skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This type of thing, while certainly low on any developer's to-do list (including mine), does indeed make for a more pleasant reading experience with very little work.

Personally, I like what they're doing because they're doing it in regular XHTML and not resorting to alternative, non-open tools.

Some sites (MSNBC, for one) are using Flash-MX to create headlined to achieve a print-like look, which seems odd because MSNBC has no print counterpart.

It's refreshing to see the IHT and the NYT working so hard to do good things with native tools.
I prefer last.fm
I speak Spanish and English (native English speaker) and was thinking of adding Chinese, until I read this: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Now I'm thinking about French.
In my opinion this go against separating content from design. While it's a nice fix for maybe a few browsers, I'd rather let the old people complain about their widows.
NewsCred: Just How Trustworthy is Your Favorite Blog?
Congrats on getting TC'd, guys. Hopefully you'll make millions of users 'happy,' and not just 100.

Referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187046
I'll check it out.

Why is it so hardcore? What do the systems actually entail?
True.

I'm not much of a coder but this seems like it might be easy enough to try out. I might give this a go, if it's not done by the summer (which is when I have free time again).
to be more precise, Mandarin
The API is already available although we haven't announced it. There is a WordPress plugin that uses it, called TagMahal.

Please contact us if you'd like to use the API, if you need to do up to 5k queries per day or so it shouldn't have much of an impact on our server.
I read that too... That's why I included the qualification of "not insanely difficult". I do want to learn Chinese eventually, but self-taught is not the way to go with that language.
What's a floppy?
My wife swears by the Roller Mouse:

http://www.contourdesign.com/rollermouse/

It sits underneath a keyboard and uses a roller that rolls up and down and slides left and right. Takes a little getting used to, but significantly reduces hand motion and strain.
Certainly not world changing, and most definitely not ready for prime time. But considering it's a couple of guys throwing things at a server a couple of times a month more as stress relief than anything, it's not THAT bad.

http://www.famoushotdish.com

And yes, this was before we had even heard of alltop. Our first version was in October 07.
I haven’t got this excited about programming language discussion in ages. It’s great to hear some honesty, there is still a lot of misinformation and stereotypes floating around.

It's not even limited to dynamic lanaguages. I sometimes find myself defending static languages like Java. Java got a bad rap for being slow... but actually, it’s a lot better these days than it used to be.

Get the facts people!
Yep, just ask the bodybuilders.
Sexy, Bold And Experimental Typography
Andrew Chen: Lessons from the casino industry on engagement metrics and lifetime value
Disclaimer: I work for this company.

I don't have any scientific studies to back me up, but the marketing for Wacom tablets says they help:

http://www.wacom.com/comfort/index.cfm

http://www.wacom.com/index2.cfm

It's a very different experience to working with a mouse; the active area on the tablet maps to your entire desktop, so after you're acclimatized, it's almost like the pointer moves in reaction to thought.

(Edit: fixed formatting)
Yahoo! Internet Location Platform
I took Mandarin classes while working on a project in Shanghai in 2005, but made stunningly little progress and finally gave up. Then again, that might say more about me than it does about Mandarin. You definitely need a teacher, and consider focusing on the spoken language if most of your communication will be verbal.

Korean is useful because very few Westerners speak it. (There's a reason it's called the Hermit Kingdom). Very cool high-tech country with a too-low profile IMHO.
Good golly, that sounds like a lot more Angel money will soon be flittering about Mountain View and Seattle.
Preparing For EC2 Persistent Storage
Free Music Studio Means No More Excuses
Hobnox.com: free online electronic music studio (full featured)
- Perific mouse...
- One of those ergonomic 'sideways' mice... that look like:
http://www.fentek-ind.com/lmvmr3sb.jpg
- Drop the mouse altogether and learn VIM/Emacs.
- Get a Wacom Tablet (Bamboos are cheap), or
- Get one of those head-tracking devices
I can't use a mouse for more than a few minutes, but I use a trackball all day long.

