skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the addition of a plugin or two and a sane Apache configuration, Wordpress can handle some pretty extreme loads. This is not to say that it's perfect, but rather that performance doesn't have to be a concern if you know what you're doing.

To me the biggest selling point for Wordpress is it's flexibility. I'm willing to take a performance hit for that.
When I'm working just-for-myself, I am not nearly as focused as when I'm working on someone else's project. I waste a lot of time basically goofing off (like now).

I've tried to figure this out, and what Zeldman is talking about is a big part of it. Approval from others is a lot more important to me than I wanted to admit.

"Emopreneur". Pretty funny. Is that your own, Jason?
Actually, you could get around the delayed posts thing. With Webby, you can specify which posts are indexed. It'd be easy to make it only publish posts if they're in the past rather than in the future (via the post date field or some other custom field). Then just run the generator automatically every hour from a cron job somewhere and you've got delayed posts.

Also, as far as I know, disqus supports trackbacks (not sure what the difference is between that and pingbacks though).

Finally, re: speed, if you get slashdotted, WPCache will still struggle. Nginx serving static files, otoh, won't even skip a beat at 100 hits a second, even on a very small VM.
Compared to our jobs board, Haystack is actually overflowing with features. The jobs board has been around for two years, made over a million dollars in revenue, and continues to do very well.

People will pay for Haystack if it works for them. Just like people have paid and continue to pay for the 37signals job board. Both applications work because we have a very targeted audience that's a perfect fit for them.

This is in part what we mean by "Build An Audience". We've spent 10 years doing that at 37signals.
before you go reinventing the wheel, here are the results from running your examples through the formula suggested by Evan Miller in the link...

10 up 10 down 0.327403766068315

50 up 50 down 0.418847795168265

100 up 0 down 0.973657278603792

70 up 30 down 0.620167865061336

2 up 1 down 0.253533865071156

10 up 20 down 0.210836926288844

and a few more to see some other interesting cases...

100 up 30 down 0.703333001615963

10 up 3 down 0.541934244292211

30 up 100 down 0.175849385303401

1 up 0 down 0.269865944074627

1 up 1 down 0.120866317496523

2 up 0 down 0.425030603165412

100 up 0 down 0.973657278603792

100 up 100 down 0.442235043128361

200 up 0 down 0.986652839030471

as you can see. as there are more votes cast, the confidence that this represents the ultimate ranking improves. with less votes, a high up/down ratio is good, but not as good as a high up/down ratio with more total votes (because there is more statistical confidence with more data points).

finally below are the test cases that broke your initial implementation.

200 up 1800 down 0.0895005864992562

300 up 4200 down 0.0608069702294983

400 up 7600 down 0.0461419135745087
Initially, yes. We picked the top cities by population in the US. We're going to change that shortly, though, so it's based on the number of firms in those cities. That way London or Berlin or Tokyo or whatever can bubble up on the list if there's a large number of firms listing from there.
How to Check Yourself For Skin Cancer
I never saw the rush. You USA'ians vote on 4 November, and Inauguration is not until January 20. Can't you afford to spend a day or two on getting the results right rather than fast?
Rate my startup - SEOTrac.com
Nutshell: SEOTrac allows users to track and monitor the effectiveness of their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns. I'd appreciate your feedback!

Long Version: SEO is going to be a Wild West community for the foreseeable future. Believe me, I know; I have an affiliate marketing site that tried (unsuccessfully) to compete against guys with big PPC marketing dollars, and I quickly learned SEO is the only way to go (for that site, anyway).

When I tried searching for SEOs, I was incredibly frustrated - there's no reputable source for objectively ranking SEO performance, and especially SEOs that work in particular industry verticals, so I decided to do something about it. My site, SEOTrac.com, allows users to track, for free, the performance of their campaigns (PageRank moves over time, keyword ranking statistics, etc.). The big question I’m trying to answer for everyone using SEO – you’ve spent $$ on improving your rankings; could you have done any better? And with which SEO company?

Once I have enough SEO’s in my database, and enough campaigns, I’ll be able to rank the effectiveness of those SEOs, and give an objective data point to webmasters or site owners looking to add or improve SEO in their marketing mix.

Signup is free and as easy as adding a URL and clicking “Sign Up”, so in addition to comments, please add your site to the database (if not an SEO Campaign as well, either done in-house or through an professional).

I’m at michaelhn AT SEOTrac (dot) com if you want to reach out to me personally (including, if you think you can help over and above your HN comments).

Thanks!
Yup - I really wish that they'd had Generics from the beginning - there are numerous places where they would have made life better, which will never be changed.
Yeah, genetics versus environment, the age-old debate.

