skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, technically, the software we've written is a distributed flash video distribution system, of the type one could use to run a CDN.

But "distributed flash video system" is like 20 characters longer and a lot harder to say than CDN.

It runs partly on EC2, partly on our own servers right now, and relies on the properties of neither.

It's much, much cheaper than buying software from Adobe or Wowza or paying a CDN.
Ask Hackers: Are Firefox extensions secure?
Could Firefox extensions access my passwords stored in Firefox? Are you using extensions working with your passwords ... to check your new mail by example?
Ack! Now I have the infomercial playing in my mind!

"Dr. Hannibal Lecter Presents: Getting Things Dead"
Sort of like the ed session here:

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

"Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity."
For a while I thought the only way to quit vi was to cntl-z and then kill.
Sardonic and hilarious!
Google's guru of giving
Comparing languages for speed is a really odd thing to do. It's much like trying to compare the intelligence of people. Give a very narrow context, it may be sort-of-do-able, but it's not a very useful picture. The problems with PHP, is _not_ its speed.
Yo! That is Master GPL! Respect or he will pop a cap in your stack.
If http://delphi.about.com/od/delphifornet/a/conspiracydnet_2.h... is to be believed, he also got a cool $3 million signing bonus too.
Have you tried actually writing interesting and engaging pieces? I know it's a little harder, but it's less of an arseholeish thing to do than manipulating social news sites.
Open source coders rankings
Congrats on launching the platform Sam - I remember you talking about that back in the summer of 05 for Radiate.

Loopt has come a long way!
Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL
It may have been that way once but these days if you use vim, by the time you get to the second ^C the message

Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim

will appear.
One of my college friends suprised me by "saving" a paper she was working on in vi by typing ':wq' and then typing 'vi <paper>' at the command line. Turns out she thought that ':wq' was how you saved in vi, and was happy when I told her to try typing just ':w' instead.
Imagine what the emacs version would look like. M-q C-q M-C-q M-x quit ...
Menu->File->Quit

I have the menu bar switched off though, so a new user trying my emacs wouldn't have a clue.
Short stories are a tough market. Few people can make a living writing fiction, and almost nobody can make a living selling short stories. (I've been told this was not the case 50 years ago.) There's a good percentage of professional fiction writers who stay away from short stories, not because it isn't a nice form, but because it won't pay the bills.

If for some reason you must write sci-fi/fantasy short stories, you should submit to the Writers of the Future contest. Great prizes, no entry fee, and you won't be competing against anyone who has already sold 2 or more stories. Write 4 stories per year and submit them to each quarter's contest. And stomp on a few cans while you write.
Will the source to news.yc also be released, as a non-trivial example program?
Why I Love Mechanical Turk and 41 Ways to Brown Bag Your Lunch
Any article that recommends something other than Bringhurst as the "one book" on typography needs round-filing.
Is this an unfortunate reuse of the YAML acronym (http://www.yaml.org)?
What is the difference between vi and Pico? I always found vi a mystery and just used pico instead.
SURREALIST TROLL STRIKES AGAIN
You might enjoy "Concrete Mathematics" by Don Knuth, et al.

I opine that graph theory and probability are typically-useful branches of math for programmers to study.
Well, I spent about an hour writing the piece. I proofread it. I linked to the relevant parts of the dialog to make it easier to skim. I summarized for those who didn't want to follow links. I inserted screen shots for context. I linked to the other sites where it was being discussed. I added updates and clarifications in response to comments made on 3 different sites (mine, here, and reddit) to help the conversation. And it is related to Agile principles. Can I get some credit for doing those things?

I do apologize if you clicked on it looking for something about Agile and then found it uninteresting and unengaging.
I would say the same thing, except swap vi and pico in your comment :)

I think it's all a matter of what you got used to first. I started out by using vi on some HPUX machines around 13 or 14 years ago. I've just kinda stuck with it ever since because it's on almost every machine I come across, and I can function in vi fairly well.
Compete: visits to Youporn up 14000%, reddit up 1000%
iPhone Gets Closer to Being a Business Device with Lotus Notes Support
IBM will announce next week a mobile version of its Lotus Notes email software for the iPhone, bringing Apple's smartphone one step closer to becoming a legit business device.
Not to mention that such serious websites have more at stake and most likely have a team of developers that learned the hard way not to change product code on the fly.
I'm sure there are really useful ways to use MTurk. I'm quite sure even really innovative startup ideas.

Can anyone think of something?
Mathomatic - general purpose computer algebra system in C
Google.org Targets Climate Change, Poverty and Emerging Threats
We're actually taking a database from usda.gov and having MTurk write unique content for each item for our application.

