skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I'd probably pay double that.

I think that there is a huge difference between $0 and $ANY, in that it forces the the user to place a value on it. I think that the model to look to is MeFi, which has very high-quality comments, high-quality posts, and as others have stated, it seems to have more memory than your average site. Old posts are frequently referenced and there is a strong culture of DRY (don't repeat yourself).

The main objection seems to be that the site will shed users that can't/won't pay. For those users that don't have credit cards or Pay Pal (I, for one, hate PP with all my heart) could there be other options to make payment more flexible? What else is out there if you don't want to limit yourself to payments of only those types?

But I do think the $5 barrier to entry will improve, or maintain, the quality. If you don't want to pay, sorry, but I like HN more than I like J. Random Bozo's troll.
I'd go for the microformats way of representing time, now that they've standardized it:

http://microformats.org/wiki/datetime-design-pattern

<abbr class="foo" title="YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+ZZ:ZZ">Date Time</abbr>

There are a lot of good alternatives proposed and debated on that page, so I'm confident that they've come up with the best way to represent the date in the DOM. Additionally, it's readable from Javascript-less environments and and uses only standard elements and attributes.
Note that both were on the law school track, and in fact both made it to law school. If this was their intention all along, taking, say, an engineering degree would have been pointless - you pay even more in tuition.

Taking out $60,000 in loans to go to law school of all places is not such a bad idea. Your pay after graduation would certainly make it worthwhile, and they both are making $100K+ a year.
Ask HN: how to learn principles of DB schema design?
I've been working with MySQL for several years, and I'd call myself pretty competent (I grok and use temporary tables, sub-selects, multiple types of joins, explain, etc.), but my knowledge of the * principles * of database design might be lacking. What I know basically comes from reading Wikipedia articles.

Aside from reading up on database normalization ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization ), and related database articles, what do folks recommend ?

Just to be clear: if we were talking about programming languages, I'm not asking how to be a better BASIC programmer - I'm asking 'what is lisp and how do I learn it?'.

thanks,

TJIC
For those of us not in the US, can you let us know what the big deal is with these E.D. ads? Somehow in my head an ad about treating ED doesn't seem so bad...
It is all about the team.

There are several companies currently executing on an idea I came up with (and thought was a brilliant, hundred million dollar idea) a year and a half ago.

But... My friends and I were comletely unprepared to execute. We learned this the hard way after months of hard work. Now those other companies have VC funding, tons of employees, etc.

If I could have done it, I'd be in their shoes.

Oh well. You live and you learn. It was an obvious idea in retrospect. I'll just come up with more.
Prehistoric 'monster snake' remains discovered (2,500 pounds, 42.7 feet)
How about a lottery where everyone pays, but where the winner gets loads of free karma?
Is Facebook just a passing fad?
First, Christians do all sorts of things for the wrong reasons, its best to clear that first before trying to explain their actions.

Second, Going to church on Sunday and believing Sunday to be a Sabbath day are two totally different things.

In fact, keeping Sabbaths is not a Christian thing to do at all. Christians do it, but that's because they think they are (really, really want to be) Jews. Tons of the crazy stuff Christians do are because they try to adopt little pieces of the Jewish economy (10 commandments, feast days, sabbaths, etc, etc,).

I don't know when/why Sunday became the de facto day for Christian church-going, but I can answer for myself, that I attend church on Sundays because it is the most convenient day (where I live) to do so. I don't regard it higher than any other day of the week (ok, maybe Monday ;).
Where's Markopolos's Blog (About Bernie Madoff)?
Does it work with SQLAlchemy yet? I see no changelog anywhere, so it's hard to tell why I should reconsider my perception that web2py cares only about reinventing the wheel.
SAP: Clueless Consultants From Accenture And IBM Giving Us A Bad Name
Hacker News Foibles
BTW, I just turned off orange usernames for now. It's not a policy decision; computing it was killing the server.

