skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An open office environment, where others should peek on at any time helps a lot! I know, this sounds pretty bad at first, but from my experience this helps to each and every member of the team, seamlessly increasing personal and overall productivity.

I worked remotely for a long time and had the similar problem like you. When switched jobs I've found myself in an open environment and after the first "shock" I soon realized the benefits.
Is QWERTY harming language design?
If you are on a mac, use Freedom, it disables networking, and allows you to get work done.

http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/
knee-jerk, much?
Fold It: The Protein Folding Game
But your application server can strip out spaces and dashes before you send the number to the gateway. Right?
Properly setting Vim up for Python coding
I don't think QWERTY is actually harming language design - designers simply implement multiple-character operators (like ==). (however, I certainly agree it's awkward and extended symbol operators would be cleaner).

Also, as the author mentioned, I don't think it's really feasible to get all coders to agree on one 'coder keyboard' layout (hell - we've had 50 years to decide on an optimal editor and are no closer than when we started).

I think the best solution is to continue with this multi-char symbol syntax, but to have keyboards with programmable centrally placed macro keys that can be automatically redefined by the current application. For example, when coding lisp I'd love to have dedicated paren keys, and maybe even a dedicated 'setf', 'defun', and 'let' keys.

I think that as OLED keyboards ala the Optimus Maximus become more economically feasible and widespread over the next decade or two, this is exactly what will happen. Then, in 20-30 years when these keyboards become ubiquitous, language designers will start to implement non-ascii operators that can be mapped to the programmable keys.

It will certainly be prettier - but I don't think it will herald in a new era of better languages.
Broadband: other countries do it better, but how?
Top 100 Telecom Blogs you cant afford to miss!
Perl6 has Unicode operators, both built-in and available to be defined by the user.

However, syntax is highly overrated. '() is more than enough.
> For instance, there's no guarantee a 400k house in Sacramento will be worth 800k in five years

Sure, but based on historical events with housing in "great" areas, this can and does happen. If you buy right before a bubble, it can even happen sooner -- in a couple years. A 6% fund is not going to even have the chance to do that.

> In markets with a lot of excess inventory, some landlords can't find tenants.

A given, per the article, is a "great" area. Great areas are always in demand. I have not yet lived in an area that lacked for tenants.
Right, it’s interesting that you wind up seeing these formats extended with additional complexity, basically reimplementing HTML in their custom syntax, for dealing with the publishing/processing pipeline.

I suggest an editor like vim or Emacs with HTML modes that give you auto-indenting and tag completion key bindings. It’s really not that much more work to author straight HTML, and if it’s what you’re targeting anyway, you’ll be happier in the long run when you have to maintain it.
This is feasible because no real programmers use consumer laptops ;)
The simulation that we are all living in.
Is anyone else getting the security sandbox violation on the vimeo player? The Flash security model is a bit frustrating to be sure, but leaving that in shipping code?!
That's interesting, because I've heard that link syntax is one main reason people prefer Markdown to Textile. One issue with Textile-style links is that something like

"Foo Bar":http://foo.com/bar.

is ambiguous, and the result depends on the parser. It could end up as

<a href="http://foo.com/bar">Foo Bar</a>.

or it could end up as

<a href="http://foo.com/bar.">Foo Bar</a>

The former is probably what you mean most of the time, but then there's no way to link to the (valid!) URL "http://foo.com/bar.".
This article is wrong. There exists a duopoly all over the US in broadband Internet - one can choose DSL or Cable - because every local municipality grants a local monopoly to one phone company and one cable company (and they usually choose one of the largest national companies in each case).

We need to break these monopolies and allow any company to build infrastructure. Then we will see competition increase and prices go down.

Not mentioned in the article is the UK, which has exactly the system I am proposing - one with almost no government regulation - and is at least on par with all the countries listed in the article, if not doing better. This example goes to show that socialist infrastructure and regulation is not the essential factor that makes broadband access better.
Discrete data on a line graph? The horror...
Young Bill O'Reilly and anger management [Video]
I'm a fan of the default syntax offered by [RedCloth](http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/). It's Textile, but with bits of Markdown thrown in, such as link syntax. It's only available for Ruby, though.
Of course - We do it.

