skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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Yes, 30 minutes in the morning, and 30 minutes in the evening. I started off doing mindfulness meditation, using 'Mindfulness in Plain English' as a guide. I now do a type of Buddhist meditation called 'placement meditation' which entails generating a specific state of mind and using that as the object of meditation, as opposed to the sensation of breath.

Meditating has helped me to relax, to concentrate better, and to generally feel more comfortable in my own skin.

Incidentally, I wrote a free Android app to help to motivate me to meditate every day. I wrote it because I would quite often find a reason to skip meditating, especially in the evening. In my experience, the days that I felt like skipping meditation were the days that I really needed to meditate. Now, using my app, I am currently on a run of 65 days where I have hit my meditation target of 1 hour per day.

See http://meditation-helper.blogspot.com/2010/08/using-widget.h... for a more detailed explanation, or search for "Meditation Helper" in the market.
I don't think this is really centralization. Just another avenue for advertising. For example, even if (less mainstream) bands generally use a Myspace URL as their web presence, Myspace doesn't necessarily control the music industry.

I find the Facebook-controlled universal login much more unsettling, personally.
"New buildings are nice, but when they're run by the same people who've given us a 50 percent dropout rate, they're a big waste of taxpayer money," said Ben Austin, executive director of Parent Revolution who sits on the California Board of Education. "Parents aren't fooled."

I had trouble believing the 50% dropout rate statistic, so I did a little Googling and found [1] that it was 34.9% in Los Angeles. While not 50%, 35% is still incredible. No wonder why the LA poverty rate is so high.

[1] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/05/high-school-dr...
The appeal to businesses is clear.

The appeal to users could be social ("What brands do I associate myself with?") or promotion-related ("Become our 1,000,000th fan and get this free thing!", "Facebook-exclusive discount!"). Also I don't think Facebook lets you put in bio information (favorite movies, etc.) anymore without it linking to a page.
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My co-founder and I met through his previous startup UpDown.com. I was an early user for the site and he was one of the first employees.

We would chat everyday on IM and he would ask me product feedback, design, new ideas, etc for UpDown. We both independently moved out to the bay area and just started working on random ideas together.

It was cool because we got to work together long in advance from being co-founders and we were also friends beforehand. Personally I think its always a upside to knowing how the other person works and being in a productive environment with your potential co-founder in advance.
I wrote the first version of a social network for him, which he is selling to niche departments of universities.

I got my first chops as a web application architect there. I had freedom to write my own web framework, implement everything from fine-grained security to pluggable application architecture for 3rd party apps, API, and had to design the whole thing to be scalable.
I think the wording is poor here but this basically appears to boil down to 'you cannot ask for a bunch of personal information from users for no valid reason'. Which seems entirely reasonable and a good use of Apple's power to stop the harvesting of personal information. But lets not let that get in the way of a good outrage session.
One of the best ways I've found is to volunteer your time. This makes sense for a few reasons.

A. The people you are with are also likely volunteers (opensource, event/meeting organizers, etc), which means you will meet people with a favorable attitude/mindset/values. The people with the most to give are the ones with the most value.

B. You have the same interests as them.

C. Volunteers are commonly a very diverse spread of people (experience/jobs/projects/goals/etc).

D. Meeting people like this makes it easy to keep things casual, or move into a partnership type relationship.
I don't think I can read Io that well, but this doesn't seem like a very unique trick; Ruby has method_missing (like the first commenter mentions) and Python has __getattr__. Is there something else I'm not seeing in there?
Just be rational and logical with your decisions; having similarity with someone personality-wise helps mostly because you will be more likely to keep in touch (not necessarily business) and keep discussions going. My collaborator and I were not "best buddies" before starting but we did have limited experience together in project based school work. Things like startupweekend might be a good testing ground [for a relationship]. I also found out being overly dismissive of your collaborator's approach on something is unnecessary; always be first to offer the other to prototype their idea out, if it sucks or is going nowhere, make your version. Be objective. The best way to find trust is to express it yourself. Be sure to take care of yourself, so that way if you do have to move on, you can do so painlessly.
good ya
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1624552
Oh and for the love of god avoid the "I have an idea, all I need is a coder" mentality.

Now that I am privy to his idea, I can tell you that he is not one of those people. He just needs some business debugging and tough love to get a few things sorted out; but for actual execution, when he has the idea fully crystallized in his head, he will need about 2-3 months of developer involvement.

