skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude...I understand relational database theory, and those things are boring. I'd rather gouge out my eye with a rusty spoon than normalize schemas for SKU databases at BigCo (I wanted to gouge out my eyes when we used them as case studies while learning relational database theory!)

That's not to say that there aren't interesting engineering problems buried in there (e.g. how does one build a high-performance, distributed database architecture that can support tens of thousands of concurrent users, blah blah blah), but for the most part, the interesting portion of that kind of work is done by the (small) company that developed the scalable database technology in the first place. When you're hired as the guy who puts it all together as BigCo's real-time widget tracking system, you're mainly splicing together chunks of other people's previously interesting work.

Most paying work is boring -- that's why it pays. But if you can eliminate a class of boring work with a good piece of software, then you've got a business.
This is the feature I want most of anything. Why can't the threads page go on forever, paginated?
I wish I could buy one for my laptop. Then I could happily disappear into a national park for a few days at a time, walking and working.
Special Discounts on Clocks | Roman Blinds | Duvet | curtains
Asking Larry Wall about good OO/language/library design, or PoLS is like asking George Bush (either really) about effective foreign policy or human rights...

Even if they say something interesting, is it valuable information coming from that source? Should it be trusted?
NOLOH, pronounced no-low is an acronym for Not One Line of HTML.
yes, they did add that form after a while... (so much for one right way to do things, eh?). It seems that people still prefer the `sep.join(ary)` form more based on the code reading/debugging I've done.

"better order" is subjective and I have to disagree in this case. perl's form isn't limited like pythons as it takes any number of values after the separator. Much like ruby's "* arg" (splat arg--HN's formatting is besting me) or lisp's &rest. Lisp's (+ ...), (< ...), etc are lovely because of this property.

Twisted is an example of some of the most popular python code out there... It is representative of real world python and is what drives me away from the language (and has me running screaming away from twisted).
You're probably right about the 25 - I'm still pretty new and my karma is at 17, so I don't see downvoting. I hope the minimum number doesn't keep moving up on me as I approach it :)
"The comprehensions from twisted were not written for clarity so they aren't good examples"

no... they're real examples.
"Exploratory programming" in action :D
nifty application --
My guess is that this was done to prevent trolls from going through someone's entire comment history and downmodding everything. (Not that this is impossible to do currently, but it's tougher than it would be if a user's comments were paginated out to infinity).

Or it could just be a feature that was left out for lack of time/motivation.
Very true, and good advice... I just want them to not dilute too much and learn the language at least enough to decide if they like it or not.
Why should I pay for this AWS design decision?
This article was apparently written in 1993 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Albini#References) and has made the rounds on Reddit more than once, but it's still a great insight into how record companies work and big companies take advantage of small producers of content.
"There is no YC kabal"
It's possible that it has always been 25... I've been wrong before, and I'll be wrong again ;)
Yes, short matters. If you can say the same thing, with fewer syllables / less letters, while keeping 2 - 5 in check, it's a no brainer.

Of course, if you can support your long domain, such as "ISoldMyHouse.com" with hundreds of weekly radio placements featureing a "catchy" tune, you can probably drive home a longer name too.

There are no hard and fast rules, but the guidelines that I mentioned above are tried and true.
Quick thing. Don't worry about alphabetizing the news sources at the top. Put them in order of importance and let users change this if possible. No one cares about fairness. It's about the best being at the tip of your fingers.
http://wordpress.com ?
Here's a random idea... Display a text box that requires a reason for flagging the post or comment.

That would cut down on flagging for the sake of flagging.
The vertical alignment between the labels and fields is off (at least in Safari 3 and Firefox 2).

