skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had some limited success with a 10 hours noprocrast timeout. It broke the addiction, at least, so I only check in the morning and night now. You're right though, you really need to find something to replace old procrastination habits with, otherwise you'll just pick up new ones.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114401

I've certainly started visiting Programming Reddit more since visiting news.YC less. OTOH, I don't think it makes up for the full difference, and my startup has gotten the balance of that time. That could be because the startup is more mature and hence more fun to work on now, though.

I had the crazy idea (since my startup is all about casual games) that instead of blocking people from playing games all day, you should just turn their daily work into a game. Carrot, instead of stick. Don't really know how the specifics would work, but it's something I'd like to play with as our game-creation software gets more mature.
"Can anyone share how much they ignore noprocrast?"

I ignore it when I'm in the middle of commenting on a bunch of threads (like now), but I usually heed it when I come back to news.YC in the middle of the day. I just wait for it to expire before visiting and checking links...I figure not that much can happen in half a day.
Actually n95 is in the hands of more than 2 million people compared to iphone that its in half of these people.

And by saying n95 I was reffering mostly to S60 Version 3 platform, which is used on more phones than N95, which means they have the same browser.

iPhone may be appealing, but overall doesnt mean that is the only way to surf the mobile web. The browsing capabilities in many phones are really worthwhile.

It's obvious this is an iPhone praising story.

"popular"
it's a vogue word, doesn't mean anything if you don't say location. In Europe, phones come free or at loyaltee-fee with connection packets, which make it more accesible for people to change their phones easier. So, you stuck with a "popular" iPhone easier.

"real operating system" ?

sorry, but it rings to my ears the 3-in-1 iPhone pre-launch Steve Jobs speech

What real means anyway? Multitasking with IPv6, multimedia capabilities and UTF-16 support that is possible to write applications for? Symbian answers to these.

"standard and good enough..."

Well, you should check your numbers with Symbian penetration.

Nokia is already working on feel-touch UI which will make touching surface feel like a keyboard when necessary.
I really wish there was something that, like RescueTime, tracked applications, but did so on Linux. I also use Linux for work and Windows for messing around, but the interesting stuff I'm working on is all gvim/terminal. I'd like to be able to tag those so I get a sense of which subsections of the code take the most time, how much do I spend waiting on compiles or installing software, how much time is spent code-writing vs. research, etc. A pure Firefox plugin doesn't tell me the interesting stuff.
I don't either at the moment, but I bet many didn't see the significance of Lisp (then or now) either.
The browser can be your SSO, but OpenID is more than that.

And if you're not comfortable using an OP run by somebody else, you can run your own.
That's true. I care about Lisp so that's where I'm starting (hence the emphasis on SLIME more than Emacs). After I get better, I'll probably make an Emacs-only cheat sheet that's applicable to non-Lisp programmers.
If you did nothing else except #3, you'd be halfway home.
My PC crashed while I was reading your comment. :)
Take it to wikipedia for a buttered-up 'rags to riches' story, these are all half-truths, and what is missing in this short paragraph is all the STRUCTURE Oprah had at a young age and later in life, just like this college educated story.

Here is another bio on Oprah read between the lines : http://gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/winfrey_o.htm

Her unmarried parents, Vernon Winfrey and Vernita Lee, separated soon after she was born, leaving her to be <b>raised by her maternal grandmother</b>. "She certainly wasn't an educated woman, but she taught me the shape of letters, and she taught me my Bible stories," Winfrey recalled in Life magazine. By the time she was six, Winfrey had moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother.

Winfrey said her father saved her life. <b>He was very strict and provided her with guidance, structure, rules, and books. He required his daughter to complete weekly book reports, and she went without dinner until she learned five new vocabulary words each day.</b> She joined her school's drama club and became a prize-winning orator, winning a $1,000 college scholarship after delivering a short speech entitled "The Negro, the Constitution, and the United States" to 10,000 Elks Club members in Philadelphia.
Why the hell should I care?
Application virtualization or what?
Three risk categories that explain IT failure
SaaS vendors, eat your own dogfood, or die
Yeah, My PC crashed while I wa
Well, there is a book about not reading books, after all.

