skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dont know if I told you this, but my suggestion is to focus on Grief Counseling. That will be a big hit.

Memorials are macabre.
With the hiring of the new female it might help actually.... The thinking might be, "Be cool, get into computers and you'll have hot babes like that too."

But from what I hear from some friends of mine that are in CS majors, it's not pretty, they are learning all kinds of crap that is totally useless and will never see after getting out of college.
A longish review of python frameworks
While it's easy to argue against his statement about the ease of monetization (does Warren even put ads on his sites?), I'm grateful for the note that burst culture is NOT killing attention spans, and the evidence is Harry Potter. (I'd say further evidence is three-hour epic action movies aimed at the same kids who watch 30-second YouTube clips.)
I'm pretty sure this was posted here earlier. Though, since the blog post is two months old, I can't find the previous post.

Anyhow, I know this guy vaguely; he pops into #pylons now and then. As far as I know, he still hasn't _built_ anything with any of these frameworks.
Internet "Spam king" is arrested
WTF is Viral? How to measure and grow it.
The New Portals: It's the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter
I am sorry, but I didnt realize that this has been posted earlier. Anyway, I hope newer folks find this of value.
Perhaps I can suggest a 'feature' for news.ycombinator.com in a separate thread.
Learn by doing. One way that I do is try to implement existing sites. This lets you concentrate on building the product instead of designing how it will look and feel. For example. Building this site in RoR would be a great exercise as the scope is large enough to include many features but not so large as to be impossible.

That said I wrote this blog entry a while ago that explains the main resources that i used to learn RoR.
http://www.productcriticblog.com/2007/03/top-6-resources-to-learn-ruby-on-rails.html
Feature Request - Check URL for previous entry
Get Popular On YouTube Through Mediocre Content
How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs -- Great post by creator of Metafilter
Folks, do you think it might be a good idea if this site checked urls for duplication when they are submitted? These urls could expire in 3 months or so..thoughts?
Agreed. I'd like to know his definition of "big", "little", and "fun" games. I agree that such differences exist...and I see people playing all three, sometimes without realizing which one they're playing (playing the big game accidentally is rare, but does happen sometimes).

And I agree that playing any one of them is fine, as long as you know what you're playing. The saddest examples are folks who play the fun game thinking they're playing the little or big game...after a while the fun goes out of it, and because it's being played like a fun game, the rewards are non-existent or certainly not worth the effort when it's not fun anymore.

I'll go so far as to say I think Evan accidentally ended up playing the big game with Blogger. Started out as fun, but ended up being big. And, to be even more bold, I suspect he started out playing big with twitter but it's going to turn out to be a little game (but it's also fun, so that's probably OK). Accidents happen. And, I may be wrong...I've met Evan a couple of times and he's quite smart, so he could very well be playing an even bigger game than Blogger with Twitter. There's certainly enough cell phones out there to make it so.
I think your suggestion is good. My idea IS a form of grief counseling in that the site will facilitate the act of remembering by friends and families.
Hrm most of the posts here show little understanding of Rails. Rendering, not AR is behind most complaints of "slowness". If you want to speed up rendering, limit the amount of redundant Javascript that gets generated, statically generate links, don't generate SQL (eager load) and cache where needed.
Google Street View Vehicle Revealed!
Apparently Google has been spying on us from a Chevy Astro.
I'm still on the waiting list for slicehost. Is this common or am I doing something wrong.
"I also took a look at Django, and it struck me as astonishingly clunky compared to Rails and Nitro"

hahahahahahaha...
Ruby and RoR, slow? This is a no-brainer. Ruby is slow as molasses and RoR is built upon Ruby. Hmmmmm....
To be honest, it sounds like RoR or ActiveRecord is doing something wrong.
I've used both. I actually think that Ruby is a nicer language in most respects than Python (except for way too many ways of expressing the same thing in syntax), but Python is a much better 'platform'.

