skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was going to say exactly the same thing. If your website is selling twitter bootstrap themes, chances are you need to put some effort into your theme.

If it's an intro page, a FAQ, a contact page and it's aimed at people who don't give a shit about if it looks like 1000 other websites then there's nothing wrong with that.

1) Do something
2) Tell people
3) Iterate

Sometimes you can swap over 1+2. Do not get hung up about not using the standard theme just because 0.1% of your visitors might recognise where it's from. Are they your target customers ?
I think we might be seeing the birth of HN's first meme. Here is another post (now dead) about the pope:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5200247
Oh, they figured out how to measure "productivity" in a largely creative line of work? Surely they're not measuring LoC #s?
A 3D FPS engine using HTML5 and CSS3 3D transforms by Keith Clark
I used IntelliJ IDEA (Java) for the past 10 years or so (since IntelliJ IDEA version 4). I was pretty amazed at how much more productive I became using Emacs to do Clojure development (fast iteration cycles, instant REPL, paredit, hs-minor-mode, etc.).

Using an IDE took your coding to a next level just as design patterns took your coding to a next level because, by using Java (or C#), you need to automate and repeat tasks that should never have been mandatory to repeat in the first place.

To me nothing beats a programmable "text editor".

I don't doubt you consider yourself "productive". However Rich Hickey created Clojure using Emacs and then, using Clojure, he created Datomic. That's certainly something I'd call productive. So there's not one true way or true light to see to "take coding to next level".

It's good for you if you like your Java/C+ + ORM ([N]Hibernate) + XML + SQL hell. I don't like that particular hell which I know all too well and, thankfully, many programmers don't like either and are, productively, creating a better world for us programmers.

I still did buy IntelliJ IDEA version 12 during their doosmday promotion because at 55 Euros or so I figured out it was going to be handy the day I'll be forced to work on some pathetic Java / Hibernate / XML / SQL hell codebase but, thankfully, I still didn't need to install it (it's only two months but still...).

Meanwhile Emacs / elisp / Clojure are getting their daily dose of love.

Your Mileage May Vary but I honestly think you don't realize that most of the tasks IntelliJ allows you to automate are tasks which shouldn't exist in the first place.

P.S: it's possible to configure vi(m) and Emacs using eclim / emacs-eclim so that you can use, right from vim/emacs many of the features of Eclipse (like auto-completion). This is something with may see more in the future and that we may see working with IntelliJ too.
A more elaborate solution is to install a userstyle (http://userstyles.org/) and a browser plugin like as Stylish. There are dozens of themes available related to hacker news: http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/all/hacker+news.
Intellij makes java much easier to bear for me. The one thing I miss is a single key combination to select a line and then select subsequent lines when pressed again (like cmd-L in Sublime). The intellij alternatives seem awkward to me.
That's pretty awesome, I don't know if the two actions are related but if they are, it's really good to see the Chrome team:

1) Taking suggestions from sources like this so easily ("Hey, look what I just read on HN, we should do that!")

2) Implementing a change so quickly - most companies as large as Google can take days to approve a change in a product as widely used as Chrome. (I am aware that most users won't use the developer tools, but with any added functionality comes an added unforeseen bug.)
Ask HN: Explosive growth or bootstrapped? Out of my depth. 
My startup, Geddit, has started getting some attention from business angels, potential mentors, accelerators and the like.

We are building a tool that enables and analyses the feedback cycle between students and educators to improve education (link in profile). The business model is currently a pure-product play. We have a tool that addresses certain pain points among our customers, and we had intended to use a freemium model to market and distribute the product. Scaling would require marketing and direct sales.

A potential mentor recently had the insight that the product offering did not have enough supporting leverage to really become a player, if someone made a big play to capture students and other users of education. His suggestion was that we create an education focussed rating platform - something like tripadvisor for education, gain traction and scale really quickly to create a lever for our product.

