skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you taken a full touch-typing course? Touch-typing (REAL touch-typing -- not practiced single-finger poke or custom-splayed hand peck) installs keyboard use in your cerebellum and removes the function of typing from your higher brain.

A new alt-key should be as difficult to master as a new coffee mug: You look at it for a fraction of a second and then put it into regular use without any further thought.

If you have to find keys, memorize them and 'practice, practice, practice', it's a sign you may need to master the basic tools of your profession first.
If you don't know any lawyers, this is very tough. If you do know lawyers, then say "I'm debating starting a company, can I take you out to lunch and get your opinion on a few things?" Then take them out to lunch at a nice place, and ask them a few questions. Whatever you do, don't waste time, so read up about starting a company before you meet with them, and don't ask them to do any actual work for free.
I'm not sure what I would do, but I know what Jack Bauer would do. He would eat the pirates.
I'd like to see you interview some geniunely smart people. People who have dedicated their lives to their work, who work in research or in laboratories and have invented and created stuff.
Damn your confidence! I want my upvote back:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
Keyboards aren't just about memory, they are a lot slower then the mouse if you don't have almost instinctive muscle memory.

Muscle memory is always instinctive, it's hardwired in the human brain. Everybody can teach his/her muscles to act "on their own" for a task as simple as this without that much practice. (Remapping your keys in your keyboard helps a lot for comfort.)

But it's hard to get there, you have to find the commands, practice them,
practice, practice, and all the while it would be easier to just reach for the
mouse.

I think the trick is to forget about "practising" and just do it. If the command is really helpful, you'll end up using a lot anyway, but the mindset is different (forced practise vs need).
American Lawbreaking
Ask YC: What do you think of a .net domain?
I just saw that Radar (http://radar.net/) uses a .net domain and does not own the corresponding .com domain. What is the general opinion on this? Is there a negative value associated with operating from a .net domain? Are most successful startups built on .com?
I find this sentence hilarious. Is it not a pun in itself?

I can, without hesitation, not delaying for one second, not second guessing myself whatsoever, with certainty as broad as the universe itself...
ha -- weebly spam. :)
Yonex Badminton Rackets
If you are a badminton player or a badminton fan, then you must have heard about Yonex badminton rackets and it requires no special introduction. All the top players prefer to use Yonex badminton rackets because of its superior quality and reliability. This brand has almost monopolized the market when it comes to badminton rackets. However, the question is, “are they really good or is it just the effect of their advertisements and promotional campaigns?”
You're dead on. The purpose for the micro-saccades is to keep the image on the retina changing. Photoreceptors on the retina do not respond to the intensity of light, but rather the rate of change of intensity. A combination of micro-saccades and blinking lets your visual system gather as much information as it can, and visual memory fills in the gaps.

The illusion of a complete image is really one of the most remarkable things about the visual system.
The topic of mental health comes up regularly. I consider that to be a large portion of your overall health.

People commonly discuss everything from depression to motivational issues.
Computer virus makes it onto the ISS
I guess that means my startup idea of offering `ls` as a web service is bound to fail, then.
Name me a human culture that eats babies. Also you've committed the classic error of confusing "Culture X thinks Y isn't wrong" and "Y isn't wrong". Is it true in some societies that the Sun goes around the Earth?
Those Django kidnapping gangs are upping their ransoms these days what with inflation and so forth.
Welcome to magazine publishing. If the magazine comes out in August and gets an August date, come Septermber 1st no one buys it because it's an old issue. At least, that's what the publishers think.
I tend to go to the mouse as soon as I have to work with more than one window, but I think keyboarding wins long-term.

