skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1, vim hands down. Cross platform, powerful, lightweight, configurable, etc
Love textmate, use it as main text editor, but it's time for Textmate 2 and its split-screen option.
Senate Bill gives Obama 'kill switch' on web‎
Komodo Edit. It's open source.

http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/
Wheel of Time fan site wotmania shuts down
That, or projecting it next to the canvas and copying. I don't object to this technique (in fact, I'm learning towards doing something similar for an art project I have in mind), but my first reaction to the work of this artist is that it's banal and suggests a refusal or fear of engaging with the subject in any meaningful way.

I'm a shy person myself and can relate to not wanting to snap a photo or sketch overtly, but 'here's what some people look like when they don't know you're staring' isn't revealing very much of anything.

If you like the hyper-realitic painterly technique but (like me) prefer a more provocative application of it, you may share my enjoyment of Istvan Sandorfi: http://www.fosaw.com/ I can't afford any of his art, but I have spent a few hundred bucks on buying the catalogs.
Aquamacs (Emacs for Mac)

http://aquamacs.org/
I'd suggest just making a list of 10 potential clients... then research the organizations a bit and contact them and ask for a few minutes to present what you've done.

The key is to realize what you are selling. In the first 30 seconds of a phone conversation you're selling them on the idea that you are professional and that they should actually not hang up the phone...

The next step is to mention your product and to get them talking about their needs. Ideally they tell you a bunch of needs that your product perfectly addresses.

From there, you have to worry about logistics, such as who is actually going to make the purchase decision, etc. You should be prepared to work with their organization and process and to do as many phone calls and online demos as needed to get everyone comfortable with the product. Also realize that their purchase timeframe might not be immediate.

The main skill that professional salespeople have is the ability to efficiently get people to commit to a purchase. One develops a sixth sense for when to ask for the signed contract, etc. But with any new product, even a seasoned salesperson is going to have to do some learning about the typical customer, the product, etc.

I think the best thing to do is just ask "so what's the best way for us to proceed?" to your most trusted contact in the organization, and let them tell you how to sell to them.

If it's a high priced product, be prepared to have an in-person meeting before someone will write you a big check. Once you have signed a few clients then it may be possible to sign people over the phone.

The hardest sales are the first few, but it sounds like you already have some happy clients, so you should probably contact them and ask if they might feel comfortable talking to your potential future clients about the product, etc.

Also, be prepared that some may say "hey, we paid you to develop this and now you're selling our product to others?". You might want to offer them something in return (such as free upgrades) and discuss this with them up front to avoid any confusion, etc.
Google is in a contractual business relationship with its partners, not an hiring or governing relationship. The contract may suck, but does anyone sign up for AdSense because the contract is great?
Visual Studio 2008 - Love it. I don't notice any load-time issues, but maybe thats because I never close it.
I switched multiple times for long periods, learnt each's scripting languages, customized the hell out of each, wrote extensions and in the end right now I'm happiest with being a speed demon with my vim keybindings-fu.

But really the only editors worth learning and using are Emacs and Vim, decide between which one or use both.
I know the central people behind twestival, and have worked with them before. I think it is important to know how things are actually run. You have a few central people who are helping a ton of people organize meetups. This lets those at the center get great reach, and makes the global event really big. It is amazing that a global event is essentially organized by a handful of people.

Like the internet, this kind of decentralization requires relinquishing a bit of control. It is daring from a branding perspective to let locals plan events under your brand's global name.

So I wouldn't say this story is the fault of "the twestival" - but of those local SF organizers who dropped the ball.
The Twestival consists of hundreds of volunteers in lots of different locations. The people the I and my colleagues have worked with for four different events have so far been very professional.
VS is probably the best product Microsoft makes, it's spoiled me for other IDEs.
What's in a number? - xml-based repository of numerical metadata
(paraphrased fta):
A quantity actually includes several components, Razdow explained. There are digits, obviously. Equally obviously to engineers, but often forgotten by the untrained, a quantity includes dimension in some defined units, and a tolerance. And in some cases, such as accepted constants also may have a proper name, like pi or Planck's constant. Attached to the quantity, either implicitly or explicitly, there is also a description, like minimal channel length or oxide thickness. Less obviously, the quantity may also have a history. Razdow's idea is to capture all these facets of a quantity in a single repository.
I fish. I also kill the fish. I kill mice too, but I don't tend to eat them. "Hacker" News indeed.
Does there exist any sort of web app that can take rows of data and allow the user to run statistical reports on it?
Emacs isn't for everyone though.

I gave it a try around a year ago since a lot of people I respect (looking at you HN) seem to worship it. After around a month I still thought it to be arcane and backwards. I even posted here to get some feedback on what I was doing wrong (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313025) but we just never got along, Emacs and I. After around 2 months I went back to notepad++.

