skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny how everyone seems to totally overlook that simple fact.
Well, what would you answer aggression with, then? Some aggressors may be turned aside by reason, but what about those who just, for instance, dislike your face? If you're not in a position to flee the situation, what are you going to do?
And yet there are times where you'd like to remain anonymous.
The detriments of a coherent identity on and offline are only going to get more compelling, too.
Tapes went well beyond what you are giving them credit for - the mixtape scene in rap pre-released compilations of hits and were massively popular. Many artists claim they went the equivalent of platinum on mixtapes in NY alone. The distribution chains were also quite complex and well defined. However - it also served as a method for new artists to gain exposure so artists would actually leak their own material to good DJ's, sometimes even paying them to use their material. So it was a symbiotic relationship, like downloading music is.

It wasn't just teenage kids recording the radio. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_Tape:_The_Art_of_Cassette_C... if you want way too much information on it.
They're still valuable, only not in a advertising-driven model. As a platform though, it has a ton of value; when the majority of a company's employees are connected on a system they use personally on a daily basis, there's a lot of potential. When an entire city is connected, you open the door to interaction that haven't been possible until now.

Facebook could replace dating, restaurant review, business productivity, classified sites, and expand into things we haven't thought of yet, but that requires a substantial user base. The company is still growing out of its college foundation, but judging by its growing acceptance among the 25+ age group, it could start gaining value fast.
Why video game music is different from every other kind of soundtrack
ASCIIcasts - Text version of Railscasts
Wikis, too. Kills me when I run across a wiki.hostname.com that has no link to hostname.com.

I think the problem (with blogs, wikis, ticket tracking, SCM systems) is that people stick to what came in the box and don't bother to tweak the templates for niceties like this.
Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrades: Difficult, but not impossible
Even with all the problems with immigrating to the US, it still is one of very few countries that is welcoming to the immigrants in general. People in the US, a lot of them, have always put aside everything about where a person is from and look at him as a individual. This doesn't happen in a lot of places. Europe for most parts has been, so far, protectionist. When I decided to move to the US there weren't really a lot of options for me, Europe would have been a lot tougher.
Perhaps, but isn't Australia generally very racist? That would definitely be something that would hamper immigration.
This stat is accurate for applying >10 years ago.

Never stay at a crappy job so it appears 'better' on your resume, when I am hiring I look only at what you worked on. Many candidates of higher caliber I interviewed bounced around.
Very true. Proper grammar is important, and this forum is as good as any place to clear up any questions so that mistakes can be avoided in the future.
I get that feeling too every time I read an article like this.

I develop 90% of my stuff on the Microsoft stack, and it just plain handles anything you can throw at it out of the box. We see 2,000,000 pageviews a day steady state, and very seldom lift the CPU off of zero, with nothing more than bread and butter index and stored procedure tuning.

With that as a baseline, I just don't see why all these little startups are having such problems just keeping their website up under a little traffic. I can't believe that these scripted ORMs are really that inefficient that you'd need to spend this amount of effort bolting 3rd party stuff onto them just to keep them alive.

There has to be something else going on. What, exactly am I missing here?
Sam, you've got Google Analytics installed on your blog, why not look there for your own survey?
Thanks for responding to this. It seems I don't have permission to view this note (probably due to a change in networks on my side) and I believe the incident was a few months ago, so I may not have perfect recollection of the note. I hope I didn't mischaracterize your note.

I recall the logic of the note being along the lines of: "You're saying nasty things to me. I see that you're a Christian. How can you do this when being hateful is against your religion?" It read to me like a snarky response calling him a hypocrite (even if you didn't explicitly label him as such).

I have serious problems with this for a few reasons:

First, as a business owner, I don't think an employee should be anything less than the pinnacle of politeness when dealing with customers (which is what FB's users amount to - even if they're only paying you with eyeball time). Implicitly labeling him as a hypocrite was impolite. The note damaged my opinion of how FB is run as a business.

The second, larger, issue is related to privacy. Personally, I'm not comfortable with you treating my profile information as anything more than raw data - as neutral and uninteresting as a set of ones and zeros. Just as I wouldn't want my doctor to tell people things he knew about me, I don't think you should reveal information about this guy - either his religion or the impolite way in which he communicated with you. I seem to recall that information from his profile not being available to the general public.

Finally, when it comes down to it, his religion just had nothing to do with whatever feature request / bug report he was making. Just as I wouldn't expect a waitress to call attention to me having orange hair when I order a burger, I don't expect you to bring up my personal information when I give you feedback on your service.

