skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's certainly possible. I have this weird ability to basically turn off my ears when I'm concentrating on something.

It can be annoying though, since if someone is trying to get my attention they'll have to yell my name maybe 10 times.
Thanks for the tip. I'll bear that in mind.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111
http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-...
I have no problem working with some types of noise, such as noise from a bunch of people doing random things, like at an airport or coffee shop. But repeated annoying noises, like a jackhammer or dog barking, really, well, annoys me.

Two solutions.

1) Music. Turn it up or wear headphones.

2) Noise canceling headphones. I don't use them personally, but a lot of people I know do, and they seem to like them.
Ask HN: Have you used iptables to prevent procrastination?
After reading the comments on today's Disconnecting Distraction essay by PG (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192654), I realized that I wanted to throttle my internet usage, not relegate it to a few times during the day. That way, I could still spend some time online, but the "Unable to connect" page would set off alarms. Is there anyone out there who uses iptables to prevent procrastination?

Not having used iptables before, but knowing that I wasn't blocking anything because I'm behind a router firewall, I read the man page and implemented some rules that throttled my hourly connections to 200:

iptables -A OUTPUT -p ! tcp -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport ! 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -m limit --limit 400/hour --limit-burst 500 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -j REJECT

Surprisingly, after implementing these commands, I searched on Google and didn't find any mentions of iptables preventing procrastination. Surely I'm not the only one to have thought of this idea, but it didn't feel right to comment this late on the original article and not help anyone. It's helped me significantly so far, and even made submitting this question a bit tricky. So, hopefully these commands help someone else, and if you have better rules, feel free to share...
a nice pair of over-ear noise canceling headphones? Yes, low music (even classical) is more distracting than silence, but you'll get used to it (like I did). And, it's certainly better than outside noise.
How about the earmuff style?

http://www.amazon.com/Peltor-Professional-Canceling-Earmuff-...
A couple of years ago, I discovered Etymotic ER-4p headphones. They block out practically all the ambient noise. When I need to concentrate, I put them on and listen to some calm music.

I've never liked earplugs, but the triple-flange thing on the end of the Etymotics is remarkably comfortable.
How much equity did you give to first generation-hire engineers (non-founders)?
Hi, all! Would appreciate your guidance: We're looking for examples of pre-investment equity compensation ranges for first-hire senior & mid-level developers (one is coming in as a Director of Engineering from another startup, the other is senior front-end Flash/Flex/Actionscript guru). These would be initial "first-generation" hires, joining the co-founders. I know this will also depend on the balance between cash comp & equity, but let's assume market-standard cash comp is implied. Thanks!
With a "persistence-aware programming environment" that uses a database as the backend, you have both. So I'm not sure if it's valid to argue PAPE VS DB...
The Great IPv6 Experiment: Free Adult Content
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73674

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61120

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763
Finding the right balance, that's the hard part.
What about online documentation? SVN/Git/etc? Googling programming related stuff?
"[P]rocrastination is actually a subconscious lack of competence."

I agree, I think a sense of "perceived incompetence", insecurity and confusion can lead to procrastination.

Trying to define a problem well, or breaking it into smaller ones, can help a lot. The same logic can be applied to projects.

Keeping up with Reddit and HN can also lead to frustration (yes I see the irony :), there's so much happening in web development. If only there were a way to ignore fads and keep up with the really important trends...
So you're suggesting that IM, Chat, SMS and message queues aren't about Parsing and I/O?

Erlang has weaknesses, but certainly those are not it. Basically, Erlang excells at writing servers. Take a look at YAWS (http://yaws.hyber.org/) for a web server written in Erlang that can actually outperform more traditional web servers in very realistic scenarios.

If I had to name a weakness or two of erlang offhand:

1. Integrating foreign code with Erlang is very different from traditional FFI and requires some initial legwork (libraries like Erlectricity http://github.com/KirinDave/erlectricity/tree/master , for example).

2. String manipulation. Erlang doesn't have a real string type. Its string libraries and core string type assume using linked lists for strings, which is spectacularly inefficient. However, there is a movement and a proposal to change the string type to Erlang binaries and provide an alternative string library. Hopefully that will address the problem.

Other than that, it's a reasonably fast and rock-solid implementation of an FP language with a mountain of solid IPC library code integrated at the language level.
I find it's only possible when I really like what I'm working on. If I do, the rest of the world ceases to exist. I could probably work in the middle of a construction or demolition site for all it would matter.

If I don't like my coworkers, or the project is a stupid time-waster, or my boss is a jerk, or I otherwise don't care, I hear every interruption and they usually make me angry. I'll never stop being distracted, maybe because I want something to distract me to get away from it.