I'm not saying emacs is a bad editor, on the contrary, just that it's not for everyone and that it does seem to require a substantial effort before you're really productive in it.
It was some time after I became seriously interested in photography that I realized framing is a myth. Bad or amateur photographers look at a poorly framed result and regretfully discard it. Experienced ones cut triangles off the sides - or nowadays, straighten it up in Photoshop or Picasa. If you enjoy photography you might find it well worth revisiting your discard box.

The myth persists partly because in film and video, the frame is a much harder limit and requires a far greater commitment on the part of the person looking through the lens at the time the image is recorded...we do mess about with it in post-production, of course, but with far less freedom than a still photographer enjoys.

Don't be too harsh on the absence of the artistic 'spark'. Even magnificent artists like Durer employed grids to aid with proportion and perspective, and composed complex pictures by making numerous studies of posed models first. Much historical art would have been viewed as a matter of skill rather than talent by its creators, with the art stemming from the selective emphasis rather than a faithful rendering.

I agree with you about the ketchup bottles though. The body of work on display here seems singularly unadventurous in its choice of subject matter.
Unfortunately, the real problem here is that Google is a company that tries to be nice and pleasant to their users, but has to deal with unreasonable customers on a massive scale. In fact, not just unreasonable customers, but many who are actively attempting to systematically defraud them and their other customers.

So I think we can all agree that this was a pretty bad example. What are the best ways that others have found to handle things in similar situations without causing these kinds of scenarios?
This thread would be incomplete without mentioning ed:

http://www.dina.dk/~abraham/religion/ed-standard
I believe in keeping things simple. This project sounds like your pride and joy; you've put a lot of yourself into something that solves someone else's problem quite well.

Talk to them, understand their problem, and then show them how your software solves their problem. Remember, it's all about them, not you. That's it. There are a lot of other details, but they are just that: details.

Focus on solving your customer's problem with your offering. Be yourself, care, and let the journey take you to their solution.
scribes http://scribes.sourceforge.net/
PubSubHubBub
I'm trying to implement real time chat engine with PubSubHubBub as the core in Rails. My question is what I need to do to or read to achieve this task ? Where I'm gonna start ? What knowledge do I need to know first because I'm really really newbie in this field and like to play with it... or are they any realtime chat engine that is fully compatible with Rails other than pshb ?
Has anyone tested SIMBL plugins such as Visor
( http://github.com/darwin/visor/tree/master )
with it? I ended up twiddling my thumbs for a while when some security updates broke it previously (10.5.3, I think?) and would like to check the same doesn't happen.
I'm a fan of NetBeans. It isn't for everyone. Sometimes one wants something lightweight. However, NetBeans has a lot of nice things. Refactoring helpers are wonderful. They make it so much easier to change the name of something when its meaning changes so that the code stays clean. Like many visual editors (rather than command line things like vim), it can do tabs and show a tree of files on the left pane. It supports a lot of different languages and even has some great hooks for running a project on your local machine. It can also detect some problems - unused variables, unused imports, syntax problems, etc. which means that you can catch small errors fast.

It does have its faults (like any piece of software), but it can be very helpful.
Like I care - I get telemarketing calls anyway. And you 'wreak' havoc, but bad-smelling things 'reek'.
another +1, but you need to learn to use it properly. Tags, windows, changing files, external commands, macros, etc. It's not user friendly, in fact it's downright user hostile, but it's powerful, and written for hackers.
Google the same question and join the thousands of other threads that have asked the same question just in the past week. Continue on to find the millions of threads that asked the same question over the past decade.
If you're a unix dev and want to be taken seriously, use Emacs or vim.

Otherwise people will just laugh at you behind your back. Or to your face.
In the Omnivore's Dilemma he story about Salatin's farm (Polyface Farms) makes me want to be a grass farmer when I grow up.
I'm curious if anyone is using vim on windows as the OP mentioned he is using Notepad++ and Visual Studio (both Windows environments)? If you are using vim, what has your experience been like?
Works fine. Unfortunately, developing without Unix stinks. and Cygwin is a hack (very slow). Vim is much more powerful with Unix tools on hand. I learned Vim on XP (no choice of OS, so it was the best choice).
It amazes me that The Way of Unix is not known and understood, and most certainly applied, by everyone everywhere.
1) You price the product based on what the market will bear. If you say "it costs $50k" and they say, "great where do we sign?" you're probably selling too cheap. You need a few 'no's to tell where the top of the pricing range is.

How to guess the initial price? Ask your existing clients how much they'd pay for an off the shelf product.

2) Read up on Enterprise Sales - you're basically doing a small version of that. Academics and Unis are notorious for long sales cycles (years).

