skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, that's quite a lot of one-liner rebuttals ya got there. I'm not sure what to do with such, ummm, condensed wisdom...

You say that it's a big planet, and someone will have to produce less than they consume. Sure, for an instant. That's why God invented Capacitors, Inductors, and Bank Ledgers. To smooth over the instantaneous fluctuations in the system. However, long term, the capacitor needs replenishing. Long term, a nation better produce more than it consumes, to make up for the times it produces less, and for the inefficiencies in the system. This is a conservation of energy mindset that I often apply to economics. Adam Smith tells me that it's not a zero sum game, and that you and I can trade, and both come out better for it. This does violate my conservation of energy model, to some degree. However, I still maintain that I better produce something, and what I produce, I better not use all of it, as I need some of it to trade with you.

You say evolution from doers to investors is not evolution. I say it is. I can bake a pie, or I can finance a 200 chef pastry kitchen. You're saying I've serviced humanity less by creating the kitchen than I did by baking the pie? If you think that, you can't be reasoned with.

You assure me that mankind will survive. Thanks. I never doubted it. What does that have to do with anything at all?
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_s...
The last 500 visitors to my blog ( http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/ ), batched by major version:

28.80%	Firefox	3.5.X

24.00%	Firefox	3.0.X

11.60%	Chrome	0.2

9.80%	Safari	1.2

7.60%	Mozilla	5.0

7.20%	Opera	9.X

3.80%	MSIE	7.0

3.00%	MSIE	8.0

2.60%	MSIE	6.0

0.40%	Konqueror	4.2

0.40%	Firefox	1.5.0

0.40%	Firefox	2.0.0

0.20%	Opera	5.02

0.20%	Opera	4.2.1

Speaking of which, I should probably upgrade from the crappy stat counter thing I'm using to Google Analytics (edit: and done).
Please include user counts to assure us of statistical significance :-)
http://www.carbonmade.com

1. Firefox 48.11%

2. Internet Explorer 25.20%

3. Safari 20.09%

4. Chrome 4.28%

5. Opera 1.89%

Our users are very design centric, so IE being at only 25% makes sense.
Wow, internet explorer 3.59%? Your site must be targeted at techno geeks?
> calculus isn't that important for mathematicians

> Many pure math classes require no (or very little) calculus.

These are not the same thing (hence my confusion.) Your initial comment seemed to indicate that nobody does analysis anymore, which is just not true at all (look at the most recent fields medal.)
It matters a lot to me. I often hit the back button within 3 seconds of the page loading. The information needs to be cleanly presented and the site needs to look credible.
I do. I just launched last week and I kind of launched here on Hacker News.
Internet Explorer 62.19%

Firefox 28.18%

Safari 4.77%

Chrome 2.48%

Opera 1.98%

Mozilla 0.11%

Camino 0.06%

Opera Mini 0.06%

Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.05%

Netscape 0.04%
I'm curious as to what the alternative to BACS is in the US (and in other countries too, but the States particularly). Are there free and simple bank transfers there?
I matters much more than you think.
Firefox 100%
(It's not live yet, I'm the only user :-)
Flash games? Is this what HN has turned into?
What would those metrics be, though? Pretty much every metric anyone has ever come up with to "measure" software development has been worthless, and it doesn't look like that trend is going to be broken soon. It's like trying to apply metrics to writing a novel. After a certain point, if something doesn't work you have to accept that maybe it's just a bad idea, and I think we're well past that point with software development and metrics.

About the only useful metrics I know of are all end-state sorts of things: bug counts and regression rates, number of satisfied users versus dissatisfied users, number of successful implementation projects versus failed implementations, and whether you can generate real revenue or business value. As soon as you start trying to look at things like number of lines of code, "function points" implemented, coupling metrics, test coverage metrics, etc. it tends to start distorting your development efforts, and the harder you push on formalisms and hard metrics the worse it gets. Pretty much any metric in software is really a way to get at some unmeasurable underlying thing like "quality" or "rate of progress," but they're always easily gamed. It's like standardized tests and education: the more you push on "accountability" and standardized test scores, the more teachers teach strictly to the test, and the less the kids actually learn. Similarly, of the best ways to destroy a software project is to guide the development based on metrics.

