skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what exactly would trick the brain into not feeling mental fatigue?

Switching subject matters that you are working on is great for relieving mental fatigue. That was my study trick in college: whenever I found my mind wandering while doing homework for one subject, I would switch to another subject. I had read somewhere some research finding that mental fatigue is largely subject-specific, and that seems to be born out by my experience.

In the hacker context, if coding is going hard, switch to business promotion for a while, or design, or whatever other task you perform in your start-up. Advise your co-founder to switch whenever one task seems too fatiguing.
I'm doing it right here. (I should clarify that you don't need to actually use another tab.)
Increasing the coolness factor: those 200 lines of code parse the textual RFC header diagrams to learn the format of TCP/IP datagrams.

Decreasing the coolness factor: it's not actually TCP (calling this protocol --- which lacks flow control and congestion avoidance --- TCP is like calling those fiberglass kit cars in the back of sports car magazines "Ferraris").
Apple is heavily embracing the site takeover ads, but I don't think it merits any attention, it's advertising and not really innovation even, these sort of ads have existed for years.
true. but i would love to see the community work with this, to keep the quality up.
but at the same time, i'd consider myself anti-over-moderation, and optimistic enough to wish for self-government (through social interaction). though not to appear too much the commie-pinko-leftist...
JWZ, on Garbage Collection
Too many rounded corners! There's no law against right angles, and rounded corners on top of rounded corners make for "soft" boundaries.

For example, look at the first screenshot. Large round buttons. Above that, large round header (or something). Above that? Small round tab (title bar?). Those elements are all so confusing that Palm is forced to use colors and gradients to distinguish them (the awkward hard grey fill on the header and the "fade into nothingness" alpha of the title bar).

Worse? Look at what happens when you scroll that form up a little in screenshot #2. What is going on here? It turns out it's not the header that has the round corners. Those corners are some sort of mask we're viewing the form through. Not only is this effect completely divorced from any physical metaphor we may be familiar with, but also ensures anything that's just below the title bar gets rounded. If it happens to be the rounded frameset containing rounded buttons and round switches that we see a little lower in the screenshot... well, that's going to be a tiring interface to mentally parse.

They aped the glitz of the iPhone's design, but forgot to look for (or perhaps discounted the existence of) any reason behind it. The result is a beautifully shaded mess.
Yes, it works. Click on link, open in new tab and you can reply just fine.
It looks a little strange to have no replies on the comment at the bottom of the screen (especially given the 'link' feature).

Perhaps we could keep the 'link' exception, but just incorporate its use into the flagging algorithm (e.g. people who use it a lot get treated as if every comment they made has been flagged X times).
Writing code is an act of communication. Your code must communicate clearly to the compiler. If you're really a rock-star coder, your code should communicate clearly to the next coder who comes along and has to maintain it.
Phishing Attack Underway At Facebook. Don’t Sign In To Fbaction.net
The $100bn number was an empirical observation.

There is a limit on the dollar price of wealth created - the supply of dollars. More precisely, the total returns to VC investment from a given cohort is equal to nominal GDP times the portion of GDP that is the profit from companies in that cohort. Both of those numbers have soft and hard limits to them.

Total wealth creation is indeed unlimited. But that shows up as increased purchasing power of dollars, not necessarily a higher return in dollars ( and it's the latter that matters from an investment perspective).
Harvard Posts The Wolfram Alpha Preview Video (1h45m)  Without A Single Shot Of The Service
In case you find yourself in C++: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_38_0/doc/html/boost_units.ht...
That's an easy workaround.
(Note: I'm the author of the linked-to article.)

Why would I take 500 photos? Because I'm fascinated by plants and gardening. For my vacation, I spent a few days visiting some of the world's premier gardens, both to enjoy myself and to learn as much as I could. As you might expect, gardens like that display hundreds of new (to me) plant varieties and treatments and, for each I wanted to study, I took several photographs to capture its interesting characteristics.

