skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes stirring-up shit can be a win-win situation.

I could agree with you and get the anti-vim guys all worked up. I could even back it up with random links and examples from all over the web.

I could also disagree with you and get pro-vim guys all riled-up. Again, suitable links, stats and a photo of some guy with carpal-tunnel would do the trick.

That's great stuff!

To quote one of the most memorable lines in motion picture lore:

"Interesting game. The only way to win is not to play."

I use vim. And I've used everything else. I don't care. All of it pales in magnitude to the efficiency losses elsewhere in the process of developing a software product.

My guess is that on a daily basis I waste more time going for a cup of coffee, shooting the shit, reading/posting on HN, getting pulled in all manner of directions on the internet than any text editor could save me short of a brain-to-code interface.

And, of course, there's the actual work of figuring out how to code something. I've spent days diagraming state machines with, yes, hold-on, paper and pencil. Once there, an hour or two and the bug-free code is written and working. Yes, even if you use Notepad.

You want to be more efficient? Get really good at going from problem to finished, shippable, documented, flexible, reusable and bug-free code. What you use to enter said code probably does not matter.

I'm going back to polishing my keyboard.

Maybe you guys ought to do the same.
A schizophrenic (and arguably brilliant) programmer who posts on HN, among other places, from time to time:
http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html
>As usual, nothing on cross-browser compatibility (respond.js, modernizr...), nothing on speed optimisation (a real problem in RWD), on backends issues (regarding the multiples images needed), etc...

Well these could all be articles in themselves really. I think this highlights the fact that RWD isn't simply a case of just shrinking your 'full' website down to mobile phone size. It is a rather broad subject and not really one that can summarised quickly in a single article.

If you would like to delve deeper into the subject then I would recommend checking out Brad Frost's articles. This is a great starting point http://bradfrost.github.com/this-is-responsive/resources.htm...
But if you use Google Chrome for all your browsing, you can let Safari be a no-identity browser for this purpose.
Yes, those exactly.

Hackborn starts with a stick ("I suspect we are going to need to start doing things to prevent you from impacting our app ecosystem") and then shows just a tiny glimmer of carrot ("Doing this correctly, without impacting our app developers... I also think it is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level...")

So who knows what to make of that. My main reason for hope is that it's just so unusual for Google to speak out that way. All kinds of bizarre things get added to ROMs and they just ignore it. Then this comes and the Google engineers go bananas. It has to mean (or at least, I think it has to mean) that they have some plans around it, and they really don't want something incompatible coming out and becoming a defacto API ahead of that.
Interesting read, thanks for linking it. When I need to write a sorting algorithm, I usually for Merge Sort, because I can never remember the exact details of swapping/partitioning of QuickSort. It seems much more natural to say "split your data in two, sort them, merge them together". And when I'm feeling damn fancy, I use an InsertSort when the size of the dataset is less than 7-8, another algorithm that I find difficult to forget (at least, the recursive definition; I usually need some paper and pencil to do the in-place version).
It's not like going without cigarettes, but it's like refusing to have a cellphone or voicemail.

Social events? Nearly every event I attend, I'm invited to via Facebook.

Family announcements? If there's a new baby in the family, I know about it because of Facebook. (My wife's third cousins twice removed will not call her to let her know, nor would I expect them to.)
Show HN: every PowerPoint presentation, from now on, should be interactive
I found that interesting as well.
So, regarding efficacy testing, I think the costs/benefits have to be assessed in full context. If you go back to the time before the FDA, it was a time of incredible wonder drugs and useless patent medicines. Kind of like the Internet: the price of being able to put up a domain name in 10 minutes with no centralized check for accuracy means information proliferates and the web/market/search sorts it out.

And we kind of know what a safe-but-not-necessarily-effective market for drugs will look like: the supplement industry. Supplements are cheap, they vary in effectiveness on a per person basis, and they have undoubtedly produced some really great things (creatine, omega 3). Take a look at this awesome graphic:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplem...

The thing is, with centralized regulation for efficacy two things happen. First, many of the bubbles on that graph never appear in the first place. Second, because they never appear, they never accumulate enough evidence/market size to rise up the list. We are choking the channel if centralized regulators require our minimum viable products to be not just safe, but highly efficacious.

The best way to see this is that centralized regulation kills iteration. Talk to anyone in the drug space: they'd love to be able to change their dosing methodology (altering dosage amount, frequency, formulation) or otherwise take advantage of serendipitous post-market findings. Viagra, famously, was initially intended to medicate blood pressure[1].

But right now they can't even change the labels on their drugs without the FDA's approval, which is why the average layman gets a folded-up chemistry textbook[2] rather than a user-friendly instruction manual, let alone a website which totes up other people's experiences with the drug. To get a sense of how much that could contribute to the patient user experience, see Help Remedies[3], which can get away with better UI/UX because they're dealing in generics.

