skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator

If I was a betting man I would put my money on Murdoch loosing money. This is what happens when some CEO who doesn't know anything about how the web or how search works goes on a rampage. I wonder if Murdoch even knows what a browser is. (Reference to Google's "What is a browser?" video series.)

Edit:

I was just laughing while watching the video. Murdoch didn't even use YouTube's name. He said "that, that huge video site that was such a runaway success." What I get out of it is he's just jealous of Google. I bet he wants to buy them out and add them to his portfolio.
No because China isn't totalitarian either. Authoritarian state with a ruling party of Marxist-Leninist political origins just doesn't have the same ring, does it?
...only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two...

Actually, quite a large percentage of my readers click to page two. If only a tiny number of your readers are bothering to click a link to get the rest of your content, perhaps your content isn't very good.
I think you just exemplified how ridiculous that generalisation was.
Sorry, but for programming language, popularity is everything. It's a social phenomenon, it grows superlinearly with number of users.

And languages become popular and unpopular for a reason.

For common lisp, those reasons are:

It's ancient.

Parties interested in it can't agree on anything so its development is stalled.

It claims to have a huge library which is tiny by 2009 standards, and doesn't have vital things like network i/o or unicode. Yes, implementations support those proprietarely, yet noone cares, because it's not in standard libs.

It has problems with reflection, which is doubly awful for a lisp.

CLOS is interesting, but for most uses smalltalkingly simple OO would be much more desirable.

Tool support is neliglible.
So someone open-sources code they wrote, and the author decides to insult them for it? And as if being an ass on HN wasn't enough, he regurgitated it on his blog and then resubmitted that to HN? Ugh.

Parsing malformed HTML is a nightmare, I'm impressed the programmer even gave it a shot.
I remember growing up I was playing on the Internet and found a 10 chapter book online for QBASIC. I printed it out and had it scattered all over the floor, and in no time at all I was writing code that actually did things. I had never written code before and I was in elementary school (9 or 10?).

Eventually this led to html, javascript, php, VB, C#, etc. Dad wasn't real thrilled when he realized I used all of the printer ink to do this, but I'd say it was a pretty good return on his investment.

EDIT:
I'd like to play with BASIC again, anyone know of a way to do that on OSX? VM?
Put Up Your Hand If You Ever Lie
Agree with you re: government, but maybe Detroit is a special case:

"This piece also highlights the absolutely crucial advantage of Detroit. It’s possible to do things there. In Detroit, the incapacity of the government is actually an advantage in many cases." (From the New Geography article linked to above)
Vancouver's CK Choi building has public composting toilets.. it's pretty modern looking. Probably depends on how they're designed.
The register and login links shouldn't be visible on every page. Instead ask users to login when they actually need to log in (e.g. creating sheets). Contact us shouldn't be a big tab, instead something in the footer.

Your "Follow Us"
"On Twitter" part should be all one line, and perhaps be reworded to "You should follow us on twitter <a href="bork">here</a> (see http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html)

The 1px border at the bottom of the page shouldn't extend past the footer, this looks pretty ugly.

The front page "Worksheets available" could be reworked into a "Popular Worksheets" ranking sheets on the number of views.

The text fields in the registration page should all line up, it looks pretty bad how they are at the moment.
Also on that page:

"We'll only use your email to send you signup instructions" could be reworded to "We'll only use your email for signup", less words means people are more likely to read it.
There's JSLint, you can surely build it in.

