skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is purely my personal experience, mind, but I have observed that Ruby users tend to be younger and webbier and employed mainly to code, and Python users tend to be older and employed to do other things, of which coding is a subset. This explains the cultural differences; Python users have been burnt before by unmaintainable codebases and are determined not to make the same mistake twice. Also, as Python users (again, in my experience) tend not to be primarily programmers, they aren't impressed by clever coding tricks.
I take it you know that the continuation timeout problem affects replies as well?

Because I think it sucks that when I spend more than a few minutes composing a reply I can't post it. On more than one occasion I lost my reply this way.

So it's not a cosmetic problem. We're not talking about the minor nuisance of hitting refresh, we're talking about losing carefully crafted replies.

Fix it please.
How to say no
AJAX Libraries API: Speed up your Ajax apps with Google’s infrastructure
Yeah, that was weird. To me playing soccer is just about the most fun thing in the world.
Exactly.

Oh, they might buy a smaller car, but they aren't going to start walking 3 miles to the store.

Of course nobody is going to walk 3 miles, that's stupid. However, riding 3 miles on your bike is trivial. You'll be there in 15 minutes. I do this about twice a week, and driving wouldn't be any faster than biking.

I think the reason people don't consider biking is because bikes in america are weird. Everyone wants to get a very cool mountain bike. Then it rides poorly on the street, and it can't carry anything, so they assume bikes are useless. I noticed that when I was in Tokyo, every bike on the street was of the useful variety. They all had chain guards, fenders, and racks, which makes casual riding an enjoyable experience. Maybe if you could go to a bike shop and see bikes like this, people would use them for grocery shopping.

In the US, it appears that most people think bikes are a fun thing to ride to kill time on the weekend. I wish we could change that perception somehow.

</rant>
The only thing mainstream attention kills in most things is the ability for early adapters to consider themselves elite in knowing about said thing.

I see it in music all the time with core fans hating the band as soon as they get popular even if they haven't changed at all just because they are no longer unique for liking them.

I never thought I'd see it with a web comic.
If you'll forgive me, that's a very metropolitan attitude. For huge swathes of the country (including, umm, the bits that provide all the produce to the stores so you can shop whenever you feel like and don't need the means to transport large loads yourself) motor vehicles (including pick-up trucks and other "gas guzzlers") are pretty much essential.

It's all very well to be smug about how high gas prices hurt yuppies in SUVs, but they hurt lots of regular working folks too.
If you click on the back button, the text should still be there in the form you submitted. Surely your brower doesn't wipe forms when you click on back?
10 Coaches That Could Be Exceptional CEOs
There's more state than that. Read the source and see for yourself.
While Geni does have family-oriented tools, it focuses first on genealogy. The implicit "goal" is to build the largest possible family tree, and presumably to use its social networking features to learn about and create new relationships with distant relatives on that tree. While Geni does a great job of it, there are a lot of families that don't have time or interest in genealogy, and are instead just looking for a simple way to stay in touch with a core group.

So we're focusing instead on immediate families and other closely-connected groups that need a simple way to share and manage information among existing members. They're looking to save time, rather than pick up a new set of information to manage (family tree). That's why I say Kinverge is more of a family intranet site than a social network.

To think of it another way, the Geni social graph is a traditional mesh, while Kinverge's is formed of circles that touch at points where members belong to multiple groups (your family group and your in-laws' family group, etc.). You could make Geni work that way, but it would require changing a lot of the default privacy settings, which non-tech-savvy family members have a hard time doing.

Thanks, keep the feedback coming! Much appreciated.
Is it possible to scrub anywhere with this. Something like streaming audio. If i click somewhere in the middle of the timeline and it starts buffering there? is that possible without streaming?
"5. Just because people can shop on the Internet, that doesn't mean that they will." This applies to nearly every online app.
yeah, but it made great linkbait!
Freeman Dyson: The Question of Global Warming
$100/gallon gas would do a lot more than slow down commuting. It would make air travel prohibitively expensive (thousands or tens of thousands to fly anywhere - fuel is already the biggest cost at any airline with $100/barrel oil). Shipping would also be seriously impacted; the 20% savings on a radio made in China would be offset by transportation costs. $4 winter strawberries from Chile would be no more. That, and global recession. Personally, sounds to me like some good and some bad.
I wasn't, but my Observer was...
They don't even post their rates anywhere? That always makes me uncomfortable.

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/truth-in-pricing-gu...
At Tipit.to we haven't sent out a single payup reminder yet and we're seeing a percentage of more than 50% (more than 75% if you exclude unverified accounts).

Read more about how we are doing things differently in my comment on the post: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/27/tipjoys-new-api-lets-we...
"The problem is, about 1/3 to 1/2 of them were basically cover-ups for deficiencies in C++ that don't exist in other languages. Although I'm not a huge Perl fan anymore, I have to admit the Perl community caught on to this first (or at least funniest). They pointed out that many of these so-called patterns were actually an implementation of Functional Programming in C++."

