skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Karma-rank (Pagerank for social sites)
There is a direct application of Pagerank to social sites like news.YC that seems to have a number of advantages over the typical "one user, one vote" scheme.

I won't explain how Pagerank works, there is a good explanation here:

http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html

Let's drop the "every vote counts equal" scheme. Say you want to get a global measure for how important every person's votes are to the site. This means you want to assign a number to every person. This is analogous to the pagerank number assigned to a web page. The votes a person has got on all his comments and submissions corresponds to the inbound links of a webpage. The votes a person gives correspond to outbound links from a webpage. You would like that the authority every user gives equals the authority every user receives (both via upvotes, let's ignore downvotes for now). Every user's importance gets divided equally among the submissions/comments that he has upmoded. These are exactly the rules Pagerank operates on, except that one user may have upmoded another several times and you need to account for downmods too.

What are the advantages this would bring to sites like news.YC? Such an algorithm would be pretty resistant to voting circles in the same way pagerank is resistant to spam (one user with lots of karma will weight more than a lot of sockpuppets with no karma). It gives a global estimate of people's importance to the site and it should allow a site to preserve it's culture better as it scales.

Drawbacks? Some people may object that it is unfair not to count votes equally. It is harder to implement (especially as you need to modify the karma-rank on the fly, although if this turns out to be hard, you can use an approximation and recalculate karma-rank daily, for example). Last but not least, it puts serious performance requirements on the site implementing it that Arc is probably not ready to handle.
This is interesting data in this connection:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
Animal, a Biologically Inspired AI Program that Tries to Learn Chess from Scratch
I have an iPod Touch, and the lack of a physical keyboard would drive me nuts were it my phone. Certainly, some of the usefulness would be cancelled out by voice activation, but you just can't feel which key you're about to press with the virtual keyboard.

I actually prefer T9, even if it's a little slower, because I can feel the buttons.
My first love affair. She was a married woman (and not to me). Didn't go too well.
Well I wasn't positing an assumption; the landing pages work best as they appear because that's how folks want to interact.
Why The 10 Commandments Of Web Design Is Complete Baloney
You can do one more step and build a recommendation system that tracks not only trust but individual preferences. Performace requirements are pretty steep for real-time recommender, but it is totally worth it.

Oh, by the way, we have it implemented already on jaanix. For an opensource implementation you can take a look at http://www.advogato.org/
> He called at about 11pm

That seems late for a phone call to somebody you don't know. Or is it assumed in the startup world that everybody is a night owl?
PayPal and Amazon are extremely popular. Their mobile payment services, while quite easy to use, are not popular. I think PayPal even shuttered their SMS service and is keeping with the mobile site. Amazon's was actually a YCombinator startup (TextPayMe.com). If you're looking to pay your brother for ice cream, get on it:

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/productsServices?sn=mo...

It's almost exactly what this clown thinks is going to make Twitter with a billion dollars, but already in existence and not worth a billion dollars. Oh and you can count on Amazon's service working for more than 10 minutes without going down. That's gotta be worth something.
It's nice to see Netflix keep the feature, though I myself do not use it. The customer outcry was considerable; See NYT (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/monday-2/).

Netflix's motivation to retain the feature was no doubt out of fear of losing customers rather than any type of benevolence. It would've been a huge gaff for them to lose customers over it; especially considering the strong competition from Apple, Hulu, and the television studios adding to the existing competition from Blockbuster, the cable and satellite providers.

Chalk part of this win up to market competition.
I'd be glad to meet with you when you get to SF.

richcollins@gmail.com
Do you have implemented the described system, a recommendation system, or both? If you have implemented similar global estimation of how much every vote counts, I'd be interested in hearing how did it actually affect your site.
> In a truly parallel system, all events are synchronized to a global clock

Ants work together to form an efficient parallel system, where is their global clock?
With respect to the Indians/pox blankets/massacres you need to understand that a societal-level berserker rage ([1] [2] for definition) was happening for the better part of 250 years because back about 100 years before America existed Indians killed almost half of the English colonists in New England [3].

Berserker rage is not specifically an American problem; it is a human problem. So an American will not feel bad about being an American because of things like this; he will feel bad about being a human. He will tend to work to prevent America from engaging in this sort of behavior again but the past is the past.

[1] Listen from 22:22 onward through "Act 3": http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=195

[2] and/or read this: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/archive/losing...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Philips_War

EDIT: Such berserker rages and violence are not justified but they do happen and it's worth understanding the pattern if you want to make the world a better place.
A rather lengthy chat:

http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_vc&chat_id=14625
I've had the same thing happen with Google calendar. (Later, randomly, I happened to meet socially the guy whose calendar I was mistakenly allowed to read. That was weird.)
now try this on for size. I'm sure you know how this works:

> def a
> yield
> end
=> nil
> a { 42 }
=> 42

But did you know this?

