skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is most definitely the coolest thing I've seen using JavaScript in a while.
IDK if it's relevant, but 64bit can seriously suck also. If you use a lot of pointers, you just doubled the memory you need for each pointer.

In my experience, 64bit isn't a good way to save memory.
Your title really rubs me the wrong way. This isn't bitrot, it's actually quite the opposite: the problem showed up because he does actively maintain the code, he made the latest release compatible with future versions of the standard Python distribution.

He's standing up to say he's going to honor his responsibility to this code even though he doesn't enjoy it anymore, but that that doesn't include writing html parsers, and you come along and scream 'bitrot'. Sorry, but that's kind of an assholish thing of you to do.
DriverSide Raises $5.3 Million To Help Keep Your Erlang Running Through The Recession
HN: 33K visitors = 32,500 random tire kickers. But it also = 500 new hackers
Just a thought about the recent surge of traffic from Coding Horror's link. It's true that things like this can threaten to swamp HN with an "Eternal September."

And making the front page boring is a very amusing defense against the random hit-and-run tire kickers. But let's not forget that 33,000 new visitors will contain a few potential hackers.

Sure, most will say "Erlang, WTF!" But a few will say "Erlang, What the... Wow!!!" It would be a shame if HN lost its way and suffered from the tragedy of mediocrity that has poisoned reddit and other sites. But it would also be a shame if folks with lots of good stuff to contribute stumbled upon HN and found it repellant.

I guess I'm just trying to say that while we should be very aggressive about keeping undesirable content and poisonous commentary off HN, we should also be careful to make sure people know that the door is wide open for like-minded folks to join in and participate, no matter where they came from.
To PG:
Jesus said it all before you did. He told the first evangelists to be resourceful in spreading the new gospel. see http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2016:%201-1...;

Note that he is commending the resourcefulness of the manager, not his dishonesty. Also he is asking them to invest in eternity and not things that perish.
Unfortunately, you consider Jesus to be irrelevant as you wrote in an essay: "bronze age shepherds wandering about in Palestine". On the contrary.
Read Jesus. Your world will be shaken.
While I agree completely with the updates comment, I don't think you're in a position to comment on pricing given that your only experience is with testing $1 vs. $2.

Pricing is a game of reward and risk. If the perceived reward is in line with the risk of getting the reward, you've found a starting line for your price. The thing with the app store is that there seems to be a very steep price/reward curve. At the low-end, the $1/$2 level, iPhone users seem to be okay just throwing their money around. When you start moving from there, the app is going to need something to push it over the edge. While I don't follow the available apps very closely, I'd venture to say the competition in the $5 level is a little steeper. You're probably dealing with large software companies (who's name reduces perceived risk), established brands (again reducing risk), and a decent promotional mix of advertising and PR.

A "lite" version should be on the radar of EVERY game developer. I don't see a good way around it unless you can consistently get good online reviews and coverage. You need a way to reduce that risk to the consumer and giving them a demo product is a way to do it. I'd package the lite version with some sort of messaging system too so that if you decide to do another game, you can pump ads into your old lite versions for the new games. With the lite version, you need to convert people to the full version, and drive as many marketing messages to the users as possible without becoming ridiculous.
Really neat stuff - I use it to sync FF bookmarks between my three computers.
pg, I have wanted to read about your thoughts on the Ruby programming language for a long time now, I have simply not wanted to impose or be a nuisance by clamoring for an essay . . . that would be absolutely great I think, I have gathered a few quotes from you about Ruby, and they are all positive (it is one of the reasons I developed an interest in the language) and I would love to read more: positive, negative, and neutral.

