skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting, I am asian, like soul food, but it's not something that would occur to me as putting on my profile. Similarly, I would write sashimi (if I ate it anymore) versus sushi, and I suspect that non-asians like sashimi just fine but wouldn't know to put it on... So the statistics point to self-cultural broadcasting, I think, more than preferences.
Building viral apps on the social web for fun and profit
The programmer in me absolutely loved the product. However, I am bit skeptical about how it would be positioned/generate revenue (Mostly because I have zero business acumen) .

Good product. Best of luck for revenue generation.
We should find a way to make a cheap DIY version with a web cam.
Does this remind anyone else of Atlas Shrugged? The government forces someone to bend to their will, then tries to also force that person/business to also speak out on the oppressors behalf. Sickening IMO, but sadly, it's just another tactic used to fool people into thinking they're doing something worthwhile here. I'd like to hear Clist speak out and say that they're shutting Adult down because they were forced to, but that the issue still remains and, if anything, having it publicly available on Craigslist probably made the "industry" safer.
Someone on Reddit did it: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/db37b/ha_do_tha...
It's often thought that having the same topic submitted from several different sites isn't such a bad thing, and I half agree with that. What I'd like to see is the ability to link multiple submisions and get a single discussion thread.

Your ideas are interesting and slick, but I really like the minimalism of the site as it is. It's hard to see how to get a good balance, but as they say, ideas are easy.

Execution is what counts.
I know more people like myself then I do sharing this authors whiny attitude.

Of course you do--just like almost everyone I meet here in SF is a well-paid designer, manager/CEO, or engineer.
Yes, for going to market you will always need a business person too (the hustler, see http://learntoduck.com/micah/hackers-hustlers).

I guess the post was more about the problem solving power such teams have vs combinations of people that are more homogeneous in disciplines. It ignores the economic aspect of what comes after 'inventing'. ;)

I could have mentioned pair programming which imho benefits hugely (though not always) from the 2nd person (the passive one) coming from a loosely related or even unrelated field.

I.e. a high level 3d graphics hacker with a low lever system programmer looking over their shoulder.
Some amazing sport mobile websites - Mobile site maker
You mentioned how bright and knowledgeable the comments are to posts and I'd like to add to that idea.

One feature of HN comments is the pseudo-anonymity. I can find out who folks are, if they share info on their ID, but the way the comments are laid out I'm usually reading the bolder toned conversations and ignoring who's saying it. That's a very powerful concept.

Only when a comment really stands out as awesome or terrible do I look at the author.
Do you have an example of someone's comment being deleted for this reason? Someone being banned from hn or experiencing any adverse effects other than being downvoted?

If I came here and posted a comment to the effect of "Paul Graham is a huge idiot", I would expect to get downvoted, but I will have succeeded in saying it.

Is your idea of freedom of speech "nobody gets mad at anything I say, even if my remark is formulated specifically to get them mad"?
Here is an interesting article on something similar: http://blog.unixy.net/2010/07/how-to-build-your-own-cdn-usin...

In this article, they actually have servers set up on the different continents, and users are served from a server nearest them. It wouldn't be too difficult to also serve them from the appropriate domain using redirects.

Keep the user experience in mind when you apply this, as there can be unintended side-effects. For example, as an American traveling abroad, I still like to see the US version of the site. It is very irritating when sites force me to the regional site based on IP address.

This happens with Google in particular. When I was in the Philippines a few months ago, it forced me to www.google.com.ph which is in Tagalog (you also see different results, likely based on what is popular in that country, and fewer search ads show because of targeting). GoDaddy as well detected I was in the Philippines, and forced my currency type to Philippine Pesos when I tried to buy a domain name, and only a call to support could fix it.

Make sure you give users a choice.
You are completely right hapless. A good comparison is a dime bag to a candy bar. What adds confusion is that a dime bag is generally thought of to contain 1 gram these days. But this is not a candy bar and is not marked by weight. You won't find a "gram for a dime" bag that actually contains a gram. Hence why dealers are called choppers. They have to know how much to chop and still make money. Illegal or not, it can still be a slim margin business so these are accepted business practices by both vendors and customers.
The problem isn't generational. It's class warfare. Plenty of Baby Boomers have been fucked just as bad as our generation has.

The worst villains are mostly Baby Boomers, but just because that's the generation who is in power, and most people of any generation are out of power.