Anyway, on net, I think something like a pharmacogenomic erowid.org [4,5] is the best way to establish efficacy. That would be distributed and the data would be public and constantly updated, with sample sizes far in excess of the current FDA process. Patients would get accounts and link their genomic information with the site after buying any new drug, and input their own survey data in order to see other people's (aggregated, anonymized) experiences. This would mean that you can launch safe drugs of unproven efficacy, and then collect efficacy data at a far larger scale than we do today. But this kind of innovation will only be possible in a jurisdiction outside the FDA's thumb.

[1] http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/lens/article/?id=116

[2] http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/

[3] http://www.helpineedhelp.com

[4] http://www.pharmgkb.org/

[5] http://www.erowid.org/
> I posted this as a comment on Coding Horror but it will probably get buried. I'm not sure if I'm missing his point but this is what I took away from the article.

I enjoyed this article, the romanticized idea of martyrdom and ragequitting in terms of 'infocide' like the cases mentioned seem to fit well, but Aaron's case was not a 'ragequit'. It was a response to a serious mental condition.

"But do not, under any circumstances, give anyone the satisfaction of seeing you ragequit. They don't deserve it. Play other, better moves – and consider your long game."

Depression and suicide is about hopelessness and constant pain. It isn't about sticking it to anyone and depression by its very nature makes 'considering the long game' impossible. For people plagued by it, there is no future, only the black dog looking back at you.

There are many conversations coming out of Aaron's death, copyright, information freedom, the overreach of the law, predator prosecutions but an important one that is being overlooked, in my opinion, is mental health. Programmers, activists, and in Aaron's case a person of extremely high intelligence, all seem to be more susceptible to mental illness.

Maybe, even if nothing else comes out of Aaron's death. No changes to copyright, no prosecutor's getting fired, no open data. Maybe at least we can all take the feeling's of the people around us a little more seriously. Look a little harder for the people that are hurting. And try to help them.
Not to mention they couldn't make the "clear all" button any smaller.
I just finished my first iOS app
A year or two.
History of the term Dynamic Programming
Consider for a minute that one of the biggest successes in the past few years have been "crapware", e.g. Talking Tom, Draw with me (or something similar), and iFog/Fart.
How can someone who is a designer choose such a poor font for their won website? Specially given that he is talking about designing text graphics
While I respect Jeff Atwood's comments, and I suspect he's leaning on the side of being inspirational, I think equating suicide with "ragequitting" (directly or indirectly) is unfair. The consequences are so different, it sort of trivializes suicide.

But also, I must admit that I am a little disappointed in Aaron. I understand that depression is a serious disease that can fell any person, however strong. But he chose the path of the activist long ago. And the path of the activist is to fight, for as long and as hard as it takes, to effect change.

I never knew Aaron, but I know that while one can choose to be an activist, one can't choose whether they have clinical depression. It is a serious illness that is hard to fight. And by all accounts I've read, Aaron put up quite a fight trying to deal with the extreme pressure he was put under. In that light, I think Jeff's comment is harsh.
Learn Windows 95 with Jennifer Anniston & Matthew Perry
Apple Forced Google's Hand On Android
The interruption issue has plagued me for the last 10 years. Firstly working at home with flatmates or wife, then with children and now at an office next to the marketing team.

Instead of trying to fight the interruptions themselves, I decided to try and become better/faster at context switching by training myself to compartmentalize the jobs on hand (programming/helping kids/answering questions).

It took a while to figure it out and i'm still getting better at it, but so far it works pretty well and I can jump between contexts much better than i could before. When I get interrupted, I'll take a snapshot of where i am, store it away and 'switch' to the new issue.
Actually, I can say that (and I did).

And when I say it's ugly, I'm not really talking about style. Instead, I'm referring to how I have to pinch and zoom when reading posts on my smartphone, and the awfully long line lengths, and the small type.

I get that such points probably aren't important to pg (or the community at large) and I can appreciate that. If it works, why muck with it? Still, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the design of this site probably wasn't ever treated as a key concern.
Absolutely.

But it's worth making a special effort for the young. As I told a teen poster below:

Someone helping me with a project is nice. Someone helping you with a project is an investment in the future. My neuroplasticity wanes with every passing year. Your mind remains limber. I am encumbered by obligations and debts, limiting my flexibility. You have infinitely more options.

