skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some problems with this approach:

1. Concurrency. Regular HTTP and pipelining allow the transfer of more than one resource at a time, often times many more.
2. Caching. The author mentions this, but fails to mention browser-side caching, which is the most significant form of caching, that is, to get a resource without having to go out over the network. This could perhaps be addressed with local storage, but his node module doesn't take that into consideration.
3. Compression. Regular HTTP requests support gzip; I'm not sure if websockets do or not. An initial google wasn't promising and it seems to be experimental. He mentioned in-browser unzipping, which is interesting but a more standards based approach would probably be via the content-accept header on a websocket connection.
Thanks for the comments so far. At the time of writing the initial blog post, we didn't want to give the complete picture but instead focus on testing the first component of our app, which is the Space.

As dwynings figured out quite well, our Space is a mix of a virtual whiteboard with media sharing, annotation and clustering features. You can use it to work on ideas, concepts, to review or decide on things.

The next thing we'll be releasing is Processes. These will allow you to work through projects in well-defined steps, where each step has its own Space.

Currently, we're not in selling/marketing mode (hence the sloppy effort on that side). Instead, we're trying to accumulate feedback and critique from potential users and hackers, so we have a bigger chance of building the right thing.
Also, just a little disclaimer: This was a couple of years back (I forget how many, 5 or so) maybe the Ruby community changed, and it's also totally possible that I just happened to land on a rather "particular" region of the Ruby blogosphere, so take this cum grano salis. I had to make a choice and was about this close to just flipping a coin over it :)

ruby-talk used to have, as one of a number of perma-threads, the question of "Why Ruby over Python". The discussion was almost always entirely civil, with most people suggesting that the questioner try both for a bit and pick the one that clicked best.

I used to host (on ruby-doc.org) a page called "Ruby Eye for the Python Guy" that tried to summarise the comments and offer links to help folks make a decision.

The community on ruby-talk at that time (probably 5 years ago) was extremely polite and helpful, and I'm sorry you landed on some opinionated blog that likely only reflected a small group of developers.

I don't follow ruby-talk much any more, so I can't say how it is, but there has always been a pretty strong tradition of MINSWAN: "matz is nice so we are nice." I expect that's still encouraged. There are, of course, various sub-groups around this or that library or framework that may have zero exposure to that, think they're the shit, etc., but I hope people considering Ruby don't a priori dismiss the majority of Rubyists as rude because of bad reports about a handful of people.

OK, end of Ruby PSA.

Side note: I'm often puzzled by people who think a language or framework or whatever geek thing has to "win." Be happy for happy people.
AlJazeera's quality of documentary along with a neat selection of competent panelists make most mainstream news outlets look like a bunch of primitive celebs mumbling sensationalist nonsense painful to listen to.

I know you have problems with AJE in the US and it isn't widely available, but the website and youtube channel is sufficient (I don't even own a tv set).

> In fact, many AJE professionals come from BBC.

Yep. Actually AJ was brought up from a closed Arabic BBC channel.
I knew nothing about your product just by reading your title, so these are my complete first impressions:

1) In the second sentence, I'm expecting to hear the first pitch for the product.

Generally speaking: with Spaceship, we ultimately aim to lift your creative process to a new level of productivity and fun.

Why "generally" speaking? You don't want to speak generally, you want to speak specifically about what you're offering. Secondly, you introduce your product with its benefits. That's great for most sales situations (think of all of the TV commercials that start with "Imagine if..."), but can be confusing for technical products like software. I want to know what your product does.

2) This is a really strong insight:

We found and tried a lot of products that try to simulate analog tools like note-taking apps or virtual whiteboards. Web afficionados work together in Google Docs. A forward-thinking filmmaker might manually copy character mugshots into a Dropbox folder. We heard of people who like the experience of Evernote.

3) The video is great. You're using the application to demo the application. Fantastic. But where's the audio? Why aren't you speaking with me directly? If you aren't comfortable with speaking, hire a friend for cheap.
Isn't that rather an argument for Java or Perl?

Or JRuby.
Sure. Please see my separate comment in the main thread.
The actual url is: http://10.10.34.34?type=Invalid Site&policy=MainPolicy but obviously you can't access that (it's a local IP).

You can download the html source at https://raw.github.com/gist/1805605/f2211718b70f7cb24f3d3213...

('peyvandha' means 'links')
You need a video series on how to customize bootstrap? It's just CSS + HTML5. Use the force -- read the source!
Freenet.Org
If I was you I'd just rent a server from ovh.co.uk / kimsufi.co.uk / hetzner.de/en and use a CDN. I am basing on your performance requirements that this is not a local gaming service. The advantage you have is you can upgrade to new hardware every year and the hardware is not your problem.

