skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tsally, don't look!

I was hoping to see simple built-in replication in 8.4 (didn't make it into 8.3, see here: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/postgresql-develop...), so I guess it's on the 8.5 wishlist.
We don't know if it's a big mistake or not. Of course I'd prefer smaller, zero, or at least very well targeted ads, but whether the new ads are a big mistake or not depends entirely on the data: when the sites roll the ads out and do the analysis, they'll discover how the bottom line is affected.

In business, mistakes aren't generally a matter of opinion.
Ben, off-topic: I really like the way you've done bitquabit, and I wanted to look at the Django code you used, but when I went to your bitbucket account, it doesn't seem like it's up there? Did I miss something?
http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html

Some amusing entries:

Aperture,
Apple,
Aqua,
Bonjour,
Boot Camp,
Capitals,
Carbon,
Charcoal,
Chicago,
Cocoa,
Exposé,
Gadget,
Inkwell,
Instruments,
Keychain,
Keynote,
Leopard,
Logic,
New York,
Numbers,
Pages,
Panther,
Photo Booth,
Quartz,
Rosetta,
Safari,
Sand,
Shake,
Shuffle,
Soundtrack,
Spaces,
Spotlight,
Techno,
Textile,
Tiger,
Time Capsule,
Time Machine,
Tremor,
Tubes.

This is okay because trademarks have namespaces. It's just that namespace collisions result in lawsuits.
Ouch.

I never meant to imply that athletes don't work. Quite the contrary. My apologies.

But I stand by my "butt kissing" remarks.

Nobody ever paid much attention to me or anyone like me just because someone else was bigger or taller and could do cool things with a ball. Make no mistake about it: hero worship of athletes is way out of whack. They're so used to having their butts kissed, they simply do not know how to function in any other environment.

"You certainly wouldn't be shouting about undeserved attention and "butt kissing" if a YC startup was acquired for millions and had tons of PR coverage."

Maybe. Maybe not. The difference is that the butt kissing would be because of the money, not the work, which few people understand anyway.

Excuse me while I paint my face, jump up and down, and act like an idiot while I watch the guy in the next cubicle crank out a bubble sort in one loop :-)
The articles actually makes a great, albeit obvious point: despite the geeky caterwauling for Chrome to have a robust add-on ecosystem, addons are not only uninteresting, but unknown to the internet population at large. Chrome needs to be easy, fast, and above all, installed by default, to make significant inroads against IE.
In the article, Zed says, "it’s just that nobody learns about state machines unless they take an obscure compiler design class. Very few universities teach state machines as a method of specifying the logic for a program."

My background is as a EE, and I work in hardware. I can't imagine not knowing about state machine design. Is Zed's statement accurate for those with a pure software focus?
A Biology of Mind
August, 2007:

Hmmm, a ticket aggregator, huh? Yeah, I can throw that
together in a month over the summer. Then we can find
another idea so I can work on something *hard*!

July, 2009:

Fuck, I'm *still* working on this thing?! When did it turn
into a fully-fledged, funded company? And why can't I find
an intern to help me with all this damn work?!

The original plan for TicketStumbler was a quick, stop-gap solution to the problem of not having jobs anymore. It was supposed to take a couple months, at most. Some day I might get into why it will soon have taken a year and 3 complete re-designs (working on #3 as I type!) and 3 re-writes of a high-performance site crawler / parser which is now largely obsolete thanks to proper APIs, just to get to a point where we kinda know what the hell we're doing. Until then, I just laugh at Techcrunch commenters who think they can clone it in a weekend. But I can get you started:

