skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stop reading and worrying about it and just choose a productivity hack and do it regularly, hourly if possible. Then reflect on, adjust it, and iterate. Guarantee within days of doing this you'll have discovered your own productivity hack that really works for you. I started using this Dotout app twice an hour, 2 minute periods. Found it really works, added my own visualization and reflection at the end and I'm 3 times as productive as I ever was.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dotout-improve-focus-concentr...
How does this compare to Programming, Motherfucker?
What you call "semantics", I call "a critical distinction" that needed to be pointed out.

In my early years, I wasted a lot of energy trying to be more productive, efficient, effective, (call it whatever you want), until I learned one of the most valuable and counter-intuitive lessons of my career: it really doesn't matter how "good" you are, how "well" you work, or how good you "feel".

All that really matters is whether or not your cumulative contributions keep increasing. Take care of that and you won't have much else to worry about. Don't do that and you'll end up worrying about all the wrong things.
I don't believe loup-vaillant was saying that it is possible to prove a negative such as "no god exists". Rather, he was saying that since he doesn't perceive even the slightest bit of evidence for the claim "a god exists", he cannot simply make himself believe in that positive claim despite this. Remember where the burden of proof lies.
Critical usabiliy mistakes
So the first and the very negative answer is that I absolutely despise the people who try to push the GPL as being about "ethics".
I think that's absolute bullshit. Why? Because ethics are to me something private. Whenever you use it as an argument for why somebody_else should do something, you're no longer being ethical, you're just being a sanctimonious dick-head.

Good lord, so we're supposed to take an interest in ethics privately but never speak about it publicly? Almost everything I believe about ethics comes from processing other people's ethical ideas, and the same is true for Linus, I'm sure. I personally don't think less of anybody who uses an MIT or BSD license instead of the GPL, but I do think less of Linus for declaring ethics to be an unsuitable topic for public conversation, simply because he can't stand to hear people disagree with him or disapprove of him.

Not to mention he is a brazen hypocrite. He broadcasts his opinions about other people's behavior, calls them dickheads, and says he despises them, because it's inappropriate for them to talk about how other people should behave. Sorry, Linus, it's hard to be more of a sanctimonious dickhead than when you're calling someone else a sanctimonious dickhead.
Curious, how do you permanently block the sites?
What to say when comment upvote counts are gone. Can't upvote this enough. (For me, mobi prefered.)
Thanks zizzler, now I don't need to buy the book ;-)
ComScore: Facebook Now Serves One Third Of Online Ads In U.S.
Firesheep would work.

The attack is more involved than just openly sniffing packets. You need to poison the DNS cache on the victim's machine, so that facebook.com resolves to you. Or, you need to poison the ARP cache, so the victim machine thinks that you are the router. These are both easy to do, though, and once you've done that, then you are a man that's in the middle, and MITM attacks are easy under those circumstances.

"ettercap" is a program to automate this technique to spy on SSH, HTTPS, etc. Works quite well.
1M/1M: Business Models for Partnerships
Video Tutorial: Android Application Development - Location Sensors
Richard Branson on Attention to Detail
The word was productivity, not production.

"Productivity is a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input."

"the ratio of the quantity and quality of units produced to the labor per unit of time"

[1] http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=productivity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity
Sony PlayStation Network down: Private investigators hired to catch hackers
While the given approach for AtomicMap is interesting and performs well in the common case, it suffers from a few flaws: some fixable, some fundamental.

First, storing polymorphic values in the map (either true values or OneShotThunks, depending on whether the Thunk has been unboxed or not) means you have to give up the static type safety of the compiler and cast values carefully. There's at least two bugs in the current version of the code due to unsafe casting. However, this problem can be fixed with careful coding and thorough tests.

Second, the given code doesn't actually prevent thunks from executing more than once. If the thunk throws an exception when executed, the thunk will still be kept in the map and marked as "unexecuted", so the next thread that tries to read that value will execute it again (and possibly throw an exception again). This is troubling both because the thunk executes multiple times and because an update from one thread can cause another thread to throw an exception. This is possibly fixable with some clever coding, but it's unclear what the desired semantics should be if the thunk throws an exception. (Possibly tombstone the value or replace it with the previous value: as if the update with the throwing thunk had never happened.)

But a fundamental flaw in the entire approach is that AtomicMap imposes a certain kind of threading model on client code. The above-mentioned behavior of exceptions propagating to other threads is one symptom of this problem, but there are others. For example, if the thunk takes a while to execute, or worse yet blocks (either momentarily or indefinitely), then other threads interacting with the same key in the map will block waiting for the thunk to finish executing. This behavior is perhaps fine for many applications, but if you want your threads to operate with strict timeouts for blocking operations, or if you want your threads to be entirely nonblocking, then you can't safely use AtomicMap. The implementation forces a particular threading model on client code, which is deprived from choosing its own threading model.

