skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the support from everyone on Hacker News!

1) Release something fast. Don't wait til it's perfect. Wait til it does one quanta of usefulness, and release.

2) Work on it tirelessly. Every day, all day. Well, take breaks, but you know what I mean. Treat your time as if it were worth $200/hr, because if you're a founder then it really is worth that, and potentially a whole lot more.

3) Communicate with your users. If they email you, you email them right away, as fast as you can. If someone writes a blog post or tweets about you, address their concerns if it's a complaint or problem. It makes a difference.

We're psyched to see how the product has been taken up by users of all backgrounds, from tech savvy to never-blogged-before. Can't wait to see what 2009 holds...
My main introduction to caches, cache sharing, etc. were from
UNIX(R) Systems for Modern Architectures: Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel Programmers

http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Systems-Modern-Architectures-Mult...

Still a good book. A little dated in some bits, but good.
And how's that working out for you? What percentage of your time is spent in meetings? How much in preparing for meetings?
It's just that good, that's how.
Triskweline: New fixed-width coding font
I love it. Don't get discouraged by the lack of comments here! I'll be giving it a shot next time I need to do a small marketing site. Looks like it'll cut my hours sharply.
Do you have references for that exodus?

By Google, XML is winning 50 to 1 - but declining, and JSON is growing: http://www.google.com/trends?q=xml%2C+json&ctab=0

However, a factor is that people already know about XML and don't need to search for it. e.g. HTML is declining even faster: http://www.google.com/trends?q=xml%2C+json%2C+HTML&ctab=...
...and the library.
I worked at Google. Most meetings had way too many people in them, and 90% of the people would sitting around using their laptops through them, attempting to tune in when it was relevant. It wasn't really all that efficient. Marissa's very special meetings were run in a special way, and were more efficient, but teams meticulously prepared for their 5 minutes with her.
To the contrary, a lot of quite successful research mathematicians claim that you feel stupid a lot if you are working on genuinely important problems. Paul Zeitz one year at MathPath put the word "STUPID" up on a blackboard in huge letters when orienting the middle-school age students attending that program to what the difference is between math contest problems (which most participants in that program are quite good at, by the selection criteria of the program) and professional mathematics research problems.
I don't know the ant specifics, but I'd surmise that one starts off thinking of a simple declarative format (we've got some targets, that depend on other targets, which is just a simple tree, and perhaps we can write various analysis tools later). Then of course as time goes on, it gets more general purpose language features (symbol bindings, conditionals, etc), and adopts an ever more procedural feel (especially in the case of a build system, which essentially all about mutating filesystem state). Since these features weren't designed from the start, you end up with rifts, such as between ant "attributes" and "properties", which don't really tax the ant gurus, just the casual users and newcomers.

Seems that it would be easier to write a build system as an embedded DSL in a general purpose language to begin with, and when further analysis tools wanted to be written, make the necessary changes (meanwhile old build scripts run just fine using the old library).

But then again, it's much easier to criticize with hindsight than to design a system that becomes popular.
You know what? Your work probably helped save someone's life. I could give a shit if it's legal - it was moral.
Why do we care? Serious question here.
Financial Adviser
Kents premier Independent Financial Adviser Blue Ocean Investment Co, offers independent financial advice on investments, mortgages, pensions for a diverse range of clients including both personal and businesses in London and Kent.
Thanks for the advice, but I think he meant to ask if there's anything specifically about December which would explain the spike...
@jacob: have done another run of spell checking.

Just curious about your comment on $299 monthly fee, why would you call it 'unprofessional'? I have read about Joel's articles on setting the price a bit higher will actually help the sales but not sure how should I play in my specific case.

Suggestions?
I read them as italic.
Ooh, duelling URLs, can I play? :)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=xml%2C+javascript

Do you have references for that exodus?

Not really. I'm talking about what I observe in the hacker world, which is a thoroughgoing trend away from XML. Do you really see it otherwise? It's not all going to JSON of course.

Most of the XML stuff is in big enterprise projects and, for some value of "count", those just don't count. Last I checked the IT pundits were declaring SOA dead, after having milked it for a decade.
I don't know if this would make money as a web service, but I think you are right to try it -- it could work.

Personally, as a developer, I would be more interested in licensing the algorithm or code from you. In my case the potential use would be for a desktop application, that is closed source. Essentially it would be a filter for a local file search engine, which is part of a larger product. Would you be interested in this ? It would not be an exclusive arrangement, so you could continue to persue other revenue methods.

Also, I suggest that you test the algorithm to see if the amount of content stripped and tossed is a good identifier of spam emails, if the algorithm is fast enough it may have use for that.
How long can wood last?
I think that for the average enterprise user, sticking RSS feeds into their lifeblood (read: Outlook/Email) makes the most amount of sense. Most executives / desk jockeys spend a lot of their time there, and I would suspect an equal sort of treatment is applied to their email as it is to RSS feeds.

