skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is a keystroke? For instance, is a control character two keystrokes? How about a shifted character? Their FAQ and rules page didn't say (or I somehow missed it).

The way that first comes to mind to do that particular text transform is (using up arrow notation for control characters):

:s/./^M&/g

If shifted and control characters count as one keystroke, not two, then that is 11 characters (^M takes two, because it is entered as ^V ENTER). However, the leader board currently shows 12 as the best solution, and I'm having a hard time believing, since I'm not anywhere near being a vim guru, that my first "off the top of my head" solution could take the lead.

So I would assume that means modifier keys do count. In that case, mine is 14. Interestingly, no one else has a 14 on the leader board. There are a bunch of 12's, then a 13, then a 16.

Assuming the cursor starts on the first character of the first line, my second idea is

qea<ENTER><ESC>q24@e

That would be 12. That's about the limit of my vim-fu. Under 5? Way beyond me...unless the submitter accidentally linked to the wrong problem!

EDIT: OK, my first attempt above doesn't work. It puts an extra blank line at the top of the file. (Swapping the order of ^M and & puts an extra blank at the bottom). The second solution above works, and I was curious enough to see if I'd guessed the counting rules that I signed up and submitted it, and sure enough it is 12, and it is the same (up to the name of the macro) as all the other 12 keystroke solutions. (Although it turns out I didn't guess the rules. Shifted characters count as one, but it counts whatever you use to save and exit).

It's interesting to see the names others use for their macro. A lot of people used 'a' or 'q', and one person used '0'. I'm the only 'e'. I use 'e' for temporary macros because invocation is easier with 'e': @e is easier, it seems to me, to type than @a or @q or @0.

EDIT 2: the problem the submission links to is named "Reverse simple deletion". There is another problem named "Simple deletion" which currently has a best score of 6. (http://vimgolf.com/challenges/4d1d9f55de2f897c2a000103). I wonder if the submitter meant to submit that one?
Sure, playing WoW lead to me getting a job at a startup (Rupture, which was later sold to EA) and moving to San Francisco. Considering I'm radically happier in my life now than I was previous to living here, I'd say it was quite helpful.
So if I wanted to I could just download Visual Studio Express for C#, and there's no catch or anything? (That's useful information, I might do it)
The deal service to rival all others: Koopla, featured on StartupList
Am proud of being in the University of Cambridge.....we don't produce apps.
Although I am very much impressed by Mark's work, his dedication and particularly the way he is trying to be different from other teens in the same age group is really appreciable. But I am not inspired with his philosophy of 11 startups, my advice please start thinking big (I mean what is that threewords.me thing anyway), you can certainly do better things if you try to keep the larger picture in mind.
A few frames from the last roll of Kodachrome ever to be manufactured
Goodbye 2010 : A Thank You Note - The Copy Paste Blog
I think the parent poster meant is - how would you achieve that, not how you would spend it :)
Ask HN: What tools give you the most joy?
I feel sparks of joy when I'm using
- Visual Studio (C#)
- Google Sketch Up
- axe
- digging shovel
- math

I also have sometimes pleasant experiences with tools that I use daily but they get swamped in neutral and bad ones that are more common.
- Firebug
- Kate

I'd like to build more stuff in life but often dissatisfaction with tools makes me abandon project before completion, so I'm searching for tools that are joyful to use and hope that whatever I can create with them will be worthwhile.

What do you suggest I should try out?
What tools give you the most joy?

(Tools of creation preferred to tools of destruction)
well that is what I believe, democracy or any populist system is too easily run on the immediate carrot and stick. What i meant is that each year the hypotheses of conspiracy wackos seem to make better predictions than the last, even if they dont have the cause right.
Founder Institute’s Adeo Ressi says you can’t teach entrepreneurship (video)
Whilst on the subject of distributed, collaborative efforts, I recommend this paper http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/lottery.pdf

This describes an attempt by a Cambridge University professor to harness the power of many students to solve a problem. A very interesting read.
thanks jfarmer, I really appreciate.
We already implemented some suggestions and we'll see how it goes.
What do you think?
Happy New Year!
As a vendor in the UK, we have been integrating the CUI for the last few years. The quality of the guidance is mixed - there is good evidence that having a "Patient Banner" in a consistent format prevents "right thing, wrong patient" problems. However, a lot of the evidence supporting the other guidance is sketchy. They also lean heavily on MS implementations of the guidance which I would think most vendors will avoid because it does not likely fit into their technology stack (Silverlight / WPF).

However, the real problem is that the market does not value good usability. We are lucky if a potential customer has even heard of the Common User Interface, let alone specifying it as a requirement on a tender.

