skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working on existing, bad quality code is the biggest nightmare for me. My philosophy is to think about a problem a lot, and write as few and as concise code as possible. Even delete code if not necessary. I am working alone on 180.000 lines of really bad quality Java code with copy-pastes, and its own 'web framework' and using all the buzzword technologies like Spring everywhere. The business requirements are not that complicated (although boring like hell) 20.000 lines of really high quality code would solve the problem I think. It has been created by 3 people for not too much money. I've reached the point that it is impossible that I can ever refactor this alone, as there is no time for that an my manager is micromanaging very much. It is extremely hard to put in new features because I have no mental model for how to do things in this 'framework' (an undocumented mess. and I've spoken with the author: he could not explain the philosophy behind it.) I am so unmotivated that I go to math/programming forums and I solve math/algorithmization problems for some fun when I should work. At the darkest times I find out math quizzes for myself or just think about P vs. NP (which is depressing as there is no chance to solve that). But I need the money, and there are not much interesting jobs where I live.

And I feel that there are people who could be a bit better at what I do now: people with very very good memory. Maintaining a huge illogical mess needs very good memory and nothing else. I don't have very good memory. That's why I love logical and conciese solutions which have 'philosophy' behind them.
In the UK Android is everywhere, but only since about July (the date of those figures) when Carphone Warehouse shops were plastered with the little green Android figure (rather than carrier specific branding like "Droid" that the US apparently opts for). The number of devices seemed to explode around that time too, with Galaxy S and refreshes of the HTC and Motorola lines.

And if you follow stories about dirt cheap, but still impressively spec'ed low-end handsets like the Orange San Francisco (aka ZTE Blade) I don't think you'd find it unlikely that Android will rapidly overtake iOS here too.
> I'm not sure Nintendo fits well in this list.

I think Nintendo is a great example.

The GameCube was clobbered by the PS2. How did Nintendo respond? Not by trying to be more like Sony but by being more like Nintendo. The point is that it's very difficult change corporate culture, for better or worse.
"maximum comfort". ha ha. yeah that was my first thought. :-)

I'd love to try it. We drag around so much wait as we go places
No, for two reasons.

1. HIPAA doesn't apply to you unless you're an employee of a covered entity, that is, a health care provider, health care plan, or a firm contracted by a member of the previous two categories to handle billing. You can hand out your private medical information to whomever you want without worrying about HIPAA.

2. Even if HIPAA did, it doesn't give you the power to refuse to disclose HIPAA data when such disclosure is required by law[1].

[1] 45 CFR 164.512 (a): http://www.publichealthlaw.net/Reader/docs/HIPAA.pdf
I doubt Amazon, Apple, NetFlix etc are going to give you their data.. they might if you paid them for it?

Also the content providers themselves may have contracts with Amazon, Apple etc which prevents them from sharing that data with any 3rd parties and is exclusively available to them.

I don't know how analogue / digital TV ratings work in the US, but in the UK it is compiled by a company (BARB) by having a representative sample of people having their TV viewing measured by extra equipment installed in their homes and then extrapolated to give the 'real' viewing figure.

I am thinking maybe a similar idea could work for net based viewing with a desktop / browser plugin.

- Collect their demographic
- Provide an incentive for people to sign up (weekly prize draw, monthly prize draw)
- Perhaps even sell it as a social aspect (allow us to collect data on what you watch will help give you good programming in the future).

On the other hand, look at the current shift for net-based viewing - a lot of it is moving onto TV based set top boxes (Google TV, new Apple TV and integrated into TVs themselves). These are all walled gardens and I can't see you having any chance of getting that data. Apple do not even publically give you a regional breakdown on their device sales (for Europe at least), so the chances of them sharing this data are nil.
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just a list of requirements doesn't cut it.
There are a lot of ways to fill in requirements, a lot of bad ones and very few good ones.
When you ask an author to write a 500 page roman about some dramatic lovestory you have written down in a 5 page requirement document, there are still a lot of things that will be unclear when he is writing it.
When the author hits an unknown he can send you an email, make an assumption or call a meeting.
1 and 3 breaks his workflow, 2 doesn't.

now speed this proces up a 100 times faster and you've got a programmer in the 'zone' with a 5 page requirement list for a fairly complex project.
It won't end very well unless you have very short communication lines for the entire duration of the project (or the programmer is reading your mind)
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I guessed 400. My brain initially gave me the number 250, but then I realised the numbers in the lower rows would add up to 100's pretty quickly, so I upped it a bit.
Loving the concept but maybe you should be charitable and make it free as it is really just a tutorial + triggers.
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Thinking in terms of "add feature X" is not breaking it down enough. No feature is an atomic piece of code...if it was, "add feature X" would be enough to implement it and you would be done. The trick is to keep breaking down "add feature X" until you have a list of todo items that are close enough to code that they are then trivial to implement.
Most "regular" expression engines in modern programming languages can handle back-references (e.g. "(.)\1"), which are actually so complex that you need a full-blown Turing machine to handle them.
I can really relate to this. For me it happens mostly when I have too many projects at once or the projects are chores which do not resonate with my interests.
Social Media Portraits.
I guessed 300.
You are right, the details are debatable. What I really want is a handful toggle switches to configure the behaviour to my liking - which may very well change, e.g. during a vacation.

