skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I had an idea about 3-4 months ago to create a new service for the local community. I wrote it all down, discussed it with a friend, went back and forth, then for awhile it was dead, just a big document sitting there.

I came back to it about a month later and re-evaluated many things, and thought of newer, more clever ways to do certain things

Then I came back to it again about 2 weeks later and finally wrote out my "concrete" plan for Goal #1 and what I want done before moving onto the next phase.

As of writing, Phase #1 is almost in completion. Basically, just like your story, letting the idea sit for awhile gives you time to think it over, see how you can do things different, and get feedback so I think it's pretty valuable in some cases
Alt-Tab always brings the selected to the front, which is annoying. Sometimes you just want to type into the bit of the window you can already see, without reordering the stack.
Scheduled Backups With Rsyncbackup On Debian Etch
This is so true. Although, for the readers here probably no news. :)

I left DilbertStyleMegaCo. 1,5 year ago, took one year off to study at home, and now am a very happy employe #4. (or zerobased: #3 :)

The atmosphere here helped me to make the move. Thanks.
It is kind of unfair to say all programmers are bad at designing interfaces. I've never personally met one that was actually bad, and know several that are quite good- to the point where they could be professional UI designers if they wanted.

I've noticed a trend where hackers with good design sensibilities have migrated to working on web earlier than other developers. That might have something to do with it.
Some excellent information in there.
Sometimes the rule is even broader: this is what happens when you let your company design the UI (before bringing in a HCI/Ux (user-experience) consultancy to fix/transform it).

Aside from griping with them about the backend machinations/magic required to transform some of their wireframe mock-ups into running code, working with a well-known HCI/Ux firm made our product's UI cohesive, usable, and functional. They also helped us build reusable common UI components. This was a high-profile, multi-million dollar new product launch so the ($$$) money the firm cost was well invested.
I always make half a dozen prototypes of the challenges involved in a project before embarking on the actual version. And often I don't even know whether that actual version is the actual version I'll continue with; I just get a feeling at some point that I've got it right.
A Version 1.0
This is what happens when you confuse technical complexity with product success. A complex product, or one that takes "more than a weekend to build" will not necessarily be successful, and a simple product will similarly not necessarily be successful.

It has much more to do with demand. The wheel isn't terribly complex, nor is it original. Yet, if I came out today and started selling wheels, I could probably sell a few thousand. There's a demand for wheels, and so it makes sense to sell them. I think that in this age we forget this part of the equation way too often.
iPhone's biggest competition might be the ASUS EeePC
I think Apple might have a different process for making their screens, because my brother's macbook doesn't look reflective at all. They probably just do a better job with their glossy screens.
You don't need books. Just start hacking!
Procrastination and darwinism. Those ideas that you actually start on. And then out of those, the ones that you build momentum on, over time.
My advice: Start with AWDWR or another how-to-build-from-scratch book and take their core example (in AWDWR, a online shopping app example) and transmute it into something simple, of the same scope but of a different domain.

The fastest way to learn is by actual coding - fight ennui and boredom by taking the tutorial code and building a toy application of interest to you.
I have both (also have a MacBook Air). They are completely different in the way I use them. the EEEPC sits in my car for if I need it whilst travelling around. The iphone is for picking up stuff whilst I'm out, at dinner, at friends etc. The iphone is in my pocket and it my calendar, address book and all the other things I need instant access to. Whilst the EEPC is great in terms of form factor, its a computer and not what the iPhone is
"I probably write three to four words for every one that appears in the final version of an essay."

Writing is cutting. Most things are: a lot of crap is produced for everything worth keeping.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings." (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.)
Whew! Close one. I was worried they were going to show one of my projects.
I like the one about the professor accepting the excuse of the students who missed the final exam by saying they couldn't make it - car troubles. And the professor let them retake it - and the exam was one question: "Which tire?"

I want to build a spam filter that would throw out email based on some measure of its content relative to Snope's DB score.
If they had added two additional widgets, that UI wouldn't be that bad. Collapse the top, and collapse the bottom, and it's pretty much exactly what you'd want in a task tracking system.
I don't think the iPhone has to worry about the EEE. Their uses and form-factor are different.

I use both daily. I waited a month after the iPhone launch to replace my 6-yr old Nokia 8265 (so old that you could only send ALL-CAPS text messages - which annoyed friends).

I love the Eee. 2 lb vs 4-5 lb of a typical notebook while commuting is a well-appreciated difference. The Eee has the added factor of sometimes being a conversation starter (a feature the me-too MacBook lacks). Not having to worry about (typical) shock-related damage makes the limited SD storage worth it.
A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets: Reconsidering Milton Friedman's Legacy
My favorite editors are BBedit and Textwrangler. I can tell that there is NO alternative on Linux.