I don't like ripping on "the Baby Boomers" because it's similar to the "politicians are awful, but my Congressman is great" mentality that keeps incumbents in office despite dysfunction. People who rip on the Baby Boomers will except their parents, and this makes sense, because the villainy isn't generational but class-based. So let's frame this issue in proper terms. There's been a whole lot of chicanery going on, but it's not something that can be placed on one generation.
WordPress Security Tweaks
Note that it's usually the programmers who have never had a successful startup who look down on business people and then wonder why their project failed.
One day sale made my paid app free for Android, now I cannot revert
Isn't subtle vandalism what's commonly known as 'history' ?
I think the "gracefully" part is misleading. This could be done with Javascript and a simple CSS class added to the <button> is both graceful and degrades gracefully. But if we're comparing apples-to-apples, what's graceful about the Flash solution - opening one (possible more - Photoshop, etc) programs, learning a proprietary language (Actionscript) and exporting a binary that's not accessible to users or search engines, etc...
>Basically this is just noise, and a null-run (random group assignments) would produce just as valid results.

You didn't substantiate this claim.
This looks like it could be a decent clone of the Firefox Panorama feature, but it seems very buggy on my system (6.0.472.53 beta on Ubuntu Linux 64-bit) as of now.

* The previews don't render but maybe 20% of the time.
* Clicking a page does not take me to the tab but about half the time.
* Tabs in Chrome do not show/hide based on which group I'm in, like Firefox Panorama.

Hopefully it is just my system being weird -- has anyone else on HN tried this extension?
It's true, but it's also fascinating to me that some people have built such a powerful voice here. I can't count the number of times I've been reading a really good comment and thought "this has to be patrick" and sure enough, patio11. And he's not the only one.
Exactly; it just doesn't make sense for us to go to them and recruit. Of course, that doesn't mean we're going to ding them for having gone to MIT or Stanford if they come to us. We're a small company, so we need to focus our recruiting efforts where they'll be most effective.
I was stunned because [An Inconvenient Truth] was so
powerful that my wife told me we couldn’t burn incandescent
bulbs anymore. She didn’t become a zealot; she just
realized that [climate change] was serious and we have to
do something.

Well, that's something, I guess. Not going to make much of a difference, though. As David Mackay says in Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, "If everybody only does a little, the impact will only be a little."
Many webservers have the ability to do GeoIP lookups from a database. I did a setup before that used a GeoIP database ( country level in your case ) from MaxMind which I used in conjunction with Nginx geo module ( http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpGeoModule ) to direct people from certain countries to different domains.

In the case of that setup, I needed a script that converted the MaxMind textual format over to a format that nginx could understand and then a bit of nginx code to do redirects based on the country that came up.

You need to be careful with something like that though. You want to make sure you aren't redirecting google's bot etc away from the site it is trying to get to.

In terms of your .com/.ca search question. They are going to get your .com. You could setup google campaigns that target users from specific countries so that your .ca appears above the organic listing...
Rails Rumble 2010 Registration Now Open
Motivation to work on what Joel will pay them to work on.

I've known a few really bright developers who would be highly motivated if you were asking them to produce a streaming media server or debug a problem with the Linux TCP/IP stack (real examples) but who would probably die of boredom working on a bug tracker.
Top 100 domains with the most unique backlinks (World)
Sensible article. But very US centric.
Thanks! Did you also try to put a block with the "answer" style in your quiz? It's not yet documented but quite useful.

I built on top of Google's webapp framework. Although if I had to start something now I would probably use tipfy or kay.
I think it should generally be inline with what other funded startup founders pay themselves. I've been led to believe in the past this was between: $50-70k.
Data mining your digital footprints
I'm not saying the results were random. I'm saying they're not really allowing for a "confidence interval" in how many more times a certain group uses a phrase than average. For example if black men use "soul food" 30x greater than average that seems like a solid result. But if it's only 1.01x more than average that seems like noise.
Will the flash button gracefully degrade if I have an obsolete version of Flash Player, or I use a flash blocker? Can an African schoolkid see it on their OLPC XO? Can a blind person read it with their screen reader or braille terminal? Can I select it using a keyboard or an accessible input device? Can I restyle it in the browser, so it's clear enough for my grandma to read through her cataracts and big enough for her to click on despite her arthritis?