I know it sounds trite, but I ranted endlessly about the half-height cubicles at a previous job, how I could hear folks from far away, had no privacy, couldn't get into the zone. Now I'm doing work I like a lot and I can't say I even care about the half-height cubicles, though I guess I'd say I want more privacy if you asked.
Although this is what should happen, it doesn't quite seem to be the case. Pretty much every other ruby implementation destroys Rubinius in terms of performance. It's also worthwhile to note that 1.9/YARV, which is bytecoded, destroys every other ruby implementation and should actually be a major boost to Rails once the compatibility issues are worked out (Matz released 1.9 during Christmas of 2007, but it's just the developer version). You can see benchmarks here:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/02/19/ruby-implementations-s...

You can also see how 1.9 fares against 1.86 directly in the code shootout:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?t...

Rubinius seems to offer some nice support in terms of running reliable ruby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubinius), but in terms of performance and actual usability, it has a long way to go.
Yep... c++ is a great language. Doesn't force one paradigm onto the programmer. Fast, portable and very efficient too. I heard the new F-35 jet fighter is using c++ over ada.
After reading your comment and others', I realized that iptables might be able to help out here. I wrote up an Ask HN ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192953 ) which shows my current setup for throttling internet usage. Granted, storing pages in the browser cache is one great way to access documentation, but throttling might allow one to add pages to the cache while keeping procrastination at bay.
"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."

I've tried this, and it's generally a better approach, but then I run into a new question: what do I want to complete today? There's always more work that I could be doing, and it's sometimes hard to judge what's a fair day's worth of work.

For example, I finished one feature yesterday, compared to a dozen commits on Wednesday (and an average of about 2-3 features/day). But it was a feature that's been bugging me for a couple weeks so far, while Wednesday's work was a couple misc features, some added unit tests, updating to a new version of JQuery UI, and a lot of refactoring. When I was working on yesterday's feature, it was very much a "Shit, I haven't done anything today" - but that was because it was a hard feature to implement that required a lot of thought into how it integrated with the rest of the system. While on Wednesday, if I'd stopped after 2 svn commits, I would've done a grand total of 8 lines of work.

Also, I've found that my attitude towards more work changes significantly after finishing a new feature. Before check-in, I was like "Damnit, I can't wait for this to be over, I wonder what's on news.YC", while afterwards, I was like "Hmm, I wonder what else I can add." (I didn't add anything because it was 11:30 PM, but I probably could've worked in a few small bugfixes.)
Just an hour online? To read articles, and all the comments, and reply to them? Not to mention emails? PG must be a super fast reader and writer, or his hours are longer than mine.
Parrot ftw. Why should there be so much redundant effort on so many dynamic language VMs? They will all run best on Parrot soon enough. The languages will easily share libraries, too.
What a whiner.
Twitter & Friendfeed: Understanding Referral Traffic, Arriving at a Business Model
What are you guys seeing (in rank) in terms of social sites referring:

1) twitter
2) friendfeed
3) facebook
i hear comcast already provides a free service something like this
Blog when you think appropriate, vlog when appropriate, no need to choose a priori. Try stuff out, get feedback from your users, then decide.
Is there a site that lists startups that are hiring?
If so, what is it? If no such website exists, then one should exist. I would love to browse such a site to look for startup job opportunities. It could include a broad range in the amount of equity that was up for grabs, etc.
Okay - first question, after reading the links presented, is "Are you sold on giving them equity or are you considering paying them straight salary?"
I found these from a quick google search. Has anybody used these? Are there others?

http://www.gobignetwork.com/startup-company-job/

http://www.ventureloop.com/ventureloop/home.php
You leave so much out - how much work/output will each member do? Are both part or full time or is one full and one part time? Are both taking full salaries, partial salaries, or what?
I actually thought about doing this quite a few times, but ran off procastinating instead of reading the man page. Will try, thanks!
> This is probably something workable, but then it needs a certain proactive work from users which I think people who don't clear their inboxes don't do normally.

Doesn't matter. As long as a big enough percentage of the recipients participate it will work.

> What about jobseekers who spam employers. As much as this is spam, there are diamonds in the rough.

This is for free email accounts only. ISP's could charge a progressive schedule of fees for accounts with fewer restrictions. It would still serve to eliminate spam because spam relies on the accounts being actually free in order to be profitable.

> privacy issues. just not worth it.

Again, this is for free accounts only. I'm a big privacy advocate, but I think a compromise on privacy to reduce spam is a worthwhile tradeoff.
Also... "deserves" ?

Erlang deserves nothing. Its just another language - one which I happen to think has filthy syntax, and will probably never use for that reason.
No way - I would imagine Adobe will take MS to court over Silverlight in the future b/c sooner or later LSFT will decide to embed Silverlight into the OS.
Or Ruby 1.9 for FTW.sooner, if you are mainly concerned with Ruby.

