skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What can I do to get better sleep?
I've tried to develop normal sleeping habits over the years especially after my engagement, and I've been really good about it.

However, I have episodes where my mind is racing a million miles a second, and I can't sleep. This will be the third day that I've just powered through the day for no good reason. There is no deadline, just my mind racing at the possibilities of ideas and their consequences.

Does anyone else in the HN community have this problem? Any suggestions on what to do?
How to set up the Pomodoro Technique in your office
Don't forget that your disruptive skill may not be one skill, but an unusual intersection of ordinary skills.

It's tough to claim to be one of the world's best php programmers, unix gurus, or apparel e-commerce experts.

But there may not be many excellent php programmers who are also unix gurus and apparel e-commerce domain experts. For the right customer, that combination is your disruptive skill.
A Simple Introduction To Playing With Big Data
No--a beard trimmer or electric razor does absolutely nothing for you if you can't grow facial hair. Thankfully, if you can't grow facial hair, shaving is pretty quick and easy and painfree.

If you can grow facial hair, though, a beard trimmer is absolutely fantastic for keeping your beard trimmed, which I presume was the joke.
String interning is a side issue here. But what you suggest is basically to destructure all structured types into lots of individual arrays. That's a technique I'm using frequently. But it's a very tedious and error prone thing to do once the data structures get a little more complex. But I still agree that it's sometimes a workable solution. It's not a workable solution if Amount objects are part of other structures.

Consider this:

class Point { int x; int y; }

class Rect { Point a; Point b; }

List<Rect> list ...
For me it's simple, running my own business was the only way to break out of the 9-to-5 low wage situation that I was in, I wanted more freedom and enough funds to really make difference in the lives of those around me.

A day job would never give me that. So I took the plunge, and it worked out for me.

If it hadn't worked I would have gone back to working a 9-to-5 for a bit only to try again a bit later.

Some people like going to the same desk in the same cubicle every day for years on end, being slowly promoted up the hierarchy of a huge company with a relatively large amount of security.

I guess I'm just not one of those people. But I would never look down on someone that likes to live that way. Whatever floats your boat, this floats mine.
I know that, but they'd never admit that would they :)

I might offer to install Ubuntu on their machines though, that usually cures them of any last resistance.
groupon has become spammy to me
How does that help? I still have to keep that extra pointer in memory for each Amount object.
You're also assuming that the person who's reviewing that old project code will dig deep enough to see how old the commit dates are. I think the GGP's advice about updating the project page is a better bet than relying on the reviewer to pick up on more subtle hints.
In fact, RSA already makes that product: http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=1313
Thanks!

This deal would be priced at an hourly rate, and the work driven by the combination of their internal departmental and project managers. From the looks of it, they'll create all the requirements and I will code. The gig's duration is expected to last only to the end of December.

My big concern is any language in the contract that would allow them access to my other work. I am working on some side projects as well that uses common technology but is not in the same domain. How have you handled this before?
Add Tabbed Browsing to Explorer in Windows 7
"But then at some point in the past year, I suddenly lost my short-term memory." Has anyone else here run into this experience?
It's about the potential for greatness. It's not about dating supermodels with PHD's or buying the best stuff.

The most successful people in the world own their businesses, people work them, follow their vision, listen to their words.

Today's startup entrepreneur will support the middle class of tomorrow. The reason your mother has a job is because back in the day someone decided to start a financial institution and with a shit load of hard it has become a big business. The creator of that bank (most likely his/her children's children) enjoy the success of his and others hard work.

Taking your idea and turning into a strong business is the ultimate in success in my eyes. And you cant do that working for someone else.
Super story, I knew you had a 'checkered' history, but didn't realize just how checkered. A cigarette cartel out of your grandmothers house is really quite neat, I'm trying to imagine my (very straightlaced) grandmothers response if I had tried something like that.
I find it really offensive that the Times describes 50-60 as a "vulnerable" time in these people's lives. That's the age of your peak prosperity, when you have the most assets to liquidate for here-and-now expenses.

The centerpiece of the story was a 57 year old female from Boeing. If her financial planning or outcomes were so poor as to leave her near-penniless at 57, she was going to be a bag lady sooner or later. It was just a matter of time. Imagining she could save for an adequate retirement in the ten remaining years of her career was delusional.
True but it doesn't solve my problem which is the extra pointer I need to hold the Amount object.
Inside Intel's security organization
Both languages are essentially ECMAScript, but ActionScript (3) is static and JavaScript is dynamic. Java is faster than ruby/python etc and ActionScript is faster than JavaScript.
In the US, in NJ, the cost for an LLC in NJ is $125, http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/revenue/gettingregistered.ht...
Nit pick: we don't really take risks with our lives.

Guys doing construction, fishing, oil drilling, mining, they are taking risks with their lives.

