skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you handle notes and ideas?
I write between ten and a hundred notes each day. Sometimes I add to an existing note or document. I have trouble working with notes, documents, ideas and streams of thought.
Do you recognize this? How do you handle it?<p>Do you keep notes in one place? How do you accomplish that? How do you handle physical notes and non-physical notes? Do you try to gather all notes online? Where and how?
Yeah. The lunar year is 351 days, as-is the case with the modern Islamic calendar.
If that were me, my reply would be to go out and by another DEC :)
Anyone else remember "Button, Button" from the Twilight Zone, where a couple is offered $200K if they push a button on a box. The only catch is that if they push it, someone they don't know will die?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight_Zone)

Creepy.
I already follow many of these people, and a lot of us are pretty boring.

Follow because you care about what we say, not because you might learn a neat Ruby trick.
Another interesting tid-bit for the comments:

The year 1582 didn't have Oct. 5th through Oct. 14th (inclusive). They just skipped from the fourth of October to the fifteenth!
1) I think this is a really smart idea, and hope it works well for you. It seems like a win for everybody, as long as the end user knows what's happening.

2) You maybe should look at the phrase on savings in your paper:

"if your application is suitable for Plura, you can save 7X on your compute costs".

I take this to mean you save 7 times your compute costs, where it should be six sevenths of the cost. There's a difference, and your customers will understand it. Sorry if I've just misunderstood.
I can see your point, but wouldn't be any ad-driven website/game be considered theft of service?

A ton of flash ads might have a bigger impact on your system performance (and on your wallet, if your ISP charges by traffic)
My prediction is that the old theories will prove perfectly adequate to describe where we're going:

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
http://www.olimu.com/readings/GodsOfTheCopybookHeadings.htm
User moderation is very useful, as are editors. Filtering NSFW content by tagging it and requiring users opt-in to see it makes sense. There are also copyright issues that are important. You want to make it easy and fast to identify copied material and yank it, in case of a DMCA takedown notice.

You could also let users tip content, and get the data from tipjoy as another ranking tool. Email me ivan@tipjoy.com for more info.
Viigo for Blackberry Fast and Free | TechJaws
Two thoughts:

1. Great post. I hope Steve Yegge continues down this path (i.e. parts 2..n). I wonder if he's ever read Donald Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About."

2. I had a betta once. It lived in a 20-gallon tank with two goldfish. The tank was on top of a bookcase by a window, so they had plenty of interesting trees and birds to watch (not to mention the cat which no doubt terrorized for a few minutes each day). Eventually, the goldfish killed the betta. And then they killed each other.
Yep, we quite aware of all of these issues. My background is in HPC and my previous company was a successful exit to a major oilfield services firm. My software and its descendants are used on nearly 100,000 CPUs.

We are definitely focused on the applications that have extremely high compute/io ratios. In general, these boil down to either high compute problems with no real data or problems where the data can be shared between multiple work units. An example of the latter is stock market analysis - the nodes download stock data for a few stocks and stay busy running different combinations for a very long time.
I guess the "Cash not stock" advice is more true right now, in retrospect, than in general?

I mean, since stock is riskier than cash, you can demand more of it? Of course it depends what stock is on offer - but as the market looks now, and if I'm able to sit on it for five years, I'd absolutely prefer 110 value-units of GOOG over 100 value-units of cash.
Hey Ryan, I've been following this from a distance ever since you'd started blogging about what it took to build dropsend and heyamigo. I think there's probably a lot of people here that haven't seen the barenakedapp website that would love to. Any chance you could put it back up?

Good Job btw, it takes a lot of courage to buck the trend and be so open about the whole process, but I'm learning a lot from your experiences, so thanks.
I applaud your effort. Great idea! Personally, I can see this widely used, on both the user and customer side. Man, why didn't I think of that! hahahha.
For most of my life I wasn't Lactose-intolerant... In the past year or so I've somehow managed to convince my body to start mutating the shape of those oh-so-wonderful lactase enzymes.

