skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gets me pretty burnt out on 'programming stuff'

22 here -- I have a similar programming day-job and nothing works better than a good 1 hour of lifting/running to relax and clear your mind of the last 8-9 hours at work. Usually after my workout I'll spend another hour to cook a good dinner and watch some TV to kick back. I make it a point to shut the door on the past 8 hours and mentally move on.

Working out seems counter intuitive because you think you'll be more tired after a workout (some days it will exhaust you), but once you get a good routine going you feel more energized and rest better during the night, etc.
It makes me sad that I no longer see it, but just a [dead] placeholder.

I like graying out the obnoxious stuff. I don't mind forcing people to click again to see something that is truly offensive. But I think when stuff disappears completely a certain line has been crossed.
Given that point alone, it's almost a no-brainer than the Kindle needs help.
Chumby bets on Internet-connected TVs
Dating Site Takes The Date Out Of Dating
The people who buy it don't have to use it; that has got to be a factor.

I remember one company, the CEO was trying to prepare it to be bought by a large company - one bullet item - "enterprise contact management and sales tracking software needs to be in place" . So SalesLogix was bought, 15 people were trained on it - one week later no one was using it.

The top salesman was using his (original version, this was late 90s) PalmPilot and his Windows laptop instead.

The sales engineer that had been with the company the longest and was employee #5, had 3 big accounts to keep happy and maybe 2 people to talk to at each account, for a total of 6.
Sort of a follow on ... right now the flow is:

1: click a button
2: select a user name
3: join a room

You could eliminate step 2 (see, e.g. http://etherpad.com) and defer the choosing of a username until later. That would make it even easier to use.

Also, there is a display bug where you try to join a room w/o picking a name first - the message (Name cannot be empty) overflows the lightbox.
Truth be told, it's not too bad considering all it does. Each language is being used for its strengths.

Programming at that level requires HTML and Javascript. Python is integrated as part of Mako; calling them separate languages is valid but questionable. (Given that the author is maximizing the number of languages, I'm a little surprised jQuery wasn't included in the list.)
The non-software patents were critical.

This isn't patenting a button clicking method. It's more similar in utility and specificity to pagerank. It has been a huge R&D effort over the last few years.

We could just keep it secret. But I want to publish with it and it could be valuable if the startup is as successful as we hope. Isn't that what the patent system is for?

If other startups entered our market and used the same algorithm; I am unsure what I would do. It's more for potential investors/acquisitions and our ability to publish.
Do you think you have seen it all?
Bespin reminds me how fast our industry is moving on ...
Patenting is the last item on our pre-launch list
Becker and Posner have somewhat more to say:

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/02/selling_i...

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/02/what_if_a...
Well it's accurate, a corporation isn't an individual and when you're dealing with big business it is always controlled by multiple people so any decision is decided by a group.
Is There Intelligent Life on Television?
It's interesting, but I wonder why he didn't just buy SheetCam for $150.

http://www.sheetcam.com/Features/Milling.shtml
So why is Apple also working on this? Do they want to build netbooks?
Agreed, more emphasis on 'breaking stories' means that there'll be more fake 'breaking stories'. Look at tabloids, the more news they 'break' the better they sell and now everything is outright lies.
Why netbooks are killing Microsoft
Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platform Now Free
I don't know what gmail does, but what you describe can be done with spamassassin. The Horde webmail program has a way for users to submit false positives and false negatives to the spamassassin training command.
Departing workers often steal data from ex-employers
Then I would seriously advise against publishing, because once published the cat is out of the bag and a patent will not protect you. Keep in mind that software patents are not recognized in a large part of the world and if one of your competitors sets up shop in a country where software patents are not valid you have no recourse.

For a physical apparatus it's a wholly different game.
I suspect it's more because these books have a fanatical following, the kind of people who want to deliberately manipulate 'Best Of...' lists to give their beliefs more publicity.
How Sabeer Bhatia started Hotmail on $300,000 and sold it two years later for $400 million
Wow, flashback from 1999
Explanations to common Java exceptions
The blog is the new resume
Finder has to be the weakest part of the OS X experience at the moment.
Is Slumdog Millionaire worth the praise?
Military Technologies You Won’t Believe
Great post Paul.

I'm pushing premium over freemium.

It relates to point 5 heavily and we're getting the startups we work with to stop trying to be a freemium company and start with premium first. I've outlined my arguments here;

http://www.pollenizer.com/content/premiree-more-premium-less...
Yeah I don't see the beef either - what is the counterpoint "ideal" way of doing it?

One language? Because you'd have to select HTML by default... And I'm guessing that might not make for the best user experience.