Python struck me as somewhat clunky at first, but after working in it for a few months, I didn't really have any issues with the language. I think there will always be initial resistance for anyone using a different language, but I don't think your mind is necessarily set to where one language will fit it and one won't. Imperative programmers moving over to functional languages will find that functional languages don't "fit their mind", but given enough work in one will probably find that their mind changes to where functional aspects make perfect sense.

So I think that's the case with Python. Some people won't find it clunky at all, for those that do, working in it for some time will probably lead to their mind fitting the language better. Personally I'd rather do that than deal with the issues Ruby the platform has.

Anyway, Ruby and Python are a lot more alike than different.
Hm. I've never heard of it.
What an excellent demonstration
a tool for admins to move feature-request submissions to comments here
Hello Ivan, many info about me at http://invece.org , recent news at http://antirez.com but only if you read italian... btw antirez [at] gmail d o t com
Not only is this a great post, but most good blog posts could be edited this short and still make sense.
well, if you like it, at least vote me up - someone regularly trolls my posts to vote me down. I have 1 point right now, up from -6 !
You don't have to be an asshole. How hard do you think it would be grok the source of the Rails database adapters, probably not that hard.
I don't think your experiment supports your conclusions.

I don't think your assumption that it only works for dumb searchers is supported, since nothing in your materials & methods suggests that searchers were in your experimental or control groups.

All your evidence supports is that adsense does seem to work for the sorts of people who click on link spam. It may be reasonable to assume, based on their behavior, that those people are dumb. It's unreasonable to conclude, based on the behavior of greedy people who click on link spam, that anyone who clicks on a Google ad is dumb.

Check out the article on ad dynamics by the creator of the Metafilter family of sites that I posted a link to. He has a better reasoned theory about when ads work, and when they don't.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=25710
Since when is it up to 37 Signals to provide support for their framework? (Which by the way they do a pretty good job of - RailsConf anyone?) Its OPEN SOURCE so instead of whining you should go fix it, and if you don't want to fix it then go use something else.

RoR is not a panacea, but it certainly is "good enough" for a lot of things, think of all the 37 Signals apps.
What OS do you use? Under a Mac OS, I went to this temp folder: /private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/ and I copied the "FlashTmp0" file that was created there and renamed it as a flv (flash video file). I then used Quicktime and Perian plug-in to play flv file. The video from Brightcove is actually h.263 video (not h.264) so you will have to resave it as iPod compatible.

Anyway... maybe someone can help you if you don't have a Mac.
Microhacks for supersizing convertible debt
Slicehost is a Xen-based VPS, not dedicated. The difference between them and other VPS providers is that they do not oversell each box so you get a good price/performance ratio.
This is common. I've heard that some are waiting many weeks (or even months) to be granted a slice. The slicehost folks have recently introduced an option to prepay for your slice, bumping you up the queue.

I was lucky to get a slice the moment I signed up for it (early adopter I suppose). I have been very happy with their service.
It does do this, though it checks for an exact url string match. So, say, a trailing slash would make a difference.

(edit: Or it used to... I thought it did.)
HammerWhat Launches: Get hit!
I'll give it a try. Thanks.
I did vote this post up. Which is why you have 2 points on it. :)
There are a lot of valuable comments here.

If I had to summarize what I think is the likely problem, I would say: look into pre-fetching where it makes sense. Databases are often troublesome beasts, and you have to do more management of the data than you would like.
evhead: Why VC (Ev, of Twitter)
Yeah. But I was as impressed with Bill's humility, especially when he said he wished he had Steve's sense of taste.
We aren't specifically looking for C#/Java developers. We are looking for generalists. When developing desktop software, Python and Ruby just aren't viable options. Two of our guys didn't know much C# before joining us. However, they are killer hackers no matter what language they use.

QA is critical to a downloaded piece of software - you can't just update it like a webapp if you find bugs.

Integrating with desktop email clients was a tough choice for us, until we looked at the market. The majority of business professionals who use email as a critical business tool, and also happen to spend money on software, use desktop email clients.
What the..? Who upmodded this guy? Go back to Sunday school.

