skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of secrecy in the industry right now, because most developers see it as a fixed-sum game. Most apps are not technically difficult to duplicate, so saying publicly that your app is making lots of money is asking for others to copy it.
Yes I know, and that confused me little bit at the first.
I'd be very interested to just see a couple of classes (or any substantial chunk of code) written by an emacs "power user" without the narration and tutorial.

I've tried to do this, but it ends up being not very interesting. There is too much breadth; you really need to be familiar with all of emacs' features to be able to use them at the right time. For any given editing task, there are probably only a few features that you need. Learning the rest will save you time, but you only need the features occasionally. This means that you have to read the manual -- a screencast isn't going to help you. Practice is also essential. You need to burn the commands into your muscle memory, otherwise you aren't going to be very fast.

Emacs is like a musical instrument. You have to practice, and you're not going to become a virtuoso overnight.
App Store facing competition from jailbreak app sales?
OK, but the open source project could fix that problem in about thirty seconds.

I think "Patches welcome." sums it up pretty well.

easily kick up the marketing machine a bit, and put this guy out of business

There are actually over a dozen competitors already and I still am going to make a living out of it but, hey, the more the merrier. If you convince them to kick up the marketing machine could you get them to try AdSense on their pages, too? It works well for me on the other free competitors.

The real message that this article conveys is that the best way to avoid competition is to do something nobody cares about.

2.6 million elementary school teachers in US, 2.1 million of them female, average salary $46k, strong continuing employment prospects, minimally BA with about 40% masters, spend $200 to $400 annually on instructional supplies out of personal funds.

I know Silicon Valley, programmers, et al thinks that is a whole lot of nobody. Believe me, that suits me fine -- please continue with doing really important things like making another social network monetized by CPA ads for 18-34 year old males. I'll be in the cafe working on getting the next 1,500 paying customers.

Why is the word list, the main point of interaction with the application, a tiny drop-down listbox?

Because the text area confused people -- they'd try to split up cells with spaces or commas (not possible since other users wanted spaces/commas in their cells and don't even think about asking these users to learn escape keys), they'd try to drag in photo albums and wonder why it didn't work, and on 50 ~ 250 word lists they had difficulty scrolling up and down to find whether they had already typed a particular entry or not. For example, if you were playing US states and capitals bingo, and you forgot whether you had added Montana yet, there was really no good way to check without all the words being visible at once.

That was a tricky requirement when some users want over a hundred words because they understand bingo math and wanted to prolong the game to last a class period.

Anyhow, alphabetized combo boxes turn out to be very easy to search to verify presence of a particular item and also completeness of a set of items, regardless of insertion order. (Alphabetized text areas, on the other hand, have a nasty feature of making something that someone just typed vanish inexplicably much of the time. Then the user thinks they did something wrong, and they get upset.)
True, but if an burger joint run by one person started making that much money within several months of being conceived, I'd be at least a little bit interested.
I've noticed HN appear in a few "spammer lists" over the last month or so.

Usually the price to spam into here is very very high because it is, by comparison, quite difficult.

Im tempted to agree with you - it is a spammer going after the good money testing a new bot.
Yeah, but most people that are good with emacs are good programmers, and good programming rarely involves a ton of rapid-fire text editing. (Typing new pieces of text, yes. But randomly jumping around files and editing small pieces of text? That's pretty uncommon.)

Anyway, people worry too much about this. Read the manual and practice the commands "in real life" (even if it means a trip to the manual to refresh your memory), and you'll quickly become able to edit effectively enough to not worry about editing mechanics anymore. It also helps to be a good typist, but that's not very fun to talk about.

Practice makes perfect.
The best part about this - Paul calls out the lawyers you should use. Thank you, thank you, thank you a thousand times for this. (We got standard corporate attorneys - I've spent almost $60,000 on legal expenses between incorporation, option plan, and IP protection. Probably could have done it all for under $20K with the right attorney from the get-go.)

I would love to see a sample convertible debt document in addition to the Series AA documents.
Effective textbook for migrating to Objective-C from C++
Effective textbook for people migrating to Objective-C from C++
Yes, one video details the interaction between each of emacs' 3 million lines of code.
I am not sure why people are spending their time developing web frameworks that only let you do less than existing web frameworks.

I ranted about this in detail here:

http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20F...

(My thoughts about web frameworks start near the middle.)
Yeah, I too know this feeling. I started out my career working at a BigCo making a nice salary/stock/bonus. After 3 years there I left to join a early startup (engineer #4) and took a 30% paycut so I could get more stock.

2.5 years later and I've earned a bunch more stock grants, but my salary has stayed flat (my choice -- we were on a good trajectory so I always preferred stock options over salary bumps). Now our prospects are not looking good and I doubt there is any upside to the stock.

