skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is an interesting approach. You are visually modelling program FLOW - something that is hard to visualize by just looking at text.

I went to Virginia Tech and since the CS department was sucked into the rest of engineering - I ended up taking intro engineering courses (read: a complete waste of time) and they wanted to teach programming to freshman engineers through Alice.

Alice, although the early versions crashed, ran slow, and often saved the XML 'world' files incorrectly, corrupting your work and making you lose it - it did a great job of teaching visual programming because you could easily create a 3D scene or game without much effort, plus it highlighted the code as it ran.

While Wizbang is visual as well (albeit in a different way), the program flow diagrams kind of look like UML diagrams and could STILL scare away novice programmers.

A main issue of teaching programming to new comers is you need to start with the basics - but printing "hello world" to the screen doesn't seem applicable so it feels like they are wasting their time. Besides, most of what they use computers for is pretty and visual.

Wizbang doesn't seem to offer anything else that other learning tools don't do in a better way - except maybe the export to a "real" language.

Now imagine if you could combine that exporting functionality on top of something more visually interesting like Alice. Make a 'game' in Wizlice (Wizbang-Alice), and then export that code (on top of your minimal graphics libraries or functions to support what they write) to C++/Java and let them tinker around with THAT... they'll be on HN in a couple of years tops.

Cool idea, polished effort, please expand visual component!
Yeah, i took a look at 3 of them and questions seem to have very few views and answers, but i guess it will evolve somehow.

Yahoo Answers and Vark.com don't always get the answer i need, for dev related questions stackoverflow does it a lot better, integration with niche websites might be a good idea, such as automotive portals.

Also don't underestimate localization, facebook really took off in mexico and spain once there was a spanish version.
I'm disappointed to see Keiretsu on there - I've known a couple of angels recommended by people I trust who are involved in that organization.

Can anybody confirm Keiretsu does charge?
It's a legal distinction. Laws say that they're different.

Also there's a number of material differences that justify that different treatment.

Theft removes the object from someone. Copyright infringement does not.

Theft (as tipified in my country, opposed to "hurto" or "apropiación indebida", sorry don't know how to translate those) means certain quantity, violence on persons or things.

Even if the same laws were applied to digital content, there would be impossible to convict anybody without specific laws, because taking something from someone without violence, dameges and not depriving the owner would amount as a small fine, not worth the legal costs.

There is a concept in penal law over here that's called "punibility". The idea is that certain behaviours can't be controlled using criminal law because it's impossible to keep an eye on everybody: "behaviour that's socially accepted". If you need a policeman on every citizen, that also needs to enter your home to see if you're acting bad... then it's a bad idea to criminalize. The punishment isn't uniformly applied so it's even more unjust.
I really love these toys that they are making available to us. Even simple examples like this give us an idea of the creative potential we will have over the next few years.
Of course, using Java on bare metal is going to have more performance/$ than ruby on Xen. That's not the point. The point is to use tools that maximize human capital at the expense of server costs.

That assumes that the tools maximize human capital more than the tools that maximize both human capital and minimize server cost. Do they?

I don't know what you mean by reducing moving parts. The only parts involved in handling the requests for this setup are Nginx and HAProxy. All the other technology parts (Tokyo Cabinet, memcached, Sphinx) are used to scale the database, something your stack still has to achieve.

Lucene, ehcache -- in-process libraries to achieve the same effect but without all the moving parts. Or, instead of lucene, PostgreSQL's built-in FTS.

You also don't need nginx, haproxy, and a complex architectural division between static/non-static content.

The tradeoffs between using bare metal vs VM and using Rails vs Java are well known at this point.

