skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working on something like this on my spare time, since I also wanted something with this functionality, amongst other things.

If you want to talk about it or want me to send you word when/if I finish it, let me know how can I contact you :)
All that money handed out and the BBC didn't even mention the site name.
Nightly Cocoa Emacs binaries (Intel-only) are available at http://atomized.org/wp-content/cocoa-emacs-nightly/
I hope he doesn't make the site suck for everyone just to "help" the users who seem to need baby-sitters. Suburbs suck for the same reason. I know you are joking but I am really tired of all the Nanny State type stuff.

"Oh I am just doing this for your own good. You will thank me later." is one of the most evil attitudes that I know. I am not able to express clearly why I think so and why I feel so strongly[#] about it. May be it is coz I find it patronizing. Also I find it extremely unhackerly.

[#] My mind is screaming obscenities and I am feeling pretty angry.
That's Jeff Atwood, not Joel Spolsky. Unless I'm mistaken about something.
Actually, a couple years ago PDF got ISO-approved as an open standard format so PDF=Adobe is no longer true.

(I believe MS tried to muscle in on the PDF market with their own standard so Adobe was kind of forced into acting quick).

They might still make money on the Writer software but it's become quite competitive so I doubt it's a big source of revenue.
Each of your comments detracted from the conversation

Clever, but not true. The sarcastic ones did, I agree. But the second one started a thread of sum karma ~100. That's the opposite of detracting ;)
No I didn't, which is why I asked the question I asked. I guess I didn't know that vmware made stuff other than virtual machine software.
"So far technology innovation hasn’t outstripped Malthusian human population growth."

Er, yes, it has. There's more food/person on the planet now than when Malthus wrote.
http://www..aspseek.org/ Open Source Implementation of PageRank
Ah yes, but those were attempt to fork the non-HN crowd away from HN.

No one should be surprised that doesn't work. it's the old timers that are dissatisfied with the new crowd not the other way around.

Forking away the hackers works, reddit did it to slashdot, proggit to reddit, HN to proggit and reddit.
If I understood prakash's comment, the first way is actually making it faster, either by generating it faster or by caching. I usually launch four or fives sites at once. HN is the first to load, so I usually start browsing it instead of the (slower) others.

Known tricks are explicit sizes for tables and images. The HTML file itself is loaded fast so you can start reading while images are loading.

There's also the opposite method: preloading images so, once the needed items are in the browser, the page renders faster.

I wonder how it would work to preload the images for the initially visible part of a page and leave for later the ones that you must scroll to see.

I've read recently about using sprites for the graphics: one big image with a mosaic of little images used, then split using CSS. This trick reduces the number of HTTP requests.
One thing I find useful is the Its All Text! add-on for Firefox. It lets me use emacs as an external editor for any browser text area. Its ideal for blog entries, web mail or any filling in text in a small text entry area (like this one on HN!).

In addition to giving me all the power of emacs editing, getting the text inside emacs means I can more easily use templates, save stuff off in text files etc.

You need to start an emacs server in your .emacs: (server-start). I also (add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'flyspell-mode) so that I get spell correction. With my setup I just control-e in any text area and it pops open a new buffer in my emacs session.
The conventional wisdom is that big ad agencies don't want their clients' ads get stuck next to a picture of you puking at a party.
You can't analyse a market that doesn't exist yet.
How Depressions Work
One of the primary reasons I come here is to learn new things.

A lot of this learning comes from people I initially disagree with, but that have good arguments or insights. And I upvote them, even if I don't agree.
I don't think forking the current concept would work. The Digg/Reddit model seems to have had its best time. Some new concept should be created. Twitter seems like the right direction to me because you can follow only the people that you think are interesting.
Java variety is not reuse
Simple question, why not have a db backed Avatar model instead?
Nightly from here: http://atomized.org/wp-content/cocoa-emacs-nightly/

Config: http://github.com/bretthoerner/emacs-dotfiles/tree/master

I maintain a very OS X-y feel, among other things.
Yeh I didn't think about that either, but I suppose it's true at least for the short term--especially for hiring! Long term it'll depend on the strength of the dollar, especially if all the new bailout money causes significant inflation.
Perhaps you're the Steve Woz I've been looking for then? :)
I know the title was tongue in cheek to attract the yc crowd.

One thing though is that once you use compass with the blueprint framework implemented in sass it allows you to easily generate css in situations where you would have used a table instead for layout.
EC2 has been in operation for a few years now, and the price levels from the launch remain unchanged, despite the fact that their largest expenses are subject to Moore's law.
Write tests first: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeUnitTestFirst

It's more fun that way. Instead of your code breaking when you add the test, it's broken until you add the functionality.

