skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Focus and concentration
Maybe it's just me, but anyone else has troubles dealing with lack of Focus and concentration, ending in not getting things done and getting stuck in a "disfuncional perfectionism" with lots of ideas but zero execution? [It's doesn't help having fear of failure]

How did you deal with it?

PS: I know it may sound a) dumb question, b) lack of discipline.
"I Have Met the Enemy, and It's Me" comes to mind.
Completely Redundant Disks with ZFS and FreeBSD
Bravo. This comment is much better worded than I managed when I wrote TFA.
W3C Nav Timing API now a Rec, but FF4 drops the ball
Math invented composable functions (sin(sqrt(blah)) -- extending it to operators is fun, but not really very important.

Oh -- I would respectfully hazard that syntax for you (and for me!) is no more for superficial than the blue eye shadow on the girl in my 10th grade English class, if you get my drift. ;)
That depends on your location and social connections. If you're in the Bay Area and have social connections, you can get funded out of the gate. If you're on the East Coast and just out of college, you're going to have to prove yourself before you get funded and, yes, you're looking at at least a year of unpaid hard work. It's all about contacts, and if you have none, you've got an uphill battle-- especially if you're not in the Valley.

Income-wise, a startup is generally a step down, but a tolerable one for most people. If you're 22 and without VC contacts, you can work for next to nothing for a year or two, make contacts by hanging out in the Valley, and start pitching when you have a product. If you're 36 and have a family to feed, but have VC connections, you can usually get early seed funding and pay yourself $100k annual salary, which is low for someone with those kinds of contacts but enough to live on.

When it is impossible is if you're 36 and have a family to feed, but don't have VC contacts. You can't afford to take a year or two off to prove yourself (which an outsider will have to do) but you don't have the contacts necessary to step immediately into a $100k/year salary with just an idea.
He most definitely means bureaucrats, and I bet he owns a dictionary. But that would have been a reasonable title, and not a link bait. And if it is not link bait who will read it!
Yes, all cloud brokerage attempts have so far stuck to the resources and avoided trying to do any unified billing. Its really tough to accomplish.

Can you think of other areas where competing services have common open billing? Great for sure but difficult commercially. Especially when you start bringing in credit risk and other non-technical factors.
The perspectives of disgruntled employees have been known to be worse than reality, on occasion. Not definitively saying that's the case here, just saying.
Fast-paced environment usually describes places that lack an attention to detail and quality, which above anything else should be the core focus of a company. A lot of people are suggesting that pace refers to the amount of work which I don't think is entirely correct. A business could have all the work in the world and still move at a snail's pace. @mrspeaker made an excellent point in that the ideal environment would be "well-paced." More often than not, though, this sort of terminology was probably picked from similar job postings that the HR person (generalizing, of course) saw elsewhere.
What you say is true if you restrict the term usability to just mean user interface design, but usability can go far beyond that. Usability should be about how your product solves a problem, not just how its options and menus are laid out. As soon as you hear about how Dropbox works you know instantly that it's far more usable than other sync options.
Reminds me of estate agent talk. "Fast-paced, agile, challenging environment" as a plus point on a job ad usually makes me skip right over. I know people say you should turn your weaknesses into strengths but I don't think this is the way!
Do you work in the technology industry? A substantial portion of your salary is based indirectly but inexorably on profiteering, which term for "pricing what the market will bear" is not widely used among businesspeople.

There are two clear reasons why the power company can't segment their market per your example. The first is that power companies are regulated utility monopolies that have to respond to state governments. The second is that they lack the technology to differentiate between power usages. Even so, if you talk to energy-intensive businesses, you'll find that there is customer segmentation in electrical power.

This shouldn't surprise you, because there is arbitrarily segmented pricing in everything from hotel rooms to canned tomatoes to beer to office space to cars to computer chips.
Your experience is the exact opposite of what I was promised by the functional programming community. Can you please elaborate on how lambdas are giving you trouble?
Amazing candor. Love the interview, good work Andrew!
Generally with you, except for the Rackspace recommendation, been burned and pissed off by Rackspace too many times to ever use or recommend them again.

I tend to try to find at least 1 good local/regional datacenter for a good portion of a server stack. There is huge benefits (IMO) in being able to drive to your servers and have a face to face meeting if there are issues and/or take your toys and go someplace else if there is a massive outage. If you're in Green Bay, options might be limited, but in any semi-major metropolitan area there are usually enough datacenter options that you have multiple choices.
"passionate professional" -- nailed it.
Mozilla outlines 16-week Firefox development cycle
I moved from an extremely fast-paced environment to a well balanced, well managed software shop. I regret that choice a lot. While I do have now work/life balance, sleep longer nights and never do any overtime, I can't help but feel I'm not even close to the productive levels I had before. I loved being pushed to my limit, constantly having to come up with new solutions to new problems, etc.

