skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use your site, I'm a fulltime Rails developer, and I would think all your traffic would be from Rails developers or at least the Rails-curious.

You might be able to get some money (I have no way of estimating how much) by just adding the same sponsors that railscasts.com has. That could be a short time investment up front for a passive income.

In that model, you don't need to redesign. The design is fine.
Ask HN: is anyone interested in a short term collaboration or skills exchange?
Motivated by the recent 'November launch' thread, I've decided to restart a stalled project of mine. I've been working on it on and off for several months but I hate the design aspect. I'm much happier coding and marketing. If it's ever going to launch then I'll need some help with the UI and design.

As such, are there any designers here who would be interested in collaborating with me in exchange for some programming work? I'm proficient in php, java and ruby/rails (with a strong preference for the latter). I'm looking for someone who has experience building interfaces for web apps. Familiarity with rails (especially templates) would be a bonus but is not required.

If you're interested, please email me (address in profile). I live in the UK (nr Wigan, North West)

thanks, Ahmed
Ask HN: If you work in the media industry, help us with customer development
My startup (NewsCred) build products for the news industry. We're pivoting our business slightly and about to enter a much larger market opportunity, but we want to talk to more potential customers who work in the publishing industry. Technologists, marketers, journalists, product people - anyone who is interested in the media business and how it's evolving. Please contact me at shafqat at newscred dot com. In return, we might be able to offer some of our solutions for free to your company if there is interest. Thanks!

Edit: Our current product is here: http://platform.newscred.com, but the new product is still under wraps. At a high level, we are working on creating a "global news distribution platform."
I hope they've all sold their stories and exclusive coming-up pictures for what they're actually worth. The footage of the first one up is going to be on every news show around the world.
This is a genuine question, I'm not trying to be rude... What is the point of the website? It doesn't seem to do anything particularly useful... Perhaps your time would be better spent working on a website which would perform a useful task and maybe generate some money?
thanks for the link!
i didn´t know it yet though i researched a while on the topic. :)
You can definitely buy them from people who host their own machines in data centers.
If the information that a site is Ruby on Rails based is not useful to you, you're completely right.
Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies
99 Designs' unsanctioned Gap logo redesign
I've never done that "fund raising" thingy. I once had an offer to embed a pay per lead banner but considered the low traffic it seemed not be a good idea.

It's a very specific app and probably the database is more valueable than the visitor number…
Why Marketing Skills are Very Important in Online Entrepreneurship
hey Roland,

That's a very tricky thing. I think that a 'service to the community' has its own kind of pay-offs but they won't be the kind that you can measure in direct dollar value. It would come back in goodwill, which is notoriously hard to put a sticker price on.

This particular one also doesn't seem to cost much to own & operate. If you want you can host it on on one of my machines in case you're worried about the costs (free of charge), I think that it's useful but I would expand it a bit to make it more useful, where you analyze not just if it is rails but also what it is if it isn't. That would also increase the usefulness of the site.

That way you can give something back to a visitor regardless of whether or not a site runs rails.

If you feel like taking me up on my offer let me know.

greetings, & good luck, whatever you decide to do with it.

Jacques
To emphasize just how long this has been an issue:

Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955.

"Federal Aid to Education" was a big political issue before "Sputnik ended that debate" (it was launched in 1957; http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q1/view613.html).

Heinlein also touched on this in Have Space Suit—Will Travel in 1958.
I read in a BBC article that it'll take around an hour per person
One step closer to Soylent Green.
Oh, whatever.

a) He didn't use the funding for this study.

b) Science papers aren't opinion articles. Nowhere in the study did he say that the virus and the fungus are exclusively the cause of the epidemic. If you got that impression, that was the media editorializing the study. If he falsified or omitted data, then he's guilty. But all he did was show that these two pathogens are present in collapsed colonies. You can't criticize the guy for something that another writer invented.
I'm living on earnings from SimplyTweet, my iPhone app. Look into some other stuff at the moment though.
Frighteningly pathetic. These "clowns" are the realization of every fictional story about the demise of reason and the descent into foolishness. The enlightenment is alive, but stagnating or trending down.
FAA warns airlines batteries in cargo hold may ignite during flights
I think there is something incredibly powerful about a continuous integration system that is fully bootstrapped. Being able to know the instant something is broken and run a single build script after a SCM check out to have a fully functioning system should be the goal of every enterprise system, IMO.

Proper unit tests with broad coverage are foundational to both of these ideas.
I would do the minimum work required and put some Amazon affiliate links up there as a starting point.

