skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not much of a web programmer but what does a scalable, concurrent language with low memory overhead look like? Does it exist?
Yeah, but in reality the ideas in the article are really more boring then the headline suggests.

He wasn't in a position to co-found youtube, not to mention there were already plenty of video sites around before and during youtube's rise to prominence.

It's a classic case of "well I had that idea I could of done it" - doing it is 99.9999% of the exercise, having the idea is 0.0001%.
I've been racking my brain for months trying to remember where I saw a quote that turns out to be in that article. "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." Thanks for that.

Lesson 8 is the best part.
They also had the connections to turn around and sell it to someone who could anchor it against the legal challenges that everyone involved knew it would have to face. Streaming video had been done before, but Youtube was the first place where you could upload your own video and show it to others without having it be manually approved by the site operator.

Given the current state of copyright law it was pretty much insane for them to expect to be anything other than a lawsuit magnet; unless they had a plan to deal with it.
I'm in a small niche, but demand is through the roof. If I had 10 clones, I could have them all on contracts within two days.
It's no secret that I'm paranoid about getting penalized, mainly because I don't want to repeat that unfortunate experience.
Expressiveness isn't about saving time discriminating among different options. That's more like a form of simplicity. Expressiveness is a soft quality and is about being able to convey the thought or feeling of an algorithm in a natural way to a human. This helps when you're reading code and when you're conjuring up the code in your head.

Functionally identical patterns of code are not equivalently expressive. Certainly the computer doesn't care, but code is written for humans first and foremost. The more ways I can express a functionally equivalent operation, the more expressive the language is. This is because (ideally) each of the different ways has a unique feeling to it that evokes the right intuition needed in the right contexts.
Depending on what I'm working on, I charge different rates for consulting, so this is hard for me. I also do project-based and risk-based pricing on some projects. I did vote, however. Demand is about normal or up slightly, however time-to-collect has gone up slightly too, which can create cashflow issues occasionally.
This is so fucking old.
That's cool to see someone from HN got in. Congrats and good luck!
I wonder how they were monetizing the YouTube channel? It seems like an expensive thing to just give away. Are they getting ad revenue from it?

Anyway, the whole thing is just sad. Their whole legal extortion team must be really depressing to the part of the company running the YouTube channel. (Three people?)
yes, but the main thing was the timing, IMHO.
Or, just as likely, on the other side of the spectrum, they tried to create the best site they could and got multiple offers on a daily basis since inception.

In other words, just because they sold to Google, doesn't mean other companies didn't also offer money that would have made the founders millionaires multiple times over if they had accepted any buyout offer in the previous 6 months to a year before that. Most any startup that sells for millions or billions of dollars didn't just accept the first buyout offer they got and it happened to be for a lot of money; no, they had been negotiating and evaluating serious offers from day one, all the while improving their software for months or years.
Host Excellence Review
I'm in school right now so I'm artificially cutting back my demand, but I've spoken to people in Pittsburgh who says that they've seen a significant rise in demand for dev (not sure exactly which, I suspect webdev). Not really sure why, but they've all been swamped.
I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were hundreds of video startups started with 6 months of YouTube's founding.
If that works, then your startup must be building a perpetual motion machine?
Which niche? The demand for quality devs will always be high imo just due to the wide spread use of computers in businesses everywhere.
I have a day job and I enjoy my free time, so I charge accordingly (76-100). I have very few takers.

I think I'd have to charge around half that to actually get enough business to make a living doing only freelance.
It's referral spam that Live's crawler sends out. Google analytics appears to block it, Clicky and numerous other analytics programs do not.
On subdirectories vs. subfolders, see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdom... - essentially, it's about benefiting from the authority/trust/link metrics assigned to a root/sub domain rather than starting a new one.
I think this is about as accurate an account as you'll get in regards to how Bill Gates made his money.

Yes, his entire family was rich and his parents were well connected (when most people tell the story they leave out "Bill Gates got the call from IBM because his mother was on their board")

Yes he got unbelievably lucky (so much so that he turned down IBM, sent them to the makers of QDOS, and still made the deal after QDOS blew it)

and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't code worth a darn)

But even with all that he would have failed if not for his keen business insight and technical accumen. I guess you need both luck and skill to become the richest man in the world (but I'm betting skill can still get you pretty rich)
Do you know the exact cause? I see this too and it is just plain weird.
But you don't have to make a choice -- you can pick both. Why not install Firefox for main browsing and keep IE6 for use with their old apps? This gives you a more productive (IE6 doesn't have tabs...) and secure browser for primary use, and the old browser to use with legacy software.
There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)

Not just directed at rgrieselhuber so much as the whole community, what would you say are the predominance of such companies relative the whole SEO market?

