skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think burnout can be a serious issue, as witnessed throughout many of these comments. I seem to be a successful burnout about once every week. I go to sleep early, take a deep breath and start the cycle over again.

I am 20 years old, and I feel that I have a lot of catching up to do. This may be viewed as an insecurity, but it is an extremely motivating part of my life.

No matter how much of these I read, it is not going to slow me down. From an outside perspective it is unhealthy, yet there is no way that I can withdraw from this cycle until its the right time.

The right time will come for everyone. Just as it did for those telling there stories.

Thanks. HN is the shit.
Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Facebook Adds Delete Account Option
I only got my first Mac about 12 months ago and I am really liking it. I too would be really sad if they leave OS X and it's traditionally associated hardware to languish.

Oh well, I guess I could always go back to Linux or BSD for my primary workstation.
Krugman always argues in favor of more inflation. He has even said explicity that the government can create wealth by printing money, which is simple fantasy. Printing money - causing inflation - only steals wealth from people who already have dollars.
agreed, but i wasn't the one to make that decision :o)
I love the fact that this got downvoted to zero. More religion.
I would highly recommend sanitizing chat input. As a quick demo, type '<script>alert("a")</script>' or something.

Very cool concept though.
I'm really interested in hearing more about this. Were you able to find a link?
I can't wait for the Creepy Robot Armageddon. I'm tracking the situation at http://creepyrobots.tumblr.com/
I can't make much sense of this article. Based on his assumptions you would think Apple is completely intolerant of doing business with any company that might compete with them even on a theoretical basis. What about Samsung? They have their own SmartPhone platform (Bada) and also produce Android SmartPhones. No way Apple would do business with them right? Of course they do though. Samsung provides LCD panels for the iPad and fabricates the A4 processor. Software differentiates platforms these days. It doesn't really matter if the new 8" Motorola Droid 3 that comes out in the future uses an x86 chip or not. Apple is still competing directly against Google in that context. Even if MeeGo was very popular in the future I don't see any strong connection between mobile and PCs.
A big little idea called legibility
Tim O'Reilly: The Pursuit of Profit and Passion
Thank you, ronnier. Very kind of you.
It's funny; I have always had what I considered an addictive personality.

Yet, neither cigarettes nor hard liquor have managed to snare me, and I gave both quite a fair shot. Nor has WoW wrapped me in it's tendrils.

The ironic thing is I definitely have fixations and addictions, but they are to stupid things you never would have thought you could be addicted to.
The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs
What makes a job/job description stand out?
What makes a job description stand out?

I've been tasked with making a couple of hires for software developers at my company. We are a "mature" startup and primarily .NET shop that focuses on C#, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery/WCF. I've seen some interesting job descriptions that ask to individuals to submit code, or solve some kind of logical problem – I assume to do some pre-screening. Is this effective? Assuming a job description is a match on your skill-set, what are you looking for in a job/job description?

Happy to provide more detail if it helps.
Given a choice between "pretty and wrong" and "ugly and correct", I'll take "ugly and correct". The beauty that hides evil is not the true beauty.
Great explanation of autism: read comments by "subtextual"
Now I have to start the tutorial all over again...but thanks! This should be a lot easier than looking up for myself how Rspec 2 works and so forth.
import operator

str = "abcaaabcccaabrrcb"

dict = {ch: str.count(ch) for ch in str}
sorted_items = sorted(dict.items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True)

The dictionary comprehension syntax is new in Python 2.7 and 3k, but you can say

dict((ch, str.count(ch)) for ch in str)

instead.
I'd like to respond and not leave your assertions unchallenged, but I think your post is a bit too charged and absolutistic to engage with..pretty clear there is little room for debate.

I'll just say that since switching to a diet that contains whole foods consisting of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, I've never felt better or been in better shape. I've seen the same results in many friends. If I have a big meal of grains I'll feel sick and almost hungover as a result.

Your mileage may vary, but have you tried it and seen what happens to your body? I've experimented with many types of diets, including strict veganism for about 3 months. So far a "paleo" diet has worked the best, for me.
How's it a hack? They went through the entire standard library, saw that the construct was generally used for the occasional exception to the common case, and front-loaded the common case expression. The principle was that the important thing should go up front.
No, even with a perfect market there will be, randomly, some people with significantly better luck than others ;)

Seriously though, crucial the assumption is a perfectly efficient market, and inefficiencies exist everywhere.
No need to pick on poor python here :). With the pysistence library, you can write code that mirrors other solutions presented in this thread:

reduce(lambda d, c: d.using({c:d.get(c, 0)+1}), "abcaaabcccaabrrcb", make_dict())

I don't know enough about HN to know why it doesn't display the two *'s that need to be be right after d.using(. I also couldn't figure out how to do keyword arguments in python where the key is a variable, not a constant, so if any python expert knows how, you could remove 4 characters from the above solution! :)
Switch to a different merchant service provider. They probably won't give you an exception unless you already have a history with them, and high volume.
Since they put the numbers in relation to manufacturing workers they surly only count robots used for manufacturing, not Roombas.

