skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is all from first-hand experience. I've been intimately involved with the Platform since its first launch and know most of the companies in the top 20.

Facebook has the destination site they want. You are not going to help them build it. The second you become even marginally inconvenient they will pay attention to everything you do and shut down your app without a second thought if they think it's in their interests.

They did it to Slide (Top Friends) and Zynga (FishVille). They will do it to you as soon as you even approach that level of success.

This isn't a condemnation. It's just the cost of doing business on the Facebook Platform. I like the fact that Facebook's motives are so transparent because (unlike Google) it makes it easy to anticipate how they'll react. They're completely rational and self-interested (for the most part -- the original live feed was a mistake, as was Beacon).

It's clear that Facebook has cared more about Connect than the Platform for a long time; at least a year. This latest change just formalizes it and finally incentivizes developers to build on Connect rather than the Platform.

See Scott Rafer's presentation "The Facebook Platform is Dead" from last October, where he predicts all of this.

But keep in mind, once Facebook has the Network they want, they're going to do the exact same thing they did on the Platform.

You are not safe there. If you're building on Facebook Connect you need an escape plan from Day 1.

Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh, and they will take.
Atractive Diamond: Diamond Common Sense
FWIW, I agree that it's a thought-provoking and interesting article that deserves to be well known. However, it's not only not new, but it was posted just 12 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916530

Still not entirely sure I completely agree with it ...
Meh... A mash-up site, that took circuits from other sites, and reposted them. They did give credit to those sites, but I'd still be pissed if they took circuits from my site.

However, a community on electronic design (ala sci-electronics-design from the old days) but with a stack-overflow type of interface, but augmented with an integrated simple javascript powered cad package to allow askers and answerers to communicate with consistently rendered drawings of the circuits. Now THAT would be a site I would hang out on.
Many have been done.

ICAD has been written in Lisp and many turbines of several commercial aircrafts have been designed with it.

CDRS was the conceptual design and rendering system, written by Evans & Sutherland in Lisp. Many cars from Ford and Jaguar have been designed with it. It was then taken over by PTC and sold as Pro/Engineer Designer.

Mirai is a 3d graphics tool used for example to create the animations of Gollums's face in Lord of the Rings. Earlier versions of this software have been used for animation films and many computer games, for example by Nintendo to design the 3d worlds. There were other uses of this software, for example the Orca in 'Free Willy' was animated with it.

Here is a screenshot of Mirai: http://lispm.dyndns.org/lisp/pics/Mirai-P5-Paint-Front.jpg

Let us know when there is a similar Haskell app that supports 2d+3d painting, 3d modelling, 3d animation, 3d rendering, 3d motion editing, etc. in a nice application for, say, SGIs or Windows machines - then show how to script it in Haskell at runtime.
Atractive Diamond: The Amsterdam Diamond
After living with a nice s-exp language, C-like syntax seems like it brings a lot of problems with very few benefits. However I wouldn't dismiss a language based only on the syntax.
It's a stupid approach and it will never see the light of day.

NL has a long history of spending lots of money on large infrastructural projects that get abandoned. But I'm sure some big contractors will clean up on it.

Until not that long ago we had a complete lock complex sitting at the head of a non-existent channel...
1. ssh access 2. Expandrive (mount ssh connection as a drive) 3. notepad++ or textmate
I recently settled on XMonad as well for most of my development needs. i run it under VMware Fusion, with xmonad and some tweaks to run less non-essential background stuff, i manage to get by with just 128mb of ram dedicated to vmware (usually it hovers around 30% ram used). Firefox is run in mac, so that i will not be tempted to surf the web when in xmonad.
Ask HN: need advice on how to write lots of data fast
I'm working on an analytics app that will be generating several http requests for every page view. Probably an average of 2-3. I'm mainly a front-end guy and my knowledge of best practices for storing data is kind of lacking.

I know that writing to log files is hard drive intensive. I also know that the preferred method is to write to a database, which I know how to do and can easily setup. But I'd like to stretch my boundaries a bit here and learn something new.