He is one of those people who are interested in a domain that developer types rarely pay attention to.
You might be thinking of a different Fan Control app. The one you linked is just an RPM control, it doesn't try to target a specific temperature.

Here's the one I use, it's closer to your description:

http://www.lobotomo.com/products/FanControl/
>The root of the problem is horrible labor laws in US + laws protecting corporations.

Good post. I hope you don't get down voted into oblivion for it. People need to realize how bad the labor laws actually are because I suspect it's going to get a lot worse if the people don't wake up on this.
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Fast Date/DateTime classes for ruby. By just installing the home_run gem/lib you'll get an amazing performance increase!
>After a few years of teaching new recruits how to program, this still amazes me: so many people will go a day without compiling once!

I can go a long time without compiling but that's because I use IDE tools that show me instantly if I have compiler errors, etc. :)
This was no "one-liner". The code was quite elegant and simple, and while without empty lines I didn't observe code cramming to any particular extent. Many lines even had small comments. I could sense that it was written to be small, not written to be under 100 lines. Had it taken 111 lines or 128 lines, I'm pretty sure he would have just adjusted the title accordingly.
cool ! :)

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That sort of rational, reasoned approach has no place in a discussion like this. Clearly what this situation calls for is a knee jerk reaction based on limited information and pre-existing prejudices and I'm shocked that you could ever think otherwise.
I don't think it should be taken literally, because statisticians come in different guises. Nobody ever says that being statistician is hot, yet there is a lot of interest in quantitative analysis and HFT (even here on HN) which is all about statistics.
A better way to handle this would be to take a set of inputs, run it through the function and then hand-inspect (or use some other tool to check) that the results make sense. Store the inputs and outputs in a CSV file.

Now, every time you run the test you should read in this file and compare the results that you get running the function with the results contained in that file (which were already verified to be correct.)

This doesn't ensure that the calculations are done correctly, but it does ensure that after future code changes the output remains consistent.
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How am I not myself?
The contest-related stuff is a big reason, I suspect - I'm in a contest now with a team of people, where the team with the most "likes" clicked through them on to a company website is given an Ipad each (8 members). Believe me, we're doing a good job advertising the company for them :)
Yes, it's a bit of a tradition both here and in New Zealand to travel for a while. I remember when I was backpacking around Europe over 3 months in 1993 meeting a couple of Microsoft employees who explained that they only had 2 weeks to achieve the same goal.

They intended "to visit McDonald's in every country".

I think the key difference between Antipodeans and Americans regarding travel is a very specific meme. A lot of Americans have told me that taking a year off "looks bad" on your resume. That it indicates you don't take your career seriously or you're having some sort of personal crisis.

Here (and in NZ) travel is seen as broadening your horizons and it certainly doesn't count against you with employers. In fact, many see it as an accomplishment - part of a "well rounded" education.

So I'd invite HNer's to consider "hacking" this meme for themselves. I don't think it serves you very well. The vast majority of Aussies and Kiwis who take a year to travel around the world aren't wealthy. They just do it on working visas and save money between travels.
Personally, I think Facebook's killer app is that it fixed email.

For a huge population, email never worked very well, mostly since they had to find out someone else's email to talk to them. Facebook fixes this completely for any personal email use - all your real-life friends are friends on Facebook.

I'm guessing a huge percentage of personal mail has moved from email to Facebook messages - does anyone have any data about this by any chance?
I also think that aliens might well have completely different mathematics. To me, the most compelling reason to think that is that the development of mathematics is rooted in our conscious perception of the world around us. Our conscious perception is rooted in how our brains work, how our world looks, and how the stimuli from the world are connected to the brain.

Consider for example the theory of differential geometry. Would we care about objects such as curves, surfaces, and manifolds if they (well, their low dimensional special cases) weren't ubiquitous in our world?

Would we care about permutations and symmetry if some people hadn't played around with arranging sets of objects?

Would we care about waves (sonic, fluid, E&M) if we didn't observe water flowing?

Even problems that seem to be mere puzzles with no basis in the ``real world'' are inextricably linked to the conscious perceptions that we learned to form by living in the world.

There was a great push to axiomatize all of mathematics beginning in the early 20th century and now it can be said that a lot of mathematics really is a collection of maps from assumptions to statements.

It could be that alien mathematicians have reached a collection of maps isomorphic to the one we have, but they ascribe completely different meanings to them.

