skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Felix Dennis is great. No nonesense but he properly lives his life too. Thanks for the link - I've seen documentaries about him, but didn't realise he'd written a book, so I'll go buy this as its sure to be a good read
I actually try to actively fight the urge to seek out "interesting" things to read. The content on HN is of fairly high quality, and seeking out more stuff to consume outside of it leads to diminishing returns on time wasted.

I find if something is important enough, it will get to me one way or another. Or I'll see it passing by on HN.
For me, the question isn't so much what Ruby has that Python lacks, but the extra Python bits I find annoying and/or tedious:

* having to declare "self" in every method argument — reading code, it just clutters up the screen/page

* the big use of of double underscores for special methods (i.e., __init__, __str__, __getattr__, etc...) — IMV, it's gooberish...

* no switch/case statement

In defense of Python over Ruby:

* I prefer the whitespace over the Pascal-ish begin/end, especially for real life code solutions

* the Ruby shorthand syntax IMV at times obfuscates code clarity - is it a method or variable I am looking at?

That said, I'd much rather code in either Ruby or Python than in Java or C...
Wait for next week's blog, when he discovers the joys of Series60 programming.
Comcast Testing New Management System | Technology Blog and more
The king
Best comeback ever (tptacek, I mean :))

I think you definitely need some balance between the two. Do a glitzy hollywood launch only after you've minimized the things that could go wrong.
As much as I like tipjoy (until recently I shared an office with them), I think that Seth brings up a very interesting issue.

We've got the metrics and acronyms down. But will we continue to deny the importance of emotional connection between a site's audience and its creator?
If I run across a particularly interesting post--linked from a favorite blog, or HN or reddit--I'll often subscribe to the site's rss feed for a week or two on the strength of that experience.

If the site's quality is consistently good, it stays in my feed reader. Otherwise it's booted fast. As a bonus, that high-quality site will probably link to other things I've never heard of, which might be worth reading long-term.

There's no universal recipe, and very few good aggregators online. But you can usually depend on the principle that good stories will link to other good stories.
It seems like most of what you'd do with this would be easier to do in Interface Builder. It even has nice little guides to snap things to where the HIG says they should go.
I try and get friends who read blogs to use google reader and then constantly cajole them into sharing stuff. Some of my favorite stuff comes from things my friends have shared. Especially things that wouldn't show up on my radar normally.
You're right. I think web apps get a huge benefit from soft launches, beta testing and user feedback. Its just invaluable information to have before you really present yourself.

On the other hand, if you're launching the next ValleyWag site, the Hollywood launch might be the way to go.
Here's an excerpt from the book:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article1084093.ece?pri...

Felix Dennis is one of those rare racehorses that not only can run fast, but can also tell you exactly how to run fast.

One of the best books I've read. Very frank and upfront. I re-evaluated many of my beliefs and assumptions after reading it.
The Brother HL-2040 only costs around $83 or so (newegg). I have one, and I'm very happy with it. Fast. Tidy. Quiet. It's a great printer. For $80 bucks it's an absolute steal.

The toners aren't free, but the price per page is very very low. I think it's in the top 5 of home laser printers. We're talking a few cents per copy here (including paper). A great deal once again. I researched the different printers before I bought one, and I knew full well that Brother can't make much profit on the laser printer itself - so the toners are more expensive. This is great, because this way people who print only semi-regularly can still get affordable laser printers.

Manjoo the author agrees with me: great printer and very inexpensive. So what makes the author think he is getting cheated? Why does he think Brother owes him anything? Why does he feel so outraged? The guy would be HAPPY if the toner ran out 20% earlier, but then he'd have faded pages for a while. Brother decides to put some more ink in there (doesn't cost them much) so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down.

"Fight back against the lying infuriating evil ink-and-toner cabal?". Please. Thanks to companies like Brother you can get great printers for less than $100. Your efforts to put them out of business by cheating their business model are petty.

