skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you pair a majority of the time, sure, make a standardized workstation with your team. My team uses viemu in VS, which the rest of our office detests, but hey, we are the ones pairing 99% of the time.

When I am not pairing for the majority, I setup my machine to my tastes, and simply install a "default" editor for the few times someone else actually needs to type on my machine. Emacs and IDEA both have good ways to revert everything to defaults temporarily.

I do not believe, however, that a perfectly customized setup has only small gains. For example, consider two tools that I have never seen as defaults in any editor or IDE: rainbow parens/brackets and paredit mode. Rainbow parens just highlights pairs: http://stevelosh.com/media/images/blog/2010/09/rainbow.png

And here is a short minute paredit mode explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0

When actually editing code, those two tools save me several hundred keystrokes an hour. And those are just the first two tools I thought to use as an example out of the entire toolbox that is emacs.

If I was to now give up just those two tools, I would be sentencing myself to the mental equivalent of tying five pound weights to my legs for the marathon that is the rest of my programming career. Why would I intentionally require myself to type more keys per hour to do the same editing, rather than just learning a faster way to edit? This is, obviously, also my argument for learning the vim editing system (which I also use in emacs).
This reminds me that the domain wildcarding we do for thumbnails probably isn't necessary anymore thanks both to SPDY but mainly how many parallel connections browsers open these days...

We only do this on the imageboards though -- not the front page.
thank you very much for the recommendations,

>>I used Markdown to write the bulk of my text for a while, but I found it didn't scale very well to large documents. It is great for blog posts and the like.

what do you use for large documents? does it have references /bibliography supports?
I'll go one further than that: we blame schools for not fixing what are fundamentally deep-seated social, rather than educational, problems. Tossing more money at schools, broken or functional, isn't productive.

Half of all children in Chicago live in single-parent homes, and the poverty rate for families headed by a single mother are around 40%: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-11-03/news/ct-edit-x.... That percentage is almost certainly much higher within the Chicago public school system, which skews poorer than the city as a whole.

You can't have functional schools with students who have to worry more about gang violence in their neighborhood than their grades. More money, better curricula, better teachers, none of that matters when the social structure outside the school is crumbling.

I imagine much of the dysfunction endemic to urban school systems is related to the Sisyphean nature of the task we give them. We focus almost single-mindedly on schools and education to solve all the ills of urban society. If only our schools were functional and our teachers competent, we say, these kids would be able to rise out of their condition and better themselves. But teachers who teach in these systems realize the absurdity of that charge. Stuck between a student population that needs help in ways that are not within their power to give, and a society that fails to realize the actual needs of these young people, teachers shift to a mode focused on self-preservation. Hence the dysfunction present in urban school systems.
Reminds me of the Caps Lock Function key on the Acorn Electron computers. Most keywords in the version of BASIC that came with the computer had a corresponding key, so if you were writing a program, you'd simply hit CapsLckFn-P for PRINT or CapsLckFn-E for ELSE etc.

It worked surprisingly well for coding.

If you look carefully, you can see the keywords printed on the front of the keys.

http://ewyse.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/acornelectron_top.j...
Once you had revenue, did you feel like you had to take funding? For example, without funding you would have lost so much traction that you would have been unable to continue building your business?
You are right my homepage is beyond lacking.. Working on a quick redesign now.

So far, the core features I have focused on building are:
Real Time Team Calendar
Task Creation (attachments, rich html editing)
Task Assignment Syncing
Team Invitations

Some Features that I wanted to build (in order of importance as I see them right now):
Mobile user experience optimization (calendar and more)
Email notifications (daily roundups, on task assignments, and more)
Team chat and user messages?
More comprehensive dashboard for Team Admin's
Smarter Assignments (Every day, every week, every X day, etc)
I think it's a bit of a category mistake to call filesystem or database data 'global state' in this context. Virtually every application has external persistence of some kind and some way of referencing that persistence. Technically those references -- variables or classes that manage connection pools or IO utilities, etc. -- can be called 'global state', but that's generally not what the CS literature is talking about when it says 'avoid global state'. The Evil Global State of CS lore generally refers to globally accessible static or class-level values that refer to in-memory structs, objects or values of some kind, in the stack or heap, rather than external persistence. Filesystem and database access is usually taken for granted, and is ceded as the unavoidable level of 'global state':

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GlobalVariablesAreBad

State, in general, at any scope, can make things difficult no doubt. But global state is classically bad because it's hard to reason about across large chunks of distributed code, pollutes namespaces, creates concurrency nightmares, etc. Reducing the scope of state to a manageable range of, say, less than a dozen lines of code, into short-lived references, is clearly far better than the alternative and a reasonable approach in the vast majority of cases. Calling it 'poison' ratchets the rhetoric way beyond the gravity of the problem. No, local state is not considered harmful.

