skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask PG: Please publish frequency data for karma-points
I would like to do some statistical analysis on the distribution of karma-points. I was just about to write a script to get the required data from the site. But then I did not want to mess with it.

Could you please publish how many items got which score? I have some hypothesis I would like to test.

Thank you!
That sounds like a really, really good idea. Thank you.
Can you tell me precisely what question you want the answer to?
Perhaps we can even make it work with only one computerL
that's actually what i liked about Linux back when i first used it. it had this "get working" feeling, perhaps because the OS was so lean
I like the separate computer concept. Is there a way to make that more practical for people who are developing websites on their primary computer? I'd like to be able to get at the websites I own and the core documentation at least. I feel like you could co-opt some of these child-safe browsing tools to only let you on to the sites that were necessary for work. Maybe this could be the next step for rescuetime--only let me on to sites that I said were productive.
All he has to do is paint the balls with funny cartoon characters and start selling them in Japan. Kids can collect all 150 different balls. They'll be a hit there, and in a year and half after launch they'll be an even greater hit in the U.S..
Ask YC: A startup blog or vlog?
In a few weeks I am starting my startup and I really want to document and share all steps of my progress. I was wondering what do you prefer, reading a daily blog or watching a daily video (like Loic Le Meur does)?

Please let me know your thoughts, and if you chose video, any recommendations on a good affordable camera?
I think part of the problem for me is having gone through public school. When you're 13, sneaking out of the lunch room to read Slashdot in the library is literally the most productive thing you could be doing during that time period. Even in high school I would have learned more by reading Reddit, had it existed, than by doing most of the homework I was assigned. The basic issue is that when you're in school you're basically forcibly prevented from doing anything productive, so the best possible outcome is to try to learn something. But at that age, when you're still young and don't know that much, you can actually learn more from surfing the web than from anything that goes on in the classroom. (School did so much to suck the joy out of reading that reading was simply out of the question for a good five year chunk of my life.)

I think the real issue is learning to realize when A) you now have the freedom to do productive things, so surfing the web is no longer a good use of your time and B) you've outgrown a given discourse group and hanging out with a certain crowd is no longer a productive use of your time. But for some reason internalizing these things is a really difficult thing to do.
An alternative is this: What I do (using my super secret self designed software) is that I monitor my usage of the internet, and for every hour firefox is open, I send $10 to my credit card account. So while I procrastinate, I lose cash money but repay my debts.
Dual boot, giving one partition nothing but internet access, and the other partition everything except internet access?
I use FF3 Beta 5 and it really is a great browser compared to FF2. Doesn't use up as many resources and is powerful enough to have multiple tabs open, w/o major slow down. Sometimes I have 250 tabs open at the same time and it doesn't crash.

The only thing with it, is it doesn't seem to like old javascript. Any time it goes to a page from the 90s it slows down biiiig time.Sometimes even crashes.

I'll wait a couple of weeks for RC version to be out though, because I hated not being able to use any of the add-ons I had installed when I upgraded to Beta 5. Seriously without adblock the internet is impossible to use I didn't even know the sites I used had so many useless ads taking up so much real estate.
No love for 8aweek? Their focus purely on the net was more appealing to me than rescuetime.
Why are you blaming external factors instead of yourself or your personality?
Also what if you use Google to find answers to your coding-related questions? That could take you to any random website.
A decade ago or so when the web wasn't quite as distracting games were my biggest distraction. On my main machine I dual booted Windows and Linux. Linux was for work and Windows was for games (Quake/Starcraft mostly).

It was extremely helpful that I could very visibly go from one mode to the other. My mind would totally shift into a different gear as I made the decision to choose Linux or Windows at the lilo prompt.
It just happened to me. Ran into a problem while programming and fired up HN and started reading PG's article. Now how do I get out of this time sink again?
Not the same thing. The idea is to physically move your body far enough away from one or the other. You can only do one at a time. Your reptilian brain must sense that something is wrong (or right). Flicking a switch while still sitting on your butt isn't enough.
Blog. Let your audience maintain control.
I do the same, except that I usually use my iPhone as my "distraction" PC. Even better, because it's more tiring to use.
I think restricting to Google and Wikipedia (or sites directly accessed through Google or Wikipedia) would cover 99% of my productive use of the internet.
Because I'm not a brain in a vat.
Ask YC: How big of a failure is SOAP?
I'm trying to do something involving a web service that's only offered via SOAP (naturally, it's a microsoft technology: Mappoint). I remember hearing a lot of hype about interoperability and web services and remote whatever and integration way back when. But now, as I'm working on this thing, I find that Java support for SOAP is questionable at best, and poorly documented to boot. Python's support has a passable interface, hiding all the setup with its powerful metaprogramming facilities. Now, if only it worked correctly. I couldn't even bring myself to look at Ruby support. Naturally, C# and VB.net support SOAP almost natively. So how about it folks? Is this another technology resigned to the rogues gallery?
I stopped reading when she wrote about her math woes.
Users are not Designers
This is an interesting business idea: a search engine that is free of distractions, for coders.
Scaling Python: Threads vs. Processes
Take Me Off Your List
What about having the other computer that's connected to the internet be physically uncomfortable to use for an extended period of time? Maybe force yourself to stand to use that computer?
Blog. I hate vlogs and podcasts b/c I can't scan them to see if the content is worthwhile. Good luck!
I'd read it if it was an article...
You could have the work computer get a filtered internet connection through the "internet computer" similar to the way some companies filter the internet.
This is a matter of self-discipline.

