skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Valve versus mall shopping is an interesting comparison in that it has shows some strong underlying differences. Anecdotally, most mall shops are clothing, an area where a lot of items contain the same basic function of nudity prevention and weather protection, plus some fashion value of relative merit. Valve's products are more akin to the one or two bookstores in the mall, where the basic function of the product is entertainment where the entertainment value of the product is enhanced by differences between individual products. Similarities do occur within genre, but differentiation is still necessary for success.

Anyway, it's the clothes stores that have neverending sales of their highly interchangable product. I don't think that Waldenbooks would see the same profitability curve as Valve by rotating sales throughout their stock though, as their product requires shelf space and falls within a much smaller price range.

As for L4D's initial price, Valve was smart to set it relatively high, as a multiplayer game like that leverages peer pressure to motivate sales.
I'm curious to know the scale of this attack. It doesn't appear to be an exploit-based DDOS, just a raw flood of traffic. I don't know how built out they are in terms of upfront hardware, but ideally it should be 10G to the load balancers. And protecting that level of traffic isn't exceptionally difficult. Pop in 4 Cisco Anomaly Guard Modules and you've got 10G of DDOS coverage. And given Twitter's visibility and potential for angering folks indirectly, I think investing in that kind of hardware would be very wise.
How to think about OO
Required reading for all entry level programmers!

I would have laughed, but it was so true that it hurt more than it entertained.

+1 for these gems:

The reason is because all of these methodologies are name-branded, shrink-wrapped cribs of the way one particular manager is good at doing his job.

It would be more appropriate if they just came out and said "every project manager should be a clone of me," but that doesn't sell very many books and conference tickets.

you're probably working for a company that makes its money by filling brown tractor-trailers sent by UPS, or putting bums in seats, or shoveling french-fries into cake-holes, or whatever.

When something breaks, they start the clock again, hack and hack and hack until it works, submit their invoice and bugger off.
just because it looks cool on another platform doesn't mean it's needed or useful in a regular web browser. the majority of people who use web browsers probably don't use an iphone, so the interface wouldn't make sense to them.
Thanks Derrek! The App Store is definitely a great way to make money, though it's of course up to developers to execute and position themselves well.

For us, the only issue is communication- we've now had a Kindle companion application, Kindling, in review for 94 days, without any communication outside of form responses from Apple.

We take the long view- the App Store is currently the best mobile platform, but we're working on expanding our business to other platforms. I think it's pretty crazy for any developer to be focused on one platform exclusively, and have 100% of their revenue capable of being destroyed with a single click of the 'Remove from Sale' button in Cupertino.
* in Photoshop - "save for web" and let it figure out what it thinks is optimal

* YSlow for Firebug to see if anything is really loading slowly / being gross

* Like you mentioned, YUI Compressor to minify/compress CSS and JS

* We use Symfony so the Symfony dev toolbar to profile slow SQL queries and generally see what is causing pages to render slowly.

* Lately, Firebug's NET panel to monitor what requests are taking the most time.
Well, I've been getting that error forever (possibly years now). Facebook's always been 98% for me. Just slightly off 100%.
Like just now. (Modded up though.)
Re: 'Free Audiobooks'

I was about to set my mother up with one of the earlier librivox audiobooks apps when they suddenly changed to be streaming-only. Will your planned app cache a whole book at a time? If so, I've got two customers waiting...
I've found YSlow very useful in identifying problems.

My lazy, three-step optimization process:

1. turn on gzip encoding in apache

2. verify that caching headers (Etag/last-modified) are being set

3. tail -f mysql-slow.log
> Sure, your favorite programming blog says they're critical for quality assurance and maintainable code

Good point. We've found it's leaps and bounds better / cheaper / safer to just have someone who's entire job is code auditing and sanity checks. Couple that with a sign out the door (4 people have to sign off on a finished product, update or feature) and you beat TDD?/Agile practices every time :)
If you think this is cool check these guys out: http://reprap.org/
Sweet; we could use more minds.
As a historical sidenote: large chunks of medical progress were made by rural and war doctors ie precisely those with few resources at their disposal (hence innovation).
Ask HN: Why do relevant and non-objectionable links get killed
I have seen this before and wondered, but the specific item that got me to ask is today's link http://accidentaltechnologist.com/iphone/i-rsquo-m-not-renewing-membership-in-the-iphone-developer-program/
So why do links like this get killed?
For once I actually like the headline. Guess I'm a sucker for a decent pun.
Self replicating rapid prototyper
Right, that's why I put "everyone" in quotes. Obviously there are people on the team tasked with maintaining the secondary platforms, and they're no doubt working hard.

But the point was more architectural: clearly Chrome is a windows program. With a little porting work, you can make it run elsewhere. So that's the development model they've picked. Do the work on windows, then hand it off. There's no simultaneous work going on, and features travel in only one direction. If a windows developer commits something that breaks Linux or OS X, it's "someone else's" problem to fix during porting.

