skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this in the article, " You have to be an amazing writer, the best writer people have ever read… and you have to have a large Rolodex of personal/professional contacts who will hire you, rehire you, support you, recommend you."

Based on what I see on TV I have to believe that the Rolodex counts for far more than the writing skill because there's a ton of crap getting produced.

On the bright side, there's way more stuff than I can reasonably keep up with, so the relatively small amount of good stuff is maybe about enough.
I'm really impressed with the way MLB embraces technology. I (from the UK) subscribe to MLB.TV to watch all games online, and the flash interface they've created is just so massively superior to any other sports (or, frankly, other TV) coverage I've ever seen online.

Maybe this is more a case of the US being ahead of the UK, rather than MLB being ahead of other people, but from my memory of NFL Game Pass (which I haven't subscribed to since 2 or 3 seasons ago) it wasn't nearly this good.

(The one thing that does annoy me is they cut commercials out and put on a shiny animated image saying "commercial break" - I'd rather actually have the commercials in there personally, it's no superbowl but they're still part of the experience, and it just seems a little blank to have the picture/sound cut off regularly.)

Edit: On a related note, given the number of HN readers who must be based in and around SF, how many people here care enough to be following how the Giants do in this World Series?
Supply and demand; the supply of people who want to be writers is too high, and you are going to have to go to great lengths to distinguish yourself or get really lucky. As others point out this may not be the only way in, but don't expect anything to be easy or even merely hard, because every metaphorical door into the place is jammed tight with people trying to get in.

We get the same effect in our industry with games programming. Nothing about games really especially calls for endless deathmarches or 18 hour days with no overtime pay six days a week, any more than any of the many other industries in which programming is as critical or perhaps even more critical (there's more to games than programming) but somehow manages to get done in 40-ish hours a week. It's just the endless hordes of young programmers who think it's what they want to do driving the price through the floor by inflating supply until there's just no incentive for EA to treat them any better; they're not just replaceable, they're aggressively replaceable.

I really recommend against any of these careers, the risk/reward just isn't there. The risk is much higher and it turns out there are many, many other jobs out there that are just as rewarding, except without the possibility of fame for a small percentage of jobholders.
If it really could predict the future, why don't they trade stocks using it?
Make your javascript a windows.exe
Assuming the pills look like they should, a good way to tell that you actually got modafinil/adrafinil is to see if you have a high concentration of sulfur in your urine. Meaning, go to the bathroom -- if you smell sulfur, you've most likely got the real thing. Anyone with a nose who's taken these before will understand...
You don't have a thorough understanding about how psychologists help people. Pills aren't always prescribed and sometimes it's nice to have a professional evaluate your life and make some suggestions. And little? I don't think depression is a "little problem."
In an classroom setting, I wouldn't recommend it...or any of the Head First series for that matter. They are all essentially hands on self-paced tutorials, not text books or references.

The big advantage is that they model improvement in their exercises by using sample code that is half-right (and half-wrong) and then showing how to improve it.

All that to say that they aren't for everyone, and certainly are not targeted at people who prefer reference manuals. On the other hand, the exercises in Head First HTML really demonstrate how CSS formatting works (and doesn't work) better than other beginner level books.
Could be a sign that stocks are not part of the future =)
Ask HN: Your Non-Glorious Startup Success
Most startup success stories I read about involve seemingly Hollywood scripted stories about how the founders ended up where they are today.

I wonder though, do I only read stories like that because people only write about the interesting startup stories, or is there some merit to the fact that you really have to go against the grain and shake up the world to do something big?

I am curious to hear your story if you have started a successful company that had a seemingly boring road to success.

Edit: successful means the founders got rich enough to not have to work anymore and live an upper class American lifestyle. Although if you have a startup and are not quite at this point, I would still love to hear it.
Gene Simmons Threatens Anonymous, Responds to DDoS Attacks Against His Site
After years of using fancy 'modern' IDEs, I've gone to using Vim. (GVim/MacVim, actually.) I haven't found any features they lack that other IDEs have... And I suspect if I found one, I could code it up myself, if nobody else did it.
You can use wikipedia to investigate strange Unicode characters
I met a good number of people who have problems in concentration. They can't focus even in the smallest tasks, especially if it is new and difficult (complicated). May be it's just fears that disturb their concentration.
True about the Gates comment, which I didn't think at the time.

I wasn't trolling. I think the value of social lies with "peer production" which is a more evolved form of crowd-sourcing. Try and imagine a more sophisticated and brilliant Wikipedia.

