skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally I agree, except for a couple points:

5-10K uniques/day? Congrats you can get into the premium CPM networks.

Not all traffic is created equal, so just hitting those numbers won't get you a decent ad deal.

1m uniques a month? Congrats you can start direct selling your advertising, without getting hung up on.

Again, depends on the site. 1MM/month is not the big deal it used to be. 1MM to a tech blog would be a big deal, 1MM to a meme photo site is not.

i.e. how college humor started threadless tees to sell tshirts.

BustedTees, not Threadless, but your point remains. (BTW, I think you meant e.g. instead of i.e., and you should always follow either with a comma)
A friend and I recently just started learning Haskell, and as our first project we are going to implement the kademlia DHT algorithm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia ). If anyone wants to learn some Haskell and work on a dht algorithm, feel free to shoot me an email or message me on github. The repo for the project is at http://github.com/johngunderman/buckets-dht .

On a side note, I'm learning Haskell through the book Real World Haskell, and it is the best resource I've found so far (I've looked through "Write yourself a scheme", "learn you a haskell for great good", and "Yet another Haskell Tutorial"). Of course, it is the first one I've actually had in printed form, and that probably made a huge difference.

As you mentioned, #haskell has been a tremendous resource. I would highly recommend anyone interested in learning haskell to lurk on that channel.
appl/*/*.b
module/*.m
What I've wanted to try but I have never had the opportunity to was having karma be accumulated on a per-topic basis. I think any time you've got a wide set of topics this is necessary to avoid the issues of people being treated as credible outside of their domain of expertise, and it could help mitigate the issue on Stack Overflow where people who answer lots of easy questions can get much more karma than those who answer a few much harder ones.
HTTP caching maps nicely to DNS TTLs...
Or you could just poke around TheFunded.com for a couple minutes to get the same gist with names named.
I don't agree that CL will come in eventually. What is their attraction point to do so? Listing in your nearest CL designated area is problematic unless 1)Listers always include their town or, 2)People in non-listed towns fail to use CL because they are not listed. I think there is an opportunity to fill in between the "nodes" that CL uses, build it to scale easily, add everything you wish CL would do, but doesn't, and launch it.
"Distributed systems" is not a new term. Please don't use it as though it only applies to systems designed to distribute data (ala NoSQL). Distributed computing has classically been focused on the use of network nodes for both data storage and computation. See: MPI, Linda, etc.
Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it.

Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_w...

http://www.squidoo.com/howtomakeanEbook

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/09/16/thirteen-steps...
5-10K uniques per day would be much more than 70K per month, no?
Perl is definitely not languishing. It just gets a bad rap from fans of other languages that are competing with it (particularly from the fans of Python and Ruby, the two upstarts trying to take its place).

Let's look at the number of jobs advertised for Perl, Python, Ruby, and Lisp over the last 5 years:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2Cpython%2Cruby%2Clis...

The number of Perl jobs is more than those of Python and Ruby put together. Lisp has so few jobs it doesn't even really show up on the chart.

Then there's Perl's CPAN archive, with over 17,000 modules, with about 30 modules updated or added per day. That much development is a sign of an active, alive community.

So the rumors of Perl's demise are greatly exaggerated.
I have to disagree.

1) To clarify on the purpose a bit, it's aim wouldn't be to be just like Craigslist. Craigslist is good, but has plenty of room for imrpovement. And the unique characteristics of a local community make a more customized solution (church sections, farming & agriculture sections, different job categories as a few possible examples) a better option. While this may start by being a simple classifieds Craigslist-like, it could evolve into something very different.

2) One of the main points of what I'm looking for is the ability to setup a simplified Craigslist-like site. Craigslist has too many subsections to make it easy to show activity in a newly active area.

3) It's always easier to promote, and gain buy-in, for a more specific (in this case, local) solution.

None the less, thanks for the comment, and idea of writing Craig directly to ask for an area section to be created.
exactly the same way - a mess

The beauty of a hosted SCM (I use Bit Bucket) is that I only have to remember to "pull" when starting work on a project and "push" when finishing and it is all kept safe :)

I swap between about 4 or 5 machines here and at work so the chances of keeping it sane otherwise are low :)
You're quite right, excuse me. I will edit my post. Thanks for the catch.
He's done a good job of positioning himself as the "anti-entrepreneur" and it works.

He is obviously very entrepreneurial and all the actions he describes are central to bootstrapping.
To clarify, by 'big' i meant not just in size, but in number of highish profile clients.

Towards the end of me being there, they added a more senior developer/manager to the Romanian team -- his code was much better (i.e. not dreamweaver generated HTML/CSS) and was easier to communicate with, but still the code quality from the others on the team was very unmaintainable.

