skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I relate to both this and the older 'bad correspondent' article immensely. I have struggled with this for at least 2-3 years now. The only times I can be truly productive (in music, programming or visual stuff) is when I feel like I have a cocoon where there will be no interruptions with 100% certainty.

For me personally the cell phone is a bigger problem than the internet, since people get annoyed when I don't pick up the phone, but I also notice I need to stop clicking endlessly all night on web sites to calm my mind down to get to that mental space for creativity.

Basically the best periods I've had were when others were on vacation or I was, and there was some natural unbroken few days where there was no anxiety at all about being interrupted. The question is how to make it happen. I basically just turn off my phone, close the browser, go for a walk, try to get the nerves calmed down, and hopefully something comes out of it that night.

It's really quite annoying though, because 7 years ago it wasn't like this. I don't want to be a recluse, I just want to balance the two things and have that be okay.
Location: Austin, TX

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: PostgreSQL, Python, PL/pgSQL, Clojure

Resume: Recently ended a contract working at Cycorp as a database engineer. Now a free agent.

I've been spending this time off working on omark, and open source channels management and inventory system:
github: https://github.com/dt1/omark

email: dbtoomey@gmail.com
Depends where you are in your product lifecycle. Pre-product market fit, it's often a bad idea to build and keep a stable backlog a few weeks in length.
> H-bomb is simple once you got the fission one.

I don't know that "simple" is a good description. The key design concepts are known, yes; but the level of technical precision and skill required to build a fusion bomb that will work is much higher than what is required to build a basic fission bomb that will work.
Ah, the Villain Effect. What the other guy says must be evil, so the opposite of that must be good, right?

Between that and the way we select politicians for it, it's a wonder there hasn't been a second civil war yet.
In arguments over the relative safeness of the world it is often pointed out that relatively few people have died recently in terrorist attacks, but as N. N. Taleb points out, the distribution of deaths by terrorist attacks is a fat tailed one: the current average does not preclude much higher future numbers. Such devices as this in the hands of such actors as NK give us more concrete feelings for the real risks involved. More focus needs to be paid to these sorts of risks, we will be lucky to live out our lives without a major nuclear terrorism event.
I just turned 40, parent of a young child, and I know what you mean. I think the below article, a cover story in The Atlantic, is really insightful and I found it helped adjust my thinking.

There are going to be things that I wanted to do, that I won't do in my life. Some may never have happened no matter what, like winning the Super Bowl or becoming an astronaut. But some of them will be things that I could very plausibly have actually done--but instead I did other things. The challenge of happiness is acknowledging that I made those choices for reasons that seemed good at the time, and anyway I can't go back and change the past. To be happy, I have to accept that it's possible to be happy, even knowing that I gave some things up for other things.

Essentially I'm working on believing that goals and happiness are separate things, each of which can be achieved independently of the other.

The link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-real...

A quote:

> Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.” In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.
Don't know if this helps, but - that prediction strategy doesn't work if your passion's for a hits-driven / inverse-square-law business.

Lots of authors, for example, write for +-20 years before writing the book that breaks them out - some of them even have HN accounts :) The calculus is similar for starting businesses, films (although the odds there are even more terrible), etc.

And experience accumulated reduces failure chance. I recall there's a statistic that most successful businesses are started by people your age, not people in their 20s.
When you've got a system that is, for example, underpinning your whole business operation (eg billing, machine controls, whatever) and that cost thousands (often tens or hundreds of thousands) to implement and it only works on a legacy version of an operating system (be that Win 3.11, Linux 2.4, or even just XP) you WILL move heaven and earth to avoid disrupting that system.

Even if it's a smooth migration to a current release, it doesn't have 15 years of perfect history behind it.

And that's when you can migrate. There are plenty of control systems for devices that cost $millions that were bought decades ago that just need to keep working. You don't have source. The vendor went out of business with the dot-com bubble.

Yeah, we probably could replace all the things, but at what cost? Will it beat the last 15 years of perfect uptime? Are you the buy willing to stake your job on it? Or shall we just paper over the cracks and keep shovelling coal into that server in the corner?

Edit: I'm describing worst-case scenarios in specific use-cases but even if there isn't a good reason to stay behind, the feeling of "why fix what ain't broke?" is pervasive in management, especially IT management. Maybe it's a generational thing and we'll see waves on waves of upgrades in the next decade or two but I'm fairly sure that'll just lead to another generation of "make do"ers.
Encouraging or even assisting users with browsers that have security bugs is also not a responsible way of going about doing business!
Price & battery life.
Por que no los dos?

I'm worried about both, and I can't say which I'm worried about more. What are the reasons you are concerned about one more than the other?
That text matches what we got from a growth commitment that included a pretty modest discount.

