skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congratulations! This is so freakin awesome! What an utterly brilliant idea. I'm signing up right now. Comments:

Why do I have to choose veggies. I'm looking for a select all button because I want to grow everything. I actually have a garden and had a great harvest last year so I'm not kidding about this. Even if I'm not going to grow it I want to know when it should be planted just to learn.

Signed up and I like the calandar a lot. I'm so jealous I didn't think of this. Already emailed your site to a few folks. Grats again!!!!

ps: Love the design. Feels like farmville in a good way.
My company's a paying customer and we migrated from EY to Heroku.

I think they're roughly comparable but the deal breakers for me were Postgres, Addons, and the Git Workflow.
The fact that Conroy has been trying to implement an Internet filter since November 2007 without success, and has now been forced to delay any legislation until after the next election, demonstrates that there certainly isn't a lack of "public outcry". During the same period, Obama has received the Democratic nomination, won the presidential campaign, and drafted, introduced and passed a substantial and controversial healthcare bill. Considering that Conroy hasn't even managed to introduce any legislation at all into Parliament (and this article states that draft legislation has yet to be assembled) suggests that the government doesn't believe that the public would be receptive to such a policy.
So it's the anti-Farmville?
Thanks for the comments. Yeah, I haven't done any performance tuning yet really, except writing it in such I way that I can easily scale to multiple machines.

Who knew the seat of your pants could fly so well?
Yale has this, and it's wonderful:

http://www.yale.edu/printer/identity/index.html

We also are working on a web style guide, designed by the same guy who wrote the Web Style Guide:

http://www.yale.edu/web/styleguide/index.html

Both come in handy for removing a lot of the little decisions when working on an affiliated design.
Elements of Twitter style
Unfortunately, most of the pathology of C++ lies in its semantics, not its syntax.
Linux Exchange just launched. Open source Q/A 
LinuxExchange is a collaboratively edited question and answer site about Linux and Open Source. It's 100% gratis and no registration is required.
You must be young. A few years ago, a bunch of students did. In a central square in Beijing called Tienanmen square. The government ran them over with tanks. China is not the West.
Entrepreneur Rollercoaster [video]
Yeah I agree, and I'd further say I do know what I'm doing and I hate the file system. Unix is much better than windows in that their are much stronger conventions on where to store things, but its still a shmozzle. I think the iPhone OS model is starting to crumble on the iPad with the increase in filetypes that people expect to interact with. I was hoping to see an extension of the itunes library style of database to cover different file types.
I used to work at a company where they did Scrum. We never measured progress by lines of code. The way they measured progress was:

1. Start with "User Stories", or things you want the software to do for your users.

2. Assign each story a difficulty ("Story Points").

3. Work in iterations ("Sprints") of two weeks or so.

4. Your total accomplishment is the Story Points of the User Stories you complete, and your productivity ("Velocity") is story points completed per sprint.

I didn't think this was a good system, as difficulty varies with experience and tools, and so if you're more productive new stories will be assigned smaller story point values. So you're really only measuring how hard you work, rather than the value you create.

Maybe they use lines of code in other forms of agile.
MySpace音乐
I voted you back up. :) Checking it out right now...
I don't know if this is a good thing, but my wife thought I was signing up for a facebook game when she was looking over my shoulder. Probably the logo and the planting mentions caused her to think that.

Other than that she and I both love the idea of the site. Good luck and congrats.
What surprises me is how often old HN comments keep sending visitors. I made a comment about my JS/Canvas games 19 days ago ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1281730 ) and I still get 5-10 clicks a day from it. It's pretty surprising actually. Reddit has a similar effect.
I like it the idea a lot.

But, you could really do with some performance optimization on that first screen. I think you'll loose a lot of people waiting for their zipcode lookup.

