skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm aware of why Twitter is successful despite Facebook. Although when it originally came out a lot of people didn't understand what the difference was. The example just points out that things can be similar and still pull away from the pack because of the small things they do differently.

My tone, which obviously text does not convey, was playful and light-hearted.

We all know you don't post news to YC to get fluffy love comments, you post it to get 100 reasons why you suck. We don't take it personally.
The old metalink was not pretty, but it got the job done. Nobody I know has liked the Flash version since the day it was unveiled. Everybody continued to use "classic" metalink. Why Oracle has persisted in pushing this on the world I don't know. The LAST thing you want when your database is down is to wait on a gdamn flash app to load.

Support ticket systems are not SUPPOSED to look like a marketing site. They are supposed to be fast, lightweight, and usable because most of the people using them have a problem to solve. Now.
Haha, getting uber hate there:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a2zr1/dear_prog...
See my comment below regarding narrow vision.
Added a number of words in name hint on the guessing page! Hope this works!
They need to concentrate on making this work in closed environments where the developer/designer is certain that a compatible browser is being used; it will be many years before someone can use this for a practical application on the "open web."

Basically, iPhone-specific websites could make them all of their money, if they could make it work correctly with the browser (the front page looked fine, but the font sample page seemed to be a bit off). In fact, I would use and pay for this myself if it were marketed as an enhanced typography library for iPhone web apps.
Thanks for your excellent idea. I added a number of words hint to the guess page -- let me know if you think this'll do it :D
Some concrete numbers on the productivity differences would help.

The chart in Software Estimation by McConnell, adapted from Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II is that projects are 2.5 * bigger in C than Java, and 6 * bigger in C than they would be in Perl or Smalltalk. Assuming that Python is equivalent to Perl, that would mean that Java requires 2.4 times as many lines. Those estimates are from 2000. Both languages have improved since then, but I'll go with that estimate because I don't have more recent figures backed up by quantitative data rather than someone's opinion.

Research across many languages suggests that lines of code/developer/day are roughly constant, so Python development should average 2.4 times as fast as Java.

Let's suppose that your programmers are paid $80K/year. On average people cost about double their salary (after you include benefits, tools, office space, etc), so each programmer costs you $160K/year. Per Python programmer replaced you need 2.4 Java programmers which means an extra $224K/year in cost. Let's suppose your computers have an operating cost of $14K/year. (I am throwing out a figure for regular replacement, networking, electricity, sysadmins, etc.) Then the cost per Python programmer replaced will cover 16 more machines.

And it can get worse. Research into productivity versus group size suggests that productivity peaks at about 5-7 people. When you have more developers than that the overhead for communication exceeds productive work done unless you introduce processes to limit direct communication. Those processes themselves reduce productivity. As a result you don't get back to the same productivity a team of 5-7 people has until you have a team of around 20 people. If you grow you'll eventually need to make this transition, but it should be left as long as possible.

Therefore if a Python shop currently has less than a dozen webservers per developer, switching to Java does not look like it makes sense. And furthermore if you've got 3-7 Python developers then the numbers suggest that a Java switch will force you over the maximum small team size and force you to wind up with a large team at much higher expense.

For this reason I believe that the vast majority of companies using agile languages like Perl, Ruby and Python would be worse off if they switched to Java. When you serve traffic at the scale of Google this dynamic changes. But most of us aren't Google.
How to build a Social Networking Website with Drupal
Rate My iPhone App: CDIP for Surfers
That is absolutely amazing. Any chance that you might share, or was it (unsurprisingly) very personal?
too true :P I'm working on a bit.ly-esque "your recent cupidco.des" list that'll help you keep track of your most recent (per-computer) codes. I'll also throw the name up on the monitoring page, too, for good measure.
What is keeping women out of tech? Do you really want to know?
My tone, which obviously text does not convey, was playful and light-hearted.

Ah, my apologies then. :)
Actually I believe a few ar problems with the parent poster:
"* Rearranging everything to fit their naive 'filesystem hierarchy'(this completely fucks up a decent packager like Ruby Gems)"

The FHS is a known standard which works with every language. What specifically about Ruby makes it unique amongst all other software?
There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that I would ever do this whatsoever. That's so sleazy. I'm not looking to exploit people -- just to channel my cheesiness into something productive and possibly make my own crush (cupidco.de/a) smile :)
I think part of the problem is that at the more extreme end they think that the world economy is going to collapse, so that if they're right, there will be no way those contracts will be honoured.
I'll take aaron.reddit.com. :-)

(Ran across a backup of paul in my apartment the other day... Memories.)
15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee
Load Rails conditionally with Rack
The Content Delusion
Thanks! I wanted to keep the site as simple as possible; sign up is a pain in the butt and typically totally unnecessary.

