skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible, but I'd be pretty shocked. I've been doing mindfulness meditation for a few months and I feel fairly confident in saying that the belief that "the operative part of meditation is sustained concentration" is a misconception. When you meditate you allow yourself to become aware of your body sensations but you don't force yourself to concentrate on them, and I don't think that most meditators explicitly try to maintain concentration when they sit. (That said, after ten or fifteen minutes of meditation concentration often becomes natural.)

It certainly has seemed to me that the important part of meditation is the relaxation that it lets you achieve. I think it's literally impossible for me (at least) to get as relaxed as I am after a typical hour of meditation by any nonmeditative means. (If you interpret "relaxation" as having low blood levels of e.g. cortisol this is actually measurable.) And I know that I have days when I don't sufficiently relax myself when I sit, and I usually don't see the same benefits that I do from "good" sits. 'Course, a lot of this could be confirmation bias.

Also, anecdotally, I maintain substantial concentration for 30+ minutes a day because that's what studying is, and the short- and long-term effects of that concentration don't seem to be anything like the effects of meditation.
Thanks for the article. I have a question. What kind of latency do you experience using MongoHQ? And maybe you could discuss this part of the system a little more?
What kind of meditation routine did follow?
Actually, in terms of physical comforts and conveniences, they don't lack that much.

See this fantastically interesting document - if you want to know how many poor households (or non-poor households) have (e.g.) a "Porch, Balcony or Deck", exposed wiring or have AC, the answers are all here.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

The poor have it a bit worse than everyone else, but it's not that dramatic. Most of the poor have a house with plenty of space, a car, etc.
First impression: pretty good, I instantly knew what was going on and signing up worked exactly as expected and was painless.

The /users/view/ pages are not nearly as good or visually pleasing as the /projects/view/ pages. As a user I want someone landing on "my" page to be impressed, not be presented with a rather boring page of text. Screenshots for each project worked on, maybe moving the user's photo over in the left pane, etc may help here.
Regex Visualization: give it a regex and see the state diagram
How does AngelList work?
Agreed. Context for anyone that may have missed it:

http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/27434483292573696
The Real Hacker News
I don't know how to downvote.
Citing facts == "Chicago school of economics only"?

You are correct - I did assume poor people avoid work out of rational utility maximization (i.e., I assumed poor people's choices revealed their preferences). You may be right - poverty might be caused by irrationality. I made no claim whatsoever about segregation, humiliation or other social problems.

Come to think of it, if the poor are irrational, that might also explain why their children do not become as intelligent as the children of the rich.
1998 I used to visit this site all the time.
I used two main techniques, first I just did focus exercises for a few weeks then I started with the more advanced stuff.

First you need to learn to focus your mind, you take a bright object (a firelighter works great) and you stare into the flame. Then you slowly and carefully shut down your brain and just focus on the bright light. If a tought pops up the most important thing to remember is to let it go and focus away from it, if you get mad or focusing on not focusing on it that's one more tought that popped up.

Then once you get the hang of that you can start doing more interesting things. My favourite was to attempt super-position and out of body experiences. Basically you sit in a comfortable position and focus on a memory of a place, or a made-up place. You slowly build up the image of your surroundings, starting with what's immediately before your eyes and then going from there. Once you're proficient in building a visual representation of fake surroundings you start with sounds, smells and tastes. When you get that down you can start fooling your kinestatic sense, which means you have to feel your arms/legs/body in a different position than it actually is.

Once you've done that, voila, you've just achieved lucid REM at will.

If you talk to a spirituality guru they will tell you it's an astral plane, or out of body experience. But really it's just lucid REM :)

I never managed to quite completely detach myself from reality, I got into the super-position state where I could feel myself being in two places at once ... sort of everywhere.

The main thing you have to remember when doing any of these experiments is that your mind is the only thing in the world fully under your control. It cannot do something you don't let it do.
> This is killing Python's momentum in my view.

It is not the job of application developers to keep up a languages "momentum", its the language creator's job. If he underestimated the momentum of the current version and didnt bother to inter-coordinate incompatible language upgrades with his users and introduced a new trademark-diluting version anyway, you cant simply blame the users for not investing time and money in order to "protect the language". They are not obliged to follow whereever he leads, and if he wants to lead without caring about his followers, they might just decide not to follow any more. Who guarantees that he's not going to pull a Python3 again 5 years down the road and then sing the same "not updating is momentum killing" song again?
For the most effective pitch, focus 80% on the problem, 20% on the solution.

- Dave McClure (@davemcclure)

http://startupquote.com/post/2874167960
My memory may be a bit rusty on this, but as I remember it in the pre-pagerank days Google were just aggregating the highest results from a bunch of other search engines such as Alta Vista (?) and Yahoo (?) ... which seemed pretty scummy.

