skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is way cool and a good MVP. Congrats on getting this far. Some notes which may or may not already be on your todo:

You need to spend some time/money on design/designer. The top left icon should always be clickable. Ouch, favicons scaled up that large are terribly pixelated, especially Wikipedia's. (Also, no reusing icons, but you knew that)

On the toolbar itself, the Google category looks poor (align those boxes!).

The toolbar itself should have an 'add bookmark' button for the current page.

On the page itself home vs. toolbar is too confusing a distinction at this stage (it seems the toolbar is really the point right now).

The intro page could actually have the toolbar loaded, and point at it, and describe things you can do with it, starting with the 1-step install procedure (Drag [this] to your bookmarks bar, and point to where the bookmarks bar is by default).

The 'windows' that come up, green vs red square top right is a bit confusing, also should have a button to actually go to the page inside the iframe. (extra credit if you detect browser OS, and copy that on the fly). Actually, the window/iframe feature shouldn't be a separate function (eg. why is clicking 'search my bookmarks' different, menu/window-wise, compared to the google menu.) Closing the toolbar itself should close the iframe in any case.

Also confusing is clicking on the icon on the toolbar vs. floating and having the menu come up anyway.

I would be less conservative about using screen real-estate if the toolbar has already been activated. (Eg. instead of clicking reference, then urban dictionary and then entering the word, clicking reference should allow me show me a box for urban dictionary). The user has expressed intent to see the toolbar, take advantage of it.

The analytics section should be redone (have the name somewhere, tooltips shouldn't all be the same...)

Maybe have a split button for tools? eg: [ Readability | (cfg icon)]
Clicking readability on the left would activate it, so it's 2-clicks to run it instead of 3. Clicking on the right would bring you to arc90's config page for it.

Maybe the bookmarklet could toggle the toolbar?

The page timer is cool and all, but too noisy on an already busy page?

"Customization: Intuative drag and drop interface." (Spelling)

You need a punchier tagline, something like Dashler: Your web, when you want it, wherever you want it.

Also, push that the customization of the toolbar, and the shared-ness:
"Add your own toolbar to any page. Includes tools and bookmarks you choose, and is shared between your computers. What's more, it's free!"

The 'Useful Shortcuts' section (http://www.dashler.com/toolbar/) mentions stock quotes and weather, but neither of those are actually on the linked page (also those section headers should be links if possible).

Are you planning on running your own bookmarking backend?
This is why you should run even dedicated servers as a vps and use the portability to move the node to friendlier territory within an hour or two on demand.

So what if you are on a cloud that unknowingly uses resources in Texas?

Sheesh politicians never think these things out.
This comes to mind:

http://www.tvkim.com/watch/357/kims-picks-mute-autistic-girl...
BTW, please don't link to that directory or it will be listed by google, thereby defeating the purpose of the maze.
> When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.
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In my case, it was a couple of days. I read the free online version of the Programming in Lua[1] book and was basically set.

Lua feels like a simpler, cleaner Javascript.

--

You have lexical scope, anonymous and first class functions, and dynamic typing.

The parser is as simple as possible (LL(1), ie top down, without backtracking), and doesn't do any magic like declaration hoisting or semi-column insertion.

The only falsy objects are `false` and `nil`. `==` doesn't do any type conversion.

The addition `+` and concatenation `..` operators are different.

Some infix operators do automatic type conversion ( +, -, *, /, %, ..) between strings and numbers, but that's about it for weak typing. There's no octal to decimal conversion for strings with prepended zeros.

There's only one way to define objects. The `self` parameter is explicit for methods, but there's syntactic sugar to pass it automatically.

Scoping is similar: variables are global by default, which allows precise scoping for closures.

--

== Where the languages diverge:

You can do some magic with metatables and environments, but once again, the mental model is extremely simple.

The other major differences are coroutines (cooperative threads) and a "generic" `for` loop that allows to build custom idiomatic iterators.

At last, the array indexing starts at 1. This may sound like heresy to devout Dijkstra followers, but it's really not a big deal in practice.

--

[1]: http://www.lua.org/pil/ by Roberto Ierusalimschy, one of the author of the language.
I did and I mentioned in a cousin comment that it's because astrological designations like "planet" and "orbit" are based on mass, not on volume.
I think he meant lossless-ly.
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Sadly, other countries are generally worse than the US.

If you're nice, I'll let you live in my Seastead: http://seasteading.org/
Interesting thought on the tax loophole closing (when considered a bit more broadly). If we must put up with high taxes, then what's the point if only the people who can afford clever accountants can find a way to shuffle money to loophole their way into lower tax brackets? I used to work for a Hollywood account, and every single actor has their own company for this reason.

