skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Emacs productivity tips
does anyone have any emacs productivity tips?

is there anything that you've done to your emacs to make it work really well?

im using gdb inside of emacs, i type M-x compile to make, i only use emacs -nw inside of terminal because the regular X version is too slow, stuff like that...

i've never used buffer rings, or customized keyboard shortcuts to automatically macro-out if statements and stuff....

im joining a startup soon, and want to get more efficiency out of my coding! :)
Obama: Astronauts to Asteroid & Mars by 2030s.
Yes, the presence of the ipad is really hindering the slew of android tablets we are going to see this year.

There is a very good reason as to why Apple has the market share it does. Apple makes the market. Once it's been shown to be profitable, others then join the market, but Apple has used it's first mover advantage very well to create and domante a market.

It wasn't the first to make an mp3 player, but it remade the market. It wasn't the first to have a smartphone, but it remade that market too. In each case, they increased consumer choice by drastically advancing the state of the art. Look at the zune now. Look at the nexus one, the new blackberries. Would those even be here if it weren't for the iPod and iPhone?

So, they may have a big share of the market (as you define it), but they are hardly a monopoly force.
Direct tax that the IRS monitors is almost misleading.
I would like to see VAT added to the equation.
Your mistaken presupposition: all drugs only ever impact just the person taking them, they are all completely metabolized into totally harmless chemicals in the first body they enter.
Crows as Clever as Great Apes
Oh, I hate the colonel, with his wee beady eyes...
Apple App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist for Satire
Here are the results on CLiki:

http://www.cliki.net/LispGameDesignChallenge

It looks like a few folks finished and posted their source.
Despite Musk's obvious vested interest, he's spot on here. The achievements of Musk at SpaceX, John Carmack at Armadillo and Burt Rutan at Scaled are impressive enough on their own merits. Consider that all 3 companies combined are spending a tiny fraction of what was being thrown at Orion and there's no contest.

The big aerospace companies seem to have lost their way - look at the Joint Strike Fighter or 787 debacles for example. Massive delays and cost overruns made sense under NASA's "cost plus" funding model. They need to get back to the "internal startup" philosophy exemplified by Skunkworks. Competitive commercial funding is the best way to get there.
Good idea. It's just too bad that for the general populace, "Hacker" is a bad term, and this logo on people's pages would be a turn-off for those who aren't somewhat tech-savvy. People think hacker = cracker.
Read http://code.google.com/apis/cloudprint/docs/overview.html

And, finally, the number one question people ask is, "How do the printers communicate with Google Cloud Print?" The answer is, "It depends on whether the printer is a cloud-aware printer or a legacy printer."

They're proposing a proxy for legacy printers in Chromium (that makes Windows/Mac OS X/Linux printers available to Cloud Print). They're also proposing that new printers add native Cloud Print functionality.

For Chromium OS, it seems like it will only be able to use new printers or legacy printers with specific proxy devices.
Best advice on the thread.
Good idea, not-so-great execution. I think this would have been better if the author wrote in a more serious tone.

I think the point is that if you want to, you can probably conjure a logical-sounding, professional explanation for just about any 'evil' action by a company. From their standpoint, when isn't it logical to do something that hurts the competition?

I'm not saying the explanation John Gruber came up with (and was later reaffirmed by Steve Jobs) is false. I just don't think it makes Apple's actions much easier to stomach.
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But that's exactly what i did, isn't it? I suggested the app store is like the brick and mortar store. And the device is like the land the store is built on. Why does the owner of the land continue to own the store?
I measure "trust" by actions, not words. When you buy a product, you aren't just saying you trust it, you are trusting it. Trust is a verb, not a state of being.

Unless you are very unusual and are completely off the grid, you've probably solved the question of how you personally decide how to trust a wide variety of commercial agencies of highly varying degrees of regulation and highly varying degrees of life-threateningness. Possibly without realizing it. In theory it may be unsolvable, in practice it doesn't seem to be.

It should be pointed out that this isn't theoretical, either. People die because the FDA forces them to not take drugs, even when death is essentially assured in the short-term anyhow. It's a well-known problem. If the FDA was more advisory, I suspect it would be a net good. I really can't imagine people en masse running down to WalMart and buying Dangerousol (now with twice the danger!) any more than they manage to now. (Which you can't ignore either, the FDA is not perfect.)
I know it's just one anecdote, but United offered me a hotel once when I missed the flight and it was my own fault.
What you write always makes sense, Thomas.
How about this as a better thought experiment/reality:

Some Linux distro makers refuse to include closed source drivers because they don't pass their idealogical purity tests. It's no good for the end user in the short term because it makes setting up a fully functional Linux machine more difficult. Some people accept this because they believe ultimately open source drivers are better. A company like NVIDIA spends some money to develop these drivers yet they are denied inclusion into most distributions out of the box solely for idealogical reasons -- a choice made by a relatively small group of people who control how the distributions are packaged.
You make some interesting points. I'm not sure what the failure rate would have been if the Apollo program were allowed to continue with the same design (albeit better materials and engineering), but its probably incorrect to assume it would be the same for the two craft because they are fairly different designs and have different physics (i.e Shuttle rocking back and forth before launch is due to its "piggybacking").

