skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Good news, you're making more than you thought: 1000 paying customers * $5-10 / month * 12 months = $60K-$120K/yr.

2) Bad news, as others mentioned you may not even get 1%.

Also, everyone tries to get covered in blogs. That's the standard tactic. Since most companies fail, you need to do something more than standard in order to succeed. Now, that may just be having a fantastic service, but you're unlikely to achieve that before you have customers to help you define "fantastic".
Mon Dieu. Apple Store Coming the Louvre
Very intriguing. Hmm.
Some people refer to carbonated sugary beverages as "soda" and others say "pop", but both are still speaking the same language.
Or to have a different opinion of significant I guess.

Python has docstrings and list comprehensions and keyword arguments and generator functions and readable syntax. To me, these are all significant differences from Perl.

See also Eric Raymond's piece "Why Python?" at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882
Best Escorts from Bucharest Romania
I tried using Joost. It was obviously using SDL, and had a kind of zooming video interface. It was so impossible to figure out the user interface, that I never got to see any videos!
Heh, I only had time to Wikipedia the first one! ;-)
I think the author is really trying to target people like myself who can't imagine spending money on something that's basically a text editor. Now he'll get me to try it, and if I think it's valuable I may fork over the $10 for the upgrade. If not, I wouldn't have bought it anyway.
I doubt that I would continue shopping at a store if they kicked me out for taking a picture of the barcode on a product.
Is that actually endorsed by the actual Paul Graham?
People like to look at rates of change, or if that isn't favorable to their argument, the rate of the rate of change. With enough operations that remove the "+ c" term, you can win any argument.

This results in:

"The total number of people that have ever used Ruby is greater than the rate of people switching to Perl."

"Clearly Perl is dead!! My decision to use Ruby is justified with mathematical fact!"
Customer relationships matter to growing a business
I think Zed's pretty much done with Rails. He said he'd only use it if absolutely necessary.
Oh, please...

Perl, Python and Ruby are quite similar scripting languages -- same paradigm, very similar niches. Modern Perl today is arguably in a good position for productivity (see Moose, CPAN, Best Practices book, Perl 6 getting ready for publishing, etc).

The reason we see the flame wars and hype seems to be competition; these languages fill the same niche.

Ruby looks quite nice and Python seems usable. But personally, I find the hype and language war mentality you see every time Perl etc are mentioned as distasteful. I would be embarrassed to be identified with that.

Edit: jrockway already did a good job of beating this horse to death, it seems.
I think I know why you've gotten negative reactions on HN. You seem to crave the exactness of a compiler yet you dislike nitpicking your statements.

Have you seriously never heard the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words"? It's a very common saying. The point is that an image can convey a lot, not that you need a certain number of significant figures in your image:word ratio. Lighten up.
But Google says they don't use virtualization.
Whatever could possibly give you that impression from what I wrote? You've read way, way too much into my use of the word "modest".

As far as I can tell, Guido's goal with Python 3000 was not to invent anything. It was to clean up the language in minor ways. That's well and that's good, but it's silly to compare that with Larry's goal for Perl 6.
I'm currently using the 30-day trial of WriteRoom to write my NaNoWriMo novel. I had been thinking about buying the program, but wasn't sure if it was worth $25. I recently decided it was, so was going to buy it when my free trial was up. Then this comes up...

I like the software enough that I might decide to buy it even though I can get it for free now. I know I'm not going to buy any of the other software from Hog Bay, so that seems like it might be the right thing to do.
I bet it has to do with improved mice. Having to move towards the \/ and keep hitting that to scroll = pain in the ass.

Now you just click on the mouse wheel and scroll
Simply Scala: Try Scala in the browser
What do you think of Perl 6 so far?
I'd shoot for about 80% of the starting salary you'd pay if they were a new full time employee just getting out of college.
Is Owning a Dog Worse Than Owning a Hummer?
But the biggest cost would be the elevator itself, rather than the platform required to hold it. But still, it sounds like something from a Bruce Sterling novel, so it gets my vote.
I think one problem is that there are two different ways people can vote. One is to cast a vote for or against a comment, expressing your opinion. This works well when there the point total is low.

