skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In any case, I forgot to set my alarm tonight and woke up after exactly three hours, wham. Anybody trying to adjust to a new sleep schedule would need an alarm for some months to stay on track; that by itself doesn’t mean you’re constantly sleep-deprived. In fact, the only times in my life that I didn’t need an alarm, I was polyphasic!

How's that for not immediately incurring any excess sleep penalties?

Rebuttal might be the wrong word but it points out some serious flaws in Wozniaks conclusions. What of his in your opinion basic point is untouched?

Regarding REM etc, here's a polyphasic forum discussion on Wozniaks article: http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/topic/340/not-sure-if-its-pos...
Interesting. By the way, no need for URL shorteners: http://www.bfxr.net/?s=4%2C0.5%2C0.7518%2C0.0237%2C0.1582%2C...

(People avoid URL shorteners here. Keeps the Rick Rolling low.)
Quashing the Self-Improvement Urge
Thanks for the compliments! The "/path" issue with URL forwarding sounds like a bug... we'll look into it. What browser are you using?
Super Meat Boy is amazing, it is definitely worth the $5. Although Bit Trip Runner seems engaging from the few minutes I've played, the graphics are little blurry and it ends up straining my eyes. The other games definitely look interesting though.
That's why I phrased it the way I did. It isn't "just" scientific studies, it's that if you examine the frequently-cited evidence of successes and follow it downstream, you find it actually ended in failure. (Or in the case of famous figures in history who putatively followed bizarre sleep schedules, generally apparently made from whole cloth, or on occasion, simply one of the people who didn't sleep polyphasically but simply slept less, a phenomenon not well understood but abundantly documented and with no evidence there is any ability to become a low-sleep person by any known activity, and certainly not as easily as simply sleeping less.) As gurkendoktor pointed out, citing Steve Pavlina as a success story is not a good sign. It's hard to even come up with solid or real anecdotal evidence that this works!

Also, as I said with "siesta", there is definitely evidence of alternate sleep schedules, basically to the point that it is so uncontroversial it is almost not worth discussing. What I don't see is any evidence that anyone not simply genetically disposed (for unknown reasons) to two-hour sleep nights can cut their required sleep per day by 3/4s or more by some crazy scheduling regimen.
So maybe you'd like to share what do you think of LStack UX?

Regarding password fields - that was conscious choice not to mask them. Do you think it could have negative impact on users acquisition?
Money = Happiness only if it's an investment in experiences. I'm living proof.
looks like GAE quota was reached. fixing now.

article is also mirrored on tumblr @

http://dedegroup.tumblr.com/post/14177518904/bluetooth
> Throw out the old cap tables. A founder doesn’t get 30% and an early engineer shouldn’t get 0.25%. Those are old numbers from when you had to raise VC capital before you could build a product. Before everyone could and did start a company.

Choice quote. I'm kind of amazed this isn't brought up more.
Saga of a Stolen Domain Name and How it Was Recovered
What about audio? I'm incredibly frustrated that I have 4 different devices capable of exporting Bluetooth audio, but I have to go through a bug-ridden and annoying pairing process to hook one up to my car or home stereo, so I don't even bother.
is it still broken? rand out of quota for a few minutes so maybe not all the assets loaded.
The key point in the article lies towards the end:

An important point to keep in mind is that, in order to maintain flexibility, entrepreneurs shouldn’t give new investors the ability to block an exit or new financings. Investors can get this block in one of two ways – explicit blocking rights (under the “control provisions” section of a VC term sheet) or by controlling the board of directors. These are negotiable terms and startups with momentum should be very careful about giving them away.

There's the rub.

Founder control of the board is hard but possible.

I really can't imagine a VC fund being happy about an exit below the valuation at their round, especially when they have deployed a big chunk of their fund via a big round.

Any experienced VCs/founders want to comment on how common it is for startups to be able to negotiate a term sheet where VCs have no explicit blocking rights?

