skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all about discipline.

I definitely enjoy drinking within certain limits, but I've also come to realize (after a career trajectory pretty similar to yours) that excessive substance (ab)use of any kind is basically incompatible with a serious, high-output lifestyle.

It all boils down to the fact that being highly productive is a choice that demands certain sacrifices; chiefly, the sheer amount of time you have to devote to it. And the fact that, health effects aside, the level of drinking you're describing cuts into your available time budget quite drastically.

In any case, 4 or more drinks night after night (or nearly so) sounds not just excessive, but distinctly unpleasant.

So as to practical suggestions: try to pick some hard, if not puritanical limits, and stick to them. Pick a magic number -- say 4 -- as your hard daily limit, then make a decision to keep to it. After this, I would try whittling down the down the "heavy" days (3 or more) to a more manageable level also, say no more than 1x a week. Then stick to that, also.

It's like any other optimization problem, in that sense: first make the problem quantifiable; the set a performance goal (40% volume reduction, say); keep it in place for a while; then do some A/B testing.

For me, what it came down to was that I realized that after a certain level (2-3 in one sitting, or thereabouts) I was getting virtually none of the "benefits" (such as they are) of stress reduction or general easing of mood, while the negatives just kept piling up disproportionately.

Another tip: if you must drink, try at least drinking better quality (if more expensive) stuff. The thing is, the cheaper stuff ends up upsetting your general metabolism (and mood) in a whole lot of ways, so you end up needing to consume more alcohol to counteract this. And wine (especially red wine) is a whole lot better for you than beer, in a whole bunch of ways.

Lastly: please don't consider switching to pot (nevermind the legal status). It's quite different from alcohol, and in my view, deeply insidious, in that it goads us into not just getting on a bit of a breeze, but totally baked, all the while conning us into thinking this isn't harmful.

And because it seems (at least superficially) to be so intellectually stimulating -- that is, it tricks us into thinking that we're having productive thoughts, when most of the time we're not, and even when we are, we find ourselves far less capable of sorting them out and putting them into action the next day (or for far longer than that).

Upshot being that for some reason, long-term potheads seem to be in an incredible amount of denial about the diminishing positive returns, and increasingly negative effects that accompany continued heavy use of their favorite substance. One of the key feature of alcohol (by contrast) is that even its biggest fans readily admit that its effects are largely deleterious (beyond a certain point), and seem to instinctively realize, at least intellectually, that it gets in the way of serious work (and sensitive social situations) -- and in general, whether they're able to put the brakes on it or not, is just plain bad for them on some level.
DMCA is really, really easy to do. If you can read and follow directions, you can DMCA someone's hosting provider for less than $6 and ten minutes of work or less. (I prefer doing it by certified mail, return receipt requested, which is the polite businessman's way to say This Is About To Become Serious Business For Your Attorney If You Don't Give Me What I Want.)
The YouTube of 2010 is very different from the YouTube that Google acquired in 2006. It's nice that Google and Microsoft share revenue with the little guy. However, the evolution of YouTube over the years at the expense of the little guy is quite similar to Microsoft's treatment of Indie X-Box developers. You don't have to do a lot of searching on YouTube to find videos where small time video producers bitterly complain about how the gradual evolution of YouTube over the years has caused the little guy to suffer the death of a thousand cuts when it comes to YouTube's video discovery mechanism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V025E_b5I4g
I had thought of that. As soon as the idea went from building an app store that I would use personally to one that would be Windows-only, I knew that I wouldn't be passionate enough about it to succeed.
That's harder than it sounds. I started paying attention a little too late for the last election. With just a day to prepare, I couldn't figure out much about my local candidates or the issues. I only had their own bland and possibly false statements to go on, plus local newspaper endorsements. On almost all of the races I ended up throwing up my hands and voting Democrat because the Republicans have done more gay-bashing, Muslim-bashing, race-baiting, and sucking up to stupidity than the Democrats have. Plus the Democrats have been less aggressive about bashing all non-car-based transit. Those are are the only issues I can wrap my brain around and really care about. Pretty lame, huh?

