skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't use Firefox because most of its add-ons aren't worth it?! Why not just use Firefox but don't install add-ons then?
It would be cool if i could hack the Google kernel, too bad its closed source :D
Linear time protein folding.
Well, you know, it's kind of true. Depending on what you want to you, you need radically different things to stay productive.

And that's why I dislike the idea of productivity blogs. They assume there's some universal standard of being productive, which there isn't. Then, in search of this standard, they actually tell you to do things that make you far less productive.
I'm sorry.

...Though you might have been warned off when you saw links to Maddox, Tucker Max, and The Angry Drunk in the sidebar.
Django Gets Intermediate Models
http://www.storylinez.com/ is ridiculously unusable. (Linked from nestedguis)
It's a bit of a fallacious argument, based on some dodgy definitions of the key words. "Hacker" does not equate to "over-engineering-prone developer who likes to live in his little walled garden".

Part of writing great code that, as a hacker, one can be proud of, is to understand the purpose of the code. Otherwise, there's no way to tell whether the code is great.

In fact, in my experience, "Developers" (as opposed to hackers... if such an opposition is warranted) are the ones who are likely to over-engineer a solution by building things they think are needed (because they're hinted at in the waterfall-produced spec) rather than questioning every single requirement directly themselves and then producing a much smaller piece of code that does what the business actually needs, rather than what they said they needed.

What he's saying, in fact, is that he prefers developers who are capable of doing analysis work to those who aren't.
Not to the masses they weren't. But let's see who remembers Henry Ford nowadays. He's the icon of that era.
Indeed. I don't disagree with the gist of the article. I think that it was somewhat hypocritical lecturing about productivity weblogs and then writing an identical entry yourself but you do raise some good points.

Of course, it could all be summarised as "Get off your butt and get on with your work" but that's nowhere near as interesting to read ;)
This "hobby" paid significantly more than my previous salary. I was full time and incorporated--so no, not a stretch to call it a company.

Anyhow, arguing with a troll is not a good use of my time, so I'm cutting this off now.
Looking at that project's website, I probably would have spent it on a designer / copy editor.
My local library here in Ohio has a Gale Legal Forms subscription for Ohio legal forms which it makes available to its online patrons for free. Other libraries in the US offer something similar. I don't know what's available at UK libraries but it's worth checking out.
Clever name :)
I can, yeah. I would be completely willing to do that, too.

At the same time, I still wouldn't want to miss my first two semesters. And I don't think there's much of a loss to be had waiting an extra few months.
It wouldn't be the first time Atwood made a generalization based on one data point.
I think the gentleman was generically referring to a project becoming a driving goal. People who are absolutely dedicated to something do get sucked in during the crunch time. For instance, people doing drama shows (part-time) by tech-week both actors and crew are spending 12+ hours a day on set (1), have the show's problems eclipse their other problems (2), and share a group identity (actors in play X) (4).

This isn't cult behavior, but it passes that test. The difference is that it's temporary behavior. You might work 60-80 hours a week for the first few months, and then you're back to semi-normal schedules except during crunch times. No doubt if you asked this family member, they'd have stories of these crunch times where they had to burn the midnight oil for a good bit.
You don't need to keep in memory the page you generate either.
Graduate school is compared to a cult. In my opinion, the comparison has some merit, especially outside the sciences.

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2004/06/2004062801c.htm
It seems like in this case we have a temporal error. A popular movie generated buzz now and skewed a result that people pronounce loosely as of all time.

Batman might be the best movie out recently but in 2 years time, it will be a dim and fading memory while the Godfather will retain its appeal as it has already proven that it can.

IMDB just needs a temporal filter to keep the latest trend from skewing the universal result.
from the link in the blog

=============

Wszystkie testy były wykonywane na MacBook Pro Core2 Duo 2.16GHZ, 4GB RAM i systemie Mac OS X 10.5.4 Leopard + zainstalowana Java 1.6.0_05.

==================

those Jruby and jython numbers look pretty funny, tho. Being strictly a MRI and Cpython user, i dunno if Jruby and jython are/could hit both cores.
The false debate on monkey-patching
Complaining about Knol's ranking contributes to it.

any publicity is good publicity
Wow. Excellent article. Absolutely dead-on. Thanks for the link.
that sites like Lifehack are absolute bullshit

Okay, so we start with a neghead tone, which I'll duplicate.

OS X is the only operating system designed to actually be productive

Moron. More productive work has been done on probably any given System 360 installation than every OS X system combined, but don't let that keep the bullshit from spewing.

Don’t use an IM client. I mean, come on.

No, really. Come on. Moron.

Anything you need to IM somebody for work can be sent more efficiently as email

Oh, really? Come on. Do you think perhaps that communications that require high-speed conversation-style back-and-forth responses might be more suitable for IM than email? And that the quiet, recorded nature of IM might make it superior to talking? No? Didn't think of those extremely obvious use cases? No? Jesus Christ.

