skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even though this is from 5 years ago I hear this argument from many people with kids. I think it's a bit of a cop out, and feels like they want recognition that their child is special and deserves attention.

No one ever looks at this from a teachers perspective. They are caught in the middle of trying to help children with wide variety of learning styles and the political machine of a school district learning mandate. They can only do so much to help. If a parent feels their child doesn't fit the mold and thinks the system is rigged, they should help their child understand how the school system work and how that relates to the rest of the working world. Where nearly everything else is based on metrics.

If they feel their child understand the material but the tests and homework are causing problems, find the path that accomplishes the goals of a passing grades. You'd be surprised if you just ask, that a teacher will tell you what they are going to be grading on. Is it just test or is it an overall judgement of how the child is doing?

As a kid I figured out that the key to "doing well" was to impress by showing off in areas where you really do excel. Is the child more creative? Then answer the homework or tests with creative answers and get the answer they are looking for but done in a fashion that may be different than what was expected. Do they have to do a book report? Make that look better than every other kid in class.

In short I pretty much skated through middle school and high school by doing the bare minimum to achieve an C but impressed in other creative areas that demonstrated effort and ability to comprehend the material.

Anyway that's my rant.
spf13 is a great plugin bundle for vim that got me started using relative line numbering. It's great for the lazy person who doesn't want to bother setting up all the fancy vim plugins and settings.

https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim
"Is there something wrong with asking one's friends to sign up and share their experiences and give us an upvote."

If you aren't aware of why asking your friends to post reviews about your site (without disclosing their relationship to you) is unethical, I'm not sure I can explain that to you.
Can you point to a historical example of a true free market system that robustly supported work/life balance?
It reminds me of this Blues Brothers quote:

Elwood: What kind of music do you usually have here?

Claire: Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.

The tendency of web developers to appropriate well defined terms for their limited little world is a bit unsettling.
Guys, this is very good opportunity to meet startups and the people behind the scenes.
How does it compare to Red Bull Cola (which some revile; I think it's really nice and different from everything else)?
This article entirely misses the point: the author is not Facebook's market. And this is why Facebook will be a long-term feature of the Internet - because it actually works exactly the way most people want to communicate.

So it doesn't scale to the networking needs of an entrepreneur or academic. That's really not what it sets out to do.
Is Angry Birds deterministic?
The article mentions that Rust is at least partially designed for low-level applications such as writing kernels. If garbage collection is shifted into the standard library, would this allow Rust to be used on real-time embedded systems such as the newer ARM microcontrollers?
This is completely unsubstantiated speculation and completely untrue. Could you please refrain from spamming our post with these comments.
As other comments note, this is missing the point a lot. QR codes are useful (or supposed to be) because they can be scanned from a different perspective. This solution requires a particular viewing angle and cannot cope with perspective shifting, making it useless in practice.

For this particular problem, attaching a QR code to a flat surface (if possible), or using "old fashioned" 1D barcodes (they probably carry enough information) is probably a better solution.

The general problem is designing a high density, 2D barcode system that can cope with perspective shifting with a cylindrical topology ; now that would be a neat mathematical trick!
Quick, Useful UI Sketches
Pirate3D brings 3D printing technologies to African Institutions
That's its value to me, too. I sit in Budapest and I'm actually in closer contact with my old high school friends in Indiana than I have ever been. And my kid's friends' parents in Puerto Rico. And yeah, some people here in Budapest. It does exactly what I want it to do, and it's way more effective than remembering to send Christmas cards.
Laughing at some one is the last ditch attempt to make the person stop doing what they are doing. When you know you are incapable of doing something, and wish to stop others from doing so in the fear they will get ahead.

When I laugh at someone (who isn't a clown or comedian) falling on their own ass, it is not a last ditch attempt to stop them from falling on their ass. It's an expression of amusement at someone else's misery, or of gladness that it's not me being hurt, or of any of a thousand other emotions and reasons.

The point Sagan was making was that just because people are laughing at you doesn't make you a innovative or scientific genius. And just because someone tells you you're wrong doesn't make you right.
And a nice blog framework built on top of it: http://octopress.org/
20% growth: Am I on the right track?
Hi HN,

I want to ask a question. Since the the start of year my company is reporting 20-30% growth every month. By the end of the year I will be making little less than what I make at my full-time job and as far as I can tell the company is not going to start making enough to start creating job places in the next 2-3 years at this speed.

Am I on the right track? There is obviously traction and although 20-30% growth is great if it remains consistent throughout the next 1-2 years, it will take a number of years before it breaks out. This thought is a little depressing.