But, like Joe Kraus likes to quote, "you make what you measure," I think worktime analytics companies like RescueTime and 8aweek are 100% inspirational.

To your point, you don't have to be a bean-counter to run RescueTime or 8aweek. All you need do is run it and reflect once in a while on what it tells you.

BTW, you do need to have a certain personality to maintain a time log in Excel. I did that for a month but was dying that I didn't have time to write software to make it easier and more useful. It was really cool, but it was hard because it wasn't more integrated into my workflow.
It sounds like the concepts he is describing are more appropriate for a DSL within an existing language than in a completely new language.
strepp throat
Leadership: A conversation with "God"
Big privacy changes at SmugMug
Of course, I have lost massive amounts of valuable data because hard drives crashed and, like 95+ % of PC users, I don't back things up.
My timeframe was off, but my prediction otherwise held:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=105968
Not particularly, if you're extending your own objects, you could still get properties in a for...in that you weren't expecting, so hasOwnProperty is always a good idea.

Regardless though, using for...in on an Array is bad practice and not a good idea. Just like having sparse Arrays in js is a bad idea.
I think the problem is that often you really do want to know if customer is nil. The nice thing about having to explicitly specify this is that you localize the effects - and make it clear in your code that you want this 'pass-through' behavior in a specific part of your code.

If you wanted this behavior everywhere, you could just include this code

class NilClass
def method_missing(method, *args)
nil
end
end

But I think this would cause more problems than it would solve.
Well 1 snickers contains roughly 1.1 megajoules. Say the squirrel weighs roughly 250 grams - I've never had the compunction to capture and weigh one - which would mean it would take 2.45 joules of energy to lift it 1 meter against Earths gravity.

With the low end of human muscle efficiency in the conversion of energy into power. Ideally you'd be able to fire the little beastie ~63km off the energy of a snickers.
Is there any research to back the time-suck problem up?

Companies will just fire users with a problem so there is no business us for it.

Having 2 companies taking different approaches is fine but I am not convinced this is big business at all.
From our S3 Logs from our EC2 instance ()which saw no interruption): The first failure we had was at 4:25 this morning, no success until 7:08, then mixed results, now full success since 8:55
Also keep in mind we've only been launched for a few hours now. Being a toolbar provides us the opportunity to do some clever things, which we have planned. So as we roll out these features the differences will be more apparent.
Weird that (according to the article) Scoble seems to have missed Mosaic... he only became aware of the WWW by the time Netscape was released?
Employee efficiency is big business. Companies aren't going to fire you for spending a bit of time on CNN or Facebook, but I guarantee you they wouldn't mind getting a bit more of that time back. Every minute gained is a competitive advantage.
Summary of my response to tons of comments (also in the comments section on the page):

OK, here’s a summary of the things I’ll include in the next version. I’ll test them on my own for a couple weeks before I repost it. Why wait a couple weeks if people already recommended things? Because I still believe that an editor is valuable, and I want to make I can 1) use these new things to make sure they’re valuable, and 2) understand them enough to distill the essence into a simple 1-pager.

Font - something that distinguishes between I and l (possibly Monaco, Consolas and Bitstream Vera) and double check it.

Other formats - didn’t know the *nix format of choice so I was waiting for someone to tell me. Not sure how plaintext would work (either one column w/regular font or multiple w/fixed width font) but I’ll put that and an HTML version up next time.

Paredit - recommended twice. Will investigate.

A few more commands regarding indenting, etc.

Refcard templates - never heard of them. I’ll take a look, thanks for the reference, PL Hayes.

