skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I concede nothing in my core argument --- I read through this writer's previous work at the Turbo-Conservative Hoover Institution, and I'm convinced she's a culture warrior, and that the subtext of this article is that if we fail to oversee the compliance of our neighbors sex lives to her standards, we'll all die of Super AIDS --- but the bit about life expectancy vs. infant mortality was new to me, and thanks.
Your interface is cleaner and more attractive, but cycletrader.com is a pretty well established competitor. Do you have a plan for beating them along any particular axis?
On the first thought: I don't see it,they would still have to contend with a growing community of people who mostly want to play homebrew and open source games.

On the second: Maybe, but that might be seen as a barrier to publishing a game made for fun that just happened to be good. "Eh, I'll just give it away, I was only doing it for fun anyway."
How continuations based web frameworks work
Links between Paul Graham's essays - revisited again
As _why alludes to, I think the best work being done in this area is by Alan Kay and his work with Squeak in the squeakland project: http://www.squeakland.org/

I think it could easily be ported to a variety of platforms.

And _why's totally right. My 8-bit sprite of a jumping cow for Logo was the sweetest (yes, C64's in Texas, that explains a lot about the jumping cow).
The easy argument supporting Hacker style over the Dijkstra style is the whole get it in front of the customer and make sure you are solving the right problem. You can solve the wrong problem as elegantly as you want no one will care.
This is a followup to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=397408

The essays are now coloured according to their PageRank, brighter green meaning more juice, white meaning no juice.

Now it's clear that incoming links create greener nodes, while nodes with no incoming links are plain white.

In addition, instead of ignoring essays with no connection to the main component, they are now shown in a separate diagram of their own.
How I Reimplemented My Shopping Cart To Sell More Software, w/ Code
Going rogue inside a big company (a la Best Buy)
> Make your customer feel at ease with what he/she is buying.

The greatest way I've found to learn about this is analyzing my own thought process when buying something online. You immediately begin to empathize with your own customers.
I would prefer something like

Rails is a domain-specific language based on Ruby for building web applications.

Django is a framework you can use to build web applications with Python.
Method arguments are a decent place to keep transient data as well. Local variables and object fields are not the only options for scoping your data.
Unfortunately, this is where you hit up against the other side -- pay. You cant really expect teachers to spend their free time outside of school as well as spend 40+ hours a week IN school when you pay them at secretary rates. And we do.

I consult with a school on a variety of issues -- they continually have trouble finding qualified teachers who are willing to work extra hours for tutoring, etc, as well as spend the extra time to create lesson plans outside of the classroom.

Personally, I blame the teachers union, but in reality thats just one small part of the problem.

The school in the article is making great strides in one part, hopefully they can also make huge strides in the HR side as well.
To count my time I made a little ruby script that loops into a txt file and looks for projects, calculate the hours for each and outputs them. Here is the link if you're interested : http://github.com/juliend2/compteurdetempstxt/

To invoice i use Freshbooks. I love it. But for the time tracking, i prefer my home-made solution (even if its not perfect) because i dont rely on a server so i can track my time even when offline.
Perhaps we could let them tier themselves into a trade. I don't think it would be so bad for society. Either they're going to end up in a trade, or worse, or they'll have a chance to realize where they're going early to work themselves back into HS and College.
So the author's guild is upset that the Kindle has a read aloud feature that does text to voice using a computer generated voice. Amazon isn't buying the audio rights to these books like someone who does a book on tape.

Amazon's response:

"An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won't confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider."

This is hilariously disingenuous. Of course they won't CONFUSE it as an audiobook experience...Amazon's hoping they'll EMBRACE it as something cheaper and "good enough."

The Author's guild and the content creators they represent will get screwed some more and Amazon's market share will grow. It's like the newspapers letting Google "spider" their content (aka, copy it and use it for their own purposes for free).
2009 calendar of conferences for web developers, entrepreneurs, web designers
I've used it personally, and it works as advertised. It sits independent of google analytics, if I remember correctly, so it doesn't matter what analytics tools you're using.

As long as you're only running a few tests at a time, you're willing to embed javascript on the pages you're testing and let the serving of the tested sections be handled by google (which adds a bit of latency I'd guess, though not much), it's a great way to get into testing. Hands down better than not testing.
That's quite cool. I'm not an emacs user, but I'll definitely consider switching to that OS at some stage ;)
Hiya guys. I recently redid the shopping cart for my business. Then I spent a few hours writing it up for folks, with the hope somebody can use something.

Article includes:

+ Results of my A/B tests with previous ways of presenting software for sales to my customers.

