skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, that's just it. The kind of power that I think hackers crave is the kind that you can't buy with money.

Even if you had billions of dollars to throw at the problem, you could never be as relevant a figure in shaping the face of technology as Turing or von Neuman were. They created the ideas that are at the very core of so much that we do. You can't invent something again, and money isn't the tool you use to invent stuff :)

The shallow, transitory sort of power certainly can be bought. You can use money to make people do things. But you can't think with money, so it doesn't give you the power to have powerful thoughts, and THAT'S what changes the world.

That kind of power can obviously be turned into money, though.
Why, what's wrong with OpenTable?
Crank or not, his stuff on parallel programming makes sense.
I think his technical infrastructure was ready for it, but his marketing infrastructure was not ready to take full advantage of it.

I've been TC'd once before, and it hit us at the worst possible time- a temporary banner was up for the hours before launch. That banner got more attention in the article than the service. The site held up fine, but >80% of the traffic was wasted. I think this is a pretty common phenomena.
Read the book "the easy way to quit smoking" by Alan Carr.

The reason people don't quit (explained in the book) is that they are afraid of what will happen when they quit. There are all sorts of imagined withdrawal symptoms. The first thing to realize is that smoking isn't merely a bad habit, it is a legitimate drug addiction. Smokers are addicted to nicotine. Now, even though nicotine addiction is real, the withdrawal symptoms are ridiculously mild when compared to other drugs. When a heroin addict quits, they get the shakes, fevers, cold sweats, diarrhea, barf all over the place, can't eat anything, and even get physical goose bumps. When a smoker quits, the only thing that happens is that you want another cigarette. Nicotine actually leaves your body completely in 3 days, so the actual physical withdrawal symptoms (which are just craving cigarettes) only last a long weekend. After that, you have to deal with the behavioral issues, which is easier to do if you have some sort of cognitive framework to deal with them, which is what the book I mentioned provides.
Businesses can be made from niches. Niche business can have social networks. However, niche social networks are not businesses.

You see which way it flows? With a niche business, the social network is a subset of the functionality if it exists at all. If it is just a niche social network, it probably is not a business.
Java and Memory Leaks
"Bad launch, the launch of the site wasn’t planned very well at all. I decided to use the “genius” marketing ploy of having a private beta to create scarcity."

What percentage of great/enviable web startups had a GREAT launch? I'm not saying a good launch isn't valuable, but it doesn't merit being on a list of top reasons you failed.

Read this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/not-so-grand...
People like creating lists of criteria to predict performance. This gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling of being in control. Quite often they fail as the best predictor of performance turns out to be performance itself. This has came up on HN before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209412

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwe...

Watch the video, it's well worth it.
"Being an actual American... I don't see that we are all that patriotic."

Speaking as a Jamaican, most people view Americans as very patriotic.
Oh, I understand. My current job is an agile shop and I've seen firsthand how dealing with poorly thought out legacy design can be a pain. We take a lot of pains these days to make sure decisions today don't get in the way of plans tomorrow.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of agile but it does hit on a few things right.
It depends on how high your level of addiction is. If you're at multiple packs a day, you definitely want to taper off, either by smoking less or consuming your nicotine in a healthier way (like gum or a patch). If you must smoke after you quit, smoke something other than nicotine. I would recommend blue lotus as a mild smokeable herb that isn't a poison.

Beyond that, there are psychiatric medications that help. The one one expressly to help quit smoking has some very odd side effects (vivid dreams and suicidal ideations). I suspect that plain old anti-depressants would also help. Ask your neighborhood psychiatrist.
3rd column all the way. Not bad, but there is still room for improvment.
Real programmers stopped using the IDE in favor of a good editor.
what were your server(s) specs?
Frontiers of the Turing Test: is this a splog or not?
I don't know, a social network can be made into a business, but one has to treat it as a social network, before it becomes a business.

Once the social network qua social network is healthy, you can then monetize it. It's a lot of work, and the financial rewards are little, but if you do it right, you can get a strong and loyal user base and maybe make a few friends.
What's wrong is they don't have much competition. There's always some market share available if you put in the legwork and sign up the restaurants OpenTable misses. There's always room for improvement, too.
Love the iPhone, hate the keyboard.
I hope you're right, but there's a lot of people with a lot of power going after them.
You're not alone. I was talking with someone from Google who works on the Gmail support team, and has an interest in user-to-user support, in general, the other day, and she was asking me about how hard it would be to convert the newly Open Source reddit into a ticket tracker.

