skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One nice thing about the HN crowd is that it is for the most part pragmatic, able to quite refreshingly discuss C# as a language without immediately descending into these tired talking points casting Microsoft as patent-wielding bogeyman, etc. This is even more peculiar now that Oracle owns Java and is actually engaging in the kind of behavior that we were supposed to be desperately scared of Microsoft engaging in with .NET any day now.

If you're reflexively injecting off-the-shelf 'be afraid to use it' notes into a conversation where C# is mentioned, and applying a trite pop-psych analysis to Miguel de Icaza to boot, you may want to take a few steps back and ask who is really bringing faith and dogma to the table here. Is there anyone in this crowd who hasn't heard your stated opinion approximately 1,000,000 times, and who wouldn't carefully weigh such considerations before making any production commitments?
The problem is that there is an actual drawback to making semicolons optional: adding a newline between tokens can change the meaning of the code!

This "feature" is really just a bad idea. I would hope that it gets thrown out in future versions of the standard (is there one?), and use semicolons in the meantime.
- Domain.com/blog might be better for seo, but it's probably not a big deal unless you are hoping to get lots of seo juice via your blog.

- blog.domain.com is easier to manage (easier to use third party service, easier to keep code updates separate, ...).
You get a notification when added to a group

Any thoughts, then, on what Calacanis meant when he said "I was never informed that I was 'force-joined' to the NABLA group."? Was he just mistaken?

Groups are private by default

Okay, that's fine. But who controls if or when that group is made public? And can you still be "force joined" to non-private groups?
Extremely Rare Celebrity Photos
This gallery contains jet unseen celebrity photos. You can see photos all the way from Marilyn Monroe up to Dr. House.
As a facebook non-joiner myself, I find that I miss out on a lot of baby pictures, knowledge of other people's birthdays, and (a few) parties.
He's practising as he preaches by using that font setup.
effective cures for most known ailments, thought-reading technology, commercially viable nuclear fusion power
I'm not sure if your post was meant to be humorous or unintended irony.
Android is Google's next giant revenue stream
How to be a freelance web developer, part 2
My, you are a nasty little troll, aren't you? Nobody's pressuring you to conform with anything. That's the whole point of non-conformity.

And I call bullshit on your choice metaphor too. Whether someone's different due to choice, lack of ability, not giving a damn about fashion or if it's just the way they're wired, bullying them for being different is wrong.
I completely agree with you. I think if I have a kid I will sit him down when he is young and explain to him that I do not expect him to ever suffer or martyr himself with his good intentions -- and then maybe he will know what to do.
I don't find it surprising at all - when you look at some of the people MS have working for them, not only Anders Hejlsberg but Simon Peyton-Jones, Don Syme and others. They've got some world-class talent in language design and nearly unlimited resources. ML in the guise of F# in the hands of every Visual Studio user, any of whom can use it without incurring the ire of the PHB 'cos "it's Microsoft". These are great days, my friend!
http://www.cupcalculator.com - Slightly profitable. Its essentially a static page with some adwords but the ad revenue has more than covered the cost of the domain name and hosting.
People seemed to find part 1 of this topic helpful, so I decided to elaborate on a few points. You can find the original post and discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1763634

If you found either of these posts useful, please email me at mail@ryanwaggoner.com. I have a couple questions about a related new venture and I'd love some feedback.
I voted for Pablo Coelho.
Just posted part 2, which you can find here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1767620
the amount of people that do not understand that html5 is not a point release is depressing, under the same rules that disregard html5, ajax/xhr isnt ready for the big time yet.
People playing pranks like this was the first thing I thought of when I read the headlines about Facebook "streamlining" group membership. And yes, some of my actual friends would invite me to some very silly in-joke groups that I wouldn't voluntarily join.

The potential problems are reduced if these groups are private and _will remain_ private in future versions of Facebook.
Their DNS servers is terrible. I've had problems two times over the last year.
Out of interest, what would you do if they never became violent and were just bullied verbally? Would you just continually tease back? How would you do this if they were on a better social footing than you?

Or perhaps every time they demonstrated their strength to you, it was just in a 'playfight' that you felt forced to 'not take seriously'.
Yeah, this seems kind of silly. I think of facebook friends as people I might have met once, not people I would trust to add information to my profile.
"You can bend over, too" was a pun.
dude, the point is not to make your design awful. It's to address a specific needs, while ignore what it's not suppose to address. This is the point of good design: focus.

catchy headline, though. :)
This technique is also used in software engineering. Apple "makes it suck" when "it" should not be done regularly. Resetting an iPod requires an extremely unintuitive key sequence [0]. Apple doesn't want the user to know an iPod can be reset - resetting is something your PC does when it doesn't work anymore. But occasionally an iPod actually freezes, so they added a complicated sequence to reset the device. Even if you remembered the sequence, you wouldn't want to use it unless you needed it.

