skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with this sentence from that article: "You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour.". You cannot work double the hours and be more productive. If you work 80 hours on a continual basis, you will get less done than if you worked 40 hours. I have seen smart people reduced to blubbering idiots by the hours they put in through misguided passion.

The true productivity benefit from going into business for yourself is not that you can put in more effort. The human capacity for productive work is not that flexible, because we are not machines. The real multiplier is that you can direct your effort at that which truly matters. Most businesses spend 10% of their budget on 90% of their value. If you can work smarter you can get dramatically more done because you are building that which truly matters. That is where the PG article is right.

But, here's the problem with what I'm saying: people working crazy hours succeed. Everyone can see that. How can that be explained? In my opinion, those people succeed despite those hours, not because of them. It is their laser-like focus on reaching a goal that makes them succeed, but it is also this focus which makes them put in more hours thinking it brings success home sooner. It don't think it does, but it's almost impossible to prove it doesn't because there just aren't many places where highly passionate and focused people stick religiously to a 40 hour work schedule.
In the interim (between my and your comments) they stopped doing that (the URLs are now relative to socrates.io, as opposed to being absolute off of raw.github.com).
The reason I won't accuse Linus of not being open even though he doesn't support my feature-of-choice is because while he ditches my idea saying it is crap, he still gives me the source to mess with. So, I or a friend can make the change for me and I can be happy and content.

Here's another analogy : It's like Microsoft Studios talking about how the development team used a Linux based compile farm and testbed for their new game but nevertheless, the game itself won't run on Linux.
Shameless plug of my own take on this: http://messymatters.com/nominology

Sam Stokes (Rapportive co-founder) called it his "favourite post on naming things". :)

Ooh, and Sam's coworker called it "absolutely brilliant". I might be reaching now.
> "The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or subscribers because we can't reach them all. Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That's crazy.

I think this mindset is the poisons venom in Facebook's revenue strategy. Facebook is seen as just a social network and not a legitimate communication or advertising platform like TV, radio, or mobile phones. Cuban has no problem paying for Ad's on Radio and TV, but is appalled when Facebook charges for a similar (And arguably more accurate) service. Facebook's response also makes little logical sense--On one hand they say the fees are to fight spam, but the screen clearly shows that the fees are to communicate with more people.
Or you can bank the excess cash and "retire" as soon as 4% of your savings equals your annual expenses. (Work hard to maximize your salary and minimize your expenses)

Between now and achieving that 4%, focus on excelling at the things you find the most interesting and building relationships in your industry so that once you cross the freedom line you can take on the occasional consulting gig to keep things interesting.

(I'm pushing 40 now and sincerely wish I had done the above when starting out in my twenties)
I think I'm in the minority, but I really hate the term, "data scientist." It seems usually to mean, "senior statistician, but with training and credentials expected of an RA" (to clarify, that isn't meant as a comment on the original article). I would be especially skeptical about hiring someone who self-identifies as a "data scientist," people are trained as Statisticians, Biostatiticians, computer scientists, various subspecialties that end in "-metrician" (e.g. Econometrician, Psychometrician, Cliometrician), etc; no one is trained as a "data scientist." Unless you're hiring someone really junior, you want the "data scientist" to have a specialty -- anyone good will have one.

But the best way to find a good "data scientist" is probably the best way to find a good programmer -- be one yourself; tap your professional network; and hire people as consultants/freelancers on non-critical projects before making a real commitment. Identifying someone with a deep skill that one doesn't possess oneself is pretty much impossible. And on the flip side, I have trouble imagining that someone who really knows what he or she is doing would want to work for some unknown.

If you want someone to scrape and clean data with Perl and generate some scatter plots and histograms, look for undergrads with good grades who worked as Research Assistants, or recent grads working as RAs at consulting firms, research centers, governmental agencies, or think tanks. They'll do great (by and large), they've have had some informal training from a more senior researcher to help put everything in context, and faculty often steer their best students into those sorts of jobs, so there's a pretty strong quality screen. I'm sure there are other places to find people too.
My humble suggestion...

I really like the feel of your brand and when I looked at your logo the handwritten script gave it a hand-crafted, authentic feeling. That made me think of signatures and calligraphy.

So my suggested name is Copperplate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script)
It's happened already in the US, and in other countries.

When do you think the peak of US manufacturing output was? It was actually 2007, it has only dropped since then due to the economic downturn. However, while US manufacturing output has doubled since 1975, the number of jobs available has more like halved, due to increasing per-worker productivity (from computers, containerized shipping, factory automation, etc.)
Currently all our executable code is bundled. We only transmit meta-data, content data and media.
Real-time map of CA Earthquakes
Given my fascination with things dopamineagenic and their interplay in modern consumer commerce, that is a very insightful observation.

