skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The music also made a big difference. Listening to Infected Mushroom while high on Modafinil and coding up a storm made me feel like I was some kind of insane coding machine that could complete pretty much any coding task in record time.

Hilarious :)

On a more serious note - this sounds a lot like taking Ritalin. I was just as productive if I was well rested, ...and working on something I cared about. - this isn't always an option. Sure, heavy use of anything isn't good. Lest we forget it's a drug after all, even regular use might be too much for some.

I really liked the article and the approach on things.

Thanks
Here's Marshall McLuhan on this, in 1964: "The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."
That's interesting, because I always think of the Lawrence Journal World (the creator of the Django web framework) and Adrian Holovaty's excellent writeup of how they thrive by excelling at local news:
http://www.holovaty.com/writing/fundamental-change/
And backticks can easily slip in when you want to tab or escape, then you can mistake them with a single-quote.

Where they are really the evilest evil is in PHP. Such a dangerous things, nearly invisible!
The Verge has some photos of the phone: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview...
Nice idea. In addition to the comments already made, I would find it useful to see how many comments an entry has from the overview pages. Right now you have to click the link to figure that out.
Possibly the author is doing something inefficient that shouldn't happen in a mostly-static blog? In which case Google could provide a bit of load testing so that people know their site won't survive a social aggregator. Or offer some read-only version, idk.
HTML5 Please API: Identify supported browsers with feature detection
While I'm happy discussing my "ideas" with most, I don't think discussing them on an open forum such as HN (entrepreneurs, coders, wannabe's, veterans, the lot) is a smart idea.

You wouldn't openly discuss a "oh my god I've just stumbled across x from Ycorp" tip on the trading floor tea room now, would you?

That aside, I do agree it adds an unnecessary level of pressure. You know, the thing is too, theres plenty more spaces out there.
Prosthetics Breakthrough Might Fuse Nerves With Fake Limbs
Ironically the few I bothered to click didn't work in Opera 12 (OperaNext on Linux).
Given the requirement that non-technical users should be able to use it, a wiki seems like a better model: GUI editing and version control.
Here's a pretty good summary of the main point.

"Therefore if we rely on consumers to factor in the total cost to society when making a decision, (which is what happens in a for-profit model), in most cases we will never discover the optimal solution for the market because of this basic flaw of human nature. Our reliance on for-profit entities means we often find ourselves stuck in a horrible equilibrium where each individual transaction seems to be worth making, for both parties, but the real net cost far outweighs the benefit."

Obviously this is not true of every market but examples abound, andI think Facebook Connect is one of them.
Adobe Photoshop Touch Comes To iPad 2
Maybe being a macro derivatives trader at an investment bank with a multitrillion dollar balance sheet put me on STRATFOR, Kroll, IGI, Dilligence and Troika's (Russian) default-to-dumbass lists, but the information STRATFOR released to subscribers was on par with what we commissioned

"on par with what we commissioned" maybe, but not on par with what they gathered.

Essentially, thet use your money to provide you with your results PLUS build a huge intelligence database with much more results (including things that come up during your commissioned search that are not for you to know) for government etc use. It's like you subsidy the CIA and get back some partial results on things you want to know.
Great article. I've found myself doing this in the past. I'd tell people how and what I did but there's always an unexpected turn that happens. I leave out that bit because its something I earned through sweat and tears when talking about how I did something.

But, sometimes I just let it all hang out because I know that there's no possible chance for someone to copy my efforts.

The few businesses that are easily copied are usually short term projects because sooner or later everyone finds out the secret. The best projects I've done are the ones where I'm going full open kimono because there's something about my personal network, skill set or etc that gives me an inherent advantage over everyone else.

Best examples are my personal connections to marketing firms and my professional licenses.
Quote from the article:

So you set up your easel and get out your paints in front of a nice-looking house and start to puzzle over how to start. Suddenly 500 other people all arrive -- some of them who actually know how to paint -- and set up all around you. Not only is it annoying, it's also distracting. And it can lead to a kind of herd mentality where everything is attempted, but nothing is really tried.

This is called "competition" - you will find it everywhere you go. Is it "annoying" and "distracting" that you are not the only one thinking about or working on something? Maybe. But it will never happen that way in life. And even if you are the only one and you finish your work, as soon as it's out and someone sees it, they will copy you.

The way that you deal with competition is to be better than everyone else - not seek a place where there's no competition. The approach this guy advocates and the way he complains about competition is not the way to approach problems. If someone shows up at the house who actually knows how to paint and you don't, it's time to bow out - you just lost. Practice up and come back next time knowing how to paint.
No you wouldn't. I agree.

