skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at a PA startup until it was bought and moved to another location. I use Provigil and Ritalin (not at the same time), but then again I was prescribed both and am diagnosed with ADHD.

The people that I happen to know of that take ADHD medication at PA startups have also been diagnosed with ADD, and my subjective impression is that the people using these drugs are model DSM-IV examples of attention deficit. I saw plenty of heavy drinking, 'work hard play hard' mentality, drinking at work, etc. I saw almost no 'drug culture'. Maybe we were just nerds among nerds, but I doubt it.

TLDR; The reddit poster is full of crap, I haven't seen nor heard rumors of any 'pressure to do drugs' whatsoever. If anything, I could be considered as 'pressuring people' because I'll talk openly about what an amazing drug provigil is, or how much of a difference medication makes to those of us who really need it.
>"Aside: WTF? Everyone produces "IP". These are not a separate class of people."

I think he meant "people who produce IP professionally" or "people who earn a living off their IP". Certainly between here and reddit and other sites I've probably produced hundreds of pages of stuff, some of it even borderline insightful, and I'd be pissed if someone stole it, but it doesn't pay my rent or buy my dinner.
You have never heard of this because it isn't socially acceptable to admit that you take drugs to work harder. The fact that you haven't heard of it doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't exist. What this comment says to me is that you aren't someone who would consider engaging in this sort of behavior and as such do not know people who engage in this sort of behavior. Depending on your length of time in the work force I bet you have worked alongside someone who has but they just never told you.
It's nifty, but difficult to use, to read the actual "meat" of the page. Perhaps the spotlight should be a bit larger?

And this is a total picked nit, but the kerning of SOP A is killing me. Wrap that P in a <span> and letter-spacing it, pleeeease.
> Airdrop is a red herring. It's to solve the short-term problem of "I have a file on Computer A, and I want to transfer it to Computer B." In the end, ideally, this would never happen.

I think in the context of Airdrop, Computer B is presumed to be a different person. The transaction is "giving away" a file, in this case, not "how do I get it from my desktop to my laptop."
Guido may be a great language designer, but the color scheme and background on his blog is revolting. Is he color blind?
Ah, thanks for the heads up :P
More to the point, what value can be got from having an interpreter in the kernel?

Having the interpreter always available in user space seems more logical.
Coming up with easily digestible tweet-size slogans targeting the average TV viewer is not a game we can win. The media will always win at that game. We can't win in the money game either.

I see one thing that could defeat this: convincing smart people who have the ear of Congress that this really is bad. I don't think we have convinced those people. Some may interpret that as corrupt Congress ignoring the people again, but I interpret that as maybe our arguments against it aren't really all that great.

Congress is going to to see these slogans just as they do the "SOPA will break the internet" stories.

Maybe our only real complaint is that we don't want Congress meddling with our Internet and that reason just isn't good enough to convince anyone?
Please email my gmail, i'm pulak1.
Maybe this is just my opinion, but who cares? If you are pressured to take drugs and don't want to, be an adult and find a new job.
Sure there's a market for more expensive shoes. Just look at orthopedic shoes, they easily cost 1000$ dollars and in some cases are just slightly modified retail shoes (albeit not very trendy).

If you want to be all 37Signals and sell only 50 pairs of shoes per year and make a decent living: fine. But scaling that process up to anything of significance will cost you a lot more money and (typically) isn't done in your garage.

But still, I do hope he can find a partner who will help him get his product to market. It wouldn't be the first time that a good functional shoe got cancelled, because it wasn't trendy enough for a mass market appeal.

Let's just hope that within 10 years from now, we'll be able to 3D print most of the parts for his shoe at an affordable price. Which would go along way of making the process more accessible.
An update on the PayPal situation. (Re: PayPal Customer Service)
Time Warner Wideband. I work around it by having a router behind the modem which firewalls off the rest of the network -- I treat the modem's side as completely untrusted. Not perfect, but it works.
From that though it sounds like it is possible, given a judge willing to take some liberties with interpretation of SOPA. Unless it's explicitly not possible it's still fair game to suggest that the bill is opening up that possibility.

Given that content producers do things like claim every pirated copy as lost income even though in reality they know this isn't the case I think taking the powers given by SOPA to the extreme case could be a good tool in the argument.
These sorts of anecdotes and here say always worry me, if for no other reason than many many develo
Apple is trying to build a post-filesystem world. When was the last time you thought about file paths, or even folders, on an iOS device? Data is presented to users with a structure determined by the application.

Apple's goal is not to compete with Dropbox directly; it is to make Dropbox irrelevant.
Entirely unrelated to the article, but apparently my employer (Ericsson) has blocked reddit sometime between friday evening and now. I suspect this could cause a bit of a stir come monday morning...