I do not complain, as this works for me, but I will be delighted if you can share your experience/comments.
We currently do not have a Google Reader compatible API that can serve as a swap-in replacement for your iPhone app. We're working on building an API and should have it ready for use in the coming weeks.
Great, expanding crap-food to the open source world.
Curing attention deficit disorder
We are actively working on supporting other encodings and non-english RSS feeds. However, we currently do not support encoding other than ISO8859.
Whats your product, your marketing plan, how much traction do you get, how much do your customers pay, do you have customers on a free plan, ...

If we don't know anything, we can't really help :-)
I think he's saying "scariest in the long run," because the worst sort are (of course) much worse in the short run, but are less likely to last very long.
Your advertised feed[1] seems to be missing. Returns an empty document.

[1] http://observationdeck.net/feed/
So a Full Stack developer is just someone who likes to work in various fields of Software Engineering and has a quick and broad understanding of all kinds of protocols, technologies and design methodologies, plus some amount of creativity ?

I don't understand why any Engineer would want their job to be any other way. Moreover, it's not like you can't be full stack anymore after you become an expert in some technology.
OK, now it recognizes me and I can see inside the app. Closing browser window upon registration process did freak me out.
Really great report! It's based on 100 SaaS companies, and concludes very differently from this blog post: Requiring credit card for signup results in 50% lower retained users after 90 days.
For 3. couldn't you just "compile but not link" your library packages and distribute the binary (non-source) .a object files for all platforms? Other Go code can then fully import and link those afaik.
Online Payment Processing Demystified
Your page disables zooming on iPads (and other devices). Why? There is no good reason for doing that and it prevents some people from reading.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote
Startup based in Perth Australia are seeking Node.js/Javascript hackers to help out on several projects. Email me if interested - dworrad AT yahoo.co.uk
How to Create a Visual Hammer
How to use kick effectively
If you are looking to join startup , this is perfect opportunity to meet the founders face to face , discuss!
the original title is "Curing cricket's attention deficit disorder"... this title is misleading
I haven't seen the term "full stack developer" used outside of web development at all. Do you have any pointers?
I don't claim that "Full stack developer" has been used before.
At least for ARM Cortex-M3 and NXP LPC2000 microcontrollers you do have GC enabled languages available (Oberon)

http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

But having Rust as option is also great.
Just know that I won't be using your product. And most of my friends have no credit card either.

Besides not being able to sign up, I also wouldn't want to. From what I heard about how credit cards work (as opposed to debit cards, which I think is the right term for the cards that we commonly use here), I'd never sign up for a free trial and give the developer (and any potential hackers) the permission to withdraw arbitrary amounts from my credit card. I sign up for so many things and try out so many demos, it'd be a major security risk. I even prefer not to give out my real name anywhere, let alone bank account details.

But then again, if you think this system works for you, go ahead and use it. If it makes you richer, who am I to say you shouldn't.
1. I feel that the pages I'm following bring me a good value. When it comes to people, if somebody is posting crap, I usually remove it from my timeline. I don't think Facebook is meant to exchange good ideas in public, but to share information. I don't want to be philosophical, but being bored is like everything else in life, you keep taking public transport, because it's useful, not that you are in love with it.
2. Facebook is not meant to build a community around a theme, you get information and feedback on pages but nothing more. Dedicated website on games, astronomy etc. were there before and will be there after.
3. I'm living abroad and share every week with my family on a Facebook private group, I just find the feature great!

In general I think that experiences in life are so different and all require a different set that you simply can't aggregate them all on one and unique website.
"The next network could be about making it easy to talk to people you don't know so well." is just called the web?
One baby picture so far on FB and that was in a private message. The only source of memes is Mr. Takei. We have evening planning chats with people from (guesstimate) 10-15 different countries (all living in our town in Germany), groups for special topics. Conversing gasp with people who moved back to their home country is another regular activity. And it's all held together by an interface that makes it really easy even for the most non-tech people.

So right now the first few stories in my news feed only has 3 posts I find interesting. And? I look at my feed every now and then and if often there is nothing interesting it doesn't hinder me. Some stuff is really interesting and helps me break out of the internet bubble I'm in bust mostly facebook is groups and chat for me. And that's why I love it.
Like in the web world, full stack would be both frontend and backend. The frontend would be the part that interacts with the user (i.e. WinForms, Cocoa, GTK, etc. depending on your operating system and GUI library) and the backend would be code that interacts with the operating system, makes use of the network, manages the database, computes something interesting, etc.

A simple example would be to take a web project that you just built and bundle the backend and frontend together into an installer, have users download and install it, and only run it locally. If you know a user's platform, you could conceivably replace individual web components with native ones. Upon doing so, you have become a non-web full-stack developer.
SEEKING WORK - Remote, travel negotiable

I'll design your iPhone, iPad or Android app!

