skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More often than not I spend more time at the airport than on the plane. Treat me like a human. Have a zillion power ports. Have free wifi. Have desks to sit at. Spare computers ala libraries. Have restaurants with food that isn't so horrible. How about couches or rocking chairs? How about a library? How about an video game demo station? Mini museum pieces that change every few months. art to look at? Music listening station?

My dream airline would be one where I could be dropped off on the tarmack, hop on the next plane that is taking off (think bus stop) and be on my way. No getting there three hours in advance.

Still doesn't help that at the end of the day airports are typically not at your destination. You have to first travel to the airport and once at your flights destination you still have to travel to your final destination.
It's hard to escape the irony of the situation of the typical programmer. Programming requires extended periods of focus and deep concentration but the very medium in which most of us work is a firestorm of distractions. How can you be an effective mobile app developer if you don't immerse yourself in the experience of mobile media? We're like the crack dealer that has to constantly sample his wares.

Like PG and others in this thread I've tried to combat these distractions by limiting email and internet time, leaving the mobile phone off, and deliberately spending free time doing things like reading books and going on long hikes out in the woods. It's hard not to feel a bit at odds with my profession though.
In answer to your question, possibly not, but it boils down to a shift from passively absorbing a primetime broadcast & actively consuming either:

i) The same thing, but at a time of your own choosing, or:

ii) Only niche programmes of interest to you.

Or some combination of the two. Either way, mediocre programmes are less likely to occupy your time.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute. Why is this "new" addiction wrong? What does it mean to say it is bad?

pg is taking great pains to distance himself from real addiction, like crystal meth. Yet he never explicitly explains anywhere why the new "addiction" is actually bad, other than trying to loosely associate it with alcohol. I don't think that the "addictiveness" of a thing alone is enough to call it bad. I'm way more addicted to air than a meth addict is addicted to his fix, and I don't consider air addiction a disability.

Now perhaps he's right and it really is bad--but I think this is a fundamental assumption that needs to be discussed and argued, not swallowed whole.

* Is it morally bad?

* Is it dangerous?

* Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent?

* To what extent is the comparison to alcohol valid? Is it mood-altering? Does it significantly affect decisionmaking?

I think these are important questions that we have somehow skipped in this discussion.

My personal take is that we simply have a lot more free time now than we did 50 or 100 years ago, where we needed to spend more time feeding and clothing ourselves, and so Farmville arises to fill the empty space. Could this be redirected into something productive? Maybe? But people also burn out and have inefficiencies, so I'm not sure you could extract much more productivity unless we returned to hand-to-mouth.
great now I have des'ray in my head.

interesting idea... I'll give it a go for a while until someone realises I email myself everyday. Does it get angry if I don't reply?

mini feedback on home page: The 'see example' link needs to scroll the page down for me, I didn't spot the page grow and was waiting for it to load.
Ask HN: Help? Problem taking credit card info before start of 30 day free trial.
I am using Authorize.net and they recommended Cybersource for my Merchant Service Provider. I thought I was good to go, then today I got this email:

"On your web site you offer a 30 day trial period. No credit card information can be taken before a trial period is over. You will need to remove the 30 day trial period or not take any credit card information until the 30 day trial period is over."

It seems like a common web app practice to take credit card information then not charge until the 30 day trial is over, but the MSP isn't letting me. What do I need to do in order to make this happen?
If you stick with normalized data (add up to 100%), though a pie chart may be visually appealing, I'd still go with a sorted bar graph. I always look for the most prevalent effect or two, and it takes me a couple of moments to maneuver around the pie chart to find them. A bar graph would fix it. Perhaps even statically ordered by labels so you can easily compare two strains visually.

Also with that in mind, you could get rid of the Top 5 text list, since the data would be similarly efficiently portrayed visually.
The Neuroscience of Inception
I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying it's the case now.
Really like the simplicity of the idea and clean look of the site. Already replied to the welcome message - waiting for it to post to the site.

