skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  how to build a tech community
We have just launched our site with a lot of features: video, photo, deal, buzzmark, and automatic news update similar to Techmeme. Our site is focused on tech community. The question is: how to bring in the tech users to share news and post comments?

Our site is here: http://www.buzzup.com
i'm going to go ahead and weigh in that the statistical analysis done AND the code written to "prove" it are incorrect.

you have a 33% chance of winning by always sticking and a 33% chance to win by always switching. it's really that simple.
I had 3-4 years runway when I started and it wasn't obviously long enough (I remember hearing the exact same comment you just posted when I asked for advice). I ended up starting up, failing, and taking another job (still have 2-3 years runway left) and don't regret it at all.

People with 6-figure salaries and 3-4 years runway tend to be calculated risk takers. They don't jump in unless it looks like there's a decent probably of success. That doesn't mean they won't take any risks, just that they want the odds to be in their favor.

All that said, I'd say go for it. You can always get another job, and 3-4 years means you won't be in dire financial straights when you're looking. Starting your own company often uncovers other opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be there if you just sat in a secure day job, too.
I remember people complaining similarly when Windows 95 came out. People were happy with Windows 3.1 and many didn't want to learn the new metaphors in 95 (which have stuck right up until XP). People not wanting to leave the 95->XP way of doing things are just as luddite as those who wanted to stick with 3.1.
Octo.py: quick and easy MapReduce for Python
CES: A Primer
First impressions of Windows Vista Beta, build 7000
Who's judging anyone? He asked if he should leave his job to do a startup, I said "probably not" based on the fact that he's hesitating even though he has a really long runway.
Another way to look at is the "Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon" model:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

Sounds like you're more or less in the B&J camp.
Ask HN: what do you think of my chat app?
http://270rule.appspot.com/ is anonymous live chat for any page, plus a feed of who is chatting where. no login, bbcode, and some embedding are supported. let me know what you think! thank you hn!!!!
Umm... you left your job, tried a startup that failed, and you still have 2-3 years of runway left. It's pretty obvious to me that you had a long enough runway.

I'm not saying this to be mean (plenty of startups fail), but your startup did fail. Your experience isn't exactly a knockout blow to the argument that anyone hesitating to jump in even though they have 3-4 years of runway might be too risk-averse to be successful with their own company.
Hilarity: when I loaded it, on the page was one of Chrysler's "thanks for your investment" ads.
sorry to interact with the service, use the bookmarklet on the main page while browsing any other page
Oh, didn't bother checking who that one was about.
How To: Simplify
Great story. Of course the expensive monitoring system did lead directly to the solution of the problem, so maybe the title should be "Networks are smart but blind at the edges."
Based on my own experience:

1 hour: rough version of the app

1-2 hours: design and css tweaking

60 seconds: testing in IE

1 hour: sobbing, taking to drink

2-6 hours: working around IE's quirks

So, yeah, that adds up to a minimum of 5 hours for just about anything.
Regarding possible exemptions to look and feel to computer programs in the U.S. Code, I'm not sure why the author cares to argue this point to minute detail when he's not a lawyer, nor being sued by 37signals; he also did not say he researched to see how real lawyers and judges interpreted related court cases in recent history, which would give more credibility of the applicability of copyright laws and exceptions to them than just his own personal analysis of the Copyright Office's frequently asked questions page.

I wonder what happens if you create your own interpretation of a mouse that clearly resembles the Disney character. Or, a realistic 3D model of Mickey Mouse. Since it's not your character, do you own the work? Is it an illegal work? Besides not allowing the author to display it, can Disney also get rights to the rendering as well as source of the model? Is work that violates copyright is automatically owned by the copyright holder? If the answer is no, then what happens to the work? If Disney can't use it, who can? Nobody? The author cannot because it clearly resembles a Disney character, and Disney cannot because they did not create it. The author must retain the copyright, then, but cannot display it or transfer it, except that he can probably sell it to Disney if both parties agree.
Picasso also outlived his talent.

http://www.amazon.com/Old-Masters-Young-Geniuses-Creativity/...
its not a silver bullet for sure. 'debunked' seems a bit excessive though.
FYI: Douglas Crockford is a contributor to Yahoo UI Theater. His lectures on js can be found there.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
Time for a Mac App Store?
Don’t overlook the real problems out there
Digital distribution will overtake physical media when we can carry the magic one device in our pockets (read: not bloody likely any time soon).

Also, Redbox is booming - and they have 10,000 "physical distribution centers" and don't even carry Blu-ray.
Everything said in the article and much, much more has been said before by Roger C. Schank in his 2004 book "Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own". See especially Chapter 20 titled "Toward a new conception of Education":
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Minds-Less-Well-Educated/dp/080...