Given that we couldn't get it; and that nobody from our company's entire VC network could get it; and that nobody on my CTO email list could get it... I'm going to continue thinking that the anonymous HN commenter is talking out of his ass.

But if you can prove me wrong, I'd be thrilled to be wrong.
Have you written anywhere about how you arrived at such a radical position?

(I mean radical in the traditional sense, not as a slur)
Idris homepage: http://www.idris-lang.org/

Github: https://github.com/idris-hackers
> While visiting France, President Barack Obama authorized the use of an autopen to create his signature which signed into law an extension of three provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. On January 3, 2013, he signed the extension to the Bush tax cuts, using the Autopen while vacationing in Hawaii ... Republican leaders have questioned whether this use of the Autopen meets the Constitutional requirement for signing a bill into law, but the validity of presidential use of an autopen has not been actually tested in court.
...ending a sprint with a couple of late-night panic sessions to get everything out of the door...

My first reaction is you are not sufficiently grooming your backlog. Stories are left too large, with too many unknowns. If you tend to have a small number of large tasks, this is likely the case.

That, or you just aren't very good at estimating. A large number of small tasks would indicate this problem.

In the second case, you need to circle back with the PO and discuss which items can push to the next sprint. And make a concerted effort to estimate better during grooming and planning sessions.
> One language to rule them all.
> JavaScript is becoming the web darling (or it already is?)

I wonder, will it be still as popular if WebAssembly let us use any programming language on the client? I mean post MVP WebAssembly with support of GC, DOM, and so forth.
The median AWS based SaaS company spends around 6% of their revenue on AWS. (this compares to a median of 7% for those who choose to manage their own servers).

As such, $500k/mo isn't a terribly elite club. Essentially every SaaS company that does more than $10MM/mo of revenue is spending as much or more than we are.
When you do, it would be really useful to include the classic fio/bonnie/etc. stuff to break down performance by the type of operation (e.g. file creation / deletion, streaming read/write, random read/write) and block size.

EFS supports NFSv4 so it should avoid being as routinely limited by server round-trip latency as NFSv3 tends to be but it'd be nice to see how well that works in practice.
Good stuff and cool your from Baltimore & working on a reveal.js project too.
Computer ecosystem is a factor when I consider a job. Granted, it's not high on the list, but it's there. I suppose though that this consideration is far less important for, say, a waiter, whose reliance on Windows for their POS system doesn't really affect his job much.
The good outcomes should be achievable without the bad side effects of the implementation (centralization and surveillance) that's being criticized here, at least as far as technology is concerned.

There is only one positive outcome of concentrations of power, and that is efficiency in execution. Which is extremely scary when combined with huge power.

This is really just the democracy discussion with different terms. It is well known that dictatorships are much more efficient at executing their plans. The inefficiency we voluntarily introduce when establishing and maintaining a democracy (and if you have ever been involved in democratic decisionmaking, the inefficiency can be really frustrating) is the price we pay to insure us against the efficient abuse of power as we have witnessed it countless times in human history.
I'm politically pragmatic. My agenda is things that work. Very much like PAP during LKY.

I see a lot of shit that doesn't work and obviously I'll fall to one side of it - which happens to be far right as of today.

Perceptions of "being aggressive" is pretty much on par with with my current torque to the right. You're reading too much into it and overvalue interpretation of tone.

My example was a Swedish lawyer that helps 30 years pretend to be 13. He charges 1600 per hour and of course lives in the most secluded and homogenous areas while he calls non-white critics for racists. You have to understand that this can't be sustainable... at all.

I don't mean financially, I mean the concept of black and white notions, especially with sensitive subjects like racism. Though I don't think this particular person is stupid enough to think like that. He knows he's making bank and will make sure to milk it as long as he can.

I actually would have preferred him to be stupid instead of criminally evil.
Writing a Chip8 emulator in JavaScript
eslisp[1] might be up your alley

[1](https://github.com/anko/eslisp)
This is a comfortable stance to take 70 years after the fact.

In WWII: Over 60 million people were killed, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion).

The US ended the war in the pacific with those bombs(129,000–246,000+ killed), who knows how many more would have died with an invasion of Japan. The second would not have been dropped if the Japanese had surrounded and ended the war. BTW, the US did not start the war. I'm not saying I support it, I'm just saying stop Monday morning quarterbacking.
As could I. (51-year-old freelance developer)
I think that self-driving cars should act in the self interest of the owners. It will encourage people to use self-driving cars and decrease road deaths.

