I recommend founders read this too. It would be useful to them to imagine how things look from the investors' side. I'm surprised more didn't take advantage of the Justin.tv stream to spy on the investors at AngelConf. They were pretty candid about how they think.

Like the idea, but a few problems:

- Sites that aren't super active yet for me must have RSS. RSS is my callback mechanism. There are probably only 10 sites that I visit on a routine basis, but I subscribe to 45 (mostly low volume) RSS feeds. Alternative for me these days is Twitter.

- As others mentioned green color is bad. I can barely read the title.

- "Academic" is too vague. Academic for what? Computer science? Any papers on anything? Professor's union meeting write-ups? Specials in the U. Toronto snack bar? Note: Current "Hacker News" ousted the previously more specific name, "Startup News".

- Is this different from http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/ ?

Makes me wonder what's wrong with posting them here - I'd welcome some "great tech papers" (as they put it) here.

One of the ways Askimet works is shared-secret-key authentication using your email address. Notice how sites collect your email address when you submit a comment but they don't usually publish it. However, they do send your email address to Askimet. As a result, we can get a fairly good approximation of whether a comment is spam or not simply by checking to see if the email address was used for comments previously flagged as spam or ham. The more non-spam comments--and especially the more ham comments--that the email address has in the corpus, the less likely it is that the new message is spam.

Now, imagine I am a spammer. I need to submit some automated comments that don't look like spam so that my spammy comments wll later get accepted. There are a variety of ways I can do this. The easiest is to give the user a generic compliment like "Wow, this was a great blog post! Thanks for publishing it." The comment doesn't add to the discussion but the blog owner is often reluctant to delete it because (a) it strokes his ego, (b) there is no way for him to tell if it is automatically generated or not. In fact, if his spam filter preemptively classified it as spam, he might even override the filter and reclassify it as ham; this would be a huge win for the spammer-to-be. Another way to do this is to automatically scrape a comment from another discussion about the page like Reddit, Digg, Twitter, or FriendFeed and submit it as a blog comment on the original page. A third way is to pay somebody a (very) small amount of money to read the blog post and write a comment (possibly using some fill-in-the-blanks response template system like those used in call centers.)

It works the other way too. If I want your comments to start getting flagged as spam then I should start submitting spam-like comments in your name. Then, users will start classifying my forged spam comments as spam and the automatic classifiers will start automatically classifying your valid comments as spam.

Interesting, but it read as kind of arrogant to me. Or perhaps bitter? I can't tell. Anyone else get that vibe?

More HN catching with top stories from Reddit. The proggit discussion has many insights.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_...

  The context is important. First, it is in reply to this, which quotes Spolsky as:
    "This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture
    group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around
    forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had
    lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
  Second, the post to the mailing list itself is a forward of a private e-mail
  from Greg Whitten. I can't see if he said anywhere he was okay with making
  it public.

More HN catching with proggit top stories.

I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently private mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter, please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles

"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."

Suing Facebook because you 'came up with the idea'?

Writing a "tell all" book and trying to sell it?

Blatently violating the Google TOS, and then suing them because they wouldn't tell you what part of the TOS you violated?

That's 3 pretty big reasons.

Disclaimer: I'm a vim guy. When I get awe-struck comments from those looking over my shoulder, it's not about any plugins or IDE-like functionality, it's about how fast I'm editing text. Let's remind ourselves, that's the core function of a text editor: to help you edit text, as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

I was hoping to see more of that angle in this video, but instead I just saw how emacs can be an IDE. I'd be very interested to just see a couple of classes (or any substantial chunk of code) written by an emacs "power user" without the narration and tutorial.

I forgot to add the corollary. Much like computers will soon be able to solve CAPTCHAs better than people, automated spamming systems will eventually be able to generate comments that are as good or better than human-submitted comments. In other words, we can expect comments that are generated by spammers to eventually become valuable enough that we want to retain them instead of filtering them away. That isn't the reality today but it could be soon.

You might have a discussion in your blog's comments and then realize that everybody in the conversation is a robot except you. And you will learn something from those robots and/or lose an argument with them, when they get really good.

Eventually, you will be able to post a rough draft of your blog post, and the spam robots will start up a good conversation about it in the comments. Then, based on their feedback, you can revise it into the final draft (if the robots haven't already given you a link to a blog post that refuted your point or made it better than you can).

As a final step, we might notice that not only are the best comments are written by spam robots, but the best blogs are spam blogs too. Right now, people are blogging-for-adsense manually; in the future, Google will be able to blog-for-adsense itself, cutting out the authors.

Today, if a site wants its user-generated content (comments in this case) to retain its value, it needs to start filtering out the low-value content, regardless of whether it was generated by a spammer or a well-intentioned user. For example, If I add a comment to your blog "Great blog post!" on your blog, you should probably delete it, even if you know I am not a spammer. Unfortunately, if you do that, legitimate users who see their complimentary comments get deleted might react negatively (e.g. stop commenting or complain loudly, generating even worse comments). So, we can see that the spammers who are generating low-value comments already have the ability to drive away your valuable commentators if those commentators occasionally submit low-value comments.

Sorry, why would I use a mouse? It's emacs.

Yeah, especially considering how much more of a nightmare COM and the rest of the .NET predecessors were which he was involved with, as compared to .NET, which he wasn't.

Maybe he's spot on, maybe not. But one thing is for sure; his story does not contain a trace of humility.

You're still thinking like a developer (like Bram) by emphasizing the merging algorithm too much. It wasn't Linus's experience merging that helped him design the superior software. It was all the rest of his project-management experience, which helped him realize the role of merging within the broader system.

Well, it's certainly beaten the crap out of Codeville, Monotone, OpenCM, darcs, ArX, and the other various decentralized source control systems that have been presented at CodeCon (Bram's conference), including the one Bram wrote.

I decided that Git had won about a year ago, so I switched to it (from CVS and darcs). Mercurial still looked like it might be a reasonable competitor at the time, and it certainly isn't going to disappear, but Git is definitely in the lead at this point.

It's won the mindshare of the people who typically start new projects: hackers, entrepreneurs, independent developers, freelancers.

Existing projects rarely switch VCses, because it's such a pain to move everything over. So new ones gain market share by being the choice of new projects, which then gradually displace old projects in the marketplace. This takes basically forever: a lot of people are still using CVS. But git's won the battle for folks creating new codebases, so it's basically inevitable at this point that people will eventually migrate over to it.