skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Might be not applicable for you, but I have never had has much productive as since I commute a lot.

I used to work 50-55h/w, and get home to do . . . nothing and see my fanstastic ideas TODO list growing and growing.

For some time, I relocated and now have to commute almost 3 hours a day (with 2 hours of train).
Now I work only 45h/w, but still have less time at home than before .

Getting home at 8pm, I have to be really efficient to get things done at home (chores, washing machines, cooking) and spend some time with my girlfriend.

This showed me that I had to be as much efficient as possible during those 3 hours, not to literally lose my life.

I use the train time to code as much as possible on pet projects and my TODO list is melting down.
I use the bus and walk time to read articles saved on my phone using Paper/Instagram.

This to say that I think that necessity can make you more productive. You don't have to start commuting :p, but perhaps put yourself in a close environement for some time a day could be good practice.
It's odd, but just do and you will be productive. Start with something small and watch it snowball. Before you know it you will get into it and not be able to break away.

This is true with just about anything. Most of the time exercise doesn't seem fun, but you get into it.

It's much easier to be a consumer than a producer. Avoid consumption and just produce. You will gain far more slogging through it yourself than reading about someone slogging through it.
I'm very happy with my experiences with CloudFlare.

My blog has failed several times under load, despite cloudflare being in front of it, but at no time was it a lacking of cloudflare. It's that they are performing a CDN service which proxies the request for dynamic data back to the source (which in my case is the majority of the load, since my blog is very image-light).

Once I set up cloudflare to aggressively cache and serve a page under load, the weight on my blog's VPS was better (the load was down from 70 on a 2-core machine, and the I/O wait dropped from 95%).

Cloudflare does what they do very well, and their CEO (http://twitter.com/EastDakota) is very, very responsive to requests for help.

I'm glad I'm using cloudflare.
It's interesting how we can have opposite reactions to the same situation; working in previous jobs I hated, getting home at night left me feeling drained of energy and needing to "decompress". I could never focus on my own work until I quit the day job.
Questions of Fair Play Arise in Facebook's I.P.O. Process
"From Dust" for Chrome (Native Client)
Markets for unused IPv4 addresses well stocked, flourishing
Who exactly is reading this backwards? That's a bit of a straw man.

I think you're jumping the gun a bit ruling that storage capacity is already slowing down; I tend to agree it's just around the corner, but this chart definitely does not indicate a conclusive trend in already released drives:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Har...
Perhaps the previous poster meant melting to open water, which is a recent phenomenon.
Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure.

This doesn't sound like a positive development to me. This kind of structure almost always seems to lead to less accountability and more business-speak bullshit.
I wrote this article and was very surprised someone posted it on Hacker News, where the audience is highly technical. Your criticism makes it sound like the post was intended to be the ultimate guide to custom building silent PCs for the technically inclined. It was not. It was meant to answer the question: For about $600-$700 can an ordinary person with no technical know how buy an off-the-shelf system that is very quiet (and clean, while you're at it)? Among the thousands of possible off-the-shelf systems, what simple rules of thumb can you apply that insure the system will be quiet and clean?

Excluding my friends in computer/technology only a small number of people I know feel comfortable reinstalling Windows and hunting down all the drivers (I know how to do it and I personally find it to be an annoying waste of time). None of my nontechnical friends and acquaintances would buy a custom-built PC. I considered doing that when I purchased the systems and decided not to invest time in learning how to do it right (I agree with you that silentPCreview is a great resource for going down that path).

I considered the Mac Mini - which was quiet enough. But to run Windows Media Center I'd have to buy a copy of Windows and to run movies an external DVD which brings the cost up to about $1000. I considered boutique builders like Pugot but they all charge $1000 or more for their better Mac Mini like systems.

I actually started to write a much more detailed article half a year ago that you would no doubt have preferred but abandoned it because I thought only a sliver of systems building enthusiasts would care. My blog usually tries to make technical topics understandable by the masses.

I sometimes share my posts here but didn't consider sharing this post for a second - not the right audience.
I'll tell you how to brag.. donate. You made a million, give 100k away. Trust me, everyone will love and respect you.
i upvoted you both. no idea how my web worked before installing those two (chrome). on pages like yahoo, msn, cnn, turning off adblock slows displaying web 2-5 seconds. nightmare!
No I am not. "Banned from twitter" means that person/organisation was prohibited from using Twitter. That is not what happened - account was temporarily suspended because of the usage of trademarked image (not because of its ownership or content) and if they stop using the trademarked image they could post to twitter as much as they wish. Nobody censors them because they offended the mighty 1% (these constant knee-jerk allegations really are getting tiresome). Their account is suspended for using trademark that doesn't belong to them - that would happen with any trademark in any situation. Try using Coca-Cola logo in your twitter account and if Coca-Cola learns about it your account most probably will be suspended. Not because Coca-Cola hates you but because you're using their trademark.
IBM bans siri
The car already doesn't need to be on planned routes, it remaps the trip as needed. That was done back during the DARPA Challenges.