Who is -really- the greedy and infuriating party here?
Compare: http://niniane.org/

With the July 2006 version: http://web.archive.org/web/20060715233014/http://niniane.org...

And that's just the oldest one that archive.org even has.
I get my news from: HN + Proggit + RSS Feeds from a few smaller, but important blogs (mostly personal blogs and other very specialized stuff) in Google Reader.

That's enough interesting news for me.
I'd add music (performance) to the list, but I can't think of any others.
I think the advantage comes from allowing multiple people to play with the files and end up with an image you can quickly email to a client or insert into a document. Plus you don't have to own a Mac to work on interface design.
I agree, build ads into your design. I don't think you need to turn them on right away though, you can fill the space with "internal" ads showing off features or other things you want people to take advantage of, like your RSS feed, your Blog, a "suggestions page" etc. Just format them as display ads, and slowly over time replace them with real ads.

I don't think you ever want to clutter up an interface with ads, but building them in so they look good to begin with is a good idea.
"You cannot help yourself because you suck at whatever it is you need help with"
Completely agree. There is just so much value to be gained from early users suggestions, and going through a few iterations.

Those early users are amazingly important. The overly passionate verging on stalker types that IM you asking if you just changed the color of a link and then tell you exactly what they think about it.

It was a similar story with Mibbit, although I didn't bother with beta, just threw the site up there and started iterating. The growth isn't quite a hockey stick, but it's extremely consistent which means I can grow the product along with the userbase.

Also I agree about techcrunch type traffic. Early on with Mibbit it got to the top on proggit. It was sort of fun, got a reasonable number of people in that night who looked around, said this is cool, then went... never to be seen again. Next day it was pretty dead. I think that's pretty typical.
Gymnastics & figure skating, though very few people can make it as professional gymnasts. That's largely because their bodies give out before they're 20, though.

Lots of the manual trades - isn't their a huge uproar about child labor in textile & small goods factories? Probably not what you had in mind, though.
the difficulty with a large assembly project is that you have to write a lot of well-named and well-designed macros and subroutines and otherwise create your own modularizations, otherwise it will be completely unmanageable. the main difficulty in my case though was having to interface to multiple devices, one of which was designed to be networkable (ie pain in the ass protocol,) something with which the language didn't help
yeah, as an engineer working in France, I can honestly say that their engineers are pretty good. The problem is that there's another grand école that specialises in producing bureaucrats (seriously!). And for whatever perverse accident of history, they are considered to be la crème de la France, so they call the shots in most large businesses. They consider themselves to be better than lowly engineers, so don't deign to listen to any suggestions about what is technically possible or not.

/bitter

:-)
The last part of my idea, I figured, was essential to its success--if it wasn't the consumer's choice that caused already-affiliated links to be repurposed, it might break those "common carrier" rules that allow a lot of more questionable forums to exist (would an ISP be allowed to embedd an ad-blocker in their traffic proxies without then doing "decency filtering" censorship?). Additionally, users might not like the idea of their own links being hijacked in this way, filtering the scripts out with adblockers ;)
I think it boils down to how comfortable you are with your product.

If your stuff feels iffy and has less-than-ideal engineering practices, the slow and steady launch might work great. Expose enough of your idea to keep people idling around and begin free beta testing.

This isn't bad, per se. Everything is a trade off, and if engineering skill or time is not something you have an excess of, the slow and gradual launch can work.

On the other hand, if you have experience building and scaling and are confident that: a) the core of your idea is apparent in your product, and b) you did enough testing that things won't break on launch, by all means, build the hype and open the flood gates on launch day.
No Obama Text? Isn't the Info Vortex Refreshing?
How could you keep a market interested in your product if you were killing people making it? Do you think some kind of secret trade-off where corporations got to kill vast numbers of people secretly in the middle of the night to keep prices low would actually work for _any_ corporation?

How could you keep a people supporting your government if you were killing people running it? Do you think some kind of secret trade-off where the government got to kill vast numbers of people secretly in the middle of the night to keep your standard of living high would actually work for _any_ government?