Also, if you are at a rail yard and see something hurtling toward 5 workmen and can push a fat man in front to protect them, you should refrain. The workmen had the opportunity and duty to take actions to prepare for and prevent rogue train cars. The fat man should not have a duty to be constantly on guard against assault.
Do you truly believe that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, or Imperial Japan would have hesitated for a second to use nuclear weapons if they had developed them first?

I, for one, do not.

---

Sidenote:

The most remarkable aspect of the story of the atomic bomb occurred after the development of fusion weapons.

The President and his chief advisors called together a committee to determine whether to wipe out the Soviet Union. The discussion took place in the Roosevelt Room shortly following the development of the hydrogen bomb.

With its massive bomber fleet, unparalleled fusion technology, and large stockpile of fission weapons, the United States could have quite literally conquered the world.

Yet it chose not to do so. I know of no parallel in world history where such an event has occurred.

Prior to the conference, Hans Bethe of the Manhattan project wrote to the President:

"If we fight a war and win it with nuclear weapons, what history will remember is not the ideas we were fighting for, but the methods we used to accomplish them.

These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan, who brutally killed every last inhabitant of Persia."
Fair enough. I'd wager that there are online gaming groups with better leadership than his, but that's beside the point too.

What this guy needs is a rude awakening. And, hopefully, he will get one.
Best Books of 2015
This looks fantastic, I can't wait to try this.
Facebook Auto Poster Platform
>Why create an ORM rather than use a JavaScript-orientated NoSQL database? (mongo, couch etc.)

I could be way off here (and I probably am) but shouldn't frameworks abstain from being too opinionated about the particular technologies that you use? The database (or type of db) you choose seems like something that should be based on what your application's requirements dictate not what your framework prefers right?
so your claiming that if wholly government managed they would be more accountable? Really? Who is a government agency ever truly accountable too?

The solution of all this is simple, government sets standards to be met and has inspectors who insure they are met. If the standards are kept and one of them can be a "happiness factor" who cares if they profit.

Plus the added benefit of these private groups is that can iterate faster, are more likely to bring new ideas to the table, and improve the lot of the refugees faster than government agencies which tend to persist problems to extend their own existence
If anyone else is interested, here's a link to someone's repost of "Why I'm a Bad Correspondent"

http://www.carlkingdom.com/neal-stephenson-why-i-am-a-bad-co...
I'm using Firefox 43.0.3 on Mac OS X. I've got "Check my spelling as I type" enabled, and I don't appear to have changed any spelling-related about:config stuff. I wonder if it's something else affecting Firefox. Very odd.
Note also that Norway is, in general, an insanely expensive country so $60 gets you less than it would in most countries.
So why didn't Google do that? Is their Java implementation closed-source?
The regex crate actually has quite a bit of optimization, which is why it's #1 on the benchmark game. In the OP, it looks like Rust is holding its own to me.

Just because Rust's regexes use automata doesn't mean they have to be slow. :-) It can be tricky to make them fast, but RE2 proves that it is possible!
Actually, it doesn't matter if the clippings wash down into the drains because the rain water will absorb the nitrogen and herbicide/pesticides which will then flow into the wetlands. I live right next to a popular lake where there are signs posted about this. The end result is what you say though (algae blooms, etc.).
Perhaps arm-twisting is more effective when the power doing the twisting is known to have used nuclear weapons.
President Obama and the Rhetoric of Rights
Retaliation for the blackout in Crimea?
It's not just about replacing the controller, which nobody understands or agrees on [1] -- it's about getting away from the idea that you can oversimplify user interface architecture down to a holy trinity of just three elemental concepts.

You could just as well ask "If Earth, Wind and Fire [2] are obsolete, what replaces them?"

There's more to modern chemistry than Earth, Wind and Electricity.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhatsaControllerAnyway

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element
He isn't. The tax payers are.
Selecting a client-side framework for Drupal
> I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP"

Can you understand the concept of people being too poor to ever upgrade? Can you understand the concept of people who live in places where up-to-date technology is hard to get? (see Cloudflare's recent SHA1 deprecation post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sha-1-deprecation-no-browser-lef... )

And before you say "there's Linux that's free", the idea of Linux being free if you don't value your time is absolutely applicable to these people. They perceive their time as having more important uses than acquiring and learning different software.
Was the author's team just totally lacking a leader who could point out the patterns in underestimating the scope of work. If you are consistently missing your estimates, you adjust. Get to a point where you are consistently under-promising, and over-delivering. Morale problem solved. It's not rocket science.

That said, I agree that regular timelines aren't the only way to create a sense of urgency in your team.
> I completed SEVENEVES recently and have three other novel projects in the works. Somewhat perversely, however, using social media has now become part of a novelist's job.