Another possible scenario is that within the universe of all mathematics, our conscious perceptions and cognitive biases have carved out some subset, and alien mathematicians have carved out another. These two subsets could be so vastly different that they are mutually unintelligible, and very difficult (maybe impossible) to translate between the two mathematical languages. Even if we could translate the alien mathematics to a symbolic language familiar to us, and check that their theorems are correct, because of the vast difference in meanings ascribed to these two sets of mathematics, we just might not be able to understand what the alien mathematics means!
Facebook to overtake Google in the next 18 months
FYI, as a founder for a startup recently accepted into AngelPad, I added a detailed response on how it's different from Y-Combinator: http://www.quora.com/How-is-AngelPad-different-from-Y-Combin...
If I can recommend a link for context: jakonrath.blogspot.com I spent two hours reading about this author switching from print to ebooks (primarily fiction on Kindle) and how it changed his life. He gets it like nobody in that business I know, and I think he is good reading for many here.

Anyhow, Godin has been doing non-traditional things with his books for forever. He gets marketing (one would hope, right) and brings a dedicated group of followers to anything he does, even the bad ideas like Squidoo. I am at a loss to name anything a publisher gives him of comparable value to what he gives a publisher.
How To Build Reputation With A Blog - The Series
I didn't make it past 11 :) i jott things down in my backpack account.. If it Has any potential to make money I'll run it past my dad and a few mates.
Most public figures already do something like this when speaking or writing. "Allegedly", is pretty much becoming a salt term for every verb and is well on its way to joining the "most used words in english" right after "the" and "a".
I do(though on MSN messenger).

For me, it's because I quite frequently have 4-5 hour conversations, and trying out both writing it all in paragraphs and pressing enter repeatedly resulted in more engaged conversations, as the other participant isn't staring at a screen waiting while I write it. It's better I think if all you are doing is talking to them, worse if you are both multitasking.

I have no problem writing in paragraphs if someone wanted me to though.
Is this something like being human 101? Captain obvious? Some other cheesy reference? Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that.
How about for an entry-level web developer in the Bay Area?
It's hard to decide which is the more impressive achievement. These guys are amazing.
Very interesting change of perspective. I think there's definitely room to experiment with tweaks of this caliber on YC's model (not so say that YC needs tweaking themselves).

I'm excited to see what they come up with!
This extract from a recent blog post[1] by the OP suggests he may have a slight touch of the said mentality:

There’s another interesting paradox regarding the people who make many of these social websites, and the people who use them. The people who make them are the programmers. These are the quirky geniuses who took an interest in computer science, math, and other inherently geeky fields from an early age. Their peers looked down on them for this, and as a result they tended to have uneventful social lives. But in their 20′s, they realized there was a killing to be made in online social networks, and so they went to work, armed with the technological know-how to make whatever application their more social peers desired. So what we have is the people with the ability to create, but no understanding of the market, and the people with the understanding of the market, but no ability to create.

While certainly a generalization, the point remains that those who developed an understanding of technological evolution (the computer) tend to have a poor perspective on those whose understanding is limited to biological evolution (humans), and vice versa.

[1] http://zachjiganti.com/2010/08/01/why-groupon-is-successful-...
High-freq trading has made US stock market inherently unstable
Sad but I've got the same impression. The scariest bit for me is that people with whom I was exchanging emails, are now sending me FB messages instead.

That is to say they already have my email address, it's there probably memorised in their email app, and yet they use FB.

That's one scary power FB got there. Suddenly email is not open anymore. (Though I don't blame FB for it: they did business, didn't force it down anyone's throat).
"No wonder why the LA poverty rate is so high."

Cause and effect.

It is more likely that the high drop out rate is caused by poverty and an uneducated environment. We have the same thing here in the north of Norway. Poor region (relatively) with low education levels among citizens and parents and higher dropout rates. Probably around 30%.

Also: educational achievement is STRONGLY correlated with equality, and California is one of the most unequal American states.

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence/education
Oh wow, thanks, wasn't aware of this. You say "most of the code" - do you know what's missing?
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Sure. My point wasn't to say that E-text wasn't inspired by Textmate: it even states so clearly on its page.

Simply that comparing version numbers is pointless: call it E-text 2010 for all I care, and it won't be better or worse for it.
it is useful to have a pulse on what the majority are thinking, talking about.
If you want to compare features, then please do. I love TextMate but it's a tool, and I'm happy to drop it if something better comes along (which might be TM2 or not, don't care).

