skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aren't you supposed to be developing your users?

In other words, what does it matter what their site does? Your users are on your site are they not? This builditwithme "looks nice"; it has 129 people; what are you worried about?

Get some feedback from the people on your site. Talk to them, find out what, how, why, where they are looking for and (not finding) help with their project. It makes the farthest sense, at least in my opinion, to try to answer those questions by looking at some other guys site design.
yes yes yes, love bansky.
Works fine but doesn't work in the same way.

On etherpad there is a lag and updates get chunked.

With websockets you could do it by the keystroke with little to no overhead.
I recall using this methodology a number of times. The usual implementation is to file a feature request ticket in the issue tracking application, add a comment explaining why we aren't doing it, then close the issue as 'WONTFIX' or 'INVALID' depending on how things are set up.

I agree it's really powerful to have the list and to consciously and actively say "no" with the same ceremony that you consciously and actively say "yes" to features.
I don't think it's fair to say that google developed chrome to prevent users from blocking ads - adblock users make up such a small percentage and likely non-optimal demographic of Internet users that I don't think google's worried abot that.

Eric Schmidt said in an interview about chromeOS that google's goal is to improve user experience on the Internet as a whole; google's revenues are directly correlateable with total hours spent on the Internet. If you look at google's efforts from that point of view, they don't seem quite so scary ;)
Chrome now available for linux
The reaction has less to do with the Crunchpad, and a lot more to do with Arrington's peculiar ability to enrage the startup crowd. He has his issues, but the real bone of contention seems to be the amount of power some people feel he wields over their companies. The Crunchpad's bizarre demise is just an opportunity to enjoy some schadenfreude at his expense.
http://openhandsmusic.net/sample_music
Apparently it had quite strange semantics, presumably for ease of implementation:

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/manual/bbckey4.html#renum...
Heated Towel Rail
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I don't think this article was targeted at us. There are people like he describes, but they don't develop for the web, think about becoming entrepreneurs, or socialize on sites like this. By and large, they're dysfunctional people; introverted to the point that it hinders their success in most things they attempt. That it seems they do not exist is simply sampling bias—there aren't many "sightings" of people that don't want to be seen, let alone remembered. This has nothing to do with those of us who are willing to imagine another's viewpoint long enough to reason that they might need some convincing to buy our stuff, even if it would be useful to them.
It seems like the guys at tarsnap have made their own application. The files are stored unencrypted, and it is the user's responsibility to encrypt them as the user sees fit, removing any limitation and not forcing the users to use only one protocol or application to store encrypted backups.

Using duplicity with a GPG key you can store your backups in an encrypted fashion.
Entrepreneurs find profit in solving problems
I prefer the larger format, in paper and with interactive media. As for solar energy, power constraints simply aren't an issue for me. I don't want to work when I am in places without readily available power (i like to keep work, work.)
Ah, thanks - I pasted from a tweet.
“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel and senior vice president.

And his boss once said

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal"
How many people in life find their calling and create it completely by their own hands? We are in one of the unique fields where don't need a degree to make a good living. Yes, many of us are self-starters, but if this post inspires one kid to join the fold, I think it's worth front-page HN.
This would be better titled "Why doesn't Chrome have NoScript?", instead of misleadingly giving the impression the writer actually knows why.

And yes, I'm aware the misleading title is the blogger's work - no need to perpetuate it.
Actually, I think a cross-licensing deal is precisely what Apple is trying to avoid.

There's no discernible reason for Apple to have not licensed Nokia's patents in the beginning, given what other licensees pay. So it seems likely that Nokia was looking for terms above and beyond what they ask from other licensees.

Which, in this case, would almost certainly have included licenses to use some Apple-patented technologies.
Benchmarking a simple DOM based cloning template
It's not ajax, it's javascript and css. All the content is on a single page.
That is exactly what I meant, and that was exactly my point. Twitter wants to become a service provider. It seems it doesn't care so much about you visiting the site as much as it cares about you using the service it provides.

How this translates into twitter making money, we don't know yet, but it seems like it is the direction they are going with Chirp( http://chirp.twitter.com/ ) and with talk of giving more developers access to the firehose.
My SE class last semester also said the waterfall model was a fairly good choice, although it "might not work especially well for projects with rapidly changing specifications."

What they didn't say is that describes virtually every project.
I would guess that the original is too long for the length filter.
That adblocker doesn't work. There was a thread about this recently here, but it's very easily provable yourself.

It uses CSS to hide the ad. Chrome doesn't expose the necessary hooks to do ad blocking the way FF does.

The chrome ad blocker is easily circumvented.
I think the author's a she.

> There are people like he describes

No doubt there are - but in my experience they are few and far between. There's no need to call out a vast minority of people to try and make the point that this sort of anti-marketing belief is widespread... it is not.

