skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My advice isn't for procrastination in general (e.g. putting off paying bills or mowing the lawn), but for that special kind of procrastination that stops you from getting a business or important project going.

Read "The War of Art" by Steven Pressman and internalize its message. You can finish it in a day. In a nutshell, the book describes procrastination and some other vices as embodiments of Resistance, an evil spirit that plagues anyone who tries to do anything worthwhile.

The strategy Pressman outlines for fighting Resistance dovetails nicely with the techniques described in the other book I'd recommend, which is "The Creative Habit" by Twyla Tharp. With respect to procrastination, Tharp talks about recognizing (1) that creative work is still work and (2) the importance of developing solid daily routines and rituals so that you stop treating your work as something you do only when you're "inspired." She more or less adds details to the Pressman's description of the "hard hat mentality" necessary to get anything done.

The hard hat mentality is that you don't procrastinate on your job or wait until you "want" to do it, you just put the hard hat on every day and do the work so that you can get paid (whatever "paid" means for you). You're doing it not because you're inspired or motivated; you're doing it because it's your job. Period.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/04...

http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Habit-Learn-Use-Life/dp/07432...
>The definition of pornography is "sexually explicit pictures, writing or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal"

Which means image processing algorithms to detect "pornography" are doomed to failure, if they are tasked with determining the "purpose" of the image. (Maybe we'll get there someday, but we're many decades away from anything like that, I think.)

What they're actually doing, it looks to me, is making nudity detectors -- which quite correctly flag artistic nudes. The article fails to make this distinction at all.
Here is what worked for me.

Work through, in order,
(1) K & R
(2) C interfaces and Implementations by David Hanson
(3) Deep C Secrets by Peter Van der Linden
(4) Advanced Programming in the Unix environment

Good Luck!
How do you set up SFTP?

You would need to install an SSH server. The Windows typical way to transfer files for administrative use is RDP with reverse maps, network shares if you have a VPN to the server, the more general way might be IIS as an FTP-over-SSL or WebDAV server.

How do you set up a light-weight HTTP server?

Install Lighttpd. But you have IIS, unless you need a lighterweight server you may as well use it.

How do you set up Python + xCGI + Postgres?

Install Postgres and Python for Windows. (NB the free Microsoft database answer is SQL 2008 Express). I don't know xCGI but Python on IIS is possible via various WSGI/CGI/ISAPI interfaces.

Is there some sort of a package manager or a browser for paid server software?

No. There's Add/Remove Windows Componenets in 2003 and Add Features / Add Roles in 2008 for parts supplied with Windows, but nothing central for 3rd party software.

How do you secure it, e.g. what do you use for a server firewall

Windows Firewall, but that will only keep traffic away from closed ports and I am hesitant to trust IIS to the internet. We use dedicated firewall devices with deep packet inspection and AV scanning for all incoming traffic (we also do that for Linux servers).

permission isolation for web-facing software (sandboxing, maybe)?

No sandboxing like SELinux or chroot, but a pretty thorough and integrated permissions system that runs through the filesystem, ASP.Net/IIS, SQL server, registry, and more. Don't run web-facing software as administrative users, for instance.

Where is the configuration kept

Typically, the registry (start -> regedit). Sometimes editable directly, but not much fun. Frequently configuration of individual components is scriptable.

and the logs written?

IIS, FTP, SMTP logs go in c:\windows\system32\logfiles, other programs log to wherever you configure them or with general system logs into the Eventlog (proprietary format files). Use Event Viewer to get at them (terrible program in 2003, improved in 2008) or something like psloglist from SysInternals.

Where is the documentation for all of the above?
Everywhere. Start -> Help, or press F1 in most of the system management consoles for a lot of text. Lots more on http://www.microsoft.com and http://technet.microsoft.com

Or more generally -- how do I make it all work?

Why have you been given a Windows server that you know nothing about that appears to have no software on it? What is it and what's it for? If you want SFTP, Python, Postgres, lighttpd, you may as well format it and install Linux really.

Come back when you want an office of desktop computers with central logon, policies, centralised sharable email calendar and contacts, email available on the web and Windows Mobile, shared files and folders with granular permissions, software install and desktop lockdown policies, local file caches for offline laptops, running software that everyone in your office is familiar with and can read and write Office documents that everyone you contact can use. That's where Windows/Exchange(/Sharepoint/etc) strenghs show up, and if you're not doing that sort of thing then there's not much point using Windows Server.
No, actually they're markov chains. Thanks for the condescension though.
NPR is thriving because it manages to be the best information source in any medium. It's not the economist, but it's informative, entertaining, cultured yet very humane. The Saturday programming alone forces me out of bed early; Weekend Edition, Car Talk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, This American Life, Studio 360, Market Place, On the Media and All Things Considered. You just can't find that anywhere.

