skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try writing a To Do list. In addition to being a proto-plan, there is also the feeling of accomplishment that comes from ticking thigns off the list.

I think that with procrastination, one of the other elements to it is how far away the "pay-off" is. Take my client-server writing friend here. The finished product is a long way in the future, so his brain sees a lot of hard work with no 'reward', hence procrastination. Whereas if he spices it up with some short term pay-offs, then the brain may perceive a better cost/benefit scenario.
I can't speak to the VC environment in Boston, but I do think there are lots of support resources for tech entrepreneurs in the Boston area, through events (TechStars, Lean Startup Challenge, etc.), meetups, support groups, startup spaces (such as the Cambridge Innovation Center) and educational networks fostered by MIT, Harvard, and other schools (even BU offers a mentoring service, modeled roughly on a program that MIT started).

There is also a small but strong media cohort that helps spread the word. It's nothing like Wired/TC/VentureBeat/assorted blogs/MSM bureaus in the Bay Area, but people like Scott Kirsner (Innovation Economy, a column in the Boston Globe), and the staff of the MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and some of the IDG publications write frequently about local startup activity.
And I doubt that they'll get aggressive like their counterparts in other areas of the country. People in this region are tighter with their money and need to fully understand the lifecycle of a entity before throwing money at it, versus having an urgency to be an early-stage investor like you may have out in SV.

But if we're going to go through the numbers that this old chestnut provides: http://wadhwa.com/2011/03/04/boston-vs-silicon-valley-compar...
If we manage to "run out" of water, then the obvious next step is to desalinate the ocean. There's a big difference between running out of water, and running out of cheap water.
The remaining eyeballs are also likely to be more valuable. I'm sure many advertisers would pay a premium to have their product shown to the sort of people who don't mind spending hundreds of dollars a year for a website. They also should have better demographics for paying customers to present to advertisers.
Great idea with a wicked execution; another why-didn't-I-think-of-that moments.
'Over' funded is a good thing too.
Node.js is non blocking server side javascript, but might blocking be better?
The downside of node.js is that due to its non blocking nature, coding must be callback oriented which requires a different programming approach and mindset. Code can become complex and callback nesting can make things hard for programmers.

Using Google V8 might it be practical to create a blocking server side javascript engine that is perhaps slower, but easier to program?
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My degree is in Computer Science. I fell in love with philosophy - political, spiritual and economics - when I was in my final year. My grades took a hit because I was convinced that I was in the wrong major. It took the quiet words of my thesis advisor to point out that I loved philosophy because my CS major had trained and opened my mind to become fertile ground.

At the end, he told me to focus on the road, not the destination and focus on taking steps rather than running ahead blindly. It was the best advice I have ever received.
I knew I should not have clicked on that link. Good times.
Splash pages will never go out of style.
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Very good article from a very good site.
I WILL read the whole article later, of that you can be sure.
I always thought these deals were typically done as stock swaps so it doesn't affect your capital gains?
Isn't this continuing the debate about centralised libraries vs. localised ones? Then you have PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 to bug fix, and new applications then need their own PHP interpreter or they add dependency crosslinks. That doesn't sound like it's getting rid of "complicated maintenance".
Since about the age of 18, my gut has always been wrong. Always. Took me many, many moons to realize this but, once figured out - I Always do the exact opposite my gut recommends.
A counterpoint: I don't like things that appear near my mouse. My mouse is rarely positioned where I'm looking, and anything that appears under my mouse when I'm about to click on something interferes with (and occasionally "steals") normal clicks. The worst is when a dialog pops up with important information, and the OK or Cancel button right under the mouse, just as I was halfway through clicking on something else.
I would disagree. If there is a choice to be made, and that choice truly matters, I believe there should be no way to accidentally make the choice.
I'm a big fan of clarity and non-ambiguous statements. If using a serial comma is what it takes to maintain that clarity, then so it shall be.
And now I cannot un-see it either. Five minutes. Train Wreck principle?
I'm not a tax expert so this assumption may be wrong, but if the 2X is being taxed as ordinary income at 35% wouldn't that imply that beagle3 is making at least $379,150 + 2X this year? I would consider someone with that kind of income to be rich.

Also, if the stock has gone down 40% can't you claim that as a loss when you sell and lessen your overall tax burden?
Google Reader for me for all of the other reasons already listed.
>the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point.

Kind of like when I watched the Atlantis space shuttle launch and then go back to working on the code for a social bookmarking service.

All joking aside, is he talking about an existential crisis, or something else? A common cause of existential crises is some kind of negative experience that prompts reflection and thinking as to why it happened, which sometimes leads to questioning the meaning of it all. The experience of which, if you went to school, you probably know pretty well. Most frequently after walking out of class after bombing a test.