The other way is to vote towards how many points you think is should have. So if something has 15 points, if I agree with it but think it's not that good to have 15 points, I sometimes downvote it. Likewise, I'll upvote some heavily downvoted comments because they weren't that bad. I figure no comment should be below -1 unless it's overtly belligerent or trollish.
Perl is one of those "expected" utility languages everybody (developers) should have some familiarity with. I don't think it's generally considered for app development. But if somebody needs to do some quick, 1-off data processing, a person that knows a bit of Perl can knock it off in a small fraction of the time as somebody that doesn't.

I have a hard time hiring developers that don't know at least a smattering of the Rubbish Lister.
Your two javascript examples are fantastic. Thank you for explaining this in a very clear way.
The concept isn't clear enough. Either that or there's not enough content yet. Or maybe I have to sign up? I'm confused.
I like what he says about learning a new language every year and I sincerely want to do that. However if you're in a Java shop and are learning Ruby/Python on your own, how do you keep from forgetting it. If you don't use it, you lose it right?
OpenOffice launches mouse with 18 buttons, 52 commands
yeah this is awkward and confusing.

EDIT: Anybody have any clarification on this they'd care to share?
I might check this out if they had a category for bass guitars.
Great link. Thanks for posting a link to a blog post about the actual science.

It's always good to consider issues of experiment design

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

when reading any news article.
Try a little simple SEO. It was true when I started creating websites in 1995, and it is true today. The page Title is the most important part of your page to search engines. Your <title>KartMe</title> doesn't help you at all. Keywords in a coherent phrase will treat you well. The Title is your friend. Oh, and use the meta description tag as well, while forgetting the meta keyword tag which Google ignores.
It's wierd, I read long articles like this, and think "This is more readable than modern webpages" even though it's a HUGE article. Is it possible people aren't writing as well as in 1993?

I'm guilty too - I used to write 20,000 word web-based articles in 1997 which my friends read without saying "It's too long!". Now I can barely write a blog entry (although I can write long emails).
>>Why is it that every 3 months there is a new article defending Perl's vitality?

You don't think a defensive attitude might have something to do with finding "Perl is dead/unreadable" trolls every time it is mentioned on the net? Including on HN.
Your explanation here is very, very helpful. I just copied and pasted it into a file for later reference. Thank you for taking the time to explain this!
Here is the list so far...

http://twitter.com/wdm954/startup-entrepreneurs

If anyone else wants on post your @username here.
A clean page with no distractions or links always snaps me into "reading" mode. It's why I like Instapaper and Readable so much.
Chances are he used django for it. He has blog posts on his new found love for django and his ratings code is in python. According to the Lamson (his project) FAQ, Lamson was influenced by django's features and structure.
Definitely cool but it would get expensive quickly.
at least learn to spell his name!

Thank you for this most kind and substantial observation. In my defense, Hoyle used to joke of himself like that since concieving his steady-state cosmology where matter constantly flowed out of a "hole"; his autobiography "Home is Where Wind Blows" is also a good read.

In my opinion that paper is on the list of the 10 most important discoveries in science

Took cosmology course (with very distinguished cosmologist) and heard of that in passing. Since then forgotten, sorry (It was that important to me, maybe as a footnote to the αβγ mechanism. Of course this says more about my ignorance than importance of Hoyle's legacy).

So then, I view Hoyle as a crank out of my ignorance, you view Penrose as a crank out of your apparent ignorance. Further discussion would not be a rational argument.
Not quite: projects written by Googlers have the 'Google' label, which is unusable by normals.

