skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My mother lives a block away. Just a phone call would have been kind of rude ;-)
I'm experimenting with the following: allow myself some web time (say, half an hour), then assign the next period (say, 2 hours) to focused work. So far it seems to work. My main goal is to prevent the two from mixing together - i.e., prevent the web browsing habit from popping up at random intervals and interrupting real work. I think that's the most important thing to tackle first, rather than the absolute totals spent on each.
You could always take a leaf out of Richard Stallman's book...

http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/
Ok am going to try using groupspaces ...
I'm one of the founders of 8aweek. It was created because Zack and I deal with the same problem.

The default settings of 8aweek are definitely not strong enough for a major news junky. Mostly because the settings that news junkies need would probably piss of most users :). There are two modes to 8aweek, if you haven't tried already switch your settings to "block mode" and edit your preferences to limit the time and limit on the number of breaks in your day.

Currently we're only on FF and tend to focus more on our incentives and passive alerts than making the blocking more hardcore. If you immediately need something a little stronger I wrote a blog post last summer on the method I used before I had 8aweek (editing your hosts file).

http://thingsilearned.wordpress.com/2007/05/04/combating-int...

Another tip is to read a GTD book and try to only spend time infront of your computer when you have a clearly defined task to code out or read up on. Then walk away as soon as your done and re-define another task.

Also as always, send us some feedback on ways you think we could help you more, especially if you find another method that worked for you.
GDP per capita has very little to do with the average income of the individuals in a country.
Only in certain countries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother's_Day#Mother.27s_Day_in_...
I'd like in. Email address is accessible from my profile page and I just submitted it to your waiting list.
There are a lot of people using Macs, but there are also a lot of people using Linux and Windows.
It's tough to keep your own success in perspective. I agree it's not clear that they have a killer app (yet).
Lenovo is already making the Thinkpads suck. For example, they use shitty LCDs because they have some pride issue buying components from Japan and Korea, and therefore get second-rate LCDs instead. On my T61, there is a slot for an xD card (which my camera uses), but for some reason Lenovo has disabled that reader in hardware. It shows up in Linux, but can't read the media. What the fuck?

Anyway, the hardware is solid, but Lenovo is pulling a lot of crap that will probably prevent me from buying another Thinkpad. Dell and Apple both suck for other reasons, unfortunately, making it impossible to get an acceptable laptop. sigh.
Gymnast: Windows / Xbox360 Freeware Game. Made with XNA and Farseer Physics.
Ah yes, the PHP way. Instead of getting a library that does POP, just hack together a half-working implementation that may or may not randomly lose data. Good plan.
I think a deal like you describe would make a lot of sense... but given the way that VCs are funded, I don't think they'd like it very much. If you've raised X dollars for a fund, and you're already worried about keeping some money in reserve so that you can participate in future funding rounds, the last thing you want is to have even more uncertainty about how much money you have left in the fund.
Is the existence of JSON news?
That is a deep basement ;)
Any site I find myself spending too much time on gets blocked in my hosts file. I still have them available on my iPod Touch. When it's time to work I put the Touch across the room.

Since the temptation to read news usually only lasts a second or two, this keeps me on task.
> it's fairly common to see guys in suits taking buses

This is common in Chicago, also, and I assume most major cities in the US. It's only the SUV-loving suburbanites that won't ride the bus.
Ask YC: do you know any good web 2.0 directories to submit your site to?
So we've found that submitting to sites like go2web20.com is great for getting blogs and so on to pick up on your site and link to it. Others we have tried include killerstartups, listio etc. Are there any other good ones out there?
GDP per capita overstates the average income (because it's skewed by high income earners), which only reinforces mynameishere's point that 50k is a decent wage in Germany.
Looking for a cofounder? Come to the new OpenCoffee Cambridge June 4th.
Stand up desk. My mind seems to act in a much more goal oriented manner when I'm standing than when I'm sitting and relaxing.
Yea it can be a potential way for VCs to spread out their risk - but then they'd be sacrificing returns.
yes, awesome book
My solution? I simply stopped worring about how much time I spent doing or not doing something.

I started focusing on one thing only: the delta between what I planned to have complete at the end of each day vs. what I actually completed that day.

On Thursday, my plan was to have items A, B, and C complete before I knocked off. A & B were done by noon. I overlooked 2 prerequisites for C and had to go back and do them, then do C, which took twice as long as I expected. I didn't finish until 2 a.m. I also spent x hours on line. So what?

Sometimes going online gives me a break. Sometimes it gets the juices flowing again. And of course, sometimes it's just a waste of time. But it doesn't matter.

What's better, spending 6 hours online and getting everything done or spending 2 hours online and not finishing?

We often forget that (time spent) != (work accomplished).

