skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a quick read of the documentation, Ext Core 3.0 is very similar to jQuery, except no-one uses it, its syntax is uglier (i.e. the distinction between Ext.get vs Ext.fly is problematic, the weird inclusion and naming of Ext.radioClass for something you can do in 2 lines of code), it adds a hodgepodge of dubious "object oriented" features, and randomly extends a few built-in objects via prototypes (or 'JavaScript Augmentation') something which is generally considered a bad idea.

The idea that people should choose this above jQuery because one day they may shell out the money on a proprietary JavaScript library is crazy, especially as so few people on the web are doing RIA stuff to begin with. There's simply no reason to use it unless you're relying on ExtJS anyway, especially as most web developers already knows and uses the simple jQuery syntax.
Joel also writes about measuring distorting results in some of his articles. Just thinking: if a scale is public, wouldn't people scramble to just match the criteria of the scale? For example, supposed somebody is considered "expert" if he has written a book about the subject. So wouldn't people try to somehow write books about things, which would take away a lot of their time and energy that they might otherwise have invested in their job directly?
Thanks, froo, we did a little test of a couple of viral things (tag a friend / youtube etc) but to be honest they didn't really do so much, maybe because the content was cute but wasn't funny/shocking/bizarre enough...the hard part is to come up with a creative idea
Obviously, some language/OS/etc cultures are more fanboyish than others. I tend to not get active in those; it'd be embarrassing.

Edit: I am specifically thinking about Ruby here. It seems quite neat and worth trying, but... Maybe I'm spoiled with polite communities.
Thats a good suggestion, thanks!
ps - got any links to the digg examples?
So do you (now) have a standard grace period when a credit card payment fails?
Yes, we have plenty to improve in improving the flow and newbie experience

Always wondering about what priority should be new features we need for stickiness vs improving the first time experience
Free for now, introducing paid options starting later this month. Yes, we'll do Facebook app/connect to get our viral growth rate up, planned for next month.

Any suggestion how to find the sites targeting particular demographics and their rates? Sorry if that sounds like a noob question, we haven't done any advertising before and are not in the US (although most of our new users are)
Thanks Nathaniel, we use analytics a lot and have some ad:hoc ways of getting some stats, but haven't properly setup the goal/funnel view... we should.
Just downloaded it and played it for a short while. Looks really great and I also feel, that the sound improved a lot.

Definitively worth the download for the casual shooter-dose once in a while...
That regexp would allow a hyphen as the first character. How about this (still assuming .com is the only permitted TLD):
[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9].com$
If you watch their video on the linked page you see clear similarities to Quake III Arena. Neat!
It may be a double-edged sword. You can take advantage of that human nature. Encouraging employees to write books on the relevant fields may benefit the company---it can be a nice PR of the company's technology level, it can attract good people to join the company, and if the company's competitive field is a niche, more books may expand the customer base.
I think really the best thing you can do is listen to your users, keep your fingers on the pulse of your site and then act accordingly.

In my case, I didn't create the rivalry, I simply listened to what the readers were saying and the discussion happening on other sites and reacted accordingly.

It's much easier to ride a wave than it is to create that wave.

Sidenote: There were a few negative effects of my antics, but I turned those lemons into lemonade. The people in the IRC channel at the time got a real kick out of what I was doing.

It ended up in the sites comments being spammed a little by Tokio Hotel fans in a short couple hour window, which luckily I noticed it as it was happening.

I actually found much joy when I noticed this occurring in realtime and redirected those particular people to a rickroll on YouTube using a 301 redirect for those specific IP's in the .htaccess file.

Actually the best use of this tactic (specific IP redirects) was to a certain Tokio Hotel fan/critic named Claire (admin of a TH fansite) who left a very nasty comment on the site. I simply set up a redirect for her IP to a subdomain on the site and a page I set up specifically for her in minutes.

http://hacked.bestactever.com/

She was very upset thinking I had somehow "hacked" her computer and had emailed me with all sorts of threats and many four letter words.

The site's users got a huge kick out of that. It was childish yes, but that's what the site required at the time. Stupid childish antics. It added to the site's notoriety and was free - word spread around about the antics and traffic increased as a result.
As a sweeping generalisation, I find people of our generation (assuming we're all young twentysomething hackers, mostly) far less informed on what you should be paying for these sorts of services than our parents. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of us are happy to throw money at the problem as long as the prices aren't too unreasonable.
I'd argue that "PC" has two meanings then. I'm going for "non-Mac PC", since that's what the title implies by separating Macs from the rest of PCs, and because I don't feel sensitive to exclude a huge set of possibilities.
That's my point: "Mac PCs or non-Mac PCs".
Only if you have a business model and you're making money... or VC funding.

