skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HowStuffWorks was probably the site I visited most through middle school and a good bit of high school. Wikipedia has largely replaced it, at least in my experience.

Considering they raised $120 million in VC, is a $250 million acquistion a major success? The founders are probably rich now, but for the investors, it doesn't seem much better than breaking even (especially since the site is ten years old). What did they need $120 million for, anyway?
AOL to Cut Global Work Force 20 Percent
I interned at a caterpillar distributor in my country over the summer, it was more interesting than expected. Most of their machines are crazy expensive so in order for them to have a long active life they have satellite monitoring of machine conditions on site (oil samples, temperature, etc). The machine owner (or the engineers) have web-based access to all this data, pretty cool.
This post is obviously a troll.
You and have different opinions about how to define a troll. A strong opinion, forecefully presented on a controverial topic obviously does not make someone a troll. I would identify a troll through a combination of personal disrespect and off-topic commentary.

Here's an example that shows up now and then:

Orig Post: "I'm trying to decide if I should locate my startup in silicon vally or in san francisco. I'd like to be near my potential buyers, which would mean locating in the valley. But I think my developers would be happier living in the city."

Here are two strong responses, one legit, and one from a troll:

Non-Troll: "San Francisco isn't as much fun as people make it out to be. I don't think it would help you attract developers at all. I'd much rather be in the valley where the action is."

Troll: "The city? San Francisco isn't a city. New York, now that's a city..."

Both of these posts are clearly going to attract some argumentative responses. The first may goad a few people, but it is on-topic, contains something that can be defended or refuted under the terms of the original debate, and continues the discussion. The second tries to provoke the thread into something kind of stupid and off-topic.

Argumentative people can further debate, but Trolls always degrade a discussion until there is no longer anything substantive.

I hope for the best for this discussion forum. Craigslist is essentially unusable because of the trolling, but hackernews is still pretty great.

Will hackernews be like that chilly bar you found that got overrun by jackasses six months later, forcing you to look for a new spot? Man, I hope not, because this is a good site.
Ignorance and inspiration abound when it comes to Web Accessibility
greeting card app on facebook
i have built a greeting card app for facebook. can you guys give feedback... thanks
I care what the motivations are.

A person with a strong but controversial opinion will stick to and defend their point of view throughout the debate. The end result might be that I now understand a new point of view, or that they alter their point of view.

A troll will duck and weave, change topics and backtrack. The goal isn't to express an opinion they believe in, but to annoy people and get responses. The end result is that I waste my time reading their posts, since they're not going anywhere with it.

Sometimes you can only tell the difference after the dust settles. I'm still trying to make up my mind about this thread ;)
How Magicians Protect Their Tricks -- One Take on IP of Ideas
interesting. I think that scribd is bound to get blocked by school and work firewalls and other services leading to the site being less useful for the general population. I would propose they create something like adult.scribd.com (or an entire different domain name) that can be easily filtered and enforce that all adult content must be posted accessed from this URL (where they can add age verification if needed).
Great write-up of your experience! It's particularly interesting that you moved away from Java/GWT to RoR. Did you find handrolling your own javascript (+ frameworks) to be just as productive as the Java/GWT approach? (My RoR app has most of the funky javascript GUI after authorization, so it's not indexable anyway.)

Some other questions:

- When do you plan on releasing your git bundle for TextMate? :)

- Has there been any gotchas when using Joyent's Sun platform?

- Did you consider using extjs? (http://extjs.com/tutorial/using-ext-grid-ruby-rails)

Thanks again for posting.
I tend to like history-like approaches.
Intent is important for law. Killing someone in a car accident should be treated differently from premeditated murder say.

But it's not clear why intent is relevant to web forums where voting mechanisms are in place.
That worked for YTMND. Unfortunately, it requires a pretty large army of moderators.
Thanks :). People confuse REST with Rails' implementation of it too often, and the slightest hint of that bugs me.
People need private space (i.e. personal territory) at least some of the time, and the biggest problem with the cubicle is that there is never any real privacy.

