skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages

To be honest, I do dislike really long pages. I tend to read longer articles piecewise. Read a bit, do something else, read some more, do something else, etc. Long pages usually have very little points where I can anchor my memory. All paragraphs look alike and I have to read several paragraphs before I've found the point where I stopped reading. That's highly distracting. I prefer pages for long articles.
The main purpose of this is not to inflate page view statistics, as such, but to increase the available 'ad inventory'. By making users click, you are able to refresh the page and serve a new ad.
There is a lawsuit, if any real money is involved. Apple just isn't a party to it.
The other thing that I wondered about is why he goes to all the trouble of web scraping when SourceForge (at least) offers an XML export option: https://sourceforge.net/export/
Hackety Hack, like all of _why's projects, got adopted by someone else after his departure: http://github.com/steveklabnik/hacketyhack/

Alas, it doesn't seem to be getting much activity.
I think you might be surprised. My blog, which is about technology and startups, has a fair share of IE6 users.
> The people who do pay have access to much more content, by subscription, than the people who only read what is free.

The amount of free content not behind a NewsCorp paywall far far exceeds the amount that is. This will hold true after every NewsCorp property is subscription only.
http://www.google.com/press/admob/index.html
Right.

And the idea behind the HTML was the same. It doesn't have to be pretty, just some kind of preview. Giving sample images might remove the problem, but when you're trying to figure out how hard the worksheet is going to be by tweaking the configuration, it'd be nice to just see an instant update of what the problems will look like. You could just show a simple plain text representation of a representative problem based on the current input and that would be very helpful in my mind.
Google to Acquire AdMob
Can you elaborate? Pool.com appears to some sort of domain name broker at the moment. While it may not be the most reputable business ever, it seems like it's a cut or two above scamming people into subscribing to some $10/month horoscope service under false pretenses.
What do you mean by "startup technology site"?

from startups.com home page: "It's THE website for business people, entrepreneurs, small business owners, home-based businesses to ask business questions."

startups.com has a wide agenda. It is very likely if startups.com can attract non-tech types to its forum, many will still have IE6.
Google Has Acquired Gizmo5
11 open source software companies ready for big business
I just tried opening up terminal on my MacBook Pro, typing in what you wrote and nothing happened.
or your definition of "overnight"
That paper is for a BS thesis. Some MS students in my old school would struggle to even understand it. There were always pockets of us that did interesting things on the side, but this would go far and beyond above the expectations for the average student.
Thank you so much for that and for your previous post. Exactly what I wanted.
Once you have a Javascript environment, it's not a large jump to emulate a minimal DOM -- see env.js, for example: http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/

With a stub DOM and Javascript interpreter, you can pass generated output from web application views directly into your testing environment and make assertions about the resulting behavior, dynamically-generated DOM nodes, etc.

There are a number of projects similar to this one (for which, sadly, I cannot currently pull up any bookmarks) mostly intended for a similar set of tasks. Being able to bring RSpec or Cucumber to bear on a hairy JS testing job can make the process much more enjoyable.
That's a pretty big leap to go from that quote to what you wrote. You may be correct, but the article makes it sound like you have it on good authority. I might change the wording a bit.
Really? Not that I doubt the placebo effect, but in today's litigious climate, I'd be very surprised if modern doctors were actually engaging in the necessary equivocation to produce the placebo effect.

My take on modern medicine is that most doctors in the U.S. are pretty much limited to cover-your-ass medicine. That is, ordering unnecessary tests and writing unnecessary prescriptions.
No doubt it would!
Microsoft Forensics tool Cofee: Let’s see if the big deal is warranted.
I have a billion dollar idea: Start a grocery store. Seriously. When you have enough money start another. Keep going until you have thousands. It can't fail.

Another billion dollar idea: Start selling well designed Scandinavian furniture really cheap. Build a few megastores around the world, and make sure to squeeze your suppliers to keep prices down.

These two amazing ideas made Sam Walton and Ingvar Kamprad billionaires. Execution you say? Nah, these ideas are so obviously amazing that they've probably spent most of their time in business fending off blonde playmates while drinking martinis at the beach.
I looked at the code. I don't think that'd work.

As for using Javascript from Ruby, it might be quite nice as a language to let your users write extensions and plugins. It's a language where the implementations all have an emphasis on sandboxing.
Who downvoted you? You're right. That's not to say lies are inherently good, but you got flattened down without anybody debating you, and it's an idea worth a conversation.
Google Voice may finally turn into something useful... Very cool. I have always preferred Gizmo over Skype because they use open standards.
It is already done. It is called Homeopathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
;-)
Multicore vs. Cloud Computing
What is the browser you are using? The download pdf file does have an extension for us.

