skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wanted: CSS / Offered: Rails
I need a designer to work with me to produce a front end/UI for my web app. I'm posting on here to see if anyone is interested in a skills exchange? I'm proficient in php and ruby/rails but would prefer to work on the latter. I propose a straight 1:1 swap of design hours for programming hours

If anyone is interested please post here or email me: ermok@tiscali.co.uk
We initially put about 5 days (2 people working almost 24 hours a day it seemed) into getting the concept from paper to a working site in time to make a deadline for a VC funding submission (which we didn't get). The crawler, ripper, indexer, DB and the website have been tweaked almost daily over the last 6 months or so. The interface is under a re-design and so is most of the back-end (crawling needs to be done better, uploading to S3). It all runs on 2 linux machines and ripped data is stored on Amazon's S3 service. So-far the only money that we put into it ourselves is $20 for a logo off ebay that we're not even using and the S3 charges, which are about $20/mo at this point. Other hardware and bandwidth is just our own personal machines and internet connections, so that's 'free'. :) We don't have any investors. See our Investors page: http://mediawombat.com/wiki/index.php/Investors
The Human Interface (Principles of Interface Design, wiki)
I didn't know voting was a privilege, not a right.
TextMate is not free software.

Also, emacs lets you redefine nearly any of the functionality on the fly without restarting (everything except the very core which is written in C). I'm not sure if TextMate can do that, as I try to use as little proprietary software as possible.
I think it would have been more appropriate to have linked directly to the XKCD comic in question instead of to blog spam.
FAIL. sorry =(

http://www.vcwear.com/fund-the-shirts/
Well, no. I think the point of the blog post was that adding features is expensive (more so than the simple development costs) and that adding needless features is incurring needless expense. That much is spot on.

The problem was that, as reality demonstrated, a "needless" feature is something that is very much in the eye of the beholder. Some folks really loved this gadget, apparently (I know zilch about the whole affair). So maybe it's a poor example of an otherwise valid point.
Isn't this the EXACT thing that happened to Friendster? If someone had made the same prediction about them around this time, they would be absolutely correct.
Would you need to sell Silverlight indexing to msft?
Time Warner: AOL Officially For Sale
That just happens to be my hometown... roughly.
Don't worry, MacBook Pros will still be standard. Right along side the equally standard WinTel PC running Outlook so they can check their corporate email.
Anecdotal evidence is amusing. Of all the vista users I know, only one actually likes it, the rest hate it for being slow, annoying, and getting in the way of their work.
REST Anti-Patterns
25 Absolute Essentials for Networking Success
I think it's brilliantly executed. The /index.php page tells me everything I need to know -- contrary to what some people are saying, I found the cart instantly understandable. (To be clear, I'm talking about the version with "These are all the shirts. If a shirt is counting down it is in someone else's shopping cart. When someone clicks ..." in red. I'm not sure if that was there when you first posted or not.)
with 82M subscribers, 82-164K using this feature, and 1286 comments -- a large majority of the userbase was getting no value out of it, while a small proportion was.... it's not so easy to define 'value' in a scenario like this.
Yea, we only submitted our site to one VC group so-far, and the competition was fierce (380 submissions and only 10 were chosen for funding). I've never dealt with Investors of any kind before, so it's kind of a new game to me. I'm comfortable with a keyboard and a compiler, not so much with business people and I suck at golf. :)

It's interesting that even this article on YC has inspired people to submit their own personal Flash websites, so we'll crawl them and index them, so there's some interest. How much interest is still yet to be seen. We're not into the 10k uniques or anywhere close to it, so that's a catch-22.

I'm intimidated by Google and Yahoo going into this market full-steam and us being the only bug to squash. They might not even care about us and just roll over the top of us, but I think - at least listening to what others have suggested is that the key is to out-innovate Google and Yahoo and just do a better job. Ask.com has great search results, but hardly anyone even knows that they exist. Personally, I think that google likes that their search results are lame - they sell more ad clicks that way. Google's search results are just 'good enough' to keep people from abandoning their site and going somewhere else. Also all of the other web-apps give customers a warm-fuzzy about using a Google service. I know that we have all of that to compete with, but I'm still optimistic. :)
Side by side MVC framework comparison Part 1: Creating a New Application
Sorry, I can't seem to change the url. Here's the original url http://xkcd.com/163/.
Cool; I will try it again. This looks very promising.
Congrats on launching! The SOLD boxes shouldn't be links... it's confusing that my mouse changes on mouseover but clicking them doesn't do anything. When a shirt times out and is released, its box stays dark grey... shouldn't it be light grey? And how about using red/yellow/green for sold/in progress/available instead of white/dark grey/light grey?
Netbeans is nice, but I am actually in the process of leaving it for straight emacs. Netbeans stalls out, is a memory hog, and crashes nearly daily for me right now. I also found that I really only use it as a SVN GUI, and file manager. I the code completion is slow and never useful to me, many of the auto complete features are just annoying. My Ruby tools like autotest, irb, debugger, and rake tasks are just more responsive on the command line (some don't really work at all inside Netbeans).