For reference, YC's AA round template documents for angel investments, widely considered to be very founder friendly, include the following:

So long as any of the Preferred is outstanding, consent of the holders of at least 50% of the Preferred will be required for any action that: (i) alters any provision of the certificate of incorporation if it would adversely alter the rights, preferences, privileges or powers of the Preferred; (ii) changes the authorized number of shares of Preferred; or (iii) approves any merger, sale of assets or other corporate reorganization or acquisition.
Thanks for the feedback. Did you link your Foursquare account, did you see results update? (or was it unclear you could even connect with Foursquare?)
I can't middleclick on results meaning that I cannot make tabs of things I am interested in.

Not sure why it is all javascript. The functionality is nothing special. The things you do with Javascript are annoying to me (popup windows that are no browser/OS-controlled windows).

Apart from that it seems nice. Seemingly good results for my non-USA hometown which is rare.
oh man. can you retry? i think it's cause not all the assets loaded (ran out of free quota on GAE) fixing now.
Our prices are $10-15 per domain depending on how many credits you buy at a time.

Better integration with Google Apps is already high on our list... check back soon!
Just pointing out that Musk is not necessarily a 'billionaire' in actual net worth.
> - commenting on docs (cut-and-paste programming ;))

Very true and rarely mentioned. PHP docs never had the fancy wiki/social/javadoc features you see in many languages, just a primitive comments system - and it was perfect.

When you were picking it up back when "PHP3" yielded 0 results in Amazon (and we had to change the oil on our desktops every week) the docs were your bible, not merely in the sense of occasionally contradicted themselves but also in having examples, Q&A and recipes for common tasks posted by your peers in the comments, much faster than doc writers could catch up with the language's growth.
The best way to deal with a downvote is to assume that it was an accident.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347793

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348210

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348427

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348679

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3347267

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3349278

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3346609 <- despite being one of the worst actual links, this has all the comments.
What's a resume farm? I'm actually pretty new to looking for a job. I have been in the military for almost a decade.
Only, I don't use Wikipedia "by typing it's URL". I just visit it that way. I use it by entering a query in the search box.

But with things like the App Store, or even apt-get and the like, native binaries can very much match that friction-less "installation".

One major benefit that the web has is that:

1) you don't mess with your system (when using a web app)
2) you get automatic updates (when the server code updates)

well, with the sandbox/app store model that mobile and native apps are going, the same can also hold true to them.

Is there a single point of the web that cannot be replicated in native-land? I'll take Apple's App Store as an example, but you can substitute things like the Android store, apt-get, whatever:

Easy discovery: App Store search, plus curation (same as web).

Easy, no mess, installation: see App Store / iPhone App Store.

Automatic updates: App Store updates

Use web technologies: no problem, just add a webkit view in the app.

Performance: better for native.

Integration: better for native.

Look and Feel: better for native.

Ubiquiteness: you can have the same app in your laptop / phone / tablet Plus a web interface as a last resort (for example: Evernote).

When laptops / smartphones / tablets were rarer, being able to access, say, your web mail, from anywhere with a connection without installing anything, made for a good proposition. Now, though? I, for one, only use the web Dropbox / Evernote / Gmail / Twitter interfaces as a last resort.
Agreed. This shift hasn't taken root yet and I think you're going to see a lot of startups that succeed caught on to the fact that the extra early-stage equity they can retain (due to less onerous funding) is best given to the first N employees than held onto by the founders. Taking the equity the VC's normally would have gotten and giving it to your first several employees now opens the door for you to hire people who are at the top of their field as your first employees, if they are not totally risk averse. I think it might turn out we end up inventing a new term for these "post founder, pre employee" folks since they are going to be a big differentiators for this generation of startups.
As an aside, we're hiring engineers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3160100

We're working on interesting problems at scale, like crawling the web and big data analytics. If this sounds interesting, it's worth reaching out :).
Do you really gain much from a carrier plane if you want to reach orbital velocity? LEO velocity being ~18,000mph, and any realistic carrier plane going much slower than that.
Indeed it's not evidence to the contrary. How about leaving the question open until proper research has been done? The fact that there are anecdotal reports of people sleeping polyphasically should at the very least hint at the possibility of it working, rather than, as Wozniak takes it, dismiss it with what's in essence a very non-scientific approach.