I think the more important thing is to hire developers who have 'been there, done that' so they already know how to write code that is balanced.
I'm just reading a book now called "Realityland" which is the story of how Disney World and Epcot were built after Walt's death. Kind of sad to see how far from the original vision Epcot is. Walt had some pretty interesting ideas on urban planning that prefigured modern schools of architecture like "New Urbanism" http://www.newurbanism.org/

If you are a Disney fan, Realityland is well worth a look.
It seems to me you have to focus on your demographic and spend some time figuring out their top websites, then figure out ways to partner with them. It sounds obvious but if you spend the money on getting Digg frontpaged or an ad on Penny-Arcade the customers presumably won't actually stick, since they're not your target audience.

Can you set up a myspace page? Add Facebook integration, a Facebook fan page, etc? Advertise on Livejournal? Celebrities is a good one as someone else mentioned, also fashion and style sites - with the death of print, could you even afford to advertise in Cosmo or the teenage equivalents? As well as casual gaming sites and possibly MMO sites, as plenty of women play MMOs and look for other distractions as well.

To be honest although I'm a twentysomething girl I'm somewhat atypical and don't really know what sites my 'demographic' visit - but you need to find that out. Maybe look at some of your competitors too, there are a ton of casual games out there.

If you've got 10k users already maybe you can incentivise them to recruit a friend with some of the marketing budget as well. Free months/extras etc.
Those are certainly all valid points and it's a nice enough story but the ability of the author to buy products that are right for her seems to be seriously impaired. No device is perfect for everyone and it is the consumers job to find out what's the right one for her.

Switching to a carrier that has bad coverage in your area? That for one is just plain stupid.
"cancerous GPL" ? I used to have more tolerance for this but when I hit this phrase I stopped reading. It's amazing how bias works. When you deliberately use a phrase designed to insult people their natural biases kick right in. So the commenter's view that "except no-one uses it, its syntax is uglier" immediately is accepted as truth. I guess freedom is cancerous, once one person has it everyone wants it.
This is great news. It seemed like BattleBots was just a couple years too early for its time. With the wide availability of Lego NXT, Arduino, and an overall "hardware hacking" ethos permeating tech culture this could catch on in a much bigger way. Best of luck to them!
Using virtual desktops really makes task switching on a Mac much less painful.
I use Komodo for Python on Mac as well. It's really nice. Plus you can always drop into vim when needed.

Doing it all on Windows just feels wrong to me after years of Mac use ;-)
That probably has a lot to do with having more experience and mostly age (read: time to get experience with it). Not so much with generations...
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VirtualBox 2: How To Pass Through USB Devices To Guests On An Ubuntu 8.10 Host
It's the same in the UK; generally, people are happy with one of the local state schools (a 'public' school here is a posh private school). However, there are definitely a certain set of parents who go to extreme lengths to get little Bobby in the Right State School, since the quality varies so much.

There are frequently TV programmes and newspaper articles about parents who move just to get their kids in certain schools; who have second homes and pretend they live there; who buy to sublet etc; all just to be in the catchment area for particular schools.

It's understandable on one level, but still ridiculous.
But I like wearing a hat.
The problem is a lot of us use all three.
Ok after some searching I found an example. The guy who used to do this is named Matt Inman and this is one example.

http://mingle2.com/dating/phases

You can also see some of the other microsites towards the footer of that page. They all usually changed after they frontpaged to promote his dating site. Classic bait and switch.
Beal Bank? I am more interested in the story of how he started the bank. How can an individual with the government's blessing can start a bank like that. Don't they need huge funds and deposits and a million financial and security hurdles? Where did he get it all?
So, how would you call a Linux machine?
I am definitely an early Disney film fan (from an animation perspective).

Another book you might read is actually written by two of Disney's "Nine Old Men" called "The Illusion of Life" (Pixar actually did an homage to them in The Incredibles) and it talks about not only the specific techniques that they created, but also the attitude of the studio in the early days.

It's actually interesting to read the history on something like Apple and also Disney and see the many similarities between the two companies in their early days.

Early Disney was definitely a startup that had a lot of the hacker values.

Walt was definitely on another plane of thinking. My favourite quote of his is:

“I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination”

- Walt Disney
The American one doesn't have these issues it seems. That's odd.
One of the reasons Ruby 1.9 adoption is so slow is that the people who really needed speed have long since moved on. 1.8 is still good enough for most of us who use Rails every day.
I still manage to type on mine with both thumbs, much faster than I can with a single index finger too. Can't see what I'm doing whilst doing it, but it works non-the-less.

Hopefully the next update with horizontal keyboard will fix that little niggle.
Over 35,000 firms in UK may go bust
No matter how many bad articles they write, the iPhone changed the mobile world for good.

I love my iPhone.
Known bug related to domain aliasing (session cookie set on one domain and not the other). Sorry about that, we're working to get that fixed.
While this may be true, I didn't really get that from the article. It sounded like the system was largely a success, except that they set the maximum level at their highest-ranked people and stopped. Those people got frustrated because they had no way to move upwards.

