skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry for the self promotion, but I wrote a blog post that is related to this discussion about passion for work. The post is a reflection on my own thought process, as I transitioned from academia to starting my own company (and creating a custom career that I would be passionate about). For convenience, here is some relevant text from my post:

"The way that we choose careers is strange. We often choose a career based on opportunism (e.g., expected salary) or fear (e.g., what family may think). The result is that we end up in a place that’s not fully satisfying. That we pick careers in a haphazard manner is stunning given the fact that we spend nearly 100,000 hours working over our lifetimes.

So if opportunism or fear are not the best ways to choose a career, then what’s a better approach? I believe three main factors should drive a choice of career. The first factor is goals. What are your short-, medium- and long-term goals in life? And it’s very important to think about goals beyond just your career. The second factor is pleasure. What activities do you derive real enjoyment from? The third and final factor is skill or expertise. Where do your innate and learned skills and talents lie?

Consider a Venn diagram comprised of these three factors — goals, pleasures, and skills — and a fulfilling career likely resides at the center.

Finding a career at the center of this Venn diagram is simple in theory, but difficult in practice. The first challenge is to overcome inertia, moving beyond opportunism or fear as your selection criteria. The second challenge is managing and balancing other commitments in your life, such as financial or family obligations. The third challenge is to know yourself deeply. It’s surprising how few people take the time to truly understand their goals, pleasures, and skills. The fourth challenge is to identify a career that aligns to these three factors. Many careers will satisfy one factor, some two, but few will satisfy all three. For some people there may be no established career path that aligns to all three factors, which means you have to create a “custom” career.

How does one learn about their goals, pleasures, and skills, and a matching career? Through a process of contemplation, trial and error, and growth. You must contemplate and be deliberate in your actions, but allow your perspective to evolve over time, as you attain more experience in work and life. You must try a lot of different things to learn about yourself and how you respond to different activities and settings. As you hone your understanding of yourself, you must undertake deliberate practice within a specific domain for an extended period to advance your expertise and skill. Imagine starting your working life at the top of a funnel, and as you contemplate, experiment, and grow, you move down the funnel, and towards a better understanding of yourself and an ideal career."

(http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/09/18/choosing-your-career/)
It's in your face but unless you've done some A/B testing, you'd be surprised what can affect conversions! :-)

FWIW, I have an e-mail newsletter myself at http://rubyweekly.com/ and the way it is right now is the best I've got it to convert. Every time I removed more from the page, the better the conversion, and unsubscribe rates are low (about 8 in total in the last month).

Of course, flat out "lots of subscribers" isn't necessarily your goal and you don't need to optimize for that if it doesn't make sense for your plan.
I guess, laying down is by definiton a kind of waking inactivity, too. So it will have those adverse effects similar to the sitting with one exception (obvious): In laying down your back is under much smaller stress.
Not necessarily; I often listen to audiobooks and the like while driving, or sometimes I value it as time to think. I've even consumed several dozen college lectures via MIT and UC Berkeley podcasts.
Does everyone need to learn a foreign language?

Does everyone need to be able to write a persuasive essay?

Does everyone need to be able to conduct a simple but rigorous scientific experiment?

Does everyone need to be able to prove a theorem?

The answer to all these questions is "no" along with the answer to the original "question". But these questions and their answers miss the original point. Sure, a given person can have a fine and even high-paid life without any of a number skills.

But should our education system make systematic effort to give most students a small portion of the skills needed to understand the modern world? Yes, yes! The point is that the education system desperately needs to be exposing people to the skills needed for a high-level understanding of the modern world (exactly what isn't well tested by multiple choice tests BTW).

The point is that a class on "computers" should give everyone an idea of what is and isn't possible with them - a far cry from learning Excel macros.
If you have an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry, Rdio is awesome for getting music on there. Way easier than iTunes, if you ask me.

Disclaimer: I totally work for them.
So one business model = Apple

Another = Unisys

Looks like the beginning of the end....
Data about the hidden volume is encrypted and kept in the second 512 bytes of the volume, where as data about the normal volume is in the first 512 bytes. If there is no hidden volume, the second 512 bytes are purely random data.

It's impossible to tell an encrypted volume header apart from random data. It's very much "try, and if you fail, you either have the wrong key or the volume doesn't exist".
You should be willing to make this startup the main focus of your life
YC is (largely? entirely?) investing the money of Sequoia and other investors as well: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/21/y-combinator-closes-new-8-2...

So it would be the same basic idea. Sequoia sees that there's a lot of money to be made by investing in good startups early, but also sees that there are people who are better than them at doing so, since their expertise is traditional VC rounds. So they give YC money to invest in super-early-stage startups, and YC and Sequoia share the returns.