My code has many many tests. My co-workers would laugh at me, telling me I spent all my time writing tests. But if my code even RUNS, I'm confident that it is correct. I would get the last laugh, because my co-workers would always be doing frantic debugging right before a deadline because they just uncovered a silent bug.
I came across a web page made in mathematica once...
Can food production technology stay apace with a couple billion Chinese and Indians starting to eat like Westerners (lots of beef, which requires tremendous amounts of grain and water to produce)?
This is asciilifeform's subtle way of protesting the inability to down-vote submissions.
Art Only Google Earth Can See
Why wouldn't you use Compass?

I think that the point of using Compass is that it makes most of the situations where you would use tables easy to do.
How many times does this need to get reposted?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465474
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465458
Are you sure? Hint: agflation.
nickb is great at bringing in the news links but I for one could have dome without yet another Latitude post today.
It is db-backed. It's just that the fields exist on the people table, instead of in their own table.
Production is solved for now, but our solution (at least in the US, as I understand it) depends on abundant supplies of fossil fuel and fossil water, which are not going to be around forever.

So, there is plenty of work to do to see that this problem stays solved.
Facebook turns 5 -- but can it survive?
I love the compact output style (Sass::Plugin.options[:style] = :compact) to tell Sass to outpus one-line CSS files.
Ask HN: Is outsourcing though Elance/Guru a reasonable way to get started
I have several ideas for web apps that I would like to pursue. I would love to begin working on one of them, but do not have a great programming background (my current capability is in front end design/UX). I am planning on spending as much time as possible over the last year of my degree teaching myself a major web-focused programming language (such as Python, Ruby, or PHP). However my current time constraints don't allow me enough time to do everything myself.

My questions are these:

Is using a service such as Elance or Guru to pay for some help a viable way to begin working on a prototype of an app?

If so, how is the best way to approach this sort of a situation?
The problem is that many testing advocates are 100% testing diehards. They believe that anything under 100% test coverage in several disciplines (unit, functional, integration, etc) is just as bad as no testing.

There is, of course, a middle way. Implement as much testing as makes sense for you. Think Pareto.. just the right 20% of testing could give you 80% of the gains.

So.. implement integration tests that test your apps very broadly and as soon as one fails, you know you can start looking deeper. No need to always start with line by line unit tests :)
Apologies if this is off topic, but I've learned to associate a harvard.edu URL in the HN topic with a Philip Greenspun post. I try to avoid his writing, so if other people at Harvard have interesting things to say, I'm not going to find it through Hacker News.

The same thing happens with subdomain blogs on github - I can't tell which blog the post is really coming from. The posts are rarely from GitHub, the company.

Is the reason the domain is used rather than the entire URL for aesthetic reasons? The short domain looks better. However, I have an internal filter of what I do and don't want to click on and seeing the entire URL helps.
You are right -- tlb is active again though rtm is not. I meant that I hadn't noticed them in the mix in quite a while.
Kindle 2.0 or 2.No?
I didn't say forking inherently doesn't work. Both nickb and mattmaroon are old timers who wanted to create valuable communities themselves, not just to create distractions and attract a lesser crowd or something.
37Signals' Basecamp turns five
HN: Give it a rest with the CSS debate, please.
Testimony of Harry Markopolis to Congress
Remember.. almost every major piece of software you will have used together was not and has not been developed using TDD (think: does the Linux kernel have unit tests? That's way more important than what you're ever likely to develop!). That's nothing to be proud of, but if you are even aware of TDD and considering where you can implement parts of it, it puts you ahead of 90% of the industry.
Wow, great use case. I wonder if EtherPad can focus on such a niche and charge for it (with other relevant features).
Ask HN: Can you help me find a cofounder?
Angels flee from tech start-ups
Sure, but not necessarily to report it to the press correctly.
I seem to be the only one here who likes how Aquamacs uses both Mac and Emacs key bindings. I find myself using both. There is probably some reason I sometimes use the Emacs kill/yank/etc. vs. when I use Mac cut/copy/paste, but I'm not sure what it is.

I also use Emacs in Windows and Unix at work, but I imagine it is sitting in front of my Mac that triggers the cmd key bindings in my head. Maybe it's just that, with Aquamacs, whatever key binding first pops into my head will probably work, so I don't have to worry about context switching so much.

I also agree that Option is the right key to use for Meta. I don't think I would ever get used to pressing cmd and not having it activate the Mac key bindings. Probably because I have been using Macs in some capacity since 1987.

