skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trying to confine myself to books I haven't seen others mention:

"Guns, Votes, and Democracy" is a wonderful book about democracy in the third world and is both insightful and surprisingly readable.

"The Retreat to Commitment" is the only philosophy book I'd actually recommend.

"The Design of Everyday Things" is a book for anyone who makes or uses things.

"The Transparent Society" is a thought provoking book on the future of privacy.

"The Mystery of Capital" is a book on the importance of non-corrupt government in successful capitalism, a good point of view to have in addition to Rand.

"The Strategy of Conflict" on how to use game theory in the real world, and negotiations especially.
Ask HN: What does everyone use for a referral system?
I have a product which asks user to register. I want to integrate an automated referral system into the emails I send out to my existing customers so that if they refer my app to any of their friends and the friends purchase it, both the friend and them get some discount. I checked zferral and hasoffers but both of them are for affiliates. I am looking for a easily integrable referral system like vonage to keep track.

Thanks.
I think this is where the problem lies, a persons Vim configuration is personal to them and their needs, there's so much disparate information out there I'm finding it difficult to say "this is a good configuration for Ruby, this is a good configuration for Python"

It would be good if there was some sort of package you could download that sets up your development environment (Vim + plugins + configuration file) for a particular language.

At the moment it's just a personal preference and I'm finding it difficult to find what's useful or not
I agree that the convenience of a quick keyboard shortcut in an IDE is really effective for quickly compiling+running a piece of code, but I'm just wondering if anyone has found any tips and tricks to do this without the need to use an 'established' IDE
Why in the world is this being down voted??? Downvoting is for comments not relevant to the conversation, not for comments you disagree with. The sentiments in this comment are perfectly legitimate
Do We Need Twelve Character Long Passwords?
Something that always helped me was to look for similar words in my native language (or another language I know a little of) and make that the mental link rather than the one you typically see in translations. In German, window is "fenster" and in French it is "fenetre" (with some symbol over the second e indicating that there used to be an S before the T in old French). So that makes "fenetre" easier for me rather than remembering it directly as "window". In German, "flasche" is usually translated as "bottle". I remember it is "flask" first and foremost, which makes it easier for me.

I also transliterate rather than translate -- ie translate word for word instead of translating it actually into the grammar of my native language. When I took classical Greek, we had interlinear bibles that showed each word in English below the word in Greek. I had no trouble making sense of this, though it didn't make sense to other people. I was the only person in my Greek class who could read a passage in Greek and then tell you what it said in English. I was the most fluent person in that class. It also helps me familiarize myself with the grammatical differences between two languages.

Good luck with this.
Anyone?:)
Don't people worry about where these things land? That's pretty fast to be landing on someones head!
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer. Ignore the breezy Gladwellesque title, it's much better than that and touches on philosophy, human behavior and economics. He presents an alternative view of the same sorts of phenomena that Kahneman & Tversky's work in behavioral economics, about which I might say more but my nephew is tugging at my sleeve.
Really hate these SEO driven, English as a second language chart thingies. Seems like they are irresistible link bait though.
I like this approach. Not because it gives you an easy start but because it forces you to look at a problem or business and think about how it could be done better.

You aren't really stealing ideas and copying people you are improving them. If you didn't the chance of success would be far slimmer. This is healthy capitalism. This process forces the other company to respond by improving and morphing. If they don't they risk becoming obsolete.
I don't know anything about iphone apps. So I don't understand what you mean by "authors". Care to clarify?
Search Engine Marketing - No Panacea for Startups
I am so tempted to call you on that one ;)
What I don't understand is why businesses like this feel guilty for not being able to turn up supply and distribution at the tip of a hat. Should you do the research, make the contacts, and be ready to handle it as much as possible? Sure. But, what is most important is that the ordering process can quickly be modified to indicate to the customer that demand is high and that their order may take much longer to fulfill than you'd like. Customers understand high demand and although they might be annoyed, it is much, much better than taking orders for things without the customer understanding how their order might be delayed.
I'm pretty sure they solved this problem in the 70s - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBcrTucxiRc (from 3:45)
Hi thanks for posting this.

I don't mean to be rude but to me this folder is just a collection of your configuration files. What I really want to know is what your configuration is, what changes have you made to make your environment usable and useful to you?
Just curious. Where are you from?
Sell House Chattanooga
Do you wish to acquire Sell House Chattanooga services? Selling houses is not a problem now. We buy homes in all locations, of all sizes and conditions for cash.
I think it's fear. It's easier to "be normal" because it doesn't feel as risky. But then, not every employer responds well to that sort of thing either. I've tried this same approach more than once, and it's never worked yet. Not a valid statistical sample, but people seem to be afraid to hire someone who is forthright.