No matter how much you have (or don't have) it's always smart to give yourself some extra help.

2 terminals is a great idea. Kinda like keeping the junk food in the other room. I'm less likely to partake if I have to "change modes" to do so.

"Lead me not into temptation, I'll find it myself."
I wish forbes.com would take YC off it's list.
Aren't Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood working on something like that with stackoverflow.com?

I'm not saying there can be only one though.
What also works is Freedom (mac only): http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/
It disables ethernet for a specific period of time. You can only turn it off by rebooting. It's drastic (but I need drastic).
I guess most of people will get more done if ISP charges minutely rather than monthly.
I'm with lanej0 on this. OP - how technical are you? I've written several ecommerce sites from scratch but I wouldn't know where to begin with you in terms of help w/o knowing more about you.
I've found that it never works long-term. Your habits just adjust to the new situation. Every year ('cept the last couple, when I've been working) I go on vacation for 2-3 weeks to my parents' summer cottage, where there is no Internet access, no cell reception, not even a touch-tone phone. I find that I'm super productive for about the first 3 days, and then I end up playing a lot of Hearts.

Without the different environment, the effect is even shorter-lived. I had a paper due once in college. Knowing that I wasn't about to do it, I handed my Ethernet cord to a friend and said "Don't let me have this back until tomorrow." And - as ridiculous as the article suggests it is - I sat at my desk doing absolutely nothing all night. Really. I was basically staring off into space the whole time.

The only thing that seems to work for me is to make whatever I'm working on significantly more fun than what I should be doing. So for example, I got a ton done on my startup between 3/15 and 4/10 because I said "Okay, I'll just put off my taxes until after my startup's in better shape." And then my taxes got done with no fuss because I was really burned out from all that coding, and filling out a few tax forms actually seemed more enjoyable than writing another line of code. This is another plus of living with parents: they give you chores, so you can say "Yeah, I'll run to the post office for you, just let me finish this feature."

BTW, I didn't quit watching TV by any conscious act of willpower; I quit because I got addicted to MMORPGs. And then I quit MMORPGs because I got addicted to Starcraft, and then I quit StarCraft because I got addicted to HP fanfiction, then I quit fandom because I got addicted to computer websites. A distraction never seems to go away until you find something to replace it with.
What worked for me was leeching WiFi from the neighbors. It was a really weak signal, so I had to stand with my laptop pressed against the window. Never been more productive!
Three. It's a magic number
Yes, but how will assigning blame help you solve the problem? You have a problem, you know the solution, and you keep maintaining the problem because you perceive this problem as not being your fault, but somehow the fault of external factors.

Most problems exist in isolation of their causes. Let's say you have a flat tire on the highway. Sure, it would be interesting to know how it happened, but that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is that you are on a highway with a flat tire. The solution is to fix the flat tire. How it happened is not relevant.
My personal preference is REST and I hope SOAP will slowly disappear because I've never felt comfortable using it.
Hey Paul. I love your writing. I specifically wish you'd keep writing about programming and programming languages though.
allow me to put it this way: 1k of text to get a 2 or 3 digit temperature from a weather service.
I've always liked Mark Jason Dominus' Conference Presentation Judo talk:
http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/
Java for soap is quite extensive and generally works extremely well. We have used it in many places with good results. The only major problem is, as you discovered, trying to deal with discrepancies when calling complex services designed specifically for .NET.
REST is fine for trivial applications. Now try using it send a large HL7 V3 message. :-(
Woot and Random Crap | Tech Jaws
sounds like this person had some strange expectations for the field of computer science.
I've used SOAP at work with great success. We map sql select queries from the input XML and use the web service simply as a language independent (text-based), read-only database (we only allow select). The XML let's us control all queries run on the database and provides more than enough flexibility for generating a flexible where clause for filtering.

