skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been using this desk for the past year now and it is awesome.

What I dislike about the authors suggested setup is the fixed height. Often, the initial height that you set the desk to will become uncomfortable. As your body adjusts to using a standing desk, you will probably find that you would prefer something a few inches different from your initial setup. That would be a several hour project with something mount to the wall, but only takes about 15 minutes with these desks.
Cognitive decline sets in as early as 45
Ask HN: What are some examples of gorgeous/elegantly designed iPhone/iPad Apps?
"Spending time with your spouse is also an important tool for getting through parenthood"

Goes right along with the best advice I got early in my marriage: "A babysitter is cheaper than a divorce."
In which case shouldn't the correct solution be to educate Joe about the issue and get him to make informed choices at the voting booth and town hall meeting?

Which, it seems, is exactly what happened here. Democracy is working (if not working well). That's a good thing.

Edit: three responses now are picking on my use of the term "educate" and referring to the willful ignorance of the public. That's missing the point. People certainly can be "educated" about issues they care about, as demonstrated here. It's not an issue of "book learning" or making Joe watch the news. It's an issue of Joe knowing what matters to him already and getting access to information that impacts those interests.
The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design
You can do the same on signnow.com for free. I'm the founder, and we are pushing a big update later this week.
I was of the similar opinion, but a research[0] suggests that sitting straight is not actually as healthy. I'd like to see a source which would confirm that sitting back causes distortion to spine shape.

That said, I agree with you that an ergonomic chair would make little sense for a standing desk, as one will obviously sit less (only when too tired to stand).

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6187080.stm (2006)
To be honest, if you're going to use Git you probably need to at least become familiar with the vocabulary of the command line interface, even if you never use it. This is because so much of the documentation (including unofficial tutorials) and even interfaces of most of the GUI clients are set up to use the same words. This is actually basically a good thing, I think, because it means that switching from one GUI client to another isn't a big deal.

Furthermore, it's possible that the real reason so much of the unofficial Git docs just talk about the command line rather than point you at a GUI client (except for documentation for those clients themselves of course) is that the Git GUI clients are still under so much development and in some cases are really lacking basic features (for instance, last I checked, the TortoiseGit client did not support any way of interacting with the index/staging area, which is a pretty important part of Git).

I think the parting words of the tutorial "Git from the bottom up" described Git as a library for building a version control system, or something like that, and suggested that we have only just begun to see what people can do with it. I kind of like that idea, that maybe it's possible to bury the complexity of Git underneath a really high level interface, although I don't think that I would actually use it. Git's complicated but it's definitely not rocket science. Plus I generally prefer the command line.
Show HN: a cool way to view YouTube's top 1000 videos
And to be fair there is EchoSign and Docusign too, be curious what angle you are taking.
Clearing Your Life for a New Year
I completely agree, but I am also follow the school that you shouldn't spend energy on something you can't control or stop. Instead you should focus on things that you can readily change to mitigate the problem, or even make it go away.
We used to use orange fiesta-ware when we needed a source of ionizing radiation; they used uranium as a colorant for quite some time.
Agree completely. I think the quantity of our relationships have gone up, while the quality seems to be going down.
My friend and I have been thinking about this for a while.

Q.How would people share notes?
A) Could be live sharing in class (etherpad for ex: http://piratepad.net/sj8l1FIUIK ), then contents of pad get transferred to a wiki and people are free to edit.

Q2.Why would people put in the effort to type-in their notes?
A2) Therein lies the trouble...

If you can think of a business model, or an incentives structure that would make this a open collaborative project, do pm me. Note: It would be against my values to put ads all over site to monetize.
The whole credit card pipeline has been optimized to the point that no additional authentication is beneficial. If you want to talk about replacing cards, that's a different story.
I think the "idea vs execution" debate is an interesting one, but I think it often overlooks the often sizable overlap between idea and execution. It's not that ideas without execution are worthless, it's that ideas without execution aren't really ideas.

Suppose I have an "idea" for a novel. It's about a boy whose parents were killed by an evil wizard school, and who is living with unfriendly relatives who don't like or trust magic, and who goes to a wizard school to slowly reach his potential and experience a show down with the aforementioned evil wizard.

Ok, an idea, right. But have I really give you the idea behind Harry Potter? If you give this idea to two different writers and tell them to run with it, I don't think you'll get two different executions. I think you'll end up with two different ideas. The execution and the idea are so intertwined that you really can't distinguish the two. Software is often like this.

