skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, so do any of these studies control for the number of hours the students - sorry, I mean subjects in the trial - sleep each night? Without looking at the data, I'd hazard a guess that all these studies show is that if you don't get at least 7 hours of sleep or so, you're less productive.

And I'd further suggest that this is only particularly relevant to pilots, where the burst of energy you get following a nap might be worthwhile, since you don't need sustained energy to pilot, only enough to manage the difficult landings and takeoffs.

For programmers, you need sustained concentration, so you need a solid seven hours of sleep per night (and from what I've read, especially for those under 25, 9 hours is a much better figure, and it will significantly improve your capacity to learn.)
Not a spiral! Simply a cycle.
Not true. It's easy to find spam accounts with dozens of friends. Try searching on openbook.com with a mildly naughty term, then click through to some of the result profiles. You'll find that they link to porn sites.

Example: http://youropenbook.org/?q=panties&gender=female
return reduce(fn, lst)

does the same thing.
I imagine there are a fair number of people out there who are "in the closet" about being nappers -- ie, they take naps in their car during lunch break, etc.
Of course, founders should care about AngelGate.

The premise of the whole drama was that there may be a collusion between individuals who are involved in early stage financing of startups.

A startup founder is by definition in a weak position commercially when facing prospective investors. An engineer puts a significant chink on his life in his venture, he does not have a portfolio of alternatives. This fact is very well known to the party on the opposite side of the table, to the investor that is.

For a rational investor, a startup investment is a high financial risk. It is not a well-researched public stock, it is an option. But it's OK, since it is a game he is in. He knows that most of his portfolio will be worthless, but a few (maybe one) stars in the portfolio will potentially make him wealthy(ier).

So, when two parties are facing each other at the negotiating table, the investor looks at the founder as a sort of a 'disposable' asset. After the deal is struck and the venture goes under, the investor is financially damaged, but he is alive and will have another termsheet discussion sometimes this week. The founder is left picking up the pieces of his life.

That's why the balance of power at the negotiating table is very important. The founder has a single recourse -- there should be competition between suppliers of money. Now, the AngelGate has shown us that such competition may be a myth. There may appear a cartel between technically-savvy suppliers of money. The market is small anyway, and when the bulk of the suppliers can fit at a restaurant table...

The article is quite dangerous in its goal. So what, instead of addressing the issue -- how to prevent collusion of early-stage investors -- the hackers can go back to work and focus on putting more hours in their startups? Really?

Let me suggest a few points that should come out of this scandal before all is forgotten and quiet.

- reputation of the individuals involved in AngelGate should suffer. This will give a chance to potential new entrants on the scene (new investors). Game theory tells us that 'tit for tat' strategy is the most viable in the long term. The cost of future collusion will be higher, and the founders will benefit from that.

- there should be a discussion about how to prevent cartels in the startup field. Maybe a self-regulating body should appear eventually in this market.

- any experts in the field of private equity (lawyers etc.) should seize the opportunity to provide impartial advice to the founder community (via blogs etc.). Angels have lost credibility, the void should be filled. We speak about standard sample term-sheets, financing terms etc.

- a credit should be given to Michael Arrington who has performed a function normally done by a regulator in the marketplace. Founders should probably supply him with more information from now on.
No. It's actually very hard (to do correctly). Especially if your cloud provider (AppEngine in my case) makes it even harder.
Founder of InVivo, not Danny DeVito's character on Always Sunny. Had me very confused.
> But how do you explain that to the traveling masses?

I think this has a lot to do with the whole "turn every device off" thing. Keeping aggravation levels down, with tired and stressed passengers, with a large mix of cultures and languages, means that it is much easier to say: everything must be turned off. Otherwise you get into 200 discussions about which devices are allowed, and you have to verify each one.
In practice, it's probably even pretty close to 100%, given the login requirement. :)

In answer to my own unasked question, yes, there may be logins available on bugmenot (http://www.bugmenot.com/view/facebook.bug) although when you search for 'facebook' it says it says that it has been 'barred'.
I disagree. All your Twitter data is public* anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem. And twitter makes it so much easier than Facebook to disable/disconnect an app from your account.

*Unless you make tweets private. But even then, your followers and followees are still public.
I'll have to try harder on meeting the early birds. The last few events where I arrived early, most people were hiding their faces behind their laptops, ipad, smartphone, etc.
Unifycle: A unification library for Clojure
How do you know 90% of your market has a Facebook account when 100% of your registered users are required to have a Facebook account? Don't allow your user base to be restricted by another user base.
The funny thing is that Xbox has almost become a brand unto itself at this point. I've been following it since the beginning, and even so I forget Microsoft is behind it.

