skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't have to enter a username and password, it's optional. If you don't provide an account, it will create a temporary Guest account, and use a cookie. It's entirely an optional process to type in a username and password. If you want to use your Toolbar across multiple browsers, or if you don't want your toolbar to reset if your cookie is destroyed, then you need to make an account.

You can try the toolbar without installing it by clicking "try it out".

I've found it very difficult to describe what the toolbar does without showing it. Perhaps you are right, I may need screenshots or a slideshow instead of a video.

You're absolutely right, the navigation is odd. The Toolbar might just become all of Dashler. I wanted to offer a start page that allowed you to search multiple sites, as well as instantly search anything you've bookmarked with Dashler. I might scrap it and make the whole focus the toolbar.

The compelling reason to use it is that it ties together the page you are viewing with a variety of shortcuts and tools. I frequently use it to reference a URL I'm viewing against, for example, Reddit. There's a shortcut called "is this on reddit?" which shows me reddit submissions for the URL I'm viewing. There's a shortcut to find which pages link to the page I'm viewing. A shortcut to find conversations across all social media sites for the URL I'm viewing (via BackType). I can search within the site with Google, or get traffic ratings from Quantcast, or see how it's been tagged on Delicious.

On top of that, it's an easy way to bookmark things, and manage your bookmarklets.
A highly accessible overview of Western philosophy, from the Greeks to present day, can be found in Frederick Copleston's 9-volume "A History of Philosophy" series.

Vol 1, as sold on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Vol-Pre-Socratics-P...

A sharp person with a high school education, and a willingness to lookup terms or references s/he doesn't understand (with the help of Google, Wikipedia, etc.), would be able to readily digest these books, though even postdocs would find much in them that is challenging and intriguing.
I'm guessing graphviz (just because it's popular), but the layout algorithm could have been better. The structure of the two big components is difficult to take in at a glance.

It's a hard problem, sure, but the simple circo algorithm really only works for trees and highly-connected graphs with components, and even then is a little misleading.
"Fanboy" or not, if you really think about it, Jobs's achievements (Apple computer, Mac OS, Pixar, iPod, iPhone, iPad) are significant in that they have inspired or facilitated the creation of countless other significant achievements, from music to movies, industrial design, software, publishing, broadcasting, etc. And if they aren't involved in the production, they're revolutionizing the delivery (iTunes/iPod/iPad/iPhone).

As impressive as Facebook's user base is, it's significance sort of begins and ends with Facebook, and that significance may or may not be positive. It helps us keep in touch with more acquaintances and friends, record our social interactions (photos/wall), but when you leave the site, does Facebook continue to impact your life? Maybe, at best, it helped organize a larger group of volunteers for a breast cancer walk, but that seems to be more of a byproduct of having 500 million users.
One of the things that really stood out to me was the site design and how cluttered everything is. I've noticed something about people; they can't assimilate information when it reaches a certain density and I think that's the case with your site.

At first glance, I was taken aback by the sheer amount of info you've stuffed into the landing page. The bottom panel really should be a learn more drop down. As it takes away the main message of what you're trying to get across; simplicity.

Moreover, the theme feels a bit depressing to me, but that's just a matter of tweaking the color.

I have a feeling that all of this might have something to do with dashler being a bootstrapped startup. Is there anything I can do to help?

[ego edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1783930 :) ]
Nope rules of branding, it's never a consumer fail. The whole point of branding is to embed it in the consumer's mind. If it's not there, it's the organisation's fault, not the consumer - the consumer isn't meant to be paying attention to this and has no obligation to learn about a brand, it's the job of the marketeer to give him no choice in the matter.

That said fail is probably harsh as it's a relatively new thing and it takes time to build up exposure and awareness.

But it's like those adverts where you go "you remember that advert with the thing? That's great, I love that advert. What's it for again?" - advertising fail. If you don't remember the product all those happy associations mean nothing and it was all for nothing.
Good place to code in SF?
I'll be in San Francisco all day, and I'm trying to figure out a good place to work on my app.

Ideally somewhere relatively quiet with ample cheap parking (rare or nonexistent in the city, I know) and free Wi-Fi. Any suggestions?
that's good to hear... we will try it
Company Uses An Array of Twitter Accounts as Its Website
Australian plugs aren't designed to carry any significant physical weight, as far as I could tell (I was in Melbourne a month ago). The thickness of the live and neutral blades is similar to that of American/Japanese plugs, rather than the round pins common in the EU or the rectangular cross-section pins used in the UK. On the other hand? "Nowhere near as horrible" fits the bill for about 95% of purposes -- because nobody should be expecting a 230 volt mains plug and socket to double as a structural support!
Chargify was underpriced.

Unless you have some inside information, it's hard to say if they were undercharging for their service. Without knowing what their overhead was like I don't think it's fair to say that the service was underpriced. Just because they can charge a lot for something doesn't mean they should.

