skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sweet. Minimal viable, clear path to revenue, useful, potentially viral, easy for merchants to start using, expandable as a revenue-sharing service that other web sites can embed. Chief assets are (1, the lesser) the web site tech; (2, the greater) the personal relationships with the merchants (3, the future potential) partnerships with other on-line properties. Asset 2, if you can keep up the momentum, makes it hard to replicate and asset 3 seals that deal and can also help with rates of coupon use. It looks promising to me.

The web site design has two jarring aspects that I think you ought to fix:

(a) It is annoying as heck the way when you switch categories (e.g., click on "Food" or "Health") the "Just launched" section disappears and then re-appears in an animated way. It's really annoying - it looks like a bug even though it's probably on purpose.

(b) You've got "Deals" and "Merchants" links. That's crazy talk. Normal people don't say "merchants" - only business people. When I wanted to know "How does one advertise on this site" I saw a "Merchants" link and thought "Aha! That'll say it!" No... that's not it at all. The link I wanted is in fine print ("Merchant Accounts").

The fine print is fine at the top of the page like that, I think. But the big "Merchants" link needs a better name - something more consumer friendly. Maybe "Deals" and "Business Directory" or "Today's Deals" / "Business Directory".
And a response from Opera
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/04/28/opera-10-53-...
Chlorine in Drinking Water - Should We Be Concerned?
I would highly recommend the book, The big short by Michael Lewis. It really exposes how subprime-backed mortgage securities were developed and the credit default swaps that insured them. The story of Michael Burry, silicon valley founder of Scion Capital, who shorted the subprime market was very interesting.
I would assume so. I have a wallpaper with "My Grammer is Gooder" on it. It seems to be one of those memes.
As you say yourself, 1.8.6 is slightly broken. But do you expect old releases to always be bug-free? 1.8.6 isn't even the newest version of the 1.8 branch, let alone that 1.9 is the current branch of Ruby.

And as for your distrust of the runtime, did you know that 1.9 is an entirely new one?
Up until very recently evolution has been selecting in favor of intelligence. Otherwise we wouldn't have it. As for the claim that the dumb are out-reproducing the smart now; well, I'd say that's a consequence of smart people desiring to invest more in their kids, but it doesn't have to be that way in a different societal environment. In particular, I can't see free reproduction and globalizing civilization co-existing for many generations longer.
What laughable and superficial conjecture.

1) It's great that the ideas that Rails popularized are being adopted on other platforms. But besides for Django which has a) been out for almost as long as Rails and b) uses a great dynamic language, the other camps you mention doesn't have anything resembling the "Ruby on" part.

Just grabbing the grabbing the general ideas of Rails are trying to fit them into less expressive languages yields some less than desirable results. Have you actually looked and compared any of the code back and forth?

2) Hahaha. The web has been pronounced dead on more occasions that I can count, but RIA has been the boogeyman since the beginning of the last decade. Don't invest your piggybank in it happening this time.

Additionally, I know of lots of Rails apps that are using all those technologies for the front end. Whether your output is HTML or Flash or whatever, you're going to need a backend to handle it. All the benefits of Ruby, Active Record, Action Mailer, and the works are as relevant as ever with that.

3. What does this even mean?!

Anyway, good luck betting.
Thought you guys may find this interesting. stats from this post getting on top of hacker news for a bit. http://skitch.com/quellhorst/dby8q/dock
I think few of the problems in the health insurance industry are technical
The minister that promoted the bill typo'd that IP in IP address referred to 'intellectual property'

Freudian, or just cretinous? let's hope the Lib Dems get their way and repeal the bloody thing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/08/minister-for-digital.ht...
Wouldn't it being a win-win for everyone include the operator of the site?

Anyway I imagine that if it became popular, there would be value in having your deal listed before other people's deals.
Morristown Family Law Attorney
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Not only that but they tend to be fragile and break when something in Rails or the other sub-frameworks they depend on changes. Somewhat ironic actually...
After you make a profile, go to edit your profile and you can add a link to your website. See how I have a link back on my profile. http://www.abtain.com/dan

I'll check into updating the geocoding. Anyway you can tell me your ip address? I'll check to see if any databases have your ip in correctly.

Will take your other comments under consideration in the next deployment. Thanks.
Why a Recession is the Perfect Time to Start a Business
I wrote this a couple of years ago and it's been very nice to see the amount of attention it's received; I probably receive an email a day about it on average.