Environment certainly plays a role, but to what extent? It isn't just parental involvement -- there are plenty of bright accomplished people whose parents were busy doing something else during their upbringing. It isn't likely to be the toys that you get to play with, because there are bright kids even amongst the poorest of the poor -- though they do tend to be rarer exceptions.

I'd wager my money on a higher influence from genetics than many people in our society would currently want to believe. Some people, at birth, are predisposed to certain natural talents. They simply have good spatial reasoning, for example -- it's not something that they had to learn to mimic at a young age, it's something they were actually born with.

From there, the talent is subjected to environmental conditions, some positive, some adverse. Maybe their spatial reasoning and their parents' guidance gets them into sports instead of taking things apart. Maybe their natural talents manage to survive even very adverse environments. Or, maybe the abilities just wither away and die under conditions that don't nurture them.
Core network security: A seldom used bag of tricks
Music Pirates are Immoral Cheapskates, Or Are They?
Finally someone who agrees with me. I forced myself to play mafia wars for about an entire month, simply to find out what was there in the darned game and still I couldn't get myself to think of it as a game.

However, I don't think Civ would be a major success on Facebook. Most people on facebook like playing games that are simple and do not require you to think too much (ex: farmville). However, I'm still rooting for civ, simply because I'm also developng a turn based strategy game for facebook and it would be nice to see this category of games become popular on facebook.
Robotic (unmanned) missions will always return vastly less information than manned. They can't adapt to circumstance well, mission goals can't be rewritten while in-flight, and its very hard to estimate risk from 250,000 miles away.
PageBus Implementation using GWT-Ext | Web Technology I/O
Thirty years of spreadsheets
Somebody in the comments of the original article mentioned the author is going through a divorce.
Pfft.

Yeah, or maybe I just want to get some things done because I'm frustrated with the things around me. People can take their recognition and hang it on a wall.
ADHD: It's a gift, not a disorder
The existentialists (well, at least the one that matters, Heidegger) would say that to be human means that one never forgets a deep "uncanniness" or an emptiness, and that part of the drive to succeed (or do drugs or find god or stay busy driving the kids to soccer practice) is a desire to fill up this fundamental emptiness.

This emptiness stems from the fact that you consciously wonder who you are ("consciously" meaning with words in your head), and, in the long term, no final answer seems to be forthcoming, even though you may tell yourself otherwise, or go to church to hear someone else tell you, etc. The emptiness is part of the human condition and can't actually be fixed or filled. We all feel it very deeply, and there is a huge industry around making us feel sure of ourselves, and/ or keeping us so busy in the world that we don't have time to contemplate the ever-present internal void.

The only "authentic" (Heidegger's term) way forward is to just embrace the "uncanniness", and quit wasting time worrying about how you can't "just enjoy life" or "live always in the moment". I think of this as the way of life that is "un-selfconsciously selfconscious" (tm). Look for my new book in the Self Help section soon!

Or, one could also say that Nietszche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard just had A LOT of bad days and wrote some books about it...
I can't believe how many people agree with this guy.

Seriously, why would anyone "break" themselves? I thought we were just learning from our mistakes...

I am very productive these days. I think when you truly love what you do, being an entrepreneur is just something you can tell people so they understand _why_ you don't work for someone.

I've worked at 9 - 6 before. I will never go back. Mostly because of the reward for not breaking myself and forgetting about what I love.

I mean how many people just like the joy of creating something for themselves and no one else. I do.
Once you vaccinate for it, it becomes less deadly. Which means there is a new (computable) "most deadly" flu. And, presumably, there is an upper limit to the number of strains our immune systems can remember and defend against.
Email in the Cloud: There’s real money to save says Gartner
The Current State of Console Software Sales In 2009
Motorola Calgary pics: Verizon's 2nd Motorola Android Phone
Why is free software important to you?... FSF video campaign
JQuery Live Events
Love this feature!
SeatGeek is hiring. We're looking for a CTO and LAMP developer: http://www.seatgeek.com/main/jobs
Missions to Mars Shows 52.4% Failure Rate
Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint?
Metasploit is an open-source penetration / auditing framework written in ruby. I also liked this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Art-Exploitation-Jon-Erickson/...
The amount of energy put out by Wi-Fi is absolutely dwarfed by the radio, television, and cell phone EM signals that we are swamped in at all times. And none of them put out enough energy to do anything but raise our temperature an immeasurably small amount.

See here: http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/09/wifi_and_radiat...
Edison Gets the Bright Light Right
I think that is to make it look like he's not just spamming 'keepingthedoor.com'.
> If your static site does any of this, it's not static, it's a dynamic site that uses the filesystem rather than a DB for storage -- which might very well be clever, but that's not what's being argued.

Is it ? The post sounded like it was against fully dynamic CMSes, not "sites that have any dynamic feature".

