skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A similar study of weight-lifting would conclude that it weakens you: after all, doing some squats leads to fatigue. Frequently an activity that causes effect X in the short term leads to its opposite when repeated over long periods; see drug habituation, the effects of physical exercise, the effects of intellectual efforts, etc.

This study tells us that self-control might be a bit like a muscle, in that its use acutely makes it weaker. But do we chronically adapt to its use, and become stronger once the temporary fatigue has passed, as with so many other forms of stress? Intuitively, from my experience, we do, but it might be interesting to study. Either way, this possibility makes this study insufficient basis for advice to "use it sparingly."
how do you know if you have been grabbed and why hasn't someone who knows about computers built an application so you can easily hide your ip? london would be a huge market for that...and for the record i find lol cats more useful than chatroulette
I love the design; I'll be watching it as you add more services.
Until they steal all your money.
I thought that was the best line in the piece, because it's so true. Probably 90% of the engineers at Google are there because they want to work on wonderfully interesting technical problems all the time, and don't want to deal with all the other bullshit that comes from running a company. And I suspect that a major part of the reason my startup failed was because I wanted to work on wonderfully interesting technical problems yet also wanted to get rich. There're a limited number of problems that people will pay you to solve, and most of them are boring.

As for who is eligible to build a complex product? Nobody. If you set out to build a complex system from the start, it invariably won't work at the end. Remember Gall's Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galls_law

Before you cite counterexamples like Linux or Google, it's worth considering what they looked like when they started. Linux started as a terminal emulator that would spit back "ababa" when you turned on the computer. Google's early webserver was a dozen or so source files that looked vaguely like Tornado, except that instead of having all those webframeworkey goodness like regexp-based dispatch rules and templates, it would just issue "prints" on the file descriptor for the user's connection.

If you want to write a database from scratch, you should start with some sort of basic persistent key/value store. Then give your values a column-like substructure. Then figure out how to index it. Then figure out how to index it based on multiple columns. Then figure out how to handle joins and sorts. Then slap an SQL parser on top of it, and you'll have something similar to MySQL c. late 1990s. Then endure all the laughs as people say you're not a "real" database, and put in 10 years of incremental improvements while you add transactions, and better SQL compliance, and query optimizers, and wire protocols, and replication, and clustering, and all that stuff.
Really curious about the downvote—did I do something gouche?
There is some research on this.

When people are talking hypothetical money they think it will take more to get them to sell than when you are talking real money. The research on this was based on surveying one group of hunters and asking them how much they would have to be paid to sell their hunting license versus giving another group of hunters concrete offers to buy back their hunting licenses. The median price the survey revealed was something like double the median price that hunters actually sold it.
I invested in SetJam: Intro to investment in 172 minutes
Choose Your Own Adventure Own Twitter
A bit unrelated, but I found http://pivotallabs.com/talks/88-demystifying-online-billing to offer a good explanation for managing recurring payments and what to watch out for.
Have you considered using last-modified/etag headers to control the crawlers? If you detect a crawler, and it requests a page that it has visited before, you could just return a 304 without doing anything else.
I think it's easier to build 'another company you love working at', than replacing a wife or your fingers.

Surgery can reattach fingers.

With $1b in your pocket (assuming your ex-wife gets the rest in the divorce settlement), lots of women will volunteer to be your next wife. (Of course constructing a successful marriage takes more work.)

Creating a new company takes a lot of work. No shortcuts available.
Ask HN: any successful start-ups started by non-technical founders?
Please let us know which companies are successful today that were started by non-technical founders.
Authorize.net should be able to help you. They also offer a subscription add-on to their merchant accounts for around $10 a month. You should be able to start the process through their website now. They've made numerous improvements to the registration process over the past year.
Ask HN: Review my cloud storage service MyNetworkFolders
My Network Folders (mynetworkfolders.com) is a new service we have created for storing and sharing files in the cloud, with a desktop-like twist. We are currently in open beta and provide 1 GB of storage for free. Check out the Home and Blog links for more details on the service and please sign up to take it for a spin. I would be really interested to hear your opinions about the idea, the implementation, what you like and especially what you hate.

Thanks.
You really have to ask that?

They make an enormous amount of money for the bank and for the processor. That doesn't mean they're good for consumers.
Instead of "F", your failing report says "You have died."
Thank you - you'll want to follow http://twitter.com/kingofapi for updates - I'll push each new site registered there.
Yeah, because how could anyone use a computer without wobbly windows!?

