skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To go to bed earlier

1) get up earlier

2) You can only shift your schedule about 1 hour per day. You can try shifting it more, but you're going to have sweater-head, nausea and hot flashes. If you go from getting up at 11 to getting up at 5, expect five days of feeling like crap.

3) The pineal gland is activated by light incident on the retina. So calculate when you need to go to sleep based on when you get up, and stop using the computer one hour prior. AND use Flux, or do something to turn down the absolute amount of light coming from your screen(s).

4) The sleep-wake cycle is naturally about 25 hours. It takes discipline to go to sleep at the same time every night. Or exhaustion.

5) Recent findings suggest that starvation can suspend the diurnal cycle 12 hours or more. So eat a good dinner.

6) Additionally, fats, proteins, warmth, and bulk activate the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). Simple carbs offer none of these things. So fatty snacks are better. Unsalted nuts are a great snack (salt stimulated the cephalic phase of eating. So, sorry, but bacon is not a good snack).

7) Caffeine. Metabolized in the liver at a second-order decay rate by CYP1A2. Effective half-life is 3-7 hours.

Coffee: 30-170 mg/8oz
Espresso: 30-50 mg/oz
Tea: 10-50 mg/8oz (more with black teas)
Soda: 30-60 mg/12oz
Dark chocolate: 20mg/oz

Minimum effective concentration is around 0.05 mg/dL. Total body water is 40L for a 5'10" male (5'10" male has about a 70kg lean body mass regardless of total body weight and 40L of that is water. The 70kg and 40L vary linearly with height for adults). So those two cups of French pressed Sumatra you stopped drinking at 8:30 after a 7pm pasta dinner could easily keep you wired until 1 or 2 in the morning. Go on, have that chocolate ice cream, too.

8) Calculate when you want to get up (remember, you need to phase in the change, one hour a day). Establish a routine that starts at dinner. Eat. No more caffeine. Work. Have a small, fatty snack. Work until an hour before you need to go to sleep. Brush your teeth, change; lay down. Read something good. I recommend the classics. Doesn't really engage the problem-solving areas of your brain, but you've been meaning to start reading those things. Start with Plato. Very readable.

9) If you just absolutely have to go to sleep with noise, I recommend white noise. A beat, rhythm, or lyric will capture your conscious mind.

As for getting up, the only thing I've found that definitely will get me up without relying on sunrise is a social commitment. If surgery starts at 7 am and I need to round on patients before then, it's relatively easy to get up at 4:15. If I'm on a "research month", um, yeah.
Have you made anything good happen? I ask because I am also contemplating the same move. I am wondering if the economic environment precludes it.
I do the same..my schedule is quite weird.. I will wake up around 9:30 AM go to sleep around 11 or 12 PM , quick power nap till about 1 AM , work more till about 4 or 5 AM , sleep and do it all over again. I find I'm most productive at night. so this is the schedule I work around.
In order to sell, offer value first. There's nothing wrong with that. He's doing a good job too, because I went from never having heard of him to having heard about him from four trusted sources in the matter of a month. All the sources were passing on the material he was providing rather than his company.
Definitely get out of there. However, I'd suggest considering keeping the current job while you look for the next one. If you are looking for a "standard/real" job, being currently employed seems to be viewed as a plus. And it may take some pressure off, money/benefits wise, so that you don't end up feeling the need to take whatever ends up being available/offered.

This approach may still make you feel somewhat better. Once you know you are getting out of the current situation, its annoyance becomes a temporary inconvenience. Still a hassle, but not one you are going to endure indefinitely.

On the other hand, a job does take up a lot of time and energy, particularly traditional business hours. And -- as I know from personal experience -- a bad situation can become so soul sucking that it becomes paralyzing.
Probably not. They say that if your browser crashes or you close the browser immediately after hitting send, the email still gets sent.
here is the link to the "IT doesn't matter" article that is mentioned. i hadn't read it before and found it quite interesting.. http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/it_doesnt_matte.ph...
I say that's a big maybe. For all it's strengths, Rails requires more programming skills than PHP... PHP will always be better for the "web designer turned scripter" set, just because it's easier to get results with if you aren't really a programmer by trade.
Google Checkout Now Offers Recurring Billing
And yet there are still qmail exploits and fixes to those.

Not many people build insecure by design, but the simple truth is that security is both hard and always surmountable in some way.
EBay's anti-counterfeiting drive: Millions of delisted items, 30,000 suspended accounts
That's almost identical to my experience, except with a bit less sleep and a bit longer rotations each day.

One thing that I noticed with the light thing is that an ultra-bright, dim-able lamp works wonders. It somehow puts me in a decent mood even if I'm sleeping at weird times.
Thanks!

So if you add in the weight of the panels, and the occasional patch of cloudy days - I think it might be a bit marginal... Would you agree?