I think you get much better results if you approach software as a design process, which is inherently unpredictable and non-repeatable, instead of as a manufacturing process where predictability and repeatability are the desired goals. As much as the word "agile" has come to be almost meaningless these days, that's really the original insight behind it: on a fundamental level, software development is an unpredictable, non-repeatable design process, and so the best you can do is to expect that to happen and build in ways to deal with that, rather than instead trying to exert more control.
but, surely if the site has what the person wants, what the site looks like doesn't matter?
If you look sketchy, why should I trust you? Your friend can use Lynx if he doesn't care about Web design.
If this philosophy were true, we'd all be using sites with tables and blink tags still.

Trust us when we say it matters a lot.
Bit.ly, a simple url shortener
Much of programming is working with complexity, not engineering.

If you know from beginning to end how to do something, then you can engineer. You can form processes to govern the engineering, you can compute some things to be just right, you can make some nice tradeoffs and eventually you're finished. You could build a bridge like that. You could build a GUI like that. Or the 10th website of similar functionality. Or the 100th half-assed C-library replacement because your project can't or doesn't want to depend on the standard C lib on all platforms.

Most importantly, basically, much of what could be engineered often gets automated. Programming always happens on the edge of unmanageable complexity and anything less than that gets quickly automated. That leaves very little to be engineered. Basically you engineer something if you insist on not being lazy and doing it by hand.

Throw in a "minor" scalability requirement, or a guaranteed response latency of less than X milliseconds, or some "easy" dynamic "addition", or some "basic" interoperability mechanism to another program, and suddenly your engineerable bridge must be designed to support a million tonne UFO the size of Manhattan that keeps gleaming in the temperatures of several thousand Kelvin.

To conclude: Software engineering does happen but only after the software has been written enough many times so that we actually have experience in doing it, and often for only a short while until the engineering part can be automated and programmers released to work on something more complex.

Software is so tricky that you don't want to redo it too many times unless you really, really have to.
Thanks a stack for that link. Having the right doc is everything. I followed it through and everything Just Worked for me. I was at the stage of hunting ebay for good deals on ciscos before this thread, you've saved me money and time.
Could be that our memory just gets worse and worse. Kinda like how when you're knocked out for an operation, it feels like it goes by instantly.
You're absolutely right, and thanks to help from this thread I got it working.
Well, yes it does.

- Assuming it's the first time someone visits the site, he has to know that what he wants is to be found there. That requires design.

- Someone new to your site will give it roughly 1 second before he decides whether it is any good or not. I'm not making this up, it's been proved in many studies. Taht's design.

- If you're selling something, physical bits or thoughts, you need to convey trust in what you're selling. That's design.

Not that when I talk about design here I'm not so much talking about nice colors and fancy gif's but more about things like overall style, usability, etc.
Ask HN: Emotion hacks? How do you work despite crummy love/life things going on?
Have you had slow-to-resolve real life problems that made it emotionally difficult to focus on your job, startup, or coding?

What techniques did you find to make it easier to focus despite the problems? (e.g. looming divorce, girlfriend breaking-up, death in the family, loss of great friends, etc.)

Obviously it's important to deal with those things in your own full way to heal/resolve them, but the practical matter is that you've got to get some things done during that process, too. What tricks do you use?
Shopping for $1,000 Shoes? There’s an App for That
1. Firefox 438,766 65.61%
2. IE 191,652 28.66%
3. Chrome 19,911 2.98%
4. Opera 10,686 1.60%
5. Safari 4,979 0.74%

This is not a tech-oriented site; but it is mainly aimed at young people (15-25).
Caching is easy. The hard part is knowing when to expire an object in cache.
Type sellers, web fonts, and Typekit
A simple answer they taught us in the high-school was that you always compare any time period to how long you have lived so far. The older you are the greater the divider.
lol, no no, I do not doubt that it matters, but wikepedia does not look so good does it? Or say, timesonline, or some other websites which kind of look horrible, like a sales letter.