OVH is building one of the most advance networks with over 1tbps. Their 10gbps servers can actually push 10gbps which just gets me really excited.
When I need to draft a document that shows visual objects and relationships (e.g. architecture diagrams), I jump into OmniGraffle. The reason that this is my tool of choice is because the input mechanism is mainly through an outline tool. I can very quickly jot everything that I need to say down into an outline format and OmniGraffle will automagically try to align everything for me. Only then do I start to drag things around.

So, my feedback for this tool is to make input much easier. Instead of "click, type, move" over and over again.. smooth that process out by having a type-only input mechanism.

Great work so far!

Edit: Grammar and last line.
Whitney Houston, superstar of records, films, dies
If you want to know what the non-technical co-founder did those first couple of weeks, it was a lot of submissions under a dozen or so usernames. Fortunately, Steve & I only had to do that for a few weeks. The first bump we got in traffic was from a Paul Graham essay, which gave us a great initial community -- setting the bar rather high, actually.

edit: also, that link from my blog pretty much sums up why I think we succeeded.
Rest in Peace Whitney.
Chocolate covered strawberries
chocolate covered strawberries
Do youy want to give a fift? exaple for birthday party or Valentine, I thinks this cake is suitable for you
I agree with this and have said so on a number of occasions, but it's not very useful advice ;)
Is a pain in the A. to use the automated checkout line though. It just ends up taking me longer so I don't really see the benefit.
One thing that makes them successful is that they weren't trying to build "something between X and Y". Why would anyone use your community portal instead of just creating a subreddit or discussing things on Facebook / Google+ / etc.?

Why would anyone use your site instead of other online discussion forums? Once you can answer that you have a shot at being successful.
Thanks!

1) True. I'll do a better job next time.
3) Yes. We'll add audio in the next iteration.
Mobile Should Not Port Web (Or Vice Versa)
Meta-Messages: Future Of The Internet
I'm sure it also helped that zuckerburg's parents weren't secretly doubling as the company's senior management. YIKES.
As a reasonably tuned in Brit, i had no idea these protests were happening until reading about it after the fact. I think sopa-fatigue probably set in more with the relevant section english speaking population.
"The sale turbo charged user adoption"

That's simply not true. Traffic continued to grow rather steadily after the acquisition, largely because Conde wisely didn't interfere very much, but it certainly didn't 'turbo charge' it.

We were lucky enough to be in the very first round of Y Combinator, which meant far less to people back then compared to now. The mentorship, talks, and friends in the program were invaluable, though.

To my knowledge this is the first article ever written on YC:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68710
Beyond off topic:

The second, sixth, and twelfth pages of the PDF file are blank. The fifth page is nearly blank, except for the auto-erroneous notation that is was intentionally left blank. We are left with the ambiguity of unintentionally blank pages, or pages that refused to be corrupted by self negating declarations of their absence of content.
Thanks for this insight! I remember now that back in the day, I used OmniGraffle the same way. We'll definitely give this some thought.
Is Mr. Altucher always this breezily dismissive of opposing views?

Yes, we've strung together a some positive numbers. But I don't see anything in his work-up on leverage levels, housing prices, or the possibility that growth to 2007 was hyperinflated. Nor anything that the current numeric improvements are generated by unsustainable fiscal and monetary policies. Greece is significant not for its own significance but the question of just how edge its particular case is or isn't.

Now maybe he's right about the overall direction. But there are excellent reasons to think we may be on the edge of turning a number of long-term trends and deeply embedded assumptions. If you're going to declare that the attention to Greece is simply a matter of hype to sell stories, and the Kardashians are more interesting -- well, yes, some people will find that annoying.
ruby 2.0 will likely be just as easy as 1.8 to 1.9, if not easier.
Agreed. Also keep in mind baseball probably keeps track of more stats than any other sport, making it easier to spot potential.

I once read an interview with a Major League scout who said he relied heavily on the numbers. He basically said, "We can get any stats, on any of these guys, at any minute, and find out exactly where they are, and if they have the numbers for the big leagues."

Talk about pressure. . it was an eye opener.
His patches comment was basically early on we realized the collision detection code was horribly broken so we just started patching every edge case we could find. That's practically an endless treadmill. On the other hand when there is a vary specific problem really late in the production cycle that has little do do with the rest of the game then you can just patch that specific problem and ship the code. When an audio driver you have no control over corrupts a single bit in your EXE that is the root problem not the symptom.
only found out about the saturday march to be held in dublin late on friday evening. currently on crutches so unable to attend unfortunately. fairly unorganised as far as i could tell from people who were there.

edit:
if i were to speculate i would say that most of geeks and nerds i know who care about these things don't use facebook and the dublin march seems to have been organised on facebook. i only found out when one person who linked their twitter and facebook accounts crossposted to twitter.
If your network card fails or your CPU overheats, how long are you down for?

