skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Better yet, play around with lots of different sorting methods, and look for patterns in the sorting method used (s), the user's data and history (h), and the amount of money the user ends up spending ($).

Maximize $, and don't ask stupid questions like "Would you rather sort by variance, average rating, or Wilson score?"

(I'm pretty sure that's what Amazon is busy doing every day. They're positively brilliant at turning data into money.)
The latency to query a central database should be under 100 mS from anywhere in the country. There's no reason it couldn't be done properly today. But ATM systems were architected in the late 70s and they depend on a network of regional data centers that reconcile nightly.
I hope they've succeeded in creating a viable web-based editor, which I (and I'm sure many others here at HN) have thought about before. But it's possible they just have their heads in the clouds...
I agree that it is impossible to quantify productivity, but I believe it is not only possible, but _essential_ to inspect it.

I like to think that most programmers enjoy being productive, and strive for increased productivity (rather than working just for a paycheck). I therefore also believe that programmers expend great effort over the course of their careers optimizing their work habits to maximize productivity.

All programmers are different, but none of us is completely different from all others. There is much to be gained from examining what the others have learned in the process of programming. The danger in this is thinking that there is some objective Truth in programming productivity.

So, Bob disagrees with Alice over what makes a programmer productive. Assuming both Bob and Alice are effective programmers, what we should really be examining are the ideas they have in common.

For me, reading programming blogs from around the Internet gives me a giant mental Venn diagram--the ideas in the center are what I focus on.
GitHub is not a YC company.
Share likelihood ratios, not posterior beliefs
Its kinda cool but I have a few problems (not that I don't want them to continue with the project).

I personally have problems with this entire everything in the cloud. I like having things under my own control. I like having my own editor be local. I do use ssh so I can edit from other's computers. I also sync my various computers so that I can edit from any of them. I guess part of it is a nostalgic feeling. I just believe somethings are better left local.

My other issue which is just an extension of the first is how they talk about writing a sort function. Yes its cool you can write a sort function but they are reinventing the wheel as he admits. 'Normally I would just use a unix command.' (paraphrase). No longer will all of your computing actions tie together. Learning to do something in Bespin doesn't carry over to other actions on the web. Particularly if its with another company. In unix learning to use vim allows you to not only write code but edit email. Learning wc lets you use it with code, with email, with anything you write.
Finding a partner in hustle
Is it just me, or did the author basically use

%w(GitHub Github).rand

to pick his spelling throughout this article?

For the record:

No, ma'am. Yes, sir!

Github GitHub
FaceBook Facebook
Javascript JavaScript
Blackberry BlackBerry
Woot.com enlists StackOverflow users to address bot/scripting attacks
Great read. Congrats on the launch.
It's not hard to differentiate between those who have true skill and those who got lucky, it's impossible. The variance is just too high. Hard implies that if you worked at it enough, you could somehow do it. You can't.

And yes, venture funding is fundamentally flawed and the average VC firm underperforms the market. LPs as a whole would be better off with index funds.

However, unlike with equities, you can get an edge in VC investing because results tend to perpetuate themselves. Remember, equities of non-public companies aren't priced by the market, so they aren't as efficient, and it's the efficiency of the market that makes beating it untenable. Also there's a tremendous deal of collusion in private equity that doesn't exist in public due to regulation. It's actually a mystery to me how they get away with much of what they do.

The two types of investing aren't really comparable due to that. You could simply invest every year in the top few VC firms from the previous year and outperform the market for a long time that way. You cannot do this with hedge funds or mutual funds, or if you could, you and I would both not support the notion of just sticking it in ETFs.
Average price for each startup sold Jul '08 to now
Social Web is the New Discovery Engine
Your simile is what disturbs me: Often when programmers describe their productivity they are really describing their comfort level while carrying out programming tasks.

However, when we use the word "productivity" in every other aspect of business, we are describing the production of output. We don't measure how the output is produced, or the subjective feelings of the producers.

So what output are we discussing when we talk about productivity? Or are we using the word in a special way that has nothing to do with productiviy as it is used elsewhere?
Microsoft makes a lot more then just an OS ;/
sure we can quantify it.*
Give Alice and Bob the same task. See who can do it faster / better. (obviously better can apply on multiple levels - but the tasks should clarify that. Performance, errors, scaling, maintenance, etc)

At the end (maybe of 12 months to allow for maintenance) you'll have a quantifiable result saying that Bob is more productive than alice.. (for that task - and probably tasks like it)

* I didn't say that it was easy or that we should spend that much time on a pissing match.
That graph of prices means less than it seems to. What happened was that ordinary acquisitions decreased a lot, so the only startups still getting bought were "fire sales" of companies that were near death.
I think this is a great move..this should be integrated with VCS and CI system to have a fully blown rapid on the move development platform
I knew only because I live in Irvine, CA where Google does their radio advertising out of. They've invited us (UCI) over occasionally to talk about it.

