skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually thinking of showing a [donate] button to people who block the adsense, which seems like a useful step.

I did try a donate button for a month or so last year, but it did absolutely nothing. It's much more useful for me to have happy users telling others about mibbit than giving me a donation, so that's what I tell people to do who ask about donating :)
My wife is Thai, and I manage to speak thai a bit. I took several months of thai lessons. I confirm what has been said before. There is no yes/no word in thai. Those examples on those sites are just bad translation for beginners.

For example the word "chai" that they give for "yes" is more close to "true" when you agree with what has been said.

"Chai" is just a particular answer that can be given to a particular question. You can't use it as a "yes" answer to all question.
You should try Chrome nightlies for Linux. It seems much faster than Opera 10 or Firefox 3.6apre1 for me and it uses much less memory for large amount of tabs.
This article talks about the supply side of the developer job market. The next logical question is "what is the state of the demand side of the developer job market"?

If demand is the same as it was before, then this is good for existing developers.
Bit.ly alone doesn't compensate for all the other pointless link shorteners out there.
Open Letter to Google App Engine: Billing for CPU time is Wrong
You are right, but Twitter (and, really, anything on the Internet) has the new feature of being persistent. Rumors in a crowd die out when more information comes to light. The unfailing memory of the Internet, combined with anonymity and its massive reach, creates an echo chamber that can reinforce false information long after the truth has been revealed.
Not ground-breaking by any means, but a nice, concrete application of Markov chains.
Like other have said before, both Fusion and VirtualBox are great. Fusion is awesome if you need to work in windows since it can use your bootcamp partition.

VirtualBox is a very good alternative and open source which is always a plus.
Things about Web Images I Just Learned
Restricting most users, because a tiny minority have old crappy phones doesn't seem to make sense to me.
It's funny he seemed to try so hard to avoid writing the email directly, and you did just that.
No doubt. As I mentioned, in all probability, Google already does it. And sharing it with webapp creators does not make it worse. Heh.. I used to create web applications and am a developer for a MORPG.
I'm sure back in the MS-DOS era someone said the same things about college students needing to learn vacuum tubes and punch cards before moving on to high level languages such as BASIC.
Instead of having external revision control systems like Git or Subversion I'd like to see revision control and re-factoring built into the language itself with fine-grain mechanism for introspection and version control.

Crazy idea :-)
I somewhat agree with ErrantX, but I think it depends on what stage of the sale you are at.
I received an intro e-mail sales letter months ago which was more than a screen long and went on into too much detail for an intro. If you are trying to get a client, i don't think this works. You have to get them interested with a catch, and give them a bit of info, and let them come to you to get more, or follow-up with more.

Overload at the beginning is a big no no i believe.
This is relevant, if you want to do something fancier:

http://megahal.alioth.debian.org/How.html

BTW, has anything better than Megahal turned up in the meantime, that is also open source?
To attract a truly formidable user base, though, (as in, beyond college students and technophiles) I think they need a killer app which has nothing to do with "a file."

Unfortunately, I think that standard computer/web users know or care less and less about what "a file" even is. Is it a photo from their Photo Library, or an album, or the photo library itself? Is it a piece of music they have which shows up in their video editing and music listening programs and also in their personal web space? Where is that file even located?

If Opera's file sharing system also can hook in to everyday users' existing media and document databases, it might go somewhere, but watching the moms, dads, and other casual users of the world have to actually find a file on their computer in this era of iTunes and iMovie and Office 2007+ managing and obfuscating where things are, is fairly painful and distressing. I like that there are systems which let people use computers in this abstracted way which is a lot closer to how people naturally think about things, but I don't like that the abstraction is one layer up from the OS itself, so that when one actually has to do things like, say, find where one's MP3 player is storing your copy of Kenny Loggins' The Danger Zone, for many people it's no longer an instant "a ha" moment.

Oops this post isn't entirely about what it was originally about anymore. Sorry for the ramblin.
Joe Armstrong seems to come up with a lot of those that are borderline genius/crazy:-)
just because there exist bad implementations of an idea doesn't necessarily mean the concept itself is bad.
Ask HN: Most efficient way to test if a string contains a word?
For an app I wrote I need to check if a String contains a word, finding the longest word it contains.
Currently I check the whole string against a dictionary, then check every substring possible with decreasing length until I find a word.

Is there a more efficient way to do this?
Startups: The Loneliness of Leadership
The Perfect Web Spider Storm
This is really very extremely selfish way to look at it. Really, what is the value of knowing that someone went to some page because they clicked on your shortened url to it. How much lazier can a content producer be, they aren't even producing content.

