skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work in a really small team of 2. So we just have a large todo list.

I work with my girlfriend so we talk about ideas, implementations and goals almost all the time.

Even when we get bigger (And I hope we do), I would really prefer not to abstract things too much, KISS.
What language(s) is the SDK or API in?
Fall 2010 Designer Shoes Review
It's not completely random. I've just tried sticking sections of works by authors mentioned in this thread in to see if it can identify them, and it's not doing badly.

I gave it a slice of Finnegan's Wake, and it told me it sounded like James Joyce. It would be a pretty bad algorithm if it couldn't identify James Joyce.

Then I got it to correctly identify passages from Dan Brown and Mario Puzo. Quite impressive.

One possibility is that it's just matching word frequencies. To check this, I tried a few strings of my own devising:

"mafia mafia don don mafia mafia" --> Mario Puzo

"vatican conspiracy vatican conspiracy vatican conspiracy" --> Dan Brown

"oh woe is me, life sucks, everything is crap" --> Chuck Palahniuk
...says Dr. Small...
no errors in firebug, tried both bookmarklets there and clicked them a # of times
What were the estimates based on? Were they specific to your business, or just to your type of business? Can you refine them from the original/related resources at all?

There's a balance to be had between fuzziness in estimates, and specificity to your business, IMHO, and by looking to SaaS averages you're looking to reduce the fuzziness at a cost of specificity. That may well be a good idea, but it should be done knowingly, again IMHO.
Once I clicked search here it made sense, I would automatically search based on the location even on the desktop.. then I can always change the location if its not right.
We use rally at work.

The best thing about rally is the short dev cycle and the often re-evaluation of our progress, etc.

Everything else seems like management rah-rah stuff, though.
Is't MySpace closely tied to music preferences? Maybe a few influential bands heavily invested into MySpace presence and their audience happened to be black?
FTA: "But even after borrowing as much as we can from Ruby, it isn’t going to make the gigantic complicated sales management system for a Fortune 500 company be not gigantic and complicated. Hopefully it will be a slightly smaller and more simple, but that application is never going to be so simple that you don’t need an IDE or intellisense. "

This is just nonsense. I used to be a .NET developer before I jumped to Ruby. The Rails application I develop on now has well over 1000 class files, plus all the associated views, etc. It's at least as complex as this mythical, undefined "enterprise application" ( a meaningless distinction) the author speaks of, and our team of 4 manages just fine using text editors.

The only reason Intellisense is needed in .NET is because it's such a verbose language. If you want to open a file in .NET, you've got to create a FileStream object, and then a StreamReader object, and blah blah blah and before you know it you've got a dozen lines of code. In Ruby, you type "File.open(filename)". Done!

Ruby just gets out of your way, whereas .NET is often an obstacle in the way of what you want to accomplish.
I didn't know what to search for so I searched for "bars" assuming I was searching for bars around me... didn't realize it should be a location.
Regardless of how simple a ruby API is, I can't keep them all in my head. That's why there are tools like ri and the various ruby doc sites. Having that integrated could be useful. When I do a lot of coding, I usually have a lot of browser and textmate windows open for reference.
Not to mention the deterrent effect. You can debate about what effect piracy actually has on their bottom line, but I'd wager that if there were never any prosecutions even more people would pirate music than do currently.
When you have lots of samples, you're usually pretty certain.
I am seeing the competitions name in Google Keywords selling at $2.00/average CPC, but the general and localized results in Canada are 0.05 with the same traffic.
Ughhh I hope something comes around and people leave Facebook behind. Companies like Quora scare the hell out of me: I don't have either twitter or facebook account, so apparently I'm "out of the loop". If this goes on people like me are risking complete isolation (or faking it, which isn't appealing)
The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us.
Can you find some existing product/service in that niche, set up a SEO-friendly site, and test conversion rates right now? You don't even have to make a dime off the conversions for now.

That's one of the things Ed Dale's "30 Day Challenge" is good at teaching: how to "taste test" niche ideas. Unfortunately all the 2009 content is gone now because the 2010 starts next month. I wish they wouldn't do that. http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/
Possibly! Added to my calendar just in case...
Well I think it depends, but in your case, as you state

"our potential hire is excited about our business"

and

"and willing to work for cheap"

so if you can afford him/her and you think the candidate would do a better job/at least as good a job than you regarding those tasks, then I think it would be a good move, because then you can focus on building a better product.
I clicked the link and got a prompt to install Chrome. I understand that you might be using some Chrome-specific (HTML5-specific, whatever) features, but throwing out potential user without even showing what he's missing is not cool. Why not to show some demo/screenshots page in case of not supported browser and only then prompt to upgrade?
Building Schools for the Future cancelled: IT suppliers ‘lose up to £3.7bn’
Do we even want big, complicated ruby apps? I thought the current thinking was that monolithic apps == bad, and smaller miniapps == good. It's definitely much easier to get up and running with a small Rails app that just grows and grows. But at some point, you should step back and figure out how to extract services out into isolated miniapps. We're going through this now at GitHub.
My theory: As a dynamic language, Ruby doesn't scale, but not in terms of performance--it doesn't scale in terms of developers. Projects written in dynamic languages have a development edge at smaller scales--more functionality can be produced faster by fewer developers.

