skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was a teen/young adult, I felt like this. I read a lot of interesting stuff, some useful but a lot not. Then I was diagnosed late in life with a medical condition. For me, inability to focus is usually rooted in my health issues. Working on my underlying health issues has been the main thing that has improved my ability to focus.

The other thing that comes to mind is something I read in my twenties about individuals having specific types of "doing" energy which needs to be expended and you can't effectively stop it until it's used up and you can't effectively push much beyond that once it is used up. On HN, people sometimes talk about either being unable to work a full-time job doing X and also do it on the side or you hear people talk about things like "the need to code" -- that they just have to do a certain amount of X. Another example is folks who do cross-word puzzles at bedtime to help them sleep and they can't sleep until they have had a certain amount of a certain type of mental stimulation. If you can figure out what your mix of "doing" energy is and consciously direct it into productive outlets, rather than frittering it away for personal satisfaction, you will get more done.

Concrete personal example: I like writing but probably spend too much time frittering that interest away posting on forums like this one rather than developing my websites. That's in part due to my health: It is far easier to respond to something someone has said than to write up something from scratch without having something to respond to. When healthier, I am more able to do the kind of writing that I want on my websites. (In fact, my first website started while I was quite ill was basically an edited collection of emails of mine or excerpts from emails.) I have left a number of lists related to the topics of my websites, in part because I am so controversial in certain circles and in part because I felt that I need to put my energy into developing my websites rather than trying to chit chat with people on email lists. Chit-chatting with people on email lists feels very productive to me but it's not that productive. There is a "live" audience that can respond and interact with me and I just feel like I am doing so much more than I really am because of the responses. This is a personal issue that I am aware of and have been trying to work on for some time. I recently unsubbed from a health list in large part so I can move on to doing more productive kinds of writing about health issues.

As for "dysfunctional perfectionism": After nearly dying and finally getting a serious diagnosis late in life, I promptly returned to college while still very ill with the attitude "A sick person like me needs to make more B's if I am ever going to get a degree." I've also done volunteer work at a homeless shelter and went down in flames horribly in various online forums while publicly withdrawing from all kinds of prescription medication. I'm a lot thicker skinned than I used to be and much more okay with failure as a productive means to learn what not to do, what my limits are and so on.

Good luck with this.
And this is exactly the problem I am describing. If the position is for someone who is only going to write js, then I agree. Those are important questions. But then that is for an engineering position who writes in js, not a frontend engineer.

If you want a good example of what happens when strict CS people write javascript without thought or knowledge of frontend best practices, look at YUI. Ugh.

So my argument boils down to making a clear distinction between a programmer and s frontend engineer. You describe the first, I the latter.
You don't need a job to have fun programming.
I don't see why the initial rejection of the question was necessary, or that he really has a much a point to make about "why" being an invalid question. All he had to do was begin explaining magnetic forces and say that if you don't get it you need more background.
My bad - it's been a while since I touched Rails and my memory was rusty.
We've been told by some news sources that have used our data/research that "they don't link out" as a policy. As a matter of our own policy, we are less willing to help them in the future and have indicated as such.

That said, we usually followup with journalists and ask for a link and most usually don't have an issue with providing it until their editor overseers ixnay the idea.

I think it's often less about malicious intent than being clueless about the "link economy".
Am I the only one hoping for a "RIP Techcrunch" any time soon ?

She just completely throw Digg's work into the trash like useless fastfood plastic bag.

This is what happens when you don't know how to create anything productive in your life, and you spend your days talking sh about other's people work. I don't care if Digg is losing visitors, it was a new concept back then, and it was successful, show some respect for the people who are/were still working for it.

I'm seriously hating TC everyday a little more.
don't worry so much about the career thing. if you're at a good and challenging spot that meets your personal needs, you'll start to shine automatically.

think about what really makes you tick, and try to find a place that matches this. why are you in a startup? for the autonomy? or for the superhero feeling? for the potential big money? other way around, what of that won't you mind missing if you switch to a big company? answering these questions may help you find the kind of spots you like best. describe the workplace you'd like before giving it a name.

i mean, there are middle grounds, it's not a black and white thing. i work for a 250-ish people software consultancy firm, who 'rent' me to a well-funded and well-managed 10 people startup. i have all the joys (and occasional overtime/stress) of working at a startup. this includes high degrees of autonomy ("we need something fixed here and there, kind of, to solve this and that problem. we think. you work it out.") and a cozy "us against the world" atmosphere.

meanwhile, at my actual employer, i get coaching from experienced engineers and managers, a training budget, and the comfort knowing that if ever my work at the startup stops being challenging enough, i can switch projects without even quitting my job.

this matches my needs, as a result of which i'm learning and growing fast. what are yours?
I like the look of it but imho the Gold plan is too expensive - €12 of VPS could get persistant IRC and a lot more.
1049 people found it helpful. :-)
Dutch Court Rules WiFi Hacking Is Now Legal
Yep plenty of room. The important question to answer is how are you going to make in long term sustainable. You need a constant flow of articles to build up readership, can you generate 5 small articles/day for say 6-12 months?