I really liked it for awhile, but I started realizing that I didn't use or really like most of the advanced features, and all the work it does trying to provide those features are makes it slow.

Do anyone else's Netbeans seem to index things for the first hour the program is opened?
Yeah I would love to know more about the gems people are using but couldn't really come up with a nice clean way to collect that information.
Exactly. I'd still love to see real study on whether unit testing is worth it (which our survey doesn't even begin to address, since it's very hard to measure). I think some good studies on that would be invaluable, but it's nearly impossible to control for all the variables, so I'm not holding my breath.

Failing that, most of the "evidence" one way or the other is based on asking people who test or don't test - and probably most testers would say that testing is great while non-testers would say testing wouldn't catch the kinds of bugs that matter. On the flip side, you have some testers saying it's not valuable (because their test quality is bad) and some non-testers saying they are sure tests would help, but only because they imagine tests to be a silver bullet.

In any case, our survey was just supposed to get a rough feel for how many people were doing testing (and what tools they used). What surprised me most was that even small teams (1 and 2 people) often had a test suite. This flew in the face of the anecdotal evidence we had previously gotten from other startups (almost none of ones we have talked to use tests).
Another good example of this is in microprocessor architecture.

A long time ago instructions were added to the x86 architecture to make life easier for assembly programmers. These instructions are large and take many clock cycles to execute.

Today since most people don't code in assembly and because modern processors have longer pipelines these instructions are rarely used. However Intel and AMD still have to support them on every x86 chip to maintain backwards compatibility despite the fact that they aren't adding much "value".
hey, sometimes if you want a shirt for $1 you have to wait a month to get it.
That's the new version.
Don't be sorry, just be glib. :-P
you have the ring tone but you could always link the sheet music for another source of revenue
But that's the wrong dichotomy. The problem is you're stuck in a particular mode of "usability" analysis. Basically, if you're the kind of person for whom TextMate (or whatever -- any GUI editor ir IDE fits the same model) is good enough, and you don't know why you would want to try emacs, you are not going to like emacs.

The point is you have to "get" it. There's a point of epiphany after you've been using it for a while where you realize that you're not just changing your tool, you're changing the way you work and think about problems. This is the moment where "usability" suddenly acquires an entirely new definition for you, and you're hooked.

But you need to junk TextMate first. You can't just try emacs, you have to live it, at least for a while. How's that for a zen answer? :)
If there's no financial pressure to stop doing the startup right now I say go for it. Grad school will always be there later in the future.
They could've pulled the feature if they really wanted to.

People might have yelled and screamed for a bit but they would get over it eventually.
Some great data sourcing, which really makes it compelling. Do you mind if I asked where you got the db from? (just out of curiosity)
Yep. I agree. And, it's not like grad school pays very well. I think his grant is for 10-15K/yr.
Indeed. There are bad coders everywhere. The problem with outsourcing is generic: you're hiring consultants, not hackers. There are "good" consultants out there, but even the best of them are basically bean counters.

And no doubt there are plenty of great Indian hackers out there, but they're not on the consulting market.
Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures
I wish Twitter would partner with Gnip
The problem is to many people value bling over any actual useful features. Here's to Apple TV bringing rentals direct to your TV.
The only thing that makes TextMate different from NotePad is the Bundle...

Even if this were true -- which it isn't -- the ability to write, distribute, and install open-source extensions to the editor is a hugely important feature. It is, after all, the central feature of emacs itself.
Exceptions suck, but I really think this is going the wrong way.

Exceptions usually suck because people are trying to graft some kind of complicated event handling system on it, to which it's not suited. Frankly, this sort of thing is better handled by co-routines. Exceptions suck because they're the often the only way to do something without more explicit control flow.

On top of this, we're supposed to be able to check everything and write error checked code, but suppressing errors can be surprisingly beneficial: observe, say, DRYing out deep checks http://code.causes.com/blog/drying-out-deep-checks.

One of the reasons GOTO sucked so much was because at the time it was all we had. Now it isn't. Explicit control flow is useful and important for certain tasks (like network programming).
I haven't given Emacs a fair shake yet, but it's definitely in my to-do list. Maybe with Viper to mitigate the shock...
One report I heard is that the rate is about one third of an equivalent UK person now. It used to be a much greater difference, but the Indian rates are going up as the developers get paid more.
The theory about the black death being the origin isn't correct. While it does provide resistance to the plague, studies have shown that it originated well before that time.

