skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While cool, and interesting, this strikes me as the exact type of overengineering tech-heavy startups kept being told to stop doing. I get the argument that it'll "give you a platform to build on" and help you "move fast later," but how much did you spend on engineering a storage library that doesn't solve a critical business need? $10k? $20k? How many people spent hours and hours on building another Clojure-based abstraction layer over key-value stores?

I also don't buy the argument that it'll help you be really "scalable". Once your datasets no longer fit in memory, it's all custom. Hadoop is a great solution if you have infinite money. Data locality matters. All those different services may expose a consistent-enough interface that you can build a common abstraction over them; their latency and reliability properties, failure modes, consistency, etc are not homogeneous, and at scale you can't pretend that they are. If your data fits in memory today (and that means 144g - 192g per machine), then why are you worrying about this? You'll need to rewrite a huge part of your infrastructure to scale from 100k users to 10M users anyway.

TL;DR: solve the problem first and abstract out the framework later. Also "scalability" is incredibly expensive (and unnecessary) to engineer for a priori.
Easter Games: Enjoy Easter Dress Up - Free Online Games
I remember the Sony Playstation. Aside from using a different media format, the controller was amazing. It's been the same ever since with small changes.

The walkman was also something I always wanted back in the day. It was good to know you could carry around music with you and listen to it whenever you or your batteries let you.
One solution to these kinds of social situations is to have the person filing the issue to close it in the end. This way the issuer is empowered to verify that either there was no issue in the first place, or that the proposed fix by a developer in fact actually fixes the person's real issue.
I dont know, even the link you provided... the first few are something about "rx" sounds like cheap knockoff drugs from Mexico, "clickbank affiliate", affiliate gambling site, "makecashtakingsurveys.biz"... These all sound like the scum of the internet type of sites to me.
That's because the site is purposely designed to make you think that.
For anyone else feeling quizzical, Pale Blue Dot is the name of a photograph of earth taken by voyager in which the earth is nothing but a pale blue dot.
An interesting mathematical puzzle
Detailed Comparison of Enterprise Twitter Tools
Also, http://www.fancyhands.com/
Sometimes the simplest hacks are the best ones.
Bash wrapper for Google Translate
NYC phone booths to become touchscreen kiosks
URL fail, try:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/city_new_phone_booths_VFGNinvlcNX30nlD7ibKDK#.T4GweFOovlY.link
It's more about "you too can feel VIP with your personal concierge", and less about "you need to be wealthy to use this service". I will agree that the product positioning isn't 100% clear.
Yes, a function's Kolmogorov Complexity[1] does indeed depend on the encoding, but you would certainly have to go out of your way to find an encoding where the official answer can be expressed more easily than "f(n) = pi/2".

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
I didn't use the term because I didn't think most people would recognize it, but we're getting technical now.
I've always felt... awkward about them too. I usually print out a copy on regular 8.5"x11" paper, and keep it next to my computer for a few days. A few days later when it either gets buried or knocked off, I know it all by then. I'll keep an electronic copy, in case I do something else for a while, and come back to it, but then it usually doesn't even warrant a print out.
I think that it's actually easier to get developers to switch to a language that's a little bit better--e.g. Python vs Java or CoffeeScript vs JavaScript--rather than "leaps and bounds ahead".
None of those are languages. CoffeeScript does come to mind though.
I'm 28. I remember Walkmans/Trinitrons/Microstereos. You wanted Sony. It's possible that there was some sort of four year cut-off, but when I grew up Sony was king.
- I made many mistakes in the learning process. Monads should be done after you know core language (higher order functions, ADTs and pattern matching, typeclasses). I was attempting to learn many things at once and perfectly, instead of climbing Wittgenstein's ladders.

- Getting used to nested functions, \x -> f >>= (\y -> g >>= h x y) is not that easy.

- The type of bind, m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b is rather complex for a noob. You've got polymorphism, and m can be different depending on the monad. Monads form a higher-kinded typeclass * -> * , unlike most other typeclasses * . I discovered Functor rather late. You need to realize Reader r is a monad, not Reader, not Reader r a. Partial application on types.

- It took me some time to read and rederive all standard monads - [], Maybe, Reader, Writer, State, Cont. Those things enter the mind slowly, especially state and continuations. Now I can reimplement all of them given a scratch of paper.

- If you do not know IO, you can only use GHCi to test expressions. I thought I need to know monads very well to do IO. This is not true, but I survived a month by loading modules and interacting with GHCi only. On the other side, after all this trouble IO clicked immediately. Fortunately Haskell has enough concepts you can learn for a month without writing a complete interactive program. Look at http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blow_your_mind for example.

