skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TFA is not telling us that. He's just saying he's trying an experiment. And he's not saying that the physical items are superior. He talks about watching video and doing email and posting to blogs, so he's obviously ok with virtual things.

Also, it sounds like he really does want to do the book reading, in that's what he went and did once he was less distracted. And then tried an experiment to see how he could bring back more of that.

Also, your "it's just that simple" line is contradicted by a lot of research on willpower. (Which, hint hint, I linked.) Maybe it really works that way for you, in which case: bravo, you magnificent alien. But it doesn't work that way for most people, including the the author of the initial article.

Some books are easy books. Other books are hard, but worth the work. Some things are quick and easy gratification, but other only pay off after a while. For humans, at least, one has to set aside the former if you want to pursue the latter.
That's changing, and fast. In Canada, pensions and retirement funds are getting involved in the startup funding game - and that's up north where funding is dry to begin with. I'm sure the same is happening here.

Source: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/03/29/vancouvers-hoot...

"OMERS Ventures, a $180-million fund established by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System last fall, said Thursday it has picked HootSuite Media Inc. as its first major funding recipient."
I believe they do. I think we're getting too caught up in this concept of fail fast, fail early, fail often and we're not sticking with ideas long enough to see if they could be a success.

After all, sometimes ideas don't fail because of the idea, they fail because of execution or sales or marketing. In which case moving on to a new idea is not going to yield any better results. People should stick with their current idea while learning all the other stuff they need to know to succeed and stop blaming the idea.

"Don't look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity."
-Paul Arden
I took a close look at Green Array recently and found a few blogs from engineerings who were beginning to play with them. At first they seemed too good to be true, but it appears that the architecture is only a good match for tasks that can easily be parallelized by hand. Computer vision would be one of those tasks, but then is rewriting CV code from scratch on a new architecture something you can viably do anymore?

Anyway, I hope these find a niche so that this kind of architecture might one day make a comeback. The advantages are staggering.
Funny!!
I started using XSLT about a year ago and had exactly the same initial reaction - it looks ugly and verbose, it's difficult to debug, and badly written code is almost impossible to understand.

A (difficult!) year of daily use behind me, I've found that all the above problems disappear. People come to XSLT expecting a procedural DSL for modifying an XML file which they can pick up in a day or two, and very quickly their code spirals out of control as they try to twist XSLT into what they expect. It very clearly isn't a procedural language, which is why I think it gets labelled as functional, because it doesn't accurately fit either model.

Once you develop good code style and know the pitfalls to avoid, it's perfectly pleasant to use. It's also significantly easier to get along with if you use a full blown XSLT IDE like oXygen, which allows you to breakpoint, see the call stack, and trace back which template generated a specific part of the output.
Well written & no-BS GTD summary. Thanks for sharing.

I just stopped using GTD after 5 years on the system, including 3 years on OmniFocus. I respect David Allen and GTD a lot. But I found a better solution: daily outcomes.

Say you are building a social network startup called FaceSpace. Here's what your daily outcome list may look like:

Help people communicate more quickly -> Launch beta of FaceSpace -> Call Jason for programmer recommendations

We're going after the "why" -- instead of just doing tasks.

You'll have maybe 5-8 of these for the day.

How is this different than GTD?

1) No long queues of things to do. Start fresh every day. What persists is the outcomes we're after
2) Aware of the "why" behind a task gives you feelings of motivation and purpose
3) Focusing on the "why" forces you to do 100% necessary tasks
4) If life throws you a curve ball and you change the task, it's okay... We're focused on achieving outcomes, not tasks

I think GTD is great but I feel it focuses on tasks at the expense of focusing on the big picture. You shouldn't be waiting for a weekly review to see the big picture -- that's just way too long. For me, staying focused on realizing my outcomes all day has led to more directed and forward-driving tasks. As many great men have said, it's not about which tasks you do it's about which tasks you don't do. Focusing on the outcome helps you choose the best tasks.

Outcome lists FTW.
DRM means missed opportunities for e-books
Vaccinate Yourself Against Crappy Customer Feedback
Windows XP support ends two years from now
They have not changed in any way, however there is a patchset proposed currently to change how NUMA works a bit. Unclear if it will change this situation.
I successfully contested a customer review that was basically a text dump of promo codes I had posted elsewhere. But had no luck with the review I posted above, where I think it was obvious the review never read the description. Your milage may vary I guess, just like with app reviews.
Thanks! I am glad you learned something, and happy to get great feedback!
Stuff like this just proves how flash is superior to the html5 spec. This technology is fragmented and it's hurting the web. By the time all the smartphones are fast enough to run flash smoothly, there'll still be different browser implementations of html5. This is why it's a shame
adobe stopped developin their mobile plug-in. Oh well, adobe air is still doing strong on native mobile apps.
No, gccgo doesn't resolve anything.

