skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Empirically, people who succeed on a grand scale work their asses off because they love (or are addicted) to their work.

So no, you won't be as productive if you aren't addicted to your work, don't love it, and/or don't think about it all/most of the time. (aside: yes, you need to eat well and exercise and take a breather from time to time).

That said, productivity/achievement might be a bit overrated. Will your life be better and will you be happier when you achieve your goal? Will you ever achieve it? Most of us disregard the fact that wealth is not remotely correlated with happiness and still hunt for the big payday.

[edit: lots of folks are asking for data. FWIW, I founded and ran RescueTime, so I was hip dip in this world for a long time.

The data actually shows that, for line workers, hours worked have diminishing returns. However, when you look at people at the top of their game (executives, etc), they work extreme hours. Correlation does not equal causation, of course. But when you look at the most successful/productive people in your circles, how many of them talk about work/life balance, have lots of hobbies, etc? Maybe they're successful DESPITE their crazy work hours, for all I know.]
You are one of my favorite online authors merely for this post. Do you write often?

I'm going to explore using this to fill parts of a vector in an otherwise normal regression algorithm and see how it does against only linear regression and only hash kernel on my dataset.
Add to it the impact mobile has had on consumers who are increasingly used to getting games for somewhere between free and 99 cents.

There is a mad rush to free to play right now in order to capture that audience. Although the market is much bigger, I fully expect the attempt to squeeze as much money possible out of the players will results in more and more painfully annoying games (most free to play already fit in that category.)
Good to see this presentation evolving.

Related graph:

"Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
We also adopted Unicorn pretty early on but still suffered issues as dynos simply ran out of memory. In fact with some apps we have seen improvements (but still far from acceptable) in stability by un-adopting this method. The issues raised by scottshea below, as a consequence concern me, what/will be the charge for these as well?

To be honest it's the fumbling around in the dark that has annoyed me. I am with you 100% on your manifesto and your points about the type of service you provide. However the time we have spent on this (starting before you came clean about the issues) and the time spent on other increasingly suspicious advice to "up dynos" or spend time "optimising your app" sours this slightly. I accept the "magic black box" comes with its compromises and required understanding at our end but it also means needing to be far more communicative and honest about it at yours. Something which you are putting right I can see.

I for one think the premise of Heroku is a great one and you have succeeded for us in many of the things you have set out to achieve. This whole situation has been a real shame, I'm sure this must have a been a pretty shody time for you guys and I hope you come out the better for it. The quicker the better to be honest so you can focus on the new features we'd like to see.
Vdio is web-based. iTunes is app-based.
Not "a cleaner tool than the browser" a cleaner layout spec. Plus you will have to build a CSS compatibility layer on top. Hard but worthwhile. Sort of thing Adobe might work on.
Personal Finance for Young Professionals
My guess is that either the company as a whole exists or it doesn't. They won't let Eidos go because they need the revenue, and breaking up Square and Enix seems infeasible at this point.

My guess is it'll go the same way as Sega and LucasArts if things go very south; release the third-party development studios from their contracts, shut down internal development, and move to licensing and hope you survive.
I guess I'm not surprised, but I am pretty sad.

I spent a lot of time in Lucasarts games as a kid. Fond memories. Thanks, Lucasart.
Speeding Up SSH Session Creation
Who cares? What's interesting about Bitcoin is not that it can be used as yet another currency, but that it can be used as a distributed replacement for Paypal.
a) Time preference (I guess you have a phone, even if..)

b) Marginal utility of every extra unit of money decreases when a person holds more of them. Couple that with falling prices and you have the killer of deflationary spiral.

A nice theory, though. The deflationary spiral one. But just a theory. Never happened.
I love this entry. Two months ago, I wrote a perhaps more-pedantically-technical entry about the hash trick and its use in building a simple classifier, even making it play nice with Scipy's sparse linear algebra (eventually writing my own CSR times CSC multiplication method in Cython): http://blog.newsle.com/2013/02/01/text-classification-and-fe...
Vague. Betrayal by unnamed person with no details of what happened. Pointless post
This is really simple. Unless you think every legislator that voted to ratify this believes that the outcomes posited by the article are valid, correct, and without problem, then there are unintended consequences. That is, literally, a consequence of the law they didn't intend.

Do you really think that every legislator has no problem with any eventual use of this law?
I think it is an absurd choice of name, given this strong association in a very related area.
>"we're now in a world (convexity) where capital is scarce in comparison to the talent that can do something with it."

Is this really a new condition?

>"The new currency... will be some proof-of-work model related to technical talent"

So other types of talent will all be secondary to technical talent? That would be quite a revolution, even with a 65-year timeframe.
Yes and no… Graymail IS the new spam. So when your company sends 800/million pieces of it day, you own that discussion.
Amazon Services Hackpad
And why would I choose that over Amazon Prime's pay-per-view services?

