skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Make a list before starting. Break it down into small tasks. Or at the very least break the overwhelming task down into smaller milestones, set deadlines for those, plan the living daylights out of the first milestone, get started, and repeat.
People who should get into research rather than development.
In fact, FB connect is pretty much the antithesis of openid. Openid is open, federated and gives user control. FB connect is closed, centralized and basically allows FB to play big brother.
Academics?
Fisheye visionaries. Their angle of view is so wide that they get motion sickness from the slightest movement. Thus they'll rather remain stationary for as long as possible.
If you want an old interface think power supply > wall sockets.
slahacker.
browser based testing is a huge huge nightmare, mostly because of the transient nature of web development, things get changed very rapidly and a test suite that needs to be continously updated is less than useless.

I am surprised things like this arent more popular, although I doubt I will ever do unit testing as a service, Im pretty interested in seeing what they come up with.
Φυλετικές Μάχες - Κόσμος 5
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nontrepeneurs?
Yes! Naps help me greatly and since I work from home, I consider them a luxury.
(flamebait warning from someone who is in research) ... research in engineering fields is hardly just about studying and not doing. quite the opposite ... research is all about building prototypes to test out new concepts, and iterating on prototypes. when they were in school, the guys who later went on to found companies like VMWare, Google, and more recently Ksplice were hacking hardcore on prototyping and testing their ideas, not sitting in an ivory tower reading scholarly papers all day ;)
OAuth and openid solve totally different problems. Openid is federated login and oauth is about authorizing access.
Planning fanatics: planatics.

As for overcoming the syndrome, try taking a workshop in improv comedy; most cities have a troupe that offers community courses now and again. By placing yourself in situations where you cannot help but work faster than your conscious mind can plan, you might break the cycle of preparation. Or try National Novel Writing Month this November. Do something that forces you to actively not-plan, and with luck some of those dynamic-balance tricks will carry over into the rest of your life.
Yeah, we know our front page is lousy right now; we've got a redesign and a much clearer explanation in the works.

You need our service to make sure your web apps work in all the popular browsers.

We've got a bunch of web browsers in the cloud which you can remote-control via and API, to make sure the features of your site work cross-browser. We use a popular open source browser automation tool called Selenium, which my cofounder Jason Huggins created.

I'm curious whether the above description makes sense, or still leaves you scratching your head!
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21 SEOs you must follow on Twitter
In this post I am sharing a list of some well known SEOs that you must have to follow on Twitter. These following list includes Matt Cutts, Mani Karthik, Rand Fishkin, Daron Babin, Andy Beal, Toad Malicoat etc.
Dilettante? But that's not quite the sense you're going for.

Evidently there's a neologism "professional student" that's quite close to what you're looking for: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/professional+student
Computers: Have you finished SICP, learned operating systems and algorithms?"

I haven't written my own OS or programming language if that's what you mean, but I find solving problems that have already been solved a zillion times better by thousands of other people working together over decades to be distasteful; what's the point?

---

Reinventing the wheel won't get you a better car, but you'll understand the hell out of the wheel.
Nice introduction to Epistemology, a thinking process that I've applied before but did not know had a formal name:

> Really important point (from Sir Karl Popper)

A belief isn't warranted unless you could have known if it's not true.

(1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable.

(2) It's your job to test your opinions against evidence.

You should always be looking for evidence that your current beliefs are not correct.

> A student who is only good at one subject is often someone who has only one learning strategy.

"Ask HN: What are your (non-hn-related) hobbies?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862139
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This activity you describe -- which I know a whole lot about -- does not really deserve the bad reputation that it has in American culture, let alone the terrible reputation that it has on a website full of entrepreneurs. ;)

I believe it was J. Michael Straczynski -- author of, among other things, a pretty good book on screenwriting -- who said:

Do not confuse a love of reading with a desire to write.

There are lots of names for people who study things without doing them: Anthropologist, writer, scholar, historian, critic, fan, audience member. If you're constantly shying back from taking the leap into doing... listen to yourself! Perhaps your stomach is trying to tell you that you'll have more fun as an observer.