I work with other programmers every single day, most of whom do not read HN, nor have entrepreneurial ambitions. More than a few are your stereotypical hackers whose sole purpose in life appears to be hacking on code.

Yet I have yet to meet someone who fits the profile the author describes. I'm sure they are out there, but to suggest that this is common, or even anything but a remote minority is absurd.
I applaud the authors for attempting a new kind of data visualization. However, I find two major flaws in the graph:

1) Because the perimeter of a circle grows as a function of the radius, an arc must grow just to represent the same share. This is misleading, giving an impression of growth where there is none.

2) It is difficult to tell which arcs on one side of the circle go with arcs on other parts of the circle. There is simply too much distance between them to judge accurately which arcs belong to the same time period.
An increase in followers is not the same as an increase in engagement.
Yep, Damien's patch greatly improved CouchDB's write throughput for the case where you've got a pool of processes trying to write to the same DB simultaneously.
Chrome doesn't support the API calls needed to do proper ad blocking.

And as for cookie handling, XPCom is a delightfully complete API. It's a platform. Chrome isn't nearly there yet. And there's not much evidence that they want to be.
Best demoed with Axiis :)

But I found a 404 in the examples page:

http://www.axiis.org/examples/HClusterColumnExamplee.html
How A Kid Earned $2m Before He Could Drink – And The Shocking Way He Lost It
I posted about this yesterday, and Andrew finally upped the interview, so here is a link.
As a non-native speaker I only find the pun when someone says it's pun. Thank you!
I'm not saying Paul considers himself beyond criticism, I am saying that the community here jumps at the chance to heap criticism on Joel (there are many historical examples of that here)....the only exception I am aware of is the article in which Paul was also mentioned...for that article, hardly a peep.
So an entrepreneur stops being crazy the moment a co-founder or investor shows up?

Get me one of those!
I think you're being reductionist in your interpretation of his point. His point is not that features are unimportant, but that some un-implemented features are equally as important as implemented features.

People pay for features, but they also pay for un-features. It's called simplicity, and it helps sell many Apple products, including the iPod.
A great achievement?

They took a rendering engine, made some changes to allow tabs to be run as their own process, and took a year to implement an underwhelming and feature-sparse extension system.

What is the big achievement? Mozilla created their own rendering engine. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we'd be worse off in a world where the sole choices are Trident and WebKit.
ok, so it's true i wasn't impressed, but it did bring a smile to my face, reminding me of my own "similar story" (no girlfriend, back then, and the person i knew who had a zx81 refused to type in my wonderful handwritten code :o)

so just because it's not impressive doesn't mean it can't be appreciated (also, are you serious about your final remark? - i knew way before then that being smart wasn't something to "show off")
Take a look at the note from the NoScript developer that was posted here yesterday:

Maybe Google plans to implement the missing stuff later,
maybe they’re still trying to figure out whether it can be
done without enabling effective ad blocking, but in the
meanwhile the pale AdBlock and FlashBlock imitations which
have been hacked together by overwhelming popular demand, are
forced to use a very fragile CSS-based hiding approach,
ridiculously easy to circumvent.

http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript/
Yeah, but then the graph wouldn't look like a Firefox logo :)
Good feedback

>is ugly

I agree it is ugly, my co-founder does design and hasn't gotten a change to improve it yet. (The project is a week old).

> lacks the basic things that every wordpress blog has

I love wordpress. I've used it on many sites. This software isn't meant to be wordpress, it's meant as an alternative.

> All those tens of thousands of companies making money by adding new features that people want to software are not idiots. It's not that they have failed to ever consider Jasons theory. They have, and it does not make them money. People want features. People will pay for features.

I agree. But I also think many failed companies that you don't hear about, added feature after feature and never got the core right. Once you have the core right, by all means add features when it means more $$$. But don't fall victim to feature creep early.

> You want to believe that features are unimportant, simply because you don't have the time or resources to develop new edge features. People who actually sell software will tell you the exact opposite though - features and upgrades are what sell.

I think really I just failed too communicate clearly enough. I don't mean never add features. I just mean think harder about it. Humans are wired to feel good when you get something done. This (un)features tactic is a hack to prevent you from adding things without enough thought.
Good point. I kind off broadly classify all javascript only pages as Ajax though its not strictly. I guess with one page only it was probably easier to make the website.
This is misleading, giving an impression of growth where there is none.

But there is growth. Perhaps it's the static percentage based graph that's misleading, I find this graph of more or less the same data rather intriguing:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3328/3421742213_db946c5ddf_o....
The clear edges of physical products make it much harder for feature creep to happen.