Wasn't it Warren Buffet that mentioned he pays less taxes than his secretary? Or is this propaganda that I've been duped into believing?
> At this point there are so many people talking of what's 'inevitable' that I'm disinclined to trust anyone who has a prediction range longer than a week.

I would at least give it more credence if it was from someone who appeared to have any sort of track record with or familiarity with economics. Looking at this guy's past columns, I see a pretty strange mix of stuff: http://www.drurywriting.com/keith/
I don't quite get why people keep calling Social Security a ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme is defrauding investors by saying that there has been growth in the assets and it's paying out dividends, SS doesn't make any claim like that.

The real problem people are complaining about is the burden that was shared by many (by having lots of kids) is going to be shared by fewer and fewer people.
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(Btw, it might be just me, but the byline (Posted by...) hides the word 'stalk' in the title. It becomes semi-transparent if I mouseover article text, but it looks amateur.)
Ugh. Yeah I found this.

I teach practical ministry courses at Indiana Wesleyan University. I write a weekly Tuesday Column during the school year and am usually backpacking or bicycling in the summer.

A real economics guru we've found.
>Microsoft addresses record 49 flaws in its software

The number matters? Read the changelogs for some software; you can see hundreds of "flaws" fixed between some minor revisions.

How does one measure "flaws" anyway? Buggy LOC (in the millions)? Things which can be fixed atomically, without interacting with each other? Files which have binary patches applied? Binary patch chunks? The number is worthless! If anything higher numbers are worse, because it means they likely sat on some while others were being worked on.
My impression of LinkedIn is that it's only appeal is that it's where "everyone is" for work related references.

You get nothing at from it but you feel a need to be there anyway. I guess LinkedIn is OK with that. Like Facebook, you are not their customer but their product.
It seems like when people say "anti-intellectual," they're not classifying engineers, chemists, doctors, architects, and people studied in management in that group.

Lawyers are the most heavily represented profession in all three branches of government. Personally I'd like to see more people that have to deal with real world constraints like the hard sciences, engineering, and market constraints taking government leadership positions, and less positions going to people who've spent their whole life doing purely theoretical work. But I don't think that's an anti-intellectual position to take.
I don't think this was Mint's pitch deck, though it is a great case study.
Launching an official complaint to a medical board as a marketing ploy? I'm guessing that would backfire hard.
What on earth is wrong with it? It's minimally perjorative, relatively accurate, and covers a wide swath of people. Better than any other term they've used that I've seen.

Think of the ichthyologists. I'm sure they like it when people call them ichthyologists, but most of the world has no idea what exactly that is and how it's different, so in the news we just call them scientists or biologists.
Actually, according to european study [1], the ability to speak English is 87% for NL versus 86% in Denmark. I've lived in both, and I think what you're describing is selection bias?

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/pdf/doc631_en.pdf
Warren Buffett did say that: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ec...

Whether it's a good example, propagandistic, etc., is another story, but on the factual question of whether he said it, he did. The main reason isn't so much loopholes as source of income: employment income (what his secretary gets) is taxed at a higher rate than investment income (what Buffett gets).
On Virtual Appliances: An Agile Engineer’s Perspective
Doesn't add much to the conversation, but thanks for taking the time to write that up :)
studiVZ (German Facebook clone, something like six million members, 17 million if you add the other two VZ social networks) has always (or at least as far as I remember) allowed you to see who viewed your profile. You can opt-out so others won’t see you but you will still be able to see who viewed your profile.
Unfortunately yes. As a Brit living in America, every time I have to deal with a plug socket I feel ever so slightly like I'm about to electrocute myself. Sure, the big bulky plugs are a pain to carry around, but at least I felt safe using them.
It's a lot easier if you build a motorized cover in from the start.
The alleged tweet is obnoxious, but in his defense, he was asked to give the bit.ly presentation with no warning because no one from bit.ly who could give it showed up, and he had interned there. I also didn't really think he was swaggering or anything - though I guess I might have been looking for it had I seen that tweet.

But yeah, this is kind of overblown. He seemed like a nice enough guy, as far as I could tell.
It would need to be :-)

What I'm driving at is that some ideas you can do a minimum viable product very quickly, other more ambitious ones might need months of work - I was trying to avoid making assumptions about what this unknown idea might be, and throw the focus on potential cost to launch. The question is so open-ended that it sounds like an interesting idea without any financials yet; so I'm trying to estimate the cost of satisfying my curiosity about whether or not a market exists for whatever-it-is.

A webapp that solves a particular problem by matching buyers and sellers might need only a week of work to begin being useful. But not all ideas are so straightforward - for all I know s/he might be imagining the next evolution of the spreadsheet.
You could also say "persons" or "people".
I have a little experience in designing software for HPC that, for the most part, is quite a bit more complicated than a BT tracker. Here's something I found on the opentracker website:

All technologies to implement this are around for more than twenty years. Still most implementations suck performancewise.