Getting the initial boost is one thing, but the difficulty is in the long slog.
Show HN: Launching my Realtime Social Video Startup
Hmmm.... this seems more like a different reddit then a different HN.
First, I am in no way justifying the inexcusable actions and decisions that lead to this tragic conclusion.*

But is it really that different to the early years of sea exploration? I mean let's face it: certain -- most? -- of the ships were known to be marginally seaworthy at best, and if it wasn't the ship that cost seamen their lives, it was surely the inadequate food, water, and supplies that precluded many from a safe return.

My point is that either way, many, many adventurers knowingly and willingly embarked on their journeys to an all but certain doom. That this particular and more recent seemingly forced excursion happend as recently as the 20th century and under the circumstances described of course renders it more palpably disturbing, I agree, but I would suggest it is different only in degree, not in kind.

Again- I'm in no way intending to minimize this tragedy or others like it.* I'm just suggesting that for the sake of these great explorers' memories, it is better to remember them fondly rather than wallow in melancholic nostalgia of their (indisputably) unjust loss.

* I understand this particular tragedy is unique in that the cosmonaut knew with virtual certainty that he was being sent to his death. My focus here is not whether he knew death was certain, but the greater context in which this certainty existed, i.e., the inherently dangerous activity of (space) exploration which is "inherently dangerous" precisely because such deaths are foreseeable and indeed statistically likely to occur, just or unjust alike.
Ah, it seems like it can only handle so many users. If you keep refreshing, you'll get lucky eventually (I'm on FIOS too).
Three cheers to you, juice.

I'm still waiting for this kind of spirit to seep back into the web. When we were first online, everything was weird, awesome, and seemingly limitless. Now we're in a state of incredibly boring commodification.

The stale and sterile nature of the FB Newsfeed drives this point home to me. All the unique and dynamic people I know have been reduced to an unformatted little post, with a link if you're lucky. This model of web communication has turned us all into just another bland-looking content generator, and automatically stripped us of identity.

My advice to startups: everyone is bored with the web right now. There is nothing sexy or controversial occurring with a decent business model behind it (like Dischord Records). Please inject some id into your business plan, and give the people what they really want: sexy fun.

Freefreebeer is the right idea...
Ask HN: Underage users and the best approach to tactfully dealing with them
Been on HN for a few years but posting under this throwaway account as this is a sensitive topic. I run a website where we have a minimum age of 16 y/o required in our TOS in order to use the site, so invoking COPPA wouldn't necessarily work. We've been wanting to deal with users who fall under this minimum in a tactful way for a while now, since we've noticed a correlation between these users and problematic behavior[1] on site. The problem is that our existence as a site/company has been predicated (in part) on transparency and being nice guys; I feel it would be, for lack of a better term, a "dick move" to suddenly notify users and remove accounts now that we've finally decided that we really need to clean things up, but on the other hand, it's something I really feel we need to do for the health of the site. We also are torn as to whether to grandfather in users falling below the threshold who've exhibited good behavior, or just deal with everyone irrespective of history. My primary concern is potential backlash from users (both those being removed and observers of this) in that it makes us look evil, even though at the end of the day, it's a violation of our TOS, plain and simple, and we could remove any account for any/no reason at any time.

So, I ask: what would you do in this situation?

[1] problematic in that it creates tension for other users, but does not technically break any laws/rules
Yeah, the answer is actually bit math if I can remember. And I'm sure these kinds of questions are right for some kinds of positions, but they aren't appropriate for frontend engineers. It was fun to try and figure out though. If the question was "you have 10 mice, 10 bottles of wine, and a house full of people that you want to leave, what's the most efficient way?" then that's something that has merit. That involves thinking about compression methods and shoving people (data) through limited exits as quickly as possible. That's a relevant question.
Until further replication I think it is more probable that three months of waiting resulted in somebody using a text editor.
An interesting insight not so much in the workings of magnetics, but more so in Feynman's labyrinthine mind. This video should be tagged "psychology" :)
I thought this was going to be an analysis of Digg's current problems, but seven out of ten paragraphs are about Sarah Lacy's BusinessWeek career, her book, her current whereabouts, etc.

