skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(not to mention - what can be learned from the flow of the users to / away from the site over time)
No offense to these guys, but how could they simply give up? Even taking another job just to make ends meet is better than stopping. Do they know what kind of opportunity they are giving up on? If they wanted to ditch Shoutfit and try something else I'm sure YC would still help them meet investors, etc. It just amazes me they would pass up on utilizing the opportunity they still have, especially when there are so many other hackers out there (many on this forum) who would give a leg for the same opportunity...

Edit: I'm just going off of altay's comment in the above thread, so I probably shouldn't jump to conclusions. These guys could be working on something new for all I know
Error Detection In The Gray Matter: Have Scientists Discovered Intuition?
I got so peeved at the crap platforms (well there not all crap but they certainly have lots of restrictions) that I wrote my own. My own efforts are just as crap but it's my crap. I can fashion my tools to work the way I want it instead of how someone else decided. For example I need something that I could (can)

- write/edit with a worst a text editor or best an web ui

- ability to markup in a meta format

- access to the source in a language(s) I use

- good db access tools

- ability to evolve and add new layers or technologies

I also have some quirky requirements. I want static pages primarily (at least at the moment). I care more for load speeds and readability than the ability to interact RT. (currently process interaction on delayed batch close to RT). For all the disadvantages this has a few advantages namely speed and fewer moving parts exposed.

My first effort was a Perl script transforming POD (Plain Old Text) files into markup. The next effort is a Python app using Django to store RestructuredText (python based plain text markup) markup in a MySQL db spitting out valid xhtml static pages. And I've already got a third system in mind using various editors with a light weight middleware web server using a db for backup but exporting to atom (something like http://bitworking.org/projects/1812/ ) and serving a combo of static pages and dynamic using some browser/Javascript approach.

Probably the most important thing is how it handles the data. To tell you the truth I don't really care too much about the tools because I throw or discard them like skins every couple of tech iterations. It's the data that's important. I care more about:

- ways to export the data safely for future use

- ability to add historical entries as I find them out there on the web or locked up in some roach motel of a web app

- re-publishing fragments of data somewhere else to some (or thinking of publishing to some as yet to exist site) other place

- making additions, corrections and upgrading the content over time

I'm finding the current batch of blogging tools worry less about these types of ideas ("with the exception of say Dave Winer & scripting.com who lets face it have more history than most blogs & toolsets than most") than they should. After you get a stack of entries, say 10 years worth the tools need more sophisticated approaches to handle and evolve how you

- generate

- edit, manipulate

- store

- distribute

the "foobar" things you create.

I also get peeved at the way most blogging tools (and most content generation tools) seem to think of blogs as pages and not data that can be transformed into "foo" format and edited, stored in some meta format capable of being transformed.

So in short I love defining my own toolset. I hate the fact it takes lots of thinking, time, effort and sweat. I hate the fact the tools are constantly evolving and are less polished than I know they could be.

I care more about my data than the tools I create and use.
hell, i would give a leg just to get a crack at that domain name and concept. i'm going to submit it as my alternate idea on the application.
what if the backend software only takes in 120 characters and leaves everything else out?
I believe doing your best work, is the best way of helping the world. If you love what you are doing, if you are one with yourself when you are doing it, you are giving the most you can ever give to the world.

All religions say that selflessness is the path to happiness and enlightenment. I think true selflessness can only be achieved when you are truly at one with your work and its flow, when you see it all around you, and you loose yourself in it...

Even though Michaelangelo didn't cure any life threatening diseases he did make something that gives everyone who watches it, a moment of beauty, a moment of perfection, a moment of heaven. I think that gift is no less than any other.

I hope I gave you something to think about. This was my good deed of the day... :)

I also recommend an old Japanese movie by Akira Kurosawa called 'Ikiru'. It has a nice perspective on the topic.
thanks for adding this I've been looking for this kind of flexible approach . Here's another article taking a different tack ~ http://mondaybynoon.com/2007/08/27/please-do-not-use-css-fra...
hey guys this is paul from socialmoth.

we had about 20k more users come in and use socialmoth than we expected the other day. that is MORE, not total. up until that point, the dot-com and the fb app were working on the same server and using the same database.

my focus has been entirely following the users, and the users are on facebook. also i should follow the money, and that is also facebook. i moved the fb app to a new set of servers sunday, but i haven't moved the dot com to the same servers yet.

i plan an relinking them soon, but i've been scaling again since then. and learning about proxy balancers (nginx vs mod proxy balancer vs haproxy - if anyone wants to give advice)

rkabir, if you ask a specific question about flow, i can tell you want i know and can make public. the sites popularity was due to the facebook users. nothing i made scaled well enough for the new popularity and i haven't gone back and redone all of the dot com code to match the facebook scaled/optimized code.