TV and regular media have no chance. Commercial FM radio is just obnoxious and loud. I'm shocked and offended every time I get my car back from a borrowing relative and have the preset on some loud annoying jockey. American television .. best left unsubscribed to. Its best hours are 5PM to 9PM of the Sunday Fox programming; when it shows animated shows, which can now easily be watched on Hulu.

For those of you who read the Economist, I can recommend Mother Jones to balance out the right-wing nuttjobery that pervades the otherwise excellent publication.
The article was measuring the speed of random writes and counter updates. While I am sure Facebook can get several hundred thousand read operations per second, they are not getting that many write operations.
Uberman's sleep schedule
The linked article is testing on one machine where Facebook has a very large cluster. He tests all of them on the same machine so it's the relative performance that matters in this case.
google map just show the location. It will be cool that it also showe the timeline so people will know how fast it spread...
Is someone in an alternate universe? From Friday's NY Times:

"In a new round of cost-cutting, National Public Radio said it would lay off 13 employees, eliminate contributions to employee retirement accounts for the rest of fiscal 2009 and impose five days of furloughs for all employees before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30."

No one--not even NPR can monetize their audience to pay for programming. Programs like "All Things Considered" and "Prairie Home Companion" are dependent on an expensive infrastructure and staff.

I work in 'old media' and the problem for businesses and employees alike is an eyeball on the Internet is worth less money than an eyeball on TV or ears on radio. As we move people to our websites we do so at our own peril. We can afford to produce less for an Internet than TV viewer.

I am no Rupert Murdoch fan, but he put it best when he pointed out ad space on the Internet is unlimited. Therefore there will always be downward pressure on advertising rates.

In the short term this isn't a big deal for end users. In the long run people will realize much of the news and entertainment programming we all enjoy (not all and not necessarily the best) will no longer be produced.
You're being a prescriptivist: "Pornography" (and any other word) means whatever we mutually understand it to mean in the aid of communication. The article is correct in that Google's "obscene content filter" would, in fact, filter out the full Playboy image of Lena.
Quoting Wikipedia is not respectable in an academic context because you are not quoting a primary source, or even a secondary source. You are typically quoting a tertiary or quaternary source. If the article is properly cited, however, it is not difficult to simply quote the original citation.
I have Steele and Harbison's "C: A Reference Manual", and _is_ very good, but probably not for _learning_ C. It does have very good explanations of some under-the-hood things that I haven't found elsewhere. It is also a good reference on the C std library, and does a good job at pointing out possible incompatibilities between ISO C, `traditional' C, and vendor-specific dialects. One of the things that I have always found confusing about C is that code can be written in several ways, depending on how lax the compiler is about enforcing different versions of the C standard.
Why should they bother? Why take this more personally than when people spread false information through other means?
Youtube Hack: Download Videos in High Definition or High Quality
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Then perhaps you should present it as an unsubstantiated claim, and not a fact.
FYI, CS107 has changed considerably this year, so the course description on the current course site is a bit different from what you'll find on Academic Earth.

http://academicearth.org/courses/programming-paradigms
Indeed: I just read Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs, and it's depressing.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Age-Ahead-Jane-Jacobs/dp/14000623...
I've come to believe that online distractions are legitimately addictive in the same way that gambling is addictive. I.e. a behavior that becomes all-encompassing to the point where it negatively affects the rest of your life.

I say this because I used to think I was a major procrastinator and looked for all manner of tips and tricks to solve the problem. But I was trying to solve the wrong problem. if I turn off the internet entirely, I have no problem at all doing what I want to do during the day.

However, if the internet is on, i can get into states where I not only don't do any of the work I need to do, I don't leave the house, I don't hang out with friends, I forget to eat, etc.

I realized my online behavior was a bigger issue when I started screwing up dates because I was doing something on the internet. Blowing off a boring work task to watch youtube videos is one thing, but when I started missing out on getting laid because I was refreshing HN and getting sucked into a Wikipedia vortex, it realized I had a real problem.

So, maybe you're not really procrastinating, maybe you're addicted to the internet. Maybe not, but it is something to consider.
Yes, this is true, but I still think it's a better comparison.