No experimentation! None!!!

(Unless you're joking.)
Real Networks player can rip any video format
The only times I've responded to advertisements, I've copy-and-pasted the URL of the destination and put it in the address bar, to avoid any payment from anyone.

_That's_ how bad techie people can be for business.

My mother, on the other hand, will sit and read pop ups.
Web2.0 Graphic and CSS Generators (What do you use?)
Business milestone: the Hot Chick Tipping Point
This doesn't strike me as a "nibble" but as a total renogotiation at the last minute but with the old deal as a price ceiling. The company was dealing in bad faith the entire time. They called for a close of new issues knowing that they were about to open new ones - but only for themselves. They had apparently done the same things many times to other people in the past.

You can't trust people who treat every interaction as a one-time play of the Prisoner's dilemma. A long negotiation is playing the game many times. If the other guy plays "screw" repeatedly your only option is to play it back or quit playing. (An aside: I once worked for a CEO who was an ex-DEA prosecutor. His entire experience was dealing with criminals once and this mapped very poorly to dealing with employees. I quit.)
Solution for finding help?
I've noticed a lot of front page posts seeking help/employees. This site seems to provide a useful interface http://www.buildv1.com/connect

(I'm not affiliated in any way)

Anyone got other decent sites?
forget about remembering.

think about - comfort while grieving.
Something to look into: I don't know if any of you guys went to RailsConf, but one of the goals of Rails 2.0 is to improve AR through the caching of repeated queries at the AR object level.
how are you different from rentacoder.com?

(assuming you are not competing with IBM Global Services or InfoSys for turnkey solutions)
Anyone interested in building some framework demos?
I've moved to Django, huge performance difference. Also a simpler stack, apache + mod_python vs the nginx + mongrel or apache/lighttpd + fcgi or etc....
TechCrunch: Get Smart, Play Lumosity (and take a fun IQ test)
I wonder if there are any structural differences between entrepreneurs and people in other professions...

Feel free to post what you get on the tests (which are actually kind of fun to take).
Resubmission can be useful, maybe a week to prevent accidental dupes.
Map API / Accuracy comparison (4 maps, one page)
The code to this is all in the page there, pure JS. You'll need to sign up with the map providers to use it, but other than that, feel free.
Startup search
A Niall Kennedy startup ( http://evhead.com/2007/05/startupsearch.asp ). I wonder about these metric collectors in startups. Hollywood also uses a setup like this ... a private cosy little web chat site for insiders that measures (and decides) the confidence of how a movie is progressing. One bad review there ... a bit of bad gossip, the group confidence drops and the bears start running.
No. As someone who runs a site w/ more than half a million hits a day at times, rails is butt slow. We memcache up the wazoo as well as make other optimizations.

Not only is it slow but there are memory leaks too.

I hope they fix alot of this. We went w/ rails b/c of the elegance, but paid for being on the bleeding edge.
I guess we just think differently about what makes a venture or business successful. Whatever... By support I didn't mean the "send a guy in to fix our bugs kind of support", just the level of trust you can put into a framework. You know, the "will there be anyone around in two years to still work on that" issue that seems to matter to some companies. You can just open source some random chunks of code that have been lieing around on your hard disk. Or you can "publish" something open source, which means that you will polish it a bit, add some documentation, generalise some things to make them more useful etc.

I wonder, though, if this case of Open Source fury is directly related to the Twitter vs RoR debate, and also to DHHs attitude? Serious question - I don't know about DHH well enough to judge his attitude, it's just a feeling that is in the air.
That is bad advice on so many levels.

It's the equivalent of getting punched in the mouth and then thanking the guy who hit you!

Also, if he really was tossed out unfairly, his buying stock ruins whatever legal case he might have.
No, It's not ok to just go around complaining. If you don't like it, that's fine, don't use it, but to just go around posting completely unproven slander about a completely free project is another matter completely.