Contrast this to Firefox, for example, where (the occasional glitch notwithstanding) the assumption is that every build works on every platform. People on Linux care about regressions on windows, etc... The model is that the software is portable first, and not "a port".
Rich countries are having more children. The evidence doesn't say whether rich people in rich countries are having more children, or poor people in rich countries, or whether it's all sections of society in rich countries.

(I interpreted the title initially to mean that rich people were having more children.)
Well, it really depends on your experience and available capital. All major exchanges these days are electronic, so you don't have to worry about which provide APIs, because it's highly unlikely that you'll working directly with them (at least until you're bankrolling some decent change). Interactive Brokers is the preferred brokerage for professional retail and small-midsized prop firms and hedge funds, specifically because they offer a decent API (cross-platform, which is rare since most non-fix providers target Windows) for free and FIX connectivity if you're doing more volume. IB gives you access to trade on virtually all large international markets with very competitive commissions. For about $10/month (fee waived if you have a few trades/month), they'll also provide an acceptable data feed. If you're wanting to focus on specific instrument types, such as only futures, there are alternatives.

There are various open source and cheap commercial platforms you can take a look at. The simple open source trading platforms are ActiveQuant (java) and TradeLink (c#). There is also MarketCetera (java), which is a professional platform, but most retailers don't find it very attractive, because they only provide a generic FIX adapter and a base market data feed adapter which needs to be extended for your specific needs (there is also no backtesting, proper data storage). There are a few commercial solutions targeted at retailers, such as NinjaTrader (free for sim-mode with free futures tick/historical data), OpenQuant, and AmiBroker. These aren't appropriate for complex high frequency strategies, but you'll get some good experience coding strategies immediately to gain some experience instead of having to tinker with the infrastructure.

All that being said, it's difficult to break into the high frequency and statarb space if you're just beginning. People always assume it's just a technology problem, but you'll soon enough find out it's not ;) So, I'd suggest that you take it a bit slower and work your way up from daily data trading to intraday to high frequency, a journey that will surely take some time and keep you challenged along the way.

I'm a CS guy by schooling and got started in the industry a few years ago. For me, trading is a very challenging, but extremely fun and rewarding. The markets are so dynamic that you'll constantly be going through the R&D cycle and you get to use all that CS/Math theory you learned, instead of hammering out generic run of the mill code like you do at a lot of jobs these days.
Under No Circumstances Start A Company Because You Hate Your Job
is there anything big/interesting enough going on today that someone would have a motivation to take out twitter's platform to obfuscate?
A nice example of this is the recent Face as the close button bug report.
that's really awesome! I saw one of the robots hanging out at the YC office, it was just standing on it's two wheels chilling. I felt like he/she was staring at me. =)
Hypertree - JavaScript Tree Animation
Absolutely!

By default we'll download two chapters ahead, but there will be a nice big 'Download Entire Audiobook' button available. So, you'll always have three chapters available in full, and you can hit Download All to get the whole thing available offline.

No streaming available- I think it just complicates the interface and is totally unnecessary. Downloading will also be done from CloudFront, so they'll be incredibly quick.
Lack of CSS understanding. No excuse.

Once you know your tools you can do wonders you'll be amazed at how easy it was.

I bet a hundred CSS experts here can give you some interesting ways on redesigning comments.

Show us your best.
True, but the normalization of cycling in a few select US cities is much more recent than the normalization of cycling across the northern European lowlands countries.
I feel like CPUs and GPUS are converging anyways. They are both going multicore, and GPUs are becoming better suited to general-purpose processing. Sure GPUs have lots of simple dedicated cores, while CPUs have fewer more complex cores, but over time this will converge.

In the long run, you won't need dedicated logic for graphics processing, at least on the low-end. Processors will just dedicate a few cores to graphics processing.

If you doubt this, look at what people said a few years ago about graphics integrated into the chipset. Now you have respectable solutions like NVidia's 9400. Within a few years, I bet that some relatively high-end solutions will be integrated into the silicon, and the low-end processors will do everything on the CPU. Over the long-term (probably when we have 32-64 cores per CPU), the GPU will become irrelevant.
What the Global Positioning System Tells Us about Relativity
"Google does the same thing by the way."

Proof?
Microsoft blames open source for revenue fall
If enough people flag a submission, it gets auto-killed. My assumption is that it has to be compelling enough to convince an editor for it to be un-killed.
The ISO download was down off the main page but I found a mirror at:

http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/Tiny-Core-Linux-Down...
This is the part I'm most worried about:

As is clear from the screenshots, Qingwen doesn’t bombard you with words like “cock” and “penis” the moment you start it up. No, the Apple employee who took those screenshots specifically searched for those words. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing as opening a website that contains swear words (like the page you’re reading, for instance) on the iPhone. If they don’t want Qingwen on the iPhone because it can show you “objectionable material”, then why allow Safari, Mail, YouTube and pretty much any other app, which can easily show you all sorts of even more “objectionable material”?

