skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a little spidering, and i give >= time for postgres:

http://blog.revsys.com/postgresql/

http://varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/

http://powerpostgresql.com/Docs

http://highscalability.com/tags/postgres

http://www.linuxinsight.com/search/node/postgresql

http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog.html

http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/

http://people.planetpostgresql.org/

http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/fdb/
truthfully, i remember about 15 Kanji, but it's still fun to stare at...

http://linuxfinances.info/
"Y Combinator style built-to-flip companies?" Sigh. Does this guy not grasp how much less we make when a company gets acquired early than we would if it went on to become a big success? The real money in venture funding, for us as for all other investors, is in the companies that become Google, not the companies that get bought by Google. The returns can be literally ten thousand times higher.

We would always prefer it if founders turned down acquisition offers and kept growing the company. Any investor would. The reason some YC startups get bought early is not that it's the optimal outcome for us, but that we're willing to get less than the optimal outcome if that's what the founders want.
Django-command-extensions
If you're sufficiently cynical, you can take in the most innovative ideas or beautiful designs and see nothing.

Conversely, if you're sufficiently observant, you can stare into the mundane, and find enough of interest to last you a lifetime.
Exceptional Performance: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
Sometimes quality doesn't cause anything at all. If you practice chess, for example, online, you'll find many player who really are no good despite playing literally thousands of games. I think there's no substitute for trying to do something well.
I think that the other benefit of using a framework is the testing behind it. At least in theory, the framework will be tested across IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. That gives a bit more confidence that your basic layout won't explode on any of those platforms.
This only works if you learn with each iteration. At times I don't. Learning is an active process and needs time and effort dedicated to it. Otherwise you're running in place.
While some of this stuff may not be surprising to creative people (in terms of their personal experience), it's exciting to see empirical research moving in this direction. Examples:

- The brain may be selectively rehearsing the more difficult aspects of a task [...] each subject was getting faster on those particular [details] at which he or she was worst

- Sleep was doing this work by using different parts of the brain than were used while learning the task

- Somehow the sleeping brain was solving this problem, without even knowing that there was a problem to solve.

Any insight into creative process, especially creative process that bypasses the habitual efforts of the conscious mind, is exciting to me.

Edit: these findings are also welcome in the light of a lot of people's efforts to get by on as little sleep as possible. There have been many posts and comments here, in fact, about taking that to an extreme (or wanting to). This research suggests that those efforts are mistaken if one's goal is to maximize productivity, and provide the beginnings of a model for understanding why.
Fantastic visualization of that data. You should release some sort of library for creating these from Analytics data or however you were logging the referrals.

I would love to have a page with my traffic displayed this way - maybe over a few different time scales.

It is always nice to see such well thought out views of data like this, for movies and web traffic it really seems to do the task.
Agreed, you are totally on to something here. It makes it really clear how the volume changes over time.
There is also the question of wether or not there would be a second (or new) offer. The Yahoo/Microsoft saga is a good example. Some (most?) founders aren't willing to risk it, specially when they have good technology but aren't doing too great on the business side.

That's my $0.02 anyway.
Designers are used to a top-down approach. i.e. They create a design (a full-on design spec with waterfall or a UI improvement/iteration). They like to have design authority. And, honestly, democratic design is generally pretty awful.

Devs generally get involved with OSS to make a different and to build something that THEY want to have (not to serve the the average user). Devs tend to be the "managers" of OSS projects.

So the big question is: When there is a disagreement about user experience in an open-source project, who wins? Who has authority? Obviously, you shoot for consensus, but it often is hard to achieve. Whem you can't achieve consensus in normal software development, a manager will usually pull rank and say, "Well, it feels like a design decision. Let's err on the side of going with our UX designer and the other people who agree with him/her".

I've never done design for an open-source project, but I'd wager that it's pretty democratic with a strong bias towards what the programmers want (which often don't jibe with what the designer wants).
Dell Tries To Trademark "Cloud Computing"
The very last paragraph is also pretty revealing.

Edit: the thing I like about his post is that it's a real example of how insight is distilled from experience. Yes, it's meandering. But then the experience itself was meandering, so maybe it needs to be.
I think it works both ways.

Putting basic functionality first doesn't mean eschewing UI assumptions-- it just means making LESS of them. You can't make anything without making assumptions.

Too often, devs assume that iterative development means that they build the simplest version however they feel like and THEN call in the designer to work with them to clean it up, improve it, add features, and make it pretty.

