skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love this idea. I always remember to buy a card the day I need it, and it either a) makes me late to the occasion because I have to stop to buy it last minute, or b) ends up being a few days late in the mail.

I should just add it to my calendar, but I think the problem is deeper than that. For instance, it always takes me a couple days to remember to stop by the store to grab paper towels or milk when I run out, because an extra stop always seems so far out of the way, even if it would only take 10 minutes.

But I digress. I like the idea. The only issue I see is, I'm usually pretty picky about the cards I pick. They are usually very topical for the relationship and recent events between me and the person the card is for. Perhaps, you can send me an email two weeks before, prompting me to browse and pick a card from your selection.
You know what the funny thing is? If you are up front about the fact that you have an illness it can be in fact beneficial for you. Down the line if your cancer ever resurfaces (I hope not) and you lose your job due to some insurance giant. Then that will be a bad place to be in.

So, on the other hand through disclosure (in the interview perhaps?) you can test the company's policy pre-emptively without going through significant pain during that time. It will be harder finding a job, but when you do find one it ought to be worth it.

However, this is a really dangerous line to walk and I really think that you need to move to a country in the EU. Over there, you will be protected in the work force and thanks to the health system things have a better chance of working out...
Fflick
Yep. I had bad grades in school as well, so I didn't put them on my resume when looking for my first job and it was never an issue.
Many of the jobs I will be applying for are in Europe, and as an EU citizen the insurance isn't an issue. But I am also applying to several in the US, so this is all quite helpful.
Kindle Outselling iBooks 60 To 1
E was my editor of choice when Windows was my primary OS and a very nice editor it was. It's a shame there's no Linux version :(
Definitely not.

"And before anyone else points out how gzip is superior, this is in no way meant as a realistic alternative."
The trend of companies being cheaper to start and the rise of angel and super-angel funds have left VC's without a place to make large investments? Isn't that the reason for the contraction of the "VC industry" in the first place?

I think you may have let the atmosphere of HN and the stories it links to distort your view of the startup landscape. Yes, there are definitely more opportunities for low-barrier to entry software startups, but look at all the industries that are operating as they were 5 or 10 years ago and are very interested in VC funding. There are dozens of said industries (biotech, automotive, chemical, etc). The seed stage companies frequently discussed here offer a great service for the software industry, but don't forget that HN is still an enthusiast site.
Do basic market research. Of course, look at existing services but also, more broadly, look at the target market as a whole.
How big is it, who are the customers, whether they would be willing to pay and how much, how competitive and expensive advertising in the niche is, look at industry blogs and trade magazines, basic keyword research, etc.

That's just scratching the surface, you can and should obviously do a lot more to validate an idea, like dry testing.
Sometimes, Establishing Expertise Doesn’t Pay Off
Ask HN: How to solve HN-loop?
Not just HN, but the entire internet is becoming too much of a timesuck for me, so despite the irony I thought that I should come to HN and ask if there is something like Leechblock, but for Chrome.

StayFocusd and Chrome Nanny don't cut it for me, because I am looking for something that can block every single site, except for the ones I specify. (Even better if it can give 5 mins of unblocked browsing every 2 hours or so)

And to prove my point, I only came here just then to ask this question, but ended up spending 8 minutes reading articles before jumping back to this tab....

Reminds me of this:
youtube loop (urbandict): When you go to watch a quick 30 second video on YouTube and regain consciousness hours later having jumped from interesting video to interesting video.
I would say that people "initially suck at programming" because most people

a) think and behave quite illogically in their day to day lives

b) express themselves in generalities and don't think in enough detail (which makes sense when your primary interaction is with other humans, it simply isn't necessary) to communicate their ideas to the degree that programming generally requires.
Wow, this takes me back!

Back around '05, I inherited the enviable task of getting a "linked project scheduling system" up and running. The creator of this MS-Project-based marvel had implemented an employee database in a VB module, that not only avoided the hassles of ADO and SQL, but almost managed to do away with arrays completely! Switch/Case statements, anyone?

By the way, if needles and haystacks are your thing, try a Google search on Microsoft Project. Hours of fun!
Or would that help it stick in their memory even more?
But doesn't your 'discovery' use-case rely on a local herd of self-promoting new media douchebags using it to 'communicate'?
I do that with macros all the time in vim.

qa
<do what you said>
q
<relocate the cursor>
@a

It's not clear to me at all why I wouldn't dream of doing that in a macro, or how that's not light-weight. Can you explain a bit more what the perceived problem of using macros for this it?
Usually I just use the Google keyword tool to see what the market is like.

1. come up with 10 keywords you'd use to look for something like that
2. see how much exact match traffic happens for each keyword
3. see what the average CPC is for each keyword.