His sketch was traction in the next 6 months, ~$0.5M funding round by November. My instincts are that this is ludicrous, but his point seemed strong and well made - we shouldn't fall in love with our solution, we should solve the problem. I want to be able to ask this guy smart questions - here's what I have so far:

- How do you expect to make a return on your time and effort?

- What sort of traction would we require (number and % of users) to move to 1.) a funding round that big and 2.) the feedback product rollout?

- What specific experience or connections do you have that would help us believe you can do this?

What else should I be asking? Who else should we be talking to? What can we read? All input appreciated.
I pay for products/services/whatever when I have no time/competences/will to make them myself.
Not for me in the UK
Smileroo
Why don't you read more than just his Wikipedia page?

Do you really like actual libertarianism? You know, judging people in categorized groups instead of as individuals isn't very libertarian of you.
An analysis of a Chrome extension
Seems to be up again.
Not for me (India)
This says otherwise http://isup.me/facebook.com
It's a good effort, but suffers from the usual problems of replicating Vim, ie lots of subtle changes and lots of missing functionality. Both of which wreak havoc with one's muscle memory.

Also, I found it really slowed things down (in RubyMine), sometimes updating just 1-2 characters a second in a big project (on a modern MBP).

I've gone back and forth, but generally I prefer Vim with Janus distro, albeit I miss a lot of cool things from IDEA.
> So... it's 2013, and I'm sitting here with my blazingly fast nexus 4, and the web sites I visit are... slow. terrible. broken. spammy.

No, your browser sucks. Because there is virtually no competition among browsers on mobile. The vast majority of users never even think to use any but the default and therefore there is little incentive to make the big improvements they need.
have seen it, but when I'm in intellij, I'm in intellij. when in vim, i'm in vim - my brain shifts enough where I don't really need the vim bindings.
I'm not a fan of using bootstrap for client facing content.

We have specific front-end designers & css/markup developers for "front of house", but for "Admin" sections - i.e. the backend that staff/etc will use to manage an app/site/etc - something like Bootstrap (i'm interested to try Zurb Foundation/similar for this role too) is perfect, because we aren't trying to sell a brand to those users, we're trying to deliver functionality, and it's nice to be able to just put pre-built components together and get functional dashboards, record lists, CRUD screens, etc.
Thank you for pointing this out. I might say "hey it's a standard bootstrap site, must not be much of a designer" but at least I'll be able to read the content.
No longer for me in Israel
Neither does collectivism.
Nowadays, even cheap non-linear editors have a built-in motion stabilizer.

Apple iMovie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7b2SOrwT20

Adobe Premiere Elements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqM1mbSsTlQ
Gabe Newell: Reflections of a Video Game Maker[Video]
It's a way of hiding your face.
You (as with most of us) probably spend so much time on the web now, shuttling around many many different websites, that you don't notice (or remember) that a large proportion of the myriad of native software, beyond a few well polished examples, exhibits flaws that while different are just as annoying, slow, buggy and otherwise irritating.

Bad websites are just like bad software. There's a chance that my making it easier to create apps there will be an increase in bad ones, but there should be an increase in good ones as well. There has been on the web.
And this doesn't even mention the pain of actually MAKING such a webpage. HTML5/javascript/css are, to put it blunt, rubbish and antiquated technologies. Why even force people to use this "boxed" and shit set? Firefox OS is just wrong from so many perspectives..
Just so everyone's clear, I am not the author of this blog post. I had replaced the I in the title with [He], but a. Mod must have annoyingly edited it out. I hope people realize that.
I think it split into two parts when some intelligent people were talking about the dangers of Keynesianism and some idiots thought they were talking about Kenyans.
It was hard to adapt after using eclipse for years, but i did not regret it.
>Come on. “Half-decent”. Is this what you want to output? To be known for? I can’t understand why, if you have an ounce of pride, you’d not want everything you release to be the best you could do?

