skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very cool process - just wondering, when you flipped the switch to the free accounts, did you let people know? What sort of announcement did you create for that?
The reason extremely polarizing movies are an indicator that movies are getting worse is because that is what Moki's data shows.

Their graph shows that "polarizing" movies are strongly correlated with low ratings by Moki users (not just critics), and that both are increasing over time (i.e. getting worse).

Moki does not claim one causes the other, or try to psychoanalyze users based on their ratings. They simply note that it does exist.
Ask HN: Best book on selling?
It's all relative, and trying to apply "scientific visualization" to literary criticism is not an especially useful activity. (Applying it to literary markets is another matter...)

Interestingly, I liked the Matrix sequels, the 3rd Spiderman movie, and thought the Star Wars prequels were pretty good (though not as good as _Empire_). And having been around at the time depicted in the latest Indiana Jones movie, late 50s early 60s, I enjoyed it tremendously.

I'm in my early 50s, and one of the things I've noticed over the years is that I become _less_ critical of movies and literature as I get older. That is to say I'm much more tolerant of elements in a movie or story that would drive me nuts when I was younger.

When you are very young, everything is new and wonderful, then you become an adult and suddenly you start to notice that "hey, I've seen this type of story before. And I liked it better then!" Of course most likely the story wasn't all that new when you saw it first, but it was new to _you_. There are very few truly new storie.

As you get older, though, you often start looking not at the flash and the surface of stories, but at the quality of execution, at the subtleties of exposition, and the nuance of character. You also can view the story in a larger context, both your own context, and the context of history. And, more importantly, you stop comparing the _qualities_ of works to the _feelings_ you had when you were twelve years old. I can tell you for sure, _nothing_ is ever going to be as much fun as whatever it was that was pushing your buttons when you were a kid.

As they used to say in old school science fiction fandom, "the golden age is twelve."

Sad, but true. In compensation, though, you do get a possibly deeper appreciation, and, if you let it happen, a broader range of tastes. If you had told me 30-40 years ago that one of my favorite genres would be josei anime and manga I would have laughed in your face; once you'd explained to me what that was...

Having said all that, the vast bulk of movies at any given time follows Sturgeon's Law pretty closely. Mostly shit. We remember the gems of the past and in aggregate they seem to add up to a larger sum than the current year's turkeys. I seem to go to the movies about as much as I did in my 20s and seem to be enjoying them at about the same rate.
I agree, it really looks strange, the interpolation just makes motion look somehow wrong. Native 48 fps would just look much more realistic.
I held out for several months but broke down in July and picked one up as a reward to myself for getting a job :) I'm jumping right on the iPad 2 when it comes out though. I'll just sell my old iPad, thanks to the good resale value of Apple gear.
The culture/community of your product is as important as the tech. Myspace held out for a very long time because, for a while, their product was focused on a different set of users than Facebook. Convore -- right now -- attracts a lot of programmers, designers, startup junkies and other tech folks. There is plenty of room and the market is far from decided: 14 y/o girls (not kidding), moms, music fans, sports followers or whoever else.

There are also a lot of really good ideas that you can apply this technology toward. To me, the most uninspired way to attack this space is to try to make your site a one-stop portal for chat. There are a lot more possibilities if you can bring the chat to other destinations, or allow people to integrate chats with their sites.

You should be aware that being in the startup universe tends to make your worldview myopic. You're hyperfocused on the hundreds of users Convore might have and right now that looks like they are miles ahead. Zoom out for a minute and realize that there are millions of users to be won before this game is decided. You are both still at the very very early part of the curve.
At the risk of preaching to the choir, here's some more input from another Yahoo acquiree - pg on 'What Happened to Yahoo' (Aug '10) http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html
Bookmarked "toread" -- it looks to be a really insightful look at byte-code that compares and analyzes a bunch of language implementations.

What an interesting guy. He runs a blog masquerading as a mailing list (that's what this link is from: "Kragen-tol" is a mailing list for "Kragen thinking out loud") which looks to be full of lots of interesting and incredibly detailed essays across a wide range of subjects.

His homepage (http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/) doesn't mention the mailing list at all (?), but it does have a bunch of other intriguing and random things, like a list of all the people he knows, for the purpose of telling search engines about it: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/pik/
Nigerian Geeks - Politcal Game Changers
So what I’m getting out of this is that if your passionate about your company and its doing well, think twice before you decide to get bought out because its possible that life might not be better/greener for your company once your assimilated.

Reminds me of Brew Masters when the owner of Dogfish Head, Sam Calagione, mentioned that he had an offer to sell off his company for a nice amount but in the end he would still obsess about the fate of his company, and the name he built up for it, that it wasnt worth selling.
But then you could also write one LISP that is a superset of all the LISPs?
but his total number is 929857, which is not divisible by 8
This dude is ranting about the wrong thing. There are parts of Avatar and Transformers, etc, that look like you're running a game on an overloaded computer.

