skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're all businessmen here, and can have a frank discussion about financial reality without anyone getting offended, right?

My ability to eat is, at present, totally dependent on two things: my site continuing to rank highly for bingo-related queries, and (secondarily) my ability to sell fairly expensive consulting services.

A/Bingo exists to make profitable software businesses more money with little marginal cost. It is OSS because it being OSS costs me fairly little and achieves business objectives to me. It is not an act of charity in the slightest: when I donate to charity, the beneficiaries sound more like "my church" or "poor immigrants in desperate circumstances" than "profitable software companies." You gaining from A/Bingo being OSS is a positive externality that I do not optimize for.

Let's talk about the actuarial composite of an active OSS programmer who has two blogs and a Twitter account, shall we? Actuarially speaking, he doesn't link to the libraries he uses: he uses too many, and he very rarely links to any OSS projects these days. When he does link to them, they are typically higher profile projects. On a good day, he tweet about individual libraries he uses. Tweets have an economic value which is epsilon from zero to me.

(If OSS programmers don't typically link to me, who does? Answer: consultants who have implemented A/Bingo and write up about their experience with the intention of drumming up more business, and sites which follow OSS/Rails/etc such as the official Rails blog... whose links, by the way, are worth rather more than links from the actuarial composite programmer's latest blog.)

Let's talk about our actuarial composite programmer, who is a) apparently interested in diving into Rails code and b) insufficiently interested to copy/paste a line into his terminal to do so. Will he make a good consulting lead for me? Well, I do consulting for profitable software firms and can virtually guarantee them "hire me and your bottom line will increase by a measurable percentage." Without going into my exact rates, let's just say they probably would shock the conscience of the actuarial composite programmer, who thinks a) code wants to be freeeeeeee b) he could implement this anyhow and c) "I do not have nearly that amount in my checking account -- what do you offer for the price of a cup of ramen noodles?" (Answer: code available for free, and minimal individualized attention to your concerns.)

Do you see where I'm coming from?
Aside from this being "Sinatra clone" #100, I think most people do not understand that Sinatra is about much more than its query and before/after-filter DSL: Its about its plugin API, its great integration into Rack (which PHP doesn't have, middleware solutions or not), its ability to host multiple apps in one process and its large and well-written documentation.

It is easy to implement the query API in any language that supports anonymous functions, but that doesn't make it Sinatra.

This one is not even a good example of a clone: its really bare, only implements the minimal set to "look like sinatra". It doesn't even have a good request or response object.
what's the phrase... content drives adaption... you are going to need some very compelling content providers to make this work.

have you considering to find a niche of content that people might pay for? istockphoto does seem like a relevant example... there are also lots of niche services that people pay for... like elance, 99designs, trada...
Hedonistic programming
Okay, lets try a question closer to Sproutcore's "build rich applications that happen to run inside of a browser" approach: Can we see some decent examples of Sproutcore applications that interact well with assistive technologies (specifically screen readers)?
got useful content in yr site yet? if it is a community /social driven site, u probably dun need to promote too much if u got useful content.
Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth.

To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. A confident person can back up their assertions to a very deep level. They can explain and defend their reasoning. With this also comes the experience that the world isn't perfect, and that sometimes you just need to do something you don't want to do.

Arrogance, on the other hand, is nothing but ego and fear. Fear that anything that might threaten that huge ego. An arrogant man has little knowledge or wisdom, but plenty of bullshit to masquerade as such.

A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't.
I'm pretty sure I'm not, but even if I were, the disclosure would still be appropriate.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kpzaEp0...
Nice hack on the gray text thing.
Very good points here.

I failed to remember that captchas are indeed used for other things besides registering as a member to a site. Things like one-time viewing of information (eg: WHOIS), etc, will probably benefit a lot from this. I showed some oversight claiming this service was dumb. It's great for things where it's OK that I get insulted, because I want to see something bad enough anyway.

I was in the mindset of imagining this being on a registration form to become a user of a website. I think the money lost from the amount of users getting turned off by this would be greater than the one-time profit incurred whenever a user registers. That is, unless your site profits from less users. In equation form:

(amt profit per lifetime of user) x (number of users that won't sign up because of this) > (amt of users that do sign up with this) x N [where N is how much you make from this ad captcha].

Notice that the longer you plan on retaining users, the less you should be willing to risk slowing down your sign-ups, unless this ad captcha offers a high enough profit. It is my opinion that for sites seeking long-term relationships with users, that this thing sucks. On the other hand, if you can afford that the user not continue beyond a point, then it's great. That's why it'll work for porn and other seedy crappy sites, and probably why I have low regard for it. I admit this is a foolish mindset.