Kensington Expert Mouse does it for me.
Thanks! The first thing I was about to do was post a link on Hacker News, but you beat me to it. I guess it goes without saying, thanks to everyone here for all the help/support/fun over the past few months. We'll chronicle the experience (its been a crazy past few days) soon.
The article says YouTube is making $100 million. Is that revenue or profit? I was under the impression that YouTube was losing money with its $1 CMPs and such.
I'm with you on this, I would love some reasoning for this.
Ah, good call. Steve Bao sounds like it has too many vowels. Mark Bao is much better :)
A USB drive, hard drive, or CD ROM all work just fine. Floppies are just a simple and conventional way to get a kernel booting. Personally, I like netbooting the best.
web2py 'gets it' about developing web apps!

Massimo has boiled down the essence of what a web app needs to do (MVC, REST), and has delivered it in a clean, simple package, which is just what I would expect from a Computer Science professor.

The new Google appengine Bigtable datastore makes any SQL-based ORMs moot now anyway, so all we really need to worry about are the business logic and presentation, both of which web2py excels at.

Yes, you can still use Textmate if you want, but the cool thing about web2py is you never need to leave the browser IDE. Also, the framework itself is so compact you can carry everything around in a few megs of a USB thumb drive, so now you have a truly portable cross-platform package you can use to develop wherever you are!

So just get involved, and let's lead the way into the cloud... I see a huge need for that kind of leadership over at the appengine; this is a chance to make a real difference and shape the future, folks.
How to enjoy your job
It takes a great deal of discipline to manage all your productive output in a system. It requires a significant upfront time commitment to initialize the system. It's complex enough that it fills a book.

It's really best suited someone who needs to manage a large quantity of varied but mostly small tasks.
_why's Hackety Hack is a good introduction for kids that involves doing real things like pulling information off of web pages and making blogs.

http://hacketyhack.net/
anfack!
Inmotion hosting review
awesome thanks have been looking for this. there are a lot of music tools out there but seems hard to find soemthing that is just click google click download click install -> start making music.
Save Should Die
Google kicks off its Facebook ground war
Who are you? Are you my twin? I have exactly the same problem with programming, do the little tidying up actions almost reflexively now, AND I climb as well. Absolutely love that climbing all in your head.

Joking aside, I'm a sophomore in college now, and I closely approximate the 'brilliant failure' model (a little arrogant to say that though!). High school was a breeze, but suddenly you can't not do homework anymore. Classes are not going well and either the depression started first or the lazy/bored attitude did; either way, it's a death spiral. Takes a ridiculous amount of brain power to stop it.

Hm that was an impromptu rant, sorry.
Why Yelp Works
Wow, very nice.

If you're not in stealth mode, may I ask what is your current venture?
Data, Algorithms, and Powerset
This is what separates good webcomics from bad webcomics, I've noticed lately.

Also, The Darjeeling Limited does a great job of showing instead of telling. And 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To clarify, I didn't mean to say that the results returned by hakia don't contain the correct answer. For powerset/google the answer to many of the questions seemed to be right in the title or description of the results, without having to click on the answers, and that wasn't the case for hakia.
I don't get why Twitter doesn't scale. It's just webmail, but with smaller messages and a simpler UI. Here's how twitter should work: every user should have a list of users following them. When they tweet, each follower gets a copy of that message in their personal inbox. A copy is also attached to the tweeter's account, so new followers can suck that copy in when they start following them.

That's it. Now, sending a message takes O(n) (n=followers) time, which is really cheap. On my machine, it takes about a second to create and sync 40,000 files (there's not much data, so replicating this via NFS wouldn't be that expensive either). With that out of the way, all you have to do is ls your "twitter directory" to see all of your friend's messages. This is another incredibly cheap operation. It's easy to distribute, and there's no locking.