It really boils down to what you choose to optimize : security, read performance, write performance, write convenience or fancy features. Depending on the usage, some criteria don't matter at all, others are critical.

Static sites (and the CMSes which generate them) are at one end of the spectrum, optimizing security and read performance while leaving the rest behind. Fully dynamic sites (and the CMSes behind them) are almost the inverse. You can compromise and fall somewhere in between.
maggit: thanks. This looks very useful!
I'm neither a CTO nor a LAMP developer, but SeatGeek is awesome and had a great preso at TC50. Any NYC people should take a look!
Real-Time Search Startups on Google/Bing/Twitter News
Someone mentioned this the other day, but I don't think it was ever given a satisfactory answer - is it really worth it to work for a tiny company that will likely crash? Does the expected payoff from the tiny equity share justify the insecurity / lower comp / lack of benefits etc.? Shouldn't you be automatically suspicious of anyone that would sign on to a deal like this? If they are so great / can execute why aren't they working on their own ideas instead of yours? I don't think this article ever answers the question.
Wi-Fi is technological magic, and some people are afraid of that.

Also: unfortunately, a lot of the approaches here aimed at educating people about wifi won't work. Not that the approaches are wrong -- they're the best approach -- but they still won't work in too many cases, because people sense that they have no reason to trust you, and if you're trying to change their opinion, it's only because you're trying to push your own agenda forward at the expense of their health.

People in that mindset then treat facts as scary things that confuse them, so they avoid them altogether.

I live in an area with a higher-than-average ratio of such people, and we also happen to have a fairly thriving tech community. The wifi "debate" comes up often, there have been town meetings about it, it's interfered with city-wide wifi rollouts, etc.
I've been considering applying for a job at Zynga so I've also been playing Mafia Wars and Farmville. The latter is a little better. Both epitomize the idea of click/reward perfected by the Diablo series, but the end game of Mafia Wars is laughably boring, it's no different than the early and mid game. Actual PVP for domination of control points seems like a straightforward addition but I guess they don't need to mess with something so popular right now.

I believe Zynga has publicly acknowledged that in the long run their games will need to have more actual game play.
Do you know what the measured difference is in steroid concentration between organic and inorganic milk?
We Tell Stories - 'Hard Times' by Matt Mason & Nicholas Felton
I'm interested in seeing if there's a physio/psycho/neurological differences between people who find her smile mysterious and people who don't, because to me, the only mysterious thing about her smile is that the media makes such a big deal of it.
Ask HN: What is the worst user interface in any webapp that you know of ?
We're all looking for examples of how to do things better, but how about finding out where rock-bottom sits ?

Sites that have a large number of users because there are little or no alternatives that have a really bad user experience.

These would look like prime candidates for some serious competition.
I always wondered if DaVinci wanted that effect or it just "happened".
Nokia sues Apple for infringement of multiple patents
Myspace's Tom Joins Facebook [pic]
I think the point is that if you create something for yourself and no one else, then you won't be a successful entrepreneur, because to succeed at that, you have to create something other people love and secretly, you want them to love you, not what you create.
I recently migrated my WP.org blog to WP.com because of this. Now I feel safe.

Nevertheless, I publish my personal site using Emacs' Org-mode and if I were to start a blog from scratch I would use something like org-mode or jekyll.

Probably because I need the feeling of being in control of my data.
Microsoft starts selling PCs online
Windows 7 [Full Review]
Will it redeem Microsoft's Vista-tarnished image? All indications are that it will. The hardware driver issues that plagued Vista won't recur, for the simple reason that Windows 7 reuses the same deep plumbing code that Vista did, and after nearly three years, the incompatibilities have actually been ironed out. In other words, most of the drivers already exist. Microsoft has also remedied the other two big complaints about Vista: its bloat and those obnoxious User Account Controls. While the trend has long been for new OSes to be bloated with new goodies, Windows 7 actually performs better and takes up less disk space than its predecessor. Long story short: I like Windows 7 a lot, and with its new taskbar, user interface, and home networking enhancements, PCMag.com gives the new OS the thumbs up.
Does anybody know how to export WP posts to plain text files? Maybe a script that reads the export.xml file.
I added my site (www.manu-j.com) and after adding it took a long time to load. Maybe you were trying to analyze the site in the mean time. It would have been better to load the dashboard page and then load the results via ajax so that the user know what is happening.

Also after I login I don't see any information that I can't get from webmaster console. It would be nice to see an example report before I signup
I'm currently making a dynamic rewrite of a legacy CMS written to generate static files. The static CMS is a huge PITA. Yeah you can slip dynamic features in there 'just' where you need them. What you wind up with is a mess, and once your site gets a lot of content you start generating a LOT of files. Our rebuild process can take a couple hours, and while it does that it's pegging the disk.