It might matter if you are a shop perhaps, but otherwise do people care as long as it has what they want and of course it does not look absolutely awful, but not absolutely sharp either.
It is indeed a terrible story, but the VC has a decent-looking track record: http://videolectures.net/yoav_andrew_leitersdorf/
Awesome. I have never heard about `disown` before.

For the record, `screen` can do the same thing.
To add to what max is saying, I've read that we think of sites as a kind of book that the user is going to take their time reading. So we fill them up with directories, gizmos, lots of information. We assume an information-dense page is worth more than a sparse page.

In actuality, web sites are much more like billboards that people pass by on the highway. If you get 1 or 2 seconds of quality interaction time, you're ahead of the game.

I've heard of designers literally squinting their eyes and walking by a monitor quickly to test what kind of impression the site has on the new viewer. For most sites, it's not so good.
Thanks for the information. I have come to the conclusion that Zed thinks too complicated for me to follow his lines of thought.
Outage for Amazon Web Services
five(-ish) years ago, you might well have faced the choice between using Perl and using Rails for a similar project. That decision would have proved fateful.

Let's keep some perspective here. Rails, Django, and the various Perl frameworks each have their rabid partisans, but they represent fairly tiny variations on a single theme: Client-server web applications. There is very little danger in overspecializing in any one of these. You can move from one to another with ease. They employ similar concepts, by necessity. The HTTP and the SQL and the CSS knowledge all transfer over. The browser is still the browser. My god, I wish the browser was changing fast enough that I risked becoming a dinosaur!

I suspect that there is far more danger of overspecializing in, say, MySQL than of overspecializing in Rails. Databases are huge, complex beasts with real differences in their implementation and operation, and they can have profound impact on the performance of your app. (Just ask an experienced Oracle DBA. He or she will talk your ear off, as happened here on HN the other week.) The difference between the various brands of glue that we use to stick our databases to our web servers? Not as fundamental as we'd all like to think. The stuff I do today is not much different from what I and my colleagues were doing in AolServer Tcl in 1999. (Now that is dinosaur web technology!)

The real danger of becoming a dinosaur happens at a higher level. I'm a professional PHP programmer now, god help me, but I'm not afraid of missing out on the Great Django Revolution: When Django is finally ready to call my colleagues and I, I'll listen, and I'll probably understand what it's saying because it'll still be speaking the language of server-side web apps. The real danger is that one day I'll wake up and realize that the interesting problems have moved off the web server entirely and that all the fun is in standalone Javascript apps, or iPhone apps, or Microsoft Surface 3.x apps, or Scala applications embedded in your shoes, and server-side web app development has become about as exciting as Internal Revenue data processing (which it resembles in many ways).

When I really want to diversify, I'll look at Javascript or Objective C or embedded systems programming. I won't look right next door. That's too easy. Alas, this means that my track record of never getting around to learning Python may continue. :(
Why do you want to know anyway?
We launched one of the projects recently and ran a short campaign on StumbleUpon. This generated ~1500 uniques out of 2000 we had so far. Respective browser distribution is
as follows:

82%	Firefox
9%	Internet Explorer
4%	Safari
2%	Opera
1%	Mozilla
1%	Chrome
..
My view on this subject, which I've also devoted significant thought, is fairly close the authors, but without the whole anticipation/retrospection aspect.

Our perception of the passage of time is, in my opinion, merely a summation of our memorable experiences. Our brain filters out some large percentage of it's input, to keep from being overloaded. It filters out what it's already familiar with.

