skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>At some point, when you become really good at something (almost anything), you realise that a lot of your own knowledge now comes from explaining the basics to people who don't know anything. By forcing yourself to redo the basics, you get fresh insight on a level that someone new to whatever activity simply can't appreciate because they don't have X years experience with which to consider things.

I'm not sure it works that way. I'm very good at one or two things myself, but I don't really find that any additional knowledge now cames to me from explaining the basics to newcomers.

Rather, it's one of these (depending on the person):

1) when you become really good, you realise how much you still don't know, so you don't find it insulting of hilarious that other people don't know even the basis...

2) people motivated and devoted enough to get really good don't really care for the politics and the elitism anyway. They just care about the subject matter, and have no problem explaining it to a newb (and some love their field so much, you can't get them to STOP explaining it!).
I also created a very rspec like bdd library, called tclspec: https://github.com/arthurschreiber/tclspec
Where is the stable, open source CardDAV & CalDAV server, equivalent to Courier IMAP/POP?

All I can see are Zimbra, some other half-finished Exchange replacements or PHP monstrosities, or an unmaintained mod_caldav for Apache.

All I want is another piece of the Courier suite that integrates with my existing infrastructure, and uses the same modular authentication, TLS certificates etc.

I don't want to maintain lots of different stacks in lots of different languages each with their own peculiar auth schemes.

Perhaps I should just move the whole damn setup to Zimbra, but at that point it might as well just be Exchange.
Your definition falls down when faced with real world problems. I can write a 'perfect' chess program in less than a day that could easily run on a PC, however it's run time would make it useless in the real world. Crossing the Atlantic is an easy problem now, but that does not mean it was easy 500 years ago even though mathematically nothing has changed. And in 500 years computer vision is probably going to be considered a vary easy problem often done as a high school level project, but that does not mean it's easy now.
Yep, me too. Courier IMAPD (at least the Debian stable packages) works just fine. But where's the equivalent software for tasks, calendar and contacts?
FeedGrabbr – Display stories from any RSS feeds on your website
I'm a CS major and coded all my life. The best way to learn is just to give yourself tasks, like building something specific and then try to make it.
From copy and paste you just learn the syntax, which is useful but not that much. From building something from scratch you learn the principles which is far more important.
Fun. I like that a lot :)

In addition to that, I love being a "creator" -- when I do programming and writing (no matter if I'm creating the product or the sales material) -- there's a substantial difference between "creating what I've thought up" and "creating what somebody else thought up". Having creative powers, I would rather make my own "dreams" come true, than somebody elses.

I guess what also drives me is "time freedom" -- that I can choose to work less, and spend more time with my kids, if I want to.

So for me, autonomy, freedom, creativity are at least some keywords.
I'm not sure. One first step would be to define whether you're talking about simply revenue models or business models. (I see revenue models as how you make money, wheras business models also incorporate elements like marketing. So "freemium" is a business model but not a revenue model, because being freemium doesn't make you money, but it does help you find customers).

I'd probably focus on pure "revenue models" as they're easier to define. Then you can ask: who pays you (all your users / some of your users / someone other than your users), how often do they pay you, and how much do they pay you? The benefit of this scheme is you can plot different revenue models on a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional graph. Eg, if all of your users regularly pay you a little, you have a B2C subscription business. If someone other than your users occasionally pays you a lot, it's likely you're selling user data or high-end advertising. If your users pay you a one-off, medium amount, it's likely you're in ecommerce or equivalent.

I'd also look at the most frequently used revenue models first, because I think people are sometimes tempted to find "innovative" ways of making money when boring old banner ads would do better. Advertising, subscriptions and selling physical or virtual products seem to be the most proven business models. Affiliate marketing or transaction fees can work, but they're harder to pull off. Stuff like "selling user data", contrary to popular belief, only works if you really know what you're doing (I briefly worked on one of those "subscription food service" ideas with the bright idea of selling customer feedback data - turns out there's a ton of enterprise companies like BrandView already selling far more detailed customer data).

That kind of info is more useful imo because it actually helps people figure out a model that's more likely to work.
Ask HN: Fundable.com vs. RockThePost.com?
Hi guys, was thinking of launching my startup in one of these sites but still unsure on where to do so. I will very much appreciate your guidance.
People seem to be missing the point. While the $37 is a gimmick, the reality is that this investment, in the form of advertising, is worth perhaps tens of thousands of dollars (I am not familiar with the intimate details of Pinboard's traffic, so I could be high or low on this). Google should adopt this model, since they have more advertising inventory than anyone and have the power to instantly propel promising startups to success. They could quickly obtain equity stakes in a vast number of startups that they deem to be promising, and throttle their "investment" based on analytics.
What I learned from being rejected by PICPC
It's in my bones.