In my opinion, the advantage of keyboarding is not due to its being faster, but the fact that, once learned, it doesn't break flow. The time lost due to mousing is trivial, but the compromise to flow is significant, at least for me. This is why hackers and gamers alike prefer to keyboard.
Hello, Raganwald, and welcome to my quotes file.
And your friend says "Sure" but he doesn't realize that the "age of consent" varies from state to state, because it seems to him like that logically ought to be a fixed number - in fact it's never occurred to him that it might vary - in fact he doesn't distinguish between federal and state law, just lives with "the law".
I was working on a project with another programmer, and there was this little "test" window and an icon that only showed up when you alt-tabbed to our app (it is a system-tray-only app). I simply assumed that the other guy knew about it and was going to take it out before release. Well, it stayed there for a long time, and the release got closer and closer. It finally got entered as a bug, and I asked the other developer "so you weren't going to remove it?"

He said "I didn't know it was there. I don't really use alt-tab."
I think you are right regarding muscle memory. I have terrible memory for everyday things yet I'm very good at "remembering" commands and keyboard shortcuts.

For example, I recently started using Emacs. At first you do have to do a lot of remembering of commands, but after a while you don't really think about the commands you are typing.

It's kind of like playing the piano. If you learn a song and practice it enough times, you probably don't remember every chord or note, but your hands play the whole song kind of like if your hands have a mind of their own. When a musician is asked something like what the chord progression of a song is, or what the notes to the melody are, usually he sits down at the instrument and plays it out with his hands first, triggering his memory.

So I think it mostly boils down to practice, rather than memory. When he says "EMACS is for people that can remember lots of stuff," that's not quite correct.
.com is the standard.

.net is fine, just make sure to brand and market yourself well. for example, don't refer to yourself in promo materials as "mystartup" -- use "mystartup.net".

i can think of quite a few successful .net companies. the .net won't preclude your success. a .com name will just act as a crutch for the mainstream audience if you want to tap that market.
How come you think that?

I cannot see any biological advantage of not eating your children in emergency situations -- i.e. where you need to eat the child (survival, extortion, ...) and she won't survive anyways.
blah blah blah. More meta-blather.
That's kind of cool. Could use more exposure.

The groups are a nice solution to the problem of trust on ad exchanges.
this will not help you 100% but not a bad idea to read:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287317

http://www.incfile.com/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273772

http://www.thinkingserious.com/2007/12/17/online-legal-help-...
Lawyers are perfectly well aware that a) if they try to screw you, another lawyer will happily screw them right back on your behalf and b) their social position is precarious enough as it is; no jury would convict an anti-lawyer lynch mob.
Anyone can make add-ons for it. Check out the forums and see if someone can make one..
Most .net companies have something to do with a network, no?
Mozilla's Ubiquity to let Firefox users tap into text commands
I sure hope you chick is firmly stuck in your tongue.
Muscle memory is always instinctive, it's hardwired in the human brain.

Indeed. It's like walking. You don't think you are walking, you just walk.

Everybody can teach his/her muscles to act "on their own" for a task as simple as this without that much practice.

I'm not sure how you can teach one's muscles to act "on their own" without too much practice. Maybe if one were trained by injection, Matrix style. :)
when somebody asks me about an Emacs shortcut I usually have to at least move my fingers as if I was typing and visualize what the keys would be. Muscle memory is truly amazing.
By that logic, you could justify absolutely anything.
Why Cisco Bought Mail Startup PostPath for $215M
I believe that users are still confused by the fact that company.com may not be the same as company.net, so it's good to hold the .com domain. Fortunately, these days people seem to Google what they want or use auto-completing browsers, which make specific domains a little less important.

There's also the practice of using .com for the public site and .net for the company intranet, which can be nice for making it obvious what's protected behind the firewall.
Rome: ROME: RSS/Atom syndication and publishing tools
That's nothing to do with the keyboard and everything to do with bad UI.

I could just as easily come up with a poorly thought out rant about how my options panel moves from "tools->options" on Windows to "edit->preferences" on Linux, how tab close buttons are placed wherever the user feels like, how tooltips are haphazardly added to an app, how sometimes the close button exits the app, other times it minimizes to the system tray, etc.