One would hope they would have been able to sustain the free tier based on the revenue from the paying tiers so that they could sustain the free tier in the hopes that many of them would become paying customers.

On twitter, however, they claimed this change was a move to get rid of accounts where users had paying customers but weren't actually paying chargify yet. This would have been fine, but they also doubled prices for anyone who had between 50 and 500 customers and raised the prices for the other tiers as well. Their explanation doesn't match with their actions.

Chargify offers great service.

In my experience it was really just mediocre service. While I give them credit for trying, It seemed like Lance was handling a lot of the support himself and to his own admission he's not a technical support person. There were a couple of times he just sent my partner links to the documentation without actually answering a question. No offense to Lance or anything, but it was clearly a good idea to hire a technical support person. The only problem is, now that I'm fully integrated, I don't really need help / support unless their service goes down or something breaks.

Chargify has been very transparent.

Only after the fact. Sure, they get a couple of points for that but I still wouldn't consider this a good thing.

You must do your own due diligence

Do you often ask a service if they are going to raise their prices any time soon before you sign up? Do you think they would have said yes if I had asked them 6 months ago? Honestly, I thought $49/month was a pretty fair price and didn't really expect it to change any time soon. I looked at all of the options out there and felt like chargify offered the best service at the best price. Would you consider me foolish?

The bottom line is that they offer a great product but it still needs some work. Doubling what I pay for it really broke my trust and if they don't fix some of the issues with the product soon, I'll be writing my own solution.
So. Millionaires save like crazy. They devote their lives to hoarding money (bad connotation unintended), to the exclusion of a lot of other material goods.

This sounds like a compulsive behaviour. Should we regard excessive frugality as a sickness and millionaires as pitiable? Serious question.

(Full disclosure. I am a first generation millionaire by this article's criteria. But I don't fit the profile very well -- not an entrepreneur, my wife earns about as much as me, we've bought "foreign luxury cars" and an expensive house. And most important, we have no kids (which explains why we have money - we're DINKs).)
It's not. StackOverflow and StackExchange run on a Windows stack. Their blog has a lot of neat information on how they set the entire architecture up.
This is great! And yes, worth it.
The ability to network, get more experience all while aiding in something for the community and getting paid?
Nice!

In Norway there was recently a funding round where personal or corporate initiatives could get funding for "webprenteurship" where you would use open data from departments etc and create something for the greater good.
It was funded by the government.
Thats somewhat similar although not as directed as this is.
This is a huge issue that I've been trying to overcome. I've found it extremely difficult to explain what the toolbar does, and usually resort to just showing a demonstration of it. Once people see me use it in person, then they love it. If they don't see me use it in person, then they are generally very confused.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to explain what this toolbar does in a concise, easy to digest manner?
> These acts demean women, portray them as just sexual objects, and are essentially misogynistic.

How do you know that the real "Erica Albright" didn't make misandrist comments about the size of his genitalia or his inability to measure up to rowers? Those kinds of comments happen all the time to nerds (just look at any Jezebel discussion thread), and are exactly the equivalent of male dissing of female attractiveness.

In reality, women's groups fought what would become Facebook tooth and nail. Had Zuckerberg stopped doing what he did after the words of the strong womyn at Fuerza Latina, he'd have been a social outcast through college. Is the takeaway lesson here really to pay obeisance to the enforcers of conventional wisdom?

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creato...

"Comments on the e-mail lists of both Fuerza Latina and the Association of Harvard Black Women blasted the site."
I teach.
There is a huge difference between "some students worked together and submitted similar labs" vs "some students handed in exactly the same thing featuring the same obscure errors and same random whitespace inconsistencies, save for some lame cut-and-paste and search/replace differences obviously intended to conceal blatant plagiarism".
It's not that the answers are similar, it's that all the mistakes are identical right down to each sporadic extra space.

Think: several students handing in the same "what did you do last weekend" essay - even if they spent the entire weekend together, their submissiions should not be the same text right down to dotting a particular 'i' with a tiny heart.
You forgot electricity, which can be quite expensive as most heating is electric. Maybe $100/m in winter.

Also, let's meet and talk shop, I'm freelance engineer in Paris :) Mail is in profile.
Go is also influenced by Ken's Plan 9 C compiler.
Seems like a great idea if you can keep it to a very low monthly price with excellent reliability and usability.

I might consider changing the name... Just doesn't feel right.

I would initially think to remove "HTML Snippet" from your page, just because the people that are likely outsourcing their problem reporting to you may be confused by that.

