skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The plan I prescribe is just taking more mental breaks. Resting is difficult, but you obviously need more of it.

Your mind is just as active when it isn't focusing compared to it being hard at work. When you rest, your mind sorts out the things in your head. This happens most effectively when you sleep, but it also works in smaller amounts any time you zone out, daydream, drift into the subconscious.

When you don't get enough rest, your mind starts to do that processing wherever it can. This is what causes you to lack attention. A big part of it is bad habits too, often things like checking email or notifications every 5 minutes.

1. Quit social media, games, and forums (including HN). Social media is a tremendous drain on brain power. You can come back later, but I would recommend avoiding it until you have recovered. Basically, social media forces your brain to keep running, giving it new things to process, when what you want is some dead time.

2. Schedule the time when you have to do stuff. I recommend a block of work, minimum 30 minutes, max 2 hours. Schedule breaks too.

3. Get more rest. If you're feeling burnt out and not excited, you have too much stress, too little rest. You know that you have too much rest only when you are getting bored.

4. Resting means doing nothing. No TV, no games, no internet. It's all you and your subconscious. This can be meditation, walks, shower, spa, swim (or float), watching a movie with friends, sitting at a nice cafe or library.

This is very hard and will make you feel anxious, especially if you are used to a hard pace. Anxious is normal.

I split my days into two types: either "lots of pain" or "recovery".

If you find yourself just wondering where the day went, you should either be pushing yourself harder, or taking a break.

For more details, check out the books Peak Performance and Deep Work.
I like how I was immediately called a concern troll after saying personal swipes are unnecessary.
They are - in a sense - by taking 40 paid days off/year on average for being 'sick'. [1] That's two month out of every year in addition to ~10 holidays and 30 days vacation.

[1] http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/gesundheitspolitik-in-berl...
Ask HN: Anyone making passive (or not passive) income from a content site?
There are many posts here about people making money off side projects or businesses they manage on their own, but it seems like almost all of them are selling a product or a service.
I'm wondering if anyone is making substantial money from a site that just generates content (and isn't selling a service/product) ?
(Looking for examples of people doing this on their own, not big companies running news/content sites)
There was no subtle argument. It only came up because I was on the whiteboard solving some simple word game that involved matching user input against a list of valid words (e.g. the Scrabble dictionary). When asked to explain the running time of the various operations, I said that we can store the dictionary in, well, a dictionary, and checking whether the user input is a valid word will be a constant time operation. The interviewer insisted, with no subtle argument about amortization or collisions or addressing, that this was in fact a linear time operation.
Almost all the cold calls I get now are bots where you have to press some button or say some keyword to get to a real person.
Unfortunately, we already got Equifax and Experian in India. https://www.bankbazaar.com/equifax/equifax-cibil-experian-hi...
Interviews suck for both parties, a world without interviews would be a better world. Why can't we just hire someone based on his experience and projects he previously worked on? You can have a first month as a "trial" where both parties can cancel the contract.

Why interviews suck is because they are very, very biased and subjective and also not a good way to estimate the actual performance of a candidate.

Say no to interviews! If you like what someone did, hire him. You can't get to know a person after 1 or even 10 interviews, because the interview environment is totally different from the work environment.

PS: I have been interviewed by 14 different people at Google. I didn't get the job. The overall conclusion was that some interviewers loved me, my skill and my work, others didn't like me from the start or simply didn't care about me. Some of them had a good day so they gave a good "review" even though I made mistakes, some of them had a really bad day (one fell of the chair) and gave me a really bad review even though, related to the actual interview questions, I did really well.

(14 interviews = applied twice, 2 x (5 on-site + 1 online), and they also wanted 2 extra interviews to take a decision)
Thank you for correcting me.
I believe your error here is "without even going on one interview". There are many developers who have proven their skills and abilities on the job, and also have a proven ability to repeatedly fail interviews. This is precisely why the developer interviewing process is such a hot topic here.
I discussed it briefly. My interviewer was unpersuaded, and the other interviewer in the room (who wasn't performing this interview) suggested we just move on. I believe the unconvinced interviewer was simply a very junior developer and an even more junior interviewer. He seemed quite nervous.
I wonder if this act can be used in court to demonstrate intent to remain negligent? The idea being that they lobbied for this because they had decided to not invest in better security.
The reviews aren't all that difficult to read, and maybe it's just that they haven't aged well, but they come off as rather masturbatory to me.

It's a review - state your damn thoughts clearly and move on; you aren't the artist, burying your message or opinion under layers and layers of flowery language isn't impressive, its only annoying. IMO the job of a reviewer is to facilitate discussion ("Wow, did you hear? Reviewer X said..", "What? No way, that's not at all what artist Y was going for when they ...", etc.) and to introduce whatever it is they're reviewing to a wider audience (e.g. I may not agree with all of his reviews, but theneedledrop on YouTube has introduced me to tons of new artists and genres)
> It's always easier to write 1000 words to say something than 100 to say it well.

