skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Let us agree that this discussion is pointless due to lack of reliable performance metrics.

Except that there are reliable performance metrics. We've seen a couple - cargo capacity, speed, energy efficiency, ability to destroy tanks. There are others.

> In general, biological systems are orders of magnitude better than systems engineered by humans

Hmm - weren't you just claiming that there weren't reliable performance metrics? Then in the very next sentence you claim something about the relative values of said metrics.

> hence, I mentioned that we have a lot to learn from Nature.

I suspect that this is the reason why you're so invested in the "nature is better" idea. However, the fact that we can learn from nature does not imply that nature is better.
Just a cheap $20 linode account will give you 200GB. you can offload the pictures to a slice or amazon S3 and you should be better off than the $30/mo. It is a bit apples to oranges because I don't know what the specs are on your current hosting.(like how many domains they give you, the speed of the actual data center connections to the outside world, redundancy, etc....)

The slice way is probably not for everyone because you will need to setup and manage the server but for the easy route you can offload the large images to S3 and that should be fairly cheap for that.
http://stevesouders.com/bio.php
Vectors may be implemented very differently from mutable arrays, but it is my understanding that they allow for efficient appends and updates, not efficient prepends. I would still switch to using lists, if only because when doing performance comparisons between languages and implementations you want the code and data structures to be as identical as possible.
I regularly read High Scalability. The Ambient Cloud article is a manifesto/memoir.

An impressive review of scaling, the cloud, technology politics, etc. So comprehensive, there's too much to take issue with, yet also personal and reflective.

My opinion is that most of the ideas espoused in the article will come to fruition. Not because the technologies are best, but because they are the most economical. Economic pressures will force heterogeneity where it is needed, and force homogeneity where is needed.

Assuming the Ambient Cloud was built - what apps would you write that you can't now?
And indeed, it might just be that, if you happen write a twitter by the seat of your pants, it will choke on the volume and you will be fired and replaced by someone who knows how data structures lead to scalability. You never know...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/amateur-hour-over-at-tw...
This is part of a domain name registration service that I'm writing with Jeff Lindsay.

It's also part of a larger project to make it trivial to work with DNS from "the web". Soon your web server will also be a DNS server.
Nefertiti Egypt fine antique reproduction furniture, French
Haha... No Way! Only difference is mine it's the same without capitalization.
Happy New Year
Nefertiti Egypt Team

www.nefertiti-egypt.com
www.royal-egyptian-cotton.com
www.nefertiti-jp.com
www.nefertiti-egypt.co.uk
www.wholesaleantiquereproductionfurniture.com
Cheap shot...

I understand your greater point but I think its misdirected in this case and not entirely fair to Max. What Max is doing in his post... how is that any different from making generalized statements about companies and the quality of products they churn out?

Though I agree that because we are dealing with actual people perhaps more tact should be used. That said, we do live in a global economy. Chances are that the clothes you're wearing now were made by some "slave" in a poor developing country.
Even with

*print-pretty*

set to T, LispWorks runs fine.
Good call on checking out the local newspaper classifieds. It's pretty tiny, single page and mostly services, for sale, or real estate.
I'll start with my own. One of the projects that I'd like to work on, is to build a site with PHP,MySQL and JQuery. It's a really simple idea, but I want to learn JQuery properly and there's no better way to learn a library than to build something that uses it.
I tried this for my hometown of 100,000 3 years ago. I spent about 50 hours on it (it was called brocktonpost.com). It had amazing features. No one used it.

My recommendation: Wait for Craigslist to come in.

> less than 15,000 people or so

If 1% of people used this, that's 150 people. You might want to start with a simpler email group instead. If you can get 150 using an email list, then make a website to accompany it.

The hard part isn't the software. In fact, it's 1000x easier to get the software going than to get people to use it.
Learn Haskell! I've been using learnyouahaskell.com, book.realworldhaskell.org, and haskell.org/haskellwiki. If you get stuck, the people who hang out on #haskell (freenode) are both helpful and brilliant.