I'll attempt to clarify. I started a business because I had experiences through school that made me think hard about why I was doing what I was doing at all times. Things like endless piles of homework were forced upon me by authority figures I didn't respect, even though I had already mastered the material.

I have this unending urge to learn more; All the time. I started programming with self-taught ActionScript. Then JavaScript/html/css. I spend a lot of time attempting to master my mind (Thinking in different ways/languages) and this has led me to Clojure, CL, Haskell and Erlang.

Show me a company that is receptive to using those languages in production and has a distributed nature. A company that allows it's employees to choose projects and throw their weight behind them. With as few managers as humanly possible. Where collaboration is collaboration and not forced.

The closest I've seen to this mindset is probably Basho. Maybe Valve, but I've never talked to anyone at Valve.

I apologize if I'm not clear or not fully explained. The answer to why my life is forcefully thrust in this direction would require a blog post of massive length that I am not ready to write. An interesting note is that consulting is likely a side effect of not being able to find anywhere I wanted to work.
Advertisements don't cost nearly that much.

My guess would be somewhere in the vicinity of $5-$10/month.. for all ads on all web pages you look at everywhere.

Though I could be off by an order of magnitude, for some people.
Many have suggested editing your robots.txt. This is absolutely the first step you should take. You could try blocking the crawlers by name or limit the request rate with a crawl delay in the robots.txt.

If the crawler ignores your robots.txt, check it's name in your access logs. Often, people build things and set them loose without thinking about the consequences. Many crawlers have a homepage / programmer contact information somewhere on the web. Let them know they are hammering your website.

What is the rate at which requests are being made? Are they making 1000 requests per second? Downloading tons of images? You should probably just ignore it if it is less than 1 request per second.
Usually I would not say something like this, but I hope he gets sued for this. Big time. He claims to sell books to doctors and patients - there is no way he should be allowed to. With no control of the content, chances are big that he gives wrong advice. This make me feel bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CalDAV_and_CardD...

Edit: Everyones favorite company even has some calendar server that runs on linux, i am told: https://trac.calendarserver.org/ Did you try that?
> You learn how useful grocery delivery when you have small children like we do, and Instacart is by far the best option for this.

Woah, I've been reading PG essays and the HN comments by you and the other YC partners for several years but didn't realize you two have kids!! Congratulations! I imagine they'll have incredible futures ahead of them growing up in such an intellectually stimulating environment/family!!

Again, congratulations PG/JL! I'm sure you two will be wonderful parents! :-)
Seems there's a few of us in the position!
I'm doing the same, but iOS development, for Christmas: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4925205
The value of Google is probably way beyond $5-10 a month for most people. I'd imagine they'd be able to charge much more.
Text to speech is easy, right? You just get a bunch of white noise and squirt it out a speaker with a bit of envelope shaping. Short rapid burst is a 'tuh'. Or maybe a 'kuh'. Or a 'puh' or 'duh' or 'buh'. More gentle with a bit of sustain is a 'luh' or 'muh' sound. I had a speech synth on a CP/M computer that did this. You might understand what was being said, if you knew what was being said.

People had a lists of phonemes and improved those.

Then people experimented with different waveforms.

Here's a collection of different voices. (Poor quality sound, unfortunately.)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQOYBNAMHg)

Why did all those people take so long to make the jump to biphones, to smoothing out the joins between individual phonemes?

You had the Japanese with their '5th generation' research who were physically modelling the human mouth, tongue, and larynx, and blowing air through it. (You don't hear much about the Japanese 5th generation stuff nowadays. I'd be interested if there's a list of things that come from that research anywhere.)

Saying "talking computers" is easy; doing it is tricky.

EDIT: (http://www.japan-101.com/business/fifth_generation_computer....)

> By any measure the project was an abject failure. At the end of the ten year period they had burned through over 50 billion yen and the program was terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, the software systems never worked, and the entire concept was then made obsolete by the internet.
on the other hand site.com/description combined with the habit of writing urls in english has allowed me to navigate a tremendous number of websites in languages I don't speak.
Online collaborative LaTeX editor
Yahoo Looking to Acquire Teen-Founded News Summarization App Summly
The biggest problem is that clients on those sites want you to build them facebook in two weeks for $300. People willing to work for this type of client are your run of the mill php spaghetti coders. They tend to attract the worst of both coders and clients.

I agree with jefflinwood's comment. Setting a price floor at a reasonable rate will weed out the "$300 for facebook" clients. I'm not sure, however, how you would weed out the bad coders.
I hate it as much as you do but it's an open market and wrong advice is not criminal.

definetly a hacker though
Pentadactyl and Vimium if you want a "real browser" underneath too.
How is this better than mutt with EDITOR=vim ?