It's telling that before he died, the guy who invented cubicles went on record to say that his vision was being terribly misused.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/09/magazines/fortune/cubicle_ho...
one relevant story of Edison and Tesla, from Wikipedia:

"During his employment, Edison offered Tesla $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2006, adjusted for inflation) if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy. Tesla worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise."
Only the header shows up in Opera. Maybe he's a good designer, but it doesn't matter if he can't make his site show up in a standards-compliant browser...
Slashdot's commenting system is one of the best I've seen. One thing I wish they had though is the ability to filter out types of comments. You can already label comment as "funny","interesting", or whatever, but you can't filter by those labels. I want to be able to read at a threshold of 3+ and not funny.
Amichail is a post-modern meta-troll.
Maybe not as cheap as you think. You see, my family immigrated from the former USSR, and my relatives and acquaintances did have... complications similar to what you describe.

Guess what? America is drawing nearer and nearer to the situation you describe. Here's a link, for example: http://uspolitics.tribe.net/thread/8a01efa4-d980-4ec7-8e1e-9...
You can go apartment open houses with me so I can move off of my friend's couch in Oakland. :-)
1) You will never do anything new if you take that attitude. Anything new inherently requires risk. If you do nothing new, you fail.

2) Scaling is a problem for Twitter because it has to scale to such an absolutely massive scale. Saying that you won't choose Rails because Twitter has scaling problems with it is a stupid argument unless you are reasonably sure that you're going to be building an application that will get Twitter-like traffic. No matter what language/framework you choose, if you get the kind of traffic that Twitter does, you will have problems.
Sure... here is maxval1.py:

for i in range(1, 100000000/10):
pass

And here is maxval2.py:

maxval=100000000/10
for i in range(1, maxval):
pass
Do you know how YouTube filtered adult content from early on? They were always extremely effective, so it would be interesting to know how much time they spent on it.
Here is the java code too. First maxval1.java:

public class maxval1 {
static int $i, $x;

public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
for ($x=$i=1; $i<100000000/10; $i++) {$x++;}
System.out.println($x);
}
}

And maxval2.java:

public class maxval2 {
static int $a, $i, $x;

public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
$a=100000000/10;
for ($x=$i=1; $i<$a; $i++) {$x++;}
System.out.println($x);
}
}
Hey - I'll let my co-founder dan talk to you about git + joyent.

As for javascript - javascript is actually a decent language IMHO, the debugging just SUCKS. And the libraries are quite young.

I hadn't seen extjs, but maybe I'm alone when I prefer old fashion ULs & LIs for lists and grids and so on. I haven't seen anything that a framework does that betters this. However, I'll look more into extjs. Thanks for the tip!
Not to nit, but communities like reddit aren't really following "wisdom of crowds" model anymore, as outlined in the book.

To truly obtain wisdom from the crowd, it has to be collected:

a) non-sequentially (i.e. all votes are cast independently of what everyone else cast)

b) taken from wide cross-section of the population.

Once a community has formed around particular topics (far left politics, atheism, xkcd, "vote up if ...") you may be collecting wisdom of _that_ crowd but not wisdom applicable to anyone beyond that select group.
This is why for a new project I just launched I'm using pageviews as the metric (it's a pic sharing site) instead of voting up/down.

Each IP address can only register one unique "vote" per 24 hour period. This makes the system still vulnerable to proxy servers and botnets, but it's not nearly to the point anyone would want to game it yet. (blacklists will go a long way against proxy server attacks)
The world needs random pie throwers, even online.
Based upon empirical evidence, that would seem to be most true.

Though I'm sure it depends heavily on what else is going on in the person's life at that time.
Create your own FORTH programming language
No gotcha's with Joyent so far. I've been using Solaris for a couple years so Matt leaves the sys admin stuff to me. We also use webmin which makes things much much easier.

