skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How often do you "Google" while programming?
Let's face it. We all google/search a lot while programming. I am a new programmer (from the last 2yrs) and I hate it, but when ever I am stuck, I search for quick solutions online.

What about you guys? How can this "problem" be solved? or...its ok?
Yep I encountered it too (using Chrome on mac). Looks like it was a bug. Pretty funny though. There is probably some programmer getting seriously heckled right now in a late night hackathon over at Google. Wonder if they've broken out the drinks yet.
It is like reaching for a reference book albeit, perhaps one that is less edited. Reference books exist for a reason... to reference.
Maze Generation Using Answer Set Programming
If you believe that your content is better than the content ranking for the words you want to people to find you with, then you engaging in SEO actually improves the quality of the internet. SEO is not an inherently unethical activity, even though many use it to in such a way. Check out SEOmoz's beginner's guide[1] to see how you can actually improve your search rankings by making your site more accessible and improving your content.

[1] http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-op...
Was wondering same thing, it was very well done.
Websockets, local storage, canvas, css3, fast and standards-compliant Javascript engines, and any other delicious candy that gets piled on top. It's like Christmas for web-devs, this is a good time to be building web apps, we're going to see some amazing stuff.
Nokia C1 & Nokia C2: Nokia Dual SIM Mobiles Launched in India
It might be one of those apocryphal engineering war stories, but one I've heard a few times: a consulting company is brought in by management with a pretty obvious goal of ratifying something management already wanted to do. The in-house engineers know what's going on, and what management wants ratified, but they're supposed to work with this consulting firm. The engineers at the consulting firm know that they're probably being asked to ratify some already-made decision, and their job is basically to find out what it is and recommend that. Early on, the in-house engineers just spill to the beans to the consulting firm's engineers, and both groups more or less take it easy for three months, short-circuiting the usual charade while management on both sides thinks that some sort of consulting dance is going on.
But, the old way of referencing is using an index, so I think I should go to javadocs and look for the method and not search for "how to do xyz+java"
If you are a visual learner, you should make sure you can draw statecharts (not decision/flow-charts), process diagrams, UML-style diagrams by hand. Learn the conventions. Then learn the design-patterns in the gof book and make sure you can draw a singleton, delegate, etc... Next bust out a notebook and start trying to draw your solution (by hand) before you sit at a keyboard.

IMHO all of the UML diagramming software are a bunch of crap but being able to understand a bunch of code as a picture should help allow your brain to see the forest for the trees.
Had the same thing. Seems like enabling it in another browser will disable the ad, so you can go back using Chrome. Haven't tried disabling afterwards to see whether the ad comes back, though...

I seriously thought my account been hacked and someone's playing a practical joke on me...
There's nothing here that a simple XSS attack couldn't do in terms of security risk which at least doesn't declare to the world "The owners of this URL are hax0rs!" As a company, all we have to do is throw a loud red banner across the top of the page, etc...
I've always wondered if there is a directory where Hacker News' finest could share their blogs with each other.

I wouldn't mind following the blogs of quite a few of you guys as you seem well-educated on a multitude of issues (and I hope at least a couple of you feel that way towards me!).
It's done via proxy, node.js, and websockets =) No iFraming. Since we're proxying, we can dynamically hijack the links and insert JS.
Flight, gunpowder, surgery, sailing, heliocentrism.
I think the fist problem is your point of view. Consider your choice of words "SEO-douche bag." and look at the title, you think SEO is bullshit. It's such a hostle point of view. Instead you should embrace seo strategies and find some that you can implement.

Another problem is the "if I build it they will come" idea. The Internet isn't a store front that people are forced to walk by. Without a marketing strategy your site does not exist.

What did you do after you posted an article? Just sit back and pat yourself on the back? Writing the article is half the job, if that. You've got to let people know it exists. Simply having google index it doesn't mean shit.
Who killed Prolog?
HEY ALL! REMEMBER TO VOTE FOR US! WE'RE TRYING TO WIN THE INNOVATION CATEGORY!

http://nodeknockout.com/teams/starcraft-2-destroyed-my-marri...

AND RETWEET THIS WITH #nodeko! =)
PB is also the person who's invested in the most YC startups over all time.
More than 10 years in (implies mastery, right?) I still search all the time. However, I'm not looking for solutions per se. Instead, I'm just looking to refresh myself on the available building blocks (whether it be the API or whatever syntactic sugar the particular language at hand provides). In exchange for this constant dependence on external technical reference, you can gain fluency in a large number of languages libraries and tools.

