skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or another possibility, which only just occurs to me: Some of these problems are going to be problems on any project, successful or not. So if a project has no major problems, these are the ones that will be mentioned -- Game Developer postmortems require 5 pros and 5 cons.

It's like how you'll rarely hear of a software project that is refactored enough, documented enough, or that has a user interface that everyone is happy with. You could probably spend an entire project's time on artist tools, and they would still be an issue for someone.
Come on, the ideas are as lazy as the writing.

Consider this gem:

We need better ways to provide financing to those who need it: students, low income groups, creatives, people with poor credits. There are lots of opportunities to provide low cost alternatives to what traditional banks are failing to offer.

So the idea is to charge high-risk borrowers low-risk fees? Didn't we all just go through this?
I use last.fm recommendations + http://seeqpod.com
already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576053
See also: xdebug + kcachegrind for a solution you don't have to alter your code to implement.
What makes this event "wacky"?
Scientific Method, via Wikipedia:

2. Form a conjecture

3. Deduce a prediction

4. Test

The basis of analytical thought is testable predictions.

Counterexample to "Programmers don't like to code" :

I am a programmer, sometimes I like to code.

Sometimes I like to code in C. I like to implement some basic objects, like a list, a stack, some math routines. It is a like a little zen garden. So it isn't anything impressive, it's just like some rocks and sand, but I arrange it in a certain way and I like it.

Maybe I should address the content rather than the title (although if the title fails to represent the content it is a poor title.)

"Programmers like problem solving" is the kind of vague positive statement that is pointless and devoid of content. Here is a problem I don't like to solve: configuring Apache . . . yawn.
Geocities -- one of those long-lost fads from 10 years ago, kind of like webrings.

My eyeballs would be even more grateful if News Corp. shuttered MySpace -- or at least reined in some of the design customization options.
Please pursue that thought to a full blown article. You might be onto something here:

"Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community..."
Exactly. Airline workers especially are quick to acknowledge a kind word. Their jobs are hell at times, and when someone offers some kindness, it is often returned in forms of vouchers and bump-ups.
Ask HN: How Do Techmeme and Google News Cluster Stories?
Gabe Rivera's Techmeme site is able to mostly automatically cluster different stories together into one larger "story". And Google News can do the same, fully automatically.

Is there an algorithm particularly well suited for this task, or even better, APIs that can accomplish it?
Allow us to customize the title, just like we can customize the title bar background.
Or put another way, if you're habitually rude to people, you're probably burning more bridges than you realize.
Yeah, we've had a lengthy (but polite!) email back-and-forth with the landlord about this. Honestly, I think at this point he's just calling our bluff - that we won't move because of all the hassle involved.

But we're all 20-somethings, so we're definitely willing to move in order to save that kind of cash :)
Once a client signs-up with us, they generally start working with our CS people. We have a support ticket system and most customers use that ... the sales people are really not involved once we have the customer.
good lord that's masochistic.

unless you really really like your webapp.
That's the article's point. My point is, by all means, be habitually rude to people. Makes my life easier when I'm behind you in line. Thanks!
You need 6 flavors of sound (1 for each color) and a mechanism for distinguishing the colors on 9 squares on each face, I think? This is assuming we're only listening to 1 face at a time.

Perhaps I'm thinking about this too linearly. You could touch one square to hear its color, and its immediate neighbors would sound as well, with stereo/spatial effects to indicate their relative position.
to the best of my knowledge, 'dunya/dunia' comes from the arabic language. It's natively an arabic word.
I think programmers do like to code. This is why the most popular libraries are ones that feel like languages.

