skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I must have misread you, I'm sorry. I got the impression that you were trying to state that the way you think about ideas, and idea-tracking (or the lack thereof) was somehow "correct" in some more objective sense.

I got the impression that you felt that if someone had to write down an idea to remember it, or if someone wasn't immediately capable of implementing an idea, that the idea itself must not be worth saving or implementing. I didn't get the impression that you were saying "this works for me, this might work for you" -- rather, I heard (or saw) "the problem you're addressing is a non-problem. tracking ideas is a wasted effort. period.". If that's not what you meant to imply, apologies.

I don't think that your solution removes the issue at its source if the issue is remembering ideas that you want to examine or implement in the future, either. If the issue is only having those ideas on hand that you felt were good enough that you remember them no matter what, then your solution works fine. If that's not the issue, then your solution only works in the sense of repainting the issue as a non-issue, unless I'm missing something fundamental about what we've been talking about.

I don't disagree that most people overvalue their own ideas, that's pretty inarguable.

I probably overreacted a bit -- as an explanation, this is a bit of a personal topic for me. I struggle quite a bit with remembering to do things, or remembering things I want to do -- and I also don't have very much time to devote to pursuing what I think are good ideas.

Without a means for me to jot down stuff for me to think about or work on in the future, I wouldn't ever come back to scratch any of the things that were making me itch in the past -- and scratching those itches tends to be better for more than just me.

This is probably partially because I, like a lot of "hacker types" am ADD. I don't mention that as a crutch or anything, but it is something that went undiagnosed in myself for a long time, and that definitely contributes to the "problem". I can not rely on my memory alone.

I can't really express the difference in how I'm able to "be productive" when I'm medicated and have a system for idea tracking versus whenever either of those are not present. It's a big, tangible difference, and this is the case for a lot of developers I know even when you take medication and ADD out of the picture.

Perhaps another semantic thing that should be mentioned is that the vast majority of my ideas are "change functionality of library X to include Y", "write script to do Z", "little app that does this", "configure app FOO to work with input BAR". I'm not necessarily talking about larger ideas.

Anyhow, I hope that clears some stuff up.
The problem with all these sites is that they get lost forever after being posted on HN once.
Format PDF docs as 5X7 landscape for on-screen reading, not letter-sized paper
AES-NI Benchmarks with Truecrypt 7.0 on i7-620M
I assume you mean JAPH?

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_another_Perl_hacker
You know, maybe I'm a casual Reddit users, but the whole sorting thing never bothered me. Really, none of these features are compelling. Oh, I'm a subscriber, and will be for more than long enough to know if I'll remain a subscriber and pay up again.

What I'd find interesting is knowing if 9000+ 'subscribers' did for the morale of the people behind reddit. Is it lower then expected? More? Around what you though? What are the feelings going forward? I don't know why, I just love reading insider stories.

Ahem. Hint hint. Ahem.
I am very, very curious about this as well. It is something I hadn't thought about until you mentioned this, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they haven't though of it either. At the very least, giving early adopters a free upgrade to the washable version when it is available would be good.

Luckily, there probably won't be a significant amount of summer left once we get the thing.
Many Stops is Good for Vacation, Not for WAN Opt
How about a benefit of Reddit it self as a community? $3 bucks a months provides way more entertainment to me then I could have gotten elsewhere for the same amount of money.

Yes, people will be OFFENDED that the web site they spend 1-2 hours a day on offers an option to subscribe and contribute something back to them for gasp $3/month.
I've never managed to understand why everyone's buying into this "badge" concept so heavily. They're a fairly reasonable game mechanic (though I think they're overused even there), and game mechanics can be effective motivators, but they really only motivate people to "win". Do we really want people trying to "win" HN?
I have found Octave to be lacking some aspects, also there is a significant network effect with Matlab, since most of the research groups publish code in Matlab, you gotta have it if you want to compete with them
I'm all over this problem, I'm prototyping some new features that should help, but they're not ready yet.
Here is a feature I would pay for: give me a checkbox to hide all the "funny" comments. Sometimes I just want to read comments from people who are actually trying to contribute something meaningful to the discussion, not just people trying to be funny. I don't care what they do to categorize the comments, but I would definitely pay for something like that. I'm not saying I don't like the funny comments on reddit, some of them are very funny. It's just that everybody is trying to be funny now and very few people can actually pull it off.
This poll is rubbish. "Are you a software pirate?" -- completely loaded question. You're not asking people if they use copyrighted software-- you're asking people to label themselves a PIRATE. Maybe I'll submit a poll about abortion "Are you a baby murderer?"

Maybe you should rewrite the poll "Do you believe in a free culture unencumbered by copyright laws that are specifically written to protect corporate interests?"

All this goes to show how much our language about copyright has been affected by the media and corporate interests.
When I was younger: Yes. Games, software, videos, etc..