While it might sound strange, having my camera helped me see better. It reminded me to slow down and examine the different parts of each plant, to look carefully for the traits that separated one plant from its peers, and to consider how I could show my friends each plant in a way that would let them see what I thought was interesting about it.

I have found that sometimes the best way to see is to get behind a camera.

Cheers. --Tom

P.S. One additional benefit of taking a camera to a horticultural garden is that you can photograph plant tags to record botanical information about the cultivars on display. With a good zoom lens, you can even capture the tags on plants that are in restricted or otherwise unreachable areas. Very useful.
Can I write a recommendation engine for HN?

Simple item-based (hackers who upvoted this article also upvoted...) and/or user-based (hackers who upvoted similar articles to you, upvoted ... ) recommendations would be cool to see on HN, possibly as a way to access (relatively) older content that one might have missed. this assumes people are actually away from the site long enough to miss something -- unlikely. addicts!
You're both right!

Obviously manual memory management is very dangerous and straight up not for the average programmer.

But if you look thorough GC code by great hackers. You'll notice a style that looks almost like free/malloc in that they take deliberate care to make life easy for the GC.

And on the other hand, programmers who are completely oblivious to how memory works, often write code which can confuse even the best GC so much that you essentially end up with a big memory leak. Strictly speaking the memory isn't leaking, the GC just can't quite dare clean it up.

The lesson is, even the best VM and GC won't make bad programmers into good ones.
A little side-note: Many people who try active dynamic meditation for the first time, i.e. deep, fast, chaotic breathing through your nose, feel an urge to vomit after just a few minutes. I've had it on a number of occasions. I know it's different from a runners urge to vomit, but ones mind/CNS certainly play a lot of tricks as well.
I don't think the answer is for you to convince your parents to buy you a new one. Your paradigm needs to change to begin focusing on 'how can I get a new chair?' In which an option is get your parents to buy you one, but the more valuable options are in looking for ways to leverage your skills.

You can make a deal with someone to barter services. You can work to earn money and buy one on your own. You can contact chair manufacturers and request one to demo and review on your blog. You can go dumpster diving. You can find businesses going out of business and selling their office furniture.

I don't think you're doing yourself a favor by asking for how to be convincing, the problem you need to solve isn't being convincing, it's how to acquire the chair.

If you're still not convinced, here are some ways to get your parents: Have them sit in the chair for dinner and see if they find it as uncomfortable. Do a high quality presentation of pros/cons to you having a new chair, don't be silly make it serious. Look for a financial barter. Yard work. Chores above and beyond normal, etc.
Another clever idea is to add delays to troublemakers' site-browsing experience. Not my idea, I picked it up somewhere.

Not that it was added according to the post, but I am just saying that it is clever. :)
WOW it seems really surprising to me that some pr0n images on some presentation has got 124 comments from people. This doesn't seem good for HN. I think it will be better to talk about some technical issue than this.

Anybody downvoting this, can you just clearly explain to me why what I have stated needs downvoting ( or why I am wrong ... please !! )
As you guys have discovered, the restriction is in the code that generates the reply links, not the code that receives the replies. I'm hoping this will suffice.
I think FW's mathematical approach probably is flawed, but I think underlying it there might be something of interest. I read it as: the creation of wealth by new ventures requires resources, which can be split into two types: funds, and everything else. The two resources need to be present at a certain (range of) ratio(s). There is a finite supply of the 'everything else' (e.g. people who thrive in a start-up environment, consumer willingness to adopt new things, etc), therefore the demand for funds is finite, i.e. VC is not a (infinitely) scalable asset class. That's a theoretical argument, and you might well say, "fine in theory, but in practice we're nowhere near hitting the limit of supply of everything else". Implicitly he seems to be suggesting that we are (via his assertion that total exit values is fixed) - that seem like the wrong way to address the 'limit of supply question' (because it looks at outputs, not inputs), but I think the limit question is still a valid one to ask. Personally, I really don't know whether we're anywhere near the 'limit of supply of everything else', but I hope not. Would love to hear what others think on this question..
I'd prefer to be able to enter my comment as soon as I can think of it, but do not have it show for other people until the time is up.
A-ha! Another racist and/or religiously intolerant character just downmodded me . . . unbelievable.

