dy

And we're back - sorry overloaded our servers!

Hey netcraft - we built this really quickly so the source is a bit messy - we'll work on open-sourcing it sometime in the near future though.

We have the last few years of data but we don't have back-testing yet - great idea though!

We've scraped the data from various sources - when Selection Sunday was announced we basically edited up a big JSON object to get it ready.

Hi debaserab2 - you can Expand Editor under Help right now, but we don't have full-screen editor. Great idea though!

Hey - David from Fullstack Academy. Our students this semester decided to build something awesome around learning to code and March Madness and codersbracket.com is the result.

It's March Madness brackets but instead of picking teams, people can write code that will automatically generate their bracket for them. Our students have raised some money and are donating it all to code-learning organizations (CodeNow, Code.org, GirlsWhoCode).

Very nice work, ked!

Having watched the Beeminder team for these 1000 days (and more), I've seen how powerful the commitment contract was to keeping them alive and growing.

This reminds me of a motivational quote: "We tend to overestimate what we can get done in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade." This is the perfect example of what happens when you just keep at it.

If this service interests you, you can also subscribe for free to my Hacker News daily summary at http://hnsummaries.com/

(the summaries are automatically generated)

Pro Tip: If the app is meant for distribution, you'll want to make sure Write-Protect on the floppy is enabled.

Very cool - anyone who's following pg's advice to "stay alive" would be well advised to git committing :)

I have three of these monitors and while they're great for coding, don't expect the color to be anything close to Apple displays. No matter the amount of calibration I do, if you sit one of these next to your MBP Retina, it will look drastically different.

Compare GMail's grey highlights to see the difference.

As the creator of hnsummaries.com and former founder of a news summaries business, seems like a nice middle-ground would be to give the user an automated summary and then let them edit it if they choose to do so. As we moved towards this model, we were able to be much more efficient (we were doing it internally though).

You have a chicken-egg problem with real contributors (my guess is that you're bootstrapping the content with editors?). Am excited to see where this goes!

I'm an occasional poet and this is something I've always wanted to build/find. Thanks for putting this together!

Prepare to have your mind blown! :)

Innovator's Solution is probably the better book (same ideas expressed, but more in-depth thinking on how to fix it inside your company by Christensen).

It's a must-read by startups because it puts you in the right mind-set of why your crappy little MVP can possibly disrupt powerful incumbents.

Thanks for your article - I've been enjoying your posts!

After reading the Innovator's Dilemma, you start seeing this effect everywhere and it applies equally in people's careers. I think it's probably the same principle as the law of diminishing return - you're getting less and less out of your current path but it's still more than some other perceived endeavor.

Perhaps there is some disruptive thing Twitter could do that will eventually disrupt their current advertising model and be a true billion dollar business. It's possible they don't see it (or less likely, there is NO path for them to get where they need to be) and so they're letting it be known that they're planning on extracting increasing rents from their current income streams.

I've tried this with a group. It's good for generating endless conversation on principles of economic fairness. It completely fails to be a time-saving mechanism.

There is the completely rational mind and then there are humans - this represents a separation point :)

You're in the uncanny valley of stress where it's enough to upset you, but not enough to get you to fix it :)

Perhaps an increase in stress level is exactly what you need to really get this fixed since you do care about it.

The idea for this was inspired by Getting Things Done (by David Allen). The key idea is that to achieve productivity, you need a clear mind. A clear mind is knowing that everything in your life is either shelved away for Archival purposes, has a clear present next action or is awaiting followup from someone else.

The 15,000 unread emails would drive me crazy. Perhaps declaring email bankruptcy is a way to get out of it?

I really like followup.cc (similar to Boomerang) but you'd be surprised how a little stick can help.

The brilliance of Gmail threads is that it reintroduces context immediately for a thread. As a developer, you should know that multithreaded context is a bad idea... :)

Beeminder is an awesome service, definitely made by hackers (both code- and life-) for hackers. I know the founding team well and for every productivity frontier you think you've personally encountered, they've already discovered a mindhack AND tracking system to help you reach the next level.

Besides procrastination, is there any reason why having deadlines later would be beneficial for students or the teacher? It seems that you can almost make a universal law that shorter feedback cycles make for better course correction in almost any type of system.

I agree that the classes I've taken where there has been significantly shorter feedback cycles I've always felt more engaged.

Hi peter_l_downs - the summarizer is based on Open Text Summarizer (http://libots.sourceforge.net/) which works very similarly to your page at bookshrink (TF-IDF sentence scoring). I made some minor edits that accommodate article structure.

Bookshrink has some pretty amusing summaries... it reminded me of this meme a while back where people would paste books into Microsoft Word and AutoSummarize it down to 6 words :)

Thanks Mark for the comments and feedback! I appreciate it.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll add the list of headlines and I'm thinking about the summaries of the comments... it gets harder to understand them because they can be very context specific.

I'll take a crack and maybe add it as an option.

This is reductive summarization so it's selecting key sentences and phrases from the text (rather than generating any new phrasing) so occasionally it will seem brilliant, and other times...

Would love to get people's feedback - built this for myself over the weekend as a way to accelerate and limit my reading of HN (and being inspired by the NLP course from Stanford).

The NLP is pretty basic and takes a ratio of the original article, so you do get some longer listings.

Big thanks to Wayne Larsen of hckrnews.com for providing me with some insight on tracking top stories and letting me use his ranking data. Also, I recommend http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ for a human-curated version.

This story was really touching and inspiring (and my first exposure to it since I don't read reddit) and I hope one day to create an environment where my own child can build as prolifically as this kid has.

Some highlights to take away if you're focused on the entrepreneurial lessons from this kid:

- Ability to see the core value proposition: that S-hook with string is the fun part of the claw game, you don't need the complex mechanical arm and flashing lights to make it fun

- Scrappiness: use what you got, he only had his toys so made those the giveaways in his arcade.

- User testing: soccer game wasn't hard enough so put up army guys

- Lean startup: don't build a ticket dispensing machine while you're still testing development, just sit in the box and dispense tickets while you watch the balls fall through

- Pricing: make the upgrade plan really easy to justify to yourself (4 plays for a dollar, 500!!! plays for $2)

- Marketing: he even had the cool web startup t-shirt going!

I'm sitting here with practically unlimited web technology in front of me and all that kid had was cardboard... and I think if the flash mob came to my creation they'd have a lot less fun :)

Have to echo that it's a beautiful app...

So this is like Uber for bike messengers (and other courier type services)? Very well done, have had occasion where I could have used it in NYC.