skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly they are all in vim, I wouldn't suggest it can't do all those things!

But, I have to use lots of programs every day, and my "muscle memory" allows me to get a lot of consistent functionality out of all the programs I use. Whenever I've taken up vim, I've started having trouble with Eclipse/Chrome/TeXShop/etc...

Many people's solutions to this problem seems to be:

1) Use vim for everything or;
2) Make everything use vim shortcuts.

Neither of these appeal to me.
The underlying issue is the attitude that if you manage to get some sort of process bound to a TCP port that produces HTML, you have nothing else to learn about programming. Then you join mailing lists and say stuff like "the law of demeter is bullshit" and then "unit testing is too hard, so I don't bother". But in reality, if you actually tried to make unit testing easy, then you'd independently discover the law of demeter and most of the other design patterns, and you wouldn't be telling other people that testing is too hard. It's hard because you don't care and haven't tried to do it. Or, you're bad at programming and it's time to pick a new career.

Either way, there is always new stuff to learn. It may crush your ego to learn something new, but in the end, it's a lot easier to read a book or Wikipedia article than to independently reinvent programming. Or maintain that app that's "too hard" to write unit tests for.
That search only works if their actual twitter page says that name on it, which is probably true for celebrities but almost certainly not true for your friends.

> Those people who want to use pseudonyms, and have less visibility, can do that too.

I think the point is that most people do not even realize the impact that going by Rogue7777 instead of their real name has. The people who post on HN probably do understand the implications of it; if you meet some random dude at a bar or a conference he will simply not be able to add you on Google+. Reconnecting with people you wouldn't usually connect with in real life is one of the things on the very short list of legitimate advantages that social networks can provide, and that is lost if you don't use your real name.

Generally social networks' rise based on what they don't let people do. Twitter's character limit is an oft cited example; under exactly the same type of argument that you are making, why shouldn't they let people write any length they want? Allowing 5000 character tweets wouldn't prevent people from tweeting 100 characters if that is what they want to do. Why shouldn't I be able to change my font and put autoplay music on my facebook profile like I could on Facebook?

These types of restrictions (and real names) are centralized overriding of people's feature requests because the company thinks it knows better (and it actually does in the examples above). You are perfectly free to buy your own domain name and write anything you want in any font with any autoplaying music and any xbox-live-handle-esque juvenile pseudonym you want, but when you use another service you are gaining the advantages of rules being enforced on other people in exchange to submitting to those same rules yourself. Maybe you don't care about if people have a red font on a green background, but that would be a worse experience for most people. Maybe you don't care if your friend is signed on as "SmokeBluntzAndPoundVag", but that is a worse experience for most people, even excluding the fact it would be difficult to find your friend and any behavior differences about someone who is signed in with that username versus their actual name.

> That way madness lies. It will stress out the companies who have to pay employees to vet accounts. It will stress out the companies when they get it wrong or get into disputes over well-known identities.

I think this is a demonstrably incorrect assessment. Facebook does a good job keeping people to real names (including dispute resolution that involves sending an image of your license if you have a name that looks fake), and Twitter does a pretty good job with "validated accounts". I don't think it is too extreme of a burden for either company; noteworthy celebrities and people whose legal name is Optimus Prime are extreme minorities and are easily manually dealt with with a minimal team of people.
Why average retention rates can lead to 50% error in CLV
Those are both still more work than ->, and you could make a shortcut for the arrow as well if it's so difficult. Anyway, my point is that I don't see why the arrow should give anyone with a normal keyboard layout an inordinate amount of trouble compared to similar constructs in other languages.
Schneier on new AES attack
The politics of Anonymous. Is it Anarchy?
I have mixed feelings about adding more communication to math textbooks or trying to make the content more accessible. I have been trying to teach myself mathematics over the last couple of years. Here are my findings -

a) Math books offered in Borders/Barnes and Nobles invariably have titles like 'Math for dummies', 'Math made easy', "even you can do math' etc. The content seems excessively shallow and diluted by huge amounts of infographics.
b) I believe the key to writing a good math textbooks is having a good feel for 'pregnant pauses'. Good textbooks have problems and prose that deliberately make the user confront their doubts and then shove them into the pregnant pause, out of which the reader emerges joyful at seeing the entire picture. I believe that writing with such mastery requires experience and skill that is not common.
c) I believe that in specialised subjects you are better off writing for the benefit of the motivated reader because everyone else will rarely be applying the contents of the textbook in real life.
d) By overly simplifying things you rob readers of one of the true joys of mathematics - figuring out a problem that they consider difficult. Unless the reader is addicted to this joy they will find most meaningful real world problems too perplexing to solve.

In short I wish we had more concise and thought provoking textbooks.

