skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suffer from the exact same thing from time to time and I've learned to resort to lists when I am like that.

Anything I need to do goes on a list and I reward myself with some kind of distraction only after any item on the list gets completed.

Usually it's a sign that my mental batteries are running low or even past empty but some stuff still needs to get done. I find that after the third or the fourth item from the list gets completed habit takes over and I'm getting 'in to it' more and more and those molehills-turned-mountains disappear with greater ease.

Good luck combating this, it can be a real problem, especially if it persists for a longer time.

I've found that sometimes it is symptomatic of some underlying issue, something else in life that is deadlocked and needs solving first, not sure if that could be the case with you.
Even if you put brown rice in a smoothie, if you blend it enough to break the husk of the rice, it changes from a low GI carb to a high GI carb because your body can absorb the sugar much quicker.

Breaking fruits down into juice definitely changes the GI index of the carb. Check out the difference between eating a whole apple and drinking apple juice. Apple juice is almost like pure sugar, where the fiber in the whole apple causes your body to digest it much slower.
how old are you that you have "stayed skinny"? What sports do you participate in? Your picture is incomplete.
2011: Recent review of anonymized data finds 34% of users on major internet services using "This is my password." as their password sentence.
If I used Rails and had to put up with a release cycle that didn't meet my expectations, you can be sure I would fork it. The bunch of people in that thread can organize themselves and get intimate with the source tree (or switch to something else.)
Human urine shown to be an effective agricultural fertilizer
Nothing about the article says that Tony is a jerk or a thug. Tony's requests for payment will be exactly the same as any other company trying to get paid for their hard work from a customer that is a jackass who won't pay. You start out with polite reminders, and gradually increase the sternness of the letters. At some point you start sending physical letters in the mail, via certified mail, you start printing headers in red, then you switch to the phone calls, and finally, Tony shows up in their front office and sits there every single day and asks to see the president, for as long as it takes. Then you'll get paid. And after the first time this happens, no more products on credit for that customer, payment in advance only.

Also, no products on credit for new customers either. Credit is only for ESTABLISHED customers.
My first Android experience
He's saying that the quality of life improvement provided by a coffee maker in 1960 consumed 0.6% of the typical 1960 middle class salary vs. 0.03% of a typical 2010 middle class salary. A 20x reduction in cost for the same quality of life improvement for the middle class, in this example.

What additional insight do your numbers provide?
Sorry I meant 3.5 hours of exercise a week, not 2.5.

Married, no kids, commute 1 hour each way to work every day, work about 8 hours with occasional overtime. Live in the Northeast so cold winters, warm but brief summers.

I've kept it off for 1 year now and still manage to eat out once or twice a week - you don't have to follow the rules all the time. I also like to eat a lot during holidays.
This is one of the reasons I'm fond of Perl's Template::Declare. It's a declarative syntax for generating HTML that's still just plain Perl.

http://search.cpan.org/~sartak/Template-Declare-0.43/lib/Tem...

I certainly understand the use case of more-limited and embedded template languages, for working with designers or people less-comfortable with actual programming, or whatever, but when I'm just working on my own, or only with other programmers, Template::Declare works so much more nicely for me.
Standard password security, basically. At that point, there's a lot more danger from social engineering or people writing down the (long, non-obvious) passwords.
Why is this news? This doesn't belong on HN. One Rails community member got uppity and Jeremy linked the classic DHH FU image as a joke.

Come on people.

You may as well be asking where Ruby 2.0 is seeing as how we were supposed to have it years ago. Instead, most of us use flavors of 1.8.7, dabble with 1.9.x, and haven't heard any fish tales of 2.0 in a while.

As others have said, it's open source. Rails 3.0 will be out soon enough.

In the meantime, someone else mentioned Padrino. As a fan of things minimalist, I'll +1 people taking a moment to look at it while they wait on Rails 3.
1) glycemic index

2) the unbelievable number of calories you can get before triggering a satiety signal

3) the social norm of scientifically huge portions. My wife and I have gotten the point of ordering a single entree and splitting it, sometimes we can get away with a single appetizer.

4) Two billion people in Asia do eat a lot of rice. They also do more physical work and probably don't eat as much rice per serving as Americans.

5) I should also add corn to the list.
The right attitude to this sort of thing is simple, treat your open source users as you would your customers in a commercial setting.

The fact that the source is open does not mean the general rules of conduct change. A professional attitude coupled with quality stuff is what will get you contributions and respect.
Pradhan's dissertation: http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-0062-3/i...
So dododo, why were you refusing to pay that company for the product you received?

Really, I am not surprised that you took your business elsewhere. Probably did them a favor - most companies prefer paying customers.
Looks like the object-oriented version of what's possible in the lambda calculus:

true = lambda(x,y) -> x
false = lambda(x,y) -> y
if = lambda(pred,then,else) -> pred(then,else)
Hmm, interesting.