My experience so far has suggested a vast number are just floating on borrowed time until someone busts them, but I'll be the first to admit my sampling might be biased.
Looks like they've been making episodes for shows on Adult Swim...
Google "MSNPTC". Last I checked, nobody could understand it, but it's a weird bot. I had it hammering one of my sites with bogus referrals. Many hits per second. I just blocked it.

(ModSecurity is a fantastic Apache module for blocking bots, attacks, and all manner of junk, btw)
Ask HN: What's the Reddit voting algorithm?
I just started using Reddit recently for the first time (yes, I'm a slow learner) but I understand that your karma determines something about how much your vote counts for. I've noticed when I log out sometimes, my vote has not registered, maybe because I'm a new user. Has anyone figured out what rules they apply? I assume there's a particular karma threshold at which your votes count more, etc.
On a related note, if you had the option to attend a pretty good grad school for free, taking two grad classes a semester, (and on top of that, get paid a half-time stipend for 20 hours a week as Teaching Assistant or Research Assistant, which should be enough to live on), would you? Should I do it? I would be finishing a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics next Spring. It sounds like it would be a great way to challenge my mind while trying to create shareware apps or web apps. Should I do it?
I do some custom projects for cash flow. Business is up dramatically over what I was doing in 2007 and 2008. However, the kind of business has changed. In 2007 and 2008 I kept running into potential customers, who usually had a marketing day job and an idea, with no way to execute it. They typically wanted to spend a couple of their salary pay cheques building some niche social network that would take the better part of 6 months for a single developer to get up and running. So, it kind of sucked. This year, my typical client is a large company or government-backed organization that is cash rich and ready to spend on actual quality projects instead of some bebo clone. It's a nice change of pace.
Alex, you may have mentioned this to me at last week's meetup, but are you permitted to blog or write about your business prior to launch?

PS: Congrats on the mention!
The SQL Guru - The Daily WTF
Maybe open up a bug report?
http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/issues/entry

From the looks of it, the author is a junior coder or new to this sort of JS library code. He may not know any better, but keep in mind he's just looking to help by releasing this-- we were all newbie devs at one point.

Overall, I'm not a fan of disparaging any code people release for free. There are too many developers who keep useful code locked away on their disks because they're afraid people will mock their work.

Don't get me wrong, it's very helpful for potential consumers to know about the issues you mention, but there may be a better way to phrase your criticism.
This isn't reddit. But both Reddit and HN are open-source, so you should be able to discover the algorithm. HN source is here at http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc2.tar and Reddit's can be found at http://reddit.com/code/ .
Do you mean the HN voting algorithm?
From the title/domain, I thought that the upg warning was from google. Is there a solution to this problem? Would adding cases such as code.google.com be worthwhile?
I think I'd have to charge around half that to actually get enough business to make a living doing only freelance.

Or you'd have to take it seriously enough to do the legwork you need to have enough clients at your current rate. I found that the more contract work I did, the more demand I had for my time. This, of course, assumes doing really good work for people that interact with other people that would need my particular skills.
http://www.seeqpod.com does something similar, though it isn't as well designed.
I would write some custom thread safe application server that's designed to scale.
Anyone with Bill's off-the-charts intelligence, business savvy, and entrepreneurial drive would end up very wealthy even if they were born in the ghetto. Maybe not Bill Gates wealthy, but more than enough that they'd have no interest in reading this sort of thing.
When I was a consultant (2003-2006), I billed at $60/hour. Three years ago, I launched a website that I had built in my free time to make some extra bucks. When it started eating up my time (and making more money per month than I had ever made consulting), I had to increased my rates to $90/hr. I informed them of why the increase, and they didn't even flinch (I was expecting them to negotiate), and all was well until (several months later) I simply didn't have time and went full-time to my "side project", which was now generating double what I was bringing it for consulting, and sucking up all my time.

Maybe once or twice a year I get a call from some of my former clients asking if I'm looking for work, and I always have to turn them down. Since quitting consulting, I've had a few meetings where I would possibly do some side-work for a potential new client, but they all wanted long-term commitments, and I simply couldn't commit to a long-term thing.

That's my consulting story. I don't actually know what it's like to be a consultant in "today's economy" and I'm sure that was the point of the question, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
Sorry for coming off so rude. Anyway, I was just going to send a message offering it up for the author due to it not being that large of a codebase and was going to offer to make neater version of the code. I'm going instead to send a bug report as you suggested as that seems best for tracking it.
Still being rung a couple of times a month. Handing work off to mates. So not too bad.
Thanks for checking - I edited my question to make it more clear hopefully. But, no, I meant Reddit. I just started using Reddit recently but the site scares me. I feel like I'm surrounded by a pack of feral dogs.

