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?

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.

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.