I'm actually thinking of coming in early tomorrow just to watch the fireworks.
Well just for a contrasting data point: at the small SV startup I work for, I don't know of anybody who uses "performance enhancing" drugs [aside from caffeine, but in that case the majority of the working world would qualify] and I would heartily discourage anybody from sacrificing their health for job performance.

I'm not saying it doesn't sound potentially plausible, but this is the first time I have heard of it so it certainly isn't something that everybody does.
Your question is addressed by the author at the end of the book:

http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/learn-c-the-hard-waych...
Old post, here's the original HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2803983
This was my article.

A team is a group of people that are greater than the sum of parts alone. A manager coordinates the team, keeps them on target, and brings out the magic that only good teams have. Can you have an orchestra without a conductor?...same goes for a team.

And I would rather keep up with new trends by hiring someone with those new skills than having to learn them myself. Call me lazy, but I call this entrepreneurial.

Studies have shown that the older you get, the more strategic your thinking becomes, but the less sharp your raw calculation power. Same reason the fields medal in mathematics is only awarded to those under 40.
That's pretty much his M.O.
A good analogy could be a shopping center found to be renting a shop to a business selling some counterfeit products. The SOPA equivalent would be to cancel their ability to take further rent payments, remove their advertising ability and something akin to lockin the front gate people use to get in (the DNS block).
Correct me if I'm taking this the wrong way, but I don't think WPM even applies to programming. To audio typers, secretaries, etc. it's a good measure of how well you can keep up.

To a programmer, you can only go so fast when you're not even dealing with human language that has no natural flow, and the quirks of the editor of your choice. Especially on, say, a Mac, where you could be typing a '#' far more times than you ever would in any other situation, or a backtick or pipe.

It's probably telling that we're favouring languages that reduce the syntactic complexity of coding, like CoffeeScript in favour of Javascript, Ruby, maybe Python, Clojure, and the functional languages like Haskell and Erlang. Not just because it's easier to read, but because it's easier to type.

I might just be talking rubbish, of course. But I wouldn't use typing speed as a performance metric for a programmer.
eh, personally, I think "Medication shame" is a bigger problem than "drug culture" - I've never seen an employer pressure an employee to take medication, however, I have seen depressed people being told to go off their medication because it's "not natural" and they can't be "truly happy" until they come off the medication.

Of course, this isn't unique to startup culture.
I think you should probably shy away from wording like 'vast majority of Americans' -- that might be consensus on the interwebs, but it's still a bit hyperbolic for something this serious.

Very nice bit of code, though; especially the thrown shadow :)
I think we'll see more and more apps have Dropbox integration. For example, Day One is an iPhone/iPad/Mac journal app that can use Dropbox to sync journal files across all of your devices. Sparrow is a Mac email client that can upload photos into your Dropbox's public folder for your attachments and embeds a Dropbox URL, instead of actually attaching it to the email.
After reading your links, I'm still unclear what the advantage of having lua within the kernel is. Remember, this is different than simply using Lua for installation tasks. The Kernel should expose all needed routines to user-level programs anyway.
Absolutely stunning effect - nicely done. Just a small report - using Chrome 16.0.912.75 on Windows 7, waving the mouse around absolutely kills my CPU - the browser process uses 75% of one core.
I'm the author.

Keep your skills sharp. Every product that has software has a purpose. Google is a search engine. Android is a phone and an app market. A good app has a clear purpose and is easy to use.

But, work on your social skills. An idea that is coded with someone else as a sounding board is generally stronger than an idea coded by someone sitting alone at a desk.

Good luck!
Let me put it another way. Let's say you were flush with cash for some reason. Would you ever invest in an early stage or startup company? Would you ever invest in any company?

Or, do you believe it is impossible to know, or at least approximate odds of, any company's chance of success?

Let me put it to you yet another way. Which is more likely to go out of business in the next two years, blockbuster or BP? If you say blockbuster, why?
Why Coworking space isn't just for startups
There is no question whatever: the sentence contains misspelled words. "They're" is misspelled as "Their", "to" as "too", "see" as "sea", etc.

There is also no non-words. It happens that today's spelling checkers are generally just non-word detectors. This doesn't mean that anyone defines "misspelled" to mean "misspelled in such a way that the result is not a word at all".

