skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first thing that came to into my head was 'What problem is he trying to solve?'

Does he have performance problems? Is it cost effective to solve those performance problems using C? What is the ROI?

Has the performance problem been analyzed to a degree that its been identified that its the web framework? (Most of the time a decent database index will help)

Go after the lower hanging fruit first and make decisions on quantitive data analysis.. not just your gut.
D7 Interview: Mark Cuban
We are building a community of engineers to work alongside the community of designers at local-motors.com. We already had one "Parts-Bin" competition to design the Rally Fighter side vent; the community chose the winner - a cohesive, functional and low-cost side-vent. As the community grows we will undertake more challenges in the engineering arena.

After the LM community & team fully develop each vehicle, some building occurs in a centralized location (like chassis welding, etc.) Then each customer joins LM experts in the Local Micro-Factory (we will build micro-factories in regions across the US, hence the "Local" :)) for the build experience & training. Vehicles are built Just-In-Time by each individual customer. This project takes two short weekends.

If you have an LM vehicle, you have a more powerful understanding of your vehicle - because you built it.

Seems crazy to crowdsource such a large physical product. But mostly we are crowdsourcing desire and ideas so that we can build only desirable cars. Local Motors has to make many decisions independently in order to make it to market in an efficient, cost-effective manner.
Cory is a self proclaimed socialist. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that when he says "public" he means government, just as if a right wing politician said "faith based", it would be a good guess that he meant Christian or Jewish, and not Buddhism.
The Founders (TechStars video series) Launches
Sounds like this guy was fucked over by a contractor.
I object to the sensationalist "THEY can send text messages".

You've got a sensor, and the sensor communicates back along a channel.

This is like saying that "stars can now imprint their images on photographic film". In fact, you've connected a camera to a telescope.
This is phony. He won't say what his money is going for, because that would be a big embarrassment. People who are not libertarians should look closely at what he supports and rue the day that he gave $1 Billion toward making the poor poorer.

http://www.pgpf.org/issues/
"Wouldn't the truth of your beliefs about software development be best expressed by the success of your projects?"

Well, your statement could have a bit of truth if Jeff only blogged about how to create a successfull business, wich is obviously not the case. But even then, since i believe the success of a business relies much more on the quality of your original idea than on anything else, for me this is just dead false.
Na, why should the be compiled! Come on, do some ASIC for some real performance!
Ask HN: Has anyone tried python-on-a-chip on a Teensy++?
I've been thinking of getting a Teensy++ (discussed here before, info at http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html and discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624327 ), mostly for the added analog inputs. Then I asked myself, and Google, if it would be possible to run Python on it, with the increased Flash and all.

Turns out that it's probably possible, using http://code.google.com/p/python-on-a-chip/ . Now I have new questions:

* Has anyone tried running e.g. python-on-a-chip on a Teensy++?

* If so, what's the speed like?

* Also, is support for the fancy peripherals included, or would I have to add bits and pieces of C to do that?

[edited for readability]
FDA/CFSAN Food Color Facts
story was updated shortly after you read it to mention that not every plant requires the chip. Like you say, there must be other stuff out there as well, so it is unclear how useful this would be versus other competing solutions
Ask HN: Biggest thing preventing you from ordering online?
Hello HN,

I recently launched an online web store that sells an actual physical product (not a service, not software, but gun supplies and accessories).

We're getting a decent amount of traffic, and people are registering for the site, but we're having a tough time converting those to actual sales.

We're expanding our catalog as fast as possible, and have offered 10% off coupons, free shipping, etc.

I'm of the idea that one of the biggest problems is asking people to register before they checkout. Do you think this is the case? Is registering for an e-commerce site now not a big, or is it something that would cause you to leave and abandon your cart?

Will professionalism cause you to leave? We are trying to have a fresh design that works nicer than other gun accessory websites, but people seem to think that it doesn't matter as much.

On the other side, what causes you to immediately purchase from a site (when its something you want/need and there are competiting sites offering the same product at a near identical price)? What incentives do you like to be offered to make you purchase from that site?

Thanks, HN!
cheers, emailing now
The graph is very steep and getting steeper!!

Seriously it is year over year sales change by quarter graphed as percentage change.(I guess to make it look more dramatic)

here is the raw data:
http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures...
Selecting a variable name is actually very meaningful, and not just for maintainability reasons.

If you have difficulty naming a variable, it could be because you don't have a good grasp of either the problem or your solution, or concepts are conflated. It could be because you don't yet have a vocabulary that provides the terms you need -- imagine if you didn't have the words "result" or "set", but were trying to name a variable to hold the output of a query. It could be that your functions don't do just one thing.

It could even be because your language isn't expressive enough.

I can generally tell when I'm doing things 'right' because decomposing the problem into functions, naming them, and composing them into a solution is easy: it feels like I'm cutting with the grain, not against it.

