skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is that a field of knowledge can endure a "crisis of foundations," in which the most fundamental issues are opened up for inquiry and deconstruction, without causing any permanent harm to the field.

I would push even further and assert that any field of knowledge which doesn't regularly experience such crises is stagnant.
I think that 2-3 hours of work a day is more the norm than the exception with programmers. Basically it is hard to keep your concentration for 8 hours straight without some kind of break.

How many comments on /. Reddit and YC news do you think are written during work hours.

So basically I think that you shouldn't feel bad about it if you get stuff done. Better 3 hours of pure productivity than 8 hours of mediocre bugridden sloshing around..
Yes, I doubt he could ever get past the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
Indeed. Who says we have to transmit our DNA directly? Just get the robots there and have them make the people or whatever we want in our image.
I am a bit daunted by the prospect of working 8 hours straight, every day [...] 2-3 hours of real work per day [might be] more realistic.

I think part of the issue here is how you define "work". I probably spend about 3 hours a day actively writing code, but I would still say that I'm working 12+ hours a day -- the fact is that most of my time is spent coming up with ideas for how to solve problems and convincing myself that the solutions I've found are in fact the right solutions.

Lawyers understand this -- they'll bill you for time they've spent thinking about your file while having a shower just the same as they bill you for time they spend at a computer writing up legal documents. Unless you're purely a code monkey who writes code according to directions and never thinks about what he's doing, there's nothing wrong with counting "think time" as time you spend working.

Edit: See also my comments from November about procrastinating: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=81366
first, find a job you enjoy -- the tech job market is good enough now where you can afford to be selective (at least in the valley/other tech hubs) -- ideally, something that you would find exciting enough to do even if you weren't getting paid, as the cliche goes.

second, i think it's common for developers to get the equivalent of writers' block when the upcoming task is large and/or poorly defined. some things that have helped with this:

- tricking yourself to take on little pieces of the bigger project (google 'structured procrastination' and hamming's article on productivity); carving out explicit "next steps" (without dependencies) that you can start on now

- writing down a plan or specs to at least get things on paper/into your editor to bring clarity to a jumble of random thoughts

- reducing distractions; putting on headphones (esp. noise cancelling); stopping multitasking
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html ; also, turning off AIM (or putting up an away message plus hide windows) and your mail client's new-email popup/toaster massively cuts down interruptions

- using rescuetime (to assess the damage and/or feel guilty about screwing around :)), noprocrast on news.yc or just making a commitment to yourself to wean yourself off of news/blog sugar

lots of people have written about productivity; http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html are good starting points.

but ironically it's tempting to waste a lot of time "preparing" yourself to be really productive or trying to come up with the perfect system. i think there are natural ebbs and flows in levels of productivity; a lot of the battle is detecting when you're slumping and instead of beating yourself up, try to trick yourself into making that period as short as possible.
There may be an underlying reason for the difference in tastes here: if you are generally inclined to reflect on the things you encounter you don't want to be presented irrelevant clutter because it wastes your reflection resources. The "masses" are not inclined that way, for them it's just: the more they get presented with the better.
Well, you don't really 'work' for all 8 hrs and then eventually a routine sets in...
It's really the bad clients that force you to become a take-no-prisoners mercenary consultant.

Other fun things (none of which is legal advice!):

- Never, ever, ever, sign an indemnity clause. That's basically an agreement to go bankrupt if anyone ever sues them over your work. (If they can't budge on it, due to an evil legal dept, you should research whether indemnity clauses are enforceable against employees (not contractors) in your area. If not, you can mention that they can always hire you as an employee for the duration of the project -- at your consulting rate!)

- Only fixed-bid for fixed-scope (change orders should always be hourly, and fixed bids should have at least a 100% fudge factor in your favor (same with calendar estimates). No, you do NOT mention that part to the clients. Some people recommend more than just doubling, but it's worked for me so far).

- For jobs you don't really want, try quoting a higher rate, and see if they take it! (Eventually, you'll find out what your market rate is). Pad your rate proportionally to how much you DON'T want the job. :)

- Never bid on a job from a position of weakness: there should never be a job that you NEED to have, otherwise you will get screwed.

- Bill weekly. (Never call it a bill, always an "invoice").

- Do not continue work when the client has more than a couple thousand dollars in delinquent balance due, until you're paid, or unless the client is a really good client, and you know they're good for it.

- Never subcontract for someone who's friends with the client. They will be unable to maintain the naturally adversarial relationship between consultant and client, and they'll let things slide (such as late or delinquent payments) that they shouldn't.

- More generally, avoid situations where you can't bill the client directly.

- When logging your hours, always keep good notes of what you're doing. Clients like knowing what they're paying for.