This might be true for simple products like water bottles, but does not hold true in all cases. Consider a car radio. I'd LOVE to have a car radio that had two knobs: volume, and tuning, which cover 99% of my use cases for a car radio. Try to buy one, though.
The Great American Hackathon is Tomorrow
This used to be the standard practice where I worked doing client web development. Random Fortune 500 Company is not going to buy into an iterative development process, because the person at the client company is usually some peon with little real power to adjust budget or requirements as necessary. That is, until it's too late, and their superiors are breathing down their necks because the website doesn't do what they didn't say it should do. Plus, if you don't use an iterative process, you can bill your client for massive change orders.

So there's no real incentive on either side to change the process, unless both companies "get it" from the start that you can't make quality software this way. The likelihood of this decreases dramatically the larger the client.
IMHO I hate their interface. That flashy Ajax is too overwhelming. Your plain list is easier for me to read. Have you tried doing user testing with your two pages and then also test how users interact with your competitor?
Mosspuppet: Arrington's bad JooJoo
An entrepreneur stops being crazy the moment somebody pays money for their product.
Unlikely. How will SQL deal with low-level semantics that do not provide transactions in the way SQL-users understand them but requires the user to understand the concepts of the CAP principle?

I'm not sure what you mean. SQL Databases have varying feature-sets already and SQL copes just fine. A "NoSQL" backend would simply be yet another type of database, lining up with e.g. MySQL and Postgres.

It's just a matter of applying the verbs (SELECT, CREATE, INSERT, UPDATE) in a meaningful way.

The individual stores could even extend the language to a degree, just like the RDBMS flavours do today. The important wins would be a common baseline (select foo from bar), a standarized way for human interaction (adhoc queries in a console are very useful) and a much easier migration path from traditional RDBMs.

How well does SQL deal with conflicting data being returned from retrieval operation?

Again I wonder what you mean?

If you're referring to versioned stores, or stores with particular semantics, then I'd imagine things like that to be simply embedded into the response. I.e. all tables returned by a select-statement could simply contain an additional column containing the tuple version. The user can then deal with that meta-data using the usual, time-tested SQL machinery (select .. where version=, group by, etc.)

Yes, this means every store needs slightly different treatment. But that's no different to how we treat RDBMs today - a common baseline with variance in the more specific features (column-types, indexes, triggers etc.).

I certainly hope that document-store developers do not take the lazy route and prematurely converge on a standard like SQL.

That's a strange wish to have as it only makes life harder for everyone. I don't see anything bad about SQL (the language) that would prevent it from taking this role.

Moreover the query language doesn't need to have ties into the underlying implementation - it's merely a common vocabulary.

SQL seems like a natural choice due to its ubiquity.

LINQ, in my book, is an ORM and operates at a different level of abstraction. Pig and HiveQL otoh are exactly what I have in mind - SQL dialects.
Or a cell phone that's just a plain phone, with nice buttons. I love my Droid so far, but years back I had a phone I could dial by touch.

Of course, the issue may just be as these products become more like (or actually) computers, the same effect comes into play.
I agree, the old version gave more information on what positions were needed at a glance and was a bit more clear...
I'd say they're right to teach it as such, though. Software Engineering is about nuclear reactor software, traffic flow control software, car injection system firmware, weather prediction grid software, lunar rover software, and, just maybe (but this is at the borderline), ERP software.

Meanwhile, web applications (that aren't Google-search scale projects) don't require any software "engineering"—they're simply designed and then crafted, more like a clay pot than a bridge. They're iterated like a play is rewritten slightly after each performance, based on audience approval and obvious errors, not based on any accepted theorem or body of knowledge that says that the given practice is wrong.

A corollary of that statement is that Software Engineering has no use for most of us here at HN :)
I could not read more than the first two paragraphs of the original article due to the paywall.

Here is a Bloomberg article that can actually be read:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0Kv...
Are there companies where maintenance & bug fixes aren't the domain of the junior developers?

I've never seen otherwise unless the junior guys can't handle it and it gets escalated to the people who are trusted with design.
lol?