Most ideas get thrown out, since they aren't a must haves. If they were...people would actually be searching for them.
Levels of JavaScript Regex Knowledge
Our Fear Is Not That We Are Inadequate. Our Fear Is That We Are Powerful.
Dos and Don'ts of applying for a Tax card in India (Read Pt. 10 of Dos)
Now I want an Ipad
You finished your Master's. Your undergrad grades are irrelevant now.
lol. What I mean bro, is that let's say you like to wear red shirts but everyone in your small town likes to wear green shirts (trying to pick the most PC example in today's PC world).

So you say, "man I hate all those green-shirts wearing bro's, I'm gonna move out to San Francisco/Portland/NYC/Seattle/Boston where red shirts are not only welcomed but celebrated!" So you move out to the big city to the soundtrack of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing..."

At first everything goes well, you see all of these symbols/paraphernalia/newspaper articles in your adopted city supporting the red shirts and you go to all of the red shirts social gathering or whatever, thinking "wow, everyone here is really into supporting the red-shirts clause." But then you slowly realize that not all red shirts are equal, there are skinny red shirts, fat red shirts, conservative and liberal redshirts, redshirts that sometimes like to mix it up and wear green-shirts and even "redshirts-wearing bros"!

It's human nature to discriminate and to stratify people into hierarchy. More people in one place leads to more structure, hierarchy and discrimination.
I suspect "better deal flow", since they're essentially colleges in a world where high schools have just arrived to supplement the traditional "single master and apprentice" mode of instruction.
> Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News?

HN is also a bad medium for real conversations ... nothing beats directly seeing or hearing a person directly. It's all about the context, which in many cases is missing entirely from a textual conversation ... like your background or your body-language.

The later is very important: when 2 humans speak to each other, there's a synchronized motion going on, much like dancing. It is said that skillful sales people are so persuasive because they can get other people to dance on their rhythm.

Twitter is to me a tipping point ... an ADHD epidemy going rampant / information overload showing its side effects.

Ever seen a 14 year old teenager talk to his friends on messenger ... context free, incomprehensible, pointless messages written with a bad grammar and lots of misspellings because typing is just too much work.

That's what Twitter is ... a communication medium that's bringing everyone's communication style to a common denominator.
Then you spend ten minutes learning the basics of a very powerful, widely-used tool that will support your text-editing tasks for many years to come.

I've often seen reluctance to actually put in time to learn powerful tools. I plan to be programming and working as a sysadmin for many years to come, and it's obvious to me that the sooner I learn to use more-powerful tools, the greater the benefit is to me over the rest of my programming career. You can get the basics of regular expressions down in an hour or so, and progressively learn more as you encounter it, and that benefit will pay off repeatedly, and yet I've seen many people refusing to learn things like that.

Anyone have any insight into this?
After a few years of teaching new recruits how to program, this still amazes me: so many people will go a day without compiling once!

I mean, I've been programming professionally for 7 years, and much more before. But whenever I need to do something that I haven't done in the last week or so, I still always start with a tiny function to make sure I still remember how to do even the basic stuff, and build from there. E.g., every time I write some new js code, I start with a function that only prints something to the console; then, does the basic functionality, printing results to console; then and only then, start doing more complex things. It always surprises me that people will spend a day or more working without checking even the most basic check that what they're doing works the way they expect.
This post follow along the same lines, however a bit more blackhat[1]. He also did another write up about using images to store xss data a while back. It is great if the image is loaded into javascript, other wise it will not work.

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070604/passing-malicious-php-thro...
Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model in Scheme - Redux
I was trying to clean out my friends list today on FB and it's clear that FB do not want you to do that (for obvious reasons). The only way I could seem to remove them was to click into each friend and click "Remove from my friends". It takes so long and was so tedious I just gave up!
I used to have a huge axe to grind with pg over his use of hellbanning as the only metamoderation mechanism. I would track down [dead] users when I noticed them, but I mostly stopped after noticing that this guy was still posting.

This guy is the perfect use case for hellbanning. It would be a much bigger problem for him and for us if he was disrupted. A padded room is perfect for him.

I don't fret so much about hellbanning anymore, especially since pg's gotten much less capricious about it.
I just finished watching the presentation. I'm not an especially big proponent of open source... but this approach is so wrong. It ignores the solutions that exist and work in favor of new solutions that exclusively use Microsoft build tools and create more work for cross platform developers.

I must still be missing something because it looks like I'll have to maintain another configuration for coapp while still supporting gnu make (including mingwXX-make for other windows developers). Is there any reason that they are ignoring gnu tools? It's almost like they don't want to make the easy decision to just bring gnu to windows. You know... ./configure & make & make install. Windows users could just use bash.

