skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A) Your superpower should be a statement of fact.

B) Your superpower should be something that is potentially useful to someone else.

So, for example:

Hi, I'm ----, and I build online communities.

Hi, I'm ----, and I have the most popular blog on NYC restaurants.

Hi, I'm ----, and I connect artists with patrons.

(I was there when Seth thought this up. Actually, I think the reason he came up with the metaphor is because I was doing a really bad job at introducing myself to others. So we decided that my superpower was that I've seen everything on the Internet, so now that's how I have to introduce myself to others. At least until I have a better superpower.)
Create value for the other guy with your "superpower".

Hi, my name's Clark Kent, and I'm really handy to know if you're frequently kidnapped.

In a business setting, something a little more prosaic. You've probably heard someone say something like "Let me know if you ever have a problem with ..." before, right? People say that because it works. Mental note: if I ever have an X, knowing this guy helps me un-X.
Diabetes, go with diabetes and you'll make ten times more.

Or anything health related.
plt-scheme has a wonderful library for "world" programming. It allows you to get user input and makes it relatively easy (although some of the terminology is a little odd) to make things that move/do stuff graphically.
http://download.plt-scheme.org/doc/371/html/teachpack/world....
Most people buy with their emotions, and use logic to justify the purchase. To maximize the number of people that get into that emotional buying state, you give out sales info in several different ways to cover most readers.

For something like a $79.95 ebook on parrot training, it would probably take you a fair amount of convincing to buy. That's why they give you a long list of reasons in storytelling format. If it were free, you would need less convincing, and the copy would be drastically shorter.
To my understanding: When git looks for changes it scans all the tracked files (checking timestamps before hashing) and hashing those that look changed. Commits generate patches for all changed files, then generate hashes for each file, then hash the set of files in each directory for a hash of the directory, repeated until the state of the entire repository is collected into one hash. This is normally pretty fast, and has a lot of advantages as a way to represent state changes in the project, but it also means that if the project has several huge binary files sitting about (or thousands of large binaries, etc.), it will have to hash them as well. This requires a full pass through the file any time that they look like they might have changed, new files are added, etc. (Mercurial works very similarly, though the internal data structures are different.) Running sha1 on a 342M file just took about 9 seconds on my computer; this goes up linearly with file size.

Git deals with the state of the tree as a whole, while Perforce, Subversion, and some others work at a file-by-file level, so they only need to scan the huge files when adding them, doing comparisons for updates, etc. (Updating or scanning for changes on perforce or subversion does scan the whole tree, though, which can be very slow.)

You can make git ignore the binary files via .gitignore, of course, and then they won't slow source tracking down anymore. You need to use something else to keep them in sync, though. (Rysnc works well for me. Unison is supposed to be good for this, as well.) You can still track the file metadata, such as a checksum and a path to fetch it from automatically, in a text file in git. It won't be able to do merges on the binaries, but how often do you merge binaries?
There's the thing between how good you think you are and how good you are when compared to others.

To be honest if you're any smart you will, no matter what, eventually realise that you're actually pretty bad. There's so much you don't know yet and lots and lots of things that bug you because you know you could have done better! This will keep you on toes which in turn makes you better than others. Conversely, it'll be quite a shock to a smart person to realise that others really aren't that smart, far from it.

This phenomenon has actually been studied: after doing some tests good students tend to think they did bad and assume that everyone else is at least on the same level, while bad students tend to think that they're actually pretty good and then assume that most other people must have done it worse.
I liked the article -- full of good advice.

My only nit is the author's bold-facing every fourth word or so. It got distracting.

One of the harder things to do in a large company when introducing agile is to get people back to the whiteboard. Large non-agile teams are so used to having their own electronic tools and document templates that when you ask them to work "without a crutch"? It's like speaking in Klingon.
Do you remember it or is it just in and out?
> The assumption most people seem to base their conclusions on is that making drugs illegal reduces consumption. All empirical evidence so far - even from less biased sources than the wildly free-market Cato institute - shows that this is not the case. In countries where more drugs are legal, consumption actually goes down.

We have empirical evidence on cannabis, true. In that case (Netherlands) statistics say that "everything is roughly better", but differences are so small that it's difficult to say it's due to the drug laws.

We do not have empirical evidence on drugs that make you physically and/or psychologically addicted after one shot.

And there should be no toying with this. Getting of cannabis after years of using it is a piece of cake compared to getting of heroin after less than five shots. It's a totally different story.
This is an interesting and apparently culture-dependent difference. Can you elaborate a bit on this, please?

