skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
5 minute breaks are effective for refreshing yourself and I do the very same probably about once an hour but this is a luxury of my workplace and is generally not allowed in manual work - in some situations - e.g. assembly line, it is crucial that no one take breaks for very long - asking to go to the toilet can get you fired (I've had this happen to the guy working right next to me once). I think we've probably tested methods to "perfection" over the last 5k years or so. This is part of why there is an invisible barrier between office and shop floor so often - because office guys get a lot of slack and have easier jobs by many measures. Just being allowed to sit whilst you work can seem like an incredible luxury to some of these guys stuck standing at an assembly line or running around a warehouse filling orders. And I'm sorry, but I'm a programmer - you can train someone to be a programmer, and most office type jobs on the fly just as easily as an assembly line worker - they won't be great but neither is the assembly line worker when he starts out - in both cases it takes years of practice. The difference, to me at least, seems to be artificially imposed by a combination of broken supply/demand models and general misconceptions - programmers are in huge supply, we just pretend they aren't. Most people rely on programming skills in everyday life - they just aren't told it that way.

I live in the UK there are two standard formats for most grunt work - either 2 hrs work 15 mins break 2hrs work 1hr break UNPAID (i suspect not allowed - i think this depends on a legal loophole against the spirit of the law) 2hrs work 15 mins break 2hrs work - or 8 hours with just 30 minutes paid break to be taken in one consecutive lump. i've worked both - its still nothing compared to what most of the world (i.e. China, India and Africa) deal with. I'm one of the very most privileged...

Whilst you work discipline can be illegally strict because it is accepted and nobody questions things if "80% of places I worked were like this - they can't all be illegal" or "its been this way for years" or "big companies know better than to break the law" etc. I'm one of the fortunates with sufficient balls to stand up for myself - even then I don't do it every time that I probably should, but I've seen so many people (the vast majority) treated illegally because it is accepted by their peers, and they just tolerate it. When you explain how they can protect themselves they don't want to because they need the money and don't want to tick anyone off, job security really matters when people tell you you are unskilled and jobs are hard to find - it doesn't matter how many times I tell them I've never been fired for standing up for myself.

Its one of my personal pet peeves - hence the irrationally strong response to, at best, a vaguely related link.
The Secret Lives of Professors (What Being a Professor is Really Like)
What Facebook does when something's rotten
Has anyone used PyPy to create an entirely new language? Because it's fast and defined in a higher level language, it seems like a prime candidate for language design experimentation.
Hackers can delete Facebook friends, thanks to flaw
But that's the thing about Hindley-Milner — most typos and logic errors will result in a different type than the one you intended. You'll get an infinite type or a number where you meant to get a list, etc. There are some bugs that can make it through, but the number of errors the type system can catch is amazing — it's actually close to being a logic checker.
I once commented on something, intending to say "Uh, have you considered..." But I wrote:

Ugh. Have you considered...

I had some 'splainin to do!
DDG remains a name that misses with people

I claim that DDG is a name that hits with people. However, it's a name that people think misses with other people. In other words, I think it's a matter of people imputing some overly-starched-shirt attitude onto others.
Yeah, let's make the workday 16 hours long instead of 8. That would save uncountable billions every year, right ?
Four of the fake incidents were tainted by essential truths. Lieberman did rebuke President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Cheney did rebuke Sen. John Kerry for mentioning Cheney's lesbian daughter, though not until well after the vice presidential debate. Bush was in Crawford during Hurricane Katrina. And Republicans did distribute a Jeremiah Wright ad. These truths may have confused some of our subjects. But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together.

Actually this one has a genuine incident with which it might have been confused as well. There was a several-day controversy during the Presidential campaign about whether Obama would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad if he became President. It occupied a large slice of one of the Obama/McCain debates. Obama's position that he would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad "without preconditions" was controversial and widely debated. So one might easily misremember that controversy as a controversy about a real, rather than hypothetical, meeting.

(In fact the meeting that Obama promised he'd be willing to attend never occurred, but I'm not sure whether this was because Obama changed his mind or whether Ahmadinejad turned out not to have any desire to meet anyway.)
Because society is better off if your irrationality is overridden.
This link is actually to an article titled "Legal challenge between Palo Alto company, Orange County hospital halts stem cell research"
“A lot of effort?”

Wrapping the PersistentMaps took like less than 200 lines of code: http://github.com/codahale/yoink
My cofounder an I are in town until Wednesday morning, so there's a pretty decent chance we'll come to this. It'd be great to meet some HNers from out here.
You haven't proven irrationality.
The main nugget:

But if [this model is] so successful, why haven’t more people—entrepreneurs and investors in particular—adopted disruption theory? Probably because models for predicting how companies will do are a dime a dozen
Yeah, I'm not sure how you could see a strong signal outside, go inside and get no reception, and conclude that's due to the carrier. Like Verizon uses some sort of cheap radio waves that don't go through walls while AT&T uses the premium ones.
Computers are theoretical constructs as well as practical objects. In order to work with the practical object "computer," you should first understand everything possible about the theory of the theoretical construct "computer." Then, when you understand it, you can code however you like.

