skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was more about the quality of those hours than about the quantity. Both my day job and my start-up were very challenging (I worked in a large consulting company, at an investment banking client... not the place to fall asleep on the job). The modafinil meant that each and everyone of those hours was highly productive, instead of spending most of that time in a zombie-like state.

Of course I tried coffee. It really doesn't help me that much, though. I end up feeling very awake, sure, but very jittery (not good when projecting an air of confidence to your clients at the bank) and even more distractable (considering how distractable I am to begin with, that's something!). Modafinil, on the other hand, focuses me like a laser.
Myths & Realities of Power Management
Very interesting. It seems like he could have used a scanner and saved a lot of time with the images though.
actual costs of ownership were higher or lower now or then though

lol

My current car has 40K miles and has never been in the shop except for routine maintenance.

My last car had 100K miles without a lick of trouble.

35 years ago, it was not a question of "if" you had trouble, but "when". This was before front wheel drive, fuel injection, electronic ignition, imbedded computers, and manufacturer warranties. A $3000 car would normally cost at least another $3000 in repairs during its lifetime. (Unless it was a Pinto or Corvair that blew up) Factor in lost time broken down (without a cellphone of course), tow fees, and lost wages, and we forget how easy we have it now.
In the U.S., banks built drive-in windows in order to see their property once a week.
Hydrogen - Without The Nasty Carbon Footprint
The Prime Database: the prime spot for prime numbers
Contact Christopher Blizzard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Blizzard , who dropped out of high school, got a GED later, and is now working for Mozilla. Find out what he would advise after having gone the high school dropout route himself.
There's no way I'm going to go through all that and trust you to make it 'free', when, to be very blunt, it's barely worth my time in the first place. If I want to add links somewhere, I'll go comment on popular blogs.
Suggested Introductory Go Resources
Nova Spivack is a serious counter-example to your claim:

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/web_30/i...

Themes like 'semantic web' or 'recommendation engines' are still very pertinent.
I am now using this as a task/bug/idea tracker internally. It could work out really well. :-)
The revenue model appears to be charging for commercial accounts with more than an unspecified number of "followers." They used Woot as an example of a commercial account.
I was referring to missiles used in self-defense.
A whole new game would begin of "X'ing" competitors search results. They need to tread very very lightly and put many checks and balances in place.
You can't just walk into Palestine, build a school, and teach the children there to be peaceful. It's not just that no parents will send their kids to your school; it's also that people there will kill you for trying to do this.
This software is super great.
awesome - thanks for posting
A multi-touch Google Earth
Fuck everything, we're doing five cores!
Revisiting History (How Silicon Valley Grew, Thru 1997)
Utter glee.

Just make sure "Search for text when I start typing" is turned off within Firefox.
agreed: 9x9 is to real go what checkers is to chess.
Steve Jobs on Microsoft: No Taste (00:54 video)
Normalize First
It's not the client's job to know what he needs - It's our job to find out
There's still comparative advantage.
I can read the comments on videos in Spanish, and let me tell you: they're not pretty. I expect readers of other languages would say the same.
This is a pretty pointless debate, but Nova's blog actually supports PG's outlook that the web is gradually evolving. Nova acknowledges that Google and Powerset are pretty semantic already. Recommendation 'engines' have also been evolving slowly for a long time. Although Nova might indeed have interesting things to say about the future of the web, I was addressing the majority of bloggers, who merely label things they don't understand as 'web 3.0', in my original comment.

Google results for 'PhotoSynth web 3.0':

"Providing a glimpse of what we might expect to see from Web 3.0"

"I am sure that after the launch of Photosynth, we will have a new web all the way and may be we'll call it Web 3.0."

"Web 3.0 Explainded"

"Related Tags: facebook web digg social networks web 3.0 technology"

"This is incredible. Amazing. The conglomeration of social ... This is web 3.0, the semantic web in the making."
The solution is to stop showing college as a pinnacle. While "everyone has a special gift" is a bit simplistic, the theory of comparative advantage still holds, and more people need to realize that.
Things I learnt during, and about, my PhD
Having kids myself, yes I can relate to that.

I complain to my folks about what I see as major character problems in my little one, only to have my parents smile knowingly (I think they think its justice of some sort). The mention something about that being "familiar" behavior they saw once upon a time ;)
Despite the whining, it is a great thing to do.

Some days.

Other days you want to give it all up (usually just before a breakthrough which provides the rush that keeps you working for the next breakthrough).
"I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest,"

I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck.

The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment.

When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this."

