skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What he should have been is a type of center of ideas where other people who could execute brilliantly, but did not have as many insights and ideas could start from to complete his stuff. He'd have become some type of manager at the end though.
My google hosted email won't load with this.
A Full Web Service with HTTP caching in 7 lines
It's not always about getting from point A to point B. There is always something to be said for the beauty of the journey.
Y'all are totally missing the point.
Ask HN: Load testing for flash swf files?
Assuming that siege or perf will not properly load test a flash swf file. Any recommendations on load testing for flash swf files?
I would say it is the place of the passionate creative to be entrepreneurs.
IMO, I think life + 20 is reasonable. To avoid upsetting company's like Disney a fee per work to preserve valuable copyright seems reasonable. I would say 10k / year + 5% of the gross sales would be reasonable. That way you promote new works, but don't need to fight corporations that want copy write to last until the end of time. It's also a good divider between works that people are actually interested in preserving from works that generate little income.
I'm guessing around 3--4 hours. But when I'm really working I never know for how long I do that. But I think should know for how long I actually work. But it's a relief to see so many people in 3--4 hour category :)
It's not an attack on the people who participated in the poll; it's a limit to the applicability of the poll results.
Engineering feat: MCE-5 Variable Compression Ratio 1.5-Liter (Torque Like a V8)
* hopeful
That's weird. I just pulled it down and built it fine on MacOS X 10.5 on SBCL as well. An error message would help me figure out why it works for me but not you.
Or you can say, these mirrors do calculation by reflecting lights in specific ways---it's real-time, continuous calculation. Electronic digital circuits aren't the only way to calculate.
I agree. As a 9 to 5er, I find this concept of "I'm always working" very alien.

Also, it does seem like the question has been skirted a bit. While going to the gym or taking a nap may benefit one's work, it clearly goes under the category of non-work.
I completely disagree that Leonardo was a procrastinator simply because he didn't do everything he dreamed of. I'm sorry, I've looked through some of the books of his designs and he has things like strip-miners and hang-gliders and such. I'm sorry, they were physically incapable of making them in his day.

He understood concepts and designed things that fit them, likely knowing he'd never be able to build them in his lifetime. The first design for a Space Elevator came in like 1895, and in 2009 we still don't have the technology to make one, so why is Leonardo a 'procrastinator' simply because it was impossible to build some of the things he wanted to.
I just remembered a quote by Thomas Edison, I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun. At least in HN, it should be called Fun not Work, because most of the people here are doing what they love or like.
"The unambiguously negative idea of procrastination seems unique to the Western world"

As an American living in Shanghai for 9 years, I have had to confront this meme in its various forms on many occasions. My wife (Chinese) will simply tell me things like "Chinese people are not afforded the luxury of your behavior". It appears procrastination is something that must be "afforded".

Its not that procrastination is unique to us (modern-Western-middle-class++), but that it may have cultivated itself into an attribute that has reluctant value; otherwise da Vinci would have no merit in this context.
Because labeling Leonardo a procrastinator makes all of us procrastinators feel better about ourselves.
If you can crank out 9 or more hours of actual billable work per day, you are seriously an endurance champion and can probably make a ton of money consulting.
Turns out it was because of Google Gears. I uninstalled Gears and it worked fine. If you have same issue, you can uninstall gears by running this command from your terminal (includ quotes):

'/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Gears.plugin/Contents/Resources/uninstall.command'
Copyright is not a human right. This is why it runs out. It was meant to be a way to encourage people to create a long time ago. Sharing, on the other hand, is a human right. People were willing to sacrafice this right when they had no means of sharing. Many things have changed since then and we need to think of what rights we sacrifice and what we get in return.
Attackers targeting unpatched vulnerability in Excel 2007
How about we all stop boasting about how many lines we can write something in, and go back to writing quality software? Who gives a fuck how many lines it is, only thing we should care about is if it's good or not.
Just launched this Twitter/OpenCalais mashup for IL special election
It was a lot of fun putting them together. I'm pulling links out of the tweets and running OpenCalais over the text in the articles. Then I count the "Topics" to catch trends and pull out quotes.
I read until I saw REXML. The author should move to a faster XML library.
Here's one way of normalizing it: what hours can you unambiguously ethically charge to a client/employer as "work?"

If you work for yourself or your own business, assume you are doing a custom project for a client.

If you work a 9-5 job, obviously everyone throws in some non-work into their day, but don't count these because it's still ambiguous if it's "ethical" to charge these (there are plenty of bosses who wouldn't consider the gym or surfing the net as work, but every boss would consider programming or reading up on a relevant programming issue work.)
Attempting to synopsize the core concern again: "So, if we changed that old headline to reflect the bodytext's 'Internet-enabled desktops', would you be satisfied then?"

tx, jd/adobe
did you make this? how did you find OpenCalais? What do you use it for?
What was the cause of the prosperity that generated these customer dollars? Isn't it arguable that with enough people with excess wealth, patronage of the arts/science is inevitable?