The "ghetto" effect described by another poster is largely down to the "market for lemons" around healthcare IT, in the UK at least (many different vendors promising a silver bullet to hospitals with no experience in procuring such things - they just pick the cheapest / "least risky").
Koopla inverts the process of finding deals
Nanodots, Kindles, And The Future Of E-Books
Creativity is an internal endeavor. How your environment effects you internally seems to be different for every single person. This article seems to gloss over this fact.

However I do agree that minimalism is certainly a periodic style. "Everything in moderation" (including moderation) is a motto I try to live by.
Since it's being moved offline (language is unclear as to what is happening) you might be interested in the (for-pay) skritter.com. It (if I understand Lingt correctly) has the same design to exploit the spacing effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect). Has anyone else noticed a lot of startups popping up in the "adaptive flashcard learning" space lately?
For everyone bashing Chinese manufacturers, it's really unfair unless you qualify the statement. All of the big EMS companies have a significant presence in China (Celestica, Jabil, Flextronics, Sanmina-SCI) and Foxconn is part of a Taiwanese holding company. They, and many smaller EMS providers, will build exactly to spec and many of them are happy to do ODM/JDM work, too (ref: Quanta & Compal, the two biggest laptop ODMs and manufacturers in the world).

Where people get burned is when these don't perform a risk analysis while deciding on a hardware partner and end up going with some back room company that probably builds their stuff using components sourced from Shenzhen electronics malls. This isn't necessarily bad, but you get out what you put in, and if you're minimizing the time & money parts of the equation, the quality is likely to suffer.
18 now

Good. The honeymoon is over.

Now you can vote, join the army, get laid without legal worries, and most importantly, be considered a true peer here without the gratuitous "17 year old" prefix on everything said about you.

I have admired your progress and even enjoyed using some of your software over the past several years, usually thinking, "This guy is great. I wonder what kinds of cool things he'll be doing once he grows up." The wait is over. Full steam ahead and best wishes!
Win32 speaking shellcode - pwn in style
I'm with you when you say that I find it more engaging now to create useful stuff, or generally beneficial stuff.

But when I was a teenager, it was quite different. I admired black hats, and people who wrote viruses, because they were playing a game: there were people whose sole existence was based on working against these 'bad guys.' They got paid to fix security holes, to design programs in an 'un-hackable' manner. And yet, the intruders often prevailed. It's a game of outsmarting. There's someone, incredibly smart, trying to prevent you from achieving goal x. He's getting paid, probably has a whole team of experts around him. And yet, you find your way into the system; break it. That sounded almost heroic to me.

Of course, the whole metaphor works even better when you're discontent, or even at odds with society at large. Read: when you're pretty much every teenager on this planet :-D
Both. The business content on Reddit isn't as interesting or as dynamic. The 'funny' aspect on HN can't be compared to Reddit. And so on...
He's obnoxious, I couldn't watch more than a few minutes. How is this better than a tutorial/cheat-sheet?
Bizarrely, people still believe that Y2K problem was not real
2011 New Years SEM Resolutions to Consider
There is actually a project going on at my university that basically does that. It's an iPhone app that takes the accelerometer and sound input into consideration. They guys doing that app are graphing the data and have an algorithm rating the "performance". It's supposed to be a little criticism about the current state of privacy (and it includes abilities to share your scores in Twitter and Facebook :) )
Well I had a similar mentality at that age: ambitious with a naive sense of the world. It was a time before reality seemed more clear, so you had all these ideas that you believed would enrich the world. Only difference here is that you actually went out there and made stuff. Like a grown citizen of society, but you weren't even old enough to vote. You are one focused dude, unlike me, and for that I...oh look a ladybug!
That's an overstretch.
Although modern mobile phone has much more power than mainframe from 1960-s, mobile phone does not have convenient interface that allows to input and output massive amounts of data.
WakeMate's missing out on a golden marketing opportunity here...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050218h.jpg
HL7 is primarily used as an interchange format, not storage. Does any currently used system actually use the CDA or EHR model?
Hold up a second, he needs to go to college first where he risks being bogged down by details that will distract him and possible crush all his dreams, but if he pulls through, he will rise with a new sense of understanding that have lead all the great contributers of society.
First impressions of vim: text editor for douche-bags
Even before launching our system in Beta in October, I did some trips in which I tried to sell it.
I really needed to go out there and see what the market really wanted, not what was in my mind.
In order to minimize risks, and because the system itself was not ready (and is not ready) for the big shots, I wrote emails to small business owners.
I first did this in Morocco in May, during a two weeks trip (I mix personal travel and business all the time) and I wrote to Riads (local "garden" hotels) which are not apartments (my core business).
I offered them "a riad dedicated website, easy to maintain and in 8 languages".
I sold two, having sent maybe 40 emails and met 5 owners.
One bought it because she was tech savy (did her own websites and so on) and immediately understood why it made sense, and the other one simply bought visibility.
She wanted to be "first in google" and did not want to hear anything else.
Did not care that she could edit her own prices and pictures, she could pay me for this.
Did not care about 8 languages, she wanted to be first in google, that's it.
I ended up selling her a "visibility results based" package and got the deal for a few hundres euros a year.
First money on the project, I'd take any deal :)

Fine for me, but it made me realize that the less they know, the more they pay only for certified results.
Make sense.
As the system grew, so I could target higher, and it became much easier and profitable.