To put it another way:

> Before I understood the Art, a punch was just a punch, a kick was just a kick. Then, while learning the Art, a punch became more than a punch, a kick more than a kick. Now that I understand the Art, a punch is a punch, and a kick is a kick.

Notice the removal of the "just"—now the underlying knowledge (the "more") is attached to the concept (it is not a pure concept, existing "just" for itself), but it is also understood that that the "more", learned while studying the Art, is perfectly described by the words "punch" and "kick"—that those high-level concepts are just abstractions for the low-level concepts learned while studying the Art.

It's a crutch to rely on concepts without understanding their foundations. (This is what I meant with my original conclusion, vague as it might have been.) However, having learned those foundations, you can decide for yourself, on a case-by-case basis, whether to think in terms of the high- or low-level concept, and indeed the high-level is sometimes the perfect tool for the job. But it's not the perfect tool for everything—and only studying the Art of Computer Science will show you why.
Honesty Counts: "‘Truthiness' Can Make or Break a Corporation"
Well there weren't really many more steps to take. Between FFT and wikipedia article was only PAQ compression, which didn't require prior knowledge. And they had to ignore a few red herrings, but the spectrogram helped there. I wonder how the 30ms rate was ascertained, though - pure guess?
My old Canon does the same thing. I select 'gray scale' in the print settings to force the printer to stick to the black ink only.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "fixing typing"? (I'm genuinely curious. I don't know Scala and F# well enough to really understand.)
Oh, so that's why it's so expensive. I'd always presumed we were being charged for the ground-up unicorn horn.
Here is a link to an article that covers what this post claims to: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/196901/hackers...
I've decided to only build on platforms from now on. You know why - the amount of marketing you have to do to reach people when you are not on a platform is huge. For people who have a marketer in their team, avoiding platforms may be a bad idea, for those who don't platforms will help you.

It's like selling craft through a website vs selling it through etsy.

You are seeing the issue too strongly through the lens of your own abilities. Try to see how it works for other people.
Who's going? Will I be disappointed for not signing up?
The fee is too high, the investment choices too few (I don't want to be exposed to Treasuries right now, thanks), and it's still separate from my checking account. Fix those things and I'm there.

In principle, I am a huge fan of mutual fund banking:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj10n1/cj10n1-12.pdf
Designing for Senior Citizens
do it, I'm interested
Hackers Can Delete Facebook Friends, Thanks to Flaw
The Dinosaur Wall Of Bolivia
Sixty-five million years ago, the vertical wall below was a muddy flat which dinosaurs walked across.
A lot more than half a billion.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Uhm.. just to clarify. There isn't an alternate Verizon app-store. There is a Verizon 'channel' in the standard google marketplace app. There are 'top free', 'top paid', and 'verizon' options.
To give a concrete example: The printf function in Haskell takes on the responsibilities of both the traditional printf (printing to the screen) and sprintf (generating a formatted string). Haskell knows which it's supposed to do based on whether the return value is used in an IO context or as a string.
$20 when you book job on Redbeacon
We decided to share our prize with you by offering $20.00 in cash to everyone who books a job between now and May 31st. You can submit a local service request FREE, compare price quotes and book it online. We support all kinds of local services, including but not limited to maid, handyman, massage therapist, photographer, mover, painter, carpet cleaner, babysitter etc …
I've tried using Emacs with Caps Lock as Control key, and it didn't worked well. So I changed Ctrl to (1)right-click-menu key (or whatever it's called) and to (2)right Alt; and turned Caps Lock into Alt. Now I can easily move around Emacs without hurting my pinky to much :). Long live Emacs!
Professional Writers Blog
Does anyone else thing that this was a massive experiment? I mean, Google MUST have lost some revenue. This is the first time that they've added anything interactive to the home page. They must want to learn something enough to do that.

If so, what? One possibility is to see if increasing engagement time during a visit has any effects like increased ad conversions or increased time spent on consecutive sessions.
Wow, you made me look. I haven't been to my yahoo home page in years. I still check my email on there daily though.

I don't know, I'm not sure I understand what their future is.
The keyword is Properly applied.

Now, has it ever been properly applied in this world? Can it ever be applied correctly in this world? How hard is it to apply it properly in this world if it can be applied?
The Emacs Problem 
<<What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do "simple" log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?

