skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Article is a bit misleading, and fairly light on facts. Strikes me as Time trying to "out" a competitor.

They're basically saying examiner.com is the Demand Media of online newspapers. This sounds like a fair assessment, but there's no scandal here. Just two divergent business models.

Side note: one thing in this article I find completely false is the statement that examiner.com's articles are "neither advancing the story nor bringing any insight."

Examiner.com has a flavor, to be sure. I don't like it, and I generally avoid their articles, but calling them vanilla is incorrect.
I'm thinking another option is that the excess males might just leave for other countries. It seems like the most rational approach when an area doesn't provide the resources you need.
I am not using the Spotlight API via mdfind. I wrote a C extension. Care to elaborate on the issue (file a bug maybe)?
That's helpful information. I'll have to dig up what I signed when I agreed to go to school here and find out what it said about research.
Find Out Risks Playing Poker Online (part 1)
The private insurance industry, as currently constituted, would collapse if the government allowed real competition. The companies offer no real value and so instead must create a regulatory system that virtually mandates their existence and will soon actually do so.

And yet no innovating entrepreneurs have emerged to compete with these profitable enterprises.

Insurance is an information business, and as technology makes information-management cheaper, technological barriers to entry will fall, and competition will increase.

Any ideas for a startup?
Ouch. [i+1] vs [i+3]... why not do a memcmp?
Many of these are good, but a couple are wrong. We've funded both a social network (http://dailybooth.com) and a travel site (still only soft launched) and they're both doing well so far.
Shuffle is something that can be done easily.

As for the other requests, you are right it may not be quite minimalist :). But will keep them in mind.
Great suggestions and observations.

But I'll remind everyone, especially those considering a startup, that they're not rules. Most likely, this article will be horribly wrong on at least one point in five years. It could be wrong because of your idea.
Doesn't the law tend to follow morality hysterically (ie with hysteresis). Also a weaker point might be that civil disobedience itself could be considered immoral [in some moralities].
Has anyone tried this?

http://www.helloandroid.com/apps/console-applications
Ask HN: How do you manage your codebase once it gets large?
Hi all! I'm working on a project, and lately I've noticed that it seems to be getting harder to navigate and develop as it gets larger and more complex. Is this a sign of it maturing, or am I doing something wrong? What do you guys do to help manage your codebase when it gets somewhat large?

(This is my first "real" project using Rails, so I have no previous experience on this question :P )
If we work day and night, we can match our competitor's features within 12 mos.
> well, things like etsy (have i got that right?) are catching on.

I know a little bit about Etsy - just enough to know that artists like the ones on Zatista complain about being undeserved by Etsy. There are lots of individual artists out there that don't want an art gallery for their works, they want a boutique store that sells unique paintings.

The site looks great and I wish the founder huge success!
I have an actual horror story about a colleague's acquaintance which proves him right:

(1) On a late project, with only 3 weeks away from delivery, a manager (the above acquaintance) was called to save the day. He found that the team was on crunch mode, and quite tired.

(2) First day, at 18 O'clock, he said "Everyone go home, I don't want to see you until 9am tomorrow". He actually made it a policy.

(3) Projects miraculously ships on time and on budget (or at least, it slipped far less than originally expected, I don't remember).

(4) The team is happy. The manager's bosses are not, on the ground that if the team worked harder (read: longer hours), it would have performed better. As a result, they didn't gave him any more responsibilities.

Clearly, as Dan Pink said, "there is a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does".
Sounds like a nice way to spend my summer before I start work. Does anyone have any personal experience with this? Any resources or tips on how to go about this would be appreciated.
On the surface this list makes a lot of sense. Each category of things not to build comes with a couple of examples of giant competitors: Wikipedia, Wordpress, Expedia...

If I were to build a startup in one of these categories, these would be the examples I would think of in the bar-napkin stage. They are obvious. I don't think 280 North will see this post and think "jQuery! We forgot about jQuery!"

There is always room for something giant and disruptive. More commonly there is always room for something small and sustainable.
> 1) There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." ..

Used and loved this extension to solve that for some time:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/594

> 2) ... the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear.

Rarely seen similar behavior in TB2 (no upgrade yet). Goes away when I hit 'get mail'. (Forcing it to check the server, and notice the mail is read. I do IMAP exclusively.)
(note the Jan 4th post date)

2 things not to build seem contradictory:
Don't build a platform-specific app
Don't build a new standard
While I can see limited usefulness of yet another markup standard xqrhtml43, generic apps, as opposed to platform-specific, have to look to standards to work upon. What should be read, however, is when building a new standard, extend existing standards to meet your needs, if at all possible, and make sure there is some sort of 'reference implementation' (ie, yours).
I found this point quite interesting and thought provoking:

'From the point of view of the internet, 'you' are a concept - the one thing in the whole system that isn't actually a part of the system. How to leverage that will be the stuff of genius and innovation'.