As (probably) Pascal said: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter".

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Driving an $8M Gigantic Mech Robot Suit
It's not a secret number, it's a unpublicized credential.

Any meaningful identity verification gets traced to an auditable event (ie your birth, immigration, etc) and one or more tangible thing s that attest to your identity.

SSN is definately important for credit, but know your customer laws are slowly making it less so.
Because it is the "mark of the beast", just as SSNs or surveillance bureau's primary keys are. And no, I'm not joking either.

It's entirely sophomoric to trash a book of generational wisdom by taking its metaphors literally for use as strawmen. A actual "beast" was no more a part of their daily routine that it is of yours.

If identifying and cataloging people were against people's immediate interest, then it would actually not happen and it wouldn't be a concept worth mentioning. So the apparent fact that the practice looks fine and dandy to you is an indicator of exactly nothing! The problems manifest themselves on the scope of many generations, and true wisdom is to heed warnings from past failed societies rather than laughing them off.

(For the record, I'm an atheist).
An Amiga emulator, for the Amiga version of Portal.
Every game mist do this, of course. Hitboxes are not (and can't be, and shouldn't be) perfectly accurate reflections of the target. Firing arcs are compressed down to the resolution of the game. Random chances aren't really random. Etc.
what game designers realized long ago is that tuning these necessary approximations makes for a better game if 'more fun' is a stronger criteria than 'more accurate simulation of a usually-imaginary situation'.
My usual example of this is critical hits in multiplayer games (I usually use WoW and D&D as examples, because they're well known). In D&D there is a chance that each attack is a critical success - an extra good hit. In the simplest versions, this is the 20 result on the 20-sided die, which means that roughly 5% of the time, on average, you get a critical. In WoW, crits do the same thing, but the rule is 'every so often', rather than '1 in 20 chance each try'. The designers of WoW understand that humans like these things to be "unpredictable but fair", so they have effectively a timer for crits; if you don't get a critical hit in a certain elapsed time, your chance goes up, until eventually it reaches certainty. This makes critical hits regular but. It predictable.
Use EnumSet to replace bit flags
A lot of speculators were indeed left 'holding the bag', as it were, when the credit game collapsed and there were no more greater fools to sell to. But the reason there were no more such fools is that the lenders had scraped the bottom of the barrel, and there was no one left to lend to. There's no question that credit standards were loosened across the board, and it was possible for almost anyone to get a loan. For a while, foreclosure rates were low as long as it was possible to refi or sell your way out of a problem. Another thing that happened was a lot of people borrowed against rising equity and spent the money as if it were free cash, and found out the hard way later that it wasn't. And that's before we even get into the effects of fraud--underwriting fraud, appraisal fraud, fraudulent bond ratings, forged paper trails, and on and on. The bubble floated on an ocean of fraud. It was an unrestrained orgy of greed and criminality on every level.
Now that we have access to the entire genome directly, instead of relying on twin and adoption studies, we are going to get many more of these insights. And it's not all going to be comfortable. There will be cries of biological essentialism, while the blank slate idea is no longer one that can be held by an educated rational person.

On more controversial lines, see this http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/06/184853.1 study (N=280,000) that correlates specific genes with IQ.
You're ignoring inelastic demand, which would happen in the case of a disaster area.

If a company is one of or the only company that can bring something important/necessary like generators to a disaster site, and the company knows this, it will charge more than is fair, e.g. more than the cost of the generator plus the expenses of transporting them. Price gouging generally hurts the people that need the product the most because they have no choice, and many people consider it unethical in cases like disasters. This situation is similar to the economics of life saving medicine, because its demand is also inelastic.

Also I don't think it's fair to use the term "someone", because it's often a company that does something like this. Don't humanize companies.
Small take-home paid project.
Being stuck in a socially dysfunctional and economically stagnant part of the country - one where you're unemployed or underemployed - is a little more severe than "not forming new social bonds," though I see your point.

The place I was born made sense for my parents - barely. It didn't make any sense for me. I'd be in a world of hurt if it weren't for the ability to relocate to somewhere with job growth.
Yes, society rests on compartmentalized information, which to people outside the compartments are "secrets"
Yes, you replaced (correctly) a x with a /, and this does require some (little) effort.

There is no "cooking" in the RPN input, the way you input is a little more similar to how you do manually operations, and in the order numbers are written from left to right, but of course beauty is only in the eye of the beholder.

A (as well small) advantage is that on RPN you "see" that you are dividing 16 by 8, particularly - as hinted previously - when you have a RPN calculator that allows you to visualize the stack you can see better "partial" results.

