skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have heard of triggers used in stories about focus in blogs that reached the frontpage here.

The examples were things like, "I only use my computer for fun or to surf if I'm in my easy-chair. If I'm at my desk, I only use it for work"

Personally, it makes me think of how some people arrange their whole living room to be focused on the TV... chairs & couches arranged to point at it, etc. My parents had theirs arranged to point towards the center of the room, encouraging people to talk or read, as you had to situate yourself oddly to face the TV.

And, if anyone wants the list above formatted in positive terms (maybe to put in your evernote inspiration folder or w/e):

1. Willpower alone isn't sufficient motivation for long term change.

- Imagine willpower doesn't exist.

2. Attempt Baby Steps, not Big Leaps

- Seek tiny successes, one after another

3. Notice how the environment shapes your behavior

- Change your context to change your life

4. Focus on creating new behaviors, not stopping old ones.

- Focus on action, not avoidance

5. Failures don't necessarily indicate a lack of motivation

- More like a failure of planning. Find a way to make the behavior easier to do

6. Recognize and understand the power of triggers.

- No behavior happens without a trigger

7. Information alone doesn't lead to action

- Our environment needs to be set up in a way that helps us capitalize on that information

8. Focusing on concrete behaviors rather than abstract goals

- Abstract: Get in shape. Concrete: Walk 15 min. today

9. Try to change a behavior for a short time, rather than forever

- A fixed period works better than "forever"

10. Remember, behavior change need not be difficult.

- Behavior change can be relatively easy when you take many steps to increase the probability that your desired behavior will occur.
If you want to load balance this and you need something custom, you're going to be a lot better off starting with Erlang. In Erlang, a PID reference (process ID) can transparently be a reference to a process on another machine in the cluster, so sending a message to the target queue is some variant on Message ! Pid regardless of which machine the queue is actually living on. MNesia can be used to keep track of what PID is what and that transparently replicates around without you having to write the logic. In Node.js it's going to be less transparent and unless there's a library that does all this for you, you're still going to be putting the solution together when you could have been done in Erlang, even if you're an expert in JS and know nothing about Erlang.

One of the queuing libraries might just work out of the box, though. But at least at the moment I would actually consider Node.js counterindicated for this task, unless you can be rigidly sure that messages never have to cross process boundaries.
Show HN: I'm offering consulting for non-technical folks and startups
Inspired by a good friend who did Unstick.me, as well as the recent MVP for 1k project, I've decided to give consulting a shot by offering my services as a developer and product guy to non-technical folks and early-stage web startups who are looking to brainstorm on both the technology and product side, and possibly looking to have an MVP built based on their idea.

I started accepting requests the other day solely with a Wufoo form, and just launched a proper one-page site here: http://youshouldworkwith.me/

Curious to hear feedback on the offer and idea in general. It's the first time I've tried any kind of "alternative" consulting like this.
I don't think I'd find this that useful. Coffeescript already has jslint support, and I'd only want to do minification right before deployment since minified JS is harder to debug.
Clickable: http://youshouldworkwith.me/
Hi, I'm definitely interested in benchmarking the EC2 instances. Are you doing some benchmarks that are CPU-intensive? You're measuring the one instance that you've got to use as a server, aren't you? (I'm interested more in, "what perfomance would I keep getting if I keep requesting instances") How can I contact you?
Very cool. Can anyone confirm that getting a 500 from nginx when trying to go to the forums for step 2 isn't part of the puzzle?
It's incredible to me that Sigmund Freud's research was turned around to actually accomplish anything--the guy was a pseudoscientific hack who did virtually everything wrong. (It wouldn't, however, surprise me that it was attempted.)
On the other hand you have beautiful games like this one:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1124533

where the computer has a lot of trouble finding the best move. Clearly programs still do not understand at the level that was hoped for in the 60's. Furthermore top human players with computer assistance can still exploit the weaknesses engines have in closed positions.
ActiveState Komodo on both Windows (7) and Ubuntu. I also plan to use it when I get a Mac, unless I run into something better there. :)
Correct, getting 500 errors from the server is not part of the puzzle.
it'd be rad if you could visualize the ratios to better illustrate the scale.