In regards to "actual problem of spam," I was referring to the answer of the captcha being in the DOM, and the otherwise flawed implementation of it.
Dear 3rd place phone platforms: please accelerate your demise
Apple discovered fairly early on that while using a keyboard shortcut seems faster, using the mouse is almost always quicker, even for very advanced users. The illusion stems from how we perceive time when performing the different tasks - we remember time spent searching for the correct target to click, but we forget time spent remembering the right incantation.

This paradox is one of the big reasons why I don't use Vi or EMACS - I think that the productivity gains are nowhere near as great as users make out, but the sense of mastery over such arcane tools is inherently satisfying to the kind of person that spends a lot of time in a text editor.

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
Sounds great, email me thomasalwyndavis@gmail.com
I thought the way the C preprocessor worked, those ended up getting literally copy and pasted into the .c file that #include'd them, and should be indistinguishable from the case where you wrote them directly in the .c file? Or does gcc keep track of where #include'd files came from, and write that info into the binary?
Whitespace networking
This isn't "armchair theory". Read the article again. The reasons are solid and the end result is what it says it is.

The article isn't saying if you do your search this way you will sell a billion products. Of course if that was the claim some statistical proof would be necessary. All the article is doing is offering a simpler and cleaner approach to search. That's all.
And yet all kinds of claims are made on Hacker News, like how to be an entrepreneur or the best way to run a start-up, and no-one ever asks for the data. It seems like this demand for data is highly selective and used to justify the lazy attitude toward UX that plagues the majority of software. It's a dodge that I see all the time - a UX person proposes some improvement, a developer says "Well I don't think that's a good user experience, we should really A/B test it, oh wait, we don't have the time for that right now, that's too bad..." And the proposed improvement is something totally obvious, like the one in this article: buttons should have accurate, non-generic labels. You have to wonder if someone who disagree with something that obvious is arguing in good faith, or just doesn't like being told what to do.
I'm not so sure you're being objective about it. He responds with a logical response that explains why he makes the claim that the OP is missing the point. Your response to him is; "Really? A 4% increase on 2% of the population is going to destroy the country?" Which doesn't say anything at all, especially in response to what the poster said.

Furthermore, in my experience it is exactly the opposite. Most of the people who advocate raising taxes do so for ideological reasons. While those in favor of lowering it are for practical. I'm not saying everyone, there are people who believe raising taxes will stimulate the economy, and there are people who are ideologically opposed to taxes; Ayn Rand for example (although she is opposed for practical reasons also.) That's just been my experience.
It's probably not a terrible default, given their cross-platform development. Slurping everything into your app bundle is the official way of doing it on OS X anyway, and more or less the only sane way of doing it on Windows, whose DLL-versioning is notoriously bad. So if they were doing any factoring out of shared libraries, it'd be solely for the Linux version, which I could see them not considering worth the hassle.
The link is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kpzaEp0...
Why? It's true, if we're talking about taxes how can we not talk about politics?
Meaning no disrespect, but I've on occasion had the situation where independent thinkers doing independent thinking suggest that A is the Acknowledged Right Way To Do Things. The example which leaps instantly to mind is consistent navigation placement: your nav bar should be visible, consistent, and always in the same place throughout the website, right?

Amazon hides sitewide navigation during checkout. I don't go quite so far, but I've tested a few variations, including A: sitewide nav and B: one-off nav which includes only things that I feel are likely to increase conversion.

B crushes A in tests on my site, to the tune of "would cost me thousands of bucks a year to do A instead". Do I get a subsidy from the Right Honorable Guild Of Independent Thinkers for doing it the correct way? Because doing it the way that actually works is really tempting.
I've never been told no when I ask this as a guest. School, however, presented a very different scenario.
Thanx - yeah - i already looked at the usual suspects including yahoo and google finance.
Definitely intending to eventually - but this is a much longer term goal for me - not sure I'd be of much help in the very near future.

My long term vision is to blend traditional schooling with both practical skills (how to manage your credit, etc.) and interpersonal, soft skills (self awareness, conflict resolution, etc.) in an effort to empower students to take control of their own lives.
can i make 3-d surface plots with this library? are there any alternatives to facilitate that?
I think jdrock might be referring to this - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985921.986078&type...
This is the fundemental fail of scibd and why ive written them off from the start.

their value depends on users being ignorant.
ZumoCast has that functionality (a download button, for offline viewing).
Would you rather be Han Solo or The Emperor? That's actually a really good question.

At least I'm sure I don't want to be one of the stormtroopers.
I wish he could lose his job for being so ungrateful and out of touch with reality and learn how truly privileged he is. This guy needs a wake up call ASAP.