I'm considering subscribing to my local paper just to get a daily reminder to pay attention to what's happening locally. Any other suggestions?
You seem to have the will power if you can hold off for 4 weeks.

Have you tried using a reward strategy like I would only drink and chill out after a couple of days when task X is finished? Gradually you can then reduce your drinking days from 4 per week to 1 (or zero).

IMO, it is very difficult to get off alcohol or any other addiction suddenly. It is more effective to tone it down gradually.
Could Another Carrington Event Destroy Our Economy?
I love these campaigns. You get to play to the home crowd, wave your flag and come off as idealistic and patriotic. But I suspect that the real reason behind most of these scheme is revenue.

If you score a TLD you can rake in serious money from trademark holders: disney.cym, google.cym, ford.cym, etc. They are more or less required to buy them to maintain their defense of trademark, and you can name your price. That's why the guy doesn't care if it's ".cym" or ".whateverthefuck". The only customers will be some government entities, the tourism board, and the Forbes 1000.
I think a closer analogy would be poker. With craps and roulette you're at the mercy of the house and aren't in any control. Poker you're playing against other people and make your own decisions based on the cards you hold and ultimately it's your fault you won/lost.

Either way it's a good analogy, any friends and family giving you money need to know that they won't see it again for a long time, if ever.
I don't think it's a fair analogy. The expected value of a startup is higher than the expected value of a night of gambling in Las Vegas (otherwise, VCs would be at the roulette table right now). It would be pretty hard to prove my point mathematically, but most people will agree that the aggregate wealth generated by startups. including those who fail (negative wealth), is greater than 0, which is not the case with gambling.

Edit: The poker analogy is already much better.
Supposedly they're not capable of saving or transmitting the pictures. I mean, obviously the machines are capable. But they're nerfed for TSA use. Supposedly.
Object oriented vs. functional programming in a nutshell
IBM Open Sources Multi-core Smalltalk VM
This is the best idea I've got so far about how prevent problems when raising money from somebody close to you. Another way to do so, is to remaind them that the round is called Friends, Family and Fools not for nothing.
Don't do it. The stress of starting a company with your time and strangers' money is enough.
I'm at the edge of burning out, and you're speaking out of my heart.

a) Eat healthy, lots of vegetables and fruits, drink lots of water, whole-grain stuff. makes you feel less like drinking beer.
b) No beers at home. Buy your beers on the same day.
c) In the evening go to work at a starbucks to do your side-projects.
d) Once a year I make a detox month like you (no alcohol, ciggies, etc), my most productive month usually :)
e) Not drinking at all is much easier then only limiting yourself. Maybe not drink at all the last week of a month?
f) smoke it up! but careful, soon you'll be sipping beers while smoking joints.
g) take a bath, makes you feel like 2-3 beers
Apple - Downloads - Development Tools - Silverlight
What's not clear from the project page is what I can do to mock the host application - since Lua is primarily an embedded language, it doesn't help to have setup, teardown and asserts if I can't say "and this host-function should return (X)"
This looks like a really well-written blog, but the way it has [tweet] links scattered around everywhere REALLY puts me off. It comes off as extremely arrogant. I hope Rob reads this...
I think Google's billions in revenue and profits would beg to differ with you. (ads on google search results are generally highly relevant and get clicked a lot)

you are right, however, if the people you are generalizing for are HN folks, and websites other than Google.
"a severe housing shortage... there were 10,000... empty houses in Belfast alone."

A potent reminder of the kind of glaringly painful inefficiencies that come out of this kind of thing.
Isn't Google a huge, obvious exception to his thesis?