Not a smartass question.
> I need it because I don’t need the government telling me what I don’t need.

So why aren't you using drugs? The government is pretty straightforward on those too. That's just a crappy excuse.

Apart from that, this post is an overall crap too and you just (unsuccessfully) try to justify owning a gun by saying 'just in case' and promoting fear of government, opressors, cops, neighbours, everyone.

I don't own a gun, probably never will, and I forbid my children to play with toy guns. There's plenty of other things that they can play with in order to make bonds with their peers, not get afraid of them.

Peace.
I would love to see how CloudFlare response to this. If they do. From my own testing Cloudflare definitely isn't the fastest CDN, but it has been improving since start of the year and now to an acceptable standard for a CDN. Especially it is free.
In theory, the "fixed cost" should be captured by the $50 term.
I did that, too. But I constantly switch back and forth when I'm writing German code (think LaTeX). Pure coding is fine, and so is pure prose, but whenever the two mix, its a pain.
Drugs are not an effective defense against an oppressive government. Guns are. That's pretty clearly expressed in the article.
Rather than talk about gun control, yes or no, why not talk about gun control as opposed to something else. That something else might be mental health.

If you manage mental health, you have guns that aren't going to massacre people.

If you restrict guns, you still have mentally ill people who are a danger to themselves and others and who are leading miserable lives.

Go to the root cause, not the symptoms. This is a public health issue. Medical solutions are going to be more effective in saving and improving lives.
Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs. All have TOS and things like Apps can have contracts. Apps has a DoD clearance.

There is a legal distinction between subcontracting out services and sharing data. One that has no difference from paying for a service contact that allows a vendor to login and fix your db.

There are very few situations where EVERYTHING must be internal.

Google Apps is big in education, so "sharing" data under contract must be legal.
That's quite an interesting take. So do you make your living doing consulting, or do you create products?
government has jets and tanks and whatnot. maybe he should also buy a couple of those, you know, just in case.
Our little startup started it's life at Ole Römers väg (Ole Roemer's road) in Lund, so I've looked up a few versions of this story. The one I like the best* has a more dismal tone: Ole discovered the finite speed of light, but was outmaneuvered by Jean-Dominique Cassini who had a complex theory based on tables. I sometimes use it when I want to explain how important it is to try and see past "social truth" to find the real one.

I can's say which version is more accurate, but there's a scientific inaccuracy in the OP that makes me a bit skeptical of the author: The distance between Jupiter and the Earth will have no impact on how long Io is hidden behind Jupiter. It's the change in distance been Jupiter and Earth from when Io disappears behind Jupiter to when it reappears some minutes later that will affect the timing.

So IMHO the illustration in the OP is wrong, the timing will be approximately the same in position 1 and 2. Position 2 should be moved so that it is at the far right (or left) of Earths orbit.

(*) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/ancestors-einstein.html
Infinite scrolling in itself is considered by some to be a terrible UI pattern.

I understand the 'need' due to the tiny screen size of most smartphones but why oh why force it down the throat of desktop users?

With infinite scrolling I'm losing one important ability: I can't just check where the scrollbar is and "come back" later to that place. It's hard to explain but it's something I can do very easily. With infinite scrolling I'm screwed.

Couldn't this be solved by serving, right from the start, a page that has a gigantic height (e.g. 5 000 pixels tall or 10 000 pixels or any unit you find suitable) and then if you scroll down "too fast" you see that the stuff is "loading..." ?

This wouldn't be "infinite" but I sure wouldn't be as confused.
Which most people? The 2/3rds still using Hotmail and Yahoo for everything?

Charging much more would mean targeting a completely different market segment with a fraction of the size of Google's current search and email users.

It's a strategy to consider, given the "desirability" of GMail users vs Yahoo users[1], but behavior of most people is highly likely to change when going from free to not free.

1. http://blog.opower.com/2012/06/the-triumph-of-gmail-how-yaho...
Good questions, but hard to answer of course. I'd say the singularity is better if it encourages people to go into science as a result and try to make it happen. Much like how science fiction sometimes inspires technology.

Is that happening? I don't know. I'm worried that people are so confident that the singularity is not only inevitable, but just around the corner, that they're simply buckling up for the ride.

I would say that it doesn't matter much; we only have to live with the consequences of the belief for a few decades.... but then again failed predictions don't often discourage those who believed.
Interesting on how no replies have been received on how it works. Mind it, I have not installed it, but, is there a server(s) to connect to, is it peer-to-peer? Care to provide more details? Thanks!
The pragmatic maxim:

"Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."
--C.S. Pierce
People are living longer than ever, but what they are dying of is changing
While I have no experience with screen sharing, letting other people on a skype conversation see your screen works quite well even with the old Skype 2 client on Linux. (Well, at least it used to - the last couple of weeks had Skype conference quality deteriorate horribly, on all of Linux, Windows and Mac.
The geo-location isn't 100% accurate, but you can type your location manually or choose one from the suggestions list below.
No it isn't. S/He said "primary school age children" and some kind of parental supervision is definitely necessary here. You can't give young children a choice in many areas - including food for example - as they don't have the skills, experiences and capacity to make an informed choice.

