skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hadn't really considered that it should scale, anymore than you would ask how to write the articles themselves without doing it all by hand.

Comments close after a period of time, so it shouldn't scale temporally, comments for a large site with lots of authors, well, they have lots of authors.

If you want commentors to be able to suggest corrections indefinitely, then either a wiki is a more suitable medium, or an "email me" link. Depending on what you want to achieve - a communally edited document or a personal reply.

As far as newspaper sites go, they go beyond 'comments'; hundreds of comments is in the realm of a forum and deserves some kind of moderators and so on.

You want to publish to the world and have the world able to reply to you while you aren't paying attention? That's not going to work. If you want to publish to the world and have the world reply to each other, well that's what people have their own blogs for, surely; why would you want to host that indefinitely?

And if you are going to have an abandoned corner of the internet where nobody 'in authority' checks what happens, then you need to rely on the passerby, hopefully give them some tools to step in and help, e.g. several downvotes over several days from different sources = autodelete. I doubt that's a solution; if you could automatically tell who to trust in the first place you wouldn't let the spammy comments be submitted.
You Are Not A Gadget - Cover Art
Yeah, now an attacker will be able to delete the binaries you downloaded from the Internet, in addition to all of your personal files.

If your single-user system is compromised to the point where it matters what files you can and can't write, you've already lost. And the "low hanging fruit" in this attack scenario was the files you actually cared about.

(Also, this is a dupe of the top-rated comment. Maybe read one comment before replying?)
NASA Picture Suggests Dubai Globe Sinking Into Sea
Isn't a difference that if you had a can of "spray glass" you could probably incapacitate someone pretty quickly with it.. whereas throwing cement or some fibreglass insulation in someone's face is unlikely to be fatal? To me, it doesn't seem like the level of danger is the issue - just how easily that danger can be manifested.
Ceci est le commentaire où je signale que j'ai arrêté l'apprentissage du français en 10 e année :(
One question I would ask: How closely can you monitor and moderate it so that trollish comments and other undesirable crap doesn't bring down the quality? If the answer is "Not very", then some other means to let users voice their opinions/interact with the site is probably better. Moderating is very time consuming and if it is done badly it alienates users, probably more than not having a comment system would.
Because as you described you have to try it to find out how much it will save you, by which point you could probably just roll it out already.

Say you have 10 servers now and you expect business to grow by 10x in next year, so you put 6 months of dev. time into implementing caching. Then you get 10x the traffic in a month and you get V.C. investment as a result. You then have a problem, people are getting a bad experience and the development won't be done for another 5 months. Your CEO buys a rack full of servers, but you can't do anything with them because you don't have a scalable system. Alternatively you could find out after 6 months that you can't make that 10x performance jump after all.

Twitter had this problem a while back, essentially their DB server got overloaded but it was already a 8 CPU, 64GB machine and despite having lots of money they couldn't quickly solve the problem, because you couldn't really get a bigger system.

Facebook knows how to scale, they want to cut costs where they can to become (more) profitable.
And a lot of Flash games wouldn't be playable on the iPhone anyway, because they assume (1) a keyboard, (2) a mouse cursor, and/or (3) multiple mouse buttons -- none of which the iPhone has, or can easily emulate.
I couldn't agree more. I've lost count of the number of times I've read an interesting article on the Guardian website only to have hundreds upon hundreds of dull comments and irrelevant arguments squeezed down my meagre internet connection. I go to the newspaper website to read the newspaper's writing and opinion, not that of thousands of internet pundits. Every article about economic recovery, for instance, currently attracts hundreds of doom-laden comments. It's enough to make you slit your wrists.

It's the overwhelming volume of comments at the bottom of national newspaper articles that gets me. A Guardian piece can get anything from 100 to around 500 comments before it starts to fizzle out. Who has the time to read through all that? It's just a racket - noise at its worst catering to the very few participants and irritating the many readers. What was wrong with letters pages, with that same noise filtered and edited by editors for hundreds of years?
and also suffers from scalability too. How many times have you accessed this site and got a connection error? Scalability and all that other work requires code.
HipHop - PHP Source
Rails 3 isn't out yet. That's just the daily auto-generated HTML, generated from the release notes file on the Git repository.
On the more general topic of whitepages.com:

The thing that frustrates me about whitepages and similar sites is they don't allow me to build up my own phonebook. Say I want to look up the number of a restaurant - after I have done that once, I want to add it to a virtual address book, maybe even something I can sync with my mobile phone (eg. via Google contacts or something else that nuevasync supports).