I haven't found a workable alternative to using tables for this.
Redeye VC: The Death of Stealth Mode
The Dash Express is pretty damn good. This might change your mind:

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/05/25/review-dash-express-gps
I agree with the voting thing. Although with me, I'm just more likely to accidentally vote something up or down from not being precise enough when clicking. I pay a lot more attention to the precise location of my cursor now, but it used to be bad.
Thanks. Would you mind moving the flag link location to not be on the rightmost edge? I think if you see below others also feel the same way. The right edge is the first place I instinctively click, and flag is the least likely use case.
I took an Asperger's test online and scored just below the threshold for the syndrome. I wonder how many other coders are in the same category.

Of course now I'm like Peter Griffin on Family Guy when he tested as "retarded" I have an excuse to blame all my quirks on, be they symptoms Asperger's or not. Walking down the hall with my fly open? If someone calls me on it I just say "Hey, get off of my case! I'm nearly autistic!"*

*Note: I don't actually do that. :-)
"What Jeremy is not good at is suffering fools in the workplace or dealing with the endless bureaucracy of the modern corporation. If someone is wrong — if their idea just plain won't work — he says so, simply states the fact. That frankness causes all manner of upset in the office, he's discovered. [...] Jeremy has high-functioning autism (HFA)."

Yes. Clearly. Jeremy has a mental illness.

The public school system repeatedly tried to "diagnose" my son with Aspergers. His handwriting is awful, and the only way they can secure OT to deal with it is to assign him an IEP, which is a formal assessment that something is "fundably" wrong with him. "Luckily" for him, my son is also shy and doesn't like loud noises. Shy? Issues with sensory overload? Bad handwriting? Autism!

What I've learned from this is that nobody has a fucking clue what any of this stuff means. There's an "epidemic" of autism being reported in the media, and, what do I know, maybe there really is something to it. But what there also is is a broad class of behaviors (not disorders --- BEHAVIORS) that will be diagnosed as "Autism Spectrum Disorders" when people don't know what else to do with them.
What I really don't like is their terrible C++ style. Working with Objective-C on the iPhone or Java on Android is just so much more developer friendly.
"you get to change the colour of the orange bar at the top when you're at or above 250 karma"

Thanks for pointing that out. I now have a blue top bar!
John Resig - Simple Extensions in Firefox 3
Dude...there are 2 kinds of things we can work on: things for ourselves (internal) and things for others (external).

"Building a high-performance, distributed database architecture that can support tens of thousands of concurrent users, blah blah blah" is an internal project. One we do for ourselves. So that we (as users) have what we need to do our jobs for others.

Personally, I prefer external projects. Both of my mentors were engineers. Everywhere we went, they had something to say about what they observed:

"I wonder what would happen if they put a Coke machine right there..."

"The plane landed 17 minutes ago, and so far 0 bags have been removed..."

"If we move the inspection table to the center of the department, we will save an average of 116 steps per person per inspection..."

That's how I think now. I have real world customers and prospects with problems like these all the time. I love it. I'm always on the lookout for problems to solve with my apps.

I simply don't care about working on any internal projects unless I have to. There is probably a solution somewhere that one of you guys already did. So I'll use it to help me do my job.

Sorry you find what turns me on as boring. I guess that's what makes horse races.

If we ever meet, remind me to hide all the rusty spoons.
Bring. It. On.
26% and 20% were US figures, that was a little mixed up I think - sorry. The rest was global.
You use stuff when it's relevant and applicable and not by applying various "century" flags.
From the examples page, it looks like Kira supports closures through normal PHP classes:

http://www.mathgladiator.com/projects/kira/?examples
Functional Metaprogramming Stunts for Ruby and Groovy
Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing
I can see a lot of use for this in monitoring frameworks and admin interfaces.
It's interesting that it's focused just on forms. I can see how this would be a useful because it's meant to work with rather than to replace the more comprehensive CSS frameworks (Blueprint, YUI's grids.css) and to tackle layouts for one of the thornier parts of css-only html, although I can't be sure without giving it a whirl.
i submitted this because i kind of think its insightful and has parallels in the world of startups and tech. thoughts?
Almost no (current) social networks provide a service - they provide a distraction. And we're supposed to be surprised that they're having a hard time making money?
On one page:
http://edge.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend...