And yes, a non-word detector is still very useful, and it's much much easier to make than something that also determines reliably when words are misspelled in ways that produce other words, so there's lots of software out there (perhaps essentially all of it) that contains only a non-word detector.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to define "spelling checker" to include mere non-word detectors. Or for that matter non-common-word detectors. (I expect most spelling checkers will reject "hight", and very sensibly because if someone types that they probably meant "high" or "height" or something -- but it's a perfectly good word, albeit a rare and archaic one.) But there's no way it's correct to say that "sea" isn't misspelled in that sentence merely because the mistake happens to have produced something that's an English word.
Go to a conference and hang out with the smokers. This stuff comes up a lot. This matches the experience of people I know who have used adderall, with or without ADHD:

His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. ... After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[13] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

... working out every morning seems to have similar effect, but requires far more discipline.
Another group preaching to their choir. We need facebook, twitter, google, and wikipedia to do this. Reddit, Hackernews, and Identica are filled with technical people that have been fighting SOPA for a while. Need to shock people that don't know what SOPA is and show them what the internet censored is like.
Unbelievable!

Legally, you cannot have refills for Adderall, and until recently the most they could prescribe was 1 month's worth. That means that 18M prescriptions is about 1.5M people using the medication.
don't get me wrong. the idea is great, the effect is awesome.

but we have to reach as many people as possible. i think a plain site with the message would be more effective.
I know a lot of developers that are taking Adderall. Even though they may not have much equity in the venture they're working on, the ability to work faster and longer gives them the opportunity to increase their pay, position, and granted stock options.

I've also seen a good number of developers that would never touch Adderall, but drink a horrendous number of free energy drinks throughout the day, for much the same reasons.
Seconded, running it in Chrome on my 2011 Macbook Air is laggy.
This is a really nice design but it's missing an important opportunity to convert what will initially be shock and irritation into sympathy and action.

When sites go dark, what remains will be the difference between the country getting behind the internet companies and hating them for causing disruption.

The blackout page needs to do three things:

1) making people understand the SOPA proponents made the site go dark (and not Reddit etc.)

2) make people understand just one thing about why SOPA is dangerous

3) make people take some form of action to help prevent SOPA (sign a petition etc.)

It's tough but it also has to do all of this in about 20s while people landing on it reel from the shock that Reddit / Twitter / Tumblr etc. have gone.
Similar experience. I've taken adderral not because it helps me focus, but because it takes some of the anxiety away. I suspect things like Xanax or antidepressants (or modafinil) would achieve the same thing. The crux of the problem is the pressure people feel.

This stuff isn't magic, there is always a trade off. If you take things like this during certain time periods, you WILL feel the effects in the subsequent days.
Wow, why does this post get's buried so fast?
It was right now on place 1 and now it is on site 2 in less than 5 minutes.
Well, it's either that or the upvoters simply find the topic intriguing and want to hear more discussion on the subject.
TV viewers really don't care about freedom on the internet or at least not as much as you think they do. And emphasizing it only gives credence to their "lawless internet" point.
As the author of this article, but without trying to sound too self promotional, I disagree. I was the only Android engineer on an app that is currently featured on the front page of http://market.android.com

Entrepreneurship is awesome. I have self generating, passive income from my personal Android apps and I respond to most customers emails personally.

As far as my skills on SoundTracking:

I already had 2 years of solid Android experience under my belt, and over the course of the project, I learned a shitload more about Android.

I made use of my teammates extensively.

I released early and often.

I managed to generate positive relationships with over 20 api partners to make this project happen.

I discovered new ways to make objected oriented abstractions work in Android.

The list goes on.
The reality is that the counter-notice process can leave content down for two full weeks. This means that a DMCA takedown can be used to silence important, time-sensitive information. Imagine there's an upcoming referendum on some major issue. The party with more lawyers can send DMCA notices to all the sites, YouTube videos, etc. opposing their view of the referendum a week before the vote, preventing voters from obtaining critical information.
My best elements of a successful game are quality and attention to detail.
True, but the lack of evidence is not proof of falsity, especially when the subject of discussion carries a stigma.
Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize
(Before you drown this comment: it's a serious question) Are these ADHD diagnoses and drug perscribtions an American thing? I'm not from the US and I find these articles on ADHD medications quite surprising (the ammount of cases, not the fact that someone is actually sick. And I know people with various diagnoses as well have a gf who works in a clinic.), more I hear of is taking anti-depressants or being bi-polar.
I wonder if holding something in your hands would help. For example, you could hold up a printed study and respond with, "I'm holding in my hands a government report that says otherwise."
Looking for contract or fulltime. I'm willing to do remote but would prefer local. I'm in the San Francisco bay area, but could be coaxed to relocate for the right offer.

My main skills are in Perl and Matlab. I have experience in Java and C as well as embedded programming, and I've used smatterings of several other languages. I am currently studying iphone programming.