Elsewhere, Microsoft intentionally designed Vista's User Access Control dialogs to be irritating [1]. Microsoft wanted applications to stop using Administrator rights for no reason, so every privilege escalation painfully obvious: The screen fades to gray, and an extra dialog appears. Application developers get the same dialogs, and can trim unnecessary escalations out of their code.

[0] http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1320?viewlocale=en_us&loca...

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/blogs/on_software/1445...
I don't think this is something that is even certain.
Ask HN: Oprah's effect and scaling
One of my customer's website is going to be mentioned on Oprah's Winfrey show in a few month. Anyone here has had any similar experience? What kind of traffic should I expect?

The website in question is a SAAS with no free account developed in Rails. What should I do to make sure it scales?

Since users of the website don't need to interact between each other, I was thinking of having one load balancer running nginx proxying to different nodes with each node having it's own database and application server.

I would hash the email address to chose the node to proxy to and then store that information in a cookie. So nginx would either look for a cookie, or an email address in the post data and proxy to the correct node accordingly. Otherwise, it would redirect the user to the login page. Does this approach make any sense?

I'm currently using rackspace cloud for this which gives me flexibility in terms of adding and removing instances but does mean that I have less raw performance than with a dedicated server...

Has anyone got any stories of this kind of exposure to share?
Making stuff suck to make it better is a pretty brilliant way of looking at things.

Sure, most of us then don't consider the result to suck, but it actually does. And we do this a lot.

Some more examples from the top of my head:

- making landing suck for fun --> skydiving

- making sitting suck --> for better posture

- making reading in light suck [iPad/etc] --> for better contrast

- making privacy suck --> to get 500M users

- making security suck --> to gain a monopoly

Yep, pretty brilliant. Let's all start making things that suck! It's obviously working.
This question has been asked so many times, on so many different programming forums. The only reason this is getting any traction is "MIT female"... ugh.

EDIT: I should add that we are definitely a welcoming bunch, but I'd try starting over with a new username that doesn't loudly announce your gender. It's not the fact that you're female, it's the fact that you're announcing you're female, as if to imply that you should be treated differently because of it. Apologies if this sounds harsh.
It was as quality-price ratio without a doubt. You wanted a cheap PC you could change different cards, you got PCs(and windows with it).
I think part of the tricky part in this is that, most likely, it has to scale up, but not at all gradually, and then scale back down too, in terms of costs, as the traffic dries up again. Good luck:-)
This is simply a 'mailing list' for friends on Facebook.

Why aren't you outraged that people can create email mailing lists with outrageous titles like "NAMBLA Email Monthly" that include your address?
Yeah, I don't think this works.

For example, near where I live, someone recently posted a flier for her house cleaning service. It was on green construction paper and written with a red marker.

My initial thought was 'maybe she'll be cheap' and then 'do I want someone in my house that thinks magic marker is the proper way to make a sign for their business?'

Another example: I buy a LOT of things online. But I only buy from sites that I feel I can trust. That means they don't -look- like a scam, and they look like they know what they're doing. When I go to a site that looks like it came from 1990, I might check prices, but I -never- buy. Instead, I go back to somewhere 'safe' like Amazon and pay a little more.

Most of the examples (shoes, chairs, tables) were designed to prevent or force certain behaviors. They don't 'suck', they 'work' for exactly what they were intended.
Umm, it took seven years for Craigslist to become "an overnight success". Newspapers knew about it--we did and I was working for a newspaper at the time--but they ignored it.

If every newspaper in America would have gone to a free + paid model they could have saved at least half of their revenue and craigslist would still only be in 7 cities. But they wouldn't embrace change a lost big.
There are a couple posts from Jeff that address this topic - http://www.mcstartup.com/past-articles/
I see this complaint a lot. As programmers, what do you recommend people who are rapidly prototyping websites to do? I think using Facebook or Twitter as a signin is the easiest way to get user administration on your site. Is there another way people recommend?
Exactly. That's what we're fighting against.
A fellow I know who works for Goodwill remarked on the folks with scanners some time back. My impression was that he thought it an odd way to spend one's time, but was glad to see the books go out the door.

As for the fellow at the library, I can understand how a retiree, able to exchange time for lower prices, might be annoyed.
> And how many of your "friends" are ACTUALLY your "friends"?