I hate those multi-page ad-pushers (even with adblock - the clicking requirement is just annoying). It would be nice if submitters would check whether there's a one-page option available, and use that link if it is.
Does anyone?

Yes
Huh? What? More explanation please?
I think it's an awesome feature to add to an existing GPS. It'll most likely be in the next iPhone.

Investing $71m though? Customers paying $10/month for this??? It's not that awesome.
Ask HN: Why is world of warcraft so successful?
Why is world of warcraft so successful? What about it made it that it became the largest and most profitable MMO game of all time? Is it the first MMO that tried to appeal to non-hardcore gamers? Or a lot more than that? The reason why I ask is that I would like to try to replicate it's social & 'marketing' ideas to a facebook app.
:) I expect that's one of the fatal flaws with it.
Anyone have an online sample?
Well, one thing that definitely contributed was that Blizzard had already established the scene for with Warcraft III, so people sort of knew what type of world to expect. Also, Blizzard's other games (Starcraft and Warcraft mainly) were a huge success, so that gave WoW more credibility.
Another thumbs up from OWC. Awesome prices.
it appealed to both hardcore and casual gamers, and at least for a while, was successful in that respect. it didn't require the latest and greatest gaming rig to run it and enjoy it. there is a huge social aspect to it, which i think luckily coincided with the development of solid VOIP technology to make it more than just text-based communications. it came from an established company with a guaranteed fanbase -- it didn't have to build itself up from the ground level.

i used to play.
The typical car carries 3000 lbs of car and less than 200 lbs of person. Even a fully loaded car with 5 adults is probably 20% payload, 80% vehicle. There's a lot of room for more efficient transportation without qualitative changes in how it's carried out.
Yeah, let me know when Garmin or Tomtom have it. Also let me know when they're going to release it for free. Considering that they charge $100 each year for the map updates, I highly doubt it would be cheap.

The UI for the Dash is also considerably better than Garmin, which is also considerably better than Tomtom. As it stands by itself, the Dash is a pretty darn good GPS unit.

Also, as for the iPhone competing with it. Maybe, but we made it kind of hard to position it that way.
Me too. I think the introduction of the functional module will actually be good, because there's less resistance to adding clever features for higher-order functions in the standard library than there is in the core language (in Python, at least, since it aims to be small and beginner-friendly). Look at the itertools module to see how that turned out -- lots of useful tricks borrowed from the ML family, and you can "buy it by the yard".
I love it, I just started building the same thing for personal use myself.

... after review though - this isn't really very good yet.
They make money. It's just not explosive growths.
According to w3schools.com's browser stats -- which, by the way, are slanted toward people with an interest in web design -- IE6's share has only been dropping by about 1.5% a month for the last year, and is still around 26%. It's safe to assume IE6 support will remain completely unavoidable for any serious business, especially those pitching to a more traditional (read "technologically backwards") audience.
- Quality. Blizzard-level of quality is hard to attain; they perfect every little detail.

- Approachability. From newbies to hardcore players, it entices them in and keeps them entertained.

- Sociability. More times than not, people just chat while standing around and make friends. Or join guilds and participate in the bigger quests.

- Addictive. For the Diablo hack and slash crowds.
I assume the latter. After a week or so (I think), the downmod button disappears from all comments.
The social element, the rich and expandable storylines, and the relatively low hardware threshhold to play it. Internationalization helped a ton, as well. In China, it's a pop-culture phenomenon -- advertisements for other brands use WoW characters a lot.

And, of course, Blizzard/WoW has a sustainable business model.

I have to say, however, that the UI and some of the complexity related to tools and weapons is a bit of a turn-off, and is probably a barrier to more widespread subscriptions, IMHO.
Why Snow Leopard Will Bury Vista and Windows 7 | Tech Jaws
or porting desktop app interfaces to the web to save having to retrain users in business environments.
My wife, who spent time around heaps of social workers, starting creating a list of vocations and which psychiatric disorders that might help them.