On the plus side, I now have the time to launch my company which will - I hope - give me once again the kind of environment in which I can push my own limits.
Going bananas over radiation | Watts Up With That?
Yes. Olin, the college where the author teaches, encourages that kind of stuff. I hope they are the start to a trend.
The need for sales and marketing could create less competition and create difficulties for your competitors.
not always , but sometimes this is helpfull.
April Nagios Training Dates Include Advanced Nagios Class
The Historical Town Of Sudak in Crimea
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-18/
Our payments using payflow pro and payflowpro.paypal.com seem to be processing normally. I think this only affects one processor, or merchants using "Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition," after reading the linked page.
Best presentation on 35 lines of JS you'll see today (Lettering.js)
"They may take away our internets, but they can't ever take away our IIIIIEEEEEEEE666666666 .... " -braveheart
If a nuclear plant has problems, it can kill a lot of people, and wreck the lives of many others.

If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

So the tradeoffs they've made, in saving some money, are probably sensible.
The issue with Reddit was that they designed their application for a single, on-premise data centre, with multiple layers of redundancy at the infrastructure layer. They didn't design for failure.

If you design your application such that single-availability-zone EBS must be as reliable as a hardened triple mirror EMC SAN, you're going to be disappointed. If you treat EBS as what it is - commodity virtualized disk storage with moderate performance - you'll be fine.

In other words, ensure you have replication of data across availability zones.
> AT&T didn't sell you generic fungible data. Because you are a nerd on a nerd site, you're natively inclined to determine that any connectivity is generic connectivity, measured and priced only by $/bps. But $/bps isn't a product AT&T sells with generic iPhone plans.

I didn't say that they did. I said that they would have to IF the FCC had included wireless telecoms in its net neutrality rules.

> There are not that many of you, and you are uniformly wealthier than most other segments of AT&T customers. Finding a way to charge you for that behavior is marketing 101.

So they are charging based on what the market will bear, not based on their costs. This is symptomatic of a lack of competition in the industry (which is the cause of most of these problems in the first place). Price discrimination is not possible when there is competition.
Do pilots start that program with absolutely no experience, or do they have to have a license (private? ATP?) already? That's a hell of a deal, given the civilian path to flying for an airline in the States and the debt that rides along.
I reached out to every provider listed on http://rubyonrails.org/ecosystem plus a list of people that they recommended to simply schedule an initial call.

Are you dead-set on using Ruby and Rails? If so, why? I ask only by way of suggesting that broadening your view of possible technology platforms might give you an opportunity to interact with a shop that will be able to accommodate your situation.

Maybe call on some Groovy / Python / Scala / Clojure / Erlang / $whatever shops? Just a thought...
In India, it's the done thing. It's done to get the newborn swallowing. Typically, a relative who's in the delivery room dips a finger in honey and applies a little bit to the roof of the mouth (of the newborn). In fact, there's a saying, "I gave you honey" (said by an older person to a young 'un), which means, "I gave you life", which comes from this procedure.

Look at the population of India. Do you think the "botulism spores" have caused any damage?

Compare the rates of allergy in the US (for instance) and India. When I was in India, I hadn't even heard of something called "allergy". And in the US, it's all around.
It will also become a differentiator in that services that don't have good usability will become ostracised.

I remember when Wifi was becoming mainstream in Estonia's capital Talinn. Coffeeshop owners started providing Wifi, not because it brought customers, but because not having it pushed customers away.
IPhone Still Dominant Platform for Mobile Social Apps
A PDF is tough because the fields are not fillable when exported - but here it is in PDF and Powerpoint. I hope this works for you.

http://www.bradslavin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/agile-u...

http://www.bradslavin.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/agile-u...
Truth is a Model
I'm going to apologize in advance for you guys being the straw that broke that camels back, but in general it's absurd that projects are requesting emails based solely on hype. I'm not going to give away my email address to a place called "IsRad" that offers 0 explanation as to what they're offering. I could "try hard" and guess what you're offering, but that is the least compelling reason for me to get on board and offer up my email. I mean are people seriously drinking the startup kool-aid and reinforcing we're headed for a bubble by giving away our emails? I sincerely believe you're good enough guys that I won't be spammed, but it has come to the point where people are offering up private information so that they can be early adopters for ANYTHING, regardless of the value it brings to themselves, the end users. Really?? Perhaps I'm a angered pragmatist, but I would love for you to tell me what I'm buying into before I give away my email.
I can get into spells of this as well. What I try to do is to set high level goals (maybe 1-6 months out), break those goals down, and break those goals down, and really scope out the big things into a lot of small things. Only look at a day or week's worth of small things at a time (to not get overloaded in the quantity of small tasks). Set milestones at which you can assess your perfection, and if its not to your standards, revise your goals.
I've been in Tokyo for more than 20 years but I cannot tell which 'Central Park' this is.

