skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vivapixel appears functional and very fast but it doesn't arrest me as a visitor with a compelling argument on why I should sign up. If I were you I would work on storytelling then I would add pro subscriptions.

I would paint a better "you're stupid if you don't sign up" story, starting with the home page. Your focal point currently is a random image from one user's photos and after refreshing 10x I think maybe your ego is getting in the way of your argument; we should not see pictures of Dave's baby or his out-of-focus drunk friend, we should be thinking 'wow I need this' within 5 seconds. I would replace that random image div with a thoughtful, visual argument for why vivapixel is a brilliant photo and video product. This is your chance to convince and sell. I like how your artistic design is minimalistic but it appears so bare-bones and unopinionated that as a visitor I'm just not confident you care much about user experience or celebrating my handiwork. Like a gourmet meal, presentation is key and IMO some elements of your design aren't paired well. Think of your customers as artists - they need to believe their gallery's curator has exquisite taste and appreciates the visual zeitgeist. If your marketing even hints that you're cheap or that you cut corners we won't proceed to Page 2, we'll be off to flickr.

I love your logo!

Your visitors subconsciously nitpick, so get into their heads. The dialog boxes are all highlighted red - that makes visitors think they've made 6 errors just by opening the homepage. The buttons should all be beautiful images - not the browser default or a graded blue. Treat your canvas as a masterpiece, something that elevates and makes us want to play with your toys. Visitors secretly resent the fact most of your language is boilerplate - would you rather spend their visual energy covering your own ass or convincing them that you've got something worth using?

Finally I think you could eventually monetize Vivapixel with a subscription model. I might make public libraries free and for users who wanted privacy I'd charge them - like Github does. Another option that might work: charge users for large filesize libraries, or for transcoding services. At any rate, great job so far - you might have a super business if you keep at it.
Sure, it's illegal. Probably HN would have to take it down if the original writer cared. Personally I'm happy it's here because the original site isn't loading for me.
Thanks alot for this!
When I think "Polar Rose", I think "A service that encumbers photos with hovering icons that in no way indicate their purpose while obscuring my picture."
I prefer to look at it this way...

If you find yourself "dealing with impossible crises", you've already failed. Something is seriously wrong for this to have happened.

I like to identify that flaw and design and implement a system (digital or otherwise) that will make is so that the impossible crisis can never happen. It doesn't really matter how achieveable perfection is, it just matters that that is your goal.
http://thefeelgood.com seems to have been around for awhile, and it's full of user-uploaded copyrighted content... so while they'll probably have trouble raising money from VC's, as long as the ad revenue is sustainable, I'd venture to guess "awhile"
Sick, sick, I got some of my lesser known progressive house songs queued up while I work...thanks!
50% of the top 10,000 sites use Google Analytics
> Developing economies generally have higher rates of growth than more advanced ones, so the fact that Russia had higher rates of growth than the seven most advanced economies in the world is fairly meaningless.

Not when the thesis on the table is that "relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation" is "a bomb" that "amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing" and "carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications." Since depopulation began in 1992 Russia has enjoyed eight years of extraordinary economic growth, not all of which can be accounted for by rising oil prices. That is a salient fact, which the article completely ignores. At best it's shoddy journalism.
>I am in favor of absolutely anything that makes it easier for macro-payments to go through

Be careful what you wish for. Do you want to have to think before clicking, lest a 3000-word article cost you the day's lunch money? I personally am very glad that there is no good, lightweight, user-friendly architecture for micropayments. I hope it stays that way.
You're building a website that stores contact information? That's a server running a database and some software. Why exactly do you need VC?
Ask HN: Open discussion on the type of VC you really need
If any other applicants, like me, have been wondering why they weren't picked on Monday and don't think the "Why Not" page is a good enough answer, I figure an open discussion might be useful to all of us.

After that e-mail, I spent a solid 24 hours trying to convince myself that our startup was a bad idea. That way I could hit this first speed bump, walk away, and carry on with my meaningless 9-5 job in my cubicle. Fortunately, I was able to dissuade myself from that option. So why didn't YC see it the same way? What do they know that I don't?

After some soul searching, I think it is the other way around. They don't know what I do know, thus they know it is outside their expertise and not in their best interest. Here's my reasoning: Our startup is 50% based on the technology and 100% based on making the right political connections (Yes, it totals 150%). So even with their proven success guiding the product development correctly, it only affects 50% of the outcome. They can only control half, and we only gain half. It may very well be a poor match.

The application forced us to be aggressive, meet a deadline, and build a reasonably functional demo. I say that is successful in itself. It has also forced us to evaluate what types of investors and contacts we need to be successful. In these reasons alone, I believe YC has helped us as much or more than if we were picked to be funded. My only regret is that I don't have an excuse to move to SF for the summer.

