Hacker News Reader

schmoeon Distributed version control? How winter 2007 of you. Let's try distributed bug tracking.

Haha, I'd bet real money that > 75% of people who read this site still use a centralized VCS, most likely SVN. The pace of change is glacial.

schmoeon Stallman doesn't use a web browser

Perhaps because he has accomplished a great deal and may have some advice for those who wish to as well? Seriously, he is out of touch with reality because he doesn't waste his time browsing the web?

schmoeon Microsoft Steals Firefox Logo

Looks more like a modified ouroboros - wee bit older than Firefox.

schmoeon Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?

I don't know if being a great programmer, and great at business (as in management, sales, etc), are mutually exclusive or not. However they do seem to require very different attitudes and skills. For example, becoming a great programmer requires an incredible amount of solitary time spent reading, thinking, and programming. This would not be very appealing to someone who feels happiest interacting with other people, which happens to be a skill necessary for management and sales.

My comment certainly wasn't meant to disparage anyone. We all start out at the low end of the continuum on any given subject. A hacker is someone really interested in the subject who dedicates much time and effort to advancing their skill.

schmoeon Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?

Sure, but what sort of hacker? Hackers have narrow and deep interests, so they tend to spend time in communities that are narrow and deep like comp.lang.*, Lambda the Ultimate, A List Apart, etc.

Based on the most popular topics, comments, etc I would say Hacker News appeals mostly to people building web apps which generally breaks down into programmers, designers, and perhaps business types. My prior comment indicated why HN doesn't appeal to programmers, and I don't see a lot of deep design topics or discussions either.

I don't think a community that addresses "hackers" in general can work. By its very nature it would have too much noise on topics any given hacker isn't interested in. I suspect that is why the hackers I know spend time in several specialized communities.

schmoeon Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?

I don't think so, at least not hackers who are programmers. Most of the interesting links seem to be cross-posted from programming.reddit.com and receive relatively few upvotes.

I know a number of very good hackers and not a single one reads news.ycombinator.com. Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit. You will however find a number of them posting on Lambda the Ultimate, and a few on programming.reddit.com.

My gut feeling is that news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers.

Here is a list of the top 10 items as I edit this post:

1. Number of founders - statistics 163 points by fauigerzigerk 2 days ago | 34 comments

2. Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital (pmarca.com) 30 points by henning 16 hours ago | 16 comments

3. Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live (heroku.com) 19 points by chaostheory 13 hours ago | 6 comments

4. Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder! 88 points by BitGeek 2 days ago | 92 comments

5. The Talent Myth, by Malcolm Gladwell (newyorker.com) 3 points by hhm 2 hours ago | 1 comment

6. Modern Lisp (with support for concurrency) based on Java Virtual Machine (sourceforge.net) 10 points by riobard 11 hours ago | discuss

7. Performance-pay Perplexes (newyorker.com) 25 points by davidw 1 day ago | 5 comments

8. Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective? 2 points by hhm 1 hour ago | 3 comments

9. Exercise on the Brain (nytimes.com) 29 points by jlhamilton 1 day ago | discuss

10. Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail (arstechnica.com) 8 points by muriithi 12 hours ago | 2 comments

I'd say #6 is the only item of technical interest and not a single comment!

schmoeon Ask News.YC: Opinions on Linux distros, Helma, Java Frameworks

I prefer CentOS (http://www.centos.org) as a server OS. It is well tested, secure, and reasonably up to date. CentOS is very nice for the sysadmin: configuration is well thought out, handy utilities like "service" and "chkconfig", automatic security updates, etc. Plus if you need support, upgrading to RHEL is trivial.

Unfortunately I don't think CentOS is built for PPC.

schmoeon The E Language in a Walnut

E is a fascinating distributed programming language, designed explicitly for building secure systems. With E and capability security you can build digital currencies, mobile code, virtual worlds, etc and bypass many traditional security problems.

schmoeon Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites

Amen! That was my very first thought as well :) You would think history provides sufficient demonstrations that private deals with tyrants usually backfire in the end.

The Dalai Lama is an amazing person; always has a smile and kind words, even in response to threats and anger from the Chinese govt. I loved his responses after meeting Bush: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/10/17/dalai.lama.ap/index.htm...

schmoeon Building the Right Connections

You might have to work much harder being outside of a tech center, but if you build something great, people will initiate contact with you regardless of where you are. If your idea depends on having connections before it can work then you might want to try something else.

There are exciting and successful startups all over the world. There might be more concentration in SV, but I believe you can succeed anywhere with the right product.

schmoeon Day Jobs

How about doing some consulting for a startup, maybe even one from a previous YC round? You should be able to negotiate a pretty flexible schedule if you have expertise they need.

schmoeon What language(s) do you use for your client / server architecture?

Server Side

If your app is db-bound then use your favorite language. If it requires a lot of CPU time, you'll probably want a language that compiles to native code. Lots of choices there so look for the most productive one given your performance constraints.

Is your application highly distributed, or in need of fault tolerance outside of the database? Erlang might be an ideal fit. Can you build the entire thing out of Java libraries? Then Java's probably your best bet, but...

If you're building something and expecting tons of of concurrent users then you'll probably have to write most of the code from scratch. So keep that in mind when picking a language.

Client Side

If your client is very GUI-based then most cross-platform toolkits may not feel native enough. You might want to consider writing writing separate clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, If a purely native feel isn't necessary, you could use your favorite scripting language and GTK+, or wxWindows, or QT. Or Java and Swing or SWT.

If you have a unique, or web-like, GUI then maybe Mozilla's XULRunner would be a good choice.

schmoeon 3 invites for Pownce

schmoe@sent.com

schmoeon Kevin Ham - "the man who owns the internet" (long)

What a great example of Hannah Arendt's "the banality of evil". Since the domain market is unregulated why not take advantage of that for your own personal gain, regardless of who it harms? After all everyone else is too right? Buy up all the names you can and fill them with worthless advertising instead of useful content. How disgusting!

schmoeon MySpace did it, I will too

Where did you get the $25-$30 USD figure for Windows Server? Pricing a server at dell.com shows $799 for Standard and $3,295 for Enterprise (useful if you want more than 4GB RAM or 4 CPUs) But the OS isn't so expensive compared to SQL Server which is $5,799.00 for a Standard single processor license, or $25,009.00 for Enterprise (useful if you want all of the high-availability features).

schmoeon What is your favorite popular link aggregator?

With the nearly endless supply of interesting links from del.icio.us, digg, reddit, news.yc, etc, do you use one of the popular link aggregators to stay on top of what's hot? So far I've come across three that look interesting: popurls http://popurls.com/ theweblist http://theweblist.net/ and trendalicious http://glozer.net/trendy/ I really like the mix of textual and visual links on popurls, but my favorite is trendalicious because it combines links from del.icio.us, digg, and reddit into one "top 100" list. Just wish it included news.yc too!

schmoeon Iminlikewithyou invites here (All out)

schmoe AT sent DOT com - oh well, thanks anyway.