skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(This first one made/saved me thousands) I use it both for home and work:

I automated the online creation of late delivery “inquiries” to Australia Post (I.e when an parcel is late or has gone missing).

Australia Post has a service level agreement for prepaid Express Post satchels where if they’re late they will give you a satchel for free (or credit your account).

When I applied this to every order my work shipped for the past year, the script accounted for 90% of the day’s inquiries I got back thousands of dollars.

The script is written in Rubsy and uses Watir.

Another script I wrote automatically pays my waste collection company via fax. They have the ability to email a PDF invoice but not take payments online.

The script takes the PDF, and fills in my credit card details, adds a signature and faxes it to the company.
What you are saying is generalized nonsense about anecdotal performance and what people want. Software architected for multi core from the beginning can scale extremely well.
Perhaps you've listened to the regular version of a song, but the Discover Playlist has surfaced its "radio edit" or some other very, very similar version?
All along, or after 10 years of physiological/mental changes from your 20s? Just because it takes when you're 30 doesn't mean it would have taken in your 20s.
and exists:
WIN: File/Private Session
Android: Your Library/Settings/Social/PrivateSession

This will cause your songs not to be influencing the AI curated playlists (like Discover Weekly and Daily Playlists)
Also, IIRC, a lot of the "cheap" property in Detroit has substantial back taxes any new owner has to pay on top of the hassle that comes with basically replacing a house from the foundation up.
The implications may be that the FSB provided specific signatures for them to look for, they came back when they popped up on a machine located at this contractors house, then further assessments were performed. In context that’s not far fetched at all.
Java is a language where nullable types aren't truthy/falsy. The following code won't compile:

String foo = null;
if (foo) { // error: incompatible types: String cannot be converted to boolean
System.out.println("was true");
} else {
System.out.println("was false");
}

If one changes `if (foo)` to `if (foo != null)`, then the code will compile.
I'd be worried about eye strain with such long, continuous, and frequent periods of usage.
Remote job listings (customer service, IT, etc.)
The FOV and PPD isn't there yet for either though. If anything is going to replace monitors it will be AR displays, not VR.

Multitude of reasons but the biggest one would be that you can still work with others line of sight in the real world with AR, whereas everyone needs to be in VR to.

Plenty will protest with the idea that the isolation of VR would be beneficial to focus, however 1. You can get most of the way there with AR as is, or just add an opaque cover to the AR glasses and 2. It's cognitively beneficial to see your real surroundings over the course of an entire work day (even if you claim your work day is 4 hours)
Yeah, I remember big spread between MtGox and the other exchanges. There was a reason for that.
Guide: Reaching Out to High-Profile Leaders for Job Opportunities
> Not trying to suggest that medicine, therapy, etc. does or does not work, just that there may be some other things that people can consider and experiment with.

Why not suggest this? It is so funny to see people been so skeptical about religion and always so believer in anything called science.
That google guy who wrote the book disagrees:

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Inside-Yourself-Unexpected-Ach...

p.s. book is worth read IMO.
I don't know why all of your comments are getting heavily downvoted. You're making reasonable points, politely. I've upvoted them.
It's also a viscous cycle once you stop doing these things. I had everything going well for me, but then a bunch kinda blew up at once and I stopped eating healthy, quit working out, and was losing sleep because I was trying to solve all these other problems and felt those things were pointless. "Oh, I can't get in the mindset to lift today I'm too stressed out and depressed/hopeless." That led me from only skipping a few days to skipping months.

I ended up going into some escapism mentality where if I'm not working I'm going to play video games/watch TV. It was a terrible rut until one morning I looked in the mirror and realized I'm letting life slip away. I'm not growing (well at least not in the productive way). Mind you most of those "explosive" problems were solved, but I wasn't. I freaked out, threw on some gym clothes, went to the gym, and ran. I don't even know what I was running toward. But I was running. I began lifting again, doing meal prep, back to studying, programming pet projects, reading, and it all came together.

It can hit you in waves, but one of the best ways to keep your head above water is to make sure those three things ElatedOwl mentioned are in check.
That's what the original paper is kind of about. The Scientific American piece is a little misleading to me, because it implies the paper is about lack of evidence, when I think the original paper is a bit deeper than that, and about definitional issues and so forth. I think the original authors might say that it's about the need to figure out what exactly is working when it does, and what works and what doesn't.