> def b
> Proc.new.call
> end
=> nil
> b { 42 }
=> 42

Proc.new without any arguments works the same as yield. tripped me out when I found this the other day.
http://searchyc.com/user/swombat
It's inherent in the speed of light in their local environment. Physics 101.
This is a terrific treatise on the problem of scaling, and the Divmod strategy, which I recommend to anyone looking for a clear picture in mind. It will help you make scalable systems where ever you are.

For me, Mantissa was more than an intellectual curiosity. I built my site on top of it. Though I'm now migrating to App Engine for other, pragmatic reasons (hosted environment, ease of deployment, Google's CDN, not having to do system maintenance, integration with Google's auth system, integration with Google services, BigTable, great prices, PR), Mantissa is a terrific place to get started to learn about the basics of scalability.

Once Divmod is able to get the rough spots ironed out, Mantissa could be a major competitor to App Engine. What they could provide in a hosted environment includes things Google has either ruled not to do, or haven't done yet (such as COMET).
Goodbye, XP. Hello, Midori
I see this chart as a list of things to learn. I'm only in the 2nd or 3rd column in a lot of these categories, and this chart forced me to honestly assess where my weaknesses are. So, it is useful as a reality check and possibly as a roadmap.
It is both. Trust and recommendations are mixed together in an SVD like algorithm as described in http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html . On top of that jaanix lets you adjust all your personal preferences in real-time.

The biggest effect is that it is discouraging trolls and spammers, as there's no front page they can spam or troll. The downside is that the critical mass required to make the site truly social is a lot higher, and unfortunately we have not figured out how to gain enough users for it to really shine.
We're working on something for this in the South Bay (Cupertino/San Jose area). Email if you're interested: alaska.miller@gmail.com
Do you... erm... Yahoo!?

And, of course: I'm Feeling Lucky!
Hey, nickb, how'd you repost this URL? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=232192
Dude! Why do you guys have to hate? It's just a simple question. Without that question, you guy wouldn't be posting comments!
How to publish your own book
lessons learned from a DIY programming book publishing project
I think IDEs are a matter of personal preference. There's nothing wrong with wanting good integration between the various tools you use, and good tools are not the same thing as "training wheels". Most of the popular IDEs have at least a few tempting features. I use emacs and command-line tools most of the time, but I also worked full time in Visual Studio a few years ago. I was surprised that I got to like it better than my usual emacs setup, for the languages it supports.
About the Cold Start problem...couldn't you have written a bot to crawl the web looking for random albums? There are quite a few mp3/music blogs. Or another interesting idea would be to scan Last.fm and see what's going up the charts.

Anyway, great post :D
The problem is coming up with these "parallel objects" through anything other than decomposition. For example, in the quick sort demo you linked to, his first step is to decompose quick sort into 5 sections which can run in parallel. But then in this article, he claims that decomposition is somehow "fake".

Message passing is a great idea, check out Erlang if you want more. Reading this guy's articles, it seems like he is half way towards something interesting, but has blown it all out of proportion. He's at war with his daemons, he even lists some of them on his "Enemies" page.
Yeah, he was calling from California on the west coast and we were in Toronto on the east. I think it's about a 4 hr difference.
Ditto. I handled hitting the front page of /., digg, and yahoo tech on the same day on a single dual core server. The site slowed down a little during the worst of it, but page load times were always reasonable. Unless your app is a total beast and/or you require a large amount of resources to service each user, a single server is probably fine.
Wow, Ishii is still harping on about his tangible user interface? His work was very thought-provoking for new user interfaces, particular for ubiquitous computing, but his most relevant work was done about 6-7 years ago. It's a little sad it hasn't progressed much further...

Admittedly the scales solution is pretty cool, a useful, cheap method for context awareness. A fellow PhD used a Lego mindstorms kit to detect which instrument was picked up in a surgical environment and update the patient record display accordingly.

I suppose thought provocation is a good thing then... I'd just like to see something really useful (in the 'real world') come out of there.
DJIA fell 14.4% in June 
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=INDEXDJX:.DJI
Today I typed "rm -rf /" on a client computer "/" and "*" are close on the keypad...
JavaScript (and thus JSON) arrays are lists, not sets. You can implement sets using arrays, but this diffs JSON, not your implementation of sets.

It diffs arrays "correctly", though not intelligently. If you have [1,2,3,4,5] and [1,3,4,5] it won't tell you the item at index 1 was removed, it will tell you the items at index 1, 2, 3 were changed and index 4 was removed. Thus it does need a little work, but not in the context you described.

p.s. I'm the author of the JSON Diff tool.
Plenty of smart people do dumb things. Every single day.
Pardon? It's exactly the opposite, if the speed of light is constant, there can be no global clock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
This sort of summaries always leave me with an impression of being written by someone about himself and a few guys in his epsilon neighborhood.