Makes me think about an alternet for when they switch the internet down.
It's not a matter of accurate estimates -- no one can do that -- it's a matter of managing expectations, and that is something a group of open source devs can do: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545892
Good rule of thumb, but I would have to break it for tinned tuna. And muesli.
It's amazing you took your business elsewhere because they were "peacocking" and not because their products were faulty, as you said. Most people would take their business elsewhere when they find the quality is unacceptable. But you were OK with the unacceptable quality and planned to continue to be a customer, it was only because of the peacocking that you left.
Of course there are differences among Asian countries just like there are differences among African countries or any other region. However, an American with Japanese cultural understanding would be much better at consulting with a Korean company than an American with no other cultural understanding.
Exactly, and while they certainly don't have to do any of that, when you have commercial developers counting on you, you will lose your community over time with a mantra of "Fuck you."

Also, while you could go digging through tickets to figure out what's holding it up, why have a release manager?

It seems as though the honeymoon has been over for some time with rails anyway. Between arrogent devs and the Rails 3 delay, I've moved on.
n2bmw
Is it possible for both sides of an argument to be wrong?

Assuming that wasn't a rhetorical question: certainly. That's actually mostly the case, which is also the reason why debates can drag on endlessly, each one pointing out wrong parts in (usually irrelevant) parts of the arguments of the other, while drifting further and further from the original point. If people forget to focus on cooperation and reaching consensus, then constructive discussions are nearly impossible.
you a drinker? I find that if I was out partying the night before, my mind just likes to do brainless and mindless tasks like watching tv, surfing reddit, etc.

That's why I try to limit it these days. I wouldn't have a problem writing documentation, but actually creating productive code is a chore in and of itself during those days.
"A reasonable reader, given the overall context of the posts, simply would not believe ... that having contracted sexually transmitted diseases in such manner she morphed into the devil."

So yes.
I love this. Finally, a use for my alarm clock.
Even in java ecosystem, there are several tools that make gui desing easier: Swing builder in groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Swing+Builder), Scala Swing Dsl (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1570175/scala-and-swing-g...), Cheri for jruby (http://objectmix.com/ruby/251973-cheri-builder-style-jruby-s...), and the list goes on.

But it's good to see the effort on Java as well, which can do DSLs as well, even those these are easier on languages that actively support them, such as scala, groovy, ruby, clojure, ...
While it is interesting I can't really get excited because to me a QSO is a two way conversation. Far more interesting to be running a few watts and be having two way conversations with people instead of being merely captured on their computer screens.
http://github.com/perl6/book/
we get a weekly box from the fruitguys [fruitguys.com] at work. it is like $25 and keeps our office of about 10 covered.
Forgot about that, as I'm using Chromium 6 on a daily basis.

The author answered to some criticism: "It requires Chrome because the other browsers aren't fast enough yet. In some months hopefully it will run fast properly in all browsers (which is not exactly what happens with graphic cards requirements).

I've changed it so it uses an .ogg instead of an .mp3. Albeit much slower, it should now also run in Firefox and Opera."
A wiki for prepaid SIM cards around the world, suitable for iPhone & Android
You need a vacation, and you need to cancel a huge number of things in your life that you "need to do".
Lists are key. A simple text file labeled todos.txt sits in my dropbox and I have it set to open with a hot key (quicksilver, osx). I tried all types of apps for todos/project management, but the simplest is the best, for me.
I've seen this great folklore story hit the front page of HN more than a few times, but it is worth it every time. It is a good reminder for every programmer that verbose, complex solutions aren't necessarily good ones.
While perhaps not 100% accurate, I found this resource invaluable in understanding quantum mechanics and the two slit experiment: http://www.higgo.com/quantum/laymans.htm
I can't help but be jealous of the ease which which today's students can find not only good deals on books, but just about any information they might need online. Everything was so much more manual and time-consuming when I was in college.
It's a great story about how CEO encouraged VP of sales to exaggerate sales success.
What really is the best language / framework combination?
Hello HN,

The various languages and frameworks come by here with some regularity, and almost always there are people that will endlessly advocate their chosen weapon to the detraction of everything else.

It should be possible to get a more objective take on this though, and that's why I'm asking this question.

Let's say that the context is that it doesn't matter which language / framework you pick (usually not the case, but for the sake of the argument let's assume that it is), that there is no management dictating a preference, you're given a blank slate.

Your goal is to create a new web application

- with long term maintainability

- to be released as open source

- that should scale to reasonable usage levels without re-work

- that can be developed in a reasonable amount of time

- that supports a variety of persistence methods

If you have extensive experience with more than one language/framework then I'm really interested in why you'd pick the one over the other.