Shortly thereafter, I quit using FB on a regular basis. I did so for several reasons, but that incident was certainly somewhere in my mind when I quit.
In some areas, AT&T's network coverage is a joke. Right now I'm in my apartment a block away from Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles, facing a window, and I can barely hold a signal.
Interesting. Thanks for the link to your report.
I have. I've never searched and thought that paid results might give me something better than the stream.
Tim Draper: Top Ten Reasons Startups Fail
Núi Dinh - Bà Rịa Vũng Tàu ( hướng dẫn cụ thể - có hình tham khảo )
Speeding up Firefox
I get the sense that your numbers are based on speculation rather than hard data.

I have several examples of sub 1 week development time to first release from projects we've done in the last few years. But then the initial deploy for those projects, on average, took about 20 minutes of one person's time.

Iterative development often goes hand-in-hand with iterative deployment. Somewhere during week 3, we'd spend an hour moving onto an automated build and deploy system, and from there on out it would be push-button.

Once, and only once, the site got big enough to need its own dedicated box at a colo, so that added an extra couple days building a server, driving it to the facility and moving the site. But by then we were 3 months into development, so the effort was nowhere near 25% of our total spent man hours.

Cool idea for a service though. But maybe you're painting the picture a little more dire than it needs to be.
the right way to do URL parameters is probably to make them RESTful and add a route.

I respectfully disagree. REST just means interpreting an HTTP verb as a logical action, it doesn't mean we wage holy war against the heretical question marks. Query parameters remain useful for, e.g., allowing one route to take a number of optional parameters:

/sales/report?year=2008

/sales/report?year=2008&vendor_id=1

/sales/report?year=2008&vendor_id=1&expense_category_id=12

Now if all three of those parameters are optional, that is eight unique RESTful routes you'd have to write (map.sales_report_for_vendor_and_expense_category '/sales/report/vendor/:vendor_id/expense_category/:expense_category_id/'... times eight), which doesn't sound DRY to me at all.
Meez overtakes Facebook in the US
Wow, that's silly. Fixed - thanks.
Great article.

I've always looked at video games at a form of gesamtkunstwerk: an artistic medium where every element has to work to further the whole. It's unlike movies because you can't skimp out on certain elements. Each song is played a ton, the graphics will be severely tested, there needs to be a lot of writing if you're telling a story.

(I actually just recently wrote a testament to my favorite video game composer: http://unalone.tumblr.com/post/80433745/uematsu)
State of the Computer Book Market 2008, Part 3: The Publishers
I totally agree; arrogance is very important if you're an unrecognized badass. Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held for ransom. He told them he was worth more than that ransom, so they obliged by raising it. Once he was free he pursued and executed the pirates.

Most people should not have that arrogance because most people are not Caesar. Thing is, if you are Caesar, you sometimes have to be arrogant to mediocre people (especially bureaucrats) because they will crush you if you're not. But it's hard to draw the line because it's so few people are true geniuses and it's hard to know for sure if you are one.

Being a genius (as far as I can tell, because I don't know if I am one) seems to be tough in this world. It's not like being a star athlete, because in that case the best know they're the best, say so, and bet their future on it. That is not the case with geniuses. You can't take out huge loans against your future wealth in order to buy status and get laid in high school, for instance. I'm sure there are Silicon Valley billionaires who wish they could get back a part of their nerdy lost youth, but it's impossible. On the other hand, it's much less likely for a genius to have the balls to bet on his brains, challenge the curriculum, and get people excited about his future the way athletes do. I guess it's because, at the end of the day, society doesn't like nerds as much as it likes athletes, and because people like to think they're better than others. In this case, it's old people who think they are better than young people, rationalizing that they are smarter.
Buried in a comment in the article is a mention of the FF extension Fasterfox which is nice:
http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/
Technical Book Exchange Cooperative
No way is it too late to turn back. There is definitely a positive feedback loop involved, but I think we have an ecosystem too tuned to potential monopolies to allow this to happen without a fight.

Instead, I think we'll see social networking layer across websites generally: imagine using opensocial/oauth over multiple sites that you use, as if you could bolt Ning.com over the top of you blog or forum or startup site.

I tested out adding Google's friend connect on my wordpress personal blog. Fairly simple, but they still collect the data :( I guess a duopoly is better than a monopoly, but there's still room for web identity to develop outside of Facebook.
I just ignore stuff like that when it happens. I've been lucky enough never to have to be in a situation where I've had to do anything more.

I got my black belt when I was something like twelve, though, so if necessary I'd do what I had to then get away. But I don't like the thought of violence: I'd never find it necessary. People drop things if you ignore them.
The Importance of Writing Well
At this point we feel we are too far along, and need to much money to go to YC (but, this may simply be us being closed minded.) We are planing a massive relaunch as a push to finalize some sort of series A.
Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy
Yeah, I've noticed that Europe and Japan are almost impossible to move to. I think this is kind of dumb... if I am going to pay taxes in a country, who cares where I was born?
Make it clear that you're not committing to anything until it's in writing and you've had a lawyer look at it. That way even if the "angel" is less than angelic, he can't cause too much damage.

