skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... I worry about News.YC being a time sink, so here's a crazy idea: what if it were turned off a few hours a day? ..."

Good idea.

This will also have a kick-on effect to searchyc and a few others. It seems the time-sink idea is something that should be looked into more. Different people procrastinate at different levels. I smell the beginnings of an algorythm.

"... because users would tend to all show up together at opening time. ..."

This bit's hard. I log in at GMT+11 and it seems I log in out of sync with a lot of stories. Having a break will also do funny things to submissions as news never has a break. Expect the server to be hit at opening time.
Avoid debt (for me, it was the IRS when I started being self-employed). Travel a LOT (it gets harder as you get older). Get jobs in interesting places (I went to school too near home and really didn't get adventurous 'till later). Being entrepreneurial is good, but don't get into services (I had a web dev agency-- crappy way to build equity)... Build products instead. Get to a tech hub sooner. Avoid the following 4 women (none of yer business). Set up an automated recurring investment program. Buy a house before mortgages get more expensive than rent.
There are very well founded reasons for the qualified investor rules. Anytime you read someone wanting to relax them make sure they aren't trying to pick your pocket.
What is the most active period of the day? I suppose hackers are night creatures.

I am asking this because I am in another timezone and I would like to get a snapshot of HN at the right time.
why don't you just download rescuetime and limit the access yourself? This way you don't punish people who have the self control to do it on their own
Due to time zones, I doubt there's really a clear time that would fit well.

Besides, people are going to procrastinate one way or another. More importantly, if you are spending too much time on the site, then just stop loading it. Nobody else is making you reload the page X times a day.
For users who contribute to the discussion, I'm guessing most of the time they refresh the site it's just for a handful of seconds to see if anyone has responded to their comments. Noprocrast isn't really ideal for this use case scenario.
"... I'm from Lawrence Kansas. It's the home of the Django web framework, but that doesn't really show. I go to the University here, but no one in engineering here has much ambition ..."

I often wonder if open-source products developed for the web, are they immune to geography. Companies are another thing. You need a certain amount of infrastructure to get things to work and take-off: employees, finance etc. So you are asking the right questions.
Um , I was referring to the article in question, not your post. Stop being so touchy. It's unbecoming.
"... On Ubuntu 8.10, the database was easy to install and CouchRest has made it very easy to operate from Ruby. I was enjoying Google App Engine, but find this much easier to work with. ..."

Which begs the question, "are there any hosts that support CouchDb?" App engine might not be ideal but it works and is there. Do you think there might be a demand for a CouchHub?
So then, if only Netflix had a checkbox on its registration form:

[ ] Yes, I am a pretentious psuedo-intellectual scenester!

Perhaps you've discovered the most important demographic unit of the century? I guess then, the greater problem would be to glean which people answered the question sarcastically.. damn.
Make more mistakes; don't be afraid to fail.

A college degree is overrated; the opposite is true of self-teaching.

Buy the Corvette. It's expensive and impractical but you'll never have more fun with a car like that than you will at 24.
Could it possibly be a temporary anomaly? I know the extreme bad global financial news has put me on occasion into a bit of a funk, but the novelty of it all will wear off in time.
I hate having to agree with you, but yes, I agree. My experience of past bad times, such as 87-91, is that the market is a leading indicator of really bad times ahead, and this seems to dwarf anything I've ever seen. The global nature of this is also novel - in '90 I rode out the bad time in the US working in Japan - now there's no place to go.
Don't work for a large company straight out of school. Move to Silicon Valley. Don't buy a sports car - every penny you save is one step closer to not having to work for someone else.
I refuse to believe in anything written by someone who is mostly vacuum.
I'm surprised that personal responsibility is losing right now (37 to 29).
ugh. there's plenty of time to start companies, but those 4 years of "not needing to worry about food or paying rent" are unique.
I got to do this! It's a great exercise.

My college (Berklee College of Music) asked me to give a talk to the incoming freshmen class on opening day. I wrote it by asking, "What would I tell my younger self?"

I called it "6 things I wish I knew the day I started Berklee" and came up with these 6:

#1 : Focus. Disconnect. Do not be distracted.

#2 : Do not accept their speed limit.

#3 : Nobody will teach you anything. You have to teach yourself.

#4 : Learn from your heroes, not only theirs.

#5 : Don’t get stuck in the past.

#6 : When done, be valuable.

Some of those won't make sense on their own, so you can read the full version at http://sivers.org/berklee or watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxYt--CFXK0
Problem is mid-day, for many, is the time for meetings and other interruptions. Rather than try to force yourself to focus during the "mid-day" hours (i.e. 10am-4:30pm) I find it easier to dedicate that time to (in addition to meetings, dealing with vendors/customers, doing paperwork) typical procrastination activities.