Anyway, just look at the mail handling systems at huge universities and corporations. They scale fine, and they're much more complicated than twitter. Twitter is just a subset of e-mail, so it should be implement that way, not as a "SELECT * FROM tweets WHERE user IN (list, of, followers) ORDER BY date". That is the wrong approach because it makes reads (very common) expensive and writes (very uncommon) cheap. That's why twitter doesn't scale.
Astronomy Picture of the Day: 13 years and going strong
Can Social Networks generate $1M in ad revenue?
"Perhaps they are continuously doing DB writes instead of keeping a write cache and storing content in batches, who knows."

If they are using rails (and certainly they started with it) that is almost certainly what they are/were doing. Thats the Rails Way. Store everything, load it up, remember nothing at all.
This isn't an entirely fair criticism. The section you are talking about was labeled "Marketplace," and it was intended to be a way for users of the software to find other companies to either network with or buy/sell from/to. It was completely independent of the "Vendors" section and had no bearing on the accounting aspects of the software. The feature has since been removed, in any case, since I didn't have enough time to work on it.
I definitely agree that creating something that other people enjoy is the most rewarding.

I'm not a writer, so I don't presume to tell you about your own craft, but there might be a difference between writing and programming/painting: I can definitely enjoy programs I've written (not reading my own source code, but actually using the programs), and if I were more talented, I could see myself enjoying looking at my own paintings, but I find it hard to see myself reading my own writings for enjoyment. Perhaps making something that other people enjoy is more necessary for a writer than for a programmer or painter?
Well, I'll tell you the story, but it's not that interesting.

I was talking with a friend about the name for a blog. My first conception was a website where I posted lots of tiny bits of code, centered around Web 2.0.

So, lots of little bits of Web 2.0. Hmm, "bit," like bits and bytes. Then I thought of Web 2.0 tropes and came up with 20bits since that was the trend (37signals, 30boxes, 43things, etc.)

And now you know.
This is so wrong! RCU lists are in linux kernel everywhere: http://lwn.net/Articles/262464/
Though this article quickly dismisses the approaches of theorists as seemingly absurd, I would recommend taking a look at section 9.2 of this document (http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/vishkin/PUBLICATIONS/classno...). Have a look at the parallel pointer jumping on linked lists.
Fellows has some interesting products which I've used in the past with some success. In general, using a variety (I also use a wacom sometimes, and often use a mighty mouse with my ibook)

http://www.google.com/products?q=fellowes+microtrac
http://fellowes.com/Fellowes/site/products/ProductDetails.as...

They used to have a presentation version of this that was wireless and had a pistol below the trackball cage. I bought two and still use one if and when I have an office. I haven't tried this microtrac version but it would definitely take all stress off your wrist!
The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research
12 Google Android Applications
The interface is cool but gets fairly obnoxious after a while. I know that it's pretty accurate as to how the original gear worked, but music UI has improved so much since the late 1970s!
Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope Released
You simply cannot argue that caching doesn't work if the data is different for everyone. I understand that. It's aggregation. But the metadata lives within a database and it is imperative for that to be glossed over with a RAM based cache.

I really hope my initial post wasn't interpreted the way it was to validate that response. I don't take back anything I said--and I'm sure it's not what I want to hear. Architectures scale, not languages... Twitter simply cannot be distributed... it's not news, I've written about it earlier.
Apologies for implying otherwise. I was primarily referring to Asians who grew up in Asia and still call Asia home, but that do business with Americans. I promise I won't ask you your "real" name.
While writing your own boot loader may be fun, I think it's a waste of time. If you are interested in operating systems programming, I recommend you skip the boot loader stage and use GRUB to boot your kernel.