Now: No on software. No on games. Besides the risk of virii, you dont get things like updates or patches. Its not worth it.

However, I still do actively download TV Shows + Movies occasionally. Its not because I wouldnt pay though, but moreso because there is no other ways to watch them from home.
I like the idea of a dashboard but most of the time they are really only useful when they are custom dashboards displaying what is relevant to your project. But great work getting something out that is simple.
> What about StackOverflow then? That's also about content. (Questions and answers) Badges there seem to encourage contribution.

StackOverflow is for programmers, and its scope pretty much limits participation to programmers and people directly tangential to programming. Thus, you don't get the internet hoi polloi problem.

> What's special about HN, in your opinion?

The editors and culture have largely managed to turn back the horde of lolcats, not funny puns, flamewars, and vacuous content. This is nigh impossible on a broad scope site. Hacker News is an incredibly rare feat, and has a fragile equilibrium that needs constant attention to preserve.

If hard-editing killing and re-titling submissions stopped, how long until this site denigrated to chaos? I'd say the over/under is two weeks.
These "right questions" sound an awful lot like half-answers to me.
I-DOSING: Dude, I'm Totally Wasted on the Internet
So generating those values in a full-fledged programming language is that much better?
I've spent the last 15 years programming professionally various imperative and object-oriented languages.

I think you're being too harsh on Haskell here. Certainly if you just want to quickly hack something together than Haskell is not optimal. Similarly, if you just want to create a web page that has one dynamic element in it, then a web framework is overkill and you might as well just use an inline PHP script.

But the real challenges in programming are always managing complexity over time. I am far from a Haskell expert, but I am definitely an expert in many types of bugs that programmers experience in the real world. And I feel pretty confident saying that at least 90% of bugs that crop up in the real world programs are due to a mismanagement of state. Different people have developed different techniques to combat this, but pure functional programming is by far the most powerful. The TDD/BDD community often touts testing as a guarantor of quality, but as useful as testing is, it pales in comparison to the assurances of mathematical provable functions.

With Haskell you spend more time developing, but you get the greatest possible assurances that A) your code is bug free and B) it will remain bug free even as the program as a whole changes.

It's absolutely true that most development these days is low-budget high-priority stuff where time to market trumps long-term maintainability. However to suggest that Haskell--the strongest bastion of functional purity, and one of the few places where the mathematics behind computer science are being advanced--should water itself down to be more like 1000 other programming languages designed for getting things done™ is just plain silly. If you don't have use for Haskell's purity than don't use it.
I am not sure how many of the upper management have MBA's, but they do hire an awful lot into middle management. It is regularly at the top of the list for places new MBA's would like to work at.
I think he means installing software he's purchased on multiple computers.
I stand corrected. It's been a while…
Best. Name. Ever.

8{D
Whats the deal with the rabbit that keeps popping up? Is it the physics simulation's Lena?
Nice idea, bookmarked.

Observation: there's alot of dead space in the middle and right of all the blocks. If there's nothing useful to put there, it might be worth considering a different, more compact graphic layout.

The InfoVis and ProtoVis libraries, among others, may have better layouts for this data:

http://thejit.org/demos/

http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496056
I'm sure APIs would be implemented which would provide games developers with programmatic 'knobs' for fine-tuning.
I haven't taken a course, but have read (most of) "How to Win Friends and Influence People." While what you describe sounds creepy, there are good principles in there, and you don't have to take it so far.

For example, he points out that most people never accept blame for anything. From CEOs to convicts, we generally blame our failures on circumstances or other people. So with this in mind, he gives ways of steering people away from errors without raising their self-defense mechanisms or forcing them to admit that they're wrong. After all, do you want to defeat and humiliate them, or do you want to help them?

Indeed, the reason I liked the book was that generally, it DIDN'T seem fake. It encourages you to genuinely care about people. And says that, as it happens, this actually works better, too.
Start Coding, People go Crazy
Somebody needs to brush up on their definition of altruism.

Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others. (wikipedia)

Selflessness doesn't post to a blog about itself. :)
How to Control Youtube Leanback Videos with Nintendo Wii Remote
Ask HN: What is the contract rate for a strong c++ developer in Silicon Valley?
Hi All,

I am bootstrapping a software startup for the last 1 year. It looks like it is going to take some time before it becomes ramen profitable.

I have 10 years experience in c++ development, Software & Hardware Product Development, Project Management, People Management, Distributed Systems, Massively Scalable Networking Systems, HTTP & Web Technologies, Embedded Systems, Computer Vision Image Acquisition.

