skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked what I saw of CSSEdit but I just didn't find it to be a big enough win over emacs + Firebug. I try stuff out in Firebug and then, if it works, I edit it into the CSS file with emacs. Since most of the time I'm editing JS or a PHP template or HTML or something in tandem with the CSS, I need to be bouncing over to emacs all the time anyway.

Have I not found the secret killer feature? I own CSSEdit, so I could start using it again tomorrow if I had a good reason!
I think Seth's main point here, is that the 10,000 hours is BS for new fields. If you are inventing and creating markets, you don't even have 10,000 hours to do it. It's not about being just as good, in an absolute sense, with less practice, it's just that if no one else has done something before, you don't need 10,000 hours to be the best, in a relative sense. Since the Dip is about figuring out what you can be the best at (narrowing the market), it shortcuts the whole idea of needing 10,000 hours.
Interesting Stewart Brand documentary on the utility of buildings.

http://smashingtelly.com/2008/08/04/how-buildings-learn-uplo...
what a wild card!
Good god, I've got to forget that exists immediately so I can keep working. ;) Thanks for the link!
Ask HN: What editor do you use?
More specifically then the general title, what editor (or IDE) do you use, and for what languages. Why do you use this editor, and what features does it give?

I am most interested in Python, Ruby, and Javascript.

I currently use Aptana for javascript editing. It gives me a nice editor (I like eclipse editor), a 1/2 useful outline, sometimes actually does auto-completion of variables instead of me having to type it all out, A pretty decent code formatter, and a tad bit of syntax errors as you type. However I am not a big fan of it, it has a bunch of features but its more of a jack of all trades master of none editor. Most features are incomplete at best.
I wonder if it was a reference to this: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/the-editor-dill.html
Stossel for the win!

I too am a bit of a fan of his. A few years back, I actually got the chance to be interviewed by him for a 20/20 piece. I was pretty excited to get to meet the guy and tell him I liked his work...never happened. He couldn't have been less interested in talking to me and the other people in our group interview and flew out of the room right after it was over. Still think he does good work though.
Do you control the web service? If so, throw XML out the window. The open source JSON Framework on Google Code kicks ass. My iPhone app, Graffitio (http://graffit.io), uses Rails on the server side spitting out JSON to the iPhone app. Its awesome.
A little googling turns up a lot of discussion about reusing water bottles. The fear of bacterial and fungal seems to come largely from a single study of Canadian elementary-school students and the contamination may have come from their hands. There seems to be a consensus that if you occasionally wash the bottles with soap or let them sit with water containing a spoonful of bleach then reuse is okay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuse_of_water_bottles
Notepad2 (http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html) and Visual Studio .NET 2008
Right click -> Settings -> in the camera tab -> select the correct camera from the dropdown, on my macbook pro, its the "USB Video Class Video".
"The first rule of cuils PR firm is you do not talk about cuils PR firm"
"Most students have little experience in taking out loans, yet the federal government doesn't require lenders to disclose the total cost of a student loan and other terms upfront -- before signing -- as it does for car loans and mortgages."

That's unconscionable, as the examples given later in the article make clear.
Currently, TextMate. Started learning Emacs, though, and hope to get proficient in that soon (via O'Reilly's "Learning GNU Emacs"). TextMate's showing its age, for me at least, and I'm hopeful that Emacs will be more powerful and faster.
I think the article's suggestion is correct that this will eventually be a big area for new medical testing products. Figuring out patient biochemical individualities to customize prescribing medicines could have a huge impact on the effectiveness of drug treatments.
People have lamented the dismal and rapidly decaying state of society since the beginning of time and yet here we sit.
If its a restful web service you could try http://github.com/yfactorial/objectiveresource/tree/master . It's basically a port of Active Resource to Obj C. You can use it if its not a restful service you just have to override some functions.
That's cool, similar to something we're building. How many people are you working with? Do you have an e-mail I could reach you at?
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This seems like an add-on that Kidmondo.com would be all over. Kidmondo is a great little service, but I found that I updated it maybe 5 times and my son is already 11 months old.

It would be great if you could use a simple email interface, but then extract all the information that you'd normally put in a baby-book (height, weight, teeth, etc...).
Komodo (www.activestate.com)
Passage was just released on the iPhone, too:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...

Non-iTunes link: http://www.apptism.com/apps/passage
vim and gedit. gedit has come a long way with its plugins, definitely worth checking out.

scribes is another one worth looking, but lack of tab support keeps me with gedit.
Yeah, I thought about it when I wrote that comment, and I cannot figure out what the killer feature is; I just do all my CSS editing by slurping up application.css into CSSEdit, making things the way I want them, and then c-p'ing them back into application.css.

I spend a bit of time in Firebug too, but I never use it for CSS editing.
I like the positive usage as well. Too bad the historical evidence is actually that it's not the original meaning.

