skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why not prepay groceries?
Standing in Costco I suddenly had an idea that seemed like good fodder for a Hacker News thread. To put it simply, why not prepay groceries? I know my food budget each month and I know where I liked to shop. Why not simplify things a little bit? I"ll pay up front each month and maybe in return I get better prices, special programs, etc. Thoughts?

Prepay groceries seems like it could be an ideal solution for grocery stores. They then have predictable fixed income, they eliminate credit card fees which eat away their profits, they increase customer loyalty, and they have the ability to potentially offer more customized and personalized service to consumers. I'd imagine it working one of a couple of ways:

1. I sign up and I setup an automatic withdrawal for 75% of my grocery budget each month ($300). If I don't spend all of the $300 it rolls over to the next month, but I can't get a refund. Funds that roll over could either reduce the current month's withdrawal or perhaps a 5% bonus could be added to the amount as incentive.

2. I sign up for set my $300 withdrawal and the store gives me a bulk buyer discount (say 10% off any prepay purchase).

As additional incentive the company could provide highly customized newsletters (exotic fruit month, come in for free samples and discounts), interactive website, in store and online classes, ask a grocer Saturdays, etc etc. Basically specialize in quality, variety, and geek services rather than marketing and loss leaders.
Jizsploojo
I don't think they were holding back so they could use these features as PR. It's the Gmail labs infrastructure that is driving these updates. It's apparently something like an internal extensions platform for Gmail, making it a lot easier for them to develop and try out crazy ideas.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...
I have a hard time figuring out precedence relations when looking at Haskell code. I can't always figure out which are the functions, which are the arguments, and which are the functions passed as argument. The fact that Haskell does not have any punctuation to denote function application obviously has something to do with this.
Macbook to Modbook
"...you have to find ways for the larger team to work together and still produce a quality product. "

I am not sure its possible. The communication overhead of so many linkages forces incoherence. The resultant incoherence forces still more additions to process and body count. That adds still more communication overhead. The result is still more incoherence - not less. If something is "finished", its simply because time, money, resources, and toleration ran out. The end result was simply called "done".

Maybe that is the best we can do but I am hard pressed to call products produced that way quality products. See Vista et.al. for instructive detail.
So what does this mean for duckduckgo.com ? They're based on the BOSS api and I figure that by now they're passed the 10.000 requests a day.
Why Japan’s young consumers are turning away from luxury goods
"get it in front of the customer" is a great idea when you don't understand the problem. Now there are plenty of times when it's OK to not understand the problem, but if your building a driver and still don't understand the problem then something is wrong. Iteration as a process of discovering the question / need, but if the problems well understood it's not really the best solution.
It seems that a good balance would be to rapidly prototype as a method of understanding the solution (in fact, for most proofs I've done, this is exactly the method: do a few specific cases and try and generalize them).

This then lets you start hacking right away, but without loss of direction. It will also help you find the general solution.
My bad. :)
The ultimate header is produced by a newspaper. Try running this line and see. It is a random line, so you might want to try it a few times :-)

curl -i -s --head http://www.vg.no/ | grep N
Starcraft Class taught at Berkeley
How I made over $2 million with this blog
Bonus Babies (Coin-Toss Banking)
The main reason it is on the website, as opposed to my blog, is because I am making extensive use of Rails as the world's most over-engineered templating system to write that. It wouldn't be interesting at all without the cart to play with, now would it? I'm all about avoiding sucky user experiences and "I am going to extensively discuss a feature of another website. Please open that website in a tab and follow along" is a sucky user experience.

But yeah, to the extent that people find this article as valuable and link to it, Google will see my site as more trustworthy and send me more frazzled teachers trying to get ready for fourth period.

I really don't have a problem with that: they get their prep work done, I get money, the rest of the world gets a few hours of engineer time writing what I hope was a useful article as a result of the cross-subsidy. The notion is quite similar to OSS. Its a win for everybody.
"Hacker-style," doesn't mean completely abandoning all planning and thoughtfulness. It means rapid prototyping, sure, and (of course) constant refactoring, not a constant deluge of slapdash quick fixes.

What you inherited was a garden variety mess, possible from any poor practitioner of any school.
Debugging comes to mind: I think most will agree that it's much better to take time to understand the underlying cause of a seemingly mysterious bug, and apply a patch that makes logical sense on the correct layer of abstract, rather than patching and repatching the layer of abstract where symptoms appear, without understanding the root of the problem, just to get the code to compile (or get someone off your back or whatever).
But - you had a perfect spec. You had a working program you could use as a reference implementation, and despite rewriting everything, you knew exactly what it needed to do.

