skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two things fascinated me about the article: 1) the inability of computers to model his thought process and 2) the experience of thinking deeply.

Computers are great writing aids but I am continuously frustrated by them for textual research purposes. They cannot model what occurs when I use pencil, paper, and write in the margins. The experience of Kimbro (the man in the article) reminded me a bit of Ted Nelson with his book Computer Lib. Ted couldn't write the book using a computer because it wasn't possible for computers at that time to layout such a complex book. I think this article raises similar issues.

Second, thinking deeply is a challenging exercise which is often ignored for more pressing concerns. Thinking, writing, teaching, and asking questions are the basis of learning. Reading and listening can only take you so far. I often find I do not truly understand something until I can either write about it or teach it. For algorithms I experience this most acutely: I never understand them until I have implemented them.
I asked this same question a few months ago and got all of the same answers.

It's frustrating. When everything else we work with has modules and plugins, you would think CSS would be no exception.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341274

I would love to take part in a project like this if I had a few partners.
Not only that, but they have a pretty consistent system of deprecating then dropping outdated APIs, at least in Cocoa.
Since these are web applications and the front pages are focused on conversion, the take away should be that there is an emerging pattern. When visitors come to a site, which is more beneficial, a unique design, or a common look and feel that makes it easier to predict where to read, where to click, and how to navigate the landing page?
Blind passengers sue United because of innaccessible web site and kiosks
European authorities blame mephedrone for the death of three young people in the U.K. and Sweden in recent years.

Except, at least in the case of the two teenagers who died in the UK, it was in the news a few months ago that autopsies later showed that they didn't actually have any mephedrone in their systems.
By all means, continue. This was the first time I've seen it, so I imagine there are others who haven't yet either.

I think HN can forgive the redundancy in cases such as this.
Interesting, I thought this was going to be about Samuel Pepys. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys)
Scale may have something to do with it, but I don't think it's intelligence. People at Google are not sitting around complaining about the idiots they have to work with. That happens almost anywhere except Google, but Google has had pick of the litter for years now selecting heavily for intelligence.

As an early-stage startup guy and hired gun, my outside perspective is of course biased towards the smaller company, so take this with a grain of salt:

I think the main thing is that Facebook has a unified product and vision, with really strong UI, and a lot of hardcore infrastructure all centered around a global experience. Meanwhile Google has one strong business, and is repeatedly throwing spaghetti at the wall to find new areas to expand to. Sure there's a lot of great products there, but nothing with the potential Facebook has.
We've made the safest drugs illegal

This is the problem.. They've also made alcohol, which is supposedly more dangerous than, for example, cannabis or MDMA, legal. Nicotine is also dangerous and legal.
It looks like this is an answer to the EverCookie (http://samy.pl/evercookie/). You can quickly select and clear a whole range of caches and cookies.

http://bleachbit.sourceforge.net/
I constantly consider and rework my goals and life strategy. I even keep my highest level goals on my website: http://dustyreagan.com/goals
Dot Notation (2005)
> Marketing may include those things, but isn't limited to them, and much of the marketing money is spent elsewhere.

And you know this how? And where exactly?

I'll assume that you're referring to ads.

> It's easy to tell the drug companies are awash in money dealing with them.

Oh really? I see significant ad campaigns for 4-8 drugs. Even 20 would be a small fraction of the total drug portfolio of a single company, and there are multiple companies.
How is being a high school drop out got anything to do with this?
"but how many possible connections have "you" (a typical FB user) missed because of time spent on Facebook instead of doing other stuff?"

Uh, "zero"? Maybe some people compulsively stare at Facebook for hours at a time and decide against going out tonight to click "refresh" instead, and I suppose there's always a marginal effect, but most people just stuff Facebook in their downtime or other extra time, from what I can see. Obsessives will obsess anyhow so even that's probably not a problem.

And then of course you stack this up against the real connections renewed that would have expired and your argument is just not credible.
Yeah, this service seems awesome.
Not HN appropriate.
You are not allowed to stand in the middle of a busy public street and pass out pamphlets. Likewise you are not allowed to drive on the road without a license. I don't think you can make your distinction between "fundamental" rights and other rights based on what you can do on a sidewalk.
PWHT
That is exactly the point. Why resort to protectionism. Let the market forces play themselves out. Protectionism is just the opposite of what the US preached to the world.

