skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't believe that it takes dedicated research and insight to determine that this is a problem. It's not caused by e-mail and instant messaging, it's caused by undisciplined workers. Today's work environment is catering to this culture - the wages in an average office job assume that you waste at least 30% of your time and do a halfway unfocused job the rest of the time.

Anyone who has ever worked or studied has seen this problem first-hand. I doubt it started with computers..you can find all kinds of ways to put off hard work if you want to. Smoking breaks, talking to co-workers, just pretending to be working etc. In college, half the students put off reading until the last week before the final exam and complain that studying is so hard. I'd go so far as to say that this just as big a problem for ambitious employees as it is for the economy at large. I am fully capable of being focused at least 80% of the time, but that doesn't mean that I'll get paid 20-30% more. In a big company, I have no motivation to do a good job. The system embraces mediocrity.

This is less of a problem in small companies where every employee is a partner. In these companies, wages are sometimes considerably greater (there are 10-man consulting companies in Norway where wages of $200,000 including stock are close to the median). And none of this, of course, applies to a startup. It's just a pain that these kinds of gigs require disproportionally more effort than a regular office job. There should be a middle ground somewhere.
How did you force yourself not to think in bed? My brother who can fall asleep in a few minutes says he can do this but I've never been able to do it once. My mind just wanders the second I lie down.
Being able to integrate email with other webapps is a very good direction. We were hoping to do this with our webapp using gmail, but were amazed to find out there is no gmail api. Orgoo could fill a big need with this, unless/until gmail finally launches an api.
Correct url to the paper: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
Wow. One of my patches (exactly the one I was whining about here ;) was just changed from "Unreviewed" to "Ready for checkin".

Thank you very much, Jack. Your blog post really helped!
I'm a an asp.net/C# programmer by day. I developed a RoR app for a client on the side. The problem was you couldn't keep the darn thing running. RoR was unstable as heck for me and was missing some features that were dead simple in asp.net. (At the time I couldn't find a good zip library, the one I found had documentation in Japanese).

If I were comparing asp.net to something I would consider django or just PHP. PHP has a heck of a deployment story. I run MANY wordpress blogs on the side and centos/mysql/apache/php is rock solid AND fast.

My 2 cents.
A few months ago i started meditating. Im not that much in to it, but i learned how to concentrate for a while on something(eg. my breathing) And in bed i just concentrate on something like that, don't brutforce yourself not to think, just take your mind away from it. It doesn't always work, but im getting better and better.
ASP.net would be my second-choice to ruby on rails. It's a close call. If Castle's ActiveRecord was better when I tried it, I would have probably never delved into rails ages ago. I'm glad I did though.

In favor of Rails:

-There are pre-existing FOSS social network apps in rails you can modify.

-You have infinite scalability where your only multiplier is hosting cost b/c there are no windows licenses, so no obstacles to moving into the cloud, virtualizing, setting up a friend

-With rails, you are mostly saved from SQL. Castle's activerecord might do this on .net, but was lousy when I tried it a while ago. Might be better now.

-It is easy to be coddled by ASP.NET and not understand the parts underneath, which works well until the abstraction leaks (viewstate, page layout, etc).

That said, asp.net is not a bad option, and would be my second choice over the java frameworks I've tried, or php. .NET has a nice IDE and better tooling than Rails.
Don't forget Linq. Linq to XML is awesome. No more xpath. One of my colleagues left the RoR camp after he couldn't get xml parsing to work.
Lies, Damn Lies and Web Analytics
I've had perfect strangers yell and threaten me in Boston. That's never happened to me anywhere else, not even close. Trying to summarize that experience will sound classist, so I won't, but I'll just say that I've noticed some patterns, and certain groups here don't hide the chip on their shoulder and can be very punchy.

The tech and intellectual social circles here are great, though. Nice people and good conversation.
Is Digital Productivity Dead?
Wow, I live in Dallas and the .NET community is very large here (have you attended any of the .NET user group meetings?)

