skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My eyes are still readjusting but thanks for the prettiness indeed.
I know, it's even been posted, nearly a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912

Apologies to showing it to you twice. However, I think the benefit of showing it to those who haven't seen it outweighs the cost of seeing it twice (feel free to down-vote this to negate the karma).
Merge Pylons. ;)
http://news.ycombinator.com/submit
I would rather read more books online than reading paper ones.

Instead of paying $30 for printed book, I'd pay $5 for online book with no ads.

Paper books are so one-way communication. Online books are interactive with 2-way communication abilities.

Picture is worth of 1000 words. So paper books now add images. Now video is worth of 100,000 words. What's wrong in adding Videos in the book?

And most importantly, I cannot search something in paper books. That's the single most reason all paper books should be converted into online books. That advantage surpasses all these negligent disadvantages by huge margin.

My $0.02s of course!
Happy Festivus HN: Stella, a Feats of Strength
Okay, so I launched something quietly today. Stella. I was planning on keeping it low-key but with the "Happy Holidays" and "Hacker News goes Christmas" posts (and colors!), I thought I could balance it out a bit with some Festivus activity. I'm not particularly qualified to promote Festivus but I'm doing my best.

In any case, Stella is a performance testing tool, written in Ruby that also supports the Java VM (through JRuby). This is a preview release (0.5.3) but it's already useful for running and comparing Apache Bench, Siege, and Httperf tests. Here's an example from the current release:

stella -a opera-10 -w 0.5 -r 25,300 -m 'MaxClients=768' -x 5 ab -c 100 -n 10000 http://stellaaahhhh.com/search?term=trooper

-a: Use an Opera 10 User-Agent.
-w: Run a warm up with half the users specified for the test.
-r: Ramp up the number of users from 100 to 300, in intervals of 25.
-m: Remind yourself what this test is about.
-x: Repeat each test run 5 times, average the results with standard deviation.

More info in the release notes:
https://rubyforge.org/frs/shownotes.php?release_id=29826

P.S. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmq-JDonTpc
Humans like to believe we can explain everything, so when we cannot predict the success of startups, we look at already successful startups, analyze their history, and create a story for why they became successful while others did not.
In reality this narrative we create is not a product of facts, but a story we use to make the world seem more understandable than it really is. This concept is discussed in The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.

I agree with the premise of your first two paragraphs, that often people will try to explain situations without being a participant of those events while decisions were being made. However, you have not shown that this premise applies to this article, which is a "logical hole" in your own statement. In fact, the stories mentioned by the blogger happen to be well known to be accurate, straight from the mouths of the founders of those companies.

I guess my point is, if you want to start a company you should do it because you have faith in your ability to provide value and execute on entrepreneurial opportunities, not because a few companies that started with bad ideas managed to succeed.

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the article. The author says a friend wants to start a business but is waiting for a perfect idea (and logically believes the audience of the blog may as well.) So he suggests that he go for it anyway, and adjust his idea as he goes. He then gives examples of companies that kept changing their ideas as they went along.
Man, I love the whole evolution of the Ebook movement. Think of what it will be like to have access to any quantity of information at any time, in a format which allows you to process the information without the fatigue associated with standard monitors.

Presumably, Ebook readers will assume capabilities reminisce of today's laptops - i.e. the ability to download most books and store them indefinitely. This means we might be able to store entire libraries on these paperback-sized devices. Not that the progression of this technology isn't fairly obvious, but it's still nice to fathom what will be possible in the future, as far as distribution of information is concerned.

Who knows, maybe no more college textbooks? One can only hope.
I have not been following it very closely, but I wonder how much of the reason there was a "private" branch was to give the perception of a stable, non-changing code-base, like nearly every other phone platform has at release, to get more people on board, but without locking up development in the meantime so that further progress couldn't happen. I can completely see a reason for doing this that is social/political considering the history behind handset development and release.
In the beginning, there were switches and lights....

And, "Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems." is false. IBM had been selling operating systems for years, thanks to one of the consent decree. (This let Amdahl and the first clone makers concentrate on building hardware and ignore software.) Moreover, Gates almost certainly knew that IBM sold operating systems.

I doubt that IBM was the first to sell operating systems, and if it was, I seriously doubt that Microsoft was the second.
Agreed. I think the point of learning multiple paradigms is so that you can recognize when idiomatic programming in your preferred (or employer-mandated) language is not the best way to get the job done--recognizing when it's time to write functional-style code in Python, OO-style code in Haskell, or whatever. But most of the time, you follow the grain of the language.
I thought this was going to be a post about the awesome Atary 2600 emulator. http://stella.sourceforge.net/
Or Time Ships ( http://www.amazon.com/Time-Ships-Stephen-Baxter/dp/006105648... ), a continuation of H.G. Wells The Time Machine.
Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books
Great selection of CS and CS related books.
To disambiguate: It was a separate project, with similar goals and similar, though meaningfully improved, architecture.
I have some qualms with the fact that Merb seems to be taking a back-seat in titles like "Merb is being merged into Rails".