To be fair, it's not an e-commerce site, but it preserves user experience at the expense of "leaving zillions of dollars on the table" in "lost revenue" by not plastering the site with ads. I think in light of Google a big part of his argument is preposterous.
Not anymore since the health care law was passed. Pre-existing conditions aren't grounds for jack anything anymore come 2013, and aren't going to lock you out of insurance now. A little high blood pressure? Please that's a totally minor problem anyhow. However years of high blood pressure left untreated can severely damage your body or you might even stroke out!

Go to the doctor for your problems. Medical problems are best solved early. Then you often have non-medical solutions available too.
I was once shuttled to a business meeting in a small plane (maybe six to eight seats). I had no idea what to expect, showing up for my small flight. I parked at the airport, walked down to the runway where I met the pilot. I said, "is there a security screening? I've got a knife [about 3.5in blade, in my pocket]. I've also got this big thing of water." Pilot said, "that's nice, hop on in the plane. Need anything else?" I even got to listen to my MP3 player during take off.

Assuming that what I flew was "GA," then no, it doesn't seem like the TSA applies there.

As for how you get these sorts of flights and how much they cost, I can't help. I was just the passenger, and haven't done it since.
People in the lawsuit are US citizens.
They just don't want to get naked and receive more radiation every time they board any flight in the US.

People outside the US must also sometimes fly to the US for business purposes. It is not easy sometimes to choose not to go to the US.
As exciting as this sounds, the dates are all at least several months old. Anybody know more about the current status of this, or the direction it's heading?
What conspiracy theory?
I can relate to you however my drug of choice is caffeine. I have never been a beer/alcohol person.

Likewise I work on my entrepreneurial endeavors at night after my day job, and often times I am so burned out and tired from the day. I will drink something heavily caffeinated on the way home from work, with the hope that it will boost my focus and mental performance, but so many times I just want to crash when I get home. A number of times I've crashed right after drinking the large Red Bull (always sugar free).

A typical day for me is: working out in the morning, taking 3 scoops of jack3d before-hand (pre-workout caffeine-heavy supplement). Drink a Low Carb Rockstar when I get to work, get a double or triple espresso around 2pm, and a couple sodas throughout the day, then another Rockstar when I get home. If I'm still dragging, I will take a few more scoops of jack3d as well, just for mixing up the caffeine sources.

I think my mindset is so performance driven, but my body/mind feel so weary. The first few times I had 3-4 cans of Red Bull in one day I got ultra paranoid. Now it's like the stuff doesn't even affect me except for the expense. $10/day or more just on caffeinated beverages that are not providing me any benefit.

I find it extremely difficult to cut back, but I have to, because I consider it a negative addiction. For what it's worth I'm in my mid 30s, am extremely healthy, and my blood pressure is actually LOW.
I'd buy Learn Assembly The Hard Way (x86/amd64) and (modern) OpenGL The Hard Way ;)
How To Do Better In Loud, Crazy Group Conversations
Ask HN: Do you know any research that could become useful technology?
Do you know any research that could become useful technology?

there is an interesting project at uab where they are using gpus to make cheap raid controllers.
It may not be unique but it is at the very least a very unusual approach. So I respectfully disagree that it is nothing remotely special.
We're very advanced people :)

Ok - sure, you're right - 33 million is a bit drastic... however, consider this:

In 2009, 74.9% of Canada's population had access to the Internet. Our population is spread out across the second largest land mass in the world. Our local laws (and the evil CRTC) allow telecom monopolies to exist and maintain exceptionally high monthly rates. In some parts of our otherwise great nation, calling across the street incurs long distance charges.

VoIP let a lone a service with all of Skype's features could make a very serious impact.

With these things in mind 33 million may be a stretch... but the potential number of Skype In users far exceeds 5000.
I tweeted it. So he will certainly be notified.
Dear igravious,

We're so much alike, it's scary. I, too, studied philosophy and math. I, too, am currently pursuing grad studies in the humanities (in my case, a philosophy PhD program). I, too, am a mostly self-taught programmer. And I, too, suffer from being unable to finish programming projects.

