skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's annoying because it's been going on for a long time now, and he hasn't seemed to have taken a break to really bring himself up to speed despite having been shown, repeatedly, to have a need for it.
On Simulation-Reality Prediction
GoalEnforcer is great visual goal setting software (way easier to use than "lists"), but they don't have a web based version yet.
They have both Windows and Mac versions and you can store your goals locally or on the web (using the built-in ftp)

You mentioned "I like to break tasks down" and " Obviously seeing my progress in a chart/graph ... might help with motivation" I can guarantee you'll love this software.
http://www.goalenforcer.com
Check the free demo. This tool is so easy and fun to use that it fells like you are playing a video game.
so it's come full circle. anglo saxons that 'invaded' england originated from denmark.
I work at ProjectLocker (http://www.projectlocker.com), and we have free plans for Subversion or Git that would suit your team, and paid plans with more space and/or users for as low as $25 per year or $5 per month.

Source control, even for just one person, is useful and doesn't have to be heavyweight. Even single developers may need to roll back in time or read notes from a few months ago about why they made an obscure change. It's worth the minimal overhead to have the protection, historical data, and in a multi-user scenario, to know who's doing what so you don't step on each other's toes.

Whatever solution you choose, go hosted; it's straightforward, secure, and saves you the trouble of having to manage disaster recovery, network issues, and so on. Compare us to the competition and pick the one that's best for you. Good luck!
Something that my high school chemistry teacher once said to me (and I hated him at the time, and did awful in his class, but learned TONS of life lessons from him) is that the best way to meet with a teacher is to do as much possible preparatory work ahead of time, in efforts not to waste his time. Preparatory work: specific list of questions you don't know answers to, for example.

People are almost always willing to help if you do your prep work.
EconTalk: Boldrin on Intellectual Property
If you're operating a top site/service, scaling is the most important issue you have. It's naive to think that you can get someone else to handle it for you flawlessly.
Here in San Francisco, SFNewTech seems to be a good way to launch your product. The event happens at least once a month.
Ask HN: Thoughts on OpenID?
Do you think OpenID is a good choice for user management if you were launching a new site today? Or is it still too confusing a concept for an average audience?

I'm not sure - as a user registering on a new site, I think I would prefer it so I could have one less username / password to worry about. On the other hand, I fear that users' current mental model of registering for a site may scare them from using something like OpenID.
It would be great to meet other hackers in Chicago, everyone on this site seems so valley focused, nice to see there are hackers in the Midwest too.
I agree with you, but I think Aristotle's conception of man as a political animal all the more perceives contradiction in the quote, "I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans." Whereas we perhaps are inclined to see socializing as something good in its own right, Aristotle taught that the community of the city/polis has a higher aim: to fulfill the higher goal of man, to make men nobler, to make them more human.

For Aristotle, to be more virtuous was to be more human. Many virtues - patience, forgiveness, generosity, thankfulness, love, courage - are either best achieved, or only achieved, in community. Hence he reasoned that a full humanity requires a community, that therefore "man is a political animal".
WebMoney is a major payment system in Eastern Europe, it works worldwide though.
Call me ancient, but I really miss the 3278, with its distinctive 6's and 9's. I never could find its original bitmaps, much less a vector font like it.
This is a terrible idea. Spitting in to a plastic spoon is not a reasonable way to check for bad breath.
very good design
Although it doesn't look as good as Mint, I much prefer Yodlee to Mint.com
Selling Wine Without Bottles - The Economy of Mind on the Global Net
A month is a bit extreme, but I do remember pg posting a poll in all serious asking if he should shut down HN for an hour each day.

A personal month long retreat from HN does sound tempting though.
Finally, CSS based gradient text, no images
most of us could schedule our lives so that we got a month (or more) away every so often

One of the recent polls here suggests something like two thirds of us are working on startups either full-time or part-time. Startups don't generally allow for taking a month off (a month is often enough time for the competition to catch up if you stop working).
This is like the essay by EricRaymond and RickMoen:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Perhaps a better version is this:

http://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html

The point is: if you're meeting someone, if you want someone to help you, if you want anything from someone - do your homework. If you don't make an effort, or aren't seen to have made an effort, why should they bother to help you?

This is especially true of people of whom many demands are made.

Make an effort - it's surprising how positively people will respond.
Wow, great questions, great feedback.

1. Design: We start with designs from 99designs.com. Then, we have Ryan (CEO and great with photoshop) heavily refine our selections. Afterwards, we convert the designs to html using psd2html services. Again, heavy refinement is needed before the code is actually usable. Here's a link to our previous design: http://blog.webnotes.net/image.axd?picture=webnotesnet.jpg

2. If the contents of the page change, we first try to relocate your highlights/notes. If your highlighted texts have disappeared, we add a "page changed" notification at the bottom of the screen which contains the text you originally highlighted.