There is a limit to this "ideas are worthless" theory. We don't talk about it enough. Instead we either treat all ideas as precious or all as worthless. The truth is much more nuanced than that.

I think people who are just getting started need to know and understand where to draw the line -- and more importantly that other people are already drawing the line in their public communications.
Your description of the subjective effects of modafinil sound almost identical to those of Adderall (d-amphetamine). Adderall has a very well established short-term safety profile in therapeutic doses, but long-term use, especially at moderate to high doses, can lead to severe dependency and a host of health problems, in a very similar manner to cocaine. If what you say is true that Modafinil doesn't have the high addictive potential of amphetamines and cocaine, that sounds very appealing, but taking any drug even once if it's too new to know if there are long-term side effects from short-term use really scares me. I'm glad you conclude that sleep, nutrition, and exercise are preferable.

P.S. Wikipedia says Modafinil is Schedule IV in the U.S., which means that, like cocaine and morphine (Schedule II), Modafinil is illegal unless you have a prescription.
I find iFrames messy, and only will use them as a last resort.

To answer your question, I have used them in instances where security or lack of an API makes it impossible to do otherwise (an example was for a chamber of commerce site using web widgets from a company that provided them as an add-on to a PC based SaaS product).

I have also used them when there was not a budget to recode a a stand alone web gaming application that needed to be placed into Facebook.

In a perfect world, I would never use them when starting from scratch and would search for an API or other alternative.
IMO the best intro to monads is You Could Have Invented Monads:

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

It starts from concrete examples, lets you write a few exercises, then it shows you the common pattern behind those examples.
The Demise of Kodak: Five Reasons
An interesting exercise would be to leak your idea just to see how everyone fails or succeeds while you build your own version.

This would obviously only work if you had an inherent advantage in the market though haha.
The Inside Story of Nokia’s 41-Megapixel Camera Phone: Five Years in the Making
It's a stumbling block the beginner must learn once, not really an overhead that comes up at every use.
Isn't this similar to Apples initial idea with the first iPhone? Everything would be a "Web App"
They actually lowered the requirements: the minimum memory is now 256 MB instead of 512 MB and 7x27 processors are supported.
I know, and we have constantly lived along the edge of the cliff because of that. From a perspective of security it was a very poor design decision. By making those decisions you create a big security burden, the attack surface is very large, the impact of bugs is very large. These are the types of security consideration that have to happen at design time. In this case I would like to know more about, maybe it's being considered but not being discussed.
That's the hell of the thing, as the article points out: you'll never know what you screwed up.

Yes, it'd be great if you could have 100 people all starting from the same point and everybody learning the lessons of what worked and what didn't because of total openness, but that's just not happening. Instead you'll get 2 or 3 survivors writing blog articles about how awesome their startup is without actually reporting anything at the level of detail you'd need to actually improve.
There's no need to wait for central blessing. Just do it. It wouldn't take much scripting work to treat the existing PG as just another branch that you can periodically merge on to your trunk. And if they decide they like it, they can switch to it easily later.
As someone with no iPad I can say we are planning on finally jumping on the bandwagon and getting one when they are released.
> wouldn't it be better to a) code f defensively in the first place,

In Haskell, you don't have to. If your function takes a String as an argument, for instance, the compiler will ensure that it never receives a null instead. It will always receive an actual String, because normal types are non-nullable in Haskell. You have to explicitly wrap a type in a Maybe if you want to add nullability, and `Maybe String` is a completely different type from `String`, so the type checker can and will enforce that they don't improperly intermingle.

> and b) not call f with invalid parameters?

Same story here. If f takes a String argument, you can't (deliberately or by accident) pass it a Maybe String instead, or your code simply won't compile. The strong static type system in Haskell eliminates the mental burden of having to always watch out for nulls and handle them as a special case.

That may not seem like much of a burden if you're accustomed to languages like Python, Java, etc. where nullability is the default. But think about how much time you've spent dealing with NullPointerExceptions (or the equivalent in your language of choice) and imagine how much nicer it would be if the language itself could simply eliminate the possibility of them ever occurring in the first place. Well, thanks to its type system, Haskell can do that.
I travel a fair amount for business and have contacts that also travel quite a bit. Let me know if you'd like some beta testers once you get beyond the California area.
Same code == less reliable independent verification. So open code is good but independent verifiers should try to reimplement the software needed to verify an experiment.
Furthermore, the article author is really stretching it with this statement:

"Generally, the comparison states that amphetamines are bad for you and that Modafinil is not as bad because it "works differently", but there is probably more overlap than the proponents of Modafinil would like you to think."