10 petabytes : 10000 terabytes :: 10000 gigabytes : 10 terabytes
The 3 A's of awesome
Completely fubar on my Nexus One - hangs for a half minute on load, then all I see is the categories/account/etc panel.
The title should have been focused on how the HR department isn't they key to getting a job anymore. HR requires resumes so they can scan them and look for keywords. Then if you pass the keyword test you get to move on to the hiring manager.

Being awesome or having a solid reputation won't help you get through HR. The author is advocating skipping HR entirely, which is a fine proposition. But it's not about the resume. The resume is just part of the established process.

Go, be awesome. But keep your resume updated so that you can keep track of your accomplishments and successes.
San Francisco Parking Ticket Petition
Partly submitted because the parking ticket situation in SF royally pisses me off, and also because the website is cool. We need more local government, and websites can help us with that.
data = models.getEntries()
html = template.render('blog',data)

I may be wrong, but these two lines has to be blocking
Spark - Pre-Birth of a Modern Lisp
Yes, definitely something on our radar.
Playing with new technology == motivation win.
Nice physics. The WASD control is unplayable in a dvorak mapping, though. I had to give up on the first level.
>"But when you got funding and sharply reduced financing risk, you got yourself to a place where you don't have to pay the lead tech person a cofounder's equity grant."

I agree that you may not have to and if you don't you can still be successful. On the other hand, if you are making a hire to fill a key position for the long term, it may make a great deal of sense to do so because a person hired at or close to the market rate can by definition find an equivalent position elsewhere.

1% of the company probably won't amount to much once the risk of failure, liquidation preferences and future dilution are considered. Not to mention a potential lack of technical chops among the co-founders.

In my opinion, hiring a key position at or near market rate is an indicator that the company views the hire as filling out the organization chart rather than as finding the person who creates significant value to the company, i.e. another entrepreneur.

I'm not saying it is a bad offer, only that it isn't structured in a way which will satisfy someone with entrepreneurial ambitions.
Stuck on Level 19...how far is everyone else?
Ask HN: What is the preferred payment provider for micropayments?
I have been working on a new web application that will be accepting micropayments (typically a $1) and I am not sure which payment provider to go with. It looks like in most cases my $1 profit is being stripped of 30 cents or more depending on the provider. I know Paypal has been the de facto standard, but has anyone faired out well with Google or Amazon?
Stuck on step 8. I found the secret message but I can't figure out what to do with it.

Edit: Doh! I analyzed it too deeply when it was staring me in the face.
Yes, I took that into consideration. The explicit equation, all from PG's article is:

i = 1 / (1 - n) + sp

where:

i: the amount I'll increase the company's worth divided by the profit multiplier (which is 1 + profit(%)/ 100, eg: 1.5 for a 50% profit)

n: equity received

sp: salary price. Which is anual salary * overhead (pg suggest 1.5) / company's valuation

In short, my values are:

n = 1%

i = 1.023 (2,3% which with a profit of 900% means they'd expect me to increase the company's value by 23%)

sp = a bit above market's salary (can't say much more, sorry)
I'm stuck on 13, any hints?
Edit: The Haiku one.
Same here. Been trying everything since I found the message 30 minutes ago.
Seriously. If the only way to get hired is to be in the top X% (for X << 100), then what exactly are the other (100 - X)% that make up the majority of the population supposed to do?

We can't all be famous superhero rockstar coders.

That said, this is a viable strategy for getting a job- it just isn't grounds to declare resumes gone and buried, because it's impossible for everyone to secure their job this way.
The Java Saga (1995)
Also stuck there =(
He's joking, and hence the upvotes...
Agreed. This sounds like an ideal learning project for Erlang.

Open a few tabs of erlang.org/doc/, grab a book (Joe Armstrong's Pragmatic book is a good one) and get started.

