skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure why I'm being downmodded, as the same negative life outcomes (e.g. alcoholism or depression) predicted by adverse childhood experiences correlate very strongly with procrastination:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Lu4r0H_wc...
He must be polish hacker.
There's a thought here that part of our fundamental intelligence is cultural, and without that language, our brains are seriously incomplete.

What is even more amazing (and somewhat relieving in its robustness) is that human communities develop language spontaneously. There's the famous case of a school of deaf children in Nicarangua, who, lacking teachers, spontaneously developed their own language. Apparently, with complex grammar and so on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language I find this profoundly hopeful, in what it shows about people. Also http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/2... (via sp332's link)

Even in this article, there is mentioned "homesign" or "kitchensign", though I imagine it is very limited, and would tend to lack abstractions, complex grammar and so on, being used by a small (ie family) group, for domestic purposes, and while the child is very young.
> I've witnessed a lot of anecdotal evidence that women don't do as well at compartmentalization as men. I didn't make much of it until I also read a book that points it out ("Viva La Diferencia" by Pilar Sordo) as one of the differences between typical male and typical female behavior.

Like I said, that's a _very_ popular opinion and it sells a lot of books. It's also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> The science is clear, for example, that although the female brain isn’t designed to compartmentalize personal feelings the same way a man’s brain does

You ask me to prove my assertion that this is not based science, and of course I can mostly point to the fact that the supposed science the article is talking about was itself not cited anywhere. So I have to prove a negative, but the article gets a pass with disguising a blanket statement as science just because it resonates better with popular world views?

There is no actual biological or medical evidence supporting the article's claims. Pop psychology studies of this matter are hampered by the simple fact that they're unable to distinguish cultural from biological mechanisms. Evolutionary psychology is also considered a pseudoscience because it's based on starting with equating popular assumptions to self-evident truths and then going out to find evidence to support these arbitrary claims, while ignoring everything else.
I'd lump DDT (and swamp draining) in with modern tech.
What do you have to lose? Nothing.

I guess this could be analogous to applying for college. Everyone wants to know what their chances of getting in are, etc. The best thing to do is just apply and let things fall into place.

You never know, getting into Y Combinator could be the best thing that ever happened to you, but on the other hand, not getting in could lead you on a path that turns you into a billionaire. You never know.

I'm applying for this next round as well.
Nicaraguan Sign Language was spontaneously developed
I have no idea where you get that interpretation. I don't know how more clearly I can state that I simply do not know where the name in the series came from. And no one has posted a link to information or given anecdotal evidence that "I saw them say in some interview that it came from...." The disambiguation page you linked to lists a name in the Christian bible and the name of a Canadian city (plus a few other things) in addition to a race on the TV series Andromeda and a name from the Quran. So far, you are suggesting that the series was influenced by the Quran and providing no real evidence of a link. All I am asserting is that I have no idea what influenced the writers of the show. That is the only assertion I have made. I remain baffled as to how that can be misinterpreted and remain baffled by the remark about the bible being widely read in the US, as if I didn't know that.
French Entrepreneurs: Apply by Midnight and Join Silicon Valley's Incubator
I bet UML people would laugh derisively

I think we have a disconnect here in most folk's opinion of UML -- what it's supposed to be used for, what kinds of people use it, how to do it "right" or not -- and actual reality.

Are you communicating effectively with others, with yourself? Do you diagram enough to help solve problems? Sounds to me like you're doing just fine. Sometimes my UML is so scratchy and rough that it looks like something from an impressionist painting. That's fine -- as long as it works for me.

Programming is full of little nooks and crannies where people get really tightly focused on one thing or another. web design comes to mind, or picking a programming language. They create a lot of complexity where most of the times just a little is needed.

The danger here is that the rest of us take a look at that complexity and kind of throw our hands up and say "hell with it. I'm just drawing little boxes. There's no way I'm going to do "correct" UML" Part of this is because other folks make things so complex, but part of it is ourselves: many times we feel that something like a UML standard is the same as a C++ standard. They're not. If I'm coding C++, I have to conform to the standard. If I don't the code won't work. But if I'm writing a web page? I can do it just about any dang way I want to. Standards be damned. Now in practice do I use standards with things like web design? Sure -- but only as much as I personally find useful.

To make it an all-or-nothing proposition is throwing the baby out with the bath water. What's required is to dive into one of these areas for a bit, learn the ropes, then use your common sense to apply just as much of it as you need to do whatever you are working on.

Modeling is a powerful tool in problem solving in all sorts of areas. Having knowledge of how to model things visually is a nifty little tool to have in your back pocket. That's true even if you'll never code a bit of OOP in the rest of your life.
(ii) I can think of oil companies owning gas stations.

