skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"by 7 pm the stress of the day makes that beer (and couch time with the wife) so much more appealing."

It sounds like you put off more work because you're burnt out. Don't feel bad about this. Everyone needs some down time. If you drink beer as part of that down time, don't worry about it, and don't blame the beer (it's the effect, not the cause). The only reason you should be worried about beer is if you mean to only relax for a little bit and then get back to work, and the beer keeps you relaxing longer than you want.

You probably are psychologically addicted. What you need to evaluate is whether you mind that you are addicted. Suppose you'd need to relax all night anyway, if you weren't drinking. Then beer after work is not necessarily a problem. If you have no other problems associated with alcohol, then who the hell cares if you're addicted?

Regarding health problems, high gravity beer is probably not the healthiest drink you could mix. Try switching to 1 or 2 (or 3, I guess) glasses of red wine. A different type of alcohol may cut around your tolerance for beer, so you'll drink less, and red wine in moderate amounts (I don't think 3 glasses is still considered moderate, but w/e) keeps being called healthy. You'll also cut out the massive calories that come with 3-6 high gravity beers. Alternatively, learn to mix drinks and start getting creative. :-)
This is a really good point, and highlights a major difference between information derived from users based on them asking for services and explicit data users have "declared". The derived information may actually be more valuable, as you say, but because the declared data is more direct and voluntary, it has higher PERCEIVED value (at least it did to me). This may be one of the reasons FB is more attractive then Google right now- and perception is everything when it comes to valuation. Great post, thanks.
I'm hoping a later revision has more "View" options. The whitespace and general padding on the contacts as well as the chats is pretty bad.
So is sudden colony collapse the equivalent of off-shoring? I understand that's caused by a virus. Is that what we're calling it?

I remember back in 2006 being shocked and appalled at how a city councilor was making more money that me. Here I am fixing the most complicated systems ever created and some low level politician has a bigger salary than me! So I went independent and now make substantially more than your average politician. Problem solved.

Good thing there's a shortage of bees.
Two months? Don't know, would need to look at the current, in use source code.
No worries. You know that door is always open.
--Studies show that publicly committing to a goal significantly increases one's chances of accomplishing it successfully.

Thats not quite true according to this ted talk.. (but I'm sure studies have found the other way round as well)

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...
Ha ha - I remember your reverse marriage proposal comment from the original thread.

Congratulations :)
Not inefficiency as such. Many houses were empty because the occupants were forcefully evicted.

"Another feature of the political violence was the involuntary or forced displacement of both Catholics and Protestants from formerly mixed residential areas. For example, in Belfast, Protestants were forced out of Lenadoon, and Catholics were driven out of the Rathcoole estate and the Westvale neighbourhood. In Derry city, almost all the Protestants fled to the predominantly loyalist Fountain Estate and Waterside areas."
I think they new interface isn't the "online contacts" sidebar anymore, they've got a separate HUD view for that now (sidebar -> small icon next to "CONTACTS"). If you use that for starting conversations and hide the main window, it's actually somewhat usable. Would be better if there were an option to hide the silly avatar pictures there, too.

Edit: Just noticed that the HUD window is always on top. Dang. Let's see if that Adium plugin is still in development…
Umm, it's one thing to have an existing substance problem to help soften life's blows; it's another to sit down and think to one's self. "Gosh, I'm facing so many problems. I should start taking substance X to deal with them!"

Especially considering the extent to which (so-called) anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs are being recognized for what they always have been -- a pseudo-scientific, market-driven fad (for the vast majority of cases which the companies making them have touted them as being useful for).

In any case he almost certainly doesn't need to go on pills -- and by definition, if he doesn't need them (and very, very few people do) he shouldn't start experimenting with them.

Please see also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618725
His intention is to make them secondary. I'm sure the TSA would have none of that - it would just be magnetometer set to the highest sensitivity first - scanner second - for everyone.
Of course its not about religion in itself. Religion is only one aspect of this, there were others: "Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Fourth Amendment"... there 4 other reasons.

Not sure why you choose to pick on religion in itself when it was within context of other reasons. For those of a religious persuasion the invasion of privacy may be an additional problem on top of the normal intrusiveness of these scanners.
There must be a mistranslation in the article or embellishment on the part of the involved companies. How can QQ have a billion active users? When last I saw, there were only 350M internet users in China. Is it possible that the majority of their userbase is extranational? Or are they counting total accounts created?
I'll concede my blanket statement with respect to general alcohol use, but I'll argue that this man's specific case is pretty cut and dried.

There is alot of rationalization on his part throughout this thread, and speaking as someone who had a bonafide addiction and kicked it, I recognize what he's going through.

