skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sort of code will not provoke those sentiments.

But it has provoked those sentiments in nearly everyone who's commented. Including the very comment you're replying to!

I don't see anything about the original example that makes it less prone to being rewritten. Nothing's going to stop a programmer who's hell-bent on rewriting something. And "modification" and "replacement" are not that different anyway, especially when the scale is small.
I'm not sure what you want to hear, so I'll elaborate a lot.

Warbook was a Facebook application written in Ruby on Rails I ran by myself in late 2007 - 2008. It grew to over 16 million pageviews a day. At the time it was more pageviews than Twitter.

I scaled it using the following stack: Perlbal for load balancing, LightHTTPD for static assets, Mongrel for dynamic requests, Memcached for caching, and MySQL for relational data storage.

I used two medium instances for load balancing, one medium instance for asset hosting, 15 small instances for mongrel, one XL instance for memecached, and one XL instance for MySQL.

I used memcached as a "write-through" cache. Everything in cache was considered fresh. Every write of a cachable object would write to both MySQL and memcached. Every read of a cachable object would start with memcached first and failover to MySQL. This reduced reads on the database by 95%.

Total hosting costs were ~$2,000 a month.
The users of reddit are downright hostile toward anyone trying to make money. There was a thread last week about paid accounts. Out of 2000 comments, I think I only found one or two people supporting the idea. Most of the comments were somewhere along the lines of "paid accounts creates two classes of users and everyone should be equal" and "it's not my job to figure out how reddit makes money" (advertisements are actively blocked by 30% of users).

When your userbase is filled with college kids and anti-capitalist, you are going to have a tough time making money,
It's an educated guess, but I suspect comparing the entire infrastructure of a site like reddit with the entire infrastructure of a site like Facebook is pretty fair. Neither of them are using their entire server capacity to serve traffic. reddit's at a smaller scale than Facebook, obviously, but it's a pretty apt comparison.
I'm glad I got a new fix of PG essays. I was starting to experience withdrawal symptoms. ;)
It's a bold boast, but honestly, it doesn't mean much if the problem domain isn't similar. Reddit in particular runs into issues because so little of what they do is widely cachable. The site is heavily customized per user, and experiences an awful lot of cache churn. I don't disagree with your sentiment (design matters more than choice of language), but I could serve 16 million static pageviews/day off of a $20/month Linode. That doesn't mean that reddit could do the same.
Sencha Touch Releases & Notes (0.92)
It's my after hours/weekend project. It'll eventually be a bookmarking site. I'm about 75% of the way there before I open it up to the public. Some of the features are nearly completed, like the screenshots and article text viewer.

Along the way, I realized it would be trivial to make a mobile HN reader, so I spent some time doing that http://toadjaw.com/hn
Free IT Certification Q and A
Are you really going to defend that this isn't trivial to read:

str = "abcaaabcccaabrrcb"

dict = {}
for ch in str:
if ch not in dict.keys():
dict[ch] = 0
dict[ch] = dict[ch] + 1

sortedItems = sorted(dict.items(), key=lambda x: x[1], reverse=True)
Humor is often OK. I suspect the problem here is that your comment can be taken in an antagonistic tone that many people have in regards to DHH and the 37signals philosophy. That sort of tone is generally not accepted here, especially as a one-liner without substance.
I'm in. Clint
It's not impossible. Examples that prove this are outliers like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch.

Just because the information is public doesn't mean people are interpreting or acting on it correctly.
"I challenge anyone to point out a major flaw in our data"

its based on a non-random set of self selected participants who happen to use facebook.

That is a major flaw in your data.

Its useless to draw conclusions from it, unless you are specifically interested in drawing conclusions about iPad users who have a facebook account and like to fill in personality quizzes.