- After you know (>>=), return you need to learn standard library functions such as join, mapM, sequence, forever etc. Then transformers.

- When I was learning, there was no Learn You a Haskell or Typeclassopedia yet. I found sigfpe's famous http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad... very late. I found a lot of useless buzz and opinions but rarely with details or instructive code.

I am happy I had a good curious attitude and did not resign.
That's one of the main goals of Hacker League. Maybe we can't keep the actual hacks online, but at least we can preserve a list of what got made and who made it.
You shouldn't be defensive, I'm just another programmer like you. I (and hopefully others in this thread) just want to share my own experiences and let you know what options are out there. Feel free not to use them, find your own preferences.

The article I linked to gives a shim for Object.create if you need to target IE7/IE8. All other browsers already support it, including all mobile browsers.

Yeah, the descriptor object is, in my opinion, a design mistake when they did Object.create. Modifying property descriptors is an exceptional need, and there are other ways to do it when you have that need (Object.defineProperty and Object.defineProperties).

However, that's an optional parameter. You don't need to use it. You can just define properties like you normally would to an object. For example:

var one = Object.create(null);
one.foo = 'bar';

var two = Object.create(one);
two.fee = 'fi fo fum';

If you want extra sugar to make the definition of own properties more eloquent (by having them in a single object literal) there are libraries/snippets that will do that for you. Here is one I wrote (which is just a very small snippet around Object.create): http://code.matthewphillips.info/thingjs/
Don’t help to erode the market for high-quality artwork just because you’re not relying on that market to feed yourself.

Countless companies run on $0 open-source software. Its responsible for a large amount of the constant innovation happening. And there are still people making a profit on software, quite obviously. It is not destroying a market, it is setting the bar higher for entry.
That’s the problem with “success.” After so many years of climbing your mountain, it’s not until you reach the top that you realize the next step is down. And the next mountains after that are lower. What could DHH do that would surpass the thrill of creating Rails or hitting the New York Times best-seller list?

Who's to say that a focus on "success" is what got Heinemeier Hansson to the top of this particular mountain? One way to be effortlessly successful is to just do what you love and thus do it really well; that and a lot of luck can in fact get you a race car.

This perspective that life is a narrative with upswings and downswings can itself be treacherous. Your life is not a prewritten narrative with defined story arcs. You should try to make sure you're happy with what you're doing now, and o do what you can to mitigate future risks and pay down your retirement. But I'm not sure there's much to be gained from explicitly plotting your ultimate success.
Hidden Factors that Make Innovation Diffusion Hard
Windows 8: Most useful keyboard shortcuts.
I was enjoying this essay and "with" the author all the way until he suddenly swerved into imploring everyone to not give their work away for free, in order to preserve the market value of the work of full-time professionals. This kind of argument has been used a lot against free open source software, and I doubt many readers of HN are very sympathetic to it.
Would you download our app for the chance at a new iPad
We're a startup looking to run a contest to publicize the launch of our iOS app. It's a geosocial interaction app. So simple yes or no... Would you download our app for a chance to win an iPad?
That positioning says EXEC is a luxury good. If you're trying to establish a product in a (nearly) empty market, why stigmatize it that way?
Columnstore Index Basics
I think using "function" for named functions makes the code more readable than something like "def" and is not super important. Now, you should really have a concise lambda syntax (not like JS or Python!), but that is a different story altogether.
Sony to cut 10,000 jobs
Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
I can't speak for the poster you're replying to, but in my personal opinion, monads exist at a higher level of abstraction than most people, even experienced imperative programmers, are accustomed to. The formal definition of a monad is quite simple, but it can be challenging for a newbie to extrapolate from the literal code that defines a monad to see how and why that pattern is widely applicable to so many seemingly distinct, unrelated problem domains. Eventually, through usage, you develop an intuition for it and it seems plainly obvious. But despite the proliferation of "monad tutorials", there are no magic words that bring understanding. Newcomers want to have it explained to them without having to get their hands dirty by writing code, but the only way to really acquire an intuition for something this abstract is through experience.

The other problem I see is that monads are really hyped (over-hyped, in my opinion) as a huge stumbling block for new Haskellers, and this turns out to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time you reach the monads chapter of whatever book you're learning from, you've already read 5000 blog posts and HN comments about how difficult and confusing monads are going to be, so you go in expecting to be confused. And this just contributes to the confusion. I think that it's much easier to learn this sort of concept if you can go into it without any preconceived notions about what to expect. But since monads are something that all Haskell users like to talk about, publicly, it's next to impossible to introduce a newbie to the concept without them having already heard about the difficulties they're about to face.
+1. Your approach is totally understandable, especially for someone reading/writing on HN. We both see there is difference between doing business online, AND doing sleazy business online. Otherwise, every and each one of us would be running a porn site.
I don't think you can compare clothing to personal assistants. Making customers feel important is the only thing differentiating H&M. Making your basement feel clean or your laundry feel done or your groceries feel delivered or your car feel washed or your mail feel sorted are all things that differentiate EXEC from its nearly nonexistent substitutes in the market.