Realistically speaking, you've gotta be not just an über-programmer, but having extensive exposure to the HR and developer management to have any credibility on the matter. Otherwise the statistical sample is just not there, so the list has very little value outside of being entertaining.

A concrete gripe with this particular matrix - maintaining a blog has nothing to do with programmer's competency. In fact the exact opposite is true based on my observations. The reference to the value of TopCoder rankings is also laughable at best; again based on my own experience.
inevitable noise that comes with growth, no doubt
This change definitely won't make it a programming language - they're not even real variables, they're more like XSLT's definition of variables. Also known as constants.
What stops Jaiku from stealing Twitter's thunder?

I bet Google has way more resources and brilliant minds to see it go live before twitter even think on the database design.

Mix with google checkout and there you have a killer payment option.
These are pretty cheap. I wonder if they could be repurposed for use with s/key in general.
I suspect pg may need to track down a bug in his anti-dupe code...

The URLs have spaces in 'em.
only one thing in the list is from this decade (Las Vegas, 2002).

i'm guessing this isn't so much a matter of "lack of memorable advertising of late" as it is a matter of time. it probably takes a decade to cement a good tagline. in fact, i bet time matters a dozen times more than any other variables (aside from the company continuing to operate and advertise).

because of that, I find that the only impressive thing on that list IS Las Vegas.
Knowing the state of ecommerce in Australia and NZ I'd say because it just isn't profitable.
Mobile phone use reduces smoking
I choose "other" - the main reason I ignore most otherwise reasonably priced mobile devices is their lack of integration with external keyboards/mice/screens. The Mac Air announcement was a disappointment to me - I was really hoping for a Mac ultraportable that could serve mainly as an ebook/email reader when I'm not at my desk.
As per rrival and my reply, I'm not sure how you're going to get this to fly.

Australians and New Zealanders are notoriously thrifty when it comes to paying for websites. I'm not exactly sure what you offer that say a Google Document could do, apart from a nicer interface. It surely doesn't seem worth $10 to create a list of birthday presents (and I'm also unsure who would do that?)

I think you'd do much better partnering with someone like Stoeffels, David Jones, etc and getting them to pay you per person that signs up, or per purchase.

Also I think it's a bit offputting to put prices on there for things you don't offer, etc. Have you had any signups or actual payments yet?
To (over-)simplify : some boldness.
Presumably you have the entire program represented as a top-level tree, and a global optimization would be a transformation of that. I don't see why macros wouldn't be just as applicable here as in the local case where you're transforming a subtree.
The reason why parallel programming is hard is, like John Hennessy said:

"Many of the early ideas were motivated by observations of what was easy to implement in the hardware rather than what was easy to use" (see http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...)

i.e parallel programming was always an afterthought. To architects, building a parallel system was viewed primarily as a hardware hurdle to overcome.
The hydra is infallible. If the Pirate Bay were to collapse (may they reign forever), a dozen new sites would spring up to replace it.
Couldn't agree more - he gets it right in saying oversleeping kills productivity, but then wrecks his argument by specifying it as 8 hours, and not addressing how much time you waste when tired.
Well, the easy way to use Lisp macros in a compiler is to start with an s-expr and successively transform it until you've got something that the target platform accepts. "Starting with an s-expr" implies that your source code is in Lisp format. So in that sense, what you're compiling is a Lisp derivative. Is that what you mean?

No doubt there are clever ways to leverage Lisp macros in compilers beyond this approach. But most people who like Lisp macros wouldn't bother. They'd just do it the easy way.

Edit: my understanding of what DaniFong is getting at is that in Lisp programming, there is no longer a barrier between application development and compiler development. This makes possible a lot of powerful things that you can't do when the application is written in a fixed language by different programmers than the ones who write the compiler. It's a different point, but one I find very interesting. It's not obvious what belongs to application development and what belongs to language development once this technical (and organizational) barrier is removed.
Tesla announces the Model S: a $60k, all-electric, five passenger sports sedan
It's interesting that this feature turned out to be important enough to customers that Netflix ultimately decided it was better to keep it, but apparently Netflix wasn't able to see that in its usage.
when we launched younoodle we hit NYT / techcrunch / venturebeat within a few hours. me and the other engineer slept through it and the site didn't go down once - it even stayed pretty fast throughout that day. btw, techcrunch doesn't send much traffic at all, we got more from delicious.
No thank you. Writing such a book would be 1000 if not 10000 times harder than reading it. I'm interested enough to do the latter, but not the former.
This sounds like PayPal's original intention: transfer money using Palm devices.