It's not exactly rocket science and I sometimes wonder what those skype engineers are doing all day. ;-)

I haven't noticed any functional advancement in ~3 years. Only some minor GUI polishing.
Except for novelty value, what is the win/feature compared to normal bicycles?

This rail system must have a lot of new failure modes, compared to an asphalt bicycle path.

Cheaper to install? Safer? Less problem in rain?
This book is actually a tibetan manual for a dying person on how to proceed with his mind during the process. It's not a poem nor mystical metaphore about anything not related to dying.

One of the translations of the original sub-title is: "the precious way of liberation through listening", meaning that the purpose was to read it to the dying person in order to liberate his mind from the subconscious baggage which resurfaces and takes over during dying.

The images, scenes and dramatis personae (including gods, demons and stuff) occuring in the text are all projections of the subconscious impressions in mind, accumulated during a life and resurfacing when dying. The fact that this is not explained in the book is because every tibetan buddhist knows / takes for granted that mind works this way, so there's no need to explain it additionally.

The other funny thing and a source of misconception is the translation: while tibetan culture was perceived inferior, mystical and over-religious by westerners, it was actually discovering lots of stuff about consciousness and subconsciousness since centuries, same as the whole buddhism. But the western discoverers couldn't believe that tibetans, being technologically inferior, were able to make a progress in different areas, so when translating they didn't used then-new terminology like counsciousness and stuff, but used church-like terminology like if they were translating european middle-ages material. This trend, though diminishing, continues to this day.

My advice is to remember this book was written for different people and then translated using language and metaphors the translators could bear. Yet since 70s some people made a huge advance of making a connection between asian and western way of thinking in order to bring the buddhist methods to the west, cutting off the misconceptions and cultural baggages. Such teachers, whether would they be Zen or Diamond Way representatives, can teach practical stuff on what to do during dying or how to help dying people in our modern world. If anyone's interested I'd reach such teachers instead of taking such books too seriously.
I'd love to but I'm not really at a point in my life where I can do a whole project full time for fun :) Since it'd be cloud based (as you'd be doing things which would be dangerous to do on your home system, under time pressure) it'd have running costs, and I expect the security aspect to be tricky.
I found myself in the same problem when I've become web developer - my attention was weakening from month to month, even having healthy work and rest, probably because of lots of distractions that internet brough. End up using Pomodoro Technique. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ (site is down currently, however it seems to be temporary). In short, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

1) decide on the task to be done
2) set the pomodoro (timer) to 25 minutes
3) work on the task until the timer rings; record with an x
4) take a short break (5 minutes)
5) every four "pomodoros" take a longer break (15–20 minutes)

That way, after a few month of working that way I could make about 8 pomodoros a day (comparing to 2 at start) and it made me merely 4 times more productive, also attention after that kind of training started to improve.
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مسلسل سيلا الحلقة 29
Thanks very much for your support wyclif, any suggestions?
Droid phone snatcher slips away despite manhunt in Palo Alto
The Four Main Things that Investors Look for in a Startup
It has different meanings in different sectors. Typical in desktop publishing tools, such as Xpress and InDesign, 'greeking' occurs when actual representation of letters is replaced by a stylised texture patterns. Usually this occurs at font sizes or zoom levels where it is impractical to accurately render the type on screen.

I must admit that after 20 years in publishing, I've never heard of Ipsum Lorem described as 'greek text', but I'm sure it is possible.
The irony of the matter is people care: for their music, for their favorite artists, for their lives and moral values.

So instead of making people be grateful for their services, the record labels are doing everything in their power to alienate their customers, bullying them into paying: and in the meantime piracy gets stronger and more accepted, since it's a lot more comfortable to just download a torrent (and no matter how much legislation they're lobbying for, the genie is out of the bottle and millions of people are doing it).

Not only that, but they've been promoting crappy music for a while now, since it is cheaper to produce and such artists are expendable.