At Fog Creek, there are several levels that no developers have achieved yet. I'm fairly certain that if someone did achieve those levels they'd rearrange the system to create a few more levels, so that everyone has something to reach for and some idea of how to continue to improve themselves.
European Social Media: Web Startups to Watch
I have looked the implementation* of Ext.fly and I still don't understand why it's smart or faster than using document.getElementById. Somebody care to explain?

* http://pastie.org/437448
I'm a big fan if jQuery and haven't used Ext. However this post does nothing to convince me to switch. It really seems all of the authors points boil down to "I think they're both tied, but Ext is better because I like it."

jQuery makes writing javascript much simpler. By this, I mean that it let's me write code to do what I want and not to get bogged down in the pecular aspects of the framework language. I have recently tried YUI and completely hated it for this reason. No consistency or simplicity to the framework. Doesn't help me build products faster.
I'm just coming up with this off the top of my head, but:

1. When loading the survey page check for a cookie. If it's not present, set the cookie, record the ip-and-cookie mapping, and redirect back to this page.
2. Now that we're loading the page with the cookie, present the form.
3. Upon submission of the form, validate that this IP was previously assigned this cookie, record the ip-cookie-vote triplet. Throw out the vote if that IP hasn't been assigned that cookie.

If a scripter wants to automate requests, they'll have to figure out that they need to get the cookie from you, then use it to vote. You can detect abnormally large ip-vote (and timeframe) combinations and automatically, or later manually, discard anomalous results.

It's not perfect of course, but there is no such thing as a perfect internet survey (unless you're going to mail out SeucurID fobs or some such to the participants).
I find the comment on C++ interesting. Having worked in Flavors/CLOS on Lisp (Lisp is slow was a criticism then also), I found C++ a step backwards not realizing that at the time C++ was just an attempt at codifying what programmers were already doing with macros in C. But with C++ a lot of what OOP was meant to be was lost. Java was somewhat of an improvement, GC, single inheritance, etc.

C++ didn't really lift the programmer away from the machine, so poor programmers who never learned proper memory management, etc. could cut themselves up pretty badly. Coplien's book on how to do symbolic programming correctly in C++ was a positive development but I suspect likely lost on most C++ programmers.

I couldn't agree more with your comments about the quality of discussion. I can only add that as an older programmer I'm also disheartened by the ignorance of history. In my generation calling someone a dirty hippie was fighting words and I had thought we had learned to be tolerant of others. When I see the vicious and nasty remarks people make about Richard Stallman I can only surmise that they have no clue as to the work he has done on the tools that we use daily. Emacs is crufty and shows it's age but contains a lot of fantastic ideas that have made it the timeless tool it is.

But this is human nature. My mother used to tell me to never say anything to or about someone that you won't say to their face. I plan on pointing this out to this fellow Zed Shaw should I ever have the pleasure of meeting him :)
Honestly? first time experience if you want to grow your userbase.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

For example, there are many arguments to why WOW is a dominating force in the MMO market and one of them is with the "first 5 minutes" concept. It hooks players early and from there tries to keep the experience fairly pleasant through the first X levels of play.

There are many other MMO's out there and the first 5 minutes can be frustrating. These games usually don't do as well.

EDIT - Having thought quickly about another benefit of stickiness vs first impression, this is another argument I came up with that is pro-first impression.

I think that if you had to choose between the two, that first impression is better for the network effects that it can create.

Think about your browsing behaviour and how you pass content along to your friends.

When you find something new and interesting, do you send it to your friends (via IM/email/facebook/twitter) straight away or do you wait a couple of days before you send it?
Easy to Make Dessert Recipe - Peach Pie Without the Guilt
This blog is written by the founder of Tabblo which was acquired by HP a while back. Some of the most interesting and credible thinking and predicting goes on here. Definitely check it out.
No one should be using Ext. Ext has had a very shady history regarding licenses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExtJS#License_History) and they have tried to stop developers from using their previous LGPL code citing some spurious interpretation of license.

Bottom line is, use jQuery or dojo or prototype if you want to avoid headaches.

The company behind Ext wants to have the cake and eat it too. They want people to adopt the code (hence the GPL) but they want people to pay for it too.
Ask HN: Flight Simulator in Lisp?
I have been an OO programmer for a few years now, and I have not done much functional programming. I have an interest in flight simulators, and am curious about Lisp. Flight simulators or any other real world simulator makes sense to me in an object-oriented paradigm. Does anyone have any thoughts on coding a flight simulator in lisp or any functional language?
Very cool, is the homage your referring to when there are the two old men talking and say something like "Thats the way you do it, old school" and the other says "No school like the old school."

