skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Will this browser cookie method work?
I'm in the process of building a social media website that basically recommends new websites to users based on a number of categories they have selected (similar to stumbleupon). I want it to be useful to users even if they are not logged in. I've devised a method, using cookies, to keep track of content that a user has already been recommended, which is important. I realize I may be going about this all wrong, so any feedback or suggestions would be appreciated!

- I have DB that includes a table for each category (images, videos, funny, politics, etc) and each row in these category tables contains information about a particular website.

- When a user goes to my site they select the categories they want to explore (which is saved to a cookie) and then they can add a bookmarklet to their browser which when clicked will take them to a recommended site from one of those categories.

-When the bookmarklet is first pressed, a database call is made that grabs the 100 most recent link_ids from each of the users selected categories which are then loaded into a new browser cookie. (so if they have three categories selected it will create three new cookies which each contain a comma delimited list of 100 link_ids for that category).

- If the bookmarklet is pressed again it will detect that the user already has category cookies, it will pick a random category, grab the link_id list, pick a random link_id from that list (probably have to turn it into an array first), and then overwrite the cookie with a link_id list that is identical to the previous list except that it doesn't have the chosen link_id in it. This way, the next time a link is loaded from that category cookie it won't load the same link. It seems like this would prevent a user from seeing the same content over again (as long as they don't delete their cookies), which is basically what I'm trying to solve. Even if a user does delete their cookie, chances are that a decent period of time has elapsed since they last visited the website, and thus the 100 most recent links grabbed from each category will probably be new to them anyway so their won't be much reoccurring content.

I know it's kind of strange, but does anyone see any problems with this method or a better way. Just wanted to get some feedback before I proceed because it's going to take some time to implement.

Thanks!
I wanted to highlight the fact that having good communicating skills is a must for second cofounder. At the moment I'm alone and since the project is mostly done, I would not expect to need someone technical, unless things will go really well :)
Apple is the second largest smart-phone maker in the US (#3 worldwide)
Good tips; but definitely common sense-type stuff. I was expecting a cross-browser PNG transparency article, since that's kind of the real difficulty with PNGs.
My project is featuring a new approach to meet people online, dating so to say, but completely different from the rest, believe it or not :)
IBM water cools 3D chips
It seems extremely unlikely that Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera are going to agree on a cross-browser VM while Javascript, Flash, Silverlight and Java are floating around.

I think we're stuck with Javascript for the next 10 years.
Any claim that any language that has basic control structures and access to OS facilities can't be made to scale is absurd on its face. When you say that a system scales well, you're talking about its asymptotic behavior. Using an inefficient language implementation will penalize you by at worst a constant multiple.
Nassim Taleb's Top 10 Life Tips
I recommend contacting Chris Messina [http://twitter.com/factoryjoe] and Tara Hunt [http://twitter.com/missrogue]. Tara wrote the book on "social capital" (i.e. community building).
You're probably right. Let's convene again in a decade then?
Works for me now. I wonder if the outage was related to adding the 3G iphone to their catalog?
When google came out, search was already hot. Google made it hotter.
I assume the average includes corridors, common areas et cetera.
An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino
My favorite quote (because it's true): "given that they control more household spend than men."

Hard to accept cries of "discrimination" when all indications are that women already control more than their share (of wealth, power, whatever measure you would like). There's probably only 20% women engineers because any obviously competent woman immediately gets promoted to management.
The graphs on Tipjoy use Google Charts. I love 'em.
Well, I generally agree with the premise of the article (math notation sucks), but I also agree with the five flaming comments -- his example was bad.

In particular, the "optimized" code was atrociously unreadable. It may have used fewer lines, but those lines were so packed with cleverness that they took more work to understand than the original notation. The first version of the code was okay, but probably not much easier to understand than the original math.

There are some very bad examples of mathematical notation out there, but this wasn't really one of them.
Wait, you want to have them as a co-founder and you want to pay them a hundred bucks an hour?

I can see one or the other, but not both. If the amount of stock is trivial then they're an employee or contractor, not a co-founder. And if the amount of stock is large then you shouldn't be paying them that kind of money as well.
They look pretty busy already :)
I think that having someone to contact me after reading my post on YC could be interpreted as a sign of that person "startup readiness"
Not per hour. The point is to avoid usual confusion at the initial stage of getting into the context of the project. People can be afraid to spend that extra hour to get fully aware of the thing and without that hour they just pass off not understanding the idea at all.

Later on the person have to decide if s/he want to continue as "true" founder, non paid in cash :)
why have someone's distillation when the article is available here?
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/art...