They're just limiting the car here for the media.
Does this mean someday we'll be able to store digital porn in our DNA?
You mean whether Apple can come up with new, innovative products. Cook should be able to recognise good from bad and keep an eye on quality, but not be expected to come up with The Next Big Thing.

Read some of Ive's infrequent interviews, he uses the word "we" never "I" to discuss the design process. That is what makes Apple so successful.
I don’t have an open-source portfolio to show off, my blog is pretty moribund, and I spent approximately the second half of 2011 job-hunting.

On the one hand, I did wish I had some code to show off, because a significant proportion of the companies that looked interesting wanted to see some nontrivial thing I had written as a precondition to an interview; “send us a link to your Github page” was not uncommon. On the other hand, I did get interviews and I did accept an offer from a place I genuinely thought was a good fit (and not just “well, it’s a good escape from the previous employer”), so it is possible.
I clicky the link he provides. I type [amplifier] in the box. I get a list of projects; the first few are still active, the next few are successful, and then there's a bunch of unsuccessful projects.

I didn't even have to click "See all results", so they're not that hidden.
The Quest for the Perfect Job
English-Chinese dictionary: http://www.chinese-tools.com

Chinese idiom dictionary: http://www.zdic.net/

Chinese character stroke order dictionary: http://www.visualmandarin.com/tools/chinese-stroke-order/

Traditional to Simplified Chinese translator: http://www.vifo.com.cn/fanti/

Chinese pinyin romanizer: http://translate.google.com
I talk with users. That keeps me motivated to move things forward.
> The correct conception is that it could be sold and the Market Economics Fairy has predicted that it will be sold as soon as a willing buyer and willing seller agree on a price. Indeed, if Facebook fails, all their data will almost certainly be sold along with the rest of their assets.

Amen to that. At this point its pointless for FB to sell their raw data, because they want advertisers to be coming back and use FB platform to pay them for access/ads. But don't hold you breath if you think that on firesale the majority of value in FB won't be its only value -- all the connections and interests data.
The lack of a turn signal made me chuckle.

That is such a software development moment :) Probably too easy to implement, that's why they forgot it.

But the fact that the car often needs the human to intervene is a bit more interesting. Why would a human better know if there is enough space for two cars to pass each other in a narrow street?
Grand Strategy, Procurement Failures and Rejecting Mediocrity
As a cross-platform developer, I would love to see clang and MSVC as compiler options so that I'm able to compare the various outputs when trying to track down undefined/implementation defined behaviors.

As it stands though, this is a fantastic tool! It's right up there with ideone for me.
Magento Music Sales
What are these "universe glitches", when one gets logged out by the browser

I've had a situation in the past where a session has regenerated - giving the impression of expiring - due to lots of AJAX calls over a period in time. Basically, you got X number of pageviews with the current session token before a new token was generated.

IIRC, the browser's session cookie wasn't getting updated due to the calls being via AJAX, and hence the user was logged out. It's been a long time since this happened though, so I may have a detail wrong.
News.me Open Sources CoreText Library
If that's the goal, we can reduce fatalities to zero by all being sterilized. Once we're all dead, there will be no humans left and the human death rate drops to zero, permanantly.
Oh, I'm with you on the "get a prototype up and running, using consultants" part. Definetely a good investment. But depending on how much work was poured into this, it's probably relatively trivial to re-implement. It is a minimally viable product after all, I hope?

There are three reasons why I would suggest that you don't emphasise the proficiency in Ruby. The first is, as mentioned above, that you're probably overestimating the effort required to switch platform at this point. The second is that a good programmer who just happens to have no/limited experience with Ruby will probably be able to adapt pretty fast, provided he has experience with similar technologies. By limiting your search to those that already know Ruby well, you're avoiding a lot of potential.

But the main reason why I think it's a bad idea, is because you are making decisions that I believe is the domain of a CTO to make. By doing so, you are sending a signal that you don't respect/trust him to make that decision. That is going to make the type of person you'd want onboard think twice about joining. I'm not suggesting that you actually feel this way (I don't know you, so I couldn't pass that judgement), but you should be aware of the way it will read to - at least some - people in your target demography.
+1, in the past where I worked in hospitality, 4 days on 4 off, I could happily spent 3/4 days off building websites.

For the last 2 or 3 years working in agencies, you need a lot of extra willpower to get back on the computer after work.