Care to explain? I was under the impression that the recent 32-bit memory usage issues are specific to the 8g implementation only.
Terrible use-case though. ID3 metadata is a few hundred bytes, all of it in the header. Just use READ-SEQUENCE and be done with it.

(defun read-n-bytes (path &optional (n 512))
(with-open-file (fd path :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))
(let ((header (make-array n)))
(read-sequence header fd)
header)))
Why did I never see this in movies?
Works for me. Anyways, the torrent for the beginner VM is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:77cfd777dd287da30dcdc5c82aa72f0ffb6c67eb
Would that be a mysql or linux kernel patch (assume the latter)? Also want to echo xxjaba's comment further down - thanks for doing the work on that post, it was really enlightening!
And yet Mono works fine in environments with < 512MB of RAM, even when using Boehm GC :-)
It'll be the default in Mono 3.0 (or 2.12, whatever we decide to call it). Currently, in Mono 2.10, Boehm GC is the default, although we've been using SGen for our commercial products (which is why we feel that SGen is now ready to be the default).
I'm finding that, with the aid of Backbone, the Deferred methodology is becoming obsolete. For instance, as mentioned by someone else in these comments, a great use case for Deferred is firing off multiple queries and waiting on their return.

You can accomplish this in Backbone, inherently even, by listening to change events in models. In my app, I used the Deferred methodology to begin with, but now that I'm refactoring the site into Backbone, everything is much cleaner (thanks to the additional structure that MVC provides).
I think you are removing whitespace too aggressively: “performanceof”, “andnew”, “linecharacters”, “googlegenerally”. “this thisamazing product” is a grammar typo after you put the space back in.
Higher learning
Django-gearman-commands 0.1
Before electronic records, the standard of "reasonable doubt" was different, and much more dependent on physical evidence and eyewitness accounts. The rise of these newer types of evidence is part of what has shown that eyewitness accounts are not nearly as reliable as once thought.
You need to... indent it. 2 spaces I think, maybe 4.
Make Social Networks Work for Your Start-Up
I think it is still hard for companies to raise money. While the article is excellent, it doesn't really note that there were several companies that applied to Y, but only 60 got in. (Disclaimer: No, I did not apply). It may have been easier for those 60 companies to raise more money now, but I doubt it was ever that easy and it will ever be to raise money.
From the opposite perspective, I have found that owners of business treat me as a second class customer when I use a Groupon voucher with them. There is either an automatic assumption that I'm cheap and a less worthy customer, or they have overbooked their services and provide a poor experience.

Maybe the problem is your friends became resentful because they were incapable of handling the promotion, so they blamed the customers to protect their own egos?

Not all of my Groupon experiences have been bad. I did a scuba diving experience, which lead to me doing additional scuba qualifications and experiences with the same group, at full price.
The JOBS act is going to let companies like these raise money on the internet from just about anyone.
Dear God am I on fucking reddit? I'm all for a little joking but this is ridiculous and adds nothing to the conversation.
The design needs major work. Your value proposition should be very clear and a call to action should also be clear. Simplify as much as you can (content) and apply a web 3.0 feel to it.

I honestly don't see a clear competitive advantage over yelp but you know your market better.

How do you plan on making this viral? incentive consumers to use your website/App?

Check out Pinchit.com, They now have more than 100,000 user after few months of launching.

Best of Luck,
I agree that, for better or worse, we'll be using text-based formats for a while.

I don't think the hypothetical alternative representation I mentioned is going to happen off the back of a single grad school research project, or anything even close to that scale. It's more like something that's going to take the R&D lab of an industry heavweight a decade to develop and refine and then launch into widespread industrial usage with the backing of at least one major platform developer when it's ready for prime time.

Sadly, as long as text-based (or, perhaps more accurately, line-based) programming languages are good enough to produce acceptable software, there isn't a truly compelling motivation to develop a completely new model. I wonder whether increasing pressure on the software industry to provide quality and security as a backlash against the current cheap-and-nasty trend will drive us toward more radical programming models first, and perhaps get us close enough to make the quantum leap to an entirely new kind of representation from there.
The author mentions the strategy of the VCs: to find the next billion-dollar company. One success of this magnitude will mask many, many failures. We should not look on a large seed round as saying "X is worth Y" (although by the definition of "worth", it is), but rather that "X has a not-insignificant chance of being worth 100Y in 5 years".
Hello,

The UK Office for National Statistics (a respected, trustworthy organisation) say that 1 in 4 people will suffer a mental health problem at some point during their lifetime. (This includes many very mild forms of illness.) They also say that 1 in 6 people will suffer a MH problem severe enough to need treatment.

