skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ability to concentrate and motivating yourself is something you have to develop yourself.

I once thought this too.

Everyone has issues with concentration and motivation. Most people deal with it through "self-discipline". This is great for them.

The problem is that people who haven't experienced clinical levels of cognitive issues in themselves or with others close to them often find it very appealing to evaluate others within this same framework of "self-discipline" that worked well for themselves.

Ritalin is not the wonderdrug you take and become a perfect student.

Someone who I know personally literally went from having many D's and F's in high school to being valedictorian in college after being treated for ADHD with methylphenidate (Ritalin). For a certain (small) percentage of the population on the far end of a certain spectrum it does indeed make a huge difference.
It's really a shame that almost none of what we know about optimal techniques for learning is being applied in real educational institutions.
Add adblocker detection. Bonus points because that means you also get to sell ads.
"Devil's advocate: brain boosters wouldn't widen the gap significantly because socioeconomic status is not primarily determined by intelligence."

These brain modifiers are not limited to such pedestrian things as increasing mere intelligence. Evidence would strongly suggest they are also capable of screwing with things like discipline, concentration, and ability to defer gratification, which definitely are connected to socioeconomic status. It's really quite difficult to predict what the effects could be.
How accurate is it though? I ask because it shows HN on iPhone render differently than how it actually renders.
Drawing such a comparison would be difficult.

But I would contend that before you try something like tDCS, you probably should try to optimize other easier and much more beneficial parameters such as sleep,diet,immunity,vitamin dosage,supplemental dosage etc.

In the end a pocket tDCS device can really come in handy when something (GEB for example :)) gets really hard to understand.Its all about using it in moderation.
When I moved to Australia and setup iTunes, I was shocked and pissed off at the price bump. Yet one more reason to subscribe to alternative methods of music acquisition. To add insult to injury, the AUD has recently been at par or stronger than the USD. If the prices were reasonable I would definitely buy from iTunes. But it's not, so I won't. Simple as that.
Workpermit.com guide to UK immigration, UK work permits, HSMP (Highly Skilled Migrant Programme) and UK work visa Services. http://www.workpermit.com
1. China isn't a communist state anymore. Hasnt been for decades, regardless of any propaganda or rhetoric. It is an authoritarian state run by a single party that happens to be named Communist.
2. China does not get a free pass in the eyes of most. Its just that no one is willing to stick their neck out and take a stand.
This should not be "FTP must die" but rather "someone needs to make a really nice GUI for rsync"

I use rbsync to backup to S3 and it really works great but was a pain to setup as it's command line only.
Seriously - we're getting all of their traffic showing up in our analytics account - that's probably the most annoying part.
They will "Facebook delete" it. In other words "hide it" from you and pass it on to the NSA through their priority firehouse feed. ;-)
Well if the author took the same care in determining that Lisp is better than Java that he did in "confirming the existence" of real life magical powers through Tai-Chi then why wouldn't I listen?
Where would you go to find a "condo"? There are no links in the article. What is the pricing/reliability/support like having your own server in someone else's data center?
"You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive.

"And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-i...
It's pretty easy to opt out of being tracked. Install noscript and adblock, and don't load anything from Google's servers. Done.

(Not to mention the standard "do not track" support. But you might not want trackers to track the fact that you don't want to be tracked. So cut them out of the loop and avoid their content completely.)
OK.

Small nitpick, Gmail used a Flash uploader for many years, at least until 2009:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/multi-file-upload-in-the-flickr-...
Putting a 'Please use this door' on a door that is open is redundant. That is why people 'believed' that the sign said 'Please use other door.'

If you were in front of the door that is open, why say 'Please use this door.' They will. You don't have to say so. People generally do not walk up to the door they do not tend to use. Hence why they assumed that the sign said 'Please use other door', since that is 1) what is most often on the doors and 2) it's illogical to have a confirmatory sign on the open door.
Spotify doesn't let you own the music that you listen to though.

Netflix doesn't let you keep the movies you watch either.

Both are DRMed because thats how the company keeps you subscribing to their services.
Yep - at least they were so kind ;)

Looks like there's just a couple images linked from our img sub domain - everything else was copied and pasted.
Cryptome.org takedown: Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook
I believe that the key word here is feel they understand. That does not necessarily mean that they actually understand.
We built this during Startup Weekend San Jose this weekend. It's built on node.js, socket.io, mongodb, redis and knockoutjs on the front end. Check it out - social networking in reverse!
Export as PDF option might be a bit sketchy. You can inject whatever you want into the URL and it'll end up in the PDF. Not sure if it's sanitized (I am not familiar with the PDF file format) but if not, this could lead to exploitation.