The problem here isn't televisions running at a high rate. The problem is film adhering to the bleeding edge of what was possible 100 years ago. 24fps is not adequate to handle lots of motion.
Set short iterative milestones. Call them whatever you like to suit the dev style you want, whether it's user stories or feature milestones or anything else. But define what progress looks like as far as making the product better goes and tell people to go knock it dead.

Ideally divide to the point that people can knock a few of these off in a normal day and let your hotshots compete to see who can score highest. Give away starbucks gift cards or cases of Bawls or the like.
Other than the ability to write by hand, doesn't your macbook do everything you listed better?
Again ;-). If memory serves, around 1985 Pittsburgh got that title (from Rand-McNally, publishers of Places Rated Almanac, I think).
Eh non-english speaking movies don't exist anymore?
I suppose the local distributors could simply become affiliates of Netflix and Amazon.
Despite Android's popularity, people are not buying apps. The google app store is in danger now of getting people relying on free apps, so they may never be willing to buy apps. This is different to iPhone users. Of course, android app store may change as time goes on, and it gets new users, but the majority of apps in the android app store are free.

Also, it is not "I could care less", that makes no sense. It is "I couldn't care less".
Definitely continue developing! I believe this space is wide open. With the death of Google Wave, I've been looking for good, free, persistent chat. Something like Campfire, TalkerApp, and others. I think XMPP integration, a nice API and embeddable content would be good things to work on.
Vnews, a lightweight newsfeed reader built on top of Vim and MySQL
This article is mistitled. It should read 'What happens after anyone acquires you'.

These anecdotes will sound familiar to many people who have been through an acquisition. Acquisitions are not something any company is naturally good at, and they inherently threaten the bureaucracy of the acquirer. Despite good intentions, the corporate immune system usually kills off the interloper before it becomes established. Not to mention that the founders and best employees usually bail within a couple of years.
That's the problem with Microsoft these days. It's just plain boring. Windows 7 has been out for more than a year and no new features.
Ask HN: How much time did you take off after the birth of your child?
I'm trying to decide how much time I should take off for the birth of my first child. I'd like to know other's experience in this matter.
For reference, a related question from Quora: http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-or-classic-books-on-selli...

I asked around the sales crew here at my $DAYJOB about this a few days ago, and heard good things about SPIN Selling and The New Solution Selling, FWIW.

Sales people also always seem to cite Cialdini's Influence.
I think you're wrong. Take a look at the toilet paper selection at the supermarket next time you're there. Every single brand you see has a fractional market share, and very few of them are going to zero any time soon. There's millions of dollars to be made in wiping asses.

According to your theory of market dominance, there should be only one type of TP available after all the 'fractional' players go to zero. Or at the very least, several 'defensible' niches - how exactly would that apply to the squares of paper you wipe your shit with? To me they look the same. They're rolls of paper on cardboard tubes that differ in price and softness.

Business goes way beyond websites.
What are you getting at?
Yummy, cheap, authentic Vnese restaurants in South Bay area. Since business is in our blood and everybody thinks they can cook, Vneses here are racing each other to open restaurants, the result is a ton of choices for quality and prices for us foodies. Yeah, I'm Vnese myself, and think that the quality of Vnese restaurants here are second to none, including inside Vietnam.

For business meetings and casual outings, try Vung Tau restaurant @downtown SJ or Paloma Cafe @Grand Century Mall on Story Road (try the beef stew there).

Really casual outings, try the food court of Grand Century Mall, chicken noodles by Pho Ga An Nam on Story Road (not on Google Maps! you got to ask a Vnese dude for directions! :) )

a little more upscale: Three Seasons @Palo Alto, Xanh @Mountain View.

btw, "pho" really is fast-food for Vnese like hamburger for Americans.

bonus: the best "French" bakeries are actually Vnese! For mouth-watering cake and desserts, try the bakeries in the Lion Plaza on Tully Road.
What a bummer... The percentages might be off by a fraction of a fraction of a percent...
"scratch your own itch, but I always found that advice overrated."

It depends. If you are building a business "scratch others' itch". It you are in it for the fun, "scratch your own itch"
Basically, when a cell divides, it needs to produce an extra copy of DNA. One for each daughter cell. The DNA in your cells is double stranded, which means it is basically two copies of your DNA stuck together. So each one of those copies needs to be duplicated before the cell divides.

You might imagine that the cell would do this by splitting the two DNA strands and sending some molecular machine down each one to replicate it. That is what it does - kind of. See, the tricky part is that the two DNA strands are pointing in opposite directions. The heads and tails of the nucleotides (A, C, T, or G) in each strand are pointed in opposite directions.