CREATE TABLE ticket_ticket
(
id serial NOT NULL,
event_id integer NOT NULL,
section character varying(150) NOT NULL,
"row" character varying(150) NOT NULL,
price numeric(9,2) NOT NULL,
quantity smallint NOT NULL,
url character varying(300) NOT NULL,
extra text,
broker_id integer NOT NULL,
last_update timestamp with time zone NOT NULL,
root_url character varying(300),
CONSTRAINT ticket_ticket_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id),
CONSTRAINT broker_id_refs_id_2b5e6c11effcebee FOREIGN KEY (broker_id)
REFERENCES review_broker (id) MATCH SIMPLE
ON UPDATE NO ACTION ON DELETE NO ACTION DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED,
CONSTRAINT ticket_ticket_quantity_check CHECK (quantity >= 0)
)
WITH (OIDS=FALSE);

Good luck! :D
New code snippets collection
A new project of me went live. A site for collecting and sharing code snippets. Every snippet is released under the creative commons license, so everyone is free to use them. Registration is never required.
Your feedback is much appreciated.
I'm not sure this is true. I asked someone in my university's donation department and they said whenever the football team wins, it's like a hurricane of donations coming through the door.
I don't think they have "Apple" trademarked. Their trademark is Apple Inc. (and formerly Apple Computer) And yea, that name has brought on some lawsuits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v._Apple_Computer
EveryBlock could have been successful with any number of designs, the interesting part about the site is the data and its organization. I agree that it's great looking, but a site doesn't have to be great looking to be a hit (Craigslist for example).
I can't really disagree with any of the specific claims here, but at the same time, the whole argument seems to be constructed on the basis of a hasty generalization. This situation is not reflective of OSS, developers, hacker news, hackers, whatever, it's reflective of a handful of people and their own biases. The author's statements about the lack of usability in OSS in the large are as dubious as the statements being made about how easy it is to implement a clone of product X, Y or Z.

I think there is definitely a discussion to be had in this general area, about the relative importance of usability and polish to applications depending on their target audience. Maybe next time.
I'm not sure if others feel this way, but I'd actually rather see someone's free form artsy drawing than a UML picture. I think it's reasonable to expect that a skilled developer should be able to provide an intuitive whiteboard diagram or slide-show graphic. It takes some practice, sure, but I think UML is the wrong solution. UML is constantly misused. Big enterprises love CASE tools like Rational Rose, which push UML way beyond its intended usefulness.
Show birthdays of Google Contacts in Google Calendar
It doesn't need to be installed by default. If Google made the insane decision of requiring it to be able to search Google, then they would get a huge amount of converts, but that decision would also be classified as clinically insane.

The real secret to them winning is going the route of Firefox and playing the long game. Get it working on as many platforms as possible and then begin evangelizing the shit out of it.
that article (as far as I read) didn't share how many people they interviewed etc... I would be hard pressed to find 82% of these 'non knowing' people. I think the answer might have to do with the question - I would ask 'What do you think a browser on a computer is or used for?'

Thanks for the information;
They definitely have Apple, as well as a number of other common English words.
A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics [pdf]
I currently use Python and Django for the following reasons:
1) Coworker familiar with Python
2) I had an easier time understanding the mechanics of Django than I did Rails
3) Some libraries I needed were only in Python

However, from a language point of view, I have a slight preference towards Ruby. Here are some things I like:
1) More consistent commitment to object paradigm, e.g. all function calls are actually method calls on an object. In Python, everything is an object, but sometimes you use methods, and sometimes you don't, e.g. list.pop() vs. len(list).
2) I think blocks are very handy.
3) I like the more Perlish regex syntax.
4) There is a cleverness to Ruby that might not be the best thing for a corporate environment, but it makes it fun.

