skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The claims that the article documents "one of the world's most efficient studiers" is very bizarre.

He studied 3.5 hrs studying for an exam, not counting any of the time studying the subject in the weeks and months before the exam. That sounds pretty normal. He's not saying he studied 3.5 hrs during the whole semester total and aced the course as a result.

I typically spent 0-15 minutes studying for exams because I was already prepared, always got A or A+ and usually the top score in the class at a renowned program at a top university.

I did well because most the students were not interested in design or engineering and were there because their parents wanted them to study it. These other students (by which I mean asians) would do things like get ahold of the test in advance (cheating) and get together and try to figure out the answers. But they were mostly clueless because they thought cheating would overcome their failure to meaningfully study during the semester. Cheating made their academics much worse because it was a crutch they relied upon rather than bothering to do the necessary work. But the poor results of the cheaters distorted the curve and made it relatively simple for others to get an A: it's not as if I got perfect scores. I remember one class I got something like 20% and that was the highest score in the class. Yeah, it was a difficult test, as it should have been, after all this was engineering school.

Me, I did the projects and read the assignments. Before the exam here are things you should do:

1. Do not study or think about the topic at all.

2. Drink a glass of wine the night before.

3. Go to bed early and get at least 9 hrs sleep.

This assumes you have been keeping up. If you have not been keeping up, cramming won't do squat for you except make you tired and do worse than you would have from just getting some sleep and guessing on the test.

The only studying specifically for a test I would do is to casually flip through my notes a few minutes before the test, where I'd have notes in the margins about things that were easy to get mixed up and such stuff that I had specific problems with. These things I had already spent time mastering in the months or weeks leading up to the exam, I obviously don't bother trying to learn anything for the first time at this point, that's just silly.

One last tip - don't care about grades at all. If you care about grades you'll be motivated to get high grades, which means you'll be drawn to cheat and then you'll end up not actually knowing anything in reality. By not giving a rat's ass what grades you get, you have no motivation whatsoever to get involved in cheating clubs and groups, and will study what you want when you want, and you'll do great.
Fair enough and thanks for saying so. I suppose I just wondered what (if any) explanation there was for these particular preferences. That is, I understand that a linter (by definition) might be very picky and strict, but usually there's some basis for the rules. In the case of the two rules I asked about, I just don't see the rationale.
The time spent learning the course would still have been spent, had one not used this special method of revision. Still a good point, though. The idea that one can magically learn for an exam in three hours or so is sadly not true...
Not surprising, Reddit was in the perfect position at the perfect time to suck up all of Digg's traffic when they briefly faltered.

On top of that they've curated not just a large community (and even more impressive -- self-sustaining sub-communities) but a culture that is just as sticky as the content. They are properly entrenched now.
"The process of doing isn't sufficient in of itself to improve."

Not always sufficient but it's certainly necessary and the barrier most people have is they don't "do" enough. Feedback and self analysis frequently follow from the doing and a lot of self-analysis occurs during the doing.
SEO filler is content written for the explicit purpose of raising your site's traffic by ranking higher on search engines. In order to be good filler, it has to look informational; but it actually contains no useful information.

Your essay spends pages and pages expounding the claim that verbal diarrhea is a good thing. Is it a joke...?
I don't know about controversy, but exposing yourself as an idiot is a very low risk, and has even lower likelihood of negative consequences. If I write something idiotic, and someone posts in on HN, it never makes it to the front page. This can happen 99 times in a row. AFAIK, there is no penalty for writing idiotic things, there is no ban applied to my blog.

I think the kinds of things you are quoting are archaic. They belong to a world of books, where people write four or ten or at twenty books in a career, and each one is precious and carries with it much reputation. I don't see the same thing with blogging at all.

Even if it was, so what? If you're young and make mistakes, who cares? Are you afraid that some day, someone will say "He's an experienced guy, but when he was nineteen he wrote a piece of garbage?" Self-censoring because you are an idiot or inexperienced makes no sense whatsoever: If you don't trust yourself to speak, how do you trust yourself to know whether what you have to say is interesting?

Reputation is asymmetrical. People start companies and fail many times, but one success makes a career. While I was writing garbage in 2004, people told me that I had no idea what I was talking about, and then one day in 2005 I wrote a rant called "What I've Learned From Failure," and immediately everyone forgot the garbage.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/01/what-ive-learned-from-fa...