IMO, the best way to do iterative development is to work with the UI designer in the designers preferred medium for early prototyping (xhtml/css, photoshop, paper, whatever) on the "basic functionality" that you mention. THEN build it and have your target audience use it. Rinse, repeat with improvements and new features.
I have very mixed thoughts on this. I guess if the information is public to begin with I don't have a problem making it more accessible. But should the information even be public, especially with all the mistakes that plague the data? I'll probably be thinking about this for the rest of the day.

What's everyone else think?
Most people in countries that can afford new washing machines don't worry too much about water. And I don't see how replacing water with plastic could possibly be good for the environment.
Old riddle: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, practice, practice.
To argue at the extremes, we shouldn't live in a world where cameras pick up your every public move and speech and allow others unfettered access into our lives.

It's been said, and I agree, that the ability to forget is what keeps us civil -- both with our family members and with others.

I think we need to legislate some kind of forgetfulness when it comes to misadventures.

I'm afraid we're beginning to live in a period without history.
Awesome!

With the-largest-the-higher convention, you have a very telling visualization of the evolution of the streams with time.

And I thought Google Analytics graphs were the best. There's always room for innovation!
My lord. How can anything manage to be this incoherent, ignorant, dysfunctional, and personally ugly all at the same time? It's almost like a genuine design achievement.

This meme of "Paul Graham the cult leader, the exploiter, the bloodsucker" is fascinating. It's really something to watch it evolve as people divorce further and further from reality. But one has the luxury of fascination only because it's inocuous. I don't think it's too hard to see in this the seed of something nasty... imagine, say, people starting a mass movement to take action against this harmful exploiter of our youth!

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying anybody's going to actually do that; the thought is ludicrous, which is the point. What I am saying is that the same psychological dynamics (of demonization and outrage) seem to be at work, only in a trivial way... which is a difference in scale rather than kind.
I'd love to see it on Reddit too. Not very difficult to implement with socialhistory.js (http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/)
An example of how not to use regular expressions?
7 strategies to put yourself on an information diet
+1 from me
The visualization here is excellent, and I love watching how a link spreads through the little ecosystem of linkers of different sizes.

However, I am very concerned about the headline, which suggests that HN is the most interesting part of this. I fear that posts framed this way are the first step into the pit of self-referentiality that reddit is permanently stuck in.
Prawn : Fast, Nimble PDF generation in Pure Ruby
The initial alpha release (Prawn 0.1.0) from the Ruby Mendicant project [http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com]. This library is the first (and only) pure Ruby PDF library to support UTF-8 text and runs on both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9
Ruby Mendicant : Prawn's First Release - Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator
X Games 14 Results (Street) : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Comunity
I think it's an interesting perspective (plus, I like his style of writing).

We all get that the 'lifestyle business' runs with different assumptions than the 'VC-funded business'. It really is two different worlds. Why not just accept, then, that the 'lifestyle business' crowd has their own assumptions (just like HN has its own), instead of casting it as the new enemy?

On another (but related) line of thought, since the 'lifestyle business' crowd is in general older (compared to the HN crowd) and not a marginal group (it's quite a movement), don't you think it deserves some attention, instead of combating it?
I (obviously) like the YUI stuff. I think it would have been good if he'd mentioned that it:

* Works the same across the Y! A-grade list (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/) such as the awesome font scaling solution (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/)

* Have style sheets to normalise fonts/styling across the A-grade browsers

* Plenty of documentation, demos, screen casts.

I also like Eric Meyer's posts on his CSS reset stylesheet (http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/) because it nicely dissects what he has done.

I've also used Blueprint from the article. That's pretty nice, I like how it's a properly FOSS project. It's a lot like the YUI CSS project but it sets up some defaults which can be handy to quick get things going. The documentation is pretty good and is a wiki on Google Code so you can add to it.

I only wish it was slightly more x-browser. I might be wrong but I don't think they support quite as many things as YUI.
I'm surprised this hasn't been a problem before for Verizon. Many Japanese surnames, when romanized, have the string 'shit' in it. In fact, ICANN had to change their rules for domain name registration to allow for this after many people couldn't register romanized Japanese words
Heh, Perl is no match for J! ;)

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Studio/IdiosyncraticIntroduct...
I wasn't impressed by this article.

At least 4 of the 7 (link baiting) points were "watch/use less X". Obviously watching less TV or obsessing less over email will reduce information overload. Duh.
The most insightful parts of Earth: The Sequel
So my dad co-authored this book, Earth: The Sequel, about how entrepreneurs are going to be the driving force behind the upcoming energy revolution. I took all the most insightful parts of the book and put them in a MindMap, and then got permission to post the MindMap online.