If you can't find a way to make that quicker (e.g. caching popular zip codes) you should at least put some good visual interstitials in.
If 10K urls is considered the creaking limit of the system's design, it can hardly be much different than Cleanfeed, the system in place here in the UK, most noticeably involved in the Wikipedia Virgin Killer kerfuffle a while back.
Android US Marketshare leapfrogs OS X Touch
Who cares about color on a website unless it CONVERTS better? Style guides only limit your ability to do that. Just my 2 cents.
Think it in this way: in this age, good IT companies make profit/benefit from promoting free-flow of information (e.g. Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia). The Chinese gov is trying to ban the unconstrained flow of information (the whole idea of free-flow of information is considered harmful to the current regime). Thus, the website is banned by Chinese gov must be particularly good at promoting the flow of information, which makes them good candidates of successful IT companies.
Great concept. I've just submitted it to the gardening subreddit that I moderate.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/comments/c2dz5/enter_your_...
Can you name any large government that consistently promotes innovation/change over stability/status quo? Not making excuses...but isn't this the nature of the beast?
Christian Louboutin colorful stripes
New Ways to Treat Pain
Zoomooz is an easy-to-use jQuery plugin for making any web page element zoom
IP geolocation / HTML5's location API could be an option too.
Very true, however I think that the roller coaster ride is experienced almost daily in my case.
Congratulations. Looking forward to it. Any chance you'll be releasing an e-book version also?
bug:

Current plan: Family/$69.99 (up to 10 varieties). Upgrade to Small Garden/$39.99 to get 3 more.

also make the logo take the person to the home page

also make the background image wider(at least 1400px wide)...anyone on a wide screen monitor sees the bad blue color.
What a cool idea. I've been trying to think of how urban farming could benefit from software, but it looks like you beat me to the punch. You might try networking with the people at Window Farms (http://www.windowfarms.org/). This service in conjunction with modern hydroponics would be a match made in heaven.
As for option c just raise the price until you're willing to do it. :-)

Or find a place nearby that stocks everything you need and pay a neighborhood kid to run down and buy whatever you need whenever an order like that comes in. The buyer is purchasing your expertise to pick the right stuff.
Thanks for the quick response!

BTW, I have a feeling it could be due to my zip-code not being in the database.
Terrific concept!

The site is beautiful.

Feedback wise:
I signed up for the email and initially it wasn't obvious that all the checkboxes of vegetable varieties were applicable to the zipcode that I entered (so have something that states "these varieties apply to zip code: -----_. Also - it would be great to have a "check-all" option. I am a total newbie when it comes to gardening and I just checked off everything.

Great job - keep at it!
This is a really cool idea, and I would totally be a user if only I had a yard. A few small things I'd change:

a) If I click the 'Get Started' button without entering a zip code, it says 'Oops! Something went wrong.' I understand what is actually going on here, but if I weren't a developer I'd probably think the site was broken.

b) I want to view pretty pictures of what my seeds will grow into!

c) Re: asking people to pray for you -- I highly recommend scrapping that and instead adopting the mentality of working your ass off to achieve success.
Ask HN:  Review my project - Breve, a simple Java IDE.
A few classmates and I were working on a project for CS169 at UC Berkeley - the typical "software engineering" class that many seniors take immediately prior to graduating. No projects ever see the light of day - so we thought it'd be cool to launch ours right here on Hacker News.

Breve is a simplified Java IDE built for people who would otherwise use something like Eclipse. We've found Eclipse to be slow to load, difficult to learn, and difficult to use what we think should be built-in functionality. (ie, subversion integration)

Breve's about two things:
1) Simplified UI, lightning-fast to load.
2) Seamless Subversion Integration.

Breve does few things, is ridden with bugs, and that's why we'd like your feedback on it. A few of my group members were hesitant about releasing it so early, but ultimately agreed that it would be better to launch a half-baked version now.

In any case, the IDE can be seen and downloaded from http://getbreve.com. It supports Windows and Linux, with Mac on the way.