(I say this because I don't have a whole lot of advice to offer, but I am glad you asked the question, and I will eagerly follow the answers that others post. I wonder how many others like us there are here on HN?)

In addition to what others have said about setting arbitrary deadlines for yourself, here are a few ideas:

1) Get a job that has involves doing some programming. It doesn't have to be at a startup. Since you are in academia, a good place to look would be in labs. (I used to work in a psych lab, myself -- psychologists seem more willing to hire people with philosophy degrees.) I don't know what your research is on, but if there's a way you could connect it with empirical studies, there are probably many labs that would give you a chance to work on it in exchange for working in the lab. And labs always need better programmers. (My guess is that, if you have any sense of code aesthetics, you will be shocked and horrified by the code you find in any working lab. The effort involved in debugging it will be motivation enough to write your own, improved version.)

2) Become reliant on one or a few pieces of Free software. (For me, these are Emacs and Org Mode.) If they are totally indispensable to how you work, you'll notice problems more frequently, and you'll be motivated to fix those problems -- all the way to the end. Lots of people say, "if you want to learn to code, work on an open source project," but for me, that's hard advice to follow in the abstract. It's much easier to follow through when I know the fix will actually help me solve a problem.
You are fighting a losing battle. Drive and focus are either an integral part of who you are, or they aren't. Enjoy tinkering around, but you should adjust your expectations on the outcome. I know and work with lots of 'dabblers'. They are nice people, but don't have any understanding of what goes into mastering something. Same holds true for musical instruments. Lots of people 'dream' of playing, but have no clue how many thousands of times you have to repeat hand movements and listening until you rise above that and can work on the 'music'. Countless hours, constant trade-offs, and arguably abnormal mental faculties are required.
Many things are black and white, but alcohol use isn't one of them.

There's a substantial body of medical evidence emerging (not to mention 10,000 years of recorded human experience) indicating that lower levels of alcohol consumption (~1 drink a day) aren't just safe, or merely "not so bad", but in fact -- when accompanied by certain eating habits -- can be quite good for you.
yes, I understand that, and I have no problems with a separate set of rules (which, in fact, already exist). I'm just pointing out a different perspective.
Save yourself $6 and do it by e-mail. Just find the abuse e-mail listed for the IP/Host and 99.9% of the time they'll take care of it in 24 hours or less.
Here again it was a British device - SYNHI-100 :)
Hmm. I'm sort of considering blogging on a fairly frequent basis this month, so while I appreciate to no end that folks find my blog interesting, can I ask that anyone considering submitting this series in the future exercise discretion? I would dislike being on the front page twice a week.

That said, if folks have any questions, shoot.
If it weren't for copyright law they could anything they pleased, so this has everything to do with copyright law.
Apparently Congressman Jason Chaffetz introduced a bill against the full-body scanners[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Chaffetz
Run faster.
This isn't about religion. It's about invasion of privacy and degradation of the human spirit by an uncontrolled government bureaucracy that thinks it has a free hand by waving around the fear flag. This smells like the McCarthy era.
I agree they rarely imitate good ideas, but they respond to competition. So if we could point to startups that happened in other countries as a result of US visa policies, that would apply pressure.
UK copyright laws to be reviewed  reviewed to make them fit for the Internet age
Strange Things about the Universe
SF is a pain in the ass to get around compared to NYC without a car or bike. I love both cities (and especially the weather in the former) but the MTA and London Underground have a much wider network of subway systems and buses.
I have read a lot about this question and never found such a short and to the point explanation as demallien's.
Yes I have! You're on fire! I haven't been on Hackety a ton lately, but I'll be back.
People will still be irrational.

It would simply move the irrationality to idol-worship, identifying with one candidate.

