skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're in a bit of a predicament with the verified name aspect. On the one hand it is an interesting idea, on the other it creates a lot of friction with respect to users creating fully-functioning accounts. The process is so onerous (by web-standards, mind you), that it'll be tough to get many users participating at the outset on a nascent site.

I'd also consider narrowing or focusing on a specific topical niche (possibly with a better brand-name that might give a n00b some hints about what the site is and what it can do).

I see you have also seeded the site with some content, but you may also need to artificially seed the site with some user participation (via "fake" accounts). I know this runs counter to your idea of "real/verified" users, but one of the toughest things about growing a userbase is convincing people that there's some worthwhile activity going on at your site to begin with. If they arrive and there's no discussion taking place, most of them will just as soon leave (there's no compelling reason for them to register to comment to nobody when they can just as soon go register at reddit or hacker news to talk to folks).

You should also look at using SEO urls for a lot of your pages. So rather than http://lonava.com/stories/314687, use a url like http://lonava.com/stories/sonys-hirai-were-over-10-years-fro...

Once you fix some of the simple stuff, you can start taking a crack at things like link-building, link-bait, link exchanges, forum postings, ad-word campaigns and viral strategies.

So I have no panacea for you. Growing an audience can sometimes require a number of small tactical moves.

One last thought: In a prior job I had worked on an account verification product. There many, many companies out there who are interested in such technologies for a variety of purposes (usually for financial transactions). Your application may have a hidden gem beneath the surface that is more valuable than the aggregator: the identity verification component. You might want to look at some of the verification solutions out there and see if there's some opportunity for you.
Funny stuff. How did you make that and how do you synchronize, the mouth movement with the dialogue?
I stand corrected. I didn't see the Droid X on there and misread the chart as if the devices were grouped by manufacturer. On closer examination I see it has been updated more recently.

How much of the hardware compatibility can be accurately tested in the emulator. I haven't run into hardware issues on my applications, but I don't have the wide device exposure I'd like to have. So I don't really have experience in having something slip by the emulator.

I think it depends largely on your type of app. Business/utility applications are less likely to be affected than games. Anything that uses a service is going to run into issues, and anything directly controlling hardware (camera, sensors). The quirks are definitely there, but I think they impact a much smaller group than people like to claim.

A service for testing would be good - $x/hr to load on X devices and click certain buttons. It'd have to be cheap, though, or most developers would probably simply opt for market-based testing. You'd probably have to offshore it to get a decent cost.

I wonder if you could get a decent response farming this out on the Turk or similar.
Oh Codd!
Ironic that transactions and guaranteed data integrity as performance tradeoffs are now being used as arguments for MySQL and against those pesky new up-and-coming open source databases.
> how much logic belongs in the controller, and how much in the model

I always thought this was really simple (at least based on the original Xerox definition of MVC):

Controller transforms inputs/parameters as needed. Controller can use Model to do this. Controller creates/manages views and sends latest data to the Views.

And a confusion-reducer: Controller is not between Model and Views. Views have direct access to Model. It ONLY uses Model to figure out the situation.

I have found these clear separations helpful in a variety of applications. I have also found that people that apply MVC to the web confuse themselves, too. On the server side, your View is what you are returning to the browser. JavaScript is part of the View of the server. It has its own MVC when it is run in the browser environment, and the browser has its own MVC. It is perfectly acceptable to have interlocking components, each with their own MVC.
The big billboard signs on the highway advertising Droid and its ability to do apps? http://blog.qik.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DroidDoesApps... (I totally get where you're coming from; this spreadsheet is super helpful.)
Announcing My New Startup Project: The Most Ambitious Yet
Tech Hiring Creeps Back to Health... at a snail's pace, but with progress
Anyone been through the "parallel startup projects" of starting a company and a new human at the same time? Thoughts, experiences?
This was a good article. My favorite points:

View anything public as Marketing

This is good advice for anyone and everyone. It doesn't mean that you always are out selling your excellent services or plugging your web site, it's really more "Use your real name and don't look like a stupid jackass anywhere online."

Only spend money on essential items

I totally fell into this trap the first time I was self-employed, and a little bit the second time. It's so easy to justify all sorts of expenses as "for the business" but the truth is, being smartly frugal can be a competitive advantage. That said, you can take my new laptop SSD when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Be Open About Your Position

I find it interesting that high profile doctors, lawyers, and real estate agents don't like to hide behind a name and a facade of "enterprisey-ness" and false sense of scale. If anything, they do the opposite, having you work more closely with with assistants and nurses than the name-brand expert.