This has nothing to do with "proponents of Modafinil" - they work in different ways on the pharmacological level. The mechanism of modafinil is still being analyzed but it has been shown fairly conclusively that they operate differently.
Null is an interesting exception in languages with static typing such as Java. But there is no static typing in Python. Literally any variable can hold any value of any type. None is not nearly so special there, since you can also assign 3 to any variable, or the identity function, or a string containing the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.

In languages like Java, null has special semantics that no other value has. In Python, there's nothing particularly special about None, it's simply used as a convenient sentinel by convention. I could easily write Python code that returns the literal string "This value is empty" as the sentinel instead, something that doesn't apply to languages like Java.
Until I use this, I'm going to hold off on the excitement everyone seems to have for it.

The tagline is "The Device the developer community is waiting for." That's great for the developer community. Unfortunately, the developer community is a small minority of people and honestly, people don't really care if their device is easy to develop for. People care how good their device is. If a device is easy to develop for, but it's slow, or clunky or crashes all the time or doesn't have features that people expect out of a mobile device, what's the point?
> This is the result of letting this subject onto HN.

Yes, exactly. This subject will always, without fail, produce vitriolic hate-filled comments, without possibility of changing opinions.

Ann will say "Look at how $GROUP does this"; Bob will accuse Ann of blatant anti-semitic racism while Charles will accuse Ann of ignoring the blatant human-rights abuses against some other group.

This is entirely predictable, and is why subjects like this do not belong on HN.
That's only true if you can beat the layer, and frankly I don't know any programmers (including myself) that would beat a optimizing compiler in code generation.

We're not talking writing assembly vs having the compiler do it, here. We're talking using a high level language with features such as garbage collection, bounds checking etc, versus not.

Those kinds of layers are both expensive AND beatable, regardless of the "optimizing compiler".

For an extreme example, a C++ program can easily beat a JRuby program -- despite the JRuby program being run on an optimizing JIT compiler.

The only cost is more programmer work, but not in the scale of difficulty of writing assembly versus C++. And in fields such as Games and Multimedia, you don't sacrifice performance for programmer convenience.
Roel, this path has already happened in the United States. In fact, we're in yet another round of consolidation where private equity groups are purchasing large stakes in the largest newspaper companies.

What we're starting to see is the rebirth of local community publications like non-profit donation supported pubs: http://www.newhavenindependent.org and http://www.texastribune.org.

We're also starting to see rapidly expanding for-profit groups like Community Impact. Who would have thought that relentlessly focusing on quality content would pay off?

It's often easier to get local advertisers to buy into the idea that they'll be targeting a local audience. Why wouldn't your bake-off article example be sponsored by the local grocery store or law firm? Which local advertiser wants to appear next to the national political debate article?
Really? You're offending me because I come from a so-called bad area.

In fact most of the population of the world actually live in "bad areas" and would no doubt feel pretty insulted to find an app that categorized their 'hoods as a "no-go zones".

Let me put it another way, this app would be a reminder of how poor you are. I wouldn't want that - I can't say I know anyone who lived there would either.
You are absolutely right. I used to be all about the ideas and think it was all about ideas, it'll be hard to explain here in few words but I think ideas are worthless up till a point.

Yeah, the startup process is heavily weighted towards execution, but if you have a stellar idea - and let me just say when I say "idea" I really mean "model" - then sure its got worth. If you know of a stone that nobody's overturned, and hell there's plenty of them you should sure as shit sit on it until you've got a flag ready that you can put in it.

But that only counts if its unique, if your going to build a "OMFG we have a startup that lets you post a 200 CHARACTER status about how what your eating makes you feel" then perhaps the idea might be "worthless" - because thats clearly a business that will make or break in its execution.

So yeah, I agree.
No?
The point is to factor out the repeated check-for-None code into one place to reduce redundancy and unclutter the algorithmic code in f. Separation of Concerns.
every reference in Python, like in Java, ALGOL 60 and countless other languages, may be of a certain type, or point to None.

Well, in Python every reference may be of any type. None is just another object, there's nothing particularly special about it.
Oh it's nowhere near halfway there. I think the idea of using git is a fine one, but some software engineering is very much required. Ideally the project would work for all phases including pushing updated copies to consumers. Once you think in those terms you start approaching a product that's going to work for non technical editors and writers.

A customized book reading application that allow critical readers to make marginal notes and corrections, and see and rate other people's marginal notes and corrections would be the ticket.
Linux Mint 12 LXDE RC is out and available for download
> I usually dose with a cocktail of piracetam, choline, and a small amount (100mg or so) of phenibut.