I like the daily emails as I don't visit too many sites daily, apart from HN and Gmail. This will be an easy way to log all that I'm up to. I'm not sure how regularly I'll do this, but time will tell.
Actually an LLC is cheaper. But if you want an Inc. and apostille and setup an EIN, etc it could cost $800
I suspect this release is in response to some of the uproar (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545773, albeit dead) on the Rails list about the lack of a release and general lack of communication between the core team and the community regarding when a release might be expected.
Great link. I knew monkeybars once, but totally forgo about it. It seems complement swing with what glade does to gtk (and its code generators do, from taking xml and turning into python/ruby/perl,etc files).
you can install a deb package, but not add a source? That seems like an odd configuration to me.
I disagree with the fact that people currently have more free time as compared to 50-100 years ago.
Nearly all institutions are run primarily for their own benefit. We often forget this when we receive their products/information/services. Sometimes, we're lucky enough to receive correct information or things that don't harm us. Trusting an expert is a good idea as you say, but trusting an expert whose opinion has been normalized by an institution is quite dangerous. It's less dangerous if you fully understand the motives of the institution, but with today's treacherous institutions, even most people in the institution are unaware of the motives and their consequences.
Interview with Jesse Thomas (of JESS3)
Open source / low-cost videoconferencing options?
I'm working with a small non-profit to help them use technology to reduce costs, and one thing they are looking to do is implement some kind of web videoconferencing to enable remote meetings with a few partners. Skype would probably be fine for the one-to-one meetings, but I'm not sure how to tackle the one-to-many (specifically, one-to-three) conference scenarios.

Wondering if the HN community could advise on some decent low-cost solutions. I think this organization could probably spend a couple grand on a hardware/software solution, if that would even get them anywhere. My assumption is that the remote locations have a decent internet connection and a PC as a minimum baseline.

Thanks,
Stacy
I never said JavaScript is best language to use server-side. That would be insane. I'm just saying that it worked well for the browser (mostly because it was forced on us, but still) and node is an experiment to try the same thing on the server.

It's a lot better than writing C, (which is what Ryan was doing before starting node) since JS has closures, anonymous functions and other functional niceties that make event based programming much easier.

The fact that you can now code your server-side code in the same language and paradigm as your client-side code is a huge bonus, but was not the reason node was created. V8 is an amazing VM and it's a language that lots of talented developers know. Why not let them loose on the server and see what comes out of this talent.

Given the constraint of using JavaScript on the server, node is the best solution. If you don't want that constraint, then maybe erlang or something with no-shared state is a better solution.
It is somehow comforting to know that PG is struggling with the same addiction I am.
I had no idea of the 300k limit...that's crazy high. I guess most people who immigrate are from within the EU so it's less of an issue.

"being a professional writer or artist of any standing makes living in Ireland much, much easier." - unless you are U2!

ps. there is a Ruby Ireland meetup in Cork in 2 days if you are in the area...no prerequisites, very informal, all welcome ;-)

http://www.hackernewsers.com/meetups/2.html
"Liking something too much" is perhaps too weak a definition for addiction. You're addicted to something if you don't genuinely need it, but it's uncomfortable to seriously contemplate giving it up. I like watching television too much, in the sense that I would prefer to like it less, but I haven't watched any in months, and this does not seem problematic.

I have to agree with the main thesis, though: however you define it, things are getting more addictive. That seems like an almost necessary consequence of capitalism. If your product or service is addictive, you can cause much more discomfort to your customers without losing them. Almost every way of improving the bottom line without improving the product involves causing discomfort to your customers (the only exception being "get more customers"), and any of those things can be done at the same time as improving the product. Just look at credit cards: everybody hates them, their policies are extremely abusive, but people are addicted to the convenience they provide. It's not worth giving up capitalism for (it's still the worst economic system except all the others, with posthumous apologies to Churchill).

I think there's perhaps a business model in managing the increasing addictiveness of the world around us. I'm not sure where, but it's such a potential value that there must be one.
According to http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us

there is a clear trend in a shortening workweek each decade across industries.
This post mentions loyalty programs for frequent flyers, but it completely underestimates their importance. The difference between business class and coach is so stark, just a reasonable chance at an upgrade completely decommoditizes the inventory. Because of this, the most profitable customers certainly aren't basing their decisions solely on price.

Myself, I always fly American, not because the coach experience is any better but because I've got about a one-in-four chance of getting upgraded to business class. Just a couple of days ago I got upgraded on my redeye back from SFO - well worth the $35 or so extra I paid for the seat vs. the equivalent flight on a competing airline. Slept like a baby, and I certainly couldn't have done that back in steerage.
Maybe PG and I would agree on this, because I do think things are becoming more "addictive", but I don't believe he's addressed the root cause of the problem.

I think with new technological advances, etc, things are becoming better at being "false substitutes" -- i.e. masquerading themselves as the authentic ways in which we should best satisfy the natural human desires and instincts we all have within us.

Addiction comes into play when we are consistently using a false substitute instead of the real thing, so addiction is really much farther down the road - at that point your brain has been fully deceived to indulge in these false substitutes...