(Go back in time 20 years, and multiuser timesharing systems had lower specs than this. And a lot of good CS work was done on these systems; UNIX written, Emacs written, Vi written, gcc written, etc.)
That's a complicated statement. The depth of your own technical knowledge sets a ceiling on the depth of the people willing to do technical implementation for you. After all, most people are unwilling to do grunt work for people dumber than themselves. The main thing your workers get out of it is a learning experience and the chance to be mentored by others more experienced than themselves, so if you're not more experienced, why should they work for you?

So yeah, you get more leverage by using your knowledge to mentor others to do the development for you. But you could end up getting stuck as CEO of a startup that's in a backwater corner of the industry, rather than as a developer in a company that's doing interesting world-changing stuff that you can then leverage when you start your company later.
Implement the standard "community" things like rating, tags and comments. Make it sortable by paid/freemium. Create a "suggest a service" form to replace the email adress, and put up some contact information. I like the overall design, but maybe the logo "style" seems a bit out of place.
The point I am making is that this logic doesn't work, MS has no obligation to make IE9 run on XP. MS continues to release patches for both XP and IE6, and that's all the obligation it has in terms of support. They have no obligation to release new browsers for old operating systems.
I think that's pretty misleading. What protects you when you've incorporated is that your contracts are between your company and your customers, vendors, or partners. It's not the nature of the contracts themselves. Consolidated Gypsum can put your company out of business by dragging you through a lawsuit until you BK. It can't take your house.

The reason contracts don't protect businesses is that they cost too much to enforce. When you're not in the same league as your adversary, they will simply outlast you. The same dynamics do not apply to an attempt by Consolidated Gypsum to make themselves whole on a debt by trying to take your house.

Incorporate early. There's no good reason not to.
Taubes has definitely made a name for himself researching and reporting on bad science. After the parent article, he set his sights on nutrition in general:

"What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-...)
and "Good Calories, Bad Calories"

Before all of that that, he wrote "Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion" and "Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit and the Ultimate Experiment"
I used the "one billionth" in the headline. Your size numbers come up to about 74 million instead of 1 billion. I think the headline writer was wrong. You will have to hop in a car and hit the open road to get to warp 2.
> Ok, back to centering that bloody div.

div.centered {
width: *x*;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
shorten the width a little, I have to side scroll on my netbook. Annoying. Also, I can't open a link by middle-clicking it with my mouse. Annoying as well.

Otherwise, pretty nice idea.
$1 Million Question - Will Math Expert Accept Prize?
good point, thanks - I'll see if we can fix this!
max: sky is blue

you: no, grass is green - just look
Monetary donations are only one way of helping a site like Wikipedia. Another valuable (even critical) form of help is editing, voting, and otherwise participating on the site.

I've donated a ton of my time to improving Wikipedia, so don't feel the least bit of guilt about not giving them money. If anything, they should be paying me!
Yeah the logo is a bit cheesy :)

Thanks for the suggestions - we will definitely put a form and allow to filter on paid/freemium.

Community stuff is also on our list for later on.

Thanks!
The parent comment covered it well, but just to make a point: the goal of preparing is to make sure the interview process goes smoothly.

Assuming the interview is soon, there's only so much preparation you can do for technical questions in a short period of time. You can't be much more prepared for the technical questions than your current level of knowledge, so the preparation is more about making a good impression based on interpersonal factors.
In ad sales a visitor is different than a unique.

Source? I was under impression that a visitor means a visitor and a visit means a visit. Surprised to see it being used the other way.

Tax deduction makes the perception of something's cost free.

That's just a baseless statement. I can find you any number of people who don't perceive that way. Who are the people that bear the perception? What is their percentage among the populace? How do you know the answer?
Works for me too. I often spend less than 5 hours a week working, and I have a 6 figure income. My web applications compete directly with Google and Microsoft, among others, so the "no competition" argument is out.

I realize that HN doesn't encourage heavy self-promotion, but what is this business? Where is its website? Your story sounds wildly implausible, though it obviously isn't impossible.

Still, it reminds me of the comments I got on my post about "You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You:" http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... . People would say things like, "I run a group of online entrepreneurs, and am a member of another, and between the two groups there are well over 200 people, a majority of whom are pulling down 6 to 7 figure incomes based primarily on the advertising on their blogs, not by “selling ancillary services.”" But they wouldn't link to the sites in question! To me, such claims smell bad.
If not this post, are there posts or resources that people on HN would strongly recommend for those that are looking to get started with jQuery?
The incentive to cheat on the second test is the same no matter how hard the first task was.
I had the same thought. Back when I was in school, I would often eat a lot of junk food after studying. It wasn't that I was tired from exerting self-control, but rather that I thought I deserved it. Many other studies about morality have shown a similar effect; people who do something "good" early on are less likely to later on because they feel they've reached their internal "doing good stuff" quota. For instance, people who do programs like Teach for America have much lower rates of volunteerism afterwards than others.
The link in Dan's profile answers your question. Web analytics and other webmaster services.
Well, and then there was Firefox. Which simply won't run on old hardware, at least not in a current version. And not at all to mention YouTube or anything a more powerful computer requiring site. (GMail anyone?)

