skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are only a couple secrets to startup success...

Save someone Time

Save someone Headache

Save someone Money

Make someone Money

Make someone cool(er) by association

Make someone smart(er) by association
Every article expounding how you can't get people to pay for news content online should be required by law to explain how the Wall Street Journal's website has nearly 1 million paying members.
The State of MySQL: The Elephant in the Room
The critiques of the planned economy, I'll have to look that up. Sounds interesting.

I see your point. I suggest we reduce risk by investing in many small projects run by small numbers of individuals, but very focused.

To the first paragraph, I have this sense, no numbers really, but a sense that collaboration is becoming more required over time. Look at nobel prize winners and how often prizes are shared over time. I don't know what that function is over the long term, but we appear to be in an upward trend over recent history.

Collaboration at this level is difficult on a global scale and across national and linguistic barriers.

Which ideas are worth rescuing from the global valley of death? Big ideas that will or will not affect billions of people for decades to come. Some who haven't even been born yet.
It's "missing" because it's not an every day operation, and it's easy to do using other built-in functions.

Languages in general should leave out things that are specialized use cases but easy to implement using simpler pieces. If you fill a language's standard library up with "useful" stuff like this, you eventually end up with a morass like PHP.
How to Save Newspapers Using Micropayments
Claiming to work hard is different than actually working hard but giving someone a chance never hurts. Just make sure they are what they say they are.
Ask HN: is it a good idea in Python? If yes, how to make it not suck?
Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber Shot
Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber Shot is the same thing for you to keep you a head and attracts other with your personality. The handset gives charming look with your personality and its existing features which attract you and all its lovers.
Also, Hollender's Tenth Rule (tongue-in-cheek): Any sufficiently user-friendly functional programming library contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of SQL.
This is very close to what the mutualists say: http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/11/organization-theory-la... I must admit I am convinced on many aspects of their critique of the current system - but still I don't buy their solutions.
Valentine's Day Charities That Could Use Some Love
is what a good idea in python?
Are those just the same people that subscribe to the WSJ in print? Or is it a different group?
Since we're talking about a subjective judgment, sure.

We're in the midst of a major revolution in music distribution. While revenues are down, people are listening to more music than ever before, and getting more choice in what they can listen to. Thanks to a new generation raised on guitar hero and rock band, I predict that things are going to get even crazier very soon.

If you define a rut as "not undergoing mainstream stylistic revolution" then sure, we're in a rut.
You are incorrect.
1. There is no maximum term. I've heard of people getting 25 year terms, although they have a really high interest rate. The reason they did this is that they were on retirement income and needed to predict exactly how much they could afford month to month.

See: http://www.ingdirect.ca/en/mortgages/index.html
For just one quick example of mortgages that go up to 10 years fixed.

The main difference with Canadian mortgages is that they force you to pony up some capital AND there is none of this variable rate nonsense. Also, no securitization of mortgages.

http://www.ingdirect.ca/en/mortgages/index.html
For Objection 1, Smalltalk also works since it's dynamically typed. There may be a bit more work to do to get it to do stuff in a CLOS-like way though.

For Objection 2, well as you said, the distinction should be blurry. I really don't understand what his objection to Time being an object is. What Erlang is doing with deftype is basically creating a new "constructor" for an object that includes bounds-checking.

The problem in Objection 3 is that he's dealing with file-based languages (and so are you). If you use any Smalltalk, you'll find a nifty browser that organizes things by package name, and there are even categories for methods.

I wish people would stop posting ill-informed rants on Hacker News.
I'm not aware of a browser that ignores URI parameters.

Moving to a CDN does not force you to put versioning in the path or filename. The URI parameter merely tricks the browser into thinking there is a new file. The parameter itself is otherwise ignored.
Well, the Government is an order of magnitude worse than the most inefficient huge companies.

The Social Security System is one of the tightest ships in the world. You can't even get index funds with lower management fees in the private sector, because profit wants to be made and should be made.
> catch up on tweets while sitting on the toilet.

That is my email strategy, sometimes coding too.
Micropayments for news will never happen. The thing with most news is that WE DON'T NEED TO KNOW IT. Think hard about this - has it made a difference that you know about some lady who got kidnapped? What has changed that you can read about the details of the Iraqi election?

You want to know this stuff only because you are aware of it - and you are aware of it only because you started reading the paper in the first place. If you never read a paper (because for example, you needed to pay to read it), then you'll not be interested in this news, and you won't see any need to pay for it.

People will pay for information, but they will not pay for news. People want to be aware of what is going on in general, and if this is available for free, they will use those sites.

The business of journalism is shrinking, and it will have to evolve fast. News will become more local, several cheap sources will be used to build a picture of a situation, and people will pay for more niche and more technical magazines (e.g Finance News).

