skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, he was a student, one of quite a few, working on the base code of what became Netscape Navigator. One weekend when nobody was around he decided he wanted more out of the project than research credit, so he let himself into the research lab when nobody was around, copied everyone else's code and took off to get VC funding. Later he would dismiss the whole thing in typicall dirtbag fashion, ie, "Well, you know, it's hard to recall who wrote what code, and what counts was I got it out to market first, etc." So basically he stole somebody else's work, took credit for it, and then hid behind the legitimacy that financial success brings in this country.
OT: does anybody have a positive experience with slicehost's 256 slice?
If yes, how many pageviews or visits daily you have?
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
See first comment to that video :))
It was a somewhat sarcastic reply. Glossing over that detail was for the sake of brevity, I think. Point being that people making $30 million a year are lumped in the same category as people making $150,000.

Since this is a study about spending habits, it is an incredibly misleading way to present the statistics. Not only does it hide the behavior of the very top but it skews the results of the rest of the upper fifth (the top 18%-19%).
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080211/tc_afp/spaintelecomtech...

The AP story. With rumors of Motorola selling/spinning off it's handset division, I'm not sure that there will be enough marketing behind any of the hardware to make this important. I'm not sure how important HTC, as a brand, is in the developing world. During my last trip to India all I saw were Nokias and Sony Ericssons.

I suppose they could do what Sony did and just get some Bollywood star to promote their phones. :)
This sounds fishy to me. If he was collaborating with other people on Mozilla he wouldn't have needed to "let himself into" (= "walk into" + furtive spin) any physical place to get code. Surely he would have had access via a network. And since Mozilla was open source, wasn't he within his rights to use this code in a product?

Edit: I meant Mosaic, not Mozilla.
ugly.

The more I know about the gphone, the more I think it will fail.

Doesn't offer enough new over j2me and windows mobile in terms of app capabilities.

Also the Iphone already does google maps just fine in a much prettier package.
I found the thoughts for the second question, "Should I launch a private beta?" to be more useful. I've been going back and forth over doing a private beta. I don't think that a hard limit for the initial userbase is always the right answer. It may be fine for services that are inherently single user but for social apps would you want it to grow virally based who someone is willing to invite?
This question pops up a lot on Slicehost's Forum. Search for "views 256" @ http://forum.slicehost.com/search.php. You will see all the many people running from blogs to rails on 256mb without a problem.
That is one darn secure door though.
Apple likely won't license hardware or software, so will likely never grab all that much of the market... just as has happened with computers.

Android is a big step up from j2me - everything is written with it, including Google's "own" apps, so it ought to be possible to interact with almost all of the system, or even replace bits and pieces of it.
Mr. Yegge is obviously knowledgeable. I think a good bit of what he's saying is irrelevant and wasn't worth my time to read.
do users a favor and DON'T steal the keyboard focus

http://reddit.com/info/628t3/comments/
Ok, I'm going to be an ass now.

Ha-ha, stupid Americans solving problems you don't need to have. Over in Europe we don't use checks. This entire problem goes away if every minor cash transfer happens electronically in the first place. You're attacking the wrong end of the challenge.

[Seriously, you need to pass a new law in order to be able to do this? Not only are you attacking a non-existent problem, you are also involving the inertia of politics in order to do so. This is the most stupid thing I have heard all day.]
The second I saw this title I started thinking the same things as all these comments are listing.

Maybe someone should write this up as a context-menu addition for Firefox. Just put it under "Add a Keyword for this Search..." Use something like "Set keyboard focus on load..."
Don't think you're doing keyboarders a favor if you do this on any page with a scrollbar. Us keyboarders like the Page Up / Page Down keys to work.

I do this on the ourdoings.com login page, but not as a matter of course.
It means to throw an exception.

