skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found it useful. It's like a guided tour of the Django models layer. This implementation is not useful to me personally, but I wish I had the breakdown (i.e. the onion description) when I started hacking on the internals. I'm still very into relational databases, and I do a lot performance tuning in that space, so I'm interested in how Django translates to vendor-specific code. Although that was not the ultimate purpose here, it was a necessary discussion, and I got something from it.
That's hardly fair. Paid tweets are a blindingly obvious method for generating revenue - they're just Twitter's version of advertorials. The hard part is, as they say here, trying to have paid tweets that do not ruin the user experience.

Given how many webpages look these days, with more ads than content, they can't really be blamed for being concerned about third-party advertising ruining the service.
Yeah, it's clear that more than a bit of PL research has fed back into C# as a language and .NET as a whole, in stark contrast to Java/JVM.
One thing I've learned about their slow payment system is that you should follow up immediately when the payment becomes overdue. That's often the first time they'll tell you that you haven't followed their procurement protocol.
Freight Train Fuel Efficiency is Up 104% Since 1980
The one with the highest conversion rate. ;)
Joel Spolsky said it best in his Mixergy interview:

basically, if you were a platform developer ... you're in a dangerous position. You are snatching nickels in front of an oncoming bulldozer.
I'm half expecting that sometime in the future Jobs are going to make a really good joke:

We've heard that people are asking for flash on the iPhone.
Well, we have listened to you.

And then shows that the phone camera has a flash. Hilarity ensues live-blogged.
A core part of Google's PR strategy, brand image, and even self-conception is that they're just a bunch of cuddly academics carrying the lamp of knowledge to the world and not, oh, a multi-national advertising firm with 35% margins.
Ask HN: Anyone having success with offering an affiliate program?
I'm curious if anyone has implemented an affiliate program for their web app business and seen a good payoff. I remember Joel saying they spent a lot of time and money on getting an affiliate program together for FogBugz and it flopped. I've also been watching the affiliate program 37signals has/had?

https://affiliates.37signals.com/affiliate/

The affiliate area never got a new design with the rest of their sites which seems to point to it not being very lucrative to get new people to signup. And the whole not accepting new members might point to that too.

Anyone have any stories out there good or bad with fooling around with getting an affiliate program up and running? I've been pondering trying one out (for http://tgethr.com/), but the work and admin involved seem daunting to even give it a small try.

I've thought about using something like Shareasale to try it. Or even Clickbank. Clickbank is loaded typically with get rich quick schemes but they at least make affiliate management pretty easy. However Clickbank isn't all that well slated for web app subscription tiering.
Shortened links are misleading, I might have not clicked your links if you wouldn't be hiding it. (already seen it, hate that specific blog, etc) - this makes your stats wrong cause many people might have clicked the link and closed it right away.

Last time I checked, bit.ly's statistics were counting all kinds of bots and did not allow filtering by useragent - they might have fixed this but in case they didn't then your stats are way wrong.
What you're calling devious is what most of us would call effective use of marketing psychology. Cialdini has written a bunch about it, and I think it's gotten into the collective marketing consciousness as the "scarcity principal". It's used everywhere else ("Act now! Supplies are limited!"), why not on the web?
I tried to: analysis of algorithms, perhaps data structures. Analysis of algorithms is the crucial one; if someone writes O(n^2) code when they could be writing O(n), and the constant factor is negligible, and they're unaware of these things, then IMO they have no business writing code that other programmers will use. They might be able to solve their own problems for their own data sizes, but they shouldn't infect the wider world with solutions that break under stress.

For data structures, it's more important to have a taxonomy, and a rough general knowledge of the kinds of data structures that are available, so that you know what's required and when, and have enough confidence to implement any given data structure as needed.