That leaves the morning (7:30-10am) and evening (4:30pm and later) to getting things done. I'd rather see news.y.c allow people to apply whatever means of time management they use (my "idea", RescueTime) to managing their y.c time.

One in the middle idea is to disable posting during those hours, allow only reading.
This might have a positive impact on the community above and beyond whatever effect it has on the individual. For example, this might improve the quality of the submissions and/or comments. We don't know yet because it hasn't been tried before. That's what makes it an interesting experiment.
I'm all for it. I'll hate it, but it has to be done.
Gvke - Watch Sarah Palin interview in turkey online
We've used it in the past, and will in the future - BUT this is not rigorous usability testing of the sort that you'll get in the lab. They're self-selected and they don't do well with loosely defined objectives (even though they tend to be North American native English speakers).

If you have access to a Mac and can recruit your own volunteers (college campus, etc), I'd recommend getting Silverback - http://silverbackapp.com/ . Not only do you get the screen capture, you also get to see frustration/delight on users' faces. Plus, it's cheaper if you plan on doing four or more tests.
Or may be just have a div appear after 10 minutes of constant activity which says "OK, now enough is enough. Get back to work. (Signed PG)"

Signed PG is an extra effect: Many take your words religiously :)
This is not the type of publicity we want. This will be the first and last time it's caused by something completely in our control.
It needs to be done, there is no other way.

Or as captain kurtz said ..

"In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. "
Totally agree.. as a recent (may 08) graduate, college didn't feel very productive in terms of starting a company but I do think I had the time of my life. I tried to spend most of my time enjoying the experience of having so many great people around me and soaking up the myriad of information from my classes. While I didn't end up starting a prosperous business in undergrad life, I did network like crazy and tried to learn a few skills to help me in my career choice (entrepreneurship).

That's one thing I don't think I regret or would tell my younger self to change. Don't get too caught up in work to miss out on the incredible experience that is college!
Couldn't hurt to try it for a week or two. What's there to lose?
I like experiments.
well HN has been going down every few days for an hour or two(you know when it only shows you the top most thread), and I haven't seen the quality of posts improve
Good - turning in to a public company has become a complete disaster.

Chief Diversity Officers, suits, red tape, bureaucrats, auditors, endless paperwork, meetings and sub committees eagerly await you.

Stay private if you can.
VCs are not sheep – why VCs invest less during downturns
Isn't PG worried that the proposal will give a competitive advantage to those other social news sites for hackers?
The vast amount of data and the prediction task remind me a lot of stock market prediction attempts.

I enjoyed Pi, by the way.
Being that it's Friday night, isn't every vote a vote against personal responsibility?
It's also cleaner than the do { ... } while(0) business, imho.
why didn't you just say that you acknowledge that you have a dark and twisted sense of humour and that you won't apologise for it?

I never apologized for my personality; to do so would have been disingenuous. As some have noted, I never said my opinion on the matter had changed. It just so happens that numerous other people have put that opinion far more eloquently throughout this thread. For that I am thankful.
Due to the nature of the CouchDB architecture, namely that views must be indexed, I would be more concerned with inserting data into CouchDB. CouchDB provides incremental replication, which means only documents that have changed need to be re-indexed. However, if you have a lot of initial data that needs to be imported, you could see a lot of latency there.
Say Goodbye to IE6
Remember Perl motto TIMTOWTDI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_more_than_one_way_to_d...
the thing is that in those 4 years you can take it slow. You don't have the added stress of running out of money to pay for rent etc.

1-2 hours per day on a startup in college is no big deal. You have so much free time in college, that you can easily fit in doing a startup, going to class and having a decent social life.
Work a little bit harder. When you're already doing average school work, it doesn't take much more effort to be excellent.

Experiment.

Don't be afraid to speak up; Don't be afraid to be wrong.

Regretting something you didn't do is always far, far worse than regretting something you did.

I'm still 23 though, so I still need this advice. Putting it to practice is harder than it should be.

edit: Also, don't rush school. Keep track of idle time.
I thought (maxvisit|rescuetime|8aweek) was supposed to keep us honest in an opt-in way?
Reminds me that there is a noprocrast setting already. I'll try it out.
If you really want to help with productivity, just track when each user logs on/off (or idles), and make a forced x minute window between logins. I don't want to be penalized if I visit the site every few days and it happens to be offline when I view it.
Just get LeechBlock for yourself for Firefox 3.
I think you almost always have to do both.
The brief e-mail/discussions outlining how the two groups will be working together, and then the long-winded proposals which gets further into the details of what each side offers etc.

