skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, they're also failing to ignore a few other important factors:

What about other bloggers like Darren Rowse, Perez Hilton,etc.? Seems like the article is portraying the story as either you have to make 5k a year or 200k a year. That clearly isn't the way it works.

What about a ton of the other networks that have done well or even more individual blogs. Gothamist blogs, b5 media, etc. Glam media is doing insanely well.

I also wouldn't equate Dan Lyons' efforts to that of Mike Arrington.
> The density of WTF's in this file is huge. Who can make sense of the following lines without any explanation?

format([$M|T], {{_,M,_},_}=Dt, Acc) ->
format(T, Dt, [smonth(M)|Acc]);

I assume you mean "Who with zero programming experience can make sense[...]". No argument there.

I know Erlang quite well, and personally I find the dh_date.erl code obvious and beautiful.
Not really hacker news, but if you're interested in mass-amateur-read audio-books, http://www.librivox.org is a collaborative effort to read books outloud (as long as their copyright has expired) where there can be several contributors per book.
Why is Cisco entering the consumer market the wrong move? Linksys is fairly sucessful i thought?
It seems Google has had these small updates waiting for the big time. And now that times are bad pushing them harder, to bring consumer confidence that Google will continue to innovate and to ensure stock holder confidence. Either way its good for us. :)
Becoming a comp sci prof won’t let you escape business and doing work for customers
My company (www.rjmetrics.com) develops software that you can use to analyze your users in different ways than web traffic analytics, things like tracking customer lifetime value, churn analysis, and segmentation by any data on which you track your user base (registration date, geography, plan, etc). We actually recently wrote a blog post on why a tool to analyze your database is a great complement to a tool to track your traffic.

http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2009/01/22/rjmetrics-vs...

For the record, we use Google analytics and of course we are ravenous consumers of our own dogfood.
There is another market substitute for Lipitor: eating right (and getting some exercise).

As for figures: as of the 90's, obesity alone directly accounted for 12% of our health care spending. I think that's a pretty reliable underestimate for spending today, since obesity has only increased since then, and medicine has only gotten more expensive.

http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/2741/Economics-Overweight-...

It may not rise to the level of "ruinous", it's definitely a big issue.
Each wants to be last through the door.
Marketing is Design
Then I'm very curious what your web application is.
I've actually found awstats to be more management overhead per domain than a JavaScript-based solution like GA.

It's also difficult to weed out new bots with awstats, which bloats traffic results (and my ego!).
"The most successful investors I have ever known were steeped in market history. History didn't mean 'what's happened in the past 15 years since I have been on Wall Street' -- it meant what has happened since World War II."

The general point of the submitted article refers to a too little known principle of behavioral economics, one that has resulted in thousands of investors losing billions of dollars in the last year. Why studying history helps is that a longer time horizon provides more examples (anecdotes) of recent trends blowing up.

In general, hackers who are running start-ups have to make decisions about how to respond to economic trends, so articles about heuristics that improve rationality against cognitive biases are interesting here.
Do you actually find that stats are different with each company?

Who do you find to be the most accurate?
Ignite Boston 5 Thursday evening
Based on the comments, it seems everyone thinks they're doing away with grades as in A, B, C, D and F. I think they're actually just doing away with grade leves 1-12.

A good analogy for the gamers out there would be they switching from a level based system to a skill based system. Currently, after each school year, you level up to the next grade. In other words, when you pass a grade, you move to the next grade level in all subjects.

In the new system, your math level is independent of you english and history levels. In one school year, you could advance two levels in math, one level in english and half a level in history. To graduate on time, the overall goal would be to average passing at least one level of each subject per year.
Is ignites a good event? Who's going?
Right, but many beginning programmers don't want to start with something boring and move on to the fun stuff. You can't show a CGI form to your friends and have them drool over how cool it is. Instant gratification is key.
> Personally, I really prefer languages with a low WTF/minute rate right from the start.

I think you are missing the point of the article. The idea is that Haskell taught the author new ways of thinking. It allowed him to see computation in a way that he had never seen before.

This is a good thing. Language features are restricted to one language. New ways of thinking are useful everywhere.
Of course I wasn't searching for "catastrophe". I've read the book. It's better than the youtube clip.
People will want their own vehicle, not many people will be willing to give up their sports cars or their trucks and SUV's to switch to a smart car look-a-like that you don't even own.

That really depends on where you live. Here, in London, hardly anybody owns their own car, and most don't want to - finding a place to park it is far too difficult. Even people who do own a car rarely use it to drive in town.

This system isn't supposed to replace the car, it's supposed to replace the bus.
You are correct, what could possibly go wrong?

