Excellent article. I like how the author's head turned to Star Wars at the face of death lol. I wonder if there's any similar kind of deviant thinking among hackers.
This is an interesting idea. Maybe it would solve pg's scaling concerns (not hardware & software but content & character) of HN to make regional sites covering NYC, Austin, Bay Area, London, etc. in addition to the top level 'global' one.
Make it a craigslist of startup/tech discussion and maybe even have the best local content percolate to a top-level/global page.
I think if you stayed on a local page you immediately get back to a vibe of the early days of HN simply because of the reduction in readers/commenters and realignment of interests (ie: the startup scene in Singapore).
One of the major issues here is that Hacker News hasn't been YC news for a long time. It's evolved on purpose to be something more than start-up focused.
Not that I don't like your idea, just that what you're asking for is a reduction of scope that I think pg has specifically not intended.
dont think sigint.sg was set up with what pg wanted in mind.
i would say that this is a great effort to start the discussion on region specific info relating to start ups which I think is what HN is not able to provide.
What about an online meeting? On an IRC channel? Can a hacker working on a project multitask and attend the IRC meeting while simultaneously coding (perhaps he has 2 monitors, he codes on the larger one and IRCs on the other one) ?
I believe work is the source of happiness. Happiness comes to you when you see the fruits of your work.
I remember feeling really happy after finishing up a program that I had been working on for a long time. Just seeing it work so perfectly gave me an incredible sense of satisfaction. It was far better from the satisfaction/pleasure I got from doing things like watching TV/movies, going on dates, eating at nice restaurants, etc.
Developing the program was definitely not play either. It involved things (like fixing bugs, coming up with algorithms) for which I had to expend a considerable amount of intellectual energy. It was work, but it was work worth working on.
C++ has a high price in terms of binary incompatibility.
I find this statement to be rather untrue because I think most modern compilers when forced to be ISO/ANSI compliant (i do: g++ -ansi -pedantic) ensure your code is portable across systems.
Well I wrote (a command-line) program that was about 2000 lines long in C++ and during most of the development period I used g++ with the -ansi & -pedantic options.
Later I was able to get my program to compile on Visual C++ with absolutely no modification.
Ah, that's different, that's just compilation (and yes, I've seen compilation incompatibilities too; VS usually requires code changes to compile).
I was referring to the binary interface. What I'd want to do (and generally can with C) is compile a library with any compiler, and link it with any other code, with no recompiling.
You see this all the time with Unix, say; maybe Sun compiles a bunch of stuff with their C compiler, but you can easily link to what's in /usr/lib using GCC. But with C++, it's typical for the loader to not link C++ libraries that were built differently; and if you're really unlucky, the loader won't notice and instead you'll see subtle binary errors at runtime.