I definitely considered this scenario when deciding to join the startup, and I always rationalized it as "at the very least it will be a good experience". Well, it definitely was good experience, and I learned a lot more at the startup than the BigCo, but as I consider my next career move I'm not exactly sure what the right move is.

Who knows, w/ the economy how it is I will probably just have to take what I can get :).
One of the ways Askimet works is shared-secret-key authentication using your email address. Notice how sites collect your email address when you submit a comment but they don't usually publish it. However, they do send your email address to Askimet. As a result, we can get a fairly good approximation of whether a comment is spam or not simply by checking to see if the email address was used for comments previously flagged as spam or ham. The more non-spam comments--and especially the more ham comments--that the email address has in the corpus, the less likely it is that the new message is spam.

Now, imagine I am a spammer. I need to submit some automated comments that don't look like spam so that my spammy comments wll later get accepted. There are a variety of ways I can do this. The easiest is to give the user a generic compliment like "Wow, this was a great blog post! Thanks for publishing it." The comment doesn't add to the discussion but the blog owner is often reluctant to delete it because (a) it strokes his ego, (b) there is no way for him to tell if it is automatically generated or not. In fact, if his spam filter preemptively classified it as spam, he might even override the filter and reclassify it as ham; this would be a huge win for the spammer-to-be. Another way to do this is to automatically scrape a comment from another discussion about the page like Reddit, Digg, Twitter, or FriendFeed and submit it as a blog comment on the original page. A third way is to pay somebody a (very) small amount of money to read the blog post and write a comment (possibly using some fill-in-the-blanks response template system like those used in call centers.)

It works the other way too. If I want your comments to start getting flagged as spam then I should start submitting spam-like comments in your name. Then, users will start classifying my forged spam comments as spam and the automatic classifiers will start automatically classifying your valid comments as spam.
Why do you think this is spam? I often use a bogus email address and fake name for a service I don't intend to use frequently, like blog comments.
Also, that discussion there seemed focus solely on the point of STORAGE.

He seemed to be concerned about bandwidth also, for which S3, frankly, is not cheap.
Boxee brings back Hulu with bleeding-edge software update
Google vs. competitors in Asia
(you probably shouldn't try angel investing unless you think of yourself as rich)

I think there is some legal definition of "rich" below which companies can't raise capital from individuals without issuing registered stock. Something like an individual must have at least $1m in assets or income of at least $200k/year I think.
wow that's some high quality bullshit :D
I forgot to add the corollary. Much like computers will soon be able to solve CAPTCHAs better than people, automated spamming systems will eventually be able to generate comments that are as good or better than human-submitted comments. In other words, we can expect comments that are generated by spammers to eventually become valuable enough that we want to retain them instead of filtering them away. That isn't the reality today but it could be soon.

You might have a discussion in your blog's comments and then realize that everybody in the conversation is a robot except you. And you will learn something from those robots and/or lose an argument with them, when they get really good.

Eventually, you will be able to post a rough draft of your blog post, and the spam robots will start up a good conversation about it in the comments. Then, based on their feedback, you can revise it into the final draft (if the robots haven't already given you a link to a blog post that refuted your point or made it better than you can).

As a final step, we might notice that not only are the best comments are written by spam robots, but the best blogs are spam blogs too. Right now, people are blogging-for-adsense manually; in the future, Google will be able to blog-for-adsense itself, cutting out the authors.

Today, if a site wants its user-generated content (comments in this case) to retain its value, it needs to start filtering out the low-value content, regardless of whether it was generated by a spammer or a well-intentioned user. For example, If I add a comment to your blog "Great blog post!" on your blog, you should probably delete it, even if you know I am not a spammer. Unfortunately, if you do that, legitimate users who see their complimentary comments get deleted might react negatively (e.g. stop commenting or complain loudly, generating even worse comments). So, we can see that the spammers who are generating low-value comments already have the ability to drive away your valuable commentators if those commentators occasionally submit low-value comments.
Disrespectful? So what -- Joel's comments sound accurate, particularly after reading the letter. The phrase "architecture astronaut" ran through my head over and over while reading the email. Along with arrogant ass.

In particular, this line: "I was a world class expert in
graph theory, analysis of algorithms, sparse matrix algorithms for linear systems, numerical analysis, and non-linear multi-variate time series analyis before arriving at Microsoft to write language compilers." Any one of the set {graph theory, algorithm analysis, numerical analysis, linear systems, and non-linear multivariate ts} is a full PhD and a full life on its own. Nobody is an expert in all 5.