Thank you pg.
anyone come across instructions for upgrading a grand central account to a google voice account yet?
How to Keep Your Dog Tick-free
Affordable Virtual Private Network (VPN) Support Services 
First came intranets, which are password-protected sites designed for use only by company employees. Now, many companies are creating their own VPN (virtual private network) to accommodate the needs of remote employees and distant offices.
No, because nobody uses Yahoo except my grandmother (to play pinochle) and people who call it 'the Yahoo' unironically (to hit on people playing pinochle).
A lot of the Google technology is based on statistical analysis, which only really works well for huge data sets. Accordingly, a lot of Google's services exist so that Google can build giant data sets based on your use. As far as I know, Google records (or can reconstruct) every single byte that you send/receive through its services except for a few of your IP address, in order to build these data sets. For example, Google Reader is free so that Google can collect attention data. Google Analytics is free for the same reason. Google's 411 service is designed to collect voice data to fine-tune its voice-to-text engine.

Some of those services also provide a platform for presenting the user with tiny classified ads, which is an additional revenue stream for them. Finally, some services are offered for free with no SLA and no customer support in order to stress-test the paid versions of those same products (Google Apps, Gmail).
Cool, the comments are bit elitist for you, they're great for me. Reddit is a better fit for you. HN for me, everybody wins! Hurray!
(Another) Graphical User Interface Timeline
Foxmarks is dead, long live Foxmarks :)

aka they replaced it with Xmarks for some reason.

ref: http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=738
Pope vows to make better use of internet search in the future
They switched to OOo in 2005, and to Firefox and Thunderbird a year later, according to this article: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iU4Lq7tOR_WVOJLZ3IeRaIH0...

You were right. They moved their 'Human Resource' application to the browser at some point, as well. See this article: http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-gendarmerie-saves-millions-with-o...
The question I'm left with: What happens if/when Amazon changes what you're given with an EC2 instance? EC2 was launched in August 2006 offering the same specs for the same price that they're offering now. Since we're coming upon the three year anniversary, I don't think it's outrageous to believe that upgrades to what we're given might come within a year or so. If I commit to a small instance (1.7GB) for 3 years and in 9 months they have a new 2009 small instance which is 2.5GB, would I get that upgrade?

I hate to be as simplistic as moore's law, but server capacity is increasing when you look at what you can get in a dedicated box. Amazon will have to keep parity over the long term and if you're committing to a 3-year period, you might miss out on the upgrades. In fact, this could be a way for Amazon to roll out newer, better hardware onto their network while not seeing older hardware just disused. And I guess you can't complain about getting a 1.7GB server for $35/mo (which is the three year commitment price).
Could you possibly put that on a site like dpaste.com so that the comments don't just all scroll to the left and then link to it.
Creative Business Card Designs
People are all arguing about whether to use baling wire or duct tape to fix something, maybe it's time to rethink the problem from the ground up.

Nulls are really turning out to be a language misfeature, IMO, and patching over them with Elvis or .andand or .try is really starting to smell.
The earlier GUI timeline submitted reminded me of the GEM desktop environment. This site also details many other esoteric GUIs as well, with specifics for many of the UIs listed.
Brain Fart: Social Innovation
The first thing you want to do is measure the problem in enough detail to identify the cause. I can recommend Rob's Debug Toolbar (though with reservations about the possible overhead, though I'd have been happy to chance that when I needed to instrument an underperforming site):

http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar/

though his tree doesn't have the injectable measurement points I've added to the timer panel yet. I hesitate to suggest this for a production setting only because it's not had much third party exposure (or if it has no one's let me know), but "it works for me":

http://github.com/mmaney/django-debug-toolbar/

You might want to avoid the most recent commit (so use da1429...) - Rob had asked about adding support for the cache API's "add" method, and I threw that together based on the spec; that one part is completely untested other than that it doesn't cause a compilation error in my test setting.
+1 Thanks for the insight. I've decided that I'm going to build this with or without YC. I'll able to take a leave of absence if I need to at school.
I thought there were some reasonable limits to how long you could wait to try to enforce your patents specifically to prevent the most egregious submariners.