Shinjuku Central Park is a well known one and it is surrounded by skyscrapers, but this one doesn't have them.

Any hints?
That would be excellent not just for IaaS but also PaaS services.
For what it's worth, it's not entirely accurate to say that you are always using shared hardware on AWS, at least for your servers. It depends on how you set up your environment.
I want to be a Greybeard UNIX monk some day.
Many compilers (gcc and mxmlc come to mind) simply warn you if you try to do "if (somevar = 5)" and suggest an extra set of parenthesis to shut up the warning, if that's really what you wanted. Python throws a syntax error.
In the minds of many people, Amazon is the most well known, and respected cloud provider. Their outage is merely a reminder that the one big difference between cloud services and in-house services is, I can't control it. Of course the probability that Amazon will have better uptime than you is pretty high for most people, but you have no recourse when there is a problem.
Open Letter to Seed Investors
“Most Social Networks Were Inspired By East Asian Tech Trends”
I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago - dangers of social networks
> AT&T can raise their data rates for everybody and attrit customers to other providers (or to less lucrative featurephone packages). Or, they can find ways to charge higher rates to less price-sensitive customers.

Sprint seems to have taken a middle approach. They just charge all of their smartphone customers a 'premium data charge' of $10/month. This is a lot less than a traditional 'tethering plan' would cost, and my smartphone came bundled with the Sprint Hotspot app, so I can tether if I want to.

This seems fair to me (even in nerd-arbitrary logic), since the gap between computer and smartphone is so narrow, and the gap between smartphone and dumbphone is so wide.
Resort - positionless sorting for your Rails 3 models
I love the idea behind EBS, a SAN makes life so much easier, but I too find that EBS glitches are the largest cause of unreliability in AWS.

I'm not immediately planning to move out of AWS, but the trouble with EBS has certainly got me thinking about other options and has made me much less inclined to make an increased commitment to AWS.
Call it selection bias - you have to understand that when I started looking I had done some prelim research and that research led me to a conclusion, and that conclusion led me to a direction. Imperfect action.

After a lot more reading I would now be open to other languages - but back to the whole user story analogy, I should have been describing the system and what the user needs vs. the technology to solve it. I don't 'really' have a complete understanding of the this vs. that so I just picked one and started making calls.

I guess when you come to a fork in the road...
I downvoted you because as true as it might be, it's not constructive to call the OP out, and you're adding some of the very noise that you're complaining about.
Generally speaking this is the sort of thing that people warn about when they say "if you want to run on a cloud, you need to design your application for a cloud". Meaning, you can't presume your infrastructure is dedicated and carries similar MTBFs of (say) an enterprise hard drive, which upwards of 1 million hours.

Amazon provides plenty of opportunities to mitigate for this, such as providing multiple availability zones. Reddit, if you read the original blog post, wasn't designed for that - it was designed for a single data centre.

OTOH, the variability of EBS performance is true, and frustrating. If you do a RAID0 stripe across 4 drives, you can expect around sustained 100 MB/sec in performance modulo hiccups that can bring it down by a factor of 5. On a compute cluster instance (cc1.4xlarge) it's more like up to 300 MB/sec if you go up to 8 drives, since they provision more network bandwidth and seem to be able to cordon it off better with a placement group.
there's someone thinking longterm.., but he's so right, one more somewhat successful batch of consoles is all I give them. Time to get disrupted there in the next decade.

and yes, bubblywobblybobbleblobb. But who cares? Majority of today's bubble companies will be or at least could be profitable long before their IPO if they wanted to.

And the bubble signs were there over 2 years ago. Too many companies getting funded. But is it a bad thing? Nope.
This article is not sensational. It does not tell you what you should do with your life. It does not say VCs are evil. It doesn't say funded companies are a waste of time.

The "if every developer" line is clearly just as much grandstanding as PG makes when he compares hackers taking a job to caging a lion. To take this line in this essay literally -- and be offended -- but not to take PG's line about lions literally is to be intellectually dishonest.

Here's what this essay actually says:

* there's a monetary reason that we're all soaking in VC/fund/"liquidity event" news

* there's a psychological reason that we seek out VC/fund/"liquidity event" news

* reading about this stuff isn't even the remotely same vein as working on it, or making real money

* the author is angry that he believes people are being pushed towards lives/businesses that don't make them happy

* every developer is capable of making a product for an independent income

* and everybody might be happier if they did

Gee, not so controversial, is it?

All the hullaballoo about this article can be only one thing: overly identifying with your life/business choices and attacking anyone who dares call them into question. In a general sense. Not in a PERSONAL attack, for example labeling someone's work "a lifestyle business" or "like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends".

The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that.

