skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do the high profile sites sell for? 10x monthly revenue or more than that?

As someone who visits infrequently I've only seen 10x monthlies which seems ridiculous for a high profile site.

I would define a high profile site as any with a long existence, tons of traffice - but still off the radar, & consistent revenue... or some super flash in the pan breakthrough site like twitter (new & no rev).
Why not nuclear?

Wikipedia: Contrary to popular belief, coal power actually results in more radioactive waste being released into the environment than nuclear power. The population effective dose equivalent from radiation from coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear plants.
Why Google is Wooing Web Developers
Sure enough.

So your question is "How do I write good controllers?"

It's kinda hard for me to give you specific advice without a model and a set of behaviors to traverse. I guess "do good things" and "don't do stupid things" is about it. Singletons are not evil, but, like, gotos, I'd try to avoid them if at all possible.

In my experience, once you've matured the model enough for it to be code, you're automatically thinking in terms that leads to good design. Singletons pop out when you start with a small piece of the problem and try to bludgeon whatever you've got into a solution. These problems arise when you start to design from the bottom-up and use functional paradigms instead of OO paradigms. Nothing wrong with that, but for good code you should really pick one or the other and stick with it.
Almost all software is social software
Single Use Web Apps Are Dead
WORKetc goes so much further than single-purpose web applications (like 37 Signal’s Basecamp) through integrating a number of essential small business tools into the single online environment. One place for the small business owner to better run their business.
In this post, Scoble writes 1200+ words on how awesome it is to be Scoble. A flock of smug webcocks eat it up and pat each other on the back for being so on top of things and not "ignorant" like the poor deluded soul that had the gall to send email (email! how quaint!) suggesting that the Emperor might be looking a tad scandalous.
DNS is down for this site.
If all the people in the US would drive electric cars, you obviously need electricity to do so. Let's assume the power stations use oil the generate electricity. How much oil would you need to keep all these electric cars in the US going? Would that be more or less oil the US consumes now for keeping its cars running?

Let's assume we would all drive a Tesla: http://www.teslamotors.com. Who will do the math?
I didn't see him use that number in his analysis (other than list it), so it doesn't seem important either way.
What cell phone is he using?
Edit: I found some references to a Nokia N82, is that it? Sounds good anyway.
9: are there really more buttons than ff2? You can hide the status bar, but he wants it by default.

8: This is Ubuntu's fault. Addons will be more available for firefox 3 after firefox 3 is released. Amazing!

6: I think the intention is to make a page with these problems look broken, protecting Bob Average from attack sites. Also, it lets the problem stay more within the current tab. Having context for errors is awesome, and being interrupted isn't.

5&3: didn't xforms get some major change too late in the development of firefox 3? And Acid 3 came way too late for the gecko version being used.

7&4: Yes the preferences are cluttered, and about:config options often require way more explanation than a single line before you know if you should be changing them (no).

"Enable pipelining? Sure! Max connections? This will make my pages load faster! -O9 -funroll-loops -f2fast2furious -fomit-frame-pointer? Rad!"
Except we are in the US, which is blessed with 27% of the world's coal reserves (by far the largest; Russia is second with 17%).[1] So there is no reason we would burn oil to generate power.

Even better would be generating all that electricity with Nuclear power, since the "middle east" of Uranium is Canada and Australia, with 28% and 22% of global production, respectively.

[1] http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/infosheets/coalreserves.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Supply
Sure he does-- he subtracts it from the (assumed) $20,000 price of a mass-produced electric car, to give a net price of $15,000 per vehicle.
An Engineer's Guide To Weight Loss
"They got money and contacts, so what to worry about? Maybe that led to the downfall."

...but did they have the hunger? Time, money and contacts are a near perfect receipe so it is surprising thay gave up so easily (as it seems). Were the people passionate enough? Did they fight for survival, and really want to stay alive?