Honestly I find the OSS community to be very weak here since most developers are corporate type and they know either Java or C# or VB.NET. Every OSS (Python) meeting I've ever been to has been populated by back room tinkerers and people that "haven't done it" (tm) so they aren't any help to me with my real world questions and problems.

Now if you expect any college to put out good developers you have the wrong expectations for what college does. They are not Devry (which you should never hire a developer from Devry). Colleges teach theory not practice (which has been beaten like a dead horse on the net).
Three things:

1. Look at the MVC framework for ASP.NET 3.5 as it makes ASP.NET act more like Rails

2. If you're going to use ASP.NET, use 3.5 so you can use LINQ and all the new 3.5 features. It makes your life WAY easier.

3. There is no real scaffolding for ASP.NET like there is in RoR. Well there is a kind of like it thing that was put out (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PuttingASPNETDynamicDataIntoCo...).

Now, here's my take... if you learn ASP.NET/C# you will have marketable skills in most non silicon valley markets that you can use as a consultant or employee as need be. There are significantly less corporate jobs that are RoR than there are C#/ASP.NET.

Also make sure you look at Python/Django (which is normally what is argued with RoR).
Expected by whom?

If you're saying Google expects this kind of URI format, then they should probably say so :)
Other than the cost and the admin factors building, deploying and debugging/troubleshooting web applications in ASP.NET environment simply rocks! Not to mention the IIS sweetness and scalability models.

I have a facebook application (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=5595659604) that I built using the LAMP stack, something quick and dirty . I like the LAMP stack and have nothing against RoR but be prepared to spend a lot of engineering resources in scaling these.

Case in point try debugging a web server crash in your favorite RoR web server vs ASP.NET/IIS environment.
Visualization for dynamic data sets
The real benefit of properly integrating email with social networks is that it provides a solution to spam. If only your friends (that you've opted in) can send you mail via this system, then your inbox there will be completely spam-free.

I was hoping for FB to offer that, but most people don't log in to FB often enough for it to be a reliable mail network. Email still wins. If Orgoo can shift that balance so that people check their email on the social networks, that's a killer app right there - possibly the best use, today, of the "social utility" aspect of a site like Facebook.
If you can bring a pretty woman with you, it works even better. My wife and I visited the MIT campus a few years back, and she attracted more attention to us than I would have alone. She knows next to nothing about technology, but it didn't matter. Note, I'm not trying to knock MIT girls, just giving you a tip to get into some labs. Also, MIT folks are very nice and open, not elitist at all, in my experience.
go to the Cambridge Common on mass ave between Harvard and Porter sq. 24 brews on tap and some of the best food around. (I recommend the English Burger).

There is also the Lizard Lounge in the basement of the same building with great live music
It is. They came up with the WinForms/WebForms abstraction to make building a .net desktop app or web app seem pretty much the same
Isn't having great ideas a useful skill?
I'm also embarrassed about those people. We live in a global economy, why should I have to pay extra to someone who thinks that his/her citizenship entitles him/her to an above-market wage when there is a hard working person willing to do the work for less?

It is disgraceful that hardworking people all over the world starve while here in the US people feel entitled to complain about their jobs being "taken".
I used to have trouble getting up by 9am back when I lived in my parent's basement. When I moved out on my own, I started waking up at 7am. It was the sunlight which did it. It was bright shining through the shades and when I lived in the basement, I had no windows.
For sport over the years, my friends and I have worked through many of ITA's great programming puzzles. I've even used one of their old puzzles (Addagram) in (surely) 100+ interviews where I walk candidates through building up the different considerations in this puzzle. It degenerates or upgrades well for the level of engineer being hired, and when we hire them, it's not uncommon for those engineers to come back with me and work through it some more.

Oddly, one of my friends (absolutely brilliant guy) sent ITA a few solutions and they interviewed him. I know an interview isn't overly efficient, but I lost a good bit of respect for ITA when they didn't offer this guy a position or further interviews. The guy is brilliant and dedicated-- it's always possible that doesn't come through in any given interview. Still, it's good as it means it's easier to get this fellow involved in my startup when needed.