And it would have syntax colouring which basic lagged in.
I don't see it as in issue. If you are looking for an apparently batteryless device, maybe this is of concern to you. The salesman at the store used two hands to get it off, and I would not have even thought about this without this blog post.
Http://gunawansablon.com/
sigh - too late for me to fix it - thanks though.
Membuat Berbagai Pakaian dan Busana seperti : Kaos, T-Shirt, Jacket, Jas, Kemeja, Topi, Rompi dan Tas ( Yang dipakai untuk keperluan Promosi, Seminar, Olah Raga, Pemilu, Diklat, Rapat Kerja, Lokakarya, Munas, Musda, Jemaah Haji, Wisuda, dan lain-lain. ) Terima Pesanan Segala Atribut PILKADA Dan PEMILU
Pakaian,Busana,Kaos,TShirt,Jacket,Jas,Kemeja,Topi,Rompi,Tas,Promosi,Seminar,OlahRaga,Pemilu,Diklat,Rapat,Kerja,Lokakarya,Munas,Musda,Jemaah,Haji,Wisuda,Atribut,PILKADA,PEMILU
Freakonomics: Was the 20th Century Unusually Calm?
The one ruling party of China since 1949 is, of course, the Communist Party of China, so it seems fair enough to call China a "communist state," after the name of the ruling party.
People said the same thing about the MySpace deal, and look how profitable that turned out to be. I don't think you give Murdoch enough credit.
Pagination breaks my articles in Instapaper, making it even more horrible: start reading an article on the train only to realize there's no page 2.
Seriously - can someone explain what was so wrong with this comment that it deserves to go down to -3? I'm amused that this comment caused so much... anger?
I'd like to see the paper that shows medical doctors only wash their hands 9% of times after going to the bathroom.

The number is mind-blowingly low, especially since when I'm in public restrooms myself, the number of people who wash their hands seems to be in the majority.

Of course, my sampling could be off because people could be self concious of being watched, doctors could be in more of a rush, etc. But 9%? That's an incredible data point and needs incredible evidence.

Edit: Went back and read the original study. First of all, the study isn't about washing hands after the /toilet/ at all, but rather about washing hands after /patient contact/. Second, nowhere obvious in the study does it say that doctors believe they washed hands 73% of times. In fact, there is no mention of any survey whatsoever...
Google Analytics will allow you to compare your bounce rate with sites of similar size, traffic and with a similar sector.
Visitors > Overview > Benchmarking
I was a bit rude, but it's not always inappropriate to be rude. Recall that I was addressing a person who claims, literally, to be a God: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html
Firefox turns five: half a decade of Web liberation
Anyone know what scale factor shrinkage you get out of this stuff? I'd quite like to experiment with optical effects, but I don't know what feature size you can get and I haven't got any expanded polystyrene handy for testing.
Fortunately most sites have a "print" view of their articles that puts it all in a single page that works fine with InstaPaper.
previous post: good comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443542
I think he's talking about the different manufacturers and brands behind Android. Think of Android's business model as a loose coupled architecture, with the creation of hardware and software as separate components. This is the same strategy Microsoft took with Windows - they didn't make Windows hardware, and hardware manufacturers didn't succeed in making their own OS to compete with Windows. Apple, on the other hand, is in business of consumer devices end to end - responsible for creating both the high-level hardware, the OS, and some of the software.
Building a Simple Regex-Like Matcher in Ruby Using Graphs
I don’t work in print media (I’m a political science student), but this seems like a pretty cheap shot.

It's my opinion. There seems to be a lot more typos and grammatical errors that should have been caught in proof stages, a lot more poor "it'll do" type photo-shopping than in the past. This may be because I've become more focussed and more observant with respect to print media given that I'm using it for inspiration for online work and to suggest what the zeitgeist might be.

Incidentally, as you note, this probably is true in other fields too.

Edit: typo, lol!
Suhail, don't get me wrong, MixPanel looks awesome and I'm sure it will work for 99.9% of all startups out there, but we're just a little more neurotic about our stuff.

Here is one example that is hard for us to convert.

Monthly Active Users on a sliding scale. This requires 30 db writes every time someone signs on. Which we could do with 30 calls to mixpanel for every user sign on, but we decided to cache the user being counted in the user field and use memcache to batch the stat to one of our servers that will automatically write 30 different entries based on the key.
I think that depends on if Google feels that they need News Corp. If they decide to play hardball with News Corp, then they'll call it cloaking (and it is).