I would also look at how Google sells the simplicity of adsense to users to get them understand they are putting Google's code into their website (or some alternatives to "HTML Snippet"

I would also probably never offer a one time payment for this service. After your first month's fixed costs the early "one time fee" adopters are riding it out until the end for free.
Same reason our University had such a hard time switching from Internet Explorer, and is still stuck on Windows XP. Most faculty members are not power users and they want to stick with what they know, no matter how crappy it is.
Technology Review: A Dubious Advance for Electric-Car Batteries
Ah, but a cluster doesn't mean they all collaborated with each other. For example, take a look at the big one in the middle: 3 identical ones and one pretty close, for a 4-person clique. Chances are that there are actually 3 connections instead of 6 - two collaborated, one shared with a friend, the other helped a friend by spelling out the pseudocode.
I once had Cleverbot and an ELIZA clone "talk" to each other. After a few back and forth exchanges, Cleverbot spit out this:

Eliza clone: What does that suggest to you?
Cleverbot: A program like Eliza.
Once again, prior art has nothing to do with it. Software patents are as ridiculous as patents on different colors of shoe laces. Software algorithms are mathematical expressions. I don't need to show prior art to prove that having a patent on 46,456,456 + 235,566 = 46,692,022 is meaningless even if nobody has done that particular calculation before me.
does it support php-db calls as well.....
Why would they correct it and say Klingon isn't an ethnicity? It pretty much is, only a fictional one.
Some of those would not be recognizable as the batman logo if presented alone.
This is one of the reasons why you should learn Ruby throughly before you could become a Rails master. The value of last expression executed within the function becomes the return value of the function itself.
You're absolutely right, it's something I need to fix, and I'm definitely losing a lot of potential engagement and clarity by not having a voice over.

I used YouTube annotations, since I have no experience at editing videos. With YouTube annotations, the sound would pause as well... so I opted to just have no sound at all. It sucks, I know.
(1)
The toughest part is to build credibility but somehow mint.com did it. Other than getting a few users who have communicated with me privately to act as references, I haven't figured that part out. It does take some trust on the part of the users but the risks are alleviated by the fact that the money is insured and even if I had your credentials, your bank should not allow me to log in as I'm accessing it from a different computer.

(2)
Good question. I had to restrict the query as it was over 1MB in size for the full list, but I'll run it and make the xml file available for people that don't want to query each time. I created the list from a couple of sources and have only tested it with my and my family's accounts so it is hard to tell how much of the data is valid and how much is stale.

edit: http://finkin.com/InstitutionSearch.xml
Also, the respective symbols/glyphs, for those who didn't recognize them on the ur-parent's page:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

http://creativecommons.org/images/deed/nolaw.png

and

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

http://creativecommons.org/images/deed/noc.png
Particularly interesting and somewhat comedic is it's complete lack of bias. I'm curious as to how it is absorbing all this data, as the order in which it processes the data could greatly effect how it chooses it's beliefs.
Users normally aren’t better, though. They try the language and expect everything to be rock solid – this has been since the beginning of D. So they play with it, decide it’s not ready yet and leave for other pastures.

Can you blame them? Everyone has real work that they need to do. Languages like Haskell and OCaml may be lacking in bread-and-butter libraries, but their toolchains are pretty solid, GHC is a fantastic compiler. The language landscape is brutally competitive; for any language to survive the pain of learning it has to be rewarded with a big boost in productivity (or salary...).
Ask HN: which web-based client/invoice management app do you use?
Being a freelancing web developer I'm exploring solutions to manage my clients and projects. Invoice management and a mobile interface (I have an Android phone) would be a nice plus.

Argentum (http://www.argentuminvoice.com/) doesn't seem to have a mobile interface nor does Ofuz (http://www.ofuz.com/).
But they both seem to fit my needs.

Thank you
This is really about freedom, education/opportunity, justice. Whereas there really was a stratification, that's becoming flattened. As you say, the pessimistic part of me thinks that all of those things I just listed are being reduced for that segment of population formerly known as the middle class.

It is easy to confuse consumer goods and an easy life with what is means to be middle class.
I really don't think it's that big a deal.
> There are some very interesting concepts in Plan 9 that linux could have taken advantage of though.

Given what I posted above, it's not clear that Plan 9 was really on Linus' radar when he started or in the formative years of Linux. When Plan 9 came out, radically changing Linux might have been a significant departure from a working system with a growing amount of software available for it.
Ask HN: Cover letter techniques for software development positions.
I am a senior in college and am applying for many positions that interest me so that I can get a job when I graduate. Now, I know there are plenty of resources online about how to write a cover letter, but I was wondering if the community here at Hacker News could give me insight on things that recruiters/companies look for in a cover letter when they are hiring software developers. Thanks!
Steam-powered Robots
Immature female behavior? What, no, that doesn't happen. What are you, a sexist or something?

