skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
start at the beginning: you don't say what you want to get out of your blog. fame? a job? money? a place to play? an audience?

if you've figured that out, there's an easy answer to whether you should sign this deal or not.

my 2c: you'll make a lot more because of your (great) blog than with it. a blog is one place you can truly be yourself and have control - do you want cede some control of your online personal brand to another party for a few thousand bucks?
Top 20 resources to increase Web site traffic
All Marijuana studies actually funded in the US (they are rare and typically have 1 result) should be cautiously taken into account with the knowledge that our administration does whatever it can to spread FUD to the public about the drug. Follow the money trail ...
Sounds interesting... did you launch yet?
It has a nice design. I would suggest two things. One, a way to pause the tour. I couldn't find it.

Two, a case study, showing how somebody used your product. Testimonials are also great, and its another way to connect to a potential customer. Believe it or not, some still are given work computers without speakers, so the video tour is useless. And some people just like reading things instead. I do at least, its usually faster and I can tell quicker if I like the idea, without waiting for the tour to move along. A more in-depth how-it-works page would appeal to me more than a video tour. Plus it gives you a chance to sell your services in the way you explain how it works.

EDIT: Here's someone else launching today: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups. They have a little more explanation, and a testimonial blurb on the front page. I think it works well.
That absolutely sounds like hell. Maybe you should smoke some pot.

(Except the doing things for others in need.)
Solving Sudoku with TDD
One of the advantages of Growl being run at the OS level is that all apps can fire to Growl and the user see it. An in-browser Growl is going to be limited to firing events only while the user is on the same page.
jQuery is the best Javascript library ever. seriously, plugins, their structure, and in 30kb. And no weird licensing like ExtJS :/
Generally I either agree with or at least don't disagree with Atwood, but I completely disagree with his point on #region. It's a useful tool to manage long files, you can still search within it, it implies some kind of grouping of methods, etc. Even though the regions are collapsed by default, there's a little '+' next to is that took me about 3 seconds to figure out the very first time I used Visual Studio.

Also, the complaints about code helping only one editor are disingenuous considering how little .Net coding is done outside of Visual Studio.
'The Dumbest Generation'
We've been using it with a small group so far, but we haven't officially (publicly) launched yet no.
We're working with a couple companies who we're working on getting some case studies and testimonials from. Soon, hopefully :) I totally agree on that one.

As for the pause button, we're working on improving the flash soon too. I'm more of a back-end coding guy and haven't touched flash in years, so I'm just a bit rusty...

Thanks for the feedback!
Take a lesson from Spolsky and market directly to the CS/EE school - either on your own or as part of a startup group. Don't wait for students and grads to figure out you're there.
How do you do Real-world Unit Testing?
I often hear about the benefits of unit-testing and how great it is to have a complete test suite and so on, but I've many times found it way too cumbersome to actually make unit-tests for the code I write.

For simple functions that only operate on scalables and return scalables, unit-testing is easy. However, it becomes a wildly different story when things like database connections, configuration files, memcached servers etc. are in play.

How do you test something like an IRC connection? Obviously you could set up a phony socket which doesn't really use the network, but that would in some cases defeat part of the test.

Dear YC, how do I make unit-tests with auxiliary resources?
Session Strength Analysis With Stompy
I was just checking them out myself! It seems lots of services are using that same homepage layout, which works very well. Maybe we should give it a try...
Hahaha, I'm not sure "we hackers" can take credit for him -- he's Ayn Rand's creation, after all, and she didn't even use a typewriter. Although, on the subject of "Hackers and Blank", her essays on writing always very much echoed my feelings about programming.

I collected some illustrative quotes from the book in this blog post:

http://foohack.com/?p=32
funny.. because i just reverted to firefox 2 today because colorzilla and firebug would crash FF3 every 15 minutes.