Jeff Bezos is one of the funders of Kleiner Perkins new "sFund". I liked his comment at the announcement about using social to solve real problems like genetic engineering and climate change.
Most intelligent introverts have friends in University though. The fact that the person is probably not into socializing as it's known to most college kids, generally means that they form a group within a section of the 'intelligent introverts' at the school.

In any case I would agree with you that he just needs to get out more if it weren't for the case that 1) he's making a pity case out of his situation 2) he is not only not happy with his current situation, but seems to be entering a phase of self loathing which can easily be an entry phase into depression.

He does need professional help, which type we can't tell because we don't really know the person, but the fact that he not only acknowledges that he is unhappy with his current social situation but also speaks illy about his situation with college and professors and thinks he needs some magic pill to actually improve his life (as if we in HN were in the position to give him any advice that will change his life that easily). It's most probable that he only needs to man up and take control of his life, but maybe his problem is not only the lack of will power to do so, and he needs a therapist to help him from a positive idea of what his life is supposed to be. At the most extreme it might even be a serious problem, perhaps a hormonal imbalance or a mental problem caused because of his environment, in which case a therapist might not even be enough and might need to seek a psychiatrist and start medication.

As you said he might just need a kick in the arse, and what I recommended to him actually gets him on this path, but if that is not enough (which is just as probable as per his situation) he might really need someone to tighten the screws in his head that are loose or maybe even missing. Of course, I'm not saying he's crazy, but something isn't clicking right now and he really needs to get it fixed asap.
I guess it depends on the resources available. If the counselors are as bad as you say the professors are, seeing a counselor might not help. But you might do well to give them a shot, and then decide. Otherwise, I will say that

1. The man who did not waste a great deal of time at your age is unusual and fortunate. As for self confidence, it seems to distributed every evenly among those who have reasons for it and those who have none; in my day I met quite a few undergraduates with great self confidence that may have carried over from being in a cool crowd in high school, but who seemed to me to be of very little interest.

2. Some of the future is in your hands, but none of the past is. Evaluate your past for what it can do for you, but try not to dwell on it.

3. Trust me, it is not only in India that one meets dud professors.
I think it's mostly about risk aversion. I've seen the exact same thing trying to push SVN over VSS. No one honestly thinks that VSS is the superior product, but once you have 5 plus years of history with it, it's what you know, and no matter what the reasons are, that is a risky proposition.
You don't have a thorough understanding about how psychologists help people.

That's probably because I've never known any who have.

And little? I don't think depression is a "little problem."

Fair enough. I switched little to the colored pills.

Anyway, he asked for advice from a bunch of random people on the internet - and IMO there were a lot of good ones... exercising and stuff like that - but that takes real effort and the OP doesn't seem capable of that right now. So in that context I think my advice was as fair as the rest - certainly seems to work for the socially awkward in the rest of the world which is why it's pretty much accepted in every culture everywhere.

Edit: Wish I could get Kingfisher and Taj Mahal here...
Calling out Go here is a strange thing to do; Go supports unicode from the ground up. Strings are UTF-8, and any identifier can include unicode characters - you can name your Pi constant with the greek letter.

Not only that, but we actually debated using the unicode characters for !=, >=, and so on instead of the standard multi-character ASCII equivalents. In the end it was decided that it would be a gratuitous change for little benefit.

So it's a shame that he levelled his criticism at Rob Pike, a guy who clearly knows a lot about unicode (he co-authored UTF-8 with Ken), built the first Operating System with unicode support in its foundations (Plan 9), and has taken great care to support unicode in Go.
Ask HN:What VPN service do you use?
I am a Mechanical PhD student and need to access a number of University workstations(Win XP/7 and Ubuntu) from home from a MAC/Windows. What is a cheap/free VPN solution? There is no static external IP at home. The university provides a cisco vpn client but it is very slow. I have used gbridge successfully between the windows machine but its not cross platform.

I need the link to be suitable to access a few OpenGl windows with the plots of data(which don't always get across).
What remote access software should I be using?
There is rdp on the windows machines and freenx on the ubuntu. And for the client I have remmina on ubuntu and rdp&nomachine client on windows.

All advice is greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.
I think this is a common problem for any programming job that's particularly visible or technical. Most programming jobs are boring, frankly, and there are a lot of very smart people in the industry fighting for the few stimulating, high-status, technically-challenging jobs. For example, anything to do with aerospace seems to have competition that puts the games industry to shame.
You can of course decide to skip the bus ride, but what if the government taxes stuff you can't skip as easily? Like food, water or housing, or air to breathe?
Hacking an ATM: How to Make an ATM Spew out Money
So, it's kind of a long discussion about intuition and then the disclaimer about not being a neuroscientist. The discussion makes me nervous in terms of it conflating the concepts of bitmaps and vector graphics with "How The Brain Really Works" type stuff. Is this really pontification about neuroscience is it just moral advice for startups couched in that kind of discussion?
I don't think hacker news is the right place to be asking advice. After all, from what I can tell, the level of confidence among the people here is very high :).