You'll be surprised how easily you made your first Erlang production system. (If this makes you feel guilty and you need to self-flagellate afterwards you can try packaging your app into a release.)
I don't mean to insult Mr. Danchev, but let's not dismiss the most obvious answer: He may be having psychological issues or otherwise be pulling some shenanigans.

There's no evidence to suggest otherwise at this point in time. The pictures don't suggest anything to me and he's perfectly capable of not answering the phone, email, or instant messages.

I hope he is ok, both physically and mentally.
People would like to learn python the easy way. Python philosophy is do it easy and clearly, so another title seem more appropriate.
exactly my thought process
after learning C Programming and Algorithms (which I had in Semester II) I realized 'Why should I believe in God?'

That's one heck of a jump there...
I also want to mention that I see Paypal and Amazon accounting for this, but they are doing it in a way that it hurts you to use it on all transactions over $10-12. In my case this could happen if someone did bulk buying. How would you model this out in a test environment, so you kind of knew what to expect?
New Metallic Glass Is The Toughest, Strongest Material Yet
Been staring at 18 for too long.
India Claims Asia's First Tidal Power Plant
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation planning the worlds longest broadcast
The old saw still rings true: turn your research problem into a military application and the DoD will likely fund it. Perhaps instead modeling a chess board as a graph you model passable routes in a mountainous terrain. Instead of chess pieces, maybe the forces you're modeling are small groups with different movement characteristics?
I actually read that post as sarcasm, not as seriousness, but I could be wrong.
Colorful termination letter from Domino’s Pizza
me too. I'm stuck on the haiku one.
The visualization in storage pods is most helpful. Just put the drives, in their current size in a physical space you can compare to your office.

The skyscraper comparison is fun but misleading. The stack of drives would be very very thin. It would work better if drives were put in one box and that box was compared to a room, house, etc..

There can be other visualizations like electrical power consumption compared to a normal computer. How much time it would take to read/write that data. How many processors are needed to read/write that data in reasonable time, compare their surface area to the our unfolded brain, which is a large cloth napkin.

I think these comparisons would be more useful to people in the field than how many books would be needed to store that much data, the standard pop show example.
Theory behind evanescent wave coupling (wireless power)
The Economist goes to a lot of effort to describe something that is not particularly relevant to getting a sense of the scale of AWS - these are "virtual" instances, which may be spun up and removed fairly rapidly. All we really get is a sense of the transactional volume of instance creation. This is further confused by the roll out of new EC2 products - it's well within the realm of possibility for an individual to roll out 1000 Micro EC2 AMI instances in a single day when experimenting.

In particular, The Economist fails to justify the statement "The results suggest that Amazon’s cloud is a bigger business than previously thought."

More interesting to me, would be the number of _physical_ servers, and their characteristics, in the Data Centers. Or, probably as useful, is the number of "Instance-Hours" along with the scale of those instances.

The most interesting part of the article, for me, was my first (that I can recall - Google Trends shows it's been around for two years) exposure to the phrase IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). I guess it makes sense that if we commonly use SaaS (Software...), and, in the last year, PaaS (Platform...), that we should bring it back full circle.

I do take exception, BTW, with the phrase "The most interesting layer—the only one that really deserves to be called “cloud computing”, say purists—is “infrastructure as a service”". I was present at the birth of Loudcloud in September of 1999, one of the first (alas for my Stock Options, failed) attempts at a "Cloud Platform" - and I assure you that we had no intention, at the time, of providing the 'infrastructure' as a service. It was all about the Databases and Applications servers.
There goes productivity for the rest of the day...
I agree that not naming names is a bad idea. Strangely, this isn't the first time I've seen people avoid it on HN though. It doesn't sound like fear of reprisal in this instance, so what is the motivation?
A Tale of Two Terminals: Beijing Terminal 3 and Heathrow Terminal 5
As a data black hole, presumably.
Really? All criminals? I'm not a big fan of developments in surveillance, but it's crazy to think that some criminals won't be caught. The fact that they're petty criminals or benefits cheats makes the exercise of debatable value, but not for the reason you state.
That's the whole point, I don't care, hide that complexity from me. I can't render the page unless I have the data and I don't want to deal with callbacks, coroutines, monads, or what not, so I'll wait patiently for the data to come back.
Sacrificing Microcredit for Megaprofits
Thanks.

