skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless valleywag changed their post, I see nothing wrong with what they posted there. In fact, the above reply is more inflammatory.

That said, the reversal to a payed model seems fine to me. It even sets a good example for the rest of us who have sites where payed is the way to go for them.
credit card verification?

Sounds like a porn site. That's a terribly unmarketable idea.
It's pretty tragic how little most people understand about basic economics. Not just with respect to how societies function, but basic concepts like incentives and the law of supply and demand. Oh, and of course No Free Lunch.

So in that spirit, here are a couple of economics books that I quite seriously believe everyone should be forced to read.

Economics in One Lesson, by Hazlitt

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, by Milton and Rose Friedman

Freakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner (this book is just so damn fun to read)

and for the hackers:
The God of the Machine, by Paterson
(Think engineering principles as applied to economics, history and politics. Probably one of the most interesting books I've read in my entire life, even if I don't entirely agree with the thesis.)
Favorite computer book: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - ISBN 0-07-000484-6 - Whether you actually like Scheme is beside the point. I got this book for an intro class into functional programming, and we only used sections one and two... but I enjoyed it so much I went through the rest of it on my own during Christmas break. Was probably the greatest experience I have had programming since first groking OO.

Favorite non-computer book: Ender's Game - ISBN 0-812-55070-6 - I have probably read this about 10 times. All the other books in the series are good too, but it really stands apart from the rest.

As an aside, the Economist is probably the best (IMHO) news source out there, as it actually goes in depth as to the causes of events, rather than just listing them with pretty explosions. It's also delightfully devoid of sensationalist stories normally found on TV News or Newspapers. Added bonus: you get a nice discount if you subscribe as a student. Not sure I could recommend it highly enough.
I got the sense Joel was talking about an SDK that does not require a plugin. Otherwise it seems Flash and Silverlight already meet his requirements.
Too bad you can't use Google Maps for that: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

Read the last bullet point...
Hmm.. They meet the requirements to an extent. They're really little islands of functionality. I'm talking about a plugin that can react to and manipulate HTML elements, persist across page loads, and doesn't have browser-specific quirks.
Layered Technologies hacked, 6000 accounts compromised
Breaking: Major US hosting company Layered Technologies have been hacked. Credentials for 5-6000 hosted accounts - and the data stored in them, including customer details in web stores - may have been compromised.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It is arguably the most useful book I've ever read, albeit with the most embarassing title.

As inklesspen mentioned, Elements of Style is a must.

Code Complete and the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Timeless coding wisdom.

For a laugh, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, or Hitchhiker's Guide.

Body Language, Julius Fast. Kitschy but fascinating insights into body language.

Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene. Brian is a fluke of nature--a physicist who can explain things realy well!

Anything by Phillip K. Dick. Sci-fi stories that make you think.
Oh, one more: A Clockwork Orange. The book is much better than the movie. It's nicer if you haven't already seen the movie and got Stanley Kubrick's acid-trip biasing your perceptions..
"... Not just cut 'n' paste: cool mashup features like synchronization and single-point identity management (so you don't have to tell Facebook and Twitter what you're doing, you can just enter it in one place) ..."

I've been doing something similiar to this. Here's what I'm finding working with lots of different 3rd party sites ...

Using API's

- not every site has an API or RSS so you have to CUT+PASTE :(

- even sites with API's have poor documentation (code, txt) so it can be difficult to use

- posting data (say to twitter,flickr ) is way easier than extracting via an API/RSS

- no company(ies) want(s) their hard-won user data to be used commercially (check the legal agreements) so while you can integrate each site requires permission - yuk!

- solve the password & authorisation problem for each 3rd party site

Integration layer

- abstract an API to talk to each service (eg: as Perl does to databases in the DBI module)

- support the most popular sites that people use first (flickr, twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc)

- constrain the features you want to support for each 3rd party site (eg: notifications by friends in twitter, or flickr. New books suggested in http://www.librarything.com)

- keep up with changes made to each service, handle bugs, quirky code

Extraction layer

- synchronise 3rd party added data and client side added data (the "add in 1 place" bit mentioned). This means being able to either/or add data at the client or get the data the user added at the 3rd party site as well and somehow sychronise them

- you need tools to extract, manipulate RSS/ATOM feeds. A boon because you don't need API's

Messaging layer

- using your abstracted API be able to message various different services
and here's the hard bit depending on the service. Do you want to send everyone on Twitter a photo update if you have entered 20 flickr photos?

- you need to capture store, query, link check and update the various links, metadata and information that message generates.

Presentation layer

- layering of data. Intelligent hierarchies of data that be queried by other

- flexible presentation layers that can export variety of data formats web pages as to XML, RSS files, mobile phone SMS, etc.