But that's the correct phrasing no matter what the underlying technical reality is. Rails is the established brand! People know what Rails is! Nobody but blog-reading Ruby programmers has any idea what Merb is!

Even if the plan was to throw all existing Rails code in the trash and have the Rails core team switch to Merb, they would still call the result "Rails". Throwing away the Rails brand would be insane, and diluting it by calling it "Rails/Merb" or "Mails" or something would likewise be insane.
Rails merger announcement, an inside opinion
this is huge. and it turns out that yesterday i was considering learning merb instead of rails. but for the moment i will learn rails. what is the best one to learn at the moment in order to be ready for rails 3?
Google bonus is smartphone not cash
What's Boxee's legal deal? They allow you to play Hulu's content without using the Hulu player, which seems to violate the TOS.

"With respect to Hulu's video player, you must not modify, enhance, or otherwise alter in any way any portion of the video player or its underlying technology. This restriction includes disabling or otherwise modifying the video service in a manner that enables users to view the Content without using the Hulu video player."
Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray are awesome. Of interest to HC, Gabler went the indie route, while Gray stayed inside EA but maneuvered politically to control his own indie-sized team. I help organize the Independent Games Summit every year at the Game Developer's Conference; last year we had them do a "A Tale of Two Kyles" talk. The conference wasn't recording video, sadly, but there are some writeups available. One is here: http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2008/article.asp?id...

2D Boy is speaking at this year's IGS with a numbers-focused talk, sharing the success of World of Goo from a business standpoint.
The key problem in this sort of site is being evidently and memorably distinct from the numerous other similar options, from email to facebook to flickr. I'd have to register with you to figure out how you're different/better, which isn't worth the effort because I'm not convinced there's some obvious problem with the way I share photos & links right now that you guys have solved, just because you "applied the family perspective" or whatever.

You have to attach to an emotional need people have regarding their families. Here's one I think many of the folks on HN share: guilt about not staying in touch with family members that live far away. One way you might tap into that need could be to offer a "time-release" delivery option, where I can seed my family account with a bunch of photots, and your service can send them out to my family at a rate of say 2 per week. I'd get credit for being in touch with my family on a regular basis, and each email can be a starting point for discussions and stories that bring us together around a particular memory. Plus, we're coming back to your site again and again over time, and I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks per month if you could send printed photos to my grandma who doesn't use email.
Scientists discover new forest with undiscovered species on Google Earth
As others have said, stop fighting the language and embrace it. For the Java haters, here's a Java one-liner that is not much longer (though I'll admit, uglier) than all the rest:

result = join(new ArrayList<String>(){{ addAll(list); while(remove("")); }},"\n");

And as a bonus - for the extra few characters you typed, this will fail at compile time instead of runtime when the list turns out to contain FooBars instead of strings.
Merbails consolidation may decrease the generality of some high-quality bundles of code. However, this may be better for the ruby ecosystem at large, especially as the New Relationship Energy with ruby is starting to level off.

Anyway, Merb isn't what Merb once was (mongrel+erb.)

This is a special case of Three Systems (from unix philosophy) where the second system was leaner and faster :)

It does seem that Sinatra has been gaining steam lately!
hey shimon, thanks for the feedback. in today's app world, you definitely have to be quick with designating the advantage/differences over other apps. we removed the whole registration issue, by being able to get started without an email, password / "another account". Any suggestions on how we could accomplish that would be more than awesome.

That's an interesting approach. The goal is to let people stay in touch, when doing so is pretty much a bitch. Doing printed photos is a rev stream we're looking into ie- via qoop or an equivalent.

Thanks!
Merb will continue to be maintained and improved:

"To be perfectly clear: we are not abandoning the Merb project. There are many production applications running on Merb that are relying on both timely bug fixes and a clear path to the future. If you’re using Merb today, continue using Merb. If you’re considering using Merb for a project because it works better for your needs, use Merb. You will not be left in the cold and we’re going to do everything to make sure that your applications don’t get stuck in the past."

What this really means is that Merb will do what they should as an open-source project: Integrating with another. But for Merb's changes to Rails to be effective, they will have to continually improve Merb in isolation. Merb's going nowhere.
the author of this comment and book recommendation is an accomplished professional physicist of no little reputation. Apparently he does not want to toot his own horn here on this site, so I'll do it for him.
Price of Lax Gun Laws
How many development feeds can you follow?
How much is too much in order not to go crazy?
Ask HN: What's up with the color at HN?
Is it just me or is everybody seeing darkish red color on the header and red-green links for the numbers? The colors at HN look a little weird to me today?
Sorry for the submission, I realized it has to do with Christmas. :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408253
Heavy losses at Calpers
reminds me of http://famster.com
I agree that competition is good. There is (was) concern that loud, shallow, infantile arguments of Merb versus Rails were damaging, to an extent. If nothing else, they were really, really annoying, and too frequent. This may be the "splintering" of which john_dahl was speaking.

