skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"More people are giving up television, magazines & newspapers than ever before"

In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources.

So, put another way, do you think even people who have given up TV, etc. have, on average, actually reduced their total amount of time consuming content of one form or another, when Facebook and everything else on the Internet is included?
The most frustrating thing about the imigration process to the US - is that the US hasn't actually established WHO they ARE looking for.

A country needs to figure out what elements it wants to excel in (services, manufacturing, high-tech, etc.) and then make policies that will drive people towards those industries, regardless of where they are from.

The US system is rather agnostic (it seems equally hard for a day-labourer as a top-notch scientist to get in) as a result - the people needed are difficult to identify and woo into the country.

Canada has an interesting method to this - and is relatively open to immigration: use a point system. (want to figure out YOUR score?: http://www.workpermit.com/canada/points_calculator.htm

If you're a PHD, add 25 points - a high school grad? add 10 points...and so on. In the end, the process is relatively transparent and helps potential immigrants realize they are needed.

In the US, as part of the immigration process - they will go through intense questioning on very relevant matters such as "Were you ever a member of the communist party?" "Are you a terrorist?" - both questions were asked of me dring the immigration process. But no one even asked if I had a high school diploma....hmm.
Ive been thinking about the addictiveness of information a fair bunch lately. I would be interested in hearing from people about the following few questions
a) Is this just a geek thing ? Many applications we work on utilise existing data, our tools are changing constantly, there are sage geeks sharing their hard earned wisdom. To keep up with all the above we consume a lot of information on a daily basis. A conversation with my dentist and a few doctor friends were mostly replied with - "How do you get time to read on the internet on a daily basis?". My dentist also pointed out that in his field developments are few and far between so once hes out of the office at 5, its no books or reading for him.
b) I would also be interested in hearing from some people who were born post 1995, or from a time when internet connectivity was already pervasive. Do they look at the internet with the same eyes of enchanted addictiveness or do they take it for granted ?
Being addicted to cigarrettes is one thing. They are bad but not as bad as drugs like Marijuana (Maybe, don't know, I don't smoke). It seems that for a lot of people that do Marijuana it eventually becomes too mild for them. Also, once they are using drugs, using more potent ones doesn't seem like a big deal.

This is only an anecdote: I had a friend who started using Marijuana. He said he only used it once in a while and it was no big deal. That it wasn't that bad really because he didn't use any of the more potent stuff like cocaine as other guys did. In his mind I supposed he was convincing himself that the really bad guys are using cocaine. According to him using Marijuana is no big deal. Two years latter I had a conversation with him and he tells me he was arrested for using cocaine while driving. He tells me it is no big deal because he only uses it every once in a while and that he is not like other guys that use more potent drugs. No big deal really.

It seems to me that starting with a mild drug can lead to using more dangerous drugs. And yet every once in a while I read somebody saying that you should use Marijuana or that Marijuana is no big deal.

No point really, just ranting a little. I guess I would like to tell you Marijuana users that if you like it don't try to convince the rest of us into thinking it is no big deal. Go ahead and use your crap if you want but don't advertise it to the rest of us as if it is no big deal.
This may be a source of confusion. In most circles, release candidate signifies that this should be the final release, and will only be changed if new bugs emerge.
I started eating primal/paleo/low carb (I prefer the latter) after reading 'good calories, bad calories' by Gary Taubes. I've been linking people to these notes for a while now: http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba... you miss some nuances, explainations and a boatload of references from the book, but it's a nice intro.