Official Google products are not hosted as normal 'projects': the URLs are code.google.com/product or code.google.com/apis/product instead of code.google.com/p/project.
thanks for explaining why starting the title with "all" is awkward!
IPhone Devs: What do you think of this web app so far?
iPhone Developers:

I've been working on this web application for the past few months. In a nutshell, it makes it really easy to get into using Push Notifications as it removes the need for developing and managing your own Push Notification provider. We handle everything behind the scenes and expose a simple REST API to send notifications and interact with the service.

We still have a few usability problems (number one being certificate uploading), but what do you think of it so far? Would you use a service like this in your application(s)?

http://pushyapp.com/
Clickable link: http://pushyapp.com/
Youporn is a top 50 site and was started in 2006.
Features to Look for in a TV Tuner for Laptop
Planning to buy a tv tuner card for your laptop? Have a look at this before buying one.
What does Google Suggest suggest about the state of humanity?
Yeah this isn't freemium at all according to the pricing plans here: http://scoutapp.com/subscriptions

Evernote is a much better example of a freemium model.
A CEO’s Dilemma: Should I Take My Burning Man Pics off Facebook?
Are you kidding? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926922
I liked the way he applies moderately useful statistics to a real world application, mostly just as an example of how we all could be using the standard deviation along with the mean.
If you haven't read about them on HN, they probably never launched.
I have a hard time believing that an individual or partnership without limited liability has a similar ability as a corporation to accumulate and hold assets (unless they have a corrupt government protecting them).

The risks of operating without limited liability are rather high. The ability to issue shares to millions of people is also rather powerful. The corporation is a massive government subsidy to anyone who wants to manage a legal entity with limited liability, and the ability to raise funds in a big way.

Managing a partnership or any non-government created entity with thousands if not millions of partners is quite difficult.

Contracts cannot provide the same limited liability that the government can.

Simple example: if the driver of a car for a partnership runs over and kills someone in the course of his job -- contracts won't stop the family of the killed person from going after the assets of the natural persons of the partnership. With corporations it would be more impossible to go after shareholder assets.

Limited liability is huge; without it, lawyers would find many ways to get to assets that they can't now.

Also, contracts are not much to hide behind as compared to the government. Contracts can be busted, interpreted in unusual ways, etc. The limited liability offered by the government to shareholders is rather fool-proof.
>One thing I've noticed, though, is that the Perl community is better at stealing from Ruby and Python than those communities are at stealing from us. DBIx::Class is significantly more advanced than any Python or Ruby ORM that I know of, KiokuDB is the only sane object database among those three languages, etc., etc. But Ruby and Python still don't have anything close. OTOH, Python's WSGI and Ruby's Rack are great ideas... so the Perl community now has PSGI and Plack. So you can see why I find it compelling to stick with Perl. Good ideas eventually migrate over here, and the community supports them.

I upvoted for this. Perl is kind of the "English" of the programming world, picking up whatever useful artifacts from other ideas it can without being concerned over language or design purity. Perl's design concept is to use whatever's best - i.e. be agnostic and be pragmatic.

This has it's good sides and bad sides (just like English). Perl can be both easy to learn the basics of, but very tricky in advanced usage, and it suffers from the "hard to maintain" problem. But it can be a nice dense language that maps well to a reasonably logical thinking process (it's probably by semi-intention since L.Wall is a Linguist).

Perl 5 is certainly showing its age though.
Front page. Top of the list. Really?

(edit: oh and no, I'm not implying anything. Merely expressing my confusion)
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Actually ZXing is a very very small part of RedLaser. We are thinking about kicking back our C++ port to the community!
$point->missed

I know Perl far, far better than I know Ruby or Python. But I can't easily reach for the abstractions in those examples within Perl.

That said, I'm in agreement with your basic point. On the whole the scripting languages (including JavaScript) are much more similar than different.
yeah, they exist, and you can google for a list easily, BUT there's issues.

For one, you have to know the carrier (or I guess send the email to all of them, but I could see that getting you blacklisted or something). Also, I think I've heard that they're less reliable and can get slow when a lot of people are sending to them.

