skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been coding for nearly 30 years and to me "the zone" is most easily described as Meditation.

I meditate often and in my early years I worked hard to master the process as I tend to be a bit hyper active and easy to distract (see I'm reading HN right now lol).

If you add the same sort of discipline to your "the zone" quests as suggested in a number of good teachings on meditation I think you will find that it is actually fairly obtainable.

I do agree with the post that it's not magical and that we can control it. That said a lot can make it hard to enter "the zone" some call it writer's block etc. When I hit those times I usually just give up and find other things to do for a bit to relax and let my mind clear up.

Your environment can only effect it as much as you allow. I've been in the zone many times in an airplane between JFK and LAX and in an airport terminal, in car rides while my wife drives us on a long ride etc. It's really about discipline and training your mind to let go of distractions.
It's funny, I wanted to say exactly the same. I would add that this picture staying here while scrolling distracts me from focusing on the text to read which is quiet ironic considering the subject of the post :-)
How to start and run an evening event, with tips from UK tech event organisers
"Many of my fellow teachers would be very comfortable with a tablet that could talk to a projector somehow and some good writing sketching software."

That's probably good for short and "casual" writing. But for long distance writing, most people can type much faster than they can write, and most people can type much more legibly than they can write.

Which is hugely ironic, given the bandwagon of reducing emphasis on handwriting skills in favor of keyboarding skills in schools. For devices without keyboards, we'll either be using glass keyboards with their tactile inaccuracy, or styluses with OCR software behind them that will have to contend with increasingly terrible handwriting.
IOS Developers Not Worried About Possible Screen Size Changes
Hi - 2 separate things I guess. One can still pay with a credit card directly without requiring a PayPal account (we call it guest payment) but in most cases it depends on how the merchant has configured his payment options. But that said there are a few corner cases where we cannot allow direct credit card payments (eg. Preapprovals in Adaptive Payments) due to credit card policies.

Regarding accepting payments from countries that are outside of PayPal networks, it really comes down to what is allowed by the local govt authorities around cross border transactions.
> When I said they are not the same size, I did not mean
to invoke the idea of set cardinality.

Set size and cardinality are one in the same. You would have to change the axioms of set theory in order to define size any other way.

> if set A contains all the elements of B and set A
contains other elements also, then set A is bigger than
set B

Not if you take "bigger" to mean "of greater size." This statement is only true if "is bigger than" means "includes" (= "is a superset of"). Set inclusion and set size are distinct concepts. We can say that if set A contains all the elements of set B, then set A is at least as numerous as set B. But we cannot say that if set A additionally contains elements that set B does not, then set A is more numerous than set B.

> In my way of thinking, the cardinality of a set of
dollar bills and the quantity of dollars are not the
same thing.

They are certainly distinct concepts, but for a countably infinite set of bills with bounded face values, the two quantities are equal (even if they are computed differently).

> if you start with an infinite quantity of dollars
and lose $20, then you lost $20

Let us distinguish money, the sum of the nominal value, from currency, the specific expression of that value. If you lose $20, then your currency has changed (let's say you lost a specific $20 bill), but your money has not (you can keep losing $20s without any meaningful consequence).

> Whether the set of dollars before and after gambling
have the same cardinality is quite beside the point: $20
never equals $0, so you were $20 richer before you
gambled and $20 less rich after you gambled.

How do you define "rich"? Do you define "rich" to be "in possession of a large quantity of money" or do you define "rich" to be "in possession of a specific set of dollar bills"? They are not the same. I don't care if my $20 bill has serial number X or serial number Y, it's still worth $20 to me.

Likewise, although you can measure the value of the difference between the set of money you had before and the set of money you have after, as long as that difference is finite, it has no bearing on your infinite total value. In fact, depending on how you do it, you can lose an infinite amount of money and still have an infinite amount left (the difference between {1, 2, 3, ...} and {2, 4, 6, ...} is {1, 3, 5, ...} and all three of these sets are equinumerous).

Infinity is not an intuitive concept.
That knee jerk objection must have taken you all of two seconds to come up with!

Like most interesting ideas, this one is NON-obvious. Try at least looking at the Amazon page for the book, or check out Lew Rockwell's enthusiastic endorsement of Hoppe's work, if you are part of the tl;dr crowd. It's FAR from ridiculous.
Reader Mode in Firefox Mobile
http://lucasr.org/2012/06/21/reader-mode-in-firefox-mobile/
Reddit Crowdfunding: $30K for Cancer Victim In Less Than 2 Days
Women in startups: Are we trying too hard to be supergirl?
Why do we still live with Twitter maxlength anxiety?
Brilliant, that is great to hear.

