise you, but there are intelligent and rational people who aren't personally offended by the same things you are. |
Weekend update -- What weekend projects are you upto? | spiralhead: Working on a web crawler that tracks the associations between websites online. Currently working on the front-end which will, at first, simply list websites ordered by how many other websites link to them which is not incredibly interesting in and of itself but my rough plan is to implement some sort of cro... |
What languages used to write computer languages? | jacquesm: There are 'bootstrap' languages that are mostly written 'in themselves', Forth (in your list already) and Lisp come to mind but there are plenty of others.For performance reasons usually some of the more frequently used constructs will be re-written in a lower level language but there is no strict requirement... |
What languages used to write computer languages? | daeken: A good deal of higher-level languages are completely bootstrapping. C#, Nemerle, a good number of Scheme implementations, etc all compile themselves. You of course have to write your initial implementation in something else, but once that's done many compliers bootstrap themselves completely. In fact, when I... |
What languages used to write computer languages? | swolchok: Arc: MzScheme core, then Arc. |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | sker: Not only that, but anything released by Apple or Google is omg awesome and fantastic, and anything released by Microsoft is another me-too product, no matter how innovative it actually is. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | dkersten: A natively compiled language can be written in whatever language you feel is easiest to write the compiler in, so either the language you are most comfortable in or the language with the best parser/code gen libraries.Once you can compile your languages source code, you could reimplement the compiler in your ... |
What languages used to write computer languages? | silentbicycle: Lua and Awk are written in C. Scheme is often written in another Lisp or C, and many Prologs are written in C or Lisp (or other Prologs). Erlang's VM is written in C, though it was originally prototyped in Prolog. It's not unusual to write scaffolding for a language (i.e., an interpreter or a VM) in C, a... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | ErrantX: As someone who never "hated" MS in the first place I am amused to see the recent spate of anti-Google posting.I think... people have fads and at the moment Google is getting to be on certain individuals radars. I have to say I will just continue using products I think are cool and useful and keep an eye on the... |
What languages used to write computer languages? | scott_s: I'm confused by question 1. I assume by saying "cross compile the language in C" you mean "the compiler for language X generates C code." If so, the answer is easy: to leverage the heavily used, portable and well optimized machine-code generators that exist for C. |
What languages used to write computer languages? | berlinbrown: Factor: Factor and a little C |
What languages used to write computer languages? | berlinbrown: * Python: C, but also Java and C#
* Ruby: C, but also JavaDo you mean there are different implementations in other languages?* Jython: Java
* Cpython: C?
* Jython: Java |
What languages used to write computer languages? | jcdreads: Here is a great description of how Alan Kay and friends wrote the Squeak (Smalltalk) VM using another (Apple) Smalltalk:http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.htmlAlso consider that a bunch of languages (most?) consist of a kernel (or other VM) written in something native (like C) surrounded by a bunch of l... |
Are we too lenient on Google and Apple? | jsz0: Microsoft does basically all the same things but doesn't provide me with any upside like Google & Apple. The Xbox/Zune are locked down walled gardens like the iPhone. Microsoft has had a history with DRM-ed audio files just like Apple. Windows is commercial software with an EULA/TOS attached to it just like OSX. ... |
What languages used to write computer languages? | zitterbewegung: Clojure: Java |
What languages used to write computer languages? | cmelbye: Ruby has also been done in Objective-C, hasn't it? |
What languages used to write computer languages? | mhansen: Javascript: C++ (TraceMonkey, Spidermonkey, V8), Java (Rhino) [EDIT: Sorry, C++, not C] |
What languages used to write computer languages? | anonjon: lisp is written in lisp. (and sometimes C) |
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