It should be possible to let you recycle your cupidco.de (so as to switch out the crush name, etc). Is that what you mean? I'll look into that tonight.
Heh. Suppose a CEO pretty much single-handedly runs a company into the ground and ensures its failure shortly after he leaves - but he also wins the investors a tidy exit. Is he a good CEO? :-)

-t
this is a little old but could be used for very approximate approximations: http://www.joelcomm.com/app_store_ranktosales_revealed.html
How to track down your stolen laptop using a free utility
I'm really sorry to hear that :( I hope that this isn't too grand a gesture though I'd be very excited were it to become one! Computer hackery is how I've always "expressed" myself. I didn't really know else how to do something extra special for her than to code up something sweet and so I went with my gut. That stinks that things soured between you two :(
They are, hence the Unladen Swallow project. But the improvements are that are possible are constrained by the language and having to maintain backwards compatibility. If Google were to just take the language and do with it what they want, they would risk alienating the community which would weaken the utility of the language. So while improvements are being made, the types of improvements are limited.
I wasn't sure which would be more fun. I decided to just post things as is and then evolve as people started giving me feedback. Speaking of which, thanks for your suggestion!
How to turn on file extensions and hidden files viewing in Windows 7
I'm using Rhino on the JVM.

Imagine writing Java code, without having to type classnames all the time and you have a rough approximation of what its like.

(And yes, you can import arbitrary Java bits into Rhino. It is "freaking sweet")
If start ups shouldn't pay for the privileges of pitching, why should employees pay for the right to pitch to employers?
Thanks! On rereading the comment, my tone sounds a bit flippant. Sorry about that.
"An easy example illustrating this point is maybe the following. Consider the sequence 'MDMD' and suppose that you can only store, say these 4 letters. A 4-letter-strategy might predict something like 'MD' for the next two letters. If those letters though represent the initial of the weekdays, the next 3 letters will be 'FSS'. It is impossible though to predict this sequence solely using information about the past on the last 4 letters. The situation changes if we can store up to 7 letters 'FSSMDMD'. Then a prediction is possible."

I was confused for a while, then I realized the guy is german.

Montag (Monday)
Dienstag
Mittwoch
Donnerstag
Freitag
Samstag
Sonntag (Sunday)
Travel for Free (even if you don't fly very often)
Objective-C Tuesdays: The do...while loop
Related: http://lloogg.com

I provide this service as free for now, its more than one year at this point, not sure about the future. Well at least this is how Redis got started :) (*SQL was not good for real-time stats, really).
I did too at a previous job where we had a network scanner that could identify (in theory) credit card numbers on the fly as they were accessed or stored into database and file shares.

The app I wrote was a few dozen lines of perl and was used as a QA tool. You could tell it to generate X number of credit card numbers, and also specify flags for generating a mix of numbers (all common US and Int'l formats) as well as a mix of valid/invalid numbers (based on checksum data).

It was a fun spend of a couple hours, and it was amazing to determine how simple it was to generate valid numbers, but then they're also useless without CVV, billing zip and street address for the most part.
There is no guarantee that the price increases will be gradual. If exporters of oil all have low time preference (which they do), then plummet could come very suddenly as wells start to go dry with no replacements (eg, an 80% drop off over a ten year period). There is also no guaranteed that we'll be able to find a suitable replacement. Only nuclear has anything close to the EREOI of oil, and nuclear plants takes a lot of time to build.
Unfortunately, for me anyway, the text on that page is really difficult to read and seems somewhat blurry. Perhaps not the best example...
I think the answer, if you don't wish to mark up your text, is to be verbose in your intentions. A message like "Great idea." is easier to misinterpret than "Great idea! Seriously, I never thought of it that way." Qualifiers can go a long way. They might be clumsy, but I think they're the best alternative.
The problem with analyzing companies like this is that they don't really admit of a traditional value-based assessment. What is the value proposition of a service like Vidly, really? It shortens the process of posting a video link to Twitter by a few steps. Yes, I'm understating what they do, but when you distill it down to its actual benefit to an end user, that's it.

Option 1:
1) Open youtube.com.
2) Create a youtube account (First time only).
3) Post video to Youtube.
4) Open twitter.com, or a Twitter client.
5) Post a tweet with the Youtube link.

Option 2:
1) Open vidly.com (or client?).
2) Post video and tweet to Twitter.