With the wealth of today's first world, anyone who wants to be a passionate creative can be. And many are. Money isn't the problem; gumption is.

I think the article is a bit ridiculous at the end, about how the man is keeping academics down - if it weren't for the university, why academics' genius would flower. Blaming is the opposite of problem solving.
IPhone App prices down 19% since late December (avg.)
> Examples include using recorded music as an advertisement for big, expensive concerts and begging people to donate after they already have your music for free.

What? But this is exactly how musicians earned their living since the forever.

> Downloaders sometimes say it is because "music isn't as good as it used to be".

That's not true. Many people simply claim that the good stuff isn't being promoted as it should. Instead what you'll see all day on MTV are boy bands.

I do pay for the music I like. Not because I want to reward the artists, but because it's a lot of fun going to the mall, looking at entire shelfs of CDs, meet girls, stuff like that. And when I'm going to a concert I feel the need to re-listen to the songs I just heard.
It was supposed to be "12+ hours", I think, to line up with the options on the /. poll [1]. He just forgot a plus sign.

[1] http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1719&aid=-1
I don't know if this is just in the version 4, but it seems to me a major bug the fact that I'm not able to cycle through tabs when I'm on a page with an input text box selected, like in Google.com.

Does anyone confirm this or is it just ignorance from my part?
Google sets billing rates for App Engine
Dijkstra argues 0.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
what kind of startup? Is it linked to science?
Unless the SWF you are hosting also creates a new network connection, the only load you take on is from the file transfer.
Collin and I found eachother here on Hacker News. I wanted to create a Twitter buzz tracker for the special IL election to replace Rahm Emmanuel in Congress. Let us know what you think.
Yes I made this. I don't remember quite how I found OpenCalais. I found it almost a year ago.

When somebody posts a relevant tweet with a link in it, I run the text on the other side of the link through Calais to pull out quotes. Some Tweets have a "Preview Article" link that expands the tweet to show those quotes.

I'm also using Calais to catch onto trending topics.
Launching a web app? Read this first (Lessons learned)
It does make a network connection, but I am actually interested in seeing how many swf files I can serve and at what rate before my server crawls.
Work isn't really defined here either, but that's ok. I defined work as either doing things that benefit me or things I've committed my time to. I work, and I go to school, so I included both in my calculations.
Convex mirrors will produce a smaller virtual image (behind the plane of the mirror) taken from a wider field of view. Concave mirrors will produce an inverted real image (for objects farther away than the focal length) or a larger virtual image (for objects inside the focal length).
Thank. You described just about what I was looking for. He does in an hour what looks like TED Talks does in 15 minutes.
I'll take a Vimperator over Chrome for minimalism at least as far as interface. It has all the Firefox issues with memory.
Am I the only one who's tired of these "X in Y lines of code!" things? It's obviously always many more lines of code, just hidden away from view, so meh!

Come back when you've actually done some REAL WORK in insanely tight code, not just imported this and that lib.
It does take some getting used to, but I love the extra vertical space it leaves for showing content. It's only a few pixels but I'll take what I can get on the 13" MacBook.
It's partly a matter of definition. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done during meetings, but sometimes I still need to be at them. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm talking with coworkers about workplace politics, but I find that it's necessary in order to avoid being blindsided by politics that I wasn't aware of. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm waiting for or pestering someone else to do something so that I can proceed, or when I'm waiting for a long installer, but I can't leave it because it asks me questions every now and again. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm doing paperwork, but it still needs to be done.

All together, four hours of work a day that feels productive (like I'm "really working") isn't that far from the norm for me, and some weeks I don't even get that far. But it's not because I don't want to do more, it's usually because I can't because of other things that are very much "work" and that I am very much expected to do by my employer, but that just don't feel like work to me.

While four hours a day of "real work" may not sound like much, my employer is actually much happier with me than it would be if I spent 8 hours a day doing "real work" and ignoring all of the "fake work" that I'm also expected to do.
Netbooks are just a price point / buzzword.

I know they compared it to overpriced crap to make a point that's just stupid 400-500$ is the new sweetspot for most people. You can buy less HW but you get a lot less power.

From Dell today:
EX1: 300$ = 9" screen, .5GB RAM, 8gb hdd, 1.6ghz cpu, no DVD drive.
EX2: 400$ = 15" screen, 1GB RAM, 120GB hdd, 2.1ghz CPU and a DVD drive.
EX3: 475$ = 15" screen, 3GB RAM, 25GB hdd, 2 GHZ dual core CPU, and a DVD drive etc.