The other "Mac-like" thing about Aquamacs is how it pre-bundles so many of the useful modes. Going out and loading each mode you want one at a time and tweaking it just so seems so Linux to me. I like how Aquamacs tries to give you something that Just Works for most of what you want it to do, instead of something more bare bones that you are expected to configure out the wazoo. I discovered both SBCL and Aquamacs when I wanted to learn Common Lisp, and Aquamacs coming with SLIME pre-installed made one less thing I had to fuss with.
Man gives out free cash to advertise website
Emacs.app GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i386-apple-darwin9.4.0, Carbon Version 1.6.0)

All my init files are check in to a repository at https://github.com/jimm/elisp/tree

See http://www.io.com/~jimm/emacs_tips.html#my-dot-emacs for how I've set up the repository for different machines.
Don't conflate having a project canceled with having it fail. Successful projects get canceled for a variety of reasons, and some failed projects never get canceled.
Good point that karma as applied to users is an average. I've done some flaming here I'm not proud of. I meant that points applied to posts and comments are supposed to be a measure of quality. If we start going solely on reputation of the poster we've merely set up a pantheon and kicked away the ladder.

You're right that the velocity of the /newest page is the biggest problem. There may be a UI way of encouraging more upvotes. But I think it's still down to culture if we want to maintain the overall quality.
Thanks, I never noticed model aggregation before. Looks really useful.
Judging by the comments, I'm not missing much, but I refuse to read this until the author gets a spelling checker.
Apple does research and development with the customer in mind. That the bottom-line of good marketing.
Your comment suggests an interesting way of rewarding people who further the conversation. Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that responds.

1 - This makes the witty comeback a lesser strategy for obtaining karma.

2 - People who are aware of this will stop responding to trolls. Even if they publish a well-reasoned response to a troll, they will be giving them karma points. Since this is not a common feature of internet forums, this might be worth spelling out above an active comment form.

3 - The best strategy for karma is to advance the discussion somehow. Even if your point ends up exposing the point of view of people on the other side.
I'm getting more questions as I start to think about this. They get revenue from ads, not searches. Did they vary the number of ads displayed? Did people look at the first page of 10, not find what they saw, then check the ads, find what they saw (which may be a page two organic result), and click the ad?

If that is what is happening, then I can see why Google would lose. That is, their main conclusion would be that people tend to check organic results first. If that's true then if a company that has to pay to be page 1 is organically moved there by increasing the number of results displayed, then G loses.

They check this by seeing if revenue goes up when they limit the results to 5 ads.
Based on my sporadic use of reddit, short comments are the noisiest form of rot/cancer a in reddit-like engine/interface, such as puns and lame jokes that self-perpetuate into long threads.

Perhaps the comment form should have a self-check note along the lines of: "If your comment is just a witty remark, please don't post it." Good heuristics for self-detection are: short and no substance. Perhaps mods need to nuke bad comments for a while to establish a noticeable standard.
FriendFeed seems to be actively building on that model, with their commenting features. What worries me is that this inhibits meeting new people far away from you in the social graph: I'd like to hear PG's or Paul Buchheit's opinions, even though I don't know them in real life.
Yes, very curious as to what the site is.
I find there's a balance to be struck. You want to get stuff in front of users quickly, but if that stuff sucks so much that it's unusable, you aren't going to release it (and if you did, nobody would use it). So you want enough tests that you can be reasonably confident of the code and not spend a lot of time debugging, since debugging is the real timesink that'll kill you.

I often find that I unit test all but the latest layer. As soon as I start depending on code from something else, it's time to write some tests. But if I just wrote something, it's probably in flux and tests would just prematurely lock down the interface. Write the code, write the client (which probably requires that you rewrite the code), and then write the tests in lieu of debugging the code.
Yeah - I met a chap at an openbase conference in 2005 that was using it for professional web-application development. I've been intrigued by the idea ever since. I'd be interested to hear more stories from people who really leverage it like this.
That's not a scarcity problem but a scarcity of luxury problem.
he he, sorry I'm more of a Jobs kind of guy ;-)

That being said, I've actually had the same problem as you: finding good hackers is a hard problem, there aren't that many around. My solution was simply to learn to program, and I haven't regretted it. It's not as hard as you would think, and it's a lot easier to convince someone else to jump aboard your boat if you've done some work on a project yourself. It shows serious commitment.
I haven't actually got anything done through any of these sites but I have some friends who have, and I think it can be hit and miss with regard to the quality of developers on the sites.

An idea I'd like to try is a small guinea-pig project that you would use to find the better developers - get them to build it and see what the quality is like. It may cost a bit up-front but if you find good developers you could save yourself a lot of money and get a lot better results on a real project.
Loopt on Google Latitude: We're still better
I think the best benefit of unit tests is really saving you from the "Will this break anything?" problem. Uncertainty is the real big killer for programming productivity; if you know what to code, you just type it out and you can get like 10 lines/minute. So have some way that you can run things and say "I know this broke something" or "I know this didn't break anything."
Actually, the two are orthogonal. You can monkey-patch an aggregation into a model as easily as you can monkey-patch anything else in.