You've reduced the steps it takes to post a video to Twitter from 5 to 2; big whoop, right? But looking at this alone misses the point. Here's where it gets interesting: given that they're both free, and that users actually know about Option 2, most of them will choose Option 2 without hesitation. Besides that, the relative complexity of using Youtube for this task might have been a barrier for many people who otherwise would've posted videos. When you combine this with good marketing, the vibrant user base of Twitter, and a large mass of people hungry to broadcast videos, big things can happen.
The Legal Rights of Photographers [pdf]
If you want to turn it into an app, ever, go with drupal. You're more familiar with WP, so use that as the default unless the "friend" can give you a list of concrete reasons to go with drupal.

When it all comes down to brass tacks, use what you know (especially since getting it rapidly deployed is probably more important than making sure it has a billion eCommerce modules and hooks).
What is the SQLite testing strategy?
Function Points/LOC is about the same for Smalltalk/Lisp/Ruby/Python. There are Smalltalk and Lisp implementations that run impressively fast. Also, memory use is more efficient. Library support is much better on Ruby and Python, however, due to the size and vibrancy of the user communities.

If I were Google, I would develop a server-oriented language on top of the V8 virtual machine, using the "good parts" of Javascript as a compiler target. Add optional typing and type inference, but only as a parse/compile time facility to provide information to the programmer. Add a functional programming sub-grammar with the same facility.

Then, add a fast Python implementation using the same engine, with strong support for calls from one language to the other.

This way, Google would get the benefit of both the vibrant Python community and a fast, scalable VM.
So (at least small) Python programs tend to have less lines than Java ones - OK. That makes them maybe less bug prone. But Java, being laughed at all the time, has got to be one of the most mature and supported programming languages out here. It means it have an outstanding toolset on every platform, and that the Virtual Machine is extremely well optimized. Damn, Java is almost as fast as C++ when written well. After that, it depends on the programmers skill. That's another discussion :)
A Startup A Day on YC RFS #1
The problem is that there is way of the developers to filter the companies - I don't want any company to be able to see my CV, I want much more info and control, if I am to pay (especially that much money) I want better service, uptime guarantees etc (I can't look a gift horse in the mouth, but only a moron will buy one without looking well at it) - and the Stack Overflow team will never go for that.
Actually I really appreciate your comment.. I took the time to go back to his page and read some of his other essays, and yes, there is some great stuff there.

Maybe his latest post just needs to be edited down a little bit.
More importantly, the line between generating a good fake and fraud becomes thinner the better your fake becomes.
Closure Fail
Somebody dropped the ball here.

Not only is this possible with a few clicks -- it's already possible with no clicks at all.

It's an entire company devoted to replacing one feature that already works fine on an immensely popular site.

Just set up AutoShare. When you upload a video, you get a tweet (and FB and others get notified as well if you've set it up to cascade)

Where was the value again?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGsF0YR7NU (instructions on how to set this up on YouTube)
Wow, what a trip down memory lane.

I ran across this sometime in '99 or '00 and got inspired to create a Flash presentation of all the proofs. It got a little out of hand when I decided to do the same for Apollonius' conics, which in the days of pre-1.0 Actionscript meant rolling your own trigonometric functions.

That PC later crashed and I lost everything, but this site is still kicking around. I love the internet.
I don't know whether it is by design but it answers: "You've cracked the cupidcode" almost for any input.

edit: Oh, I see: "The system will tolerate names within an edit-distance of 2,"
Why? The notion of oil going up in price in the future is already priced into oil futures contracts. Go and take a look at some.

The only way you would make money going long on oil futures is to correctly predict that oil will increase in value more quickly than the market does.
This is just an enormous advertisement
Feds Charge $522,000 For One FOIA Request
Towards frameless (clockless) video
The Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact
It's very easy for individual traders to get slaughtered in the futures markets

I've done far better short than long. Fundamentally, I should be long, but there's a lot more going on there besides simple market forces.
still, your bandwidth usage is pretty much the equivalent of what comes with a single dedicated server.
Mocking, Cappuccino and You - Project OSL
Apollo 11 Landing Site
"Addiction" is a term with a very specific medical (psychological) definition: broadly, a compulsive behavior that negatively impacts your life. I don't see where you have addressed a link between entrepreneurship and compulsion, or negative life impact. Can you elaborate.
It isn't a language, it's a notation. It's like math. No one tries to read math like an English sentence, so why would you try that with Haskell or even other programming languages?

