skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Echoing the mentions of cognitive load, I get the impression that only about an hour or two of "forceful mental effort" - the period when you're hovering outside of a flow state and have to reassemble the problem you're working on - actually takes place during work hours.

This would account for why it becomes incredibly difficult to polish up creative work after a certain point(fit+finish of software, detailing artwork, tone and timbre in music); once you've solved all the big problems. You're spending all your time on figurative hands-and-knees, straining to find the little things - even though you may know how to attack a problem once you're aware of it, collecting the necessary data to turn the process into a fast feedback loop is hard. Hence why polish work is absolutely exhausting, because you're constantly knocked out of flow.
So we're pulling Bill Nye out of the mothballs now?

The way I see it Copenhagen couldn't get commitments from anyone and things have only gotten worse for Pro-GW side since then. It seems we're at least a decade away from legislation (assuming man-made GW is a valid theory) since no one is going to reshape their economy on "a maybe".

Given that I'd like to see two things.

1. Have the scientists turn back to the science and eliminate the measurement/methodology problems that have led to questions in the last 10 years.

2. Have the politicians and pundits turn their attention to funding and/or raising money for the literally millions of clean energy startups out there. Because the easiest fix here is energy entrepreneurialism. Space based Solar Power alone could fix this problem.

At least, that's what would happen in my perfect world
Mixergy is always a gold mine for me. I get the same feeling listening to Andrew's interviews that I used to get browsing Napster for all my favorite music. I would easily pay $20 per month for this stuff.
"The first source of difficulty is this – that it is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt. You investigate for curiosity, because it is unknown, not because you know the answer. And as you develop more information in the sciences, it is not that you are finding out the truth, but that you are finding out that this or that is more or less likely.

That is, if we investigate further, we find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known to different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true;" or "such and such is almost certain but there is still a little bit of doubt;" or – at the other extreme – "well, we really don't know." Every one of the concepts of science is on a scale graduated somewhere between, but at neither end of, absolute falsity or absolute truth." - Richard P. Feynman
Does not help. There are other exploits out there, and there are always ways to programatically turn it on, which some malware will surely do for your convenience.

Better update, or seek an alternative PDF reader.
A wheelchair-bound homosexual.
But "Closures for functional programming." is still on the TBD list.
I liked the insights presented in this essay, although sadly I think the whole thing was mangled to make it seem relevant to recent events: the banking bailouts and the outcry over bankers' compensations should probably have been left out of it completely; banking is regulated in so many ways that you can hardly apply market-principles anymore.
Not turism, but for business I plan on driving rather than flying to Toronto from Boston in a few weeks when I have to go back.
Timothy Sykes on Investimonials.com (Yelp-like reviews for investments/finance)
I use http://start.io for the same service.

It's as simple and attractive, but I can add more links and very basically organize them.
That's my understanding from the interview.
They've edited the post so that it no longer includes anything about 5 million users. Apparently it was premature (still love Dropbox though).
And yet to borrow from a commenter on the post. If you complain to a tool company about your hammer being a sucky screwdriver what exactly should the tool company to do? Make the hammer a better screwdriver? or point the user to the real screwdriver?

Sometimes the solution isn't to optimize your tool for something it can't do very well but to build a new tool that does do it well. I think turning Google the search engine into a site redirection service for keywords ala AOL falls into that category.
Richard P. Feynman - The Relation of Science and Religion
This is woefully anecdotal and I wouldn't let it stop me, but I've mentioned my regular trips to the US to a lot of people here in the UK and I frequently get responses like "Ooh, America - aren't they supposed to be really scary letting you in when you get there?"

The TSA (even though they're not known as that) has a reputation in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect. Not that that should put anyone off, but hey, I'm always a bit on edge when I arrive there - they just create that atmosphere (to sweat out the true nasties, I guess).
I can't believe it! The TSA I know would never apologize for anything or to anyone :-)
1. answers.com is another juggernaut from years ago. It was launched in 1999, but was rebranded in 2005. So giving them as an example doesn't work.

2. StackOverflow works for programmers, but like Joel and Jeff say, 90% of their traffic also comes from Google.

3. The reason Stack Overflow worked because they were able to bring in their communties from the start. Sure a stackoverflow for law would be nice...but good luck finding thousands of lawyers to give their advice away for free.

4. Yes technology sucks....but Google and users care little about technology...for Q&A 90% of traffic is Google...if you haven't hit that statistic yet, you must have a very new site. Google IS Q&A, to dismiss them is suicide.

