skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It sucks to be a night owl in an early bird world.

this is actually quite interesting - you'd think that humans who are less functional during the day time may be at an evolutionary disadvantage during pre-historic times. However, a lot of animals actually tend to be active at night, and so in theory, easier to catch prey at night!
It’s hard to run a business, but the hard part is not honoring your own stupid promotional gimmicks instead of using them to insult your customers and make them feel like complete idiots.
Financial Markets, Politics, and the New Reality
Slashdot, some time ago, had a link to an article "A Plan for Spam" that led me to Paul's essays, and thence to here. That led to meeting some folks and actually a gig.

The articles and commentary here have a depth and quality in topics that I am interested in that cannot be found anywhere else. There are a large number of friends that I now have that can be traced back to making connections here on HN.

And like most things that are truly interesting, it is reasonably difficult to get to the bottom of it.
My first reaction to this is why.. why would anyone want something like this. If you are smart enough to use one of these things it seems likely that you have a smart phone. Maybe it's hipster appeal? shrug I don't get it but if this product found a niche and it's selling (or will sell) good for them!
How to Convert WMV to MP4 on Mac
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(FWIW, that "photogenic young lady" is Lucy Southworth, Larry's wife.)
The link is just http://www.slugbooks.com - cheers.
PTO is also a liability on the balance sheet, when the economy went bad normally companies prefer you to take time off so the sheet can look a little better.
People who are into self-help books are the ones most likely to be miserable to begin with ---- since happy people are not interested in reading them!
OCULUS Surveillance and Telepresence Robot - from Kickstarter to eBay
Saw this kickstarter project in Jan 2012: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/289767902/oculus-telepresence-robot

They are available on eBay now: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Xaxxon-Oculus-Surveillance-Telepresence-Laptop-Robot-kit-/320966583279
At a lot of companies, the project manager is the first line of defense against a late project, it's their job to harass their people to move quicker, otherwise they are often the first to be on the chopping block if things don't go smoothly. It's their job to fire ineffective employees when they notice slowdowns or incompetence.
#each and #map are not meant to be the same thing. #each in any language is meant only for side-effects. If you only care about the return value, #map is a much better choice. (Similarly, if you only care about the return value but want many items condensed into one "reduced" item, you want #reduce.)
Something similar to this exists for local tours, if only I could remember what it was called.

I think your biggest problem is going to be vetting the providers and managing your risk/liability. How do you plan to provide/require insurance? How are you going to deal with problems between customers and providers?

What will your vetting program look like when your providers are global?
Right :) I'm just being more specific about what the "very compelling reason" is.
Well, Project Orion was certainly more dramatic -- detonating hundreds of nukes to punch a rocket up into space. It was also top-secret at the time; that explains its mystique.

As far as being a superior choice, I don't think it's quite apples to apples. Project Orion (nuclear pulse propulsion) was designed to get very large payloads directly into orbit. Nuclear thermal rockets like NERVA were apparently designed to be used as drop-in replacements for upper stages on conventional chemical rockets, or as space "tugs" in orbit. That might imply that it was difficult to design a nuclear thermal rocket which would deliver the high initial thrust(?) necessary to lift a payload directly out of our gravity well (but IANA rocket scientist, so I may be mistaken on this). That said, a small blurb on Wikipedia does mention that "Robert Bussard proposed the Single-Stage-To-Orbit "Aspen" vehicle using a nuclear thermal rocket for propulsion and liquid hydrogen propellant[...]" -- so maybe it would indeed have been a superior design choice in the end.
validate your idea..run some craigslist ads to gauge some interest. Validate it without wasting time and money
Rodriguez - Sugar Man
I like the idea and plan to make it my home page, but there is lot of coding nerdliness that doesn't exactly fit with design.

Are you just trying to fill it out for now and as it gets busier, narrow the focus?
I had a networking prof, which allowed us to use a $15 book for our programming, but required a $225 book to cover the 7 layers. He understood the issue, but could not address all of it realistically. I've had 3-4 1301 classes in which the professors make money off the books/keys. Mostly, after generics, the text book battle seemed to be less exaggerated. There is a trend:

2009-2010 $3100/books

2010-2011 $1500/books

2011-2012 $1000/books

2012 $255/books
Your phone number is associated with your Apple ID. So I'm guessing they just reverse lookup the number you're texting to determine if iMessage can be used. It can definitely be reserved engineered. Just text any number from an iOS device and see if it switches to iMessage. The only caveat is users can remove their phone number association with iMessage so you could never be 100% sure.
> a ClearChannel radio station advertised 'accidentally' that we were sold out and tickets wouldn't be available at the door. Nobody showed up.

