skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Common sense emacs tutorial that doesn't assume I'm stupid?
I know there are tons of tutorials on anything I want that I could find via google. However, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good emacs tutorial that assumes I know why way around a command line and am familiar with programming. I have recently read The Little Schemer and am currently reading SICP, and I am starving for a better Lisp workflow. For example, interacting with my own code via a REPL is something I would love to experience. I have read some tutorials and had a bit of success, but it's mostly skimming through either elementary stuff, or stuff that assumes I already know emacs. Thanks a lot for any tips or links.
@dnsworks.... well I am trying to relate to what you said but I believe pros and cons exist with all sorts of responsibilities but again I will ponder over it :P
Interesting to see the iPad mentioned. That's what interests me about it: is it an adequate substitute for an A4 (paper) notebook?
For the still-eating-ramen contingent here, ING Direct has the most customer-friendly policy on overdrafts that I've ever heard of: they charge you actual interest on money the bank fronts you to cover overdrafts, rather than charging you a fine. This means that if you have occasional lapses in your cash management and a bowl of ramen pushes you $5 into debt, you owe the bank ~9% interest on $5 for the three days it took you to cover, or less than a penny, rather than the more traditional "Enjoy your $35 overdraft fee."

Don't abuse this -- overdraft is not a credit line -- but it is nice to have.
I too was shocked, and am also quite shocked that this isn't shooting up with up votes. - Developer specific I would say this isn't developer specific at all - but it has very convenient !bang support for developers
suhweet! Thanks so much!!
Someday, I'd like to be able to import the settings of an existing theme and tweak from there.
From all I've seen, I would bring home these points:

1) Have a full-time job and do the startup on the side until you're simply not able to anymore.

2) Read, read, read about modern successes and failures. Studying management of the 80s doesn't make you a good manager - it makes you a historian. Find people you look up to, and learn what you don't want to do.

3) Don't make a copy of something until you've tried to fix what you don't like of the original.
I remember meeting many of those new college graduates when they came to the United States (and, particularly, to my alma mater) in the early 1980s.
No idea. But it will definitely make it easier to change jobs, and it will definitely make it easier to strike out on your own.
I sometimes wonder if these stories belong here, due to the incendiary properties and tangential relationship to start-ups. Not that I don't think Hacker News could handle the discussion more or less maturely.
Plus it'll be easier for us to poach employees with families from big companies. I couldn't imagine what it would take to get someone with a preexisting condition at a startup.
A startup/small-business related point on the bill is "A tax credit becomes available for some small businesses to help provide coverage for workers."

Just trying to make the top story in HN at least a tiny bit relevant to HN...
Or, instead of using this odd "security through wasting time" method, you could just employ a large salt to make rainbow table usage infeasible.
Casting the ID to an int (like you should do) will make any non-numeric strings into 0. If your ID is 0 you can assume an attack and give such a message. With PHP you should be using mysqli_ functions instead of mysql_ variants as they protect against multiple queries executing in one mysqli_query() call.

I do agree prepared statements are the way to go at least 90% of the time.
From my casual read, that's for businesses where the average wage is pretty close to the minimum wage.
Pre-Market U.S. Stock Futures: http://money.cnn.com/data/premarket/
> Better change that

You can't change introversion, because it's not an externally-visible face you "put on," but rather part of your utility function: extroverts (re)gain energy from social interactions, and spend energy working in solitude, and vice-versa for introverts. You can't change what tires you out, although you can fake not being tired.
Here you go. Should work in all browsers except IE7 and earlier.

You can add as many column divs as you like.

Note that the html { height:100% } is needed when in HTML5 mode.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
html, body { height:100%; margin: 0 auto; }
body { display: table; vertical-align: middle; }
.column { display:table-cell; vertical-align: middle; }
p { text-align: center; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="column">
<p>holy cow!</p>
<img alt="shock the monkey" src="http://i.imgur.com/Pt9Pd.jpg" />
<p>it worked!</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Nadda. Just don't take it in the afternoon or evening.
You couldn't. I mean, speaking as the father of a child with kidney disease - forget it. Impossible. That freedom, the freedom to start a company even if your children are sick, is granted only to the very rich in this country.

Until - I hope - now. It remains to be seen how much hash was made of the bill during the sausage-making process.
Another way this bill affects readers of HN: Parents can keep children up to 26 years old on their health insurance. Previously, the age limit was determined by individual insurance companies or individual states.
[I posted this on the other thread, which seems to have been deleted as a dupe. Sorry if it's against protocol to re-post. But I tried to find both sides, good-and-bad wrt startups.]

Some discussion of the impact on startups in the thread at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1208019

While it didn't discuss all of these, it seems to me that the things that will directly impact startuppers:

Pros

- Community rating, no recision, etc will make it easier for people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage. For people who have pre-existing conditions (or who have kids who have pre-existing conditions) and don't have a spouse at a bigco and want to do startups, it makes it possible.