(It's not the computation itself that's the problem. The problem is that it causes a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would otherwise not be.)
Ask HN: Is HN slow for you lately?  Or even not responding?
For the past month or so, HN has been getting slower and slower. Do you experience that? A few minutes ago it was not even responding.
World's largest telescope under construction in China
I have a godaddy and a hostmonster account. hostmonster is VASTLY superior in my experience. They use cpanel for the backend interface so it's somewhat standardized. Also the call center is in the USA and they actually TELL you what number you are in line when you are waiting on hold. When you do speak to somebody, it's not usually that long of a wait and they actually know something about how to provide support.
I figured someone might mention this. (I almost addressed it in my original comment, but it was a bit peripheral to my main point.) The various quantum interpretations are not schools of physics thought; every physicist "believes" in quantum mechanics. They are schools of thought on the interpretation of quantum mechanics---which certainly is an indication of that (sub)field's intellectual immaturity. And, like economics, the interpretation of quantum mechanics has more than its share of bullshit. As Stephen Hawking supposedly once said, "When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun."

N.B. I predict the rise of quantum decoherence theory will change this picture in fairly short order.
Yes it was "dead" for me for a few minutes just now
No, you're confusing cause and effect. The arrival of the spammers and trolls led to the discussion of the long(er) timers over how to prevent it. The meta-discussion was the symptom, not the cause.
Yes. In fact, I noticed problems increasing around the time of PG's 2009-01-15 "Faster" news.
How to save newspapers (mentions TipJoy)
I tried to respond to you, but it 404'd you which was ironic.
Yes, it does seem a bit janky today.
It crashes every couple of hours and then takes a few seconds to minutes to come back up.

I've just been playing around with the source code to see if I could figure out why it would lose the port, but the only thing I can think of is if the whole mzscheme process dies, otherwise it would just hang while trying to connect and it doesn't do that.
well written by a journalist (not an internet nerd like us) who has come to understand how important micropayments are and how they might save good journalism
Yes, that has been occurring frequently for me.

Many times when it hangs for me, I seem to get the "static" parts of the page (title, upper bar) and as soon as the dynamic parts would be expected to load it hangs or times out or goes very slowly.
I'm relatively ignorant about these matters. Anyone out there willing to chime in with a qualified opinion?

dcurtis, i know you're here somewhere...
The computation for the orange usernames was destroying performance. Not directly, but because it caused a lot of stuff to get loaded from disk that would not otherwise have been. So I've temporarily turned the feature off till I can write a more efficient version.
So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time
Excellent take on the new opportunity for developers through the iphone
I should have qualified and said this was Kansas City. $110k definitely can raise a family there. It's not exactly the carefree level of money, but when the average house costs $185k, it's no where near 'lower middle class'.
So how would an elite hacker who knows no one currently on Hacker news join under your system.

Seems like a pretty broken model to me.
Seagate continues to communicate bad news
It's under NDA, so I can't do a day-by-day blog of everything that gets said. However, I'll certainly write something up toward the end of the experience.

We do have a public group blog though, which you can find here:

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/
I think the last point is the most important:

"6. Everybody seemed to feel the web game has shifted to the higher level. A lot appeared to feel that small publishers and sites would start to be squeezed out of the market in the coming years."

This is true, but I don't think it's completely accurate. To succeed as a small publisher, you will need to be remarkably talented and know how to efficiently market your site.

Gone are the days of lame content sites succeeding on pure bulk, like About.com. Except for Mahalo I guess.
PG: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468585

Maybe that'll help.

Edit: Paul's post here made that link irrelevant.
The problem with the official implementation (using lots of divs) is that you lose the semantical value. They should have used the <button> element that can be styled using CSS. He does mention that he tried using <button> elements, but it was released using nested <div> elements
I appreciate your breakdown, and your post below about how its harder to rent with a family.

