skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After trying many methods (as seems everyone on this thread has), this is what I do too.

I think that software for people who do this might approach a solutions by starting with a basic text-editor/word-processor and adding some features to it, slowly. Remember that you are making a list.

Apple mail notes/tasks gets that general idea right but it has so few features that it's not all that useful. Working with email (eg turning an email into a task) is important, so mail clients are in the best position to produce this stuff.
I use lots and lots of loose leaf 8.5x11 printer paper and different colored pens. I keep a stack of this with me all the time. The top page is a to-do list and notes to myself. The other pages are other notes on things I've been working on recently. I continually add new items and cross them out as they get done and when a page is full and has all the items finished I toss it out. Same with my other notes.

So how swamped I am or how on top of things I am varies with the stack of paper I carry in my bag.

Doing things on paper also gives me time to focus hard on a problem away from the distraction of a computer.
Size is not an advantage or disadvantage, just a choice.

If you want web in bed, 12' is about right. If you want web in pocket, it's too big.
I've used Photoshop a good three or five times total; however, doesn't this seem (to everyone else as well) to be a tutorial that I could have made? (By which I mean something that a new user could easily figure out.)

Not trying to be mean or rude. Legitimate question to all..
Best of class - concise, thorough. Thanks!
I would strongly consider partnering with a developer who has the right skillset. Starting a start-up is a long-term gig. When you are hiring or buying, you are partnering with someone who may only be with you for 1 or 2 iterations. Their motive is short term profit, and your motive is long term biz-dev. When you partner with someone, both of your motivates are aligned to the long-term.
MegaHAL is open source and a lot of fun to play with. Be ready to feed it a lot of text, though.
Agreed. But it's live now. Sorry for making you wait. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943616
The Kindle, nook, and rumors of an Apple tablet sucked any excitement out of this.
To ask a somewhat nuanced question, what do you feel the modern relevance of Lisp and Prolog are in AI? After writing a great deal about both language families, your first "go-to" language these days seems to be Python. Have major features for exploratory programming historically associated with Lisp been incorporated into dynamic/scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, and Lua?
The company claims... "longer-lasting love"

Isn't it funny how cheap love is now? Whether you believe it is a chemical reaction or real, love is worth nothing anymore.

Maybe people are learning to accept it.
And if you lose, and there are damages and fines?

I guess I'm skeptical that simply being right is enough to triumph in court against a determine company with a lot of money and little conscience.
I quote from the stackless mailinglist:

"Go is stackless where Stackless is not. Its goroutines use allocated
stacks (starting at 4k in size) and can continue running on different
threads where Stackless tasklets cannot. In fact, when a goroutine
blocks on a system call, the other goroutines in its scheduler are
migrated to another thread."

So stakcless is not really concurrent at all, given that, it is no wonder performance is different given that the functionality provided by stackless 'microthreads' is in no way comparable to goroutines.
Or decent keyboards for their terminals. The new ones are glorified laptop keyboards, complete with non-standard key layout and a really shallow keystroke. And the fingerprint readers still break all the time. If you're selling software that costs $25k/yr, the least you can do is provide a decent keyboard.
Stop fetishizing moleskines.

Meditate.

Get off the Internet.

Do what you're doing now.
I am 100% color blind and suffer from both forms. For the most part they do not look different, one picture may look a little more washed out than the other (less crisp) but they do all look the same. It is really weird because when I look at tests like this, I have no frame of reference, so it is much like not being in on the inside joker. I just don't get it.

On another note, I think traffic lights are a great example of how to deal with color blind interfaces. (I assume) The color catches the normal persons eye, while the secondary interface of position allows the color blind person the ability to know what the sign is indicating.

Shapes and position are a good way of creating indicators for the color blind.
Cloud Computing Debate: The cloud cannot be entirely trusted.
Doesn't ANYONE notice the problem with this sentence?

“We want to be the world’s most influential news organization,” says Mr. Lack, who oversees Bloomberg’s television, radio and dot-com endeavors.

The most influential? If there was ever a more honest statement. Why should news be influential and not informational?

You aim for influence in the news because politics and business are at your mercy? I'm ok with that, but don't call yourself a "news" organization.

News is as cheap as love.
"Membership does not include a copy of the final version of Atlas, but we'll deduct the $20 from the final price."

Has there been any indication as to the neighborhood of the final price? I'd hate to invest a bunch of time learning a new tool to find out that it's priced outside of my budget when it releases.
A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority
Ask HN: Tools/Libraries to build a RESTful web service in Python?
The title says it all: we're coming from a Ruby background where Rails worked very nicely, but we are not sure what to use to implement an API for an existing product (Python web app).

