skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... you will quickly get a feeling for how the project is organized (or not organized). This helps determine if you really still want to use this project."

I was looking for a simple Python webserver on which to do some Comet stuff a few months ago, and despite some fairly limited documentation, reading the code made it obvious how to use Tornado and that it was a straightforward, well-architected solution to the problem I had. Whereas Twisted was a disaster that I did not want to get anywhere near.
The cost of development/testing is the same for customers that pay as it is for those who do not. Additionally, that cost is one you'd use no matter the processor you'd use, so your first point seems a bit disingenuous.
Is there any website that does that (permanently, not as a “launch fast, details later” strategy)?
http://techzinglive.com/

http://mixergy.com/
(39) HardHacks
A place to show off your real world hardware hacking skills.

This sounds like somewhere between Hack A Day (www.hackaday.com) and Instructables (www.instructables.com). Could be interesting. Take the hardware hacking level of hackaday and allow the user submitability of Instructables.
SequenceHunter exists. It's called BLAST.

http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
Note that one of Kayak's options is to filter by wifi availability.
DISCLAIMER: I'm the founder of Visual Website Optimizer but I will try to give a fair and honest comparision. Optimizely team, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong in my understanding.

What VWO has that Optimizely doesn't

- VWO has (JavaScript based) A/B and multivariate testing and split URL (based on traffic redirect) on while Optimizely is strictly (JavaScript based) A/B testing. You cannot do multivariate testing with it.

- VWO has heatmap and clickmap reports while Optimizely doesn't

- VWO has various advanced features such as visitor segmentation, cross-domain tracking, testing behind login wall pages, test results notifications, variation screen shot generation, etc.

- VWO has team collaboration such as multiple-permission based logins and subaccounts. Optimizely doesn't have that.

- In VWO, for all plans, CEO equally shares the support work ;)

What Optimizely has that VWO doesn't

- Changing layout of the page. Optimizely has a drag and drop feature in its test designer which is useful if you want to test different layouts (say sidebar to the right). To achieve the same in VWO, you need to enter some CSS (say float:right v/s float:left) as there is no drag-drop support (yet)

- Since Optimizely exclusively focuses on A/B testing (and not MVT), in its test designer you can change several elements of the page (say headline, image and text) at once to create a variation. In VWO (currently), you need to change one element at once for A/B test and multiple elements for multivariate test.

- In optimizely, results update on the page in real time. In VWO, results are also realtime but you have to refresh the report to see latest results (no auto-refreshing)

I hope this was a fair comparision. I wish Optimizely team great luck for their product. I hope A/B testing market is big enough for multiple players to survive!
Really? It does not work with noscript. I get a blank page when I attempt to vote.
Eh? Citation needed. Most anything I've ever seen suggest that gunpowder was unknown world wide before the Western Empire fell, and horse collars were just being introduced.
yes, but there is less variation than you may think

Is there though?
Valve timing, fuel injection, emission control, idle. All of these factors are vastly different from vehicle to vehicle and the majority are variable dependant on how other elements of the engine are performing.
Upgraded my laptop from 10.04, the upgrade was smooth, rebooted and everything works as it is. Love the new fonts which look quite good in a smaller size. No other noticeable difference
I'm sure I'll get clobbered for this, but I am wary of economists using statistics to make political arguments. Between "economist","statistics", and "politics", that's three yellow flags right at the outset.

Unless, of course, they agree with me, in which case they are simply wise academics trying to share their wisdom with the unwashed masses. :)

There is a logical problem here, and it's much deeper than life expectancy. It's a problem with this form of argument. The problem is that, if you use statistics to make political arguments, you're going to be arguing forever. Whatever this guy wants to do -- and god bless him I hope he gets his way -- next year the same guy will be using statistics to tell us to do something else. That's because you can slice statistics in an almost infinite amount of ways, and I can guarantee you that one of those ways will show some kind of imbalance or injustice that needs addressing.

