skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great idea: before releasing a feature to users, start serving web pages that access the feature programmatically and monitor how your system responds.

One thing I love about web development is how much scope there is for experiments like this, and how quickly the good ones get disseminated.
The nice thing about this application is that if one does not write for a while they can simply email "Where have you been? What's new?" and the user is very likely to hit REPLY. The rest of the story is that your answer is turned into a new post.
Valve: Why the PC is the future
You have a responsibility to do something...

I don't think so... a responsibility to whom?
The torrent for the Slime screencast has no seeders. The video is also available here:

http://www.guba.com/watch/3000054867
/gratz on your release and good luck to Posterous

Feedback:

1. It's not simpler, engaging a series of emails (if you want to have a Posterous address other than something like xY4.zgBX) is not as easy as 1-click.

2. You can post by email to Tumblr — photos too.

3. Missing custom CSS, or even option to select a different theme and/or color scheme is a big deficit.

4. Engaging in comment threads through email seems more annoying than Jar Jar.
99 Designs [http://99designs.com/]
I just set my delay to 1 minute. That should be more than enough to proofread and check typesetting of average length comments.
i haven't laughed that hard at a video in a long time...awesome.
As someone who often posts comments and then edits or deletes them after a minute or two, I like this feature. For some reason it's always easier to figure out if your sense of humor isn't actually funny or if you're being an asshole after you hit the submit button.
Point taken, I guess i am looking more for a formula.

Such as: If total interest in application, x, results in willingness to provide, y, amount of information. This part i understand enough also assuming the constants being what is considered adequate.

I guess the question was more relevant to persistency rates of usage as a result of y, the amount of information they have provided. If you have invested time and value in a system it would be difficult to just drop the system.

Do these easy sign up places allow for the ability to add this information later. Since in most instances this information will make it easier to serve a better product by truly knowing who is the customer.
Who uses twitter? (And why it matters)
it's a nice feature but I assume your audience is also mainstream users.

So, those people who are not technical users, most probably use webmail. Even, if they do have another address (from their university) they would still probably login from the web or prefer not to use that address but that of their IM.

just my thoughts..
...I'd have to agree if it was coming out today. Good thing D3 isn't coming out until Summer 2009 (my educated guess). Furthermore, you've got SC2 this holiday season (also, just a guess) and then D3 to follow that as it was announced second.
Scratch that then, the stats are the stats :)

Don't know if you're up to share the information, but what was the difference in conversion rates? Really interested in how big of a difference there was between the two. Also, what is the difference in time on site of new users between the two signup methods? Retention stay about the same?
Yeah, of course every person isn't like that. It's still true that the majority of people simply do not care about sharing what they do online, no matter what it's called or how they register for it.
He probably wants a "green" option so he can advertise it on the site itself -- that will make it popular with the hipster crowd, the kind who has the Facebook widget "My Profile is Carbon Neutral" (ignoring the obvious fact that the greenest Facebook profile is no profile at all)
Interesting. I guess the article is sort of just saying that the rich people were already working hard, which is what GOT them rich in the first place? People who aren't rich stay not rich because they sit around all day watching TV.
Are your operations simple enough that you could perform equivalent ones using carefully constructed keys and S3 list/get/put?
If you honestly want to be "green" you can make changes to your personal behaviour (such as using CFLs, recycled packaging etc.) and not rely on some company to hold your hand

But surely hosting is by definition an area where you need a company to do it for you? Things like what you eat, how you travel, etc, you can control yourself, but the whole point of shared hosting is that you don't own or even see the server.
Well, S3 doesn't have a Query operation. But I suppose you could do the same PUTs, GETs, and DELETEs using S3 if you wanted.
I wonder why they are publishing this now (well, last Monday). I read about this paper in an Economics class about two years ago. Naturally, the paper itself is a lot more interesting than the news blurb.

"Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?" [http://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/125krueger.pdf]
Can you make the "delay" title in the settings link to this page, and noprocrast link to the page where you first described it?

This would probably help an extremely large number of people who will find an unexplained "delay" field confusing.

It's a good feature. I wish Twitter would implement something similar. I always find myself deleting tweets that I posted as a kneejerk reaction.
Neat, although ideally it would only delay the RSS feed comment, not the one visible on the web page, so as to keep things moving along quickly.
It does however support listing key ranges with "prefix=" parameter.
Gazelle Firms
That allows you to get a list of items with names in a given range, but doesn't allow you to do queries on the items' attributes.
I'm not sure what they actually say about overthinking. All their experiments deliberately exclude reasoning of any kind. They ask people to make completely arbitrary decisions and then they tell us something about the timing of their incredibly crude measurements. Not very illuminating.
For what I was thinking the value you want to query could go in the "name".
I hate to say it, but the reason is that software startups really don't need tons of VC any more. Gone are the days when a software startup needs $150 million to succeed.

