skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Also, I didn't know anything about your site before
>> I viewed it. The video helped but I still don't know
>> why someone would create a lesson.

Good point. It's a tough decision on where to keep the focus: the what or the why. For this video I decided to focus on the what... but thanks for bringing that up.

I need to decide whether to weave the what & why together or have them be different videos. Any thoughts?

>> Personally I think you should consider letting
>> people sell complete lessons, rather than posting
>> crippled lessons that require the lesson-master
>> to try to hawk products through email.

That's where BrainBank is going. We're going to give content author's the ability to sell single courses or offer a subscription for all their content, similar to Aaron Wall's SEO Training system.
As a business guy, I completely agree that we are helpless to develop a web application at the start. We develop a thorough business plan to put our great ideas to paper, evaluate the structural requirements for said business, and set off to file the proper government documents. As soon as we receive our EINs from the IRS, however, that horrible pang of incompetency sinks in--we just dont $_GET it.

The point is that in developing a business, we both have our own strengths and weaknesses. Great things happen when people accept that fact.
yea, most people seem to agree with you. It's going to get chopped out in the next version.
What would happen if you made registration include a tutorial followed by an exam?
Registration would be much more difficult this way, but those who get through it would have a much stronger understanding of what the site is about. Moreover, the score on the exam could even be used as initial karma for example.
Seth Godin has ADHD
Seth Godin Has ADHD. Seth Godin is a modern marketing guru - in fact, he has his own action figure. As the author of many best selling marketing books.
Fantastic article. The history really puts things into perspective.

This is interesting: "The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented."

The jab at Tom Friedman is fair. I've seen the trailing Paul Romer quote at least three times within the past week, though. There certainly is truth to it. Reinforcing "idea infrastructure" like internet connectivity seems crucial.

Here's to affordable housing in talent-rich and diverse Manhattan and San Francisco...
Feels too long. After about a minute I got the point and skipped to the end. The site seems easy to use, so I don't think you need such detail. If users are having trouble learning how to use the product, consider splitting up the demos into multiple videos so I can watch short segments.

The script felt very wordy. The words and screencast should compliment each other, but they felt very duplicitous here. I'd cut out 30% of the voice over, allowing the video to get the point across. My favorite resource for learning how to be concise is "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Check it out.
On the Tour page, there's a typo in one of your screenshots: "What product or service you want to review?"
Not necessarily to be scared. Ultimately what you want from life is up to you; you have to decide it. However, to make wise decision, deep knowledge about the object is important, which is yourself in this case.

Human mind constantly try to trick its owner. Mostly it's a kind of optimization and works well for normal situations, but it doesn't necessary work well for once-in-life extreme situation, and knowing your mind's trick will help.
How Javascript was born
def generate_code(len = 5)

(1..len).map { (("a".."z").to_a + ("A".."Z").to_a + (0..9).to_a)[rand(62)] }.join

end
Regular blog in Google top 10 on a competitive phrase can it be done? Let's find out
I have a dumb question: how can a theory stop?
If I had to define something that "drove me nuts" about 37 Signals (although it doesn't, really), it's that the product they have worked on for the longest, and is the most visible, is their blog. The blog, and their fame, via the blog, Rails, conferences, etc... is the real barrier to entry. They say "make it really simple", and it works for them because they are way more visible than other people, who could copy much of what they've done in a relatively short amount of time (because, after all, it is simple, and "does less"). However, if I make something super simple, I don't have that visibility as a competitive advantage, and someone else could quite easily copy my simple app in no time. That is, IMO the grain of salt that they need to be taken with.

That said, they certainly do quality work, and I am eternally grateful for Rails. I hope they continue to be successful.
Evolution is a process. Processes can stop. No one is suggesting that the theory of evolution has stopped; as you point out, that would not be a meaningful statement.
Small things I really like about your site:
1) "share the love" icons; 2) ability to log in using my twitter account (you should make it more visible, missed it the first time); 3)
the way updates are formulated: <user> <action> <status> (particulary "user replied to another_user" is so much better than Twitter's); 4) rocks!/sucks! reviews

Good luck to you and many satisfied users!
Diagramming the Obama Sentence
What would happen if you made registration include a tutorial followed by an exam?

Uh ... wow. Good luck getting people to sign up!
What do you mean by "predictably unique"? Do you mean "guaranteed unique"?

As a way to generate unique ids this isn't horrible. 12^62 is something like 220 bits. The odds of a collision are even lower than with a UUID.

Guaranteed uniqueness is preferred, yes. But the level of effort needed to guarantee uniqueness across a large application / dataset / etc is much higher than "unique enough", just as it's a lot more expensive to prove a number is prime than to generate a number that is 99.9999% probably prime.
8 books to kickstart your adoption of Lean Software Development
The whole bill of rights thing seems a little bit unbelievable - until they have a viable long-term business model, there is absolutely no guarantee that any of this couldn't change. They're not going to lock themselves in to their current relationships with their users - especially if they want to keep innovating (which seems to be facebook's mantra right now).