Asperger's: engineers/coders

Narcissism: politicians

Egotism: CEOs

Lawyers: OCD

others?
That is actually really cool. I thought it was going to be an article/metaphor about technology tightening the spiral of efficiency to the point the side effects that served its creators as the purpose are seen as dead weight.

Or a slight at ruby on rails/35 signals quest to deliver the minimum amount of functionality and charge for it. you know rails, trains, passengers/customers etc.
As far as I heard the TomTom has the same feature - you just connect it up via a phone - which seems a better idea.

I don't know though - it's just not something I'd pay for. Especially $10 a month.
You know what would be awesome? A way to ignore submissions from a certain domain or the posters that keep spamming the same domain.

Or at least a means to include multiple sources. SAI doesn't think this is happening.

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/microsoft_and_yahoo_in_ta...
Interesting post on an often overlooked filing that has outed more than a few startups.

The part that get's me is about the updated Form D for next year. " ... so that companies no longer need to disclose names of investors that own more than 10% of a class of securities."

So if an investor invests in exchange for more than 10% their info is kept off the Form D? Am I reading this correctly.
The flag link is appearing on [deleted] posts. Just thought you'd want to know.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226682
It would be even better if they were accurate. http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/080624/yhoo.html
The flag link is appearing on [deleted] posts. Just thought you'd want to know.
I saw this at least a month ago. Is this a reprint or am I losing it?

The date on the article is Monday, 23 June, 2008. However my super IT Aperger's power gives me total recall abilities so I know I saw this before.
Am I the only one that finds the idea of a CSS framework funny? After I heard about Blueprint I now see new CSS frameworks popping up left and right. My language fails me at the moment but I have put off posting on this for a few "CSS Framework" articles on HN until now. I just don't like them, there will never be a framework friendly enough to compete with all the different print and web designers that decide to throw a website together. If that framework did exist it would be enormous and then not usable for the reason of bloat. They walk a fine line between niche code snippets and an elephant code base of CSS styles.
WoW has very repetitive PvM gameplay (so do its competitors). No one seems to mind very much. I guess Blizzard's designers understand what most people want in a game much better than I do (I love Warcraft 3. I tried to play WoW, but got bored.)
This is actually pretty nifty.
Extravagance in movies seems to pay off more than splurging does in startups. I am guessing because it builds hype and thats what sells tickets.
VOIP isn't it. Only the hardcore had third-party VOIP applications like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, and in-game VOIP is a very recent thing.

Instead, I can break the game's success into three aspects: initial install, short-term retention, and long-term retention.

Getting people to even pick up a game (or register with a webapp) is one of the hardest parts. World of Warcraft came into the space with a huge lead in that respect. With the established base of extremely loyal fans, and giant brand recognition in its space, it was sure to get massive attention. The vast majority of new products cannot hope for a thousandth of the eager launch-day users WoW had. Blizzard reaped the fruits of years of brand-building and marketing.

Short-term retention is covered in other comments. The game runs well on old hardware, looks pretty due to great art direction, plays smoothly, doles out a lot of quick rewards, and so on. Over the first few weeks, the player is bombarded with tons of fun things to do and sharp increases in character power.

Long-term retention is the real magnet, though: the game never becomes a chore until the very end. All the way to the max level, the player is led from locale to locale, challenge to challenge, in a masterly display of game design. Compare the solo-friendly WoW leveling experience with the infamous "hell levels" of Everquest.

And what's more, people seem to keep playing at the maximum level, even if they are NOT tackling the high-end raid content. (For the uninitiated, a "raid" is an extremely difficult, often murderously difficult game area whose enemies can only be defeated with a level of teamwork, personal skill, and above all time investment beyond the capabilities of most players.)