Learning Python and Scheme was fun. Learning Haskell feels like being in an 80s training montage. One day you're a nobody, the next day you're an FP-wielding superhero.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications is good for inspiration.
Upon rereading, I agree with your assessment, but the crux of the issue is that his example of Lisa isn't so "pristine."

He argues that her small business failed because her skills weren't rare and valuable. Then he says his skills are rare and valuable.

A consistent argument springing from those two statements would be either a) my business won't fail because my skills are rare and valuable, or b) Lisa can't find another job in marketing (the job she held for a decade before quitting) because those skills aren't rare and valuable.

He didn't make either of those arguments, instead focusing on her yoga instructor skills. It makes for a muddled post.
Nice work! It's very useful for app developers on platforms like App Engine which don't provide a server-side DNS API.

Is http://dig.jsondns.org for demonstration only or can we use that as an official deployment to use in our apps?

Thanks!
Yeah, we have something simple. I'd be glad to let you get the code, or even set it up on one of our servers here. Provided you totally run it.

We use it in Jamaica for stuff there.
http://www.brawtalist.com

Dependencies?
* Ruby on Rails
* Redis
Of course! I'm not looking to replace DNS, just make it easier to use.
insufficiently

currently :
master git repository for everything, something like ~/docs
lots of breakdown of documentation
more git repositories under :
~/docs/code/projects - stuff I am currently working on or using
~/docs/code/legacy_projects - stuff that I don't want to die or need for reference, but I've lost interest for one reason or another
~/docs/code/public_projects - mirrors of servers, portfolio pieces, videos, all sorts of things that other people can see

I've been flirting with mavenizing everything for some time, but I just can't seem to overcome the inertia of... current build process works, code needs to be written, deal with it later
Sweet! Thanks for the links!
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think Ning would work. For one, it's all about getting people to join the community, which is too high a barrier for most people to post a classified ad real quick.

For another, Ning's design and community management backend is oriented to getting you to add more stuff. It's not at all intuitive (for the community manager) to create an interface and section architecture that'll be intuitive to visitors.

I'd like to hand this site off to someone who lives here, who isn't as web savvy as your average HN member, and not worry about the service they're using making it easy for them to decrease usability and usefulness of the site.
Also the ability to create polls, which I usually find interesting but which are rarely posted.

I've thought sometimes that it might be interesting to weight votes by the logarithm of the voter's karma, so that the interest / approval of a highly-ranked member would be enough to promote a story from new to the main page.
I've found pen and paper to be the most flexible way to go. There is also something to be said about clients reactions to quick and dirty layouts done on paper... its more collaborative and inspires innovation more so than specific tools like photoshop or markup layouts allow for.
I have similar habits, which feel like a big time leak. I recommend git because I find the peer to peer model more elegant, but I've yet to use git collaboratively.
I leave ARCHIVE in all caps because most of my project names are all lowercase, and that keep it from popping up in auto-tab completion. Color me lazy. :)
I'm 100% self-employed and build websites where I earn money from advertising/affiliate/sales-revenue. Been doing it fulltime for 7 years now, before that I was a student for a couple of years (where I learned that me and academics wasnt a match made in heaven..).

I used to have a site that carried 5m uniques/month, but I've also run sites that had has worse performance problems with much less users. I know of several instances where I got stuck and had help from academic books (to refresh my memory) or friends that paid more attention in class than I did :-)

My point, and as others point out, you just dont learn these things yourself unless you are forced todo it. Learning to solve a problem and learning to learn are two very different things and the later makes your view of a issue much more complete. Many subjects is completely useless stuff that is only in the courses to make them hard, but when I look back I tend to see that many courses were very valuable.
I did hs and collegiate debate & speech to some success.

The keys to speaking "smoothly" outside of the technical aspects of cadence, tone, etc, is more organization and thought-flow than anything else.