Should I really have waited a year to write that? How would I know to write that piece but not to write "Are you a perfectionist?," which I wrote the week before? How would I know to write that one but not "Passionate Communication," which I wrote the following week?
My Most Meta San Francisco Startup Experience...Yet
Yes you can! Our indexes are persisted in Lucene format internally. Nobody has asked to download an index but if they asked we'd make it available.
Firefox does, if the calling web page is itself a local file and the XHR requests a file in the same directory as or in a subdirectory of that page.
This has forced me to just go back to pirating TV Shows instead of giving them my money. I'd gladly pay for it, but they won't let me.
That's what blows my mind. There are very few good business reasons for Comcast to be in the position they're in. "Customers hate them" is a symptom of the underlying disease: chronic-head-up-the-ass. They have the technology and relationships to make huge headway on every one of the items you complained about. The only problem not directly addressable by technology is price, but I think there's a solution to that as well.

Apple does very well selling hardware (at a premium) that is typically 6-8 months (often more) behind the rest of the market. When they upgrade their lineup, prices typically don't change much, but the hardware is upgraded. How do they get away with this? Because they have something consumers want. They provide a great experience.

What's the lesson? Consumers will pay what you ask, and they won't complain (much), provided you give them what they want. Use your technology for good! Provide awesome services that consumers want, and no, running down a check list saying, "But we have streaming movies 'On Demand™'" isn't what we want. We want an experience that makes us happy we bought your service. Get with it!
Numbers look great. Time on site is an average of 15 and a half minutes, which is pretty impressive user engagement. Looks like Conde Naste is committing some additional investment into Reddit. It will interesting to see how they try to generate revenue.
TechStars Boston Demo Day highlights health start-ups
It sounds to me like one of the ISAs is x86/x64 Windows and the other is the thing you get with Direct3D. Sure it's "heterogenous" but only in the same sense as, say, .Net managed and native code both built with Visual Studio are.

I need to watch the video if I'm going to complain any more.
I definitely would use a nice separate service for incoming emails because parsing incoming emails is a PITA. There are services like Mailgun or Sendgrid with incoming mail parse APIs, but they concentrate more on the sending end.

Features:
- reliable (!) charset conversion (everything to UTF-8)
- attachment handling (large attachments too)
- backup storage (in case of problems on my end)
- and letting me choose what I want to receive, such as full source code, HTML, text only, "safe HTML" (HTML stripped of JS, tracking pixels and other presumably dangerous code).

These I'd consider as basic requirements.

Later on it 'd be nice to have other stuff such as spam ratings, filters etc.

As for the pricing: please only charge for the number of emails received and maybe storage used, but don't charge based on the number of mail boxes ;)

So, when do you launch? :D
The Alive Web (Why interaction is more valuable than content online)
Cable Internet already provides more than enough bandwidth. There are been many times where my room mate and I are both streaming content from NetFlix, and our third room mate is watching Hulu in the living room.

No issues with lag, or slow downs or anything like that.
The Strategic Commander looks like an awesome beast. And I like your idea of keyboards that were mice. If there were some way to move beyond the obvious ergonomic issues, that is. It would definitely be for the power user. Or power gamer. I mean, these guys already learn some pretty insane (to me) mice[1][2] to get an edge.

[1] http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=gaming+mice&um=...]
[2] http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=gaming+mice&um=...
type Ctrl-F2 and then "hi". Problem solved.
Now that you've explained SEO-filler, I refute the supposition thus: You explain that SEO-filler is written with the intent of attracting search engine referral traffic. I have no such intent, therefore my writing is not SEO-filler or anything else related to SEO.

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by an author's love of reading his own writing.
I'm ok with sacrificing the second hand market on the alter of digital downloads. Getting away from the constraints of physical distribution has opened up so many options for pricing on services like Steam, and it's allowing startup companies like Runic Games to really thrive. The future of game companies is going to be so much leaner then they are right now.
Reinigung wien
Strangely, this growth happens in the exact same time I ponder leaving reddit because of its degradation.
Show HN: My weekend project on the Mac App Store
The point is that if you, say, go to a conference, you want to see the random pictures that strangers snapped which you might be in.
Yeah, the id thing is just bs. That's the point of id's, to be used for non-repeating tags in the html. While you could try to generalize and find all instances where id's shared similar properties, then extract those and apply them to classes, then add those classes to the elements, that just seems like a ridiculous approach to achieve reusability. In addition, if you move that direction, you start to deal with class bloat, which is no better than just adding inline styles (ie div class="red centered absolute fullwidth", etc)
>Isn't the whole point of an ID that it is like a class, but unique?

The argument against IDs is to encourage a mindset for making reusable rules. Obviously, in any project of even basic complexity, you're going to run into elements that only appear once per document. Having a class rule that's used only once is not only acceptable, but probably an inevitability.

In my projects, I use IDs purely for Javascript identification. I never use IDs to style things because 1) they complicate CSS specificity rules and 2) I get an urge to couple the element with JS, which creates this weird bind between JS and CSS that shouldn't exist.

