skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who needs a script when you can simply install a userContent.css file that eliminates most ads: http://www.floppymoose.com/
He's looking at a specific kind of website, which I'll call the "big empty room" variety. You know what's popular with people? Big empty rooms. They go in them, talk, eat, smoke cigarettes. Wow. I think I'll start my own big empty room in order to attract people. What do they need?

4 walls. 1 ceiling. 1 floor.

Wow! What could be easier?

Actually, you'll find that revenue-generating websites like eBay, Amazon, adwords.google.com, etc, are pretty heavy with respect to architecture, features, and (I suspect) industry standards.
"""

Amusing true side-story: I met Paul Graham at Foo Camp last summer. After his crowd of admirers had dispersed on the first day (he's pretty famous), I came up and introduced myself. He was very nice and polite, and he was even kind enough to venture: "I've read some of your ...essays." He said the word essays with this funny pained look on his face, as if he'd just swallowed a gob of wasabi and was trying to play it off like nothing was wrong. I think he meant well, but that expression was just priceless.

I already knew my work wasn't for everyone. :)

"""
thats a good point, but I doubt they are planning to do all the interviews themselves, I think the article mentions that they just want to add any related video in there, i.e. interviews, lectures and anything else of that sort ... but if they don't there is no way it can scale, it will be like a tv show with a couple of episodes a week
Paul, you should certainly take a look at dropping affiliate links into your post. At Triggit we have bloggers making really good money with content like yours. With shopping.com paying a buck a click for gadget traffic it can be really lucrative. Best of luck.
No offense, but there can be benefits from going out.

Exercise, social interaction, some downtime...make a trip to a grocery store!

If you are being frugal, it is almost certainly better to shop around locally.
JavaScript lib to make IE behave like a standards-compliant browser
12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them
At least for now, you can get around the 100 char limit for titles in YCNews by first submitting with a shorter title and then editing it to have all the chars you want.
And dramatically decrease your chances of anyone actually clicking on it (except for me).
Start-up to Google: OpenSocial's too close to our name
The article says that because the mentors found the project work acceptable, then lines of code becomes a good measure of productivity, even though it generally wouldn't be. But I think it's still a bad measure of productivity.

In fact, I think the lesser amount of code for the same size project is more productive. I'd prefer the programmer who can meet the project goals in 4,000 lines of code over the one who does it in 20,000 lines. Given those two numbers, I can't help but feel that the 20,000 lines is spaghetti code. (I realize this in my own prejudice and it may not be the case.)

As Antoine de Saint Exupery says: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Going for perfection, in most cases, is probably not the most productive use of time. But I think this quote is still generally true for programming.
This Video Makes Bill Gates Look Cooler Than Steve Jobs | Farwell video @ CES
I am not advocating it :-)

I wanted to give the gist without the user having to click thru to find out. Those who want to actually use that JS library will click through, of course.

Plus, won't you agree with the "because I can" factor in wanting to try it? :-)
A programming language cannot be better without being unintuitive
agreed of course, but there is an ever-present stigma on reddit and news.yc about "nerds" never "getting out", which is important but lets not forget that when you're doing a startup you make some sacrifices, sometimes this includes some or all of the following: exercise, social interaction, spending money
Yes.

Actually, (like most things), this makes me want to look for the opportunity. A new AI app - I can see it now...

Inputs: LongTitle and CharacterLimit

Output: MostEnticingUnderLimitTitle

In your case:

"Use JS Lib to Make MS IE Suk Less"
Bountii Opens Up Its Price Engine With Release Of API
The jSkinny on jQuery
Garbage Collection in Erlang
Very cool idea, but I wonder how profitable it is, especially if they intend to continue producing all their own content.
Support Vector Machines (SVM) in Ruby
If your goal is to deny the competition free code, then, yes. But too often people think that they're successfully hiding some trade secret when they're not.
I actually did that the first time: "JS lib to make IE behave like a standards-compliant brwsr. Fixes HTML,CSS,PNG issues under IE5 & 6." (exactly 100 chars)

But when you can trick the system to let you have more than 100 chars, its kinda cool to do it.
Because Paul Graham woke up this morning and said, "news.yc is 50% faster. And Paul looked upon the site and saw that it was Good"
Bad design doesn't make sites successful. It's more that sites that for some reason have a strong grip on the user can get away with being lame in other respects. But you can't learn anything from this lameness, because it's random.
A person might go there to find out things about YC. I mean, supporting YC is the ultimate purpose of the Hacker News application, after all.

