ZackOfAllTrades

I've kept a diary of sorts most of this year. Every night before I go to bed I try to fill a notebook page with all my thoughts from the day. Think about what I want to do tomorrow.

What I ended up doing by mistake which I really like is that when I get to the end of a diary, I have usually written only on the front side of pages. So I start writing on the back sides of the pages and I watch as my life unfolds in reverse. I can see how I felt yesterday, then 3 days ago, then 5 days ago, and then it gets to several months. And I am looking back on how I thought/felt and seeing all these patterns. You start looking at what you wrote in a different like. Patterns, like maybe a person in your life being sad often or a certain idea that you keep writing about, start to really emerge clearly.

I think it is a worthwhile habit if you want to understand your mind. It also helps me sleep most of the time by letting me get stuff out of my head.

I took a look into Hacker News hotness algorithm a month or two ago, and it is way more complicated than just points and time. Youtube videos probably don't rank that high compared to other websites. People could be colluding, but I think it is more likely there is more to ranking than we can understand from what we see.

[Edit: This was in response to someone asking why it wasn't on the front page.]

Normally I lurk and don't vote. But this is worth people's time to watch.

You are totally right. For somebody like me who did learn from W3 initially though, those first class functions are conceptually and in practice "inline" functions. If you are talking to somebody who knows the difference between inline functions and first order functions, then you probably don't need to tell them to learn more about how to use higher order functions. But if first class functions are conceptually the same as "inline" functions to a person, then they would probably benefit from the advice to learn more about higher order functions. How would you suggest explaining how to handle an event without using the word "inline"? Explain how functions are first class and go from there?

A rambling side note:

If you come from a javascript background, you will have a leg up on most people in terms of learning clojure. You get used to inlining functions pretty regularly.

What I am encountering as I chew through Programming Clojure though is that I had no idea what I could have been doing in javascript all this time. I would look at C and laugh about how they have to define an extra function for event handling. It just seemed so verbose.

Looking back at the javascript I wrote/write, I really wish I had understood what I could have been doing with functions, mappings, and apply. I didn't/don't write javascript: it's just C with some in-lined functions.

Moral of the story: Inhale the Zen of Crockford(http://javascript.crockford.com/) and exhale the suck of W3 schools.

I am a student and I worked with publishers last semester for a while to get interactive electronic textbooks published. I got to view things on the inside and what I've concluded is that the publishers don't actually care about students.

They are marketing to the schools and universities first and foremost because they are the ones who actually make the buying decisions. All the publishers try to do is make something that looks better their competitors and lets colleges cram more students into the classrooms. I don't ever remember them saying "students need this" but rather "universities want to see this". It is a broken system that relies on lazy/overworked teachers and massive hulking collegiate bureaucracies.

Good electronic textbooks won't come from companies that made shitty paper textbooks.

Well, what's your goal? Why do you comment on Hacker News so much? Do you do it to give back to other hackers? Is it to promote yourself? Do you do it just because you enjoy it?

People might not know what they really need, so any advice people give might just be a weird version by what they want to hear.

Oh also use scriptsrc and jQuery UI some. Saves time and headaches.

My path so far with javascript (with examples!):

Desire to make neat web pages. Learn enough jQuery so that you can make something move and change colors with maybe two lines of javascript instead of 20. Keep trying to one up yourself in what kinds of cool shit you can make (I use the term shit because you won't be making anything useful persay, but it will be something that will make friends say "Shit, that is cool. How did you do that?")

Start to learn more and more jQuery until you think in callbacks and events. Use the canvas to make weird patterns (treeowls.com). Make something using Ajax (try the hnsearch api: pretty fun http://zacharymaril.com/HNSearch/Topics/testing-api.html). Try to solve a hard problem with JS that requires lots of computing (some work with Ramsey theory: http://zacharymaril.com/thoughts/constructionGraph.html) . Mess around with Three.js (http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/693) and Processing (http://zacharymaril.com/). Use chrome or firefox with the debugger.

Then get bored with frontend stuff and jump into node on heroku or whatever hosting service is popular but has good documentation. Make a chatroom with a lazy bot(zackbot.com) and a static file server. Look into the database bindings. Look at the stuff DailyJS puts out on node(http://dailyjs.com/tags.html#lmawa old with bugs, but very in depth for the time). Make something neat (still working on that part).

Read a bunch of Javascript/jQuery blogs. If you learn that way, pick up JS The Good Parts. Read anything/everything by Steve Yegge, John Resig, and Ryan Dahl. Use the jquery documentation from the website, then get frustrated with it and use jqapi.com

But that is all based on one approach. It sounds like you are interested in more backend stuff. Starting out with node would probably be what you looking for, but without much know how of how to make things work, you might not get thrilling enough results to actually stick with it. I would say stick with the frontend to learn how javascript works and where it came from and then when you get really really bored go mess around with node.