- Might also make it easier for bootstrappers to get coverage.

Cons:

- The new taxes are concentrated on capital gains, so will tax startups and angel investors most of all. [This bill proposes a 3.8% increase on cap gains. The administration is also planning to change the regular cap gains from 15 to 20%, so if everything passes the rate will go from 15% to 23.8%, or a 58.6% increase.]

- Shifts costs from the older to the younger, so most startups here will pay more.

- In realistic scenarios, will probably increase the deficit, affecting interest rates. But that's long-termand not clear.

Pro or con, depending on what you think:

- Mandatory coverage will require that you have coverage during a bootstrapping phase.

A mix of good and bad for startups, depending on where you are in the process.
I heard one really great line in there "You only want one? Ok you've got no friends. Just like me." after the the whole "buy a bunch for your friends," that line had a nice balance of making people feel like they suddenly needed to show off how many friends they had and yet not making the guy feel so terrible. Other than that I really don't see what makes this guy so special, I just kept waiting to be like "oh wow!"
Whether or not it creates jobs, it will surely save jobs and that may be even more important. Health care is a cost that companies bear, and that cost has been rising at an absurd rate. Unless we do something to control that rate of increase, companies will have to start cutting to save costs and the easiest cuts to make are in staffing.
The day pre-existing conditions don't matter is the day the us explodes with small businesses.
It's been discussed quite a bit on HN: http://searchyc.com/duck+duck+go

Gabriel is an active user, see his comments and submissions here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epi0Bauqu
Down-voted for pointing out that a salted hash is a better alternative? Weird.
Being an introvert can have many reasons, some of them are 'born in', and are hard to overcome others are caused by a lack of confidence or bad experiences in the past.

You can overcome some of it, but not all of it, your mileage will definitely vary on that one, but almost everybody can shift their attitude, even if only a bit, and usually more than that.

Read 'darkxahnthos' blog on this: http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com/

Giving up before you've started is a great way not to succeed at anything.
There's a difference between "covered" and "doesn't matter". What I'm not sure about is what, if any, the price difference in premiums will be. Just because they're required to cover you doesn't mean they have to do it cheaply.

I do know adults with preexisting conditions will be in some sort of special "temporary pool", whatever that might mean. No clue on the cost.
Average wages need to be $50,000 or less:

From WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405274870453490457513...

Tax credits for businesses: Businesses with fewer than 25 employees and average wages of less than $50,000 could qualify for a tax credit of up to 35 percent of the cost of their premiums.
Here's a plug for my pastebin: http://privatepaste.com which supports custom hosts with different defaults, http://hn.privatepaste.com or http://python.privatepaste.com for example.
Like he said, relevant to startups.
What makes it special to me is this:

- the crowd that he draws in on a potato peeler

- his continuous performance, not a gap in it, he never loses the attention of the crowd

- his salesmanship, indeed, selling a bunch where he should only be selling one, and a few more little instances like that

- the fact that the guy made an absolute fortune selling a $5 product to passers by

- the fact that in spite of being a street salesman his presentation is impeccable

- the fact that you can look at it and it looks so ordinary :) Now try it for yourself...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ades
It's a nice tip, and it could be nice for just changing one or 2 colors, but for totally doing a theme from scratch, I think I'd prefer a color wheel to messing with color hexes.
I wonder what the average wage is at YC companies with more than 5 employees.
The Nicholsen Group website - Garden Route
I never said to give up—I just think there are ways to succeed at external tasks that don't involve changing the kind of person you are internally. Because otherwise, it's basically equivalent to saying "only extraverts can do this job"—that if you aren't one already, you need to turn yourself into one. And that sounds like a defeatist attitude to me—why can't I do that job and still be myself afterward?

But in generally programmer-y terms: I don't think it matters what you've got on running the inside, as long as you can manage to conform to the right protocols :)
Proving a Negative
http://www.kingapi.com/ for anyone who wants to go direct.
I'm curious why you say it will make it easier to change jobs or strike out on your own? Only employers with 50 or more employees will be required to offer health care and the mandatory levels of insurance that everyone will be required to purchase are comparable in price to the plans already offered by insurers. The only differences seem to be for preexisting conditions. Those that don't currently have health care due to cost may end up worse off since they can be fined if they do not purchase a minimum level of health care.
Of course. Money that goes to ensuring your employees don't die is money that won't go to the investors as dividends, which means the stock goes down.

In the long run, a healthier workforce should increase productivity, and then stocks will go up.
> It's been discussed quite a bit on HN

That's exactly why I was surprised the main site hasn't been submitted so far. I've seen a lot of articles about it.
I'd be ashamed to be in my 20's and be on my parents insurance plan.
Is there any reason that the Dalvik VM shouldn't get TCO even if the JVM doesn't? I read somewhere that implementing TCO would necessitate a change in the bytcode and the jvm guys didnt ant to do this to break backward compatibility.

