skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you add the "dynamic ranking" to the rdbms model, it's turns very complicated.

Would be a good idea to model the three on XML and store complete trees on the dbms? (thinking loud!) :)
Didn't Myspace have a similar story?
In my case, there was room because there's a significant non-technical component to the business. So, my co-founder is a business person. She handles that side of the business, and I do the technical.
One more idea :

Is here the solution? http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3426
Make a very simple database model with at least these columns: comment_id int, created timestamp, parent int, score int,...

When you need to view a page of comments that has not been loaded, load it into cache and then use your cache from there on out. When updates come in, write them directly to the cache, re-sort the cache as necessary, and then have the database updates run in the background.

For the cache tree model I use something like:

{'root_comment_id':123,'children_sorted_by_points':[]}

Cache expiration left as an exercise for you.

This can very easily handle something the size of hacker news.

edit: And this easily handles "many reads and many writes and an ever-changing order".
That's an interesting one. Difficulty in finding funding overseas. I wonder if the YCs of the world will branch out internationally someday. I don't see why not.
I've had a few problems making it work like I want it to in IE when I have multiple replacements but otherwise it's fantastic. Although I can only get one replacement (all of my site's h2's) to work, my entire site just looked a whole lot better. I highly recommend it if you think you really need it. Just make sure you don't use it for substantial amounts of text.
httperf, ftp://ftp.hpl.hp.com/pub/httperf/httperf-0.9.0.tar.gz
Good point. I think gov't provided healthcare would have a huge effect on small businesses.

Let's go Obam.... ok wait, let's not get political :)
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/140...
"SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER!
When you see the white whale!
Break your backs and crack your oars, men!
If you wish to prevail!
This ivory leg is what propels me!
Thrust your harpoons to the sky,
Aim directly at his crooked brow,
And look him straight in the eye!
WHITE
WHALE--
HOLY
GRAIL!"

I took this quote to heart when I first read (guess what book) and it seems to apply to nearly every situation I've been in, somehow.
I'm more of a Holub disciple myself. "http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2004/jw-0102-toolbo..." discusses MVC in particular.
Windows Server 2008 upgrade from 2003 is a huge aggravation, and then some
I suspect that we can, as yet, only see the first incling of the laptop's replacement but it would be fair to point out that with a VPN and something like (dare I say it) Microsoft's Remote Desktop you can get some work done without toting a heavy hitting machine around with you.
As a hard core web developer (who likes to visit local coffeeshops and travel), I had similar needs: loads of RAM, lots of pixels, big battery, etc.

I ended up getting a 17" MBP. Love it. The super high resolution variation, 1920x1200. The resolution is great for coding/development. The battery is good enough that I normally head out for coffeeshops without the charger.

The weight made my really nervous, my first "real" laptop was heavy and I swore never to get a big laptop again. This laptop isn't bad, I slide it into my laptop backpack and hop around town without a problem.

Spend some time down at a local Apple store. That helped me finally seal the deal.
If you've really got a handle on the business side of things and you're a great people person, I'd say yeah.

Even if you're not actually coding, you can provide ideas and feedback.
By its nature this site does not generally have deep nesting. Adjacency lists are inefficient with deep, narrow nesting. I think that performance would be acceptable with that approach.

However, nested sets are more elegant. I believe the best approach would be to do the reordering in the application. Retrieve the comments in arbitrary order (probably chronological), and sort the siblings by votes just before you render.
I think this is a good way to describe startups.
That's way too long and that makes it harder to remember.
New York Times
Hacker News
Digg
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888
Consistency, not novelty, is the key to success - John Berardi
Shove the sun aside - Dave Weiner
I didn't realise this was a pg quote until I Googled it:

"If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean."

I've seen enough PHBs around software to know you won't be waiting long.
Norvig: A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming (from 2002)
It's best to keep things in-memory if you can.

Since you mention MySQL I assume that's what you're using to persist data. Storing a tree in a flat database is kind of a challenge. This page (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/hierarchical-data-database) suggests two ways: adjacency lists, and modified preorder tree traversal. MPOTT is a cute idea, but that's about it. It will make your database schema more complex, make your algorithms more complex, and require preexisting entries to be changed when new ones arrive. It's not faster than doing things in memory, and it's just asking for trouble.

Try using adjacency lists and reconstructing the tree in memory each time you serve it. This will let you get away with a single query for both reading and writing. The dev.mysql.com link you mention warns against using the adjacency list model, but that's because it's an area where MySQL itself is inadequate. It's fine when you fix things in another language.

Here's a minimal schema:

topic, id, parent, payload

ID is unique and non-zero. Parent is the ID of the parent node (0 if top-level). Topic is shared by all comments in a given topic. When you select, select by topic and then recreate your tree by going through and reestablishing "children" lists for each of your parents. You can then use traditional tree algorithms.