What is the worst possible outcome from a startup? Bankruptcy? Gaining some weight and not sleeping enough?

What is the worst thing that can happen? It isn't climbing a mountain or sailing across the ocean. It doesn't help to inflate the "startup" bravado by claiming it is harder than it is. The fears your average startup has (oh no, we're out of money, our business if failing, and we're going bankrupt!) is felt by a lot of small business owners, not just cutting edge startups.
And you can send mail from the US to outside the US. CAN-SPAM is irrelevant to most of the World. I actually have a score in my spam filter for email bodys matching /\bCAN-SPAM\b/i as emails claiming to be "CAN-SPAM compliant" are almost always junk.
I think I may have worked at the most "fun" corporate environment ever. The parties! The BBQ! The evenings on the roof top deck in Tribeca! The pillow room! The Wii! The wall-o'-drinks! The buddha statues! The one-team-cooks-a-full-lunch day once a month! The expeditions to South's! That one guy who was always napping in the weirdest places trying to be polyphasic! The singing, the dancing and the hilarious coworkers.

The key difference between that workplace and the others I've experienced/observed, was that the fun was bottom-up instead of top-down. It wasn't cheesy, but it was real. If an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, well, Limewire had a pretty whacky shadow, but the air of freedom was what led us to all bring our own flavor to it. We weren't whacky, even though the guy who ran it was whacky. We just did what we wanted and made our own fun. The biz-sponsored parties were the only orchestrated element, other than the cooking.

Ah, Limewire, I miss you sometimes.
Create a Visual Slideshow Resume to Avoid the Slush Pile
People loathe it as Socialism.
RIABench - Benchmarks for Rich Internet Applications
Just joined startup (automates expense reports), looking for feedback.
I just joined http://abukai.com on the sales side part time. I'm looking for any feedback on the start up or product. I think there's big opportunities for it. We automate expense reports by allowing you to take pictures of receipts with your mobile, and we use OCR to fill in your expense reports. The app is out on iphone but we're still working on BB and android.

Any feedback would be good, but I guess my questions are 1) would your company use this 2) who would this be most useful for 3) why you wouldn't use it.

Thanks,

Taige
I stayed geeky, to my detriment. I went to an all-boys school, and didn't so much as talk to a female younger than 30 between the ages of 12 and 19. Meanwhile, I was too geeky even for school, getting buried in computer science etc. long before there was any academic reward from it, to the extent that I failed English in my final exams and ended up going to a small-town no-name college a couple of years later than my peers, surrounded by unambitious and average students, and knowing more about the topics that interested me than my lecturers. I had a good time playing pool, though.

It kinda worked out in the end, as I knew that once I had a job, I could shine. But I regret my misspent youth. Irresponsibility isn't as kindly regarded in older people.
Cancer patient thrown out of hotel for negative Tripadvisor review
good luck, ww does have a ton of potential. I think we are at a point where people expect web 2.0ish sites. So if your site doesn't look the part, they think they are viewing an abandoned project.
A thesis of this guy http://www.timo-ernst.net/2010/09/a-scientific-performance-c... comperehensive testing of performance of various RIA
Please, for the Love of God, Upgrade Your Browser
I completely misunderstood what you were saying. Please see my edit.
JQuery Blueprint - a js templating framework in just 30 lines of code.
I remember writing an app that took a FICO score into account. It was pretty much a range - if your number fell below the range, rejected (or price increase). While the person using the system could see the qualitative reports, the whole thing was very much driven by your number.
Thanks!

Until November they would have been pretty much right about it too.

I knew I had to go left (sell it) or right (turn it around), I've decided to go for the turn-around because I think that if you sell something you should be negotiating from strength, not from weakness.

Time will tell if it was the right decision.
37 is when he is moving around, zooming in etc. Look in the bottom right and it will say 57.
What is your github address?
BigDecimal uses 10 times as much memory as an int but I didn't intend to properly model currency amounts anyway.
> You can't say somebody is a "borderline sociopath"

Gates is manipulative, disregards rules, is ready to lie under oath to further his interests as long as he thinks he can get away with it and shows no sign of remorse. I cannot diagnose him (for I am an engineer) but I am entitled my own suspicions.

My bet is the only reason he is not a serial killer is because Microsoft has been more fun.
She keeps using the word "disruptive", but actually only discusses uniqueness of skills. Probably just a bit of PR.
the net effect for me is the same
Astronaut Mike Dexter.
Too much effort - the last thing I need is more newspaper spam begging me to pay up for something I need, with no escape in sight. Maybe if I lived in NY.
Google rolls out 2-step verification for Apps users
You'll always need a pointer to the objects, no matter the language. But you'll save on having to store a pointer from those objects to a string object, which with 2 unicode characters (assuming Java strings are null terminated) saves you a total of (I believe Java still uses 64-bit pointers no?), 8bytes for the pointer to the string, 16 for the string, 24 bytes per object minus the int which is 4 bytes so 20 bytes per object. Assuming these are transaction objects, that's a crap-ton if you have lots of transactions.
I'm going to defend my Ph.D. in December. I agree with the parent post. Check my profile for my academic page, which has my publications. I do research related to systems for high performance computing. Not much math. Mathematical reasoning and understanding is needed, but the research is not math.