That's all fine and dandy if the entire country could turn on a dime. I wish it could but it can't. Not reality. Instead we live in a system where it takes decades to make even one change, and it's extremely rare to stop doing things that don't work -- we just do more new stuff. I hate to rag on the IRS, but take a look at the tax code. It's so bad that I'm willing to wager nobody alive knows how to file taxes exactly correct.

This puts us in an infinite cycle of where we're always measuring things with statistics, finding some social cause worth pursuing, painfully making changes, then making more measurements. Each time through the loop the system gets more and more unwieldy and complex. It's a feedback loop that increases government dysfunction.

So instead of arguing about one cause or another, I'd like to suggest a rule for such discussions: if you want to make a case for some kind of social policy change, then make it in terms of a trade-off from whatever the existing status quo is. I realize there are a lot of problems with this suggestion, but at least it starts putting things in terms of trade-offs instead of wish-lists. Just from looking around, it seems to me that the real world is a lot more about trade-offs and compromises than moral crusades and justice. But that's just me. The only thing that I am observing is that this pattern can be repeated indefinitely, and each time through the loop conditions will continue to deteriorate. It's reactive leadership by statistics, and that almost never works.
fair enough, I'm not a driver so it was just a thought.
Oops! Thanks for the correction.
While we're talking ideas, is there any way to see a users Twitter feed? e.g., I can hit twitter.com/username to see what they've written/RTed, but I've never spotted a way to see what they would be seeing. e.g., Twitter through their eyes. Options are: it's right there and I've never seen it, a service already exists, or it's not something that anyone else cares about!
I absolutely hate hearing these things:

Remember, ideas are worth nothing. And these days, even your code is worth very little.

Alright, so creativity and idea-making worth nothing. Technical expertise to make it? nothing.

Honestly, what's left? The business side of things?

Maybe this article just bothered me because I was getting similar vibes to "you can just have an idea and hire some programming monkey to create it for you."

Or as he said it: You and I could get together and clone almost any popular web application in a month. Or for that matter, we could simply buy a clone script. Twitter, Facebook, eBay, Groupon, Digg, and about 50 others are available for around $100 each.
Unfortunately the British Empire collapsed for a reason

Except the British Empire DIDN'T collapse. Rather the British decided that running an empire was actually more trouble that it was worth, and it was converted to what is now the Commonwealth in an orderly and deliberate fashion, and Britain enjoys good relations with the vast majority of its former colonies.
This is a neat service for sure and will be useful to many. I would however like to address the following quote from the TechCrunch article:

"In fact, I now assume that all flights will have Wifi, so when they don’t (eh, hem United Flight 0059) it’s like someone cut off your oxygen. And it’s such a rude awakening when you get off the plane and realize that there’s a thousand emergencies that went down while you were watching the inflight Adam Sandler movie and you have to scramble for the rest of the day fighting fires."

If you are working with that kind of pressure for a long time, thats really counter productive. It can be kind of addictive being that irreplacable but its bad business.
Don't be a conference ho
I'm oblivious to the obvious
"Beyond the fact that you will most likely find exactly the answer you are looking for, there are some other side effects."

That's either naive, or only looking at simple libraries, or has the luxury of taking as much time as necessary to dig/poke around, absorbing multiple author styles. My head starts to hurt after looking at often un- or poorly-documented libraries written in a mishmash of styles.

I often search first - google/irc/bing/mailinglists, etc - because I'll find out pretty quickly if other people are really using the library. They'll have found and dealt with the real world issues that come up (the docs say X, but really, you should do Y, because of performance, security, etc). If no one is using something, perhaps there's a reason - searching will turn that up.

Finding an error message like "Foobar is barfoo-ed on line X", then having to trace through back from line X through 30 calls, then finding that all I see is a sprintf() error message of "%s is %s" doesn't really help. Yay - I read the code! It's not useful/helpful in debugging my real world use of your library, not the few aspects you felt like documenting or commenting.

