skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I learned Dvorak over a summer break late in high school/early college (about 10 years). I was never a very good typist, so maybe this colors my 'switch' story. I think that I just generally have a hard time with feats of manual dexterity (no musical instruments, etc.), so I consider myself about the worst case scenario for QWERTY Dvorak switch time; I hope this gives someone who's on the edge the push to give Dvorak a try. It took me about 2 weeks to be able to use it such that it wasn't aggravating, 3 and I was using backspace way less, 4 I could use IM, 5 I was faster than I ever was with any QWERTY method and in 6 weeks it was very natural. So if you think it'll be a painful ordeal, just think that you'll almost certainly do better than me.

I'm also a post-Dvorak Emacs user. The way that Emacs works is just wired into my fingers now, I don't have to think about what the keys are, I just think "Find file" or "Suspend Emacs" etc. Some chords are probably a little tougher to do, but they are the exception rather than the rule. If there is a weird fringe benefit of Dvorak use it is that it makes me way more reluctant to reach for the mouse in any circumstance. I've never moved the keycaps on my keyboard (so there is no "cheating" while looking down) and so I have to depend on my fingers always being on the home row. I have to agree with Steve Yegge ("Effective Emacs") and consider using the mouse to be a pretty grave cache miss.

I'm a relative newbie to vim but I have no trouble moving around, I just developed a "feel" for where the HJKL keys go. It is hard to describe but you can kind of "unroll" their directionality in your brain. In some ways vim is nice (although it won't ever move me from solid Emacsity) in that the commands are simple letters which Dvorak makes really easy and comfortable to hit.
What do you guys think of the language?
Richard East Search System
If there is one place to monitor on Windows, that's a slight advantage. But, it wouldn't take many edits to that one place to cause permanent damage to the system (i.e. programs are now screwed up, you have to reinstall Windows; good luck).

Maybe it is harder to notice a breach on Unix, but it is also correspondingly unlikely that the breach will affect all programs and make the system unusable. The closest thing to the frailty of the registry would be something like hacking /etc/ld.so.conf on a Unix system.
No, anarcho-capitalism does not say that corporations should replace government. Anarcho-capitalism merely says that government should go away.

90% of everything that government does wouldn't get done at all in a free society, and the other 10% would be done by multiple competing firms.
Instead of surrendering your PC to this group to control, why doesn't the app simply give the tools and control to the user to wage their own war on a list of pre-determined websites? The targets could be updated like an AV definition list and they could avoid the bad PR about trojans etc.
Norwest’s Chang: Things Could Get Scary For Facebook, Slide in ‘09
Wow! A lot of downmods. Didn't expect that. It was sort of a joke (and like all good jokes, has an element of truth). I was debating if I should write that at the end, but decided not to - guess that was a mistake.
If you don't have an MSDN subscription, you can get a free (well, $100 after three years) one by joining Microsoft's Startup program.
I wrote "Have you seen their clothing? They are bland and tasteless." Not t-shirt.

I'm glad you are satisfied with your plain $20 t-shirt
http://store.americanapparel.net/men-short-sleeves---t-shirt... based on it's fit and comfort.

In my subjective view, it just makes me sick to see American Apparel in other countries and people go in and see that "Americans" are about looking like 1970s high schoolers. Like it our not this brand does represent us.
Ha - I still remember that night/week. Tom and I were so worried that we took turns staying awake to make sure the Boogie Monster wouldn't take down TicketStumbler. I think I ended up sleeping 10 hours in 4 nights and puking my brains out before we gave our demo day rehearsal presentation later that week.
The Money Management Boom
How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (Hint: Its Founder Works Just One Hour a Day)
You're thinking of the old model, Monty:

"Unlike monty, QA is 100% battery powered, and gets 4-6 hours of runtime on every charge. Monty's pneumatics required it to be tethered at all times. Also, its much lighter at around 35lbs. Monty is too heavy to pick up."
Most code examples are ok. The problem is that users use it for quotes. Perhaps a better solution would be to support the <blockquote>
I think the problem with this logic is that you're thinking about filenames and not credentials. There's one place to go to cripple a Windows box (a parallel filesystem), and there's one set of credentials you need to cripple a Unix box (the capability to write /etc, or /usr/share, or /usr/local/mysql, or ~/Library, or...).
Email SMTP server recommendations?
We want to send biweekly emails + user registration emails, etc. for our web startup. Any other startups have experience in what kind of smtp service to use (if any), or set up our own email server? It seems that even if the SPF settings are correct, there is a problem of other popular email services (gmail, hotmail, etc.) recognizing our emails as spam, and we want to get away from that. Any feedback will be welcome.
yeah, I looked in to buying the DataHand. It looks like the future of human-computer IO (right before cybernetics).
It's an amazing product, but sadly in the hands of a totally inadequate company.
37Signals does full announcement, with logo, for reorderable sidebar links.
Sooo some guy at the Guardian smokes a pipe and the author (and everyone else) was bored at Macworld. Did I miss anything?