Didn't you sue them? I hear all the time that US is a country dominates by its lawyers, and that you can sue you physician if he didn't forecast your cancer ten years in advance. Here you seem to have a legitimate case, and would win some money they would find a less disgusting way to fight next time. Or maybe, or surely I'm wrong and laws don't protect people and businesses in US the same way they do in Europe.
I that this post reflects more on the author than it does on the organisation. The challenges the author overcame are mostly to do with organisational frictions and processes that make Zynga sound like a terrible place to be for engineers.

Good for the author, not so great for Zynga to lose someone who could tolerate their environment.
Hmm, interesting that you guys are all about facts and convey that without a shred of optimism.

Regardless of the source or accuracy of the article, would it not be awesome if the answer was yes?
I feel compelled to note that it's also quite toxic to cats (but not dogs). This is one reason you should never use flea products intended for dogs on your cat.
Here's just one of them Northwest Missouri State (scroll to the bottom) - http://www.nwmissouri.edu/admissions/laptop/index.htm

Note that their stats about how rentals save students $1160 a year are sort of BS. On books where renting saves you a lot of money over the full retail price (which no one ever pays anyway), you can usually just buy the book outright for the same amount on Amazon (and then sell it back when youre done for a ridiculously lower total cost of ownership).
Yeah, they really botched Cassini. However with the experiance they gained from that, and a healthy awareness that PR issues like that can happen in the first place, I think they could overcome any issues they might run into. The answer they gave was correct, and they were correct to not be concerned. They know RTGs are safe, but they forgot that the public doesn't know that.

(and yeah, I love NASA's twitter accounts :D)
> There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.

Are the problems with ticketing things that the big companies (eg: ticketmaster) don't want to change because of revenue concerns -- but will eventually be forced to as new companies arrive -- or things that are so ingrained in the industry that they can't be changed without significant work from everyone involved?

(irrelevant side note, I realised I'm wearing a seatgeek t-shirt as I type this)
Funny, I thought we were talking about karma.

You're right, you don't owe her anything. Or yourself. Just stay home with clenched fists and stay angry about it. Be sure to have some aspirin handy in case you have a heart attack.

Call me crazy, but just for fun, you could try a mental experiment: imagine for a moment that she is in fact a deeply wise and loving person, and she was at that time doing just the right thing to teach you perfect patience. Just saying, neither you nor me can prove it true or false. Just saying, you know, it's a way to look at it.

By the way, that's a gorgeous picture on your blog. Makes me want to go travel.
The keyboard is a crutch?

I strongly disagree. When there is another input method that allows me to rapidly and precisely enter text, then, at that point the keyboard will be a crutch for us old fogies.

I haven't seen anything short of a direct neural interface that can replace a keyboard in the near future. I've tried some of the alternatives, but I didn't see myself becoming fast and accurate enough for them not to be annoying.
I like the idea, and there is a startup doing the same thing. http://www.urbanadventures.com/
A master textbook designed by a committee? It would probably be the most boring dull thing ever.

Worse, this is effectively what you already have in state school systems like Texas where you have a committee approving the sanctioned books for the public schools.

The results of this is the inclusion of intelligent design, downplaying of evolution, etc... etc..
Same thing happens if you just try to pass it a bare 3. I'm thinking nothing gets evaluated without parens.
As Facebook stock sinks, how secure is Zuckerberg's job?
In the sense that you are bringing up productive time, or when you are at your best, I vote for the morning because of something that is probably personal to me. I see the mornings as a time of hope and possibility ('imagine all that you can get done today'). No one says to themselves, 'oh, I hope today is crappy'. Not a surprise then that I actually get more 'depressed' as the day goes on (ie, afternoon and onward) and it's not necessarily dependent on how much I've accomplished or not, but rather that the realm of what is possible has dwindled.

Coffee is also my friend. I have between 1 and 1.5 cups per day but just getting up and feeling like Success Kid, per a mix of caffeine and hope, gets me going in the right direction.
Adjunct faculty are typically paid on a per-course-taught basis and can make as little as $400 per subject [1], although it's most common to see pay of about $1500–$2500 per subject. To pick one well-documented discipline in particular, psychology professors make a median of $2500 per subject taught at the graduate level [3].

This blog post guesses without giving evidence that the instructor may be making $5 off of each of his 250 students (who each paid $150 for a textbook), which would represent total textbook-company revenue of $1250.

To be sure, not all faculty are paid as poorly as adjuncts — [2] cites an estimate that adjunct faculty earn 26% less than tenured professors — but there is not a lot of money in teaching undergraduates, and for many kinds of instructors, textbook fees have the potential to become a substantial alternate revenue stream.