I think it underestimates the importance of other aspects of a tracker--but my lack of confidence in the idea may be based on my own prejudices based on years of working with traditional issue trackers. I expect to receive an email when a new ticket is filed, so we'd need to add notifications. I'm missing emailed ticket submission (I miss it in my current tracker, and will be moving to something else because of this lack), so you'd need to add email ticket submission. Assignments are a core part of any ticket tracker--you need to be able to take ownership of an issue so that others don't spend time on it unnecessarily (though others should be able to follow it).

But, I do think several things would shake out of the model that are hard to do now:

Priority. The less someone knows the more important they believe their issue is. So, it's basically a no-op field in most trackers I've ever used. The developers might use them to good effect, and a few advanced users. But since greater than 50% of priorities are set incorrectly, it's a useless field for sorting (and my current tracker doesn't let me remove it from the form, as it is the primary sort key!). Since everyone gets a vote, priority as "hotness" would be a great improvement. But, it assumes your whole community is looking at the tracker, which is extremely unlikely.

Discussions. People rarely talk on issue trackers because the conversation tools are weak--the focus is never on making it work really well for discussions. reddit/HN have great threaded conversations, and you can vote on what's relevant and accurate. I would very much like better discussions in my tickets.

But, I think it would require something like a total conversion to this sort of forum as the entirety of your forums/mailing list/bugs system. Which might be a good idea for someone starting from scratch. If you have sub-reddit style categories, with one for tickets, that'd be a pretty effective system, I think. Though you can't currently "close" a thread on HN or reddit, and call it "fixed"...so that'd be something to add.

Anyway, I'd love to see how an implementation like this worked out in a reasonably large community. It might be something we'd want to try on our Open Source community site (our commercial site is already too set in its ways and customers hate change). But the Open Source site needs a bit of a refresh...it currently uses SourceForge for its tickets, which kinda sucks.
In the name of attacking goldplating and useless makework design fetishism, he seems to be opposed to basic principles like separation of concerns.

Talking about getting things done in the least amount of time and then bringing up the retarded old "it's all Turing complete" argument shows that he has some more thinking to do on this subject.
Wow I'm sorry, but that was a pretty bad article, it seemed like the author knew little about the subject?

First of all, it said rails doesn't scale. This is so inaccurate on so many levels. Mainly because everything scales. Obviously for some situations languages like C will deal tons better - like google search. And some languages will be able to support more connections per server (again, C and even Ruby without the rails framework on top). But at the end of the day - Ruby on Rails will scale like any other language/framework, just sort out the database side to shard/slave and your away.

Oh and it compared Ruby on Rails to the Google App Engine. Two totally different things.

Just doesn't seem like a well thought out article to me?
The 100 Most Influential Taglines
to demonstrate overpaid you must compare actual pay to actual value. so provide an estimate of his value, or you have no grounds to call him overpaid.
IMHO, this guy is 6 different kinds of crazy. Parallelism is of course more efficient. Parallel algorithms are about determining which steps in an algorithm can be executed independently of one another to take full advantage of multiple CPUs. Some algorithms can be decomposed this way, some can't. As we hit the upper limit of single processing we have to scale out into multiple cores to get more speed. My impression was this guy never really understood how parallel algorithms work, so he decided to hate them.
I use searchyc.com for this purpose. Works fine. Everything still exists...it's just not "reachable" directly through the HN UI.
some exceptions i can think of :

clos and the meta object protocol - the idea of leaving the language open for the user to change by using a metaclass

hygienic macros

first class continuations

monads

functional reactive programming

the first few developed in the 80's while the last is quite recent
I remember signing up for this as a kid, thinking I was going to make a few extra bucks each month. Little did I know that the pay didn't even cover the phone bills I racked up using dialup.
These guys remind me of the iWon days. It's essentially the same idea. Click on links, win prizes and big money! Woo hoo! Um, no.
Netflix listens to customers, keeps profiles
I understand the author's motivations, but I disagree with the conclusion.

The simplest solution is often also the most flexible. I don't think you can argue that simple is bad design.

During requirements and feature planning, I have often found that features get more and more complicated until - guess what - things click, similarities become obvious, and you end up with a solution that's a lot more simple - and more flexible - than you expected. You don't always get that "aha!" moment, and you can't spend your entire development cycle chasing it, but it is often there.
Yeah. I never understand B&O stuff. Its so expensive, and I'd never buy it, even if I had the money.
Not so grand
Some skeletons should remain in their collective closets.
The lack of tactile feedback does not bother me on my iphone at all. I also disable the annoying audible click the keys make by default.

I think that in order to get really comfortable with the iphone keyboard you have to become dependent on the auto-correction feature. I mostly use my iphone keyobard for texting, and the spelling correction catches nearly all of my mistakes. Otherwise, my only major complaint is the send an SMS button is just above the keyboard and I hit either 'o' or 'p' instead of send all the time.
I prefer a physical keyboard that literally disappears when I'm not using it.