Why?
Photoshop’s New Offspring, Adobe’s Next Chapter – The Journal of Fine Imagery
I find it hard to equate an automated (bad) copyright takedown with any of those terms. Or file downloading, for that matter.
As Open-Collar's designer/developer THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. You have no idea how helpful this is.

I will be making changes today to try and speed up page-loading and we will be making textual changes as well.

Once again, thanks :)
No Company Follows Apple’s Expanded China Audits
Mentor
I am Computer Science student with some coding experience and is looking for a more experienced programmer/developer to teach me. All I really need is some guidance to help me develop my skills. In return I could work as an unpaid intern if you so wish. I have been learning nodejs on my own as well as some php before than, jquery currently and web coding in general. I am in the NYC area
>Most poor people don't work and don't even look for work,

Citation badly needed.
> USA is not going to tolerate an invasion of Falkland(whatever the Argentinians feel about Maldivas as their own).

*Malvinas. Would hate for you to go about Argentina confusing the Falklands with the Maldives in conversation.
Sort of. The key difference is that B2G is aiming to allow web apps to do absolutely anything a native app can do, whereas on the iPhone it was just intended to augment the native experience. That's how I see it, at least.
No, they also asked for my email password, so they could harvest my address book. It was optional, but optional phishing is still phishing. Maybe they've stopped doing that now, but they were doing it a year ago.
Google cache http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lM3dxT7...
“Anonymous” Hacktivists Crowdsourced Takedown Of Vatican Through Social Media
Redis Proxy for handling Redis Master/Slave setup
You are not wrong, however, I think the you have maybe missed the main point in the article which is yeah, competition is inevitable, but at least while your getting started its probably best not to share your idea (yes, just an idea) with a massive audience of hungry biz/coders/wannabe's/veterans and instead keep things hush hush until your ready to put it out there.
This seriously excites me the most. I can't wait until this reaches the stable build.
Twitter User Can't Remain Anonymous in Bachmann Investigation
Mini 10 battery
buy new replacement dell Inspiron mini 10 2200mAh battery .high quality and low price dell Inspiron mini 10 2200mAh battery with one year warranty.
You don't need to raise taxes to kill the cattle industry just remove the gigantic subsidies and force it to compete with something that costs 1/3 as much.
Did you post this once before? The entire article and especially the conclusion/takeaway sounds so very familiar! (but the publication date is today)
"You are not the one terming something good and bad"

You wrote the program, you set the thresholds, you are responsible. You can't absolve yourself by saying "the computer did it". It wouldn't stand up in court.
The Impact of Bad Bosses
Do relationships have a place in startups?
It's more nuanced than that. I'll often click through a link or comment link and immediately leave. Often times the title was link-bait and I'm not actually interested in the content, or the content was disappointing even if the topic was interesting.
A Classic Startup Horror Story
By local BIG paper I specifically mean the Boston Globe or Boston Herald.

I would rather take out an ad in the Globe than in a bunch of smaller papers (one per town, but they are grouped under umbrella companies so it's not quite as bad as it sounds), but not if my prospects aren't going to read it.

Small regional papers may be better vectors for small regional businesses, but I would guess that Sears, Friday's and Pep Boys would also prefer to cover a larger area.
Addiction is not just in the mind

Addiction, in rats at least, appears to be more in the environment than the body. Rat Park[0] is a fascinating experiment demonstrating this.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Of course they use an automated system for confirming copyrighted audio content. It's a second line of defense after Google's initial scan.

It's good to pay attention to cases like this, if only to flush other such cases out of the woodwork. You say it's once, but it's more accurate to say it's at least once.

I also say that if I were greedy, I'd make my "automated system" confirm everything as a violation. I'm not making that up as a crazy consume conspiracy theory. That's exactly what robosigning was: mass-production of claims that put the burden on consumers to figure out, and show evidence, of whether the company was making a valid claim or not. Robosigning (or simply returning "true" in this case) is extremely cheap, gets the job done in cases where the company is in the right, and gets the job done in many cases where the company is wrong because some people fail to jump through the hoops placed before them. In either case, it softens people up a bit before the company has to do any real work.

In the case of robosigning, it might actually have been profitable, even though they got caught at exactly the wrong time, when people were mad as hell about the crisis. At any other time, the penalty for getting caught would have been lighter, and it's certainly profitable when you don't get caught. If the strategy comes close to making money even in the worst possible case, I'd call it successful, and any established means of gaining an advantage at somebody else's expense merits a certain amount of vigilance. We put locks on our doors, we have laws against fraud, and in cases like this:

rest assured you can always make an internet s_storm about it and your problem will be solved (this is clearly the ideal solution, yes?)

Exactly. I'm not any good at it myself, but I have to admit, it's the best way to get things done as a consumer.