1) Obtain a vague patent from a failed startup. 2) Wait for Blizzard (and multiplayer 3d games in general) to get reee-heeheehee-ly big, 3) Profit, should not be a legitimate business model.

On the bright side, these losers have probably missed the boat on making a quick buck through regular old patent extortion. Now that they are challenging an entire industry, they are bound to face considerable (and well funded) resistance. (They've probably SCOed themselves)
I might be mistaken, but when I originally posted your edit wasnt there yet to clarify.

To answer:
$3 over $2 is a big leap on the internet. Clearly there is a huge barrier between free and paid. 99c or $1.99 have been somewhat standardized by the itunes store, but anything above that I think still has huge pushback from traditional web consumers unless they are receiving A - a service, or B - something physical in the mail. I'm not claiming it is rational, but neither is buying $5 in coffee, which I also dont do (per my post).
Panics and Booms, a lesson from 1897
After having run various html/xml/rss parsers against a 1B page web crawl, I'd have to say that it's pretty rare to find ones that can actually pass the web fuzz test. Most seem to have been written from a more spec-driven approach. This is fine in a controlled environment, but pretty useless if you want to turn the code loose on real world web data.

Some of the stuff we find, like 1-in-80M core dumps are to be expected because they're so rare and most folks don't have that much test data. But many others could be found by simply running a parser against a few hundred random urls from the dmoz rdf. I wish more lib developers would do this.
It's time to free the iPhone
Obama's CIO and the U.S. government's fiefdom problem
Though the common sentiment here is not to start a company with a friend; I respect the general opinions in the article and comment threads, thought I must add that 'trust' is key. Typically those you trust are friends or family; unf. a Catch 22. I've started a few companies with friends and have learned a few things along the way. They are as follows:

1). Legitimize the business. Get the paper work done and a lawyer and advisor on board. The ability to have an unaffiliated third party arbitrator it key.

2). Definition of mutual goals. Know why all parties involved are even considering being a part of the venture, make it transparent and relate possible exits to that.

3). Define roles and respect them. If you co-founder is a designer trust his judgement; likely-hood is that he/she will do the same.

4). Define bailout plans. I you or your co-founder decides to bail; have a plan and make sure everyone involved knows of the plan. Hopefully the team 'trusts' each other to execute it incase they decided to seek greener pastures.

@lionhearted has some great points as well. Great thread and article.
That would be most likely be illegal in many states so I wouldn't hold my breath.
While that's true for some things, that doesn't account for the memory overhead of a copying garbage collector.
"Sure, most will say "Erlang, WTF!" But a few will say "Erlang, What the... Wow!!!""

I think that argues even more for flooding the front page with ultra-geeky stories. Several people (including me) discovered that we found a page full of Erlang stories more interesting than a lot of the more general common interest stories often found on the front page. We should try to create more "Erlang...Wow!!!" moments by promoting more articles with deeper content.

I tried to start a thread about promoting lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the day" kind of thing. The thread was killed, not sure if it was because it was thought to be an attempt at humor or if it just runs counter to the spirit of Hacker News. But I still think more articles with deeper content on the front page makes for a better Hacker News.
That is a strong guess to make. Bravo tho for putting it all together...

Smart thinking.
I think this is why God made proxy servers.

Actually, that's really surprising. Why on Earth would you not be allowed to get to those services? Canada, of all countries? The 51st state? ;-)
Do they tend to complete things they've worked, or die 90% of the way to the finish line (a really bad thing)?

That does seem to be the most crucial criterion. Thanks for your thoughts about track record.

A very big one for me - do they read books? Yes, books, not blogs/social news/newspaper/magazines.

This criterion makes a lot of sense to me too. I'd better end this HN session and go read some more of my latest book.
That's definitely not the case anymore. Canadians have to pay taxes on world-wide income unless they can demonstrate they have "severed ties" with their Canadian residence. Working abroad for a year or two in an expat job doesn't cut it.