How it works, and why is it like that? What's the mentality behind people's minds there? Does it hold for everyone, just geeks or everyone but geeks?

What do you have to say in order to look good? How truthful -- I mostly agree with the article -- can you stay while still keeping other people thinking you're good?
Business model: none.

Life expectancy: one week.
I would be fine with this if hard drugs weren't "no return tickets".
I think that's a great way to put it, better than any of the other approaches listed here. Useful without seeming arrogant. Actually, it comes across as being generous.

"I do X. Let me know if you ever need ..."
Who is going to help me with the Jellyfish secrets eBook?
But "hackers > business people" does indeed hold when it comes to hacking.

We're not trying to tell the business people that we could do their jobs better than they. That would be arrogance.
Great article, spot on. Given the high-tech nature of my (our) work, I find it amusing that whenever people ask me, "what software do you use to track X" or "how do you manage your tasks efficiently" I just say, "I use a whiteboard."

And it works too.
I don't remember the specifics of every webpage, but I remember the general idea and enough about the page so that I could find it again. So, for example, if someone wanted to see an example of what the financial assumptions for a startup should look like, I remember that Guy Kawasaki is the one who posted about that on his blog and I could find the link in two or three minutes.
Browsing tags, I wonder why porn hasn't invaded twitter
Here is another take on targeting a narrow niche from an interview by Andrew Warner (also about selling to bird lovers - an interesting coincidence):

"When Bob Dunlap of ClickBank told me that one of his clients made $500,000 last year selling an ebook about how to attract humming birds to your home, I had to interview him."

http://blog.mixergy.com/sell-ebooks/

The article for that post pretty much outlines exactly what parrotsecrets.com has done.

Important part of business like this is the role of affiliate marketing in driving traffic to these sites.
Affiliate costs (that can be very substantial) should be factored into how much these sites make.
>>> It would actually be an enormous improvement if these agencies just said what they wanted to say through blogs, rather than filtering it through "journalists". <<<

But as you wrote, they will just say what they want to say, which might non necessarily by the truth...so while it might be entertaining to read such a blog, ultimately I want to know what each party is saying, also with some background research, and that is a work of a journalist. Of course, another issue is whether current journalism plays such a role...
Great analysis.

Back before I got a Mac, I'd go to Apple's web site just to look at all their redesigned pages whenever something new came out. It was beautiful looking at how they displayed their products, and the manner in which they'd move things around to display everything as prettily as possible.

Now I do have a Mac, and I have friends who do the same thing I once did. Reading Apple.com is like reading a glamorous car brochure: you get the same thrill looking at the way they present information.
Americans and their obsession with drugs is so strange. We're 5% of the population, yet we consume over 50% of all illegal drugs. Something tells me that this cultural inclination for drug usage makes it much more difficult to justify legalization. We're a country that can barely handle a free-market debt system -- I don't even want to know what we would do with a liberalized drug market.

Then again, I am one of those people who doesn't do drugs, drink, smoke, or eat processed foods, because I understand that it's extremely expensive (in that you lose long-term quality of life / life expectancy - the single most important non-renewable resource for a living creature); I am obviously a minority...
Pattie Maes: Unveiling game-changing wearable tech [video]
Git IS a key/value store database. (A filesystem is a kind of database, too, of course.) There's a good summary of the internal data structures here -- http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual....

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, tracking metadata (path and sha1 hash) for large binary files in git and otherwise ignoring them via .gitignore works quite well. I'm pretty sure the "right tool" is either rysnc or something similar.
Victus Spiritus: Stewart vs. Cramer, comedians chasing financial consultants
Great Grub Spots for all the SXSW-ers
If the economy is going to recover, Americans need to start taking risks again.
Lisp is a multi-paradigm language. You can write code as imperatively as you need with it. Use the functional paradigm "by default" and then revert to imperative where it makes sense.

If you wanted to make a game in Haskell, which is purely functional, then your concerns would be more appropriate.
That would be legalization, he uses the word decriminalization.
Perforce only scans through everything when you update or scan for changed files, but mostly tracks changes file by file. Git (and mercurial) work with the state of the tree as a whole for most operations, because this makes handling searching, branching, merging, etc. much nicer, but it means that when you have gigantic binary files just sitting around, it takes time scanning them as well.
Everyone missing the obvious thing here. It's not about the parrot site at all. It's about Cringely's site. Cringely has written a post about how to make a lot of money doing something easy. Cringely's post gets a lot of traffic. (Currently #1 on HN.) Cringely's site hosts ads. Cringely (and Mrs. Cringely) make lots of money. The parrot site is to Cringely's site what parrots are to the parrot site.
Ask HN: Would you like to have a whiteboard for HN comments?
I wonder how many Hacker News participants would like to use visual diagrams or charts, perhaps simply hand-drawn, to add to their comments on submitted links. I tend to think visually, but I hardly ever show people sketches or diagrams in online discussions because the typical technology for online discussion isn't friendly for that.