These papers have a strong brand now, but those brands are decaying. They should work on making sure their brands are strongly available everywhere, so that when the reorganisation happens, they can still remain a recognizable name.
We're on the slide down now! Weeeee..... How far I don't know... wwoooooo.....
That's "arbitrary", and not random at all. Some basic testing shows that the same dictionary keys will always lead to the same popitem order.
thought i had a valid point, $600 wouldnt cover my costs
I would guess there's some overlap, but when I was a WSJ Online subscriber I didn't get the print copy. Just a waste of resources in my mind, something else to throw away.
Classic article by Shirky - I still see data-centric programmers making this fundamental underlying mistake all the time.
Journal readers have more disposable income than typical newspaper readers, and the WSJ is a valuable brand, so its subscribers are willing to pay extra (where "extra" means "more than zero") for the quality. There are other niche markets where this works: e.g., LWN.net is supported mostly by subscriptions.

But the history of mass media publications charging for content, as Kinsley describes, is a history of one failure after another.
>> Location-based is the future of business. I wonder if this guy sees it and is trying to drive away the competition, or if he took his one flawed pass at a business model and gave up. Either way, he's full of shit.

Are you doing this successfully? If not, I'll take the word of someone who's been there over the word of someone predicting the future.
Just keep track of a 'url stack' in the POST message (assuming the post body is structured with something like JSON or XML). If a service detects a cycle it can drop the message or give back a 50x error or something.
Erm, Friday is the 13th February
From the article:

#
#Problem: all these lambdas suck. Any better ways to do it?
#

#
#TODOS/QUESTIONS:
#
#1. is it a good idea?
#
#2. can it be made to not suck (do something with all those lambdas)?
Custom views and Oracle: The tyranny of capitalization
I'm a minimalist too, but this time I don't agree. You can't have this feature at all if it is not implemented in the core, not in O(1), and is general enough, hash.random_key() will not really bloat the language and it is very clear what it does. If there is 'partition' in Ruby's array I think random_key is not so strange to see inside, especially given that you can't implement it in Ruby itself.
And on top of that, when he talks, it makes sense! I mean, it feels like what he is saying is true even though I don't personally have an evidence to support it. The numbers could be anecdotal, who knows. In 6 Billion people, there are probably going to be one or two or 10 people who make every "wrong" decision and still become billionaires.

He may be one of them.
Where is Pearl Jam when you need them? ;-)
I'm interested in functional programming, but I think there are some features of OO that are a bit hard to reproduce in non-OO functional or to do anything similar.

So you have a type. And you have functions that do something with instances of that type.

Are there many functions that do something with it, such as set a certain boolean field in the type to true or false? If yes, you are in a world of hurt when you realize that every time something sets it to false you need to write it into a log, as you will have to change all functions.

If you have just one function that sets that field - haven't you just reinvented a setter method?

There are clumsy ways to do OO. But OO itself shouldn't just be judged from the clumsy ways. Python got it almost perfectly. You have a function, you have your local variables within the function, any time later on you can define functions within a function and then you have something very similar to a class, with the main function being the constructor of it. Or you can do the other way around, you define a class and later on if you need it you add a __call__() method and for all practical matters and purposes you have a function. WIN.
I'd rather be bankrupt of money and have the idea than be bankrupt of ideas and have the money.

Thank you Mark. But no.
That's a very short-sighted view you have there. I really hope you are not working in this space, because if you are, you are blinding yourself to the reality of the situation. Numbers are down everywhere.

The question is - how are those numbers broken down? Are these people who stumbled across the site and decided to subscribe because the content convinced them? Or because of the already existing brand?

Think of a paper just launching with no name, but that wants to go the pay route. How long do you think this paper will survive before running out of money?

The wsj is just moving subscribers from it's paper to the online, this is completely different from launching a successful pay website.
Is is just me or does this "flies on a urinal" story make the rounds every 6 months or so?

Either that or I have way too much piss related content in my web surfing.
His argument is basically that even if people do, it isn't enough money. The WSJ costs 79 bucks a year (and I somehow suspect many people aren't paying that full price) 79 million a year isn't nearly enough to save the NYT.

I guess the value of our eyes looking at ads printed on paper for a year is much higher than $79?
Part of this guy's argument is bogus. It is basically "Someone big is going to do this so why bother." That could be said of 99.99% of all businesses. "IBM is so big, why bother with Microsoft?"

Part of the problem with any business with a localization aspect is that it takes more people to get buyin. Yelp in the bay area? Fabulous. Yelp in Louisiana? Not so great. Same goes for meetup.com, where I can find people in my area, as compared to plazes, where there was maybe 1 other person near me.