With J. Allard and Robbie Bach gone, that could easily change. Without fierce, passionate protectors who get it, Microsoft could easily screw up one of their most awesome products.
No actually, it was a bacterial infection that needed very specific meds. Apparently most doctors miss that particular infection...
Microsoft Announces Partnership With WordPress.com
Sort of already exists... only in the other direction.

http://www.ideaconnection.com/blog/2009/04/japanesetoilet-an...
If/else statements easier than ever in C++
I often did this to and from work on the train, it's an amazing quick fix for when you're feeling drowsy.
Seconded. I don't understand OpenID, but it works, and it's not tied to a single (ominous) company.
As an aside, Facebook rejects mail from the main mailinator ip, so you can't use their domain for a fake email address, you'll have to find a different service that does the same.
The contracting I would be doing is in the mobile application space, so that market may not be indicative of the rest of the economy.
Oh yes.

When your cat crouches down and does that ass wiggle, he's pretty much driven everything else from his mind except ballistic calculations: distance to target, plotted trajectory, azimuth, elevation, etc.

It pays off though because he either catches the mouse or, if he is more relaxed, does a perfect four-point landing in your lap with a minimum of impact.
Scribd Adopts Facebook Instant Personalization
Strongly agree. I used to use Facebook. I don't any longer and never will again. Any service that forces Facebook connectivity won't get me as a user.
I know about the optional parentheses, but omitting them makes the comma very easy to overlook :/ I do like your fake operator idea, but it seems that it would go against the spirit of python and make it easier at the expense of readability...
I just started reading it in a Cockney accent and it turned out fine. ;)
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Chris Cummer launches ClimbIt: Feedback?
Just to make sure we're all on the same page, I'm not complaining about Bunder and this is not an open letter to Yehuda or something (he's actually advising against using add_bundler_dependencies: http://twitter.com/wycats/status/25423837210).

I'm simply giving my opinion and I don't like how add_bundler_dependencies worked. Since there's a -- in my opinion -- better way to solve the same thing, I'm trying to urge others to stop using it. Not criticizing Bunder.

In the end of the article I ask how everyone feels about adding a deprecation warning and I specifically call out to Yehuda and Carl, because I'm interested in their opinions about it.

Thanks for your comment,

"This Guy"
Eric complained about implementation-specific language features in JavaScript -- things that only run on some, but not all of: SpiderMonkey, V8, JScript, and Nitro. To quote:

Instead of coding in one language, we're actually coding
in two. One is the subset JavaScript that can be run in
all browsers, and another is the set of JavaScript that
can be run by Node.

He's not talking about features specific to the Node API, but to features present in V8 that are lacking in older versions of JScript, effectively. A lot of Node libraries use features like Array#forEach, Object.create, Array#indexOf, Function#bind, making libraries unusable in the browser, even when they should be able to run perfectly well there.

CoffeeScript doesn't prevent you from using implementation-specific features if you want to, but provides in-language alternatives to all of the things listed above, in a cross-browser fashion.

Objective-J works in the same way, doesn't it? It's possible to write Objective-J code that is tied to a particular runtime, but if you write in the regular style, you won't have any cross-browser trouble.
Or because good enough is good enough.
Yeah, exactly. When I see a Facebook login, what I parse is "this site decided that it was a better idea to leave security to the professionals rather than hack something together. A secondary benefit is that I get to get through this signup in 20 seconds than 3 minutes."

When I see a dodgy username and password form, what I parse is "I can't wait for them to email me back my password in plaintext, and then store it without a one-way hash."
WordPress.com is a great service and you can get a lot of the same "stuff" that we offer. Obviously, they've been around a lot longer and have a ton of experiece.

WordPress.com has, essentially, two pricing structures - free and custom pricing starting at $500 for VIP customers. They make a ton of money in upgrades, as you noted.

They don't give you access to the files, unless you're VIP, and then you're still limited. You don't have access to plugins of your own choice. The freedom that you have with WordPress.org (self-hosted) doesn't exist on the theme, plugin or user side. But you get an amazing architecture, with almost no downtime, and a crack staff that knows WordPress inside and out.

WP Engine targets an entirely different market. We're targeting self hosted WordPress and trying to provide premium value for premium blogs. You couldn't take my blog, for example (http://technosailor.com), and put it on WP.com. There's too much I've done with it for it to make sense even if I bought the Custom CSS add-on. I can put it on WP Engine (and do) and get all the stuff that is offered.

I don't know if I'm making sense. I hope I am. Certainly, we are still honing our messaging.

One big bonus that no one else will give you is free CDN. If you need it, you're going to start at $40/mo roughly. And maybe pay up to 20 cents/GB bandwidth. I think you can see where this, essentially, pays for itself.