The following quote from the article:

"Take away religion, he says, and people start believing in nationalism, which has killed far more people. Religion is also a good way of handling uncertainty. It lowers blood pressure. He’s convinced that religious people take fewer financial risks. "

is a pretty lame conjecture. Has nationalism really killed more people? Even if it has, is there any proof that atheists are more prone to nationalism? And even if that is so, is there any proof that nationalistic atheists are responsible for any significant proportion of deaths attributable to nationalism?

Contrary to the above, I did like most of the original article.
I used to teach at a college, and a lot of my students didn't realize that. Just yesterday I was talking with a vendor, and somehow the talk (mostly his) turned to politics, and he didn't realize it. I think if articles like the one here explained it, more people would have the chance to understand that we're behind that much more every year, and the accumulation now is startling.
That's a bad rule.

You just have to do the math. Does giving away n% ownership increase your chances of success (or eventual magnitude of it) by enough to justify giving it up? A lot of times, it does. A co-founder offers a lot more than free labor.
And the largest U.S. smartphone manufacturer. Actually, I wonder if Palm used to be the only major U.S. smartphone manufacturer.
If there is ever a post-mortem for this outage, I really hope it gets linked here. I'm interested to see what it could have been.
Ask YC: Getting started with OODB
With all of the talk going on about MagLev, I'm realizing I'm a bit out of touch with OODB. Does anyone have any good recommendations on where to get started? I'd like to evaluate it for myself, but I don't see a standard OODB setup that people are using for themselves.

Any recommendations?
see http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html for more detail
i don't take that quote as a condemnation of atheists.

rather, i think he's saying that there will always be people who want to 'believe in' or 'belong to' something - and w/o religion, that hole would be filled with nationalism... which has problems in its own right.
Why read that when you can read his books: The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness. They are pretty amazing.
Independent gaming could flourish on the iPhone
Typical button mashing games (favorites of portable gaming) will never work without physical controls, and neither will most any other ports from other gaming systems. The iPhone could take off gaming-wise if truly creative developers get behind it though, and the App Store is the perfect tool for that to happen.
Good UI: A better ATM experience at Wells Fargo
There always is more room, but you have to come with something unique, innovative that makes you better than the rest.
We're in the same position. Hopefully, we have that something. The users will decide.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4610

If you want Live.com, you can have live.com.

Not sure why you'd want to, though.
I forgot to mention YouTube but it's a good example. If I remember correctly, Vimeo actually came out first and YouTube was itself a "clone."

I don't think something has to be as popular as YouTube to be considered a success.
I'm not sure I see the problem here.. click the Google icon, choose manage search engines, then "Get More".. Sure it's a few extra steps, but it's not like the browser forces you to use google.
I measured it: on the Model M I'm using right now, the keys go down by about .4cm. It's an IBM, though; it may be that newer incarnations of the design are different.
My question is, will a new order that I place today be properly logged...
Google Spending $250k/month On Outdoor Ads In Russia
Amazon’s Web Site Goes Down: An ‘Unplanned Event’
Sorry, bit math formulas in code are really unreadable. Bad, bad idea. It's the only downside of the popular book "Collaborative Intelligence" that it doesn't give proper maths formulas, only code.
Twitter Killer... Or, is Twitter Already Dead?
You're saying that it is difficult to educate people, so it doesn't matter if they are taught to do incredibly dangerous things without a second thought. The fact that it is difficult to educate people makes it that much more important that companies like Yelp not do stupid things like this.
How to screw up the iPhone.
Three Girls Win Intel Science Fair
It's true, especially for papers about algorithms. But if you need to do complicated calculations, math notation is useful; compactness does help you keep everything in your head.

Most fields standardize notation quickly, and conventions helps also. In a physics paper, $\rho$ is a density and $\psi$ a wavefunction. Any author who gratuitously forks notation deserves to be rejected (with instructions to fix the notation).

As for "too many subscripts", I'm not sure how other notation could fix it. That's just a problem coming from nested loops (sums, integrals, whatever): if you can't get rid of them, what can you do? Is
∑_x ∑_y f(x,y)

worse than

tmp = 0
for x = ... :
for y = ...:
tmp += f(x,y)
return tmp
Like socialism, their heart was in the right place...
Doesn't it seem likely that MS created Silverlight so they could build web based versions of their applications that don't suck? I wouldn't be surprised to see Office 14 really blur the lines between desktop and web based software.