I got an A in that class.
Why are there so many of these "I finally understand [cloures | pointers | misc CS concept]" posts? I mean these are pretty fundamental concepts that any first year CS student should be able to grasp pretty quickly.
It comes from the devil. The devil, I say. Beware, the Ides of March!
We did it in 2 ;).
I totally agree. He's trying to retrofit hardware that is ridiculously outdated for this purpose. And why bother when a few thousand dollars will get the average Joe a good size PS3 cluster, which has been proven to be effective for near-supercomputing applications?
Well, for a few grand, you can get a TeraOPS development board with a 336 core chip from Ambric. The chip at the heart of it is only a couple hundred (quantity 1000).
I for one aim for an empire where the sun never sets, so this strategy isn't for me. But why not use power saving modes for the servers if only few people are using them (as might happen at "night").
Of that 21-23%, how many of them are poor and uneducated immigrants whose children we can expect to be better educated?

That's not to say it's good for there to be people so uneducated, but it might not be as bad as a naïve reading of official figures might make one think.

Instead, it's the illiterate children of nonimmigrants that make me really worry, but I don't know how many of them are.
They are great tips and must know for all Entrepreneurs.
"Novels and history...produce insights...that science can’t match."
Your Design Is Good Enough
Have you turned on a TV lately?
Ask HN: What are some good iPhone app developer blogs or forums
Mostly I'm just curious how I get into the program and what the ETA is to get a an app in the store. It looks like they haven't added any new apps since the launch which is kind of discouraging.
I still participate in some old-style forums/bulletin boards (as well as Reddit and HN).

The other day I found myself wanting to vote on threads and feeling irritated that I couldn't.
I don't think it's so much "I finally understand X", but more of "I finally have found an application for X".

I think it's interesting to see how other people solve problems.
This example demands that you understand some domain-specific needs (of a text editor), so it's a little annoying.

But, the main idea is right on the mark. The point is that the natural structure of the code (that uses closures) is completely impossible to achieve without closures.

Great stuff! I think the author gets it. :-)
Duplicated data and synchronization problems are often overstated and relatively easy to work around with cron jobs.

Yikes, I hope he's not actually doing that!
Thoreau said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root."

Here is my attempt.

Shortly after we're born, we begin to perceive a certain amount of value in everything we encounter. We assign value to food, attention, comfort, safety, pleasure, affection, entertainment, possessions, virtue, appearance, and a million other things. We assign value to a thousand instances of a hundred types of those things - particular tv shows, certain cars, particular kinds of attention, certain types of pleasure, even one virtue over another. Automatically, they line up along a spectrum of desire and the sorting continues each moment till we die.

Some people value books more than people. Books have never hit them. Some people value an infomercial on tv more than any book imaginable. They still remember all those years ago how the class laughed when they had to read aloud. They don't feel stupid watching tv. They don't feel poor, inferior, or much of anything while it's on. A superficial man can see a woman and in a tenth of a second assign a value to her. We call him superficial in hopes that he will start valuing her other qualities more. A child of six in a bad neighborhood somewhere has never seen any of their friends or family open a book for fun. With perfect logic the child's mind takes note of what seems valued and what does not, by people like him. A very reasonable, and very wrong valuing ensues.

And there is something out there that each person on this website ought to value but doesn't for the very same reasons: We haven't yet encountered it, or we didn't understand it when we did, or the people around us didn't seem to value it, etc. High school art class comes to mind.

You are on this website right now because at this very moment you value it more than everything else that can at this moment be had. Not because of your DNA or inherent intellect, but because at some point you began to value time on this website, and before that websites in general, and before that time on computers, and before that a million other things that compose rungs on a ladder to somewhere.

And by my simply saying that, many of you will suddenly call into question the value of being on this site right now. That questioning is the combination of your own ability to reason, imagine, and introspect as well as your environment of which my words are now a part. And those four ingredients more than anything else are what have formed your beliefs, including your beliefs about what is to be valued.

Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else.

Things work out better when we value things of value.
Qualities of An Ideal Opportunity
Blackweb 2.0 | My Philly Network
Found my job through that list, extremely happy with it
Gunning for Google - on the wall of an ambitious startup
Tolkien is a strange exception to that rule. You can get into endless debates about symbolism or about the influences that Tolkien built on, and end up enjoying his work more than you ever did before. I can't think of any other author who's like that.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind" - Gandhi
The one thing that I failed to find in the article was a clear and concrete reason that he wanted to get a Ph.D. I don't think anybody should get a Ph.D. to "get some ideas off [their] chest." You don't need a degree to give you permission to build cool stuff.