You'd be amazed at how two groups can differ in their expectations they have of what the other would be offering, therefore the long stuff is needed.
Celebrate your failures.

Insulate but donot isolate yourselves

Ignorance is sin. Innocence is bliss.
I totally agree about buying your dream car :-) .. I bought a SC430 2 yrs ago when I was 23.
People are not as hard to hack as you might think.

What's the worst that could happen? Seriously?

It's better to be right than consistent.
Your engine produces a massive amount of heat that must be vented. Your car pulls/pushes a large amount of air (using a motor + fan) through the front (or sometimes bottom, or sides) of your car through an array of metal fins that helps dissipate the heat.
Why do aren't simple, easily processed stick figures the height of art then?
And for those of us with income: don't forget to donate to EFF. http://www.eff.org/support

My employer matches any donations 1:1, so be sure to check with yours.
Ruby; It has the fastest idea-to-working-code rate out of any other language I've used.
Well, there still is an unspecific and vague line between 'quantum' and 'classical' objects, entanglement is hard to understand and there isn't even a metric for more than simplest cases, and quantum systems appear to evolve in ways which classical computers cannot (it is believed) even approximate quickly enough. So it's likely that there's some fundamental complexity there...
That was a good talk!
I am guessing most of us have regrets and/or proven recipes for our younger selves. However, I do wonder if simply pointing to a list would have helped me. The process by which we arrive at these points is more important, and that seems to be introspection after missing (or meeting, but rarely does success lead to introspection) childhood goals.
Unfortunately, I don't think I would have valued introspection over poorly thought out reasoning for why my existing trajectory would lead straight into the lush fields of success.

Would I have, I wonder, been more receptive if I had been asked to meditate on why the counter to any prescription was bad? Why, for instance, was focus important enough to trump the sheer enjoyment of youthful disorientation and distraction?
I do like the idea of everyone showing up at the same time; worth a shot, in my opinion. What is the median number of pages loads/user/day?

As an aside, my deskmate habitually edits his /etc/hosts file to keep himself under control :)
You already know what you want.
It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

You're right, we should make the down hours fluctuate a little bit randomly. Like within the peak visit zone, make one or two of the hours a blackout period, and let that change every day (randomize it).

The page that replaces YC News during that time could be anything. What if YC did some advertising? That way, the silly folks who sit there refreshing (probably me) will at least be doing something productive (generating pageviews)?
Sure. I'm getting it from Jared Diamond's book Collapse:

http://books.google.com/books?id=QyzHKSCYSmsC&pg=RA1-PA4...

Probably a good idea to check his source, but I can't find my hard copy at the moment.
Seconded, link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
I'm reminded of Red's (Morgan Freeman's) classic speech from "The Shawshank Redemption" --

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtwXlIwozog
"don't waste your college years"

precisely...two chicks at the same time. don't blow it. College is the absolute best time to achieve this with just a bottle of vodka instead of needing to become a millionaire.
The plant I was at also manufactured HVAC and power steering motors - I'm basing my assessment of them not only on the reliability of these products, but also the pricing structures the companies were demanding from us (e.g. a company that wants a $15 radiator is probably not out to create a very good car).

The plant didn't make anything for Toyota, Honda, or Mazda at the time, so I can't comment on those.
It's not a race. Don't forget to slow down and enjoy life sometimes. Learn to appreciate friends and family, because the times you spend with them will be the ones that you cherish the most later.
I believe in the end it was something that deserved an apology, but doing so certainly did compromise my personal integrity. I guess compromising it one time won't kill me.
My similarity explorer would have picked some of those out for you without much effort! :)

http://gflix.appspot.com/netflix/3281

http://gflix.appspot.com/netflix/14273

I wasn't even using the algorithm ensemble that helped me get much further on the leaderboard.

Here's more about the app : http://www.discerniblepreferences.com/2008/10/netflix-movie-...
Another poker analogy is a four - flusher; someone who is all talk and no substance. There certainly are lots of wantrepreneurs who fall into that category.
Gandi.net ... Not the cheapest, but reliable as hell and not based out of the US.
I like Mark Twain's take:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
I can't use Rescuetime, can I? I don't use Firefox.
I can see it now. McDonald's new policy - you're all eating too many Big Macs. In the interest of public health, we're closing just a few hours in the middle of the day each day and we're going to do it when most of you normally come to eat. Give me a break. Dumb idea.
Yep. We have some wasy to go yet:

http://dshort.com/charts/bear-markets.html?four-bears
Is Gmail Safe? How do you protect yourself from these kind of attacks? 
Do you trust your gmail ? How do you protect yourself from these kind of attacks ?
Short?
http://ruby.gemstone.com/

Now that I've closed my eyes the Sun has gone away forever!
I'd probably just give myself a sports betting almanac. Until you asked that question I never fully appreciated Back to the Future 2.
Sarcasm doesn't parse well over text, and well I can't think of an effectually true way to say "HN loves the down button when humor is used to point out a painful truism" without getting downvoted myself.

