skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell yourself you're going to do it, trick yourself into thinking you're going to do it, and then actually do it.

I get the most work done when I feel like I "fit the bill" for what someone who is about to get a lot of work done is like. Sort of like "Well, gee... I've got a clean room, and a clean desk, and I got a good night sleep, no distractions, had some caffeine, wont be hungry for a while... There is no way I'm not going to get some work done!" Then I just do it.

I find that starting work is a lot harder than sticking with it, as well. Once I get in to some problem or homework then I find its pretty easy to keep going. So, this thought is good to keep in mind when I'm having trouble starting because I know if I start I wont feel so bad.

I think the most important part is tricking yourself into thinking you're going to do it. For me, it was having a desk and clean enough room that I felt "studious"...but it was also reading books about how to get work done. The advice in the books didn't work for the most part, in my opinion, but because I felt like I was really headed towards "being able to buckle down and get stuff done" and had examples in mind of how I was headed there, I tricked myself into doing it. Then once I actually started doing it, it because easier because I could say "well, I've done it before!"

One last tip: I like reading biographies of impressive, academically accomplished people. Being inspired by other people helps me stick to things I find boring because I want to be like them, and having a good GPA certainly isn't going to hurt anything in my goal of achieving greatness!

Ok, seriously one last tip: listen to music without words. Words distract my thoughts, but I really need to have some music on to keep me from being distracted by all the noises outside my room.
Google is a Global Consumption Tax
I'm sure you can find prior art on this one.
Only if your opponent is evenly matched with you. Generally knife fights are like sword fights, being more skilled usually means a very short fight.
Spoken like somebody who has never suffered through editing 32GB of RAW photos on a laptop before.
Honestly, I wasn't thinking about the 'truth' of the claims, I'm FAR from qualified to judge. But rather his approach is something that would be interesting to hackers. Was I wrong?
Um, keep reading PCL?

How about writing programs to implement and demonstrate the calculus principle du jour?

You have to do a certain amount of grinding. For school, optimize around what grade you'd like to get (the answer shouldn't always be "A") and how grades are calculated. Then optimize around whatever least amount of work gets you that grade.

If it's something important but boring, first build a story about why it's important to you. Then find an interesting way to solve it (whether by writing a program to show it, forming a study group with a hot girl, reading background information on blogs or library books, etc).
Dead pigs used to investigate 'dead zones'
Atul Gawande on why heroes use checklists « Jon Udell
Oncologists offer significant resources in pain management, which is very important. Life extension isn't the only thing doctors are good for.
Comparison of advantages and disadvantages of strong typing that java provides
I actually advocated something analogous to Clojure in 2001 on comp.lang.lisp:

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/miles.txt

And was pretty roundly flamed for it. In any case, I totally agree that the community surrounding common lisp is utterly and irreparably toxic and that Rich is right to ignore it and to carefully cultivate a far more civil and friendly community around Clojure.

I don't know exactly what it is about functional programming that attracts people that can't tolerate different philosophies. Maybe the more Aspberger-prone coders naturally gravitate towards tools that promise to impose simple, elegant order on the inherently messy world of real-life programming.
I'm a fan of clearly-delineated lines of argumentation since it's difficult to have a debate if people just talk past each other. It's much more fruitful if you can really pinpoint exactly where it is that you disagree with the other person: if I think "B" is true and you disagree, it's much more useful for me to say, "Well, I think A->B and A, so thus B is true" and then you can say "Well I agree that A->B but think A is false" or "Well I agree A is true, but I don't agree that A->B", and then we can have a much more useful conversation instead of talking past each other.

In the case of the patent issue, there are so many entangled issues that it's often difficult to find the real points of agreement and disagreement.

I'd be interested to see someone actually try to make the argument that more good comes from the current system of software patents than would come from a system with no patents, since from my perspective the balance is pretty negative. On the good side you have inventions/work that wouldn't have happened without patents, the resulting utility created by them both in the form of direct usefulness to end-users and in terms of economic activity they fostered, and the knowledge sharing enabled purely by patents and all its resulting downstream effects.

On the bad side, you have all the inventions and work lost due to patents: all the work not done because of fear of patent litigation, jobs lost due to companies sued of existence by patent trolls, all the resulting loss of utility to end users, and the economic cost of diverting so many resources to patent litigation.

