skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even once you can write code on your own, things are painful from times to times, and I believe that's normal and a good thing.

It means you're pushing yourself out of the comfort zone, staying current.

But it's also important to detect when you should "give up" or not invest time in something that is just too painful (I personally gave up on EJB, or temporarily on C++ to go back to Pascal, then back to C++ a few years later).
You're not going to like the answer, but:

Immediately.

Like in the first 5 minutes. When I was seven years old.

And frankly, if it didn't happen like that for you, you're pretty much screwed.

Every good programmer I've ever known started doing it young and immediately just "got it". Most mediocre programmers I know followed the path you're on, learning it in a class in school, fighting to get things done, eventually coming up with ways to solve particular problems, but never attaining fluency.

Try not to feel bad about it. It's just about the way your brain is wired. Good programmers have a specific something wrong with their brain that makes them ridiculously good at logic, and, sadly, not very good at much else. We can overcome the "everything else" part through hard work, though we'll never be as good at it as you. Similarly, you can overcome the programming part through hard work, but you'll never be as good at it as us.

Sorry to be the one to break the news.
Pomegranate: storing billions and billions of tiny little files
I run GTD-like system and I am not immediately attracted to this. To me, an email either "requires action" or is "done". Obviously, a lot of stuff goes directly into done (receipts etc.), but I would not trust automation with that I think..
>...with not even a link to the actual article.

Incidentally, how is it that a newspaper could ever report on published research without linking or citing the publications? I could never understand how common that is, not could I get a good answer from anyone in the industry.
It's fun, yes, but at the same time, it's nostalgic.

We've had such technology for decades. There have been desktop sharing apps for years, in Java applets etc.

So whilst it's cool that the browser wars are generating a ton of improvements, none of them so far are really things that will blow users minds. HTML5 is just catching up to where other platforms were 10 years ago.
I have to admit, I have been going on for years and years because I can see that it will work, no matter how much I hate it at a particular moment. I can't claim that this is the best approach, or even a good one, but that's what I'm doing: not quitting. I guess it's not really a decision. In the past, a free competitor caused me to quit - but that was a mistake, because mine was still valued, so I unquit that project (but I was uninspired, so I focussed on the next one - I guess inspiration is another factor).

You need information to make these decisions. I like Steve Blank's idea that your startup is a process for finding answers to questions, like here's my idea, I think these people will need it - do they? Try to get this information as early as possible - before version 1.0, before version 0.1, before any version, before any planning or design. Some questions will require a version 0.1 to find the answer.

So, try to formulate the specific questions, that if you had factual answers to them, it would be obvious to you whether to stick/pivot/quit. Then work at obtaining those facts (instead of at "keep pushing forward".) Some of them, by their nature, might take a long time or a lot of work to obtain; but because they are concrete, specific and factual, it's easier for you to decide whether it's worth finding the answer or not. Or, just by thinking in these terms, a brilliant short-cut for getting this information might come to you. [Note: I haven't actually talked to customers, which his approach says to; but I have researched my questions in other ways, which was very revealing.]

Some startups also have engineering questions, is this technologically feasible, can I get this to work? A similar approach applies, where you try to solve the bare essence of the problem first; customers can't tell you about this aspect. [Note: I do this all the time; unfortunately the basic "is it usable?" question can require a substantial prototype - a lot of work]
That's interesting, why would you never go back to normal shoes? How does sprinting on these shoes go?
Questions to Explore Problems
That is a mighty limited concept of 'reference' you have. Reference books are books you refer to when you want to know how to do something. Build a deck, grow orchids, how to do xyz in java.
One potentially bad thing for TechCrunch: it looks like their comments aren't indexable by search engines right now!

I read up on Disqus and their FAQ says if you use their API (through the Wordpress plugin) it can generate indexable comments. But from viewing the source on TechCrunch it looks like they are using just the normal Javascript comments, which means they aren't indexable.

http://wiki.disqus.net/FAQ#Willsearchenginesstillindexmycomm...

Can anyone confirm this?
I love this! Company gets nailed for going "too far" in an industry that clearly stretches the limits, and then begs for reinclusion. It strikes a deal and gets back in (worth millions). They then publish an article praising Google and denouncing SEO... clearly part of the bargain? And now Matt Cutts suggests they might even name the particular SEO firm.. "if they want to"?

Classic SEO world.Google rocks... you all know it.
People will always try to game the system. I think it's merely a matter of elegance on how you do it. Your style will decide whether you will be called a spammer.