In any case, YC is not a separate site: it's the parent site of this application. The logo is not the Hacker News logo, it's the YC logo, and should link to YC.
I changed some things about the way Arc handles strings.
Possibly if requests are handled faster, there's less chance the thread that answers yours will be interrupted. A rendering of the front page is now a 30% smaller target.
Two New Ways to Wirelessly Print from Your Mobile Phone--Without Ink
Two new mobile printers let you print wirelessly from your BlackBerry, digital camera or other mobile device--and neither of them require ink.
Well, like I said: the anecdotes are fine. I don't necessarily have a problem with anecdotes. One of my favorite genres is the oral history, in which a historian sits with a bunch of people and just writes down their anecdotes. (The Box: An Oral History of Television is really good, but let's not forget Founders At Work, which is essentially in the same genre.) You can learn quite a lot by just listening to people talk about their lives and their professions. I certainly agree that it's good to know that quite a few lawyers are bored stiff, and that quite a few doctors hate practicing medicine in our broken health-care system.

What I dislike is this style of journalism where the storyteller tries to tart up the anecdotes with meaningless numbers in an attempt to make them seem more significant. Meaningful numbers would be nice; meaningless numbers just distract you and dilute the directness and frankness of the stories.

Reading a story like this is like having a conversation with a day trader: they are anxious to impress you with their detailed knowledge of the up-and-down movements of randomly-walking lines on charts, but they barely know what their favorite company's product is or who its customers are.
Completely agree. This is why I wrote my own java webserver 'framework' for my current project.
No, I'd argue that they are separate sites, though it is obvious that y combinator is affiliated, and it's linked at the bottom of the index page. Very rarely will users of hacker news want to go to ycombinator.com, so having the link in such a prominent position is a mistake.
Create a Success Habit
Been there, done that, regretted it.

I think it depends on the scope of your project. Small to mid-sized project? You must use a framework, or you will end up with a bug-filled half implemented version of a framework that exists. Large project? Perhaps you can write a framework, but perhaps consider extending a current framework to your likings.

Why the hell would you write your own framework and reproduce all the features of an existing framework (if such a framework exists, which it does for Java, Ruby, Python, etc.)
I think i broke it :-X
VICTORY! Thank you for only making 10 levels - this could have caused employment and marital problems if it went on longer! Some comments:

1) I loved the fact that the AA guns could damage its allies (my enemies) - after a rounds where I would engage the other planes away from the guns, I had much more luck dogfighting around the guns because there were so many more of them than me.

2) So much of my strategy was flying around and around and around that it was tough to hit stationary targets

3) Because of #2, I had a terrible time with the Zepplin because not only were all the targets stationary but there was much less room to fly.

All in all, it was a good mix of challenges and extremely fun to play. Keep up the good work!
Whereas, with something like Rivet or Websh (or PHP for that matter, even if I don't like the language), it's good old tried and true Apache taking care of dynamically allocating new servers as needs be... fancy that!

I love Rails, but those guys are too anxious to throw the Apache baby out with the PHP bathwater.
IBM is breaking Moore's Law
I don't think that's quite I'm saying. I'm not put off by the platform because of the initial incarnation of the language I still want an Android phone and expect to write programs for it at some point. Instead, I'm saying that I'm put off by the contest because of the rules - which is something different.
So . . . does it work??
A Standards Based Approach to Comet Communication with REST
Atta boy Johnny. ;)
Wow! I saw them fix it! Got "page cannot be displayed" for a second and then the title was shortened. Just a blip like deja vu glitch in the Matrix.
Apparently it used to .
Nice move, bountii!
I think the post is mostly tongue-in-cheek, he isn't actually suggesting you do these things, just pointing out that there may be more important things to worry about.
New Blog For European Startup News, From The Guys That Broke Into My House
This hole isn't there because I wasn't aware of it, but because I trust users here. Writing code to enforce rules is boring, so my general approach to abuse is to wait for it to happen before I expend time preventing it.
Paul Buchheit: Building a great team
I agree, being forced to know ahead of time how many mongrels you'll need is sub-optimal.

At the same time, it's trivial to switch this number if you've not hit your server resource limits yet. (i.e. when coming under a digg load)

Once server limits are reached (in Apache or nginx/mongrel/rails), the point is moot - you'll have to instantiate new servers at your co-lo / hosting company by hand anyway.

All that said, nginx is a fantastic web & proxy server. It blows Apache out of the water in terms of memory usage, etc.
Nothing different happens when an item is in the middle of being edited, either by the submitter or the editors. The next request after the edit is saved just gets the new version.
Oops... I am sorry.
Fail. Is this supposed to be a joke? I honestly can't tell if the guy is satirizing the self-indulgent tone of most tutorials. It has constant digressions to useless topics, like Int versus Integer, that just show off the author's erudition.
Generate Static html cache files automatically in django
Have a django site you want to be able to weather just about anything? Superjared put together a simple way to tweak your django site to auto generate static html pages on database updates which, when combined with nginx configurations, defaults to these html pages. Cool stuff, and a great way to maximize your server's potential with little effort.
I have the same system, unfortunately people seem to do stupid things all the time.
this may be relevant for some languages but I don't think the whole essay applies for all languages
woot, i got news'd
"Why the hell would you write your own framework and reproduce all the features of an existing framework"

For fun.
To learn a new language.
Because you have a new idea to explore.
Because sometimes people do invent better wheels (I love the irony in this phrase, given this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel )

So you are saying for a large project it might be justifiable to implement your own framework?