Having said that, if that small subgroup of iPad users is, in fact, the group that you wish to discuss then go for it, but please be clear about that at the top of your post.
Yep. I think it's a valuable business lesson: unless you know what your plan to make money is, don't announce that your attitude is "ads are bad". Although I think they'll figure out how to make money, this situation could've been avoided if they ran ads from early on and weren't loudly against them.
There's a word for a substitute that's more compelling than what it copies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
BeautyLeg,Sexy Legs
Sexy Legs
Excuse me but I didn't ask for advise. I though we were having a debate.
I agree, I think my examples weren't as clear as they should be. I was running out the door trying to get my thoughts out...

My point still stands though, we're often addicted to or deceived by that which is an inferior and poorer substitute for the "real" thing. Sure, technology may improve our ability to better fulfill desires when it's the only option.

However, given the context (and this may just be me), usually I view addiction in a negative light, so my examples were used to demonstrate the negative effects of addiction to false substitutes.

Rarely do you hear the word addiction mentioned in a positive fashion about someone, such as "Oh, he's absolutely addicted to healthy eating!"

Even when we do joke that someone is "addicted" to something positive such as healthy eating, we're usually passively stating that we think they're doing something far in excess than what we believe is normal... so it's still ultimately a comment delivered with a negative subtext.
How are you coping with the side-effects? When I tried Adderall for the first time, it was like some one had switched on the stadium lights. However, it killed my sleep and I was a wreck within a week. I had to discontinue it as lack of sleep was causing social issues with my wife and co-workers.
Where can I suggest books? I didn't find "Founders at work"
Love it! I've used penzu.com intermittently throughout the yr and every so often get lost in reading past entries!

One thing I've always "wondered" about more than concerned is privacy. Being a journal, I write out some of the deepest and most personal things in it. I'd find it assuring if you guys laid out your thoughts on privacy. I know there is only so much you can do but merely knowing your longterm vision will help.

Last thing I want is to do a journal on a site whose longterm vision is to open up the journal for public viewing ala facebook. If that was the longterm vision(to open it up), I may still use it but for a different purpose.
We focused on the 11% and 3% slices, yes. But from there we looked for the most over-represented groups. The fact that the independent geeks and selfish elites are 3 and 6 times more prominent in those slices is statistically significant, and it's a statement about the strongest tendencies of owners and critics.

But yes most owners are not selfish elites, and most critics are not independent geeks. It's difficult to say any group is "mostly" any particular psychographic profile. We're highlighting correlations and tendencies, not stereotyping. Admittedly, the title doesn't convey this, but if it tried to no one here would be reading the post, it would sound like something out of an academic journal.
Y'know, yesterday I declared it "internet-free Sunday" and just turned my internet connection off. I was amazed by how many hours there were in the day. I did some exercise, read some books, went shopping, read some more books, fixed some things around the house I'd been meaning to fix, did some writing, and watched a movie I'd been meaning to watch. I was sad when it came around to Monday and I had to sit in front of a computer again.

Internet usage is a crappy ground state. You can easily do six things at once, all borderline-interesting, none useful. I think I'll make internet-free Sunday a weekly event.
Reddit has 8 million unique visitors, but only 300k subscribers to /r/pics, the top auto-subscribed subreddit. Generously assuming half of people manually unsubscribe, that's at most 7% of their user base that are logged in. I know full well about cache churn with logged in users, but that's a lot of lurkers.

I'm also not sure what makes a Facebook game's domain more "widely cachable". 100% of users are logged in. The vast majority of actions taken are changing state. Any app touchpoint is writing to the database. Page caching is nearly impossible.

It's a lot less different than you think.
There is a broader underlying cause for these addictions. We can't adapt our culture fast enough to address technological change. What applies to these new addictions equally applies to our laws and other social customs. And through other parts of science. Cloning, Stem cells, privacy laws, DRM etc. In the broader context these are all unsettled ideas for our civilization. Example of settled areas from an ethics standpoint - slaves, civil rights, women's right, property ownership, etc.

