skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Q. Why does misery and inequality seem to coincide with technological progress?

A. Because the dead don't fill surveys.
A neat subnotebook
It's worth noting if you're fighting sleep or fighting attention span. If you have no taken care of your sleep/stimulant/nap issues, I wouldn't even start on your concentration and productivity issues.

For me, that means 8 hours of sleep and often a 10 minute nap after lunch. Once I have that down, and interesting problem can keep me going 8-10 straight.
This doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I am, however, looking forward to turning 30 in two years. The big 2^30. Will I live to see 2^31? I don't know...

All this is assuming that time exists, of course.
Not much substance here... I'll wait for the article that announces an actual theory next time.
I know the whole point of Bayesian statistics is that you actually need much less data to get a good prediction. But the edge case I was talking about is still interesting I think, if not as a criticism of Bayes.
Incredible Security Hacks - You have to see these
"The reason I so deeply disrespect the man, though, is because with that 10 million dollars he has done absolutely nothing to advance the experience of people on his site."

So why don't you do something about it? Start a company to right his wrong and profit from it.

Fact is that he is smart and successful and his user base speaks volumes for his contribution to society but he does everything WRONG for a YC inspired/funded startup:

1. No Co-founder

2. Bad design

3. Doesn't use Apple products but MS.

4. Isn't from/hasn't moved to Silicon Valley.

etc.
Centralising distributed social networks
He was definitely given an early boost by SEO. He talks in his blog about the SEO communities he was a part of.
Yes absolutely, but logic aspires to be useful in the world. Therefore it seems important whether all ravens are black because all white ones have been culled a minute ago, because the word raven is defined as a black bird with some additional features, or because the genetic pattern of ravens causes them to always be black. Each of those possibilities would have very different consequences for inductive reasoning.
8 hours?!

I've been pulling 12-16 hour days, nearly 7 days a week for the last 12 years.

You have to love what you do. It has to be what defines you as an individual to pull that off with any kind of success.

It'll kill you though, I have more medical and mental problems than I know what to do with, all stemming from the damage my passion/obsession causes. But that's the cost and I gladly pay it. Why? Because it's what I am, it's what I do - and I'm pretty damn good at it.

How do I do it? Marijuana mostly. I don't drink caffiene (nor alcohol or any other types of drugs/stimulants). Caffeine causes peaks and crashes which make doing 16 hour sprints impossible, so I steer clear of that and I also minimize sugar intake but have noticed a semi-regular pattern of minimal sugar intake during the day - usually in a sweetened beverage or a fruit smoothie or eating fruit - although at 4am I will sneak a snickers.

I also tend to eat a lot of smaller meals throughout the course of the day, which helps keep me energized without making me lethargic.

Also, a few brisk walks during the day are good to clear the head and give me time to isolate my thoughts about what it is I'm working on.

It helps to start the day out with a list of things you want done, with the understanding that you can reshuffle/prioritize that list at any point, so long as you have a list.

But it really does boil down to the marijuana. It does a few things for me, cheif among them is that it sort of clears my brain and lets me really focus on what I'm working on. I'm disciplined enough at this point in my game that I can do this fairly easily. The other thing marijuana does is make me slightly lazy - which actually has the effect of me writing significantly less code to do the same thing, so I gain a LoC metric there. It also forces different perspectives when analyzing a problem so it's fairly often that I find holes in whatever system I'm developing that I might have overlooked otherwise.

Note, I'm not advocating you start smoking weed at work. I'm the boss at my company, so it's kosher, but most places - no way, you'll have to find other ways to achieve the same results.