Add-a-gram for the curious:
http://itasoftware.com/careers/puzzle_archive.html?catid=39#...
A.) 5 years ago
B.) Only impacted unpatched servers
C.) They said they were using MySQL anyway

Two words: hanging chad
I'll avoid the "Boston stinks because ... " part and just tell you about a few things that rock here.

1. If you're old enough to sit in a bar (you are, but for others reading this), go to Chez Henri (http://www.chezhenri.com/). Get a cubano (they go great with a Manhattan btw). I've been to Miami (never Cuba though) and never had one as good as the bar menu one at Chez Henri. If you don't eat meat, get the veggie one, still amazing, but not quite as.

2. The Kendall and Brattle Theatres. Awesome REAL movie theatres. Great for dates or just getting away from the next, big sequel of crap.

3. Getting gifts for the folks back home? For some you just have to get Harvard / MIT clothing (it's just a fact), but for those who are a bit cooler, or not parents, grandparents - go to Joi de Vivre on Mass Ave just south of Porter (http://www.joiedevivre.net/). A store where you, as a grown up, will actually want to play with stuff.

4. Get some rockin pizza at Cambidge1. I haven't been to the new one by Fenway, but the one in Havard Square rocks hard. The lines during weekend prime time don't though - so you've been warned. Their pizza is way better than their website (http://cambridge1.us/).

5. Those ten books in your queue not enough? Challenge yourself by reading something in another language. Schoenhofs is an amazing resource.

And then pretty much everything everyone else said. Have fun. Cambridge is a great place to be in the Summer (Winter, not so much ...)
Skip Castle, it pulls along a lot of baggage with it and its not for beginners. ASP.NET MVC with LINQ + NHib is my pick as most productive .NET web stack right now. I think there's enough literature out there to get you started on MVC, NHib will increase your learning curve a bit, but it should be a good second stage.

You can build anything with anything. It's mainly about what personally works for you and what kinds of skills you want to end up with on the other side.

Good luck.
I must have missed something basic here - is there some reason that "physical data storage capacity", and "information-theoretic information content", should have different units? Aren't they the same thing?

I guess a string of 2^32 '0's would take 4 gigs, but it's information content is much smaller. Is this what he means?

I have heard of people using natural logs instead of base-2 logs to compute the average entropy of a distribution in which case information is measured in "nats" instead of "bits".
Really? I've grown up in NYC as well, and I've found thats its much easier to be friendly in Boston than in NYC, but that might just be a consequence of the fact that when I'm hanging out in boston, its generally over in the MIT area, which is certainly a very unique culture, combined with that fact that being in one's 20s in boston certainly very different from being in Boston and not being in one's 20s.
A Simple News Aggregator
SmashingFeeds.com is a very simple online new aggregator that displays feeds of your interest from various news/blog sources.
As people have mentioned - who cares if it exists, everything exists in some shape and if it didn't exist, it probably doesn't have a market anyway!

If you can do it better, you can succeed. (though don't try, for example, to create a mail app like Gmail, you will probably never keep up with them!)
I would go with Rails because there are several options out there to give you a good starting point for a social network.

Try out Insoshi (http://portal.insoshi.com/) and Lovd By Less (http://lovdbyless.com/). Work with each for about a week and see if you like the way the code works and their extensibility.

Also, I'd concentrate on only one factor, at this point- what platform gets you to launch the fastest? Unless you have significant ASP.net experience, Rails will probably get you there faster. Add in the massive amounts of Rails open source code that you can build off of, and I think the choice is clear.

