skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks everyone for all of your info. Let me explain our situation and it might help some of you guys understand where I am coming from and where I am trying to go, as well as others out there in the same situation.

Right now we're developing, as I mentioned above, in Django and use SVN for everything. We have DB's locally.

From the get go we knew that there would be two major versions of our website. "Phase1" was fairly simple, the initial creation of the site and initial deploy into production.

"Phase2" Was the next giant step, which was essentially (and we learned this as we went) going to be an entire redesign from the ground up. We pretty much touched every file, redesigned over half of our models, etc... So, we created a branch called phase2-development and continued working. This was a pain in the ass because we still had to run and maintain the older "phase1" code locally for bug fixes, etc.. as well as continue our future development of the "Phase2" code. We also ran into problems later on because we were fixing bugs in the trunk "Phase1" and not merging those as we went into our phase2-development branch. So at one point we spent an entire weekend merging code.

We just launched our "Phase2" stuff a month or so ago, however, it wasn't all of the functionality we wanted in phase2 so we refer to it as phase1.5. Our head guy (more marketing/business xp. than tech came up with those names, so for all of us you can think of it as s/phase/version/g)

So now we're about to dive fullspeed into actually completing phase2, and but we still need to be able to maintain and fix bugs on the production site. What should we do? I would rather not run two copies of the site but since the new development we're going to be doing is going to be even crazier than going from v1 to v1.5 so not sure if that's even possible. Should we just create anther branch and develop on that? I'm not even sure the correct questions to be asking here, maybe you guys can help me from what I've described :)
Yeah, Capistrano is language exclusive, you can use it for anything. I have looked into it but never found it that exciting. I guess I need to revisit Capistrano :)
Clouds forming over Silicon Valley?  Funding may slow down.
Craig Venter: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention [mp3]
Peter Thiel's Optimistic Thought Experiment:  Trading in a world that might end
Time to Twitter
Thanks for your response. I often wonder if increasing supply means prices will fall so low - for example, get hired in a big company, and bring your code free, as a reverse-sign-on bonus. A little disturbing to think about ...

Before someone jumps in and points out there has always been death of start-ups, the YC companies are quite good, and quite plenty (with even more coming ...) which is what raised the supply-demand concern.
Obligatory tweaks-love-firefox comment:

At the moment, Snaptalent has start ups advertising for hackers. Do 50% of the people they want to hire use IE?

Of course, when they make some sales to BigCo, they ought to be 100% IE compliant.
I've started tinkering with the idea of using JSON for RPC calls, particularly across languages. It's lighter than CORBA, XML-RPC, SOAP, etc. and well-supported by all of the languages I like and use. One has to formalize some sort of standard function call interface, but since JSON is relatively limited and similar to the data structures one could pass as arguments in Perl or Ruby or Python, that's pretty easy and natural. And I hate XML.

I use Perl (which, given the number of others here mentioning Perl, seems to not be so unconventional after all). Partly because our codebase is 450kLoC, or so, and almost all Perl. Won't be rewriting that anytime soon. Perl is also very comfortable for system administration tasks. Moreso, in my experience, than Python.

I think a lot more than I code. If I write more than a dozen or so lines a day, it's a heavy day. I am mainly maintaining and extending existing software...so it's often just wrapping my head around the existing API and code. But even when starting from scratch on something, I take a long time to start actually coding, and only occasionally have a blast of productivity where I push out a couple hundred lines in a single stretch. This is somewhat bug-like, but I've never really been able to change. Luckily, as I've gotten better at the tools I use (Perl, JavaScript, and shell, mostly) those few lines of code tend to actually accomplish quite a lot--and the resulting code is usually nice to maintain because it is very short. So, the work does get done...but when I look at my co-founders output, I always feel tiny. He pumps out hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of lines per week...and they all work really well and are often as concise as what I would have come up with (though not always...he sometimes "powers through" and tightens it up later when it becomes a problem, which is a skill I often wish I had).
Sounds a little passive aggressive to me.
Maxmind is good, we use 3 of their products on getclicky.com. They all have straight forward APIs, and are very easy to setup and use within your own application.