Every time you use Flash, you're insulting the dignity of the elderly, the disabled and any number of others. You're saying to users "if you're not a healthy young person on a modern computer with a fast connection, you're a second-class citizen". We shouldn't tolerate it, and in many countries the law doesn't allow us to.

HTML works because it works for everyone, not just a fortunate few. This isn't about technology, it's a civil rights issue. No matter how hard Adobe try, Flash accessibility is massively inferior to HTML accessibility. They should be ashamed that they took so long to even begin to address the needs of disabled users and developers using their products should be ashamed for not using the open, standards-compliant, accessible alternative.
> I notice that if you have the door to your office
> closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow,
> and you are more productive than most. But 10 years
> later somehow you don't know quite know what problems
> are worth working on; all the hard work you do is
> sort of tangential in importance.

I think Joel's office will avoid this problem because they have scheduled interaction time each day. The daily all-company lunches prevent the employees from becoming isolated and out of touch. I don't think he intended for the free lunches to be a balance for the private offices, but that seems to be the function they serve.

Edit: fixed a typo (I'm don't vs. I don't)
Yeah, I've heard it both ways - I don't know what the original origin of that term is.
Except that you're also wrong. Pricing varies from region to region, and I've heard from a friend that $10 is a gram here, and a quarter is much less than $100. Lookn up online discussions about the price of weed. You'll see a good variety of answers. Quality also matters in pricing, which adds another element to it.
Explaining jokes is usually an unsatisfactory business for everyone involved, but:

What's in question is not the value of working in a startup rather than doing nothing at all, but the value of working in a startup relative to the sort of business that DHH founded. So far as I know, it's an open question whether that is positive or negative -- whether you look at the founder's own interests, or those of society, or the amount by which the founder's extra skill and efforts can improve the chances of success.

Of course I was not suggesting, and do not believe, that founding a startup is exactly like buying lottery tickets. I was suggesting that "for such-and-such people, identified in hindsight by the fact that they were very successful, founding a startup appears to have been a tremendous success" -- which I took to be the point PG was making -- is a poor argument for the superiority-for-some-people of founding a startup over founding a "lifestyle business", since there may be no good way to know in advance which people they are, and it may largely come down to luck.

(Which is not the same as saying that there's nothing at all you can do to help your chances of success. Rather, what making a heroic effort does might be to move you from the "almost certain to fail" category to the "quite likely to fail, and some tiny chance of huge success" category, after which it's a matter of luck. And it's perfectly possible -- and I don't profess to know whether it's true -- that on the whole you're likely to do better in a "lifestyle business" in a startup even in that second category.)
I stumbled upon this infographic of Wikipedia edit wars yesterday, coincidentally also a dConstruct speaker:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/wikipedia-lamest-...
Between the SC2 shoutout in the Scaling Disqus presentation, and the name & icon of this, my money would be on the Disqus team at Startupcraft (http://www.startupcraftsf.com).
This is an example of a bad misleading title.
Dieterrams, thank you. What you said is exactly right. The reason the comment form is the way it is is because I could not find the right css code to change it, as the site is a WP theme buried in code.

However, this is completely irrelevant to the idea in the article and does not take any merit off of it whatsoever. If you cannot judge an idea for the idea itself, what chance do you have at learning anything from anything you read?
I'm not referring to censorship from the administration at all. I'm referring to voting patterns in relation to the expression of honest opinions about 'sacred cows' of HN.

So,

a> no, no adverse effects other than being downvoted (which is a form of suppression of speech through discouragement).

b> that's a bit of a leading idea, assuming I am referring to statements which serve no purpose other than to intentionally inflame. I'm talking about honest opinions, offered as such, which happen to go against the group orthodoxy on HN.

I wouldn't say 'getting mad' would be an issue. Actually, what I'm thinking is more in line with what you are assuming - people make the assumption that a certain line of thinking is being offered solely to be provocative, and they do not take the ideas as having been offered seriously, and rather than engage the idea, downvote as if the intent of the poster was not to seriously engage in discussion.
Looking For Work
Quick feedback means quickly finding out if you're building the right thing.