What it seems OP is really talking about in practical terms is pure stateless programming, where the application has no implicit or explicit references to a value whose authoritative data resolves in main memory. If you were to tell me the only state you have in your application is Filesystem or database data, "just beyond the edges of our program logic," I'd say you'd basically achieved the fabled 'stateless' programming ideal, long held as a kind of Holy Grail of functional application development, and as OP points out, that's not often achieved even in the strictest functional environments.

I don't want to diminish the points made, the article was instructive to me as yet another anecdote about the perils of shared mutable state at any scope. But the fundamental principle, that one should avoid shared mutable state as much as possible -- which is the upshot of the essay -- has been axiomatic for quite some time.
Ask HN: Do you know anyone who left the tech world and found happiness?
I've been working for over 8 years in support/consulting roles. I've never found any of the jobs bearable. I really like web development but I can't get anyone to take a chance on me even at half of my current salary. I don't really have time to do side projects and build up a decent portfolio so I understand why people are skeptical. Any other type jobs I apply for I'm told that I'm not qualified or I need a bachelors degree to even be considered.

Since I've hated life for the last 8 years I've been thinking about making a drastic change like leaving tech to go work construction or something. Basically my life is already office space so why not? It made Peter Gibbons happy...

Do you know anyone who has been in this position that has left tech completely and was better off (at least happier) because of it?
thank you, i will look into it
This is why FKs don't automatically get indexed in many DBMSs as some people expect (I find peopel assume FKs imply indexes due to the fact that PKs and unique constrains tend to). Of course if any code searches for rows matching a given key witohut joining to the target table of the FK and without other relavent filtering clauses, then an index definitely is useful, and in some circumstances the query planmner will determine (given the choice) that the hash join is not the most efficient way to go for a given query anyway, so it is sometimes worth indexing your FKs. Testing/benchmarking (with real or real-a-like data of realistic scale) is your friend here when you are not sure. Unless disk space and write performance are a significant issue (which for many applications they may not be) I tend to err on the side of indexing FKs.
Rubrication used to be a normal thing. It was just harder to do economically for a very long time; there's no reason why we shouldn't do it now for general publications (at least in hardcover and electronic editions).
There are hard limits in terms of energy/thermal efficiency to computation. I don't think you will be able to process all the information on the internet - even assuming that people use ridiculously high resolution images regularly.
>In addition, “in accordance with Hendy’s Law (a derivative of Moore’s Law), pixel count per dollar for digital cameras has been doubling approximately every twelve months. This trajectory implies that mobile phones could soon carry >39 megapixel cameras routinely.”

Ah Moore's Law. It explains everything. Double every twelve months, eh? Hmm, quick math. Facebook has been around for 9 years... oh yea, that explains why Facebook allows you to upload full resolution 60MP photos. /s

>What do your Instagram and Facebook photos reveal?

Nothing. They're about 100 times too small for this technique. And they probably always will be.
This is probably the best/most relevant CSI example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0
Headline of the Week
Immutable local state is (as you've observed in that example) harmless, but once you start mutating closed-over state, you've given up completely on referential transparency[1] which gives you a lot of power when reasoning about what code does (and doesn't!) do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency_%28co...
Haha! "Uncrop" amazing! I should really watch Red Dwarf.
This is a little aggravating. De Morgans Laws are CS101 material. I'd like to think the content on the front page is a little more enlightening than that.
Japan researcher builds device to transmit 'force'
What non-compete? Are those common on VC deals? There weren't any when I took funding, but that was awhile ago.
Yes, it's true a lot of VCs will encourage you to spend faster than you should. I warn about this in essays and in a lot of individual conversations with founders. But fortunately they can never do more than encourage, because founders almost never give up board control in funding rounds nowadays, at least not in the US.

As for marginal exits, I think the biggest reason they're rare is that there is not that much demand on the buyer side. There's lots of demand for HR acquisitions of failed companies, and there's demand for high fliers, but Facebook and Google et al are not looking for small, moneymaking businesses.
How to Earn Money Online through Blogging
> Is it just me or has the US foreign policy been upside down the last 5-8 years??