Good luck!
Apple broke a lot of its developer reference urls... again.
vim is one of the most user friendly pieces of software I have ever used. The interface is incredibly efficient. The designers put great effort into making sure that common tasks were one or two keystrokes that usually don't even require moving your fingers off the home row.

Just because it's not the most discoverable interface doesn't mean it's user hostile. I wish more software designers would look at vim as an example. A text editor falls into the category of software which users spend a ton of time using. For those types of software a steeper learning curve is completely accpeptable if it means the users can operate the software without even consciously thinking about it once they've learned how to use it.
Well, I think we all agree that google agregating your news should be opt-out, and the threats to stop search-engine-indexing site which doesn't allow its news to be on unrelated news-aggregator service is ridiculous.

So that ridiculousness is worth investigation, sure.

On other hand, I don't see why newspapers would object aggregating their articles into google news. Google news is all about links to the newspaper sites; it's a source of clicks, not a way to steal content.
What are you talking about? This (appearently) is a trend in startups and entrepreneurship. I, for one, am interested.
I use ultra edit nearly every day. I love search/replace with regular expressions.
For a Digital Pioneer, the Web Was No Safety Net
Nature vs Nurture: Rich parents have rich children, but not if they adopt
Thanks, you are correct. I really have put a good amount of time into this niche and truly enjoy it, to the point where I just decided to drop a client so that I could give this my full attention.

What you describe is how it worked for my first set of customers. I solved the needs of the first person, and then for each subsequent customer, I was introduced by the previous one, met with them, and had a 'be myself' approach. There has never been any paperwork beyond a simple text file describing the work that will be done, and no one has ever signed a piece of paper. I just showed what I did for the previous guy and I believe they liked the fact that I wasn't really pushing a product, I just knew how to develop something that solved a problem for them. I am very comfortable with this approach and perhaps I shouldn't change it.

However, pretty soon I will have exhausted the potential clients in my local area since it's not a huge niche. My thoughts were that some other organizations might have different attitudes towards forking over a lot of money to one guy in blue jeans, and that maybe I would benefit from actually "learning" sales. This thought came from watching this particular interview:

http://mixergy.com/maponics-darrin-clement/

He focuses on a mapping niche, and describes how he was able to expand and sell more expensive software by actually taking formal sales classes.

I really would prefer not to do this and would prefer to just say "check out what I did for these other folks", but then again I'm willing to do what it takes.
Notepad. It's a simple, feature-rich, light-weight editor. The learning curve is long and steep though, but well worth it. I've been using if for 3 years now and still don't know all it's bells and whistles. Best of all it comes preinstalled on a lot of OSs so you don't have to go through a laborious install process.
By analogy, it may have been the desire of people to travel from London to New York which made transatlantic liners, worth investing in, but it wasn't the passengers that steered the Titanic into an iceberg.

The disturbing point about the concentration of capital management power into the hands of a few is that to some extent it distorts the market's price-discovery function. Portfolio managers routinely align themselves with corporate managers - not necessarily out of any ill-intent, but just because doing so has delivered relatively steady returns over time - and as a result shareholder motions at company meetings - on board membership, executive compensation, risk strategy and so forth - are usually marginalized. This is good from portfolio managers point of view as it reduces share price volatility and pushes corporate management towards maximising quarterly returns, but as we've seen in the last two years those goals may not align well with the interests of investors over the longer term, at all.

Activist investors have changed this to some extent, but generally they rely heavily on leveraging in partnership with private investment pools or proxies, and even then a majority of activist investors are focused on increasing growth and profitability rather than risk management, preserving the interest of stakeholders, reducing externalities or capital preservation. The political consequence of this is that even those who are heavily invested in the market via pension schemes and so forth are hostile towards it because they can not see how their interests are reflected by capital flows, and regard the invisible hand as something of an iron fist.

Of course, some of this is due to ignorance and short-termism on the part of retail investors and pensioners who actually support rent-seeking economic behavior but simply don't see the big picture. A more serious issue, though - returning to my titanic analogy - is that the smaller the pool of portfolio managers, the greater the risk of disaster when herding or flocking behavior affects financial vectors with very large displacement.
Uh, what percentage of the Internet backbone is running on government infrastructure? The President hardly needs a new law if he wanted to shut things down.
I went to the abstract of the cited paper

http://www.nber.org/papers/w10894

but didn't see much there that would help me check for warning signs in experimental design and interpretation,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

which I generally like to do. Does anyone have access to the complete NBER working paper or to a more thorough description of the underlying study?
Agree with all points on consultative sales..

I'd like to also suggest to do some research into what kinds of conferences your clients go to. If it is a niche industry, there are probably one or two of these a year. You (and your sales rep, if you can find a good one) should absolutely go to these. Visit the trade booths, go to the happy hours, talk to everyone. If you can afford it, you should have your own professional looking booth.

