skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also Firephp for getting the server to send additional trace data:
http://www.firephp.org/

EDIT:

Also, this article has a good overview of multiple Firebug extensions:
http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/list-of-firebug-e...

I know some people who love PixelPerfect for transferring Photoshop mockups to CSS.

Also one of the comments mentioned widerbug which I might try now that I have this weird 18.4" laptop:
http://www.command-tab.com/2008/01/19/widerbug-widescreen-fi...
Why Bill Gates Quit Microsoft: Man's Quest for Happiness
They don't need one since they have an open api. They're not a walled garden like Facebook.
A startup's first year...in numbers (check the blog)
We use Pivotal Tracker to manage our agile development at an airline. We love the open nature of the tool, in that it only presents the bare bones of what you'll need and then you can make it work in any way you want. We also like the dynamic nature of the real-time updates. I can watch my browser window update to reflect the work in process.

The tool has been extremely robust. They notify us well in advance of outages, both on their site and via twitter.

The most important item for gaining acceptance of the tool is that we can export our work from the tool into .csv so we can continue to work if Pivotal goes offline.

Highly recommended.
More along the lines of philosophy of science then;
great stuff!!!
You're right. I just took the time to look deeper into the FPS documentation.

So I'm getting the impression authorize.net is what most people here use for no-account recurring payments?
> To cache the results of complicated joins (or queries without indexes).

Not true at all. The purpose of Memcached is to completely avoid a call to the database because the database, even if it keeps everything in memory can't touch the read speed of a distributed hash table. Memcached allows you to spread the reads across farms of boxes instead of sending them all to what is usually a single database server.
Shoot me an e-mail (shafqat at newscred dot com)... We might have an open position, but can also point you to some others.
Way back when? So Xobni is an example of "what is old is new again." (I had no idea there used to be a ton of Outlook plugins...)
I only know as much as is there - it's not mine, I just remembered seeing it and thought it was cool.
Good point.. It's pretty inappropriate to complain to the person you are interviewing.

It sounds like they just can't afford you. When we can't afford someone we often ask them if they would like to work 4 days a week. Sometimes they jump at the chance!
Conkeror - http://conkeror.org/
Not to derail, but a friend of mine has a "Twitter for schools" that's been getting a ton of traction - http://www.edmodo.com

(He's an IT guy at one of the suburban school districts out here, which is why he knows exactly what his users want.)
nice green on black terminal

i miss osx transparent terminal ... i can't get the equivalent in linux/bsd :(
I remember back before we launched I was so worried that TC/Digg/Reddit traffic would bring the server down and I'd be a laughing stock. Then we launched, and...

Nothing happened. I mean, we got the traffic and all that, but the only way you would have known was to look at Google Analytics. The site was screaming fast (way faster than any competitor) and it was a pretty uneventful day for my sysadmin hat.

It was then I decided that maybe you don't have to architect some masterfully optimized site to survive traffic surges... you just have to use common sense and everything will be fine.
I didn't say he wasn't deliberately confusing OSS / Free software with freeware.
I only just starting using MySQL to store tables of around 100,000 entries. But MySQL would take literally > 30 seconds (sometimes taking minutes) for a query that PostgreSQL (which I installed after it) can handle in 10 seconds.

It seems like MySQL is therefore dreck. I can't see any reason not to use PostgreSQL.
"Merge without merging"

Isn't that the same thing they claimed they were doing (with Apple) when they introduced Google Maps and YouTube on the original iPhone? Mr. Schmidt appears to really like that concept...
It's a fair question. Everyone is aware the traders, which are normally a big deal, are slaves to the research gents and their algorithms.

My guess is largely, they can be. The actual trades could be automated (this would become increasingly necessary with rapid-fire [millisecond] trading, which we don't do now but could in future). The meatware oversight could be consolidated to a smaller group of individuals.
Twitter Baby - Most unique use of twitter this week
The parent's statement is still technically right:

"python interpreter doesn't even support multiple real threads let alone multiple cores"

multiprocessing allows you to have the interpreter start another entire OS process (another interpreter). It mimics the threading API.

