skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If Django's admin is so awesome, why hasn't it been ported to Rails?
I'm curious...seems like many arguments I hear for Django end up being the equivalent of "Django is an adequate Rails replacement...PLUS it has the unbelievable admin module".

Ok, great. I've played a bit with Django, and I do admit I like the admin interface. Makes things very nice when you're in the early stages of development. However, I have to wonder...if it's so great, and if folks are choosing Django over Rails simply because of the admin module, then why hasn't someone simply ported the admin module to Rails? Is it really that complex under the hood? Python and Ruby aren't that different...is there something there that makes this sort of undertaking impossible?

Just curious...
Came across this site which might interest other hackers. Entities (companies, individuals, non-profits) list a particular problem they would like solved and offer an award for the solution. Some examples:

"The Seeker is looking for a low cost outdoor localization system that can guide a robot with high accuracy in a residential property that includes obstacles, defined or not defined" http://gw.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/8507361
search for unladen swallow
I agree - this TDD-koan stuff really turns me off. What's preventing the author from just writing fibonacci as an infinite series of tests, and an infinitely long switch statement?

What the article doesn't mention is that full coverage on a function taking all positive integers is impossible unless you're comfortable making some assumptions about the behavior of your program.

The 'leap of faith' here is induction and the transition from simple testability to recursive implementation is huge, and left basically unexplained.

I personally think TDD is a great tool and an awesome way to write code. But it doesn't have to be this mysterious; I just think a function like fib is not a good way to show the benefits.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

CPython is between 32 faster and 14 times slower than Google's V8. Most of the time, however, V8 is 2-6 times faster than Python. Overall, V8 is quicker.

The authors of Unladen Swallow have talked a bit about performance challenges in optimizing - a big one is the fact that they're not breaking anything that depends on the CPython interpreter- include C-based modules, and even esoteric Python modules that modify python bytecode on the stack.
I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).
Addiction: Entrepreneurship as a Coping Mechanism
edit:

nevermind. i misread the statement that displays when you visit the site with an unsupported browser.

it read in such a way, though, that made me believe that it wasn't supported with IE. it might help to clarify that, a bit.
You don't mention what type of applications you're interested in, Web apps or something else.

The most fun programming i ever did was for my Digital Image Processing class, mainly because the output was so visual. You might try something visual, graphics(a game perhaps), image processing(non photo realistic rendering of a pic).... you get the picture :-)

Edit: you might even do some visualization of data, using processing.js for example. This would not require much time and you can even share them as a web app.
that would be nice... oh, wait a minute http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan
Pretty sure it's just seed content...
Riak creates vnodes, or virtual nodes for each node. These vnodes make up what's called a ring server. So you may have 1024 vnodes in say, 4 bare-metal nodes.

I pointed this presentation out below, but I'll point it out again, because it's a really good presentation to understand riak: http://riak.basho.com/nyc-nosql/
Thanks for the suggestion! It will be in the next push, later today.
Yes, but let's be fair, this is an incidental parenthetical to the main point, which is that the true value of these failed projects comes from the fact that the projects never increase the efficiency of the bureaucracy. If you simply cut that paragraph the essay is, if anything, improved, demonstrating it's not a critical point.
Can someone explain the rationale behind such a service? Twitter and HD video? I must be showing my age, but what is the point? I'm genuinely curious to understand what kind of company they are trying to build. Do they want to take down youtube?

Someone please spell it out for me.
Hadoop cluster powers Tennessee smart grid
Real-time feature releases, nice work Dan!
The reason I asked is you brought up CouchDB isn't continuous where yours is, but you approach CAP in the same way CouchDB does. So the difference between continuous and scheduled replication is mostly syntax sugar. CouchDB can be cron scheduled to replicate across or pull from continuously in a similar fashion for similar functionality.
The question of hedonic bias is more complex than the article indicates. I would recommend Game Theory Evolving by Herbert Gintis. Gintis talks about human short-term bias and hyperbolic discounting and shows that this is often not as "irrational" as it seems (look especially at Chapter 11).

