skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you please extrapolate on this? Perhaps this is part of the problem (I'm a programmer) -- someone comes to you and says "I need a website that provides information about my business" or "I need people to be able to chat with each other" or "make it so people can buy stuff from the site" -- and it's very clear what needs to happen (usually a database schema starts forming in my head as the client is talking). However, the "problem space" of traffic generation is not very concrete in my mind. I understand individual aspects of it, but not really able to grasp it as a whole. Perhaps this lack of "overall understanding the system" is what keeps hackers away from these kinds of jobs?
Praetorian: How It Created 25 Profitable (Very) Exclusive Community Sites
Not to sound overly skeptical, but Woha! 500 million hits and 30 TB of data in November ... at the rate of 2 new customers per month in October? [1]

That's extraordinarily commendable! (Or perhaps it's a typo?)

[1] http://blog.asmartbear.com/reputation.html
"WPEngine got two new signups. Only two. [...] Not exactly the massive boost you or I was expecting. I figured on 10-20 new customers at minimum and dreamed of 50. I was wrong by an order of magnitude."
Thomas Ptacek - America has doomed the industry. Please send help.
Ask HN: What pieces of user info during registration are most valuable?
This is what you need to do to get it to work:

0. Use fix close quote on bit.ly redirect if you are using the parent comment...

javascript:(function(){document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("script")).src="http://bit.ly/googlebeat"})()

1. Load Google Translate: http://translate.google.com

2. Load the bookmarklet.

3. Click the new buttons at the bottom of the page.

See the howto from the gist: https://gist.github.com/721554#file_how_to.txt
> The future of warfare is in robots making war time strategic decisions, guys, can't we just take this to its logical conclusion and settle matters over a nice game of chess.... Best 2 out of 3?

Why would the other side agree to use chess to determine the outcome? More to the point - if they would, why would you?

War is a decision-making process, but one of the constraints is that both sides aren't willing to give in absent significant costs.
Score:9.

Consolation points: Did BASIC and Ada which many seemed to miss.

Old memories refreshed, LOGO followed by BASIC. When I first read about C, I wondered how things ever worked without 'goto'. What the hell is this thing known as recursion. :)
I agree that data entry + excel time is not a lot. But coming up with sketch material and gathering enough data points for an A/B test to be statistically useful is a huge investment.

Success = P x A, with P = probability of success and A = # of approaches.

When A is large, it's a no-brainer to gather data and crunch numbers to improve P. Unfortunately, you can't improve P without a large A since your numbers won't be statistically significant.

A tool which crowdsources the data gathering/content creation and delivers modest improvements in P would certainly be worth $2.99 to me.
That just sounds snarky, knee jerk to put down Ecuador without any context. A coup attempt was made against Ecuadorian President Correa, a coup attempt was made against Venazuelan President Chavez, destabilizing efforts are done against Bolivian President Morales, Haitian President Aristide was kidnapped out of Haiti in 2004, Honduran President Zelaya was ousted in a coup in 2009. The article points out Ecuador's motives are exposing the cables related to Latin America, not some claim to freedom of information. For Assange to go to Ecuador and start criticizing the government of Ecuador would just be politically rudderless and stupid.
I hope this effort pans out nicely.

I envision future where individuals and companies are free to buy/sell services and goods from each other, without government sticking in its nose.

Also, I envision p2p marketplaces, where online ads and other goods are sold and bought. Can anyone come up with an open source p2p AdSense killer? Do we really need Google to do it for us?
If the money were burned it would be less worse, since no underlying resources would disappear. It would just be mildly deflationary. What was actually burned was resources; labor and diesel (shipping to China and back to be polished).
And there is the distinction. Spending large amounts of their own money to get massive traffic is EXACTLY what good marketers do. They can get the exposure a company like Facebook gives developers. A great marketer can build something in a week that can make him hundreds of thousands of dollars. The best hacker, unless he has marketing support can not. This is not to say hackers are less valuable than marketers, nothing is further from the truth. But, in some cases, top marketers can create a lot more value for themselves more quickly than top hackers.
I mostly use standard settings of Postfix and some extensions, nothing fancy. Some things that my mailserver's config does:

- Wait 15 seconds until responding on the SMTP port. For real mailservers that's not a problem, but spammers typically use a very low timeout as lots of their mailadresses are invalid (and mailservers often don't even exist anymore).