I'm not a hater, but as long as they are selling crap, then I'm not buying.
Good idea however your site has no news, contact info etc .. nothing apart from an overview of the product and links to paypal .. add some info about yourself at least and I'll cough up £11.99.

Good luck!
Just that the assumptions are different. Actually, the West is becoming more and more like Japan in this regard. In the past people started with a computer and built out from there. Now I know people with a smartphone and a games console and a Sky+ box and no actual "computer".
"kah-plah-yeh"

Say that out loud and tell me this isn't Klingon.
I'd guess the guy talking about burn out might be correct. Try working less for a while and take up a totally different hobby. If you don't get exercise, start doing it. [Edit: The advice below to go Voltaire and get a garden might be good.]

Some other possibly reasons, from mine (and others) lives.

Check physical health. "Random" examples: Sleep apnea. Bacteria infection.

Some weird allergy/food intolerance. Change where you work, eat and sleep. [Edit: From comment below it seems you've had this long enough and in enough jobs to know this isn't true.]

You might have problems relaxing when not working, try a course in meditation. [Edit: You took time from comment, so this is probably not it, either.]
Have you checked out Hacker Evolution? Might be a good source of ideas. It also strikes me that £20 may be a tad much to ask for an interactive fiction text game.
In the summer I made a Chrome extension to block status updates about the World Cup from my notifications stream, and replace them with a philosophical quote from twitter, or a picture from Flickr's API. It worked, and was fun.

I should resurrect that project, and blog about my experience creating it.
I'm so happy they're back up, here I was thinking the world would come to a screeching halt when people cannot check-in to places.

Seriously though, are they THAT important?
Great. But in order to use it daily: Where do I put my rucksack?
Thanks! Good point, I'll pop some more stuff up!
it would be more aerodynamic. I have a recumbent bike which is a lot faster than a conventional racing bike, but too low to ride safely in traffic.

i think it is interesting from the point of view of extremely efficient transport, rather than as an alternative to a bike; you could certainly see it being successful if it was all electric rather than pedal powered.
2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for New Ways of Linking Carbon Atoms
I can spend all day clicking and watching.

Gravity (thou art a heartless bitch)
> They broke clean room design by hiring engineers from sun, jvm engineers etc.

AFAIK not unless Oracle proves that exactly these engineers were involved. And a lot more must be first proved to establish even "involved in what."

> The patents are integral to the JVM.

Google doesn't use JVM in Android.
Nothing is permanent and we are all dying people, if you really think about it.

The book is about shedding all the layers of delusion that separate man from the universe.

Einstein believed Buddhism would be an ideal candidate for a universal religion for lifeforms outside of Earth too.

What I got from the book is a simple way to focus on the immaterial instead of the material. To see the entire universe with consciousness and compassion instead of an expanse to be colonized and conquered.

I think the world is just reaching a point where the Eastern and Western perspectives are starting to become one. The 21st century is the dawn of the universal age where we all start to realize we are made of equal atoms and cells striving for survival and transcendence.

This book seems to be in tune with modern science journals too.
I believe estel was just pointing out that it should be "England and Wales", rather than "London and Wales". :)
yes nothing beats inexperience
the ideas are ancient and they still resonate today. the author never claims they are all original either.
"Don't categorize yourself." Good point. I should let others do that, if they so desire.

I am passionate about it and when the need arises I am able to get this across. I'll take your advice (and noahc's) and pitch what I can do, if only to get some feedback to iteratively improve myself and my skills for the future. Being a corporate generalist is an asset in some respects as there are things that I'm good at that are in demand. I need to work on identifying this and selling it, I guess.

'Bootstrapping Your Business', ordered.
There are significant deployments of BT among software vendors. You probably already know about them, but in case you don't, off the top of my head, Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute patches for WoW and most Linux distributions use torrents to distribute ISOs. Both perfectly legal, legitimate, and great uses of BitTorrent.

I wish that BitTorrent usage was more prolific among legit large downloads too, it would really help with corruption, etc. BitTorrent is really the simplest way to fix a large file that mostly downloaded correctly but has a few corrupt chunks; the torrent client resolves that problem automatically for already-downloaded files and fixes it on-the-fly on downloads it handles.

It is really annoying to download a 350MB service pack from Microsoft at 300kb/s and then have to download the whole thing again because "the file was corrupt". I don't know if MS just has shoddy servers or what but I've had that happen multiple times. Large torrent swarms, which Microsoft could easily populate itself but may not even need to, usually max out a client's connection and then the corruption thing would never happen.