So, do I want to target the guys who "never wanted to be on the internet"?
No, they will probably be go with a webdesigner who sells a joomla website for 2000-4000 euro (in Morocco they spend a lot, even more than Europe!) and then realize they are not "first in google" and spend 1000 more to be "first in google" with a local "SEO" firm.
I have no time and no need to explain how things work to them, I better invest my time with the guys who, after 5 minutes, tells me "great idea, let's try it, how much?".
There's many of them and they will appreciate my project more than anybody else.
'jkl;' for the win! 'hjkl' always seemed awkward and never made sense to me. 'hjkl' is supposed to be convenient so that you never need to move your right hand to navigate the file, but you don't type with your fingers on 'hjkl', you type with them on 'jkl;'. I remapped my vim to 'jkl;' and am loving it. (Though it is a bit of a pain for less, and other vim-keyed applications).

For those interested, you can remap to use 'jkl;' with:

" Navigate with jkl; instead of hjkl
noremap ; l
noremap l k
noremap k j
noremap j h

Edit: Being a bit nicer to vim's authors...
> Everyone will eventually die anyway.

Oddly enough, not everyone agrees with that. Some of them are even working on that problem.
What enables him? Why can he keep playing and not have to worry about paying rent or having enough money for food?

I play quite a lot of videogames, and I play wow, but I'm a grown-up, I have a job, I have a home, I buy my own food, I pay my mortgage, and if I fail at my job, I'll starve and lose my home and my ability to play videogames. Why hasn't your friend come to the same realization?
Why does the other lane always seem to go faster?
My uncle rides dirt bikes aged 54 and is the Scottish senior champ
Salman Khan & Katrina Kaif Hot Wallpapers, Pictures & Photo Gallery
I've not played WoW, but I'm guessing that the arguments from this article apply: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-p...

The gist is that Farmville isn't fun. Perhaps the problem is that WoW doesn't allow you to achieve happiness.
>What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW."

That's probably true of the vast majority of people, including addicted WoW players.
A look back at 2010. The Evolution of our startup
How do blind people get impressions of what we see with our eyes? They use touch, as well as the other senses.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78553575@N00/321522242/

What can be learned by a blind person touching an avatar on a computer screen?
welcome to the real world. idiot.
FYI: Only works on Windows (No Mac/Linux love, yet)

I wonder why.
If I could only do this with reddit and hn, but work instead of working out!
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!

Ayup. But then I've brought a few of those folks back, too. Folks that were dead from respiratory or cardiac arrest, or were dying of anaphylaxis or severe asthma, or recognizing an impending fatal condition and just talking somebody into one of those drives into medical care. Pushing a med or defibrillating or whatever, and having them survive. Sometimes just helping somebody get back into their chair, and having a nice chat. That helps offset the ugly parts.

As for heroin, medical-grade opiates tend to be something folks can maintain and can tolerate, it's the random weird stuff and the wildly different purities that can be a problem. Nalaxone can help there, but if I was pushing that, that patient was in compromise or in respiratory arrest from a likely opiate overdose, and usually headed for dead.

And yes, mental issues in real life can extend to and can involve WoW, paramedicine or heroin abuse. Or worse.

edit: fixed some wording
>I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday.

It seems like it would be a good thing if guilds could be set up based on the geographic location of the players. If you had a reasonable chance of making "real life" friends, a lot of the objections to MMOs that aren't made to, say, a ski club or a bowling league, would go away.
That's not (just) for making a buck.
You bring value to your customers.
In the current system if you are more environmental friendly than your competitors you will go out of business (the comments here talk about 10x the costs). I'm not saying this is ALWAYS true, but as a general rule. The system makes environmental consumer-based businesses non-sustainable.
The system causes such businesses to be unsustainable.
Now, what is 'The system'?

The easy (but probably wrong) answer would be how western import taxes don't have enough environmental/ethical component in them.
Ask HN: Review my portfolio
> 'hjkl' always seemed awkward and dumb to me.

Except that you press J, K and even L way more times than H and thus is makes a lot of sense having them right there under your strongest fingers.
He is showing the flaws in the argument of the OP, which at the very least help concider that myabe the argument is flawed and thus the conclusion is wrong. That leads to valuable discussion, so it's getting upvoted.
Asking why "the fuck" he's getting upvotes, however, only leads to discussion about the discussion, which is a lot less interesting.
If you give out 50US loans are expexted to do due diligence and are onyl allowed to take 8% (4US) how should that work if you also have to cover for defaulting loans and pay fo the capital you are providing.