There's no reason they couldn't do the same thing for someone who's interesting in angel investing but doesn't have the money or doesn't want to risk his own money.
Instead of taking time off to do this, I'm doing it on the fly while my startup is up and running. I fought this fight for just about 2 years, outsourcing much of our web development during that time. And I don't regret outsourcing - it can get you up and running faster than learning, especially if you're building something that borders on complex. But in the end, we really needed to start bringing things in-house, from both the standpoints of protecting our IP as well as enabling us to become more nimble in terms of making changes on the fly etc.

We haven't completely weened off outsourced web development, but I can now see a path to get there, and it all started by learning how to become more self-sufficient.
There are several completely different algorithms for converting DFAs into regular expressions. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cdm/pdf/KleeneAlg.pdf for three. One of my favorites involves eliminating states by replacing all pairs of transitions through them with regexes -- it winds up looking almost exactly like the Floyd-Warshall algorithm.
It doesn't matter. UMG is the elephant in the room, they'll do whatever UMG does.
Breaking the noise barrier: Enter the phonon computer
I definitely miss MegaBus from when I was in the Midwest.
James Dyson Award Winners
The end of life of Windows 2k in July hopefully will mean this will change soon. Thankfully many companies will upgrade once there is no support whatsoever for their current OS.
Dear Yelp, What am I supposed to click on?
This article doesn't even come close to suggesting a solution to the problem.

As entrepreneurs, I think we overestimate the amount of people that look to their jobs as a way to reach fulfillment in their lives. Many people just see their job as a way to pay the mortgage, feed the family, or as a way to fund their hobbies and passions.

I always struggle to believe that all jobs could find passionate people. For businesses of a sizable scale, can you really find 10,000 passionate insurance adjusters or tax auditors. They may be good at their jobs, and they make care about the quality of work and their professionalism, but are they truly passionate about it?

If the whole world wanted to be passionate about their jobs, most of the mundane services we need to operate as a society would probably fall apart.
On another topic, the diagram is wrong: 'English' and 'British' are mutually-exclusive, as English are Germanic and British, Brythonic.
Interestingly the cause of the most severe part of their downtime seems to still be unknown to them:

As a next step, we introduced a new shard, intending to move some of the data from the overloaded shard to this new one.

We wanted to move this data in the background while the site remained up. For reasons that are not entirely clear to us right now, though, the addition of this shard caused the entire site to go down.

To those who use MongoDB - does this sound like something that might have been caused by MongoDB itself, or Foursquare's use of it?
Where I live (not along the Mediterranean) a dinner invitation for 8 means people starting to arrive at 9:45. An appointment with the dentist, half an hour away, at 11 means leaving at 11:05.

To say more is to be horribly politically incorrect.
I suppose the issue was more that there are barriers which require the effort beyond that which the 98th percentile will exert for the benefit that Chrome gives, and therefore 98% of users will stick with what's given to them.
One way to have long, but memorable passwords is to construct them using the first letter of each word a rather long, but memorable quote/phrase. E.g., The opening of the Gettysburg Address yields: fsasyaofbfutcannciladttptamwce. And if you forget the exact words, you can always look them up.
Twitter on 24" vertical screen.
Hipmunk already has a ton of revenue? Source?
I'm happy to provide numbers for Tarsnap.

Average revenue per user is slightly more than $3/month. About 50% of users are less than $0.15/month, about 70% of users are less than $1/month, about 85% are less than $3/month. The top 15% are responsible for about 85% of the total revenue.

What else do you want to know?
If it was my music to begin with I hopefully have it backed up somewhere, so no harm done. I'll just go back to doing whatever I did before.
I am obsessively punctual, and I find that I only very rarely have to send the "sorry, I'm late" text. Much like the poor woman at the end of the article, I view it as a respect issue. It's not difficult to be on time so long as I leave at a reasonable time. For the common case (no problems) I can take a leisurely drive at a safe speed (see article http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20190187 about driving fast). If I do encounter an unplanned delay, there's enough slack in the schedule that I can usually make up the time and still be punctual.

I am also aware of the time and place, so if I know I will be driving east on I-40 at rush hour I will need to bake an extra 5-10 minutes into my schedule.

I don't do this to make myself look good, I do it because I respect the other person and would like to be treated the same when the other person is meeting me somewhere.
You don't need mailing lists - it works for bricks and mortar stores.

I bought a groupon 1/2 price coupon for a fancy clothes store (Gap). I wouldn't normally go in there but for $10 they got me to go in and buy $50 worth of shirts. I will probably even go back.

Or they could have hired some 17 year old super model I have never heard of, for $Ms to promote them in a magazine I never read - but that wouldn't have got me in the door.
Wow! A clean page like this does make my wall of text look pretty scary... I guess I have a lot of work to do on the UI. I'll try to simplify it as much as possible in the coming days.