For example,

print urllib.urlopen('http://news.ycombinator.com/').read()

feels more like a language statement than a library call.
UCSB's New Venture Competition Finals Registration
Hiring Of New MySpace CEO Settles Many Old Scores
Not everyone here is a native English speaker.
Google should buy it for Docs - looks like it was designed with their API. The help page (Learn more) is also a model of clarity and good documentation. Excellent work.
I was trying to rent my 2 br (technically 1 br since 2nd br was large but didn't have closet) place in hayes valley and saw this happen nearly in the blink of an eye: I had a renter ready to go at $3,000/ mo in December, but foolishly turned him down because he needed it too quickly and I wasn't yet ready to move out. Then in January, a lot of people coming through kept mentioning how many 2 br's were out there, and I ultimately ended up renting it for $2650 after the applicant showed me several comps at lower prices.
I think many of us fall into the same boat. I know that as a younger child, I loved to build with blocks, Legos, and Knex. While my tools have changed, it is the same desire to build that gets me excited about programming.
Growing Happy Users -- One Customer at a Time
The Calorie Tracking example (in the blog posting) illustrates that Mechanical Turk relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth.

A rich, fat, lazy person snaps a picture of his lavish meal with a fancy iPhone, and rather than take a brief moment to ponder the calories, … uploads it for, not just one, but three other people to ponder and estimate the calories and report back. The most dissimilar answer is rejected; that person is not compensated.

This only works if there is a very large pool of very poor people who are willing to do these mundane tasks for (fractions of) pennies. These “workers” certainly can’t afford an iPhone; they probably can’t even afford the meal they are looking at.
I just added it lookup caching - ended up using memcache, turns out GAE supports it pretty nicely: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/overvi...
I was once approached during school (I am a high school student). A quick explanation was all that was needed.
Oh, yes! :)

I think the idea I was trying to push was that for this trial, the outcome in courts of appeal will have more to to with politics and media leverage than the legal code.
Given the downvote mobbage that has just occurred over an appropriate post, it seems as if HN is turning into Reddit.
There’s a common perception that Mechanical Turk thrives on exploiting 3rd world labor. This doesn’t appear to be the case.

From:
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanica... and
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2008/07/mechanical-turk-demogra...
82% of turkers are from the US, Canada or the UK and over 75% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
Sorry, I have to use what the company provides, not what I wish the company provided. That's the real world.
"Founders" class stock agreement
For geocities? That can't possibly be that high.
Wufoo customer service
I wonder what'll happen to web 2.0 when web 3.0 or whatever rolls around. I fear all these permalinks aren't so permanent after all.
U.S. Said to Seek a Chrysler Plan for Bankruptcy
As previously mentioned in the thread, a wget --mirror http://www.geocities.com/my/path will save your site.
That probably answers your question :)
adding two dictionary words and a number, yeah, that helps a lot. looks like you are right, and that if your users use 2 words and a number, and you use a hash that takes 50ms to calculate, you are probably OK.

but my point is that passwords are a lot less secure than they sound if you just add up the characters. And most hash functions take a whole lot less than 50ms of cpu time to calculate. Bcrypt does look pretty cool in it's ability to slow down brute force attacks. It does still require a minimum amount of entropy in the user passwords, though.
Amazon EC2 Running IBM Now Available
InDenverTimes.com gets just 6% of its paid subscriber target
The Wufoo guys seem great all around - business approach, design, technology (their PHP profiler from today), and customer service.

I egotistically wish their main product was different, because I want to use what they make, yet I don't need HTML forms.
So maybe they should make that field visible to everyone?
Privacy scams on Facebook -- "ghosts"
I don't think many people would like that as a default option. Spam is something that people tend to get aggravated about.
If you sell Geocities, then you can't convert them to paying customers of Yahoo web hosting. You can't convert them to Yahoo anything at that point.

If you publicly mothball GC though, then you can maybe get a fraction (5-10% at most I'd guess) to become paying users at SOME level.