Note that Marx's version is usually given as "the opiate of the masses", but still.
I am not a fan how every single youtube link is automatically embedded on the page.
What are the chances! I am from Whitinsville!
Esprit d'escalier: "In my day (usenet), we didn't have links--and we liked it." (old SNL joke for those who don't get it).

This conversation has 2 angles I find very interesting. The first is the whole question of quality of the content. Google is a huge AI trying to give you the same quality of information that you'd select if you looked at the same (millions of) sources. At first, I liked netcan's answer[1], which says essentially, nofollow them all or none, Google will sort out its own. But the more I think about it, the more context that sites can provide automatically, the better. If a site can say "this content provided by untrusted source" (because we're a community-driven site, and we can't police everything), that's a help to Google's Algorithm. Google is free to still follow the link and perhaps, using it's other knowledge of the target, assign a trustworthiness score to the nofollow quality on the original site. If a good community is providing good links, but the website owner still marks them nofollow, that might become a badge of honor in Google eyes (all-crawling robot tentacles?).

As a side note, I love how everybody, from slimy SEO to internet ethicist, is trying to guess Google's secret formula (it used to be Coca-Cola that had a secret formula that was releveant). Google is essentially the unknowable proto-God of this new information universe.

The other interesting topic is getting paid for content. My first reaction to the OP was "wah, wah, OP doesn't want to pay for his little corner of the internet." Let's face it, the internet doesn't run for free (hardware and electricity), and the content that attracts people doesn't write itself. StackOverflow provides a community for people to deliver their content into and receive socaial rewards. If SO can't do that because of some quirk of SEO, then it's likely it wouldn't be able to host the community anymore. The internet has still not figured out a way to pay for that other than advertizing (the forcing of unwanted content on readers). But advertizing only works if you can keep track of views and stay on top of the SEO game. I totally agree they're hypocrites for hoarding the follows (must follow to us be we nofollow to everyone), but how's that different from a corporate board's fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize the profit of the company? I also think cheald[2] makes a very good point about why the dynamics must be towards nofollow. The question is then how involved or committed are you to the community, and how do you feel rewarded for the time you contribute to it.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4777260
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4774888
:) you are very right ! It probably would cost about $40k if many of my close friends (who are professionals in the video/movie industry) would actually charge their fees & equipment...they simply decided to help and didn't want to stop until it was polished...what can I say, they are good friends and we're all a bit of perfectionists. The "actors" are actually friends and 2 of them work on XVDIA project full time. The entire video therefore cost about $3k ...but I owe a looooot of favors :)
regards to all, Uros ( FOUNDER - XVIDA )
The effect would be a lot nicer if it stopped when the tab lost focus. I would prefer not doing it at all, but my tastes are not everyone's.
That is correct and thank you as I was being unclear. I was intending to reply only to the question of why this is a matter for public comment; I do not believe given the information so far presented that he acted illegally. I'm not even convinced there was any real basis for resignation if he still had the respect of his peers and the confidence of the President.

Still, in my view, and I think in the view of many others, "flag" officers never really retire. And as such his behavior in this matter brings disgrace to the service and uniform. For me, it is just another recent example that really calls into question the ethics of an entire generation of our military. Patraeus, Ward, Sinclair, Allen, McChrystal, the list goes on and on.
Great article. Discussed previously at HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707101
Designing a New Electronic Medical Record
To the reply below (for some reason I can't reply directly to you, which is weird).

Yes, I agree that on average, social science people tend to like maths less. However, you're not looking for the average social scientist, you're looking for the ones who weren't satisfied with SPSS (like me). The other, more common kind, are not likely to end up in a data scientist position (though perhaps this may change).

Hilariously enough, after I learned R, SPSS made way more sense to me, while before that it just seemed way too easy to generate reports without a shred of insight.
Web Development vs. Internet Explorer
I read this title and thought it was a demand to increase the working work. Work 40 hours per week? Is that some kind of joke? Then I read the comments and was quietly horrified. I'm guessing a long long working week is a U.S. thing.
Yes all 3 people note that you can get a cheaper contract on T-Mobile. However the 500 lb gorilla none of them mention is that T-Mobile's network really sucks:

http://opensignal.com/coverage-maps/US/San%20Francisco/

T-Mobile in San Francisco makes AT&T's network look good and it's a shadow of Verizon everywhere.
Your article seems to be written from a phd-centric, low-industry-experience perspective. I'd reconsider this bias if it's real, finding good data scientists is hard and you may be eliminating good potential candidates.