- flexible presentation layer(s) that can support different levels of information from a complete archive of past posts to their titles or individual tags

- metadata ... support things like tags, microformats at a per document level and be flexible enough to allow for more formats that arise.

Of course on top of this you have to build something that others will use, that is bug free as possible in Javascript. Something on or along the lines of Yahoo's YUI ~ http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ Maybe this YUI or NewSDK is what Steve Yegge meant when he was talking about the "Next big language" ? ~ http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht...

In all this I can't help think that maybe just solving a few little problems might be a better starting point and if you do so make sure it's the open web and not some roach motel that sucks up data instead of allowing data to flow.
I'm aware of it, and I've been meaning to try it out. I may drop my project if I like Weblocks enough. Note sent.
Very interesting. Kinda frustrating. The imprecise aiming and awkward click, click, click-in-tiny-zone-to-aim placement is not the most fun part of the game. (I suggest a real click-drag then on release, one more click to aim, with a larger aiming zone around the turret.)

Might want to add in some additional 'rescue' or defensive moves (walls?) to prolong the game.

But very unique, could prove really popular.
I liked it but the most frustrating part was aiming the pod. Why not have 32 or so different directions you can aim?

or, if you want to make the aiming very digital in nature, could you have the eight directions be fixed? it seemed to change based on the first direction I aimed.
"... 3) It be hard for a company to lock everyone into its javascript platform when the entire source code is downloadable...."

I hazard a guess that the real value is not (just) in the generated source code in the design tools - site used to generate the end result?
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger is among my favorites of all time.

The Dark Tower series (Stephen King) is one of the most amazing tales I have ever had the pleasure to become immersed in.

There are plenty more, but the key thing is just to READ. Read everything you can get your hands on.
I don't know him either; I'm basing that on the perception I got of him from reading the book. And yeah, the plan just doesn't scale.
Get others to do your work for you as much as possible, basically.
I got a beta invite a couple weeks ago and tried it out. It's pretty useful. Integration with the first two accounts I entered was really easy once I decided to commit and give them my credentials. I noticed later integration with another bank was much more complicated due to the security measures on the bank's site. Mint did a good job of explaining why they needed so much info and how to extract if from the bank's site.

Categorization of transactions is done really well. Most things were categorized correctly by default and I like the ui for manual categorization. You get one big overlay with every possible category visible at once.

My main complaint so far is how many times they've emailed me so far. This is aggravated by the number of places I've had to ferret out to get the emails to stop. There isn't one email pref page; you have some global email preferences and then preferences for each account that operate independently.
Aiming is too irritating to fine tune.

Don't use 0xff0000 and 0x00ff00, they're painfully programmer-y.
I think you are right that there is one entity who will come up with a uniform solution which will just get everybody to adhere to their set standard. What I fail to believe is that this is going to be a language or a SDK.

Instead the real war in the internet will be who will keep your data together and present it to you in a uniform way. This step is already being taken by google with their whole integrate gmail, docs, calendar,... suite. What we are seeing the real Web OS being built and this is not any crap proclaiming to be WebOS.
Um, meh? I don't see much past gmail's sidebar reimplemented in outlook, but otoh, that seems like it could be a decent niche. Perhaps most surprising is that I've actually heard about them, which is an impressive marketing push.

I don't like the logo/pronunciation, the bar over the "o" implies "xohbni" (a long "o"), but whatever I guess.
looks fine in IE7 to me.
In order for a challenge to be fun there needs to be some consistency or pattern to it. The actual pleasure of playing a game comes from the brain learning to recognize patterns. But the aiming seems completely random, making it frustrating, not fun. If you fix that though, the game has the potentially to be moderately addicting.
He has some interesting ideas and analogies, but it's not clear that Joel actually understands AJAX/JS. The browser incompatibility problems are largely overblown, and the most annoying limitations are imposed by the browser (meaning that no JS library is going to fix them). He also doesn't seem to realize that all of the Google JS running in his browser IS generated by a compiler (from JS in most cases, from Java in a few others).
"... new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript ..."

Rhino supports this ~ http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t87870.html ... http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Rhino_JavaScript_Compil... Anyone tried this?
Looks pretty slick.

I really, really dislike clicking on the try-it link and getting a fullscreen-ish popup. Someone, somewhere that knows something about design must have a list that includes "Don't change my window size, unless you're a musician."
Clicking on the thumbnail should start the show.
I'm surprised that you're the first person to point this out. That's the first thing I thought of when I read this:

"But then somebody you've never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK, which combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript, and even better, a huge Ajaxy library that includes all kinds of clever interop features."

No, it won't be some bratty Y Combinator startup. It'll be Google (but the Facebook/Twitter integration features won't be there, mainly because they're silly).