This is all a little uppity coming from a blog using the Svbtle theme.
John Cleese on Creativity [video]
Ask HN: Anyone interested in beta testing SQL Server source control?
I've always felt that most database source control systems interfere with the workflow many people use when developing for SQL Server. So, I've created a source control system for SQL Server that automatically commits your DDL changes to SVN or TFS so that we can concentrate on the code, not the process.

I'd like to get more beta testers; anyone interested in trying it out?

http://sqlhistorian.com

If anyone had any feedback about the web page or idea, I'd appreciate that as well. Or, if you're not interested, I'd like to know why (and if it's something I can add in the future). Thanks!
I understand the general principle of how this works, but how are things like press cards dealt with? It seems like that's a major signal that you aren't part of the in-group.
Clickable: http://sqlhistorian.com
OK, put that way it makes sense and I agree with you.
BananaTag.com. They alert you to when the e-mail has been opened and if they click any of the links within the e-mail you sent them
Indeed. Some people have even used e.g. Haskell to provide more "real" logic, but with Excel as the user interface:

http://qconlondon.com/london-2008/speaker/Lennart+Augustsson

http://urchin.earth.li/~ganesh/icfp08.pdf
You seem to jump to a lot of conclusions. My set-up for Java is pretty light-weight: nothing is generated for me by IntelliJ (except for if I use any of the refactoring tools). We have our own tools for generating ORM code, but that would be the same regardless of editor/IDE.

There are pros and cons with Java, but if that's what the application is written in, then I'd much rather use IntelliJ than Emacs/Vim. The reason is that a lot of the coding is navigating the code base - finding out what the arguments of a method are, or finding out all the usages of a class/method/variable. This is much quicker in IntelliJ than in a generic editor.

Another argument I hear a lot against IDEs in general (although not from you) is that they force you to click the menues a lot. Not true. There are great built-in keyboard short-cuts, and of course you can create your own, so there is not a lot of reasons to touch the mouse.
No more Chrome updates for Red Hat users?
Seems that Chrome from the official repos at Google will not get updates anymore as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is deemed "obsolete". Note that they continue support for Windows XP at the same time ...
As a web person, can you honestly say that you always put yourself 100% in the shoes of a user?
Maybe an analogy can be drawn here to popular music. You run into a lot of people that say they don't listen to it, and some who say it's crammed down our throats by radio stations giving listeners no choice, but at the end of the day it's still popular and changes our global culture. As much as I sometimes don't like to admit it, but, the trend is your friend.
He's saying that you cannot take anyone for a ride unless they buy the car also.
Short version: "If you're not paying for it, you are the product, not the customer".

Most of the sites probably don't have a big incentive to make a really awesome mobile app type experience, which would involve zero ads, and a lot of work to make the site work like an actual app on a variety of target devices.
So, does anyone consider the fact that most of the mobile web is optimized for whatever apple ships? It is not surprising to me that small annoyances in web pages exist in everywhere but ios. I have no comments on browser chrome though, they all have annoying behaviours in general.
Facebook sued over 'like' button
This is not the "most egregious Excel abuse", but rather standard opreating procedure for most Excel applications I've seen in my career.
It looks the same as regular forums to me. What features does it have that regular forums don't?

• “Written in Python and uses the popular Django framework”: Doesn't really mean anything. Not a feature.

• “Mobile CSS that adapts the layout to your iPhone”: That's a front-end issue, which forums can handle just fine without switching from phpBB or whatnot.

• “A redesigned, mobile-friendly admin interface”: Also front-end.

• “Experimental dyslexia support”: Also probably front-end. Dyslexic users probably have different default settings for text anyways.

• “A powerful editor for writing and creating content”: These have existed for several years.

→ “Super simple Markdown-based formatting learnt in no time ...”: Okay.

→ “... with automatic, typography-friendly SmartyPants conversion”: What does that mean?

→ “You can even create tables for data- and fact-based discussions!” Tables are not exactly revolutionary and forums have had those for a long time. Granted, Markdown doesn't necessarily. Do you have quotes, though?