Of course it wouldn't be on a grand scale necessarily, but as they say in several contexts, "a hole is a hole."
This is an excellent write-up; I like the metaphors, and it doesn't feel too much like it's trying to force a preordained conclusion.

One option I have trouble fitting in, though, is the "run your own server locally". This might be #5, except it's often seen as actually a lower-class option than #4, rather than a step up: before you go all out with a colocated server, how about just a machine with Apache sitting in the office hooked up to your office's business-SDSL line?
rsync can provide file-listings:

jsight@jsight-ubuntudesktop:~$ rsync localhost:/home/jsight/hackernews/
drwxrwxr-x 4096 2012/01/29 20:02:48 .
-rw-rw-r-- 0 2012/01/29 20:02:36 tmp1
-rw-rw-r-- 0 2012/01/29 20:02:38 tmp2
-rw-rw-r-- 0 2012/01/29 20:02:39 tmp3
-rw-rw-r-- 11 2012/01/29 20:02:45 tmp4
-rw-rw-r-- 11 2012/01/29 20:02:46 tmp5
-rw-rw-r-- 11 2012/01/29 20:02:48 tmp6
I think it would be funny if you started out blocked by everyone since you are the owner, sort of a joke at Tom from Myspace.

And that's an interested idea, how do you think user growth will affect this model?
Search for [colocation].
You might be able to use a Google Voice account for basic call distribution and a voice mailbox or something like onebox.com or grasshopper.com for something more advanced
The way your HN title is written it makes your project look like a fb plug in or somthing. You may be more direct in what is your interesting project about.
It sounds interesting, however the dependency on Facebook makes me not want to even try it. What about it requires Facebook integration?
The same thing can be said about depression too - we don't really know why SSRIs work, but they generally work enough that we use them as a first-line treatment for depression. Like ADHD, depression is sometimes confused for being a product of the environment, when in both cases the environment is really just an exacerbating factor (clinical depression, unlike PTSD, cannot be caused by environment alone).

The problem with studying ADHD like this is that we generally agree that ADHD is over-diagnosed and over-prescribed, but then for evidence that ADHD exists as a medical condition, we look to the existing pool of people who are diagnosed or even taking medication to confirm that there is a difference between those who are diagnosed and those who aren't. 'm not saying that this means ADHD is a hoax - I agree with you that it's more than just the environment. It's just very difficult to construct definitions for mental conditions in particular, because there's usually no way to do a double-blind randomized experiment.

The problem is that ADHD and depression are both heterogeneous conditions - they're likely not single conditions themselves, but a bunch of somewhat related conditions that we're currently unable to distinguish between. The various hypotheses for what causes ADHD (and depression) may not be mutually exclusive.

That makes studies that much harder to conduct, because you have a mixed population, which makes identifying characteristic traits harder (and sometimes impossible, depending on the mixture). It also means that anecdotal evidence is that much more worthless, because what is true about one member in the population could be completely false for another.

And, in some cases, having a mixed distribution can give you the exact opposite results; see Simpson's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox
It's a shame that Xgrid never lived up to its potential. Unless your rending podcasts there's not much it's good for.

It would be awesome to have something like seti@home or folding@home for rendering small independent studios work.
It seems the website is having trouble loading, so here's the bookmarklet for those who can't load the page:

https://gist.github.com/1701741
you misspelled the url- it doesn't work. (protip: It's always a good idea to double check your spelling When posting something on the subject of education.)
We just needed it for faster integration. And we want to steal market share from FB. :)
I would definitely try it if for no other reason than the novelty. But I don't enjoy logging into facebook to check facebook... much less logging into facebook to check some other social networking site.

Cool idea, though.
The Coming Tech-led Boom
The road ahead for Barnes & Noble
it's probably not included because keeping your production server outside of a datacenter is kind of a silly idea. you save some money, but you don't have the cooling, the power conditioning, the network redundancy, or the security of a proper facility.
well, maybe connection to TCDS

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...
I'm a 42 year old software developer, and I stay current: SOLR, Hadoop, HBase, Storm, iOS, Clojure, HTML5, etc. Its harder to keep up now (primarily because of less time to study and play with tech) but I still love it. Also, keep studying business (entrepreneurship, startups) and never stop working on communication skills. I get paid well and get job offers all the them. Last but not least, take up running.
Most datacenters should be pretty good on support and reliability of things like the connection, power, etc. Otherwise it's all up to you to support your box and to make sure you buy reliable hardware.
No idea. We are playing with it and figure it out.
Even leaving aside completely the issue of working conditions in the factories that produce all these smartphones running any OS, one could make a strong case that Apple is more "evil" than Google on account of its restrictive policies around iOS.