Also, I'm pretty sure you'd have to use something if you want a shortcode. Having them put in an email address, though it would work, is kind of ugly.
Agreed. This is kind of the reason PG did away with numbers on comments a little while ago but brought them back after a lot of criticism.
I really don't see how he's setting double standards -- unless his trip to burning man was a business trip?

The rules, as I can deduce from the article, are that you can't compromise the privacy of guests. Was anyone at the company ever reprimanded for being shirtless on their Facebook profiles?
You guys are totally trashing the place and I love the guy who is putting up fake walls.
Performance is only one reason I've chosen MongoDB for my new app. I actually don't see the performance factor yet as I'm still developing and would see good enough performance on any number of DB choices.

The benefit I am seeing right now is development agility. I'm writing my app in ruby/merb. I created a simple lib for mongodb's ruby driver to give me simple first class object wrappers for my JSON data structures. I do not need to declare schema stuff anywhere. I can also write ruby scripts outside the merb server proc easily without going through an ORM framework.

As I have another in-production app also using merb using postgres through datamapper, I have a clear comparison to believe I'm realizing productivity gains with mongodb.
They don't use virtualization for any of their normal infrastructure -- it's much more productive to have locality with GFS/BigTable/memcache/App/etc all running in the same OS image on every machine.

I do see them having plenty of use for virtualization when provisioning machines to run non-infrastructure, their client software, other people's software, etc. Its usefulness for software testing should be obvious.

I don't know if they use full x86 virt. for it, but your App Engine processes have several layers of OS sandboxing around them.
Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning
True. One of the things I like about this place is that one-liners are frowned upon, even when they're somewhat funny.

I feel that policy should be extended to sarcasm. Sarcasm doesn't work very well on the net, and is often rude and dismissive.

What I used to like about Slashdot was that you could give the +funny modding a -1 weight. This improved Slashdot discussions quite a bit.
I think learning a language that may not be applicable at work has two key benefits:

1. I learn it "enough" to know what it's good at, what it's bad at, and to have enough hand-written code to pick it back up pretty quickly (particularly if you set up a test-driven learning environment)

2. Even when I forget the language's particulars, it changes the way I see other programming languages. For instance, while I don't use Ruby in my day job yet, I still think of things I can do with method_missing and how I might approximate that same power and flexibility in my work where appropriate. In short, learning languages helps me program "into a language" rather than "in a language", to borrow Steve McConnell's terminology.
I was also in the midst of a 30-day trial of Writeroom (inspired by http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2009/10/30/tools/) and I was planning to purchase it. When I saw the Macheist bundle, I downloaded it instead. I don't hesitate to purchase useful software, but I'm too practical to pay more than necessary.
I assume this is what chasingsparks is referring to: http://graphjam.com/
With Gumband, your users send to the shared shortcode with your keyword, but if you want a dedicated/international incoming SMS number, I've been happy user of http://csoft.co.uk/ for about 2 years now.
Would you elaborate on what words the picture had? It is a saying, but that graph doesn't say anything. It twiddles the 'OOH ASCII' bit and pretends to answer the question, but that's all. Honestly, what worth did it convey?
Ohloh tracks source control activity for open source projects.

They show a steady decline in Perl activity over the last decade:

https://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?measure=projects&...
no feedback on the service itself, but the volume on the screencast is so quiet i can barely hear the narrator
As well as a printed version, published by O'Reilly, for those of you who prefer dead trees to pixels (like me).
Free app idea that I don't have the time to write... coupon-o-matic.

1) scan coupon barcodes, ideally using video (1-2 seconds per full page of coupons in one of those mailers?), beeping only for those you ought to keep based on what you buy and/or how good of a coupon it is.

2) automatically generate shopping list, based on coupons + what you normally buy.

3) Profit! (Well, less cost; potentially much less cost, given how many coupons there are out there, doubling, store coupons matching mfg ones, etc.)

