skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm somewhat surprised that "Free" as a concept gets people so hot under the collar.

Like the concept of "Open Source" or "The Selfish Gene" people seem to become enraged by the very thought of it and end up responding to straw men of their own creation.

I've not read the Anderson book but anything I've read by him on the topic seems almost boringly obvious to me, and I would assume anyone who spends much time online.

I can understand people not liking it if their industry and therefore livelihoods are under threat, but for anyone else it's seems too banal to get worked up about.

Here's John Gruber reacting in a bizarrely prickly manner when readers pointed out that they are consuming his ad supported blog for "free":

"Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it."

I can't connect that in any sane way to what I've read from Anderson, only to some "freetard" (I really dislike that word) caricature of his position. I fear Gruber would have a stroke if I pointed out that probably most (and the best) of my online reading matter is both produced and delivered without direct payment or advertisment.
Spot on:

"This entire debacle is representative of a problem I think is endemic in the industry these days, the inability or unwillingness to engage in rapid prototyping. Every successful project I've ever worked on (and I've worked on some fairly large enterprise-sized projects), we started by designing and coding a quick "throw-away" skeleton of the application, that let us look at how the thing worked, where the unseen warts were, and where the vendors had lied about their APIs, etc."

I don't have the perfect solution (yet) but there is a definite difference, a sort of "feeling of entitlement" present in many coders who came along after the microcomputer wars of the 1980's.

They expect things to "work as advertised"...and a heartbroken when their project ships late due to unexpected difficulties with the environment/ide/framework/etc.
Hat tip to John Nack on Adobe: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/07/super_cool_video_stabil...
No offense to this guy, but the first argument that doesn't seem to make any sense is that you couldn't reproduce SO because it would take you 33 hours just to type the existing code back into an editor. It seems like a pretty arrogant assumption that the existing code is the simplest possible code that could be used to provide this functionality.

Beyond that, he is ignoring the fact that...Stack Overflow is really not that obscure of an idea. There is posting questions and responses (or stories and comments); basically a blog which, by this point, is kindof trivial to put together.

User icons and profiles? Seriously? Not to be a prick, but I implemented those on my own website in a matter of about an hour. From scratch...and I am not a developer.

Okay, so...upvotes and downvotes and a frontpage that bubbles like reddit does? Mayyybe...how nice do we have to be to the database?

select (upvotes/(now() - time_submitted)) as heat from questions order by heat desc limit 50;

On a related note, he also mentions the scaling...so, what are our constraints here? What hardware are we using and how much do we get to use?

Okay, then search. Seriously? This is also something that most geeks have written at some point and would have no problem dusting off.

Granted, yeah, this guy is probably right. I don' think anybody is TOTALLY going to reproduce a verbatim copy of SO over the 4th of July weekend...but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world. Especially when he is talking about such a common problem; what is essentially a blog.
<rant>

Well written code is approchable without constructs like UML.

ANY code is approachable without constructs like UML. Compare the Addison Wesley "Professional Programming" series (the ones that published APUE, UNP, Pthreads books, etc; the white text with a splash of blue) to the yellow/khaki "Object Series", the ones that published Booch's books and the french dude who was pushing Eiffel, etc.) The difference between the two series of books is essentially UML and "object technology". The first is readable bliss, the later is an abomination cast at us from the bowels of hell.

UML is wankery. It's what liars and crooks push when they lack the sufficient bullshit to make it to high executive positions, and the talent, dedication and honesty necessary to be an engineer. Everytime I met a "software architect" that used that garbage, the person was always nearly clueless and a pain to be with.

</rant>
I think a lot of the otherworldly quality is simply that they've put the camera on a line. Not "sort of a line", not "a steadi-cam pretty-close-to-line", but a line. Very few shots ever are actually on a rigid line, especially at a single rigid speed. Even track shots will do some panning, or travel at different speeds throughout the shot.

This is easy to fix, of course. For demonstration purposes, it really drives the point home that they have stabilized this picture, no ifs ands or buts. For real use, I'd probably stick with the lowpass filter. Also, in real use, you'd be able to configure the algorithm selectively; line here, lowpass there, etc.
Yep, thats me and I'm still going to try do it this weekend =) 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. EDIT: it actually appears to be the same guy who wrote this blog post.

To me its just a fun little thing I'll try to do over the weekend and hopefully it'll offer a bit of refreshing perspective into web-based app development again since I've been stuck in the flex world (what pays the bills for now) for so long.