I had an idea the other to use nginx as my webserver to handle the requests. Very fast & lightweight. It would dump any new data into a memcached instance, with a cron running every couple minutes to suck the memcache stuff either into a db or into a flat file. Even I can think of several reasons why this might not be optimal, but I thought it would a cool way to learn about how to use memcache and get experience with building light-weight systems.

So does anyone have any thoughts on anything I've said, and maybe can make some recommendations?

I ran into a related project called memcachedb, which purports to use the memcache api calls but writes to a berkelydb backend. I haven't looked into it much, but it does seem interesting.
ssh & vi, svn to keep me sane :)

Call me old fahsioned...

On a java project I work on I use intellij, and I hate every second of it. The amount of (external api) stuff to remember is simply too large to commit to memory though.
sci.electronics.design still exists, and there's still some good stuff mixed among the nntp spam and political arguments.

Good point about an integrated CAD package--while some sed posters do great ASCII art schematics, many do not and it can be hard to follow.
You can make the minimum deposit/withdrawal for your system 50p or higher, while still allowing smaller transaction amounts for questions and answers.
probably not my 3 favorites but they quickly come to mind when i think favorite movies: evil dead 2, citizen kane, talladega nights
Yes, It’s (Sometimes) Ok To Be Inefficient
The standard gnu linker is quite slow.

Free Pascal does have generics, but doesn't appear to have equivalent template metaprogramming. C++ that only uses templates for generics may be similarly fast-compiling.

I'd compare C to Pascal.
I agree wholeheartedly, although I personally dislike xmonad. We need more experimentation; we need lots of people trying out random ideas. Most new ideas will fail, and even more implementations will fail, but the good ideas will slowly rise to the top. If we don't see more failures than successes, we're not stepping outside the comfort zone enough.

So I present a challenge: take a common piece of software/functionality that you use and come up with a new approach. It doesn't have to be a good approach, but it has to be different. Implementations aren't necessary here, but they often help to turn a bad idea into a good one.

For example, I don't believe much has been done with tabbed browsing in the past few years. It'd be nice to see a tiling window manager inside the browser, with tabs acting as a sort of taskbar. Would this idea work well? Doubtful, for most people at least. But who knows what idea might come from it if it was implemented?
Doesn't the gasoline tax we pay in the US accomplish the exact same thing without all the fancy GPS and central data gathering business?
I find Scheme quite a bit more ugly than Common Lisp. The simplistic design makes it much more unpleasant to use as CL. For learning programming its fine, smaller programming task are fine too, but anything interesting is just a pain. Scheme then provides much on top with SRFIs (and similar extensions) - unfortunately the base language does not scale.
A very clever idea to enforce copyright with minimal lawsuits.
Why can't you just say 'Its in France' or 'Its in Germany'?
'really large volume' is obviously subjective but we've had individual clients send 100M data points in a month.
PhpED has been my favorite environment for a while, although it is commercial.
I wonder if the javascript sends to GA each time a page is reviewed (e.g. "back") without being fetched anew from your server.
I visited it a few months ago, and left with a heavy heart. It seems almost useless, with all the spam.
The Dutch government is batting 10 for 10 when it comes to pushing through legislation that mocks the idea of privacy openly. Another stellar idea they had: gather fingerprints for every single person in the country and store them in a central database. I know it sounds like a bad joke, but it's not (http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2009/09/fingerprints_i...). The law was passed without any problem, and only now privacy groups are fighting back.

It's scary when your government is so obviously looking out for itself, rather than you, and failing to even see the difference. After all, what's good for the government is good for the people, eh?
Oh I hope so. But I doubt India taking the lead in R&D and innovation. At least within the next 5 years. I don't see it happening. Except Zoho, you'll be hard pressed to name any other Indian startup doing extremely well.

Indian startup scene is pretty much like the Chinese startup scene. American success stories are ripped off and given a local twist. Because this ripping off is lucrative - but comes without a lot of startup risks.