5. Here is the thing...users just don't care. They don't care if the top answer was upvoted by 20 people, or if a magic unicorn decreed that it's the top answer. They just want the answer. Even if the site is nothing but pure text, as long as the answer is what the person was looking for, they are happy
I am (as many of you probably are) the go-to guy in my family and non-technical friends for computer issues. I tell people about Dropbox because once I tell them, I know they wont have to annoy me for help again.
WTH are Aardvark, Hunch and Quora?
Eh, I think it's a solution in search of a problem.

Other than looking cool, if you timed yourself, I bet it's much faster to just type it.

(on my mac):

Cmd + L

type "gm" (gmail.com is now highlighted in the dropdown because it's one of the 4 most frequent websites I visit and FF is smart enough to know I probably want it)

Enter

Total time: Less than it takes for fav4.org to load.
Agree, other than books and people, code can be a mentor.

With one _giant_ exception: there are too many bad code out there so be very careful.
I'm betting that if I'm not an a-hole entrepreneurs will be more open with me than they would otherwise.

The live audience heard me tell Adii don't give me a number that will hurt your business and don't lie about the number you give or the audience will catch it.
Worst. Ideas. Ever.
Or, in Safari, you can invoke your bookmark bar favorites by pressing Cmd+[1-9], where 1-9 matches its position.

I have Gmail as the left-most item in my bar and access it by pressing Cmd+1.
If they don't generate too much extra traffic, then I don't see any problem with spot-checking people. If it's a small amount of hits, then the faked referrer should just appear as noise.

Now, if it's a lot of traffic, then you might have a problem, but the post showed something like 2 hits. 2 hits from a crawler does not a spammer make.
Is Your Network in Gold Medal Shape?
Firing Jewish people doesn't just hurt the bigoted employer, it hurts the people wrongfully fired, too! There is something appealing to letting everyone keep to whatever groups they wish, but historically the idea has led to horrible things for the shunned groups.
My god people, he just described a toaster. Is a toaster awesome because its operation is straightforward?

Or, if you don't like that example, compare it to just about any online game. Consider the incredible complexity and operation requirements of Call of Duty (or whatever you like) and then come up with an adjective for it. How about "awesome". Well, no, that won't do, because Dropbox is "awesome" and Call of Duty is several 1000 times more awesome, by far.

Not to mention that most games are also playable by non-technical people.

Get some perspective people. Fanboyism is really pathetic and there's a lot of it going on right here.
I don't neither. My guess is that in a few months (decades in Internet time) we will know more. Twitter started out differently also and it eventually morphed into something else.
Very very interesting. It has me doubting the provenance of a Kingston SD card I bought recently from a third party seller on amazon.co.uk; it has a silk-screened lot code in the same pass as the logo, just like the dodgy one talked about here. (Full D though.)
Despite its utility in making the undesired 0.01% uncomfortable, a feeling of oppression is still not a nice first or last impression of a country.
This means a lot to me.

I got a couple of crappy emails on vacation this weekend from 2 viewers who thought I wasn't doing enough. For some reason I let it get to me. So I'm esp grateful to hear that you appreciate my work.
Touching and beautifully written. :)
Response from Pitchfork Regarding Tumblr Subdomain
Hm. I prefer the google chrome homepage to this. It is also simple and displays the sites it knows you visit regularly.
Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Hunch is basically a diagnostic type site. So you say you want a computer...and it gives you 20 questions with each question narrowing down your solution. Do you want a laptop or netbook? Do you want it in black or red or blue? etc.

Quora is basically a regular Q&A site mixed with twitter and Facebook. So you can follow a topic or a question etc. Personally I found it a bit confusing.
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans-detail.a...

I use this with my Nexus One. Works for SIP and tethering.
They also acquired Foldershare years ago and it was remarkably similar, even had Windows/OS X integration, although they haven't done much with it since the acquisition. Dropbox feels like the much better designed younger sibling - the Web version is a first class citizen rather than some clunky admin panel, for example.
Yep. Plus I hate being always told what to do; I fear it helps to kill my creativity. That's why I always set start page to blank and turn off Opera's speed dial forever (after admiring it for a while).

That said, a solution is nice.

UPDATE: Hm, now I think I could set my homepage to this, but leave start page as blank. This way I won't be distracted the moment I start the browser, yet be able to reach this launchpad with a press of "Home" button whenever I want to.
Interesting word choice they used for Pitchfork...

"We started this process last week upon our first correspondence with the trademark holder."
Unfortunately that's the price paid for getting an interesting piece of science news into the main stream media - neither the journalist who wrote the article or his sub-editor probably have much grasp of what science is for so a hyperbolic but misleading headline is the order of the day.
Nobody said anything about dark matter:

We like symmetry, Dr. Kharzeev, of Brookhaven, noted, but if the symmetry between matter and antimatter had not been broken long ago, “the universe would be a very desolate place.”