Learn the big, important concepts in a variety of domains, and don't ever worry about memorizing the finicky details (which might very well change in the next release anyway).
I would honestly look at your idea from a strategic and straight business perspective. Can you create something or have the secret sauce that is defensible and hard to copy from competitors? If your isound.com provides something that is a great product market fit and a secret sauce that is defensible I would stick with the product. But make sure the business is covered in terms of there is a real need and people are willing to pay for it. Distribution is very important. Most internet companies fail because of lack of distribution and people just don't know you exist. So if you have a killer product, business fundamentals look good, and you just need to put more effort in marketing and distribution then I would totally continue.

2. Pivot is a hard question because you need to know your customer. I would say totally question and understand what the customers need is and if your product meets well and do the same thing with information that you gathered that tells you that you shohuld pivot it. Basically question your product market fit and information that you have to prove it. Ask why 5 times in row.
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Wouldn't "setting a strategic vision" be more akin to "let's write a happy little ditty about love in the spring" than actually sitting down and composing a song with notes for all the various instruments?
Alan Turing said that programming would always be interesting because the boring mechanical aspects could be automated (where "interesting" means "you don't understand it" - or else you could automate it.)
I daily run into issues that I don't understand. That's what programming is for me, I'm afraid; rather like science. It's a sequence of monsters. The best we can do is to be tackling new monsters, not the same ones.

Of course, programming jobs do exist where you do the same thing over and over again. And there's a threshold of skill required before you can automate some classes of things; and you also need a clear understanding of the task, to see precisely which aspects are mechanical, and which aspects are configurable. It pretty quickly gets into compsci research. And sometimes it's not worth the effort (it can take a lot of effort.)

But if you've ever called a method twice, instead of writing the code twice, then you have done some of it.

I feel that your question "start to make sense" suggests your thinking is all-or-nothing. Does no aspect of programming make sense to you - or do some "trivial" aspects make sense but they "don't count"? Does a print statement make sense to you, to some extent? Does a loop make sense to you? There's a continuum of mastery. If you only acknowledge perfect and complete mastery as "mastery", then you won't feel any satisfaction in mastery of one small bit of it. And without the confidence and encouragement of that success, it's very hard to be motivated to continue. (oh yeah, plus, of course, it's impossible to have perfect and complete mastery of programming anyway, for Turing's reason.)
Reading that makes me think I should call my parents and thank them again for putting me in front of a Commodore PET at about 5. I may not be great at it, but programming's always seemed fairly natural to me.
be so good they can't ignore you. be so good people naturally tell others about you. rinse, repeat.
I'm guessing it's thebuzzmedia.com

For what it's worth, it seems to be a fairly decent site
Programming, as a whole, is far larger than any one person could come to comprehend in a single lifetime (imagine it being 1000x bigger). And to make matters worse, it is continually growing more complex at a rate no person could follow either!

Just when you think you've finally gotten a solid grasp on writing CRUD apps in PHP, someone shows you Haskell, or Prolog, and suddenly realized just how little you thought you knew.

That said, this all makes for programming being an excellent domain for both a career and a passionate hobby. Easy to learn (a tiny corner) and hard to master (a chunk you can really appreciate 10 years in) -- what more could you want?
try having your server tell the senders mail server to resend the email in X minutes.
a pretty nice spam killing technique but it costs time. you can white list them after they get through the first time so the following emails don't have that artificial delay.
That's by design. The worst thing you can do is tell spammers why you flagged their thing as spam.

Right now, there are spammers repeatedly submitting shortened URLs to their WOW Gold sites and not checking to see if they're killed. That actually stops a good fraction of it, because frankly, they're not very smart people.

If you told them exactly why their current tactic is not working, they'd immediately move on to the next one and the next one until they find one that works.
I was amazed when I saw some of the smartest programmers I know drawing pictures of their problems. I always thought that you had to do everything in your head, but that's definitely not the case. So draw pictures, figure out how they translate to code.
An elaboration:

Maybe folks have never done this exercise before, and it is instructive and won't step on anyone's toes, so let's go over the rankings for [Scott Pilgrim review] and guess why they rank

#1: Rotten Tomatoes. Megabrand in the movie review space, plenty of content, and they aggregate all the other reviews you could possibly want.

#2: http://www.ugo.com/movies/comic-con-2010-scott-pilgrim-revie... In a just world, this would be probably #1. They have a comic book design for the review. They have better images than most of the reviews, which just recycle the same publicity kit, and they integrate them better. They link to content readers will find quite compelling, such as "Every Video Game Reference in the Scott Pilgrim Comics." A random newspaper reviewer in Kansas isn't chasing that stuff down.

#3: 1UP review of the video game. Three words: "query deserves diversity", which is Google's way of saying "Hey, maybe they actually didn't want a review of Scott Pilgrim the movie. That query was ambiguous. Maybe they meant the videogame instead. In that case, we should surface a few results on the front page so they don't get frustrated." It isn't a particularly compelling review, but it is a less competitive niche and a noted brand.