sounds like a non-technical manager who is unable to identify the smart coders, who uses policies that have consistently chased the smartest coders away from his department, and who has chosen to blame this on the coders rather than his poor policies.
The Capture API (Video and Audio in Javascript)
I don't see that as a big problem. The queries will have to be parsed and processed inside the Database anyways. Thus the servers could simply accept SQL strings over HTTP - or any other transport protocol.
Just a note, Mixergy seems to put up a bunch of interviews that I'd be interested in _reading_ but watching a 1 hour interview just doesn't work for me.
Why don't these graphs ever break down into the major versions of Firefox? I know there is still testing done on 1.5, 2.x and then of course 3.x as the current version. Why break down IE, Opera and Netscape but not Firefox or Safari?
As a writer who sometimes covers tech startups, I can also add that it helps to get in touch before an event or official news release happens. It can sometimes take a while before a story gets ok'd by the editors.
I'm sure he stole the quote from somewhere....
And since the absolute total has grown close to linearly, the tree rings are not that misleading after all.
Maybe the assumption is that people are just auto-updating these.
If you scroll down, there's a transcript made by MTurkers. (It's Friday, so you get snark-free. Well, aside from this parenthetical.)
I have this issue with Mixergy as well. It sounds kind of stupid now that I'm typing it out, but... an hour is a long time. And the synopses that they write for the interviews are rarely very good.
This title is a little misleading. He didn't lose the $2m. He spent it all on fun stuff and then broke his SEO in some way so that the revenue stopped coming in.
New York limo service
Most content on the web is text. I feel a sort of deeper connection with the people involved when I can see them talking, so I am happy there is content for me as well.
Yep. This is brilliant!
So what does an EIR (at First Round… in New York City…) do?
It's a comedy website. Not true.
Calling yourself a hacker makes you look like an egomaniac.
Majority of Twitter users use a third party app:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_t...
Vevo is Where Your Missing Music Videos Went To
I wrote a short method that when given a background color it will tell you whether or not white or black text will be the most readable. Using this you can still generate saturated colors but still have the text be readable.

You can find it here:

http://blog.nitriq.com/BlackVsWhiteText.aspx
If you stole my flux capacitor blueprint I'm going to sue the shit out of you!
The two aren't exclusive...
It was an interesting interview, definitely more Howard Stern and less 20/20 as far as the guest and content are concerned. I really didn't need to know when and how he lost his virginity. His money management (or lack thereof), business "partnerships" (giving full server access to a kid in another country he never met before) and business ethics (scraping a competitor's site and spamming their users under the guise of direct marketing) painted a picture of a very naive entrepreneur to say the least. I think this interview is a very good example of what NOT to do.
They stopped breaking down opera after 8.
TechCrunch Sues Fusion Garage Over JooJoo
What are you copying from builditwithme? I don't see much of a similarity. Anyway, I think your original site is much better than the new one.
i kind of like the blog... very minimalist. all substance and no fluff.
Very interesting, but makes me wonder, why would the body naturally suppress this growth at a certain age and what possible side-effects could come about if this were altered?
This guy has reinstated my love of hacking binaries, we used to do this alot when we were rewriting memory of MMORPGs like Asheron's Call. Never thought about doing it for legitimate reasons.
Is the market really growing by 2 x PI x the width of one of their slices? That would be quite the coincidence.

Your link is much easier to read.
Yeah, I didn't read that post as being meant to impress necessarily, just motivate. So, the fact that lots of people start early is even more motivating for those who have been told it's too hard.
I stopped reading when he mentioned that he had a girlfriend when he was 14. Was there anything else he did that was remarkable? ;)
It's also misleading in the fact that he didn't earn the money before he could drink. He earned it before he reached the legal drinking age.
My understanding is that while slang the language sucks (where "sucks" sometimes means "is not C++" and sometimes is actually meaningful), slang the dataflow system is fantastic for the organization.

The dataflow system allows higher ups to simulate possible outputs and measure risks easily. I.e., you tweak the LIBOR, run each desk's slang code to see how it will affect them. Then you combine the results and see what happens firmwide.

In contrast, at most other places, you'd need to ask each individual MD to tweak the LIBOR in whatever spreadsheets or C++ models they are using, write a report, have your underlings combine the reports into their own spreadsheet, summarize, and explain to you.
Talk about Hacker News in it's truest sense. Makes me embarrassed to have ever said "we can't" or "I can't" on any project I have worked on.
Arrington’s Bad JooJoo
Wait, so he cashed in a house, a bunch of cars, and kept his girlfriend showered in gifts?

Sounds to me like he came out ahead. Now he's got the financial security to try whatever the hell he wants for the rest of his life as long as he can feed himself and pay his taxes.
It will be interesting to see if Chrome retains it's growth.

Also an nice reminder of how fast Mozilla/Firefox grew initially as well - I thought Chrome was exploding on the scene and had forgotten how fast FF took a decent market share. A neat reminder not to wear rose tinted specs.
Because it makes the Firefox share look larger.
I still have the 3-ring binder containing, among other early projects, my first BASIC program written for my Timex Sinclair 1000. I was also oblivious to some of the basic structures of BASIC so there's a ton of repetition. It's fun to go back and look at some of my notes and scribbles from over 20 years ago. Fun for me, boring as hell for anyone else.
Doctors are taught in American medical schools that they are supposed to provide all options to their patients and explain to them the cost benefits and not try to make or even bias their decision.

I'm not sure if it's simply for fear of lawsuits or if it's coded in the law itself (although I think I read that it's the latter somewhere).