What would you choose and which factors would sway your decision one way or the other ?
doc here: anything remotely close to normal water intake will not effect the efficacy of the digestive process. A big slug of cold water might be a skosh uncomfortable, but I've never heard of water intake causing diarrhea.
Being an entrepreneur is very different from picking up an instrument essentially because of 1 thing - you need a strong network.

Putting your intention out there and building that network even before you start will always help.

Infact that act of creating that network might be the one thing that would force you to make the jump into being a real entrepreneur.
CRM is war
You will: Create a system to stop Premium users from churning and bring them back if they do churn
That's not a mental illness. That's some sort of an existential crisis. I recommend you stop worrying about problems you can't solve, and start living. It's the only way you will find out what God thinks of you, or whether girls like you, or whether the earth will end.

And everyone is unprepared for college (as they were for high-school, or elementary, or kindergarten, and especially for their first job). The difference is in how they approach it. Personally, I locked myself in the library until I could do Calculus problems blindfolded, and then went to the bar to celebrate with my friends. Your results may vary. Note that feeling persecuted and defeated after you flunk a Calculus test is not a viable solution.

Sorry for being harsh.
You're burnt out, it happens, more so in the thinking oriented fields. As some of the other comments mentioned, you need a break.

Fortunately my gf forces me to take time away from work, otherwise I would be burnt out half the year.
There's nothing unethical about this. The unethical part is the client who doesn't want to pay for the product they received according to the previously agreed terms. Now THAT is unethical, and those people should be shot, and their dog should be shot as well. Sending them a friendly repayment notice instead of doing what really needs to be done is a great act of kindness.
Exactly, which I find hilarious.
You know you could match it against a corpus and reject the password as being too weak. Right now it's just a graphic, but if you become proactive about it by education through a meme or something and reject passwords. Then maybe people will learn.

An astonishing number of those users love chain emails. It's certainly not an exclusive set, so why don't we use that? Make it "cool", or something.
They are not being deceived. They are being told to pay for the product they received in accordance with the contract terms they agreed to. There is nothing deceptive about a company wanting to be paid for services rendered or products delivered.
because the social norm is so deranged, the good advice could be repeated 1000 times without ill effect.
Okay that was the "stat" answer (which brings in too many irrelevant details). The "business" answer is think in terms of something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter and say "the middle scores are just noise- so the only meaningful summary you can pull out is the net difference in 4 and 5 star reviews against 1 and 2 star reviews."
This seems like a good first step, and I've been looking for a way to get into C. I'll check it out...
Ga. School Forces Christian Student to Alter Beliefs to Graduate
IANAL, but the wikipedia page for defamation[1] seems instructive. In short, for something to be defamation, the defamatory statement must be "expressly stated or implied to be factual". Another possibility would be that this was "public disclosure of private facts"

So the first citation, this is not defamation, because it is not stated or implied the statement was true. It would probably be comparable to a fictional account. On the other hand, per the second citation, since it wasn't true, it wasn't unlawful "public disclosure of private facts".

This seems to mean that in fiction, everything is fair game, as long as it is clear it's fiction and you don't 'accidently' include facts.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
I bought one - a used Thinkpad T43 - on eBay a couple of months ago for that sum...
Just clarifying, Django models only create the initial tables/columns of a model after running the `syncdb` command. If you add fields later on, you'll need to write the SQL to add the columns yourself (http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SchemaEvolution). It won't try to be smart and automatically migrate your db for you.

I haven't used DataMapper in a few years, but I remember their initial approach was to be smart and automagically add/remove any required columns/tables willy nilly.
Code is the enemy. Code is weak. Code breaks. Coding is a last resort.
It is perfectly possible to be an entrepreneur without a network of other entrepreneurs, you're better off concentrating on your customers initially anyway.

I see a disturbing trend in my environment where people will spend more and more time 'networking' and less on developing their product and / or their business in general. They're all backslapping each other what great entrepreneurs they are, they organize events and so on. Meanwhile the real entrepreneurs run off with the contracts.

Networking has its uses, but don't overestimate it.
That's very true. For any fact you needed for a report, you used to have to go to the library, look for a relevant book, try to find what you were looking for... Now, you can just do a search online and have the answer in seconds.
unfortunately for them, i was a paying customer. sorry if my comment gave you a different impression.
Most likely you have given your brain the task to do so. You have given your brain the task to care about a lot of things without letting go.

The best things to start with that I know and have done:

1. Make a list of things that cost you energy. Mark the three most importan. Solve them or let them go.

2. Free your brain from your todo list. It has better things to do. Apply the book "Getting things done" to give your brain peace from the things you haven't done yet.