It's so short term focused it makes me want to puke my guts out. People with no vision create products for people with no vision and then people with vision get harmed by it. The future of the internet is getting harmed by it.

URL Shorteners should be outlawed for the sake of humanity.

Short urls = short focus, while the Internet = vision

I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here. Shortened urls reduce future generations' ability to find information. Information and access to it will simply Vaporize!
I've learned two important things about marketing in the last year
1) Virality doesn't come from what you build, you have to get it into the hands/minds of people who will make it viral or viral isn't code/product/design it is people powered. The deadliest bug in the world could have all the potential to wreak havoc, but if it doesn't get spread by the right people at the beginning, it isn't going to go anywhere

2) you have to keep marketing. You can launch a product and it can do fairly well, but marketing is an ongoing task.
Doesn't matter which product,
SchuelerVZ | Meine Startseite
I languished in my computer science degree in much the same way. I graduated with good marks but it was like pulling teeth. I questioned whether I had chosen the correct path.

Now that I'm a programmer in the real world though, I love my job and I've learned more since entering the workforce than I ever did in school. The passion has gone from 2 to 9 and the rest flows from that. Maybe you're just not wired for the college learning format - god knows I wasn't.
We constantly joke about making "Beach Sniper" but I don't see that happening.
So, as we've seen, this "social capital" is great if you're going after the tech-savvy early adopter market (balsamiq, 37s, stackoverflow all are).

My question is, is it useful/relevant if this crowd is not your target market? There's a lot of people here that are running successful startups that cater to people in the Real WorldTM so I'd love to hear your thoughts on marketing? (patio11, etc. :)
"Users don't want a music player in their browser, they want a good music player."

And, incidentally, iTunes already has sharing from within the player and it is very widely used.

Anyway, Unite is an interesting experiment, even though it probably won't revolutionize anything on its own. The "this will revolutionize the web!" PR sort of obscures the actually utility/novelty that this likely has for a subset of users.
You made me tilt my head!
"...But if your problem is just that you'd rather play Halo, you're just going to become a more focused Halo player..."

Totally.
The issue is "skill development" vs "mind development" BASIC, or any particular language is a skill.
+1 on CSS sprites, definitely one of the biggest wins in terms of faster page loads and reducing connections to your webservers.
His followup addresses this, and brings up some examples which he can't work out how to solve with that pattern.
But there aren't very many of you! I mean, we've all spent some time looking for jobs, right? Even the best of us.
The problem is people don't put the information they're given up to scrutiny anymore. So much is being force fed to them that they've started to just take it sight unseen. Let me take the three examples the author gives…

* 3 million people protested in Tehran: I was just pointing this out to someone. If you truly had 3 million people and they stood in the road you'd have 5 people across. Take those 5 rows and have everyone line up behind them. In that case 3 million people would go on for roughly 114 miles (assuming about a ft of depth per person). It would be visible from space.

More important, a few thousand Iranian police wouldn't stand a chance against a group 3 million strong. They could overthrow the capital with that many people.

* Mousavi under house arrest: Possible but pretty stupid. This is the most plausible of the ones listed but it would be suicide for the ruling party to do so it stands to logic they wouldn't.

* the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid on Saturday: If you've watched the news for any amount of time you know the election committee can't invalidate an election the Ayatollah has approved of.

So under basic scrutiny all these claims seem unlikely. If people are believing them on face value they clearly aren't putting much thought into what they believe and that's the problem.
Bali Activities | Nakbali.com
The funny thing to me about this article is I am already living in a country where you can live reasonably well with 500$/mo (I born and live in Venezuela). But you know what? This cheap third world country is a big piece of shit because of its political situation (Chavez).

So, from my point of view, I am just planning how to leave my country. But move to another third world country?? No way man... I would prefer to live in a expensive first world country and work as developer/codemonkey/entrepreneur/whatever.

So, if you choose to "retire" to a cheap third world country, check its political situation and background. Now, if you just don't care to be rescued by UN blue helmets when shit hits the fan, just be my guest...
I felt I didn't need to respond to the reasoning, it's the Unabomber. Do people need a point by point refutation of Mein Kampf too these days?
Many non-geeks don't understand the whole URL thing in the first place. If you really want to save it, than educate the masses.
And paula is going to go to another job having added "Developed Enterprise Shipping Application" to her resume.
For the first three years of college I was in your exact same position. I had no idea how to do well in school, constantly blamed myself for "sucking", and this was a pretty awful downward spiral.

Then on New Year's Eve, approaching my final year in college, I decided to shape up and just suck it up. My GPA for my last year in college was over a whole point higher than my average for the last 3.