- If the client likes to call outside of normal working hours, institute a minimum 3-hours-billable for each off-hours call. Now, you can sleep at night!

- Always be professional and courteous. Never burn bridges, no matter how tempting.

- Emotion and drama are your enemies. Both your own, and your clients'. Especially keep emotion out of the picture when negotiating about money.

- Go the extra mile to keep your best clients. Weed out the bad ones.

- Don't put up with abuse.

- Always negotiate in good faith.

- Always under-promise and over-deliver! NEVER over-promise and under-deliver!
http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they
I'm part of a distributed team. Apart from daily scrums where we all sync up, we all set our own hours.

I have a wife and two teenage kids so I work nights as much as I can and sleep during the day when they are at work and in school. We see each other in the mornings and evenings.

When I'm in a serious mood I try and get three 4 hour shifts done with a two hour break in between each. If I don't get sidetracked I can get "in the groove" for one or two of these shifts. After a few days of that or whenever I feel burnout approaching I spend one day where the work shifts are swapped out for personal/family time.

If I can't be in a serious mood for whatever reason, I just let my "work brain" idle and let my life's "garbage collection" take over until I get back on track.
the causal link is probably UI simplicity, not bad design.

survivorship bias strikes again: for every CL or POF there are thousands of ugly sites which are dead; and the vast majority of popular sites have pleasing designs.
It is hardly surprising that it only takes one person to run this kind of thing.

Everything they say he does was done years earlier (match.com and hotornot come to mind), but the technology needed for this kind of application hasn't changed in a decade.

Perhaps he's being a little disproportionately rewarded for his efforts but that's just good business. Also I'm sure he's helped make plenty of real people happy who could care less about how his site looks.
totally agree, being a programmer is more than writin code. I have pulled a 90 hour week of writing code and it was very painful and I would never do it again.

I tend to pull an hour and then do something else unless I am in the zone and I can go up to about 3 hours and then break and come back to it.

8 hour days normally go like this when working with at clients place.

hour 1. opening up stuff, replying to email, grabbing a coffee, having a chat with co-workers(makes for a better working atosphere and you might learn something).

hour2. working on project, coding some, asking questions about the spec(if there is a spec, if not then asking questions that the end client or the account manager hadn't tought to ask)

hour3. repeat 2 but throw in a coffee and a chat and maybe a quick surf while you drink your coffee.

hour4. repeat 2

hour5. lunch time get up and move around people

hour6. repeat 2

hour7. repeat 3

hour8. start tying up loseends last coffee of the day etc send those emails you have been meaning to do, have a look at your bug list and fix a couple.

now you have done about 3 to 4 hours coding and plenty of other work.
These days he gets a lot of free publicity because newspapers keep repeating the story how he is making so much money...
Should Yahoo open up its web search index?
Even though initiatives like EC2, S3, wikia and nutch are lowering the barrier for the next wave of innovation on search - building and maintaining an internet wide index is still a huge engineering initiative.

The only player which comes close to google is yahoo. If yahoo opens up its index like wikia it could set the stage for the next wave of innovation in search. Through a use based pricing model like amazon it might also make business sense for yahoo (lets face it, yahoo search isnt really going anywhere yet) and just might also help yahoo in getting its mojo back.
Think of NASA as one huge tech VC firm. Technologies that are much less likely without NASA and the space race of the 60's:

1. GPS
2. Advanced robotics (Martian rovers)
3. Tang!

Can anyone name more?
There's also the human profits. I think there is no better image for 21st century humanity than the view of Earth from space. There are no borders, cultures, skin colors, or religious differences. There's just one big blue rock in the middle of pitch darkness. We call it home.
Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington (Software Patent News)
You've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting.

I'm sure they are all authentic but that's one I can really imagine him saying.
I don't think I've ever had a problem with pointers, and it may be due to the way they were first introduced to me. I read a book that said to think of * as 'value-at' and & as 'address-of'. Well, except that the * in pointer declarations (char* etc) IS different, and I just read that as 'star', so I know that its a declaration of a pointer.

Anyway, ever since then, I've always said those words in my head when reading c/c++ code, and it's always made sense. Its true I had a little assembler experience before I came to c though.
time flies when you love what you do
Class and Web Design, Part 1: The Class Struggle
By doing something you truly love.
"...but a company spokesperson, Darryl Siry, told us there's no reason to worry."

Whenever something has to be said by a company spokesman, you know something's up.
I'm a Terrible Programmer, and You Should Be Too
Short Math Joke
He's probably not a native speaker.
I don't think it is too hard to do both. Last night I got home from a night out with friends at about 2:30 AM. I then wrote a blog post, wrote a little code, compiled and fooled around with GIT before going to sleep at 5:00 AM.