Today, most all of us have one possible workaround for sharing visual information in comments.

1) Draw a drawing or plot a chart with any convenient software (including hand-drawing software) installed on one's own computer.

2) Save the drawing as a file in some highly universal format browsers can handle, e.g. .GIF.

3) Post the drawing to the Web on some website one can submit files to.

4) Post the link in the comment and hope readers follow the link.

That's not all bad. That's much better than most of us can do during a live telephone conversation. But maybe more convenience would bring more diagrams into online discussion, and improve the quality of discussion of some issues. Edwin Tufte

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1

of course has great writings about how to use diagrams to analyze and present data better, and there are many other guides to that important topic.

P.S. One good example of online use of diagrams to dispel a common misconception is

http://www.iapsych.com/iqach.pdf

which expresses an idea that can apply to other issues about correlations.
This is better than just hiring an MCSE, but, having dabbled in open source software, I've seen a lot of WTF-worthy code written by people who would fulfill all of those criteria (well, I couldn't honestly say whether you could hold a conversation with them).

Is there any such thing as a headhunter who is also a hacker? That would probably be the best solution for the MBA-types, short of taking a few years to learn to hack themselves.
when you use msn on iphone does it charge to your usage? if so, how much usage does msn take
Hi, I'm Jason, and I connect people with technology.
on a practical side what's happening at the moment with facebook and twitter is destroying the classical online communities and replacing them with your personal social recommendation network. That works quite well for people who already have a wide network and a lot of people to follow, but I think it's a bit sad for the kid who wants to learn and just starts...
This idea that there is no history of business types starting technical businesses seems so silly. It is well beyond the "blind squirrel finding a nut". A great manager can assemble a great team and the world of successful companies show that.

EA - Trip Hawkins was a business guy, but somehow they dominate software.

eHarmony - A good sized web based business with a doc at the helm.

McDonalds - Everytime you order a big mac anywhere in the world a bun, patty, slice of cheese, two pickles and a squirt of ketchup come out of inventory.

All of the airlines - May not lead to great business results, but they certainly know software.

And of course these from my earlier comment:

Walmart

FedEx

Disney

Bank of America

For all the people who think it is impossible for non-hackers to hire a hacker, why don't you comb through the Fortune 500 and prove your point, or write a program to do so.
C has no types, as a quick (int*)&var will show.
"reminded me of Feynmans comparison of Princeton versus CalTech.."

Pardon me for being pedantic, but I believe he was comparing MIT and Princeton.
He won't make much from the traffic from HN. Social media tech traffic is worth hardly anything.

Ultra targetted non-tech savvy traffic like the parrot site gets from adwords is worth a lot.
With loose blank A4 pages and a pencil you don't have to stand up. In my experience, it works better if it's paper printed on the other side picked from the recycle bin.
I find for brainstorming with myself, regular paper (or and roll 11" wide - I found a few for free and they last FOREVER)is best, but with a bunch of people the whiteboard works better.

I am somewhat hampered on the whiteboard by my incredible lack of drawing ability, but it still works out.
Actually the majority of your followers wouldn't see it, only if they have the users with the "show me replies to users I don't follow" setting enabled.
You might also want to read this : http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphic...
They aren't no return tickets, many people can experiment with all sorts of dangerous drugs and be able to stop using them.

From:http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/532/most_first_time_drug...
The research report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) found that only 1% of first-time users of inhalants and tranquilizers were dependent a year later. For hallucinogens and sedatives, the figure was 2%; for pain relievers and alcohol, 3%. The drug with the highest number of dependent users a year after first use was heroin (13%), followed by crack cocaine (9%), marijuana (6%), stimulants (5%), and powder cocaine (4%).

http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k8/newUseDepend/newUseDepend.cfm
Choice quotes:

"When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

[...]

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work."
For the people who would like to follow the progress of Da Button Factory: there is now a development blog http://dabuttonfactory.blogspot.com. You can suscribe to its Atom feed to stay in touch, or whatever.