Oh wait, they take password security so seriously that the login form which sends my Twitter username and password does so over HTTP and not HTTPS! Hooray, my password goes across the wire in plain text.
"To cut to the chase, if you read old books you get a sense for how thin the searchable veneer of the web is on our world. The web's view of our world is temporally compressed, biased toward the recent, and even when it does look back through time to events memorable enough to have been digitally remembered, it sees them through our digital-age lens. They are being digitally remembered with our world view overlaid on top."

Good point. Another example of recency bias.
Status (continued)
Sony develops finger-vein biometric authentication for laptops and phones
No, I mean who with zero Erlang programming experience. Over time, I have programmed in: BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, PHP, Perl, Java, Javascript, Ruby - and that's the languages I actually did stuff in. I am familiar with Python and Lisp as well. And yet this code is not obvious to me.

Of course it's clear to someone who "knows Erlang quite well". But the Ruby code is clear to someone who "doesn't know Ruby at all", that's the difference I was pointing out.
OK, perhaps I should have written a bit more here.

The issue is, there is pretty much no barrier at all to programming at the moment. That's why there are so many bad programmers who have just heard there's money to be made.
Add to that the fact that identifying bad programmers is sometimes hard, and you have a bad situation.

Raise that barrier for entry, and perhaps someone who thinks "Wow there's money to be made in programming, I better get a job in it", will fall at the first hurdle.

If you're interested in it enough, there's plenty of easy to start development environments around for any beginner.
I like making detailed comments on here, ideally supported by a personal story, or a link to some science or history. But on this one - I just gotta write that my gut says "not gonna work". Now, there's been lots of gut feeling throughout history that something's "not gonna work" that did, in fact, work. But this one - I'm thinking not.

Two reasons off the top of my head: Where's the value in signing up for Kachingle? What do consumers get? Assuaging of guilt? If Kachingle negotiated so that every Kachingle publisher had Kach-only (or otherwise paid only) content, it could work as a giant "subscription fee to everything". But Kach would need a lot of traction to get heavyweights like the NYT to make some content only available to Kachingle users.

Second - privacy. I'm not Captain Uber Security online, but I don't want my credit card and favorite reading online linked. I've seen too many companies abuse user data to be excited about telling Kachingle/AMEX/whoever else exactly what I like reading and my interests are. Ultra-targeted demographic based advertisements all over the internet does not appeal to me.
I agree especially with (b). Commenting is closely tied to personality, which is very easy to tell if it's forced or artificial. On the other hand, if you have something to truly add to the conversation, don't hold your tongue because you feel it holds little weight for the funding process.
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So your point is that these ways of thinking are unachievable without a syntax filled with WTFs? I'm no expert on functional languages like Haskell or Erlang, but somehow that doesn't ring true to me. There's gotta be a way to create languages that provide new ways of thinking while maintaining a clear syntax. Ruby (sorry, that language again), for example, provides a number of functional language features with a very clear syntax.
End Times for Milton Friedman?
I generated two normally distributed samples (10,000 large)for post and comment value. Each of these pairs (or vectors) is considered to instantiate a possible user (PO).

Friend networks for each of these possible users is instantiated by randomly choosing 50 possible users from the set of 10,000 such that the distance between the PO and friend candidates is less than .1 (arbitrarily, but small enough to make a tight cluster of friends).

The initial user set is randomly chosen from the 95% percentile of this 10,000 vector set, and new users are inducted through the networks of these existing users at a small rate.
News of the world: France gives teens free newspaper subs, should others follow suit?
I don't think any of Haskell's syntax is intrinsically unclear.

If you read the article, you'll notice that most of the WTFs are things like "oh, I never though of abstractions like monads, functors, etc." There is one about the indentation thing, but honestly, braces are probably a WTF to people that only know Python.
IE's MIME Sniffing Allows Execution of Images
you may want to read 'founders at work' by jessica livingston (of yc fame). it's interviews regarding the rise of many successful web services (yahoo, hot or not, hotmail, etc).

a lot of those companies started as hobbies or side projects, and one day the site crashed and the founder realized he needed a whole lot more servers to keep up with the growth.
Shaving digitally
Good to hear. I haven't really had the time to look into Haskell (or Erlang, for that matter). Some day, perhaps...
Tech layoffs: The real numbers aren't so bad
Cloud computing promises dramatic savings -- if downtime is kept in check
RIM releases patch for buggy ActiveX control
Like maybe a tutorial that helps you build a breakout clone, where all the code is live and interactive in an editor in your browser?

http://billmill.org/static/canvastutorial/
The more time you spend commenting on News.YC, the better. Other investors look at this, as well.
Five products compete to protect clients from malware, viruses, and other threats
I think this is overlooking something important. I would never pay for access to say, NYTimes.com or something.. because it doesn't give me what I want.