All the big R&D hubs in India are run by Non-Indian companies (IBM, Intel, Microsoft)... thats not a coincidence. Indian companies are yet not at the stage of spending a lot on R&D (medicine and defense are 2 exceptions.)

Yes VC funding is increasing in India. But really - the biggest news I heard in the last year was a VC investing in a Netflix copycat. And Vinod Khosla investing in a micro-financing fund in India (copy cat of Grameen Bank etc...)
Put the data in a message queue asynchronously. A second process can take the data from there and put it in a database or wherever it's easiest for you to analyse.
thanks. this is very helpful.
What if we taught young children abstract algebra first?
this is now my homepage. thanks for sharing.
I have one opinion and it's not mixed. I have no remorse for the killers. They want their name removed? Well, maybe they shouldn't have killed someone.

I'm not trying to troll or flame or anything, I just feel that the punishment fits the crime.
->
You kill an actor, you get fame. You don't like the fame? Don't kill the actor.

And I feel the first amendment should have priority over anyone's personal feelings anyways. =/
Ok, so 10M per day is not going to scare you ?

650K uniques, about 15 pages pp.

Or would you like some advance warning if I do something like that ?
They already have high fuel taxes there compared to the US. The majority of the cost of fuel is tax pretty much anywhere in Europe.
Ask HN: Am I just blind or should HN increase its default font size?
I typically leave it "zoomed" with Firefox

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23927132@N05/4104134652/sizes/l/

Do you?
Oh, Haskell is also not used very often for those things. It's just my (outsider) perception that Lisp programmers frequently pick on C/C++ as inferior. Haskell programmers instead ask "what can we do to make Haskell performance closer to C/C++?"

However, I am doing graphics for a living, and much of it in C++. I am sincerely interested if I can use another language to give me a higher degree of productivity and not sacrifice too much performance. Common Lisp might be able to pull this off, but it certainly is not often used in this way.

I think you'd agree it's more common for a Lisp person to ask "why do people still use these inferior languages?" rather than "how can we match the performance/scalability/parallelism of these other languages?".
Penn Stater here!
I've thought of organizing something like this for some time. I know a few of you Penn Staters are regulars on HN.

Lets do this sometime next weekend.
jacquesm, we watch our infrastructure all day long and while we may not have enough hardware if a company like Zynga showed up tomorrow we're prepared to provision more nodes to handle scaling and work through it just like any other company would. The point though is: we can scale. Additionally, we'll be fine as we have many sites that do more traffic than that already on our system. If you have any concerns feel free to email support@mixpanel.com. The email will go directly to both Tim and I.
That could be, but then I'd just see more pageviews, not more uniques, and it is with the uniques that there is a serious problem.

Adsense pageviews are pretty much dead on, GA pageviews are 'spotty', sometimes more correct than at other times, GA uniques are simply unreliable.

What I don't get is how adsense seems to get it right wrt to pageviews and GA does not.

Adsense only reports impressions though, not uniques so I can't compare that metric between adsense and analytics.
One problem with that is, that you can't increase the tax too much or many people will refuel across the border and evade your tax that way. After all its a small country.
Most sign up forms give away that information anyway--try putting in a name or email that's already taken and you'll get a form validation error.
I agree that the contention between the two problems is real. That censorship is bad needs no explanation in a community like this. But the stigmatization of ex-criminals is counterproductive to them achieving the standards they're being judged against, and this is a real and under-recognized problems.

However, I don't think that the censorship legislation is an effective way to address this problem. I'm not convinced that legislation is a proper way to address it at all, but I think this legislation in particular is especially misguided, because it's dodging the whole question. It does not limit people's discriminatory actions, much less attitudes, against former criminals. It's not having been criminals that's the problem, it's people's reaction to it that's a problem. That's a social engineering issue, and this German law is a band-aid fix that tries to sweep the whole thing under the rug and call it a day.

