skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do we need caffeine?
Whenever I sleep for less than 8 or so hours, I feel really tired the next day and have trouble getting out of bed. This is true even if I sleep for slightly less, like 6 hours. In fact, even if I sleep for 8 hours, I still get really tired before many of my friends at night.

Many people I know past college sleep 6 or less hours a night and appear to be doing fine. But of these people, 100% are habitual caffeine consumers.

I have read some articles and journals in the past (sorry, no sources off hand) that claim that caffeine comes with a list of side effects, some of which effect your ability to think at the highest levels, and this has always prevented me from becoming a caffeine consumer.

But I have been wondering lately if it is physically possible to be someone who runs off 5-6 hours of sleep a night and never consume caffeine. As hackers who like to work on their own projects before work or late at night, this seems of particular interest to people around here.

Has anyone had any personal success (no myths please) extending the amount of productive, awake hours you get each day? Or do you believe that we need caffeine to live this lifestyle?
I export encrypted backups of PasswordSafe into Dropbox's magic folder. This serves as a convenient automatic backup.
A few things to note after having run a club night a while back:

1) We actually managed to go as cheap as possible with our venture. The scene that we were targeting, Gothic/Industrial, is already a hard to come by group of people compared to the larger genres out there, and we even had competition on the same night; however without large decor changes, or even spending more than $500 on opening night, we were able to make a decent enough of a profit. I think marketing may be the key factor here.

2) The space we found was very small - in fact it was a hard to locate bar that was looking for something to take over their Saturday nights. One of the issues we had with the bar owner was decor, which in the end had to be left untouched - thus our Goth/Industrial night took place in a Caribbean/Tiki style bar.

3) In regards to marketing a nightclub - as previously mentioned by mschwar99, social butterfly types are a great asset here. By getting promoters to hand out flyers (stamped with their promotion id/name, and the promoters targeting very obvious members of our target scene) you can get a good amount of patrons in. By presenting the flyers, the customers will get free entrance, and the actual promoters get a cut based on the amount of patrons they bring in. Your promoters will work extra hard to get the word out as it's purely commission based work at that point.

Sadly, in our case, the reasons we failed were mostly attributed to the NYC smoking ban in bars, the incorrect cross streets being printed on our flyers, as well as midterms taking up the time of our customers.
To buy discount Chanel replica jewelry
Oh my! I'll be more careful next time.

Thank you for taking the time to point this out.
Being introvert doesn't mean being antisocial and being social doesn't mean publishing your life on Facebook and high-5ing every dudes you meet.

Just be yourself. Talk to the ones you want to talk and share things you like to share with friends.
Be nice to the people you care and never be an ass even with people you don't really admire.
That's the basics and it worked pretty well for me since I've met the girl I love and the friends with whom I've actually started our company lol
I was thinking the same thing, but not as something public -- something internal for the company.
He does have a point about the incompatible systems. It was only when they all started to speak SMTP that email really started, and it was only when they gave up on their individual implementations, and spoke only SMTP, that email really took off.
What's with the weird misspellings/typos all over the place? Like 'ey' for 'he', or 'eir' for 'their'?
I think that’s good as a rule, but I’m not sure it holds for cases like Joyce. If you want to write a book that has to do with how experience is translated into language and vice-versa, transparent language might not be best. Sometimes confusion can be a very deliberate and controlled effect, like in David Foster Wallace (who’s also on the front page today).

Just like Picasso could draw a realistic portrait when he wanted, Joyce sometimes used very simple and conservative prose. But I would agree that most people who use long words (like most people who use more than one perspective per painting) shouldn’t.
Well if you want to be a uber-meta-contrarian you learn the art and do your own research. Otherwise you're just repeating what someone else said who either did their own research, or pretended to in order support some pre-determined conclusion.
I can't speak to the Spanish language, but I think his use of the English language is one of the more incredible things he accomplishes in this novel. Really, this is the type of thing that must be read more quickly than not: because he introduces so many things that don't get explained until hundreds of pages later, it is best if they are at least sort of remembered. If not remembered, you may get to the end of the book and have kind of a "huh?" feeling. If this is the case, re-read the first 50 pages. But hey, this book is so much more about the journey that getting to the destination probably won't change your opinion of it much. If you don't like it now, might want to just pick up another book.
The Last Psychiatrist: The Terrible, Awful Truth About The Tax Cuts
This is what a lot of HN posts are about. Or is this exactly what HN posts are NOT about? I think so.
> I think what people are up in arms about, is that ESR calls himself a hacker—and most hackers, being programmers as well, think of hacking as referring to a particular kind of programming.