The other end of the argument will suggest that it makes for better code readability: an element with an ID guarantees the author intended for this element to appear only once in this document.

There's the whole "IDs are faster than classes" argument; the renderer has to do a substring match instead of a full string match on classes, which you can imagine with today's processors is a relatively tiny hurdle given the scale of an average HTML document.

The whole thing is a trivial matter, but there exists a group of people who focus a good portion of their career on, specifically, CSS, and like any master of the craft, arguments at their end of the knowledge spectrum is going to boil down to things that seem like minor details to laymen. So don't worry about IDs vs. classes too much.
I've used two different formal ORMs, ActiveRecord and JPA (backed by hibernate), and I've never felt completely at ease with them. In fact, I was lining up to agree that ORMs suck, except that I realized I'm probably using one no matter what I do.

If I have a model object, and I want to to persist it in a relational database, then I'm going to need to do something that persists and retrieves this object back and forth from the RDBMS, right? And if I want to retain the flexibility to switch to a different database (or different persistence strategy in general), then I'm going to some way to specify the implementation details for each possible approach, and swap them in depending on which approach I take. The java world tends to handle this with an ORM and a DAO tier these days, using DI to swap in the desired implementation (sigh, Java really is a soup of acronyms these days), whereas Rails developers tend to use migrations. But either way, I'm pretty much stuck with an ORM. It may be an ORM that works at a very low level, directly with objects, sql, connections, and transactions rather than through a higher level API, but it's still an ORM... (right?)

In spite of the inevitability of an ORM (I really hope I'm defining this correctly), I'm going to agree with a lot of the points made in this blog post. If I'm using SQL, I really don't like having the SQL hidden from me. And I really can't stand languages (like HSQL) that force me to re-learn a variant of SQL. ActiveRecord and Migrations are, without question, very productive, but I like to see the objects and understand very directly how they are being persisted and retrieved. I want to see the fields and methods, and I want to see the SQL. I've found that I almost always end up changing it, and it's easier to do that when it isn't all hidden from me.

Rails offers me so much that I can get over this little issue of mine, but I don't feel the same way about Hibernate. My personal experience is that if Rails isn't going to help me, and something has pushed me to use Java, I probably need to write a lot of lowish level code anyway.
FOLLOW US ON TWEEETER
Patronizing comments like "Have you had enough quiet time today?" are anything but innocuous. That would be a huge red flag for me that the relationship is unhealthy. There's no reason to tolerate such overt disrespect.
"If your project really does not need any relational data features, then ORM will work perfectly for you, but then you have a different problem: you're using the wrong datastore. The overhead of a relational datastore is enormous; this is a large part of why NoSQL data stores are so much faster."

I have never been able to receive a straight answer to this question: Is there a "NoSQL" database that provides the same ACID properties that major RDBMS databases do? Things like "eventual consistency" are entirely unacceptable for the software that I work on.
How do you know that the choice you made is a consequence of introversion and not some other reason?

If you can't explain your behavior to your roommate in terms of immediate personal motivations don't expect a generalized explanation to be any more enlightening.
eh. Been backpacking plenty of times by myself (as well as with other people).

EDIT: I do understand it's just an example and there are indeed some activities that need to be done in groups and would often, in practice, be done in groupls of people you don't know or don't know well. But there are also lots of typically multi-person activities that you certainly can do by yourself.

I do lots of solo travel, partially because I'm often traveling solo on business. I find a lot of people cant conceive of heading off by themselves for a weekend or longer, especially in a foreign country.
I knew some, but not all of that. Thanks for the links!
During their presentation at Velocity today, they made the github project public:

https://github.com/stubbornella/csslint
Don't pay attention to that tool. Nicole has her own and peculiar view on CSS and many rules in CSS Lint make very little sense.

There is nothing wrong with .foo.bar. There are problems with outdated versions of IE, should that stop you?

There is nothing wrong with ID selectors.

There is nothing wrong with having display:inline on the floated element. No harm done, fixes double margin bug in IE6 if you need that.

It is ok to have many rules for heading no matter that CSS Lint says.

It is ok to have width, padding and borders defined. I do that all the time and surprise surprise, result is just as I intended. I am not sure if CSS Lint knows anything about box-sizing rule.

Etc., etc.

Unit-less zeroes, no empty rules do make sense, but I guess decent CSS compressor would take care of those.
You don't need banks or wallets. You just need reputation management.

Users can trade amongst themselves if every user in a market has visibility into the reputation of their counterparties.