Compare Norvig (1998): "Design Patterns in Dylan or Lisp: 16 of 23 patterns are either invisible or simpler". http://norvig.com/design-patterns/
Firstly what is your product or service? It probably makes a difference who you would choose. For example, if you have subscription payments then Google Checkout isn't in your space (yet). PayPal is an obvious one and I think you can hear "horror stories" about most of them in my opinion - how would your customers perceive you offering payment in PayPal. In theory it could be a negative. Where are you located? Are you wanting to offer in Dollars, Euro, Yen? Give us some more info on what your service/product is and we can help you some more.
> Do I get bonus points for not really seeing much point to the Singleton pattern when I read the GoF book?

This comment entitles the bearer to one (1) Hacker News Bonus Point.

Don't spend it all in once place.
The problem is that Ruby's scoping rules aren't consistent. Sometimes it appears lexically scoped, but sometimes it acts dynamically scoped.

Sometimes this leads to funny looking code (if you know to avoid it) or truly inscrutable bugs (if you don't).
the author is right when is says that "The argument that copyright holders are wrong or stupid for not coming up with some new business model and for trying to enforce the law is not just wrongheaded, but dangerous."

Time has arrived where original content creator (musician, writer etc.) has to decide how they want to publish the content and make money. Self-publishing is gaining momentum in the book arena, the same can happen in music, movie and tv - the only thing is someone has to make self-publishing eco-system simple and affordable.

The other platform that can be explored is creative commons. Licensing under creative commons and sharing content freely with the support of some kind of revenue generation (may be thru ads) is one of the best option.
Paul,

I understand that you're busy, and I don't mean to discount that. I'm sure it takes lots of time to write those essays -- as I thoroughly enjoy how thoughtful and articulate they are. Also you've got your YC companies to look after, and lots of (I'm sure) exciting events and engagements to go to.

Hear me out. I love Hacker News, and I read it every day. Sometimes, though, I get frustrated...

I finish reading a fascinating story about hacking or startup's and, to continue in my adventure I hit the "more" button at the bottom of the site.

I'm expecting to be sent to the next page so I can continue scrolling through the news and stories from the site, and instead of seeing the next 20 or so news items, I see this, "Unknown or expired link" (see http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=qQ88X1AyDg).

Then I leave the site, even though I'd rather keep reading.

It'd be nice to have this fixed. That's all I'm saying. Thanks.
I think that he had a pretty good idea.
Ruby EventMachine - the speed demon!
It's really amazing how he can manage to draw the dinosaurs to look exactly the same from day to day.

He must have a very steady hand.
Fair point, particularly since Microsoft didn't start out evil -- it was in fact Apple that tried to sue Microsoft into oblivion before Windows took over the computing world... back when Apple was a $4 billion-dollar behemoth and MS was an upstart.

We shouldn't forget how Microsoft obtained the monopolistic power that it later abused...
[Edit: pg edited his comment to be more civil, so shall I. It's really nice that this happens in this community.]
Would electricity costs be relative enough for an electric car to still make sense? What about goods and products that you buy that's shipped on the massive fleet of trucks?

A sudden surge to $100 a gallon gas destroys civilization.
I walk for 5 miles every evening. It's not very strenuous exercise, but I'm always happy to do it (thank you BBC comedy on radio 4). I suspect doing something easy 7 times a week beats blowing off something hard every day.

The diet part was only hard for two weeks, which I got through by having only one day's food in the house at a time. Now not eating that much just feels normal.
America would look a lot like it did during the Great Depression. People wouldn't travel much, more things would be produced locally because shipping would be expensive, people would live closer together (both in proximity and density), people would eat local produce because out-of-season foods would be expensive to ship, etc. Things like digital content, electronics, etc would seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas), while other things like wine, strawberries, air travel, etc would be extravagant luxuries. It wouldn't be like the poverty of the great depression, but a lot of things we take for granted now would get very, very expensive.

On the other hand, the high shipping costs would make local labor a lot more economical for manufacturing, maintenance, etc.
Announcing Pragmatic Screencasts
Tipjoy is the Adsense of tipping. I don't care what the doubtful minds think, I see Millions down the line.

EDIT: I may be mistaking, but it appears to me that the first day Adsense rolled out, they earn 10 bucks, and they had way more followers than TipJoy. I know I am buying this stock.
I can do so over a beer, not here. Find me (it's an invitation.)
This is really cool, but I'm not sure I'd use it because of the plugin issue. Usually, I don't just use JQuery - I use JQuery, plus a few JQuery plugins, plus JQuery UI, plus some custom JavaScript files that are built off this. To deploy them, I concatenate them all together in dependency order, minify the whole thing, and GZip it. That saves HTTP requests, and multiple files with the same coding standards tend to compress very well. (JQuery + Dimensions + Dropshadow + Corner = 20504 bytes when compressed together, vs. 21919 bytes when compressed separately.)

