skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
compare http://www.tutorialspoint.com/prototype/prototype_hash_proce...

to
http://www.prototypejs.org/api/hash

Why wouldn't you just read the (awesome) docs?
Twitter Be Down, Be Down The Most
Think Niche to Slay eBay
Couldn't that just be further distilled down to users scanning material until they decide it's worth taking the time to read more thoroughly? Even if I'm in surfing mode, I'll stop to read an article if it's something that piques my interest.

I mean, isn't that the whole idea behind people getting lost in the depths of Wikipedia? You may have only brought it up in the browser to fact check something quickly, but all of a sudden you find yourself reading about completely unrelated materials 20 minutes later.
I would say that logic isn't limited to just browsers. I'd argue most people default addresses to .com when trying to recall them from memory.
I had a code to check for a valid url, but removed it because I didn't think it was really necessary. I just want to make it faster and simpler
Map of Language Distribution in Europe
Well written narratively but not very potent (or relevant to the HN audience generally).

The Cliff Notes version: You need to tell people you're starting a business, believe that it will work out, be prepared unexpected things will happen, and bear in mind there are ups and downs.
Apologies for interruption. The file is restored and downloads can resume.
Absolutely true! .com has definitely gotten a lot of mind share. This is a great example of it:

"He pulled up Google News, quickly discovering the culprit. The vice presidential debate between Cheney and Sen. John Edwards was going on, and to defend his record, Cheney told viewers to look at Factcheck.com. Cheney had meant to say Factcheck.org, a site run by the University of Pennsylvania. Factcheck.com was one of Schilling's."

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...
This is all a matter of personal taste.

With small methods you indeed make code hard to read and harder to debug. Plus you generate method calling overhead (yes I know, a smart compiler will inline - but if thats true, you can inline yourself). Combine atomic methods with a wealth of design pattern, and your code may become absolutely unmaintainable (all in the name of pure object orientation and better maintainablility).

If - else chains cannot be avoided with small methods (one for if and one for else). You just move the if else to the point, where the decision for the one or the other methods has to be made. A smart replacement for if else chains is switch.

But as I said, please no flamewar. I think the best you can do is to leave every programmer with his own style. That will make him most productive. All these stupid rules come from non programming managers, who want one style throughout their whole codebase, because they believe this makes every programmer easily replacable. This is no developers interest (and its not true anyway).

Pure oo style leads to some very dangerous constructs. In my experience, the true oo scholars often produce slow code, thats a memory sink (ever created a new object in a loop?).

Like with patterns, it needs a lot of experience to know, when to use them and when to avoid them. These truly simple rules, are in my opinion made for beginners (and I tend to say also: by beginners).

What matters most, is a clear style, comments, well chosen variable names. Everything that makes your code easier to understand - and that mainly for you, the author, because if someone has to maintain your code, he very likely will rewrite it. And that can be smart, because most of the time its the faster way.
Gah, it's not like DHH invented the concept of profitability!! It annoys me every time someone mentions they're being profitable "DHH-style". I enjoyed his speech too, but you don't need to pay royalties to DHH.
I Was Wrong About Twitter
WGBH and ACM to Launch Initiative to Reshape Image for Computing
This is an example of a bad headline for the content. It is not demonstrated how or why ".com" has "allure" in the subtle sense.

The only clue the writer gives is that .com was "one of the first domain name extensions available" so it had a "head start." She then moves on to say domain registrars recommended .coms to customers and the runaway effect made .com the most popular TLD. That is only casually interesting only to a newcomer to the Internet, but merely a reminder of common knowledge to established users.
I don't totally agree with him. I draw the line at stored procedures, triggers, and views; he draws the line at, uh, any relational integrity at all. I think database constraints are good to protect against application bugs.