There is so rarely a dissenting voice that the moment there is one, however mild, everybody is in attack mode.

In short...

Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax.
EBS is not a SAN which is largely the point being made in these comments and in the other HN article on reddit's post mortem.
Yeah, "tethering" was previously usb, then bluetooth (ooh, almost forgot IR tethering). Now that you can tether with wifi, they changed the marketing term to "personal hotspot"
How can I get developers to code for a NPO dedicated to helping entrepreneurs?
Wordpress Simple Graph Plugin
The thing is, the mathematics behind parsing, such as they are, are not complicated. The concepts of first and follow sets, if not their names, are required to see how grammars can be ambiguous for a simple LL or LALR parser. Set notation for formal definitions of state machines may be slightly daunting, but the intuitions are easily grasped from a few diagrams.

I'm probably too close to this domain to have a useful perspective for those not familiar with it though.
Agreed but companies should always try and use their own products. If you manage Mercedes, it is eensible not to drive a BMW.

Article is theater though.
As are often the perspectives of folks from another team, or trolls posing as employees. Definitely a grain of salt needed.
Why are there relatively few female tech startup founders?
My first startup story
The manager was admitting to doing something that he knew was inefficient. He ultimately knew that multitasking was the worst practice, but he chose to do it anyway.

There's ignorance, and then there's willfully choosing to do wrong.

Edit: This was at an investment bank, in the proprietary trading group. There are no customers or deadlines. So we (should) only work on something we believe will make money.
Certainly! I find myself shilling this book all the time. It's a great starting point for people dipping their toes in the design pool because it tells you just enough to improve simple stuff without being preachy or over-complicating things.

Good luck!
We (Cedexis) presented our findings on - How do EC2's East, West, EU & APAC zones compare: (pdf) http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/2011/presentations/free/76-...

If you would like to know more please send me an email: prakash [at] cedexis.com
So how much profit are you making? 100k/month is no good if you're not making any money and paying it all out.
There's another thread round here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337313) where shykes is allowing more people into the dotcloud beta. It's a brilliant product, and if you're lucky, you can get in.

I believe its backend is EC2, and it's completely normalized deployment for a variety of different projects - similar to Heroku, but for almost any language or platform.

The only downfall I've seen in using it for complete deployment is that it doesn't yet support naked domains, but it DOES support www.domainname.com, so I have a static page that just redirects from domainname.com to www.domainname.com where necessary.
Because you are a nerd on a nerd site, you're natively inclined to determine that any connectivity is generic connectivity

It is, in the sense that they have to go out of their way to make it not so.

Finding a way to charge you for that behavior is marketing 101.

Sure, all companies would like to extract consumer surplus by charging more and providing less, or in this case providing nothing. That doesn't mean as customers we should congratulate them on their brilliant strategy.
Taking Down Botnets: Microsoft and the Rustock Botnet
I agree 100% that "my family thinks I come up with good ideas" is a very weak statement. It's by no means the basis for my pursuits but, I don't have friends in the IT-field so I discuss my ideas to my friends/family instead. And they are a TOUGH sale. In fact, as a rule of thumb, I go to them only b/c I know they'll give me EVERY reason why my ideas won't work. And I give my rebuttals on why it will work and I win. :)

Right now I'm working on an online microbiz that will promise to deliver traffic to small businesses locally (with scalable potential). The entire web development is being outsourced and should be ready by April 1st. It's my first "online venture", but it's not innovative. I'm just replicating a successful business model and using it to do a few things:
1) Generate income independently
2) Learn more about outsourcing projects
3) Get my 'foot in the door' in the online business world
4) Use this to gain some recognition amongst like-minded peers so I can expand my network.

I just had a new housemate move in and as luck would have it, he's a Java Developer with a masters in comp sci. He's only been here for a month, but I know he's a great guy and I plan to discuss this idea with him for possible teamwork in implementing it.

You're right that I should develop the prototype then be concerned about the sales pitch/growth after wards. I realize it, but it helps to hear it from others.

Thanks.
This is outrageous and it's a harbinger of things to come for all internet communications, goodbye net neutrality you will pay to use data how you want.

Let's geek out though, does anyone know HOW they are determining who is tethering? Is it just excess data use that is flagging your account? Are they watching packets? If you use a VPN would they not be able to detect tethering use?
> If reddit has problems, I suppose the worst that can happen is a cloud of toxic and poorly thought out comments is released on the internet.

Actually, that's what happens when reddit is working :)
Rustock takedown: un gigante KO
Microsoft prosegue nell'applicazione del suo progetto MARS (Microsoft Active Response for Security) e dopo l'Operation b49 di febbraio dell'anno scorso è giunta la notizia della Operation b107, ossia della messa off-line di una delle più grandi botnet in circolazione - Rustock. Tanto per dare qualche informazione dimensionale...