skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vivek is absolutely right about Quora's scaling chances. I made the same assessment back in October when I first started using it and their recent unveiling of their future plans just confirmed it. Quora is niche, it picked a good niche to go after, but it's still niche.

For a Q&A site to take over the market, it needs to be designed with scaling in mind from day 1, it's just that type of market. Thinking that social was the only missing ingredient was pretty naive, though it did advance the state of the art a bit.

The last thing I will say is this, the real deal Q&A site won't have people questioning it's scaling potential, but rather why nobody figured it out before.
Have you considered using a "trampoline" function like this?

http://paulbutler.org/archives/tail-recursion-in-python/
Thank you all so much for the awesome support. :) It's been a pretty insane roller coaster of a month, and I'm (unfortunately) starting college again in a few hours.

The interesting part of all this is that it's actually helping me develop my next step. Not in terms of startups, but in terms of life. In other words, is college something I'm sticking with long-term? Or is time of the essence and the need (and my parents' need) for a degree less vital?

Edit: also, how good is the startup community in NYC? I love the city, but not sure about the startup environment.
Doesn't Scientology have the status of an accepted religion in the US?
I gave it a quick look and I wonder why would I want to use it? I am a fan of both lisp and python and enjoy trying new languages but why would I want to use it instead of one of those languages? What exactly cool features does it offer?
It's a tough question. I suppose it would be useful if it helped me make less regrettable purchases. Steepster is of course aimed in that direction, and it's proven unprofitable for them. I wish I had a better answer for you.

I would probably see if anyone has solved this problem for wine, beer, chocolate or coffee and see what value they are adding.
I would hypothesize wildly that younger students might respond well to this for the same reason that young children prefer the Kraft macaroni in the shapes of cartoon characters—it's a kind of association, "This is fun because it is like the video games I play!" I suspect both that a. it would become less effective as the students aged, especially towards the end of primary/elementary school, where students might see it as a kind of trick, and b. it would become far less effective if it became the standard way of running a school, because it's no longer "like a video game," it is "like a school." Which all is to say that it's not the experience points that are improving the experiences, it's the mental association with video games. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, though, and I don't think that the experiments with this shouldn't be done—I'm just skeptical.
i think you mean hubpages instead of hubspot which is a company that makes internet marketing software for small businesses.
I think the article was really about how useful the CPAN testing ecosystem was (and still is) to the author.

Someone (in the community) being helpful was just an added bonus :)
A million times, yes. What geeks would consider spam, often ends up being roasted ham for regular people. As web entrepreneurs we must not forget this. If we do, we'll needlessly be judgmental of other people's work, as well as missing out on good opportunities that appeal to mainstream web users.
I got done over with this. When I was leaving a job (for geographical reasons) I found a friend, convinced him to apply for my job, and then organised the interview, etc. They gave him the job pretty much on the spot. When I asked for my referral fee, they refused on the basis that I was a 'contract employee'. Nobody of course mentioned this when I was busy organising the interviews. I found out later that the agent who was busy trying to place the job leaned on the HR people to make sure I didn't get the money, because he didn't want to lose out. Yes, I occasionally went to the pub with the HR people also. Well I did him in, I instructed my incoming friend that the agent wasn't to be trusted and so my friend never put another job through him again. The guy probably lost 50k in commission over the next year or two, all because he didn't want someone to get 2k of someone elses money.

Why so many employment agents have to act dishonestly and sneakily, I'll never know. It's as though they think they can control every conversation that happens within the company.
> For some queries, not necessarily all, I'd also like to be able to block all sites containing AdSense.