That being said, Microsoft will probably continue to flounder until they commit to a new BHAG.
Architecture & Design World 2008
Dr. Dobb's Architecture & Design World is the only independent conference dedicated to software architecture, design, modeling and UML. With more than 70 educational sessions, this conference provides the tools, resources and knowledge needed to effectively implement the latest design techniques into your software development projects.
What's your usage model? Lots of files, long tail? Very few files but very popular? Are the files really large (videos) or medium (images) or small (text)? How much are you willing to spend? Do you care about latency or just throughput? Etc.
man, i wish i could check this out. good luck.
legal != moral
hot to the end user, the major players didnt seem to care much about it.
The old Apple keyboards are nice, if you can find one in decent condition -- I couldn't. Matias produces a new version of the Extended II called the Tactile Pro 2, but it's not nearly as good as the Customizer, as I discuss <a href="http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/product-review-mati...">here</a>.
sounds interesting - depending on how much revenue you generate and how you see yourself strategically in relations to folks like EVE/CCP games, it may be a good time to speak to a VC...

max (maxniederhofer.com)
And if you don't like IE or windows, go write your own IE and/or windows.

See? This sort of logic cuts both ways.
Fonts can be made to scale by pressing the ctrl key and then rotating the scroll wheel.
I'm not sure how much overlap there is between people who use live.com and people who use Mozilla's Firefox. I'd assume that people who use live.com use internet explorer because they apparently have some sort of preference to Microsoft products. But, since Google is the most popular search engine on the internet, the vice-versa isn't true, meaning that an IE user wont automatically prefer live.com. Logically speaking, it would be a bad product that doesn't use the most popular search engine as their default configuration. I'd have more issue with this if Firefox had chosen Yahoo! over Google.
Thirteen Apple Innovations: Past, Present And Future
Twitter = Friendster 2.0
Nice game, Jeff, if a little buggy. :)
Disney: When You Wish Upon a Startup
Astronomy study proves mathematics theorem
AT&T Embraces BitTorrent, May Consider Usage-Based Pricing
WARNING: I used a model M for a few years and during that time got into the habit of pounding the keys far harder than necessary. This has led to some RSI problems.

Beware. The model M was designed to please secretaries who were used to positive click from the days of mechanical typewriters -- it's silly, and analogous to making running shoes with metal in the back to mimic the jingling of spurs.

I did enjoy the positive click, it made my typing sound like some sort of engine rattling away... but that entertainment comes at a cost.
Are you a solopreneur? How does it work for you?
The question is simple: are you a solopreneur, rather than an entrepreneur? How does your business work, how do you manage different clients, responsibilities, etc, being a single founder, possibly with no other persons to help you with the tasks? And also, why are you a solopreneur in the first place?

I had a small game dev studio, but I found that I wanted to work on more interesting technical issues by myself. Currently I'm working as a one person consulting company, for the development of new tech related projects. Projects I work in are very interesting, I learn a lot with my work, and I also keep a better part of the gains of the company. However, I have issues with the kind of services I can provide: I can't provide a soft development service as, once I'm developing programs for one or two clients (even if I make a part of it be developed by a third party), I have no more time to do a second or third project. So I'm starting to provide a consulting service, and only eventually offering development for very interesting projects.

It's working now but this is new for me, and I'm not sure how I'll manage this in the future... what do you think about it? do you know other cases similar to mine? how do they / you manage this kind of problem?
Why Online "Noise" is Good For You
Affinity Labs CEO, on why you should give more equity to your employees
Amazon Un-Planned Event (06/06)
I prefer to write Ruby than JavaScript, but I do enjoy JavaScript. It's not that big of deal to use both.
280North guys did what I always thought would be an awesome and useful undertaking and implemented it better than I thought could be done. I am talking about ObjectiveJ/Cappuccino specifically, but 280Slides is a whole different story. Everything runs snappy and I don't remember last time I was so impressed with so few people's worth of work.

I can see a lot more being done in this direction, but I am just in awe in how well this was done so far in the time they had.
Asking HN: so if Friendster lost out to MySpace (and then Facebook, etc) - who is Twitter's MySpace?

I would argue it's FriendFeed.

A race for the distant 2nd:

- Plurk
- Pownce
- Disqus (strange - but possible)
Fuzed+EC2 Screencast: Instant Capacity
This suggests that there are fundamental differences between men and women, and that to get some particular behavior or result you'll do better with women.

Yet that same argument, when used to advocate using men for one or another tasks, is usually ridiculed.
Look, Google can easily say they like Mozilla, want to fund it with a $100 million per year and that they want to back their stated goal of protecting user choice by saying they do NOT want to be the default but rather one of several choices that a user actively selects from. Mozilla wins, Google wins, users win. But bottom line, if Google is for choice in IE, then it should be for choice everywhere.
#2 Go to parties.

Will do. Thanks for the tip. (Frankly, I'm surprised no one thought of that before...)

You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity.

Parsing...parsing...

Okay, so for envelope he must mean one of the following definitions:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/envelope

This? "something that envelops; a wrapper, integument, or surrounding cover."

Or this? (As a metaphor) "the technical limits within which an aircraft or electronic system may be safely operated."