I'm not sure I agree, given the constant repetition of "Ruby is more productive" as a justification for poor performance and complex architecture. Is it more productive than Scala? Clojure? Groovy? What about using even just using JRuby?
you can also keep track of how people browse the site from page to page, etc. and draw lots of good stats. e.g. similar to amazon's "people who bought these also bought..." or "people who viewed this ultimately bought..." but globally across multiple sites
Is there any benefit in using unicorn over passenger?
SHA-3 Candidate Algorithms: The Case for Skein
The videos get hosted from Wordpress.com regardless of who hosts the blog.
Little known fact: bos is actually the pseudonym for a collective of hackers, much like Bourbaki.
Thanks. I'll look around for it. Anything more recent in that vein?
"Look at Erlang, which maps lightweight erlang processes to operating system threads, providing SMP scalability at a low cost..."

Erlang can use native threads, but they do not map to its lightweight processes. Erlang's lightweight processes are basically green threads. Native threads are used for SMP scheduling only. So on a four-core system, you might have thousands of Erlang lightweight processes running on just four OS threads in one OS process.
Excellent List. I am particularly fond of "Good Math, Bad Math" http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/ .
Entertainingly silly (especially the cigarette-smoking 'aids'), but a couple of them seem strange selections for inclusion - Clive Sinclair's mini-TV (1966) is arguably widespread and portable now, while the external turkey roaster with heat lamps can be found in many an eatery, especially the kind that serve doner kebabs. Yum.
I very much appreciate their use of the word 'clone' instead of 'fork', and the focus on maintaining the idea of canonical repository and project:

User clones aren't forks, in the traditional sense,
where a fork has little intention to contribute back
to the original project. Rather, the entire purpose
of a user clone is to allow users to contribute to
projects without requiring official commit access
permissions.

I was thinking of migrating some projects to github for this feature, but instead I think I'll just switch to Mercurial on Google Code.
I had a similar experience... I have tried to switch for the last few years, unsuccessfully. Until a month ago which I installed 9.04 and it pretty smooth. The only reason that I boot my laptop on Windows is Photoshop.
Unicorn doesn't make your site very slow for the 5 seconds-2 minutes (YMMV) after you deploy.
I think we all understand the difference between threads and processes and where context switching fits in.

In Linux 2.6, there's not a lot of difference between switching between processes and threads.

From the github dude: "Our Ruby application code spends very little time blocking on external resources." That is why using threads in this particular case won't help.
For marketing, I've found HARO (http://www.helpareporter.com/) to be a really useful resource. Essentially, you have reporters who are looking for leads / sources, about a wide range of topics. Obviously, you're going to have a lot of "Jon & Kate + 8" and "fashion week" requests, but you occasionally get topics that deal with your area of expertise. You can then step in, and you get free exposure, in some fairly high-profile media outlets, and are quoted as an expert. Even the interviews that aren't in super-high-profile papers still give you a good chance to refine your pitch and to practice speaking to a non-technical reporter, so you've got a more polished presentation when it comes time to chat with the WSJ/NYT/etc.

So there's that.

BUT.

You might want to consider holding off on doing any publicity until, as zaidf mentions, you've ensured that you have a good product/market fit. In addition to Eric Ries and Sean Ellis, check out Steve Blank's stuff. If he were your advisor, and he heard you were looking to spend runway money on PR, he'd be apoplectic. He'd probably say that the best return on that money is going to come from doing user testing (that is, interviewing people to see if you have a product that they'd spend money on; if not, using the money to tweak the product, and then do another round of interviews; repeat), or from using it to extend your runway so you have longer to figure everything out before you run out of money.
CABINET MEDICAL DR. BOTEA - Psihoterapie si terapie alternativa
Ask HN: Why do comments play a role in story promotion, but not in karma scores?
?
I love JavaScript as a language, there are some neat things in it (not the least of which is expando object, whoo), but there are much better tools than it for doing application development (even if we go no further than Flex or SilverLight, we've improved dramatically over JavaScript in terms of project management and toolchain availability). If you're worried about namespacing, then you're using the language with the intention of a real application programming language. There are other ways to get code to client in a web-accessible way that doesn't mean "AJAX everywhere!"
The "natural world" we observe is not the world God created. It is a ruined version of it.
My point is that both behaviours are misrepresented by the persons that oppose to them. Calling someone "copyright infractor" doesn't sound like an insult. "Thieve" is incorrect, but sounds more dramatic. With abortion happens the same thing.