The German law casts a discrimination issue as a privacy issue, and therefore misses the point. I side with the First Amendment on this one.
I wish Amazon would preselect the "existing user" option, or at least have a JavaScript that selects it as soon as I type the password.
Germany's 'robot' restaurant
I'm a fan of ManicTime on Windows. It does a great job of tracking how much time each app is active (i.e., has focus). I have rules set up so that it aggregates the time I spend with things like a terminal or IDE open as "work" time and things like VLC as "fun" time.

It also has the ability to track which web pages are being viewed while the browser is active, but I haven't figured out a good way of classifying work pages versus fun pages.

Free download at http://www.manictime.com/
I'm a huge fan of UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com). I've been using it for years and I like the ability to browse any of my (S)FTP sites and make tweaks quickly. My main day to day work is in Visual Studio so I don't use it as my primary editor but when I do work on legacy ASP, PHP or any other kind of text (or binary) files I use UltraEdit. I'm especially happy because they just released the first version of UltraEdit for Linux (and soon OS X).
I've already decided to literally give them the finger when the time comes to renew my passport.
How the fuck is 3 euro cents 7 us cents?
Ask HN: Keyboard Recommendations?
Hi all-

I am currently in the market for a new keyboard. I do a fair amount of hacking and am looking for suggestions for comfortable, reasonably priced options.

So, what say you?
Couldn't it be done with the log files of your versioning system? Problem is maybe to know when you started. Maybe if you used git so as to always branch for new features, it would work.
It would be sad if it came to that, especially for wrongly convicted people.

Changing your name is not just some paperwork, there is a pretty strong psychological aspect to that.
check out http://lapsusapp.co.uk seems to keep track of time of textmate edits plus more (not affiliated with it but the author of the app did tweet me a few times, seems to be targeting RoR devs).
As a longtime GA user, I checked out MixPanel extensively to see if it was worth switching. I can't find anything that MixPanel does that can't also be done with GA. You can track any event in GA by calling pageTracker._trackPageview('page/here') with JS when the event takes place. It's just as easy as setting up a tracking event in MixPanel. Plus, the segmentation and analytics are far more rich in GA. And you can also tie it in with Google Website Optimizer, which makes multivariate testing easier.

GA tries to appeal to non-coders, so they don't widely publicize their ability to track custom events. But the functionality is there, and it works great. When you consider the fact that GA has more comprehensive analytics and is free (jacquesm you're right on target...MixPanel's is bewilderingly expensive) the choice is a no-brainer.

I love startups that are trying to innovate in web analytics. The MixPanel folks have clearly put a lot of time and thought into their app. But they have a long way to go before they can compete with GA.
Ask HN: Atlanta Hacker News Meetup?
Do hacker news readers in Atlanta want a meetup?
Not only that, it is searchable for eternity, whereas in the past you'd have to visit a newspaper morgue for that.
looks like the '90s
Is true that Google chrome OS to launch within a week ? | Unixmen
One thing he didn't mention that helps is learning and reviewing similar things together. If you learn things that are too similar at different times they can interfere with each other; proactive and retroactive inhibition. If you link them and learn them together, they will not only not interfere with each other, but can help reinforce each other.
Why don't they just change their names? I mean, if it's about finding employment and they don't want their employer know about this - what's the plan to explain that 16 year gap in their resume. Holiday in poland?
I'm down. Name a time & place and if I can make it, I'll be there.
There are a lot of approaches to abstract algebra for adults.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=pd_rhf_s_1?ie=UTF8&search-al...

Which approach, if any, best fits young children?
> personally dislike xmonad

Interesting. I believe that is the first time I've heard someone say that. Could you elaborate?
I typically leave all my sites "zoomed" with Firefox.

And when I temporarily want something bigger, I use Ctrl + scroll-up (Mac).
Vivek Wadhwa, like Rafiq Dossani and AnnaLee Saxenian before him, has been making too many wild extrapolations. Yes, a few start-up type Indian companies will innovate and progress. A larger number of large established companies are likely to take on global competitors successfully.