Reverted because this is an invaluable tool...
Please can someone explain more about "BDD" here?
http://amiestreet.com isn't mentioned either and I've discovered lots of good music through the site. I guess they just aren't popular enough.
Here are my thoughts on it:

Have you tried going to advertisers directly and failed? It seems like this would be the only way that they could benefit you. If you want money, direct advertising seems like the best way to go. The rest of the terms put you in their pocket, and if they can't give you numbers (based on your current numbers) of when you may or may not get to the $1k threshold (based on their other numbers), then can you really trust that you will in 'no time at all'?

It seems like and infomercial, all promise and no product..

You can sell ad-space, or sell blog-posts (you already do some great reviews)
Richard Feynman on The Value of Science
Child trafficking on EBay
Before we write the book on the "dumbest" generation, we need to write the one about the "worst generation". That would be the boomers. Nobody has collectively fubared things up as much as they have.
Programming Puzzles and Our Mismatch Problem
I blame the hippies.
What are they using to analyze the queries like this? It looks pretty useful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior_driven_development
Judgment, Hope, and Being a Public Company
Dell disables some audio ports on their computers under the pressure from RIAA
I think you wanted to link

http://foohack.com/2007/10/required-reading-for-web-develope...
I think this would be more useful if the items looked realistic, and were not crude hand drawn graphics. If I want something hand drawn, I'll do it myself on a piece of paper.
Chewing tobacco is also disgusting and possibly dumb (because it causes mouth cancer), but it is not illegal. Pot is though. That's my problem with the anti-drug tirade: Nicotine is a drug and is not illegal, but THC is also a drug and is illegal.

(I should probably note that I've never smoked pot.)
Never mind... AmieStreet should be on there. (I made my comment before reading the article fully >.<)
SQL "development" gone horribly wrong...
Talk to a few good plumbers and you'll realize that they are all set. Kids these days want to go to college and get "white collar" jobs and this has created a huge opportunity for smart people who work in the trades.
As far as I understand it, you're talking about dorks, not nerds.

Nerd: Very Smart, socially inept

Geek: Smart, somewhat socially competent

Dork: Not smart, socially inept

That also explains why most people prefer to be called geeks.
There's more than one way to skin the revenue cat
They say you can't link to anything "offensive"? That is a blanket clause that lets them say you have violated their terms whenever they want. It's also a wildly unreasonable restriction on your freedom.
I particularly found the explanation of Gresham's law to be the best I've seen...
The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?
I agree and disagree. They probably don't want you to focus too much on the actual design during early prototyping. But they could have made it a bit more polished and still kept it bare.

Another benefit of this app is you can easily share your work (I know you can scan your sketches). But a negative is you can't really interact with it or make comments (Balsamiq).
Eleventh ICFP Programming Contest (July 11th-14th) rules posted
If they approached you, you have the ball. Feel free to walk away.
Starbucks and the Restroom Anti-Bubble
Yes, IIRC, there is a phenomenon called the "French Paradox," i.e., the French consume a lot of fatty foods (gourmet culture), yet have relatively low incidence of heart disease. It was found that that their high wine consumption kept their arteries clean.

As the Bible says, "A little wine for the stomach's sake" and "brandy to give you cheer."
An Apple User Tries Ubuntu
I'm partial to whiteboards for early mockups and tablets for digitizing more final mockups. I don't really see much value in using a tool like this for early mockups. You might as well use a real designer like Visual Studio, Flex, Blend, etc. and go to prototype stage if you are going to spend that much effort laying out controls.
Hackers+Entepreneurs Play Video Games For Charity
Perhaps I'm just sadistic, but I actually like the fact that it's taking startups years to reach an IPO. As someone who has witnessed a startup die slowly over the past year as the C-levels chased the impossible dream of an IPO, I wish that more people would realize that it's the creation of solid products by great people that get your company bought or IPO'd.
Thanks, guys/girls. Looking at the forums on geonames it seems like it's over kill and that it may be slow reading such a large database, and mondial seems to be the same. I think I may spend a day or two typing in the countries and cities myself!
We're taking the day off from our startups to play halo to raise money for childs play. If you have an xbox 360 and halo 3, add us. gamer tag is:

bday2008
Thanks, amarcus, but I needed cities too.
8 Questions: The Right Span of Control Isn't a Number
Why there will never be "One Ring to Rule Them All" in web services for groups
There's no word on the actual problem, of course, but they outline the available programming languages ahead of time -- a departure from previous contests, I think, which allowed any language.

