skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could buy that that was true some decades ago, but these days I'm not sure European monarchs can be said to have any power at all. Yes, technically the Queen of England has reserve powers, but only so long as she never exercises them--- if she ever tried to withhold royal assent from a duly passed bill (last done in 1708), or fire a Prime Minister (last done in 1834), she would be buying herself a quick ticket to formal figurehead status, if not outright abolition of the monarchy.
I've found that nothing helps me into the zone faster than white(or pink or brown)-noise type audio: waves at the seashore, rain falling in a forest-- that type of sound. It's intriguing to me how a little randomness can gel my mind.

I certainly recommend trying it before going with the Provigil (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524757)
I read this some time ago and have been feeling vaguely like there was probably a miscommunication somewhere. For sake of clarification, to me it "goes without saying" (which is why I didn't say it) that people who are more touchy-feely are also highly likely to be the type to lie (say nice things) to your face while stabbing you in the back. Both things tend to be rooted in or related to a dislike of confrontation. People who place an inordinately high value on the (superficially) feel-good experience are, obviously (at least to me), the same type that will make nice while doing you serious harm. Can't have people (ie THEMSELVES) be uncomfortable while we burn them, now can we?

And if you got that the first time: nevermind. :)
US Poverty in Space and Time (2003)
Good rule if you want to be popular or socially successful: talk less.

the amount of times at parties, at networking events, whenever when I'll be listening to someone and simply thinking "please stop talking now"

you could patch that rule with "listen more" == "talk less, listen more" eg: ask questions.

a cardinal sin when networking is to dive into what you do and talk and talk without bothering to ask the listener any questions.

i promise this will make you 10x more popular. and if you are talking, think about how you can cut to the chase with fewer words.
You touch on a good point. Being in this field is intimidating for everyone! It is impossible to be the master of everything, and yet there are people who will challenge you on every front.

Showing up to some groups, posting on some boards (like this one even) and jumping into the conversation can be outright terrifying.

My XY-card doesn't make it instantly simple to show up to any event and feel comfortable.
"We need to reward producers more and punish consumers so that Americans will produce more and consume less and rebuild our nation to its previous glory."

That's a very statist way of thinking, which is what Austrian/libertarians are opposed to. No libertarian should care about "rebuilding a nation's glory" because that's the sort of rhetoric heard from authoritarian nations.

It is natural for people to want to consume. The reason people produce is so that they can be able to consume later on. What the article states is that removing patent protection from society (which is in line with removing government interference in business) is feasible, because the originators of content/ideas would still be able to profit by branding and earlier entrance into the marketplace, as opposed to expecting a government-sanctioned monopoly.
Not much more than any other source of growing up. From "Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art" by Stephen Nachmanovitch:

"Schools can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and all too often do. Ideally, schools exist to preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give children the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grown-ups to feed the marketplace with workers, with managers, and with consumers."

....

"But we have not yet gotten down to the marrow of the matter. We have been talking as though there were something called "society" that defends itself against creativity by all the means we've mentioned above: education, specialization, fear of the new, fear of raw creative power. There is no such thing as society, there is no such thing as institutions, schools, the media, and the rest of it. There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs. The marrow of the matter is that however we might restructure society, however many resources an enlightened regime might bestow on the fostering of creativity and the arts and sciences and freewheeling education dedicated to the deep exploration of mind, spirit, and heart, we would still be in the same soup. There is something called growing up, which happens to us no matter what our circumstances. We all have learned what it feels like to be betrayed for the first time, the second time, the third time, when our innocence gets stripped away, and we jump from innocence to experience. There is a point, or rather a long series of points, at which our innocence and free play of imagination and desire collides with reality, with the limits of is and is not, with the limits of what can and cannot be.

"Everything we have said so far should not be construed merely as an indictment of the big bad schools, or the media or other societal factors. We could redesign many aspects of society in a more wholesome way--and we ought to--but even then art would not be easy. The fact is that we cannot avoid childhood's end; the free play of imagination creates illusions, and illusions bump into reality and get disillusioned. Getting disillusioned, presumably, is a fine thing, the essence of learning; but it hurts. If you think that you could have avoided the disenchantment of childhood's end by having had some advantage--a more enlightened education, more money or other material benefits, a great teacher--talk to someone who has had those advantages, and you will find that they bump into just as much disillusionment because the fundamental blockages are not external but part of us, part of life. In any case, the child's delightful pictures of trees mentioned at the beginning of this chapter would probably not be art if they came from the hands of an adult. The difference between the child's drawings and the childlike drawing of a Picasso resides not only in Picasso's impeccable mastery of craft, but in the fact that Picasso had actually grown up, undergone hard experience, and transcended it."
> They're just words arranged in a particular order

Hmm. That can be said of any piece of text
Sorry about that. I copied the number from Wikipedia, but picked the nominal GDP by mistake.