The project style looks like classic Microsoft. I guess that bothers me because he claims independence. XML all over the place. New syntax and new ways of doing things that already work in * nix. A lot of magic and little explanation of the limits that will be placed on these builds.

I support a build system that works on windows. I just don't support some rigid new build system that kicks out pre-built microsoft binaries and requires me to maintain additional build configurations as a cross platform developer. Especially if that means I have to use a completely different development tool chain.

Ideally if I could maintain and update my *nix gnu tools and python using coapp I would use it. But I'm uncomfortable with a build system that isn't flexible. I've run into enough problems building on windows. I don't need another complication to add to the process.
I just got an email about the free update today. I only boot my Windows laptop about once a week, but I am looking forward to kicking the tires of the new version. Good editor.

E makes developing on Windows 7 nicer, but not as nice as OS X or Ubuntu.
Cool hack. Of course, running GZIP on your server renders it all useless.
How To Collaborate And Protect Your Ideas?
Think about:

- potential customers: businesses or consumers? If you're targetting businesses be aware of a large sales cycle; that means you'll need more working capital. Lots of customers or just a few? If there are lots you have more power, but it also means a certain type of business model. If there are few, they will have more power, namely to negotiate prices. The worst situation: you have one customer, government.

- potential suppliers: businesses or consumers (eg user generated content)? These mean different business models. Lots of them or just a few? If there are lots of them you'll have more power (eg. price negotiation). If there are just a few (or worse, just one), you might have problems down the line.

- potential competitors: are there any (if none, perfect!). Are there just a few or lots of them? Just a few might mean that its an available market but it might mean that it's a difficult market to get into, namely in terms of initial investment. Lots of competitors means that its easy to enter that market, competition his big and that means a constant price fight.

-- MV
I will ask a few close friends about the idea, then build a quick landing page than explains the idea and asks for email signups.

I post on Hacker News and analyze feedback. After looking at the feedback, I decide if I should proceed with the idea.
Probably most people would just say "cardly" and the other guy would type it in and not find the site and give up.

Buying both domains would be a wise move.
You Can Block Any Facebook User Except Mark Zuckerberg
I ask my friends what they think but that's mostly to get excited. The truth be told is that my friends are not my target market. I build a landing page using UnBounce.com and then throw $200 of AdWords at it.
So does this mean that it tracks your location and offers location based service? The explanation on the web site and the video is not good, although interesting. Seems like a really nice service if it gets traction.
I'm pretty sure the law in question also has clauses about reasonable expectation of privacy. If you're on the phone, that's one thing, if you're in a public place, that's another.

I'm not saying that the police have any more right to demand someone turns their phone off in a public place than anyone else.

But the laws that do exist actually create protection of civilians from police -- otherwise they could surveil you at will. Just a funny point we've reached, is all.
When I get any sufficiently-interesting idea (generally, I decide to write it down when I'm trying to code but find myself distracted by the new idea), I open ~/random/ideas.md and start writing down the premise.

A lot of outcomes may follow. I may get a few sentences in, look at it, say "that's stupid", delete it, and go on with my life. I may just write down the basic idea that I've been thinking about, push it up to the private GitHub repo that holds it, and come back to it later if I have more thoughts on it. Or I may get on a run where I keep expanding on the idea and making it better; then I may start researching to see if it's already been done, how doable it looks, etc. Then I'll usually send that fleshed-out writeup to a few trusted friends to see their thoughts.

Then, if it's a small enough idea, I'll try to find time to hack together some kind of MVP soon. If it's a bigger idea or it's a busy time for me, it'll sit in my ideas file 'til I get to it, if I get to it.
Is nobody bothered by the prices of the actual books?
Well I think the unsaid thing here is that the social media 'startup' itself is quickly being commodified... If you can write code, you can potentially build a semi-profitable product on your own for less than the cost of a TV. All the other business infrastructure can be handled by free or nearly-free web services, crowdsourcing etc. A lot of the marketing channels are free as well.
I have it bookmarked and find myself peeking in at least once a day during other news downtime.
http://technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/mcsele/OhioScientifi... seems like a nice and detailed summary of what these machines were like and where they fit in the market. I don't think I'd heard more than the name before.
National Parks Infinite Photo Mosaic (Flash)
> But does svg have javascript functions to make elements drawn interactive, like keyboard movements etc? (under the assumption that svg/canvas is one way. like only draw and not refer to the elements and edit props)

Not sure about svg, but you're right that canvas doesn't support that sort of thing natively. It's one of the main things canvas-based game engines encapsulate, though. While the canvas loses all your higher-level object information once you write it (it's just a bunch of pixels), the engines keep track of object locations separately, and then map clicks on canvas (x,y) coordinates to the objects that were clicked on, which can then trigger a callback (sometimes with some additional features supported beyond the direct click-to-object mapping).
That's true bro. But I don't think it's because other people aren't interested in you or don't have time for new friends. I think it's because in these situations when you are the new kid to the social clique/workplace/club, the onus is on you to take initiative to make friends. Sure there are probably ass-holes but you probably don't want to bother with them anyways. But most people are friendly if you make the move, but they'll never know that you are interested in bromance/romance if you never do.