I just thought people might want a heads-up when planning their weekend or setting up teams. These are usually pretty fun.
You really should make the first page have a more obvious "buy now"-button. It took me a while to figure out that I had to go to an individual edition of the app (JIRA, Confluence, Desktop) to get a price.
I wonder which of the following describes best the downvoter's reasoning:

a) The study is flawed, thus it shouldn't be cited
b) You misinterpreted the study
c) The study is valid but it's bad news for me, so I decided to shoot the messenger.
A couple years ago, as a happily married 35 year old, I took a few math and physics classes for fun at a nearby community college.

I purposely would not talk to the younger crowd for exactly this "Creepy" issue. Luckily there were a few older students around that I could talk with.

I found after a few classes that the younger people (especially home-schoolers) who had real interest in the technical subjects would seek you out in the math and science labs. I ended up being friends with a few of these students, to the point where they would ask to sync class schedules so that we could work on projects together.
(Males only; there were some smart females in my classes, but for a variety of reasons I had as little to do with them as possible.)

It seems kind of unfair that a person feels compelled to distance themselves from like-minded people, just because of an age difference.
If the roughest thing in life you ever encounter are the "rigors" of a PHD program in a non-scientific field like whatever CritLit field this guy is in, then you are truly living a blessed life.
If I understand it correctly, what they want is to continuously copy your content to their website, making money out of it and give you 30% back? I think that isn't a bad deal, provided you can place any ads on your original blog. Is that true? Because then I see it basically as an additional income.

What I would worry about is the $1000 cap. If they give you 30%, it means that they need to make at least $3333 from it - and making such number from a blog is not easy. So you may really wait a long time, in which case it might not be worth it. IMHO reasonable cap is $100.
> I know Ubuntu is free software, but I don’t care about that. It’s more important that my system be good, not cheap. (And if it was really that great, they’d charge for it, right?).

I wanted to stop reading right there, because the reviewer is ill informed by what it means to be "free," however I stuck it out and he gives a favorable review.
Jesus, I wish I could conscionably downvote you for making me feel guilty (this kid's a SOPHOMORE in high school).

Awesome job.
Sorry, anecdotes ≠ statistics.
Cool! I use YubNub every day!
SOA and Future Trends
They are using query reviewer

http://code.google.com/p/query-reviewer/
This wasn't a bad article to read, although it doesn't really get anywhere. A reasonably novice Mac user tries out Ubuntu, finds some pros and cons.. the end. Quite well written though but some of his insights don't quite make sense..

> I had heard that Linux users still use a command line. Instead of pointing and clicking, they actually type in obscure commands – a series of numbers, letters, and squiggly things. It’s very Russian spy, black hat, deep nerd.

So do most technically minded OS X users. Admittedly he says he finds the command line quite useful on page 2, but Linux's command line offers no benefits over OS X's.

> My test laptop was using the GNOME desktop interface. On start up, it offered me a choice of interfaces (KDE, GNOME, etc.) The oddness of this struck me: isn’t Ubuntu enough? It appears I still needed to select a separate desktop interface. [...] The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience.