Just wish I had a bit more time to add one or two of the most requested features, though I'm deliberately not adding too much - There are much better tools for generating full sized charts in Javascript.
Mastering The VC Game
Yeah I love the annecdote. When there's a gold rush, don't be the guy digging for gold, be the guy selling shovels.
I don't find may life so interesting that I would want to take the time and effort to record every event for later reflection. I'd rather to remember things imperfectly. Isn't the need to for a record ones life like this obsessive compulsive behavior?
So, does anyone know which patents are these, then?
What happens to the contents of a memory-mapped file when a process is killed?
I think that speaks to the quality of the HN community.
I don't really understand the need for Jeweler. Gemspec is a straightforward format and I've never had problems maintaing a gemspec by hand. It provides a version bumping rake task, but that is a single line edit in the gemspec.
Ball Balance Machine
Two examples of deliberately abusing this effect on a static subject (house and church) by pivoting the iphone while taking the shot:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3158/2421813332_3c36b3b808.jp...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3187/2421813434_dbdc309901_b....
The problem is that 37 signals qualified the statement. They're claiming there are 3 million "people who use our web-based apps". That pretty explicitly means active and current users of their products. If they said they had 3 million registered users that'd be an entirely different thing, and, ya'know: true.
"Somebody please give me a sharp rap with a wooden spoon if I ever sound like being a pundit is my job and writing and selling software that solves problems for people is my quirky hobby."

Unfortunately, this is exactly what has happened to some people who are pushing the "lean startup" meme as consultantware. You (patio11) are an inspiration and role model. Thanks for your candour, humility and wisdom. I doubt we'll ever need that wooden spoon!
I was in a start-up in the health insurance industry (we just got acquired by a much larger company). While I agree there are some opportunities, mostly in the areas of information, what most people don't realize is that health insurance is highly regulated and hence a very expensive business to be in. It's not like you can just throw up some web site and start selling insurance. It's much more complicated than that.
Why Microsoft Will Finally Enter The BPM Arena & Change The Dynamics Forever
You aren't listening. He said to, "deride the language" and "praise the approach" to those you give the book to.

i.e. When you hand it to them, say, "the language is overly simple and patronizing, but his approach is a good way to learn." Then your (apparently) big-ego friends can mantain their air of superiority while reading the book, without being insulted.

Not that I agree that his language needs to be changed; on the contrary I think is is great. I would have loved such a gentle introduction, at any age.
40 Useful jQuery Techniques and Plugins
I feel like I'm about to ask a really stupid question:

Why not simply set your server up to serve javascript files nicely gzipped? The end file will be way smaller than anything minified, which will have much more of an effect on the end-user surely?
Unlike the US dollars/balboas in Panama are not printed out of thin air. Panama has to do productive work in order to earn dollars and thus the money supply can not race ahead of the productive capacity of the economy. This is why Panama has never had an inflation problem (unlike the rest of Latin America) and has short periods of deflation.
Which is why I don't understand Apple's terrible default mouse acceleration profile. On a 27" iMac, even set to "fast" it's 2 swipes of the mouse across the desk to go corner to corner.

It's one of the few areas of OS X that I consider broken by default and needs a 3rd party tool to fix (made more difficult by the Magic Mouse requiring its own drivers).
No mention of Nicholas Felton? http://feltron.com/
It seems likely that parents will always only approve the most fun, exciting games.
Even better, just hit Shift+I ...
Not quite accurate. The code he wrote does the "proxy" logic while libraries underneath it are doing the work of parsing HTTP. He's definitely not doing "calls into a lib that implements an http proxy."

More to the point, what he has is a proxy in 20 lines of code which will let him make, say, a custom load balancing http proxy in 40 lines of code.
So, either anthropomorphizing companies is bad, or its ok. In your first paragraph you criticize people who do so, but the second is about how companies act in their own self interest.

Second, the only reason a company does something is the people there make decisions to do so. These people are perfectly capable of being evil and being dicks, and frequently are. Since they are the decision-makers and act on the company's behalf, and cause others to do so as well, just assume people saying 'company x is evil' is shorthand for 'the decision makers and people who carry out actions in the name of company x are creating evil by this coordinated action'.

Third, I accept that most institutions act in their own self interest, this really doesn't require too much deep insight. I have been voting with my dollar and my cooperation for a long time.

Finally: I was not suggesting anything other than what you said, I was disagreeing with the "can't fault a company for...". This is totally doable. It is a dick move, and may or may not have long term ramifications. Self interest is different than lazy "greediest move available now".
For use with http://nonoba.com/chris/everybody-edits.swf ?
No worries :)

I really like the idea of using the mouse demo for a pretty useless display of say, current processing levels, which'll make every geek's eyes roll and get the guys in marketing salivating ;)
My use of tests is situational.

If I'm writing security-sensitive string parsing code that isn't going to change much, I'm going to write a thorough set of unit tests.

When I wrote database abstraction layer that ran on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, I found that a good set of tests made the process of porting the system to a new database almost trivial.

Back when I was getting my PhD, I rewrote a simple-but-slow calculation to use a fast-but-complicated-as-hell algorithm, and I don't think it would have been possible (to get the right answer) if I hadn't used the simple code to create unit tests for the complicated code.