Wondering if anyone uses a payment gateway which prohibits this..
It just isn't economically viable to run fiber/copper out to areas below a certain population density. Particularly because those low density area also have less demand for broadband.

Also, why is it automatically assumed that more broadband is better? How much more productive is broadband going to make a farmer or a welder (over 56K or ISDN?).

This is just as bad as thinking more education is always better. A doctor with 20 years of school may be more productive than one with 14, but would a mechanic with 20 years of school be that much better than one with 14? (Note: I'm talking about formal in-school education. Both doctors and mechanics have considerable on-the-job training in addition to their schooling).
I haven't been on the top of the Powerset developments but from trying it out, I have to say I'm disappointed. I asked it a few questions and it returned really poor results. I then asked the same thing on google and used site:en.wikipedia.org so they're using the same data set and Google found what I asked (I was asking questions like "who was born on <specific date here>".

Am I doing it wrong?
Craig (of the List) Looks Beyond the Web
I don't. Give in to your temptations!
argh, this really bugs me, because there are spaces in the number on the card itself! i can't enter the number the way it's printed.
I've started using Amazon for a lot more stuff since they set up 'Subscribe & Save' (http://www.amazon.com/Subscribe-Save-Grocery/b/ref=sc_iw_r_1...).

Basically, they provide 15% off a lot of household items and free shipping. There isn't really any 'subscribing' either. You just sign up for what you want, and after you get it once you can cancel that 'subscription' with no penalty.

I've found that it's often cheaper than even Costco (generally they're about equal once I factor in transportation costs and tax). And it's far faster and easier.

(Not affiliated with Amazon, just a happy customer)
Ask YC: What is J-Mango? We think "Mobile friendly web goodness for the masses". How about you?
$400k for a 2 br place is expensive by national standards, which would make Sacramento a high-priced real estate market (not hard to believe, most of California is).

He claims $949 a month is much higher than median for a 1 br. That does not seem to fit with what I've seen in high priced real estate markets. By comparison, in Ohio, a brand spanking new two bedroom detached condo (nobody builds 2 br homes in most parts of the country, so you couldn't find a newish one) in a great area would cost maybe $150-175k. But rent on a good one BR apartment is still $750/mo.

I've looked at places in a lot of markets (midwest, Vegas, Bay Area among them) over the last 5 years and if what he says is true, it makes me think the rents in Sacramento are depressed for some unusual reason, and the ratio of mortgage to rent is atypical, and therefore not permanent.

My off the cuff guess as to why would be the terrible real estate market there. It's so hard to sell a house right now for more than you owe the bank on it that a lot of people have taken to renting them out instead, creating an unusually high number of rentals. It's a lot easier to rent a place out at a few hundred bucks below mortgage and pay the difference out of pocket than it is to sell it and pay the bank the 50k you'd owe them after. If you're doing well enough to afford two mortgages, you can pick another house up at a good price, move there, and rent the old. That's exactly how we got our place in Campbell, and what a lot of the places we looked at in the bay area were doing as well.

So maybe he shouldn't buy a home in Sacramento, at least right now. There are lots of times in various markets where this happens and it's financially beneficial to rent until the ratio swings the other way.
Ok, that makes much more sense. As I said in my earlier comment, his ratio seemed really far off.

Sacramento must have been hit pretty hard eh? I looked there 2 years ago and seem to remember prices being considerably higher. I was looking at a new 2 br attached for about $350k in East Sac.
"... Data formats are interesting, but I think everyone that reads this site has been using JSON for centuries now. ..."

Are you sure?

The disqus guys I imagine they read this site or at least represent the readership. Well go check a disqus account and go to http://disqus.com/configure/username then http://disqus.com/migrate/username and what do you get? Xml and Rss. So there goes that idea.