Don't get me wrong, I like this guy's style but there's not much here to sink my teeth into.
This is off topic.
But I use Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. My hands are positioned much more naturally when I type.
Dandelife's Struggles Offer Lessons for Startups
I'm not criticizing them so much as I am in awe of the confidence with which they take trivial features (not even in their flagship product) and make them events.
Wow people don't joke on HackerNews, didn't know it was that serious, sorry guys. I don't usually do that, do a GG alert/search on Producteev, you'll see that I'm never posting anonymous comments on my product, but in this special case, I reacted too quickly maybe, I apologize.
Also, I don't pretend to be using my software, we really do, and it changed drastically our internal organization, it's way better, sorry to be enthusiastic about my product.
I won't do that again anyway (even though I was already convinced that it was not fine). Mea culpa
Top Marketing Trends for 2009: Execs ‘Sick’ of Web 2.0
My experience is slightly dated (2 years), but I've always had the best luck running my own sendmail setup on a box I own/maintain.

SPAM flagging will have a lot to do with content, and some to do with your source IP (IME). Sharing a server (and source IP) with a bunch of other people doesn't help your odds.

Owning and controlling the server, the DNS records (forward AND reverse), plus sending a few test messages to test accounts, has always seemed to work best for me personally.
I see your point and often use vim w/o customized color scheme (but might pick a custom color scheme for MacVim's fullscreen mode to resemble WriteRoom).

However, editor color schemas allow for finer customization. For example, to specify colors for code-highlighting: keywords, statements, strings, ...

Terminal itself would not know anything about these things.
The Dangerous Trend Of Thinking That Ideas Can Be Owned, Sold Or Stolen
Am I the only one who finds it odd that the President will have to _fight_ over whether or not he can do something in his personal life? It seems to me that if we believe him to be intelligent enough to run the country, we must assume he is intelligent enough to override a decision about his personal safety.
It's probably not, but it would make sense of why he describes libertarians as "corporatist". He's driving a wedge between small government and the defence of natural rights, and assuming that libertarians would choose the former over the latter.
Not sure what you mean by this? I wasn't advocating anarchism. I'm simply saying we need to think of (and implement) government as an agile entity, one that dynamically allocates resources as necessary rather than suffers from "institution creep".
See also accompanying video from the photo shoot:

http://www.inc.com/inctv/2009/01/oh-shoot-markus-frind.html
This strikes me as being a PR thing - Obama being a 'man of the people' while accepting that it's a good thing because the emails would be discoverable.
I've also seen real-world governments ruin their own economies by making short-sighted (or just plain stupid) decisions. And I've seen Ponzi schemes in a lot of government plans as well.
I agree as well. Too many people in the US use the term "liberal" or "socialist" without really understanding what that means. The same seems to be very much true at the moment about libertarians. Zed who I have a world of respect for doesn't seem to have the faintest idea what a libertarian is. What he describes is a centrist Republican.

I grew up a Socialist in a Socialist house hold. I spent much of my teenage years in all kinds of "important" positions in a socialist party in Denmark.

Then I became an entrepreneur and my whole world view changed. I didn't read Ayn Rand or any libertarian literature until 15 years later, but my world view changed completely during a year and I became what I later realized was a Libertarian. Most of my opinions are based on observation.

This also frustrates me sometimes with other libertarians (and in particular Republican's) is that they don't understand where socialists come from, so they often have difficulties communicating with them.

I understand all the arguments socialists make because I used to make them. But I also understand that their reasoning is based on absolutely flawed understandings of economics and human behavior.

I would recommend anyone reads Marx's Communist Manifesto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Manifesto as it expresses the basic ideas behind not just Communism, but socialism as a whole and to a somewhat smaller extent the more left wing parts of the Democratic party in the US.

It would also be useful if Republicans, "liberals" and socialist had a quick read of Adam Smith's truly profound Wealth of Nations as this is kind of the libertarian equivalent of Marx's writings. So they would actually have a clue what we believe. PJ O'Rourke wrote a pretty good cliff notes edition of it:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6743689
Why did they design it to look like some disfigured woman?
Yes. it's a pain in setting up mail server to get emails delivered to users from applications.