I work best late at night and early in the morning so just try and fit my side projects in around that time, when I'm most productive.
Of Actors and Streaming Data
Reading is not being productive - or I'm being really productive without producing anything.

Anyway I read at work and at home, but I have trouble working on my own stuff sometimes.
FTA: "But the biggest step will be to create a car that will let me just sit in the back seat with no-one at all in the driver's seat. . . . If Google can get there before a major automaker beats them to it, I'll be really impressed."

A major automaker has as much chance of beating Google as a 350lb man has of beating Usain Bolt at the 100m dash. The automakers aren't really known for doing cutting-edge software, you know.
Girl fired for being too hot?
"if you’re going to use a crowdfunding service like Kickstarter, it’s important to figure out what’s worked for others in the past, but also to figure out what hasn’t worked for others in the past."

This is exactly why it would work in Kickstarter's favor to make failed projects visible. Since they only make money on successful projects, they stand to make more money if users don't continuously remake the same failed ideas.
I would do the exact same thing. As the author points out, unsuccessful projects can't have any action taken on them. All they serve to do is get people less enthused about the website.

As DanBC points out, it is definitely possible to find failed projects by performing a simple search. All this says to me is that Kickstarter doesn't want to broadcast them or use up valuable screen real estate for them.
I'm considering taking BrowserID (Persona) into production for my MMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctp0uWBH7sM

Aside from taking well over a second to verify an assertion, it's great.
Ask HN: Any Dallas/Ft. Worth-area folks looking for FT work?
I have a position open at my company - we're past the "startup" phase but I think the position would be of interest to some of the newer/upcoming/recent grads on HN in the DFW area. We're in the Dallas area and the job title is "E-Commerce Operations Assistant" with a pay rate of $30-$40k. Basically I'm looking for someone to work with me directly on running the web business - your work will run the gamut of "all things a web company deals with" including customer service, order mgmt, purchasing/invoicing, marketing/branding, conversion tracking, fraud detection/prevention, and a ton of other things. It's a job in which you could get your hands on a lot of different areas rather quickly. It's meant to be about a 2-4 year job after which you either start your own company, or use the hands-on skills to move on to a much bigger company.

If you're interested, you can reach me at my name using Google's popular email service.
Try monitoring your energy level. I ran this experiment on myself (http://madhadron.com/?p=254) with very useful results. I know that my energy level drops like a rock at 16h and doesn't really come back until about 20h. So I take care of stuff that doesn't require massive energy in that gap and try to protect my second energy burst of the day for getting other stuff done.

As for the articles you've emailed yourself, I find it quite often the case that I no longer have enthusiasm a few hours later to read something that seemed interesting at first glance. The best solution there is not to read it and find something better.

I also find that it helps to schedule a block of time for a particular project. For example, I'm typesetting a book for some friends of mine. On my calendar for yesterday evening was to put the chicken on to roast and then typeset while it roasted until other friends came over for dinner at 7. The broccoli and sweet potatos required some time, but not much focused attention, so I could keep the state of the typesetting in my head while I did prep work and then go back to it when things were cooking.

You also may be using up your capacity for certain kinds of thought (e.g., programming and mathematics) at work. Try a project that uses a different part of your brain, such as drawing or writing fiction.
This almost feels like the 5 Stages of Grief: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
Really good point on the platform decision - thanks a lot, I'll take that into account a tweak my search accordingly.
The Art of Stealth Studying: How To Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work
So sad it's only for 1.9
>The correct conception is that it could be sold and the Market Economics Fairy has predicted that it will be sold as soon as a willing buyer and willing seller agree on a price.

Mmmmm... unfortunately, I think YOU'RE the one with the strawman argument here. The misconception that he's talking about is the notion that "the purpose of collecting your personal data is to sell it to the highest bidder". That IS a misconception. The purpose of collecting user data is to rent out the aggregate value of it to advertisers. The fact that the collector might someday be forced into receivership and the user data may end up on the auction block as part of their assets is not actually relevant, because a purchaser of such is ALSO not interested in selling the data for profit, but rather collecting rent on the aggregate value of the data from advertisers.
I know plenty of people with really interesting things pinned to their fridge. It often takes them a while to remember anything about pictures that have been staring them in the face for years. Why? Because, you go the the fridge to get food. People are terrible multitasking which is why Facebook advertising has such a low click-though rate and a high accidental click rate.
At least in the USA...

We irrigate our lawns with drinking water.

We pay farmers to not grow (or to dump what they do).

The greatest medical malady of our poor is obesity.

1 in 50 live on government-provided welfare.

The "poverty line" is twenty times world median income.

