skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally, strenuous physical activity is very good for concentration and relaxation. Sports are good. Chopping wood is lots of fun. Competitive Timberman Challenges are probably the best option.
Stereotyping like this doesn't really accomplish much.

For instance, I find that a lot of people who program because they love to often have no problems with speaking in front of crowds. The only time I'd be nervous is if I had nothing to say. I love sharing the things I find interesting with other people, so after you get started it comes very naturally and you can just be yourself.
I usually sleep.
That's true. On the other hand, when I do turn it on, it will apply retroactively.

As for the question of what effect this story has, that depends on what the editors think. Probably they'd be split on it. This is arguably an Internet story as much as a political one.
I felt parts of me resonate with the Nerd Stereotype. It made me laugh.

There is a good description of a personality requirement I found on this blog (http://blog.boxee.tv/2007/08/08/wanted-a-code-poet/) for a programming job in Israel typifying the stereotype:

"someone that can write PHP with two hands tied behind his back, but dreams in C++.

favorite beach book reading: design patterns (hard cover edition, signed by the authors)

favorite debate topic: LAMP vs. J2EE (prefers LAMP, but can argue both sides of the issue)

favorite animal: penguin.

hobbies: none.

(social skills are not a requirement)

if you think you fit the bill please send us an email (don't forget to mention your favorite compilation flags for the Linux kernel)."

Obviously they're trying to find someone of the stereotype - they'd be the best for that job. I laugh at my Nerd side, it's only just the beginning of personality development.
Running and yoga are particularly good.

If you really want to clear out your brain, the best thing I know is hang-gliding, but that tends to take place at inconveniently distant locations.
Really? I haven't kept up with the guy. Does he make endorsements of various parties and candidates? Is he a prominent member of some political party or a spokesman for one?
> Scenario 1: an influx of foreign capital.

Greatly limited by the "10 mile rule".

> Scenario 2: US startups seek VCs in booming markets overseas.

Certainly doesn't seem that this can happen overnight.

Can't say much about #3. These are my guesses.
I'd like to recommend aviation in general. Nothing like aerobatics or instrument approaches to clear the mind.
This is a fantastic comment. You are absolutely right.
Alcohol in moderation, combined with relaxing music can be good. Hanging out with friends...
really?! I want to do one, how does ones start with chopping wood in San Francisco?
YouPorn.com: the best of "web 2.0"
Sounds like lake woebegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Interesting that females go toward someone of their own ethnic/cultural group (except for East Asian women who are neutral) and males are indifferent to the group of their would-be partner. It's like men are still spreading the seed far and wide, and women seek to avoid the raping conquerors.
It's one of the better talks I've listened to (it's been posted before) and I usually can't sit through such things.
I can think of RSS, Atom, RDF. But to me Javascript is the most undervalued. Plain old Javascript - the first mainstream lambda programming language.
To add to this, there's several different kinds of mediation. The one you're looking for helps you relax your body in a way that doesn't fuzz your mind, or burns up your focus.

Some of the meditation methods overlap with deep breathing. You breath deeply by expanding both the bottom of the lungs, the sides of the lungs, and the top of the lungs. You make sure the bottom ribs are expanding. You don't try to force the expansion to the point where you're trying to hold air in like a puffed up balloon, greedy for more.

You cannot force yourself to relax. Consciously relaxing requires you to relinquish control over the muscles that are tensing up while still observing it.

In your case, I would also work on clenching and then relaxing your toes. There's connective and control tissues going from your feet to the jaws and temples.

If you're going to learn how to do this though, you'll need to set aside definite time where the startup cannot intrude. Supposing you set an alarm clock to buzz in fifteen minutes, then within the fifteen minutes of meditation/relaxation, you must allow all of the concerns, worries, thoughts, obsession, guilt with the startup to drift away. Otherwise, this won't work very well. There are people who develop superlative levels of skill in relaxation and meditation; these folks spend as much time and energy dedicated to it as you would to a startup ... so the least you can do is respect it during the fifteen minutes you are cultivating calmness.
More coffee:)
That's a little disingenuous. All the article contained was one paraphrased quote on his campaign being more than a few spammers. It certainly has nothing to say about the voting patterns of ron paul devotees on reddit.