I always wondered why they were in that scene, but that would explain it.
Agreed. Most of the "points" were either personal taste, or jQuery won but it was called a tie because of "negligible difference" (for example - the fact that jQuery core is 30% smaller than ExtJS, but it's "only 19Kb").

Or ExtJS's ostensibly "more powerful DOM manipulators", which actually fail to be demonstrated in the article.

Very poor article.
Ext.fly uses the Flyweight pattern, which basically means that instead of creating a new instance of Ext.Element to wrap around the DOM element, it uses one global instance of Ext.Element and just simple replaces the internal pointer to the DOM element within that instance. This makes it faster because it can skip constructor and additional logic to create the Ext.Element instance, and smart because it doesnt need additional memory for a new instance. To read more about the Flyweight pattern, you can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyweight_pattern
Well it's Sunday morning here, beats going to church :)
Assuming you're on a laptop, Fn+up/down = page up/down, Fn+left/right = home/end, and Fn+backspace = delete.
This comment reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538466
When I used a Mac a few years ago, none of the ports systems all had the latest versions of packages I needed

Things change. Hackers have been migrating to the Mac en masse. So MacPorts has gotten better and better.

Two or three years ago I went through the pain of installing Ruby/Rails, MySQL, Apache, and git from source -- that was the popular choice at the time, because MacPorts was just not up to date. But MacPorts now has current versions of ruby, mysql, git, and apache, so it's time to switch back.

Yeah, it's probably not as good as apt-get. On the other hand, on the Mac I have Mac software, which more than makes up for it. And if I'm ever nostalgic for apt-get a Linux virtual machine is not far away.
The performance is kind of "meh", though, especially in VMWare (where it's practically unusable). I personally prefer IETester: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/
SlideShare: Lessons learned from an April Fool’s prank
Edit: Oh, I see you removed your post ;) I'll leave my reply on here anyway for people interested in what the Ext.select element does.

Actually you can't use CSS selectors with the Ext.fly method. I think you are confused with the Ext.select method, which returns a CompositeElementLite instance containing an array of all elements conforming to the specified CSS selector. It lets you perform operations on a collection of elements as if you are using a single element. This is very close to what the jQuery $('.some-selector') provides you and works by iterating over the elements array and swapping the DOMElement pointer on an internal Flyweight instance right before it executes the operation on that Flyweight, and thus performing the operation on each element.
EXT-JS is the shame of software development and ethics. I doubt anyone will have the guts to use EXT-JS libraries as the licenses keep changing on whims. It's not just cancerous but HIV+ve as well.
Nukes redux
it's all about cpu and memory cycles you wait for while compiling, debugging, testing.

Did you miss the part where the guy did a lot of Python development and HTML/CSS?

"Why are you sword-fighting in the hallway?" "Oh, I'm waiting for my CSS to compile!"

Last year DHH claimed to be doing all his Rails development on a MacBook Air, a wonderful machine which I really like but not the fastest computer around. On the other hand, it's still faster than anything I had years ago. And the speed difference between the Air and my 24" iMac doesn't much matter for Rails, unless you recompile your MacPorts or rubygem docs on an hourly basis.

But, if you see no value in the Mac OS, by all means use something else.
For desktop web development all you need is an iMac 24" and Photoshop.

Nothing else...
So your definition of hard-working, talented developers trying to create quality products, while trying to be able to keep doing this by selling a license for commercial projects not wanting to use the GPL license (note that GPL is as open-source as code can get) is "the shame of software development and ethics". I was about to write a detailed reply, but after rereading your comment a couple of times, I think there is just no point in arguing with someone who obviously doesnt know what he is talking about, and is obviously meaning to offend others by making untrue and hurtful statements.

Besides that, The Ext Core library is released under the permissive MIT license, and I'm confident in saying that that won't change in the future.
Furhtermore, I wouldn't trust my money to a bank where the owner spends millions playing poker and brags about it. WTF?
And/or you use Quicksilver and Witch. And life becomes even less painful.

I hide the Mac OS dock on day one and never look at it again, except for every couple of days when I have to relaunch Quicksilver. (It's not the best-maintained piece of software in the world, and it has some kind of long-term memory-management issue. One of these days I might have to try Launchbar instead.)
Learning new languages makes you a master of none?
You frequently hear you should learn a new language every year or so, or have a variety of languages at your arsenal to use in different situations, but won't that make you a jack of all trades and master of none?
If you need to use Photoshop for your HTML/CSS editing (for taking image from layouts, for example), dont go with Linux. Because you will not have the possibility to install the latest version of Photoshop in any version of Linux. Sure you can use a VM for things like that, but Photoshop requires a lot of memory. Sometimes you'll have to open a 100 megs Photoshop file (PSD files can really be huge like that)... Because of this, i cannot imagine myself using something else than a Mac or Windows. Unfortunately, because i love Linux otherwise.