skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@gopalv82, your first comment seems to have got your account hellbanned. No one will see your comments.
I'm very sorry. I mistook the first link for a cluster of tags.

Can I help you with the site layout? We could make it much clearer. I think I just proved it's not idiot proof. :-(
Thank you for implementing command history :).

There is a slight bug though. Since the position gets updated after the position is calculated, the displayed value is out of sync.

So entering

1

2

3

And then typing: UP (3), UP (2), DOWN (1)

Displays 1, rather than 3.
JavaScript debugging in WebKit inspector
Well, at least in Ruby, there's one way in which each is more abstracted than for; each creates a new scope, while for does not. This actually is a reason I'd prefer to teach each.

On the other hand, I agree with Zed that for is a better abstraction than each, and I disagree that each and for are at the same level of abstraction. If you're approaching it in the abstract, sure, they're both pretty high-level. But each is as close to pure functional as you get and for is plain iterative.

And assembly is iterative, so I'd call for better for giving people a sense of how the metal works. Which, I think, is important for newbies.
Well, I think it depends on the person who you're trying to teach. I, for one, spent nearly two years before I even started learning Haskell, precisely because I can't bear the thought of using constructs I don't understand. In this two years time I learned OCaml, Scheme and Erlang, not to mention read countless implementations of monads in these and other languages, just so I could start learning Haskell.

As a side effect (haha) I realized that a) a monad is very interesting and useful concept, no matter in which language; b) Haskell "cheats" heavily in order to be able to do I/O (and side effects) and c) it's this cheating (ie. IO part of IO Monad) which makes it hard to understand (I really prefer Clean's approach, where you get explicit 'world' object to manipulate). As a result I don't know when or even if I'll learn Haskell - and it's caused solely by the lack of full, up-front explanation of Haskell I/O model in most (all?) learning materials for the language.

So, for me, yes - you need to teach me "theoretical grounding of monads" and more or you'll lose me. I never read Zed's books, but I think he's targeting people like me, so your criticism is invalid.
One thing that I am impressed with is that Joel (OP) is good at following advice.

About 7 days ago I commented that I thought his post was inappropriately named (I took issue with Joel using "How to name your startup" rather than "my experience with how I named my startup" (because of what I felt was his limited experience in this area).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4371318

On this post he titles correctly "6 Things I do to be consistently happy".
Find the right incentives. Whatever your solution, it has to make (financial) sense for the school and the professor, otherwise you're not going anywhere.
As is ruby's entire object model basically. It's Smalltalk with a pythonish basic'ish pearlish syntax.
App.net has a shot, Twitter is smoking crack and I was wrong
I'm from the UK - meant the VWP :)

Thanks for the replies everyone
Europe has known this for many many years. A 35 hour work-week and several weeks of vacation time (e.g. in France and The Netherlands) not only creates more jobs, but also results in happier people and additional productivity.
For a community based around design I'm surprised the thumbnails are as small as they are. I like the idea though.
One case I found at my last job where the interstitial Google search result saved the day was when searching for the MFC class CString. As it turns out, the most popular thing out there called a CString has nothing at all to do with programming, and if I'd done an "I'm feeling lucky" on it, well, no doubt my boss would have walked past at just the wrong moment...
What the hell do all those new Outlook.com emojis mean?
Good luck explaining that to people.
WTF is a "muser"? Yes, I Googled it, and nothing turned up that makes sense for the way it is used on that blog.
5 Best Social Media Tools To Manage Your Business 
What are your favorites HN???
FWIW I learned on BASIC. "GOTO" looks natural to me. It's also much closer to the machine. Structured programming is a prettification of test-and-jump, and you have to be able to see through it, to use it well.

Functional programming, on the other hand, is a bit of a conceptual leap away from the metal. If you're mapping two functions over a stream of data how many loops is it? In a dumb language like Ruby, it will be as many as your map() calls. But in Haskell, it will fuse them into one loop doing two operations. And the thing with functional programming is, you're not supposed to care - except, you do have to. Generating an endless unresolved series of thunks in Haskell is a beginner mistake. But if you can't see through the functional list-flipping to the generation and consumption of callable heap objects in a test-and-jump cycle, you're going to be scratching your head.