It'd be great if they had a subscription plan like Rdio or Spotify (similarly to Netflix), but it seems there are too many copyright and profitability issues involved.
It's funny/tragic just how much better the Fate of Atlantis' story was than Indiana Jones 4. They could have just made that into a movie and it would have been amazing.
> Since ActionScript VM is far slower than JavaScript

This is actually incorrect. While ActionScript is actually far slower than Javascript, the VM is actually really good at running C code compiled to it. Providing about a 30x speed up over Actionscript.
TC of business? Guessing it refers to this:
http://betabeat.com/2013/04/michael-arringtons-ex-girlfriend...
Original architectural decisions can constrain and push development in a certain direction. An analogy might be made to evolution: one's phylogeny constrains the space of available organisms available in a given timespan.

5% might not sound like much, but I'd want something comparative. How much code in the 3.8 kernel is shared with what Linus released in 1991? I suspect it's similarly low, but we still recognize them as the same project.
People also put their savings in Apple stock. That doesn't make it currency...
Random routing to concurrent servers works fairly well if the kind of long running requests you need to worry about spend a lot of time blocking for some external service (e.g. a database call). Then you can get a lot of benefit on the from cooperative or preemptive multitasking on the server, and so the performance characteristics, from the point of view of a new request, of each server is roughly the same, and so going to a random server is pretty good.

However, if you have long running requests because they make intensive use of server resources (CPU, RAM) then concurrent servers buys you very little. In that case, sending a new request to a server that is chugging along on a difficult problem is significantly different than sending it to one that isn't. That's where knowing the resource state of each server, and routing accordingly is of huge benefit.

While load balancing is a very difficult problem, with some counterintuitive aspects, it is an area of active research, and there are some very clever algorithms out there.

For example, this article (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/153348/idleq.pdf) from UIUC and Microsoft introduces the Join-Idle-Queue, which is suitable for distributed load balancers, has considerably lower communication overhead than Shortest Queue (AFAICT the original 'intelligent' routing algorithm), and compares its charateristics to both SQ and random routing.
I love the CoffeeScriptRedux project and this is a perfect little application of it. It's very easy to pick up once you know CoffeeScript and I love the idea of stylizing your developer tools to fit a framework as rightfully opinionated as Ember.
It's been long enough for me to state, but I used to work for a contractor hired by CMA Communications.

ISPs of this size try and maximise as much profit out of their customers and being that a lot of CMA's sites were over provisioned and are barely able to provide telephony service without incompetence-y along the way, it is not shocking that ads being injected into pages is a new thing for them.

To see these bullshit ads showing up on random pages is far from surprising.
The industry is fine, trying to make 30/40/50 Millions AAA games by the truckload is a doomed strategy, but that's not a surprise. Lots of developer are doing a whole lot of money.

I cannot find brad wardell's blog from his galactic civlizations 2 dev time (from Stardock), he had a really good quote which perfectly applies; I don't remember it word for word but what he was saying is: it is stupid to make a really expensive game and then hoping to get your money back on it just because another game did, you have to find your market and make a game targeting it. If you sell 3.5 million units and you consider that a loss, then you fucked up, it's not a market problem.

There is a reason why indie games are exploding, and it's not a lack of liquidity, editors are pouring money into franchises trying to get the next call of duty, and it's not working the same way every action/sci-fi movie cannot have a James Cameron budget and get its money back.
In this case though the real problem you're dealing with is that the Argentine government has enacted capital controls (from an outsider perspective, it looks like this is to force people to use pesos while they monetize away their spending). I think if a lot of people were trying to move their money out of the country using bitcoins the government would crack down on that too.

Just out of curiousity, is it easier for Argentines to get Bitcoins than USD? I find BTC really hard to get even in the United States.
> And in both cases the terms aren't immune to new information, nor can you expect to honestly get away with assigning anything you want.

Actually, you can get away with assigning anything you want. That's hidden in the assumption that the criteria he lists are more-or-less independent.

> You might have a different list of criteria or different probabilities, but the point is to lay them down and give a reason why you think it's unlikely enough not to pay the small sum of money.

You've got the burden of proof backward. The cryonics advocates are the ones trying to argue that cryonics will work with sufficiently high probability to make investing in it worthwhile. The grandparent cited 5% as if that figure had even one significant digit -- which it doesn't, by Hanson's own calculation.

> It also lets others argue with you over your estimates, because they might have information you don't, now or in future years.

It also lets others argue even if they don't have new information, which just wastes everyone's time. The same phenomena also occurs with the Drake equation.
Something that I should have mentioned in the post: I've reached out to several people on Youtube, as well as Reddit U.