#4: Internal Google callout for Google News results. This is their sop to a dying industry which has worse problems than you ever will, for similar reasons which are exacerbated by their cost structure. The current best ranked review from Google News is from the University of Dayton's school newspaper. It is as good as one would expect.

#5: Wiki. More pagerank than God. Very, very internally optimized. Content is a poorly written but comprehensive plot summary.

#6 ~ #10: ... you get the idea.

Now, I'm not going to mention your site if you don't want to mention it, but I read your review. Do you have a sense of where a blind oracle with perfect knowledge of content quality would put it in these results? I have an opinion. Be that as it may, can you economically make your review look more like the #2 guys here? If not, why are you competing with them?
I cannot stress this enough: learn refactoring, http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-...

You will simultaneously learn:

- terminology and models relevant to software design and construction at every level

- principles of good coding and how to tell good code from bad

- the ability to redesign code as needed

- the experience and knowledge necessary to approach coding with confidence

All of these are the most critical tools you need to transform yourself from someone who sorta-kinda knows a few principles of coding to someone who groks software construction.

If I had to choose between a co-worker who truly groked the principles of re-factoring and a co-worker who had a PhD in Computer Science I would choose the former every time. It's really that important.
I can see how that mismatch would feel frustrating - more so than if you couldn't see the solution and had to muddle about in exploratory code to discover it.

re "practice framing": I find that asking the question is very helpful for clarity - and then defining the key nouns in it.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-learn-abo... gives an overview of term sheets.

For numerical term sheet examples see http://thefunded.com
What are you using for server side dom manipulation? jsdom? apricot? node-xml? libxmljs? I spent a lot of the weekend working on a webcrawler, but couldn't find a xml parser that didn't choke on the internet-at-large.

Any chance you'd consider open-sourcing?
So you want government intervention to ensure user-hostile technology is forced on the marketplace.
Great. The problem with proprietary infrastructure is locking yourself in to a vendor and that isn't always a safe bet. For me, that is the problem with Google AppEngine and Amazon SimpleDB. As a happy CouchDB user this makes Cloudant a contender for future projects (or even existing ones). I don't want to roll my own infrastructure, but still want the option to move away from a vendor if I ever have to.
7 Most Common Types of Nightmare Online Daters
If you are searching for love then the internet seems like the ideal place for you. Having outgrown their social stigma as the web equivalent of the school’s smelly kids, online dating sites are currently booming, boasting over 40 million users in America alone.
I've been programming since middle school and I'm now almost 30 and I google all the time. There's too much to remember, and I wouldn't want to burden my memory with too many specifics. I try to focus on remembering generic patterns, since those are far harder to search for.
SEO for most startups isn't about doing all sorts of trickery to rake in tons of traffic, it's about letting people find you easily.

The most important part of the SEO process is keyword research, figuring out what people are searching for. This is the stuff you build and optimize your copy around. Figure out what the most searched phrases are and look at the competition for those results. Why would you use the term 'get a blog' repeatedly in your copy if 'start a blog' had 20x the search volume?

If your site includes embeddable widgets for users you probably give yourself some kind of back link. Why would you waste that link anchor text on just your domain 'ManageProject.ly' instead of a term you want to rank for, like 'Online Project Management'?

If you totally ignore SEO and call it 'bullshittery' then you can't complain when your site doesn't rank well.

Google primarily focuses around a site's authority. You get authority by incoming links from reputable sources, for a startup these would be places like Techcrunch, Mashable, RWW, etc. And it's not a numbers game, it's a quality game.

Your site needs to be authoritative, people need to like what you do and recommend it before good search rankings will even be possible. But when Google's trying to figure out which blogging platform to rank for the term 'start a blog', given two sites with similar authority, they're going to rank the one that is optimized a bit more for that term than the competitor.
I don't think that's good advice for a newbie.

To the OP: practice, practice and practice. It will take a long time. Months to start getting it, years to go anywhere. 10+ years to be good. If it's too hard, choose another profession. 99% of folks out there would hate programming.
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The top Premier League clubs have low interest loans from their owners, like Manchester City or Chelsea, or they have debt brought on by the owners to cover acquisition costs. It's harder at the bottom, clubs like Fulham or Stoke have low incomes. Here's a link with more details:
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/t...