There's going to be a big shift in VC investment away from software to other technologies like biotech and greentech where large amounts of capital are a requirement.
"... I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments ..."

Nice my own personal garbage rss feed.

- does the rss option kick in for all users or karma > n?

- any idea of how many entries? (20?)

- will personal rss result in an extra hit on the servers?
I don't think "good leadership" is about fighting a battle you can't win. Energy is best spent on battles that you have a good shot at, in areas you're good at. Not setting yourself up to fail.

In this case, I didn't know I couldn't win, so I fought a losing battle and no good came of it.

On-the-ground I created an ambitious assessment program called "Assess the Past, Inspire the Future" which for the first time, connected participants from the past & present of the future and had them submit evaluations of their experiences... and "from-above", I was ultimately asked to give a report to the cabinet minister in charge of this thing. You can't go higher up than him without reaching the prime minister, and I could hardly have asked for better results and response for my survey. I believe I had the personal support every single active participant above the age of 20 (the younger ones were mainly oblivious), though none of them knew as much as I did about how deep the problems actually went. And my mentors would have supported me to run the damn thing if we'd have been able to get some change in the air.

Unfortunately, hearing the truth didn't help the organization -- they reacted by selecting young, naive people to participate in their programs, shying away from people who were old or mature enough to realize what was going on. Neither did it have the intended impact on those with the power to change things -- no politician, including the cabinet minister, would touch this with a 10 foot pole, because it would be way too risky. Much easier to let it continue as-is, and deny knowledge if anything nasty ever bubbled to the surface in the future.

In the end, the people who had the real power to make things right failed to act, so the only choices I had were to leak the story to the press, which likely would have destroyed the program in an instant, or walk away quietly. And since I believed (and still do) that our country is better off with the program than without, even when taking into account its imperfections, I took my cue and left the scene.

The whole ordeal took way more out of me than I expected. I don't even like the way I sound when describing it here, because it comes across as so negative and pessimistic! There are way better things I should be spending my time thinking about and acting on -- now, just as then.

To accept other people, that I can't change them, that I am always going to wake up and find new forms of nastiness. Then, to move on and think about better things. That's what I believe in these days.

My mistakes were misjudging my chances of making a difference, and misjudging the value of my own time. Life is short -- pick your battles accordingly. Those people are going to be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. I can either try to fight that reality or I can find something productive to do.
If you want to use S3 LIST to emulate a SimpleDB Query, you can only Query one attribute and that attribute must be at the start of the name. Obviously you can't have two different attributes both at the start of the name, so any Query involving two or more attributes can't be emulated by S3 LIST.
Nobody really knows what a reasonable valuation for facebook is. They've yet to turn a profit, and it remains to be seen how well they can monetize all those users. Plus, value is in the eyes of the investor: it was worth over $15 billion to Microsoft, but not even $3 billion to whoever is selling.

I say it's all just speculation right now, since their shares aren't very liquid. And even if their shares were liquid, on what basis would you value them?
"Web apps have some inherent advantages. Being 'installed' by clicking on a link, which lowers the barrier to a user trying your app. Having data available everywhere. Autoupdating that doesn't involve a download and relaunch."

Java Web Start gives you the first, and common networking libs give you the second.

For the third, something ina desktop app would need downloading and a restart, though, on the other hand, using a Web app means downloading something on almost every use; a desktop app is always there, so off-line use is likely more robust.
Wow, that's a cool one... I love that about emacs: even after years of using it, I'm still learning lots of cool things.
Agreed, but if your values aren't large and if your client can do the obvious filtering then you can emulate it quite easily. This is actually what Mark Atwood's S3 storage layer for MySQL did.

I'm still curious about the values you're using in your test. Did you use exactly the same ones described on the "Indexing and Querying Amazon S3 Metadata with Amazon SimpleDB" page?
Debian is definitely the most popular OS on slicehost among posters here. Virtualmin works on Debian and also on CentOs
Daylife's API for the News
Twitter have a good number of users. When they give a consistently bad user experience, people are going to leave.

It's just like watching a very very very big car crash.
Nice, I hadn't heard of the second one before. I have always maintained that English is an extremely flexible language. You can mutilate it to such an amazing degree and still make sense of it.

I'm not sure if this is true for other languages, since English is the only one I am fluent in. Maybe you can just remove "English" from my comment and make the point "language is flexible."
Agreed, but if your values aren't large and if your client can do the obvious filtering then you can emulate it quite easily.

True, but the S3 LIST operations you need for that can get expensive quickly. I considered it for the application I intend to use SimpleDB for, and decided that SimpleDB was far cheaper.

I'm still curious about the values you're using in your test.