GeoIPCity - returns city, country, "region" (state in the US), lat/long, area code, zip code, and more. This is available for free, or ~$400 for the full version, which is considerably more accurate, within the US at least. The free version is still pretty damn good considering it's free. The paid version is updated weekly, free is monthly.

We also use the "organization" and "hostname" products, which tell us for example that someone is from "Comcast Cable" and their hostname is "comcast.net", or "Google Inc" and "google.com", etc. These products are not available for free but they are pretty cheap ($15 for the hostname and $80 for the organization I think).

They're not 100% accurate, but you won't find a product that is. We are very happy with them and highly recommend them.
You can change the DNSs too. At least you can choose to use OpenDNS or not in the first place.
Whatever openDNS is doing, it doesn't make Google and Dell right. Users should not have to live with built-in advertisement in their laptop. I don't think it matters how easy it is to uninstall, it's still wrong. I would even get rid of logos on monitors and lids: this is a computer, not a t-shirt.
I knew I wasn't the only one who hates those stickers.
I'd like to see a search feature. There's so much useful information on this site and I'd love to be able to find items that I can't quite recall the details on.
put as many of your costs into $ as possible (hosting, etc) so you're hedged there.
I'm forced to reconsider this remark. Venture capitalists -- like all investors -- play an important role in bridging the gap between consumer demand and actual innovation. They are less risk averse than most investors, though -- and more able to drop a bunch of money all in one go -- so they tend to be more timely than other investors.
First Video of Hacked iPhone 2.0 In Action
Many people consider "writing a postmortem of the product" part of the game development process, even though not all those do. In any case, I don't think it's a GDM-only phenomenom.
Alexa indexes pages they should not
Make sure you protect the pages you don't want to be found.
10 Killer Internet Companies That Want To Pay You to Write
Some of these listed sites are new to me but #2 really caught my eye!
Engagement advertisement is an idea that I think successfully addresses the problem of click fraud. Instead of just measuring clicks or impressions, they would base the results on a desired user experience. Hard to do and track also, imho.
Acquisition prices would decrease in proportion to supply of new startups if the total amount of wealth created remained constant. But wealth doesn't remain constant.
what is YAML?
Two explanations:

1) The cost of starting Apple today would be much lower than it was two decades ago. However, the cost and complexity of starting a computer company that is truly groundbreaking by today's standards is just as high, if not higher.

2) The cost remains constant, but the price of startups, as set by investors, is actually getting higher. Anyone could make a Facebook in 1998 at approximately the same cost (even though servers were more expensive), but no one would have valued it at $15bn. Pricing would either go back down or the change in economic thinking (i.e., advertiseming is more important than hard cash sales) would become the standard.
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
The best way to understand continuations may be to think of them as copies of the stack.
Actually, I think GUIlimia works better on both counts...
Seed round investment outside of the US?
Does vc/angles sometimes taking serious on those startups from outside the US, especially in China?
I was working on a project and it seems hard to talk to some good vcs here(i went to china last yr).
This is their BUSINESS MODEL for crying out load. If you don't like it then use another DNS server.
It is like complaining about Google serving Adds.
them's fightin' words
Good point - start-ups do create new wealth. So I wondered - where does that wealth come from? In the web world, it comes (ultimately) from the healthy growth in user count, and the time they are spending on the web (which makes them either more productive or entertain themselves better or both). The web wealth also comes, to an extent, at the expense of some old wealth destroyed, like newspaper, TV etc. Finally, some of the new web wealth is also the effect of old web wealth being transferred - recent Yahoo acquisitions seem like a case of this to me, because Yahoo itself is declining in value, but they keep buying companies as they do so, effectively transferring their wealth to a new generation of start-ups.