Avoid plugins.

Whoops. I just realized I was reading satire. Please disregard my criticism. Thanks for wasting my time.
I obviously don't speak for Chris, but I took it to mean that instead of:

ira_account.register_with_irs(customer.get_ssn())

He suggests:

ira_account.register_with_irs(customer)

Which I think is a roundabout way of getting at looser coupling and working at a higher level of abstraction.

(update: obviously, I cast this in OO rather than functional terms. I suspect the point is isomorphic to FP).
Endgame: Scrabulous Gets Wiped Off Facebook
its a nice looking, easy to use application and the concept is good.

however, you're pushing your way into a market with a good number of existing applications. you need to make yourself stand out. the application is currently very simple. as you mentioned, you're going to be developing new features soon. pick what you do carefully and deliberately in order to make yourself stand out from the pack.

a few thoughts on features:

- it took me a while to figure out how to delete places. consider making it more clear, with a delete option on the city page where the "add pin" option used to be.
- perhaps a friend suggester that bases suggestions off of cities that both people have visited.
- perhaps a feature that allows you to also build routes/trips/itineraries where you can connect the cities that you've visited on a single trip.
then, you can visually display the itineraries (or browse other peoples') and write information on them beyond the information you write about the individual cities' reviews.
- allow commenting on more things. like individual users' profiles. the user profile is a commonly traversed place. allow for that interaction.
- hook into wikipedia for the bigger cities.
- add in some sort of landmark feature into individual cities that allows people to easily and quickly identify things to see and do that are special for the individual cities.
so that people don't have to read every review to see whats interesting. allow people to add them onto the map by a right-click interface so that they will show up on the map of that single town only.
- iphone application.
- clickpass integration

what can you do to get more users?

- consider building a facebook and myspace application and try and get your current userbase to make use of it and push it to their friends.
- get to a point where you think your application is good, useful, and ready for people to really look at.
then, ask your users nicely to spread the word about it. send a short invitation to review the application to the larger web app and/or travel blogs.

hope these help. also, full disclosure, i think i might've applied a while ago to a job posting of yours on FS :) so, i've thought about what to do to improve the app in the past.
This is awesome
I work 95 hours/week and I invented http://www.google.com
Lines of code accrue the same way interest does. An extra percent of yearly return may not seem like much in the first year, but after 50 years the difference is huge.

The same goes for code: 10 lines of java doesn't seem much larger than 5 lines of python, but after 2 years of hacking your java app can easly be 10x the size of a python app.
Except, in Apollo people died/can die.

That is a rather silly criterion. All engineers build things that can kill people if they go wrong. That's what engineers do.

You think that social software can't be used to kill people? Do you know the number of people (mostly women) who are murdered each year by stalkers, most of whom are former lovers or spouses? Do you want to bet that none of those stalkers have used, say, Google to help locate their victims?

Do you think that having your identity stolen and your bank account drained can't lead directly to your death? What, do you live in a country where health insurance is guaranteed to all citizens? (Oh, wait -- perhaps you do. Never mind.)

"Toy companies"? Interesting choice of phrase. Here's what one minute's Googling found for me: A court case, Estate of Matthew C. Metzgar v. Playskool, Inc:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=3rd&#...

the plaintiffs' expert, E. Patrick McGuire, reported for the record that in one year studied, 1988, there were eleven deaths due to aspiration of small toys or toy parts by children... the plaintiffs submitted a CPSC estimate reported in the House Congressional Record that in each year from 1980-88, an average of 3,200 small children were treated in hospital emergency rooms for toy related ingestion and aspiration injuries. The CPSC also reported that between 1980 and 1991, 186 children choked on small toys, toy parts, and other children's products.

Frankly, from the viewpoint of danger and death, the space program's engineers are wimps: They do very dangerous things, but they only endanger a handful of people at a time. A toy engineer who specifies the wrong paint can kill hundreds of babies at once. Social software is pretty safe, but if the odds that a Facebook user will be killed because of a Facebook design error are as small as one per 100 million user-years [1], the company stands to lose 1 user per year, because they have 90 million active users.

[1] I have no data, but I doubt the odds are that small. I'd be astonished if Facebook hadn't already been a factor in thousands of suicides, for example. One of the reasons why humans are so incredibly talented at socializing is that it's fraught with peril.
It's uses hover and zoom to navigate. not clicking. Did you watch one of the videos?
From the article: "Cities are compared to New York as the base city, with an index score of 100."

I think this reveals as much as the rankings do.
I think that a mother using reverse psychology to motivate her child to do her homework is "ethically manipulative." I think a national leader using lies to lead his country into war is unethically manipulative. I don't yet have a formula for it though.
I think the article is a troll, but I don't think you can fault him for the way he interpreted that sentence. You said you've been working 18 hours a day, and then you implied that the only time you took off was to watch a movie now and then.