Aside from that, the HN voting algorithm is pretty straighforward for a new user to figure out. Whereas on Reddit I never know whether the vote I see is the one that is actually registered for me. When I log out of my account I often see that my vote didn't "stick". I don't think that's a good policy on Reddit's part. Just let me know honestly that I'm not at the level yet where my vote can count like a more experienced member.
Cool. Thanks. I appreciate the links.

Didn't mean to give the impression I don't know where I am. I realize I am not on Reddit currently - I don't hear the sound of wild dogs grinding their teeth.
If I'm not going to support IE 6, I'd rather have something like this than for my site to just be broken.
The purpose of the SafeNestedHash is to be able to directly reference or assign deep nested hashes without initializing every level. Ruby will throw an error if you do this with a regular hash because the first undefined level returns nil and nil does not respond to the [] method (square brackets are just a method in Ruby). The UndefinedHash is a class that stands in for nil so we don't get an error as we make a deep reference and it also keeps track of the keys so that if there is an assignment at the end it can initialize the necessary sub-hash and attach it to the original top-level hash. There are simpler hacks around that auto-initialize a hash, but they suffer from auto-vivification of hash keys (ie. looking up a hash key will create an empty hash there even without an assignment).

In essence, the problem could be "solved" by monkey patching nil, though that would be the worst sort of abuse of monkey patching I can imagine.
As far as checking the class is concerned, well that's just a convenient method of showing what I'm doing, I could also define a method such as is_not_defined? and check if the object at the end of the hash responds to that. The fundamental issue is that any object could be stored in the hash, so whatever I check has to be valid for any possible object. That's why I defined nil? for the UndefinedHash class even though it is a bit kludgey--it's better than monkey patching Object or NilClass.
Having had the opportunity to "intern" with Seth as an early architect of Squidoo, I would recommend spending time with him to anyone. Seth is exceptionally intelligent, and a very giving person. I count the summer of 2005 as one of the most pivotal moments in my career, where a lot of the "standard" marketing curricula I was taught during college was outright challenged.

I was also able to see how a startup could be very quickly and efficiently architected and launched. Squidoo went live less than 6 months after that initial summer. And while it isn't a Google-like success story, they are profitable and still growing.
If I may ask, what is your website and what does it do?
> and Yes, he's not a great hacker (he's smart and knows enough about technology but the couple Gen 1 Microsoft employees I've met say he can't code worth a darn)

What? I'm pretty sure Gates is the quintessential technical founder. He wrote the original Altair BASIC implementation himself in something like a week, and snuck into University of Washington's computer labs in the middle of the night in high school. I don't think I've ever seen anything that implied otherwise.
I have a friend who does upwards of $100-$200 and he is constantly in demand. He's really good. One of the best coders and best designers I've ever worked with (in my limited career, which is only 2 funded startups).
In practice it looks like C++ with a lot of custom libraries.
IMHO it is what you make of it. I'd recommend understanding what type of problems are reasonable to be solved in the time you're given, find someone who's working on ones your interested in and see if they need help.

Also, you'll be passing up a lot of potential $$ going to grad school so make sure you understand why your doing it..
Wine On Tap May Benefit Consumers and Restaurants
Reddit does say that their "anti-cheating/spam" code is not public. I suspect that's part of the voting algo.
Checkout 99Designs - http://99designs.com
From what I've seen, the industry as a whole tends to get a bad rap from the people doing stupid stuff. My experience comes from working with global brands so it's probably skewed, but there is real business value to be derived from doing a few things right.
I've always wondered if the advice to avoid argument and criticism from "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was at odds with internal business meetings. It seems that extremely successful businessmen like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison create a culture where criticism and argument form the cauldron from which great ideas are culled. At the same time, the human mind is seldom changed by argument or logic.

My current opinion is that the Dale Carnegie way of business is great for sales or extremely flat organizations, but in larger or more established organizations, credible and aggressive (almost totalitarian) leadership can build "consensus" more effectively through argumentation, criticism, and decisiveness.

Does anyone have any tips on how best to arrive at decisions in a <4 person startup?
Ditto - what niche? I'm out of work and could use a few tips.
The Reddit ranking algorithm was/is this: http://redflavor.com/reddit.cf.algorithm.png

And Hacker News's was/is this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231209
For the answer to these and other exciting questions, you can click on peoples' usernames to see their profile. Often they handily include links to, e.g., the MMORPG guild hosting website they manage.