If you're good, you are your brand, and you don't have to pretend to be a dozen people. In fact, a dozen people don't generally solve client problems better than one person who really has his stuff together. I'm proud to be able to deliver well as a one-person shop.
Caching in ASP.NET
As usual, use the technology that fits your needs.

If you want a lot of speed and can tolerate the possible (even if unlikely) data loss, use NoSQL.

If your business requires that your data is guaranteed and always up-to-date at any moment, then use RDBMS.
These videos are certainly funny, particularly the iPhone vs HTC one that was popular a few months ago. But as cscotta pointed out there's an interesting trend of picking certain flaws in particular databases and highlighting them without telling the whole story.

Anyone watching this might believe that MongoDB has a major flaw where data isn't written immediately and you have no idea if it has successfully been stored to disk. Whilst it's true that inserts are not immediately written by default, you can a) change the startup config to set the delay time b) force a write of all pending changes from the command line c) force the write from your call to the insert/update/remove/etc method in all the libraries and most importantly, d) request the library method wait and return the response from MongoDB so you can determine if the write was successful or not.

This means you have complete control over when you need fast inserts at the expense of potential data loss, or when you need to be certain the data has been written.
Actually, I was considering using GWT over the AppEngine. It provides a lot of supported functionality (such as fast Image serving, OAuth & OpenID, BLOBStore, Memcache) that seem a bit of a pain to integrate with ROR. Those features in conjunction with the free quota limitations (for approximately 5 million page views per month) make it seem like an ideal low investment platform that can scale one demand. I'm just wondering if anyone chose ROR/Django over GAE and what their reasoning might be.
100 Gigabit Networks, We're Getting Warmer...
Ask HN: Setting up an SMS server/gateway?
Increasingly I have found text messaging to be very interesting and would like to build a few apps / play around with sms in my spare time.

Do you guys have any advice on where to start?
I don't see how automatic, silent updates are any better than "phoning home" for key validation. The partial verification system requires constant updates to be any more useful than a verification of the entire key, and if these updates are optional, the illicit users will just opt out of updating.

Presumably it's also possible to run out of new parts of the key to check, at which point anyone who has been keeping track will have enough information to build a full generator.
Can you elaborate? I'd be curious to know what limitations you've experienced that work against GAE for enterprise deployments.
Thanks. Isn't it defgeneric that is allowing you to open and close different types of things without knowing about them in advance, not the macro?

All we need to do this is duck typing and closures I believe.
http://www.twilio.com/ ?
That's an impressively verbose and obfuscated way to re-state the very basic and completely independent (of ORM, Django, Python, etc) notion that if you have common code you should abstract it into a separate function.
The Curious Case of the Cat Bin Woman
I think we call these Named Scopes:
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/NamedScope/C...

Maybe it's this in Django:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/managers/#mod...

The overall purist argument, that the controller should have no knowledge of the database seems ridiculous. If one removes or adds a field to the model, one would expect there to be cascading changes across the whole system. If you generate most of your SQL with an ORM, you can switch database with minimal fuss. Although, how often do you do that anyway? ORM provides a lot of benefit in reducing the amount of code you have to write for many operations.
Funny: yes. Meaningful: no. The tradeoffs between MySQL and memory-backed k-v stores are in a different league than the old tradeoffs between MySQL, Postgres, and Oracle.
A note:
The architecture model where the controller sits between the model and view is instead called 'Model-View-Adapter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-adapter), where the controller (or adapter) is doing the mediation between the model and the view. It supposedly allows for a stronger separation of concerns.
Reusable method implementations for deftypes
Groupon saves not one but two social ventures with one deal
A leader is supposed to be someone who has gotten very good at doing something and now leads it.

The problem is that we've created this parallel track called "business" that has separated leadership from any practical experience. There are now two parallel unrelated non-intersecting career tracks: those who do, and those who lead. Those who can do. Those who can't lead.

The pure MBA is our equivalent of the apparatchiks of the former USSR.
I appreciate the points, thanks again for taking the time.

I don't know that "fake" accounts would work, but what I might be able to do is to convince some of my friends to each reply to a half dozen articles a day. Even if I had to needle them until they did, it would provide some content.

For the SEO-level- Reddit does that, and I suppose I could.
As I user, I prefer a short, straightforward URL, but I suppose I could see why generating Google traffic might outweigh that. Fair enough. Thanks! ;)

The acct verification product I'm using is off-the-shelf. It was a pain in the ass to find one that was both affordable and reliable, but It's working pretty well. I don't really think I could/should leverage it.
Yes. My daughter was born almost parallel to birth of my startup.

