skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found this never worked for me. By attacking the problem head on, I made it more of a big deal than it already was, which just made it more stressful and unpleasant, which made me less inclined to do it.

Instead, I noticed that almost all instances of my procrastination fit into three categories:

1.) I was trying to do something too ambitious, which I didn't have the skill level for, and so I couldn't complete it, yet wasn't able to admit that to myself.

2.) I was trying to bite off too big a chunk at once, so I'd get confused and wouldn't know where to start.

3.) The task is really boring and takes no real skill to complete, so I just wouldn't bother.

#1 is fixed by backing up and doing something easier - and oftentimes the "something easier" ends up being far more useful than the original task. For example, I spent like 3 years on FictionAlley.org (a PHP/MySQL rewrite of a website that had previously been 40,000 hand-written HTML pages), vs. a week on Scrutiny (Amherst's course-evaluation system). Once I'd done Scrutiny, though, FictionAlley was quite a bit easier for the practice.

#2 is tricky until you get some practice in breaking things down, but then it becomes quite manageable. For example, I was starting a new project for work this morning, one of those unsolicited I'll-build-it-and-then-show-my-manager things. Spent a half hour or so doing nothing but checking HN, then I created a git repository and figured "Hey, I can create a Django app. That's no problem." Then I figured "Hey, I create a basic HTML page with just the app's name on it. That's no problem." Then I figured "Hey, I can wire it up with django.views.generic.simple.direct_to_template", and suddenly I've got working code that just needs to be refined. The rest should be smooth sailing.

#3 is best solved with habits and routines, so that it really does become thoughtless. For example, I think paying bills and opening mail is about the most boring thing ever, so I always do it Saturday morning before going to the supermarket. It gets done, and since it's always at the same time of week I usually don't have to think about it. Same with responding to e-mail - usually, I make sure to respond immediately after reading or else not respond at all.

The smoke and mirrors can be quite useful. It works for me, at least.
Reported: 2002-05-28

Lovely.
Wow. If you read this story carefully, you begin to understand that Apple totally copied Sony's Playstation model for the iPhone and its application platform. Applying music development/sales disciplines to the videogame market seems to be a winning proposition. One might also say that, as Sony has failed to figure out how to effectively sell music online, it may have problems effectively selling videogames online as well; there might not be any correlation, however it's an interesting Sunday afternoon thought.

Thanks for posting this, Keyframe.
Indeed, the problem with C is just that. Once you understand how it works, you'll realize it's just a thin abstraction layer over assembly language. It really is just that simple. My last job was almost purely C, and what made C "scary" at times were:

1. naming conventions. I don't know why C programmers use the strange names that they do.

2. macros. C macros are a pain to read and follow.

I hope things will be easier to learn if you know this going in, because that's really all there is to it.

The catch with C is that while it is simple, writing good code with it is not. You have two tools for metaprogramming: macros and function pointers. C++ classes seem evil, until you see what people do in C in the absense of any mechanism for polymorphism.

Thankfully for you, you probably will only ever need to deal with libraries, not applications, so you'll never have to deal with the hell that comes with trying to use C for higher level work.
Sudbury Valley

http://www.sudval.org/

"At Sudbury Valley School, students from preschool through high school age explore the world freely, at their own pace and in their own unique ways. They learn to think for themselves, and learn to use Information Age tools to unearth the knowledge they need from multiple sources. They develop the ability to make clear logical arguments, and deal with complex ethical issues. Through self-initiated activities, they pick up the basics; as they direct their lives, they take responsibility for outcomes, set priorities, allocate resources, and work with others in a vibrant community.

Trust and respect are the keys to the school’s success. Students enjoy total intellectual freedom, and unfettered interaction with other students and adults. Through being responsible for themselves and for the school’s operation, they gain the internal resources needed to lead effective lives.

Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968. Located in an old stone mansion and a converted barn on the mid-nineteenth century Bowditch estate, the ten acre campus adjoins extensive conservation lands."
This is really interesting on many fronts... Google queries are trivial and dumb - they take virtually no CPU power to execute (on a per-query basis) in the grand scheme of things. But I'm trying to imagine how Wolfram Alpha will scale, and I'm not really seeing it. You can't precache results, queries require the aggregation and manipulation of huge data streams, and so on and so forth.