Last time I checked, "slider" phones have exactly that. Physical keyboards and full sized screens. The trade-off wasn't mentioned because it isn't necessarily true.
A good read dmix but do not despair. Only a very few startups ever get any traction and you have done a nice job of identifying some of the reasons.

The nice thing about software startups is that no matter how unsuccessful a business model or product introduction might be you have expanded your personal code base and increased your marketability to potential clients (e.g. now you will be able to charge $200 an hour instead of $100)..
Get Windows XP Even Though it's 'Dead'
Fresh UI ideas from Songza and Algorithm Ink
Elegance here means having much meaning a small space. Variable replacement is hardly programmable. More of a macro expansion.

To my eyes, this has lots of meaning:

div { color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor) }

To my eyes, this has very little meaning and forces me to consult a reference doc every time I look at it:

div { color: #e852aa }

I think the var() syntax is non-elegant, it's a bit fugly. I think Perl's $ might visually look more elegant.

Advantages: DRY works. Designers can make sweeping changes to a page with a small change.

I don't think designers are going anything but more flexibility in having this available.
Obviously I like Physical keyboards more, but I would prefer a bigger screen (i.e. iPhone) if I was given the choice. I don't have much of a problem with the iPhones on-screen keyboard...
Not a lot of technology companies in that list. IBM "Solutions for a small planet" is one I don't even remember a little bit--and I've been serious about computing since the mid-80's. So I think I have to disagree with them. Apple's "Think Different" is pretty darned good, and "Intel Inside" was definitely a winner...and the right thing for them at a time when they were facing stiff competition from AMD, with very little to differentiate them (the CPUs were pin-compatible at the time, so one could drop an AMD CPU into any system and manufacturers could switch on a whim).

I'm having a hard time thinking of good tech taglines...Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today?" always seemed like a parody (with the obvious answer being, "Somewhere far away from this infernal blue-screened machine"), but that's not the fault of the marketer who came up with the tagline.

Anybody have any favorites among recent companies, particularly software companies?
Can Hotshot Ad Guy Alex Bogusky Make Microsoft Cool?
I remember installing MyAdvantage on all my friend's machines in a dorm at UCLA. You got paid if the mouse was moving and you kept surfing. So someone made MyAdvantage, a program to move the mouse and auto refresh your brower. A made a few hundred dollars :)
Its not the worst in the US.

I'd say the US is pretty good. Generally ppl are left to be who they are. Its very homogeneous societies like Japan and Korea that have the worst problems. The pressure to conform is high and everyone gangs up on victims.

Its considered a huge issue that can drive kids to commit suicide.
This is where you see a strong advantage in a language like Ruby over Java.

The less code you have to write initially, the less you'll have to scrap when the rewrite comes. And the rewrite always comes. The question is when.
The threat of losing profiles made my household seriously consider how useful Netflix was for us. Since I'm paring down expenses anyway because of shifting from consultant to startup founder, we decided it wasn't worth it. Cancelled yesterday. I briefly considered re-activating today, but we'll be OK with iTunes.
What about global optimizations? Macros operate on local expressions only effectively. Things like global alias analysis still needs to be done outside them.
Facebook started out as a niche social network for Ivy League students.
I don't think you really read the article since the author never said that parallelism is inefficient. He's saying, among other things, that decomposition (which you seem to favor) is not the right way to design parallel programs. In other words, if sequential objects are used to create sequential programs, it follows that parallel objects should be used to compose parallel programs. Sequential order thus becomes a consequence of signaling, i.e., communication between parallel objects.
Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras - Just a cool afternoon diversion
Good article raganwald.

I'm just learning RoR and I guess my biggest hangup is the prodigious use of colons.

I admire your ability to "rewrite code for Ruby"...

For me it's tough enough to learn one language. There is no way that I would ever attempt anything but a greenfield application with RoR and to finish that I will probably need some help. What attracted me to the language was the impression I got from reviewing descriptive materials from DHH and the 37 signals crew that Ruby has a great deal of elegance when it comes to interacting with databases. And, for me anyways, that's the only kind of elegance I'm really interested in because I think that's where the money is going to be. So far I'm not really good enough with the syntax to say whether it's going to live up to expectations but I haven't really seen anything yet that would cause me to say I've made a mistake in choosing this platform.
Sounds like a solution to keyloggers, but why charge?
To be honest, I hadn't heard of the profile feature until the brouhaha came out about them being canceled.