In this way, coding is like writing a speech or a poem. Deliberating on precisely the right words to use is a key part of the process, and the better your grip on the domain and your arguments, the easier it is to find the words.
Whiney comments: The "FIRST PSOT!11!!!" of Hacker News.
"I'm of the idea that one of the biggest problems is asking people to register before they checkout. Do you think this is the case?"

yes.

http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button
Should Health Care Standards be Open Source?
It's just that wom is the best marketing. It's free. It's credible. If you can make it work, do it.

No disagreement there. But the article claims that if you can't make it work, you should go back to the drawing board... I was disagreeing with that.
This is quite useful, but I challenge your assertion that nothing can be done for an app that is not inherently viral.

I am not looking for a miracle here. Since I already have a stream of prospects I don't really need a VC>1, I'll be happy if each normal sale ended up bringing in one extra viral sale - this would double my revenue.
I think it's for the IBMs of the world, that won't allow 3rd party hosted services... most small companies are fine with it.
For convenience:

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624327

http://code.google.com/p/python-on-a-chip/
Seems his blog is down. Should've used C.
Cool. I was thinking you sell both a webapp (free trial + normal price) and download (super-premium price!).

Uh... why don't you make your own webapp player? For the download version, you could setup a server on the user's computer, thus reusing the same server and client code (but the user doesn't have to be connected).
This xp post isn't that interesting, but the laws of power that it links to are
http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cgt/courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws...
"There's no reason that it can't be handling other requests while waiting for a DB response or a pipe."

Concurrent request processing most likely belongs in the server, not in the application.

"Scaling Rails is a nightmare."

For someone who complains of "well-trodden ground" in others' arguments, you certainly seem to have a deeply-rooted belief in the myth that particular languages and/or frameworks "scale" or "don't scale".
I normally read reviews before buying a product online, and even when I buy it, I buy from a site which has a good reputation.. (eg. i buy shirts from thinkgeek, electronics & books from amazon & buy, and whatever comes on woot etc). I'm no expert, but I would say building a trusted community should be the first step and it will help a lot.
Or write it in Python, then run it under Jython.
If you were to send in your code to someone as sample code for a job interview would you need to change anything?
I know it's in the rules not to post comments moaning, but do we really need a live feed of every single app store rejection on here? Is it useful or interesting? It's linkbait + spam IMHO.

If you don't want the risk of developing for a closed platform, don't do it! But please please please stop whining about it.
Wow, wow, and wow. So you're saying better to trust a private interest than a public one, due to scandal & corruption?

Okay, I'm trying to do justice to this with a response, but it's just going to fall into a trap, probably a libertarian one, but I'm not really sure, perhaps just a childish one. I do need to leave a comment though, even one not very information filled, at least to cover the gap and give people pause and think about what you just said and all hopefully they will think of all its implications, until someone with more time fills in the gap or this article just fades away and the comment with it.

I hope, swombat, that you just haven't thought about all the implications of what you're saying, so at least you're just uneducated, and not evil.
Would it make you happier if they would give it all up and become homeless?
"Isn't that exactly the attitude you're supposed to have in your twenties?"

Why stop? It's a great attitude to have forever.
How is this a great point? How does this 'fact' (serious question: does anyone actually know if this is true?) at all inform how we should feel about Apple's app approval process?

It's not like every app that gets unfairly rejected gets this kind of publicity - Eucalyptus did because it caught Gruber's attention and he blogged about it; this one did because it's coming right on the heels of the Eucalyptus incident and it's the EFF.

So, seriously, what, exactly, are we supposed to take from this point?
WE'LL DO IT LIVE. FUCK IT. I'LL WRITE IT. FUCKING RUBY SUCKS
What Startups Could Learn From Rupert Murdoch
Text only Google Cache.

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:2KAAnfh6M88J:jrmehle.com...
"Everything you see was paid for by Dear Reader." (1990)
"Scaling Rails is a nightmare."

I find this similar to Woody's fear in the following exchange:

Cliff Clavin: Boy oh boy, talk about your lucky days, huh, I just found twenty smackers back there in the pool room. And to celebrate my good fortune, I'm going to buy a round a drinks for all my friends.

Carla Tortelli: What are you going to do with the other nineteen bucks?

Sam Malone: Woody, that could be your twenty dollar bill, the one you lost.

Woody Boyd: Hey yeah, you know I was in the pool room earlier.

Cliff Clavin: Hey, wait a second. Let's be fair about this. Give me the serial number.

Sam Malone: Oh, come on man. Nobody knows serial numbers.

Woody Boyd: L21886119B

Cliff Clavin: [hands the bill to Woody] That's amazing.

Sam Malone: How did you do that?

Woody Boyd: I memorize the serial numbers on all my currency.

Sam Malone: Why?