I still hear "hacker" used a lot in a third sense, too, meaning "bad programmer" - not a criminal, just someone who does a hack job. Perhaps this meaning goes back to "hack" as applied to writers (churning out slop for money). That usage goes back to hackney carriages and hired horses.

Edit: dictionary.com (yes, I'm ashamed) has only the positive meaning for hack:

7.	Computers. to devise or modify (a computer program), usually skillfully.

... and gives the positive meaning priority for hacker:

3.	Computer Slang.
a.	a computer enthusiast.
b.	a microcomputer user who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems.

Those are pretty cool signs.
We've been making revenues for a while at HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com). Business model is simple: monthly subscription for access to software that meets a need (internet marketing).

We've never sold advertising before (though we do have decent traffic on http://grader.com).
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I use Vim & jEdit.

I use Vim for editing stuff from a shell.. mostly small to medium size editing tasks. It's really good once you've got it set up properly.
You can get all the usual stuff you get in IDE's such as syntax highlighting, split windows and tabs, autocompletion, source control integration.. the mouse works great too.
Actually learning how to use Vim effectively takes some practise, but it's totally worth it.

For more heavyweight editing/programming tasks I use jEdit.. it's a really good editor for nearly any language. You'll probably want to get some plugins for it though, the vanilla install is a bit basic.
The one exception is - its a great time to buy. If you're lucky enough to have cash or a high-paying and/or secure job, suddenly everything costs less.
Good luck with that last bit. Remember that the closer you get to it, the greater the concentration of scumbags (check my profile if you don't believe me).
Linux & win need a decent editor. sign.
i just sent an email to your .edu address.
I am making a mindmap for that :-)
> methane sequestration

We were talking about 'carbon sequestration' which, I've attempted several times to explain to you, also covers methane.

You can bloviate obtusely all you want, but it will not change the fact that I have formed the opinion that you are either an idiot, which is bad; or a troll, which is worse.

You pollute this site with an endless string of political cheap shots which; I'll be frank, even when I agree with you your tone and manner make me want to disagree with you.

And if I were a customer of yours I would be wondering how many of the billable hours I was paying for went to feed your HN habit; you're on here an awful lot.
There are definitely many more low-power tube amps available now. There are some really neat ones in the 1.5 watt config. Even still, I think there is room in the market for more.

If you already have a larger tube amp for gigs and are obsessive about the tube tone, I'd recommend searching for "power scaling" and "amp attenuator." You'd be very surprised with the sounds you can achieve at decent volumes. You can buy amps with power scaling built in or you can retrofit the circuit. Attenuators vary in quality, but they are easy to use external devices. I'm addicted to tube amps...and I used to like playing in my office in downtown Chicago to blow off steam. I often used a 30 watt amp with an Air Brake (attenuator) and I never got into any trouble because of the noise. I was able to use the same amp to play a gig in Grant Park on a Saturday and then to play in my 10 X 12' office on Monday.
I was thinking about a "Facebook for families" just yesterday actually :)

When I started to think about it though, I realized that one thing is that you tend to be part of families that overlap. For example: my in-laws don't really know my siblings and even less my siblings' in-laws (whom I don't know very much myself) So, the schema tends to become exactly like Facebook: focused on user accounts linked between each other rather than families with members. So, I figured it wouldn't be easy to make it work since, as with any social network, moving over to a new one or managing multiple ones, is not easy.
What are your thoughts about this? How do you deal with that?

Don't get me wrong though, I have been thinking about something like this for my family!

Also, what does the name Ramamia mean?
I like Ebert's writings on movies a lot. But in this case, I get the sense that old age is a factor. Or more precisely, a certain rather distinctive kind of pessimism that sometimes afflicts old people. It happened to a professor of mine that I love. And earlier this year I heard an NPR piece about the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss that talked about how he had lost all hope for humanity. As I said, there's a kind of distinctive quality to this that makes me think it isn't really about the state of the human race... it's rather more self-centered than that (which sounds more judgmental than I'd like).
When I mowed lawns I got a lot of work, not by being the best at what I did, not by being the cheapest, but by being a person. I would get most of my customers by going door to door and knocking on doors where I saw people with high grass. In my area it was rare for a highschool/college kid to have a job at all, much less one requiring real effort. It also helped that I was the one doing the work, not a crew of people working for me.
There are tons of little solid-state amps that have headphone outs and will give you a good sound. (The Roland MicroCube, for example, is a very popular choice. I even have one, and I'm normally a boutique tube amp snob.)

There are also little battery-powered headphone amps that clip onto your belt, but they tend to really suck sound-wise. Something like a MicroCube would be a better investment if you think you'll stick with it for any length of time.
Like everything else, video games follow Sturgeon's Law. Not only does Ebert's quote only consider big-budget mainstream games, but it also lacks perspective, considering the relative youth of the video game compared to other media. Anyway, the rest of the article far from endorses him.