There is natural demand growth for start-ups due to these factors, which manifest themselves as new acquirers springing up - as an example Google wasn't a factor in the last bubble as an acquirer, and may be Facebook will be very acquisitive soon.

So my question can be rephrased as: are we outrunning that demand growth in terms of supply of start-ups? It seems to be so sometimes. And in a recession demand growth could temporarily reverse too ...
Isn't any bank the same if you use a credit card like Visa? Is BBVA well known in USA?
I include it to mean support software that sits between the OS and applications, like a runtime system or a memory allocator. Much of that code (and MapReduce) qualify.
I'd be a bit shocked if people (particularly the more academic types) didn't use matlab or R. Anyone know if these two are prevalent in financial shops of various types?
What the fuck is with you people? 60 responses and most of theme seem to be arguing about Steve's content instead of his average blog length. After all, it's Yegge we're talking about folks!

=-P
Sure, but publishing them (and the particular format they use) is something Game Developer has advanced more than anyone else in games. It's become their hallmark.
>> my wrists have not hurt again ever.

Have you tried a trackball? if I use a mouse for a week or so my wrist starts aching, with a trackball none of those problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML
Meh, Y combinator has already helped to solve that.

The problem is Google is wasting investor money trying to be a big company, recruiting thousands of employees and trying to expand rapidly. Why not just stay small and efficient with respect to their core search and advertising services, and just buy startups if they want to expand in other areas?
I too am curious why this was posted being that it's 4 years old.

"The Most Dangerous Geek in the World" ?!?! Where did they get that from? Free spirited? Sure. But how is he dangerous in the slightest?

While I admire his free spirited nature I don't admire his hypocracy. If AOL was that much of an idea crusher/non-innovator why didn't he leave and launch his ideas? Instead he chooses a manner that is disrespectful and possibly illegal.
You got a tax break for hiring a convict, right?

Did your clients know if his experience? Did it improve ViaWeb's reputation in any contexts?
Celebrate pi day: Learn hundreds of digits of pi at lightning speed, software open-sourced
I wrote about the method I used to learn 100 digits of pi in under an hour and remember them days later without extra practice.

One part of it was harder for me to do, but easier for a computer to do. So, I decided to make a computer program to find the words and optimize everything for me. I did, and I’m releasing the code under GPLv3.
You may be right. This is the last semester of my Senior year and I'm trying to finish my undergrad up so I can start on my Master's next year. My Junior and Sophomore years weren't as bad school wise, but I was working part-time during both of them, so all in all I was probably still busy about 60-80 hours a week. I guess my point is that I've gotten used to being really busy, and working only 40-50 hours a week won't be a problem. Sounds like you're used to being busy as well, working full-time all the way through school.
Google Sky in your web browser
im not sure what the point of this is? how does it scale?

seems like flickr's interestingness model is much more.. well,.. interesting
Ahh, that I can see, but is the bottleneck in encryption really in generating the random numbers? I guess the part of encryption I was focusing on is the part that does heavy-duty bit-crunching during the actual encryption/decryption process, which must be exact if you want to get back the same data you started with.
Why risk is important
Honestly, I was hoping to come in here and see a "this is not reddit" comment. Apparently, mine will have that dubious distinction.
Ask YC: What do you think about our hug-or-ditch network?
My brother (matstc) and I had about a week of free time recently and we decided to build a few websites along the concept of "Hot or Not" (that is, a simple interactive rating site):

www.hugamovie.com
www.hugacity.com
www.hugamusic.com
www.huganoodle.com

We're aware it's not rocket science and we're not going to get rich with it. But we had fun in the process and it allowed us to experiment with a few toys: Rails, Google AdSense, Amazon associates. Our 4 sites have been running for a week now, and we would be interested to get your feedback on about anything related to those sites.