Vi(m) and Emacs are great and powerful editors, but they have a completely different philosophy than BBedit (or Textmate, or SubEthaEdit). If you are looking for something similar on linux, you are stuck with JEdit. Although JEdit is also a first class editor after years of using it I am bored and want an alternative.

There is Nedit, Kate and this stuff. Not usable if you compare them feature wise with JEdit or BBedit.

From my perspective, its the other way round: Mac editors rule and linux is editing desert.
Money quotes:

"Essentially, it says that financial markets have built-in biases which have an impact not only on prices but also, in extreme times, the fundamentals themselves. In such moments, market events affect as well as reflect supply and demand."

"But this crisis is profoundly different from its predecessors, he argues—at least, all those since the Depression—because two bubbles are coinciding: a “straightforward” one in housing, pumped up by low interest rates in the wake of the dotcom collapse; and a longer-term, more complicated “super-bubble” fed by globalisation, deregulation and decades of credit expansion, which is taking in commodities, currencies and more besides."

“[S]hort US and European stocks, US ten-year government bonds, and the US dollar; long Chinese, Indian and Gulf States stocks and non-US currencies.”
T. Boone Pickens, an oil-made billionaire, has been saying that daily global oil production has peaked. He's been right (and made hundreds of millions off his predictions) before.

Transcript of Steve Forbes and T. Boone Pickens Debate Peak Oil [DOC] http://tinyurl.com/6lqtgu
Internet, Cell Phones May Prevent  Speeding Tickets
Yawn. Not definitive. Nothing that reading bash(1) wouldn't tell you. And bash(1) at least covers the useful !^ and !$ which this doesn't.
I've had an idea for a particular product for the US market for something like 10 years... I am continually amazed that no one else has provided it, as many people in Europe love it. Requires a lot of capital, and I'd need to be in the US to pursue it... we'll see.
In the daytime, you're supposed to work, whether you're in the flow or not. At night, if you're coding, it's because you're in the flow. So the phenomenom is explained by a biased sample.

Order people to work at 2 am and see what remains of this productivity boost.
Exactly. This is a ToDo list application. There are dozens of valid approaches to designing one. This looks like an app that could be very fast and effective once you got comfortable with it.
Ask YC: How would you do keyword classification
I'm trying to automate the classification of documents that we are seeing from our crawler. I have done a google search for keyword classification using Python but I'm not getting any joy. Anyone here automatically tagging or classifying documents (Maybe after some teaching) ? Would be good to know how if you are
Resistance to "new things" is always the signature of something interesting. (I don't need a "word processor", my type writer is just fine; or I don't need a "copying machine", the world runs on carbon copy; or the best -- we don't need a "telephone", the telegraph is far superior!).

There is power in the chaotic nature of Twitter. I believe that a higher level of organization is about to emerge soon from the bedrock of what it currently is.
Totally agree. I have an eee (that sits around doing nothing now honestly) and lust and Iphone (damn you sprint for sucking so many donkey balls that you don't need to eat for years).

The Iphone is like "whabam" internet at the dinner table to settle the arguement of who starred in some movie.

The eee is "look at me I have a cute small computer."

The Air is "lookit me I'm a douchebag"

;)
Ask YC: Is MacHeist Good or Evil?
The newest group of "12 Top Mac Apps" is now available for purchase in a $49 bundle at http://www.macheist.com/

I bought the last MacHeist for the simple reason that I wanted Pixelmator which is $59 alone and got a boatload of other software for -$10.

Afterward, I felt a little dirty. Like I just helped to undermine the otherwise thriving Mac shareware community.

What's your take? Developers: would you partake in MacHeist? Consumers: Do you buy bundled software when it's available?
I liked the comparison of studying the classics in the middle ages to "Alien Studies". Very revealing metaphor!
People who aren't specialists design interfaces they think they'd like. Programmers, therefore, design interfaces for programmers. This is going to suck for consumer apps, of course, because most people aren't programmers - but this is actually a good thing for other programmers. Take a look at Emacs or Vi - is there ANY way they can get more confusing and badly designed from a consumer-app point of view? Yet they're perfect for the programmer.
I hope so because otherwise they could get stuck in one of those:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap
It's worse than that.

Soros is saying that "cheap money" in the US has been caused by a ponzi-scheme in US asset markets. Capital inflows pushed up prices and attracted more investment, which pushed up prices and attracted more investment... Now that people are taking money out prices will fall and obliterate a lot of wealth that exists only on paper.

There's no question that what he's describing has happened. The real uncertainty is over the scale. This could be very significant, or it could be insignificant. Soros is implying that this sort of speculative investment dominates US markets and is the reason the USD hasn't followed fundamentals for the last ten years.

Not much mention of this in the news, but Hong Kong and Singapore have just adjusted their basket peg to the USD. Reduced demand for USD by major debt-holders means reduced demand for USD assets.
The mother of all bad UI http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Enter_The_Matrix.aspx
Are you sure you know what I want in a task tracking system?