I would think for a smaller project you could quickly put something together in less time that the learning curve for some of the frameworks.

Bug-filled/half implemented seems to be more a comment on programming ability than the decision to write a framework.

Fortunately for many people, others have decided they would rather write a new framework than use something that exists.
I recommend www.podiobooks.com if you are interested in hearing some non-geeky stories. I have really enjoyed listening to some of their content over the last few years. adf471587879rzq
Thanks for the interesting info, Matt. adf471587879rzq
One app server and one DB server counts as "scaling" now?
Hiring is key. I liked the note about the Lake Wobegon hiring strategy here:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg...

Hiring below the mean of the people at your company will cause tolerance for less talented hires to increase. Worse people hire worse people.

Smart people should be instructed to only hire really smart people. This way, you'll never get the feedback loop of degrading quality.

So the theory goes.
I am sorry, I disagree with

>Bug-filled/half implemented seems to be more a comment on programming ability than the decision to write a framework.

How you can write a fully featured, bug free framework better than an entire web community? Sure writing your own framework is interesting, but I feel my skills are lesser than a huge community of people working together.

A smaller project you would not build a large framework, you would build a tiny subsection of features, however then you cannot easily add caching, internationalization, etc if needed.

Many programmers will write their own framework. Most of these programmers will jump on a common framework afterwords.

I fully agree with

>For fun. To learn a new language. Because you have a new idea to explore.
I just noticed, any edit page has it, but the add comment page doesn't.

Perhaps this is adequate, you mess it up the first time and go to edit and it is available.
Do you have any sources for what you say about Kubrik's film? I'm very curious about it...
Is this seriously the first implementation of this in Django?

I seriously hate gloating, but Rails' page caching has been around for two years. I must be mistaken.

edit: After browsing the Django documentation, it appears that I'm right. While you can store the output of a view in the filesystem (or memcached, or whatever), cached hits still need to go through the framework to get dispatched. This appears to be the first way to skip the framework (aside from Squid or similar), which is what Rails' page caching does.

Page caching creates the cached page on the first request, and dishes out the cached output until it is swept (after a new create/update/delete). This seems like the "no duh" approach. The Django "standard" way of setting a timed expiration seems silly and inflexible.
Absolutely, it is all about balance and what you are willing to sacrifice though.

I will not sacrifice exercising for a startup; for me personally it is counter-productive. The time spent exercising pays great dividends in my energy levels throughout the week.

I will and have sacrificed spending money, some social interaction, and various other things.

To each their own though, I just feel that grocery shopping is trivial, only takes a few minutes, and has it's benefits. Not to mention you could listen to a tech podcast or think about an algorithm while shopping/running into other carts.
Just Ping will, err..., just ping a url or IP from across the globe
The wikipedia page mentions this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_%28film%2...

Deleted scenes

Kubrick filmed several scenes that were deleted from the final film. These include a schoolroom on the moon base; Floyd buying a bush baby in a department store for his daughter; additional space walks; and astronaut Bowman retrieving a spare part from an octagonal corridor. The most notable cut was a 10-minute black-and-white opening sequence featuring interviews with scientists discussing extraterrestrial life, which Kubrick removed after an early screening for MGM executives.

I'll need to find another page that mentions the Feynman probe, as I like to call it.
Anatomy of a Blackhole (flash)
Goodbye, cruel Word
Simple Lempel-Ziv Compression in Erlang
There are a few different levels of caching within Django. You might notice his graph has 'Django caching' in it.

It allows about 10x more requests.

His route seems to add another 10x worth of performance or something.

As to caching pages, timeouts, it is completely possible to cache things as they are created and make use of them. The timeout method is just the first, simplest way of caching saying (cache this one page for a minute, so when it gets YC'd, it only recalculates the page every minute)
A Tiny Taste of the History of Mechanics
No. It's true, it also happens in craiglist, ugly = success, it may be because is less scary without design to the masses?
i'm not much of a rails head but I did enjoy that article and it makes me happy that we're using nginx on http://Skribit.com
Entrepreneurship 2.0 in 2008 and Beyond
Keeping An Eye On Grandma Over the Internet
Summary: the UI designer of Gmail, Google Reader and Google Calendar joined FriendFeed, and Paul is really excited about it.
How Google controls Apple
I disagree. Often if you write your own framework you end up with small, maintainable code that you fully understand and that does exactly what you need.