I hadn't really considered regenerative braking. I can see how it would be useful in a place like San Francisco, but I'd wonder how effective it would be in places like NY (where you need to slam on the brakes instead of just curb your speed).

I recall reading about a mine in Peru (?) that used regenerative braking on all their hauling vehicles. They were all hooked up via a quite clever bumper-car style grid. When one was going downhill, it was helping power something going uphill.

Apparently the regenerative braking in that case resulted >50% efficiency - which seemed like a very good figure to me. Do you know any figures for cars/bikes/scooters in more regular practice?
"One [problem] is that the user has no easy way of discovering how complex the recurrence rules can be."

Easy. Show both the text field and the traditional UI at the same time right from the beginning and link them together so that manipulating the traditional UI updates the text field and vice-versa. Have an area where you show a few additional alternate syntaxes for the same "sentence" so that users can see that the syntax is far from being rigid, however if you input a sentence and then later manipulate the UI, the text field should retain the original style (not canonicalize to the default syntax).

Ok, this might not be so easy to implement but I'm pretty sure it's the best solution for the user as it scales from beginner to expert.
What's to stop people just inserting bad test results? Seems like it could be really unreliable/dirty/bogus data.

BTW here's my testing :D http://axod.net/browserTesting.png (OSX+Firefox/Safari/Opera, XP+IE6, XP+IE7, XP+IE8, XP+Chrome/Firefox, Ubuntu+Firefox). Thought it might make my macbook sluggish, but it just carried on regardless :)
Coroutines are concurrent. They are not parallel.
In the extreme, eating can kill you also :/
I don't know what Plato you've read. Most of his dialogues are very dense.
Life is too short to be muttering through the day like a zombie, either, so you're going to need to sleep as much as you need.

Keep going to be earlier until you wake up when you want. Stop using an alarm clock. Be consistent.

I haven't used an alarm clock in years, and when I need to get up at 3:30 to hit the gym, its not a problem. Of course, I'm going to bed 8 hours before that too.

You can't cheat the math. If you want to get up earlier, as pg and others said, go to bed earlier.

EDIT: By nature, I have the damnedest time going to bed. I'm always immersing myself in a programming problem or a TV show or some other time sink (worthwhile or not). To fix this, I started taking melatonin an hour or so before I plan to go to sleep. I know its helped me adjust my sleep/wake cycle.
very succinct ... brings together a lot of current thinking in tight read. i think it's well said - must've been a great experience also to see adaptations finally work to bring vision to life.
Does America Miss W. Yet?
> India's emission norms are based on euro-emission norms.

I didn't notice that when I lived there. It was hard to breath in busy intersections. As a European I'm quite sure that isn't happening here.

But the standards are probably different for old vs. newly produced vehicles.
Dude, quit your job and move to Thailand (or some other cheap place) while you work on your web businesses. The cost of living there is super cheap so your daily expenses will be low and your savings will last longer. Plus, you'll get a chance to explore the world. It's not nearly as hard as people think.

Good luck.

Here's a good article that discusses this idea:
http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2008/05/laid-off-one-t...
I use multiple worker processes in nginx (2 x # of cores), which work in parallel. Then FCGI::Engine is configured to run multiple processes as well. Finally, I use the external JS and image files (in part) to speed up the client-side via parallel processing of requests. (Note that IE7 and below limit concurrent connections per host by default often to 2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304129(VS.85).aspx).
Makes sense to me. It's akin to a charitable donation. Would you rather donate money to a guy to fix his plumbing (who, by the way, could already afford a house)? Or to someone to get an education so they can drastically improve their financial status?
American newspapers are history
I've always thought it was funny when someone would try to sell me on macs by saying there are less bugs and viruses on them.

Why do you find that funny? You said yourself that it's true.
Seesmic is just a plain terrible idea though. Growth first, profit after is a great proven model which works well, but not if your idea is lame to start with.

There's no evidence to suggest people want to view slow videos of people making comments/waffling, rather than reading them. Seesmic traffic barely registers.
I fast to reset my sleep cycle. I can only tolerate 10-12 hours of no calories, but longer supposedly works better. I try to maintain it by not eating during my desired sleep schedule. So if I'm up all night coding, no calories are allowed.

Story about it was even posted here almost a year ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394
You're right, of course, I'm just commenting that result-oriented design and graphic design may not be compatible worldviews.
Google is an archetypal "Seesmic" startup. They didn't even start making money for years. It just happened to work in that case.
I think we've latched too much on the pricing specifics. I don't think Miller cares; I think he's just trying to illustrate that there is in fact a market value for this work, and that vendors and customers appear to expect to get the work product for free.
What specifically makes English "loose"? What makes other tongues "tight"?
What does this have to do with hacking? I have political feeds as well, There's a whole internet full of what you're looking for. Putting everything everywhere just makes a mess.
Find something cool to do the next day. Regulate your body and mind so you can sleep well and wake up early.
Refactoring CSS with Sass
there is no best language. they're all tools in a toolbox.