(iii) You have to add value to the main experience, I think. If you offer mints their experience of eating in a restaurant is improved because they don't have bad breath. If you offer beverages in a gas stations people won't be thirsty while driving.
Did that work?

What does "zwolnij" mean? "Release" ?
This.

Fear is a multi-faceted and very powerful, yet often times extremely irrational, emotion that can destroy you even before you get started. A few people here have brought up Seth Godin's Lizard Brain concept, but what's missing from it is a deeper dive into fear being a huge blocker to accomplishing something. "Just ship it", or "ship early and ship often" are techniques that are of great help but they're farther down the pipeline than getting started.

Of immediate and initial importance is needing to understand why you are getting in your own way - what is the cause of the fear that is preventing you from executing your idea? Is it a fear of failure, of success, of being judged once you finish, of making mistakes, of having too much responsibility, of making the wrong decision along the way? It's not a question that you can answer immediately, and unwrapping fear can sometimes lead you down a path where the only thing you have feared is more fear (sounds like a very familiar quote, eh?).

When it's someone elses idea that you're working on and you're not the one in charge it's much easier to meet and often exceed expectations b/c many of those fears aren't possible outcomes (to the trully paranoid mind they might be, but since you can accomplish tasks at work you don't fit the bill for this).

It's not easy to understand the 'why' of our psychopathologies. Everybody has their own that they struggle with. Some people create coping mechanisms and live within the pathologies, and some people overcome their pathologies through a combination of technique / drugs.

Two books that I found of personal help on first helping me understand the 'why' of my personal struggles and then provided helpful techniques to break through them are:

"Do It!" by Peter McWilliams http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Get-Off-Our-Buts/dp/093158079X (there's a free version @ mcwilliams.com but the website seems to be down)

"The Procrastinator's Handbook" by Rita Emmett http://www.amazon.com/Procrastinators-Handbook-Mastering-Art...
That's something I want to know. With the amount of energy given to our broadcasts, they surely would decay long before traveling any noteworthy distance. I'm curious as to what our most powerful broadcasts have been, and how far they'd travel before becoming unnoticeable. Especially, when compared to the amount of EMR released by neutron stars, pulsars, background noise, etcetera.
Totally. The reasons men look to prostitution are basically divided into three possible scenarios:

1) They have a significant other and are not getting what they need from the person, but since they don't want to leave the person they look to undercover sex with little risk of getting caught.

2) They are single but incapable of achieving casual sex with someone that fulfills their standards because of their bad looks, lack of cash flow to flaunt, shyness, social stigma within the social circle they frequent, or any other of the myriad of reasons that make them less than desirable candidates for a woman willing to have casual sex.

3) Single or not, the type of men that view sex as a physiological need (in contrast to men that see sex as more than just penetration and exchange of fluids) are more prone to look for comfort between the legs of a woman that won't judge a man for not really having a desire to please her.

My opinion? For me at least, I have sex because I enjoy the look in the woman's face when she climaxes. I could care less about pearly necklaces and cleveland steamers, the only thing I care about is making sure my sexual partner is satisfied. Having sex with prostitutes, be it with a cheapo hooker in the dark alley or with a high end, four figure, 'siliconized' escort cheapens the experience. There is nothing better than waking up beside a woman (or many for that matter) the next morning and saying to yourself 'That was a hell of a freaking night...'

I don't think prostitution is a bad thing at all, but I do think that it completely devalues the act of seduction, and forgoes the main element in sexual relationships... desire.
Café Thought - Creative Services for Start-ups
Café Thought is a creative design communication studio providing creative services at low costs for start-ups.
http://www.cafethought.com
"If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” - The Joker

There's a difference between free and $0. A developer's goal may be to just build his portfolio, in which case giving away the software is more valuable than the cash he could make selling it. Nobody gives anything for free, the pricing just depends on the person's motivations. Another example is Google giving away Chrome because it wants user data more than it needs cash. I could go on, there are plenty of things more valuable than cash, depending on your situation.
Signed up. Looks like a solid idea if it works :)
From the selection of brand name to your website, the corporate color theme, web design, content writing, logo, hosting, corporate email, and the business cards, letter heads, corporate templates for proposal documents and presentations, brochures, leaflets, identity cards, menu cards, signage, print advertisements, video presentations, and...well, we do all these and much more...at unbelievable costs!

Our mission is to give start-ups the freedom to choose and to help them focus on their core offering.
Student makes anon secret valentine site to get over girl. Reminder of facemash?
This is a very interesting idea that I haven't seen done before. From what I see you would have the potential of having several people helping you with your startup. If this is the way it seems something like a "project dashboard" to organizing help would be awesome. While it would be possible to keep track of all of this in your email it could get difficult with 5+ people helping you with different aspects of the startup.