However, people without CCR5 receptors are slightly more susceptible to some diseases, such as West Nile Virus.
If we are playing the anecdote game, in my high school, girls did best in math class (straightforward math problems--evaluate this integral), but boys did the best in math team (more creative and applied questions).
Sockets, HTTP, XMPP, and Leap Frog
What is your name? Bill Gates

What is your quest? To conquer the world with Visual Basic.

At what index shall arrays start? One... no, zero... (arghhhhhhh.....)
100,000 source files? and you haven't quit? you deserve eclipse. :P
Ustream.tv Just Got a Redesign, But Justin.tv Is Still Beating Its Pants Off
Great, now can you unban me? :-)
I would add the only reason we tried it in the first place is that it was a free offer. So we weren't really "serious shoppers", and did not shop around.
The Why of Gnip: Stop building what everyone else is building
I was the one asking the parent question (something about a comparison between Vim and Emacs). I have, since then, spent at least 20 or so hours struggling with Emacs...

And although I wasn't sure at first, I'm pretty sure it's worth it. Though many of the things in Emacs are nowhere near perfect (like the in-buffer terminal, blech!), it feels like something that can go much farther than Vim in terms of I'm-going-to-turn-my-text-editor-into-a-full-fledged-IDE type stuff. I still don't know if I'm going to stay with it, but I've promised to myself that I'll use nothing else to edit text for a month. When that's done, I'll decide, though I suspect by then I won't want to switch.
"... John McCarthy has already agreed to give a talk about the early history of Lisp, returning to OOPSLA after his successful keynote talk at OOPSLA 2007. ..."

Anyone going?
The study, however, leaves us with yet another question of this sort: why do boys appear to read so poorly? We clearly can't ascribe it to social inequality, but that doesn't mean it isn't due to some other social factor.

This is just stupid. The study (or any other I've ever seen) as described offers no such clarity. My reaction to any such study that offers such grand social pronouncements is extreme skepticism.

For once, I'd like to read an article about a study that only concludes what the statistics in the study will actually support, and nothing more.
thanks. http://techentreprise.comingsoooon.com
I disagree with this.

Whatever you do, some subset of your users will moan. You need to see what sort of % of your userbase is pissed, see if you can please everyone (User prefs or something) etc

This post seems more like an excuse as to why some products have hardly any features to me.
I already tipped it :)

http://tipjoy.com/joy/28560/

There is no reason a page should go down because of bandwidth limits. Just ask the readers/viewers to support the cost. One tip in 10,000 should suffice.
How much would it cost to just pre-print 100 of them? You could always do an end of the year grab-bag of any that didn't sell (like woot.com's woot-offs).

You'd probably not come out ahead on all designs, but I'm sure people paying $100 for the shirt would love to have it asap.
I have been following both Ustream.tv and Justin.tv since they launched last year. They are both great sites, however, it is amazing how blatant Ustream copies Justin.tv's interface. Almomst every time Justin.tv comes up with some cool redesign for its site, Ustream.tv eventually copies them. Yeah the color schemes are different, but Ustream is stealing the principle layout of Justin.tv's redesigns. Take a look for yourself. Ustream.tv just launced a new version of their site. Now compare that with the current Justin.tv site. That should speak for itself.

Maybe this is one of reasons why Ustream is so far behind in terms of traffic. As a lot of you may already know, building a website without unique design principles, usually puts a site in perpetual cathup mode. And you never want to play this game with a competitor.
Study finds long-term benefit in illegal mushroom drug
Strings does not work at all. It spits out nothing but junk. There's not a single chuck of legible content.

If you want something quick and easy you can just look for instances of 'getURL' objects. These will always have the index of a string in the constant pool as an argument. From there you simply grab the value at that index and you have the URL.

Something even more primitive would only look for interesting strings in the constant pool. The constant pool is found at the top of an action block and you don't need to implement any instructions to get to it. By the way, the constant pool is the only place where you will find any "blobs of text".

If a variable or concatenated strings are passed to a getURL function in ActionScript then it's different. This is a 'getURL2' object. In this case you get an index to a table that contains variable names. From there you would have to look up the value of the variable, but you only have that if you've actually implemented all the instructions and you've been keeping track.

Text is... complicated... It's not just chunks of text or even character arrays. It's arrays of objects that contain all sorts of information, the most interesting bit being the particular glyph in a given font that should be displayed.

You can find a surprising number of external references just by looking in the constants pool of for instances of getURL without actually implementing a VM, but anything beyond that is a lot of work.