Stop worrying about how much time you spend planting seeds and focus more on finishing each day's harvest.
I wasn't very clear, but my comment was more trying to highlight that political correctness is the enemy of potent, memorable communication. The article was not suggesting or presenting anything particularly interesting, but seemed to have been modded up because of its potency. Perhaps this is also what happened to my comment!

On your topic, however, I agree that it would be sad to see a Slashdot-esque consistency to opinion on here, but I consider it an inevitability. When it takes over, yet another site will become our refuge :)
I really want to try this. I have a feeling it would be incredibly helpful.
I don't know. There are lots of great WinMo phones out there that do everything a BlackBerry does but without needing a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. But everybody has BESes and BlackBerries, and all of their employees are used to BlackBerries, so the momentum is enormous and nobody is switching. The costs for a Fortune 1000 company to do so are prohibitive, and the incentive minimal since the Berries work so well.

Also, BlackBerries still have keypads superior to all hardware alternatives. I've owned Treos and a Moto Q, and I picked up a newish Berry and could tell the difference immediately. That's far and away the most important feature to a frequent emailer.

It's entirely possible that an Android phone will match that, but lots of people have tried over the last decade and none have come anywhere close. But even if they do, they have to make inroads against the massive numbers of installed BESes. That's going to take a long time in the corporate world.
I think the author seems to underestimate the importance of having a technically competent manager (he seems to work at ITA, so he probably never had to deal with that ;-)).

In my experience technical skills should are a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for being a manager. How do you expect someone to lead salesmen, programmers, or widget makers if they don't understand what their workers do?

'Management Skills', imho, can't exist in a vacuum without technical skills to back them up (which also means that 'management skills' don't magically translate between industries). 'Management Skills' are a conglomeration of inter-personal, bureaucratic, and technical skills.

As a bit of an aside, this is one of the big problems I have with many MBAs. Good MBAs have already put in years to hone their technical skills and then go back to school to augment what they already know. The bad ones (a depressingly large proportion of the ones I've met) have no technical skills (or technical skills so far outside their current work area as to be useless). I've even met a couple of managers who did their MBA right after finishing their undergrad degree (wtf?).

I'm not suggesting that the manager should be the most technically skilled person on a team, but he should have sufficient technical chops to at least understand and evaluate what his employees are doing.

I personally think that any manager interview should include the type of managerial behavioral questions that the author proposes in addition to a standard interview that his workers face. A programmer's manager should also be asked questions about Big-O notation, pointers, etc.

If you wouldn't hire the guy as programmer (the tech du jour may change, but the fundamentals don't) why hire him as a manager?

And, as a personal note, congrats on working at ITA. I'm moving to Cambridge in a couple of weeks and hope to join you guys one day. It takes a special type of man to look at the traveling salesmen problem and say, "You know what, this looks too simple. What can we do to make it more fun?" ;-)
I don't think I disagree with you, I just don't think that is relevant to the corporate world. Corporations don't want their workers installing third party apps on their phones, that's jut more IT headache for them. They want a device that enables their employees to communicate effectively. Nothing does that like a Berry. And even if it did, the cost of switching would keep everyone using Berries.
Why is this shameful practice so common?
Political Loyalties in Web Frameworks
It is the cost of housing that is the real problem.
Great article. Awesome insight.
Subsequent allocation of funds can be friction-free after "account" is setup at particular VC fund. I have heard it someone agreed with their VC on a schedule where money flows one way and shares flow the other way. They have bailed half-way too, since they were doing well enough.

Of course now that you are holding an extra advantage over VCs they will expect higher compensation for their disadvantage, if they know what's good for them.

.

Now, if you were asking for infinitely elastic fund, that presents a bigger problem. When you buy things from AWS they know the value of what they get in return - dollars. When you ask for dollars and provide equity in exchange the other party does not know what the value of your proposition is. To assign value requires a lot of labor.

What would work here is some sort of automatic way to establish value of stock. For large companies there exists one. it's called stock marker and its very elastic - you can keep issuing shares as long as you want, until your balance sheet starts looking bad for all the cash you are sitting on (or squandering). Stock markets price the equity based on SEC reports, news and analysts opinions. All of these things cost money and only make sense when such cost can be amortized over large pool of shares.

If the value of shares issued is identical to cost of valuation process the whole thing is wash.

So for this idea to work at minimum process of valuation needs to be (a lot) less expensive than the total stock price itself. Additionally, several VC funds would have to share the cost somehow.

Normally valuation is quite expensive, but if you do it every month maybe it could be less so. In essence, VCs already kind of do it for the companies they invested into. The only problem is that they will not share this information with others.

