skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me be perfectly clear. I have not investigated the code of Chyrp, primarily because I was turned off right away by a) the number of queries made, b) unsalted-hashed password in cookies (not that salted-hashed password in cookies is any better) and c) the fact that I dislike PHP. I should also mention, that I'm NOT an advocate of WordPress either.

I didn't say that there's an is_admin thing, just that the password is stored in a cookie, seemingly for the purposes of authentication. Storing a hashed password like that is probably a bad idea, and perhaps even worse is storing the associated user id with it. Logging into the demo and looking at my cookies shows both of these things. This does nothing to prevent session hijacking, at all. In fact it doesn't even make an attempt.

In regards to queries, I should point out this screenshot taken a few minutes ago: http://apgwoz.com/images/chyrp-85.png in which you'll notice, 85 queries, a bit worse than the 55 I saw before. It was probably my mistake for linking to the homepage, which shows 18 queries, rather than an inner page with other content. I apologize for that lack in judgement.

As for wanting the software to improve, you're right--I don't care. It's not solving a problem that hasn't been solved many times before, and aside from looking pretty I don't really see the need for a new blog platform. Just my 2 cents. Good luck in your efforts to release a version 2.0.

EDIT: I wanted to commend you on your sense of style. I really like the Chyrp homepage's design.
More telco FUD and scapegoating. Their train of reasoning leads to a few obvious solutions:

1) Charge users more

2) Since Pirate Bay and the other p2p services can't be squeezed or driven out of business, get YouTube, Hulu, and other video providers to pony up

3) Make sure Net Neutrality has a stake driven through its heart at the earliest possible convenience
Lol, you have one hell of an attitude problem.

downmods all posts by rokhayakebe
The average Joe seems to be moving towards a web presence based on a blogging platform or a social network or a CMS. If app providers build semantically and enterprises or large data set publishers build semantically, you could conceivably end up with a reasonably semantic web for content of value.

I think the idealists are on to something, but as usual they are whacking off over the thought that one day everything will be semantic. That's the pipedream to which you rightly refer. What I said above will not take place for many home-spun sites or apps or businesses that can't justify the cost with added value or increased revenue.
Sailors do it that way too, its called a hockey puck compass, you site through it at a landmark and triangulate your position on a chart after you get a few bearings on a few different spots. Now most people just use GPS but the idea is the same.
If your job is to read news for research then perhaps you should get on the case and do your own evaluation of the best sources of news for your research.
I'd advise using WP Super Cache instead. It's based on WP-Cache, but allows you to generate static HTML files as well. I've found it vastly improves WP's performance on shared hosting.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
Correct. My mistake.

Can't edit, for some reason.
And how's Altria (aka Philip Morris) doing?
Hey thanks - very practical advice - will definitely go to this forum to get feedback.
OLPC ready to scrap Linux?
I hear what you're saying but I don't think it's as easy to dismiss as that. There are ways that microformats or semantic data could easily start showing up in websites. If a web framework, like say Rails, supported microformat creation based on your models then it wouldn't cost the developer or user any more time to markup that data. All of a sudden your movie app starts automatically inserting semantic movie info about the actors, director, etc which can link back to authoritative sources.

I'm not saying that it WILL happen, but I think it is definitely doable. With a framework like Rails your schema is already available to the program. If we just had one more generator (or more likely a gem for each supported microformat) then you could get semantic data in your app for almost free.
Woah. Back up there.

1) Who says there will be a "next version of the web"

2) Who says it will be "about" anything? How can a decentralized communications network be "about" something? What planet are you from?

3) See jamess's comment

As for microformats, it's mainly been embraced by navel-gazing bloggers who don't write much code if at all.
That's an interesting question. I think that the software world (distinct from CS or Math) does have "public intellectuals", though they are rarely known outside software. I'd say that Eric Raymond, David Heinemeier Hansson, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Kathy Sierra, and Linus Torvalds are "public intellectuals" within this space. Many of these folks have impressive tech accomplishments, but people know who they are largely because they've read their writings/essays about software (ie., I'm distinguishing people who are known purely on the basis of code). It's very difficult to become a software public intellectual without reasonably impressive technical achievements, though I'd probably say Lawrence Lessig is in the club.
"Also, will people be more employable after quitting their jobs? It depends what employers are looking for. Some of them want "stable" employees who won't go leaving soon again, when the next best opportunity shows up."

Yea I guess that is true. It gives you a lot of things to talk about in an interview though, and you will no doubt have polished your dev skills nicely.
They may be slower, but they return more results. Also, the interface is better -- I don't want to have to go to News.YC to see the context of the result.
Only in the sense of "metadata you get for free."

