skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey I run a photo sharing site as well - http://Simplebucket.com and so here's my response from my experience.

1. How do you folks attract new members ?

Mostly from google search. When I started Simplebucket, I had the concept of making the simplest photo hosting, no registration, no login. And so I targeted the words "simple photo hosting" and now Simplebucket is #1 on google for those keywords. When we first launched, after RailsRumble 2007, the site had bare functionality and minimalistic design. I redesigned and added features to Simplebucket and relaunched in 2008. After the relaunch, I emailed blogs that wrote about photo sharing sites and tell them what is unique about simplebucket.

2. How often (if at all) do you interact with your members?

Not a whole lot and I know now that it was a huge mistake. I kind of neglected our community due to job commitment. Photo sharing is about building a community and interaction should be first, I was also too focused on features which I think should be secondary to building a community.

3. I recently tried to monetize my site with some ads. I regret doing this, it wasn't my idea, a friend recommended I try... it was a bad idea. But how do you folks monetize your sites ?

I'm not sure why ads turned out bad for you, but for me, it went neither way. There isn't a whole lot of ad revenue, enough to cover hosting cost in certain months but that was it. I did not receive any complaints from existing users so my perception was they are fine with it.

4. Should I Keep Going? With all the other photo sharing sites like google,flickr etc. Is it worth it for me to keep working on this ? Maybe I should focus my efforts on a niche? (now what niche do I focus on?)

I went through this same dilemma a year ago. Simplebucket wasn't growing like I had expected. It was very utilized by a small group of fans and I had decided to keep it going for them. Photo sharing is a very competitive arena, if that's one thing that I learned from the past year. In order to emerge from the noise, I knew from the start that the service had to provide something unique and niche. Simplicity was mine. I also thought about photos for Twitter in 2008 but did not implement that because I had too much on my plate from my day job. And look at Twitpic now and how several other photo sharing sites are going Twitter in 2009. So yes, going niche is necessary, but it does not guaranteed success.
Interesting way to earn money. However, why a regular user can't run a plura client too so that they can earn cash themsleves?
One might argue that heeding road signage, signaling, and lane discipline impairs the driving experience.

It is, nevertheless, necessary.
installing something is boring and kind of dumbifying, sure. but if you're a system administrator who solves problems, optimizes and tweaks, i could imagine it being engaging enough to be interesting.
you have an excuse to move to SF for summer founding a startup.

Why would you even consider giving up after being rejected from YC? Isn't that telling the world you're not sold on your idea?
Rails, via ActiveSupport, adds a lot of extensions to core Ruby. I kind of wish it didn't.

Apparently modular ActiveSupport is in the works:

http://github.com/wycats/rails/commit/21c17e893fd8f5f7dc41df...
The key is to spend all the ad money in a small period during the day, say 1hr. It is better to have a lot of people on your site 1hr a day then 1 person on your site all day, that is if you site relies on users to interact.
Or start at 0 --- for geek cred.
I am trying to find the point of your first sentence, but I can not. Are you seriously claiming something like "people shouldn't use 3D printers unless they've already made paper-mache models?" Gating access based on old-school criteria is anathema to the new internet age, really missing the point on several levels.
I'd blame this problem on gem writers monkeypatching base functionality.

Why not use the Array.map and pass it a summing block? That way if you've got an array of things other than numbers, you can correctly utilize the strategy pattern to sum them....
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
(http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science)

Despite agreeing with everything in the article, I am still devoting my life to somehow getting into graduate school - simply because my life goal is to eventually spend all of my prime waking hours working on beautiful, elegant, entirely non-commercial concepts, and there is still a non-zero number of academic positions which allow this, in contrast with industry.

Like choosing gladiatorial combat in place of meekly kneeling for beheading, it is an issue of having a sporting chance vs. no chance at all.
Coming of Age in the Gaming Industry
That is merely soft and polite description. In fact there is literally humanitarian catastrophe. This article is focused mostly on physical heath of society and death rates, while there is a second side of the coin - a unprecedented rate of alcohol, drugs and stress related mental deceases which no one can count.

And precision statistics is not required anymore - just step down into any station of Moscow's or Saint-Petersburg's subway at friday's night and take a look at the faces. Everything is visible with naked eyes.
I agree with you. Usually when you work with great programmers, you will be exposed to great code as well.

But sometimes, I have also seen that even when exposed to great code, it might not be evident to someone that it is truly great, without the accompanying commentary by a programmer on why it is great.
You can't think of advantageous ways for a nation state to use a burst of funding, even if it comes due in a huge way five years later?