As far as being vegan goes, check out 'the vegetarian myth' by Leirre Keith, I've been reading parts of it and it's both entertaining and it really gets under your skin.
it appears you can now refer to yourself in the third person: kids, sesame street... this sounds like an educational setting to me.
this is obviously a mysql bug ;)
The design is beautiful, but why would I use this over WriteRoom? For years now, I've been writing at least 500 words in WriteRoom every single weekday, and I'm closing in on a year of doing it (and a bunch of other habits) without missing a single day. It's not that hard, I know I'll probably never lose my entries (time machine + dropbox backups), and my privacy is more assured. I'm just not sure I see the advantage here...
The iphone is definitely a hip flask for internet addicts.
Ah that explains it, good to know that its currently as intended :)
Whoever says there aren't Entrepreneurs in Mexico is wrong
This is a week MDP-athon whose we'll have at the end of the Challenge a VC dinner here in Mexico City!
If you don't spread the word about internet addiction on Hacker News, how are the internet addicts going to find it?
The answer is clearly to rely less on social antibodies to specific addictions and more on recognizing and fighting the general pattern of addictiveness, an effort that this essay itself is a part of. The more we learn about the generic properties of addiction, the more we can not only recognize addictive and harmful things earlier, but also deliberately make worthwhile tasks addictive as well, such as exercise as an obvious example.
As much as I hate to admit it, the fact that this is on Python.org Wiki makes it a biased source.

I gave it a chance and went ahead and read it. Sure enough, it sounded very biased towards Python with many PHP inaccuracies.

I really would be interested in a true "logical comparison".

edit: this is coming from someone who primarily programs in php & python, but with a lot more php experience.
I think PG makes a good point, but I hesitate to call some of these things addictions, because many typical people get over them. I watched a lot of TV when I was a little kid, but practically none once I was past twelve. I watched my daughter do the same switch, but even more rapidly. I found MMOGs incredibly attractive when they first came out, but much, much less attractive by a few years later (as measured by no subscriptions). A lot of things people call addictive are qualitatively different from an addition to opiates, say.

Still, he's definitely right that the world is getting more addictive.
I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you.

The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so
there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these.

The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back.

I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again.

And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two
years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life.

And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then.

And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.
Interesting idea. I think I'd much rather interact with this service via a browser plugin or something that makes it more painless to get a peek at where I'm about to be redirected. Any plans for such a plugin?
They probably think you are weird because consciously or sub-consciously you are acting smug.
Is this true? Because the Archos 5 Internet Tablet source seems to be on their site (I originally didn't find it because the naming is kind of weird, but it's there!)
So the only thing that differentiates this from Google is the ability to save some preset search booleans?

What happens once Google adds that functionality? It already has the same types of options (inurl:, +/-, etc.), adding the ability to save them is a trivial addition.

Plus, with all the search engine privacy hoopla in the last few years, wouldn't people be concerned about having to be logged in while you search?
How will Apple respond to the DMCA revision? They won’t.
Could you link to an article where is says the minimum amount you need to invest for the countries you mention? I live in Ireland and I've never heard of these limits for the countries you mention.

Here's a link showing the minimum capital requirements for different nations:

http://doingbusiness.org/documents/Simulator_2010.xls (Excel Spreadsheet)

Some Examples:

China - Overall Ease of Doing Business: 87th - Min. Capital to Start a Business(% income per capita): 130.9%
Germany - Overall Ease of Doing Business: 25th - Min. Capital to Start a Business(% income per capita): 0%
Ireland - Overall Ease of Doing Business: 7th - Min. Capital to Start a Business(% income per capita): 0%
Singapore - Overall Ease of Doing Business: 1st - Min. Capital to Start a Business(% income per capita): 0%
United Kingdom - Overall Ease of Doing Business: 5th - Min. Capital to Start a Business(% income per capita): 0%
United States - Overall Ease of Doing Business: 4th - Min. Capital to Start a Business(% income per capita): 0%

Granted, the rules may be (somewhat/drastically) different for non-citizens, but imposing extremely high minimum capital limits (if it's true) is very stupid economically.
The "Slow movement" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement ) is an interesting example of an attempt to create a mass movement that addresses some of these issues, while not completely cutting off modern conveniences.

(I'm linking it not because I agree, but because it's an interesting example of an attempt to collectively change people's response to modern technology. Examples like the Amish are in a similar vein, but much more extreme.)
I don't know about that. It's more frustrating to use long-term than a full fledged browser, so while it gets the job done for utilitarian fact-finding while on the go, it can't feed an unfocused addiction. At least not in my case.
s/Most/All/. I've never heard of a release candidate meaning anything else, it's something you'll release as-is with a non-rc version unless critical bugs emerge. This is a beta, not a RC.
One problem that people who work with computers for a living have versus people who don't, is that, if you are an internet addict and you are, e.g. a nurse, you can always just avoid computers altogether for, say a week or a month, if your addiction gets out of hand.