Part of what I was getting at is the analogy isn't perfect because each have their own unique characteristics. We can make a mapping from one to the other, but we probably won't learn anything from it.
Is everyone under the mistaken impression that a human is primarily a reasoning animal? Much of what appears to be "reason" is pattern recognition with no significant cognition backing it up. Don't think you're immune either. We all do a lot of things that if questioned closely is based on presuppositions that aren't ultimately as justifiable as we think.
You may want to check out this guys work: http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=053007-1 "heat -> sound -> electricity"
The Processing.JS port is amazing in and of itself, but also check out the portfolio of the guy who designed the site, Alistair MacDonald. You can see an index of his Processing experiments here:http://www.hyper-metrix.com/#Processing. You can also follow him on Twitter @F1LT3R. Very interesting work.
the thing not being taught in school isn't any basic fact, but critical thinking skills. I firmly believe from all my time as a tutor that there is a window in childhood during which children need certain stimulation to pick up these skills, and much like language if this window is missed it becomes much harder to train them later in life.
"Race" is basically an archaic, outdated and inaccurate cultural construct and taxonomic concept. It resulted from perceived differences due to biological traits, cultural differences and self-identification. For a long time there were attempts to keep it in the scientific domain, but it's clear now that it's really just an archaic classification system that people relied on before modern science (racial classification does not accurately reflect human genetic variation, often quite the opposite) and widespread contact with disparate population groups.
An internet oldie. Here's another one:

"Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

-- Robert Heinlein

Much 'education', classroom and otherwise, falls into this category. Not to mention that much of it is done by people who can't sing, anyway, or are teaching atonal "music".

And the consequences are not tragic, either. Does anyone have scientific proof of the contrary ?

(No, I'm not a drop-out - that's why I know ;-)

P.S. nazgulnarsil nailed it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580529 ). Neatly put, sir.
I just finished an interview circuit for summer internships with six or seven different companies (Fog Creek, Google, some YC startups... other big names here).

The companies in my sampling space definitely were not "filter[ing] out the really bad engineers." It wasn't discussion about hashtables or pointers. They were basically asking me to write actual code over the phone. I was asked to explain how to sort four million items in linear time from a network stream, because there wasn't enough memory to hold the input. I was asked to prove a lower-bound on O-complexity for comparison sorts (over the phone). Several companies asked me to actually implement a hash table, including designing the associated hashing algorithm (really good ones involve some hard prime number math. It's the sort of thing you need math textbooks for).

This is all very interesting, of course, but not really very useful. For one thing, I was not being hired to foster interesting discussion over the lunch table, but rather to write good code--yet these sorts of questions were clearly normal lunch faire. Nobody asked me about how to properly document code, evaluate design patterns--and worst of all, very few companies actually had me write any code to speak of. It was assumed that if I could explain an algorithm, I could write it, which I don't think is strictly true.

In any case, there appears to be some sort of deadlock condition inside my head--the part of my brain that explains an algorithm cannot function at the precise same moment as the part that invents such an algorithm. So while I write great code, I often struggle with phone screens (either I sit in silence for a minute or two to think, or I start spouting off tautologies to give my mind a chance to work). In the real world, it's perfectly acceptable to think before you code, but it comes back to haunt you in phone interviews.

Even more troubling to me is that I have a pretty extensive list of projects on my resume (web stuff, OSS stuff, etc.) and nobody (NOBODY) actually looked at any of the published code I've written. If I was hiring someone who had put OSS code on his resume, the first thing I would do is checkout the source and poke around, but I guess asking constant-time-sort questions in rapid succession is more fun than doing actual work.

If the companies hadn't made me an offer after two or three phone interviews (maybe half?), I told them thanks but no thanks when they tried to schedule more. I looked the hardest at the companies who had me write and e-mail them actual code, which I had time to carefully contemplate, after which the "interview" was largely a formality.
How To be a Cyberwar Expert
Your idea of an all-private school system might indeed be better, if only because the current one has such severe shortcomings.

But there are benefits of education that just won't be incentivized at all in a market model, especially in whatever option the market makes available for people with lower incomes. Remember that the existing system was designed by big business in the first place, to turn out docile workers for German industry.

I'm not sure what the right model is, but I don't think it's market-centric or parent-centric. It has to be learner-centric.
>What do I have to lose by asking?

The spirit of a go-getter! Rock on man, good luck!
Swine Flu Spreads Panic Over The Web
And of course, try not to use "anti-bacterial" soap. It won't help against a virus, and if anything you are simply selecting for those strains of bacteria that have that extra edge.
"If you don’t know anything about the science, ask someone who does, or check in Wikipedia. (It’s not infallible, but it’s a lot better than the New York Times."