Here is what Feynman had to say about textbooks: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
The Test Anything Protocol: http://testanything.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Thanks for the suggestion, but it uses ctags, which simply chokes on boost.
Tracking Calls Through Virtual Phone Numbers?
I'm setting up a marketing campaign and I'd love to be able to track calls that come in to this campaign. Ideally, I'd like to:

* Set up a new virtual number
* Have the number forward to the main office line
* Be able to track the # of calls the virtual number gets

Someone has had to have solved this already. Is there a service that helps automate this?
Groupon founders in talks to buy Wrigley building
In this same thinking there are still some USB 1.1 hubs out there too. This should give you a VERY slow drive for a decent price. As an example:

http://www.amazon.com/Ho97958-Usb-1-1-Slim-4-Port/dp/B00030N...
No post-PC iPad
Here is an interesting case study I found that shows what happens when the CEO demands too big a salary.

http://startuplawyer.com/venture-capital/series-a-startup-ce...
I'm sorry but what? Are python and ruby ugly and unreadable? Are they on the same level as js? Because coffeescript syntax is essentially a combination of the best aspects of both with a cleaner lambda syntax. I'd love to hear which languages you find beautiful and readable if cs doesn't meet your standards.
> Using DropBox is the clever bit here for me. DropBox make it so the files follow you so you can edit them on any of your machines.

I mean, I guess you could do that, if you really wanted too... or you could use Git. Dropbox is a great service, but for code (even static html) it isn't a good fit.
I disagree; I think the more standard handling of `this` and the automagic variable scoping, constitute a significant reduction in complexity for people coming from other OO languages. Certainly for me, having more experience with Python and Ruby than Javascript.

The abridged syntax is just gravy.
I pay for Netflix and Hulu Plus streaming (the latter of which still comes with ads). If it's not on there, I feel like I've done my due diligence and have no ethical dilemma with pirating.
If you're doing a side-by-side comparison, then you want to compare with what a human would write, not with what a compiler would write. Otherwise, you're not really showing the advantages of your language, you're showing how easy it is to read the object code -- something that's only really an advantage when debugging your compiler and/or trying to map the generated output back to the source for debugging purposes.

I mean, look at what Hello World in C is, compared to Hello World in Haskell!

http://pastebin.com/sePpUJ1J (Haskell source)

http://pastebin.com/seqAy4VD (C, generated from the Haskell above)

Clearly C is unreadable garbage! (It's less expressive than Haskell, for sure, but showing generated output makes it look far worse)
So all the people who are incapable of calculus can't appreciate pysics? That makes sense. It also restricts appreciation of physics to the top quartile, conservatively.
Charlottesville Real Estate Agent
Don't worry, I'm sure they wouldn't actually want to enforce the restrictions in their policies, and any suggestion that they would is clearly the work of Microsoft employed FUD-monsters.

More seriously, LWN articles get posted here quite often, and the exposure probably encourages more people to subscribe. I always assumed that was the point of allowing people to create these links to subscriber articles.
How is this 'radically different'?? Optical discs are going away and all drives will someday be SSD.

By the time the next Macbook Pro is announced, 500+gb SSD drives will be available, and with a 17" screen, you can probably squeeze two into the space of a laptop (with the removal of the optical drive.

Is the only reason it's 'radical' is because it's apple?
Though I have to admit, I'm amazed at how PC manufacturers seem to be sticking with the optical drive, I haven't wanted one since 2007.
WFH (work from home), WFCS (work from coffee shop), WFV (work from Vegas), WFP (work from plane), WFF (work from France), WFW (work from work)

Where can I get me some of this? Most very small teams seem to want co-location and fairly regular office attendance. I find I am a pretty effective remote worker and am quite good at staying in sync with a distributed team, but for some reason founders of mid-early-stage startups seem less enthused by that idea.
Even Baby Emerson can teach us about design
Earlier this year, a London, Ontario-based mom noticed that her 5-month old son Emerson got really frightened when she blew her nose. She caught one of his petrified moments on video, and posted it on YouTube to share with a few friends.
>What about things I know how to do in every app I ever use:
Cut, Copy, Paste, Find, Find Next, Replace, Load, Save, Print, New Document, Undo, Redo.

And variants of course

* Cut - d

* Copy - y

* Paste - p

* Find - /

* Find next - n

* Replace - s///

* Load - e

* Save - w

* New Document - e

* Undo - u

* Redo - Ctrl + r

I'd call those pretty standard.
Was wondering when this would happen, took about 24 hours after they went on clearance for $100.
Hi. Sounds like you want to consider being a project manager, or maybe running your own startup. I used to be a coder, then took an MBA (but you don't need to be that drastic!), and now I run my own start-up called ViewsHound. I get to conceive and run the products, and do a whole heap more besides, like marketing etc. Maybe you could consider joining an existing start-up that's still quite early stage but has a bit of funding.

I hope that helps,
Ian.
Why You Need A New A/V Receiver
Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't see the pricing as very attractive relative to the free options available.