One difference: Schank believes that, since the best online courses will be created by the best physicists, chemists, psychologists, etc., the need for local teachers will change. They will become mentors, guidance counselors and coaches whom students visit when they need more assistance than the online courses offer.
That's a great article. Thanks!

I am definitely in the B&J camp, and this article really got right exactly what that means.
What netbooks come with only 512 megs?

Dell Mini 9. However, Crucial has a 2GB upgrade module for it for $22 shipped.
> Also, a small plug for Sinatra, that app is perfect for it (or any other microframework).

Why even use a framework at all? There's no interaction. Serving a page generated from a cron job would be the best way to do it.
True, but you do need to register your copyright if you want to be able to take legal action in U.S. courts. Just stating the copyright does not provide you with protection in the court system's eyes.
I think it's interesting to see what people can do in a fixed amount of time.

Submitting such a project doesn't mean that's all someone is doing with their life. In fact, it necessarily doesn't mean that.
Hey dude, 2004 called, they want their news back.
nice work! Can you get it to load in avatars, too?
yeah, the design and CSS tweaking took a lot of the time. I hadn't done any Twitter / search.twitter API stuff in Rails before either so it took some time to find the best way of doing things. Plus, I was watching a couple of movies - that didn't help.
Live SkyDrive from Microsoft - 25 GB Free Space
Book details how Sony paid for Xbox 360 dev...acted like a doormat
Screen out the troll posts and spam posts. So far Stack Overflow (and HN, for that matter) seems to be doing a good job of that. That's where to devote your management and technical expertise, methinks. It's easy to find lousy online communities but rather hard to find good ones.
Beginners like to have fun, and it is a good and healthy thing that they do so.

It's not their fault that social news systems are broken [1] and tend to vote their fun beginner projects up to the front page where they waste your precious time.

If you're going to rant about this problem, try to rant at the systems that are at fault: Digg, Reddit, and perhaps even Hacker News. Don't pick on the people who are doing silly practice projects. Everyone needs to do silly practice projects some of the time. We are all beginners at least once. In software, we are beginners much of the time.

---

[1] In this writer's opinion, not in mine. I don't think these particular headlines on HN are a big problem. I even appreciate the utility of the "built in x hours" headline format: It's truth in advertising. I know what I'm going to see on the other end of such a link, and I can avoid it if I like.
It's pretty cool. I'm using it on this page right now.

Your home site needs a little work. The links sometimes collide with the text.

It also would be good to add some kind of description on the home page. Even just putting "Anonymous Chat for Any Page" right below the big "270rule" would be a step up.

Also, it would be nice if it would highlight what I've posted (even if it's only temporary, going away after a refresh) so that I can quickly see which messages are "new" (as in came later than the last thing I've said).

Also, I did eventually find the close link on my own, but it's not at all obvious. You can put "270 rule" somewhere else, but you really want to tell people that that link closes it.

And if you can find a way not to allow people to open it several times on the same page (Try clicking the bookmarklet several times and see what happens.) that would be cool.
Internet Explorer's share of the browser market fell below 70% in November
So you wrote a blog post titled "You made your site in 5 hours - nobody cares".

Nobody should care.

I was doing my usual reading this morning and I started to recognize a pattern. Not just this morning, but a pattern that has been occurring over the last year or more.

It goes like this:

* Blogger sees a link to some app on [Reddit,Digg,Hacker News]
* Blogger thinks the app is stupid and insignificant
* Blogger takes the time to write a rant about it

I understand why this happens. I have done it myself. Bloggers do this because there are posts out there that have been made in just minutes or hours that turned out to generate a huge number of page views. The allure is tremendous.

Here is the part that gets me: There are so many bigger problems out there to blog about.
Trends in IT for 2009
Depends on the form of DRM, really. DVD's DRM doesn't bother most people, because it doesn't really pose an obstacle to what they want to do with it. But Windows Media DRM won't work nicely with set-top boxes, with Macs, perhaps even with Microsoft's own products (remember Zune not working with PlaysForSure?). And there have been well-known cases of Windows Media DRM servers going dark. The DRM the movie cartels insist on for digital downloads is just too intrusive.
Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan
Imagine a similar but slightly different scenario: We now have two contestants: Mr A and Mr B. Mr A is the contestant in the original story. He gets to pick a door. The host then opens a door with a goat (and removes it from the stage). Then Mr A gets to choose whether to keep his door or open the third.

Now the second contestant, Mr B, joins the show. He has not seen anything prior and has no knowledge of Mr A or the other door previously removed from stage. All he sees is two doors. He has the option of opening one of the two.

Mr A has 2/3 chance of switching door and coming out with a car. Whereas Mr B has 1/2 chance (from his perspective) of picking either door and coming out with a car.

I think the main problem why so many people have a hard time grasping the solution is that they're looking at the probability as Mr B and ignoring the extra information they do have as Mr A.
> In January of 2007, IE held nearly 80 percent market share; now it holds 68.15.