However the two most significant design changes that would have reflected far different failure rates are: 1) Change in fuel type and 2) Presence of an abort sequence.

1) In the Apollo design, the rocket was liquid propelled, thus it could have been shut off (theoretically) at any point in the launch sequence. The Space Shuttle by contrast has Solid Rocket Boosters, which once lit, do not turn off.

2) The Apollo rocket had an escape rocket mounted to the capsule that could have been fired and brought the crew to safety in the event that 1) did not occur. The Space Shuttle by contrast cannot enter into an abort sequence until those SRB's are done firing.
We feel the exchange is that journalists serve their communities, and the communities help them earn a living. Using the comments off site helps that goal.

> And what effect might this have on the people willing to comment?

You incorrectly (to my mind) assume that this is a major problem for most people. I think there won't be any effect. People don't read T&Cs, though we make it explicit in them that we do this.

This isn't like Facebook changing their T&Cs. This is publicly posted information, not private correspondence between friends. That would be very different.

> Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange.

That's not the exchange, just your perception of it.
So you mean that's how its pronounced in English? (Sorry, I'm British and am a Canadian resident, so this is inevitably what I say to my spouse when we get into an argument over pronunciation . . . you may feel sorry for her if you wish)
Attempting to trivialize abhorrent human right violations by comparing them to restrictions on a piece software run on a gadget?

I invoke Godwin's law - you lose your argument.
Switching input modes isn't a problem in terms of cognitive processing, it's just annoying to have to lift up your hand only to place it back. I find typing less annoying on a laptop because you can use the trackpad by stretching one finger without having to lift your entire hand.
Yes, of course! Every platform is exactly the same, and any statement that applies to one also applies to all the others in exactly the same way!
Alright... I said I didn't like it, but with this, I'll give Chrome another try.
A pretty lousy one. People are just going to focus on the obvious logical problems of making this comparison.
Long overdue feature. You could do this with Exchange/Outlook more than a decade ago. I wonder if these meeting invites are compatible with Outlook?
>> Apple MUST use native windows controllers such as our in built Windowing system and scroll objects.

... except that the Windows Presentation Framework (the successor to Windows Forms) does allow you to completely redesign the chrome and "scroll objects."
Won't CTRL+T (or CMD+T) open a new tab and focus the URL bar?
Vision Helpdesk Satellite feature Rocks
Satellite Helpdesk — Managing Multiple Companies through a single Helpdesk.

Vision helpdesk has well-organized and logically constructed interface that allows users to add multiple domains/companies and further easily access and manage them all from one place.

Better controls are definitely achieved due to the centralized nature of the system which in turn is easy and has low maintenance.
Uhmm...except for I can still install the nvidia stuff if I want to. This sounds exactly like what everyone is advocating.

Allow people to install rejected apps, just make it tiny bit more difficult.
I'll probably get hunted down and killed by this, but I think they could do much better if they used Flash. For really quick projects, it's about as good as a game making program can get.
The input type="file" way is one file at a time. You can't drag and drop 4 pictures into a file input.
how about reddit.com/r/education?
When Interns Must Be Paid - California Revises Guidelines
F the other side of the table
Hm. I thought a thought experiment required some thought on the part of the person proposing it.
Ask HN: Subscriptions on lots of apps/services starting to add up
Am I alone in getting a bit concerned about subscribing to so many different paid online services/apps? Each one is valuable and necessary at the time I sign up but I am looking at the amount of cash going out on solutions such as bug-tracking, project collab, CRM and accounting/billing and wonder if anyone else has turned away from them to go back to less polished but fully free OSS alternatives? Has the pendulum swung for others or is it just me being cheap?

Would love to hear solutions from anyone that has a fully free stack running their business.

(Edit: formatting)
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Interesting concepts, which echo some other analyses; but the author seems overly sure of himself. Of course, prophets of doom always look that way at the prophetic stage...then again his book on the 'coming collapse' has been out for 9 years.

I would have been more impressed if his ideas had been accompanied by statistics or graphs, rather than individual data points or reports of trends, whose significance is hard to evaluate.
I don't think I've ever read about a founder who doesn't care about their idea or wasn't driven to make it a viable business.
Ouch, what a mishmash of the law goin' on here.