Plus, we are working with Automattic/WordPress.com and our customers should be seeing the benefits of that soon. Stay tuned. :)
Ask HN: Review my (first ever) screencast
Windows isn't going anywhere for a long time.

True in multiple senses.
They can be an indicator, but do you check every subscription? Are you going to refuse subscription telling people "sorry, you don't have enough friends"?

Here is a very quick experiment I made:

- Get the name of one of your contact and the surname of another one and subscribe with that.

- Take the picture of a random girl on the internet that looks real, put a copy and paste famous quote in the description like "it will not rain forever".

- Subscribe to a couple of groups or pages with the word "sex" in them.

Bang, hundred of friends in a couple of days, and the profile now seems legit.

Still harder than generating fake profiles automatically, but I think that with a little bit of effort this can be automated too. There are also companies that will give you some hundred of friends for a fee.
Proposed style guide:

When you want to get the (n+1)th item from a list, do:

item = stuff[n]

To get the first item, do:

item = stuff[0]

Unless the list has one element, then do:

(item, ) = stuff

At least you'll never be accused of consistency.
Windows Live running its blogs off Wordpress, on Linux with MySQL?

It doesn't get any better than this. Chairs will fly.
Ok so you got me curious :) since I only know ligatures as, in my simple understanding, two glyphs that are joined together for typographic (visual) purposes. Googling 'dental fricative', that seems to be about phonetic spelling. Would you mind explaining? Is the unicode code point for a 'dental fricative' the same as the bytes of t and h in succession? How does the ligature fit in?
TBD - My Thoughts: Superangels vs. VCs
Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and Tips To Get Started
Thanks a lot for all the replies. Some more info:

If you give a founder (or early employee) more than they're going to be worth in the long term, you'll feel increasingly motivated to fire them and recover their un-vested stock. If you give them too little, they become increasingly motivated to quit and start something they can own.

Totally. I actually felt like he didn't contribute as much (coding-wise), and felt that 50/50 was a bit generous for him, but then again a business is not just coding and he was into the "CEO" role, and I was fine with that. I was at the extreme of the second scenario: no motivation to do this at all. What amazes me is his proposition; how is he going to get anyone else doing this job, with no funding at all to pay a salary?

One or other of you was going to end up unhappy, in a company-destroying sort of way. I would have quit also and would make sure to sort the ownership question out earlier next time.

This was my key takeaway. Free GOOD learned-the-hard-way advice for ambitious would-be startupers: before even starting to discuss an idea, agree on how are you going to work on it and split the equity. You might be amazed by some people's concept of "partnership".

Somewhat tangentially, people also tend to over-value the ownership that their "idea" should entitle them to.

The initial idea was his, but we developed it much further together. On the implementation side there also had to be tons of decisions on how to move forward, and here I believe I was contributing way more to make it happen. Overall I felt it was a fair deal.

Sounds like you're both putting in same resources and taking same risks. You didn't mention opportunity cost.

We are mostly on the same terms. We have both been working our jobs with almost the same salaries, so we were taking very similar risks here and "losing" about the same in opportunity costs.

If it's his idea, and he can get someone at his term (0% ownership, percent of sales), then it makes no sense for him to take you on a 50%.

That is what puzzles me the most, because I think he can't. We both have no track record and no capital to invest, nor have been funded before, and have very few contacts. And I don't see anyone working on a business with no revenue without being given any equity at all; even with a nice salary, the job could be gone at any time.

If your co-founder put in significant work before you started, then you should expect less than 50/50 ownership.

That was not the case.

Again, thanks for your comments. And, again, the lesson I learned: discuss with your would-be partner(s) how you'll split the equity, work and what each is willing to contribute before even talking about the ideas. Especially before starting to write code.
Oh, you're very much correct. Let me benchmark that...

There doesn't appear to be any difference in speed between the two. Assigning the result to one variable (totally different to this) is about 6% faster, so this syntax is what I'll use, thank you!
Techmeme keeps up with lightning-fast tech news
How will you know when you should fall back to manual? There's really no measurement of accuracy that I can think of. If you've reached the point in the algorithm where you know you've incorrectly identified the food it seems like you've already solved the problem.
What's impractical about it ? I'm very comfortable with separate identities per-site.

If your site isn't worth a separate identity, why am I interacting with it in the first place?
That's a good point - you don't hear much about IBM either. Though Microsoft is much more consmuer oriented, and thus more known to the average Joe.
Create an iTunes App Store account without a credit card
Yeah I know what you mean. I'm not terribly experienced with screencasts, and I did this one mainly for practice before a live presentation. I posted it for people who weren't in attendance, but thought perhaps others might be interested.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I'm not saying that forcing Facebook will 100% eliminate fraud. But forcing Facebook can reduce fraud, by several orders of magnitude.