My personal advice would be to get busy with something that doesn't involve college, like a web app or a game, and keep at it. I've found that seeing a project you've worked on all by yourself slowly come to life is a great confidence booster. If that doesn't help you, maybe you should look for professional help. Good luck man!
I think the term 'network' implies some kind of connection between nodes.
Isn't their a natural counterpart? Like a mind hack or something similar. I found myself ,in the last week, deeply concentrating and working on something that is very boring and I usually tend to lose concentration on it very quickly. I was surprised how the hours passed without complaints.

May be I ate something special that made that day goes like that, but I felt like I fall into that deep concentration state of mind. My creative abilities weren't touched, though.
I believe Mr Spock also has such self control.
I agree with everything written in that blog post. I haven't travelled anywhere near as much as this blogger, but i've visited a fair few countries, and for sure that really started to change my view of the world.
Gvim/MacVim for me.

I was on the Eclipse wagon for a while. Where Gvim finally clicked with me was (1) when I discovered Pathogen for more easily installing plugins, (2) discovering NERDTree, and (3) when I finally got the idea to use something like github or even Dropbox for storing my .vim folder and my .vimrc/.gvimrc files, and just symlinking them into place on each machine.
Sponsor a Startup
In theory, this shouldn't be able to predict future financial information or stock prices, because the stock prices should already reflect any information that would be used in the prediction model (efficient market hypothesis). Of course, that's just a theory. Thousands of traders think they can beat the market with tools, models, and prediction engines of their own (though few actually do)
So, in the end, this site may attract that type of crowd, people who think they are gleaning information to help them "win" - in actuality, I'd be skeptical about its ability to do that though.
I don't like the legal speeds. I would not accept a prescription for one.

Modafinil feels very different from the legal speeds, crank, coke, or other heavy stimulants... not that I know that from experience or anything. Just from reading posts on HN and Slashdot and shit. And movies. And ex-girlfriends. And doing drugs. Oh wait.

So I don't sound like I'm in love with modafinil: I have seen a person react unfavorably on it, although I can't be certain it was the modafinil that caused the unfavorable reaction. I have not had any side effects I can tell. Besides the new hairs on the tip of my nose and severe tooth vibrations. [Just kidding, obv.]

It has its place, and it just helped me on a trip to China considerably.
The Physician's Drug Reference (PDR) is not the last word on this. It is literally just a desk reference, as the name implies. It isn't meant to be a definitive guide to medications. It is meant to be a quick and easy way for physicians to get an overview of a medication.

The following is taken directly from the FDA's website for Modafinil ( http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2007/020... ). This information is also included in the product information sheet you receive with your prescription, and on the Provigil website. To say that Modafinil does not have the physical effects of other stimulants is not true. They are present to a lesser degree, but still exist.

In addition to its wake-promoting effects and ability to
increase locomotor activity in animals, modafinil produces
psychoactive and euphoric effects, alterations in mood,
perception, thinking, and feelings typical of other CNS
stimulants in humans. Modafinil has reinforcing properties,
as evidenced by its self-administration in monkeys previously
trained to self-administer cocaine. Modafinil was also
partially discriminated as stimulant-like.
"I know nothing about the entertainment industry..."

Then maybe you shouldn't speak about it as if you do. I have heard the same advice in this article from a number of people working as tv writers (either reading articles, or as part of my mfa in creative writing), and it does seem like the vast majority of them only got where they are by "working their way up". The idea that you can just make something good enough that people can't ignore it is, in fact, the view that is hopelessly naive. It isn't like the internet where you can easily achieve massive distribution. You have to get it in the hands of a very small number of people who are swamped by an incredibly large number of people in the exact same situation as you.

The amount of good content that is generated by writers is overwhelming and, in fact, incredibly easy to ignore. Not saying you can't point to success stories of people who produced their own stuff. You can just point to more stories of people who lost a lot of money producing their own stuff and have nothing to show for it. Building relationships certainly seems to be a more reliable way to go about breaking into the industry.
Pardon my ignorance. You're correct.
Great post, Martin. Spot on.

This is a big part of what I enjoy about teaching. Aside from all the usual stuff about not properly understanding something until you've taught it to someone else, there's something else going on, which (by crude analogy to your analogy!) is a bit like the rsync algorithm: you have a large "bitmap" to sync, and limited bandwidth to sync it over, so you proceed by checksumming the receiver's existing copy and trying to figure out what diffs you need to communicate to bring them up to date.