There are no two ways about it. Addiction is a problem with no tepid, dipping-your-toe-in-the-water approach to solving it.
1. That's not right. I'm not interested in FUD, I am interested in the debate about releasing source code that's come about because of the so-called "ClimateGate" thing.

3. Also not correct. I simply don't believe that not releasing source code is the right answer. It's one group of scientists claiming to save another group from themselves. The argument appears to be that if they released the code others would run it and be satisfied with the result. So? That's just bad science and tells you something about the people who run the code. The solution isn't to protect idiots from themselves.
Excellent point, but I'm not sure either his friend or father are interested in investing so they can increase the aggregate wealth of society.

That being said, I think that at the very least your father can look at it as a better investment than college if you do fail. You'll learn more in 6 months to a year building your own business than 4-5 years of college teaches 99% of people.

Plus, it can be said that Casinos increase the aggregate wealth for society as well. They are a business like any other and as valid as any Zynga, Playdom or Playfish. They are in the business of offline social gaming.
"Somebody who can program" have written probably 99% of used applications in the world today. From Bill Joy to Donald Knuth to David Cutler to Linus Torvalds to Guy Steele to Jamie Zawinsky to Guido van Rossum to John Carmack, and almost everyone in between.

Great programmers somehow only appear to write books and give pristine examples of how you build infinitely extensible architectures.
If it wouldn't hurt your father then accept his money and leave the friend out of it. As a father you want your children to be successful and if you failed he would be there to pick you up.

Seeing that your father started his own business and now it is doing great, he should have a solid understanding of what he is getting into.

Your friend on the other hand seems to not understand the risk so I would leave him out of it.
I don't think upselling has to be a negative thing ... if you put a bit of thought into it and are actually trying to help the user, it definitely could be a big plus.

I love when I put a book or some Music in my cart at Amazon and it shows me related items I could be interested in ... I think almost 25-50% of the stuff I've bought from there has been as a result of this.

What I do find rather retch-inducing is this idea that you as a business are 'leaving money on the table' by not trying to upsell me, it shows that you see me as a wallet and could care less whether I find some awesome book or new music that makes my week.

I would never want any business I run/start to end up like that.

ever.
Plus maybe a different voting system. The ability to only vote for one candidate gives little incentive to vote for a third parties.
From my experience full body scanners are much faster and more convenient compared to traditional system when you take off your shoes and go through metal detector. If you are unlucky an airport worker additionally scans you with a hand metal scanner. With full body scanner you just enter the cabin and voila! The scan takes 3 seconds.
I wish they would rather solve the ridiculous memory footprint of skype in windows. The other day it had 300M private bytes
I'd guess that there isn't one single person at google who knows all of it. They do base a lot of their stuff on LSA (I think probably more generally just NLP), but they have so many filters and minor adjustments that the whole thing is like a really complex ball of string.

I doubt there's one person who knows how the whole thing is exactly put together.
But I wonder if some TSA employee who doesn't like can just "randomly" pick you for additional questioning and delay you just enough to miss your flight then let you go.

Would they just retaliate against you just for making a fuss?
Britain didn't react any more sensibly though. We had arguably even more erosion of civil liberties as a result eg http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/8...
I spend a lot of my life trying to maximizing what the guy refers to in the article as "the madness", the crazy obsessive phase that comes with a new idea. I am desperate to grasp that productivity...

Unfortunately, he doesn't offer any real solutions for getting there, other than saying, yeah, it fades.
Scripting News blocked by McAfee
The GA safety record is 50 times poorer than that of commercial airlines. (http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety) I'll take the rectal probe, thank you.
"The politicians can't be reached."

Of course they can! Mail, email, they can certainly be reached, and right now they're extra sensitive to issues that upset their constituents.
Contrary to what dazzawazza says "taking the edge off life" is not what you are doing my friend. Even though you say that you have no problem going without for periods at a time realistically what that "feeling" is is you satisfying the craving your body has for alcohol - that unfortunately what an addiction is all about. The monkey on your back. Whether the amount of alcohol you consume is a problem for you depends on whether it is an on balance positive or negative in your life. If you've gotten as far as posting here it shows you have serious issues with your habit but if your life is not coming apart at the seems because of it then you are in control and not the substance. I would recommend going to AA meetings as corny as that may sound. You will quickly find out more about your relationship with alcohol from people who have gone further down a road you can imagine.
Thank god someone finally says something about this. If I see another one of those "73 Beautiful Web Designs" with all the same layout and content type (simple blog) I'm going to go nuts.
"Happiness does not write code" is an awesome quote.
Ask HN: sql reporting service ui replacement
(english is not my native language but i'll do my best)
for the first time in long i got a startup idea but i want to know if there is a market for this.

so as the title sugested i want to make a ui replacement for sql reporting service mainly because the native one cannot even run desent on ff or chrome.
the idea is to create a site where you can put in your server url, username and pass and then you can browse all the reports from either my website or through an iframe on there own site.

i like to know your thoughts about this idea.
> Ideally you'd hope that the reason something gets exposure on HN is because it meets a minimum level of inherent credibility on its own, wouldn't you?