I find amazing the fact that he manages to write 3 or 4 novels at the same time.
> If I was a developer,

It's pretty clear you're not a developer (or wouldn't be for long).

There are two really bad decisions here:

1) You are driving away up to 15% of people who actually use your product. How much would you spend to acquire that many active users? It's easier to keep existing users than acquire new users.

2) Sending users through a ticket system for errors you could have prevented with a simple warning is a bad experience for them and far more work for you. And most users will silently disappear instead.
People make this out to be far more complex than it needs to be. Just give the car a fast connection to the credit bureaus and have it minimize the sum of the FICO scores of those killed.
When you, everyone else in this thread and all your friends become supporters of the Software Freedom Conservancy, then they will have enough funding to continue GPL compliance efforts. Right now they are about 50 supporters below the level needed to continue basic services (but do no compliance activities). They need a few thousand more supporters to keep up with GPL compliance activities.

http://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
But the prosecutors also manipulated the public opinion with that public conferences about that what Brendan and Steven supposedly made to the victim, only based in a doubtful and manipulated confession of Brendan.
^ famous last words.. :)
With that kind of attitude, you would obviously not be able to scale anything that would meet even the most minimal resistance.
> Someone else in this thread mentioned unfollowing everyone on Facebook, that helped quite a bit. But there's a lot to be said for declaring social media bankruptcy and being freed from that involuntary compulsion to open up a new Chrome tab and waste time.

I did this recently (unfollowing (almost) everyone on my FB friend list), and it has resulted in me spending less than 10 minutes a week on the site. I didn't do it so I would use FB less, I did it because my feed was full of nothing but hatred and negativity, and to see that from friends and family is extremely depressing. If I didn't use FB to promote a couple of projects I'm running, I'd drop it altogether and rely on my wife to keep me updated on family and mutual friends who choose to only have contact with the outside world via the FB window.
Maybe you should try working remotely if that is a possibility.
SSD upgrade for iMac G4 Globe
Heh, it's good to know I'm not the only one snapping shots of construction sites in Tokyo. I was surprised by how well they dampen the noise so as not to bother the surrounding areas. Also, every site had those same white perimeter privacy walls. I wonder if that's mandated for all projects.
It can store recipes.
A reflex does not necessarily involve fear, but the Low Road sounds suspiciously like a reflex.

In addition, it seems like the Low Road is not a response to fear, but a creator of fear, based on my understanding of those quotes. And, fear being a drive to avoid something, and the Low Road being a response to unwanted stimuli, it would appear that fear is rational.

N.B.: I'm using the definition of "rational" used by game theory, that is, a decision is rational if the possible outcomes for that decision are better than those for other decisions (assuming a certain goal, of course).
What people don't get a lot of the time when they're opining about what a business should do or should have done because the market is collapsing/collapsed for a particular product category is that you have to run the numbers. Maybe the business executes brilliantly on creating a new $1B business (which is hard). But if that replaces a $10B business, things are still going to get ugly. I don't have the exact numbers at my fingertips but, as I recall, film revenue fell something like 90% in under 10 years.

(That said, Fujifilm provides an existence proof that Kodak could have, however painfully, probably navigated this with better management making better choices.)
If NK regime falls down, likely it's going to be South Korea who is going to get refugees and to clean up the mess, since their long-term objective is to unify Korea and only the NK regime is preventing that.

The problem China does not want to have is a US ally at his border.
HN is the only social media I use. Quitting social media is really the best thing I have ever done. I used to check facebook and twitter every 2 minuter when I had nothing else to do. The result was to never have a dull moment. It just stressed me out.

After quitting I realized how much I need all those small breaks. I am less stressed and much more productive. Jobs kept coming by word of mouth.
We can only hope that the other novels will be better than Seveneves.
He isn't going to be able to enforce the GPL for Linux much longer as SFC needs about 1800 supporters to be able to continue their eminently reasonable copyleft compliance work.

https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
Take it with a grain of salt. The reaction of the astronomer community is much more skeptical than this article leads you to believe. The paper in question, for instance, has been "withdrawn until further data is available" from arxiv.

There are many who think it can be an issue of data reduction - i.e. the process that leads from the raw instrument data to a publication-grade result.
Aspirin May Lower Risk of Lethal Prostate Cancer
The Dematerialization of Consumption
Many of them didn't flee ISIS. They fled Assad.

Attitude towards ISIS borders between "don't care" to "they're alright"

Some may hate ISIS, but they like parts of ISIS. Like treatment of infidels, women and LGBT.

http://english.dohainstitute.org/file/Get/40ebdf12-8960-4d18...

Getting radical muslims out of muslim cities has not proved to make them less radical.

My parents wish more "quality control" was imposed. My parents were refugees.