skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The federal debt dropped in the 1830s because Andrew Jackson withdrew all federal funds from the national bank, then the Second Bank of the US.

No federal debt, but it resulted in the Panic of 1837!
Being limited by a $200 application fee to get 10 more slots is NOT going to kill a market for quality-focused developers (indie or not). I'm sorry but that's hardly the case... In fact, we would happily pay ~$10k to publish to iTunes if it meant half the stuff on the store would not be there.

That said, I really wish Apple had let apps run wild. As an alternative, developers could apply for iTunes Publishing and give up 30% + extensive review process. This would let Apple pick and choose without criticism, while "experimenters" could keep the clutter off the store but in a true free market economy where if it was truly that great — it would be recognized with or without Apple's support.

My guess is the Blackberry market will be nerfed by inconsistent hardware that will require extensive testing to ensure a consistent experience for all consumers. Have you developed a Blackberry web-app? Have fun, it's a nightmare... especially when almost all the user-agents report a unique browser specific to the phone. And that's when things were relatively simple.

It's in this regard (and others) that the iPhone wins, and while critics will find fault in a closed/commoditized hardware device — it's truly one of the primary reasons for so much interest in the iPhone (though possibly not recognized given the influx of 'new' software developers). If we had a thousand+ configurations to deal with like Windows Mobile or Blackberry, we would likely not be publishing out of our apartment unless we had funding of some sort.

Look, I'm all about experimenting and hobbyist developers and there's really not much stopping you now... build a few apps, install them on your phone and friends w/ ad hoc distros. But there's really no reason that many of these apps need to clutter a market place. It's like putting a .99 store in a respected city mall, which would never happen be/c there is a gatekeeper preventing crap from leasing space and degrading the shopping experience for customers who go to the mall with an expectation.

That said, I really wish Apple never let iFart on the store. Complete free markets tend to be overrated and resemble anarchy.
ruby-doc.org is nice, but there's a lot missing in the package level (FeedTools etc). Also, it could use a lot more code examples.

Here again I think it's interesting to compare to PHP's annotated docs ca. 2000, which were a great resource since they usually contained a few common usage examples for every function. The language itself was less consistent and mature than Ruby, but the user contributed (pre-Web 2.0! ;)) docs made up for it.
So what? He likes Scala. Likes it enough to write a book in his spare time, of which he has precious little since he's, oh yeah, a full-time developer at one of the biggest, fastest growing sites on the face of God's green earth.

So it's a (mild) conflict-of-interest (really, it's just a promotional opportunity). Doesn't make the arguments any less valid or his book any less worth picking up. Nice thing about code is that it's like science - every claim can be tested ad infinitum.
First of all, I don't think it's fair to accuse the Twitter dev team of working without real experience and numbers to back up their decisions. They have a huge volume of data being generated by their service, and have weathered the whole "Rails doesn't scale" flame-fest with relative grace and good humor. IMHO, that entitles them to talk fairly freely about the relative scalability of different languages and frameworks.

Secondly, any "ranting" you hear in this article is the product of El Reg, not Alex. He mostly offered a calm, positive presentation about the improved speed (with relatively little, if any, tradeoff in developer productivity) that came from using Scala instead of Ruby for critical infrastructure services.

Regardless, most Java web applications' performance issues stem from framework-itis, not from the underlying runtime. By itself, Tomcat (or another modern Java servlet container) is capable of some pretty impressive throughput -- perhaps not on par with a lean, pure C server like nginx, but not nearly as limited in functionality and extensibility, either.

No matter what you think about Java the language, you at least have to admit that HotSpot blows MRI, YARV, the Python VM, and Parrot out of the water when it comes to raw performance on low-level code. That doesn't save you from bad implementation ideas, but it does at least give you the possibility of getting fast, efficient code, if you have a decent compiler and work fairly close to the metal.

Using Scala is one way to produce that sort of low-level implementation code without wanting to gouge your eyes out (which is how most Java source tends to make me feel, anyway).
Google search for "free dating" put PoF at #2
Remember: betting is always legal in the US if you call it some sort of market. Finance, how I love thee!