The original implementer presumably did not. In reality, you were taking the "hacker" approach, but your iteration was to rewrite everything, because you knew exactly what was wrong with it. The first guy, if he was a true hacker, probably would have abandoned the fixes at some point and done the rewrite as well.
You may also consider Klok (http://klok.mcgraphix.com/) for straight forward timetracking, it's simple, stylish and exports to excel.
There is no single analytics solution that would be fully satisfactory. The ones based on web bugs (e.g. Google Analytics) slow down your site and usually have clunky, slow and/or limited interfaces. Additionally, better ones are getting expensive for more serious use (also, I prefer one time fee over subscriptions).

Local analyzers of server logs do not filter out well robots and also logistics of transferring and updating logs is a pain.

I use Google Analytics, though not everywhere. Almost always I supplement it with some sort of local log processing. Over the time I tried several log analyzing tools, but I kept using only Visitors [1] and WebLogExpert [2]. I remember Web Log Storming [3] was also good: very fast and it allowed to track individual visitors.

Though often I just end up doing some custom logs processing, either by some Python script, or (more common) by some combination of Unix command line tools, directly ssh-ed into the server.

For example, to get real-time referrers:

cat access.log | grep "GET / HTTP" | grep -v '"-"'

If there is a lot of traffic, just use "tail -n XXX" instead of "cat".

[1] http://www.hping.org/visitors

[2] http://www.weblogexpert.com

[3] http://www.datalandsoftware.com/weblog/
How do you take a super tall screenshot of a page that won't fit on the screen like that??
IMO, it's not a hard problem, they a just incompetent. Edit: For more constructive criticism:

1) Don't require a DATABASE as part of a real time system.
2) If it's not in RAM your doing it wrong.

PS: I have worked on a real time messaging system with million+ updates per day that used SMS for sending and receiving data. There where times that parts of the system where down, but I never had total failure for the 3.5 years I was there. Granted individual cell phone networks tended to crash and burn, but that was not really our issue.
Virgance: Harnessing The Community To Save The World (Business Plan Included)
I wonder how this relates to how we view karma on HN. Is higher karma meant to imply higher competence? The average karma per comment experiment from a few days ago seemed designed around that concept. Is karma just another way of making us feel more important or capable?
Why Search? Of Course Search.
That's really a job for google.
That's because it was likely just a pile of quick fixes. At first, most accounting systems are nice and fast, but then one of the guys over in marketing needs this feature added, and one of the managers wants to be able to track his employees in it.

Over time what may have been a relatively quick, agile system has ground to a halt because of all these "Features" tacked on. Does this mean the original style of programming was wrong? Does this mean that every time a new feature or bug was found the entire system should have been reengineered? No. That's what they hired you to fix. It took you a month to recreate the software, with all of the current features built into it. Since the only other real alternative is to keep a developer on hand all the time to re-write the software when needed, the "hack some features on" method seems to be far more cost effective.
Then start using closures :)
GizmoOjo.com

Ojo means "eye" in Spanish in case you were unaware.
Guitar Hero is an incredibly popular game and requires no 3d graphics or full motion video.

I'm pretty sure I could write Guitar Hero in Python. (Oh wait, someone already did! http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/)
http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/
I think all of Stunt Software's products come with 20 day trials. My experience is with version 2 of On The Job but the newest edition looks even better so I'm probably going to upgrade shortly.
certainly easier to run this in terminal. the firefox way (a bit more tedious, but nice if you're already on the website):

open firebug, enable net monitoring, look at the very first GET request, check out the headers, scan for sense of humor.

---

stick this in your controller:

headers["We-Are-Uh-Meh-Zing"] = "true on sunny days"
Personally, I feel like our government is dead set on implementing only the stupidest possible ideas that have pretty much proven not to work. I've seen tons of ideas that at least ought to be considered before bailouts #5 and #6, considering how well 1-4 worked, but apparently haphazard bailouts are the Only Option.
Although the downtime must be frustrating for users and the temptation to build the shiny-new-system-that-will-solve-everything nearly irresistible for developers, I think they probably made the right decision not to do this. They have a runaway hit on their hands. That makes the risks associated with rewrite way higher (and they're already way high). One thing that people often do is start a "next-gen" project with an "architecture" team to figure out the new thing while a maintenance team (often lower-status within the organization) works on the existing product. This is so consistently bad an idea, it's pretty much a red flag all by itself. If I were ever going to rewrite a successful system I'd insist that it be the original team doing it.

I also wonder whether Twitter's downtime doesn't psychologically reinforce the sense that everybody's using it so it must be valuable. Scarcity and all that.

One thing about Twitter does make me pause. Haven't they hired tons of programmers? What are they all doing?
The Great iPhone Sync Debate: Desktop, Laptop, or Cloud?
The advertising model strikes again. Last.fm cost CBS $280m - any predictions when they'll break even?
Um, I'm not sure I'm reading this right but you hard-code your prices in JS to cut down on an AJAX call.