The one I made for myself was quite different and far simpler.

There were two listboxes and one text field for entering new items. You could open any item with a keypress and see a text box with more detailed notes. All the data was maintained in human-readable text files.
There seem to be some clear patterns in what was cut: anything angsty, opinions lacking empirical support, personal feelings, etc. Which isn't to say that all of these weren't needed to get the thoughts down on paper.
Funny, this has never worked or made much sense for me. I have always been able to kick butt from 6 a.m. until as late as midnight, but after that, forget it.

Then when I read the author's reasons for being so productive at night, I realized that you can do all of that during the day. I never IM, text, or RSS, only a few people have my cell phone #, I only check email (and hacker news) every hour or two, and the door is closed. Works great.

Whatever works for you, do it.
Also China has hinted at using its $900bn in US Treasuries as political ammunition
Probably the revised version is "better", but I enjoyed reading the deleted parts. By condensing an essay you can make it more syropy and thus increase the number of people who will consider it worth reading. But I think it's doubtful whether you're doing a service for the readers who would have liked the original version.

The same phenomenon is being played out with music and bootlegs, and movies and director's cuts. Most people want the short version, the fans want as much as they can get.
Reminds me a little of the story of the fleas. They can normally jump 3 ft, but when the are put in an 18" high container with a lid, they can never jump more that 18" for the rest of their lives, even when the lid is removed.

Sometimes I wonder how much I let the rest of the world turn me into a flea.
I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of coding. It's true that you can generate much more ideas by writing, and it allows you to cast your gaze a lot further than whatever particular method you're working on. Any thoughts?
i think you are looking for document classification algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_classification

the current state of the art algorithms are based on support vector machines, but their learning part could be tricky to implement in a scalable fashion. if you are looking for a quick and dirty approach, TFIDF algorithm (it is a naive "naive Bayes" :) is simple and is adequate for many applications
I don't think this one was designed by a programmer:

http://www.goladus.com/_.jpg

In I don't think it's fair to say the UI was actually designed at all. This is what's leftover from what committees and executives decided the application needed to do with no thought whatsoever to anyone who would actually be using it. Notice how the most relevant information for the technician is on the fourth tab over, in a tiny unsizeable window next to a massive expanse of empty space. Note that several of the tabs seem to be describing the same thing. Where do you go to find out what you have to do? 'description?' 'instructions?' 'sub-tasks?' 'change details?' Why not 'general?'

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. This thing was an enormous, slow, resource-hogging java applet that required internet explorer. It no offline mode yet booted you off every 15 minutes which sometimes made you close out of IE and clear the cache or else you couldn't log back in. The boot-off process involved the entire application leaping into the foreground interrupting anything else you might have been doing.
Most of the apps in MacHeist (my opinion) aren't useful to me - nor to many - and therefore the value is much lowered. Many of these apps have competitors that are freeware anyway. I bought the first one just out of curiosity and don't use ANY of them
forgot to mention that you may want to look at the Orange framework which is in Python
http://www.ailab.si/orange/
Gruber wrote on this a bit when it first came out- http://daringfireball.net/2006/12/macheist_lousy_tshirt and http://daringfireball.net/2006/12/iniquities_of_the_selfish

I'll admit that I bought the package for the same reason that you did- It was a way to acquire Pixelmator and Snapz Pro, for less than I could pay for either on their own.

Personally, I think that MacHeist is a good deal for a lot of small developers- It publicizes the names of programs such as Cha-Ching, which otherwise don't have nearly as many opportunities to gain the eye of a developer.

On the counterside, if you program has enough publicity on it's own, It may simply detract from revenue you have otherwise made.

Ironically, it seems superficially similar to the YCombinator program- It's a way for a small group of programs to gain publicity together, when they might not be able to get substantial publicity on their own. Some stars might come out of each group, but others would fade to obscurity.

The similarity between the two programs is only shared in the one aspect, however; While YC does offer greatly increased blog coverage the real strength of the program is the networking between developers and participation by other YC teams and leaders in helping to suggest and guide during the development process.

Given that we do see several developers repeating the process from one MacHeist to the next, they must find that the additional publicity is worthwhile to them.
I was a night person until the final year of my PhD. Something about that year made me switch to being a morning person, strange as it sounds.

Now I get my best stuff done before most people wake up. I start to slow down a little after lunch. After about 7 or 8pm I find it hard to get any good work done.

I was just trying to find a quote I used to like, about it being uncivilized to expect people to work after lunch... I think it was by a famous mathematician or philosopher, but I can't find it now - does anyone know who I'm thinking of?
Bookmark everything - Evernote first look
Funny, this is not my experience.

Whenever I have an idea, I want to act upon it immediately. And then continue to work on it. Sure, I will need occasional breaks, but this is what I think happens...