But actually his post offers a pretty good to-do list for the list of things I need to do to get it working, so basically, there is:

1, Asking and Responding to question
2, can't downvote person too many times in certain amount of time
3, spam bot detection/prevention
4, user icons
5, sanitizing html lbrary
6, karma
7, full-text search with search-as-you-ask
8, user bios
9, important questions that bubbles down slowly
10, bounties
11, email notifications
12, javascript smart tags
13, user configurable badges
14, history of karma, upvotes and downvotes

and oh yes, I'm not going to attempt to implement the design, i'll prolly start off by using the stackoverflow css and html as a template like what cnprog did when they started off and perhaps let someone else ( or do it myself ) replace it later.
New map shows 99 percent of Earth's terrain
I think the ".in" is perfect for some location specific service.
You could build urls like tweet.in/London etc.
There are already some services that show you twitter-users in some specific city or area, the problem is that these people do not always tweet about their city, so it's almost useless.

I once thought of a service that lets you add a location to a tweet and a short url. That service would create a map with all your tweets composed in that way.
What happens to shares when people stop contributing? Are they recycled? If not then how do you deal with the possible eventuality that there will be no more shares to award? Printing more on the other hand means this would be a currency, not shares.

On a related note the Capitol Hill Baby-sitting Co-op paper is well worth reading. This has been posted before, but in case you missed it: http://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kuiedp/0335.html
Have you seen the TV show Dirty Jobs?
Those people.
I suppose these just seem odd to me, which was my point. Not that I find something absolutely wrong about them, anymore than I can find something wrong about a language which doesn't have mutable variables or whatever the case may be.

A lot of Ruby's conventions simply scream "ambiguity" to me. A "subset of a collection" is extremely ambiguous; if there is more than 1 foo in my_string, does it always get the first? How do I get the rest? my_string['foo'][2] or something? I can't even intuitively make something up which makes sense to me. Perhaps there isn't a way to get the others, which I suppose would be in line with Python, which doesn't supply a string method to find all occurrences at once... but how do I offset it?

I can see where standardized methods like to_a can be more convenient, but they also open up the possibility for unlimited ambiguity. What does Foo.to_a do for your Foo class? It could do anything! There's no way I could rely on these methods to do something across the board unless I know your class conforms to some Interface (do Ruby folks use/have Interfaces?). In Python, if I do

[foo]

Then foo is now a list. I always know what I'm getting. I always know what int() is going to attempt to do to an object, etc.
The bunny is truly an amazing piece of kit and a testament to the abilities of erlang. Interestingly the setup he describes is pretty much functionally equivalent to twitter. Except that RabbitMQ likely scales better...
Yes, the pickaxe book or the class docs at ruby-doc.org

Although I've been using Ruby on windows the last few weeks with Ruby Shoes from _why(normally use for unix scripts or web-dev). It's pretty nice (although a little rough around the edges as it's under heavy developement).

When you install shoes (the latest version anyway) you get the GUI tools, ruby gems, and sqlite, and a ruby interpreter, all neatly packaged. And there is a whole load of items I havent looked at yet. It's fun.
Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications
LinkSyncer: bookmarks to go (useful tools app review)
You might also run into copyright/trademark issues with that domain-name.
see: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/01/twitter-grows-uncomfort...
Harvard Business School Gives Steve Jobs An "F"
Are we taking bets here? let's talk shop; get a check for $2k ready, list everything from SO you would like to see copied and have a stop-watch ready.

Sorry, didn't mean to put you in the spot like that, but yeah, sometimes it's just that easy, specially when you have a check list and well specified requirements.

Sometimes it takes longer negotiating the deal than writing the actual software.
But that's the way it's supposed to work. If nobody is willing to pay more than $Y for X that is harder than Y, then you shouldn't go into it. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

You're looking at an instantaneous snapshot of a dynamic system. If it's a problem that nobody will do X, then people will pay more for it once the feedback propagates through. If it never does, then it wasn't worth it and you shouldn't specialize in it.
Usually you have very productive posts on here, but I'm down-voting this one because it's BS.

There are extremely few elite athletes who can simply step into their sport with little training and discipline and perform to their max, in the same way that very few startups ever take off on pure luck and little work. For the majority of athletes, however, they apply the same level of startup-like discipline and drive to their sport to maximize their own individual talents, and I think it's ridiculous for you to claim that the attention they get is somehow undeserved or out of place. 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.