It looks like with this, I'd need to request JQuery off Google's infrastructure and then all the other stuff off my own, so it's multiple requests where one used to do, and you don't get the benefit of compressing them together.
Chip company unveils new open-source PC design
Self-confidence is common thread
Rail. Ships with sails.

Humans can take a lot more shit than they are given credit for.
Doh! Sorry... That's down at the moment. It's the join the mailing list on the right that does work or you can email me at ebeland on gmail. I should have been more clear on that, sorry.

I'm connecting the load tool to the site, currently, although more still needs to be done.
We are. Actually I think more startups are than you're assuming. There are two reasons that this is not obvious:

- Usually a good solution to a hard problem looks easy to users.

- Simple problems get a lot harder when they're forced to scale. Just keeping things from flying apart at the hinges often involves significant optimization and engineering problems.
Slicehost API Updated
Excellent. With pipelining browsers this will speed things up even on the first hit
Ok so I looked at the source and found:
(def process-comment (user parent text ip whence)...

I don't see why it would be hard to submit "parent" and "text" as POST-parameters. User seems to be stored in a cookie anyway and ip should also be easily retrievable.
What's the Biggest Rails App? It Doesn't Matter
Paul, I you have convinced this 82 year-old to stop procrastinating. I will now begin taking care of the pile of paper on my desk. Thanks, Bob
And the winner of "Startup most likely to accidentally eradicate human life" is...
Grad Student Accidently Discovers Ultra-efficient White-Light LED
Refactoring. What is it? Why do it?
No, I backup my home directory and some web directories.
NVDIA launches CUDA coding contest
Orgoo Launching Soon; 500 Invites Available Now
25% is 2.5 times higher than the payment rate for public radio, which is just 10%.
It's a neat idea, but I can't imagine using it. Do you really, really trust Google with your business? What happens when google decides to "fix" something in one of those frameworks that the upstream developers disagree with? Even worse, what happens when your app is irreconcilably broken because of something that happened at Google? Worse still, what happens when your app somehow becomes reliant on Google's version of the framework(s), and you don't realize it until it would be too expensive to unhook yourself from Google?
Congrats guys! I know we're awfully excited about this for our sites. Thanks for all your help getting setup.
The reasons they have failed in the past are valid. We're different. It's much easier, with less thinking.

That could even be our tagline, "Tipjoy: less thinking, more love"
How 'Gossip Girl' Is Changing the Way We Watch Television
I'm not sure all of this type of initiatives have happy endings.
There was a small penalty for answering only 10 questions.
Answer 20 more questions to remove penalty.

Lame. Also, my ten-question IQ apparently has five significant figures, and is about three standard deviations less than the results of full IQ tests administered by trained professionals. (Not sure why I expected any different.)
Thanks for the advice.

"How can you start a project like this without having already encountered all that research?"

My project actually has to do with parenting, not medication. I'm basically interested in applying models from many areas of academia to parenting, including the research on medical non-adherence. However I'm only interested in ameliorating one or two very specific issues, and medical adherence best practices will probably end up playing only a supporting role to research from other areas of academia. Also I'm still in the kitchen table phase of the project; I just finished my undergrad two days ago so today is really day one in the library.

If you could find the meta studies, that would be excellent though.

EDIT: I'm also interested in whether there are applications of adherence medical research in athletics, in terms of understanding why people don't do stuff (like working out) in general.
Ask Pg: what's your view on copyright laws? 
There are 2 sides presented by 2 reputed sources (Michael Arrington and Hank Williams), and they both have couple of valid points:

1. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/27/its-time-to-rethink-copyright-law/

2. http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/michael_arrington_on_copyright_wrong

My point is that, time has arrived where original content creator/artist (musician, writer etc.) has to decide how they want to publish their content and make money. Self-publishing is gaining momentum in the book arena, the same can happen in music, movie and tv - the only thing is someone has to make self-publishing and internet distribution eco-system simple and affordable (wow! here is the business idea).

The other platform that can be explored is creative commons. Licensing under creative commons and sharing content freely with the support of some kind of revenue generation is one of the best option (i think).
Actually, nuclear is not as economical as other forms of energy after all the US govt. red tape is accounted for. If that were not the case, much of Japan and several countries in Europe would not get a majority of their power from nuclear power plants.
I would be a lot more comfortable writing a Facebook app if I knew that I won't be dependent upon their continued good graces. With the platform being open source developers no longer have to host with Facebook. With an open source platform developers can go with Facebook solely to have access to Facebook data rather than to Facebook code and servers.

The next step is to free the data.
I registered at viaopenbook, but when I tried to log in, I got an alert that read "Your login has been blocked. Contact the administrator."