100%, but I seem to be in a minority with that decision
Saif-Kareena's relationship in trouble
Depends what you mean by 'people'. It's useful where you are building an interest group of people from the same domain. If those people are 'mavens' it can be a useful to see their thoughts and engage them in discussion.
Yep. How about the award in 1974 to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson? Maybe it's easier to win when you're both on the panel that picks the winner?
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Newsweek’s Price Tag: $1
Getting Comfortable With Self-Promotion
more aimed towards building web apps than deciding where to put your blog, but someone from wuffoo strongly recommended against subdomains

http://particletree.com/notebook/subdomains-development-suck...
Looks great! Good luck.
Do I have to study all this theory? Yesss
How Does Spam Worm Its way into the Social Media Web
BerkeleyBionics Gives Paralyzed Woman Her Legs Back
So don't friend them on Facebook? No snark intended, I don't understand why that's always off the table in Facebook discussions.

I have 95 friends, they are all family or friends or coworkers. I previously had a lot more friends, but what's the point? I'm not friends with them, I don't care what's happening in their lives nor they in mine. I'm not even leaving room for the 'trust to add information to my profile argument'. Your perception of Facebook is kind of irrelevant, Facebook is giving you a platform that does one thing. You don't get the option to disagree with what it does based on a perception of what you think it does or should do -- aside from not engaging with their product or engaging in a way based on what the platform actually does.
Strategy is Not a To Do List
While I agree with the sentiment, I don't know that heroin, crack, or crystal-meth should be included in the lot of legalized drugs. They border on poisons, and their existences are due solely to the drug war. Chemical modification to make the base more potent for smuggling and then cut on location have driven the trade to formulate stronger product per-gram so that it can be easily transported. In doing so they have become near poisonous products.

If we take opium and Heroin for example Heroin abuse was not ramped until the availability of opium and laudanum where no longer available. Opium, despite the fear mongering, is a relatively safe product with few deaths attributed to it, it was also the drug of choice among opiate abusers until it's abolishment at which point Heroin became the primary substance of choice due to availability. The same can be applied to the coca leaf and crack.

We should legalize the natural forms of these drugs and we will see the market for the expensive hard stuff dry up.
InfoGraph: U.S. Opinion on Global Warming (aka Climate Change)
Well, that explains why the majority of vendor support systems suck. It certainly discourages me from using them.
Washn't this posted from the original blog already?
I'd say about 70%.

The other 30% are family -- lord knows I'd defriend them in an instant if we didn't have to see each other on the holidays!
You could've found the answer using Google in about half the time it took to post this question.
Let me fix that for them:

"We're afraid because we make big-budget games, and Zynga has made people pay for low-budget games."

I've thought for quite some time that game budgets in the millions are getting out of control. (And movies, too, for that matter.)

Good controls, decent visuals and audio, and great plot and/or mechanics. That's what makes the best games. Big-budget games ramp up the visuals and skimp on the rest. I'm sick of that.

Not that Zynga has plot (at all) or mechanics, mind. But they're cheap enough and they make you happy, so it works. I broke my Facebook games habit about 6 months ago. Prior to that, I did 'donate' way more than I should have to a couple (non-Zynga) games. Eventually, the repetitive mechanics palled and I broke free of it.

Big-budget game companies need to learn from Zynga. They need to use the same techniques that compel people to play Zenga games, but in bigger, better games that actually have more. Instead of being scared or saying Zynga is breaking their market, they should learn and improve.

And some have been doing it for years. Achievements, collectables, upgrades, bonuses... Pokemon even has it as the slogan: "Gotta catch 'em all!"

Any game designers that are 'gloomy' over Zynga's success are flat failing to learn from the situation.
I would regard that as a benefit.
wow this is awesome!!! bookmarking to my tools.

here's another one I use frequently. http://css3generator.com
"The C Programming Language" -- Answers to Exercises
Followup to my Facebook research
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The video is down right now I guess it will come back up after the press conference
Remarkable- that list supports your conclusion way more when you insert an item! Darn those irrational technophobic nature-romanticists, putting mobile phones into lists where they don't belong.
Reason #2 really isn't a good one. It's pretty simple to setup subdomains locally (just use your hosts file to configure something like dev.whatever.yourdomain.com to point to localhost). Every webserver I know of supports name based virtualhosts, so it's not even like you need multiple IP's
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/images/google-new-previews.png

You can read the text on the preview on the right aside from the extracted portion? Because I'm pretty sure you're the only one. I can only make out the site logo, the headline of the page, some button text, and an odd word here or there. It's just a contextual image just like the surround text of the search phrase is contextual text.
Not only that, but he also spells the acronym two different ways "NABLA" and "NAMBLA", don't know which one is the actual name. You'd think he'd mildly proofread his writing right?
I maintain the library! I work for such a small organisation, and this library is deployed on such a tiny web app, that the fact it wasn't built using JQuery or whatever is utterly inconsequential.
Startup links shoppers with local retailers in real-time
Obvious in my opinion, mainly because the checkout button didn't need to be so visible considering that the user likely dind't buy anything yet. Search instead leads with more stuff bought. See amazon, the searchbox is the most visible part of the design.
I like to think of it this way: left of the "/" is for systems/operations, right of the "/" is for code/content/development. So if you're going to put something on a separate subdomain it should be for mechanical reasons, such as using a different cdn or a different hosting stack. Think of it from a workflow perspective. To add /blog to your site goes through your existing code publishing workflow. To add blog.domain.com to your site means involving server configuration or a third party web interface, etc.
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/images/google-new-previews.png