Indians are sufficiently entrepreneurial - especially given the constraints they work under. I am quite confident that Indians would figure out a model that will continue to work.
Right on. If someone really wrote everything that crossed its mind, that person would end up in some kind of infinite feedback loop:

"I'm tired writing." (write it down) "Ok, now I gotta stop writing." (write it down) "I wish I could stop thinking so I could stop writing." (write it down) "Ok, I'm stopping now." (write it down) "Let's try to do something impulsive next time without thinking." (write it down) "Yea, it worked! I stopped thinking... Oh sh..." (write it down), etc.
Sorry to break it to you but the drugs you are taking are not safe.
HAPI Halloween
As a former GoDaddy hosting customer, let me tell you all that these attacks are not new business. There was a point in May where our sites were attacked weekly with massive damage done. We would perform all the fixes they recommended yet the next day our site would be hacked to crap again. It is obviously a huge vulnerability on their side (from what I remember it was with their phpmyadmin implementation) yet all they did during this time was blame their customers saying it was security flaws in the php software installed by their customers.

Stay away from Godaddy hosting at all costs.
Maybe just the fact that it makes it so easy for people to look up other people. All you need is there name, and know what they look like. Pretty hard to do that anywhere else.
How are results weighted for the search engine in general? It seems to value individual articles vs. sites for specific things more. For example if you search for Minecraft you'll see most of the topic results are individual items, and some of the links are just crazy. The Team Fortress 2 blog (an unrelated game, the only relation is they mentioned Minecraft once in July) ranks higher than official sourced of information? The first link for the Minecraft forum is rank 15, that isn't even a general link it's a specific topic.

The Slashtags idea looks awesome, but the search ranking seems terrible.
http://99designs.com
I think the problem lies in that the downvote has two distinct purposes:

1) People down vote to express disagreement.
2) People down vote to eliminate value-less comments.

There needs to be a separate function for each of these. Perhaps the current down arrow for disagreement and some sort of irrelevance flag which wouldn't impact karma, but would still make the comment fade or eventually disappear.

I typically approach down or upvotes to my comments as (dis)agreement.

What is important to me is furthering the discussion if someone downvotes me for disagreement.

Requiring a dissenting opinion with a disagreement downvote would not only satisfy my wanting to hear the objections to my comments, but it would also require the downvoter to have a good dissenting opinion (lest his post be flagged as valueless/irrelevant).

Requiring a dissenting reply with a downvote is for my own personal reasons, but I do think there needs to be a distinction between disagreement downvotes and irrelevance/valueless downvotes.
His thoughts here: http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html
I've never been able to find something similar. I tend to start off with a good font stack and then calculate vertical rhythm. I also tend to start with a larger base font and work toward a style with narrower line lengths.
Is Nicotine itself actually dangerous or is it the predominant vector that is dangerous?
Lion has more information about this on his own web site: Map of Every Thought you Think - http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/nb/

Lion is also behind some other cool things like Saturday House, a (now defunct?) weekly hacker/tinkerer gathering in Seattle: http://www.saturdayhouse.org/
Spreets among turbo-charged start-ups
> advantages that others don't: nonconductive material, heavier weight against winds, etc.

There are other large US cities with wind, one is even known as the "Windy City" (although it isn't the windiest). All of them need nonconductive and heat resistant.

So, what makes SF's ladder needs unique?
Do not use dot-notation (Objective-C 2.0)
"Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence."
The rockstar startup team
> I think it's the only method to ensure that all the ladders are of perfect quality.

Then what about their trucks, their hats and coats, their hoses, and so on?
Justin Bieber Yum Center Tickets
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One of the great American foreign policy mistakes for the last fifty years has been the decision to keep India at arms length, while embracing Pakistan and China. It goes back to Cold War politics - India was suspiciously socialist and non-aligned, whereas Pakistan and China were willing to act as bulwarks against Soviet Communism. However, the West has far more in common culturally and economically with India than it ever will with Pakistan or China.

In strictly utilitarian terms, a strong India is far more to our advantage than an empowered China. Pakistan is a crucible for radical Islam and a haven for terrorism, while China is chronically autarchic and mercantilist. I fear that neither is ever likely to integrate well with the existing group of first-world nations. So far, India appears much more compatible.

Fortunately, it seems like attitudes have been changing in recent years. Liberalization and outsourcing (not without its own problems, obviously) have opened India to the west, while people are starting to realize the westernization of China and Pakistan isn't as inevitable as was once claimed.
Children really do see things differently
Actually, IT labour is not cheap in India. It is quite common for IT workers to expect 15% minimum yearly increase in salaries and not less than 30% hike in salaries when switching jobs.