Working link for the aforementioned article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/10101...
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I have some questions:

* Is the Jit in PyPy standalone, i.e. can it be used by other projects independently of Python? Is it documented?

* How does PyPy compare with highly optimised C?

* Assuming that the benchmarks that used to be at the Computer Benchmarks Game for PyPy are somewhat representative of overall performance, why is there still such an enormous difference with optimised C?

* There used to be this thing called restricted python. If one limits oneself to using that only, are benchmarks much better?

* I read somewhere that some projects have merged or combined forces. There used to be this thing called Unladen Swallow. There was also Psyco. Have either of these merged with/been absorbed by PyPy? Are any other such projects still going?

* Cython is another fast project. If it became part of mainline Python, would PyPy become irrelevant?
> Sounds like you're in the same boat as everyone else in your round, right?

5% of the investment is accounted for by US tax payers. The rest are not, so I'm not in the same boat.

> If the stock goes down further, you should be able to claim the loss on your taxes when you sell, which should mean you would need more than a 52% total decline to go in the red on the deal.

No. The tax event is on the grant, not a capital gain (therefore capital loss does not cancel). Furthermore, if I fall under AMT (very likely), I can't deduct anything.

> Are you an accredited investor?

Yes.
Only if done in very specific way (google "triangular merger", there are several variations).

This deal wasn't, and I wasn't in the driver seat to make it that way.
I can easily see myself bothering with a few seconds of technical effort to get to a sub-par page. That page has the specific thing I happen to want to look at, but that itself doesn't mean it's very good. If quality was all that mattered people would only visit one site, the best one.
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Your Start-up Is Not The Customer
Semantic argument about an asshole grinding on a woman in a club which was undesirable, even in the face of potential influence of "looks," even if it was a Brad Pitt type, the attention could have been undesirable.

Please picture 8 foot tall gigantic men wanting to sexually have at you on a 24 hour basis whence in public, and maybe you'll have an idea of what a women feels like. Or, go to jail as a frail man, then get the same idea (I'm reaching / exaggerating, but these discussions are getting very "all the dudes I know would never.." vs the reality of data, supporting evidence, statistics, and just the fact that the majority of men can overpower the majority of women. It is a physical dynamic men can't understand, unless the above extreme examples, or if you have had your ass kicked, badly, in a physical confrontation.)
I'm sorry, but I'm unconvinced. It's just too easy to use "human evolution" to explain all sort of behaviors. I think the problem is that you don't have to validate anything, you just tell a convincing story.

The nearest the author got to validating it was:

"[...] only a small minority of the fifty hyper-organized students I interviewed reported procrastination as a serious problem"

I don't know how this study was carried down, but it seems as self selecting as it could possibly get.

The author went from "early humans' advantage was complex planning" to "procrastination is your brain silently rejecting your ideas" in little more than a handwave. Here's what I think was lacking:

a) Why does the idea selection characteristic had to be an unconscious process?

b) If it had evolved to save lives, how can we be sure it would still kick off when lives aren't at risk?

c) Why would it manifest itself as a lack of motivation instead of more efficient alternatives such as fear, or simply losing interest?

d) If the brain is rejecting the idea, how do people cling to them for so long? Are we consciously overriding our brain?
The safe way of doing it, is limiting your users to accredited investors... if you think about it, AngelList is the closest thing to having this already. They just need standard terms and and a buy button.
Maybe I'm confused, but isn't Cython just a tool for writing C types and C functions directly in Python? Whereas PyPy, Jython, etc, are full runtime environments.
There isn't a clean way to initialize all of your static properties doing it that way. If you're using a language that has accessors you can call a private init method, but you have to do it for all of the properties. Or you can just use methods, but again you have to remember to call init at the beginning of them all. Or you could have a public init() and just remember to call it when your application first launches. Using a singleton is a natural way to have an entry point towards initialization. You can also have the best of both worlds by using static properties/methods that point to the singleton version.

In Java/C# you can use a nested class to ensure thread safety and cheat towards having your static methods. For example:

private int Foo() { }

public static int Foo() { return _instance.Foo(); }

private static FooBar _instance {
return Nested.instance;
}

FooBar() {
// Initialize here!
}

class Nested {

static Nested() { }

internal static readonly FooBar instance = new FooBar();

}
Are you rejecting an option just because it's simply bad, or also because there's a better option available? So in essence, you'd reject the idea of charging the mammoth, because you could throw the spear. Likewise, you'd reject the idea of sitting down in the library with a quadruple-tall mocha (and probably your study materials), because it doesn't seem viable. So, you procrastinate. But what's the better option, in this case?