On the other hand, there are a lot of cases where I've written unit tests and they've become a liability over time; for instance, requirements would change, so I'd have to go back and maintain this collection of tests that, frankly, I didn't care about anymore.
I stopped reading at "And they've paid equal, or even greater, attention to suburbia; in the developed world, after all, that's where most people live."

I don't think this is true. Google failed me but according to http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=y&-geo... ), the plurality of people in the US live in "urban, urbanized area, central place" (39%), as opposed to "not in a central place" (29%) or "rural" (21%). And my experience is that the US is much more suburban than the rest of the developed world, Europe particularly. Seems a very odd thing to say. Turns out, most people actually live in cities, and have jobs other than writing this kind of nonsense.
He may simple be relying on statistics. Even in Western Europe, an estimated 10% of people is functionally illiterate.
I think the utter absence of any app successfully exploiting this model demonstrates that I am not blowing things out of proportion. The burden of proof is on you to show that consumers are amenable to this model.
So, what differentiates this (at this point in time) from dailybooth? (Apart from having fewer features)
Can someone actually find the source for this 93% figure? I haven't been able to. I just keep seeing the link back to the NYT page. I'd be good to actually see real numbers - not just Krugman's opinion.
The mouse speed demo has been pretty popular - I think the best actual example of that technique in action that I've seen using jQuery Sparklines can be seen at the Firefox download stats page:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/
If you read the blog, it was released early with only a small portion of the overall idea. I already know exactly how I'm going to make it profitable.
I guess he meant systems like functors in ML/Ocaml.
>fight with Python and PHP on their markets?

PHP has lots of opensource web-apps: OpenX, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, SugarCRM, Magento eCommerce, MediaWiki you can just download and run on any hosting in couple of minutes. Every app has a community behind it. Haven't heard about anything as popular built with Rails(except Redmine).

Python - studied in Universities like MIT and can be found in any UNIX/Linux distribution. Lots of bindings and libraries(SciPy, NumPy, Twisted). Ruby bindings and libraries are far behind.
IMVU is proud to be (one of the last?) users of Pixomatic, Michael Abrash and Mike Sartain's commercial software 3d renderer. Even today there's a surprising demand for software 3d rendering, especially in the laptop/netbook space: many (potential) users out there have terrible intel graphics accelerators but fairly fast dual core systems.
Nah, the truth is that Americans don't have time to have family, friends and neighbours. This is what happens when you have mortgage, car payment, insurance premium, college debt, this debt and that debt. Americans are too busy being slaves to their banks to do anything else than work.
If you aren't using gzip, you're crazy. But gzipping is one small piece of the puzzle. Even the simplest web application would benefit from the concatenation and minification of its scripts. Plus, as it turns out, those aren't the only things that real apps need to do.

In Cappuccino, we have a whole suite of tools that operate on applications, and Jake is the conductor. Our preprocessor gets run ahead of time before deploying for performance, a process easily automated with Jake. Images get base64'd and combined into a single file to improve download speed and perceived performance, again completely automated with Jake. We have a tool to strip dead code that Jake knows how to run, and a tool that combines apps into a single file as well.

Our jake scripts handle our deployment process too, creating zip files of everything that's relevant and preparing them for upload to our servers, incrementing version numbers automatically, etc. Turns out automation is important.
Interesting that this happened around the same time as

http://trst.me/
One of the nice things about the Closure compiler is it prunes dead code for you. So, for example your original source can include test harnesses or full unit tests and as long as you wrap the code definitions with a global flag set to false that test code doesn't ship in the minified version.
Well, Apple has one platform that is winning (for some definition of "winning") in a market that will be the focus of the coming decade(s), and another platform that lost long ago (even if it's currently growing) in the market of the past two decades. I'd think it irresponsible of them not to focus their efforts on the iPhone OS.

Also note that the only development platform for those Apps is the Mac.
Seriously, seriously cool demo there, and just the kind of thing I can see lots of people enjoying :)
It's simpler and hopefully easier to use. Dailybooth is certainly doing well, and part of what inspired me to start this project, but I don't think it's at the size where I have to compete with it (many people haven't heard of it). I'm definitely not trying to get existing Dailybooth users to switch to Snapza, at this point.
I'm curious about how common this is with big corporations?

My personal experience suggests it's ridiculously common. People who work in large corporations often feel that the way large corporations work is the only way to do business.

Because of that, they simply look at all the resources they require and conclude that since they require this, that there must be no other way of doing things.

This is why startups can succeed - large businesses are stuck inside the boxes of their own design.
Thanks for replying amidst the downvotes.

You're right that those points are valid (as are the rest). Nits don't happen because some people like to dawdle. They happen because there's a lot of valid points to make. Which makes it particularly important to spend time finding the right ordering for them!