I interpreted the statement literally too.
Three years?! If this company is truly ruled by such trite examples he would be CTO by then.
Labs At Night - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
"The evidence in favor of cognitive differences across race and gender is enormous".

That differences in realized cognitive ability exist is without dispute. Evidence for a genetic basis for these differences is pretty much nonexistent. The Flynn effect basically shreds the credibility of any argument from so-called "g". Disadvantaged groups invariably score 10-20 points lower than the dominant groups within societies, and when members of both emigrate to other countries, the gap vanishes.

Frankly, I'm pretty sure that my barbaric, 7th-century European ancestors would have tested very poorly on any IQ test.
There was a site called "The secret to productivity" or something, that was just big black letters that said "CLOSE THIS FUCKING WINDOW AND SO SHIT." It inspired me so much.

I promise to you that this shall be the last productivity article I ever write. Unless I find some good Greasemonkey plugins.
Dive Into Python | Online book
Wow. This Y Combinator thing suddenly seems even more tempting.
The Koan of Lazy Evaluation
He's right that time is the key resource. However, money can buy time. This has to be bought in certain established increments, however. (Full-time employees. Interns.) $80k is going to be a lot more useful than 16 chunks of $5000.

There are very few Open Source projects with some form of GUI that reach a professional level of polish without money. Anyone know of the exceptions?
i heard callcc and eval were on the table for modifications due to their effects on performance. anyone familiar with the details?
The issue is one of variance, not mean. When social intelligence is included, I think the average woman is probably smarter than the average man, but men have more variance and are thus more prominent at the extremes.

I doubt that there is a strong genetic basis for this. It is probably due, in large part, to the ways boys and girls are raised. Speaking very broadly, and acknowledging the existence of counterexamples; boys are raised to be smart, while girls are raised to be social and cooperative. This means that gifted male children can more easily zip ahead in school, but that the stragglers fall further behind in academic and social skills... and are more likely to end up becoming criminals. A lot of girls feel guilty and insecure about being "too smart" compared to their peers, which holds them back.
How could Berlin get there?! Passionless, uninteresting city...(IMHO of course, sorry Berliners!)
Actually I've heard of a number of Rails apps that are CPU bound rather than being IO bound, and that's with the database hosted on a separate server.
The results do seem a bit strange. I'm curious to know the exact method they used for their evaluation. The accompanying text mentions criteria such as "level of traffic congestion, air quality, and personal safety," but given that Honolulu came in at 28, they couldn't have given much weight to cost of living, could they?

Also, I'm guessing crime as a metric probably skews the results away from American cities, generally. America's per capita murder rate is much higher than european countries', for example. I think those of us who are upper/middle class are often insulated from the crime and social problems that exist -- usually in areas we never venture -- in certain portions of our cities and thus forget that, taken as a whole, our cities may not be as nice as we imagine them to be.
So, what's up with these insane hours?

You've written about the need for working long hours, but aren't Michael Parkatti and Mike Marrone taking it a bit too far?
What do the letters D,M,C,A spell?

I assume the Indian creators were too tough for Hasbro to negotiate a settlement with (good for them, not good for their addicted users).
Sprint Loses Early Termination Fee Case, May Pay $73 Million
Creating a game with PyGlet and Python
How to Read a Novel
This is some kind of weird seo spam.
Warp Speed Engine Designed
Apollo engineers make a design mistake, it kills people. If you don't like that because it doesn't effect enough people (Sorry I didn't realize that since Facebook serves 100 million people it is more of a feat than going to the moon) lets talk about Boeing. Boeing makes a design mistake, hundreds of people die. That has happened and will continue to happen.

Now you compare that to Facebook - if Facebook or Google goes down, who dies?

And this whole stalker point - wtf does that have to do with anything. Do you think there where no stalkers before the internet? The fact that people misuse something doesn't make it the engineers fault. If I designed kitchen knives and it is used to kill someone is it my fault? Hell no. But if I design a hatch door that doesn't open because of a design flaw, and people die, that is my fault.

That responsibility is the difference.
Maybe, or maybe they're just using it as a numeric reference. Something has to be 100, right?
"tenacious independent mindedness that makes you start a new search engine in 1998"

or even 2008, ie Cuill. I suppose it's all about feeling you can do something better and believing in yourself enough to prove the doubters and incumbents wrong, at the same time attracting like-minded folks into the fold.
I worry more about asteroid impacts, which we should develop a program to prepare for, than I do about "green men".
Because Firefox doesn't offer anything of real advantage beyond add-ons. If we're not talking open browsing, Opera beats it hand-down feature-wise, and Safari beats it hands-down design-and-efficiency-wise.
'We call it the Three Gorges of the sky. The dam there taps water, we tap wind'
So the people that built Rails, Django, Lift, various ORM libraries, and optimized libraries, such as Boost, all did it wrong? Hell, I hope everyone is that wrong at least once in their lives.