There are several other sites that already rank well just by copying the same data. For a few hundred dollars we should be able to be very competitive.
you obviously haven't heard of the genre "nerd core". it's exploding.
It may be an odd thing to do, but it's a common thing to do. People are prone to premature optimization, and that includes selecting a language. The perception that the language that's otherwise optimal is too slow has resulted in a number of projects being written in a suboptimal language.
Another sub-$200 Linux PC?
It's the same as installing any piece of software. So yes, they could.
If you liked this short story at all, go buy Choke or Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk.
Yea... another half-assed attempt of delivering news from techcrunch.
That was really enjoyable. Practical and amusing. I sympathize, somewhat, with the plight of a career-writer. I have a hard enough time just getting a few blog posts up every week.
I find it funny that the 31 lines of code in the example can be easily reduced to 8:

def merge(a, b)
c = []
c << (a[0] > b[0] ? b.shift : a.shift) until a.empty? || b.empty?
return c+a+b
end

def mergesort(a)
a.size <= 1 ? a : merge(mergesort(a.slice!(0,a.size/2)),mergesort(a))
end

Language Power > Language Speed
A tenfold improvement in battery life?
The Programmer's Food Pyramid
I like the way this guys describes the technique of visualization. Some people have taken the idea of "visualizing" a goal and have forwarded the claim that the visualization will CAUSE the world to bend to your will.

The author displays the missing piece of the puzzle when he says that visualization will make you more AWARE so as to take advantage of opportunities that will lead to your goal.

good article.
Ask NickB:  How do you do it, dude?
You're all over the place. Your current karma is over 8000. How much time do you spend submitting links, etc...? Any tips or tricks?

By the way, thanks for the hard work in making the site better.
AFAIK they're not isolated, i.e. running with the same privileges as the rest of XUL code, including Firefox UI itself. In the realm of a browser, I can imagine quite evil XUL extensions.

I cannot tell anything about the level of isolation for XUL runtime itself though - i.e. how protected the rest of your computer is from XUL code.
NickB is not real, he is my bot

(just kidding)
Lotus Notes is usually considered a detriment to business. :)
what does defopr do? google search for 'defopr, lisp' returned nothing, google code has 'defopr' as parts of other words or variable names? I want to understand the joke. Is it a joke?
Are you going to offer streaming services to other companies?
it's all those xkcd submissions :X
Some Guy to Sun: Drop Support for JRuby and Support Groovy Instead
Create a Rails 2.0 Blog in 10 Minutes with Netbeans
RubyWeaver Dreamweaver Extension IDE for Ruby and Rails
Most of the "features" of the language is what I call "constraints". Old Kernigan's "Why Pascal is not my favorite language" in large part stlil applies today - the damn thing simply wasn't designed to be practical, and I was paid money for nearly 3 years out of college to write Pascal code, this i s probably why I have such a strong opinion about it.

Pascal's OOP is about as useless as C#'s compared to power of what multiple inheritance + templates give you, not to mention the true Smalltalk-style message passing.

Virtual constructors is not a "feature", it's (just like various additions to C#/Java) is an afterthought patch to a rigid static world. This is very typical for created-in-a-lab languages: they were designed with a average Joe programmer in mind, protecting him from shooting himself in a foot, and later on, to make them less painful to use, were given these "features".

Pascal's came from academia blessed by a traditional and inevitable "kiss of death" preventing it from generating a true massive fan following. Compare that to Unix/C/C++ (or Lisp, Smalltalk, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) that were created by programmers for programmers.
Applying the Martini Method to coding is not so simple: as has been pointed out countless times, programmer productivity can't be measured in lines of code produced.

But maybe something like

svn diff | wc -l

is a good enough stand-in. Replacing a big section of repetitive code with something smaller and more elegant would then count as productivity. Of course, then it becomes an incentive to write dumb, repetitive code, check it in, and then rewrite it the right way, but probably only for the programmer with more alcoholism than self-respect.
Get Mad But Don't Get Even - Turn an Insult Into a Favor
Ask YC:  What music do you listen to when programming?
This has probably been asked before, but I am curious about the musical tastes of all the rest of you, having noted very similar tastes in the "Ask YC: Books" thread.

