skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Own up HN: What are your craziest abandoned projects?
I think everyone has at least one of these projects: something that seemed like an awesome idea when you started it, then mid-way through you realize how bad it was for such-and-such reason.

Going through my old files this afternoon in an effort to reclaim some HDD space reminded me of some of the crazier ideas I've had. It's always great to follow up your ideas, but it's even better to realize when they're totally crazy!

I'm sure that all of you have some great stories, and who knows, maybe our crazy ideas will inspire someone else to write their own crazy, and possibly great, app!
Don't Cut Out the Middleman--Become One
Ok, are you open to collaboration ?

That way other people could do the stuff that is not priority to you.

I'm more than willing to really dig in to arc if I know the effort is not in vain. (other than learning arc, which is interesting in and of itself but that would be 'academic' interest, nothing productive).
This is the option I believe that would cause your doc to be indexed:
Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)

Simple as that. Just don't check off this option when sharing.

I don't know why everyone is so worried about this security wise.
Then that good programmer would leave to go work on a good language.
I guess I'm not a real man then. I have a number of pink shirts that I wear for work (amongst a whole load of other colours) and I've never even thought about my masculinity when wearing one. Frankly, the opposite seems to be true to me. If you have to put a big sign on your pink shirt talking about "real men" then you are pretty insecure about your pink shirt and your man status.

I agree -- the "wear a pink shirt to indicate confidence in your masculinity" trick only worked briefly (was it in the late 90s?), for the first few men who started doing it. As soon as it got noticed and people started writing articles about it, it stopped working, since it was an easily-faked signal; I remember the bars suddenly being flooded with desperate-looking weak-chinned men in pastel pink shirts at some point. Nowadays, I think, that whole phase is over and pale pink is just another colour for men's shirts, though I personally try to avoid it because of all the layers of attached symbolism.

This, of course, is the whole point about fashion -- those who aren't at the top try to look like those above them, and those who are at the top try to look different from those below them.

If you're thinking "but surely a highly confident man doesn't care what he wears" then you're right, but a highly confident man still needs to go to great effort to make sure he doesn't look like he cares what he's wearing, otherwise he risks being confused with those below him.
Mayweather Vs Marquez Live Stream
Watch Mayweather Vs Marquez Live Stream on September 19, 2009
Quickbooks Online has ways of connecting to bank accounts and getting balances automatically.

My guess is that Intuit will be able to dump Yodlee now and use their own systems.
What about simply giving meta discussions (including features) a place of their own ?

That way if there is an interesting one (and it does happen, even if rarely) it has a spot and doesn't get killed because it takes up valuable space on the 'new' page.
What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store.

It's a good essay, but I didn't much like this paragraph. It feels too much like playing semantic games.
While going through my old files today I have found 3 already!

- A JavaScript framework: Like jQuery wasn't good enough?

- A client-side search engine: Used AJAX calls to crawl a website and return results... Can you say slooow? Yuck.

- Hoppy: A simple little program that creates several new versions of itself, with names generated by a markov chain, then runs those new versions after a time delay. I never inflicted this upon anyone else, but trying to shut it down without re-booting was hell!
emacs sorts '50 cent' before 'AAA...'. Funny if being first in listings was the true reason for his success.

pg has more data and convincingly reduces the advice to - 'determination' (http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html) - and 'be relentlessly resourceful' (http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html).
Motivation and conviction could have rightly trumped justification.
No apologies needed, I thought your comment about learning formal type theory and your book recommendation were valuable. My comment was based on the premise of this thread (per the title) and the premise of the article.
Got a source other than a single article in The Women's Journal, though? Womens' magazines often give against-the-grain fashion advice.
Not every sale is an indicator of success. Even if it were, more visitors would've made the company more valuable.
fnid says:
"the big problem to me is that people think somehow humans are distinct and unique {and _above_ all other life forms). That consciousness begins and ends in homo sapiens."

But except for the part I bracketed, the above is pretty much true. There is little evidence of self-awareness in other animals and certainly nothing like what humans display. Along with that, our language ability is unique (Sure I know about signing apes, dolphins, African parrots, et al, wherein minimal language abilities are present).

No doubt that animals have emotions. But consciousness? No. Animals other than man live in the "here and now". Other than following genetically-programmed patterns, they neither plan for the future nor reminisce about the past as we do. And that is just fine: that's all they apparently need.

Some unique situation (I have no idea what ) must have occurred in man's history for the ability to think outside of the "here and now" to develop.

