skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is another example of how a raw arithmetic mean can be highly deceptive. Looking at the median performance, or the mean +/- standard deviation, is much more informative.

A good example (which I picked up from Gnuplot in Action) is this: you're organising a marathon and need to know when to have end-of-race refreshments ready. You load end time records into a database, then take an average (say ... 1 hour, 30 minutes). You plan to put out drinks at 1 hour 15 minutes, expecting the bulk of the runners to arrive then.

The big day arrives. Suddenly, around the 50 minute mark, runners start arriving in surprisingly large quantities. It's a disaster, there's nothing for them to drink, and afterwards you live a life of chagrin and go to your grave humiliated (marathon runners are pretty serious people).

What the mean obscured was that the marathon times were bimodally distributed. About 20% of runners, serious marathoners, arrived "early", and the rest of the runners much later. If you'd thrown it up on a graph or looked at some other figures, you'd have known. But you were deceived by the easiness of the mean.
"Maybe if I say it's controversial, it will become controversial."

It's an interesting strategy.
It's amazing: This site can predict the best sleep cycle for all 7 billion on the planet.

Hmmmmm.
Two actually, and a punctuation mark :)
Why didn't you move your domains with everyone else during the SOPA uprising? JotForm sat on their asses and stayed with GoDaddy, now look at them.

Stop the song and dance. If you haven't moved your domains already, you probably never will.
From what I can tell, the only encyclopedia you have that really refutes my argument is an encyclopedia of science fiction. When I asked you to pin down what original research the Encyclopedia of Physics hosts, you provided examples of things that are also fine on Wikipedia.
JotForm should have bailed from GoDaddy when most other people did. Instead, they were apathetic and took a chance with their business and all of their clients as well.

Damn right it's their fault.
Two things that work for me:

I use L-Theanine[1] capsules in combination with caffeine to sharpen my thinking; it works great, but if taken without caffeine, it can be a bit of a relaxant/depressant, which can make it easier to sleep. The jury's still out on its effects on serotonin, but anecdotally, it seems to help me sleep easier and more deeply.

The second thing is a falling-asleep routine that I think is probably closer to self-hypnosis than simple relaxation. I consciously slow my breathing and hold after each breath in or out for a 3-count. At the same time, I sort of visualize a wave moving slowly down my body from the top of my head, and where ever it touches, I relax those muscles. I'm usually asleep before it hits the legs. If it fails, I restart the exercise, with a 4-count on the breaths, and so on. Most nights, I'm asleep in just a couple of minutes; my wife frequently remarks on how fast I go from alert to dead asleep.

The effort of concentrating on both exercises tends to silence the "inner voice", and consciously relaxing muscles tends to remove blocks to sleeping that I didn't know were there; the nights that you can't sleep, you're probably laying there in bed clenching some set of muscles without realizing it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine
The history of this matter stopped being relevant when domain-seizures stopped being the last option.
Ever try signing up to publish Blackberry apps? Don't waste your time.
Point taken; recommendation withdrawn. For the record I ordered my drive on the 4th, before that article was posted and after, I'd believed, those issues were resolved.

I don't expect that I'll receive an apology for being called an unethical shill.

I'd still love to see some statistics on failure rates. All this anecdata is obnoxious for a buyer to wade through.
Could you please suggest the best way to get started with Sinatra for a beginner who just knows HTML/CSS?

Most Sinatra tutorials I've found seem to deal either with very specific hacker-interest cases ("How to combine Sinatra with x to do y better") or teach you how to do specific basic stuff and then stop short, promising more tutorials later.

I'm looking for something that takes me from Part 1 to Part 10, so that I can really learn to use Sinatra to make cool stuff that average people would like. Maybe this means one source, or maybe a list of multiple sources in order. It would be great to get a list like:

1. Read this
2. Read that
3. Try this
4. Now you can do that
5. Get really good at #4, then read this
FWIW, the key, sleep-inducing ingredient is melatonin, which you can pick up at most any drug store for a few bucks. It’s often recommended for people with sleep problems.
Hey Zack,

To put it simply, you rock. You know and understand programming a lot better than most people ever do in their lifetime. And to be honest, you are really better off than I am. Please don't underestimate yourself.

Being a script kiddie on Hacker News especially sucks. You see everybody bouncing around with their Phd’s in CS or engineering from Stanford or MIT talking about how there are so many people out there who are terrible programmers because they don’t know the difference between a linked list and a vector.

I know the feeling. It often gets at your nerves. But here's the thing, those people too were at some time in the past very much like you are right now. In fact, I know a lot of people who'd agree that it is really * what you do with your skills * that really matters.