Okay, let's look at the context: "...parties...envelope...of serendipity". Serendipity is a sort of accidental discovery. So at parties we find the envelope (wrapper? limit?) of "Serendipity" Okay... maybe he means that parties are a good place to accidentally discover things?

If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

Right, because people who have agoraphobia typically have colleagues they can order around. Howard Hughes and no one else maybe.

That's his #2 life tip. My #2 life tip is: "...but no simpler". My #1 tip is: "Make everything as simple as possible". I can't possibly be alone in seeing this list as combining the worst of banality and inscrutability.
Why don't they just stop new signups and limit everyones tweets to 20 a day. That seems like it would help them address scaling issues without shutting down.

I might of course be missing something. Maybe the 20 a day limit is hard due to APIs needing updating etc.
Is pngcrush still in vogue, or is there something better these days? That tool was a huge help over the years.

http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/
Can someone with expertise in concrete construction clear up an issue for me?

I would think this type of construction was not safe because concrete needs some sort of reinforcement to make up for its low tensile strength. The wikipedia page on rebar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebar) seems to support my concerns, so my question is am I missing something?

Is it possible to make up for a lack of steel reinforcement using special concrete mixtures, or is it perhaps unnecessary for small scale construction?
Engine Yard Express VMWare Image
pngout does slightly more aggressive compression.
Microsoft’s Latest Bad Idea? ARAX - Ruby-powered AJAX
This is nice to see, but the Intel fair is hardly a meaningful measurement of demographic trends.

Winning the Intel competition depends heavily on a high-school student's (rather privileged) access to university-level research. It's no secret that universities are invested in youth outreach for women and minorities in science. In other words, there's a huge, not-so-hidden selection bias going on here.

A far more interesting question: what happens to these women after 8+ years of post-secondary education? (Hint: they don't tend to stick around to gather more awards)
I shall follow only the even ones.
I am, it's deceptive and goes against the moral high ground Open Source projects typically take. Call me old fashion but I see an issue with back room deals to generate profit that aren't explicitly outlined to the user.

I'd prefer a situation where FF asks you on install which charitable foundation you'd like to donate to, which would then assign the appropriate 'id' to the search box that would effect Google/Yahoo/MS and Amazon searches.
Thank You ... seriously, it's promising to see people in this discussion who actually can see beyond the Google/Firefox fog.
Providing a choice does not create confusion if the interface is designed correctly.
Ever consider that te FF default search choice contributes to those nifty Neilson ratings?
Straw man. The fact that some people choose to deny the differences between men and women has no bearing on the argument made here.
DenisM I have to say I think you and I are alone on this.

The chorus of "shhh Mozilla is making millions on this" is drumming out logical debate.
Does anyone know where I can read more technical details about Objective-J or Cappuccino?

This sounds pretty impressive so far ..
Great comment, except Google and Mozilla are too busy counting their millions to care.
Most popular != best

Why is letting the user choose a bad thing?
I'll remember this wise and helpful advice when I hit 5 million dollars in revenue.

If only we all had these problems.
> 2) Moved to an original IBM Model M and a PS/2 adapter.. Great, except for the immediately apparent fact that there was no Windows/Command key, thereby making it incredibly useless for a Mac power user.

I use an old keyboard through a PS/2 adapter on my Mac. I just mapped Alt to Command, Ctrl to.. Ctrl, and Caps Lock to Option. But then again I probably don't have insane buy-in into any sort of muscle memory.
Mozilla, actually.. but Mozilla was still so ugly (and therefore Old School) that only a nerd could love it; certainly the nostalgia is rushing back.

I remember someone literally asked me: "WTF is that browser you're using? It's so damn ugly!"
It's Twoorl (http://twoorl.com), of course :) Twoorl is open source and it's written in Erlang.
Yes it does. You'd be shocked at how fast I've seen some people complain that IE was easier when they get the import favorites dialog during FF installation. They don't even bother to read it and see if it's easy, they just see it requires work and want to go back to whatever they were using before.
From what I've collected, it doesn't sound like new signups and normal users are really putting much strain on the system. It's popular users with tens of thousands of followers that are causing the outages since the current architecture isn't set up to handle frequent updates to thousands of followers at a time.
Not exactly. Creating a fork is much different from writing one's own Firefox- it's just copying code and changing the default browser bit, not writing an entire web browser that's exactly the same.
Why did you chose to do Objective-J -> JS processing in the browers? For sake of speed, wouldn't it be a good idea to do it server-side and then just serve the JS?
Hi, Tom Preston-Werner here, one of the fuzed developers. Keep in mind that Scott is running Rails in development mode. We'll be doing more experiments with EC2 and production Rails to see what kind of numbers we can push with that setup, and also what kind of performance we can do for static assets. We'll put our results into the Readme once we have some solid, repeatable statistics for you.