La Liga top clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid have huge amounts of debt and keep on borrowing money every year for their shopping sprees.
55 Black & White Logo Designs
It’s usually best to design a logo in black and white before adding color just to focus completely on the design.Most logo designers start designing logos in black and white. They do this to see the logo in it’s purest form.Here are 55 of the best and handpicked examples of pure logos in black and white.I hope this collection of 55 Beautiful and Inspiring Black and White Logo Designs will be useful for all logo designers out there. So please have a look and Don’t Forget to Share it.
Patrick, if your "day job" as a bootstrapped ISV doesn't pan out (not hardly I bet) I think you have a backup career in the wings of doing startup/internet advice blogging. You rock, man. Thank you for all the great comments here on HN.
This is at least half of my youtube experience.
I don't think it's a good idea to just quit if you have a new idea that you think is better. I say this from experience. A few months back I was convinced that we should drop our iPhone apps because we weren't passionate about them. We weren't making that good of money on them either. I was really passionate about a book sharing website (shower idea that you wrote about) and I wanted to devote my efforts to it.

Fast forward to now, had I have made that move, it would have literally cost me thousands - as the apps are really gaining traction. I blogged about the book sharing website twice and it seemed to generate little interest.

My criteria would be: a) If you aren't getting ANY traction in a predetermined period b) when you talk/write/tweet/blog/speak about your idea or product and very little seem interested, it might be time to quit or pivot. My 2 cents.
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This article introduces a step-by-step guide to create a password for SQL server. It also tells you how to easily remove SQL Server password with SQL password remover if you forget your SQL Server password.
This is a cool demo; props to the guys who made it.

I have done a few demos like this, and it turns out to be surprisingly hard to turn it into a product. For instance, just because you can send over changes to the DOM, you can't necessarily reproduce the javascript side-effects, exactly. You can't just poll the state of the DOM because it doesn't reflect all of the state that lives in javascript closures that you can't even see.

One easier method, and probably what they did in this demo, is simply catch any user-generated event in browser A and re-emit it in browser B, thus letting the existing javascript code / browser logic do any actual DOM/state modification.

But what happens when each user triggers an DOM event at the same time? They end up getting applied in reverse order on the two browsers. In many cases this can cause the two browsers to fall out of sync.

Anyway, I love seeing WebSocket demos, and this is pretty fun. Just be sure you realize what a rabbit hole this is if you want to make a product.
I got over a dip - about 10 minutes ago. For the last 2 months I had what seemed like an unsurmountable technical problem. Well, it was surmountable but I really didn't believe in the business enough to go through all the steps to fix the problem. Well after an expresso this morning I just solved it and now I feel like I can take on the world - I don't really care if the business idea is that good anymore because, by fixing this problem, I feel I have something valuable.

If you've been working on something for 6 years you've definitely got something valuable. I recommend that you don't quit.
A full HTML popup window shouldn't be necessary:

javascript:alert("hello, " + prompt("what is your name?"))
Really, moderators? I'm aware of the compulsive need to prepend (YC xxx) after every Y-Combinator company name, but it just seems like a bit much to do it even for word play like this title.
What is the definition of a "stack" in this context? Is it the actual vm itself, or the services within the vm? What makes it social?
SEO is the least of your worries at this point.

You need three things to have a successful blog/platform/whatever.

1) Something worth saying

2) The ability to say it in an intelligible manner

3) The ability to promote it to the right audience

Looking at thebuzzmedia.com, I think you lack 1 - it's not quite clear what you're trying to communicate with your blog, other than an expression of your opinion on a wide range of things. No case is made for why anyone else should care about that. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but no one gives a shit about your opinion about various events. Moreover, the site seems to do a bit of everything rather than focus on a clear topic, which is probably why you don't get many subscribers. People looking for movie reviews won't subscribe to your site because of the geeky articles. People looking for geeky articles won't follow you because they don't want to be spammed with your movie reviews. And neither of those two groups of people will be interested in your cat pictures.

You also appear to have a severe disdain for 3. Well, there, once again, this may sound harsh, but get real, dude. Cases where some undiscovered genius suddenly gets famous through no fault of his own are one in a billion. Almost every success comes with some amount of self-promotion. Post your articles on social news sites. Get feedback. Improve. Connect with the community. Relentlessly put your site out there, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Post comments on other people's blogs. Submit your articles to Slashdot. Keep at it until you get through. It might take months, or even years. If you don't actively do it, though, it will never happen.

You need to answer the following questions. If you can answer them satisfactorily, your blog readership will increase substantially:

1) Why should anyone care about my blog?

2) Who should care about my blog?

3) Will these people be annoyed by any part of my blog?

4) How am I promoting my blog to get to these people?

5) How am I connecting with these people as human beings rather than just readers?

Good luck!
Awesome. Now can we do it on a local MUA (Thunderbird, Mutt…), or on an MDA (procmail…)?

I like to own the computers that analyse my personal data. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648400
Flowplayer can play at double speed. It can also play YouTube videos, so it should be a pretty easy hack.
SwiftRiver: Curating in an Age of Information Overload