Much of what she does have to say about Digg and the history of Web startups is questionable (for example, "The entrepreneurs were the exact opposite of the kids today seduced by the promises of Y Combinator, easy cash of super angels and lure of TechCrunch headlines. They were doing something that still stank of broken dreams and evaporated billions. And they were doing it for one simple reason: they couldn’t stop themselves.")

Sometimes TechCrunch does well (particularly when it gets a real scoop) but "R.I.P. Digg" is poor, in my opinion.
Please for the love of ada lovelace. Do Not Do This. Pivot, start something new, what ever you do stay free. Do it for those of us who dream to have the will to someday also break free of the share cropping bit shoveling that is big-company job-land.
I have a 28" external monitor at home for myself. I also value portability more if I want to work away from the desk. Vim tabs and navigation is okay on small screens too. Works for me :)
Any number like that 2% is pretty silly. Different people have different needs, different current resources, and different comfort zones. The only thing that can really be said about how much to invest is the old rule, "Don't bet more than you can afford to lose", however much or little that may be.
i love the idea of iRobot but my Roomba died a few months after I bought it new. All it had to do was drive around on my carpet and clean it -- which it did do a few times well. Hope and assume the models they send for the nuclear plant are much more robust.
To be clear, coasting while in gear still saves gas.
Hey guys, I've been reading HN for a long time (since before it was called HN). I rarely comment or submit to HN, but I am really proud to finally submit my site here.

Would appreciate any feedback you have!

Thanks
Thanks, I will contact them.
I haven't used PHP heavily in about 2 years, but it surprises me that at this point there's not a configuration setting that negates the need for the opening PHP tag and instead just treats everything in a .php file as php.

I doubt anyone using PHP at Tumblr's level is mixing raw HTML into their PHP files and thus has no need for the php tags.
I enjoyed it; it was addictive to the point where I kept hitting refresh to watch the progress bar grow. Offering real rewards beyond just "you'll get access sooner" incentivized me to actually share the URL vs. just signing up and leaving as I usually would. Well done.
Speaking of earthquakes... How would an entire city react when it's tied together like on giant building? My guess is the legal aspects alone of determining cause of damage would prevent this type of city-wide design.
Bloomberg Game Changers: Marc Andreessen
I'm curious what others think about #3 (The vertical scrollbar). Traditionally it's considered messing with the defaults of the browser, and wasting precious screen space; but I hear from more and more (graphical) designers that they'd like me to stop the page from jumping by doing exactly this.
I agree with some of the other posters here, there is no shame in working for a big company, there is also no shame in working for a startup and not having an exit (lots of people do it)

I would say you are a great fit for some well funded companies that are still considered "startups" i.e. Twilio, Airbnb , HipMunk, etc. judging from your comments and without seeing your resume.

I am rare in the sense that I have never actually looked for a job since I have always had my own ideas for projects or startups that I have always decided to pursue. But I can tell you the one thing I see most often when I am looking around is that almost everyone hiring is looking for a 4 year degree (since I am a dropout maybe thats why I usually dont look/apply for jobs) but if you have finished your degree I am sure you'll do fine.

Personally I was not even going to school for programming I started doing it in middle school for a hobby and it progressed from there, I sold a software company in my junior year of college and never looked back, even still I am not sure many companies would hire me because of my lack of a degree, so that is something else to consider as well.

I dont think you should at all feel selfish for considering your future or desiring to be able to save money again, at the end of the day if you are not happy you are not putting your all into the product and the MVP probably will never be as good today as it would have been if you had put it out 3 years ago with a fresher vision and lots of drive.

I'd say to follow your gut, seems to me most peoples first instinct is almost always their best.

Good luck with everything!
I was surprised they didn't have robots on site within 24 hours, if not prepositioned there by default. We're talking Japan and we're talking about a place with obviously potentially extremely hazardous environments where a billion dollar budget is considered standard.
this is a weekend project (over x-mas actually) that has a similar motivation: Dynamically creating communities and discussion in a manner that treats topics as first class, as opposed to following people (reddit/HN vs twitter), with the hope that quality pervades http://hashpost.com

For now it's mostly cat gifs and youtube videos, but it's topic generation is dynamic by simply adding #tag to your posts.
Yup, it's bitmath. I happen to know which company's asking that variation of the question right now. Interesting to see good companies miss the mark in interviewing so widely.

I think it comes down to most people (myself included) having a hard time recognizing competency and skill outside their own experience.
Good points although I'm not sure the technology basis is at the heart of it. Bloggers are equally bad about linking to primary sources. Back in 2008 I traced several stories from the first reports via the tech and politics blogospheres to the mainstream media, and in almost all the cases the primary sources had vanished a couple of articles into the chain. X writes something on NewsVine; Y writes about it in Wired (linking to X) and then it gets on Slashdot or Reddit or HN; Z writes about it in the New York Times -- and links to Y, but not X.