Does anyone here know of a site allowing that?

I know, I know, I have asked this before... (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754175) - hope springs eternal, though.
A First Taste Of What The Google Tablet’s Interface Will Look Like
Are Passwords on Modern *nix Systems Still Limited to 8 Characters?
It's interesting that it doesn't really read fundamentally different than the release notes of the most unfashionable and enterpriesiest frameworks out there. "Enjoy the great advances of the generalized Smimgle API while ensuring to convert your Smapti configuration file. A conversion script is provided. The framework now supports Glump and Froffle including some experimental functionality that can be activated with the --zugzug flag"
Or leave off comments altogether (Kottke is an example of a successful blog without comments) and put other interesting entries in the article tail instead to keep people moving around the site.
I know what you mean, I will often check the comments here before following the actual links. More often than not the comments provide more facts and better commentary to the issues.
"The Java way is better. The implied this is easy to understand."

Until you meet a nested class. Or the implied objects that use this in JavaScript callbacks.
Okay, I've bought extremely potent acid used for removing imperfections from granite that can cause chemical burns within seconds of contact when diluted. The undiluted form could easily cause grievous harm if thrown in someones face, and there's specific warnings on the bottle that any contact can cause burns or blindness.

It's exceptionally easy to manifest the danger, and I bought the bottle for 3 pounds.
This is potentially true, but it's not a slam dunk because CPUs may be much more powerful than whatever you can build into a disk controller cost-effectively. This may not be true (a high-performance ASIC implementation may be tiny; this is not unheard of in the world of bit-banging algorithms), but it is worth considering. I'll have to look into what compression algorithm they used, and whether you can get away with something smaller/less power-hungry than a Core 2 on a disk controller.
I think his point is a bit deeper than "I don't like it".

How so? Everything in this article -- and nearly any point one could make about a programming language -- comes down to a matter of taste.

Take your example -- Python "has objects, but not in an 'opinionated' sense." What you see as a lack of purity, I see as just the right amount of pragmatism. To me, "un-opinionated" classes is a positive point, not a negative one. Where Zidek sees "inherently static" standard libraries, I see inherently stable ones. Where he sees a distressing lack of encapsulation I see a refreshing relaxing of constraints.

I'd go on, but I think you get the point.

You know what's awesome, though? If you don't like Python you don't have to use it!

But you know what isn't awesome? When you complain about this free thing that nobody's forcing you to use. You're just shitting all over someone else's hard work... for what? Page views?

Hacker News -- hell, the whole Internet -- would be a better place if people just shut the hell up about whatever's got their undies in a twist this time.
So ... what? Don't have clear, intuitive methods for common cases?

Ruby also provides arr[-1], arr[-2], etc. But there's a subtle difference when I read arr.last vs. arr[-1].
Although it doesn't satisfy your 'no speed bump' test, you could still generate css files with CSSEdit and then convert them to Sass with css2sass. Certainly inelegant, but it could cut it.

Also, just out of curiosity, why do you use CSSEdit? I'm guessing you probably write your HTML or Haml markup with Textmate and not Dreamweaver, right? Why do something different with CSS?
Switching to Mac - Two Years Later
Nice soundbite, but that's nonsense.

They're not trying to compete with Apple. It's just a demo they had lying around (probably from back when everyone was going crazy about chrome os), which they released because everyone's going crazy over tablets.

It's timely, and it's worth watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq3EeZz-W3A has some similar interactions.
"I already know HTML, semantic whitespace is evil, and designers don't work in Haml". Ok.
That seems to be missing a few features, like accounts.
This is an excellent point. I gave up on Slashdot as a comment site a long time ago, and now satisfy my commenting craving on Reddit and HN, where, effectively, you always have mod points; so I forgot that it didn't work that way elsewhere. Thanks!
Digital Nation: Life on the virtual frontier
Neurosimulation with JavaScript and Raphael.js
Kottke's blog is without comments also. More should follow their lead.
Yikes. :)

Thanks for the compliment, though the idea of "definitive" anything typically makes me bristle.
.
I stand by what I wrote, but I wrote it mostly because enough people kept asking me why I didn't care for Haml, and I'm sort of bad at keeping my mouth shut.
Mixergy's content is stellar, nothing spammy about it, so what's wrong with a "VOTE FOR ME!" link and headlines that grab your attention... Are we all against marketing quality content?

The fact that the headlines even cause a stir is all the reason to keep'em...