Now be nice, and do (13+3)/(3x(SQR(4+2))).

[1 3 Enter 3 + 3 Enter 4 Enter 2 + SQR * /]
License: Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License
Yes, that theory certainly eradicated drug use in the US.
What problem does a national ID solve that a driver's license with linkage to a birth certificate and photo database with facial recognition will not?

Identity theft is about the regulatory environment. Banks are allowed to quickly vet credit customers, and consumers hold the bag for cleaning up the mess.
> Literacy rates in the 1800s were low.

Not all that low. Even in 1870, 80% of the US population were literate (and nearly 90% of the white population).

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
Future Frankensteins: The Ethics of Genetic Intervention
I'm sure most businesses would love that situation, but for employees it would require you quit your current job, but have a good chance of being fired after a month at your new job.

I imagine young employees would be happy (I did a bunch of short-term contracts myself), but once you have a mortgage and kids, it's nice to be a little more certain about your new job, before quitting your old one.
Is this true? Afaik I've never seen full screen Google ads (or perhaps I have, but just didn't identify them as such).
this solution is absurd, do you understand?
> I found the argument convincing that even naming the breach "identity theft" is beginning to push responsibility away from Equifax and make it seem a personal problem of those affected, or a general societal phenomenon. When in reality it's just Equifax's poor security practices.

The thing being hidden isn't the surveillance bureau's poor security practices, but the banks who actually extend credit. Banks want to pretend that they can define identity as equivalent to a few bits of public information, and when they're defrauded blame innocent bystanders instead of their own broken abstraction.
Of course I do. That’s not the point.
A WEIRD MIT DORM DIES, AND a CRISIS BLOOMS AT COLLEGES
My verbosity is a shortcoming. Were I able, I'd be more precise and brevity would be the result. This is actually something I work on improving.
Because Shaub didn't like what Trump was doing in secret so he outed them before he resigned?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/top-ethics-of...
They do and have said it would be a negative ranking factor.

So yes, one google product can result in a penalty with another. You will probably make a few quid more on adsense though.
On programming languages: It also doesn't matter whether the language has such a good support for functional programming when you don't care about doing in on the small, inside inner-inner-function level, so `map`, `foldr`, functor or whatever... make no much difference. As long as you have the basics, like "first class functions" and "lexical closures", you can do "large-scale functional" programming in languages like Go just fine. It actually feels more refreshing in a minimalist language like this and with a minimalist and explicit type system :)
You're aware that those taxpayers actually got a very good deal, right? Roughly 10% return on investment, we effectively just invested public funds in good companies at cheap prices.

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
Even on a 16MB machine I had open tens of tabs without much problem, browser responsiveness on Firebird(?) was the same as this multi-core machine
My dad hired me when I was 14 to help with an engineering project that required calculating thousands of structural tolerances. The job was pretty repetitive once I figured out how to run the formulae using a slide-rule. At some point a relative who was also an engineer was moving out of the country and was selling off his extra stuff. Dad bought what turned out to be an HP-65 programmable calculator, thinking it might come handy for something. He never opened the box and it sat in his office for weeks.

One day I came across it and started noodling. Pretty soon figured out you could program the calculator to do the main calculations for my job. What was supposed to be an all-Summer project ended up finished in less than two weeks! (I still got paid for the whole work. Thanks Dad!)

That was my first taste of how programming machines can save time.

A few years later I bought myself an HP-41C with a card-reader attachment and then discovered 'synthetic programming' (one of the earliest versions of 'jailbreaking').

These were all gateway drugs. Have been hooked on programming ever since.

Thanks for bringing back all kinds of fond memories.
Funny how the main site loaded much faster than this version for me. Wonder if it does reverse with a 2G connection.
Just noticed that if you're using Safari the message is different, more subtle
This process is very similar to analyzing the plot of a novel to the utmost detail: it depends not only on the "facts" but very much on the writing style (compare f.i. Joyce and H. James).
Yeah pretty similar and it didn't do that great if I recall. I was thinking about the thing a little before G+ came out.
How Americanisms are killing the English language
Any recommendations as far as his writings go?

Pretty substantial list here: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/papers/index.htm
Yes, in hosted environment it is UB, unless the implementation specifies otherwise. Relevant quotes from N1256:

1. In this International Standard, "shall" is to be interpreted as a requirement on an implementation or on a program;

2. If a "shall" or "shall not" requirement that appears outside of a constraint is violated, the behavior is undefined.

3. (5.1.2.2) A hosted environment need not be provided, but shall conform to the following specifications if present.

4. (5.1.2.2.1) The function called at program startup is named main. The implementation declares no prototype for this function. It shall be defined with a return type of int and with no parameters:

int main(void) { /* ... */ }

or with two parameters (referred to here as argc and argv, though any names may be used, as they are local to the function in which they are declared):

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { /* ... */ }

or equivalent; or in some other implementation-defined manner.

