skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since 2006 I've had four separate sites and two separate companies covered by Tech Crunch, a couple of them with multiple stories. The effects of each crunch were slightly different but I'd call almost all of them positive.

The biggest thing Tech Crunch provides is not traffic or users, but awareness within the industry. In every instance the traffic that TC sent was fleeting at best and our sites, while technologically impressive, had nothing to do with a tech audience, so we never gained users from them.

Over the years I've noticed that the actual traffic sent is less than before. This has very little to do with a change of influence with them, but in the fact that they now have more writers and more blog posts. The stories don't live as long as they used to. 3k uniques though is generally on the low side.

The awareness that TC provides though is great. In the first years especially it helped provide some easy networking for a couple nerds that were very unlikely to leave their code dungeons. Don't discount the ego boost of attention which gives you the thought you're working on something that might actually be a success.

Also don't forget the baffling amount of lazy biz-dev guys at VCs who have very little in the way of drumming up new companies other than calling up every company featured on TC with a decent design and idea. Never bet on these kinds of calls, it's just something that is part of the business.

Concentrate on your product above all else.
Raverly has 10mm requests a day: http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/9/22/how-ravelry-scales...
Ask HN: Anyone else having a sh*tty day?
Maybe I have a case of the Mondays, but sale fell through for my startup, potential investor is not happy with certain aspects of our term sheet (they are fortunately justified claims) so back to the lawyer drawing board, few other operational items that are piggy-backing on the previous two, and it looks like it is about to rain and I'm at a cafe with only my bike as transportation.

I realize these are minor, but it is just one of those days where everything seems 10x times worse than it actually is.

What do you do to pick your spirits up and snap out of a funk?
An Inner Scorecard - Warren Buffett
has anyone tried InDinero and outright.com? those seem like the up and comers to me. I'd really love to see a compare/contracts of these 2 & QuickBooks (QB has 80% market share)
I've charged rates from $60 (totally spec'd out product with full page designs and everything how he wanted it) to around $100 (lots of hand holding).

Depends on location and type of work. I'd say that $45 is a bit low.
A valid point. I'm just not so sure that higher levels of education are providing state-of-the-art machinery. Often outdated - at least in my admittingly vary narrow perspective.

Nevertheless, access to equipment shouldn't be the defining element in an education framework.
The only alert I have set up is for "emacs".
Are you honestly denying there's no connection between the stuffing of the order book with hundreds of thousands of orders and the crash?

Perhaps you missed it, but most of the graphs in your link are from July. The flash crash was May 6. So unless you want to assert that the flash crash caused the weird graphs, no, I don't see the connection. That's not to say you couldn't find similar graphs on May 6 - I guarantee that you could. In fact, you can find graphs like this almost every day (pre and post crash) if you look hard enough. And yet, we don't have flash crashes every day. We've only had two (the first was in 1962 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395760457527... ).

So yeah, I do expect you to do more than point out an everyday occurrence and then assert that it (and not thousands of other things, including things which don't happen every day) caused a once-in-a-lifetime event. I expect, I dunno, correlations at the very least. Maybe even a mechanism, rather than just a theory that "I don't understand everyday event A or once in a lifetime event B, they must be related."
I think most people use them for alerts about themselves or their company. Noise can be a problem sometimes but there is a good solution/hack for certain instances. You can set up a google alert to function similar to a google search. So if you're getting only junk from http://foobar.com you could set up the alert to be as follows:

"your name" -site:"http://foobar.com "

This will return matches for "your name" but exclude those alerts from http://foobar.com. Very useful if you're getting a lot of inbox clutter.
Amazed your question doesn't have upmods, it's very original.