Or JRuby, FTW.now, as amazing progress is made daily, and I expect that interaction of libraries from other J* languages will be all part of the JVM wonderland.
Java does have a pretty good SOAP stack, namely Axis.

The claim of early SOAP advocates was that it would enable more loosely coupled, 'be liberal what you accept and conservative about what you generate' type services, especially when compared to older technologies like CORBA.

Unfortunately, the approach taken to this was to add more and more metadata, and the outcome has been, well, lousy interop because implementations disagree over the metadata. The standards and the stacks have been designed and tested based on hypothetical use cases rather than having arisen out of real world uses and I think we all know how well that approach works out.

It actually turns out that there are some things that SOAP is good for - for example, you want to create a service that can only be called with digitally signed, timestamped requests from known clients you trust, well, you can do that with SOAP pretty easily compared to rolling your own. But unless you are doing B2B, it's unlikely you have any need to do that - and even if you did you will probably find yourself mandating a particular stack for both client and server to make it work. So much for loose coupling - SOAP ironically turns out to be great for tightly coupled SOA.
I wish I knew of a place to post jobs for startups other than craigslist. I have a position open now if anyone is interested for a junior .NET/SQL Server dev. http://www.learnitfirst.com/Jobs/2008/JuniorDeveloper-01.asp...
This is what I meant when I said the long-term solution might be software that controlled how you used the Internet, rather than simply turning off wifi.
One thing to take into consideration -- and I've seen this become an issue on several occasions -- is that there is a lot more work required of the technical co-founder. There's a point at which all of non-technical 'work-long-hours-to-produce-a-deliverable-under-deadline' work is done and then the effort switches over to making the occasional document/presentation revision and taking meetings, etc. This tends to happen way before the product is shipped. It's at that point that the techie catches the non-techie browsing boing boing or watching youtube videos and s/he starts to feel resentment.

That's when the stock split can sometimes start to seem inequitable in the eyes of the techie unless the split is heavily slanted in favor of the techie, simply because it's natural to think of 'value add' in terms of 'time invested' and not some other difficult-to-measure metric.

I know that doesn't answer your question, but no matter what you choose, it's a good idea for both people to discuss and understand the value of their contributions in terms other than the number of hours spent in front of the computer.
Ask YC: How do we submit a job here?
Right now, Justin.tv is the only company that has any job postings and there's no way that I can see to post one. Any ideas?
I just checked out gobignetwork.com. It seems to have a lot of traction. It's been featured on MSNBC, Business Week, Forbes, and the WSJ.

Apparently it's helped companies get funded, find startup employees, and help freelancers market their services... and has an easy user interface.

Has anybody else used GoBigNetwork?
Data Portability Evangelists Get Out of Line
my site whichstartupsarehiring.com is now hiring
Love my Maps? Use its line and shape editing in your API Apps
" If I were to describe what a programming career looks like, it would go something like this:

You solve interesting, hard problems every day, and not just 'math' problems. You solve communication issues, design issues, and you learn a hell of a lot about the way other businesses operate."

Every day? I'm skeptical. I've worked at various levels of programmerdom, and at least of the time the work was fairly mundane. At certain points I did get to work with great teams of smart people doing interesting work, and perhaps on the whole it is a win, but there is still a fair amount of tedium in coding.

People looking at programming for a career should think of the big picture and know that some days, perhaps for extended periods of time, life will not be filled with cutting-edge work that challenge your complete brain and fills your dreams with Turing-complete psychedelia.

Over all, though, if you do let yourself get into a rut (and that means actively learning new technologies and probably a good number of job changes) you will be well rewarded.

Basically, the cool things the OP listed are not likely to be up for grabs for most entry-level coders, but show some initiative and take charge of your career and you can very well be the stand-out hacker that gets the deserved perks. (You will be in a minority.)

I may very well be wrong about entry-level options; YMMV, etc., but that's been my experience over the last 10 years or so. And a strong motivation for having my own company.
A C++ programmer tries Lisp, learns a few things
Did you look at GoBigNetwork.com?
Have you looked at Ruby 1.9?

Or JRuby?

I'm stoked about Rubinious, but for day-to-day, you-can-use-it now excitement my money's on JRuby.
The link didn't work.
Looks like an interesting concept, but it appears to be just that, a concept. Very cool though.

In a lot of ways, it looks similar to BumpTop (http://bumptop.com), although without the physics.
Representing strings as lists can be very efficient depends on what you're trying to do. Incidentally, Haskell does the same thing.