Deals fall through; that's a fact of life. Deals with inexperienced angels fall through in particularly screwy ways. Shortly after I started working on tarsnap, I talked to a wannabe angel; it sounded like we had hammered out the framework for a deal, but "I'll get this put into writing and send it over for you to review in a few days" stretched into two months, and the draft he sent over was unlike what we had discussed on nearly every important point -- and then when I objected he accused me of backing out of a deal and threatened to sue me for the cost of drafting it (he never went so far as to tell me how much those fees were, though, so I guess he came to his senses).

Seriously -- unless you're dealing with an angel who has a track record, trust them as much as you'd trust a second hand car dealer.
@Medianama running it in some other city would not be as beneficial as running it in Ahmedabad. IIM Ahmedabad is the source of knowledge for this program, and this gap will be too much if the program is done in some other city.
There are other ways to build HTML without templating. Take a look at Template::Refine, for example:

http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template-Refine-0.02/lib/Te...

http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Template-Refine-0.02/lib/Te...

(Those are two different examples, which is unclear due to news.yc's URL truncation.)
There is no interpretation necessary, it is illegal/wrong to pirate MPAA and RIAA works. It doesn't matter if you think what they do is wrong - they have the law on their side.
Exactly right. The employer who rejected anyone who moved around a lot (usually 12 to 18 months, with a maximum stay anywhere of around 2 years) would exclude pretty much all the best people I know.

I suppose it depends what you're looking for. A lawyer firm or family medical practise might be looking for long term stability for the sake of their patients/clients. But for programming, and I assume that most of us on "hacker news" are programmers, you want passion, initiative and the ability to actually get things done.

It's a completely natural cycle to arrive somewhere new with a new project, full of passion, and to put a lot of work into it. After a while, around 18 months for me, you're sick of it and ready to move on. There is no point, either for you or the company, at pretending otherwise and sticking around just to clock up the hours. And what you really don't want is the "lifer" mentality.

The role of "permanent full time worker" is retrograde and disappearing fast. Perhaps it's better to cast out the concept entirely and start thinking purely in terms of contracts. I suspect that a large number of the best programmers already think like this and companies that can't adapt to that will simply miss out.
If someone gets paid for the art they produce, then they can spend their full time on tuning their art. I wonder what the world would be like if Michaelangelo had a day job.
Yet another reason why nobody should be using facebook.

In any case we can't expect a website as big as facebook to implement encrypted urls which dynamically change with each user's session, which the session data server-side is used to decrypt and execute. Its not necessarily the best way to do things (like say ensuring the given user HAS permission to access the photo before serving it.)

O well I guess if the problem is too big for facebook, it must be too big for the rest of us. I am going to go to work tomorrow and rip it out of our application since this should not be a solvable problem.
is this an essay?y s 8 dat this s too long?from julius paluga
I think you've missed the point. I don't think anyone is saying, "Use lots of windgings, lol!"

Instead, we're talking about the entire mise en scene.

The point Glenn (and others) are making is that every non-cog position requires 'style'.
Just to make it blatantly obvious that this comic was not specifically made about this situation.

http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/getting-ready-for-...

P.S. not strictly relevant but Dylan Horrocks is a really great guy and you should all read Hicksville
For the most part, Yahoo started out as "personalized start page," like Excite and a few others. They had, and still might have, far more people using any one Yahoo service than Microsoft had using whatever it is they had back then (I'm not even sure they had MSN).

Anyway, all Yahoo had to do was make mail, then their millions of users would automatically get e-mail accounts. From there, it probably spread just the same way as Hotmail.. your-name@yahoo.com, and a little message at the bottom of each e-mail: "get your own email at yahoomail.com"

What's amazing is that it took 6 months for a competitor to come in.
The problem with digital distribution is that it fucks with our already imperfect understanding of how an economy functions. Our explanations of how price works generally relies upon supply and demand as well as the cost of production.
How do you analyze these variables when supply is infinite and the cost of production is zero?

This scares a lot of people. The more your business model relies on the status quo the more it scares you.
Very true! I make reviews on my blog and several startups I cross paths with doesn't even have a small link to their main site from their blog. Very inconvenient.
Illegal? Yes. Wrong? Not so sure. You should be able to download Queen songs or Steamboat Willie cartoon from the Internet.

I see it as a form of civil disobedience against bought law. No matter how many trials the industry goes through, it will be not respected, because it is not balanced.
Thanks again, will add these points
40% of geeks surveyed really work fewer than ... say what?
The DMCA seems to legally broaden the intellectual property rights of mega-corporations in nasty ways. The RIAA, MPAA, and many electronics corporations frequently abuse these rights, while staying within the law.