Now, I don't _have_ to drink lactase-added milk, but it certainly helps those who are around me.

I can still do cheese and yoghurt, but its only straight-up milk that irks my stomach.

"Good" oils are very good for people. "Good" oils raise HDL levels in people. They lubricate blood vessels and do amazing things for your body. Generally, the only things you need to stay away from are hydrogenated things and things that don't occur in nature.

+Fish oil

-Partially Hydrogenated (insert plant name here) oil

+fat (I never understood why people were so obsessed with fat-free stuff. Fat is good for you. It's satisfying, yet has a delayed glycemic index response.)

+fiber

+protein

-simple carbohydrates

+exercise

= health
I follow a few of those people on Twitter (and stopped following even more), and most of what I see is an approximation of line noise. Certainly of little real Ruby value.

If you want to keep tabs on what's up in the dozens of different Ruby communities, please consider getting a life, or, short of that, read blogs. The content is usually less random.

But if you want to learn Ruby, here's a clue: Forget Twitter, stop reading Hacker News, and code fucking Ruby. I wish more things in life were that simple.

Cult of Personality == Community Death
I don't.

Like you, I probably have about a thousand different ideas and streams of thought during the course of a day. Unlike you, I don't write any of them down.

I do this because there is no way I'd get anything done if I didn't. I don't mind forgetting some key insight, because if it was important or relevant enough, it'll translate into sometime I will write down when the time is right. If not, it's probably something that I shouldn't bother wasting my time with. (That's not to suggest it isn't valuable).

You only have so many hours in the day to work on so many things. People like us need to ignore our own brain 80% of the time to be productive. It's a curse really.
If it is evil government intervention, what about warning labels on cigarettes?
As a programmer who has troubled himself with designing sites and CSS from scratch for the past 6 years and hating every minute of it... I found this approach highly refreshing.

I've fought my charset battles, stayed up endless nights arguing with the W3C validator whilst comparing the pros and cons of each stylesheet, manually converted paper designs to both CSS and table-based layouts, and done a hell of a lot of toil I could most certainly do without.

At the end of the day? My months of deliberation and constant change of doctypes, my incessant searches for a good <table>-free layout that both scales the way I want and is flexible to new content.... all were really not worth the effort I put into them.

Now, if I want to design a new site from scratch (God forbid!), I will do as the OP suggests and just go with the flow. Let someone else worry about the hacks and incompatibilities, I just want to get my content out there in a way that doesn't look like I plucked it out of my rear end and get back to my server-side programming.
So that brings up a good issue, namely the proprietary nature of the code you're distributing. For instance, stock market analysis firms zealously guard their algorithms. Let's say I'm a potential customer: How will you protect my bytecode from being stolen by competitors when it has to be run on unmanaged machines in the wild?
He should have bought a female betta.
While the list is noble, I have difficulty trusting the source. Other pages on the scriptol.org website are somewhat immature and, unsurprisingly, full of Scriptol propaganda.
Would this work in a JS+HTML AIR app? The Plura for websites iframe code seems like it would work if you got the AIR sandbox requirements right.

Also, what is the average CPU percentage your developers run on their clients systems?
Currently I have a "notes" directory with a bunch of flat text files in it. If I'm looking for a particular thing I use grep to find it. vim is my editor of choice.

I'm not a huge fan of the system because it's not available online, it doesn't support tagging, and it doesn't work well for branching, annotations, or hyperlinking. I have yet to see any particular wiki, blog, or mind-map software which really does what I'm looking for.

This might be a good candidate for me to write up some software to more sufficiently meet my needs.