I wonder if the readers on this site and/or those who use JSON use it because it's just there in their toolkits. Or do they purposefully choose it after asking why?
I think it's just a case of programmers thinking like programmers and not like users. They think "I want this to not have numbers or spaces, so why would I let the user put in numbers and spaces?"

You see errors like that everywhere you look on the web, though much more at big corporations than at startups. Startups tend to eat their own dogfood, which greatly reduces that, though not entirely.
First of all, it's clear that the article is not talking about the QWERTY layout per se, but the character set on the keyboard-- switching to Dvorak would do nothing to improve the situation described.

Second, it's odd that he doesn't bring up the experience of APL, the only language that I know of that tried to break out of the traditional character set. Aficionados find it concise and elegant; personally, I find it cryptic. I fear the same might occur with other attempts in this vein.
Facebook has 500 employees. They haven't been a startup for a long time.
Peculiar. I just asked Google and Powerset "who was born on october third 2003." (No quotes used.)

Powerset: Andre Agassi He was defeated in the third round by world #2 (and eventual finalist) Rafael Nadal, 7â€“6(5), 6â€“2, 6â€“4. ... Their daughter, Jaz Elle, was born on October 3, 2003.

Google: October 3 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
October 3 is the 276th day of the year (277th in leap years) in the Gregorian ... 2003 - Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy is attacked by one of the shows tigers, ...

What date did you use, out of curiosity? I picked 10/3/2003 at random.
Oh, one of the neater mathematical 'paradoxes' I've seen is finding the sum of a divergent series (obviously you can't treat infinity this way ... but it's a fun trick).

(excuse the notation, I'm doing this with plain ASCII characters ...):

Let the sum of the geometric series
1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + ... be called (=) S.

Now multiply both sides by 2:
2S = 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + ....

Now subtract the second equation from the first:
S - 2S = (1 + 2 + 4 + 16 + ...) - (2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + ...)

Notice that all the terms except for the '1' cancel out on the right:
-S = 1

And simplify:
S = -1

Therefore:
1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + ... = -1

;-)
That could be the case at Facebook. I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Rothschild, Facebook's VP of Technology, last year. He was very obviously both experienced and smart.
If things like hi5 and myspace - in my opinion - much worst than facebook, are still going strong, I can't see how facebook won't continue to be relevant for at least few more years

I kind of share your same observation, most of my friends dont use facebook as much, but they still do, they check it like email to read all the messages, know about outings, know about new events (concerts, bdays, etc .... )

So to your observation I add, its possible that the first wave of facebook users ( i will call them the addicts ) have faded away

But now there is the second wave ... the casual users wave which is probably just as big, only different!

Finally if facebook post site usage statistics, this should be a more concrete indication of how well the site is doing
If enough people star the request ticket for a Gmail gData api, perhaps a xobni style widget for gmail will be easier to build in the future.

http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=271
"... As I represent PingMyCompany.com so I will be honest. ..."

Excellent. Why not just say this is mine? Anyway I tried it. It reminds me as a cross between trumors and F@#ked company that was all the vogue after the last tech crash. The beauty of trumors is it's a vertical twitter. The value is both entertaining and the sliced categories ready made for advertising. As more users add & use the service there must be some interesting things you could infer.

Get enough stories and users and you can even spin off the data to another site. For instance ~ http://alltop.com/

"... I will appreciate your suggestions if it can improve the sites credibility ..."

Put the site to work.
I wonder how well it
would work as a tool
to measure company
problems ?

Stand behind it. Make it clear what it is. And what it is not. Read here for an idea how trumors place the product and their company ~ http://truemors.com/about/
You nailed it. Lately I've been bored by my work. When I'm excited about what I'm working on, the problem is much less serious.
This reminds me of that fizzbuzz thing. It's surprising how effective a low bar like that can be.
Didn't work for me, either.
For what it's worth, Ruby methods can be named using Unicode characters:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/10/fun_with_unicode...
ByteFlow - a new django powered blog engine
The payment gateways I've used have explicitly stated in their documentation, that there must be no validation of credit card numbers. I guess it's to avoid programmers messing up the card numbers or something.
This is just silly. I install xobni, and just like the comments on that site, after a couple of days I was thinking - huh? What does this app do? And how come it swallows so much of my screen real estate.