Data. Hard facts. I'd much prefer to pay to access something like AP's newswire, where I can get a lot more salient information without having it regurgitated by someone.
"But that doesn't mean it's insane to listen to 37signals advice"

unless you're after advice on writing markup.
If you have experience in Python then it's clear that the Ruby code won't be hard to understand, because those languages are similar. The Erlang code makes use of pattern-matching, which is mostly used in functional languages. So I think someone with experience in Haskell or O'Caml wouldn't have problems understanding the Erlang code.
Is ccraigIW a script that submits an rss feed every morning?
Usability For Strategic User Experience
Maybe I'm not 'average', but I pay $80/yr for a subscription to the Economist even though I can get all the articles free on their website.

Part of that is that I spend 12-15 hours a day on my computer for my job and side projects... being able to go outside and read my news on paper is a welcome break from that.

But the other part is that I find the reporting to be of generally high quality and depth. I think the print media that is hurt the most by the Internet are those with shorter stories and lots of ads in between. The Internet does this bite-sized content extremely well, so traditional media will have a hard time competing, but there is still demand for longer, in depth content, which is (so far) best supplied by paid reporters.
Startups: The Concept Stage
What _why describes is half the problem. (Maybe a bit more than half.) In the Good Old Days, you could take your Spectrum/Amiga/BBCmicro/C64/whatever, and (1) write a program that (2) did something comparable to the games you could buy. (Less polished, sure, but not a million miles off.)

Nowadays, #1 is harder because there's no programming language bundled with the system, because it doesn't drop you into a REPL when you boot it up, and because the programming languages you can easily get hold of don't have nice easy facilities for graphics and suchlike. That's _why's point.

But of course #2 is harder too, because modern PCs are capable of all sorts of astonishing 3d moving graphics and stuff, and the games you can get for them exploit that. But that stuff is really difficult for a novice, and poorly supported by learner-friendly programming languages, and really difficult to do well even for experts.

So, for most people, the amount of gratification you get from writing your own code is less relative to what you get from just using other people's software, even if we solve #1 comprehensively. So the motivation to learn to program is less.

(Of course, there's a small minority who fall in love immediately with the very idea of programming. But it is a small minority.)
The financial and credit card cartel have some trillions to loose. Just ask the microfinance players. For example, Grameen has been receiving attacks for decades from both government (via World Bank) and private sector, with every possible block and type of scandal you might think of.
Ask HN: What time tracking and billing software (or related solutions) do you recommend?
I'll be starting a contract job fairly soon and would like to provide an itemized bill including time spent per task etc. Up until now I have usually done this manually based on rough estimates after the job was completed. I'd like to move to a more automated solution, but I don't have the time to evaluate multiple packages. Ideally I'd like something that allows me to define tasks, clock on to and off from those tasks, and have it produce a report of time spent per task at the end. So I ask you, what software do you use and why? If you don't for a reason, why not?
You want reporters with a clearly stated bias towards a certain opinion?
no, see the 3rd submission about cloud computing, it has a different title than the article.

it's most likely a person at infoworld which gets the list of infoworld articles in his/her inbox everyday at 9am, and then submits them dutifully one by one to HN
Same here, I made some pretty complicated games on the TI-85, tetris for example with all of the blocks drawn with "0"s, that was a HUGE mess of gotos and especially when you can only see like 8 lines of code on the screen at a time gotos to far away can get very confusing.
The user makes the same submissions at reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/ccraigIW/

The titles are slightly different so it's either a human or some powerful AI. mtw is right. It's most likely an IW employee (note the username).
For previous answers to this question see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123371

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224473

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124856

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460677

Before asking questions you might try searching to see if it's been asked before.

http://searchyc.com/

If you did, say so:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/smart-questions.html
When facing a difficult problem and trying to project confidence, I prefer sitting astride a rearing horse, brandishing a sabre.

The body language mirroring and influence thing has a comprehensive theory on using it to your advantage: Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Unfortunately, it has little experimental support, but it's still trendy with the management and life coaches--which doesn't necessarily make it not true; which wouldn't necessarily make it not useful.
Since you're the only one who's mentioned it, I second Alice. ( http://www.alice.org/ ) I learned about it from Randy Pausch and his "Last Lecture" (it's also mentioned in his following lecture). It's a way to simply drag and drop java until you want to drop it and type on your own. You control animations. From their site.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

They've even gotten EA on board to allow use of their Sims 2 characters. Good stuff.
I loved this post because it spoke directly to the difficulty my software developer brain has wrapping itself around marketing.