Not a certain kind of programming. Just programming in general. I think in most people's minds, the concept "hacker" implicitly includes the concept "programmer."
This might sound kind of silly, but I noticed that I tend to tense my stomach up during social interactions. I've recently attempted to stop doing that so much, and I think they've become significantly easier as a result.
I couldn't care less what other developers thought of me. As long as my code works and works well and others can work with it. I'm happy.

However, I do appreciate and will take your advice into consideration. I do only talk to my immediate co-workers about code, and 90% of my code is closed-source.
I do drink coffee every day, but I haven't found Caffeine to increase my overall amount of wakefulness. It just gives me a bit more control over it. I actually analogize caffeine to a high interest loan.

I think a lot of hackers consume it the way I do. Start out with moderate amounts, then increase the intake week by week for a while, then cut way back (sometimes with some withdrawal symptoms) then repeat. When used this way, I think it's fairly appealing because you're essentially spending future alertness as you go, making for longer stretches or better focus, but then after a while you have to catch up, sleep extra, and re-calibrate to low/no caffeine or else you may end up with stomach irritation, jitters, insomnia, etc.

I'm not sure whether it impairs high level cognitive functioning. It does help me focus better, and I have found that my most focused state is not always my most creative, but I always assumed that's unique to me.
The article, of course, is discussing email as it existed in 1985 - where it indeed did suck. In fact, even in 1993, It was still pretty much impossible to send email to someone and be certain they could receive it. Heck, I'm prepared to suggest that even in 2000, (15 years later) you couldn't be certain that the person you were talking with had an Email address.

Today, though, I would suggest that the vast majority of people in North America have an Email Address.

Where the article really goes awry is in this paragraph:

"Chances are that before a universal e-mail network is ever developed, the whole idea of electronic mail, along with those of teletext and videotex, will have been reduced to the span of a few specialized applications. As a general means of information exchange, the concepts are technologically intriguing. But they are economically naive and, more importantly, no more convenient than the existing alternatives. "

Bold prediction, but absolutely, totally, incontrovertibly - wrong.
That's really interesting. What's the reasoning behind it?
I completely agree, but I meant it more as an example that sometimes people can be obscure to appear intelligent when really it may just be concealing the fact that they have nothing important to say. I am not trying to slight Fitzgerald or Joyce, I like both of them as authors, but when you meet people, at say a dinner party, who try to speak similar to Joyce or Fitzgerald's style of writing, it comes off as pretentious and like it is serving some other motive--mainly that they want to say they're better than you.
Well, good luck finding good developers whos primary language isn't English.
Or developers who treat writing non-code sentences as a waste of time.
Or you stop defining your beliefs based on the beliefs of others.

Problem solved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investors

If you could put 15-20k a month into startups, how are you not meeting the accreditation reqs?

I think the requirements are to cut off companies from taking investments from little old ladies. It's the startup that would get in trouble, not you.

You considered talking to a lawyer?
Not entirely, as it's only recently that anything even remotely challenging Flash has been a viable option, and where fallbacks / functional pages without it exist frequently.

I do agree with your second point, however. Is it too much to hope that the standard JS libraries will eventually support scalable shininess?
It seem that he may have an antagonism with ESR or he thinks ESR lack hacker creds. In his previous comment about ESR, he said that ESR isn't a great coder and that he only contributed minor code.

As for me, he wrote the FAQ on how to become a hacker. He wrote the Cathedral and the Bazaar. He's a mentor, the old wise elder who introduce a culture's customs and ways of thinking.

How many hackers in the world have that kind of role of seriously influencing the intellectual trajectory of 13 year olds? Linus, Stallman, etc, doesn't seem to literally mint hackers from google search.

ESR does. Say what you will about Eric Raymond being boastful, a minor code contributor, an anarchistic gun trotting nutcase and what not.

I say he created hackers and people who respect hackers more than Linus and Stallman and many old longbeads will ever do.
I have monitored my caffeine intake for quite a while and keep it down to 1-2 cups a day.

For the past week or so, I find it extremely beneficial at around 3-4 pm when it gives me the boost required for me to shift from low energy items to high concentration items.

I guess it might be possible to work without caffeine, but you would have to get a trigger to switch yourself from low energy to high energy zone, good substitutes could be a walk, workout, a game of foosball etc.
I thought you were inventing functional reactive programming, but then I saw it was relational. But I think, due to the relational aspect, you end up achieving the same thing. Anyone interested in this should also look at Jonathan Edwards paper, Coherent Reaction http://coherence-lang.org/Onward09.pdf which takes a similar look at separating control, but achieves it in a more imperative looking language.
Python is one language I wish I would have learned, but I didn't want to waste my time with it. It's not good or enticing enough. I wish I'd get paid for writing Erlang code already!
'They want to kill people with software that doesn't work'
If we want to be a bit more precise with our thoughts, then we sometimes have to break out the longer words for instant clarity (given a dictionary, that is.) Technical fields need jargon in order to communicate a lot of metaphors / concepts in the least amount of paper and time as possible.