More specifically, they are called prediction markets. They are legal and have been around for a while. You can even bet on the weather if you like! Enron came up with the idea of Weather Futures (aka Weather Derivatives) in their heyday, and these investment instruments are still used for hedging.

As far as I know, http://www.intrade.com/ lets you bet on elections and similar current events. Can't tell you how legitimate they are though.
I'm think using Mongrel/LigHTTPD for a while might make you see Apache in a new light :)
Plentyoffish makes almost no money, they made $10 M last year and they're one of the top site on the internet. You need to think relative.
Please read the original article. Nowhere in it (or the original talk) does Alex advocate using Scala instead of Rails for the things that Rails does well -- namely, interactive web page rendering.

Within that niche, Rails does a fine job. For infrastructure and middleware code, however, Rails has little to offer other than the Ruby language, which has serious issues when applied to time + memory-intensive problem domains.

I'm a huge fan of Ruby, and a (perhaps somewhat begrudging) user of Rails, but that doesn't mean I think they're the right solution to every problem.
We are readying the SDK now for public release in a couple of months. But if you are interested, we can work to get you a private build. Please let us know.
I think clang is intended to provide these features for Xcode.
The vast majority of the unfunded liabilities of the government (most Social Security obligations, Medicare, pensions, various new bailout programs) aren't captured in the official national debt data at all...total federal obligations under business accounting standards amounted to $65.5 trillion in 2008.

If you really want to geek out there is a lot here:
http://fms.treas.gov/fr/08frusg/08frusg.pdf
Since there's plenty of shitting on Scala going on, I'd like to point out that the Scala equivalent of that is:

1 to 10 foreach println

Which seems more concise than the equivalent Ruby to me. Feh.
A really talented sysadmin with good tools may be able to manage 100 servers; a great developer can optimize your algorithms to get an order-of-magnitude reduction in the number of servers you need.

Eventually, more servers == more headcount.
The battery integration is quite interesting, although I'd bet they are using it for purposes other than "having to buy one big UPS."
One benefit I see to it is high availability, since the site UPS going out won't take down the servers, since they all have their own. Plus, I'd bet it makes the guys that work on the power buss sleep sounder at night, since its easier to work on without worrying about taking out the whole datacenter.
Actually, there's plenty of Rails work out there, and usually in higher rates than PHP (granted, you do accomplish more work per Rails hour).

It seems to me most Rails jobs are either for companies who chose Ruby because they really know their stuff, which is great, or companies who chose Rails because 2 years ago it was touted as some sort of Web app pixie dust in Wired Magazine, which is often less fun :)
PoF is mostly word of mouth, it was the only 'good' free dating site for awhile and they're still banking off that.
"The trouble, he insisted, is that the so-called Web 2.0 languages aren't always as efficient as they need to be, especially in an economic environment threatening to bring Web 2.0 to its knees."

I'm saying that is false, over-optimization is what brings startups to their knees.
As I said above, the AppStore should not be a "free market"... it should be a PREMIUM market and the free market should exists outside of the store where developers and consumers can buy and sell iPhone apps as they see fit. (IMO)

The AppStore doesn't scale for a true free market, it just doesn't and it's certainly not designed to fit the needs of software developers who are forced to use the store. There's no relationship management tools, there's no way to track marketing effectiveness, app reviews are not like comments where developers can easily respond to mis-informed consumers (or worse, developer cronies leaving wrong feedback), etc. I could go on, really.

The more popular it gets, the more broken and junk ridden it will become without some regulation.
It's a little funny. The first I heard of Sam Altman was when Paul Graham said, "Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19."

