skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I left a comment on Gabriel's blog, but if you're a startup building a site and doing SEO, be careful not to take all of this advice, particularly #9 and #13, but #6 is also not entirely wise.

p.s. Yes, technically I fit into the "someone selling it" category, but I also despise misinformation on this subject.

p.p.s. sachinag - your assessment of "independence" due to being on a subdomain and use of "pass PageRank" isn't accurate either. All pages pass PageRank, and PageRank is not limited to "independent domains." There are other link weighting factors that certainly do apply to separate "root domains" but the logic you're trying to apply isn't going to help get better rankings in the way you suggest.
When I saw this page, it hit me: all browser logos are round.

Is there a reason for this?
No, what broke Spore was the fact that all the really good, technical bits of evolution were ripped out at the last minute to make the game easier to EA could sell more copies to kids.
I just skimmed through their manual[1], which by their admission is "under redaction" [2]. Here is what I read from the manual and the tutorial[3]:

The language looks like C++ in syntax, which means it should be readable to Java, JS and ActionScript programmers. This is specially true of the class-based OOP they implement, where a class definition lexically encloses all instance variables, except maybe for methods.

Nice seems to implement generic-function polymorphism, or multi-methods. Methods can be defined outside the class they act upon, but unlike C++ it doesn't use a scope resolution operator but dispatches on the argument type. [my suspicion is confirmed upon further reading].

It has parametric classes with the same exact ugly syntax of C++ templates.

It is strongly and _statically_ typed; the later making it less-nice for people like me.

Nice is apparently embedded in Java. But unlike Clojure, it doesn't target the JVM with its own compiler, but seems like a source-to-source translator to actual java code. You can cut and paste java code into the bodies of Nice methods!

It has enumerated types, aka enums.

They completely don't understand what "variable argument functions" mean. They confuse variable argument length, with optional arguments, with arguments with default values. (at this point I would have thought brushing against Lisp would be a prerequisite for designing programming languages; they betray the Alan Perlis quote in the opening of their manual.)

They have some assertion and design-by-contract constructs. The manual says their assertions are just like java's, and give a trite example of displaying an error message when an assertion fails (no hint of first-class conditions here, a la Common Lisp's.) On further reading, their asserts and contract stuff is strictly for "dying"; no means to recover from conditions or how to return to a handling point up the call chain.

Their implementation of tuples just looks so horrible; again, would have thought a language designer would know at least one ML dialect, and see how tuples should be done.

The arrays are your usual algol arrays. Nothing about adjustable array with fill pointers, a la Common Lisp. Nothing about a type hierarchy that points to arrays being of a sequence type, for example, so you could use sequence operations like LENGTH, INDEX/NTH, SORT, FIND, etc. on various datatypes with the same interface (lists, tuples, arrays, vectors, etc. all satisfy a common denominator of sequence operations; they should be layered.)

Look, a masochist can only hurt himself for so long before reading the Nice Manual becomes unbearable. I might have reached my threshold :-P

[1] http://nice.sourceforge.net/manual.html

[2] ibid

[3] http://nice.sourceforge.net/language.html
He says in a Kotaku interview (can't link, on iPhone) that it was something he should have "tuned into more" and "a corporate decision."
But how can we make use of quantum gravity when we want to come up with buzzword loaded and totally irrelevant questions?
I started coding on a ZX81 with 16K RAM.

In 2 years, that will be 30 years ago. If RAM doubles every 1.5 years, then in 2 years a new machine should have 16G RAM (x1,000,000). At the moment they have about 4GB, so it's not far off.
I'd also be interested to see what this crowd uses.
well maybe I could write a script to do this.

Make it generate a string from a template - "How do you use $buzzword1 and $buzzword2 to do this?" - and a dictionary of buzzwords.

Then instead of apprenticing with Godin, they can just run the script!

Maybe expand it into an Eliza like program for "strategic business consultation".

Hey there's a startup idea! I think I'll apply to YC next time ;-)
This is actually true of Lisp and Scheme too, though, since nearly everybody indents their code the same way (how Emacs does it). Code with lots of small functions, long and relatively flat imperative code blocks, etc. has very distinctive shapes.

Come to think of it, that's true for most languages that don't have Java-style static typing annotations interspersed throughout. Functional and imperative code in OCaml or Lua code look noticeably different, too, and there's not a whole lot of stylistic overlap between OCaml, Scheme, and Python's syntaxes. (Lua's is relatively similar to Python's.)
Why not bind <Ctl> to caps-lock instead of swapping them - have <Ctl> on both keys? Except for the rare people who actually use caps-lock.
i think this is something that's inherent in most techies, you know just enough to know that something like this would be unreliable, so you don't trust it when it comes out. While a regular user would go "OMG More Space!!!"
I don't think so. I believe he had similar thoughts (streaming video online would be great) but immediately dismissed them as requiring too much bandwidth.