Ideally. In practice, I think HN lends more credibility to some things that don't deserve that extra credibility.

I'm not trying to suggest that the original article was wrong or not credible. Rather, would it be successful without the HN influence? While I don't think the original idea is bad, I think the success was due to HN.
John Carmack produces the most maintainable and readable codebases. I happen to have the Quake3 source code up on my github at, so you can see for yourself:

https://github.com/mtrencseni/quake3

Donald Knuth is the author of literate programming, which is a framework for writing human-readable programs:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/lp.html
I honestly wasn't expecting this to be as upvoted as it was. I have some pretty crazy ideas and this was one of them.

That being said I think there is more than enough interest from just those Hacker Newsers reading this thread to show that this would definitely be a popular blog post if written.

With that in mind, go for a $100 note instead of $50 if you decide to do this and write about it as that denomination would make for better linkbait as a blog post title.
The first time I looked at the code for a large 3D game engine, I felt this. It was almost like someone explaining a magic trick for you, you go "oh, so it all just worked because I was looking from this direction and that detail is something most people don't notice". Very disappointing, and it actually ruined it a bit for me.
While we're at it, can we eliminate campaigning?

Let's just have a nice web-app that will show you all the candidates for whatever position, and factually list their previous political actions (votes on various issues, etc), with perhaps a very small section wherein they can list their stances on more current issues. Campaign contributions cease to be a problem because there's no campaign to contribute to, and candidates are free to support the wishes of their actual constituents.

Not saying it will ever happen, or that it would be as simple as I've presented it, but it's at least an idea.
Percona's is probably the closest to the MySQL people are looking for; Percona is the premier MySQL consultancy, and they've patched the codebase for performance, etc.
Ask HN: Do I need more at bats?
I’m working on a couple different projects. It’s taken me about 3 months to say, “If I had to work on everything on this list for the rest of my life I could do it and not want to work on anything else.” I feel as though I’ve really reached my stride on what matters and what doesn’t.

However, my biggest fear is running out of money. Right now my runway is around a year. When I run out of money, the game ends. I can’t play anymore. I can pick up consulting jobs locally here that involve wordpress + shopping cart implementation.

This isn’t my passion though and I’d like to be in a position where I’m learning from others instead of teaching about the internet and why your lumber yard probably doesn’t need to be on twitter and Facebook.

What I’m passionate about is marketing, sales, customer support, and business. I can code in python and it works, but when I put it up on stackoverflow they say I’m doing it all wrong. I can modify wordpress themes all day long. So I’m not technologically dumb, but my heros are Seth Godin and Alexis not Jeff Atwood and DHH.

I’ve sent three e-mails one to Ben Casnocha, one to SpiderOak and one to videolla.com. SpiderOak and Videolla.com are from the remotely hiring thread. I’ve gotten two ‘quite impressive’ e-mails back. One from Ben and one from Vlad of Videolla.com fame. I don’t know if they’re being nice or how to take the ‘quite impressive’ comment.

I’d happy to forward the e-mails I wrote to anyone that would be willing to look them over and make sure I’m not making some silly or basic mistake.

My ideal job would have me working with an underdog company making sure their customers knew we cared about them. That can come in many forms from awesome documentation, hand written letters, promoting our users on our company blog, recording screen casts on how to do common things, and making sure they get support answered quickly. Generally, just turn me loose and say, "Make sure every customer has an experience they tell their friends about in a good way"

I’d love to work for a company like SpiderOak because it’s a niche underdog with awesome features. Their company culture seems awesome as well. I’d probably be happy working for a company that sold niche specialty products as well as long as their goal was to change the world in some way. That’s what I love about SpiderOak they have a philosophy about storage, encryption, multi-platform, etc that the other companies don’t have.

So my question is do I just need more at bats or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?
> something must have years of testing or it's not really ACID compliant

Can't really grasp that. Drizzle is MySQL minus cruft... Its parts have been extensively tested for many years.
You are self-serving and only believe in something that will benefit you

Actually no I don't, I value individual freedoms. It is what this nation was founded on. BTW I am a business owner and have built and sold three businesses before my current one. I respect the right to my employees personal life. In my life I, as a business owner, have employed over 600 people. I have never once had an issue with their personal life affecting their ability to perform their duty. The truth of the matter as you state above, is just like the religious right you want to impose your will on others. While the subject may be different, you share the mentality. As a business owner you have power and therefore a greater responsibility to not do so. As Uncle Ben says with great power comes great responsibility.