That's intellectual laziness masquerading as broad-mindedness. Obviously Ruby is going to be better for most web apps than Fortran.
I guess it depends on if you trust the majority making the right decision.

When you're running a business and the decision is whether or not to convert, trusting the majority is the only decision. If others see it as mediocrity, so be it.
Because rails is so 'hot' right now. Like git/charging customers/cloud/etc
He means that some people do well going to sleep and getting up around the same time every day and some don't. (My hackers go to bed later every day, so their bedtime wraps around the clock often.)
So then, to be honest it's really not supporting motivated students get a great education, is it? It's supporting motivated students get an education at the same place I did

I certainly understand it, and even commend it, but I don't think its as charitable as thing as perhaps you are making it out to be. Your concern seems to be more with the institution and less with helping motivated students get educated.

Sorry for the sharpness of that analysis, but I think it must be pointed out.
Why Hackers Can't Cooperate
"PHP will always be better for the "web designer turned scripter" set"

It all depends on who you want to build your web applications, the guy who knows how to build them or the guy that knows how they should look.
To make quick regenerative braking efficient, you need something other than batteries to store the energy -- they can't absorb that much power so quickly. They're working on ultracapacitors, which seem like an expensive solution to me. Our strategy, which is also used by so called hydraulic hybrids (in garbage trucks, most notably, which are constantly stopping and starting), is to compress air during braking: this can be done quite quickly and efficiently, and avoids conversion losses. We were expecting a cycle efficiency of between 70% and 80%. We're not working on vehicle technology at present, though.
Won't let programs share a single in-process object the way proper threading support would.
Stop Your Cat From Spraying
Can Digg Keep Up with Facebook?
Yeah, I had never heard 'idempotence' used in a mathematical sense before. I just think of that as a function hitting a fixed point.
Leksah: a Haskell IDE written in Haskell
I just converted my account, it looks awesome!

I wonder if they're going to allow you to turn in your number in exchange for a new one -- I lived in a different area code when I signed up for GrandCentral. Maybe they could allow you to pay a $20 fee for additional phone numbers?
As a huge fan of Django, Python, and both communities I would like to point out a few more things:

- Always track the trunk, there's really no compelling reason not to. It's always extremely stable and full of new features you won't find in the tarball release.

- The ORM is good for simple things, but you may find yourself needing to write SQL if you're doing anything complicated. In reality this probably applies to any ORM, though. Even though people ignore it.

- Caching is built-in, effortless, and awesome.

- The template language is intentionally crippled in various ways to keep you from "doing too much" in them. Thankfully Django is modular enough to allow you to drop in a more powerful replacement if that's your thing.

- Django is basically retarded when it comes to multi-processing environments and should not be considered even remotely thread-safe. I mean it. Copious use of locks can usually keep transactions from walking all over each other, but your mileage may vary.

- If you want some piece of functionality or add-on or whatever, chances are somebody has already written it. Check djangoplugables.com and djangosnippets.org before wasting precious cycles.
John Resig's Presentation on JavaScript Libraries from SXSW
I think Charlie Miller wakes up thinking, "you're the weak, and I'm the tyranny of evil men, but I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd". Then he goes off getting in all kinds of adventures and shit, like Kane from Kung Fu.

That's just what I think.
Hello World in 300 Programming Languages
Back in the '80s, at the University of Buenos Aires the first intro to algorithms course was taught using the Spanish-based TIMBA language. It was a kind of Pascal/ pseudocode language that we used to program an imaginary one-armed robot to perform some tasks on a deck of cards. We would write a program for sorting the cards by number, or pick all cards with the number 2, things like that. I think it was a good idea for those of us not familiar with either computers or the English language.

The language didn't have a running implementation that I know of; it was all paper-based.

("Timba" means "gambling" in Argentinian slang -- for some reason writing TIMBA programs always reminded me of the late Rene Lavand, the one-armed Argentinian magician.)
That was pretty much my first impression of Django as well, and I bet it's the impression they want to leave.

The reality doesn't really hit home for a few weeks. Django gives you all sorts of really cool stuff right out of the box that does nearly everything for you. The problem comes when you want to do something just that little bit different, and you find yourself unrolling every single piece of it one-by-one as you discover that these pieces don't fit your needs exactly.

I also found myself baffled by the terrible decision to make everything revolve around function calls rather than a Request and Response object. No matter what happens in your page flow, you still need to return a HttpRequest object at the end of the day. No more Response.Write();Response.End(); from any point. You need to have every bit of code capable of returning in a way that triggers the thing above it to return in a way to trigger the thing above it to return a HttpRequest object. Makes debugging a serious pain.