But for people who work with a computer for their day job, avoiding the cause of the addiction is much tougher.

It's like if a TV critic had a TV addiction. He/She couldn't just stop watching TV altogether to defeat the addiction.

Sometimes I think the only solution for extreme cases is to take a sabbatical from work and become something like a waiter for a few months. No computers needed and lots of human interaction.
Yes, my wife is amazing. She never believes me when I tell her though. This comment might finally convince her!
seatguru.com addresses some of this already. Although, the limited extra info they provide doesn't often help to differentiate one flight from the other.
(frequencies "abcaaabcccaabrrcb")
Sounds familiar:

Anathem is set on and around the planet Arbre. Thousands of years prior to the events in the novel, society was on the verge of collapse. Intellectuals entered concents, much like monastic communities but without the religious elements. Here, the avout—a term for intellectuals living under vows and separated from saecular society [...]—retain only limited access to tools and technology and are watched over by officials answering to the outside world (known as the Sæcular Power).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
Not quite that massive. With 3 degrees of freedom it's impossible to say for precise (see simpson's paradox), but according to the numbers,

europe's industrial robots = americas's*0.09 + asia-pacific's*0.51 + africa's*41.66
europe's manufacturing workers = americas's*0.06 + asia-pacific's*0.28 + africa's*1.67
africa's manufacturing workers = europe's*0.60 - americas's*0.03 - asia-pacific's*0.17
Internet addiction seems to be the elephant in the room of modern culture. Whole families are addicted, but it's not talked about. Not to mention the more, shall we say, illicit side of the 'net.

That said, TV and newspapers are arguably just as bad (or worse) and they've been around for ages. So that's... reassuring.

However I think the iPad an iPhone are good in the sense that they remove the social isolation involved with logging onto the net.
It might be too broad to refer to the internet as a single entity. Those of us with internet addiction are actually addicted to specific things online - the internet is just the medium.

In the case of hacker news, what we're addicted to is startup news and gossip. It's ironic that this very morning I was thinking about how to produce some sort of audio version of HN for my daily commute.
I wrote something similar for chrome a while ago:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/edooipcjkkbjmnog...

It's a little bit more lightweight (not in respect to memory usage maybe).
> one array type that doubles as a list and a dictionary. Dictionary keys are iterated in their original order.

Retort: Python 2.7 and 3.1 finally has standard ordered dictionary type (OrderedDict from collections) with basically same functionality.
We've known each other for a very long time, (met when we were 10, started dating 10 years ago), so this was just another experience in a very long series of events. Our relationship is stronger now, but it was strong to begin with.

Any more than this is too personal to share.
I don't think Marxists have that view at all--- university pension funds, as large allocators of capital, are pretty universally condemned by Marxists (who see them, along with endowment investment funds, as prime evidence of the absorption of the modern university by neoliberalism). The view you're talking about is more standard social-democratic liberalism, which likes certain kinds of capitalism but not other kinds.
Web Designer as The Artist, Scientist And Philosopher
>> the ternary operator/statement (... ? ... : ...)
> Retort: Python 2.5 has conditional expressions

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0308/ looks more like a hack than a feature
I actually want to get an iPad just to quarantine my internet addiction. If I treat my computer purely as a workspace I'll get more done while at my computer; if I've got an iPad for other things, I won't go through Hacker News withdrawals.

This was inspired by something PG said in another essay--that he deals with internet addiction by using separate computers for work and internet. The iPad is just a purpose built machine for that, in my view.
Why do you think that explanation is particularly probable out of all of the other possibilities? It seems more likely that society would consider actions strange if the actions have justifications that most people don't understand or agree with, and they don't succeed in masking their judgement.
Scripting News: How about a hybrid of Google Calendar, Foursquare and Flickr?
A while back PG said that he has a separate work computer that's not connected to the Internet. RMS goes even farther, only interacting with the Net via email.
Thanks for the great reply. Back in high school I used to work at a real nice hotel doing Bell and Valet service. I remember being quite similar to your experience as a bartender. I wasn't dancing but the job had its own charm in running a mile for cars or seeing how well I could pack the bags in a car and all of the other small things like those that make up a job like that. I also attribute learning how to be more social to this job like you do with your bartender job. Being forced to talk to strangers all day definitely builds up some networking suaveness.