As for my 'thinking' on Google, here's the way I see it. I see people giving money to Dell. I see people giving money to HP. I see people giving money to Adobe and Microsoft ($deity only knows why). I even see people giving money to Apple.

When was the last time I saw someone buy something from Google? I've met two or three people with Android phones. yeah, so Google gets what - a $10 royalty? Don't spend it all at once!

Which then raises the question: who/where/when/what on earth is paying for all this 'free' stuff that Google gives away? Surely it must be the advertising!

And if advertising is really the only thing they have bringing home the bacon, eventually the bean counters from advertising are going to run the company (if they don't already). Google maps is awesome, but I never once paid for the privilege... how did they afford to put all those cars on the road eh?

What I see is things like Google buying youtube, and then making it worse by slapping ads on it. I view Google as a modern day King Midas. But they don't turn things to gold, what they touch gets covered in advertising instead.

Secondly, I have noted several instances where Google has been very 'cavalier' (to be generous) with the truth

(no we're not sniffing your wifi. Okay, we're sniffing your wifi, but only accidentally. Okay, we're doing it systematically and deliberately, but we're not storing it. Okay, we're storing it, but nothing important. Okay we're sniffing your passwords, are you happy now?!?!?!)

also privacy (Eric saying he doesn't believe in it - has he been snorting the Zuckerman again?), or even lives

(see also: Chinese dissidents being sold up the river to Beijing by Google)

Google was bending over big time for the oppressive regime, until China tried to hack them, when they suddenly grew a backbone and started standing up to them. That's not character. That's not 'not being evil'.

===

NB: me saying Google is not perfect is not the same as saying that some other company is perfect. what I was saying originally is that not only is it unfair to compare Google to Apple because of Apple's unusually good current results, but also they are different kinds of companies, working in mostly different markets (fundamentally Google is an internet based advertising company, and Apple is a media/hardware company - comparing them is like comparing a biotech stock with Walmart, it just doesn't make sense.
Moreover, one of the primary differences in their financial results is that Google is in a saturated market, but Apple is not. It is hard to be a 'growth stock' in a saturated market where you already have a massive monopoly.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, I looked at the US/Canada radio market size and I am consciously going after a niche. I've been trying to get local stations to try out the MVP before I start dealing with the "consolidated" players. Getting a Clear Channel or a CBS Radio on board would be great but I fear I'll run into the problems that you point out :)
It should be noted that this is a fairly unusual practice, quite different to the more common concentration, insight, and awareness meditation systems.
This is what is missing in the article, thank you
I certainly prefer leisure to my current work situation. The universe of possibilities (for most people) is {work+pay, no work+no pay}. Within this universe, I prefer work+pay.

You can deduce this based on revealed preferences - I've been either working or looking for work for my entire adult life. Similarly, revealed preferences suggest that most of the poor prefer no work + no pay to work + pay.
JQuery File Upload – Multiple File Upload Plugin for jQuery
Creating Fast Buttons for Mobile Web Applications
The feature that auto identifies IP addresses from valid input examples and uses a well known IP address regrex could save you some time.
One wonders if General Motors qualifies as a startup or product by their definition. They've put out a cool piece of technology (the Volt) even.
Compare and Contrast Essay Gives an Brainy Impression
There are many reasons as to why writers are drawn to the compare and contrast essay. This is one of the easiest styles of writing and one of the most often assigned. Therefore, in order to submit a well written compare and contrast essay, students need to know how to write one.
This is an interesting albeit, scary idea.

I can see the benefits of such a company for a select group of individuals. However, the rest of the population may be treated as second-rate professionals; like the way it is with Hollywood. Most "talent" in Hollywood are not the best and brightest. They're either well connected or extremely lucky (with very few exceptions).

If an idea like this were to be successful, I think we'd see a flood of talented people more interested in being stars than being productive.

But, then again, maybe we're already there.
Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering
Another useful command, along the same lines, is disown. This is basically nohup, but for a process which is already running.
People who do that are absolute psychopaths.

It's not the same, but I came to know a graffiti "artist" up close and personal. No, not the clever, cultural-references and political-stencil type, but the sign-your-name-on-everything fuckwit. Absolute monster! He would look at the nicest part of town and get physical convulsions, just aching to spray his name on it (funnily, his real nickname which is also his myspace handle, in graffiti font) He made absolutely no effort to hide is actions or intentions.