Although, I don't think it's a question of whether I'm forthright or not, that's too simple. The whole interview process, starting with the initial letter/application is actually a kind of mating ritual. If you get the sequence right back and forth, then you get a chance to get hired. If you don't get the sequence right then you make people feel uncomfortable, and they won't hire you probably.

Basically, by being brash during this process, you make people wonder if you're capable of the mating ritual, and if you aren't, then why not? Are you socially inept? Professionally incompetent?

The off chance that you're perfectly ept and competent, but have just chosen to apply for a job in an unconventional way is too great a risk for most people, so they pass, and look for the next guy who follows the rules of the ritual.
I did part of my MA on Thompson and even reviewed a collection of letters for Canada's National Post newspaper years ago (http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg57692.h...). I don't know if people will read anything but Vegas in 100 years, but his style and humour made him a standout in his time. He was influenced by Hemingway but he also typed out The Great Gatsby to try pick up on the style. Another strong stylistic influence was Revelations. A great letter that brought it all back.
Let's do more computer science
YMMV - I rather liked the very personal descriptions of Montana. By comparison I found G,G&S rather dry.
Not sure where you are from but it should be easy to replace Maxim with low brow mens entertainment publication. It has a large number of pictures of girls in bathing suits, beer etc.
C.f Lion Kimbro's free Ebook "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think" http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/
Scotland, where cricket is a strange and foreign game ;-)
Careful with subjective measures. Measure interest.

Invest some $$ in google ads, have a purty-looking landing page that says "coming soon!" Build a site and ads for each of your ideas and chase the one that has most interest.
This idea will be incredibly useful to me. Not that you can run a successful business by copying and iterating on what others have done, but that the human psyche needs an enemy for motivation.

It's everywhere: people going crazy watching sports, gang wars, people scheming to get back at those more 'popular' then they are. It's probably a huge part of why WoW is so successful. Using this to your advantage is bound to boost motivation.
This does not work across domains, guys. (Among other reasons, it would turn injection attacks into $X million bugs for some companies.)
You can check out my lectures here http://inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Courses (math only). These are written lectures but they start at about the same place as Khan's (in a real classroom though). Hundreds of illustrations but I haven't figured out the "interactive" part yet.
gcc (4.3.4 on my box) is pretty vocal and explicit about all the shenanigans you mentioned.
"What I'd really like to see is a Linux distro that managed applications the way OSX does - every program is contained in its own directory."

That exists, it's called Gobo Linux. I've never touched it, but you can give it a try:

http://www.gobolinux.org/
I'm not sure if you don't realize it but the entire purpose and key feature of Mint (and perhaps Wesabe as well, I've never tried it) is to aggregate all of your banking information in one place. Of course to do so they need the credentials to your various accounts, as the banks don't offer any sort of open APIs or OpenID or anything like that.

If you're not comfortable with this then of course the product is not for you. You can read more about Mint's claims of security and privacy at http://www.mint.com/privacy/
Okay, you can have the relevancy while I take the revenue...
Summing up what's being said in the comments, the two main points are:

1. Subjective: are you really really willing to spend a lot of time and energy (not to mention money) on the idea, to the point that it becomes the only subject of your thoughts? (Paul Graham wrote two inspiring pieces on this: http://paulgraham.com/top.html and http://paulgraham.com/determination.html)

2. Objective: is there really a market, is people really willing to pay for your solution? etc... There was a submission a while ago on HN about a technique dubbed "Ghetto Testing" that was quite interesting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485057
Yeah I honestly don't feel safe sharing that kind of info. I would much rather use my bank's "export data" feature once a week or so and uploading it there.

Also, maybe my bank is weird, but how can Mint have access with just the user/pass combination? I can't do anything online without a RSA certificate ...
I found this disturbing, morally repulsive, profoundly insightful and utterly compelling. Blog added to reader.
I have come to the conclusion that IDEs are overrated. I did exactly what hga notes otherwise here when I used Visual Studio--I edited with Emacs, compiled and built with VS.

I now use Emacs for everything. It has just enough pieces to be able to configure the task you want to do. In particular, I make heavy use of key mappings, for example, F11 to the compile command, which defaults to "make -k -f Makefile".

VIM is highly configurable--several at work use it. Two of our more experienced guys use Pico.

Check out "Coders at Work" to see what the truly serious programmers of our time use for IDEs. Short form, none.
GCC 4 has seen big improvements in that area, especially with -Wall. Other compilers (except clang) not so much.