It doesn't mean that abortion and file sharing are connected in any other way.
Sites do tend to lag for at least several seconds after the restart though.
Tool Talk: All about Internet marketing tools
I run the US operations for a capital equipment company. We make equipment that makes nanofibers. This sounds high tech, but it isn't; our customers are textile, nonwovens, paper and filter companies. All of the modern pharmaceutical miracles are made possible by advanced filtration. www.elmarco.com
I just tried to play the office on high with my desktop system and it was unwatchable due to how choppy it is. On this same system I play 1080p content with mplayer without an issue.

AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 810 Processor
4gb ram
Thanks for the feedback. So far we have identified and began reaching musicians and reporters. Really targetting them though is something we could use help with.

I think part of my posting is that anxiousness of seeing slow/steady growth and the fear that it will die down on it's own. I want to see it ramp up a little :).
Erlang can use native threads, but they do not map to its lightweight processes.

That's not what I said; I said: "[Erlang] maps lightweight erlang processes to operating system threads."

Erlang processes are green threads mapped to OS threads. They're called processes in erlang, but they're M:N scheduled threads.

So on a four-core system, you might have one thousands of Erlang lightweight processes running on just four OS threads in one OS process.

Or you could have thousands of Erlang lightweight processes mapped to 185 OS threads (not that it will, but it could). The fact that they're green threads is irrelevant in terms of scalability -- they're still threads, but even less resource intensive than a direct mapping to OS threads. M:N scheduled green threading is also very hard to do in the general case, which is why you don't see more of it (see the abandoned attempts to implement generic M:N OS:green thread scheduling in FreeBSD, for instance).

You could also be using Scala, where an actor only maps to a thread when it's blocked inside of its react loop, but in that case will consume a whole thread.

What's your point? :)
Thanks. I'm completely open to holding off on doing any publicity related tasks. I wanted to make sure I didn't stay head down in engineer mode since I feel that the main features are complete. I wanted to turn some focus onto growing the userbase.

We've started to do some A/B testing on small features. Most users have positive remarks and we're using Get Satisfaction to acquire more input from them (though it's not got much traction yet).
Cringely: Apple and the future of publishing
Yeah, wish people would critique good versions of their opponents rather than bad versions. Otherwise, no one learns anything. Both sides remain content in their arguments and assume the other side is a moron.
I think we all understand the difference between threads and processes and where context switching fits in.

You might, but I don't think that's the general case.

From the github dude: "Our Ruby application code spends very little time blocking on external resources." That is why using threads in this particular case won't help.

It hits a database, loads content from memcached, and waits on HTTP requests to complete, does it not?

I'd be surprised if the usage modeled a pure event-driven sendfile() based static-only file server (such as lighttpd), for instance (where threads vs. processes is moot).

Moreover, a fair amount of effort has been expended on a complex architecture to push only a very specific type of requests to Unicorn.
Well, an economist and a sadist.
I have no idea what you two are talking about. Are you ambiguously trying to argue for creationism? If so, could you point me to those "good arguments"? I've never seen them.
Really cool to see how this would be done in Haskell, thanks for the link! I just read through so some of it went over my but seeing how they layout the mathematical logic was insightful. Here's another great take on the problem (in python) for those who may not have seen it: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html
But don't make the mistake of assuming that when writing "for (var i=...)" that i is scoped to the loop block. JavaScript does not have block scope. It only has function scope, with the "Global Object" scope being the top level scope.
"PrivateEquityForums.com (stunnning $14,500 to $25,000 plus 3-5% of your raise to present!) We’ve received information that Mike Segal of Joshua Capital Partners runs this forum that is looking for up to $25,000 and/or 3-10% of how much you raise!"