N.B: I haven't investigated the Dalvik VM and/or the Android ecosystem in any great detail, so this might be afoolish question,but any answers appreciated.
I've heard this a number of times but not heard it detailed: in what way are the CBO estimates unrealistic? What more realistic assumptions would you make, and what is their effect on the deficit?

Also how is it shifting costs from the older to the younger? It seems more that it is shifting costs from the near-bankrupt uninsured to those who make significant portions of their income from capital gains, i.e. the wealthy.
The US during the Great Depression had a few cases like this. I believe the NYPD placed people entirely based on standardized tests in the 1930's, and had 10 to 100 applicants for every available spot--and an extremely effective police force.

And here's a fairly politically-incorrect view of how CCNY, a free school that also admitted students only based on test scores: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/iq.htm . What's amazing about them is that they have eight alumni who went on to win Nobel Prizes, all graduated in the same 21-year period, and the school was, well, not exactly Ivy League.
> If you compare Ruby 1.9 to PHP...

1) "Ruby Scales, and It’s Fast" makes a point of talking about MRI not Yarv.

2) The fastest of those PHP programs relative to Ruby 1.9 (n-body and mandelbrot) don't seem to make any use of the PHP standard library - which undermines your "library is written in C" point.

3) If you look at the quad-core measurements you'll see PHP but you won't see Ruby 1.9 or MRI because (unlike PHP) no one has contributed Ruby programs that can make use of more than one processor.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
As a counterpoint, countries that already have this are far behind the US in small business creation. Despite this supposed handicap, the United States has the most dynamic large economy in the world. It turns out that the government soaking up a large portion of the GDP to pay for expensive public benefits diverts capital away from financing private ventures, and this has a detrimental effect on entrepreneurship.

If universal health care were really that important to entrepreneurship, why isn't Silicon Valley in Europe?
So you'd be ashamed to be in grad school? (Or doing a startup right out of college?)

Often the insurance offered by a parent's plan blows away what can be had through the University. Of course, you can buy individual insurance fairly cheaply... unless you aren't in perfect health, or are a girl.
Point taken (my bad!) - mixed should definitely be off the table. Replace with "student" :)
It seems that so many people are glad for it when they see it, that it should really just be a web-browser feature. It'd be used somewhere around as often as "Undo Closed Tab", so it's justifiable.

Perhaps we can get the default browser stylesheet changed from 1994-black-Times-new-roman-100%-width-on-white? Then turning this on would be as simple as pressing the "disable styles" hotkey in whatever browser you're in.
I am curious. What's the benefit?
Protocol is exactly the right term, but 'introverts' can have issues with protocol.

I figure that at heart I'm an introvert, I'm just very good at masking it :)

And over time it got better, I no longer have a problem approaching total strangers and starting a conversation, it became something of a sport. And that kind of ability is priceless in a sales situation, as long as it is genuine.

You can be yourself just fine, it's just that if you appear unapproachable or if you can't approach others that your chances of success as an independent take an instant nosedive. So you man up and overcome your limitations, you try to do your best and in time you'll look back at that 'introverted geek' that you used to be and you wonder what happened to him or her.

It doesn't mean you're going to 'turn yourself in to an extrovert', it simply means that in order to succeed you will have to behave more or less as predicted, protocol as you call it. And that such protocol has a lot in common with extrovert behaviour is unfortunate, but that doesn't mean that you are changing your base character.

I also think that there is way too much emphasis on being 'introvert or extrovert', I hardly ever come across people that fit the stereotypes well enough that the label alone is sufficient to predict their response in every situation.
I couldn't imagine what it would take to get someone with a preexisting condition at a startup.

It's easy: Just open an office in Canada.

For what it's worth, "pre-existing medical condition" is the #1 reason why Tarsnap is not a YC company.
I think the plans specify that no plan may cost more than 2 or 3 times the cost of the cheapest plan.
How well do you know HackerNews ? a Quiz
And now we will wind up paying for you because your family has medical issues and couldn't previously get covered. The burden has simply been shifted. Good? Bad? Shrug, depends on which side of the line you sit on.

I sit on the side of the line that favors less and smaller federal government. One of the beautiful results of the power we give to States to govern is that as a country we end up with 50 solutions. Our diverse populous can then choose which one fits best with their ideals and personal circumstances--and we get this while still maintaining ourselves as a cohesive country.

Unfortunately, this time the government has chosen to white wall a solution across all citizens rather than to let the fundamental action of our country (States rights) do the work which would have resulted in a better solution, IMO.
Loss is typically attributed to not using their newly learned skills. Teachers are constantly being bombarded with new ways to teach things, and new ways to focus on retention and comprehension. Since this has been a problem for decades it's logical to deduce that the teaching methods aren't the problem and the break is.