PS: I don't think most people are going to be happy to give up the ability to use a DVD / CD drive anytime soon and using a 9" screen all day is not a great idea.
Uh, novice here, and although I'm sure we all agree that quality of code > lack of lines of code, there's no reason to bash clever programming. Who cares if it's pragmatic -- that's obviously not the motivation.
How to scrape data from sites you can't log into
Translation:

Many content sites only really consider two types of users: content creators and content consumers. However, there is a third and more important user that is often overlooked: content distributors (the users who will share the content).
I've re-posted the note so that anyone can access it: http://eff-yeah.com/fb_note.html

I admit that my responses were mildly snarky, and I acknowledged in the note the blurry distinction between my behavior as an individual vs. employee of Facebook. But I maintain that my responses could all have been comfortably delivered in person, as an individual.

A few important points/questions:

- Was I acting as an individual or as an employee of Facebook? This is a very difficult question. We set up and publicized numerous official channels for user feedback on the new profile. Of course, we would never respond in this manner through those channels. These individuals all elected not to use those channels and instead sent personal messages to my individual Facebook account. I understand that this will still largely be viewed as acting on behalf of the company, but I think the question of context is a very important one. Where do we draw the line between personal use of Facebook, and use as an employee? Was I interacting with customers or individuals?

- I didn't violate any data privacy. These people sent personal messages to my Facebook account, which granted me permission to view their profiles (as natrius correctly pointed out).

- In the note I posted, I removed the last names of everyone who messaged me. David, Carissa, and Derek are hardly unique identifiers.

- These were all blatant cases of hate mail. I'm not a lawyer, but some of these would likely have held up in court as charges of assault. Characterizing any of these as a "feature request / bug report" is honestly quite a stretch.
Everything is good except for SOX, what he proposes would just lead to another internet bubble
Is Microsoft's copying of what works and making it better simply smart business strategy?
You might not want to do that sort of work, but it does sound like a way to create solid products and be highly profitable.

Why not let others take the risks of innovation and just copy what works if you can get away with it? Much cheaper that way and you get the benefit of creating a refined product.

For example, while Windows 7 has copied from Mac OS X, the resulting product is actually very good.
Priced competitively with AWS, will be interesting to see how many people adopt this considering the fact they are locked-in on the google stack.
Procrastination is like masturbation, it's all good until you realize you just f***ed yourself.
I wonder if this works every time...

And if it did, how long until a defense is made...
I'm no proponent of the nanny state, but there is something to be said for standards. It's important that any driver be able to drive any car. Otherwise, a driver used to 1:1 mirrors who rented or borrowed a car with convex mirrors would underestimate the speed and distance of cars passing him.
The question of "what is something worth?" is answered with, "Whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay."

Anyone who follows the economics of sports can show you that some contracts are absolutely ridiculous, and a team totally overbid. Likewise, sometimes really solid players get signed quite cheap.

So it goes with acquisitions too: Sometimes an acquirer falls in love with a company or sees value they can add quickly and pays way more than people would expect. Sometimes a company needs to sell now and sells at a bargain. It can still be worthwhile to try to peg values on companies, but final sale prices usually will differ greatly.
An entrepreneur who caters to something other than a "customer driven market" is a rare one. And even if an entrepreneur can create a whole new market on their own by innovating, it will soon become customer driven.

I am betting on the theory that entrepreneurship itself provides much more space for creativity than most other professions and if you succeed, you'll have a lot of money and time to pursue creativity full time. I have also read about a lot of successful entrepreneurs who discovered that they really need a startup to give direction to their creativity. Thus, serial entrepreneurs are born.

pg is one of the few entrepreneurs I can think of who didn't become a serial entrepreneur in the traditional meaning of the word but still found great outlets for their creativity. Although, at least one of pg's outlets - YCombinator can be thought of as a startup.
I have Command-E mapped to Safari's search bar, and Command-2 mapped to a Javascript prompt to search (which helped with a bug that seems to have disappeared in Safari 4). Since the two fields were an equal number of keystrokes away, I've never found myself entering something in the URL bar that I meant to search. (I guess if I did have to, I would Command-A-C-tab-V it to save time - not too much of a time loss.)
Jason Fried: 'Free is not the future' of apps
Most porn bought per household?  Utah.
I'm not a Delicious user - I've never seen the point to storing my bookmarks on a web site - so that's a feature I never missed.
I'm using Sinatra et al for my thesis project, for a Master's in Latin, and minimizing the non-interesting bits of infrastructure helps a lot.

It's interesting to me for the same reason PHP is interesting: it helped me wrap an HTTP interface over an executable in Ada with its own homegrown database, and (sociologically) it's a social commentary on the bits of plumbing we've agreed upon as useful.
Isn't this already happening with YouTube? People making a name for themselves without going through the normal channels?
Why are you so eager to jump to their defense, but so reluctant to ask that they treat me with courtesy, dignity, and respect?