Here for starters: Do you like the simple design? Any suggestions to maximize the revenue? Is it a good choice to use Google AdSense on these kinds of sites? What's your experience with being an Amazon associate (our ads in the bottom-left corner)?
Do or DO
A More Satisfying Programming Experience
I'll show you an online magazine rack
I tried it a bit. Maybe there should be a skip link because it's impossible of course to rate a movie without actually watching it...

The challenge will be to find features that will make it go viral...
thankyou. but wikipedia got banned here:(
Wow, this is interesting. I'd like to learn more about their process, but considering how secetive hey are, I'm surprised we learned his much.
These processes seem pretty obvious for success, though, so I'm not surprised they make 10 comps for each feature. It ensures the absolute best.
UPDATE: a major bug that prevented people from submitting new links was fixed.
I discovered today that's actually an established practice: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2711. I haven't read any of the papers yet, but looking at the abstract of "Language Oriented Programming" by M. P. Ward, there does seem to be a difference between his idea and your approach with Arc and your other projects.

In the abstract, Ward defines Language Oriented Programming as defining a formal description of the language to develop the type of application in question, and then write the application in that language, and implement the compiler using existing tools.

The problem I see with this approach is that it's rare to know ahead of time what the ideal language for an application should look like. I don't think you're really going to know until you try to develop it. That's how the Arc approach differs. Particularly when you're already working in a language with rich meta-programming/code generation capabilities, I don't think there's any reason to have a strict separation of the phases. Even if you're not using a language with innate code generation, it's still possible to iterate back and forth between writing the application and changing the language/compiler

Keep in mind I haven't read the whole paper yet, or any of the related work, so the methodology might not be as strict as I've presented.
I have looked into SVMs but I don't think they would work well in this case because:
1) A separate classifier would have to trained for each user and this would take too much resources.
2) I think an SVM would require too many training cases before it becomes useful.

If you know different, let me know.
I'm sorry, I forgot to mention, Freenode is the best network, connect to the server irc.freenode.net first.
Yeah. We pondered about this 'skip button' and decided not to put it in order to keep the voting interface simple and because you can always click on the 'get random movie' link (although admittedly far away from the voting panel).
i didn't see that, maybe you can rename 'get random movie' to 'skip' or have have both in different locations and monitor user behaviour to see what works
This is a very out-of-fashion confusing concept on which to write tutorials in your blog! Monads are the new continuations. Try to keep up.
There are also two other physicists already in congress, Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Vernon Ehlers (R-MI).
Scientists identify new longevity genes
Totally Agree! Akamai not only gives you geolocation but thier bandwidth as well, so you can serve different content to a dial-up user versus that of a high broadband user
If you want to improve your design, don't ask a bunch of geeks. Ask your users.

Automate the process of doing A/B studies. In other words, make it easy for you to test a different layout against the existing one. 10-20% of your users should see the test design. This will give you concreate data on how your changes improve things like stickiness and ad clicks. Keep what works. Rinse, repeat, get rich :)
Neckband used in "telepathic" chat
StartupCamp Toronto 2 - Tuesday, April 29th
OK. In that context, the unconventional thing I've done is to make an actual functional site used by people who don't have CS degrees. In fact, the target market is adults who have a life. Like me! I do stuff, you know. I'm about to go do stuff now. (Upgrade tinymce.)
Navy prefers open systems
HSBC. "The World's Local Bank". The only problem with them is that their presence in the States is really limited so far.
The author talks about investors preferring to invest in a 35 year old MBA over a 25 year old hacker, which is most probably right. He then goes on to talk about how this is not necessarily rational in terms of classical economics. (maximising value)

The funny thing about economics is that in the traditional macro economic models people are thought to be rational. This is obviously not true, as can seen in countless examples in everyday life.

In the case of why Y combinator has found a hole in the market he has the answer himself - an investor feels better explaining to his peers why a 35 year old MBA failed than explaining why a 25 year old pimple-faced hacker failed.

This is a part of behavioral economics, which tells us that markets are not rational at all - they are more based on psychology than rationality. This in turn gives a great advantage to people who have the guts and insight (or luck...) to see beyond it.