I agree. That's why I use a development process that encourages quick feedback. I don't consider that market research because I'm not out looking for customers to give me money in exchange for a DVD full of software. I'm sitting down with the person who hired me and demonstrating what I've done in the past week or two.
Google Instant Search
Your call to action needs to stand out more by using a color that will pop. It currently blends into the rest of the page. Instead of "Register Now" it should say something like "Start Tracking Your Goals".
it is interesting how source control systems like Git are making this process happening for source code: now that everybody getting the project will fetch the full history it will be very hard to lost the changes that happened in the full history of a given piece of code.
I thought it was interesting how the largest countries aren't the most nationalistic - no Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan, etc.. I also came away with an identity crisis - #1 good food (Soul) and seeing Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco and Talib Kwali in the top "stuff"... dammit I might be black.

-
If they only use a phrase 1.001x more than the population average, it's going to be much further down on the list than the top 50, unless they use nearly every phrase less than the average (which, barring some extremely pathological outlier cases, is impossible).
This line of thinking is about ten years too late for Detroit. At this point, I don't think the city even has the resources to manage its decline. They're struggling just to keep the whole city from going up in flames.
The cost is approaching $10k now but I don't know what the final value might be

WIll you get $10k+ worth of additional revenue from having that name alone? What else could you spend that money on that would net the same benefit?
Thanks, this is interesting. What I think would be the best solution would be a pop-up (either in the front page or an actual popup) that if a user is from a certain country's IP address it just says: Are you in Canada and looking to buy our products? Please go to XXXXX.ca to place your order.

Is there a boilerplate app like that out there that we can just embed in the front page? Also, our products are physical products, not software, so if you are in Canada and even if you are American, you will need to place your order through the .ca domain.
I too would be interested in purchasing the(these) book(s).
You should think of it as equity, not money. Do you want to extract your equity (convert it to cash) now and buy stuff, or do you want to reinvest it in your business?
I suppose they could have been, but looking at the author's website it seems he runs an on-demand print house himself (whether he uses a third party provider to do the actual printing isn't clear).
The Four Hour Sprint
Considering this is based on profiles from users at a dating site, wouldn't the inverse be more likely?
Live Coverage Of Google's Search Announcement
When I was in the VC world, the founder's salary vs. equity demands were usually used to gauge how invested they were into the company's vision and concept. If the founders spent a lot of time penciling in $200K+ salaries, elaborate bonus and commission packages, and exorbitant perks (a $5K/month 'car allowance' was my personal favorite) for themselves, then it was a definite red flag. If instead they were willing to take modest salaries but fought hard for equity, you knew that they truly believed in their idea and were fully invested in the concept.
at wepay the founders are the lowest paid employees in the company
I still think that sites like "ebay" or "facebook" (granted that had some small significance to Harvard students) or "craigslist" or "etsy" or "google" or "skype" (though that is more oriented as a client software) prove that the win is in the product itself and the positioning. xkcd is another example, though not every geek necessarily loves xkcd.

A good domain name DOES help people understand what your product is about, but it is not the absolute make or break success criteria that so many people seem to think it is.
Is it also also easy to correct the flaw?

Not at all. If everyone involved in the project (everyone with a stake in the success of the project) agrees to give an agile process an honest chance, great. If not, you'll have trouble. A similar rule applies for coding standards, for test coverage, for security and logging, for transactional safety, for dieting, and for getting out of debt.
This is a frustrating thing to witness. There are people close to me who would rather stay in a bad situation where they don't have to think for themselves instead of putting in some real effort to learn a valuable skill or identify a real opportunity. So much of the work environment in the United States to day is much more babysitting than gainful employment. It kills me to see the talented all around me that is wasted because of a lack of initiative and a preference for simply following someone else's directions.
Varies from founder to founder depending on their psychology and their personal situation. While the board approves it, you make the proposal.

There's a lot of benefit to being able to say 'this is a great opportunity, but we're being careful with our cash right now - I'm the lowest-paid person at the company' when recruiting. That said, you don't have to be a martyr and drain away your savings after you've raised. Your board may vary, but after a Series A you can likely justify a low six-figure salary.
Making marijuana available for medical purposes is basically decriminalization. I drew the distinction as I've encountered people who think that states are legalizing it which is an entirely different thing.

Practically speaking decriminalization is making pot available to a much wider audience at a lower cost as (at least in Denver) there's no practical limit to how much people can buy. One person with a medical marijuana card can (and does) supply a fair number of people without.

* Edit: Fixed a typo.
Actually, about 12 states have decriminalized MJ. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decriminalization_of_non-medica....
I pay myself $33K gross annually. I'm the lowest-paid salary employee in the company.