...wouldn't have been possible without an exceptionally good wife.
what does that have to do with income inequality? how does it help your business that an increasing narrow group of people can afford what you sell?
Wow, this is the first time I really wished I could down vote an article on HN.

Wayne, the author or RVM is a smart and incredibly nice guy who is very open to evolving RVM to include new techniques. He is a model open source citizen and RVM has helped a great many.

Regarding this post, spewing angry criticism without moving the conversation forward is just sad, and I'm really glad I don't have to interact with Lucas on a regular basis.

Regardless of the brash and unhelpful tone of the post, Wayne still models the selfless open source maintainer by attempting to pull out any value that may be hidden behind all the rhetoric.
NYT Says Tech Is Changing Our Brains, But What About Our Language?
Definitely. I've played with it and it's very slick.
(http://www.twilio.com/sms/)

Also, if you just want to send SMS messages to your users, you can do it the "poor man's way" by just emailing it to their SMS gateway. The downside is you need to know their provider. It's not too difficult, however, and we actually do it in one of our apps (just have fields for mobile # and provider in their profile).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

If you happen to be on Rails, there's a decent plugin too:

http://github.com/brendanlim/sms-fu
When to Forget: How to cope with being a coder with a sadly finite brain
Two books I often recommend:

Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved

They're probably the best, most thoroughly researched, and least political of the evolutionary bio books I've found that aren't primarily about hardcore genetics and heavily math-based game theory.
There's the old joke about finding an SO. Attractive, intelligent, available: pick any two.

I recently realized that with programming languages, it's similar, but not quite the same. Runs fast, has libraries, isn't totally frikkin braindead: pick one, if you're lucky.

Just now I realized that much the same applies to databases.
Yeah, the whole DevOps thing is weird - it's like these guys have forgotten than there was a time when every sysadmin worth his salt was a competent Perl or Tcl programmer who regularly worked on thousand-line scripts for automation. We just took it for granted in the 90s that if a sysadmin needed a tool and didn't have it, he'd make it. One of my former cow-orkers, a dyed in the wool sysadmin, happily used C++ and Motif.

Maybe the sort of "Redhat certified" sysadmin you get these days can't even shell-script and they think this is some radical innovation.
Agreed Twilio is probably the place to start/ the most established. I guess my question pertains more to rolling my own sms server/gateway.

Or is that just not worth the hassle at this point?
Well the British Empire isn't exactly as large as it was in its imperial days but London could be fairly accurately described as ubiquitously surveillanced, perhaps moreso with CCTV than mere (ha) UAVs would allow, since the CCTV cams permeate urban canopies (buildings).
I'd caution everyone about using Joyent. I company I work with used them for hosting (spent thousands on Accelerators) and had horrible IO. Clearly some other client was using all the disk IO related performance issues, yet their tech support claimed it was working properly. Note, this was all on Joyent's "new" architecture which was supposed to prevent these problems.

Joyent's tech support was arrogant, annoyed, and unhelpful. Caveat Emptor.

Bottom line was that Joyent thought that because it was using Solaris it could massively overload the number of zones per box. This was generally OK for CPU and memory sharing, but for disk IO it simply didn't scale well enough, yet Joyent's entire business model (and pricing) was based on the idea that you could squeeze a lot of zones onto one large box.

Example: Typing ls at the console would lag horribly, sometimes taking 3-4 seconds to return. Other times it would be lightning fast, and was thus declared a non-issue.

Heroku, on the other hand, has been fantastic. They even have responsive, helpful people on IRC most of the time.
I understand what the author's point is, but the quotation lends support to the counterargument: accept that the joy is in the journey, not the destination, and continue moving forward because you will get to where you desire, no matter where it is.

Or succinctly: life is about adventure, so don't make plans.

"Cheshire Puss, she began, rather timidly, as she did not know at all whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. Come, it's pleased so far, thought Alice, and she went on. Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to said the cat.

I don't much care where, said Alice.

Then it doesn't matter which way you go, said the cat.

... So long as I get somewhere, Alice added as an explanation.

Oh, your sure to do that, said the cat, if you only walk long enough."
Ah, I thought you had "rolled-your-own" for the verification solution. If you went off the shelf, you can't really leverage it as you say.