Even when GWT matures into the world-dominating SDK Joel speaks of, I still won't use it. To paraphrase jwz: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use Java." Now they have two problems.

I'm waiting for someone to generate Javascript from Java through GWT from Javascript through Rhino. I wonder if that's possible...
Joel just hit the nail right on the thumb. His hypothetical NewSDK doesn't give javascript any new abilities nor would his NewSDK provide any new ways of using those abilities which couldn't be duplicated in other ways.
I hear you.

I haven't written any Java code, but I recognize that my opinion was not formed by modern experiences: I was woefully unimpressed with the insanely slow craplets of the late '90s (and Paul Graham's mentions of Java in his essays didn't help improve my opinion of it either ;).

Still, I'd be willing to believe that there are far more skilled Java programmers than there are skilled Javascripters, and something like GWT could only help the move to the web for many applications, especially if it truly helps to bypass the browser compatibility issues, not to mention far simpler testing and debugging.
worst thing about the email:

"Sincerely,

Todd Abrams
President and COO
Layered Technologies Inc.

Confidentiality Note: The information contained in this transmission is legally privileged and confidential, intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you receive this communication in error, immediately delete this message."
You're right. I see that now. I would like to understand better how many Yahoo stores there are, how many are inactive, how many use the different services Y provides (shipping, inventory, etc.) Is it fair to say that Yahoo hasn't added many features to the stores since Viaweb? There are a lot of functions which Yahoo store operators have to perform which Yahoo has never added provisions for.
that's a good point... I think this is one of the key things Flash had to make its strong start (besides being fast and small) - as a bundle with IE

then again I'm not sure how much freedom MS has this time around (anti-trust lawsuits and I think there may be some more pending settlements) or it would have been done with .NET on Windows already

I could be premature - but I still think Adobe will eventually own web ui in the future... assuming that they eventually get it right on mobile devices
I remember hearing about someone making a 'desktop' out of firefox. That would be the perfect way to implement some of the extra functionality he's talking about. Just run a browser as your window manager. Then you could build your interpreter into that and copy and paste between web applications as much as you want.
News.YC in Polar Coordinates
This was something that John Yu (yubrew) and I hacked up during DevHouseBoston this weekend. It scrapes the front page, figures out which stories have commenters in common, and plots it in polar coordinates. The radial coordinate is the total number of comments, on a logarithmic scale (with the inner 1/3 or so reserved to reduce clutter). The angular coordinate attempts to cluster together stories with similar commenters. It updates every 6 hours, and there's a delay while scraping to keep from overloading PG's server.

A lot of the features (animation, selection, title/domain swapping) are basically gratuitous - I wanted to get more practice with JQuery since I need that functionality in my startup. Hell, the whole thing is basically gratuitous. But it was pretty fun to write.

John was working on a scraper for Reddit...that may be a bit more interesting, since it updates more frequently and the larger audience means more posts in common.
Widespread Diffie Hellman Implementation Weakness: Conspiracy or Ignorance?
Agreed. Joel is growing old :-) He is young enough to keep up with major valley developments (Twitter and YComb) but too old to have a grasp on technical details (Java-to-JS-compilers, for instance).

Another thing he is wrong about is "moore law of bandwidth": it does not exist. While CPUs are getting faster and RAM is growing like crazy, bandwidth is not growing. In fact I am starting to notice an annoying trend of businesses running on slower and slower connections.

But his thoughts on parallels between terminal/HTML transition to Windows/FancySDK are cool nevertheless. He may not be right about everything, but something similar to what he's talking about sure will happen.

Steve Yeggie blogged about inevitable "Rails for the Client" some time ago. Similar idea but expressed in more technical terms.
If my future choices are being stuck coding in JS, Flash/As or Silverlight, I'm rooting for MS, monopoly or not.

Despite what Joel seems to think, though, I still believe the general trend will be for successful browser apps to move out of confinement of the browser, rather than for successful desktop apps to move into it.
FireFox already has it built in, it is called XUL and "Mozilla Platform". FireFox itself is written in XUL (you can run 2nd instance of FireFox within Firefox).

What you would need is to build an IE/Opera/Safari plugin that runs XUL code. And possibly add some security system on top of that.

Zed Shaw, if I understood him properly, built a prototype of an application that used this "API": server side was Ruby/Rails, serving XUL UI to a browser. That works even now - only in enterprise environment where you can make everybody to run FireFox.
It's happening already - the contenders are JQuery, Prototype, YUI, Mootools, Dojo, GWT, haXe, etc., along with Apollo/Silverlight/Parakey if you allow desktop plugins. We just don't know who the winner will be yet.