Yes, people probably won't pay for services who tell them where their current friends are, but there's still value. I personally would be interested in knowing where my "facebook friends" are - for me that's people who I am acquainted with but necessarily socialize with unless it's convenient, like if I'm shopping and want to go see a movie in 10 minutes. Random people who might be interesting are also a way to pass the time if I'm bored waiting for a train.
He's been there with a model that failed. He talks in great length about why that model sucks, and then draws the conclusion that the whole space is doomed. Why is that more convincing?
I bet this scan the table from the first to the last bucket.
Google Reader. I try to keep my feeds clean, skimming over headlines and marking content I do not want to read as read. Then, I actually read the rest of the posts.
Skype investor Morten Lund's talk at BIC 2008. "Business is the best sport"
I think this article makes a really good point and has got me thinking. We all want to build cool things and innovation is key. Although, in these times I think coming up with solutions to make people and/or businesses more efficient might be even more innovative.
German Jetpack Runs for Hours on Water
whoops.. it's my asus eee's way too small keyboard... fixed
The decline of the newspaper business is more a classic case of living in your own bubble long enough to lose the ability to adapt to changing realities than anything else.

In this case the internet is the catalyst for change; just like in the music industry and the movie industry. Shareholders should be demanding their respective CEO's have vast experience in the domain that threatens to defeat them, instead of continuing to twaddle along in a world that will die with the boomers.

I'd imagine 20-30% of this board would excel at the c-suite level of a newspaper. The rest of us would be more than adequate strategists and advisors. Why? Because we understand the nature of the medium that matters, not the medium that is already dead.

For example, my two cents worth:

What is it that local papers, including the Times (which is basically a local paper from a city many people enjoy reading about) do that the internet can not? Easy - they offer consistently high quality and in-depth analysis of current events. It's their editorial board that matters, really. They can't compete with timely news delivery. They can't compete with bloggers breaking stories. They can deliver a broader and deeper explanation of what events mean to the lives of others. They can provide opinions of well respected and well researched individuals.

If they were to truly leverage this strength, they would do the following:

1. Shut down their physical production lines, immediately saving millions of dollars a year. Move to online only format.

2. Move full time staff to consultant roles, and retain a small editorial staff of the highest quality.

3. Focus less on news snippets, possibly partner with companies that can already do this better than they can - Google news anyone? Newsvine?

4. Focus more on opinion, editorial and deeper feature stories that appeal beyond the 10 second sound bite. Attract readers with the higher quality that they can provide. (Again, there's a market in every local for this - the Guardian doesn't care about what city hall is doing in Buttfuck, Iowa, but the people living there sure do)

5. Either sell ads or subscriptions for such content.

Does this mean they can't rake in the revenues that they once did? Certainly. Does it also mean, however, that they'll remain relevant for the foreseeable future? Of course. Most papers have already conquered the biggest challenge to doing this - building a strong brand-related audience of readers. They've already got the leg up on competitors, and they don't even realize it.

First one for each market to do this well wins.
A very forward-thinking exposition coming from a print source, but still telling in it's anachronisms:
"...Or some Web site might mutate into a real Web newspaper."

A Real Web Newspaper? No. They will be much, much better than that.
It's unfortunate that HN has gotten so busy lately that your reply won't be seen by more people. Thankyou for taking the time here to clarify the argument.
Correct, nice catch.
Someone else in the comments (on Cuban's site) said something similar. His response was to the effect of, "I have no interest in investing in those types of businesses. They take time to build. This is about hitting the ground running" [link to comment](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/02/09/the-mark-cuban-stimulus-p...)

Sounds pretty straight forward. The three you mention are ad based, he wants no ad based businesses.
Diversity is a waste of time in this case. It's better to work on this "centralized" piece of code and create new forks based on it since the code is a damned good starting point. Don't the MooTools people have more important shite to work on anyhow rather than solving a solved problem?
(Python)

TweedHeads.Say("something", visitor4rmindia.Listen)
visitor4rmindia.Say("something else",TweedHeads.Listen)

The Say method takes 2 parameters, what is said in a string, and a reference to the listening method of the partner.

The Say method will first write into the it's private log "I'll remember for a while, I said to {listenmethod.im_self}: something" and do perhaps do some other stuff, and then call the referred Listen method passing in the "something" as a parameter and also passing self as a parameter, to let him know who said it to him.

The Listen method of that object will write into it's own private log "I'll remember for a while: this guy {the passed-in self} told me something", and then perhaps do some other stuff.