I agree that comparing political systems based on numbers directly is a bad idea. It was just a reaction to the many posts I see where the citizen of one country automatically assume that their system is the best as it was a fact.
I should have qualified. The only reason that might be reasonable to maintain a high GPA is an honors program or some other program with an arbitrary GPA requirement (i.e. 5 years BS/MS http://www.cs.vt.edu/undergraduate/degrees/5yr-BS-MS).

I will say that I started my college career in the honors program and on the 5 year BS/MS track. I just couldn't wait long enough to start doing real work. ;)
The Pandora subscription is really worth it.
That ordering of words might actually convey some insights into life, love, and other such follies.

Definitely. Hamlet has some amazing passages that are beautiful and thought-provoking.

Maybe in the act of memorizing it this may come through.

In my experience, understanding the text and memorizing it are entirely orthogonal endeavors.
Go to pandora.com

Make a station, use "Abakus" as the seed.

Upvote/downvote the next few dozen songs. (If a song has any words/lyrics in it at all, it gets an immediate downvote no matter if I like it).

There you go.

I've found that Abakus is just the right mix of continuously pumping music that keeps my brain flowing, without being too intense (like a lot of trance or goa can get). It ends up flowing into the background pretty smoothly and keeps me going. Before I know it, hours have passed. As a seed in Pandora I've found tons of other artists and music that flows in the same way.
There is no kidding that he was off the charts brilliant, but he was also - especially towards the end - insane.

That is why it is so hard to figure out what Tesla actually did or didn't do.
The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs (2008)
Is there a non-Flash version?
Where can i buy this from the uk?
Correct. I was talking about it in terms of information. I can memorize the particular order of the symbols in Schrödinger's Wave Equation and still not understand what it means.
I think it's a good use of time, especially in an English class, because the beauty of Shakespeare never really came out for me until I read it word by word and knew enough to perform a bit of it. It wasn't created to be read, it was created to be performed, and I didn't pick up on all the nuances, humor, and craft that make it really good until I freed myself from reading it from paper. I'm likely a better writer because I've been forced to read poetry and plays in that way.

I expect that he didn't substantiate his claim for the same reason the original poster didn't substantiate his claim that learning C is a good use of time - people around here who have done both likely appreciate the value of the task.

Meta-point: I think a lot of people around here who argue "school is worthless, why am I doing this useless task" will point to this sort of exercise without asking or understanding why it's done. I certainly felt the same way when I was memorizing Shakespeare. While it's important to think for yourself, it's also important to take the advice of those who have more experience than you do, and when I see these threads I think many of the commentators haven't learned both lessons.
This thread is about needing an implicit return. So my "ditto" is 100% correct!

But you are quite right that Perl if/else are statements and not expressions. Instead you can use the ternary operator:

my $value = $cond == 1 ? 'true' : 'false';

And because of ditto for Perl you can also do following:

my $value = do { if ($cond == 1) { 'true' } else { 'false' } };
You're right that many of the restrictions on the Queen's power are customary rather than official, but there are some official restrictions on her powers as well--- she isn't an absolute monarch. Since at least the 17th century, the Monarch has been unable to impose taxes without Parliament's consent, cannot make new laws through proclamation (they must be passed by Parliament), cannot imprison people without a judgment by the judiciary, etc.
Modafinil-data on results and side effects from 2000 patients
Yeah same here, I'm sh*t out of luck on my iPad. So are most mobile users, where's the accessibility Google?
G-WAN is certainly fast, and I don't know about any other Web server (or Web application server) that is faster, whether commercial or free (like G-WAN).

But after one year of existence, it obviously still lacks the features that many have been accustomed to use with Apache.

Time will tell if G-WAN can do better than just be so fast.
50 Beta Invites Available for Next Generation Collaboration Platform
Sorry the site was down, we got bombarded with a ton of people at once. We still have some invites left, and the site should be back up now. We had to upgrade to a larger cloud server. Growing pains. :)
And as far as I know, the value of SNPs is debatable at best.
Great illustration of the pitfalls of both social and monetary obligations
The most effective monarchy succession plan is probably having the current ruler groom his successor and retire or alternate - that happened during the height of Rome with emperors choosing and grooming their successor before retiring

True, and worth noting that the run of good emperors stopped once they stopped adopting heirs.
It just so happens that after the quiz is a very nice intro to creating a recursive descent parser by hand. It's actually quite well written...
> The data include users who may simply arrive on the homepage and then leave without paying, but Mr Goad said average visit time had stayed relatively consistent, suggesting most visitors had paid to view a story.

It might be that the people who are paying to read are people who spend longer reading the site.
Thanks for adding .. I've been on a Toronto music binge lately as I just moved here and definitely going to check more of Tunturia out.