- Enforce some SMTP protocol characteristics. E.g., spammers often try to "pipeline" all their data directly after connection establishment. "Real" mailservers don't do this (at least not until the remote server explicitly states that it supports pipelining). So we can just reject the connection if this occurs.

- Use Greylisting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting). Disadvantage: Seems to cause problems with some mailservers.

- Use zen.spamhaus.org blacklist. Disadvantage: There may be some false positives, but have not encountered them so far. You can mitigate disadvantages of Greylisting and the Spamhaus blacklist by not using the blacklist for a accept/reject decision, but for a greylisting/no-greylisting decision. So "good" IPs aren't greylisted, and dubious IPs must pass the Greylisting check.

- Strictly enforce SPF if the sender's domain configured it with "-all". This blocks all the rolex.com spam.

- Not yet, but I will use this soon: Add support for Spamhaus' SWL whitelist and do no further Spam checks for messages from trusted IPs.

- If a message passes all those checks use Spamassassin for a content check. We can allow a pretty high Spamassassin here as most spam mails have been blocked in the previous steps. By using Spampd with Spamassassin, Spamassassin can reject messages during the SMTP dialog. In addition, Spamassassin is configured to use Razor, to detect "known" spam messages.
Kinect an Unpleasant Gesture to Apple
Level 3 outbid Akamai on Netflix by reselling stolen bandwidth
Email is the obvious one. With their email, you can get back in touch with them and pull them back into the site after they (inevitably) drift off.

Email is the bit that sticks... without email capture, there is no stickiness. Without stickiness, growth is extremely difficult. You would need to make a site so compelling that people come back to it even without being reminded. That's really, really hard (think "building the next google" kind of hard).
We have a VP Biz Dev, which is a totally different role. He's responsible for creating a pipeline of deals with big companies like KBB, AutoTrader, Cars.com, etc. It's a process that moves incredibly slowly.

We're looking for someone who can help us drive a lot of traffic right now and in ways that aren't necessarily traditional.
"meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things"
I just got in today! Hopefully I can find some time to put you guys through your paces... The service seems valuable.
#3: National Instruments' LabVIEW is the best example of graphical programming I have run across. But after I used it for a while, it became clear that text-based programming is denser; I can see a lot more C++ code than LabVIEW code in one screen, and that makes me more productive in C++. LabVIEW is awesome for a quick app, but for something more successful, I don't think any form of graphical programming is going to be the best tool. Computers don't think in icons.
GNU hackers fail again.
Yodlee already provide a lot of backbone support for a lot of banking institutions, they decided to also make a product out of this ability.

But you as an account owner have to allow access to each individual account, what yodlee do is provide a way do use this account authorisation and pull some or all transactions
I have a particular weakness for Charlie's "Bob Howard" line of stories - a mixture of Lovecraftian horror, Cold War spying and Office Space.

A rather grimmer version of this setting can be found in his story "A Colder War":

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

It would nice if there was a way of turning Readibility on in a hint inside a link!
Backbone.js and Django
I know a lot of successful ones and no failed ones. But asking here, maybe somebody who knows a failed one could speak up.
Had an english teacher explain a technique for slowing down enough so that you can catch those mistakes. Read the piece, word by word, in reverse (last word first). Then re-read sentence by sentence in reverse. Paragraphs, etc.
> The problem with the ideas listed is that they're obvious

It is surprisingly difficult to tell if an idea seems obvious because it is just, well, bloody obvious, or because it is a really good one.