+ How I use lightboxes to make a good deal of money

+ An AJAX cart I have used to good effect

+ How I went about designing and reimplementing a cart, in JS, to give the feel of the AJAXy one but improve its speed and UI

+ Code for everything, which I put in the public domain. Go nuts.
Thanks. So far so good.
For those who hate slideshows, here's everything on one page so you can scroll quickly:

http://jottit.com/uqsqc
I'll check it out for future reference. At the moment though I'm quite bootleg and need something cheap and cheerful.
They have to be "money-back guarantee", right? Because that will help you almost as much.

Ah, drats. I didn't guess right. But seriously, if you don't have a money-back guarantee, start your A/B test now. Its one of the easiest, no-brainer-for-software, works-just-about-everywhere techniques I've seen.
Will definitely check it out. Cheers.
For new users, the greasemonkey scripts suffer the same non-discoverability as searchyc.
Gay marriage is too limiting
ECalc: Online Scientific Calculator
We've release a new version of our online scientific calculator called eCalc. We've spent a ton of time designing the user interface for this project as well as supporting full complex math calculation in both polar and rectangular formats. Also, we've created a Windows and Mac download for purchase that includes some additional features such as color schemes and a side bar.

Finally, my karma is not high enough to submit a poll, but eCalc supports both RPN and algebraic modes so I'd like to see what mode people prefer to use.
That sounds perfect. Although they offer a download and also have an option to pay seemingly with no explanation whether the free version is crippled somehow? I'm not currently near a Mac so I can't check what the difference is between them.
We've release a new version of our online scientific calculator called eCalc. We've spent a ton of time designing the user interface for this project as well as supporting full complex math calculations in both polar and rectangular formats. Also, we've created a Windows and Mac download for purchase that includes some additional features such as color schemes and a side bar.

Finally, my karma is not high enough to submit a poll, but eCalc supports both RPN and algebraic modes so I'd like to see what mode people prefer to use.
There is no parallel universe in which computer-generated text-to-speech compares with a real audiobook. The Authors Guild should pick their battles more carefully, because nobody is going to care about this stupid feature.
Exactly, if you know what the problem is the Dijkstra style is great: system software, compilers etc..

If you are doing anything with business logic well that's where hacking takes precedence because the problem you are trying to solve isn't well understood.
The USA is almost schizophrenic about food.

On the one hand, god forbid anything is unpasteurized, on the other - all the corn syrup you can handle.

On a somewhat related subject, I know this is a story about a startup, but does it feel like someone's testing what stories will crack HN?
Librivox -- a distributed collaboration possible via the net, digitization, and open licensing -- is absolutely Hacker News!
I don't think this is an invalid argument, but it sure is stupid. Clearly, you can't read a book aloud, record that reading, and redistribute it --- even with the original book. The argument would be, the Kindle circumvents that restriction by not recording the actual voice, but instead an algorithm that reconstructs the voice.

On the other hand, it's hard to believe anyone gives a shit about this; text-to-speech readings are tolerable for minutes at a time, not 10 hours.
But really, why have any kind of law regarding relationships at all? It seems that Americans have decided sex has nothing to do with procreation, sex has nothing to do with love, love has nothing to do with life long commitment, and procreation isn't necessary for our society anyways. Since the government should only deal with things that have societal consequences, it should not legislate any of these things.

Of course, if we are wrong about the importance of procreation, what are the consequences? Most likely America will go the way of the rest of Europe and face population death.

So what? It isn't like there aren't many other cultures that are more than willing to tie marriage to sex to procreation, and thus take our place. Of course, they don't tend to have the respect for freedom of thought, conscience, and choice that America historically has held. However, we've decided sex with whomever and whenever we want is more important than preserving such a rare culture. If that's our choice, then so be it.

Otherwise, we'd be compromising our principles.
Partly it boils down to the sort of problem you're trying to solve.

I find that if your problem is not very domain-specific; ie if you can strip out the labels, and consider what you're doing as manipulations of relatively abstract objects; rearranging lists and graphs and so on - then up-front thinking is repaid many times over.

There tend to be lots of corner cases (what if this list is empty, what if this graph has no nodes, ...) and accidental infinite loops you can fall into. Thinking about it and specifying the algorithm up front forces you to take a coherent view on your problem domain.

If you approach this sort of thing iteratively (well, if I approach this sort of think iteratively) I tend to find that even if I can get my initial usecase working quickly, I haven't got the problem well enough established in my own mind, so I end up fixing things in an ad-hoc manner, squashing bugs in one corner case only to find 5 or 6 cropping up elsewhere because eg in half the code I assume X can never be 0 while in the other half I've been using 0 as a marker value for invalidity.

Solving that sort of problem I find is much better done by thinking hard about it before hand and working out what you're trying to do. Of course, in any case, you should surround your method with lots of testcases documenting what it's doing as well.