The alternative route (procrastination) is also not a better option. Everyone that procrastinates (so that means everyone) knows when they're procrastinating, and have that 10% of their status quo thinking about the fact that they're procrastinating and shouldn't be procrastinating. I don't buy it—that means your brain thinks procrastination is better than just trying to do the work, because in the long run, we know procrastination is worse than just doing the work.

My argument only holds if you believe the brain is functionally logical, which... probably isn't true.
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Well, it might be _just_ 33% depending on how my other projects work out this year. Not much of a difference those 2%. I've been doing well so far with actual work, and my investments seem to be going well, except that I keep getting hit on the crazy taxes (to the point that GOOD investments end up as losses!)

The reason I "told HN" is that I was not aware of how bad not optimizing the taxes could be; I thought I'm wasting 5-10% of potential profits by not optimizing. Turns out to be more than 100% on a totally ordinary deal.

> Also, if the stock has gone down 40% can't you claim that as a loss when you sell and lessen your overall tax burden?

Not really - not with AMT.
I probably could. The stock went down during the week I was trying to get clearance from my lawyer :( It used to be illegal to hedge against SEC rule 144; Apparently, it is now legal (but check with your lawyer before you hedge -- don't trust an anonymous person on the internet)
I did _not_ know about the excess inventory. Do you mind posting a source?

It just seems like someone would be willing to pay $0.001 CPM at least for those impressions...

(edit: this HN post, interestingly enough, seems to be the top of my google searches for this :p)
They used to explicitly prohibit you.

As far as I can tell, they don't explicitly prohibit you but they say something like "we'll look at it badly if you do" in their publications. Make of that what you will.
I think he's missing the point. "Do what you love" does not mean "do whatever the fuck pleases you, not caring about consequences and reality."

Rather, it means: Find a career and lifestyle that is intellectually and emotionally fulfilling and make the best of it.
And your efforts might imply that the photographs depict only the fish and not the tool or the tool use.

Diver photographs tool-use by fish?
You say procrastination, I say lazy evaluation.
I recommend picking up a copy of the movie Startup.com, it wont assuage your concerns of going into business with family, but it paints a much easier to digest picture.
No one listen to the same artist over and over for the rest of their lives, facebook is living its hype moment what's great, see what happened to many internet companies. Nobody rules forever.

If Mark could build facebook with US$25K I don't imagine what he can do with U$20.4Bi, so Mr Zuck sell those stake right now.
I have some answers!

* Yes, the JIT is part of the RPython translation toolchain (more on this in a few) and can be used in other interpreters, for example we have Scheme, Javascript, Prolog, and Haskell in varying level of completeness (Prolog being the most complete).

* Highly optimized C? Not spectacularly, normal C, not bad, on numerical code we often hover around gcc -O1.

* They weren't representative, most of that code was heavily optimized for CPython, which has very different performance characteristics.

* RPython is the language the PyPy interpreter is written in, it's not really meant for general purpose code, it's designed mostly for VMs, but it does run at basically C-like speed.

* Unladen Swallow was Google's fork of CPython, it's basically dead at this point, retrospective here (http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospect...), Psyco was an extension module for CPython that added a JIT, it's no longer maintained (but still works), it's creator is the lead developer of PyPy.

* Cython isn't Python (this could be a meme or something), it does not implement the entire language and thus isn't directly comparable (although we still often compare, because it is a competitor in the space of "making Python-like stuff faster").
Isn't that what WordPress.com is?
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Best roles or positions for strong speakers?
Hi,

What are the best roles, positions or job opportunities for a person who is very good at speaking to groups of people (5 to 100, or even higher) and technically inclined?
Will RoR help you make useful products that attract paying customers? If so, use it. If not, don't.

Who gives a shit about stroking potential developers' ego's. Focus on your customers above all else.
Yes! I love this. Thank you for telling it in a succinct and human way.

I'm going to bookmark this and send people to it often.

I get lots of emails from people wanting to know what I think of their business idea. 99% of the time it's a business that I would never use. (I don't have an iPhone or iPad. I'm not looking to share things online with friends. Etc.)

I tell them to just ask their potential customers, not me. But your post describes it much better. Thanks for writing it.
My wife is a high school English teacher. The ongoing joke with teachers is they get 3 months a year off. What other profession gets that, right?

Speaking from experience, she generally brings home work every night (grading, lesson planning, etc). Weekends too. This fluctuates based on time of year (grading a round of research papers, preparing new lessons for a new quarter, etc).