What?
The A-Z of Programming Languages: AWK
Hey Internet, it’s time to show a token of gratitude.
This is the wrong question.

The real question is:

What will be the economic and social implications if the current trend (up) of commodity prices given the timeframe (fast) were to continue.

Just to note: statistically, oil prices peak around this time. Oil prices do tend to be seasonal, so be on the lookout for that.
Sorry, but what is marijuana_sql.gif doing as the pic attached to that story? Too funny...
Old article. 2005. Quantum dot LEDs. Original Vanderbilt article is here http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/stories/quantumdotled....

(I hope it bypasses their abomination of a web interface, but if not you'll have to learn to navigate to the main part of the article.)
While I think you have some good points, the difference between 20504 and 21919 bytes is completely meaningless.
Pay-as-you-go subversion hosting
Pay-as-you-go subversion hosting
It may hurt regular working folks, who or whatever they are, but it's hard to feel very sorry for them.
Warren Buffet invests in trains: http://www.cnbc.com/id/20519680/
Freight ship with parachute-like sail:
http://www.shippingtimes.co.uk/images/Beluga_SkySails.jpg
Clay Shirky on New Book "Here Comes Everybody" [Video]
How feasible is using horseback for small distances?
Indeed, this is old, I remember reading about it when I was doing research on quantum dots when I was still doing physics at university. I wonder if it's actually been used in practice though, as use of "fake white" LEDs is still abundant. Was it too expensive? Inefficient in power or production?

A lot of cool new breakthroughs seem to come out and then nothing is ever heard of them again, and I often find myself wondering "whatever happened to that?"
“Yahoo is convinced they are a strategic imperative for Microsoft, although I think sometimes that their execs must be smoking something,” said one source who has been briefed on the talks.
I think the professor's point is that using red-black trees is a dominant strategy over using AVL trees.
It's brings it down to one request _and_ it reduces the filesize. Requests are relatively slow, you want as few as reasonable possible.
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. I sometimes see people create an entire class wrapping a single factory method, and then override that method in various subclasses to construct different types of objects. The class, the subclasses, and the factory methods are all redundant in Python. The Twisted framework is an offender that comes to mind.

I haven't worked in Java very much, so I'm not sure what the trade-offs are with using reflection vs. factory methods. But GoF gave examples in C++, and was published in 1994, before the reflection API was released with JDK 1.1 in I think 1997. It's entirely possible that using factory methods to customize the concrete types of objects doesn't make a lot of sense in Java, either.
Algorithm + Strategy = Parallelism
edit Nevermind, nothing to see here edit

In the video they say that they used many of Steve Souders' techniques to speed up the deliver of the files since most web servers aren't properly optimized out of the box

Looks like Google missed the part in Souders' High Performance Web Site where he talked about using ETag to speed up sites. :P

curl -I http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Last-Modified: Mon, 26 May 2008 18:45:05 GMT
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Expires: Wed, 27 May 2009 17:39:22 GMT
Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 17:39:22 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Content-Length: 55740
Server: GFE/1.3
Indeed, I found that this statement sounded alarms in my critical thinking cortex:

"the Singleton "pattern" encourages you to forget everything you know about OO design, since OO is hard, and procedural is easy."

Why, oh why, are we encouraging people to use OO 100% of the time, when it's admittedly harder than the alternatives? (I'm looking at you, Java.) Methinks the bandwagon continues to play on, even after two decades...
Very well put, Prrometheus, but perhaps some more subsidies for electric cars would be in order as a softer way to move in that direction and would be justified as a measure of national defense (cutting off the funding to terrorists and Islamo-fascists by driving down the price of oil) and environmentalism?

In general, I'm all for free market solutions and only free market solutions, but they don't work as well when you're talking about defense and things that are in the commons like air and water.
Google Maps Without JavaScript
I took the habit of always copying my text to the clipboard before submitting anything substantial because between session timeouts, expired links and other failures there's just too many opportunities for your contribution to land in the bit bucket.
Freeman Dyson's brilliant, as usual. His analysis of what the wiggle in the Keeling graph means has profound implications for global warming policy.
You'd be surprised, that has always been my instinctual reaction to those kinds of failures but oftentimes the textarea would just come back blank for some reason or something like that. I think it had to do with the "you can't go back because the page was generated from a POST operation" kind of message.
Blogs tend to also have a smaller passive audience percentage than public radio as well. Also, I'd rather have a 10% payment rate where I'm getting significantly higher donations than a 25% rate where I'm getting 10 cents. I don't know what the average gift is but I'd guess it to be over $100.
I've noticed a pattern with the 37signals folks.

How to profit on the internet: Make something people want and charge.

How to say no: Explain yourself, be honest, and just say no.

I guess it just has to do with what you leave out.
sounds like they lost all the data