Stop all your crying, go watch some of his interviews, and learn something...
> Discourages people from taking moderation seriously as if it was a big deal you wouldn't be able to do it all the time.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I really like the HN system whereby upvotes are free, but downvotes are restricted. (Well, I assume that's the way it is --at least, it's easy for me to see how to do one, but not the other.)

This makes it easy for me to give a post a tiny bump up, so that I don't think much of it, but emphasises the cost of giving it the equivalent tiny bump down; and isn't that a good attitude to instill in a commenting community? Certainly I think the culture here is notably friendlier than just about anywhere public-facing site (LtU (http://lambdatheultimate.org) being perhaps a notable exception).

EDIT: I saw a mention of Metafilter elsewhere. I forgot it as an example of another site with a novel approach to the commenting problem; namely, make commenting not free by imposing a small, one-time cost.
A radio industry forum did that a few years ago - fed up of the vitriol being spouted anonymously, the forum owner closed it down and reopened it with a verified real name policy. You have to register with an employer email address and the forums are invisible to all but the registered users.

The result? The forum is quiet and discussions very boring - for a start, Google isn't picking up the topics to pull in new users and besides, no one wants to say what they think when they know either their current boss or a potential employer is reading it under their real name. (The British radio industry is a small place.)

Worse still, you get the odd threat. "I know such-and-such a radio boss and you're never going to be employed again if you keep posting that station X is pants." It's just not a pleasant atmosphere.
Best Way to Lose Belly Fat - Top and the Best
This is just a tiny toy I wrote for a class that my brother, who is a professor of neuroscience, is teaching.

I love the idea of interactive math/physics/bio labs on the web. With the advent of tablet like objects, perhaps there's room for someone to build compelling, touchable educational content?
Where'd you get that notion from?

From the documentation and from the fact that pretty much every git user who's responded has told me the same things. Or am I supposed to take that as a massive coincidence?
Mitch Armata
Placing 'self' in the parameter list allows external procedures to be monkey-patched into a class, without needing to wrap it up in a 'partial'. For example:

def foo(self, x):
self.bar(x, 42)

class MyClass:
def bar(self, x, y):
print ("%s %s" % (x, y))

MyClass.foo = foo

While this is ugly, there are times when augmenting (or replacing) a class's existing methods is useful.
User tests for this page? Or basecamp's page? This page looks complete without having to scroll down.
git show

Did you miss the part where I said I'd like to not involve the VCS tool? Without using git, how do I see two different branches' versions of files?

So never delete branches. You'll know if they're "done" if they've been merged into your master branch.

But nobody else will. What everybody and their brother has told me to do is delete the branch and invent an ad-hoc naming scheme to tag the merge commits. Which is... um, no, that's not the same as being able to close a branch.
To sum it up in one line:

This white-space lambda encapsulates batteries.
"6. To minimize the chance of liability for IP infringement

Ignorance is not bliss. It can get you sued. And as some unfortunate software developers have learned, trade secret misappropriation can land you in jail."

I frequently hear it said that it is better to ignore the existence of IP when building software than to look for related IP beforehand, because prior knowledge of a given patent can be used as evidence against you in court. Am I misinterpreting this part of the blog post?
git is a superset

A superset which doesn't include everything that's in the alleged subset? That must be a new definition of "superset" that I haven't heard of yet...
You can tweak it here: http://github.com/gilesbowkett/hacker_newspaper
Hey Andrew I'm glad to see how much work you are putting into becoming a better interviewer, I haven't watched all of your interviews but from the ones I have seen, I can see you are really refining your technique and pushing the boundary between what your interviewees want to reveal and what they actually reveal.

But you gotta decide once and for all, are you going to be an asshole or not? Because I can see your frustration when you catch your interviewees in a lie or manipulation of the truth, and you let them get away with so much because you want to be nice. Go for the kill!

You don't have to be aggressive or adversarial to get at the truth -- for example, Sacha Baron Cohen and James Lipton are 2 very different kinds of interviewers, but they have both learnt how to put their interviewees in a position where truth is revealed. You do have to be willing to allow some people to hate you because you made them tell the truth, because some of them will. Otherwise all you are going to get is the same ol marketing PR spiel again and again.
I found The World is Flat to be a useful insight into conservative economic thinking. I also interpreted it as an attempt to persuade the conservative political and economic base to take a more global look at their activities using their own language, rather than as an accurate treatise on globalization.