[Edit for clarification: I'm getting modded down so I assume someone read the above as snarky. That was not my intention. It was intended to directly answer the question and provide him and other readers self-help via a non-obvious feature of this website that is only discoverable through verbal lore.]
No offense but this blogpost is pretty much fluff. All it is is a blatant transcript of the video. I was on the A/V team to help record this. Everyone is better off just watching the video.
If you're just learning Emacs this is an essential piece of literature to read to get you up to snuff on Emacs.

And always good to check back everyone once and a while for experts.
I'm trying to figure out which answer would hurt competition most...maybe I should make the people who are overcharging feel one vote more comfortable (don't worry, haven't voted).
Git Commit History Visualization
Notice what happens at the 5 minute mark. That is when Rails moved to Github last April.
Ever heard of "wasted clicks"?
All good points which I agree with.

It appears that we were using different meanings for expressiveness though - yours was focusing on communicating both the feel and the function of the code, mine was focusing on communicating efficiently[1].

I don't think that they're orthogonal, and I'm not sure at the level that "there's only one way to do anything" is normally applied in Python that it negatively effects either, especially since the implied full version seems to be "there's only one way to do anything if you don't have a reason to do differently".

Not that it helps with communicating the feel of an algorithm, but at least it doesn't necessarily hurt. I was only trying to point out that "there's only one way to do things" may not actually be the opposite of expressiveness. Liberally
applied it's possibly neutral or better.

[1] An argument could be made that accurately communicating the feel of the code is the most efficient way to communicate it, although I'm more concerned with the time it takes both to read and to write the code - surely at some point of massaging your code for readability you reach the point diminishing returns :)
Rachel likes bacon. I like Rachel.
http://grooveshark.com/about
My company works directly with them. I've not been directly involved but I've heard about everything every step of the way. They are slow to change, resistant to doing anything new, and their decisions are chaotic.

Pretty much what you'd expect from a company that almost refuses to adapt to modern times.
Funny they asked about business model. That seems like a startup that will be very easy to monetize if it catches on. Anytime your clientele are people who are paying hundreds or thousands a month for something related to your service, it's not hard to make money.
Two thoughts, and an obvious third comment.

First, because the browser logo started out as the status indicator in NCSA Mosaic and in the '90s browsers, before UI designers started thinking about screen real estate. The animated logos in these indicators needed to display indefinite progress, so they were elaborate spinners, and spinners are round.

Second, because the globe is a visual metaphor for the world wide web, and circles figure prominently in navigation, which is a design motif for browsers.

Finally, because the first major commercial browsers (Netscape and IE) had circle logos, so circles became part of the marketing vocabulary for browsers. You could do a square logo now, but it'd stick out.

Note that the original Mozilla browser logo was not a circle. AND WHERE IS IT NOW?
As far as I know, this practice is illegal in some European states. Will be interesting when the first one sues Facebook...
$80-120/hr and flat-out.
I don't know... I watch my Ph.D candidate boyfriend (in a non-science discipline, mind you) and it's close minus the coming in to the office bit.

More time on facebook, less time on tetris. Update for 2009 as necessary.
IPMI servers and related devices like Sun's LOM and HP's iLO have little to no storage space, perhaps a few MB of flash.

You can set up a limited number of users, like 16, and cannot store or access random data (i.e. you cannot use it like a 1GB USB drive). Of course, you could image that data, as there are tools under Linux etc. that let you read the IPMI / LOM / iLO information.
Being able to create something quick that's workable doesn't really indicate that you're a good programmer.

As far as never hearing anything about it, I based the statement on a couple personal accounts. But "Barbarians Led By Bill Gates: Microsoft From The Inside" has an account of at least one programmer calling Gates code terrible. The programmer in question co-wrote the book so you have to take it with a grain of salt but it seems true because the story he tells is one that paints Gates in a positive light (he doesn't fire the guy for calling his code junk right to his face)
I'll go ahead and play devil's advocate here for a moment and look at it from the FBI's point of view. I can imagine that they would rather keep the original equipment and make copies for the involved parties. What if they missed something during the copy or the machines were modified in some strange way? They don't really want to blow their case.

I agree that they should do it onsite, however, and not make them wait days or weeks to get it back. It's a lame excuse to seize that many machines just in case without the ability to assist the businesses to keep operating, especially in the current economic environment we're in.
Ruby will throw an error if you do this with a regular hash

So, why not just let it throw an error? The interpreter is expecting one thing and gets another -- that's a type error right there. Why bother with anything else?

(ie. looking up a hash key will create an empty hash there even without an assignment)

That's pretty silly ;)