For adults it might not be that big of a deal to lose the specifics learned in school as hopefully the ability to learn and tools for learning have stuck. When you are trying to immediately build on a specific set of skills it can be a real hindrance to have to reteach things that the student should already know, but has lost because they didn't use it for 10 weeks. This may not even be that big of a problem for older students, but at the grade school level we are wasting the kids time by having to reteach things.
Finish school.
>But the teacher predicted that she would be asked why she wanted to study French, advising her to say she was doing it to serve the revolution.

Sort of like a Harvard admissions interview.
This looks promising! This functionality (and also the other projects on type-inference, etc linked in the research section) is very much needed. I'll use it myself, to be sure - but better IDE-related Ruby code analysis will be a great help in easing the complaints of the "religion of static typing" folks.
Having even a 4KB salt doesn't help: if the hash is too fast, the attacker has time to dictionary attack each user individually, without precomputing any rainbow tables. Hardware assists (e.g. GPU-based parllel processing) can cut the time down to O(minutes) [edit: or O(seconds), see below] per user.
It will be interesting to see how the markets react to this.

My personal theory, which I haven't seen anyone else state, is that the reason we heard from the bond raters last week about how the US might lose its AAA status is an oblique threat to so downgrade our rating if this bill passes. Even if we merely apply the conservative "three times more than the government says it will cost" we're stacking on another staggering amount of debt and entitlement on an economy that can't take it. (Given our current entitlement loadout even if our economy were to start rebounding tomorrow at record pace we're still in deep trouble in the not-so-distant future... and that's before we handed out yet more entitlements.) I'm not ready to "predict" it, but I wouldn't be surprised we lose it in the near future, as in, single-digit weeks.

They'll be right, too. An entity deep in debt whose only priority is to pile it on even deeper is an entity that is not going to be cleaning up its finances anytime soon. We'll have earned it.
1) Taking longer is not an indication of strength of the algorithm. Just like banging your head into a wall, multiple times isn't the best way to pass through it.

2) bcrypt does not appear to be well documented, well analyzed, or well maintained in the security community. Security through obscurity is not a good thing, as you have no idea what your exploitation window looks like.

3) If your goal is to limit the effect of rainbow tables, and not storing the password in the clear, and do not need to retrieve the original password, the ideal solution is to store a hashed password on disk and a salt for that hash. Thus your salt rotates for every password created/saved and you recovery of all passwords requires a rainbow table for every password. Not a simple task.

4) Lastly, you should make yourself familiar with the security risk of any system you use. For example, you shouldn't generally be using MD5 anymore...
That feeling of shame is better than having no insurance or having to pay lots of money for private insurance.
Last year I finished my graduate degree in computer science. I worked a full-time job while doing that (also during undergrad). I'm actually pretty proud of it. I finished up grad school with a lot of work experience, zero debt and had insurance the entire time.
A search engine duck duck go flattens
Flashcards for Focus
I will advise students to first get some experience at either at a big company or well funded startup. Work for a couple of years and then do your own thing. Right after college, one is usually full of hypotheses and an unreal model of real world. Best way to test all those hypotheses and get a good understanding of how outside-college world works is to work at some other company.
Speak for yourself. Where was this bill 5 years ago when i was 22: I broke my clavicle when some asshole did a hit-and-run and ended up dumping my entire savings (~$9K) into medical costs.

I would have loved to have my parent's insurance pick up the tab on that one.
Ask HN: Does anyone have a reference for a mid-sized clojure project for study?
I'm ready for my next step in 'clojure land', and I'd like to build a semi serious website using it (figure about 10 to 15K lines equivalent in PHP, no idea what that works out to in clojure).<p>So, I'm looking for the source of a medium sized clojure project, preferably using 'enlive' to see how it's done.<p>I learn the fastest by studying working code, rather than out-of-context examples and little bits, a complete project is a much better object of study for me than a step-by-step course.<p>So, to you the question if you are aware of such a project?<p>thanks!
Preexisting conditions are a huge issue, though; if the insurance companies dig hard enough (which they do) they can find a reason to deny almost anyone a policy. Do you have high blood pressure? High cholesterol? A low-functioning thyroid? Did you see a doctor because you strained your back when you were 19? Does your kid have asthma? No insurance for you!

Insurers have been known to dig in much more once you make serious claims trying to find something you didn't initially disclose to them so that they can invalidate your policy after the fact.

The bottom line is that the personal health care market is a scary, scary place for a very large number of people, not just people with cancer or heart disease. It's one thing to risk not being able to get coverage, or having your coverage taken away, when it's just you; it's an entirely different deal when you have a family to take care of.

If this reform bill is able to really address that concern, it will make it much easier for a lot of people to transition jobs or start off on their own.