Even at that meager conversion rate, I see that being a better call then selling the remnants of GC off.
They have a 24 hour hacker lounge for code sprints + scheming and socializing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532314), a rude robot on Twitter ordering people to submit proposals/ attend (http://twitter.com/osbridgebot/status/1536795780), all proposals were automatically updated to a public page + feed, even before accepted, anybody could send (private) comments to committee on what they thought should be/not accepted, the rude robot submitted a (rejected) talk, i've seen various organizers appear on a public-access like show drinking tiki drinks, promoting it.

It's all volunteer run, so it seems to have the spirit of BarCamp, but its scale and logistics is a bit more OSCON-like, held at same convention center where OSCON was last year.
I can't decide what is more amazing: that we can create molecules, that we can see them in their 18 micro-second life, or that some guy predicted this particular one in 1934. Maybe it's just me, but I'm still impressed by the crazy crap we as human beings are capable of.
Duniya means world in Somali too! wow, I can't believe my language has such influence and reach!

kidding aside, "Duniya" is an important word in Islamic tradition. It's the counterpart for "after life". "Duniya wa Akhira" roughly means "Earth and the After life", or "here and in the after life". Whatever its origin, it's an Islamic word, just as "Rahma/Rehma/Rehmat"; it's used throughout the orient to mean various things: blessings, thanks, regards, with kindness, etc. It's used by Arabs, Africans, Persians, South Asians, Turkic peoples, South East Asians, Carribean muslims, Pacific islanders, etc.
I wish they were more visible, would love to chat to them.
You are not thinking this through. Ally yourself with four or five rude people and get them to stand in front of you in the line. Then you get some tickets for the next plane and split them with the rude people.
Wow, imagine all those calculators and fart programs.
When you get to the statistics class you'll realize it's just that you notice something more when you are dealing with it.

Those types of stories are there frequently, but you never remarked on them before because you were not thinking about it.
Don't we already have this via gem and rubyforge?
grep -in "fil duniya wa akhira" /home/god/pub/quran.txt

Dunia is one of the most repeated words in the Quran. duniya, salam, rahma, akhira, salat/salawat, anbiya/rusul, etc.
How Google streamlined their results page by loading only 1 image
Microsoft Reports a Massive Miss With Net Earnings Down 32 Percent
When you handle certain kinds of data, you're required to take maximum possible care to ensure secure and continuous operations of the system, and the steps you have taken towards that end.
Please take my comment as a truism about evolution rather than women in particular. The extremely superficial explanation is my view of one strategy among many.

Primitive strategies are none the worse for being primitive: though no guarantor of success, they're often adequate. thus the number of citations of a science paper is not a direct reflection of its quality, but not irrelevant either. I was surprised to discover that market traders, far from being tight-lipped about their strategic overview, spend a lot of time calling each other up when things were slow to ask what their competitors thought of the day's financial 'weather'. Google's Pageranks are similar. And so on.

It is true that a fairly non-promiscuous person will likely be a better parent and thus a desirable match. Nevertheless, some competitive genes don't hurt. Also commitment after experience is more interesting than commitment by default (see daily YC thread on how 'Windows users only like it because it came with the computer they bought').
...and move the port.
We got a letter from them a while back -- it got a bunch of comments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=325904
Apple’s App Store: 1 Billion Served
And I think that investment bankers had more of an idea of what they were getting into when they started their career.
On a long enough timescale, everything dies, including hyperlinks.
Mio: A Tiny Subset of Io in Ruby
A ~300 line implementation of a subset of the Io language (http://iolanguage.com) in Ruby
As opposed to insecure SHA 256 hashing?

Anyway, if you don't use a nonce per user or a time consuming hashing method, then all tptacek's comments apply. His link in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576021 is worth your time.
Wufoo will even do ecommerce for you... so much awesome.
Microsoft suffers first sales dip
If an XML parser is really important to what you're doing, then definitely go ahead and write one.

It's that judgement call.