I apologize if it seemed as if I was generalizing the entire country of Romania's programming abilities -- definitely not what I intended. If all the developers were as good as the senior developer added on later, I'm sure it would have went much better.

My main point remains the same though, and I think is one that we can both agree on - that hiring inexpensive labor with only focusing on the front end user experience, without any respect or idea of how well the back end is being constructed is a bad idea. I'm sure outsourcing can work, but only with careful attention to the behind the scenes backend code quality, to ensure the project is not being held together by duct tape.
I'm saying that academics helped me understand some subjects that have been very valuable for me in my "career" as a website developer.

Perhaps I would have done fine without them, but I'm sure my projects are better as a result of me spending a couple of years learning stuff.

If you want to become a "better" programmer in the context of writing more efficient code, more bugfree code and become more efficient (learning to use the concepts that comes with the language instead of reinventing the wheel). Then yes, school helps.

You can learn it outside school aswell but I bet it will take more time in the long run. I think we'll have to accept that we disagree on this topic.
Agree, you are right.

s/kernel code/kernel related code/g.
This is probably one of the reasons they experimented with removing the down-voting on comments. Some people, rather than vote on relevance or insight of the comments feel they should be enforcing their own arbitrary standards.
Being outside the valley (and being outside of much of anything, really) my startup experience hasn't had that many VCs. But any time I deal with money people it always seems to seem like a heroic waste of time. Sometimes, as the article points out, it's almost comical.

For instance, I was interested in some grant money the state had available to high-tech startups who were pre-launch. Hey -- states need businesses to grow, and micro-investments at the pre-prototype stage looks like it makes a lot of sense. Their website bragged about the mission they had to encourage innovation, especially in the web and communication sectors (which I'm in)

So I get a referral from a couple of folks who know them (referral: check). I was introduced via email (personal introduction: check) Then they had me complete a form that took 3 hours which asked ridiculous questions like income projections for three years out. Finally I get a phone interview.

The interview lasted ten minutes, in which time I learned that a) the interviewer hadn't bothered to read my application before now, b) they were really interested in post-launch businesses with a growth record, c) really what they wanted to do was bigger-money investments, d) the interviewer had no experience in how to monetize the type of business I was in and didn't seem to want to hear anything I had to say about it, and e) no, the answer isn't no, just let's talk again in a month or so.

I mean come on. Let's get real. Until you respect my time as much as your own we're not going to get very far, whether you choose to invest or not.

From all I can see, something is deeply wrong in the way most all of these relationships are being created. I can see and understand that most companies fail and that most interviews are a waste of time from the interviewers standpoint, but that's the name of the game, folks. You don't let customer service slump and lose screening quality simply because you're playing a numbers game. That's idiotic.
Yes they do: http://github.com/jpf/jsondns/blob/master/jsondns.rb#L66

HTTP Status Codes also map pretty nicely to DNS RCODEs.
Those system still seem to have some obvious safety issues... Yes, the convoy vehicles can all brake in unison, but what about mechanical failures that would slow the vehicle faster than trailing vehicles could safely brake?

While I can't think of a single incident of a jumbo jet experiencing a spontaneous catastrophic failure during a flight mode when drafting would be useful (@ cruising altitude, in clear weather, etc); I'm sure such events have and will occur. Doubling or tripling the possible number of casualties in such an incident seems like something that should be given a whole lot of thought... (fortunately it looks like they're doing just that)
Jeff Thanks! What you saying is very true of stack-overflow and although I visit occasionally their whole karma formula does not appeal for the reason you mentioned. I was thinking in similar lines and have introduced the groups concept for example when you belong to the 'lisp circle' you will be able to earn additional points when you answer or solve lisp problems. My concern is not to let the users focus too narrowly, I was thinking that joining groups should be limited i.e, when you accumulate 100 points you can join a group and as you earn open up more groups... To link the whole thing in a sort of 'PageRank' algorithm to stop people from gaming the system is what is puzzling me.
The other issue surrounding electronic publishing besides the cost is the DRM issue. I should be able to transfer electronic books between devices without restriction and without the possibility for some remote company or organisation to delete purchased content from my reader.

I imagine that book publishers will eventually become what iTunes is to music, but like the music industry they may have to go through a painful period of denial, loss of old business models and restructuring. Google are also paving the way for the future of publishing with their books service. It seems likely that before long in addition to merely previewing a few chapters on Google there will also be some convenient mechanism to purchase and download the entire book to a reader device.
Unfortunately, IE chokes on application/json. So its actually safer to use application/javascript, or even text/html instead.