The primary reason you feel like that is because, in essence, you are a hacker and not a computer scientist. Read pg's brilliant thoughts on this. (http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html)

Confession: I have no idea what the difference is between a linked list and a vector. Well, before I wrote this I had no idea.

I didn't too. Big deal? :)

I looked it up so I know now in theory what the difference is.

See, that is the whole point of learning things. You always have to be ready to assimilate new things and look up the strange bits as you come across them. And you're doing a blimey good job at that.

I can glue things together as fast as the next guy.

An invaluable skill for two reasons:

- Most great ideas/products come up when two or more existing ideas are glued together.

- This helps you understand how things connect and inter-operate.

But I have no idea how to make my programs go faster or take up less memory. Or why the program actually works.

Don't worry. You will, in time.

I got on the phone with the interviewer and one of the first things out of their mouth’s was “Sorry, I don’t really understand functional programming at all.”

My take on this one? Find people with overlapping interests. There'll be plenty of startups working with Lisp and Clojure. Keep looking in the HN Jobs section. Maybe this one for instance. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580917)

I suspect it will give me more confidence when talking to people about computers. But I don’t really know.

I read a very good article recently - "The Biolar Lisp Programmer" (http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm?)

I don't know about you but I feel like that all the time. I think hackers often suffer from a huge lack of confidence. (Note: confidence is different from self-esteem; in that it is your perception of other people's image of you.)

You seem to have a decent amount of self-esteem. (ready to accept things) So here's to you - Cheers, my friend, you are doing great!

you can write to me here: singh@diwank.name
What is real democracy if not representative democracy? Direct democracy?
Sounds exactly like just about every IM app.

It's pretty much how me and my friends use Google Talk. We all actively update our statuses on it quite regularly... "At work" or "Playing Forza, join if bored" etc.

Combined with the presence icons (Away, Busy, Available etc) it does the job well, eg can have text status as "At work" but be set to Available, or switch it to Away if in a meeting.

And of course you get a chat feature with it ;)
Domain names look a whole lot like rental property. They're hardly allodium.
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Apple's PR dirty secrets.
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Then how do you rectify the statement you made that their customers should be angry with them, and that they shouldn't be destroyed? I really want to hear this.
You could be right: http://www.jotform.net/answers/72220-Fraudulent-site-please-...

And JotForm appears to respond quickly and take action, at least to that request.
OT, but I clicked that link expecting a discussion of exception handling ..
Now thiiis is a valid reason for it being their fault
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The same risk existed last year alongside the many exploitable-by-phishing flavors of hosting. Although this wasn't even a domain seizure, this is just an overzealous domain registar which has also, always, been a risk to web services.
You don't get real choices at the polls. We need to get rid of the winner take all system and replace it with a percentage based system.
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Are you sure it was for AWS and not Amazon.com purchases? Or for that matter if the email is legit? I haven't seen them announce anything (although I'm not in Washington).
Better safe than sorry?
Here's http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/11/court_oks_priva... an example court order giving "an injunction against the top-level domain name registry, directing it to change the registrar of record for the domain names to GoDaddy".
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Ah, but it doesn't have to predict the best cycle! I am fairly sure that even a rough approximation is better than nothing. And, depending on the distribution of optimal sleep-cycle times, their guesses could actually be pretty good for most people.

To be useful, something just has to be better than other options as long as you factor any costs in as well. Since this site does not have any significant costs, it just has to be even little better than nothing to be useful.

Finally, even if the actual calculations aren't useful, it did get me to think about working out better sleep patterns, which is likely to be healthy in and of itself. (Who am I kidding, I'm probably going to forget... but it's a nice thought :P.)
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Congratulations, .com is considered part of America (in the same way that .ly is Libyan).
You are now doing business with the US Government.
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I agree with your last sentence. The post has a vibe that I've noticed from some more socially awkward/not-totally-self-aware people, where they'll go to an event that pushes their comfort zone (usually a party or a club), talk to some strangers, get in some mild antics, then later they'll report on it like it was this totally crazy, daring adventure they had.

To them it was totally out there. A more socially comfortable person may do the same kind of thing, but it feels normal to them and they don't see it as any kind of big deal or accomplishment.

Actually, what this blog post really reminds me of is a breathless 'Field Report' by a clueless but eager beginner in that whole Pick Up Artist subculture. I wouldn't be surprised one bit if the guy was into that stuff.
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It's the Agile pyramid!