At first glance, a REST API is not much different from a regular web app, except you serve XML/JSON back instead of HTML, but if one looks closer, you'll see issues like safe parsing of submitted objects, WSDL/WADL generation, etc. Googling doesn't help much: a few projects here and there that look like abandonware, Pylons (our web framework of choice) doesn't really have anything built-in.

Thoughts?
Any plans on an e-book of some format (pdf, mobi, azw) or otherwise?
It depends on the stakes. If this is merely a case of C&D, and if you lose you just stop doing whatever it was you were doing, the risk is nil.

If there is a claim for damages or restitution or whatever, and you may be out of pocket if you lose, you need to weigh the cost of legal help versus the risk of losing.
We haven't set a final price yet. We're hoping to use our beta members as a sounding board for determining the right price point.

It's worth noting that all of the stuff Atlas builds is still usable without Atlas, though there will be no way to edit it without Atlas.

Of course, most of the editing technology is also open source, so building a cib2nib (the reverse of our nib2cib) should be very possible, and give you alternatives.
I'm going to PDC this week and hopefully there will be people there with some good real world experience with Azure that I poll.
Never the first time I think about a problem. But sometimes when doing a from-scratch rewrite of a medium-size program, I will understand how everything should be, and it works the first time.
I have messed around with Emacs org-mode in the past, but never quite climbed the learning curve to the point of effortlessness.

Many people justifiably are promoting Moleskines, but these days I prefer http://riteintherain.com/ waterproof notebooks. http://www.tadgear.com/ has a good selection (if a horrible website). Much better if you're in the habit of jamming a notebook in your pocket, and paired with a solid waterproof/space pen you're pretty well guaranteed that your ink won't run.
Things on the mac and iphone works for me! Small notepad also.
How is a signup form meant to be interesting? Perhaps I'm just out of the loop, but the only thing I know about Atlas now is that it's associated with Heroku and it will cost more than $20. That's not enough.
Yeah, but in order to get that quality information typically you need to be one of the higher regarded 'brand' news organizations. The journalists at the WSJ and the NYTimes are probably going to have better sources than those at Bloomberg and in turn break better stories... making them more "informational".
Thank you. I guess its also a good test to see if you can convince someone to partner with you.
We're just hosted on heroku. If you'd like more info, there are a few videos available on http://280atlas.com

Don't worry though, this is a beta, and it's meant for people who already know what Atlas is and already want it.
I'm proud to say my site passes all tests with flying colors!! Under the first test, I think the colors actually look better. Thanks for the quick check tool!!
A tool such as Tourbus might work. It's a Ruby app meant to stress test Web sites. It uses Webrat and (I think) Mechanize underneath, and does not open any browsers.

If the site in question has scripting you're out of luck, but otherwise it should be quite useful.

In fact, I found yourself using both Tourbus and Selenium on a project, and decided I didn't want to have duplicate tests, so I wrote some helper code to allow Tourbus to execute my Selenium scripts. So far, so good. I can record the actions in the Selenium 'IDE' plugin, and use them in Tourbus.

http://github.com/dbrady/tourbus
I've tried a bunch of computer based solutions, software designed to help with doing GTD, to-do lists, Remember The Milk, a fancy, small leather bound notebook, all sorts of things.

These days I carry around a small, cheap 50c notebook that fits easily in my pocket and a small pen, and use it to jot down thoughts. I write down everything, from to-do lists, to business/application ideas, to what to have for dinner tonight. Whenever I feel like I've forgotten anything, I just flick through the notebook. It's low-tech and always available.

I have recently gotten an iPhone and started using Evernote for things like voice notes and photos that would take too many pages to write down in my notebook, and sync them to my laptops, but that's more of a secondary solution.

When it comes to more in depth and organised research and note taking, I carry around an A4 size spiral bound sketch book with a low tooth, and I write with a Micron or something similar. This lets me take notes and not feel constrained by lines. I'm free to write as big or small as I want, put diagrams and tables and formulae wherever it makes sense. I've started to do one notebook per subject, and now have 2 notebooks - one that I'm filling with math research and working, and one that I'm getting ready to start filling with research and notes for the Starcraft AI competition.

All up, through out the week, I carry the small notebook, one A4 notebook and my small pencil case and Sony ebook reader. If I'm going out to dinner or a movie or something, I'll just take the small notebook, and my iPhone and transfer notes when I get home.
Everyone interested in this topic should watch this talk:

http://mtnwestrubyconf2008.confreaks.com/11farley.html

Ruby Internals - Patrick Farley
A sea mushroom!?
no, simply because writting extensive code without running it is silly from a developement time point of view. It would uselessly increase the distance between writing the bug and finding it.
That choice is up to the publisher -- the authors have no control. Pearson has traditionally released eBooks, but so far not in Kindle format.
11 Companies launched tonight at Atlanta Startup Weekend
طريقة التخلص من البريد المزعج حصري
If they were screening for diseases, now that might be interesting. Alas, no
Ask HN: When to listen to users & when not to?
Andreessen has said he thinks the highest entrepreneurial ability is shown by knowing what advice to take and what advice to ignore. It seems there are 2 diametrically opposed camps, to which to you ascribe to?