Personally, my money is on JQuery (literally - I'm using it for my startup), but it really is too early to tell. Interestingly, nearly all the "serious" contenders are open-source: it's possible that the developer community learned their lesson from the Microsoft monopoly of the 1990s. It's very difficult to get any sort of programming tool adopted these days unless it's open-source.
Just curious: How many of you are willing to give your bank passwords to Mint.com? I'm still scared to give out my most important credentials to a 3rd party. Maybe I'm paranoid.
What, you sleep and eat or something? Psshh, mere mortal.

Here's a similar question I asked in proggit:
http://programming.reddit.com/goto?id=23yo7
It's bad because those people ONLY plan to work hard, but not work SMART.

It isn't just about building to flipping. They would never start a business at all. There is much more honor in pushing papers around and accomplishing nothing at some huge company than ever actually doing the most you can do.
No, it was at Biola University (private Christian college) with the Torrey Honors Institute. Probably not quite up to par with St John's and the other one (Thomas Aquinas?), since THI only started about 10 or so years ago.
Looks pretty close to Ruby:
1) remove semi-colons
2) replace a = b - - with a = b followed by b -= 1
3) while (z) { .. } with while (z) ... end

However the if modifier (if it works as in Ruby) doesn't work out very well. I haven't touched Perl in 9 years, so I don't know how different the operator precedence is if at all.

What's the deal with the if? Is it a regular modifier?
Yeah, I third the Master and Commander series. Besides extraordinary historical detail, his characters show a deep understanding of the human personality (at least to a socially inept geek).

That being said, I'm only on my second one so far.
Is freakonomics pretty credible? It seemed intriguing, but also smelt a bit of marketing obvious ideas when I flipped through it in the store.
Apparently many people gave their information to Wesabe (http://www.wesabe.com), which is a direct Mint competitor.
Being a programmer, you've probably felt the appeal of Platonism, so I'd recommend a couple of his dialogues: Phaedrus, Symposium, and the Republic (in order of length, short to long, since they are pretty dense). I'd also recommend reading the Republic last, so you can get over the misconceptions you were probably taught in high school.

Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is also very enlightening for a) understanding the goals of the enlightenment, and b) understanding the current state of our culture.
Jobs quote of "A 3G iPhone later next year" should kill demand for iPhone 1.0
Oh yeah, Ruby has a slightly different interpretation of true/false, so I changed while(z) to while (z != 0) - likewise with if. No help though :(
Along a more specific line, what are the best books for understanding the business world?
Yes, it should be possible. BUT you need to make sure Rhino restricts the Java classes being to those core classes in the GWT JRE Emulation library:

http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/jre.html

Then you would want to wrap the other GWT classes. Mainly what you would be interested in is the RPC libraries so you can directly send Java data types over the wire to the server using GWTs serialization/deserialization routines. You dont know how nice it is to not have to deal with complex XML parsing until you've actually experienced it. Its heaven on earth compared to manual Ajax programming.

Oh and the debugging... I shouldn't even have to explain the merit of this to an experienced Ajax developer.

Using Rhino for this seems kinda pointless though when you could just write it directly in Java. I find it ridiculous how some hackers have such an aversion to coding Java. I think if people took the time to learn GWT they would quickly discover what kind of competitive advantage it brings when building complex web applications (web applications, not simply web pages). Yes, it is verbose, but once you get the hang of it its very intuitive.

Why cant it be some Y Combinator startup who builds what Joel describes? GWT in the hands of a small team can build web applications that compete with Googles. If you dont believe me, then I challenge you to give it a try and see for yourself. Just dont give up too quickly; the learning curve is a bit steep.
This is a hot new view.
No. It's frustrating, and makes me feel like I can't control the pods. I gave up after three runs through...I couldn't aim the bastards, so the game sucked.

It would be addicting, if I felt like I could control my elements within the game...as it is, I feel like the deck is stacked against me. Computer games that cheat aren't fun. ;-)
Paul, did you use GWT (or a form of it) for GMail?

I am curious about the evolution of GWT from an internal Google tool into its current form as an open source platform. Did the JS compiler tools you describe simply evolve into GWT?

I see parts of GMail that could be highly custom GWT. Google Mashup Editor on the other hand is pretty obviously GWT.
Yeah baby! I missed one true/false Ruby idiosyncracy, and that did the trick :)
Yeah I think I'd still prefer a desktop application for that.

I actually stand in line to cash cheques instead of using the ATM because I'm afraid it'll mess something up somehow.
You're saying you're more comfortable giving your bank passwords to an internet enabled desktop application than a web app? or that you would just rather type your information in yourself, in Quicken or something?
Sure there is room. It's just that if "social networking" appears in the project title there's a high probability that they haven't figured out what that room is. I'm sure there are a lot of great new ideas that include some kind of social network, but have something more interesting to say about it than that it is a social network.
Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb and Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars have just completely changed the way I think about the business world.

I'm looking forward to getting to The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups me hearties