Edit: I also question the necessity or even the marginal utility of conferences.
It is a bit of a surprise that Scrabulous, an obvious copy of the board game Scrabble, managed to avoid shutdown as long as it did.

So what if it's a copy? You cannot copyright a game: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html What Scrabulous should have done is to modify their name so it's not even similar to Scrabble (and doesn't share a syllable and a half) and they should have fought this in a court. They've made enough money to hire an excellent lawyer in the US. Had Hasbro had a really good case, they would have filed charges in court. They opted for a generic DMCA...
As far as I can tell, how hard people work has little correlation with whether they have follower-type personalities. It does, however, have quite a high correlation with working on a startup. So my guess is the cause is that they're working on a startup.
Rumor: Apple's new MacBooks [might not] have Intel chipsets
$5000 isn't enough to quit your full-time job, so it's pretty much worthless. There is only so much time in a day, regardless of monetary incentive. The best way to "donate" to an open source project is to hire the developer(s) to work on the project for a certain percentage of their time. (Google does this.)

That said, the money is good for traveling to conferences. I can't believe this .NET guy can't think of a single conference that he wants to attend or speak at. I've already been to 4 this year, and have at least 3 more. Three are international, so the travel costs kind of add up. So that's what I use donations / book revenue / etc. for.
In 1.9 Ruby is also adding "Fibers" and built in Actor patterns (i.e., Erlang-like concurrency)- more exciting IMO. http://www.infoq.com/articles/actors-rubinius-interview
Yahoo SEC filing on Viaweb purchase (including Viaweb financials)
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...

Overall it looks like Ruby 1.9 is 2-4x faster, which is impressive but not massive.
You believe you can write it faster or better or more efficiently than any available library

Unless you're right.
Repository Formats Matter
10 Must-Have Python Packages for Social Scientists
-OS X is designed to do whatever you want to do as efficiently as possible. The fact that it lets you do a ton of things can be distracting, but I've found that I never impulsively open up GarageBand while I'm, say, replying to snarky critics.

-I like how you rebut my IM claim twice. It shows that you have a very focused mind.

-Very few essential communications actually REQUIRE back-and-forth responses. And, frankly, I think that the phone is a great way to have discussions. It means actually communicating, which is something a vast amount of people today ignore. I was going to mention using Campfire if you were really going for efficiency, but then I decided that most people just don't care.

-Yeah, because plug-ins really... I mean... plug-ins... Like, what would my life be... without, you know... plug-ins? Man?

So out of five rebuttal points, you attempted to rebut me... never. Nice. You're a real thinker, you.
I think his point is that if your goal is to create a web site, building your own framework is a waste of time. On the other hand, if your goal is to create a framework, knock yourself out. I don't know that I entirely agree but it's a decent rule of thumb.
So what do we need?
More advanced browsers?
I'm a big fan of not making people register until they're already committed to your service. Maybe instead of asking users to "Sign Up" right away you can have them just "Try it out". Then once they've input some data if they want to save it they can create an account.

And since I didn't sign up for the service, how are you enabling users to share what they've created? This is key to building your user base.
Bottom line, I think the site needs to be much easier to use. There are already a few apps like this, but one place you might be able to compete is on convenience.

First off, you might want to consider letting people play with this more without making an account. The registration was short, but making yet another account is still a big jump for some people (like me). You should let people enter cities and put pins in the map before they register so that they can play around with it and feel more comfortable. I think that would increase your conversion of visitors to sign ups.

You should find a way to add accounts via SMS or even the iphone GPS. That would make it way easier to track the various places I go than going back to the website. More moible integration seems like it's a good idea...these people travel a lot right?

I think your social system (the list of thumbnails when you click on "viewed by __ other people") looks pretty cool. Only one thought: That method of listing people places a lot of emphasis on the photos. It might be better to show more information about less people so that people can scan for something other than an eye catching photo.

Nice guy, keep it up guys
high ceremonial cost

That is an excellent turn of phrase. I think I will borrow it.
This is a nice little script. I added it to three of my sites.
No they weren't, but I suggest that the number of people who got a net win out of developing their own frameworks is statistically insignificant.

We can both reel of lists of great frameworks, but that's survivor bias at work, because we remember the winners. For every Rails, there are hundreds or even thousands of terrible in-house frameworks all competing to be the subject of a DailyWTF post.

Of course, this leads to an age-old debating point, namely if you can find a few exceptions to a rule, should you toss the rule out? Add a lot of fine print disclaimers? Or keep the rule and trust that anyone who knowingly violates it has a good reason in mind?