[1] http://mtprof.msun.edu/win2000/wickun.html
[2] http://cehs.unl.edu/edad/partnerships/facultyResearchDocs/Ad...
[3] http://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/11-fac-sal/table-3...
Moreover, it seems that this printer uses thermal paper, which contains Bisphenol A (carcinogen).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A
Capital (equity) and net income (income - expense) are separate. It is possible, as you point out, for for taxes to be affected and this is what I am getting at. Something can affect equity and assets without affecting net income but net income always affects equity and assets.

As for prepayments, assuming you aren't one of the rare cash-basis filers, it will be deemed income at the time goods are delivered (and is technically a loan before that point since you have a debt (the goods to deliver) to the customer and if you have to refund the money you may yet have to do so.
I'm not sure why I started.

I like writing, but when someone says he or she reads my blog, I'm a bit freaked out. I mean... I did a couple interesting stuff, wrote a couple articles here and there, but... It always feels weird. Other forms of online discussions took away a lot of the energy and effort I used to put into my blog and, gradually, I mostly stopped.

Oddly enough, today I pulled down a copy of it. I'll start moving it to Plone 4. Since it runs on an ancient version, 2.5 tops, my hosting provider would be very happy if I migrated it to something less... anachronistic.

I will migrate it, of course. And possibly continue posting articles on it. But I don't see myself investing as much time and energy on it as I did 10 years ago.
wow. amazing post.
I like the idea, and know a number of people that would be keen to use it on both the supply and demand sides. Note that this is a bit similar to Zozi's "Gurus": www.zozi.com

Worth poking around and understanding if those economics have worked out for them / how this might be different (from a business model perspective)
I like the concept quite a bit, but the devil is in the details (as always). A similar idea was attempted by findmefit, with a focus on fitness events and yoga practice, but I think they had a lot of trouble getting traction.
I think you answered your own question: these things, although pleasurable, don't lead to happiness. The confusion of which you write is the cause of much unhappiness.

Am I happy that I ate too much fatty, high energy food? No. Did I find them pleasurable? Yes. Are drunks happy? Usually not, as their lives become messes. Do they find getting drunk pleasurable? Yes. But it's the fact that they can't tell the difference between pleasure and happiness that ultimately leads to their pain (assuming they aren't genetically doomed to develop the disease). Those who forego responsibility to engage in sensual pleasures too often end up very unhappy.

EDIT: Type to -> too in last sentence
It's actually for both designers and developers, not just designers. But perhaps you could add a few default tags you like, "web design" for instance.
I still don't know how to do it.
I can't see it as a step backwards when it provides great functionality to hundreds of millions of people. I doubt iMessage would be anyone's sole IM platform, and in fact the OSX client supports AIM XMPP as well, so it's really more of an enhancement (where available) for iOS users. Apple isn't really trying to solve problems for people who don't buy their products. At some point in the future I could see AIM and XMPP being added to the iOS client to be used as a fall-back in the same way SMS is used now. So eventually there may be one client that is basically a proxy to various other services and just sort of figures it all out for you.
Beyond the free tier of Heroku, I feel like it is significantly more expensive than GAE.

Recently I've been doing a fair bit of traffic and I'm still below the $2.10/week minimum. If I get even more traffic I don't have to touch anything to deal with it. Heroku doesn't auto-scale quite the way that GAE does, it isn't transparent. Yes, I know there are tools to help with this, but GAE does it automatically.

A key point for me is that Heroku doesn't have the GAE Datastore. This might be fine for you, but the hope for my company is to get as large as possible and the last thing I want to think about is replication, backups and scaling of databases. I've done that before and it sucks.

People seem to quickly forget about the recent outages on Heroku. That said the past year on GAE has been pretty darn stable. I think they've really fixed a lot of the issues they were having early on.

I do use Heroku for two apps running in the free tier and I can't complain because they are free and they wouldn't be possible in GAE. I have a NodeJS webpage scraper (which is controlled from RESTful hits from GAE) and a reverse nginx proxy so that I can serve up mapquest OSM tiles over https. =)

So, maybe it boils down to the needs of your application and your tech stack comfort level (there is no Ruby or PHP on GAE).

On a side note, I love your business! =)
> each creates a new scope, while for does not

Yes. Its a bit of a side issue and the OP hardly mentioned it, so I thought I'd ignore it. I can see how in this way you then might see 'each' as more 'abstract', but this difference doesn't back up the OP's main points (eg. the "piece of cake"/"easy" analogy).

> On the other hand, I agree with Zed that for is a better abstraction than each, and I disagree that each and for are at the same level of abstraction. If you're approaching it in the abstract, sure, they're both pretty high-level. But each is as close to pure functional as you get and for is plain iterative.

Firstly, how one abstraction can implicitly be a 'better abstraction' than another I am not sure. Only perhaps because you (individually) understand it better or have used it before it is more useful to you.