Kudos for outing these "epic bastards" - IF it's true.. certainly hard to believe anyone that gullible hasn't already sent his $$ to the widow of a recently ousted African minister...
ClusterShot: How a Startup’s Pet Project Became Profitable
Probably so that it's harder for link spammers to do their job.
Do you not need Flash to view the Hulu website? Am I missing something?
It seems to me like the Passenger guys could easily add an option so that on a "touch tmp/restart.txt" a set of new worker processes is started before the old ones are killed off. I imagine this would make this slowness a thing of the past. For the record, my apps experiencing this momentary queueing and slowness on restart (5 seconds max).
Thanks, I was looking for clarification that what Google is really after is not the innards of the Web applications so much as the content that can be considered "standalonable."
www.xero.com is a great accounting system for people that hate QuickBooks. It is extremely well designed.
Code metrics for any Ruby github project
Methinks you haven't looked.

I went to seminary briefly before deciding to go back to being a coder, and my favorite courses were apologetics and the courses having to do with creationist theory.

They didn't teach creationist theory as the absolute definitive truth, they tought it as a plausible element to many Christian worldviews (in many variants, including Deism, Intelligent Design, Young Earth, and others).

If you're looking for a variety of resources representing the different creationist worldviews, check the curriculum and resources at Summit Ministries. They were, at one time, loosely affiliated with Dobson's Focus on the Family organization (not sure of the current status of that affiliation), and lead by really deep thinkers in Protestant beliefs.

http://www.summit.org/resources/
Any US citizens use Pirate Bay less? I applaud them for forcing media's hand which prompted great sites like Hulu and Justin.TV(lol - best of the bunch). It maybe time to throw in the towel; downloading no longer cuts it for me, prefer streaming.
Wow, Windows 3.1. The TCP/IP stack on that was horrible, surprised to managed to get online ;)
Answers.OnStartups.com -- StackOverflow for startups
In-process libraries that are orthogonal to your domain aren't a golden ticket. SOA lets you scale the parts that need to, one service at a time, be that caching, search, storage or domain logic.

I disagree that in-process libraries are actually less complex architecture, it just hides the complexity within a single process.
GitHub's Angry Unicorn
Coldfusion runs on the JVM?
Here's the changeset that fixes it: http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/11603
I read about those events in the "College of Computers and Digital Media" (or whatever they are calling the CS department now) newsletter/mailings a while ago (after I relocated to SF), and thought it sounded like too good to be true. I think the main goal of it is to be marketing for the CS department like "if you attend here, look at the kind of access you'll have".
Compared to Vimeo, it's the same cost ($60/year) if you limit yourself to 3gb of video, VideoPress offers iTunes support, & there's an open-source framework:

http://code.trac.wordpress.org/browser/wordpresscom-video-se...

Discussions and feedback: http://wpvideo.wordpress.com/
Troubled minds think alike. :) Any chance I could convince you to join forces with me here:

http://answers.onstartups.com
Yes, very expensive as well.

All of these angel groups are pretty much a total joke.

By the way, here is a very similar discussion on this topic a few months ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782980
In-process libraries that are orthogonal to your domain aren't a golden ticket. SOA lets you scale the parts that need to, one service at a time, be that caching, search, storage or domain logic.

SOA is also considerably more complex to architect, configure, and administer. If you don't need it yet, why pay for it?

I disagree that in-process libraries are actually less complex architecture, it just hides the complexity within a single process.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hide". Using these tools you can scale up a much larger order of magnitude before having to worry about breaking out services.

We're talking about the difference between 1-2 servers and 10-20, and that's a fairly substantial difference in man hours, architectural complexity, physical plant, etc, especially early on in a startup.