I still think it's ridiculous. I'm not going to go into a point by point rundown because it would take a lot of space and fork the argument several times, but basically I feel that if you ran these numbers by most Americans they would first laugh out loud, then get a little angry.

You seem to think access to top schools and a luxurious lifestyle are prerequisites for a marriage. Empirically, this is false.

That's looking at this situation WITH children. Once you take the children out, as was true with the original case, it gets even more ridiculous. They no longer have such a case for a mortgage and even if they do keep it, they can put away about 1500 a month by not feeding and babysitting a kid.
Same here. But, I wish there was a way to get HBO.
Do you mind posting the current code for it? I'm sure some of us would love to give optimization a shot.
It's running out of memory. The half million or so of HN comments and stories no longer all fit in memory at once. This is not in itself a problem. We only load stuff as needed, and only crawlers ever look at the older stuff. But it does mean that eventually (currently after a day or so) we run out of space and the server crashes and restarts.
I'm working on a less crude version of garbage collection.
Legendary VC Arthur Rock invested with Madoff
PHP Dynamic JavaScript SCRIPT Insertion for Embedding
I don't think I am. There were meta-discussions very early on.
Optimizing a program via messageboard would be like writing a program by mail.
Or like a programming competition.
Use your mouse to quickly highlight the text. Now you can read it as light grey on blue, which is much easier.
We have been discovered!!!
Just because everyone else is doing it. I like Compojure (library for Clojure):

(html
[:head {:title "Boats.com" }]
[:body
[:h1 "Boats.com has great deals"]
[:ul
[:li "$49 for a canoe"]]
(sidebar)])

render(:partial, sidebar) is accomplished by just calling another function that generates html.
No, it's not a fad there is too much value in the network. Now, once the social 'graph is made easily portable then things will change but right now FB has little incentive to do so.
Are Internships Working?
If she's an elite hacker, she already knows someone on HN, or could easily get to know someone...
Yes, not responding at random times.
You can easily commute from Jersey to Manhattan, make student loan payments and raise a child on $110k/yr. I did the first two on only $20,000/year (though I admit, my loans were a lot more sensible than those of the couple described in this article).

You could also live on $110k manhattan if you are willing to live north of 111th st. A 2br 2bath up there ran $2100/month back during the bubble (less now).
Let's you and I be clear: I agree with you that 2.8k/mo is not a dealbreaking debt load for a couple with a joint income of 200k. I'm just suggesting that, on the story's own terms, it clearly could be: their marriage could have easily broken up because that (large) amount of debt was incompatible with their life plan.
Was Friendster, Ryze, Myspace? a fad? Probably.

Digg? Yes.

Is it an essential cant live without it staple in your life? If you can't answer that question easily then its a fad for you.

For me its a fad, a willing participation on my part because so many others part of the fad- its still a fad though, eventually the flock will leap to the next fad, and the next, and the next.
That is a good one, but I got the feeling he was holding a lot back. Not just tech secrets, I mean.
It doesn't look so bad to me. They're reporting on the rate of growth of the revenue; not just the revenue. If you want to look at it positively, the chart provided shows that online advertising revenues have not fallen for at least the last 5 quarters... not something you could say about a lot of markets.

While it's true that the increase between Q3'07 and Q4'07 is not as large as in '08, revenues are still going up.
Median household income income in the US 48,000 USD (2006).

Let's say you get to keep 1/2 of the 60,000 per year over that for rent. That's easily 2,500 extra rent to cover living close to Manhattan / San Francisco over the national average and you probably don't need a car. The secret is to avoid Starbucks and other expensive things that are not part of the normal middle class lifestyle but seem so important to yuppies.
I referred to return on investment because there are other law schools in California

a) with lower list price (and thus lower total cost of attendance)

and

b) even higher prestige (thus making a higher starting salary even more likely).