Summers off? Kinda. New lessons and curriculums often have to be prepared for the following year. She's been doing that for a bit already whenever our little guy naps.

The other part of overlooked is the emotional toll. In my wife's case, she's dealing with high school freshmen, juniors, seniors, all who are one hell of a handful most of the time. Last year, she had a class that had her crying more than a few times. The kids were literally trying to make her cry.

But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference.

(For the record, my wife's district actually pays pretty well, so I don't think she's underpaid).
How about the one that got all the fame, made the prevailing technology, didn't backstab his partners, and wasn't celibate?

in other words, neither seems desirable to me.
new trend: movie studios speculating on start-up movie rights like VCs on Start-ups
When are you planning on open sourcing the Python version?
I have co-founded a business with one of my best friends and then someone we didn't know prior to getting started. Working with both has been an awesome experience. It really just comes down to picking the right people.
I usually have a konsole open ready to run make; and two kwrite windows open, side by side. Sometimes also a konqueror window open to the directory containing the source code I'm working on at the time.

As lukesandberg points out, there's no reason to have 10+ files open at once. Work on one thing at once and only open up files when you're working on them or need to check something (e.g., "what order did I put the parameters to that function").
* Yes...I have already seen it for some "build your own language interpreter" examples. Not sure about the documentation quality.

* http://geetduggal.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/speed-up-your-pyt... lists an example where PyPy is in fact faster than C++ with STL. Not sure how it would compare to well-optimized C, but remember that JIT warmup time will hurt you for short lived jobs.

* Can't answer this one, sorry.

* RPython is still around---PyPy is written in it! Certainly it would be more friendly toward the JIT, which does best when the types of variables are consistent (which is required by RPython). Plus, RPython can be translated directly to native code and you can get rid of the JIT entirely.

* Unladen Swallow tried to do a lot of the same stuff that PyPy is doing, but on top of LLVM. It never did much better than CPython (within an order of magnitude), but if it did they were planning to merge it into CPython (of which it was a branch). PyPy is a followup to Psyco (which only ran on 32 bit x86) by the same people, but Psyco ran under CPython.

* Cython does not interpret Python---it compiles from a language that looks a lot like Python but with C-like semantics (for example, optional strong typing, and the ability to directly call C functions), and turns it into C or C++ code that can be compiled into a Python module. As such, it targets a slightly different use case.
And your point is that Facebook isn't a product "of unambiguous value to society" I suppose? And that Zuckerberg's supposed lack of "innovation" is the cause of this deficiency?

Facebook may not be your thing, but I'd have to say the fact that tens of millions of people enjoy the benefits that Facebook brings to their lives, enough to visit the site multiple times a day pretty much proves its value to society.

And I believe pretty strongly that taking ideas that were innovated by other people and improving upon them counts as innovation in its own right. Facebook may not have done anything earth-shatteringly new, but what it did do, it did better.
I asked Rob Pike why they didn't add pattern-matching given that it already has multiple returns and some other baby steps in that direction. His response was, "We considered it, but it turned out to be too much work in the compiler."

That was a huge WTF to me. Isn't your job as a language designer to do that work so that I, the language user, don't have to?
I think I read in different places that the option pool for a startup is usually around 10-15%. So assuming those guys on the list are not part of it, and FB allocated half of it to employees, that is nearly 4B (at a 80B valuation). If you split that evenly between 2000 employees that is $2M per employee. Ok, I know my math gots to be wrong. Can someone help?
That's nice, but it doesn't answer the question of whether two days is a normal amount of time to grow a trachea or if they used a growth stimulant.
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That's what I thought. How do they offer cash in that type of deal? As a fixed price purchase agreement that hits after the holding period?

(I'm still learning how all of this works..)
"smashing success". You have to love this guy. He succeed in not wasting time on a project that his audience does not want. Kudos.

On the other side, though, what would have happened if JD went around and asked about Twitter or Zuck did customer development before writing FB?
Ask HN: Is the Web 2.0 Expo worth attending
I was considering attending the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo this fall in NYC. Are these types of conferences worth the amount of money charged? How about the "Lite" sessions?
The best thing I've read on this topic is The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel (http://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Equation-Putting-Thing...).

He concludes that different people procrastinate for different reasons and that those reasons boil down to:

- learned helplessness (you have a low expectation of success)

- boredom (you don't value the task), and

- poor impulse control.

He then gives specific advice for working out which applies to you and then for dealing with each of these, which is far more useful than either saying, "Just do it," or telling an impossible-to-apply just-so story about mammoths and frontal lobes.
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