We will include the age targeted and grade based worksheets.
I started using BeautifulSoup a few weeks ago to help write more exact unit tests for front end design. Instead of saying "make sure this page contains abcdef", I can say "pull the exact section that abcdef is supposed to be in, and make sure it is (or conversely, make sure it's NOT showing up when it's not supposed to). If you have access to the HTML code, you can make it a lot easier on yourself by putting eyecatcher IDs or classes in elements and starting from there.
Agreed, on face value it seems a bit nuts to openly announce you're targeting a megacorp like EA. However, Playfish is a tiny company. If they're getting bought out for ~300 Mil I doubt their revenue is much more than 1/10th that, probably maxing at 60 Mil.

Before Playfish announced they're targeting EA's consumers, EA likely didn't think twice about the puny company. Playfish's annual revenue is likely a drop in the ocean to a company making 4.2 billion in annual revenues. Playfish's announcement likely got EA to investigate the company and see that they're making consistent profits and might be a worthy investment.

Football and Soccer players don't hound down the team they want to play for, they get in wherever they can show that they're a major threat to the team they want and then say "make it worth my while!"
he makes this joke in the article
Lies are a bad thing and a big deal. Reality is all we have; lying to people means taking that away from them. So in that sense, lying seems to be up there with depriving someone of their freedom, or physically harming them.

Fortunately, it's pretty hard to figure out what the exact damages are, so the combination of cultural norms against lying, plus penalties for fraud ("fraud" being, basically, "a lie whose cost you can quantify,") will have to do.
Google acquires AdMob for $750 million
view source gave me this (for <noscript>):

Startups.com | Your Business. Your Questions. works best with JavaScript enabled
And they would no doubt be using Playfish's top minds to tailor all EA franchises for social/casual gaming.
I never read that short until now, thank you for posting it!
I like their name, and the company of people involved. :)
Dosbox is a great emulator and works in OSX

http://www.dosbox.com/
Presumably it couldn't be eaten by man or beast.

Oh, but it could. My assumption is that it's a near certainty that some enterprising contractor would sell this stuff as feed, regardless of the damage to animals and humans.
Mondays. Because we're Google and we feel like buying stuff.

(See admob acquisition for 750 mil earlier today- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931306)
I took a somewhat similar route. My math education after grade school was poor. I had disinterested teachers with the exception of one, under whom I advanced quickly and almost enabled me to catch up with my peers, however under the next math instructor and those that followed I again struggled and barely scraped by, often by repeating semesters.

Without the math requisites, I was only able to take introductory programming courses in High School. Those teachers recognized my interest and feed me more advanced material while I was with them, but when I had taken the only classes available without those math prerequisites, we parted ways.

After graduating H.S. I took to writing excessively intricate batch scripts on my family's XT, and later while working on a help desk I checked out this new "HTML" and "JavaScript" stuff by way of WebMonkey tutorials and free hosting on a new service called GeoCities.

Years later, with ASP/VBscript, PHP, and bash experience all from after-hours activities I transitions from systems support and administration to programming as my career, after which my experience and expertise has mushroomed.

I couldn't have come all this way without the resources of the Web to back me up.
Your requirement that there be no external libraries is unfair. It's perfectly valid for a tutorial to start with "Download this package and run the installer," which is easier than any actual programming the reader might do.

There are plenty of great tutorials for PyGame and pyglet. The main issue is that you have to open a terminal.

If you look past Python, Scratch provides a very low barrier to entry for this sort of thing.
Retooling a team to go from programming real games in real languages to making a flash game is a rather absurd prospect. Are they really going to convince people to leave teams working in their Sports division, or get anyone to leave one of their major franchises with real experience?

If I was working on a new Medal of Honour or Battlefield, or even The Sims, you'd have to shoot me in both kneecaps before I'd consider taking my name off a game that could boost my career.

All you're going to get to make these games are either raw flash kiddies, or you have to take over a company with experience in making money on flash games. IMO I'm not surprised one bit, buying a company like Playfish was EA's only move to make.
"Our revenues are down millions of dollars because we don't have the patent" and the royalty stream that would have resulted, he said. "We have no market power. That's the essence of it. You can't protect your interests." He said competitors have entered the market, and utilities themselves have "reverse-engineered" WeatherWise processes

You mean you can't get a government-backed monopoly on your product, so you actually have to compete?! With competitors who charge lower prices?! Cry me a river.
See also, Merlin Mann's "Noise-to-Noise Ratio" series:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlin/sets/72157622077100537/d...
Findwords.org - open source version of morewords.com
"deal making" is pretty damn important, I don't know why you think it's some intermediary step like making a phone call or sitting in a meeting.
Makes perfect sense. A year and a half ago Eric Schmidt said this: Schmidt cited the iPhone as the first mobile device with a good web browser and that more devices will come to market, enabling advertising to become personal, during an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The CEO predicted that within a few years, mobile advertising would generate more revenue than advertising on today’s web.