Looking at code and docs alone only solves my issues about 25% of the time - maybe up to 50% depending on the platform/problem domain. I guess all is magical in the Ruby/Rails world - 100% of all problems are solvable solely by looking at the purity that is all Ruby code, apparently.
Human rights? Working in a sweatshop beats being a farmer, which is what workers in those sweatshops would be doing if they weren't employed there or in places like them.
PC's Die A Little More
Verizon is often acting like an evil megacorp, but in this case I'd say it's all your wife fault. The roaming rates are in the contract. Canadian telecoms may be charging Verizon a lot to use their networks.
I would go even further and say, they're expecting Cristal for the price of tap water.
I think it's safe to assume that. It shows that Apple and Verizon don't have as terrible a blood feud as some had thought. In fact, the offer looks somewhat... desperate. It's blatantly anti-consumer (lug around a MiFi and pay for the privilege!) in comparison to the AT&T offering. I wonder if it's not part of some contractual agreement from Apple: "Alright, we'll give you the iPhone, but we want iPads in Verizon stores this holiday season, and [we don't have the CDMA chips ready yet/don't want to announce we have CDMA chips yet]. What are you going to do?"
I'd be interested to know what percentage of time it takes up for rendering a comment thread in the live system though.
Initial thoughts on Redis
Yes but the £100 is a one off cost.
Can Red Sox Owner John Henry Save Liverpool?
Hundreds!

Who would want to use something like this? I mean, there are message boards everywhere.
I can think of rather more companies who failed because there was no market for their products than companies who failed because while there was a market the product didn't work. Indeed I have been involved in spending tens of millions of investors money learning this fact during the Dot Com years.

If people really need your product then they will excuse it being a bit crap (Exhibit A: most enterprise software). However, if your product is a work of technical genius but doesn't do anything useful for anyone then it is surely doomed.
ASK HN: I need your opinion regarding my web app
Please critique my web application. Right now this is just a part of my site and I'm planning to buy a domain just for this. Do you think it's worth it? http://jamafriend.com/LargeMap.aspx
mobile broadband is pretty much useless on a train, at least in my experience on the edinburgh / london train (using a 3 dongle), you pretty much only get a connection when you are pulling into a station

east coast used to be free wifi, I think virgin charge? and crosscountry dont have it at all. damnit now I want this service for uk trains.
You can build an email list cheaply, just use Google Forms: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/forms/
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.

* Triumph of the Nerds (1996)

I didn't verify this link, but google says the interview where Jobs says Microsoft has no taste can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw
And by god is it ugly.
"Yes because you can write your own" wasn't quite what I meant :P
A few comments about your list:

AdFreeZone - There is (or was) money in this. Slashdot at one point allowed you to pay $5 to remove ads (still might for all I know). I think Kuro5hin.org did something similar. I don't know how this is still relevant with AdBlock though.

Or did you mean something more than a community in a website? Somehow I can't help but be reminded of the "walled city" in Tad William's "otherland" books.

AfMijn - There are a couple of auction sites that implement short bidding periods. Google just found me bidz.com for example. I think finding a way to verify users as serious in an affordable way is what would get in the way of somebody implementing this.

ArticleBody - There is a service doing something similar, but I can't remember what it's called. Actually, it might be a firefox extension I'm thinking about.

DeadMansKnob - In the UK knob is a slang term for penis. Saying dead mans knob out loud will cause a lot of laughs.

exes4all - I know I've come across something like this before. It turned into people telling each others secrets and trying to hurt their former partners.

FossBounty - Sites like Rentacoder have escrow services. I don't remember seeing this applied to FOSS code bounties & it would be interesting to see it happen.

hardhacks - See instructables.com and plenty of other niche electronics hobbyist sites etc.

NoSEO - I wonder what Gabriel Weinberg might think about this.