Why not just print your JS from server-side - i.e. you can still have your prices in your JS but have the server generate these?
Much discussion from the original posting 14 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453235
Yahoo! should have announced this as the plan from the start. Its awful hard to give something away for free, then go back to charging for it. At the very least, they should have grandfathered everyone in who was already using BOSS.

I understand the desire to charge for a service like this, but the way Yahoo! handled this does not encourage me to use their services (I've used BOSS extensively).
Don't get all defensive bro. It's cool to get paid.
"I remember going through public school in the 80's, and having to be careful which questions I asked in class because the teacher would be literally learning the material at the same time as the students."

I'm curious: Do you have more details? Because it seems to me that it's just absurd that such would occur. Not because I don't believe you; I do. But... at the risk of sounding snotty, there just isn't anything that a public school could cover that should have the teacher scrambling to learn the material, unless the school did something radically stupid. The curriculum just isn't that large, and by definition, teachers were at least smart enough to get through college.

The only thing that leaps to mind that this could have happened with is "new math". I could see how that could cause trouble, since it was pretty stupid. But what else could throw the teacher for such a loop?
I like the general idea, we shop at the same place every week and would use something like that. Value cards are coming pretty close to all this (including customized newsletters).

People are still trying online, too:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/subscribe-and-save/details/index.ht...

http://www.alice.com/
Last year, Japanese department stores posted their 12th consecutive year of declining sales.

That seems like a huge trend, I am honestly shocked this is the first time I have seen this. Thanks for posting this.
Depends on the type of analytics -- as that is a huge area.

- For just tracking traffic -- Google is fine.
- For Adwords, Omniture has a slew of products.

Once you add on a couple of layers -- such as an affiliate program, some display and then PPC from Yahoo & MSN .. you will run into a couple of areas .. such as multi-payouts and an issue with attribution.

One client just started using C3 Metrics

http://www.c3metrics.com

Its working for them.
the number of writes is pretty close to the number of reads

This is only a "problem" if your database is MySQL. People have been doing this kind of workload on the major commercial database for decades.
What's wrong with corn syrup?
I've got to go with the name issue. Not sure if you were first or not but your name is too close to gizmodo. Also you need more content, not just on the front page but some of the categories are empty.

Of the six people on the front page only one has a picture, they could all go. More text, having just pictures makes it look like a shopping site.

For example the "SanDisk Sansa c150 2 GB MP3 Player" is just a picture. How about an excerpt from the review "Enjoy skip-free music playback and photo slideshows with the amazingly small and lightweight SanDisk Sansa c150 flash memory digital audio player..." while is much better than that thumbnail. Ok it looks suspiciously like a sales pitch but that was actually from the rewiew.

Graphically it's very nice, perhaps too nice. Like I say it looks to me like a shopping site. Is this really geek aesthetics? Maybe it should be more like ThinkGeek, Ars or practically any gaming site.
sigh must every post end with a trite patronizing question posed to the reader?

>> "Create something in a few weeks that normally takes a few months. Do something in a way that works better than the status quo (or shows the promise of working better), Then you won’t need to convince anyone with words — the results will speak for themselves."

This might work, but it can also actually work against you. If you go against the status-quo, people can actually doubt you have done things properly, assume you're not a 'team player', etc etc. If you start telling the truth about how long things might take, you'll get laughed at. If you go away and complete it, and show it working, people will assume you cut corners, didn't do it properly etc

Some big companies just work really slowly, and fighting that often doesn't seem worthwhile.
I agree. Working everything out is the best way to get all the details into your mind. Once you know all the details a good design should be much more obvious. You may need some extra coffee to finish the final version, it is tempting to leave it alone once you are intellectually satisfied since you already have a working version. If you managed a decent modularization of the first version, you may be able to prioritize and just do a final version of the important parts.
The problem is that the subprime mortgages are just a symptom of the problem, which is the complexity of the economic system. You have written about this on overcomingbias as well! Even if such a band-aid solution were implemented, it would be like sitting around and waiting for the next economic shock to wipe the economy out.
"It’s the closest to side effect free programming you can get in OO."

No, you can still have side effect free programming in OO. All of the techniques for programming without using mutable state are language agnostic and should carry over to whatever OO language you are using. You might have problems in languages that lack tail-call optimization, but even that can usually be worked around by using folds.