I'm worried now that everyone is going to feel the need to explain the concept of a status good to me, or explain why some products get marketed as luxury goods. People: I get it. There are products where a niche can be carved out by luxury positions. But something else about the markets for those products: they're all super competitive. This isn't some remarkable insight on my part; it's banal enough to be in Porter's _Competitive Strategy_. Even MBA's know it.
I'm confused. I understand the whole "we are the web" thing. But do we really need a PSA for social networks?

Seriously, is there some grander message I'm missing?
I wonder why almost every language designer miss the fun opportunity to name the function keyword "fun"? Even Go got it wrong with its "func"!
Spec work for startups? ... Spec work in general?
> Why can't we have simple, unambiguous syntax with no pitfalls in new languages?

Yeah, s-expressions should be more widely adopted.
It's rare, but possible, even in devices which should have nothing to do with wireless signals at all: http://dansdata.com/gz128.htm
It took me a while to realize that you were probably talking about television. My instant thought was "channels" as in communication channels.
I have a hunch that the trick to writing the sufficiently smart compiler of legend is in deriving nondeterministic parallel cousins to sequential algorithms. In simple terms, if you could quickly compute potential solutions and verify them, then you could get a speedup in the average case. I doubt NC=P (that no problem is inherently sequential), but we could perhaps tackle many real-world problems with this line of thinking.
This is very left field. Maybe they're spooked by something and want to be part of a movement rather than the target?
I'm not quite sure you got the gist of the post. The library isn't about scalability. It's about having a consistent way to describe how data sources accumulate/aggregate new values to do something useful with them.

We don't have a batch MapReduce problem and so Hadoop isn't really an option and, having used it in the past, not sure it's even a great choice.

Also, most of the data we're working with comes from content being shared and not number of users, so for our case in particular, dealing with a lot of data is an issue from day one.

Lastly, " solve the problem first and abstract out the framework later" I think is one of the core misconceptions in computer science and engineering. Abstraction lets you build faster if done correctly.

Again, if we only needed a simple key-value store and only had to deal with managing user data/events, we have built this kind of library out. Many of the reasons we built this library is because of the kinds of data aggregation we encounter in relevance ranking and machine learning.
I like it. People who've commented before me seem to have very specific criticisms regarding how your design conveys brand but remember that this is a _redesign_, not an absolute final product to be shipped by the company. and by the way, this is way better than the current site. in the sense that it actually conveys a brand - whereas the original is far more neutral (thanks twitter bootstrap).

functionally, I would try to establish more of a visual hierarchy as you go down the page - the yellow color accent throws me off as I go down and the path that my eye intuitively follows is all over the place.

aesthetically, consider introducing a third accent color (maybe grey?) to round out the gold and white content you've got going on.

nice job!
They still make some of the coolest laptops out there. I've been in awe of my coworker's Vaio-Z
You're absolutely right, there is still a lot of dross in there without a doubt - probably because very few people sell their decent, stable, money making sites.

I use it as more of an idea generator and its one of the few places where you can get some indication of revenue levels for particular types of sites .
Ask HN: How many instances are you running your app on?
Would love to find out how many instances people run on versus the traffic they get. The only articles that mention this info are the run-away hits with millions of hits a day, on highscalability blog etc.

I wonder what the upcoming startups are running with a rough range for traffic [if you're willing to share that.] Also would be interesting to find out your monthly expenditure on infrastructure.
Rio de Janeiro (or Remote)

Rails Developer - Fulltime

Glio (glio.com.br)

We're a local reviews social network. Our story is similar to the guys at Yipit, ie, our team consists of two non-coders that learned to code in the last couple of months and used some freelancing help to launch our MVP (our official launch will be this week).

In the meantime we also were selected to incubate at Instituto Gênesis, which is brazilian's top startup incubator, at PUC-Rio university. And we're about to close our first round of financing.

Post-launch we're looking for a Rails developer to join our team and help us run faster. Being able to move to Rio would be a big plus, but we practice the 37signals' philosophy so it's fine if you prefer to work remotely. The compensation for this position includes salary plus significant equity.