Thoughts?
A Google search gave me this: http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lsi/

Is that what you're talking about?
Interesting. We have sort of solved this problem in Perl. When you want to add a method to a class, you do it by applying a role. If two roles conflict, like by adding a method with the same name, you have to resolve the conflict, or the class won't compile. (The class can rename methods, but you can also call the method with a name that will always work; $instance->Role::Name::method.)

We can also apply roles at runtime. This means you can add a method to a single instance of a class. So Rails could add its version of sum to its own instances of Array, and Classifier could do the same. Then there would be no conflict, except when Classifier tries to add sum to the Rails array... but at least you get a fatal error message instead of unexpectedly wrong behavior.

We can do better, though. 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. Then they can both share arrays, and when one tries to apply the sum role, the already-applied sum role will be used instead.

They both get their sugar, the sugar is isolated to the smallest area possible (a single instance), and they can both confidently share those arrays-that-can-sum.

And oh yeah, with Moose::Autobox, you can apply roles to Perl's native types (arrays, hashes, etc.), and call methods on them. So this is not "pie in the sky", it's an already-solved problem for us :)

Edit: ContextL also provides an interesting solution, "layers". Each module can define their own layer, add their own sum method to it, and activate it inside themselves:

(defclass array ...)

(deflayer rails-sum ...)
(define-layered-method sum :layer rails-sum ((self array)) ...)

(deflayer classifier-sum ...)
(define-layered-method sum :layer classifier-sum ((self array)) ...)

(in-package :rails)
(defun count-users (users-array)
(with-active-layers (rails-sum)
(sum users-array))) ; uses rails' sum method

(in-package :classifier)
(defun count-results (results-array)
(with-active-layers (classifier-sum)
(sum results-array))) ; users classifier's sum method

(in-package :my-app)
(defun broken-code (array)
(with-active-layers (rails-sum classifier-sum)
;; ERROR, methods conflict
))

This is a pretty good approach, but not as good as agreeing on semantics in advance.
I agree that that would be ideal, but I don't know whether it's worth doing the extra work for people who have flash disabled but who could possibly be convinced to turn it on. I think that they might assume that all seven of you together aren't worth the additional advertising revenue. :) I haven't even visited the site yet, so I dunno if they actually have ads.
Booting from a USB or CD typically means the OS needs to adapt to new hardware, uncompress the disk image and so forth each time it's run. The start up time of the Ubuntu LiveCD is considerably greater than a HD install of Ubuntu, for instance. So a 10 second boot time for a OS on a USB stick is fairly impressive.
It may be true that many, even most (although I doubt it), law enforcement agents dealing with IT are competent. But that's not good enough.

The cornerstone to the philosophy of our legal system is that the USA should be a place where someone who is acting legally need never worry about being a victim of law enforcement. That's why we guarantee a jury trial, require that anyone arrested be read Miranda rights, forbid searches without warrants (and enforce the Exclusionary Rule), etc.

Saying that someone implicated in a crime (or more importantly, someone whose server happens to sit next to one owned by someone implicated) will probably not suffer at the hands of incompetent agents is nowhere good enough.

It's far more important that no innocent be persecuted than that no bad guy slip through the net. I will not have it on my conscience that the government, acting in my name with powers I've ceded to it, has violated the human rights of someone that was no danger to me.
I don't think most people mind advertising. It's the ads that force videos and sound and blatent distractions that they don't like. But for the most part, it is a reality of how these sites make money and if it keeps things free, it is an inarguable benefit to all.
I have not verified this myself, but the people you're talking about apparently have reputations and have posted work outside of StockArt. It's highly unlikely that they were just "made up".
Internet comments as heckling
Must be a slow news day..
It would also be nice to list the song duration in the search results.
We've implemented cron on GAE by using silent ajax calls from clients to kick start things. Works pretty well ... as long as at least one page is open in a browser somewhere.
I don't know. Research that tends to make computers more tactile and replicate common real-world actions seem to completely ignore how typical users work on computers. Not one of my fifty corporate users does anything fancy with their files or folders. Most don't even switch from grid view to detail view unless I do it for them. They delete by right-click 'delete' and will not be comfortable lassoing and crumpling. Making neat piles is useless because they have memorized the haphazardly arranged desktop icons and will freak out if anyone arranges them (Ooops!).