I think the "Erlang sucks for strings" argument is overblown, and it's rarely if ever backed by real world experience and/or data. Erlang is fine for most string handling tasks you'll find in a typical (web) application.
http://jowba.com
Yeah, I need a better sysadmin. Hence hiring.
npost (http://www.npost.com) is a good place to check out for startup jobs.
The blog post doesn't make it clear: Is ActiveRecord running under Rubinious?
Is there a Hacker News embedd-able Button?
I have the Hacker News plugin for Firefox and love it. Is there an icon to include on websites? I can't find one.
I think a good compromise would be a table of sitting-height, but without a chair.
Wikimedia Censors Wikinews
Erlang is great for writing high-availability, low latency server-based applications -- including web applications.

What people will use it for is up to their imagination. Wings3d (http://www.wings3d.com/) is a good example of using Erlang outside of its "intended" domain.

Don't forget that when Java came out, it was only "good" for writing applets...
I was like 'scale ordie.com', what a strange sounding site. Ohhh, scale-or-die.com.
How will you control your experiment without arbitrarily voting stuff up? Especially if you don't have access to data on how long something is on the new page?
There will be days when keeping a chipper face on video is going to be impossible. Stress shows on your face long before it shows in your writing.
#$%# how many times do ppl/agencies have to post this article? I've seen it at least 15x in other places already.
http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico ?
Works in landscaping, too!
"I know it sounds trite, but I ranted endlessly about the half-height cubicles at a previous job, how I could hear folks from far away, had no privacy, couldn't get into the zone. "

I've heard it argued that the half-height cubes work well for noise because they do not create the illusion that people are off in their own separate sections.

In theory, this makes people more mindful of others and they speak more softly, etc.

It may also require some additional office culture reinforcement.
Very cool yes, but as tlrobison said, very hard to navigate.
Ah, there may be mindane aspects of a coding career, but there are mundane aspects to any career. Even entry level coders can contribute and solve interesting problems, but I suppose a lot of that depends on where you choose to work.

In any case, the whole idea that programming is a boring, non-career path is wildly incorrect.
I usually keep separate Firefox windows open: one for distractions (with the basic four tabs: google RSS reader, gmail, facebook, and news.yc), and 'n' other windows for work.

You may not need to be as explicit as a different computer on the other side of the room. I wonder if it would be enough just to theme your firefox windows. You could have the circuitboard theme for work firefox windows, and the carebears theme for play windows. The theme could change depending on what tabs are open in the window.
http://startupers.com
"...	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 ..."

Text.

The written word works best because your readers can search, read and print text. It is difficult to get Video to work because it costs $$$ to make it look good. This has nothing to do with getting a message across to an audience. It just sends the message - "I have money and time to burn on hardware". Having said that If you have a reasonable audio setup ~ http://podcastacademy.com/shows/detail1600/ plus a good speaking voice, I'd recommend doing a podcast on topics that you personally have researched, discovered. I'd suggest converting only your best ideas into a podcast. It hits the middle ground between text and video.

I think the biggest hurdle for doing anything but a blog is the technical/experience hurdles. Not everyone has the voice and experience of a Doug Kaye. Not everyone has the technical chops of Justin.tv
Hey, you can do so with Snaptalent. See the Snaptalent widget in the corner, click 'your job here' and make something appropriate.

Email me if you have questions: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com
Snaptalent - http://snaptalent.com
joinstartups.com
My roommate can only study with horrible emo rock music turned up to concert-level volume. Finals week is unbearable.
Yes, my router provides access restrictions by day, hour, website, and keyword, but I wanted a throttle for my own computer that wouldn't effect the rest of my family. If you're the only one using the connection, then controls at the router or at Comcast's routers makes sense. Also mentioned on the other thread was Freedom ( http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/ ), a Mac-only application that disables access for a specific period of time or until you reboot. However, throttling sounded better to me, and other iptables modules (e.g. time and owner) can match packets for certain users and certain times of the day. I haven't thought it all out yet, I'm seeing what helps the most to improve my efficiency. (RescueTime, feel free to implement this feature :-)
Oh and the normal listings are only for YC companies
Glad you didn't procrastinate this time around...and glad I wasn't the only one to think of it :-)
Sfsexp - the small, fast s-expression library
i was actually making a joke about how they silently kill some of your traffic for you.
Just a quick point of identity on which I believe you're absolutely wrong. You wrote:

"Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing."

I won't try to argue with you about religion, but it also denies the existence of ethnic identity.

Here's a counter-example: Black parents can tell their kids that they (the kids) are black, and that's not a lie (unless you deny the existence of ethnicity or ethnic identity), and there is no need to tell any further lies lies by which black people would "differentiate themselves" (even though such lies certainly exist). Skin color and heritage are two very real things that are very relevant for many people.
Yes, fortunately they're still up at port 6881 and have a ways to go to get down to 80 :-)
Google Treasure Hunt has begun