2.5 years later Paul puts Sam on the list and leaves Bill off of it.
Servint upgraded all their VPS packages - for free
The server rack that they have at the Computer History Museum has them stacked 4 systems per tray as well.
If you want to have the HN chatroom always at your side when browsing HN... go grab the GreaseMonkey HN toolkit, then copy paste this code at the end of the file, but inside the last IF clause. No warranties expressed or implied. :-)

var center = document.getElementsByTagName('center')[0];
var tbl = document.getElementsByTagName('table')[0];
tbl.setAttribute('width','100%');
var chat = "<iframe width='100%' height='" + ( window.innerHeight - 20 )
+ "px' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' marginheight='0' marginwidth='0' "
+ "allowtransparency='true' src='http://chatterous.com/hnyc/embed/?"
+ "bgcolor=FFF0DA&titlecolor=FF7800&linecolor=FFB547'></iframe>";
center.innerHTML = "<table width='85%' cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0"
+ " border=0><tr><td valign='top' width='60%'>" + center.innerHTML
+ "</td><td valign='top' width='40%'>" + chat + "</td></tr></table>";

(edited for formatting)
Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is now Open Source MS-PL
Big database of quality articles
>Do you seriously think the iPhone would have been better if Apple had asked people what they wanted?

That has nothing to do with the article's argument that Apple's secret is evolution of simple systems.

As for your point, each approach has its virtues. What works for Apple probably won't work for the rest of us. Apple has hundreds of brilliant designers that create three different pixel perfect designs for each piece of new UI. Three different teams (and all brilliant at what they do) working against each other... how many of us can afford something like that?!

I still contend that Gruber's argument about Apple's secret being simplicity and evolution is bullshit. He probably came across Gall's law and decided to spin it into an article about Apple.
Thanks for this, hopefully they will begin letting us in soon.

On another note, who else hates having to second guess articles because of what day it is?

:)
Wait, you work in construction and read hacker news?
China Vies to Be World’s Leader in Electric Cars
Simplicity and sophistication of the UI/UX has nothing to do with the simplicity of the overall system. Underlying system is probably more complex because the UI/UX is simpler.

So maybe Gruber should have said that UI is simpler, but not the iPhone. If iPhone is so simple, why aren't other big companies as successful at creating new phones? Clearly, things are not as simple as some people would make you believe.

Also, a jump from Razr or Palm (for example) to iPhone is much bigger than that of iPhone 1.0 to 3.0.

Had Apple released a Razor-like iPhone and then iterated to iPhone 1.0 system over a year or two, I'd buy Gruber's argument. But iPhone was clearly 'from the future' when Apple presented it and everyone else was scrambling to catch up. So Gruber's argument is not really serious.
Yikes, Meebo Rooms is a UX disaster though. I tried using it on our 'maintenance page' once when we were upgrading our servers, and it was a visual design abortion.

Definitely psyched about using Chatterous in the future.

Also, Campfire, watch out.
Ask HN: How to do targeted web crawling?
I'm thinking of building a domain-specific search engine. What are some general techniques for doing a targeted web crawl?

First, there's the issue of crawling pages that are relevant to my domain. How do I keep my crawler "on topic"? I know that I can start crawling from relevant seed sites, but how do I prevent my crawler from moving onto the general web once it hits a very general (and high PageRank) site such as Wikipedia?

Second, suppose that I am interested in finding a particular type of file (for example, PDFs). Are there techniques (again, other than seeding) for guiding the crawler toward sites that are likely to have lots of those files?

Thanks for any assistance.
Lease Purchase vs Lease Option
I think anyone who has any depth of experience with Ruby can attest to the flaws it has data-intensive tasks. Thats why many of us just drop down into another language when we need to get something done efficiently. Ruby's clarity and conciseness make a lot of sense when writing views, controllers, and models, but don't have the same effectiveness in a background process that needs to be written and forgotten about.

Unless there are some major changes in Ruby (MORE than 1.9), I believe that it will be relegated to simple web applications, and never really be good at processing tons of data.

And honestly, isn't Ruby really just about prototyping? I admit, its great for startups who have nil for cash that need to get something written QUICK (to get money from investors), but once you cross that threshold, why not write it over with a language designed for efficiency?
I wasn't sure whether the latter firms had found some new pixie dust by now. Good to know. Obie Fernandez has a talk online somewhere about billing where he says something like no one working in Rails should bill less than $150/hour and that he bills himself and his developers at $250 but will occasionally give discounts for various reasons. Maybe I have numbers wrong - just found it - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/fernandez-sales-do-the-hu...