The platform independence is huge for obvious reasons. The XML based querying is huge because now the data model is totally hidden from our users. We just work from what they're asking for.
I like the idea of two different computers. Knowing the kinds of people who read PG essays and frequent HN, the "work" computer would invariably be some flavor of Unix. Perhaps you could get rid of X and just run in console mode. This would mean even fewer distractions.
This sounds a lot like Joel Spolsky's Fire & Motion.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Where are they coming from? | Tech Jaws
Second that. Who's got time to watch video? Plus, text gets indexed, and you can search it.
I had an idea for "manual overclocking" once. It would be a crank sticking out of the front of a PC that you could turn to overclock your processor when you really needed it. Mostly it was a therapy for waiting on slow processes. No, I didn't make one, although now I hop on News.YC or some similar site when I have to wait for too long, so there may still be something there.

You could adapt that idea here, with the Gilligan's Island concept of "powering" certain tasks. It would be interesting to configure your computer to require you to regularly move your mouse (or finger on your trackpad) to keep the browser window from fading away or to "power" a check of your email. But could you make it annoying enough?
Want to tweak your YC experience? Here are some GM scripts
For those of you who are interested in tweaking your YC experience a bit, here's a few links to some Greasemonkey scripts that will help. To use these, first thing's first: use Firefox.

Step 1: Install Greasemonkey and restart Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748)

Step 2: Visit this link and install one or more of the Greasemonkey scripts: http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=ycombinator

My two favs so far are the "HN Blacklist" and the "Remove upmodded YC News links". I've put forbes.com on my blacklist :)

Hope this helps someone
Why is this here? Put this on reddit or digg but not here.
blog. faster to read than to listen.
Equitable Open Source
Downloaded it and it looks nice. I also appreciate that they seem to have plugged the memory leaks. Wake me when StumbleUpon works with it, though.
I can't speak to java's support for consuming web services, but I've written plenty of code that consumes java web services from .net. So far most of the problems I've encountered were the result of the partner (using java) publishing an invalid or incorrect wsdl. A little hand editing is all it takes to generate functioning proxy classes.
This is a bit tangential:
Every start-up that YC funds is potentially worth an essay. Isn't that why they are funded? They solve a problem that nags many. So I am not surprised to see Rescue Time linked in there (The title itself is a sure bet that it would).

However, given the wide reach of pg's articles (beyond news.YC), should the link merit a disclosure? There's a fuzzy notion of when that needs to be done and I am intrigued by what these notions are. People would be baying for Michael Arrington's blood if he was found responsible for such an omission, but I am guessing it is a non-issue here. So what's the difference? A higher implicit trust-ranking for pg? An assumption that everyone already knows about the linkages between YC and RescueTime? Or the fact that these essays aren't actively promoted by pg. That could be a factor even if the probability of his latest essay being posted within hours, here or elsewhere, is now close to one.
PG and others, instead of using 2 computers, you might want to try what works for me.

I used RescueTime for a few months before realizing I was asking the wrong question i.e. (Where & how long do I spend my online time?).

The correct question, for me, was to spend as much time online as I wanted as long as I have completed the things I wanted. Once you start browsing, while you are supposed to be working, you go into this downward spiral, and before you know it, it's the end of the day, and you have not done much.

So, a better solution for me, is to enable this gem of a software called Freedom (http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/) that disables all wireless & ethernet networking on my computer for up to three hours at a time, and I can go about doing my work for those hours. At the end of it browse a bit, and enable Freedom again.
I don't suppose you have specific recommendations as far as this goes? I'm lost in a sea of libraries and options. As I mentioned, I'm trying to work against the MapPoint webservice, but I've had no luck in creating even the most basic client with axis2 against their wsdl.
There are other sites that index YC for search purposes etc., so if you are doing something that will index this site to parse threads and scores I'm sure you will be OK.
Do you have to love math to be successful in IT? No lol - what a fallacy. It's totally acceptable to be a great developer without knowing how to hand code a bubble sort or how to calculate the tangent of a klabobble. If you want to work at Google then yes, it's probably a good idea to have a CS degree though. I think this person just isn't really sure what she wants though. "In the end, CS just seemed like a dead end job. I want a career." Huh?

I would assume that more than 80% of IT workers worldwide do not know higher mathematics. I've been an IT trainer for nearly a decade and trained thousands of people as well as worked with many as a consultant and I base my guess on my own exp.
No clue - upmodding so I can save this though and hopefully someone will answer it (so that I can come back and see!)
Mobile phones just got interesting…
We are using a simple alternative that we call 'Query Style calls with JSON Responses' ... http://code.google.com/p/polarrose-wsf/
f&^ing Yahoo has to put a stupid y on everything. Annoying. "Ypattern" - #&$ you.
What is 'HL7 V3' ?
This article read like a rejected submission to The Onion.
Stability is great as is performance improvements. I look forward to the final.
Getting Boxes of T-shirts printed up?
Getting boxes of T-shirts printed up?

We're going to be presenting at an industry trade show this August, and we're looking to have some apparel made up for giving away to attendees.