ACLU v myriad wasn't about patentable second use of patented products, nor was it about obviousness over the state of the art (the natural world is not considered to be in the state of the art):

it was about novelty - the natural DNA in your cells was, in the judge's view, still the same substance (even in cDNA form and artificially synthesised) as the chemical in Myriad's 'invention' (since for him, function was crucial not form - its form might be altered and origin be synthetic, its function is the same - to carry information - and that information is the same).
You know, I'm having difficulty applying a separate set of standard to Bootup. Something like this wouldn't have happened if it were Ycombinator; I'm thinking: why should you take the standards you apply to one incubator, and exempt another from just that set?

Seems rather dodgy to me.

To be honest, for all the talk about 'deals fall through' and 'I'm sure they tried their best', things like this shouldn't have happened in a startup incubator. Things like this wouldn't have happened if the Bootup people knew what they were doing. And a PR fiasco of this magnitude wouldn't have happened if Danny and Boris had been intelligent enough to be humble and apologetic, right from the get-go.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but something tells me we're not dealing with professionals, here.
Aw, you mentioned LD before me.

Your last comment reminded me of this guy's entry "toy game" for LD10, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/16/working-title-ruck... made in Common Lisp. I think I remember seeing a Scheme game at some point... But yeah, lots of languages and libraries make a showing and people make some awesome stuff.
Thought experiments generally have the expectation that you don't quibble with them; Maxwell's demon doesn't make sense because demonic spirits don't exist, but that's not the point of the exercise.
"Swinging for the fences increases the odds of striking out."

Not a law. Good entrepreneurs are game changers and it's easier to just play a different game where there is not a high reward/high risk correlation rather than play this losing game that assumes that high reward must mean high risk.

In my opinion good entrepreneurs are not risk takers, they are risk managers. The best ones are money takers.
SIGPIPE 13 » GCC 4.5 & C++0x
AMD's 48-core Contest Winners Announced
I feel as if Songbird has reached that stage. I guess it's personal preference thing, but I am really impressed with the recent Songbird releases (even though they have been infrequent).
did I say equity was debit? I'm just trying to say that earnings only have meaning within the context of equity invested.
I think it's pretty widely acknowledged that the gaming crash of the '80s was due to a glut of horrible software, since there was no approval process, crap flooded the market, and since people had no way to judge what was crap, they bought random games and hated them, and therefore stopped buying. I'm not sure this is relevant to Facebook.

Nintendo came along with an approval process (Nintendo Seal of Quality) and made games popular again. Sort of makes Apple look sensible for all their iPhone shenanigans.
Sounds great, I just hope you guys have fantastic privacy controls when munging all those various networks together.
So basically, you feel that there is a set of people out there incapable of making decisions for themselves. I suspect you also don't consider yourself to be part of that set.

But if some people truly are incompetent, why not just have them declared as such and not restrict the rights of others? Rather than creating a class of elites who rule over all of us, why not simply delegate the task of managing the incompetent to social workers or other such professionals?
Damn, I typed a big long thing, then hit the wrong key combo and zapped it all. Is that irony?

Anyway, the gist of what I wanted to say is that when you use vim, you do a lot of thinking about how you're going to position the cursor or exactly how you're going to do a visual selection of some chunk of text. When you use something like Acme that's mouse oriented, you mostly use the keyboard to enter text, while the mouse is used to point and select text. Changing the cursor is a visual, spatial thing, as is selecting text; the mouse is ideal for this, being a two-DOF system, while the keyboard is a discrete/linear tool.

I'm a huge fan of Acme for most of my editing, but I like vi for quick stuff, plus there's a certain charm to firing up my old VT-220 or ADM-3 and hacking away. However, when I see somebody trying to do serious editing in vim, flailing away madly to move the cursor to the right place and do that funky funky visual selection thing, I get impatient and a bit ticked; he feels busy because he's slamming all these keys, but I just keep wondering what the hell is taking so long.

Vimperator and this new Chrome extension have a good idea in providing keyboard shortcuts that are both extremely brief (one keystroke, no need for Ctrl combos) and pretty familiar to people who use vi. However, people should be mindful of the best uses of all their input devices, not merely the keyboard (which is certainly more 1337, but not always the best choice).
Normal parens (like this) seem to work with URLs on HN.
and not working on Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3
At least one of the teams there was using Flash.
Oh damn it, I started watching it. For like the 10th time. I had work to do, you know!
How dare you crush my dreams.
iTunes for Mac is totally adequate. One thing you're missing here is that iTunes is the only way you're able to use an iPod, and so - if we're arguing about general market behaviour - iTunes doesn't appear to be a problem for the millions of iPod users out there.