Had he had the foresight to avoid those limiting beliefs, he could have invented something like YouTube.
more reason to have at least a daily backup of your site on S3. Unless you are hosting trillions of TBs, its affordable enough as an offsite backup solution
It ended in September 2006. It was cool because you could see the other person's IP, which was useful because you could then use your Google analytics to see which hot girls were clicking the links from your facebook profile to your home page.
Another counter-example: okcupid.com

Apparently their site is ~200k lines of C++

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OkCupid#Technical
"Shut up, I'm at a public library, I don't have a choice."

And hundreds of similar reactions to pretentious frontend web developers who assume that every computer is a personal one.
The eternal procrastinating grad student. Only now there are even more ways of wasting time on the internet.
A internet user's attention span is tiny.

You are wasting the precious few seconds of first impression you get asking them to sign up for something they don't even know if they will like yet.

Bring them straight into the flow of your site, and let them signup only when they want to, not when you want to.

You can whet their appetite by showing other people interacting, no need for them to interact themselves.

Take YC for example, I bet there are hundreds of people who just lurk and read submissions/comments, but if they really wanted to reply to one of them, then they sign up.
Browser versions are really messed up. IE8, Opera 9.6 are out already and Chrome 2 is not released for general public yet.

By the way it's interesting to know how the newly released IE6 for Windows Mobile reacts on conditional comments like this. Does anybody have an idea?
That's exactly what I always do, and is easily done in both Mac OS X and in most Linux distributions.
Hmm. Why was this downvoted?
Yes, a lot of servers have this. My point was more along the idea that as long as the FBI has the drives, they don't need anything else - so they should return everything except the original drives.
What if they seize S3?
but maybe if enough major sites start doing stuff like this, IT will finally upgrade browsers.
I'm guessing it's just the desire to look like the IE logo. Even others are round: Maxthon, Flock, xB Browser. Netscape also went from square to round:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_classic_logo.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape.svg

Also, Phoenix/Firebird wasn't round:

http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/...
Probably only as long as people cannot get that online from citizenry who are more involved than newspapers can afford to pay reporters to be.
Good observation. It could be because the "world" in www is round.
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but you were right not to make it. youtube doesn't make money...
Thing is, a lot of people could have invented something like YouTube, and a lot of people tried. But the YouTube people had the skills to grow and scale their site in a phenomenal way, which is why they're the ones that are remembered. YouTube exemplifies the notion that ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
Not the current product iteration. I talked to Trevor today and he said that they've been doing research on bipeds etc for years but decided for the market they were pursuing (essentially mobile video conferencing), a Segway-like solution is perfectly feasible (ignoring stairs, but I'd imagine they could do something with RF transmitters hooked up to elevators to ignore this problem).

The current product weighs about 40lbs, and thus is probably sturdy enough to hold maybe 10lbs of stuff?
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Certain languages are clearly better suited to some niches, though. I just learned awk, and, in retrospect, it's obvious that I've reimplemented a subset of it in every other language I've used* . Sure, it's designed specifically for processing semi-structured textual data, but that's a surprisingly common situation. (Unix, man!) Since it's clearly a niche tool, it can dispense with a lot of boilerplate, and everything I need to know to use it fits in about 30 pages. (I've already written a couple useful three-line programs in it.) Likewise, if I have to calculate dependencies in a DAG, make immediately comes to mind.

I think the real problem is languages that don't have clear mechanisms in place for co-operating with other languages (and their libraries). Without an FFI or other integration, you're stuck with a languages' weak points. It's too easy to get bogged down rewriting everything in Lisp (or whatever).

* Granted, I don't like Perl (the heart of which is a sort of sprawling mega-awk).
I wish Alice (one of the people tweeting from that account) would stop capitalizing random letters in her sentences. Otherwise I agree, I love how they're using Twitter. It's really nice to see them update about delays and issues.
Because this frees up the ctrl key to be an extra backspace!
you won't really care, since your original servers will still be up
The author's argument is a total non-sequitur. The whole "mental block" about sites like YouTube and Flickr was that DEVELOPERS couldn't imagine having to pay for such outrageous bandwidth usage (or that they'd even be able to find a place to host the site, for that matter).

He then goes on to equate this to developers not wanting to have their users download 64MB runtimes or 2GB IDEs. These two things are entirely different.

A developer knows that, while Joe User may have no problem waiting for a 500MB video of some chick topless to download, the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards.
Supposedly there are special inks that help with that. But even so checks are hard to control, and the company I worked for switched to paypal for international payments.
As I mentioned in a comment earlier today, I have some experience in this field.