I wonder why he uses a relational database at all if he's really just using it as a bit bucket.
Exactly. This picture just keeps popping up on all the 'social news' sites. I guess it's time to move to a new community that hasn't been "topless chicks with unix book roll'd"
It even doesn't take a conspiracy to start a propaganda. Successful companies support PR, advertizing and, for example, style magazines, which improves their business, and other businesses see that and copy that.

The argument, that politicians have elitist views on the society, is also relevant. It doesn't mean that they conspire, it's just how they see the world.
A few companies (justin.tv, drop.io, del.icio.us) have pulled off not being a dot-com, but this required creativity and great marketing.
It will be interesting to see if this works. del.icio.us is a good demonstration of sharing and storing links with attached context but very few users use this aspect of it. I sense that many users do not have enough time or inclination for such advanced features.
I360 Adds Semantics to Everything
How Far Are We From Real Mobile Commerce?
I would have more respect for usability groups trying to quantify everything if they actually did a rigorous job. The habits of 25 similar people's monitored† browsing are interesting, but don't tell me they represents the entire internet using world.

What's with seeking averages for everything? When you have completely different situations the average is not useful information:

When I go to a book store I pick up a lot of books, skim them, and put them back because they are boring or not what I wanted. Eventually I will find an interesting one, find a hidden courtesy chair, and read 50 pages. You could study this information and say on average I read 3 pages of all books. That's correct, but it's wrong and misleading.

It's not really worth critiquing the rest of the study since it's just not rigorous enough from the outset, but a couple more points:

1. He threw out visits lasting longer than ten minutes. Obviously that's going to affect his conclusion.

2. They have no idea what percentage of the text on a page was actual content. I'd guess 25% of the words on any newspaper site page are not the actual article. He should correct for this.

3. He tacks it on the end, but it seriously challenges the usefulness of this entire study: the content matters. People will read what appears interesting to them and ignore what doesn't.

† Surely knowing their behavior is being monitored alters their behavior. If these are work computers then they're probably wary of spending too much time on the internet if it isn't directly related to their work. Maybe they bookmarked articles to read at home. Or maybe they altered their browsing because they're worried about being judged.
emacs, but it isn't really an IDE

I've used IntelliJ a few times as well. There is a lot that that it does that could be implemented on top of emacs. Had there been an attempt to build a 3G/4G ide on top of emacs (Intelligent completion, "quick fix", generating Makefile/Makefile.PL/build.xml)?
Those struck me as the four steps you take before you reach your first hurdle.

The hurdles I though the author would note are: Defining a market, building something to address that market, generating revenue from that something and reducing costs/increasing revenue to create sustainable profit from the business.
The whole point of the site is to post and share documents, which is what this contest is encouraging people to do. In terms of SEO, inbound linking is never irrelevant.
is it necessary to put your name before every post? we can all see the link with your name in it
Sure, some people are interested. But even they may, with further consideration, wish they hadn't upvoted, commented-on or otherwise spent so much time following minutiae of the MSFT-YHOO negotiating process.

Since there are no downvotes, we don't know if >>34 people are tired of such headline-news-ticker-like microstories. But the real question shouldn't be raw vote totals, but what people want this site to be.

TechCrunch floods the zone with morning, afternoon, night updates on MSFT-YHOO, as do many other sites. And yet any one tactic or reversal in the middle of this multi-month negotiation isn't likely to have any lessons for hackers/startuppers/those-selling-their-companies-to-GYM-etc.

My comments are made in the hope that next time, some of those 34 upvotes decide to pass, so the next frivolous "Yang writes letter" or "Balmer drops new hint in internal email" story doesn't shoot to #1 in an hour or two.
I agree with your comments generally, but I'm not sure I'm willing to say "it is all a matter of personal taste."

Would you be opposed to a guideline that no method should have a cyclomatic complexity above, say, 15?
Are you a Batman CEO or an Iron Man CEO?
Big companies can innovate, but the whole MS / Yahoo debacle seems to be about a clash of titans in entrenched spaces.