Perhaps a better interface for AtomicMap to implement is ConcurrentMap[A, Future[B]]. This alternative map could still make all its operations atomic, but by returning a Future[B] (instead of a straight-up B), it gives client code the power to check whether an exception was thrown or to block with a timeout when getting the value. Then its up to the client to decide what threading model it feels most comfortable with.
It's a good improvement over HTTP 1.1 and it's nice how they did it in a completely transparent way. Now it's time for the other browsers to support it and to implement way to hint the usage of spdy (maybe a <link rel="" in the first HTTP request, or an extra header in the HTTP request).
Dumb money will lose in tech bubble, investors say
For mac users, the Self Control app works really well.
http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/
This article is linkbait and stretches a metaphor way beyond its breaking point. Also, I think the author confuses various parts of the software field (process/methodology vs engineering/development vs craft/artistry).
Introduction to Complex UIs Using the jQuery UI Components Library
The "most important thing first" can sometimes get in the way, I find. Maybe that thing is not yet clear in my head, or seems overwhelmingly difficult. Diving in with a less important task first can sometimes be a way to build up to tackle the more urgent tasks.
Intel Reinvents Transistors Using New 3-D Structure
But the people writing the CRUD apps get that too.
I am curious, why did you apply for support, not engineering?
If anybody has any suggestions, just post it here -- I love to find new, useful stuff!

K.
> The reality is that you can't prove either case.

Perhaps, but under what circumstances should one have to prove a negative?

We, similarly, can't prove that we're not living inside a magic pill ingested by an all-powerful rhinoceros who deplores our existence and wishes to excrete us at the first opportunity unless we all bake delicious lemon tarts and sacrifice them to the rhino by putting them into our toilets.

We can't prove Tupac and Biggie, now at peace, aren't living on an island, with black Michael Jackson as their producer, cranking out new tracks and submitting them anonymously to YouTube.

We can't prove there's no sea monster who looks identical to Regis Philbin, but bigger than Burj Khalifa, who is contributing to global warming.

But basic examinations of the facts lead us to the conclusion that such claims, especially absent evidence, aren't worth arranging our lives around.
yeahbut, some are interrelated. Like the speed of light and the permittivity of freespace (1/c^2 * mu). If you measure that constant and solve back for c, then you better get ~3 * 10^8 m/s.
Really good post. Keyword/interest targeting on Facebook is a gold mine that is completely ignored by 99% of advertisers.

Facebook Ads reminds me a lot of the early days of AdWords. Whoever was first to bid on long tail keywords must have made a killing. You can be that person in 2011 bidding on long tail keywords on social ads.
And you thought the tea party was bad? This is the next generation of voters
Unfortunately you can just right click and disable extensions on chrome. Since the exit barrier is so low, I was always able to exit even when I shouldn't have.
One of the best features is that it runs on a timer and you can't cancel it prematurely. Even if you restart.
Phantom Ray UAV First Flight
I agree. I think the author does understand the difference between scope, object lifetime and manual/GC object management.

The article is clearly written for pogrammers coming from C++ to C#, which there are a lot of, including myself. I like both C++ and C# a lot but have to admit that managing object lifetime in C# is one of the things I really dislike. There's the suggestion that RAII is reasonable in C# but for me always ends up being a headache.
Except for one of my ex-coworkers. When I asked him why did he chose Hudson over Jenkins, he murmured something about superior Oracle support.
Co-founders are by far the hardest part of starting a venture. Everyone has ideas, everyone has time and most of us have some money to invest in our own projects. Finding a co-founder is something you can't control yourself so it's always the first big hurdle.

The good news is that there are a ton of people just like you having trouble finding co-founders themselves. Great ways to meet them are:

1. Meetups. These days, services like Meetup make it easy to find meetings of people interested in the same things you are. Whatever area you think you'd like to start a company, start going to a meetup or start your own meetup.

2. Classes. Class is always a great way to meet people and work together. This doesn't need to be full time school, I've met great people in night classes (even in cooking classes).

3. Start blogging. If you start writing about the topics that interest you and start reading blogs by other people on the same topic you'll realize who is like-minded. It's a lot easier to know someone is the right fit if you've already read their thoughts on the matter.

4. Join a start up. This is the best option. Join an existing start up company. They are always full of people who are smart, take risks and will probably be interested in exploring your ideas with you. You can easily find start up companies in your area by browing the sites of nearby Venture Capital funds (see their investment portfolio) or searching Crunchbase.

Hope this helps.
That's practical! thx
Results seem to vary considerably depending on the market and keywords, although it does seem that with some patience and experimentation you can find that high value/low cost sweet spot.