So, if I was writing code just for myself, I might choose Ruby over Python, assuming performance and library support were sufficient.
I'm tentatively aiming to release it around the end of July. At the moment, there's a bit too much hard-coded to handle my site (e.g., there's an entire urls.py that does nothing but map my old MovableType and WordPress URLs to Django, which can be messy, and my DB passwords are in the source repository), and there are a few features I want to add before I release to the world (like putting StackOverflow's markdown editor into the post editor so you don't have to guess-and-check whether your Markdown looks right), but once I do that, she's all yours.
Sony Walkman 30 Years Ago Today | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
> I think some people takes things way too seriously like the fog creek employee who posted in the original thread whose post this blogpost references

Well if he is really an SO dev, or knows the SO devs, he knows how much work has been put into it. SO is definitely not a complicated site, architecturally speaking. But as he points out, it's a very polished site. This may not be important for a programmer, but it is for an user (it is for me as an user at least), as he also points out.

Regarding the amount of work wich probably has gone into it, your original statement :

>it looks like something that can be thrown together in a weekend.

surely sounds disrespectful to the labor of those guys.

I'm also quite amazed by the general reaction to this. I don't understand how some commenters on hn, wich is supposed to be oriented towards entrepreneurs, who are by definition people interrested by the end user experience, could so quickly discard in several largely upvoted comments the work that has been put by those individuals, by saying that their success is just due to 'owners reputation'.

This is amazingly rude, and seems to be going along just fine.

When you provoke an argumentated and well thought out reaction as this one, you should ask yourself, before saying some people takes things too seriously, maybe you're taking what is important to them too lightly. And that's your responsability, not theirs.

EDIT: This is not to say your challenge is not a nice one. I'll be interrested to see how it works out =)
Free CSS Templates Collection From TemplateMo.com
Reportedly World’s Smallest LCD Screen Created: 0.27 Inches in Diameter
Autocrattic (www.automattic.com) already does this for wordpress and wp in urls. So yeah it is a possible scenario
Can you post this? I'd like it in my archive here, but I want you to get credit if others agree.

EDIT: I meant submit here to Hacker News (it hasn't been submitted before). I think of most of my submissions and upvotes as an archive.
Jobs has ambition rather than "humbition." - I just puked; who makes this shit up? ... thats not even a fucking word.
How Science Will Enhance Your Brain
ok fair points; I assumed you were pointing out flawqs based on the model I mis-represented.

Im not 100% sure I agree the problem would be as dramatic/bad as your presenting though.
I didn't gather that. I mean, I got the part about Securities are invisible, after all, and if you don't study them, they're unintelligible. Not to mention boring. Inventions, nightclubs, car dealerships and T-shirt companies have an advantage: the thrill of tangibility.

But flotation devices for furniture? Inspirational movies? Restaurants? Missing prenuptials?

I grant that athletes might tend towards more physical goods, but I'll bet you good money there has been a lot invested in less tangible ones as well.

Actually I've given up on VCs for now. Their track records are worse than mine. Bootstrapping is much more logical for technology in this climate.
I'm studying CS (in switzerland) and we've learned about state machines during a mathetmatics lecture in the second semester. that's it. since I didn't take the compiler class, this was the only lecture in which state machines were covered.

I personally think it's important to know about state machines. at least once in a lifetime you are going to write a DSL or parse specific input, and these are use cases were the application of state machines is pretty useful.

oh and by the way: Zed has written a nice tutorial about finite state machines, called "A Painless Introduction To Finite State Machines" and located at http://lamsonproject.org/docs/introduction_to_finite_state_m... . it's worth reading it if you're interested in the subject!
That encourages new-account spam. Maybe you could make them wait, like a "signing bonus", for a month? or until their third contribution?
NIGAZ with Attitude - Branding Fail
This is ridiculous. On Nov 21st 2008 a representative from Twitter said this,

"There are certainly many applications out there that include Twitter as part of their name, but we prefer that you not do so. Twit, Tweet etc. are all fine."

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:SGqicWFJttIJ:groups.goog...

Many people, myself included, acted upon this information in good faith (and in my case at a monetary cost for a domain name containing the word "tweet").

Does this public pronouncement affect their legal standing when it comes to defending the trademark "tweet"?