Immature female behavior is actually celebrated. Look at Sex and the City, which is all about four middle-aged, presumably successful women acting like vapid teenagers, and this is supposed to be empowering and inspiring.
Seems like an instance of the well-known "Michael Bolton Problem" from Office Space. You had a name, you were using it, but something significantly more notable comes along with the same name. They didn't steal your name, but by virtue of being much more popular, now nobody thinks of you when they hear your name, they think of the other thing that you have no association with and came after you.
There's no theft, just an annoyance for you. You were probably never going to be famous, but now it is much harder. On the ironic upside, people who didn't care about you before now remember you, because of the naming conflict.
Do you have a sample PHP plugin?
Perhaps AT&T? Sphere with blue stripes?

And perhaps this is cheating, but since this started with comic books, Spider-Man. Similarly, the "branding" of the United States is pretty distinctive. You see a star and stripe in any form, and it's pretty much "oh US" (forget about Liberia).
Actually I finally chose the name because the HTML fallback URL ends up being http://reportaproblem.at/yourservice

Could you elaborate on what you mean by removing the HTML snippet from my page? The problem ends up being reported to the e-mail address you enter when signing up. reportaproblem is just the delivery mechanism of feedback.

Thanks for your thoughts!
As an aside, an effect of health issues can be to distract you before you get this far along.

If you're having trouble executing, don't forget to consider your state of health.
Great Step! php support would accelerate innovation around Tonido..
Thanks for pointing out the spelling mistake. It was a spelling mistake.
It's more that they don't need it yet. I think you should run with it for a little while and see where it goes. If you can add more value than just cron via REST, you might have something. I don't know what that value is.
Extsrcjs: Cross-platform way to defer loading scripts (even with document.write)
The basis for homophobia being that straight men are scared that gay men might be out to sleep with them has always struck me as odd.

Extrapolating from my experience with women (only a tiny minority find me attractive), why would I think that all gay men want to have sex with me?
I agree. If you read my thoughts under "sustainability", this is what I talk about.

"I love spending time with my customers and community and learning new things. I like teaching and enjoy writing. I also want my business to have meaningful social presence. There is tremendous scope for doing all this while making decent money ($100k-$200k per year). While technologies may change, I can adopt and continue to be passionate about data, analytics, visualization in future and share what I learn with my audience. This is more sustainable."

And this is what I am going to do
How embarrassing. On the other hand, the only clue that he's one of the authors of dojo is that he links to dojo projects in the sidebar a lot, but he also links to chromium and webkit. Should I assume he's one of the authors of those too? (He could be, I've no idea)
How about this?

Dashler is an attempt to re-imagine the toolbar minus all of the frustrations.

[Screen shot of dashler]

Be more productive:
Using dashler is like putting a swiss knife in your pocket. You just whip it out when you need it. Get your job done quickly and easily inside of it. Smile and whip it back in. All without leaving the page and other messy stuff.

[Screen shot of search inside dashler]

and so on...

(I used this analogy because I'm using it with my bookmarks bar)
It's not really a gotcha since it's documented:

See the section "Cancelling Callbacks" in the docs for ActiveRecord::Callback: http://rails.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Callbacks....

"If a before_* callback returns false, all the later callbacks and the associated action are cancelled. If an after_* callback returns false, all the later callbacks are cancelled. Callbacks are generally run in the order they are defined, with the exception of callbacks defined as methods on the model, which are called last."

before_filter in controllers used to work the same way, but somewhere along the way it was changed to check #performed? on the controller. That way before_filters only cancel the action if it redirects or renders a template.

How else would you do that for callbacks though? Force the user to raise something like ActiveRecord::CancelCallback? Use the obscure throw/catch statements?
> Isn't there some legal strategy reason why challenging patents is a bad idea? Like, the due process involved is minimal, and having survived a challenge, the facts behind the challenge strengthen the patent in court?

At the margin that's indeed a concern.

Many patent attorneys think, however, that --

A) On average you're likely to get a better take on patentability from an examiner, who has at least some background in the technology and who doesn't have a presumption of validity to overcome;

B) Suppose you have prior art that you think invalidates the claims of a patent application, but you withhold it from the patent applicant in hopes of using it later on as a defense in infringement litigation. The patent owner's trial counsel is likely to argue to the jury that your actions then speak louder than your words now. "If the prior art was so great," counsel will argue, "why didn't they give it to the patent applicant to be forwarded to the patent examiner? They're just trying to pull the wool over your eyes, and making you do extra work evaluating this supposedly-great prior art reference, when they could have saved you the trouble by having the examiner look at it in the first place."
How about a gallery of screenshots with captions at the bottom?
$100k has roughly 5x ppp in India.

And yes, you are right. 100k is revenues. Costs are there. Mainly rent, affiliate commissions, blog hosting expenses, site maintenance, outsourcing fees (to contractors). While I do not have audited figures yet, the expenses should be less than 20% of revenues. May be even less.