P.S. I wrote about this last week, speculating that the Android platform is really about expanding the mobile search ad inventory. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922429
When I read 'OO-style' sadly I immediately thought of sugar to create private variables/methods and some lame class-based inheritance (which I strongly advocate is nigh useless in JS).

Now I understand you mean 'OO-style' in the message passing / Smalltalk sense of the phrase. Which is much better IMHO, but might be lost on monolingual practitioners using "broken" OO style in their languages.
I imagine that some prescriptions for antibiotics by doctors are more or less because the doctor doubts it calls for antibiotics but rationalizes that the placebo effect will help, coupled with patient's angst that they may leave the doctor's office empty-handed.
Not all lies are evil.

You lie to your kids when you tell them the tooth fairy and Santa Claus exist to make them happy.

You lie to the guy robbing you when he asks whether you've got more money on you

You lie to your cancer stricken grandmother when she asks you whether she'll survive.

If you don't I'd say you were a heartless bastard ;-) Life isn't as simple as you make it appear in your comment.
This is regarding an article covered in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930730
If you focus on your customers and your customers don't pay anything you still die.
How many general computer magazines still exist?

The web has made printing code redundant. Why type it in when you can cut and paste?
greps & cuts on the access logs.
I was actually in Detroit over the summer visiting some extended family, and was awestruck. It's really quite remarkable... within maybe ten blocks of the (surprisingly nice) Renaissance Center and re-developed waterfront area, there were entire city blocks that were completely overgrown with ivy and other such plants. It felt like I was inside the pages of "The World Without Us". I can totally see the urban agriculture thing working out in Detroit, except for the industrial contamination problem.

Of course, what really struck me was the abrupt transition we saw driving to the north and east along Jefferson Ave. For block after block, it's nothing but abandoned factories, vacant lots, and eerily empty and overgrown neighborhoods, with the only operational (i.e., not boarded up) businesses being convenience stores and the occasional bait shop. Then, all of a sudden, without any transition, the scenery changes to a ritzy suburb. I swear, it was a sharp enough contrast that my mind was reeling from psychic whiplash for the rest of the day.

It was like the NYC good-block/bad-block phenomenon, only on a massive geographic scale and with the volume turned up to 11.
Testing: Chances and Challenges in an Agile World
Thoughts about testing in agile projects. What are the effects of acceptance test driven development and behavior driven development?
I'm against patents in general. I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components. Now that many patents are based on protecting the right of someone who expresses a simple concept with or without any effort in implementation, I think they've lost any meaningful value they had.
I'm interested to see the merging of Google Talk and Google Voice. The one missing piece of the puzzle was the SIP infrastructure so you could dial out from Google Voice without using standard phone lines.
> journalism from around the world with different points of view

Journalism isn't supposed to have a point of view. It's supposed to give you the facts and stay neutral.
pg is completely correct regarding "principled" arguments against software patents. There's no consistent way to assert "temporary property rights to ideas about physical devices are fine, but owning ideas about math is morally wrong".

If you (quite sensibly) throw out the obfuscating language about morality and property rights, however, it's certainly possible to assert "temporary, government-enforced monopolies on ideas of this type will encourage innovation, but government-granted monopolies on ideas of that other type will hinder progress and encourage misuse". This is a statement of factual nature, that may be correct or incorrect, but is not logically inconsistent. It also makes it more obvious that patents, despite being called "IP", are not actually about property at all--they're a regulatory hack, the government deliberately distorting the market with the goal of subsidizing particular behaviors, namely innovation and invention.
What will Murdoch do when Twitter hijacks the links?
Egad, Mr Urbanophile is here! I suspected you were a computer guy but you're fairly coy about your Clark Kent side on your blog. Welcome!
Since 1987 I have personally completed over 40,000 one-on-one, face-to-face sessions.

So that's at least 5 of these interviews every single day of the year for 22 years. I'm not really buying it.
All of which applies very neatly to the other examples of generally evil stuff:

You send your kids to their room if they've misbehaved, which doesn't mean it's acceptable to lock a stranger up in their home.

You can injure or robber (or not particularly care if he gets injured), which doesn't mean you should feel justified in clobbering a stranger.

You pull the plug on a relative in an irreversible coma, even though starving her to death under normal circumstances would be frowned on.