It's a rhetorical question. The answer is patently obvious at this point: Lisp is evil, and you'd damned well better write all your code in C++ and XML and JavaScript and PL*SQL and CSS and XSLT and regular expressions and all those other God-fearing red-blooded manly patriotic all-American languages from now on. No more of this crazy Lisp talk, ya hear?>>
People might be relating this to differences in the clarity of (analog-style) radio stations, where you would get worse reception if the station wasn't transmitting at a high enough power for your radio to get a clear signal.
99.99 Durability does not mean "1 out of 10000 objects WILL drop", it means "you can _legally_ expect 9999 out of 10000 objects not to be dropped, dont come back suing us, if 1 out of 10000 objects goes missing".

Its basically a legal clause for SLA, to protect Amazon from lawsuit inundation.
If there is no correlation between productivity and age/race/whatever then it is a massive inefficiency in the labor market for there to be such arbitrary discrimination.
Has anyone used Bespin extensively and would be so kind as to give us an idea of its current status and potential?
The title of Mankiw’s post is “Do two rights make a wrong?”, not “do two wrongs make a right” as in the HN title. Mankiw argues that it is noble and “right” to voluntarily give someone a kidney. Likewise it’s noble and “right” to voluntarily give someone money to help them pay their mortgage.
Also relevant: how many pilots would not have gotten into the cockpit without the illusion of control given by an ejection seat?

The ejection seat creates the illusion that even if everything goes pear-shaped, you'll have a chance to survive. The real-life cost was often gruesome (see John McCain's stay in the Hanoi Hilton), but it gave pilots at least a chance.

If no pilots would get into the cockpit without ejector seats, they were worth it.
Let's not get hung up on definitions here. It doesn't really matter if $10/month is a job or just a hobby to you. The important question, is whether or not it is attainable with low effort as you seem to suggest.

I've built a few websites with pagerank 2-4 where I spent more than 20 minutes every 3 days and enjoyed it. All of them have netted less than $10/month over a span of 5 years.

This experience has led me believe it is not possible to even get to $10/month without treating it as a job...unless you happen to enjoy blogging about acai berry and prescription drugs.
This has considerable potential. I've been looking at the study of law as a career move and and studying over the last month as preparation to acquiring some make-up credits: I've been struck by the inefficiency of cross-referencing large numbers of documents. Legal citation is highly refined, and services like Lexis/Nexis & Westlaw make research comparatively easy, but are expensive^. So I'm glad to see an effort to build something more open. I do think they need to look beyond the hierarchical model alone for exploration and presentation - a freeform relational explorer like Directed Edge could be a major asset here as the database fills out.

^ That said most of the database vendors give access to law students for free or a nominal annual cost.
But a little less now than there was before reading the article?
I think this link needs flagging.
Wrong audience.
No IronPython? :(
Bullfighter
MADRID — A Spanish bullfighter left intensive care Monday and was recovering satisfactorily in a Madrid hospital after a bull’s horn ripped through his throat, pierced his tongue and smashed his palat
Ah ok, so they're nowhere near a workable process, just a theoretical experiment. That's another 10 to 15 years at a minimum then.
Is it? This policy:

1) hurts ageists, racists, etc (that's quite a lot of people, counting mild cases)

2) discourages ageists from starting businesses

3) discourages ageists from hiring anyone

4) makes old people feel entitled to work at ageist businesses, when perhaps it'd be better if they didn't expect to be able to work anywhere and put more effort into finding a better fit

5) harms productivity and therefore the economy (via making some people uncomfortable at their own business)

6) makes it hard to fire old, black, gay, female, etc, persons for vague but legitimate reasons, or reasons one doesn't want to tell them

On the other hand, if an ageist doesn't hire an old guy who was best for the job then the harm done is roughly:

1) the old guy gets the second best job available to him

2) the company gets the second best employee available to them

That's only a small inefficiency.
Actually, it turns out that trees for paper come from tree farms. They're domesticated. Hence, reducing deforestation by using less paper is like saving the bald eagle by eating less chicken.
"Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep till noon."

Not that I necessarily agree. I haven't used Verizon in years. But back then I switched to AT&T (Cingular) because they had better service in my area.
10 seconds is plenty of time in a b-52. Obviously a fighter it is ludicrous :-) but a bomber is very different.
I would be surprised if there is no correlation between age or race (or gender, and others) and productivity.

For age, it's hard to guess if the productivity is more or less for older people (the extra wisdom and experience helps a lot!). It must vary by field. It'd be pretty shocking if no fields at all have significant correlations between productivity and age.
No memory usage data? That's usually important for heavy-duty optimization.
Here's a write-up of the talk from someone who was live blogging from the conference: http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2010/05/24/no-sql.html
Bruteforcing subdomain names with John the ripper
I wish some of my professors would have read this as grad students. Become a professor because you love teaching, not because you want to do research.