This method is easily modified to support caching.
"Anything you can conceive and believe, you can achieve" - anonymous
One of the factors that lead Reddit to become unreadable, in my opinion, was the proliferation of editorializing headlines.

When the headlines begin presenting ideas that are too large a subset or superset of the actual contents of the article, it becomes difficult to judge what articles one actually want to reads.
Overseas funding would be great but YCs and similar companies would have to be careful though. I am not sure in other places, but here in Cebu(Philippines), everything is booming... Infrastructure is improving due to large international companies (EG: Lexmark, NEC, etc.) setting up in this small island. And like i said, everyone speaks english...
I read this as "Social Standing Still Predicts Better than IQ..." ... coulda used a better headline.
"Building product awareness is a full time task and so is programming."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136649
ahem. there's NO WAY apple will allow that.

they've said over and over again that iphone apps must be purchased through their app store. do you think they're suddenly going to say "oh yeah, and there's a loophole you can exploit, where you can email an app to somebody else. sorry for not mentioning that earlier."

as if.
You're much more likely to be struck by lightning or bitten by a rattlesnake than you are to win a lottery (even assuming you buy a ticket.) Not being struck by lightning or bitten by a rattlesnake is one of my major goals and so I never buy lottery tickets.

Investing in the stock market or starting a business is risky enough - but with those activities you have much more control - and less potential for needing CPR.

To answer the original question, though, no - no one I know has ever won the lotto (or been bitten by a rattlesnake or struck by lightning.)
Web 3.0 Demo
Wow, how could I forget this one:

eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work by Randall Stross (San Jose State Professor, Writes for the Times Occasionally, etc.)

Seriously, this is a really open approach to how Benchmark Capital approached investments in eBay, Webvan,etc. I believe it's available on itunes as an audiobook as well.
Free 512 MB USB Thumb Drive from IBM
I disagree. My toughest problem is finding people I am comfortable with in terms of their technical ability.
You might consider how much of the structure and ordering you actually need to maintain in the database, and how much you could compute in your app servers after pulling the raw data from the database.

For example, say that your comments table stored the user id, the post id, the parent comment id (where the parent is the one the user clicked "reply" on), the vote count, and a timestamp. Then to render a page for all of the comments for a particular post, you could just pull all of the comments keyed by that post id and then order/arrange them however you want in your application code, such as by timestamp or number of votes. This doesn't require any tricky db writes and generally removes load from the db (which is desirable since its the hardest part of the app to scale).

The harder part is dealing with a case like the user comments page on neww.yc, where you show all of the user's comments along with of the descendants of those comments. Aside from the traditional approaches to storing hierarchies in relational dbs like the ones you linked to, I know of two other possibilities. One is to store the path of nodes to the root as lexicographically-comparable strings. The other is to create a separate table that stores ancestry relationships, in which for each node you have one row for each of its ancestors in the tree up to the root. Again, both of these approaches would allow you to pull out exactly the comments that you needed, but you would have to do the arranging in the application code.
I've done threaded comments with adjacency lists like this in MySQL in the past, and it worked well. Note also that it's compatible with scores moving siblings around relative to one another -- just calculate sibling position based on both score and date. Your schema might look something like this:

id, date, topic_id, parent_id, score, payload
I use autobench (http://www.xenoclast.org/autobench/)
"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
SXSW: Where were the Europeans?
The New New Thing(http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall99/newnewthing.htm)
You could have a good-faith "how did you find out about this job?" field for ppl to type in a site, etc. But there are obvious limitations.
money+non-programmer vs. broke+programmer

I'd say it's a draw.
"Read Paul Graham"
Ask YC: How do you read YC?
Personally I follow the RSS Feed using Google Reader and on encountering interesting items open up the article and comments, favoring if the article sparks conversation.
I'd also highly recommend The Monk and the Riddle - I don't think I've ever seen it suggested elsewhere, but I recommend it to everyone.

I found PayPal Wars to be a bit dull, and the author a bit smug.
Agreed. I quit a good job at a major company to join a venture-funded startup in 2000...obviously my timing was terrible and the startup went under within a year. The result was devastating personally and financially. I'm just now to the point where I have enough savings to try again...but at the same time I've rebuilt my career. It is really, really hard to walk away from a good paycheck again, especially since the economy looks like recession in 2008. So I work on things on the weekends.
Or if we just had competition in health care. It's illegal in America to sell health care insurance across state lines, for example. It's also illegal for associations to buy group health care. One could imagine a competitive market where you could shop for insurance online nationwide, and where groups like Y Combinator or university alumni associations could offer insurance to members (getting the price benefits of scale that individuals can't get). That's John McCain's approach. U.S. tax policy is the reason health care is employer-provided-- that's what we need to fix, not expand the government's role in the system.
Pycon 2008 Disappointment
Just wondering, what are you up to these days after digg? I would imagine you could utilize the notoriety you gained from digg to create an app development team. Something to the nature of electricpulp.com ...
Natural Selection: Mathematical Model Predicts Success Of Businesses
Panda3d full featured open source python 3d engine - 1.5.0 released
The special consideration is in the stock options and MAYBE the subsequent position they are offered and not necessarily in the relative compensation for that position.

