skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The value of the percentage metric is that it allows you to compare a certain benefit in terms of the work it took to obtain it at different times. Given 2000 hours/year of work, it would have taken 12 hours of work to buy a coffee maker in 1960 vs. 0.6 hours of work in 2010.

To me, this makes the comparison exceedingly easy to understand.
I have similar issues at times. One cause (for me, at least) might be anxiety -- if you are very worried about a failure or have had negative experiences with evaluation of your work, it can carry over into small tasks. Our brains can be pretty clever about avoiding stressors. Bringing your work with you at all times (e.g. always thinking about some problem) doesn't help.

Some suggestions that sometimes work for me:

Get enough sleep (though, sometimes I find that lack of sleep, to a point, can help with focus, especially if paired with loud music).

Cut down on the caffeine.

Segment your time. Specifically allocate blocks of time to do something totally unrelated to work (see a movie, read some mindless fiction, whatever you like to do for fun). Make an effort not to think about your work projects during those periods.

Exercise and/or meditate.

Train yourself to be mindful of what you are doing, so that you catch yourself when you switch from work to some distracter.

When you sit down to work, use a timer to set how long (at a minimum) you will stay on task. When you feel yourself starting to drift during that time, close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing for a minute or so, then back to work.

If all else fails, you can try psychotherapy, but shop around for a therapist who specializes in this sort of disorder (adult ADHD would be one way to classify it). The person you visit will probably try to prescribe some drug as treatment. From my experience (long ago), Ritalin really really worked as a focus-enhancer -- perhaps too well, in some ways -- though the side-effects were unpleasant enough not to want to use it for very long periods.
Make it a command line utility only for turning those entries on, but make it as hard as it could be to remove them again.
If Condé Nast thinks that they're going to be getting 50% of their revenue from consumer subscriptions, then they'd better start increasing the quality of some of their offerings. Wired comes to mind in particular with its terrible content-to-ad ratios both in print and electronic forms and its legion of short also-ran articles. I know when the option of renewing my $12/year subscription to Wired came up a couple of years ago, I just couldn't find the value to justify the admittedly-marginal cost.
Opensource Bug Tracking System
Hi,

I am developing an open source bug tracking system. I have recently started working on it.

I am using PHP on server side (no framework). jQuery on client side (If you are joining and prefer naked javascript or any other framework, I am fine with that). I am planning to use MongoDB.

Anybody willing to be a part of open source project?

GitHub URL: http://github.com/ashitvora/BugTrackr

This is more of a learning project.
I don't expect you to be an expert but dedicated and enthusiastic.

If interested, get in touch with me on Twitter @ashitvora
I don't quite buy this. You're still getting all the fiber in a smoothie, it's just pre-chewed. By the time I swallow a chunk of apple, it's pretty well juiced. The only difference is that actual juice has the solids removed.
On a side note: Anyone wondering how Paul the Octopus was able to predict 8 games in row? My little basic math skill tell me the probability of that happening is around 8^0.5 = 0.003~. So this really shouldn't have happend, makes me wonder if any cheating was involved.
Basic concept:

Unicast traffic has safeguards against spoofing. Multicast does not. Spoof yourself as the AP, send out multicast traffic, and clients respond with unicast traffic with their key.

OK... seriously? Session keys! If you never send them out after negotiating them, the attacker would never get the key, and all your past traffic would still be secure.

The state of "security" with wireless communications continually strikes me as an ass-backwards place... wtf keeps going wrong? A couple standard, basic security techniques would seem to resolve nearly every cracking problem, and a large number of MITM ones too (certificates!).
The problem with that line of thinking is that those valuations would have only been possible with Zuckerberg and his cadre of Harvard branded friends at the helm of Facebook.

If Ceglia exercised his right to those shares so early in the stage, those people could have easily been poached by Google or started another company.

Just because Peter Thiel and other investors valued it highly doesn't make it so. Would you agree with his investment in largely failed Friendster? No one should be beholden to imaginary valuations by pre-IPO investors who have a higher tolerance for risk.
What's so great about the CL APIs for web applications? Could you provide some examples?
GI is a great reference point, but be aware that most of the GI numbers for foods are quite old and often inaccurate. For example, look up the GI for dates. You'll probably find 104 (on a scale where pure glucose is 100)...
I agree. Rudeness is a subtle act of body language that often goes undetected, and is probably only made more explicitly obvious by the presence of technology.
Well, it depends on your needs, situation.

If you are not running after money but want to work for yourself (passion for being an entrepreneur), I would suggest you to take risk and start your own company. Try it for a year. I possible also have a co founder who's frequency matches with you but skill sets are complementary with yours.

If you need more money. Forget about starting a company now.
Get few years of experience (4-5 yrs). And than start.
Thanks for posting this. I had lost site of the Concorde's fatal flight. Good perspective.
Ask HN: Anyone know any good maths libraries for Ruby?
Well, basically, what the title says!