But then the problems start: Say you have two robot arms, one to hold a part up, the other to weld, are those two arms two robots or one? Is a CNC machine a robot? And so on.

Those differences don’t matter so much if they managed to get their definition of robot somewhat right (the amount of CNC machines is probably highly correlated with the number of [other?] robots, so it doesn’t really matter whether CNC machines are included or not) and if they counted consistently. You probably shouldn’t read too much into the worker:robot ratio. (Oh look, all Japan needs is a 35-fold increase in the number of robots, then they won’t need any workers anymore …)
Very interesting essay. Internet addiction is in my opinion spreading like wildfire, spreading well beyond procrastination as Paul Graham said and actually impacting workspace and home environments extremely negatively - the analogy to alcohol is spot on. You aren't procrastinating, you are the equivalent of drunk.

Introspectively, the problem with my addiction lies in the acceleration of production as well as distribution. There are more movies being produced, more novels being written, and more content in general to consume. Technology has been making producing these mediums easier and easier. Musicians used to have to write down lyrics and notes on paper - now there are programs which can practically generate a whole song for them. News can be written by your friends who just got the latest scoop at a major conference. Producing content has never been easier.

At the same time on the distribution side, the internet has made all this content available at your finger tips instantly. As bandwidth increased, it became almost too easy to spend 10 minutes watching news or entertaining on YouTube or a myriad of other free media streaming sites.

These processes will only get more efficient and more effective. As a corollary, the media which seems highly targeted and interesting to you will become increasingly prevalent.

There are no easy answers, and I for one am taking the issue relatively seriously. Getting away for extended periods of time without internet is vital - which is also why I don't own a smart phone.
How to Acquire Customers by Marketing “Heroes”
ads for munchies
any recommendations for a merchant service provider?
I phrased it in an ambiguos way. What I meant is "doctors and people practicing pseudo-medicine". I wasn't implying that doctors are practicing pseudo-medicine (well, most of them anyway).
Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity.

This article relates to one of my crazier recurring thoughts. Looking at how most of us have readily shifted to or accepting of virtual experiences and Baudrillard type "simulacra", I can't help but run the clock 250 years forward to see people willingly living with their brains permanently wired into an artificial reality (or, if we "crack" consciousness, being converted into conscious computer programs of sorts).

No longer would fighting the laws of physics be necessary, you could merely play a futuristic, hyperreal version of EVE Online in what your brain would identify as "reality" and do whatever you like.

But ultimately, I think we're guided by our minds and feelings. If we get the ability to keep a brain in a post-orgasmic-esque level of satisfaction and inactivity for perpetuity, it's probably game over for humanity.
I don't think pg's argument relies on an objective definition of bad. The subjective one works fine.

After all, the subject might be wrong!

"Wrong" being subjective, of course.
my understanding is that braintree is a gateway, and replacable by authorize. either way, its independent of my merchant service provider, which is the problem here.

if you think this is incorrect and switching to braintree solves this problem, please explain further.
This is what happens when our technology outpaces our culture and becomes a danger to us.

I'm reminded of the atomic bomb: we had the technology to destroy ourselves before (we feared) we had the emotional and cultural institutions to show restraint.

In this case, what's become dangerous is the technology of satisfying human desire.

We see this in pretty much every designed human experience, to varying degrees. Yes, it's in World of Warcraft and Twitter on your iPhone and crystal meth. But it's also in game mechanics in your hybrid car's display, airline loyalty programs, and summer camp rituals that keep campers coming back every year.

All the things in your life that know how to push the happy button.

Very thought-provoking essay.
Coding Style as a Failure of Language Design
I buy Southwest always for one reason: no change fees. Every dollar I spend is applicable toward another fare if I don't go or want to change times. I spend more money sometimes, less money others, but always have confidence I'm not throwing money away or being nickel and dimed. Every single other airline focuses on profitability through obscurity and I simply can't stand that.
I am pretty sure this is false. While the overwhelming number of unique visitors to reddit are not logged in, those users are far less engaged than average. Logged in users make up a huge percentage of the pageviews because of their higher engagement level.
For the HN audience there's a starker message: You can be either addicted or a purveyor of addictions, Eloi or Morlock. Choose.
"87% of tweets indicate intent to purchase the iPad"

oddly enough, I have less of a problem with that article than I do with your post.

They clearly acknowledge all the limitations of the data right up front.