I love that there are some people here that seem to think they are entitled to something or that 37s or DHH owes you something. It's open source, you have 3 options:
1. Fix it and get kudos.
2. Don't fix it (because your either too dumb or too lazy) and work around it.
3. Don't use it.

But coming on here and making some generalized proclamation that RoR is slow is irresponsible and unacceptable, IMO.
'... I am sorry, but I didnt realize that this has been posted earlier. ...'

Shouldn't have to appologise for crappy software. We have no search facilities so things like this are bound to happen. You could try looking for the search page (somewhere) but it's spidering is always behind the posting. The only alternative is for a live search to be added to the page.

Btw I've fallen down in the same way ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=24506
How can you so blindly proclaim something like this? In a world of systems programming I got used to people posting stack traces with milliseconds attached to each function call, complaining about something specific. A good example would be GNU glibc's printf() function checking system locale on every call.

Have you ever done any programming before?

Your claim Active Record is slow sounds almost like my computer is slow. How do you know it was ActiveRecord? How did you benchmark? Was it even RoR? Maybe you had another process spinning in an endless loop in the background eating your CPU.
Google Reader: "A connection to the internet could not be made. Would you prefer to read in offline mode?"
Anyone know what this is all about? There's nothing wrong with my internet connection.
Good review, especially of django. However, one tiny gripe: it's actually really easy to use an arbitrary templating system with django. Since HttpResponse objects just take strings, you don't have to use render_to_response(..), you could easily generate your html string from mako and pass that to a hand created HttpResponse (or write your own render_to_response).

I also don't think it would be very difficult to amend the url dispatch either.
Amazon's Greatest Ever Discount *Funny*
So how do you explain this? http://360east.com/blogfileupload/billgates.jpg
Fog Creek: How to Compete with Open Source
YouTube signs broad licensing pact with EMI
Yes, but real value can be _delivered_ by trickery.
If they provide offline support for Gmail ir Google Maps it might be the killer app to get Google Gears used widely.
Oh, I don't think his attitude was appropriate, but his point was justified.

I'm still not sure what you're trying to say about the Rails framework in general, I've never had an issue using it, or contributing to it.
"more excited than you"

I'm willing to guess this is true.
Oh, for the love of beans, they're taking the words straight from the mouth of St. Paul:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
eHarmony sued in California for excluding gays
I like it. It's the kind of database I'm sure some investors already maintain internally. It's neat someone is creating an open site like this. It doesn't accept user contributions though, which seems like an obvious mistake.
There's some ways to get megs of storage on the client using Flash and other things (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2007/01/ajax-performance-local-storage.html) to store a few megs of content locally. I wonder why they didn't go with that, in order to avoid the plugin?
No, not joking.

Here are some people who might have upmodded me:

http://web.mit.edu/committees/couhes/
"Carlson's lawyer Todd Schneider said the lawsuit was "about changing the landscape and making a statement out there that gay people, just like heterosexuals, have the right and desire to meet other people with whom they can fall in love.""

But you don't have the right to force a private web site to achieve that task for you, do you?
Free Software vs Free Trial
Rami, are you egyptian?

If so, let's chat!
First Round Capital stumbles upon first big exit
Does this mean I get to sue GayFriendMatch.com?
'... Startup Search is a community site for everyone interested in tracking our growing industry. ... Members of the Startup Search editorial team often know more data than they are able to report, limiting our profiles to publicly disclosed data, or data provided by affected companies and investors with the explicit intention on inclusion on this site. ...'

It's a sponsored site (trueventures). While that's ok. This is a business. But it's not entirely free as you pointed out is the contributions. Thinking about this it smacks more of a PR front for investors ( http://www.startupsearch.org/investor/ ) trying to get in on the action now Web2 is officially safe.