I now wonder if Google will be closing that office...
I won a BoC once. Lord, that's the #2 letdown of my life, after sex.
You never will know just how productive you are or were, and you're best just accepting that. I learned from playing poker that when the quality of your work and your results (in the short term at least) have no provable correlation, it's easy to fool yourself into believing one way or another, but in the end you can only look back and guess in hindsight.

The nice thing about programming (or writing, or tons of other creative endeavors) is that feeling you are more productive will likely actually make you more productive. If you're frustrated because your tools are holding you back, that's going to spill over into your work and make you unproductive. If you feel like you're getting things done, you're more likely to get things done later. So you just use the ones you like best, and assume you'll be more productive because they're the ones you like best.

The only time when you're certainly not productive is when you're arguing on the internet.
Ask HN: Two-Dimensional Comments
Person A is one of the first to read a story, and has an interesting comment to make. This comment is immediately voted up, and there are several replies. Then Person B adds their interesting comment at root level. This comment goes to the bottom of the list, below all of the replies to Person A's comment. This leaves Person B's comment to be read only by those that make it all the way through.

The current system takes up a lot of vertical space for each reply, making it less likely that people will make it to the comments below. My idea is to put replies to comments directly to the right of the original comment, moving horizontally as more comments are added, so that each comment and its subtree takes up a much smaller amount of vertical space. This will allow those following a conversation to scroll from left to right, and those looking for different conversations to move from top to bottom.

Having a very wide site would probably cause no end of trouble, and I'm not saying that it's the optimum solution. I just think that it is an interesting idea to consider.
Unfortunately the duplicate submission was not detected.
However, it really does'nt scale if you'd SMS all your friends to see if any of them are up for grabbing a bite.

Not trying to sound mean but I often read arguments like that for the next big social web thingy and I find them very contrived. Coordinating group events is certainly an interesting application but I think you should find a better use-case than "grabbing a bite".

Remember people are just animals and strongly conditioned on taking the path of least resistance - especially when hungry...
Because the tools are there to support this. Let's just say I want to be able to query the current weather at a longitude/latitude, and I want to make sure this service is accessible not only to my client application, but also any other apps that want to integrate this feature.

I can:

- Write my own protocol with very low overhead, just a simple TCP handshake, the client sends me a little string with its location, and I send back the weather. Simple, really fast, has low network and processing overhead. But then you find that this is almost impossible for someone to integrate into their webapp, or even a native app, without opening sockets and doing a stupid amount of work just to set up that connection. I can also write my server code in C++, which gets me some hellishly fast performance.

or

- I can implement it in PHP, and accessible via a URL like http://www.mysite.com/weather.php?lat=X&long=Y and be done with it. Total coding time? Almost zero. There is no need to set up or tear down connections, and no worry about things like encodings, endianness, or anything of that sort that you'd have to worry about with a raw TCP connection. These tools are also proven, and relatively bug free, which one can't confidently say about anything they re-implement themselves at a low level. Hell, a simple shell script can curl my URL and get the weather back, just like that.

There are gains to be had for doing everything yourself, but for the majority of webapps the tradeoff in reliability and ease of use/development simply isn't worth it. The existence of talent, tools, and community knowledge is often worth the lower performance and sometimes unnecessary overhead.
Edit: they hit at least 49 different cities according to the article.
Doesn't mean more? Less acquisitions were made. There's a smaller chance of selling a startup.
It immediately seemed false to me. Still, my initial suspicion was that he was being lied to by Paulson's crew, not that he was cribbing unsourced figures from the NY Post.
Thanks for sharing and being open about all the problems you encountered. Launching an application is definitely not easy, nothing takes as long as you hope it will (even if you pad for unexpected problems) and it's really hard to declare something "done." Congrats on your launch.
Horizontal scrolling bars are a no-no. None expects them. Mouse wheels and page-down and space bar doesn't work. It breaks how users expect the page to behave.
Interesting I wonder what kind of things people will create with it.
MMOG written in Stackless Python supports ~52k concurrent players
When you click to add an item on the calendar, the set of icons appear without any indication to what they stand for until you click on one and see the description in the "what" field. I know some of them are obvious, but you should think about clearing the ambiguity by having the "what" field populated appropriately as you hover over the icons.
Version control is not the same thing as a backup. They're completely different, and you need both.