I put number icons next to the nodes that I thought news.yc people would find most insightful, taking into account the general interests of the group and what I thought people would already know based on the stories that get up voted here.

Also, the questions in bold are topics I thought would make good blog posts, albeit some are only tangentially related to what's in the book. If you find ideas in here that you think are useful, feel free to blog about them.

You can view the MindMap on the web via a flash applet here:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/earth.html

Or, you can download FreeMind 0.9.0 Beta19 and the original file here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7118

http://www.alexkrupp.com/earth.mm

The advantage of the latter is that you can navigate with the arrow keys and spacebar, and it's a lot prettier. (Go into Preferences -> Appearance and check "Edges start from one point at root node" for best results. Apparently the Flash applet doesn't have this functionality yet.)

Hope this is useful.
OLX: Craigslist + modern-looking UI - traffic
The choice isn't only about Changing the World or just getting paid. You can also change the world in a small way that gets you paid consistently.

Search engines changed the world in a big way, and Google continued with that. Google makes a ton of money as a consequence.

Wireless Toll Payment changed the world in a small way, which will probably get bigger in time. But for now, toll roads are just a bit more convenient to use.

You can also change the world in a big way that doesn't generate much money at all: YouTube.
I think this is interesting. I looked for myself, and the information is just plain wrong. (I have no criminal record, but I clicked a link to some affiliate site that gives you general information.) I learned something new -- getting wrong information is more comforting to me than getting no information. If someone decides they want to kill me for disagreeing with their Hacker News post, they will look up "my" address, be excited that they found me, and then go to the wrong city to do the deed. If there was no information, they would keep looking until they found something, but this false positive should satisfy their curiosity and they will stop digging deeper. (Of course, if someone really wanted to kill me, they should look at my public Dopplr profile instead :P)

But should the information even be public, especially with all the mistakes that plague the data?

The legal system provides recourse for publishing false information. If someone turns you down for a job because of the false criminal record, I'm sure your lawyer can help you out. In most cases, though, the information is probably correct, so there is no point in hiding it.

This is sort of like the argument against Google Street View -- "what if someone sees me walking out of a sex shop." I say, well... eventually society will realize that people buy stuff at sex shops, and we can stop worrying about what other people think. It will help society evolve.

I think the same is true with criminal records. If everyone sees how prevalent marijuana use is, eventually society will stop demonizing it. In the case of other crimes, perhaps you can explain yourself out of the shame.

Either way, I think this will hurt individuals in the short run and help society as a whole in the long run. (That probably means it will be made illegal in another week or so. Call me cynical :P)
"I actually found this pretty easy to read", said the ADHD kid typing while looking out of the coffee shop window.

I liked how he took us through a Journey a lot of us have made struggling with people who try and make patterns into buzzwords.

This is a great article which will hopefully help you with an "Aha!" moment as well.
You can also change the world in a big way that doesn't generate much money at all: YouTube.

This was also true for Google for about 2-3 years after they started - perhaps more. I think we should judge Youtube after a few more years. Everyone accepts it has changed the world in a big way.
Are there any current companies that you think have a reasonable chance at pursuing an IPO within 12 months? 24 months?
Kids will work for pennies.

That's not true. The difference in pay based on experience is negligible, even ignoring the tremendous difference in expected productivity.
That's a very interesting way to present content.
What's so clever about his implementation is that he took the stream graphs and made the rendering very simple (blocks in columns linked by bezier curves, most drawing kits make these trivial). It turns out that it's actually an improvement for lots of different datasets.

It's really a great hack, and I suspect that a lot of people will copy it shortly. Certainly, I already am.
I think this has a lot of fair critism of Knol.

Anyone who has read many of the interesting books on collaboration published in the last few years (Spider and the Starfish, Here Comes Everybody, etc) will see the similarities between Nupedia and Knol.

Jimmy Wales has been quoted as saying that it took Nupedia's failure to make Wikipedia a success. It seems surprising to me that Google would hark back to Nupedia now.
I don't think there are many companies in the world that have a significant chance of doing an IPO within 12 months.

I do think there are several YC-funded companies that have as good a chance as any other startup at their stage. Loopt is obviously one. There's another that's almost as old but is building something so big that they haven't launched yet. More recently than that, it gets harder to say, but there are at least 5 more I wouldn't rule out.
(First off, let's be clear that I'm using "real" and "imaginary" in the context of the fictional world of the comic strip).