As a point of opinion, I would posit that lack of integration into other common office applications is a barrier to entry to applications soliciting the enterprise space.
What happened to GE's stock price in 1988?
Love it!

I like that it's not a full blown MVC framework. Going to give it a try.

Thanks!
David
@henry: "This type of algorithm is definitely something I would pay good money to own, but as a service, it doesn't make much sense."

We're pretty flexible with the business model. Selling license with source code is actually what our first paying customer is doing. Just thought making it a service will make things, such as evaluation, a bit easier. Maybe you'll disagree?

I don't have that much experiences selling 'naked' algorithm, specifically where to find prospects for this one. Any hints?
It looks like for exactly that year they split, and then returned to their previous level once the year ended.

Why did they do that?
Effect of human activity on evolution
No typo, timburks.

Before the app store debut around July 2007, web apps was the only way to develop for the iphone.

With Webapps, Apple simply place your application on their http://www.apple.com/webapps page and gives you a chance to promote yourself.

Apple does not seem to promote those web apps as much as they should.
You don't win the the console war (and if you could, Nintendo would be the victor now) you just win battles.
Some good points here. Thanks for the responses.

-"The term "citizen journalism" does not have to mean "your wacky neighbor up the street". What about the, few, independent journalists working out there."

There's a difference between an independent journalist and a citizen journalist. The terms are not interchangeable.

Josh Marshall (TPM) is an independent journalist. He is not a citizen journalist. He does this for a living and lives off the fruit of it. Arrington is not a citizen journalist either. I agree that independent journalists (essentially, journalism startups) will become increasingly important. But that's different from citizen journalism.

Furthermore, while many citizen journalists are independent, I would argue that many aren't. What about the folks uploading to CNN's iReport? They're working for the mainstream press.

-"I'm having a hard time seeing how you are rationalizing that news orgs like CNN or NBC are not comprised of iffy product placement and factual errors."

There are instances of sketchy product placement and certainly factual errors in the mainstream press.

However, there are also mechanisms for dealing with these when they're exposed. People lose their jobs. Have their pay docked. Get moved to other assignments. Lose face with the public. They also get sued...all the time.

Citizen Journalism, on the other hand, is, by definition, the wild west.

I am constantly underwhelmed by the stuff I read on blogs and on Twitter. It's all marketing. And it's often disguised as editorial. Ever been to a "tweet-up"? The one's I've attended consisted of dozens of people talking about how to talk to people on twitter. Ugh.

The mainstream media screws up all the time. But at least there's people there committed to NOT screwing up.

As per your last point...what are these "better sources of news" that you speak of? I'm always interesting in finding new stuff to read. If you've got some great links, please share them.

So I think we're on the same page regarding independent journalists. We're only going to see more Talking Points Memo's and the like.

But I'm still very skeptical about citizen journalism as a tranformative force unto itself, based on months of watching the local scene here in Chicago. There are some great blogs here, but none that are really capable of carrying the torch for a newspaper if it went under.
Re-Potting with Resources: What Would You Make?
> Servers, being larger/louder/faster than the average PC

I'm not sure about larger or faster. A lot of web servers are physically smaller (i.e. they fit into 1 rack unit) and less powerful. Have a look at web hosting options. I believe google in particular uses a large number of quite moderately powered units.
That post is a good example of what is wrong with blogs. It's basically an interesting intro without a body, 'cause, you know, blog entries are 500 words or less.
I am so going to read this later.
It's not about being honest - I've been to many meetings with talented people that thought they had everything under control but looking at their reactions and behaviour yeilded another answer. These people were deeply honest, they just hadn't seen all the perspectives and ramifications of what they were doing, or were a bit too positive. Good managers know this and use it productively - it is one of the primary functions of meetings.

This probably touches on one of the big differences between engineer types and business types - engineers think it's all about technology and business types think it's all about people. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

My point is that the communication you do in a meeting is very very different from the communication you get from e-mail. Psychologists have found that when you interact with people up to 90% of the communication is non-verbal. This means that the bandwidth of talking face-to-face is ten times as high as sending an e-mail.

There's a pretty interesting wikipedia entry on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-verbal_communication
> I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time.

I get a ton of spam via the GitHub web interface. It is really annoying.
Thank goodness no one uses JSON to encode a language (in the way that ant uses XML).

Heh. Of course, they don't need to. As the French guy says in the Holy Grail, "we've already got one, it's very nice!"
Google Quick Search Like Quicksilver from Google
> Very telling points about LaTeX - that like XML/HTML

No, it's a demonstration of ignorance. LaTeX wasn't written by Lispers, it is merely used by them. The fact that they find its design decisions acceptable must be weighed against the cost of their alternatives. That doesn't imply that they wouldn't have been happier with a more lispish syntax.