Still it's a great discussion, I'd love to see it much more developed, hopefully the article's author reads here.
For comparison, the Pre sold around 85000 units in its first weekend and the iPhone 3G sold 1000000 (one _million_) units in its first weekend. OTOH, don't put too much faith in early numbers being useful as a comparator among these devices -- wait for a month or two to see if there is a trendline.
Has anyone else here been thinking "How can I implement a solution to this particular method of online communication?" while reading this article? I guess emoticons, bold, and italics seem fine, but perhaps there should be some professional standard or a completely dynamic and alternate device. (Like a program to leave voice messages on web pages to accompany text or something similar as an example. This is a bad idea by the way... I am just using it as a conversation starter on this topic.)
Here's a link to view the real-time traffic on betashop.com. Pretty cool to see the Y-Hacker News impact.

http://chartbeat.com/dashboard/?url=betashop.com&k=1fd04...
Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers.

Thanks!
Look, that wasn't a tone problem, it was a content problem.

Whether or not ed was sarcastic or complimentary, nevertheless his comment made people realize that Spolsky could stand to gain financially from the article. Putting that on the radar (even if it was in the form of a compliment) was a hit to Joel (even if he didn't intend the article as PR).

All the smileys in the world wouldn't make that content issue go away.
A wiki is really good for this, such as MediaWiki or Trac.
Redis, Part 1: Intro, Setup, and Basic Commands
Persuasive Technology
CVV/CVC doesn't have much to do with it (I can process cards with nothing more than the number). The issue was that sites were not authorizing cards in real time.
A Twitter-integrated video site. Now displays HD.
As the lead developer, I can say quite confidently that the encoder matters a huge amount more than the standard.

See:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual...

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102

As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid.

The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.
What's the point of generating a good fake? It's not like you're going to guess a number that actually authorizes.
In stressful situations, just being asked probing questions by someone you don't know can feel like an act of aggression, even if it's not meant to be. They can sound like a challenge to your authority on your subject matter; I could see how you would feel like it was a good cop / bad cop scenario (which I really doubt it was).
Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary .

If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode.

I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it.

Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)
I wish Mr Def Macro would go back to talking about Lisp or computing science or something interesting...
Eight indicted for $9 million hack
Summary: Be the ball.
did you put his picture on reddit and ask for help to find him?
I find it sad in a way that although you've put a really good thing together, it's started to become the goal for some people, instead of just one of many ways to enable them to reach what should be their actual goal.
I know I certainly am. We're building a group chat application for companies (http://shoptalkapp.com), so this is a very real problem for our users. We'll definitely be brainstorming ways to overcome it. I think a good system for indicating tone could make online communication much more pleasant and effective.
One thing to consider.
If you decide to host remotely, be prepared to give support.
If you don't mind it though you will have a nice (depending on your view) source of extra income.

A better alternative might then be the opposite; create a hosted environment in which you provide them with the security they desire.
The multiple cofounder myth: Admobs one more data point
I know that pg is a strong advocate of having multiple cofounders and many other people have even stronger views on this. I also see the benefits of having multiple cofounders versus having a single founder, but I don't think the impact/differences are as stark as many people make it out to be.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525 had some interesting stats on how single-founder companies have had more success than 2-founder or 3-founder companies (within a sample of 100 publicly traded comapnies)

Scobelizer's interview of the AdMobs founder (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/11/09/the-wisdom-of-admobs-founder-omar-hamoui/)is one more data point of how "one guy with a laptop" can build a hugely successful company.Incidentally Sequoia funded the 1-man company without any dogmatic rules on the number of founders (or for that matter employees)
Links for the urls mentioned above

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77525

(http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/11/09/the-wisdom-of...
Ask HN: Share your resume
I was revising my resume today, and I though quite a few people would like to see how hackers, founders in general portray their wide range of skills on their resume. For us programmers there are plenty of non-coding experience that we pick up along the way, how do people highlight them?

I thought a look at other peoples resume might be more helpful than reading up on silly bulleted lists on blogs.

I'll post my resume as soon as i finish it. I was using LaTeX, before but decided to move to Scribus because it takes too much effort trying to change the layout. I will probably lose out on the benefits of git on switching.
I did read the inflammatory headline and the complete article and that was my takeaway from it.

You of course are welcome to your opinion.
That zoom effect is great. It reminds me of the ZUI (zooming user interface) described in Jef Raskin's book, The Humane Interface. Oh how I wish someone would build a desktop OS with a ZUI.
People in the industry are using custom mozilla builds for that actually.
Give Feedback vs. Respond Now: A/B test your language
Hmm,

Despite the limitations of the written word, human authors have been producing written works with profound emotional impact for thousands of years. And without emoticons!

It's true it requires concentration and imagination to read Shakespeare (with full impact) than it takes see his plays performed.