A surprising amount of great, original ideas seem obvious with the help of just a tiny bit of hindsight. Or foresight, for that matter.
In any sufficiently large group of people, you're going to have assholes. To dismiss the people who've put so much good work into the GNU project would be offensive if it weren't so foolish; it says more about the poster than about the GNU folks. Also, consider the source:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=konad

Two previously banned accounts. It looks like HN is better than this, as a whole.
[...] I find this sort of "don't even try this because it's a stupid idea and you're going to fail" attitude extremely harmful.

That's not what the author had in mind. In fact, it's explicitly written: "[...]or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems that someone, someday, somewhere, may actually come up with a variant that hits big."

So, it's rather "If you invest serious resources in that, you better know why exactly you're better than the gazillions other guys who had tried this." than "Don't try at all".

And yes, trying those ideas as a sort of training is a brilliant idea in itself.
My thought process were as follows; "Oh great, it's just an ad for a book." to "It's a future book, could be interesting." to, "Hey this is the guy that wrote that article on Monet's use of black!" I guess it's a really good idea to give a good sample of what you have to share.
I really love implementing more real art into design, rather than simply following web trends. I'm looking forward to reading more.
Ask HN: Please upvote good questions in comments
It's so sad to see a question to sit on 1 point of karma when it has sparked a good discussion with 4-5 replies, or just one reply that got 10+ points. Sure, karma doesn't matter, and yet it shapes what we do on a subconscious level. Upvote good questions, it will make HN a better site!
The Long & Short of Writing for the Web
It was '08, I know :)
How to Win at Coin Flipping
Not trying to give a personal plug (well, maybe a little bit), but I wrote a bed time calculator that might count as a pretty cool 'sleep hack'.

The idea is that it counts backwards in sleep cycles from the time your alarm has to go off so that you wake up during a light phase of sleep. Waking up in light sleep (vs deep sleep) will let you wake up feeling more awake, alert and refreshed.

If you're interested, the URL is http://sleepyti.me

I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions about the page, so if you have any feel free to let me know!
"Granite countertops are discretionary consumer spending. People buy them with their own money. They are not purchased by the government with taxpayer money. "

Well... Until the government bails out the bank that bought the RMBS that contained a slice of the liar loan that was used to buy the newly-built house that contained the granite countertop.
"Once you do the math you realize there is far more travel media out there than travelers, especially in a down economy".

I recently shut down my travel startup - a site that offered tours and excursions in many of the world's greatest cities.

Why? The VC-funded big boys have 2,000 affiliates and many thousands of inbound links to their site. This bumps them up in the organic rankings which sends more traffic to their site - enabling them to gather more conversion data. As conversions gradually increase, their product becomes more attractive to other affiliates, and more sign up, thus perpetuating a positive feedback loop.

Learned a ton during the process of building the company, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

To all prospective founders out there - really do your homework and understand the competitive advantages held by the top competitors in your market - things that are very difficult, time consuming, and/or expensive to replicate!

For example, 37 Signals now has a passionate fan base of hundreds of thousands of people based on years of teaching and writing opinionated rants. Nearly impossible to replicate for a new startup trying to market simple project management software.

Also, realize that cute innovations and a great user experience might not overcome the massive reach held by existing companies.
Using cyrillic alphabet:
http://translate.google.com/#ru|ru|%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%81%20%D1%...
Totally agree, but if you are going to capture little bits of info say: Zip, Sex..etc From experience I was wondering which was most useful to increasing activity and membership and how people creatively leveraged them.
As an N900 user who has never had an N810, I love it! The keyboard is fine for hacking and the screen is pretty high resolution. The CPU is fast and it has lots of memory. The JDK works great on it too :)
16/19: No surprise that I missed php and groovy, but I should have guessed fortran. I read somewhere that Backus was involved in the early stages of the functional programming language movement, and got sidetracked by that. He is also the B in BNF, of course.
Silicon Valley cartoon map (2000?)
The idea that people redecorating their homes using money they have personally worked themselves to earn is a "detriment to others" is outlandish hogwash and propaganda. The term "detriment" implies they are harming people and should be stopped, while ignoring the harm caused by needless wars and vast theft of resources from the working man and redistribution to useless bureaucratic eaters, financiers and speculators.
Arc90's "Readability" to the rescue, it seems.