It's the same advantage corporations get, only with military options.
<sarcasm>i agree, let's forget the computer altogether, it's much smarter to write code with pencil and paper</sarcasm>
In addition I would say, work where your code actually gets code reviewed. (is that a dying practice?) You will write better code.
A Cloud Computing Clash
I like the article because next time I have to explain to my manager why we should 'zig' instead of 'zag', I can explain the cost of hasty or poor code design in terms she understands (the long-term cost and pain).
You can make it fun by writing scripts to automate whatever the task is while you do it. Then, at least, you only have to do any given sysadmin task once.

I usually find it interesting to set up things I haven't used before. Tweaking conf files can be as gratifying as tweaking code... it only becomes boring if you are doing the same install/config over and over.

Of course, most things are boring if they are repetitive.
V.10 Power in the Shell - tmsh and You
There's certainly no problem with individual users doing it. Just contact Plura through the web form at http://pluraprocessing.com/contact.php.

Alternatively, you can use one of our affiliates to raise money for charity (not related to our company) http://donatebot.com
Top Car Social Networks CarDomain And StreetFire Merge
In my opinion, if someone were to want to port Clojure to something other than the JVM, Parrot would be an amazing place to go.

The idea of having Clojure + CPAN makes my pants tighter.

I know that there is someone working on Clojure on .Net, but I don't think that really adds much vs the JVM; especially since it seems like some of the best libraries for the .Net stack have come from Java.

I'm sure I'm at risk of sounding like yet another Clojure fanboy, but to me this really seems like one of the few times where I've seen an article and that's the first thing that popped into my head.
Domino's Pizza Tracker - Great User Experience
While I grouse about Rails, here is the challenge I posed last July at Rubyfringe: Forget about Rails providing all these extensions for Rails programmers to use. How does Rails perform this kind of metaprogramming for its own use? How can its own internal libraries use Array#sum while leaving Array unmodified for Rails programmers?
Just curious, isn't that site violating music copyright laws? I would be afraid to use it for fear of getting sued by the labels.
Performance wise they seem pretty similar (althoug I couldn't find any up to date benchmarks), feature wise it depends on what you are looking for. Sphinx has aggregate support and lucene can update the index (sphinx can "only" merge deltas).

If you don't use java already I would always go for sphinx, java adds allot of dependencies/"things you have to take care of".

One neat feature added in this release is that you can connect to sphinx using any mysql client. So there is no need for a specialized client api and you can use it with everything (literally).
Like telemarketing killed landlines, spam killed email.

I rarely use it.
Since when is this kind of language acceptable on HN? You just insulted an entire race....including myself.

I urge you to reconsider your views on Arabs. I really wouldn't want anymore false info spreading about us. If i could down-vote, i would.
Can anyone explain (or at least speculate) a little bit more about what kind of vectors the "cyberspies" might have used?

The article didn't seem to imply physical presence, so my mind goes next to social engineering and e-mail trojans.

I'm assuming our power grid doesn't have externally-accessible web servers that are linked to the actual management functions...

http://uspowergrid/admin/show_grid.php?plant_id=19';DROP TABLE powergrid;

That would be really frightening.
The result really isn't any better than what most blogs have. Yes it's highlighted and yes there is a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom to accommodate long lines but that seems fairly standard today.
Usually, I think, people write sum with inject:

[1,2,3].inject { |s,i| s + i }

Which is presumably why sum doesn't exist.
The site doesn't answer, "Why should I use this instead of Flickr?"

I hate to pull an MBA-term on you, but, "What is your unique selling point?"

Figure that out and then hammer it home.
http://tipjoy.com/APIcontest/ for those that don't want to read through the techcrunch article
What do you do that has users, and what would you do with 200M of them?
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Off topic: Thank-you HN for having a "Don't editorialize the article's headline" policy. Over on proggit this was submitted with the title Metaprogramming has its pluses and minuses. I feel that statement completely misses the point of the post.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ayr1/metaprogr...
Running Sinatra apps on Google AppEngine (Java)
Well, if the clients are using work StockArt owns the rights to, it's perfectly reasonable to contact them and ask if they'd licensed it.
"thus it is impossible to predict when, or whether, it [the shrinkage of Russia's population] will finally come to an end"

That's some loopy hyperbole, right there. Babies are still being born in Russia. Even a shockingly huge drop in population due to low replacement will eventually end in a stable population size.
I believe Cucumber uses this approach:
http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/a-whole-new-wo...
I think they keep it in beta because it hasn't become the app they want it to be yet. Google wants the end all email client not just a better alternative to hotmail/yahoo/msn et cetera.
200 million users is approximately, hmm, 1 million times more users than one needs to be ramen profitable, and one hundred thousand times more users than one needs to be quite wealthy, and ten thousand times more users than one needs to be filthy stinking rich, and yet still not enough for Facebook to be profitable.

Charge money.
If you really want to enjoy your job, learning how to become the 'Fire Prevention and Safety Officer' is much more rewarding.