It's useful and it does allow you to take advantage of multiple cores without unfamiliar APIs which I take it is your point...

You can see in the PEP that for many situations the overhead of processes is not a big concern:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0371/
Basically, I am willing to give a significant % of the revenue of the app.

If not, maybe spend about 1000 $. Like I said, micro project.

I think this app could be built in one weekend.
Ask HN: UNIX / Command Line tutorial for non-dummies
Dear HN:

I've recently begun the process of hosting a website for a friend on mine. He'll just be running a wordpress install, but I'm giving him shell access and it would be nice if he was able to do basic php and css config himself if he needs to. That said, he has basically no UNIX experience. He's not a computing novice - he's currently working through a python programming course, for instance - but he's never used GNU/Linux, and whatever OS X experience he has is pretty superficial.

Do you all have any favorite tutorials to get him up to speed with sshing into GNU/Linux shell account running bash?
Ask HN: sendmail vs mailto: links for viral content sharing?
I have a widget that has share-on-digg and email-to-your-friends type functionality. I've implemented the emailing in what seems to be the standard fashion - a minimal dialog allowing entry of the to/from details, with the email then being sent using sendmail from my server. However there seem to be lots of issues with scalable email sending - host throttling, getting caught in spam filters etc. I'm wondering why I shouldn't change to using a browser mailto: link. I can still fill in the needed email content but the sending is then done from the users local machine and email mechanism.

Having each user do their own sending seems like a more scalable and robust solution to me. But it doesn't seem to be standard practice with similar apps. Any thoughts on why? Are there a significant percentage of folks who don't have an email client set up correctly for mailto: to work?
To be very precise, the following is what I want to do. Please don't steal my idea. I am not a programmer, but I do run the site www.nimonik.ca and can do the design/marketing/admin.

1. Automate a scraper to pull data from the PDF files found here: http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=65,2151455&#...

2. Have that data in a basic mysql db that can interact with the UI found here: http://www.pnika.com/hockey

3. Package into an iphone app and submit to app store.
Do you work on Celtx?
Actually, that isn't the wealth creation. It is am important market and business function, but the process of want creation and distribution are actually eliminating market inefficiencies, not increasing wealth. Of course, my argument is based upon the simplistic economic model, and I pay no heed to people that believe want creation yields emotional value through the deliverance of material satisfaction. Now, if you mean to say that business people are responsible for increasing factor income, than yes, exactly.
Arggg.. no Firefox 3.1 support

Firefox plugin API really needs an overhaul. It shouldn't be assumed that everything breaks on every point release. Firefox needs to come up with an API going forward and stay backwards compatible till the next full version number.

I think Chrome is going to lead the way here. Their plugin strategy seems to be based off fixing the mis-steps of firefox.
I would think that if you have an attacker on the intside of your corporate network trying to brute force accounts on an external service, you have wayyy more problems than locking out everyone else from the corporate network.

And I still don't care if everyone else on your network can't access my service; until you find the hacker and put a stop to it, why should I have any trust in your network address? The street goes both ways here.
CES 2009: 3D video gaming to become a reality next month
Having each user do their own sending seems like a more scalable and robust solution to me. But it doesn't seem to be standard practice with similar apps. Any thoughts on why? Are there a significant percentage of folks who don't have an email client set up correctly for mailto: to work?

It might be more scalable, but it's (in my mind) not more robust. Most people I know use webmail with no mailto setup.

The impact will really depend on your content and your audience. Is your audience savvy enough to Copy Email Address if they don't have a mail client setup? Is your content worth their trouble to do so?
You're better at this stuff than most other teams, Tom.
It's slightly sad that racism still has a part in world-wide culture. In some countries, it's even pretty much accepted - I read a Russian newspaper recently saying, "Well, the Americans have finally got themselves what they deserved", implying that nothing is lower than having a black president.