I bet these people flashing lasers are similar idiots who are bragging about it to someone. If not in person, then online. The freaks tend to "think aloud" and can hardly keep it to themselves.
I think the real problem with most uses of GAs (including this one) is that to the extent that they work at all, they're merely performing a random walk search driven by mutation, and the "crossover" operation is, for all intents and purposes, just functioning as a random-restart of the search, a jump to a new spot in parameter space rather than a useful shuffling of units of functionality.

Sometimes a random local search is exactly what the doctor ordered, of course, it's almost entirely trivial to code and especially if you tune the variance over time you can get pretty good results, though I'd agree that in general you can usually get better results in less computer time with a more typical algorithm (though you've still got to choose the algorithm, implement/integrate it, test it, etc., so you lose a lot of programming time unless it's already part of your framework).

Genetic algorithms should really shine when it's not clear how to cast the problem as a finite dimensional optimization problem, for instance if you're trying to evolve some constructive procedure to solve a problem rather than tweak variables to improve performance. You're absolutely right, aothman, most problems, even most problems specifically constructed to show off GAs, don't fit into this category, so there's no real point except that the algorithm sounds cool...
> I have limited resources as well

I'd like to make clear that I wasn't bitching, because I know exactly how the limited resources dance goes. Disappointment with further confusion between Python 2 and 3, yes; disappointment with you, no (are you kidding? half my stack is Pocoo stuff).

> All I said was that right now you shouldn't be too concerned with Python 3 yet

The real question is when "yet" will be. Python 3's been out two years, and I don't think I'm alone in the community in wondering if it'll ever be completely figured out. The fact that PEP 3333 was just accepted is a testament to the slow nature of the thing.

It's getting tiring to want to use 3 but instead having to stick with 2to3. Even that is a distant goal: when will I be able to finally run 2to3 and move entirely to 3? If I'm entrenched in a lot of Python 2 libraries, I'm beginning to believe (two years later) that the big day will never come.

Python 3 is great. I want to use it. It's fights like Web3 vs. WSGI and the resistance to (or impossibility of) porting the libraries I use that are personally keeping me away from it. I think that speaks for the lack of eagerness to move to 3 that you've observed. It's very real, and entirely, I think, due to libraries.

I'll be at PyCon as well on behalf of my employer, and I'm interested (as it sounds like you are, from your blog post) to hear what the consensus is on Python's future. Right now, I have a lot of questions, and nobody seems to have answers.
"X-Coral-Control: redirect-home
headers show up. This header is used to tell Coral that if Coral can’t handle the load of requests for cached copies of your page, it should redirect these requests back to your site."

This presumably makes sense if the site operator is prepared to scale or has a scaling strategy to put into play - but it might take some time. He'd rather have people bounced back to his infrastructure in order to see how to optimize than loose the visibility by coral.

Also - (just a guess) some of the other headers - like the limerick - could be there to get around that IE behaviour where it won't show the real HTTP error message and instead shows you something generic and useless.
Wow! Lots of interest in meditation lately. The study suggests that meditation does something, as opposed to nothing. I imagine watching TV for 8 weeks changes brain structure too. Neuroscience based on imaging has a long way to go, but we have to start somewhere, right?

As for haecib's point about improvements in cognitive function, I say it's tough to measure in the global sense we really care about. What's the value of being a more kind and patient person? Can you measure cleverness?

Current tests of cognitive function are things like working memory (somebody must have tested that -- I'll look), phonemic fluency, etc. Did you know that "long working hours may have a negative effect on cognitive performance in middle age."[1]

Is Hacker News going to start covering meditation? Great! in the meantime, here are two more articles that might interest readers of this topic.

This is Your Brain on Meditation, quote: "Science and meditation teachings are exactly parallel" he explained "but they don't speak the same language."[2]

Can Meditation Cure Disease?[3]

[1] http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/169/5/596.full

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/28/this-is-your-brain-...

[3] http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-25/ca...
Clickable: http://www.gcet.ac.in/icisd/index.html

I would offer some advice. Your objective is not to present the entire contents of the paper. Your paper is, presumably, available. Your objective is to present an overview so that someone gets the idea of what's in it.

Picture this. In the future person A, who was not at the conference, mentions a problem to person B, who was. You want person B to say "Ah - I say a presentation about exactly this. Here's what to look for!"

You want enough content to give an accurate impression of the content and why it's interesting. Then you want something memorable for people to look for later.

Note: I'm not in your field, but I do give presentations professionally. You need to entertain and inform. But your objective is to be memorable for the right reasons.

Email me your topic and I might - repeat might - email some thoughts.
Undersea Nuclear Power Stations Could Be En Route to France
The latency gets up to about 60ms+ but it's mitigated by caching a lot of the data temporarily. MongoHQ are using Amazon so if you're also using AWS it's going to be negligible.