Also, I wonder where he went to school, because at every school I've been to, there have always been many resources to go to for support. You could always talk shop with more seasoned graduate students for honest advice on classes, advisors, or places to work outside the office. If you want books, there are many books available devoted to advice on how to finish your dissertation, find a research topic, or manage your time. Even for magazines, the Chronicle of Higher Education has articles and advice for the burgeoning and established academic. Yes, you have to do most of the research and your dissertation won't write itself, but it doesn't have to be one man fighting the academic windmill alone.
so you decided against continuing grad school?

why not put an email in your profile...
Oh man, this is just as bad as the Coding Horror post.

Four lists:

1. Things which are relations

-- relations

--

2. Things you can use to represent relations

-- pen and paper

-- perl/python/ruby/javascript/etc arrays & hashes

-- c arrays & pointers

-- SQL RDBMS tables

--

3. Things which the concept of relational normalization applies to

-- relations

--

4. Things which the concept of relational normalization doesn't apply to

-- pen and paper

-- perl/python/ruby/javascript/etc arrays & hashes

-- c arrays & pointers

-- SQL RDBMS tables

--

If it sounds like I'm being pedantic, realize that 3 things must be taken into account when talking about whether or not a group of SQL tables represents a normalized group of relations: table stucture, row structure, and access methods.

It's possible to put an entire, fully 3rd normal form, relational database into a single SQL table.
I think that the linked blog post goes a bit overboard. Atwood himself says repeatedly that you should start with a normalized schema; he just also says that denormalizing for performance reasons should not have such a strong stigma attached, given that it's the only way to make big, massive databases work correctly. We can argue over whether Atwood is arguing to optimize a bit too early, but the general idea he's expressing is neither new nor (at least among experienced DBAs) disturbing.
"I've always felt that taking people out of ignorance will always make them less inclined to kill."

Actually, taking people out of ignorance always results in warding off some error. The thing to be doing with the great bounty of western prosperity is reducing ignorance in ourselves and in others, not entertaining ourselves to imbecility.

People figured out at least 2,500 years ago that knowledge is the antidote for ignorance and even laid out the specific conditions for its acquisition. Unfortunately, designating that the economy is full of "knowledge workers" doesn't cut it.
Since this isn't the first time someone's cloned the mac (I think the first cloner was NuTech, or something like that), I was only surprised that Apple gave PsyStar so long before filing their suit.
Ruby programming is art
That will make the 1 GB images much easier to process. Woohoo!

At least until I get a drum scanner, or become insane enough to start shooting 8x10's... or both. :D
i'm not sure my handwriting would look real to me as if i did that. the appearance of a given letter varies according to its neighbors or the word it's in.
Also:

http://www.goproblems.com -- a great site with thousands of problems to solve

http://senseis.xmp.net -- a Go wiki with a lot of interesting articles especially for the intermediate player
You might want to consider starting out with 10 messages per week (or 3 days, etc.). You're ultimately creating artificial scarcity. If you reduce the supply of messages further and thus increase the price, it's likely you'll see higher quality messages -- which in turn should drive traffic. You can "prime the pump" by starting with a longer message lifetime.

The disadvantage is that you may train users to visit weekly instead of daily, which is obviously counterproductive to driving traffic.
It's not really for the double encryption. It has a big advantage in that you don't need to open SSH up to the internet, only to your VPN server. Even though you may have perfectly secure passwords, why expose SSH to the internet if you don't have to?
I don't think it is a bad move per se. Mining companies buy machinery on credit, and this machinery depreciates. But in the context of a consumer, I agree, it's surprising. It's short-sighted.
I always like a good, consumer-informing post like this, but this seems overly reactive:

5. Wimpy 2 MP camera.
In the world of 5 MP Smartphones and 10 MP point and
shoot cameras that you can buy for under $200, why is the
iPhone still stuck with a measly 2 MP? That’s so 2003.
While we’re at it how come we can’t record video, afraid
the non-existent SD card might fill up? The iPhone should
be able to stream video by now just like many other cell
phones can already do right now.

Let's be fair - and I don't know the specs - but pixel count and linear resolution aren't the same thing. A 2MP camera on the iPhone may be of better quality than the 6MP camera Canon sold you last month.

See my article submission (yes, I'm a karma whore) post for full explanation

update: arggh! Nickb!

The Megapixel Myth (kenrockwell.com)
12 points by nickb 200 days ago | 6 comments | flag

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/mpmyth.htm
Even if my friends wanted to invite me to something, I would rather it come from them saying "hey check out this site" via some IM network, rather then an form email from the website. I get too much spam as it is, I don't want advertisements to go use your product (which is spam to me)

Bottom line: If you site is useful enough, you don't need to spam people via email to get them to join.
I'm just curious, what does it mean to "comment intelligently" on a literary work? It's a skill I never learned (1), nor could I even explain what the skill consists of. It hasn't really impeded my (non-corporate) career, although I did need to learn how to write when I got to grad school (note: I learned to write based on Principles of Software Engineering, not Strunk&White).