3a) Optional: scan product barcodes as you're shopping, automatically crossing them off the list, indicating the coupon savings you should get, and also reordering the list based on what grocery department you're in...
Unlike cats, domestic dogs can live a healthy life on a vegetarian diet. My dog has been a vegetarian most of her life for health reasons (she has allergies to most kinds of animal protein which results in skin lesions when she eats pretty much any meat-based food). She's 11 years old and in great shape.

Also, the "vegetarian driving a Hummer is better than a meat-eater driving a Prius" theory has been debunked. That's not to say vegetarians don't have a much smaller footprint than meat-eaters, they do, but that there's a lot of cranky and questionable science going on in this area, and one has to take most surprising claims with a grain of salt. Of course, the vegetarian that doesn't drive is unarguably a dramatically lower carbon emitter than a meat-eater that drives a Hummer every day; so maybe that should be the goal we're all shooting for.
direct voting: having an up and down arrow, or a "digg" button. one of my favorite old community sites (half-empty.org) had a buttons for + = -. This was before the term blog even existed, and that site suffered the same problems, and had endless meta discussions about it.

I wish there were a way to send someone a private message, cause I'd give you more specific details. Anyway, the site I built, which gets about 10k uniques a day and has around 200 active users, uses the ratings of posts to sort the homepage and the tag pages. It uses a few different signals like the number of distinct commentors, click throughs, and the reputation of the poster (this is mainly to break ties). It has a decay so that new posts come up, and it also has some safeguards for abuse. For example, users with no or very low reputation don't count in the distinct commentors number so that it can't be spammed, and there are similar safe guards for the click throughs.

Building community sites has been a hobby of mine for years, and I have a bajillion ideas on the subject. Right now I'm working on some bayesian filters for collapsing insulting comments, porn, etc. Fun stuff :)
Sorry about that, I think the fact that I was just using my iMac's built in microphone may have contributed to it.
Makes me want to burn an iPhone.
Whatever it is, it's really fast.
"The Mouse team have worked closely with experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project."

Ah. Well that explains it.
But you can measure atoms indirectly. I have not heard of a many-worlds theory that is measurable even in principle.
Unfortunately, the iPhone isn't made from cast magnesium. It wouldn't burn nearly as well.
All the links on the right of the map go straight to the remote sites in question. That's still where Google is driving the traffic.
Thanks.

disclaimer : I'm a radical graph data, noSQL proponent, so you had me at 'edge', however...

The only thing that I care about on that page is the graph.

Id like to see just that graph, but prefetched, fluid interactive javascript. Nothing else, except the text bar at top, and the interactive sliding autoscaling graph data app.

That would be wonderful, a new thing packaged out of old things Id half enunciated a thousand times myself.

the other stuff, Id put in some links.

This way you have all the focus on what your about.

So my 'Crazy Thought' is - make that the whole company, trim away everything else.

What would it look like if you had 2000 data points on the screen, gradually getting smaller at the edges, and fluidly navigating with say 500 nodes of prefetch ahead.

This should be in JS using Raphael if its not already .. [ I didnt see a raphael.js inclusion in your source page. ]
Maybe I'm the problem with edw... I don't see any value in the graph/post itself when it lacks the standard hallmarks of quality- reason, background, explanation... Maybe I just missed the seasonal swings when I was doing my own thing, so I didn't "get" the graph like you did.

I'm sorry to have left you out of the direct accolades- I figured you'd be happy in the company of pg, of so much merit that it need not be mentioned. Your posts are consistently thoughtful, reasoned, and insightful, with an incredible signal/noise ratio. You're just smart, and you write/do/make awesome things.
Is this some kind of PR stunt or a real product? This sentence from the press release smells of PR: "The OpenOfficeMouse includes default profiles for the five core OpenOffice.org applications based on 662 million datapoints compiled by the usage tracking facility incorporated into OpenOffice.org 3.1."
Startup Poker SF inaugural meetup (November 19th, 8pm)
We're starting a Texas Holdem' Poker Tourney meetup for hackers and startup entrepreneurs in SF.

Check us out and tell your friends.
http://www.meetup.com/startup-poker-sf