They key is patience. I had tried Facebook Ads several times to no avail, but after reading one of your blog posts as well as several others, I went back to the drawing board until I started finding the variables that made it work. I'm hoping this post expresses some of the lessons learned.
For those interested in playing with SPDY, ruby parser and generator: https://github.com/igrigorik/spdy
A CoffeeScript Intervention (how to avoid common JS mistakes)
I'd be curious to see what you've built. I'm pretty sure that's what everyone will say!
FWIW we (getdpd.com) totally agree and are working on adding this feature to our system soon. Vendors will be able to upload the file variants themselves or we will do the conversion on the backend.
I'm the author. This is a short article in this month's PragPub (http://pragprog.com/magazines) to promote my new book on CoffeeScript:

http://pragprog.com/titles/tbcoffee/coffeescript
Ask HN: Application Development on Physical Devices?
I'm looking in to starting a service in the UK based around the problem that application development for mobiles is costly if you want to test on a broad set of devices before you launch.

The thought behind the concept is that the mobile Android market is diversifying a lot with phones coming in all shapes and sizes. The iOS market has big performance differences between product updates. Various other Android tablets each having their own quirks and heck, The Playbook even having its own OS.

The concept I'm looking to propose would be subsidized device rentals for bundles or individual devices at a price point which Developers would pay to be able to test their projects and products at say, the last 2 weeks of development. ( eg, you've built an Android app on your personal Nexus S but want to make sure it still looks good on the Desire HD and still works on the Nexus One )

2ish Questions for you?

Would a service like this solve a 'real' problem?

- Having built a very small game I know that the simulator vs the real device is very different, but does everyone struggle with this?

Would you use a service like this?

- The devices would come pre-wiped, dev ready with all wires and passwords

- The cost would be for around £35 pw for a bundle ( 2-3 devices )

- How comfortable would you be in renting devices knowing that you would be financially liable for losing the devices or excessive damage?
Triunfo Del Amor Capitulo 138
It's great to hear these stories of success. And yes, it seems like a positive attitude is critical to success, rather than looking for reasons not to do something.

However, this kind of over the shoulder throw at "what it takes to succeed" seems pretty shallow. I'd rather hear about what really made these two people different. How the one overcame the actual challenges s/he encountered and the other did not.

Maybe the key difference between these two people is that the one tried and the other didn't. But this article doesn't really make that argument.

OTOH, I don't have 2 million in annual revenue at the moment :)
Tracing functions in python
I agree with everyone who said "you're working on stuff that's too easy" but got me thinking that it would be interesting to put together a project made up entirely of cut and pasted fragments from SO. Probably not really possible since there's always some glue or editing needed so there's always at least some thinking involved.
Get Disruptive
Thanks for the tip, I didn't think to copy the data to ephemeral storage like that. That'll probably speed things up a lot.

I ended up splitting the data in to a relatively small number (~200) of ~30MB gzipped files in order to initially saturate the mappers and speed things up. If that's not necessary after moving to ephemeral storage that's fine by me!
FAA wants your opinion about commercial space rules
Mono developers to lose their jobs at Attachmate(Novell)
Here's to hoping that an OEM or software/solutions provider implemented some sort of local disk encryption before deploying to the field.
I think a thread about leasing private office space is a great idea. I found my place by driving around and looking for "for lease" signs. I tried coworking before that, but way too many distractions, and no ability to keep your monitor(s) and keyboard setup there. I think ideas for "private hacker space" -- something between coworking and overpriced offices like Regus would be valuable.

RE headpones: The pair I use I got at Levenger over 10 years ago. Served me well in grad school and while writing the code for the MVP of my first startup that I ended up selling.
Chinese Facebook Debuts on NYSE; Raises $743M
1.Go to meetups for languages and like minded individuals (this is harder in small towns)
2. Work on opensource
3. The are sites like techcofounder and such, not sure how well they are though.
4.Another big city thing, go work in a coworking space (this does cost some money)
I often scroll down using space or the pagedown key. This has worked with every webpage I've encountered so far.

While I don't care about the styling, every single linked example on that page doesn't work with space or the pagedown key. I wish there was a bit more polish here...
While that's definitely a stumbling block we discovered from our experiments, I think there are several other key takeaways:
1) an "appealing" image is very important
2) start with broad demographics and narrow interests
3) increase your CTR before decreasing CPC too much
4) wait for the demographic reports and then narrow your demographics using your most success ads
Now it's time for the other browsers to support it

Nope, that time would be when there is an RFC
Which startup did he apply to YC with?
I think it just means that the sites stay redirected in his hosts file.
Sony’s Response to the U.S. House of Representatives
Intel Increases Transistor Speed by Building Upward
I'm not really sure what to make of reports like this. One the one hand, it does seem pretty terrifying. But on the other, I feel like the fact that the governing apparatus of the US has more-or-less worked for several hundred years can't have been predicated on a hyper-educated electorate.