Git is hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it. It's as if you've got a button that saves the state of your entire project, instead of just saving one file at a time. Each time you press the button (which is called committing or making a commit) you save all the changes that you've made to any file in your project directory or its subdirectories, along with your name and the time and the date and a note describing what you did. The resulting series of commits is better than just a bunch of backups: it's a very long series of annotated undos which (ideally) stretches back to the beginning of your project. Making a commit is much, much easier than copying your entire project directory over and over, so you end up with a lot more date-stamped backups than you ever would otherwise.

Only it's better, because this history is editable: you can rearrange the order of your commits, break one commit apart into two or more, smash several of them together, edit their descriptive messages, undo some of them while leaving others, group a bunch of them together and mail them to someone else as patch files, and so on. You can edit the history of your software's development after the fact to turn it into a clear story that other people can understand.

But wait, there's more! You can create multiple different versions of your project ("branches") and work on them in parallel. With one command you can switch from working on the production version of your code to a development version, or to a crazy experimental version. And you can move commits from one version to another. Of course, every developer has their own private copy of each of these branches, and commits can be moved from one developer to another. If two developers change the same file in incompatible ways, the system warns you so that you don't inadvertently destroy each other's work.

You need to find some screencasts of someone using git for something real. I'm not sure what to recommend. Maybe someone else can link to one. If I can't find any, I've been thinking of trying to make some myself.
I just read the whole thing. Very interesting - A good read to bookmark for later if you don't have time now.
It's like intelligence, or obscenity, or justice. The more you try to define it, the further it slips away from you. If you think you've got a universally-agreeable definition, you're wrong.

But you know it when you see it. (Even if somebody else might not agree.)

What are you gonna do? All the halfway interesting concepts in life work like that.
I personally use Pivotal Tracker's velocity feature. I write a one liner to describe a feature, and assign it a 1, 2, 4, or 8 point value, depending on estimated difficulty. Tracker will then graph points/time, which is productivity. This lets me keep track of myself over time, but points vary person to person.

It's hard to get an exact measurement of productivity, unless you have multiple people do the same sample problems. There is no standard unit of programmer production, because in the real world you should be solving an unsolved problem every time (or using a library).
The pro account is the best idea. Stay away from advertising, IMO, it looks cheap and turns people off. Personally I absolutely hate advertising and won't use any site with it. And I doubt much would come from the book idea/affiliations.

I would take it nice and slow. Wait until you have some serious users who have put a lot of time into the app. Obviously you and your friends have to catalyse that, looks like you already are which is good. Once you've got some nice multi-month videos to show, and perfecting all the little niggly bits about working with it (which YOU will be doing), try to get some publicity. It would be really helpful if you know some girls who will do it, your digg/reddit/etc-fu will be greatly increased if it's a girl.

Anyway, then start introducing new options. Pro members can get better quality video out - free is just the flash video, pro gets a full on quicktime version. Free has one "stream", pro can have several - they might want to do their cat or family members or something. Free can embed the flash output on their blog, Pro can embed the picture taking app on their website and make a "my blog visitors" stream .. or something.

Pro is $20 once off fee. Get a bit of press exposure and who knows, it could really take off. The Pro account taking pics of their families sounds like it could have real potential. Maybe a family package deal - $50 for a year of photos including a printed book?

Anyway congratulations on the launch, many people don't know how hard it is to take a decently sized project from idea to fully realised implementation and release. It's fucking hard and even more so if you're running on nothing but your own internal motivation. Good shit and well done.
RDBs are very good at modeling your data, but have scaling problems.

I think the scaling problems of relational databases a vastly overstated. Right now, using off the shelf kit, you could build a relational database handling 10,000 commits/sec and 100T of data, without using "sharding" or any nonsense like that. Too many people think MySQL and its limitations are representative of this technology; it isn't, not by a long way.
An alternative would be to collapse 2nd level comments and below. You choose which thread to get involved with by clicking in. There's probably a greasemonkey script that does this.

That's how I read the site without any help from the UI, I don't find it to be that big of a deal. If there are more than ~5 comments on a topic, I will scan all the top level comments first to get a feel for the conversations and then dive into what I want to read.
Kudos on the launch. Looks really great. :)

Is there anyone else doing this? Just curious.
I typically get 20-40 tickets done per week. I don't have your problem of granularity, because my tracker is optimized for highly granular tasks (5-10 seconds to create a task, 2 to check it off, it's almost a todo list). I find the granularity greatly helps my estimation abilities.
Those are welcome changes indeed!
Why wouldn't you just hide them and put a link up to expand the thread like Slashdot does?
Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon
Dr. Scott Mosser is a board-certified plastic surgeon in San Francisco. He specializes in breast augmentation, liposuction surgery and tummy tuck plastic surgery.
I should also point out that I agree with your statement that it's unrealistic to expect that we'll ever find a universal best practice. However, I also believe that is orthogonal to the question of whether productivity should be measured or not.

