skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
being persistant and/or quiting at the at the right time can both be correct. in this particular case I didn't see the right questions being asked. I don't think we should debate which path to take without knowing anything about the situation. Thats why I originaly say to stop thinking negtive, stop for a few days etc..
To say that Hollywood loses billions of dollars a year is not only true, but a gross understatement. The figure is actually about 1,000,026,000,000,000 (one quadrillion, twenty-six billion).

The reason is that, a few months ago, my six-year-old cousin filmed a skit in drama class and planned on selling it to my parents, who told her they were interested in buying it. My Dad once told her he had a bajillion dollars, so she figured a quadrillion would be a drop in the bucket. Unfortunately, before the transaction was completed, my cousin's unknowing mother found the DVD and sent a copy to us, causing my cousin a quadrillion dollars in lost revenue.

When she found out, she cried. I had to give her a lolly-pop to console her.
I just found Shoes last night, it's really interesting. I'm excited to make an app of my own for the shoebox.
h34t,

Please read the second paragraph in this article:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1604891,00....

How different would the developed world be if he didn't persist in creating his own "Gubmarine" and listened to his colleagues who told him to quit?

Success is the veil of hard work, difficulty, and a whole lotta pain. It's the result of these things (and many more negative things people usually avoid enduring) that we identify as "success". Rarely do we see the torment that the successful go through in order to get where they are.
That's hard. But the opposite strategy might work: upvote non-fluff links. Only a few percent of the users of a site like this ever vote. So if the "silent majority" who never vote made even a slight effort to vote up non-fluff stories as a way to protect the site, that would have a real effect.
:::looks at vote count:::

Is this a trick question?

<grin>

Actually, I sympathize.
Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?
Cool, I will keep you updated. Did you end up going to TechCocktail last night?
I like what edw519 says. The community filter's itself via up arrows. If fluff reaches the top - isn't that what the community wants? Though, I do think we should put the following message at the top of the site: "If you vote for fluff then you really, really suck." :-)
Happiness research is nonsense when used in this way. People from different cultures often have different conceptions of happiness.

There are also calibration effects: show person X someone else better off than him, and tell him that guy reported 8/10 (happiness units). Then he will never report higher than 7/10. This isn't jealosy, it's just not knowing what the units mean.

Another reason to see why there is something off: compare Bhutan on your first link (#133) and on your second (#8, higher than Canada).
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "epic" originally meant "story or poem", which later became "grand or heroic". On the internet its meaning has shifted to indicate general extremeness -- much like the word "awesome" did in the 80's.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=epic
Thank you! :-)

I am not sure of the answer for: "Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker?". But working on cool stuff will earn this soon or later I guess. So, thanks a lot for the encouragement.
It's available, incorrect, and was refuted in 1850 (search for broken window parable).
from his blog, at http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/ --

"Louis Castle announced yesterday at GDC2008 that EA's upcoming title 'Boom Blox' will ship with an easter egg that allows head-tracking using the Wii remote! [...] I'm proud. If this pans out, it'll be only 5 months between the initial research prototype to integration into a major product release. Sweet! Happy to see my stuff being used. [...] Just in case you are wondering: No, I don't get any royalties or benefits for the use of this technique in games. Personally, I'm much happier impacting the state of technology on such a large scale in such a short period of time rather than struggling to transform it into personal financial gain."

sigh. if we were just a LITTLE bit greedier, he could be so, so rich.
JSLint ( http://www.jslint.com ) won't catch this, either. It will complain about using == or !=, but it doesn't say anything about other comparisons.
Personally I find that the hardest part is just getting started (and I sometimes find this extremely difficult, spending hours surfing the web or watching TV to put off making the first code edit of the day). Once I'm programming, I tend to block everything else out to the point of forgetting to go to bed.

Mentioned a while ago here was a "martini method", and I realized the above after I started using that a few weeks ago. For review, the modified version of the method I proposed is just to do

while true
do
echo -n `date` " "
svn diff | wc -l
# or git diff -- I'm going to switch to git soon
sleep 600
done

and exercise as much self-control as possible to avoid some specific set of timewasting or otherwise enjoyable activities (traditionally, drinking a martini) until the diff reaches a certain length. (Occasionally I give myself a break if I just came off a hugely productive run the previous day, or if I'm just wiped out from my day job.)

However, I accidentally set what turned out to be ridiculously low limits (because of the extra metainformation and surrounding lines of code that svn diff prints out). As it turned out, I didn't need to revise the limits upward, because it turned out I was frequently (not always, but that doesn't matter) staying engrossed in the task long after I'd reached the limit. I realized that it was enough to create an incentive to reach that easy goal, just to get me to switch to the task.

