gkst

Thanks for this suggestion! I did The Science of Happiness https://www.edx.org/course/the-science-of-happiness. Not sure what "the best" really means, but I think it had the biggest impact on my life.

I've been a customer since 2006 and just cancelled my account. Not sure, where I'll move, but I need a provider that supports .de domains. I'm leaning towards uberspace.de, but will consider Hetzner as well.

Pascal is an interesting language choice. I think it is the 1st time I see an open source project that is actually used in production written in Pascal.

I doubt that Google prioritizes Wikipedia deliberately. Wikipedia has tons of backlinks, authority, trust, typically a high text to html ratio, probably a low bounce rate. Moreover, it is fast, works well on mobile and on and on. It's is just a very well done and useful site for users and search engines.

Having done a similar project[1], that also includes affiliate links to Amazon and being called a spammer by some people because of that, I really appreciate your stance, that if a project adds value, monetizing it is okay.

Moreover, I'd like to add that affiliate links are less intrusive and dangerous wrt to malicious code and user privacy. I wonder why Adsense et al rarely get called out, but affiliate links do. Maybe it's my confirmation bias or it's because people don't see those other ads, because of using an ad blocker.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924741

I wanted an easy way to search HN, especially limiting results by number of comments/points and to restrict them to sections like "Ask HN". This is what I came up with for now, maybe some of you find it useful as well.

Many of mbostock's recent "blocks" use D3 v4 http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock

These are not tutorials, but working examples with some introductory texts. They are very helpful for diving into D3.

Apache server. I know it is not a hip choice, but I've used it for more than 15 years to serve static and dynamic websites. I've changed tech stacks from perl to php to python used different data bases and Apache always just worked.

Exciting release! I played with the force layout on canvas to graph reddit conversations http://ramiro.org/tool/graphit/

It's harder to get interaction done with canvas compared to SVG, but for large graphs the performance gains are huge. Curious to dive into the other new features.

Thanks for this incredible piece of software mbostock!

No, it doesn't and therefore is no viable option for many real-world datasets.

I've used robobrowser for a project, where I needed to log in to a website and subsequently access pages as a logged in user. It worked well and I like the API. For "simple" scrapers that require authentication or some form of user interaction this is a good tool. If I need to scrape many pages from a site as fast as possible, I'd probably go for Scrapy though.

I just tried the query myself. The result set contains this URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headli..., which does not work when entered in the browser. It appears that OP merged this URL with the working URL, that occurs on rank 49. Also notice, that a URL variant pointing to this page occurs on rank 89 again.

Does it make any sense to you to compare a particular group to the general population then? I think it does, the insights you may draw from such a comparisons are obviously different than comparing two sub-groups, e.g. programmers vs. doctors for example.

Also the article doesn't judge the differences of incomes, the "overpaid" is your interpretation.

The full text of the comment is available on BigQuery, but I can't write an SQL query that returns all comments containing potential book titles.

To do such an analysis I'd need to download all 8M comments and process them individually and find a good way to detect book titles.

I see the case for having a disclosure section that informs about affiliate links and don't mind adding that. But quite frankly, everyone who knows about affiliate programs can see that the links to Amazon contain that tag. No redirects or whatever fishy techniques I've seen to hide that.

That page isn't linked in this post. I don't know that site and won't click that link to find out what it is about.

Yes, that is probably the case. Quoting from the post

"Amazon is often the goto website for referring books, but many books have dedicated homepages as well as pages pages on their publisher's website. Moreover, many freely available are referred frequently in comments, but are not considered in this ranking."

The approach used here has limitations, I hoped to make that clear by pointing them out and choosing titles and headlines accordingly.

Thanks!

Thanks!

I consider doing a writeup.

As mentioned in the post Amazon is often the goto website for linking books, I've never seen a link to Barnes and Noble on HN, Reddit or the like. I took care to make clear that this is a limited sample and didn't claim generalizability anywhere in the post.

Tagging the links was a conscious decision, but I do think that the approach of looking for Amazon links provides more insight than any other domain/online store.

The counts would be a lot higher I guess, if I searched for book titles instead of links to a particular shop.

Thanks for your reply! Going to look into the NER capabilities of NLTK.

Cool project! Do you mind telling which library or service you used for the named entity recognition?

If the comment contained a link to amazon, then no. If only the title was mentioned then yes.

The "I don't want to pay for content and all ads are evil" mindset is not really sustainable. For me affiliate links are the least obtrusive form of advertising on the web I'm aware of. Thanks for your comment and appreciation of the post.

Good suggestion, thanks!

Do you accept any form of advertising on the web?

Discounting multiple links by the same user is a good idea. Your seconds suggestion brings some rather complex problems, for example if a comment goes like "Code Complete is the worst book I ever read" it is certainly not an endorsement, while linking to a book in most cases is. Also a sentence like "programming perl is fun" does not necessarily refer to the book.

So this would require some form of sentiment analysis and also require book titles to be uniquely identifiable.