FWIW, GCC 4.2.1 on OSX 10.6 silently accepts

x += ++x;

by default. -Wall catches it, at least. I'm trying to think of a reason why the warning might not be on by default - I can only assume it's either lumped in with some other, less reliable undefined behaviour detection, such as aliasing. -Wall doesn't even catch trivial cases of aliasing though, such as

int* y = &x;
x += ++*y;

Maybe it's the default in a newer version, or this is Apple messing with me, not GNU.
bonestorm |bōn'stôrm|

noun

A sausage party: a preponderance of men in a gathering. The term is a vulgar pun implying that men in a group with even a small number of ladies will become sexually aroused (i.e. have boners).

EDIT: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bonestorm urban dictionary disagrees ... but I still prefer my interpretation.
What sort of content? Are the authors known? Do they have some name recognition that can be leveraged?
Do you doubt that there will be an app for that?
If you stick with vim or emacs, you may want to check out ctags (or etags), to help you with some of the functionality you normally get in an IDE. IMHO, when you go the non-IDE route, you will forgo some features you are used to and satisfy those needs with alternative mechanisms. This is my personal preference. It's a bit of a learning curve, but I think you end up with a much better understanding how your code fits together.
I recently read Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49", which is amazing and dense and hilarious. Highly recommended, but it's not an easy read, so be forewarned. It's short enough that you can easily power through it on a plane ride or whenever you have downtime.

A little while back, i started reading DFW's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," a collection of shortish essays. DFW's writing is a bit like Douglas Adams where you really start to think and write like he does if you're not careful.

Both Pynchon and Wallace though, have a ridiculous command of the english language, so it makes for really engaging but sometimes challenging reading.

Have fun!
If you have written a book, or you are a blogger, or you have some kind of a speciality then I'd consider you an author on a potential author :)

What I'm offerring to a potential author is that we work together to prepare an application that would sell. The author provides content / knowledge / expertise, I (we) provide the technical background and some initial marketing. Then we split the profit.

It's a model similar to the one that book publishers have, but the medium is different.
Patrick, BCC is a web app but you charge a one-time fee, correct? Doesn't that present a structural problem is sales tail off and you're on the hook to spin the servers indefinitely
I absolutely agree. There will be a bigger better thing than Facebook at some point. There is always something bigger and better. Facebook will represent a major plateau in social technology, no doubt about it. Facebook changed the social landscape of over 500 million people and counting.

Remember however that relevance is increasingly driven by the user's want of instant, here and now, access to information. Location sharing, augmented reality,RFID, Qr codes, and mobile social games are all very new and exciting. Add to that the ultracool mobile hardware out there from Androids to iPhones and the tee tablet market and I see unlimited possibilities here! It's exciting! There is so much possibility when you look at all of those variables, I can't believe that there wont be newer and shinier platform that catches us by storm! 5 years from today I'm sure we'll know the Facebook killers name...we may already know it.
I don't think it is public info how they accomplish it but it seems that they are simply scraping the site, for a good number of my personal accounts at least. Mint has me answer a number of the individual bank's "security questions" to be able to fully set up the bank account in Mint. If the bank changes the login procedure in anyway, then I have to re-edit the info about the bank that Mint has.
Ask HN: Wufoo not accepting new signups for some countries
I get this message when trying to see the pricing:

We're sorry, but Wufoo is not currently accepting new signups from your country or region.
Are you asking about the authors that I'm already in contact with, or the authors I'm looking for?

If you're asking whether the authors I've already struck a deal with are famous - no. One application is a polish travel guide (Wyspa Wolin) and the author had previously written a book on the subject, the other one is a game that has very nice graphics - the author is a painter.

Of course I publish information about the authors and their brands. Hopefully the company will get to participate in more and more famous ones.

The content I'm looking for - for now it's too early to specialize in just one, so just any content that is not too hard to transform into an application and is not too niche ( polish travel app was too niche :)
If I'm not too busy tonight with Business of Software prep work and dinner, I'll write something on my blog about it. I'm a mere mortal whose skillset is very, very difficult to hire for. That describes lots of people on HN, although the skillsets are probably different.
I feel TextMate is the best middleground between classical editors and the modern IDE.

It's a modern editor with as much IDE as you care to add.
Wesabe actually used a Firefox plugin that was a macro recorder, you just enter the form and go to the export data part of your banks website, and then Wesabe would replay those actions once a week to get new data. Of course it still could have read your password and sent it off, but it was a little bit more control than mint.
I could help you forget revenue by taking all your money. That would free you up to focus on being relevant, which is what really matters. Deal?
yeah it wasn't overly useful, but it was the best that I could get, being an Australian (thus, my bank was unsupported on Mint). The firefox plugin uploader of wesabe meant that any bank could be supported, I'm interested as to why Mint couldn't offer a similar thing?
Isn't that John Steinbeck rather than George?
This is what I've always done, too. Lately, I've been using Padre a lot, which is an open-source programmer's editor written in (and mostly for) Perl and Wx. I know if I really want to, I can change it - so even though I still don't ever change it, it removes the stress of wondering whether I could if I really want to. If you see what I mean.
90% of CVs are in .doc format, at least the ones going through recruitment agencies in the EU. From what I've seen the numbers for the US should be similar, but I don't think my experience there constitutes a large enough sample.