In a sense, I am in the same situation, as I have created a product, and am searching for a market. However, I do believe that market exists, as I see plenty of evidence of amateurs struggling to teach with only mediocre tools. It's not really the way "west coast" entrepreneurs tend to operate - but quite a few successful companies are started that way.
Steamrolled by Big Data
Interesting point. I guess, as an extension of this, I have noticed I'm accomplishing the same amount of net work in fewer hours. I can safely say I love my work, and that's definitely a driver in -wanting- to work more, but because it's exciting and fulfilling. (Obviously still balancing my non-work/family life with this.)

Personally, my only goal in doing all of this is to create great things which are fulfilling for me and others to use, and that hopefully have some lasting/tangible benefit in my/their life. In a sense, I've already achieved that. The idea of great wealth is not a driver (and I think would only distract me.)
>> it's a shame they couldn't follow up their legacy in recent years.

Agreed, but it's worth keeping in mind that "recent years" in this case means over a decade. LucasArts pumped out hordes of sub-par games, quickly shoe-horning various game paradigms into the star wars universe.

As much as I feel nostalgic towards the hey-day of old, the article is spot on in pointing out that all their recent greats (KOTOR, etc.) were developed externally. If I were in Disney's shoes, I might have made much the same call, alas. Either that or take a gamble on a radical re-vitalization campaign, which is dicey in today's game market.
Amazon ELB? It does cost significantly more than Heroku AFAIK.
SimpleHoney acquired to make digital currencies like Bitcoin go mainstream
There is MechWarrior online in a freemium open beta and another mecha but more FPSy game in development I can't recall right now.
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Please send an email to dnevogt@gmail.com if you are interested. thanks
I partly agree. I've worked at various times in my career as a developer and as a sysadmin. When I've worked with Perl is has usually been in my sysadmin role and the advantage that Perl has always had in that role is that it is part of the system. I can always rely on at least Perl 5.6 as being available as part of the system and I can write Perl scripts targeting it in almost the same way I can write scripts targeting the Bourne or Bash shells. Not having to deploy a new interpreter or package management system on my targets makes things much, much easier.

At the same time, I've worked as an application developer as well, and in those circumstances I generally want the latest versions libraries and interpreters. Since I'll be writing all the code expected to run with them, stability is less important. I can work around bugs and incompatibilities myself. Generally though, I need to make sure that my application interpreter and libraries don't interfere with system equivalents because that is a nightmare. So a secondary package system makes sense in this case.

What I would like ideally, is a OS package manager which is capable of handling multiple versions of a programming language gracefully and will let me install a development version alongside a system version, as opposed to hacks like rvm.
Didn't intend to imply that. Number of dynos needed varies extremely widely, with the app's response time and language/framework being used as the main variables.

There are apps on Heroku that serve 30k–50k reqs/min on 10–20 dynos, typically written in something like Scala/Akka or Node.js and serving incredibly short (~30ms) response times with very little variation. But these are unusual.

The more common case of a website, written in non-threadsafe Rails, with median response times of ~200ms but 95th percentile at 3+ seconds, would probably use those same 10 dynos to do only a few thousand requests per minute. Whether or not you use a CDN and page caching also makes a big difference (see Urban Dictionary for an example that does it well).

But it really depends. We were trying to quantify when you should be worried. If you're running a blog that serves 600 rpm / 10 reqs/sec off of two dynos, you don't need to sweat it.
If the economy today is 10 billion quatloos, and it grows to 11 billion quatloos next year, you would also want the money supply to grow by 10% over the same period of time.

Capital can make money because it increases productivity. If you use your 10,000 quatloos to buy a machine that makes a worker more productive, your reward comes from the interest on that. Everyone can increase the value of their savings if everyone does this.

If everyone is hiding their quatloos in the mattress, there is no input of capital to increase productivity. Yet a deflationary spiral exactly encourages people to hide their quatloos in their mattress. Why bother taking even minimal market risks when you can make 10% from the growth of the rest of the economy?

And economies can grow not just from increased productivity.

EDIT: As a fraction of total buying power you are still were you were before.

This is a really, really, really bad idea.

If I have shillings equal to 5% of GDP, and I put myself into cryosleep for 100 years, there is no reason I should expect my uninvested shillings to still have 5% of GDP. This is a child's view of an economy.
I don't know how Netflix producing content and making it exclusive to their subscription service is a win for consumers.
Would You Pay $1500 for A Bottle of Whisky & A Flask?
Is promising one service but delivering another not fraud?