BTW, Da Button factory now have: color pickers, a few more fonts, a public API, a better handling of the Opera browser (but, sorry, still bad with IE), and a lot of minor improvements :-)
This reminds me of Guy Kawasaki's AllTop
You can have state, several styles of OO, or even the worst sort of imperative spaghetti code in Lisp. It's not a pure functional language like Haskell -- it doesn't force you to write functionally, it just has excellent support for using FP when it suits it the problem. The design of Scheme (a Lisp dialect) encourages functional programming, but it's mostly via things like naming conventions -- functions which mutate state end in exclamation marks (set!), for example. You may consider this nagging, but it's easy to ignore. It's not a bad idea to know which parts of your program depend on mutating state, though.

Good libraries, particularly multimedia ones, will be very important. Chicken Scheme has a great library collection (http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/eggs/) and works well with C. (Chicken compiles Scheme to C.) Other people here strongly recommend PLT Scheme, though I haven't personally used it much.

For learning functional programming in Lisp, I'd recommend starting with The Little Schemer. After that, The Seasoned Schemer and/or SICP.

I would also consider Lua under those circumstances. Game programming is one of its strongest areas, and IMHO it is a very practical and well-designed language. (Lua and Scheme are, by far, my favorites.) You can also do FP in Lua, though it's not really emphasized, so Scheme is better suited to learning it.
Well, rsync has a mode where you say "look, if the file size and timestamp are the same, please just assume it hasn't changed - I'm happy with this and am willing to accept that if that isn't sufficient any resulting problems are mine".

I wonder if having some way to tell git to do the same for files with a particular extension/in a particular directory would get us a decent amount of the way there?
Abuse game logic was programmed in Lisp. This was the first time I saw Lisp in a commercial game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_(computer_game)

Any other examples?
The content isn't Spam, but it looks like someone is testing the moderating procedures. ==> Flagged
I've had a similar experience. We do use some software tools to help us with the process, but I would feel very comfortable managing a moderately sized team doing Agile development using nothing but a whiteboard. It's still my teams go-to tool when we need to create ad-hoc lists of "this is the critical list of defects to fix prior to the release" type of lists, as well as hammering out architecture decisions.

That said, I now have one member of my team who is remote full time. That has made it a little less useful. We use Skype and a Logitech webcam, which helps him to be able to see the whiteboard, but he can't really participate in the drawing and writing. I'd love a two-way digital whiteboard, but alas those are fairly pricy.

If anyone has worked with teams like this (majority of the team on site, one or two remote), I'd love to hear suggestions on how you've overcome these problems (if in fact, you have).
I think it would be better if you just send an email to all signed up users saying "Christie has sent you a message...". Something along those lines.
Next thing you know, they'll be able to miniaturize and "cheaperize" still further and anyone will be able to buy one for home use. And they'll sell bags of all the ingredients you need.
Nice app. Do you use a plugin for the authentication? I also use CI for some of my projects. Its my favorite PHP framework so far.
I love it! It's a great idea, and a scalable business.
previously http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509974
LinkedIN runs over Apache Tomcat/5.0.28
> This idea that there is no history of business types starting technical businesses seems so silly.

What's silly is the strawmen that are being thrown around. No one is arguing that biz types can't start/lead tech biz.

The claim is that the vast majority of non-tech people can't usefully evaluate tech people in time to do any good.

It's not unlike the complementary situation, technical people evaluating non-technical people.

As I pointed out, if tech people can't evaluate non-tech and non-tech can evaluate tech, something interesting is going on.

But, let's ask the question - do non-tech people think that tech people can evaluate non-tech people? If so, why do tech people think otherwise? If not, but non-tech can evaluate tech people, why the difference?

> EA - Trip Hawkins was a business guy, but somehow they dominate software.

Hawkins also always has a tech partner.

The same can be said for every other company on the list.
You could be wrong. How about having paid twitter users on the front page, or any other page as ad?. Just last week Jason Calacanis offered $250k to twitter, if twitter puts his link on the front page.
Once a traffic is established,, not definitely $250k here, but even a few dollars from twitter users for paid links would make him profit.
> Whereas in CL these functions are defined directly on the implementation (cons lists) so map can't map over a vector you need to make a special vector only map and so on.

Wrong.

The Common Lisp list functions, such as mapcar, are restricted to lists but Commmon Lisp also has sequence functions which take any Common Lisp sequence type.

Common Lisp's map happens to be a sequence function.

I forget if hashes are a Common lisp sequence type, but vectors definitely are. IIRC, Common Lisp strings are sequences.
Mozilla Firefox startsida
LOL there are some people listed as "celebrities" that are definitely NOT celebrities!
While I haven't checked the source, I'm pretty sure by default git doesn't re-hash any files unless the timestamps have changed. (I know Mercurial doesn't.)
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