The git bundle is pretty basic (add, commit, pull, and push) if you are interested in it shoot me an email and I will send it to you.
Cubicles don't provide the right collaboration environment (depends on the layout) and don't provide much in terms of limiting noise or providing privacy. I'm glad that larger companies are starting to realize that cost savings are bad if they lead to lost productivity.

I think an ideal office layout should have plenty of collaboration spaces where employees can work together in small groups and quiet areas to focus individually.
It still doesn't beat plain old com files in DOS/Windows. Take a look at site http://www.256b.com. There are a bunch of 256 bytes programs that do (visually) amazing stuff. My favourite is called lattice: http://www.256b.com/download/256
Why so many "Enterprise vs. Web 2.0" discussions? As if you had to pick one of the other.

The real gravy will be where the 2 meet and the ground will be fertile for the 7 million small business that the enterprise behemoths haven't been able to crack. (Salesforce.com, anyone?)

So once the social networking phenomenon settles down and enterprise software levels off, the real demand will be for people who understand both business processes and modern technologies. Regardless of age.
Well, the internet is for porn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MvSAoJdMW0), after all...
I'm not sure, but YouTube initially had a strong community. They might have simply let everyone flag content as inappropriate. That doesn't scale, but it works when you can trust most of your community.
The end result is not useful, but I learned a lot of new things about C and processes along the way.

And I thought it was an inspiring exercise to go as far down to the metal as possible.

It does make me feel guilty when programming Ruby that I sometimes create an entire array object to compare two integers because it looks prettier, without any regard for performance. It feels so wasteful.
Yeah, Edison was to Tesla what Newton was to Leibnitz. Practically destroyed the other.
I thought it only takes a few days to write a web app in Rails (minutes actually). OK, humor aside - I am coming from Java and trying to pick up Rails, and I have to say, I am really not that enchanted. Many things in Rails just seem extremely ugly when you are used to the clean Java code. Passing everything around in Hashes does not seem elegant to me, and I wonder how Code completion is supposed to work with that. Maybe if you know the whole Rails by heart, it is OK and you don't need completions, but I am lazy. Java is not that ugly - it might look like a lot of typing, but actually most of it is done by Code completion/Code generation these days. Spring also offers quite a few "Code by Convention" features, so it is not that much harder than Rails.

For example with Java annotations, I only have to press ctrl+space in Eclipse above a variable in a model, and it gives me the options for mapping all sorts of things with hibernate (ie many to many etc). Much nicer than looking things up in a book. Presumably it would be possible to set up the Dev Environment to be able to offer completions in the rails migrations, but that would be a hack - in Java, it follows from the types... Oh and btw, isn't it ugly to have the model code distributed all over the place (migrations, model, database schema)? I'd rather have it all in one place.

Internationalization seemed very fishy in Rails, too, from what I gather from "Agile Rails".

Anyway, sorry for the rant - I really have to force myself to complete at least one Rails application, but my expectations are rather low. At least perhaps I can appreciate Java again afterwards...

I like Ruby, but the reality is probably that in a typical Web Application, it's features don't come into play that often. It's mostly CRUD, after all...
well, it looks interesting but there a couple of problems. The first is that there are no facts on this yet (at least not in the few sections I bothered to check) which makes it less likely that I would use it as a reference in the future. I'm also not sure the search works well for this type of site. It's a wiki search which means that if I type something like memory in the search box I'll get back the memory page as opposed to a list of all the pages that contain the term.

Given that this is a reference site search needs to be made more visible and perhaps changed a little bit. I assume as the number of facts grow it's going to be impractical to navigate some hierarchy to look for some particular data. Some of this facts also don't fit particularly nice in any one category. Maybe some sort of tagging might help as a way to categorize the data (or just really good full text search).
Twitter spreads Truemors -- but is it malignant or benign?
hmmm...I think all this tech stuff about sport is cool, but the most important thing in sports is sportsman's will. The one can drip thyself with dozens of sensors, ipods, etc. But if he don't have a passion....it's useless. Nevertheless, smart point for Nike.
Oh come on. The adult group is the biggest is because you're required by Scribd to add your adult content to it.

