Jebdm

Nope. I go through in Reader and open up all of the interesting looking stories' comment pages at once, then go through those tabs afterwards.

I basically don't read anything online except through RSS feeds. My strategy for dealing with high-update sites is twofold. First off, I don't subscribe to redundant feeds (since many sites offer highly-overlapping content), and I am very trigger-happy on the unsubscribe button.

Secondly, I make use of this highly customized neural network-esque technology I use which gets a finely-grained history of everything I do and uses it to build a model of importance by which it can filter out irrelevant content. It's a bit processing intensive--it can only filter through 30-50 items per minute--but it's not a big deal since my RSS feeds only produce less than 500 items a day, so that's only 10 to 20 minutes of processing per day. It produces (on average) only a couple of false positives (items I don't actually care about) per day, and (although of course it's hard to empirically confirm) it seems to produce similarly few false negatives. This is a huge gain over every other system I've tried (especially populist voting-based systems).

Try Readability (http://www.readability.com), though it actually failed on this article.

I click through for comments, and find the front-page ordering pretty awful (people tend to vote up the less technical articles more, probably since there's a lower barrier to entry; also, articles in the same genre as the recent influx of stories about Color/etc., which I couldn't care less about, tend to get voted up a lot). And as someone else mentioned, it doesn't mark stories as read, which is a Big Deal for me.

They even hired Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie! http://oi51.tinypic.com/o8xo53.jpg

All of them. Meta-p followed by a couple of letters from the program name launches any installed program via dmenu.

(I'm using wmii on Ubuntu).

This is actually a bunch of links to other online guides to procrastination, plus three videos, plus three books, and some commentary. Reading it all seems like a pretty good way to procrastinate.

Ah, okay; I skimmed and missed the non-profit part.

Have you considered adding a way for content makers to require a small payment (via a Facebook Connect-esque popup)? It seems like you're halfway to micropayments.

Stick your one-sentence summary in the subject line. If possible, omit the rest (unless the person you're contacting is likely to be offended by a lack of pleasantries).

This is something of an aside, but: if you're blogging about your product, put a great big highlighted link to it front and center. There is a link to it in the sidebar, but it could be way more noticeable.

I was assuming that they were asking you to teach them to program, or at least give them a comprehensive survey of the field. What you said is the obvious short answer for people who are just asking to be polite or to get an idea of what you do.

I don't think that what you're calling mastery and proficiency are matters of degree like you seem to be expressing. Ability to communicate can be completely separate from understanding, because (particularly if you're of above-average intelligence) most people don't understand things the same way that you do.

I think that's a particularly salient point for most intelligent/dedicated people to understand; if you're intelligent, you've got to remember that most people have a harder time understanding things than you, and if you're dedicated to your idea, you've got to remember that most people don't care about your idea as much as you do.

Sure; in the particular context of a ten minute interview, you'll have prepared and it ought to be relatively easy to be concise most of the time. But if they throw you a curveball, then I don't think it ought to reflect negatively on you if you're a bit verbose (though it might reflect negatively on you that you didn't anticipate whatever the question was).

I replied because the quote was taken out of context, and I don't think that the idea applies in the general case.

The only numbers I know are the ones that haven't changed since before I was a teenager (basically just my parents' numbers and 911), my own Google Voice number, and Bing 411. That's partially because I can always look up numbers in my contacts, on Facebook, or online, and partially because I make phone calls less than once a week.

The thing is, I tend to think about the sorts of things which are complex enough that you can't trivially describe them in a linear format. Imagine that somebody asked you to tell them about programming. Programming is such a huge and complex topic that there really isn't an effective way to begin explaining it without putting significant forethought into how to explain it, even if you're an expert programmer. So, unless you've put thought into how to explain and teach it, if someone randomly asks you, you're probably going to fumble and be verbose. (This is one of the reasons many professors are bad at teaching.)

Of course, in the context of the article, somebody interviewing with investors probably should have thought out in advance about the sorts of things the investors would want to know and ask about, so they shouldn't be fumbling too much.

Not necessarily. My friend and cofounder is one of the smartest people I know, but even when he talks about things I know he is an expert at (as demonstrated by his skill), he's often a bit verbose.

Personally, I can generate concise statements (and I'm good at it when I try), but the first couple of times I verbalize an idea I'm usually somewhat verbose. I make an explicit effort to figure out a concise way to say things once I've noticed that I'll probably be expressing the same idea again (and when I write). Perhaps other people become significantly more concise over time without effort, but I'd estimate my baseline compression rate is only something like 10% (whereas when I explicitly compress I can often get 30% or better).

I think the difference is that some people think very verbally and linearly, whereas I tend to think more visually and abstractly. A lot of the time, I have to translate the ideas in my head from these somewhat amorphous concepts or visual ideas into English (or German, or code, or whatever).

I'm curious too, though I think the whole point of this change is that a private Google profile is essentially useless.

Without the letter shuffling, that'd be an interesting skin of the Google interface.

The solution: whenever you make a decision, explain to yourself why it is you made that decision. If you can't, think about it some more.

That's because it's a static error message page that others redirect to.

If for some reason you wanted to do this, you could just do

  import sys
  def debug(*s, sep=" ", nl="\n"):
    print >>sys.stderr, sep.join(map(str, s)), nl,
    pass

  debug("There was an error on line", 10, ":", nl="")
  debug(1,2,3,4,5, sep="-")

And then comment out the line with "print" to disable it.

Of course, by that point you may as well use the logging module.

It's fairly ironic--Google is restricting the page views (to limit bandwidth usage), but at that same time they're hosting a copy in cache of that same page, with no limits.

I like the Economist's style as well, mainly because it rings of old intelligence. But they have a large, overarching identity backing them, while as individuals most (usually) don't. Similarly, they publish in a formal medium, which Hacker News is not.

I read it the other way around. Calling somebody that you're not acquainted with by their last name in writing is pretty standard practice, and doesn't carry any connotations (at least to me). On the other hand, using a title like Mr. or Mrs., especially when your tone is negative, makes you sound like a prick. It's like saying "With all due respect, my good sir, you are incorrect".

Obviously, YMMV.

People use AIM because their friends use it. What IM protocol people use seems to vary from locale to locale (among the non-nerd types), probably just depending on which got used first.

I'd happily switch away from AIM (by that, I mean the protocol/servers, I use Bitlbee/irssi and Pidgin), except that a lot of the people I know use AIM exclusively.

Should this be encrypted? My computer says it is.

I used Vimperator for a while, but it slowed Firefox down significantly, and made it more prone to crashing. I believe it's a known bug.

Better yet, don't require "changing everything". Write a program that takes a password, and upon validation sends you an email. If you don't reply within a certain period of time (say, a week), then it will send your info to whoever you want to leave it to.

And make sure you can change the waiting period, in case you go on vacation or something.