That's what Ubuntu is attempting to do: enforce a standard. I don't recall Ubuntu asking me this question with a default install. You're never going to be able to eradicate the ability to choose though, because people on both sides of the KDE/GNOME fence are pretty diehard. I can see why, because I "quite like" GNOME and think KDE is a bloated, ugly, block piece of Windows-inspired junk (basically, I respect KDE as much as I respect Comic Sans) and I don't usually take sides on things like this..
i really like the idea/concept of the app, I've used iRise to do mockups and specs and was really impressed but the high price tag per license is geared to enterprise users so once my trial ended I was done. I always thought this would make a great web app with a subscription model, that would be very helpful to a huge small biz/consumer audience. not sure if balsamiq fits the bill but def excited about testing it out.
Check it out on OpenSourceRails
http://www.opensourcerails.com/projects/85

YubNub was actually open source before. The real news is that I was able to upgrade it to Rails 2.1, and cleaned up the codebase.

Enjoy!
> 25g is .88 ounces, which is what a recreational smoker might consume in an entire year.

Then all of the smokers that I knew were professionals.
It's parody. He's simultaneously pointing out the grandiosity of Graham's allusions, taking the piss out of them by comparison, and mirroring Graham's style to do it.

It's a really nice piece of writing, and it's even more fun if you read it with a copy of Hackers and Painters next to it to spot the references.
The author misses the point that PG's essays are not intended to be understood literally, but as literature, to be appreciated on an aesthetic level only.
I don't think the applications of jgrowl are the same as the system growl alerts.

I imagine this being used for webapp-specific notifications, much the same way as iminlikewithyou.
This is something to consider. It is relatively easy to avoid being busted if you're in a relaxed place like the Bay Area. However it is easier to get busted in other places. Unfortunately, if you're poor or not white, you're also more at risk for being busted. Two of my friends are barred entry to Canada because of previous possession charges, and Canada has some of the most relaxed pot laws in the world. Also, if you have a pot bust on your record, it is hard(er) to get your passport renewed. If you want to become a heavy pot smoker, it is a good idea to be white and rich enough to afford a good lawyer. Whatever you do, if you're black, you or your friends smoke pot, and you travel to Dubai, make sure you clean off your shoes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-512815/Briton-jailed...
The best "toys" I had as a kid were not toys at all. I think kids are often frustrated by toy versions of real things. Kudos to the author for suggesting a real laptop instead of the cheeseball alternatives.

When I was young, instead of toy version of real tools, my father managed to find me kid sized versions of real things. Instead of a plastic pretend hammer and screwdriver, I had real metal 1/2 sized versions of these tools that could actually make things.

I had a small soldering iron by the time I was 8 or 9 and after a disappointing experience with a pre-made "1001 electronic projects" kits, my dad just started bringing me bags of surplus transistors,caps,resistors,and ICs which I would solder together into little lumps of partially functioning goodness.

I did these things because no one ever told me that 9 year olds shouldn't be doing this. This is the message I'm afraid that these toy versions of things convey. The kid world should be impotent and pretend because the real world is not for children.
For something similar in Emacs:

(defun toggle-fold ()
"Toggle current buffer's folding." (interactive)
(if selective-display
(set-selective-display nil)
(set-selective-display language-fold-column)))

where language-fold-column is the column that function bodies (or methods within a class, etc.) are indented to by default. I set the language-fold-column variable in my language-mode hook.

I find this helpful when skimming a module -- it limits it to function descriptions (docstring-like comments preceding the methods, if any) and the function type (in the OCaml sense); the function bodies are replaced with "...". With well-named functions (long sigh), this is often sufficient. Granted, it's based solely on indentation, but it works pretty well for several languages.
Oil price shock means China is at risk of blowing up
OK, webapps are cheap to build and can be built in a relatively short time. I get it.

From now on, can you please advertise your app for its features and benefits, not for how quickly or cheaply you made it?

Although, this app has a nice design. I'll give it that.
how come all these "Built a web app in XX hours for $XXXX" apps have to do with twitter?
"Let me guess edw519, you probably...*

You guess wrong, josefresco. But it doesn't really matter anyway because I never "advertised" my habits to the world. This guy did.

Just slightly ignorant as I pointed out above.