Well, here's the thing folks: HACKERS simply don't do that . . . there are way too many people here that simply don't belong here, and need to scram like pronto.

Edit in reply to comment below:

Mayhaps I should have stated that I disapprove of its tenets of violence, among many other aspects of it, instead of saying I am not tolerant of it. Since I refuse to act (such as downmodding you or anyone who disagrees with me) on my opinion I guess I am tolerant of it in spite of the sheer loathing I feel for it and its practitioners.

Anyway, I hereby leave the discussion, any who want to take advantage of this go ahead and ridicule yourselves.
Except that the point of this article is that this "second wall" is in the brain, and not in the muscles.
I'm skeptical of the exponential delay -- seems like another way of saying "if you're in a drawn-out conversation with somebody, take it somewhere else because you're boring us"

Which then limits your options for participating in a controversial subject to a) doing nothing, and b) making some grand overarching statement and not caring what comes after it.

Neither of these seem to add to the site.

I understand the desire to prevent emotions from overwhelming posters, but geez, sounds like throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I've found that if both sides are honest and stick to an intelligent conversation, a lot of times you can learn a lot by the time you're about 7 levels in. Most of the time you learn that the two sides, while posturing, aren't really that far apart.

I like deep threads every now and then. Shows me how people are thinking. Shows how they react on their feet. Shows the depth of their position (or lack thereof). Teaches respect for each other and community values.

Flamewars? Not so much. But HN hasn't exactly been a nest of flame-waring, at least as far as I can see. There are heated discussions, they blow over, then life moves on.

But hey, not my call. I hope this works out the way you want, Paul! I'm always willing to see how an experiment works out. After all, I was one of the original orange members. (or was it red?) : )
As a rule I only buy frozen vegetables as they don't get sprayed with preservations to stay pretty in the store.
Rtm just made a couple changes to Arc's internals that have made the site visibly faster.

I was just reading the wikipedia page on Arc yesterday and it talks about an unofficial fork of Arc which came about because of a perception of slow development in the official branch.

How are those two branches playing these days? Is there any cross-pollination of code?
Flight Control (#1 paid app) iPhone Game Sales Numbers
iPhone App Development Notes from Bill Clementson
>> " Would you leave the conference thinking that the industry was equally representative and welcoming of males than females?"

No. I'd recognize that most people were women, and women like 'Women stuff'. :/

You gotta cater to the majority.
Learning from StackOverflow.com
There are no strategic similarities in the Lane's Gift case; in that case that i can see, so you should elaborate on what you mean.

Google did what all class action defendants try to do: retain control over the payment of monies (in LG)...Here... they transferred that right to the Guild in exchange for the rights to orphan works. Google tried to make the class as broad as possible so that it would be binding on as many authors as possible, which all Ds do in every class action.

It's important to note that all the LG members were already Google customers; here, most of the class members have no prior relationship with Google. It's also important to note that the transfer of rights contemplated by this settlement is not possible via a class action (at least, not on behalf of absent members); see the Ars Technica article for more on that.
The Art of Selling Your Firm
"Am I tolerant of all other religions other than Islam? Yes."

I think people might find this somewhat offensive. Islam is a diverse religion spread over all parts of the globe. Your comment seems to dismiss it entirely.
Most universities provide XP and Vista to their students via the university's software download repository.
Some things take a long time to "rot", like dried rice and beans.
That's an exact thing though. It's instructions. Map reading. It's not the same thing...

Perhaps one of the reasons that there are more male coders is the same reason that in general men are better at map reading than women.