I do, however, agree with you. As I mentioned in the note, I did spend a lot of time responding courteously to a great deal of personal user feedback. Having invested significant time doing so, I know and fully appreciate the difference it makes. I am also personally appreciative when I am on the receiving end -- I enjoy the thoughtful personal feedback people take the time to send me, even if it is critical.

I only responded in this manner to the most intensely offensive and bigoted messages received. I was sent thousands of personal messages in the span of a few days, a pretty good portion of which suggested I should die.

I also agree with diN0bot. The professional decision is to simply ignore personal attacks in a professional context. In this case I can ask forgiveness for a momentary lapse, call attention to the tricky distinction between personal and professional contexts on Facebook, and chalk some of this behavior up to stress relief during a period of highly intense work.
Canadian judge: No warrant needed to see ISP logs
I kept a journal of what I called "long term productive work" for a while. So I didn't count email, waste of time catch-up calls, cleaning my desk, clearing my desktop, etc. Then I clocked focusing on just one task that I termed long-term productive with no multitasking. If I had to take a call, I'd stop the clock.

I realized I didn't do all that much really productive stuff - lots of BS admin. So I set a goal of 30 minutes per day, and gradually expanded it to one hour, then eventually two hours. An amazing day I'd get six hours of LT productive work done. Like, it was a rare, epic event. By just getting two hours per day done, I was one of the most productive people I knew. (I also didn't let my admin totally melt down, but with a new focus that it's not really creating anything of value, I moved through it much faster and just got it done, instead of toiling in it to feel productive).

Most people are "working" a lot, but are not "getting shit done" at a very good pace.
Google Analytics JavaScript is Broken
The best creations are the ones inventors are making for themselves. I was reading the interview with Steve Wozniak in Founders at Work, and what most struck me was how he talked about Apple's biggest innovations as being things either he or Steve Jobs made for themselves, because they wanted their computers to be better.

The guys at 37signals made their products so that they could use them. Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook for himself and friends. I'd imagine the thought process was something similar at Google.
Just because he once worked on Duke Nukem Forever, da Vinci has been unfairly tagged as a procrastinator.
Silicon Valley needs entrepreneurs, not bailouts
Thank you for that, as I do not speak Jive.
yeeeeep, welcome to the platform.
Is Russia blind to basic economic principles?

I inadvertently took an economics class in college. Fortunately the professor was amazing and the class was incredibly mind-expanding. The downside to this is that now I am constantly aware of people (and nations) completely ignoring proven economic principles - it can be really frustrating to watch.

This is a bit off topic - but I've often wondered why the US public school system requires so many classes in order to graduate from high school, but rarely even touches economics. I'm all for english literature, social studies, etc - but I think a simple economics course would be far more valuable to the American populace. Apparently, basic economics would be pretty valuable to the Russian populace as well ;)
sounds more like your firewall filtering is broken.
so you use Calais to extract quotes from documents?
I translated that as fear and a retreat to the comfort zone.
The best creations are the ones inventors are making for themselves.

I agree with this, and this is something many successful entrepreneurs have said. But here's the dilemma I was pointing out (maybe not so clearly) in my previous comment: After your initial success, when your customers clearly want you to add widgets A, B and C but you want to work on innovative product Z instead, it takes a visionary and gutsy person to do that. I realize that there isn't always such a clear cut binary choice.

While it might not be an either-or proposition, many if not most entrepreneurs find their interests diverging from that of the business after initial success. If you're acquired, this is almost guaranteed.

37 signals, Facebook and Google all have one thing in common: the founders are still in control but it's hard to argue that Google still builds what Larry and Sergey want to build for themselves. At best, Google now builds what its employees want to make for themselves. I can assure you that day to day, Larry and Sergei's jobs look very different from their jobs in 1998.
Is he a procrastinator for not actually attempting to build his helicopter with late-15th century technology? He would have failed, as the rough-hewn wooden gearboxes of the day were incapable of the power levels needed for rotary-wing flight. And other reasons. It was probably better to move on and sketch some new ideas than try to build things centuries ahead of what was technologically possible.
"You know how Einstein's grades were bad as a kid? Well mine are even worse!" - Calvin (& Hobbes).
useful maybe, funny yes. i agree that there may not be a whole 3rd segment, but the channels for distribution are really important to consider and if the content is going to go viral, its because of the distributors.
What has Windows 7 copied from Mac OS X exactly? The new Start Menu takes more inspiration from the 20-year-old RISC OS Icon Bar than the Mac OS X dock, for example.
Unfortunately for da Vinci, pg had not yet finished the "noprocrast" feature, so would-be masterworks gathered dust as da Vinci frittered away his days on an early version of Hacker News.