The best part is that I never sit down feeling like I've got some insurmountable pile of work I have to do, even though the project I'm working on as a whole is much larger than I'll ever be able to do by myself. When I task-switch, I'm just focused on thinking of what little piece I can do next. I _can_, if I want, make a few small scattered trivial changes, and I'm done for the day, but usually it's enough to get me thinking about the code, so I usually stay at the keyboard.

The fact that the goal is so easy to reach also makes self-control a lot easier. It's really no big deal if I feel like vegging for the whole evening -- I just have to do a smidge of work first. And I usually find after I've taken that first little step that I wasn't as tired as I thought I was.
I'm perhaps different than a lot of the other folks here doing startups. My goal in my entrepreneurship is not to exit to $millions; it is to create a long-term sustainable lifestyle for myself where I am continually doing work that I find interesting and also have have the time to enjoy other pursuits...

Viewed through that lens, then as soon as dissatisfaction or a lack of motivation become chronic rather than intermittent, it's clear that something needs to change.

It sounds like you have been trying to whip yourself into shape -- trying to create external motivations to push you through tasks you no longer find enjoyable on their own. This isn't sustainable; sooner or later you'll run out.

Personally, I:

* Don't beat myself up about time spent procrastinating as long as it's reasonable. Brain breaks (I play a lot of go online) are just fine; it's taken me a lot of work to break the "slack off -> guilt -> demotivation -> more slacking off" cycle,. Hint: The solution is not to crank up the "guilt" lever.

* I make sure I'm not working too much, even when I'm very excited. Things will still be there tomorrow, and in the sober light of day my 2 am code usually sucks.

* I nurture other interests and hobbies, including non-programming ones. I always have a couple of 'learning' side projects going on, and I make sure to go rock climbing (my excercise drug of choice!) at least once a week.

* It's always time to change! My business plan (drawn out in Inkscape) looks like a railyard, with lots of potential branches being added.

* I always start with high expectations and a huge feature list; I've begun to accept that trimming this back is a natural and inevitable part of actually getting anything done. Maybe it would be a good idea for you to call a 'feature freeze' and get a release out? Like someone else said, a year is a long time to be working in a vacuum.

...

Time for me to get back to work and stop being distracted, now. ;)
Many of the hackers in the Felten group at Princeton (www.freedom-to-tinker.com/) are good lockpicks.

One of my cofounders is one.

Once I was locked out of my apartment and knocked from door to door to find a coat hanger to try my luck. I wasn't terribly successful, though.
Read carefully, this is only for commercial customers, ie. bulk mailers.
You are correct as far as you go, but what you're saying is contained in the first ten pages of any book on device reliability. There is at least one whole Ph.D. project's worth of additional research between your statement and the time when you throw up your hands in despair because your Monte Carlo models just don't seem to work.

If you really want to know, you'll have to read the papers. I'm sure there are quite a lot of them. The incentive to solve this problem is very, very high.
Researchers Find Way to Steal Encrypted Data
GPL only covers source code. It doesn't cover other copyrighted works (like help manuals, logos and other text) or allow users to user your trademarks. So while the source code is open you only license use of all the other material for noncommercial use.
> The flaw I see in that argument is that you have no guarantee of service.

Oh god, not this shit again.

Look at any typical SLA and tell me you don't see a zillion loopholes for lawyers to wriggle around. There's never any real guarantee of service unless an ironclad SLA is hammered out, and I suspect that if Google gets traction with Gmail for Domains, they'll do it.

When I was at Google (2003-2004) we had something like 10 seconds of user-visible outage. That was before Gmail, but it was also with a staff of ~200 people and ~250K servers. I have every reason to believe that Google can still stomp the shit out of all contenders on uptime; they just need some incentive to do it for specific services.

(my $0.02 only; I don't work for Google anymore. In fact I doubt I could ever go back; it would be too depressing to see what's become of the bullpen atmosphere in ops. Even still -- Urs may be the best in the world at what he does.)
I keep seeing comments about how the original builders of Legotown were unjustly punished for being successful little proto-capitalists. The argument goes something like: "They added value to their raw materials and created something great and beautiful. Then they were struck down for being better than their peers, and all the children were doomed to a life of uniform mediocrity."

To me, the story of Legotown was not one about capitalism. The questions about whether the builders added value to their Lego brick raw materials, and whether the trading game only allowed zero-sum transactions are irrelevant to the larger point of the story.

To me, the story of Legotown is about legitimate and illegitimate authority.

By what right did the original builders of Legotown assert their authority over the Legos? Why were they able to make the rules about who could use the Legos and who couldn't? Because they got their first? Because they built the best, most elaborate structures? Because they were bigger? There were no classroom rules that allowed them to claim ownership of the Legos. Instead, they took control of the Legos by force and simply asserted their right to make the rules about them.