Until we know more about the details of what happended is such speculation worthwhile?
I'm interested in your approach because I'm working on something similar. I'm also interested in seeing the research on reasons for non-adherence. Send me an email: alex DOT krupp AT gmail
Where Does Facebook Grow From Here
Looking back at my post I see my mistake. I understand OOP programming and class interactions very well, and as I mentioned have my own "pattern" that I'm using to great satisfaction; built, like you say, from the ground-up to serve that particular purpose. Getting there wasn't easy and certainly not reproducible - it was a mess.

So, my problem is that my solution is specific to my case and it's terribly complicated to explain to someone asking for advice on design patterns. So my question isn't actually how to write a good controller but what resources to recommend for intermediate-level coders asking for advice on the matter.
Using twitter to keep up with the Mars Rover??? why oh why...
I'm working on a hosted load testing solution. I would say it is challenging compared to many of my ideas since I have to basically build both a website, and a load testing tool, but not in the difficult-computer-science-problem category. The site is: http://testomatix.com

I'm getting there, but I am behind schedule. I struggle with whether I should release before I've added reporting in, or if I should wait. If folks are interested, the website has a mailing list signup.
is that an open invitation?
Sure, but those constraints pretty much rule out most Web (2.0) apps, and certainly fail in the Digg case in the original post. (Cf. the "too imitative" heading in the link you provided.)
The cars can be charged at night, when the base power stations are producing electricity far below their capacity. (In many places, electricity is cheaper at night for that very reason). I remember reading somewhere that 70% of the US fleet can be converted without needing more power plants.
For sufficiently large values of "almost", or sufficiently loose definitions of "social software."

Is Excel social software? Word? Photoshop?
Are most Line of Business applications? ERPs?

Hello, Mr. Hammer-- see anything around here that looks like a nail?
> Acid 3 came way too late for the gecko version being used.

Opera and WebKit aced it two months ago. Gecko had plenty of time.

One of the Mozilla guys explained here the Firefox approach to Acid 3:

http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/03/27/the-missed-opportunit...

In the end, though, it comes across as a poor excuse.
I agree with all of this.

What does any of it have to do with "stop coding". If you can't juggle eggs, you should probably be someone else's employee.

I do the things you mention and I still code every single day. For a software startup, coding is like breathing. Stop and die. Only hackers understand this. Whoever downmodded my previous post is probably an MBA.
i think its a fantastic idea provided there are few committed and determined individuals ready to volunteer here to help each other - i always believed in the power of synergy ... "Synergy generates incredible Energy".
Adobe releases public betas for next round of Creative Suite apps
He mentioned nuclear, too. But are there not even less resources than oil?
RE the oil price: at status quo, prices will go up, since Chinese and Indians are learning to spend like Americans.

But if the US spent 8 trillion scrapping its entire auto fleet, that would probably have a chilling effect on oil prices (incidentally making the entire effort less meaningful)
Stat Counters
Lurking on just about every web page is a webpage stat counter. These little snippets of code have been around since the beginning of the internet. They serve a very simple purpose – to count and store statistics. They can store a range of different data, and at the very least they count and store page impressions, or the exact number of times a specific web site has been accessed or viewed by a user. Now the stat counters that display how many page views to visitors? Well, let’s talk about them.
I once saw code that had factories that generated factories that generated factories. Yuck...

Like the ancient world view, "it's turtles all the way down"
Very true, however Ruby is still very much growing in popularity and growing as a language. Therefore, if you employ a "little-known trick" and somehow it becomes popular, it is no longer little-known and it becomes a "standard idiom."

This is not automatic, but I suggest the possibility is much greater with Ruby than with certain other languages for various reasons, and therefore it is at least worth considering a new idiom in Ruby rather than rejecting it outright.