A badly designed user interface sucks. There are lots of them out there.
Comic-Con 2008: Interview with Gil Kenan of The City of Ember
Walden Media and Fox had two special retro Pullman cars set up chock full of gear and footage from the upcoming film City Of Ember, and packed some lucky press sardines inside to get a peek on the way down to Comic-Con. While the Amtrak train I took wasn’t quite as cool, I was able to catch up with director Gil Kenan and talk to him about the movie, his passion for sci-fi “without laser beams”, and what he’s added to the source material to aesthetically flesh out the novel’s “steampunk” world.
Depends on the employment contract. Some companies specifically state that they own any idea you have while working for them. Be especially careful with working for large companies that seem to have a product in any market you can think of, and are planning to enter the others.
Twilight Movie Poster
I have to admit, I didnt think “Twilight” had a whole lot of potential until I saw the teaser trailer , which is really, really good. Not least of which because it defied my expectations but also because it actually looks like it has a lot of promise.
Absolute veracity is generally acknowledged to be a virtue, conflicting with the "utterly evil" trait. Thus, the pirates disappear in a puff of logic. This once again proves that conjectural sophistry based on impossible examples is categorically un-compelling.
Depending on your standards, you can justify absolutely anything. There is nothing that is inherently right or wrong -- perhaps something that is right or wrong in most views.

Our standards have changed, too -- not even a century ago, holocausts were considered absolutely appropriate (even by scientists!).
some, yes. that was the intent of the domain name.

but that would be like saying that all the .tv domains are sites based in tuvalu.
That is how it used to be but it isn't any longer. .Net is now the go to for any commercial company who can't get the .com -- I think most people are okay with it but if the branding doesn't strongly include .net then the .com will get a lot of the traffic.
This idea is so old, doesn't anybody remember last century?

http://web.archive.org/web/19961224043248/linkexchange.com/
I agree that you are not putting yourself in harm's way by discussing legal matters with non-lawyers, even HN non-lawyers.

I have often discussed legal matters with experienced businesspeople and investors. Of course, when the conversation turns to "Ok, what is the next action step?" the consensus is nearly always "Talk to a lawyer" :-)
I don't think they would screw me as in doing illegal stuff to me. Just waste my time and money.
Living With Mental Illness | SlashBe
I think the trick is to forget about "practising" and just do it. If the command is really helpful, you'll end up using a lot anyway, but the mindset is different (forced practise vs need).

I wholeheartedly agree. I have become a 'keyboardist', as it were, just by using what I needed.

If you find a shortcut for something you use often, eventually you'll get used to using it, not because you want to, but because it'll feel natural to.
Heat maps could also be utilized to provide a computer system a probabilistic notion of the "current object" that the user is referring to. If a computer system could respond to where the user is looking, this could augment verbal input greatly. The computer might actually stand a chance of knowing what the user means when she says, "I want you to look up that."
YouTube Uploader now using Gears, and what people missed in Gears 0.4
What Does Mozilla Do With Its Dough?
Very cool. What do you guys have in 'Geek Heaven'? Is it books, CDs and stuff?
You need practise to nail something, but not that much as one would think. Once you learn to do it, the extra practise is for speed (take guitar/keyboard playing, for example).

I guess you could argue that without some speed, you can't really say you've learned something (what's the point in playing "Voodoo Child" at snailpace?), but the threshold is still there.
The problem with this "inviolable rule" is that it's circular:

if you have a legal question, you should ask a lawyer, and only a lawyer

I agree, but what is a "legal question"? Only lawyers are qualified to answer that!

Many of those who pose legal questions to the web, rather than to a lawyer, do so because they don't recognize that their question crosses the boundary where they need a lawyer. It's not as if such edge cases are particularly rare, nor are they easy to resolve. Every post that I make to news.YC is a potential libel action; every quote that I cut and paste could be the subject of a copyright suit. (Just ask the folks who post about Scientology... and note that I just substantially increased my legal risk, and YCs, by using the word 'Scientology' in this context. Perhaps my lawyer would have suggested a different example...)