I suppose if I knew I couldn't fail, I'd just have to overload the meaning of the return value.
Perens: 'Badgeware' threat to open source's next decade
Single-User Subversion
Use math for Valentine's Day happiness.
Is anyone willing to test the formula out?
I'm curious to hear replies from people experienced with Scala, Haskell, or other static-functional languages.

I've looked at Scala, and type inference seems like it would be a big win compared to declare-every-type languages like Java. (I haven't written Scala programs so I don't know for sure.) I haven't learned Haskell, but I get turned off by the school-marm "statefulness is sin" attitude. I like that Lisps generally push you in the direction of good functional programming style without preventing you from doing imperative, or OO, or whatever style you think matches your particular problem best.

However, what the static-functional languages seem to have going for them is giving the compiler more to work with to improve performance. Scala and Haskell seem to do well on benchmark tasks. And, despite being turned off by Haskell's draconian enforcement of pure-functional programming, I was impressed when I saw that you could enable parallelization with a simple annotation on the section of code you wanted to run concurrently. Of course, Erlang fits this as well, but I think is not nearly as fast as Haskell for sequential code perhaps due to lack of static typing.

I admire SBCL for the performance they get out of Common Lisp. I've heard they do good type inferencing even on dynamically typed code, and of course Common Lisp has optional type declarations that the compiler can use to speed things up.

So, it appears that strong static typing might enable compilers that emit faster code. What do you all think?
At a glance, I see this four-paragraph article starts with an Obama reference, ends with a Ghandi reference, and has about 15 bolded or italicized sentences.

I think it can be safely skipped.
Microkernel OS in C#
I don't get the practical value of it. They cite low system requirements for embedded applications because unnecessary components can be omitted during compilation.

So? Linux kenrel can already be compiled with minimal configuration without performance-penalizing JIT in the kernel space.
Project Kittyhawk: building a global-scale computer [pdf]
Yahoo Confirms Rejection Letter to Microsoft
I created a Google Spreadsheet with the data, and the pre/post-tax percentages:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p-dY8J8J_WREnyO8P_QLq...

Interesting point: the lowest fifth use 60% of their post-tax income for housing. Add in food, and you're up to 95%.

Add together the trio of "food, shelter and clothing" and you're over their income.
Worth the read. Good reinforcement on what's important when building a Web site.
Interview with Dov Moran, founder of Modu
Yes, my experience so far has been positive. I got Ruby on Rails up and running fairly easily; it's documented here:

http://www.perplexedlabs.com/2008/02/04/building-a-rails-cap...
Advertisers are back in the driver's seat with rise of Internet TV
I think that choice of vehicle is extremely dependent upon location as well. It's definitely a cultural as well as financial choice. I've lived around the country and each area has its own distribution of cars, independent of the financial status of the residents.
It's official: Yahoo rejected Microsoft bid
I did pretty well on a 256 meg slice. I outgrew it after awhile, and I'm currently running 8 mongrels on a 512 slice, and I'm pretty much hitting the top.

RAM is by far the biggest bottleneck for me.

Overall, Slicehost is great. I just wish they'd include more RAM in their plans.
I just posted about doing some basic load testing on my 256 slice here:

http://blog.notedpath.com/2008/02/10/using-jmeter-for-load-t...
The lottery.
Judging by his blog posts, can you imagine how much commenting he did as a n00b? Something tells me those examples at the top of his post weren't that far off.
So, I get to have an ADDITIONAL amount cut from tips (beyond what PayPal does) -AND- I don't get cash...
I took my first few dives into c.l.l recently (see here http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/...) and I noticed a couple people (left unnamed) with a poisonous negativity, and I'd have to say that Ken seemed like a pragmatic realist with a hint of optimism (kind of like me). I don't even think I would have finished reading the threads I looked at without Ken's comments.
Adobe's Magic Lens Lets You Control Image Depth After the Shot
Yahoo Officially Rejects Offer
"Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site."

That depends what the site is for.
The answer to the last question is definitely 50%.
Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms
Hey!

Yup, the Rand took a beating last week, but doesn't that make it cheaper for foreign investors?