There is space for an outlook plugin, but xobni have just picked a weak product and are getting it installed by effective marketing.

Let me make this clear guys: Your product does nothing. It's not useful to me. It's not killer, it's very weak.
Doesn't work properly for me, either in Firefox 2 or IE 7...
You're a bit off on the WYSIWIG thing. Rich text editors don't generate Markdown, but they can be configured to generate extremely regular, limited HTML, which can be converted to Markdown easily (a la HumaneText). Computers are good at stuff like that.

Typical end users dislike raw HTML. Most of them don't know what a &lt;code&gt; tag is. Markdown (though probably not Textile) is superior to HTML for end-users in that you don't even need to know how it works to get better-than-raw-text results.

My company's product does Markdown, and my philosophy is this: tens of thousands of people edit Wikipedia. Most of them are not particularly computer savvy. Wikipedia has perhaps the most baroque and ineffecient markup syntax possible, and people still tolerate it. So, there's the lower bar. By all means, exceed it, but don't obsess.
This may hold true, in certain areas, if you keep the same house for 30 years. I read somewhere that the average American home changes ownership every 11.9 years.

I did a quick calculation on the percentage ROI after 1 year of owning a $300K house.

home cost: $300,000

10% down payment: $30,000

30/yr mortgage @ 6%: $1,618.79

tax at 1.25%: $312.50

maintenance/misc: $200.00

actual mortgage payment: $2,131.29

investment after 1 year (($2,131.29 * 12) + $30,000) = $55,575.48

appreciation after 1 year at 4%/yr: $12,000

percentage ROI: ($12,000/$55,575.48) = 21%

what index fund are you going to see a 21% return on investment from? did I make a horrible mistake?
No matter what your editor does, editing in HTML is simply slower than writing a Markdown document. You may be overstating the complexity of things like Markdown and Textile.
This response is at least an argument! Sorry to sound impolite, but bad advice/decisions costs money. Your main point is that there is another way. OK of course I accept that, but your examples are pretty lousy mind, these are not mum and pup stores, (like the free car ads site the author of this question is promoting).

I insist, even if you have a viral web app/widget, to not focus on SEO from day 1 is missing the whole point of the net and will cost you bucket loads in the long run at best.

FWIW I would be very interested to hear of the app / widget that you are enjoying the 8% weekly growth. Mine is myplaylist which is also enjoying high viral growth.
Different design goals.

Textile is more expressive. It has more features and does more stuff.

Markdown is more transparent. It's designed to capture the features of a text email message and render them in HTML.
Powerset doesn't have AI-complete NLP, it's more like real NLP. So try things where your w-words (who what when where why how) are somewhat like wildcards. You can't say, "List all Kosher meats in alphabetic Order" but you could say, "Which meats are Kosher?" You'll see a link to "Kosher Foods" with acceptable results. Click on the page and notice your complete list of results are highlighted on the right. Click one: http://img.skitch.com/20080512-piw4tn8pc6gnf4w7h46q6ghekn.jp...

Powerset isn't just about an open-box search, it's also about integrating search into the results. It's clearly not perfect, but it's definitely interesting.

Also, for fun, search for Comic Sans. Good luck regaining your sight.
Remote Port Forwarding over SSH (good trick to have up your sleave)
http://www.umassmed.edu/Content.aspx?id=41254

maybe?
Windows 3.1 Font Dialog Still in Vista.

Win 3.1 was released in 1992, yikes!

http://bink.nu/photos/news_article_images/images/13552/origi...
Ask HN: Free (Quality) Financial/Stock Content/Widget?
Hey,

Quick question. I've been searching endlessly for a simple, unobtrusive, stock quote/chart widget and/or data source, etc, that can be freely used on a website. Something similar to Yahoo! Finance Badges but not ugly and bulky. The end-result would be something I could use dynamically per the stock in mind.