It's great they reverted the change, but I really doubt this will last for long.
Ease off on neuro-linguistic programming techniques. They are really annoying and make the page look needlessly busy.
Digital TV Transition Slips Because of Upside-Down Priorities and Uncertainty
Hi, how to keep the string/id is unique? In another words, how to deal with the id conflict?
Although in the image, nowhere could I see p value, I have verified it by myself that there is 95% significance. And I agree with you it depends on perspective on what you consider significance.

BTW, those wanting to know the math head to http://20bits.com/articles/statistical-analysis-and-ab-testi...
YouTube - What Inspires Sir Ken?
Things Every Software Architect Should Know
well, even 99.9999% possible, we should handle the 0.0001% exception ;)
Can I understand that, if collision occurs, let the it generate the id again?
NASA’s Mars Phoenix Twitter Receives Shorty Award
It's generating a big (BIG) random numbe. The odds of a conflict are many billion times more than the odds of getting hit by a meteorite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID#Random_UUID_probability_of...
I wonder how much of this is really a tempest in a teapot. I don't think my "Aaron is making awesome coffee" status update is really valuable enough intellectual property to be concerned about. I understand the "big brother" aspect miffing a few folks, but in our litigious society, I can't blame FB for covering their butts.
can anyone get 100%? my top score is 90
That would be guaranteeing uniqueness. Don't bother guaranteeing uniqueness. The 99.99999% was an understatement. 12^62 is 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999992% unique. This is higher odds than being killed by a meteorite.
This is a great article.

One point (only tangentially related, at most, to the article's thrust) that always bothers me when it comes up is this:

"On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we’ve produced."

Can somebody explain this to me? I mean, the amount that Americans overconsume should be bounded above by the trade deficit, right? That's the net imbalance in flow of goods and services from other nations to us. We've demonstrated that we can actually produce everything else that we consume ourselves. So we're talking a maximum overconsumption of like seven hundred billion-ish dollars a year, which is about 5% of our GDP.

Are people really worrying about removing the 5% overconsumption, or am I missing something?
Explaining Why Interfaces Are Great
It's interesting to compare this to the "google is reading my email!" reaction they got for showing ads in gmail. People get easily upset on stupid stuff like this, but it doesn't mean the company should ignore it.
problem is most people think their family photos and 'OMFG awesome coffee' status updates are their creative, personal and marketable 'intelectual property'.
well, ok - the family photos ARE personal...
I like how they said they'll rewrite 'in a language everybody can understand' - and then will probably rewrite changing the meaning of it, not just making it 'noob-friendly' (e.g. removing the offensive bits).
Youngentrepreneur: Seth Godin Interview
The startup I previously worked for, Trovix, never faced a lawsuit and it was sold for 72.5 million. I guess it didn't matter.

There just wasn't any real advice in this link.
Nonetheless, you have reduced the uncertainty in the system. At least you know where the system is breaking down when you find bugs if you have proven your algorithms conform to spec.
that's probably why people that BUILD stuff usually don't sell it - not just software/tech...
I think that if you dedicated your project to being as efficient in developing quick, painless processes, you'd get yourself a following pretty quickly. I think the best instance is a company like Contrast, which is very similar to 37signals in some ways but only because they follow the same process in their design. This isn't something that just one company can do.

That said, there's a big difference between having a product with very few features and having a product that's elegantly simple.
what do you think of shopalizer.com its not taken
Electric Motor and Pump Repair
Mahalo Caught Spamming Google With PageRank Funneling Link Scheme
Hmmm, perhaps if you can explain the why real quickly in the beginning of the video. It sounds like a fairly simple concept that could be explained in a few sentences.

"Brainbank lets you post short online classes. Then when a customer downloads your lessons we'll send you the lead. Here's how to create a lesson"
Thank you for the invitation -- I appreciate it. I'm in the Chicagoland (as it's called) area. I have some friends in New York, but haven't been out that way recently. Travel is minimal until I find my next gig, but if I'm out that way, I might give a shout.

If you make it to Chitown, feel free to drop a note. (Didn't this site used to support messaging? I'll have to drop an email address into my profile.) I'm not the most exciting company, but I do recall a good pub or three. Plus, you have to get a "cheezborger cheezborger" from the original Billy Goat Tavern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Goat_Tavern
I started trying netbeans after reading this article, and I actually like. Besides the fact that JDK can be memory intensive to run, I think netbeans is pretty responsive. And I do like the Firefox style search.