I use MongoDB for a few components - user-created levels and leaderboards are the biggest parts. The big advantage is I can let developers attach custom data to scores/levels without having to even think about it - it slides right in just like any other property, and it's just effortless. The other big advantage is price - they're a lot cheaper than getting another server.

The leaderboards is the biggest one running at a total of almost 10 gigabytes because of the indexing.

I use MongoHQ because there's a learning curve with MongoDB that I never have time to explore properly, originally I ran it myself and even got it sharded and replicated, but when it falls over (and it did) you really need to know a lot more than I do about it. Those guys are awesome and I plan on building more on their service.

I use the Samus C# library for it, I noticed recently there's an official one now but it didn't exist when I started using it. One of these days I will upgrade to that.

Here's the leaderboard database stats. Mostly it's just lots of reads, and only if whichever server doesn't have the requested data in-memory already.

btree accesses	0.47 /sec
btree miss ratio	0.2%
global lock ratio	0.1%
indexes	8
objects	24,222,154
op deletes	0.00 /sec
op get mores	0.73 /sec
op inserts	0.57 /sec
op queries	4.02 /sec
op updates	0.02 /sec
all ops	0.02 /sec
size of data	3.3 GB
size of index	6 GB
size of storage	3.7 GB
uptime	4 days
connections	128
I wonder how many people bought more than one. LivingSocial's validation was easily thwarted, making it possible to refer yourself and get close to a 3-to-1 discount. Slickdeals.net was all over it
I am in the middle of making the slides (I know, I know I am very late but the speech is almost ready I am reworking the slides in beamer as I suck with power point). Maybe I will email them to you and you can look at it? See if they are too elaborate?
20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web
I have not directly - they were the enemy as I was a search guy over at Searchbutton. Freefind is another very light SAAS site search solution. If you are interested in the space Searchblox is an open source search platform based on Lucene that can be had for free and deployed easily on EC2. Also take a look at the newcomer Constellio.
> Narrow band filters get expensive fast.

Way less expensive than a new airplane, though.
Per the work of Clifford Saron of UC Davis and the Shamatha Project, I believe they have correlated it with stronger attentional capacities. More interestingly they also have found a link (if indirect - a product of stress reduction) with greater telomerase activity, which could translate into greater longevity. http://www.ls.ucdavis.edu/dss/news-and-research/shamatha-pro...
1. It's not meant to be used with other frameworks :)
2. Namespaces are nonsense in 5.3. I've created my own way of namespacing which is much nicer in my opinion
3. The global functions are being worked through: it's early days... less of those to come
4. MySQLi because that's what I use. Limits my support costs

As with any open source framework, you can actually change it to suit your needs. It's not for everyone, if you want those things go elsewhere. This is what I use to get my apps started - they start quicker, finish sooner, work faster.

It's not an exercise in 'best practice', it's about getting the job done - actually building an app that works!
Privacy Concession: Facebook Agrees to Change 'Friend Finder' Feature
how much is linux specific in this?
It's early days folks, so I'm just getting it out there. Appreciate all the comments and feedback... of course if anyone wants to help develop, please feel free to fork on GitHub... it is an open source community after all right?
Simple silent meditation is not useful.
You need rhythmic vibrations which we have discovered almost 10k years ago. The mantras we use are just a proxy for producing the vibrations in sanskrit. sanskrit was just a proxy since that was the only language we knew. all the vibrations are written in sanskrit. wont speak more.
IPad 2's display - putting the pieces together
Heroku should have filtered other processes out of view that were related to other user's dynos. I think they will fix that.

It was interesting to read how the author figured it out, and his point that he could run a bunch of reapers to steal the information.

Now, if the IT guy running Herkous operations has his hat on straight he will notice the change in bandwidth patterns (higher upload following a heroku push) from the reapers, which is what the Heroku press release alluded to.

Generally, to benefit maliciously you would have to be watching the content without downloading it ("by hand" if you will) and then find something that was worth the effort.

Now that Dynos have more time to be considered in a different light, design changes will at least make the same "lottery watch dog" effect harder to achieve than just lurking on node.
Interesting to see the balance between Android and iPhone at AT&T where people are able to choose. Of course, a lot of those iPhone users went to AT&T solely to have the iPhone.
I think it's pretty unfair to call this situation Guido's fault. Python 3 was developed with a significant amount of feedback from the community, and it was in development for years before being released. At multiple points in the process, Guido listened to feedback and conceded; one instance that comes to mind is Guido wanting to drop lambda, map(), and filter().
Those three accounts are also all new (two are four hours old - as are the comments - and one is four days old), with no other activity than saying that it's a great group.