3. We do think about public sharing of notes, though our primary focus is on improving research. Several other sites have focused upon social annotations without great success, and so we hesitate when considering such options. Also, the UI does seem tricky. If we were to implement more sharing-related features (you can already share annotated pages through email or permalink), UI would be of utmost importance to us. Several of our engineers have taken usability classes (6.831 was awesome!), and we pride ourselves in the simplicity of our product.

4. We are looking into implementing your suggestions. Thanks for pointing this out.
Working to Rule
A galactic mentor
What's wrong with "git gui" and "gitk"? Built in and adequate. Esp. gitk...
My current desk. Macbook for dev work, server under the desk. Fairly simple setup but I've got a lot of space to work and room for my betta fish.

http://www.deskography.org/people/TME1103EMJ/desks/789/photo...

[Edit: running macvim, terminal and safari with either vlc or itunes for music]

[Edit 2: forgot to mention quicksilver. Kind of funny, but quicksilver is the only osx application I absolutely cannot live without.]
seems to be about ruby and rails by coincidence.
Hi Dan,

It seems you are on a crusade against SimpleCDN. You forgot to mention that you have refused to mention SimpleCDN without us FIRST taking out $30,000 dollars worth of advertising, and exhibiting at Streaming Media West & East.

It is a dis-service to your readers to only recommend providers that ADVERTISE with you, and to talk negatively about providers who do not.

It's funny that there is "maybe" TWO angry customers on this board (could be same customer), that I work support here everyday and maybe one or two people have issues with the service, that are easily rectified by changing some settings with their embedded Flowplayer, JW Media Player, etc... and yet you claim to receive a call every week from an angry SimpleCDN customer? I doubt that.

We offer a $15 free trial to everyone WITHOUT requiring a credit card or any other form of payment... come try our services out. If you like them great, you can use them and pay. If you have any problems or issues... just email us, and our 24/7 support team will help you right away.

If you do email, put attention Robyn, and I'll answer you personally right away.

Why would they call you anyway? You don't know the first thing about CDNs, except what the companies who PAY you tell you to write about them.

Just admit it... It is pay for play with you... you talk up companies that pay you, talk down ones that refuse to play your pay for play game.

We are a value service, but support is ALWAYS available via email and our customer support portal 24/7.

Go ahead and compare us to AudioVideoWeb.com - we are 100 times less. So it is your call... phone support with them for $1,000 per month, or email support with us for $10 per month.

Stop crying Dan that we refuse to advertise in your crappy publication and your crappy blog.

We are stable and profitable, and have been around for about two years now... and are now pushing about 25Gbps+ of traffic on a daily basis, spanning over 25,000 individual accounts. You can't argue with that Dan.

Thanks,

Robyn
SimpleCDN Support
We give you $15 free dollars to try the service, and you DO NOT need to use a credit card, or provide anything but your email address to get started.

We don't "bill" our customers anyway, so no, we do not "apparently bill people thousands".

Do keep in mind that our StormFront service has a $149 per GB storage charge. So if you do upload 10GBs of content to the CDN, then yeah, you will see a $1,000+ charge to your SimpleCDN Account. But if that was a mistake... email us and we'll take that off of your Account; all charges go to your SimpleCDN Account, and then you fund your account.

Upload a 50mb file and try us out; I'm sure you'll love the service.

Our use our new Lightning service, which is a CloudFront clone, and there are no storage charges at all!

So you are wrong on both accounts, DAN!

Thanks,

Robyn
SimpleCDN Support
support@simplecdn.com
I use both Yodlee and Mint, but i much prefer the UI of mint. May I ask why do you prefer Yodlee?

Also, note that Mint uses Yodlee in the back end.
So they're saying that incentives actually matter. Huh.

Actually, I think this needs to be qualified. When penalties are pushed so high that the criminal quickly reaches a penalty plateau, then they "in for a penny, in for a pound": if they're willing to commit the smaller crimes, it quickly escalates to larger ones.

So if the penalty for kidnapping is death, then you may as well kill the kid to eliminate witnesses; the murder charge won't hurt you any further. And if you're killing one person, you may as well kill a whole roomful: the first is expensive, the rest are free.
Not really, just that the first X-er on Mars is exceptionally defiant or ignorant of social expectations.
Focus on Marketing: With training, staff can be your best marketers
biggest issue i see is that initial effort hump required of new users. the more difficult it is to create a new account, the fewer people will tend to do it. i'd compare it to the standford marshmallow test.
Band Metrics Announces Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF)
For deeper thoughts on the use of psychology as a means of control, see Thomas Szasz, especially The Myth of Mental Illness .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

While there surely exist some disorders rooted in physical defects of the brain, mental illnesses too often become a means of forcing people into conformity. Thus, the use of illicit drugs is evidence of mental illness and must be treated.
Atkins isn't the runaway success because its a particular variety of low carb diet. Its also very restrictive, primarily during the "induction" phase. If you want to see other low carb diets that may be more manageable, try South Beach or Paleo.