If you're interested in the position please email me: robertoriccio1 at gmail.
awesome demo! interesting to see the progress.

one thing that is very noticeable though; no multi-threading! as soon as you start moving the 'cube' stops. my guess is physics updating defers to player movement.
The world happiness report explains what makes people happy
Maybe a better solution would be to have a syntax for writing and a different syntax for reading, i.e. the editor would automatically add the semicolons at the line endings where they would be appropriate.
To me the name means "not random people off Craigslist". It does not mean "I have to be an executive to use it". If that's the message they intend, the service should cost way more than $25/hour.
A meetup group would be great http://www.meetup.com/create/
Assuming you're right, presumably if the person you were replying to knew about companies in the storage market, they wouldn't be asking that question. So it might be more helpful to list some of the companies you're thinking of: EMC? Basho? Dropbox?
Open a business bank account at a local bank. As you complete the paperwork, tell them you want to open a business credit card account too. If they're any good, they'll make it happen.
It is funny, because you are really what the article is all about.
Ask HN: poll option is down?
Seems like http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll is down any reason?
Fancy Hands seems like it's more in the mold of Internet Personal Assistants; it doesn't look like they'll come clean your basement.
Maybe you should built it, try to develop a userbase then sell it on Flippa? ;-)
Many of the Flippa niche content sites (rather than 'service' based sites) are evaluated not just on traffic numbers, but on the product of traffic and topic-based AdWord CPC values, e.g. the top ones being: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/07/18/most-expensive-...
I am just curious because the Global Variables and Scope are the Awful Parts of JavaScript: http://oreilly.com/javascript/excerpts/javascript-good-parts...
I had someone on TaskRabbit sift through a bunch of childcare options to find an open spot. It worked well, and saved me a lot of frustrating phone conversations for around $30.
Agreed. People love to focus on the failures of government while ignoring its role in developing technologies we rely on every day.
How to make tutorials
I think Trey Ratcliff (http://www.stuckincustoms.com/) and many, many others, would disagree.

The market isn't being "eroded" by people giving away their work. The market was "eroded" by the fact that there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of people in the U.S. alone who are now skilled enough to regularly take what were once considered "professional" level photographs. There is simply too much supply.

If you want to blame someone, blame Canon and Nikon and Olympus and Sigma. Blame capitalism for giving us such unprecedented wealth that huge swaths of the population now have free time to study, scout, take, edit, and publish photos. Don't blame the artists.
I haven't used these Buckets nor have I scaled anything to that level with any need for uptime guarantees, so I'm certainly really naive.

But at the same time, simplifying the interfaces seems to me to (a) provide less points for buggy failure (b) allow you to write lots of machine learning methods that all "just work" on buckets.

It might all be custom, but if you're spending lots of time building, testing, analyzing, and deploying statistical models from scratch (the place I do have expertise) then a simple, consistent data interface is godsend. Scaling might still be custom, but if you can expose the Bucket interface then it "doesn't matter" what happens underneath.

If there's some real bottlenecking then it's probably important to break through that interface or to expand it (like that flush-rate parameter the Op mentions). Until there is though, you're winning on experimental fluidity.
Probably shouldn't have to dignify a comment like that. I flagged it.
(this is gonna sound bad, but) I'm a fan of how lines end in sh/bash. If there isn't a matching close for every open symbol, or there's a slash (opposite of /, my phone doesn't have the character on the keyboard) it ends after the next line that doesn't meet these conditions. ; is then a command terminator that separates different commands on the same line. I like it because it's explicit, easy to see visually and doesn't require special understanding of the semantics of the language to know if the line can be split there, only understanding of the line endings. It also allows folks to explicitly include the line endings if they want.
Yes, please! A think a lot of people who won't be able to attend the conference would love to have the videos.

As you probably noticed, video quality of presentations vary greatly. I'm always amazed by the quality of the PyCon recordings: http://pycon.tv I'm speaking as an user; I don't have any affiliation with the PyCon AV team, nor I know anything about recording video.

I understand that you want to run the conference as non-proft, but I'm willing to pay to have good quality videos for this conference since I won't be able to attend, and I assume other people will be willing to pay as well. Maybe you could setup a donation page to raise money to record the videos.
The most common type of reference sheet I use, is just a table of values that don't have a real meaning, for example I have bookmarked a table of ANSI terminal escape codes, and this table of Bash string operations: http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/refcards.html#AEN22587
Imagine reading an english text with no punctuation

I don't think this is a good analogy considering that each statement usually go on a separate line. Punctuation is helpful if there are multiple statements on the same line, but finishing each statement with semicolon and new line just adds noise.
This could be one of the best things Anonymous + Occupy will do for the people. Education = power!!!
And to save everyone else the time, here is the picture on wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png

It looks like lens dust 1/2 down the right side of the picture.