I should try to sell consulting services on torrents to MS at some point I guess.
Develop my concept
looking for a technical star to work on a web concept with me, if interested, send me some samples of work to jedarogroup@gmail.com
Adding a keylogger (presumably hardware) is not without its risks. If the suspect discovers it, they have a window of opportunity to cover their tracks.
Either he already changed the site or you using some insanely low resolution, it's above the fold for me even on my laptop screen.
I've been using clang 2.7 instead of GCC for a few months now. I'm never going back to GCC:

* It has much better diagnostics messages: http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html

* Compilation times are much faster, even though I always wrap gcc/clang with ccache.

* It uses a lot less CPU / memory on equivalent compile options.

The only disadvantage is that compared to GCC 4.4 the resulting binaries are usually around 5-10% slower. The LLVM developers say that's to be expected, currently they're targeting GCC 4.2 for their performance metrics.
ha. what I've learned from reading the comments is that it's not necessarily necessary to compensate for this error. (I also guessed 400 as a lower bound.)
Was just wondering, any reason why hackers seem to prefer Mac over Linux ?
Are you a facebook/social media guru
help me grow my brand using social media, tell me how you did it
Why should I? You provide no information about yourself or why working with you would be a good idea.
Because you purchased an Apple product.
Sounds not too bad, but I haven't gotten an email yet, so I can't say anything about the service. Do you have any plan for monetizing it ?
Ask HN: Backup tools for distributed home LAN backup?
Options for tools to run on multiple computers in a lan so that each computer can be backed up to all of the other ones?

Are there apps for this?
Could you shed more light on aspects of your self-discipline while being an early employee at a startup?
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You'd think tho', that if salesman A takes client B to dinner and charges it to expenses A at least would clearly understand that it was not a social relationship. Interesting bit of cognitive dissonance that they don't.
I think I might also have that problem.
This has happened to me a few times. These are the tips that I follow.

-Don't worry about it. Its just a phase and it happens to the best of programmers.

-Drink loads of water. I don't know the biology behind it but when I'm properly hydrated I think much more clearly.

-Take some time off work. Play a game, watch a movie. Any of those guilty pleasures that you generally avoid. And don't feel bad about wasting a bit of time. Your mind needs the rest.

-Cycle through different kinds of music. I see that sometimes working with music helps and sometimes working without. Sometimes changing music genre helps. I cycle through phases during which I am most productive in either Heavy Metal, Folk, Classical or 80's pop music.

-Aboodman has already mentioned the importance of timely healthy meals. I tend to keep some fruits with me when I start programming, to munch on over the programming session.

-Something that might be the most important is, solve easier problems and gradually move to the harder problems. Generally (and managers would tell you) that you want to solve the harder problems first, but when you are in stuck and looking for inspiration solve some easier problems. If there are no relatively easy problem at work, there are lot of easy programming problems available on the net (Google programming interview questions). Find some relatively easier problems and code a solution. Then, move to relatively harder ones.

--I tend to like easier problems where the target is to achieve a particular performance (say processing should end in xyz seconds) because then you could gradually improve your solutions. Victories in small battles are just as important for our mind as the bigger ones.

Just my 2 cents.

edit: formatting
Ask HN: Tools for backing up the contents/filenames of a directory?
Backing up media seems pointless to me, I would rather save the name of the file, then if I lose it and decide I need it I can get it again.

If not, at least I know what I had.

My current solution (on windows) is to use this cmd, but a tool would be even better.

tree /a /f > contents.txt
Created 14 minutes ago and first post, I smell something dodgy.
I'm 1m94, most desks are too low for me :-)
That doesn't cover you for swap files / hibernate files or memory dumps which are written unencrypted and largely outside your control. Obviously it's hit or miss what may or may not be included in there but there are a fair number of leaks where even "secure" information is handled in an insecure fashion.

The TrueCrypt section on data leaks (http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/data-leaks) talks about them and how to get round them.

But if you're really serious about these things it's more complex than not storing things on your local drive or even using encryption.
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That's scary and cool. Don't you think so?
I guessed 600.
I've used BitTorrent for legal files a lot. An example would be Ubuntu CD images, or patches for games.

"Secondly, I really dont think iphone is good for bittorrent also -- i mean you would continuously loose battery and bandwidth"

The easiest way to remedy that would be to ban all apps. Then no apps would use any battery anymore.
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I guessed about 700, so I was way off, but on the other side. My reasoning was: the morning was pretty booked out, but most of afternoon slots (24 of them) had about 20 - 30 free. 24 * 30 = 720.
telecommuting is a must, as most stars are in other locations. do you offer a redshift differential?
Essentially correct. There may be some second order effects that help established forests pick up some more carbon out of the atmosphere, especially if the atmosphere gets more carbon laden than it used to be when the forest was formed. The Economist had a special report on forests last week that had some details on the climate benefits of old forests.