It's a large thumbnail where the text isn't legible at all outside of a few select words and the extracted surrounding text. This isn't the same as providing a full-page preview with Google wrapping it in an iframe, for example, to get advertising revenue. People still have to go to your site to read anything outside of the contextual text.
If you like SASS, check out compass http://compass-style.org/
I'd say, Scala and Ruby (primarily JRuby, i'd say).
Most of time I'm working with Java libraries, and I do enjoy Java a lot, but it's not quite as powerful as Scala or Ruby. So, reusing Java libs is awesome, since there's a whole lot of them laying around.
Have a listen to the Java Posse this last week, #325. The new platform architect seems to think Java is in better hands, for the greater community too.

How do you simply dismiss Oracle as having a culture of engineering? Are the products bad? Is it simply that the corporation wants to profit? Is it the lack of hacker's names and faces on products? Is it the cost of the products or that they don't do something that they claim or should do?

I'd assert that they might be so good at engineering that it's no longer sexy to talk about it with them and they've matured so far beyond hacking that the names and faces aren't important.

Have you ever used any Sun hardware and then maybe a similar vintage IBM or HP piece of hardware?
Tesla lifts veil of secrecy at its Palo Alto facility
Perl Arpspoofing / Packet Forwarding
Common Misconceptions About Software Engineering
Many undergraduates have misconceptions about software engineering that lead to an "impoverished" view of industry and that hinder their transition to the workplace.
you cant use wildcards within your hosts file, so you have to manually edit your hosts file for every new subdomain you want to use, I have had a huge hassle doing the same. particularly when you want 1. dynamically generated sub domains, 2. to test a lot of subdomains.

Unless you want to run bind of course
I'm currently knee-deep in CSS gradient generation, so this is very welcome.

It would be nice if there was a way to shift all the colors in a gradient simultaneously - for hover effects, you frequently just want a slightly lighter version of the same gradient. In Photoshop you'd do this with an adjustment layer (which still isn't perfect).
Would you care to elaborate on the long term disaster part?
Finally, keep this in mind: freelancing might seem overwhelming, but your competition is terrible. Seriously, absolutely terrible.

This doesn't just apply to developing, or other stuff you're particularly good at, either. In general, people suck at stuff.

My experience tends to be that if, as a hacker, you think you've got an okay grasp of a subject, you're probably in the 90th percentile somewhere. If you think you're pretty good at it, probably 99th.

The "keep raising your rates" advice is good for life in general. Never, never sell yourself short on anything.
Google to Push Android Deeper into Asia
My mum, my dad, my sisters, my wife, my grandpa, my grandma, my aunt, my cousin...

Only one person's willing to pay in my family...me :-P
Fair enough. How can one get in touch with you? I don't see an email when I click your user name.
I once went to a info session that Facebook put on at our school (this was trying to attract coop students). One of the things that the previous coops, as well as the recruiters/presenters emphasized was the lack of formality and 'set' procedures. One coop recalled how he was directly responsible for a 20 minute downtime in facebook because he pushed something to production after testing it locally a bit.

Yeah, no real testing servers (they exist, but aren't actually required), no real dedicated QA, none of the usual trappings. The coop laughed it off. And the recruiter did too, and pointed out that a lot of responsibility is placed directly on whoever is coding the code. They're even the flexibility and freedom to do what they think they should do, and if it causes a little downtime? As long as its short, and nothing is lost, no problem. It's something to laugh at at the bar.

Now, I'm sure there's some embellishing going on there to ensnare more young minds, but I even if its half true, I think this anecdote provides a lot of insight into how facebook works. Perhaps many of the little privacy things isn't the result of Zuckerberg deciding that everyone doesn't need control, it's just the individual programmer placing it lower on their priorities to even think about, and there being no real overarching structure to impose these privacy concerns.

Until it gets released to production and 'blows up' in their face.
Perhaps, it won't make sense to many of you, but I am really curious as to what happened to this person afterwards he wrote this article. What path in life he followed... any body can help finding out?
Googling his name didnt yield anything relevant yet.
Is it Pablo or Paulo Coelho? Or does Pablo == Paulo assert True in Portuguese? Amazing writer, I was blown away by The Alchemist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(novel)