Thanks alot..
I heard from a buddy who worked on IE7 while he was a summer intern that the IE team still had code from IE 1.0 sticking around.
Try to avoid extraneous sites (and email and IM, if possible) until you've gotten something done. I.e. don't start your day off with surfing and email. If you are bored by your work it is too easy to not get started and just continue reading stuff online. The effect of this is that by the time you get around to doing work, your brain is totally scrambled by all the stuff you just piped into it - making it even harder to finish the boring stuff you need to do, and more tempting to just return to the distractions.

At least that is how it is for me. I've found that if I have boring work stuff to do, the ONLY way I can get it done in any sort of reasonable time frame is to just immediately dive into it and barrel through it as soon as I wake up. (actually after I wake up and do a bit of exercise)

Of course any super rich and successful person will tell you the real way to solve the boring work problem is to convince someone else to do it for you, so you can spend more time keeping up on things. :)
Dynamic Languages Strike Back
how could they possibly even know you've already stripped out non-numeric characters?
Hi All,

I thought I would share the video of the demo we submitted to YC. We have been frustrated by mobile development and decided to something about it.

Please let us know what you think.

hb
Both of them will make you long for the days when you could have just typed in some simple HTML tags.
according to my friends in the UK, the internet options available for their home are bad/unreliable.
Are you nuts? ATMs get away with margins around 1% (say, a buck or two on an average withdrawal between $100 and $200). That looks low compared to the margins bookstores make, but the warehousing costs are negative!
The governing metaphor doesn't work so much. The right/left political metaphor is overloaded enough as it is.

How hard is it to say that some frameworks provide some features that others do not?
Perhaps, instead of specific people meeting specific people, people create a large database of "characters" (profiles of sorts), and then you select a few and rate yourself on how well you match each of them. You then select a few "characters" you like and rate those, and you are matched with people who are rated highly at being like those characters.

Tagline: You can meet a person, but you're looking for an ideal. Why not admit it?

(Of course, the ideals could become simplified, one-word-ified and adjectivized, and become tags. But the extensible system is more interesting in that it allows you to select a batch of tags at once. A character could still exist in the tag system, as a set of tags with weightings.)
I've never seen that before (then again, I haven't looked...).

Do they literally mean no validation? Can't even check to see and strip any non-numeric characters? No luhn algorithm?

Also, how would they know? :p
Railscast Contest Winners -- Huge list of Rails Tips
Web Development Why is it Important
Java Web Framework Tournament 2008
Found this today, really really liked it thought I'd share it.

I notice most people here are not big Java fans, but this is still really good.

The first round:http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/tournament-1st-round/

The second round: http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/tournament-round-2/

The third round (quarter finals): http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/tournament-semifinals/

The fourth round (semi-finals): http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/java-tournament-final-four/

The fith last and final round: http://audiblesmirk.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/java-tournament-championship/

I think all debates should end like this!
I have an idea: an idea aggregator. If ideas are really worth so little, why aren't they indexed, searchable, and community-improvable?

One example of this model is http://www.halfbakery.com/, but its ideas are, like it says, of the "half-baked" variety.

I think I might call it "MindCycling" or something to that effect--rather than throwing away ideas you'll never implement, put them in the big blue bin (-site) and let other people re-smelt them into something someone can use.

I admit I'd use it every day, for more than just start-up ideas: as an author, it would probably help my fiction worldbuilding immensely.
I think having the ability to have a home equity line is reason enough to buy. That's 100-200 thousand dollars credit you have at your disposal for a rainy day. And unlike credit cards its not at 30% apr.
Broadband access in the UK is definitely not on par with the countries listed in the article.
Oh yea..

I'm currently using Google/Yahoo mobile finance quote pages in an IFRAME, but they are pretty ugly and I'm not sure if thats legal..
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html
http://www.burbed.com/ makes me glad I am a renter.
Hahahah. Amazing.