In the same fashion that you chose to sacrifice athletic achievement to delve into learning, some athletes chose to give up some learning to dive into athletic achievement. Regardless, this whole nerd vs. athlete nonsense really needs to stop. Both are simply two groups of people who have been given different talents who are working equally hard trying to maximize those talents.
HTML 5: Should we be excited yet?
Credit Freeze or Fraud Alert?
Credit freeze, like fraud alert can be one of the important devices to prevent the attack of identity theft. With the upsurge of identity theft, not only credit freeze fraud alerts are used as protectionism but also credit freeze is placed as a safeguard
Only a few schools make money off the football team, for example UTexas and Duke. Most lose money on sports.
Big Websites Start Running Bigger Display Ads. Big Mistake.
Venture-Backed Liquidity Going Down, Down, Down
LinkedIn Deal Whacks Consulting Firm GLG In The Nose
The Venture-Backed IPO Up In 2nd Quarter, M&A Still Meh
Actually I wasnt thinking anything like as complicated :)

The divison would be based on awarded "shares" - so we're not talking stock exchange type shares (dont worry, I play the markets :) Im genned on realistic shares) but "share of the donation"

After I posted the original message I realised it was misworded. The project doesnt get X shares to divvy up. Rather share count is "infinite" and the project owner hands them out (either by automated means or manually) to others. So if 10 people contribute and each gets 1 share they recieve 1/10th of the donation pot (after costs etc.).

If the owner wants a "share" they must give themselves some ;)
How Can Google Chrome Become More Popular?
"'Google? Whoa. I gotta check this out'"

I had a similar experience in '02 or '03. Then I quickly recognized that Google's decision to concentrate on Python, Java and C++ doesn't have any bearing on my companies' choices, especially since some major factors in Google's decisions (eg, dealing with a very large number of internal developers) just don't apply.
> StackOverflow’s .cs, .sql, .css, .js, and *.aspx files come to 96.5kB

This simply can't be correct. The css file by itself is 26kb. Actually the js file is over 90kb...So it's not correct, unless I'm missing something?

I would expect the source code for a site such as SO to be will over 3 or 4 MB...
Joost’s Last Hope Isn’t A Promising One
Read the article again. They invest in crap businesses because the ideas are simple and the products they offer are physical. The thinking goes, if the t-shirt company goes I still have the t-shirts which I can autograph and sell.

Your idea wouldn't go very well, stick to VCs.
Does A Freelancer Need A Resume?
Carmack: EA and Activision wouldn't be a good home for id
Does anyone actually believe they will be pursuing companies using tweet or twit in URLs?
Crap. That's a superb example of me not actually processing whether what I'm typing makes sense. The actual size of those is 2.3MB. I'll update the post accordingly. (96.5kB is the size of all the file names in StackOverflow.)

Edit: Post updated.
Re: "5" 2 == "55" vs. 2 * "5" == Exception*

You need to remember that EVERYTHING is an object, there are no basic/literal types at all; in this case, "5" is really just syntactic sugar for creating a "5" String object, 2 is syntactic sugar for creating the "2" Integer (Number?) object, and the " * " operator is syntactic sugar for the " * " method of the "5" String object == ' "5".times(2) ' (which is similar to Perl's ' "5" x 2 ' construct).

The String class supports a " * " method which creates n copies of it's string value, and concat's them together into a new String object, but the Integer class does not.

Many "basic" objects have explicit conversion methods, but will also frequently support implicit conversion where it makes sense.
"I don't think either of those options can be faulted and I don't think the people who choose either of them are the ones with problems."

I do. I'm perfectly willing to fault people for going to University, spending tens of thousands of dollars, and walking out with a degree in some obscure postmodern discipline or something. No matter how you may feel about such a degree, the objective value is quite low.

"Shouldn't people follow their bliss?" Well, first of all, no I actually don't entirely believe that, but secondly and much more importantly, have you looked at a real University's course list? You seriously had to pick "French Literature in the 19th century" as your specialization when there are 30 types of engineering, 50 types of science, and a couple hundred other programs with some sort of actual use?

When I went to university, I had two basic interests I could have specialized in: Music composition, and computer programming. That's a no-brainer! In the course of my education, I subsequently discovered that I could have tolerated psychology, mathematics, electrical engineering (though I do prefer programming), and there's a couple of other things on a lower tier below those. Note how those are entire disciplines, each with interesting specialties of their own.

Did I fail to follow my bliss? No, I still minored in music, in fact. But I have no regrets about spending my money to get real skills.

The only people who share the fault with the students are the numerous people who told them to ignore practicality, at a time in the student's life when they still had no actual experience with which to understand the full implications of that and resist. Some might still have chosen to pursue their bliss, and I have no problem with that, as long as it is done with eyes open.
probably 96.5ksloc
And should we be amazed at your drawing scribbles, boxes, triangles and whatnot? How should I interpret your abstract and masterful artsy drawing?

There's a time and place for UML. Overdoing is wrong, I agree. But that doesn't mean UML is bad. When a project is huge enough, sometime you do need few pictures to help others to understand the big picture. Some people can understand better via visualization.
It doesn't help that the link to "stupid hacker tricks" in the referenced article is about script kiddies.
"Unix doesn't look any deader than usual"

Said about a much Better technology from a civilized age.
This seems like a list of stuff I tell clients when they sit down with only the ideas of how the visitor will access the site.