Different reasons for writing a new framework:

1. sometimes you disagree with the general direction of the available frameworks. Different people can think differently (think for a second about the different TYPES of frameworks available for web development)

2. a lot of times you don't need 100% of someone else's framework.

3. sometimes it's faster to write something than to research available frameworks and read their documentation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against code reuse. For tedious work (like re-implementing a protocol with a nasty spec) you want to use a library that someone else has developed and tested. For doing crypto you probably want algorithms and libraries that have been well studied and tested.

I look at frameworks (not libraries) as examples of how to integrate various libraries and an approach to solving the particular problem. This is good. Take a look at many frameworks and get inspiration. But then feel free to write something that works for you, reusing code where necessary. That's the beauty of open source.
nginx - isn't it just another in a long line of select-based web servers that "blow Apache out of the water" when it comes to serving static resources? boa was what I set up to serve static files at Linuxcare back in ... 1999? Or is nginx different somehow? That's fine as far as it goes, but the tricky part lies in serving up the dynamic stuff.
i see what he did there...
An Interface of One's Own (leaving MS Word behind)
[SF] Justin.tv: Looking for a Flash/Flex Engineer
the difference here is that the html files are served by nginx, before django is event touched. Removing Django from the equation (and fastcgi or modpython or whatever nginx is proxying too) is where the speedup comes from. This isn't "caching" as much as it is fairly smoothly making certain areas of the site static html.
Yahoo Is Clearly Up To Something Big Around Music
blah blah, if he wants a hammer for a spice rack he can use php.

If he wants to build something a bit bigger, and actually maintain it and grow it over time (e.g. cabinets for his kitchen), he would be wiser to spend time standardizing the parts and dimensions so that he can buy in bulk and speed production time (roll your own framework), or buy a pre-built set of cabinets and customize them to his kitchen and desired layout (existing framework).
Most existing frameworks are designed to cover a million use-cases. Which makes them non-optimal, and overly complex.
On a societal scale, the size and "meaningful content density" of communication seems to be inversely proportional to the ease with which it is delivered to it's audience.

Would you bother writing "Java Sucks" with a quill and paying a horseman to carry it 2000 miles? I wouldn't bother writing this comment if I weren't already logged in...
The Search Party: Google squares off with its Capitol Hill critics
"How you can write a fully featured, bug free framework better than an entire web community?"

How can a small startup team write software better than an entire corporation? Sorry, but bigger+more developers isn't necessarily better.
You're welcome. asjh123832wld
I mostly use adagio, but will check those out.
You guys rock. How did the holidays treat you?
Yes, that's exactly my point. Is this the first approach that does this within the Django framework?

That is exactly how page caching in Rails works, and has been implemented for two years. It seems like Django's idea of "page caching" is equivalent to Rails' "action caching".
I've made a small fortune monetizing my poker blog by creating poker-related services and leveraging the trust built with my audience. I still collect significant revenues from this with no ongoing effort beyond answering emails. In fact, though my traffic was never above 30k uniques a month, I made more profit than many blogs that have uniques in the low millions, though it was also more work than simply slapping on ads.

Even off of ad revenue I was making low 4 figures monthly just by selling them directly. At least in the poker niche, when your blog gets big enough advertisers seek you out. I don't have enough experience in other niches to know if the same is true.
>How can a small startup team write software better than an entire corporation? Sorry, but bigger+more developers isn't necessarily better.

In a startup I would suggest your efforts would be better working on your core competency. For many people, publishing to the web is just a tiny piece of their startup.
i see your point. i would assume someone else has done this before in django, but regardless, i thought it was interesting as i haven't seen something like this as easily accessible for us django people.
I tried this library sometime around May of last year. I read through a wrox book called "CSS Instant Results" and many of the discussed CSS layouts required use of the IE7 script to work properly. I had some problems with the max/min width/height adjustments not holding when the browser was resized, and additionally there was some flicker when resizing. At the time, it appeared from the site and forum that there was not a lot of active development going on. Now it looks like there has been an update, and active development has resumed, so I would be interested to look into it again in the future.
Generating is never the hard part, it's keeping the cache current, pruning it when it gets too big, etc. that's hard. (Ok, I didn't read the article, yet.)
The pages load for pg before he even clicks the links.
Nginx is both incredibly fast at serving static files and pretty useful all around for reverse proxies and whatnot (not to mention being easier to configure/maintain than apache). I use it at work and it has been fantastic.
I really like the approach of having X number of processes started automatically. You can get really fine-grained in your scaling strategy, and can balance multiple projects on the same server much better than you could with Apache.

If you really want the "automatic blah blah blah" approach, you can always use fcgi with Apache. Many people do (including 37signals).
No, and the author never said it was.
I have a feeling that anything gambling-related is easier to make money from. I had a similar experience with an advertiser (a British casino, iirc.) seeking me out when I made a silly little blackjack game.