The best things and stuff of 2012

[salboaie]

Did you know about a "hidden" page: http://news.ycombinator.com/best Looks like an experimental feature to me but it will be nice to have something like this.

Waiting for: http://news.ycombinator.com/best/2012

[MattSayar]

Hmm, looks like all the top links are made in the past few days. Is this only the Best from the past week or so?

[kickapps]

thanks ... how did you find that?

[rocketmail4ever]

I don't know if this is from 2012, but I just found out about this page -- it's the best papers from computer science from 1996 to 2012 http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html (based on awards given by committees at the top conferences)

[xmanifesto]

Best thing I've done all year is learning how to code. I feel like I've broken the cycle of illiteracy.

[marquis]

Apropos Engelbart’s Violin, I'd be interested to try a Microwriter. I think I'd pick it up quite well as I played piano for years. Did they ever make it into widespread production? Though I suppose you could make one quite easily with an Arduino.

[gcr]

Try Plover, the open-source steno software. http://plover.stenoknight.com/ You can download it from the wiki. The author has a demonstration of typing 250 words per minute using Plover and her stenography knowledge.

If your keyboard has N-key rollover (and the $50 Microsoft Sidewinder USB keyboard does), it will work well with Plover.

[tsm]

There's more discussion and a few links on previous HN submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4016421

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159213

[andrewcooke]

they certainly existed; i used to know someone who used one.

see also http://www.cykey.co.uk/ (same people; available now)

[gruseom]

Favorite musicians discovered: ... Klaus Nomi ...

As a card-carrying member of the Klaus Nomi Fan Club (well, formerly – I lost the card), I heartily approve.

[danso]

I recently went through the HN posts I upvoted/saved this year and maybe someday will get around summarizing the ones that taught/inspired me the most...here are two technical ones that stuck out for me:

SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society. http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-ris... This to me was the epitome of a great HN post: the author decides he wants to learn how to build Chrome extensions and implement WebSockets and builds a chat app from scratch. It becomes a runaway hit and he leaves it alone, only to rediscover later that it developed into its own online civilization of sorts.

How We Nearly Lost Discovery http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/how-we-nearly-lost... A former NASA engineer describes how Discovery nearly ended up as tragedy, and "how I found out that we were never really as smart as we thought we were."