I'm going to steal from myself and just repeat this: I consider computer science to be everything concerned with computation in both the abstract and in implementation. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606
Ah! A fellow traveler! Some of us are just born hustlers.

When I was 12, I funded my own computer in no small part by selling most of my stuffed animals and all of my My Little Ponies.

When I was 13, I used to make good money reselling brand new IKEA lamps and things on eBay. I had it down to a system -- selecting the ones that had the biggest multiple of going price over real price, never keeping stock on hand, having a real system to writing the listings, and spacing them out, etc.

Things just got more boring from there on out. And while the secondary IKEA market is funny, it's not as funny as yours.

Bicycle upholstery! Cracked me up. That's amazing.
That's fantastic! If you need any design advice, just get in touch.
The other important thing to realise about London:

Use the buses. Really.

In most American cities, the bus network is just grim. In London, it's something everyone uses the whole time, so it has a budget, it's (relatively) clean, and it gets maintained. Very different deal.
IPhone 4 Available in China on September 25
The people who would comply with that header are the sort of people who probably already had a very easy to find unsubscribe link.
If the reviewer doesn't know enough about source control to fairly quickly find the most recent activity date, is it likely said reviewer is competent enough to review the source code itself, or even spend time reviewing it in the first place?
Speaking of echo chamber, stepping outside SV for a while would probably do many good.
> Awww, that's some broken logic :-P

Not really. After being exposed to days of propaganda, those employees may recommend products based on what no longer can be described as their best judgment.

Unless A is a reseller of B, I see no circumstance where E being MVP of B is not an explicit conflict of interest. More likely, A uses products from B and E's judgment, being an MVP of B, will tend towards B's products even if company C's products are a better fit. Sending E to B-sponsored events further distorts E's judgment.
7 Ways to Design a Useful & Customizable Tumblr Theme
So you had tons of fun decking out your own personal Tumblog, and now you want to try your hand at contributing a theme to the Theme Garden. But how do you design a template that would be used by (hopefully) tons of people? What should it look like? How customizable should it be?
I agree--that bit was clearly intentional.
What are the benefits of an S-Corp over an LLC when it comes to freelancing and a side business?
You can use the IAM command line and APIs right now.
Napster Now Available for iOS Devices
Ask HN: When to colocate/VPS/etc.
In another article linked there was a discussion about hosting your own website to maintain your online presence. This is always something I have felt was important --- as evidenced by attempt #29 of getting up a somewhat good looking personal site.

I have always hosted my website and e-mail at home on a simple "server" box. With the minute loads I have at present this works fine --- and I don't foresee any problems in the near future --- but the minute you start getting any kind of load (which is bound to happen sooner or later if the site isn't utterly superfluous) an itty-bitty ADSL link will be maxed in no time.

Which leads me to the question, when do you move to a more professional hosting solution? And which hosting solution then? The main alternatives seem to be colocating and VPS, but each have significant pros and cons (especially for poor students like me).

Colocating, pros:
- Resources are cheap (sticking in a few hundred GB of disk space costs next to nothing)
- Full control over the hardware and OS

Colocating, cons:
- High up-front cost (server and for a lot of colocating deals set-up cost)
- Your problem when stuff breaks
- Not always accessible 24/7 (especially cheaper hosting)

VPS, pros:
- No costs upfront
- No worrying about hardware failure
- More common/low budget hosting

VPS, cons:
- Less control over OS (for example mostly linux based, FreeBSD hosts seem few and far between)
- Low cost version usually have very little memory/disk space limits

Now I guess you could say "Just learn linux then!" to take 1 VPS con away, but I just don't feel comfortable working on linux machines. I've grown to like FreeBSD and I have no intention of ditching it.

So HN tell me, when did you change to "professional" hosting (or did you start there immediately), which route did you go and how did you arrive at your decision?
Market cap has no bearing on whether the keynote was or not horrible.

But, come on, what did the writer expect at an Oracle conference?
damn that's expensive
These are common requests, but I will pass them along to the team anyway to guide our prioritization process.
Given that it's usually my wife or my stepmother, usually I say Yes. I did help with the internet connection on a neighbor's computer about a year ago, but we've known them for years and are on good terms.
Always amazing... thanks for posting that
* I choose what to build. I love chatting with my CEO about what will help our customers, what will make our site better, what's feasible, what's already out there that we can leverage, etc. It's much more satisfying than I found writing code at e.g. MSFT to be (not that that wasn't also fun).