They started out with reasonably good starting salaries, but unreasonably high levels of student debt.
No, I wouldn't pay for it. Shouldn't the trolling issue naturally work it self out over time? If anonymous users are the issue perhaps add some additional validation of identities?
yes, if it was moderated by a editorial staff - not crowd rated. otherwise, no.
I think it would be preferable to do both. Have a few really solid and well contained modules that are well tested.

Testing is only a piece.
I recently did a microcontroller project that needed a fast way to estimate the root mean square of a bunch of data samples. Simple in a high level language. Nearly 200 lines in assembly.

I believe it.
dwm, dmenu, mrxvt, w3m, xzgf, vifm, mpg123, mplayer, vim, curl
You're also adding a ridiculous amount of markup, it's less semantic (you have a table in your button!), and requires use of an image which requires yet another http request. If you look at the "just barely enough to be renderable" mark-up of the G homepage, you'll see that they're really big on conserving size...
I was offered a job at Bloomberg in 2003, at a significantly better starting than $110k/yr, moving from Ann Arbor, MI. I did this math. So, three things:

(1) I'll spare you yet another hypothetical family budget monthly itemization.

(2) I'll concede that it is clearly possible to raise a family in New York on $110k/yr.

(3) I'll assert again that it is not comfortable to raise a family in New York on $110k/yr, nor does it appear to be easy.

There are obviously a lot of sacrifices you can make to make the budget work out, but in a family scenario, not all sacrifices are tenable.
But it blatantly does. The National Lottery funds all sorts of stuff ranging from arts to athletics and provides a form of entertainment in and of itself. People who don't wish to participate don't, yet it is still very popular.
Right, but it shouldn't matter what the makeup of the top 30 comments are. In this case, it only matters that someone can net a 3.5 average over their last 50. Which maybe isn't statistically probable for users who happen to write the occasional popular but low-value comment.

Either way, I would argue that while the upper bound on exacerbation isn't high, the same is true of any potential mitigation. At the end of the day, I don't see the major problems subsiding much, and it's not just one-line zingers, but, say, uncharitable comments that piss people off and provoke deep threads of people talking past each other. There's nothing more unpleasant in online communities than being the recipient of an uncharitable reply, and feeling compelled to defend oneself. (I say this being guilty of uncharitable replies myself.)
Interesting that assume said elite hacker is female.
Breaking up is not going to reduce their debt.
I consider the silence of the Copenhagen interpretation over what happens during measurement to be an actual difference of physics, not of interpretation. If some other theory were able to predict, say, the time it takes for a wave function to collapse, or the number of particles another must interact with for it to decohere, or so on, it's a difference in predictive capacity, not merely of metaphysics.
Exactly. It was not faster for me but slower. I didn't report it though, because my own connection was unstable at the time (I was playing with asterisk and my LAN).
It does, but given how quickly it runs, I can't think it's doing that much? I remember playing with it a while ago and not seeing any performance worth remembering.

Apparently the latest version of mono has much better AOT support, and performance improvements as well.
None of these are extremely surprising:

#1 considering VS's have probably heard half a dozen "Facebook, but with FeatureFoo" pitches a dozen times a day for about a year.

#2 and #3 go hand-in hand - Google seems to have gotten the top of the hill on monetizing people going from one place to another on the web. If you figure out how to take away 1% of their tolls, you've got a successful startup.

#4 is an old one - education doesn't scale. Web can make it scale, with money to be made.

#5 is the core of "Web2.0"

#6 seem to be off - as jwesley expounds on well.
'Starbucks saved my life'
Anyone else feel the site is getting too self referential? I noticed the lag as well, but is this worthy of a devoted thread taking up space on the first page?