My answer would be to teach both assembler and FP, and step up and down simultaneously. Start on Excel and move to Haskell, while also starting on 6502 or some such toy assembler, and moving to C, and meet in the middle at Scheme.
Don't worry, I'm sure they'll edit the title to be "C_CppEd - bergmann", or something equally misguided.
CU Denver undergrad students seeking a degree are forced to take a few 3000+ level courses to meet a cultural diversity requirement. Most other general education requirements can be met by taking equivalent courses at a community college which is what I did. I've always speculated that these are required in order to help the college get some extra money from students. Some of the options for these courses have required materials that can only be purchased from the university bookstore and they consist mainly of printouts of wikipedia articles.
This is what I love about science, and endeavors designed to push boundaries. Inside a fat forty something is a small child jumping for joy because a robot is firing lasers on frigging Mars !

Please can we vote for candidates around the world who will put money into advancing what is known, and what is possible and stop putting it into arbitraging smaller amounts of dollars at smaller fractions of the speeds of light

excuse me while I run around the sofa making pew noises
Oopsie. Got confused with another HN story, my bad!
I appreciate the attempt at trying to instill some realistic expectations, but beyond that I'm not sure if I'm missing something -- I find this article to be toxic for multiple reasons:

- The thought that "superstar"/top entrepreneurs "never fail" is ridiculous.

- The idea that anyone other than the top 1% can't have an "original" idea, have vision, or have any sort of competency period.

- The examples of his failings sound incompetent to such a ridiculous degree. Again this reinforces the previous point.

- After reading this, I have the impression that "luck" is all there is unless you're in the "top 1%".

- The idea that procrastination is a positive force and that it means you need to step back and think about "something". There may be some truth in that, however I find it dangerous to accept it as simply as this.

I'm reminded of the below two sayings. There's probably some truth in them:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Fake it till you make it."
A zen approach to business
Sent From My iPad
For people interested by this subject you can look at the free online MIT course "6.002x: Circuits and Electronics". See https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.002x/2012_Fall/about
It is a good course covering all the "Middle Age" part from the answer linked on stackexchange.com
Earlier this year I had developed my own app to listen to music through YouTube because I was finding myself using YouTube to just listen to songs I wanted to hear: http://www.deskamp.com

With all these new YouTube music apps coming out recently you'd think 2012 is the year when YouTube reigns supreme for music listening.
"I'm quite happy, and I manage to be happy without having a list of the 6 essential things I must do every day to stay happy."

I don't think the OP is doing what you imply he is doing. He is merely listing things he does that work for him.

And some of the things listed I agree with and do (sleep, exercise) but getting up early and going to bed early is not.

"the people most into self-help books"

From my personal experience I would agree with this. There is something wrong and it appears they are searching for answers. People who are already happy don't need these answers, and if not a subject which you want to find out about because of curiosity there isn't much of a reason to read those books.

Related, on things that I am really good at I tend not to want to read any books, lest what I read alters my thinking as far as what already works for me (might put doubt into my head).
It is surprisingly demanding of mice; you need to have a three button mouse and ideally with a separate button, as chording on the mouse wheel can be error prone. I try to switch now and again but I never really stay; particularly with acme I find I like the way wily (a nominal clone) did the current working directory better; easier to create utility files.

But it is a really good editor, just not to my taste.
As a DDG fanboy, I must ask if you've tried the !msdn bang shortcut on DuckDuckGo.com
Yeah, but it's easy to phone home once for a password and then toss it out when finished.
Coincidentally I just started working on one last weekend too. http://github.com/garyb/fiction

It's more Scheme influenced (but not at all RnRS compliant) and as of about half an hour ago has working define-syntax/syntax-rules style macros.

The code isn't as nice though ;). I just wanted to get it working so I could rewrite it in itself.
Absolutely. After all the support they've given to their citizens acting very stupid in Indonesia, it's disappointing they are so quiet on this.
I wouldn't be so generous as to call your initial comment a point. More like an antagonistic expression of wilful ignorance.

That you would assert that the only people who need to be concerned with radiation are people 'living in a containment vessel' is simply absurd.

All you're doing now is applying the industry's standard response to rational concerns over a disastrous reactor incident: paint public concern as ignorant 'hysteria', engage in a bit of character assassination ("I'm surprised you have the courage to get out of bed in the morning"), and gloss over the seriousness of the situation, and impacts ("it's only 20 km").

Your stance also clearly indicates you've read little on the impact on the ground in Fukushima over the last year. I don't think there's much to be gained from discussing this issue with you, as at any point you'll be arguing with a concocted mental model of an opponent who is 'hysterical' and 'ignorant', and bring only arrogance and snark to the table. Boring.
ugh i loathe the day when people start doing this shit on their webpage. I remember when i thought <blink> was bad, ahh the grass isn't always greener is it :(
Introduction to Algorithms - online course from MIT
Woody Allen films are a less stressful way to garner some acting credit for film stars whose bread and butter is big dumb films. Usually one has to take on a small off-broadway role (that's what Kevin Spacey has been doing hee at the Donmar for years - offering stars who will fill houses roles to prove they can "act".