I'm saying that from a relatively small business that is looking to do more video perspective. I'm small enough to be able to host this myself with my own player and not have problems, and not large enough to see the value in $20 or $50 a month. I could see doing the free trial, but 1 video makes it not seem as attractive to me.

If I were you I'd consider doing the trial for a certain number of views instead of the 1 video - that way your true functionality grows with the views (and value) coming to the business. If it were 5000 views a month or something then I get to use the cue up features, see the analytics, etc, but when I'm doing xxxx number of views a month on the videos then I'm more likely to drop the money and convert to a paid plan.

Anyway, just my opinion, but I doubt my monthly small business video hosting will ever be nearing the cost of my invoicing system...
Viewing videos is not a necessity. It is possible not to watch something at all.
Chrome Gets New Bookmark Manager
LucidChart: In depth review...
Are there any special kinds of emulation that you could use for this purpose? I mean, there are DOS, gameboy emulators out there, it would be interesting if there were emulators out there for PCs with a particular hardware configuration which would emulate slow disk access and so on.
Article says they're using RTMP streaming. Doesn't that mean it won't work on iPhone/iPad because there's no Flash there?
I can appreciate continuancy of mind, but red squiggles shouldn't be a deterrant to that. Rather, it is simply saving you the step of compiling before giving you information. You can just as easily train yourself to not worry about red squiggles until you're finished with the task at hand.

As for variable naming, the better question is:

Why would you willingly choose less descriptive variable names when there are editors that will help you produce more readable code?
Our focus is on consolidating your web video. Many companies leverage YouTube, that makes sense. We help them kill the outbound link created by the YouTube embed on their site. You can host with us or YouTube and your video players will all look the same.
i think the only true value of hungarian would be in helping "paul" a sense of identity i.e. "pointer to an unsigned long" :)
My initial reaction was to wonder if Norman Harvey carries iPads. It does, and the lowest priced iPad is a few bucks less than the lowest priced Playbook.

I've been surprised how many Playbooks I've seen here in Whistler, Canada. Of course they are nowhere near as popular as iPads, but I thought sales had been terrible, but I see them about as often as a Galaxy Tab, if not maybe a bit more often.
Almost anytime you see a product and your reaction is "I could do that myself slightly more cheaply," it means that that product isn't intended for your use.
Aw man, I was all excited because I thought my posting was getting a bunch of traffic. Then I realized this is just a repost :( plays violin

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2912066
Shotgun solution: make the target fn be a process. Have a 2nd process be a watchdog and kill the target process if it exceeds the time limit. Design the arch of this system such that no matter what the target proc was doing precisely when killed, that the system can recover/resume reasonably well.
But the point of these calculations is to say what resolution the thing you're looking at needs to have. Which, unless it physically tracks the eyeball somehow, needs to be as crisp as the center of vision throughout.
> So I can type my text in ed and then use my mouse to position the cursor somewhere up, select text, and make a change.

No you can't, not in ed on Plan9.
Are they clearing inventory at the lower price, or were they ~$300 the whole time?
I don't really know in general; I personally didn't appreciate physics when it was presented to me algebraically in high school, despite getting an A in it. Perhaps it'd be possible with a different way of teaching it; not sure.
The link it goes to explains why it is extremely sarcastic ;-)
I've been impressed with this idea and interface. Although there rarely are only 2 sides, I find myself checking in on issues. Also, I agree w/ xtra great landing page.
Is it significant that Ruby on Rails seems frequently learned "framework first, then language" -- many people first learn Rails, then go to work learning Ruby. Whereas I think frameworks like Django are learned by people already familiar with Python. It's possible that folks can more easily get through the hassles and design questions posed by unit tests with a better grounding in the underlying language.
You can't count on that, because acquisitions are so unpredictable. In bad times they dry up entirely. YC was not in the black till December 2010, more than 5 years after we started.
I wouldn't read the word "silence" in this article as a precise term. Check out their abstract/paper:

http://www.usenix.org/events/sec11/tech/tech.html#Gollakota

The abstract says they've made it work on busy networks.
But LWN has a feature specifically for sharing subscriber-only articles on social news sites, and that's why everyone can see this article. Presumably if this is killing them, they'd just turn that feature off.
Short of any evidence whatsoever that Apple was selling phones in contravention of Japanese law, or even that such a law exists, such a headline would seem absurd.
I thought we already talk bout this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/13623/does-gi...
Not really. The real problem is that many claimed environmental/diet factors turn out to be statistical noise or complete bullshit when examined further. If environment or diet plays a role then it is possible to discover how this triggers some latent element of the genome or some existing physiological process that gets subverted and from this discovery it is sometimes possible to interrupt the process. If a pharmaceutical company can develop a wonderpill that can be marketed with a basic message of "yes, we both know you are fat and do not have the willpower/desire to stop grazing 24x7 but if you take our pill we can block or delay the onset of type II diabetes" they will have a very reliable revenue stream to look forward to...
Why don't you just find something that people will pay for, and charge for it? If nobody will pay for whatever you're offering, maybe that's a sign.
I honestly think the author is full of crap. The students I grew up with were either school oriented or not. The students who failed to produce coherent writing in English class weren't excelling in the sciences to say the least. Kids were either there to learn or they weren't and there was very little in-between.