* I choose how to build it. I doubt I'd be able to write production code in CoffeeScript at a big company (or even a medium-sized company).

* I think learning to be a CTO at 24, having to have employees and work with non-tech people, forces me to pick up more transferable life skills than being a software engineer at a big corp.

* I don't think I'm in that 90%. Of course, no one does, but even knowing that I still don't. :)
Life Sack filters drinking water after shipping grains
And I'm surprised at his drive "I’d work until I passed out, and wake up eight or nine hours later, which might be 4 p.m. or 3 a.m. Then I’d work again until I passed out." I don't think I've known many people to push it quite that hard.
"Sorry, I only use Macs." (This tends to work well whether it's true or not.)

If it turns out to be a Mac they're using, I'll usually help because it never turns out to be a weird hardware problem, driver incompatibilities or the like.
Recent MBA graduates have seen their ROI fall since the recession
you're absolutely right about the redesign, we're moving the server side stuff to Yii first, then implementing the redesign will be relatively fast and straight forward. Also if we encounter serious bugs we can revert to the old code while we fix them without end users noticing.
While not exactly a duplicate, this site has been posted before, as its a startup run by one of our very own HNers. ( The submission was here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1534973 ).

On the other hand, I still think the idea is a good one, and both pkrumins and his partner appear to be incredibly bright and kind people. I wish them the best of luck, and hope to see this actually go somewhere.
It's hardly a 'work around' :/

int[][]

or

reals int[]
imaginaries int[]
Well, imagine playing chess. You can become a good player and the game is lot of fun, you can become a great player and game is even more fun. Now, imagine inventing--yes, inventing, not playing--a game like chess. That's the mother of fun. That's what entrepreneurs are after. Few succeed and that's the allure.
Some jobs don't "require" more than 40, but when your fellow developers are always there earlier and later than you are, and when your performance reviews go from bad to good after you ratchet up your number of working hours, and when your assignment list keeps growing longer and more urgent, you get the message.
That looks very promising. Is it more than a proof-of-concept yet, though?
For now it seems the right decision, getting new users and retaining them is the name of the game...
The Opinions of Attractive People
I'm glad that so many people find Common Lisp useful and practical.

I just wish they realized that at this point, nobody else ever will. It's showing it's age. It's incredibly idiosyncratic. Noone new is ever going to start loving it.

Clojure may only be a blip on the radar in the grand, glacial evolution of LISP, but it's really, really nice that there's a featureful, modern lisp that a 21st century developer can actually pick up, use, and enjoy.
PostgreSQL 9.0 Final Release Available Now
The entire article rests on the false premise that Clojure is not a Lisp.
Depending on who it is, I either do it for them or immediately start talking about how much I charge.
String[] currencySymbols;
int[] amounts;

?
Basically how I got my current gig, I knew my (now) boss from some open source work, they were looking for a contractor, and I had a job. No interview, no nothing, just a discussion of the terms and then down to business. Economists like to say complete information generates efficiency (or something to that effect), case in point.
I think one thing that often gets overlooked in these types of things is whether or not Gillete just executed on other parts of their business plan better than their competitors. Maybe their sales force was twice as good, maybe their distribution was more reliable, maybe it was just more effective marketing. Perhaps they just figured out a way to manufacture blades 20% cheaper than their competitors.

For while the razor/razorblades story gets the headlines, for a lot of other products there is one company dominating the category for no apparent reason. Coca Cola, for instance, doesn't have any real benefit over other drinks, but they have a fearsome salesforce, marketing and distribution.

All I'm saying is that perhaps Gilletes main competitive advantage is kept quiet because everyone thinks it's their razor+blades strategy, and the company likes it that way because it stops people looking at other parts of the business to copy.
Why not?

I understand device drivers cannot be easily tested (unless we write accurate hardware simulators, which can be done with a lot of effort), and the same happens with time-critical stuff (that could be solved with even more hardware emulation) but this kind of stuff (checking if a known exploit fails) could and should be tested in automated fashion.

Not everything can be tested reliably and automatically, but what can, should.
I don't get asked that a lot, so unlike quite a lot or replies I read, I actually try to fix it most of the time!
That's not an excuse for not having proper automated tests in place.
Java has closures.... anonymous inner types
Actually, yes. Not completely (as in, not forever), and it's not very serious (I get the feeling of a failing short term memory in times when I'm more stressed out) but it's definitely cause for concern. I guess it is the combination of sleep deprivation and way too much stress.
Hopefully, no one will read the cutest programming book since Starting Forth, Conrad Barsk's "Land of Lisp":

http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/dfpmq/no_starch_press_...
They won't email you unless you want them to. I have been registered for years and haven't gotten one email. I've also only had to sign in once this year, when I got a new computer. It's well worth the effort.