To me it seems obvious that Wozniak has a clear agenda with the article considering his general advocacy of free running sleep as the Only Path.
Some TLDs will be 2 or 3 credits per year instead of 1. We're still working out pricing on everything.

Yes, we're actively working on the co.uk (and about a dozen more TLDs) and hope to launch quite a few more within the next few weeks.
Great point! I'll add this to our todo list. Anything else?
I agree with the philosophy of "do one thing, do it well", but my problem with a lot of app ideas is that they focus on adding one feature to an existing app. I dislike this because then I have to switch accounts just for one extra feature. Instead, I think there should be a focus on providing one value in a product. It should solve one problem, and solve it really well. That means defining and scoping the problem in real life terms. The difference is you might need to write several features in order to have the perfect workflow.
"""On the whole, web apps are more accessible. Native apps are a nice bonus to this experience, however if the core is not web-based, then it loses a lot of value."""

Well, that can be easily solved with native apps that also have a web counterpart, for desperate times (i.e in the middle of Tahiti without your laptop/mobile phone/tablet).
Inspired by this very presentation, I recently knocked together a library for munging text streams in Python, rather than calling through to sed and grep.

If anyone's interested, the code's here: https://github.com/inglesp/munger.py
Yep, you're almost certainly right. I'd bet on it being more than 70% though.
VCs will lose their grip on tech startups
Thanks, we look forward to your feedback!
completely agree. as someone that's just about to graduate, i have to say i was a little shocked when i figured out this is the way things are. the difference between the first engineer and one of the founders never seemed so categorical to me, and this was one of the few things that made me feel it's not really worth joining a startup as early as I'd like (to work on interesting+useful things, have impact, etc.) unless I'm actually involved at the founding stage.
You should indeed move somewhere better, especially barring circumstances that prevent that, but this doesn't change one's current situation.

Philosophical rights and their interpretations by courts are quite disconnected, with courts mostly choosing to not restrict themselves (surprise, surprise).

The whole US legal system has been bursting at the seams for quite some time based on this flawed idea that rights are axiomatic rather than universal qualifications, with technology and privately-owned commons forcing the issue. For example, a communications network shouldn't have the ability to censor based on the contents of messages (this is currently mostly taken care of by lesser statutes, and luckily it's also easily solvable with encryption).
thank you. this is probably the cleanest way to do this i've seen, and i've seen a LOT of ways to do this.
Seemingly sketchy pdf hosted on some download site with cheesy ads and popups...
Is there a site Hacker News geared towards App developers?
Twilio Launches SMS API in Canada. Cool, Eh?
Yes, there is lots of research - see above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3349117

Road accidents are expensive for the public finances - think of all the mergency workers and medical expenses multiplied by the large number of road accidents. That really adds up over a year, which is a big reason we have such a thing as a 'national transportation safety board' in the first place.

The most recent stats (2009) show about 30,0000 fatalities a year (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx). Thirty thousand deaths! Even in a country with a population of ~300m, that's a lot. On the plus side, it's fallen by about a third over the last 15 years. The most recent fall is probably linked to a loss of economic activity and the rising rice of gas, but regulation of vehicle construction and the like has played a big part too. Consider the loss to the economy of 30,000 people a year, plus the cost of people who are 'just' injured; there's no #s on that FARS page but I've seen estimates of $250-350 billion a year, which is near 2% of GDP. Put another way, if the ~30% drop in fatalities shown at the link above is a good proxy for costs, the US economy benefits to the tune of $100 billion a year. Changing driver behavior only accounts for a fraction of that, but the obvious place to start would be looking at DUI statistics.
looks nice but no middle-click or no open in new tab kills it for me.

also the results show events that were only temporary and are already over .i only checked Hamburg, Germany and the first 2 results are temporary events that are over.
It's all relative, just like in the tech startup world. We all envy him. Meanwhile he envies Jerry Seinfeld.