Imagine for a moment that you had broken a limb. You'd wear a cast for a while. Maybe you'd need to use a crutch or a sling. And when the cast was removed you'd gently exercise to build up strength.

Would you feel guilty about that? Why?

You say that you feel like so many years have been wasted. Those years have not been wasted. You have learnt valuable things. You have learnt techniques to recognise and deal with stress. You have learnt the importance of good eating and sleeping. You are working. You now have a set of skills that other people don't have.

You say that you wasted some years. Well, so what? The only thing that affects is savings plans - compound interest is handy. But that's easy to fix. You just live frugally and pay more in now. Everything else is fine. People change their lives and do different things all the time.

Did you learn any Cognitive Behaviour Therapy techniques? Perhaps you could apply those to your feelings of guilt / anxiety?

But, importantly, congratulations on taking back control of your life. I very much hope that your recovery journey continues. Good Luck!!
"At this point, we're stuck with all of git's quirks, until something new comes along that's significantly better in enough fundamental ways to displace it."

A better git than git?

git done right?
I think ~Yes/No~ is the better answer. You can remove apps and sync them from a backup later, or even download them from Apple, but AFAIK the only way to restore an app and its user state ('where was I', login info, preferences, etc) is by doing a full restore of a backup (all apps installed at a given time and their stare, plus all device settings from that time)
Internet activists take aim at a new House cybersecurity bill
So do the "it's bubblicious!" comments this thread is responding to.
Mod_redis
Don't the big VC firms like Sequoia raise a lot of their funds from institutional investors?
Futures/Promises are an interesting technique to do control flow. IMO, there are certain nuances like losing distinction between async/sync calls that work against the technique. I wrote an article about it at: http://javascriptturnsmeon.com/93769736
I suppose we all ought to move back to Slashdot now.
Yes, but at much lower levels. That's a valid concern with the JOBS crowdfunding provisions, though.
Wise words and ones that anybody that ever wants to be funded or has attracted funding would do well to heed.

YC has become a very strong brand, and one that attracts investors from all over the globe because they have proven that their method for picking winners works better than what those investors could ever achieve by themselves.

Keep in mind that the factors that differentiates YC from all these other cats are very hard to replicate and so it is easier for them to ride on YCs coat tails than it is for them to copy the process. Hence the glut of money.

This is good for everybody that gets 'in' to YC, they're more or less guaranteed to find funding and find it on their terms. For once the recipients of funding have a slightly stronger hand.

Still, that won't change the long term outcome for the majority, the majority of such investments will still fail (and the investors are well aware of it), and a smaller portion will break even or make it big. Picking the winners out of the ones that got 'in' is just as hard (if not harder) than picking the ones that got 'in' in the first place.

I like the tone of this article, it sends exactly the right message. Feet on the ground and get to work, being funded is not the end, it is the begin. And it definitely isn't a guarantee for success, that's up to you & your team, the market and timing. And you only control one of the three.
Thanks. Usually I have a 1-day/500-word minimum between initial writing of anything like this and posting it, because I don't want to embarrass myself with mediocre writing. I like to have days between drafts.

This time, I want a message to get out, and fast.

I might rewrite it in a week or so. Pretty much all of my 2000+ word blog posts deserve to be more than one post.
This looks awesome. I've taken a large interest in security over the last couple years and am always looking for ways to increase my knowledge in this space (FWIW, the Stanford crypto course has been great so far). This will be a good follow-on to that.
If 512mb are needed as contiguous space, then one hacky solution is do define a BSS section of 512mb, or in "C" terms - global array -

char mem[512 * 1024 * 1024];

the executable loader would "allocate" this memory before loading any dlls, and later dlls that were supposed to be in that memory would be rebased

Oh, and somehow Go would need to use this memory rather than allocate it.
git add --patch can also help with this. You don't necessarily need to make all your changes simultaneously.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
"fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.

Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable.

Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something good enough out there and iterating.

Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have to actually know what you're doing before you act.
The proper way to eat Easter eggs
Startup CEO Cyclist kills pedestrian, posts eulogy for helmet
Halfway through I got a feeling that (a) the author doesn't know what he's writing about, (b) he's never read Eric Ries, otherwise he would at least state somewhere early a different interpretation of what "fail fast" could mean.
Ask HN: Why is there still no Python-based blog engine alternative to WordPress?
Python with its super awesome microframeworks like Flask and Bottle, simple routing, great Jinja2 templating engine, simple to implement DB connection to any kind of existing DB engines and a lot more still has no its own alternative to WordPress with its outdated overbloated spaghetti code.

