skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: avoiding burnout
Hello, this might not be the best place to write this, but this place is so full of smart and succesful people so I might ask here.

I am 20-something old compsci student and I don't know what to do with my life.

I always have tons of ideas what to create or what to build (some of them ended on frontpage of hacker news which I am quite proud of). I am active in several online communities where I write some code that does funny stuff (browser extensions, statistics, stuff like that) and it's almost always popular. I am active in two nonprofit organization and a political organization (and for some reason people think I am quite able to organize stuff). I am also interested in (natural) languages (I can speak 2 languages very well, 3 other mildly and can say basic stuff in few others). I do have a small job on "the side" (which is actually helped one company to be top1 leader in its field, but it's a small field anyway.) that does't earn me much because I am always afraid to ask for more money.

Now I know this all will probably look good on my future CV, but I have a problem.

I am always working on something.

I am working like hell without any regard for organization, with no regular sleeping cycle at all, burning like a candle, often up to 40 hours with no sleep, somehow chopping my way through the myriad of ideas I always have, before I fall down senseless.

Then the burnout comes.

Suddenly I realize that no matter hiw hard I try the world is still the same. Sure, what I do is definitely helping someone, but in the gramd scheme of things, it's really not that important while I am left with no social life whatsoever. Also, because of tons of things I always do, school results are below average (and FAR worse than I have capacity for).

But I still feel the world needs helping.
There are still things that need to be done. Areas that cozld be discovered. And as I have been proven again and again - if I won't do it, nobody else usually will.

Damn. I really don't know what to do. There is just TOO MANY STUFF that need to be done at ANY GIVEN MOMENT.

(using throwaway account, I don't want this to seem like some karma whoring)
Apple, Motorola & Cingular Launch World’s First Mobile Phone with iTunes
Yet another datapoint: I've had a Transformer Prime for ~6 months and haven't had any issues. It's a wonderful (and severely underrated) tablet.
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When I first saw camlistore (http://camlistore.org/) it jived with much of how I pondered the foundational bits of "the cloud I'd like to see". Private by default, distribut(ed|able), share-able, index-able, version-able dumb content blobs who are described by other dumb content blobs of the same nature.

They might be getting some of the programmer interfaces right enough to give folks a chance at getting some user interfaces right.
Empirically. Certainly not by comparison to some ideological ideal, but by analyzing the net results. If something "shouldn't" work, but appears to produce the correct result, I change my theory to match the new evidence.

For instance, empirically, lots of governments "hide the cost of health care" by setting up universal health care programs, and in every country that's economically, technologically, and culturally similar to the US, the result is improved health care metrics and lower costs per capita.

I could wave my hands around and say that's the wrong way to go, based on some crackpot ideology cooked up by a Russian novelist on speed. Believe me, I've tried that. But it's easier and saner to just use normal empiricism instead.

The problem with monetary policy is that it's nigh-impossible to do proper empiricism on it. What we can say is that we certainly aren't experiencing any major catastrophes that we didn't encounter with the gold standard, and in fact a lot of the problems we faced then are no longer possible.
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The UI is amazing. I really liked the tutorial screen for some reason. Great job!
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Do you know if CTRL and ALT work on bluetooth keyboards? My perfect IDE is only a SSH session away but I've heard that CTRL and ALT are not supported in Android and without those EMACS is pretty useless.
Brief History Of The Universe, The Big Bang
I'm sure you know this, but in case you don't - ActionBarSherlock is incredibly easy to use for backporting the actionbar, tabs, and fragments to 2.x.
There's a demo video at http://pair.io that explains it pretty well (along with some GitHub setup magic)
By saying Second law of thermodynamics still in effect I assume you mean "calories in calories out" still in effect, and that's actually not what the article said at all (though the law is still in effect of course).

Consuming the same number of calories with different consumptions led to different amounts of calories being burned, and different amounts of weight being gained.

TLDR: what you eat matters, it's not just how much.
The best definition of humility I have heard is: keeping in mind the possibility that one might be wrong.
Marriage benefits should be different for heterosexual and homosexual couples like beef and pork subsidies.
There's really not much difference between a script and a program, other than size/features. A program just has a few more added :) It perhaps seems like there's some extra sauce if you're looking in from the outside, but it's really just a case of iterating, adding stuff and polishing the "out of the box" experience.

Minor plug - I actually wrote a book which I think follows the pattern that you're looking for: http://manning.com/briggs/

It's essentially completely ass-backwards if you're used to traditional programming books, in that you don't learn everything about Python up front. Instead, it's a bunch of small-ish practical projects, and you learn as you go.

