This is a follow up post to How Hacker News ranking algorithm works. This time around I will examine how Reddit's default story and comment rankings work. Reddit's algorithms are fairly simple to understand and to implement and in this post I'll dig deeper into them.

The first part of this post will focus on story ranking, i.e. how are Reddit stories ranked? The second part of this post will focus on comment ranking, which does not use the same ranking as stories (unlike Hacker News), Reddit's comment ranking algorithm is quite interesting and the idea guy behind it is Randall Munroe (the author of xkcd).

Last night, TechCrunch reported that Google will now require sites that import e-mail addresses from Gmail to also allow export of their data. The move was clearly aimed at Facebook, which has kept Google from accessing their users’ data. In response, many people have mentioned that while Facebook lets users download some data, they’re still not able to download an e-mail address book of their Facebook contacts. However, that’s not quite the case. Back in March, I published a guide to exporting data from Facebook using various tricks and FQL queries. Facebook has since made changes and added tools which have made the post a bit outdated, but much of the information still applies. In particular, I described using Yahoo’s contact import tool to download an e-mail address book for all your Facebook friends. This technique relies on a Facebook-approved feature and should not violate the site’s terms of service. A few specific steps have changed a bit, so I’ll recap the process here.

When working with Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X, I always forget which bash config file to edit when I want to set my PATH and other environmental variables for my shell. Should you edit .bash_profile or .bashrc in your home directory?

You can put configurations in either file, and you can create either if it doesn’t exist. But why two different files? What is the difference?

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When you login (type username and password) via console, either sitting at the machine, or remotely via ssh: .bash_profile is executed to configure your shell before the initial command prompt.

But, if you’ve already logged into your machine and open a new terminal window (xterm) inside Gnome or KDE, then .bashrc is executed before the window command prompt. .bashrc is also run when you start a new bash instance by typing /bin/bash in a terminal.

This is a set of apps which creates the same application in various Python web micro-frameworks.

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Microframeworks:

* appengine * flask * web.py * juno * bottle * itty * tornado * pyroutes

Full stack frameworks:

* django * web2py * pyramid

jQuery has changed the way we write Javascript by abstracting out much of the painful cross-browser implementation details that used to plague developers, but to use it correctly still requires a little knowledge about what’s going on under the hood. In this post we’ll take a good look at jQuery’s selectors and how to use them efficiently. I’ll also talk briefly about DOM manipulation and event handlers.

This document is an introductory course on Unix system programming, with an emphasis on communications between processes. The main novelty of this work is the use of the Objective Caml language, a dialect of the ML language, instead of the C language that is customary in systems programming. This gives an unusual perspective on systems programming and on the ML language.

Video for Everybody is simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element, falling back to Flash automatically, without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing. It therefore works in RSS readers (no JavaScript), on the iPhone / iPad (don’t support Flash) and on many, many browsers and platforms.

I wanted to have something similar to the Firefox extension provided by del.icio.us. More detailed I wanted a button in my Opera, that opens a small pop-up window and fills out the URL field with the current URL, the description field with the current page title and the notes field with some text that maybe currently selected in the document I want to post to del.icio.us. After posting the pop-up should just close itself.

Google Instant

is a new real-time search service from Google, which for some reason does not seem to work in Opera even though it supports all the other major browsers.

But on closer inspection, it turns out that it does work in Opera! All you need to do is to work around Google's browser sniffing and spoof as a different browser, as demonstrated by Bruce Lawson.

Linux users have never been well-served by Flash. The official browser plugin offered by Adobe has tended to lag behind releases for other platforms. Flash is available only for 32-bit Intel-compatible processor architectures, and it has long been a source of browser slowdowns, freezes, and crashes. And to all that the fact that it is a proprietary, binary-only blob, and you can see why many Linux desktop users want to free themselves from it. You can, with a little bit of time and preparation, this weekend.

How to install Lightspark and Gnash.