You might think that, if evolution can create a machine that works in one direction, it could create a machine that works in the other direction. Then, one could be used on each strand in parallel. Back in the day (~40 years ago), this is basically what everyone assumed must be happening.

But that's not what happens. We only have a machine that goes in one direction. People spent many, many years looking for these little molecular machines, but only ones that went in the same direction were found. None that went backwards.

So for the backwards strand, it's duplicated in a really convoluted process. Basically, instead of copying it all in one shot, it has to repeatedly jump ahead, work back, jump ahead, work back, creating a bunch of little DNA fragments. While it does this, all the little fragments have to be tied together. It's a very strange process.
Strange, where I work the firewall blocked the site also, but calls it: "Dating/Personals".
Why Hacker News Didn't Ruin My Morning
I once witnessed the moment when the messenger from the new management team comes over to explain to the brilliant engineers who built the company up from nothing about these "timesheets" they need to fill in, and how it's "really not a big deal". You could feel something dying over the course of the conversation. It was one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen, and I'm sure it's far worse if you are one of the original engineers.

Is it something every acquired company has to go through? Is there a right way to do this?
So what do we do? Obviously this sucks, but how do we build a company and get investors liquidity without Sarbanes-Oxley-riddled IPOs or Yahoo-level-incompetent acquisitions?

Do we just keep being regular companies? Is there an alternative? How do we build things that matter (and require outside investment) and end in real change instead of just getting rich?
Award of Excellence
Absolutely fantastic.

Although I'm a bit bitter: where were all the great graphics frameworks back when your only choice was native code? There was Processing...and recently Cinder and openFrameworks. Only very recently.

Once OpenGL moved to the web, we got Processing.js and Three.js and PhiloGL and some others in a fraction of the time.

I guess it was too difficult to make a framework that worked across operating systems. So now that high performance 3D graphics are on the web (which is the closest we've gotten to "write once, run anywhere"), we can expect to see a lot more.
Yeah, you are right, I always confuse the two.
Good luck with this. I am especially interested in the noise ratio. Reminds me of a great "about hiring" article from Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
Can I recommend building for ladies? It's like you get to avoid 98% of the competition for free.
Also there's an older thread on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=568556
Who said anything about a me-too? The point is not that fractional market shares are a guaranteed route to success, but rather that they are not a guaranteed route to failure.
I was listening to a 'To The Best of Our Knowledge' interview last week with Chuck Close, the American painter, and he said something interesting and relevant. He said that we are all very good at problem solving, but not good at problem creating. Problem creating is the process of finding interesting challenges. He found it in his art, and suggested that if we can find our own interesting, unique challenges, we don't need to find ways to keep up with everybody else, or worry about others taking our ideas. Kind of interesting and unique perspective.
This could have been me writing this article! In fact, it's ironic because just this morning I wrote post on HN asking if I should release early or add some more polish for this very reason. No, my site isn't related to books! Yes, variations of the problem I'm trying to solve get announced here more often than I would like to see! :-) I guess your post was better written, cause mine only got a few points! Maybe your title worked!!!
Depends on what you mean by "web software engineering." Really it's almost a useless term, since a web-frontend can be the front-end for almost any sort of system. The question really should just be "where does linear algebra have applications to software engineering?" in a general sense.

Pedantry & ranting aside, the obvious place is anything to do with machine learning / text mining. If processing large amounts of text and searching for things within, or based on, that text, you may well wind up using algorithms that involve linear algebra.

One of the Mahout project founders speaks fairly often in the Triangle area, at User Group meetings and such, and he always seems to mention Linear Algebra in his talks. There's a reason for that.
If 30% of Apple's revenue is skimmed, it will end up with $2billion in losses.
Final Android 3.0 Platform and Updated SDK Tools
Take a look at this short video: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2649

It looks like an API is on the way, as one of their roadmap items. It should be no surprise that they're going to do an API, given that their CEO is the creator of Twitter. Twitter is basically the textbook example of explosive growth due to API usage.
Android 3.0 is here
Closeup views of our holiday cottages
I'm surprised this is a common scenario. I would think, due to the pervasiveness of the sunk-cost fallacy, that companies would stand behind their aquisitions to a fault even--just cause they spent so much money on them.
This is why it's helpful to work in a big, successful company before founding your startup. You get a sense of the scale and complexity of problems that actually have real users, and practice dealing with those problems. If you stay long enough, you also get a sense of the trade-offs involved, and which complexities are accidental vs. which are inherent.

Of course, when you actually go to found the company, you should forget all that scalability nonsense and start with the simplest system possible. However, it's worth having an image in your head about how the system will evolve and what the appropriate response to various scalability challenges is.
Why the hell would you want to stop your project over the miniscule adversity of a pseudosimilar, vaguely-defined and -implemented platform that hasn't even gained traction yet?