I will welcome any ideas as to how it can be leveraged.
He has a dog in this fight, and he stands to lose. He's not 'slanting' this piece to trick readers into supporting a position that would actually harm them; instead, he is merely telling the story from his perspective.
The general consensus on contrarianism is wrong.

He's being a contrarian about contrarianism! Must be a smart guy.
North Korea is richer than China?

Are you serious, or is your comment meant to be facetious?
How to use your own site as an OpenID using your Google Profile
Another pointless person-bashing exhibition that gives no real insight into what makes the healthcare industry tick. As someone who works for a major medical center and deals with billing and regulation, I am amazed at how much I still don't know about the process, and how much more the general public does not know and understand.

If you have never worked with the puzzle that is hospital billing and regulation, you really have no idea at how helpful many of the clauses in Obama's bill will be at lowering health costs in the U.S. Because of the tight regulation, high barriers to entry and mandate to provide the most expensive services for free to those who cannot afford it standard economic thinking does NOT fit when looking at healthcare.

No one, I believe, thinks for a minute that anyone in congress is an angel, or is working from truly altruistic motives. So let's stop basing our criticisms and writing our news as if anyone still does and let's start looking at facts based on BOTH economics AND the moral and ethical obligations of this country and our health system. If we are to live up to the hype of "the greatest nation" then we must...MUST provide health coverage to ALL americans especially the youth of this nation.
Depends on the university as many have noted. Some universities have a technology transfer office or a commercialization director or something similar. I'd double check with them BEFORE you do anything for your project.
How many poor, rural, Chinese men have that option?

It will be the poorest Chinese who go without mates. They are the most violent and the most dangerous, and no country is capable or willing to support the immigration of literally millions of childless and aggressive poor men.

The Chinese leadership really only have two potentially effective options in my view. Try to manage it through pacification campaigns (estrogen in the water?) or send them abroad to die in wars.
Segmentation, interfaces, documentation.

You want to make changes that do as little damage as possible. By structuring your project so that independent functions are really independent, you can think about them independently. Providing interfaces to your own code also helps there, you can ignore one part of the code and just use its functionality, and only have to keep the interface in your head. Also, notes-to-self often help provide context and memory cues to reload something you've forgotten. Either way, you should be using source control. That way you can look at the changelog for a file and reconstruct what you did with it, again helping you recall structure.
what scm system are you using?
The Clacks - discworld semaphore
I think these are generally somewhat true, but with a lot of glaring counter-examples. As the companies that control these spaces get larger, there will always be room for smaller, disruptive competition, especially in more domain-specific areas.

I'm reminded of an article from HN earlier this year wherein a Harvard Professor admitted telling Mark Zuckerberg he was chasing his tail trying to create a social network. (Anyone have this link?)

In 2004, a plain old social network probably wouldn't have worked, but a Social Network of Ivy League colleges might.
Worried about carbon regs yet? You should be
Some good points, but I disagree with the what not to build section. If you have a great idea for one of these that is truly innovative, build it. Just because you'll have large competitors shouldn't stop you. Now if your idea isn't that ground breaking, that's a different story
Or... you can work just as hard to find a new approach to the same problem that gives you an edge over them.
This is one of my periodic pain points with Rails, as compared to Java. At the day job I work with multiple code bases with more than X00,000 lines of code each. My Rails site has 5k lines as reported by rake stats, and due to a combination of poor IDE support compared to Java and the toss-it-all-in-one-folder Rails conventions, that sometimes results in headaches.

My suggestions:

1) Refactor like it is going out of style. Rails classes (particularly controllers and models in my experience) have a tendency to accumulate cruft over time. Periodically evaluate whether something should be broken into two classes, or at least two files. Mixins and require are your friend here. (Breaking a controller into two changes URLs by default. I think letting Rails assign publicly visible URLs is a mistake, but most people do it. Consider carefully whether you can accept URLs changing as a result of code changes.)

2) Encourage internal code reuse, and better separation of responsibilities, by breaking things into plugins when appropriate. I extracted code from my own classes to make A/Bingo for example. It keeps my own classes readable and makes it much easier to publish and reuse A/Bingo.

3) Coding conventions are your friend. Since the IDE lacks a reliable jump-to-definition-of-this-function feature, I tend to try to put predictable things in predictable places. For example, model classes always have a consistent ordering of filters, validations, and associations at the top of the file prior to business logic. (Those could be externalized if they got realllly messy, via the magic of require.)

4) Put partials into thematically coherent subdirectories. This saves you from having to find the right form partial from a directory with 20 views and 50 partials.
> In return, they cover the legal, patent, and marketing costs to get the product to market, or to find some company that would want to market it. Given the number of things that are created in a university, the process of selecting which items to pursue is long and involved.