I don't like the idea that reviewers are doing their best to try and make my apps fail approval. That comes across to me as a developer that Apple doesn't want me to succeed. And based on how they have been treating developers lately, that definitely seems to be the case.

At the very least, this shows that the execs at Apple at least know about the problem. I know it's hard to miss, but I honestly thought they could have not heard about these issues by now. It's that bad. The utter silence that their corporate culture encourages is creating a horrible situation for them and for us. They need to realize that the traditional ways of secrecy and black boxing that normally works for other areas of their business is not going to work here.
1) The YSlow presentations.

2) YSlow itself.

3) Cheating creatively. For example, the front page of Bingo Card Creator has one middle-weight screenshot on it, which links to a hefty full-sized version in a lightbox which accompanies some text exhorting users to download or sign up now. I want opening that Lightbox to be faster than instant, but the screenshot is huge. So I cheat: by the simple expedient of placing <img src="/blah.jpg" style="display: hidden;" /> somewhere visible on the front page, everybody who hits it will start loading the image more or less immediately. Then, when they trigger the lightbox (some seconds later), the image displayed in it (<img src="/blah.jpg" />) doesn't come from my server at all, it comes straight from their browser cache, and renders almost instantly.

Related trick: I load the critical assets for my purchasing page on every page on the site. Thus, someone accessing the purchasing page (which I have clear reason$ to want to be fast) will almost always see it stupidly fast, despite it having a fair bit of Javascript and whatnot to render the cart.

I also abuse the browser cache for "live" previews in my web app. Switching an image's source to an image which is not downloaded is a bad idea, because it typically causes both a delay and unsightly flicker. So instead of switching the source of the image directly, you switch the source of a hidden image, then use a Javascript onload callback to switch the visible image to the source of the hidden image when the hidden image finishes loading.
For images, I haven't found a better solution than to fire up Photoshop and do batch process on all the images and save for web. The quality looks the same, and the images are WAY smaller.

I've used pngcrush before, but just for png's, and it didn't come close to what Photoshop was giving me as a result.

Photoshop does cost ~$700, but if you already have it, definitely give it a whirl.
To tell two people to collude does not give them any right to do so claiming there was no communication between them, effectively there was. They both could check if the other party was holding up their end of the deal on their respective websites. I highly doubt a judge would fall for it.

It's clever though, that's for sure. But like most typical layman attempts at 'hacking' the court system it would probably fail. Judges are not nearly as stupid as people seem to take for granted.
Oh gawd, I've never taken a peek under the hood of HN but all these font tags almost made me slash my wrists in despair.

Time to run a "Redesign HN in HTML5" contest,

Reward: a standing ovation, and an iPhone.
Sometimes a small rendering performance hit is worth avoiding the development headache of getting multi-column divs to display properly across browsers.

Tables can still be useful when holding short content that has lots of columns.
Any kind of link to any google product. You don't need to be a genius to see that the pagerank of plenty of those links is inflated.

There's more and more of these in the regular search results as well, it used to be a lot easier to tell these from the real results.

Being evil is not a 1:0 proposition, there are degrees.

EDIT:

In case you don't believe me:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&q=condoleezza+...

For me the fourth result is a youtube link, I find it hard to believe that the pagerank of those youtube pages is higher than the ones preceding it.

Especially since there seem to be more of them that conveniently fit side by side.
Yep, I was surprised that the BBC could call up the US Air Force and say, "Hey, you know those spyplanes, the ones with the mechanics needing a top-secret clearance? Mind if we send up a camera and a goofy middle-aged bloke for a joyride? Thursday? Sure, Thursday works... thanks!"
I generally dislike people who get emotional about technology. I was quite surprised - not being an Apple person at all, and having seen this footage at the time - to feel quite saddened by this.
It's a continuum, as hinted below, but the results are pretty different in the polar cases. I'll fall back to my Miles Davis example.

Searching for "Miles Davis" returns 10 pages about Miles Davis. Hitting our engine with Wikipedia data for Miles Davis gives you John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Canonball Aderly, and so on.

http://www.directededge.com/?Miles%20Davis

The search end of the spectrum is about finding something you're looking for -- recommendations are about discovering things you didn't know about.

The two meet in the middle with "personalized search". If I type "python" into a search engine, do I want snakes or code? You can probably figure that out based on what I've done in the past.
I do the following:

1. Use a python profiler and look for problems, which usually means rewriting db calls to tradeoff storage space vs CPU time and/or front loading tasks so they're heavier on write than read

2. Write memcache layers wherever possible

3. Optipng or cut the backgrounds out of gifs

4. Clean up redundant css / js

5. Minify

6. I set really long modified headers, but use a version number that I can increment in my statics files' query strings
I dunno why people (somewhat including myself as well) are so much against Bill Gates. At a high level he's a very noble man compared to Steve Jobs.