For the record I think the ron paul movement on reddit has in no way been consciously controlled. I think its a classic case of internet mob syndrome. Its like the way people follow the righteous indignation of someone whose camera has been stolen, people band together to right the wrongs against ron paul. Its still a failing of the voting system of reddit though, because ron paul articles just aren't interesting to those not caught up in the mob.
I've noticed using martial arts as a means to de-stress yourself lowers the quality of your martial arts and rots away your skills.
yea, probably, especially if I lived in a country with a lower cost of living than the USA

Most 'web 2.0' sites are not difficult or time consuming to make from a technical perspective, the value is in the community.
No I have not been (which disappoints my father greatly).
What's the source for Paul Erdos getting it wrong?
I guess it just depends on your approach. I learned to put less effort into each technique with more training - I used to muscle everything. In the process, I learned to calm myself until the point of impact. 2 hours of that 3-4x a week made all the difference in my personal sanity. It become a moving meditation with practical applications.
I can't tell if that's sarcasm.
Although this is surprisingly accurate overall, I think the author is describing the INTJ personality. That's a much better label than "nerd".
Pattern Matching in Ruby
Tables. How tedious is it to code beautiful looking layouts nowadays, with CSS and all? Sometimes, I dream of those messy, ugly, large, but easy-to-make-with-photoshop tables.

ahhhhhhhhhhh.
Declining USDX and booming emerging markets are drastically limiting pool of cheap workforce, especially Indian, Russian and Eastern Europe developers.
Firefox: It's not memory leaks, but fragmentation
Interesting that he didn't mention Prolog... Prolog's pattern matching is one of the reasons why I still look favorably at the language as a whole.
Yup, absolutely. For some reason we got the more expensive magnetic kind at Xobni. We never use the magnets though. We should switch to something cheaper.

Justin.tv used to have a whiteboard wall - an entire wall of their apartment covered with the Home Depot stuff. I wonder what happened to it.
Gibson - yeah, that's Greg and his three monitors.

Good point about the windows, but he chose to face the door, not the window: I guess our cavemen instincts want us to face the entrance of the cave, in case any carnivores drop by.

I just moved into a new room and I can see both the window and the door. That's as good as it gets.
Startup Weekend's Most Recent Startup: Skribit
Preferably aggressive ones. Fencing, wrestling, martial arts.
Don't you see any?

United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, Finland and other rich countries are on the top. Afganistan, Angola and other poor countries are on the bottom. Looks pretty obvious to me.

Personally I know few people living in Eastern Europe (European Union, though), who were so tired with problems with taxes, law etc., that decided to incorporate in the UK remotely.
XSL-FO.
I'm very happy to hear someone is working on this.
Great, I hope this works!
Thanks for the info.

I'm disappointed to hear of any "King Solomon" decisions because clients could make (in my view, obviously) extravagant claims and demands.

Even if one can show that such claims are bogus, it's only useful if the arbitrator is more concerned with informed justice than in trying to make everyone equally (un)happy.
If it's just undervalued tech, and not "what's the most powerful tech that's obscure" I'd say it's the PNG file format. Lossless, greater color-depth, and alpha-blending: PNG would make the most difference on the most number of average people's web pages if they used it. Some of this other stuff is a lot more powerful, but it doesn't get my vote for undervalued because I think the audience is anybody who is creating a web page, not just tech guys.
Is it not installing for anyone else?
There are some open-source heap managers out there. It might be interesting to replace malloc with one of those and see if they don't do a better job of keeping the heap defragmented. Quite honestly, its a problem that's been done before. I sure hope they don't go reinventing the wheel.
The trick is to prep the surface before use.

That means a good solid cleaning with WIndex, and then go over it with that toxic Expo spray cleaner (DO THIS OUTDOORS!) until you dislocate a shoulder.

We've got 'em up all over the offices.
It would be interesting to see the results using Google's TCMalloc.
http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html
Seconded. Spot on comment
What would happen to society if everyone learned to write simple programs in a high-level language?
My question is not whether this is feasible but rather what would happen in such a society?
Left-brain/right-brain -- the dancer illusion debunked
In regards to the purported test for right/left-brain dominance (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78295)...

I suspected this article was bunk, so I went straight to the source -- a scientist friend whose research focus is binocular rivalry. Here's her (entertaining) reply:

...as for your question, you have definitely asked the right person. The idea about the left and right hemispheres comes from my old phd supervisor. The guy is awesome but completely insane. I can guarantee it has absolutely nothing to do with hemispheres, but it is a very cool illusion anyway. The idea is published, though, so if you wanted it for some crazy trivia question you could use it, but nobody in science believes the idea...