As much as I love keeping old computers alive using Linux, the nowadays common way using the web puts the spoke into the wheel.
This explains some aspects of corporate politics quite nicely.
Good point. They've done studies where just eyes draw on a tip jar get more donations.
Freelance Switch has a collection of good articles on this:

http://freelanceswitch.com/blog/explore/#2
Indeed. This kind of thing really irks me: the military talking about 'open source' intelligence when they just mean publicly published intelligence, or creeps like Calacanis using in his interview today in some other odd way.
Seriously, why downvote? If your attention is devoted to monitoring things like body language, handshake firmness, etc. then your working memory will not be operating at full capacity, and you're going to be less spontaneous with your code solutions as well as responses in general.
Honestly I liked the logo, but I'm not crazy about the font it uses.
Entity Framework 4.0: Creating objects of correct type when using lazy loading
Not sure it's really readable, having a second look. Maybe switching to a more common font will be better here. Thanks for the note.
AMD Contest: What Would You Do With 48 Cores?
I still hope that http://flattr.com can prove otherwise
Less Avenged - a design firm in seattle. Great guys! Pretty cheap too. If you want an intro to them email me: burdick.dj@gmail.com
1.) I pulled the figure from WolframAlpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wikipedia+monthly+visit... Which is based on Alexa.

2.) Every charity makes it a point to spell out that donations are tax deductible. The reason is to make the donation appear cost-free.
I hope so too. I'd like to be wrong in my observation.
http://www.awio.com or http://www.dangrossman.info/folio/ if you'd like to take a look.

I'm extremely open about my business. I've thought about writing this type of article to share on HN before, but it always comes across as bragging instead of sharing so I can the idea soon after starting.

This is not an overnight success story. I earned my first paycheck on the internet when I was 15 or so, 10 years ago. I've had a long time to build my skill at development and marketing, try ideas, and build up my user base across the websites.

Some of the sites took a year or two to break even on up front costs and hardware. But since I build services that require almost no ongoing development or support beyond basic "how do I sign up, where do I find feature X" questions, each customer added in the following years is almost pure profit.

Very incremental, steady growth, and sometimes a leveling off. A bigger business wouldn't want a site to level off at a couple thousand a month in revenue, but if it's only supporting and supported by one person, a couple of those and yes, you hit 6 figure annual profit.

I also sell websites from time to time, if they level off and it seems like it'll require more work than I'm willing to put in to reverse that trend. Here's a site I sold on Flippa for $90,000 earlier this month. It generated over $200,000 in sales in the 18 months leading up:

http://flippa.com/auctions/84185/11000month-Revenue-No--1-In...
Why do you assume that the OP wants only to break things?

Because he's new here, and when new people wander in here looking for security vulnerabilities, it's usually because they've misunderstood what the site is about.

Also, he specifically asked for the latest security exploits -- if your goal is to learn rather than attack, it doesn't matter if a vulnerability has been fixed already. (In fact, it's better if it has, since that way you can see both how the attack works and how to prevent it.)
This is a startup weekend, though. I don't know what all the weekends have done, but for the ones that I did pay attention to, they did almost zero due diligence on their idea before starting work.

If an idea has been done before, more players are still welcome, of course...

But you should know that it has been done before, know what the competitors are, and intelligently design your product based on the existing market.

Blindly creating a startup without this knowledge is foolhardy at best.
Started as a sysadmin 12 years ago. Money is great, better than a corporate programming job, and if you look at the role as a automation programmer role for infrastructure software you'll have a better time of it. Don't just fix it, make sure it never happens preemptively/again then prove that to whoever's paying your bonus.

The downside is working with other people's shitty software, particular in the enterprise space where ticking boxes is more important than security or other features. There are 'SOX compliant' banking environments where the unchanged root password is stored in plain text on a file accessable by any client as a Windows drive. But they have a security policy exemption so it's OK.

Personally I can't stand the legacy stuff - working on something that's being retired gives me the shits and the ancient userspace of the proprietary Unix sucks when compared to the modern ones - but if you want to learn Solaris (especially Solaris 8, the most widely deployed release - yes, there are more people talking about ZFS and dtrace than using either), you can make some extra pain money for dealing with it till it's gone.

Re: proving your worth, I started as a knowledgable nerd helping the senior sysadmins, at somewhere where there was good comraderie - some of the people I met there became friends for life and by helping others rise up later in my career I did the same.