I don't make the same nebulous distinction between governments and other entities. A government is just type of corporation that is allowed to kill/incarcerate people.

I hope you don't think I am anti-corporate. Quite the opposite, I think that the shared stock company is responsible in large part for the civilization we see today. Feudalism would have continued indefinitely until the markets were allowed to take over. And I think that government should be run like corporation: the interests of the shareholders is made explicit and shares can be bought and sold on the open market. The job of the CEO is to maximize revenue and only shareholders have a say in whether the CEO is doing a good job or not. This is in essence what we have now with congress playing the role of CEO and special interest groups playing the role of shareholders. The only difference is that everything would be formalized and transparent.

And yes, I do a LOT of reading on the history of government, specifically between the renaissance and the 18th century. Read enough and you'll start to see that democracy is a type of fascism. It is a fascism of public opinion but fascism none the less. Our capitalist republic government is not quite as bad as a democracy but it is also not a stable entity, it is a delicate balance between the powers of mob rule and that of individual liberties.
I'm not sure if this is Hacker News, but the linked author isn't talking about the study's findings at all. He just uses it as a springboard to rant about a few mothers so bad they got sensational tabloid headlines. Then he works in a few predictable jabs at the welfare state for producing parasitical monsters.

This may be the study that the author is discussing, although it was released in 2007.

http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc7_eng.pdf

Hopefully, anyone on this board isn't afraid of real data. The picture seems kind of mixed and even the authors find it difficult to pin down the exact sources of well-being.
True, I agree it'd be best to be completely upfront about it with the users, and possibly give them a way to opt out of it.
The links provided are "MacBroken". Here they are, fixed:

http://www.satisfice.com/articles/hrbt.pdf

http://www.stickyminds.com/getfile.asp?ot=XML&id=13289&#...

http://www.cs.tut.fi/tapahtumat/testaus04/schaefer.pdf

Or maybe it's NoScript getting in the way. Anyway...
Schneier on Security: MI5 on Terrorist Profiling
These sorts of studies aimed at ranking countries from worst to best are almost always pretty useless, based as they are on a points scale made up of some poorly-chosen metrics of goodness assigned arbitrary weightings. They're even more useless when just used to compare the twenty or so rich "western" countries of the world, all of which are fairly similar in terms of their absolute quality of life.

I like the way the author here acknowledges that he wouldn't usually believe this sort of study, and that he doesn't know enough about the other 20 countries to really judge, but since the study agrees with his prejudices he's inclined to believe it. I applaud his honesty here.
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/ross/Flying_Spaghetti_Monste...

http://space.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn14573/dn1...

I want to believe
A Mom's Life
Indeed, pruning the feed list is important. I usually only remove a feed if it keeps annoying me with frequent irrelevant content. What I want to prevent is having too many unread items in my reader because it leads to either wasting too much time filtering through them or deciding it's not worth the hassle and missing out on good articles.
Turn them on as soon as possible. I made the mistake once of waiting a long time (as in years) before turning on ads, and the users were NOT happy campers. They seemed to think that it was their right to have an ad-free site.
Did anyone else have a flashback to the movie The Manhattan Project just now?
As I said, it's just a slight preference. But I look at things like the official Apple support for MacRuby (Apple is employing Laurent to re-implement ruby in Objective C, so that ruby objects are Objective C objects - you'll be able to program Cocoa in Ruby without having to take the performance hit of crossing a scripting bridge all of the time!), and I don't see a commensurate support of the Python world. But as I said, it's only a slight preference - Apple s evidently right behind both languages, as they make leveraging the power of OS X so simple.
When you click on an Ad, the owner of the site gets only a fraction of the revenue. Tipjoy is much more direct and favorable.
When I was young it was interesting. Now that I'm older I still find it interesting but possibly more importantly it allows me to remove a lot of the repetitive and tedious aspects of my job, which technically is not programming.
I think that connection is really important. Tipjoy doesn't do a perfect job of accentuating it, but we try by pushing the tipping information out wherever we can, like friendfeed, twitter, and RSS.