Also surprised they didn't include (implied) CSS.
I think you need to at least move the JS out and write it unobtrusively. Sticking 'onClicks' all over the place inside a templating language is a recipe for spaghetti.
I have the same problem, I just don't approve of 'style' when it comes to writing. There are lots of personal style and it does amazing, but there are company style guides and printing houses all have different ones.

I have a serious problem using '...' in writing unless it's from the person's mouth. I always learnt if someone says something directly to you then use '...' and if it comes indirect you use "..." so all novels should use "..." because it's fiction and was never said. Yet so many printing houses have gone away from using "..." and have switched to using the quotation form '...'.

I'm unsure why I get worked up over this, I guess I just think it's stupid so few people have control over how the masses perceive the English language. This is a prime example, in the US most institutions use 'is' in this situation, to such a degree that 'are' looks bizarre and the opposite happened in the UK.

The same is with 'ise' and 'ize'. Using 'ize' is so prevalent in the US that in many words the letter S is being supplanted with Z in situations it's not supposed to be. The prime example is how analyse is incorrectly spelled (even in spell checkers) as analyze and I'm sorry but it is technically correct to substitute the suffix 'ise' for 'ize', however analyse is a complete word without suffix, it's not discussing anal.
I think the rules are different when you're creating an API that's supposed to be used by thousands of developers and millions of people right off the bat. FB is no longer a startup and developers are depending on them not just for the apps to 'work', but for their very livelihoods.

The app I'm working on for a living was brought down recently because FB changed the name of a method in their javascript library.

Once the origin of the bug was discovered it was easy to fix, but that's still a pretty unreasonable thing to do when, as was the case, a major library that is linked to from the very front of the wiki (the FB/AS3 bridge) is broken by an update.

It's also pretty painful when the median call to a certain specific API method is about a second or two, but the peak is literally ten seconds.
With title "Perl for Bioinformatics"
Why ? Flashback to '78 when the term was coined maybe, but since roughly 2004 there has been an enormous acceleration in the amount of funds that are poured into this field.

Right now a large number of companies is actively building solutions to deal with enormous amounts of genetic data, pattern matching (see the various iterations of 'blast'), very rapid sequencing (a complete human genome now in about 14 days, possibly already faster).

Nanotech is still in its infancy in comparision, and major breakthroughs in nano machinery seem to be forever about 10 years in to the future (a bit like real A.I.).
I posted this at the original blog entry, but his Preview and CAPTCHA didn't seem to work correctly in my Firefox 3....

========

<p>Hi Sam, so, if we changed that old headline to reflect the bodytext's "Internet-enabled desktops", would you be satisfied then?

<p>These consumer audits have been going on for a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.macromedia.com/softw... long time</a>, and now that North Americans have their first acceptable mobile web device it could well be time to help remove something they might find confusing.

<p>(btw, be careful on "native web application", because you need to break it down with some <a href="http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=All&alts=p&cats... granularity</a> to find exactly what that term means.)

<p>jd/adobe
I see no "leave a comment link". in fact there is no word "comment" on the page at all. Fail at web accessibility, you know the part where your site should work without javascript. At least I assume this is added if I allow one of the 10-ish domains that noscript says I'm blocking, I tried allowing the main domain, but that didn't help.
How short is "too quickly" ?
Another thing you see with software developed by large teams: No one takes ownership. Think about it-- How many people who worked on Vista say, "Wow-- Vista SUCKS. And I feel responsible." My guess is NONE. Instead, they all say, "Vista sucks. I did the best I could to make it NOT suck, but I just couldn't make a big enough difference."

The rare examples of big-team success that you say invariably have a big ego (benevolent or not) at the top who has a sense of ownership (Steve Jobs? Linus?).

If everyone on the project has the attitude of "This is MY baby and you will NOT fuck it up," you can build great things. If no one does (the most common state on software teams), you almost certainly cannot.
since roughly 2004 there has been an enormous acceleration in the amount of funds that are poured into this field.

Really? Because I left the field in 2004 partially because funding was drying up.

Some of the big ideas in bioinformatics are interesting but most of the grunt work is not very interesting or fun. And, the "bioinformaticist" on the team is the one responsible for the grunt work. The actual work is mostly 1990s style java, perl and visual basic programming.

Maybe things have significantly changed over the past five years but I doubt it since I've hired a number of refugees from various biopharm firms.
Atlassian Adds Widgets to Confluence via Widgetbox
Facebook has been approaching profitability for a while. They've got a bunch of different models, some of them have been working, and they're constantly refining.

Both Facebook and Twitter would collapse if they charged. Not as many people would pay for Twitter as you seem to think.
It looks like @tropicana isn't even owned by the brand. Most likely, they searched twitter for "tropicana", as many brands seem to do. If the company replies to the user from another account, it should show up even if that user is not following @pepsico or whatever (depending on the user's options).
I want a vehicle that costs $4,000 and does moderate-good mileage with good safety. It could be a possibility with Tata Motors buying out brands like Jaguar and Land Rover. They have a vehicle that fills this criteria selling for $2,500.

