skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do some weekly volunteer work to help others, even (or especially) if the work is "beneath you." It's not a guaranteed cure-all, but it's highly likely to make you feel better -- it gives you a different perspective, and reminds you that there are people worse off than you (and there seems to be evidence that humans like to feel that they're better off than others).

(Some evolutionary psychologists also think there's evidence that "feeling good from doing good" is a selected-for trait. That's because the doing-good that results from the feeling-good can confer advantages on kin or on a group. EXAMPLE: Other things being equal, a parent who happens to derive pleasure from caring for his/her offspring is more likely to have his/her genes passed on to grandchildren. EXAMPLE: OTBE, an infantry squad whose members happen to feel an urge to look out for one another is more likely to succeed in war than an every-man-for-himself mob.)
Most Lisp compilers have intermediate representations too, although these IRs are still technically Lisp code (although they may not be executable). There's a really good series of blog posts about the IR of the SBCL compiler by Roman Marynchak:

http://insidelisp.blogspot.com/search/label/python-book
Why the MacBook Air (11-inch version) is a win
Stare into the face of every fan at the World Series
Google is harder to replace because to replace Google, you actually have to replace Google. Develop their search bots, scale up your operation to their scales, sell ads in a market Google dominated, etc. Building a "better search engine" merely gets you a better search engine, you have to monetize it all the way to actually replace Google. This is intrinsically a multi-billion-dollar effort, competing with them the whole way. Distributed internet search has not been shown to be practical, I'm not sure it is even in theory.

Facebook on the other hand can be replaced with open standards and tons of little nodes everywhere. It isn't even all that hard, coordination is the biggest problem. (Or if you prefer, yeah, it's hard, but the original timeline was 20 years. It's not 20 years worth of hard. Again, think back to 1990. Consider the history of open source software since then. Creating distributed-Facebook is not harder than KDE or the Linux Kernel, each of which is only a vanishing fraction of the open source world's output in the last 20 years.)

Semantic Web standards will make Google obsolete? You haven't noticed them leading the charge to actually get these things out into the wild? The little tables of contents, phone numbers, etc in search results? And they're the best in the world, from what I can see, at semanticizing content that wasn't semantically labeled by the originator.
I lived 3 out of 4 years in college without cable, I just couldn't afford it. Couple that with not being a big sports fan and never having had things like HBO it was actually pretty easy to keep from jumping back in an buying cable.

Hulu, Netflix, and other network specific outlets (ComedyCentral) provide 99% of the content I care to consume.

Sure I miss some of the programs that play on channels like Discovery, and History. However, I've also realized that most of the time the return on watching TV is nothing or negative. I'd rather spend my time making things.
I see, thank you. I wasn't aware that these were compiler-specific extensions.
Great article. I fully agree with its findings that 93% of US economists are me-too academics who don't understand economics and whose "consensus" is destroying the world.
If only someone were accountable for measuring that . . .
Dropping Comcast (along with 275,000 others)
Don't worry about the particulars of your problems. Everyone has problems(and they will often go out of their way to hide them), but the best way to resolve them is to keep working on yourself and try to find whatever lifestyle you are looking for, within the context of being a student. The small positive habits can build up to help you achieve larger results, because at each step you will worry a little less about your life, and feel a little bit freer to take action.

Most of the other suggestions here are based on exactly those kinds of small habits - take exercise, eat well, try to talk to people, etc. Many people enter adulthood retaining major imbalances in their personality, and they tend to find their way towards balance only with the passage of years and effort.
another figure - johan galtung (mathematician, peace advisor) - talking about the state of the world:
* the berlin wall will fall before 1990
* shortly thereafter the soviet union will collapse

* when the udssr collapsed for real, he said there will be a new enemy: it will either be the green party or islam.