Of course this is functional/OO, and a pretty awesome kind of OO, it being Python, not just basic mainstream OO.
79 million dollars of operating profit (hosting costs assumed to be negligible) a year is quite a lot of money, and that's not even counting advertising. If the NYT's costs are so far above $79m/yr, perhaps it needs to slim down a little...
It's not an excuse, it's a rationalization. The difference being that once you address the problem they claim to have, they still won't care.
Several comments have objected to this as if it were stupid:

In an OOPL data type definitions belong to objects. So I can't find all the data type definition[s] in one place.

The point is that OO programs consist of many type declarations scattered everywhere. As complexity grows, it gets harder to understand what all the types are and how they are related. The textbook "shape" and "animal" examples never come close to revealing this problem: they're oversimplified and they refer to things already familiar from the world. In other words they rely on OO's roots in simulation, where it works ok. In any complex system, though, you have to go far beyond ready-at-hand concepts. You end up declaring all sorts of arbitrary types that exhibit the problem Armstrong is talking about. There isn't even an easy way to see what they all are.

It gets harder and harder to change such programs because changing one type definition entails changing others. You can change how the internals of a class work (where it reduces to functions operating on private state), but significant overhaul of the class hierarchy itself is an order of magnitude harder than it should be (than it is in a program where you just have functions).

Armstrong's reference to keeping everything in a single file is not because he believes everything should be kept in a single file. That should be obvious, since he's obviously not an idiot. His point is how much easier it is in certain non-OO languages to understand a program's type system.

I think this is a valid criticism of OO because it cuts to the core of what people claimed was great about OO: that it helps to organize complex programs better and that it makes complex programs easier to change.

Edit: Armstrong is obviously smart, and Erlang is a real contribution, but it is also true that he is not a very good writer. I find he's the kind of writer that I have to make an effort to understand, which in his case is worth it because his intuitions are worth paying attention to. Of course not everyone need feel that way. But some of the comments in this thread seem a little knee-jerk to me.

Edit 2: Smalltalk is pretty clearly an exception to all of this. This has puzzled me for a long time. It just hit me maybe why: Smalltalk is actually not an OO language. Not in the sense we talk about OO nowadays. We've all been misled by the fact that it was the original OO language and that its creator introduced the term. Smalltalk's greatness comes from another place entirely, which is why no other OO language has equalled it.
I figure humans are best modelled as singletons, each being one instance of his own class...

(This is why prototype-based OO would sometimes be more useful)
Is the NoStimulus Petition from Americans for Prosperity good for Entrepreneurs?
Send me all your business plans! I won't sign an NDA and neither will anyone else... but at least someone will profit from this (not necessarily you however)...
This Is Why You're Fat: An Instant Viral Smash
Needing to know it and wanting to know it are two very different things. Ask Nancy Grace. The issue for newspapers is that they are hampered by their current medium, which is simply too slow to provide up to the minute "breaking news" stories that people want.

Even worse, there are other mediums that can do exactly this! Newspapers need to focus on their quality, and remove the shackles of an outdated medium for once and for all.
Here's a Brian Hayes column on good algorithms for this problem: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.3822,y.0,no.,cont...

I think lacker was probably thinking of a correct algorithm for finding the n largest values in a set, instead of the n most frequent values.
There's so much of this that's just factually incorrect it's really hard to give the weight of the article any credibility.

To start, "Dojo" != "The Dojo Foundation". The foundation is a nonprofit (US 501c6, as it happens) entity that exists to hold open source IP -- usually web related -- in a neutral place. "Dojo" is a JavaScript web framework; its IP is held by the Dojo Foundation.

In other words, Dojo : Dojo Foundation :: Apache : Apache Foundation (except that to Dojo Foundation has far fewer requirements on member projects than the ASF). If I want to submit code to CounchDB, it doesn't have to work its way through the Apache web server contribution process. If I want to contribute to Sizzle, the Dojo contributors have no bearing on its acceptance.

Second, Sizzle has an extremely permissive license. Moo (or any other toolkit) can pick and choose how to participate, at any level from just poaching a good idea or three to full contributor/committer status (merit willing, I'd assume). They can even fork if need be. The fact that a major contributor to an open source project seems to completely miss the basic tenant of open source is scary and shocking.

Finally, this argument against the "centralization" of code is... well, again, it's counter to the entire spirit of open source. The ramifications of this argument are intensely scary. I can use of the dozens of languages on my laptop to parse XML using libxml2, and I don't have to worry about each language having subtle differences.

I could go on and on with examples like this; the fact is the code reuse, and the separation of pieces into libraries is part of what makes open source so much more productive than the alternative.

If MooTools doesn't like Sizzle for technical reasons that's totally fine, but arguing against code reuse appalls me.
Postgres doesn't have native replication AFAIK - what are the state of the plugin projects that provide this functionality, and how do they rate against the MySQL clustering?
While that may improve the situation, it won't help if your IP address changes during the outage.
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