I know, however, that if I'm spending $12,000 on a Yaris, $25,000 on your basic sedan or $35,000 on a Ford F-150 what am I going to choose? Well I'm going with the F-150 (or other truck) because the amount it'll cost me to do 'extra' things with a car is going to cost me more than it saves to buy a truck. I've worked in construction, which means any work on my own house is going to be done with my two hands and everything I use needs to be loaded into my truck.

If there was a car for $4,000 I'd probably get it and suffer with renting a U-Haul every time I wanted to do something, but over the run of 10 years U-Haul's will add up way past the $10,000 difference between a truck and a sedan.
yeah backgroundrb sucks, who wrote that shit? (me and i wish i never did)
Where are you located ?

I know lots of the code is in Java, the people that I know that are active in the field are complaining about that more than I care for.

here is an overview of the UFT faculty for Genome Biology and Bioinformatics:

http://www.biochemistry.utoronto.ca/cgb/index.php/Category:F...

They added a whole new wing to their campus...
Considering there are things you can do with web apps now that you couldn't do at all in 1996, I'd say for some use cases web development is now "infinitely" faster.
Comment I left on the post:

As a potential customer, instant deployment is not what appeals to me. If I knew that 1 day after my code was done, my app would be working just perfectly, I'd be a happy camper. Instant deployment = cool but not mission critical... at least not for me. (Now, if deployment took 2 weeks, I'd be pissed.)

What appeals to me about Heroku is exactly what I like about my MacBook Pro: It just glides. I don't have to think about it. Things just work (at least in theory.) It's not the time, but the thinking about deployment that I'd like to remove.

I just click the magic deploy button (command) and tada, "It's a live." And if I hit the jackpot and land a massive client or show up on TechCrunch, things will just keep on gliding smoothly. And hopefully, I'll make more money and serve more clients.

That is the ideal I'd like to reach.

Now instant deployment might be something I fall in love with (like git) but I'm not there yet. I just want things to "just work" for now.
Bug in parsing: line 2 is mostly javascript, not mako.
Today is not my day...
That pretty much sums up my experience with FB's APIs thus far. Very little documentation, even to the point where it's hard to figure out what the APIs even do. Little to no support for languages other than PHP.

It's sad too. If they could put out a working (not even decent, good or usable, but working as in compilable) C# wrapper for any of their APIs, I'd have all of my apps using FB to some extent. As it is, it's just a time sink.
With Chernin Out At News Corp, What Happens To FIM?
Do you really need Venture Capital funding?
IMHO, IMDB.com qualified as Web 2.0...
Ah, bingo. Yes, "it just works" and "it glides" are exactly what we're going for. Our version of the magic deploy button is "git push". We've got some great detailed posts coming up about this.

The thing that we've discovered is that instant and "it just works" are tightly related. If something takes minutes or hours to do (even if automated), it's likely that there are many steps involved - each of which is a potential point of failure.
Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?
If you had a design/marketing/seo cofounder that was willing to hunt for sales/bizdev opportunities, domain knowledge for that person doesn't have to be THAT deep and would bring huge benefits.

I think you might be overstating things here. I've found my domain knowledge to be very important when selling tarsnap -- being able to convincingly explain why tarsnap is secure and efficient (and why the competition isn't!) has gained me a lot of customers.
Ridiculously sluggish Javascript pages which are still loading after 5 minutes.
"5. If you're a serious startup, use Engine Yard, they're life savers."

- If you're a serious startup that doesn't monetize off of display ads, use Engine Yard. Otherwise, you can't afford them.
This is/was already done to some degree. I don't have all the details but relatives on both sides of my family had to prove "their value" when applying to enter the United States (from China). The application process is a long (on the order of years) and tedious one with no guarantees.

A bit off-topic:
Some of you may recall the hoopla in California a couple years ago regarding granting amnesty/citizenship to illegal immigrants who had been in the country long enough. One angle the media did little reporting on is how upset those who played by the rules and went/were going through the actual immigration process were that they were being bumped by those who broke the rules and entered the country illegally. It's not all that different from how financially-responsible people are upset today that the irresponsible receiving bailouts.
yikes, missing two languages. everyone knows number of lines should equal number of languages.
Twitter doesn't have the same operational costs though, so that top-line number doesn't need to be as high as you would think it would be.
A valid point undermined by the extravagant attempt to prove it.
Actually my point was that your average teenager is more or less attracted to the "latest and greatest" type games (enforcing your point about consoles), which in the MMO arena would be WOW.