On second thought I shouldn't start a heated debate.
The DB2 adapter now supports Django 1.1
Oops s/won\'t/want
The Worker's Plea
News Alert: Twitter Down and Under Attack
The fact that they're competing means Windows Mobile is a business, not that it's a core business. Something isn't a core business until it makes a significant fraction of the company's revenue, and WinMobile doesn't approach Windows/Office on that front.

Microsoft's strategy is to have as many businesses as possible, and for each business to compete, in hopes that some of them become core businesses. Apple's strategy is to make almost everything a core business. I don't think "having tons of businesses that don't try to compete very hard" is even a strategy.
freakin tweakers. amphetamines may help you energetically do a bunch of mindless tasks, but when it comes to hacking - insight, intuition, and the ability to notice patterns as you go are all very important. these are also the things that diminish with the use of amphetamines.

see: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/12/brain_performance_dru... and http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/07/the_neuroscience_of_i... and then google around for more...

do more research before messing with your brain like this. there's enough brain-dead yet hyper drones coming out of the younger generations as is.
Google Page Speed is also worth a look. It will point out problem areas and recommend best practices to speed them up.
The first GPS satellites had a switch to enable the correction for relativistic effects because there was some skepticism if it was needed to do so.

It didn't take very long before it was decided that the switch needed to be permanently in the 'on' position, and it was dropped from subsequent models.

EDIT: makes you wonder if Einstein had not made his predictions regarding relativity, this would have been the first real opportunity to find out in a 'natural' way, how long it would have taken them based on the observation that things did not work as intended.
The improvement really is quite noticeable. Just check out:

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/balldroppings/

Run it on the current stable Chrome, then try the new beta.
My super-bright LED flashlight runs on 1 AA and puts out as much light as my halogen bike light from a few years ago (which has a huge rechargeable battery pack).

This sounds like an engineering problem that will be solved (or at least mitigated). I remember how a few years ago we were told that silicon processes were nearing their limits, and then engineers figured ways to get around some of the perceived hard walls.
Perl have http://perldoc.perl.org/perldsc.html

* arrays of arrays
* hashes of arrays
* arrays of hashes
* hashes of hashes
* more elaborate constructs
Are you failing enough?
data types < data structures < design patterns
They didn't hire Jobs, they acquired his company. NeXT is probably the only acquired startup ever to take over the acquiring company.
Audio White Paper - Load Balancing 101 Nuts and Bolts
Exactly, I would even argue that without OpenCL on CPU (which can serve e.g. as a fall-back when your GPU can't do it), OpenCL wouldn't make sense.
Regulation, Taxes and the Movable Cloud
"We’ve reviewed your submission and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time. The following criteria did not meet App Store guidelines: Application stopped responding after iPhone was thrown against concrete.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program"
It actually sounds like they had some talented coders behind this project. I bet everything worked fabulously when they tested it in their lab. Pity that they neglected to think about the real world.
Exactly. This has countless applications. Vastly simpler to create an HTML report, and convert to PDF, than to program said report in some sort of PDF library. You can use your framework's template library, and leverage existing skills. Your designers can design reports as easily as pages.

On my Mac, the kerning was wacked on Arial. Probably something that can be done about that. But all in all - highly impressive.
Ideas aren't worthless, but they can only take you so far. Odds are someone is trying to do what you want to do. Unless they've taken valuable market and brand share they haven't "done" it. I'd bet a lot of money that listia overtakes freenapkins' traffic within the next 90 days. They should stop crying and hire a new designer.
Audio White Paper - Load Balancing 101 The Evolution Of The ADC
Microsoft Has an Anti-GNU/Linux Team
How can a person on one hand say "Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words" and on that other hand know that the app was being banned because they wanted a 17+ rating due to the availability, to quote the article, of the words "shit, fuck, and cunt, specifically." Are not the former common swear words, and is not the restriction of material from wider audiences censorship?
Bruce Schneier: Risk Intuition
MakerBot and RepRap have a lot of overlap in ideas and people. MakerBot founder Zach Smith is a long-time RepRap contributor and also runs the RepRap Research Foundation (http://www.rrrf.org/). MakerBot's "Cupcake CNC" fabricator is based on RepRap hardware and software. MakerBot also sells RepRap parts in their store.

The two projects are both contributing to each other, for example just today:
http://blog.reprap.org/2009/08/one-of-my-partners-at-makerbo...
In your case I guess it's an Apple fanboy problem :)
Great article and REALLY great blog. Definitely going to be added to my reading list.