5. (J.2 Undefined behavior) - A program in a hosted environment does not define a function named main using one of the specified forms (5.1.2.2.1).
Even if China imprisoned rather than executed, we'd still have a much higher number imprisoned. The US prison population is 33% higher total than China and almost 7x higher per capita. I guess you don't realize how messed up our justice system is. When you look at the numbers, it's a real eye opener. China is a distant #2 in total imprisoned yet they are 4x more populated than the US.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China#Ra...

The number of executions has dropped significantly since the Supreme People’s Court regained the power to review all death sentences in 2007; for instance, the Dui Hua Foundation estimates that China executed 12,000 people in 2002, 6,500 people in 2007, and roughly 2,400 in 2013 and 2014.

For actual numbers, we have 2.1 million people imprisoned and China has 1.6 million.
> asking the candidate if they'd be comfortable doing an actual task on the actual codebase, having them sign an NDA, and then giving them a bugfix to perform. They're compensated for their time, of course.

At Google, we call these internships.

Well, more or less -- there are restrictions regarding enrollment in a degree program, the work is for a fixed duration rather than for a fixed scope, etc. But the goal from the company's perspective is largely the same.

I'd be surprised if internships at other companies in the sector don't serve the same purpose.

(obligatory disclaimer about how these are my opinion's, not the company's, etc etc)
This option is available only on website. The app doesn't support it. Yet.
> National IDs are a nonstarter politically in the US. One side thinks it is undue encroachment on local rights, and the other side thinks requiring ID disenfranchises the poor and undocumented. That's the tl;dr version of course -- reality is more nuanced.

As a non-American, this doesn't really make much sense to me. There's already a national ID, the Social Security card. It's just a really really terrible form of national ID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement

The trouble with "designed" rather than "evolved" cities is that they tend to be a bit soulless, and inevitably the design reflects whatever the prejudices of the builders were at the time. Hence the famous roundabouts of Milton Keynes, one of the very few cities of the UK that really accommodates car culture.

Personally I think it would be simpler to try to distribute jobs across the existing cities a bit. The UK is over-focused on London and France over-focused on Paris. The US is larger so the effect is spread over the top 5 cities, but we still see that in order to start a tech business people think they "must" move to SF.
For me I have interviewed many people with a technical test, that was the easiest part i.e determining their competency. The hardest part is figuring out what their work ethic is, can they pull their own weight and will they cause friction in a team, sadly you only find that out often AFTER hiring them.
thank you for sharing your suspicions
If it was such a fantastic deal, why wasn't someone else willing to step in and take it?
Pixel Art – Thriller WIP
Why “Nothing” Is a Very Subtle Concept
Coming weeks after headless Chrome is released, wonder if there is a connection.
Can this be explained by confidence levels? I'd guess that "small group consensus" values would be a skewed towards the values from people who say "I know this" and away from those who say "I have no idea, here's a wild guess".
I did, and my portfolio is super happy about it. I cheerfully 'bailed out' Ford too.
Debugging tools in n64 emulators (such as nemu64) are sufficient to make tracking down particular game logic more in the neighborhood of a fun puzzle than a slog through (roughly) a megabyte of assembly. Super Mario 64 in particular has had an active ROM hacking community for over a decade, so there is a large body of knowledge about the game's internals, though it resembles folklore more than a systematic approach. The hard parts to discover through disassembly are the 3d graphics api and memory-mapped IO, but that was already worked out quite a while ago for emulators (based largely on patent documents).

In fact, there are level editors for SM64! Kaze, the creator of this hack, occasionally streams development on twitch; it's a lot of cross-referencing different pieces of accumulated documentation.

Edit: An example of some of the documentation, a list of ROM addresses of various textures: http://wiki.origami64.net/super_mario_64/textures
I work for an e-commerce company. This absolutely brutalized our sales until we made significant changes to our layout.

I understand that this instance is seen as a net positive for the end user, but Google should not have the power to force websites to conform to whatever Google decides is the new standard, or become irrelevant.

The end user should be deciding what is and isn't worthwhile content, or where to shop, or what have you. Not Google.
Sometimes folks have no choice if they want to be part of society. My very survival in a social setting was to not let folks catch on that I'm bisexual just to not be treated differently. I found this out early: some girls in 8th grade decided I was lesbian and people quit talking to me. This was in the early 90's. It followed me around until I switched schools again, and I had very few friends. I'm more open about myself now, but at 13/14 through... later in life... I wasn't equipped to handle such things. I'm also atheist, which doesn't fare well in Indiana.

In societies that are more accepting of others and focus on inclusion, there isn't as much need for secrets. I never found this in American society for the most part.