It reminds me of a quote at the beginning of Types and Programming Languages, attributed to Tom Melham: "Formal methods will never have a significant impact until they can be used by people that don't understand them."

I would think systems of government would be similar.
Me as well. And pdfs tend to look/read very poorly on a Kindle (especially if they contain code blocks).
A 45min vignette on medieval founders from Andrei Rublev
Travel + Hackernews = Art Sumo
After 4 years working for the man and reading hackernews religiously, I decided to quit my cushy day job and create Art Sumo while working from the road. I am happy to announce that I am launching ArtSumo.com today.

I would be glad to answer any questions from fellow hackers over email - naysawn@artsumo.com.

www.artsumo.com
> There's a difference between being productive and whining. The worst work environments always have people complaining about the same stuff, sometimes for years.

But what makes you think that if they stopped opening their mouths about it, they'd suddenly stop being the kind of mediocre person who never does anything to address the issues they constantly run into?

I think you're mistaking correlation for causation. It's perfectly possible to complain and fix things. The real advice you'd like people to follow is "Don't be Mediocre"
The problem is publishing any such strategy on a public forum like HN will essentially render it useless.
How to identify and stop spam on Facebook
The governing apparatus of the US is less than 300 years old non? A couple things are also different this time - at no time in world history has american reach/impact been so great, and the US is pretty much facing a one of a kind set of challenges with the combination of near fiscal ruin, with being the world's reserve currency (just to name one).

The quality of education that voters have might be the same as it has been in the past, but the consequences of poor electoral choices is most definitely greater.
Actually the acquisition was in Fall 2008. You can also try out the cloudkick CP for linode and AWS as well, from their CP you can use all 3 providers.
Furthermore, does China belong to its people?
I found it useful to force myself to manually comment/uncomment lines in my hosts file. It gives a critical few moments for a bit of humiliation to set in, as you realize how desperate you are for diversion. On the other end, it gives a moment to mentally pat yourself on the back for eliminating the distractions.
A couple of highlights from the article:

"The key to today's breakthrough is Intel's ability to deploy its novel 3-D Tri-Gate transistor design into high-volume manufacturing."

"The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37 percent performance increase at low voltage versus Intel's 32nm planar transistors."
Well, I mean he also dropped hints about his location on Twitter and Facebook during the project. Anyone looking for anonymity would stay away from those.
It's easier than you think if you target organizations with non-technical decision makers. I've seen "directors of software" force LAMP development groups to switch from SVN to TFS.
It's ensuring a default value basically. If you instantiate a person without an argument and try to reference this.gender later, you'll throw a script error. This is just avoiding that.

A way I'd prefer might look like this:

function Person = function(gender) {
this.gender = gender || 'neuter' //the sauce that defines a fallback
}
Correct. If I ever catch myself surfing to a website from my laptop, it gets bookmarked for my iPad and blocked in my /etc/hosts.
Dunkin' Donuts files for delicious $400M IPO
Damn, now I'm hungry again.
Work for a company or industry that you enjoy. That you couldn't imagine doing anything else. You'll never have a problem being productive again.
This will obviously leave me continuously trying to access hacker news while preventing me from doing so. My continued attempts will block all other operations [i.e. work] hence creating a race condition.

Far preferable is the event-driven technique whereby I make a cursory attempt at doing some real stuff until the HN bot tweets something of fleeting interest, at which point I defer said real stuff to a background thread to be completed in an asynchronous fashion.
I really, really like support. My body of work doesn't qualify me to work as an engineer at Dropbox yet - I believe that I'm smart enough, but I have no evidence of that fact. I will create evidence in the next few months here, and if Dropbox doesn't want me, someone else will (or I'll have my own product to make money).
Android is good, but the non-Google (Motorola) software that came with my phone is clearly not as well designed as the Google stuff, and definitely not as good as the Apple software that comes with iPhones - mail clients being a good example.
This is not advertising but related to the question: if you want to express yourself anonymously, you can use us. We erase or never capture whatever may link the creator with the posting. Every posting is heavily moderated before publishing.
Looks interesting. Can you say more about it? What made you build this? How did you build this? What's your revenue model?
Every time I see that name change, I mentally prepend Leeroy to the name Jenkins. Given how well known that meme is, I have to wonder whether it was intended at some level.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU if you don't get the reference.
The whole process stinks, the reasonable thing to do is just give the Hudson trademark to Kawaguchi. Oracle won't do that because they want to be in control of the winning project, and they know that without the now-Jenkins community the Hudson project is going to quickly become irrelevant.

Moving to the EF is too little, too late, and I don't think the Jenkins community is going to bite. They already dealt with the pains of switching to a new name and anyone who needs Java CI and isn't completely blind will find Jenkins just fine. Remember Ethereal? Yeah me neither.
Gmail increases contact storage to 25,000 from 10,000.