Can my personal laptop be remotely wiped if I connect my email client to an exchange server? If not, why not? It seems to me that a laptop is even more likely to leak sensitive information out of email, like spread sheets and word documents.
I don't think you understand what "citation" means.
They are contrasting the two.
You can vote for both.
You forget the rubber-stamp effect. "As seen on TechCrunch" is a good thing to put on your site, for most businesses.
I'm pretty sure PostgreSQL is intended to be pronounced "post-gress-q-l", given its relationship to Ingres ("in-gress").
Tried to train myself to say "earl", but I keep spelling it out.
Can you easily live in SF without a car, and get around well only walking, cycling, and using public transit?

I did this in Boston for a while and it was quite great. The bike went away for the winter, of course.
On the other hand the SSD is probably doing transparent compression and de-duplication because it helps with real-word workloads.

If you only test the pathological it isn't informative if your real workloads could benefit from compression and de-duplication.
I've never really talked to anyone not from the east coast whose first impression of NYC wasn't horror. If you haven't been, it really is unlike anything you could imagine; even the nicest parts of the city seriously feel like a neglected warehouse of city parts haphazardly strewn about.

But NYC makes up for that by being the most vibrant city in possibly the world. It can be very hard to take, but you're always aware of why you're putting up with it.
Metabolic Path Finding
I go back and forth with rails.

Sometimes the black magic is great, especially if you're trying to rig a prototype together. Also the configuration is almost always really easy so it's not difficult to start burning through a project.

Other times it's like "too much framework". I've never really been a fan of the all the javascript hocus pocus that occurs and prefer just writing it out on my own.

I also started to get frustrated with the active record query interface and started writing my own queries out because it was faster (for me).
I'll believe it when it ships.
This post is extremely confusing.

As soon as you attempt to step outside of what Rails is built for

Rails is a tool for building database-driven websites. It does this well, and I'm confused as to how you can "step outside of" this. Admittedly Rails probably doesn't help you built a GUI application well.

or need some new piece of functionality

Wait, what?

How did you arrive at this conclusion? Rails doesn't ship with authentication, but there's no less than two (authlogic, restful_authentication) major frameworks for authentication, and countless smaller libraries or self-written tools. The same goes for uploading files (attachment_fu, paperclip), testing (rspec, cucumber, steak, shoulda, ...). The list goes on. Rails' active community is one of the main benefits of using Rails in the first place!

Rails is painful to scale

Rails is no more painful to scale than any other web framework. The bottlenecks for scaling usually come down to application design, not your ORM.

Have you ever even used Rails, or have you prejudged it based on posts by people who also have never used it?
Adobe Illustrator Goes HTML5
Is there an off-the-shelf framework you used to create this kind of voting/comment/social-flagging system? Did you customize it much (beyond CSS)?
Personally I think I heard the phrase "don't be dependent on other companies' platforms" enough times to feel it in my bones. Some people obviously didn't.

On the other hand, that's morally draining - particularly when one works on something that's open source.
It looks really cool; is it going to be the WEKA killer for '10?
http://upload.imghostr.net/941stats.png

For anyone interested this is the traffic on instantise.com from the last 2 days. Techcrunch and HN were the main contributors but as you can tell HN kicked TC's ass completely.

Just based on me measuring the time that it happened i'd assign a good 80% of the "Direct" hits to HN. The google referrer is google reader so thats mostly TC.

My estimated breakdown:
TC total uniques: 3.5k - 3.8k
HN: 7k
You solve problems for business owners that prevent them from making money, right? That gives you a very different comparable than php code monkey, which is an implementation detail they do not understand anyway.
Public transit in SF is pathetic for how small and dense the city is. Fortunately its fairly bikeable...
You pretty much have to own a car in the Valley
Disaster Disgust
until you lose your wallet.
The problem with S.F. is that it's too much of a compromise. It's not big enough compete with New York or small enough to be as livable as Portland.
The title is misleading. It's "here" when it ships. From the article: "The game will be released on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 sometime in 2011".

