skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Blessings provides just one top-level object: Terminal. Instantiating a Terminal figures out whether you're on a terminal at all and, if so, does any necessary terminal setup.

Why doesn't the module figure this out at import? Since there is a single terminal (at least right now), I don't see the point of having to instantiate a class. All that stuff could be provided directly by the module. Or if there's the possibility of controlling 2 terminals simultaneously, do something similar with the random module. Provide both functions and a class that can be instantiated if needed.
I have to say that apart from the current London logo, these are all amazing! They each capture the mood and place of the games at that time... I can't believe that so many countries got their logos so consistently right for one event!

One dud amongst many is remarkable...
Code is a Liability
I think that's the OP's point, though. Sometimes you have to clarify which decisions are unambiguous, not presently open to negotiation, and absolutely mandatory. If a decision has been perceived as something less than that, you need to clarify it. "This is your job, this is why it's important, and like everyone else in the world who doesn't have a damn good union, a sinecure, or serious blackmail on their boss, if you don't do your job you get fired."
Help a team produce world class products?
This article and concept reminds me of thhe beautiful "game" by Jason Rohrer, "Passage"

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/
Good observation on the memories.

During intense periods of memory-forming activity, you feel like time passes quickly, because more things are packed into less time and you move on from one thing to the next (think camps in your childhood when everything was exciting, there was a competition to prepare for, etc.). Once it's actually over, you felt like it just zoomed by so quick, but was packed full of stuff.

It's the same with the grade/primary-school years: each year feels so full of experiences, but before you know it you're in primary/grade 6 and at the start of a new phase, wondering how you got there so quickly. I used to be almost scared by how quickly I moved through the school years, thinking I'd be an adult in no time.

I think young people just tend to have much more packed into their time, which makes it feel longer. You literally live more when you have more different experiences in the same time. That's why I regret it when I think back and realise I haven't been doing anything much different over the past week. I'm going to have to schedule better and make some time for salsa/whatever classes.

So yes, I strongly agree with your conclusion:

> Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more there.

Wring life out of every day.
When stories like this involve lower-level employees such as programmers, I think HN's response has invariably been to favor the superior, with whom an entrepreneur who 'doesn't code any more' can identify more readily.

But in this story, a manager of managers was getting disciplined and the response is very angry.

From which I would infer that a lot of HN is at a similar level to the guy who was disciplined.

BTW, from the story, the guy who was disciplined handled it extremely professionally and I would not be surprised to hear he was good to work with from both sides.
Downvoting doesn't solve this kind of problem though. The irrelevant subthread still takes up most of the real estate of the page. The problem comes in when the subthread is attached to a highly rated parent thread.

It doesn't help that so many people feel compelled to jump into the irrelevant subthread as they're usually emotional topics.

Perhaps if the community as a whole downvoted every response in the subthread such behavior would stop. As it is, only the half that the majority disagrees with is punished, but the entire subthread is a problem, whether you agree with the individual posts or not.

More than once I've given up on a comments section under a post from "irrelevant subthread fatigue".
What is a manager doing without awareness of what is happening as it pertains to company priorities? Seriously, what is such a manager even doing?
The execution here is excellent, well done Tracks.by
>> Again, I fail to see how is this related to my post.

So to requote your original post.

>> >> The world isn't entitled to anything Twitter builds.

>> Nobody says it is.

Let me put it more succinctly. My interpretation is that the OP is basically saying that the world is entitled to anything Twitter builds.

My subsequent quotes weren't so much related to rebutting you but to highlight the parts of the OP that I felt supported my point.
And Now Facebook's Bankers Are Divvying Up The $100 Million They Made Shorting
There ought to be a way to bring IRC into all this..
I agree that the buddhist saying confused me at the start..

For the moon vs luna thing: For the line to be valid, 'moon' must be a datatype in C, so it can't be the name of the variable. It also makes sense literally because moon is a generalized body orbiting a planet whereas luna refers specifically to earths moon.
Two words: do it! If you can do it, and if you'd learn something useful for yourself, think about the consequences later as long as it's legal :P Google might just as well hire you ^^
Oh please. I'm sorry you interpret my capitalization as "angry". It's a typing style I'm used to. I'm 52, and I've been on the net since the late 80's, if you want to suggest a simple italicization trick for HN, please let me know.

As far as the rest of your question, I am completely dumbfounded, gobsmacked, and bewildered as to WTF you are saying.
> Maybe having a distributed network of sorta timely servers wouldn't be such a bad thing. I seem to remember debates happening fairly rapidly on USENET.