This is what I did:

1. Sleep at 11, wake up at 7.
2. Eat on a strict diet.
3. Exercise everyday.
4. Sit in the first row of class.
5. Do your homework in-between classes. Treat school like work, it's a 9-5 job, then you're done.
6. Still party like a rock-star on weekends and selected weekdays.
That's exactly the point of constructionism (the epistemological school that the
article's author subscribe to). The objective of the educational system is to
form citizens capable of critical thinking and independence, something that a
soldier is very much discouraged to do, so your analogy is exemplary of an
incorrect approach for the educational system (which is our current rigid model,
of course).
the value is mostly found in marketing activities. to know where traffic is coming from allows you to get a better idea of where to focus and what provides best results.

i'm curious to know why you think that shortened urls will reduce future generations' ability to find information. especially since, for the most part, their usage is restricted to the social web.
What Is The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work?
I'm waiting for the next step: Why don't they provide a "headless opera" to permanently store applications on their server infrastructure?
Users, Accounts, Identities and Roles
This is not a big issue if you spread the power plants over various places in the sahara, each of which is cloudy only a few days per year.
Email – The Original Social Graph
An arcade game should be organized using a game loop. Just make the game loop update the state of the entire game world each frame. This makes it relatively easy to write most of the game in a functional fashion. (You may have to have n "phases" in your game loop. Movement phase, collision resolution phase, etc.)

The OP is accustomed to thinking only in terms of mutating state. He can't get away from it. He wouldn't have had all of these problems if he'd just done ye olde AI class with turn-based board game project in Lisp. (With a prof who set a coding standard for pure functional Lisp.)
"the biggest complaint he’s gotten so far is the pace of reporting"

That's funny, I suspect they are weary of reporting on a monthly basis because it would show that nothing is really being accomplished.
I agree with you about needing to teach low level things like data structures and algorithms, but I don't see why teaching Objective-C would be a bad idea. If anything it's lower level than Java in that you can still teach people about pointers and memory allocation, etc.
traceability and testability. update world1 is traceable you know just by looking at it what it modifies (sure in the example given it is opaque since it is the entire world) but if you consider that update world is probably broken into update world.player update world.ai etc. Then it becomes easier to trace execution because there is no implicit state. The lack of implicit state also improves testability. I can create a world and send it to update and know that I don't have to do any implicit state priming.
It's just that laypersons are now seeing the global news feed. You've always had a mountain of eyewitness accounts of breaking news events with varying degrees of accuracy; but now you can see every single one of them posted on twitter.

It's a journalists job to explore, verify, and report. I don't think it's bad to have access to all the chatter, but sometimes information needs context from an editor for an accurate picture to emerge. If you are not supplementing all of this information with some intelligent analysis then it's easy to get caught up in "trending topics".
10 Tips to Improve your Alexa Rankings
A nanopass framework for compiler education
What commands do you use the most?
I recently discovered the usefulness of find (which makes up its clumsiness, forcing you to type -name to search, with the awesome -exec option). So I'm curious what commands do you find to be the most useful?

history | awk '{print $2}' | grep -v cd | grep -v ls | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10
(to look for your top ten commands)
Very like getting engineering apprentices to make a
1 inch steel cube using only files. Serves no direct purpose, but you gain a lot of understanding of the materials and tools.

Edit:
Or these for machinists:
http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b201/michael0100/reducedtu...
Perhaps he's more interested in experimenting with this kind of architecture?
I disagree with 1). I mean, I agree with the idea that reaching the right people matters, but I don't think it's all that matters. You might want to check out my recent article: http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-applicat...
I had this idea in 2002, except searching of this network via the Gnutella network. I called it the Transient Web.

I came to the conclusion that this would just create fractured webpages, and a site one week could be gone the next. This is really bad for things like Archive.org to keep track of.
I killed Paul Allen. And I liked it.
I guess the basic principles from the article apply nonetheless. It's just the "media" are different, like using a telephone line for customer service, appearing at real-world events in person and so on.
" And some of the apps I've downloaded have had multiple new versions available in a single week"

Not sure if having to update the same app multiple times in one week is something I'd like to do as a consumer. I like the release early, release often strategy for development, but when the app is running on someone else's device I'd like to see people put a little more attention into the quality of the software they ship. Why exactly does someone need to update their app multiple times in one week?
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Indeed, it might be sometimes frustrating to pass around state that in C would be directly modifiable, but the benefits are huge.

Such as? Ok, so you get better multithreaded behaviour but now you're copying state all the time and having to thread it though all your functions. Sometimes just updating state is the right thing to do.