Treat your audience like their stupid and hand-hold them through the argument you're trying to make. Organize your speech, even if informally, around some natural structure.

i.e. intro --> relate intro to topic of speech --> argument --> summary of points that defend your argument --> detailed breakdown of each point --> conclusion where you resummarize your argument and the points that defend it

If you can't engage your speakers with some sort of natural charisma or speaking ability at the very least make sure that your points are stated clearly in a well organized easy to follow way.
Only problem I see is that the results are cached. If you're trying to build a live lookup tool, then that sort of kills it. I would love an API for DNS that is non-cached so I can build tools for my support techs.
> The alternative would be a larger deficit, for which you'd sell more UST bonds, which the entitlement programs would then buy since they need a safe place to park their surplus.

It's not clear that UST bonds are a safe place....

SS has made a lot of promises. It's unclear that they'll be satisfied. And, to be fair, there's no legal obligation to satisfy them.

The whole "we lent the money to the federal govt" angle will make it harder to fix SS.
> Soon your web server will also be a DNS server.

Why?
Why we can never rest: a year in the life of Twitter by @biz
Flightcaster's Clojure => Cascading => Hadoop infrastructure has been tempting me. Starting with Clojure I'm working my way down the stack in hopes that I'll garner insight as to how we can use this infrastructure or something similar on our own datasets.

Statistics with Incanter is another piece of this pie that seems interesting and valuable. Hopefully I'll have written something useful with these technologies by this time next year.
Mine is get Haskell code into Production. By any means necessary.
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

--Carl Jung
Only partially, use taxes cover about 50-60% of the costs for roads IIRC, the rest comes out of the general fund.
To all you sys admins out there: Is rush2112 really as common as some of these? I am a bit chagrined by its presence on this list as I have used that as a low security password for 10 years. In fact it is currently my password to HN!! (of course by the time you read this I will have changed it :P )
Nothing to do with style: the other sort of presentation :)

i.e. I believe you started the response with a rather silly statement then structured the rest in a sort of out-of-breath "OMG SRSLY" way. Unreasoned response is bad - but badly structured reason is worse.

I apologise for the rudeness but I feel that sort of posting needs to be discouraged.

I'd have let it pass but for the cancer comment: that's just idiotic.

(sorry, I hope it comes in as constructive criticism - because the point was good, I just doubt anyone really read it)
Feel free to use http://dig.jsondns.org in your applications. I'm glad it's useful!

I just can't make any guarantees regarding response time or uptime. If you need guarantees for either of those, you can run the service yourself, the code is on github: http://github.com/jpf/jsondns
> I'm a small government, anti-tax guy, but discrimination against bricks & mortar businesses seems quite unfair.

A bricks and mortars biz in CA gets benefits from taxes paid to CA. Amazon doesn't.
I use eclipse because it has support for a lot of the different languages I have to work with. So I organize my projects by language first under an eclipse workspace folder.

~/workspace/perl
~/workspace/erlang
~/workspace/cpp

Then inside each folder there is a project. And I either create them or import them using eclipse.

For projects that are large and require a large number of languages. I simply create it under the workspace directory. (i.e. ~/workspace/MyBigProject)

And from then I break it down into languages again along with other folder necessary for larger projects.

MyBigProject ->
bin/
conf/
docs/
erlang/
perl/
sql/
web/

Then I tend to use the best possible layout for a project of that language. For example since I use CGI::Application a lot using perl, my perl folder uses the following structure:

perl ->
deps/ <-- cpan/other modules that are needed
MyBigProject/ <--Namespace for project modules
startup.pl <- mod_perl2 startup file
templates/ <- HTML::Template templates...
and MyBigProject breaks down like so:
MyBigProject ->
DB/
UI/
(Other Modules)

and so on, the same goes for the erlang OTP:

MyBigProject/erlang/ ->
db/
deps/
ebin/
Makefile
src

and MyBigProject/web just holds all the html/javascript/css files for the WebUI.