You're still free to add it to any additional group too, but this is essentially Scribd's way of tagging the content.
I think, only fans will pay for music and go to concerts. The others will listen to music for free. I don't know anybody in Russia who pays for a music regularly. But I know a few fans who buy legal albums.
I really want to try that, especially since they also support Groovy, if I remember correctly.

On the other hand, what puts me off is that it seems to require an application container. I wonder if that would have been the case if it had not been developed by employees of JBoss... So far I was very happy with Tomcat, and I am reluctant to move to a full-fledged application server.
Alexis is writing the Hollywood version.

Aaron's is the indie flick equivalent.
Porn is like the Special Forces of startups. Special Forces were known as "force multipliers" because they can take a small army of native people and make them have a big impact. Looks like porn can take a small company and give it a huge kick in the butt.

The question is whether they want to go this direction or not. I know some companies run from it at all costs. Some embrace it. It'll be interesting to see where they go with this, assuming the article is true.
In the Field of Battle (Or Even Above It), Robots Are a Soldier's Best Friend
Well, give it a try. Again - a tool is just a tool and it has to fit the hand of the person using it. If Java is your thing, Java is your thing... but there is a lot to love in Rails.

Give it a shot for your own edification - a lot of making a rails app is the command line: install ... The lightweight plugins are just beautiful, and they would only be possible with Ruby or a language like it. It really makes your code a joy to create, maintain, and update.
Mesh networking is indeed slow, but it works great for some things. I'm not sure if music is one of the however. The nice thing about iTunes music store or a fast connection to a P2P network is instant gratification. I remember dialup days when it took 15 minutes to download a song and that was painful enough. Now if I want a song I can get it in under a minute and once you get used to this it's hard to wait several hours for the songs to potentially finish downloading.

On the plus side, chances are that one of the other devices in your mesh already has a copy of the song you want (especially if it's a popular song) and if storage isn't an issue you can have a lot of locally cached data that should speed things up.
Has Facebook already cut a deal with Google?
this is a good point. i have a hard time dealing with one of songs I download or purchase. Since they are not in an album (and are often by an artist that I barely have a couple of songs from) I tend to forget about them after a while and never listen to it for a long time, until I accidentally stumble upon it. I can imagine finding songs you like out of all the songs ever recorded would be pretty tough.
Well, it seems that the only AdSense adds on Facebook are those on some third party apps. Unless the third party app in question is owned by Facebook (I'm not a big facebook user, especially not a facebook app user so I'm not sure) I don't see why this would be an indication Facebook cut a deal with Google. Last time I checked they were serving primarily MS adds.
Got one chef, one maid, all I need is a partner

To play spades with the cards up, all trust.
Which makes perfect sense if you think about the particular time lines in which each of them were relevant.
Wikipedia is on google's front page for almost every noun in the English language, and #1 for many.

Examples:

"top": 3 and 4

"ten": 11

"noun": 2

"English": 1 and 2

"Language": 1

"number": 1 and 2

"one": 3 and 4

"many": 3

What's it worth? Billions and billions and billions.
Ask: Text Message Providers? (Who do Buxfer,etc use?)
I wanted to see what experiences other news.yc members had had with text-messaging providers.

There's quite a few different ways to send text messages- Some providers have RPC requests versus TCP sockets, and there is a whole slew of pricing models.

Does anyone here have any experience working with different vendors? What have you liked/disliked?
Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050
'Dark Web' Project Takes On Cyber-Terrorism
What blatant hypocrisy. The author of this article offers no evidence that Scribd has deliberately used porn to increase traffic-- that the proportion of porn in Scribd is any higher than any other large repository, like the Google index. And yet it seems pretty clear that the author himself is using the topic as a way of increasing traffic.
to troll is inherently negative. regardless of their intentions, if they aren't bringing a discussion to a bad place, then they aren't trolling.

i don't quite see how someone could be a "good troll"; if they are being voted up then at least some users feel that they are contributing to the discussion.
I have been considering this, but sms gateways are more expensive then I can afford (I haven't found a good free one).