Allen films are just 6 weeks shorter engagements

for me the lesson here is be the manager who has a fixed short term project each year, where everyone involved can claim kudos and respect, and you will be hiring engaged talented and frequently famous people who will lend you some of their charisma in return.
I think there exists a terrible confusion about emotions in general fueled by pop culture. People should understand that emotions are just a form of motivation and not something magical. Unpleasant emotions don't have purpose to make you feel bad, they are here to help you to better adapt to your environment. Pleasant ones mean that you are well adapted. Simple as that. Also I would like to add that on the topic of happiness and other stuff related to positive psychology there is an excellent course from prof. Tal Ben-Shahar.
I'm not sure why the focus has to be on whether or not self-help books are helpful?

After reading what he wrote, my takeaway was that he's sharing things he's discovered about himself. What's being cited may have come from self-help books, but he's doing it to show evidence of what it is that has helped him come to each realization about himself. He is by no means marketing these self-help books, or pushing us to believe in the potential of self-help books. He's just stating what works for him, and asking people to share what works for them. Parents who love their kids can say things like, "I drop my kids off at school every morning." It's the same thing.

Take away all mentions of being "happy", replace it with "productive," and remove the citations he makes. What you're left with is something I believe a lot of people do as well regardless of it's conscious correlation to happiness.

As long as what he does helps him achieve his goals (without causing harm to himself or those around him), then all the power to him. I don't think we have any right to attack him for it.
.each isn't a looping construct. It is mapping function. Looping constructs allow control over the loop iteration. Mapping functions do not.

People probably shouldn't confuse them. Does Ruby actually have a looping function?
Yes, karma definitely exists in reality. It means that what you have done and what happens to you all accumulates inside you. It continually exerts an influence on you and tries to control you – it appears through your actions even though you don't want it to. Karma is always trying to conquer the self. That's why in order to truly live your own life instead of following the orders of Karma you need awakening and determination.

Here's a particularly illuminating article on karma. I hope you decide to have a look and read with some interest: http://www.members.tripod.com/tathagata2000/enlightenment_wh...
Make Money Blogging Basics - John Divramis Paramarketing Blog
On fooling people with numbers
I couldn't help of think about Eve from Wall-E and her laser beam. http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs38/i/2008/340/3/a/wall_e_and_ev...
My best suggestion for the author of the post, is to return to the restaurant. Be gracious, say please and thank you. Make sure your kid is especially well behaved. Tip well (30% plus). When you get the chance, tell the owner that you come an extra distance because you appreciate her food and enjoy the place. Because it's a touchy subject now, don't quibble about the bill (even if there's clearly a mistake). For a while, don't worry about the promotion.

Just be a good customer. You'll see, in time, that her attitude will soften, and things will be comfortable again.

It's hard to run a business, whether it's a startup or a breakfast spot. There are lots of stresses your customers will never see, and a lot of burdens. Especially financial burdens on non-venture-funded/bootstrapped businesses like the breakfast place. Maybe she snapped, maybe she overreacted. Maybe there's more to it than you realize. Maybe she gets annoyed with people who are too exacting about small financial things.

It doesn't matter. Just be a good customer to her. It's he best thing you can do.
I agree. Making the thumbnails larger would be a big improvement. Also for me personally, the page looks slightly cluttered. There's so many little details. (I do like the logo mouseover though.)
What happens to the hustler when they fall in love with something? How does their behavior change?
I have two issues with this advice. One is, it's incredibly robotic. The same routine every day, the same times doing the same things, the same route every evening. Basically he is creating boredom. I have no trouble believing that it makes the st of his life more interesting. Would I want to follow that? Hardly. Responding to my environment, doing unexpected things, improvisation, these are things that make me happy. I get bored doing the same thing twice, there is no way on earth I joule be able to robotically do the same freaking routine every day.

Second: this life advice clearly comes from someone without a family. I read some comments stating that his routine is conductive to a family friendly life style, and in theory it is. But young children do not care about theory. They have dreams, don't want to sleep yet, throw up, get sick and a million more things. Every one of which would ruin this guy's schedule. Also, he never goes out, a movie or dinner? There's never a concert in town? Friends and family to visit?

Seriously, it's advice from a person with no social contacts (IRL) who has discovered bliss by living like a monk. Thanks, but no thanks.
And yet Zed seems to think he can teach the basis by which Ruby's for ... in works without laying nearly the same amount of groundwork. That's the real question---why do you need to go over so much in so much detail in the one case, but somehow the other is significantly simpler? (Especially if the second is actually syntactic sugar for the first!)