This is very different I think from the argument of agile development against waterfall-style development. The hard thinking in this case is at most a few hours - it fits in entirely with agility.
Ah, I see now. I definitely missed that the first time skimming the site (and so did a colleague).

I suggest adding a column to the chart on the Learn More page that says that.
I use harvest and it works quite well for me.
There are many ways to write a small piece of software so that it conforms to certain specs. Rules, even if arbitrary, tell a developer what is a "better way" and reduces the doubts he has about how to write that code. So developers, especially novices, like rules.

Software engineering is fundamentally about trade-offs and it seems plain rules like IF context THEN follow_recipe are not expressive enough. Like a database engine, rules based optimizer will only take you so far, for better results you need to use cost based optimizer, and learning the costs associated with each option only comes with experience.
Home Business Ideas and Opportunities at SixIncomeStream.com
Not all high-traffic websites are equal. Youtube has way more visitors than Twitter, but is a far simpler site to scale.

Twitter is a particularly difficult problem, because unlike most high-traffic sites the number of writes is pretty close to the number of reads. The latency expected by users is also very low - people are carrying on conversations over it after all, and these two factors combined mean that there's very little that can be done in the way of caching.
Add this the complex relationships between all the different users and you've got a difficult site to scale to the sort of volumes they're experiencing.

If the guys at Twitter want to offer me a job, I've got a few ideas though ;)
My background is on an HP48G, and so I've been a diehard RPN user. However, after spending lots of time designing this calculator, I'm starting to switch over to algebraic mode. Say it's not so....
And after you've posted this twice, I'm not sure your karma will rise quickly. I suggest you delete this before people notice.
Are you sure about that? I know of a reasonably successful person in Canada who started this way (and now sells to Costco). Of course, the barrier to doing this may be lower in Canada.
Put this in your .htaccess:

Redirect 301 / http://www.gizmodo.com

But seriously, when I look at the page:

- it doesn't render properly in Firefox
- it seems like a knockoff of gizmodo
- it seems dead, e.g. everyone has 0 moojos.
This isn't so much a criqitue of the theory of "updateable content" as it is about the way in which it's updated. Nick lists the benefits, but, losing the "permanence" of a hardcopy of a book works both ways.

In the printed forms, books can go out of print and become extremely rare heightening their value and making it extremely difficult for them to be acquired.

If someone recognises the problem and introduces a revision system to the system in which books are updated, this is effectively sorted. Anyone could potentially rollback.

Whether the updateable book or a revision history of changes is on the cards is anyones guess however. I'd imagine the publishers would prefer this wasn't the way it was implemented.

Also, I believe the example given is more censorship than anything wrong with some sort of auto-update protocol. If a book is censored, for example, two weeks after it's published and re-published thereafter, the number of uncensored copies in distribution is probably extremely small. I can only imagine in this scenario using a technology like the Kindle, that someone would simply copy the original manuscript and redistribute it themselves.

Again, open formats make things like this easy to solve. Closed DRM-like formats are going to make this hard. Guess which one we hackers want? :)
Coming soon: Capitalism 3.0
Exactly.. lol. I guess some people's field of vision is about this big |<--->|
I also noticed, just yesterday, that there is a link to a Firefox plug-in for searching HN. The point is I only noticed it yesterday and I've been on HN over a year - same with searchyc - i didn't really know about it until I got fed up with not being able to searchyc and started googling for it. If people at HN are so bothered by dupe submissions then a search on HN should be run by the system at the point I submit a link. I shouldn't have to think about it otherwise.
I'm stoked on Freshbooks as well.
First, find a better name, then we can talk
Dijkstra advocated thinking about a problem until it is well understood.
I haven't heard this new computer-generated voice, but surely Amazon's going to iterate and iterate and iterate until it's "good enough" to disrupt the audio book market.
Here is more about Twitter's architecture, I guess it has changed a lot right now. Also check out the presentation by Blaine Cook, Architect of twitter.

http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10...

http://www.slideshare.net/Blaine/scaling-twitter
I think you sort of missed the point of _why's original article, though. He's not lamenting the difficulty for computer-savvy adults to get started programming -- the main thrust of his article is towards our failure to provide an easy-to-use, freely-included sandbox for kids to experiment with programming.

How many of the other folks here started out just as described in this article: namely, writing silly little BASIC programs for early Commodore, Apple, or DOS systems?

There are a handful of projects aimed at just this niche (Scratch and Greenfoot, for example) but none of them come standard on any new system. That lack of immediate availability means that kids have to actively seek out the tools + have the ability/privileges to install new software before they can even start experimenting with something like this:

10 PRINT "JENNY HAS COOTIES!"
20 GOTO 10
That was a really lame trick.
You are correct, as long as you don't get too many arguments.
do you have any suggestions?
A Geek's Guide To Motivating Your Employees - PowerShell Style
Stimulus by Leadership
The title editorialises needlessly, and incorrectly. The API remains free for up to 10,000 queries a day. That is more than all the traffic the techcrunch network makes, so it remains free for most everyone.
This headline is typically misleading.