Self-reports of well-being are important, because self-perceived well-being is so important to the construct. I'm not saying other perspectives aren't important, but think of it this way: if you thought you were severely lacking in well-being, but others thought you weren't, would you want others to ignore your own perspective on that?
Rimshot
As someone who has meditated 20 years, 2-4 hours per day and participated in long retreats 7 days to month, I have always been skeptical about this "mindfulness business". It has it's roots in old meditation traditions, but they were never supposed to bee quick fix, relaxation or therapy.

Many therapy methods work well with the therapist who developed it, but don't give good results when packaged into programs and courses. Kabat-Zinn is experienced meditator and I'm not surprised if his therapy works when he is involved. He has so much personal experience. Meditation traditions transfer their knowledge to the next generation trough training regime that takes decades. It's not (yet) science that can be transferred trough short courses and readings.

I have instructed newcomers in meditation. If they have mental problems I suggest they seek therapy and do little meditation on the side. Meditation can help, but I have also seen meditation induced psychosis several times when people see it as the cure for everything. Many experienced meditator's go to normal therapy to deal with their mental problems and find it useful. Some use medication.

My experience is that people with mental problems benefit more from concentrative meditation that builds one-pointedness and calmness, than pure mindfulness type awareness meditation that brings problems into the consciousness. Build strength before facing your inner dragons.
Do it yourself and verify. If it works for you, then great! Otherwise move on. Most of the drugs recommended by doctors and FDA also don't work. But people are still trying them out. :)
I'm pretty sure I could do that too without much practice. Assuming it was an intentional choice, anyway.

Your body can only handle so much pain before it basically shuts off, and then you don't feel much of anything. The real pain comes later, when you're healing.

Not going to test it out though.
> For persons who don't benefit from such therapy, mindfulness could mean re-focusing away from the abstract thinking that solves problems or invents or creates. Many people deliver their work product or improve their circumstances through this type of thinking. Practicing mindfulness may negatively impact them by reducing the amount of time they spend contemplating in such areas.

I understand where you're coming from with this, as I used to also hold this (very logical) opinion. However, after meditating and engaging with Buddhist philosophy for many years, I've never felt negatively impacted in this way. I now view this opinion as resulting from an overly-simplified understanding of mindfulness.
That's amazing— thanks!
Different things can be shown by different measurements. Income disparity in Brazil is high, so you have a few people like Jorge Paulo Lemann worth tens of billions of dollars, and then a lot of poor people. So per capita GDP there is more an indication of how he is doing than everyone else (GDP divided by population).

One metric we can use is hours worked per week. Obviously, the less hours of required work needed, the better for the average worker. Of course measurements like this are not the focus of many blog posts. And you yourself are probably deficient in this respect to many hunter-gatherer bands, who do less than 40 hours of work per week. They spend the rest of their time in leisure activities. Marshall Sahlins "Stone Age Economics" goes into this. You yourself are probably required to work more hours per week than native people in Polynesia and other areas.
The Boring Company has a solution for housing: tunnels with no traffic or stoplights. 200kph means you can live far from downtown and still be at work in 15 minutes.

“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk
GDP only measures taxable activity (goods bought and sold), which was a far smaller part of a person's day to day activity back then. Also, these are 1990 dollars, which are worth about twice as much as 2017 dollars.
I really like the idea. Feel there is lots of potential to build similar stuff for anything related to sales.
While this article has perfectly reasonable things to say, I'm enormously skeptical taking life advice from a 22-year old. At 22, life is simple. Your choices have no real consequences for anyone other than yourself. Your life is your own, and you are entirely free.

Tell me more about how you grapple with your mean inner voice when you have a family to take care of and real obligations to attend to.

Advice: putting your tender age in your Medium signature doesn't make you look like a Wunderkind prodigy; it makes you look naive.
Their flexibility. I'm using Wunderlist & bear currently, however, I wish Wunderlist had better integration for note taking and I wish bear could do task managment, but I wish both would support Markdown.
I was hoping to buy the current Oculus, but I never got around to it since I for one need to plan out a bit more when it comes to that price. At a $200 price point though, I can pick one up without having to think about it twice. I'm getting one when it comes out.
And that is proof of what ? That some forms of mindfulness can overcome some physical or mental stimuli ? I think this can cause an increase in self-destructive behaviour as much as affirmative ones (as your example shows). Why would that be proof of the positive mental effects ? (I think it's what this general discussion is about at least.)
When you visit the Tower of London and enter the bedroom chambers of the King and check out the modest bed and other things the tour guide pokes some fun at how most modern people today live better than kings of the past.
My landlord charges a flat fee for just using their online portal and my checking account. There's another 3% fee for using a card.
Exactly.