Authentication isn't -- and shouldn't be -- a one-size-fits-all problem. For us, Facebook has worked extremely well. (We originally supported Twitter and OpenID but dropped them when it turned out that 100% of our fraud incidents had authenticated with one of those two.)

That said, I'd love to know if our FB heuristics would "catch" you or not. Email me your fake FBUIDs and I'll publicly post their score. We can all learn something! portman.wills[at]gmail.com
For one thing, you don't have to sell your CEO (who you just told blogging was key to your future growth) that the security of your blog is worth $8 a month.

Price is a signal.
"I forgot my username/password" is an immense burden on a small company. You end up having to make horrible tradeoffs between privacy and convenience (how do you really verify that this user is really this person?) and end up with a serious support issue for a product that might otherwise not generate much support email at all.

To be clear: even if it costs half your conversion rate, it may be valuable, at least until you grow in size to the point where having some support staff on hand is a non-issue, to force people to use a "well known" login provider. The users who insist on per-site accounts very well may just not make enough revenue to hire the support staff required to maintain them.

(Also, I think the privacy issues are seriously underrated: users often seem to insist that you should be willing to trust From: headers on email messages and that looking someone up by real name should be a common/valid way of finding people... I'd much rather Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, whomever, has to think about those issues rather than me.)

Edit: (typed on my iPhone, already fixed a typo)
In my experience labelling someone as smart, just because he/she finished college and got a job, is a mistake or a bad assumption. I have plenty of ex-classmates who ware A students trough high school and college, but they fail miserably at anything that requires thinking, common sense, or coming to conclusions on your own. They ware just good at learning things from books, remembering them word by word but not understanding a thing they just "learned".
Your comment is interesting at a number of levels. And by interesting, I mean that I can hardly fathom you wrote it:

> Yes. Why is that surprising?

because you called it "tuple unpacking". Furthermore, because in functional languages where this feature comes from you actually unpack tuples, and pattern-matching of other structures is not called "tuple unpacking".

> I've always thought that the tuple referred to by 'tuple unpacking' was the target containing the variables being assigned

That's what the "tuple" is unpacked into, it makes no sense that the name of the pattern would come from there. At best and stretching it, you'd have "into-a-tuple unpacking". Furthermore, you're not actually unpacking into a tuple (even less so in Python 3, `(1, * a)` isn't a valid expression... anywhere that I know of), you're unpacking into free variables. That's the point of unpacking.

> because you frequently unpack things other than tuples.

The only other thing frequently unpacked is a list, and Python's tuples are immutable lists, it does not stretch the imagination that a read-only feature of tuples would work on their mutable cousin as well. As for other structures, in 6 years of Python I'd say I've seen unpacking of arbitrary iterators thrice at best. You do not frequently unpack dicts or iterators.

edit: fucking hell, yc's comment format sucks donkey balls.
Good idea, except roughly 40% of peoples' food budgets are spent on food outside of the home.
Why node.js excites me
Well... Not so much. I'm playing with it, but apparently it doesn't yet fully run on Windows. I think that'll work for my project, but that would prevent most people from using Go.
Not really. The first two are consistent, but the last one is "get the only item and assert that there is only one item to get. If you don't care about the assertion, use [0], as always. I like the latter, because there's added info for the reader ("this should return a one-item iterable").

It's not really inconsistent, because you aren't performing the same operation in the two cases.
While it's quite embarrassing in regards to this conversation, zero effort has gone into making the homepage render properly in IE. The language is quite another matter. After working around IE bugs all day, getting up motivation to tackle them for the homepage of personal project is difficult -- you want to draw a line in the sand, and say, not this time. But you're right, of course.

Edit: CSS updated, see below.
The problem with OpenID is that takeup is orders of magnitude lower than Facebook. That hasn't changed for years, and I don't think anyone really expects it to. Users can't use it as a direct facing log-in because users don't tie themselves to URLs, they tie themselves to email addresses. OpenID eventually asks you to trust someone to hold your sign-on details, it may as well be a company most users already do.

I somewhat favor the StackOverflow approach, which is "we won't authenticate you, but here's a bunch of services that do", but inevitably I forget which service is actually tied to my account. This is how it's been with my HN account for a while, I loathe deleting the cookie, as I spent 10 minutes figuring out what ClickPass wants.

TripIt has both Facebook and Google Accounts. I'd probably expand to Yahoo! and Live Mail (if MS has anything for that) and leave it there.