Frankly, he sounds like the sort of person startups in particular should stay as far away from as humanly possible. I worked for someone like this at my last startup and he was a cancer. But he could hold endless meetings, drop jargon like a master, demean fellow employees, and act as a general barrier to accomplishing useful work.
How many users would you have?

Because I'm tempted to say you should just try one of these cheapie web hosts and see if that fits your needs. For example, and I have no affiliation with this company other than using them a few times, webhost4life has an account with unlimited* bandwidth and unlimited* storage for $6.95 a month (http://www.webhost4life.com/linux.asp). That's a pretty standard price for linux based hosting.

The disadvantage to these types of deals is that they stuff a bunch of websites all on one server which makes performance slow. But it sounds like you'd only have a 1 or 2 page site so that might not be an issue for you.

* when these providers say unlimited there is often a clause in the fine print that sets a limit. You should check before signing up for one of these services.
HTML 4.2
512 MB Slicehost VPS: $38

Wordpress.org software: $0

Knowing that your blog can end up on top page of Reddit and HN simultaneously without slowdown or swapping: priceless.

(Though I'm sort of glad that I decided to put the blog on its own VPS "just in case". As in "just in case it gets burned into ashes by a traffic spike, the people who actually pay me money will be completely unaware of my technical difficulties happening on the other server").
This looks so scary.

we can expect comments that are generated by spammers to eventually become valuable enough that we want to retain them instead of filtering them away

What is the point? Why spammers would submit a valuable comment? Just to be kind of a door for them to enter through later, and nobody will think it's a spam?
Thanks for this, it really cleared up a lot of questions I had after watching the livecast of the conference.
Humanized no longer even owns Songza and we were fans of Songza but it's not getting iterated as fast we'd like so we thought we'd throw our hat in the ring =).

If we built a better and more compelling service would you really care? That's the goal. The only thing stopping us from doing better is Songza not being lazy, don't we deserve it then in that case? We're clearly at a loss otherwise. This is not a startup, it's a project.
> (Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)

That I can answer. In a recent episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel Spolsky mentioned that old Excel Basic story as an example of dealing with self-declared software architects. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact episode number and the transcription wiki doesn't have it yet. But he basically didn't say anything that he hasn't already said in his "Two Stories" article (link below).

(I don't know if this new discussion is particularly interesting or relevant, but that's why it suddenly erupted.)

Links:

Stack Overflow blog/podcast: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/

Transcription wiki: https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/?W4

Old Joel article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html
Eric Schmidt Tells Charlie Rose Google Is "Unlikely" To Buy Twitter
This is actually the problem with a lot of the W3C standards (I should know I've worked on 3).

Often times the working groups identify a problem that needs to be solved, but there isn't a solution. The web moves so fast there is this great desire to bring things together as soon as new trend emerges. However, the point of standards is for a lot of experimentation to have happened so that some consensus about what works and what doesn't can happen.

Doug is absolutely right, standards and research don't mix.

I believe this is one of the reasons one of the standards I worked on (WCAG 2) took around 8 years to create. Starting WCAG 2 hot on the heels of WCAG 1 meant that the industry hadn't figured out how to do accessibility, for whatever socio-political reasons. As such the 8 years was more the time it took for patterns to emerge as to good practice than it was the working group's inability to understand the problem, or apply appropriate definitions and constraints.
Ask HN: Is there code-block-enabled chat out there for programming teams?
I'd trade my kingdom for the ability to GChat my co-founders some Python and have the formatting look right.
You're thinking of the SEC "accredited investor" rule:

http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33ActRls/rule501.html

I'm not an investor and have only moderate experience with funding, but I've brought this up in lots of HN threads about investing and haven't seen it shot down; I was also involved in a negotiation debacle that doubled the value of some options I held in a company that sold to another private company (I had left, had non-expiring options, and would thus have been a non-qualified outside investor had I exercised them, or some-such).

The rule is basically: $1MM net, or $200k ($300k with your spouse) income for the last 2 years.

Even corporations need to be accredited to buy, so you can't just start a consultancy and invest your profits into angel syndicates, unless the principals are themselves accredited or the business has a such a huge amount of net assets that the principals would certainly be accredited anyways.

Again, I feel weird every time I bring this up, because what do I know? But this appears to be the rule.
Is this some kind of security problem?
$60k on incorporation, option plan, and IP?

You know more about this stuff than I do, but that sounds crazy high. Is the breakdown like, 10%/80%/10%? The one of these that I can see spending money on is the option plan.
What You Can Measure You Can Improve
When you submit a comment to a blog, you usually get to include a link to a website along with the comment. Usually the commentator's name is linked to that website in the resulting comment page. If my spam comment is good, a very small number of people will click my username and go to the site I choose. The more comments I get published, the more clicks I get on my link. If that is a spam link, I get paid for every one of those clicks.