I imagine most of your traffic is going to come from Rails developers or those interested in getting to know Rails. If you can find out more about why your visitors use your site, then you can develop a more effective commercialisation strategy based on their interests.
If someone pastes an amazon link that doesn't have an affiliate link, then add your affiliate link? Things like that?

Another idea: Create a final page for each set of entered text (so that you'd get redirected to onlineqrlab.com/text/hello-this-is-a-test which would have the image), then put some google adwords on that?
Off-topic, but I went to see what does this billionaire do nowadays: http://www.asana.com

Sounds interesting, but what's wrong with their web pages? Both Chrome and Safari seem to cut the bottom part of the text.

There seems to be Javascript snippet to resize the blog but it ain't working. And they use iframe for blog content, why? Maybe they are developing some new technology and used it to implement their own blog. Seems that tech ain't production ready yet,

There's even a comment:

I assure you, we typically write nicer code than this. This is git-it-done hacktown. -jr
For every good thing that you could create on the internet there are going to be people hell bent on screwing it up.

Your 'friend' and her copycats think they are somehow entitled to that traffic, which in the long run is responsible for the famous eternal September feeling that many websites have.

Gaming the system is like the internet equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture.

I don't care whether it works or not, or whether you consider it justified because her content was good I think it sucks.

If you want to have that traffic start your own social site, promote that and make it work, then feel what it is like to have people come out to game the system and use your knowledge of how such systems can be gamed to put a stop to it.
As you've mentioned hosting isn't a problem so that's not an issue.

My experience after running (resurrecting) the local ruby user group (http://ruby-muenchen.de/ all done/run by me) and http://IsItRails.com/ for two years are disillusioning: At least here in Germany nobody gives a sh*t if you do something to the community.

So having some flattrs/tweets per month is already a positive feedback that I appreciate much :)
Learn More link from your website is throwing a 404 error.
Isn't there a possibility that keeps me from distracting the users? Don't you think the database might have a value on its own?
Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society
Why Hacking Matters : A Primer
The nice thing about the 3rd world is that fast internet is everywhere. And it's cheap. Like cheap enough that the locals in the most remote little villages can afford to spend hours online every day.
I think the post conveyed the tongue-in-cheek nature pretty well. I actually thought you'd be disclosing an even smaller finding.
I would like a website where you enter the url of another website and it gives you a list of technologies which it uses. One which just tells you if it uses rails seems to be of very limited usefulness.
Well, here is my compliment to you then, in spite of other parties here asking what the 'use' is, the URL was easy enough to remember that when I was wondering if a bunch of websites might have been written using rails (they weren't) that I used your service and it worked well enough.

So thank you for running isitrails.com :)
Misunderstanding: I simply meant that every time I hear the word "jew" (for example in the news) it is either about the holocaust or Israel.
That may be so but based on sales most people who choose to part with cash pick Office as with Adobe CS over Expressions Studio.
Porsche employess are banned from Facebook (German only)
That's simple- write an app that writes a novel!
Sorry about that; though there's a link, About page does not exist yet. i've removed the link.

Thanks
Tried to find some English version, but the news is new and has not been picked up yet by the press.
Point is that the fear of industrial espionage triggered Prosche management to ban their employees to use Facebook.
Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Feld & Cohen
uh. accessing your account, once you authenticate, is in the API.
Not to be rude but on your #2 point that's not really a bash at his application or programming talents. If you have a problem with Hitler being displayed as a cartoon then don't use the application
A very simple Calculator application in C++
As usual, the US are the outliers, more than Japan :) I think venture financing in most European countries is closer to Japanese levels than US ones.

One particularity in Japan, I don't know if that matters that much: working for a big company is still regarded as the quasi only way to get a career in Japan.
let me try a pitch:

"If you provide Ruby/Rails hosting like Heroku, Engine Yard, RightScale etc. do, the database could contain up to 4300 potential new customers"
Git and Mercurial are pretty similar, but I must say that I don't like the Mercurial branching model. It forces me to have a repository for every topic branch when I'm contributing to an open source project. You can read more about this here:

[1] http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-me...