One of the ways you can make your favourite idiom popular is to blog about it, of course. Or perhaps to write something really popular and use your idiom in it, such as returning() {...} or perhaps Symbol#to_proc.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/1100inject.html
Pages 243 to 256 are, in my copy at least, the Interpreter pattern, in case anyone else was wondering.
Critique: "Programming Collective Intelligence"
I have just gotten the book "Programming Collective Intelligence" and having read a few chapters i am wishing that i had gotten the book earlier!. At the same time, it shows how much most web applications being developed today lack deep technology (I am also guilty of this). Whats your take on this?
Small-Business Books That Break the Mold
I think he rather succinctly managed to prove the opposite of his point.
I like the gest of that article, but I surely disagree with the premise copied to this thread title.
When software in the cloud goes sour
Start smoking, eat more ice cream, drink lots of coffee... Hm... Seems to be the old fashioned type of engineer.
+1 for assembla, I got there 3 projects

and 500MB of free space is great too!
I use github for public and SVNrepository for private repos. SVNrepo recently added git, so that's awesome.
The Official "Successful Website Checklist Challenge"
But think about the generalizations it affords... ;-)
Nice work man. You've got a good touch at this stuff. ActiveScaffold really saved me on a Rails project.
Powers of 10: the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero
Life, Death and Twitter on the African Savannah
The Smartest Browser and OS
I can second this. Their uptime has been perfect in my experience and they do hourly off-site backups. They are also really cheap.
I make Flash brochureware!

...no, it is not satisfying.
Ask YC: Best credit card payment processor?
I've heard a lot of horror stories about Paypal, although I haven't experienced them myself. However, I think it would be beneficial to get recommendations for payment processors. Any ideas?
just to find out what's wrong. Doctor's tend to over-prescribe.
Here comes another bubble...
Problem #9: If we are sending all of our gas-consuming cars to Latin America how does this solve any environmental problems?

Problem #10: This neglects the energy costs of producing a new car.

As long as we're being completely hypothetical, wouldn't it make more sense to just mandate that all new cars must be electric after a certain date?
I'm making photo sharing work the way it should have worked five years ago, using programming techniques I learned twenty years ago. I'm enjoying it immensely and wouldn't trade it.
Why Startups Need Community
well..they chose the worst path by just closing it up when they ran short of investor money.as I have pointed out, they could have at least survived on the reviews written by their own editors..also, even though they had a high profile person in the news industry as an investor,they gave up very easily..
lots of ideas - visit :

http://searchyc.com/credit+card
Déjà vu, I guess this made is to the front page about 6 months ago or so?

Anyway, still a fun watch.
SoundManager 2 is Audio for Javascript
Not sure if I'm being helpful to you or not, but I'll reply again hoping I hit on something that you find useful.

I think the question is: at what point when designing from the bottom-up do you realize it was shorter to come at it from the top down? And at that point do you do a "52-pickup" and refactor, make the best of what you have, or continue working the way you were?

I used to do this, but haven't for a long time. I was really suprised when I got into this same mess a year or two ago writing a system that had multiple datasources and multiple valid object graphs.

Looking at this from the distance of a year or more, my mistake was in paradigms. I really should have went totally functional with the project instead of trying a classic OOP-tiering structure. Because my head was in the wrong place, I was like a guy with a square peg trying to get it into a round hole -- I just kept thinking I needed a bigger hammer.

Now I could have still kept an OO mentality and solved the problem -- no doubt about it. But that would have required more design up front than I gave it. So in this case lack of sufficient thinking up front combined with my head being in the wrong space caused the code base to be a lot more jumbled than it should have been.
Wired published a quick oil reserves map the other day: http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/oilreserves

Most interesting find: Canada is #2 in the world with 179 billion barrels. Why are we getting our oil from the middle east? And what % comes from up north?
Mobile video small, growing. Will it ever take off?
The best way to find meaning at work? Don't look for it
Ask HN: do you think "Steve" is a lucky name ??
4*Steve = Steve (Jobs + Wozniak + Ballmer + Case) = Power Punch !?!?