More and more countries are moving towards world-wide taxation, unfortunately.
Whilst this is nice, some of the gestures are far too complicated. Moving between pictures is intuitive (similar to iPhone etc) but the other actions aren't necessary.

I don't look forward to the day where I have to remember four gestures just to change a help menu.
I think it's a great idea to occasionally step back, throw away some of your work, and start over. That being said, it's hard to say where they draw this lesson. This post is thin on the details of "how it failed for us".
Google Voice, the new Grand Central
Ticket Scalping- TicketMaster Even Does It
Not much substance in that post.

However you need to control events and not let events control you. If you react to every tiny issue reported you will end up in a cycle of release-issue-fix-release.

If the issue is only affecting a minority of customers and it's not critical for security - park it - and keep on with the feature plan.

You can't please all the people all the time.
I agree 100%. I enthusiastically support measures designed to encourage "Wow!!!" moments :-D
Such a great project should have little trouble finding good devs.
Imagine how many bright young hacker would kill to be an official contributor for BeautifulSoup.

He could make an earnest attempt at finding other people to work on it and just do code reviews. Be a figure of advice and authority while doing no real work. That would be great IMHO.
Not true anymore. You're talking about the state of Orkut from two years ago, maybe longer.

There is integration with Google Accounts, the main page today shows (timidly) Google's logo and they have a good part of their team in Brazil working on it.
Hiring (and firing) at a startup
On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting
The most powerful word is no
I think you must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. I certainly had no intention of impugning the author of the code, and in fact, I thanked him with the thread-opening comment.

Personally, I can't/won't pitch in on BeautfulSoup, but I thought maybe if I posted the page to this forum, a better hacker than myself might jump in. We can across the behavior he describes in building TrailBehind, and I just thought I'd share with the community.

As for bit rot, that's a pretty old term that just means code breaks down as it ages.
Sorry, can't edit it anymore and only now noticed the problem.
Will do what you suggested next time.
Mozilla Contemplates a Future Without Google
Laser-based haptics system lets you feel distant objects
lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the day"

Permit me to disagree. The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my perspective. Because if there is one thing I do not have it is the time to read an entire page full of in-depth links on a topic that I barely know the first thing about. Especially when at least half of those links aren't necessarily good: They were chosen mainly because their titles contained the word "Erlang". Yesterday was not about quality. It was about quantity.

All that yesterday accomplished for me was to create a subconscious association between Erlang and concepts like boring and spam and slushpile, an association which I must now work to overcome. Any good links in that pile were lost in the shuffle. And this is terrible, because the design of HN is such that a link cannot be submitted twice unless you find a way to hack its URL. (It's a perverse form of reverse SEO. I'm pretty sure that standard SEO advice is to give each piece of content a single, canonical link -- but text which is accessible by multiple URLs can be submitted multiple times to HN.)

If you want to promote excellent, deeper articles on a specific technical topic the correct plan is to release them gradually. Declare Wednesday to be Erlang Day and submit one Erlang link to HN each week. Or, if you want, declare Erlang Week and do one article per day. But don't waste our time. Don't overwhelm us with noise.
Markup Language 9
"nuke anything" works:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951
Hmmmm... I don't know why everyone keeps confusing introversion with social anxiety?

The wast majority of introverts I know, that includes myself, are not the least bit shy.

The few people I know that die 1000 death when it comes to being social are all extroverts.

Public speaking is a great way to tell introverts from those with social anxiety.

Introverts are often bored by the sound of our own voice when we speak to crowds of any size, small or large.