For example dropbox.com became a huge success because Drew Houston started serving Digg-"Easter Eggs" inside of dropbox to the Digg crowd that in turn gladly upvoted him. I find his approach very smart (they came out of nowhere) and I think dropbox would have not taken off without it.

It's always the same. When you think it's spam, it's spam. It is like in that youtube video that was passed around some time ago: It's only sexual harassment when you aren't attractive. Otherwise it's charming.
You know those stories you hear of the (by now) mythical "Homebrew Computer Club" of yore?

...yeah, like that.
The guidelines say: If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

A lot of HN users have used the "About" field in the profile to link to their websites.
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I can't agree more. I was really disappointed when found out that I need to wait for release. Most likely I'll forgot unless it will appear on top of HN next week.
It depends a lot on the experience/background of the person, as well as the problem at hand. Most programming "problems", like any other engineering field, have already been solved, so there's no shame in turning to a search engine or even better, StackExchange, for solutions. The best coders are the ones that are learning all the time.

On the other hand, there is usually an impedance mismatch between the description of the problem and the actual solution. Take a look at the horror stories on The Daily WTF. http://thedailywtf.com/

Anyway, try to read as much code as possible, both good and bad, find a mentor(s), be able to take constructive criticism, and just persevere, and you should be fine.
The rare earth element big squeeze
If the price came down a lot, you could do this with a home base station. Still illegal, but I think unlikely to be noticed. I am not a cellular engineer.

Likewise, anything out in the middle of nowhere like burning man could probably do this covertly.

Governments in other nations might view this in an entirely different way: cheap infrastructure.

Plus, this is a great example when arguing for opening up these frequencies a bit here.
I could not disagree more, refactoring is perfect for a newbie. It's not an advanced technique, it's fundamentals. Any beginner who can write a method can extract a method.

But more than that, refactoring provides the mental models and the vocabulary to talk about, reason about, and understand code. It provides well-worn expert advice about the characteristics that make good code good and bad code bad, heuristics to be able to recognize good and bad code, and basic techniques to transform bad good into good safely and effectively.

There may be some advanced techniques in the book itself which won't be useful to beginners, but that's true of any programming book, and that's easy enough to skip over and return to later (especially with the organization of the canonical refactoring book specifically).

A beginning programmer who has learned even the simplest of refactoring techniques (extract method, insert/remove cached value, etc.) will be able to look at a piece of code and see the ways it can be changed, and will also have a reasonable idea about which changes are more likely to improve the code. They will also have the mental models and vocabulary to talk about, reason about, and understand the code, even if only to themselves. These tools are hugely important for beginners. They can transform coding from a task filled with uncertainty, fear, and irregular advancement born from experimentation to a task filled with confidence, knowledge, and curiosity.

Certainly practice a lot, but don't just blindly stumble about on your own, there's lots of good material out there, learn the techniques and then practice applying them, build up your toolkit a bit at a time until you feel more and more comfortable with coding.
Only tangentially related, but should be of interest to most HNers:

If you haven't read _Money Ball_ (http://tinyurl.com/28ryy4b) you really should. It's the story of how a coach and a stats guy hacked major league baseball; they took one of the poorest, losing-est teams in the league (Oakland A's) and turned them into serious winners. I found it well written, informative, and quite a pageturner...and I don't even /like/ baseball.
okay now this is heading into ridiculous territory.

standards-based is user-hostile?

If you truly believe this, the IETF and IEEE would like a word with you.
Giles Bowkett's new mini-startup E-Mail Without The Inbox
>none of them so far are really things that will blow users minds

It's not the actual feature that will be new, but the simplicity is what will make it from a 'technical tool' in their eyes to some far more common.
Andrew Koenig
Yeah, I really with this was a google labs feature so I could try it out right now. Although the fact that it is not a lab feature means they are taking it quite seriously.
Why on Earth would you limit yourself to the old way of doing things? You're not recreating a war; you're trying to get stuff done.
I wish the shortcut keys (such as j and k) would reach down into the multiple inboxes. Unfortunately they only work on the top inbox.
Maybe it's all the recent discussions around the eternal September recently, but this has kind of stuck in my mind, and Reddit with the subreddits actually seems kind of ideal for what you're looking for. Set up your own subreddit and just submit every blog entry to it. You then have a catalog, an easy way for others to discover new posts, and a discussion forum all built in.
Try not to feel bad about it. It's just about the way your brain is wired.

No. I spent an entire summer staring at C and getting blocked on ridiculous basic stuff because I had dumb learning techniques and kept being too ambitious. I know a solid guy who did first-year C three times before he passed.