And I was just thinking this was the 21st century.
Toy trains 'Star Wars' fans to use The Force
I use a similar site right now:
http://camelcamelcamel.com/

I think their interface is a bit cleaner than RSSTalker and probably more developed right now.
"Basically, I am willing to give a significant % of the revenue of the app."

I hate to break it to you, but (freelance) developers hear this all the time, and it screams "I want you to work for free". Either you're paying for it, or you're not.
I just use extensions.checkCompatibility=False in about:config and most extensions work just fine.

Also, they've changed addons.mozilla.org where most addon authors just have to flip a dropdown box to move support to a new version-- no new upload required. Many authors don't know that, so they wait until the full release to change their support.

FF 3.1 should break very few extensions. Almost none of mine died, though Firebug is particularly sensitive. But I used Firebug 1.3.0 betas just fine for a while on FF 3.1. (My new laptop isn't using FF3.1 at this moment, though.)
is there a minimal, single dll version of Tk for Windows?
My weekend project: ObamaMillion.com
$1000 will get you about 13 hours of time from a competent iPhone developer, and maybe 10 from a great one.

And every great programmer who wants a chance to make revenue from a product has a great idea already, but not the time to do it. No one is waiting for someone else's great idea to get working.
There are a few problems with the industry. A tough one is that people read fewer papers. However, the major one that I don't see any way around is that the business model is unrelated to the core competency/value/activity of the company. That's a problem almost inherent in advertising though not quite.

The classifieds just piggybacked onto newspapers because they had a distribution mechanism & the could make the network effects happen. It never had anything to do with news. There was a symbiosis, but it was an incidental one. You can't just counter that with 'Democracy needs News.'

Consider a possible parallel. Imagine T shirts where a major ad industry. Various brands are able to sell cool T shirts that are very fashionable & desired. They sell em cheap & make it up on ads bought by the highest bidder. This becomes a cultural norm. Everyone wears these $2 shirts that would otherwise cost $50 & everyone gets a handful every month.

Now say no one wants to buy the ads any more or say the fashion becomes put a sticker over the ad or say atheist buses & neon building become so common that advertising is devalued. Whatever. Can't sell the ads any more. OK. Well, people will buy less shirts. It was nice while it lasted. We had $2 shirts. But that's it. No way around it. I will buy fewer shorts at $40 then at $2.
FireCookie: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6683

Great when working with sessions or cookies.
this project seemed so promising at first. now it has become a parody of itself.
On my last day in SF, I randomly had this idea to create a huge physical wallpaper with little pictures of Obama fans all over the world.

Logistically, that would be hard to do and I just didn't know much about wallpapers. So I decided to start with a digital version which I coded in LAMP over New Year's. In the process, I learned a fair bit about ImageMagick and PayPal integration.

We'll see where it goes:)
But surely an analysis of the reasons why they stopped working on it would prove interesting?

I.e., what chain or confluence of events brought them to the breaking point, and what processes/practices could have prevented them from reaching it? I imagine there's probably a great deal to learn from even the most "boring" failures.
More seriously:

1. What about copyright / bandwidth / permission to scrape from that site?

2. Where is the mysql db? Do you have servers and hosting or do they need to be conjoured from somewhere, configured, installed, etc?

You're talking of iPhone programming, which is currently popular and therefore costly, and also database skills and some kind of communication between the two, and scraping and unmentioned extras (particularly backend scalability if you want a lot of iPhone purchases, user accounts? database reports? some kind of admin controls)?

A weekend sounds optimistic for a robust solution to me.
>I learned that not everyone cares about "good problems". They care about "cool problems".

Exactly, and sadly true.
Failure Is a Badge of Honor: Insights from VC Erik Benson
It's fair - a bit more expensive than you could get doing it yourself. I think if you shop around, you can 2.2% for Visa/MC and 20 cents per transaction even with no credit or volume. The question if it's worth it is how do they handle refunds, cancellations, and most especially - expired credit cards. In a monthly service, you might lose more to expiring CC's than to cancellations! People's cards go over their limit, get canceled, or simply expire. I was surprised when I started seeing monthly credit card attrition numbers, it can brutal.