India taking on Silicon Valley? Won't happen for a long, long time.
- An Indian living in Silicon Valley.
Yes. Not quite as much as you do, but it is also the only site which I have Firefox increase the size of. I'm happy with that though; that's what the zoom feature's for, right?
From my notes I can't tell what this planned WP plugin is supposed to do. Help?
Don't ban him. Just ignore him or stop taking him seriously.

Banning TechCrunch is a dumber idea.
C/C++ are inferior. C and C++ are very bad as a dynamic and interactive languages. C makes it hard to write secure programs and C++ is just horrible in many ways.

But C/C++ are superior as static low-level languages compared to Lisp.

The Haskell programmers should really ask themselves how to get closer to C/C++ in speed - especially since the Haskell language implementations (GHC!) are mostly static and code is usually statically compiled - just like C and C++. If Haskell compilers generate slower code or user code is slow, Haskell users have little excuse, only poorer tools and/or poorer code.

Lisp programmers do have an excuse, since the tools are optimized for safe execution of untyped dynamic (changeable at runtime) code. That's a completely different angle of programming. From there the Lisp compilers try to recover some speed by selectively removing dynamics and safety - where possible or needed. Lisp programmers ask themselves how to improve the compilers, but since both the application domains and the architectures tend to be different, things are hard to compare. C/C++ wins in the static performance contest. Lisp wins in the runtime flexibility contest. But those are really very different domains.

You think that Common Lisp programmers think that C is inferior. The reality is that these are completely different languages developed for different tasks with very different implementation and design decisions.

If you are a Lisp programmer, you can write graphics intensive applications in Lisp - you can also get near to C performance - but it's hard and it often is not full C performance (unless you are using specialized compilers). But still you would be very lonely (unless the company around you uses Lisp), since much of the industry uses C/C++ for graphics (from Low-level drivers to Maya).

Still many Lisp programmers, despite knowing that Lisp and C are different, try to use Lisp either alone or together with C in performance oriented domains: sound processing and image processing were and still are such domains.
I don't find HN's font too small, but I usually have Firefox set up with a readable minimum font size in the first place to evade that problem. This breaks a few sites' designs, but that is rare (and the "victims" are most of the time guilty of other design mistakes, too).
And what is the threshold? These are important things to add to your FAQ.
No. If reducing emissions is the goal, gas taxes are actually superior because the price is proportional the emissions you make. This tax doesn't provide a disincentive against gas guzzlers, but they already have insanely high gas taxes in Europe. To me, this seems like a supremely over-engineered means of taxation.
My Kinesis Advantage meets at least one of your criteria. ;)

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm

And given that I spend so much of my life in front of a keyboard, I'd argue that the Kinesis is reasonably priced, for me. But your mileage may vary.
Metrics in software and physics
Don't rely on Javascript for things this important.
Would you mind being more explicit, for those of us who don't have direct experience with what you're talking about?

At my last start-up, I had an Indian mentor, five years older than me, who had been through exactly what I was going through. I had tremendous respect for him, both “technically and as a person”. I learned more from him than I did from any of my non-Indian friends, co-workers, or bosses.

He's thinking of heading back to India to do a start-up there. I'm not Indian, but I'd love to spend a few years there, so I might go with him. As far as I can tell, he would make a great boss. Is there something I'm missing?
This is just the sort of self-important self-congratulation you would expect from "Forbes".

I would suppose that "Forbes" readers are upper management, and, like George Will, only own a single pair of jeans worn once yearly. Of course looking like "upper management" is the right thing to tell upper management readers who either never had any sense of style to begin with, or have had it ground out of them over the course of years of private boys schools, ivy league colleges, and board room meetings.

They say that everyone in the FBI is either an accountant or a lawyer, and nobody ever meets the lawyers. I think this is an article by an ex-FBI accountant telling you how to dress like an OCD accountant.
Yes! Limiting the maximum width of text lines would be great too.