What got me through was learning to break problems up into tiny pieces, practicing and learning patterns, and ignoring advice like "if you don't get pointers straight away you'll never be a programmer".

For example, a pattern you use all the time is open a file, read some data, close the file. More than half the people I've interviewed as programmers can't do an adequate job of this from memory in their language of choice. Practice just that until you have it memorised and can type it out at speed.

Look at programs as collections of patterns, and look for excuses to practice dumb simple stuff (like scales in music). Something I knocked out over breakfast on Sunday morning to price a collection of stocks: I have a file containing a list of symbols. The program reads this data. It splits it into tokens. It uses a yahoo web service to look up prices for them. It collects the data in an object. I pass that to a formatter. Then I print it. I built each pattern independently, and then stiched them together. Some people do test-driven development to force themselves to construct software in this way, and you might find that useful (I just do it that way without formalising the tests).

amorphid wrote,

Maybe I'm the opposite of a natural.

I felt the same for five years after I'd finished my degree. Work towards mastering two things: (1) learn to reduce all problems to triviality. You can use code to feel out a problem but do not ever try to cruise through complexity - that's a path to certain failure. (2) Hone your tools (including your memory for patterns) so that your cognitive load can be dedicated to problems at hand rather than typing or looking up patterns for bread-and-butter stuff like reading the contents of a file.

amorphid - I don't know what your problems are specifically but maybe some of that will be useful.

Edit: I made a claim at the top that I couldn't reference. Removed.
This is an anonymous account for obvious reasons. I also did the same job as the AMA OP, used this linkbaiting technique for over a year.

Posting as I think HN would be interested in the results.

Tens of thousands of optimised backlinks,
Quality trusted links from major news publishers (almost all of them),
Search traffic up from 30k a month to 200k,
800k to 1mill visitors a month.

The infographics game is almost up for linkbaiting. Most of the people using this technique are now moving on, including myself.

Expect some interesting innovations in this space.
You need to design first - on paper, white-board, etc. You wouldn't build a house without blueprints, so why try to write a big program without sketching stuff out so that you can break down into manageable chunks.

If that doesn't help, then maybe you need to take a good CS course. If you have only programmed in C++, then it doesn't sound like a comprehensive background in CS.
I am amazed at how google has created a virtuous incentive cycle in which experts are competing with each other to give away the best information and gather the most interest.

Seems to me that it's more like a vicious cycle in which people compete to stuff pages full of the right keywords at the expense of content.
this is cool!

I made a similar nodejs application too sometime back, but mine is still with some bugs.
I find searching is the fastest way to find documentation for library functionality as well as example code for when the documentation didn't cut it. I don't see why you should hate it. I did a fair bit of Win32 stuff a while back, and still poke around the occasional bit of Windows driver code when trying to make weird/outdated stuff work. The documentation on those is terrible. Searching is the only way. I mostly write Python now, but I still find I rather search modulename+functionname than use help().
I know how you feel - I wrote an 'anything and everything I've ever found interesting' type blog for ten years, and hardly anyone read it (despite a pagerank of 4, and certain individual posts on obscure topics getting decent traffic via Google).

This year I set up a tightly-focussed, single topic blog and committed to writing three posts every week day - it took off, I have lots of enthusiastic readers (and this month I paid the mortgage with a single Amazon affiliate link, if that matters). I did no SEO beyond writing clean, simple HTML, and actively ignored some standard SEO advice (eg. one-word titles, no repetition of keywords).

In other words: in my experience you're never going to become the next Kottke with a general interest weblog, but if you find a niche you're passionate about, you don't need to do any SEO douchebag stuff to attract readers.
The problem in my mind seems to be this:

t's just anything and everything I've ever found interesting written in a slightly more professional manner than "stream of thought" with a small amount of attention paid to titles and internal links only when appropriate and valuable (I HATE how sites like Engadget inner-link every keyword for Google sake).

Blogs that write just about everything NEED to do SEO. People who write very targeted get's traffic without SEO because they will hit a specific interest group which is much more likely to share your stories.

If you have just about everything you are doing 3 things.

1. You are commodifying the value of your content.
2. People won't know what you are all about thus won't relate to you or take you serious.
3. you haven't really written 2000 articles but perhaps a couple of hundred maybe less on each specific subject.

There is nothing wrong with writing just about everything that you find interesting, but if it spans over to broad a spectrum you won't reap the benefits of accumulated linking, thus you will have to increase your SEO to compensate.