Balmorhea sounds great, too!
I agree with everything you've said.

I think you would understand my position better if I clarified that it was memorization of the lines I was being graded on not the understanding of what the lines meant. That is the issue I took with the assignment.

Learning C is an objectively better use of ones time than memorizing X because learning C requires that you think whereas memorizing X requires that you simply spend time committing the order of symbols to memory.
That depends on what she'd use if for. If she started to dabble in day-to-day politics, say, demanding funds for a certain issue in the budget, then yes. But if a prime minister was successful in getting support for abolishing the limits on when to hold parliamentary elections, or other such irreversible steps towards totalitarianism, the Queen might very well intervene, and, in the long term, be applauded for it. I think it's likely that this safety valve helps to keep such attempts at bay.

But the essence of my argument isn't that I disagree with you (much, at least) on that point. It's that a monarchy is a monarchy as long as there's a monarch with formal power, no matter if they're exercised or not.
This essay is mainly based on the common folk wisdom that you see everywhere, on iteration and solving the actual problem: 37signals. Steve Blank. Fred Brooks. esr. extreme programming. Moore. In Search of Excellence. Linus. [off the top of my head]

Reddit is successful, in that it's valued by many. It was successful for the founders [I'd dearly like to know how much they got, to an order of magnitude]. It's only 5 years old - it took Amazon 10 years to become profitable, google began in 1996 was incorporated in 1998, but didn't even start serving ads til 2000 - which accounts for almost all revenue today. So I think it's too early to call reddit "not very successful". [It would be interesting to have data on how long it typically takes for "successful" startups to become successful.]

I do disagree with pg that the essence of reddit was "to tell people what was new". Slashdot already did that and other news sites. Reddit's (and Digg's) innovation was that everyone could vote on comments. [But pg has far better information on reddit than me, so I'm left wondering why he thinks that...]
I read this one a while back. Anyone know of a source for more recent data?
Sure. Ignoring all the other reasons to pirate something, like lack of legal alternatives or whatever, most people who pirate a song, film or whatever, don't do it for profit.
I get the joke. But it's not funny. I've read the same joke about 1000 times on various forums. It's just a somewhat mean statement with no humour at all.
Technology Choices: Building Your House On A Rock
if any reporter has the balls to quickly run over and unsheathe the boxes

None of the reporters had a camera, and most cloths probably weren't covering anything serious.
What about C#?
Yet another Wikipedia article with graphic pictures that I agree should be there, but are not something I want to see while eating my morning bowl of cereal...
> The last monarch to not sign a bill was around 1700, but the queen has the legal right to not sign a bill.

When King Baudouin of Belgium refused to sign the abortion bill in 1990 (for religious reasons), the Government declared him 'temporarily unable to reign' for a day, and signed it for him.
Why I Like Ruby, Part 2: Blocks
For what purpose does memorizing Shakespeare serve?

Shakespeare is clever, bawdy, and often amusing, and you have to be even more clever to understand it. A lot his wordplay is based on idioms no longer in active use.

Take, for example, Act 1, Scene 1 (http://www.shakespeare-literature.com/Romeo_and_Juliet/2.htm...)

SAMPSON

'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the
maids, and cut off their heads.

GREGORY

The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON

Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.

'Maidenheads' as a colloquial term for a woman's virginity (or more crudely, her hymen).

Or Act 1, Scene 3

NURSE

And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow:
And then my husband--God be with his soul!
A' was a merry man--took up the child:
'Yea,' quoth he, 'dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?' and, by my holidame,
The pretty wretch left crying and said 'Ay.'
To see, now, how a jest shall come about!
I warrant, an I should live a thousand years,
I never should forget it: 'Wilt thou not, Jule?' quoth he;
And, pretty fool, it stinted and said 'Ay.'

The nurse is speaking of her husband and Juliet. As a small child, she 'waddled all about', fell on her face and 'broke her bow'. The husband asks, amused -- when you have more wit, will you not fall on your back? The young Juliet clearly innocently replies 'Ay', likely sending everyone tittering -- to fall on her back when she has more wit is an oblique reference to her having sex (on her back) when she's older (has more wit).

It's crude, inappropriate, and -- at least to me -- pretty damn funny, in the story's context. It also has a hell of a lot to do with "words arranged in a particular order", and the nuances of the meanings of words. Memorizing it forces you to study the text more deeply than you likely have before.