SPF is not enough. You need to set up domainkeys as well. see my post at http://www.kai-mai.com/node/156 for details.

You absolutely need to stop any open relay on your server. Once your server gets onto a black list, it's hard to get off it.

The other solution is to pay some provider to outsource your email delivery. Check http://www.emaildiscussions.com/

You shouldn't rely on gmail's IMAP server to deliver emails because it has daily limits.
The first feature that really jumped out at me were the scoped mixins. From the docs:

You can swap out mixins for the span of a single source file. Example: you could give all strings a "backwards" method. But just for the code inside your test.pn script.

This would let you monkey patch in a safer fashion.
Man, _why knows how to just come out of nowhere and drop awesome stuff on us all. This is really slick.
There was a time in human history when it did not exist, period. There are no demonstrated limits as to how pervasive it can be.

The ability to engage in charitable discourse is simply a skill that can be taught like any other. Parents could be teaching it to their children, but socially and culturally we haven't yet made it a priority. We should.
The 2008 Linux and free software timeline
Scott Adams Blog: Sign of the End Time 01/06/2009
> I don't like significant whitespace, personally ... (one of ideas is an) elimination of line noise*

Yay to that.

If you think about it, very few programming languages had legibility (readability) of the code as one of their design goals. Not through the natural language verbosity, but rather by reducing or eliminating the code needed to please the compiler and otherwise not related to the actual application logic.

D makes a good step forward in this direction (compared to C++), and so does Python. Java is close, but still pretty "noisy". Petrovich is the best there is, but it's not very practical.

This is an interesting subject, so if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please post below.
His Catalog Spotlights the Crunchies - What to Wear
Legal to-dos before quitting a job to form a startup company
Live CES 2009 Palm keynote
What hosting service are you using, pray tell?
Sure, not counting Windows CE variants here.
Is embargoing the foreign workers, who are perfectly willing (an understatement in many cases) to work for the wages being offered, ethical? I would say no.

I personally feel that free trade is far more ethical than nationalist isolation/protectionism. (It's not just Americans that are "entitled" to a high standard of living.)
Bravo, right on.

Historically big cos use government to keep smaller competitors out.

Just look at internet businesses. They are fairly unregulated and while there are short term market leaders, these are constantly being challenged and eventually replaced by smaller more innovative competitors (90's .com vs. Google vs. yc)

Look at regulated businesses such as banking, auto and telecoms. These are examples where the bigcos itself has lobbied in most of the regulation. They have grown bigger and bigger and are now so big that "they can't fail" even though they actually did.

A truly free market (as libertarians believe we should have) in banking, auto and telecoms would have killed off citibank, gm and att years ago just as Excite, Netscape, AltaVista and others were in our business.
I actually made the same comment in response to Marco: Facebook is not valueless. Neither is Tumblr, though. I don't know if it's "making a difference" in the sense of, say, social change, but it's providing the best product of its kind in the market. That has value to me.

I don't use Twitter. I think it's stupid. But creating a vast opt-in, entirely-indexed community is something of value. The fact that companies can search to find real-time who's talking about them is big and will be leveraged more in the future, and the fact that its APIs let Tweets be used for nearly anything is big too. So it has value, even if it's value I will never need myself.
In theory I agree with you - but in practise I don't.

There are a number of reasons why business plans don't seem to work as a plan to run the company.

- The business plan of many companies tends to be a stale document that never gets rewritten, and gets more and more out of whack with reality until it is completely obsolete.

- If there are many stakeholders (investors, founders, banks, partners. etc.) they will all need to give their consent whenever changes are made. This easily turns into political hell with you in the middle.

- The more specific you are in your businessplan the more it will come back to haunt you. If you wrote it and it turns out not to be the way you said it's your falut.

- Nobody actually reads updates to business plans, thus rendering them unusable.

Some of these can of course be remedied, but it's a lot of hard work. And maybe that effort is better used building a product or getting customers.
AMD and OTOY Working Together on "Fastest Supercomputer Ever"
Early performance tests of the latest build of Windows 7 have shown it's significantly faster than Vista and XP (and still outperforms both with 1 GB of RAM):

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236&page=2
Sweet. Now cross-reference this against OpenSecrets and we're getting somewhere.

Then, if we can just get version tracking on the edits to bills we might find some fascinating correlations. The politicians would probably be partial to git, the Senate being full of them.
To quote a comment from the blog entry:

It’s the little things that matter, thanks for paying attention to them.
Yep. That's confident of them. Another company that would do a logo for that minor of a feature?
I really have to admire MS for what they've (?) pulled off here. Maybe. They have cleaned up an OS with a dire reputation, managed to get it out on the torrents, and have received nothing but great press so far.