Ignorant I can live with. But this was also irresponsible.

This is hacker news, where people post and learn and share together about doing difficult and exciting work. I realize that OP had no idea where his essay would end up, but it ended up here (at #1 no less) so that's where it warranted a response.

I really don't care what anyone's personal habits are, but as soon as you write about how you use drugs to take the easy way out, and that post ends up on a site where people bust their butts to do good work and add value to other people's lives, you're fair game.
I recently looked at a lot of mockup sites to design my site but none of them were easy and simple.

I finally decided to just create a bare bones html site.

I also remember seeing a canadian site a while back that helped in prototyping websites (can't remember name) but they too were too difficult to use.
PostgreSQL Gets Religion About Replication
He claims you say the connection between hacking and painting is strong, in an essay titled "Hackers and Painters", in which you say, "of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike". I think you're begging the question.

Moreover, you yourself are constructing a straw man. His point isn't simply that your comparison is broken, but that it's hopelessly filtered through your own experience. He knows you see similar connections with architects. He's saying, the only reason you picked "painters" was that your art education taught you to admire painters and their lifestyle.

The word "fatuous", repeated in his essay, is the core of his argument: that your insight about the relation between Hackers and Painters is superficial, and where it applies at all, it's built on knowledge of painting that is itself superficial.

I neither agree nor disagree, but it's graceless to dismiss him like that. I'd be flattered to have someone refute me as carefully as he did you.
You are right!

They switched some years ago for the exact same reasons they mention now from Mac to Windows PCs.
I might quibble with the "Linux's command line offers no benefits" line. It's true that the shell is identical. But OS X, out of the box, is lacking huge chunks of what you expect to find out-of-the-box on a typical Linux distribution. That's a problem for anyone who wants to be able to portable scripts, etc... Add that to the fact that the existing package managers for the command line tools are kinda lacking, and I'd honestly put OS X behind even cygwin as a good example of a OS command line environment.

The bit about Gnome vs. KDE is a sore point, alas. Canonical itself is clearly a Gnome shop, and that's what they ship on their core Ubuntu Desktop distribution. But KDE has a huge user base of near-fanatic volunteers, who insist (how dare they!) on maintaining the Kubuntu distribution in parallel. Both desktops work very well, and at this point neither is likely to disappear.

FWIW, I use Gnome and prefer the architecture and API.
If the doctor was accused of negligence, the court would be able to requisition all the medical records of his patients. (Actually this might not be true of a doctor, but in any other industry this would be perfectly legal.)

We're talking about YouTube being the accused, not an individual anonymous user. Am I understanding that right?
The webapp in N days/hours meme is begining to lose relevance. Markbao has clearly built plenty of web apps in the past, so the umpteenth app does not incrementally cost much. What is not included in the 18 hours is the years of training needed to build that skill level. As someone recently said, it takes many years of work to become an overnight success.
I don't see why the vehemence is warranted

You're probably right. If this hadn't made it to #1 so quickly (no fault of OP of course), I may not have even responded at all. But it did, so I did, and I didn't hold any punches.

I just found it ironic that many of us who do good work 80 to 100 hours per week and come here for a break among our peers find a student who needs to resort to drugs to cope (or whatever) with his difficulties at #1.

Without even entering a debate about the pros and cons of drugs in general, I found the essay wimpy and irresponsible. Since I can't vote it down, I shouted it down. No apologies.
Did any of you catch the Minnaert recommendation, for "Light and Color In The Outdoors", the author's notion of a strong work about the connection between programming and art? I bought a used copy for Erin, and it was pretty awesome. Did any of you read it? What did you think?
Tobacco is a local industry. Marijuana is not.

The US was built with the money from Tobacco, not Marijuana.

So we can't criminalize Tobacco any more than Columbia can do away with cocaine or Afghanistan can out opium. Personally, I think that marijuana use is probably harmful, as is most drug use, but isn't worth the cost in criminalizing it.