That is a 14.8 percent decline, not 'nearly 12 percent' [alternatively: a 12 percentage point decline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point]

Also interesting:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
(the site has a more technically interested audience, but the trend is pretty evident nevertheless)
Done: http://www.yaplet.com/
Lord Kelvin and Being Usefully Wrong
Twitter moves fast enough that you probably want to re-fetch every time and display. But you're right, this is a very simple problem, just felt like rails was taking a sledge hammer to it.

Not to say it isn't a cool idea, it is.
It is possible that it meant three kilocalories instead of calories?
"Nobody has ever made a compelling argument for how having unionized teachers helps students. Nor has anyone ever made a compelling argument for how having tenured teachers helps student performance. Our country's best performing schools (all of them private) have non-unionized teaching staffs. We can't afford to experiment with unionized teachers anymore. The government created the right for public employees to unionize and it can remove that right very quickly if it has the political will.

"How good a job would you do at your company if customers were required by law to buy your product? That's the situation faced by public school management today. It would be illegal for a 14-year-old not to attend the local school, unless his or her family can scratch up a huge tuition payment for a private school. We need to set a deadline by which every American family has the choice to send children to a school other than the local one. There wouldn't be a problem with 'failing schools' anymore because parents would have withdrawn nearly all of their kids from such a school and the building would end up being taken over by a new school with new management."

Hear. Hear.
nice way she handles a lot of things there. i like the way usernames on the chat are handled. interesting use of frames too
yes, we have dedicated one editor to delete spams right away. We try to keep the site clean like HN. I think that is the most important thing to attract tech users.
Gameplay: google gadget for true gamers.
Not quite open-air. Goes through about 120ml of tap water an hour, which it sprays onto the air, and uses a rear projector onto that.

The video doesn't look too impresive. It just shoots up water and projects a 2D image onto it.

Maybe has potential. But I'm not all that excited about spraying water into the air.
I guess I'm going to be the cynic here and ask, how is this an "app"? Unless I'm missing something here, where is the utility that constitutes the label of 'application'?

Like "cloud", I think a lot of people are misusing the word "app". In my opinion, an app suggests a meaningful purpose... otherwise it's very much akin to "art" in relation to design. Sure, art is beautiful and often conceptual... but design is form AND function.

A widget - maybe - but calling it an app seems a little overkill.
What's your standard for posts? That they should only discuss things that have been invented in the last few months? By that criterion much of the best material posted to HN would disappear.
I'd say I'm more of an irregular contributor...but I was invited to write for them a while back after I wrote my book.
Lost me when he confused the normal distribution with the plain English meaning of normal.
I really like this story.

It shows that simplicity rules and that simplicity often comes out of simple a situation not considered by the big planners.
So what you're saying is that while I'm blogging about education and healthcare software problems, I haven't chosen big enough problems?
Does anybody make a vibration sensor that could be used to correlate cabinet vibration with latency?
Actually I wasn't blaming the social news systems at all. In fact I only mentioned them as examples of where I see these links most often.

I still contend a beginner practice project can be built around some of these bigger problems. Why not?
Freescale gives away this source for free. It's driver source for some of their hardware.
Sometimes innovation lies in what you did not build, instead of what you did.
He has a very calm & soothing tone of voice which, unfortunately, sets off all sorts of alarms in my head.
Affordable Web Design - Web Design Outsourcing, Low Cost Web Design, Ecommerce Design
I think so, but that still wouldn't explain things.
9. Finally, always remember that an elaborate, far-reaching plan, which relies on people reacting exactly how you plan for them to react, is always better than a simple plan. Nothing illustrates your genius quite like a meticulous, detailed, super-plan which will go horribly awry if people don’t react exactly the way you think they will. Just know who to blame when things don’t go the way you expect them to.

Should have left that one off. Otherwise nice work.
Really need to get in on coding in Rails, not tried it as of yet. How does working with Twitter API differ much from other languages in Rails though? Still based all around parsing the atom feed from Twitter surely.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=oops
For renovation, it's not just stainless steel appliances, it's little things over time. In 1 or 2 years it's not really noticeable but over 5-10 years it starts to take a toll. Even the building I used to live in used a large tarp on the roof rather than fixing some leaks that would drip through the ceiling of my apartment and cause bubbles in the drywall when we had heavy rain.

In the mission, I would prefer if a subsidy was just given to the poor via tax dollars. Say it's a $200 per household subsidy. Maybe it makes sense for that family to pay it to the landlord, but maybe it makes sense to find a cheaper apartment and spend it on a TV. If it turns out that the TV was the chosen decision, that helps drive down the price of rent b/c maybe the landlord will have a slightly harder time raising rent prices. If, on the other hand, the tenant chooses to allocate the money to housing, it will help drive up housing prices. The upside of driving up housing prices is that it now becomes more worthwhile for someone to convert their house into apartments, which in turn increases supply and would tend to help keep prices affordable.
i wouldn't know anything about this, considering i'm always right...
I vacation once a year on the shore of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The closest larger light source is Thunder Bay, several dozens of miles across the lake. The depth and richness of the sky (vague allusion to Vinge, yes) are wonderful. The stars, the galaxies (with the help of a friendly ranger and his telescope). Watching satellites cast their slow arcs overhead.