As a kid, you're not familiar with much. A yield sign is interesting, for example, and you notice it. Later, you see a yield sign, and can't even remember you saw it.

If you travel to Australia, and the yield sign says "Give Way",you notice it again. That's why travel is so memorable. Your brain filters less when you're in unfamiliar territory filled with new perceptions.

As we get older, unfamiliar things and new perceptions are fewer and fewer, so we're getting less input per unit time. Thus it seems that time is passing faster.

My own philosophy, which I often forget to follow, is to optimize my perceived lifespan by doing as many unfamiliar things as possible. Unfortunately, sometimes I just want to get a hamburger instead.
Music Industry Lures ‘Casual’ Pirates to Legal Sites
For the past year at http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com

Firefox 64%
IE 20%
Safari 7%
Chrome 4%
Opera 3%
Mozilla 2%
Funny as mines aimed at young people and it seems we have the users in direct symmetry regarding firefox and ie.
And by offering something the media companies don't:

* Movies and tv-series as simple non-DRM'd non-crippled files that can be played on any available video player as many times as you want.

* Old productions that aren't for sale currently or any longer.

* Productions that aren't released in your country

* Productions that you've already bought but unable to convert to easily copyable digital format.
I agree. To elaborate:-

A given duration of time pales away in comparison to one’s age as he/she grows older.

For example, a 20-year-old sees a decade as half a lifetime. For the 100 year-old it counts as just 10%.
Ask HN: Review My App
I wrote http://ajaxtrans.com as an interface concept when I was 15 years old. It's very simple, only took about a day to get up and totally. All it is is a quicker interface to existing Machine Translation websites (i've managed to dodge TOS complaints with google translate--now using their published Ajax Language API--for the last 4 years).

Regardless of the small time commitment it took to create, the application (widget is probably a more appropriate term) now receives 60,000-70,000 unique visitors per moth. I've tried monetizing through Adsense, but my Click-through rate is abysmal (eCPM is ~ $0.40).

I really shouldn't complain. The app requires zero maintenance , has minimal costs, and it more than pays for itself, but I keep feeling like i'm sitting on a ton of untapped potential.
http://arstechnica.com (or A.R.T.S Technical, if you're our ad ops people)

Firefox 43.97%
IE 23.83%
Safari 21.43%
Chrome 5.95%
Opera 2.03%
Camino 0.18%
Konqueror 0.10%

Safari on the iPhone accounts for 1.8% of our traffic.
This might work for some things, but if you are radical enough, the single venue will not give you appropriate feedback.
Yuk, why doesn't it bother anyone that this is proposing a say-so theory without any suggestions for testing it? Truth isn't truth if it isn't falsifiable. Instead, how about:

In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds.

This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable:

For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group.

For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.
I disagree. Just do this thought experiment. What seemed longer to you? Your senior year of high-school, or your freshman year of college? I bet the college was longer, even though by your logic, it should have been shorter.
From the past 30 days on our hip-hop record label site, http://QN5.com

Firefox: 56%
IE: 20.7% (IE 6: 2.9%)
Safari: 11.9%
Chrome: 5.6%
Opera: 2.7%
Mobile: 2% (mostly iPhones)
Mozilla: 1%
Playstation, Wii, etc: 0.1%
Departure
http://ajaxtrans.com/

1. Internet Explorer 55.06%

2. Firefox 33.91%

3. Chrome 4.97%

4. Safari 3.66%
http://jquery.com/

3.3mil visitors / 1.57mil uniques (for this last 30 days)

Firefox	61.51%
IE	15.60%
Safari	10.89%
Chrome	7.56%
Opera	3.15%
Mozilla	1.02%

All else less than 0.06%
This is interesting.