And what is particularly galling about Amazon is they essentially pay no taxes. Since 2008, Amazon has paid $1.8B in income tax while Walmart has paid $64B [1]. So they're basically leeches demanding public services while contributing virtually nothing. As someone whose name I've forgotten said, the fundamental question surrounding silicon valley / SV type companies is how do you run a country when a company with $0.5T market cap / Fortune #12 essentially pays no taxes. Who pays for roads/fire services/schools.

[1] https://www.l2inc.com/daily-insights/no-mercy-no-malice/brea...
A Walkthrough of Prometheus by James Turnbull
The author seems to discuss "mindfulness" like a generic thing, mentions trials without actually referencing them or diving into the details in order to consider their validity, and finishes the article mentioning that "it's a personal experience".

Quite unworthy article of HN front page in my opinion, besides the possible interesting discussion that might arise based on it.
It is just not that: you need to display Mesopotamia and China and the Indus valley. Those were the fertile and rich places in the world along with Egypt.

Those places are now devastated by war, revolutions or overpopulation, or just were invaded by other empires.

It is a reminder of the powerful forces of change.
>While the Romans were able to build engineering marvels such as roads and aqueducts, they wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a mobile phone.

But - to be fair - they wouldn't have needed to buy a new smartphone every two years or so, nor to pay subscription to any mobile carrier.

With all due respect for the map (and the accuracy of the calculations by the econo-historian) that may be very valid, the comparison with modern times (i.e. the linked to article) makes (at least to me) very little sense.

GDP/PPP based calculations on poverty line already (even in modern times comparisons between different countries) suffer from "skewing" because of the different needs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity#Global...

let alone comparing today with 2000 years ago.
In college I wrote a script to register for classes. I'd input the potentially-full classes I'd like to register for, and it would just hammer the registration site repeatedly until someone removed themselves from the class at which point I'd be registered. I'm still amazed IT didn't pull the network connection to my dorm room or have any kind of rate limiting.

No 8am sessions for me!
I imagine this is the way we get to "true AI", or AI indistinguishable from our own. We train it with a simple virtual environment, that we can gradually increase the complexity of, until it mimics our own. Then we can download the AI into a robot. Boom, it's that easy :P

One interesting outcome of this type of AI is that no one knows what the robot's thinking, since no person designed its brain. The brain evolved, just like ours did (but over such a shorter period of real time).
Passive learning. Whenever I come across something cool or interesting, I put it into a chrome extension I made called "Harvest". It sends me email reminders of what I've added on a spaced repetition schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days into the future) for optimal retention

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...
http://creativyst.com/Doc/Articles/Mgt/AgileBridges/AgileBri...
More importantly, it doesnt require external sensors (to the opposite of the vive controllers and headset which require the 2 lighthouse sensors)
> I don't think people then were 1/100th as happy as us on average.

Your user name is oddly appropriate for that topic.

In ancient Greece, the Epicureans (a form of Hedonist) supposed that people's pleasure and pain depend on the satiation (or lack thereof) of their appetites. Related is the idea of "Hedonic Adaptation" which has it that people's appetites tend to adapt to conform to their expectations and that, as a consequence, different people in wildly different circumstances tend to be about equally happy.

Perhaps you knew all of that already. But you seem to be rejecting the idea of the Hedonic Treadmill without properly mentioning it.
Homeschoolers National Merit Scholarship-Earn One
Thousands of years of Buddhism isn't midnfullness therapy.
I get the same feeling when I see these products. I think they are targeted at the (surprisingly large!) segment of the population for whom their phone is their only computing device.

In the bubble that is HN, they make little sense, but I assume these companies must have done some kind of market research that indicates that these products actually drive demand in a consumer group that has basically zero overlap with ours.
> Edit: to the down voters, I'm not implying it's any easier than, say, beating cancer.

It for sure is and a lot less damaging. Only depressed people that can't pull themselves out of it think it's not, because they are depressed. Childish behavior frequently comes together with depression. I've been there, fixed it without meds, and would never freak my brain chemistry to not feel depressed with the shits of my life. Depression is a EVOLUTION trait. Get over it.
To extend this a bit, I would consider Flask if I didn't have a relational database. Without a relational DB, you lose the ORM and most of the ecosystem that's tied to it. At that point, something lightweight and simple is appealing.

In practice though, when I've been in that situation, I've found it more compelling to just drop Python and use Go instead. I guess with a use case that relied on NumPy, Pandas, Tensorflow or something Python-specific but that didn't have a UI, I might still go with Flask.
"Anecdotal data is better than a study" ... that's a big agree to disagree.
Actually, I remember some years back that when I needed a REST API for a project I started with django-tastypie because back then (circa 2012) was more popular than DRF. Unfortunately, I did not have a good experience with it (too long to release a new version to support new django version) so I switched over to DRF and hasn't look back since.