About the bracketed part: I would omit it because I don't think that there is any design where man has any inherently "higher" role/purpose/goal than other animals.
Django Debug Toolbar Screencast
I've been using Ack tons, love it. However, I don't like the --notext default. I find that I specify --text almost every time. Just wanted to give everyone a headsup that this is the case: I introduced some bugs in my app when I missed a whole bunch of .txt templates for plain text email variants.
It seems really silly that you have to CC the recipients and tell them to ignore the message and instead look for a different message from some other address... I think that's gonna be a problem. You should try to figure out another way to handle that.
So you'd rather be killed now with a pin driven into your brain, then live out the rest of your life?
Blizzard internals from GDC Austin
EuropeRegistry seems ok. They pick up the phone, but they are sort of expensive. Thank you for the information.
I do recall hearing about some mismatch between Scala and Java generics (both ultimately use type erasure, due to JVM limitation). Scala generics on their own are fine.

2.8 is supposed to improve both, I think.

The type inference is local (and unification based), and not Hindley-Milner (ML). I'm pretty sure Scala's type inference is more complicated (and less awesome as a result).
The controlling of people's fear in your usage is also known as manipulation. You're right that it works quite well since it takes advantage of the emotion parts of our psyche that are more fully evolved in us than the newer rational thinking parts.
Canonical URL: http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/
I'd rather have good carpenters working with a few blunt tools than rubbish carpenters working with a good stock of sharp tools, but I don't think the good carpenters would stick around very long.
I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but doesn't that seem to stretch the meaning of 'your own property'? I mean, if you can't even cut the trees down, what exactly makes it 'yours'? (aside from the privilege of paying takes on it)
Sugar Labs and FSF announce joint efforts to promote learning platform
"One solution is for the upper class to wear clothing so expensive the lower class could not possibly afford it."

Another would be to make it illegal to wear clothes of a higher class than your own:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
Music professionals have also noticed how easy it is to sample their work in the iTunes Store, and argue that these samples count as public performances.

They should test out that theory in public: Offer a concert where they only play 30s cuts of all the songs...see how many people buy tickets.
http://github.com/petdance/ack#readme
" ... would it still be ethical to eat them?"

Still?

Why do you think it's ethical now to eat animals, given what we already know about them?
Complicated how? The number of unfamiliar features (Scala has stuff that Java does not)? The size of the language specification (Scala's is much smaller than Java's)?
The clothing industry believes someone my age wants either clothing laced with profanity, clothing that objectifies women, clothing that glorifies alcohol or drug use, or clothing that makes them look like a gangster.

What the hell is he talking about? Does he live inside of a locked Ed Hardy store, never allowed to see the light of day? Can't this guy just go to the Gap and stop whining about non-existent conspiracies?
How is it working so far? I use it at home and it's more than powerful enough to meet my modest needs. However, at my work, a lot of legacy applications and templates are base on Excel with macros; I'm not sure what would be involved in converting them all to be compatible with OO Calc.
What a message that sends about you! :)

I agree with him: you can't claim to signal nothing.

I don't doubt your conscious intention.
You might be dismissing the point too soon. To the lay-person, junk DNA looks like as useless a feature as a ridge in a door panel, or dummy pathways on a chip. To an expert auto-maker, the purpose of the panel ridges is obvious, structural rigidity. To an expert chip-maker, the purpose of dummy pathway is obvious. To Our Holy Creator Who Art in Heaven (or whomever you wish to credit our creation), it is possible that our junk DNA has a very obvious purpose that we have yet to divine.
That is one of the differences between sailors and rock climbers. The "base" knot for sailors is generally the bowline and for climbers the figure 8. I think it has to do with priorities.

In rock climbing your loads are pretty defined. So the ropes are sized appropriately and the knots are the weakness. You care about the strength of a knot, the stronger the knot the thinner the line you can carry.

On a boat, that isn't really the priority. I have lines from 1/32" up to 2.5" on my boat. I don't really know the exact loads on anything and they are always changing. So all of the lines have a huge factor of safety, like 3-5x more than it needs. The strength of the knot matters little.

But what does matter is speed. I can tie a bowline in under 2 seconds and figure 8 in under 2 seconds easily, if i'm using both hands. But if I'm using one hand, well it takes me a hell of a lot longer with the figure 8 than the bowline. There are a lot of situations where that might happen. For me it usually arises in emergencies. Am I laying on the deck reaching to tie a knot with one hand while holding on with the other? Or am I tieing a knot around a towing post while the line is starting to get taught? Am I holding onto a sail while trying to tie it off because a shackle broke?