I can read that article and understand within the first 2-3 sentences that they are playing a game of mental masturbation, and then grin at the conclusions.

Its clearly a pointless piece of puff, and perfectly enjoyable as such.

My problem with your blog post arises because it is inviting me to take it more seriously than that.

You state upfront that it is based on MyType users who are on Facebook and who participated in a personality quiz.

The question you never speak to, and need to answer, is why on earth do you believe that a narrow sample like that can reasonably be used to draw conclusions about the broader set of iPad users?

do you fully intend that the blog post be a pointless piece of puffery similar to the techcrunch article? in that case, make that explicit.

do you actually believe that you can, using the statistics you have available, speak usefully about the broader set of iPad owners? explain why, giving your confidence level and other assumptions you have made.

If you want me to take it seriously, you need to take it seriously.
Why would it not make sense now to use this as an amicable excuse to axe the AT&T deal from apple's end saying it's clearly no longer legal to do so and just getting on with the business of competing on the basis of product instead of who has the better team of lawyers?
Sure, some people get lucky. Hence the "with much consistency".
That's why I think there should be premium airlines which perform aerobatic maneuvers occasionally throughout the flight, because that would be entertaining. Bigger seats and better food? These people just don't know how to create an enjoyable experience inside an airplane.
That's right, Safari doesn't support Ogg. See http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works.
Ask HN: How do sites obtain their initial content?
This has perplexed me for some time. Whether its Wikipedia or Yelp, I'm always late enough to the game that when I arrive for the first time, there's already a wealth of content. But they had to start somewhere...so how does a company build up its initial data set so it can properly and adequately serve even its first users with useful content? What's a good rule of thumb for knowing how much content you need for a minimum viable product? Say if you were to start Yelp over from scratch...how many reviews would you have started with in San Francisco before you opened it for its very first users?
I wonder which category the huge amount of Apple fans that have every Apple product fall into? I know a good number that I wouldn't consider geeks, elites, or critics (though they may consider themselves elite).

(I don't mean for this comment to be anti-Apple)
Both United and Jetblue have extra legroom economy sections available for purchase by anyone well in advance.

I think this shows that the original article is incorrect in its assumption that given more product differentiation people will chose an alternate airline. If more people were willing to pay for extra legroom then more airlines would offer these "economy plus" sections.

For me, I'll stick to flying one airline, keeping my elite status which almost always guarantees me an upgrade to first class.
Using git with bzr/launchpad
I don't think the phrase "don't want to want" has any semantic meaning if you try to break it down.

Here's a silly contrived example: I am addicted to air. A suffocating person has no air. They are very well aware of their addiction. They wish they did not need air. They "don't want to want" air. The whole of NASA probably wishes humans could get along fine without air. But none of this means that dependance on air is "bad" or should be avoided in the normative case.

I agree with you 100% that there is a smooth continuum of addiction. Where we disagree (and where, I would say, you've forgotten to argue something) is that you believe addiction and badness are inherently correlated.
Nike SB Dunk High Premium Skunk Green for sale $89.98
I can't claim to know the specifics of your application, but consider that a single upvote invalidates however many thousand copies of a given page. An action in a Facebook game might invalidate a page for 10 or 20 or 50 users. An upvote, (or a comment, or an edit, or an upvote on a comment) invalidates that page for upwards of 300k+ users. Combine that with the rate at which reddit's pages change, and you're talking an obscene amount of CPU time spent building fragments/pages to stick into your cache. Scope of visibility of a change means a lot.

You obviously know how to scale an app if you were pulling 16 million pageviews a day, and I don't intend to discount that at all. I just mean to point out that while fundamentally the same problem, reddit has to deal with a version of that particular problem that most applications don't begin to approach.
Same as Compaq, it's gonna end up as a sub-brand of HP

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/22/hp-ceo-palm-could-end-up-...
Most of this article is pretty good, but it mostly isn't about any sort of relationship between high-speed rail and freight trains. That comes in only at the very end of the article, and is quite speculative.

They admit that the current batch of high-speed rail lines being built, mainly California's, will run on new lines that won't interfere with freight. The Economist's worry seems to be about the more extensive proposed high-speed rail network that's currently on the drawing board, which is proposed to include extended portions on existing freight rails (at 110mph) to link together the purpose-built higher-speed segments. They seem to be thinking of plans like this one: http://www.fra.dot.gov/Pages/203.shtml

But is that really even a medium-term worry? I'll be surprised if even California's line gets finished by 2020. I would be very surprised if this more extensive national HSR plan that's supposed to follow later gets anywhere anytime soon. The map linked above is the result of a process begun in 1991, which has not been turning into a high-speed-rail network at any particularly great rate of speed. It'll be a miracle if they settle on a final plan by 2020, much less fund it or actually start building anything. I'll eat my hat if that entire network is built in my lifetime!
I wish I were kidding when I say that I had sworn off HN for a few weeks to make sure i sufficiently devoted myself to a project. I lasted 2 days and the first thing I see back is this essay at the top of the front page.
Entertaining legal opinions
If you don't mind me asking what happened to it? Facebook now reports about 5,500 monthly users. I'm guessing you were acquired by SGN but I'm don't see why that would cause traffic to drop so much.
You are right. I misread this PEP. Sorry.
Just wondering, thanks for letting me know.