I have been working for oceanographers, and I would prefer to continue working in the sciences. If you are looking for someone who can take the data computer grunt work off your scientists then I am probably the person for the task. I probably know more about ocean optics than you might need, but if you are in the environmental or optical sciences, I probably have a lot less to catch up on than your average programmer.

My contact information is in my profile.
I wonder where in the 1% those doctors and lawyers fall? You only need to make $350k to be considered "1%", but then it goes all the way up to Zuckerberg/Gates/Buffett levels. It's the 0.1% who are the millionaires and billionaires.
As user of NoScript [1] (and its Chromium sidekick, ScriptNo), I'm often let down by pages posted to hacker news that have poor or no graceful degradation [2], and that often makes me feel like writing a comment complaining about it (which I haven't, won't, at least as long as I don't start offering quick fixes along with the complaint).

It's really refreshing to see a page of such a design complexity having given thought to scenarios where javascript might not be available. Kudos! (I actually have a hunch this default state was crafted with mobile browsers in mind — but it was nonetheless a thoughtful thing.)

[1] http://noscript.net/

[2] http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/g...
I'm glad to see this is no longer on the front page.

The OP is full of shit. I have lived in Palo Alto for my whole life: no such problem exists here.

Even when I was at Palo Alto High, "study drugs" were never a problem. Sure, some people took medications, but it was all via prescription. I have never seen anybody, no matter how rigorous the course, ask others for a drug that would improve memory, performance, etc.

My evidence is also anecdotal. Nevertheless, my sample (Palo Alto High, as well as jobs around the area) is much larger than the "really small company" the OP is from.
ADHD meds are fairly prevalent in the US, especially amongst children.
I don't know exactly..most the religious people I know don't even like the term "religious". It's what we call them, not what they call themselves. Similar to Hackers being the same as Crackers to the outside world.

I wouldn't even like you calling me a "liberaliod". I think the "OID" brings to mind android. Like I'm a liberal who gets my guidance from outer space??? (read crazy, lacking logic)

I can't think of a way your term would be considered positive. It could be a catch phrase to describe crazy people...if that is what you mean it for. I wouldn't use it.
The only "drug culture" I've seen at startups is a manifestation of a different core cultural brokenness. I've seen people pressured to do modafinil (Provigil) and amphetamines (like Adderall) by their ludicrous deadlines / working hours, but I've never seen anyone pressured into doing drugs directly.

I think "drugs at startups" is more a symptom of many programmers legitimately having ADD combined with stupid work demands than it is a problem in and of itself.
It appears to be (quite literally) impossible to determine which areas they cover without signing up for an account.
>"Two working people earning $200k together isn't what I would describe as particularly wealthy"

You probably should, since the median household income is something like $50k or so, a quarter of what they make.
I've adopted the belief that very, very few people in the startup world were born with a passion, or at least developed one at a very young age. Even those who claimed to have developed such strong interests from a young age that later influenced their success, I find hard to believe. It's easy to romanticize the past and connect the dots in hindsight.

Here's what I think: You can develop passions when you realize that the problem you're onto is a meaningful one. I think when you truly believe that the solution you're trying to provide genuinely helps people, you grow a passion not for the specific domain your startup is working in, but rather for the idea of solving a big problem. Growing a deep interest in how a particular domain works is secondary and required in your pursuit to solve a problem.

I don't think anyone at Stripe has a genuine passion for the technicalities of online money transactions, but I do believe that they know they're addressing a huge pain-point that many, many people have been forced to deal with. They know their solution will be meaningful, and so they'll try to dig as deep as they can into that specific domain so that their product is better tailored for their given problem. I could be wrong. I think pg's recent essay on Schlep Blindness touches on this as well. If you develop a passion for solving problems, you might open your eyes to many, many more opportunities, versus if you directed your attention on finding that one domain that really sets your candle aflame.

But, I do struggle with that question on an almost daily basis. While what I stated should provide encouragement in that passions and deep interests can be developed, I can't say I'm not jealous of others I see who have seemed to genuinely take a liking to a specific subject, so much so that, startup or not, they'll chase their dream and be happy doing it.
Help wanted at LWN
Remove the apostrophe from "tip's". It may well be that you meant "tip is included", but it could also be interpreted as poor grammar.
My thoughts exactly. To understand what was said you often have to understand the context and the intention. Otherwise you have no chance at decoding garbled sounds people make even with you carefully optimized meatware.

Perfect text to speech also needs true AI that understand the text it is reading it's context and intention. Reader must understand the message to read properly.
It's going to be difficult to make dropbox irrelevant without reasonable cross platform support.

If I have all my data in "the cloud" but it can't be accessed without using a device from particular manufacturer I have to be pretty sure that myself or anybody else I want to share data with will never use a device from another manufacturer.