The reason why universe would be a very desolate place is because if there was symmetry between matter and antimatter, they would immediately annihilate themselves. Why exactly is the observable universe composed almost entirely out of matter and not antimatter is now one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics, although several hypotheses exist - some of which even propose that there is also a universe composed almost entirely out of antimatter.
If I had a better source to estimate total debt from for Greece I would have used it. But that was the best that turned up in a couple of minutes of Googling.

You are absolutely right that the debt servicing number is a much better thing to use. It not only handles obvious things like different interest rates for different entities, but also subtle ones like preventing double-counting of securitized debt. (In securitization a pool of debt is sold to a company created for the purpose that immediately issues bonds which sum to the total debt modulo trivial operating expenses. Thus securitized debt shows up as both personal and corporate debt.) But that information is harder for a random internet user like me to get at than total debt numbers.

But better thing to use or not, it is harder for me to estimate the total cost of servicing the debt. I'm just a random person on the internet and don't have direct access to any of the data. And besides, total debt is what the original article used, so an apples to apples comparison talking about what was in the article should use total debt.
He forgot http://shapado.com my open source stackoverflow =)
There's no legal precedent that a theme is somehow a derivative work of the software it's designed for. There haven't even been any good cases to give precedent for dynamic linking creating a derivative work. That's the only way the GPL could possibly apply, since nobody's distributing WordPress with their themes.

How is taking the HTML for a webpage you've created, replacing the title with <?php the_title(); ?> and putting <?php the_content(); ?> in the content area, a derivative work of the WordPress code base? Yet that's the argument they're making when someone say you're bound by WordPress's license by creating a theme that will work with it.

You can't just throw a license at someone that hasn't agreed to it. It's a completely untested legal theory Matt relies on when he says WP themes have to be GPL. There are lots of people that don't buy it at all, like the creator of Thesis, which is one of the best selling commercial WP themes.
Is WooThemes in anyway related WooFu?
What are these "other countries"? Yes, one can point to some countries that are doing considerably better on broadband on speed to some customers - specifically Japan, South Korea, and France. After those three, speeds drop off a cliff (to the 10-20Mbps range).

And Not everything is perfect in those countries. About 35% of Japan's broadband users are on lowly DSL. And Japan, while having one of the most urban and tech-savvy populations out there, has lower broadband penetration than the United States. That's right, a greater percentage of Americans have broadband than Japanese people. France, despite its urban population, barely beats the US on broadband penetration and most of it is DSL! A tiny fraction of it (a few percentage) is cable of fiber.

Part of the problem is how the OECD reports on broadband. They report on advertised offers of service (and what speeds companies are advertising as their theoretical maximum). US companies tend to create a uniform structure where they serve their urban areas in the same way they serve their suburban areas.

And it should be noted that the US is 7th in fiber connections and 15th of 30 in penetration all with one of the most subruban/rural populations. So, saying that we're behind is factually wrong. Saying that we're mediocre could be correct.

The US should improve. It needs to improve. However, the situation isn't as dire as many like to make it seem. Many countries are getting in the 10-20Mbps range and the US is on the low end of that at 9-10Mbps. It should improve. It should be a priority. However, it also needs to be noted that the situation isn't as rosy in other countries as people make it out to be and the US does have a more difficult challenge due to its suburban/rural population.

*All statistics come from the OECD broadband statistics.
Ah ok, that makes sense now. I've never seen wheel chair users labeled 'wheelie' before, I thought that was a motor cycle stunt.

Thanks!

edit: I wonder what earned you the down-mod, you simply answered my question in a way that seems to make sense in the original context.
Even inquiring about the religion of your workforce should be illegal, let alone taking punitive action because of that.
Electronic Privacy Information Center files FTC complaint over Google Buzz
When I hear these stories, I sometimes wonder where any ounce of common sense comes in with the workers. Or how anyone could seriously demand that a child take off their braces and walk unassisted through the metal detector. Disgusting.
By describing it correctly? Yes.
> Aardvark is a SMS Q&A site, you ask a question and it spams your friends with text messages, tweets etc. They were just bought by Google.

Au contraire, Aardvark was built so you wouldn't have to spam your friends. Each user of Aardvark puts his field of expertise in his settings and only receive questions Aardvark AI thinks a user can answer and it gets better with time. It's really brilliant, and it doesn't ask your friends only, it asks anyone in the community that may be able to answer your question.
It's a fast way (by IM, twitter, email etc ) to ask and get answers without bothering people who don't know anything about your question.