If you care if your website is up there are other costs when doing a colo. You should have spare for every component which nearly doubles your hardware cost and have someone on call for sys admin and hands-on fixes.
This has been discussed before. Here is the conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098756

And pg's explanation:

It's not so much that it's ahead of its time relative to hardware as it is something you do in the early versions of a program.

Using closures to store state on the server is a rapid prototyping technique, like using lists as data structures. It's elegant but inefficient. In the initial version of HN I used closures for practically all links. As traffic has increased over the years, I've gradually replaced them with hard-coded urls.

Lately traffic has grown rapidly (it usually does in the fall) and I've been working on other things (mostly banning crawlers that don't respect robots.txt), so the rate of expired links has become more conspicuous. I'll add a few more hard-coded urls and that will get it down again.
Can porn be copyrighted? One file-sharing defendant says no
That must have been the most awkward workplace ever. Working for two asian parents...that's probably a recipe for disaster
Starting reddit back in 2005 certainly had disadvantages compared to today (for instance, launching hipmunk in 2010 was a dream for me compared to reddit because there are so many more people online and sharing: twitter didn't exist, facebook was only in colleges, etc etc).

It's a lot easier to spread the word about your startup today, but far more competition if your startup happens to be one of those 'social media' websites. Fortunately, I only spent $500 or so to date advertising reddit - and that was on stickers. No billboards, tv spots, magazine ads, newspaper ads, etc -- build something people want and give people excuses to share it.
Perhaps not for "hackers" per se, but Shop Talk (http://shoptalkshow.com/) is worth a listen if you're a front-end developer type.
Executable whiteboard.
They did well, but they didn't win, and they haven't won. And winning is the point after all.
If they don't, there's another 1.2 million jobs lost to technology in a country that has no answer to the growing imbalance between working-age population and gainful employment opportunities.

Let me re-cast your comment, circa 1900 (or 1800):

"There's another one million agricultural jobs lost to technology in a country that has no answer to the growing imbalance between the working-age population and gainful employment opportunities. 'Gainful' employment doesn't mean that you yoke yourself to someone else's factory somewhere; it means you own your own plot of land and work it."

I'm tempted to delete this comment because of the quick downvotes, but I'm not going to.

The reason you'll get downvoted is because your comment fails to account for productivity and other gains from trade or specialization; taken to the logical extreme, ensuring that no jobs are "lost to technology" means that we all live as hunter-gatherers, since any level of further technological development will put someone "out-of-work," even if that work is of no value.

This is going to sound harsh, but if you don't want to be downvoted, learning some economics first (and I'm talking about micro-econ—the stuff that works).
The Lifestyle Business Podcast - http://www.lifestylebusinesspodcast.com/

Great podcast about the intersection between business & lifestyle - focused on bootstrapping and hacking your own business to get them off the ground.
love it John, great script too -- looks like your hard work learning JS all day paid off ;)
99% Invisible is in the same category of general nerdy podcasts like Radiolab (i.e. not just meant for programmers). I think this show specifically would be interesting to hackers, on manufactured sounds for digital interfaces, but there's a lot of good stuff in the archives.

http://99percentinvisible.org/post/3230995265/episode-15-the...
What is confusing there and/or against "mainstream conventions" (whatever those are)?
With 20 people riding in a $1.5M raft, you need to know exactly where you're headed and why. Security-wise, you'd almost rather be in an actual raft.
Boost your command line productivity with "fasd"
The closure explanation would make more sense if paging through lists of links/articles wasn't one of the oldest solved problems of web site UI. Closure may be a quick & elegant rapid prototyping technique but probably not as quick and useful and doing what thousands of other web sites already do in a few lines of code.
Perhaps you could take your racist stereotypes elsewhere?
It may be time to start a news podcast, the "hacker new podcast", where 3 of the top HN users discuss the day's headlines and comments on HN - 5 minutes/day.

Think of it as a summary of HN for HN fans who don't have the time to read all the comments.
I'm going to have to say it was two parts luck and ease of joining the conversation. You can create an account so easily (no email required) and that probably allowed a lot of people to chat about subjects that they would normally not put their name/identity on. That's my guess.
1. They would use it instead of creating a new subreddit, because as I mentioned above it will be in another language and country, there is no such portal.

2. It will have better site architecture/sharing system/notification and commenting system than traditional discussion forums.

3. Building "between" doesn't mean it will be something mutant. Structural like reddit, from community philosophy perspective like HN is a good system, I think.
If we get to a point where we can do all the work we want to get done with, say, 1/4 of the workforce, then everyone can work less, or the average amount of one's life that one works can go down, etc.

There isn't necessarily value to "having a job" (especially when you talk about all the unskilled jobs that are going away, which are often jobs that people are doing purely as a means to support their life); there's value to being able to live and have the life that you want. If getting everyone they life they want takes less and less work, cool.