WeWatch - YC funded a startup that was doing this a few years ago. I don't know what happened to them.

By the way, thanks for sharing :)
I completely agree with this article. I'm amazed at the self helpless of some programmers. I see people going to great lengths to try to find problems when there's a more direct route available.

They will threat anything not written by them as a blackbox and if it's not working they will poke around it endlessly, they will do anything but walk through the code and find the root issue.
As you probably know, Martin Krzywinski is also the author of the Circos software. Circos has been in development for much longer and addressed different kinds of issues.
I was thinking of a similar thing the other day. Could one make an easy-enough-to-use public-key encrypted social network?

One of the ways that sites often scale is denormalization, so if they're generating each person's activity feed anyway there's no storage overhead. And I'm pretty sure that pgp encryption performance is measured in MB/s, so as javascript performance catches up the encryption time will be less of an issue.

Obviously even if everything is encrypted on the client side, what's to stop the server from sending down a broken javascript encryption mechanism, or javascript to send your messages in the clear? I don't think there's a good solution to this, but you could make some (optional) browser plugins to monitor outgoing requests, and that might be enough to keep server operators honest.

Even if someone overcame all of that, there are still a lot of features that just can't be built without the server having access to the data. But it's interesting to think about.
Heh. They're out of stock. Go figure.

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/mobile-broadband/broadband2go...

That's an awesome deal though. When they come available again, I'm jumping on that.
I don't agree. I think the advantage of iOS devices is that they're instant on "appliances". Air is more of a computer with no moving parts, i.e. a full computer but many of the benefits of instant on. I think that will have a place until SSD gets to the point that it's a viable option on the pro line.
And you thought the Gap logo redesign was bad...
The £70 for the MiFi is a one off cost - you still have to pay for the data in both cases.
It's especially interesting as we're now hearing rumors of AT&T's relationship with Apple souring a bit.
That's exactly right. Ideas aren't worth much. I like Siver's article on ideas as multipliers. Execution and the 'business side of things' as you stated are what matters. If Zuckerberg didn't execute like he did with Facebook, Facebook would've still have been a cute little toy project at Harvard. The idea of Facebook itself is pretty simplistic.
To be really fair, OO does the same thing, and forget about there being any kind of ODF interoperability between different FOSS packages.

Hell, OO won't even save and reopen the same document unmodified on the same computer consistently.
Writing an S-Expression parser in Ruby
Poll: Do you use your real identity on Hacker News?
As far as I'm aware, shared libraries only allows me to share with another iTunes library. My fileserver is not a mac. In principle, I could have screwed around with some linux server that attempts to convince iTunes it is a real mac. Or, somewhere in the preferences, I could have told iTunes not to copy to the local folder, and just run it off NFS.

In principle, I could have hacked my way around most of iTunes shortcomings. I freely admit that I didn't try very hard to do so since I saw little advantage in it.
Remaking Detroit with microhoods and digital maps -- a visit to Loveland
Um... reflection is a core feature of Java, and has been since Java 1.1
CruiseControl.Net driving Selenium Tests
It probably beats being a subsistence farmer but farmers as a profession are often wealthy - look at France.
Fake tiffany
how do you suggest i go about that? i emailed the company that owns it, and haven't heard anything. i also bought that stupid thing on godaddy that tries to grab it, to no avail. it was recently renewed.
Per wikipedia://GSM…

GSM has used a variety of voice codecs to squeeze 3.1 kHz audio into between 6.5 and 13 kbit/s.

So that is between 100k and 200k bytes per minute of speech. That gigabyte is the same radio load as 10000 minutes of talk time.

Where does one get 10000 minutes of talk time for only $20?

I think the question is Why is wireless voice so bloody expensive‽
So I'm going to be brutally honest with you...I was a freelance web designer in college and I completely agree with what you're saying. The trouble is, the solution is already out there...

www.vistaprint.com/websites.aspx

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I work for them, and yes I built that page. But you guys aren't our market (too savvy) so I posted it because you probably didn't even know we made websites.