I believe this is what twitter does. At least that is the impression I have as a user. Having 'watched' a number of live events on twitter I tend to get a floods of 10-30 tweets at a time all in the same language. I presume this means there is a delay related to geographic servers packing up multiple tweet for replication.
Add the droid x and ill be happy. You cannot believe how hard it was to install cyanogenmod on this device. If you had a fully updated android os running you must first root the device then revert the device to a previous android verson. Next you had to install a custom cyanogen rom that was designed to work with the gingerbread kernel. A single misstep and your device is bricked thanks to the efuse. Gawh
Other industries would of course be considered on merit. I don't know if any so thoroughly under attack from people with a poor grasp of the topic (or supported by people with such a poor grasp of the topic...)

What other industries would it be relevant to benchmark like this?

Why is it a poor way of weighing up the hazards?
I've slept at airports many times and I can never get a good night's sleep because

- you have no privacy

- it's difficult to get comfortable

- you're always paranoid about somebody taking your stuff

- there's usually a cleaning crew who make a lot of noise and sometimes you have to move your stuff for them

I'd much rather use a sleepbox.
By the way, there are quite a few autoimmune diseases[1] where the body attacks parts of it. Some examples: psoriasis (affects the skin), celiac disease (small intestine), rheumatoid arthritis (joints), multiple scleroris (nerves), Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_disease#Classificati...
> This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments everyday has definitely made time slow down.

That's interesting, because most people would say that time seems to go faster when subjected to intense learning/experiences.

For example, from another article on HN's front page right now:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/

> The next day, I arrived at the meeting location. I faced four YC partners and a barrage of questions about how my business worked and why it would succeed. We talked for almost an hour, but it felt like just a few minutes. I answered questions non-stop.

Perhaps when looking back, time seems to have stretched out during those learning-intensive experiences? But at the moment of the experience, time sped by?
Searching Email Addresses on Facebook will show User Profiles
Strange explanation of the word "variable" in here. It doesn't mean "many" - more like "changeable". It's the opposite of "constant".
Amusing, that this thread pops up the day after the "Why I hate HN"/"How to Fix HN" discussion. The 50% of this thread about sexism is a bit off-topic, and about another 25% is claiming the application process is broken or that beer equates to a bribe. I feel like this would have been more valuable if people had simply taken it as a lesson for success through tenacity. Here's what I take away from this: delivering the beer made the YC partners realize that Instacart was already up and running with a functional app, at which point it became a quasi-Pascal's Wager - if Instacart busts, it busts, but it looks like it could pay off big already, so why not bet on it? This is similar to how we got into YC with Light Table. Our initial application for a completely different idea didn't even get an interview, but when we applied late with numbers from Kickstarter to back us, it was a different story. I would wager that for a late application to be successful, the founders have to show a certain above-average mettle, but must also have some demonstrative additional value (like a functional app that can deliver a six pack in 30 minutes) that makes YC take the risk of a late acceptance.
Right, this behavior is to be reserved for the lower-level employees. Executives should all be chummy together against the employees.
This is math describing the effect not the cause, so the title is inaccurate and misleading.
I appreciate your confession.
So if your managers are totally failing the employees they are managing... you cannot seriously correct them?

But presumably you expect the employees to take serious correction. So this really reduces to an unspoken code that management shouldn't be treated this way.
Thank you very much for this list.
I would argue that the effective age of people vary with their behaviors and environment.

For example, I've seen 60 year old in australian outback on horses doing heavy work, as if they're 40. And I've seen 60 year olds in australian capitals barely doing anything of their day.

Which do you think will go extinct first?

I'm going to argue that simply "we are what we repeatedly do". Some people act old at 50, some people act young at 70.

For example, my uncle in Europe has acres of property, works in it every day, goes dancing with the local "brotherhood" and would drink you under the table any day of the week. And he's close to 75.

Trying to explain people with mathematics is similar to trying to explain women with science. It may work, barely. (no pun intended, just a cheeky joke)
This makes sense; for instance when you are 10 years of age, a year
represents 10% of your life, and seems like a very long time. However,
when you are 50 years old, one year has reduced to only 2% of your
life, and hence seems only one-fifth as long.

Interesting hypothesis, and he makes it look very scientific with the formulae and all, but it's still a wild crazy guess that delivers no actual falsifiable prediction. I think for claims of such magnitude, there should be a modicum of neurological or information-theoretical basis involved - instead we get to read repeated statements about how groundbreaking the idea is.

The article makes claims that at 30 life is essentially 3/4ths over which to me, while holding no subjective truth as far as I can tell, at least exhibit some self reference in the way that after three lines of statements the article's content seemed 75% over yet the actual text went on for much longer.