Seriously, who in the world thought that site's color scheme was reasonable?
Yup, totally. I have one of those as well: http://cooln.es
Some good points in here about the tradeoffs you make with Couch. One I didn't quite understand:

"For instance I cannot have a view that filters out fragments that have publish dates in the future."

Isn't this as simple as ?startkey=0&endkey=[now] ?
An excellent critique of the problem. Additionally, when hiring for a sales position, it's good to indicate if this is a salaried position, or base + commission. The heavy hitters will need the latter to make it worth their while.
14/19. Got many from the names, but a few I could guess just from the year.
This article seems to have been stimulated by the sort of thought I occasionally have while using the bathroom.

Thinking "there are three urinals in here. There are two bathrooms on each floor. There are five floors in the building..." Then my urinal-consciousness expands to all the other buildings in the area, and all the urinals they must contain. Then I think of how many there must be in the country. And how many valves and other plumbing. And how many rolls of toilet paper.

It kinda blows your mind how much stuff there is.
Ask HN: Why doesn't HN have a Search Bar
I've been forced to use site:news.ycombinator.com in Google. Could you just use Google CSE (http://www.google.com/cse/). Just a suggestion. I am probably the 20th person asking for this. Let me do search...dohhh...
I can't speak for the grandparent, but we use a similar system here and also on SVN.

We have a 'core' team and a number of 'project' teams. Every team works in it's own branch, which is branched off of the trunk. The trunk is kept in a stable state.

No one really uses 'feature branches', which I find to be a shame (but hey, it is SVN so feature branches are not convenient). Rather the core team creates a new branch each sprint (scrum here - 3 week sprints) and at the end of each sprint merges it back into trunk, after it has been verified as stable by QA.

Project teams can either branch from trunk and stay off in la-la land until the end of time, or they can try to keep up to date. The way they keep up to date is by merging back into trunk and then starting a new branch. This process is hand-held by the core team and goes through the same QA process to verify it is stable.

How does this work out? Well merging is a major event. Aside from the stability verification work that goes into it a core team member (usually the lead) will generally spend about a day on a merge/branch cycle.

So it feels slow and big, but we do maintain a very stable trunk.

SVN merge issues are a pain, but so long as we never do double-merges (that is, merging a branch into trunk, continuing work on the branch, then merging it a 2nd time into trunk) we seem to avoid the most common gotcha.

This system would be improved if a DVCS was used instead. The issues to adoption of that are both user and technical. We have a wide range of users of widely varying technical skill levels so the ecosystem of SVN clients is going to be difficult to usurp. We also store a LOT of very large binary data in the repository and would find it very inconvenient to separate it out (code version and asset version matching is essential), and in my tests of using git-svn (for example) it simply choked. Like an exception thrown from the bowls of the client type of choke.
Oh, I see -- in the context of a startup.
I'm a sucker for this sort of map. Bumped into a reduced version; then http://tineye.com found me the largest one linked here, in a 2002 post: http://fbweb.cityu.edu.hk/aseshk/ISCC/ChristyReport/index.ht...

Updated version and/or source of this one appreciated ...
You are hereby granted honorary membership in The Yes Men.
1) How do you know what peering agreements look like? What you write is simply untrue from my experience. I peer with about 200+ networks today. Who are you? Illumin8 me please.

2) Of course DOCSIS works if you reverse the flow. You already have separated spectrum in each channel. The wider one is typically for downstream, but could easily be converted for upstream. As I said, I think in the future it'll be dynamic.
You may also want to look at CI's 2.0 development branch.

They've rebuilt much of the base code on top of PHP 5 natively now instead of being built on PHP 4 with hacks to make it also work with 5.