Agreed that time is a lot of it, but it's also a matter of how people want their articles to look. What's more important, linking to the original source or buttressing the story's credibility by highlighting that it's reported in Wired? Both! But it takes a lot of work to craft a sentence that reads smoothly and allows you to link to both stories (and even then it may be very hard to fit in the authors' names) and very few authors consistently make the effort.
I'm not really certain about eastern Canada, but in Calgary the seasons are something like:

Spring: Mid-March til Mid-May. Snow goes away. Then it
comes back. Then it goes away. Then it comes
back. Then it goes away.
Summer: Mid-May til early September (with luck) or late-
August (without it). Mostly warm, usually dry.
Punctuated by hailstorms. Once every few years
punctuated with a smallish snow storm.
Fall: Early September til late October. Stuff cools down.
Frost is common. Occasional hail or freezing rain.
Winter: Late October til mid-March. October-til-Christmas
swings back and forth between (very) cold streaks
and stereotypically fall-ish weather. January to
March is mostly just cold and snowy and icy.

Bear in mind that the climate really only gets worse the further east you go, culminating in the maritimes - where winters of five-foot snow alternate with summers of hurricanes. :P
The key isn't so much that the configuration language is the source code language, but that both are a template language. As far as the parser is concerned all three are written interchangeably in an HTML superset that's sent down the wire raw by default, no matter where they're located or what called them. PHP gains its low barrier to entry partly from the fact that HTML becomes valid PHP just by changing its extension, but that useful equivalence also cuts the other way.

Many other frameworks use the source code language for configuration without risking this particular error, because they keep templates separate. (In Django, for example, templates use a different language and are read out of template-specific directories.)

It's not even a problem unique to configuration files. A disclosure of source code would have occurred by replacing the first character of a PHP source file. The fact a configuration file was involved makes the effect both more severe and less likely to be caught ahead of time. More severe, because it discloses passwords, rather than just proprietary code. Less likely to be caught, because standard testing methods tend to rely on a staging or test config instead of the production one.

There are other posts disagreeing over various single villains, but a wider view is that Tumblr was bitten by a combination of a single-character typo, an otherwise useful PHP language design choice, the common and otherwise harmless practice of configuring via a programming language, and the blind spot typical test suites have for production-specific issues.
I've heard this before, and I understand how cutting the fuel supply to zero would save gas, but there are a couple of things that I don't understand:

Wouldn't this mean that coasting down a long hill in gear would cool the engine and in particular the catalytic converter, potentially causing some operating hiccups and a big emissions spike when eventually reaching the bottom?

Why would built-in mileage computers, with direct access to actual fuel injection figures, compute gas mileage from some other measurement that's only theoretically related under some circumstances? Isn't that sort of going out of the way for worse results?
Possibly true, but what if employees had the additional flexibility that being tied down to their homes prevented? I think you are confusing this effect with a more general bias towards mobility relative to other countries.

The most recent housing market collapse has made America much slower at readjusting to restructuring of the economy--for example, workers in Florida can't easily sell off their homes to move to a different location with greater job density, for instance. I'd like to see more data supporting your assertion.
The United States is founded on illegal behavior (sedition and treason). If the founders of the country have taught us anything it should be that great things come from those willing to break the law in furtherance of mankind.
It's not a bubble until we install a slide in our building (Twitter). That's how i'm judging this.
I am seriously excited about using this. I've been holding off on configuring new forward deployed servers before automation is in place, this lets me get work done now without worrying about shooting myself in the foot later.
Tech journalism has ALWAYS been this way. Ever hear of John C Dvorak?
I can't find a source now, but this reminds me of the story where Bill and Melinda gates would stay in touch when one of them was traveling by having an over-the-phone movie date night. Both of them rent a movie and start it at the same time, they call each other and chat throughout.

Edit: Here's a cite but it tells a slightly different story than I remembered. http://davis.foulger.info/papers/RelationshipEqualsSumMedia....
Any good investment plan involved diversification.

If you buy one house, one bad tennant could mean six months or more of no rent payments while you go through the eviction process and try to get someone else in there. One really bad tennant could cause tens of thousands of dollars of damages.
Does one need graphs or any particular smarts to know this? If 500M people are on FB, it seems obvious that the double-digit growth trend would have to abate.

Sorry for the haterade comment, but I don't know why we need "research" to uncover these master of the obvious trends.
This is a neat idea and something I had considered prototyping a while ago. If it's helpful, my goal was to create a better way than email to share links with a very small, consistent group of people. Good luck!
Yeah definitely worth a shot, I don't think you'd have any problems. If so it would be minor stuff we can fix quickly.