Don't pay attention to people who say "Rails can't scale" but haven't actually built a large Rails app. I run a Rails app that handles >1,000,000 hits per day, and I've spent about 3 hours resolving the scaling issues that I've run into.
I don't understand why this post was downvoted. It seems rational and inoffensive. The main post asked for opinions and he gave his- what's wrong with that?
Microsoft’s Not Bluffing
Google-Yahoo Deal Raises Antitrust Fears
Why Facebook is now the number one social network in the world, and why this matters
Robot Asimo judges rock-scissors-paper contests
After a nice northern vacation in the upper $20s, Yahoo stock heads back south
3D overlay of Disney World for Google Earth
Definitely not a hacker.
Grow Your Website Traffic With Google Friend Connect
Coming up with ideas isn't all that hard (I have about 20 on a list right now). There are very few world changing ideas, even though everyone thinks their idea is. So most ideas have been done in one way or another. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do them.

Facebook wasnt the first social network, but they did it. Basecamp wasnt the first project management tool. They took something that they thought wasnt great and made it better.

"Idea guys" as mentioned earlier often come to you with a "world changing" idea. Offer you 50% of the company and you, the tech guy assume all the time and risk. If you do partner with someone, find someone who brings a viable skill to the table and not just a pile of ideas.
Interesting that in the absence of Flashpaper, similar service iPaper (Scribd) is taking off.
Check out these guys, nice blog with good info:

http://www.softiesonrails.com/ (Ruby on Rails for .NET Developers)
I think we have some idiots in our midst that will downvote simply because they don't agree. It's sad.
Google grows stronger in Microsoft-Yahoo fallout
There are substances that are bacteriostatic, which mean that they retard the growth of bacteria. Sterile water is actually bacteriostatic, because there is no food for the bacteria to grow in.

Silver and other heavy metals are bacteriostatic as well. Other substances are bactericidal, which means that they actively kill bacteria.

Antibiotics are bactericidal. You don't want to take antibiotic or bactericidal substances on a regular basis, because you end up putting unnecessary evolutionary selection pressure on your normal bacterial flora. That is, you don't want to kill all the good bacteria, otherwise the bad ones will overpopulate because they have no competition.

I'm guessing that the crocs aren't bactericidal, they are probably baceriostatic.
Well then you should get a Zipcar account: http://www.zipcar.com/
http://addagram.mytestbench.com/

I too have played with that one, but I used JavaScript... These problems are engaging enough to keep you interested, especially when you are trying out a new language. The challenge is significant, and the optimizations required to solve these help you explore some the deeper depths of a language, when compared to a "hello world!" type of problem.
Victor Hugo closed years ago, and Quantum is no longer in the Cambridge location. Sad, they were some of my favorite book stores too.
About the half-hour morning walk, you can skip it if you can put an 100 watt light bulb (or equivalent) somewhere in your field of vision. It should be visible without turning the head, but not directly in your retina. Mine is (accidentally) half a meter above and behind the monitor and works just fine. Used it to get over a bad case of winter blues (more like winter depression, if you ask me) and worked wonders.

I'm still waiting for someone to try and confirm the latest Harvard study, the one about not eating 16 hours before the desired wake-up time. Looks very good on paper.
check out Bloc 11 in Union Square. by the makers of Diesel Cafe.
free on Sunday mornings
G. J. Sussman, Jolly Good Fellow

(http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/810000/804464/p208-sussman.p...)
That's the final argument for us, night owls. Even if we could "fix" our schedule, it's not worth it because it's the best for us. Plus nothing compares with work done after 7 pm - no phones, no emergencies and even less noise.
I think the spokesman for Nokia is spot on. Nokia is a key component behind the symbian os, which is the most widely used os on phones and is open source as well. Right now Android is really just a concept that has had no commercial implementation. I really don't think Android will surpass symbian or s60 ever. Nokia is the only company in this game who just makes phones, this is what they do best, so they are in a unique position. People arn't going to use Android on their phones just because it's made by Google. Only a small amount of people even know about Android and its non-existant in handsets out on the market now. Symbian and S60 however are widespread with presence worldwide in a wide variety of handsets.
cambridge1 is great. tech trivia: one of the co-owners of cambridge1 started android and now is VP of Mobile at Google.
First good TechCrunch article in a long time - it's nice to see Arrington can still write a decent, fair, and sensible article once in a while.
" I came up with a vague impression that Ruby is more pure and is set to win in the long run, but that Python is currently more practical for now"

I'm curious as to the reasoning behind both these assertions.
Can I do that in the summer too? I'm going in mid-July, and I tried emailing some people in there but didn't got many replies.
Sure, but that's kinda bad. During 4th year of university, my bedtime crept up to a regular schedule of 5am - 3pm with some nights even later. It made it hard to do a lot of things, including going to pretty much all classes.
Symbian is closed source (and, as you say very popular and very good).