omouse, do you use socialmoth? new features are on the way. they are done, but not publicly shown yet. also, my facebook users are dying for new features and suggesting them, but they realize there is a lot of scaling work to do. (i love how nice my users are) sometimes you just need to take a break and make new stuff though.
you are right about jumping to conclusions. life is complicated (and good)
Another of life's mysteries solved. I've been wondering about that poem every time I open that book.
Simplicity patterns (John Maeda, vid 39m)
Doubtful they would do something so opaque when their input is "Please try to answer each question in less than 120 words."
> i plan an relinking them soon, but i've been scaling again since then. and learning about proxy balancers (nginx vs mod proxy balancer vs haproxy - if anyone wants to give advice)

I haven't compared the various load balancers, but have you considered pound? It's small, lean, mean and easy to set up.
In other words, contains 0 bits of information?
That is hilarious. I plan to repeat this experiment.
I think this article gets to the heart of the matter. Coding in Rails is much nicer. But PHP is still a very easy and capable language, and will continue to be the BEST language for large-scale Web Apps for many years to come IMHO.

Coding in another language like Ruby helps improve programming skills tremendously. But then it makes sense to apply those improved skills and learned design patterns to code PHP apps.
Facebook needs to find their adsense. Fast.
Paul Graham wrote: "Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in verse. This must have affected what they said. If you try to write about the nature of the world in verse, it inevitably turns into incantation. Prose lets you be more precise, and more tentative."

I've written some poetry in my time, and I've read enough of it too, to know that verse can be even more precise than prose -- but it is generally less tentative, mainly because it takes more effort and thought _per_word_ to write poetry. Verse is crafted; prose tumbles out of discussion.

One can imagine Plato or Aristotle stumbling back home after a long night of drinking and talking philosophy, and then quickly jotting down a particularly juicy discussion in prose. However, good poetry (especially when it's highly philosophical) tends to require a lot of thought, and it tends to come from individual reflection. Wordsworth's "Daffodils" talks about this:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Poetry comes out of individual reflection, and usually not directly from a discussion. However, the classical Greek philosophers produced philosophy by discussion -- hence the "Socratic method."

Verse is no more or less suited to philosophy than prose, but the classical Greeks preferred prose, because it reflected their approach to philosophy.

Ironically, especially nowadays, prose cloaks philosophy in a garb of officialness. Prose claims precision through official-sounding vocabulary and structure; poetry _exhibits_ precision through careful choice of sound, word, image, and structure.

mfh
http://hilbertastronaut.blogspot.com/
So.. What happened?
What if you just apply and not worry about things?
I haven't used it, but you might look into this as well:
http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/index.html

with mongrel:
http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/mongrel.html
Photo Story: The Days Before the Xobni Launch
switch to django is best ;)
Its really not as bad as you might guess. It takes some time up front to go through each model and tell it what the actual table name is, what the actual primary key is, and etc.

Once that is complete though, its pretty much Rails business as usual.

This might not be practical for all applications. But, in looking at CDBaby, I would find it hard to believe that their data is all that complex.
Principles and Guidelines for the Modern Photowalker
http://techonion.blogspot.com
I offer the following idea as both useful and general.

Beliefs, or articles of faith, may be defined as intrinsically untestable assertions. Under that assumption, people can and should feel at liberty to maintain whatever beliefs they like. Their beliefs need be of no concern to anyone else, as they can never have any consequences. For if a belief had definite consequences, it would be testable, contrary to our assumed definition.

As an example, suppose I assert a belief that the world was created 6,000 years ago, and that God at that time laid down the fossil record and all the related evidence which has made scientists believe in geological history and biological evolution. My belief should bother no one, as it is untestable and has no observable consequences.

Continuing the example, if I later throw a stone at a scientist who fails to share my belief, that action of mine must stand on its own. It cannot be ascribed to my belief. "I believed that I must..." is rightly not an acceptable argument in any court.
Haskell: there are too many experimental pure lazy functional languages.

Scala: why should you have to choose between functional and object-oriented programming?

F#: OCaml has no libraries.

Erlang: C doesn't scale.
This is a good idea. It's fun to see what went on behind the curtain. I'll have to remember to take more pictures next time around.
He used MVC and DRY practices not common in PHP but is still very possible(I know I use them). Very nice! I would give kudos to Martin Fowler's Active Record pattern which can be found in (phpclasses.org). Very nice library and easy to use as well. I'm willing to wager the author is taking advantage of PHP5.
paul - thanks for answering. I was concerned that an awesome site like socialmoth had lost its userbase - glad to see my worry was unfounded.