Still, a vast emotional "punch" can be contained in the written word, just requiring a bit of effort to extract.
gah! but all those steps make the whole process harder than just thinking hard and writing down the correct function to start with. Or to write several test cases to start with (because you know many of the expected outputs up front) and writing a single function that passes them all.

TDD should make the process EASIER and MORE efficient.

>>> This isn't a perfect example of TDD, but that's not the point.

Illustrating a process by applying it to a problem that doesn't need it is surely the wrong way to go about it. Unfortunately "the point" is mostly dwarfed by the imperfect example.
All this disagreement! Look, both sides can probably agree:

Rule number 1: My code is crap.

The worst kind of incompetence is believing you're better than you actually are. Even the best make mistakes. Have an accurate idea of where the problem lies. Often, it is more likely that a bug is the result of your code than "a compiler bug" or some such thing. Every once in a while, you actually do run across that mythical "compiler bug", so you gotta keep your mind open. You don't solve bugs by restricting the search space before you prove the bug's not there.

Rule number 2: I care about my code.

I shouldn't have to write this--making something better is hardly arguable. Note that a shipping product is in fact the original killer feature; sometimes the best move is to stop development. But that doesn't mean you should stop finding and executing the best moves.

Rule number 3: My opinion about my own code is wrong.

This could have been written better. Your code is not right because you wrote it. It is very likely that there is an alternate approach. Sometimes, the alternate approach has enough advantages to recommend it over your approach. Sometimes it doesn't. Keep your mind open.

Rule number 4: My manager doesn't care about my code, and he pays me.

Again, a bit of hyperbole. Better said by bad_user: the manager cares about the project. That's his job.
I don't have that sense, rajeshamara.

YC seems important to me for a few reasons:

One, they do a better job than many investment firms at teaching some basics about start-ups. In that way, I think they encourage a lot of people to try who might not otherwise have tried. People often like to impress their teachers.

Two, as angel / early-stage investors go, YC is the closest thing there is to a top-tier firm. We don't know much about their financials but we do know their first big raise came from Sequoia, itself a top-tier firm. Top-tier funding comes with perks. You get YC's participation and connections. You get to say you got money from YC. $N from YC is worth a lot more than $N from your uncle.

Finally, for many, a YC interview will be their first big pitch and so there is a damaged goods concern: if YC turns you down, your odds with others are diminished. (That's not exclusive to YC: if X turns you down your future odds are diminished, for many values of X.)

Being turned down by YC doesn't mean that you are at the bottom of the pit. I'm sure there are many good firms they would pass on for reasons that say nothing bad at all about the firm. It is, however, a big obstacle you'll need to get around.

-t
The whole situation is a result of a common communication problem, applied twice.

Simply: we see ourselves in the gaps.

i.e. readers assume the writer shares their own values/goals. From that default, we build our mental model of the writer, generally by recording deviations.

Until a deviation is recorded though, our assumption is that there's agreement. That's why new information that violates our mental models can seem so surprising, even when we have no good reason to expect otherwise.

The common advice to 'never meet your heroes' is direct result of this dissonance.

Seeing the reply as an insult required Joel to assume the writer had the same values Joel did: a mistrust of sales and marketing. Ergo: any congratulations on an effective sales pitch must be a sarcastic insult.

And in writing that reply in the first place, the author clearly assumed Joel had the same values he did. That is, that the article was an intentional (and commendable) application of marketing and that Joel would appreciate an 'atta boy' from a peer.

Emphasis and emoticons can go some way into clearing up these misconceptions. But not even face-to-face communication really solves the problem.
This is due to a difference in assumptions/metaphors, not tone. Many people assume that being a salesman is a negative, like a used car salesman. The original comment sounds negative if understand it through this frame. But, if you view sales from an entrepreneurial frame then the comment sounds like a compliment.
If you want to build an HTML parser, go ahead. From the comments in the code, it's clear that ESR tried to parse HTML because he thought he had to, not because he wanted to.
Automate finding servers of a certain type or version
My understanding is this: sometimes you want to tweet a link to a video. If the video is not already on Youtube, you have to upload it first. The last time that I did this, the following steps were required:

- browse your file system for the video (starts uploading as soon as you select it)
- while it uploads, fill in the title, description and tags. The title could be your status update, the other fields are not necessary if all you want is to tweet the video.
- click submit and wait a few minutes (varies depending on their load) until your video becomes available for viewing
- copy the url and compose a tweet including it

It would be easy to create a mobile or web app to streamline this process using the Youtube API(e.g. type in your tweet, chose/record a video, submit and forget. We'll fill in the details and publish your tweet when the video is available). It's probably been done.