Corporate slavery is an insult to people that were actually slaves

Dude bondage is bondage, what if you just steal a little? Just because it comes with a rainbow and a kiss does not negate what it is. When a business owner imposes his will on his employes on their free time (where they are a freeman) it is a form of subjugation. That by all definitions is slavey (the absence of the ability to act for oneself, without fear of reprisal). I am not saying all employers abuse their employees right to the pursuit of life, love and happiness, but it is obvious some do.

Banks don't hire felons

Right they are a felon, they have past track record of grievous criminal behavior. It is the reason there is a distinction between a misdemeanor and a felony. These people have been found guilty. You on the other hand are imposing guilt before any infraction has occurred. It would be different if you said I will not hire someone with a DUI. But that is not what you said. What your logic implies is that all Alcoholics commit DUI, those are not the words you said but it is the logical argument that you are making and it is flawed, not only is it flawed but it is dangerous.

BTW for the record I do not smoke or drink.
What you don't believe the defensiveness was merited?

The top comment on HN (with 136 karma) was run4yourlives decrying his generation's lack of humility and saying "You are not fucking special in any way shape or form." You mean to tell me you wouldn't be a little bit defensive? Don't kid yourself.

Also- just because you, psych degree and all, think he is self centered doesn't mean anything more than you, eggbrain, feel he is self centered. Give him some credit. He was in a rut, tried something new, and was successful. And now you want him to feel bad about it?
my source tells me the qq user base is around 600M
Why didn't they add some kind of protection act for children to this lawsuit as well?

They are making children go through these things and then showing them naked to who knows? That violation should surpass the far more vague "religious freedom".
The fact that you ask the question, is a good indicator of a problem. That being said, this is a very complex subject, with a variety of solutions/paths.
I myself stopped drinking 25 years ago,as I was less disciplined than you. For myself, I believe there was quite a bit of benefit/damage reduction from refraining from alcohol. Of course there are some negatives also, but I don't think for me that it was an option.
Far more important, the practices I picked up to prevent me from drinking, have given me lasting benefits.
The practice of daily personal evaluation, and corrective action, while not followed exhaustively has been an enormous benefit. I was introduced to meditation, and put on the path of continuous improvement, While these are just targets, it was a great starting point.

As I said at the beginning of my comment, the fact that you asked this question, shows you have awareness of a potential problem. I am not sure If I would be able to stop drinking if I had it as "under control" as you, but I think it is very commendable of you to be looking for answers.
feel free to contact me anytime off list for any pointers, or references.
Very nicely summarized. I would like to add one minor note regarding entertainment, just in case anyone considering Vancouver is a concert addict:

I find myself driving to Seattle for concerts more often than I would like. Lots of acts come to Vancouver but lots of acts skip Vancouver, usually (from what my music biz contacts tell me) because of two main reasons.

1. It doesn't make sense to add a border crossing to their schedule if it would mean doing just one show in Vancouver before returning back to the states or elsewhere.

2. Some acts have also quit coming to Vancouver because the audience attitude has made shows less enjoyable to perform here. It is sad but doesn't surprise me. I have watched audience enthusiasm progressively fade here, during the last decade especially.
Other recent posts on HN have said that the TSA is planning to start more thorough pat-downs specifically to discourage people from opting out. You may not mind the pat-down right now, but I'm not sure you'll be saying the same thing a few months from now.

Good thing I'm too poor to fly these days.
The "education" angle is a good one, particularly if it's $100k your dad would quite happily have spent putting you through college without any possibility of a direct financial return.
That's really brilliant. I wish that were possible.
Not alcohol consumption, necessarily. The benefit is cited most ofter for red wine specifically, which indicates the active ingredient is something else.

10 000 years of recorded human experience only tells you that minimal alcohol consumption is not catastrophically bad for you, not that it is "safe".
Can both sides play the "think of the children" card in the same fight?
Text in Hard-to-read Fonts Harder to Learn But More Easily Retained
Let me be the first to say it: Wow!
I think you are looking at other news items on the page that are several months old?

The actual document submitted to the court is dated November 1, 2010.

[PDF] http://epic.org/privacy/litigation/EPIC_Body_Scanner_OB_Fina...
I get your point, but those results were still diverging from the original wrong answer and converging on the right one, just not di/converging as fast as would be ideal.