skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you do your user-facing documentation?
This is really two questions in one. We're about to go live with our SaaS offering, but need to put together documentation for our user-facing administrator interface.

1. What forms do you maintain your documentation in? Little "question-mark" bubbles next to input fields? Link to HTML tree on the main page? PDF file?

2. What format/system for managing the documentation has worked best for you? I've done LaTeX and Docbook before, both of which should have little trouble producing nice HTML and PDF versions, but I'm still mulling over the best way to reproduce the info alongside the input fields.

Anyway, any advice is appreciated :)
And all that debt? It's payable in guess what? U.S. Money.

Welcome to economics.
Can Other People View My Saved Passwords In Firefox?
Let´s assume you´re facebook user , also use mozilla firefox , and allow the friend to use your computer without your supervision. If you think that your passwords are protected, then you´re wrong. You friend can easy view your facebook password and username and tricky you. The problem is that the Firefox lets anyone view all your high security passwords.
The headline is inaccurate. If you do not have microsaccades you do not "go blind." If you stare at the exact same spot without flinching your eyes adapt the the image projected on the retina and the image fades away until you move your eyes again. Adaptation in vision is completely different from going blind and it is actually a good thing. For example, if something obstructs your vision permanantly your brain learns to ignore it (all of the senses work this way.) Adaptation and microsaccades check and balance each other.

Also, this is old news. I learned this when I was still in school so I don't understand how "new research" has uncovered this.
I find it very satisfying that although my wife and I are getting divorced, I can still kiss her good morning, wish her happy Valentine's day and tonight I'll probably tell her to have a good time on her date as I hug her goodbye!

Nothing about our relationship has ever really been conventional :-)

Flowers? Card? Good sentiment, but I'd try something from the heart: paintball, horseback ride, hot air balloon trip, have the in-laws watch the kids while you two disappear to the sleazy motel around the corner for a few hours, or just bake him/her a huge chocolate cake and eat it naked in front of the fireplace with a nice Zinfandel.
Sitting on the dining room table waiting for her return from work, then we're off to dinner + dancing :)
He must mean co-founder.
Absolutely nothing.

You are one paragraph of time in the hole on this already, but don't throw good time after bad. Every additional quanta of time spent on worrying about this or implementing (ineffective) solutions is time you are not using to make money.
Lance Armstrong Racing in SF this Monday
http://freelanceswitch.com/freelancing-essentials/how-to-pre...
I like it to some degree, but I think they're missing the point. Their traditional audience would have a very hard time reading the newspaper like power web users do. I think that you have to have a way to distinguish the "headline" news from the "hey, read this over here" second tier stories. I do think, it's a good experiment and worth exploring more.
I wouldn't mind if there was a limit (maybe as few as 3) on the number of words you can make bold. Or a percentage of your post, or something. Now that I think about it the same solution could be used to support blockquote (ex: max 2 blockquotes in a post + other restrictions). After all the argument against implementing it was that excessive use of quoting is often bad style.

I think it's pretty ridiculous not to support useful features just because 1% of people might misuse it.
Not merely "for its time" (as though films have improved dramatically over time, like computers and womens bathing suits), and I'm stunned that anyone who likes movies doesn't like Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is a great film, and an enjoyable film...watching it is not like doing homework, and there are only a handful of movies that I've found more enjoyable or satisfying.
Apple Owns 51% of Mobile Web… And Growing
TweeterGetter is very cool.  So why aren't the top Web 2.0 blogs talking about it?
Maybe it's not in their self-interest to promote this service?

http://tweetergetter.com
Manages to break alt left-arrow "back" shortcut.
Cool. Reminds me of Drudge.
What we did was ignore it. It's annoying, but (a) there is not much you can do and (b) someone who has to copy your site is probably not that much of a threat.
I agree. It's also important to remember that if those tickets didn't generate revenue and if they would never generate revenue no one would really want you to spend time on them.

Most businesses seem to use software as a set of automated business rules or as a service to clients and what the owner of such companies are looking at is profit. How much money did it cost for you to write software that made $X million? Honestly I think that's the only metric people really care about.

What about maintainability and the SOLID principles? That's a matter of by spending $N million on maintenance how many millions have we saved on future cost to implement profit driving features.

If what you are doing at your company doesn't somehow lead back to profit (even something as simple as "letting the devs do this keeps the good ones here") I guarantee no one will want you to do it. If you do it and it does drive some revenue, the question will be was the cost worth the reward.