Wolfram Alpha is going to be _expensive_ to keep up. It's good to see they've already thought of this (with their Pro offerings), but the thought of the sort of power this thing would consume if it becomes popular en masse makes me shudder.
Agreed. PyOFC2's graphs have better interactivity than the other options - being able to see values at a specific point where the mouse cursor is is quite liked by my users. There are two distribution sites: one has far more sample code.
RSS Email: such a much
I'd ask it for the perfect recipe for a decent mug of tea. It'll hold up WA's severs for months on end, causing unmaskable interrupt that won't return until I get my tea.
How Can I Burn Cds Without Paying Anything
There are no burning programs installed and you desperately need to burn something…Don’t worry , there are a lot of free programs and windows tips which will allow you to burn cds. To help you out, I decided to provide you the best ways to burn your cds without paying anything.
I'm pretty sure everyone's already heard enough. I only care if I'm forced to stay inside. Otherwise, it's business as usual.
I wonder if the project devs have thought of putting an instance of this up for the world? There's a solid version of this for ruby (http://tryruby.hobix.com/) I direct people to when they ask about the language, I'd like to see more "try this programming language on the spot" type setups available, it's a shame I can't host them myself.
When Sexual Addiction and Infidelity Meet
One kind of extramarital affair revolves around sexual addiction. The partner involved in the affair, plain and simple, has a difficult time saying "NO." He/she may want to, but feels compelled to say "yes."
I'd second this. In fact, Steve Yegge once said this about K&R ( http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ten-great-books ):

This is an odd little book. It's frequently mistaken for an introductory programming book, which inevitably leads to frustration. It's not a good way to learn how to program; it expects that you're already familiar with machine architecture, assembly language, compilers, and at least one other high-level language.

It's not even a very good way to learn C. The idioms and best-practices for C programming have evolved substantially, even since the second edition was published, and some of the code samples look a bit dated.

As the parent said, you'll appreciate C only if you learn about machine architecture and Unix. Diving into a large codebase will get you acquainted with "modern" C.

I've found the book C Traps and Pitfalls to be the book to get you to think like a C programmer. The C Puzzle Book is pretty good for exercises, and Expert C Programming does a good job exposing the ugly side of C.
The history of SEGA
Promotional leaflets 
Finally, I received promotional leaflets for my company today. Now let's go with the promotion.
Swine Flu on Google Maps
"Can entropy ever be reversed?"
I think for most people your advice will work a lot better than the parents. I've had the same work behaviors myself, but never identified them until I read your post. Every time I've made something great, it's been from hacking on something that's manageable and then expanding. When I bite off more than I can chew, that's when I fail.

I suspect I'm note alone. Thanks for your post.
I've found that aggressively filtering resumes does a better job than a phone screen. E.g. the presence of "Three years at Microsoft as an SDE" or "Avid reader of Joel On Software and Coding Horror" give you better people than just those who know what a pointer is.
"GeoCities = MySpace = newspapers" because "they are platforms for creating content" unlike Facebook "which is about social" and Twitter "which is about live and social"

This is not worth reading.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but my personal experience was the opposite. C was the first programming I learned and I learned it by reading K&R in high school. I certainly didn't know anything about assembly, compilers, or another high-level language.

From there I learned by contributing to open source projects.

Not saying K&R is the best way, but it's not so opaque that a beginner with zero knowledge of C (or even programming) can't pick it up and learn if they're motivated to learn it.
Um .. heavy boots will help to be more rooted to the ground (because of the additional momentum necessary to move them) and thus will help achieve a more natural walking experience, right? Am I missing something?
Thanks everyone. I'm going to UCSD.
C Traps and Pitfalls: http://www.literateprogramming.com/ctraps.pdf
This issue is nine years old at this point and has been published, republished, and blogged countless times. I yearn for the day it stops wasting space on the front page of news aggregators.

A partial bibliography:

2000:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57351

2002:

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Feb/0271.html

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777

2006:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1135777.1135884

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1135777.1135854

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-yo...

2008:

http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/

http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-h...
I always wondered if there is somewhere a list of things one can do to remain active longer. Preferably categorized: minimum exercise requirements, regular checkups, drugs etc.
You should learn C. It is a small language but to master it requires a lot of work for a reason: you need to get good at design. When all you have in your hands are structures and pointers you absolutely need to develop the ability to design well organized programs in different layers of abstractions, otherwise to scale over the 1000 lines of code program is almost impossible. This is probably the most valuable thing C will teach to you.
When it comes to power from sound, be warned that results are likely to be rather disappointing - there's a reason microphones and guitar pickups benefit from such highly sensitive pre-amps! If you're just looking to do it out of intellectual curiosity, though, then piezos will at least get you somewhere - like DC motors, they're a 'two-way' thing; put power in, get vibration (sound), put in vibration, get (a little) power. You can often scrounge them from old toys, too, so they might be worth a look.

Other than that, there are a few interesting projects out there looking at alternatives to turbines for generating wind energy - my favourite would have to be this one:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4224763....

Cobbling one of those things together could make for an interesting and fairly cheap project - if you find the time to do it then I'd love to see the 'vital statistics' of how much juice it'll give you!
Could you arrange fields by competitiveness?
True. But on your laptop you can at least have VPN set up and be somewhat secure in your use. Sidewalk Express I am not even sure I want to log into my email account with.
Engine Yard’s in great hands, and I’ve done what I wanted to do
As outlined on this previously killed thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580157

Not worthwhile news. The US declared public emergencies for everything, throughout the year. It's more like a preparation for a potential emergency than like a real "emergency declaration".