• “Values security and privacy with such things as: SSL support, PBKDF2, password-hashing, django-secure vetting”: These aren't “features” we should have to look for actively. They should be a given.

• “Complete HTML fall-back support for people who block JavaScript”: Forums have had that since the beginning of forum-time.
What's going on with Posterous?
Standard web design guidelines
His blog isn't using the Svbtle theme.
Very true, It would be like trying to pump more blood into a bleeding patient and calling it good when the rate you are pumping in matches the rate at which its exiting the gaping wound. I live in an apartment building so the relatively small space and little bits that I can do to increase insulation make the Nest perfect for my application. Also being able to turn my heat on while I'm driving home is a huge win.
Ask HN: Best way for an Irish company to receive payments from American client?
I'm a US citizen running a tiny company in Ireland. Our first client is an American company that we're doing some software development work for. I'd like to make it as easy and fee-free as possible for the client pay us.

I've used World First for personal transfers which gets me a good rate and minimal fees. World First, however, requires me to have an account in the US. This is fine for personal use but I don't have a company bank account in the US. The client has used international wire transfers previously with other contractors. She mentioned that the wire transfers resulted in a poor exchange rate and some relatively annoying fees.

So, what's the best way to set this up to maximize convenience and minimize cost? It's likely that this will be a recurring (monthly?) payment on an ongoing basis.

Advice appreciated.
It works reasonably on my Dell Venue Pro with Windows Phone and IE, though there are a few glitches when long comment pages don't word wrap. But I've been using HN on my phone for almost two years. Having a hardware keyboard helps - my Nokia brick had one too.
I've bought PyCharm and WebStorm recently when they sold it for 75% off last year and i must say i am extremely well pleased. Up until today i would've thought SublimeText2 is enough, but PyCharm just kicks ass, with its vagrant/debugging/ssh/sftp/intellisense/unittests/sphinx integration.

Thanks Jetbrains, for a great IDE!
I'd like to hear someone's comparison of IntelliJ and Eclipse. I've used both, but because most books and online tutorials on Java revolve around Eclipse (even Google recommends it for Android development), it's my primary IDE and feel quite locked into it. NetBeans comes second because this is the only other IDE I often see in other resources.

My only experience with IntelliJ is with a job I quit within a month because they were using some boring proprietary Java framework that has almost no documentation. I have no qualms about IntelliJ, I think it's pretty, looks a lot like NetBeans, but I don't think I've fully maximized its features (heck, I can only say it's pretty). I also hear a lot of people say that IntelliJ is the best IDE for Java. What makes it so much better than Eclipse, and maybe even NetBeans?
This is just trolling, come on now.
> Imagine the joy of getting 2 marshmallows instead of 1, the struggle is definitely worthwhile

Is it? Maybe. Maybe not. Our desire is largely disconnected from our reward mechanism. Dopamine will cause an intense drive to reach a goal, but once the goal is met, the faucet is switched off, and unless you derive a reward from the goal in itself, you're not guaranteed a feeling of wellbeing at all.

In other words, often we will agonize over cravings for a long time, only to find no joy when they're fulfilled.

Maybe that second marshmallow really would provide enough of a reward to be worth 15 minutes of potentially agonising wait. Or maybe not.

Some persistence is clearly worth it, and in this case the experiment did predict material success later in life. It's then down to what you consider "success" to what extent this is a good thing.

I don't believe they measured happiness for example, and happiness is notably not tied to a great extent to material success (people who don't have shelter and food are substantially less happy than average, but people who are wealthy are only slightly happier on average than the rest of the population - happiness is largely tied to other factors).

Looking at material success it is no wonder that those who are able to resist cravings does better in life. But they are also able to resist pleasures that might very well not be compensated for in any way by whatever goals they are chasing. It is not a given that this tradeoff is good for them. I'm sure some managed to strike a good balance, in both groups, and I'm sure some of the kids who did not have good impulse control ended up doing quite badly because of it. But I'm equally sure some of the kids with good enough impulse control ended up miserable because of that.