I would think there would be more Safari than Chrome. A lot of young people use Macs. It's possible they chose to use Firefox instead.
Hmm I can certainly buy this explanation. From the perspective of a child(me as a child) every day is nearly always an anticipation, because nearly everyday you have school and every morning I would wake up hoping its not a working day, only to be disappointed ~70% of the time. And every week I would be hoping for the weekend to arrive. I would keep dreaming about the time I will be allowed to drive, the first time I can taste alcohol, etc.

Well looking back at all the weekends and my first drive and my first sip of alcohol, it all seems to have gone so fast :(!
I'm interested in seeing mobile stats (iPhone vs. the rest?) of some sites. Anyone care to share those numbers? More particularly: is the 70% iPhone number I get from my stats realistic and how does that breakdown change once a mobile-specific site is launched?
Frankly, I don't remember. They feel about the same.

But I do have a memory of my parents leaving me with my grandma once and telling me they would be back in 3 hours. I was 3 or 4 at that time and I remember thinking how mind-bogglingly long these 3 hours felt when they said it.
College freshman year seems to be shorter to me.
Perhaps (they are equivalent fractions) but I rarely meet American movers and shakers that worry about the American underclass.

You should read my statement as a positive consideration of the priorities of the Indian elite.
Yeah, if Bootsy Collins had orbited the moon nobody would ever have forgotten it.

As it was, it took Frank Zappa to figure out the marketing angle and name his child "Moon Unit".
Safari 1.2??
Why go back to the Moon?
We're based in Slovenia, a country with a very high percentage of FF users. We used to be in 2. place, right after Finland, but I'm not sure about current stats.
Why FF is so popular here is a different question. My theory is that it has a lot to do with every forum over here having a tech support section and that the first advice everyone gets there is "install FF"! :)
This site doesn't seem to work on my iPhone.
It depends on what's your final goal. Many HN posts saying you can't get rich with an iPhone app ( anymore ). Maybe o good idea is not yet implemented on Android.

I've planned to build something for my iPhone but many things stopped me: a MacBook, AppStore freakness and now I'm just hearing that 100$ entry fee.

Now I'm rather building a mobile interface to my web app than sticking to a new platform
For myself I agree, but I was never big into engineering approaches. Very suspicious of agile methods, too. The way I see it: for example in mathematics the first proof of a difficult theorem is often very long and complex. Over time more mathematicians might look at the proof and find ways to make it simpler. Eventually you might have a 5 line version of a proof that used to be 30 pages long.

I don't see how any agile method or engineering approach could help much in getting the 5 line version from the beginning. There always seems to be a kind of "crunch" step involved in solving the problem. Once the problem is solved, the solution can be cleaned up. But solving the problem at first you explore maybe hundreds of possible paths in your mind, and combine lots and lots of aspects. You are stuck in the jungle and try to find a path to the summit. Once you are on the summit, you can look down the mountain and see the easier routes you missed on your way up - because in the jungle you can't see very far, and you have to fight for every meter of progress.

I find the same applies to my own code - which is always crappy, anyway. But refactoring usually goes quite fast once the first working version has come into existence.

I'd expect having to focus on getting some agile method right would just distract me from solving the problem.
http://flooha.com

Firefox 66.64%

Chrome 11.28%

Safari 10.99%

Internet Explorer 6.56%

Opera 2.10%

Mozilla 1.56%

Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.36%

Camino 0.18%

Konqueror 0.11%

Opera Mini 0.07%

SeaMonkey 0.07%

(not set) 0.04%

webkit 0.04%
Good point. I guess when one looks backwards - different years may seem to have passed quicker or slower than others.

And, by the way, for me senior year high school seems the longer.
Wow, Wolfe writes like a God. Not a dull sentence (I read Bonfire of the Vanities and it was like stepping into another world).
Justin.TV:

Internet Explorer 56.97%

Firefox 32.17%

Chrome 4.78%

Safari 3.84%

Opera 1.54%

Playstation 0.42%

Mozilla	0.15%

SeaMonkey 0.02%

Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.02%

Camino 0.02%