1) Use customer testing/validation (e.g., A/B, #leanstartup, et.al.) to drive design & feature decisions. Your job as the developer is to only iterate quickly and have a fast feedback loop incorporating their input. Prominent example: Google/Marissa.

2) Users don't know what they want (especially when it comes to "new" product categories that don't fit nicely into a pre-existing frame of reference) and so you must develop your own Design sense and intuition. Prominent example: Facebook/Zuck & of course, Apple/Jobs.
I have tried so many things - notebooks, moleskins, PDAs when they came out, web and desktop to do lists and organizers... nothing has ever worked more than a week.

I am seriously retarded in the organization debt. I own two businesses and have equity in two others and its all going well, I'm just handicapped with time management. I think about the only thing that would work would be to hire someone to stab me with a bayonet everytime I get off track from a list we made in the morning... hmmm, maybe this could be a business - Boot Camp Assistants™.

Curiously, anyone else on this thread ENTP?
A.L.I.C.E [ http://alicebot.blogspot.com/ ] is a 'brute-force' chatbot model that has been developed for many years. It has several free software implementations and is very easy to work with.
The Fort Hood Shooter: A News Quiz
I think that when I was in grad school, Lisp was unique in the power it brought for the type of exploratory programming that was necessary for AI. I think that today Lisp is still a great choice, but there are other choices that are also good---as you say, other languages have incorporated many (but not all) of the good parts of Lisp, so that today the choice of language can be made based on other factors.: for example, what language do you already know, do your friends know, etc.

There is a lot of content in an AI course, and I didn't think it made sense for an instructor to take a week or two out of the semester to teach Lisp, so we added Java and Python support. Java because it is widely-known, and Python because it is fairly widely-known and because, of all the languages I know, it happens to be closest to the pseudocode we invented in the book.

I never programmed at a serious level in Prolog, so I'll let other people comment on that.
I would agree that the tax system needs an overhaul. Though a lot about these GDP type measures are ridiculous- based on what??
I have been loving http://www.actionmethod.com by the Behance crew... It is what I wished basecamp was. Lightweight but can manage a ton of projects, has an iPhone app and even gasp paper.
Reconsidering Vim
Other sites have already sold tests like this. It's basically complete bullshit and still faces the dating site chicken vs. egg problem.
The Mythbusters of Psychology
...ARPANET was an incremental step from late telegraph systems <a href="en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_55-A">Plan 55</a> to the early Internet. Given the size of a typical telegram, transition from message to packet switching was more like a buzzword change. And ARPANET didn't have the end-to-end principle initially, thus functioning very much like late telegraph.
I second that. It's a lot of fun to tinker with. I've once fed it 20k+ posts from an online game I was playing, basically the whole usergenerated story and put it online in the game's IRC channel. And as it is, the users indulged in nostalgia every now and then, which triggered the bot to happily tell about old times. :)
I find it interesting that you (implicitly) like Data Munging better than Clever Algorithms. I agree that the former is orders of magnitude more common. I haven't encountered a Clever Algorithms problem very often at all on commercial projects. My current project is an outlier insofar as we've been doing algorithmic work for months. It's fun, in the way any good hacker would expect such a challenge to be, but it's also stressful to work on something for a long time and not know for sure whether you'll end up with a solution. (Especially when the context is a startup and not a research project.) It's much easier when you know for sure you can get there, you just have to figure out how. Thankfully, the Algorithms category gets more and more fun as you knock off significant chunks of the problem. Once you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're home free. Unless, of course, you got it wrong. :)

Edit: by the way, do you actually use APL/J/K in the way you mentioned? I really like that paradigm. I think it deserves a place alongside OO and the others as a fundamentally different approach to programming. However, I haven't used it nearly enough.

Edit 2: I would distinguish two different kinds of Data Munging. One is Data Transformation, where you have data in some original context and it needs to go through a series of transformations or passes until you've extracted or computed what's suitable for your problem. That is way fun. The other type, though, sucks rocks. I call it Meat Grinding. That's when you have the exact data you need in a form that you can't use because of some purely technical limitation. A common example is you have data in a database or a DTO when what your code need is a domain object, so you have to copy the properties over like this:

myStupidObject.CustomerName = stupidDataObject.CustomerName

This isn't so much a programming problem as an integration one. (You sort of touch on it at the end.) It's also one of the worst things about programming in less powerful languages where you can't easily write a program to do the gruntwork for you.