Also, look at how disgusting some of the comments are on the cache, truly disgusting: "The poor are inferior to the rich in the U.S. The ones who are rich have used the system to generally move up, not manipulate the rest of the population as the liberal biters/haters would have you see the world you created."
I disagree. Aside from the fact that not every web startup is affiliated with Paul Graham--mine isn't--I think the question was unambiguous.
i am sort of seeding the site with some content... from wikipedia... etc. the original content is very little (primarily from my personal entries testing the site.) that is a good point though.... good content, even in a small niche might be helpful.
Is this really the correct ordering of market share? I'm pretty sure Blackberry actually has more market share than either iOS or Android, albeit massively less buzz and consumer interest.

edit: An IDC estimate from a few weeks ago (http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/qQjngE0rTd8yp1SXLrr4FA?...) gives: Blackberry OS (17.9%), Android (16.3%), Apple iOS (14.7%), Windows Mobile (6.8%)
This is factually wrong. Many of the richest economies in the world have much higher taxes than the US. Some data,

Denmark 50% of GDP taxed, $56,115 GDP per capita
Sweden 49.7%, $43,986
Belgium 46.8%, $43,533
France 46.1%, 42,747
Norway 43.6, $79,085
Netherlands 39.5, $48,222
US 28.2%, $46,381

Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenu...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom...

PS. I wish I had some statistics chops to see if there's any correlation between these two lists of tax rates and gdp per capita. My hypotheses is that there's not.
Nice app!!! Keep up the good work! Would love to have custom colors though so looks like the original HN Reader ...
Instead of politics and bureaucracy, I'm generally free to pursue an idea. I may have to focus on the bottom dollar, but it's mine, it doesn't belong to some anonymous nobody in another city who doesn't even know my name.

I'm me, not employee #5239.

In an economy that can pretty much put me on the street tomorrow, I might as well take a gamble knowing that I put myself in that position, rather than some spreadsheet miscalculation in New York.

When offshoring is cheaper than retraining, I'm not a person in the company's eye anymore.

None of what your parents or you did is wrong. It's just not right for me anymore.

The main difference between my situation now and my situation then: less pay and less vacation. But at least the work is interesting for a change.
Alternative software and apps
What's the big deal with startups anyways... in the words of homer simpson: "this is our ticket out of this hell hole." :-)
While the article is a good read, the best part is the ad on the first page that links to MySpiceSage.com offering Ghost Chilies! Yum--- or not, your mileage may vary along with your taste buds.
I've recently seen a lot of spam on my blog that isn't caught by Akismet, which is fairly atypical.
It would be nice to hear of some hypothetical usage opportunities. My website usually comes with a keyboard and mouse and a using a phone seems more cool than realistic.

With one good example, I could get excited about the possibilities.
Not really saying all that much.

We earn over $250k so we're considered superich though that's not fair because we're not really rich because we spend all our money on normal stuff like house and groceries and richer people evade taxes offshore but we're not rich enough to do that and we could evade taxes by pretending to be divorced but we're too moral to do that and if you tax us we'll have to fire our gardener and cleaner and sell our house and that's not good for the economy and who said that you can spend money better that me anyway you Marxian.
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Because when your dead your dead.
I will know that I created something greater than myself or died trying.
Some might retort "what about happiness?" Driving my Porsche makes me pretty freaking happy!
It's odd how America can simultaneously have a problem with anti-intellectualism and a problem with over-intellectualism. I guess they are the same thing: the idea that you must either be part of the intellectual elite pulling shots at Starbucks, or a working class Joe trying to save the American dream from the eggheads.
Heh, it's funny you should mention that.. I had a go at a Sinatra + Rack style framework in PHP a little while ago.

Check it out:

http://github.com/dhotson/kelpie

http://github.com/dhotson/kelpie/blob/master/demoapp.php

It's got its own Rack style web server built in ... kinda crazy huh? ;-)
Basically what you're saying is that all the beauty of Sinatra comes from Ruby, I disagree.
My main problem is that it's old irrelevant information that I would rather not have in the public domain and I think they should remove it if requested to or just update it. What the WhoIs information was 10 years ago is irrelevant.
Signing bonus that you only after x months of work, is this normal?
I was under the impression that a signing bonus was given to you as soon as you started the job. But I just got a job offer where the sign on bonus is only available to me after 2-3 months, with the additional specification that if I quit or am fired within a year I have to pay it back to them.

I just wanted to know ... is this normal?
Few months of vim use is not really enough to see major benefits in raw speed. You have to get not just the basics but the advanced movement/replacement commands in your bones. A click-and-type editor will start you off fast and top out quickly.