By the way, here's a hacker news equivalent for internet marketing that I've found useful (since marketing is a key component of audience building):
http://sphinn.com/

Good luck!
At the risk of getting downvoted like crazy, can somebody please explain to me the point of this blog post? It's just a couple of empty comparisons of Scala to lego/smartphones and C++/C#/Haskell to morse code.
http://phras.in/do%20only/only%20do
Actually that's one of the most ignorant statements I've ever heard. I'm hard pressed to think of a single application that does not have related sets of data.
You just hand-wove their arguments, called their ideas half-baked, and accused them of being like Fox News with little to no actual data.
I just recently returned to the US and for the first time got to go through the citizen's/residents line (Green card holder), and the difference between the two was unbelievable. This time round, the queues were a fraction of the size, the immigration officers were friendly (as opposed to being outright rude to visitors) and the whole process was incredibly simple and quick. The difference is striking, and I'm certain it's not just me - visiting family always complain about how long immigration takes.
And the point of this article is? Seriously, it's nothing but bashing a library for no point or reason. And who cares if it's ever "accepted into Debian"? Bashing with no solution or attempt to help fix problems? Sorry, but this is nothing but flame-bait.

RVM is a terrific piece of software that has made my life as a maintainer of multiple ruby libraries so much easier. Wayne is an awesome developer who's always ready to help people, super accepting of patches to any part of his projects, and is just an all around great guy.
hmm, nothing on networking or computer architecture, so sad. or would they be considered a part of a "computer engineering" degree ?
Durability is a generic topic, not only the problem of NoSQL.
This. Let's say you had free will. In most definitions, this means you can do what you want, without being forced by anything. But are you really free in your choices? You still can not decide against anything you want. Your mind (or soul, or whatever) will decide what you want to do, and then do that. You may be in the mood to deliberately choose something that is bad for you, but again, this is influenced by your mood. This is actually something I often hear as a reason for free will: If we did not have it, we would never do something that is against our interests. But this will only work if you assume a mind that is both very simple (always trying to choose the best) and extremely smart (so that it can differentiate between bad and good decisions). There is no reason to think that we are like that.
Tutorial: Create a real-time auction site with Scala and Lift
http://marinsoftware.com/product/benefits.html

these guys also have their own frontend to AdWords. it allows you to manage a campaign across platforms even.
To address you comments:

PENSIONS

I didn't mean to criticize all pensions. Just the State of California's where you can retire and make 90% of your PEAK income for rest of your life. It is simply an unsustainable amount given how much the public sector workers make. There was a case a few weeks ago of a police chief from a small town in California who was going to earn ~$900,000 a year in retirement. It is purely ridiculous.

HOMELIFE

I don't think that has degenerated that much. I do think that we see the population of people who are dysfunctional emotionally, socially, and intellectually is growing at a faster rate than those who socially responsible.

I do not have numbers to quote here, but is it unreasonable to assume that main factors that determine children per generation, period (in years) of a generation, and survivability of said generation.

One could argue that survivability is a huge factor when it comes to inner city youth. Gang violence, malnutrition, high infant mortality rate, ext. However, in terms of the total population it is very small.

However, we have a real division in class since the dawn of birth control in our country. One where people wait to have children and build a career and what-not. And another where people do not. There has also been a steady rise in teenage pregnancy. This creates a separation in the rate of a generation.

We can assume that the number of children born per family are close to equal. But the truth is that families that are poorer typically reproduce more. Or maybe, the families that reproduce more are more poor. Or it could be that the people who have more money, have less children.

This all doesn't mean much until you throw in a little human psychology. Given that most family dysfunctions are generational (alcoholism, sexual abuse, ext) and that these dysfunctions are commonly tied children who have poor education scores in poor families. You quickly begin see an inflation of emotionally damaged people, who just quite frankly don't have emotional resources to invest themselves in an education. Every once in a while, you get some that power through, but the human condition only permits so many.

However, why the kids in functional families systems are screwing up in school? I have no idea. If I had to guess, I'd say that the way our brains learn have been changing rapidly since the invention of the internet.
Also, when it comes to programming, the biggest bottleneck for most people isn't typing -- it's thinking.

That's so true for me. I'm not pumping out code nonstop where the efficiency of keyboard vs mouse comes into play. Being more efficient with moving around a source file only matters if I actually knew what to do once I get to a particular spot of code and many times I don't. I struggle more often with the high-level design of a program than the details. And when the design is sorted out then everything else falls in place. That's when more efficient navigation may be more important to me.