Helping you is just a better bet than helping me. You're still on the launchpad, fuel tank still full. If there's something simple, like an encouraging comment or a thoughtful correction, that can be done to help you meet a wonderful trajectory, we should absolutely do it.
This is something I've argued before, too. Even if Intel gets every bit as good as the ARM competition in mobile devices, that may be pretty irrelevant to them, as they will have a very hard time competing as "just another mobile chip maker with tiny profits per chip". It will be hard for Intel to adapt to that as a company. And that's besides having to defeat established incumbents in the mobile chip market. The end of the "normal" PC market is not good at all for Intel.

As the situation becomes worse for them, you'll see them adopt more desperate moves such as mandating every "ultrabook" (a trademark they own) manufacturers buys their McAffee antivirus, and other such moves, to try to increase their profits and revenues, but I don't think it will help them much in the end.

The ultrabook market is a dead-end, anyway. So far their ultrabook sales have been several times lower than initially predicted, and most PC buyers want to buy "cheap" Windows machines, not $1000 Windows machines. The people who want that kind of PC, usually go for a Mac instead, and the latest sales data shows that. And Macs are still a niche market in the grand scheme of things. It's about the best Intel can hope for as far as "ultrabooks" go. And they better hope Apple is not moving to 64-bit ARM chips for Macs in 2014.
Did You Say PINs?
Lessons learnt on Indiegogo: A very detailed look at our first crowdfunding
Twitter down..
Completely agree. I have the same problem with those apps but since I keep all my apps organized in two pages, I added a third with a folder called "useless" with all those in it.
Go right ahead, since your profile says you're an affiliate marketer with an "eye for monetization."
newbies should not get discouraged. I am involved with a lot of young developers through mpelembe.net and I always encourage newbies to get involved in discussion groups and ocassionally manage to persuade to attend developer events.
I would say people being assholes brings the thread off-topic.
If you've done this, you've been an extremely fortunate outlier. The people I know who have done "a successful side business selling apps" have had just as many emotional highs and lows as friends who have done venture-backed companies. The problems can be even more acute when you consider that founders who elect to go that route usually cannot quit their day job until the company has started to take off, adding another large source of stress that they have to balance with everything else.
This is a delicate topic with a lot of factors. I don't know if I would call a suicide due to depression 'ragequitting.'

Quitting, in general, is a healthy and normal action. It's why we all ended up doing what we're doing today (we had to quit something to stop being the proverbial male ballerina). Jeff himself leads the article with what he quit a year ago, and I interpret his view of that decision positively.

It seems like Jeff believes that there are 'ok' ways to quit and 'not ok' ways. Great. But, who is he to decide what is ok and not ok for others? I'm certainly not equipped to say so, and I don't believe Jeff is either. He is judging Aaron. When I was brought up, I was told that telling others what to do in absolute terms was also a form of immaturity. It's all a matter of perspective.

Aaron's death is a tragedy for many reasons and due to causes and circumstances I will never understand. I can't pretend to proscribe any decisions Aaron made. I appreciate Jeff using his articulate and otherwise entertaining writing to help express what he is feeling.

It's open writing like this that helps our community grieve; I just don't agree with Jeff.
All of them haha
In response to point #2: Glad to hear you'll be choosing to install my new search toolbar! Did you know it comes with free 3D smileys?

Really though, if you weren't one of the criticized parties (for funding them), would you really think the same about points two and three? And even bothered to point out the first? Regardless of whether you should have funded them, your post sounds rather biased.
Agreed. The question should really be "Successful de facto solo startup founders".
"And the path of the activist is to fight, for as long and as hard as it takes, to effect change."

One has to choose the battles with care.

UK resident, not my issue, very sad as per Tim Berners-Lee's post. A light lost (or was it a moth?)
Repost..

;-)
I'm curious about the test one. Do you have "." in your PATH? Or do students simply not realize that they should call their program as ./test anyway?
Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>

I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.
I love the honesty from Sujan Patel. They basically took advantage of a fluke that greatly benefited the website. The site was edu.com, and they utilized everyone across the web accidentally linking to, for example, harvard.edu.com instead of harvard.edu by building out a bunch of subdomains for thousands of colleges.

(Worth noting, this doesn't seem to be in place any more. No surprise really. This is probably the real takeaway, that taking advantages of loopholes doesn't work long-term.)
If Jeff says that he equates suicide with rage quitting a game, I'm prepared to believe that he believes it. But I don't and I don't even think it's a comparison that's useful.

Perhaps he means it sincerely, but my experience with someone close to me committing suicide and the research I have done since then--including research prompted by feedback from HN to posts I have written--is that it can be dangerous to try to "reason" with a suicidal person.

"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" is something I often say about bigots, sexists, and so on, but it applies to depressed people as well. You don't come back from the brink because of life lessons, or essays on the internet, or the love of a small child. Or this comment.

I won't even try to explain how being so depressed that you kill yourself is nothing like deciding that you don't want to "play the Internets" any more.

