techiferous

Although not really "nearby", you can also try to view a launch yourself: http://www.marsspaceport.com/

I saw a satellite launch from this site a few years ago. It's one of my favorite memories.

Very creative.

I would expect the biggest win for this campaign to be in the very beginning when the novelty attracts people.

I don't think this would be sustainable, because the QR code sculptures would require continual adjustment throughout the year to account for the procession of the sun. And clouds.

Good point. Or that 200k would be better spent in an X Prize style contest for a better JavaScript web framework.

The "penalty", as I understand it, is neither a fine nor a record of wrongdoing, as paying at the end of the year is not illegal. The penalty is the IRS saying that it would like to have the interest back that it otherwise would have earned if you had paid earlier.

As far as I understand, it's perfectly kosher to wait until the end of the year to make payments; you just have to make sure you have the money to actually pay then.

Disclaimer: I am not an accountant nor do I have expertise on this matter.

I love this skeptical and evidence-demanding attitude.

You may find evidence to support this (and other information about habits) in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/14000...

From personal experience, I've found the Seinfeld Calendar to be powerful, which is similar to the idea the author wrote about. http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

A one-hour old account with negative karma. Sounds like HN needs an auto-delete algorithm.

GPL requires you to give back; MIT gives you the choice. Developers are by nature creative people. And humans are not incapable of altruism. Even with an MIT license, I expect a lot of community contributions to pour in.

In fact, I expect more community contributions to come in. MIT means (perhaps) a lower percentage of users will give back, but there will be a higher absolute number of users since the license is more permissive.

As a Rails developer, your comment baffles me. We are practically drowning in open-source Ruby gems, many that are very useful and of high quality.

> If you completely open source a new system, developers will just rip it off, contribute nothing, and it will go nowhere. So where's the incentive to continue making it better?

The exact opposite of what you described happened with Ruby on Rails.

"Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days."

This is true if you are already an experienced web developer. You already know the problem space well and have an intuition about good solutions and approaches. Someone handing you Rails as a tool can certainly speed up the development time.

This is also only true if the application is trivial; you can only create a simple "first cut" of a product in a matter of days.

"Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming."

I think Ruby is a great first programming language; it has a cleaner, more consistent syntax than some other languages with fewer gotchas and edge cases (I'm looking at you, JavaScript!).

Rails, on the other hand, has a lot of magic, so that if it is your first programming experience, you will probably approach programming more in terms of memorizing and repeating the magical incantations instead of having an understanding of how the system works and practice in designing and crafting good systems of your own. So in that sense, Rails (and the state of web programming in general) may make it harder for people to get really good at programming.

Computer Engineering, so I clicked "Yes".

I agree with your reasoning that it might not be worth the time, but I think spending five hours a month on server upkeep is a little steep. I've got two Linodes running and I rarely spend more than an hour a month on server-related issues. Of course, I don't have millions of views, but if that's the case, my assumption is that this high traffic would come with enough revenue to make it worth my time.

So yes, I agree with your sentiment, but once you have servers up and running with good tools they don't take that much effort.

Yes, the "empty quarter" or "outback" of Oregon is mentioned, especially the amazing challenges of census workers in the region.

If you like geography, this book is a good read. It's a bit dated, having been written in the early 1990s, but this, in my opinion, turns out to be a good thing. It gives us some great glimpses of how isolated these communities were and I'm sure the Internet has since changed this considerably.

This sounds like an extremely high-cost environment. How would you compete with high tech R&D centers around the world that may have 1/10th or 1/100th the costs? I'm not saying you can't compete, but I think you'd have to offer something (1) that you couldn't get anywhere else but Nauru and (2) is in very high demand.

(And by the way, not trying to rain on your parade; on the contrary, I find this discussion fascinating, so thanks for starting it.)

True. And yes, please keep thinking of alternatives to brute force. :)

I recently read a fascinating book called "Miles from Nowhere" which described life in the least populated counties in the U.S. One recurring theme is that counties with almost no one living in them are subject to being taken over by groups with their own agenda. For example, a county with only 150 people in it might be the target of a group of libertarians. 800 libertarians may agree to move there to set up a libertarian government. The point the book made was that virtually uninhabited is very different than uninhabited, and that there are still people there who have wishes, dreams and rights of their own.

So what you are describing is actually an act of force. Overtaking Nauru for your own purposes is a unilateral destruction of someone's home. Imagine for some odd reason the entire population of China decided to buy out and relocate to your city and turn it into a Chinese culture and economy. You may have nothing against the Chinese or Chinese culture, but you may wish to simply keep your home city as is.