It's also nice to have the time and opportunity to look at different levels of various stacks, such as the network stack (the analog wire signals, how binary signals can be encoded on them, ethernet, IP, TCP and UDP etc.); and things like OS caching, process scheduling, etc. But where you're looking to put those kinds of things into practice, it's not difficult to take a day or two out of your time and read up on them - it doesn't take long to scratch deeper than an undergraduate course covers (IMO).

Depending on what area you target, other things can also be useful. Re compilers and languages, I'd be wary of taking the academic stance too seriously. Classic texts like the Dragon book overemphasize the analysis of finite state machines and pushdown automata, DFAs and NFAs, and the details of grammars and parsing, LL vs LALR, and generally all the data you need if you want to rewrite lex or yacc. But really, parsing is a very small part of writing a compiler and is actually quite easy, unless you're trying to parse C++ or something. And a more modern trend is to overemphasize type systems and their analogies to proof systems; I'd also steer fairly clear of these guys, as they are (IMO) primarily interested in churning out PhDs by creating new mathematical abstractions that have very little practical application.

When downplaying the practical value of much of a CS degree, however, I'm assuming that you already have pretty decent coding chops. For example, I would expect that you wouldn't be intimidated by programming competition problems, for example see some of the problems in the PDFs from this page:

http://acmicpc-live-archive.uva.es/nuevoportal/

The harder problems rely on a relatively small amount of base knowledge, but you have to be pretty comfortable with recursion, generating combinations and permutations, dynamic programming, and often a little computational geometry. The easy ones are more like warmup in how to read and follow instructions.
Scientists create first artificial cell
> At least be honest and say you want people to share more and more information so you can make money off of it.

Assuming that profit-maximizing decisions must be harmful for customers seems pretty intellectually lazy to me. You can't see any ways in which encouraging users to share more thoughts with more people could make the product more interesting to use?

> He talks about being too granular with regards to privacy settings. Who is this op-ed aimed at ?

Most Washington Post readers know what granular means.
Yahoo, Nokia To Launch Co-Branded Services Around The World
In your suggestion you fail to consider what prompted the 140 char restriction. The source of that restriction was that tweeter wanted the main source of tweets to be mobiles, using SMS. Now we can argue that they can allow people posting from the web to add some metadata but that would result in the inconsistency between the web and mobile protocols.
fool me once, shame on you.. fool me twice, shame on me. By now we should realize the pattern with twitter is that any company that adds real value to twitter, they are more than willing to take the idea, and build a competing service. Search, trends, ads, alt. clients, and url shorteners. They fooled us all when they said they just wanted to be the pipe.
VCs expect a 10x return and put an incredible amount of pressure on a startup. getting VC money is not the right path for every startup in every market, which is why the numbers are so dire.
Of course a pure 500GB SSD would be better, but it's at least 10 times the cost. Is it 10 times better than this drive? I really doubt it.
Linux Mint 9 Review: Solid, Simple, Shiny
Not with the Google Maps Data API : http://code.google.com/intl/us/apis/maps/documentation/mapsd... Other overlay apps/mashups are using datasets for the most incomparably smaller than the base map data.
Scala 2.8 has manifests, which reify generic types. What do you wish you could do with reified types that you can't do with manifests?

Also, in Scala 2.7 I wrote my own library to wrap Java collections that didn't take much time or effort and allowed me to seamlessly pass scala collections to java code and use java collections the same as scala ones. Scala 2.8 is supposed to have such a library built in so you don't have to write it.

Lastly, your comparison between Scala's functional lists and Java's ArrayList is pointless. Scala has an ArrayBuffer class too, so you can choose between either as appropriate. You can also pattern match against ArrayBuffer as well.
Natural User Interfaces are not Natural
Impressive specs for the new BN eReader by PanDigital:

7 inch screen (vs 10 inch for iPad)

.5 inch thickness (same as iPad)

1 lb (vs 1.5 lb for iPad)

6 hour battery life (vs 10 hour iPad)

1gb internal storage with SD card (vs 16gb+ for iPad)

full touch-screen

runs Android

only $199
Nokia and Yahoo hook up over Ovi
privacy != you and/or your circle of friends oversharing

Quitting Facebook doesn't stop your friends from sharing pictures that include you that you may not want out there.
App Store app names are now being auctioned off (by squatters)
A Transcribed History of Unix
> Another issue with Scala is that the interface with Java, particularly using collections, is awkward; [...]