If you did want to use the fact.. the more interesting fact is the experiments that he used to work it out. It is called caloric stimulation and involves injecting freezing cold water into someone's ear, with the aim of activating the other hemisphere (I was a subject and it hurts like hell and then your eyes start spinning around and you feel seasick). So my boss Jack worked out that if you squirt freezing water into someone's ear they tend to see it go one way rather than the other. He also published (citing personal observations) that the only thing that stops rivalry is laughter, sneezing and orgasm.. he says that during these three events you end up seeing a combination of the two images... the guy is crazy!
Good analysis. I've been thinking this for a while, but the write-up crystallized the reasons. If you want my services, you'll know it, and you won't be hesitant to pay for them. (I've had the strange experience of a client whom I billed at $125/hour send me a tip for saving their business... in 5 hours) LinkedIn is useful for surveying the landscape, but I generally know beforehand whether I'm likely to obtain a job, though I'm always game to look around. (I am currently in graduate school, but I'm trying to collect enough data to build a regression model for deciding how long I can afford to spend on my dissertation before the opportunity cost catches up with the forward earnings differential.)

Bottom line -- unless you're taking the big risk and starting a company (congratulations and good luck!), the truth has always been the same. It's not what you know. It's not even who you know. It's who knows what you know, and their perception of your value, that will make the biggest difference in your career (again, this is far less important to serial entrepreneurs).

Thanks to transburgh for submitting this. I can now point people at this page when the topic of LinkedIn and professional 'networks' comes up.
Installing MySQL on Ubuntu (the NSFW way)
Running works great for me for several reasons:

1) It's got a fairly flat learning curve.

2) The rewards are immediate and gradual, but clearly noticeable.

3) It's relatively cheap, though you can't cheap out on shoes if you are going to run on cement. A good pair usually costs over $100, but you can get them for half the price online if you know your size for a particular model.

4) It's convenient. However, you do need access to a shower afterwards.

5) You can do it alone or with someone else, at any time you want.

That being said, I found taichi to work just as well in clearing the brain, but you don't get the endorphin rush or the cardiovascular improvements as much.
Functional Javascript 1.0.2  released!
I agree completely, except to mention that 15 minutes may not be sufficient at first. I wasn't even doing a startup, and 15 minutes was barely enough for me to let go for the first time I tried.
Today's Fun: Google Will Acquire ______ Quiz Question. Answer Starts With S And Ends In T
Shit. For about a second and a half I honestly thought I was color-blind when I was looking for the green squares and I couldn't see them right away. Genuinely scared me. Obviously time for bed.
Sleep is basically a prerequisite for any of the other relaxation techniques. But some of the other suggestions will help you sleep better.
Read some fiction. Really helps to stop thinking about things in your world.
oh. well yeah. like someone commented, its like an advanced necker cube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necker_cube

As far as the brain thing goes...whatever...

It was pretty accurate for me though. I saw it clockwise. Right brain? lol
Is the paper online?
I like doing complex things that require your full attention or you die. Stuff like rock-climbing (although I'm too out of shape to do that) Strenuous hiking is great -- wish I did more of it. The trick is that if you have an analytical and goal-intensive mind, like I suppose many of us do, you may have to try some unusual things to beat it into neutral gear.

I've found that even out of shape old farts like me can get the same results by simply raising your pulse to about 80-90% of max for an hour or so. If you do this using smart exercise equipment, it does all the work of figuring out how hard you should be working. Somewhere around minute 20 or so I find myself relaxing mentally, although the physical part is a little painful. Your mind begins to wander. At this point, once you're used to it, you can easily slip into a very meditative state. Focus on a point, recite a mantra, relax your mind. This reminds me of the same feeling I had when I ran, except you don't get the great feeling of being outdoors. On the good side, you don't have to worry about dogs, traffic, or slippery roads.

Best thing about all of that is that you get a great endorphin rush when you're done for the next few hours.

My problem is that I'm always trying to hack my way out of relaxing -- using less time, gulping a Red Bull instead of doing my workout, etc. I'm slowly learning that this isn't something you can take shortcuts with, but it's a lesson I have a hard time with. I guess my mindset is that if you can make a computer do something really cool in ten minutes you should be able to hack your body-mind the same way, but it doesn't work like that.
The freakonomics guys did a pretty unscientific study, the result of which was the test had some limited predictive power - but opposite to the original hypothesis.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/right-versu...
Actually, in High school, my entire grade level/class of 2009 uses a forum board I made. We trade study guides and by the time the test comes, everyone answers the same things. If the class average is low, we get a curve. Otherwise, we're all happy. The internet is indeed revolutionizing things. Of course, then theres always that class geek who kills the curve, but its not that often.

And yeah I totally agree with this post. My father is a Computer Science professor and he's friggin pissed with the corruption of the entire school system. He got rated down for failing a student and a lot of crap...a lot of undo stress
Just go to any park with an axe and run away when you see the cops. Drum circle disruption is a good cool down activity.
No Choreography for REST?
I don't clearly see how it de-bunked the bunk. Infact I think it still supports the fact.Coldwater disables one hemisphere at which time they see it one way implies illusion could have something to do with the active hemisphere?
"It's not that foreign students are any smarter, ... They just have relentless discipline."
Norvig - new world's longest palindrome
As I said the previous time it was posted (the url you posted was to the dupe), it is just badly rendered. A badly rendered image is not going to have any special predictive power about mid-level brain functions, especially since the information that's extracted (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) makes no sense in this context.