I find it a little easier to think about an idea when I have something sketched out on paper. I find it a lot easier when I have a prototype, no matter how limited. Both the processes of getting it on paper and getting it on-line clarify my thinking much more than just thinking about it.

I often have to crumple up a lot of paper and scrap a lot of code, but the paper and the code are not what's important. It's what I thought about while I did them that has advanced my thinking about the idea.
This is an interesting counter-point to the "do something, anything -- right now" school of thought.

I think "good ideas", whatever that term means, motivates people to get into the arena. You need something that you feel makes sese with the world. Once you're in the arena, however, it's the flexibility and adaptation that matters. (Fair warning: I'm blowing smoke here, as all I've done is struggle these last few years)

There are two things that I have noticed. First, no matter what your idea or concept, once you put enough work into it you tend to get motivated. So motivation can come later, not at the beginning or a project. Second, really good concepts exist whether you work on them or not. I know -- I've had a couple of really good concepts I've worked on which didn't work out. My execution ability lacked. But the concept didn't just dissapear -- heck no. Some other groups with a lot more execution ability took them and ran with them. (and made a lot of money)

This leads me to believe that really good concepts are like races. Once you "get it", be assured that a dozen or more other people have it also. So you're in a race. I say take all the time you want finding something you feel has magic, but once you got it, run like heck as fast as you can, because time is running out.

I'm in a mode currently where I'm consulting and saving for a few months to run as a startup for a year or so. In the last couple of days I had one of those "ah-ha" moments that occur to me every few years or so. Quite frankly, it scares the crap out of me -- I'm not ready, it's bad timing, I don't have a team in place, etc. But once the idea clicks, the clock starts ticking.

BTW -- anybody interesteed in doing some P2P-type startup work and looking for a team, drop me a line.

EDIT: And I'm not actually an "idea" person. By good idea in this post, I mean a general fuzzy concept that maximizes dozens of criteria simultaneously: marketing, money, deployment, etc. It's an area of interest, perhaps a slogan. But not a concrete thing. You get the concrete thing by executing the concept in the real world, not by imagining it.
They may also be Canadian :) That's how I knew the answer.
Hi, iamelgringo. I will not RSVP because my flight from the east coast doesn't arrive until 8pm. Depending on how things go, I will still try to make it. Looking forward to finally meeting you and the others!
That's what confuses me a lot. What is the reason to get Mac with Darwin and purchase a secondary laptop with any type of Linux on it? Come on, you are shredding your money away. ;) But this is a pretty common behavior and frequently asked question over here. Is it a try to look more "geeky"?

A lot of people motivate that Linux has got an apt and this makes it a hacker friendly platform. I've started using FreeBSD from 2-RELEASE (sorry, don't remember the numbers). The ports sucked there so much, that you can't even imagine now. But it still was a great platform to develop and to use.

The Darwin' port system is a very nice tool. They're really similar to BSD ports and they are powerful enough. You just never learned how to use it. Do you still miss apt? Get Fink (http://www.finkproject.org). What can be easier?

People, don't get me wrong, I'm not about a holy war. But I'm really confused why guys over here want to have two laptops running Unix at the same time. ;)
Ask YC: Looking for an agile author
Anybody out there have a lot of experience teaching and running agile teams and would like to be part of a book project? Drop me a line.

I'm looking for a small group of people who can talk about common problems agile teams have when integrating into large organizations. The perfect candidate will have a dozen or more experiences in various formats and be able to show demonstrated writing ability.
Interesting, my experience is the opposite. When I have an idea, I try to make mockups or crude specs as soon as a I can, and have some sort of basic prototype within a week or two.

Just like you use feedback from blogs to separate the good ideas from the bad, I usually show a few friends my prototype. I have abandoned several projects at the prototype stage, but that's more a question of "Is this something I want to commit a lot of time to?" rather than "Is this a decent idea?".
I don't think someone who want to be good designer would go far without also being a (good) programmer.
Starting a Business in a Shrinking Industry
An idea has come to me about how to solve a major problem in an industry that is currently struggling to adjust to its shrinking revenue (print media). I have 7 years of experience in this industry, though I left it last year to find another industry that is not shrinking as fast as this one is. I have kept up with the trends in that industry and believe that the idea can help businesses in this industry tremendously.

I am curious if anyone has ever entered an industry that is struggling to adjust to an entirely new landscape, as print media currently is. Is the risk too large? Can a new business become successful? I certainly believe it can if it solves a major hurdle that the industry is facing, however I am interested in opinions from people who may be in the industry, or those have attempted to make a go of it in an industry in crisis.
5 Steps to Develop In-House SEO Functionality
great! that does look interesting. I'll have a good look through it. You involved in this field yourself? If so, drop me a line as we're looking for a consultant to help us with something