I've been what you could call a data scientist for over five years now, and worked with dozens of people you could also call data scientists with different degrees and varying experience. From my sample, I don't think PhDs add much, if any, value over masters degrees after a year or two of experience (I'm biased here, I don't have a PhD). I think industry experience can add a tremendous amount of value you can't get from a degree, but it comes at a cost premium. Not related to your article: I've also found the best people have physics or computer science + applied math backgrounds.
I think many of the HN crowd has a slightly different mindset, since a lot of us are entrepreneurs. I'm in my early 20s, and am about to start working 40+ hour weeks for an early-stage startup. To me, this work _is_ a great experience. There's also the very small chance that we'll make it big and I'll be able to 'retire' and focus on my other passions. Even if we crash and burn, I won't consider that time wasted. The lessons learned will be invaluable, but I also hope to save enough to travel the world for a while, no matter what happens.

20 hour work weeks don't usually lead to more life experiences, in my experience. You just have more time to focus on side-projects or hobbies. You'll still be 'working' 40+ hour weeks, but dividing your time between different projects.

As someone commented before, if he wanted experiences, then he should take a few months of unpaid leave of absence, and go exploring the world.
> "and yet you would be hard pressed to find people on this site who hold the opinion that software destroys jobs"

You've found one right here. Not all software destroys jobs, but much of it certainly does. More often than not this destruction is a net positive for society - but it tends to create localized minima that are hard to resolve.

In less abstract speech: by using software to destroy jobs we create more jobs that ostensibly have a greater positive impact to society, but that's really very little comfort to the auto plant worker in Michigan, or the call center agent in Minnesota, or the travel agent in California, most of whom are severely underqualified for these new jobs, and have no reasonable way of becoming qualified.

Humans are not discrete units of productivity - specializations, experience, education, intelligence, all of which exist as substantial barriers in making humans easily interchangeable.

One cannot reasonably take the position of "relax! we won't even remember this in 100 years", even though it is true. While society will recover from these periods of change, you still have millions of unemployed, hungry, desperate people at your door step right now, and you will have to face that problem regardless.

> "Automation has never created poverty or starvation."

Are you serious?

"Automation has never created a net decrease in productivity in the long term (measured in decades)" is probably more accurate.

If you want to see automation creating poverty and starvation just go to the rust belt in this country. Go to Detroit and see the boarded up houses, the burned out husks of neighborhoods, and then try to say with a straight face "automation has never created poverty or starvation".

Whenever this topic comes up on HN (and elsewhere) the response is invariably highly binary. Either automation is a noble advancement with no negative effects, or automation is a complete evil that destroys people. Both views are equally ridiculous. Automation is an inevitable fact that is, in the long term, a positive for society - but it creates very significant localized destruction for substantial amounts of time (measured in terms of human life).

The ignorance of that last part is dangerous. Automation has already put millions out of work just in this country alone, and will continue to put more people out of work. There are substantial gaps between the unemployed and the new classes of jobs that are being created, and bridging this gap is neither inevitable, nor trivial, nor will the magic of unbridled capitalism solve it automatically. It is a tremendous social issue that faces every society on this planet, and it should not be trivialized.
AppFog is absolutely NOT being discontinued! We are incredibly proud of what we accomplished with PHP Fog, but we think that the AppFog is the true future of PaaS: polyglot and poly-infrastructure. We simply don't think that single-language PaaS on a single infrastructure is the future, and we're working on rolling all of the functionality from PHP Fog into AppFog, where you'll be able to deploy Node, Java, Python, Ruby, and other runtimes and deploy to a variety of infras.

AppFog is absolutely thriving right now and will be around for quite some time, we assure you.
Hey guys,

I run an available domain name search tool called Lean Domain Search [1] that might help. I ran a few relevant keywords through the premium version of the site and filtered the results so that you're only seeing the ones that end with these terms (which generally make better small business names). Here are the results:

4,285 results for "outerwear" - http://leandomainsearch.s3.amazonaws.com/-outerwear.txt

3,059 results for "shirts" - http://leandomainsearch.s3.amazonaws.com/-shirts.txt

4,147 results for "menswear" - http://leandomainsearch.s3.amazonaws.com/-menswear.txt

The farther down these lists you go the more brandable the names are. You should be able to find something in these that suit your business well, plus you know that the .com is available too. If you'd like me to run other keywords just drop me a note: matt@leandomainsearch.com.