Or, a spammer might generate some good comments just to get the comment classifier to mis-classify a blatantly spammy comment that will be submitted later.
Yeah, I stopped watching after 1.ii hoping that maybe someone else would upload the complete set of videos in a more organized manner.
You are more than a genius!

Do you have any publications or a blog?
I am very interested in learning more from you... you look like a scientist!

EDIT: But there is a point here that you did not really mention!
You assumed that spammers will be smarter, but spam filters will still stupid?
Don't you think that as spammers build a smarter bots, the spam-fighters will build a smarter spam filters?
I think the thing compounding the problem is that there has never been a well priced, small laptop with a decent battery life. I mean I can pay $450 for a Aspire One with 6 hours battery life, whilst before I could pay $800 for a 'cheap' laptop (like the dell latitudes) that had 3 hour battery life and was the bastard child of a real laptop. My laptop cost around $1100 dollars, yet it was like more than 4 times more powerful than the latitudes (thank god they got discontinued).

I would pay $400 for a netbook, most of which aren't that bad. 1.6 ghz processor, which some have the intel 945gm in, which in my 3.2ghz laptop can push 1080p, so something like an aspire one with a 945gm could easily push 720p to an external screen, which means it can essentially do everything except like post 2007 high-end games. However when you think about it, what moron is going to try and play like Far Cry 2 on a 9 inch screen?
See, this was a very nice demonstration. How am I supposed to tell if thepanister is a robot or not? Based on the content of this message it could go either way.
Testing Market Demand with Facebook Ads
LOOOL
But I edited it to look a man-made. :)

Please re-read it again.
HTML5 seems different than ECMAScript 4 in that it proposes substantial, widely beneficial, updates to HTML that would do the web itself a lot of good.

Standardized, yet open, enhancements for the web: video, audio, sockets, cross-window communication, and more. Sure, it's ambitious, but it stands to push the web forward in noticeable ways.

If we take IE out of the equation, a lot of HTML5 features have already hit Safari, Firefox, (opera?). The primary drag on HTML5 is IE, but even Microsoft has embraced HTML5 to some extent (it describes HTML5 features in its documentation for IE7/8).
When the spammers write comments that are better than people's comments, why would you want to filter out the spammers' comments? Wouldn't you want to filter out the people's comments instead?

Imagine a time where we have a CAPTCHA that is impossible for people to solve, so that we only allow computers to submit comments.
I bought a whole book to tell me the same information as in the PDF. I like this PDF better.

The book was odd, though: Not one mention of exceptions or error handling in a whole book.

Sigh
10/10/40. I got bad advice. Everything's overbuilt because our guy, even though he's a member of the IVCA, didn't have standard docs.
Allowing users to:

only comment without links up to 10 karma,
submit at 20 karma,
comment with links at 50 karma, etc.

sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

Initially one proves themselves in discussion, then they can bring new ideas to the table. By setting the limits at relatively low levels it doesn't discourage new participants.

As a relatively new member of the community, I believe that this is important because you don't want the community to become static any more than you want to get overrun a la digg, reddit, etc.

A few days registration won't work, though, because the bad guys will just start setting up accounts, keeping them dormant for the waiting period, and then do their dastardly deeds. Besides, karma is a better measure than seniority.
If $24k for IP is bad advice, what do you think the right number would have been?
Nicely done. Apple-centric, but then most people going to objective C are going for Apple.
Is this any kind of news at all? Wouldn't Eric Schmidt have to be made of stupid to tell Charlie Rose that Google was likely to buy Twitter?

From Michael Lewis' "Wall Street on the Tundra", writing about Iceland:

“They wanted to know,” says Shearer, “why our share price had risen so rapidly over the past couple of days. So I laughed and said, ‘I think you’ll find the reason is that Mr. Einarsson, the chairman of Kaupthing, said two days ago, like an idiot, that he was going to make a bid for Singer and Friedlander.’” In August 2005, Singer and Friedlander became Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander, and Shearer quit, he said, out of fear of what might happen to his reputation if he stayed.
I think part of the reason might be is that Bram has supposedly self-diagnosed himself to having Asperger's Syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
I have been meaning to make a blog but all my computing time has been spent building some software that I will release soon. Email me (brian@briansmith.org) and I will send you a link when it is ready. Include what kind of phone you have (e.g. Nokia 1100, Android) and I will send you a free copy of the software if it works on your phone.

(This is an open offer to anybody: if you are the first person with your model of phone to email me, I will give you a free license if/when it works on your phone. Also notice how spammy this comment is.)
What's the word you'd want to use for "uninformed navel-gazing"? This seems to me to miss the mark in so many ways that I've actually flagged it; no good could come of discussing it.