MS has a bigger warchest than Google and with the combined MS / Yahoo they'd have more eyes too. They could run that segment of their market at a loss for a while to try to steal some of Adwords' thunder. Think of MS's entrance into the game console or MP3 player markets. While, again, I don't think it's a great strategy to plow into entrenched markets like that, compared to creating new markets (a la your Amazon example), MS has certainly demonstrated a willingness to do so. In fact, I'd say that's almost they corporate modus operandi; almost their complete history has been bulldozing their way into markets using sheer brawn.
absolute beauty, please read if you about to graduate high school; I suspect it won't be received well by current college students for the very reason it talks about.
Before doing it with triggers, I had a table that mirrored the main one. So whenever there was an update to any value, all of the data would be copied. If a column was changed in the main I would have to change it in the history table. Now I would change the trigger instead of that other table.

Rows are never deleted from the database, a soft delete is used.

When a user edits something the application does store that in the original table.

How would you propose doing it differently?
More on passion and pop
going rates are whatever you can get. I've seen from $20/hr to $200/hr. The high rates are usually for something horrible like "Oracle Financials." Most LAMP/Django/RoR independents charge somewhere between 50-100.
Would you rather have a single date format that switches based on an argument?

Or create 20 little classes?
it's a subtle and effective form of marketing. I don't have a problem with it.
Scipy - the embarrassing way to code
I think we are an 'android' away. ... also with some new apps coming to the iphone, its getting close. (1-2 years)
I read his post and the one he linked to. It's an interesting argument. I've found great usefulness with views and triggers. When working with multiple developers that might mess with your models, I like to have overall control by being the database guy. That is where I am coming from.
Twitter Leads Social Networks in Downtime, But Still Up Near 99%
I'm in my early 40s and trying to start a business now.
Prototyping 50 Games in One Semester
My guess would be through some sort of computer club / group. I got to meet Ken Thompson because he was visiting the university I worked at and the unix users group on campus convinced him to stop by. Join up these sorts of groups, get on mailing lists, ask around.
I'd avoid using the term 'newline' in the description. Maybe something like "Enter URLs, one per line". Newline seems like a developer term.
The current ranking scheme is such that just after submitting a story that it only lives a few seconds on the front page

Not even a few seconds. A brand new story is only visible on the new page.
Simpler phrasing: do you consider Lisp your invention or discovery?

(Which was my question, but you beat me to it.)
I finally took the plunge. I'll admit it: Twitter is fun.
The article sounds doubtful: the smart guys gathered and invented something, but, as I understand (having jumped paragraphs to save time), they only patented their ideas, neither evaluating, nor testing any of them. This may lead to making a set of useless patents that nobody will ever try to use.

Imagine that instead of YC there were a "think tank", a gathering of people who would invent websites or startups and then just document the ideas. This can be much more entertaining and may seem a deeper thought than advising on and evaluating the "materialized" projects. But how many projects, that sound nice, will ever be done, and how successful can they be?
Lisp is not a functional language except in the trivial sense that it supports HOFs. Common Lisp is not even functional in the sense of Scheme, where purely-functional programming is not enforced but seems to be encouraged (disclaimer: IANAS). Common Lisp is a pragmatic, multiparadigm language in which functional, imperative and other styles can and should be used as appropriate. In a very real sense Lisp is that language "in the middle."
The bottleneck in writing code isn’t in the writing of the code, it’s in understanding and conceptualising what needs to be done.

Good observation, succinctly stated. Most of my days are spent trying to figure out what I need to do, not how to do it.
Ask YC: Unexplored Search Paradigms
In these Googlerific days, it's easy to feel like any information I could ever want is at my fingertips. Not so. The other day I was out walking with my 2 yr old and she pointed to a tree and asked what kind it was. My best answer was "Um, a big tree?" Same with flowers, dog breeds, etc.