Luckily this is not really a problem since you return on investment should be closer to 1000% than to 100% (obviously your returns will diminish pretty fast as soon as your investment gets bigger). Therefore even interests rates of 50%+ shouldn't be a problem as long as it invested in income generating activities.

If you are interested in that topic I wrote my master thesis about it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/92714/Microfinance (partly a bit dated but the basic premise regarding interest rates should be still valid).
patio11, we need you here. Where are you?

From what I know, Patrick used to spend a lot of time playing WoW. It will be interesting to know what he actually got out of the game and what made him stop playing the game (assuming he has indeed stopped playing the game)
A friend of mine got seriously hooked into WoW. She's still hooked.

However, she's made quite a few online friends that translated to real world friendships, and even met her husband in-game.

I guess that counts.
You're living a life that most of us could've only dreamed about... well, ok I speak for myself in that regard, but you're clearly doing awesome things! :) I can only say take a break every once in awhile and remember to play and do all the stupid stuff that you can get away with in your youth. Being irresponsible is frowned upon as an adult(and I mean that in your mid/late 20's and beyond). Ok enough grown-up talk - you're seriously awesome.
Redis, that super quick key value pair data store which integrated support for hashes has made my life easier for message queuing and session management.
Yes, there are people who can smoke crack or take heroin a few times and forget it. Or play WoW for that matter. It depends on your personality.
he's 18. bright, but 18.
Haha, this shows how much of a jock nerd I am. I thought WoW meant Work Out World, haha.
And people keep using that word. There is no proof videogames are addicting, and no serious study on the subject has been able to show that such a thing as "videogame addiction" exists.
It's quite the admirable goal.. I'll be looking over your blog throughout the day and reevaluating my goals for next year... and hell, for my life, after reading the "About me" section.

One quick thing you should know - Ramania.org has a bunch of 404's in everything but the home page. Also, clicking Ramania.com links to genevine.com...was this intentional?
> Do it the way that works best. If you can get around easier with hjkl, go for it. If you find the arrow keys to be WAY faster, use them.

Except that arrow keys do not blend well with other commands, for instance I wonder how V<down>d can be "WAY faster" than Vjd to delete two lines. Also, I wonder how reaching for the arrow keys can be "WAY faster" than pressing the keys which are right there under your fingertips.

Power tools are designed that way for a reason. If you fail to understand the reasons, and you feel smart about using a power tool like a dumber one, well...

OTOH, having alternative "dumber" ways to get things done while you are learning is helpful.
If your middle and ring fingers are not strong enough to push the buttons, you need a better keyboard.

In all seriousness, though, I personally don't like having to reach with my index finger to move left. I tend to think of 'jkl;' as being a more efficient set of arrow-keys. (Where, with the arrow keys, your index finger goes left, ring-finger goes right, and middle finger goes up-down).

If you can hack it with 'hjkl' more power to you, but I found it extremely annoying to have to 'reset' my hand position every time I wanted to type text in insert mode.
It's sad how often comments about higher education are expressed in a light like this. Contact me if you have ideas on how to fix it.
And if their stuff doesn't work as expected? "Sorry, you are not paying customer, so buzz off" or "sorry, but not enough paying customers want that fixed. You are minority, your money is worthless, so buzz off". While with Free Software you can have your people fix it, or hire consultant. I don't believe in that Bill Gates' ( http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html ) "Microsoft code has no bugs" religious gospel. All software has bugs, except Free one can get fixed.
Thanks :)

Cool, as long as you can fit in all you want to achieve in life it's all good.

I spent a lot of my teens sat in front of a computer writing assembly language, and although infinitely enjoyable and useful to me now, I probably did miss out on some of the social aspects of being young (Not that I was particularly interested in those things at the time).

The other thing is I started roller skating when I was about 30. I really wish I'd started learning when I was 20 or 10. Some things are just a lot easier when you're younger.
Predictions for Google's 2011
What WoW needs to do is start hooking in-game rewards to real-life rewards.

For example, a deal with 24 Hour Fitness where you need to attend for 30 days in a row to unlock some kind of sword. The biometric system at 24 Hour is now sophisticated enough to permit this kind of tracking [with your permission of course].

I'm completely serious. This is an inversion of the Zynga model in which real life money is exchanged for worthless virtual goods. It's more like worthless virtual goods are dangled as an incentive for real life improvement.

There's a lot further you can go with this concept (hooking it up to location based apps, for example), but if we're talking about a "game layer on the world", start with converting an unhealthy dependency into a healthy one.
We don't know the whole story but if you hold that much grudge in yourself this is how you end up. Bad karma brought him bad karma.