It's perfectly reasonable for, say, a CMS to semantically mark up when an article was posted. That's free. The server knows the date, so why not? It's not hurting anyone. Similarly, a camera with a GPS chip could easily add LAT/LONG EXIF metadata to every photo, except for the power, that's free too. You could use that to answer queries like "give me all photos taken in Laos in the past year", for example. Nothing wrong with that.

Where it breaks down is that there isn't enough free metadata to make the semantic web worthwhile. It relies on people actually saying "This is an address I'm typing right now... this is the street component of the address... This is the City..." It's ridiculous. Certainly, there'll be special purpose applications making use of free metadata in the future, but the whole web being semantic will never happen.
Yea that would be correct I reckon - the more adventurous you try to be, the bigger the reward, but also the less chance of getting any reward.
And Yahoo! - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_kelkoo_microforma...
That's not lying, that's bullshitting. In this sense: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html

That's not true or false, that's just something he's saying in order to make the customer feel better. He might as well give the customer all kinds of complements, they can be true or not, the point is that the manager don't know (or care) if they are. He's just trying to please a customer. That's very bad practice.
go ahead. be my guest. if this makes you any happier. i could give you a good 200 and still be ahead of you. frankly i can care the less i am not running a popularity contest, i think that is what makes the difference between YC and other communities. you can downmod all day, i can really care the less. what do you think will happen if i ask 10 people to go and downmod you all day. i outsource by trade, so believe it, when i say you will end up with 0 karma points in less than 57 minutes.
The relevant statistic is not the aggregate they arrived at, but the per capita cost they started with. Even $30/day is incredibly cheap considering how much it boosts productivity. Not only do people stay at work longer if they can eat for free, but they don't have to worry about food and can just focus on getting things done.

I had lunch at the Googleplex yesterday and thought, "All big companies should do this." Maybe small ones, too.
When measuring the value of the feature, you have to ask if the feature would have been added if Michael Arrington wasn't an investor in Seesmic.

On a blog with the number of comments as TechCrunch posts have, video-comments aren't useful, quite on the contrary.

You can skim fast through text, perceiving value in some comments are reading those more carefully. With video-comments you just can't do that -- are you going to waste minutes and minutes just to 'see' the comments of a post you read in less then a minute?
So is there any difference between "scaling" and "performance tuning"?
We're running on a Linode virtual server. Yes, we can index across multiple machines, but we aren't currently.
Dude, I am not asking you to tell me how to improve my job. Maybe in another post I will. If you cannot answer my question, then you should hold your peace forever. I am not interested in your advices. Post news links or Comment on someone else's posts. that's all.
Stop filling up the comment threads with this crap.
New mobile image ads
I would go there, but comparing Twitter to high-fructose corn syrup is already unfair enough. ;)
I don't think that MS ever claimed that Singularity would produce a product, while Taligent was supposed to be a real OS IIRC.
Apple posts profit of $1.05B, ships nearly 2.3 million Macs
There doesn't seem to be any explanation of how the software works. Seems like snake oil to me.
Many of the PA Semi team also worked on StrongARM; maybe Apple thinks they can outdo the Cortex.
Well, imagine you're right. What then? Once you have all the magical, microformatted metadata what is it exactly you do with it?

The canonical semantic web idea is that you build ontologies and search them. Now you have a new problem. How do you know which metadata is trustworthy? You'd be a fool to think people aren't going to attempt to game the system. If I search for "all articles about Lucy Liu", how is it that your semantic web search engine filters articles that are really about Lucy Liu from those that are merely marked up to make them appear so? You've just substituted a problem that requires as much intelligence as adding the metadata in the first place. Hell, what am I saying? Trust is a far harder problem. Even Google haven't cracked that one yet.
I feel a bit awkward for asking but I keep on seeing posts by people who have eaten lunch at Google, but how do you do that... Do you have to know someone there, just walk in, go on a tour?
Braintree is great to work with.

A few weeks back I hadn't heard of them either. My client was going to use TrustCommerce originally, but they couldn't get their act together and decided to not return phone calls or be very responsive. Responsiveness is SO important, especially on the web.

For example, I signed up for a demo (developers) account with TrustCommerce. 5 days later they have a sales lackie call me and ask me if I still needed an account. wtf? 5 days? No way. My client had started getting their application together etc before Christmas and was still waiting on various things from them.

By the time TrustCommerce called back, I'd already found Braintree (it was on the list of supported ActiveMerchant gateways). Submitted some feedback via their Contact Us form on their site, received an email less than an hour later. Then after a few back and forths, the CEO (without ever mentioning that he actually was the CEO, I put that part together later after I found him on LinkedIn) calls me to hash through things on the phone rather than back-and-forth via email.

They've been super great to work with so far. Their developer documentation is a work in progress, but anytime I've needed something (which hasn't been that often at all) I received a response within a few hours from someone on their side.