Personally, I would argue that far more is not done or is lost in the software world because of patents than is gained because of them; if you just eliminated all software patents I think you'd see a net gain in worldwide utility rather than a net loss. Copyright and trade secret protections mean that most software activity would still happen (that's what pretty much everyone uses for protection anyway: only big shops have the resources to really use their patent portfolio, and then it's often purely defensive), so the main loss would be in terms of disclosure. What you'd lose in terms of, say, not reading papers on PageRank, you'd more than gain back in terms of startups that don't get shut down and by diverting all that money spent on the legal system to better purposes.
Isn't that what PG set up with Y-Combinator ;-) ?
I agree with you as well. I think we're basically saying the same thing; I'm saying the paginated model will stay with us until a new technology-enabled successor takes root. Our expectations of document structure will certainly play a role in pagination's tenacity even after that successor arrives, but I don't think pagination will be our permanent future.
Or how about changing types? Javas weak type system should make it necessary to re-compile (and even change the sources).
How to spot fake job references
Everyone is entitled to their opinions and I appreciate yours.

Why can't we do what you incredulously suggest?

I'm recommending an eBook created by the community of Y Combinator for those that apply to the startup school. This eBook will contain blog posts, videos, essays and presentations that the community finds to be informative or even inspirational. It will be updated for each session. Each post will also include a blurb from someone in the community and why they think the post important.

It will be 40 - 50 pages in landscape format. It will be diverse and touch on technology, marketing, finance, management and design relating to startups. We send this eBook to every founder right after the deadline. Not as a "gift" from YC, but from YC's community. We can call it "Y Combinator Home-Schooled".

How it enhances the message of learning and helping that YC already conveys is obvious. But there's also the opportunity to make the community that much stronger by working on such a project and to invite these new applicants to join the community.

It's easy to say, "no". Probably worth it to say, "yes".
Isn't this sort of thing the perfect hardware for ChromeOS? Why run Windows CE?
Luv It!
>Why isn't paying to advertise on those sites and getting some link juice (without the link being nofollowed) an option?

Because that breaks the assumptions of their algorithms - that people link to what is interesting without any conflict of interest. If webmasters were allowed to pay to increase their pagerank, then rankings become about who can pay for the most/best backlinks, rather than what is most interesting to users on a given subject.

The short answer: Google doesn't want their SERPs to be overrun by spam.
His reasoning smacks of a religious/political debate: given two complementary destructive human tendencies, we should direct all our concern and condemnation at one, because the one is a seductive vice that threatens to run disastrously out of control, while the other is not so seductive and can be safely left to human judgment. See priggishness vs. debauchery, meanness vs. gullibility, paranoia vs. complacency, etc.
Abrupt ending. Is page 7 missing?
"So the argument that these various contemporaneous iPhone-like devices would have happened without the iPhone is pretty weak"

How many ways can one interpret that? Clearly, he thinks large-screened touch-based phones would not have existed without the iPhone.
> I think people overestimate the significance of choosing e.g. Ruby over Python or vice versa. C vs. Java is a legitimate choice, Java vs. Clojure is legitimate, Ruby vs. Python is not, IMO. I'd like to see an example of where choosing Ruby / Python / Perl is a momentous decision.

I agree here as well re: Ruby vs. Python vs. Perl. I've found that since I know Perl (have spent many years working on it, both professionally and on my own), I can fairly easily work on Python projects. Out of those three, my choices are generally going to be based on whether one has a better library than the other two (e.g., Python having a better ncurses library than Perl, Perl having an better XML parser interface). I've no personal preference between the languages themselves, as I feel when I program in them, I am not learning anything that I don't already know well. (Ruby being a slight exception with its Smalltalk-like features, co-routines, etc...).

It's pretty much the same way for me with C# vs. Java and C++: C# has language features which make it a more pleasant than the other two, but ultimately the choices come down to platform choices/library availability/project-specific limitations (e.g., I'll use C++ or C# for desktop applications, C/C++ for non-trivial UNIX command line utilities, Java for server side/distributed applications which make extensive use of threading; C# might be nice for that role as well, but having Windows in a datacenter can easily kill a project or a even company -- and Mono isn't quite "there" yet). Again, compared to each other, neither of these languages teaches me something the others won't, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Java's interfaces taught me the pattern to use -- most of the time -- with C++'s multiple inheritance: inherit a single non-abstract, constructable class and multiple purely abstract classes).

Doug Hoyte called the concept "blub central": there's game theoretic disadvantages to the mainstream languages introducing new features (e.g., for the long time Java wasn't taken seriously in the mainstream due to being a garbage collected language; I'd imagine there was similar debate around closures being added to C#, but now Java will -- after much botching -- have them).