Chapter 6 is an adventure game, and chapter 10 turns it into an networked MUD via twisted - it sounds like what you're trying to do. But there's also business stuff - csv parsing, etc. - an asteroids clone, writing a web app in Django and so on.
apropos,

http://en.nothingisreal.com/wiki/Why_I_Will_Never_Have_a_Gir...

and

http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392
How to Make Money Effectively like LinkedIn
I love my Transformer, but I have the dreaded stability problem. I get continual reboots, but only when it is asleep, plugged into the keyboard dock.

The ease that is worked around (unplug it from the keyboard at night) means it is more of an inconvenience than a big problem (for me anyway).

I believe it can be fixed by putting CyanogenMod on it anyway.
Small talk - with a space - is an important social skill, which may elude people whose skills are centered in other areas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_talk

All languages have small talk, which ought to suggest that it is not bullshit or something which is possible to eliminate, but is instead an indispensable part of human communication.
Chess concepts Peter Thiel used to become a billionaire
Is there any public demo using OpenCyc that does something resembling anything?
Very old fashioned reasons. There have been many advances in abortion.
"He’s dead for a reason. He was a show-off, and he tried to spray us." - the dead cousin isn't happy. Neither is his Mom. Classic stuff!
Assuming I am right, I would expect a decision striking DOMA on 10th Amendment grounds to be far more welcome on the right than the left of legal academia.....
Looking into Cyc I infer the following...

Q: So what is Cyc used for?
A: You could use it for games
Q: Has it been used for a game?
A: No
I use Better Terminal Emulator on my Galaxy Nexus and it has support to map CRTL and ALT to several different keys. You can also map the arrows, which is handy if you are using it on the phone with no physical keyboard.
It wasn't miraculous, RIM capitulated and provided the keys to the kingdom. BBM is vulnerable.
CTRL works fine on my Transformer keyboard - I use it in SSH all the time.

I'm not an EMACS user, so I can't comment on ALT.
The Fed's major mistake in the Depression was not printing enough money--the money supply contracted and started a deflationary spiral. Solution: go ahead and print more money when a big recession hits. Which is exactly the solution you people criticize.
Which tricks?
https://github.com/shawnjgoff/.config/blob/master/awesome/th...
But whether they are the same or not is not the question.

The question is the extent to which one is informative on the other, in cross-cultural and trans-historical studies.

If we ignore the rest, I suppose we could say that only in the US is homosexuality biologically determined but that would be silly wouldn't it?

Simply put, you can't talk about trans-historical and cross-cultural patterns if you limit the discussion to homosexual relationships in the form they exist in the US today. That's tautologically true. So if you limit it that way, it's a fancy way of avoiding any cross-cultural/trans-historical analysis that could be meaningful.
If you intend to spend time working in the U.S., spending some time improving your written (and perhaps oral) communication skills is probably going to serve you better than iterative improvements to your programming abilities.
>> So as an example, a $100K salary, which corresponds to roughly $50 per hour working 40 hours a week, requires a freelancing rate of $56-58/hour to pay for healthcare and time off.

Cringe -- this is bad advice for setting your consulting rate. In the US, the full cost of an $100K employee is not $100K. It's $100K salary + paid vacation time + employment taxes paid by employer + healthcare + office space & pro-rated related expenses (like cleaning of said office space). This metric is called the "fully loaded cost" of an employee and ends up being 1.3x-1.5x of the salary.

But even this calculation fails to capture the flexibility advantages that your clients get from hiring short term. It ignores the fact that as a consultant you are hired only when you are needed and are 100% utilized, while a yearly employee may not be fully utilized every day of the year. Essentially, an employer that hires a full time employee agrees to "buy in bulk" and pay for time that may or may not be fully utilized. By necessity this means that your rate should be higher to account for the additional value provided plus provide cushion for those in-between project times when you are looking for work or doing proposals.

Two quick and dirty metrics I have seen for determining rate per hour are 1) yearly salary / 1000 and 2) 2x full time employee hourly rate. Both of these converge on about $100/hr. Un-official data from HN seems to confirm a median freelance rate in that range (about $90/hr):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203
If "a mini-laptop with better battery life" is what you are after, then you should look at an Asus Transformer - it is perfect for that usecase.

If you think you'll use the keyboard occasionally, then choose a tablet stand that suits your style, from EBay or http://s.dealextreme.com/search/tablet+stand
Unless they've studied a little economics. Like, not enough to be a real economist, but enough to have a shot at running for Congress.
The full term is laser ring, or ring laser gyroscope.
I agree with a number of points made in the article and the general comments about corruption in India. I disagree with the assertion that Indians are out to thug you for your money, and that is not the case with businessmen in America.