Also, modules aren't monkey-patching. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch

Lastly, the modules referred to in the article were added statically, not dynamically. We don't use a lot of dynamic module inclusion (though we do it some).
Give the user their upmod points of the entire thread that responds.

That sounds like a surefire way to encourage provocation (a.k.a trolling). If you make a deliberately provocative and clueless statement and n people take the time to exhaustively tell you why you're wrong (for which they get karma), I don't think you deserve any of the karma given to the comments you provoked.
I agree, it seems to me that like many things in life, the answer lies between the extremes
The only thing I can come up with off the top of my head is the correlation between the displayed progress of a loading bar and the perceived speed. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html

That article also links to a great article called "Maximizing Human Performance" (http://www.asktog.com/basics/03Performance.html) which goes over a few topics, including response times and their perceived meaning and optimizing user flows for the human thinking process.
Ask HN: Recommend a Great Branding/Marketing/Strategy company?
I'm looking for a branding/marketing/strategy/design/UX/campaign company in the LA or SF areas.

They need to be very good, smart, and able to handle large clients/projects. And ideally great to work with.

If you can recommend anyone, please do so! Thanks!
Chris Pinkham, leader of the team that built EC2 (in South Africa)
Interesting content inside Markopolos's prepared testimony to Congress is the revelation that the Wall Street Journal had the Madoff story early but never ran it. Markopolos's suggestions for reform of financial industry regulation are detailed and thought-provoking.
If I'm not mistaken, wikia does not want you to download their crawls using a robot: http://soap.grub.org/arcs/robots.txt
One of the critical factors in an aggregation site (or in a consulting relationship for that matter) is the ability for participants to step outside the norms. To disagree.

HN has a better record of this than say, reddit. That's why I stay here. There's some opportunity for people with radically different opinions to meet and share. To the extent that the board supports that, I'm a big fan.

But to the OPs point, you can say the same thing different ways and get different results. It's not about information. It's about emotional impact.

So you end up doing this little dance whenever you'd like to correct somebody. There are lots of tactics, but it all boils down to presenting information to somebody they're not going to like in a format that's easily digestible.

To some degree, that's just being civil -- treating people like you would if you were talking to them at a bar. But that's time intensive and most times I know I don't think it's worth the effort. Folks will argue with you ad infinitum anyway, and that's best-case. So you stick to short, catchy, terse comments that mix in a little information goodness. People upvote the comment thinking it's the information, but it's really the emotional impact of the message. It's the presentation, stupid. The content is not nearly as important.
> However, I don't know how you'd pay for fleet-style driving because vehicles like a big rig would be improving efficiency for dozens of vehicles, which would assume nationalized transportation control so big rig drivers don't get ripped off on gas.

You're assuming that the "drafters" cost the big rig gas (actually diesel), presumably by increasing air-resistance. They don't. Drafting reduces air-resistence for the lead vehicle too.

You can see this in car races. Two (or more) cars running close together, front-to-back, are faster than any of the cars are when running by themselves.

I don't know how much fuel drafting would save big-rigs (there's a somewhat an odd relationship between fuel used and work done in diesels) but at the very least, it doesn't cost them fuel.
Most great programmers take very well to unit tests. The way they became great was to assume their code is flawed and take steps to remedy that.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh, but I don't think Joel or his employees are really all that great. I mean, they're working on bugtracking software. Great programmers tend not to trade interesting problems for private offices and gigantic monitors (plus, they often can get jobs at places that offer them interesting problems, private offices, and gigantic monitors).
This submission is from an official source (Google itself) and the headline mentions Loopt (a Y Combinator project), so I appreciate this addition to the discussion of this hot story.
If you're talking about "meaningoflife", that's mostly something we're using to benchmark our difficulty algorithm. The difficulty is approaching zero pretty quickly, meaning it won't be handing out sickles for very long. Sorting out problem difficulty algorithmically instead of arbitrarily makes it harder to game the system--if someone writes a bot, difficulty will go to 0 pretty quickly without us having to do anything.

Most of the other ("realer") puzzles randomly generate after you solve them the first time. This keeps the difficulty (and sickle handout) up.
That's one facet another is how deflation and loans mix. In effect deflation increases interest rates just as inflation decreases them. If you owe 1$ @ 5% over a year with 50% deflation you now owe 2.1 times the value of what you bought. Once deflation starts people start trying to pay back their debt because their effective interest rate increased. Which decreases the money supply and causes even more deflation. This cycle can quickly get extremely nasty with most people defaulting.

The free market dampener is people refinancing at slightly lower rates, but this this hits a wall. Negative interest rates never happens, because why lend money when you can just keep it. And even mild deflation is hard to deal with because loans have risk so you can't lower loans below the rate of risk.
Seconding this. I think the internal Google training materials were some of the best I've run across, and the Google Testing Blog is basically the public face of those.