Just my two cents.
Sorry, yes, FCC.
"Apple Is Not Fighting Jailbreaking": Wait, What?
I had thought there was a shortage of rare earth metal deposits... but it seems that it's a shortage of processing facilities. I feel that tasmania (the triangular island at the bottom of australia) has incredible deposits of everything else, and so would probably include rare earths - but if we (australians) don't have the processing facilities, it doesn't really help.

Otherwise it would be a good investment.
Also (c) when your idea isn't working out.

We're undergoing a massive internal change that's pretty much akin to starting an entirely new business within a business, simply because what we're doing has less potential growth than what we're looking at doing, which is new (which is rare in our industry).
It's not the asking for money, but rather the amount of money that is asked. I applaud your free workshops, and I'm even comfortable with moderate prices. But I genuinely can't conceive that someone would get $1000 worth of value from a day's training of anything. I want the cost to be commensurate with the value created.

One could certainly argue that the 'market' has shown it feels otherwise, but the market also has proven susceptible to Scientology and multi-level-marketing. I guess I fear that at the price being charged the audience must have expectations that can't possibly be met.

Perhaps my problems are simply my false impressions of 'value', which may be out of sync with reality. But based on the rates of good college courses, for a workshop such as yours, I could probably rationalize $100-$300 per person. Is there price at which you'd start to feel uneasy, even if some portion of the market was still willing to pay? $1000? $10000? $100000? Or relatedly, why didn't you charge?

ps. I don't mean to imply that Jason is not giving a top quality workshop. I have a similar feelings toward the Ted Conference charging $6000 a ticket and toward top colleges charging $50000 a year. It's not the quality I'm questioning, but the 'value'.
I'd call most of the math lectures, except the later calculus and differential equations and linear algebra lectures high school (or lower) level. For college level you'd expect a more rigorous treatment of limits and integrals for example. The videos do seem excellent as an intuitive explanation.
In case it isn't obvious, a likely result from answering these questions is to split up the site.

I have made good experiences with having a programming blog, a personal blog (which parts of my family and non-geek friends tend to read), and a few sitest that specialize in some very narrow topics (like, Sudoku).

It's OK to cross-link between those sites, as far as there are relations - but don't expect the movie audience to read your Java and Digg stuff.
I should have added "in the minds of observers." to make that sentence clearer. It's more a statement about human nature than the relative weighting of the ingredients most vital to elite athletic success.
> People aren't stupid. They can distinguish between Froyo and Cupcake.

No, they can't, normal people don't know that there exist different versions of Android. They don't care, because they don't want to care.

> People do in fact get that there are different versions of software. If you're aiming at people who don't... they aren't going to know an iPhone from a Nexus One anyway.

If you're not aiming at these people, then you're dismissing the largest chunk of the market, and you are going to lose to your competitors.
Totally disagree. Anything in life comes with time. Learning an instrument does not take you 5 minutes, even if your Eric Clapton. If you learned programing in 5 minutes when you were 7 years old, your a genius and definitely not the norm. So I cant agree with you that this is the way all people will take it. It takes most boys a few years to learn and master the technique of peeing... :-)
If profits and business considerations are what is driving this decision, it's hard to see how your proposal ameliorates the issue.
I'm curious how much of that $10,000 is for hardware and how it compares to the amount for hardware for those other solutions.
Selling Out
Agree that 3500 calories = 1 pound of fat, but the point I'm raising is about how those calories affect elements such as muscle growth, which will aid weight loss. Read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648841
I spent an entire summer staring at C and getting blocked on ridiculous basic stuff because I had dumb learning techniques and kept being too ambitious. I know a solid guy who did first-year C three times before he passed.

Sounds like we're just using different definitions for "good". You seem to define it as meaning competent, so yes, you and your friend fall into the category of people who have successfully taught yourself to program computers despite not being wired to do it.

I was talking about the Fred Brooks 10X types when I said "good". Those guys didn't drop Comp Sci 101.

Again, please try not to take it personally. They're not better people than you. They just took to computer programming like everybody else takes to breathing.
This is pretty awesome, I just hope it plays nicely with OtherInbox.
From the video, it looks like they have a Bayesian-style mail filter, but instead of applying it to find spam, they apply it to find important mail. This is not too hard to set up; the tricky bit they've automated is analyzing which emails are read and replied to, as opposed to just which ones are marked, so it's more automatic.
What it Takes to be Great
Ask HN: How is the avg in my HN profile calculated?
I currently have a karma of 1556 and an average of 2.55. I'm a HN'er for 509 days as on date. Clearly, the average is not straight forward. So, how is it calculated?
Because the meaning of it is totally counter intuitive, for one ?
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Scene-Demo running on ATM-machine
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Youtube-Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GynWoDcjE-4
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