It made me wonder if anyone is working on (whether startup or research) about visual search. I know I could look for a site showing flowers with names, but I was wondering about where I could send an image and get results. I know this is a complex computer vision and cognitive problem, I'm just curious.

Are there any other ways of searching (besides text keywords) that you wish we had?
And/Or, this would be a very useful way of using humans to relate URLs to each other with an explanation of what the relation is. I'm not well-versed on the current state of AI but I think this sort of activity is still something that is too complex to get computers to do well and efficiently.
Google's Head of PR leaves for Facebook
Google has lost its "Vice President, Global Communications & Public Affairs" who decided to Facebook as a VP for Public Policy and Communications
Cool graph, but as of when? 1750? Nowadays they don't speak primarily German in Alsace, or Welsh in Wales, or Irish almost anywhere in Ireland.
LoveHappens closing
This site gets pretty good traffic (Alexa). No reason given why they are shutting down, but got this email (I never remember signing up for this website). Is this furniture store advertising style?
=====

Dear LoveHappens member,

After much consideration we have decided to end the LoveHappens service. You may continue to use LoveHappens until May 31, 2008.

After May 31, 2008 you will no longer have access to LoveHappens.

We hope you enjoyed using LoveHappens as much as we enjoyed making it for you and we wish you love and success in the future.

The LoveHappens Team
I thought I read in the Google Story (http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/the-google-story-b...) that there was a provision that if any of the Class B shares were sold, they would convert on a 1:1 basis to Class A shares.
They couldn't liquidate hundreds of millions of shares at that price. The more they tried to sell off, the lower the price would go. In the acquisition, all of the shares would be bought at that price.
When stock is bought, it becomes money. If there's a stock swap, then it becomes MS stock.
well no matter what it is, it's going to be too high. Stay strong and get paid what you want for the work that you do.
Really - what is going on here? -29 for some batty comment about Christians and pawn shops? I would have voted it down to -1 too, but come on folks. We've always reserved big downvotes only for offensive, insulting trolls, not things that were in some way "wrong". A -1 or 0 is sufficient to indicate that.
Actually, if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, you are required by law to act in shareholders' financial interest. That's the price of getting access to the public equity market.
The former, of course.
In Need of a Tagging Assistant
Cool - One thing I'd fix is the horizontal scrollbar (I'm getting it at 1024x768)
And I still can't remember how to get to the delicious site....
the "new" delicious preview drops that name and uses delicious.com instead. Also, delicious.com redirects to del.icio.us.

also, in the very beginning when I was using delicious I'd type delicious.com instead of del.icio.us. It's just harder to remember a name like that O:p
Thank you for your comment. As it was mentioned, this wasn't to be used just during emailing but it can also be used during texting, chat session and posting comments
a lot of browsers still tack on "http://www." and ".com" to a generic term you enter in the address bar. Some of them redirect to a search page, but still.
Yes, I rethought my statement this morning and slapped myself on the head, but by then the edit button had disappeared and didn't feel like replying to myself.
Andreessen to Facebook Board?
Luck, mainly. I'm taking an AI class at Stanford, and it turns out that the professor knows McCarthy. The class is philosophical, not technical, so I don't know how all of these technical questions are going to be received, but I can't not ask them.
Ask YC: Does Net Neutrality Decision Threaten Your Startup?
I just heard some testimony on CSPAN regarding HR 5353 "Net Neutrality." The testifying party (didn't catch the name) made the case that if net neutrality was not in effect when Google, Yahoo and similar companies were founded they would not be viable. Thus, the outcome of this decision could threaten entrepreneurship.