Listen, if you aren't passionate about what you are doing, don't fine any thrill in it and are worrying about how you're going to pull of an 8 hour day, then maybe this isn't the right career for you?
Oh, I misunderstood. You were comparing the types of people who use CNN to the types of people who use Fox News. Got it.
Why this guy is not doing a startup I cannot figure out.
Notes from Isaacson's biography of Einstein
Caffeine and lots of it. Also, I set strick rules for myself at work to stay focusued on the job. Such as: no video games! And yes, it helps to love what you do and respect whom you do it for.
I've worked at several startups now and I have never worked a full 8 hours per day. There's always some internet surfing, phone calls (which might or might not count as "work"), meetings (also might not count), lunch, coffee or smoke breaks, and general BS'ing with co-workers. It usually works out to 3-4 hours per day at max. Any experienced programming project manager knows that a "work day" in terms of coding is never more than 4 hours.

With that being said, I have at times taken time off to work on my own projects and forced myself to work a full 8 hours. No stopping of any kind, phone and instant messenger off, email closed, no breaks of any kind. It was incredibly difficult. I remember I would choose a playlist with 8 hours of music and not stop until it was over. But it was something I still do only rarely. It was very productive, however, but not something anyone could do every day.
Rebuilding Iraq through micro-loans
Google's Eric Schmidt Won't Talk About The iPhone At Apple Board Meetings, WTF?
Someone who wants MS as an aquirer would probably benefit from it... it's just a way of spreading their software to people who can't really afford it - like their Academic Alliance programs ("free" software for students). The point is to compete with F/OSS as a choice for startups until they go public, then making loads of $$$ on license fees because they're stuck with MS tech.
Another relevant PG quote: http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/7867532
Trying to set Linux up is making me feel like a noob
This sucks. I've been trying to get the linux os set up for two whole days, and I've consulted about 60 websites on how to do it. I might add that while I suck at using computers, most everyone else sucks more. As far as I'm concerned, linux is completely inaccessible for most everybody because the frictional cost of changing from windows to linux is enormous.

I'm still trying to install it. Wish me luck; it might take a few more days.
Interesting. The language/problem design helps focus on internal resistance in the terrain of code where competition helps focus on external resistance in the terrain of the problem.
Necessary but not sufficient. I need side projects to feel sane, to spend time thinking about programming stuff that I don't have to, at least once a week. Based on last night it sounds like you're similar.
Microsofot is the dominant player in Web 2.0 software space? Really?
Scientists announce new technique for tissue engineering
Notes from Facebook Interview on 60M - No IPO in '08
Would probably be easier to help if we knew what distro you're trying to install...
Just install Ubuntu. Couldn't be easier.
I agree. I don't know what distro you are using, but you shouldn't have problems installing Ubuntu.
The learning curve on Linux if you're coming from a complete Windows background is really steep. Also, each distribution has it's own pain points, and advantages. Some ditro's I'd stay clear of until you're on your way to being something of a Linux.

But, that's kind of the point of learning Linux. Feel like a noob because you are a noob. But, after setting the system up, you will have learned tons about how your computer works. Keep at it. You'll get it.
Why Ubuntu needs better marketing
37 Simple Stress Management Tips
I find it easier to install Linux than Windows, but that's probably because I'm more familiar with Linux. Anyway, unless you're using a geek linux distro, you really shouldn't be having such a hard time. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or (my favorite) Fedora 8 should all be really easy to install.

Also, what exactly is the problem you're having? You'll get more help if you have more specific problems.
In a perfectly beautiful capitalist society-- that is, a small community-- I would create a better site and put him out of business. But due to the sheer number of users he has now, the switching cost (for each user) is almost assuredly too high for me to compete with him barring some great publicity or a large sum of money. I might still do it, though, just for kicks.

I don't think it's a good idea to compare his company to YC-funded/inspired sites, because he didn't set out to make a successful company; he made a site to learn a language, and people gravitated toward it over time. He got lucky by entering his market accidentally at the right time, with the right features.

Some people voted me down, I assume for saying that I "disrespect" him. But I really do. Any businessman who doesn't believe in advancing society with the power and responsibility that comes with business ownership deserves no respect nor success. But the fact is that whether or not someone deserves something, they sometimes get it; and he did.