You can also use vim as if it were TextEdit, mostly, and the gradually add the advanced features, as per wycats. Best of both worlds.
It's not worth a drive down to Seattle but I'll have to dig deeper to find out how to contact their customer service.

I suppose I could get a lawyer involved, but I'd much rather figure out how to do this on my own. I'm sure it would be in their interest to keep the information relevant.
Brain Confidence: How Our Neurons Make Decisions
Phone count
>To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience.

To me, this entire continuum from not confident, to confident to arrogant has to do with how you act when you encounter a new situation, or some other unknown, well, and how you act around other people in a social situation. Re-reading my posts, this is obviously most of what I'm talking about.

The guy I think of as the least confident guy I know is an absolutely awesome c++ programmer. Incredible. The man holds himself like he thinks you are about to punch him. He looks a good four inches shorter than he really is because of his posture. He speaks with such a soft voice that he's usually got to repeat himself several times when he orders food. In any sort of social situation, he looks pretty uncomfortable.

But if you talk about C++? He'll look you in the eye and say "I don't write segmentation faults" or "My code has no buffer overflows." and he believes it, too. (hell, after working with him, I believe it.) - but to me, that doesn't seem like confidence. that's just experience, and being obviously very, very good at something.

>A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't.

Logically, I don't think that is the whole story, but emotionally, I really like that definition.
pay money, pretty much.
Unless you're planning on getting a huge amount of traffic, its generally not worth the cost to go to akami or anything. Some people have tried to use github or google app engine, but it doesnt appear that they cache any files at various locations,. They are more setup like S3, in that there is one master bucket, and far off nodes call home to get any files.
What don't you like about that approach?
"It would require a separate interface, and now we're back to where SproutCore gets us."

That's precisely the downside a JavaScript library or application development platform should be seeking to avoid: forcing developers to write two versions of their service - one with SproutCore and one without.

In a startup world, I'm surprised that someone on a tight budget can afford this approach and still have a viable minimum product at the end of it.
That's because it's inside information.
I know it was public record, but my main problem is that having it archived from 10 years ago is ridiculous. I'm sure many people have entered info into their WhoIs information they don't want publicly available before they really knew what it was really used for.
Use set pastetoggle=<f11> and press F11 to toggle the paste state.
A few lessons here re the blog post being referred to:

1. The title "professor" does not confer knowledge, intelligence or wisdom.

2. Know that your online audience is diverse even if your regular readers aren't.

3. If you're in a prominent non-activist position, avoid discussing politics, religion or sex.

4. Never disclose details about your personal life, especially financials, unless you've thought it through and had a trusted and objective friend to review your post.

5. Be careful about making yourself the subject of a blog entry. It's tough to avoid coming off as narcissistic.

And the obvious cliche: Write your emails and blog entries as if they're going to be published on the front page of a very popular newspaper that holds opposing views to yours.
:set paste

Should help with indentation issues.
I agree that people use "show me the data" as an argumentative strategy in a selective fashion. That said, "show me the data" to "X is the best way to run a startup" is fundamentally non-interesting, because typically that claim borders on philosophy and when it doesn't there is no convenient test you can do to get actionable data.

But UX improvements about button calls to action? Come on. Anyone here can test this, in less than two minutes of work. You could have an interesting discussion about metrics selection, but arguments which collapse to "I have an aesthetic preference for this alternative" leave me a little unsatisfied.
1. Figure out the kind of stuff your interested in.
2 Determine the kind of tools others use to build said stuff.
3. Learn those tools.
4. Build something cool.
Awesome, and I agree. But that sort of idealism should only be advanced if it can be implemented and maintained. How long will superintendents and school boards advocating such principles remain in their positions when parents and students complain that they can't get a job out of high school/college?
My favorite memory of shopping in Vietnam (this was 25 years ago) was the shopkeeper writing down the price on a pad and handing you the pen and pad expecting a counter offer. You usually ended up half way between the two values.

That experience changed once we started speaking enough Vietnamese, and the first quoted price also changed (went down, especially for my mother)
Drop me an email (in my profile) or add yours to your profile and I'll get something out to everyone.
This is completely off-topic, but may I nevertheless take the chance to extend a big THANK YOU towards the whole VLC dev team for gracing us with arguably the best, platform independent media player.
Reading your comment it is apparent you dont now "enough" vim. It has a long learning slope with many comfortable plateaus. You must be diciplined and interested in mastering your tools to push beyound these.

fyi,

:set paste
:set nopaste
Unfortunately the law requires college degrees, as it's the best ranking mechanism they have ... e.g. what a working Visa in the US? You need a college degree. Want to work for the government? You need a college degree.
yeah i rely on replacing first pattern all the time!