So if Amazon lets customers cancel without you/your support team doing anything, that's valuable. If they let you offer "no questions asked refunds" where the customer can get it themself - that might be valuable. And biggest of all - if you can define an automatic process for dead CC's, that'd be really valuable. If Amazon would check if a CC verified, then automatically try again right away if it didn't, then again the next day and day after, then sent a series of 3 emails - if they offered something like that, that'd be phenomenal. I'm going to doubt they do though...

So their prices - competitive enough. You'll want to make sure you're not held hostage to them once you start using them, which I suspect you are. And does someone need an Amazon account to sign up? Big question there. Depending on what value they add, they might be worth using. But only if they don't hold your customer data hostage if you want to leave as you grow.
Can H1-B and F1 visa holders earn money online?
First: this is a really interesting thread and I have a lot of respect for your experience.

But is it really better to statically allocate resources to threads? You may have 8 cores on a box and 1 of them burning and 7 of them cruising. By utilizing a small thread pool and letting the scheduler spin things off dynamically you can turn that into 8 cruising instead.

Just curious.
I have a mysql db running on a bunch of sites we can use. As for copyright, i don't know for sure, but it is municipal government data so that is not a big worry.

No user accounts. No admin. Weekend might be a tad optimistic, but I think it can be done with someone who has a some experience scraping data from pdfs and already has tools he can use.
point # 1 - true.

point # 2 - perhaps, perhaps not. also trying to build a relationship with an iphone developer as I have other ideas and places to get money from. Just want to do this one quick and dirty.
Please set up automatic system imaging for your server (e.g. Slicehost backups). The biggest barrier to learning is fear, so it helps him to know that he can press the "undo button" for the entire system at any time.

Other than that, I recommend letting him watch you use the terminal for 20 minutes to show him what proficient console use looks like. Advanced commands can be Googled later, and those "Unix Cheat Sheets" and cram tutorials were always simultaneously too complex and too simplistic for me to ever find useful. A working understanding would be more valuable.
I haven't used the osx terminal, but gnome-terminal can be transparent if that is all you want.
There's something terribly horribly wrong with either your database setup or your queries. 100,000 entries is miniscule. Do you have indexes on the join columns in your queries?

(But do use Postgres, it's better than MySQL for most cases!)
whats that island on top of Australia that has no cables going to it?
I'm not sure I really get this project. I don't know much about it, but it seems they had a starting vision of how this would work & are now in the process of squeezing it into reality.

Is technology really the issue here? Is the operating system or dust proof case really the bottleneck?
We use unfuddle, http://www.unfuddle.com . Kind of like Basecamp, but a bit more dev focused. Integrates well with Subversion.
hi there!
We've been using Producteev.com for the past 2 weeks, and it is simply amazing for Team Task Management... A pure jewel.
If you request a code on producteev.com, you get a token within the hour
You might want to try them out, I discovered them through this post on TC : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/09/producteev-launches-gro...
"Do you care to start doing it?"

Unfortunately, I don't think I have the chops, nor the time right now. (But, fortunately, it may not even be necessary... see below.)

"Other than doing your own, I think the most sensible choice is wxWidgets, which, from my point of view, only has one big problem: the API"

That's a biggie. :) In fact, I'd go so far to say that if the API in unpalatable, then you should keep looking. Otherwise you'll end up just procrastinating every time you've got to deal with GUI code.

Thanks to posts in this thread (thanks Baltar!) I'm taking a much closer look at the most recent release of Tk (8.5). Given recent developments, it doesn't seem to be as "vestigial" as I'd thought. And the fact that it's implemented in Tcl instead of C may actually be a hidden benefit. And really, app developers never even need to be aware of the Tcl'ing going on under the covers. :)
Niche dating site ideas?
So after being mentioned on here a while ago, I've been trying to think of some good ideas and niches for dating sites that have thriving (quality over quantity) online communities and presences as well as a decent amount of overlap between men and women.