I've just written a DNS client, because I needed to. In the process though, as well as having a very cool DNS client I know will work, I've learnt about the DNS protocol.
How two guys met on Twitter and weeks later had a startup which changed their lives
I assume that he is talking about payment processing:

http://wufoo.com/docs/payment-settings/

We use it at Antiwar.com for donations...great way to create consistency in data across payment types.
People should not be surprised seeing more Indians or even Chinese developers/engineers... First off in terms of numbers they are 4 to 1 over us engineers individually and if combined about 8 to 1 just in sheer numbers. So even in the US where we only have 300m people, in most cases when there is engineering or development you will see these types of ratios.

Also, we want people coming here making businesses, buying our software services, starting businesses etc.

Keep this in mind as well, the larger base of developers that you have, the more you have that are better, AND the more you have in multiples are worse. Race/culture means nothing in technology and innovation.
Then you end up trapped on a plane, surrounded by rude people. Sweet!
what have you heard about this? looks interesting.
>> "If programmers liked to code, every last one of us would be overjoyed to write our own HTTP client."

Writing an HTTP client, and server is actually something I believe every one of us should do. As well as providing you something useful, tailored to your use case, it teaches you a massive amount about how everything works. It's pretty much definitely good fun :/

(I wrote both of these, and a dns client, etc etc for Mibbit).
"Their jobs are hell at times"

Their jobs can be hell. The last time I flew, I got stuck in a airport both ways because of weather trouble. Unfortunately thousands of other people were stuck with me. The line to just talk to a flight attendant literally took about 11 hours to get through.

I was on a break at the time, so the experience wasn't horrible for me personally, but it must have been a nightmare for the flight attendants. They had staff not show up for work. So basically overworked staff had to politely deal with thousands of angry and tired passengers.
Microsoft revenue down 6%, earnings down 30% for third quarter
Ok, I added the complete list. I think working on some categorization/user ratings sounds good too. Thanks!
I understand. I thought people were leaving them under the impression that everyone could see them.
$50 application fee and the program costs $450. This is a boot camp, not an incubator, they don't invest any money and they take 3.5% warrants to allow stock purchase at the price of first round equity. I would expect it is a pretty good program and they differentiate themselves by encouraging you to keep your day job.
You are in fact nutty, but are still trying to solve a problem no? Sometimes we solve problems because the solutions are useful, and sometimes we solve problems because the problems are interesting. I think most of my personal coding falls in the latter category.
Wrote them a message yesterday -- got a polite and helpful response in under an hour. Great CS....
I would say its actually a case of efficiencies using batching rather than the pay discrepancy.

Taking the time out from what you're doing to write down what you ate and how many calories it was incurs a lot of "transaction" costs. Its distracting.

However, if you're on your computer and are sitting there doing many of these one right after another its a lot faster and doesn't require changing your focus.

This is the exact same reason all time management books recommend answering emails in batches.
(Geekiest Of Chefs) Grant Achatz On Turning Logistical Problems Into Inspiration
>> "What, do you work in HR or something? (jk)"

Heh no. I'm a single founder with a 'lifestyle business', making money off it currently. But I plan to grow the business (head count+diversify) when I can.
Once you start seeing how stories like this fit into the Hacker News ethos, it's kind of hard to stop seeing it.
Pirate Bay lawyer demands retrial.
I'm naturally friendly and patient with most customer service staff, probably thanks to a nearly two-year stint as a tech support guy at EarthLink. And sure enough, I get all kinds of special treatment because of it.
Marketing disguised as customer service?
This was true back in the days of cmd.exe, but with powershell the state of the windows command line is a different story.

Powershell is a huge step forward for Microsoft. I've been using it for about a year now and so far I'm very impressed. I'd even go so far as to say I prefer it to bash for certain tasks. The concept of passing objects around is, while strange at first, surprisingly intuitive and powerful.

If you're currently using a combination of windows + cygwin (as I was) I'd strongly suggest picking up a copy of "Powershell in Action" and giving powershell a shot for a couple of weeks. I'd be surprised if you don't switch to powershell.