They usually DON'T stay. But when they do, it's usually due to stock option vesting plans.
I am using Pythonpaste's webserver - does this only work on apache?
httpunit looks interesting...
I use it because it lowers costs.
Can I make some copies because I have to make some copies? :)

http://tinyurl.com/2udsgm
No, it's just HTTP. It just happens to come with apache, that's all.
Merit-Based News has arrived: Social news fueled by the submitters' puzzle solving abilities.
There's no voting here. Rather, the point score of a submission is equal to the submitter's Numbrosia Puzzle score from the last 24 hours divided by the number of submissions made by that submitter.

http://numbrosia.com/?cmd=puzzle_n

http://numbrosia.com

Note that it makes sense to delete submissions so that the set of submissions associated with you is not too large (so that the score for each submission is not too low).
there's a huge difference between recording my personal conversations and recording my movies, searches, or voting habits.

It isn't a personal conversation if it's going through an intermediary.
Right. Here's a simple example:

ab -n 10000 -c 25 http://your.com/your.py

10000 hits, with 25 concurrent requests. You can keep cranking up -c n and see what happens. This is also useful for testing your network capability, e.g. simultaneous connections, from a fast remote network.
I'm in school right now, but I do my schoolwork in my spare time.

It's all in your state of mind.

Best of luck.
You're supposed to fail.
Markkit.net - web2.0 text highlighter
Apple to iPhone devs: Keep on developing for Jailbroken iPhones guys!
When the winds of change are blowing some people are building shelters, and others are building wind mills.
- Chinese proverb
so I get down modded for giving examples.... I know its not cool to moan about down modding but at least people could give a reason.
try also my :

http://markkit.net

featuring a bookmarklet.
that should be:

Founders aren't programmers == doomed

silly.
What the world wrote
First submission of new Internet art project, The World Writes.
Only a percent or two of stake for a mission-critical programmer advisor?! You're crazy.
Have a message table and an ancestor table. The ancestor table allows you to find all ancestors of a message or all decendents of a message. This allows you to quickly retrieve a branch of the discussion tree.
interesting. it show entities, but does it show relationships? I kind of see that in actions, but it reminds me a lot of grammar class. That's not bad though, as the semantic web is going to have a lot of those fundamentals. Very cool stuff overall.
(2) determines a level of a "competitive entry barrier", and as such it's really a part of (3).

The harder the idea is to copy, the more time you have for the app to mature. Any new idea needs real-world tweaking, e.g. the actual use of the app may end up being different from what you envisioned, some non-obvious features may be in a high-demand, unforeseen scalability or usability issues may surface, etc. The longer you have to address these issues without worrying about users leaving to the competitor the better.

Writing an actual copycat app is a different game altogether. I don't have an experience with it, but the common sense suggests that it's not worth doing unless there is a large, under-served market segment or all existing solutions really suck. Hoping to bite a piece out of established market with a couple of (flashy) features is not a very smart thing to do.
I am using this for my game http://aff2aw.com
there is plant of commercial games that use it too:
http://play.toontown.com/webHome.php
http://apps.pirates.go.com/pirates/v3/welcome
http://code3d.com/
http://www.msapoliceline.com/thermal_enforcer.html
http://aff133.games.is/product/product=795
fullasagoog.com
techcrunch.com
http://aws.typepad.com/?
I don't think the idea of a web 2.0 era, version, or set of technologies is very compelling. I do find the notion helpful for classifying user experience though.

I consider the most sophisticated apps today to be web 2.5 ("service web"): cross-site APIs/widgets and the resulting mashups.

And then web 2.0 ("social web") as single sites with readable/writeable content. Forums, social news, sharing sites.

Web 1.5 ("application web") as writeable sites. Webmail, instant messaging, site builders, search engines.

Web 1.0 ("document web") as single sites with solely readable content. Blogs, arcades, galleries, oldnews, papers, homepages.

When we integrate structured portable data, the social graph, cross-device interfaces, and decentralized identity, I think we'll have something to call web 3.0.
Imagine hordes of offshore spammers solving this puzzle all day long for fun (and profit).
How smart are these offshore spammers though? Presumably smart people would find better work?
Based on what I see on my site they are pretty smart and very determined.