If I were still a freelancer THAT would scare me. The price point is exactly in the budget of your stereotyped user - $200 is like the price of the PROFESSIONAL package, you could go even cheaper for the simplest stuff. As SHOwnsYou pointed out, paying commodity prices is using boilerplate, and that is EXACTLY what we use...there's no magic tricks here: we make it easy for non-technical baby boomers and older (the LEAST tech savvy) to have a website at a price they can afford. The UI is simple enough for a 40-yr-old business owner to make a site. And to the point of the original poster, yeah we are capitalizing on a booming market.

I think the problem is that people want what they can't have: a beautiful looking site at a great price. As I said, speaking frankly, you get what you pay for with our templates. I would never have created those templates and called them my work as a freelancer, but I think the HN community of aesthetically-seasoned designers/developers/entrepreneurs generally forgets that the overwhelming majority has NO IDEA what good design is like and truly DOESN'T need it. This is perhaps the BIGGEST lesson I've learned about business, and truly echoes the sentiments of the greatest creed in marketing, "KNOW YOUR TARGET MARKET."

I guess in the end, the problem from a web designer is that they refuse to produce commodity work, and justifiably raises their rates, when they COULD be making money hand-over-fist if they just kept a slew of simple, cheap templates and just did the labor of porting them to a website for their customers and charging next to nothing. Each transaction would seem like peanuts to most freelancers, and they would feel like they aren't earning anything, but this is a numbers game, and the numbers don't lie.
The pros & cons of no job title
Aren't all the web developers just white-labelling WordPress these days?

On the money part, you're right. Small businesses that are used to paying their staff < $10/hr aren't used to paying the prices for a pro.

For some reason, devs aren't in the same mindspace to these potential clients as lawyers, dentists and architects.
Latest Deal Terms for Bitly, Inc.
Oh my God. I've been using Opera for close to 10 years and had no idea that I could ctrl-tab windows.

Opera has a lot of features, even weird stuff like a BitTorrent client, text-to-speech reading of documents, custom search engines (eg. I can type "h [a] -> [a]" to look for Haskell functions of type [a]->[a] on Hoogle), yet it has excellent performance, even though I almost always have 20+ tabs open.

Edit: I knew about the mouse wheel, though. If you hold the right mouse button and turn the wheel you can do the same thing as ctrl+tab.
I love how this is being downvoted. Is the truth so hard to hear?
Would 1,000 space-bound lasers deter a missile attack?
You're right. The vote is counted, so I consider that as "works." The result is certainly ugly, but I'd name that a "minor display issue" as I can hit "back."

Of course it would be nice if that "back" step wouldn't be needed.
IPad coming to AT&T and—yes—Verizon stores Oct 28
Unless you've got a board seat, probably not. You get what's in their public disclosure for investors and that's about it.
New Skype 5.0 Integrates Facebook – Is Social Video Here?
Spring vs. Java EE and Why I Don't Care
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Facebook never had copywriters. You live in a stratified branding world my friend.
I really don't think anyone in china is going to be more wealthy if they choose farming over sweatshop work.
I didn't know anyone was still offerring unlimited 3G data. Probably will be fading away soon like AT&T and Verizon's unlimited plans.
Why teach with Ruby?
> orderly and deliberate fashion

See Kenya, Cyprus, Palestine, partition of India, etc.
As a non-Java developer I thought this was an interesting insight in to how the Java community are responding to competition from dynamic language frameworks like Rails and Django.
He's correct that it's legal ANSI C, but pvg is also correct in pointing out that compilers will warn you. (And being legal ANSI C is not necessarily the same thing as being portable.)
> In the UK knob is a slang term for penis.

hehe. Oops...

I never knew that.
This post was a lot of work, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, HN. Please tear me apart. :)
GIT!

'nuff said.