Really? For me one of Scala's best attributes, by far, is the ability to use its implicit conversions to make awkward Java APIs smooth like butter.

> One problem is that, based on the JVM, type erasure is a big "broken window" that seriously damages the Scala type system.

I'm not sure I understand or agree. Understand: If you don't use casting, Scala's type system seems just as strong as ML, albeit not as good at inference. (F# has the exact same inference weakness as soon as you start using OO and inheritance.) Agree: having the ability to consciously drop into a dynamically typed/runtime-casted world for small bits of code is quite nice (true for F# too). And I've yet to see a place where erasure (a) caused, even in theory, a runtime type error, or (b) lost any type information within the scala language at compile or link time (which is where the type checking lives). I think it's a red herring / mere implementation detail.

> As for oCaml, the real excitement is in F#. You get the wonderful oCaml language and all of its features, plus you get an interface to the C#/.NET world that's much nicer than Scala's interface to the JVM.

Counterpoint: I've written production code in both Scala and F#; give me Scala any day of the week. I really wish its .NET support was more mature; I'd ditch it in a heartbeat for Scala if I could.
Shrek Forever After’ tops box office with $71.3M
LOS ANGELES: “Shrek Forever After” roared its way to the top of the box office, making $71.3 million in its opening weekend.
Michael Arrington interviews Carol Bartz
Slate's experiment on implanting false memories
search was purchased (summize)
This begs the question: how does Twitter define a "paid" tweet? Does payment from advertiser to service or service to publisher matter? Do both? What about Foursquare/Gowalla checkins? Would those count as "paid"? What if a business rewards its mayor for all his checkins... do the mayor's tweets now count as "paid"?
Preceded by: "You run a very tiny company".

Amusing, but unfortunately that kind of tone from the CEO of a Yahoo is just descending to Arrington's level. Not constructive, nor would it really inspire me were I one of her employees.
Too bad I didn't put AWESOME in the initial post. :)
I've shared this feeling my entire life. I never really understood why anyone would want to build a product on the back of someone else. This is going to sound harsh, but it kind of feels like a cop out to me. And if not a cop out, certainly ridiculously risky and limiting.
Sexier? Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlinks?
Cell Phones and Brain Cancer: The Real Story
Word is a native app in osx. Word on the Mac is a completely different piece of software and not a bad port. I read a blog from one of the team members on the word.app team and it showed me that they are very committed to a good product. I doubt they would intentionally slow down the startup of the app just because it's on osx.
I don't get this. They open the conversation with "So how the fuck are you?" If you start that way, then closing with "Fuck off" does not seem unusual at all.
and if you're VC funded your model is capital intensive, otherwise what's the point.
"Reflects" is the key word here. Of course they keep a profit as well.
If you listen to the carriers tethering is a magical new feature that they have to spend lots of resources adding support for, when in reality it's a capability inherent to the architecture of the Internet until they deliberately block it. Building tethering into Android puts a spotlight on this idiocy and will hopefully end it, the same way that pushing updates quickly to the Nexus One has motivated some carriers to actually support their existing customers.
They fooled us all

This is at variance with my recollection of events.
I wonder how many technicians were killed by accident by the ejection seats versus how many pilots' lives were saved. If there are more accidents than ejection saves, I wonder if it's calculated such that pilots are more willing to take risks if they think they'll be helped out by the seats.
Class Splitting and the Graph View of 'Extract Method'
Could You Replace Copyrights And Patents With A Fairness-Based Legal Liability?
The author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley

It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development (wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism).
I think that nowdays the 140 char restriction is for keeping Twitter clean and readable, making it harder on the writer and easier on the reader - links are not hard to read and therefore there is no reason to restrict their length.