* his recent prediction: the american empire will fall before 2020. he usually continues arguing the american republic will be better.

johan galtung is doing "integrative assesment". he is taking into account the non-uniformity observed in some situations. and he considers different attitudes influencing each other.

one example: when the avantgarde left the church, they turned to science. why does science describe the world in terms of perfection? it is easy to see, he says - because "god's creation was perfect".
Do you mind telling what dosages you were taking? Thank you.
No More Users
You are correct; I forgot IV is not very stringent.
Yeah, as I was publishing my Hacker Newsletter last night and it took me by surprise.
Scotch Whisky Basics with Master of Scotch Whisky Martin Daraz
If you read the article, you'd see the youtube guy is not leaving:

> Mr. Kamangar will now take the chief executive title and continue to try to improve the site's advertising features and strike new content partnerships to carry well-known television shows, clips, music videos and films, in addition to enabling more people to upload homemade videos that fueled its initial growth.

edit: if you downvote please do tell why, I think I gave factual information
I totally agree with the small dose tip. Experiments among my friends and family lead me to recommend 25-50 mg as a sweet spot between effectivity and side effects. 200mg is an overdose obscured by modafinil's relatively benign effect profile and people's expectation of ill effects from drug use.
Darcs 2.5 released record and pull run in constant time
> Unix solved [the problem of rainbow tables] in the nineteen seventies.

> incremental crackers [were used to] harvest thousands of passwords [and] forced Unix systems in the 1990's to adopt "shadowed" password files.

As someone who is interested in security but has not spent significant time studying it, I'd be interested to hear more about this. How did Unix solve the rainbow table issue? What is an incremental cracker and how does it relate to shadowed password files? (I'm familiar with the latter but not the former, and a Google search generates more noise than signal without more keywords to go on.)
I think you believe I'm trying to get rid of the FDA here. I'm not, I just want it to approve new drugs more quickly. Generally I'm in favor of things like the late 80s/early 90s reform which reduced the gap in approval speed between the US and Europe * , or like HR.6270 (which never made it to vote) which would let terminally ill patients use drugs that haven't been proven safe yet. There's no reason to get rid of the FDA, its probably both better and politically easier to reform it.

*Europe generally approved drugs much more quickly than the US (well, United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Germany at least) and there wasn't any statistically significant difference in the number of bad drugs let through. People noticed that and hence the reforms in the early 90s. For instance, you could use propranolol to treat hypertnsion in most of Europe by '68, but not in the US until '78. That cost 10,000s of lives right there. Luckily the modern FDA is better - though it still needs improvement.
Kate Vale, YouTube Australia Chief, gone as well

http://delimiter.com.au/2010/10/30/google-exodus-lars-rasmus...
If you didn't gather from the article, there is an entire subculture of people like my wife and I that loves the iPad. I am slowly finding other members of this little community.

So here is a free product idea that would scratch our itch: build an iPad case that is friendly to autistic/motor-skills-impaired individuals. The OtterBox Defender is a step in the right direction but it lacks:

* a transparent screen protection layer

* optional carry/grab handles

* a detachable carry strap (I may hack one out of duct tape -- I did this for my wife's Kindle case ages ago. Oh, and did I mention how the adjustable font size is totally awesome for my wife?)

* more padding so that my wife could possibly drop the iPad from ~4' and not have to be terrified that she just destroyed $500 of iPad?
I don't know, I always took the Alertec. As far as I know there should be no difference, but I'm not a pharmacologist...
Incidentally, I have not yet found the harmful effects on creativity that the author has, but I do not take it every day. I have taken it in two week stretches with no loss of creativity. An extremely successful and creative entrepreneur I know takes it daily for narcolepsy.
In other words you can't own a TV? I have one and use it primarily as a monitor hooked up to PS2/BlueRay or a laptop every once in a while. It also has built-in Ethernet with Netflix. Just a tool to watch movies. I don't have cable and never use antenna. Just curious: if I lived in UK, sounds like I would have to pay someone $300/year for crap I don't use?