I'm currently experimenting with RubyGame(self improvement and all that), as a Rails coder by trade, and I thought it would be interesting to see if there's any library that anyone knows of that does basic things for you (like combining movement vectors)?

I've got some fairly basic maths knowledge myself(maths/cs graduate), so I've got no problem writing all of that myself, but I'm always up for cheating and including a gem that extrapolates calculations for me :D.

I've done a quick google for solutions, but I'm interested in what people think!
Infiltrating Microsoft and Barclays? What a waste of spies
No. The point is that the policemen (plural) actually had real power over me and their threat was actionable. For example, if you're rude to me, I could never ever care, but they actually have guns and the power to jail me, so long as it's "their word vs. mine."
I'm guessing that this is not a disorder, because if it is, then we all have it.

Every programmer has trouble sitting down to code at certain times.

You say that when you are not at your computer you think about how to code it. Why not keep a paper notebook with you and write down how you think you are going to code it? Or keep a laptop with you and boot it up and start coding when you get excited thinking about it?

Later on, when you want to jump start your programming process, read through the notebook and let yourself get into the mental state you were in when you were excited about it. (Also, unplug the internet).

In my experience, coding isn't as easy as 'making' yourself code (unless you are typing boilerplate or doing copy/paste coding).

You have to either take advantage of the times that you are excited and want to code, or you have to coax yourself into that mental state.

It is just like creative writing. Most good writers do not sit at a desk with a blank piece of paper and just start writing. They make notebooks and journals and they write down ideas as they come. Later when they do have to write, they have all of these cues to start the creative process.

For me, at least, this is roughly equivalent to "writer's block," so you may want to read some literature on that.

(first off of google: http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/block.html)
There you're talking a statistical analysis of a code, specifically one based on a "code book", which are vulnerable to attacks like this. Hashes are designed to prevent this by being (ideally) evenly distributed based on input, and salts destroy analysis across multiple clients. To perform that sort of attack, your hash function would have to be "cracked" in some way, like MD5 is (you can create collisions easily - values which resolve to the same hash), and thus almost totally worthless.
The Beholden State: How public sector unions broke California
I often get cravings when I am nervous/stressed out and this is what I do.

I buy those large heads of lettuce. You can get three of them in a pack for 2.99 in Trader Joe's. Then I open the pack put one head on a plate and whenever I get a craving I peel off leaves one by one wash the leaves and eat them. I eat as much lettuce as I feel like, I do not try to hold my self. But I just leave the washed leaves, there's absolutely no dressing allowed.

This is great, because peeling and washing each leaf individually satisfies the nervous desire to do something. As somebody else said this cravings are usually mental, they have little to do with you being hungry, but mostly mean you are nervous about something so you need a distraction. And washing leaves one by one before you eat them provides sufficient activity to distract you and relax you a bit.

The other great thing about lettuce, is that they are good for you, and yet when you eat them without dressing they effectively provide no calories. The human stomach is not very efficient at breaking down raw greens so eating raw lettuce pretty much takes up as much calories as it gains. So you get necessary fiber and a bunch of other nutrients, but you get no extra calories.

And this means that you can eat as much as you would like without feeling any guilt. Also if you eat a lot, you will get a feeling of being full. The feeling will not last for long, but you can use this technique to last you until the time you get a regular meal and can satisfy your hunger with regular food and not junk food.
Yes, that metric is also good, although not as visceral as the one I used. It's also timeless whereas someone reading my comment 20, 50, whatever years from now wouldn't be helped as much.
Yet you contradicted him. Are apples low or high GI?

Thanks for both of your comments. They were enlightening.
At $38.99 for a 160GB drive, they're paying $0.244/GB, which is pretty bad. Of course, at the low end of the price ranges, the price/capacity ratio goes up a lot.

Their part selection still leaves another $7.05 available, which means you could afford a drive up to $46.04. For that price, you could get a Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 7200RPM drive for $42.99 ($0.086/GB). If you don't like Hitachi, there is a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB for $44.95 ($0.09/GB).

During the evenings I've been working on a site that tracks hard drive prices and price/capacity ratios (http://pcpartpicker.com/partscharts/internal-hard-drive/over...). If you're willing to spend over $80, you can get drives at $0.053/GB.
I've had all these symptoms excluding calling myself a CEO and writing a business plan. Luckily all symptoms are cured except the 10-25k investment. Now I'm looking for a job to save 30k for the first investment (living costs, services, travel, servers, etc.)