Everyone who writes software tiptoes around legal issues of patent and copyright. Should I consult lawyers every time I use Pastie?

Everyone who downloads a piece of software risks a lawsuit. Click a link that installs Firefox: legal. Click a link that installs a P2P client? Depends on what you do with it. What about HD-DVD ripping software? If I install it, am I committing a crime?

Yes, the ultimate arbiter of all of these issues should be a lawyer. I'm certainly not qualified. But we can't afford to pay lawyers every single day. In the end, we all have to develop our own sense of when we need professional legal advice and when we don't -- and the web is helpful for that, even though any individual anecdote (even the ones told by bona fide lawyers!) may be unreliable or inapplicable to your individual situation.
Yeah, its one thing to conduct a joint-training exercise and its another to enter with force.
I remember when I was jockeying my Dad's Apple II+ in grade school. I got to typing "catalog" very quickly. So quickly, that I doubt I was conscious of placing each individual finger.

I wonder if mouse + keyboard input could be augmented by head gestures? NaturalPoint sells an economic mouse that can be operated by placing a reflective dot on a pair of glasses or a hat. What if instead of being a mouse, this could be an entirely alternate input device? You could read head gestures in the same way that the Wiimote detects different movements. These gestures would likely become "muscle memory."
Mac Clone Maker Psystar Plans Antitrust Suit Against Apple
Magenta Ain't A Colour
read the oreilly book. On your sources: read ToS, robots.txt, and don't pound on anybody servers, even if you're iwthin ToS.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158902

theres a bunch of python scrapers in py pkg index

http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=crawle...

until you're sure your IP won't be blacklisted, test crawler from your friend's houses. I've heard that many cablecos/telcos regard a request for a new IP as very suspicious!
So which of the examples above (with the exit keystroke) is well designed, and which is not?
DTree - free JavaScript tree menu
Right, I mistyped my comment. It is pretty autobiographical.
You're confusing ethically wrong (as in 'considered to be not nice') with scientifically wrong (as in 'considered to be not consistent with observations')
No doubt they'd love to own the .com, but generic name like that would be worth a fortune, and acquiring it would be a massive distraction.

Does it matter? I'll give you some real figures from one of our non .coms which is branded "ourdomain.tld"

All figures from Jul 27 - Aug 26.

Total Visits: 4,702,217

Type ins: 2,214,766 (47.10%)
Google (organic): 926,313 (19.7%)
Google (CPC): 390,382 (8.30%)

And then a very long tail featuring Yahoo (2%), Live (0.6%) and 1000s more.

Now for the interesting bit - of the keywords for those Google referrals:

38% were for our brand name without TLD e.g ourdomain (in other words, "radar")
33% were for a variant of our domain name e.g. ourdomain.tld, www.ourdomain.tld, ourdomain.ccTld etc.

So again, does it matter?

Obviously this is only data for one site so it's impossible to say anything conclusive, but my feeling is that by building a strong brand around the domain you own it doesn't matter too much whether it's a .net .
‘Forgot your password?’ may be weakest link
Maybe the traditional software buyers (CIO, COO, et.al.) still need to be convinced, but that's an easier conversation to have when a number of people inside the company are already using the free/light-featured version of the service.

I'm not sure the old fashioned type of marketing the article describes is really necessary anymore.
The Internet Link Exchange (ILE) is a free public service designed to help web sites advertise each other. The concept is simple: by joining, you agree to display advertising banners for other members, and they agree to display banners for you. You can decide what type of sites to advertise on and advertise for so you don't need to worry about inappropriate material showing up on your pages.