Spinning is neither clockwise nor counterclockwise unless you are looking along its axis of rotation. In that image, we're looking perpendicular to the axis of rotation.
From Metrics to KPIs
The death of computing
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals
I was wondering what they might be doing buying manure... but after clicking on the link I see it is Sprint.
Albert Einstein: "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?"
Everything I Learned at MIT
You can also install macports (or something similar) on the mac and then it will be same as the Ubuntu way.
They have to make sense or there's no point. Make a python script that can do that.
I was really wondering why my teeth were shifting!!
Google Options Put Masseuse in Crowd of Multimillionaires
Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox?
I guess we now know why Mark didn't switch to Gentoo.
> So I still don't know of a single example of an exclusive platform that worked.

Really? Not a single example? How about iTunes Music Store (and/or the iPod), as well as the vast majority of gaming consoles?
Facebook: Marketers Are Your 'Friends'
I'd say there are really only two reasons that have stopped widespread adoption of PNG:

1. The file sizes can be rather large (less of a problem these days)

2. IE6 improperly displays PNG alpha (This is big one).

Even the "IE7" javascript hack (http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/) didn't really catch on.
Tai Ji is incredible in my experience, but it does take a lot of initial investment.
Rather unlikely to happen because:

http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every
introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the
proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research
into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause.
It has long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming, but
until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it. Programming ability
is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with educational attainment; nor has it
been found to be correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional 'intelligence' or
'problem-solving-ability' tests.
We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give details. We can predict success
or failure even before students have had any contact with any programming language with very
high accuracy, and by testing with the same instrument after a few weeks of exposure, with
extreme accuracy. We present experimental evidence to support our claim. We point out that
programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are
certain to succeed.
I feel sad when I have to click "new" to find such interesting links, and the top ten is about the dancer's illusion, relaxation and pattern matching in Ruby.

<here goes your favorite whining about redditization of the Hacker News>
There's also a graphical installer for MySQL that works on the Mac. Apparently it hasn't been updated for Leopard yet, but it will be along.

Another effortless way to get MySQL installed is to use MAMP, which also gives you an independent Apache with mod_php and some admin tools.

I wouldn't know whether or not Mark's catty complaint about automated MySQL security updates on the Mac is valid. I don't sweat MySQL security on my Mac, because it's just for development. I don't run public-facing Mac servers -- I run Linux servers, just like everybody else. MySQL is one of the few Linux killer apps, and it's developed on Linux; of course its support on Ubuntu is first-rate.
Ask YC: Feature request: hide
Why are so many top terrorists engineers?
Some more info and a link to the original from Michael's Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena [http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/sze_silhouette/index.html].
Check out the 'eyes' on the enhansed version. Freaky.

Also, Michael provides a little info on what goes on in the brain when the figure reverses [http://www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/augenklinik/live/homede/edg...]
well yeah.

actually I noticed scala has pattern matching as a first class control construct. Its pretty amazing. Just right there in the language (which is not surprising, given the functional influence in it).
Yoga, meditation and all those are great, but for simple quick fix I recommend breathing deeply, slowly and comfortably. When you get tense, or feel like relaxing, focus for a moment on your heartbeat and breathing, and give a little part of your brain to slowing both down a bit. Repeat as necessary.
Startup Weekend San Francisco next week -- any YCers going?
Great, now I've got crazy ideas about wordnet and markov chains and such nonsense swimming in my head, when I should really be thinking about useful things.
Shrinking chips use novel recipe
I'm afraid hang gliding would clear out my brain a little too literally.
>>When their intensity is combined with multi-potentiality, these youngsters become particularly frustrated with the existential limitations of space and time. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to develop all of the talents that many of these children have. Making choices among the possibilities is indeed arbitrary; there is no "ultimately right" choice. Even choosing a vocation can be difficult if one is trying to make a career decision between essentially equal passion, talents and potential in violin, neurology, theoretical mathematics and international relations.

I'm curious how others have dealt with this. When faced with seemingly equal career and life decisions how to you go about choosing what vocation or path to pursue.

Does anyone have any specific methods?
I flipped a coin to choose which college to go to.

I actually ended up going to the school that lost the coin flip, however.
Reminds me http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3503877302082311448
I read this almost a year ago, although it was posted on a different site. It's a pretty good read.