I remember a philosophy professor discussing this a decade ago. And as time has gone by what she said has made more and more sense. Maybe because technology continues to accelerate while relatively speaking our social customs stay (nearly) the same.

EDIT: added to it. Clarified.
Http://zcampuz.nab.su/Tool.html?8543
Delta, which has most of the gates in Minneapolis, does not sell exit row in advance, and I wouldn't count on getting it when I'm going to be flying for 10 hours to Italy.

Northwest would sell the exit row seats in advance, but unless you had elite status, you could only purchase them 24 hours in advance. This was great when I had elite status, but sucked otherwise.

I would gladly pay $100+ for exit row if I could get it when I book my ticket.
Yes, when using languages, there's really no reason to go to war (unless, like a developer fresh out of college, you only know a few, and they are thusly your de-facto "favorites.")

But the thing about programming languages, that's different from all the other things people have aesthetic preferences about (art, music, food...) is that (most) programming languages are also open for modification by their user communities. Saying "PHP is crap because it leaves its functions all over the floor" is just a mean way of saying "I vote that PHP should be changed so that it puts its functions back on the shelf before dinner time." Picture a toolbox where, if you complained enough about your screwdriver slipping too much, it would evolve a new head design right before your eyes. The toolbox analogy seems to break down there, doesn't it?

The closest thing I can think of to a programming language that regular people deal with is an apartment/office building. Just by getting the "user community" rallied around an issue, you can actually get large changes made to the product itself. Thus, people are always, always shouting about what's wrong with their building, hoping that someone will agree and a mob will amass to Get Things Done.
This is a huge problem to address, and could be the thing that changes the dynamics of search. Google has become useless to me for a lot of searches -- many things that attract "MFA" -- because of the overwhelming amount of search spam. The problem has gotten much worse over the last few years because of the content mills presumably. Fortunately Google's still great for sufficiently obscure things that don't lead to transactions (like research papers).
5 Big Questions About Twitter's Move to Multimedia
JavaScript, Comet, and RabbitMQ Fun
I think that Ars is over-thinking it. The simple fact is that Intel's roadmaps lately haven't been all that well aligned to Apple's product lines. Back during the days of the Apple-Intel transition, Intel was all about killer laptop chips, which was the biggest weak point of the PPC chips of the day. Apple and Intel were a good match.

When it came time for Intel to introduce the successor to the Core 2 microarchitecture, they did it with the i7, a high-end desktop chip. Apple doesn't make a high-end desktop. They make small form-factor desktops and they make workstations. It shouldn't surprise anybody that the desktop i7 didn't get picked up by Apple quickly. When the Nehalem-based Xeons were released, Apple was the first to use them, in the Mac Pro. Much later, Apple was able to get the i5 and i7 into only the biggest of the iMacs, which have always (in the Intel era) been MacBook Pros at heart.

Things have been a bit different in the laptop department because of Intel's anti-competitive behavior with respect to graphics chips. First, they refuse to grant NVidia the licenses they need to make chipsets for the mobile Nehalem processors. Then, they refuse to release a mobile i7 that doesn't contain their pathetic integrated graphics that to Apple (who is trying to ensure all their customers can have GPU-accelerated video decoding and OpenCL) is just a big lump of wasted silicon. Thanks to Intel, Apple's laptops need to add an extra graphics chip to their already-crowded motherboards. That's why none of the 13" machines have gotten an i5 yet: they're too small. In order to put an i5 in a MacBook, Apple would have make a major compromise or get really clever during a complete re-design of the internal layout.

Ars tries to partially attribute Apple's continued use of the Core 2 to a lack of engineering resources due to a focus on the iOS devices, but that sounds absurd given Apple's recent financial numbers. I think it can be entirely explained by the differing and conflicting interests of Apple and Intel. They undoubtedly are watching each other's mobile strategies, but that's not necessary to explain what's happening with the desktops.
Letting others be the canaries in the coalmine is a great strategy. This is what the Amish have been doing.