I recommend watching it. Good talk. Takeaway point - always err on the side of charging too much :)
Wow, because you can't just run the code using Spidermonkey to get the source!
Everyday Survival
This isn't noteworthy since every hosting provider should improve price/performance over time thanks to Moore's Law.
I just replied to an email about my server hanging when trying to retrieve the python code. If you have a similar problem just email me I will reply and attach the code.

Email address and twitter are in my profile.

Also, any fixes are much appreciated. Patch file not required. I've gotten a few emails that just show me where I should add code and why. :)
Google's CADIE - Out of Time
I fell for this one. It's not fair if "April's Fool" is celebrated 27 Dic in my country, I will always fall.
The transactional memory / garbage collection analogy
Why is it "over-optimization" to use language with a genuinely well-implemented runtime?
Your examples seem about as strangle as Gruber's. The initial releases of RoR, XUL, and Mozilla were not "simple" by any stretch of the imagination (RoR was less complex than XUL/Mozilla, but still much more complex than many other web frameworks).
No other implication about Scala intended (Alex is very credible), but optimizing for lower hardware footprint at the expense of your hiring pool (by choosing a very niche language) seems like a bad trade.

Won't every new developer who works on this codebase lose a week to two weeks becoming facile in Scala? Assume a 6 person dev team, and a conservative fully loaded $180k for a valley dev, and that's $43,000 out the window.
There is a way to get profitable, companies like Twitter, Digg and Facebook haven't figured it out, yet, and it gives the whole web 2.0 business a bad rap.

MySpace is quite profitable to the tune of pushing $1 Billion in 2008: http://bit.ly/PJPc2

Dogster has been doing quite well in the advertising space: http://bit.ly/7WZL and http://bit.ly/ytNf They've been able to be profitable by hiring their own advertising sales team. They are getting CPM's of $20-40 for their email newsletter: http://bit.ly/p9nB

CuteOverload.com is profitable. icanhascheezburger.com is profitable.

Part of the problem with web 2.0 companies, is that a lot of them don't realize that they are media companies. Mainstream media companies figured out the monetization bit years ago. They make money by selling the content (Movies, Music, print media), selling advertising space on the content (TV, print media), or by branding and merchandising themselves (Star Wars, Saturday Morning Cartoons). * See Footnote

Mainstream media has also learned a long time ago, that you can charge a premium for delivering a targeted demographic. If you were able to launch a Social News site devoted to the people interested in buying car insurance, or people intersted in investing in day-trading stocks, your CPMs would sky rocket.

Dogster is making money because they figured out the setting up their own ad network and selling ad space on it was much better than using Adsense. TV stations, radio stations all have their own sales teams that sell ads on their networks.

* Newspapers and Print media are really struggling because their overhead is so high, and can no longer compete with online media. But, for years, these companies have been cash cows. Just look at how Rupert Murdock made his money.
That's exactly it. Before all of this interweb stuff the highest-margin ad venue was the phone book. Every business and trade professional spent at least 50 bucks and every lawyer, national chain, auto dealer, etc splashed out for more. YPPA are still pulling about $10B per year.

The phone book is kind of the upper bound for behavioral and demo targeting: everyone who sees your ad wants to buy what you are selling right now. The only question is which ad they see first.

A social network simply does not have that kind of audience. A site that is not in the business of telling people things they want to know is never going to make the same margins from ads.
Doctrine of the Elect is also significant for creating voluntary association, which has been a subtle but important catalyzing principle of western civilization.
You are wrong.

Intrade is based in Ireland and is illegal for US users. The Iowa Markets got a special exemption from the FTC as an academic research project.

And you can't sell derivatives unless you get regulator approval (which they won't give for betting markets) (see http://hanson.gmu.edu/ideafutures.html, for example).