And so on.
Ira Glass on storytelling: first thing, whine. Second, be pretentious.
If you were to do it again, what would you do different? What worked best for getting some users?

I definitely understand the software is the easier part -- that's why I'm getting started with it and looking for the simplest option available. I understand the basics of building community sites:

* seed content, and seed interaction with a small core of dedicated users.

* setup natural flows from existing online communities serving portions of the same audience. Facebook communities, Hiawassee's Topix forum, etc.

* Reward action, and encourage sense of belonging in a community.
Easiest thing would be to set up phpBB or similar forum software, then recruit a few neighbors to moderate.

There is no point in applying more technology -- all the
value will come from the users (if you can get them).
I have a "Playground" folder with a ton of randomly named projects in it. I like using the word "Playground" because then I don't feel guilty if I don't finish something...
The snprintf idea is a real-world example of something I worked on as part of a larger project. I took over maintenance of a poorly-written code base and cleaned up all sorts of problems. sprintf -> snprintf requires you to look through the code to figure out how big the buffer is, update the API to include new functions with buffer size parameters, determine whether buffers are large enough in the first place, etc. Something that can be dull, but can't be automated.
That would work, but I'd probably go even cheaper and get a basic HostGator account or something similar (~$10/month). Really depends on what your needs are (you won't get SSH with shared hosting, but you'll have all the bandwidth / disk space you need).

But 100k pageviews a month is nothing, and no host should be giving you a hard time about that. If you're hogging the CPU, that would be a more reasonable complaint.

In general, its always a good idea to reevaluate your hosting. Chances are there's a better deal going, much like cable or phone service, and its a good fire drill to change hosts now and then.
That's a fantastic offer! I'd definitely like to explore it. Could you send me an e-mail, so we can talk further?

jay [.dot.] neely [@at@] socialstrategist [.dot.] com
Ouch. The original was right. Ignore the oops. This is hilarious.
Ask HN: How to design a karma reward system
I am building what is actually a large portal for a 'tutoring site'. Visitors will be able to join groups, create groups and post comments, lessons etc. They will also be rewarded for completing on-line exercises.

I would like to introduce a 'karma reward system' in order to a) motivate people to contribute and b) to crowdsource ratings both for people as well as content.

I am leaning to something that is in-between what http//thesixtyone.com offers and HN's or stackoverflow's floating method of ratings.

I am looking for suggestions, formulae and good links to resources, books etc as well as other sites than the above three that you favour.
These results are cached on my end and also by the server I'm querying (Google Public DNS).

Non-cached (non recursive) queries are part of the standard that I'm coding towards. I just haven't implemented them yet.
Personally I tried Ruby on Rails and I did not like it. There was too much magic going on and it was confusing to a beginner like myself. I thought about Django but I got the impression that it is just "Python on Rails", so I stayed away from that too. I ended up going with web.py, and I enjoy it. I understand what is happening and what all the pieces of my program do.

It's not for everybody. There are fewer plug-ins for the framework and doing things like session management is a little harder than in Rails. The community is small (though the Google group is active). I had to spend 10 or 20 hours learning sqlAlchemy instead of having an DBORM handed to me out of the box.

But it is far easier to create a complex web app that breaks the Rails/Django paradigm. Reddit uses web.py.

There are some cool open source projects on Github that can get you started:

http://github.com/alexksikes

Please note that my experience may have been better because I already logged a thousand lines or so in Python before diving in (which reminds me of a great free book for learning Python - "Dive into Python").
Yes,

Especially since craigslist will come in eventually and so your fix will be temporary if it's only aiming to be like craigslist.

Hey, you could even write Craig and ask him to include you. I know places in rural California well-served by craigslist.
~/projects : where I keep my personal projects

~/extern-projects : where i pull other projects from github and stuff, just to mess around with / bugfixes

~/src : where I store little scripts or test code, just a sandbox area to mess around.