In any case, the truism in the sarcasm is there. I'm kind of getting tired of 37signals "do what we say because we had a strand of isolated success".
I hear ya about the debt. Though my dad told me that and I didn't listen as well as I should have, so it might be a waste even coming from myself. I've just now returned to the good credit category.
This is a tad paternalistic. You can't turn off nyt.com or my tv. So your chances of stopping me if I want to procrastinate are slim.
Close new link submission, maybe, but don't close the site. Everyone is on different schedules, and I don't like the idea of having to adjust mine to yours if I want to read what the community submit/is talking about at the time I usually do each day. Selfish? Maybe (but that could be applied both ways).
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate and say: it might suck, but under the current rules Apple is legally in the right. And it could further be argued that they are entitled to dictate how you use their products.

I used the analogy of playwrights who won't let you perform their plays unless you do it exactly to their specifications once. I think that Apple has the right to do this, even if it's making a bunch of people mad.
Haha, I think there's so many yes votes because any group like this can't resist tinkering.

Its like my grandmother told me as a kid when I took apart her iron, "Don't fix what ain't broke."
The whitespace is still different. I'm amazed at how used to the UI I got -- I'm finding it quite disconcerting.
So is everyone seeing this now?
In cell phone era, a new picture of stupidity emerges
I really wish there was an open source incremental SVD-based library to to collaborative filtering; the algorithm is known, we know its pretty efficient, scalable and high performance. Sure there is Mahout (http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/) but development seems pretty slow, if there is still dev work at all on this.
Am I allowed to disagree and say that I'm one of the rare males who doesn't find the prospect of sex remotely interesting unless I really care about the girl? I've tried getting shitfaced and hooking up, and even at my drunkest I find the prospect entirely repulsive.

As a freshman: I'm not really into the whole "college experience" thing. I've been in better situations before. A friend and I are making our start-up, and I'm looking forward to leaving college early and finally talking with people who care about things like making a living and going through life. I can't stand the immaturity of the average college student.
No, please don't do that. Honestly, I cannot imagine anything more non-brainy (euphemism for foolish) than that. People do what they want to do. Maybe HN gives them a creative pause or a state of subdued brain activity which boosts their post HN productivity.

Live and Let Live! :)
Maybe I am missing something, but this article doesn't seems to support the hypothesis the title advances.

First it explains that the habitable zone for planets is bigger than we thought, but then it also introduces a ton of new criteria (other than distance from the planet's star) that must be met for a planet to support life (size, composition, orbit, etc.).

To me that implies that there is likely LESS life out there, not more. The summary version of the article as I read it is: over the past 20 years the habitable zone got bigger, but we realized that habitable zone is only one requirement of many for a planet to be habitable.

How does that support the article's title? (Serious question, not trying to be snarky. Me = not a science guy.)
Out of curiosity (I think that's sound advice through-and-through): would you say the same thing to the dramatic socialite?

Most of my friends are part of the theatre circle: for a lot of us, impressing people and seeming really cool doesn't come from a desire to be liked, but from the thrill of getting reactions from crowds. It's more the act of people who specialize in trying to handle crowd emotions. Is that a separate thing, or would you bundle that sort of community attitude as attempted impressing?
Either way congrats on the publicity.

Hopefully this is all serendipitous!
It wasn't planned, and so not anticipated by users, so therefore no community effect.

I think the concept is a little like a departmental morning tea.
Soul is "like" radio waves, brain is "like" radio, consciousness is "like" radio program. Damage to radio results in garbled signal.

Note: I'm not saying I believe the definition or that it is complete, and I'm certainly not going to defend it, but maybe worth thinking about.
Maybe he's tired of a monopoly.
Viral Video Done Right
kiss her, you idiot... :o)
RescueTime is an installable app (for Mac or Windows) and plays nicely with most browsers (FF, IE, Safari, Chrome).
Seems like it would make more sense as a per-user option. If you make it mandatory, you could still make the hours configurable. Personally, I'd find some other way to procrastinate at a given moment.
Huh! I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I thought it was Windows-only, too.

I'll check that out. (And, as an aside, I love the level of feedback that Hacker News gets on YCombinator's stuff. It's so cool that people like you are members here.)
That is why I really wonder why you say you look people's News.YC accounts in the application process. Someone with a lot of karma must be spending a lot of time on the site.

How about all those people who have little karma because they're working so hard?
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Perhaps make every page load remove some fraction of a point of karma? :-)
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