One example of a soulful postmodern video game is Earthbound, complete with its own "auteur." Here's a very long (and chock full of spoilers) discussion of it: http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=mother2
Those huge motorized desks with 20 electrical outlets sound awesome.
Yeah, but the Yellowstone volcano blowing its top is one of those "so bad and unlikely its not worth worrying about" scenarios, like asteroid impacts.*

*That's not to say someone shouldn't worry about asteroid impacts. It just shouldn't be us average Joes.
Great artifact. I think this is from the famous conference where the term "software crisis" gained currency. (The term, in the 1970s, came to stand for the unanswered question of Why Is Software So Hard? And specifically, why so much harder than hardware.)

One thing I was surprised to see (in the discussion at the end of this piece) is that Peter Naur was among those falling for the idea of mass-produced components and the industrialization of software. He seems to have changed his mind quite dramatically later.
Are you kidding? She helped him out big time. He was just sitting there hopelessly waiting for the phone to ring for a plumber, which wasn't going to happen, and she realized it. She gave him the motivation to at least try something, and she apparently didn't kick him out during the time it took to print out all those cards and pass them out.

Sometimes helping someone means a good swift kick in the ass. That lady is a hero.
How come it demands I create a google/gmail account? :( Anyways, I'm sure they're nice.
I'd like to see some actual implementation of Sugars. Right now they are incredibly basic.
Anything that pushes Textmate to actual finish version 2 is not a bad thing in my book.
If you like Groundhog Day that much, you should check out the novel it was loosely inspired by, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky. Ouspensky isn't known as a novelist (he became a guru type) but up until the end where it gets a bit doctrinal, I thought it was a thoroughly delightful book. It's also a psychological tour de force, but I don't want to spoil the story by explaining why.
Tell HN: Term Sheets and Vesting
Earlier this month I asked about vesting and no one contributed anything useful to that thread ... or at least nothing close to what I was hoping to discuss. Fortunately I found a couple of good write-ups here:

http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2005/05/term-sheet-vesting.html

http://www.naffziger.net/blog/2007/04/05/startup-stock-options-vesting-schedules-acceleration/

If you'd like to discuss this info or compare / contrast your own vesting schedule with the examples please do so, thanks.
You don't need permission from Microsoft to write a Windows program. You just need to know a bit about the Windows API. Apple actually screens iPhone apps, so it is more of a closed system.
It sounds like your daughter's being taught with the Suzuki Method, which is fine to get started with, but you will want to switch her to a better teacher soon. Suzuki will train her ears, which is important, but that's about all it's good for. It's designed so that kids reaquit shortly after they enter high school, and it leaves them mostly unable to sight-read.

Background: I am a violinist, playing professionally at weddings and such about once a month (full-time student), and I started on Suzuki.

btw, my father (who also had very little musical training) forced me to improvise (make up music as I went) for five minutes every day, even if it didn't sound good. Today I am quite good at musical improvisation, a skill that is no longer really taught in the classical school of music. I don't know if my dad's method would work for everyone, but I'd recommend it.
It looks promising, I am going to try it out, see what features it has. Can you give any more description on what you like about it and what language you use it for?

EDIT: Maybe I am missing something, but this seems like a regular text editor with no nifty features like code outline. What does it actually give you over something like vim?
Just a guess: FutureWorks, Text100, Outcast or Bite.

The last three are the "typical" names for firms in the Internet industry. FutureWorks is Brian Solis' agency.
I tried the Netbeans Ruby editor... and wow the difference between that and anything for eclipse is major. Code completion is useful. It can figure out what class I am referring to pretty well. Ctrl+click works nicely to see the definition of a method (no matter where it is declared, and it finds them quite well, shows list of choices if it is unclear).

Definitely worth a try for ruby.
I'm not so sure... how many children own an iphone, or are likely to own one in the coming year? I'd wager it would be a small fraction of the number of DS/PSP owners.

Wishful thinking at its finest. I get that iphones are popular, they're just not _that_ popular.
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In conjunction with ISPs, the (US) government or a large private company like Google or Microsoft could aggregate posts based on IP address. In fact, according to a report by Frontline ("Spying On The Homefront"), Homeland Security started implementing such a system for monitoring all phone and Internet communications after the passage of the Patriot Act. I was going to say that it would probably be political suicide for a private company to participate but I just remembered Homeland Security actually contracted a private company to do this work for them. I can't remember the name of the company but you can watch the whole show online:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/

Using writing style seems a little far fetched given the limited scope of variations in language relative to the large number of people using language. Otherwise it would not have taken so long for effective speech recognition software to appear - even the current incarnations are more fragile than one would expect relative to how long the best minds have been looking at the problem and relative to the high economic value of an effective solution.
I live and die via Coda (www.panic.com) Best editor I could ask for.
$140,000 for a BA in photography? Good luck paying that off...
Maybe you should speak to the differences you guys are having. Are you both coding?