But in the grand scheme of things, looking at plentyoffish.com makes me want to vomit, and that's why I highly doubt it will remain successful indefinitely. The only problem with overtaking its lead is that it's a user-to-user business, and competing with a company like that is hard for someone new like me, because at first there is zero benefit for signing up due to the lack of users. The first few thousand users might not even get anything. So you end up with an alarmingly high switching cost.

In the war between beautiful design and achieving benefit from the product, the latter almost always wins. At least in the short term.
So would laws advocating eugenics, euthanasia of old people and cripples, sterilization of dumbasses, etc. Doesn't mean they're good ideas.
The biggest thing to keep in mind is that you will be transitioning into a world of "butt time". Your employer will care far less about what you do than where you do it. You could institute world peace and make your company a billion dollars from your arm chair at home and your boss will still call it vacation.

As a bit of advice for working in this world...
You have no control over when you work, so you must regulate the density of your work in order to keep from burning out. What you would do in a single day at your startup takes people at "normal companies" many days or even weeks to accomplish.

Also, guard your time off like For Knox. If you are willing to "sacrifice for the team" your boss will gladly steal as much time from you as you are not willing to defend. Work ends at 5, anything further will need further compensation, be it overtime or extra vacation. Your boss asking you to work extra with no extra reward is stealing, pure and simple. Use more tact to say that to your boss, but make no mistake, this is what it is.

Lastly, try not to think too much. 90% of what goes on in an office is inane nonsense having nothing to do with the bussiness at hand. Its just part of the deal. Dwelling on this will only frustrate you. Get your zen on and roll with it.

Good luck.
I checked into this last year. If you want to develop software for the desktop, and become an ISV like Xobni, they actually have some really good deals to help get you off the ground.

And, I tend to be fairly OS agnostic. I like to use whatever technology is the best fix for the problem. I'm certainly not shilling for MSoft, I'm doing all my work on Linux at this point. But, I might decide to switch in a couple of years, we'll see.

I forget if it's through their Start up Accelerator program, or another program, but you can get an "Action Pack" of Microsoft software:

https://partner.microsoft.com/US/program/managemembership/ac...

And, you get all of this software for the low low price of $299. I'm sure that Xobni is using this. It's a very cheap way to get a bunch of Windows Licenses. If you don't mind being Windows based, it's a great way to lower your Licensing fees while you're getting off the ground.

It's a pain to develop for the Windows Desktop, but there is a good bit of money to be made. And, if they keep developing Languages like PowerShell, IronPython, IronRuby and F#, it might become less painful for language geeks/hacker types in the next couple of years. C# already has some pretty cool functional programming features.
Heh, I feel that pain. I tried to install Vista about a week ago after not having run windows since 2001. I never did get it all working right, plus thanks to (I think) not having some drivers right, my 2Ghz dual core with 3 gig ram was so slow it was unusable.
I'm out of time for now but I'll try agian later in a few weeks after I buy some "vista ready" gear.
Netflix Offers Unlimited Streaming As iTunes Rental Spoiler
hmm, I see the point. But isn't that just the limitations of classical logic? Just seems like a question of semantics rather than a clash between logic and intuition, but maybe I don't get it
Yep, you are probably correct. The wikipedia quote is more of a restatement of the paradox. But from that I thought my statement inferred.
"I would create a better site and put him out of business. But due to the sheer number of users he has now, the switching cost (for each user) is almost assuredly too high for me to compete with him barring some great publicity or a large sum of money."

I think you're being too hard on yourself. POF is many things, but it isn't a dating site. Seriously. How many other dating sites run their competitors' ads? How many have a 30% monthly attrition rate? When you look at it critically, POF is little more than a glorified banner ad for other dating sites.