I've known many people who put fear of public speaking above fear of death, and all of them were extroverts.
Minscasting = "Twitter meets Delicious." It would be more appropriate to use a service like Diigo to accomplish the same feat. Then they could also highlight relevant text, attach notes, etc. But you have to go where the people are I guess. Twitter is a lowest common denominator for information exchange and to watch people use it instead of the right tool for the job is, sometimes, unfortunate in my opinion. As practical as he makes it sound, he probably still has to sift through dozens of "the lettuce in my sandwich is soggy today", etc. posts.
VPS Showdown
I'm testing small posts. Not everybody has the time to read a long post with infinite details about a story when the conclusion is "you lose the grand scheme of what you’re building" and that you sometimes should "wipe your entire work".
It definitely does. If anything great came out of Cuil, it was their layout of results.
Tyrannical Databases in Durus
I guess it is here just to show the power behind the plugin. I agree with you, there is no reason to implement such a complicated way to toggle help. But enabling up/down/left/right to navigate through images is sufficient and intuitive (and awesome). And that's why this plugin is all about no ?
Google, obviously, doesn't do everything it tries well, but I've always been impressed with the way they integrate different services. I also have always appreciated the cleanliness of the UI on their products. Even their ads have always been text-based, where many other sites went wrong with giant "flashing text" banners and animation. If Google did build a social networking service, combined with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Chat, etc. I think they would have a strong hand. Since they just announced targeted advertising based on profiling, gather social data about their users would make perfect sense. I know its been brought up recently why Facebook doesn't do something similar with all the data they have. It sounds as if Google is making moves in that direction, testing the "privacy waters" so to speak.
IEEE Spectrum: Can Machines Be Conscious?
That was actually funny.
Why it's time to break out of Twitter (Scripting News)
'Bit rot' is a pretty loaded term, it's not as benign as you're pretending it is. It's one of those things that you can say about your own project, or in pointing out a specific problem within a codebase, but to say it about a project as a whole that has an active maintainer (especially after he releases an update to avoid bit rot going forward and then asks for help dealing with the upstream problems), that's assholish. Sorry, but it just is.
H.R.578 - Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs Act of 2007
Wow. Insane prices for bandwidth. I had no idea that still existed. I get a terabyte of traffic with my 12 EURO VPS in Germany at http://www.hosteurope.com
There's a boot-time argument that will move the barrier to 3G instead of 2G.
Seconded. Unfortunately this is one of those technologies that you hardly ever get a chance to actually apply in a real project.
I think the whole erlang meme was amusing for a day, but it'd be very tedious if it repeated itself regularly.

I for one would be just as annoyed to see HN become purely programming/deep-tech oriented as I would be to find it turning into reddit/r/politics.

HN has a unique mix of contents that balances a lot of different interests. Please don't try to shove it one way or another.
Bookdress
Paddress (IPhone + address)
BookTacts (Book + Contacts),
Undresser (Might sell based just on the name) lol.
Addresser
I'm sure the html5lib guys would love to hear about parser bugs exposed by a corpus that large:

http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/

Especially since html5lib is supposed to follow the HTML5 parsing rules, which were basically reverse-engineered from IE's HTML parsing, so they ought to work for every web-page in existence.
I've had a couple of friends bitten by BeautifulSoup's sudden loss of functionality; dropping in html5lib's BeautifulSoup mode turned out to be a more than adequate replacement.
....but does it count as a hack??
How annoying, I signed up with the beta link to be notified probably over a year ago, I am sure others have as well. But a bunch of random tech crunch people get invites instead of the people who signed up so long ago?
This seems like a poor argument against "release early and release often". First of all it's not all that coherent or structured, and secondly it's very lacking in actual discussion of what went wrong.

It sounds like the author's team got stuck in a bug-fixing cycle where each release caused enough new bugs to fill the next iteration with bug-fixing work. Were they using automated testing? Was the development team good enough to adapt to a rapid release cycle (not everyone can do it)? Too many unknowns to comment on the author's experience...

It's also worth pointing out that nobody said a rapid release cycle was easy. It's hard to keep the vision and the details in mind. As they say, "Programming is hard, let's go shopping".
I send the HN rss feed through Yahoo Pipes to add the url of the link to the text.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=zFbbu_cK3RGfhLcgn0...