Hanson (a professor of Econ at GMU, and contributor at overcomingbias) is one of the strongest proponents of legal prediction markets. He (and many others) have been lobbying for them forever, with no luck.
Thanks a lot pclark. Is there a place where these startups post jobs ?

Also, how is the general startup scene as compared to other centers in the US like Boston, NY ?
This will a lot of time for me every day. I don't mind the hours I spend here. But what really bothers me is how inefficiently I consume HN.

If SearchYC has multiple customizable filters, it will be perfect. [points, date range, etc] I'd like to be able to exclude websites too.
How can you reduce the time in fixing the problems on your web application?
No, I wasn't missing the point. I was asking why writing software in college doesn't count.
I actually rather enjoy your comments about the Digg fiasco. I've never gotten the impression that Kevin was a great business man. And, I'd avoid taking business advice from him most days of the week, although his celebrity might be handy. I'd definitely take advice from you re: business arrangements with Kevin any day of the week, however.

Tim... I agree. Very tool like. I actually liked Tim's book. He's a rampant self promoter, and turns a lot of people off. But, he did have some interesting ideas, which I liked a lot, however. Having him as a angel or board member... I don't know. I'd have to think about that one a lot.
It's not. It's hard to to monetize with advertising which is all most sites even try. Virtual goods, premium accounts, merchandising those are methods that work.

Also thinking it in terms of monetizing users instead of monetizing your site/products is symptom of failed thinking. Users aren't cogs in your money making machine, they resent being used/abused for your profit. Do something your users want, offer something they will pay for.
Well worth the time. Larabee is a very interesting architecture.
Not just hilarious, but truly in the spirit of AFD, unlike most of the lame "pranks" that plague the internet every April 1st. Maybe it was unwise and bad for business or maybe it didn't actually matter, I don't know. But either way, this was a great prank!
slide show hucksters

april fools

egos deflate ;)
you're right, other than having a large enough distribution to do experiment with different pricing scheme pricing too high and backing off is probably the best way to go.
I hope they have a licensing deal with TicketStumbler.
My brother gets immense satisfaction about haggling in China. "Don't you give me the foreign devil price! I grew up in Hong Kong, I know how this game is played! This T-shirt is shoddy and only worth 1/6th of what you are charging, I will pay 1/5th and curse your name!"

He can pull it off, despite having grown up in Chicago and being white as the driven snow. Personally I'm glad that Japan is largely a sticker-price society, the stress would wreck me.
Nirmal that readability service is incredible. I tried it on my blog - I hate to admit it, but it does look a lot better. One thing that makes it much easier to read is that it strips out the comments. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I suspect for 80% of readers (and likely many of the people who use the bookmarklet) the comments are just noise.

Similarly stripping the navigation also makes it easier to read, but then it loses it's value as a website.

I wonder if there is a readability wordpress plugin that could display the readability version in a JS pop-up overlay. I think if I can find one, I'll add that to my site.

Edit: I just tried it on DaringFireball. Beautiful.
thanks pclark, jaikoo!

I'll get in touch with you offline.
Have you seen this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214028
You can do it easily in Rails without a redirect too, and without regex as used in Django.

In routes.rb for example:
map.login '/login.php', :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'new'

But I suppose that wouldn't make for a very funny April Fool's joke.
What does Emacs have to do with LISP?

Isn't it like saying "I dislike C++ because Visual Studio doesn't run on Linux"?

Also, on fun of learning LISP. It's fun in a "oh-crap-my-head-hurts-AAAAAAAAH-oh-I-see-now" way of expanding your brain. It's not Ruby "lolz-I-can-type-5.years.ago-hehe" type of fun :)
You could try latent semantic analysis of new pages to determine similarity to other documents in your domain.

I've been doing a lot of web crawling recently, feel free to get in touch if you'd like to discuss further.
Reminder: Philly Entrepreneur Expo Today
If you're in the Philadelphia area, come stop by and say hi. My startup, Classlet, will be there as well as a whole bunch of other great talent.