So, would the argument in that testimony apply in your case? Would a lack of net neutrality threaten your startup, your startup idea or YC and the angel community in general?
For your specific example of the tree, I'm only partly joking when I suggest the Audobon Field Guides. I had a bunch of them when I was a kid, and it was easy to look up a specific bird or bug or plant based only on what it looked like.
So Christians don't use credit cards?
The Entrepreneurs Dilemma - Sell now for $Millions or holdout for $Billions?
tabs requires concentration and clicking; scrolling is always the best option
It can happen to iTunes customers. The difference is Apple is continuing to support the songs they sold whereas Microsoft is backing out of its former promise to let consumers play the songs for as long as they own the devices.
This is not just wrong, but stupid. You don't have to be well versed in Christianity to know that most Christian sects have long since rethought their positions on usury. Most Christians take offense when people insinuate that they still believe in Geocentrism or something like that and this is very similar.

But you are right, the comment is rather batty and I don't think the fellow meant anything by it.
The Coolest Business Plan Ever
It's not really obvious to a non-technical user that there are multiple pages going on there. Not sure how you would make that more clear, but the links at the top don't quite do it.
Interestingly, research results on this come out in favor of longer functions. I read this a long time ago (in the book Code Complete) and remembered it because it went against my assumptions. Can't get at it in Google Books but a summary appears here: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~mohrj/courses/2003.fall/csc220/l...

Examples:

Routine size is inversely correlated with errors, up to 200 lines of code
Larger routines (65 lines of code or more) are cheaper to develop per line of code

There are all sorts of objections one can make to this. Perhaps it indicates as much about the weakness of software research as anything. But I still find it interesting enough to temper my opinions.
I have thought about this as well many times, for plant and animal identification it would be very neat to get a system like that to work.

You could try to hack it with the mechanical turk... don't know how good those people would be at this sort of thing
Very few Christians take that stance on interest today. Most haven't for at least 400 years.
A philosophical AI class? Please elaborate. I took an AI class for my CS degree and it was technical.
The bit about Perl isn't completely true either. Some people have Makefile.PLs that require CPAN modules; until very recently they had to ship the CPAN module along with their module. (Now we have the "configure_requires" directive in the META.yml which will allow CPAN or CPANPLUS to download that module before running Makefile.PL.)
It's the atheists that are causing the economy to collapse by buying houses they can't afford and maxing out their credit cards! God is punishing them, finally!!11!

Oh wait, you mean most people in the US identify as Christians, and they're the ones having problems? I see.
That's the point, he's trying to be an insulting troll, or at least bait the OP. His comment is almost incoherent so it can be misread as some weird guy who hasn't kept up to date on xtian usury prohibitions.
Personally I write my methods like I write text: one thought, one paragraph, one method.

But: if a method is always used as an entity, meaning you don't need to reuse parts of its code elsewhere, there is no single reason split it only because it exceeds an arbitrary number of lines. There are reasons not to split it in that case.

I know developers who write more than 15 lines of comments into their methods. That can be perfectly fine.

My goal is to fit the code of one method on my screen without having to scroll. If its one thought, it should be comprehensible at one glance (Thats again personal taste, because it depends on the size of my screen ;o).

If it has to be longer, its not a problem of metrics. Its more a problem that the design is not clear enough and the things to do are too complex.
Pointing to the fact that a lot of apps being built on Rails/Django/etc. (but not all of them) make sense with something like a doc-oriented DB.
Is it bad that I at first read the article as coming from "The ONION" ?
About 3 paragraphs down I began to realize that the satire sounded all-to-real.
But Apple is continuing to support their songs because the iTunes store is profitable at the moment. What happens if all the labels decide to pull their content and offer their own service? Suddenly Apple might not be so willing.

Does iTunes do the same dial home approach? If not, the point may be moot.
Ask YC: Looking for Ruby on Rails Contract Work?
We put up a site, http://www.rubyonrailscontractors.com/ to try to find the perfect RoR gigs to fund some new features of our product. And we did - but now we're getting requests for contract work that we don't have the bandwidth for.

We're looking for a few Rockstars to add to our "people for hire" section. We're happy to put a few, great people up for free. If you are interested in being included on the list, please either post or email us your full name, and link to your portfolio or resume. Thanks!