Looking forward to any feedback on what you'd like from such an IDE. Landing page feedback is helpful too :)
I can double confirm it.
I checked into it, and the problem is that SproutRobot doesn't have weather data for Puerto Rico yet, so things are broken for you. I'm sorry about that... the site should've handled that more gracefully.

Support for places outside of the continental U.S. is definitely on the todo list but it will be a while. If you follow @sproutrobot on twitter, you'll be sure to get the announcement when we get Puerto Rico in there.

Thanks for testing, and sorry it didn't work for you.
I guess it is blocked because Dropbox was used to share software like GAppProxy/MyEntunnel/Puff, which can be used to surf across the GFW.
Same with upvotes. I'll post a response, get a few upvotes, post nothing for a few days, and usually get an upvote after the article is long off the front page. Guess people are a lot more backlogged than me! :)
OK, that's awesome. Thanks!
Hard Problems in Cryptography
What's so scary? The worst that can happen is nobody uses it. Even in that case, you'll probably still learn something about programming, and might learn a bit about product development.

If you put effort into it, it will be a good experience even if it doesn't take off. And if it does, so much the better.
It is like FarmVille for real life! I think you should highlight that, definitely would get some eyes on the site. Maybe even a targeted ad on Facebook? Another suggestion (maybe you already do this) is to give detailed info on how to take care of the plant. Spin a user community around it, and they'll be exchanging tips, posting photos and celebrating their flowering plants.

Other than that, I love the idea, and really nicely executed for a launch! I'd signup if I were into farming, and did not live on the 10th floor of an apartment complex.
But these fluctuations are often just noise. Having a glass of water before you step on the scale isn't going to help you lose or gain weight, but it still shows up on the scale. You're just micro-managing things that don't matter on this point. And then are just some things you can't control. If you have bowel movements at the same time every day, then that's not an issue; but if you go at different times every day (or not even every day), you might register as having gained two pounds one morning, when in fact you ate at a caloric deficit the day before.

But if you are going to weigh yourself every morning, keep this in mind and try to keep the exact same conditions every morning. Do it at the same time every day, either eat breakfast before weighing yourself every time or after every time, etc., otherwise you'll be worrying about changes in weight that don't mean anything.
It's a good thing most laptop reformats these days just involve inserting the manufacturer's disk and rebooting. In that case the phone contact is just needed for moral support.

But I remember the good old days where you had to make a boot floppy, run a command line partition formatting utility, and then launch the OS installer from the CD. That would be a real feat to explain over phone.
http://browsershots.org/
Hey Erik,

Congratulations on the launch! It is a very aesthetically pleasing web design. Seeing the product kind of gives me an itch to start gardening :)

Here's some general feedback I had:

1. Instead of "SproutRobot tells you when to plant & sends you seeds," how about an even more general statement, like "We'll give you everything you need (to grow your own groceries)!" I feel as if the current statement limits your what your product does in people's perceptions. Personally, the main reason I don't garden is because I'd have to do a lot of initial work. If you positioned yourself as making the initial work a lot easier, I'm sure a lot more people would be encouraged to sign up. Sure, gardening may mainly be knowing when to garden and having the seeds, but I think most people perceive that there's a lot more to it than that - of course your product will change that :)

2. Why not change the "Get Started" button to "Get Started, It's Free!" and remove the small banner underneath it that says "It's free to sign up!" I like the button, and I think it's one of the more prominent features on the page, so why not use it to induce trial by incentivizing clicking on it?

3. I also agree with one of the comments above me talking about how the actual sign-up page is a bit wordy. While having illustrations like you mentioned would certainly help, you should try to greatly shorten the sentences. It made me think it would take too long to read the page.

4. Sorry for jumping around, but on the homepage, you should also put in some client-side validation to ensure that the zip code field is already filled in before they click "Get Started!" Receiving that error page would be enough to discourage me from continuing.

Other than that, I'm liking the website. I can't comment too much on the actual product itself because I haven't tried it out yet, but I will certainly give you my feedback when I do.