P.S. Sub'd to Ruby Weekly
There are a lot of reasons. The ports system has already been mentioned, and some people really like ZFS. More to the point, though, licensing differences ensure that more software (like ZFS) is legally compatible with FreeBSD than with any typical Linux+GNU distribution.

It has also been mentioned that FreeBSD is "a sysadmin's dream". A big part of the reason for this is its userland. The truth of the matter is that BSD tools are often much more consistent and less overly complex, and have better thought out basic functionality and interfaces, than GNU tools.

BSD Unix systems also resist the influence of the GNU project where many Linux distributions do not. For instance, in some distributions you will find far too many pieces of software that have nothing for man pages except a reference to how the real information is in a GNU Info page. The GNU project very much as a "not invented here" problem, where it not only wants to replace everything in the world -- even when it's "free software" -- with something weird and less usable that bears the GNU stamp on it. Meanwhile, the various BSD Unix systems insist on standardized tools and documentation that is easy to use, like man pages instead of Info pages.

Speaking of documentation, that's another good reason to use FreeBSD (or OpenBSD, for that matter). The big BSD Unix systems are among the best-documented OSes I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few operating systems. Consider the completeness and helpfulness of the FreeBSD Handbook, which is actually one of the best pieces of documentation on the Web even for many Linux distributions, but is even more helpful for FreeBSD (of course).

Also . . . this is not comprehensive, but it might serve as a nice introduction to the whys and wherefores:

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin...

I wrote a comparison as well, once, but I seem to have misplaced it.
The always-deadpan delivery of these vids is normally annoying, but it fit this one so well.
Perhaps the password is a sequence of 50 characters that he's never memorised but keeps on a slip of paper, and which has recently gone missing.
Yes, as others mentioned, there are good tools to rapidly prototype things, and using them shows you are resourceful and committed.

If you really can't do that, at least put in the time to create a detailed spec.
Huh. What is the point of this posting exactly?
Is this really an issue? Why not just try to benchmark job performance instead of citing this ill-defined (and worse—self-reported) survey? If two people both do the exact same job and the same level of performance, and one claims to be more passionate than the other, does that really matter? This is essentially the philosophical zombie argument.
I don't think the standard CRUD web app is necessarily what will make an exciting startup. That would more likely be some new twist.

Also, I can feel with business types who say it doesn't make sense for them to learn coding. In a way I am in a similar situation, as I am constantly extremely hampered by my lack of design skills. Should I try to become a designer? I admit to trying now and them (decided today to go through the inkscape tutorials, bought the occasional book on design), but honestly, odds are very low that I'll be able to compete with real designers. And the graphics design takes away much needed time from coding.
Note 1 is pretty important. If you're non-technical how do you know if your idea is technically challenging or not? In many cases you don't, even technical people often misjudge how challenging and idea can get.

If it is challenging, you get too deep into code, things take too long, get discouraged, etc.. Or settle for some gimmick that you can execute within a reasonable timeframe.

It's a good theory, but it assumes that non-technical people will try ideas that are minor improvements over existing ideas, like twitter, groupon clones. But they may also read up on magic new tech and come up with ideas based on that, not knowing how hard they'll be to prototype.
From what I read as part of the comments in the article, it seems Google already licensed some if not all of these patents (for Nexus one) and hence kind of validate them.
And in the London tube over Christmas. Chrome marketing is pretty awesome.
I think you're confusing "reasonable doubt" with "any doubt at all." Postulating malicious data-encrypting malfeasance is not reasonable doubt, it's conspiracy theory.
The point of plausible deniability is that is simplifies things, at least for you the owner of the data.
Wouldn't surprise me, knowing quite a few small businesses, if they were told about the option to cap their sales, but ignored it ("How could more business ever be bad?").

Groupon have info online for merchants, advising them on how to deal with what they'll experience, but again it wouldn't surprise me if most merchants completely ignore it. People won't read instructions or advice unless you hold their eyelids open and force them to take it in. And small business owners (I'm one of them) are usually busier and more stressed than others, meaning we're even less likely to make use of such guides.

Regardless it sounds like a great challenge for Groupon to have. I'd rather have a near-endless stream of customers in this situation, than be at the beginning of it all trying to attract anyone to the site at all.
Kids' science kits may take hit from safety ruling
For a Few Monads More (new chapter)
I don't want to sound harsh, but that's at least in part because talk is cheap - everyone enjoys talking and brainstorming, but at some point you have to put your head down, get your hands dirty, and get through that last 10% of work that invariably takes 90% of the time.

There's nothing wrong with what you enjoy doing - it's very valuable to have someone good at it - but there is a difference between a good sales/marketing guy and a good founder, just like there's a difference between a good programmer and a good founder.
we noticed that one of these shards was performing poorly because a disproportionate share of check-ins were being written to it.