(and to prune the ones that don't flow. Which would you prefer, that 10% read everything or that 75% read the 10 most important points you want to make?)
Actually the best way I connect to girls is to be openly nerdy. Show the excitement, but keep it short so they don't get bored.

As for the queuing models & Petri nets, assuming everyone understood I was a more than a little tongue-in-cheek:

- Setup your net as a cycle between weekdays and weekends. I only use 1 week of forward planning, so my base net is 3 weekdays (I save a few weekdays for non-dating) and 2 weekend days. 5 vertices.

- Duplicate the net for different stages, roughly equating one stage per date sequence number. E.g stage 1 is first date, stage 2 is the second date, etc.

- Each girl is a token.

- Each token in each stage tells you how your day is likely to go, once you equate the stage # to an expected progress level. Especially early on in the dating sequence, dates can be short, so multiple dates can be stacked into a day (e.g. an afternoon 1st date vs a dinner/movie 3rd date that night).

Nothing fancy by any means. Note, again, that this is pretty tongue-in-cheek, but it does help me keep a rational (and semi-quantitative) focus on what is fundamentally a numbers game. I don't lose my cool on dates b/c each one I understand as a single token, instead of freaking out on how this or that girl could be "the one."

Edit: clearly this needs work, but I'll have to look up Petri nets again before tightening this up.
Future of Open Source in a Cloudy World
Grr, how did I forget to mention concatenation ;)

Anyway, I agree that there are lots of little tricks, and you've got me thinking now. My only gripe with spriting images etc has been the pain of maintenance. If that's taken away with nice automation, well, that could be very good indeed :)
The last time I used a floppy was in the spring of 2004. The only way to get G-Code to my university's CNC machine was via the 3.5. I'm not sure if the setup is still the same 6 years later.
But the quality of dating sites matters too: is a site with 1,000 flakes or 200 people seriously looking for a date better? One thing that charging, even very small amounts, can do is weed out people who don't care. For example, Love Lab: http://thestranger.selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals... through Seattle's The Stranger seems to work pretty well because a) it's already oriented in the community and b) charges, which keeps out spammers and flakes.

You might be right, but I 'm not sure which element is more important: sheer numbers or the quality of the people who have joined.
What are Thematic essay topics
As evident from the name thematic essay topics are those that are based on a particular theme. These are essay topics that are usually given to students at their school or college to check their essay writing
Not to mention that even if it were the case that gzipping were enough, closure-compiler is actually specifically designed to generate code that gzips to smaller sized (those google guys know what they're doing ;))
>Sure, your sources may be real peer-reviewed journals and theirs may be blogs

Or they might just start a peer-reviewed journal to point at. This one's been around for a while. http://creation.com/periodicals#journal_of_creation There's even a pretty sophisticated cosmological model that tries to fix some of the timescale issues. http://www.icr.org/article/seven-years-starlight-time/ This kind of thing makes the argument even harder.
I would be completely on Ruby 1.9 right now if not for Redmine. :(
That is true. But the organizations that have been forced to internalize externalities have a strong desire to externalize them again. And will try to change the regulations to allow them to do so. Success is generally a question of when, not if.

As an example we averaged one credit crisis per decade for over a hundred years. Then Depression era regulations such as Glass-Steagall put an end to that for several decades. The regulations were eroded then finally removed, and a decade later we had a credit crisis. The Depression era regulations succeeded. But a later generation came to believe that the threat they were blocking was hollow, and the regulations changed.
If you look at the end of the article we link to the post explaining our unique way of handling image spriting that is completely automatic in Cappuccino projects.
I can completely understand there being disagreement about how to test code, how much testing is enough, when to write test (test driven vs write tests later), etc.

But what boggles my mind is we've got people in this very thread who, if I'm interpreting their comments correctly, are arguing against doing any testing at all! WTF? How, in any non-trivial codebase, are you going to prevent regression?

Does anyone here have any experience in another engineering discipline (civil, mechanical, electrical engineering, etc). Isn't some sort of testing an accepted part of the process?

Maybe I'm wrong, but this seems like a huge sign of the immaturity of the discipline of software development.
I've done some professional development with Symfony and Grails. Both close to RoR(Grails even better in my opinion). I also use Python as my scripting language, and tried Ruby/RoR, but it didn't fit my needs.

I'm language agnostic, but you must remember that other languages evolve too. PHP got namespaces and closures, C# - some dynamics, and Groovy - support from SpringSource/VMWare and is most popular language on JVM: Jython, JRuby, Scala - all far behind.
My Defamation 2.0 Experience
The conclusion of the article is (and I paraphrase) that Americans are so lonely because they don't gossip anymore while shopping. I'm not buying that.

It wouldn't surprise me if the opposite were true: that by buying everything from the internet you save time you would otherwise spend in shopping malls... which you can then invest in meaningful (real life) relationships instead.
"Sustainable" mantra no recipe for saving the world's hungry millions