However I think most of these 'cures' are 'easily' achievable, but having enough time to cure these symptoms and looking for a co-founder are the hardest parts of becoming an entrepreneur. In my case I took advantage of having been laid off in 2009. So I've decided not to look for a job until I've got some stuff done.
I didn’t downvote you, but the OP’s comment doesn’t seem to me to reflect “burnout” as it is described in that Wikipedia article (e.g. the Tracy quotation “burnout is largely an organizational issue caused by long hours, little down time, and continual peer, customer, and superior surveillance”). Then again, I’m still not sure I understand either a formal technical definition, or quite what people generally mean when using the term colloquially. Seems like a broadly and fuzzily defined term.
That is usually the point that I decide the three hours sleep isn't worth the pain getting up will cause.
... and ARM's stock raises with another 15 percent. Compare it to 12 months ago and say "ooooh".
As has been said, LOW GI is one way to limit cravings. Another good one is to add protein to your diet.

Protein stimulates the production or release of a hormone in your body called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghrelin. Which suppresses appetite.

Another food "HACK" is soup.

To that end, it appears that taking your meal and blending it with a good amount of water (thick soup is best) will trap moisture around the solids, take longer for your digestive system to work through and keep you feeling fuller for longer.

A couple of years back, there was a great show on the BBC called "10 things you need to know about losing weight", where both of those concepts were detailed with scientifical experiements. (a torrent existed last time i checked)

Oh. Another one that I just thought of is to make sure you never let yourself get hungry. When you're hungry, your body goes into a sort of "starvation mode" and sends signals to your brain that tell it to seek out foods of very high calorie density. Sugars and Fats. MRI tests have found that if you look at pictures of those foods when you're hungry they'll light up the pleasure centers of your brain. If you look when satiated, all food registers at about the same level of pleasure.

When you're starving, doughnuts are like sex.
Set up your router to block certain sites during certain hours so that you are forced to work.
That was the same problem I was having. My time is usually 1-3am.
It's funny the author put templating as one of the things he dislikes about rails, especially when the Django templating system is probably one of the worst (of all templating systems out there). They invented their own pseudo language for templating so anything more complicated requires you to write your own special helper functions. I remember back in Django 0.9 (which is still fairly recent), I had to write template library code to do a nested loop over a data structure.

Why couldn't they just write it in python instead of inventing strange keywords like "ifequal"? Every time I use django templates, I have to look up documentation on how to do something as simple as string/number comparison. When I write Myghty templates, I'm writing python on top of html and it just feels so much nicer this way.
Just because Peter Thiel and other investors valued it highly doesn't make it so.

Surely the value of the company's shares is however much investors are willing to pay for them?
That comment about advertising being risky while they move out of a recession is a strange one. Outside of a recession advertising rates will increase hugely; what they should be scared of is the next recession and preparing for it.
Nice. It's like a modern day LOGO, which is what got me interested in programming when I was 4 or 5.
hey there i'm kd8mek, i wrote a blog piece about software radios and such the other day http://verily.posterous.com there are a billion of these qrp small radio blogs out there, all kind of people dreaming up all kinds of things
Perhaps do the parts of the task that do not require thinking and that will lead to the thinking part of the process.

Perhaps write out a detailed description of the task (even if its a small task) without a commitment to tackle it. That might concretize it for you.

A recent article on procrastination referenced on HN summarizes the ideal process as thinking in concrete terms to get started and then visualizing the wider ramifications as you are moving forward.
Wow. It almost hurts reading that, it's so spot on.

It least we did our own coding.
Solid advice. Plus, if he lives frugally (he said living with his parents was on the table) while working for a few years, he should be able to save up a nice cushion of savings.
Yes, that was exactly my point. Burn-out is a (very) serious condition that can have many consequences, including depression.

To say 'you're burned-out' and to say that 'you need a break' combined with the statement that his gf keeps him from being burned-out half the year indicates a use of the term burn-out that does a dis-service to both those that are really burned out (because someone might read this and think that his friend that is really burned out needs a break whereas in fact what he needs is a radical change of career path or professional help to avoid worse) and to those that will pick this up and think that they are burned out, when in fact all they need is a break or a change of scene.

To me the OP does not sound burned out but has reached a phase in his work where the normal tricks of the trade aren't enough to put him back on a productive path.

Compare that with the symptoms listed for burn-out in the wp article and see if you can match them up, it's a lot less fuzzy than you imply and from what I know about the subject once you are burned out you are not going to cure it easily and permanently.
If Flash were standing on the same RFC-based ground that TCP is (Jon Postel was speaking of a principle that implementations of TCP should do) then Dave might have a point.

Heck, I'll be generous and say that Dave might have a point if he were referring to an independent implementation of Flash, and what it ought do.

But mobile Safari is not a flash runtime, it's a web browser, and so its duty to the robustness principle is to be strict about what it sends (HTTP GETs and POSTs) and permissive about what it receives (HTTP responses, HTML/CSS/Javascript documents). It is no more obligated to include a Flash plugin than it is to have a plugin for Iterated Fractal Systems image compressor.