Thanks!
I was definitely hesitant, but it got extremely good reviews.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-social-network/

97% is incredibly high for RT.
Phonebank to End the War on Marijuana
Dear god, please don't let swordfish be right about "hacking."
If I told you where I work, when I started working there, it doesn't make sense that you'll be able to derive my motivations or my character. Of course compensation is always a factor in choosing a place to work, but I am sure each individual case is so different and so complex that holding them to a greed metric is a little heavy-handed.

It isn't even a question about character here because if these people were concerned about money before everything else, many of the smartest Silicon Valley people could have had a job on Wall Street a long time ago. On Wall Street, almost 100% of the time you'll be very well off (remember how much GDP goes through that street). Wall Street will take brains anytime. If not Wall Street, FB IPO expectations haven't changed significantly in a year, these people would have moved over ages ago if they wanted a big equity cut.

There is only so much liquidity to go around with 1700+ employees and a marginally liquid market on secondmarket. For me, second market changes the game a bit because the error in valuation is potentially a lot smaller (there was a very good discussion on FB over here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719975). Either way, I wonder the size of the equity packages involved. Even if they are large, someone like Lars is very well off and spent most of his whole life building things so I don't think he is a jump to FB for the IPO kind of guy. Choosing where to work, when to work is a complex decision and not indicative of any character most of the time.
In principle, yes, it very much should be. In practice people use a lot of lame-brained things for salts. WPA uses the SSID for a salt, for example.
The problem is these screener DVDs are available much sooner than traditional DVD releases since they usually go out to critics and/or people judging for awards. Especially the last 3-4 years, many of the big Oscar award contenders have been ripped weeks or even days after the theatrical release which seriously cuts into the exclusivity period enjoyed by theaters.
The Addictive Allure of Instagram
Offer HN: Kuala Lumpur Tour Guide
I recently quit job and now in meditation mode. With some spare time doing pretty much nothing, i thought i could lend some help to fellow HNer who plan to visit Kuala Lumpur or somewhere around Klang Valley areas.

I can be your cabby, take you from KLIA airport and doing one round trip on KL/Klang Valley for sightseeing then drop you by anywhere you plan to stay. Till then it up to you to do adventure on yourself.

I hate to say this as it look like a valid scam but really, all this free of charge!

my email is my nickname at gmail
Regarding #2, my standard recommendation is Don't Just Roll The Dice, a free e-book that covers the territory nicely. You can find it here: http://www.neildavidson.com/dontjustrollthedice.html
Don't underprice yourself too quickly. Price has a signal effect, and is viewed as a proxy for quality. You should definitely aim to make money even on your early customers.

Regarding #1, there's no magic-- just total up the expected expenses, and leave some breathing room.

Note: the only relationship between #1 and #2 is that you want to make sure your price exceeds your cost. Otherwise, the price should be independent of your costs-- the key factor is the perceived value you provide the customer.
There are many, sometimes very different measures of what "a great one" does and would mean for an OS, as I'm sure you know. And therein lies the beauty of having rich diversity to choose from.

I can sympathize with the irritation of seeing duplication of effort. But when that irritation pushes a mind toward the tempting presupposition of some single measure of goodness which could have been a guiding light the whole time, paring away effort duplication and dead-ends... well, the thinking has gone a bit absurd.