It's actually pretty simple to get a "hello world" kernel booting using GRUB. After that, you have real, actual operating systems programming like implementing paging, multitasking, interrupts, and so on.
Top Down Selection: Sifting For Quality Information
HBO Shows May Sell on iTunes for $1.99+
http://seekler.com

It was our project for awhile and I still think community driven ranked lists of the best of any given category would be great for online shopping and finding new bars and making recommendations, but it just didn't work out how we wanted. We got bogged down on to many things, made it to complicated, and focused on bad pieces... So the project is now just chilling as we are starting a new project.
Under the hood: Learning more about task scheduling
I used to use XML, until i finally got around to learning how to write parsers myself. Atthat point the lightbulb went on, and I realised that I could produce formats that are much easier for humans to read/edit, much smaller, and much quicker for the parser to analyse.

XML knows nothing about the structure of your data. This is intended, but it means that you have to describe the structure of the data along with the data. Seeing as the software that is going to use the XML has to know about the stucture anyway,if it is going to do anything useful, this just means that you end up specifying the structure in the software and in the XML. Blech!

Go and read up on what yacc and all of its decendants can do for you. It'll open up worlds for you :-)
Why Windows Threads Are Better Than POSIX Threads
There was an article in a major media outlet (too tired to look it up now!) within the last six months about that. It was posted on Slashdot too where a big discussion ensued about what a ridiculous comparison it was also.
Ask YC:  What tool do you use for web page / ui mockups? 
I dont want to/cant afford to buy photoshop, whats an alternative?
Why Linux people lust after DTrace (and how DTrace saved Twitter)
Hewlett-Packard Said to Be Close to Buying E.D.S.
In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time?
gimp, http://www.gimp.org/
That had the lowest meaning / words ratio of any programming blog post I've read.
You know, he probably could have, you know, written that in like a couple of paragraphs so I actually would have finished reading it or something you know.
'grats guys.
I have to say the arrow key navigation is awesome. I hate to have to click all over and the fact that there is only one story at a time yet I can navigate to others easily is very appealing.
It's doubt it's the language. Sure, you might get more efficient throughput with another framework or language..but I think the core problem lies in how many polling API connections they have. If their API is based on their core DB and not polling off a read only copy..they have a serious design flaw.

API conections, given their nature of having to do a security check each time should be based on a slave copy read-only db which is near-realtime, or potentially dirty read but who cares, its for their API. The security lookup should be cached since you rarely change API security accounts more than once..if you do, then you update the caches.. etc.

Granted I'm no expert, but it just sounds like they're overloading their DB with polling.

Their web pages for each user should be cached since they're not really hit as much as the api or rss

I dont' care what anyone says, having THAT many API connections constantly polling their DB along with what blane said about having to do authentication requests on every singel hit is taxing on any setup you can put together.

Oh and if they have a single table holding all their tweets...big issues there. I'd have a 26 "tweet" tables, one for each letter of the alphabet and my switch in the business layer. Then simply ship tweets older than a month, or patition based on that.
yeah, my blog is awesome :p
Ruby implementations roundup - one year later
That's one great UI, thanks for sharing!
Canadian Startup Map.
It's a shame - the idea is quite nice. Could use a simpler UI.
I've done both, and I regret the mini-parsers I wrote. It was for stupid stuff, like config files. The main problem is that nobody else could do anything with the code. XML is at least a common denominator. Not the lowest, but pretty low. :)

I've found it easiest to deal with xml in a very focused way. In my case, I always define a schema and use a code generator to get things in/out of memory. From there on, I don't care about the xml anymore. This is fast and reliable. The only real downsides are (a) ugly xml syntax, and (b) having to remember how XSD works every time.

Where I really object to XML is as an internal construct in a system. It's useful for putting things on disk, and it's useful for interchange with damn near anybody because of the ubiquitous libraries. But you don't want to be keeping your core application state in a DOM. Or using it as an inter-component interface. I've seen more than one person do that, and it made me very sad.
Facebook users warned about ads
Nice! Make it scroll scroll scroll as people add new stories.
i would probably learn spanish really well instead of learning yet another one with limited use.