But discussing/comparing features is a sensible topic. Saying that E-text beat Textmate to version 2 it useless. First, version number has nothing to do with features (as I was pointing out in the browser world). Second you can say E-text 2 is better than the latest Textmate, but nothing more: nobody apart from the author (and his collaborator) knows what's TM2 gonna be like.
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Lots of things can lead to lawsuits. Especially in a climate where reason and live-and-let-live have been replaced by litigation. It wasn't always like that, but then again we didn't always have this many lawyers.

I have received on average at least one threat of a lawsuit per month since roughly 1998, which is when we started getting a little larger online. As a rule these threats come from the United States, and equally predictable once I outline the legal situation to them they change their tone and become polite and reasonable individuals.

I think that for bloggers the same holds, simply add an international component to your situation and the cost of 'because I can' legislation goes up so much that you might end up resolving things amicably instead of through the courts.

I also have a rule that anybody that does not want to be reasonable has to sue me, that is, they actually have to follow through on their threat. To date that hasn't happened.

So most of this is all bark and very little bite, but I'm sure that it is possible to be sued for blogging or operating any other web property, it just hasn't happened to me yet. If you go out of your way to slander or libel someone then of course you're just as culpable as you would be 'in real life', after all the web is an extension of real life.

Just like lots of other activities can get you sued. Just be a bit more careful when you criticize someone in print than you would be if you spoke out loud, that should take care of most of it. 'It is my opinion' goes a long way towards solving most of this.
I don't see why Apple would pull the plug. Sure, the app store has its problems (and I dislike those too) but it seems to me their only danger is that they are competing with Apple directly.

There is already Kindle and iBooks... and there may very well soon be more. I don't think Apple really cares that much, who sells the books. Especially if, as in this case, they still get their 30% share.
Show HN: Pomodoro-Timer
Someone suggested the Pomodoro-technique on HN and I quickly threw together this page that is supposed to help me try Pomodoro out today.

Join my effort today and let me know if you like it!
Someone suggested the Pomodoro-technique on HN and I quickly threw together this page that is supposed to help me try Pomodoro out today.

Join my effort today and let me know if you like it!
This is without a doubt a huge benefit of IDEs (and compiled languages, since with interpreted you don't really get the same benefit). I wish more people realized how great the benefit of this: I suspect most people dismiss it without ever trying.
Too bad you did not reject an urge to rant about the things you neither care about nor use them.
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There is a difference between in demand and sexy.
Velocity, the entrepreneurial residence, at University of Waterloo: http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/
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Hi, being new I think it might be a good idea to tell you why you're being downvoted. You're posting a comment that is a good question, but has nothing to do with this article. There are other places more suited for such questions (you can post it here as an "Ask HN" thread, but there are places that talk specifically about these kinds of issues which are even better).
Rape victims have to go through an incredible amount of bullshit to actually get their rapists put behind bars. This includes:

1) Talking about and reliving the experience over and over and over to police, prosecutors, judges, juries, family and friends, delaying your ability to "move on".

2) Being mercilessly attacked by legal challenge from your rapist, including attempts to defame your character (defense attorneys trying to prove you are a "slut"), and whatever else they can throw at you to try and make your life miserable so you'll drop the charges.

3) Significant legal expenses.

The fortitude required to actually see a rape case through is immense. Assuming that because someone dropped the charges they must have been lying is just as bad as assuming that because someone had charges brought against them that they are guilty.

Our legal system is better than most, but it's far from perfect. Have some compassion.
I gave a talk at a barcamp, he gave a talk at a barcamp.
I often get good information on Twitter, for example about events happening in my city. I am thankful that some people share the information. Ego driven, I don't know - obviously there are "egos" behind the keyboard, but sharing can be a win for everyone.

Maybe it is just hard to grasp for people who don't understand the concept of "pay forward"?
I've always been a bit amazed at how many people think that writing something on the internet is safe, even if they know that writing the same thing in a magazine, or printing it up on flyers and handing them out on the street, would get them in trouble for libel.
The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws.

For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science.

Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power.

-- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking."
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To me, he's always seemed like he was cautiously crafting his public image. Kind of like John Edwards.
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a lovely shrine to our re-education facilities.

honestly if you have ever been outraged at the perceived inefficiency of public education read Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto. Most of the "inefficiencies" make plenty of sense when you see that the stated goals of our education system do not align with their actual effects.