That's enough for me to keep ignoring it. I've heard "it's almost ready" since 1997, when it was on the cover of the first PC Gamer issue that I've subscribed to.
Relevant: http://www.postgresql.org/community/survey.33
Source on what? I made 3 claims:
1. Muslims are offended by images of Mohammad. Do you really need a source for this?
2. There are images of Jesus in churches and Christian stores. Again, do you rally need a source for this?
3. Muslims are not offended by those images of Jesus. If you are claiming that they are offended by them, then the burden of providing sources is on you.
Can there really be crackpot Catholics? Yes. We all knew that, just like there really is a crackpot Evangelical sect in Kentucky that runs a creationism museum that suggests people rode dinosaurs. If we were more attuned with (say) Indian culture, I'm confident that there's some pretty awesome crazy stuff they're doing too.

Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with what Catholics actually believe. You'd have a hard time finding one in my suburban neighborhood church that couldn't explain and argue in favor of evolution, let alone "geocentrism".

So why is this Hacker News? Flagged.
> The new "we're better than everyone else"

He didn't say that at all.
Good News for Linux Users from...Broadcom? Zemlin Blogs.
We recently got our company posted on techcrunch and the numbers line up almost exactly only off by 4% and our traffic has fallen off exactly the same way.

Our post went up on a Monday so day mattered little in at least these two instances.
I've spent semi-serious time in Portland and have to say that it really seems to live up to the hype. I really like Portland.
Yes, assuming you work in SF too. And its never too cold for bikes, which is good because youd be in some trouble otherwise (MUNI is pretty terrible)
Anonymous Site Threatens to Leak IE 9 Beta Today, Pulls Last Minute
Honestly, TrueCrypt will stop all but the most determined and sophisticated criminals. So unless you have state secrets on your laptop, TC should be sufficient. Unless they have a wrench:
http://xkcd.com/538/
You don't sound like someone who has had experience with the framework, but is merely regurgitating what other blogs say. You should spend some non-trivial time working with the framework and yes it's not perfect, but it'll probably serve your needs. I too used to criticize Ruby and Rails until I started using them. I think it's too bad how Rails may be over-hyped as an easy-to-use, does-all framework because it sets up high expectations for the beginning developer. It does reward the developer who has put in the time to learn it.
Tom,

This is golden. Thanks for taking the time!
Hood to Coast 2010
I have a common-ish name for a prospective new product. No brand built yet, and I wanted to make sure the phrase wasn't used by somebody else. Google Alert on the phrase for a couple of months and, yep, nobody else seems to be using it, so it's safe for me to use.
I would suggest less text on the homepage too, or at least get some kind of better image-text ratio going.
Quantum Crypto Products Cracked by Researchers
You understand that Twitter's issues weren't due to Ruby on Rails, but due to application architecture, right? If Twitter had implemented the same architecture on top of a Python web library, they'd have had the exact same issues.
I don't even like the idea of it.

I think it removes an important aspect of UI that has until now been so entrenched that we take it completely for granted: pressing 'enter' signifies the completion of input.

In a conversation between humans, it's considered rude to begin responding to someone before they're finished talking. This behavior is more than just an interruption; it ignores the full thought intended by the speaker in favor of an assumption.

Interacting with software is no different; even if the conversational dynamic doesn't directly apply, we still have similar subconscious expectations. I don't want a response until I press enter. Before that, I'm in the process of constructing my search terms as I type them, often revising them, expanding them, and correcting typos.

Besides all of that, Google is now executing several queries for every single query that would have been provided previously. Most users are probably not even going to look at the results until they're done typing, so this is probably a significant waste of bandwidth and CPU cycles that could be put to better use.
Scribd Redesign Is An Attempt To Become A “Social Network For Reading”
I think nowadays such analysis plays a big part in sports. For example when Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach (legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't.
> knowing, tongue-in-cheek Rails (and to a lesser extent, Ruby) hating

> There are merits to Rails, and also drawbacks, as there are with every tool.

I think that was exactly his point.