Which also raises the question whether there should be a similarly venerable(and compensated) position reserved for researchers who don't teach?
Some data about Lisp vs. Java/C/C++:

http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html

Not clear how much is due to the functional nature of Common Lisp, but does show a clear difference between programming languages in expressiveness and productivity.
Many people would say the hours where you are productive in order to rake in some money are – in some sense – wasted.

Time in which you can do whatever you like is what life is all about. You are truly lucky if you can make money with that but most people cannot.
Old news. We've known for decades about how easy it is to implant false memories, and bad therapy has caused millions needless suffering by implanting really horrible false memories. Between the memories, and the fallout from false accusations, this ranks as one of the biggest disasters in psychology in the last hundred years.

See http://www.fmsfonline.org/ for more.
There are two different types of "PDF forms":

1) PDFs that you download, print out, fill in, and fax or scan+email back.

2) PDFs that have a form filling capability if you use a recent version of a PDF reader that supports it. I'm not entirely sure of the process or of how well it works, but I do know that the intention is that it does keep everything electronic.

I think that the author of the article isn't aware of the second type and commenters have conflated the two.
That sentence continues but they’re getting faster with Moore’s Law. They're worse in terms of speed.

They are described as a threat to Intel in terms of Intel's market, the desktop, ie. they may invade the desktop from beneath, which would be a classic disruption.
It's also quite possible that people are IMing about as much as they did before, but are spending more time online.
I've often thought about starting a business that's outside of my skills/competencies, but I suspect that, much like a non-programmer doing a software business, there's much I don't know, which would lead me to failure.

OTOH us developer types do know how to learn :) so maybe my fears are misplaced.

I never gave serious thought about a ferry, but I have sometimes wondered about it (when stuck in traffic :) ).

There is a potential ferry route over here (Bay of Montevideo) from the wealthier residential neighbourhoods to downtown that should be faster than the land route during peak hours, as it avoids congestion.

However, I don't know if the potential customers would tolerate sea-sickness or bad weather, or if the time savings would be enough, or even if it could be made profitable when competing against subsidized public transportation... (quite a few unknown variables).
2. There are no Verizon icons I can't delete.

AFAIK, Verizon does have a boot logo on the HTC Incredible. Not the most intrusive thing, but I'm not aware of a way to delete that icon.
"Fix those things and I'm there."

It sounds like you want them to be Ing. :-)
There is no reason to keep using a (visibly) empty toner cartridge, in fact, it can cause 2 issues:

a) When the cartridge has no toner, there is still a 'buffer' of toner that is in the developer roller that transfers the toner to the drum.

Now, it will last for quite a few copies, until it becomes completely depleted, and then developer itself starts transfering to the drum; Best case it causes premature wear, worst case it does serious damage and you end up with a costly repair bill.

b) When a laser detects low toner density, it ups the voltage bias to compensate, this too is bad for the drum, but more importantly, when you finally add that new toner cartridge, the printer will be suddenly 'overtoned' and has to get rid of the excess toner from the developer roll somehow. The way it does this is to print black copies (which get cleaned off the drum, straight into the waste toner container).

I'm not saying don't use the toner cartridge until it's completely empty, since sometimes the sensors do misdetect the toner level and report it empty when there is a small amount left - just don't over do it.
Really good page. Interesting and beautiful.
I'll be using it to see if this model is right for me.

As a good surprise, I discovered the Midori framework you use behind the scenes. In addition to be lightweight, I like it how you use it in flow.io, So I'll be playing with it as well.
http://www.midorijs.com/
> Facebook's own instant messaging system - not covered in the UK Online Measurement habits

Thats the problem. Personally I have moved most of my social IMing there. Work is mostly Skype/gmail.

The rich environments many of the traditional networks are trying to build nobody in my circle of friends really cared about, apart from some initial novelty value(aww look i can say bye with a cute waving puppy)
The application deadline for Work at a Startup is tomorrow
The author seems to consider potentially losing 1 out of every 10,000 objects in a year unacceptable. It's true that it isn't the reliability that I would want for critical files, but many things are non-critical. For example: YouTube stores multiple copies of every file (the original, 360p, 480p, potentially 720p and 1080p and potentially using multiple codecs). One copy is "critical". The others are nice to have. On a site like that, you can make the original and the 360p critical so that you're always able to serve the video and you always have the original and then if you need to regenerate the 720p version, you just do that and really people can wait an hour - especially since it still works, albeit at 360p.

Likewise, think about the thumbnails that Facebook stores of images. If one of them disappears, it can be regenerated. There's no reason to store so many copies.

Amazon's new service level shouldn't be used for data you want to keep absolutely safe. It should be used for data that you can regenerate if it disappears since it will save you money. If you have to re-transcode 1 out of every 10,000 videos a year (0.01%) while saving 50% on storage costs, you're in a good place.