(I use "envy" as hyperbole.)
I found a bug in your signup process: If the passwords you enter on the signup form don't match, it gives you an error, but creates the account anyway — so when you retype the passwords, it then tells you it can't create the account because the email is already used.
Our landing page conversion is hovering around 14%, which sounds like the higher side from what I've heard. My guess for why it's higher is because we've been targeting very specific people within our community. We chose launchrock for it's simplicity, but having done more research, I'd like to try unbounce the next time around (better integration with other services, more options).

Quora has some interesting posts on the topic (http://www.quora.com/Landing-Pages). For reference, our landing page is http://beta.opperator.com
Square is now used by over 1 million active retailers
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah those links trigger lightboxes with js, so there currently isn't a way to view those in new dedicated windows. But great suggestion

Alternative browsing method might be using Next/ Previous buttons inside lightbox, or left right arrows on keyboard
But can you change a student's trajectory? The college has experimented with various intervention strategies, so far with mixed results. For example, early data showed students in general-education courses who log in on Day 1 of class succeed 21 percent more often than those who don't. So Rio Salado blasted welcome e-mails to students the night before courses began, encouraging them to log in.

That sounds dubious -- she's taking an indicator of class engagement, and hoping to improve class engagement by changing it. But hey, you never know what may help people. She should send out those emails to half the class, with the other half as a control group.
> This might be getting less interesting
> to the general audience, so we can take
> it offline if you have any more questions.

This is Hacker News. I, for one, would much rather read about the nitty-gritty details of this project than debate about how great Facebook's engineers are or read another opinion on whether or not PHP is a good language for X.
I hadn't realized that there already is an air-launch-to-orbit system called "Pegasus" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(rocket) ).

It comments that air launches reduce the costs to orbit not (as ColinWright rightly points out) through energy savings but because it 1) doesn't have as many weather-related launch delays, 2) it can insert into almost arbitrary orbits, 3) there's no need for a blast-proof pad and related ground equipment, 4) launches over an ocean save on insurance costs, and reduce collateral damage should an explosion occur, and 5) the higher altitude means the first stage engine bell doesn't need to optimized for higher pressures, and the lack of high cross-winds means there's no need for gimbals; lighter fins suffice.

On the other hand, it also says that Pegasus is "one of the most expensive "launch-to-orbit" vehicles" (I assume per-kilogram to orbit), but that the flexibility in choosing the orbit makes up for it for small payloads which otherwise must piggyback.
Go is a great mirror; i'm glad it played a role -- even if an antagonistic one ;) -- in such a positive result.
Mojave Aerospace Ventures developed SpaceShipOne. It was co-founded by Paul Allen.

Seems odd this wasn't mentioned in the article.
great suggestion, thanks!
Honest press release: We "turned to highly underpaid coders"
Doesn't even scroll on my iOS device. #irony
tl;dr: there's an SMS-activated backdoor and they do in fact collect URLs. They blame Trevor Eckhart's observations on the handset manufacturer who allegedly shipped debug code. They deny logging keystrokes or text messages. No explanation why they are hiding the app.
"Raising the first $25K for product development is easy – join an incubator."

I think that trivializes the process. There are now multiple incubators, but about two orders of magnitude more looking for spots. Y Combinator gets thousands of applications for a few dozen spots. Tech Stars Boulder got 600 apps IIRC, and only 10 get in the program. Early stage money gets trivially easy if you're in one (especially YC or TS), but getting further funding is still a time drain, and now you're competing with the 100+ incubator-based startups for VC/Angel money.