I'm South African and busy on my own startup. I was a PHP programmer for 6 years, now I'm just doing Python/ Django - and sometimes some PHP to pay the bills.

I'm in Pretoria and my co-founder is in Cape Town chasing down clients. I'm self taught.

Btw, Didn't you run the quake/2.co.za back in the day?
I'd murder someone if they made the search box in Google Reader grab keyboard focus. Keyboard shortcuts are way more important, and '/' focuses the search there, anyway.
New interactions, not just moved interactions
The picture kind of fails to capture the idea that people's common sense notions seem to come to a screaming halt whenever computers are involved - no one in their right mind would believe doing things that way makes for a secure home, but it's easy to get people to believe all manner of things with respect to computing.
I also have a few bug reports:
- while signing in it said that my email-address was already taken, and did I left my pwd blank. Highly unlikely and no.
- in safari I can't move my cursor around in the email-address field because you jump to the end at each keypress.
We have been using Slicehost's 256MB slice for a little over two months now for a PHP site and haven't had any issues; uptime has been excellent and support is great. The fact that they are one of the few providers to offer Arch Linux is another plus, too.

Another place I personally purchased a VPS from to test out is Linode (http://linode.com). I've only had it for a week so far, but so far no problems. If you're going to run a Rails app, you might want to look at them as for $20 they provide 360MB of RAM instead of 256 :) Their community seems on par with Slicehost. Their Xen is in beta testing, though, so for now their VPS' run UML.
I'm glad you're aware of this. I don't know much about blackhat SEO, but if Tipjoy becomes an "authority site" such that getting a link from you would be the difference between page 2 and page 1 of a SERP, they'd gladly pay more than a few dollars for big-revenue keywords relating to gambling, porn, and finance.
As far as I've been able to find, there isn't. And yes, I think there would be value in something like this. I'm actually working on a weird doxygen/wiki/interaction-graph hybrid thing to ease code comprehension at the moment. Not far along though, so I'm not sure it'll be as useful as I'm hoping it will be.
Designing Effective User Interfaces
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera
Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
Only if it's really really really what every user that would EVER use the web page will want.

I would actually like it if IMDB put focus in their search box, when I'm looking up a director of photography or such, I'm just impatience and would like to go, type, enter, read. The extra click to type is annoying. But I still don't know if they should actually implement that as I have not done a real analysis of how the broad community uses the site.
Principles of User Interface Design
A Summary of User Interface Design Principles
hopefully paradise will have Windows Firewall
Elegant Software
I don't know how can they compete with Google on this. They have to offer their product for free. They can't place ads on user's pages, because Google does not require this. Google makes money off the users that do put ads, but this is only because they are the ad network too. Weebly can't make money off them.

I just can't see how Weebly can win. In theory they could get so much better than Google that Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft) buys them because of their loyal user base and better product. This is pretty much the Youtube story, but Youtube at least had the potential to monetize without Google, which is not the case with Weebly.
The beauty bias: Can people love the one they are compatible with?
Firefox Vulnerable By Default.
Microsoft screws up big-time with TechNet update
I think that you're right, but for the vast majority of fly-over country, where EBay is king, Craigslist really isn't that popular. Craigslist is a blue state phenomena.

Case in point. I have family and friends in Indiana, Iowa and Minnesota. I'd bet most of them had never heard of Craigslist, but they shop/sell on Ebay every other month.
The importance of customer loyalty and its three element foundation
It's hard to disagree customer loyalty isn't a strategic success factor for most businesses. So, what makes a customer loyal and why is loyalty important?
"Samsung said yesterday that it won’t debut an Android powered phone until 2009"

and Nokia has its own platform anyway..