But I agree with lotusleaf1987: sometimes, I just want to yell, "JUST SPIT IT OUT IN PLAIN LANGUAGE." I think it's easy for someone to fall into the trap of getting too enthralled with the jargon and not understand the concept behind it, so they can reformulate the concept into a more understandable metaphor...
> Isn't that the way it should be in general? Nobody is allowed to copy specifically your program or font but they can copy the idea, invest in the effort, and come up with a similar one, often worse but sometimes better, themselves.

Yes, but they aren't allowed to distribute your program just by grepping your name out. You can basically do that with a font AFAIK.
Jailed Journalist Sues Telecoms Company for Supplying Wiretap Tech
One thing that people tend to underestimate is exactly how much advertising does affect them, even though many seem to adamantly claim it does not.

Effective advertising doesn't always = click throughs and action. But also in terms of name recognition and branding. Every "impression" is just that. Is GoDaddy the best domain registrar? No... but you likely know they are a registrar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
Stock market could be one such avenue, also sometimes utilizing your brain or other skills to save money can also help (cooking instead of eating out)
Ask HN: how to get back after epic fail.
Hi HN folks,

first, here's the background: in 2007, with friends, we watched a lot of Korean Starcraft games on Youtube. And we became fan of this guy: http://www.youtube.com/user/KlazartSC. He basically commentates the match in English because we can't understand Korean.
But he eventually retired because it takes too much time to download the source video from Youtube, cast, record, synchronize manually, encode and put it back on Youtube.
So, we came with an idea: create a nice service that does all these tasks easily and full web.
We did it! I've actually, talked about it in NH and TechCrunch France also covered us.

BUT, it's a fail. lol.
The feedbacks we received we're all pretty good BUT no one really uses it.

Marketing fail. We had the wrong target. We wanted to target the video game players but they were looking for Ustream, Livestream or JustinTV live video synchronization which we can't do because their API don't have stuffs like Timestamp.
What we could do is synchronize with Youtube video but people prefer to use offline tools to do their "VOD cast" because they are not afraid of doing hard-job and spending hours and hours to do something "perfect".
eLive is meant to help people to cast easily and quickly, not meant to be a Adobe Premier online :/

So we are now thinking about re-positioning our service. Actually, eLive could be used for many applications such as singing Karaoke or giving a lecture or just doing an interactive video/audio podcast, alone or with friends.

Do you have any idea, guys?
Have you ever failed in doing something but eventually succeed in re-doing it in another way?
Thanks about that ;)
Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

Which phone network are you talking about? Certainly not any I'm familiar with.

I'm no evangelist for government-financed R&D, but I don't think you could possibly have picked a worse example (http://www.corp.att.com/history/history3.html) for your argument.
Clogs Are a New Fahion Brand for Fall 2010 | Shoes Blog
"But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?"

I think that's a wrong question to ask, because "hipsters" aren't being deliberately uncool.

A better question would be: "why is not following what the mainstream does cooler than following it?"

And the answer to that is simpler: because it shows a sense of leadership.
I wonder how conscious is this process?

Do people really tell themselves things like "aha, I'll show them that I am rich buying something I don't need that's expensive" or does the desire to buy something extravagant and expensive just pop into their head out of nowhere and they are just compelled to do it.

Also, what is the strength of the desire to signal among all groups? Perhaps a poor person has a stronger desire to signal that they are rich than a rich person to signal that they are not poor. I think that's the second axis -- how much one signals.

If it is conscious, where does the refusal to signal fall into? Like the author mentions, it would seem that an intellectually honest person should rationally analyze themselves, and steer clear of this kind of trap.
Sorry about that, the introductory paragraph became unclear when I rearranged things.

We fully agree, I think it's awesome that typefaces are not IP — what I find fucked up is the present situation where everyone tiptoes around that fact and kowtows to the foundries, because anything less would be an affront to typography itself (ala 'hating the troops').

Upstart type nerds everywhere could legally be crafting better-implemented versions of Helvetica — but they aren't, because other type-nerds would beat them up for paying such an insult to the $300m corporation that owns the name.
You might read a bit about the history of the Bell System before lecturing us all about how the telephone network was built and paid for.
Some, certainly, but not all by any means. Try doing well in an art / music field, both of which require many many many hours outside of class - typically more than 2x the hour load - and learning more abstract skills like math or coding. The stuff you can sacrifice a little becomes the stuff you sacrifice.

For instance: across two projects in two classes, I've clocked over 1000 hours. Both classes had 3 (shorter) projects, and I had three other courses at the same time.