"As a result I don't know when or even if I'll learn Haskell - and it's caused solely by the lack of full, up-front explanation of Haskell I/O model in most (all?) learning materials for the language."

The IO monad is just like the State monad, except you can't get the State back out. You're passing around RealWorld. (In any event the "theoretical grounding of monads" doesn't tell you anything about IO. It would tell you things about monads in general---monadic bind and return and join, etc. Haskell may be doing weird things with its IO monad, but your objection actually bypasses what I was talking about, which is the category theory shee that Haskell is known for, but is also found in, say, Scala, where IO is not done through a special monad.)

ETA: given that these books are apparently for people who might need to be taught about variables in the first place, I wonder how accurate your conception of how like you they are is, and how much that resemblance applies to the case at hand. To reiterate, I can't really understand why any explanation that would pass muster with Zed for adequately explaining how "for foo in bar" works in Ruby, including the binding of the name foo, the repeated execution of the body, etc., couldn't be straightforwardly adapted to "bar.each { |foo| ... }". Would the adaptation not get into the weeds of the .each method? Indeed it would not. But then, the explanation of "for ... each" also didn't get into the weeds of that. Both should be acceptable if either is.
"There is a real correlation between a society that tells people that you can do anything and the existence of low self esteem."

5:20 @ http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...
I think the use of 'idiomatic' that daviddaviddavid had in mind is this one[1]:

1. a. Peculiar to or characteristic of a given language.
b. Characterized by proficient use of idiomatic expressions: a foreigner who speaks idiomatic English.

That use of the word 'idiomatic' is very common, and although it's related to the word idiom, it's not quite the same thing. An idiom, as you say, is a phrase that you can't guess the meaning of just by glossing each of the individual words (a favorite example - in Puerto Rico, though not all Spanish-speaking countries, a flatterer is a 'lambeojo', literally 'eye-licker'). But someone who speaks Spanish idiomatically or who writes idiomatic French does so 'like a native'. It's a good thing. So when someone says that 'each' is 'idiomatic Ruby', that's probably what they have in mind.

All of that said, I can understand wanting to teach beginners the for loop first. But I don't think a Ruby course should finish without looking at each. If a person plans to read any real Ruby, they had better be ready for lots of iteration with each.

[1]: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/idiomatic
I don't understand, why not just be fully transparent?

This is the work left, we think it's this size*, this is how much work we've been getting done. It looks like we might be done at this date but that's dependent on a) our estimation being correct and b) our pace continuing.

I think it's more about managing expectations than it is about managing the information you let stakeholders have.
For what it's worth, that blog post was from September last year and Notifo notifications are still being sent at present. I assume the dude has put it in caretaker mode as he says in his post.
There is lots of useful and interesting detail about how the ticketing industry works in this thread, and I certainly sympathize with the post's complaint. But I'd like to briefly (and mildly) chastise the idea for a more abstract reason, if you'll indulge me.

The post advocates starting a company in order to build and sell a new software application. If this resembles every other business app I've ever written or used, the developer will quickly run into a complex set of rules and requirements that is almost impossible to fully anticipate or characterize a priori.

The motivation for doing so is admittedly egregious fees charged by an incumbent vendor. Imagine one is successful in building the app, despite all of the unforeseeable obstacles. All the incumbent would have to do is lower its prices, either accepting slightly lower margins to maintain the fee pass-thru to its partners or eliminating such fees as the hypothetical startup would do.

In other words, the proposal is to dedicate years of effort to a problem in order to compete on price by 10-25%. This is generally a losing proposition. If one can achieve a 90% lower price for the same or slightly better functionality that an incumbent will find difficult to match (the famed 10x price/performance improvement), then one may have something sufficient to build a business around, depending on how difficult/capital intensive it is to create the product--ignoring all of the other barriers to adoption that exist in this or another industry.

But faced with a narrow price-performance improvement, incumbents can either lower prices or, if it's a functional improvement, invest a similar or lesser amount of capital (they already have employees, a brand name, a salesforce, etc. that a startup would have to build from scratch) to match to the feature set.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want to talk anyone out of the desire to start a company, to improve a process or an application, or to return excess profits to the consumer in the form of lower prices. But part of being a successful entrepreneur is picking the right battles and bringing an unfair advantage to bear against tough competition, something I and many others still struggle to achieve. In this case, I don't see the unfair advantage or the 10x improvement, and I think we should challenge each other to be hard-nosed realists about where we focus our collective entrepreneurial talents.