I think perhaps it's a sign of something jumping the shark when they start making pyramids for it.
Can you help me to test the USBSaver program? Thank you.
I have a program which I tested a few months ago, it worked.But now,I retest it on my Win 7. It didn't show the Blocking Reason. The program address is : http://pixelstech.net/download/index.php?item=26. Hope those who have Win7 installed help me to test it. What you need to do is 1) Download it;2) UnZip it 3) Run it.4).Plug in a USB device.4) Try to log off the system, see if the system is prevented to logoff with a block reason like "One or more ...".
The basic idea of this program is to help those who frequently forget to plugout USB drive when they log off or shut down the system, especially for those who use library's computer, to remember plug out their USBs before log off or shut down the system. I swear to God it's not a virus.
You can put your test result after this thread. Thank you very much.
In that case it looks more like Chanel convinced a court to sieze a domain; GoDaddy had little to do with it.
For those interested, more info on the differences between D and Go: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3554956/d-versus-go-compa...

More different than I thought.
Is Cisco trying to secure the future of Video Communication?
Are you talking about (a) completely hiding low-karma posts, or (b) "minimizing" the text of those low-karma posts in a way similar to how the example works?

If it's (a), that's basically what sites like Slashdot and Reddit already do for desktop users.

If it's (b), the obvious question is how you algorithmically filter text to only include the pertinent information (the given example is almost certainly hard-coded), which doesn't sound like a simple question to answer.
This doesn't describe anything about their setup. Not software used, not hardware used, not networking setup, not anything.
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Hey, yeah, how did I get an extra block of "000" on my number with just a copy and paste? Sorry everyone.

Anyway, I was going for human reaction time of about 0.15sec real world. So about 4.75 years in the analogy.
EasyDNS is excellent, but more expensive. It isn't a good place to park a lot of domains, but a great place to host a few important ones. YC/HN uses them, I've contacted them a few times, nice Canandian group.
Messed up the submission. Should be a link not a post to HN. If a editor could fix that, I would be really thankful.
So? The same is true for real estate and most everything else with a central registry. Jotform is paid up with ICANN through 2020. Even a commercial tenant can't be evicted instantaneously.
If you found his party hacking admirable or maybe just entertaining, you'd probably like the movie, "Wedding Crashers":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BchoV-6UHI8
Because there are two things here:

1) GoDaddy overstepping their bounds and shutting down a website

2) JotForm having inadequate, perhaps even non-existant measures in place to prevent or respond to phishing

Obviously #1 dwarfs #2 significantly but that doesn't make #2 okay.
This is nothing to do with copyright issues: its to do with phishing and scamming forms being setup by a handful of users. One would think they could just remove those users and be done with it - this heavyhanded approach by govt. is a total disgrace. When scam ads were found being run on the NYTIMES website (without the knowledge of the NYTIMES) a while ago, did the govt. shut down that domain? No f---ing way - because that would have p---ed off too many people.
It appears people were setting up phishing forms using the service to grab peoples' bank info.
9 of the 13 root servers were taken down via a DDoS back in 2002.

http://c.root-servers.org/october21.txt

Although the report states "2.4. There are no known reports of end-user visible error conditions during, and as a result of, this attack.", it's not entirely accurate. I personally experienced issues with name resolution shortly after the attack started, and had no idea what the cause was until afterward. If I recall correctly, my name resolution was handled by Qwest, as they were the T1 transit provider I was using at the time.
Which browser plugins are essential for privacy?
Considering a well maintained '/etc/hosts' file, what does AdBlock+, Ghostery, etc... do, that a well maintained 'hosts' file does not?
Well it's a pretty funny coincidence how whenever there's domains to be seized they always seem to end up at GoDaddy.
A novel first dip into the waters of sleep optimization for first timers, but I'm a bit wary of the blanket approach that's being taken. Much like others in this thread, It'd be cool if they linked to some studies.
What's so special about .is?

From http://www.isnic.is/en/:
"The registration of a domain confers rights to the use of the domain name according to ISNIC rules at any time but does not confer ownership of the domain."
Don't fall in love with your technology
Through some studying of my sleeping habits (polyphasic sleeping for more than two months now etc.), I can say that the 90 minute rule breaks down around the 2 cycle mark - it is usually preferable to sleep 3.5 hours and not 3, particularly when you want to sustain a schedule that sticks to a main sleep that short.

This may not sound like a big deal, but for me, the difference has been night and day, where adding that half hour made the schedule sustainable in the first place.

http://trypolyphasic.com/forum/topic/992/ultimate-adaptation...
"In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free."