Having a social life is pretty much the best counterbalance to a career in software development. If you don't have one, you're doing it wrong.
I'll add to the chorus of "do something you actually like" but with a caveat: no one works 8 hour straight.

Sure, you're there for 8 hours, but no one just sits and codes and configures and thinks. You get up. You socialize. You drink coffee. You surf the web. That stuff is important, too -- you're a human, not a robot, and you can't be effective if all you do is work. (Remember The Shining?)
Urban Mapping Neighborhood API opens up
> I had some courses in Psychotherapy, when I think about it, I realize more that most of people working in software industry have mental sickness, even if they don't admit it.

I know of at least one for sure.
Or fall back to in vitro fertilization.

Come to think about it, wouldn't that law (the richer you are, the more children you are required to have) fix a lot of problems? Inequality, dumbing down of society...
Recently, I crossed this:

Ben Rich, former head of Lockheed Skunkworks, said at a UCLA Alumni Speech in 1993, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity...Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do."

Who knows if its really truth and what has been achieved already...
Most interesting comment in that thread:

I have the exact same story as the OP.

I lived and breathed Paul Graham's philosophy.

I even slept in a kitchen cabinet while working on reddit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33809408@N00/150538078/

But eventually I fell in love with someone from work :-) and realized what I was missing in my life:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/73086/Cozy-Domesticity

-- AaronSW
"The truth is simply that money won't solve all of your problems."

True, although I suspect there are a lot of problems that money could solve that we just haven't figured out yet. A really cool book for someone to write would be a collection of best practices for solving problems with money.
Dale Carnegie wrote about guys working in a foundry who, the experts calculated, should be able to carry 47 tons of pig iron per day, yet they were only actually able to carry 12 (or something similarly smaller than 47). Upon closer inspection, Carnegie noted that the workers took no more than a short break for lunch each day, so he advised them to sit and rest for a pre-determined amount of time each hour to renew their strength. As if by magic, the men were all then able to carry the predicted 47 tons per day, leaving employees and management quite satisfied.

Your brain is no different in its need for rest than your body. I've discovered that I need a break at about 3pm every afternoon, so I find a quiet place to lay down, close my eyes, and think about precisely nothing. After ten or fifteen minutes, I am ready to go back to thinking very hard. I've had co-workers who choose to sit at their desks all day looking very diligent rather than rest when they need it, and they are far less productive. (Of course, there are a few out there who don't seem to need to ever rest, and they're much more productive than I.)

You're not being paid to log hours; you're being paid to accomplish something. If you meet or exceed your employers' requirements for you, then they are getting their money's worth.
I don't. I work from about 10 AM to 2 AM, but according to RescueTime, the actual amount of time spent coding tops out at about 6-7 hours, with an average of about 4.5.

That's slightly more than when I had a full-time job (I averaged about 2-3 hours then), but seems fairly constant over a bunch of employers. And employers know this. My first boss told me, "Nobody expects you to spend the whole 8 hours working, just as long as you're getting something done with the day. That's why contractors get paid twice as much hourly as employees - they can only bill for the time they're actually working."
Then I'm basically limited to 15 minutes a day.
Gizmodo blogger banned from CES [Follow-up]
If you are a strong programmer, go with Flex Builder trial, later you can ditch it for a basic text editor like Textmate and use the command-line compiler.

Dive into some Flash Game Programming books and Actionscript 3 books and look at free tutorials online.

The thing you'll have to figure out is what tool to draw your "sprites".
Get the robots there, then send the pattern of one of my intelligences to let the robot be my avatar. :-D
Farm subsidies is a great example, and I'm glad to hear more people understand the issue.

It is a good example because most people, when explained the situation, would opt to have more competition and help the third world with trade rather than aid. Americans think a third of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Ridiculous.

Such a small percentage of people work in farming that it should be easy to convince people to make the change. People fear the lobby.
I don't know how good yahoo search actually is because I don't use it, but I agree with you about the strategy and business model.

I'm much more comfortable with building applications on top of infrastructures I pay for instead of being held hostage to the odd loyalties and uncertainties that come with ad supported services.

I may want to be yahoo's customer but I don't want to trick my own customers into somehow watching yahoo provided ads or rely on some other indirect means of helping them make money.

Amazon does the right thing. I hope they succeed.
That's why contractors get paid four times as much hourly as employees. Twice would only just cover what contractee isn't paying for taxes and accounting/legal overhead.
A Dude, it's like you read my mind
Go to rescuetime.com and get their tool. It'll help you know how much time you spend on things.

Now it's a game for me. I don't want to stop working until I've hit the peak for that week.

I work for myself though, so working more directly benefits me.
Happy New ... err ... CentMill!
Dishonest Programming
Shared hosting is not a ghetto
never crossed with any of his writtings

the thing is that innovations in languages don't happen tomorrow. Though when they do happen, an experienced progammer shouldn't have any difficulty in adapting in a new feature of a language that is added to supposly to add value.