Blogs are an interesting one-to-many-to-many dynamic where a content creator feeds an audience, each member of which feeds their social news services or friends.

Tipjoy could do a lot better to harness this relationship, and we have lots of plans, but Ads are so far removed from the relationship that I agree with Paul's analogy.
Hah! Spoken like someone that has never had the pleasure of coding assembler for the %*$!#@@ ST20
I had a coworker who was a game programmer in California before moving to New England and finding his way as a defense contractor. He preferred defense contracting, by far. He told horror stories of death march after death march for less pay than as a government contractor.
"logic-crunching-hard-ons" - LCHO!

I code to help me communicate dreams into reality.
Yet more bikeshedding, this time in Lua!

This first approach doesn't use an internal lambda but is idiomatic - (do/end does not create a block in Lua - it creates a scope):

At the Lua repl:

> function which_answer_is_correct (...)
>> for index, answer in ipairs {...} do
>> if tostring(answer) == '42' then return index end
>> end
>> return 'none of the above'
>> end
> =which_answer_is_correct('black', 'white', 42, 'symbolic_logic')
3

The next approach duplicates the semantics of the Ruby code you posted, if Ruby blocks were actually lambdas:

> -- first a bit of magic to make Tables act more like in Ruby
> mt = { __index = table }
> function Table (t)
>> return setmetatable(t or {}, mt)
>> end
>
> function table:each_with_index (block)
>> for index, value in ipairs(self) do
>> block(value, index)
>> end
>> end

> -- now actually write our function:
> function which_answer_is_correct (...)
>> local answers = Table {...}
>> answers:each_with_index (function (answer, index)
>> if tostring(answer) == '42' then return index end
>> end)
>> return 'none of the above'
>> end
>
> =which_answer_is_correct('black', 'white', 42, 'symbolic_logic')
none of the above

Now, if you want the nonlocal return properties of Ruby blocks in Lua, you need to be a bit more clever than I feel at the moment. There's probably a trick available via coroutines, because coroutine.yield() yields to the caller of the currently running coroutine, rather than to the caller of the currently running function.

Making anonymous function creation less verbose is a popular topic on the Lua mailing list. "function (args) return args end" is more verbose than "do |args| args end". There are several implementations via community-developed macro extensions. I wouldn't be surprised to see something appear in the Lua 5.2 RC candidate later this year.

In the real world, I'd probably write something like this in Lua:

function which_answer_is_correct (...)
return table.find({...}, function (value) return tostring(value) == 42 end)
end

Implementation of table:find(cond) is left as an exercise for the reader.
Sure, but that is more than evened out by the fact that tipping is always going to be more work for the user than clicking an ad.
Brother.
Not so fast.

There are two kinds of futures contracts. One type is an obligation to buy at a future date at a specificed price. The other is an obligaiton to sell at a future date at a specified price.

Until said date, the only thing that one can do with such contracts is buy/sell them. When the date arrives, the only thing that one can do is pay and accept delivery or provide product and accept payment.

Speculators who are unwilling to accept delivery and store product can't cause a shortage.

Note that Southwest Airlines is paying a lot less for fuel than many of its competitors because it bought futures contracts with a delivery price that is lower than the current market price. (Southwest can accept delivery.)

Note that Southwest gets to decide when to buy futures contracts, so it's unclear how a "speculator" can make money by timing Southwest. (A speculator, of course, can make money by predicting future prices better than Southwest.)
> Even Tcl "uplevel" is better than Python's castrated lambda.

Tcl, in its own way, is more powerful than both Ruby and Python in that only the syntax is a given. There is nothing special about 'if', 'while', and other control structures, which are not syntax, but commands. Indeed, you can write your own control structure commands in Tcl itself, with 'do ... while' being a classic example.
Socialbrowse has been a cool way to find stuff "word-of-mouth" lately for me.
Doing Your Best
Where I grew up, it wasn't socially acceptable. Now, I had other nerdy characteristics, but I purposely stayed away from programming, D&D, and Star Trek precisely because they were nerdy.