SfY brought the cost down significantly but I really hope this project could make it available to even more people. Best of luck!
A developer can definitely produce software independently. I do that as well. But the question is about selling that software to the business users. This is where a good BA/PM comes in again. I have said before that in small setup such as startups etc which produce software as their core business, a developer can possibly wear all hats. But in large corporate settings, developers do not want to go through the pain of people management, bureaucracy, follow ups etc.
I become very angry, when I don't find a RSS feed for a blog I like.
Trello might be a good fit as well.
Maybe decide for one or two images per "small thing" you want to explain and move the text really close to it, eg in the box below? Right now the scrolling is so much.
If you are looking at the default front-page, then that can often seem the case.

But if you create an account (no personal details needed, just a username and password and there is no "no fake names" rule so there is no personal information needed) you can change the default selection of sub-groups and you end up with a rather useful (if still somewhat random) aggregator of interesting stuff. Those things you liked from the first few months are still there and if you select just those sub-reddits you care about. Some of the other stuff will still leak in, but not overly so.
Thanks for your comment. Good idea. Made the change and lowered the barrier to 5 clicks.

(I had kept the milestone at 15 clicks as a comparison to $3. But you're right, lower base doesn't matter if it can increase the number of people who start sharing.)
I'm at the moment working on a product to help me (and others?) to keep their bookmarks synced across devices. I've done some preliminary work on importing google bookmarks and delicious to my system. A lot of work still left undone, though. But let's see, maybe it's somehow usable soon if I will stay interested :)
Geeky video game marriage proposals
> keep in mind that not all HN posters are native
> English speakers.

In that case, feedback is even more valuable.
I get a "permission denied" dialog opening this page in Safari & clicking on the 'how many slave work for you' button.

Is there something weird on that page?
I'm inclined to agree. I've been doing native iOS apps for over a year now but I'm cross-training myself with the HTML5 apis because I think that's where more of the work is going to shift over time.

I don't see any reason why mobile should be qualitatively different than the desktop in this respect. There will always be an equilibrium point between web and native but I expect it to come to rest heavily on the web side just as it has on the desktop.
Apple Store Refuses to Sell iPads/iPhones Farsi Speakers
looks pretty sweet
Why does it require me to put my email address on the end of it for a reward. Considering that for anyone to get any real benefit out of it the links (containing the email address) would have to be posted publicly. Just seems like a huge spam magnet.

I think most people would be pretty wary of adding their email address to a link and posting publicly. Especially on a strange site they dont know about.
Dallas Pool Builder
Thanks for your feedback. Any suggestions on a replacement font?
Easy to beat a 747

A rackspace portable storage center fits 12,000 hard drives (=36Pb) of data, into a 40ft shipping container.

A container ship like the Emma Maersk can carry 15,000 TEU (20foot containers) across the Atlantic in 5days

So 12,000drives * 3Tb * 7000 containers = 250 million Tb, and it takes 5days = 450,000 seconds

So a data rate of 250,000,000Tb/450,000s = 600 TBytes/s

Although you do have to watch out for pirates!
Here is a small screencast about talks gem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaUpwQMBvOY
How To Show Your Customers A Little Extra Love
"But why did they have to demo it now"

Someone with power allowed their ego to make that decision. It must be now, because of something that some other company is or isn't doing. Damn the engineering, full speed ahead.
Or the suffering that lead to the innovation was just that much greater ;)
"There are a few open protocols in various stages of development"

Can you, or somebody else please name some? It always irks me a little when someone just mentions that "these projects" exist, and then fail to mention any of them.
Women and Tech
I will second that. I love that my Transformer Prime has an (almost?) stock ICS experience, I think ICS is beautifully designed and very usable.

I'm trying to decide which phone should replace my Desire HD, and I'm leaning towards the SGSIII, but the custom UI is really putting me off. Too bad there's no stock-ish phone in the top contenders, I might have to go with the One X if it's less customized.
I think you mean "sneak peek"

(https://twitter.com/#!/StealthMountain)
According to the article on Ars Technica, the lawyer sent copies of his ID to Twitter to verify he was being impersonated and the account was suspended.
Yahoo Users Consume More Energy Than Gmail Users
In my experience, the best way to test Android is on device(s). You're going to want to test on device anyway, and it's very easy to do, so just skip the emulator.