All an all I love the idea, very simple design, easy to use. I will use it over the next few days and let you know again what I think.
really cool idea! looking forward to where it goes.
Pale blue dot feels like an apt comparison --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pale_Blue_Dot.png

If you don't know yet, that's what earth looks like from just beyond Pluto's orbit.

Also interesting to note in these discussions is the Hubble deep field image. These 3000-ish galaxies are covered by a quarter at arm's length when you look into the sky --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HubbleDeepField.800px.jpg

We are indeed small and insignificant, but alone? Doubtful at best.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416236
The "sometimes I blog at" links don't seem to work; for example, on http://resume.github.com/?rupa
HN as the open door, and why HN is so awesome.
Nothing officially at all, I'm just a Debian user.

The nick is just a little game because I like to extract Debian's juice in my machines.
Super Bowl Scene: Make way for geeks and nerds
I can practically give myself an aneurism thinking the following when contemplating how it all began:

Try and put religious arguments aside (while this will have some overtones) for a moment and work with me here and not throw the notion of time having no beginning or end which is equally frustrating to comprehend.

Reverse the creation story and you wind up at the beginning with light and darkness. Before light there was darkness or nothing.

But what was before the "darkness" or nothingness? The religious will say God whom has no beginning or no end, but how did God or energy pop into to existence if there was nothing?

Then, put yourself in God or energy's place... You are in a "space" with nothing around you... everything is void... Then where did "you" come from?

I know this is linear thought and time and the universe should not be considered in this way many in the field of science and mathematics explain... I understand the many dimensions that are possible and how time should be viewed, but it still doesn't answer the question of how something, anything came of nothing...
i assume the mo is a typo? and it should be hr?
The cost of building software pales in comparison to the cost of maintaining, enhancing, and supporting it.
Totally nailed it.
UML and its manipulations are only a relatively small thing -- the Unified Process covers much more than that.

So, as a question on process, OO or functional does not matter much: the software is treated really as modules or parts. Whether those are composed of lists or objects, methods or functions, is a minor concern. Process deliberately works at a higher level. There is some specialisation to OO, but translating it to FP would seem essentially straightforward.

But as a question on that particular sub-area, it is valid and interesting, and there does not seem to be such a functional specialisation.

Perhaps there is a way to answer by looking back to the history of the Unified Process. A substantial basis of it was developed by Jacobson while working at Ericsson on phone switches etc. And that was the same place and same kind of work where Erlang was later created. So maybe investigating how to use Erlang might lead to some approaches.
Good catch :) Fixed and pushed.
I recognise this template, I used it for a crappy filler cv I made a while ago. Pretty neat idea!
Debian is made by volunteers and sure here at HN are amazing web designers, so jump to Debian ship and help to make Debian project even greater.
> I've witnessed a lot of anecdotal evidence that women don't do as well at compartmentalization as men. I didn't make much of it until I also read a book that points it out ("Viva La Diferencia" by Pilar Sordo) as one of the differences between typical male and typical female behavior.

Like I said, that's a _very_ popular opinion and it sells a lot of books.

I agree that it's popular. What I'm trying to find out is how much of it is just an opinion and how much is proven. There certainly seems to be a behavioral pattern out there.

It's also somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What do you mean by "somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy"?

You ask me to prove my assertion that this is not based science, and of course I can mostly point to the fact that the supposed science the article is talking about was itself not cited anywhere. So I have to prove a negative, but the article gets a pass with disguising a blanket statement as science just because it resonates better with your world view?

No, not really. It seems I wasn't clear enough with my question. I wasn't asking you to prove your "assertion that this is not based science". When you said "That is a lie", I saw what seemed to be categorical denial of the claim that men and women have different capacity for compartmentalization and I was intrigued enough by your vehemence to ask you to point me to what made you so sure.

The article didn't "get a pass" because it never even entered into my side of discussion at all.
Ask HN: How to go back to school?
I graduated in 2010 and I'm currently working in a sort of junior developer position. I have a math background but I've found that an engineering master's is required for many of the jobs I'm interested in. For those who have done it or have some knowledge about it, what's the best way to go back to school, financially? As a non-degree seeking student initially (as I'd be taking undergrad prereqs) I know I won't qualify for certain financial aid. Any advice from those who've bootstrapped through something similar is much appreciated. I imagine this question could be helpful to many in the future as well. Thanks for your input.
From the SETI FAQ:
"Detection of broadband signals from Earth such as AM radio,
FM radio, and television picture and sound would be
extremely difficult even at a fraction of a light-year
distant from the Sun. For example, a TV picture having 5
MHz of bandwidth and 5 MWatts of power could not be detected
beyond the solar system even with a radio telescope with 100
times the sensitivity of the 305 meter diameter Arecibo
telescope."