For the show, we're interested in finding the cheapest reliable vendor possible, so we can crank out the shirts, and give as many away as possible. Hopefully we can give away a few hundred one-color logo shirts as freebies.

After the show, we'd like to sell shirts from the website, but these will probably be through a vendor who can print up nice multi-color shirts, as well as handling the inventorying for us and POD.

If you have any experience with getting shirts printed up, either van loads of cheap ones or expensive nice ones for sale, I'd love to hear it.
A Process List for my new OS
Hilarious.

From the article: I excel in reading and writing (like you can’t tell)....It’s their way or the high way.
Wouldn't a statement like this make more sense after the entrepreneur has sold his / her first company? Once you've obtained a certain amount of money and success, ideas become a lot more important because you've got the freedom to choose which ideas you want to develop?
The JVM had them a long time ago. They're gone, and it will be very hard to bring them back.
I liked how she was upset that she had to understand the problems she was solving instead of just applying some formula written on the back of her hand. It's a conspiracy, I tell you! College isn't for thinking, it's for getting a degree, right!? </sarcasm>
Indeed, my experience of SOAP seems to be data transfer overheads often totalling several hundred percent of the data transferred. This always seems to me to be wrong on principle.

I don't think I've ever seen an instance of SOAP used appropriately, and I'm finding it hard to think of even a theoretical example where it would be a good idea. Maybe I'm not the target audience, but it seems to me the code, object size and data transmission overheads are almost never made up by any advantage SOAP offers. I think I'd consider ASN.1's XML encoding before I ever considered sending a SOAP message somewhere. At least then you could translate it to DER for efficiency.
View cache.
Yeah, it's got some visibility. The question is: will they be able to run with it? Erlang does some stuff really well, and other things not so well. Will it remain the right tool for a specific job, or something people also use for a variety of tasks? Despite knowing and liking Erlang, my guess is that the first is likelier to occur:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/09/22/erlang
I've recommended Pre-Paid Legal many times on these boards and it sounds like it would fit here: http://www.prepaidlegal.com/. They have a small business plan that might help you. I don't sell for them but I've been a member for more than 15 yrs and found it to be very useful.
"2-3 Math courses all four years of college"?

Is it just me or does that seem like kind of a outlandish statement? I guess her school could just be really different than mine.

Actually the whole article is kind of ridiculous.
But then again I'm kind of biased.

Good for her, for finding a major that fit's interests more.
I'm going to say something unpopular now, so be warned.

Is wasting time on..TV, MMORPGs, the Internet, senseless magazines etc. really that much of a problem for us as individuals? Procrastinating obviously robs time from "useful" activities like working, but how much use are these activities, really? Work applied correctly certainly brings humanity as a whole to new and better pastures, but I'm wondering whether this is really the case for me as an individual.

Personally, I find it very pleasant to waste time. If I don't have anything in particular to do (when I'm on vacation, for instance), I get bored with whatever time-sinks I have in about two weeks and quickly move on to something that brings me forward as a person. But if there are demanding activities occupying my mind - when I study, or learn a new skill, or have a job - wasting time seems to become a natural and healthy part of my life. Four hours a day seems like a good ballpark figure - according to this I spend 28 hours every week doing nothing, in addition to whatever useful things I do the rest of the time. I fail to see how this is a problem.

To me it seems as if recreation naturally follows from any demanding activity. If you get 8 hours of real work done every day, what is the problem if another four are spent doing nothing? Or even if you only get four hours of real work done every day, or two, you will still produce more wealth than an average Joe would be able to produce 80 years ago. I guess what I'm questioning is the aspiration of being great if you don't find it natural.

Doesn't this apply even, as PG writes in "How to do what you love", if your work is the most interesting and rewarding part of your life? Even great minds need rest.
How am I supposed to write any code without googling up some code to copy?
Which PHP Framework?
Hi. I am wondering what the best PHP framework is. I googled and found a few: CakePHP, Symfony and Zend. Which PHP framework do you use or like? Or, should I even bother implementing PHP framework at all?
I think it's because nobody imagines pg would be lame enough to fund a bad product, and then promote it with his name. That would turn off lots of good potential YC applicants.
i picture a chair covered with metal spikes
It's easy to process mentally.
Blog, without a doubt.

Unless you've got an extremely compelling reason to use video, there's no question that the written word is the way to go.
I prefer Paul's wider take on things, it's what makes his writing so unique, it encompasses almost anything and everything.

I've thought many times about quitting programming altogether because it's in some ways such a narrow and suffocating field, which can relate to, yet fails to relate to, so many real world issues. Paul grasps, combines and presents these issues admirably.

My counterwish, therefore, is to say don't change your writing one bit!
If you have to ask...

(no idea, guessing 2-10% depending on deal size)