@Others, If I really want to contact someone on HN, I can definitely find their email ID. But email takes it out of the HN context and makes it much more formal.

And we could always have a PM disabling option.
Echoing the sentiment this is a fantastic idea. Count me in for helping out too as needed.
Which chess piece is the guys with guns, and which chess piece is the airstrike?
Stuck on level 1... haha
The author states that educating by reward solving problems that are of increasing complexity is not the perfect method. The goal he propose is to bootstrap education, the child should be able to educate himself, but how to accomplish this is not clear, so he propose to try several methods.

Well, I should propose that children should receive reward when they are able to organise themselves, but being independent is not a goal that society need. Imagine thousand of children in the street shouting that our society is crazy, that people with thousand million dollars and other starving is not ethically acceptable and that we need a revolution, would you sign for it?
Sounds like you're in the lead. Go go rkudeshi!
Edge 2011: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
I wonder how those compare to others IaaS providers like Gogrid or Rackspace
Websockify - A WebSocket to TCP socket proxy
You can use the EAAccessory framework to talk to it. Just use the protocol string "com.southernstars.sw9a".

What I'm not sure of is what sorts of apps they'll let into the app store that repurpose the cable.

EDIT: Here's my test code thus far:

https://github.com/frankus/SkyWireTest
"i teach python ask me how!"
I'll share my secret for getting past HR. I have been consulting for the past 30 years, so I get to job hunt more frequently than most of you. I have a good resume, but I am older than most of you and I run into age bias in small startups. So I have most success with young companies with 100 to 300 employees where the first generation product hack has to be rewritten, extended or whatever. I have a resume for buzzword content, job history, and project stories. Experiments with content and style have shown me that it has little impact on securing initial interviews.

It's the cover letter that has the most impact. During the dot com implosion I was having little success with a cover letter targeting technical hiring managers. This was after all San Francisco and I was competing with laid off dotcomers and programmers for all the infrastructure companies.

I changed it to target HR and technical directors. I rewrote it to show a little wit and to soften the jargon. I even quoted a Johnny Cash song, "been everywhere". Immediately the interviews tripled, which is good when you are middle aged and expensive (putting three of your cohorts through college).
I wish...someone tweeted about an hour ago that they finished the entire thing!

Now I'm stuck on 21 and I swear it involves the Dropbox Wiki, but I can't find anything...
Luddite were afraid of losing their jobs, where I live the rate of unemployment in young people is about 40 per cent, if you increase unemployment rate by introducing robots no wonder that people become Luddite and decide that we don't need more robots.
There's a secret word...look at the first letters of each line. Go there and look carefully at anything visual.
I think one important point you're missing is that a chess engine looking to mathematically prove a victory is very different from the ones that play against grand masters. Deep Blue may have been able to calculate 6 to 8 moves in advance, but that was after it pruned all the moves that were obviously incorrect. When you're trying to prove something mathematically however, you have to assume that even something as silly as sacrificing a queen for a pawn with no obvious positional gains is a valid move and calculate all possible branches taken from that move until checkmate some 30 moves down the road.

For example, checkers is a vastly simpler game than chess. Yet, it took 18 years of constant computation to solve it [1]. Even a game as simple as tic-tac-toe has 255,168 possible games [2]. The estimated number of chess games is 10^10^50 [3].

1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12296-checkers-solved-...

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe

3. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chess.html
The implication of your comment being that feeling superior is somehow wrong?
Citation? This seems to be a reflexive "counterpoint" to anybody who says that manufacturing can be done in the US.

I live near a car plant and have lived near a small semiconductor fab (in the US) and I can tell you that I've never seen any smoke or smelled anything. I've also lived in India and even small-scale industries used to emit smoke and smells (indicating chemicals).