Since you reffered to natural speaking languages its obvious that it seems natural, programming languages to take characteristics of other languages as it happens in real life that they take words from each other.
I might use it, but I am running Linux, so no rescuetime for me.
I've done it every day for a year once.
It has been a long time since we got an essay from him, yes.

BTW, I was just speaking for people with day job who can't use Firefox. Anyway, proxy should work in that case.
Is there actually a good way for someone to open up a web search index even if they wanted to? I know wikia is doing it but I didn't really investigate what that meant. Seems quite challenging.
I had the same dilemma. Then I got my shiny new MacBookPro. It took about an hour to setup an equivalent development environment. I was surprised it was so easy. I expected lots of builds to fail.
The Raven Paradox (logic)
The statement that "my pet raven is black" is not even weak evidence that "all ravens are black." Rather, it's strong evidence that "there exist black ravens." That's the flaw I see.
Who knows, if Apple delivers on the 15th, I might switch ;-)
I looked at it very briefly. The codebase is actually pretty small. It appears to depend heavily on memcached.
Wake me up when we reach 2,000,000,000.
I really thought I once heard about the A9 search engine opening access to its index. I can't find it now though.
Ask YC: Linux-VServer vs. Xen
It looks like Dreamhost is going to start providing what they are calling "Private servers" (http://www.dreamhostps.com) using Linux-VServer. Does anyone have thoughts on this approach vs. using Xen for virtual servers ala slicehost? (http://www.slicehost.com)
Sounds like enacted regression to the average. ;)

But what you miss is that socies are now far less stable than they were. In the longer long no one is longer able to have hundren, to say nothing about few thousands, like this czar from China.
Ahh to be a Startup in this crazy Web 2.0+ world
Interview with Johnny Lee - the guy who hacked the Wii remote
A9 is open, though afaik its not good (read big,exhaustive etc.) enough to provide an adequate platform to build something on. Amazon, it seems had their google strategy worked out EC2-S3-A9 though A9 is the weak link which yahoo search can fill.
I think there's an underlying sentiment here: design is fantastic. Great job!
"You ask me, why do I continuo in this career then, I will tell you because of money"

... Loser.
The Zen of Steve Jobs
a follow-up for the recent link to quotes by SJ
It depends entirely on the criminal ... ;-)
Come on, the laptops are not being given people for whom access to food, water, and protection from the elements is a problem. The point is to provide the educated working poor in 2nd/3rd world countries access to tools so that they can improve their lives.

And for these people, access to education and communication is very, very important. To take one example: farmers in rural India have a very hard time getting a fair price for their crops because they can't access price information before harvest, they basically have to just hop on a bus to the nearest big village and take whatever price is offered by the middleman that day. Poor communication leads to an inefficient economy.

If you don't think that laptops are the most efficient way to help these people out, what are you proposing instead?
Alexa opened its search index: http://websearch.alexa.com/welcome.html
They too are owned by Amazon.

Also, look into this: http://www.opensearch.org/Home It's A9's search spec.
This opens up another topic that is equally interesting, which is the relationship between entrepreneurs and risk management.

My observation is that entrepreneurs are NOT risk takers. They are very much risk-averse. This is a strange comment but as an entrepreneur, I differentiate between taking risk and mitigating ambiguity.

I don't gamble and I don't play the lottery. I think doing so would be taking undue risk because I have absolutely no control of the outcome.

On the other hand, doing startup is not risk to me because I believe I can control the outcome. It is just that the outcome is somewhat ambiguous which I know how to mitigate.

I suppose if I take a step back, this is not unlike the difference between an amateur gambler and a professional gambler. If I know how to count cards, I won't think that I am taking risk neither.

--Denny--
"Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity."

of all the places for a double negative...
Single-image systems like Linux-VServer (or FreeBSD jails) are more efficient than fully virtualized systems like Xen (or VMWare); however, they're not as secure (the userland-kernel interface is far wider than a kernel-virtualizer interface, so there's far more potential for escape-from-jail bugs) and the fact that there are more shared resources increases the potential for a busy website to cause other sites on the same physical hardware to slow down.

Personally, I wouldn't hesitate about using a jailed system for testing purposes, but I'd want a fully virtualized instance (or real hardware) for a production site.
Sadly, it's much harder to name the technologies that would have been developed with that talent and wealth instead.
LAMP performance tips: I've spent the last 6 months combing Google for 'slow mysql'. It was enlightening
What's with obsession of giving pointless names to things? I'll accept "deceptive code", or just plain "bad code", but "dishonest" and especially "immoral" aren't appropriate terms.
CNN.com actually is a beautiful site.