3. Use a countdown timer to work 50 minutes on one task. Make a 10 minutes rest and then do the same thing with a completely different task. What this does to you is NOT to urge you to get something done. What it does is giving you complete freedom not to care about anything else for 50 minutes. (I know a similar method with 25 minutes. I prefer 50. It is no accident that it is exacly half the time. Do 25 or 50 but nothing between.)

Feel free to combine this methods ad lib.

Gerd, brain hacker, hypnotist, NLP master
I prefer using a physical notepad for my list. I really like being able to physically cross out items after I have completed them.
Inception Analysis. Dont read if you have not seen the movie.
you're right---consistently faulty products would certainly make a bigger (negative) impression than peacocking.

but in this instance, for some time, the products were just fine.

a customer's trust is most tested when things are going wrong, not when they are going well.
"The client should only care about the product. While an insult from a core member may hurt feelings, it doesn't make ActiveRecord any less useful."

Maybe. But you know that every lib and app has bugs, so when you start looking at tools you take into account how reliable it is now, and what happens down the line as bugs or issues are uncovered.

If the project members seem to have a shitty attitude about users' concerns, you should have second thoughts.

Realistically you want to look at the big picture and be a bit pragmatic about these things. People should by now know what to expect from various Ruby cliques, decide if it's worth the annoyance, and act accordingly. Overall, stuff gets done in Rails, even if not on the schedule people might want.

However, people should also look at the dozen or so other Ruby Web frameworks and see if their communities might not be more the kind they want to be a part of. The Nitro, and now Ramaze, community, was and is a big reason for my interest. The people and the code rocks.
I eat a bowl of oatmeal with a little butter and brown sugar for breakfast if I found myself having a lot of cravings the previous day. That usually covers me for a few days.
That would be a very good idea indeed.

In meantime for Rakudo Perl6 the direct link is: http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo
* Keep a stack of almonds or cashew nuts next to your desk. That way it'll always be there when you get even a little hungry. This way you can stave off getting really really hungry which is usually the main problem in eating bad.

* Eat many meals with smaller portions. How I started doing this was to just eat half of whatever sandwhich, burrito I had bought and eat the rest after 3 hours. This is a good way to start getting into the habit of eating 6 small meals instead of 3 big ones.

* Start cutting down on processed food. Stick to meat, veggies and fruit. You dont need to be strict about it - just keep decreasing how much processed food is in every meal.

* Stop drinking anything other than plain soda, water, near 0 calorie drinks. The easiest way to do this is to get flavored seltzer water. 0 calories but still more "fun" to drink than water.

This will get you into a healthy state and keep you there. Losing poundage after this "state" is going to be harder but all it means is taking each of these rules to the extreme:

Ie only meat, veggies(the weird thing is you can eat as much of this as you want and you wont get fat) and fruits occasionally. Only water, seltzer. Eat every 3 hours with a bunch load of protein in each meal. This plus weight lifting will get you a six pack. Simple but not easy :).
Programming is just a means to an end, a way to tell a machine what to do to achieve a result. In that it is no different from any other skill, even if as a skill it is probably one of the most satisfying ones that I've ever learned.

Nobody learns how to program in order to program, but always in order to achieve some other goal. Writing for the sake of writing (Calligraphy) has an analogue in programming, but it is probably no coincidence that we call that the obfuscated code contest ;)

Code is a means of communication, and while it has elegance and moments of extreme satisfaction I really see it as part of technology as a whole, and not as something that stands by itself.

Computers were built to solve problems, and software makes solving problems easier than rewiring computers between jobs.

Why the negative in the question? Wouldn't it be easier to just write 'Are you a programmer?' Not that a single negative makes the question harder, it's just that the optimiser in me sees that as a thing that could be re-written shorter and more elegant.
Title should also include the price - $35 for the most exhaustive search.

This kind of speed has been around for a while - at the cost of a $50,000 FPGA box (eg, http://www.picocomputing.com/). Too expensive for the home user, but I'm guessing the NSA have spent way more, and have much faster computers.

A brute force on WPA is also very parallelizable which makes it easy to throw more machines at the problem.
For useful, non-trivial directory structure examples for Django projects, be sure to see the Pinax project:

http://pinaxproject.com/

Pinax comes with quite a few example projects using a common directory structure, which is very well thought-out, separating media, reusable apps, common templates, etc.
Thanks for the clarification. I thought when you said that the "same thing" happened to you you meant you were contacted by a fictional Accounts Payable department after not paying a bill. But I see in a later comment, by "same thing" you just meant the part where the owner pretended to be an employee.
His while can be written more concisely, I think:

Ether :: while: condition do: block {
if: condition call then: {
block call
while: condition do: block
}
}
Or: Theory predicts experimental results perfectly.