Woody Boyd: For just such an occasion. Tell you though, I pray every day I don't get rich.

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003010/quotes

Not quite a perfect analogy, but my point is worrying about scaling is a very good problem to have, and is likely to be accompanied by the resources to fix it. Twitter is the poster child for Rails scaling problems, but they re-wrote the parts they needed to write, and people kept using it because they liked the service even when they did have scaling problems.
Ask PG: YC Founders over 30 yrs old
I'm curious to know how many YC companies with founders over 30 yrs old have been funded.

We hear so much about founders right out of college. I also wonder how much of a factor is age in selecting companies.
Yes. YouTube only had 150 videos uploaded after their first 1.5 years of existence. But once they added the click to share buttons and allowed users to embed their content they went crazy viral.
This is exactly what terrorism is. This is coercion with threats.

All you're talking about are the threats to TechCrunch from China and your tone seems to be threatening and very negative compared to others. No praise for China or for TechCrunch talking about this story, no criticism of China, no criticism of TechCrunch, only threats of being blocked.
I'm not saying tables are necessarily wrong. I'm saying that this one-line framework is effectively replacing td's with div's, in that the heirarchy of markup defines the presentation. I don't see what value it adds over tables, given the purpose of CSS.
They don't entice me to share. OTOH, when I have the impulse to share something, I'm much more likely to do it if it is easy to do, especially via apps I already use regularly.
Continuing visual flight rules into instrument conditions is the pilot error most likely to kill you. If the weather starts to look bad land - now. Even on a golf course or a field if you have to

http://www.humanfactors.uiuc.edu/Reports&PapersPDFs/isap...
I read a discussion on Usenet many years ago about squats in weight training.

A post described how they measured the stomach muscles' pressure on intestines. Someone asked "How do they get anyone to do heavy squats with a pressure sensor up their ass?!"

The answer was just two words -- "grad students".
Indeed, the guy is delusional. C is the linga franca of computing? Ew, no thanks. How about we change the world for the better instead of sticking to the same old junk?
I was watching the conference live, and I had the same reaction: "There's no way this actually works." Then they brought out a lady who did a live demo with it... I can't find that video right now, but it was very similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3vWzzoLHrM

Notice how you can clearly see the on-screen body mapping to the person's body. Between that and the fact that I doubt they would make such a big announcement if it didn't already work fairly well, I'm now on the "this probably works" side.
Wait... you thought the C web framework guy was serious?
Awesome, thanks for pointing me to this!
Of course their costs are ridiculous - I was trying to make the point that we are living in a "golden age" of relatively ad-free bliss on the internet. We won't have YouTube in its current, awesome-for-the-consumer implementation forever. Either they are going to have to start serving many many more ads, or they are going to have to scale back the amount of content they provide - both options are not really ideal from a user standpoint.

I don't think the online advertising model is a failure - I just think there is a lot more room for increased ad volume with it. As traditional media outlets decline, we are going to see more and more of that room exploited on our screens.

As far as AdBlock, no company wants to pay for eyes that they are never going to get on their ads. There was (and is) plenty of resistance to TiVo from the networks because they know that companies do not want to pay for commercials that consumers using TiVo can and will skip.
Definitely. We're trying to build it up as much as possible, going to add a blog soon, stuff to talk to our customers, etc.
http://page2rss.com/
I see now: you're interpreting the article as saying wom is a litmus test of how good your product is: if wom isn't working, your product is rubbish, and you're better improve it. You're saying that the ease of wom varies with industry, so that as a metric, it's not a universal indicator of the quality of your product. I think you mean "discouraging", in that one thinks one's product isn't good enough. But maybe you mean "discouraging" in that one thinks one's marketing isn't working.

I interpret it a strategy: make your product so extraordinary that wom comes into play. Wom is so great, that it's worth the effort, even in an industry where wom is harder.

But I see your point: maybe the wom-bar is so high, that you're better off just marketing in traditional ways. I still think wom is great, and worth trying for, but I acknowledge it's a tradeoff, not a simple "if no wom, do nothing but improve your product".
Nope...it would make me happy if people stopped judging the extravagance of other people's lifestyles according to their own arbitrary guidelines.
Typing a 3-paragraph comment to finish with an empty ad-hominem is very lame.

I'm saying that I'm not convinced that putting a public body in charge of search would be any better than the current situation. I don't trust either of them.

I know what Google wants - they want us to continue using them and they want us to click on adverts. And I think they're smart enough to realise that if they mess too much with search results in an unethical way, people will get pissed off and go elsewhere.

A government body could have any number of varied and colourful motivations. They might want to pander to the latest anti-whatever craze and ban all related results. They might abuse their power for political purposes (far worse than commercial abuse imho).