Translation: the university is where your IP goes to die. The professor in this article (sorry, couldn't find a complete one anywhere) http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-13985948.html is a family friend, and his invention (violin bow made for <$10 in parts that beats >$1000 bows in blind tests) is 100% legit, but last I knew the University of South Florida was just sitting on it. He was still experimenting and building bows for himself and friends, but there was nothing he could do to actually get it to market.
The private insurance industry, as currently constituted, would collapse if the government allowed real competition. The companies offer no real value and so instead must create a regulatory system that virtually mandates their existence and will soon actually do so.

This is an attractive sentiment, but, unfortunately, false.

I used to work for a private health insurer a couple of decades ago, and they absolutely do provide "real value", in two different forms.
1) They offer an opportunity to share risk among subscribers. If every small business (or individual) were responsible directly for their own health care costs, a catastrophic illness in the pool would most likely cause bankruptcy. By spreading the expenses (in the form of premiums) across a large pool of people (both healthy and sick), costs are levelled to everyone's advantage.

2) Even for groups with large enough risk pools to manage their own risk (i.e., companies of over 500 employees, generally speaking), health insurers provide a useful services in terms of negotiating discounts with hospitals, and in the formulation (and execution) of rules (such as which services are covered, what the co-payments should be, etc.). Large businesses often would self-insure (i.e., manage their own risk) but pay us a service fee to administer their plan.
It's back up now (or should be). An update: http://twitter.com/prgmrcom/status/6495790410
I maintain a codebase that is about 300KLOC C++ and about 900KLOC Java. Abstractions become important at this scale.

We follow a simple MVC principle, C++ side is model, JNI-glue is control, and Java is view. Then, individual pieces are broken into functional modules and there is documentation on slides (flowcharts) on how these functional components interact.

You should be able to let go and trust fellow developers. I don't know all of the code; There are four others who have their own pieces of functional modules that they are responsible for. I trust their judgement/decisions on their modules just like they trust mine-- we still question which is important.

Rest of it sort of fall into place as we progress. Hope this helps.
We use subversion. We develop on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Science or Séance?
MEDIA FANFARE OVER AN INCAPACITATED CAR ACCIDENT VICTIM (AND THE NURSE WHO “COMMUNICATES” FOR HIM) RAISES THE QUESTION OF HOW WE CAN KNOW WHETHER A PERSON IS CONSCIOUS
The problem has been 30 years in the making. Undoing that is going to take approximately as long.

The big question is whether China will remain stable long enough for the feedback mechanisms do their job. What with the shrinking labor force in what is currently the land of cheap labor (labor costs will rise) and the social obligations (cost) that come with an aging population, it is a pretty scary picture.
does that mean Twitter has no idea how to make money off it's inventory other than selling it in bulk?
Will Yodlee's new API revolutionize banking?
AT&T: Tighter Control of Cell Data Usage Ahead
Ugh. There's a reasonable pro-market way to criticize net neutrality, but this isn't it. The fact remains that broadband providers are by and large monopolies, so it enhances rather than restricts the market to force them to play the role of the common carrier while separate firms focus on selling content.

Google doesn't even especially stand to profit, nor are they at the most risk. That would probably be Hulu or Netflix, at the very least.
If you're willing to hook up to USB, TetherBot (http://graha.ms/androidproxy/) works through the Android debugger and ssh tunneling without rooting your phone. It requires you to install the Android SDK, but I've been using it since I got my G1 last December.
> I'm only one week into my latest love affair with bzr/launchpad... and so far so good. I hope it doesn't break my heart again.

I'd be interested to hear how it's going after a couple more months.
GWT 2.0 Released
Ynot on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Downloads
What about the oyster guy?
Roll the clock back 9 years and "Don't build a search engine" would have been on the list. Surprised it is not there now.

To me it seems it is the exceptions to the common knowledge that so often seem to exceed the rest. Off the cuff: Japanese cars are cheap (answer: Lexus), markets are efficient (answer: Buffett), VC's need home runs (answer: Y Combinator?).

I wonder how is each item on the OP's list might be mistaken and why?
Think of it more as playing the odds. Yes Facebook will be surpassed one day, but we don't know when.

Odds of succeeding to make the next facebook 1/5000
Odds of succeeding in building recommendation system for something that currently has no recommendation system 1/2.