I'd love to know the root cause behind this specific issue. Was this a behavioral issue within the user base, or a technical problem that routed check-ins to this specific shard more than others?

Since they mentioned they partition their shards by userId that would probably rule out their routing process. I wonder if there was some event that caused a certain sharded subsection of users to start sending so many checkins?

And since this was a subset of userIds on the same shard - could this have been a targeted DOS or SPAM event?

I'm making a very conscious migration to MongoDB so I'm very interested to hear what the root cause of this was.
Google responds to Oracle's patent lawsuit
A bit more, if you don't mind:

Having a simple 'about' page would help, though the site is very self explanatory.

A menu at the top, even a simple one, can probably be useful.

How about making the names of celebrities (or other keywords) into links, wherein clicking on them would load a list of articles related to them?

Got a bit more, but you didn't want it to be brutal :).

Nah, just joking. Its a good idea.
stuff like that is fine if you write a big essay once a month...but good luck making that a daily publication.

there are only so many topics you can cover, before you tun out.
You mean those too poor to own a house so they don't get the John-McCain-8-house-ownership-tax-credit?
The pro-speed limit argument falls apart as soon as someone says "but accidents are more deadly at 90mph" or "your reaction time is less adequate at 90mph." The problem is that while the statement is true, it's also true any lower limit, anything >0.
This is a summary posted by Engadget. I thought it'd be more friendly than the full doc.

Here's the link to the full document if anyone's interested:
http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/oracle-google-a...
Ask HN: How many of you have a Living Will?
Do many people even know what a Living Will is verses a Last Will? If you do have one, where did you get it?

I've created a free document if you would like to create one.

http://thewillcreator.com/free-living-will-forms/
I'm a huge Splunk user and I agree with it's price tag it would make it very difficult to justify the costs against the gains when you're operating a small and tight ship. However, I would be very interested in the tools that they use to analyse their data. Obviously they could use a series of grep/awk scripts to pull out the data in key value pairs but what do they do with it after that?
Erm?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ironical
They took out the outlets after a laptop user pulled the plug on their cooler. Overkill, perhaps, but there was some fairly rude behavior there for a while, including people bringing in starbucks cups and camping for the wifi.
Here is a clickable link: http://thewillcreator.com/free-living-will-forms/
Well I have nothing constructive to add, but it certainly makes me rethink using MongoDB in any sort of serious production environment. I've been hesitant to use MongoDB for this very reason...what happens when things go wrong? I'm certainly not an expert in how to handle those situations, and there aren't very many of those experts out there. Unfortunately for Foursquare, they got caught with their pants down, not having someone on staff who really understands all the ins & outs of a database technology their entire service depends upon.
advice for coders who can't found: have an idea, learn to talk to people.

now we can all be single founders.
That's for the jury to decide, eh?
I'm that founder learning how to code right now and I couldn't agree more with you.

Been hacking away for a 1-2 months so far with a friend who is a developer. It's totally worth it.
Sorry to be a downer, but you just took the spot of someone who cared enough to think ahead the tiniest amount, and now you can't go? Seems like not a very nice thing to do...
Lol, You won't find a good designer there. Let alone a UI designer. Look for them in blogs for UI design, or ask the people who have apps with good UIs.

Though I do UI design myself but not sure if it's a good idea to promote that here.
مسلسل العشق الممنوع الحلقة 79
Yes, but I'm assuming the UK didn't draft a law in the mid 90s to prevent Islamic attacks on the US.

The fact that their plans would be written in a foreign language (never mind a foreign alphabet) would have been more than adequate to keep it secret from British intelligence.

ps. You do know that we have been having terrorist attacks for almost a century.
So you're saying that doing hardcore marketing and biz-dev isn't 'putting your head down'? If a fantastic technical founder programs a fantastic app, but no one finds out about it, what value is it? It needs to be in the hands of users!

I believe that it's just as valuable (i'm not going to say 'if not more')
> All the reasons to prefer FreeBSD (network & VM performance, stability, security, etc) are no longer clear advantages when compared to contemporary Linux.

Really? Why don't you think stability and security are important? What about consistency of interface between tools in a single system, and adherence to expectations of standard tools that make sense to the user (e.g., man pages instead of GNU Info pages, which are slowly creeping into Linux-based systems everywhere I look)?

I'm afraid I have to disagree with this estimation. In fact, the more time that passes, and the more the biggest Linux distributions are those that pander to people with expectations grown in the MS Windows ecosystem, the more the benefits of FreeBSD over Linux distributions grow. I suppose your mileage may vary, though.

> Also, the Gentoo crowd seems to be similar, at least in spirit, to the FreeBSD folks. While they don't have the same deep integration of kernel & environment, they do have the same values when it comes to clean aesthetics and keeping up-to-date with packaged software.

. . . but not when it comes to stability, from what I have seen.