What kind of queries would you want to do that for? I can't imagine any.
What happened to the idea that D&D led to Satanism and suicide? This was a big deal back in the 1980s. You never hear about it anymore, and yet I haven't heard any of the old scaremongers actually admitting that they were wrong. Ditto for Satanic ritual abuse, which used to scare people out of their wits.
They got an exception because of the all the rich/famous people they have.
Why Pandora is the #2 App of All-Time
That's like F# operator |>

f |> g == g(f)
[1 .. 3] |> Seq.map (fun x -> x * x) |> Seq.sum |> printfn "%A" // prints 14
Still got the right stuff: the next generation of rocket scientists
Great review, thanks :)

In terms of Scala in enterprises, I think the question is not only if it is or can stay the "better" programming language with long living support, but also how popular it will become, i.e. how easy it will be to find (and afford) skilled developers for it (and the numbers you found don't allow too much optimism yet).

And I think that is not only true for enterprises - also startups should ask themselved if they can easily get talent for the technologies they use or how much time they will need to spend on getting people trained.

I look forward to the next review - in another year? ;)
Arg! You're right, my mistake. I really like Hubspot, too :(
An alternative that you can implement right now, is to create your own custom search engine powered by google that gives you very deep control over which sites are excluded from the results. google has made it easy and surprisingly powerful: http://www.google.com/cse/
There are many conflicting viewpoints on college especially on HN. I took the view that college was an opportunity that while not impossible to be taken at a later stage isn't easy to "go back to" later. College is what you make of it and assuming you've gotten into a half decent school for your vocation you can get a lot out of being embedded with a lot of like minded people for a few years.

College won't exclude you following your entrepreneurial dreams at the same time and you can leverage a lot from the experience.

Good luck!
Actually, it's not that surprising. In that article, we learn that the founder of Demand "is also friends with cyclist (and Demand investor) Lance Armstrong, a fact that he mentions frequently. (“I’m supposed to go to France Wednesday with Lance, but I just can’t,” he confided, sighing. “It’s a lot of travel.”)."
The problem: People generally prefer not to read.

In Mac OS I have keymapped Option-S assigned to the built-in text-to-speech on the fly, so anytime there's text on any page that I want read back to me I can quickly do so with a keystroke.

You know what? I never use it. I generally prefer to read.
Hope this integrates with what the Pirate Bay founders are working on, as discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132482 (at least if their "mysterious website" is still going to be based on torrents).

But in either case it seems a fortunate move towards much-needed standardization of torrent RSSes :)
I've seen lots of high quality blogs that have AdSense just to pay the traffic costs -- you would potentially be filtering out a lot of good content. (Not to mention the fact that since Google makes money off AdSense, you'd be asking Google to essentially cut off its own foot).
Signs of Bubble anyone?
Yes, the purpose of the article is to beat up on the dehumanizing culture of shame. That does not, however, imply that the Judeo-Christian culture of guilt is any better. Most likely, each is better in some areas and worse in other areas. But it's difficult to beat up on two different cultures in one blog post.

> seems more like an ad hominem than anything else: "Look at these barbarians in their shame culture, the shame culture itself must be barbaric!"

A common feature of a culture of shame is that it takes any criticism of any part to be an ad hominem attack on the whole. There are two different ways to read any criticism of a society: (1) "Look at those barbarians!" (2) "That's wrong. They should fix it." To the extent that a society prefers reading (1), I think that that tendency of that society is inferior to the contrary tendency of another society. To the extent that Western societies such as the United States also display a similar tendency, I think that the United States also has a problem.

This, however, does not imply that one culture as a whole is superior to another -- in fact, this over-generalization is exactly what I'm trying to criticize. All societies have problems of one kind or another. They should fix those problems, or at least try.

> Some people should be ashamed of themselves.

Sure, the 300 pound guy should be ashamed of himself. But that's a matter of conscience. It would be wrong for others to ostracize him, or to expect him to ostracize himself out of shame.