Now, the Arecibo message should carry over a couple of hundred light years easily, but it was transmitted for three minutes only, and if you miss it, you miss it.
A friend of mine that banks with BofA showed me that any credit card will do to open the door. I don't know if this is still the case, however.
When looking at the radio bubble image, I immediately wondered if the blue color was chosen intentionally as a reference to the Pale Blue Dot. Great coincident association, at least. Similar sense of the infinitesimal scale we live our lives at. Now, let's see some Electron Microscopy.
That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying some businesses are more effectively run by engineers and others are more effectively run by MBAs. It depends on what the business is trying to do.
If you're experience really is as you suggest and you are an EJB/JMS/Spring/RDBMS/transactions/JAAS guru, then yes, that is low-ball, and I'd have expected you to be getting double that!!!

Caveat: I'm not NY based, but I have worked out of a US telco for a while. $100/hour was their top rate for telco experienced Java architect/developers.
Perhaps he is willing to give only part of his work for free. I don't see much inconsistency there.

I guess analogies doesn't always map to reality.
Doesn't this mean you're back to selling time, then, rather than a product, losing the almost-zero marginal cost benefit of selling software?
However PNG is much better than JPEG at rendering texts. So using JPEG for articles is ridiculous.
I disagree. In my experience, dreaming is more correlated with attempting to gain mastery than in having achieved mastery (in language and other things).

I think having one's inner thoughts in the new language, without having to mentally translate from another known language is a more relevant gauge of mastery.

Of course, there is also the level of mastery where a thought is more naturally expressed in the newer language, and you have to mentally translate it back to your native tongue...

kb
Yep, BMI is horrible especially if you have any muscle on you. My BMI is 27 which is in the overweight range which I definitely am not. Edit: Really what you should be concerned with if you are trying to judge fitness level is body fat %.
Great idea!

It would be great if you could expand the areas of expertise though. For example, I have significant expertise with cloud computing, EC2 deployment, scaling, MongoDB, but there's nowhere to mention this. I also have expertise deploying Rails in production, the different possible setups, etc. Just checking off "Rails" is a bit broad.

Thanks!
Best Buy Buyback Program Genius for Them, Horrible for Consumer
I find it useful for metric for comparison. I can't compare my weight to yours as we have different body types, height etc. . However, if your BMI is in the 18.5 - 24.9 range and mine is 26, it would be a fair to say that you are in better shape than me.
Sit down, roll up your sleeves and get to it. 2500 commits later and you may get somewhere with this...
For many types of problems, shared state concurrency is not the nightmare it's often made out to be. For example, if your problem can fit into the consumer producer model then it's really easy to make that work on the jvm today.
Startup is a modern day slavery.
Cloud Business News Roundup: January 31 - February 06, 2011
I was interested in this because I bought a netbook and recently bought a Macbook Air because I got tired of the former. It's been over a year, but I'm sure I could get more than a paltry $50 for it, and worse, having to buy it at time of purchase is an additional expense that makes little sense.

On the other hand, BB can lure people into buying these, then giving them reduced cost hardware that they can profit from a 2nd time. Genius.
The author postulates three character vignettes, each one based upon an identified predictor of procrastination. There exists, however, a forth:

Zach stares at a blank document in Microsoft Word. His essay assignment on municipal politics, due tomorrow, is mind-numbingly dull. He decides to take a break, texts some friends, watches a show, and finds himself even less motivated to write the paper than before. At 10PM, he finally dives in, but the result is... well, it's great.

This forth case is strange, because it does not suffer from the generally proposed downfalls of procrastination. This is because the author has ignored an entire segment of procrastinators: Those that operate better under an impending deadline.

This is how I completed nearly every task in school thus far, and assignment grades less than an A are few and far between despite the fact that I put in, in many cases, a small fraction of the time it took my classmates to complete this assignment. I operate this way because stress is my friend. My output quality/time ratio is never greater than when I'm working with a looming deadline.

My entire life I was told that procrastination is bad. Procrastination is bad. Procrastination is bad. It's only recently that I've realized that procrastination is actually one of the greatest contributors to my success.
scarytechnologies.com and scarytechnologies.co.uk
I really doubt that there are fewer business monkeys than code monkeys. In 2008, 335,000 students graduated college with a degree in business, while only 40,000 graduated with a degree in computer science or a related field. An additional 70,000 studied other types of engineering, meaning there are about three business majors for every engineer.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/figures/fig_15.asp
http://www.tahlent.com/ is working on similar lines.
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about my thoughts on this, -two posts actually: http://corpusdord.blogspot.com/2006/02/existence-and-non-exi...

Basically, I was waxing on the idea of existence, and what it meant. Might be another angle for you to consider.