That said, I agree with OP's point about iTunes's performance in Windows. It is - quite frankly - terrible. So much so that when I switched over to OSX, I opened iTunes and marveled at how quickly it could actually do things.
Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch at 500FPS, narrated
If you're interested, I'm working on a command-line music organizer:

http://code.google.com/p/beets/

It has an MPD clone player built-in, so you can use ncmpc with it if you want. Or just keep using cmus.
I almost upvoted you until I read "horribly naive."
Apps for the Army: the military offers cash for app dev
Only open to Army civilians and soldiers, but this signals that the Army will welcome applications that improve the lives of soldiers in the near future.
Hmm, I could see this working in an Airport Express USB print kind of way; but too bad, Airport Express still requires the printing origin computer to have the printer drivers. If Apple (or anyone else for that matter) Express can support cloud print, that would be so much nicer.
Only open to Army civilians and soldiers, but this signals that the Army will welcome applications that improve the lives of soldiers in the near future.
Canadian engineers helped save Apollo 13 crew
This guy's a dumb-ass. At least use Ballmer so that there's some reality to the satire.
Is anyone here using Yii for a production (or near production) application yet?

I'd be curious to hear about it. Am using CodeIgniter now, but parts of it bug me sometimes.
"But you think it works for all 100% of businesses."

Did David or Jason actually say something to this effect?
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It seems that you have some knowledge in this area. Sometimes people who have know-how get bogged down by the limitation of current state of technology.
It then requires an outsider to come in with a fresh perspective and fire in the belly. Yes, they may fail hundreds of time, but there is a chance that during the process they can do a breakthrough which the well funded gov labs had overlooked.
If it has not worked for past 30 years (cheap space travel), i bet it is a good idea to stoke up these innovative companies and see the results.
I would say that the land would equate to the server farms. I don't see how the device is analogous to it.
How do you explain Marc Andreessen's company laying off half its staff? Is he not a good entrepreneur?
Charter Extension Denied to Low-Scoring Stanford School
IAd not iPad is the future
Thank you!

Informative comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN.
Usability Test Example [video]
Ask HN: How to be a responsible single founder?
I'm on the cusp of launching my own startup in the near future. I've never been so excited about anything I've ever worked on and I think it shows in the near-final product (damn thing looks and works great).

I also happen to be in the single founder camp. This was just some small side-project that I realized had the potential to provide a nice little side income.

But I have more than a few worries. Don't get me wrong, I have good people around me to lean on for legal, business, and financial matters - but not too many technically-minded folks.

I'd love to hear from you guys about what specific tools and processes you've put in place to be sure your site(s) are always online, or that you can easily put up a "down for maintenance" notice on your frontpage if your server starts throwing lots of 404's, etc.

I imagine you guys have some pretty cool mobile apps specific to your company. But anything you can share with me about me a responsible business owner would help put me at ease.

I'm afraid of scenarios in which I go out with friends on a Friday night to see movie, the site goes down, I have no idea until the next morning - and then come Monday half my userbase has evaporated.
I'm not qualified to judge his entrepreneurial abilities; my main point is to question the correlation between high reward and high risk and also to make sure risk is not glamorized. (The only reason you take a risk is that it is a necessary means to a greater benefit.)
Spanish Solar-Panel Trade Group Calls for Fraud Investigation
Contest is limited to 100 people and $30k cash pool. It looks like a trial, or a pet, project.
This is exactly why I love HN. Nowhere else could you expect the founders to take time to excite (and educate) us in such detail :-)

Congrats Matt & Xobni. I hope that fund means that we'll get an Apple Mail & Thunderbird Xobni soon. I bet Xobni will good on the iPad.
Always remember the about page
Picking a log level
Finally! Now, all that's left is to have something like Loopt with this, so you can check on your friends to see if they are nearby for that serendipitous outing.
Most vim users do recognize it as a powerful editor.
Here is the deal though, we have no idea of what you are trying to do so it is impossible to give you any sound advice. The only advice we can give you at this point is ideas are a dime a dozen (I have 2 or 3 a day) execution is everything. I have been involved in 3 start-up companies that have successfully exited for huge deals the common ingredient in all of them was execution not the idea.

So to be as up front as I can, without being forthcoming you come of as an amateur and someone who is not experiences in this market, that will reflect poorly on your efforts in seeking capital. As good as your idea is, the guy down the street has one just as good; different but just as good. Seriously if it is that wizz-bang and revolutionary then get a patent-pending and tell the world. That would be your best first step for a few grand you can get a patent attorney to put it together for you and then generate some buzz with press releases about your patent.
Google Announces Q1 Earnings, Beats Analyst Estimates But Shares Drop