skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting way of dealing with scarce items. I liked the timer as well. I agree with comments about the need for better design, but it's a good start.
Adobe Makes Web’s Flash Crawl
On the plus side, now I can direct my coworkers to his cheat sheets since the old site was blocked by our firewall (presumably due to the name).
OK, I just finally figured out what the timer is for. Anyone who doesnt go as far as the shopping cart won't know why there is a timer...
At first I thought it said "My Web Bacon Finder" and got really excited.
I like the site and cart setup, but the "we will reserve your item while you checkout" model is already used at most e-commerce sites, although your info on how many are being reserved is public. (plus the time limit is likely shorter)

Still, I wish you luck!
"What's with "200 Nipples?"

That's how many nipples we assume will be covered by any single run of our high-quality shirts. (We'll have the third-nippled buyer in there occasionally, but we didn't want to count on it when naming the company; this is serious business, after all.)"

I think its a interesting way to brand it.
Linkedin and Xing both charge for premium service.

Badoo has an optional charge as well.
I'm not a lawyer, but I guess if someone is serious about developing a business, they could have developers they hire sign NDAs/non-competes and whatever other documents could give them legal recourse if someone pulls a Facebook.

The thing that happened with uConnect, I assume is that it was a very informal, spoken relationship, which gave Zuckerberg the ability to do his own thing.
We debated loooooong over the naming issue. We decided to go with something not easily forgotten and a little funny/edgy over something that is safe.

It's a boutique shop anyway, so we're after the 20% rather than the 80% of our market. (Which made safe and bland much less desirable. In fact it made it wholly undesirable.)
It is safe for work. It's a non-objectionable t-shirt site.
"Shirts counting down are already in someone's cart and will be available when the count down ends, unless purchased."

This should appear in red right above the number matrix on the home page. It only appears if there are shirts counting down.
get yourself an iron-clad employment contract with some loose non-compete and non-disclosure clauses.

basically, let them know that they're signing it to ensure the safety of your code, and there won't be any problems as long as they don't steal code.
Mine says it will ship August 7th. Why so long?

I really like the "Chicken Exit: If you don't want to purchase this shirt, click here to release it back into the wild."

The whole goal is to get a customer who really likes a design but maybe isn't sure if they want to spend the money. Well, they know their time is limited, panic starts to set in, and of course they end up buying it. Smart.

But I didn't really dig the RIAA design. Maybe next time.
Yeah, while the counter is great, it could use a sentence or two more of description. Keep the counter, add a fun sentence about why its there, not just what it does.
Personally I think YC benefits from clearer leadership and vision. Its simplicity is what makes it so strong. It is easier for people to conceptualise and understand the model and the benefits they get.

People I speak to, even those who initially know nothing about YC or Seedcamp, seem to understand how YC is led and works and its preference towards making product-focused companies. They also appreciate how being on YC gets insight/advice from many influential experienced people, such as pg and the guest speakers, and (easier) access to funding at later stages.

The message Seedcamp sends is not as clear and most people I have spoken to have a harder time understanding the model and the benefits Seedcamp offers and compare it to traditional VC. I am usually asked about the funding model, what they give, what they want, what are the benefits other than money, the people behind it (as there seems to be a lot of them) etc. If there was more transparency and a simpler message, it would be easier for them?

However, most of this can be attributed to awareness, and promotion as Seedcamp certainly does not have the same awareness and hence profile as YC, even in London, especially among the tech entrepreneurs and startups (or want to be) I know. Hopefully, in the next few cycles Seedcamp will address some of these issues.
You can add error codes and whatever else you want to propagate to an exception object.
I completely agree. Their reason for releasing this isn't to allow people to look into their SWFs, but for the two largest search engines to be able index them.

This is an attempt to bump up the number of flash sites because now "not indexable by Google" is not an issue.
yous tudy CS and only studied programming in the 2nd year?

What languages do you know more?

Id say go functional, entirely different, mindexpanding and might be very important in the near future because of concurrency/parallellism.

Erlang, Clojure, Common Lisp, Scheme.
you could do some kind of equity deal / revenue share with them, thus incentivizing them to stay with you rather than do their own thing
You mean, how can that be replaced with ordinary operators? If you have multiple return's, move your 'finally' block to a separate function and call it before every 'return'.
Flagged. What a shit post.

This is mostly a complaint about shitty developers than about exceptions.
Laptops lost like hot cakes at US airports
His name is Dmitri Gaskin, he's 12 years old and here's his Google tech talk on jQuery
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/05/why-apple-is-more-expens...

iTunes has DRM while the "competition" doesn't because the music industry cartel is trying to use its monopoly over music rights to manipulate the distribution market.
Launch tip: if you're posting during work hours with a URL that suggests NSFW, put that its a t-shirt site and its safe for work in your title or post. I bet you lost a ton of people who looked at the URL and moved on because they were unsure. They might not have come back to check out the comments to know its ok. You have to realize, there are serious consequences for some people at some companies for going to a site with a bad URL, even if its not a bad site, it puts you on the bag guy's radar.
RaiseCapital.com: Social Network for Entrepreneurs - @Work
You should really note what kind of shirts you're printing on. By the sizing chart it appears to be American Apparel (nice shirts, I wear one of theirs about every day).