Its not meant as a negative sentiment aimed at WOW or its playerbase, it's more along the lines that EQ2 has a different kind of following that stems from it's roots as being one of the original MMO franchises. As a result, many players migrated from EQ1 to EQ2 when Sony released it, which would suggest that it's playerbase is traditionally a much older crowd.
The small portion of time I spend maintaining a Facebook app that my company supports is without doubt the most unenjoyable, tedious, soul destroying time I spend on anything.

What isn't outright broken is ugly, poorly documented, highly fragile (works one minute then fails, then works again for no reason), unreliable (occasionally major parts of the API just break during upgrades with no notice), full of arbitrary and unexplained constraints (how many invites / notifications / emails etc. you can send all have built in limits per day after which they just stop working) and if nothing else, it's just ugly as all hell. Layering FBML on top of HTML and then trying to work with FBJS is a hellish way to construct a UI.
Rails scales just fine - the problem is that it's just really expensive to do it.

Here's some of our learnings:

1. Use query_trace to trace your DB calls and query_analyzer to automatically run EXPLAIN on each call:

http://github.com/ntalbott/query_trace/tree/master
http://github.com/jeberly/query-analyzer/tree/master

2. Use our patches to mongrel proc_title to troubleshoot slow queries: http://asemanfar.com/Request-Queue-via-Mongrel-Proctitle

3. Don't use ActiveRecord.

4. Don't use any link or url helpers in Rails.

5. For that matter, don't use Rails. Rewrite your most hit components in something faster.

I love Ruby, but the simple truth of it is that we'd be saving a couple of engineer's worth of money if we weren't on Rails.
But Twitter is valuable because of the number of people using it. Get rid of them and other users dwindle, and it would feed back on itself. That's the same problem that Facebook has: each user less is a drop in value for the site.
That's an application bottleneck which is fixed by more application servers. This has no effect on scaling what-so-ever.

And by scaling here, we're talking about 1 M to 10 M, not 10,000 to 100,000.
Did you say WHY you want to go back to school? It is a very personal decision to make. Many make it to the top just fine (maybe not easy) without the paper in their hands. I have to agree with you on the BS that schools deal out. ASU made it clear during my time there, that they were a business in it for the money. But regardless, just worry about what it is you're looking to get out of the experience.
The digital version of sticking together pages of a book draft.
"While it's rumored that Apple is keeping some more significant interface changes close to its chest at this time..."

I sure hope so because I see no reason to get it with, basically, only those changes.
I usually use too-large images in my design nowadays, because I tell them to scale with the page. Thus, when you increase the font size or resize your browser, the image gets larger, but not more pixelated.
A Challenge To Break Python Security
I REALLY liked the new packaging. I actually bought one simply because of that.

Now wouldn't that be considered a win for PepsiCo?
This page reads like a parody of a ycombinator startup.

Taking the 'what people want' mantra a little too literally.
We have now come full circle. Next week: learn how to cut out Twitter entirely, and just use IRC! IRC is poised to be "the next Twitter", so get in early and be cool later!
Rails Developer Needed
KODA, an online start up based out of Union Square, in the heart of San Francisco, is looking for smart, innovative and talented web developers who can join our entrepreneurial team. Developed in collaboration with IDEO and Pivotal Labs, KODA is scheduled to be released in April of 2009. The company is currently funded by angel investors.

What is KODA?
KODA is an online system that redefines the job recruiting process for the emerging workforce. The website bridges the communication gap between millennials (Generation Y) whose skills are not accurately reflected in the standard resume and companies that face time/efficiency challenges.

KODA, which means friend or ally in Apache, is designed to create a “shared space” for millennials and companies to come together, discover more about each other and go beyond the resume and basic company descriptions.

Responsibilities
-Become the first website developers in-house!!
-Ruby on Rails experience (six months +).
-Experience with web applications connected to a relational database.
-A Computer Science degree (preferred).
-Startup mentality (self-starter, proactive, flexible)

CONTACT: Jeff Berger at jeff@koda.us
but then mr. myhrvold couldn't horde a bunch of patents and collect protection money that is then reinvested in the hording operation, and then he wouldn't be able to bake the world's biggest chocolate chip cookie that he was so eagerly planning.
I agree. It's enough to say that development has gotten much faster, but deployment is still a slow pain in the neck, and you are the guys who are going to change deployment. Most of the time the smooth, concise story sells best, in my experience.
Comcast to launch OnDemand Online to select audiences
I think the numbers/graph are necessary. Of course they are made-up, but the point is the trend over time. I find this argument quite compelling, and I wouldn't have found it interesting had it just been a qualitative description of these trends.
You said exactly what I was thinking.
Atlantis? No, it Atlant-isn't.