I have a feeling that mediocre programmers (or programmers who really don't know as much about systems as they think they do) are to blame here :(.

Edit: A little more detail.

Opentracker is built by a C programmer who knows his stuff. He knows that disk access in a app like this would be suicide and designed around that. Advantage #1.

Opentracker uses libowfat which looks to be written by another good systems programmer with an eye for clean design. He has also had a quite a bit of time to perfect his implementation. Advantage #2

Libowfat is inspired and partially architected using libdjb written by Dan Bernstein (a phenomenal old school systems developer with a long track record). His design models have been at work for years and years. Bernstein is truly a 'legend.' Advantage #3

Short answer: same as always; smart people doing smart things :).
While I was in college, I admittedly went ~5 years without seeing a dentist.

When I graduated and got dental insurance, I immediately googled for "laser dentistry" in my area (having heard about it from my girlfriend). I chose the dentist with the highest ratings (well, one of the only dentists with any ratings at all).

Interesting fact: in 5 years, I apparently accumulated 5 cavities, none of them very serious. I got all 5 filled in under an hour, with no anesthetic whatsoever. Then, when I went for my checkup 6 months later, I had 2 new cavities. (Btw, if anyone is wondering, there is a low-power laser that reflects off your tooth enamel based on tooth density to determine which teeth need attention, and then there is a different high-power laser that actually gets rid of the decay).

Being my usual skeptic self, I started wondering if dentists didn't embellish reality a bit (or even create cavities while they're in there... ok, even I'm not that cynical, but I'd be lying if I said the thought didn't occur). Then again, my dietary and health habits probably did change considerably that first year after graduation.

In the end, I trust this particular dentist for a couple reasons.

1. He readily explains every step of every procedure he's doing, including how the tools work and why they work, even edge cases in which they wouldn't work. And he does so with enjoyment, like it's pleasant for him to have a patient interested in what he does. This appeals to the engineer in me.

2. He has said things to me like, "Well let's wait and see on that tooth. There's no reason we need to do anything to it just yet, it doesn't seem to be getting any worse." Also, when doing the laser fillings, he's asked, "Do you want anesthetic?" I responded, "do you think I need it?" And his answer: "Well, we can start without it, and then do it if things get too painful. No reason to numb you up and mess up your day if not necessary." Realizing that he'd get more money from me and my insurance if he used anesthetic, this alignment of interests was refreshing.

3. Given that every procedure I've had with him has been without anesthetic, I can say with certainty that he is extremely attentive to any pain I may have. He notices immediately if I wince at all, and makes adjustments accordingly, like turning down the power of the laser.

At the end of the day, I pay him for peace of mind, and he delivers.
Zed says intelligent things
Ask HN: my startup addresses a small market. How much of a problem is that?
Longtime HNer on a throwaway account. I've just started work on a startup making a web app for a particular type of business. (Sorry about the intentional vagueness.) There's something like 5000 businesses of this type in the U.S. With subscription billing, if the average customer is paying $25/month, I'm looking at a total market size of $1.5 million/year. Granted, maybe there are additional apps I could build in the same domain, and other unknown sources of revenue, but I'm starting to worry about potential for growth.

Am I overthinking this? Have any of you launched companies into markets of similar (or smaller) apparent size? What problems am I going to run into, and what's the best way around them?
There is a word for this sort of viewpoint: Luddite fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite_fallacy)

It amazes me how people fail to see their own Luddite-ism. Look, here's the deal: The Luddites protested the mechanization of the textile industry during the industrial revolution. Their reasoning was that if one person maintaining one machine could do the same work as 100 individual laborers, then that would mean 99 people out of work. It turns out, what businesses actually did was keep all 100 workers employed and instead turned out 100 times the product.

The U.S. (and the rest of the developed world) is only in trouble if we cannot continue to grow our economy exponentially (and keep in mind that an exponential increase in efficiency or an exponential decrease in material costs is just as good as an exponential increase in gross product). What really _kills_ me, though, is that the very thing that we need to achieve sustained growth is the very same thing that people are trying to cut out: funding for science and technology research.

Every time I hear some Republican's campaign add talk about: "Can you believe we spend money digging up dinosaur bones in China? Shouldn't we spend that money at home?", I die a little inside. If China overtakes the U.S. as a world power, it will be due, in part, to the rapid increase in Ph.D.s and research funding that they are currently undertaking.