The Rupee-Dollar arbitrage is the biggest advantage Indian IT companies are enjoying right now.
Thank you. This is a lot of great information I can use to revise the note. I am Canadian, so I will have to investigate how it applies to our laws. Links and pointers are appreciated.
Never underestimate the effect of growth, or lack thereof, on the public attitude.
The difference is, India is clawing it's way out of those conditions. We can only go up.
Probably this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1710702

That's where I picked it up, too :-)

Incidentally I also remap jh to write & exit insert mode (inoremap jh <ESC>:w<cr>). This turns out to be super helpful for web development, which often requires that you hop over to a browser after modifying code.
The estate is very litigious. Maybe try "Hendrux."
I have tried using appcanvas.com, great idea. But you need to concentrate on the UX and UI. Try to concentrate on that.
Blekko is great for the geek but bad for the rest of the world
similar to 99designs: http://www.crowdspring.com/
There was a small cafe here in Montreal that used to sell legal highs but had to shut its doors due to pressures from law enforcement. I once tried Salvia Divinorum (which has no known negative side effects [1]) and I can testify it's definitely not a placebo as I first suspected with "legal highs".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Long_term
Thats a theoretical question.

Point is, writing down a very large part of what goes on in your mind, and then being able to mine it for stuff can be worked upon.

I find the idea very interesting. I end up ignoring a lot of thoughts that come to my mind, and I usually get most of the ideas when I'm not working very hard. Probably it would be great to take 10 days off work, do nothing, and just write down whatever comes to mind. I'm going to try this.
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/

Doesn't look like anyone's posted this link as yet.
Thanks, have you personally used 99designs.com? A bit pricey, their cheapest price for a logo is $223.
That's not entirely true. Some were, sure, but it also depends on your perspective. Piracy was a way to wage war against foreign powers without openly declaring it. For example here is a Letter of Marque granted to Henry Morgan (the Captain Morgan) by the governor of Jamaica: http://www.piratedocuments.com/Letters%20of%20Marque/henry_m.... To the Spanish he was a pirate, but to the English he was a hero fighting against the Black Legend. Sir Francis Drake is another example of this. A really fun book if you're interested is Empire of Blue Water - http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Blue-Water-Americas-Catastrophe.... If you read it you'll see that pirates were actually a lot closer to modern entrepreneurs than you might think, except they operated in a much less regulated system.
> And the health care bill is huge for potential entrepreneurs; one of the major disincentives to quitting your job is the lack of health insurance.

Oh really? It's not a problem for many married folk with employed spouses. It isn't a problem for 20 year olds who can put <$100 month towards it (aka much less than rent). It isn't even a problem for 50 year olds.

Yes, there are a small number of people who have pre-existing conditions, but that's a problem only if they let their coverage lapse. (No, you can't be turned down for pre-existing conditions if you've kept up your coverage.)
Don't discount that Pakistan and India have much more in common than is obvious to someone not from the subcontinent.
I think it does. The former tells us to expect a curated list of more than 29 but fewer than 31 eye-catching designs, at least in OPs eyes. The latter is just bleh, like a statement on a resume that reads "I managed a lot of money when I worked for a really huge company." Far more compelling is a line like "I oversaw a fund of more than $[Big Number] during my tenure as Investment Manager at [Company Name]." I think that's what's going on here.

I'm not saying that makes it right in the eyes of PG or in terms of the guidelines. But IMHO those 2 characters tell us a lot about what to expect on the other side.
SensCSs:
"It supplies sensible styling for all repetitive parts of your CSS, and doesn't force a lay-out system on you."

http://sencss.kilianvalkhof.com/
@mxmpawn

You need to provide us with more detail about what your application does.
> One big change that's in effect now for young entrepreneurs is that they can stay on their parent's health plan until 26.

Since young people's coverage is very inexpensive, that's not a huge benefit. However, it is being paid for by other people.

Of course, there's no guarantee that such cost shifting will continue.
If I wrote down everything that came to mind I would have to hide the book so no one else could read it.
I think it is a very important question. There are many advanced fields like linguistics, NLP etc studying communication. But the idea is to explore his understanding of communication from his perspective.
> I've been looking to create a "driverless" "serial port" using HID communication

When you say "driverless" do you want it to act as an actual serial port or just provide bi-directional data transfer for a userland program?

I think there's a standard V-USB example that provides driver-less bi-directional data transfer via reports.

I adapted the example to work with the Arduino and a Python script. Some details are in the entry dated 22 October 2009 here: http://code.rancidbacon.com/ProjectLogArduinoUSB The code is online as the UsbStream example available in the download from here: http://code.google.com/p/vusb-for-arduino/downloads/list
Right, like Diaspora, or any of the many Facebook alternatives, for a start.
I can do this anywhere in the US. The only time I can get into trouble is if I'm conflicting with someone else' fundamental rights. If I do this at a Walmart, they can kick me out because of their own property rights. But even then, they're not saying I can't express myself, I just can't do it on their property. I can go to the public sidewalk in front of the store and they can't do jack.

Except that isn't really true. Try doing that on a public sidewalk in a residential neighborhood at 1AM. Your going to run into trouble. The Supreme Court has long held that certain restrictions of speech are acceptable. We're all familiar with shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, but the court has heard countless variations. Much of the courts rulings on the first amendment have clearly been in trying to establish a line between the reasonable restriction while preserving the intent of the amendment.