Are the style differences in how you are building the app hurting you?

Do you guys openly talk about the differences you are having and how to resolve them, or is it just 'high tension' all day long? Do you need to learn what the best communication style is between the both of you?

Is there a way to clearly separate the work you are doing so that one person has the majority of the input on what he's doing and can be focused, for say, a week or two at a time? At which point, you can go out to lunch, review things, set up your todo list and go your way for another week or two? Not working together in the same space may be a good idea.

I've been married 11 years and I've learned how to deal with sticky situations like this: it's simple -- you just can't always win.

You have to pick your battles and sometimes (often?) cede for the common good. You can learn to argue and still be fine 5 or 10 minutes later.

Also, you mention that you aren't passionate about the product. That is really bad news when you are a founder. Is there some way you can rewrite your job description so that you can find something passionate about the project that can carry you through the first year or two?
Notepad++ on Windows, gedit on Linux
subethaedit http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
vim, for everything

ed, when i really have to
Joel hang out here on a pretty regular basis.
>That's right. It's 300 dollars.

Wow; apparently my old highschool should sell the chairs in lunchroom to raise a quick million dollars.
It wasn't a perfect comparison, I know. I was talking about closedness in the private API sense. Namely, the private APIs in Windows (see the lawsuits against Microsoft in late 90's early 00's) vs. the private API in the iPhone.
The shrinkwrap software business is good.
It's cool that they have a shower in the office. Never worked in an office that has one, always wished for one.
Brilliant, Joel.

I love how you're able to market your company. You just got about 14,000 top notch hackers to look and drool over your office space. It's a great recruiting tool.
As I get older, I am not sure if life is so simple anymore. Although I guess ultimately it boils down to this: women want to have children, and children cost money. The time in which women can have children is limited, so they can't sit around and wait for you to get a hold on life forever.
Thing is, don't women somehow deserve it, too? Women are needed to bring children into the world, so men are competing to make women bring THEIR children into the world. If husband doesn't provide said benefits, woman is missing out because other men are probably waiting in line wanting to provide.
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All those who have got used to online gambling sites will know what it means to win a game in online casino, online poker or online bingo sites. It is just not about the money that you make by winning in online gambling sites. It gives a great sense of achievement. Many think that winning in online gambling sites is a mere stroke of luck. While this may be true to a certain extent, it is only partially true. When you are playing any online game, you should be fully focused and you should have a clear strategy that you will use to win the games. If you are going to employ random approach, only then you should fully rely on your luck. On the other hand, when you use well thought out strategies you could certainly increase your chances of winning dramatically. Therefore, planning your game and coming up with a strategy is what you should remember as your first and most important tip for winning.
I would say the world is getting worse in some ways. Overall though, yeah, I like the trend.
I've been learning guitar for the last few years, never having had much musical training as a kid. I fiddle around with it most evenings, just trying to play stuff I like, not taking it too seriously, and I've gotten good enough to enjoy it. I'll never be as good as [insert guitar hero here]. So what? Most nights, my place has the best free live music within miles.
I always wanted to run that experiment on the Hacker News data...
I work for Daylife and any newspaper or blogger can have an API for their own content using our API platform, as long as they are in our index (http://developer.daylife.com). The API interface is scalable, very malleable and flexible to use letting you ask almost 400+ questions through the interface.

A sample Nytimes API can look as simple as this - http://nytimes.enterpriseapi.daylife.com/articles/obama

Vineet at daylife dot com
How does this (and TextMate) compare to vim and Emacs?
vim or emacs: pick one and get back to work. Editing text is a solved problem.
Typical case of watching too many news on TV. Cure: stop watching (or reading) the news.

Although I admit I also feel a bit uneasy about living so far removed from food production.
I use Intype for all of them - used to use Notepad++.
Kate and Geany, depending on whether I want the better editor, or need an IDE, and Quanta for HTML. Kate is very configurable and (like any KDE app) can open files over sftp which can be very handy.
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You've listed scripting languages there which arguably means you don't necessarily need an IDE. By this I mean, there is no code-compile-test cycle and you don't need an IDE to take care of your builds.

Possibly the most efficient way of coding would be in a shell with your choice of Vim or Emacs. You have quick access to your choice of VCS, you can tail log files, you can use your language's REPL and you can grep for things across your whole project. As well you will have minimised your usage of the mouse which is a great speed and flow inhibitor.

Take the time to learn either of the 2 great editors. The investment will most certainly pay off.