Neat! Good answers.

How do you make money though? Who is paying for what?

Devil's advocate: Reddit is getting better at the trolling with confirmations from moderators. Reddit AMA gets a surprising amount of important people to pass their way. And technically reddit is in the YC network (though the founders have left). But agreed that there are some people who would never do a AMA on reddit that might come from YC.

Also, let's say that anyasq isn't a YC company (not sure if they are or not). Then all they have going for them is better moderation. To me that just sounds like retweeting on twitter without the character limit and a cleaner interface. I am not so sure that is a winning combination. One would think that YC would pick a company that didn't need to be in YC to succeed.

I am guessing anyasq is a YC company that just launched? Rationale: Harjeet doing an interview at a relatively unknown company/project.

Also, how does anyasq beat reddit ama?

Yeah, it seems like it would be considered bad taste if you kept working on the project but no longer open sourced the results.

Stark contrast to startup accelerators/incubators: Everything must be triple-y open sourced. Profiting from the idea is fine but not required (or even heavily encouraged). No equity involved. Emphasis on technical mentorship from Mozilla crew.

Sounds like a program that accelerates your chance of getting recruited by Mozilla to keep working on your project. None of this is a bad thing, it just depends on your particular bend in life. If I was trying to make the next jQuery or Modernizer, for example, I would be bouncing off the walls trying to get into this.

http://www.wdyl.com/#lolcats reveals that there is a patent with the word lolcats in it (http://www.google.com/patents?q=lolcats)

But besides that and "Scour the earth for lolcats", this isn't really doing much for me. Nice try google interns.

Keywiz made me realize I know absolutely nothing about emacs.

That is how emacs has felt to me. There was a large amount of upfront learning, more than there probably should be for this example to make perfect sense, but after a few months with it I am able to do the basics pretty well. Every time I wish I could do something in emacs, a little bit of googling shows that there is a key binding for exactly what I want. So bit by bit, emacs is going from a weird text editor that does the basics into something way more useful than I thought.

/noob rant about the magic, magic!, of using emacs.

That looks terribly depressing to me. Just saying.

What about Socket.io? Heroku points to this announcement and it looks like the sort of thing that could function similar to Websockets.

(I just started with Node so please forgive any glaring ignorance I display.)

Thought: my linear algebra teach this past semester told me that some of the greatest mistakes in mathematics came from people assuming something was obvious without a proof. After building a huge intricate structure around the assumption, they would watch everything fall apart as it turned out the obvious fact wasn't true. Now, whenever I hear somebody say "it's obvious" I always get skeptical now.

Feature that would be useful: When tumblr goes down, redirect to the backup pages automatically. Sort of like a just in case for tumblr. Would be worth the money for most businesses, and would require very little investment in terms of hosting. Spin up a bunch of amazon servers or something and throw it all up on there. Spin down when things have settled down for an hour or two.

That sounds like an excellent problem to have.

1. I have no idea what this website does, but it sounds like it is web based security checking. 2. The web site is down. Potential Delicious Irony: Somebody took down ThreatSim with ThreatSim.

Disclaimer:I am not on your level nor was I in the past. I am a 20 year old student who hasn't really accomplished much compared to what you have done. You sound like you are rocketing towards being established as a prodigy of sorts. Way to go!

What's going through my head: "I really want to give him some meaningful advice. This kid seems really neat, he is obviously going to do neat things. I want to make an impact on his life because I want him to succeed."

And I think that is what is going to go through everyone's heads here. It doesn't matter who they are or what they do: they want to see you succeed. And I think that sort of thing will carry over to whatever you try. People will want to see you succeed because you are so rare and so different and stand out so much from everything else in people's lives.

At this point, whatever you want to do, people will want to help you out and make sure that it happens. If you talk about your problems or struggles, people will come out of nowhere and help you out. If you want to learn a particular technology, email the people who made it with your story. If you want to "do" a startup, email some startup ceo's for advice and you will get some amazing advice. All you need to do is decide, and people will show up to lay out the red carpet.

Most normal people, like me, want to help you out but have no idea how to do it. I have had a hard time typing this because I keep thinking of advice to give you that probably wouldn't help. I want to say something profound to you but I have nothing much to add to what has been said here. I think the thing you should do is just pick something, anything, and start doing it. For you, things will probably line up amazingly well. People want to help you.

If there are only a few options for a variable, could you have them be expressed as part of the object returned by http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items?pretty_print=... Example: Type. Although it is a string, it isn't really a string field. It is a binary choice between two preset strings (comment or submission).

It would make using the schema for things much easier.

Interesting. I wonder how you go about setting up an rss feed.

Neat! What makes it awesome though? How do you go from the quality to the quantity so to speak? Is it some function of the number of comments and points?

Could you explain further? This sounds interesting.

Does this work? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

PG: Need to change the link in the bottom right of the page that says search to hnsearch instead of google with site:...