Responses:
RET: didn’t include it because the docs said it “mostly does what you think it does” and I agreed.
M-. and M-, are on there under “Exploring”
Seems it ain't Photosynth. "The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before." http://scobleizer.com/2008/02/15/misreading-scoble-on-micros...
well, there's Nirvanix (http://www.nirvanix.com) which competes with S3.
Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Battle to Host the Air Force's New 'Cyber Command'
Uncle Sam wants You, for the Air Force Cyber Command...  No, Really.
Maybe it's a high rate of "transience" in that there are a lot of people coming and going, or maybe it's the fact that you simply don't interact as much with other people, but put it all together and I still don't see it as an area where many people choose to "settle down". It's great place to venture forth and try doing startups, but I think the point was that it's not bad if you can also decide to simply call someplace home, which he sees more in Seattle than SV. I tend to agree. I've never been there, but I imagine that this is also more true of Boston.

You can get that in the bay area... you just have to head way out in the east bay to find more 'average' housing and people, I suppose. SV is pretty much full, and zoning regulations, american attitudes and earthquake laws apparently prevent density from going up too much.
I think the real question is one of reliability. Which is the most likely to fail, your server, your host's, or something on the cloud? How many 9's do we need before we can evolve?
EMC's "very massive" storage cloud
Here's a good post.
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2008/02/is...

I also bet it's a mix between seadragon and photsynth, that lets you scroll thru images going back and forth in time.
Why Seattle might be a better place to start a company than Silicon Valley
Bingo. Lesson learned: Data in one place is going to die. Data in two places is probably going to live. Defense in depth.

Lesson NOT learned: S3/my hard drive/Carbonites/etc rulz!
How To Make A Million Before You Turn 20
A Guide to Customisable Websites
N95/iPhone is the first devices to make mobile browsing acceptable. A great lesson on supply and demand.

Demand for sucky mobile browsing: vanishingly small
Demand for ok mobile browsing: really high

But GOOG, etc were surprised because although those two statements seem obvious, there's no way to measure beforehand.
What Do Computers Tell Us About God - Reflections of a computer scientist
trust me companies that monitor their employees online time will fire employees caught surfing to much after a couple of times. The person surfing the net to long is not working and thats the end of the story for these companies.
While playing with this project I noticed a tear running down my face.
But that higher median means that you get less variation in the kind of people around you. You only get the kind of people that could meet that price level. Thanks to the 30 year mortgage, gentrification is slower than conventional economic theory would predict.

The fact that the median is higher means that there's a smaller slice of society that can afford it.
Great reading! Here's more:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1600080138
I just asked because Bruce has 10 users paying < $50/yr.

I always hesitate to ask Viaweb questions because you prob get tired of them, but since you brought it up: :-)

How did you get your first users?

Or did they find you?

How long after you started was it before you had customers?
Its a nice round number for techcrunch
I do wonder about building services on top of services on top of services. Since you have to multiply their availability, you get an overall level of service that's lower than each of its components. I think the answer for high reliability built on top of services will be to have each layer run off of multiple services (for example: storage on S3 AND local servers AND someone else's cloud disk) with seamless failover between them. Lots of work, but if you can't stand to be down, them's the breaks.
Good luck getting the tech people you need for this kind of operation anywhere but Hanscom AFB outside of Boston.
Note: we had no data loss or corruption with the S3 outage
The big question that I have is whether the "key" in this scenario is a hash (or a pieces of a hash), or if it is randomly assigned.

The former is much more susceptible to being reverse engineered and hacked. Especially with a relatively small search space: ~30 bits.
Like with Betamax?
From my psychology reading, that what we measure tends to improve. So, measuring anything is an important step to improving.
What is the point of an employee self evaluation?
These are coming up at my job, and the idea makes me cringe. What on earth is the point of these?
So it is 6 hours complete outage in around 22 months since its opening beta. The lifetime outage is somewhat around 6/(30 * 22 * 24) = 0.00037 = 0.037%! I think this is pretty impressive achievement to build a system with uptime as 99.963%. Especially for some poor engineers woke up at 2am in Seattle and started to figure out what went wrong and get it back on line. I think it is pretty cool.