They were utterly synthetic -- the first things which came to mind: The item names were 0000, 0001, 0002, ... 9999, the attribute names were "square" and "cube", and I think you can guess what the attribute values were. :-)
For believers in evolution, this is a missing link and is a good example. For believers in not evolution, this obviously isn't the missing link because it is extinct.
JSON Diff
It seems like there must be a way to just reform the sentence, solving the problem from the other end. Use "his/her" when it is known, and a whole new sentence when it isn't.

"Pat Jones has has been tagged in a photo" or something similar. That removes the aspect of it being done by themselves though.
PG: Did anyone specifically request this feature or did you work through a bunch of log data and noticed this behavior?
In the next two years of Facebook, they could only be acquired as a strategic investment, valued at $5-7B if a large player like Google/Microsoft/Yahoo tries to buy them. Maybe a sovereign wealth fund? Unless those funds stay away from Web 2.0.

Beyond that, yes, they'll have to show revenue. Facebook will be a good test of the ultimate stability of the Web 2.0 Bubble. I think their best strategy is to go into the mortgage market, but the consensus of this board seems to be that Facebook won't succeed in the mortgage market.
Thanks. I remember your earlier article where you wrote

Third, if you have an item with only one attribute, and your read:write ratio is more than 22:1, it's cheaper to use S3 instead of SimpleDB -- even ignoring the storage cost -- since S3's 1 μ$ per GET is cheaper than SimpleDB's 1.305 μ$ per GetAttributes request.

and wondered if that still held true for varying I/O rates.
I was surprised that I couldn't find a wikipedia page for my favorite: "Fish fish fish eat eat eat."
Yes, still true -- the price (per BoxUsage) of SimpleDB requests doesn't depend on how many requests you're making per second.
I just have to point out one thing, however tangential:

if you're such a "manager" why is your team in this position to begin with?

It could be the industry. For example, game development is nothing but late nights to hit tight deadlines.
So people basically see rich people as doing what they themselves would do if they had lots more income appear magically.

Yeah, so, turns out that's not how it happens. And yet, that would seem to be the cause of many popular misunderstandings of wealth and the rich.
Furthermore, you've got SC2 this holiday season...

cries why can I only have one life to live?
The next big programming language feature after closures
Five Reasons The Intel-Microsoft Duopoly Is Dead
Thanks for the thorough explanation. That does put quite a different light on it, indeed. My apologies for jumping to conclusions in my first response.

Personally, I probably wouldn't have had the balls to raise as much dust as you did, but ideally, why didn't you warn the leaders of the organization that unless the issues were resolved internally, you'd be providing evidence of misconduct to the media at such-and-such a date, giving them time to prepare whatever PR kung-fu organizations do during scandals?

To me it just seems really immoral to walk away when taxpayer money is involved...
His fever is nearly 102! Thats dangerous right? Should I take him in? If I do there is no way we'll make rent, and probably not the car payment either. Maybe if I just give him extra Tylenol, it will break by morning. Dammit, how much is too much?...

The extra happiness that comes from being wealthy does not come from more leisure.
How Facebook Stores 540 Terabytes of Photos
Meet Tech Teentrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky
This is no fun: it is dead serious. You are cheating yourselves.

The following crowd of PG's self delusion of ~ creating wealth out of void is a fallacy: the tomatoes for his spaghetti and $ for Vulture Capital has to come from somewhere. Xobni, viaweb, Y! and alikes are "acquired" using money which is being literally extorted from institutions of state capitalism, colonies and client states. This is not "legal" per se, so the euphemism for this is "cheating". Tongue in cheek...
Very interesting.

How did Humans first contracted the virus from monkeys?

Does this findings mean that if we cannot find the cure for HIV, ultimately our system will grow immune or resistant to it? If so how long would it be before Humans can get to that point? 100, 200, 500 years?
Google Code Blog: OAuth Available for Google Data APIs
By pamper I meant "hide the nitty gritty details of setting up a server from scratch".

For me great service is a must. Unlimited possibilities is why I moved to slicehost.
Daylife.com is running an API contest
You keep using that word "cheating". I do not think it means what you think it means.
I sure am glad those Java boys (and girls) are there to drive the state of the art in programming language /sarcasm.
Ubercool Visualisation: The commit history of the Python scripting language project
The problem of language (is it a learnt pattern or inherent?) brings us to some Necessary Illusions, which some believe is essential for building large systems.

What I am saying, is that abstractions behind wealth transferring interfaces hide a great deal [in both sense]. Being naive about it or ignoring it is cheating yourself. Letting others getting away with cheating also makes you complicit, therefore you are back at cheating yourself.
Revealed after 50 years: The secret of the greatest-ever student prank
Compared to the aggregate operations mentioned in the article, I think virtualization techniques and primitives would be more useful as language extensions.
How To Find a Dream Job with Startups in India
I'd guess that he does the post/edit thing too, and is solving his own problem.