The problem most companies have is it is very difficult to relate what each task a programmer works on to each dollar of revenue earned.
In Response to an HN thread: Credentials
Thanks. Thats pretty much what I'd thought. Absolutely disgusting though. I mean, look at the competition and try to improve on what they've done but word-for-word copying is low. Anyway, thanks. Going to get on with doing business!
It's a pretty good deal for us though: they produce concrete goods, we pay with abstract ones.
Thanks Paul. We've been in competition on various products before and its all been good, fair competition. This is a new one for me. Appreciate the advice and we'll just roll our sleeves up and carry on. In a sense, this has spurred us on today :) Thanks for a few people who sent me suggestions and best wishes privately
I'm with you on this one. Tonight, while couples are happily enjoying each other's company, I will be eating dinner at a dining hall in my college.
well one of them looks like http://280north.com/
Did you just willingly ignore what I said? I just said that yes, there's no surprise that IQ and overall intelligence correlate. It's like how if an auto mechanic made an intelligence test, Asimov would do better than a retarded person. IQ isn't wholly random. At the same time, it still is not an overall measure of intelligence.

Your fun little snide numbers comment is great and all, but numbers mean nothing on their own. Interpretation is also important, and interpretation is almost always subjective. It's why there are so many tests that say the exact opposite thing. So unless you cite specific examples of that paper you cited, don't just throw it up and assume that's the end of your case. That's snotty, arrogant, and allows for no counterresponse because the rest of us don't all read the exact same journals as you.
If you don't have a significant other today: www.goodcrush.com

</shameless plug>
How the battle with Victoria's bushfires was fought and lost
cool, doly noted.
Can you teach entrepreneurship?
Yes, but you have to understand it to teach it. That might seem obvious, but it's missing in this plan.
I tend to feel cheated out of my time when I come to the end of a post like this one, because it seems to focus on the wrong thing. Here's what my issue is:

"What do people want?" is a very broad and imprecise question, and on that level, it is very easy to answer. I've been alive for a little more than a quarter of a century, and I can easily tell you what I want.

1) I want it to be easier to maintain and improve my health.
2) I want my relationships - friendships, business partnerships, romances - to require less effort to maintain and grow.
3) I want it to be easier to acquire and retain new knowledge and learn new skills.

I am willing to bet that at their core, everyone has an approximation of at least those desires, and then some. However, the things that I've outlined are just the difficulties of "the human condition", if you will. Breaking down those problems into their more detailed subproblems is difficult, but it seems that solving those is infinitely more difficult, and pushes them off into the realm of science fiction. These are important, hard problems where a working technical solution would make the inventors orders of magnitude more money than solving some pain point that some company in some niche market has.
I'd like to point out the most important equation in all of business:

Revenue - Costs = Profit.

Too many in the valley subscribe to the Venture Capital + Growth = Profit mindset.

You think you can go years without funding, but then a disaster happens, or a new competitor rises, or costs to use SMS suddenly increase. Then what do you do?
It was really upsetting how few people got that comic when it came out. I loved it.

edit: (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_shave#Roadside_billboards)
Absolutely, it's as vague as it gets. Is it for zsaqa.com, something else, what?
Wow great timing, was about to ask the same thing.
Actually, I think the equation is more like:

Venture Capital + Growth + Acquisition = "Success"

I don't think profits enter into the equation at all. (Unless you're talking about the shareholders making a profit).
Did somebody hack your account to post this spam?

It's quite clearly a pyramid scheme.

Edit: I now think it's likely you're being sarcastic.
For #2, I recommend Sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ ) as an alternative to DocBook. You write your documentation in reStructuredText (yet another extensible Wiki markup language) and generate HTML, PDF (via LaTeX), Windows help files, Eclipse help plugins etc.
Word order fail on my part. Revise to "waiting, with a hard-on, for these judges to die."
It is a legal pyramid scheme since there is no money involved.

One could argue that it encourages tweeters to spam their followers with numerous mentions of their link on Tweeter Getter. But if you mention your Tweeter Getter link too many times to your followers, then many will stop following you.
I was expecting a genuinely good movie. I got a shamble of a tale with pretty much nothing going for it.
It can work, but it's not for everyone.

I know a short bald guy in his 50's who currently has three 30-ish girlfriends (russian golddiggers, I think) he found over the internet. However, I think his entire life (outside of work) consists of chasing women over the internet. He also claims great skill at writing seductive emails. The internet works for weird people seeking compatibly weird wives also.

On the other hand, for me, internet == FAIL. It would have filtered out 2 of my 3 serious relationships.

Last, you are probably too young for internet dating to work. I get the impression it's more for the 30+ crowd who didn't get tied down when they were younger.
Responsibility Is Still Good For Business
No. You're wholly, unequivocally wrong.

A movie is good based on certain various aspects. There's the directorial technique. There's the cinematography. There's plot, there's acting. Donnie Darko had almost nothing.