[2] http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/managing-releases-and-branch...
how does it compare to, say:

http://www.appliedstacks.com/

http://blindelephant.sourceforge.net/
Just to reduce confusion (hopefully):

> or even this (which is how my old webcam software worked):

> request - answer - answer - answer - request - request - etc

This is not HTTP pipelining, though it sort of looks similar. It's a neat hack, but the HTTP spec doesn't allow guessing what the request will be.
It's written in ASP.NET, not VB.
This is a presentation, made using the showoff gem. Seen through that light, it's pretty solid.
Sell the data to the sales staff of rails hosting companies. Seriously, the sales folks at these companies use this data all day long. Let me know if you want introductions.
When I was a student, I usually took a bus for Nara <-> Tokyo for around 5000 Yen each way - but that was barely tolerable, indeed. Even if the bridge to cross the Osaka bay must add a significant cost to the ticket when coming from Tokushima, I would be surprised if you could not find cheaper.
Do you have to throttle back to 1 api request per second per ip? Any worries about hitting the daily request limit with Amazon?
I'm wondering if there's bad writing on Twitter's wall
k, javascript, javascript

None of my solutions were particularly elegant :-)
Now why in the world would that get downvoted? Is that not a reasonable suggestion? Sometimes HN confuses me...
Roland,

This may be a completely useless suggestions as I'm not sure if it's even possible, but perhaps you could port IsItRails to other open-source projects (e.g., IsItDjango). The site could then be a useful way for recognizing open-source projects/devs.

As the database grows, I may start using it show non-technical people that these projects are not just fringe, non-scalable technologies.

Great work!

One last note, as far as fundraising, what's the worst thing that could happen if you sent an email to all the sponsors of RailsCasts asking if they'd be interested in promoting on your site?
I've had the opposite experience. I've generally found git a joy to use and I don't miss SVN in the slightest. I highly recommend reading Chacon's Pro Git book. As really understanding how Git works internally helps in using it a lot.
Invest Southwest taps 12 companies for new funding
Larry Niven said there are two bumps in a writer's career:

- In the beginning, a writer should accept all work he can get, because he needs to develop his skills, and any work will do that, regardless of how well paying etc.

- But then the writer needs to learn to turn down bad work - that's the first bump.

- And later, he needs to learn to turn down good work, because there's a limit to how much you can handle - that's the second bump.

The submission here is talking about the first bump. It's not necessarily right for everyone, at every stage; though of course it's good advice and worth knowing about (btw: I always interpret the "fast" as meaning performant - ie. fast software not fast development - but the latter makes more sense for work in general.)

Note that most writers have a day job (or are independently wealthy, as Niven was - for a year), so it doesn't apply to a professional full-time contractor... but it may apply to you if you are a student, hobbiest or moon-lighting contractor.
I knew this purple-haired superheroine who did this to a certain "Zone"

Because of this, I was picturing Ramona Flowers performing the rest of the actions described in your comment.
Wikileaks publishes documents on plan to curb free software in the EU
My team of 5 switched to git this year. Hust yesterday (I'm not making this up) one of my team members thanked me for pushing the change. Develoment for us has gone much more quickly now than before and we have had very few issues.

One thing that is essential to a good transition is to have a strong evangelist who is willing to address problems, educate people and investigate when something happens that you don't understand.

ProTip: #git on freenode is a great resource if you find yourself out of your depth.
We use git to manage the codebase of two apps that have about 15 people working on each. Every team or project branches from master at the start of an iteration and works off that branch until the end of the iteration then merges/rebases back onto the master branch.

Then we we tag and branch at the end of an iteration to push code live.

Works very well for us and seems a lot less painful than the frontend guys using SVN.
> I mean for 10 years he controlled most of europe

It wasn't nearly 10 years. The Anschluss was in 38, by May 45 Hitler was dead, and Europe was for the most part free again (except for those parts that happened to find themselves under the Soviet boot).

The German expansion in Europe was at it's peak by August 1942, when the Russians fought off the Germans in and around Stalingrad, one month later allied forces successfully established a beach-head in Italy, from then onwards it was down all the way, even if the situation was more or less stagnant until D-Day.
If you replace SMO with propaganda, your comment makes an even more thought provoking read.
Zuckerberg Quits NAMBLA, And Facebook Downplays Privacy Criticisms Over Groups
These types of presentations do not work on an iPhone :(
I immediately found the quote "never take software advice from a bug tracking system salesman" an ad-hominem attack. It doesn't address at all why the advice would be bad.
It doesn't say you can't either ;)
This touches on an very important topic: the corruption of scientists (often "scientists") by funding. The corruption that lead to the "climate consensus" is now costing the world a LOT, and the green-industrial complex is not likely to rest on its laurels.
blindelephant is interesting. Was not available when I started 2 years ago.