Yes, capitalism requires adding value to raw materials and ability to trade freely, but it also requires the rule of law that is accepted as legitimate by its participants. If there had been rules about claiming ownership of toys in the classroom, then the builders could have followed those rules and then enforced their own rules about things that they owned. But, in the absence of such a governing framework, they cannot simply assert that they own something, and then expect others to accept their authority.

That's also the real point of the trading game. It wasn't to model capitalism. It was to show the children how it felt to be treated in a system ruled by arbitrary, illegitimate power. By what right do the holders of all the green Legos get to make the rules? Why should their power be considered legitimate? The answer is it shouldn't, because tilting the game in favor of the green Lego holders is obviously arbitrary and unjust. And, if it's unfair for the green Lego holders to make the rules in the trading game, how is that different than the original builders making all the rules about who can and cannot participate in Legotown?

In the end, the children earned back the Legos. But, it wasn't because they agreed to a more "Socialist" set of rules imposed by the teachers. Instead, it was because the children came together and agreed to a set of rules that reflected their values of fairness and justice. And, because the rules were the result of their input, the children considered them to be legitimate.
Like five women of negotiable affections? :-p
Code CAN be beautiful
I'm not sure users can be neatly split into "mental 14 year olds" versus "mental adults". I act like a mental 14 year old sometimes (usually on reddit), and sometimes I don't (usually here). I think most users are like that, and if we give an appearance of incentive for people to act maturely, then they will. I think this is at heart a psychological problem, not a sorting problem.

Of course, some people will act like "mental 14yo's" no matter what, and others never visit reddit anymore - but it seems intuitive that most people are somewhere in between.
In Safari 3 and Firefox 1.5, at least, null == null, so I would expect null <= null.

Both Safari 3 and Firefox 1.5 do the decidedly unexpected null <= 0 thing.
CSS from the Ground Up
Hey Ezra, what are your thoughts on Litespeed? I never hear anyone talking about it, but I've found it extremely easy to deploy Rails apps on it (though I've never done so with a high traffic site). Do you cover Litespeed in the book, at least as a comparison to others?
Will security become Facebook's Achilles' heel?
$10 chip puts Australia on the fast track
I would second this. We currently run an open-source project (distributed storage) and commercial venture based upon it, but the open-source was the driver done because we thought that it was an important problem to solve and that it would be worth more as open-source than as a proprietary product. Our commercial venture arose by choosing one specific application of the code and building a business to address it. Note that our open-source project is something that we (and others) have worked on independently of the commercial venture. The community is separate (though aware) and drives the open-source project in directions that we did not expect.
I'm into it, a little bit. I'm good enough that I never get locked out of my apartment, but I couldn't crack a safe or anything.

There's a weird and compelling sensation you get when you successfully pick a lock you've never picked before. Especially if there's some practical goal involved.
An elegant mathematical solution against fluff on News.YC
Make user's voting power a function of their submission karma, or their account age, or post length and score. How about a formula like:

voting power = log_a(submit karma) + log_b(account age) + log_c(avg[log_d(length)*score])

With bases a, b, c, and d picked appropriately. It would seem a > b > c would make sense.

The first term rewards those with good judgment as to what others find interesting, the second stops one group of think-alikes from dominating opinion, the third rewards long+insightful posts and "punishes" shorter posts (but not too much, with appropriate d). And by rewards, I mean trusts to know what is fluff and what is not.

This also gives a clear incentive for people to write thought-out posts, which is important - this is, at heart, a psychological problem more than a sorting problem.

Of course, the real hacker spirited solution would be to let people make/share their own such formulas to make their own front pages, but I'm not sure if Paul has the time to implement that.
Amusing that this finally comes out... now that Ezra has developed Merb. Not that I am complaining... It's nice to have a book from someone that obviously knows what they are talking about.
Optimus Maximus: at long last, we bring one home to test - Engadget
It's the other way around for me -- the more abstract the problem, the happier I am.

Good thing there are both kinds of people, huh?
Perhaps, in your hurry to condemn, you have misinterpreted.

When I can walk out the back door and speak directly to the head of the department in charge of our application programming team, or the guys running the servers, and so on, then I feel pretty good about guaranteed uptime. More importantly, I can blame someone when it fails.

Let's presume for a minute that my smallish enterprise was to move to Google Apps, and for some reason completely beyond the control of my people (Google failure, cable cut, whatever), the service goes out. Who do I blame?

You can call it "shit" if that makes you feel better about it. But it certainly doesn't cut any ice for me to walk into the President's office and say "But Google only had 10 seconds of outage in 2003-2004." I'm still fired. Imagine how much worse it would be for someone in a large installation.