I think it's time for us to stop calling them "programming languages" and call them something else. I suggest notation, but even "Awkdawdkawd" would be an improvement :|
Funny thing... I've stopped hanging around Reddit for the last few weeks, and my outlook on life has noticeably improved... I used to be a very cynical, see the worst in everything sort of guy, but once I distanced myself from others like this, I've found that everything is suddenly... better.

YMMV, but I'm not going to go back to being a reddit regularly anytime soon :)
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/list-of-stackexcha...
Just philosophizing here... Falling head over heels for a girl without knowing if it will be reciprocated is not much unlike building a beautiful webapp without a concrete business model planned yet.

All the best on both.
Whole lotta snark there. Murdoch, of course, has properties in a dying industry and he's got to do what he can. Not sure why that requires so much sarcasm. If he succeeds, the Guardian will be right there in line to do the same.
It's notation, not a natural language stop treating it as such.
Cells are great. You're welcome.
Thanks. Makes a little more sense now.

So basically: it's complicated.
Before we started Vidly, we did a test on YouTube out of interest and it took us well over 15 minutes to sign up and post a video to YouTube. It takes a very small fraction of that to post to Vidly.
Why Oracle has persisted in pushing this on the world I don't know.

They don't want to admit that they wasted X amount of dollars on something that no one uses. Better to make some money and try to justify the development costs.

You can also tell that the company is run by marketing people by this.
Social media challenges social rules
I was all set to write a snarky comment about the WSJ doing another piece on how (retrospectively) brilliant some outlier founder was until I read the piece and discovered that "wisdom" refers to a series of blog posts written by AdMob's Employee #1. Skip the WSJ and go straight to the source:

http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/23/omar-hamoui-on-ideas-an...
http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/25/omar-hamoui-on-deals-an...
http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/26/omar-hamoui-on-sales-an...
http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/27/omar-hamoui-on-competit...
http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2009/05/29/omar-hamoui-on-communic...
Well, the government generally uses its own servers, I think, and not hosted servers. So they'd be getting and responding to the complaints directly, and they've got all the lawyers they need, thanks to our tax dollars. Plus, it just might backfire by destroying what little government transparency we've got through the web.

It would be more interesting -- and directly painful -- to do this to political candidates' campaign sites. But of course, doing so would be fraudulent, and we'd like to take the high road.
Or the Guardian et al will happily let non-Murdoch-approved search engines search their archives, hoping to fill a Newscorp-shaped hole. I guess that scenario is why Murdoch is trying to attack fair-use.
Zaproyce
Sorry, but your article is completely wrong, and your site doesn't allow comments, so I'll have to post here.

The DMCA works very well for copyright owners, our users, and us as a web host. Here's how the process should work for an abusive DMCA request:

1- DMCA request (seemingly legitimate) is received, including a statement under penalty of perjury that the sender is the copyright owner.

2- Host contacts the site owner/removes the content.

3- Site owner is the legitimate owner of the content, so files a DMCA counter-notification with the host, with a statement under penalty of perjury that they are the copyright owner.

4- Host immediately brings disputed content back online. One of the parties is guilty of perjury, and they are both free to duke it out in court to have the content removed. Content can and will remain online until a court orders it removed. Web host has no liability for content remaining online (even if the counter-notification was bullshit), and the matter is presented and judged where it should be for such a dispute: in court.

If you believe that someone filed a bogus DMCA notice against your content, immediately file a counter-notice and your content should be immediately (or shortly, if not automated) back online. Then, you can sue the person who filed the complaint, and they will have quite a bit of responsibility and liability.

Sounds like the real fault in the process is that no-one understands it and that the system doesn't make itself accessible to the average lay-person. Maybe what we really need is a site that explains everything more clearly and makes filing a notice/counter-notice much simpler.
Go: an experimental language from Google
If you go down this route of letting your clients install the software on their own servers, you are essentially selling enterprise software.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.. For one, you can charge quite a bit more for the software, support, configuration, etc. Just understand that it's a very different kind of business and sales model than a typical web application - know beforehand what you're getting yourself into.
Google Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++
Selfish generosity, or the value of n+1
Oatmeal is designed purely for viral distribution. Go here instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
I knew it blocked the adenosine receptors, but I didn't realize it actually triggered adrenaline and dopamine release. I guess that explains one of the reasons I get cravings even when I'm not tired. Makes me realize it is perhaps more of a drug than just a trick for staying awake and something with a good taste. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate my intake.
Ostensibly more useful links:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20091110_free_a...

http://www.freeholidaywifi.com/
A counter-example in six words:

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn

is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. http://www.litkicks.com/FlashFiction/

See, no emoticons :)
No wonder you, amoeba, think so.
Brilliant layout & design.