There are many regions of possible-OS space, not everyone needs or wants to be in the same one.
The PDR describes its action as "unknown."
The PDR describes its action as "unknown," and says it is not a stimulant. This is a common error.
Last chance to buy from programmer-tshirts.com (proceeds to charity)
Bluetooth low energy is option once more phones support it. With a button cell the transmitter will operate more than a year. Hide it completely in a wall or somewhere else where it is difficult to remove.
Its hard to fight the urge to become an extrovert, everything on TV tries to make you believe you have to do these things to be cool and have friends. But like what you said, you make friends at local techmeetups. When your around people that share the same interests its a lot easier to make friends and be social. Start there and then work your way outwards.
Please discontinue downvoting the parent comment, it is correct. Provigil is not classed a stimulant in the PDR.
Totally diaagree with him about conferences. I could nit pick about one or two of the others but based on my experience doing several startups this is an unusually good list.
... or any OS which doesn't automatically run an executable when mounting a volume. (I have no idea if the autorun stuff is still enabled on Win 7.)
Your mentality is self-fulfilling. If you think you have a problem and can't get better without professional help, you probably won't get better. Introversion isn't so deeply ingrained in your genetics that it can't be conditioned out of, and I speak from experience.

Your problem right now is that you don't really believe that making a concerted effort, despite how uncomfortable it might feel, is ultimately going to be worth it. (or even work, for that matter) It is.
Disastrous Halloween Costumes
These people just couldn’t wait for the Halloween to come and had worked very hard to make their costumes interesting.
I'll have to play the ubiquitous "abstractions leak" card.

Moving to this sort of setup will result in a) conflicting representations, b) significantly slower code, or c) epic frameworks on the order of all-of-CPAN with tens of thousands of things you must know to be even remotely efficient.

Barring a Sufficiently Advanced Compiler, of course, but until one exists (and puts all of us out of a job) optimization is still frequently important.
This came up over breakfast this morning, coincidentally.

I start out with a mainly visual representation like a graph, with modules as nodes and edges as interconnections. I'm possibly strange in this regard, but my perception changes as things get more complicated. Once this graph gets sufficiently complicated that it's difficult to represent it as a planar graph (too much edge overlap), I lose the visual representation but can continue to reason about it. What's left isn't particularly visual, nor is it textual... I'm not sure how to explain it really. I end up manipulating this abstract "thing" in my mind, which I can translate (on paper or in code) to a concrete representation after the fact.

Anyone else have similar experiences?
This site is very informative, easily the best hub of nootropic information I have seen. There are links from each of the drugs to the medical studies, user surveys, etc.

http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/43394-nootropics-thread-i...

Also read:
Ten months of research condensed - A total newbies guide to nootropics: http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/36691-ten-months-of-resea...

Choline + Piracetam + Melatonin are what I use. All are 100% legal, nonprescription, effective and safe (according to all scientific research so far).

Routine exercise has been shown repeatedly to provide tremendous gains to mental cognition. Get yourself to a baseline that includes daily cardiac exercise before jumping into the great chemical unknown.

I have tried both adrafinil (legal/unregulated in USA, metabolized in vivo to modafinil) and armodafinil. The best way I could describe them is that they provide the wakefulness provided by caffeine, without the attention deficit hyperactivity. While they are certainly both interesting and effective, cost is prohibitive.

Stay away from amphetamines. Regardless of the potential for physical dependence, you will rapidly develop a mental dependency on them. For a short while I had a prescription for ritalin and adderall (stopped taking them on my own accord)and can admit that they made me feel superhuman. However, they also provide a hellish overconfidence that can cripple you. I was not more creative and was ironically less focused upon the important aspects of my work. Information triage is far more difficult when everything in the world suddenly becomes worth of intense study.
That's a great question to ask. The problem is, how would you measure if an acquisition was a success?

Facebook's Friend Feed acquisition wasn't that long ago but it looks like a success; They got a new CTO out of the acquisition.
Snow Leopard made the very first step toward it: when your app is in a consistent, everything-persisted-that-needs-to-be state, it can set a bit that tells the OS that it can just kill -9 it at will.