It's one thing for a person to feel guilt and/or shame when he realizes he did something wrong. It's another thing for an entire society to use shame as a means of forcing individuals into compliance even when the behavior in question is not obviously wrong, like playing Villager Number Six.
Not a lot of love on HN for Tim Ferriss, but his first book "The 4 Hour Work Week" is a great discussion of the self-employed trap.
Not all the time. But my wireless keyboard + iPad + Xcode would work great en lieu of an otherwise expensive, bulky laptop.
Unprofessional and bad aren't the same thing.
[dead] doesn't mean it was downvoted; it means that a moderator flagged the comment as spam. There seem to be some out-of-control moderators here, who also "dead" discussions of their actions. I imagine my comment, and perhaps your post, may be deaded too.
I wonder if this is going to work. First of all because it is a paywall, and many people might go elsewhere.

But secondly, as set out in the article, their aim seems to be a semi-transparent paywall, that will allow people to read a few articles before triggering a payment requirement.

Will people buy into this?
who'da thunk it?
Well, the main one is that you combine access to Python libraries with Lisp macros.
Sounds like it would be a great way for Google to experiment with crowdsourcing results quality. If there's a ton of people blocking, say, experts-exchange.com – that should feedback into their search result quality ranking.

Of course scammers would attempt to game this system too (by, for example, blacklisting stackoverflow.com) :)
If you are in the United States, you may want to consult a lawyer about federal computer intrusion laws before you actually attempt your proposed plan of action. IANAL, however I think unless the client explicitly authorizes you to go into their site, and roll back versions, such acts would constitute "unauthorized" access to a computer system, which in addition to being a felony, has some stiff penalties. Of course, with a properly written contract, you can stipulate implied authorization.

If you're hosting and you set their site to issue 503s for non payment, that's a different matter altogether.
The iPhone app version of the tools and databases is good also.

I never go to the website.
Interesting...no, I hadn't seen that before. I'll think about it.
Mark, good luck with college and your startups. You will have all your life to be full-time entrepreneur. There will be always opportunities for talented and hardworking people like yourself. What college is going to offer you right now is the view of a parallel world to the one of businesses. Having an additional perspective to things can only help you in the long term.

Good luck with everything you do.
An interesting aside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_doma...
Oh, snap, I guess you win that argument.
Block sites with Adsense? Large part of Google's revenues come from Adsense.

Advertising is also the only monetization for most sites.

What can you contribute to Google and other sites if you want to cut off their revenue?
Well, you know Google is dual-class, right?
The article rings true to me. In college I met a lot of eager kids who worked hard and were good at... being students. They executed assignments diligently and knew how to get straight A's.

However, many of these kids lacked basic critical thinking skills. They didn't read the news or have much of an idea of what was happening in the world around them. They largely did what they were told and didn't have the guts to question professors.

I'll share an anecdote:

At the very first meeting of a statistics course, we were informed that our assigned professor was sick and a new professor would have to fill in. A kid sitting next to me said, "I already looked him up - he gives 60% A's. The last guy gave 65% A's." I asked the kid if the new professor was a good instructor. He gave me a dumbfounded look and repeated, "He gives 60% A's."
Hmm. Maybe. I'd have to look closer.

My main resistance is that I've used languages where you have to use special syntax for a recursive function, and I hate it. But this isn't quite the same thing.
Be Careful About Outsourcing Your Customer Acquisition
I've been using Scala for about a year now. Started writing some test using ScalaTest, ScalaCheck, and Specs, and really liked it. Then I solved some hard problems using Scala, with a lot less code, and a lot fewer bugs, than it seemed like we would have ended up with using Java. I'd say about 99% of our codebase is still Java, but the Scala bits are quite noteworthy both for leading to something nicer to maintain over time (mostly by need no maintenance, or very very little), and for solving a hard problem without an explosion of Java boilerplate. A more functional approach ends up being a bit easier to test. The collections framework is >awesome<. For us it has been a slow, grassroots thing, and I don't think we are going to see a big bang, but those of us who have taken the plunge have a very hard time going back to Java.
I just checked the book Perl 6 Essentials (2003, sigh) and it has given / when already, looking very close to the current standard.
Mount windows remote partition under linux
Like the way back site - I wish they had a donate button because I would like to give them a small donation.