They have a great recurring billing API, it's extremely flexible, and also a way to get that data back OUT using their query API. They have a 'vault' that you can literally check anything into (jpegs of drivers licenses, whatever) - not just credit card numbers.

In short, their shit just works. The web interface they have isn't all web2.0ish, but it's concise and easy enough to navigate. I'd rate their site 10 out of 10 when compared with any other payment gateway out there. Plus, they blog. I mean, how many gateways do you know of have a blog? ;-)
Penny Arcade does Twitter
Sorry, couldn't resist...
He makes a good argument but I'm curious as to what everyone else thinks - I just don't see JS as powerful enough.
5 Principles And Ideas Of Setting Type On The Web
Sucks for those who are duped, but great for making DRM impopular with the general public.
$250 for just a demonstration of proper billing code alone is $250 well spent. I'm sure you will get at least $250 worth of ideas and gotchas out of it without even breaking a sweat.

Again, not a shill, advertisement or even a customer. I just know how hard it is to write good billing code. It's a bit of a black box -- not something that many people share. Unless you've built one yourself previously, this is the way to go.
More I read posts like these, more I appreciate what Paul Buchheit had said during startup school speech - "Listening != Obeying".
You just Lost 22 Karma for not taking a suggestion. Constructive criticism is not a bad thing.
I guess it is some what expected when Google and Microsoft both are entering in same market.
I think those are largely people who are 1) interviewees 2) contractors 3) vendors or 4) clients.

Or you could be like Jessica Livingston and get invited to the Google Author Series.
Strange, I've never had that many queries show up in testing the comments module, but now I see it too. I'll look into it.

Thanks for the design compliment. :) I might be changing it soon though, since white-on-black doesn't really work well for other sections of the site, like the documentation and forums.
I used to think spending outlandish sums on employees was a bit silly...until I actually did the math.

A lot of people choose to work at Google over working at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Yahoo, etc. Let's face it, if you can get a job at Google, you can get a job at most of those other places. But, Google pays a lower salary than all of those places for the same position. The way they make Google a more attractive place to work is all of the other non-salary compensation and the general vibe.

Even if they spend $30/day/employee on food (I was also shocked by the snack cost alone, which I've heard from folks inside Google...all those $3 juices and such add up fast), it's still not all that big of a deal compared to the thousands they don't spend on salary.

Likewise for the dual monitors, Steelcase Leap chairs, and the ergonomics team that Google employs to keep their employees sitting and working comfortably for longer hours.

All of this stuff probably comes close to making the cost per employee as high as Microsoft, Yahoo and Sun pay...and yet, Google still gets first pick of the best talent. And it's not because Google employees get to work on cooler stuff--they don't. A large percentage of Googlers work on really boring crap. Building tools to sell ads and scaling them out to a massive scale is probably not an exciting development job.

Everybody at this point is probably wondering why MS, Yahoo, and Sun don't just start doing all of the stuff that Google does, and make their workplace as cool and attractive as Google. They can't, of course, because they'd have to lower salaries for everyone in order to open the budget for it (or lock everyone into their current salary for the next couple of years and eat the losses until inflation catches up). And, of course, that would lead to a mass exodus...because nobody will accept a pay cut.

Say what you will about Google, but the whole food+massages+snacks+etc. thing is genius on a whole new scale from the recruiting and employee satisfaction perspective. And, since they make $1 million per employee (a number beaten only by Exxon and a few others) they can afford to spend a few grand each year shoveling food into their employees to keep them feeling fat and happy.
So now that I've answered the 'How do you do it question' I have to also explain what would be done with it? Alright that's fine.

Yahoo is already parsing microformats out of it's search results, so if two sites are otherwise equal in content and my site has microformat information about the data I'm going to get a better relevancy ranking from Yahoo than you are, which translates to more hits and more money. More data beats better algorithms, I've seen that on this site about a dozen times in the last few weeks but when the 'more data' is overhyped like the Semantic Web everyone decides that it's totally pointless.

Your other point, that 'people will game it' is an amazingly bad reason to not do something. Think if Google had looked at PageRank and said:
"yeah that's cool but all people have to do is make a link farm and they can game the system, making a new search engine is pointless."