On the other hand Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, Scheme and Common Lisp each teach me new concepts that I haven't seen before. Even if I ultimately disagree with the languages' aims, I still find these languages worth learning: e.g., I tend to think that, ultimately, dynamically typed languages with optional type hints (e.g., Common Lisp, Clojure, Strongtalk) are preferable to statically typed languages, statically typed languages with well-designed type systems (Haskell, OCaml, Scala) are still very much worth learning.
Amway sells nutritional genetic tests. They're junk. http://scienceblogs.com/geneticfuture/2009/06/amway_sells_ge...

I would really appreciate it if someone can link me to a scientifically valid nutrigenomic test for humans.
At the time I think CVS was the proposed system. Linus said he preferred patches. I'm not sure he was wrong. AFAIK, bitkeeper was designed (not sure to what extent) when Larry got together with Linus and Linus explained how he wanted it to work.
So I moderated this conversation last night and there are a couple of important elements to keep in mind.

1. This is actually happening. Rafe Furst, who is the investor who first put this into action, has actually made this sort of investment in at least 2 (and maybe more now) people. So it's jumping off the page.

2. The Thrust Fund model that this article discusses and that Kjerstin (the girl in question) is working on is slightly different, in that it is more heavily focused on social sector organizations, where the "gain" for investors is even more complex then just making a new type of financial bet.

3. The reason this is coming up for mission related ventures is that there is simply less funding available for social (vs. web) startups, the costs of building a successful organization are often higher, and frankly, the entrepreneurial class is just at an entirely different place than the foundation class that has traditionally been in charge of funding nonprofit ventures.

4. What came out of the conversation last night is that this is not a type of investment that someone would make for a purely financially strategic reason, although Rafe would argue that it's extremely financially strategic in that you get a piece of a rockstar's success, wherever that success comes from.

Instead, most investors that I've seen interested in this (and a couple made commitments on the spot last night) are thinking about this as a new way to combine mentorship and investment.
Shouldn't this apply to patenting trolling, too?
The many voices on the web
I would hazard to say that while most problems can benefit from a functional style of programming their solutions are not entirely without side effects. Somewhere in there there is a “sweat spot”. A functional side effect free line in the sand, so to speak.

Piling on the contradictory metaphors (is it a line or a spot?) is one thing. I'd really prefer to use a language without a sweat spot though.
Non-final rejection was on 2009-10-09. Response submitted on 2010-01-20. I haven't read any of it but you can look up application number 11/741429 at http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair.
How about patenting a method of getting a patent despite prior art?
LiveJournal stripping users' affiliate links
He's recycled that one, so several paraphrases may be valid. I won't claim my memory is accurate, however.
Laconica -> StatusNet

OMB -> OStatus

Identica -> Identica
Password Caddy for iPhone Will Be There When You Need It Most
think we all agree that the internet is one of the top inventions of the last few decades, if not the century. We are all on it constantly, and very few things in our day to day lives cannot be done via the Web. What that means, and this is backed up with proven numbers, is that we are all spending more and more time on the interwebs. We do our shopping, research, education, and now socializing through various websites.
Or your startup will help you learn how to work hard. I've failed at least 8 times by my count with mine. I'm getting better at this with each time.
While I do agree that Memory usage should be kept somewhat in check within reasonable boundaries, what on earth is the problem with a browser using available memory to accomplish speed and good response time?

I use Firefox myself and not Opera, but my work laptop has 4GB of RAM and my desktop at home has 12GBs of RAM. I don't want those to go wasted if they can be put to good use.

For the memory test I'd actually rank it the opposite way, or just omit it all together.
No, no. Conserve cleverness for emergencies. Logical consistency is the best policy: most of the time, you should trudge along, applying existing solutions (2 wheel drive). The only time you should be clever and try to do something innovative is when your traditional models fail you. (4 wheel drive).
sorry i dont get this..how did the airlines fix people buying all the tickets for a flight ?
> I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you've never been held up by someone with a weapon.

Wrong - that's why I got interested, and training.

How about you - did your attitude come from experience or ....

> If anything, if the guy only has a knife, you might have good odds running for it.

And you might not. (For example - Eric Raymond can't run worth a damn and there's no place to run in a subway car.) There's no blanket rule. Note that attackers plan too. They pick victims and circumstances with their goals in mind.
All About Language Models
How the Obama administration is looking at cloud computing
You should have a look at colorForth. The author replaced punctuation with colors exactly because he has poor vision. (So I have heard.)
I agree that reasoned and clear debate is the best approach. I've tried to make the case 'pro' by citing the impact of PageRank/MapReduce/GFS, and suggesting that the impact is no less than reshaping the way we think about computing.