In practice this means that teaching is a deeply interactive activity which involves first exploring the contours of someone's existing understanding and then trying to move them to a richer understanding in the most direct way possible. Perhaps this is a more general case of what you're talking about: intuition is one thing that you can try to teach (or communicate) to another person, but maybe all you're trying to teach is something mundane and concrete like the difference between a Google account and a Google Apps account, which is less about intuition and more about having a simple but exactly correct mental model of the world in order to not be hopelessly confused by it.
The Paris Review ran a series of interviews with successful writers. The one thing they had in common was a fixed, immutable writing schedule. A schedule impervious to deaths of family members (some will take offense to this, but writers aren't necessarily nice people--I grew up with one).

I'm reminded of an alt.writers post from the annals of USENET.

"... My opinion is that if you want to be a good novelist, start by being a bad novelist, not by becoming a good magazine article writer. Start at the top and work down -- don't start at the bottom and work up.

On the other hand, I know people for whom "start small" has worked. But it doesn't for me."
This is a good way of showing what deadweight loss is. Another way of explaining it could be anytime you have an economic loss with no gains elsewhere in the economy. For example: trade quotas and tariffs create deadweight loss in a economy because they transfer value from the consumers to the producers by raising prices.

Also, anytime you have a market where theres a monopoly, deadweight loss will typically occur.
I was a long time vim user too. I switched to emacs after witnessing slime and clojure. I can't image life without org-mode anymore.
I'll contact you by email.
An interesting idea would be using client computers to synchronize boxes automatically in the background.
100% agreed with everything in this post as well. I just spent 2 weeks traveling Sicily and I have never had an experience quite like it in my life and now I am addicted. I need to do it again. The people, culture, food, way of life, everything - nothing else can compare. I ran through vineyards touching the grapes and later drank the wine. I ate from the earth and all I needed was a backpack, iPad, and the clothes on my back (and of course good shoes).
Excellent point, and definitely worth pointing out.

It's amazing how many people are quick to self-diagnose ADHD, but have no problem spending hours on their hobbies or interesting projects. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the coding community who never has problems concentrating on uninteresting projects.
As GC's get larger, they tend to have the leverage to require their subs to use email...when they get really large, they often have the leverage to require the use products like Buzzsaw.
Land Of Lisp chapter 7 - Using SBCL
It is supposedly hard on the liver. I'd strongly recommend not dosing any medication without a doctor's supervision no matter what, and this is one more reason to avoid going that route.
wow - you see no difference between coffee and a neural enhancer? this is way off the chart for me here. I have no difficulties seeing authenticity in what I do vs. the pill-popping programming regimen (maybe that's why I am getting downvoted here). I would also say it keep me very happy so far. So I wish good luck to those who choose that instead :)
Governments tax things that signal an ability to pay. It wastes effort to impose taxes that some people can't pay.
Then it's Applidium's problem.
From what I have gathered in the past, and what has been said here on Hacker News as well, FreeBSD is looking to replace GCC in the base with clang/LLVM, and that is exactly where this move is going.

As the mailing list message specified clang is going to be the default on i386 and x86_64. GCCisms will eventually go away and the code base will be cleaner and more manageable based upon it.

As states in the FreeBSD status report for this last quarter there are already experimental tests being run on the FreeBSD ports build system whereby clang/LLVM are used to compile all of the ports in an attempt to see how far clang/LLVM can get.
Thank you for pointing this out. I've used CI for a couple of previous projects, and was just starting on another.

It's not too late to port everything over. :)

Adios, Ellis and CI.
This URL points to the front page, and the article will be replaced in due course. The submission here ...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850763
... points to the item in what will most likely be its permanent home. Comments are best directed there.
Stephen King tells everything you need to know about writing in 10 minutes
On the ports build clusters they are doing experimental runs using -CURRENT with clang/LLVM as the only compiler for the ports tree in an attempt to weed out what would be broken and what will work without changes.

So this is definitely something they are already testing.
Since "synthetic" is basically a synonym for "artificial", I don't see why it shouldn't. Silicon is no more special than carbon.
And that sigma that you led off with is the mathematical summation sigma and not the Greek letter. This gets really really hard cross-platform. (On Windows, your best bet for typing summation sigma requires a registry hack.)
Nothing that deep. I just thought that I had come to an intuitive understanding of what I think of as intuition (meta!), and I wanted to share it. The analogy isn't scientific at all; it is just an attempt to communicate, in the hope that others might find the thoughts useful or inspiring.