Imagine that productivity was as simple as bug-free function points per iteration. In this hypothetical case it's entirely possible that Alice is more productive in Ruby and Bob is more productive in Python, and we can measure the productivity.

However, the problem as given is that we don't even know that Alice produces more in Ruby or Bob in Python. All we have is their subjective assertions. That is the question I have: What are Alice and Bob talking about, and do we even know whether there is a correlation between their self-diagnosed productivity and anything useful we can measure like project success?

I don't think so. Consider Charles the Arc programmer and Debbie the PHP programmer. They work on identical Ruby projects for the same amount of time.

Charles reports that he was horribly unproductive using Ruby's brain-damaged implementation of half of Lisp. Debbie reports she was way more productive in Ruby than she ever was in PHP.

But in reality, Charles accomplished far more using his knowledge of Lisp, while Debbie spent most of her time learning how a truly dynamic language worked. Nevertheless, she felt "flow" and "freedom" while learning Ruby.

Can we trust their self-diagnosis? According to them, Debbie was more productive than Charles.
Someone hasn't read the excellent book "how to measure anything".
It's impressive that they can do this in a browser, but some parts of the video were pretty funny. We can keep up with the user's typing! We can clone the Finder! We can measure and ellipsize text! We have layout managers! Welcome to 1995, Web 2.0.
Ask HN: Anyone else get these from their clients?
Just got an email from my client:

"Just to make sure you don't get too relaxed, I have had yet another brainwave re [app name]"

...

"From my simple understanding of programming I thought it shouldn't be too difficult."

I've no additional comment to make...
India clones world's first buffalo
what i would really like to see is direct embedding of your choice of local editor directly into the textarea.

Back in the day I was hoping that OpenDoc would provide this, but it was not to be. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some vi and emacs clones evolve out of Bespin and then some Greasemonkey scripting could use them to replace textareas.
Some of the prescription meds I take would have me arrested upon landing in Dubai.

Scary stuff.
I'm a year or two away from eligibility of permanent resident status here in HK and, while I obviously haven't hated living here enough yet to pull up stakes and move, I can't really agree with your assessment of HK as a great place.

The pollution is frighteningly terrible most of the year (some from vehicles here, some from coal-fired power plants here, and about 60% from industrial activities across the border on the Mainland), about half of the population endure a desperately low standard of living and live in sprawling public housing estates because they simply cannot afford to purchase or rent apartments of their own, the economy is run by a handful of tycoons that dominate every sector and drive the price of each and every good and service up, elections for the chief executive (local equivalent of mayor/governor) are "small circle" (a few hundred people, mostly pawns of the tycoons or pro-Beijing folks cast votes last time), etc.

It's a third world city with some British traditions that are being systematically expunged or, when that would likely draw too great of an outcry, gradually eroded under Beijing's rule.
Or you could drag and drop them like a normal desktop application. I actually find that netflix has a pretty usable interface. Maybe it's not the best but very usable for most intents and purposes. If your only option was to use the text boxes then it would be a whole different story as that is a usability nightmare.
Xkcd - Sierpinski Valentine
Are canvas drawn apps going to be the launching point for Web 3.0?

I'm really amazed at the performance. This is Javascript, drawing characters pixel-by-pixel? Whoa.
Are you asking if anyone else gets feature requests? Sure. And I'm not a programmer, but I get them all the time. A client isn't a client until the client starts coming up with "By the way, could you . . . ?"
Carnegie-Mellon Public IR/Web Mining Datasets
Sieve of Eratosthenes is actually a straightforward algorithm based on the definition of prime numbers:

1. Mark all integers that greater than 1 as primes.
2. Take the smallest prime that is not already considered and cross out all its multiples.
3. Repeat 2nd step for the next prime.

The above Python code that returns all primes number less than a given limit uses two optimization:

1. Repeat 2nd step upto sqrt(limit), not upto limit.
2. Start crossing out at the square of the prime, not at twice of the prime.

The only “intuitive” interface is the nipple. After that, it’s all learned. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409288 (It might be not true literally but the quote is useful as a general idea that people have different backgrounds; an “intuitive” thing for one person is a cryptic for another. Intuitiveness changes with experience.)
Free Cell Phone Directory
It is not cryptic it is just wrong. '1' is not a prime number.

See my answer http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479514
I would say when one writes less buggy code in a short time he is in the ZONE and that would depend on the problem domain, technology and programmer's passion towards it.