But I'm not going to buy a shirt, especially after the first few cheaper ones sell out, without knowing the specs.
One of those "Why didn't I think of this?" ideas. The very best kind. Very well done.
Zuckerberg vs. ConnectU

My advice there, don't outsource to developers at Harvard. ;)

If anyone can copy your idea and overtake you, then you need to worry more about better implementation rather than copycats.
A glimpse of the real Bill Gates
Quick nit: that headline should read "What If...It WERE Easy to Write Firefox Extensions?" due to the subjunctive mood of the verb.
I wanted to say Lisp as well, but if you want to tackle web development...there's this web "framework" called Seaside that's written for Squeak Smalltalk and there's a one-click package meaning that you click, it loads up and starts a web server and you start messing around with it.

http://seaside.st/
Microsoft's Plan B for Search
The Website Is Down (Hilarious 10 Minute Video)
I think instead of labeling the shirts #1 to #100, you should consider $1-$100. Would make it a lot more intuitive to understand the grid.

Also the top line said sold and was all dark, which made my mind think of it as a title bar to the table and ignore it, not sure what a good way of dealing with that is but that made it harder for me to work out what was going on.
If your code is key to what you're doing, then you should develop it in-house.

If it's not, then stealing the code won't give your competitor any particular advantage.
Scale Cheaply - Sharding
May not be the best of hacker news, but don't drink and watch this at the same time unless you have a waterproof keyboard.
GoogleTalk Architecture
Not sure if the page is a joke, but randomly I thought I'd mention you might not want to publicly "sell" equity for a venture. I don't think that goes over well with US regulators if you're in the US (I'm no lawyer, but that's what I've heard).
Propagating exceptions without handling them anywhere is bad, but IMHO still better than ignoring an error code.

If you ignore an error code, the program will continue but probably fail later or just be wrong in subtle ways, generate corrupt output or whatever. An unhanded exception OTOH will just stop the program. At least then you realize you have a problem, and where it originated.

Empty catch-clauses however, are just as bad as ignoring an error code.
We were thinking of hiring off-shore developers. Our concern is that even if we make them sign NDA's and an employment contract, it will be difficult and costly to enforce and to gain back any payments for damages, if they break the contract.
Good idea. Very good idea.
Gexla,

stop posting comments. they are automatically dead.

log out of your account, then check your comment history to see this.
When reading C code either all return codes are checked or not. Either way you know whether errors are dealt with. If you don't check a pointer before dereferencing it - the code is wrong. It's that simple. Correct code looks correct, crappy or unfinished code looks crappy or unfinished. This is a good thing.

When you read Ruby code you have no idea if the programmer thought about exceptions at all. In order to figure out what exceptions should be possibly handled you have to take the union of all the exceptions that can be thrown by all the functions you call, and then check if they are all handled correctly. Unfortunately, it's impossible to determine which exceptions can be thrown by a function, because any function can throw any number of exceptions. If your buddy decides to throw a new exception in some helper function then the exception signature of a hundred functions changes.

So basically, there's no way of telling whether the code is correct. Good luck with that. So people give up and just rescue every possible error and return a default value, excactly like described in the article.

For your enjoyment:

http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=lang%3Aruby+rescue&hl...

And this is production code you're looking at.
A good thing about exceptions is that you can place your handler where you know it's best, that could be in the top level. Unless you use Java so you are forced to fill this burocratic method passport all along the way. That's no good and putting the word "innovation" there freaks me.
A very unique + political webgame
How many games are there were you get to play as Obama or McCain?
That's pretty ugly, although I've seen a lot of that style of coding at my workplace as well. The problem is that there generally isn't anything useful to do once you catch the exception besides throw up an error page. You're probably bother off either throwing RuntimeExceptions or wrapping exceptions as RuntimeExceptions.
"The music download service Rhapsody [has made] its catalog of five million songs available without electronic restrictions on playback or duplication"

"free previews of complete songs"

"Rhapsody will restrict full-song previews to 25 a month"

Two of these sentences are not like the other.
This kind of argument also seems to miss something important: that exceptions (at least in C++, but this argument probably applies to other languages as well) aren't intended as a general-purpose error-handling mechanism, which return codes are perfectly adequate for.