I also have a physical notebook which I write in chronologically. I tend to use a page or two a week, with things scribbled in the margins and diagrams all over the place. It's kind of neat in that you can read it in order and see what I've been thinking about. Unfortunately this doesn't mesh well with my electronic system. I haven't yet found an interface that I like for doing graphical notes or scribbles yet on the pc... maybe there will be a tablet PC which has support for what I dream of.
This is an awesome idea. I have actually been working on a game that I have been looking for a platform/revenue model for - this is perfect!
What's with the payment being per-user per-month? Why not just straight per-work unit? Isn't a user who plays the game 20h/m (or at least leaves their browser window open that long) more valuable than the one who only plays for five minutes?
To quote a friend, because it defeats the whole purpose of CSS, loads up your html with extra cruft, and chops up your page into table-like sections. It's a backward step.
automate it, suspend posts that gets tagged a lot with "spam!" then give the original poster ability to dispute. It'll cut down the effort on your part big time, since spammers most likely won't bother appealing
I use Google's online spreadsheet program to maintain lists of people and specific work-related tasks, and daily scratchpads for reused HTML.

I sometimes email notes to myself, from my work to my personal account, so I can review later. I also use Palm Desktop to maintain lists of things to do or buy. One problem with the email approach is Yahoo Mail's search function is terrible -- emails that are older than a few months are not indexed. But I've had the account for 10 years, and don't like the gmail interface enough to switch.

I write some notes on paper, especially when I am using the phone, and will re-enter the data into Palm or a text editor if necessary.

Haphazard, but it works.
Movie Organizer Software
The problem isn't getting your files in the right place, the problem lies in how inter-connected and "integrated" everything is on Windows. There are many examples: "Internet Settings", for instance, from the control panel, while they seem to be IE's settings, actually affect how some Windows Internet-family API functions behave. Then there is a big hairy mess called COM/ActiveX: you can't parse XML without it, yet there will be computers, be it one out of 100, with broken XML parser COM registration. Same applies to various "shell services" which are essential to desktop integration.

Then there are cases when other applications break your code: Symantec used to install their own version of MFC DLL right into System32. Then there are super-aggressive anti-spyare/anti-virus/anti-whatever packages that are basically hacks breaking all kinds of legit software. Windows encourages this style of development: when an application essentially becomes a collection of COM servers scattered across your hard drive, hooked into your system via complex mesh of registry settings. And there is no way around it: this is what MSDN tells you to do.

Then you'll have users complaining that when they launch your RSS reading software (or whatever you do), they get a popup that says "Windows Installer: configuring Microsoft Office" that disappears after about a minute of "collecting system information". And users will tell you that everything worked great for 2 months but then "computer did something" and this popup started appearing.

And they keep adding more shit on top of existing shit. Now, in addition to COM and MSI and registry you get this "side-by-side execution" bullshit, when you can't even tell which version of a DLL is being loaded and Windows Explorer essentially hides fucking files from you so even locating a misbehaving DLL becomes a debugging session on its own, where you'll need to decode cryptic hidden directory names and extract a manifest from some executable's resources to see which DLL it actually wants. When they rolled that out I felt sick for a while.

And finally, there is no such thing as "Windows API" anymore. XP machine connected to a domain controller/AD is a very different beast than XP home or Win2K. I'm not even mentioning Vista here.

For my last Windows project I went for "xcopy deployment" with one single fat executable statically linked to everything it needed to run with some help from open source libraries, essentially very similarly to how Firefox does it. But this style of development isn't really for "Windows Platform", this way you're targeting a "sane subset" of Windows platform.
Brain's 'hate circuit' identified
Or to Staples.
I've been reading the new Pragmatic Programmer book, which is still in beta form. The final printed book will be released in December 2008. It's pretty good, and walks you through step-by-step. I must admit, it's been difficult so far since I had zero experience with Objective C, XCode, Cocoa, etc., but hopefully the concepts will click soon.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/amiphd/iphone-sdk-development
It definitely depends on the circumstances. Viaweb sold to Yahoo for stock before it went up in a huge way. They probably would have had a much lower price if it was straight cash.
I do that with Java now, and the results are great IMHO. I just needed to build an installer (with NSIS) that downloaded a JRE if none was installed on Windows.
Years divisible by 100 are normally not leap years, UNLESS they are divisible by 400.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year#Algorithm