Around 10 to 12 years a go I always wondered why no magazine (that i knew then) is having three most powerful people (Jobs, Ballmer and Case, I didn't knew Wozniak then) of IT world on their cover page, and write a story how these guys changed the world or will change the world. I imagined that if i were the owner/editor of the magazine then i would do in depth research and write a cover story.

Fast forward these many years, 2 Steve(s) are still at power-play and still trying to change the world or have changed the world in many ways. Steve Case is no where in picture and I hear about Steve Wozniak on and off (here and there is few articles).

Just wondering whether readers who are 30+ yrs old still remember the way this 4 guys revolutionize the world of computers.

What if they never existed?, is "Steve" a lucky name?, what if they worked in the same company?, what if they all are on the advisory board of your company? etc. etc. etc.
If the rover had crashed and stopped responding then that somehow would seem appropriate.
Start training for an Ironman. Worked for me (-16 kg).
Little over simplifying the situation but its fun to read and think the way he does.
Electric cars are important to the United States because of the economy and energy independence, not because of global warming. Remember, the people making energy decisions don't "believe" in global warming.
This is hella old! Hacker News should start thinking how to avoid links like this in future (I mean the ones that have already been here once).
We could use nuclear for 100% of our energy needs for the next 5 to 10 thousand years (assuming everyone in the world uses as much energy as people in the US and a world population under 20 billion.) If we switch to fusion we would have energy well into the billions of years range.
Nuclear power is not actually as economical as other forms of electricity, which is why, even with massive government subsidies, there aren't any new nuclear plants being built in the US.

source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080512/parenti
10 cool Twitter news & information feeds
Can you day-trade like him?
He's probably full of shit. These employers make deliberately ridiculous recruiting efforts so they can prove to the INS there are no domestic candidates and they need worker visas. They post the ads in tiny low circulation classified sections and then come up with specious disqualifications for any domestic applicants.

This smells just like a case last year where a PR piece pushing liberal immigration law backfired. A guy who owned a lawn service company did his bit for the cause blathering on about how he couldn't get ANYONE domestic to work for him for something like $10/hour. He needed illegals. Well it turned out, he wasn't advertising anywhere and was just directly recruiting illegals. When this piece got even a little circulation native born Americans were lined up around the block asking him for work.
The electric grid gets cleaner even without renewables. Clean coal is a rapidly growing area in electricity production and nuclear production continues to increase.

Having to create electricity to meet our energy demand is a fantastic problem to have. Energy independence should be an economic goal of any developed country. You don't want ANY foreign control of 7% of your GDP, let alone a cartel like OPEC.
"We", as in North Americans, don't get much of our oil from the middle east. We get the majority of our oil from Canada, Mexico, and various South American countries.

However, we pay world price because the oil that we get from those sources can be sent elsewhere. If the middle east shut down, the Euros would buy from "our" suppliers.
Is twitter still the biggest rails site?
President Clinton turned the biggest source of clean coal in the world into a national monument. Curiously, the folks who owned the second biggest source (in Indonesia) were big campaign contributors.
Creating AND USING your own cipher is nearly always a bad idea (for typical non-security-clued developers, in particular, who are the ones most prone to this). Designing and analyzing one can be a fairly interesting and/or educational process (and all part of the process of public crypto research, which is what this is about).

Developers, by all means, should use AES and not some random unproven cipher. That does not mean new ciphers should not be designed and analyzed.
That works so well for folks who vacation by car.
Woman: Doctor, my daughter has trouble breathing.

House: Have you been keeping up with her medication?

Woman: She doesn't use that except in emergencies. Pharmaceuticals are very risky.

House: You know what else is risky? NOT BREATHING. That has some minor side effects such as DEATH. Your doctor, after carefully weighing all the options, decided that NOT BREATHING is more dangerous than [insert minor side effect of pills].