Subjectively time seems to go by faster the older we get, but that doesn't mean these bold claims are necessarily anywhere close to the truth. Personally, my relationship with time has certainly changed over the years, including the perception of a speed-up, but I also notice that some activities or states seem to last just as long (if not longer) subjectively as they did when I was 16.

My pet hypothesis is there are multiple factors involved in "the speedup", and that a large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well. This would mean as we get more experienced, an increasingly bigger amount of the average day consists of things we already did many times before so we don't store those moments in memory. That would result in increasingly large memory holes over time, which our brains then glance over as they piece together our past - thus resulting in an apparent speed up. This would also explain why days with unusual content seem to last much much longer than others (at least that's my experience).
http://bfi.org/about-bucky/biography/guinea-pig-b
Your first use case seems perfect for Dropbox... just share a link to the specific files in question.

The second use case, I'm unaware of anything that legally provides that guarantee (i.e. with an SLA), but if you trust that Amazon will be around for 10 years, you could just sign up for an AWS account and put the images on S3 yourself. I'd put more stock (literally and figuratively) in Amazon than Archive.org for data reliability.
The conclusion I draw from this list: boring companies spend money on rebranding efforts to change their image; good companies give meaning and value to their logos by themselves.
A Ranking of World University Rankings
I think this is a fabulous idea. Can you do me a favor? Can you make it so that I can enter my name and address and then it will send a postcard to my choice of 'congressional representative (state or federal)', senate representative (state or federal), governor or president ? My experience is that getting paper mail from people is more effective at communicating than email, and knowing that someone paid $2 to send this comment is a clear sign to a representative that the person really really means it. I would love you long time if you could do that.
I suppose it depends on the experience. Time does fly by when you're having fun but I suppose it has to do with the richness of experience as well.

If you're subjecting all your senses to new experiences (say.. eating a new dish in a strange place - sensory overload for smell, taste, sight and sound), maybe your perception of time is slower.

It's hard to put a number on how we perceive real time I guess, but boring tasks do tend to stretch out into infinity.

I think the article is however discussing the way you remember time. It all has to do with our brain processing and storing memories. That ability can only be jogged by having new ones I suppose.

These topics could make for an interesting study, not much is yet understood about our perception of time.
Natural gas is made up of hydrocarbons, mostly methane, so it's both hydrogen-based and carbon-based.
> We - and I don't mean "hackers", I mean most people if you asked the question straight - do not need or want middlemen for something as basic as communication or trust. That's what it boils down to.

The fatal flaw in this argument is asking the person. Very few will say 'I want a middle man in my news', but at the same time few will question that middle man. Quite to the contrary, they will spread that middleman's link to everyone they know through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. This even happens on Hacker News (e.g. constant TechCrunch and HuffingtonPost articles).

Often times people will say what paints them in the best light. They will answer questions not in the context of what they would actually do but what they would do if they were whom they imagine themselves to be.
While we're on pet hypotheses, what about the fact that the brain simply gets bigger? If neural signals–maxing out at ~100 m/s–took longer to traverse the average distance through the brain, one's perception of time would seem to slow down.

Anecdotally, when I was 8 or so I once sat there for an hour or so memorizing the rate of the clock (so I could later mentally estimate intervals of time without a stopwatch). At the age of 23, I noticed and then calculated that a second in my "internal" clock was about 1.3 seconds. Since then I have used VLC to re-watch movies I saw as a child at ~80% speed. The musical rhythms seemed closer to what I remember.

Obviously this is insufficient support by itself, but I's love to see this phenomenon studied more rigorously.
Your comment reminded me of this wonderful video: Moments

http://vimeo.com/8189067
I wonder this exact thing. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of boredom plays a role. As a kid you feel bored a lot more.
off topic:

why is equation rendering still broken on the web?

http://everything2.com uses pre tags, wikipedia uses rendered png images.

is this just another ie work around or have we really not implemented a standard yet.

googled it myself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML

edit: thanks mbell! mathjax looks great

project to get mathjax working on wikipedia ~> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax

breakdown of mathml support ~> http://caniuse.com/mathml (only firefox and safari)
No real evidence beyond this theory.

More likely, as peoples' lives get more complex, and as they get older and more able to separate life into compartments, the individual compartments get less time and therefore time seems to go faster. Children have one "life thread". Adults have a ton of them for various relationships, interests, and aspirations. For one example, since most people only get to spend about 2 weeks per year in the "travel thread", time from that perspective seems to go 26 times faster. If you have a summer house and show up in June and it feels like the last time you were there (September last year) was yesterday, that's what's at play. In that thread, it was yesterday.