So I have been considering sending via a mobile phone or GSM/GPRS modem for now since I wouldn't have to scale it up very high for now:
http://www.developershome.com/sms/freeLibForSMS.asp
Tip of the day: Ditch your office cubicles
Find the power in proper delegating
Intro to Distributed Version Control (Illustrated) | BetterExplained
Facebook Out to Get LinkedIn
tagging and user ratings will play an important role as users are given more choices.

rather than how itunes sorts your music, the model used by netflix is a bit more useful. realistically, in a few years everyone will have easy access to library's the size of netflix, available for instantaneous streaming. there is no reason to assume that music will not adopt a similar model.
Oh, how happy I am NOT to be known as the inventor of the cubicle.
StartForce - A Real web desktop
It takes too long to create an account but it's worth taking a look at. Here is a video on cnet to whet your appetite http://www.news.com/1606-2-6200186.html?tag=st.rb
I am determined to write at least one Rails application. Obviously there must be something to it, otherwise it would not have so many fans. I just wrote that rant because I was kind of frustrated with Rails - sometimes aesthetic issues are hampering my productivity. I would be curious how many excellent Java developers have switched to Rails happily. Your example doesn't convince me very much, because of the GWT ingredient. I haven't used it, but the concept sounds very weird (compile Java to JavaScript), so I am not surprised that you gave up on it.
I can't wait to try this out on the Wii.
Tichy, Hibernate is aweful.

Ruby is just PHP 2.0, or at least it seems that the same crowd that sweared by PHP few years ago, are attracted to it and "have seen the light". Every beginner is a "Rails" expert now.
Same people, same crap will come out.
Well, the original article was pretty far off-topic, and that has only bred discussions that are even further ranging. I guess I find bilbo0s' postings to be a bit vague and not well defined. China has a hegemony because it has a few actors and lots of restaurants? Can Italy be one too, then?

That brought out the comparison by ph0rque, typical of reddit posts, that the US is "just like (X|Y|Z)".

And now I'm adding meaningless meta-commentary. Bleagh:-(

(BTW, your comments were brief and to the point, and weren't what I was taking issue with).
What I think is interesting in this approach is that they "got it". The idea of "permission marketing" is something that Seth Godin talks about for years.

Even big companies are seeing the value of providing services as a way of forming branding. It is no longer "guerilla marketing". It is getting mainstream.

Now, PG: wouldn't it be interesting to have a startup that could take this idea and "go meta", finding a way to provide smaller business the means to reach out for the users? :p
Hatebook Embraces the "Evil" Side of Social Networking
No, it's not just a matter of guessing someone's intent. Baiting is clearly distinguishable from other forms of argument.
Nanowires Hold Promise for Future CMOS
Virtual human has a roving eye
So I suppose you've "read other scientific articles on the subject"? Guess that makes you a "knower"?
A troll is not a devil's advocate. A devil's advocate is making one side of a case in order, ultimately, to clarify a question. A troll just wants to make people mad.
Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher I.Q.
Microsoft wants to read your mind
My usual programs are. In fact, you might have one of them on your computer right now... unless you've run a scan recently. ;)
Weighted voting is different from merely having editors, because there are two steps. The editors don't pick the stories. They (in effect) pick the people, who pick the stories. Sort of like the president picks a Fed chairman,
but does not directly control the money supply.
One thing you can do is to send it through a phone directly, but that limits you to ~6 messages/minute.. That's not going to support a very large user base ;)

Gateways, such as http://www.bulksms.com/ generally charge $.05c/message, which is insanely high. Difficult to make money at those prices.