There are other frameworks, although they get little "press", as they lack an Engine Yard or 37signals hype-machine. In fact, if you visit ramaze.net (one of the more mature frameworks) and scroll down, you can find a listing of all the frameworks of which the ramaze people are aware. Twenty-one, including Merb AND Rails, at last count. (It is likely that not all of them are wholly distinguishable from one another. I can't say, as I haven't tried them.)
It looks great.
There are plenty of people in the Ruby community who avoid Rails (whether their reasons are valid or not). I think you'll find plenty of Rubyists who wish to create things outside of Rails. Whether that means they will be throwing weight behind another framework such as Ramaze, or creating a new one, I can't say. I do believe that there are enough anti-mainstream hackers in the mix now that you don't have to worry about that "scene" dying.

You're one of them, to an extent, and there's nothing wrong with that. Have at it.
Interesting. It also happens with people newly infatuated with OO, esp design patterns.

I think this is a natural phase of learning - when you first grasp a new concept, you use it everywhere; later, you use it where appropriate. Maybe the first phase is exploratory practice, to grasp its limitations. I'm sure there is a pithy expression for these two phases.

Anyone know it?

The first phase is like "To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". It's also similar to Fred Brooks' "Second System Effect" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_Seco... , where you try to learn from all the mistakes you made in the First System.

Children learning language will apparently learn and use plurals correctly - until they discover the abstraction that you can add "s" to make a plural. They then apply it everywhere, including the irregular plurals: mans, foots, tooths, mouses etc. (that last one may be legit these days, mouse having acquired a technical referent). Or even like that developmental stage of babies, where they try chewing everything they find.
Put simply, simple sugars can screw with mood. Better to avoid them in general. This doesn't mean you shouldn't eat that brownie. It means you shouldn't eat them often or eat a lot of them.
Low barriers to entry are important, but they're not a reason to use a site. When a site has a great and obvious value, people will jump through all sorts of hideous crap to use it; and conversely, when I can't figure out why I should care, whatever's behind my back button is going to seem more interesting.

It's admirable to pursue great usability and I like your registration scheme, but I still need to smell the bacon.
I'm not sure if advertising is stable or not, but there's been a lot of talk about how it's going to collapse (and how Google is going to be worth $2/share, doom-and-gloom). I think that's the reason for this guy's question.
Who cares? Seriously... Adult Friend Finder? Don't even give me some crap excuse about how it's relevant because they're a startup. These guys have been in business, ripping people off since '96. Someone submitted an RFC for an avian IP network earlier today and now this. It's way too early to be posting April fools stuff.

vaksel, you really need to stop submitting everything that pops up in the TechCrunch RSS feed. I'm starting to wonder if you're some kind of sock puppet for them. It's already bad enough that we have to see any of their articles here at all. Their so-called reporting is so bad I don't even know where to begin. At least have the decency to filter out the obvious garbage like this.
Both. They're both Ruby. The learning curve for one over the other changes very little ultimately.

In practice, however, Merb docs, tutorials, articles, howtos, et cetera, are lacking. That is reality. If you're starting from scratch w/ Ruby and her frameworks, you'll probably find Rails more newbie-friendly from a learning-materials standpoint.
28 nuker spyware
Ditto. I'm Diego, founder/CEO of Flaptor (and friend of llopatin). I lived and worked in the Bay Area for several years (the first .com cycle) and then started Flaptor in Buenos Aires. I'll be happy to share my experiences, my email is in my profile.
Their marketing is brilliant.
What makes me think one ought to be able to style your websites however one wants?
That's an anachronism man.
having something so crappy go for an IPO is news enough for me
People can choose to style their pages however they please.
this is good news, i think. not that AFF, is a great business, but simply adding to the IPO count will help others do the same.

i am still of the opinion that a majority of the funds in the hedge markets had cash conserved during the down turn. if this goes well, then it will show that there is money out there.

on another note, in down times, entertainment seems to do better and this might be the only time that an adult website could grab the attention of investors.
The 'make the toy' first is probably the most powerful tip.
Ask HN: Of all the things you've done, what are you most proud of?
HN is filled with lots of creative, ambitious people. So, of all the things you've done, what are you most proud of?

A painting you made? A company you founded? An adventure you had? Raising your kids?
I'll go first. I'm most proud of Adonomics, which I founded in 2007: http://adonomics.com/

I won't lie, it's mostly because it's the most successful thing I've built. I also learned a lot of hard lessons from it, so it was valuable if painful.