Regarding the automatic blocking of porn, I agree that this shouldn't happen, but when it comes to children I believe that good parenting is one of the parents being selective until the child is grown up enough to make their own decisions
I love it. I do it over going out with friends, going to the movies, or just about anything else you can name. And I have. But its not so much the business part as it is inventing and doing something. Business is just the vehicle to get things done and part of it.
Ask HN: Found someone building my SaaS idea, does that mean idea is validated?
I'm about to start development on a new SaaS idea. The 'market' is not new, there are already some products out there - but they are crap.

I was planning on doing a landing page, and 'testing' the idea to confirm there is a need for a newer/better product.

I just found a competitor who is doing exactly what I'm planning on. They have a cool landing page, and an open beta.

Does this validate my idea? Should I just jump in and build the MVP product?

I am aware that it might be the blind leading the blind if they did not 'test' the idea themselves - but given the market already exists - I'm thinking it should be reasonably safe?

Thoughts?
Ask HN: Why is this "Ask HN: " not in the Ask HN section?
I make my living consulting. I took a couple months off to try and build a product with a friend, but it didn't work out for non-product reasons, so I moved to SF and started looking for new contracts a couple weeks ago.
> My interpretation of the Second Amendment that is that the Constitution explicitly grants Americans the right to private gun ownership because it is the last line of defense against an oppressive government.

> I believe it is for the government to be afraid of its people, not the other way around.

HA!

The government is not afraid of you. If you ever tried to actually use your weapon against them, you'd be branded a terrorist (justified or not), and hunted down and killed, or if you are lucky, detained indefinitely.

The logic behind the reasoning in the quote is the same that make people think they can end an oppressive regime (like Iraq or North Korea) by just walking in and killing the leader.

You feel powerful with a weapon in your hand, but the world is more complex than that.
Is he taking a % of the companies or just doing this for exposure for pinboard/public service or...?
I like the simplicity of that gist. Very cool hack.

However if I was to implement a Python to JavaScript compiler, would there be some benefits in transforming the Python AST into a JS AST first?

There are existing code generators such as escodegen that transform that AST to JavaScript code.
What Google Sees in New Hire, Futurist Ray Kurzweil
> It's like Google Docs for any application

Isn't this a bit too misleading? The appeal of Google Docs is that two people can work on a spreadsheet at the same time. They can be working on different cells or even different sheets of a workbook. PowWow allows one person to work on a spreadsheet at a time but allows you to quickly and seamlessly switch who is working on it. In other words, only one person can type.
News orgs circulate Facebook profile, photos of wrong shooter
The page seems totally broken in Android. They need to turn off that "join the conversation" modal.
Where else could you get somebody to pay you like fourteen times the median family income to hang out anywhere in the world you please and solve interesting puzzles all day?

Where can you find this $700,000/year software job (assuming median family income of $50k/year as it approximately is in the USA)?
Very cool. You should also graph them next to things like safety and customer service scores and other indicators of quality - and give overall rankings.

Cost is not the only important factor!
I'd do a bit of work promoting your landing page and see if you get any interest.

If you think you can beat this competitor then go for it - or if you think the market is large enough to support both of you and some others.
Indeed infinite scroll is annoying in the presence of footer, or in the case of huge pics to be downloaded, or when doing scroll bookmarking.

Another bad UI pattern at this blogging site is the lack of a home page link. It pushed me to struggle on my tablet just to see who the guy is.
>I Am a Gun Owner. Let’s Talk Gun Control

You're the BS result of an arcane societal obsession of one certain Western country based on an judicially blessed misrepresentation of what their "founding fathers" had in mind on the issue which even in it's original intent is obsolete anyway (e.g people being armed in militias to overthrow a possible repressive government -- a notion that made sense back in the day, but today's government has 1000 times the resources and most gun owners don't care about the government anyway).

So, let's not.
I'm pointing out the false equivalence implied in your "why aren't you using drugs?" not suggesting that a lone individual can stand up to the full might of the US Armed Forces. Several million could, especially if the triggering government issue/event/policy caused defection from within the formal military ranks over to the ad-hoc militia.

Several million drug users mad at the government won't have nearly the same effectiveness.
Nobody said it was criminal. But it is most likely negligent.

If I rely on his books which presumably have no editorial oversight, he'd better hope I don't suffer a loss as a result.
14x worldwide average income makes more sense, which might be an order of magnitude less