If, on the other hand, your stomach is telling you to jump, perhaps you should listen to that as well.
The 5-paragraph essay with the self-similar structure (first sentence is an introduction, body sentences have the meat, final sentence is a conclusion) leads to incredibly rigid and repetitive essays. I too wish it was more well-known that this was the most basic, paint-by-numbers way to make an essay, and not the pinnacle of writing style.
One step closer to being able to grow spare parts for ourselves.
Brilliant! His novel Turing is also great.
Your initial concerns are addressed by openid "personas". myopenid.com has them implemented and is free (or you could set up your own server to achieve it). https://www.myopenid.com/help#personas

Your later concerns are solved by openid delegation. Any uri you own can be made an alias of any openid you want. Thus if you switch openid providers all you need to do is edit a page you own and make it point to a new provider. https://www.myopenid.com/help#own_domain
just use rip, it builds gems from git repositories..
Good openid providers like wordpress train their users not to expect a login page on anything a authenticating website redirects them to.
The physical data interface of USB is simpler (only two signalling wires, D+, D- instead of the two differential pairs for firewire). Supply of power to the devices is simpler (+5V instead of >20V with firewire, which needs an additional DC/DC converter on the device). For most primitive low-speed devices (mice, keyboards, toy rocket launchers) the data transfer implementation is simpler (see e.g. the bit-banging software-only V-USB implementation for microcontrollers).

So on the low-performance side, the advantage is clear. And end-users like the simplicity of having the same physical port for all their computer peripherals (which can use low- (<1Mbit), full (12MBit) or high (480MBit) speed, without the user knowing or noticing).

While I personally think that Firewire is the more elegant, better performing and more flexible communication technology, I can see why USB surpassed it in the marketplace.
The psychology of Google Wave
I'd pay good money for a Selenium that worked (well) with Flex. Note: FunFX need not apply.
Looking at Life as One Big Subscription
The Economist reviews Michael Moore's new film
In 1999, I bought 10 domains of several large companies and trademarks, who at the time did not have any non .com domains. Think something like toyota.co.uk, but different country.

I sat on them for 2 years, then let them expire. Right now they are all owned by the rightful companies, but I don't know how that came about.
In (what should have been) my second-last semester of school I had a very solid job lined up for post-graduation. Then I D'ed a course by 3 points on a 150-point exam, which meant I had to tack an extra year on to my schooling, and lost the job. What really kills me is that there was an assignment I didn't hand in for that class that would have pushed me over the edge - it was done and all, it was just cold that day and I couldn't be assed to bike to school to submit it.

Having said that, the job no longer exists (the company got bought out and everybody fired), I got a much cooler job that summer by chance, and now I'm in a whole new industry doing stuff I love - so it ended pretty well. But I still consider that course one of my great failures.
Hmm, this site for some reason evokes codinghorror for me. I wonder why.
Central dogma of self discipline
My main failure(s) have always been, and continue to be, not sticking with ANY idea long enough to see it through. What I consider good ideas (for myself) are few and far between, so when I have one I tend to over analyze it to the point that I add so much to the idea that it becomes too much to take on or I eventually convince myself it really wasn't that great of an idea and I move on. I also hesitate to get real feedback on my ideas from my peers, because of some silly fear that one time it will really be goldmine and someone will execute it faster and better, which is ironic considering that I eventually write the idea off anyway. Would be interested to hear if anyone else goes through something similar.

A more tangible failure, which was also a mild success, was a tracking/analytics site I did for Xanga, a not so well known blogging/social community site. They allowed you to inject JavaScript into your themes, which made it ripe for a wide array of scripting features/widgets/etc. I was one of many tracking sites that would show you who was visiting your blog, name, IP, etc. Xanga eventually took my domain name, "XangaSpy" through legal pressure. The change in name had a huge impact on my traffic and while struggling to rebuild, my host corrupted my database and its backup. That was all she wrote. Xanga eventually added similar features themselves.

At peak I had 15,000+ registered users and was making ~$200 a month from Adsense. The tech wasn't terribly advanced and I certainly wasn't making a living, but it was still a mild success for myself as it was long before I really understood web development and well before I took my first entry level job as a developer.

Lessons learned? Building an app that piggy-backs on someone else's service could find your work obsolete should the service implement similar functionality. Also, backup, backup, backup.
Hey, did Jason leave Chicago to help get Sauce Labs out of beta?
Not just Ask HN questions but people will think thrice before commenting on anything and everything. The quality of comments on HN is pretty good as it is. I think this is a bad idea. Sometimes not showing something can be a good thing.
Another good source of ssh tricks and tips are Brian Hatch's articles - http://www.hackinglinuxexposed.com/articles/
Route of GFW on Twitpic
- all talk

- wantrepreneur
Possibly a chemical, not heat.

When I was a kid I sprayed 'Off' (a mosquito repellent) on a calculator and the keys had a similar melted look to them.
It depends.

Learning a significantly different language can be mind-expanding. Going from C to Lisp is not just picking up a different tool. More like a brain transplant.

Going from Java to C# is more ho-hum. There will be no epiphanies. More like "Oh, Microsoft solved problem X. That's nice."

That really is like replacing a Husky brand wrench with a Craftsman brand wrench.
Lately I've been thinking that what we really need is something based on PGP/GnuPG. Think about it. If the browser implemented access to your keychain, then you could use your keys as login.