Now, I'm not claiming that it's feasible to make an entire app in (for instance) Java purely functional, but you can definitely build the majority of your app/library/whatever without using mutable state.
Also if you go for a wiki like system then be prepared to moderate heavily, it will be a spammers paradise.
More discussion on a much earlier posting of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453235
Long term trends in macroeconomic indicators are not the estimates that can be used in these exceptional times.
Moreover, the author is talking about median values of change, there could have been much bigger numbers at the tail ends, and all it takes (mathematically at least) is couple of big numbers to zoom the economic closer to its state few years back.
Go to python.org and read the documentation on threading, concurrency. The mailing list under community is very good, but they expect you to have read the docs and goodled first.
they even randomized it. that's awesome
Power and responsibility are divorced in our political system. The quality "is supported by concentrated and active interest groups" is far more important to a bill's success than "benefits society as a whole".

This is an old problem. Democracy has always been non-rational.
Google's PowerMeter: New Opportunities for Entrepreneurs Exploring Energy Conservation
Just a thought: perhaps these two facts are related?
X-Ignore-X is longer than close, which I suppose would mess up the packet length. Or maybe having an unrecognized value for the Connection key would still default to a close? Just guessing here.
Ask HN: He v. She
While doing some research I am noting that most authors are using she when last century they would have used he. Was there a meeting and I missed it? :P

For some reason I feel uncomfortable when I read she instead of he. I don't think it sound natural :P

What do you use? I like he, maybe (s)he but then what about his or her.
For once, just once, I would like to see someone compare apples to apples: OO vs corresponding encapsulation techniques in functional languages (abstract data types, ML-style modules/functors, Haskell-style typeclasses).

In case anyone was wondering, yes, the functional community loves namespacing, encapsulation, and creation of new data types with functions specifically intended for use on them.

The real question is: How do we express relationships between data types...

Do we use subtyping? (OO yes, functional no).

How do we allow multiple types to see each others privates? (Friends/inheritance in OO, modules in Haskell and ML).

How do we do polymorphism over static data/functions? (Basically, doesn't exist in OO... functors in ML and typeclasses in Haskell).

The immutability debate is another discussion entirely.
No, he's tilting at interfaces. Just because it's possible doesn't make it part of the culture.
I call anecdotal evidence. Not everyone can have one of the first blogs on the web and be in the top 100 most trafficked blogs. Also, attributing the success of a startup on a blog is a bit of a stretch.
Advice for startup entrepreneurs: reward performance with vesting
IBM Software Available on EC2 With Pay-As-You-Go Licensing Model
I don't trust forecasts without standard errors. Using the smaller 1987 - 2005 data implies less precise forecasts, so that last graph needs some caveats.
This is an important topic to me. Again the other day, a friend entrepreneur of mine asked me how to structure a deal. He is starting what could be a very visible project with 2 co-founders. But he is unsure about the longevity of one of them... I walked him through various scenarios, and it's clear that vesting is a great way to keep everything fair under mot scenarios and preserve everyone's ego in the short term.
If I understand well, Techcrunch uses BOSS API only for custom search of their sites. I would expect only a small fraction of their visitors search directly from Techcrunch sites.

The change would affect significantly somebody who uses API as a part of their primary function of the site [1], for example for some search mashup (like various Cuil parodies or DuckDuckGo). For these, basically each page view could be one (or more) API requests.

[1] http://mashable.com/boss
Word-of-mouth case study: HP 31 Days of the Dragon
I wonder what Dan Lyons was thinking with his initial column. He's obviously a smart guy. He knows the blog landed him a book deal, his new job at Newsweek, and internet notoriety. He knows there is money to be made through and around blogging, so I'm inclined to think it was an intentional publicity bait, which is working amazingly well.

Otherwise, I am constantly amazed by how dense people are about the value of internet traffic. Like just having a ton of visits is the only thing the matters. Visitor intent is just as powerful a factor in the equation.
Maybe I've missed something, but it seems like you could completely eliminate the security flaw of letting your user's decide how much to pay for your software very easily. Just have the server send the price with an HMAC, check the HMAC on return, and voila.
Ah ok, I still don't see there being any barrier at all,

I bought my son a ZX Spectrum. You can still buy all the fantastic home computers on ebay etc etc.

Or, there are web based spectrum etc emulators out there where you can just write code and run it.

I'd agree though, it'd be nice to make sure kids can get access to the dev environment that lets them play quickly and easily.

It'd be cool to have something better on netbooks, like the eee. I don't know if there are any good learning programming tools included, but there definitely should be.
MIT approach versus worse-is-better philosophy
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Remember That Company You Sold Last Year? Its Buyer Wants Its Money Back
This relates to the "version 2.0" dilemma. Version 1 of a program works well enough to make money, so that team gets to make a version 2. But they try to "redo it right" by making their product do everything conceivable (think emacs), but it's slow and buggy and in the practical ways, worse than 1. Version 3 (where they learn from version 2 how to make it elegant) doesn't get written because the team gets split up because v2 was such a failure. Another example of the v2 problem is Winamp.
Good work, I admire your approach.