Promises from the Heroku website pre-Rap Genius posts:

"Incoming web traffic is automatically routed to web dynos, with intelligent distribution of load instantly"

"Intelligent routing: The routing mesh tracks the availability of each dyno and balances load accordingly. Requests are routed to a dyno only once it becomes available. If a dyno is tied up due to a long-running request, the request is routed to another dyno instead of piling up on the unavailable dyno’s backlog."

"Intelligent routing: The routing mesh tracks the location of all dynos running web processes (web dynos) and routes HTTP traffic to them accordingly."

"the routing mesh will never serve more than a single request to a dyno at a time"

Actual service provided: requests are routed randomly to dynos regardless of how many requests they are currently handling or their current load.
The original is better: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

Highly recommended if you enjoy variational principles in physics and are at all interested in biology/cooperative phenomena.
I agree, which will be much to the chagrin of the community. I spend less time working, and more time thinking. I find that I am able to get more things done in a shorter amount of time if I have fully thought through exactly what I am doing before I do it. I don't just mean the normal thought process, I mean the meta thought process (is what I am thinking truly accurate). It makes my work a lot better, and I often have to work a lot less to make something that is higher quality. I often out work the people who work twice as much as me, and my work quality is higher. Getting things done is important, getting things done right is more important. If this takes me more time, then so be it. The market doesn't go who gets done first, it goes to the person who does it best.
> you'll generally find his entire bibliography, SF and non.

Ditto in my bookcase, and I'm in NL, not the UK...
This is excellent. I have a list of possible first 50 potential customers for something that I am about to start soon and was thinking along similar lines. In my case however, I know about 30% of the 50 potential customers as well.

I strongly think that hand crafting these first emails will be very important. I know some people are talking about automations through crawlers,twitter etc. but for first few initial customers, I would go with the way mentioned in this blog.
On this theme, I've found having kids has actually helped me be more productive. I don't have the opportunity to work crazy hours. I know I can't catch up in the evening so I have to make every day count. Because my hours are limited to a standard working day I never burn-out, and I'm motivated and ready to go each and every day.

When they were really young it was rough (no sleep, etc.) but now they're a bit older it generally works out well. (Modulo illness. They are both currently coming down with something and it's going to wipe out at least two working days.)
It's a sparse random matrix, but definitely in the same family of techniques.

I was concerned more about distributional properties of different hash functions than reversibility. Checksums-as-hashes often work, but it's not that much work to swap in something a little more robust. If you want a good output distribution, pick something where that's a goal of the algorithm.
But those games were developed by Totally Games, not LucasArts.
>> Because C++ is poorly suited to preventing these problems,

It is really hard to take seriously any project that has this kind of nonsense in its introduction.
I'd wager that their just-terminated employment contracts explicitly prohibit them from doing such a thing.
Love it: a wonderful gift to millions of students, analysts, journalists, researchers, and others who for many years have had to extract data from PDFs via throwaway scripts, copy-and-paste, or (yikes) read-and-retype.
What does this have to do with anything? Let's ask wikipedia.

The Federal Reserve's policy of ignoring food and energy prices when making interest rate decisions is often confused with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' measurement of the CPI. The BLS publishes both a headline CPI which counts food and energy prices, and also a CPI for All Items Less Food and Energy, or "Core" CPI. None of the prominent legislated uses of the CPI excludes food and energy.[9] However, with regard to calculating inflation, the Federal Reserve no longer uses the CPI, preferring to use core PCE instead.

So the people making the monetary policy decisions are ignoring food and energy prices, and hence, in my opinion, underestimating inflation.

Anyway, as someone else said in this thread, everything is a good investment at some period in time. The question is whether we are in that period of time.
That studio disappeared a long time ago, though. In the mid-00's it transitioned to a licensing group and only fairly recently started making games on its own again.
As someone already mentioned, -1 on Erlang-> (Go or Scala)

They didn't try to improve they removed features such as error handling, distribution, all which are very important for building fault tolerant system.

Paradoxically perhaps, I see it inverted:

(Go + Scala) -> Erlang

Temporal sequencing doesn't necessarily imply strict improvement.
The Email sample, with simple and clear justifications, has to be the most valuable point in the post. I'm consistently amazed by writing that seems so genuine that I knowingly ignore the fact that it's spam.
a) That's a downward pressure on sales any way you paint it.
b) Obviously this is why the well-off never want any more.

You have no concept of history or the problems associated with a gold standard do you?
Why are C/C++ so much faster than JIT'ed Javascript? Can't a subset of Javascript be converted to ASM.js JS that'll run around the same speed? loops, arrays, conditional statements, etc. Why does Javascript have to be so much slower?
Force Unleashed was a solid brawler that needed a little tweaking to make it really good. Then they managed to royally screw it up in FU2.

Still not sure what happened there.