When you 'sign up' you would just provide you public key to the website (upload or url). Then when you were presented with a login, the browser would be sent a data set to sign with your private key and send back to the server you are trying to access (which would then verify with you public key).
This is not a issue isolated to Kohana and PHP, its affects all languages and frameworks.
- [Android will be] second most popular mobile OS after Symbian
- [Android] operating system is free (unlike Windows Mobile)

Hm, interesting logic. Seems like Microsoft-bashing infiltrated very deep into thought process of many authors.
Mass Customization Can Create Value & Profit
As an interesting counter-point, here's Tesla's opinion on Edison:

" His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. "
I read a sobering fact somewhere -- we'll only be able to read about 1000 books in our lifetime (50 years, 20 books a year or nearly 2 a month). Maybe 2000 or 3000 if you're a voracious reader.

Given that, it doesn't make sense to waste time with a bad book when it's taking the place of a better one. This helped me with that same guilt.
I think that is <a href="http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowToEditPythonCode>intentio...;
Microserfs by Douglas Coupland is about some MS employees who go to do a startup in Silicon Valley. It captures more the atmosphere and feeling of living than specific advice on startups.

The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is also interesting since the colonization of Mars is sort of like a startup and the trilogy really delves a lot into the social, political, and economic impact of the growing martian community.
I'm ambivalent about this concept.

I agree that everywhere I've worked, there's been a residue of boring yet necessary stuff like your describing. Sometimes the residue could be reduced by automation; not always.

However I'm very concerned about the potential of these 'slow' developers injecting bad code into the codebase. By bad, I mean redundant. The 'slow' developer will create code that later gets maintained by the 'quick' developer - who is soon disgrunted and slow. Unless he just rewrites it from scratch.

If you really have a steady stream of 'stuff' to feed the 'slow' developer, great. Otherwise he will work through his queue and end up smearing cruft around.

I don't know the answer, but I'd rather have a very bright, very inexperienced developer for that role than a 'slow' one.
Ask HN: Tool to Evaluate Web App Services?
I'm looking for a tool to evaluate different Software as a Service apps, such as Basecamp, Unfuddle, Tender, etc for my client (early stage startup). The founders are keen on using the best tools, but not having to buy anything large (paying per month is ok).

I've been trying to find a nice list of the best ones, their prices, and maybe some sort of editorial review so I can come up with a nice toolbox to start with. Google is failing me though so far, getting sites that have been around 10 years that looks like absolute crap, or serve large enterprises.

Can you guys suggest any good google keywords? Or a site that maybe does aggregation or reviews on these types of sites?

Please, no shameless pimping of your startup's service. Mainly looking for a place to find objective coverage and listings for these types of apps.

Thanks!
Success of AIDS Vaccine Trial Is at Issue
Something to read in the general context of failures: 'Technology and Courage' [pdf] http://research.sun.com/techrep/Perspectives/smli_ps-1.pdf
Sorry, formatting screwed up. The link is http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowToEditPythonCode, it says that using tabs is a bad idea in Python.
Perpetual students?
Sometimes multiple xterms are easier than using screen with multiple buffers.
Rosetta@home (distributed computing project)
I agree revert back!
How do you find your first customer?
The first sale first (FSF) sales process is extreme selling. Just like any extreme sport, the conditions are tough, the risk is higher, and few are willing to try. As an entrepreneur trying to build your company with customer capital, you will play among the elite. If you succeed, you will be a star.
I actually think this will help comment quality improve. You can definitely see the difference in the quality of comments on HN from a year ago to today.

Just take a look on some articles on searchyc.com.

I'm not saying that the quality today is any worse than the quality a year ago (it's very difficult to judge that metric), just the submissions and comments are different, which is to be expected of a growing community.
Learning Scala in small bites
Wow this wouldb be very useful for many projects. Any chance of distributing the sources?
The Other Economic Crisis
How to Self-Undermine Effectively:

* Link to an oversize PDF of your PowerPoint presentation

* Present idea salad in bullet point format

* Use italics and bold to give your argument "turbo boost"

Actual quote: "Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."
"Traction and friction" - Seth Godin
The 5-paragraph essay isn't meant to be the end all be all but a starting point on writing your thoughts down in a cohesive manner.

Even the great essayists (MLK Jr. for one) followed this to a degree. Introduce your point, support your point, tie it all together and conclude.

You learn it in what? Like 5th grade or Jr. High? Why would it be the pinnacle of real-life adult writing? But that very simplistic structure is the basis for much more complicated essay formats that you learn about in college (Compare & contrast, cause and effect, argumentative, etc.).
I use the carefully/comically pronounce words trick for better spelling, it really does help.