I bet that there are many more niches just waiting to be exploited.
http://yaml.org/spec/current.html
MySpace is obviously trying to learn from Facebook's success and incorporate a prominent feature of Facebook.

Unfortunately for MySpace, developers and the population in general are boarding the Facebook train and leaving MySpace back at the station.

MySpace is starting to remind me of the times when Friendster was technically sub par to its peers. All ugly/distasteful design considerations aside (seeing as how that has actually proven successful for MySpace) it is in fact technically inferior to its competitors.

Moreover, adding new features like OpenSocial without fixing its current fallacies could be detrimental.
Goto a cheaper grad. school - a state run one. I'm going to san diego state and its waaaay cheaper than most schools and great for what i'm doing (applied math). Professors are almost the same everywhere (some good, some bad) and grad students are into what they study independent of location. If i was in-state, i'd pay only $4k/year in tuition, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than private schools. You might incur a bit of debt while working towards a masters, but you'll learn a ton along the way and be very practical, which is what a masters is for anyway - apply all that theoretical knowledge to a real situation under the guidance of those who've do that all the time.
I have seen specs calling for Matlab, R, S+, and Mathematica. But my impression is that since the finished product is going to be in a high-performance, low-level language, they don't care what you do your rough-drafting in as long as the finished product is C++. Exception: Jane St. Capital uses Ocaml; one of their top execs is a Lisp fan who has been credited in pg essays.
Oh, I forgot to mention dynamic level-of-detail in computer games and other types of real-time rendering. Very similar to the video concept, but still worth mentioning.
The author of the article, Bill Buxton, has a book I'd recommend to anyone making a product - "Sketching User Experiences".
His hypothetical continuations don't quite work.

theSite = mark();
puts "Hello, World!"
theSite.return();

This is the first example in the post, and one which it's claimed will loop continually. Translating to Scheme (where we can actually run the pseudo-code):

(begin
(define theSite #f)
(set! theSite (call/cc (lambda (c) c)))
(print "Hello, World!") (newline)
(theSite #f))

And we get:

> (begin
(define theSite #f)
(set! theSite (call/cc (lambda (c) c)))
(print "Hello, World!") (newline)
(theSite #f))
"Hello, World!"
"Hello, World!"
procedure application: expected procedure, given: #f; arguments were: #f

This translation to Scheme seems fair, since the definition of mark() explicitly states that it "allows you to pass information back to the original site, so that it evaluates to a different value" -- which means that the return value of mark() itself is clearly significant, and therefore that the step of "set theSite to the result of evaluating the current form" is considered part of the continuation (or "mark").

In this case, theSite gets set to #f, and the continuation is then "broken".

It might seem tedious to nitpick here, but continuations are so mysterious exactly because of these issues. mark() _can't be fixed_ without drastically changing the semantics of continuations. This is kinda non-obvious, and something that people often discover suddenly when wondering why call/cc is implemented in such a roundabout fashion.

Continuations are confusing to point where even toy examples in pedagogical blog posts are easy to mess up.
A search engine that applied a bonus for sites with well organized semantic information would be an interesting idea.
Reznor's one-week take for 'Ghosts': $1.6 million
...wtf?
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

Drive it Forever by Robert Sikorsky.
PBWiki Gets An Overhaul
I think Wiki's were a great concept - a SIMPLE way to share information in a logical manner.

In my opinion these companies are bloating the idea and pushing the limits of what a wiki should be.

Your thoughts?
seizure while hitting "add comment"?
I think Wiki's were a great concept - a SIMPLE way to share information in a logical manner.

In my opinion these companies are bloating the idea and pushing the limits of what a wiki should be.

Your thoughts?
this neck technology was invented by russians and used in army at least the past 15 years to replace microphones in communications
Ten things you don’t know about the Milky Way Galaxy
Strategy Game Programming