Edit 3: I'd also argue that your "API spelunking" nightmare is at its nastiest in OO systems. In poorly designed pre-OO APIs (like Win32), it might take a long time to figure out how to call a function or what to do next; there might have been some ugly one-off struct you had to populate, etc.; but at least you didn't have to figure out how the hell to make a Bar out of a Foo so you can pass it as the third argument to Baz, when neither Foo nor Bar has anything to do with your problem. But with poorly designed OO APIs, these absurd hurdles seem endless. I used to compensate for this by studying such code archaeologically (if I couldn't avoid it altogether), in order to learn how the absurdities had arisen over time. This was a way to escape Dostoevsky's definition of the easiest way to drive a man insane: make him move a pile of dirt from one end of a prison yard to another and then move it back.
I had a bit of fun with chatbots. If you want OS and easy way, you have 3 choices really:

- AIML engine

- MegaHAL engine

- proper parsers (most of them are written in lisp-like languages for some reason)

Now it really depends on what you want to do - only waste someone else's time? MegaHAL will do just fine. You can feed it conversations all the time and it will learn to interact in some environment rather quickly.

If you want some basic scripting, you should look at AIML-based soft. You can write your scripts and basic expression reduction in XML. There's a "javascript" tag in the specification, but noone really supports it. I map it to python functions in my bot and it works quite well. You will never parse more exotic sentences though - just basics. And your bot will not learn automatically.

If you want to use it for something really useful, look at the http://www.generation5.org/ articles. You'll find a lot of code that's easy to port to your favourite language there. Serious language parsers connected to something like word-net are the only way to go if you want good quality. And you need to create a lot of stuff yourself - afaik there are no standard response libraries like alice, because the parse format is not really standardised.
I think it looks like a really cool product; I definitely want to use it. You guys are making the right decision by charging for it for sure. My only concern is that I don't know how 280 North views pricing, so it gives me a little bit of pause.

Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how it shapes up - good luck!
I can tell you that it will be a lot more than $20, and it will be less $1000. Big range, I know.
A simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction
I'm not at liberty to discuss reddit's revenues, but what I can tell you is that the entire operational cost of the site (about $15K last month) is small compared to the human cost (ie. salary and benefits)
What she talks about at the end, filtering out information, is also called confirmation bias: you unintentionally, or intentionally, filter out information that contradicts your, oftentimes emotional, bias.
I take it will be a one time charge, not a subscription model?
> Maybe I am and maybe I'm not.

Good for you. However, it's unclear why your choice, either way, should bind someone who'd rather choose the other.

> What I am sure of - and this was closer to the general thrust of my post - is that I don't need to know if my neighbour once had sex with his girlfriend in high school

Not so fast. You're using inaccurate/irrelevant knowledge to argue against having accurate knowledge. (That's why I used the word "pedophile" and not "sex offender".)

In this world, there's going to be knowledge. We can only affect how accurate it is.

The public sex offender lists were in part a reaction to semi-public lists. Which would you rather have?
And the lesson is, try to avoid using C :)
I'd be interested to know how many Droid sales were made via the frontpage link.
Does the book discuss the Markov logic network (MLN) formulation for structured representations of belief states? In your opinion, how promising is the MLN approach? Thank you!
Leveraging lsof for *nix troubleshooting
What's your idea? Someone on this site may have the necessary skills and be interested in working with you to develop it.
Why does everyone fetishize Moleskine notebooks? I went through a couple, and they all have terrible paper. I hate seeing ink bleed through to the next page. Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks have significantly higher quality paper.
Yeah, Atlas 1.0 is a downloadable app with a one time charge. Eventually we will have an online component.
ISTJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/istj
ISFJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/isfj
INFJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/infj
INTJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intj
ISTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/istp
ISFP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/isfp
INFP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/infp
INTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intp
ESTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/estp
ESFP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/esfp
ENFP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/enfp
ENTP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/entp
ESTJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/estj
ESFJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/esfj
ENFJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/enfj
ENTJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/entj
Less than $1000? For any per-seat pricing that nears $1k, Atlas needs be so much better than the current tools that it'll shoot sunshine and rainbows out of our asses while we're using it.

Investing in Atlas is making a heavy investment in technology solely provided by yourselves: Obj-J and Cappuccino. The foundation being open source may alleviate some concern there, but to do so, the open source foundation will need to be of sufficient quality and usefulness that we feel we can work without your IDE in the future.

I'm also VERY surprised that you're charging for an expiring beta. Doing so will greatly limit user exposure, and I'm pretty uncomfortable with paying for the privilege of testing your software.

You're not Apple -- developers don't need to pay for the ability to test/update their software for an upcoming OS release.
Rails like console for any Rack based ruby web app