Conferences are where potential clients will go to make a decision to buy, and it can often have more to do with your personal skills than your technology. Find out who has the budget or grant money and focus on them - don't spend too much time talking to people who aren't decision makers or who aren't in a position to buy - but don't blow them off either, because word of mouth is very important in consultative sales, and they may one day be potential clients, or they may refer you to someone that they know who is looking to buy.

Good luck!
I have come to really appreciate Eclipse. It's come a long way since the first time I tried to use it.

Eclipse, plus vim in a terminal window, take care of all of my editing needs.
Jedit is amazing. It's like the Firefox of text editors - not the smallest or fastest, not the biggest or slowest, but reasonably quick and very very extensible. I would say that other tools (vi and especially emacs) are also very extensible, but Jedit has no learning curve and fits in well with Windows.

That said, I'm slowly becoming more efficient in vi and it will eventually overtake Jedit for myself.
You're very right. I've been using it for years and I still haven't gotten around to 'properly' learning vim.

It's not exactly laziness, it's more that I got really spoilt at some point in the past by writing my own editor, but maintaining and porting it to new platforms as well as lots of work on customer machines has made it infeasible to keep the project going.

So, I use vim. But at the bare minimum level, I really should go and do something about that.

Thanks for the prod!
Eclipse (and intellij) are both resource hogs though.
Coda drives me nuts just because it is Mac (not "MAC") only. I bounce from machine to machine, and I hate it when a tool I like on one machine is simply absent on the next.

I know Panic is all about Mac software, but I wish they would find a way to get apps like Coda up and running on other platforms.
Lately I've been using Textadept - http://caladbolg.net/luadoc/textadept2/manual/1_Introduction... - and I like it a lot. It's a lot like vi in that most menu items have a key sequence, you can split buffers, but everything is in GTK. It's also 100% extensible through Lua, the only drawback is that there aren't many themes and theming it yourself could be a little smoother.
For Java, yes.
Yeah, I've seen this several times. I don't know how they put the site together, but it doesn't sound like it would be a hard problem to solve.

As weird as it is on the web, it's even weirder in their developer tools. I kid you not, there are HTML files in "/Developer/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.CoreReference.docset/Contents/Resources/Documents/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSApplication_Class". Whereas, if they'd hired me to do it, I would have probably called it "/Developer/Documentation/Cocoa".
I use Kate for GUI and nano at command line.
Or joke about you in irc while secretly not using either tool themselves.
I was under the impression that people with Asperger's tend to be really honest, to an abrasive fault. Not that deception is out of the question, just not the norm.
Loved ultraedit when I was a "Windows-guy"
I won't necessarily dispute this, but those "resources" on my system are there to be used.

Sometimes it seems like people buy quad-core machines and 8GB of RAM, and then are angry if an app uses more than 1% of CPU and a few MB of that RAM.

I'm not going to sit here and say that Eclipse's hour-long startup time doesn't annoy me, though...
I agree. It's like Photoshop: at first you're like "WTF were they thinking?" until you really use it and see what geniuses they were.
> He focuses on a mapping niche, and describes how he was able to expand and sell more expensive software by actually taking formal sales classes. I really would prefer not to do this and would prefer to just say "check out what I did for these other folks", but then again I'm willing to do what it takes.

There are people out there who live for this sort of thing. It's ok if your interests lie more in the technical side of things, but you should seek out a dedicated sales person who has a passion for it.
Yes - There is a combination of technology, new businesses, entrepreneurship, and new trends in society. There's also some development challenges, and recognizing a new market.

I'll agree with a previous poster - slashdot, digg, have pretty much dropped off my reading habits - HN, NYT, and techcrunch (and sporadically groklaw and salon.com) are now my web distractions. Not every article can be about erlang.
Thanks! That looks superb.
Opera is correct. https://epoch.oreilly.com is using a 512-bit RSA key.
I'm a huge fan of VS as well. When I'm at home on my personal machine, it's always a bit of a letdown when Intellisense doesn't kick in...
Credit Cards Offers: The Importance of Comparison
"A one-lane road, in a town, with a speed limit of 65 miles an hour? That is the only problem here. (They don't even let you drive that fast on the 9-lane expressways in Chicago!)"

So here's a map of the spot which may help you understand what's going on here:

http://bit.ly/ZlTJc

The smaller strip of concrete to the north is the bike route. As you can see, it's not exactly "in town" -- again, this is a bypass connecting a couple of highways with a route that doesn't go through the town.

"There are many more accidents where a motorist turns across a bike path without looking than there are where a motorist hits a bicycle from behind. Playing the numbers, you're safer on the road than on the bike path. That is why "experienced cyclists" avoid them."

This contradicts what I was told by a number of "experienced cyclists".