I wonder what backup plan they have in that case? I suspect that Bing.com won't have any problems accommodating these demands... I wonder if that's the backup plan?
If this happened google bombing would become that much easier.

I shudder to think of what 4chan would do with such power
Sure you have to gamble, but the only way this will make money for Murdoch is if makes less money on people who comes to his site from a search than it costs to serve that page; unless he has gotten the worst bandwidth-deal of the century.
NetFlix Streaming on Playstation 3 Video
I can attest to this from my own personal website building experience. I have found that random people are much more likely to click on ads. Amazon product ads are very effective with random search engine users.
I don't think they would selectively remove ads from critics' pages. That would be monumentally stupid. fyi: not to be nit-picky ;) but Matt Handal, President of DoubleDing gave that explanation. Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing so maybe that is about the same as Pincus giving the explanation- who knows?
The Ruby revolution is over
The best solution would be to produce content nobody else has - but that means doing real journalism (which has not happened since Watergate).

I won't pay a penny to a newspaper to read about Britney.
'Road trains' get ready to roll
I miss _why ...
You don't know; that's why it an investment. :D

If I had this money to invest, I'd put it in a 6-month CD while I did research. I'd spend 2+ days a week going to meetups, hanging out at cafes, talking, listening, making friends, making notes. Also I'd try to get time with more experienced investors and ask their advice. After that intense immersion, then I'd feel qualified to invest.

Here's the problem with that plan. The startups I'd been talking with would be very annoyed with me by that time. Here I am, with all this cash, and all I want to do is waste their time asking them questions over coffee!
The Calculus Lifesaver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Calculus (Vid)
Soldiers tweeted images from Ft. Hood - we need restaint in social media
A surprising effect of minimum wage - Obesity?
Vitaly Ginzburg: 1916–2009
Certain types of mushrooms can be used in this way as well
Not all ads are about the clicks. I'd expect NewsCorp's online properties to be more concerned about impressions.
Ruby has two popular HTML parsers, Nokogiri and Hpricot, both of which are awesome and fast.
Shazam Launch Shazam Encore iPhone App
The irony is that had he actually contributed significant amounts of code to the larger open source projects, he'd be used to this sort of criticism. Hell hath no fury like a maintainer's scorn. Incidentally, I think that's why developers in the major open source projects tend to generally be pretty good: the commit crappy code, get flamed, fix, commit-cycle tends to be instructive.
I'd agree that artificially inflating page views is the primary reason for this practice, but I do wonder if any other things contribute. For example, I believe there is an antiquated and probably flawed notion out there that readers dislike really long pages, so they like their content broken up. Does anyone think something like that has anything do with it as well?
Have you thought about whether removing the pagination would cause an even high percentage of your readers to read the full article?

And if the percentage who click to page two is in fact so large, have you considered how much more satisfied those same visitors would be if you removed an obstacle that so many of them confront every time they read an article?
Ask HN: AGPL software for services - licensing questions
I have been licensing some of my stuff for years using GPL/LGPL, but find myself not understanding the licensing issues of building services using AGPL projects like MongoDB or Neo4J.

I thought that if AGPLed software is used in a system, even as a separate service, then the entire system needed to be released under a compatible license.

How, for example, is a proprietary Rails app that uses a MongoDB service affected, license wise?

If I build a service using Neo4J, is it sufficient to release the code for the service under the AGPL, or do other systems that use this service also need to be released under the AGPL?

I am a huge fan of MongoDB (always keep it running, like PostgreSQL, on my laptop), and I have a few ideas for useful web services that might use Neo4J (instead of, for example, Sesame) - so, I am asking these questions for practical, not academic interest.
NoSQL Ecosystem
You speak the truth :)

(I know that this is a different article. I just wanted to add to the follow up what people here on Hacker News said about the slider thing.)
My guess would be a CPM somewhere around $0.15. It would appear that he was correct regarding traffic though: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wsj.com/
Database replication in 5 easy steps
There's really not much detail about the technology behind the scam in this article.