~/test : i send testing tarballs here, basically anything I don't care too much about, as I empty this folder out periodically.
Excellent options, especially that last one it looks like. I'll look into these. Thanks!
Create a 'Django' for Lisp!
Please serve JSON with the application/json content-type, not text/html.

If you want to debug it more easily in a browser, you can install the JSONView Firefox extension. It's quite handy: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10869
I wonder if anyone has thought about doing a typesetting/proof reading service for self-publishing authors but no marketing
"Don't expect to actually develop websites in it"

I just tried to develop a website with SBCL and Hunchentoot, and it works relatively well for small examples. There's pretty good MySQL support, and it's all pretty fast. I couldn't figure out how to get a long-running SBCL process to keep even on memory usage. I saw a talk from a guy who works at ITA software [1] where he said they blow away their SBCL instances and restart them on regular intervals, so maybe it's just not possible!

To anyone who is serious about developing a Lisp website, I'd spend a lot of time up-front evaluating different Lisps

[1] I can't find this talk anymore :<
The bots are that good these days now , huh?
~/<Project> for anything active, ~/Content/<Project> for anything I've stopped working on.
~/projects/PROJECT — my personal projects (no longer used);

~/projects/package-gen/dst/PROJECT — my personal projects in RPM package format, with automatic build system, various templates for new packages, repository of built binary and source packages;

~/work/PROJECT — work;

~/bin — various personal scripts and programs;

~/tmp — scratch, e.g. ~/tmp/1 or ~/tmp/foobar;

~/gtd/projects — various stuff, sorted by purpose, tag or/and date. Links from here to many other places;

~/gtd/income — various stuff, to be sorted;

~/examples — various working snippets;

/usr/share/bash-modules/ - various typical functions for bash scripts, e.g. "backtrace" or "..." (recently created as alternative to ~/examples/bash-..., see http://vlisivka.pp.ua/en/bash_modules ).

I use very simple tagging tool to speedup sorting, e.g. "s foo.tar.gz foo bar" will create two hard links to "foo.tar.gz" file in ~/gtd/projects/foo/ and in ~/gtd/projects/bar/ directories, and so on.

Currently, I use RPM packages only for my own projects, because they are easy to install/uninstall/upgrade, they contains documentation, changelog, and description, they are easy to verify or rebuild, and so on.
Python is a mature language with solid implementations, top-class web frameworks, an above average user community, and hundreds of libraries that do pretty much any thing you want.

Ergo: it is fine to use with web apps.
mine comes and goes for no apparent reason (I was without votes for about a month at one point).

So I've given up flagging more than once a week and voting a more than a couple of times a day. Sadly all the older HN members I talked too say the same thing.

I wonder if the site algorithm is actually favoring newer / less active members?
We are in agreement, mostly :).

I don't know which professionals rings around were run, but again, who cares, that's just conjecture, the conjuncture was between a need for a free Unix, BSD sat in court, the GPL, LAMP. The result was the cartesian product that remains today.

In the world of worse is better, Plan9 wasn't bad enough !
40. asdfgh
41. asdfgh
But im not deriding Python per-se (indeed I believe it is a fantastic language and the vast majority of my code is in Python).

However when you consider it in the situation of a Web App (i.e. running under Apache or another web server) it loses most of the advantages. Not to make it worse - but if you know PHP there is no huge benefit for switching to Python :) Which is what the OP is asking "should I learn a new language to make a web app in". I'd say no, not if PHP serves you fine! :)

On the other hand if you want a general purpose language to hand then, yep, Python is ace.

(despite all that when programming for the web I still prefer PHP, because, well that was what it is designed for).
Sounds like you dropped out of academics, were successful in website development, are arguing for a hands on learning approach where it "makes your view of an issue much more complete", and even successfully used compsci books, you write "many subjects is completely useless stuff" and yet in your first post you give advice of doing the opposite of what you found success doing.
If we're going to claim that an ineffective TSA is a "feature," then let's at least have an _efficiently_ ineffective one.
One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information.

I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.
They should just have each plane fly behind a flock of geese.