Also, where are the file names? Who really opens files solely by their icons? Most of my users have 1000s of PDFs or Excel files nested in multiple levels of folders. How is the 'fan out widget' going to help them, especially if the long file names can't be displayed neatly? The files most users (corporate or even small business) deal with are something like:

\\FileServer\PublicDrive\CONTROLLED DOCUMENTATION
\Quality System Docs\OP - Operating Procedures
\OP 12 R41 Cleaning of Tanks and Totes for Water-Based.pdf

The real-world unsolved problem is how does someone without much experience get to the right file with minimal effort. The answer could be a number of things like tagging, deep search, meta-info, file ranking based on usage etc. The problem research like this concentrates on is "how do I manage my 4 excel files, 12 mp3s, and 100 jpgs?" Yes, it's a wonderful app but it doesn't solve one problem for today or tomorrow's users.

I thoroughly believe that we need to continue research into better UI, even when the technology cannot be applied immediately. But I don't think making already simple things more tedious or complex for the sake of coolness is the way to go. Personally, I never see my desktop and barely have any icons on it so I'd never use this. My users would get confused because they lasso'ed the wrong file and now it's in a pile they can't find anymore.
How will you decide which projects to fund? The ones with more code to show, having founders with a more prestigious CV, etc. tend to be the ones building on old, broken (i.e. Unix) foundations of the past.

There's no shortage of crackpots who are convinced that they can turn computing upside down if someone were to pay their living expenses for a year or so (disclaimer: this might include myself: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8 I started entirely from scratch, and with a conscious rejection of burdensome OS traditions, but have practically no free time to work.)
Its more then anything a term of endearment. Gmail was the first app and the first beta app. And overall it still represents the hotbed of new features and design.
Project management using Twitter?
Hacking the grid in preparation for war?
We can also apply roles at runtime. This means you can add a method to a single instance of a class. So Rails could add its version of sum to its own instances of Array, and Classifier could do the same.

This is possible with Ruby, but culturally rare. Quite possibly because (blamestorming mode=ON) Rails simply patches whatever it wants, whenever it wants and many people follow its lead. I personally avoid the practice because it is difficult to contain in Ruby. For example, if I am handed an Array it is easy to extend that instance with its own #sum method, and when I'm done with the array I can remove my own extension.

However, what happens if, while I am still holding this extended array, I pass the array to some other method that wants to extend it with a #sum method? Same problem. Working on an instance method does reduce the scope of each modification and thus make collisions statistically less likely, so I am all for it. But at the same time, when I step back and look at the big picture, I yearn for something that solves the problem in a more fundamental way.
What Could You Do With 200 Million Users?
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An 'Accordion' of Wood and Glass
We already have a handful of interns coming on board this summer. We're looking for a few more.

These are volunteer positions unless you are student eligible for work-study via your school. (bilumi has been approved by MIT and Tufts for work-study, and we'd be happy to go through that process with your school, too. One student is leading a grant application to fund investigative journalism in Brazil.)

You can check out the range of internships on this flyer:
bilumi.org/interns.pdf

Development-wise, I'd be happy to talk about our modules in detail with anyone who is interested. Work areas include but are not limited to: python, javascript, browser plugins, web design, data manipulation and analysis, mobile and social network apps.

Some interns work remotely, some here in Cambridge, MA. We do a work retreat weekend on the Cape that brings everyone together at least once.

http://bilumi.org

getinvolved@bilumi.org
I would add...

"Work in a shop that QA's the source code by people who know what they're doing." This would be in addition to User Acceptance Testing.

The first program I submitted in a shop like this was rejected for 38 reasons. Some were shop standards, but many requirements where I thought "I knew better". I didn't. And I've been a much better programmer ever since.
A lot of this is solved by namespaces in Ruby (Modules.) Unfortunately, developers don't really apply them consistently. A best practice should be to put everything in it's own namespace. Been playing around with .NET MVC and C#, and this is something it manages really well.
Alan Kay wrote a paper about a very elegant metaphor to solve this, it's called "Worlds":

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2008001_worlds.pdf

You create a "world" for your Classifier gem, which (in a trivial implementation) makes local copies of any global objects when they're modified instead of actually changing them. ActiveSupport runs in yet another "world", and knows nothing about the "local" changes to the global variables Classifier made.
Hamming distance between two words
How exactly are conflicting changes to global variables soved by namespaces?
Certainly a very novel (to me) definition of coupling and cohesion - I had to re-read the coupling section again, and I'm still not confident that I've fully understood it.

I may have misunderstood, but I think its lacking the idea that change doesn't necessarily propagate in both directions between two coupled elements. Taking the wire protocol example from the article, you can change one endpoint without that change propagating to the other, so long as you don't change the protocol element which connects the two endpoints. This then highlights the need for good abstractions and interfaces to break up the consequences of making changes.
My Start Up Stories (User Group Startup)
No surprises there.