What about you?
I could really care less as long as everything works, except for one little thing, since nothing has classes or IDs, it makes it much more difficult for me to tweak my userstyle all the ways I want to. I know this isn't anyone else's problem, but it would sure be nice if there were classes and IDs that didn't have any CSS by default, but anyone could use as reference to style the site themselves.
Why not sign up for cryonics? It's not exactly what you wanted, but if and when it works and you're revived, you'll have plenty of time to catch up on what's been discovered.
True, especially for the many people who make one attempt, fail, and stop.

Though if you look at people who make several attempts, and who learn something from each, I think the probability of success fast approaches 1. I think that in practice, if you persevere and are reasonably capable, success is inevitable.
NYT sued over linking practice
Ultimate Fighting Robots
OK. When Honda started making the Civic and Toyota the Corolla, what American car where they competing against, or copying? (I'll give you a hint: it wasn't a car that was remotely competitive in the small, reliable inexpensive car segment, and probably not one that you'd recognize today as a direct competitor to the first Civic, Prelude, or Corolla. Go drive an '84 Omni and an '84 Rabbit and tell me which is the better car. Or a 70's Chevette and a 70's Civic or Prelude.)

I will grant you that the ur-Mustang was a stroke of genius, reasonbly innovative in the sense of creating visceral demand for a fun and cheap car. Right after the pony cars came the muscle cars, which may have represented the pinnacle of Detroit as measured by getting the country to actually lust after your products, to care about what engine and trim package was in the latest chromed sled to roll down Main Street. Even today, I'm proud to own a 65 hardtop and 66 convertible Mustang, both of which are 5+ years older than I am, and I feel happy to see the smiles of passersby of all ages when they see a piece of proud American history roll by. And that's exactly the problem, the pride is in the history, not the present.

The Mustang and Pontiac GTO debuted over FORTY FOUR YEARS AGO! That's a pretty long drought, and despite their appeal, the C-5 'vette, Fox Mustang, and Hummer (the H1, not that plasticky rebadged Tahoe they call an H3) haven't really hit the same chord, have they? Of those 3, I suspect the vette and H1 didn't make significant annual profits, and almost surely not what Porsche makes on the 911 alone every year, nevermind the significant profits they bank on the Cayenne. (And all 3 of those together, over their entire production run, certainly didn't make what Porsche made this year on VW options alone!)

By way of background, my 3 registered and insured cars are all American; I don't have a huge axe to grind here to justify my own purchases, but as I see it, Japan and Europe are eating Detroit's lunch, and based on my experience with my '96 Jeep, Satan will probably be wearing a winter coat before I buy another new American car. (I do all my own maintenance and help friends maintain their cars, so I see first-hand how my cars and how the Japanese and German competition are engineered.)

FTR, I agree with you that the UAW deal stinks for Detroit. I'm just ALSO unconvinced that if the government paid Detroit $2000 for every car they sold that Detroit would be remotely competitive. So while they have a cost basis problem, that's not their only problem, not by a long shot.
Analysis of Java Class
Analysis of Java Class
agree their ads annoy me heaps
I don't even know how to respond to that. What are you trying to say? That this should be some kind of inspiration to readers here? There's hope that one's startup can eventually go public if AFF can do it?

A twelve-year-old casual sex meetup site is successful enough that they're going to start selling stock to the public. Stop the presses! Sex sells!

I really don't see what this has to do with hackers, entrepreneurs or HN.

I also find it somewhat ironic that you-- only a month ago-- submitted a poll asking users if they felt HN should be invitation-only in order to improve the quality of submissions.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373789

"Seems like the site is growing by leaps and bounds...and slowly losing the quality we've all grown to rely on."

Sheesh...
Having anything go for an IPO is interesting news, at the moment.
Update: I probably should have made it more obvious for some people that the title of the post is not entirely serious, and mainly I'm just griping.
I support your idea, Mr. Lessig, but good luck with that.

The people working for the FCC have much more political pull and much more incentive to lobby (it's their jobs on the line) than any third party do-gooder. It will take a huge publicity campaign before the costs of doing nothing outweigh the benefit for a given Congress person.

You can always add a new bureaucracy, but it is hard to take away an old one. That's the incentive structure in a bureaucratic democracy.
Too cool for words...only drooling can suffice.
Seconded, its extremely aggravating, I remember clearly when I had the horror of working with an old version of .NET C# with a big project on a SHARED slow server, which took roughly 1-2mins to compile, can you imagine trying to learn and debug C# code under this environment? Right, not a good idea.
Service provides flash-embed of any file or other site in your site
Are there any tips on the technical side of prototyping a game in 7 days? I'm guessing most of these games are done in Flash, is there anything more to it than that?
A Church's social network - acquired for $4mil.
I'm on board with the brandy and eggnog, but the cognac is going too far.

Too far!