I suppose sometimes there really isn't much of an idea - like when a programmer is handed a series of wireframes and told to "make it live" (or when a writer is asked to "novelize" a screen play, with absolutely no deviation from the script). Programmers do often end up in this category for hire, so I'm not dismissing the "idea vs execution" thing completely. But I do think it often misses a big part of the picture.
I've been working from home for the last four years, and maybe I'm an outlier but I literally have no issues with it. I am productive, I have a good separation between my work and personal lives, I never have an issue getting motivated, and I don't feel lonely.

It probably helps that I love my work, but I don't have any issues with distractions. I actually appreciate the fact that there are distractions around home, because if I need a break from work it's as easy and heading to the living room to play some games or kick back and relax to some tv on my comfy couch. When I need a change of scenery or human interaction, I just head to a coffeeshop to hang out and work alongside a friend or two who have also flexible work situations, or I go to a co-location workspace in the city.

I waste no time commuting, my workstation is setup exactly how I want it to be (complete with a Geekdesk and two 27" cinema displays), and I control the temperature. And if I need to "stay late at the office" it's not hard on my wife because she knows I'm just downstairs. Heck, she can even hang out in my "office" and read or do whatever while I work.

Every 6 weeks or so I will fly to the offices of my current contract to work on location, so it's interesting to compare that experience. I do end up getting into sync with the rest of the team a little better when I'm physically there, but not by too much since we heavily utilize collaborative tools like skype and join.me to great effect. What I do find is that I get pulled aside WAY more when I'm on location and my workflow constantly gets interrupted; I'm way less productive. I always end up with back-pain issues too because I'm working at a substandard workstation. I do admit it's fun to BS with my cohorts though, but I don't know how important that is to the project.

I know there are benefits to working on location, but honestly in my opinion working from home is better on almost all fronts.
When you're building a marketplace, it's important to solve the chicken and egg problem. Search Google and you'll see how Groupon, Airbnb, etc. have solved this problem. Thumbtack's approach was to build its merchant base first, then to leverage that merchant base to attract consumers.

So I think you're incorrect to say the "size" of a company can only be measured in terms of the number of buyers. For younger companies, you have to look at which side of the marketplace they are building first and measure that. For mature companies, I think your critique makes sense: it does make sense to look at the overall size of the marketplace, rather than just one side of it.
Workplace Confidential - The Per Se Waiter
Do you really think the people who are advocating spending more think the desk looks stable and sufficient? As you say, that makes no sense, so why assume that? Wouldn't it make more sense to think they feel differently about the quality of the desk?
Also someone googling about recursion probably knows something about recursion (e.g. that he is googling for it).
25% of New Year's Resolutions are already broken - How to keep yours
I was never able to get into social bookmarking.

Until I was introduced to diigo. It just works.

Best part for me: when I bookmark something, I'm usually bookmarking a sentence, or some information. Diigo lets me do the usual create a bookmark / tag it, but also highlight and annotate the link, something that shows up in my central Diigo feed.

No more digging through my links to find one link, then digging through pages of the article to find the one sentence or point I was looking for.
This is a problem caused by the differing world outlooks of technical people and "business people".

I have fallen down this rabbit hole plenty of times myself as well as seeing others do so.

Technical people have a desire for maintainable and fast code , coherent architectures , DRY principles and designing a robust , well tested system with the long term in mind.

Business people are interested in cashflow , agility and being able to get their ideas into production quickly. They are worried about waiting months for a requested change to make it into production and not having it be exactly what they wanted/needed.

Managers often have a belief that programming should be unnecessary and there should be some way to drag and drop functionality into their applications. For example anybody who implements simple email capabilities into their web app will soon have users demanding to know why it does not have a spellchecker , contacts database , spam filtering , mail merge , mail folders etc etc (basically everything that MS outlook has)

This conflict leads to problems where business will ask for what they feel should be a simple change and will want it working by the next business day. The technical team will take this change and promise to include it in the next large update. For example the small change may interface with parts of the system that are undergoing bigger changes upon the next release.

Developers do not want to mess up their code base doing these half assed changes without proper testing so they attempt to anticipate everything that might be required and simply add more and more options to their program making it increasingly complex.