Democracy is often thought of as peaceful, but it can often be a vehicle for the majority to disregard the legitimate needs of the minority.

> I would offer 50.000k$ to every citizen to abdicate authority trough democratic process and move off the island (or possibly stay and work for me).

History teaches us that there will always be hold-outs and that the most effective way to achieve this goal is through brute force. This is how the U.S. base in Diego Garcia came to be. The islanders who lived there were forcibly deported from their homes in the 1970s by the British who owned the islands.

You'd have to be creative with the economy. Nauru is literally made of shit. The phosphate-rich soil has been basically completely mined, so it has very little natural resources. It's very expensive to have humans living on an island with little natural resources. You'd have to be very creative in your business model to make this work. But I imagine that's your point entirely: the business model would be founded on the "benevolent" dictatorship which would have the latitude to create a completely unique economic system that could attract particular types of business ventures.

> With this environment, you can easily work in private, no distraction mode, or in full social mode...

Bingo. It seems that so many people operate under the assumption that there is only one way to work (social or private). The truth is that some people tend to be more productive working mostly alone and others tend to be more productive spending most of their time in direct collaboration. Also, some tasks lend themselves to private, heads-down work and others lend themselves to group collaboration. An office environment needs to have the flexibility for this.

Any office setup that only allows for one style of work is bound to have problems.

Also useful: a comparison of languages, cookbook style: http://pleac.sourceforge.net/

Yes, the idea of biking in Boston scares me. About 90% of the people I know who ride bikes in Boston have gotten in at least one accident. The streets are very crowded.

"In general I found having a car was a pretty key part of living in Boston."

This is true for you, but not my experience. I moved to Boston in 2008 and got rid of my car. I've been living car-free for four years now. I thought I'd need zip cars or cabs every once in a while but I don't use either. I mostly walk everywhere (I live in Cambridge) and occasionally take the T.

The real story is not how bikable Boston is, but how walkable it is.

The choice between (1) 12-year-old operating system and (2) current operating system seems like a no-brainer. But I suspect the choice for some people is between (1) upgrading 12-year-old operating system and (2) paying rent/eating.

Check out the Sublime V8 package. It comes with a JavaScript console and JSHint support.

https://github.com/akira-cn/sublime-v8

Agreed. It's a good first step, though.

To learn about how a web server actually works, I'd suggest setting up your own VPS on Linode. They've got a great library of information to help someone get started: http://library.linode.com

If you're coming from a Windows background and don't have any Linux/Unix command line experience, though, this will be daunting.

> best name

Best (1) currently available (2) 5-letter domain name. I think they did well for these standards.

Good point.

Best thing to do would be for Linode to generously reimburse these people, but they have no obligation to do so.

As a policy, it would neither be good business nor appropriate for Linode to assume all of the risk in a situation like this.

Also, if Linode did put a policy in place to assume some of the risk (some sort of insurance policy) they open themselves up to scams (just get your friend to rob your bitcoins and cash in on Linode's good will insurance policy).

Reminds me of this Zen koan: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/1acupoftea.html

> Since everybody in the Ruby community seems to think that it's okay for major breaking changes to occur on a minor version bump

I would say this is true for Rails, but I think (or hope!) there is a consensus (or at least a majority opinion?) among Ruby developers that any gem version that breaks compatibility should change the major (1st) version number. Otherwise, the ~> operator used by bundler and RubyGems becomes meaningless.

All of the gems that I publish strictly follow the rule that any change that could break code will bump the 1st version number, any change that adds features/behavior will bump the 2nd version number, and any change that has no interface effect (bug fixes, performance enhancements, documentation tweaks) will bump the 3rd version number.

> make a breaking change to the gem versioning system to force all library, framework and gem authors to use versions properly.

I really like the RubyGems rational versioning policy ( http://docs.rubygems.org/read/chapter/7 ) and wish everyone followed that.

I think it might be harder for gems like Rails that are actually metagems. But I do agree that it's surprising for a move from 2.3.5 to 2.3.6 to break backwards compatibility. Have we forgotten Ruby's ideal of the principle of least surprise?

Perhaps a good compromise between what Rails is currently doing and what it should be doing is to add a fourth version number. When the fourth version number changes, you can rest assured that the change is backwards compatible. (However, there is always the danger that some plugin/engine/gem author monkey-patched a part of Rails which could make their code break during a "backwards-compatible" upgrade to Rails.)

Slightly off topic, but there are some insanely convoluted borders in the world, the worst of which is Cooch Behar: http://bigthink.com/ideas/21160?page=all

Also, the border between Belgium and Netherlands: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/baarle.htm

Also of note: a border dispute between Canada and Denmark took place using Google in 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island#Google_fight