The thing that I really liked about the guest services gig was that the harder I worked the bigger my take. I made a lot of money doing the job and I definitely felt better about it because I knew that if I hadn't put in my best effort I wouldn't have made quite as much. So, I guess what I am trying to assert is that perhaps there is a sort of link me and presumably you, sophacles, who enjoyed working a service job, moreover one that most people hate, because of the nature or getting more value for more work and our interest in entrepreneurship?
I'm making an attempt at trying to establish myself online to catch the attention of VCs and angels now that I've moved to the bay area, but the result has been a constant urge to monitor everything. Buried within PG's essay is a hint that maybe he thinks it's not worth it in retrospect - zen painter or junkie hacker it seems.
While everyone talks about the wired generation, I think that the ability to focus on one thing for an extended period of time may become the killer mental app of the future.

The long hikes that PG mentioned are a good idea. I've started to do things that exercise my ability to focus. Reading challenging novels and writing are good drills.

I've also started trying to recognize when I try to do two things at once and look for opportunities to focus on only one thing. This can be trivial. I'll fold laundry while watching a tennis match, but I avoid browsing the web. I've noticed that if I do this while watching sports, I quickly lose track of what's going on in the game.

Lastly, I'm more certain than ever that you really need to be engaged (maybe even passionate) with your work to stand a chance against distraction. About 6 months ago, I was really enjoying my programming project, and focus came easily. It took no motivation to get started. I did check HN, but I wasn't killing time on it.
Is Groupon Sitting on a Legal Timebomb?
I'm from Ireland myself, and it is indeed different for non-nationals; eg Ireland requires E300,000 a credible business plan, and ability to hire at least 2 people. http://www.inis.gov.ie/en/INIS/Pages/WP09000012

It is sort of stupid economically, but then the other side of the coin is that government don't want to be accused of selling visas or try to evaluate micro-businesses proposed by people who might or might not be actual entrepreneurs. Protip: being a professional writer or artist of any standing makes living in Ireland much, much easier.
On one hand, TiVo, Hulu, and Netflix have replaced casual channel-surfing (which can consume unlimited time) with purposeful TV watching where you only watch the shows that you want to watch. OTOH, the amount of TV available these days is enormous (cable now has four-digit channel numbers) and there are recommendation engines that can always find more for you to watch.
From memory when I read the DVD specs many years ago, the no-skipping provision was put in there solely for the use of the FBI warning screen.

It is an abuse of the spec to mark what are basically "advertisements" as such in order to prevent people skipping them.
Redesigning the Boarding Pass
The cost was around $80 for business class which is something like $10 more expensive than regular.

Travel time is 4 hours (driving is 2 hours). Border check is in Vacouver, so we just rushed around slowly walking people not to get stuck in line.

In general it makes more sense to drive than to take this train. We took it because we were going to Olympic Games and we were afraid that border wait time will be unpredictable (it turned out it was completely ok on that day, but we already had the tickets) and for sightseeing reasons. It was also refreshing not to worry about parking and to use public transportation, which is quite usable in Vancouver (compared to Seattle, for example)
I prefer http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/: that's the top 10 articles of the previous day. Reading them one day late is not too bad for me, and it helps procrastinate less: it has put an end on my "let's see if there's something new".

Still this is a very good alternative, which I'll probably end up trying :)
I think this because there are plenty of vegetarians and non-smokers, and non-drinkers around that people overall don't really find it weird. I myself do eat meat and drink alcohol but it is so little overall in a year that you could almost count me as a vegetarian and as a non-alcohol drinker. I do not smoke at all. Also, I've noticed that people that claim to be vegetarians do it in such a way that they come off smug.
"That said, TV and newspapers are arguably just as bad (or worse)....."

How are newspapers as bad or worse than internet addiction? You don't have most of the members of a family going off to read newspapers in different parts of the house.
Agree completely about long hikes. Sadly I was posting pictures from a hike in the Tetons this summer. Not sure what that has to say about Internet addiction.
via criteria that Apple defines...