150 years ago, they were not that different from the surrounding culture. They became distinct as the pace of innovation took off.

As new innovations come, they allow a whole generation to consume it on the outside, then consider adopting it only after it's been out for decades.

They seem kinda weird to us, but its a very wise strategy. Just because its shiny doesn't mean its helpful for human living.
Yes, it's a biased sample. I've already admitted that. My point is that it's not egregiously more biased than any other sample from academia or professional surveyors, and in many cases it's less biased.

Do you reject most academic psychology research because it is based on students at the college of the researcher? Certainly that's a more biased sample.

Do you reject political polls because they're based on who answers calls from random phone numbers and then does not hang up once they realize it's a poller?

Do you reject most commercial research based on paid volunteers or visitors to sites with much smaller and more biased audiences than Facebook?

I state upfront in the article that this is based on MyType users who are on Facebook. What more do you want? If you want no bias, just do math and don't believe any data based on people, written by people, spoken by people, anything having to do with people.

The bottom line point is, this is much more rigorous than much of the crap blogs and media report on. I'll take a random example that I googled for the iPad: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/06/ipad-sentiment-analysis/. "87% of tweets indicate intent to purchase the iPad". Give me a break. Talk about bias. The sampling errors there are horrific.

I'm just trying to maintain a reasonable perspective on MyType's data, not hide any facts about the shortcomings of it. There are shortcomings, they're just not so bad to make the results "entirely unreliable".
The word you're looking for is "Fungible". One barrel of fuel oil is the same as every other barrel of fuel oil.
Apple's new Xcode 4 could portend new HTML5 development tools
How to put VIDEO_TS on iPhone 4 with Mac
If you got an iPhone, say new iPhone 4, one of the things you probably want to do isyou're your VIDEO_TS folders, either from ripped commercial DVD movies or homemade DVDs, on it. It's a hassle to get all the way to the end only to discover that your movie performs badly on your iPhone 4, which supports higher resolutions than iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. This iSkysoft DVD to iPhone Converter for Mac provide optimized presets for iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 so you don't need to worry about the settings and resolutions.
Kudos for adding the user's Twitter username. Really impressive!
Except that marijuana has never directly caused death (ever), is less addictive (almost non-addictive physiologically) and thus is far safer to use.

But working for tobacco companies seems pretty frowned upon, definitely something I wouldn't share openly if I did. Alcohol seems acceptable though, my mom used to work for the liquor licensing board (Canada) which sells and regulates distribution in Ontario.
A Baffling Engine
Dr Drew always says the hallmark of addiction is
progressive use in the face of adverse consequence (effects on school or work, health, finance, legal, relationships).
That's only for the provincial fast track essential jobs stream - the points based permanent residency doesn't care what job you do.
Addiction to videogames explains the Fermi paradox?
AirBnb named one of the top 3 tech companies by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus  - Video
Yeah Palm to me is not as stale HP. Of course this subjective, but when I think sexy and elegant I do not think HP (Apple and somewhat Andriod).

Overall I still hoping for a Nintendo IP/phone type device.
I'm not so sure about this—the "unpaid debt equals destroyed wealth" part. It's important to be concrete about what we're talking about here. A society's wealth can't be sensibly measured in money, because currency is just a neutral medium of exchange having no intrinsic value. Central banks control its supply in an instrumental way. This is monetary policy 101. I trust we agree.

So what happens if you lend me $1 million and I don't pay you back because my business goes belly-up in a month? Well. No actual wealth is destroyed if you don't get paid back. Whatever you created (a business, a book, whatever) to get so rich still exists, and society still enjoys its benefits. You say that well, it could have been invested elsewhere; there's an opportunity cost. But assuming relatively fluid capital markets, someone else likely invested in whatever you didn't invest in, and so whatever great thing was created by that other business still exists.