Chances are good you'll never even need to grow to that scale, either -- we ran a game site with 4 million in yearly revenue (and quite a bit more than 10 million requests/day) on about 8 mid-range servers.
Are there any js frameworks/libs that do something like this on the client :

render_as_dom(table(tr(td("one"), td("two"))));

I'd prefer to write code like this rather than have a mix of JS and html, with html rendering on the server.
Yeah. We load balance across 5 Apache/Passengers and I do rolling deploys (all in Capistrano) by removing a Passenger from load balancing, updating the app, restarting Apache, and adding it back into load balancing with a 10 second delay between each. We tried the Passenger touch restart.txt and that didn't go well at all when we were under load.
Will Twitter's lax data ownership policy result in jailtime?
I know a lot of people like Candidate B and I would not like to work with any of them. Life is a balance. Passion for programming is good, obsessive compulsion is not.
Abortion is murder because it purposefully denies the baby their life. Copyright is not theft because it does not deny the creator access to and full enjoyment of their creation [though it's probably possible to construct some situation in which it does?].

Whether you believe the murder of the child is justified is a separate question. But even if you believe copyright infringement is wrong someone doing it will not stop the original creator from have access to their [original] copy.
I wrote a Sudoku puzzle solver in Haskell as practice a while ago, if anyone's interested the source (including tests and a description of the algorithm) is here: http://github.com/vito/sudoku.hs
My startup's a Wide-Area Bonjour service (DNS with client updates, long lived queries and a convention for service discovery) which squares it in the client/server camp although it does have a web interface. The next thing I want to do isn't a (strict) web offering either.
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColdFusion#ColdFusion_and_Java
$10 billion takes fiber to every school, hospital in the US
Ok, thanks for clarifying what you were saying.
AP, News Corp: Google is exploiting us
Taking a picture of a car you got from Google Streetview != theft of the car. Taking a car from the Googleplex [without the owners permission] == theft. Do you need us to explain why?

The first has zero cost to the owner of the car, they keep their car and Google keep their [Google's] picture of it, plus I get my copy.

The second denies the owner their original and any possible use of that original.

The distinction is physical, not metaphysical. The clue is in the terms property and intellectual property. One of these is ethereal and almost impossible to steal [at present], can you guess which?
Recently launched an implementation of StackExchange for startup questions:

http://answers.onstartups.com
One thing that always intrigues me about the Mac Parallels argument is why doesn't Microsoft kill that excuse? Apple doesn't allow me as a PC user to run their OS, why does Microsoft allow Mac users to run theirs?
My feedback is metafeedback: This is not even remotely a new idea. If you can't immediately rattle off the names of three similar systems, well... consider that a sign of how successful this approach has proved in the past.

If you are serious about this, you should dig up those previous systems, and see if you can come up with a reason why your system will fare better. I will concede I am pessimistic that such a property can exist, but who knows if I am correct? But if you really want this to succeed by any measure, you really really ought to do this.

Or decide you totally don't care about success, by any measure you choose, in which case, have fun. But I can't in good conscience just blindly encourage someone when taking on a visual programming language. It's like happily encouraging someone to go ahead, leap off the diving board into the pit of spikes, no problem, everything will be fine. We're taught by our culture to blindly encourage everybody, no matter what, but such encouragement has consequences. We shouldn't ignore those consequences.

If I had to pick the most likely angle of attack for such a system to stand out from the crowd and potentially enable some sort of interaction that might help you escape from what appears to be a total black hole of effort, it would be the input device. The mouse and keyboard have been explored on this front. Perhaps a stylus-based system could do something different and new, or something. (Touch will probably be too imprecise, it virtually drops your resolution and you're going to need more precision, not less.)
So Amazon invents the Kindle, starts this thing off, and somehow it's okay for Apple to barge in with their monopolistic bullshit?

I think Amazon knows a little bit more about books than Apple, so I predict Apple won't steal a dime from Amazon.
That sure is a lot of code given Haskell's concise reputation. I don't know Haskell. Would you mind explaining all what all the logic is doing?