Even better, anything confined to specific locales and cities?
>Windows Media Player, which for some reason has a reputation of bloatedness

The reason is that when it came out it was competing with WinAmp 1.x which was the antithesis of sluggish.
Google Testing Blog: Interfacing with hard-to-test third-party code
I think doing it yourself is an option.

You can integrate with something like authorize.net which I see mentioned a lot.

But they, in turn, integrate with what are the I guess actual processors:

http://www.authorize.net/solutions/resellersolutions/reselle...

(note that I have no direct experience here yet)
Project Darkstar
hmmm...I think the problem with the big niches is they tend to be either heavily female or heavily male.

My friend I came up with the idea of a dating site based on what your fashion sense is - t-shirts/casual personalities being more compatible.
LOL, I have to know, did TC actually have it like that when they first published? My comments are in [ ], this is the text FTA

"If you try to visit the URL for wine review website Corkd [<-- this was a link], you’ll automatically get rerouted to porn site Adult Friend Finder (obviously NSFW) [<--- and this, later on, was their warning]"

I can just imagine people clicking it, curious to what the hack is, and then learning that they shouldn't have ;)
R.I.P. Dr. Dobb's
The video response by Gary Vaynerchuk was amusing.
I'm confused now, at the link above Chase paymenttech is listed as a processor connection. But they are listed as an authorize.net reseller at this link?

http://www.authorize.net/reseller_dir.asp?page_id=148721&...

I guess I have a lot to understand yet, sorry.
Can anyone without shell/cli knowledge really be called an experienced user?
well atleast it did help (even without meaning to) galvanise other companies to build el-cheapo laptops and netbooks right?
This is a fun contrarian rant, but really I think the author is confused about what Yates, and Mendes, by extension, are critiquing. The suburbs, as such, aren't under indictment here, but rather the culture of conformity that was endemic in the suburbs in this time period in particular.

To say that this suffocating culture of conformity as merely a mirage invented by the artistic and intellectual elite out of jealousy is absurd. Women in the suburbs were actually ostracized and turned to alcoholism to escape their mundane lives, people actually bought bigger and better lawnmowers and TVs to "keep up with the Joneses", etc.

It's not that the suburbs are the "physical correlative to spiritual and mental death", but merely that the suburbs were the actual place where cultural and individual diversity were discouraged and the spiritual and mental death actually occurred.
Would you buy a notebook with a battery you wouldn't replace?
I actually work for a startup who's flagship application is written on top of xulrunner. I'd say some of the complaints here are valid, it is at times slow. However, we do have the advantage of the future integration of tracemonkey!

Also remember that xulrunner apps become instantly cross-platform because of their nature - think of all these other apps that you're comparing to and ensure you take that into consideration. Is Windows MP cross-platform with all the same features?
Point #2 is definitely true. Even if a developer has no ideas themselves, there's no shortage of business people like you who are giving their ideas away for free in the hopes of getting a programmer to work on them.

Perhaps you should be more clear about what you are bringing to the table yourself. E.g. marketing skills, access to an existing user base. $1000 is not enough unless you are aiming for an unskilled programmer.
This project has been a Charlie Foxtrot from the first.

Dirt poor kids don't need laptops - they need clean water, vitamins, and malaria vaccines.

The project was a scam by ivory tower intellectuals deeply out of touch with the real world, and more interested in reinventing the wheel than in accomplishing good.

The sooner this project entirely dies, the better.
I learned SQL at University, but that was 5 years ago so I'm a bit rusty. There's 1 table with a primary key (a string ID), which is used for rows with duplicate ID's, so in theory MySQL should be quick with it.

Thanks for the info, I'll have to dig further, but at least now I know it should be fast even in MySQL.