These are all cases in which violence -- a bad thing -- is used to prevent worse things. The fact that you give specific examples of when lying is a good plan should be evidence to you that it often isn't. Which doesn't prove that it's evil, just that it could be.
Very informative article for NoSQL noobs like myself. If I understood him correctly: Scalability (an implementation) is the partitioning and distribution of data for databases across multiple machines working interdependently. Data and query model (an interface) is the essence of NoSQL since it is the equivalent of what I'm used to doing in SQL, which is hitting the database with a query; yet, the obvious advantage of NoSQL is that we no longer have to hit it (the db) with SQL and can instead take advantage of an API that queries our database specifically designed for however we are storing it (into our data-model). The API is as much as an interface as SQL is in a relational-database design. Lastly, persistence (from what I can tell, an engine optimized for a data-model) is what I think NoSQL is really all about because each engine is storing and fetching data according to specific a data-model which is optimized for run-time.

Please correct if I'm misunderstanding anything or everything. Also would someone care to elaborate more (educate me) on scalability? Is this same sort of scalability Amazon's EC2 servers are optimized for?
I would strongly recommend outsourcing that unless you know what you're doing. Dealing with spam block lists can easily turn into a full time job.
Very simple, yet insightful article. This is something everyone should look out for-not just entrepreneurs. When it comes down to it, we're measured by our results not by our efforts.
The only one not evil in that case is the lie to the guy robbing you.
SEOmoz | Social Media Marketing Guide, Directory, & Resources
Knowing whether I could generate anything more advanced than what was shown on the available worksheets stopped me from bothering to register. In other words, having to register in order to discover if "this is it or there's more" was an impediment to registering.

For example, my son is studying basic graphs and functions. y=3X + b. Would have been more likely to register if I had reason to believe I could generate worksheets for that type of work.

More generally, I saw no reason to register at all.

I liked the simplicity.

I also like the pdf generation, contrary to others. I liked seeing the results as-is immediately, and my browser (FF on linux) had no trouble opening the pdf for me in an external reader.

However, it would be nice to see an example graphic/screen shot somewhere: two thumbnails, leading to a worksheet graphic and its answer sheet.
Gmail - Sweating the Small Stuff
If you’re cleaning up your user’s input in your views you’re doing it wrong
Two things, one: the world is a lot larger than just the US.

Two: doctors aren't going to go out of their way to tell their patients they just got some compressed sugar because that would take away the effect.

There is a class of patients that will run to the GP every chance they get and they won't leave until the doctor 'has done something' which translates in to 'had prescribed them some medicine'.

In these cases doctors prescribe placebos without any qualms at all, and to the happiness of both the patient (the placebo works!), insurance company (they're cheap) and the GP (patient leaves them alone).
Interesting. I've been thinking about the 'Small World' problem for the Facebook puzzles and came up with the quadtree concept, but I never even imagined something like the geohash/Hilbert curve.
Right, because you couldn't have users both post news stories on Twitter and have the pages be indexed by Google. That's simply not possible.
I think they were a great idea for a time when a product could be easily taken apart and reimplemented based on looking at its physical components.

You've actually got it somewhat backwards--patents were in large part originally motivated by inventions where reverse engineering was not possible--metalworking techniques, for instance. By granting a temporary monopoly, patents would encourage inventors to publish their ideas. Otherwise, to protect their advantage, inventors would keep their methods secret, preventing others from improving on them and eventually taking the secret to the grave with them.

In that situation, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that patents were a bad idea.
Avoid this Deceptive TV Commercial and Website | TechJaws.com
I'm curious what framework you use to generate the pdfs?
Anti-biotics are not prescribed unless there is some need for them because there are serious detrimental side effects of using anti-biotics when they are not strictly speaking required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance
An Interview With Chris Coyier
Ok, as clueless as he is, not even Mark Cuban can believe Twitter and Facebook live updates are going to supplant search engines. They serve completely different purposes. Traffic from each source is almost completely independent of the other. The traffic you lose from Google News might be made up by Twitter, but it is never going to make up for the loss of Google organic search results.

It is also ironic how each news outlet is so enthusiastic about their competitors blocking Google. They know they would just get their competitor's traffic for free.

This jumping on the Rupert Murdoch saber-rattling bandwagon is getting old really quick. I will believe the viability of their alternative business models when I see one of these media moguls actually block Google in their robots.txt file.
Not a good idea, for one thing it is against the law in most states.

If you do not manage the composting process correctly you can transmit pathogens that are dangerous to humans.
Good point.

The way we do it is to identify the people we want to drop first, then send them 2 or 3 blasts with increasingly dire subject lines and a huge "opt me back in" button before we unsubscribe them. Somewhere around 1% of people opt back in that way -- even if they haven't loaded images or clicked a single link in years. My impression is that it's mostly people who are reading the message on a crummy old Blackberry or similar device with poor HTML support.
€26-million seed fund launched for Irish startups
Is Jaywalking in the Eye of the Beholder?
Is anyone else's Bubble Alarm going off? These are the kind of articles that are often a sign.