Having recently bought a new car, I know full well how so-called, honest, American car dealers operate. Additionally, I am familiar with the "fair" and "transparent" lending practices of the bankers. How can you discount the eBay hood-winking, the mortgage crisis, medicare/Medicaid scams, identity theft, browser-cookie based tracking, etc. that all originated in the very United States of America that you consider so virtuous? Is profit not the motivation behind all of these immoral activities?

Please, get off your holier than thou perch and see the world for what it is: Everyone that owns a business is out to make a profit. Even the small business man inside of you that is looking for the best deal regardless of the impact it has on the business you are under-cutting. Once you see this reality, you will also realize that there has always been, and will always be, a tug of war between a consumer and a producer/supplier/business-owner. Except of course if you are dealing with a not-for-profit.
Privacy standards are much higher when you rent a house.

Why should they be lower when you rent some bits?
Doesn't insurance hide the costs of health care?
> To address the actual point: I do not prescribe a specific moral framework, only that there be one.

Everyone has a moral framework, whether or not it is examined the way Socrates would demand it to be. The issue is that you gave an example, which undermines your claim that you're not prescribing a moral framework: no example can successfully be free of every possible framework.

You claim that "life is the ultimate aim of moral design", but this is completely untrue. Many moral systems encourage the wasting of time and the dismissal of life in its various forms. Many moral systems, indeed, are not about the contribution of work to society and humankind at all. As a matter of nuance, this can be argued. (Is afterlife a form of life? Is life in the city or in nature? Is your time wasted if you intentionally wasted it? Et. al.)

In short, you actually are prescribing a specific moral framework. Yours. There's nothing wrong with this, except that you didn't even realize you were doing it. You've answered the relevant questions, at least implicitly, and so forgot that they were even questions to begin with.

> I do stand by the idea presented there.

You're not wrong, exactly. Take Richard Bartle, who has been pounding out a very similar message to the game community, though you'd have trouble recognizing it.

His message is simple: know why you do things. Why do you have levels in your RPGs? MUD1 (his game) had them because they represented the possibility of social mobility to a pair of British country-born schoolkids annoyed by their circumstances. But most designers only have them because well... that's just expected. Their decision stands unexamined; often unrecognized to be a decision at all.

He did not need to bring up morality, because it's not the point. The point is that, when you do things, it should be grounded in a solid self-aware understanding of what and why you act. Design intentionally. Think about the details. Care about consequences. Test everything, hold onto what is good.
That boat has sailed. If that happens, we might as well just require banks to hand credit card numbers over to Russian organized crime lords....
you can get small FPGA kits for less than $100 now

I know, but a DE0-nano has only 20k LE's, and runs at 50MHz. You'd probably be limited to simulations of an Intel 8008 or thereabouts.
Absolutely. They need to get this right: they can't afford a traditional "v1.0" release when they are up against very mature competitors (iOS; Android; WP7/8). The Playbook was an example of their rushing to market, and the device lacked email, calendaring (basic features; especially for RIM) and relied on a BlackBerry for a full feature-set.

The shareholders are no doubt frustrated at RIM's financial performance over the last several quarters, but things will only get worse if they put out an unfinished product. As they say: short term pains, (hopefully) long term gains.
"why so few people vote or take part in the discussions."

To vote or participate you have to be logged in.

Would be interesting if PG released some data on logged in visitors.

Also, isn't the amount of votes the amount of net votes? So you could have 100 upvotes and 60 downvotes to net 40? (Of course that still doesn't jive with his numbers which I agree were very interesting and unexpected I would have never guessed that.)

Not participating could be also a) a confidence issue or b) lack of ability to type or use of a particular keyboard (I never comment from mobile for example).

Still, it doesn't explain the discrepancy in the numbers.
Well, the point I was trying to make was how a small retail chain can get successful to an extent that make any one awestruck. Innovation need not be the revolutionary or apple kinda innovation. Even a small innovation can make million user base. Besides, i agree, they are not start ups per se. The definition of startup itself is a bit loose so going along that line won't get us far. The important thing is to be successful. Innovation is a way to success. If you need to be innovative for achieving million user base, so be it. Else, even the out of the world innovation can be shunned by the customers. The blog points out that serving customers are far more important than spending loads on marketing etc.
Because "A man's phone is his castle" doesn't have much of a ring to it....

Rights in renting a home are interesting though. In 1982, the Supreme Court decided the one and only 3rd Amendment case to come before it, where a state evicted striking prison guards and placed national guardsmen in their state-owned workforce apartments. The state lost.
Here in Canada most people don't know how copyright law works because they just don't care. Even the RCMP (federal police) has said that they'll only go after people who make a living selling bootleg DVDs/CDs.
> Well, the "big" difference is, that those destructive "things" are substantially impacting the health of their users, while a game, no matter how sophisticated, rarely does (except for a few extreme examples). One might more draw the argument into the gambling direction.