If that's enough to make anyone quit a project, I don't think the startup scene is for that person.

For what it's worth, your project looks a lot more interesting. (Aside from the Flash.)
> People don’t use that crap.
> But they do want pivot tables, ...

That's what the cookbook recipe provides, a function called summary() that makes a pivot table. Problem solved :-)

> I should be clear that my complaint is with
> Python rather than the code as such.

There are plenty of ways to write the summary() function with plain, straight-forward Python code that doesn't use generators, itertools, or any other advanced feature.

So, why does the recipe author use itertools? It is because they provide a way to get C speed without having to write extension modules. Had the author used map() instead of a generator expression, the inner-loop would run entirely at C speed (with no trips around the Python eval-loop):

for pivot_value, row in groupby(data, key):
yield k, sum(map(value, group))

I think it's wonderful that a two-line helper function is all it takes to implement pivot tables efficiently.
Clients still need to authenticate when they start a stream, amazon could use that information to approximate traffic.
You obviously missed the WordLens announcement on HN, it went from HN to national media coverage in a few days!
The issue is that it's hard to know what ladies want, but then again, that's your competitive advantage...

I mean this in the "It's harder to come across this information" sense, not the "LOL ladies, amirite?" sense.
Robert Heinlein once wrote (On the Writing of Speculative Fiction) that, gimmicks aside, there were only 3 stories that were about people:

Boy meets girl.

The little tailor.

The man who learned better.
He is right to normalize the results, but parent's point is that he is wrong to do that by modifying his data collection.

He should just collect as many commit messages as possible, then divide the profanity count for each language by the commit message count. Because that has lower standard error [and no more bias] than what he did.
It all boils down to the fact that scalability of an organization often is harder than scalability of a web site. Yahoo just happens to be a very good example of that.

As hackers we tend to focus a lot on technical scalability issues. We love to work on things like NoSQL, the CAP-theroem, large scale caching and whatnot. But I think that the organization often becomes the bottleneck quicker than the web site. This is especially true now when we have services like Amazon AWS and GAE which helps us with the technical scalability issues.

So next time you work on that really cool memory optimization maybe you should ask yourself if you don't get better scalability as a whole if you focus your limited programming resources on features instead (so you don't have to hire that extra programmer to do that for you, since you work on your memory optimization).
It's all true, and Yahoo is probably one of the better companies that could acquire you.
I see no reason to believe that, given his process for ripping an "equal" number of commit messages per language was broken, that anything else even approaches validity. It's simple arithmetic; a grade schooler who notices that the last number is 7 would realize something's off.
Awesome, thanks for posting that.

I'd really love to know what the ETA is on a webservice API, even if it's just a rough ballpark. I sent them an email asking about it, hopefully they'll be able to provide further details.
This stuff isn't taught per se, you learn it bit by bit as you solve each problem that you face.

Some of it is taught. I learned about HAproxy second-hand, before any problem had to be solved.

I do agree that much of this has to be learned initially through experience, but I also believe much of it can be taught. Teaching it in a classroom wouldn't work, though, as Ops only exists when there's something to operate.

It's my perpetual dilemma: few startups have enough [1] scale to warrant having a senior enough sysadmin to be a mentor, let alone another one or two more junior ones, but large companies are awkward environments for experimentation.

I try and dump some bits of wisdom/experience to my blog. Shameless plug: http://blog.maxkalashnikov.com

[1] Even Disqus is borderline in terms of traffic. Moore's law and even its more linear corollary for I/O can take one a long way.
Not always. When Northrop Grumman bought TRW they did not realize that they were acquiring a new CEO in the process!
But that should apply equally to all languages. One would expect the same to be true of, say, Ruby or C++, but PHP's slice of the pie is minuscule by comparison. So your mundane answer is probably correct, but it's answering the wrong question. The question isn't, "Why don't PHP developers swear at their language all the time?" It's actually, "Why do PHP developers swear at their language less than most others?"

And I posit that it's because PHP programmers at that level are less likely to be surprised or scandalized by the language's well-known quirks than somebody working with Ruby or C++ (i.e. they are resigned to its frustrations).
Hungry for a Solution to Rising Food Prices
Ask HN: Where can I find upcoming tech conferences?
I'm a conference virgin, never been to any conferences, let alone anything technology related. (Actually, that's a lie. When I was about 8 I went to a "Better Homes and Garden" conference with my parents) I always hear about cool conferences happening out in California, they all seem really cool (such as CodeConf). Except they might as well be on Mars, there's no way I can afford the time or the money to go to one.

Is there a website that keeps track of tech conferences happening, even those that, while smaller, happen outside of Silicon Valley?

I'm in Florida, if it matters.