Edit: Should I continue with this?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677643
Quite right. There's nothing wrong with a dash of UML as seasoning or a visual of some actually critical process, but just like you wouldn't want to eat a half pound of oregano on top of your steak, you don't want to produce as much UML as code.
"a web obsessed person who follows everything that's happening on 'the next web'"

... and he finds friendDA 9 months later?
Maybe you should go back and re-read the article. The whole point of the article is that programmers see a few database queries and the major, obvious functional points and say "I could do that in ..." Whereas, to me, saying "something like" means recreating a comparable user experience.

I think any decent web programmer could hack together a bare bones, functional Q&A site in a few hours. I have no reason to doubt you couldn't implement a lot more features in 24 hours. But to claim you could provide a comparable user experience, I'm just not buying it, even if you have a lot of the generic building blocks already written.
Let's not forget Windows

"If Microsoft loses the trademark battle, it will have a much more difficult time fending off imitators that promote their products with variations of the same name. Company officials say customers would be in danger of buying inferior products and that rivals would effectively get a free ride at Microsoft's expense."

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/25/business/microsoft-tradema...
In my experience, you don't. A portfolio helps. So does networking.
You might not have to go all the way back...

I've thought of this concept before, and I think the key is to measure based on contributions to functional goals of the project, not amount of code added.

For example, participating in a discussion on requirements for a specific function is worth X points. Submitting the code is worth X points, too. Documentation is worth X points, as is communicating with the end users who requested the function or found the bug.

In short, reward people based on participating in a collaborative development process. Then that 5-line patch is more highly rewarded by someone who takes ownership and truly participates, not just a random coder with time to spare.

Might this discourage some people? Yes... but only people who wouldn't have time or inclination to be significant participants in the project anyway.

In the long run, the team and project should be stronger.

At least, I thi/hope so...
True, it could have been.

To me, it would have been nice to have the design to use as a starting point.

It also seems that it's part of the source code of the site.

When reddit went open source, they included their CSS, images, HTML, etc. I think this makes it easier to get going. Reddit and EveryBlock are going to continue to innovate enough to differentiate themselves from the clones.

I also hope they've included the mapping code/JavaScript. I haven't had a chance to look through the source to see if this is the case.
> could so quickly discard in several largely upvoted comments the work that has been put by those individuals, by saying that their success is just due to 'owners reputation'.

> This is amazingly rude, and seems to be going along just fine.

No one is "discarding" their work (well, I certainly am not, in any case), just saying that you can be covered in all the spit and polish you want, but if you don't have a community, a site like SO isn't going anywhere. And having Joel and Jeff as backers contributed to that. A lot.

Also, if we're talking about being dismissive, any idea how much work has gone into make things like Gnome, KDE and Ubuntu better looking? On beating all the involved code into shape so that it has started to conform to some kind of uniform look and feel? And it "it sucks" according to this guy, whom I will quote from directly:

"open-source software is, incontrovertibly, a total usability clusterfuck."

The astute observer will note that he's wielding an awfully broad brush that is very much discarding the work of a lot of people, who, while they may not have attained perfection, are working on these kinds of issues:

http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/

http://usability.kde.org/hig/
The author seems to have boldly gone straight into a tortured metaphor, but the topic is interesting. If you're interested in reading more about hardening software for production, I highly recommend checking out Release It! by Michael Nygard.
It seems that they have the same problem the App Store has now - mixed messages as to what is acceptable, and no clear public guidelines.
Here is a video of Adrian talking about Everyblock's internals: http://blip.tv/file/1957362