We could have fun and bring up spiritual health. :D
How good is the UI? Is it the same it had when it was Google wave? Thanks
Venture in China
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Full Show 7/5/12: Mr. One Percent
Hey senthil, I think you are missing out an important point here. It is not abt two successful companies, it is about how they got successful and their success is an outlier,by not following the usual path. And how the current so called corporate structure need not necessarily guaranty success. It is abt how, sans marketing, they have managed to gather million customer base.
Nitron has [slightly hacky] support for IB: https://github.com/mattgreen/nitron

Check the tutorial for an explanation of how to use it. Disclaimer: I'm the author. :)
I have used GNU Screen + Skype in the past as well and it worked out quite well.

"I like to add some stuff to the screenrc setting up a status bar at the bottom showing all the windows and which users are viewing which window, but I'd have to dig out my old screenrc to remember how."
Or you could use Byobu(https://launchpad.net/byobu) which is an enhancement of GNU Screen and comes with a lot of good features.
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The GPLv2 provides an implicit patent license. Imagine you hold a patent and publish some code that implements your patent under the GPLv2. Everyone who gets the program from you is granted, by the GPL, the right to use it. In order to use it, they'll need a license to your patent, which you can't deny because of the GPL. The GPL also stipulates they can give this program to other people, provided it is under the same terms. This grants downstream users the same rights to use your patents your direct clients have.

I'd love to see this tested in court.
Getting started with Restify using Node.js and CoffeeScript
Great quote. It sums it up really well, especially the distinction it draws between extrinsic and intrinsic aspirations. Going to follow up on Deci. Thanks.
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No, they are still saying "calories in calories out" These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. They where also saying that types of calories in changes calories out.
I agree completely, my apologies if I made it sound like a mathematical postulate.
whoa! this sounds awful lot like a superpower. Without any sarcasm: I'd love to learn what you've to teach and become ~100x more productive than an average programmer. Just so you know: I have done a CS degree but I hardly went to classes and all I know is a little bit of C++ and little bit of Java. So, my brain is totally uncorrupted. So, please teach me so I can be 100x more productive than an average programmer.
cool. have you looked at http://nreduce.com/ ? i'm participating in their first batch and each team is supposed to do a weekly check-in video of what they're working on. it has helped keep me accountable for my project, and provides that no-excuses-allowed pulse to drive weekly iteration.

i'm not sure about a long conference call. i think a community site or even a single mailing list would be rad... something that's missing with nreduce currently.

good luck.
Micah Baldwin wants you to break the bullshit curse
I get the implication, and while that wasn't the point I was making, the purchase of a self-contained app from the app store is essentially the same thing as owning the app.

You've exchanged money for a good, and as the app owner there aren't any readily available means of getting the good back from the owner should you disapprove of how they're using it, just like it would be with a tangible good. Obviously copyright still stays in effect so their ability to copy, resell, yadda yadda are still restricted, but otherwise it's theirs.

That said, in this day and age, fewer and fewer apps are completely self-contained, and/or work without being plugged in to something, so it's effectively a moot point.
As someone who lived in south India for about 40 years, I can tell you that spiritual tourism is a good source of money.There are too many godmen and godwomen (some of them hugs people and some more sophisticated ones speak in the U.N... You will not find true Gurus here.True Gurus don't sell their wares in shops).

What you mentioned about dirty garbage strewn over the streets is true in most Indian cities and towns.If you wake up early enough,you will find women sweeping the area around their houses.They will not give a second thought before dumping that swill on the street.The same people will complain loudly about the local authourities not doing enough to reduce the garbage problem. Travel to Kochi by road.It is one of the fast developing cities in Kerala.Coming from Trissur side,the first thing you will notice is the huge dumps(about 3-4 mtrs high) of garbage on both sides. The people living in that area are definite candidates for cancer.I wouldn't wonder if another Plague epidemic happens in the near future.
Pop quiz. What is a douchebag?
I disagree. That approach might work for teaching CS to college students, but most young children would find it boring. A much larger percentage would find the idea of making an interactive story fun than would enjoy learning about the low-level mechanics of a computer.
> "How are you" and "fine" are just the SYN and ACK of human (American English) speech.

Haha! This cracked me up. I bet I would be a lot more social if I could find mappings between communication protocols and human interactions.
I think NFC has potential to replace it altogether, but for the same quandary of having to launch a special app out to use it. At least it's less fidgety though, as in not having to wait for camera to focus or aligning it to some center point on the screen, just tap and done.