At the time that those decisions were made, LaTeX was pretty much the best alternative. The fact that Lispers, like almost everyone else in related communities, made that decision merely says that Lispers don't cut off their noses to spite their face.
Garry do you think it had anything to do with the Google page rank update? Or what about more people taking photos during the holidays?
I really think it's just that ant dates from the time when everyone was walking around with XML stars in their eyes.
Revealed: The Times Made Up That Stuff About Google And The Tea Kettles
Anyone else wondering if the mass exodus from Pownce had something to do with this? I am a former Powncer and strongly considered Posterous as a replacement.
Everyblock launches neighborhood news trends
What gets me about Microsoft every time is how it has this, like . . . "universally" ugly font. I can take a look at a screenshot capture and in the blink of an eye know it was rendered on a MS system.

I think one of Microsoft's biggest foibles has been its poor use of fonts, its stubbornness in rendering for modernized CSS, its stubbornness in rendering for modern everything. I stopped caring what web pages look like in IE in about. . oh, 2005.

Of course, Microsoft "hates" to render proper, modern CSS, so its no surprise that their web arm is so archaic. Almost all of the design foibles mentioned in the article could be easily corrected if they were to let IE let CSS do that thing that it does best.
Best Dressed from the Crunchies (Part 2)
Ask HN: Parallel Programming Languages
Has anyone used any parallel programming languages such as NESL or Cilk? I am in particular interested in languages that abstract away threads and focus on irregular problems. Bonus points if it includes some kind of hashtable data structure.
From the article: "Nor is it an accident of history that Lisp programmers never came up with these technologies for Lisp data. The central idea of the XML family of standards is to separate code from data. The cental idea of Lisp is that code and data are the same and should be represented the same."

No, that's not the central idea of lisp. The closest "central idea of lisp" is that code should have a standard and convenient representation so it can be readily manipulated by programs.

Lispers separate application code from application data. They do so even when the application data is a program....

It is true that Lisper's didn't engage in years of meta-whinging and defining transform languages, but the fact that the XML folk did was more of an accident of history. When the Semantic Web hype was in full-swing, the Lispers were still licking their wounds from the AI winter.

And, how is that Semantic Web coming along? Pretty much where the Lisper's left it....
I was just about to post a link to that very pdf. Drepper has some quality material on his site.
Yeah. I was interested to know what caused the spike in December specifically.
No, the QA on those cookbooks is better than the QA on most software. That's the point of Cooks Illustrated. You don't even have to trust me; read a CI recipe: they've documented everything they did wrong. They not kidding: they made that coffee cake 45-50 times to get it right. Also, check out their "board of advisors"; they're name-brand people. Bittman used to be on staff, and restaurant chefs are on their tasting panels.

What's funny is, CI used to have a third Consumer Reports style section where they rated other cookbooks, by turning their (large) kitchen and staff loose on the recipes and evaluating the results. CI does a better job QA'ing other people's cookbooks than they do.
An iTunes for news? Dumb, dumb, dumb
I used cilk in college to code some throw-away examples. I liked it for what it's worth. I also tried learning Erlang for a week, and really dug its execution model and the way the language felt in general. I was using Armstrong's book for that.
Hmmm... I don't think hackers ever went towards XML. The old C hackers hated it (too inefficient.)

The nice thing I see in XML is that it abstracts out grammars (using XML Schema / DTD). For JSON, a grammar isn't used - it's a nested tuple transmission format - sort of a dynamic type systems, but without, er, types - just tuples that can contain anything. It's agile, and all you need in many cases. And JSON is a natural for web-client stuff.

BTW: who said SOA is dead? SOA doesn't solve any pressing problem, but all the vendors switched to it.
The spike itself? Announcing our funding on Techcrunch and the ensuing blog storm. ;-)

EDIT: We also did launch group blogs and multiple blogs per account. That helped quite a bit, (fallentimes jogged my memory below) since we did see people start family group blogs while at home for the holidays. I like to think of people talking about posterous over Christmas ham and egg nog.
So you want to make your own MMORPG?
Looks to me like there's a typo in the input data somewhere -- probably an extra digit accidentally got entered in the "# of shares outstanding on January 1st" field.
Yup saw this on the scribd documet that listed all the incubators.