Minute to minute, time seems to be going at the same rate. It's when you step back and take a macro perspective that there's a difference, because our lives accumulate complexity that we couldn't have imagined when we were children. Because our lives are a lot more complex, there are contexts in which 5 years isn't an eternity in the way it would be for a child, so from a macro perspective, long time durations aren't nearly as long.
Yep, because every time you re-initiate the animation (by clicking a button), it starts an animation from the current position to the wall and sets it to get there in 2 seconds. So the speed is dependent on the distance from the target.

Given how easy it is to duplicate the same effect in Javascript, I see no reason to use this hack.
Jeff Foxworthy to Host the American Bible Challenge on the Game Show Network
Ask HN: Are HN moderators selectivly targeting my posts? Why?
The past few articles I have posted to HN seem to have quickly been knocked off the front page as soon as they have gotten traction.

I thought I was imagining things but the below screenshots seem to prove my suspicions.

Does any one have any idea if this is the case, and if so why? See the below stats and screenshots for background.

Here is my post ranked at #117

#117: It's Time for an Open Twitter (justinvincent.com) 32 points by jv22222 7 hours ago | 41 comments
http://grab.by/fttY

While at the exact same time there are several other posts that are older, have less points, less discussion but are ranked higher....

#50: These guys are building a startup and Live Streaming it (ustream.com) 24 points by adamcoomes 7 hours ago | 8 comments
http://grab.by/ftuc

#55: Facebook and Twitter Don’t Know What You Want (diegobasch.com) 25 points by diego 8 hours ago | flag | 11 comments
http://grab.by/ftuo

#58: Random Ideas For Sites and Startups (thebetastartup.com) 30 points by pepeto 10 hours ago | flag | 25 comments
http://grab.by/ftuo
I don't think it's that people skipped the rest of it but that they totally agreed with the importance of 1:1s, positive work environment for engineers, value of engineers vs. management, etc. I still wouldn't communicate the importance of individual contributors vs. management to a manager by threatening to fire him over what was partially my fault for not having adequate reporting from my direct reports, when there are so many other ways to communicate that importance. But maybe with a specific person you've worked with for 7 years, it could be the best way to communicate. I would not want to be in a relationship like that.

(also, wow, welcome to hn! love your essays on Rap Genius!)
I've stayed away from management my entire life because I assess my own management-talent as so low, and even I can know this isn't how you do it. Managing by fear does not make for a pleasant job experience!
I think there might be some experimental data in support of the fact that (at least some types of) neurons get slower as we age, though I believe it was for metabolical reasons not due to connection length. I still think you might have a good point there not only due to that cellular slow-down, but also because I would certainly expect an increase in connection density, thus leading to longer computations.

I seem to recall an article from Joel on Software about the same phenomenon from a procedural point of view, where he compares increasingly complex institutional reaction times to the increasing amount of ritual that is being performed before we leave the house (with old people taking the longest time, because based on past experience of all things that went wrong in the past, their checklists before leaving the house become absurdly long over time).

Just an interesting side observation about the VLC speed thing: my personal sense of rhythm has always been so bad that I couldn't tell the difference between 100% speed then and 80% speed now. But an observation I recently made was that I can now comfortably listen to videos at 110% or even 120% their speed without losing content - something I certainly couldn't do at a younger age (in fact, I remember I often had to pause recordings in order to think about stuff that just happened or even just to empty my "language recognition buffer" before I could move on). So while it may well be true that 1 second doesn't last as long for me as it used to, I certainly seem to have become more efficient at processing some types of data.
A VC is really unlikely to get involved with the details of how your corporate culture works, provided the business works. The board-level decision they could ultimately force is replacement of founders/CEO, corporate events (financing, M&A, etc.), and really high level strategy.
It's a Zeno's Paradox demo by accident.
Surround what you're typing by asterisks. It feels awkward to me after spending a long time _underlining_ things, but it certainly looks better.
I don't fully understand acqui- hires especially points like this "For example, don’t be afraid to say “I’ve raised $X dollars and my investors are looking for a 2x return.”

If the company is flatlining, why arent acquirers just poaching talent and paying no regard to investors? Why is investor return on a product/service that the "acquirer" will not support or that they don't even care about part of the equation?

Is it because acquirers don't want to alienate investors who may have great cos for them in the future? That's what I've heard but that seems like a soft justification to me. There is a much smaller pool of acquirers than investors so while an investor might not be happy with an acquirer poaching from his prior portfolio company, it doesn't seem they'd walk away from a future acquisition if the economics made sense.

Genuinely curious as to logic of acqui-hires from the acquirers perspective as the conversation suggests investors have some leverage in these discussions when it seems logically that they'd have none.
Try On the Experience of Time by Robert Ornstein. Has some fascinating experimental results.
Startups: Being Resourceful #pkosl