If you think opposing democratizing movements in areas where Islamist movements are popular favor of friendly authoritarians is upside down, then, even if you are just talking about Middle East policy, its pretty crazy to say that's a distinct feature of the last 5-8 years.
it 'is the season to be jolly' do
expect(☃ + ☀).to eq(♨)
end

;)
Ask HN: How do you do your To-Do list?
What method of organization works for you? Do you use Evernote or pen and paper? Do you have multiple lists for different things? Do you review your notes? What works for you?
The article covers only Rails 4.
Cool keyboard. It's also interesting since you assumed, and all of us would have, P would be PRINT, but it's actually PLOT. PRINT is on the /.
Isn't LyX WYSIWYG ?
Personally I would say it is. (and also @vancomycin below).
Sure there is also the "WYSIWYM" category, but it's more of a pun and not broadly known.
You are right. I definitely dropped the ball, I should have put more effort into the landing page for my Show HN. Working on a more in depth homepage right now.

Definitely still working on the one line pitch, but here it goes:
Teamite is a tool for teams to organize their repeatable systems, and simplify their communication.

Teams can create tasks (basically like blog posts, HTML wysisyg, attachments.. And these tasks can be place on to teams calendars, which basically is a glorified "To Do List" as of right now.

I've built similar systems for small businesses on contract. This is my attempt at turning the things I've learned with them into a SaaS
They buried the lede pretty well on this one.

The energy conversion efficiency of this device is ~12%, which is hardly high.

Also, according to the article, apparently crystalline silicon is now expensive (it's not, particularly compared to what they make this device out of).
In a photograph pasted into a Word document and then cropped within it, you often can uncrop, because the crop is non-destructive.
> And they probably always will be.

Famous last words when predicting non-advance of technology.
I have tried a few things. I used Evernote for a few months and while it is more work than a notepad+paper, it is great for when I need to look back on something. Better for structuring and searching.

Can't beat notepad+paper for simplicity though.
> Imagine having to spend money on your daughters education, tending to physical safety and then only to find the boy's family asking for big money gifts during marriage. And not just that, in most common cases the demand for gifts just keep coming infinitely even after marriage.

Why? Why would the bride's family give these gifts? What basis is there for these demands?

Tradition and culture perhaps, but if the situation is so screwed up, then maybe it's time to abandon or fix those traditions. Spend money on education and teach her independence, and if she wants to marry out of love, she can do so without any dowry.
Your answer was so profound that I shared it with all of my friends. Thank you for taking the time.

Reading the first article was cathartic: I have never thought about the deconstruction of habit forming before.

I will implement these suggestions and create a system to follow based on them.
Having just listened to the Snuff audio book, I can't wait to read/hear the further adventures of the Nightwatch and its captain.
Why does an IDE require a username and password to use it?
Our business has been profitable from the start and is now a pretty comfortable lifestyle business, but I don't know as any of us want to still be running it 10-20 years from now, so an exit certainly wouldn't be out of the question.
Maybe https://www.writelatex.com/ can help you become familiar with LaTeX? I'm not huge into type-setting myself but there are numerous text editors and markup formats that can export to LaTeX. The bonus is that you can script most of the workflow and cargo-cult what you need to get the document working until you properly figure things out.
What's the rationale for paying teachers more money? The usual one that is trotted out is that existing levels of teacher pay are insufficient to attract the caliber of teachers we want in our schools. In other words, experienced or not, our existing teachers just aren't very good: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/do-tea....

Under that rationale it makes no sense to pay existing teachers more money. Paying the same people more money isn't going to make them more qualified, more competent, or smarter. Higher salaries are just a tool we can use to recruit people with those qualities.
Self-promotion is an obvious byproduct of a highly competitive society in which actors need to struggle against each other in order to survive, rather than a more cooperative society where there's less pressure to survive and less pressure to get as far ahead as possible.
Reading the thread sibling responses, it seems plausible you could get around that? (I'm just a lay-person.)

I mean, you pay the University $XX for "misc facilities and support". That goes into the school's fund. Later, the Dean gives you a "completely unrelated and coincidental" Xmas bonus of $X. Also out of the school's fund. It's not grant money at that point. It's from a general discretionary fund that just happens to get deposits for services provided to grant based science.

So... money laundering basically I guess?
>If you look around you will find a lot of such covert channels.

And if you look around you'll find far, far more examples of honest foundations, filled with honest people, doing honest work. What's your point?
Lots of good advice. There are people who might say, "This is why you have think things through better in advance" but your situation is what it is. I'd also seriously consider whether his bad points could still be good for the company. (Zuckerberg clearly had an ego.) Also remember there is a cost for the divorce. If your contribution is 70/30, but you split the money evenly, the damage from the divorce may still be more than the benefit of finding a more equitable partner. (He may leave with all his equity, and perhaps some folks leave with him.)

All that said, here's my advice:

1) You have to be mentally prepared to walk, and go do something else, because there is a good chance you won't be able to work with this person again. You also should be prepared to rebuild the company from scratch.