When this becomes too much to manage they will eventually create a small DSL or a "rules engine" of some kind. This starts off simple enough that the secretary can use it and everyone is happy since the developers get their nice codebase as seperate from the messy code developed by the users.

Of course this rules system becomes more and more complicated in itself and it becomes a full time job to maintain this rules engine while more and more of actual live code is being written by people who have a baptism by fire introduction to programming as well as no testing facilities or version control.

Eventually the developers have to step in , view the programming atrocities that have been created in the higher level engine and somehow re-integrate it all back into the original codebase and start again.

Basically you are moving the mess out your area of responsibility and moving it to someone elses.
This isn't always a bad idea provided you limit the power of the rules system and make sure expectations are clear as to what it will be able to perform.
They do inform you that it's only supported in IE10+ and FF8+.
okcupid app is pretty descent.
PyCon conference fees are very, very reasonable. I would take an intro tutorial or two, and enjoy soaking up all that is python. Talks range from beginner to advanced, and cover a wide range of development topics. I love this conference.
I just searched for Twiddla from the main page, and it's the top result, with 3717 saves. Tagged with whiteboard.

http://delicious.com/search?p=twiddla

Is it possible you bookmarked something more specific, like twiddla.com/specific_page ?
Are there layman-friendly tutorials on these OS-level steps to ensure full control of encryption? If it remains a matter of editing and recompiling an operating system, the masses have no hope of reestablishing that control.
I agree, education is key. And I'm happy about what happened in this particular story. Not disputing that at all =)

But how do you educate someone that plugs their ears and yells "na na na na"? This is what I was getting at - politicians that legislate the ignorance of the masses, even when credible sources are saying its a catastrophic idea.

I don't have an answer to this, by the way. The opposite is legislators that ignore the general public and enforce things "for your own good", which is also a problem.
> 3. Storing private keys in the cloud -- scary.

Why do you need to do that? Isn't it enough to sign a transaction that includes the customer's (public) id, using your own private key (which does not need to be different for different customers)? Either way, your service is "giving its word" that this transaction was authorized by the person with the given id; but this way there is one less security risk.

Disclaimer: I do not work in this space.
But what if additional authentication reduced fraud? Wouldn't that be beneficial? Are you saying it's impossible to reduce fraud rates any lower than where they are now?
That's not a desk, that's a shelf attached to the wall.
Good point... I also thought the title was very misleading, and just lame, to be honest. Also Yelp isn't even in the same space.. Yelp is more for local businesses, not for contractors. Thumbtack is more like Angies List.
Ask YC: Review my app (trackprofiler)
This is my hobby project (not a weekend one). I know it sounds similar to other sites for GPS tracks sharing; I tried them many but didn't found options I needed for my mountaineering tracks (with lots of GPS errors because of bad satellite visibility). So I tried... :)

The result is this app: an online GPS track and route editor. It can join/split tracks/segments, waypoints, images, remove points, detect latitude/longitude/elevation errors (and automatically remove those errors), move tracks, ... And I hope all that is easy enough to use.

Do you think this would be useful to anybody?
I'm not even sure what the product looks like. I think it would be helpful if you include a live demo on your website.
/me just discovered Alt+`. Sweet!
How to link to external posts in Octopress
The very fabric of nature is changing for humans. Data can be replicated worldwide in seconds. The problem of intellectual property getting copied is not solved by hindering or putting barriers to copying. The solution is to change the business model.

Make it so that the copying is free and anyone can do it, but If I earn money from said copying, then a reasonable tiny fraction of my profits go to the entity that did most of the work in making my profits possible. All surrounded by a heaping helping of due process. Note that my proposal isn't necessarily the best one, but it doesn't attempt to enforce the impossible.
Not for mounting a desk! For things like pictures where the stress is mostly shear (downward force), you can use something as simple as an angled nail and hang five or ten pounds of picture frame on it. Wall plugs, especially the ones that expand behind the wall, do provide better resistance to pulling force. But these desk brackets will have a LOT of pull applied to them because of the leverage of the desk surface.

Some plaster against the ribs of that plug are not enough; it will likely yank out of the wall and may take a chunk of wall with it. In older plaster-and-lath construction, you'll most likely crack/damage the plaster from the flexing caused by the plug pulling against the lath in the wall.