Now I'm trying to learn to program. It's slow, and I wish I had started earlier. I'm too old for this shit (http://xkcd.com/447/).
Guys like you are why guys that this have $100m bank accounts.
Art & Letters Daily : http://www.aldaily.com/
In Lua, the Pluto serialization library has no problem persisting coroutines, which are isomorphic to one-shot continuations. Lua isn't terribly active in the web space, though this feature has been used to good effect in games.
The big elephant in the room that nobody here seems to be taking into consideration: 37Signals charges their users to use their product.

The Hollywood launch allows for such a case, whereas this example makes that much more difficult. Do you force beta users to pay? Do they pay the same amount as others? Etc etc.

Hollywood launches allow you to broadcast a product as "finished". The issues Aaron cites seem to arise from broadcasting the "finished" announcement when the product is clearly not in that state.
Clicking an add usually takes you away from the page. Tipjoy doesn't. You don't even have to pay right away - we trust that you'll pay eventually.

But putting money into a system is certainly a lot of work for lots of people.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Mor...
Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem. Did I accidentally murder your dog or something?

I wasn't saying anything about what 37signals does, I was criticizing what they recommended. You know, in their book. That I link to in my first paragraph.
After leaving Ruby (non-Rails) for Python this year, I've mostly noticed the difference in the obsession about testing. The Ruby crew is very into TDD (and now BDD)–that isn't to say that Python folks don't test (or do TDD/BDD), but simply that the tools available in Python aren't quite as polished. Ruby's RSpec, RCov, Flog, Autotest, & Heckle are all quite wonderful. I do like Nose, but get annoyed by lack of friendly code coverage tools in Python.
You can do the same thing in Japanese Tcl using blocks.
"I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth."
Don't like 'em? Don't buy their products.
Are you creating your own workplace stress?
You know how, sometimes, you read an article and some startup is doing the thing you thought would be cool and would displace an entire industry? But you were lazy and didn't write it down and ask for funding?

Doh...
A subscription to The Economist is great for having some printed material to read in the head.
Don't take myself too seriously.
From the site,

DESCRIPTION
add ?<lang> to url for line numbers and syntax highlighting

shabda@shabda-laptop:~/pastebin$ cat settings.py | curl -F 'sprunge=<-' http://sprunge.us

http://sprunge.us/ULaS

shabda@shabda-laptop:~/pastebin$ firefox http://sprunge.us/ULaS?python
I like the fact that you define "Properly lives his life" as spending over 100 million on whores and drugs over the course of it. :-)
Then use a function with some introspection and pass it some parameters.
It is the great enabler of my ideas.
Why is 'symbol table hack' a 'bad' word? There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way symbol tables are used in python.
It matters a lot. 6% of a company in the idea stage is worth a lot less than 6% of a company that's been in motion for a year. Earlier stage = more risk = less value. It's that simple.

If a company in the idea stage were to hire a rock star, they'd almost always need to give way more than 1 or 2%. A company that's already gone through YC and/or done an angel round might give away that little.

And even then, bringing on a CEO would be way more. You wouldn't want a CEO to only get 1 or 2% equity.
This is one of the advantages of Lisp. It is common for Lisp programmers to map the [] keys to () and vice-versa. Since Lisp requires so few of the keys, such mappings can prevent you from needing to press the less comfortable keys.
What are you doing with Python that can't be done with FORTRAN?
Turn ads on when they turn you on.
Have you looked into WFH so you can take care of the newborn while the wife returns to work?
again, with the ad hominems!
That's like asking "what would wireless phones or wireless internet do for us?" If you don't have the vision to think up 100 practical uses for wireless power and the sense of history to realize that those 100 would only be the tip of the iceberg, startups may not be for you.