Exceptions are intended for unexpected conditions (i.e., exceptional) that must be handled somehow. In C++, this is pretty fundamental to the RAII idea.
That would depend on what you would want to work on in the future. In my opinion you should try getting hold of 8085 Kit and do a bit of assembly. You should also try one of the functional languages(Haskel, LISP or XSL Transforms). If you want to do web programming you should look into Python and C#(ASP.Net).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230703

But your title is more accurate.
bzzt. depending on the language and the author of the exception-throwing code, the exception will contain information about where the error occurred and what might have caused it.
>> Adopting semantic search technology would require the big guys, in essence, to start from the beginning—rescanning every Web page according to the technology's fundamentally different method of analyzing and classifying Web pages.

They make it sounds as if Google indexed the internet once and hasn't done anything since. Don't they "rescan" the interwebs every day?
Great idea. Hard to see how it's defensible in the marketplace, at all.
dont hire offshore. if you're considering hiring offshore because of the cost, the simple truth (which is backed up by studies on the topic) is that you get what you pay for. you'd be better off trying to find someone here who will work for you, possibly for equity if your budget is tight.
If there were no sales, how was he getting paid? I'm assuming there is also a risk management/compensation moral to this story as well. You paid someone a commission before a customer had written a check. If the customer later changes their mind (or in your case, does not exist), you would have to get the money back. Even if they had been legit customers but later changed their mind, getting money back is never a good thing to do. I presume you don't compensate like that anymore.
I logged in just to mod you down, due to the dull sadness I feel at your apparent sense of obligation to spew such bile.

This blog post is full of misconceptions and appears to be written by an individual who has not sufficiently delved into algorithms, parallel computing, or operations research. Similar problem has been around for decades, such as controlling the flow of tasks on parallel factory assembly lines. Guess what helps us find near-optimal flows? That's right: algorithms.
>So what? Lots of software gets written without ever touching Windows.

Except most people doesn't want to write "lots of software", but software that fills certain requirements, often customers' requirements: run on Windows, do threads, have a rich GUI, minimize to tray, detect screensaver, interface to word processor, customer's database, customer's crappy ERP, etc.

>the amount of stuff you need to know to start working with Java is pretty darn daunting as well,

I've done both starts (Java and Lisp) and I can't disagree more.

>But I think commercial, professional work is possible right now given the state of SBCL.

It depends on your requirements. For some environments that's not true at all.
I recommend establishing a pool of unallocated common stock, against which you can issue vesting (4 year vest with a 1 year cliff, for instance) stock options. The gentlemen to whom you refer sounds like a good candidate for compensation via options.

Another question to ask is if he subject to a non-compete. If not, should you consider making him a Part-time employee?
I thought this was Hacker news. This is, what, 4 days old? Ancient!

</sarcasm>
I can't begin tell you how many VCs were more concerned with customer acquisition than the monetization strategy. Furthermore, less focused on early-stage and more focused on growth... does anyone else see the contradiction in that web 2.0 "investment strategy"? Too many finance guys lack operation experience...

These results do not surprise me.
Skinny controllers, skinny models (as opposed to fat models)
How much should I charge clients?
If finding questions with a lot of different answers made me money, this question would be a goldmine. It seems every freelancer has their own formula for determining how much to charge. Rightly so - as your price can make quite an impact on your business. If you charge too much you’ll be less competitive, and if you charge too little you aren’t going to make money. Most freelancers charge their clients by either an hourly rate or a fixed “per project” or “per item” rate. Regardless of which method works better for you, it’s a good idea to establish an hourly rate that is going to keep your head above the water. You can then use this rate as a basis to establish fixed-rate prices.
Wasn't it around 3% for a long, long time? That's an impressive jump. I wonder how much is because of Apple and how much is people avoiding Vista?
Also I like the concept. I think anything around improving e-commerce websites especially with variable pricing is smart.

One issue is that as you hit $100 it may seem pretty unfair to buy something that someone has bought for $1 previously. Maybe the pricing should be non-linear compared to quantity. As in there are 10 shirts available at $50 and 1 at $1 and it not going all the way to $100. Just a thought, but I guess if in practice you find that the $100 are easy to shift then...
Between the second and third columns mostly. Sometimes slipping into the fourth. Which is ok; it's where I saw myself anyway.

Give me a couple more years and I'll be at four pretty solidly, though I think I'll focus my learning myself rather than focusing too heavily on this guys assumptions of what I should learn.
T-Shirts: You need to get better designs. They are not that special and limited edition does nothing for them. Limited editions only really work if other people know the item is a limited edition, or the design is very unique. There are lots of markets out there filled with handmade items that are "limited editions" most people will not be aware of. Try and get something like a XKCD design that only is seen on one of your limited edition shirts.

Cart: Nice idea and implementation. Emphasise the sold items less (i.e. not in black) as it is counter intuitive. Also have some basic images explaining what is going on (especially with the release-to-wild concept) as I only really understood it when I went through the process and not in the first 5~10 seconds of visiting. 4 or 5 should do it outlining the workflow i.e. look, select, buy, or release.