And that wasn't my busiest semester. That one had 21 credits - one of which was an internship - and a part time job. (not recommended under any circumstance, btw)
On this kind of case, probably... Libel law are more stringent in France and as pointed by bertil Google does already censor inappropriate associations...

Also the damage awarded is mostly symbolic (5,001 euros is hardly a big sum for Google) and the aim seems to be mostly for google to add the relevant terms to their list of inappropriate associations...
1) I've noticed my desire to be around other people is often influenced by my reactions to recent conversations. If I talk with someone and then think "That must have been so awkward for them" I'm less likely to go out and talk to someone the next day than if I say "That person was really interesting" or "I learned a lot more about that person that I didn't know." Lots of times it could be the same conversation; your interpretation counts for a lot.

2) Turning conversation into a game helps; asking "what's the most interesting conversation we can have?" or focusing on getting to know just two or three people at a party instead of being overwhelmed by the whole group.

3) I agree with Derek Sivers's comment that, correct me if I'm wrong, tolerance for social situations is a skill that you can build up over time, like your ability to focus.

4) It can be useful to have some autopilot topics; see Kaj Sotala's notion of cached thoughts, http://lesswrong.com/lw/2co/how_to_always_have_interesting_c..., stories you're really good at telling, or funny things you've seen (a guy on the street wearing gladiator sandals is one i've been telling recently)
Perhaps other people are different, but I rarely learn important things or acquire deep understanding without doing a certain amount of "busy work".

It took me a semester of physics homework to actually understand vector calculus. I had to write philosophy papers in order to see the beautiful arguments in my head fall apart on the page. I tried to learn a language by immersion alone -- but that left gaps it took hours and hours with a textbook to fix.

Even points aren't a terrible idea: I'm very good at overestimating the depth of my understanding, and I often have to do a certain amount of grinding to uncover the deficiencies in my knowledge. During my undergraduate career, points (when properly applied) were very good at getting me to realize how important some of the pointless-seeming work was.

Good professors will probably give you some "busy work". Whether they're assigning the right work, and providing the right incentives, is another question.
But that's only because you can say you got the same resulting serialization of vectors from creating it yourself from scratch.
This email makes the sender look good. The last leaked email made the sender look good. Work out who is leaking them.
BlackBook2 GUI
I have 4-5 a day and I have no trouble in sleeping (sleep well from 1am to 6-7am).
Actually, I work better when I wake up early and work during the day then working at night and sleeping in the afternoon.
When I was younger, I use to work late, at night, but I was wasting my time procrastinating and doing side-stuffs than just focusing on my task.
Tell HN: You can run two different Google accounts in Chrome using incognito
For those of us with multiple Google accounts due to a mix of personal and business accounts, it's always been a headache. You'd have to have two browsers open, or log in/log out, etc.<p>Well, I just realized that incognito mode is walled off from your non-incognito browser. Control+shift+N lets you open a new incognito window, quickly get something from a different Google account, and close without breaking something or having to use a different browser. It's been very helpful to me since I realized this.
There's no need to feel bad for the DoJ. They rarely encounter encryption and when they do they get around it. For instance in 2009, there were more than 2,300 criminal wiretaps that caught the communications of more than 230,000 people. The cops encountered encryption once, and still got the plaintext. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/wiretapping/

Moreover, we've been down this road before with the Clinton/Gore push for encryption backdoors -- the so-called Clipper chip. Congress asked the National Research Council to look into it and what did they come up with?

"It is true that the spread of encryption technologies will add to the burden of those in government who are charged with carrying out certain law enforcement and intelligence activities. But the many benefits to society of widespread commercial and private use of cryptography outweigh the disadvantages."

http://epic.org/crypto/reports/nrc_release.html

Simply put, this is an egregious power grab that's unnecessary. It's a technical mandate that limits secure communications and outlaws technology like PGP and OTR and possibly TOR.

Online encrypted e-mail services are already push-overs. Hushmail will rat it out its clients with a court order. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/

And if that doesn't work the FBI can always deploy its zero-day browser bug that installs spyware -- CIPAV. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/07/fbi-spyware-how/

Don't feel for the feds, fight them.
I think that part of the problem is that each professor believes their classes to be the most important, and students have wildly varying workloads.

Personally, my favorite setup is what one of my math professors does: recommended homework, which can be submitted to get feedback, and which 1/2 of the test questions are pulled from. If you do it all, it's a lot, but you're not required to do any. Predictably, most people do little, but the people who need it / actually care still get the benefit of homework, and the flexibility of a lack of deadlines.
Sure. I wasn’t really thinking about technical writing. It’s good to remember that people like Einstein and Feynman could happily explain their work in very simple terms.