Big difference - this one only does the exchange between groups that agree to exchange with each other, which removes a lot of the trust issues that linkexchange and its other variants used to have.
Unfortunately, this is a legitimate concern. You can't really sue someone for giving you subpar legal advice. It has to be really, really bad. And you would be surprised at how rare it is for a lawyer to lose a malpractice case. Doctors, sure, lawyers, not so much. It turns out that juries actually respect the work lawyers do when you get them in a courtroom.

On the plus side, if you really do get screwed, a lot of states have funds set up to compensate you. But if you pay for some legal work that might not have been completely necessary, you're on your own.
So half of all users typed in the domain, even though it was not the .com? That's quite high. What's your firefox user percentage as a way to cross reference (an informal test for geekiness)?
Raphaël: Cross-Browser JavaScript Vector Graphics Library
Most Desired WordPress Hacks: 11 Common Requests and Fixes
The same applies to every aspect of life that you are not an expert at. Can doctors be trusted? Salespeople? Do your research, ask for recommendations. There are people in every profession with good reputations. These people usually have little to gain from screwing you over as opposed to providing good service. Conversely, if you are happy with their service you will keep coming back to them in the future once you trust them.
This is not always true. I know a serial entrepreneur who wouldn't know HTML from e-mail but he is a great salesman. Basically he has sold the project, signed the contract and has the money in the bank before the first line of code is written. I would recommend any coder I know to take a 10% share in a startup he launches in exchange for building the thing.

The key point here is that there are just as many lousy business people as there are lousy programmers. Often programmers don't know what to look for in a business guy, and end up with one of the lousy ones that are full of hot air and no substance. This goes the other way as well which is why a lot of business types end up with lousy programmers in their startup.

Being able to bridge the gap and walk both roads is worth more than gold.
MSIE: 78.10%
Firefox: 16.92%
Safari: 3.84%
Opera: 0.55%

Now I think about it, although type-ins is convenient marketing/analytics speak - and it's the label for that field in the report - it's a bit misleading as the total would include bookmarks.
Don't settle for a .net domain. Just come up with a name. Ideally it should be one or two words and actually mean something.

Youtube
stubhub
priceline

If you can't do that, think of spelling it wrong--

google
kongregate
flickr

or a portmanteau

startuply

Those are just names off the top of my head. There are tons of ways to avoid the subpar .net domain
No. Despite your opinions, and your best efforts to redefine good and evil, there are things which are inherently wrong. Murder is one of those things. All humans know murder is wrong, whether they admit it or not.
Ubiquity for Firefox on Vimeo (video)
Apple iPhone ad banned by Advertising Standards Authority over misleading internet claims
Modern Microprocessors - A 90 Minute Guide
Ubiquity for Firefox (Video)
Slinkset lets you populate a social news site with submissions from a collection of RSS feeds. This is great for populating sites that are just starting out, and can also be used simply as an RSS aggregator. I don't think Reddit offers this functionality.
Back in the .com boom days, I was at a startup developing online negotiated trade software. The sales team had figures where only about 15% or so of sales to large corporations are turnkey products. The remaining 85% or so are customized in some form or another. And that means rounds of communication between vendor and purchaser. I'm not sure if the actual percentages were accurate, but if even in the ballpark, and the difference in acquiring turnkey versus custom goods, then old fashioned negotiated trade, either phone/in person or electronic, will be in fashion still for quite some time to come.

[Edit] The percentages were for sales in total dollar amount.
The reality is the best .com (and .net/.org/.tv/etc.) names have long gone. Short of being lucky with a droplist or in the domain aftermarket, you will not get a good one without $$$.

Work with what you have. Build value. Build a brand. The name will not matter as much as the product. If the product is good, people will remember the name, no matter how bad.

Lastly, one good thing about the lack of common names is it forces you to be creative. Perhaps startups should not seek common names or phrases. You want a brand name. Something you can trademark. Something memorable (the way flickr and del.icio.us force memorisation). Something that does not bring up too many unrelated hits in Google (you can dominate for the term, can promote it for cheap due to less AdWord competition, etc. etc.).
Thanks. Didn't lnow about those.