Importantly, they might mandate that everything has to go through them. With search engines being private, I at least have the choice to go elsewhere. If you make this a public, government affair, they might pass laws requiring you to use their search engine, or other equally asinine things. Google at least is under no illusion that the only way it can convince people to use it is to provide the best results.
What have people got against enthusiasm, any ways?

The ruby and rails fervor never read like genuine enthusiasm. The pro-rails bits were always framed with negative comments about how php and java sucked, or how stupid business people are. Even DHH has a lot of this in his blog posts and talks. I thought it read more like an abuse victim or recovering addict who found a religious support group. It was always a bit manic sounding.

I'm a bit cynical but I think a critical mindset is the bane of the engineer, or really any maker. If people are zealously gushing about their framework, something dark is lurking underneath...
1100 Handsfree Car Mode Problem | repairmobiles.saaqi
Does my writing read like I'm telling kids to get off my lawn? If so, please tell me, I own a funhouse mirror. When I look into it, I see a guy that still loves programming and thinking about for its own sake...
10 Best Firefox extensions that I use
Sounds like a perfect viral approach to me. So you find that once one of these called-in collaborators uses the product, they then instigate use on a separate independent project? That is, a viral/chain-reaction, not just one user inviting their immediate collaborators and it stops there?

EDIT You're probably already on top of this, but (just thinking) if the collaborator-->instigator step is the problem, you could offer a discount for that specific conversion; the idea being not to make it more affordable, but to buy the bargain-seeking mindspace of "I wonder if there's a way I could grab this bargain?" (totally opposite of the article's "improve the app" approach).
>>The solution? If you ever murder a programmer who wrote

>> for x = xx to xxx

>>the penalty should be an $18 fine and community service.

I would respectfully submit that the community service has already been done (by definition), and that $18 is sufficient to cover the cost of the paperwork.
I agree with Doctorow that a monopoly is dangerous. But Doctorow doesn't like the idea of a virtual monopoly, either - the sort that a company gets when they're popular for any number of reasons despite having lots of competitors.

But then, Doctorow has never quite been a bright bulb, he's just been a loud man with a blog. So it helps to take what he writes with a grain of salt.
Dear EFF, please sue Apple.
Windows 7 to show up on October 22nd
I just told people by up-voting... nuff said.
Gone to the dogs: Cautionary tales of IT pet projects
Want to know what went wrong at GM? See our visualization on GM's fall.?
We're not an IBM, but tend to avoid solutions that won't readily integrate with our existing LDAP users and group-based access control, backup system, etc.
This sounds like a really cool app, but I run Linux so I can't try it out. At least, not without messing with Wine, which I don't really want to do.

Hook it into something I can use without hassle and I'll try it out immediately.
An unexpected application of the P vs. NP problem (2003)
I don't. I get these http://moderndevice.com/RBBB_revB.shtml ... you basically get 5 ATMega328 + power supply for 48 USD. Not a bad deal I think. They fit nicely into a breadboard or you can use them in a more permanent setting.
Maybe I misused the word "point". I do think it would be interesting to see some sort of analysis on how press attention regarding rejected apps affects sales.
There's a third option: ride it out on the revenues from the other business lines until the advances in software, processing speed, power consumption, storage, and network bandwidth drop your costs to a profitable level.
Chords will help you figure out the notes if you know your arpeggios and scales.

Guitar Pro tabs are user generated and vary in quality. And good luck if you want to find an obscure song.
this is really cool, but I couldn't help but notice this quote:

“Killer apps makes or breaks any platform. With GitHub, I think the Git hub just scored one.” -DHH

Um. I know DHH is an important guy, but not only is that quote grammatically way out there, I don't think it makes any sense at all...
"If a web app is spending most of it's time blocking for I/O, it's poorly designed. There's no reason that it can't be handling other requests while waiting for a DB response or a pipe"

If your request-handling logic is responsible for concurrent requests, your application (and the platform it runs on) is poorly designed. This belongs to a thread/process dispatch mechanism in the platform, not inside your app. When one thread waits for the database, I am sure the processors can be busy with other requests.

"Scaling Rails is a nightmare."

No. It's not. There is little reason for it to be. While I am no Rails expert (I use Django and was a Plone guy not that long ago), the scalability issues most people have happen because of RDBMS concurrency much more than any problem with Rails itself. Like I said before, that time spent waiting for the database to respond is time spent in the database working. It is incredibly rare to have a front-end having heavier usage than the database that feeds it.

If you want your applications to scale, design it around the database limitations. Use C, C++ (I would prefer ObjC), Java or Assembly if you want, but faster request processing won't get you past database scalability issues.

Using C* or Java will only push back your release date.
I can almost imagine Google's inquisitive feelers crawling out of my computer, down my power cord, into the electric wiring up to my meter.

They never supply something for free unless it will provide them the data they crave.

Yes I know, "No personally identifying information will be shared" blah blah blah but this such an obvious data grab.