I'll start us off:

Mashups:
http://bootiesf.com
http://djearworm.com
http://partyben.com

Also all manner of classical: Bach, Mozart, Strauss, Beethoven, Debussy

And last but not least, some excellent indie radio: http://www.bagelradio.com/blog/index.html
Boring engineers and boring designers.
How to turn your trusty Rails helpers into plugins
Lots of things, but predominantly hip-hop and rock. If I'm in "discovery mode," I'll use Songza or Last.FM.
Vi is a text editor for serious text editing, it takes some getting used to but is chock full of powerful features. Pico is designed for people who occasionally log into a UNIX machine to check mail or something (its origins are in Pine, which is an email client for UNIX newbies). As a programmer you spend all day editing text, so it's definitely worth putting in the effort to learn how to use a good text editor.

After a decade of regular use I'm only an intermediate vim user, but what I know so far really helps with my productivity.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vim%20tutorial
I guess the links must be the money-maker, they tend to get more points then the comments.
Um, no, you're just being arbitrary. Someone could just as easily say that about hacking and heavy metal. They'd be just as wrong.
Step 1: Attribute value to Karma

etc.
It's an Arc macro. Currently, public Arc documentation is pretty spotty :)

In http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98265, pg said that defop was to define an operation, and defopa was to define one only for admins. But the 99665 is the id of the comment where pg used defopr. Not sure what it means.
Almost everyone values the opinion of their peers, and that is what karma measures (or tries to).
The Erdos-Bacon Number
FWIW, in the past 5 days, nickb has gained 150 points of karma from submissions, and 25 points of karma from comments; so clearly it's primarily the submissions which are putting him so far "ahead of the pack".

Interestingly, in the same 5 days, nickb has submitted 37 stories -- an average of score of just over 5 points each -- which places ranks him highly not only in volume of submissions but also in quality.
Video Killed the Broadband Buffet
This is the source code for what made that link stop working and instead go to the comment containing it. All the operators in it are specific to Arc (if not to News), so I didn't expect anyone to really understand it. But if you want to:

(defopr foo ...) means news.ycombinator.com/foo will redirect
to whatever url the body returns.

(item n) returns the item (e.g. story or comment) whose id is n, loading it if necessary

(item-url i) returns the url that leads to the item page of i

Actually I was in a hurry when I wrote this. I could have just said (defopr s2008form req "item?id=99665").
I know that Ruby's metaprogramming facilities don't equal Lisp's, but does that matter in practice? i.e. is there a convincing number of metaprogramming use cases that can be implemented using Lisp macros, but can't be implemented using the Ruby meta object protocol?
Yeah seriously!

I recently got into the leader board which gave me a good feeling, although I know I shouldn't be feeling that. But even with my low score, I feel like I am Karma Slutting sometimes (I prefer that to the term Karma Whoring).
Ever heard of custom burned RSS feeds and an alarm clock?
Isn't calling someone wrong kind of arbitrary?
You're right. I'm far too nerdy for anything that's "exploding".

Isn't "nerd core" a contradiction in terms?
I don't see much correspondence between quality and upmods. Exhibit A: This current "submission" is at #1. Why? Who is upmodding it and why do they think it is a valuable or even sensible question? nickb "does it" by submitting and commenting a lot...too much, really. There's usually something wrong with outliers.

I'm on the "leaders" link, but I know perfectly well that plenty of my comments would have had me banned from any real world settings...and that includes comments that got upmodded.
Nickb clearly has some clever software working for him :)
When you come back as a walrus, you'll be sorry.
nickb "does it" by submitting and commenting a lot...too much, really

I don't see any problem with submitting lots of stories as long as they're of a reasonable quality. Unfortunately the fact that stories can't be voted down means that there's no penalty (at least as far as karma is concerned) for flooding the site with submissions.

While I don't think nickb falls into this category, there are certainly other people who are making (IMHO) excessive numbers of submissions without significant merit.

Ironically, a few hours ago I posted a suggestion for dealing with this problem (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99846): Make submitting a story cost a few points of karma, so that submissions only result in a net gain in karma if the submissions get voted up.
Kaltura Partners to Add Crowdsourced Video to Wikipedia
Mixx Hits 100 Days Of Service; Reports Stats and Figures
Can you downmod a submission? I don't see how. If not, then submitting is a good strategy to get karma. You can't lose any.

Engaging in a debate, OTOH, is another issue. Doesn't matter who's right, what you've done, or what you know. If someone else disagrees with you and doesn't feel like saying why, they just click the down arrow. "Anonymous Coward Downmodders".

I could earn 50 points by posting the cure for cancer in one post and lose it all by saying I hate <Ruby, Facebook, Lisp, whatever> everywhere else.

So, to be safe, keep submitting, don't insult anyone, and never say anything controversial. But what fun would that be?