Apple wants a future in which we can't do anything with the devices we own which isn't sanctioned by them. No imagination is required to realize how this will be – and in some cases, already has been – abused by Apple themselves and by the governments which hold sufficient power over the company. Moreover, Apple is abusing the legal system of the United States and other countries, trying to eliminate competitors through bogus patent claims and lobbying for legislation that would make jailbreaking illegal, in order to hasten this future.

As others have stated here, I don't think there's great utility in arguing over which company is more "evil", except that it does highlight the absurd extent to which the Hacker News community in general defends Apple right or wrong, while freely calling Google and others "evil" for issues as negligible as a transparent terms of service consolidation.

It's well past time for us to stop deifying Apple around here. The future of computing is at stake.
Try BrowserID, it has the fastest integration I've ever used (this is with django).
Ask HN: What successful startups started as "Show HN"?
I thought pulling together a list of startups who've done this would be interesting, to explore and perhaps better document the influence of HN on the startup community.
We'll count both stand-alone startups who used Show HN in their launch / iterating strategy and side projects that have evolved into stand-alone startups, for the sake of discussion.

Also, if your startup has gone through this: how do you feel using Show HN as a means of launching / gathering feedback my have helped or hurt your product?
The only thing I really want is a good and easy way to use SQLAlchemy to manage a change-set as well for my schema so that I can upgrade/downgrade at will. Something like what Rails has built-in would be awesome.

Is something like that already out there? Something that works well and can easily be integrated into a project?
Thanks! That was new to me.

Still, can it also serve as an interactive shell with mkdir, rename etc.? An rsync-based ftp-clone would indeed be my favorite for a replacement.
The authors of How to Design Programs use Lisp (well, Racket/Scheme) and they are some of the most careful and thoughtful CS educators, who are appear to be thinking deeply about CS pedagogy (at least, this is the impression I get from reading some of their papers and some of HtDP). So I wouldn't be so quick to write off Lisp as an intro language over Java.

"I studied both Java and Haskell at University and found it much easier to get going with Java than with Haskell (I hacked lots of QBasic - I am getting on a bit - when I was a kid)."

I think Java is arguably closer to Basic than it is to Haskell, so this isn't really a very fair or representative data point. (I don't claim that non-programming undergrads taking CS 101 would be more successful if started with Haskell instead of Java, although I believe that's not unheard of).
Haha no worries. I'm Russian so I'm a bit sensitive =) Not that Russians are completely honorable but it's not always the Russians!
Agree. I was surprised they overlooked this one. Perhaps they couldn't think of an appropriate metaphor. Prison? Orphanage?
I work for a company that processes sensitive data, and almost all our interactions with clients and suppliers are over SFTP, which is more than platform-agnostic enough.
The link should be
"http://www.topeducationalapps.com/2012/01/an-easy-way-to-suc...
At 10% it's also worth comparing to a placebo control group - I have the suspicion that the results of such a study could annihilate the "improvement" claim entirely if an independent study were to be conducted on this.
I'm a geezer (50) at Facebook. It's not the hours, as Indiana Jones might have said had he been a programmer, it's the lines. (I don't know what that means--it's just too good a line to pass up.)

There are ways I provide leadership and ways I accept leadership from my peers, and the mix is different than it might have been twenty years ago. My code reviews focus on strategic issues ("could this be divided up into N diffs?") instead of sorting out complex behavior. I pass off many of my ideas since I'm slower than I was at implementing.

I am as engaged by this job as anything I've done for fifteen years. A positive, curious attitude goes a long way, as does the expectation that I need to earn the respect of my team and give them respect where due in return.
Great idea. We may integrate that into the system in the next day or so.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
The may be off topic, but... At the moment we're mostly using option two (Linode VPS), and it's working pretty well. I've been repeatedly tempted by option option four (colo), but I'm kind of daunted by the task of getting started. I've been burnt by option three (renting a dedicated server) before - it seems like the worst of both worlds.

Can anyone recommend a good guide to getting started with colo? Obvious questions include:

Where do you go to buy a cheap server? Can you just have it shipped direct to the data centre, or do you need to configure it yourself? How does that even work for startups in a different country to the data centre? Is there anything I should look for in a data centre to make it easier? Do any offer out of band consoles? What sort of costs are we talking about? Is there a break-even point beyond which you really should colo instead of using VPS? Is there a detailed tutorial anywhere on "getting your first coloed server up and running without bricking the stupid thing and needing to spend thousands of dollars getting a data centre technician to fix it"?

And so on. :) It seems like there are a LOT of resources to hold your hand as you get up to speed with Linode-type services, but colo is dark magic.
This would actually be pretty easy to do (for someone on Hacker News).

You could do it with the real API, but it could also probably be done with a few lines of Javascript pasted into the URL bar on your profile.

Any takers?
This seems to be about memorization as opposed to understanding (or skills).