There is opportunity in here somewhere.
any systems out there that use filenames to store data?
Well, I assume that when Twitter gets overloaded the non-paying people would be denied access. Paying means you get 100% uptime, not paying means that twitter is down a lot. Not that different than it is right now ;)
You're confusing Macs-the-hardware with UNIX they run. Yes, all hackers work on UNIX of some sort. And even then, OSX requires a quite a bit of work to get it up to Linux levels of hacker friendliness.
But at the same time, it could provide an "in" to people who normally wouldn't take funding for fear of the way VCs normally operate.
As you suspect, we get a similar picture when looking at that in conjunction with the Gini coefficient and median income (and normalizing everything with PPP).

For example, Germany has an extremely low Gini of 28.3 (compare to the US at 47), and a relatively low median income of ~ $25K. This suggests that people are, uniformly, relatively poor (compared to counties like the US and UK).

So, yes. $50K there would be pretty good.
Fold Your Arms to Increase Perseverance On a Problem
Data Centers, Power Consumption, and Global Warming - Will the Web crash?
What Is the Oldest Code Written Still Running?
Should you really learn another language?
Ask YC: If you could create the ultimate tech news site what would it look like?
People bag on some of the News sites for being to fluffy, too gossip filled, etc...

I've just started a site to cover technology and startups in the Midwest: http://windywire.com and I'm looking for feedback to create the type of site we'd all like to see.

So I'm coming to you guys for feedback, what features, what style of writing, what mashups would you like to see in a tech news site?
Go offline.

Large parts of even web applications can be developed without connecting to the internet. Have everything you need on a local network, or even just your own computer.
http://windywire.com
Thanks, I know Eclipse has SVN support.

I guess my point (see: "those things would take considerable time to set up/learn on Eclipse.") was that yes, the feature is there, but it isn't free because it costs me time to learn/configure.
Those aren't "random" search terms. They tell quite a bit about the types of products you would be interested in, in this case hard drives and computers. Plus, data in aggregate is far more useful than data in isolation. Google knows what ads people with a similar search history have actually clicked on, and they can use that information to target ads at you. Google can rebuild most of the useful data from your Facebook profile (what kinds of books, movies, activities, etc. that you're interested in), and they also know what you're interested in right this moment. That is very valuable.

I didn't know that they don't actually use historical search data, but they have the data and it can be used in the future. I don't see how using past searches to target ads is so different from using current searches.
Tuning LAMP systems, Part 3: Tuning your MySQL server
Knowledge Workers and the iRevolution - 10,000 Times the Productivity of the Industrial Age
Of course, at this time the housing bubble is still deflating, so this kind of calculation heavily favors renters in many areas.

The guy at Shadenfreude Central, a.k.a. www.irvinehousingblog.com, recommends computing the ratio of a house's sale price to the monthly rent for an equivalent house. The charts on this page:

http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/blog/comments/wot-3-22-2008...

assert that the national historic norm for this number is about 180: i.e. a house that rents for $3k should cost about $3k x 180 = $540k. As a rule of thumb, if the sales price is significantly more than this calculation would suggest, it's a good time to rent instead of buying.

Having said all that: The reason to buy a house was well articulated by Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language (which, as all pattern-wielding Java programmers should know by now, is a classic):

Pattern 79. YOUR OWN HOME

People cannot be genuinely comfortable and healthy in a house which is not theirs. All forms of rental - whether from private landlords or public housing agencies - work against the natural processes which allow people to form stable, self-healing communities...

This pattern is not intended as an argument in favor of "private property," or the process of buying and selling land. Indeed, it is very clear that all those processes which encourage speculation in land, for the sake of profit, are unhealthy and destructive, because they invite people to treat houses as commodities, to build things for "resale," and not in such a way as to fit their own needs.

And just as speculation and the profit motive make it impossible for people to adapt their houses to their own needs, so tenancy, rental, and landlords do the same. Rental areas are always the first to turn to slums. The mechanism is clear and well known. See, for example, George Sternlieb, The Tenement Landlord(Rutgers University Press, 1966). The landlord tries to keep his maintenance and repair costs as low as possible; the residents have no incentive to maintain and repair the homes - in fact, the opposite - since improvements add to the wealth of the landlord, and even justify higher rent. And so the typical piece of rental property degenerates over the years. Then landlords try to build new rental properties which are immune to neglect - gardens are replaced with concrete, carpets are replaced with lineoleum, and wooden surfaces by formica: it is an attempt to make the new units maintenance-free, and to stop the slums by force; but they turn out cold and sterile and again turn into slums, because nobody loves them.