The open source Nokia is looking to adopt is Linux, already seen on the N810. Nokia seems to be making the move to cut development costs.

Nokia also doesn't just sell phones, they also sell network infrastructure and service and software outside of the telecomms industry.

Quite why they think that the OSS world will help them with DRM is beyond me. It seems highly optimistic at best. But since it is open source they can really do what they want provided they are willing to comply with the license and pay their own developers. There is not much stopping companies erecting DRM on top of Linux (and other GPLv2 code) - see TiVo and the motivation for moving to GPL v3 for an example.
When I posted this, I noticed several posts in this thread that were at 0 that I thought were good, so I voted them up. Some people come here to discuss tools, some people come here to be tools.
Good point in the second to last paragraph. Do you want a corporate job? If so, consider .NET or Java. Do you want a freelance/startup/independent job? You may find the Ruby (or Python etc.) community more supportive. There are exceptions to each - there are .NET startups, and Ruby is making inroads at lots of big corporations - but your career will likely have a different flavor depending on what you choose.
While this is true for shared hosts, if you want to install on your own machine, run test and dev servers (virtualized or no) or cloud-host your app, there is still a very real cost to windows licenses.
New 'super-paper' is stronger than cast iron
Nocera to Yang: Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby
Agreed - IMO, until 2 or more players have saturated the market, competition isn't going to necessarily keep you out.

Two other bits of advice:

1. Find something limited in scope, and build it under constraints. At least to start, assuming that you're going to keep your day job. In other words: can you build something that actually has value, and that you would use, in 40 hours? This is a good exercise for a first startup project, and can keep you from running down a rabbit hole.

2. Decide if this is a side project or a full-time job. If it is a side project, you can build something you like and help it grow slowly, without worrying about your take-home pay right away. If you're going to quit your day job, the stakes are much higher - you can't rely on slow growth (because your rent/mortgage depends on profit), and you should never rely on explosive viral growth (because it probably won't happen to you, no matter how good you are).
Some retailers give vinyl records a spin
A Guide to CSS Support in Email | Web Resources | WebAppers
Accidental astrophysicists: Mathematicians inadvertently settle question about bending of light
Well put. A problem many who are starting out face is contingency if things go wrong i.e. startup fails.

It is easy to say do another one, but without funding/investors this can be hard and people must eat and bills must be paid.

Hence with .NET being the choice of most businesses (as most they are already tooled with MS products etc), going .NET initially also allows the fallback position of easier consulting/contract work at times when money is needed.

However, ultimately the choice should be on what allows you to meet and iterate upon your objectives in the fastest way possible, as the best way to stay live is to be able to adapt and change and exploit markets rapidly. Hence with this in mind, I would opt for Ruby as imho it provides a better grounding into architectures and pratices that will best serve you in both the short and longer terms.

Hope this is of help :)
Throughout university you could not of convinced me that I would be a morning person. But once I got into the real world (aka corp gig) I realized that I was most productive in the early hours of the morning, my job required me to get up early. Now I have totally embraced the morning as my "getting stuff done" time. I have more energy and time, I won't be going back to the night owl lifestyle anytime soon.
Or get a day job/contract.

I did just so I would be forced to sleep and get up at 'normal' times.

...so far so good. A hidden benefit that never occured to me is all the prety girls I now meet with no extra effort. (day<girls<night). :)
[Ask YC] AJAX vs. AHAH
I have been struggling with this question so I thought I would ask YC.

Personally, I am leaning more towards AHAH.