My wife and I just looked at the progression of my site markwatson.com starting in 1997.
My original point though, is that they're only worth money to people who think they're worth money - domain speculators and 'cherished name' buyers.

To anyone else, if you think about it with a clear head, they're fairly worthless.

What is god.com? It doesn't get any traffic, have any users or product. If you bought it, you'd still have to find a way to get people to go there.

Yes, you could build a brand/product/service around it, but then you could just choose some other name for your brand/product/service.

The web is literally full of domains like this.

insure.com $16m Alexa 39,000
sex.com $12m Alexa 24,000
fund.com $10m Alexa 602,000
beer.com $7m Alexa 374,000
diamond.com $7.5m Alexa 103,000

So none of these get any real traffic, some are just holding pages asking for other silly people to buy them for millions.
This would be much easier to try out if I could give it my Github repo to pull down some code instead of having to sync files with my computer.
The One - How exactly *will* AI come about?
Undoubtedly, there will be maintenance projects that will develop this attitude, the places I've worked usually took a while to move to a new version, but once they moved they had no problem integrating the new features.

Essentially, this will replace the horrible callback syntax we have and have been using for a while. The new features will be integrated slowly, but they will be used.
Why are you Still Making Crap? Open Source to the Rescue
Efficiency and Insanity
You just seem(ed) very dismissive of Quora in your example. I also think that your verbiage of "destroyed" is greatly exaggerated.

I think that, on average, you'll get a much more useful response on HN, because there is a general feeling of how to reply and what can be done. When you write a question on Quora, it doesn't feel like you create a discussion; you submit a ticket you hope people will be kind enough to answer (seeing that there is no incentive, i.e. reward, model in Quora whatsoever). The comments for each answer are just yays, nays, and cutesy remarks.

There's a reason I don't feel comfortable calling Quora a community, because the interaction is mainly from answerer to asker.
I see, and quite agree. As this is about to get off-topic, I'll follow this up with you separately :-)
Retroviruses generally are.
rNTPs are the monomers of RNA
So you wouldn't rather have irc.com than mibbit.com when you were starting out?
Because they get the same services from the government as the person making $1,000,000 a year?
Al-Jazeera releases 1,600 internal documents of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
Not everyone is out to make a buck, some people are just having a discussion or have a point, and they might appreciate being found.
> [dead] doesn't mean it was downvoted; it means that a moderator flagged the comment as spam. There seem to be some out-of-control moderators here, who also "dead" discussions of their actions. I imagine my comment, and perhaps your post, may be deaded too.

15 minutes and you're still alive, I'm quoting you so I'll have to be killed too.
Here is some older material on pipeline coding in Lua you might be interested in that describes this problem in terms of Filters, Sources, and Sinks: http://lua-users.org/wiki/FiltersSourcesAndSinks

LuaSocket implementation of the above: http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/ltn12.html
And I'm offended by your general lack of humor and dismissal of the merits of the article (which I did not find that enjoyable) based on something so trivial. I used to think that commenting on HN could not hurt your career, but the smug attitude you displayed (ie: your answer towards nowarninglabel) could be an indication that I'm wrong. C'est la vie.
It's not a "mandatory minimum wage". Stop trolling. You can pay yourself $0.50/yr if you'd like; you just can't do it will paying yourself tens of thousands in distributions.
That's just fine, today many spammers are building up domain reputation to exploit, so if we force them out of their domains it will slow them down quite a bit.
> Sure his comment was light on details -- but it was incredibly relevant to the overall discussion.

The comment in question, in its entirety: "Security is a major issue and it is a top priority for us."