For instance, the supreme court has dealt with exotic dancing on a few occasions. They've held that the exotic dancing is a form of speech (expression) and therefore subject to first amendment protection. However, at the same time they've consistently allowed for limits on that expression. Including cases like Erie vs. Paps (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-1161.ZO.html) in which the court held that the city of Erie could enact certain controls over nude dancing (reversing a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision).

The point being that in the United States there is no such thing as a 'universal right'. The bill of rights lays out fundamental principles, and the courts are responsible for figuring out how best to satisfy those principles in the real world.
I have been wanting a search engine that will remove stackoverflow scrapers from my search results for some time.
This will inform you, rather than provide a reset or framework: http://webtypography.net/ (and of course, reading The Elements of Typographic Style is worthwhile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...)

This series of blog posts by Mark Boulton are a good read: http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-st...
If you like that, maybe you should get his book: http://fivesimplesteps.com/books/practical-guide-designing-f...

I haven't used Baseline, but it looks like fairly good framework that has type in mind: http://baselinecss.com/
> The Gini coefficient

Why do I care how much someone else has?
I can't help but draw some parallel to AOL/CompuServe/etc. Like Facebook, they were attempts to make the web both more accessible to the average person as well as present in very clear terms what they could do on this new "Information Superhighway".

A lot of technical people look at the collection of services that Facebook is offering and can easily enumerate instances of prior art and thus I imagine feel somewhat dismissive of Facebook.

"Farmville? Why not just go to any of the number of flash game portals that have existed since the early 2000s?", "Messageboards? Older than dirt".

Technical people tend to forget that the average person doesn't like searching, and needs to be told what they "should be doing" (topically, that was probably part of the problem with Wave's lack of adoption - too much freedom, too different - people need to be guided). People prefer having "everything in one place" with explicit parallels (rather than absolute freedom) to what is important to them.

I would hazard to guess that to the average person, Facebook is the web. That part is kind of game changing (and arguably, not necessarily in a good way).
True, I don't want to downplay the distinctiveness of Indian culture or its ties to Pakistan. But speaking from a western, utilitarian foreign policy perspective, the aspects that are desirable about India are the parts that are distinctive, or if they exist in Pakistan are undermined by the political realities there.
Smoke doesn't cause heart disease.
Actually, the Mac app store is demonstrating Apple slimming OS X down. The OS X had had a ton of compromises in it's design including the Mac-like UI (rather than a NeXT-like UI), the Carbon API, and a Java API. These are being stripped away.
Really? I've found the site quite useful when I've forgotten some piece of CSS that I don't generally have to remember because I'm not doing web stuff all day.

What site do you use instead? Or do you just have it memorised? :)
Loved the presentation, but alternately excited then saddened when it came to features and then browser support.

It really makes me wonder that anything ever gets developed on the web when there's this gradual and incomplete adoption of features/standards. Imagine what it'd be like if there was a world-wide HTML5 Release Day, when all browsers updated and suddenly everything Just Worked wistful sigh
Poll: Would you use a keyboard without Caps Locks button?
I really wonder about the reason it is still with us and if there isn't any better use for the space on the keyboard
Yes, Definitely, I see no use of that, except confusing my mum when she cannot enter her Facebook account owe to the fact that caps lock was on.
No! I DO LOVE TWEET AND COMMENT IN A BOLD WAY AND CAPS LOCK SAVES ME FROM PRESSING SHIFT ALL TIME WHILE TYPING
Sorry about all the typos. I originally submitted this from my phone.
"Given current market trends, retail banking as we know it today will no longer exist by 2020. Even by 2015, almost all small retail banks will be struggling, and even some of the large banks will be trying to re-invent themselves as software companies as they are confronted by competition from more agile and technologically adept competitors: the people who make your cell phone."

Hmm, I don't know if the competitors will be the people who make cellphones, but I do think there will be plenty of competitors, like BankSimple.
> Personally, I remapped caps lock to esc, because I don't like the
> way the editor lags when typing an "i" after "ii"

That's the problem with mapping non-Ctrl/Alt sequences in Insert mode. Even thing like bindings that automatically insert a closing } (with auto-indent) when you type the opening { are really annoying because they are commonly bound to the sequence "{<Enter>". So when you type { without <Enter> there is a delay while it waits to see if you're going to hit <Enter>.
> When a ladder breaks and a firefighter breaks a leg, the department can't really sue itself, can it?

The department doesn't sue, the firefighter does.

Department-made equipment means that the city is the only party on the other side of the lawsuit.
There is a site called Ad.ly where you can browse through an extensive menu of people who will tweet for money.
Geminoid F: New Smiling Female Android