Of course, now that I know the feature exists I'm going to start using it immediately.
Early on, the author says: "If you write an application with Rails, you probably have to write a whole bunch of new code, or at least change around all of your old code, in order to get it to run on multiple computers." This is absolutely true. Rails "scales" by forcing programmers to do a whole lot of extra work (yes, sharding and secondary databases and lots of other things) which isn't particularly natural in the framework.

As a programmer, I'm not particularly thrilled to have to set up and maintain a memcached cluster and then write code to make sure my object reads pass through the caching layer. It's more work. It's more fragile. It probably forced me to revisit and modify working code.

The author wants to build a framework where scalable code is the default and natural way to write applications. Seems pretty well-thought out. He touches on many of the common pain points.
Interesting to think of this in terms of 37 Signals feature-minimalism and "say no" philosophies. Once added, this feature became a weight netflix had to carry through it's designs and keep working. Netflix chose to listen to the minority of customers and keep it--to not "say no." Would 37 signals have listened or just "said no", I wonder?

I think keeping the feature was a good move--the profiles feature previously stopped me from canceling my account under a barrage of my wife's chick flicks that kept "accidentally" topping the queue. :-)
eBay Has To Pay $63m Because A French Court Doesn't Know A Platform From A User
Report: half of prospective smartphone buyers eying iPhone 3G
Isn't that the y cable he mentioned? I assume he just bought a bad one.
Yeah, hilarious... but people still use each other for "reproduction" or even, gasp, conversation! It may surprise you to hear this, but some people actually want to have a family instead of spending all day fucking a robot.
What makes them infallible? They're human. Maybe one of them gets sick and has to stop working. Or maybe they get bored. Or Sweden/EU's laws change.

Maybe the companies that make up the RIAA or MPAA will change policies and offer a better alternative. Perhaps a better alternative will come around? Who knows what the future holds. "never" is a strong word to use. Especially concerning technology.
Chatbot Game bot is getting better.  Check out some of the chats and chat rules.
Please tell me you don't judge an entire country with a population of > 300 million based on the actions of a few that get media attention? Cause that thought scares me more then anything the MPAA can try and do.
I think half the people who say "rails doesn't scale" are idiots and the rest are making fun of the first half for trying to reduce the issue to such a glib statement.
It could really use some examples of what the hell he's talking about.

Wide ranging examples, too. I'm sure he could come up with one or two, but can he come up with a whole bunch, which span a reasonably wide swath of algorithm space?

Show me how to, say, invert a matrix, which is a possible-yet-annoyingly-hard problem to parallelize ordinarily, and I'll take it seriously.
TechCrunch really just doesn't send that much traffic.

If you can do 50 reqs/second you will be absolutely fine; it doesn't take any kind of special server.
You're right that if you keep the implementations of Lisp compile time macros and use only that, you have as hard time reducing code that's already been macroexpanded, or applying global effects.

But when you might macros and the language itself, what you find is that you already have the pieces of what you need for a serious compiler: a symbol table, built in, a way to manipulate the parse tree, an easy way to do local expansions, and most importantly, a fully featured language.

You can do this with existing Lisps by a a few methods: making first class runtime macros, for example, or by saving the source code and working over it in passes.

Does this explain it?
But that phone design, too, has tradeoffs. It's thicker, and more failure prone. This isn't an either/or subject you can poll. It's OK to ask if someone prefers the iPhone or a Blackberry. But you can't just separate the keyboard feature and get a meaningful answer.
He has a parallel quicksort example on his "relevant links" section. He seems to be saying that software should work pretty much like hardware.

http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/quicksort.htm
could someone comment on why files should have license headers (code organization within a file)? i'm not clear on the idea there, so i'd like to know more.
Paypal isn't popular? Ruh? Amazon isn't popular because it didn't create a "killer app" for the concept.

I think the idea is fucking brilliant. Instead of ad injection for revenue, take Paypal on directly.

I'm a buy-my-buddy-a-beer kind of guy, too -- but there are circumstances where it would be convenient to move money to family and friends.

If my brother buys me movie tickets because I'm getting to the theater late, twittering him payment during previews beats trying to mentally remember how much I owe him when I am buying ice cream later.

If you are already familiar with the Twitter UI, it isn't a stretch to learn an additional command.
Each credit card transaction costs someone at least $0.15. You just don't see it.
Who cares? It isn't like you and ruby are getting married.

If you have a project that ruby seems like a decent fit, use it. You'll get nowhere are learn nothing without actually doing.
I think it's a decent taxonomy for the skills you can use in practice. It's for learning about your weaknesses, and either learning something to fix them, or finding yourself on a team where someone's an expert in the area.

I'd also nominate machine learning/simple ai/recommendation systems/probabilistic filters as another skill -- once you have some familiarity you can use it everywhere.