Nothing to see here. Move along.
Chances are you already know C, but don't realize it. Java and PHP have mostly C syntax. All you have to do is substract objects and add pointers.

Like rsheridan6 said, assembly helps. It's not necessary though, as long as you realize a pointer is actually a memory address and not something abstract like a reference in Java or PHP.
"Try this programming language on the spot" with wide open public access is something I've been working on recently. I hope you'll like the results when it's released.
Not at all. According to Wikipedia, the population of Europe before the plague peaked at 70-100 million, while the plague killed 25-50 million, still leaving the population over 20 million, possibly over 50 million. The population of Washington DC is 592,000; if you include the metro area, 5.3 million.
So the US has 79 million broadband subscribers, and ~300 million people. The article states that this means that ~26% of the US population has broadband. But does one subscriber equal one person?

I read 'subscriber' as 'person in the household that pays the bill'... multiple people may be using that account.

If you click through to the OECD numbers, you'll find the following:

Rank Country Subscribers/100 people
1 Denmark 36.7
6 Sweden 32.3
7 S. Korea 31.2
10 Canada 27.9
15 United States 25.0
17 Japan 23.0
20 Spain 19.8
30 Mexico 4.7
=========================
OECD Average 21.3

Not near as alarmist as he makes it seem.

I agree that our slow speeds are embarassing, but statements like:

"But it’s pathetic that roughly three-quarters of the people in this country don’t have broadband Internet service."

are disingenuous at best, and, as you'll see in the next table, blatantly false.

The fact is that "subscribers per 100 people" is always going to be higher in countries with smaller households (Smaller households mean more households per 100 people, which means more subscribers per 100 people).

More useful statistics would be "households with broadband access", which thankfully is also provided by the OECD data:

Rank Country % households with broadband
1 S. Korea 94.1 (includes 3G)
4 Denmark 69.5
5 Japan 67.6 (includes 3G, but only when tethered)
7 Sweden 66.6
8 Canada 64.0
14 United States 50.8
20 Spain 39.2
30 Mexico 6.1
=========================
OECD Average 48.2

Also, before the obligatory "but the US is different, we are spread out" comment comes, the OECD has data on that too. There is a positive correlation between subscribers and population density, but it is 0.22, so not overwhelming. While correlation (or lack thereof) does not imply (or deny) causation, I'd imagine factors like regulation have much more to do with it than geography.
As I said, I simplified the expression to show all the relevant parts of the pattern in a single function. In a real application, either all the features of the pattern might be inline, or some might be delegated to other functions, or some might be omitted.

Also, you can make it slightly more powerful by wrapping an object around it. I did this recently:

var queue = (function () {
var q = [];
return {
run : function run () {
var fn = q.shift();
if (fn) setTimeout(function () {
fn();
run();
}, 0);
return this;
},
push : function (fn) {
q.push(fn);
return this;
}
};
})();

so you can do stuff like this:

queue.push(
function () {...}
).push(
function(){...}
).start();
Some helpful reminders for learning any programming language, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LearningProgrammingLanguages.
Could someone briefly explain how unschooling works for kids under ten? Do you just leave your five year old on her own, since her life is her own?

I'm not trying to be snarky--we home school our kids (although in a more classical way) and I agree with the assessment that the school system in the U.S. has failed (and I've read Illich and agree with much of what he says).
Men's lifestyle magazines are dropping like ninepins
Downtown San Diego is a long trip for nightlife. Most students probably won't have a car (parking is ~$600), so it'll be over an hour on the 30 each way (150 doesn't run at night). I don't even know how to get to PB by bus. My friends who live there all drive or bike to school.
You don't need either in a pacemaker, though. If you're dynamically allocating memory in a pacemaker, something's wrong.
... and figure out how to deal with allocating and freeing things. Taken together, pointers, and manual memory management are a big chunk to bite off. The syntax isn't the problem, in other words.
That sounds very surprising... these numbers look pretty appalling for memcached... can anyone confirm that this is not simply due to a badly set-up memcached? Or perhaps the author is not using memcached for its intended purpose?

I find it hard to believe that a widespread solution like memcached would be 100 times slower than one of its alternatives.

Also, all those numbers look awfully low.
Well that depends entirely on which theory of gravity you believe in.

I personally like the whole anti-theory about gravity being produced by vacuums, because when you argue it against someone unknowlegable it makes pseudo-sense. However anyone with any clue of physics knows this is the easiest debunked theory in the world. I mean vacuum tube factories would have exploded in anti-gravity force.
NPR makes up about 50% of the podcasts I listen to. I've been able to plug my ipod into my car for 4 years now. I never listen to the radio (music or talk) at all any more.