So by emphasizing the english portion of education over more sciences we'd only get more of the same crap at the expense of students who DO want to gain formal education in the sciences. Kids don't see the connection between the education and the practical nature of the knowledge they're fed. Stupid is as stupid does.

I was a gung-ho math/science kid. I pulled 95% in my classes of choice and low 60's in the english classes because I refused to participate in the circle-jerk discussion that was english 30. "Now class can you tell me where the foreshadowing is?", "what was the meaning of this poem?". I'm certain I could have pulled out better marks with the effort but I decided my time in classes was better spent doodling. Having more of my time pushed towards english courses and away from the sciences I'd be hard pressed to say that I'd be half the engineer I am today without it. Hell, too much of that 65% crap and I probably wouldn't have gotten the post-secondary education at all.

Provide the tools children need to make formal decisions about their future and provide the fundamentals they need to get there. You can tell which kids are going to be working with their hands or with their heads pretty early so help them get where they want. Everyone needs a fundamental level of communication but over-emphasising it instead of something more practical to the child will only put us full circle to where we are now but with "sciences" and "english" reversed in the discussion.
Ask HN: Expired Links - Am I the only one who gets struck by these regularly
The way I use HN is to open both the article and HN comments page in new tabs for each article I'm interested in.

Of course, I have to do this for two listing pages of HN (home 1-2, new 1-2) because if I go read the articles first, I get an 'expired link' when I click on 'more'.

Then, I refresh the comment page to see new comments, read the comments, and submit my own comment or reply to others. However, sometimes when writing a response or comment, I'll take too long, and have to refresh and re-create my comment again.

Does anybody else have this problem?? Would it be worth it to have HN pages load comments dynamically (and possibly articles on a set schedule) so we don't have the 'expired link' issue?

Or is there a reason that the 'expired link' exists that I'm just not understanding?
It may be that the ranking exercise at the beginning is the big benefit, rather than the resulting ranks, because it makes you think about what's important to you. You may hire someone who doesn't actually fit the ranking, but the exercise was valuable anyway because it helped you better understand the candidates and their relationship to your business.
Do you have something useful to say, or do you just like moralizing at people?
You're absolutely right that Nook Color is a far worse general purpose tablet, for all the reasons you mentioned. If the question though is how to carve out niches in the overall tablet market, then Color Nook answers with one possibility:

A sub $300 e-reader than can, in a pinch, work poorly as a tablet. The Color Nook can do quite a bit of what a typical person wants, right? Like consume news (Pulse), check and respond to e-mail, and browse text-heavy sites.

You can of course do so much more and so much better on an iPad or Galaxy Tab. But not everyone needs "so much more" enough to pay for it.

Surprising tidbit about the Color Nook: women love it for the women's magazines:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/business/media/23nook.html...

Not the profile of a typical hacker news member but hey - if there's a niche for a device you can stick in a purse to substitute for a handful of women's magazine's - what's wrong with that?

Maybe the market will bifurcate into iPads at Galaxy Tabs at the top, and a bunch of niches serviced with less expensive devices?

EDIT: reworded awkward sentence
On the bright side, if we assume that developing a drug (i.e. treating the symptoms) is easier than developing a 'fix' for the root cause (if the root is genetic- we don't have a long track record of fixing your genes) then we can possibly surmise that the drug is still a good thing, because at the very least it buys time for the afflicted until a root fix is found.
The truth behind "Push button, receive bacon"
I've solved this and more with www.getvolta.com. We are a lightweight CRM for companies that rely on the phone.

Our outbound stuff is more advanced, but our inbound is simple. Simply change the phone number on your site with a bit of javascript and you're done. That javascript rotates through a bunch of your phone numbers that we give you, tracks referrers, search queries, etc.

When the phone rings you can have a callerid screen that instantly displays all the above plus history of conversations with that person.

We also allow the person who answered the phone to enter a numeric value after each call. Then, you can see ROI for all the various marketing efforts.

Contact me privately if you're interested in learning more. We are still private, but opening up very soon.
Ask HN: Favorite Support Tool for Startups
Does anyone have a support tool that they're particularly in love with? Ideally, we'd be able to do all of the back-and-forths over email, but have the discourse tracked using a reference ID with an email agent or cc or something. If we could auto-close cases with an email, that would be even better. Any thoughts?

Thanks a lot,

David