> It isn't magic, or anything close

The black magic reference is from the article itself.
I didn't say he did. Reread what I said.
I usually pronounce PostgreSQL "post-greh-see-quel", though sometimes I use the pronunciation you give, just as sometimes I pronounce MySQL as "my-s-q-l". Partly it depends on the conversation, since I tend to fall into whatever the other person is calling it.
> they make money hats

Where do you get these phrases? You're making me laugh at work :)
Yes, I am figuring that out now:) Though it did help me get going when projects were dry.

That is interesting. I have a system where I give a flat quote if the specs are clear or hourly if they are not clear. You seem to take it a level further and only do hourly. How has your experience been with that? With hourly, how do you take any deposit before starting(or do you?)? Sorry for inundating with questions.
If you stay in the (miniscule) center of the city, yes. As soon as you take a job outside the city (say, in San Mateo), drop "easily" from the description. It's always doable, in any US city, to live without a car. But it's not always comfortable. SFBay is not comfortable without a car.
I like sparklines in print, but not on the web. For me, it comes down to dpi. Until higher resolution displays are common, I'm likely to avoid.
"San Francisco is flat and open and that makes the piles of human feces somehow harder to take."

I've heard San Francisco called a lot of things, but "flat" is not one of them. Am I misunderstanding you here?
I have not seen a library for bash, however, which is all the previous API needed.
I think it is that simple. You don't build your startup solely on a free service that someone else has complete control of.
Questions not even 5+ years of grad school will help you answer
I understand that based on the author's previous posts this seems likely, but I'm curious:

Is this just snark, or are you familiar with cases where Rails' "black magic" stopped working and caused problems? Because I'm not.
The Javascript hocus pocus is the one key thing I haven't really figured out yet. Rails 3 seems to have made a move to unobtrusive Javascript, but it appears half-baked compared to the RJS stuff I keep stumbling across on the web. If you ignore the `:remote => true` business, it is as if there was no special support for js at all. As a solid jQuery developer, that's probably a good thing.
Jiff is actually the correct, though rarely used, pronunciation
Superfeedr just got 4x cheaper
Yes, you should go. I was in a similar position, although not particularly badass myself. After getting an associate's at a local community college (practically for free) I wasn't sure whether I should transfer to a university or spend more time building stuff.

Bottom line, as I'm now about to graduate with my BBA in Computer Information Systems, I'm quite glad I opted to continue. Like you, I wasn't sure how much tech stuff I'd learn. And it's true, most of my computer classes were way too easy and not really beneficial for me. But my program is also heavily focused on business, which I think is extremely important, especially for someone considering working independently. I also discovered an interest in Economics, in which I decided to minor. However well you can program, if you can't manage the business side of things, you're cooked.

You also shouldn't underestimate the benefits of developing more in the general education areas. Developing a firm grasp of English writing is absolutely vital. Developing the capacity to further understand and appreciate history and culture can also be very helpful. This kind of sampling can also help you realize other areas of interest and help build up a general pattern of understanding which can be useful in understanding all frameworks. You can, in theory, learn all this on your own. It's just that college can really help you get started if you're serious about it and are actually there to learn.

At the same time, though, I've now been considering whether to continue into a graduate program. I've excelled in classwork, and it seems like a no-brainer, but since I don't have a definite direction I'm opting not to pursue a graduate degree. At least not for now. That would be an additional large commitment, even just of time, and I think it's benefit, since I also don't want to work for a large, corp would not pay off.
It only takes one person to prove that something is possible.

Your comment also implies that people should only base their career decisions on what non-outlier (average) people have done. That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity.

"A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
Right.

What he's describing is just like team rowing, or tug-o-war or a sport like american football, rugby, basketball, etc.

We've had this technology for thousands of years.
Arrived in 1992. Left in 2001. Lived in a Sunnyvale apartment two years and a San Jose house (NW of Campbell) for seven years.