So yeah, if you're doing a simple CMS for a media site (which is what they wrote Django to do), it rocks the house. If you're trying to do any heavy lifting, it seems to fall apart pretty fast.

I don't think I'd use it again.
My favorite is kvikkalkul. Its source looks like full of smileys :)
"On the one hand it doesn't make sense to abandon a piece of technology because it has an immature cultish community"

The community around a technology is a good approximation of the vector in which the technology is headed.
A mouse most unmighty indeed
Have a look at: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/
That's a good point - I hadn't thought of that before. Protests rarely last long over trivial matters - usually a site is killed not by controversy but by apathy. This shows, if anything, how attached to Facebook its users are.
Ideally, I'd want one of each.
Tripeedo (http://www.tripeedo.com) actually does this - I agree, it's a really nice way to let the user know they're ding the right thing. I find it a lot better than the traditional calendar widgets.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there who don't like the keyboard. It's easy to forget this, especially with so many people in CS and IT who try to never take their hands away from it , but there are a lot of potential users who would rather do everything with the mouse. Efficiency isn't a concern for these people (like my mom), since the input speed into the computer isn't ever their bottleneck, no matter how slow.

That said, nice job! I love natural language parsers!
I can't think of any public facing ones at the moment, but a couple of prior (subscription or you had to have a series 7 type license) sites I've worked on would let the user get the data as an excel spread sheet. Sorry.
Tetris Company sues VC-funded OMGPOP
Interesting story about IP in video games. I remember there was a discussion here and on gamedev I believe especially about tetris - how you could make a game and just call it something else than tris in the name and you'd be ok. Apparently not, even though OMGPOPs version from the screenshots looks like a blatant ripoff.
The main thing I felt at first was relief. For the whole three years we'd endured one disaster after another. There was literally some new mortal threat every few months. When the deal finally closed, the feeling of finally being able to relax was so strong (and so unfamiliar) that I was practically high for several months on it.

When I was in grad school I once had a kidney stone so bad that I ended up in an emergency room on Thanksgiving Day. They gave me some fairly strong opiate intravenously. If you've ever had something like this, you understand the appeal of heroin. Especially coming after a week of being curled up into a ball with pain. The feeling when we sold was a less intense but longer lasting version of this.

In retrospect, we could have made Viaweb a lot less painful by spending/raising less money. That was what made it so stressful. But startups were more expensive then. Or at least, everyone thought they had to be.
Nowhere does his post imply that the reason he's leaving is because his design aesthetic clashes with Google's desire for "clean, spartan, and utilitarian." It's perfectly possible to meet those goals and not be ugly, like, e.g., iGoogle and Gmail are. I consider most of Apple's designs to be "clean, spartan, and utilitarian".

Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of silliness. I'm reminded of those room makeover shows they have on TV. At the beginning, the designer tells the couple one of the colors they've chosen. The couple is aghast. "What, I can't stand magenta. No way!" Sometimes, the wife looks like she's about to cry. At the end, magenta is used and the design is breathtaking.

There is no way user testing has gotten efficient enough to beat a designer at that level of detail. Moreover, users often don't know they want something until a designer shows them they do. You can never get to those designs by testing blues and borders.
"I finally gave up trying to get ruby talking to MySQL on my home windows box and just moved everything over to linux"

I'm not a Windows fan by any stretch, but it seems like people put up with a lot of shit to use Rails; why would you choose a web framework which requires you to change your operating system? That's asinine. It seems these days when people say bugs and shortcomings "don't matter" they really mean "I haven't run into a situation where they've screwed me over yet or if I have I just let the framework win". It's a web framework, people; it should make easy/moderate things easier, not make hard things any harder, and get the hell out of your way. It should not make you change your life to use it.
thats being a bit hypercritical and decontexualizing, don't you think? obviously he doesn't want to use cobol on punch cards, either, but do i actually have to spell that out? fine, i'll do it just for you:

there is no best language for web development . the subset of languages being used for modern web development are all tools in a toolbox.
What's with the downmod party? I've read 100s of feature articles and this one was pretty dull, especially at the beginning. It does get better towards the end, but there's just nothing great about this guy, or his life, or his life-in-words. He seems really pathetic to me. Makes decent money playing a clown, and then throws it away in Atlantic City on gambling (and probably hookers and blow).

Eh. Except for the "clown" part, how is he different from a million other losers?
I think the article reads much differently if you picture the author saying, "Rails won in this particular instance, for me/us." Perhaps that is not what the author intended, but that is how I read it. It's much less polarizing that way.

I do agree that it lacks substance.
Thanks for your comment. Zed's review got me pretty interested in Django, but since I'm not building any CMS's for media sites, I'll just stick with Rails and merb for now. Thanks for saving me some time :)
Joseph Brodsky: Listening to Boredom