Thinking about both of these problems for a few days you can come up with tons of interesting angles and technical problems. Every once in a while a major player will be replaced one someone else, but every day someone else will have a sustainable business in a less competitive area.
Clickable link to the startup I'm discussing in this blog post: http://www.visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

For my full opinions, see the blog post. I think most HNers would be better served by the best A/B testing library available for your platform of choice, but if your Aunt Cindy runs a business with a website, then Visual Website Optimizer will let her A/B test it without having to spend a few years in learning to speak geek first.
Is there ANY country in the world that is interested in allowing in millions of single, male Chinese peasants? Which country is that?
NewLisp is a deliberate return to the Stone Age of Lisp. It abandons almost every worthwhile innovation the language has seen in nearly four decades.
Yup. Our solution to the health care crisis is punishing people who don't buy health insurance. Hurray America.
Sounds like sour grapes...and it's a bit ironic, considering (spun back off) AOL is going for this exact same strategy, even more so, with its Seed effort http://paidcontent.org/article/419-aols-armstrong-orders-up-...
I've had this conversation in the game industry more times than I can count.
CL is concise? I hadn't heard it described that way. Now, I've certainly heard [Arc](http://www.arclanguage.org/) described as concise.
Points 1 and 2 are sort of fascinating to me. As far as I'm aware, patents and copyrights are defined in the constitution as monopolies granted to "Authors and Inventors". Do you know how it is that the laws, which are supposed to build on the constitution, have extended ownership of copyrights and patents to corporate entities? It seems to be directly opposed to what the constitution allows.
It's not there because at this point, it's self-evident. There may be a path to profitability for niche engines, or engines which do something quite different from the big players, but it seems ever more unlikely that a new direct rival to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo will arise.

I mean, I get your point. But there's a difference between the pre-Google world and now: before Google, search sucked, and everyone knew it. Now, search is awesome. It's not really a pain point.
In regard to social networking, I think the author means "Don't build a generic social network (Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, etc)" We have enough of those, and I think Social Booth doesn't really fit in to that category.

All useful modern web apps have elements of "social network" in them.
The percentages matter, but the numbers matter too. Taiwan had nearly a 10 percent surplus of men when Chiang Kai-shek's defeated armies settled there in 1949. Women who were young in the 1950s in Taiwan (I have spoken to many of these about that era) remember fondly that they could be very choosy about whom they married. Many men in that era never did marry. (Taiwan has had tolerated prostitution throughout the postwar period, which presumably is how the unmatched men dealt with being unmatched.) Today, Taiwan is a HUGE destination for young women from poorer countries (there are a lot of poorer countries than Taiwan, notably Vietnam) who are brought in as "mail-order brides" for older men. But for China to do the same, the Communist Party would have to explicitly give up the claim that it eliminated prostitution after "Liberation" in 1949, and the number of women needed to move into China--from countries that themselves often have shortages of women--would be enormous. Absolute numbers matter. It's much more difficult for China to deal with this problem than for any other country, because of the sheer size of the problem.
Well I've had a look at some of the project that are sitting on my hard disk (all are current by the way) and here is the Code LOC values for them: 50, 225, 261, 346, 402, 572, 857, 980, 1099, 1213, 1475, 1677, 1841, 2002, 2123, 2242, 2887, 3138, 3338, 3421, 3421, 7812, 7812, 46757, 57495

The most used projects, used daily by our clients are in the 2000-4000 range, the smaller ones are supporting tools and the two massive ones are that way because the business rules are completely insane. Also they are quite old and could probably be trimmed down quite a bit.

Some of the more actively developed code has been trimmed down through constant development, the two monsters do not get touched too often.

Actually I'm quite surprised has to how small our core applications are, I would have guessed more in the 8000-12000 LOC. But then Ruby tends to be rather concise.

What sort of numbers are you seeing?
He's not really saying it's impossible to succeed at these things. Only that there are other ideas out there with far better conditions and chances.
The nightly for the 1.0 branch is compatible, and fairly stable. I have been using it for months with TBird 3 pre-releases, and am using it in 3.0 right now.
If you can help refactoring into sub-folders, thats a small change that helps a lot. When I can, I break down components of my application as much as possible. In Java thats natural with the packages idiom. In C++ or C I just force it upon myself to do it.

For example with the language/VM I've got built for doing some DSL work, I've got folders for the garbage collector (src/gc), the compiler (src/compiler), the runtime (src/runtime) and so on. I'm not entirely familiar with doing any sort of large-scale ruby development so I don't know how much that helps you (most of my ruby code are small 100-200 line all inclusive scripts).

Hope that helps.
We were just talking about this in my office the other day. How "feature match" is such a popular strategy because it's something a non-technical manager can say without having to rely on his technical staff (which in many managers' eyes makes them seem weak)
No, this:

http://tinyurl.com/ylfqp37

is what debugging ought to feel like.

SLIME is a cheap imitation.
Which "worthwhile innovations" are you referring to?
> no country is capable or willing to support the immigration of literally millions of childless and aggressive poor men

The UK begs to differ.