(disclaimer: i totally miss the old school socialmoth.com and the community without any facebook - but if fb is where it's at, then fb is where it's at. i was the one who posted a couple times that i was glad you put ads on sm - i REALLY like the site / concept)

it seems (at first glance) that the facebook app has less comments / conversations based on posts than the main domain - is this something you've seen from an aggregate perspective?

otherwise, it seemed (from a user's perspective) that sm had this core set of users in the beginning - i read about it on techcrunch, etc. and then when the facebook app came out - all hell broke loose (not to mention "love inflation"). I'm guessing facebook caused a near-exponential spike in users?

also - props on overhear.us - looking forward to enjoying it as well.
care to tell why?
will there ever be one language to rule them all?
My favorite is "Lisp: Turing Machines are an awkward way to describe computation", especially given that McCarthy originally only intended Lisp to be used as a theoretical device, and not for actual programming! (so goes the story, anyway)
The bit about boredom worked out a little differently for me. I remember being bored at least a few times a week as a little kid, but I'm 22 now and can't remember the last time I was bored. It was definitely before late high school, maybe about ninth grade.

About realizing the need to get things done, there's a window that a lot of people don't notice. It opens with said realization and closes when it's too late to act on it (you could say it never closes, but having kids certainly makes things harder). So a lot of people spend much of their 20s and early 30s lamenting their wasted youth without realizing that they've still got time to fix it.
PHP: Doesn't [insert other language] have that function? Let's add it, too!
He mentioned using a feature only available in PHP 5, so yes.

PHP definitely can be used in a reasonably professional way, you just won't get a lot of examples of it being used that way in books or in code you'll come across on the Internet, usually.

Probably most of the people who know how to use PHP as well as it can be used work at Yahoo.
This is interesting because it's a good way to look at the domain of language not in its power or application but its audience.

Haskell: Because programming isn't enough like math

Mozart: Because Prolog is pretty foreign

Lisp: Because parens are really underappreciated ; )
I am using swiftiply's evented mongrel + nginx for my site. I am tremendously happy with it and would be happy to spread the love (and config files). Email is in my profile.
True. However, given some sort of neural re-sequencing technology, the two processes will become one and the same (though the word "cloning" will fall into disuse as those engineered won't have exactly the same DNA....)
Now that's an interesting thought--a two-stage compiler to replace C++: C with a LISP preprocessor.
I wonder if that is true or a myth? I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.
Very nice of you to share this. It really conveyed the kind of pre-release urgency, uncertainty, and excitement that most people don't talk about, let alone document. Thanks.
I didn't start taking classes in philosophy until several quarters ago and had merely read out of interest for some years. It has always been a matter of some discomfort that people hold even THIS sort of knowledge at arm's length, fail to truly enter into it, mistake a kind of aimless and wandering detachment from the essential questions for objectivity, and fail to develop any understanding whatever of philosophy as a project.

I have no stake in this matter except an intellectual one. It's quite saddening for me to see yet another formal student of philosophy produce such a boring, typical, and downright naive treatise on the subject, a writer who has chosen to convert into assertions of half-truths a thinly veiled myopia.

If this is the sort of intellectual cynicism that the modern institution produces, then I am quite happy that I've had no part in it.

And why on earth is there no mention of the Americans? Is that once burdgeoning and scientifically literate pragmatist tradition completely lost to us? Why are we still dwelling on the befuddled analytic solution to continental problems when such great American minds as Charles Sanders Pierce have made such sharpening new developments without precociously discarding the old? And their writing is as far as anything out there from being mealy-mouthed or inexact.

I'm sorry, but we can do a hell of a lot better than this. And we ought to; our current level of science demands it.
Standby Saver: First product to get unanimous investment on Dragon's Den
This is yet another article comparing a framework to a language. Aside from #2 and maybe #4, his points would be equally valid comparing Rails to Ruby without a framework. Only #4 is an argument against starting a new project using Ruby, and I think it's a bad one; programmer time is almost always orders of magnitude more valuable than machine time.

Edit: I took a look at the site in question. It's simple, fast and mostly well-designed, but the fact that it required 12k LOC and 2 months when he had the best possible functional spec (a working, but internally messy old version) doesn't give me much faith in his abilities or recommendations.
Neither you nor Derek Sivers has made a case for PHP being the best language for large-scale web apps. In fact, Sivers only makes one argument for PHP: it's "small and fast". The rest of his arguments are either against Rails or against switching platforms for part of a production system that still needs to integrate with the old platform.

Unsupported blanket statements don't contribute anything useful to the discussion.
are you sure this was meant to be in reply to me? :)
Oh, and live previews of themes and color swatches (which should be independent from themes) using my own data.
Arc: Common Lisp is a kludge, and Scheme has no libraries.

This seems to address the reasons the languages were created more than the reasons people continue to use them today. The former is insightful, but the latter might be more useful.
Nope, otherwise hot girls would be having sex with any ugly guy that wanted it.
It is easy to add features to a language. It takes courage to take features away. If you just add every feature than anyone might want, then you end up with something like Perl. Which incidentally seem to be much more popular than Python, so maybe Larry Wall have a point.