So, this thing as it is, is already dead in Europe
Report: Yahoo Considering Merger with AOL
YARB: backup_fu Makes Rails Amazon S3 (MySQL) Backups Redonkulous
A small city in Israel sues Google for false information | Israel On Blog
Don't be sorry for good feedback! Thanks.
Top 15 Google Logos | WireSmash
People don't really tip online because PayPal is a pain. Amazon's micropayment system takes 20%. We take a few percentage points. As we get more efficient at the financial operations, we'll pass on savings to the content creators.
I love Amazon Turk. I wish people used it more. People-powered processes with contributor cuts is not a new idea at all. I certainly never come up with new ideas :)
And the tip button doesn't work in Safari either. Are you developing on Linux? ;-)
Funny. That's exactly where I thought he was going, too.
I cringe everytime I see someone use Windows on their home PC with an account with Administrator rights
I don't recall all the details since this was about a decade ago, but as far as I can recall, Netscape got sued by the U. of Illinois & they wound up settling out of court for millions. In addition, as for the open-source thing, I believe it wasn't totally open-source originally which is what caused the lawsuit when Netscape distributed the browser for free.

Anyway these points are off-track; in conclusion startups are secretive because while execution may be crucial, so is being realistic enough to realize you're not in the best position to execute properly and that it's best to keep your mouth shut until you are, lest someone who is in a better position to execute than you are run off with "your thing." And there are plenty of people who can/would run off with your thing, take the credit for it and not think twice about what happens to you as a result of their behavior.
Dude, I wish more Americans had to carry the shame of knowing that our banking system feels about circa 1982 compared to some other countries. After a couple years in Sweden and a couple months in Finland, there were plenty of times I walked out of a bank, hanging my head with shame, dreading having to go home and write on a piece of paper who I wanted to give money to, then give them that piece of paper, then they could take that little piece of paper to a bank, who would inspect my piece of paper and in a couple days, give them some money.

Sure this check scanning thing is an improvement, but it's lipstick on a wombat as far as I'm concerned.
What's the competing Google product? Google pages just lets you make a page AFAIK. Weebly lets you make a whole website and manager the various pages and how they link to each other.
Tesla: The greatest hacker of all time
Marc deserves credit for proposing IMG.

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

"I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

IMG

Required argument is SRC="url".

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull
over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text
at the point of the tag's occurrence."
Become ruler of the world?

Ground me somewhere on this one.
New Reference for the SLIME/Lisp/Emacs Screencast
Start a profitable business and be successful in mentoring others how to start their profitable business (not network marketing by any means)
Just that one needs hope to drive hard work to make it all work. Not much substance to those already there, but perhaps quite a bit to those that haven't taken the leap.
But smart people don't endeavor to regulate minutia.

I think you just implied that all politicians are dumb. I agree.
You can collapse/expand comment blocks in Visual Studio, although I'm not sure if VS can hide all of them at once. If not, it's a matter of writing a very simple plug-in. But anyway, that's not my point.

I think the idea of turning your plain-text source code into a 3D monster that requires a special rendering engine - is a wrong idea if you are in the webapp business. My server was under a massive attack recently and what saved my arse was terse and beautiful server-side code that I changed with vi on the fly. But of course we all know it's not only about attacks. Thus, unless we have magical IDEs that can edit and compile projects remotely on a Mars Rover, the conservative mantra Source code must be plain text wins.

So there's no hope for noobs. Either you jump onto the veterans' boat straight away or you don't even start programming. Ok, just kidding.

Damn Steve Yegge, my comments become longer than usual after reading his posts.
No Click Interface Design
Thanks for the reply. I tend to think you are largely correct for certain groups and practices, though that's just gut feeling.

I read most of Founders at Work; I don't recall much indiscriminate broadcasting of ideas and intent, but it's been a while.

For myself I find it useful to kick around ideas with a small local group of developers and business owners. The collective Bozometer is very handy, and indeed people are good about suggesting things I would not have thought of.