I've also tried zend studio (trial), aptana, activestate and I didn't like any of them. I feel that it was hard to use and learn.
"They" is just a single person :)
"Any scientist that works in biology claiming that human evolution has stopped will soon find himself/herself the laughingstock of his profession."

like that guy named Darwin found himself, at his own time? :-)
After being out of college and working full-time as engineer for two years, I've discovered that money doesn't buy happiness.

It was quite a discovery. I really don't like my job and performed a simple thought experiment one day: what would change if they doubled my salary. The answer: nothing! How would I magically like my job? The last thing I think about when I'm in my cubicle is my salary.

Having discovered that money doesn't buy happiness, things get more complicated. I now have to figure out just what will make me happy.

I've recently applied to several PhD programs. I like to learn new things and think that I will gain some satisfaction from going to class and performing research. I still have trouble deciding what I want to do, however.
Same here. Although come to think of it, what if it's the other way around. What if playing with Lego shapes your interests and way of thinking in a way that leads to a more general appreciation of hacking latter in life?
>> Algorithms are _meaningless_ without accompanying proofs.

Most of what we write as coders (and in fact, most of what the world runs on) are algorithms without proofs which "mostly" work.

In fact, you could call almost all of our strategies in social interactions "heuristic algorithms"!
"What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing." Sounds like something the Republican party will fight against tooth-and-nail.
AFAICT, they prefer shortest time route, not shortest distance.
Congratulations! Its a great initiative.

Is not moving to Ahmedabad an option for participants. I wish you ran this program in Delhi.
Get the self-refilling fridge up n running and you are the next WalGoogle.
It should be pointed out that there is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Not everyone who is alone is lonely. (That's why the article speaks of "perceived loneliness").

Aloneness is crucial for productivity, flow depends on not being interrupted. The art is to configure one's environment in such a way that balances aloneness and social contact.
To whomever rated me down -- why do you think that human-written software has so many bugs? It's because we don't take the time (and don't have good strategies yet) to effectively "prove" that our code/algorithms exactly meet the program specs. To write code, we need to make certain idealizations (e.g. thinking about "doubles" as actual real numbers) which actually have tricky corner cases.

So many areas of life cannot easily be mathematically analyzed. Hence, our brain resorts to algorithms which work "most" of the time, which is luckily usually sufficient for survival.
Completely agree. Other replies in this thread reveals how non-intuitive this insight is (why not just learn to sell?).

The thing is that selling and engineering are two different mindsets - one requires you to be a borderline delusional optimist, while the other requires you to be a nitpicking pessimist, always looking for flaws and shortcomings to fix. You'd have to be schizophrenic to be great at both at the same time.
They should involve the EFF + Lawrence Lessig to help draft a sensible terms of use agreement.
> If you've got something to sell or are already selling something, [the nextNY presentation] is a must-attend!

A corollary to the article's point is that sales and marketing precludes building product, so that sounds a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
It's hard to see how a computer would produce a proof of the Banach-Tarski "Paradox"
( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411043 )
without going through effectively the same steps as a human. It doesn't seem likely that it will be reduced to calculations, or simple formula manipulations such as can be performed by Mathematica.

And in case you think that B-T is irrelevant, informal reasoning about infinities produced all sorts of results that caused people problems. Formal reasoning about infinities gave us calculus for real, that works wherever it's known to work. And I use infinities on a daily basis designing and implementing systems to assist with tasks similar to air traffic control and automated target tracking.

Computers can be used to explore and experiment with numbers, geometry and some structures, and will probably one day be able to assist with exploring more abstract concepts, but as things stand today, there's a great deal of mathematics that no one can see how to do with computers.

To say otherwise is to demonstrate ignorance of both fields.
You should go back and read it, then, as NOT looking for the Zen seems to be the conclusion for the article....
It's typically because we don't even write a spec :-)
This title is a catch 22 -- loneliness is an emotion (aka brain state)! Hence of course it affects the brain, and the brain affects it ;-)
I got 97% on 'Particle Pro'
Got 100% 15 seconds, 15 coconuts
http://img259.imageshack.us/my.php?image=carlt3.jpg
did some small changes in driving... 12 seconds
http://img148.imageshack.us/my.php?image=topscoreuz9.jpg
There's also python print_r
http://wiki.github.com/marcbelmont/python-print_r
While this seems like shady tactics from Mahalo, it also seems to suggest the need for a better (read: less game-able) ranking system than PageRank. There's now tons more data about which sites users visit for a given query, whether they return to the results page, how much time they spend on a site, etc. If you can sift through the noise, it seems like this would be an even more accurate indicator of site quality than hyperlinks to a page.
what is Mahalos long term strategy? It just seems to be pages full of links to other content..
how about "shopnsoc(k)"?
Cash flow analysis of a small community site: Bookmooch
You can now use Zim desktop wiki on Windows
I stopped reading after One line of working code is worth 500 of specification and It's never too early to think about performance.