(Geez, I hope nobody disagrees with this.)
Mostly classical (especially Bach) and jazz (Dave Brubeck, Pat Metheny, Abraham Laboriel, Miles Davis, et al)

Very rarely anything with lyrics, as it tends to disrupt my concentration.
As a former startup CEO, I think Jason pointed some really good pointers on priorities and what it takes to make it. I'd like to see more articles like this from other CEO's.
"Make submitting a story cost a few points of karma, so that submissions only result in a net gain in karma if the submissions get voted up."

Interesting approach.

My own experience tells me that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how well a submission will do. Sometimes I submit something I find especially profound and helpful, and no one else ever votes or comments. Other times, I see something of passing interest, and it goes wild. Of course, there is always the "Old Faithful List": Facebook, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, pg, Google, or anything professing a like/dislike of a language.
This is why I never save passwords : simply for the just in case possibility.
It's interesting how you treat MTurk as a machine. I would have expected to read:

"[...] and having MTurkers write [...]"
[...] and was happy when I told ter to try typing just ':x' instead.
I didn't call you wrong. I said you are equally as wrong as someone who says some arbitrary other type of music is antithetical to hacking.
That's what I thought of (command-line) emacs first.
I guess it all depends on how you view the site. I view it the way I view Delicious . . . I'm using it primarily for social bookmarking (except that I make sure I only submit items that are of "hacker interest"). If others find my bookmarks meritorious, that's nice. If not, that's fine too. Either way, the cream will rise to the top for the most part.
None. Interferes with my concentration.
Publish to your site without code- Uses Erlang
There are consequences if you spam the site with huge numbers of crappy links; they're just not so visible.
On another note, do you guys wear headphones/earbuds or use external speakers? For me, I really find external speakers distracting, while headphones suck me into the code.
I'm really psyched about this, nice job on opening this up.
Thank you, nickb, for the great response! I, for one, really appreciate anything that adds a human touch, especially here at HN.

I agree with so much of what you've said about HN; I feel like I've found a 2nd home here.

Keep up the good work and drop us a personal line every once in a while.

(I'd put you on a pedestal, but you're already there.)
Compete's list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007.
Depends.

Planning/Thoughts stage: Classical, Jazz

Implementation Stage with Nothing to Explore: RnB, Rock

Exploratory: nothing, flow issues
Who is upmodding it and why do they think it is a valuable or even sensible question?

I upmodded it because I can see that, while grammatically a question, its real purpose is to thank Nickb, and I think he deserves it.

There are plenty of situations where being an outlier is not a bad sign, and reputation in a (nonlame) community is one of them.
Thanks everyone, those answered it quite well.
Time Warner to test Internet billing based on usage
Sink or Swim? The Top Moving Sites Of 2007
The Hidden Factory: How to Tell if the Customer Would Pay for That?
I would add one more item at the bottom, bigger than anything else, "Deciding What to Write"
Headphones, but mainly because part of the use of me listening to music is to block out other sounds.
Then I'd also be equally as right, right?

That feels a little less arbitrary.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831
headphones, mostly everything, but especially daft punk, Tiesto, lots of blues and stuff too.
I use a variant of the Martini Method where I try for at least 2 substantive svn commits a day (not including minor bugfixes or cosmetic issues). I try to do atomic commits, so this correlates very closely with function points. It seems to work quite well; since the beginning of the year I've gone from r569 to r623. It's had a corresponding effect on observed product quality, having gone from essentially a blank webpage to the full editor skeleton, a working game, and several widgets for customizing it.
Well done Nick. You clearly deserve your Karma wealth.
Recently, a lot of movie soundtracks and instrumentals; lyrics divert my attention. BSG, 28 Weeks, moody/epic stuff. Not sure why, but it works.
Not everyone listens to their usual genres when coding.
Cliqhop at somafm.com
Any music that my brain doesn't try to process. Preserves concentration while keeping out noise.

I'm currently listening to Nujabes - Modal Soul. It's a mix of hiphop/jazz and mostly instrumental.
How does Loopt make money?
Become An Xcoder - A free book for starting with Cocoa using Objective-C (get ready for iPhone SDK)
Half the time I listen to nothing... the other half involves NIN, Tool, Deftones, Massive Attack, Glassjaw, Ska-P, and other music roughly like that.
Just read it, Kernighan's "Why..."
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
No single point in this article is relevant today and pertinent to Object Pascal. None. Too out of date.

Delphi does have messages, templates are not part of OO, multiple inheritance is present in Delphi in some restricted form (I* interfaces) and the rest in your post is just emotions.