This was still present in IE7, but they may have fixed it in IE8.
After the first $1000 / month I started caring a lot less, because I could eat and pay rent. After $2000 I stopped caring some more, because that is enough for budget travel, which is the biggest "thing" I want. Now I've found my next motivation to be "for each extra $2000 I make, I can have these things some month in the future when I've lost my revenue source".
House flippers galore in Southern California
Actually 5K is the official requirement for Tribal Fusion: http://www.tribalfusion.com/publishers/siterequirements

But yeah if you are in a very saturated niche or mediocre(lolcats) niche, you might need much higher numbers to get in.

And yeah quality always counts, but 1 million uniques should be a good enough point to start selling ad space. You may not get the top of the line advertisers, but you should be able to get some.

Yeah you right, I meant to say Busted tees that's it, got them mixed up.
I think the issue is in looking on down votes as a bad thing :) who cares? You did make a silly comment and people are pointing that out (relevance is fairly subjective; I suspect a number of people read the cancer comment and then stopped reading it as "not relevant")

Sometimes people down vote poorly or for the wrong reasons, I agree. I think this case was justified - but for the cancer comment I myself wouldn't have - indeed I'd probably have upvoted because I do agree. That is how badly it came across (and as you might read elsewhere this is about my 2nd vote today :))
Social engineering: Britain's reviled bankers and MPs pour their hearts out
Just in case you haven't yet, put in a city/country name that doesn't exist.
Build stuff. Break it. Fix it. Build more stuff.
I wrote a PHP app back in the day. It was small and messy, had code strewn all throughout the HTML. Hell, I didn't even know how to run a PHP script without loading an URL in the web browser.

That's not necessarily a fault of the language, but the books available for PHP taught me how to code that way. And the community was in a perpetual state of newbishness. At least in 2005, the IRC channels were dominated by people (like me) who one day though "I have no programming experience but I would like to make a web app. I know! I'll use PHP!". PHP can be programmed well, but it was hard to find someone in the community to point you in the right direction.

Facebook proves that large, successful web apps can be built with PHP. But PHP was probably not Zuckerberg's first or only programming experience.

As for your contention that "Python isn't really a web app language (really, at all, in the slightest)", that's just straight stupid, and doesn't deserve a further response.
Craigslist started as an email list.
Try to speak with a rhythm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHZIA0-G1sc
He also says:

>I stay 2-3 years behind the trend. After the early adopters have left, there is this gap that can be filled by people who are willing to learn from the failures of the early adopters

That sounds great in theory, but can anyone expand on that? What are some specific examples?
Indonesia Java International Destination - Bismillah Slamet
Downvoted for tone, not for the quality or validity of your viewpoint.
I imagine the way that it might work in future is that the author registers their new book with Google or Amazon (or some other similar company acting as a distributor), and they then make the book searchable and downloadable by readers. The author selects what price they want to charge, with some percentage going to the distribution company. The distribution fee might vary depending upon whether the author decides to opt for additional promotion/advertising, or just do that side of things themselves on their own web site, or via their own social network. Authors retain copyright on their works, and can at any time cancel an account with a distributor and go to a new one.
Thanks for the link to the TF specs. They specify 5k/day, which is more than it used to be (150k/month as opposed to the 70k/month as I'd remembered it).

My math was wrong anyway so I edited that out, but you were definitely correct. My apologies.
Curiosity has the better of me: What other GUI puts all the information at your fingertips besides the one noted here?
Nah, Lucasfilm is usually pretty cool about nonprofit fan stuff.
Redis can now batch operations and execute them atomically
> As for your contention that Python is not good for web apps, that's just straight retarded and doesn't deserve a further response.

Im not sure that contends a good reverse argument ;) but anyway... (I do stand by the statement somewhat though; it was never designed to be a web language but as a general purpose successor for ABC, any web implementations are incidental and I still contend that it cant beat purpose built "for the web" languages :))

It's a difficult call all round. I used to code PHP that way - but one good book (I forget which) and some experience with Frameworks cured me of it. It's probably similar for other languages; the person I know best who swears by Django does pretty much the same thing (horrible code)

Not good for web apps is perhaps not the point I was making (it got confused in trying to be concise). More Im saying that if the OP is sat there knowing some PHP and wondering where to go next if his aim is to make a web app I would say: go make a web app in PHP. There is no killer advantage that makes Python better for the web than PHP (for me PHP is better for the web - but that is a somewhat subjective choice).

if his prime aim is to learn a new language - and he also wants to make a web app RoR is a good choice. Again because it is tailored for the web.

If he wants to learn a language and wants something general purpose which also will do him for web work Python is a great choice.

To make things even less clear; if you want to do something specialist Python is probably your "best foot forward".