Those are the times that the ease of tieing and the speed of getting it done out weigh the benefits of the figure 8. They both have their place but doing both sports I think culturally thats why people know what knots they know.
It's quite simple: fashion is a positional good. As soon as other people are wearing what you're wearing, what you're wearing is no longer fashionable; so you need to start wearing something else.
How's it selfish and short-sighted? And certainly that's better than making blanket statements about the next generation or having the gull to think a company is sparking a "revolution". That word is starting to become more overused than the word "celebrity".
Tbird's threaded view is nowhere near as intelligent as Google's threaded view. When an email client arbitrarily adds a "Re:" is messes it up. Conversation-style view is more or less useless when split up among multiple conversations.

Or at least this was my experience this summer.
This is a slippery slope, but suffice to say that if Mint hung in there and took over Intuit's place in the marketplace not only would they be treating their customers better (you know, the ones who got them here in the first place?) but they would also have many more millions to feed children, etc.
The A-Z of programming languages: Groovy
I just wasted 4+ minutes of life watching that video. I saw no smack down or anything unbrilliant about what he said. I didn't make out anything brilliant either i'm just saying I don't see any relevance in that video to anything I said before you posted a link to it.
I think the association of pink with femininity is relatively recent (less than a hundred years old), but I haven't found anything but other people asserting it in a quick search.
This: http://votesimple.org/

I would like to see this kind of thing in the USA someday, but there are some pretty significant practical hurdles in the way. I think it's possible to design around the problems, but I just haven't had the time + energy to move forward.
I think there are more abstractions available compared to java. That means there are possibly more things to understand before you can know how a piece of code will exactly get to be executed. Now, having more abstractions also mean the code can be more explicit and demand less "simulating in your head" in order to understand what it does.
No luck for me either. I added factorial, saved, saved, image, loaded image (it shows factorial in transcript being loaded). Try it out in workspace and nothing. It was interesting to "show it" on an anonymous block and see the javascript function it is creating:

[:x | (x + 1) + x].

function (thisObject, x) {
x['perform:with:']("+", 1)['perform:with:']("+", x);
}
Did Ted just confuse an MVC (Django) with a non-blocking web server?

Honestly, if that's your attitude ("don't take any risks by going after technical challenges, keep cranking out business logic"), you should be working for/attempting to start the likes of Siebel or SAP and not be working for/attempting to start a technology start-up. I don't mean that in a negative way: see http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/

If you're building a product where you already know your customer and which features it needs, yes, don't take any technological risks. If you're making a product which has never been made before, you're already taking an enormous risk-- you should use every bit of your technical expertise to your advantage.
Work out, wear slim cowboy shirts and lots of denim. Classic.
I already used OpenOffice, so it hasn't affected me. No one else seems to mind it on my floor though, since we're all programmers.
I see that they let you choose the custom url after you create the blog.
All lies.
I work at IBM, and I have heard no such thing.
As for "330,000 use Symphony" - everyone gets a computer with Symphony pre-installed. Nobody I know ever uses it - ever. We all use MS Office, and have not been told to stop.
While publishers have long been in the business of selling the medium, people were always in the business of buying the content.

E.g. I didn't set out to buy a little plastic disc. I set out to buy a copy of TO BE OR NOT TO BE, specifically. I bought it on DVD only because it was the format that was available for sale that I preferred.

When the DVD market disappears, the publishers of little plastic discs may well disappear. But my demand for a copy of TO BE OR NOT TO BE doesn't.
Bear in mind I'm responding to the comment above my own, not the article itself.

"how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again"

This quote outlines something that benefits the individual (self), as opposed to the many (Mint's existing customers), no?
Prison Buddy Search.

Basically, I wanted something that would let you search for your high school friends in all the jails & prisons, state and federal. Optionally I thought about hooking it into facebook, for automatic updates.

"Ben Jerry has just been imprisoned for 5 years for aggravated assault!"

Hope someone doesn't steal my idea; then again, if they do that means I'd get to reap the fun benefit without the hard work!
The U.S. doesn't have an official language.

Also, as a business, if you have the option to make it easy on a significant portion of your audience, and you don't, it shouldn't be a surprise when that audience chooses not to patronize your business.
I agree.

I was recently 4 hours into a flight from Chicago to Germany on a large double-decker Airbus when I started smelling smoke on the plane.

Suddenly I see flight attendants running to the back of the plane with fire extinguishers. Other flight attendants are running to the front of the plane with bottles of liquor.

The captain comes over the intercom: "Flight attendants, prepare for emergency landing"

Over the next 5 minutes I watch how different people react to the scenario. Some people grab hands, some start to pray, some people just close their eyes. Others start demanding up-to-the-minute information about our situation.

Without warning, we hit the ground. In a made-for-the-movies moment, the entire plane erupts in applause.