You may see on ThemeForest how popular WordPress themes are. The money is there.

I swear it would be a really joyful experience to create and maintain themes for a Python-based blog with clean, logic and lightweight code and markup. So why is not the market moving in this direction?<p>May be some of you thought about it like I do?

Please share your thoughts about how you see the possible future of python-based blog engines and its markets.
Sorry, I assumed this was ok in a ask HN post. I'll write a blog post next time!
Blogging Platform with awesome UI
Apple patent could lead to face-based user switching in iOS and beyond
This is actually talking about missed opportunities for publishers, not ebooks per se. Despite all the talk about author support/development, curation, editorial services, and the like, publishers have historically maintained their cartel-like position for one reason alone: the amount of capital required to go into the publishing business. They've profited immensely by wedging themselves in between the money and the talent, and for obvious reasons they don't want that to change. In point of fact, publishers have been low-balling their author services for some decades now. Unless you have the sales clout of a Stephen King, you are going to see precious little publisher support, and may well find yourself dropped even if your books are selling (just not at best-seller levels).

Unfortunately for the publishers, the amount of capital required to go into the publishing business is now effectively zero.

Yes, an author might still want to hire an editor, a cover artist, and all the rest, but the key term there is "hire". There's no longer any reason to fork over 85% of the profit from your book to some middleman, and more and more authors are wising up to this fact. Publishers do provide advances to authors, but you'd likely be better off in financial terms by getting a bank loan, or heck, even a credit card or payday loan. Yes, you will have to pay interest, but at least those organizations won't claim to own 85% of your book's profit in (effective) perpetuity.

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the rest will put your ebook in their store right alongside the most recent offerings from the Big Six, and you will likely make more money from pricing your book at $2.99 (or even $0.99) than you will from your share of the the DRM-encrusted $9.99-$19.99 book from the major publisher.
this. I bought a Groupon once for a small restaurant and among about 12 customers there was just a single one who ordered conventionally. The restaurant was at capacity and was really small but they sold around 8000 Groupons and when I visited a couple months have passed and it was still completely full with Grouponers.
Even though it was cheap as hell (18 EUR all you can eat tapas for 2 people) I won't go back there because the food made me sick.
CMD+0 no longer works to reset to default zoom since you've bound it to the help toggle.
I did, actually. In systems, failing fast (as opposed to silent failure) is a good thing. Technical fast-failure is often correct. Better to catch the bug at compile time than at runtime. Better to throw an exception than do the wrong thing. Full agreement. No question there. That's because failure is objective and should be reported (and acted on) fast.

I haven't read Eric Ries, so I have no opinion of him. I know that people are using "fail fast" to justify being ethically sloppy. I don't have any basis for assessing whether this has anything to do with Ries. Quite probably, it doesn't.
I think you would prefer Reno/Las Vegas to Seattle
Such a plot really needs error bars. It's possible that the difference is not statistically significant.
Show HN: Tired of entering map directions on Android? I've streamlined it
I don't think it's that easy for all companies to raise money. In fact, I just watched an interview with Pinterest's founder who said that they were turned down by virtually the entire investor community. I think the pendulum has made a full swing for YC companies, but a partial one for others.

Deciding what to invest in is hard, especially in the seed stage. With the market being so hot, investors have to decide quickly which makes it even harder. When investors are agreeing to an 8 million cap on a YC company and a 4 million cap on comparable non-YC company, they are essentially saying that the YC company is twice as likely to succeed, which I don't think is far-fetched. You may also wonder whether this anticipation fulfils itself (a company that seems more likely to succeed may get "better" investors, positive media coverage, early adopters, etc, which may end up helping it becoming successful).

I also think that the increased popularity of convertible notes is a contributing factor. The 8 million cap only becomes 8 million valuation if the company raises the next round at 8 million or above, so in a way it has to live up to its promise in order for the increased cap to take an effect.

And finally, if a company becomes the next Google then the valuation at the seed stage is insignificant. Therefore the valuation just represents the perceived probability of that happening.
MPAA / RIAA might Boost Cyberlocker and VPN Revenues
I use a combination of SelfControl.app, my hosts file and OpenDNS content filtering. I need 3 layers of protection.
Error bars on what? The ratings themselves can be measured with perfect accuracy, and the results were averaged over 5000 merchants, so any error in the mean would be too small to see.
Usually happens during the first and the last week of the promotion. I learned my lesson, and if you time your visit anywhere in-between, you can generally get into the place on a low-volume day.
While Apple Is Criticized for Foxconn, Other Companies Are Silent
It would be really cool if I could plug some URLs in and then see how well it works / make sure it doesn't screw anything up. That would be a lot more convenient.