The JavaDocs for TransformSWF (which Describe SWF is built using) have quite a bit of useful information too.

Anyway, your original point that there's a simple solution that's at the very least a good start is still valid because a high number of external references in Flash can be found with minimal effort. For whatever reason, the major search engines chose to ignore Flash. Maybe they were waiting for a good solution instead of a good enough solution, but my guess is no one cares except Adobe.

http://www.flagstonesoftware.com/transform/datasheets/index....
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. (And a sure way to stay months behind your competition)
"We're not into the 10k uniques or anywhere close to it, so that's a catch-22."

Seriously, solve that problem or have a VERY credible story on how you could in a very capital efficient manner with a little money. If you aren't growing organically (and FAST), you need to very critically ask yourself why. If your solution is YCombinator, TechStars, getting TechCrunched, etc-- you need to realize that none of those things generate growth. If you can't grow 100 visitors to 1000, you're not going to fare much better with the 10k uniques that a TechCrunch post gives you.

My gut tells me that the only people who want to search a database of ONLY Flash sites are Flash designers/developers... The rest of the world doesn't want a vertical search engine-- they just want the best results (whether it's Flash, HTML, or a PDF).

Maybe there's a niche business there, but there almost certainly isn't an investor on the planet who would fund it without proof of dramatic traction and growth. We're fundraising right now, have the YC stamp, a great growth rate, paying customers, bafflingly good PR coverage, and we still get plenty of investors who balk due to the perceived size of the opportunity.
Soon we'll see whether or not Apple gets viruses proportional to its marketshare. This old, tired debate has been going on for way too long.
after his successful keynote talk at OOPSLA 2007

The talk wasn't all that successful. It was about Elephant (his new language) and a friend who was there told me it was "rambling" and hard to understand. Apparently things brightened up, though, when McCarthy started answering questions about Lisp.
Voting is a right you might lose if you use it wrong.
Well, I found the list to be very useful. I did not know about "/jo[ha]n", for example.
I actually went to the B&O "flagship store" in copenhagen, and it wasn't really all that impressive. Their TVs & Speakers seem pretty cool, but being a student, I can get a lot more bang for my buck elsewhere. (obviously i'm not B&Os market)
The friends I know who use Justin.TV all use it to watch sports, e.g. NBA Finals, Eurocup 2008, Olympic Trials.
I would highly suggest you get a license to feature the lyrics on your site if you intend on going mainstream. Aside from legal troubles you could face, I think intellectual property should be respected. Using someone's copyrighted material without their consent is never ok.
I'm not debating, just simply saying I was interested in purchasing a t-shirt, but when I saw the ship date, I decided not to. The $1 purchase price was not available to me, so I don't really see that as a valid point.

I've only bought something with a ship date as long/longer when they were shoes hand-made in Iraq.
Diary of a deliberately spammed housewife
10 Reasons Enterprises Aren't Ready to Trust the Cloud
Private beta (waiting is so poetic)
Twitter's Potential for Business Users
It may be "dangerous", but basing causation just on correlation (or statistical data in general) is actually a pretty prominent idea: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/.
Chris Anderson obviously glosses over many tricky details, but Judea Pearl among others have written extensively on it. Ultimately, all these ideas can probably be traced back to David Hume (at least here in the West).

Hank's argument that Chris is suggesting that we don't try to find spurious correlations is rather simplistic since a probabilistic theory of causation can account for "spurious" and "real" correlations quite well. Indeed, the only reason why we know that "spurious" correlations exist is because they eventually show up in the data (i.e. the economist finds out that the stock market does not predict sun spots). Thus, a statistical definition of causation (more or less one that only uses a notion of correlation), can actually be quite robust.
8 Golden Rules of Interface Design
Ask YC: Links in submission text?
What do you guys think about having linkable text when folks ask questions?

When people ask about their start-up, we are stuck with doing a copy-and-paste to view the site.

I don't see a downside to this, if the submission is spam, it won't rank high for long.

http://www.make-me-linkable.com/
Ok. I thought I read something where somebody was furious because their thesis had grown large enough that suddenly Emacs couldn't load it (or process the LaTeX?). I'm pretty sure it was Emacs 20, though. I'm glad it's not the case anymore.
That is a pretty good example, actually. Yes, if it is an expression whose value cannot be known until the browser figures it out, then there could be value in having CSS support it.

But JavaScript supports dynamic lookup of style information, and has math expressions. It may be that CSS is still the best place for such an enhancement, but the trick is to always look for the best place to make these changes. Would a JavaScript onLoad script like "page.styles['x'].margin.left = page.width_in_pixels()*0.20 - 20" be as good, better or worse? I'm not even sure myself.