But 18 man months seems like an awfully long time, but I bet their framework has 10x more features than they use!

If the guy thinks it is just a feature of OSS he clearly hasn't bought much shrink wrapped software. Procomm anyone?
try these proprietry programs
http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/shame.htm
MPhil in Computer Speech & Language Processing at Cambridge.
TopRoundups
Listing all the best roundup articles published on the web. Easily find roundups by topic, by publisher, or by author.
"provocative title that lured me into reading"

Headline fails are the biggest threat to web usability. Not only are they an abuse of language, but when a genuinely good article with a suitably entitled provocative headline appears, its impact is diminished, the reader is more weary, and the article may be in fact skipped over.

"Pushy and manipulative news editors are akin to the boy who cried wolf" --- there, that's an overly provocative headline, isn't it?
What you were thinking and what the system would eventually become are two different things. I'm saying the inevitable consequence of a system like that would be the scenario I described.

Do you think company stocks started out that complex? No, they started out as an intuitive way to divide the profits of a business operated by multiple people, just like your intuitive way of dividing profits from a project built by multiple people.

Edge cases presented themselves, conflicts arose, opportunities for individuals to maximize profit came to light, and thus was our current system grown.
And this comment to which I'm replying, and I'll delete this one ...
It wasn't awful, but they did exaggerate on the warehouse. Instead of calling it what it was (again, as far as I can tell - I haven't been there or anything) they made it out like the DC version of Groom Lake, a "heavily guarded government facility."
"Every successful project I've ever worked on (and I've worked on some fairly large enterprise-sized projects), we started by designing and coding a quick "throw-away" skeleton of the application..."

Me too. But for another reason...

I almost never get real specs. But once a user sees a prototype, they are suddenly no longer bashful. They'll tell you how it really should be.
Seems like donations could be put to better use than just being tunneled into another organization under a different name.
That's a fair point, and one I thought about for awhile. Both this post and the previous one were originally a single Yegge-length post entitled "The Eternal Optimism of Programmers." The problem was a) Yegge's columns are so long that even when they're great, people zone out, and b) I'm no Steve Yegge. So I split the column into its two general parts and started editing two essays: the one in which I said software sucked, and the one in which I seemed to be calling out Hacker News. I realized that no matter what I titled the first one, someone was going to end up posting it as me saying open-source software sucked, so I simply decided to one-up them and meet that title on its own terms: the usability side of the equation. At that point, turning the working titles into the actual titles made sense.

Are they provocative titles? Yes. Are they fair titles? I think also yes. That means they're good titles. There's nothing wrong with being provocative, as long as you're not being provocative for the sake of being provocative. I don't think I'm doing that here, but I understand if you disagree.
I beg to differ. Coming up with an easy-to-understand, easy-to-use interface for the surfeit of data is incredibly difficult.
You can't trademark a word that's in the English dictionary can you?
Yes. Consider this hypothetical scenario.

Twitter builds image sharing as part of twitter.com at say twity.com. But twitpic.com is beating them all the way(better implementation, user inertia whatever).

Is it hard to see someone at twitter, try to use their trademark to beat them?

[Edit]

Also in their response Twitter says,

> As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built using Twitter APIs to invent original branding for their projects rather than use our marks, logos, or look and feel.

And says nothing on whether using tweet in names is acceptable by them. If they don't mind, wgy not say so?
>but I don't think this guy (I am assuming he is the author of SO) should assume that he is th BEST, FASTEST dev in the world.

Where in the world did you see him say that ?
jerf, you aren't looking at it from two perspectives. Both employers and employees have options. If an employee could do teaching or job x, and teaching pays $30k and job x pays $60k, which should the employee take? If teachers earned more, then the pool of talent gets larger.

You say, If it's a problem that nobody will do X, when really the issue is, "Nobody will do X for $X, but lots will do X for $Y."

In something as complex as a society, society has to make investments it its future. In our society, we have become so short focused on quarterly reports, that we have forgotten the value of education. The payoff of education to a society takes years, decades, generations... this is beyond simple supply/demand microeconomics.
You can build a prototype of pretty much anything in a weekend. We've all done it.

Most of us have also gone through the 6-24 month process of turning that prototype into a real functioning product that people would actually want to use. We know how much work goes into "polish", and how many little details crop up and eat into your time.

So yeah, I have no doubt that this kid will put out a working prototype of a StackOverflow clone over the weekend. And he'll think he's just a few days from putting it live. He'll be wrong, of course, but if he puts in the year or so it will take to finish it up, he'll learn a lot about the software business.

I wish him luck.