So what are the (non-anecdotal) examples of the costs? It's also important to put those costs into context, because everything has negative unintended consequences in the real world. What's the total annual expenditure on patent litigation benchmarked against (for example) medical malpractice cases? Which companies have been shut down by patent trolls benchmarked against (for example) the companies shut down by new environmental legislation? Which inventions are available on some platforms and not others (e.g. ClearType), and what's the productivity cost of them benchmarked against (say) not pursuing remedies against the Microsoft monopoly?
Var Work4Dzone = False;
Goldman Sachs 8th most admired Companies
Robert Scoble chats with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson - What is Hadoop?
Stripping affiliate links from freely hosted blogs = dubious, but just about defensible

Stripping affiliate links from freely hosted blogs AND replacing them with your own links = unacceptably sleazy

Stripping affiliate links from paid blogs and replacing them with your own links = outright offensive? Extra serving of fail?

What's next? Inserting porn ads into people's blogs?
It's started
Not if you have Miro, Songbird, Firefox and Celtx all running, which isn't unheard of.

Also, that's not including the gigantic libraries that Songbird and Miro might share (as they are both media apps) but also the smaller ones.
"Praise them for succeeding"

Praise them equally for failing, if they worked hard, learned something, and are willing to keep trying.
Why England and not China and India? The history of the Industrial Revolution
Title could potentially be improved to "How shipping a product saved my life". I figured he was getting a liver or pacemaker on a container ship from China.
Coz then they wouldn't have been to do the demo as it wasn't connected.

Seriously I see these to be more popular in 3rd world countries like India where purchasing power is not as high as the western world. Also as Wifi or internet connectivity isn't as pervasive as US/Europe and people are more familiar with Windows (possibly due to rampant piracy) there I see Win CE as good platform to market there for a company in ultra low cost net books.
> "... do your best to make sure your kids are challenged. Praise them for succeeding..."

I especially agree with those two thoughts. I might be inclined append the the caveat that giftedness qua giftedness does not constitute an achievement - does not constitute a success. It is doing, and not being, that counts. While Socrates was surely a brilliant fellow, we'd know almost nothing about him or his philosophy were it not for his equally brilliant but vastly more dynamic pupil. Without the doings of Plato the wisdom of Socrates would have amounted to little of consequence.
Economist Debate Final Day: Does financial innovation boost economic growth?
I think the author could have gone further with his imagination. Yes, iPad will allow to display the formless content into different layouts, but that's hardly impressive...any e-book reader should be able to do that soon.

Actually, the iPad, or tablet computers in that matter, could open completely new ways of "reading entertainment", since the book could contain not only text and static images, but also other pieces of multimedia or even pieces of software! I am now making up a quick list of what could be possible:

1. iPad books can have video illustrations or sounds embedded.

2. Books can have some taxonomy data. For example, I could see a list of main characters which were presented in the book until the page I have read. I can see their short description, their relationship, or even where are they currently.

3. The text can be "location aware" - for example I am reading some scene, and there can exist an interactive map for that scene, so I will look around myself how it looks like there.

4. There can be some elements of gaming incorporated, like some puzzle or whatever, etc. etc. etc.

The possibilities are really endless here and I am excited to see what the content providers will be able to come up with.
No. Yes. Problem solved.
This is an emotionally charged issue for me, I lost my mom to ovarian cancer. My bet is that you, quite frankly, have no damn idea what your talking about.

My mom was supposed to live 6 months longer (at best). Instead she made it more than 2 years. Where they difficult years? Yep. However, they where still valuable ones. She got to see me marry. She met the future mother of her grandchildren. She got to see and do things she always wanted to do. She saw her estranged family again.

The value of those oncologists simply can't be discounted. It's an incredibly difficult profession, one in which most of your patients die. However, the ability to extend lives...even by a few months... and manage to make those last days as painless and productive as possible makes them angels in my book. Not profiteers.

It was interesting getting to know her oncologist. He clearly struggled with the emotions of his job. In the wake of her death he couldn't bring himself to attend her funeral (understandable). There was hardly a human being who knew her better in those last two years... and for that I'll be eternally grateful to him.
> Health should always be far far far more important than money,

I'm pretty sure that your own behavior proves otherwise. (I'm not claiming that your choices are wrong, but they do show that health isn't always your highest priority.)

> but to prevent evil companies making a ton of money out of desperate people, it should be provided by the government.

In what universe can govts provide unlimited healthcare?

The current US healthcare "reform" includes significant cuts in Medicare spending on certain conditions. Folks who have those conditions will get less care. You know, pre-existing conditions....

Feel free to provide a checkable citation to any govt healthcare system that doesn't limit the amount of care.