Also, users who actually use Twitter via SMS would probably not be capable of viewing the link anyhow so it could just say "(+lnk)" or something.
He was asking for it...
Every piece of software we write is built on the back of someone else. We're all vulnerable to the whims of the people who build the operating systems, the browsers, heck, even the protocols. The important question probably comes down to ability and motive: "can this platform be turned against me, and do those who control it gain some advantage from doing so?"
> that can’t be interrupted, paused, or changed and can’t be very easily recorded, either.

Umm, it's very easy to record anything on your screen, e.g. with Snapz.
The series sounds like it could be really great, I wonder if they have a frequency for new interviews planned already? The series title alone got me though, as someone who is working on a startup that is something I really aspire to be, profitable and proud.

Campaign Monitor is a great service too, I frequently reference and share their Guide to CSS support http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/ to coworkers who have questions on what can and can't be done with styling in emails.
I wonder if, as gradual progress is made on these issues, some of the techniques can be back-scaled to larger die sizes for multi-layered chips. This happens to some extent already - current Intel and AMD chips have 10 layers or more.

IBM made a minor splash (groan) a few years ago when they unveiled water-cooled chips that had liquid flowing though 50u channels. They're in partnership with a Swiss university on a technology called Aquasar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbGyAXsLzIc), the first incarnation of which is anticipated to go online this year.
I apologize, but I don't have the time to put together a considered response right now, though I wish I did. Maybe this evening.

I do think it's interesting the amount of anger I encounter whenever I even remotely question one of the Singularitarians' babies. There seems to be more ... emotional attachment ... than is healthy for skeptical inquiry.
"First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created."

Hmm this sounds familiar...
Apparently 200 channels has already necessitated a Google for TV

http://www.google.com/tv/
I'm warming up my "flag" finger now and have about ten Erlang submissions lined up... gotta be prepared, you know.
The Gallery app is now tied in to Picasa: previously, I could only see my local picture files. Now it shows me my Picasa albums and pictures.

The down-side is that I first discovered this on an iffy Edge connection and it struggled to download the thumbnail pictures for the albums. Once I got home (wifi), it popped up the albums, thumbnails, and pictures nicely.
Twitter Bans In-Stream Ads
Why the downvote? I'm genuinely confused. I guess I could have read the link better, maybe this thread isn't talking about that?
Scala has Twitter to champion it in business and tech circles as well as creator Odersky's technical university affiliations to appeal to the academic crowd.

Clojure has a lot going for it in terms of theory but I don't know that it can claim any of the social proof of Scala.

The closest thing I can think of for Clojure is all of Siebel's Lispy interview questions from Coders at Work that lead an underinformed coder to think highly of STM and of Lisps.

Edit: Scala apparently predates Clojure by a good four years. The larger mindshare is no surprise in that light. Also it appears to have simple pattern matching and several other things that Alex Payne liked: http://www.slideshare.net/al3x/why-scala-presentation
Which is funny, because Joel in the past year has launched one platform (FogBugz Plugins) and has another brewing (StackExchange + just released API).
I agree that since you can just pay to redo it once you're actually making money/getting funded, then what is the point of hiring a lawyer to create an S-Corp in delaware? I want to read this article: Legal things you have to do to cover your ass while you're bootstrapping
I smiled when I read this:

Haskell's type system literally allows the compiler to infer the correct code to run based on its type context