For example, to remember the spelling of Wednesday, I have always pronounced it in my head as "Wedness day".
There's probably a deep insight for AI to be had by whoever discovers why verbose, repetitive writing is easier and more "natural" than taut, clear prose (which is "unnatural" insofar as it is rare and hard to achieve).

Not some folk-theory or heuristic, but actually understanding the mechanism.
It took me years to unlearn the 5 paragraph format. I actually wish that I had been thrown into the deep end and taught to write from reading actual quality essayists like Thoreau.

A part of me feels sad that the American schooling system relies so heavily on sub-par standards to teach the basics.
Isn't that exactly the danger of running on a freemium business model?

Everything goes according to plan, you establish a new market, lots of free customers get introduced to your product and love it and you skim off the cream that want power or enterprise features as your paying customers. What stops a new competitor from swooping in and saying they have something very similar, they aren't going to be spending anything supporting free customers, and with presumably lower costs, charging their customers less? With complete focus on paying customers, they might provide a better product too.
Ask HN: Name for Biological Buildings
What's the name for engineering or science that specialize in using biological engineering to construct whole buildings and life support system using living things?

Think walls made of calcium, rat brains controlling the equalibrium of the house, a building wide circultory system with biological pumps, etc.
I enjoyed this overall, but I just want to point out that he didn't really make an argument against moral relativism, just said "practically, that's dumb." Most moral relativists [that I know] aren't so concerned with practice—they're instead trying to explicate that human sentient culture is just one possible variety of sentience in the universe. For example: if we could make exact copies of ourselves (incl. knowledge et all), would that be a good idea? Well, we have one moral viewpoint; the people we will be when we need to answer that question, though, will have different cultural biases—that is to say, context—than us. The universe has as many definitions of "good" or "bad" within it as there are ways to compose a utility function.
This only matters if you care what your average karma over some arbitrary number of previous posts is. Every once in awhile when I go on a long run of posts with low/negative karma, I'll check searchyc.com --- which doesn't have the same limitations as news.yc. You can safely ignore the HN leaderboard.
> If your writing is nonsense, maybe your thoughts are nonsense too!

I was in a meeting at VeryBigCompany where someone presented a PRD for review. A large Word document, projected. In theory this is a high leverage document; getting things right would make life easier downstream.

I noticed a few spelling errors, and gently pointed them out. I was ignored. Unwisely, no doubt, I sharpened my voice a bit and repeated the comment. The author recorded my comment with the air of someone humoring a small child.

Next I noticed grammatical errors. Some sentences had two plausible meanings; some had none.

To the other participants, the important thing was that the PRD touched on the key concepts. My focus on minutiae was inappropriate.

But to me, the flaws in expression signified flaws in thinking. I think Covington was right in this case, and the thoughts were nonsense too.
It'd be cool if you could sort by average karma. You'd obviously need some way to compensate for users with only a handful of comments that happened to be highly voted up, but this would still be nice to see.
I think that the thought is that Windows Mobile is more 'open' as a platform that Symbian, but you still have to pay for dev tools.
That's an interesting view. I'm not scared of doing the hardwork no money entrepreneur thing for a while. Can you give me tips on how to go about finding direction?
Does anyone have a good tool for jotting down ideas and rearranging them? I find that word processors are not very good for this, because they are more concerned with formatting than manipulating units of text. Simplicity is paramount.
I found out about Growing a Business on HN, loved it, recommend it w/o reservation. For a similar but more hard-headed perspective, I also liked Norm Brodsky's "The Knack".

I started doubting this list as soon as I saw Guy Kawasaki on it.
I get along with other people (I'm not a social outcast or anything), I just don't do very much with most of them because we're not interested in the same things. Is that wrong? Should I feel terribly guilty about it? If so, why shouldn't they also feel terribly guilty for not being interested in the same things I am?
I don't think it's late to do anything. Richard Bransons mom went around the world and learnt to scuba dive at the age of 85. If she can, then so can you (live your dreams that is).

My harder problem is finding out what your direction is. You obviously have a rich experience so far, what is that interests you? And like Hugh Macleod says, don't ditch the day job, start something on the side see how it rolls and then decide what you want to do with it.

The worst thing you can do is become an entrepreneur because everyone around you is becoming one or because you think that's a way to a quick buck.
Learn Shavian
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAMA>Please go here and tell your story</a>
*nix, Mac, or Windows? For Windows, I use OneNote.
The mobile phone operating system battle is going to be fascinating over the next few years. I'm sure it will be studied in business schools for the the next 40 years. The stakes are extremely high and the market is global. Hardware, software, and carriers all play an important role. Overall, consumers will definitely win.
A plain text editor works for me. Copy to a word processor (or e-mail, etc) only when you get to the formatting phase.