I've written software for a electricity generation company that provides operator guidance on the level of generation requested by the market on a real-time basis.

Eventually, said company is interested in linking that software with their control systems to automate the regulation of the power plant. This is, to my mind, kind of scary. The regulatory bodies seem to agree - should that happen my software would be subject to audit as a "critical cyber-asset".
It is interesting... Perl has such a reputation for being unmaintainable that Perl programmers today are very careful to spend extra effort making their code as maintainable as possible.

I think a lot of practicing Ruby (and Python) programmers are under the impression that Ruby magically solved Perl's maintainability shortcomings, and so they don't invest any effort into writing maintainable code. The result is ... unmaintainable code :) It turns out that programmers write the unmaintainable code, not programming languages.
If you care so little about version numbers, why do you start at 0.01? Why not just start at 1 and save yourself the three characters?
A template to hack your own cocktails
I don't think this is quite what Worlds are. Worlds would not allow you to have a data structure that is used by both Rails and Classifier.

FWIW, ContextL is closer to the solution:

http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/contextl.html

But it's still better to just add a standard "array that does 'sum'" to the language, or for Rails and Classifier to cooperate.
And it works in Canada!
Honestly, I don't think LSI is a good place to start. It'd be better to start a few steps back with basic IR algorithms and data structures like tries, inverted indexes, stemming, string search algorithms like KMP and Boyer-Moore.

When I got started with IR I used Baeza-Yate's "Modern Information Retrieval"; Manning's new "Introduction to Information Retrieval" looks great, though I haven't gotten my hands on a copy yet. Here are the Wikipedia pages on the concepts above:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth–Morris–Pratt_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer–Moore_string_search_algor...
Also you guys surely you would like this book too:
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...
http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/pdf/irbookprint.pdf

Is a very readable and comprehensive introduction of the field. Besides it is recent and covers in a depth several current hot topics.

here is a review the book
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/book-review-introduction...
I think most roll their own (we did just did) since it's easier to integrate with your existing authentication system.

Take a look at: http://railscasts.com/episodes/124-beta-invitations for some decent starting points.
I'd almost blame this problem on Ruby not having its own standard Array#sum method (or more likely it should be a method on Enumerable?). I'm guessing a lot of projects add their own, so it's a natural source of conflict.

Secondly, it seems like most conflicts like this occur between Rails and some other library. Rails, via ActiveSupport, adds a lot of extensions to core Ruby. I kind of wish it didn't. Framework or general purpose library developers should recognize that their library will likely be combined with many others and avoid conflicts by sticking to what's available in the standard, namespacing their code, etc.

I like Ruby, but I'll readily admit it's not a perfect language. I'm sure someday a better Ruby-like language will come along. Hopefully, it'll be a language with better support for avoiding these kind of conflicts without removing support for open classes. I'm sure it's an interesting technical challenge.
V.10 Has come to DevCentral
200 million: more than the entire population of Luxembourg?

That's a bit of an understatement, 200 million is about 400 times the population of Luxembourg. It is more than the population of all of Luxembourg's neighbors (France, Germany, and Belgium) combined. It is more than the population of Brazil or Pakistan. It is 2/3 of the population of the United States.

Facebook is about the size of the fifth largest country in the world. Comparing it to Luxembourg is pretty silly.

In the end, this demonstrates the $15 billion valuation the media proposed is not plausible. That would value current users at $75 each.
I feel that using patterns or coding conventions to make Ruby metaprogramming maintainable is isomorphic to greenspunning higher-level programming practices with if statements and gotos. It is assuredly what a good programmer does to get the job done with the tool that is provided. But a toolsmith thinks about ways to improve the tool itself.
Best practice for formatting code in blog posts
How does it compare to Lucene? I use Lucene alot and it fricking rocks.
Implementing your own language on the Parrot VM
I'm really impressed by this site. Huge selection of music and a very friendly UI. I like how when you add a song for immediate playback, it prepends it to your queue instead of overwriting your queue.

Facebook Connect / OpenID would be nice. Also, when I signed up with a taken username it gave me an "unexpected error" message, a bit sloppy.
I love how Scala solves this problem (or rather, provides the same functionality while avoiding the problem altogether):

http://louisbotterill.blogspot.com/2009/02/scala-implicit-co...

http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/scala-for-java-refugees...

Edit - more links, more detail:

http://technically.us/code/x/the-awesomeness-of-scala-is-imp...

http://scala.sygneca.com/code/simplifying-jdbc
V.10 - New class features in iRules on DevCentral
Sometime ago I read a thread linking to TC post that said Facebook was lowballing its user count and also containing a video of an FB guy being corrected by another guy behind camera when he said the user count was around 270-280M users.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/27/is-facebook-purposefull...