The first 10k requests a day are free. Previously it was 5k.

Once you pass that threshold (it's not that low) it starts being charged according to your use.

I'd love to hear feedback on what people think about this pricing model. Please feel free to leave a comment here or email me croucher at yarrhoo dot com (remove the pirate misspelling).

Edit: Whoops forgot the disclaimer. I work for Y!
This would be welcomed by those who just want cheap, reliable transportation. Those who see their cars as status symbols and reflections of their own unique personality can continue to pay for the traditional dealer experience.
Give Up and Use Tables
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I spent a month to reengineer a billing program. Previously, it needed 24h to issue monthly bills; after the reengineering it finished in under a minute. It was an easy target, the previous guy had that "hacker" style of thinking which resulted in a program being a pile of quick fixes.
Tim O'Reilly Talks About Following Your Passion in a Start-Up
I have a web scraping script written in Python that I want to make multi-threaded. It scrapes web pages from a list, and enters results into a DB. Can someone (the author maybe) show me a simple example of how to make a multi-threaded Python script?
I think it should come down to this simple yes or no test... Are you are working in house at a corporation, or agency and someone else pays you? Then use CSS. If you work for yourself use the table. Only half kidding. :D
Ok, but Dijkstra would be the last person to use a go to statement in step 3.
But often times you don't have all the information. You can watch how people currently do the task, but that might not be the optimal way once software starts being used. It's better to get them using the software so that they can suggest features, or perhaps even whole new ways of doing the task.

Not all problems can be merely thought about until their understood there are quite a few that require experiments to get further information. That is the hacking approach rapid experimentation.
From Evolution Comes Literature
Point well taken :-)
Spotify versus last.fm
I suggest a bit of both. Start with "Dijkstra style" and finish with "hacker style". Adjust levels of each as appropriate for the project you are working on.
On any Mac said kid could do:

$ python
>>> while True:
>>> print "JENNY HAS COOTIES!"

No installations, no extra privileges, nothing. It just works. _why is tilting at windmills.
I once launched a Facebook IM application using AjaxIM. Everything was beautiful for about 10 days. I went from 90 users to 18K users in 21 days and the whole application came to a HALT. IMs were taking 5 seconds to get to the other end. I, for sure, did not have the technical ability to make it work and I decided to not invest money into it. We were dumping the DB of IMs every 3 hours, but with IM you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of real-time messages. This is extremely hard. Add to this the fact that each Twitter account has a different graph and your messages go to several people.
App Store tally: 20,000 apps in seven months
The predicament presented is not new since there has always (in my geek lifetime at least) been a division between "computing" devices and "gaming" devices.

Yes, I too learned programming on my TI99/4A and Aquarius and Laser 128 but then I also played games on my Intellivision without a way of trying my code there.

I always saw hacking on my computer as a "gateway" (no pun intended) to creating more advanced programs in much the same way as playing backyard football was a "gateway" to playing professional football (if I was good enough).

Finally, it seems to me that the ultra-portable laptop revolution will be the driver of getting more "computing" devices into the hands of future generations.
It has been well articulated (with some of the consequences) in James Burkes' Connection series during the "good old days" of the beeb.

Would people know why is it cold inside the fridge, while it is hot outside? Or what makes the cold stay inside the box? Nevertheless, almost everybody relies on a fridge ...and almost nobody knows what actually it is. Tricky situation indeed on the long run...

Somebody has made the series available on:

http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=JamesBurkeFan

but the account has been closed. There are some traces on:

http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeWeb

You might like it: it is worth every minute.
> The first 10k requests a day are free. Previously it was 5k.

The 5K limit you refer to is from the old Yahoo Search API, Yahoo Boss allowed "unlimited queries".
"All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans," said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. "We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate..."

Every now and then, you run into something that is such a brilliant and absolutely good idea, which has such an infinitesimal chance of being implemented, that it makes you feel like crying.
I prefer the opposite; hack together a prototype to get stuff moving. Encounter issues you didn't even think about during the planning stages. Eventually notice your code is a big morass of hacks that you don't want to look at. Enumerate all of the issues with the hacked-together software which could be done much better now that you've got hindsight and experience with the problem domain, and rewrite the software Dijkstra-style.
Google Analytics & Visual Sciences are my favorites, Visual Sciences is really for enterprise level sites but the level of data and ways you can slice and dice things is significantly better than anything I've seen out there.

I have also heard a lot of good things about Omniture and have used it a few times.
How I SEOed my website to make more sales!
↑ Quote of the week.