While I agree that there are lots of good comments which are killed for no apparent reason, that's not necessarily the best example you could use. It adds absolutely nothing to the conversation, after all; it's just a sarcastic response to the presence of criticism of wordpress.
As a recent owner of a Sony e-reader, Calibre is really functional, but I don't think I've ever seen a worse interface.
My Dad was director of a think tank that had access to remote timesharing (primitive Basic, over a 110 baud teletype) when I was about 11 (1962??) and I enjoyed that.

I have been programming for a living since the early 1970s - still love it and frequently try to talk friends' kids into considering computer science or engineering.

One thing that has been especially fun: I have become a pseudo-expert in a lot of application domains over the years. This is sort-of like changing careers frequently, keeping the working experience fresh.
I hate how experts-exchange does their pages, trying to pretend you need to sign up to see the content. They even had an ad on the side that said "Tired of scrolling? Sign up!". One would hope such misleading tactics would be penalized in search results...

But on more than a few occasions, I've gotten some pretty high quality answers off their site.
Adjusting the contracting rate as needed to get $50/hour after taxes is also an option.
not if you use some kind of obfuscating routing layer. think tor style, but heavily optimized towards music streaming and nothing else.
Seems like there's SOME element of truth to this, if probably not as rationally analyzed as one might surmise from this comment. It tends to be more "oh why would I work harder at this dead end job, I'm gonna go home and have a drink and play World of Warcraft"
It's never about blogs or books or classes.

Therein lies the reason why you haven't gotten it yet...

If I told you I started in the mid 70's at the age of 8 with a teletype
on acoustic couplers, it would only be a matter of time until someone
older than me came along to tell us how I had it easy.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but my drive has always been the
same; I am absolutely fascinated by the prospect of making a machine do
what I want. I'm just totally enamored with the very idea of it, and I
always have been.

The current nudge could be wanting to build something, or wanting to fix
something, or wanting to change something, or even just messing around
to see if it explodes. The current nudge might be a friend in need, or a
boss looking for results. It doesn't matter. The current nudge could be
anything since the underlying fascination is always the real motivation.

Most all people sit around being annoyed by their software and hardware
because it is beyond their control, or more accurately, they let it be
beyond their control. You can see their frustration in the endless
drivel of rants on the Internet. The rants fix nothing. The only way to
ever solve the problem is taking control and making the machine do what
you want it to do.

Today I finally figured out how to prevent firefox from loading CSS by
default, along with adding key bindings to selectively load parts of CSS
(in page style, same-host style files, 3rd-party style files, ...) when
they are absolutely necessary. Some people thing CSS is a good idea and
should always be forced on by default, but others disagree. Those
opinions don't matter. What matters is I made the machine do what I want
to meet my own needs. It was a fun challenge.

Many people would say I wasted my time... --They don't get it.

Many people would take offense, yes, seriously. By removing all CSS I
basically just said all the UX/UI "designer" weenies are useless. I
essentially deleted all of their "hard work" by making the machine do
what I want rather than letting it do what they want.

When one is unable to make a machine do what one wants, the problem is
not the machine, instead, the real problem is the person. Yes, the
person operating the machine is ALWAYS at fault for the machine not
doing exactly what the person wants.

I know exactly who is to blame when a machine is unable to do what I
want it to do.

Do you?
Trailblazing DIY pinball game snags Pioneer Award for Bill Budge
Modded you up. I learned so much by typing in code. I still spend a lot of time reading other people's code, but the act of typing in code from articles in the 1970s and 1980s was a great learning experience.
So the defining characteristic of a religious entity is how much that entity can extort from its followers, and because Scientology extorts from the rich rather than the poor they attained this status faster.

Now where's my chapel in the Apple Store? I suppose the Genius Bar may constitute, but I'm smarter than those people so it doesn't provide me any solace.
Is Factoring Really In BQP? Really?
The Answer Factory: Demand Media... (2009)
One of my own blogs has AdSense! So I'm not against it in all cases.

I just want to option of retrying some heavily-SEO'd-by-MadeForAdSense-sites queries without all those sites in the results.