Edit: here's an article on it. It's called "sudden termination". http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/03/mac-10-6-comes-with-license-t...
I wonder who's going to drop a auto-run USB worm into them...
I find it amusing that the article doesn't contain examples of the unicode characters he mentions. For example, he brings up "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" ⏇. I sorely wanted to see this printed next to the description, but it's not. ACM portal limitation?
I had to go back and check, but it appears I've had this conversation with you before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833560

Why don't we pick up where you left off: you can tell us what compilers you use yourself, and tell us how you are protected from the same.
Thats one of the bad uses of OS but so common
Compiling structural types in Scala
Metanote: The last time I saw a topic like this come up on proggit, almost all of the messages were people saying they would be happy to go have beers with the poster and chat. I like the HN community but this is a pretty stark difference with the "advice" he's being given here. Interesting.

So in the spirit of a slightly nicer community, if you were in San Diego I'd be happy to get some beers with you and talk to you about this. I'm 32 now but I was a 21 year old introvert who had just dropped out of school and had low self-esteem once and now would consider myself successful in making a living programming. The thing that got me going was just getting to work. Start making something. Making progress on a project is important and will certainly help your self-esteem. I always learn by picking a project and figuring out the technology/language I need as I go. It helps, believe me. Don't give up, just keep moving. I've never personally been bothered by loneliness but there's got to be clubs and groups around, even if they're like Public Speaking clubs or whatever. You don't have to date or even make best friends in school, just meet people and let things happen.
What if the USB ports on your laptop are all sideways? I'm sure that'd be even more inconspicuous.
Just fucking figure it out
I see why that's a problem for domain names, but not for programming languages. You just define that one character has meaning and all its homoglyphs are syntax errors (even in identifier names).
The New Authorize.NET SDK
Someone could always re-wire the thing into mains power, in all probability destroying anything connected to it regardless of any software it might be running.
Some governments have gotten rid of them. I believe New Zealand cut its agricultural subsidies greatly in recent years without ill effect.
Hey man, we all go through rough patches in our life. You're at a very good position right now to do something about it. You have a lot ahead of you. Looking at the past, and making unrealistic goals for the future won't help. Look at the present, what can you do right now to make things better?

It's not going to happen in a day, it'll take time. We're all strong and you can get through it.
Talking to someone helps. We've all been there and when I talked to a professional it made the world of a difference, but see what you can do for yourself first.
Just donated $100 to EPIC's http://www.stopdigitalstripsearches.org/ . Especially motivated by tptacek and bugsy's comments. If you find the choice between having your children sexually assaulted or digitally strip searched repugnant, I strongly urge you to donate as well. How can we even say "land of the free, home of the brave" with a straight face anymore?
I feel like I remember Jef Raskin talking about this in his Hamane Interface book, the idea that there should be no saving and that everything should always have infinite undo (all as a goal). I might be wrong about that.
Airbnb making $30m a year
heard from an airbnb source that they are hitting $30m in annual rev this year
In particular, the case-of-first-character-in-identifier rule breaks foreign character sets, so they have to prefix public members with an X or something.
ETF Investment Risks
What I’ve Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years
Why use hash tags? HTML5 has support for altering the URL without leaving the page and adding new entries in the browser history.

Sounds like a better than the age-old hashtag workaround.
HN Parents Have An Average Of 1.7 "Little Startups" (Infographic)
This is not terribly uncommon with open source projects (see the same complaints towards Django's commit process a few months ago).

But CodeIgniter can't accept query strings in its urls? Really?
"However, purification of the DNA is usually enough to render it patentable."

Could you explain a little more about what this means? DNA in its natural state is impure?
This is largely why I switch to Kohana long ago - the developers of Kohana forked CodeIgniter and then maintained it, while Ellis Labs let CodeIgniter rot.

For those who are interested, Kohana is in version 3 now, and is no longer a CodeIgniter fork. KO3 is basically a ground-up framework reboot with all the lessons learned from making CodeIgniter not suck (query strings, requiring PHP5+ for cleaner architecture, etc.) taken into account.

http://kohanaframework.org/
This is good advice b/c it breaks down the mind-body dichotomy. It is all one piece of meat and so the key to mental happiness is physical exercise (and plenty of sleep).