IMO, that's the real reason why Markus doesn't have to invest in user experience. It's actually better for his bottom line if they bounce to one of the many other dating sites who advertise (prominently) on POF. It remains to be seen if a free dating site that focuses on user experience can thrive, when the only vetted revenue model involves selling your ad space to the non-free players in the same industry.
What Happens When Web Services Do Not Backup?
Non-paradox, since each non-black object that is not a raven will infinitesimally increase your belief in the proposition, until you find a counterexample or exhaust the set of all non-black objects.

The reaseon that finding a black raven is more important is because the set of ravens is much smaller than the set of non-black objects, so it increases your certainty more.

The green apple does indeed offer the same infinitesimal evidence that all ravens are pink, but by going through the set of non-pink objects in the universe and eventually finding a raven, the proposition will be disproven.

So part of the "paradox" here is a conflation of "evidence" and "proof". The other part of the paradox lies in the fact that the evidence gained by seeing one green apple is SO tiny that it won't even register on the human brain's "is this evidence?" heuristic.
Silly nerd... theories are too boring for the News... they don't explode enough!
Some data from his cv:
- He has 7 patents (some of those owned by Mitsubishi)
- He got over $ 600k on license fees and sales revenue from institutions.
- His small business Little Great Ideas Inc. got $250 k in gross sales.
Sounds similar to startup'ing to me...
"linux is completely inaccessible for most everybody because the frictional cost of changing from windows to linux is enormous."

Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot the Linux community can do about that. The only reason Windows is so accessible to so many people is that it comes on their computer. I doubt if most Windows users would be able to install the OS from scratch.

I have to agree with you on some level though; Ubuntu is great and it has been my primary OS for several years now, but I can't say I would recommend for a non-geek to use it instead of Windows. It excites me, though, that with every release I get closer and closer to being able to do that.
I'm trying ubuntu. I checked the hash on the ISO I made on the disk, and it's right, but I'm not sure what problem I'm having. First, I'm not sure I burned the CD as an image. Second, I've been unable to partition my hard drive because windows is in Spanish. Whenever I try to boot the computer after telling the BIOS to prioritize the CD-ROM, it just opens Windows as if there was nothing in there. When I give priority to the CD and nothing else, it says there's a disk error and that I need to put the system disk in.

What's most likely the problem?
Back about 200 000 000 seconds ago, I had the joy of attending a 'billenium' party -- complete with countdown clock.

The best part was that the party was inspired by a bug in our code caused by the rollover.

In short, there were time values stored in the DB as text -- everything in our DB was text -- and we were using the expedient route of doing simple string compares.

I won't bother explaining more.

But the cake was tasty!
"I'd rather pg working more on essays or other features than on something like that."

I would posit that excellence in journalism is achieved when releases are scheduled not with the passage of time but with the need to say something.

I imagine we'll hear from pg when he has something to say. And I'm sure we'll be ready to listen.
Survey: How many lines of code can you clearly visualize?
I asked a productive coworker if he always kept his code "in his head" while he worked. He replied, "When I was younger, I could keep three thousand lines of assembly code in my head. I could go to the exact line of any feature instantly."

He single-handedly wrote several games for major publishers (Electronic Arts and others) when games were becoming popular.

So, setting aside for a moment that number-of-lines-of-code is a bad measurement, how many lines can you clearly picture in your head? Just throw out a rough estimate.
U of M researchers create beating heart in laboratory
"Maybe it is only my problem because I frequently don't sleep very well and on some days am almost too tired to work."

Something is very wrong and must be fixed. Now. Doesn't matter what your work or lifestyle is like. Life (and work) is a marathon, not a sprint.

I don't know if your problem is physical, emotional, psychological, or just plain laziness. It's up to you to find out and fix it. Until you do, I wouldn't bother working on any other problem. You may be surprised what you learn.

Figure out how to start getting a great night's sleep every night, and then figure out how to change the world. Keep us posted. Good luck!
"Maybe it is only my problem because I frequently don't sleep very well and on some days am almost too tired to work."