The answer to almost any marketing question is "it depends" and getting to the "right" answer for your situation can take lots of time and testing. This can be very frustrating when you're used to the relatively instant feedback that you get when developing an application.

The code either works or it doesn't, and you know almost right away. Not so with marketing, and that can be a tough pill to swallow.

Great post by Rob and thanks to rwalling for finding this and sharing. Using "marketing is design" as a mental model is a great idea and will hopefully keep me from beating my head against the desk a few less times in the future. :)
IRobot: An Intelligent Crawler for Web Forums
I know you're being flippant, but there really is a critical underlying problem with making everyday technology intentionally arcane.

If people are unable to easily learn how something works, they will, for all intents and purposes, treat things as black boxes or "magic" and learn to distrust them (and those who do understand them) when things go wrong. This problem isn't unique to computing. My father grew up in an era where automobiles could still be serviced by end users, and learned to appreciate doing things like changing the oil or replacing parts himself. As such, he knew the limitations of the machine and could be more helpful to mechanics when bringing in a vehicle that was too broken for him to fix. Even more importantly, he knew when a mechanic was trying to snowball him with bogus repair suggestions.

The distance most people have from our food production processes is another example. A century ago, vegetarianism, when it was rarely practiced, was usually a religious choice and not regarded as a threat by meat eaters, or vice versa. Nowadays, its a full blown political movement which I suspect is in no small part due to the shock some people have growing up when they first learn where meat comes from late in their life (and in conditions most people feel have to be hidden.) I've seen kids who vehemently deny that meat comes from animals. When they grow older and finally learn/accept the truth, the impact would be much more shocking that a child who sees farm animals from a very young age.

Back to the original topic, even if most end users don't bother to learn to program, the perception that it is easy to get into is very important, in that it insures that they might know somebody who does.

I wish I could write more, but the gist I'm trying to get at is very hard to put into simple words. Hopefully, somebody else here will understand my underlying point and enunciate it better than I can.
"There's a limit as to how much I rely on baseball/political prognosticators for macroeconomic analysis."

He's got a degree in economics and makes his living as a statistician. Not to comment too heavily on the article, which doesn't make very strong claims, but he is exactly the sort of person to rely on for (macro)economic analysis.
People don't click on the links.

When your looking at NYT or Facebook you are interested in their content when you using Google your looking for something. Put another way, how effective would advertising be when inserted in the middle of a phone conversation?
OO Side Effect Free Programming
I agree. It was a well-written, entertaining post that went through the why and not just the how. It's definitely worth a read and a bookmark.
Would that be such a bad thing? Some of my best friends are scripts.
"I have an idea, and a couple sketches, for a site I'd like to get help on developing. I think it's a relatively simple idea to actualize, along the lines of a twitter/craigslist mashup. The idea's imagined success is found in its simplicity, so I'm not looking to pack it with features."

Ok, just what does that paragraph mean. What the hell is a "twitter/craigslist mashup"? Do you have any idea how this proposed site would actually work from that description?

And if you don't know what weasel speak is how do you know that it is not weasel speak? Weasel speak is the sort of buzzword laden zero content nonsense that marketing usually churn out.

There were enough words in his post to actually describe the site or at least what a "twitter/craigslist mashup" was and how it would be different from any other 'me too' dating site.

I have personally been on too many projects where the specification was full of this kind of nonsense to take such things kindly. A project that may end up being conducted by people on different continents needs to be clear. Other than it is a dating site I have no idea what he wants. If he justs wants to rip off craigslist or plenty of fish then fine, but at least say so.

Hell if he just wants to rip off a site but is prepared to make sure that it is hosted and promoted then people would probably do it for free just to get it on their CV. Hence the reason I asked for clarification of those four points.
Yeah, that would be great, but I don't see it happening. In 1982, little geeks like me wanted to spend time playing with their computers, but there was almost nothing you could do with them, so you /had/ to become a hacker to have any fun. And the hardware was more accessible. We wrote code in real mode with no protections, and the peripherals were simpler. I wrote my own banner printer when I learned I could control the pins of my dot matrix printer individually. Now you have to learn postscript or something comparable just print "Hello World," or you have to write a kernel driver to talk to the thing directly.

The bar to get the machine to do interesting things is too high, and the distractions are too many. You can spend weeks with your computer without running out of websites to explore.

P.S. If anyone does figure this out, please be sure not to implant damage that must be undone later. The mental leap from line-numbered BASIC to structured programming was a big one.