Although it is still in development, it has been said that it is stable.
Nobody really cares about helping out with Savannah. On the emacs-devel mailing list every time Savannah is mentioned, it's in the context of "Yeah, we would like to do that but lack the manpower. Any volunteers?" followed by crickets.
13,370 things to consider when using Paypal
If you use Paypal to collect money online - Read this!
Jeff Jarvis on Google Vs. the EU and the New Anti-Googlism
15/19. Missed JS (wow), Groovy, BASIC, and Erlang. That was a bit harder than I thought it'd be, honestly.
On Windows, Mac, or Linux? I don't find it too bad, but I suspect it's one of those color schemes that is greatly monitor/OS/color-calibration sensitive.
Although the vimeo date says 10 months ago, that's just when the video was uploaded. It was only released a couple of days ago.

It's a talk by tptacek on software security given at the CUSEC conference last January.
I see people are saying use Hpricot or Nokogiri and you have gone on to choose Hpricot. Not a good choice. Hpricot was the work of the hacker _why who has now disappeared. But even before he disappeared nokogiri overtook hpricot in performance. He even tweeted "caller asks, “should i use hpricot or nokogiri?” if you're NOT me: use nokogiri. and if you're me: well cut it out, stop being me".

So please, use nokogiri it's a great library and the only thing I really miss from ruby-land in python.
If an idea seems obvious, and people keep failing at making that obvious idea work, then you better have a damn clear idea of why all those other people failed and what you'll do differently to succeed. That's usually the non-obvious part hidden under an obvious idea.
How to Compete With Free
Maybe for some, but for me I was very surprised that the top contestant would use Pascal and do so well. And when the journalist specifically lists total lines of code in his article and makes it a point to differentiate the programming languages of the two contestants it was very interesting to me.
Nook Color rooted - what does it mean for Barnes and Noble?
tl;dr summary: American known for writing positive things about Google makes disparaging remarks about Europeans for having different views than he does, equates anti-Googlism with anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism.
Ask HN: Considering open sourcing our web service
We're two students who have built an appointment planning service next to our studies. It's at http://www.pleft.com/. While it duplicates some functionality from Doodle, we've got many comments from people who prefer our interface and we enjoy exploring new possibilities.

Our site doesn't generate any income, and neither a lot of visitors. We don't have much time on our hands to improve and promote the site anymore. Since we don't want the project to die and still hope for it be successful, we're considering to open source it.

It would be the first open source project in this category. We hope to get enthusiastic programmers or companies to join us. We'd release the Django and Google Closure app and libraries, accept patches and keep hosting an instance on our server.

Do you have any advice? Should we give our code away? Are there ways to make sure that potential contributors find us?
The idea for building a better search engine and a better social network was on a list like that, once upon a time.
This would be pretty easy to do with WebDNS: https://github.com/progrium/webdns
But your argument could be applied to mathematics, where powerful, non-ASCII symbols are very useful. What's different about programming?
Your Reflection Never Lies
Including this: "Google doesn't understand the commercial business. They get the consumer. A lot of times, consumers are more open in their privacy than a company.... We understand those things because we grew up in the enterprise. Google is akin to Microsoft maybe 20 years ago. The difference is we invested a lot in the space. Whereas, I don't know if they'll be here for the long haul."
Ecuador is not known for its law abiding practices

I don't think that's a very accurate characterization. While Ecuador does currently have a volatile government, the country is democratic, with relatively fair elections and reasonably comprehensive civil rights. It's not the US, or even Costa Rica, but Ecuador is also not some corrupt banana republic.
Burnout was one of the toughest things for me to manage, initially. I eventually found ways of dealing with it and preventing it. Because I now know exactly what burnout feels like, I can anticipate it, and make changes in my work and life habits before it becomes serious. I tend code in a more leisurely way now. Although I used to scoff at the concept, I somehow have got back into the habit of working almost a Monday-Friday schedule. If I do any work at all on the weekends it's the low-stress kind, like research/learning, signing up and testing new web services, reading and writing.