Firefighter, janitor, whatever you call it: either way you end up cleaning up someone else's mess.
"'My books and my house are my twin legacies,' Mr. Stewart says. 'If I hadn't commissioned this house, I'm not sure what I would spend the money on.'"

$24 million dollars? I can think of a few things, including education, feeding starving children around the world, healthcare research, etc. I have no problem with a man spending every penny he earned to build a house. I only take issue with the preposterous statement above. I think saving hundreds of lives, sending hundreds of kids to college, building schools in impoverished areas, etc. is a much more powerful legacy. And I would argue that the house is ultimately the architects' legacy and not his.

That said, it is a beautiful home.
I looked up the homeowner's calculus book and realized it was the one I used in college: http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-James-Stewart/dp/0534359493
In my own library, I use inject instead of adding Array#sum. But, I know that's sidestepping the issue, not solving it.

Honestly, I'm not sure how Rails uses #sum. I'm not sure whether they really need it or not. I suspect not.

I'm not a big fan of a lot of non-standard additions to Ruby. For example, all the #try, or #returning, or even your #andand. I don't consider any of those to have enough intrinsic value to be worth the risk of collisions with someone else's subtly different implementation.
Accountants: We're losing more money with every new user

Zuck: We'll make it up with volume!

Investors: OK
Interesting, the article worked for me without having to pay.

Use google translate if you have to: http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&...
A decent computing environment.

(Technically available now: http://www.lispmachine.net/symbolics.txt but I would like one that meets modern specs.)
This doesn't surprise me. (The fact in the headline not the urchin/ga split the article discusses.) Google Analytics is incredibly robust and reliable considering that it's free.

I always hear arguments against using it, but one has yet to win me over. My agency subscribed to LyrisHQ Clicktracks service for a year before canceling it in favor of just using Google Analytics and passing the savings on to clients. (Customer service was great with Lyris, but the interface was unintuitive and slow. It also costs an arm and a leg.)
Man, that sucks almost nothing works in Canada. Hulu doesn't work in Canada. Netflix. But you have some good content on CBC.ca.

Dragon's Den is fun to watch.
monetize them
That means google has 50% of chances to have a good advantage in the negociation process when/if buying one of the top 10'000 websites. :)
Faster than a speeding photon
Post should be titled

"The 437th Time You've Read About Programmer's Tribal Aversion to 'Marketers', Except This Time Written By Orson Scott Card"

P.S. Let me take a whack at the bee's nest: good software that can't be marketed, isn't.
It sounds like your building a thick client, but in case your building a web app check out: http://www.seaside.st/
What sort of network is/would this be on? I would like to think this would be on a dedicated network but is a vpn more common?

I'm assuming this isn't going to be publicly accessible.
People won't pay money for what facebook is right now.

However, I think a premium account model would be very lucrative for them.
Ask HN: Custom labeled flash drives/cds/dvds
does anyone know any good suppliers for these that would print ones corporate logo on it? I haven't taken the time to look yet, I'd like to get some recommendations.
"The way around this problem is to implement (and CPAN) a role that adds a sum method to arrays, and to have both Rails and Classifier use that role."

+1. I see this, ideally, as a social organization problem rather than a conflict resolution/avoidance problem. The conflict between two array#sums is a side effect of the real problem which is that each project had to create array#sum in the first place.

The granularity of gems is too large, so some other system would need to exist. That system, whatever it is, seems to me the answer.

Merb, and other projects, have "extlib" gems that go along with them. I think that's another symptom of the problem. Those need to go away and some sort of social extlib repository/system needs to take their place.

EDIT:

Facets can probably be thought of as the cathedral (non-)solution to the problem. What we need is the bazaar solution.
JSON.js does something similar. It puts methods in the javascript object prototype for generating and parsing json strings. WTF? Is it so inconvenient to just expose two functions to do this?

This was a problem because it broke some jquery functionality, and I ended up removing the portion of JSON.js that was updating the object prototype.
Top Gobbledygook phrases used in 2008 and how to avoid them
Making the virtual tangible
I believe in the product. And although I have been involved in startups previously, I've either worked for one or haven't been in a position to found one as serious as this. My personal risk is greater and I naturally question it more.

And you are right, I can still move to SF :).

How about you? Have you already founded a startup? With or without YC or anyone else for that matter? And why?
I'm not a big fan of a lot of non-standard additions to Ruby. For example, all the #try, or #returning, or even your #andand. I don't consider any of those to have enough intrinsic value to be worth the risk of collisions with someone else's subtly different implementation.

#andand is soooooooo "raganwald." The Homoiconic Way is to use rewrite: #try, #returning, and #andand are all removed from your code and never conflict with other people's implementations ;-)
Web2ExpoSF 09: A Conversation with the Founders of Threadless
Google for it.