In the case when our PCs/Macs crashed. Even I could rush to a Circuit city/JR store to get a replacement hard drive. I probably will spend the same amount of time just to revive my system, given I have good habit back up the system. If that is not the case, I will need to reinstall operating system and applications. I guess the down time may be 24 to 48 hours.

So the downtime for a person without good habit in backup. The uptime will be 99.849%! if it takes 24 hours to get back the system in 22 months.
Order Starbucks Coffee from your iPhone
If you want to build your own S3 clone before you get started on your project, that makes perfect sense.

Although, in that case, it makes little sense to use S3 at all. The whole point is that you don't have to write your own clone.
It's more technical than unethical. You can't expect thousands of servers to all stop serving your ads the microsecond your balance runs out. Nor is it reasonable to expect the costs of the ad impressions to be an exact multiple of your budget.

You may wish that Google would eat the cost, or average things out, or whatever. They have decided not to, just as your phone company decides to round up your minutes. Nothing to get too irked about.
Silicon Valley Is For The Sheep, Michael
Looking at the factors of poverty in
http://www.cpa.ie/povertyinireland/whatispoverty.htm

Work - He started out with out a job but soon he was able to get one.
Age - He had a perfect age to work.
Health - He was in good health.
Education - He was well educated.
Family - He only had to support himself.
Location - He lived in the U.S.

So he really had no factors for being poor.
Because they don't do a good job monitoring you and they want to take advantage of your honesty and have you give them a ceiling to your evaluation.

Or, they want to correlate several data points (objective measures, peer review, management review) to find outliers and improve the reporting process.
It lets the most interested party do the data gathering that the manager would otherwise have to do. It also ensures that the employee is thinking about everything that they're being evaluated on more than just after the annual eval is done.

They're a good thing - it gives you a chance to tell the boss about everything you do, especially the stuff she doesn't notice. Spin it freely, and use quantitative stuff wherever possible.
Jumpers - Teleportation Article
Amazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It
Well, Google is competing a bit differently - they are offering to replace not just the servers, but also the software (mail, document sharing, calendar, etc.) that runs on the servers with their cloud/web services.
myspace, craigslist? I think he means that eventually best of market will win. Not sure I agree but some of the examples for it are compelling.

I think it just depends. I disagree with his implication that one can't improve the product after they launch, but I guess he is talking more about hardware products.
After 20 years of Microsoft and today's Amazon outage, I'd gladly welcome a little competition. Monopolies aren't good for anyone except the monopolist.
Yeah, my work life can be described as a dark room, a huge monitor, and a fullscreen terminal running vim.

Statistically it does miss a lot, but I was looking for a way to try and throttling my online mucking about. I haven't run out of "countdown" yet today. Heck it says: 21.3 minutes remaining...
ThinkPad X300 Detailed Specs Leaked
When Geek Relationships Get Old [Humor]
If this is inappropriate for Hacker News, I apologize. I found it funny because I thought it could really be happening...
So they just moved their service over to S3, eh? Nice timing on the article with the outage this morning.
sounds like "stacking of errors" that will put the whole operation out of tolerance fairly quickly.
Screenshots of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg competitor
20 Work-Life Balance Tips for the Overworked Entrepreneur
I think that too many people get hung up on the first "S" in SaaS, when it's really about the last "S".

SaaS is not about playing hot potato with the server infrastructure and trying to farm it out to the lowest bidder. SaaS is about providing your customer with a reliable software platform, while removing headaches and leveraging economies of scale.

There is no reason for every little company to have their own micro server-farm to host their CRM app. There is no reason for every company to maintain internal knowledge on the care and feeding of that app. These companies can benefit from outsourcing the care and feeding and hosting of that CRM app to a centralized provider, like Salesforce.

SaaS vendors should eat their own dog food. They should use their own app, to the extent possible, so they experience what the customer experiences. SaaS vendors also need to make sure that app is always up, always online, and always zippy. You can't really do that if you outsource a key piece of what makes the app what it is: the server infrastructure.