Summary: intentionally proprietary and out-of-date software, oversized and chaotic IT/IS department, AS/400, two disconnected trading systems, AS/400, lots of printing, AS/400, fake split/strike trades managed in Excel, AS/400, anyone who looked into the details would have smelled a rat, enough paper evidence to tax even the substantial computing capacity of a mighty AS/400.
What's he not getting? The current method of news distribution, where papers put their content up for free on the web and continue to take punishing losses isn't sustainable. From what I understand, online advertising alone simply won't cover the cost of running a newsroom - some sort of pay model is inevitable.
Insanity. Apache Incubator should be about education (was:
When I was a kid I did not know any adult programmers and thus assumed programming looked like the strange special characters you would get through alt + shift combos. This didn't scare me - it just upset me that I didn't know how to utilize it. If someone had shown me APL I would have been amped hahaah!
This looks like one of the rare stackexchange.com sites that might actually go somewhere. It's a hell of a domain name to use too.

The only real question is if the answers are any good. It looks too soon to tell to me.
I find I make this mistake constantly: I've contacted someone, I've put the ball into their hands, but the goal is still as far away as it was when I started. It's an easy trap to fall into, at least for me, because clients have as much to do as we do to get various projects completed. Now that I've seen the issue, however, I can watch for it and take action where appropriate.
Constructive Criticism: use a softer background color and consider retweaking the logo: glossy, over-stroked, drop-shadowed site logos imply that startups don't know better and are the epitome of bad design that many associate with "web 2.0"
The biggest e-commerce lies and how to avoid them
* If you can't intelligently discuss this with me not agreeing with your conclusion, then it'd be kind of useless for me to continue huh? *

It has been my experience, that no matter how smart and civilized, folks quickly start to sound ugly when it comes to health care. Take guests on Bill Maher show, for example. Proponents of a single payer system like myself quickly get called "communists" and it goes only down from there.

But sure, I am curious to hear how are you going to lower the cost of knee MRI exam from $1,100 to $80 (US vs Japan). You can even drop me a line if you want, my email is in my profile.
Detailed PDF referred to by the referred to article (mmm, linked list): http://www.aia.org/aiaucmp/groups/aia/documents/pdf/aiab0802...
By default we do not paginate, but sometimes I think it makes sense. Personally, I don't like the way it looks when there is very long text on a single page. All the navigation links at the top and sides are scrolled way off the screen and the user is adrift in sea of text. (I admit part of this is a limitation in our design. Perhaps all the blocks of HTML in the sidebar should repeat for the full length of the page?)

I'd be very interested in testing paginate/non-paginate, but I'm not sure there's in easy way to measure "satisfaction." Perhaps a javascript hack that detects if they've scrolled to the bottom of the page?
No boilerplate, no installation of Python, no installation of pylab. I think it was a lot easier on the ZX Spectrum.
I disagreed with you on the previous thread, but I would agree that if anyone deserved a harsh reality check on his skills, it would probably be esr:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1350#comment-241727

"On the other hand, every once in while I am reminded that “programmers I’ve known” are clustered in the top 5% of ability, usually the top 1% of ability."
You can easily pass an object into Javascript:

context.put(“rubyObject”, MyRubyClass.new)

Whether you would be able to call methods on it depends on whether the Snarl author did some (trivial) code magic or not, but it's certainly doable too.

Still I have no idea why would you want javascript in ruby in the first place.
If you boot up an Apple II without a disk in the drive (or something incredibly simple like that), it drops into AppleSoft Basic. That's how I learned that one could program a computer. For sample code I could turn to a number of magazines about my computer, or the manual that came with it. No questions or outside research dependent on anyone else (including the Internet) were required. This was when I was of single-digit age. The barrier to entry was tiny (type "10 print hello world" at the command prompt). Nothing like that exists for a curious child at this point unless their parents take the initiative, or the child waits until they're older.
Yes but I think they have some serious competition by the answers.onstartups.com which has quite some momentum too
I don't see how this is "artificial." If you read a two page article, then you viewed two pages. And if the design is so hideous that you don't click to view the second page, well then the number of page views isn't inflated at all.
I disagree, it was much easier back then.