I mostly listen to Science Friday. They're constantly pushing alternative interaction methods, like second life and twitter. I always figured it was an attempt to engage 'the kids' into science.
Feynman got laid before he started drawing, if I recall his book correctly.
Ask HN: Need a TI-85 calculator?
A while back there was a thread from someone with an old scientific calc who asked if anyone needed it. Quite a few people seemed to express interest and as such, I'm now making the same offer...

While cleaning in preparation for a move, I found an old TI-85 calculator from high school at the bottom of a box. The lid doesn't fit very tightly anymore but the calculator is in perfect working condition and I just cleared the memory.

It's not the most advanced TI in the world but if you're a student in need of one and money is tight, this will definitely get the job done. The similar post I referenced above asked people to make their case in the thread but I don't think it's necessary to ask people recount their plight in a public forum. Please just email me if you need the calc and are having trouble purchasing one on your own. First come, first served -- I'll cover shipping (US please).

I will post an update if and when the calc is spoken for.
1. K&R - an absolute essential. I found myself in your shoes about two years ago, picked this up, and worked through it.

2. "The Unix Programming Environment" (http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice-...) This is a recent find, but covers more application. It's almost a Part 2 of K&R and covers building problems and the Unix signal and file APIs. The examples are in an ancient syntax, but part of the fun is coding them and getting them to compile.

3. "The C Puzzle Book" (http://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Book-Alan-R-Feuer/dp/0201604612) I found this one day at Fry's, and it's fucking awesome. You can effectively learn C using it without a compiler.

Good luck!
A very interesting article, but poorly written. The first paragraph is filled with disjointed thoughts "It's not a story .... Nor is it just the story .... It's also the story". It's not, or it is?

"The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected ...". That's a disagreement.

Don't they have editors for this stuff or do they just publish straight from the author to the website?
C Programming Notes by Steve Summit should also help you get through the K&R, http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/notes/top.html; although, you'll probably get the most benefit from doing the problems/examples from K&R.
I found that learning the basics of assembly was helpful. You can really see what's going on with the stack, what a pointer really is (pointers are really the only tough part about learning C, everything else will be the same old same old if you already know how to program)

This is key advice. Understand hardware first and pointers are obvious, don't and they are (apparently) confounding.
Grants for Informal Science Education are available
Can people please stop submitting about this. It's not interesting, it's not relevant and it's all hype and drama so news companies get higher ratings.
This article is pathological in a fascinating way. I don't mean psychologically; I'm all in favor of effective therapy for non-productive suffering. I mean intellectually. It's a disaster of a hodgepodge. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the reductio ad absurdum that Western intellectuals create out of Eastern spiritual teachings:

For two decades he lectured on the emergence of Western lay Zen, arguing against what he saw as the antiemotional bias of monastic Asian Zen in favor of an approach that integrated psychological experience into meditation practice. But as a pioneer of Zen in America, he had little success practicing what he preached.
http://codepad.org/ does something like that. It seems handy for trying out small bits of code.
Check out The Day I Became an Autodidact http://www.amazon.com/Day-I-Became-Autodidact/dp/0440550130
Brilliant. Thank you all.
It's pretty easy to see how much of the performance drop is protocol overhead since the numbers are there for Tokyo Cabinet / Tyrant over the memcached protocol and not.

This isn't terribly surprising. One is a distributed network protocol, the other is just moving things around in memory.

The poor performance for memcachedb doesn't surprise me a lot. In my tests I've found BDB (which it uses behind the scenes) to be frustratingly slow with writes.
Javascript template engine for users of HTML::Template released on github
What makes you think he's not?
Schools are not designed for the masses. It is designed to satisfy those who are in power and make them look good.

A better system is to go completely private. A real school would be something like "School of Grammatica" and "School of Mathematics" where you know, people learn actual reading, writing and mathematics without having to do 10 god damn standarized tests every year.

It would serve the masses without politicans getting pretenious for "saving the school system".

Then there will be tons of microschool which teaches different careers. You could have a School of Game Programming which might have a class like "Physics Programming" which combine mathematics, programming, and actual physics.

For those that alway want expensive, liberal art education, there's alway universities.
Ask HN: Can software qa skills translate to telecommuting gigs?
Say if somebody had 6+ years of QA experience, primarily on the automation side of it including unit test experience with things like JUnit, what if they wanted to transition into some kind of telecommuting gig? Is this doable? Are there websites specific to finding telecommuting gigs? Say somebody loved testing software, writing scripts for it, and so forth, but just was not crazy about office b.s. like "tps reports" and so forth and wanted to kind of do the work from home on a consultant kind of basis. How might one go about that? Appreciate any thoughts you guys might have.