Now, sometimes you have situations where no one trusts anyone to pay back their debts, and you have frozen credit markets. We saw this during the financial panic of 08-09. But the problem there is that real stuff---factories, people, stores---sit idle because capital markets are necessary for this stuff to function. The problem isn't that "lending isn't happening," the problem is that a society has a massive amount of idle stuff that could be otherwise productive, sitting around wasting away for no good reason.

I'm not sure I even disagree with you, I've just been trying to think through these issues in a non-abstract way.
You think the functionality of Facebook compares equally to that of Reddit computational-wise? I mean, I know neither is the most complicated thing ever, but does Reddit even allow photos anywhere besides thumbnails? Does Reddit find things only specific to your account and show you a list of friends and their content you are allowed to see (or even something vaguely similarly complicated)? I also highly doubt that Facebook counts all of the ajax-goodness it delivers as pageviews. I could really go on for a long time (widgets, Facebook connect, Facebook Apps API...) about the huge differences that you glazed over since it's using PHP for the frontend.
Artificial organs, cheap clean energy, cheap clean and fast transportation, robot house-cleaners, faster-and-faster computers.

Rich people problems
What? Of course they do. For every dollar borrowed, a dollar is lent. U.S. debt is financed through the sale of Treasury bonds, for example. And for each bond sold there is a real investor on the other end who paid actual money for it.
Distributed Ruby - Exploiting ‘Enterprise’ Software
I know that I've seen one around recently ...

One for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13140/

One for chrome: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/limjcpdphjbhdldh...

Other web services which appear to already do this (I'm sure that I could find more if I spent a bit more time on google - they're generally described as url expanders): http://unfwd4.me/ http://www.clybs.com/urlexpander
It is particularly odd behavior given that in 2006, Intel sold off the mobile portion of the XScale line of ARM chips, but not the rest of the XScale line. Either they've since had a complete change of heart about the wisdom of going after the handheld market, or the 2006 deal was the result of a really huge outbreak of Not Invented Here syndrome.
She says someone stole her phone:

http://twitter.com/Kate8

I find it a little disturbing that they can, and will, locate a phone and publish it's location.
Viji's Food Recipes
Be shown that there isn't a SIM card in it, and try to explain the difference to a judge / jury.
Can you please please please somehow tell someone important to get rid of those phony review sites, which when you get there have zero reviews of the item in question?
Well, Intel is the one who came up with the killer SSD, which Linus himself raved about.
Viji's Food Recipes Log On: http://www.freefoodrecipe.wordpress.com
Robots are only useful in certain industries, and these industries don't dominate US manufacturing the way they do in the robot-heavy countries.

For instance, cars are built largely by robots, but aeroplanes largely aren't. Japan builds a lot of cars and no(?) aeroplanes, while the US builds a lot of cars and a lot of aeroplanes.
They have conditioned their user base to be hostile to the idea.
It's from internal Google jargon. Typically builds that break early, like the canary in a coalmine.
And what do you do if you're a startup founder at the next Zynga and discover...

It depends on what your goals were. :) If you were in it for the money you plow right ahead. If you waned to make the world a better place (and get paid for that) you dump it on your investors and move on to the next thing.

Another option is to see if you can put what you learned about compulsive behaviors to better uses - I think the world would be better off if people were compulsive about maintaining good finances, hygiene, business schedule etc. Better yet, compulsively making sure they did the best they could for their family.
I spent a flight across the Atlantic with my knees up & between seats, and my feet off the floor, because I'm 6'2". Utterly ridiculous. In the opposite direction, I had an exit row seat, but I now check seat distance religiously.
The data might be more vivid as a population pyramid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid
Bias in sample data is unavoidable, but the bias should be clearly called out before, during and after the conclusions to ensure that the context is not missed.

and yes, I do reject any poll that does not take the idea of sample context and data bias seriously, regardless of its source.

If you do not clearly acknowledge the limitations of the data you have, you might just as well spend your time making numbers up.