I'm starting to believe that elections are more random than one would think, and odd things decide elections (see for example the Spanish elections where a politician's stance after a terrorist attack by blaming it on ETA completely shifted the election - if the attack had happened another day or said politician had blamed it on Al Quaeda instead he'd have won)

I recall some interesting studies that said that random selection of leaders worked better than deliberate selection:

"Evidence That Random Selection of Leaders Can Enhance Group Performance"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

we cannot rationally assess each candidate, so we turn to substitutes. If it isn't the political party, something else will have to do (his smile, demeanor, clothing, whatever).

I've seen elected officials whom I expected to be bad perform better than expected, and people whom I had big expectations turn out to be busts.
Set Your Mouse Free
Right. So it's not so much the physical aspects of pat downs, but the reasons behind the pat downs?
Global Positioning System
H.323 baby!
I'm too friggin' old for anything that contains the childish monikers of "rock stars" and "ninjas". What is that supposed to mean? That your business partners takes lots of drugs, tries to showboat all the time and finally leaves you after he finds an artsy girlfriend?
This is just bullshit. Intel got away with murder a few years ago when AMD's processors were way better than Intel. As the article says, they've regained the engineering lead now, thanks in part to their anti-competitive practices, making this settlement useless.

Full disclosure: I work for AMD.
I've worked/studied computational physics for a few years. My experience has not been good.

First, I don't think that we've learned how to make complex models yet. But in fairness, it's a really hard problem. If my numerical code is wrong, I won't get a segfault. Rather, I may notice "unusual" patterns in my model output, which could be:

- A genuine physical effect

- An artifact of the assumptions we used (because models are simplifications)

- A numerical method that hasn't converged, or whose accuracy is insufficient

- A bug

Untangling this is nigh impossible, unless you rely on very, very careful testing of independent parts. That's how the NASA does it [1], but it's simply not within the realm of what the typical physicist can/will do (and understandably so, numerics is hard).

The solution would be to have tried and tested libraries, built by numerical specialists, so that physicists would only have to specify the equations to solve. That's what Mathematica does, and it's the only sane way I know of making complex models.

But it's slow, so physicists use Fortran instead, and code their own numerical routines in the name of efficiency. Tragedy ensues. Fortran's abstraction capabilities are below C [2]. Modularity is out of the window.

I spent a summer working on one particularly huge model, that had been developed and tweaked over twenty years. At some point I encountered a strange 1/2 factor in a variable assignment, and questioned my advisor about it.

"Oh, is that still in there? That's a fudge factor, we should remove it."

A fudge factor. No comment, no variable name, just 1/2.

Another scientist told me: "No one really knows anymore what equations are solved in there.", to which my advisor replied "Ha, if we gathered all the scientists for an afternoon, we could probably figure it out."

But I agree with the other posters and jgrahamc: the incentives for producing quality code and models are just not there. And sadly, I don't see them changing anytime soon.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print?

[2] (At least, the subset of Fortran used by the physicists I've met. Modern Fortran is a bit different.)
Google Buying Netflix Just Makes Sense
Is your backup culture really that sketchy? Your source code is probably just one of several digital assets the loss of which would cripple your company. If you don't consider an SVN repository reliable, it might be a good time to check your database backup procedures.

Also, SVN stores a local copy of the codebase as well. If you're working off trunk and the SVN server detonates, all you lose is the history and any branches you didn't have checked out.
I'm also curious. Do you use a national charter company or do you have to contract directly with owner/pilots? How much does it cost? How fast is it compared to regular commercial travel?
There's a theory that I can't recall the name of right now that says political leanings natural coalesce around 2 "parties" regardless of how many there are much less none at all. It makes sense really. Voting on something is a binary action so logically groups coalesce around for or against.
I've also experienced similar spikes before. It's important to added that everything will slow way down... that includes SSH access.

Even if you think "I'll just jump in there and correct the issues if/when the time comes" you may not be able to if SSH access slows down to a crawl.

Like the post says, the best course of action is to be prepared ahead of time and not trying to make tweaks while the traffic spike is happening.