There's nothing wrong with static sites, for something like a blog it's OK. The feature set is fairly limited. But once you do want to add dynamic stuff, it can get tricky. I'd say for most projects starting with a static generator is a mistake because unless you know for sure the requirements won't change you can easily paint yourself into a corner.
These are very good, and I appreciate them being posted here. No-nonsense and well written. Gives insight useful to tech people how to reach customers and get the order.
Movable Type is great :D
Has that actually been shown? It would be ironic to use one unfounded fear to dismiss another unfounded fear, itself raised to dismiss a third unfounded fear.
If anyone is interested in what a real "machine learning" approach the problem of learning a ranking function from data looks like see this paper:

Burges et. al. Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=69183

Although this is most definitely an active research area and the papers citing this one should be pretty interesting.
The diagnosis of ADHD has nothing to do with being "different than the standard 9-to-5-er." People with an attention disorder also don't "question the very fabric of society."

As for the historical people claimed to have ADHD, being brilliant and productive is not sufficient to diagnose someone.

This is hyperbole and wishful thinking with no facts or actual argument.
Engineers create fingernail-size chip that holds 1TB of data
There is something going on with the moderation. About 2 months ago they began approving at most 3 posts a day. It completely ruined a decent community.
Implementing Application Frameworks, Mohamed E. Fayed, Douglas C. Schmidt, Ralph Johnson, eds; Chapter 24, Dynamic Database Instance Frameworks David A. Janello, William G. Lederer, and N. Peter Schnettler describes a framework we built to speed implementation of adding new data feeds quickly.
Perhaps; on the other hand, once we have the capability to do something as hard as compute most-deadly-flu, we'll almost necessarily have the immunological understanding to vaccinate against very broad categories of diseases, not merely individual strains.
Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension
I'm glad you think so!

Feel free to add issues to the issue-tracker :)
South Park Studios Deutschland -
If you Google for that magic number, you will find a large number of explanations, requiring various levels of understanding. No doubt there is one clear enough for you; perhaps stack a few of them.
From the article:

So did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not to mention scientists? Absolutely, Otero Martinez contends. "He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street."
Careful, that's a load-bearing wall...
Funny, I saw an interview with Stelios (of EasyJet, Easy*) and he was saying his motivation was always to prove himself to his father, even after his father died.
I'm a vegetarian who does regular, strenuous exercise. I probably get a lot of my fat through whole milk, which I drink with protein powder. I go through about a gallon every 3-4 days.
Ubuntu's Encrypted Home Directory: A Canonical Approach to Data Privacy
noone, the whole employment thing is too much of a pain in the ass for an early stage startup
WP-Supercache will cache the blog posts as static file by default. So why would it struggle ?
>>I would get the injected (dead) vaccine if

So you're getting the nasal spray vaccine?
Isn't it more that Russia sucked at sending things to Mars? The US definitely had some failures too but most of the failed missions are on the Soviet Union.
Self-Organization vs. Evolution
they are getting desperate
Um.. Why cant the blog be static and have a dynamic webapp hanging off /admin/ which operates as a static site generator? The only difference would be that a program on the web server creates the static files and copies them to the correct directories, instead of a local program creating the static files and copying them to the correct directories.

Edit: I should clarify that I am refering to programs that create static html files. I read the story as dynamic == generates html from some other stored format, be it database or flat files in rst.
What the hell.. ? I thought us Finns didn't do lame greed-lawsuits.
Structure Padding Analysis Tools - Finding the holes in your data structures
Anything in here that we don't already know?
I didn't get it either. Finally, this article at least explains the mystery, and now that I'm looking for it, I see the point. I still process it as a "small smile", though, where the ambiguity is moved into the representation of the emotion and not the visual processing. "Smile" is not an atomic face state, there are many gradations within it.

I suspect the people finding it "mysterious" are suffering from an aliasing error, basically, binning a complicated thing (the human face) into far too few bins.
MySpace abandons race with Facebook
If you can't beat them, sue them?

"The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models."

I would love to know exactly what they are suing for?
- People prioritize those who they have met in person: it's why in-person meetings are so important in sales.

- There's a higher likelihood they share networks, or have the potential to share networks, which provides additional incentive to do a good job.

In short, all the reasons that geography still matters in most businesses.
Measuring Online Applications – Structuring a Measurement Interface
Good tip, thanks -- now on to making my brain hurt!
I agree. How can he say ALL electronic artists are nerds? What about Portishead? Michael Jackson? The Human League?

'Nerd' isn't even an insult in my book.
Some people say that, some people say the opposite. How can I know which are right?
Linux adoption
Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone
A new startup idea - ridicule other startups until they feel they have hit rock bottom then they can succeed.