The metaphor I use is that suicide is the end-game of a crippling disease that attacks the brains ability to manage stress. I liken depression to AIDS of the emotional immune system.

When we're healthy, we have ways of handling stress. We have good days and bad days, but they fall within a certain manageable range because our body musters compensation for our emotions. The depressed person can be triggered by something bad and spiral into an extreme mood.

If we use my metaphor to explain why someone facing a lot of jail time would commit suicide, the jail time is like pneumonia: Something serious but beatable by a person with a healthy immune system and social support. But not beatable by someone with a compromised immune system, and deadly to someone whose immune system actually attacks himself in response to certain kinds of stress.

Long ramble here, but we can't talk people out of AIDS or Cancer or even the Common Cold. Good spirits and support have been proven to be very helpful, but not as a substitute for proper treatment or for understanding that if you are contemplating ending your own life, you are sick but what you have can be treated PROVIDED YOU AND YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK TREAT DEPRESSION AS A SERIOUS ILLNESS THAT CAN BE TREATED.

I am not telling Mr. Atwood to retract his remarks. But I am saying that I do not support trying to talk someone out of suicide by comparing it to rage quitting a game or walking away from the Internet.

I do support everything he is saying about the ridiculous injustice in the plea bargain system.
Of what value to users can be a piece of software that they never heard of, don't know what it does and don't feel a need for it? Were they having a problem they wanted solved, they'd intentionally look for the software.

> we can't assume that our computing preferences are shared by "most end-users".

Those are still anecdotes, but I think most of us actually can say this or that about end-users preferences, after countless of hours spent on cleaning their computers. I for one think that calling it "nuisance" is a massive understatement.
Budget Traveller Trends 2012-2013 [Infographic]
The piano/keyboard isn't my main instrument, but I'm not sure that the color of the keys would make a huge difference. Practiced/professional violinists, for example, don't use sight to figure out how to place their fingers, and pianists don't even have to worry about tuning the way violinists do.
Perspective: That bit about protecting his privacy is the same sort of excuse Ortiz's office gave in their initial response to Aaron's death.
Seems find for me., but reported as down at http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/twitter.com . Something most bee going on...
This seems like a pretty fair analysis -- both fair to the users/ecosystem as a whole, and fair to a portfolio company that you invested in.
Part of what makes the "wait it out" solution particularly troublesome is that as generations pass, the "hey're family members. They were friends. They were neighbors. They are not strangers" thing will gradually become less and less true.

Right now there are families in which people who were once together are now divided, but those generations are rapidly aging. How many generations can these two groups of people be relatively isolated before those bonds start to falter?
That page has generated some heat in the past: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.ch/2010/05/why-is-haskell-use... (admittedly this guy seems to have some personal grievances with people in the Haskell community)
I don't know how much the page has changed since this rant was written, but some of the entries seem to be the same, e.g. 'Ansemond LLC' which is a company with a single mac app that hasn't been updated since a beta in 2009 and only mentions Haskell in an old blog post. The site for that company is so charmingly dated that I feel kind of bad for highlighting it, but if this is the kind of 'industry success story' they think worth mentioning then I'm not sure the wiki page is of any value.
Profit === Earnings
(http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnings.asp)

From the article:
"reported net income of $2.5 billion, or 48 cents a share, down 27 percent from $3.4 billion, or 64 cents a share, a year earlier"

Which is a 27% drop in total earnings or a 25% drop in EPS. The difference due to a share buy back improving the EPS by reducing the issued share capital.
I'd argue that Apple makes it possible to create location-aware reminders, but not necessarily "very easy."

Say I want to set up a reminder to pick up some dish soap next time I'm near my neighborhood grocery store. I could open the "Reminders" app and try to do it, but that only works if the store is in my address book for some reason or I know the address. Otherwise I have to search for the grocery store in Safari or Maps, copy the address and paste it into the "address" field for that reminder.

So I've learned my lesson - next time I open the Apple Maps app and search for my neighborhood grocery store, thinking I'll add a reminder from there. But you can't.

Software is super hard, and I get that, and I still love and use geofenced reminders every day. But this particular set of interactions is too complicated for, say, my mom - who just got her first iPhone (and smartphone) - to use, which makes it kind of a problem.
Is there something stopping Google from shipping Google Now for iOS? If you use Chrome on iOS they're collecting all sorts of information, you can also pull GPS data etc from G+ on iOS and associate it server-side.

You don't get the cool springboard shortcut though.
As I expected, you can't even articulate what crime you think was committed.
11 WordPress Game Template for 2013
> But it is another thing entirely to play the final move and end your own life. To declare the end of this game and all future games, the end of ragequitting itself.

(Emphasis Jeff's).