At my last company, someone used the phrase "you can't outsource liability" a lot. That applies here as well for SaaS vendors, you can't completley outsource the "liability" of your server farm without also losing control of your ability to provide availability to your customers. You can reduce overall liability by taking advantages of things like S3/EC2, but you can't eliminate it.

As my own company is delivering an SaaS app, and building the infrastructure to make it available, I have said many times that EVERY datacenter provider WILL have an extended outage at some point. Put all your eggs in one basket, and it's just a waiting game. Spread your chips out to different vendors AND different geographic areas and you better ensure that you have no one single point of failure.

The SaaS vendors who think they are only about the software, and try to outsource 100% of the computing cloud are the ones that will die. The SaaS vendors that recognize what their customers are actually buying (a hosted app all inclusive) will fare better in the long run.
News Corp to save Yahoo from Microsoft?
At the end of the day, they're all likely to fail. Provided of course that you know how to setup and maintain a server (farm) in the first place. If you don't, you have no business being a SaaS provider.

However, when your own servers fail, YOU can generally react faster than when someone elses server fails, and you rely on them to fix the outage and get you back online. This is especially true for SaaS startups. When Rackspace had their issues last year, and had to shutdown "some" servers because their datacenter was overheating, who do you think they shutdown? The startups with 2 or 3 servers, or the BigCo's with 2 or 3 full cabinets?
Being the best available option hardly makes Amazon a monopoly. You don't even have minimum purchases - you pay as you go!
Sigh, here comes the short-term memory inspired backlash. This is only news because a bunch of sites went down at once. Compare this to outage rates for self-hosted sites and I'd still bet the AWS users are ahead. In the last couple weeks, 37signals and Fog Creek have both announced outages. This AWS crash today doesn't change the economics of their offering: service levels good enough for Amazon, and you don't have to spend your time futzing with servers. Websites have outages, that's life. 9's of uptime get more expensive quickly, and you've got to weigh that expense against how much your site makes per minute. Get over it.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/800-what-happened-this-mo...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/22.html
maybe you should just point to it instead
This is a fallacy.

Best to market wins if the first to market doesn't have a competitive edge or the establish barriers of entry.
Google Data Center
Y2 Combinator
[Cringely] What if Microsoft doesn't really hope to buy Yahoo at all?
3 9's uptime as "pretty impressive"? You must be a programmer.
Another Vice President Parachutes From Yahoo, Lands as CEO of Xobni
Good point. Scoble informs us that this project is beautiful for the same reason a scientific paper is beautiful, yet he cites the for-profit Netscape as opposed to the innovation that was the "father" of Netscape... or perhaps he just got the two mixed up - I'm willing to give him the benefit of doubt on this.
When People Feel Powerful, They Ignore New Opinions, Study Finds
A guide to the ways of rich, white customers
Every one of these entries here could be construed as a potential web 2.0 niche waiting to be shelved and occupied! :)
Jeff Bonforte Joins Xobni as CEO
Taking a vitamin B complex will give you a good boost of energy for a few hours. Beyond that, if you don't regularly take a multivitamin, now is a good time to start. I'd bet many people would be surprised at how much better they feel after a couple of days of taking one -- it seems that plenty of people have vitamin and mineral deficiencies in their diets that they aren't even aware of.
Hey there. I like the site redesign. I think you have a good product and a good looking site. But it doesnt tell a story. You have a great voice on the blog, but that doesnt come through on the site, which seems 'blah.' There is no 'About Us' page, that can help tell your story and why you built it (at least I couldnt find one). Also, you've mentioned so many features and reasons for why you built the product on this page, but I cant see them highlighted on your home page. Tell a story! All that said, good luck and keep going.
wow, big win for xobni. Congrats
A good example of the s3 chaos today, if I'm not mistaken

http://s3.amazonaws.com/wootimages/wootoffdetour4.gif
How to Kick Silicon Valley's Butt
what exactly is going to be left for MSFT to buy?