(1) I took english 101-102 at a community college, similar to what author describes. But the professor neither explained how to write literary papers, nor read student papers before giving out grades.
It's lucky to be a [enter profession] if you can appreciate it and accept it.

Comparing with other fields and thinking that ours is better is like saying one religion is better than another. Which some people argue it is how we should be thinking anyway. Because if other fields/religions are better/more correct, then why are we in this field/religion.
Mining Crowd Feedback For The Gems
I think that it's not only that older people didn't grow up with, say, the Windows interface or, as someone mentioned earlier, a telephone interface where you have to press send to make a call, it's an even more basic issue. They grew up in a world where machinery was expensive, fragile and dangerous and a world where adults seldom learned to operate fundamentally new machinery. Even sturdy, harmless household machinery wasn't safe to "play around" with. One reason you had to dial 1 to make a long distance call, even before exchanges and area codes overlapped, is to reduce the risk of misdialing or misunderstanding your way into a big bill. If you pick up the phone in the middle of the night and dial random numbers to figure out the numbering scheme and whether it takes longer to call cross-country, you'll get a big bill and, if you piss enough people off, get a visit from the police or a stern letter from the phone company. If you enter random URLs into your browser, you're unlikely to break anything.

We (younger people) have an advantage in that we're used to pretty much everything being software driven, so we know that if we screw up our computer, phone or DVD player we can just pull the plug or the battery. We're also used to the idea that not every device will behave the same way to achieve the same function. We press "send" to "send" a call, but not to send an SMS message, even though the latter is standard usage and the former is not, but we don't care because we know that's how the UI works. And, we know that we'll have to keep learning new UIs as we get older. Older people don't have a problem dialing nine for an outside line, even though at home they just pick up the receiver, because they probably learned it in their 20s.
No North America in country select
Not long ago I submitted an Ask HN that requested information on database design practices but it never got popular. It seems like it would be quite obvious to most here on how to perform quality database design, but I cannot find any good resources online. If any or you here have that info, or more specifically standard practices that are not necessarily in books, please reply because I tend to feel somewhat lost on the topic.
This has been a problem in every online game with a serverlist that I know of.. It's quite funny as it's gotten extreme enough that some of the names are just spaces.
The data seem to suggest that, while those students were certainly deplorable, average literacy is actually at an all time high:

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
How CAPTCHA got trashed - The wiggly words are now most useful for malware authors
I mean, really....

How hard could it have been to have the label on the far right say "Americas" instead of "Latin America" and just include Canada, the U.S., Greenland, and Iceland in the list?
In Search of a Beautiful Mind: MIT Mathematician and Logo inventor Seymour Papert
Which car did he buy?
IPhone's Location-Aware Apps
Interested in another job as a program trader?
I hear ya, notdarkyet. A post about the price of oil in Yemen will get 200 comments but a post about database design practices will get 5 comments on hacker news. Go figure.

There are millions of references on the subject, but perhaps you could start with a good intro, one of my favorites:

http://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/...

Hope that helps.

And keep on posting. Sooner or later the crowd oughta pick up on it a get your ball rolling.
Couldn't agree more. Over-architecting should be the 8th deadly sin (at least for start-ups).
I've seen mention of KGS (kiseido go server) but not IGS (internet go server). I play on IGS because generally the players are a little bit stronger there (not that I am ;-) ).

http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/
That's why there are things like kerning and ligatures.
The arts and humanities are just terribly taught. People notice it more with regard to English than art or music class, because you have to take English every year pretty much anywhere, while usually you stop taking art or music before you realize how bad it is.

I had a lot of great science and math teachers and a few great history teachers. I had some good English teachers but none who were really great. I think that's because people with math and science degrees have plenty of job opportunities, so only the ones who really want to teach high school even consider it. Probably the best English teachers I had were baby-boomer or older women who would have done something else if not for workplace misogyny. As they retired they were generally replaced by ignorant young women.

I love reading and I can write lucidly, but I knew people in college who had had really strong English instruction and can analyze a novel on first reading in ways that wouldn't even occur to me after a month of full-time study.
"... As a recruiter, I love dealing with candidates who are passionate about their work and are in their profession for the right reasons ..."

Close to spam but relates to this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229160 by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DaniFong which is a much better post to read.