The plot is extremely basic. The only reason people call it deep and confusing is because the director was absolutely shitty. It was his first time ever with a camera, and so the guy had no sense of timing and placement. The cuts are awful: I'm not a huge film buff but they made me cringe. The writing is thoroughly terrible. Donnie is a Mary Sue: hot, people like him (or, the right people do), he's very smart. Look at how he cuts down that strawman presenter at the start of the movie! Never mind that the arguments he makes are extraordinarily basic, or that this is a supposed professional he's arguing against. When I was 14, I had these same fantasies as myself as somebody who could say basic stuff and get away with its seeming clever. The problem is, by the time I was 15 I'd realized the valuable lesson that people tend to be smarter than you assume at first, and that they can respond to dumb stuff like that.

Other people my age didn't get that lesson, and as a result became unpopular, developed lots of weird obsessions, and left school with fantasies of themselves as supersmart supermen. Richard Kelly, the director of this movie, absolutely seems like one of these people.

In an interview I saw of Kelly, he says that the movie's not at all deep or complex. In his mind it's a straightforward movie. That shows the utter incompetence of the guy. He wasn't out to make something complex, and he made the movie so poorly that people decided it had to be complex and brooding.

Look, for instance, at the movie's much-lauded connection with the Reagan era. Once you've been told it's there, yeah, it's obvious. Beyond that? It's not a consistent theme. There are two or three moments where it's over-the-top blatant in your face, and beyond that it's completely abandoned and ignored.

The fact that you can't understand the movie without reading an external web site is a flaw. If you make the movie well, the entire thing is internal and consistent.

Acting-wise: yech. Nobody does a good job. It must have been because of the directing intent, because Jake Gyllenhall is a good actor when he's with a good director. In this he had about one tone of voice overall.

A good friend of mine who's a film buff once said of Donnie Darko and Moulin Rouge: they're the two tests of what kind of a movie person you are. If you like them, you're saying that you're willing to ignore a lot of flaws in a movie's conception for the sake of its glitzier sides. I agree with that statement, particularly about Donnie Darko.
When psycopg2 Can't Import tz
> But in the sense that a new protocol emerges, not in the sense that bittorrent stops working.

I've often wondered how practical it would be to have a P2P protocol that only connects with people in one's social graph. For example, it could use someone's email, IM and facebook contacts, minus anyone they deem as untrustworthy.

If such a system existed, it would be very hard for law enforcement to break into, as they would have to infiltrate people's social networks. Of course, if law enforcement could force people to turn traitor on their freinds and entrap them, that would make it easier to roll up such networks; but it's unlikely in democratic societies that people would let the government do that.

The range of files available to be shared from one's immediate friends is going to be a lot less than what's out there on the whole internet, but if the protocol allowed requests to flow over multiple nodes, potentially a much larger set of files would be available. (Consider that everyone is no more than six handshakes from everyone else).
I have a question that maybe you can answer, having really perused the PDF spec. Is it true that PDF removed the turing-completeness of PostScript?

I had heard something that the main reason for creating PDF was that you couldn't render a single PS page without rendering all the ones preceding it.
But such a search is uninformative for the author in question. If I had used a pseudonym you would have had no such additional information.

My point remains. With no credentials, with no idea of the author's background, you must perform independent verification. With some idea of the author's background, you have more information, and can decide whether the information is likely to be trustworthy, or at least worthy of pursuit or verification.

I am concerned that hacker culture teaches "Trust no one, verify everything." I think it is thereby unnecessarily impoverished.
Let me ask you: why do you make your text fixed-width? It's got to be a conscious effort because you do it repeatedly, and it makes the rest of us cranky.

I haven't seen the movie yet, and for the record? "Just like films" means nothing. Unless you're fascinated in the art of filmmaking - if you're a "buff" - it doesn't count. I have friends who "just like films" who watch The Notebook and American Beauty and cite those as "incredible films", and that just doesn't count. The people who really like films are the ones who get deep into them.

But I haven't seen Citizen Kane, so I'll withhold judgement.
Didn't Sun originally bill for 6 minute increments (or something like that) for their Sun Grid Computing service?

While it isn't seconds, 6 minutes would be a lot better than an hour.
From an idea perspective, it's actually quite cool, since it does all the work for you.

To me, it just doesn't make any sense to start following random people, and have random people start following you.

That, and the format of the page is the familiar "skeezy product" pitch format.. so I just don't trust it. What's in it for the guy running the show? Besides thousands of usernames and passwords?
I've just found this is called Friend-to-friend filesharing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend-to-friend

An extract:

"""A friend-to-friend (or F2F) computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.

Many F2F networks support indirect anonymous or pseudonymous communication between users who do not know or trust one another. For example, a node in a friend-to-friend overlay can automatically forward a file (or a request for a file) anonymously between two friends, without telling either of them the other's name or IP address. These friends can in turn forward the same file (or request) to their own friends, and so on."""
That's not really a mindfuck: it's straightforward and consistent according to its deranged world.