Congrats!
If Javascript used JSON in the way I described, it would look something like this (view page source for original):

{
"function": {
"signature": {
"name": "byId",
"args": ["id"]
}
"body": {
"return": {
"call": {
"target": "document",
"method": "getElementById",
"args": ["id"]
}}}
}}
Seriously mechanical (gears!) Rube Goldberg corkscrew and wine pourer.
The Photo Marketplace That Never Launched: Flickr Stock
AirBedandBreakfast has done a pretty impressive job of capitalizing on the inauguration. It's been surprising to see HomeAway, with its half a billion dollars of funding and existing marketshare in the vacation rentals space, completely miss the boat.
The sooner you read it, the sooner you can move on to that next bookmark.
Hi there again,

I'm less concerned about the newspapers than the journalists. Pandora probably won't help the music labels, in the long run, but it seems like it helps the artists, who gain listeners from communities that might not otherwise.
The 2000 election was "stolen" by the Supreme Court? I don't usually expect conspiracy theory on Hacker News.
That's what software looks like inside.
<3 bigspaceship
I've evangelized various social webapps to my friends for years: Friendfeed, Tumblr, delicious, etc. Posterous is the first that I've seen immediate understanding, adoption, and excitement among them.
I found this quote interesting: "psychologists have found that a person flourishes when their chance of success is between 80% and 95%. If your chance of success is below 80%, you start to act desperate. Above 95%, you start to get complacent".

I wonder if many startups feel anywhere close to an 80% chance of success.
The posterous guys are great - and offer a great service.

Congrats!
A startup flourishes when its founders have the belief, whether it is well founded or not, that there chance of success is at least 80%.
For pagerank update, I actually didn't see a significant change when that happened. And most sites see a big dip in December when everyone is home for the holidays and not really getting on the computer.

But it's certainly possible that the latter came into play, especially since we just launched group blogs (and multiple blogs per account) at the time.

A lot of people are starting to use Posterous for group family blogs, and I expect that trend to only increase when we introduce password protected blogs (coming soon)
I was going to say I think we've (well, a lot of us) have forgotten how to make and engineer mechanical, physical things... but you're completely right, it's not like a computer is any less complex. Still, hot metal is impressive!
Ask Justin.tv: Are you hiring?
I know Hacker News loves to support the YC startups, but if you're going to post your job listings and disable comments, can you at least combine them all into one post? Otherwise it seems a bit spammy...
Site has been taken offline for a refresh.. The old site will be online soon!

However playing with the site is not the ONLY way to research. Like the blog entry states there are other tools mentioned in the article that allow you to find out more about the site.

There has been enough written about taazza online.
The first video recorded on the G1 — and it looks awful
Teenage Girl Sends 14,500 SMS Texts In 1 Month
The article suggests Lispers could have used sexp as a front-end to LaTeX, in the same way that XML was used as a front-end to LaTeX. Very easy to do.

> If S-expressions were easier to edit, it would be most logical to edit the document in S-expressions and then write a small Scheme program to convert S-expressions into a formatting language like LaTeX. This is, what XML and SGML people have done for decades [...]
"what if you could input a bunch of fetishes and it would automatically find the videos that have the most tags in common with your search?"

Something like tiava.com?
BTW: who said SOA is dead?

http://apsblog.burtongroup.com/2009/01/soa-is-dead-long-live...

A friend who works in banking sent this to me, mainly because the two of us had been predicting it for years.

The post, incidentally, comes perilously close to saying that it's time to invent new bullshit acronyms because business people have stopped falling for "SOA". One could hardly ask for a better exposé of the IT racket.
It's a sign of the times that, after reading the headline, I figured this would be a Malthusian article about "peak wood".
Yeah, I know you meant that. The point is people don't do it because they don't have to. In XML, by contrast, your example has been written countless times. For a few years it was almost de rigeur.

JS's notation for data and code may not be identical, but they're close enough to get things done (that's JS's Lisp heritage showing). Since XML was explicitly designed to prevent people from doing a bunch of things they needed, it's not surprising that what resulted were montrosities.

I suspect that XML is a manifestation of the kind of people who like to lock things down and specify them up front, until they're so tied up in knots of their own making that they form a committee to design the same thing all over again. As you may guess, I'm of the opposite camp. Happily, I can work in my medium and leave them to theirs.
"Winning the war" is such a terrible metaphor for measuring business success. (Winning the war is, relatedly, a poor metaphor for measuring military/political success, but that is an aside for an another day.)

Who "won the war" in selling food, McDonalds or Olive Garden? Who "won the war" in selling clothing, Walmart or Armani? Who "won the war" in entertainment, World of Warcraft or J.R.R. Tolkien?

(You might say that none of these business compete against each other, which I would say is accurate as far as it goes, but not distinguishing against the Microsoft or Nintendo example.)
Tunnel's Vision
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard
I would have liked your comment better if you had left off the last sentance. OoO
I don't have a huge amount of experience with either framework, but I've used them both. One thing that stands out about jQuery is that it's unobtrusive - Prototype is not (at least not without some help from something like Lowpro).
This is because I started using it, obviously.

But seriously, it's dead simple to use, which is why I use it but haven't gotten around to trying 80% of the web startups that come through here.