I do this with both comments and blog entries. Not sure why, but it's easier to assess what I say when I see it in final form.
Well there you have it I guess. Anyways thank you so much for giving time to share your experiences with us.
I Google, therefore I am losing the ability to think
Geez take it for what it is alright? I personally can relate with Bill as my company is doing exactly what his company is doing. If anything it just validates the presence of what my company stands for and why we are here.

But hey I'm sure you've got something really useful to do right? aside from wowing us with your knowledge of Internet social groups and anonymous posters.
A better comparison might be no longer getting water after not agreeing with the utility company's revised contract that insists you pay them anytime you drink anything, even if it is milk. soda or some other beverage.
I would rather have an ungrammatical (but easily understood) sentence than one that obfuscates reflexive actions.

Also, publishing alternatively-worded stories for genderless users is a little bit of a pain for third-party developers. Customizing gender in a feed story is as trivial as typing "<fb:pronoun uid=/user id/ [+ optionally possessive/reflexive/objective=true, depending on context] />", customizing stories based on gender or lack thereof is as nontrivial as 1) registering a feed template for the new form 2) making an API request for user's reported sex (or perhaps keeping information from an earlier profile info call) 3) selecting which template to populate and publish based on the results of that poll. Nothing outrageous, but potentially annoying for developers with many newsfeed integration points who want to adhere to first-party publishing standards.

Also also, [it's been a bit since I've taken linguistics courses, but] there are going to be situations in non-English languages where you simply cannot write a sentence without encoding some gender information, wherein reforming an item to be completely genderless (and grammatically not inelegant) wouldn't be possible.
I do it that way as well for posts + comments, I am guessing, like you, so does PG.

Still is that the only reason or was there a feature request by someone?
I think you're being too optimistic about the number of non technical people that will use this service. For them to do so would require them to understand what blogging is, why they would want to keep a blog and how simply mailing your posts is an improvement over typing something into a web form. Posterous is a fantastic idea (IMO anyway) but I doubt this will happen anytime soon.

I'm guessing your audience will be tech savvy users who understand why publishing some conversations online using a tool you're already using anyway (email) is a good idea.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
The Perfect Desktop - OpenSUSE 11 (GNOME)
Highscalability.com is down...
I find it interesting when sites that write about uptime or scalability are down.
"There was no theory of Chinese, no understanding. Just data. (If anyone ever wanted a disproof of Searle's riddle of the Chinese Room, here it is.)

Shouldn't this be a 'proof' instead of 'disproof'?
This is simply redefining cheating such that Microsoft is guilty of it because he doesn't like them. That sort of contract seems like a brilliant maneuver to me. The fact that they were merely forced to stop it, rather than pay for having done it shows the DoJ probably didn't feel it was illegal.

And if it ain't illegal, it ain't cheating in business.
The major flaw with this article/study is that it defines wealth in terms of income rather than net worth. It would be interesting to see how much time high-income/low-net worth people spend their time in comparison to low-income/high net-worth, and high-income/high net worth. It may also be further intersting to see if there is a correlation between spending less time doing things you enjoy, and how much of the income is earned (as distinguished from passive income, such as royalties and dividends).
He almost got there on the end. Concurrency.
Thanks! I checked in a couple of the usual places and they were 404. It was already time for bed ... :)
Clearly, entrepreneurs are "unreal persons": they live an "alternative" (read: unusual) lifestyle in an un-regimented context, they pay themselves.

So, entrepreneurs are vulnerable to living a "fake unreal" life too. They can recreate the very mistake they are trying to correct: become workaholics, lose their agility and their thrive for innovation. Caveat entrepreneur.
The other point I made was that even if they were offering "green" VPSs it doesn't mean they're going to have a "green" and "non-green" power cables running in to the building and they put your VPS in the rack hooked up to the "green" one. They`d probably just do exactly what you can do yourself, pay someone to offset the environmental cost.

One of the main things about purposefully choosing "green" companies, often at increased cost, is that you are influencing the market based on your preference. Choosing environmentally friendly products encourages companies to offer them (I also appreciate that this is why many abuse the term).

Furthermore, if you wish to brand your site or company as "green" you should probably do a little more than choose a "green" VPS provider lest you further obviate the term.
Dude, it is a well-known fact. At the time the dealing was made, Bill Gates didn't have the software. Then he immediately bought the rights of QDOS, which he then recast as MS-DOS and sold it to IBM.
>We're never going to launch. ever.

You should sue them :-P

Big corporations should create good, addictive games to ensure young startups never get anything done. Oh, wait, so this is Microsoft's strategy with the XBox.
Developing Secure AIR Applications
Slicehost rock! The only thing I can find bad about them is the pricing above 1GB RAM VPSs, but apart from that its a rock solid service with great staff! Cannot recommend them enough....