In the history of the world, there has never been a time when the most powerful nation was not also the most technologically advanced.
I wonder how slide 10 "Finacials" has matched with reality. Especially as the deck was created and used pre-GFC. Would love if one of the founders commented on that, though would be surprised if they did.
I expect to see this very thing funded by this time next week.

Looks like someone else has already proven the market http://sandbag.org.uk/

But since they aren't doing it in the bay area it's an easy run for a motivated team with strong leadership.
What does pre-launch mean? This deck lists First Round, Felicis, and Ron Conway as investors, and slide one has screenshots of a product.

Pre-launch? Really?
So that’s why US healthcare costs are so inflated ;-)
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I lived in New Zealand (as an American) and discovered Tall Poppy Syndrome while I was there: It drove me mad. Even talking about any of your successes is seen as ostentatious, regardless of the context.

The article mystifies me from a global perspective. Americans to me seem obsessed with upward mobility. The "American Dream" is a dream of upward mobility, for goodness sake.

Why do we resent taxes on the rich, even when we're poor? Because we expect one day that we might be that rich person. One's skin color or religion is largely irrelevant in the US compared with the amount of money that you have. This is not the truth in many places.
Right now, in the wake of the most significant financial crisis in decades and with the country staring down enormous structural deficits, the most contentious issue is whether it's fair to let tax cuts expire for people making more than $250k/year.

America isn't remotely close to a serious debate.

The problem with articles like this is that they assume the country is still capable of negotiating changes that would require significant shared sacrifices. The last thirty years, and 2008-2010 in particular, show exactly the opposite. Americans are going to insist on high spending and low taxes until a serious, generational crisis like the Great Depression makes that impossible.

Can anyone seriously look at the political culture today and imagine that a VAT could become law? Or that anyone is going to fall on their sword to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits? If anything is clear about American politics since the emergence of movement conservatism, it's that any attempt to increase taxes or tackle popular social programs is political suicide. Look at Obama's health care bill. I hope you like it, because no one is going to touch healthcare again in our generation.

I expect exactly nothing to be done about America's problems until those problems are so serious and the social dislocation so severe, that one party assumes near-dictatorial control of Congress and the motivation to use it, as happened during the Depression. There was an opportunity for rapprochement after the 2008 election, but that moment has passed. Now it's only a matter of time until the next, far more serious crisis.

If you want to plan for the future, don't assume American politics is somehow going to become more rational on its own. Plan for the crisis. Invest defensively. Don't assume the existence of government programs or the absence of sudden, sharp tax hikes.
I was there as a tech ambassador. The article exaggerates a bit about Ian, but it was a pretty intense atmosphere. A lot of great companies presented (Foursquare, Twilio, bit.ly, NYT, Dropio, Hunch, MongoDB, and several others) and the participants did build some pretty cool stuff for a single night's work.

It wasn't surreal and it wasn't a Hollywood montage, but there were probably 70-100 participants and a lot of smart people helping out, and a lot of people came up with pretty cool ideas. So while the description of Ian was overblown (and a lot of (intentionally?) misleading language was used, e.g. saying Hilary "warned" people not to disturb Ian as if breaking his concentration would ruin some magical dev process - she was really just reminding everyone that despite having given a presentation, he was a participant, and that there were other people hanging around just to answer questions, so please ask them instead), the event itself was pretty awesome.
More. You can have laser eyes, dual battle axes, and a parachute!
Have the "real" economics gurus like Greenspan (snicker) delivered?
I lean towards "humans". And I nominate "humen" to be the plural form, as "humans" sounds weird.
Is ClojureCLR converging toward a release?
Don't think this is Mint's deck. See the names on the first slide. This is a case study by Berkeley students. Still a good reference though.
I'm serious, actually. I was talking about this gender supply/demand issue in SF with my wife the other day and she observed that since baseball is a non-aggressive sport featuring high-status men, it serves a signalling function for single ladies that a bar doesn't.
It's just the standard 8th rule: If this is your first night at FIGHT CLUB, you HAVE to fight.

Requiring participation in a community is not elitist; it is what makes it a community. Otherwise, you just have some vaguely related people coming together, some of whom are leeching. By requiring everyone invest in the community you create a shared bond and a shared ownership. It's not saying it's an elite club only for special people; but it is saying you have to make a minimal first step of your own before you can enter. It's the same as building a monastery or dojo high up a mountain -- partly for the peace and quiet, but also partly to make it hard to enter -- those who turn up have demonstrated some commitment.

In terms of motivation and teaching others, I'm imagining a fun club that I can't go to unless I get on with doing some actual hacking....motivation to load Vim in 3..2..1!
Amazon adds barcode scanning to iPhone mobile shopping app
Synchronizing Vim plugins with Git submodules and Pathogen
Interesting. Are you sure taxation ends after 10 years?