Appliedstacks seems to be a wiki so it's entirely user generated.
Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
As gtani pointed out that there's a opensource project that probably does this already: http://sourceforge.net/projects/blindelephant/
While you may just be trying to talk-down on the MySQL dudes, I don't think that "RAM is faster than disk, so you're more performant if you can fit your data in RAM" is really all that puzzling.
Neither "ok" nor "cancel" are appropriate answers to the yes-or-no question, "Are you sure?"
update: blindelephant seems not to cover rails apps yet
Which retail brokers charge more for using stop limit? Never seen one that does.
> We recently switched from SVN to Git

Part of the problem is that git is not similar to SVN in the way that SVN was similar to CVS. People have to give up their old paradigm of thinking, and it certainly helps if at least one person in your group is a git guru (or at least someone that is willing to investigate/fix problems without feeling like it is a chore) otherwise you will end up in the situation where everyone feels like the whole conversion process/idea was just a chore. If there is someone that makes themselves the 'go to guy/girl' for git issues it alleviates the rest of the group from thinking about git issues all of the time.
Your first three sentences are kind of funny; many people actually consider memecached a NoSQL data store by now.
Maybe you could create some additional research/marketing value by combining your current efforts with something similar to the information available in Netcraft's "What's that site running?" utility? (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph)
Wi-Fi Is More Addictive Than Coffee for Young People
Really? Since when?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html: "FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html: "And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript." (granted, VB != VBScript)

http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html: "Today we happen to use Wasabi, JavaScript, xhtml and CSS, and C++ to build FogBugz"
Aici_e_distractie_la_maxim chat group - aceptam toate persanele
Do these groups allow you to aggregate the various group walls into your news feed? That was my main issue with the old groups system. It was a pain to go though a dozen groups checking their walls for new posts.

If so, I may re-activate my FB account and give this a go.
You should talk to jarnold since he says that you should sell the database and he can provide you leads, and everything you've said in the comments seems more like, "Does anyone want to buy my database?" than "How can I monetize this". Down to posting your sales pitch. :p
Most people find success on social media sites is capricious; not a lot of people read the "new" queue, so your first few organic votes are a matter of luck. Downvotes on reddit make this go double. Even great content can get buried if it doesn't get noticed.

I've seen this happening as well. I've also had several experiences of submitting a link and having it buried at -2 or -3 and then seeing a different link on the same subject up-voted a day or so later.
Really, you're totally wrong. :o)

I think you're confusing what 'people who read HN' want with 'what the majority want'. It happens really commonly in tech-literate circles.

I'll grant you that texting is important, but that revolution happened a decade ago with the Nokia 3310. You don't need a smartphone for that.

The calling experience on most smartphones is horrific. On my iPhone I need to find an icon and tap it before I can even start dialling. Once I do get through to someone, the signal reception is weak - and this is an iPhone 3G on a UK network.

Pick up a Nokia S60 smartphone. There's number buttons on the front of them (except their weak attempts at touchscreen phones). You push them. The signal quality is rock-solid. These are things that normal people don't even think about until they dismiss an iPhone or Android smartphone as 'too fiddly'.
There should be at least a noscript version with manual navigation if one does not want to include it in the regular.
I was with you right up until you said "they are afraid that their jobs will be taken." I realize the plural of anecdote is not data, but from my experience, far and away the most common frustrations Western developers have with offshore outfits is the language gap, and quality of work.

I've never seen anyone afraid that another outfit would take their job-- after all, who would fix the code they got back from offshore? :)
Nick Parlante has done good with this project. At UCSB, I'm on a team that's doing research into running this kind of website with unit tests, etc. for even more languages and for harder problems, as a curriculum aid.
Try http://builtwith.com
That is weird. I'm also creeped out by any company that has as many 'advisors' as they do employees (10 emp, 13 advisors). But then again, maybe that is how these companies work...
Asynchronous document.write (http://github.com/eligrey/async-document-write) does mostly the same thing, and actually supports real async and deferred script execution on browsers that support it. Also note that extsrc.js waits until everything, including large images which may take a while, on your page is loaded before running the "asynchronous" scripts, which doesn't sound that asynchronous to me.
The author points out that women who want to have kids can't wait very long, generally don't have time to do a startup first, and that you'd have to be crazy to try to do a startup and raise young kids at the same time.

I'm not sure that I believe her arguments about men, though:

For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Men have to trust that the kids will be okay so that they can leave and go get food or make more kids.

It seems to me that she's ignoring the most important factor: Men have more time to do a startup before having children because men are usually older than their wives.
The average age difference is 2 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if the gap increases with education and income.

(Then again, maybe this is just wishful thinking from a single 29 year old who still hopes to get married and have 2.5 children some day.)
This got me thinking about literate programming. Here's a thought: why not use natural language to specify a program, but add annotations to disambiguate the parts which are ambiguous due to the inherent fuzziness of natural language?
> So, I'm curious if plannr will be shut down or will be allowed to continue and develop.

According to a screenshot in the Reddit thread of a mail allegedly sent by Plannr, it will be shut down.
I wish we had a downvote arrow as well. This is SEO spam and it reached nr 1 on HN.