So? That would be a sign that the value the journal adds by selecting what get's published is apparently not worth the price they are charging. In fact, why wait 12 months? If that leads to journals going out of business, there work wasn't worth the money. Of course there will be a need to organzie journal access, but I am sure that will be figured out super fast and the result will be cheaper and better, than what the Journals are doing right now. After all it's a problem we are solving on the Internet all the time.
What we ought to be talking about is moving .com/.net/.org out of US jurisdiction entirely, not just diversification. This will eventually happen in one of two ways, one of which will leave US customers with a completely separate com/net/org registry from the rest of the planet.
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True, I upvoted that and wanted wider exposure for this article. So I thought resubmission at different time would work, but apparently not.
Instead of capsules, you could also go for green tea - the better brands (go at least with proper loose leaves or matcha etc.) have Theanine cranked to 11.
I think this is in error. The delivery times for SSDs are correct, if you only consider the periods when the SSD is working. When the SSD fails, the delivery time comparison is the AGE OF THE SUN. Ok, I kid. You never get your data. So, lets call "Age of the sun" an average between really fast and infinity.

I've owned 3 SSDs and have had 2 failures, so far, over 2 years[1]. In the past 20 years, I've owned around 100 hard drives and have had only 4 failures.

This is the achilles heel of the SSD for me. I've gone back to spinning rust because I need the reliability more than I need the performance.

The performance was nice, very nice. But having to restore from backup is something that I do not like doing every year. I'd like to do it once a decade or less.

Until then, I'm no longer using SSDs.

I did a bunch of research into why SSDs fail and inevitably it seems to be software bugs due to the SSDs being clever. I suspect the Samsung SSDs that Apple uses are not clever and thus do not fail. I will use an SSD if it comes with an Apple warranty. But I had an intel SSD fail, and I had a Sandforce based SSD fail. Both catastrophically with zero data recovery (fortunately I had backed up, though in both cases I lost a couple hours of work for various reasons.) In both cases, near as I can tell, the SSD had painted itself into a corner-- it actually hadn't been used enough to have flash failures sufficient to be a problem, let alone in excess of the extra capacity set aside. Nope, it was a management problem for the controller that caused the failures. These kinds of problems can be worked out by the industry, but give that the market has existed for 3-4 years now and we're still having these kinds of problems, I'm going to wait before trying something clever again.

[1] The one that is still working is in my cofounders machine, and I'm dreading the day that it too fails. I am afraid it is just a matter of time, and as soon as we can reshuffle things they'll be using spinning rust again as well.
Even if its not. Bail from Godaddy.com. Seriously. Granted the same problem may persist given that .coms have a US based organization that governs them (I think). Nonetheless, this is the exact same godaddy.com that supported SOPA. There have been so many forks in the road where the obvious choice was to bail on GoDaddy.com. Yet, they stayed and here they are.

This is why we can't have nice things.
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UK has instant runoff voting for Upper House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

UK rejected alternative voting in 2011 for Lower House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...

So the winner take all would remain for a while.
Woah. Thanks for the kind words! Mostly, I just want to be able to say I understand how things are working. Like memory and data structures. Once I grok that I think I would feel much more comfortable. I want to know all of those tricky things so I can forget about them safely.

Also, I was just reading hacker and painters (the book) over dinner tonight. I forced the kids in my clojure class to read bipolar lisp programmer for homework. Excellent, excellent essays.
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Can we all PLEASE agree to stop using GoDaddy?

This is a GoDaddy thing, plain and simple. They get one complaint--they shut your domain name down by changing the name servers to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM and NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM. Exactly what happened here.

This has been going on for at least SIX years now; see http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0 (and I saw a hosting company shut down for similar reasons a year before that.)

Wasn't their support of SOPA enough? When are we all going to wake up? How many times does this have to happen?! STOP. USING. GODADDY.
okay, lets see..... so your kid is in the mbulNce on his way to the hospital. a bunch of people, by way of their sheer numbers, purposefully prevent your kid from receiving the medical attention he needs. kid dies.

i agree terrorism is a strertch, to be sure.... . but lets not mix words. a picket line is one thing, they generally wont physically stop you from passing.
there are plenty of countries in the workd, quite nice places otherwise, where such proteststurn into full blockades of highways, and they will not let an ambulance or anyone else past. the first time i saw this i wondered why they were not all arrested for blocking a critical transit route ( And this was no exaggeration or trumped up thing....f they blocked the highway for days. a few people died for kack of medical care)
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I suppose, depending upon your aim.

(And by long-form, I assume you are talking about an article or something rather than a book.) If you aren't concerned with people actually reading your text then yes, thats probably a good idea. But prefacing in this manner generally tends to disuade meaningful consumption, "why read in 4 pages what was summed up in 4 sentences", a reader might think. I think prefacing could arguably contribute to effective communication, but it stifles engagement significantly.

Just my 2 cents...
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