If a project expands to a large number of number of developers, eventually the power to do virtually anything becomes a liability when a lone bad developer can wreak havoc on a project-wide scale by redefining standard functions, or relying on scary monkey patches.
I've taken lots of downvotes lately to say that HN is becoming less hacker and far more generalist.

That happened to virtually every other site: Slashdot, Digg, Reddit. As the site gets attention (because of its core strength of great hacker content) it starts drawing in a non-core audience. Because it's a voting system the non-core articles will start to grow in influence. It loses what drew people in in the first place.

Ah well. It's the circle of sites.
Steve Jobs Is Sitting Next To You - Are You Smart Enough to Notice?
Initially it didn't bring anything up for my hometown (quite small but there are some foursquare users) but after going to my uni city and back again it actually brought up a surprising amount of stuff. There's a business networking group and a hidden cafe nearby!
'Frivolous' Facebook Lawsuit May Have a Leg to Stand On
"Sign in or Sign up here" doesnt work in Chrome.

DONT make your new startup's page unusable in a major browser. ;)
I was captivated by this book and (since I didn't allow myself to buy it) stood for hours in Borders perusing the pages. The game approach to relationships is discussed to death in these comments.

My question is: Can you generalize the PUA approach, e.g. use a form of it for angel investors, prospective customers, etc. For a prospective customer the "neg" could be: "here's where your business fails" and then, when their curiosity is piqued you tell them how to fix it, etc.
What do you base that opinion on? I'm certainly not a fan of huge amounts of process, but I think I'd be more frightened of going to work for a company that had no process at all.
"isn't really making any constructive or lasting contribution to society"

The common argument is that if you are increasing overall efficiency, that means that capital can be more readily available for real businesses which do make lasting contributions (often in the form of polluting the environment, but that's another question).

It seems your argument is a bit simplistic. Couldn't the same logic be applied to the distribution of goods, middlemen, marketplaces, banking, etc. Are you dismissing all those?
I think you misunderstand what intellisense does. For example, if I start typing a method name then it will give me the possible completions from which to choose and if I call a method it will remind me of the parameters required. These are not things that can be "baked into the compiler/parser/libraries".
I'm not sure that MySpace was ever associated that closely with a small number of bands, but it certainly was/is associated with bands and self-promotion in general.

At least in the beginning (this has changed as Facebook has become more mainstream), you didn't hear people in "up and coming" bands flogging their Facebook URL, it was all MySpace. The flipside of that was, if you were just a regular person looking to interact with your friends, and not someone trying to 'build a brand' or tell people what club you were playing at this weekend, Facebook seemed like the place to go.

The article talks about spammers, and spam was/is certainly a problem, but MySpace turned itself into a vehicle for self-promotion much earlier and more crassly than Facebook did. I think that shaped the direction of the site and drove users who weren't looking for that away.
Actually it's a prompt to install Google Chrome Frame (http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/) in Internet Explorer.
I agree that the experience for IE users could be better. (We support Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the desktop right now)
Have you thought about using the tournament algorithm to improve accuracy?
What about System.IO.File.ReadAllText(path); ?

That said, even if the language required more than one line to read a file, that wouldn't be a good example of a language being verbose. That would be an example of a missing shortcut in the standard library, which is an important distinction (the latter is much easier to fix than the former.)
And of course as with all AI and investing, there is huge incentive for the stuff that works to remain secret.
>during the period beginning in 2006 when teens began to flock to Facebook, teens' preference for either MySpace or Facebook appeared to fall along lines of race and class.

The obvious answer to this is that Facebook was closed to the general public until September 2006. In 2004 to early 2005, you had to be a college student at a top-30 or so school to be able to use Facebook. Throughout 2005, that loosened to all colleges. In Sept. 2005, they opened to "invited" highschoolers.

So let's flash-forward to September 25, 2006. MySpace's population is drawn from the general public, and Facebook's population is "college students, recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with college students". The next day, Facebook opens to everyone. If you don't have many friends who are "college students, recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with college students", you have little incentive to join Facebook.
up until very recently, no templating language provided XSS protection by default. Rails sample code you see in the various tutorial for example still is full of <h1><%= title %></h1> which for all versions of rails < 3 is an open door for an XSS attack.

PHP had a filter extension that helps with this for ages, but it's not on by default and not widely used by the various projects which hope/need to still run on up to 10 years old versions of PHP.