There are thousands of these companies out there. I've always just gone with the cheapest company at the time for the product/qty I wanted.
Variable Music Pricing Spread to Amazon and LaLa
It's because Delicious is something people use to save things, and anything in the form of a list is something that seems like it ought to be kept. You can make any essay seem like a reference work by recasting it as a numbered list.

Delicious/popular was better before writers started intentionally gaming it by doing that sort of thing.
I think Luc meant the article on Science (not the BS review on Science Daily):
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5923/81
Meet the newest Anybots robot today at Stanford
Yup, proper use of namespaces would solve the problem, in part. Supposedly Rails3 will be using namespaces quite a bit more than the current version of Rails. That will allow things like mounting apps inside other apps, aka slices.

What I take away as the overall point of the article though is: monkey patch with care.
I see this, ideally, as a social organization problem rather than a conflict resolution/avoidance problem.

This requires getting all of the framework, gem, and plug-in authors everywhere to agree on standards for everything. If even one goes his own way and writes his own idiosyncratic thing that conflicts with a "standard" thing, there are going to be problems.

I just can't see this scaling, it's a Tragedy of the Commons in the making.
If you are not dealing with the occasional unforeseen crisis, by definition you are only sticking to things you fully understand.

Some people prefer that, and in some fields like aircraft safety maybe it's an essential characteristic. But in most competitive endeavors, that attitude tends to be defeated by the person who chooses to take more risks, even if some efforts fail.
Your comparison of depopulation to "overpopulation in an already overpopulated world" is hardly just. Really you are comparing population decline with population growth, but with the latter in a very particular context in which it is known to be harmful. In contrast, nobody is concerned about population growth among polar bears (but many seem concerned about their potential depopulation).

Regardless, the concern of the article isn't even whether or not depopulation is bad; in fact it states: "In the modern era, population decline itself need not be a cause for acute economic alarm." Rather the concern is that Russia's depopulation is fueled by increases in illness and mortality. Just my personal opinion, but death and disease are bad things. The article claims that, furthermore, they are bad things for economic growth over the long term.
http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#sphinxql (connect directly to searchd with any MySQL client)

That might be the coolest feature I've ever heard of. I want to play around with Sphinx now just to use that. For those that know SQL, SphinxQL should make getting up and running rather painless.
In my opinion, anything on JVM isn't going to become a mainstream language because VMs refuse to share code between OS processes.

.NET and Mono solve this with AOT-precompiled modules. Ruby and Python kind of solve this by heavily reusing C runtime/libraries, so at least there aren't 25 copies of printf() and qsort() wasting space in RAM.

JVM doesn't solve this at all. JVM-based softwares act like pigs showing zero respect to the enrivonment they're in. They're good at "one program = one computer" tasks, i.e. only for server-side or perhaps developer's workstation scenarios.

Flash/Air is even worse: not only it won't share anything, but it also brings in its own graphics, font rasterization, hot key bindings, scroll bar behavior, etc, making every software built on top of it look and feel like a poorly designed console game running on your PC under software emulator.

This is why I never touch anything like JVM/AIR: I don't believe the cloud is "the answer" and I want my code to run on servers, desktops, netbooks, routers and cell phones.
Sphinx is awesome. I've been using the "unstable" versions for the past year in production and it's rock solid.

It's also incredibly fast.
Preparing for war? Sound like FUD to me.

Being prepared in the event a war happens is more likely.
I'm planning a summer, "write my own language" project for fun, and I wonder how well the parrot compiler tools would be for this. I imagine its a nice way to get my language into an AST, even if I don't target the Parrot VM.
It's still good software, but good software isn't necessarily successfull.

I like the article for the beehive analogy.
Help me understand your point.. You're saying Java will never become mainstream because it runs on a VM?

Edit: The more I read your response the less it makes sense to me. You say that you hate VMs because they don't respect the OS, but then you go on to say you want to write code that will run everywhere... That's the point of running in a VM, no?
Worlds would not allow you to have a data structure that is used by both Rails and Classifier.

I might be misunderstanding it... but why not?
I think this article is about how to get bureaucracies to do the impossible.

Smiling and being patient isn't the right approach if, say, you're a football coach, or Steve Jobs. There, passion and impatience can work to inspire others.

The difference is that a bureaucracy is set up so that no one is motivated to assist. One has to build human relationships to change those motivations.

When you have acknowledged leadership power, you may use different techniques.
It's nice to see some acknowledgement (and reasoned argument) that smaller isn't always better because there is increased complexity in the connections between parts of the system. I'm fed up of people who've read no research and learned their skills from Dogma University telling me or my team that we should be using smaller functions and fewer levels of nesting and trivially simple classes, because.