At the moment I'm trying to build up my portfolio so whilst I won't be mega cheap elance-style, I can do some very good rates right now. Whilst it sounds a bit hard-sell-y, I can only keep it low for so long though (bills!)

I can also build the app if required - have worked in Titanium & Phonegap. Decade of webdev experience too, so any API integration/building etc etc is no problem.

Happy to share some samples with you by email/skype/whatever & can set up Testflight to show you apps in progress.

Email is in profile.
I only use -g when installing runnables, like less, jade etc. I try very hard to reduce the number of CLI apps that I install this way (I've written several build.js scripts that use less/jade/etc as a library instead of an application) because I don't trust the npm repository (no signing, no guarantees, etc).

Please avoid -g unless installing a CLI tool. You will only end up in version hell if you install globally, which is what node_modules was designed to avoid.
Ask HN: do you keep a stash of ideas?
And if you do, do you post them publically?

I just want to see if people actually follow the "ideas are useless, execution is everything" and "share your ideas ASAP" memes :)

Here's my stash: http://firespotting.com/submitted?id=shadowcats
Until now I've always charged a very low trial fee. Say, $1 for the first 30 days of service then auto bill after the 30 day $1 trial.

Never thought it was a good idea to request credit card for free trial, though I haven't tested it.

Now I am testing a free trial that is action based, so the first 3 actions are free, but anything beyond that requires a full subscription. The reason is because the product I'm selling the primary concern potential customers have is "how would I use this" so we give them time have an a-ha moment but not enough to get a tremendous amount of use from it.
> Vim is not more "efficient" than just pressing a key combination

Vim and Emacs both use key combinations... Vim's just require fewer fingers at once. You type Vim key combinations as you would type words in a language with a latin alphabet.
I'm not sure the conclusions are very different. Yes, in this report, you get more customers if you don't ask for credit-card upfront.

But, those 120 signups you get from 1000 trial signups, meaning, for each signed up customer you need to support over 8 trials (support here means your time and to a lesser extent, your service's resources).

For the 60 signups in the case where the credit card was asked upfront, there were 200 free trial signups, ie a bit over 3 trials per customer.

So which is better depends on how much money (or time) you invested in getting the 10000 interested visitors to site (prior to them signing up), and how much money (ie. time and other resources) you need to spend to get them to become paying customers.
Or the publisher's machine has been compromised. Or maybe he accepted a malicious patch. I don't see any difference here.
Only Americans actually believe that the job of politicians is "protecting the rights of the people", and even then, most non-Libertarian voters in America don't actually believe that's the only job of politicians.

There's a fundamental trade-off: power attracts the corruptible, but a certain amount is necessary to get important jobs done.
While I'm glad that people from Turkey are voicing there opinions here, I think there is also danger in being too credulous. The people who use English speaking social media are not necessarily representative of the whole population and the fact that people are able to spread their message on social media doesn't make them right.

I am still waiting to see confirmation of the existence of a media blackout in Turkey by the mainstream media, and the more general claims about the current regime are even harder to judge for an outsider.
Conversion rate 100/200 = 50%(cc required) vs 200/1,000 = 20% (cc not required).

As OP mentioned in his post:
> Also, as an independent developer, it’s also very important for me to minimize time spent dealing with users who will never give me money for my product.

As an indie dev, it's a big difference.
London, UK. The Guardian. Software Engineer.

We're hiring :)

Come hack the news.

The Guardian are predominantly a Scala shop but use anything that does the job. We're into that whole agile thing, so expect a minimum of bureaucracy.

My team works on The Guardian's Content Platform, the central infrastructure that enables virtually everything we do here. The Content API holds a datastore of Guardian content from the 90's to the present day and serves about twenty million requests for it every day. It powers large chunks of our desktop site, as well as the entire mobile site, our Android/iPhone/iPad/Kindle apps, our syndication business and a heap of lucrative partnerships. We're also the ones best placed to be looking at non-traditional revenue streams – how do we generate value from our content except through our own ad-support properties?

We have hard problems to solve. We offer a competitive salary. And, it being The Guardian, health insurance and a good pension come as standard.

Ping cantlin at guardian.co.uk if you want to grab a coffee.
How To Amplify Your Event With The Right Hashtag
>10 lines of code for every city, county, state, etc? And keeping it up to date will be easy too right?

For every city, country and state that has special rules about renting, yes. If they really don't want to participate in a particular market, they can let their competitors serve it instead.

And no, it's not especially difficult.
" Some would even sign up, promptly forget that they signed up, then never use the app again"

"...only 1% of them actually stick around and pay you for your product."