Maybe the RIAA and MPAA are the good guys. They're just stress-testing the system to work out bugs. Legal loopholes and kinks will be discovered, abused, and patched up much more hastily this way.
"Look at the numbers in the link above. The United States is being turned into a different country, a Latin American country, an Asian country, an African country all at once, many, many times faster than it turned European after 1492."

I think the appropriate metric for measuring becoming a different country where different is defined as dissimilar along arbitrarily racial lines is to use percentage change in ethnic mix due to immigration per year.

In other word, if you deflate the raw numbers in your table by the total population of the United States at the time, you get really low numbers for the last sixty years relative to their historical averages. Basically think "what's the chance my neighbor is a first generation American?" and you get much lower probabilities today than you would through most of American history. Some people have reason to be happy about this.
There's also a nice Firefox plugin that you can use to make the pipelining changes. It's all here. http://tinyurl.com/dgenbf
hear hear, pet peeve of mine. I mean this seems like self promotion tip #1 right? But huge colorful links to your main product all over the place!
If you were to buy it now, you'd not be purchasing the nearly exclusively rights to "e-mail" as it was back then. People would actually say: "Send me a Hotmail." What made it valuable to Microsoft was they they got to capitalize off of the leverage over the largest user-base of any online product of that time. With it they kickstarted MSN.

Today, Hotmail probably pulls in quite a bit of revenue from advertisements, but most of it's value was "spent" by herding the massive group of users into other products, which may or may not have made MS more money.

I think Twitter is today's version of Hotmail, in terms of the concept... except Twitter seems to have gotten much luckier.

What this ingrains into my head is: give access to known technology in easy ways. Hotmail, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook -- they allow people to publish/share information where previously they'd need expertise in IT to do it.
IQ tests are considered racist because the results are not perfectly uniform when you collate with racial demographics. since IQ is the best measure we have for future success we are handicapping ourselves.
What is funny about sql designer is that it is better than any other er diagram tool I've ever used till this date. And those were native applications, this is web-based. Just goes to show you that the idea and skill is what counts, not the platform, framework, or anything else.
In my opinion the interactive form basically allows a kind of meaning that is different from narratives. Environments, character designs, and other elements that are tangential to a narrative experience(such as music), often come to dominate a game more than anything in the story surrounding them.

Basically it comes down to the workings of the game mechanics; with repetition and reward/penalty systems they point the way towards deeper inspection of any desired element.
Except that this Last.FM post is currently the number 3 result in Google for "TechCrunch", with its title prominently displayed.

Oops.
the search for new hypothesis to test is not governed by the scientific method. empirical science is pure induction. when we start speculating about how reality might be (and come up with hypothesis that make useful predictions) we are engaging in deduction and or abduction. You can view these as forms of stupidity if you like.
I agree with what the author is saying but take a slightly different approach to it. I think writing well is important but I think more focus should be put on writing succinctly. Because if you write succinctly it forces you to be clear.

This is the theory of William Zinsser's On Writing Well (http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-30th-Anniversary-Nonficti...).

It's one of my favorite books and its primary point is that verbosity is the enemy of clarity and therefore the clearest sentence is also the smallest one. I think that concept is a 1,000 times more important than having perfect grammar.

Oh, and to bring this back to tech, I think this concept is even more important given the sheer amount of data available to use today. Everyone should be trying to write as succinctly as possible just so their readers can fit it all in.
Some posters touched on this but I don't think anybody made a strong enough point.

Size. Too damn many people involved. Startups and small companies innovate/code circles around Enterprises cause they are small 2-5 maybe 10 people per project. They all know each other, they're all responsible, they're all committed to success and there's no one in their way.

The more people involved the closer to (their)average you get. It's possible to have small number of awesome, above avg people, but not the 50-100+ involved in enterprise app, not consistently.

If enterprise's gave cross-functional teams of 5-10, 20 people autonomy and a general goal they would rock out.
Where is there upside in ecommerce in this recession?
One way of looking at YC is that you give up 6% (perhaps less for you) in order to be able to raise your subsequent rounds under much better terms because of the superior connections provided.
I still think 1.0 should have been named 2.0.
I tend to use double quotes, so that if you have a word like "don't", you don't have unbalanced quotes. Ok, that's pretty geeky, I admit it:-)
I would say it depends on marginal cost of growing in other markets. If you need to localize the site/content and/or need offline presence (sales team, etc), it might not be such a good idea.
If all you need to do is strike a couple of content partnerships or PR exercise in those regions and can be handled by one person - you must go for it... Growth of Orkut/Linkedin/Facebook in India is a good example

Monetization might be lower today, but things may (and will) change going forward...
Founders At Work: Uncovering The Truth Behind A Hotmail Founder’s Claims