But really, people will likely just keep wanting more and better and we won't run out of work to do
Okay that was funny. :)
Interestingly, dealers already sell some of their new cars below cost. But they make their money back with service and financing charges, so the basic laws of economics still apply.

http://blog.truecar.com/2009/04/24/more-than-ever-dealers-ar...

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/eag/246374a.jpg (from http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/eag/246374.htm)
"when you bring up the “team” page of the Airy Labs website, you now get a 404 error message."

Because the team is now 404: not found.

"employees were told not to speak to anyone who had left the company."

Oh, so it's a cult then. Understood.
Interesting you mention TCL's focus on command-line usability. I think it was a great step forward there, but there's a fundamental thing it's missing, which is complexity extending to the right. What I mean by that is, say you have a command like

tcl> foo { bar baz zot }

The only way to use the result of the command is to surround it with square brackets, which requires me to jump all over the line:

tcl> quux [foo { bar baz zot }]

This makes it pretty difficult on a readline-style interface to cobble together small commands Unix-style.

And while interactive languages may be a small niche today, I think part of the reason is that nobody's solved the usability problems as elegantly as the Unix shell has.
"We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily."
Many years ago I've decided it was time to pick up a modern programming language. In the past I had written lots of (Turbo) Pascal code, some x86 (and more exotic) Assembler and a bit of C, but then for several years I only did shell/awk scripts and ported C software to IRIX and SINIX/RU.

So I sat down and decided to find a nice general-purpose language that I would focus on learning. I wasn't quite sure what for yet, but I decided I was going to pick one and stick with it. I didn't have the time to learn multiple languages and I didn't have a lot of time to try out different ones, so I just looked around a little bit. Some I ruled out early: C and it's relatives were just too verbose, I didn't want to spend the time writing all the error handling necessary just to read a damn file. I was doing a lot of sysadmin type work at the time and had therefore developed an intense disliking for Java. This was based on too much badly packaged Java software that even if you got it running at all was sluggish, hogging way too much memory and crashed with arcane error messages. I did like the quick & dirty way I could make things work in a shell script, so I looked mostly at scripting languages.

I looked at Perl, which was the standard scripting language at the time and had a huge library (CPAN) of modules, which was great. I hated the syntax though and found the code often unreadable and there being too many ways of doing the same thing.

I looked at Pike, which had the benefit of using a C syntax (which I already knew, so that was a plus), but it seemed not widely supported and nobody was using it (this hasn't changed since, it seems).

I don't remember what else I looked at, but then there was Python. The syntax was a revelation. Here someone had finally made the most of creating a language from scratch and spent the time thinking about syntax and how to do away with largely pointless stuff (brackets), replacing it with things that everyone did anyways (indentation). It also came with a sizeable library of stuff that did almost everything I could dream of at the time. It was love at first sight.

Recently I've spent £35 on a stainless steel mill that grinds salt when you twist it one way and pepper when you twist it the other way, just because I really love well thought out and engineered things that make stuff that's been around forever just a little bit better. That's how I feel about Python. It's not doing anything fantastically new or unique, but it's doing the stuff that others do just a little bit better.

Today I'm doing lots of web stuff, some sysadmin stuff and random hacking of various things on the side. I'm still doing almost everything in Python and whenever Javascript bitches at me about a missed semicolon I do think: "All these fantastic things you can do in a web browser these days and you couldn't figure out that this command in an entirely different line isn't part of the previous line?".

The only thing that I can't do in Python is write software for my iPhone, which bugs me a bit. But every time I try to get into Objective C I just get annoyed by the syntax and amount of cruft I have to write to do anything.
Yeah. But I'm a lazy soul so not having to go to a different page is a big plus.
I didn't know about coderwall. I haven't really thought of Swym as a reputation system for programmers so I can't compare it to other sites that do that.

Anyway you should use both because it gives you more exposure. Swym is going to be very much focused on output, not just skills, so it should be a good way to get users for your projects.
http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose

Oh yes, I got flamed by Arrington for predicting it, but diggv4 had to have been some VCs getting hungry for a return they'd expected before the fickle market turned.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/29/guy-who-copied-digg-slams-d...

Conversely, Steve and I always talked about 'letting users do the hard stuff.' The more power and ownership we could give them (with guidelines) the more they impressed us. See things like /r/IAMA and /r/Skyrim for a couple examples of genius in idea & execution we alone never could've come up with.

As for traffic, reddit's traffic the Monday before diggv4 was about 600k uniques and 900k the Monday after.

It pretty much skyrocketed from there. Last month reddit had 34M uniques and 2.3B pvs. All after Steve & I left, too. Correlation or causation, I leave up to you.