(Day job is at a company providing CV parsing to recruiters.)
Ironically enough, that's the way it's pronounced in Greece.
Mint uses Yodlee [1] for website scraping. Wesabe built their own and apparently inferior scraper, and this could be one of the reasons of why they lost to Mint.[2]

[1] http://www.yodlee.com/

[2] http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint
I'm curious -- why do you care how many megabytes or CPU cycles some random tool on your computer uses?

Just seems like such a strange thing to say. I've never, for example, preferred one media player over another based on it's algorithmic size, or bought a iPhone app because it used especially fewer screens.

IDEs are just big text editors with a lot of stuff tacked on. I can see, perhaps, wanting to become VIM or EMACS master-of-the-universe, where you've macro'ed yourself to death and the entire planet can be controlled with just a few keystrokes, but for "regular" coding? What is it about an IDE that bugs you?

I hope I didn't sound too critical. I'm just curious. I'll use any IDE anybody has as long as I can type code and compile it. Add in some macros? It's all good. Why in the heck would I want to dive deeper than that unless I had to? Why would I care? Why would, say, Eclipse be any worse or better than EMACs? Or VS any worse or better than Multi-Edit.

I understand there are big fans of various tools. Feel free to jump in here and make your case. I've love to be mistaken. I just think this is like all the hoopla over Git -- it's a tool. I shouldn't be thinking about it very much. If I am it's not a very good tool.
Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents
Dropbox never deletes cache files
(aka how to reclaim multiple gigs back from your runaway Dropbox client)

The documentation says it deletes after a 3 day cycle but this is completely untrue. I still see cache directories from several months ago.

If you look at your cache folder (~/.dropbox/cache for Mac and Linux), you might be very surprised at how much space is used. The current solution is to stop Dropbox, clear out the cache folder and restart which inane at best.
Both gcc-4.5.1 and clang-1.1 (from LLVM 2.7) both silently accept the second case with -Wall -Wextra -pedantic.
Some might also not use the full width of their screen. Is there any good data on this?

My browser window is nearly always about 700px wide – that’s half of my screen. Two-finger scrolling makes vertical scrollbars just as easy to use as horizontal scrollbars but 1000px wide designs are not optimized for 700px wide windows [+].

I certainly don‘t want websites to start using 700px wide layouts. I would, however, love to see more websites that change their layouts depending on the width of the browser. Twitter could drop one column if needed. Many browsers already make such changes easy and it is just as easy to force the common denominator layout on older browsers. That would be completely in line with progressive enhancement.

[+] To all the web designers out there: I can understand that it is not exactly your priority to make it easy for someone who like 700px wide browser windows to use the website you are designing. But could you please at least test whether everything still works even when the browser window is that narrow? I really should always be able to scroll to any button and backgrounds shouldn’t disappear.
MIT 6.189 Multicore Programming Primer by Mike Acton
I'm happy if the bicyclist at least stops (and appropriately yields right-of-way) at stop lights.

I taught my kids to get off of the bike and walk it at cross-walks. I would be very surprised if they still do that because so few folks do.
His point was that there is no way you can separate the author from the story so you might as well go in whole-hog.

I couldn't agree more. Every now and then I hear people talking about setting up a truly unbiased media company, and I roll my eyes.
What if the web really died?
> It's a text editor at its heart.

While I mostly agree that this is true, the best IDEs allow you to get your thoughts on the screen much quicker. This goes beyond allowing you to type faster.

When I'm writing code, I find that a lot of times, my mental "stack" can grow deep, especially when you try to write code with smaller methods. I start to write method A, which has a section I extract into method B, which has logic in method C, but slightly different. So I start refactoring method C, etc.

A good IDE allows me to accomplish all these much faster, including updating all reference to the refactored method C, while still keeping track of my train of thought, allowing me to go back to method B and remember what I was trying to do there, then back to A.

It's been said a lot of times here in HN that most of your time writing programs isn't spent on typing code, and that's true. However, once you do start typing, a good IDE can help quickly get your thoughts converted to correct, compilable code (proper reference names included), and I find that it helps a lot.
Calling the DDR a 3rd world country is a little exaggerated in my opinion.