I'll concede that overall powershell still has some significant obstacles to overcome before it's better than the linux command line, but just like when windows xp came out and people stopped making legitimate complaints about window's stability - with powershell released now, I think we'll start to see the same trend with people complaining about the windows command line - these complaints will no longer be legitimate.
Cornell U. Startup Wiggio Passes 100k Users
Summary Please. This is hurting my brain.
Hi pclark, while our physical presence and interactions are limited because we're not in the valley, we're easy to get a hold of...just send a message through Wufoo's contact form. We do our best to answer anyone interested in what we're doing to the best of our abilities.
We had someone on the team looking at it, but our emphasis was on things that a consumer or service provider stack could screw up in software, not so much on the protocol itself. (Our analysis was also very, very casual; we wrote code for it, but we didn't have a project plan.)

The other thing that messes with you with OAuth is how closely OAuth resembles a lot of ad-hoc schemes that preceded it; many of them have been tested and analyzed to death, so it lulls you into a false sense of confidence.
You're right that "relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth," but not in the way you argue.

People don't spend time on MT for the money. Ok, some people do, but I believe the overwhelming motivation is the same motivation behind casual gaming.

It's just a fun thing you do because you're bored and it's like a little internet scavenger hunt.

Most Turkers are from North America, IIRC. It's more about the cognitive surplus of western laborers versus their third-world counterparts, which is related to their earning power.

Edit: Not sure why your comment was getting downvoted. I voted it back up -- it's an insightful and appropriate comment!
This is news? This has been discussed for years
One of the best pieces of advice my mother gave me was 'date the waiter' -- because when you're on a date, the girl you're with is going to pay attention to how you treat the staff, because that's how you'll treat her.
In 1996, my friend and I made good use of Geocities by writing an online magazine.

The most amusing thing was the rule that you had to link to Geocities at the bottom of the page.

So we had stupid little slogans, derived from the article's topic, being the text link.

Not only that, but we took the piss out of their stupid graphics.

Oh, and possibly the world's first cat-picture site. One iconic animated GIF we made had a cat head composed of 2 cat heads, blinking its eye alternately.

If we had done a cat picture site in 1996, we'd probably be millionaires.
Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson Gripe About Design's Current State
Myspace becomes slightly more usable if you're running Flashblock.
In this case Google could use an ordered list element to give context to the search results.
Slick New Ubuntu 'Jaunty Jackalope' Springs Onto Netbooks
WuFoo is awesome, they sponsored our community startup site in Austin Texas and were (still are) extremely friendly and responsive during our exchange. Nothing but respect for those guys, love their product. Pure class.
"The Institute will also be offering scholarships"
A quick way to increase your cloud expenditure by 64x - run WebSphere Portal on your EC2 instances :)
Opinion Space - New Tool Plots Online Comments Like Stars in Constellations
"One who is doubtful or noncommittal about something"
Opinion Space
Search Any PDF Books and Tutorials
Quite insightful comment!

I think now, if they spin this correctly, PBay will have far more leverage for their main point - that the trial is a set up by the IFPI-industrial complex.
In Windows it is very rare to ever have to do ifdown/ifup.
Scientists make super-strong metallic spider silk
Still waiting for the service that will let me cash in my news.yc karma. I give it 5 years.
Yes. Yhe definition of the word "news" has been expanded to include anything that seems new. The other way of looking at it is to limit it to "things someone doesn't want you to announce." The argument in this article is that these databases are full only of data that people want you to announce. So how useful can it really be?
Yes, the average wage is $4/hour and most people spend it as Amazon credit on plasma TVs and home theaters.
"Jews didn't intermarry, keeping their gene pool closed. They were subjected to periodic persecution, which kept the population from outgrowing its professional niche."

It hasn't been pleasant, but we have to be smart in order to survive.
For some reason, I am a little sad to see them go. I mean, some of the first HTML I ever wrote was on a GeoCities page when I was in middle school. I'm sure many of us have similar pasts.