Vidly looks like yet another video site, only it attempts to be Twitter-friendly by incorporating that feature from the start.
My email address is in my profile if you want to email me. What languages do you know? Are you interested in web based projects? What other projects have you been doing? What other experience (besides programming) do you have?
Invitation Cards Are Shinning Products
I think that it has a lot to do with what each system was designed for. Both are great and can accomplish nearly the same things, the difference is that django was built for newspaper websites originally, so the focus on a standard admin CMS makes a whole lot of sense, especially when you are going to be using the same codebase on 5,10,20, etc... sites.

Rails was built around making client websites and in house web apps for 37 signals. Thus, perhaps on an app like Basecamp or many client sites, a standard admin panel wouldn't make a lot of sense. Something more custom would need to be built for those.

I find that most devs tend to "scratch their own itch", so that might explain the difference.
And using Python in this scenario is better than using Java, where you may have faster execution but a huge memory use due to the VM.
A good publisher has nothing to fear from Stack Overflow.

I suspect the site exists instead because the company wants to have a web site with a lot of traffic but isn't willing to pay anyone to write things people want to read. Thus their solution is to reuse material from books and convince people to contribute original material in exchange for badges and coupons.

The company's launched quite a few experiments on the web, only to abandon them a couple of months later. Perhaps this one will last longer than three months; it appears they've actually put some money into it.
For a moment when I read the headline, I thought they were sending videos over Twitter by splitting them into 140-character data segments.
Hmm, it's not really the difference between continuous and scheduled... Basically, Couch is a shared-nothing system, meaning, it retains all the data on one node. Then you can easily replicate (say via scheduled task w/ cron) the data from node to node.

Riak is a distributed system, where each node that joins becomes part of a cluster of nodes and shares everything (data, work, etc).
Y vs Google Free Wifi? Yahoo Gives Out Free Wi-Fi Too (in Times Square)..
Hi Andrew,

My apologize. Are you still having a problem? Email me direct and we will figure out the problem. patrick@appsto.re
I'll try to look at this possibility, thanks.
How to keep your amazing employees
Isn't this kind of like asking "If Lisp is so great, why hasn't SLIME been ported to Java?"?

The admin in Django is great, but it's not the only way to do things.
Thanks in advance [my_Hnews_Username at gmail.com]
I think it's a natural thing, after all HN is also the 'breedingground' for a lot of YC startups, and some of the emotions around applying for, acceptance and rejection are expected to spill over into the forum.

The tips by those that 'got in' serve mainly to reassure those that are about to make their pitch, which, if you've never done it before can be absolutely terrifying.

Whether or not you get in, you always learn something.

I think because the barrier to entry is so low at YC that you'll see a lot more of this emotion than you'd expect in a more seasoned environment, for many people this is the first time ever they apply anywhere, and given the number of applications vs the number of available slots it's logical that a bunch of people with an excellent plan and team are not going to be funded.

That can be quite frustrating. Give it a few days everybody will have picked up the pieces and moved on, and they'll start realizing (if they haven't already) that not being accepted by YC is not the end of the world.
Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Free 24/7 Christmas Music
:) Thanks in advance [ myHNusername @ gmail.com ]
The thing preventing infinite implementation is a combination of (1) the rules of simple design and (2) the definition of "simple". I write about those in the follow-up to this post: http://blog.extracheese.org/2009/11/the_limits_of_tdd.html

I've said this several times across several forums since publishing this post, but my goal was to write a very brief example of "doing the simplest thing". It's not about doing the entire TDD process on a real-life software problem, because that post would be so long that no one would read it! :) I don't think TDD can't be adequately demystified in any short example.
That's interesting. We do have some very recent versions of x264 installed (Core 67 - 68, depending on environment), but it looks like Mencoder might be using a different library. I'll have to check.

Thanks!
> I suspect the site exists instead because the company wants to have a web site with a lot of traffic but isn't willing to pay anyone to write things people want to read. Thus their solution is to reuse material from books and convince people to contribute original material in exchange for badges and coupons.

And the material not reused from books (both some posts and most of the answers so far, perhaps all of the answers so far) comes from various O'Reilly employees who have a new responsibility: "seeding O'Reilly answers."
Countering Kernel Rootkits with Lightweight Hook Protection [pdf]