The point being that China and India choose to pollute (to save costs), not that the technology to manufacture with low impact doesn't exist.

In almost any major US city, if you go a couple of miles perpendicular to most major roads, you will likely see some light industrial activity. It's usually so quiet and non-polluting that you don't even realize it's there. At least, that's been my experience. YMMV.
Did you know there was a haiku contest a while back in the Dropbox forums?
I'm getting no where from there
90% of the mothers in our country are superior. superior in buying hardcore preprocessed food.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033180 referred to this a while back.

centipaid.com talked about having a scaleable micropayment solution.

However, almost any solution requires one to have money 'in the system' and earn/spend the micropayments, and pay a fee to take it out or put money in. There are a number of other providers that do this through stored value Mastercards, etc, but, those fees sometimes become prohibitive.

The way I've seen a number of companies handle micropayments was to keep the money in the system, but, you couldn't get it released without earning $25 which kept administrative costs to a minimum. You had to fund the account, but, if you didn't spend it all, you couldn't get it back. Facebook credits work in a similar manner - one purchases $x of credits, then can spend those coins on various apps.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree
That's also what makes programming harder. As a lawyer you can write a contract that is literally factually incorrect with respect to the law, and may never get tested and actually works as intended (gets two parties to abide by the rules of the contract).

In programming, the first test is the computer. If my program doesn't compile or pass unit tests, I can't even get it to the client or customer.
so hard to listen to.
There is shell mode - maybe not obvious from the article. Run ipython with:

ipython -p pysh

and you'll get pysh "profile". It's a shell and python environment merged together. This way you don't have to use bangs.

> ls -> (output of ls)
> ls | grep x -> (output of grep)
> res = !ls
> res?
Type:	SList
Base Class:	<class 'IPython.genutils.SList'>
...
Bravo! Fantastic project. Keep it coming!

Any plans to be the Hudson of the node world?
http://reddit.com/r/programming

http://reddit.com/r/compsci

http://www.reddit.com/r/startups

And other similar subreddits. Definitely not the front page though.
ASK HN: Becoming a hacker in one year
I have a start up idea that I have been pondering for quite some time. However,if there is one thing I have learned hanging around this board, no one gives a damn about my brilliant idea if I can't execute.

With that in mind, my goal is to become a competent programmer by the end of the year. My plan is to learn a new language every two months.

Tentative Schedule:
Jan-Feb: JAVA
Mar-Apr: Haskell (functional programming seems intuitively easier to understand than OOP)
May-Jun: PHP
Jul-Aug: Python
Sep-Oct:HTML 5, Javascript, XML,Jquery
Nov-Dec: Execute my brilliant idea

I am curious to hear what others think of this plan.
Are there other languages that I should work on?
Would I be better off picking one language to focus all my effort on?
What are the best books or resources to get a general understanding of programming and computer science?

Thanks
Jimmy Wales on Apple Model: 'very dangerous and something I'm concerned about'
1. Mostly a, with a bit of b.
2. I don't watch football.
3. Not presently employed, but way back when, I guess b (VERY rarely diverted)
4. rummy, or whatever my folks are playing these days
5. I don't usually plan for weather, even though a Michigander should, but when I do, I'll try a
6. Martin Gardner
7. I don't know that I "prefer" it, but I guess I use the mouse more often. For serious work, the Wacom tablet.
8. Maths and sciences, actually, but between the choices, probably history.
9. Sudoku, actually. I guess that puts me closer to "b".
10. Having somewhat puzzled out relativity, I consider them about equally important.

Answer to the Answer: I wouldn't say I tried to "game" the test while taking it, but twenty years of coding in one form or another says you called me wrong. Then again, maybe I didn't bother trying to game it because I figured it was BS from the start?
jeeze alanh, I'm sure you're on to something. I just don't think supporting oppressive regimes is it.
Thanks, I kept thinking it would be in the source somewhere!
Some New RuneScape Membership Codes