We'll see how the common Rails user will react to all text injected into ERB being escaped by default. I'm sure this will cause rants like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162122 which was complaining that ruby 1.9's string handling became "so complicated".

"but... I just want to allow the user to type HTML and to display it - why do I have to go all these lengths to accomplish that?"
How alleged spy presented her online start-up
File.Open - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b9skfh7s.aspx

There's a subtlety to API design -- and naming in particular -- that's separate from writing the code and getting it to work. You can get by in .NET development with classes like ObjectFactoryManagerBase, and rely on Intellisense (or, worse, copy & paste); or you can put some up-front thought into designing a usable set of components and giving them clear names.
I'll second that. Had Hodgkin's Lymphoma when I was 19. Clearly having health insurance was the key, but no additional amount of money would have stopped me from having chemotherapy. That was the age that I realized money didn't matter, being alive did.
PCLinuxOS 2010.07 LXDE Screenshots
Startups, add your blog here to reach peoples mobiles, category Startups
Will you peerfund my crazily ambitious work?
Nice site, just added my blog. Only problem I see is that if it does keep growing and becomes popular, then people could add feeds of irrelevant blogs, and like most social news sites it would turn into a digg/reddit.
This is only tangentially related, but try looking up "Iverson brackets" and Knuth's "Two notes on notation". One argument there is that False - True = -1 makes sign(x) = [x > 0] - [x < 0], which is convenient. I don't know of a case where True + True = 2 helps, but maybe something involving dual sums would be relevant.
How Supermodels Are Like Toxic Assets
Isn't the underlying assumption behind all these machine learning models that an incomprehensibly complex system can be modeled with a far simpler approximation of that system? I only have limited experience with ML techniques but my impression was that they're all essentially statistical and the essence of a statistical approach is that you don't really model the underlying mechanics.

I'm not saying that this approach can't work, but just that an insanely complex macro-system like the market is never really going to be reducible to a tractable statistical model.
Not yet, but thanks for the pointer.
I don't think he did a very convincing job of explaining Intellisense. Frankly, one of the reasons I avoid Python and Ruby for my projects is that there's simply not a good IDE for either of them. The Eclipse plugins make me want to cry as I pound CTRL+space in vain trying to get autocompletion to work for a class I defined the same file I'm typing in.

In VS.NET, intellesense doesn't just reduce the amount of typing you do. I mean sure, it does and all. It reduces it to pretty much zero. You can put the cursor on an empty line and hit CTRL+space and it will suggest "for". It knows everything about the language, and everything about the class library it's dealing with, and everything about every class in your project, and everything about stuff you haven't even referenced. It knows context too, so it'll figure out what you actually want to see.

But that's not why you need it. It knows your codebase so you don't have to. It knows all the class libraries so you don't need to memorize any of them. It compiles your stuff as it goes so that you can navigate around it like everything was hyperlinked. And it doesn't find things by matching strings, so you can refactor to your heart's content without breaking anything.

All of that is stuff you want to do in Ruby. It's an awesome language and all that, but it still needs to open files and I don't want to keep file opening in my head, so I need a tool that lets me type "File." and pops up a little menu telling me properties of the File class.

So no, it's not that we're doing different things. We're doing the same thing. I just feel like I have a lot more space in my brain to keep domain stuff because it's not filled with the entire content of my codebase.
Club AJAX Video and Presentation: HTML5 Video Explained
If your thesis were correct, (which I don't think it is) then you could just as easily argue that Ruby is verbose because Rails auto-generates code.
I'm using adcenter on Chrome. All you have to do is click Continue on the popup with that notice and it works pretty well for all aspects. I haven't seen anything too buggy except for seemingly random text alignment issues. Not sure about dev though as I'm on 5.x
I personally prefer the Nation stamps: http://www.wearenation.co.uk/2010/06/the-like-button-stamp/
Oh, great. AI will be over-hyped again, just like in the 80's, and we'll have to call it something else for a decade when our families ask us what we're doing lately.
My results were actually consistent. I pasted in parts of an unfinished novel four paragraphs at a time and I got Dan Brown each time.
Might Our Universe Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole?
Amazon's digital music is pretty awesome. The only annoying limitation is that you're only allowed to download the file once, but I just immediately upload it to S3.
I agree with this. I was lead designer in a team developing a multi-format game about 3 years ago. We switched to using agile and it really hit relationships and the way we worked in the team.

Rather than the lead programmer, artist, designer, and producer having a good picture of the development process, the project manager was the only one who had a view on where we were in the project. He was not from the games industry which made it even more difficult.

We were only using a subset of agile, but it seemed to break up the team rather than get them working together.