I think such sights, like the science fiction alluded to, remind us of our potential. Current circumstances get some needed contextualization.

And the peace of the moment reminds me of where we come from. Not from a realm of endless distraction, but from a realm of endless engagement.
i guess the reason amazon doesn't have many distribution centers is because they are expensive

she outsourced the problem by having amazon marketplace

now every kindle is distribution center (cheap)

looking at this trend, she might be better off creating a kindle for movies

her strength is not in rental (why safari bookshelf is unchallenged ?)

if she really want to be in movie rental, maybe safari dvd-rack model (download high-res per dvd chapter or streaming lower res for full, 3 titles/rack/mo) is a long shot

the success of youtube indicates that not everyone cares about dvd-quality clips, they simply want to watch it now
Amazon does video on demand to Macs, PCs, XBOX, Tivo, etc. Who cares if DRM servers go dark, this is a streaming service. You watch it and then Microsoft could be fire bombed and it doesn't affect you.

I agree DRM is shitty for purchased movies, but this is basically a pay-per-view service. For most movies that's all people want. Why wait for the mail man or go to a store/kiosk when you can watch instantly from your couch?
We're often victims of design piracy. Roughly once a week someone emails us with an anonymous tip that someone has ripped off our "UI look and feel" and is using it for their own site or their own app. It's amazing what people and businesses think they can get away with. -Jason

I have all due respect for Jason Fried, and enjoy many of his posts on SvN, twitter, and other modes of communication, but only a royal dickhead could make a statement like that.

It's amazing what kind of brain-dead statements copyright fear-mongers can get away with.

I warmly urge all who are considering copying the 37S look-and-feel to not hesitate to use it identically, if it is appropriate to your application.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/11/hadoop_dziuba/

It's got all the makings of a blogosphere hit: cluster computing, large datasets, parallelism, algorithms published by Google, and open source. Every four days or so, a nerd will discover Hadoop, write a “Basic MapReduce Tutorial with Hadoop” tutorial on his blog with some trivial examples, and feel satisfied with himself for educating the world about a yet-undiscovered gem

You even did word count... same as everyone else. In painful self-referentiality, you can even Google for "map reduce word count" and get 264000 hits.
I sense a pattern.
Yeah except likely no one ever thought to go and ask the guy on the lines opinion on how to fix the problem in the first place.
Dunno. I plan to use a use a network engineer with a mobile phone and have him walk around the datacentre putting his hands on things while I kick off batch jobs. Tho' now that you mention it, a metal ruler held in his teeth would probably be better.
Hyperlinking the Real World
Another case that is applicable is Williams Elec., Inc. v. Bally Mfg. (No. 82 C 2167)

In this case, the copyrighted design of a pinball machine playfield was copied almost exactly. The court did not rule there was infringement due to the fact that all elements that were claiming copyright protection were key to the utility of the product, and therefore could not be copyrighted.

In this situation, the look and feel can be claimed to be inextricably linked to the function and utility of the site by the same argument.
Looks like you're having issues w/ the quotas already.

I just got a 403 Over Quota. Refresh fixed, but still.
Six Reasons Your Web Startup Will Fail (But Don’t Let Them Stop You).
Almost certainly made up (or hugely exaggerated). However, if it were true a better title would be: Hierarchies are Dumb at the Top.
Awesome! I always watch Feynman videos when I need inspiration :-)
lol you say it like a joke, but i just did that exact cycle last week when I found out about IE's improper HTTP Headers (even in IE 7!!!)
Wondering what possible expertise Greenspun brings to this arena. Worse, this post of his is just a long list of assertions without any references, supporting material or backup. I guess we're just supposed to accept on faith that he knows what he's talking about.

Which is kind of how we got into this cluster F in the first place, isn't it?

Thinking that your experience in specialty X translates to great insights into specialty Y is a known FAIL. Greenspun needs to operate with the minimum debate rules that he'd demand from someone making equally blatant assertions about electrical engineering or web based computing.
I've tried it in a VM. I thought the taskbar behavior resembled the MacOS dock. No surprise, it feels slower than my XP VM.
I would love to see Greenspun and Paul Graham battle in rhymes to settle once and for all who is the one true PG.
Interesting article. If this was originally written in 1999 then someone must have tried to create a fractal generator on historical market data for the Dow or Nasdaq. I wonder if it helped anyone prepare for the current stock market troubles.
Why password security will never work