I thought this philosophy was proven flawed!
To some extent, he confuses the beauty of the problem with the beauty of the solution.

It is of course possible to write interesting software in boring domains, make beautiful portraits of ugly people, joke about serious matters, write poems using swear words or intelligent plays with stupid characters.
The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
heh, no offense pclark, but shopnsoc(k) is a godawful domain name ;) sounds ... dirty or violent or both
97 conventional wisdom recipes in an awful, screaming font, linking to explanations. I didn't read them all so maybe there are some gems, but I highly doubt it.
No, they mean that loneliness doesn't just affect the inputs into an algorithm, but the algorithm itself.
How many have experienced biz problem solvable by some code but had no time to pursue it?
Specifically, have you experienced a moment while running a startup where you wished someone else had wrote something to do meet this need?

You'd pursue it but it would take too much time and distract you from your core task. E.g. if you need a CRM, there's already plenty of CRMs out there, thus you wouldn't build your own.
I don't think "make a product for yourself" captures the entire philosophy behind 37signals' products.

A better discussion of how to copy can be found here (it is about Picasso's famous phrase "good artist copy, great artist steal"):

http://www.businessofdesignonline.com/picasso-good-artists-c...

The essence is that copying something in a new context with understanding of the underlying principles is often harder than building the original.
All this really shows is that there should be several completely independent ways of ranking search results which alternate so that it will never pay off to try to scam them all because the ROI is too small.

Gaming the google ranking system is only effective because of the monoculture.
So, on a scale of 0...10 I think facebook just scored a '9' in customer relations.

I'm really impressed, I would have expected worse.
Perfect, that's just what I was looking for. Thanks!
I think the problem with this book is not about recipes it gives, and way how it approaches the problem, but the problem itself. I spent 8 years working in different software companies, and never met a person with the 'architect' job title, whose job would be different from one of either developer or manager.

Therefore, I personally do not believe in 'software architects'. And this book supports me in this! I went carefully through the list, diving inside some specific topics and it seems that all of them (or overwhelming majority) lie in the field of responsibility of someone who could be described by job title other than architect. "#12 There is no one-size-fits-all solution" -- fine, development issue. "#17 Business Drives" -- fine, management issue. And the the brightest gem of all: "#80 Dont Be a Problem Solver".
Fair enough, they're different concepts, but very closely related, and I fail to see how evolution could work without natural selection.
dirty and violent? here, have my money :)
you expected worse? How can you give them 9 when they just changed their TOS and only reverted it when people kicked up a fuss
Only the people with lots of time on their hands would bother registering. I don't think these are the people we want dominating HN.
Motorola KRZR K1 Gold Unlocked
Motorola KRZR K1 Gold is the updated presentation of the Motorola with multitasking features and glamorous look. If you are looking of change of your phone then you can have the deal at keepontalking at an affordable price.
I think there are two points to that: the first one is the interest on that loan, which compounds and could end up to be several times the actual amount, the second is that the dollar has devalued significantly because of all this further increasing the deficit in case a part of the debt is in another currency.

If you spend 5% on top of your GDP annually (if it is that much I can't verify) and you do that for two decades you're in hock for a full years worth of GDP. If you think about GDP as your whole salary before taxes and costs then you can see how long it would take you to pay back that loan.

I hope that's all correct, I'm nowhere near an economist but that's how I read it.
GM, Chrysler seek billions more, to cut more jobs
Interview With Oren Todoros - Founder Of HYPick.com
Here is an interesting interview with Oren Todoros - founder of HYPick.com:
Morally Wrong iPhone App Pricing?
Different Charms of the Chiang Mai Walking Street
Top Things You Can Do with Client Virtualization
Top 10 Things You Can Do with Client Virtualization (in no particular order)
School research portal raised $ 2.25 million in it's second round of funding
Or perhaps when ill we feel a greater need for companionship?
Here's a very quick and dirty one for Ruby:

require 'zlib'

base = "whatever"

salt = "whatever"

Zlib.crc32(base + salt).to_s(36)

This will generate 6-7 character strings. Not sure how likely collisions are, but they should be rare enough that a simple check/regenerate should work.
Sweet Tooth Fairy ~sweet wishes granted
Your local Provo bakery, The Sweet Tooth Fairy, offers unique and beautiful cakes for any occasion. Visit our Provo bakery for all your cake needs.
There are no such thing as "best practices". What's "best" always depends on circumstances.

As such, this is perhaps useful as a list of advice to software architects (basically senior senior developers, in my experience), but only with a huge disclaimer that you must figure out for yourself which bits to apply in your current circumstances.

Why is that disclaimer always missing from list of best practices, even when those lists (like this one) contain self-contradictory examples?