The low carb diets work... its just that they are very difficult to follow for most people. If you live in the US and have a fairly normal lifetyle, you will eat too much carbs unless you really go out of your way to avoid bread, rice, sodas (or just about any drink besides water), fruit, etc.

> "The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet, their effect on insulin secretion, and thus the hormonal regulation of homeostasis—the entire harmonic ensemble of the human body."

> "Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated—either chronically of after a meal—we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel."

These are the central ideas to weight management.
This sounds like a simple eager loading fail. Viewing the log for any page hit uncovers these mistakes quickly.
An RPG you play through Twitter
Tweet Lord, an RPG you play through Twitter just went into open beta this weekend. www.tweetlord.com
Memcached with UDP get can handle 400k gets per second (from a facebook engineering note earlier this year) on a single commodity server. Which "decent" DB can even approach this even for simple queries? A cache server and DB server simply have different performance priorities. Memcached makes a lot of sense for caching application specific fragments that has application specific expiration policies.

Regarding your 2nd point, latency != 1/throughput when you have parallel queries.
As it happens, I am "in the market" for such a product ever since the demise of Google Notebook. Having given it a quick spin, I may consider using your product. The only immediate irritation is that it isn't obvious how to move an annotation from one folder to another in the sidebar; it looks like drag and drop should work but it doesn't. The documentation (ie the FAQ) didn't cover this either. Oh wait. I managed it somehow but bugger if I know how - I can't undo it. Ah. I see. You have to grab exactly the right part of the annotation - the title (Not the URL, Not the Favicon). The design doesn't lead you to this because all three are in the same grey box, making it look like one drag-n-drop unit.

This is my opinion only, but I think the price point for your premium service is too high. There are two reasons I pay for premium service: one, I really really want the extra feature; two, I have a really good feeling about the service and want to keep it alive. Ten bucks a month hits neither of those for me. In comparison, I pay toodledo.com $15 a year for a really important-to-me feature and awesome customer service. Looking at webnotes I would get by with the free features, but if I liked it, I would pay you $15/year even though I am not interested in PDFs. With your price point at $10/month, I'm just not going to. I mostly use this kind of service to collect and organise recipes - that is nowhere as big a deal to me as half my Netflix subscription, which is what $10/month comes to.

The .net address in unfortunate. People do type "webnotes" in their URL bar then get confused when they don't go where they intended. There is no obvious reason why this is a .net kind of site.

I get some overwrite issues on Firefox/Linux in the sidebar. Not a biggie.

Hope this was useful to you.
Drew may correct me on this, but I dont think he is necessarily talking about the BDUF approach from a traditional software development viewpoint. ie. not documenting every detail of the system from a developer-standpoint (eg. this function must be AJAX-driven, user details will consist of x and be stored in a mysql innodb database table etc), but more as complete-as-possible account of the user stories the website / application needs to satisfy.

I've managed development teams that have very successfully implemented agile development work within a larger organisation that follows waterfall within its general IT teams. The trick is two-fold.
One: remove low-level system dependencies (do you really care if i use Apache 2.2 or IIS to host the website??),
and two: internally tier the requirements to allow iterative progression and evaluation.
"Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet."

Then put it behind a paywall. Or at least put a small, indexable summary page in front of an unindexed article (using robots.txt). Or invent your own search engine/news aggregator.
> No one really cares about "We more clearly delineated required fields and section groupings."

I do. There are a lot of designers out there who are obsessed with making things pretty and cutting-edge, but can't do proper UX to save their lives. Show that you're not one of them by explaining your design.

> What you said reminds me of the article about the Googlers who asked for reasons why they should use 3 pixel borders instead of 2.

Which is a worthwhile question - there is a hard science behind user interactions, it's not some magical, ephemeral art (though creativity certainly plays a role). What users think is "prettier" or "preferable" may in fact not be ideal in terms of usability.

Case in point: Amazon.com has an god-awfully ugly website, but it's been proven time and time again to generate superior sales numbers. I'm sure we can redesign it to be more Web 2.0 and aesthetically pleasing, but that's not the goal of the business.

Similarly, in AA's case the goal is to sell flights - aesthetics matters very little in this regard other than to establish your brand image.

I do agree AA's site is in dire need of overhaul - and I do like your design from first glance - but you have failed to defend your position in any worthwhile way. You have failed to point out examples of how the existing site fails from a UI perspective (no, "it's obvious!" doesn't count), nor have you suggested how your design improves upon these failings.
If all startup problems are unique, what's the point of VCs?
As a RoR developer I have often been hired into optimize various services. One of the biggest issues I have seen is this exponential growth of queries.