I have no idea what constitutes normal ad rates for a site because all the projects I've worked on have been pathological cases in either direction.

What would some realistic numbers for something like Reddit be?
It seems that we're both right and wrong :D
If you have an arranged job offer, then it seems that they don't care what category you're in.

However, if you don't have an offer, then you have to have a skill/occupation that falls in this list http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/apply-who-ins...
Corollary? managing focus, addiction and being an out of the box thinker is a big asset in the current world.
Difficult to prove, but an observation with precedent. 37 Signals is famous for justifying Ruby by saying that hardware is cheap, developer time is not, so use RoR and just throw servers at your app till it meets your performance needs. Hardware is cheap, but maybe not cheap enough to run a site like Reddit with intentionally scant ad revenue.
It is a problem. Things like MFA spam and Google's recent trend of being less useful as a Search Engine for Programmers (ignoring quotes, ignoring punctuation like ? and !) are enough to make me switch, if I find something better. This article has convinced me to try out DDG for a little while.
You can browse the internet via email too! :-)
And I missed the previous submission. How nice to see it now!
Odds are his parents are net tax contributors, including whatever the state spent on him. Only people with poor parents really owe what they got to the state, as opposed to productive people like their parents.
The simplest answer is style over substance. The UI looked nice enough, but I wasn't that impressed with the way it actually worked. One of the central UI paradigms seems to be a carousel interface, that loops upon itself. Personally, I feel like a more linear interface that has bounds at each end is easier to navigate.

There's also no clear way to navigate between applications. If I started a song playing in the music player then played with maps, there wasn't any easy way to jump back to the media player app to skip songs, etc. There's basically no paradigm for moving between apps other than dropping all the way back to the home screen and digging for the app you want.

I'm an Android early adopter, so that may color my opinion some. The guy who had the device for me to look at is a hardcore iPhone guy. I think his description is probably best -- "it feels like iPhone 1.5." That may have been passable in 2007, but not now.

I guess the bottom line is I came away feeling like Android, iOS, and even Blackberry's OS were far better, and I'm not a fan of the latter two. There's just absolutely nothing compelling about WP7 that makes me feel like I'd want a handset running it. It's a far better system than WM6, but that's a rather low bar, IMO.
The subjective definition of bad only works if you happen to share the values. But this kind of argument does not bear examination. If we ask, "why is tech addiction bad?" or argue, "tech addiction is great because we it is a pathway to posthumanism", we immediately come to a question of this objective standard. If a subjective notion of evil is all you have, you'll start waving your hands here.
If the site has user-generated content, you should open it to users from the very beginning. The early adopters will get a certain satisfaction out of nabbing those early reviews. You'll likely have to prime the pump with some paid writers in the beginning, until the site gains popularity.
Sounds about right.

Since you're apparently familiar with both Clojure and Erlang, what are your feelings regarding the concurrency model in each?
There are other indirect mechanisms whereby content-farm-junk -- aka 'spablum' -- benefits Google.

What if spablum doesn't prevent a person from eventually finishing their task, but lengthens their browsing/searching session, requiring a few reformulations? Up to a certain threshold -- when the person gives up entirely or tries a competitor -- such delaying tactics may give Google more AdWords and AdSense impressions and clickthroughs.

Next, as the quality of natural search results drops, the value of the paid-placement slots goes up -- for both advertisers and users. This is one giant hole in the argument that it's effortless to switch to another search engine, if it offers better natural search results. Lots of the value from Google searches now comes from the relevant ads -- only if Google were to let competitors run ads from the same pool would this switching cost be eliminated.

Finally, the quality arms-race is something deep-pocketed, heavily-PhD'd Google can fight indefinitely... but adds an immense barrier to new shoestring operations. Google, given its position, would be perfectly happy if search quality just hovers where it is (or even declines slightly) -- as long as the cost for potential competitors to achieve that same search quality, at scale, grows moreso than for Google.
Yes, very cute and concise, and you know Python and I don't:) My point is to ask why to devote yourself to "rules" and optimizing conciseness of a trivial problem here. I don't think "readability" is a defense, because I believe my program (not being a Python programmer) is nearly completely free of guile, still fairly concise in terms of symbols, and instantly readable even to a new programmer.

So where's the payoff?