With the level of intelligence and Hackertude that is available on this site I'm pretty astounded that there are so much vocal opposition to the Semantic Web. You're not going to beat Google in standard search but something like this could give a startup a leg-up in the market place. Maybe we should start looking at ways to answer the questions instead of just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that it won't work.
What crap? Defending my position is nothing crappy at all. Some users being offending by punctuation is crappy. Like we are in a beauty pageant.This user is talking about downmoding all my previous posts that have nothing to do with this one. What is crappier then that? Disappointing.
What I Think I Know About Running a Web App
mhartl is YC SFP'08 applicant. May be he is working out a deal with Google ;)
If you live in the valley, you probably know someone that works at Google. Most Googlers are pretty loose with invites to come for lunch or dinner. In fact, I've heard that Google actually serves nearly a 1:1 ratio of Googlers to non-Googlers every day at dinner (lunch is far more Googler centric) as Googlers often bring family, friends, etc. And despite some gnashing of teeth among the money men at Google over this fact, Sergey has declared that even if Google were to fall on hard times, food would be the last benefit to go.
Maybe. Or maybe he just knows people at Google. Many Googlers leave to start startups...so there are many Xooglers among the ranks of YC startups.
"He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius."

http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
Yup, it's a one-time payment for use for one application. If you want to build more than one application using the same codebase as a starting point, it's a one-time payment of $999.
Plaxo and Disqus Announce BFF Status
You can see some of the UI parts in action by creating a free Catch the Best account, since this code was extracted from that project. Feel free to upgrade to a paying plan to see that functionality, too. :)

http://catchthebest.com/

I'll be throwing up some more info on the site over the next couple of days, too, so thanks for the ideas on what you'd like to see.
Making Long-Distance Business Partnerships Work
Portrait of Christopher Hitchens
I think you'll find that the code is very easy to get into and bend to whatever you want to do.

I'll toss more details up on the site, soon, though, so hopefully that will help give you a better feel for it.
I think all of you have missed an important point. Sure, purists like me use microformats all the time, and you're right when you say it's going to take more than that.

You're missing the advantage for the business people. It isn't just going to be the standardists that will care. As web developers, it's our job to explain the technology, why it matters, and more importantly, how they can benefit from it. "Get ahead of your competition by using semantic information, start future-proofing your web site."

I recently built a website for a client, filled with microformats. Advantage? I cut down on development time because I could re-use CSS from previous jobs, pretty much just copy-and-paste. I used hCards to markup people's contact info, and as a result I could create a simple link to Technorati's hCard conversion service. It means I'm maintaining one copy of the data (instead of creating an XML format too), and I can add extra functionality with no extra effort. Google now use microformats to add location addresses to it's search results. For a small-to-medium business, this is great!

Also, Standardists will typically keep things semantic anyway, so you're not really asking them to change their methods, just giving them a nice easy format to markup their format.

Businesses will adopt the technology, especially if us web developers explain to them the advantages. Plus, they get to use a whole bunch of nifty buzzwords at the next big meeting.
Javascript is a great language, and it will never replace ruby, python, java, or any other languages mentioned.

Let's get right to the core of the problem: prototypical based inheritance is worse than class based inheritance. It's nothing like what all other languages are using, it's a pain to use and it's less powerful. That's the only language feature that is wildly inconsistent from other popular languages.

Rhino's been around for long enough that if javascript was going to be the next big language, it should be used by lots of smart hackers as a scripting language. And yet, they keep turning to Ruby and Python and concurrent functional languages. Maybe with the next version of js (which is will support classes and some other nice features), javascript will become big. Until then, I'm not holding my breath.
Ah, thanks for letting me know!
I'm confused. Are you trying to be funny?

Maybe you should head over to chompchompdead.com...
Saturday I bitch at Bezos about EC2 prices, Wednesday they announce a price cut. I'll let my ego think that it isn't a coincidence :-)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
E2: The (NP-Complete) Kids’ Game with the $2 Million Prize
Useful time saving tips
When Google says, "Use Microformats," or starts indexing hCards, or gives bonus pagerank for it, it will happen.

Until that day, or the day Google dies, there's not much point.
THE Aurthur Dent? I miss him so...
DataPortability: Logo Design Contest Winner
MIT Media Lab: Reality Mining
I already built logon/user accounts code for my app. Does this require your app's user code?
How can you possibly think that Grothendieck should be on a list of public intellectuals?
Well, powerful enough in what sense? If you are talking about power in the pg sense (http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html), then JS is indeed very powerful - properly written it can be very succinct and expressive and and has had many great features for a long time. With ES4 (due out later this year I think) the language should really come into its own.

Where JS isn't powerful is things related to where and how it runs - performance in the browser is not great and the API is practically the HTML DOM and a few other objects.

I think the author's strongest point is that when it comes out, ES4 will need some type of branding/marketing campaign - perhaps a new name, then getting all browser vendors to use the same name (ie, no more confusion around JavaScript 1.6, 1.7, JScript 5 etc). Perhaps even go further and asking all vendors empasize the commonality - Javascript can become ES4Web, ActionScript ES4Flash, Rhino ES4Java etc. My names suck but you get the point.
Time management tips
I use the service, but I have a hard time believing 99% of 'Net users will ever adopt it, especially if Facebook and IM services start adding similar functionality.

More here:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/30/twitter-fanatical...
IMHO: Linus, Alan Kay, Alan Turing