I've never made use of Shakespeare as a programmer, but I still remember reading his works in school -- and the significant appreciation I had for the art and cleverness of it. I even memorized the entire Queen Mab Speech for extra credit (I'm glad I didn't refuse!). It did help that I went to a private school where the teacher was intelligent enough to explain the word-play to us, and didn't avoid the less appropriate aspects of it.
I've found that Baroque composers work far better for me than older or newer work.
Grade school nurtured my creativity. The only way I could get through the boredom of it was through sketching and daydreaming.
The title of hnhackers is "Hire HN consultant", that seems very different to me.
When I really need to concentrate, I go for my "Pretentious Shite Radio" station on Pandora, which I seeded with John Cage and Steve Reich.
Prototype systems are great. I use them all the time, even in other languages. Extending prototypes of existing objects is amazing and powerful, and can be used for some beautiful data structures.
Tiesto's stuff is good, Deadmau5 is also good if you want something a little more upbeat.
Using Razor with ASP.NET MVC in Four Easy Steps
Reich is somebody who I've been introduced to in the last couple weeks. I haven't tried him yet, but I find his work absolutely mind blowing...and exhausting to listen to. It's like a really great hike up a mountain, watching the scenery slowly change the entire way, then absolute exhaustion at the end of the climb.
You can simply buy a new, better CPU for less money after a few years if something goes wrong (Moore's Law), and from what I've read from those who do overclock their CPU...quote:

...."I'm being particularly doomsday here to emphasize that things could go wrong. If done correctly, overclocking is generally a pretty safe endeavor (I've never damaged my gear), but if you're not willing to risk damaging your processor, you may want to skip it." from http://lifehacker.com/5580998/a-beginners-guide-to-overclock...

So your comment is both incorrect and misleading. Also, who is to say that "using drugs" will reduce the lifespan of your brain by two-thirds? When you drink coffee (caffeine), tea (tannin), alcohol, Panadol (paracetamol) you're not thinking "oops my brain is slowly dying". Just because something is prescription-only (or illegal), doesn't necessarily mean it's any safer or more dangerous than over the counter drugs. Examples: Coca-cola once contained cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' before cocaine was outlawed, and George Washington once grew marijuana on his estate (http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/thepresidentandcabinet/a/gwthe...)
For something old school, FSOL Lifeforms
And an absolutely stunning musical work. The number of great themes in that music is amazing. It's a shame, I've never felt that his later work ever really explored and expanded on those themes well.
Yes, schools exist to teach social conformity and to prepare you for a lifetime of working for corporations.

There is no question that part of this involves absolutely smothering creativity. Whether it is a primary goal or a side effect, I'm not sure.
Rupert Murdoch and Cablevision have now proven this model doesn't really work and is contrary to the rules of the Web. Anyone else wanna try?

(Disclosure: I actually subscribed to Newsday's paywall mode for a little while, basically to make fun of it: http://shortformblog.com/tag/customer-36 )
About three paragraphs in I thought, "Yeah, that's section 8" and was preparing to be unsurprised when it didn't mention it. But it did.

Anyway, the whole point of Section 8 was to move the riffraff from the too-close-to-rich-people city areas to the suburbs, in a Parisian style setup. The suburbs, of course, were where middle class people fled to when the cities were originally ravaged by similiar population movements years ago. The eventual white flight (ie, ethnic cleansing) from the suburbs was baked into the cake and none of the other unexpected consequences were in the least unexpected.
I actually used to live in section 8 housing growing up. Once I was old enough, the path seemed so clear on how to get far removed from that environment. I'm not sure why others don't see it and continue to accept their situation as unchangeable.
Remnants of an 18th century ship at Ground Zero Construction Site
I've found that process of deciphering Shakespeare is as exhilarating as attempting to comprehend a new topic in mathematics. It feels like I'm using the same parts of my brain. I do really enjoy reading and understanding Shakespeare.

Memorizing Shakespeare, though, has nothing to do with this process. Of course one needs a working memory of the text to put it all in context, but rote memorization of a passage is orthogonal to understanding it.
This article needs to be printed everywhere, at all times.

I have no idea how some of the people I see every day are going to save up the $1.5 million (in today's money) they'll need to retire. Half of 'em can't even pay off their credit card bills every month.
Ask HN: What timezone is HN running on?
I sometimes miss some good articles from the previous day, that were around earlier in the current day.

Is it subjective to the number of new stories being submitted? Is there a daily reset of top stories at some point? If it does, Is it possible to change it to use my timezone?

I am trying to reduce my visits to HN to max once a day. I'd like to come in around the last hour of the day. ;-)

Thanks.
Or if you want to step up the pace there's always the Black Mages: hard rock renditions of FF battle tunes.
Jabotinsky had plan to kill Hitler, highranking Nazis  JTA  Jewish  Israel News
Also, the military is giving gang members top notch gun/ambush training now:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2506292,CST-NWS-graffiti18...
I think the basic answer is they won't, which is a sad sad answer.
More like, wow! Creationists daring to post on HN! Who would've thought? I'm kinda curious what was deleted actually.
You've got the price wrong, it's £1 for a month introductory offer then £2 per week from then on.
Article about a paywall behind a paywall? Stack overflow...