Raid gamers are not where Blizzard is making its bread and butter. Instead, the people WoW is retaining are the people who are doing repetitive, seldom-updated content in exchange for slow, incremental, but guaranteed rewards. For example, there is a Capture the Flag team-battle level that has not changed in years -- and people still play it, over and over, in exchange for a handful of points each time. Thousands and thousands of these points can be traded in for a top-notch weapon.

The final major retention pull for WoW is the social aspect: after a while, you aren't playing so you can have fun. You're playing so OTHER people can have fun. You don't want to let down your team, so you log in for scheduled events whether you like it or not. This afflicts raid and "casual" players alike, to different degrees.

So, you want to make a Facebook app that taps into the same qualities as WoW? Make it extremely fun to use at first; give users a sense of reward and increasing power/ability; then make the rewards come slower and slower, in less and less value, for the same amount of work. Just like the diminishing returns from a drug addiction... oh, and somehow monetize it.
So, you have no idea why it's successful, and yet you want to replicate it on a facebook app? A facebook app is not a mmorpg, so you'd have to understand in depth the success of WoW to map it onto a completely different environment, drawing analogies from one world to the other.

It would be the same to ask, Why is the Porsche so successful? I want to replicate its ideas on a facebook app...
I knew it:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...

The author must have gotten married she's now Tracy Mayor Framingham instead of Tracy Mayor. Apparently you can then reprint all of your old articles.
Post mortem: The inside story behind the collapse of chip startup Montalvo Systems
What threshold? I hate to think about karma... I think it's bad for our community.
I enthusiastically agree. I don't have time to keep a blog. If I did, I'd feel obligated to add to it and that's the last thing I need. The great thing about HN is that I just comment spontaneously when I'm moved to do so, and on several occasions this has led me to express thoughts that have been kicking around in my head for a long time, but which I never wrote down before. It would be nice to have access to the history of this.

It would be even more useful to have the full history of other users' comments too. One of my favorite things to do on this site is run across an intelligent remark and then look back to see what else that person has had to say.
I would argue distraction is a service, but not an easy one to monetize, at least in this form.
The Stalled Server Room
Fair point. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it being entirely pop-up window based, which I presume is the alternative to MDI.
I played it for quite a while, which is really unusual for me (I generally get bored of a game after about 20 minutes.) There were a few factors for getting it:

- My friends were going to play it. So I added my pre-order to the list.

- It was really easy to get into, with some fun intro quests.

- The point and click skill level was really low.

The reasons I carried on playing were (somewhat) different:

- I made lots of friends and acquired power and influence (establishing a raiding guild.)

- Regular rewards. Damn you Pavlov and your accursed bell.

- Customisable interface. It was my game in their environment.

And the reasons I left:

- I felt I had gained as much out of the leadership experience as I was going to get.

- My other projects were being neglected and I wanted to catch up.

- Frequency of reward dropped (as I mostly had them all).

All in all it was a pretty worthwhile. Certainly managing a raiding guild, running an engineering team, and herding cats have many things in common. (Scarcity of loot/loot/fish for example.) And after a year break from personal projects I bounced back into it with a vengeance and extra energy - I got a book published, passed the first of my finance exams, and got back into programming all at the same time.
I have one ram (purebred, Castlemilk Moorit)which services all my ewe's needs
IAC's Vimeo - hey, people are watching our videos
I'm still not convinced that conventional windows work inside a browser. I think it confuses the user, and makes for bloat and mess.

Yeah it's cool you can do things like emulating desktop windows, resize, drag, minimize etc, but just because you can do this, doesn't mean you should.

There's a lot to be said for keeping things clean and simple. Keep things accessible.
I would also add a voting feature.
What did you use to write this? RoR?
CNet.com Gets a Facelift...
Come on, iPhone will go fine, nothing can stop it. Only Android has some chances, but nobody knows when they will appear. It's a future, man, and it will do without Flash support.
I liked it because when I first saw the headline, I couldn't imagine how a train could do that. Watched the video and it seems so obvious now. Innovation is cool.