The problem with Web apps is that the web server is by far the greatest leveller. It removes any clear advantage Python has over PHP :)

I am mid/high experienced in Ruby, Python and PHP and I personally would say PHP was the best choice for a basic web app with Python bringing up a very close rear :)
And that is besides the fact that mice only have vertical scroll wheels. (Unless, of course, you have the new Apple mouse that supports two fingered horizontal scrolling.) So horizontal scrolling is difficult people because they have to actually mouse over the scroll bar, click and drag. Once again the exception is the MacBook in which a two fingered scroll on the touchpad can horizontally scroll.

I think that is the real reason why people hate horizontal scrolling.
I would just start an email list.

I would go door to door if I have to and tell people "I want to create a classifieds for our community, can I add your email address?" (Then ask them for their neighbor's emails too)

To post, people can send you an email and then you can compile it.

Do this for 1 week and see if you can get 100-500 people this way.

Then create a simple 1 page site that just reposts the emails. Then create a simple form that allows people to post directly.
Then add categories.

I wouldn't skip any steps.
I Don’t Git GitHub Yet, But I Hope I Will
I'm planning on working on something potentially very similar. Here's an outline post I made a while back: http://karanbhangui.posterous.com/course-learning-aid-propos...

Lemme know if you're interested in collaboration.
It depends on your choice of language and some specific implementation details....and whether you are more interested in the user interface side, the data modeling, or both.

There's a range of approaches to motivational systems, and I think in 2010 we'll see some real innovation in this area. For instance, I think Gowalla is doing a particularly great job.
Great list. Four years at school for theory is an increasingly inefficient investment in time and money. A high school senior starting today and ending in four years would learn a lot more about cutting-edge programming by reading HN and following up with lots of experimentation than by going to school.
Writing programs for people to read
They could store plain text passwords plus a counter for each. Just so long as there's no connection to the users. They would not need that connection for this purpose.
Good advice, I've been over thinking it. Thanks :)
Common Lisp beat out Interlisp, and maybe for good reasons but it doesn't mean Interlisp had nothing to offer--some very good ideas got lost in the shuffle and I don't pretend that Common Lisp just obviously had a better way. Java is going to beat out Smalltalk perhaps, but that doesn't mean Java is better than Smalltalk. We owe it to the losers in these little skirmishes to make sure that, if nothing else, the good ideas are not lost along with the framework. And we do not accomplish that by defining that there was nothing lost. That's both callous to those who worked hard on these other things and short-sighted to the future, which might one day care about the things that got lost.
Good point, I just need to get more "practice" with programming... anything :P thanks!
I do almost the same thing: ~/projects and ~/projects/old

I also have ~/tmp, which is where I put things I'm unlikely to need more than once or twice. Keeps my desktop clear and my projects folder uncluttered.
The Master, The Expert, The Programmer
There are many examples, the whole Japan growth in the eighties was based on this model. They took existing technologies and refined them. Stackoverflow is one example of redefining forums (they essentially killed a lot of programming forums). thesixtyone.com redefined indie music!
I agree. Our town has a website with forum section for all of the residents powered by phpBB.. While it isn't the perfect platform, it's a great way for residents to exchange a variety of information. I find myself on here every day for a variety of reasons and it's become a really valuable tool for many, many people in our town.

Here is a screenshot of the categories that were created for us: http://client.palmsdevelopment.com/frontporch.png

I would also look at Vanilla forums as an alternative to phpBB: http://vanillaforums.org/

Hope this helps!
I use ~/proj/${SOME_PROJECT}/

Tarballs go in ~/proj/v/
Good advice and helpful links. I would add picking up a few good books on Design Patterns.
You'll get a productivity boost with good people. Those are rare and expensive.

Lisp is a bit remote from machines and their operating system: GC, data formats, ...

Lisp has many degrees of freedom. It is much harder to control. It is designed for flexibility (even at runtime).

The original Lisp was done for 'symbolic computation with recursive functions': Theorem provers, machine translation, computer algebra systems, knowledge representation, planning systems, ...

If your problem domain fits into above list, then Lisp is likely to be a good candidate language to use. Then there are related domains where Lisp has been used with success: expert systems, algorithmic composition, language implementation (compilers, ...), deductive databases. Again, Lisp may be very useful in these domains.

There are lots of domains where it does not fit that well or is mostly useless. From the domains above you can see that those are not domains that many people work in (compared to web development, database apps, accounting apps, ...). Lisp is quite useful in those domains, but they tend to be a bit remote from the current mainstream.

Viaweb and Orbitz are exceptions. Most Lisp applications are relatively unknown and they are not widely published. Huge successes were for example DART and SPIKE. DART was a logistics system for the military (it is said to have repaid all the government expenses for AI research made) and SPIKE is s scheduling system for telescopes (originally for the Hubble Space Telescope). These applications were not written because some guys knew only Lisp, but because lots of the research applications in planning and scheduling systems were written in Lisp - because in this domain these applications work with symbolic representations of plans.