PayPal/Max Levchin Interview, Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston, 2007.
An Industry Wishlist for Future Browsers
In the frame of reference of the ants, all clocks agree with one another. This means that timing is global within their FOR. There is no problem in determining simultaneity because there is only one FOR in question. And even in multiple FORs, their relative speed would have to approach that of light for any ant to notice a difference between local times. Deny at your own detriment.
I never made any serious money with AllAdvantage (less than 40 or 50 dollars total) - but I was in pretty active on a message board with people that were earning serious cash. The people with several thousand referalls were sometimes pulling in several thousands of dollars in monthly checks (albeit, only about 6 months maybe.)

Say what you will, that's a hell of a return for basically putting an affliate link up on a busy website (one guy was running a basic wallpaper website.) AllAdvantage might have gone bankrupt, but it paid out $49 mil to a lot of small site owners in one year. That's pretty cool.

(Business model never had a prayer, though.)
What news regarding the story?

Link?
I really wish they could grow a self-contained human immune system in a lab the way they can grow skin tissue and (some) organs these days. It would really simplify this process.

Then again, and this is somewhat of a modest proposal: why not just use dead people [donated to science] for these tests? If you can get their immune system, all by itself, functioning again (say they're decapitated, but you've installed a pacemaker and are filtering their blood), why not use it instead of some animal's with very little resemblance?
My wife and I owned a small software company, 12 employees. It all fell apart when we hired the wrong sales person. He came to us after reading about our company in the paper (We'd just won a World Summit Award). His references checked out, so we took him on on commission only.

4 months later he'd generated almost $4 million in sales. We dropped everything else and threw our whole company behind the new sales. Then he was arrested while crossing the border. Apparently he was indicted in Massachusetts for fraud, for falsifying millions of dollars of sales.

Turns out there were no sales. The people we spoke to on the phone were actors he'd hired. The pages and pages of functional specs from the customer were all made up. And he'd been to jail twice before for doing the same thing.

Moral of the story: Sales people suck. Always check criminal records as well as references.
It seems like the process behind Wikipedia made physical: (almost) all of the edits are contributed by people who haven't been "immersed" in the creation process, so the perspective is constantly fresh.
No, real programmers use cat.
Helped a guy who was an acquaintance, who I thought was a friend move into my apt while in grad school with my other roommates, vouched for him, paid his part of the security deposit too. He turns to be of the kind who talks behind the back, borrows without repaying, a general douche.

Long story short, months later, said guy moves out. Lost my money, lost my other roommates, and lost my reputation as a guy who can vouch for others. Lesson learned: takes years to know a person.
Started a company with a guy with a freaky talent for manipulation. Went to China with said partner for four months. Discovered the freaky talent. Lost almost all hair. Eliminated partner. Allowed remaining two "older, more experienced" partners back home make decisions while I continued to "execute" in China. Progressively lost all sense of control, along with remaining hair. Massively burnt out over the subsequent five months.

The upshot: spent six glorious months recovering -- living, working, and traveling independently in south east asia, learning python while rediscovering why it's worth waking up in the morning.

:)
Inclusive of taxes, that's a biggie. The net effect, inclusive of taxes, really wouldn't have put Yahoo! in a much more favorable position or made it any more liquid. As the article states, "Yahoo reiterates that the deal would have added nothing to Yahoo's cash flow, despite Microsoft's claims that it would add $1 billion a year."
Neat stuff!
10 of the Biggest Platform Development Mistakes
Years ago I grew a client site from 0 to 30k active users. The client complained about everything that comes with success.... Users calling/emailing, needing more equipment, problems with billing/fraud.

What happened? Emails went unanswered, site got slow, users ran off, spammers took over.
American Scandal - Seniors Target of Fraud Schemes
Best technical one... misuse of chmod, which caused the ISP I was working at to be down for a few hours.

Best non-technical one... in the 2nd grade, asking a girl if she wanted to come over for dinner and her rejection being akin to "Hah! Hey everybody... he just asked me to dinner!" That screwed me up for years... fortunately, I've recovered. :)
Diabetes is also cured in mice.
We are doing one called TableRush.com in India - but we are not the founders. We should launch in a few months and then follow up with a Symbian mobile application.
Microsoft: The "Velvet Sweatshop" (1989)
Really illuminating article written in 1989 on Microsoft's culture. Any parallels you draw to large corporations of today are strictly your own.
That was me. When I wrote it, I didn't know millions of people would download it and would spawn the auto-surf genre of apps. It ended up making me ranked 15 on their pyramid with over 60,000 people underneath me. During the hey-day, I was getting great checks -- not bad for a 16 year old back then. I also ended up being a consultant for them. I still keep in contact with the guys there who have since moved on, but thanks for the good memories -- glad to know people still remember one of the things I wrote!