If I was you I'd see a doctor about that. Motivation, focus, and energy are heavily influenced by your hormone balance and not sleeping well can affect that. You could have sleep apnea or another medical condition which is causing your fatigue. If you're not doing much exercise that wouldn't help either.
I'm so happy this website exists.
I think "picture in your head" and "know well enough to go to the exact place of any feature" are not the same thing. I can picture in my head a very small number of lines of the code I usually write. Less than five, at any rate. But maybe I misunderstand what you're asking.
"...I used to put Bill Gate's picture on my wall..."

That explains it.

Maybe it you stopped worshipping bandits who bully the world into crappy software, you'd give yourself a chance at doing something remarkable. Then things wouldn't appear to "suck" as much.
I Read the article and tried hard to take the guy seriously -- that being the un-simian thing to do -- but I just couldn't make it happen inside my head.

* He doesn't understand the difference between lisp and Common Lisp. He appears bullish on Scheme.

* He thinks referential transparency can be hard to understand.

* He hangs out with people who prefer Java because (Most Developers Think) lisp is odd.

* Elsewhere on his page, he talks a lot about frameworks, business process standards, and enterprise architecture.

* He seems to have trouble with English grammar and word usage.
He was lying, no one who isn't a savant can remember 3 thousand lines of code to the exact line. More likely he remember key lines where particular features began.
If you can boot from other bootable CDs (for example a windows install CD) then it looks like you haven't burnt the disc correctly. If you can't boot from any bootable CDs then there is something wrong with your setup (on the hardware/bios side)
Unfortunately, the question can't be very specific. I've always been fascinated by people who can clearly picture things in their mind.

For example, one time Woz accidentally deleted ColorMath, a program that Jobs was going to show off at a trade show the very next day. Deleting it wasn't a setback, because the code for ColorMath was "in his head". Presumably he was able to sit down the next morning and rewrite ColorMath extremely quickly.

It seems like an artist can only be good if he can clearly visualize large amounts of detail before touching a brush. Perhaps the best artists are ones who can visualize the most detail.

In warfare, the best generals are the ones who can keep track of every single nuance of the battlefield simultaneously.

The mind's eye seems to be important in every creative profession.

So this modest survey is an attempt toward figuring out what makes an artisan excellent.
That is awesome, vote for a pro drug candidate.

It seems like all intelligent people do some kind of drug.

(e.g. not Clinton)
I'm not too surprised. I was just reading a blog post (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zoho_omnidrive_data_sta...) from a year ago, in which the CEO of Omnidrive posted a mistake-ridden comment defending their decision not to use WebDAV. "The reason why you can't write a WebDAV client in Javascript is because XmlHttpResponse() is a HTTP function, not a WebDAV function" Huh?
Ever heard of Kim Peek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek)? While he doesn't memorize code, he remembers other equally impressive things.

There's an interesting documentary about him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2T45r5G3kA
Not quite the same thing, but possibly achieving the same end goal:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=5...

Amazon users can create a wish list, and then others can buy things on the list, which Amazon will send to the list creator's shipping address.
Crunchies, who is going?
You typically need very specific software to burn an ISO CD. If you just copied the file, that won't work.

I used this to make my last Ubuntu disk:
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
Yes, it seems like your cd has some errors (maybe it wasn't burnt ok, maybe the downloaded file is bad and you have to download it again). If you can't start the cd, make another bootable cd or download the image again. (Remember you have to create the image with the iso, not just create a cd with an iso file inside of it.)

If you do that ok, you'll be able to boot from the cd. Once you get to boot it, choose the option that lets you do a check on the entire cd, so you are sure there aren't errors on it (so there are no broken packages, and that kind of thing). Only after that, start the live cd, and then install from there.
The choice of distros definitely is key. How bad it is also depends on how long you've been working with computers in general. I've noticed that people who started pre-Win95 tend to make the transition a bit more easily. It helps a little if you're at least comfortable working with a CLI, doing basic scripting, etc.