By "dumbing down" I assume you mean "looks less like lisp". You can do the same as map and filter in a more elegant and pythonic way using generator expressions.

Btw. he was just thinking aloud. In the end he just moved map and filter out of the core language and into a library, and lambda stayed.
It is just a small script that shows the word count for the current textbox in the lower right corner of the screen. Useful if you don't have a clear sense of how much 120 words is, and you don't like to count words manually.
Sadly that's true. There aren't many good examples of using PHP the professional way. That being said I can somewhat relate to the author(coming from PERL/PHP jumped to Rails and back to PHP). I loved the way Rails was constructed and how it approaches web app development not to mention. I definitely think most web development frameworks should take a page off it's book.
Introduction to Common Lisp (With Cartoons)
don't know anyone using pound, know one person who left it. i prefer solutions that are more mainstream for things that should be very well established and solved problems.
how many boxes do you have?
i'll look in to it. no matter what i do, mod proxy balancer appears to not actually balance equally. i think i need to read more about it. and see if there is a mysterious setting.

balance=1

of the boxes, the first box always has a much higher load.
i miss it too. the original crew was hilarious and smart. i'm working towards more personalization and localization, but it is a couple steps away, and lot of those steps are scaling, speed, and caching/invalidation.

the fb app has a different feel because of the high volume of posts. it is almost impossible to refind a post. we have notifications, but just not enough, and nothing as good as the old socialmoth.com. working towards it though.

the first week socialmoth on facebook was out, it doubled every 29 hours.

the most common feature request is "negative hearts" whatever that means.
Tanya Andersen's motion for attorneys fees against the RIAA is granted
As long as the resistance isn't 100%, aren't the options 1 and 3 basically the same from an individual's point of view? That is, can't you rephrase "You are naturally resistant" as "You don't have increased risk", as long as you talk to individuals rather than to societies? Like you explain, what people can do with this kind of information individually is get health advice that applies to them personally.

Edit: I think I should explicate that I think people take a doctor's opinion more seriously if they can see it's tailored to them more.
Arrington isn't espousing about how great the app is, he's talking about how "cool" it is. Bob Dylan defines the meaning of coolness. Kids these days...
I currently have two other developers on my tean.They are assigned different individual apps to work on. I polish the apps once they are made and take care of the business aspects. I also handle all of the software and data base design. We are working on some pretty interested facebook apps. I'm very excited about the work that we are doing. Face book right now is like the California gold rush. A lot of money and hype around it. i'm still looking for 2 more developers for flash,php/mysql.
Paul Buchheit Affiliated imo.im Seeks Hacker ($25k starting bonus)
Again i want to stress that you did great work. However as to the concept, your what people call a "me too" company. Alot of other companies doing the same thing at the same time. Yes you are a little bit different ,but not enough that most people will pick over .....google or whoever. If you can figure a way to interact with other service and provide features that they not have that might work.

Did you work on this alone or with a team?
Thank you, Dave Winer (social network not graph)
Guide to Low Cost, High-Impact Websites
15 tips for kickstarting your web project. Almost 40 shopping sites listed at bottom.
unifying messaging. blog here ~ http://imoim.blogspot.com/ pb is an advisor
Media often reaches the point where it is just as much about entertainment as useful information. This Techcrunch post didn't teach you a whole lot about Web 2.0 business or technology. It was just playing into a clever viral marketing campaign. In the end, it's hard to fault Techcrunch because the application is pretty cool.
That's a hell of a list. Thank you. May the internet gods grant you good pagerank.
i mean to say, does the monetization just not scale?
Do you know that Darwinism is becoming more and more obsolete? It's not me saying this, but many major scientiscts.

The only reason for Darwinism still to exist is because of the atheists. But atheists are extreme - an intelligent human should leave the question open, and not stupidly deny something nobody can really know by reasoning (since God is transcendent by definition).
You mean that evolutionary theory is becoming more refined over time. This makes the case for science, not the theistic God of the Hebrews.
I mean that there are two different things which can be confused easily: evolution and adaption/assimilation/conformation.

Many things that seem to confirm evolution could in fact be of the second group cited above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator#Portfolio
King Algorithm: An Oracle Part Man, Part Machine
Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore (pdf)
meebo?
it loads faster than meebo
Humans left Africa earlier than previously thought
Non-stick gum could slash millions from street cleaning costs
Does it load faster than RadiusIM?

Ebuddy?

The Google Talk Widget?

KoolIM?

Aren't these things a dime a dozen?
maybe Arc 2...
It's explained in section 8.8. The source code is there.
Free Barcode Maker
Lots of people sounding like monkeys in the comment section to the post...