It literally has overloading! Imagine that!
Holy cow. I could look at the page for only 30 seconds before the blue started burning my eyes. Tone it down.
You're taking it too for to the extreme. Building on top of a browser or an operating system is a proven and solid model. Building on top of another software company, web app, etc., is a whole different ballgame. Web browsers aren't going to turn against you. Other companies can.
Which, um, isn't sold? Isn't that the whole crux of the argument?
I wrote a Chrome extension that uses their API, but beware that their API does go down from time to time.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ecnmdlgmbjkiikea...
The future of "online television" isn't YouTube or Veetle, it's Netflix On Demand and subscription Hulu. Quality, organized content, modest subscription prices, and while I'm not stupid enough to hope "no ads" I hope there's at least a "no ads" option for $$$.
Interesting. On a somewhat related note, the technique of film editing has been heavily influenced by early Russian artists; Lev Kuleshov discovered that audiences' perception of what occurred in identical segments of footage was heavily influenced by the context in which it was viewed.

Stalin later suppressed the output of these early filmmakers, objecting to the idea of formalism (but was happy to have his propaganda people indirectly employ the technique to political ends).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Experiment
The only winning strategy is not to play.
SMS has 140 bytes but not chars restrictions. When you use non-english letters you could not send 140 chars in one SMS. But you can use any 140 chars in Twitter.

So one to one mapping to SMS is not possible now.

When I enter SMS bigger then 140 bytes it's splitted transperently and the only consequence is increased payment for that SMS.
Maybe it was just said so she could end the interview with a Yahoo-ish exclamation mark...
One of my favorite features with Linux Mint is the ability to play pretty much all media codecs right out of the box. Flash, QuickTime, MP3s, and so on just work. And work really well.

From a legal perspective, this is a bit dicey. It's not technical considerations that prevent other distros from shipping these codecs, it's legal ones.
They did say that they are going to clarify that...
ssh didn't invent that format. It's the rcp format, which is older than URLs. It's hard to reuse something a decade before it exists.
Much like "How does Google define if a link is paid?", asking this question is less useful than you'd think: they're under no particular obligation to have consistent standards, enforce them without caprice, or avoid changing them on a whim and/or retroactively.

Plus, even if your conduct is currently kosher, they can always invent a new policy that you've already broken tomorrow.
Anatomy of a funding
Here's a video of it:

http://www.folderboy.com/public?sid=1274782273670&tn=fal...

Using Chrome on a Vista machine.
I am always surprised at the simple brilliance of these type of people. They see simplicity in a way that I just don't see. Not that I would do this, as I believe in filling a role that produces something and not just profit off of speculation. I think they add no value and suck value out of the system. But I am still amazed at how they spot such simple opportunity.
Google Adds SSL Encryption
Heh, I've ended up doing the same thing. The issue is that Vim's key scheme has a much better economy of motion (faster with less movement) while Emacs is much more extensible and flexible. So this is the compromise instead of creating yet another text editor.
[Disclaimer: I'm a compiler dev working on F# at MSFT.]

Performance and user experience on Mono are something we're definitely trying to improve - we spent a fair amount of time trying to make our Mono story better for our 2.0 release, and plan on investing more in this area as we move forward.

We can't be everywhere at once, so your feedback is really important here - If you're having problems with our tools on Mono, please let us know via Microsoft Connect or fsbugs@microsoft.com. Also, don't be bashful about filing Mono bugs. So far, they've been really great about responding to any issues that have cropped up.

Thanks!
Sounds a lot like what RMS called Java Trap

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
The process that created the item died before the submitter's vote for it was registered. This can happen when the server gets restarted or when a temporary spike in load makes processes time out. I don't make the combination atomic because correctness doesn't matter super much.
Vim is cool because it's built in to every OS (except maybe Windows) and highly usable even without any configuration and requires very little resources.

For me knowing vim has proven a very productive skill. I often work on random new OS installations like virtual machines and cloud instances, and sometimes in very limited environments like embedded Linux devices. It works there just as well as in my regular Mac/Linux environments.
Yes I have. Thats not what I meant, my point was if you use any company's work to build a product that eats into their own core revenue, they will go after you no matter how open they claim to be.
I think that the Boy Scouts in general especially the Eagle Award teach many skills one can use in business.