All this, just prior to Apple putting out a modestly tweaked version of their own OS X Leopard, which is unlikely to upstage Windows 7 too much.

Very Impressive. Maybe Ballmer knows what he's doing after all.
Agreed, _why really makes me think of the days when hackers weren't doing things with the hopes of getting a paycheck in the end, but more because they had the know how, and they wanted to do it just to see if they could pull it off.

It's an infectious virus that works rather brilliantly with the presentation, and quality of work this guy puts together.
I didn't watch the video (yet), but your comment makes me think of my experience with artists with whom I've been impressed: A lot of them are really good technicians in the technical areas pertaining to their art.

Somehow, when I grew up the overall message I received regarding art seemed to want to separate the "creative" from the technique. It just isn't so. It takes a lot of technique to reliably record the creative.
The Nine Inch Nails Theory of Entrepreneurship
I think your fanboyism has wiped your long term memory to DoD specifications. They've had tons of bugs in their iPod/iPhone line. Remember the launch of the 3G? Mainstream magazines covered that fiasco.
It helps get money, period. I organize things via basecamp and wikis, not by a business plan.

Business plans are a VC marketing tool for me.
Absolutely agree with the points of this article.

Love this quote: Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to "own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.

The same concept applies to all other forms of "Intellectual Propery" - which, in my opinion, is why Intellectual Property is a contradiction in terms. There is no "property" in the intellectual realms, only a temporary exclusive licence in some cases (like some artistic creations and patentable inventions). To call it "property" is a misnomer with terrible consequences.

The result of this dangerous trend that the RIAA/MPAA and other content publishers have been pushing is that people now feel that because they've created something they have some ownership rights over it, and they feel hurt when someone "steals" it from them.

Actually, one of the greatest gifts of the universe is the fact that ideas are free and intangible, that they can spread with no resource cost, rapidly, until they are supplanted by better ideas. We should welcome this fantastic circumstance and make use of it instead of trying to arbitrarily make it look like physical property.
/me waits for web framework named: cauldron.
What this really means is that the definition of "operating system" has been lost. A computer's OS is supposed to manage resources, and control abuses. Consumers don't understand that they should be demanding these features from an OS vendor.

The fact that an OS is "less" of a hog isn't a feature, it only means that the OS vendor is continuing to completely fail in its responsibility.
$200 mittens! Those must be some mittens.
That's quite an amazing feat that he accomplished. The message rings true. Find something people need, and provide it.
Zed. There are many more than two.

For starters:

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_libertarianism

Notwithstanding these and the adolescent, Platonic fantasyland in which libertarians reside, it's a source of predictable and endless amusement how libertarians perenially attempt to present (and poorly camouflage) simpleminded greed as supposed societal good.

Odd, that dishonesty. And the last eight years, if not the last three decades, further show the lie of libertarian economics.

Any libertarians celebrate the 24th anniversary of Bhopal (and all the subsequent "market corrections" of Union Carbide) back in December?
You'll get much more feedback if you make the site open without a login, or due a demo video, screenshots or something else.

Just the front-page telling me what it does and asking me to sign-in isn't going to get you very far (unless you really answer the question as to why I would do this).
I think you've missed the central points, which were:

a) Property rights are a form of coercion.

b) 'Property rights' is a wide umbrella under which almost any form of coercion could be justified.
Now where have I heard that story before? Only mabye about a million times? Hopefully with this submission the last three people on the planet who didn't know it yet have been "filled in", so that we can turn to other things.

The funny thing is that this "story" is probably the single most effective marketing factor for plentyoffish. Nobody would have heard about it if it wasn't for the story...
Tech investors don't ask for business plans because they know they're worthless. In fact, they're worse than worthless, they're a possible negative indicator of success. If anything, they've been burned by the companies that did have them. Polished MBAs with great business plans start stuff like Pets.com and GovWorks. Nerds with no business plans start Google.
Thank you! I've just used it to send out a message to customers and it rocks.
Whopper Sacrifice: Ditch 10 Friends, Get a Free Whopper
SlingPlayer Is Finally Coming To The iPhone (Video)
Palm Unveils iPhone Competitor, the Pre
Palm shows off its Palm Pre gesture-based smart phone
> And quite a bit of evidence that suggests that the "myth" arguments are recycled propaganda from a guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind.

Really? Where? (I'm not being sarcastic-- you are being specific enough that you clearly have something specific in mind.)