The rest of my trip I was a little nervous getting back on planes. However, the one thing that helped me keep things in perspective was something the flight-attendant said during our emergency landing:

"I have a husband in Germany. I don't want to die either. We're doing everything we can."

Simple and rational. It always works for me too.

FYI, the smoke turned out to be a coffee maker--and after several hours stuck on the tarmac in Newfoundland, we were on our way again.
I like it! It's a very clever way to combine a direct democracy with the current system! I would be happy to see it working...

I was talking with a friend of mine who is a political analyst a while ago about a similar scheme... While sketching out a basic plan I realized how much work it would be and let it die...
Haha, nice. Takes all the hard work out of avoiding jailhouse beatings :-p
Most programs are written by teams these days... it is the culture that matters.

Culture provides support, best practice and good staff. Some good languages will never be widely used unless they have good communities/projects associated with them.
I can only assume that Mint has an iron-clad contract with Yodlee. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Intuit doesn't fully appreciate the importance of having non-OFX data in Mint. They had another data feed product targeted at investment advisers that was killed due to problems with data management.

Article: http://www.fa-mag.com/fa-news/2683.html
Ahem, straw men arguments?
Rachel Maddow mentions Dana Milbank's quote, explaining how it is not what Obama said and how it came to be misattributed to him. She talks about other stuff, someone else talks about other stuff, and Pat Buchanan comes in reading Dana Milbank's quote and commenting on it as though they were Obama's words, despite the refutation of the quote in the media at large and the refutation given by one of the participants only several minutes earlier.

I only posted the video to illustrate that he can say 'A' only seconds after someone has explained, indeed, 'not A'. Whether or not you accept the explanation of 'not A', reasoned discourse requires addressing, rather than ignoring, such a statement.
Hunter Thompson did
Animals other than man live in the "here and now".

That's a very strong claim. Care to back it up, especially in light of the linked article?
The problem being that this is exactly what a person consciously wearing pink to look like a real man (because they read an article in a back issue of Cosmopolitan) would also say.
Google Voice rejection came from the top (Phil Schiller) at Apple
Not even the Ramones' songs are so short.
Smokescreen : A Game About Social Networking
Sure, out of context. And that doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome :) You throw out a lot of insults and blanket statements without a lot of backing. Also, you're insinuating that it's selfish (and perhaps wrong?) to sell a company, which is just ridiculous.

It's funny you're nitpicking a quote when the original article is pretentious and what were your words "short sighted and immature" enough to call their own company a revolution.
It's about signals, not reality:

He claims that the goal of fashion is to signal status. So far, so obvious. But low-status people would like to subvert the signal. Therefore, the goal of lower class people is to look like upper class people, and the goal of upper class people is to not look like lower class people.

Signals aren't interpreted the same way by everyone (hence "high-status" and "low-status" are very coarse terms), but anyone actively trying to control the signals they give off through clothing has some idea of how they will be interpreted by those they are seeking to impress.
mine was something similar to hoppy.What I basically tried to do was write a ruby script that generated newer ruby scripts.And what did all these ruby scripts do?they scaned the long long equation and then try to put in different values in it and solve them for one variable. All this was so random and vague that I had to abandon it after about 66 minutes into it.
Google Finally Links AdWords to DoubleClick
CloudCrowd - Parallel Processing for the Rest of Us
You do realize those large lenses are all part of the 80's retro look that is so big right now?

I don't think it's as much to do with celebrity behaviour as it is the fact that past fashion tends to re-emerge after 20 years or so.
If I recall, it was actually Microsoft who started OFX under the name Marble. They pitched Intuit on the idea, even though Intuit eventually became the dominant partner.
As people have pointed out, it is fairly easy to keep your stuff private still, but this does represent 'one more thing' that you need to do to ensure personal privacy. There is getting to be more and more overhead online taken up with making sure you have all the correct boxes checked/unchecked in order to ensure privacy. Facebook being a great example of a really obtuse system. I wonder what kind of startup opportunities these companies will carve out for little guys as they continue to slide towards the 'we own your data' side of things - after a certain point more and more people will desire a simpler, more private set of tools.
123-reg are ok.
I did nearly the same thing once and dragged 2000 files to the dock by mistake. Had to be removed one at a time back then.
I just remember that an hour or so after I left Hoppy running the whole machine would freeze as Hoppy consumed all it's resources... Seemed like fun at the time, but I always was a strange child!

At least your script started out with a vaguely practical purpose in mind!
The other thing about flying:

I cannot even possibly describe to anybody who hasn't spent time in the captain's chair how good of a job the FAA and the aircraft manufacturers do planning for EVERYTHING.

You practically have to ask for clearance, then follow a checklist, when you scratch your beard.