Fun movie, though. The soundtrack is incredible.
I wish them luck, but a 40-core Forth processor sounds like it needs to come with a free Chuck Moore to program it.
The Hangover Theory
I would appreciate thumbnails of photos with headlines under them, similar to traditional newspaper format.
He's getting lots of followers!

But yes, the presentation of the page could be improved.

As for getting lots of random people following you -- well at least it's a start!

If you are worried about your password, then change it immediately after using the service. A more serious problem concerns privacy (e.g., access to your direct messages).
> It's Valentine's Day. Don't forget the flowers and card for your s.o.

Are you only supposed to care about your S.O. one day a year? Shouldn't you be nice every day?
That doesn't really solve the problem of not knowing anyone to date.
I was thinking more irrelevant than cruel.
Cheap Dell Vostro Laptop
Until, eventually, you're running out of one particular abstract stuff called trust ;-)
Doodle 4 Google: Get your kid's drawing as the Google logo
Yes, I know that Android works on many different platforms. However, the Market is not available for any of them. I contacted Google myself and they said they had no plans to make it available. That makes these ports pretty much useless unless you get the .apks yourself, and most apps will just go for the store.
LG KE990 Viewty Black Full Touch Screen
LG KE990 Viewty Black has with its 5 Megapixel Camera. This makes it a suitable replacement for a camcorder and can even take video. LG has released a bundle of touch-screen phones but none compare to the technology.
Except for the Straight Story, obviously.
STUN - Method for NAT Traversal
I Became a Savant For a Day
I just got a new car a few days ago... I filled out a finance form online, made a call the next morning. Did some negotiation after I got there, got $5500 off and drove off the lot with the new car with the salesman following me with my old car.

Old car is for sale on craigslist now.
Well yes, that's kind of what is happening now. However, as the article points out, even if they don't really trust us anymore, they have almost no other choice.

This is exactly the kind of strange situation that happens when you're dealing with global economics which is so hard to understand for people that are only used to dealing with their own finances.

I really have no idea what is going to happen, but its not going to be anything the typical doomsayers predict.
Their MTBF, on the other hand, can be gauged by calculating a smoothed poisson distribution over their smoking, drinking and swearing habits.
awesome, the end is nearer everyday for sourceforge and the like...
This had to be written by a woman! ;-) just kidding

Seriously, it was probably someone who spends too much time with his/her s.o. :-)) kidding again

ahh, probably wasn't funny
I decided a while back the real way to fix this problem was to not use eggs because they are complete rubbish. I have never had a deployment where eggs didn't cause some sort of issue, until I stopped using them entirely.
I have always wondered about this. They essentially improve their country by financing our buying. Why don't they simply buy directly? Could they not instead put that excess money into building things they desperately need, like roads and schools?

Investing in a first world infrastructure would stimulate growth at home and lessen their reliance on our consumers (whose buying habits have recently become rather fickle) and our Treasury. The second part may be more important too, with our country hurling toward a Social Security meltdown. Our debt as a percentage of GDP might be low now (relative to Japan) but check back in 20 years.

I'm not an economist, but I'd love to hear from some why I'm wrong (which I'll assume I am).
I typed up a similar response.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481272
A one-page sales letter? Web 2.0? Are you serious?
Don't know. Where's the "mind" in that?
Platform of Web
I don't think the US is losing trust yet when it comes to economics and I hope that never happens. But there's a temptation, if you owe money in your own currency, to just inflate your debt away.

If the Chinese start to believe that the US government deliberately heats up inflation putting pressure on the dollar, trust would be eroded pretty quickly.
Did you read the page? Do you understand how it works?

It's actually an automated service.
Hey, if we're on the topic of a Valentine's Day thread, I figure I'll ask a question that's never been worth an Ask HN: how do you start-up people deal with relationships when you spend a lot of your time intensely focused on the work you're doing or want to do?
No. This is the classic sign of a bubble in US govt. securities. One thats been building up for decades. The redesign will come when the Chinese decide to use all this US debt to by US property. They can already buy several Fortune 500 companies outright. Thats going to become more and more prominent. If we are lucky, they will succeed. If not, something, either falling value or the US govt. will interfere sending the value of the dollar into a tailspin at which point, you can welcome Russia 2.0.
Improving your processes doesn’t mean buying expensive tools : Caldeas Blog
I am a graduate mathematics student, and you are embarrasingly wrong.

First, the term kernel certainly does have meaning in this context. The kernel of a mapping is the set of arguments it sends to the identity element (zero here), so in this case the kernel is just {1111, 2222, 3333, ... , 9999}. Like you, I thought the author should have used the term "fixed point," but there are situations where his way would be better. Details if anyone asks.

Now, why could anyone possibly gain from studying permutations on the digits of integers represented in base ten?

EDIT: the short answer is "cryptography." I'm cutting this post in two. For the longer answer, see below.