Now if they really get the Web2 bit they would add a RSS/ATOM data feed for fee or free. So you could digest this information with software and not just humans.
onblur Before onclick
Time is the one truly limited resource
How Many Technology Companies Suffer?
Does Google Succeed Despite Bad Design?
Testing the Three-Click Rule
Innovation is the New Black
Upvoted for pictures of hot chicks.
The Magic Marketing Formula
5-second tests: measuring site content pages
nope, sorry!
Typically discrimination (in the legal sense) doesn't work backwards. The gist of it is that the groups who can sue for discrimination have to be politically disadvantaged. If straights wanted to force GayFriendMatch.com to match straight couples, a law could easily be passed.

I sort of wonder what the real aim here is. It seems like the service is being targeted because of the religious beliefs of the founder as much as the product itself.
Point taken.

Just a nit though: how was del.icio.us making money?

I never saw one ad on there before Yahoo acquired them, come to think of it, I still don't see any ads on there.
Can you share the URL of your site?

Just curious - what are your plans going forward?

i.e. continue what you've been doing, rewrite in another language, or what?

Not that this is your scenario, but whenever I'm in a crunch situation, it always feels like the grass is always greener. When you get to the other side... well, you know how it goes.
plz post benchmarks from all levels and i'm sure the ruby / ror community would love to help.

when X page (a problem page) loads, what exact times and % of the total load time is taking place at:

http server

ror, broken down into: activerecord, non-AR logic, & rendering

web browser (pulling down JavaScript files, CSS files, etc)

(calculated for several runs, with perhaps an offpeak benchmark & onpeak benchmark to see if there's a major difference)

Chances are, 80% of your slowness can be alleviated by a few small changes in one of the above areas, but each app is different of course.
think it's even less than that =)
"If you are running a website that is the biggest site on the internet running that framework though you should have an inside-out understanding of the technology you are using."

Well, I bet that's true now.. Or will be..

But I can't imagine anyone not building or releasing a Web app until they have an inside-out understanding of the technology.

Assuming they have some means to monetize their traffic, they can now go hire someone to fix a problem most people wish they had.
Mod +1. I wrote an app in rails over a few long weekends (having never touched RoR or ruby before).

Idling on the rails irc channel helped me get through some tough spots. These days there are a ton more resources than there were 2 years ago.

Having a goal seems to help get through the tough or slow-going parts of app development. (i.e. the goal of just finishing & launching it)
Google reader is now using "Google Gears" to enable offline browsing. Maybe that has something to do with it.
Sure, if you assume that the end justifies the means.

Hint: It almost never does and you will lose more than you gain with the outcome.
Add a password reminder, and also password confirmation during registration. I mistyped one of my standard passwords when registering, and as a result I was locked out of YC News until I noticed that the password was stored in the Firefox on my laptop's Windows (blech!) partition.
maybe because i've time-profiled it?
maybe because i've calculated the time it took to instantiate a new AR object for every new db record?
maybe because the results show that the AR component took the largest portion of the page loading time?
yeah. i agree. tried python. the language is really ugly compared to ruby. django just doesn't fit into my brain like RoR does.
Blogga, please.
To be fair, the current implement of Ruby (1.8x) is slow because it does
not compile source code to byte code and run in vm, which will be available
in next version (2.0?). Python, on other hand, already use this for a long
time.

So, just stick to it and wait if you like the beauty keyword "end" and dislike
white space vs tab war.
Finally! Somebody who felt the pains of having a popular Rails site. I feel your pain my friend.
A different, but possibly correlated metric that I am considering is to base ad invasiveness on how desperate to use your service each user is.
I've already done this. Got a minor speed bump.
You have to understand that the majority of the page loading time is in the instantiation of the AR object, not from fetching the db result. At least that's my experience in my app.
Y Combinator, google maps
Indeed. I recently turned off adwords for content network and left just adwords for search on in my adwords settings. Much better performance.
Your original post doesn't mention any of this. I think it would help everyone understand your point a lot better if you posted a few specifics...
Cool. Anyone find FogCreek in NYC? Or Google's Googleplex?
New Palm Foleo is Linux Based and the Software is Open Source
Wow that's cool. Looks like tlb designed the sign :-)
What he did was a bit closer to a marketing study than a drug trial.
Locks up firefox with the latest Ubuntu:-/