I think it's worth noting that there's an important class of software that needs to be strict about what they receive — compilers — and I often find myself wishing that browsers were more like compilers. But that's just when I get sour thinking about the excessive permissiveness of IE.
While the T43 is a laptop, and therefore more portable than the desktop built in the article, it is also 5 years old. Unless it was upgraded, it will have a smaller hard drive and slower CPU, giving you less performance.

The T43 is a great computer (I used to own one), but being that the author specifically wanted a machine that was upgradeable, it would not be useful in this situation.
nothing infinite here.
See http://ericholscher.com/projects/django-conventions/ also.
I think you are exhausted and bored. Other people has told you what to do: force yourself to relax, to take vacations or take a break, sleep well, eat well, and exercise.

Read "The power of full engagement" Tony Swartz's. It has a very useful video on youtube.

Force yourself to use facebook or read hackernews ONLY when you had finished your work(evening-night), never when you start it(morning). Your short memory is clean after sleeping(it gets backed up in medium and long memory), and you don't want to fill it with pasive stuff but with active info. Creating something(code, making things, writing a book...) takes way more resources than consuming something(reading code, using things, reading a book or what someone has updated on facebook). You should do what is harder first.

Your work environment should be at the right temperature, if it is too hot(now the north hemisphere), your brain shuts down(so you don't generate more heat), if too cold your body wants to move(not good for programming).

Maybe you are in love, who knows.

Don't worry too much, it's normal, the only problem you face is to know consciously what your mind knows unconsciously as the origin of the problem. Once you know, it will be easy to solve.

Bye
Viewed on iPhone, disclaimer won't let me see anything else.
This is a cracking resource if your travelling abroad, one thing to mention is that if your travelling to the UK, 02 has a £2 a day for 500meg on both the iPad (microsim) and datastick format, however it usually lasts more than 24 hours as they seem to have a script that runs at midnight cutting anyone off that has been on for 24 hours... if you do it early in the morning you tend to get 36-40 hours out of it..
If you're running on Windows, Vista/W7 has `clip` as an equivalent to pbcopy. One project I was working on, the sysadmin didn't give us any access to the server, so we had to instruct him to use git each time an update went through (daily). `git rev-parse HEAD | clip` was the fastest way to get the "revision your tree should be at after pulling" then and send it to him.
If you're getting enough sleep and don't have any other psychological disorders, e.g., depression, etc., most likely it's burnout. A serious lifestyle change should help (e.g., spend 6 to 12 months travelling through Europe, work as a logger in the Canadian wilderness, join the Peace Corps) but, alas, not all of us have the luxury of doing that. Perhaps also just finding a less stressful job might help.
No, the stupid 2/3rds rule to pass a budget did that.

Unions are just one of the many special interests that win from that silly constitutional issue.

Supermajorities to do normal things are bad.

If they had a normal budgetary process, then they'd have more normal repubs cut taxes/services vs dems add them sort of dynamic that the rest of the country does.
I was more responding to the authors statement about how he thought that doing what you're told and getting good grades in school would lead to real-world success.

It's been my experience that getting good grades has very little to do with the quality or completeness of one's education.

I think that working hard is the path to success. And by 'working hard' I mean working with intellectual honesty -- doing work which makes you smarter and requires thought.

Adding fluff to an English paper to make it longer is intellectually dishonest. Copy+pasting selections from a Wikipedia page into a PowerPoint presentation and then spending an hour rearranging the words to make it look like you didn't copy verbatim is intellectually dishonest. These things are standard practice for 95% of all high school students and they are rewarded within the education system.

Yes I may get a good grade doing it the honest way, but it seems unfair to me that those being dishonest should get the same grade.

I'm not saying that intellectual dishonesty isn't possible in math or science, but it is certainly easier and in my experience, 'the norm', in the liberal arts.

I am happy to know that somewhere down the line this all comes back to bite you. This seems logical to me that striving to better oneself intellectually rather than striving to get good grades would make one a more desirable employee in the job market.
They're missing a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Also speakers.. This is a good setups assuming you have all those parts laying around and not being used by anything else. Otherwise you might also need to get a KVM to share those peripherals.

The missing peripherals will probably add at least $100 to the total.
That's utter nonsense. Postel's Law doesn't say anything about that. You're just making it up.
You're wrong. Postel's Law is a principle of software design.
So does being unemployed. Sometimes you have to make the tough decisions.
Whether or not that was headed anywhere compelling, he ruined it when he insinuated that market cap is comparable to market share.
Polarized politics boost demand for Bellevue man's 'NObama Countdown Clock'
Whoa. That's an awesome web application/site you got there.

Is implementing dual-core, quad-core price ratio CPU on your list of TODO, and how soon will you implement it?