Hell, people in the club probably think you are the one with so many friends that you don't want to talk to them because you are just there for the hobby.
That's a bad way to think about it. You probably don't want to work on the same project forever anyway, and if you're so smart, teaching other people what you know is the most important thing you should be doing.

The bottleneck on many projects (especially those that are either poorly defined or particularly novel) is not coding speed, but rather learning speed. The faster the team learns about the problem it's really solving, the environment the solution has to live in, the people who will have to use the software, and what the possible solutions are, the faster you're done.
The most important thing is to translate idea (typically, a solution) into an underlying problem. Then, validate the problem:

Who has this problem?
Talk to them, do they really have this problem?
How many people have this problem? Would they pay for a solution?
Is there another solution for the same problem
that is easier than your initial solution?

After that I just make a pause. After a few days/weeks I revisit the idea with a fresh look.
I really want to learn do to stuff like this. Could you guys give me some pointers on where to start?
What shocks me: I can't imagine being surprised at a result after two years. Analytics, while having many flaws, tell me the impact of my companies social media projects pretty quickly.
> Twitter invented a problem and then solved

They haven't invented anything ... they just brought an existing paradigm to the Internet: and that would be SMS messages.

And don't know about the US, but SMS messages have been all the rage and are still really popular, with some anecdotal evidence of how similar they are ....

Retwitting (CHECK): I got the same jokes over SMS from multiple people.

Many-to-many communication medium (CHECK): Around every holiday, people are sending SMS messages with greetings to a whole list of people. It costs a lot more than on Twitter so it only happens around holidays.

List of connections (CHECK): it's called a phone-book, and phones have one incorporated.

Messages limited to 140 chars, encouraging retard-like talk (CHECK): of corZ, ritN crrct sentences S jst so lst yr
Realtime Web Techniques
It pays to be popular: one developer's tale of iPad success
Perhaps the ladies were dumped and got pissed, or changed their mind a bit into the act, or perhaps Julian is not quite familiar with the expectations of a Swedish woman in bed heheh we will defend our female rights and expectations!). When the ladies happened to meet (quite interestingly) after a lecture by Julian, they changed information and decided to go to the police. They only gave info and the police decided to make a case (the police are more aware than Julian about correctness with feminist and human values at this point in Swedish rape case history)..then one thing led to the other. The Pentagon is not amused. This "untouchable" guy keeps farting on their faces for years, then they're accused of doing a really ridiculous framing job.
For one author. Not a very good sample size...
OK, "you wouldn't dream" is a little rhetorical. There are obviously users much more skilled than me who do use it. I'll try and answer from my perspective. Sorry this post got long: I'm a big fan of editors, and I really think this multiple-cursor thing is one of the most important new things to happen in text-editing recently.

I used vim for a solid few months (not that much, I know) and emacs for a while before that. I used both to create macros, but I found one problem: I almost never managed to make the macro work exactly right the first time. This is probably something that gets better with practice, but every time I set out to create a macro, it took some thought into making sure I always remember to start at the beginning of the line, always use searches to find the next piece, etc.

None of this is a reason not to use macros: they still save time when dealing with a lot of text. But this overhead, both the debugging overhead and the "mental" overhead of thinking all these details through, definitely stopped me from using them for macros I'd only use once.

On the other hand, in Sublime, let's say I have two similar "if"s. I select the first "if", hit "ctrl+d" and it selects the second "if", and then I can just start editing. I move the cursor down, move it to the place I want to edit, edit away, all the while not having to think explicitly about this, since I can see everything that happens as it's happening. This is just much more intuitive, and not just for me: other programmers who don't have the same "love of editors" I have watch me do this, and actually ask how to do it too. These are people who wouldn't ever think of using a macro.

I hope that explains why I much prefer it. I really think this is the biggest "revolution" in text editing that's happened in the last few years, and I really recommend you at least try it a bit. I promise I'll blog about this on www.loopycode.com sometime soon, with actual screencasts and some better examples.
As the comments in the article suggest, this is a completely unreliable datapoint. I've just got an iPad and the iBooks store sucks - there's barely any choice. But I can download the Kindle app and can buy Kindle books, so I'm fine. I dare say that a lot of iPad users prefer shopping at the Kindle store over the iBooks store.

Jobs is probably talking about 20% of the Times best seller list but on the long tail, Amazon has it beat for selection