Keep in mind that the iOS Simulator is a simulator, not an emulator. You'll have the full CPU and memory of your dev box, so there will be a fair number of bugs that occur on the device but you won't see in the simulator.[1]

[1] A tool that's useful for testing in the iOS Simulator is Network Link Conditioner, which allows you to simulate 3G connections on your dev box. You can download it from developer.apple.com through your developer account. From XCode: click on the menu item XCode>Open Developer Tool>More Developer Tools... and you'll be taken to a web page with a downloadable disk image containing the Network Link Conditioner Systems Preferences pane under Hardware I/O Tools.
When is a Startup Non-Disclosure Really Required?
The bus monitor verbally abused. Internet raises fund for a nice vacation.
I don't know how this would work out ergonomically. My dad is a cab driver and he often complains that pressing the clutch with his foot often giving him RSI kind of pain.

But however I think this is purely subjective. From an experiment perspective, this is really cool! And this generally qualifies into what could one call a 'real hack'. This has a air of freshness to it.

Now the real power of vim is in getting into a mode called 'extreme keyboarding'. I didn't realize this until I read Tom Christiansen's seminal essay "Zenclavier: Extreme Keyboarding"- http://oreilly.com/news/zenclavier_1299.html

This is to ultimately turn the keyboard into a Musical instrument, and then to become 'one with the keyboard'. Totally loosing any realization that you are actually typing. Read the essay carefully and try to understand how he tries to talk about 'moving in and out of zones'.

I started learning vim a few days back, after I suffered from Emacs Pinky. When I started question I asked was, 'Why should I memorize so many commands'. The thing is I quickly realized that being proficient with vim, requires you to understand some things. You really have to understand the vim paradigm, without that straightly diving into vim wont be much productive.

You have to learn h,j,k,l are not just navigational keys but also can be combined with multipliers like 20h(Moves 20 positions to the left). You basically speak a 'Editor programming language'. You program editor with a stream of characters. Like for example you my say 'copy this line, move up 20 positions and paste it'. This will be yy(copy current line) 20k(Move up 20 positions) p(paste it there).

So you have to basically learn these things in detail. You can use position stuff for things as well. Like for example 'd' specifies 'cut from here' and 'y' specifies 'yank/copy from here', but to where? the next character specifies that for example '$' specifies the end of a line. You can also do something like 'y2/foo' this means 'yank from here till foo'. You will have to learn regular expressions, touch typing, and many other text processing stuff. Basically you learn a terse programming language which is written as a stream of characters with data on the editor as a input.

Recently a colleague of mine introduced me to a editor command called ': perldo' you can do perl oneliner on the editor line by line.

The only thing is I couldn't find a book so far in my early days of vim, which completely teaches the 'zen of vim' completely in the paradigm, in which one needs to understand it. So vim is really about these things, I don't how far the pedal/clutch experiments gel with this concept. You may need a totally different editor paradigm to work with this setup.

In the meanwhile, if someone knows of a book that talks of vim in the way its supposed to be explained please recommend. All I could find on the net was cheat sheets, books that teach a commands in bulk.
It's OK, the discussion that he generated here on HN is well worth whatever flaws are in his post.
They're attempting to use geolocation to identify your location. Safari must be blocking it automatically (er... automagically?). FWIW, I couldn't get past that screen either, even after allowing location tracking.
Useful, simple and clean plugin with readable code that solves a spesific problem very efficiently. This is the kind of jQuery plugins i love to work with.
A thing I've found about zoning, is that no matter what the magic sauce required to get there, it is impossible if you don't ever start working. He mentions going in needing to know what you are going to do -- I totally agree with this. I don't know if it is a key component of zoning, or just bootstrapping to get there, but it is important. In fact even in complicated bits, I tend to have a list of todos around that are simple or at least straight forward, that can be done any time (e.g. clean up comments or rearrange methods to my preferred ordering style or whatnot). I used to use these tasks for remaining productive during meetings, or in those wierd little 30 minute windows between things that crop up. But I found they are also a great bootstrap for zoning.

A different way I sometimes think of it is "warm-ups", like the little walks,stretches etc before a workout, or the first 10 mins of a run, the minutes that are largely useless from a running point of view, but are needed to get the blood flowing and the joints loose.

Good article, thanks Martin.
I'd really like to know if they're equating low wage jobs to slavery or if they are actually talking about true slavery in which the workers are paid nothing and not allowed to leave. Because there's a big difference there.

edit: they clear it up here: http://slaveryfootprint.org/about/#methodology
I love how the "excellent" VIM editor would benefit immensely from a hardware peripheral.