I'm not so sure that scales well to the general Internet and infinite strangers, but I've nothing concrete to back that up. Just more gut feeling.
Best Practices for Form Design
I don't know about Dave, the author of this post, but I am in a position where I'm developing my web app while learning RoR and programming in general. I feel I could go 3 to 10 times faster if I had a co-founder with RoR and programming experience better than what I have. Hiring someone right now is out of the question, due to my financial situation.
Oops, sorry. What I meant was how much information should you share in your public search for a co-founder.
Have you got an example where design alone has created success?
Absolute File System Design
But yesterday it worked fine -- A JavaScript gotcha
Starbucks to Offer Free Wi-Fi
As well, I think the article could have been compressed significantly; it's overly wordy. Mr. Yegge should apply his programming manifesto to his writing.
PicAnswers - Help us figure out what the photo is
I've had both Slicehost and Linode, and Slicehost is much faster by far (Xen). I used the 256 slice to power a few of my Rails applications, but I upgraded to the 512 so I can add more.

The best experience I had with Slicehost was the upgrade from 256 to 512. It was a couple clicks on their admin panel, 30 minutes of downtime, and then a quick SSH to verify everything was good.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the rumored iPhone/Starbucks ordering application? It would make sense to partner with AT&T instead of tmo...
No, but I have an example where usability and utility failed to create success due to aesthetics. I will have a blog post about it in the next couple of days.
The source code could remain plain text. For those who want to view the meta-comments, their meta-comment-enabled IDE would open the plain text with its accompanying meta-comment file.
How about my old-school comments that I might need when editing my source on Mars Rover?
Surely filling all your personal information fields with obscenities and changing your name to something that insults facebook would get your account terminated. I haven't tried, but hopefully that would work. Anyone heard of doing this?
Good catch! After you pointed it out, it seems obvious.
The problem with the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't approach is that, when you separate the code and the comments, they quickly diverge. The veteran will tinker with the code but never touch the comments, because she doesn't see them and doesn't care to see them. Then the comments become worse than useless, because they will actively mislead or confuse the newb who reads and writes them.

This is a special case of the general problem with metadata: you can't keep it in sync with the real data. This is what leads, e.g., Ruby programmers to become religious fanatics about DRY.

The other problem is that not all comments are equal: some are fluff, some are fluffy-looking but destined to become HTML documentation and are therefore important to keep around, some are terse and vital, some are hints for future refactorings and bug fixes. A system which hides all comments isn't really what I would want; I'd want to hide the fluffy ones and keep the important ones visible. And suddenly you need meta-metadata, and your editor becomes baroque, and your head explodes.
I have tried this, and it won't allow you to change your information to any common obscenities, etc. A message box pops up that says something like, "Please enter your real name." Maybe its possible if you get really creative, but I didn't have the patience to try.
When you make accusations you should not go on recollection.

Mosaic was open source from its earliest days. Marc was not just one of many students working on it, he was the most prominent developer on the project. That's my recollection, but it's also what I find when I look for sources to cite:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0262.ht...
Some of us read for fun, and his writing is fun! What you describe as "irrelevant" others of us see as "exposition." He follows a fairly well established tradition of using stuff unrelated to programming to illustrate programming (see Joel Spolsky and Philip Greenspun for more irrelevancies).
Nginx and Memcached, an easy 400% boost in req/s
I tried both linode and slicehost, and I far prefer slicehost. Their service is absolutely amazing, but more importantly they have hardware virtualization, instead of linode which only offers UML
Faster-than-light travel.
Mac Users: Tried Webkit Yet?
www.webkit.org -- this is the dev version of Safari. The new prerelease (very stable) is so FAST that I've dumped Firefox for good. Even tho I have to do without the nice greasemonkey scripts for YC News.

The first question I had: is there some kind of Adblock clone? Answer: multiple. See pimpmysafari.com for all the pluginz.

I'm sold on this new browser. Makes my old PB G4 run like it's on an intel core duo.

Oh, and you can run it on Windows too, and Linux. Didn't mention this because I think the essential plugins only run on the Mac.