I knew about the 100, didn't realize the 400 though until I looked into it. The response is comical, but you can understand where the user got confused.
It all goes in my Moleskine. You'd be surprised how well just the act of physically writing something down w/ pen and paper will help you remember it. I look back at my notes once in a while but for the most part they're all retained in the brain.
Zed in real life is actually a very personable fellow. I know he has deliberately crafted a persona of over-the-top arrogance and hubris, but you should appreciate his blog for its hipster irony, and not think he takes himself seriously. His response to a random phone-call is completely consistent with what I've seen of him in person.
Who's Paul Hofner?
Bozo filter. When you ban someone for posting crap, don't delete their crap, just flag it and only display it to that user. By giving the crap posters less feedback you reduce their ability to evolve new crap-posting abilities.

On the reverse side, you must also identify your best posters. It's easy to forget while dealing with the obvious problems with crap, but you must find the content that is highest-rated, that draws the most traffic, that most contributes to your business goals. Praise them in public. Send them swag. Make sure your customer service system highlights them, so you're responsive when they have problems. The best users are around 100x more valuable than average. Identify and cultivate them.
Website for Movie Collectors
"alas, Digital Equipment Corporation was not there to greet the new millennium."

Or even to (February) 2000.
I've got it worse--I made a calendar alert on my iPhone to download the free Crossover Office yesterday, as soon as I got home--then forgot, because I'd added it to another calendar entry. There's probably a business opportunity for a service to aggregate your notes/appointments from different sources, sort them, and output them automatically to a format of choice with reminders at varying levels of assurance.
> Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market?

Well, there are two factors:

1) If the government mandates that a certain value is indicated on the label, it also vouches to a certain extent that the "better" value (lower for calories) is actually "better". So calories is OK, but it's a slope. How about an Atkins-adherence(or whatever)-index? The problem is that once such a measure is implemented, it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of it, even if it turns out to be bogus or even misleading, because the politician supporting it will be accused of being anti-consumer (why would s/he be against more information?), or just in the pocket of Big Food.

2: It may not be very cost effective to calculate the appropriate value. Consider a restaurant, where the chef that goes to the farmers market every day and gets whats really fresh and in season. The chef now has to commit time, everyday, calculating the calorie-count for each dish. More bookkeeping, less cooking. It may be easy to do for calories (I'm not sure, I'm neither a chef nor a dietist), but what if it requires samples to be sent to a lab somewhere?
> [serious buyers] don’t want [the price] available to competitors

Anyone know why?
I have a single text file in a git repository, plus a Perl script that appends a timestamp to the file, opens it in vi, then commits (and pushes) the changes when I leave vi.

It's been working great since September 2000 (it was in subversion then I think, or maybe even CVS).

Search is via grep or vi.

I also have a tiny CGI script that prints the last n lines of it so I can refer to it from my phone's web browser.
"I don't see why this type of government intervention should worry anyone."

Regulation disproportionately burdens small players. If other drafts of restaurant legislation don't exempt small players, my favorite restaurants (and my friends that run them) get a big headache.

Regulation seems to swell unless it is violently opposed. I've been locked out of exciting things by it personally (international trade), and seen it killing the things I love (eccentric houses, innovation, hiking trails) in my few short years of adulthood.

I like this regulation. But I'm going to holler mightily if it tries to get any bigger.
Should read: Paul McCartney on a Hofner bass (semi-acoustic, violin-shaped electric bass guitar).
You could cough n times and sneeze m times, where your sale price is nem.

[edit: nem as in n*10^m]

Actually, all we care about are the sneezes.
I wasn't happy with any of the solutions out there so we built our own.

We treat notes as a stream and you categorize notes using hashcodes.