I'm not really familiar with the status of django-tastypie right now but from what I see from the other comments it probably is better than tastypie.

Also please notice that I wanted to include one of each kind of package in the list since it's the actual list of packages I'm going to use when I need a feature - so there's no reason to include both DRF and tastypie (yes, django-simple-history and django-reversion were both included but as I explain in the article they have different usage models).
I've considered buying a dirt cheap "VR" headset as I already have TrackIr[1] for 6DOF head tracking and the only games I'd use VR in (Racing/sim driving, sim aviation, spaceflight) use much more expensive external peripherals instead of touch pads and hands and are explicitly sit-down

[1] https://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/
>> I don't think people then were 1/100th as happy as us on average.

I'm not so sure. Actual starvation, death due to lack of food, is extremely rare in the modern world. Far less than 0.1% of the human population actually starves to death today. But in Roman times it was not uncommon. It was a relatively normal occurrence for a region to starve should the weather not play ball. Add in all the various diseases and I'm open to the idea that the average Roman was far less happy than the average person today.
It's different from the vive controller due to not having external sensors, but its very similar to what Microsoft showcased with all their new touch controllers and inside out third party headset for Windows Holographic
No, you wouldn't be able to do that. They burn themselves to death.
So many things about that are depressing, like, why would someone cut into a tree like that, and why would they decide that, if one of the trunks is gone, the whole thing needs to be decimated? Both are completely absurd.
Off-topic but modern Spain being in the news I found it interesting how modern Spain is shown on the map in 14 AD. There is a sharp divide between Spain and what is now France I imagined Catalonia and Occitania would have been one province.
Let’s go over this. As a previous DC metro area resident, I agree and disagree with this statement.

1. Transportation: the vast majority of workers in NoVa drive to work, either to drive to Metro or drive to their workplace. Traffic is unacceptably bad now. Going from Bethesda to McLean, which is about a 15 mile drive, can take over an hour.

Solution: Amazon locates west of Manassas, in Front Royal or Leesburg.

This still puts them close to their us-east datacenters, but it’s still far from nightlife and city attractions for their workers. Maybe Richmond would be better, except there is a dearth of tech workers there.
Thank you very much for your kind words!
Evidence is hard to get due to variables in such studies. You have to observe people's daily routine for a long period of time, which gets to be expensive. You also cannot fool the subject, or the people monitoring progress, so there's no way to do such studies double-blind.

For these reasons studies on nutrition are also hard and mostly flawed. But do we need a study to tell us that sugar is poison?

Well, ok, we do, but we can also notice our grandparents weren't eating that much sugar, they weren't suffering that much from obesity or diabetes and that's enough for me.
It's a smorgasborg of code. I think it's running in azure on some web app services with scheduled jobs. I should clean it up a bit first. Also, I don't really want to compete with more people for the higher jackpots. ;)
My gas company and electric company are subsidiaries of the same company, and they use identical (read: equally terrible) websites with the same payment gateway. One of them lets me use a credit card and the other makes me pay from a bank account. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In many cases those governments are the end users. They're buying the same licenses as run-of-the-mill businesses.

Furthermore, if you said "well, private users only can review the code," then every government is just going to ask its code reviewers to independently purchase private licenses. There's no way to keep government users out of source code reviews unless you totally block code reviews whole cloth.
The New Class War – origins and possible solutions
Oh okay. I see the similarity now - it does look like prose discussion of chess games. The analogy can be pretty deep, like strategic considerations ("opposite-colored bishops" vs "spread-out dependent instructions" in the prose you replied to). Thanks for the clarification, this was insightful.
Yeah, sure. Thats the company which according to Google (March) has a huge mess in own nest of Certification Authority resulting in google chrome removing their certs: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/googl...
The main issue with self-play is that unless done very methodically it can lead to behavior that does not learn what we want it to learn, but games the simulation and basically cheats. Its not a perfect solution and is just another tool being used to improve models. It can produce really interesting results especially in complex games but its also not perfect.
I just moved to a place with laundry. I prefer it to sending it out actually, but anything is better than going to the laundromat.
Maybe the situation is more analogous to joining Costco or Sam's Club where you pay a membership fee, i.e. buying the phone. Your point about losing all your purchases is a good one. I guess you could say you still own your purchases after you ditch iOS, you just can't use them with other platforms - but since all the food you buy gets consumed, it's a unique scenario.