2) If you have a good enough relationship with your co-founder (and one that's worth preserving) you have to go to them and say, "I think this isn't working. Can we figure an equitable way out of this?" You may have to be the one that leaves. You have to be prepared to let him have a large chunk of equity. If you skip this step, you will have an enemy for life. (You should only skip it if you already have an enemy for life)

3) After step 2, you should contact the board member that's closest to you and tell them, "I'm considering moving on. Can we talk?" They will be savvy to know that something is up, and they can help make the call for which of you two will stay.

4) No matter what the outcome, conduct yourself professionally at all times.

In the end, the code/passwords/money won't disappear. If your co-founder does something crazy when there are outside investors, his career is doomed. He may get angry, and you may get fired, but he won't so overtly steal.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.
Web Search interest: Node.js, ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript
I watched this, and it's really interesting. From what I remember (and leaving out his astonishing achievements, with which I assume everyone is familiar): Erdos would have no stable residence, instead he would travel the world with all his possessions packed inside a single suitcase. He would 'crash' at the homes of various mathematicians, often unexpectedly. While visiting, he would start banging a spoon to a pan in the middle of the night, to wake up his host mathematicians and insist that they start working on a Math problem. He was very attached to this mother, and her death left him somewhat baffled. He was celibate, and in one interview he says "he likes women, but dislikes what they stand for".
us foreign policy aside, screw the Muslim brotherhood. they are worse than the troops who massacred them. why is everything Arab related always about picking the lesser of two extreme evils ?
Thanks for this reminder, as this is what I used to use. I had a friend of mine very abruptly pass away and the months following his death, I motivated myself just as you are describing. As time has passed, I have forgotten about this. I appreciate your input.
I use Ctrl+C to get out of insert mode. Also a diehard Programmer Dvorak user.
I hate trendy presentation with slides containing one or just a few words. It's sexy and effective when well presented and everything, but if you read the slides later alone, or stumble upon them on slideshare, they are completely meaningless.
You may not want to use the same tools to write academic reports and blog posts. It's best explained by the popular programming quote that "when you have a hammer, you see every problem as a nail."

LaTeX can get hard, but templates lower the learning curve. Google "latex report templates," learn how to compile them, play with them. Even if it's harder the first day, it will be a lot more useful in the long term.

The learning curve is not a fair excuse not to try it. If you try it, build things with it, and don't like it, you'll know what you're not missing.
And now i'm wondering whether you could create an app which detected faces reflected in images and scrambled them... though with eyes that might destroy the way the original face looks in some creepy way. Of course you'd have to strip all the EXIF data as well including any internal thumbnails which would be of terrible quality anyway...
the fact that it's not a good plan hasn't stopped others from doing it. It's not much of a comfort to know that the person ergo
who sued you made a bad business move.
Yup, you're right. I'm lacking imagination.

Please help me understand a future where social networking sites will maintain and display ~ 6200px X 6200px photos of your selfies. Outside of genetically engineering new eyeballs, I'm struggling here.
Is the definition of 'lifestyle business' 'a company you want to run for the foreseeable future?' I think that's too broad a term (because such a definition would include even some huge, high earning multinational companies)...
Not at all; LaTeX is a wrapper over TeX made exactly to hide all formatting routines behind structural declarations like \section, \itemize or \emph. To this end it is not really different from Markdown; yes, tokens require slightly more keystrokes, but you get something way more powerful and predictive -- Markdown won't give you nested enumerations, tables, references, footnotes, automatic TOCs or figure lists... Niether BibTeX which will happily eat your Mendeley of Zotero library and compile a perfect bibliography, includes that allow you to split your work into several files or macros that can save you from re-typing certain things over and over.
One thing I've always thought lost in the discussion of increased digicam pixel count is that at a point you gain no real useful information in those pixels, because you've crossed the threshold of whether vibration allows resolution at that level at all.

Sure more pixels usually mean slightly more information, and there's obviously techniques: stability-enhancement, faster shots etc, that change this critical point. But for the average person carrying a camera: we crossed the critical point long ago and now just waste a lot of SSD space.
30C3 live stream
For example, we were great buddies with Mubarak for a couple of decades before he was deposed.

And that's just one tiny example. US foreign policy is frequently, well, evil.

Edit: OK, I'm not normally one to complain or even care about downvotes, but really? At least reply to explain your disagreement. Do you disagree that we were friends with Mubarak for decades before he was overthrown? Do you disagree that we have routinely and for ages propped up evil dictatorships in other countries, or even overthrown democratic governments and replaced them with dictatorships?
Nashvillians don't want to be happy or else many wouldn't be able to effectively do their jobs of writing and performing country music.
Is it possible to purchase all the information they have on you? I'm curious to see the extent of what they have on me.
Did you watch the video? He uncropped a picture which had been printed as a cropped photo.