We have an iPhone and Android client so you can easily include pictures in your notes.

We aren't live yet, but will be in a few weeks. =)

If you want me to contact you when we are live sign up below,

https://3banana.com/doLogon.action?s=hn

</blatant self promotion :P>
Five Ways to Keep Your Momentum After A Big Announcement
If I'm at a computer, I add ideas and TODO's to a ticketing system (RT) and if I'm in the car and brainstorming, I use the iPhone app voicenote to make a quick voice recording of my idea before I forget it, then I dump them into the ticketing system when I get in front of a computer.
You could combat that by picking a couple 'featured' matchups that have high-quality sites. Or pull from the top x% of popular ones.
Besides the report, what are you going to do Nov 5th?
Does your app have much UI? When you say "IMHO", does this mean you think it's OK that it doesn't feel like a native application? Or, have you been able to overcome the issues that make the typical Java app feel clunky?
How is it better? (Genuine question, I mostly do web programming.)
Petition to require full disclosure in broadband advertising
The excessive downvoting has become something of a recent fad here. I'd have put your comments to -1, but not further, because I do, like apparently many, believe that your notions are fundamentally flawed.

Complexity theory isn't hand-wavey-ultra-complicated-irrelevant CS; it's first / second semester stuff. It's fundamental enough that it's a cognate for most lots of physics, math and engineering students. That's to say, that it's relevant enough that if you're even doing something moderately related to computer science that it's worth knowing.

Are there a lot of jobs where you don't need to know this stuff? Well, I think there are a lot of jobs where you can get by without knowing basic CS, but it'd still benefit you from time to time to be able to apply these sorts of abstractions.

"Why is this function so slow?"

"Its runtime is quadratic."

"Huh?"

In my particular case, not knowing fundamentals of CS theory would cut me out of being able to work on precisely the problems that I find most interesting in programming.
How common are the two scenarios? A lot of YC companies are created with one and only one thing, so I guess you can sell the whole company. Other kinds of companies might have more products, and sell the product off, rather than the company. Does it really matter much one way or the other?
Nice blog post. At a previous job, I saw all of these factors at work on the core product. I had a fight with the CEO where I told him, "You're screaming about cracks in the plaster, I'm telling you it's because the whole foundation's rotten. If we keep plastering over it without fixing the real problem we'll never stop having these stupid issues."

Didn't happen. I couldn't begin to total the amount of time, energy, and money wasted, but I know it went on for two years after that conversation until the company had to do a new financing round and abandon the project.
This does strike me as verging on unethical; you (and your affiliates) need to make very clear statements to end users that you will be using their computers to do other processing while they are playing.

That said this is a pretty cool model, and I'm sure that most people would be happy to let a few of their CPU cycles pay for the game they are playing.
I always carry a moleskine notebook with me and write stuff in there when it occurs to me.
I have a small notepad that I try to keep as close to me as possible. When I'm out, it's in my back pocket. When I'm at my desk, it's right there. Ready to rock. It's mainly about keeping track of to-dos and remembering ideas for blog posts.
Am I the only one who thinks both sides are wrong? Not having sex because god doesn't want you to is sort of insane, but not having sex because you won't get into a good college if you do is equally bad.

It's possible to do something dangerous, responsibly. Not that sex is terribly dangerous.
Nice rebuttal, I wish you the best of luck, it seems like something with a good amount of potential. I especially liked your perspective on because the gaming services do this and you pay them for it, they can implement better features for their own users.
Issue with that is no fulltext posts. Of course you can always hack together a Y! pipe that takes the post body HTML and adds it to the feed, but that seems like a lot of hackery just to get an RSS feed going.
It is probably a silly thing to say... but I was working on something like this some time ago. Now I wish I had followed through with it.
Ahh, thank you.
phpBB sucks because it's free

There's plenty of free software that doesn't suck, e.g. Linux, Apache, Wordpress, etc. Therefore freeness doesn't cause suckiness.