Secondly, how is 'each' any less 'plain iterative' than 'for...' when they both do exactly the same thing (iterate)? Also, how is it more 'functional'? To me its more object-oriented in that the object is stated first, but this isn't to say it is less plain or more abstract.

> And assembly is iterative, so I'd call for better for giving people a sense of how the metal works. Which, I think, is important for newbies.

I agree that Assembly is good to learn, but not sure what you mean by calling it 'iterative'.
> Why is this unexpected? From my nonreligious standpoint, I see Christianity (and indeed, most religions) as a device created specifically for this reason -- to allow people to be content with themselves.

I'd like to clarify that I see a difference between the so-called Christian "way of life" and the Christian "way of thinking". The activities and behaviours (e.g. hard work, fair dealing, etc.) of the Christian way of life may lead to happiness, but the thoughts and mindset of the Christian way of thinking may not (e.g. guilt over over normal sexual desires).

In fact, I think that many religions, and this especially goes for more severe, "by the book" versions of Christianity, actually make people much less content with themselves, but they carry on spreading themselves in spite of (or because of) this anyway.

What I think is interesting, though, is the effectiveness of certain behaviours as a means of achieving happiness, and what that means for the course of human civilization. Perhaps it is the case that (most) humans need to work in order to be happy. What does this mean when we arrive at a level of technological sophistication that makes work unnecessary?

In fact, it is possible in Western societies not to work and to still enjoy a level of comfort that is higher than that achievable by someone who was working 12 hour days 150 years ago. However, doing this is frowned upon. Why? Is it because not working is fundamentally incompatible with the "good life" and by extension, happiness?

And is it the case that treating others fairly and honestly is genuinely an integral part of achieving happiness, quite aside from the fact that not doing so might lead to negative consequences for oneself? Or is that just something learned?

Is it actually impossible to live a happy, contented life that is characterized by indolence and a total disregard for the feelings and property of others, or is that just something we must all believe or civilization will just fall apart?
I'm dreaming of the day when a programmer writes this article.
I don't know, catholicism and scientology make a point of making you feel unsatisfied...
Agreed. There just isn't a more effective tool for communicating instructions to a computer than a keyboard, and I don't think it's really close. To say that the keyboard is "a crutch to the past" is in my view no different than saying that spoken words or written language are a crutch to the past. Just because something has worked well for a long time doesn't mean that it necessarily is due for a change. Sometimes just working well is far more valuable than perceived convenience or migrating to new technologies.

To me the only real pain point for using a keyboard is added bulk, but that in and of itself is not a huge deal. In fact when I am traveling and have to use my laptop, I miss having my iMac keyboard with a number pad and additional inputs that don't have to be combined into single keys with multiple functions. There's a reason nobody codes on their phones or tablets- there's no effective way to communicate with it at high speeds.
I hadn't seen that paper before; thanks for the reference. I read through it and saw that they were reweighting the sampled image patches with a Gaussian mask prior to learning, which explains how they got Gabor-like filters. The masking effectively forced the learned filters to have localized receptive fields, while locality/nonlocality is generally one of the (visually) clearer differences between filters learned with ICA/PCA.

In other words, the Gaussian-modulated part of Gaussian-modulated sinusoids was built into their learning process, rather than appearing as an emergent property. I also chuckled a bit when they described how computing eigenvectors for 4096x4096 matrices was "beyond reasonable computation".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

They tried increasing light. Result: increased productivity. They tried decreasing light. Result: increased productivity. Eventually they worked out that any change increased productivity. (reminds me of teleported Arthur Dent cautiously checking his body for injury, and encountering pain wherever he felt. Eventually he realized it was his finger that hurt)
I'd like to see some footage of the laser in the lab; I'm sure they tested it out on all kinds of stuff ranging from the everyday to the exotic, and quite extensively too.
We used to pass around photocopies of "the diffs".

These were just what you think. The scant things added to this years "edition" so that you couldn't use last years used one. They were rarely more than a few pages long and mostly full of hints on where things got moved to instead of legitimately new content.
if humans are safely out of the picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots
I mostly depends on how much resources you can provide to your legal team verses what your opponent can. The vast majority of the time, it boils down to who has more money. The exceptions are usually due to public agencies or organizations with a “dog in the fight” that would benefit in the long term if the underdog wins.

ClearChannel/Ticketmaster is huge and it would probably take the backing of a corporation the size of Time Warner or Apple to challenge them. Issues like this aren’t usually “sexy” enough for PR focused firms like the ACLU or FSF or whatever would be apropos here to get involved with, at least initially.
Nuclear propulsion will open vast horizons to the future of mankind. I think the best option will be fusion-powered plasma turbines. http://youtu.be/ro5-QYqqxzM
http://www.vayable.com/