The recent surge in self referential threads has felt Reddit-esque.
60+ Resources For Entrepreneurs To Step Up and Take Charge
I've had trouble when I clicked on 'submissions' for a while, and now even 'threads' is getting pretty slow.
I doubt it will ever work with SQLAlchemy, it comes with its own ORM layer. Does Django work with SQLAlchemy yet?
First off they started at over 200k/year and one consulted on the side so they where probably into 300k/year fairly quickly. With 200k in student debt you should not buy a house until it's paid down. Rent a nice place for 2500$ / month in 1995 and in 3 years that's down to 160k. This is normal for most people starting out. My guess is they where trying to keep up with the jonzes and living way above their means.
Nope, it's working fine towards me.
That's interesting, would you be willing to share some more of the technical details (any problems you ran into, rails/db side) and maybe some stats, requests per second, type?

Working on a rails-iphone app here and need to start stress testing it soon!
I appreciate the offer, but it's not the kind of optimization that consists of taking one chunk of code and making it faster. The answer will consist of several little changes spread out throughout the code.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466965
No.

Sorry, let me elaborate. I do comment on HN, I generally don't post as much as I should. I find HN valuable but no more valuable than other community sites I frequent. If HN went to $5/yr I'd lose some of the discussion but ultimately I'd move on to a different community that didn't charge $5/yr. Whilst there are many on this site that probably would pay the $5/yr for this community with this amount of users, the community would lose a lot of people and the quality of the community would drop with the quantity (as in you're not just losing deadwood and trolls here).
It seems like it is something that could be computed once every few hours and cached without affecting the experience.
The expected value of extra documentation for a possible lawsuit is lower than the expected return on just carrying out the business plan with the same resources. That is, it's almost certainly a waste of time.
Why Incentives Are Effective, Irresistible, and Almost Certain to Backfire | Fast Company
The Case Against Micropayments - Clay Shirky

http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/515
I completely agree. It's been getting that way for too long, and it's half the reason I check the site less frequently lately. I don't need to see a Happy New Year post here. It's cliche and unnecessary.

Polls about which text editor people use are the same, because they're just going to be repeated by newbies every few months.

My opinion is that self-posts should be on a separate page, by themselves.
You can use SQLAlchemy with it as you can use any Python package you like but...

1) The web2py DAL is designed to work with SQLFORM. SQLAlchemy is not. By using SQLAlchemy you would be using web2py more or less like you would use Pylons, thus missing a lot of the extra stuff that web2py does for you (and that you do not see because you think SQLAlchemy).

2) It is internal DAL is comparable and in some cases better than SQLAlchemy because is smaller, faster, and it works on the Google App Engine. By using SQLAlchemy your web2py programs would not run on GAE.

3) web2py users like the web2py DAL better than SQLAlchemy. That is why hey use web2py.

We are not reinventing the wheel. We are just building a better wheel that runs faster and is easier to spin. We are not reinventing the wheel any more or less than any other framework did.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467838
Easy on the anti-designer bigotry there, dude, it's only the crappy designers that use super low contrast text just because they think it's cool. That's not the case here - see my comment below and pg's confirmation for a rational discussion behind its usage here on HN, it's a very intentional decision and serves the intent well.

Now whether the intent is right or not (should HN morph more into a Metafilter-like free-for-all message board for hacker types, rather than a structured conversation around links?) is a different discussion. I like the current orientation towards news.
I think it's time to go to an "elitist" European-style system where only qualified students get to go to university

What system is that? Here in the UK the ex-polys churn out Media Studies grads like there's no tomorrow. You don't even need good A-levels to get in. GMTV did a story the other day on how they're working manual labour jobs now. Now don't get me wrong we need people to do those jobs but we didn't need for them to spend 3 years partying on the taxpayer first.
Mouseless and WIMPless desktops are great. I've been using ratpoison for the last 6 months or so and I love it, previously I was using ION3 for about a year but I ended up not using the tabs at all, just having everything in fullscreen and using the hotkeys to switch between them. Of course it wouldn't work for everyone but when 99% of your computing time is spent in Emacs and Firefox it really does make sense.
Yeah me too, as I have my Mac Mini connected to my LCD TV & use a wireless hand-held mouse as remote.

All together I pay $50 a month for Internet & limited cable (Internet is cheaper when you purchase limited cable).