[1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com
Comparing ArangoDB with CouchDB and MongoDB
What do you mean by "Erlang allows us to take the good parts and move them to a 'friendlier' language when the time comes"? Is there something I don't know about porting code from Erlang to other languages? (Not being snarky, genuinely curious.)
They're not dropping standards as far as I can see. They're setting goals for relative improvement. If blue people average 40% on tests and green people average 60%, and after a year those scores have increased to 50% and 70%, respectively, one group has seen a 25% improvement and the other a ~17% improvement.

Yes, actually educating children is hard. But isn't it worthwhile?

Of course it's worthwhile. What are you trying to say, that I don't want to educate them? If we posit only a single standard for k-12, what happens when some children fail to reach it is that the educators and parents end up in mutual recrimination. We've tried the one-size-fits-all approach for years and it doesn't work that well in practice.
Awesome guys.. glad to be a part of this.
Cool. So they should go back to Hunting and Gathering then?
....and then turn left.
Yeah, another social science guy here. My employer has found my statistical and behavioral knowledge very valuable, but I'm not much of a coder yet so it doesn't seem like I'm yet able to market myself as a data scientist. I've been doing some serious self-directed training in Python and trying to get better at R (moving from SPSS and SAS)
In OS X, you can do this:

1. Copy the text of the talk and save it to a file, say "life.txt"

2. Use the "say" command to read it:

$ say < life.txt

To change the voice, go to System Preferences > Dictation & Speech and pick the one closest to Hawking's. (On my system, "Fred" comes pretty close.)
Does this mean the robots can be installed in the US and we made iPhones and iPads here in the US, at least the robot service jobs will be local.
PayPal Bug Bounty Program - playing fair?
At many stores you can. "Sorry, that's not in stock right now, but we can order it for you".

Especially bookstores, what few record stores still exist, some clothing stores, hardware stores, and more.

This is actually my preferred form of shopping. I don't care for online purchases generally, shipping and returns are a hassle (you have to be there for it, there's always the question of refunds getting properly processed, and there is simply no online presentation which is as comprehensive as having the product in your hands to assess its qualities).

For electronics, which are readily produced, it's a real sham if you aren't able to do this.
I didn't realize the impact.
I like it. Good work!
What if they went from being a store-builder to being an online mall? I hope that's true! At first glance that sounds like a brilliant idea
How can she slap? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdzi74GnPeI
Inaka does a lot of Erlang. We really like Elixir and we're excited about it. It's still early but it gives you the runtime environment of Erlang with the syntax of Ruby. It has a few very active, passionate folks behind it which will cause it to continue to grow.
Your accounting argument simply makes no sense. Try stating it with specific groups and numbers to see why. How do you write off a lack of progress for one group when it's there in its own category for everyone to see? And what backs your assumption that there's a preponderance of disadvantaged kids in every school?
Status Blog
I think the point there is actually about money, not productivity. If you're paying by the hour, they're both the same to the employer, but you'll get more from the 5 40hr employees.

There's a bunch of simplifying that's going on there (overhead per person, etc.), but the basic message is that if companies can only afford so many people-hours, it's hurting the people they don't hire in addition to their own employees.
Nicely done!

To stop it from breaking the back button in Firefox, try using:

history.replaceState();

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Manipulating_th...
it weighs exactly 125g...you were pretty close :)
regards, Uros (FOUNDER)
There's some strange behavior going on with the back navigation. Seems to endlessly cycle through different posts.
Data Science as Sport
Hidden characters that come with computer’s typefaces
IPad will dip below 50% tablet market share in mid-2013
Make it happen! You'll be buying back your time, which is the most valuable thing you have. I wish that I'd done this when I was young and single. Now I have a family, and am the only income earner, so I have to work 40 hours (for now). A friend of mine works part time, and spends the rest of the time in discovering and finding himself. I've been having to do this while raising my family, so that I don't screw them up. Full-time work can easily become an obsessive-compulsive escape from finding oneself. But work isn't what makes us happy in life (it is part of it, but not all of it).
Ask HN: Someone is using our trademark to market our competitors site
A friend of mine and I built a product called teamloop which is based around providing simple communication between coaches and parents/players. I currently have a trademark for teamloop in the U.S. as it relates to online sports communities. When we initially launched, the teamloop domain was already owned by someone else (but was not in use) so we launched at teamloopapp.com. I offered to buy the domain a couple of times but was turned down.

Now the teamloop.com domain is currently being used as an online community about sports and not only that they are actively using the "teamloop software" name to link to a competitor called TeamSnap.

This project has always been a side project for us as we both work full time but my question is what should we do? Should we send a friendly email to them asking if they would remove the links to our competitors site or should we ask them to remove the content entirely since it all seems to be infringing on our trademark? Should I just contact lawyer right away, or do we even have anything to stand on if I did contact a lawyer?

Thanks!