The portion of Hobbes that is real is just an inanimate stuffed toy tiger. Hobbes as a motile, living, thinking being exists entirely as a figment in Calvin's mind, projected into the object of the toy tiger. So Hobbes the toy is real, while Hobbes the being is imaginary.
My Dad's was "shut up and do it"
Optimizing Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Languages With Polymorphic Inline Caches
Looking at the mind map this looks like a great book.

I'm buying a copy from Amazon now (http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Sequel-Reinvent-Energy-Warming/d...)

I really believe in the idea that outsiders to the traditional energy business are going to bring the disruptive technology because they don't have the same incentive to be inert.
Irate Customer: "Come on, people. This experimental rocketry stuff isn't rocket science!"
Finally, I can have that useless lump of pinkish-grey jelly work for me!
i'm a big fan of nyt's movie revenue graph:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...
Title is inaccurate. While the chart shows it, the linked article is not about reddit vs. hacker news traffic, nor does it even mention "Hacker News." It is a visualization of traffic from several sources, one of which is HN.
Washing machine generally work on a couple of principles,

* beating wet fibres to remove unwanted particle mater (stains, dirt, etc)
* centrifugal force to extract water

It looks like by adding the plastic chips the surface area and frequency at which the laundry is beaten is increased. This allows for the reduction in water.

Depending what kind of "plastic" is used it may be something biodegradable.

The stains and smell associated with dirty laundry is because of the foreign contaminants in the cloth. If those are removed and absorbed by the plastic particle then the clothes won't smell any more.

Personally I wonder how many plastic particle would 'escape' each wash though. That could be a bit of a pain. But this seems like a great improvement to washing machine technology.
The only place I've had that feeling that "education" was more important than knowledge in Cambridge was actually directly on the Harvard campus. But I completely agree.

There are two strains of culture in Cambridge, "you should be smarter" which is why I love living here. And "you should have two PHDs" -- which is very different and unfortunate message. It's almost the opposite of the Valley, which speaks so reverently of the Harvard drop-out.

The best thing that those of us who live in Cambridge could do is keep the culture focused on ideas and less on diplomas.
yep we are, funny anecdote:

One older guy I went to school with made a posting over 15 years ago on some small usenet group about doing LSD.. its now one of the top 10 results for his name on google.

He would have never thought back then that anything he writes on that small forum would every be accessible and searchable by the general public.

Its not fair. Google should really anonymize most usenet postings done > 10 years ago.
News : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Comunity
It's a reasonable question. In fact most of the internet industry is based on advertising, even Google, Yahoo and MSN.

It seems like there are 2 models.
1) Provide advertising users really want resulting in clicks
2) Provide a service to important to consumers/businesses they can't live without it and are willing to pay for it

Right now mostly everyone is working on 1) by trying to be the company who can sell another business a "guaranteed" customer.

A few companies (like 37signals) are working on 2) but that's much harder for a number of reasons. Until the internet is more embedded in our lives it's harder to provide a concrete value. Because the internet is so friction-less it's very easy for someone to compete with you reducing your share of a small market. Finally even now it's mostly middle class to upper class people with good internet access, dramatically reducing the market size (Exxon obviously sell to everyone).
I love innovative graphs like this one.

Not only does it show both volume and ranking at a given time, but it looks awesome.
Seriously, now there's 208 people's ashes scattered somewhere over the Pacific instead of space..

"The rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space,"
I think the same is true with criminal records. If everyone sees how prevalent marijuana use is, eventually society will stop demonizing it. In the case of other crimes, perhaps you can explain yourself out of the shame.

This sort of assertion I tend to doubt. Many of the people who seek to demonize and preserve the criminal status of marijuana have, in fact, used it, although they defend their behavior with pithy excuses like "I was young and dumb" or "it was the '60s; it was different back then". Society doesn't demonize the rare vices, unless they are dangerous to innocent people, e.g. pedophilia, so much as it lunges for the common ones. What do the morals police stand to gain from crusading against, say, a blue-and-yellow-striped-dress fetish? Virtually no one has such a fetish, so it gives them no power base. Premarital sex, on the other hand...

You might hope that people with rigid moral stances might soften them when they discover good people who live differently, but the fact is that a lot of these people are more inclined to turn against old friends than to revise their opinions.

The issue with vice voyeurism is, moreover, not one of acceptance so much as privacy and professionalism. Pretty much everyone accepts that sex is a part of normal life, but no one would want to have his/her sexual history available on the Internet, nor come up at a place of work.
Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. If you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, you gain nothing.