Yes, the ISOs (Independent System Operators) have Internet presences. Yes, they can send out dispatch signals to the generators over the Internet. Yes, the generators can access an extranet to find out what their current dispatch should be.

Security (in the environment I'm most familiar with) is provided using well-known standards (SSL certificates on both the server and the client). I'm sure there are ways to spoof, but I'm not an expert at those things.

I have ideas on how to create a bad day for the grid, but I don't think it would be wise for me to share them ;)
Wouldn't the FBI need to secure any onboard storage, including an embedded computer running Linux? Can they (currently) guarantee that they've found all locations on which evidence could be stored?
Technically, Opera, being the independent sort, is more of an oval.
All the newsletters and business-mailings I subscribed to, but ignored for years, became handy as case studies to see what marketing format works and what doesn't. If you kept getting pricelists from manufacturers/vendors, you easily track the market growth of things and gain valuable insight into the direction of a niche market. This is specially true if and when you pick up AI and data mining as a side hobby and you suddenly figure out ways to infer business insight from large corpora.

I say archive them to separate folder and keep them away from your inbox.

Sometimes marketers make a mistake and CC thousands of people. Instant targets for your own marketing.
the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards.

As something of the resident expert on this topic, let me tell you: users are certainly willing to wait for a 12MB installer for a program that makes bingo cards. It actually converts (very marginally) better than the 500kb installer which needs Java as a pre-req.
Sadly, inside corporate environments this is unlikely to be the case. Big companies often have web apps that are broken in anything other than IE6. These IT departments will fight the upgrade until it is the only option. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of IE6 users are people in big companies forced to use it. At my previous employer they were STILL writing apps that only worked in IE6 last year.
Flickr blew my mind when it appeared back in 2004.

A mind easily blown. Stand back anytime this guy is near a website that is anything more than an aggregate of img tags.
I think Amazon will have a better shot at either avoiding that or preventing outages from that.
I think this is a view that some subset of developers has, but there's definitely another camp of developers who thrive in an entrepreneurial environment with a lot of focus on business success. I'm one. The company I work at was like that, and has now shifted more towards the "beehive" described here. I call it "developer day care" and it doesn't motivate me in the slightest.
Yea I'm a big fan of his writing. His writing gives me ideas and let's me think about a variety of topics.
Poll: How much do you bill per hour?
For those of you who consult or contract what do you charge per hour? Extra credit, how much demand are you seeing right now?
less than 10
more than 150
I hadn't heard of Pharo before. Thanks for the link. It looks like it might be interesting and I'll keep an eye in it.
This is the main reason I've switched to Python in all my side-projects. I drank the Rails kool-aid for a long time, until I finally realized I couldn't get much done with it, as the libraries I wanted to use were unstable, and I couldn't understand the source, due to all the black magic going on. (Not to mention that you're forced to go to the source more often than not, because for some reason most Ruby projects' documentation sucks.) Sometimes I miss Ruby's expressiveness, but I'll take Python's abundant, stable and well-documented libraries any day.
I know Wolfram Alpha is going to be great, no doubt about the genius behind it. But the first time I heard of it, it was presented as a google killer which gave it a bad reputation as overhyped and cuil-like image.

I like their new image. They do one thing and they do it like nobody else before.

Kudos to Stephen Wolfram and his team.
I'm currently taking a web design course, and we're supposed to be using XHTML. Strict. We lose points if we don't have all our pages validate as XHTML Strict. :) So yes, some people are still using XHTML, and thinking it's better.
"100k Signed up for mailing list about service" != "100k signed up for the fee-based service"

I signed up because I want to learn more, but I'm not planning on using it.
This is a good example of the FBI's answer to the question "Is it better that guilty man go free than 1,000 innocent men be punished?" The FBI is doing their job to get the 1 or few guilty parties (allegedly - they're innocent until proven otherwise), but in the process hurting many others.

If anything I think that the FBI should have at least provided more aid to the innocent parties. Honestly, making them supply their own drives to recover their data? That's pretty low in my book.
I'd like to second this thought -- on each of the occasions that my thoughts turned to "hey, I can just do a little bit of paid development work part-time while I work on my own stuff!", that "part-time" gig somehow managed to take over my entire day/week. And so all that extra time I had imagined I would be spending productively working on my own stuff mysteriously evaporated, because my paid work was taking up all of my headspace.

"Brain-dead" work, on the other hand, tends to make me _more_ productive when I sit down to design or develop something. So there's probably a continuum effect here.

