jacobscott

Berkeley's hackathons are every six months, and given the way undergrads generally sleep, I don't feel like this is a huge deal.

That said, the main pros are probably the camaraderie and the challenge. The general case is people coding (long term projects) during the day and sleeping at night. Hackdays are different and fun! Plus there were prizes.

Full disclosure: I was a judge. Trevor Blackwell (from yc/anybots) was too.

In addition to a cloud-hosted solution, packaged software (along the lines of Hadoop) would be great too. Not everyone wants their corporate data out in the cloud, but I suspect they would all be happy to skip writing one-off "fix RDBMS scalability" layers.

Whoever solves the "scalability or consistency: choose one" problem will make a boatload of money. From what I can tell this is a very hard problem, so software that makes it seamless to operate at multiple levels of this tradeoff curve -- perhaps at the same time, for different parts of your data -- would also be a big win.

I think posterous is awesome, and it has become my primary blog, although I don't blog much. That said (and no offense intended), this feature is not exactly groundbreaking. Livejournal, Wordpress, and MoveableType all had stuff like this five years ago, right?

My understanding of how posterous works is to select and implement, cleanly, core functionality in a way that keeps the interface simple. I don't think that posterous out-competes other blog websites (or software) on features.

Putting my graduate student hat on, it seems like what HN is faced with is a problem of mechanism design. If we can agree that the goal of HN is good news and discussion (and defer to pg on the details of exactly how those resolve), then the question is how to design comment/karma features so that the best interest of the community aligns with the best interest of the individual poster.

pg doesn't mention the implications of gaming (in this context, flaws in the mechanism) in the newsnews announcement. I haven't had time to read the entire primary thread, but if anyone has pointers, send them my way.

Also, if any game theory type people are around know more about mechanism, would be interested in what you think of the new commenting features.

Sounds about right. Wikipedia has more information on regular languages, which computer scientists know a lot about, and of which Perl regex is a superset:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language

If you are:

* selling software people pay money for

* writing software people install -- that is, /not/ web stuff

Then under what circumstances would it make sense to ship untested code? When is there a difference between code that has unit tests, versus that with only end-to-end tests?

The following quote made me decide to post to HN:

"A lot of people in the news business, myself included, don't buy as a matter of theology that information "wants to be free." Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for."

Couple of points:

1) I understand the use case, but asking people to trust you with their twitter credentials is bad news bears. Isn't some combination of OpenID/OAuth supposed to fix this (once twitter gets around to it, or whatever)?

2) I think the intersection of digg with twitter is interesting (don't know if it is novel), and using a tweet tag is a clean way to do it.

3) Your design is pretty clean, don't know if I like the color scheme or name though.

4) Is "thoughtful tweet" an oxymoron? Is there a good use case for high SnR microblogging?

Flash mobs for not only fun/doing good, but also profit? This doesn't sound like something you can get wealthy doing, but if you have other priorities, seems reasonable.

Does anyone have figures/stats on how much of an impact social or "web 2.0" for-profit do-gooders are having?

I suspect that the delivery is probably the problem for you, rather than the content. To me, the core of it reduces to:

* If you disengage your brain periodically (e.g., get enough sleep, have fun, etc) you will find you work better

* Occasionally one should look at their life on a macro-level, and evaluate their long term goals

I don't think many people would disagree with this advice, it is pretty common sensical.

Thanks for the pointer.

Also, my work is gasp enterprise java duck. Eclipse integration with JUnit, Ivy, svn, ant, etc etc, saves me lots of time. My cover is blown :(

Real time polling is all well and good, but it seems like facebook itself is a bit of an elite audience.

Do you really need facebook's infrastructure/tie-in to run a realtime poll? What advantages does running it through facebook have?

FTA: you get $100k/yr as a teacher after working at the same job for ~30 years. A sweet pension is also possible -- although who knows whether this is still the case or will last.

Anyone know if there is git-svn integration with Eclipse?

Ask yourself: why would kijiji be competitive with craigslist? What advantage do they have?

I suspect:

* Buying pets is not a killer app for craigslist-like sites

* The fancier design is a net negative

craigslist has a pretty good lock on what craigslist does -- they don't charge users for much, have the userbase, have a simple UI.

no.

Not that we couldn't use better government priorities. Also, per guidelines, better link would have been to TFA:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/181392

Very enlightening. I recently did a week or two of ad-hoc product management (in contrast to my day-to-day backend engineering) on a tight timeline. I wish this had been written/on HN a month ago!

"make sure the architecture and code is examplary"

If you have time to write beautiful code at a startup, I might be suspicious. If something is ugly but not broken, why spend the time to fix it (versus releasing a new feature)? If you do everything right the first time, more power to you, but I think the prior suggests otherwise.

"Look for fundamental problems and propose fundamental solutions. Shoot as deep into the software stack as plausible/possible."

Not that I explicitly disagree, but the deeper you go, I suspect the higher your implementation risk.

the MYSQL escaping seems broken:

http://www.listable.org/mysql/random-stuff

this kind of thing is good to write a blog post on, but when else is it useful? I think it is irresponsible to choose "_awesomer_" over "scalable, readable, fully tested" for anything that is supposed to be production quality (don't know the status of the particular project in question).

You may end up with non-scalable, unreadable, and/or untested code in a production system for a number of reasons. Some I can think of off the top of my head include performance and schedule pressure. Introducing it for fun sounds like bad news bears to me.

I guess there's nothing super-wrong with posting links like this, my surprise was more that it got so many upvotes.

I guess I can now sympathize with everyone who complained about too many econ/politics/non-ruby/xyz posts to HN.

Front page story about a suggested change from 'RT' --> '♺' on twitter? If I had less faith in HN I would label this a jump the shark moment.

This writing in this article reminds me of the science fiction Charles Stross writes. It has lots of interesting points on enterprise IT versus web 2.0, but imho would have been a better read if it was a little bit more straightforward.

You should run a spell checker on your website: instaniously, algorihtm, even your pricing @ $299.00 (!!) a month all look unprofessional.

Will people doing serious semantic analysis be okay with using your service in a black box manner, not knowing how your algorithm works?

I remember hearing stories in undergrad about code written on paper and mercilessly reviewed so that it would work perfectly the first time it was compiled. Can't remember the specifics and may have been an urban legend -- but this is the closest thing I've seen recently.

Why post a TechCrunch article syndicated at the Washington Post instead of the original (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/01/the-problem-with-twply-...)?

Also, the whole thing seems like a super tempest in a teapot:

1) There's some twitter app that does something straightforward but useful

2) It may or may not be a spammy app

3) It is sold for cheap

4) Press ???

Facebook apps are one thing, but big to-dos over twitter apps I have a hard time taking seriously.

Since no one knows who you and your friends are, you could easily be the NSA, right? It seems to me that when launching a security/privacy service you should make an effort to explain why people should trust you.

sorry, any relevance to anything?