This, in an article about the spread of false rumors.
There is a more universal way to save any flash movie.

If you're on a linux box with Firefox, let the youtube movie buffer all the way from beginning to end.

Then look in for a /tmp/Flash???????? (use the timestamp or mplayer to figure out which file is the correct movie file). Move this file somewhere else.

Use mencoder or something to convert it another format if you wish (or leave it as is, mplayer or xine should be able to directly play it)
Is this book free now? If not, you should kill that link.
The curse of the entrepreneur: The more successful you are the less satisfied you get.
This is news? We've had youtube-dl (http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/) and clive (http://clive.sourceforge.net/) for ages. I even wrote LuckyTubes (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~swolchok/luckytubes/) which downloads videos and then rips the mp3s using ffmpeg.
http://shell.appspot.com/ for python

http://ironpython.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Silverli... - for interactive shell for IronPython and IronRuby in Silverlight.
Well, I have had a similar problem. I haven't beaten it but here are some things I have found helps:

1) Exercise: spending time going running or cycling helps relax and really makes you feel like you have more energy for other things.

2) Being Organised: When you are organised you know what has to be done by when and what you can start working on right now. I find this lowers the amount of energy required to get started. A TODO list plus calender are probably enough but more high powered systems like GTD also might be worth considering.

3) Embrace your fears, create safety: In my experience this is the root cause of procrastination. In my case it is the fear of failure, so we try to avoid the experience temporarily be engaging in other activities that don't remind us of our fear. This is covered in "The Now Habit", in which is called "creating safety". You might also might consider looking at something called "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" which provides strategies for accepting which is aimed at overcoming "experiential avoidance". There is a good self help workbook "Get out of your mind and into your life".

4) Internet blocker: I was unhappy with with Leechblock as its approach was a bit authoritarian. I wrote a firefox extention that made me type in "this browsing is for the purpose of completing my degree" or "i have worked hard and deserve a break", which unlocks the internet for 20 minutes. I can still browse the internet as much as I want but this helps remind me that some sorts of browsing can wait. It helps but I still don't win constantly (right now for instance).

5) Time off, sharpen the saw, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. You could combine this with 1) and take up a sport, running, cycling, yoga, tai chi, etc. "The Now Habit" recommends scheduling free time to look forward to after your work is done.
Agreed. I think there should be multiple ways of actually learning a subject that a student/parents can choose from, but that there should be a standard obviously for evaluating that learning. The problem with this kind of system is that a tremendous amount of responsibility is put on the child and parents who may or not comply with what he/she is expected to do.
Read "The Path of Least Resistance." It's not about procrastination, but I assure you, it will change your life, in a small but critical way.

The other books scratch the surface, vainly trying to solve the problem at the level of the behavior. They're like slapping bandaids on a stab wound.

But the Path attacks it at the next lower level, just like that quote from Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
It'd be nice to see how many flags the article has had. At least then we know if it's had 100 flags and the admins have just ignored them, or if no one else has flagged.

Some sort of transparency into how articles like this stay around so long might improve things.
Thermal Imaging for Energy Efficiency
Learn C at Harvard (virtually) for free:

http://tinyapps.org/weblog/misc/200904120715_learn_c_for_fre...
I actually picked up and then put down a good looking book on Unix systems programming either by Stevens, or by someone who worked very closely with him and wrote an updated version. I think I'll scream off to the book store and track it down.
How Much Money is This Business Going to Make? - 4 Pitfalls to Avoid
They still don't use peer-to-peer sharing. Every now and then Ira Glass will plead with podcast listeners to fund the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bandwidth that This American Life costs. I emailed them once about why they didn't simply send the cost of this down to zero by going peer-to-peer, and they said they'd looked into it (and didn't supply further details).

Possibly there would be problems tracking downloads for sponsors. Or, maybe it's the structure of how pledge drives work, where a breakout show like TAL helps fund the entire station.
NASA may move up Hubble repair mission by 1 day
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA may move up its final trip to the Hubble Space Telescope by one day.

Space shuttle Atlantis could blast off with its telescope repair crew as early as May 11th, if the Hubble team can complete all its flight preparations in time. NASA wants to have extra time to get the mission off, before having to get in line behind the Air Force. A military operation planned for mid-May would delay the shuttle launch by more than a week.

Hubble program manager Preston Burch says he'll know better in a week if his team can make a launch on the 11th. Liftoff has been targeted for May 12th.