Not quite the idealized form you have in mind, but getting there.
Show HN: 312Seasons
I've recently learned .NET4 MVC3 and wanted to push something out on my own. This is my first on-my-own app. All feedback is welcome!
Apple has been an outlier kind of performer under Steve Jobs, because Jobs was an outlier kind of human being. All I take away from that article is that people better start tempering their expectations of this new Apple, because once the product pipeline that Jobs oversaw is depleted, what we have left is merely a "very good" company built on a great foundation.

So much of the article seemed to point out the Tim Cook was friendlier in terms of investor relationships, but who cares about that (from a technologist point of view)? I mean, the biggest indicator of the shift in their priorities is that they took 100 billion dollars in cash and used it for stock buybacks and dividends. Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? They would never dream of this, because they are too busy re-investing their profits with their big-picture potentially world changing research projects.

But hey, kudos for Tim Cook for not trying to be someone he is not, he's a money and operations guy. So money and operations will get looked at at the expensive of innovation. But this is not good for those who are used to miracles from Apple:

"It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine," says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011.

"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."

Yuck. The geek inside dies a little at reading this.
Well, what do you like? I think that you really want to work backwards from there (or at least I do). We've all worked crap jobs we hated just to make ends meet or to satisfy a checkbox somewhere - but you really don't want to be doing that forever do you?

If you posted back with what you like to do and what interests you, I bet you'd get a lot more detailed responses.
I don't agree at all. It doesn't matter if someone copies your product, they will be marked as the "<your app> clone", and as long as you have a stable, good looking app and with good feedback from clients you don't have to worry that much.

Yes, you may loose a margin of profit that might be redirect to your cloned app, but if your app is really good you are safe. People tend to use the original, not the copy-cat.

Look at Angry Birds, the cloned games tend to be called "that game that looks like ANGRY BIRDS" even if they don't even have birds, but pigs or elephants.
8 Clues that Your Business Honeymoon May be Over
Show "how you present the results" instead of showing the man page on your landing page.
Of course. As I mentioned in the piece, search still turns up unsuccessful results.

The point of the piece is that failed projects don't show up in: a) Kickstarter's Discover interface b) Google results
Google has covered large parts of the (populated) world with Street View. Pictures [1] indicate that the cars were equipped with laser sensors. So Google probably has enough data to have the cars drive new routes.

But thats not the point. Most of peoples daily driving routine is the same routes over and over, commuting to and from work.

Going even further: I'd imagine that you could train the car on a specific route by driving it manually. Such information could be crowdsourced, much as Google already does with its traffic data on Maps.

[1]: http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/streetviewca.jp...
Res Civitas non-Gratis: 21st Century Public Realm
Google's Eric Schmidt pledges funding for UK computer education
Right now I have 6TB of space in my desktop. I keep all my music and movies on the drive. DVDs are painful to watch, so I rip all of them to the hard drive then store the physical backup on a shelf. I have eclectic taste in music sometimes, so songs I own never get deleted for fear that they may never become available to me again.

Not to mention the massive amount of storage required for just a handful of modern video games (when they weigh in at 15+ GB each)
To me, the opposite question is the hard one.

Since I've started using a tool to plan my activities in a weekly, and also in a daily, basis, I've seen my productivity boost. I have separate task lists for my day job, my side projects, and also personal stuff. I use Trello, and Google Calendar for tasks that have a clear deadline, meetings, or appointments.

It feels good to tick the "Done" box.

Also, I use a tool to track where I spend my time, so that I try to improve my "time invested on productive activities" per week. I use Rescue Time for that.
How Microsoft solves touch on the desktop
Do people get their money back if a project fails?
The argument here seems to be that Kickstarter, by hiding failures, is doing a disservice to others who may want to start a similar business.

Kickstarter is a business. Showing failures would be a bad business move, as the author admits; they obviously don't want to do that. On the other hand, entrepreneurs starting a business have a ton of work to do to ensure their business is viable. Kickstarter is doing them a tremendous favor by keeping failed attempts on their site; they don't have to do that! Writing a post that calls them out for not doing more to showcase failures seems pretty misguided to me; the only person served is the budding entrepreneur, and it has potential to significantly harm Kickstarter, as it could induce fewer people to start projects.

I guess I completely disagree with the post's intention.
Absolutely. I'd also be shocked if Jobs had left his post without leaving some handover notes and a couple of potential ideas for the future. Jobs seemed to have a good relationship with some of his employees and I'm sure that there is a lot left in Apple for the next five-to-ten years.
Imagine an engineer knowing there's less NAND flash available and it's getting more expensive. So they can focus on giving the software a smaller storage footprint. Now the product is the same, but because engineering and global-supply management worked together, the product is cheaper.