I've always seen myself as having a poor memory, but found that if I focused on understanding, I could remember easily. I thought this was because understanding itself is simpler (so there's less to remember), and one can reconstruct the facts from this understanding (also, verify them).

This is treating understanding as a theory, in terms of which the facts can be stated more briefly than without. An abstraction, if you like, that factors out commonalities/redundancies. If A always implies B, then you can just need to rememeber "A".

But later, I've realized that in fact, I do remember a great deal of detail that isn't derived from understanding. Perhaps understanding actually requires a lot of domain knowledge - facts - that the understanding is about. You can't "understand" in a vacuum. So, now I think that's it's just that somehow, causal connections and explanatory relationships stick in my memory more easily - they are certainly more interesting to me (because meaningful), so that helps with concentration and therefore memory.

I actually once tested my opinion that I couldn't memorize, for a university exam, and found - to my amazement - that I could. It really was surprising. But I didn't score nearly as well as I usually did, since I wasn't focused on understanding - which is what it is all about, IMHO.
I came here to suggest exporting via giving the user a unique url that anyone can go to, but your way is far far better for a layperson. Visiting a link is about as foolproof as it could be.

Could be implemented as freemium, too, by charging for more than 7 uses a week to the same email address.
It's a reverse psychology marketing ploy. Those guys need funding and are looking into commercial applications which this article is designed to invoke interest for. I think those claims of performance increases when applied to healthy brains can safely be assumed to be highly questionable.
Yes, if they were given different salts. But the attack model for password authentication is very different (e.g. there's usually only one salt in play and the attacker doesn't get to choose salt or password he's trying to crack). So the collision attacks on MD5 don't seem obviously relevant.

Even with salting MD5 is still far too efficient to compute to be strong for password hashing. It could be combined in an iteration framework which made it secure, but there are plenty of other hash functions (with better reputations) that would be a better choice.
"A year and a half ago, a dear friend of mine send me this link."

pg's "Beating the Averages" is not known widely enough. We must promote it more. We owe it to our friends who toil under inhumane conditions and work with sadistic technologies.

BTW, pg, I'm taking my "Hackers and Painters" to PyCon 2012. Will you have time to write a dedication? That is, if I get the book back from the colleague I lent it to. ;-)
Indeed. It worked pretty well, actually - in the standard Windows Explorer 'mount network drive' dialog, you could type an HTTP URL and get an ordinary-looking Explorer window and drag files to and fro.
Might want to look at Browserhawk, they have been offering this for quite some time. Sample report for your browser: http://browserhawk.com/showbrow.aspx

No affiliation, but I know some folks who have used their service and were happy with it.

Edit: P.S. should have mentioned that they historically have been an ASP[.NET] oriented product, an important detail I forgot about.
as someone that has done colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS, i'm a huge fan of dedicated hosting.

colocation was expensive and the hardware problems were all mine. i was pretty much tied to my local datacenter because i didn't want to ship a server around (which would be at least a day of downtime). pricing can be hard to compare because of power/space/bandwidth. if the equipment i colocated didn't have IPMI support, it could sometimes take up to a half hour to have a datacenter tech be able to put a remote console online when there were problems. at the end of it, i had a bunch of servers that were worthless on the resale market due to their age.

VPSes were never a serious option for the reasons stated in this article. it's impossible to track down performance problems when a dozen other VPS customers on the same server are taxing the CPUs and disks. i do use one that i pay $10/month for just to run a network monitor for some off-network perspective. they can be useful for single-task servers that don't need a lot of processing power like dns servers.

with dedicated servers, though, you can signup on a website and within a few hours have a complete server with modern CPUs, disks, and lots of memory assembled, tested, and connected to the internet with a remote console waiting for an o/s installation. when hardware goes bad, the server provider has lots of spare parts waiting around to be swapped in for free. and the best part of all, when you're ready to upgrade or move to a different provider, you just cancel the account and let the provider worry about what to do with the old hardware. i have a handful of these on various providers costing between $140-$190 a month for something like a core i5 ~2ghz with 8gb of ram, 2 big sata drives, and 100mbit ethernet with more than enough transfer every month.
Why is it that people will hold against you an immature act that you did years ago, ignoring the fact that people tend to mature as they age?

Perhaps the timeline will help overcome this tendency. By making everyone's history more visible, maybe people will become less sensitive to seeing past examples of immaturity and therefore weigh them less when making judgements about a person.
What this (very good) post calls the "condo" tier is what the hosting industry calls "co-lo" or "co-location". Search that term and you'll get more options than you can probably wade through. The "rackspace" option (biggest name for good quality mid-tier sized setups) is http://www.equinix.com/

Huffington Post, Gawker, BuzzFeed, CafeMom and AdMeld all co-lo with http://www.datagram.com/, most of them are within a few feet of each other.