I am going to look for contract positions in Silicon Valley area (6-12 months). What is the hourly rate i should expect. I would appreciate any information or tips you can share for a fellow bootstrapper.
Ruby Summer of Code Status: Routes
A/B testing is great, but your data is severely limited. How do you know that sticking with the vision doesn't pay off in the long run? Unless you've been running A/B tests for years with doppleganger-Patrick who eschews the cold, mechanical methods of A/B testing, writes blog posts about how important gut-feeling is in web design, and made every page of BCC have yellow text on a green background because dammit he likes John Deere, how could you know that you're better off now? We know a lot less than we think we do, and running some limited tests doesn't change the fact that most of the time we're just guessing.
> So what are the regulatory rules that apply to cosmologists?

No idea. However, we're discussing whether regulated trades have trade associations and whether those associations are involved in the regulations. No one implied that every trade was regulated, or even that every trade with a trade association was regulated.
Yes, I understand this is ironic and also against the rules but come on, downvoting this comment? I know that HN loves its iPhone vs Android debate. I know "we" all love to downvote people on the "wrong" side but really, really?

And the only response was that it's on a different magnitude. The discussion wasn't about the magnitude, it was about willful ignorance. It's actually worse. BP was taking a risk by being cheap. Apple knew that the decision they were making would have consequences rather than just a chance.
Hi Hop, Curious about your background. Mfg/ID/MechE? Always nice to meet another "Atoms" person here. Shoot me an email at jflaherty@replicatorinc.com.
"Patented formulas"? WTF
I don't see how this is dependent on a personal lifestyle, really. Everyone values their time, and in reality it's when you have a lot of free time that you'd benefit from this more.

but surely you want to pick up on the best ones rather than just what you happen to have come up with recently

That's my point though: the best ones don't really go away; they are annoying in their persistence to be executed on. Wait long enough and the landscape that the idea lives in has changed as well; an idea from 1989 will need to be re-imagined so much that it won't even really be the same idea.

Sometimes you might be in the mood to act on something fitting a particular brief when that's not what you've come up with lately.

If you have this much of a time luxury I am truly envious, I must say. But in this case you're speaking more of hobby projects, not true business ideas. True business ideas will need to be worked on consistently regardless of your daily attitude or they will fail, unfortunately.
Ask HN: Managing direct ad sales - yourself? or hire?
I have a website that has enough traffic that I'm going to start seeking direct advertisers.

I've never done it before, and someone suggested just posting an ad on Craigslist and hiring someone, paying them 20% commission.

Does anyone have experience doing this? What worked for you? What didn't?
It's the Stanford Bunny.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bunny/bunny.html

It was preceded by the Utah Teapot. There's also the Cornell Box, for global illumination testing.

So, yeah, like Lena.
$250K Competition to Change Management Grad Schools
Thanks for the reply.

Yes I have. I didn't want to mention it in my original response to avoid taking the topic away from Haskell and Clojure.
Ask HN: Rate my project: MakeYourGirlfriendHappy.com
You should. Livejournal has been run by an excellent team for years and they've perpetually struggled with this.

One of the big problems of "Web 2.0" is that web communities lead to high user engagement, which leads to two things: (i) low click through on ads, (ii) self-selection of an audience that's got a lot of time but no $$$.

The result is that you can bust your butt to build a community with, say, 40k users, and still be struggling to pay for $800/month server costs, never mind getting paid yourself for the butt-busting.

I've got an answer to this, sort of a way to make a "community" site without actually having a community, but that's a card I hold close to my chest.
Ask HN: What is the precentage of Phds in successful startups?
Hello,

I am trying to get an esstimation of this for a research I am conducting. Successful being an exit/net profit > 1 million. Computer related startups only. Any directions/hints/data?

Thanks,

Virgil
Same as many others here. Copied a lot of stuff when I was a teenager (had 200+ floppies of BBS warez - those were the days...). Now I migrated to Linux completely and I don't really need any commercial apps. I buy some games once in a while though (World of Goo lately) and some music CDs.

These days I see the problem games producers face: When I wanted to play games, my parents would have to buy me one, and they wouldn't be keen to do that. Now that I'd happily buy a game which I really like, I'm not interested anymore.

