evanmoran

I've used OneNote for years, but I definitely agree with the parent that it could be better. Here's a brief summary:

Good stuff:

1) Search is fairly fast and comprehensive

2) Supports lots of content types easily with paste, including images and other Office app content

3) Shortcuts for Table manipulation, todo checkbox items, and other icons are really helpful. I wish every editor had these.

4) Handwriting is well supported.

Bad stuff:

1) The organizational structure is overly complex and confusing as it has three categories of structure: Notebooks (top pulldown), Sections (tabs on top), and Pages (tabs on right). This makes it hard to know which to use and it's visually overwhelming.

Wikipedia is a good example of something better as its structure is much more uniform: everything is a page and all navigation uses links.

2) Synchronizing is very slow compared to google docs. This makes it fine for simple scenarios where people edit alone and share after it's mostly written, but makes it hard to work together on a document (no multiple cursors on the page)

My guess is (1) and (2) are an artifact of Notebooks being files instead of "in the cloud". This likely forces the organizational structure OneNote has, and slows down synchronizing because it's harder to sync at the file level rather than the text-run level.

3) Shared freeform content like this gets out of date fast. This should be built into the product so we can see which pages are important to the organization. Most people don't delete pages ever, so some way of showing which pages matter and which should be disregarded would be very helpful.

I'd like to highlight that Wonka has it right (CSS3 & jQuery) and also add that NodeJS is pretty important right now for server-side.

The reasoning here is that the heart of the web is, and has always been, HTML, CSS, JS.

jQuery is a natural choice because it's replaced direct DOM manipulation quite elegantly and is used by 80% of websites. The only thing you're missing is server-side, and Node makes this an easy choice by also being JavaScript.

In short, it's all about JavaScript. If you can code, you'll do well. Keep practicing functions and with Node you can practice command-line apps, or server-side apps as well. Good luck!

This is quite well said. It never occurred to me that 10x programmer is just the programmer who has already written code that grappled with the ideas that matter most. By your fifth compiler, all the basics seem easy.

This a great point. It's not a conspiracy. Housing prices trend to match median income in an area. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If your income was significantly higher then current prices of houses you'd immediately buy a house, because why not, it isn't a big percent of your income and therefore isn't a huge risk either way. The moment prices reach what feels uncomfortable you'd think hard about renting vs buying. We are now in the later stage in several tech cities for tech wages.

This makes me think that Amazon thought they were buying YouTube when they really were buying ESPN for gaming. Twitch is a fantastic business -- and I wish them all the best -- but this doesn't play to their strengths at all.

They wouldn't have had fingerprint readers and the deals with credit card companies to make it then. In my view they didn't kill it they saved it by waiting until they could do it well.

I don't have the information on traffic fees, but there's strong evidence that lottery fees are supposed to go to charity but get put in general state funds instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

Also remember that the first non-founder employee is the least desirable position to be in. Usually you have very similar risk to the founders with _significantly_ less equity. Don't take the job unless you get market rates or significant equity (10%+). If they already have funding the former is much more likely, if not then latter makes sense considering the stage -- you're effectively a founder, even if you're not leadership.

For me I had to do science on myself. Keep a journal throughout the day on what you are actually doing, minute by minute. If hacker news is in there too much. Block it (I did this for years=). If you spend too much time polishing and not enough doing, then set alarms for yourself that say "get it working first. Do the core of it." You will find what's slowing you down and then you can take action to fix it.

Also, exercise. Put aside 3 hours a week and run/bike/do anything. It will give you energy in ways you won't expect! You probably are 100% there already, but for me it wasn't obvious and so I wanted to include it.

I think it's much easier to get 100 people to agree to high moral ideals then to try to get everyone at once. The reason this is possible is only the programmers have to agree.

We don't think about sorting specifically, but we do think about performance and the structure of data all the time. How data is stored very much effects how quickly it can be retrieved. This is pretty universal – Twitter needs different storage then Google – you'll be surprised how often you think in these terms.

Agreed. If they initially brand the Fire phone as a high-end device it will seem more valuable when they ruthlessly cut its price=).

My advice is to strive for excellence and let the rest come in time. "Excellence" is a journey you can do alone, and it will make you feel better regardless of what happens for you socially.

Ok, so what does this mean? You mentioned you don't speak English well. So the obvious choice is to go to classes to learn English. Definitely do that! But also follow the path of excellence: teach others English. Go to conversation groups and try to help people as much as they help you. Read books and share your favorites with people there. Why do you like them? How did they make you feel? Become more thoughtful. Which English words are your favorites? Memorize your favorite passages and poems. This is going for excellence. It isn't easy, but it's powerful.

Why does this work? Well, it turns out people who love what they do are fun to be around. Now when someone says, "what do you do", you can tell them this: "I'm really excited about learning English. I've never had a chance to really focus on it until now." Then ask them what their favorite words are, and they will join right in. Your energy and love of what you are doing will be fun to be around and interesting.

So now you are learning English and loving it. Do more. Apply this principle to work (master an area, really master it), to exercise (join crossfit, a climbing gym, martial arts, or dance). Follow your interests most of all. Try to put yourself out there 100%. It will take time to find mastery, but as you improve others will notice your energy and be drawn to you naturally.

For those interested. This book won a Pulitzer in 2011 (http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2011-General-Nonfiction). That's pretty strong evidence that it's well researched and worth checking out.