Personally, I think a good tradeoff is immutable data but mutable references.
Here are the commands I use most frequently. However I find lsof and pstree to be the most useful. Even if they are used infrequently.

60 hg
37 ./all.sh
30 vi
27 ssh
27 ruby
20 rm
18 mate
15 curl
10 scp
10 grep
This is a clever way to promote his book.
Beginner question: does this involve a lot of memory copies which can result in performance problems. "world state" sounds like every data structure in the program.
Redis 1.0 RC1 released
Why VCs Invest In C-Corps
You mean in how we use the Web. We're just moving all the Internet services into a Web browser, which is interesting but not that interesting.
Gout, the Ailment of Kings, Now Afflicts the Middle Class
The Fierce Idiocy of New
I know it's over the top, but it's to try sth different for once. Also - multithreading is because my earlier games was in one thread, and I've always had problems with consistent framerate - some frames was longer, some shorter. When I tried considering last frame duration as multipilier, game became not stable (too long frame and bullets will fly throught the wall, etc).
And networked game is difficult to get right with nonuniform duration of frames. So I try to see if this will be better.

What's for sure overenginered is using function of time instead of simple numbers for positions. But that is just to make it different.
So by the nature of the app, the string I am checking will often increase by 1 letter, and then I check the string again. Right now I save a list of strings I have checked, because it is quicker to see if a string in in that small list than in the dictionary, then once I find a word I clear the list of strings I have checked. Is there any thing else like this I could do to speed things up so I am not constantly checking if the same strings are a word? Should I not be clearing that list so often?
Just to be clear, is this a valid example of the output you're looking for?

longest_word("oteuhbicyclentehut") => "bicycle"
In this case, it's a game, and there was a feature release with some new configuration options, and then two days later, a bug-fix release for one of the options under certain user conditions. In this case, maybe the bug could have been prevented, but the fact that the developer was able to get a fix release turned out in a very reasonable timeframe is what's important.

Shit happens, and updating to fix a bug should not have a two-week latency where some reviewer could all of a sudden decide that your app is now rejected or no longer meets some amorphous criterion.
Not a shocker, AT&T announced that it will do for the iPhone what it has been doing for every other phone it has and every other phone that every other major US carrier does. It would be a shocker any other way, conforming to the market is entirely unsurprising.

(MMS and SMS used to be on separate pricing tiers but a couple years back all the US carriers switched this and count them as the same. You can't buy a MMS plan from AT&T Wireless anymore, though some legacy customers may have something similar. Humorously, AT&T had to create a SMS only plan for the iPhone since it was the only device they carried without MMS support.)
But things have been like this since ages in the software industry : think to the CON device under windows or termios under unix, to use examples that appeared recently on hn.
There have been more than a few overnight successes in tech. Unfortunately, therefore many people believe that's the only road to success. I'm not a big fan of praying for wildfire adoption since it is so uncontrollable and unpredictable.

At FreshBooks, we have slogged it out every day, day in an day out, trying to introduce FreshBooks to new people every day. The book that has inspired me the most is Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. Building excellent word of mouth praise in a focused niche that will lead to following niches is a very repeatable path to success.

It takes a long time, but it does build year after year.

That's how you get from Step 7. TechCrunch to 8. Profit. It's important to recognize the value of TechCrunch is very limited in your overall success. I wrote about this earlier this year, actually:

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2009/01/28/techcrunch-is-not-...
Kurzweil in the Lyons’ Den
And don't forget that you have to know the location of an url to access its content.
This is great to see. Twitter really left you with few options. One huge advantage with rolling your own site is you can do everything that Twitter hasn't done. Due to either scaling or their community (depends who you ask) there is a lot that has been left to be desired with Twitter.

As an aside: I recently had a historic sport stat question come up and couldn't readily find the answer. Did Michael Jordan ever go scoreless in the second quarter during his career? I'm sure the information is out there. But I couldn't find it in a usable or detailed enough way to answer my question.
Least squares fit of a surface in Python (with ridiculous application)
Dasient: Ex-Googler's Launch Website Security as a Service
No, I think by critical mass he means your Aunt Minnie knows about it and asked if you are using Twitter at the last family gathering. Aunt Minnie will never know about StackOverflow.
Source? Every national US carrier. Go check. Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile all count SMS and MMS as "messaging" with no price differences. And no, they do not charge you for the data too.

They have treated SMS/MMS as the same for quite some time. I forget who switched first (I want to say Alltel which is now part of Verizon), but it was a very short time between the first and the last.
Couldn't you do the same thing by just not using global variables in an imperative language? Then you get the benefits you're mentioning without lots of pointless data copying. You just pass a reference to the world object and you can see exactly what's being modified.