In that context, I was able to get past his obeisance to the corporate superpowers of America and his other inaccuracies, and see points that may be valuable. Even though I frequently disagree with their opinions, Friedman and another conservative, George Will, are two of my favorite editorialists. Maybe the fact that I'm neither liberal nor conservative contributes to my enjoyment of their writing.
Good luck giving that to a designer.
I do not use HAML in my projects because it is much easier to find somebody who can understand 'html-templates'.
It's more like scalability is the derivative of efficiency, for N_1 and N_2 user counts,

scalability = (efficiency(N_2) - efficiency(N_1))/(N_2 - N_1)
Isn't Stanza a free app?
Great interviews by Andrew all the time. The range of questions Andrew covers are phenomenal. Just finished listening to one of his old interview with founder of Twitpic.
Mac OS X (affects Safari and presumably other WebKit-based browsers like Chrome): run the "Keychain Access" app in /Applications/Utilities. Select "System Roots" from the upper left pane, then "Certificates" from the lower left. A long list of root CAs should appear in the middle pane, double click "CNNIC ROOT" to edit, expand the "Trust" triangle, change to "Never Trust", close, and authenticate if needed.
The possible workflows with git encompass hg workflows.
You're obviously not interested in gaining anything but self-fulfillment throughout this thread.
This comes up every time people talk about Haml. It's a red herring. You're crazy if you ask your designer to work in Haml. There are few enough excellent designers to begin with; consider yourself lucky to get semantic markup out of them, let alone Haml and Sass.

On every professional project I've worked with, we were given markup and assets from designers, and then expected to integrate them ourselves. If you're lucky enough to have a designer on staff, train them in Sass. Otherwise, the process of converting HTML to Haml and CSS to Sass isn't any harder than converting mockup HTML to templates.

On the opposite side, if you just need a refresh or a facelift, you give them the HTML and CSS that Haml and Sass generate. It's nicer looking than ad hoc markup already.
A developer that can't understand Haml is a no-hire, whether or not you buy into Haml. Designers don't need to work in Haml and Sass; Haml and Sass are developer tools.
I don't know about that, breaking the API entirely is pretty damned brazen and not very enterprise friendly.
Interesting, Macromedia was geared on its flagship products to the internet, While Adobe was essentially revolving around print publications and single user PC software. In that context it makes sense that Macromedia will take the helm in a sensibility.
unless you want to read a transcript.
It's our sense of mission and purpose in the world. It's something that nobody else has.

Whether that's true now is debatable in my opinion. I think the American dream has been perverted into a lust for enhanced mediocrity. People where I live seem to want to get a job with good benefits, a decent house, and a nice TV, so they can just get through their lives by watching sports and reality shows. Everyone wants to be the best middle-class, Prozac-popping average Joe they can be.
What he says does make sense, to an extent, in regards to entry-level positions. I'm sure he wouldn't do the same with mid-levels or higher. I bet a lot of the people who've seen his post are more experienced then the entry-level, so of course they would react the same way i initially did, in disgust.

So, seeing that he specifically wants 'entry-level', he's probably looking for some young recent college grad with no long-term commitments. Having considered all that, if I were a recent college grad I'd probably be scared away by the prospect of just dealing with self-employment taxes, which at $8.55/hr, this job would totally not be worth the extra effort required.
How and where you do the compression matters. ZFS compression appears to be much more efficient than ext2 or NTFS compression due to the copy-on-write nature of ZFS. It would be difficult for a disk controller to implement the same optimizations.
It's nice to know that it isn't solely my crappy internet service. I always assume they are at fault any time I run into these issues. So thanks for bringing this up.
... which was updated yesterday, because Rails 3 beta is going to be out real soon.
Hmm. Good point.

This becomes a much larger problem if something runs things from /usr/local with increased privileges -- something from launchd run as root, for instance.

I was originally thinking just from the perspective of the active user, but a lot of things get run without the logged in user's knowledge, and with a varying level of privilege.

Ok, yeah, I agree with the original poster of this thread: yikes, time to start chmodding things.
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Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam
I believe we are confusing what we are discussing. It does no good to take someone's words out of context and display them in a political-style sound byte, as seems to be the case here. In every one of my posts I have always said that HTML 5 will be strictly better, but that Adobe's CTO was absolutely correct that currently (and unless the trajectory changes in the future too), we will be jettisoned backwards into a world where we have to create multiple versions of things.

We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing intelligently.

The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory. We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think "what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 . However, I can see that there exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to "HTML5").

Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works... everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved.

The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use it to fix it.
Sacha Baron Cohen...learnt how to put their interviewees in a position where truth is revealed

Absolutely false.