I moved there for my career, which did very well. I largely hated the valley as a place to live, simply because it's too crowded. I have a low tolerance for traffic. I couldn't stand to drive to the supermarket, let alone go to work every day. So I spent all my time either at work or at home, and went out as little as possible. Lived in a tiny house because it was all I could afford. Hated it.

OTOH, I did meet a lot of lifelong friends there, including my wife. It's the only place I've lived where my geekiness wasn't the least bit unusual and where I wasn't usually the smartest person in the room, and that was refreshing.

Now I live in the middle of nowhere in a 4,000 ft2 house on 50 acres of land, which in retrospect was overreaction to the valley's housing and crowding. It still takes 20 minutes to get to the supermarket, but now I travel 15 miles of country roads instead of seven blocks of six-lane parking lot.

When I go back (I telecommute), I'm struck by the wealth, the workaholism, and the aforementioned number of geeks. I also have the energy to deal with the traffic, get out and do fun things for athe week or two that I'm there.

So that's my advice for QoL. Work there, live someplace else, visit occasionally.

(I still can't think of SF as part of silicon valley. The valley, to me, starts in Palo Alto and extends south. That's less true today than when I lived there, of course.)
" I doubt that it plays nice with other package managers"

Your not adding much value to a conversation when you make assertions based on zero experience with the thing you're criticizing.
DO whatever you can to understand the need, first. (Sidenote: I checked out the product and it's not addressing my needs.)
Graph Your Inbox (clean Chrome extension adds stats to Gmail)
Why?

RoR allows lots of HN-types (hackers, people prototyping web business, etc.) to build products quickly. In fact, that's exactly what TFA is an example of.

I'm actually constantly surprised at the number of HN readers who seem to hate on RoR out of general principal.
The vast majority of startups don't have to worry about "real" scaling. You don't need to be Twitter or Facebook to make money; in fact, it might help to not be. Especially, if you are actually, you know, charging for a product.

This fascination with scaling is hazardous to the health of both the startup and engineering communities.
Or better: talk to a few people in your target audience. I can tell you right now that they are not (much) price sensitive. They are "impress my clients" and "make my job easier" sensitive.
He's not 'hating' on rails, he's just indicating that there is a period when you use something new that you think 'wow, this is great' when after the shiny newness wears off you realize that there is plenty to be improved.

Calling it a honeymoon period is not too far from the truth, everything seems rosy and pretty.
Knowing How To Solve Your Problem
Wondering why Redis isn't the default builtin storage on Android is just a non-engineer question, and the only blemish in a fairly accurate article.
The question is, how do you spell NoSQL? :)
It's easy to get a platformer wrong; this is exactly right. The controls are snappy, the gun actually shoots properly, the jumping physics feel satisfying, and the baddies don't just stupidly trawl a preplanned path.

Also, the performance is impressive. Playable without a hitch with Chrome 6 on my Eee 900.

Excellent work!
I think it's pretty clear that there's someone high up in the food chain making executive decisions based on personal technical skills they're not competent with. More hirings etc doesn't seem to be having the right effect. I think you need meddling to make things this bad.
I'm still unsure how what they're describing differs from VoltDB. This initiative seems like it's primarily geared at churning out project names to continue to get industry attention.
er s/spell/say
Eat out a lot? Try one of these Secret Menus
Nil nil. No matter the score, always play as if the score was 0 0.

Every day is nil nil. Score a goal today, no matter what happened yesterday or the day before... That mindset helps me a ton with progress every day.
Nearly two decades of work on business excellence – in ONE picture
Also, all firefox, chrome and safari extensions use javascript and you can read the secret keys in plain text. That include chromed bird, tweetbar and many others. And some of these are not even open source, they just happen to be written in javascript.
Excellent news.

Since the standard way of working in GLASS is to persist sessions to the stone, the 4GB limit was always a worry in case I get a big peak in traffic.