I do agree about cap tables. With less money needed to start a company, the equity normally given to investors can (and should) go to employees. It's an opportunity for many who have talent to get a bigger reward for their hard work.
Though I personally haven't used this, I know many people who do and use it very well. It seems like a great tool for UX proofing.

http://www.balsamiq.com/
That's why I usually pay out a minimum of $20 for the bundle with 100% towards developers.

I may sound like an ass saying this but those are popular charities and receive a lot of funding from lots of resources, they can survive without my $5 or $10 while many of these developer groups have only released a couple games. I want to see DRM free indie game development take off so I will contribute to the developers who I feel need it more.
Overall, this is really excellent. My town is small but near Silicon Valley, and this does a great job of showing me stuff that's actually near me. Well done!

I imagine it's going to be hard to present information in the same way for large and small towns... Maybe you need some kind of a city/busy/crowded interface to give categories and narrow down, but for a little place without much of interest you just showed paged and ranked like this? Like, "entertainment in Chicago" or "food in Los Angeles" are way too broad a category to present in this format.
A Case Against Using CoffeeScript
That's not much of a useful consideration then; a more relevant question is how some non-negligible percentage of people can achieve at least moderate success, not how a handful of people can do something anomalous that gets famous (that'll always happen one way or another).
Sketched out well. I listen a lot of podcasts by comedians and they all think what Louis CK is doing is great. I'd imagine that some that aren't quite as popular as him think they can't do it too, but once they see that it isn't insurmountable it will happen more. Comics are really protective of their material and want control of it: a few months back there was a big controversy over Stitcher.com grabbing RSS feeds and putting ads on them (http://www.nerdist.com/2011/09/the-stitcher-situation/).
I usually take the default split. I think the devs deserve most of the money, but the Humble Bundle guys need money for bandwidth and their marketing/support efforts. Charity is also worth a little bit.
Bill Would End Overtime For More IT Workers
I think that identical URL submissions don't work. However, sometimes a discussion isn't just about the topic, but the specific coverage of the topic.

I'm not sure that merging discussion based on topic would work, or how it would be decided.
I assumed it was sarcastic, since posting about Louis CK all the time for the past 5 years is sort of Reddit's thing.
So many people text below the windshield level. How will someone prove that I was texting at a certain time? Some cop will say he thought he saw me texting and demand my phone records.

And the original point of my post is that to ban texting is arbitrary; you can't ban everything before the fact. If anything, put additional punishment on someone whose accident was found to be caused by texting.
Android the most closed open source project?
Pretty good list. I'm still not convinced of the fabrication costs in the high-res ipad3 to be justified. Perhaps more ppi but not as high as iphone4 till costs come down.
they should have opted out because it's not their damned business, but ya.
Most Important Open Source Projects of 2011
It is hard to write really large and complex programs in bash, so scripts stay small, which is good thing.

In my scripts, I declare and describe command line interface of each script, so it is not hard to rewrite script in an other language when necessary. About 5% of my shell scripts were rewritten in an other language (Perl, Java, C). I had no problem with that.

Other developers and admins are happy with my software, I even got some internal awards.

My documentation/code ratio is about 7/4 (7 lines of comments and documentation per 4 lines of code), so it is easy to catch design errors - they are hard to describe in documentation in most cases. :-)

I am avoiding debugger as much as I can (lack of builtin debugger in bash helps me a lot :-)), so my software handles errors in most cases and error messages are _very_ descriptive.

I have no problems with bash, perl, C, Java, JavaScript, etc.
I'll just link this instead of duplicating a response here: http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/nbb6u/combine_all_the...

There are some pretty big advantages, but speed isn't a big part of it.
They're just getting back what they own, one download at a time.

Makes sense
One thing you gain is less friction. Fifty percent of the atmosphere by mass is below 18,000 feet, per wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Pressure_an...