As the original article says, you'll want to hit a stud, and IMO even that (alone) is not enough for this kind of application.
Why would evolution need that? If grandpa is badly adapted, he'll starve/get eaten/etc; no need for a built-in kill switch. In fact, if there were a kill switch getting rid of it would be highly adaptive, if only because you could be around to defend your great-grandchildren.

(Of course, we do die. But the explanation looks more like "growing and reproducing quicker beats longevity" than like "planned obsolescence".)
I've almost finished reading "The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work".[1]

It's based on scientific results, so it's not yet another esoteric self-help book.

Now, back to your question:
If you expect it to suck, it will suck. The author explains with princile #2 (the fulcrum and the lever) how this negative priming turns this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, it might be, that the particular job simply stinks, but usually you can find something positive and just thinking about that shortly before will make that negative feeling go away. My explanation might make it seem simple and useless but I can't possibly replace all the valuable advice from the book. And it works. Give it a shot.

It's a very good read and I recommend it very highly.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Advantage-Principles-Psychol...
...the CPI doesn't account for the "anhedonic pain" of substitution, to poke fun at their own terminology.

Yes it does, or at least it attempts to. The hedonic penalties are exactly the hedonic benefits with a minus sign.

If guacamole is 2x as good as salsa, then if the price of guacamole doubles from $5 to $10 and consumers switch to $3 salsa, then mexican dips have increased in price 17%.

Look, I'm not saying a good job is done. In fact, I've argued many times that inflation is wildly overstated. I'm just saying that the hedonic adjustments and substitution adjustments are necessary if you want to have any sort of CPI-like measurement.

Of course, it's also the case that CPI doesn't actually measure inflation. To get a real inflation measure, you'd need to measure the price of a fixed basket of goods. But then no statistic like CPI would even be possible, since inflation would no longer be a rate - Inflation(1970, 2012) would not be equal to Inflation(1970, 1990) x Inflation(1990, 2012).
I remember reading about thathigh soon after you guys launched, I think on reddit. It sounds like you are no longer working on it. Could you give a summary of the site in terms of how it started/ended with growth/revenue?
Electronic Tablet Review
The cost of [idea] execution is approaching zero. Where's My Angel Broker?
Interesting. Honestly, not supporting JS is very low on my list of things to get working; but fwiw, the code is all OSS and located at: https://github.com/eldarion/pycon/tree/2012
It's hard to know how controllable something is until you try to control it. The copyright industry has plenty of evidence that it isn't practical. They're slowly moving toward accepting that not everyone wants a DVD, but I still can't get half the movies I want to see with Netflix Instant. I would happily pay a few dollars more for Netflix if the copyright industry would let them stream new DVD releases.
I let our backend people know
When I was in Germany, a group of students (who wanted to do it) were given the task to take notes in latex. Then every week they compiled the pdf and was put on the website of the faculty.

To write the latex file, they worked together (sharing the same file, same idea as google docs).

And at the end, they put the effort only because they thought it was nice to have all the notes in pdf, commitment with the class, and because it was a good idea to share it with the other students. I still have all my mathematic classes pdf's.
I can't speak for SignNow.com, but on our side (Signsquid), we decided to ditch completely the hand-written signature, in favor of a better thought process.

We use a combination of a unique link, sent by email, and a unique secret code, told by phone, for each signatory. This way, we can be sure the good person signed.

Also, we decided to not enter the contract redaction process. You simply upload the pdf that will be signed.

Once the contract is signed, a page that contains the audit trail (who signed and when) is appended.
This is a group selection argument. Why do you think the group selection pressure outweighs the selection pressure on individuals (which favors organisms who can produce the most offspring, and hence favors organisms who have long reproductive lives)?
It reminds me of Roger (the alien) from American Dad. Not sure how I feel about that, but do agree that it seems a bit "friendly." The bulgy(sic?) right eye is what does it.

My biggest qualm is with the italicized header text. You use it as your logo text, the header, and the pricing, but it is difficult for me to clearly read.

6 items on the menu seems a bit much. While legality always seems to come up when talking about electronic signatures, I don't know if you need a completely separate item for it. Maybe Partners and Legality should go under FAQ, and Discover and About should be merged too?

How do you plan on taking market share from your larger competitors such as DocuSign, EchoSign (Adobe), HelloFax, etc.? I notice you do not have an API (yet?) and that would seem like a great way to increase your customer base (especially coming from HN).

Disclosure: I work at DocuSign
Why didnt Harry Potter just use Google?