(Paraphrased, I don't remember the exact lines.)
The biggest problem that I see with this idea is a social one, and not an economic one. It can be summed up in one word:

Pride.

Just look at how tenaciously consumers cling to SUVs and large luxury cars, even though they surely know better. People who can't even afford decent food or housing spend ridiculous amounts of money on excessive vehicles.

I'd imagine you'll have to pry the wheels of their gas-guzzlers from their cold dead hands before they get in some cheap, mass-produced, plain-vanilla electric transportation, virtually devoid of status and "bling."
The problem with fusion energy is that nobody got it to work yet. Unless you count solar power.

I've heard other numbers about the nuclear energy, but anyway - time will tell.
UPDATE: After wrangling with them for two days they finally discovered a server that had failed in their cluster that was causing intermittent problems.
How often do you vacation? You can rent a gas guzzler for those two weeks of the year.
Lame article. First of all, that system (I've tried it) sucks. It requires constant attention and effort. I'd be surprised to meet anyone who's male and can be bothered to count their calories every day for more than 1 or 2 weeks (though some girls seem to manage, but they really care). You won't lose much weight in 1-2 weeks, so this system will only result in making you feel bad for yet again failing to lose any significant weight.

As I propose in my article here: http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/01/02/feedback/ - you need a good, timely, but also effortless system of feedback. Something that requires you to carry a notepad and add up numbers every day is a still-born failure.

The system that worked extremely well for me was much simpler: weigh yourself every day (including body fat %). Plot that on a grid, and that'll provide you motivation enough to keep your calorie intake down.

As an engineer, you should be aware that there's a few key vital behaviours that, if you implement them, typically make all the difference. According to various food associations, there's 3 vital behaviours for losing weight:

- Weigh yourself every day

- Eat breakfast every day

- Have a way to exercise at home

Since I lost 10kg in 3 months by doing just 2 out of those 3 (but going heavy on the "weigh yourself" bit by actually charting my weight and BF%), I can say that it certainly seemed to work for me.
Some of our users had the same concerns when we made our site featurelist.org. That's why we added (due to a user's feature request) a way to export all data from your project to XML.

Without exports like that, users will become even more wary of storing their data on sites that aren't supported by the "big 5" internet/software companies. There's always the risk the company (or handful of hackers) will go away and take their hard work with them. It's also a differentiator when you do that because the big guys want to hold onto the data.

Obviously an XML dump is not the same as having the full service, but at least, if bad things happen, the users can salvage some of their content without digging through Google/wayback caches.
Another vote for github.com. If you're interested in a more generic storage and backup service, try rsync.net. You'll have to write your own rsync scripts to do backups, but rsync.net's uptime and support have been fantastic for me.
So this company provides CRM, contact management, calendar, invoicing, and timetracking in one interface - well, pin roses on their noses.

To come to the conclusion that "single use web applications are dead" because you're selling a product that integrates 5-6 of these operations-type applications is just asinine.
I'd be surprised to meet anyone who's male and can be bothered to count their calories every day for more than 1 or 2 weeks

I take it you don't know any bodybuilders, or any guys in a weight-class sport, like wrestling, boxing, BJJ or MMA.

I think exercise can be feedback unto itself. Performance gains in strength training and calisthenics come surprisingly fast.
That's right. The programmer may not be stupid at all. He or she may just be in the middle of learning patterns.

One might say that only stupid speakers make simple grammatical errors. Or they might be beginners in a second language. I hope and expect to always be a beginner in something in my life, whether it's a new computer or human language, a new craft, or some other new way of thinking.

By the way, Peter Norvig says that in Dylan or Lisp, 16 of 23 patterns are either invisible or simpler.

That's from the "Design Patterns in Dylan or Lisp" slide from his Design Patterns presentation at:

http://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/
#3: Simple - we just all drive the same car issued to us by the government. This has the added benefit of reducing class disparities in transportation.
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