Disclaimer: I don't work neither for Vark nor for Google. But I think it's a great service.
I really liked this interview. I esp. liked the little preview of the revenue question. That could be used to increase the number of people who stick with the interview if you gave a preview like: I'm going to ask him X, Y, and Z.

I really am interested in how these companies really get off the ground - going from doing consulting for example to selling a product and making enough from that they can live off of it - I think an earlier interviewee called it getting "wife profitable".
And since the bad guys have no doubt anticipated just that it seems to be effective only against those that weren't planning any nasty stuff anyway.
Dropboxen /drɒp'bɔksn̩/ (German): (lit.) candy boxing. Compound word of „Drop“ (old fashioned) and „Boxen“.
I am with you on this. All the debate about user experience, proper tool for the job, etc. is interesting, but in what use case would it be valid to return any page higher than the actual Facebook login page for the query "facebook login"?
Agreed, it hurts everyone involved -- just as hate speech does.

As for the history of discrimination, I believe that the majority of it was actually codified into law. So, I don't know if we can blame individuals acting on their own. Has there ever been a group that was shunned where it wasn't codified into law/sponsored by the government?
You nailed the concept but the execution was soft. They didn't have enough information on their users to do this well. They knew I was interested in 'wine' and 'software engineering' but didn't understand the huge difference in expertise I had in each, for example.
It's a little more than that though.

Exactly as I said. It basically uploads and downloads files; your hyphenated examples are all under the category of "uploading and downloading". It does other things, but that's basically it. I hate it when I speak plain facts and get everybody disagreeing with me.
I live in the UK. A number of my friends have either been hassled by the TSA, or have expressed reluctance to travel to the USA because of them. Anecdotal, I admit.
As an immigrant, I can certainly attest to the number of friends and relations who've listed the hostile attitude of customs and immigration amongst their reasons for not visiting more often.

It turns out visitors to your country don't like being treated as if they are unwelcome, and terrorists by default. America is not some gift to the world that visitors should be grateful for the chance to visit. It's just another arbitrary geographical nation-state, no better or worse than a dozen others.
Probably 10 minutes. That guy has no reason to lie. Meagan, does. Her response is also awful and she should be fired, she clearly has no respect for the users and without users... well we all know what happens.
2) Streaming HD

Given that large a pipe, I'm sure higher quality sources would start being available, that start at 20-Mbit and only increase from there. Throw in 3D, which for some reason is seeing a resurgence, and you easily increase the bandwidth requirements.

Also latency. Streaming movies seem to require a large buffer such that scrubbing back and forth on the timeline (to find where you left off of) is cumbersome. Taking advantage of a faster link would improve that part of the experience.
How do I do it?
fwiw, my nexus one is way more responsive than my wife's iphone 3g.
Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey talks about his new project, Square.
The vocal minority is almost always negative. (But that's just what it is -- a minority.)

Keep up the great work. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who draw tons of knowledge and inspiration from your interviews, myself included!
From the time you get up to the time you go to bed, do you know how everything you interact with works?
Cmd-L gm down-arrow is my algorithm to get to Gmail, too, and so on for other common sites I visit. I thought I was the only one.
A refreshingly drama-free resolution to the affair.
> They knew I was interested in 'wine' and 'software engineering' but didn't understand the huge difference in expertise I had in each, for example.

Me too, but then I replaced 'software engineering' with the language I really know and I now I can answer most questions I get.
On December 2009, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared after privacy concerns: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.". And on February 2010, he made some of our email contacts public.

But I'm not worried, because I know that the bigger you are, the harder you fall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
I downloaded a free, crappy drawing program on my nexus one and drew lines line they have in this article, and they weren't squiggly at all. I call shenanigans.
Apart from delicio.us, I can't think of any decent startup using that naming scheme. I may be wrong, but 99% of non super-geeky users don't understand this syntax and would not dare use it. Am I wrong?
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

1 in 10 chance that it isn't man made, that's pretty good odds the enviros are wrong. No wonder they are starting to criticize the people rather than their ideas.
Themes are more than dynamic linking, are they not? After all, they require PHP code to function properly.

I understand with regards to artwork, but a theme is more than images and CSS.
So by your logic, if they cut the code base in half, took out everything that made it just work. We would then have something that easily looks twice as complex and this would be twice as awesome?
Hamachi: A billion-dollar tech revolution that can still happen if you build it.
What Is Overengineering?
ASK HN: How are you becoming a better programmer?
People do not tend to get much better at their professions after 3-4 years - as I heard today in a TED talk.
This made me ask myself, if I was constantly becoming a better programmer or was just staying on the same level.

What are the most significant techniques / books / methods / thoughts that improved you as a programmer?