Major growth areas: virtualization (you can make great bank very quickly in vmware, then transfer that into cloud skills learning xen or kvm & cloud deploy concepts in your own time), storage (but it's boring). Anyone with web reporting skills will will points with management, as will anyone who can produce and consume microsoft file formats (eg, reporting, someone sends me a spreadsheet with 390 static routes, you turn that into a routes file). Your manager wants something they can show their manager to prove they (ie you) are doing a good job.
The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free
It's a bit of a stretch, but you could put Jeff Bezos into this category. He's obviously a very smart and generally technically-inclined guy, but I don't think he was ever particularly involved in the technical side of Amazon.com.
Audience Size Doesn't Prove Influence on Twitter
Convert Your Text Blog Into A Podcast
That seems very solvable though, and importantly: solvable in ways that could be a real competitive advantage if done well.

The hard problem is how to get cell phones into people's hands that would work with it.
DC Code-a-thon for government citability needs coders AND librarians
Online dizi izle
FYI IE9 (probably) won't support WebSockets
I emailed Eric Lawrence from the IE team to ask. The response:

"Sorry, Mike-- The IE team has not made any announcements regarding if/when support for WebSockets will appear in IE.

-Eric"

Make of this what you will, but it sounds like a probable no to me.
Two things, I suppose—first, users can block services on the Notifo website, once they've [been] subscribed to them; second, developers have to sign up for an API key, so you can't just create a thousand spam services and subscribe a person to all of them.

I think it would pay to encourage users to use a shared secret in place of a username, though, since it's not going to be visible to anyone else, and so is really more of a "stream name."
Please refer to this post for his 2009 sales stats:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/18/bingo-card-creator-year-...
Maybe I'm missing something here. The only duty-free shops I've ever seen while traveling internationally are on the secure side of the airport terminal. You need to show you're checked in and boarding a flight leaving the country. The bottle isn't handed to you until you're walking onto the flight (and sometimes not until you're on the plane)

So how did the replacement material get on the secure side of the airport before being swapped into the bottle?
No URL. Just checked the times the ads would air and would look for any spike at all in traffic.
When I'm at home, I can just refresh the /threads page in the background. iPhones don't have a "background" to refresh such things in, so this is a useful niche.

I admit, though: an RSS -> iPhone push notification gateway would be more useful. (Though as far as I've seen, none of the iPhone RSS clients want to support Push, because none of their servers could handle the load. It would really just need to be a part of PubSubHubbub infrastructure.)
Also, get this, there is a nonprofit: The League of Technical Voters ... dedicated to motivating and assisting technical experts to improve lawmaking and governmental process. http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org/
Mostly targeting by time and show (which is demographic by nature). There was some geographic stuff but it was pretty limited. You can create an account and browse without spending any money on it.
The Physics of Alice in Wonderland
i just went through this myself. that will center the content horizontally, but only if you can declare the width. why can't i just say "use the width of the longest element in the div?" and if you want to center vertically, forget it. might as well use a <table> instead.

oh, this isn't the css-bashing thread? whoops.
There was an interesting BBC radio show that looked at this chap's achievements and 2006 win: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld_2006082... (it's still listenable but is RealAudio, though VLC played it fine for me - I also just tested it through a US-based VPN and seemed to be OK unlike a lot of BBC content.)

I also recall seeing a Marcus du Sautoy documentary where he went to Russia to try and meet Grigori (without much success as I recall). I can't find a watchable version of that, though.
Uh...math "expert"? Let's try a different word, NYT.
> (Go back in time 20 years, and multiuser timesharing systems had lower specs than this. And a lot of good CS work was done on these systems; UNIX written, Emacs written, Vi written, gcc written, etc.)

I was there. That doesn't change the fact people expect different things from a desktop computer these days.

You know... You could run CP/M out of something the size of a coin if you really wanted to.
It says "300MHz Atom", which would be a nonsensical clock rate, the manufacturer's website says it is actually a 300MHz MIPS cpu. That isn't a lot of horsepower by desktop standards of even a decade ago.
I searched but couldn't find info on time spent in school across nations that included Finland.

Why Finland? I "heard" somewhere that Finnish students spend less time in school, and/or on homework, than American students.

Why Finland? This chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu...

2000, Reading Literacy:
#1 Finland, #15 United States

2003, Mathematics:
#1 Finland, #24 United States

2006, Science:
#1 Finland, #21 ah fuckit

This other WSJ article looks at how Finland does education:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120425355065601...

There's really too much to quote, but here's something really embarrassing. A Finnish exchange student, who went to school in America for a year, was forced to repeat that year when she got home. Ouch.

More time spent in a failing school system is not going to fix the school system. Something from what Finland and other countries are doing, regardless of hours, is probably closer to what we need.