In my case: I started on basic in dos 5 or dos 6 when I was 10 or so, and every function I had to my disposal was listed in the help file. Alphabetically and by sorted by category. Sooner or later you find the SETPIXEL function, then discover screen 13, then discover how to draw lines and so on. You can discover that "one more thing" pretty easily, and at no point can you get stuck because dependencies are missing or you have the wrong version of libgd. Basic was installed on the family PC, and I had gorillas and snake as example programs to study. Many people I know started in a similar way.

Compare this with python today. First you have to download and install it. You don't just discover it by accident. Then you have to learn the whole edit program, save program, run in python steps. BASIC had a primitive IDE, Python doesn't. Then you have to understand packages and package management, learn how to install pylab, and so on. Python also isn't a very forgiving language.

Programming sound on BASIC was trivial too. The moment you discover SOUND and PLAY you can make primitive melodies. Want to delay? Add a few SLEEPs in between. Exploratory programing at its best, and no internet connection required.
> it allows people to trade effort for discounts.

It doesn't really do that. Instead of going through the hassle (and it is a hassle) of price matching at store A, I can just buy the item at store B at the advertised price. The store offering price matching knows I will do that. They don't care because the guarantee sounds good to the consumer too busy to comparison shop. Unlike, say, coupons, price matching guarantees are not meant to be taken advantage of.
Very quick feedback: it was immediately obvious to me what the site did, and it only took a couple of clicks to make it do something useful. This is exactly the way that things should be. The site solves a clear problem and it does it well. Good stuff.

I didn't see any monetization in my (admittedly brief) visit. Do you have any plans to make money from the site?
I wonder, is Logo still relevant for children (was it ever)? I know Netlogo or StarLogo are still in active use in academia (for artificial life/complex systems research).

I have been toying with the idea to write a Javascript LOGO for the Canvas Element. There used to be Online-Logo Applets, but I think they were all Java.

At least it might be a fast way to draw nice things programmatically.
Why do you say that? I'm pretty confident Google News would still be the #1 news site, even if they completely delisted all news corp sites.
IANAL, but, if I read the AGPL correctly, you are not required to AGPL your application unless it is derived from MongoDB.

Make sure the drivers you use to connect to the database are compatible with whatever license you are using, or roll out your own.

And, if you are serious about using it, ask a lawyer to review the license and both of you help each other figure out how it relates to your product.
Show me what I can do right at the start. I know it's hard with this specific type of service, but some kind of screenshot or visualisation of the what you can do would be helpful. I don't know if it would work, but one idea I find quite intriguing would be some sort of reduced live demo right at the start page. I honestly didn't really understand what you were offering until I tried it out, so this seems to be the easiest way to show what you can do.

And what does registring get me? If nothing, then don't even allow it, if something, then show me what.

By the way, I really love that you fill the generate form with sane defaults. You don't even have to think about filling anything in and can just start to see what it's all about. Lesser sites would annoy you with stupid "Required field" warnings.
This also makes karma a zero-sum game. This necessarily results in a distinct winners-and-losers scenario, which would be antagonistic to the goals of the site.
Seeking programmer as 3rd co-founder for web startup
Seeking a creative and out-the-box thinker as a programmer/web developer for a position as a 3rd co-founder with equity benefits in a new web venture. Looking for someone with music sharing development experience. We are located on the eastcoast. Can telecommute and work with those located elsewhere. Especially contact us if located in MD, VA, NC, DC areas. If available and interested, please contact me here on HackerNews and email info to me at lorenzo.dickerson@gmail.com, so we can discuss futher details.