Thanks,
David
What about status.net for the base (what identi.ca runs on), It could easily provide the base for the activity/status feed since that is basically what it's designed to do anyway (And it's open source!).

Then you would just add on the other parts you want to system (for example: pages, apps etc)
I'm not actually sure what I'm looking for, it wasn't necessarily traffic. I wouldn't expect HN to lead to signups on my site and I don't actually monetize my blog at all. However I have gotten something great already; I got a comment to correct my spelling or grammar, I don't know which but I appreciated it.
What happened to my privacy?
Great article. Wish I read it earlier. I started a company (graduate jobs board) which failed remarkably. I had no idea the extent of difficulties I would face. The hardest thing was getting the "buyers" - i.e. the employers - to advertise. The "sellers" - the graduates & students - was a piece of cake. 1,000 users in a couple of months. But without buyers, the whole thing was for naught.
The other thing I noticed in the "marketplace" business model is that the leader is able to reinforce their market position and take the lion's share of the market. It's very difficult you're up against a competitor like that but if you're establishing yourself to be the leader and succeed, it's extremely profitable. The CEO of Australia's leading job site, seek.com.au, commented that unless you have market leadership in "marketplace" business models, it's not worthwhile.
The google indexing is absolutely true. I've tried to time it, usually it takes only about 45 minutes from the moment it gets posted to being indexed. You can see how long it took by searching in google for the hn submission and then check to see how long ago it was spidered, versus how long ago it was posted.

The google bot must re-visit hn very frequently, 10's of times per day for the 'news' and 'newest' page.
Here's the Skype Brand Book, which a complex version of the linked style guide. All big companies have something similar to this, but Skype's is particularly well done.

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/the-skype-brand-book
True, but every reader must have clicked through at some point. If you're using analytics you can narrow this down quite a bit, and if you get consistent nuisance from a certain source you could even decide to blacklist that source.

I've done that with a few sites that would be a great source of trolls and griefers.
JQuery Circulate
I think a decent analogue of "lines of code written" would be "number of public methods with unit tests" (i.e. the size of your stable API.)
The only comment on the HN submission is 'is your site down?', that can't be good news. Maybe it was unreachable for a bit right after posting, that's a surefire way to scroll of the new page without upvotes, which will effectively kill your post.
Yes, I heart urban gardening. :) Definitely something we want to support, going forward.
When I was over there we often used a simple proxy server, like pimpmyip or zend2. Occasionally we were not able to access these and had to look around for something else.
Wow. I'm surprised at the one-sided-ness of comments here at HN. I read the article and totally agreed. I've been trying to deal with all the complexity of working copy/index/local repostory/remote repository/other remote repositories, merging changes back and forth, and umpteen other things, for a good few months now. It's genuinely Hard (TM).

I have definitely done occasionally awesome things, like amending commits with small noticed typos before pushing, stashing is totally awesome, cheap branches are mostly convenient. But there's _so many_ layers, and nothing (that I've yet discovered) that lays it out in a manner that makes it easy to understand.

I've a lot of past experience with Subversion. I used SVK for a while, so I could get local dev branches and commits without pushing to the central repository. But git continually confuses me. Plenty of it is un-learning other VCSs (no, to get rid of that mistaken change, I don't revert the file, I checkout the file. revert is a command but it does wholly other things.) Not to mention the many names for things. Local, staged, cached, indexed?

Yowza.
The reason for this is that if the HN thread has a keyword rich title it shows up in Google search results, which in turn passes visitors on to your site.
Screenshots?

Why not just contribute to Blue J or what differentiates you from them? http://www.bluej.org/
It really depends on how close to the need you are. If your buyer does not have any other option then they might just go through the hassle.

For receivers it doesn't really matter. They will accept the hassle of setting up a PayPal account and transferring funds to their bank account or credit card as long as they receive the money.
Ah, good catch. I hadn't seen that bug yet.