Definitely a neat hacky idea (so by its nature, me gusta), but VIM is a silly, silly editor for real world purposes.
"Hello," iPhone turns 5 next week: Remember the first TV ad?
Don't worry about it, a lot of techies are just grumpy about the very idea of marketing, because they think the world would be a better, purer place without it. They're obviously wrong. Carry on!
They offer a username alternative:
(And yes, for folks who don't want to show their email address in the URL due to spam worries, they can replace their email address with a unique username.)
You are correct, it doesn't kill the task.
Ace Maxs
Ace maxs produk baru, dioalah dengan teknologi terbaru dan dengan ramuan dari penelitian terbaru, memadukan antara kulit manggis dan daun sirsak.
Terry Moore: Why is 'x' the unknown?
WPA–Xperf Trace Analysis Reimagined
There's so many ways to get into insert mode in VIM he's going to need pedals from a church organ to make this work.
If people leave after training then that's a retention problem and has nothing to do with how skilled they where when they started. And yes, giving a 22 year old tech worker a 25+% raise might seem crazy, but if you want to keep up with their increase in value you have to consider such things normal.
I used to do a lot of photography before dslrs were common, but hadn't done any digital work before. I have a friend who's a professional photographer and offered to help out when she needed an extra camera there if I could use her gear. The two best compliments I got were from two different weddings. One, the couple each used a random, but what I thought was an awesome shot (sun setting behind them as they kissed at the reception, gave a nice halo effect) as their profile picture on Facebook. The other was the first wedding I helped with shots of the wedding, she told me she used some of my photos for the album and, when I looked through it I couldn't tell which were mine.

The point of this is that most people just don't really care about random art you did, but they care a lot if it's something personal. And it may take 1000 shots to get that right one.
You can probably use an unmodified pedal if you implement the logic with ControllerMate (Mac only) [1].

Works here (misusing the F8 key) [2].

---

[1] http://www.orderedbytes.com/controllermate/

[2] http://imgur.com/AUZsA.png
I'm not, it's a lame ass idea. There isn't even a demo on the page. Plus, you'll get penalized by Google once they catch on. Scammers gonna scam.
Ex-Dell CEO: People Don't Want A Microsoft Tablet
I believe that'd be a non-issue since the "i" is always preceded by an "Esc".
Two things nobody is considering: price and time to transfer data to the disks. I'd rather pay for a 100Mbps connection than 10 hours of jet fuel.
We had to make a choice: go with a signup form which leads to fewer referrals. Or automatically sign people up when they add their email id at the end of "any" page on your domain to increase adoption rate and get more people to promote you.

This second option could lead to spam worries. Thats why, we offer optional usernames. The first time our system recognizes a new email id, an email is sent out to them with instructions on setting up a username with which they can replace their email id while promoting URLs.

(Also, we'll be launching social media integration buttons next week, which will automatically shorten the URLs and disguise your email ids.)
I believe the guy can say what he wants on his blog, and it's arrogant of you to think otherwise. And your notion that Hacker News users can't discuss what they want on their own site is crazed.

My point, and I think his, is that the ever-narrowing topic definitions may be what the participating community wants, but it is driving off people with different ideas.

If you're happy with that, fine. But insisting that outsiders aren't allowed to comment on it is just another symptom of the drive for orthodoxy that I think is ruining it in the first place.
COOKOO - The Smart Watch For The Connected Generation
My brother made a foot switch using a piece of wood and a sanwa arcade button. I have a couple of teensy boards here, if I get time I may just make one.

This can be used to easily control the keyboard: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_keyboard.html
Probably not, most of these devices are old school embedded systems, doing most of the decoding via HW with slow processors, so, many fancy things like XMBC are very out of the scope.

Probably in the next couple years, doing NNTP, bittorrent, xbmc inside our tv, could be a reality, now, not so much.
The Power of Reinforcement
Bunch of crap. They're not slaves, they're people living in extreme poverty, to whom those jobs are the only way they have of getting out of it, and those self-righteous idiots are their worst enemy, because they're actively trying to remove their possibility of having a better life. Krugman's article explains it well: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

I think C.S. Lewis' quote is completely appropriate here:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
As a drummer, I'd say you'd be surprised how fast people learn to sync feet with hands. It's really quite easy with a little practice.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

How far we've come. Now we use 747s as the ironic competitor to digital transfer.
Opa 1.0 now available, the ultimate framework for JavaScript
I hadn't though of using Github as a straight web server before. Will consider it for future projects.
I don't believe that the reason people are buying Android is because of openness. I doubt most can even understand the concept because they know relatively nothing about computers. If they did then they would understand what Samsung has been doing for the past year and move away. Instead, the SIII is seeing unprecedented demand for an Android phone.

It's always been about price. Buying an unlocked iPhone, even for the low-end model, is extremely expensive because of the extra $200 that is tacked on.