I have routinely seen requests at clients with 2-3000 queries (even with query caching). Most of them are small, but at that amount it doesn't matter how small and efficient each query is.

I love AR to death as an OR library, but it is extremely easy to get into these kinds of issues when you iterate over a large dataset and then call associations of associations without thinking too much about it. I don't think it is only an AR issue, conceptually I think it is true for all ORMs.

They can be a PITA to unravel and are often very hard to do in a clean AR like way in more complex data models. Normally you end up doing some fairly un AR like pre loading like you would do in a pre ORM app, which while ugly works.
Microsoft Says Silverlight Installed More Than Firefox, Safari and Chrome Combined
Ruby on Rails and the importance of being COMPETENT.
i think you mean a css and javascript/jquery based gradient text.

doesn't seem to work too well with dark backgrounds, either. at least, in chrome.
What about the Japanese?
I read the article. I must of glossed over the line where he mentioned reading "Why VC's don't sign NDAs". His about page gives a much better idea of who he is: guy with money.

And that's about it. He's a guy who now has enough money to give to other people in risky ways. Other than that, he's pretty bland.
Ok, fun making fun, but if you had to solve the same problem (official site with unknown but probably large traffic), how would you do it? Other then google "amazon ec2" or "amazon hosting" and see where it goes.
Obesity is at record levels in Japan.

To have the Okinawan (or Japanese) diet work for you, you'll not only have to follow it closely you'll also need to live the traditional Japanese lifestyle.
Though my first response was to say BS on thinking about it I actually believe them on this one. As the article points out they landed a few high profile events which got a lot of people to install the plug in (albeit an earlier version than 2.0 which is the first worthwhile version imho)

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect them to over take Flash any time soon. But I think this gives Microsoft Developers enough incentive to use Silverlight rather than jumping ship to Flash (which is much harder for a .net deverloper to pick up). In that aspect I think this is a victory.

For better or worse the great thing about being Microsoft is you just need to hang on to what you already have to be successful
The difference is in acknowledging that the people spreading the message do that out of their own will - not because they have been contaminated by the meme. In other the 'spreadable' metaphor focuses the thinking on why people want to spread the message, what they get out of it, makes the message author to concentrate on cooperating with the spreaders - instead of trying to contaminate them.
I don't think HAProxy supports SSL either, does it? I had to put an nginx layer in front of HAProxy to get SSL working.
The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current horrendous attention span. I miss the ability I had to sit and lose myself in one thing for a long period of time, frankly.
I wander when that was.
Agreed, I do all my dev with query trace in order to make sure I'm not looping back into individual queries.

to those that don't know, Rails doesn't load the children of AR objects by default, so if you do something like

Select * from books

and then iterate through the books and get books.author_name where the author data is a relational table, you're going to get a separate query for each row.
Here is the Facebook Developer blog post: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=246

I look forward to the day Facebook can totally stop managing passwords. That means my grandmother will be using OpenID.
Interesting technique, but it does use JavaScript (but degrades nicely).

A couple of side-effects: Firefox 3.0.8 is pretty sluggish when scrolling (although it might be better with only one instance of this used), also you can't (visibly) select the text that has this applied to it.
Umm, it sounds like some tweaking of your ActiveRecord::Base.find calls with the ":include" parameter might improve performance by 10,000x as well.
We are looking into making the next step more obvious, and we do agree that the homepage has a lot on it. Thanks for the feedback.
Japanese has tons of English words, even for some pretty basic concepts (チャンス, タイプ, etc.)
they also had a stranglehold over the olympic games. i would've thought that this would be one of the biggest installation drivers.
Classic case of overengineering the problem. I'd venture that it's a common enough class of mistake for those who have recently learned the hip/new/cool way of doing a thing. Thing = scaling a webservice in this example.
Considering Microsoft.com is one of the most-trafficked websites on the internet (Currently #15 http://alexa.com/topsites), and considering you're required to install Silverlight before MS lets you browse it... yeah, it'll have a high adoption rate.
ORM is rarely effective unless it is just used for CRUD. Most OOP programmers using ORM rarely use it efficiently.
I think the point is the hormone regulation is exceedingly complex and attempts to circumvent it either won't work or will have unintended consequences. The body can regulate itself if you let it.
I think that OpenID is too confusing, until presented well to the user. I'd include a short piece of text on yuor registration/login page about OpenID - and make it clear to the user that they probably already use an OpenID-enabled service (such as Google Accounts or Yahoo! which actually tell you now). Try to present it as a way to speed up registration - less fields etc.

Right now, I'd still use a classical registration system, but show off OpenID as an alternative system and allow existing registrations to link OpenIDs. I still view it as an alternative, rather than a replacement.