The background image is an interesting point. I don't know if I want to have people download a 1400px wide image. I'll maybe make the gradients fade out to blue so there's a smooth transition.
FYI, the title of this link was changed by HN. The new title does not reflect the point that not only were the site names removed, but that the Posterous brand was used in place of them -- even though the link can go to a domain name other than posterous, for blogs using domain name mapping.
I've read that the diatomaceous earth basically sloughs off their shells, leaving.. not much left.
Great concept, feels very original, great attractive web design, also a positive for the environment and community to be promoting more gardening and locally-grown plants -- all around full of win! Good luck!
I actually cleared that up with the commenter directly but thanks for checking in. I saw that comment and was worried it was down too and had to check everything out immediately.
How to get through the Great FireWall of China
Any one of you can provide some method to get through the great firewall of Chinese government?

And I've tried "tor", but it appears not to work well !
I pick one millllion dolllars.

Seriously though, the bottleneck right now is my attention, not funding. Although I'll think about it some more when I'm doing my next planning session. :)
If you're using standard GNOME-based Ubuntu (not Kubuntu or Xubuntu), then you probably want vim-gnome.
If you've got your tweets protected (private), you have to accept users to allow them to follow you.
Hi Vincent, Thanks for your comment. My comments below:
1. The facebook issue you mention was already in the past. To clarify, this concern is not about that. This is about after you made the change for that, and then did an additional change of taking out the blog name.

2. I totally respect if it was not Posterous' intent per se to do a 'brand grab'. At the same time, if we look at the change it is clear that it is now +more Posterous brand, and - less individual blog brand. For example, Posterous changed the wording to 'Read more on Posterous' and not 'Read more on my blog'. So in that context, it is at least a 'Posterous brand enlargement', and a 'user brand removal'.

3. As I mention previously I suggest that the team be concerned about the brand perception they are creating. I recommend you speak with trusted outsiders to get some independent feedback on this. Posterous would benefit significantly from better communication. significantly...

4. Garry requested constructive suggestions and several members have replied with suggestions that can work without needing to have an option. Can we have feedback from Posterous about these suggestions? (I think the overall suggestion is that for names > than the max # of chars, use just the first letter of the 'border-crossing' word, followed by an ellipsis character.) (I suggest you discuss it in your blog rather than here, though feel free to do so here as well).

5. Users are giving you some valuable feedback here that you can use to increase the value of your offering, the value of your corporation and also your long-term profits. I hope you will appreciate this free feedback and find a way to leverage it.

6. Bloggers do care very much about building brands for their blogs, so this area can be high value add for your service offering.

7. In terms of not wanting to announce all of the many changes you discuss making, how do you wish for us users and potentially paying customers to communicate feedback to you?

8. We would not be investing the time to provide you with this feedback if we were not big fans overall of your offering, and appreciative of the work you've put into it.

9. If you feel that you'd prefer simplicity over providing users branding capabilities, can you recommend another solution for us? You already offer many great branding capabilities, such as the domain name mapping, and favicon.ico setting capability, which were key features in my decision to try out your platform. I have less urge to post now though, admittedly.

I hope these comments and this feedback help!
True. There's been quite an outcry, it seems to me. What's more, should this legislation ever get passed, it will surely be challenged in court. It's entirely possible such a challenge would succeed.

So, dodgy legislation under threat from irate voters and an independent judiciary. Nothing too concerning there.
Unicode etc.
Unfortunately, the United States discredited itself in the minds of many young Chinese over here when Bush Jnr took the US, UK, and Australia into Iraq after "creating" evidence of WMD's.
Yeah! Another [x] killer!
I've had my site go down because of submitting. Dumb, dumber, dumbst.

Never figured on the number of people that would make that click...
I agree to an extent, but knowing people are rooting for you can sometimes help with the working your ass off bit.

Also, a few kind words do a lot to calm the "oh shit I just pushed the button" jitters.