When I control the gear, I control what I can and can't accomplish. Unless you can sell me on a serious guarantee of service and compelling functionality...no thanks.
and it's freely available abandonware hosted at the Underdogs! Though it probably doesn't count as abandonware now that it is on GameTap. I won't tell anyone if you don't.

http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=4973
I agree with your post 100%, but I think I'm generalising more than you're thinking I am.

My cards out on the table: I'm not a student of Economics (a deficiency I intend to correct, as time permits).

In terms of evidence, I have none. However, I think I need to be clear as to what I mean when I say 'raw materials'. It's probably a poor phrase to use (I guess it has a well-defined meaning in Economics); I consider even intangibles to be 'raw materials'. As an example, education is the 'raw material' on which 'intellectual property' is built. As a web developer, the LAMP technology stack (for example) is the 'raw material' (along with many others, including education) on which websites are built (and aren't we hackers lucky that people make much of that technology available to us for no cost? There's huge value in those 'raw materials' for us. Most people in the world aren't so lucky). For me a raw material is anything that acts as an input into a process that leads to a monetisable output. Of course, money itself is perhaps the ultimate 'raw material' in this sense, creating an interesting situation where one of the raw materials used to create the desired product is the product itself. Perpetual motion machines may be a physical impossibility, but a perpetually expanding economy apparently is not.

There are certainly many examples of low-resource cities that do very well; at least, low in terms of the amount of stuff that can be dug out of the ground. These are obviously not the only saleable resources or those cities wouldn't exist (I'm not sure about Hong Kong, but didn't Singapore first become wealthy due to its strategic location?).

As to the high-resource locations mired in conflict and poverty, I would suggest that much of this conflict is indeed related to who controls the raw materials.
Whilst this may or may not be true, I was more thinking originally about internet posts on economics and 'social justice' in my first comment, which seem to me to boil down to whether ownership of resources (of many types) should be 'more equitably shared' by some 'fairness' metric, or owned only by those able to compete effectively for them (or who just get lucky).
Of course there are many threads on what is actually meant by 'more equitable sharing', since all participants seem to feel that their approach is the most equitable without exception :-)

Hopefully I've not led too many people down dead-ends with my rather wooly use of the term 'raw material'.
A few notes:

1) Users with an old account do not necessarily write better comments or post better stories than recent arrivals.

2) Length doesn't equal insightfulness. There might be some correlation, but not a lot. This comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110034 is three characters and has a vote of 57.

I like the idea of people being able to write their own formulas and share them. Especially in a forum like this :-)
The $60 Million Missile
Sure, what I'm saying is just the basic stuff. What I was getting at was the air of mystery in Cringely's column regarding why the whiskers grow.

I guess I want to know as much as you want to look up the papers :~).
I like lightspeed but the free version is crippled and only usable for smallish sites. The real version costs a lot of money but is pretty nice. But it not being open source makes me personally cringe ;)

Lightspeed is nice for smaller sites because the processes can go away when there is no traffic. But I'm not a fan of it much and it's not covered in the book.
I voted up because I found it interesting and wanted to read it again. Starting to smoke might be a dumb idea, but doing so methodically is unusual and interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
what do VCs think? 
When I started developing my site I never thought about needing any capital. Sure I needed private servers but I managed that. And yes if I had money I wouldn't have a day job but that actually may have helped. its weird but if you are under pressure you become really productive. so after the first year I managed to develop something decent and by next year have paying customers. Then few month ago I got an email from a vc saying that they are interested etc and setup a phone meeting. I had not much of an idea of what vc's do and what they want. Also I had never approached them before. So the only thing I though was to talk about my product and give a demo and explain some of the detail. instead the conversation became something else and very short. I guess they had though we were a large company or something and basically explained that they invest some millions of dollars and in companies with a revenue of about 100,000 per qt or more.

So what's the point? if I had 100,000/qt why would I need investment? All I need is more servers and do more marketing and bring few more people to join.

Also why is a vc interested in investing millions in say similar companies like ours that have a terrible product but perhaps have more users because they are marketing etc., when they can invest in a better product?

The only explanation I can think of is that people feel good about something when they pay more for it. And another explaination is that they just don't get it. I mean if google had gone to a vc before they became google would they be able to see? Another explaination is that they just want to wait until they are realy sure or something...
this is a PR plant
Reminds me of the experience I had trying to learn Emacs. I was never a vi power user though but I still hated how hard things were in Emacs compared to something like TextMate. I really liked the idea of being able to start using something right away and mouse around looking for menus at first and become a power user later. First time I started emacs I couldn't even figure out how to exit it.
Microsoft Email To Employees: Really, The Yahoo Deal is Perfect For Us
Thanks for the heads up. Looking forward to grabbing the book. :)
Virgin Galactic orders more spaceships
Robots that are "self-aware" (video)