The other problem is about apps - it's in company's best interest to give me (for example) a copy of Visual Studio as soon as I say I'm interested in it. Since I couldn't get it, I learned on djgpp and migrated to Linux as soon as I could. Now you can get new VS from MSDNA program at universities - I think it's still way too late.
I think Jason knows exactly what he's talking about. After reading this: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/letter/index.html and this: http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/02/who-founded-facebook-aaron... The quote seems very fitting towards you. I understand that this may come off harshly, but I believe it: it's a good thing Mark didn't take the advice you gave in your open letter.
That's much trickier than you think, because people's reactions are highly contextual. Imagine if someone went on the dance floor who you wouldn't expect to have any dance moves at all, but they are pretty good. They would get extremely positive reactions, so an alien posing as a human watching this would imitate this, but suddenly get a negative reaction because it would be seen as mocking. It's also possible to dance so well that it generates negative reactions like jealousy. Or you can have geeky Napoleon Dynamite dancing - cheesy, inappropriate and flawed, but somehow able to succeed despite itself. This is because quality of dancing isn't wholly intrinsic to the dance itself, it depends on other social factors, like the social identity of the dancer, the self-perception of the audience, the social meaning of the music and the type of dance being performed. For an alien, this would be the hard problem of dancing. What it boils down to is that when knowledge is highly contextual, it's very hard to learn it as a neutral external observer, you have to become a participant - in a way, before you can learn to dance, first you have to learn to be the audience for dance, to become embedded in the social meanings. This might also be the significance of being a good listener before you can become a good conversationalist.
Ask HN: Review my startup for Employee/Customer Feedback
We are a bootstrapped startup developing a product for gathering customer feedback for client-facing employees. The goal is to create continuous feedback throughout the year in a way that customers who interact with your employees feel comfortable filling out. The focus is on anonymous feedback, while allowing for the addition of escalation procedures / non-anonymous interaction for particularly bad feedback.

The idea comes from the frustration of dealing with performance reviews in an organization where most employees were customer-facing and therefore in a "customer service" role, regardless of their title. Hundreds of tiny interactions happen throughout the year, and our goal is to capture as many as possible. That allows for problems just below the surface to be dealt with quickly, and also helps aggregate performance/customer service on the whole.

If you manage a team of people, please take a minute to fill out our quick survey to help guide product direction:

http://bit.ly/bBGke6

Feedback welcome. Thanks!
Breaking A World Record for Gaming
In my case, I have built some trust with my users on a couple of small tools, so I have moved the needle enough to where I think I can try this. 'Half-off for life' seems like the kind of deal that would tempt anyone seriously interested.

Agree with you on taking the cash being a form of promise, to help motivate me to punch through the last 10%.. errr 90%.
Some people seem to think "a task described in a phD thesis" implies "a phD-level task". "Oh, crap, dude! This expects me to read a phD thesis! I'd better wait until somebody on reddit summarizes a blog post about a blog post about it."

By that logic, implementing Lisp is "a phD-level task", too. (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf) (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf) (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AITR...) *

* The third is actually a masters thesis, but whatever.
The discussion wasn't about the magnitude, it was about willful ignorance. It's actually worse. BP was taking a risk by being cheap. Apple knew that the decision they were making would have consequences rather than just a chance.
The analysis is flawed because it merely takes into the account the fact that ebp is callee saved verses using a different register that is caller saved. But ultimately, the register still needs to be spilled somewhere so you're not changing the overall amount of work done.

Furthermore, it doesn't take into account the fact that by using ebp as a GP register, you've got an additional register to work with which eliminates additional spilling.

Basically, there's nothing to see here.
> In most English-speaking countries it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair

Which Obama didn't....

In general, real professors have publications. Heck, so do real academic doctors. Honorary and "we're giving him an appointment to curry favor" ones don't.
You know they give you a version of xp and vista for testing ie right? It's a virtual machine image preloaded but time limited.

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21E...
A some of the leaders in this area work at or with Pixar and ILM. e.g. Baraff and Witkin.
Take a lesson from @dhh and get some sleep
Google Images is now...Bing Image Search?
BP photoshops fake photo of crisis command center, posts on main BP site
Post Submitting Error In News.YCombinator.com
When i M Submitting any Post i m getting Error Stop Spaming Us Dont Waste Your Time Y THis Eror?
Code errors, but it's ok now.
Thanks for the idea. Users almost always write about their day or write some opinianated stuff. They don't really link to products, so I don't think it will earn us much. But it could be an easy to create addition, so why not...
The electronics are removable and the wristband is definitely washable.

How hot the wristband gets was initially one of my main concerns. I haven't had any issues with heat or sweating while wearing mine.
how do you prepare and develop your mind to be able to make better decisions over time?
I'm skimming and bookmarking some Grice right now. Exciting stuff. Thank you :)
> Boolean([])
true
> []==false
true
> [] == ![]
true

How the hell does that work? Aren't all non-booleans implicitly cast?

edit: rephrased
personally, $3/month is the same to me as $30/month. The actual amount isn't that important at that level. But it's something else to keep track of. Something else to manage. Another hassle. So the actual cost in terms of time/worry/hassle of paying for subscriptions on the internet is much higher. That's the hurdle. Not the price, the fact that it costs something.

So saying $3 is cheap is irrelevant - it's "paid vs free". There are complete books written about that subject. It's easy to give stuff away and fairly easy to make money whilst doing it. It's harder to sell stuff, especially cheap stuff.

Also though, Reddit isn't a startup. It's part of a massive multinational. Perhaps the people who cashed out on the sale should contribute some back to keep reddit running ;)