I think you should make it truly merit based - submit a bugfix or a feature patch to an open source project to post a link :)
Can't give up the salary (wife, house, etc). Luckily I've found an employer supportive of my startup (was originally a consulting customer) and has let me structure my day job to get more time than nights and weekends to work on it.

I went at it full-time for 6 months when I first launched and it didn't fail, I just ran out of money to sustain a salary. That was 18 months ago, I'm still solvent and quitting working at it full-time was probably the best thing to do for the long-term viability. My goal has always been to get going on as little resources as possible so that if it failed, it wouldn't be a huge disaster. So far, so good.
Interesting idea, but the problem is many people use social news as a quick way to view/post/discuss things. The time involved in solving puzzles offsets that convenience, i.e. it can discourage posting because of the time necessary to make your post heard.

Though it would be funny to see porn sites have you solve a puzzle to view some pics :)
Thanks, I am using Siege which does this and a bit..
If i am going to learn anything new then httpunit it is.
Why not? I can have a personal conversation with someone else verbally over the air, but I can't have a personal conversation with someone else over bits?
I don't misunderstand at all, I know it's an application, but applications can be built with standard HTML and Ajax as well, see the Seaside/Arc framework for a good example of just how easy this can be with continuation frameworks.

I said RIA's have their place, they'll succeed a small amount on the desktop where they can be forced upon workers, but on the open internet where they have to compete against web applications, they'll get their butts kicked, as they always have, because they don't force openness.

Allowing the developer the option to hide the code is a fatal flaw, people learn by modifying examples, and that's what makes HTML/JavaScript so unbeatable and viral. When a teenager attempts to learn to program, he'll choose HTML/JavaScript over any RIA platform precisely for that reason, the barrier to entry is much lower. Given the choice to hide their code, most developers will and that creates a barrier to new developers learning the technology.

RIA's aren't new, the idea isn't new, this is what Java was all about, applets, ActiveX components from Microsoft, and Flash from Adobe have all been able to do this for years as well, and they all failed miserably to gain wide adoption. Flash found a niche doing video, but beyond that most developers hate it.

This new batch of RIA's will fail for the same reason, in the end, users don't want them, developers do, to protect their intellectual property. Users don't give a rats ass about a developers intellectual property.

Users are perfectly happy with web apps that use standard controls they understand. RIA's give developers too much freedom to deviate from the normal conventions users are accustomed too. HTML's constraints aren't a weakness to be escaped from, they're a strength that forces you to focus on providing value to the user rather than the mental masturbation of playing with and using non standard widgets that in the end mostly just confuse the average user.

RIA's will always have their place, and it'll always be secondary to HTML/JavaScript, unless an open standard is developed for RIA's that isn't owned by any one company and doesn't require any plugins to run, and doesn't allow developers the ability to hide the code from the users.
You can vary the task based on the sort of news site you would like to have. To compete with programming.reddit.com, you could use merit-based news with your suggestion.

As for puzzle solving, you can make the puzzles really difficult to eliminate the vast majority of spammers.
Here's a way I've previously "validated" some of my designs in this area.

Look at Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/), the code that powers Slashdot. They have quite a few threading features and they obviously figured out performance issues.
Well, I dont think they need the money - why then, why?
I'm not working full-time because of college. I've heard many arguments for/against it, but I do feel that a degree is a useful and worthwhile plan B in case you do need to go to a big company for a paycheck. So for now I hack away on weekends (and weekdays, and whenever I'm not working on homework) in hopes that when I do get out of college I won't necessarily need to cash in on that plan B. That, and if I dropped out of college my family would disown/dismember me :).
Would you please stop filling up comment threads with this kind of thing?
I used a slightly different approach of combining acts_as_tree (for faster updates/inserts) and added a dotted_id for faster reads. The dotted id is a string,as in 0001.0002.0007. Index this column and its fairly fast. The obvious limitation this approach creates is the depth of your comment tree. approx =dotted id col size/#of digits in max pk -1. Not an issue for many. When Im updating the hierarchy , I update root of the hierarchy being moved and then a single UPDATE to update the dotted ids in that subtree.
If you are using MySQL, then the max length of a column that can be indexed is also limited. Don't remember the exact length.
I dont like Google Reader much. I read the homepage once a day and if I visit again I only read the new subs.

PS: I use greasemonkey to pretty it up.
It's an interesting concept, but practicality wise it looks like a stillborn.

Why not just tie it to their FICO score for yet another more random solution? At least the person can have a life outside of solving esoteric puzzles all day long.
You can be an ex-programmer? As I see it it's a mentality, you can't really lose that.
This reminds me very much of the irritating adverts that highlight specific words it knows about and pops up adverts related to them :/

Completely unconvinced...
Autobengh is a wrapper around httpperf.