Notice in the video he didn't weigh an iPad, he weighed the MacBook Air. Microsoft is going after laptops – not tablets – with the Surface. This makes sense to me because when I'm working I need a keyboard (typing is just too important). When I'm in a meeting I want to jot notes down with a stylus (feels more personal then typing). This is a pretty impressive bridge between these ideals.

I was at a conference this weekend, and let me assure you that most people have not forgotten.

Sony's project Morpheus was announced last month and is doing VR for PS4: http://www.sony.com/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-com...

In my view Facebook separating out Chat from its core Facebook app was a brilliant move. It simplifies its core UI, yes, but even more makes the integration of WhatsApp into something that might actually make sense. Imagine WhatsApp built into the FB chat app... That's a huge, extremely active user base.

Lastly, if the worst happens and the core FB popularity declines, this new app could live a VERY long time. The only thing close in competition is GChat, but considering how popular WhatsApp is and its powerful reach into mobile, this could be the dominant chat platform going forward.

This is true, static hosting is served by the ecosystem -- yet they are buying companies very quickly right now with less obvious user value. Why wouldn't they buy one of these and see if they can grow it into something?

The most important thing to keep in mind is this is for designers not coders -- I haven't looked at this deeply enough to know if it is good yet, but my guess is if you read hacker news comments it isn't for you because, well, you probably code=).

Yes, these sorts of editors often create horrible leaky abstractions. Yes, these editors often confuse product folks into thinking that coding isn't necessary or important or hard. But that isn't its goal -- the goal is to make the common stuff easy to do for people writing / designing simple site content -- fades, positional, simple triggers. There is no reason to write code for this stuff.

If you don't believe me, imagine drawing something without showing the picture. Word documents without wysiwyg. Photo editing without Photoshop. In this video (http://vimeo.com/64895205) Bret Victor brilliantly shows what a powerful interactive editor can do. For the web, no amount of manual css typing can beat what a great editor could do. Whether this is that editor remains to be seen, but the idea of editors is a good one.

This is absolutely the right direction, but not in the way you think. This shouldn't be branded as a phone -- size and look matter too much. It should be branded the tool of the future, designed for people people in the field: electricians / construction workers / scientists / tinkerers. Let me plug in an altimeter, leveler, or multimeter. That is what is missing on my iPhone, and this is the first thing I've seen modular enough to pull it off.

And, yes, I've been thinking Tricorder this whole time=).

The world is full of assholes and yet there is only one Steve Jobs. If you are thinking of emulating him, I say stick to his better sides: understanding the industry, positioning, marketing, branding, public speaking and of course product design.

I love the experiment of it! My concern is that the scale of the discussion changes the discussion itself. Hear me out:

1) If a post is unpopular less people will be there to endorse.

2) With less people endorsing, replies will appear slower to people with low karma (lots of us), so we are disinclined to reply because we can't see the discussion. Less replies mean, less discussion.

3) The system also creates a strong disincentive to comment on unpopular posts because if no one reads it you can't comment on anything else. This will slow the comments of unpopular posts further.

One solution would be to weight the number of endorsements needed by the popularity of the post. The more people seeing it the more endorsements needed. For new posts (not popular yet) I would say comments shouldn't require any endorsement and let the existing down/up system rule.

I don't know what people's impression of him are, but he is #34 in twitter followers: http://twittercounter.com/pages/100/30

This is my favorite quite from the interview:

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...I feel that the effort to use machines to try to mimic human reasoning is both foolish and dangerous. It is foolish because if you look at human reasoning as is, it is pretty lousy; even the most trained mathematicians are amateur thinkers. Instead of trying to imitate what we are good at, I think it is much more fascinating to investigate what we are poor at. It is foolish to use machines to imitate human beings, while machines are very good at being machines, and that is precisely something that human beings are very poor at. Any successful AI project by its very nature would castrate the machine.

UPDATE: Can't help myself. This Lisp quote is too good=).

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Lisp was great at the time of its inception if only for a radically new way of using machines. It has suffered the fate of having been elevated to a status of de facto standard with all its defects. Despite its conceptual novelty a lot of the design of Lisp is terribly amateurish even by the standards of the time. When I read the first manual, the Lisp 1.5 manual, published in 1961, I could not believe my eyes. It was an extremely poor language. Now it has become the defacto standard of the AI community, which now suffers from Lisp, the way the rest of the world suffered from Fortran.

If they have key logging on your machine Google 2-factor authentication is the only thing that would save you. This to me is the most important security precaution you can take, the next being auto generated passwords with PasswordSafe or something similar. Good luck=).

Well worth reading, if only to be someone else for a moment and also to remember that internet is a harsh place. I really feel for this person.

This is great advice. I know it seems weirdly unrelated to your mood but it has helped me from the same sort of mood issues. Let us know if it helps=).

You wouldn't take 3 billion from someone else?=)

I use my Pebble to play music on my phone. It actually makes me listen to music more -- the play button is so easy to hit. It's really quite fun. Clearly other bluetooth connected devices can do this too, but I don't have those=).

As a whole, I think smart watches will eventually be quite common. There are clear advantages for: notifications, calendar viewing, remote controls, music, health/fitness monitoring, timers, siri integration. That said, Pebble has a ton of work left to before they have decent support for these things. It is impressive how well it works considering, but they need to step up their game fast or someone (Apple) is going to crush them.