+1 to that. The most "useful" thing you could do would be to seek depth, not breadth: Keep working on your mediocre Spanish until it becomes fluent Spanish. There's an absolute ton of Spanish speakers in the USA, to say nothing of the rest of the hemisphere.

(By extension, another useful thing you could do is just continue practicing ever-more-advanced English. :) But that presumably fails the "fun" test big time...)

From there, if you've ruled out Chinese (native speakers everywhere!) and Japanese (inspiring manga and anime everywhere!) as too hard (which is probably wise), I think you're down to:

- French (folks on the web rave about French in Action; lots of speakers around the world; great movies and literature; and the food...)

- a language spoken by some nearby foreign friends who will be pleased to practice with you occasionally (in my case: Chinese, Polish, Hebrew)

- a language spoken in a country you really want to spend time visiting (hint: Italian)

- Latin. Intellectually interesting. Relatively easy to study without a teacher: Your accent will almost certainly suck, but none of the native speakers will ever care, because they're all dead! And you've got thousands of years of classic literature to appreciate:

http://www.amazon.com/Harrius-Potter-Philosophi-Lapis-Philos...
Ruby Symbols in 1.9 — End of an Era (and a good thing, too)
I once did the same for ActionScript. And of course this stuff works best for visually-oriented languages, like CFDG: http://korsh.com/cfdg/
This site makes me happy too! Thanks for sharing :-)
I find it really sad that marketing is so pervasively backwards that marketing that's useful to the user can be considered an interesting concept... it should be the norm!

If a product or service is so great and amazing, it seems to me that simply describing it, without the usual bullshit hype and borderline (or outright) lies that usually accompany the description, should be enough for people to try it, love it, then tell everyone they know how great it is.

As an example of what I'd call "real marketing", for my upcoming niche fansite about some MMORPG, I want to give maximum information to potential users about what my site does and how, before they even sign up. And I'm working hard to structure the site properly and have usable navigation, and eventually I want tutorials integrated all throughout the site and such. In fact, I'll let users try a limited version of the site just by providing a username and password, no email required. The idea is to make barrier to adoption almost impossibly low.

And I do want to produce marketing material, though I'll let my users distribute it. First, the marketing stuff will be segregated in one section of the site, so that people can go look it up only if they actually want to, I don't want to use the braindead "opt-out" approach that seems so popular where you spread your bullshit hype everywhere and your customers have to ignore it if they happen not to want to hear it (which most of them don't). I'll produce a couple versions of my marketing material, targeted to specific kinds of users. So if for example some alliance member wants to convince his leader to adopt my service for the whole alliance, he'll show him the leader-targetted page. So, make a great product that people WANT to talk about and then make it EASY to do so, provide a lot of "meat" so they have lots to talk about. I'm lucky because my site is so focused on a tight audience that I just need to tell a few people directly about it to bootstrap adoption.
History of the Strongtalk Project
Perhaps not quite grandiose or revolutionary enough to meet the description at the top of this page, but here's my dead-in-the-water project:

http://ploya.com

It's supposed to be a community for finding out about and then getting into interesting internships or graduate jobs. It seemed to catch on a bit for a couple of positions, but has declined since then.

My own interest in the site dropped significantly once I got my final internship and graduate job, and I guess this generalises to most potential users.
The world needs an antisocial network, where each user is explicitly supposed to swindle others.
I would pay for this. Hell, you should pitch this to Adobe. Would be an awesome PS plugin.
I love reading the comments on Yegge's blog. They all read to me like, "Wow, this guy just wrote 10000 words about himself, and now I feel useless. If I reply to him nitpicking a point or two, I will be as awesome as him!!11!".

This one especially.
http://newsconomy.com/ Social bookmarking and news website.
How Google Does Project Management
http://www.answermonk.com

We liked the idea of automatically tagging your links based on what you were searching for, but with all the link/bookmark sites we kind of lost interest.
digg.com
How about 2.0bits.com?