Examples:

1. Processed "Fat Free" garbage food and fad diets instead of healthy eating and normal exercise.

2. Facebook instead of "Face-to-face" social networking

3. HD porn instead of healthy sexual relationships

4. Online dating instead of learning human interaction

5. Books like "The Game" or PUA. Rather than addressing your inner confidence issues, you read this, learn the rules, and treat women like they're another sport

5. Passively watching TV and sucking up the Internet for mental "stimulation", rather than reading books, creating, and building things.

6. Constantly seeking your 15 minutes of fame and attention (which is FAR easier to get these days) rather than real love and affection

7. The list goes on...

I know for a fact this list will be controversial, but I think people will agree with me that these are, in fact, substitutes for the best way to satisfy the many human desires we have. Obviously if you're not addicted, then good for you. It's harsh though. Suck it up and desire to do better. I'm certainly guilty of some of them myself.
In chrome, just type Ctrl+Shift+J (Cmd+Opt+J on Mac) and there's a wonderful JS console
The graph is per-10k manufacturing workers.

I'd say it's due to strong unions in the US.
Technological progress means making things do more of what we want.

There are two reasonably distinct categories of things I want. I don't have good names for them, so I'll just label them A and B:

A is things like: Artificial organs, cheap clean energy, cheap clean and fast transportation, robot house-cleaners, faster-and-faster computers.

B covers things like: When I was quitting smoking, I wanted more alcohol and coffee. When I was doing a boring job, I wanted to browse the internet more. When I was exhausted from a long commute I wanted more and more TV in the evenings.

Category B is full of things I want, but which I don't want to want. What I really want is all the stuff in category A. I only ever "wanted" each thing in category B as a short-term quick fix to some other underlying problem in my life.

Capitalism is great as far as it goes, but I don't believe it is able to distinguish between these two senses of want. Perhaps it needs an upgrade?
It's really a question of how much state you're storing, and how you're dealing with that. Many languages and many runtimes allocate stacks in megabytes, and store every local variable in it.

With a callback-based system, stacks are short, and you explicitly carry that state. You KNOW what state you're storing, and you can see it easily.

There's some benefit to that.

And the pattern for aggregating functions is different: Receive a starting event, emit a done event -- you aggregate processes into sets of events, not into function calls. So yeah, it's not going to follow some of the same patterns that non-event-driven code follows, and event-driven code is going to look rather different than callback-passing code.

I think Ryan's right about coroutines, too: Coming back to vastly different state after a simple function call is basically going back to the days of using global variables.
Thanks for the answers. For all the flak US education receives, the option of taking AP classes sounds good (and it gives college credits, which is even better!).

This is utterly derailing the main topic of conversation, but...

I know that a lot of mathematicians dislike AP Calculus. The original thinking was that Calculus couldn't be taught to highschoolers, so you waited until University to take it. Aspiring mathematicians would take a rigorous, proof-based Caclulus course, which would prepare them to tackle harder subjects in the future. Everyone else (engineers, chemists, physicists, etc.) would take a more general/applied course. Now, all but a handful of universities offer such courses, under the assumption that anyone who wants to be a mathematician has surely taken AP Caclulus. So the idea of proof-based Calc. for future mathematicians has been lost in transition, and the end result is that you have kids hitting Multivariate Calculus and Differential Equations who haven't seen a proof in their lives.

The current AP Calculus courses are 99% computation. I was challenged while working through Spviak's book with no teacher guidance in highschool, but I scored a perfect 5 on the AP test with little effort.
It's interesting that the article talks about avoiding addictions, rather than making beneficial things more addictive. If we're in some sort of addictions arms race, we need to strive for balance, not isolation.
Thanks! Yeah, the "VM fork" thing is something we have trouble getting across to the general population. That probably should have been the title of this post though.
I used to use techniques like this to maintain my focus. Let me toss something out though that might be a bit controversial. Perhaps having to do this is a sign of ADHD. For me it was. There are many signs and symptoms, and unfortunately many people have heard that people are over medicated on things like Ritalin and Adderral. However, the thing to consider is that people with strong ADHD actually have a different brain structure. It turns out that the focus benefits of being on the medication only works for people who genuinely do have ADHD, and does not work for "regular" people (if there even is such a thing).

Let me just say, that Adderral changed my life. I used to have what I termed "Reddit seeking behavior". I could work on tasks that were interesting, but if it got a little rough or boring - what's happening on Reddit, or HN or Digg? However when I got on Adderral that entirely changed. I still check HN, but much less frequently because I'm busy getting things done. I don't have to resort to extreme changes in my environment to resist distractions. It comes naturally now.

I don't discount or disagree that focus can be improved. I know it first hand, but I would also argue that people with ADHD have some additional things going on that are much harder to train. If you are one of those people, getting on the appropriate medication could well change your life. I know it did mine. That's a big statement, and often over used, but for me, it changed the way I experience every day life in substantial and dramatic ways.