If you're a programmer (which I think you're not), after watching this video you'll know that the design is not the important thing about EB.
I have a $2k motorcycle for fun, the equivalent car would cost $50k (performance wise). That way I don't think about my econobox commuter car.
The BBC 7/7 and that Ripple Effect Conspiracy Files Show
Does anyone elese think that the BBC raised more conspiracy theory questions than they answered?
I dont mean to be harsh, but apart from the Future of...events, what startups of Carsonified's have been a real success?
Cool. this reminds me of that Django blog we never got around to building in that house course. I look forward to seeing it when it's done.
That's how I feel about Django at this point. A quick glance at reddit reveals how out of hand it's getting; the answer to every web programming question is "Django!" regardless of whether it's relevant or not. And every popular comment or blog post by Django developers discussing Rails contains a bunch of inaccuracies. At least with Rails there's enough of a push back that even the the annoying minority is better behaved, and Rails development these days is more wycats/merb than anything else. I've always liked Django, but in recent months I've been totally turned off of it, but these days it's tough to develop web apps with python and avoid django.
Which economists? Most economists I listened to 3-5 years ago thought everything was fine.

I can justify it by looking around at the world. I see an over-abundance of debt. I see too many imports and not enough exports. I see a housing market that is continuing to decline. More layoffs on the way means even more people won't be able to pay their bills. I see that we are spending too much money on guns and not enough money on butter.

I only took micro and macro in college, so I'm no economist, but all the signs are pointing to more decline. I look to history to tell me what the future will hold and it's looking a lot like 1929, years before the depression started.

My question for you is: What is going to pull us up? What value are we going to create that is going to bring us money?
Not sure I understand what you're asking. It's not mine, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to post someone else's work here. You can always pull a copy and put it in your archive, can't you?

EDIT: OK, understood, I'll do so ...
>Okay, then search. Seriously? This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off.

Of course, because search is really quite a solved and ridiculously easy problem... You know, it's so easy I could probably reimplement Google in the same weekend, too. :P

Not to be rude, but brushing off basics like search, upvotes and downvotes, etc as something 'most geeks have written' and can easily write again is a mistake. The amount of these minor features makes a real reimplementation in a weekend utterly impossible.
so...because you live farther away you don't think you're a member of this group?

by sane metrics the person who makes $60k a year is fabulously wealthy.
You've attached extra semantics to X and Y that were not in the original post. I do not apologize for failing to guess what you would read those variables as.

I acknowledge the value of government in tweaking the market values of some things; I'm only a little-l libertarian. However, as an engineer, I observe that in order to do that successfully, you have to start with a correct understanding of how the market works, dynamically, not just statically. Getting emotional about valuations the market gives is not a good start.
Plus of course Google were seriously involved in Firefox till recently. A lot of the lessons learned by Mozilla wont just be passively taken onboard by Google: devs / managers there probably saw some of it first hand.

I suspect your right and this will be their approach; they have a killer base engine and a decent browser (in an amazingly short time if you really think it through).

I suspect Google have figured that the Browser could well be a very important tool for the next generation of the web. At least if they have a working product they can instanlty compete in such a market - and with Wave coming in and Gears proving pretty popular it will be good to have a browser they can control. Right?
I honestly cannot see Twitter "building" anything new outside of their current feature set. If they are going to add a native image service, they're going to buy one of the current popular services (twitpic, yfrog, etc.) and integrate that.

Come on, they had to buy a search company to give people the ability to search their index, so the precedent is certainly there.
On commercial Internet and Enterprise application development
Anatomy of a Software Implementation Project
I propose (well, actually Stephen Colbert proposed it) that Twat be the new Tweet.
It's a pretty interesting article, if you can look past the link-baity title.

Although, the topics he covers do address a larger part of HN than just the guy who said he could clone StackOverflow in a weekend.
As much as we work at viral marketing campaigns, its great to see that sometimes marketing is just dumb luck.
Open Source Browser Performance Tool For IE By MySpace
A link to a permanent URL for each article would also be easy to 'cite'.
Could you elaborate a bit more about the the CS program and how it prepared you for industry? What distinguished you from other BA holders?
The best solution I know of is:

a, i = 11, 0
while a > 0:
a, i = a & a-1, i + 1

If there are k bits set out of n bits, it only does k iterations.
i wonder if the writers checked the domain before they greenlit the joke