People will only be able to feel comfortable in their houses, if they can change their houses to suit themselves, add on whatever they need, rearrange the garden as they like it; and, of course, they can only do this in circumstances where they are the legal owners of the house and land; and if, in high density multi-story housing, each apartment, like a house, has a welldefined volume, in which the owner can make changes as he likes.
The ABC in Second Life - are the monkeys running the zoo?
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation have a presence in Second Life and the relationship between the admins is breaking down. Is this an example of the challenges facing longer-term work in virtual worlds?
GMail is a moving target and anything that integrates with it is liable to break without notice. Outlook changes once every couple of years and actually has a documented API for integrating with it that is updated when a new version is released (I presume).
"'Is the existence of JSON news?': JSON's simple values are the same as used in programming languages. JSON's structures look like conventional programming language structures. No restructuring is necessary. JSON's object is record, struct, object, dictionary, hash, or associate array. JSON's array is array, vector, sequence, or list ..."

It's not the existence that makes it worth posting. It's the why it's used.

One of the questions I was wrestling with yesterday was, "Why am I thinking of using XML as a data format when all I want to do is give users access to their data?". "Do I really need to spend excessive time developing a data standard with XML schema's . Then burden my code with machinery to manipulate it?"* "Do users really want this now?". Asking these questions I realised the approach I was taking was code-calorie rich. Too rich and the better alternative is "Fat-free" JSON. Hence the inclusion.

".. The cost of adding a feature
isn't just the time it takes
to code it. The cost also
includes the addition of an
obstacle to future expansion.
... The trick is to pick the
features that don't fight
each other."

I used to hang out on Slashdot a lot and I remember reading an interview with John Carmack back in the 90's. I can't find the references now. But the gist of it summarised in the above Carmack quote. HackerNews is what hackers find interesting. Data formats are interesting. Choose the wrong one and you may hamper yourself later on. Case in point is a new xml format that is in development. It work well. But does it need the extra 30Mb in software libs to run it? ~ http://knitml.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/knitml/knitml_core/...

When making things a lot of the time there is no one "right" choice. Just lots of little ones ~ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Carmack
FloatingTime, a Google App Engine application for time management: Private beta for YC users only
Sign up now and I'll let you in on the private beta. I'm looking for some feedback. All you need is a Google account to sign in.
Probably has to do with the recent canvas progress, and John Resig's new javascript. <--total speculation
I think if I voted this article up it would create infinite recursion, causing smoke to pour out of the Internet just like on Star Trek.

Thus, I back slowly away from the button...
Largely agreed. Cost of energy is bad too, though, and that's driving increases for nearly everything else.
Vertical vs Generic Business Applications
Facebook’s CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company
this article presumes that's twitter's outages are because they don't have enough money to spend on the problem. Twitter seems to be very well funded. Charging $$ isn't going to fix the uptime problem when millions in VC money hasn't.
The extra advantage held over the VCs can be balanced by their ability to cut their losses at any time. Let's say you get $1M/month for 2%/month. If the VC gets cold feet, they can pull out after a few months rather than wait for a long and expensive failure, rather than having to offer $12 Million up front for 24% of what could turn out to be nothing.
The way some sites (eg. LiveJournal) have handled that is to have paid users hit a dedicated cluster. Since the number of paid users is limited (and they're paying, so you can always add more hardware), response times to the paid cluster are usually super-fast.

It also has a neat viral growth aspect - several times when LJ was running slow, I complained to my friends, "Damn, LiveJournal's moving like a snail today" and they replied "Not for me. Paid account. :-)" Still didn't get me to buy, but there's a certain social pressure when they can use it and you can't.

If the app hasn't yet scaled to multiple clusters, you can do something similar with an interlock that dumps the user out to a static page if server load is too high, without making any queries to the DB. I've done that on a nonprofit website, and if we'd been able to charge, it would've been trivial to check a paid users table first and let them in if they're paid, otherwise exiting with a "Server too busy" message. Heck, you could even redirect to the account signup page, saying "Our servers are overloaded now. Help out with a paid account! You'll get access ahead of all the freeloaders" and let them signup immediately.
Build yourself a Scheme in Haskell in 48 hours
Please tone down the excessive condescension in article headlines. It's not that the headlines are annoying (they are), but rather that it's weird that this would be a way of getting people to click on a link?
I doubt it. A document like this doesn't get written in just a couple days.

I bet it has more to do with the flak around poor Linux/Unix support for Flash and the fact that in the face of more competition it makes more sense to open up and remain the standard.

Regardless of how open the format is, Adobe knows that they still have the best composition tool. Flash isn't going away any time soon.
"FloatingTime is in private beta. We will let you know as soon as we have an opening."

Meh...
Ask YC: Textile vs Markdown
I'm sick of writing html tags. It is a bore, even when using my favorite editors (vim, textmate).

I've been considering the pros and cons of the 2 most popular lightweight markup languages, but can't seem to pull the trigger one way or the other.

I realize that ultimately it comes down to personal taste, like vim vs emacs, but I'd still like some external input. What do you prefer and why?
Interesting comments on Disqus