Even using untraceable pseudonyms, there is economic value in having a high trading reputation. Oftentimes companies on eBay and in other markets are able to command a price premium over their competitors based largely on their reputation. B&H PhotoVideo is a perfect example of this. They don't have the lowest prices, but they have easily the best reputation on the web, especially among professionals and consumers that purchase the types of products they sell. They are extremely successful and many people I know purchase from them based largely on their reputation.

The general equation that would govern whether counterparty A would defraud counterparty B would basically be:

if the value of price premium of Counterparty A's reputation multiplied by trading volume is greater than the transaction amount then they have an economic incentive to remain honest.

Of course this equation isn't that simple. For example, the reputation damage from one fraudulent transaction committed by Counterparty A would not ripple through the system immediately. This means that if Counterparty A wanted to extract the maximum value from his reputation at the cost of torpedoing his reputation, he would be able to commit as many fraudulent transactions as his daily transaction volume multiplied by the number of days it takes for fraud to be reported in the reputation system.

So long as the "speed of fraud reporting" is small, Counterparty A can enjoy very little economic value from torpedoing his reputation, expect in the case that the transaction amounts are very very high.

One way to increase the amount that could be transacted solely on reputation would be to apply relationship data to reputation. i.e. my reputation helps/hurts the reputation of those that I vouch for and vice versa. Such a system would greatly reduce the incentive to defraud others, because you'd have to hurt those that placed their trust in you. This system is of course vulnerable to Bernie Madoff types that take advantage of the trust of their in-group, but then again everyone who put their money in with Bernie Madoff are idiots who are in deniable about their financial stupidity.
Hah, I was just sitting in the talk at Velocity where they announced and open-sourced this.
I found the example complicated. Real learning comes from simplifying. In the case of the provided example, it is trivial to simplify.

$100 is worth $121 after two 10% interest cycles. The PV formula asks the reverse: what is $121 two cycles out, worth today (what is its present value)? In reverse, we can calculate that by dividing $121 with 1.1 twice. That's pretty much what the formula is : FV/(1 + i)^N or $121/((1.1)^2) = $100.

kapish?
benvanderbeek:
Thanks for the positive feedback. I agree that we have to be skeptical of an all powerful government state, it is just as dangerous as an all powerful corporate state.

Preserving the decentralized integrity of the Internet, where no one government, corporation, or person "owns" the Internet... rather it is essentially owned by every one, whether you're Bill Gates or Ben Vanderbeek - everyone is equal in communication.

Don't get me wrong I believe in a capitalism, within the constitutional framework of a democratic-republic... but our Freedom of Communication and 1st Amendment is too important to be put up for sale.

Tim Wu's, "Master Switch" does a really good job explaining how communication mediums over the years have gone from Open to Closed. I encourage any one who is interested in the subjects of Communication Empires, Internet, and the democracy to get this book:)

Here's a blog posting I recently wrote on savetheinternet.com

I'd love to get your feedback on it:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/06/14/killswitch-and-...
Your post made me take a step back and realize that most of the day-in, day-out communication on Skype is less pressing than I originally thought. There are times when it's important to be around all day, such as during release sprints, but other than that, as time goes on it seems it will be less important that I'm on schedule with the rest of the team. Certainly the benefits of me working after a solid 8 hours of sleep outweigh any negatives.

The approach I'm planning on taking from here on out is to get to bed around 4 AM. This will allow me to get up at noon, do any day activities I need to do, and then start work in the late afternoon where I can then overlap with the beginning of their day and be a part of the standups.
Data in sight: making the transparent visual
I observed that also. I wonder if it's a flat cyclical fluctuation that popular public social news sites go through, or if it's a sloped cyclical movement (usually downward).
Write.
I'm right with you on that one!

Thanks for the support.
http://devongovett.github.com/pdf.js/test.html
Thank you for confirming my views. Best wishes.
What is Conde Nast's plan for monetizing Reddit? How much operating profit would it take to recover the investment that bought Reddit?
"The animation archived on this page shows the geocentric phase, libration, position angle of the axis, and apparent diameter of the Moon throughout the year 2011, at hourly intervals. The Current Moon image is the frame from this animation for the current hour.

This marks the first time that accurate shadows at this level of detail are possible in such a computer simulation."

It's a sim.
Partnership for a New American Economy
Whacky Wiki: How Some Wikipedia Restrictions Can Reduce Content Quality
8mb per thread is just constant overhead.
Delete after "Write", then add full stop to the end.
Be A Better Entrepreneur: Be A Little Selfish
Reading "JavaScript: The Good Parts" is an excellent crash course in writing decent JS but JSLint regularly ensures that you stay on the right track. Reading through CSSLint's guidelines, I agree with the bulk of it and am excited to have CSSLint keep my stylesheets on the right track. Hopefully an analogous TextMate "run csslint on save" bundle is right around the corner!