Take it for what it's worth, YMMV.
Paul I've never been much on flattering you for your essays. You're a great writer, but sadly none of them did much for me -- and you've got a willing audience, so it didn't seem necessary.

This time, however, you wrote a good essay. Broadly-scoped, yet with enough cogent sparkles to make it a worthwhile read.

Glad to see you continuing to engage on this.

My hope is that we're going to develop new social norms for what is "normal" -- best operating range. This time in our evolution might be like when heroin first was introduced. For a time, normal as in "regular people" were people who used drugs. Normal as in best operating range were people who abstained. They were probably pretty boring people, actually. Here's hoping the boring people save the day.

Heard a new phrase last week, "digital drugs". I like it. Seems to fit.

Also, for more reading, here's a shameless plug for "Technology is Heroin" which I wrote a year and a half ago on the same topic http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is... You said at the time you wanted to address this issue, and I'm glad it's still on your radar.
Re:The Acceleration of Addictiveness
I agree. If I can get all RSS, twitter, video, etc. on the iPad and off the computer it will start to feel more like a TV or entertainment device. This way I will feel like I'm wasting time vs. working.
Is there a way to turn the sound off? I couldn't find a way.
That's different. In Anathem, the world suffered one Manhatten project too many. Governments isolated the geeks and confiscated their toys as a survival measure.
Upstart Takes on Google, Microsoft in the Cloud
I am assuming people were asked to participate in this survey, and that the survey mentioned that it was for the iPad (I couldn't see any place where it was mentioned that it the topic of the survey was anything more generalized such as "portable computing devices").

Because opinions on the iPad were quite polarized, especially among the techies who felt like the iPad was too inflexible, I tend to think the opportunity to participate in such a survey created a self-selection bias for the so-called "independent geeks" and for the Apple fanboys who want to ensure that the outcome of any satisfaction survey yields a positive opinion score for the device. Those are the two groups who dominate in the comments sections of any blog post or news article about Apple products, so is it even surprising that the two dominant profiles are "Selfish Elites" and "Independent Geeks"?
We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

Does that make it harder or easier to keep one's identity small? - http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
Wouldn't it be peculiar if the sort of person who was going to use cocaine didn't first try marijuana, or, for that matter, alcohol or cigarettes? Who jumps in at the deep end?
A sincere thank you!

I could relate the 'balance' aspect to (unburnt) people I see (both I whom look upto and them, who are seemingly 'happy' in doing the chores of the day).
I am by code/articles/hn all of my waking hour. During work hours and when I go back. I even have my lunch and dinner by my laptop. I read articles or watch (from the huge list of google tech videos, that I have to finish).

What I gathered from earlier posts here is to 1) not compare with anyone. If anything learn and use yourself as a benchmark to improve upon. 2) don't worry about the results. 3) don't fear the failure. 4) baby steps (do anything that is answerable to big task, anything.) and from you : 5) balance.

I look forward to doing a 'Tell HN' after I overcome this struggle.
That is a great writeup. Hits home also: my wife and I had decided a while ago to not have liquor in the house - just wine. I also hike a lot (live in the mountains of Central Arizona (Sedona)) and my wife and I additionally try to walk every day on easy trails. Getting away from computers for long break is good in so many ways I'll not try to enumerate them.
At 6'3", this is the difference between a miserable and pleasant flying experience.

And if you don't want to pay the extra fee usually charged, immediately go to the counter and request it. Usually there are exit-row seats that nobody paid for and they'll give it to you.
The U.S. Immigration System Sucks, period. It's broken broken broken, out of touch with reality, has the problem of being hard for legitimate users to use and easy for illegitimate users to get around. It's basically DRM for borders.
It appears to me that you publish your essays in bursts. Coincidence, or the result of something else, such as working on multiple essays in parallel?
The odds of being shot by anyone in China unless you are comitting a violent crime is far less IMO than in the US.
That's the beauty of the internet, you can sell your product/service to anyone in the world, no matter what your own location is.
IMO, it is obvious that he views it as new and suspicious.
When you put it that way, you may have a point :)
This is a nitpick and an aside, but this sentence:

When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population.

...is not literally true. Cigarettes are hundreds of years old. They were apparently being manufactured in Europe in the 1830s.

Of course, this doesn't affect PG's point in the slightest; he's remarking on how the smoking boom stopped, not how it started.

I wonder why cigarettes went through such a huge boom in the mid-20th century. Perhaps it's simply a matter of better manufacturing techniques leading to a decline in costs.
No More Tabs - The *other* tabs solution