Those two quotes lead me to believe that you're not doing lifecycle emails. Would those people still forget after receiving four emails from you over the course of those 30 days with specific calls-to-action leading them back to the site? Would only 1% of them convert if you actually sent them an email asking them to come back to the site and enter their card details?

My experience has been a lot different to the author's. I see almost exactly 25% of my free trial customers converting to paid. And over half of those enter their card details on the day I send them an email asking them to.

So if you're not doing that, I could see you getting the results you were getting.

That said, it sounds like it would make for an interesting long-term A/B test. I'll try to get around to doing that, and if I do I'll be sure to post the results here.
That's trashy, nasty, cynical comedy for trashy, nasty, cynical yemanim. Don't post it in here.
Currently 1.2.11. As you can see above, I've only ever installed one package globally (jsontool).
The first few times I heard the term "full stack" developer it meant somebody who could understand what's going on at all levels of the call stack.

That means from the kernel through C libraries, web server / JIT / high-level server langauge, through network layer, through browser implementation, javascript JIT, javascript / CSS / HTML interpretation and layout and so on.

Has this turned into "I can does the servers and the javascripts too" or did I encounter the term out of its original context?
Bombay, 1999 - my first ever Internet connection was a VSNL shell account that could barely load Yahoo.com on Windows 98.

PCQuest, the (paper) magazine which Atul edited, bundled a CD with a new distro of Linux (or KDE or GNOME) with each month's magazine and became my introduction to the world of Linux, and soon there after to programming for fun.

Sad to learn that he is no more.
SEEKING WORK - Remote or travel around Europe fine. Native British developer based in Warsaw, Poland.

Back-end and front-end jack-of-all-trades, concentrating on PHP/C#/MySQL, experienced with Apache/Nginx/IIS, and general Linux admin.

A few sample projects I work on in my spare time, using PHP/Kohana/MySQL/jQuery:

http://track-chat.com (also uses Erlang, but I am by no means an expert!)

http://interactwive.com

http://tweetingmachine.com

I'm very good at finding solutions to complex problems, enjoy rescuing projects in trouble, and like working with technology in general.

I always enjoy chatting about projects, whether they're in the planning stages or just need a bit of help.

You can get in touch with me at tom@tbbpolska.com
5 things web developers can teach web designers
My intepretation of his definition is for a developer (web or other-wise) to be able to build an entire software mostly by himself, from setting up the server/database/network, designing the data models, implementing the business logic (with frameworks, APIs) and then designing the HTML/CSS/JS UI.
I stash many ideas to stop thinking about them, otherwise they distract me from what I'm currently building. Once I've written them down, it's easier to go back to the current one.

I usually don't share them because it would take too much time and would defeat my main purpose. But sometimes I just can't help myself and do that anyway :)
Although this article was written in 2010, his general complaint still applies. Compare a code-completion engine written for Emacs, with that written for Vim: auto-complete [1] is written completely in Elisp and utilizes Semantic as a source (mentioned in the article; also full Elisp), while a completion engine for Vim can be written in C++/ Python: Python is first-class, and it's a simple matter of invoking 'py import vim' [2] (it interfaces with the C++ code by simply importing the prebuilt ycm_core.so [3]). There is still no widely-used well-maintained clang completer for Emacs; the most dominant one spawns clang for everything [4].

That said, Emacs has a very rich Elisp ecosystem that's not going away anytime soon. By focusing on extensibility from the very beginning, Emacs has done many things right (it's just an Elisp interpreter with some editor functions bundled in); in comparison, Vim is a dumb-text editor focusing on keybindings, with extensibility as an afterthought. I don't think it is possible to replace Emacs today, primarily because writing a truly extensible text editor is a huge project with many boring parts, and there is no money to be made as a result. Elisp does have its drawbacks, and the Emacs community is suffering because of "philosophical" decisions like bzr (a dead project), instead of focusing on technical merit. So, the project will die a slow painful death, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

The takeaway is that Elisp needs to learn to interface with other languages better. There is a dead Elisp <-> Ruby bridge [5], but clearly not enough has been done about it.

[1]: https://github.com/auto-complete/auto-complete

[2]: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/blob/master/autolo...

[3]: https://github.com/Valloric/YouCompleteMe/blob/master/cpp/yc...

[4]: https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang/blob/master/...

[5]: https://github.com/trogdoro/trogdoro-el4r
I can see how long-term use of something like that would cause problems. Yet, at the same time, it looks very relaxing and I wouldn't mind using something like that (or the OP) for X hours a day.
I remember his columns in PCQuest in the early nineties quite fondly. Before internet access was widely available in India, logging into CiX - a BBS he ran - over a 2400 bps modem and a noisy (and expensive) interstate connection was an exhilarating experience.