I'm not saying this is the fault of the agile method, or that agile is wrong for games development, but in my experience it was enough never to want to use it again.
Our understanding is mongodb should scale to tens of millions of rows better than a SQL database (which would be a nice problem to have)

Once we made the decision to use mongodb, it made sense to use the built in near functionality, rather than roll it ourselves.
I'll be there. :)
Yes, but according to the FAQ they're ranked like this:

"On the front page, by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way."
'Also it should be borne in mind that this kind of activity isn't really making any constructive or lasting contribution to society. It's really just moving money around slightly more efficiently than previously. If you really want to change the world, do something else.'

I agree completely. While have reasonably efficient capital markets is necessary for society, its very hard to show that the marginal improvement offered by this kind of activity justifies the massive amounts of effort that go into it, just because:
1. It's cool.
2. It can make a lot of money.

But unlike making money out of making something people want (e.g. providing value), here you're making money (if you succeed) out of very small market inefficiencies that are probably not hurting anyone, or even just by being 1ms faster then the other guys who were already catching them anyway,
??? Under PythonWin 2.6.1 k[0]() gives me 1.
If IDE is your primary hang up -- go with IronPython, which has integration into VS.Net : http://www.ironpython.net/tools/ (including intellisense).
Putting Wall Street traders out of work seems like an efficient use of capital ;)
Just wanted to emphasize one more time that you need to act right now. Stop sleeping if you need to. The next few days are super important.
I am the curator, I check it every ten minutes (I am that addict) and believe me, I hate fud, payperpost and propaganda to death.

If I see one blog incurring in a fault, they're banned for life.
I was once at a lunch with one of the Franz Allegro lisp dudes and he said that he'd had an epiphany about the nature of Java and IDEs. He said Java does have macros in a sense, it's just that they're one way and built into the IDE.

I don't buy this argument that "enterprise" software requires enterprise languages and tools either. There are plenty of counterexamples of large, complex systems built in dynamic languages.
Hmm, this just gave me an inspiration for another article: Apple's failures and why. How To Fail Like Apple.
care to share your startup's blog url?
After creating the Entrepreneurship Category on www.gmbhnews.com under http://www.gmbhnews.com/categories/Entrepreneurship.html , it's time to create a startup category listing startup's blogsn under http://www.gmbhnews.com/categories/Startups.html , would you care to share your startup blog url or rss url? you could also add your blog under the category startup here: http://www.gmbhnews.com/addsite/ , keep in mind the site is optimized for mobile devices and webkit browsers. I welcome every startup blog.
> “It just seems to me that if intellisense really drastically reduces typing, perhaps the language is too verbose”.

@viggity ... your friend is right ;)

But it's not the language (C# is decent) ... it's the company behind it, the community, the culture, which ultimately contribute to God-awful libraries.

Also, please don't hide behind the "scalable enterprise applications" argument.

Show me any CRM, and I can make with you a bet that the stuff 37signals does is way harder ... even if their products are simpler in functionality, a small company that sells products straight to consumers has drastic budget and time limitations, not to mention the burden of meeting consumer expectations (which with enterprise apps doesn't happen, because enterprise apps are awful by definition).

Also you want to talk about applications ... but I still haven't found a good CMS written for .NET (commercial or open-source), even though a CMS is nothing new and even though for PHP you can find a dime and a dozen.

Again, it's not the language, it's the culture ... go have a look at http://playframework.org , a gem among piles of shit that are forming the Java ecosystem.
> Ruby just gets out of your way, whereas .NET is often an obstacle in the way of what you want to accomplish.

To .NET's defense, Microsoft seems to be very aware of this. New features in .NET and C# are specifically designed to get out of your way. The language's verbosity is definitely on the decline. It's nowhere near Ruby's level, but for a mainstream, "Fortune 500" platform, it really isn't half bad.
We use daily standups, user stories, CI, and TDD.
We're NOT pairing, keeping a burn down chart, or doing a great job of having regular retrospectives or iteration planning.

Our customer rep is someone who worked in the industry for several years before joining us as a salesman. He's now our fulltime customer rep/product owner for the team. So far that's going well he's a new addition so there's still time for it to go really good or really bad.

We're not an a startup, rather an established company with a successful line of products. The project I'm thinking of however is a brand new product that's been given a lot of leeway and autonomy.
Are you sure you meant to say "Hackers"? Not "programmers" or "engineers"? How is hacking different from programming? I have always thought that a hack is making something unexpected out of things that aren't supposed to be used this way, hence "iPhone hacking" is an oxymoron since all iPhone programmers are using iPhone SDK in a way Apple permits/tells them to. Same goes for most web apps that follow various standard best practices and recipes - that's as opposite from hacking as you can get.

So why destroy a word then? Hacking != Programming,
Huge applications have been built in dynamic languages. It just requires good architecture and code discipline. But that's true of development in any language.