Maybe a 15 minute wait for two marshmallows was better for these children than one right away and no agonising for 15 minutes, but I doubt I'd see it that way for my part: I'd see it as a single free marshmallow and get out of there. A second one would be welcome, but it provides far less pleasure than the first one. And 15 minutes to enjoy life rather than trying to keep my mind of something I crave would certainly provide far more pleasure.
My example is not as amazing as seeing Woz in person but it got me one of the finest job out there.

I second you: pick up your phone.

Most people love to leave names and responsibilities on products, in credits, etc. Analyze who made what, search the web, find a name of someone which you think could help and then try to find a way to contact him at his work (do not stalk into his private life) and then call him and ask to meet him. Many people will accept.

The first I got invited to a dinner and thought I'd be just meeting the man: no, it was better than that, there were many people around and I got to meet several of the people I'd be working with later on.

So now go do it.
GifVine: Make GIFs from Vine
Yes! I actually wondered if this is where they'll go, asked if there is a way to do it on programmers.SE and posted it here [1] (question got closed, should have been an SO question probably). so I'm not that crazy after all. getting hot swapping and contextual real-time auto completion is really a productivity boost.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5115930
I'd say the barrier to mass-market electric cars isn't battery size, the Model S can already go over 300 KMs on a single charge, which is very reasonable. The lack of quick charging infrastructure is much more troubling. Without quick charging, it takes many hours to charge the battery, making long-distance driving infeasible. Quick-chargers also require a rather large supply of power, far more then most homes, or even petrol stations would probably have.

We also have a petrol station on nearly every street corner, but it will take a long while for quick chargers to approach anywhere near this. There is also already a split on adapter standards, which will take time to settle down.
Because people use desktop apps all the time now...
I want to take it as a compliment, but I don't feel it was intended like that!
"Wasnt the whole point of science to build their own chain of verifiable tools to rely on,"

... No it wasn't and isn't, what gave you that idea?
With a bit less negativity, this could have been a useful post, but it's really hard to extract the points from all the "rantyness". Even though I prefer Angular as my personal choice, I didn't think the post this responds to was that aggressive it provoked a response like this.
The universal reaction I get to any standard bootstrap web site I show to people is "this looks awesome, great work". Nobody outside of the web dev community knows or cares what Bootstrap is.

I hate Windows, iPhone, Android, OSX and Linux apps that try too hard to look and behave "different". Much of the hate for flash was because that was the standard tool people reached for when they wanted to make their sites fancy and different. I think we'd all be a lot better off if more sites used Bootstrap rather than less.
Except for the ones that aren't slow, terrible, broken, spammy. Selection bias at its finest. I could open up a random sampling of native apps from the Play or App store and make the same ridiculous claims about how lame native apps are - because 90% of native apps are complete crap.
I think those eras had browsers that weren't capable of delivering on the promise.

If you only work with IE9+ (all the other browsers are quite good now) you will be working in a run time environment that is far superior to those available in the DHTML/Ajax era.

Another issue is that very few people know how to do large scale JS applications, where I work we do (130,000K+ lines of code, 900+ classes) but it has taken us several iterations to get to this stage.

I believe we are planning on making our tools open-source so hopefully people will start to see that large scale JS apps are very doable. www.caplin.com if you want to keep an eye on the open sourcing of our tooling.
How The iWatch Could Kill The Password
Don't use webfonts? Lame but effective.
Syntax aware selection (Ctrl-W) doesn't work for you? I know it's not exactly what you ask for, but I think it's great. It successively selects a bigger and bigger block of code. According to Productivity Guide, it's the feature I use the most in IntelliJ (by a wide margin).
I received my acceptance within two days. Then again, I applied for a class months in advance. If you don't get accepted, you will receive an email saying so. Best of luck!
And what makes those "standards" different from "another framework"? A rubber stamp from W3C?