My recommendation to the original poster is to find the _easiest_ and most menial job that still meets the requirements of your visa, whatever that may be.
No.. the bdb.c file is 800 lines of trivial near-BDB example level code. The rest of it is from memcached core. Either way it's solid. Read the code.
I attempt to keep everything I have ever sent, and all but the tiniest amount of everything ever sent to me. But sometimes my software deletes for me, or my operating system puts it "beyond use," or something. In general, anyone with a legal education, which was my most recent higher education, keeps copies of all correspondence forever.
Frames are sooo 12 years ago
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But there is a flip side. Let's assume for a moment that this is a true story and that the military did not authorize its release. In that situation, an anonymous source is pretty much the only way to get the story -- unless someone is willing to ruin their career (or worse) over it.
Thanks for the feedback. We anticipated that one of the initial critiques would be that it requires some work up front, which is true. It's really not much of a bubble to get over, though; after that you'll likely just add filters once in a while. The idea is that, in the long run, it will save you time. If you don't mind sifting through all of the cruft, though, a standard feed reader would obviously fit the bill.

If you'd like to try it out, simply drop your email address in here: http://www.ectofeed.com/signup. Rather than generate invitation codes at the outset, we'll simply generate them as needed.
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Maybe I don't really understand Ruby, but isn't it basically a duck-typed language? Why would you be checking the type at all (which I am assuming `is_a?` does)? Type checking is evil for weakly-typed languages. Either it implements what you need it to implement or has some property value, otherwise it should throw an exception.

What are you testing for here? To see if the hash is empty or something? What makes an "UndefinedHash" undefined? If it IS defined, then it should be assumed to be the type of object you are looking for until the code tries to do something that breaks on a non-supported type.
That depends entirely on your definition of "good software", something which the article has already addressed.

Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine.

I think the use of the words "marketers" and "managers" in the article is misleading and only causes hostile knee-jerk responses. Rather, what's important in the article is the description of what happens when drones take over a software company, i.e. a stifling environment, which hackers cannot stand, and for good reason. Better people than I have written about this. For example, PG.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

Come to think of it, PG probably makes the same point in a more neutral (and productive) manner --> http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
Also see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...

Finally there are many degrees of so-called black magic and it's paranoid to suggest that Google is instantly onto all of them and will inevitably penalize your site. I would be happy to answer questions by email on this topic.
This is really an excellent service. I need to start using it more, instead of defaulting to my ISP, or manually whois'ing all the various domain+TLDs.

Also, Nomina on the iPhone kicks royal ass. Great way to scope out branding while on the road. Checks major domains, USPTO for trademarks, Yellow Pages, Google, the dictionary (words in dictionary for branding are good right?), Library of Congress, Thomas guide, D&B, iPhone App Store, etc. I have no affiliation to the company that make this iPhone app, but I just love it.

-Kevin
At my wiki, I don't try any SEO tricks at all. I just write a lot of content and focus on submitting to social news site and post my wiki on in certain forums to get feedback. Eventually, I just stop doing them.

Eventually, the search engine traffic just overtook the organic traffic that I have built over the years.

I still don't know why search.live.com show up consistently as the #1 referrer to my site even though it is completely about FOSS.
In fact, a cheap high-speed VPN is useful for plenty of legal purposes. If it really costs only 5EUR a month, it's a reasonable way to secure your surfing at a public cafe -- provided you trust TPB.
thats the way we do it, force the suckers to upgrade or deny them service!
The library code made me sick. Look at all the globals and where is the indentation and organization?
http://ie6-upgrade-warning.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ie6/warn...

Edit: Wow, the main function, e, (great name, definitely not going to collide with other names) has >50 var statements. I don't think the guy who made this library knows that you can var a, b, c, d;
Nah, even the worst IT department isn't that clueless. If they've still got IE6 deployed, it's for a reason.
Ah, so these Upgrade-IE-warnings are actually anti-procrastination tools in disguise! :-)
Right, but the article isn't really about creating youtube, it is about realizing when you've mentally added an artificial constraint and not letting it stop you.
I think a lot of program icons went from square to round (or irregular) once transparent backgrounds caught on.
How would you use Blue Ocean Strategy and long tail value stream personalization to do this?

That's easy: crowdsourcing!
My former tech lead was like this, and it seemed like impossibilities just did not exist for him. It was very inspiring.

One of the reasons I left that job for this silly wild goose chase of starting a business was to force myself to learn some of these skills the hard way, rather than letting someone else magically handle the problems.
Last-Modified: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 00:51:40 GMT
When I first saw this, mixed emotions. Great for them with a business perspective, keeping people "on" your site whilst showing them external content. But bad for the sites being linked to. I'm not even sure if those kind of links would count from a web search perspective (I'm guessing not).

Perhaps time to include the old frame busting java script in websites again?
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