Name: You can come up with edgy mnemonic names that won’t put people off.
"split-second" decisions ... are a function of ... what your brain was doing many seconds before you saw the problem

This reminds me of the famous finding by Benjamin Libet that the brain retroactively adjusts its experience (by about a half second) to make responses feel closer to the events that they're responding to. That is, there's a half-second lag that we simply don't perceive. Of course, 0.5s is a lot less than 10s, but still a long time.

The experiment was thought to have implications about free will (or the lack thereof) because it demonstrated brain responses originating before the conscious experience of making a decision. Very similar to this recent experiment.

If anybody here can offer a more accurate summary of what Libet found, I'd be interested.
AT&T to Offer IPhone Without Contract for $400
In straight C, errors are a real pain. They just are. In working code, the evils of exceptions don't come up, because you don't get exceptions for the most part. As a practical matter, they're just debugging tools, and not control handlers.

This is 100% true. I was once trying to do something with POSIX semaphores on OSX and while the code compiled without so much as a peep and ran, the semaphore didn't seem to be working. Only after meticulously examining my semaphore calls and printing out the error codes was I able to discover that sem_init doesn't work on OSX. (At least this was my experience). This would have saved me hours of debugging time if the compiler spat out a warning instead.
Dupe (from three months ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156863
They should scan a violinist playing a fully-rehearsed piece. I wouldn't be surprised if the "decision making" parts of the brain never light up. That doesn't mean that the piece isn't played according to conscious decision. It becomes mindless, just like arbitrarily deciding which letter to choose.

They should also try passing random math problems. Let's see if the motor regions of the brain can calculate 12,000 * 1.08.
Numenta, AI and the Web
Strict pagerank does set global weights (necessitating the "seed" values that I mentioned in another comment), but this is not a requirement of flow-based weighting systems. If you implement a canonical pagerank algorithm then you will get a global view based upon what certain people feel is important/worthy, and as you expand the set of seed users you will end up with complete personalization. There is a continuum here and deciding where to reside within this range has some pretty large effects on the nature of the site.

Google determines global pagerank because they lack the computational horsepower to do otherwise and because web pages and users are not similar entities, but on a site like this where the links between users and articles are effectively a single measurement this sort of individual pagerank is possible.
Not necessarily - paid-for downloads aren't restricted, but by limiting the number of free full-song previews, they keep themselves from being an online radio station.
It actually makes no difference. Competitors fight for money in a market. Whoever makes less mistake then grabs more gold. It feels like baseball games between Red Sox and Yankees. But this game will never ends until PC fades.

We should cross check market share change of Linux Desktop at the same time. I think due to Vista's snafu, both Linux Desktop and OS X gain market shares. But it seems OS X grabs much more than Linux Desktop does.
Wow that sucks! You build your name online with great resources and boom - gone.

Sure he will recover, and it is kind of his fault for using a trademark in his domain - but it seems Jack Daniels have probably done it to get the traffic!!
Are people really going to pay more than $30 for a t-shirt? I would think that people who like to spend a lot of money on clothes usually buy things other than t-shirts.
I saw this a few days ago and considered submitting it, then I thought, "No way the HN community would find this kosher."

Shows what I know :P

EDIT: kosher for submission to HN, not kosher in general.
There was one post on HN that was testing the crawl time of the Google spider, it was 10 or 20 minutes, I believe?
Good points.

Remember the obsession with "eyeballs" from the first bubble?
You could always make a set of 25 "tea cosey"-like creations.

Market them for cows and their udders? You could get a little blog exposure that way I'm sure.
I think the concept is great... definitely in the vein of woot.com. Also an easy way to make a quick $5k on a T-shirt design.

Have you thought of reversing the dollar amounts? Have the #1 in the series cost $100 and the #100 cost $1. People are always willing to pay more for the first of any series, especially a limited one. I personally have no drive to pay $99 more for something that is the 100th of it's kind, but I might pay $99 more to say I had 'the original'.

(Also: Hello fellow citizens of KC area!)
There is a store in my hometown that sells 'designer t-shirts' for $80 each. Never underestimate the psychological effect of 'pricey = exclusive'.
Exceptions are not meant to be handled where they occur, that's why they unroll the stack. For the most part, you can't recover from an exception -- you just abort whatever you're doing, print an error message, and let the user try something else. Checked exceptions cause developers to re-interpret the exceptions or just swallow them -- neither is a benefit.
And that's totally bizarre, because I've seen people wearing Linux-branded portable music players everywhere, and I've seen Linux distro logos in major motions pictures and even Metal Gear Solid 4. Given Linux's all-encompassing focus on making their software beautiful and easy to use, and their extensive TV and print ad campaigns, I'm amazed we haven't seen a major uptick in installs.