Once you start stating things like this though you run the risk of people getting offended. The fact is though, men and women are very different creatures, often suited to very different jobs.
Unix To PowerShell - Find
The exponential delay on the "reply" link's appearance means that sometimes the link is sometimes not present on the page. I believe that this reduces the ease with which someone can scan a thread, because it changes the layout and spacing of comments later in the thread.

My suggestion is that rather than not displaying the reply link, display greyed out text in its place that reads "reply", with hover text explaining why you cannot currently click it.
The VC Industry Is Too Fat and the Exits Are Too Thin
I started using Linux in 94, mostly as a way of riding out the dark ages when operating system diversity all but vanished from the face of the earth. I'm a developer, and my primary development system was several years old, running Debian ('unstable' branch). I loved it; I was good at it.

In 2006 I changed jobs and was fortunate enough to get a quad-core MacPro to work with. By that time I had already been an OSX user at home since Panther came out. Before Linux, I had the good fortune of being exposed to Nextstep on x86, PA-RISC, and even a SPARC 'tadpole' laptop. (Noisy beast!)

I don't miss using Linux, although I still love it. It has its own set of hassles. Most things do.

I respect this guy's choices. Obviously he feels the need to vent, and that's what the internet is for.
I'm thinking this would significantly affect the effectiveness of this new feature. Maybe we'd get some flamewar thread depth transferred into breadth but otherwise have about the same quantity of flame comments?
I think the point is that this mechanism lets users cool their heads before they type away something silly on the heat of the moment.
Thank you for the comments. I am working toward a better look and feel but I now recognize that I am not a graphics designer.

The coupons and stuff are from the advertisers. I can’t control what they send in any way. The real value was in the fact that 75% of the sale of the mailing list was distributed back to the people on that list. The other benefit is that you get the information of who is purchasing that information.

The model I am trying to put forward is where the people are in charge of the information that is traded about them.
Virginia Tech professor, WWII code-breaker Irving Good dies
And this was written before Java's garbage collector was even good.
Another option you may want to check out is expresswayvideo.com. This is flash-based video, audio and text chat software. The interface is made in Adobe Flex, which makes it different than some of the other options listed on this blog. Another nice thing about it is you can buy the license outright, so it is ideal if you are starting a video chat business yourself, or just want to install it on your website with no usage restrictions.
In principle we ought to be able to treat width and height as two separate subtypes of some numeric type and have the compiler generate an error if we add them together. But unfortunately today's common languages like C and Java don't support that.

Here is the original Hungarian notation article by Charles Simonyi.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260976.aspx
There is one constant: widespread paranoia, justified or otherwise, about the quality of the site and alleged degradation. This since approximately day 1.
And the point to teaching binary trees and linked lists is to teach you how things are structured under the hood...
Promotional Air fresheners 
I gave my companies promotional air fresheners to all of my friends. Free marketingm, why not.
This text is more than 10 years old (1998).

Are you just indirectly polling if there is still controversy about GC?
How to get a decent paying job, for a high school student in a Latin American third world country?
Step 1. Learn <some activity>.

Step 2. Perform <some activity> in return for cash.

Step 3. Purchase chair of dreams.

At any rate, your parents aren't the answer.

I know this will probably enrage some ergonomics hacker, but I actually prefer wood chairs with straight backs over anything fancy (I sit up straight even in nice chairs, so there doesn't seem to be too much benefit...). You could get one at goodwill (or similar) or a restaurant supply store for a few bucks.

Don't sit on the ground or the couch for long periods, though. You could damage your spine. Some people like standing desks too, have you given that a try? Maybe it would work long enough to earn the money for your chair.
The local fix is nice, but I would be tempted to offer a solution for all code that does the same thing -- put a big chunk of GC-opaque data on the stack. It might take the form of informing the garbage collector: skip this range.
Are you just indirectly polling if there is still controversy about GC?

There is, apparently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585094
I sometimes try to acquire too much knowledge at once and don't really get anything done of what should be priorities as a result.
I follow you, but what I was talking about with regards to unconscious competence is exactly what makes that "nagging 1%" totally irrelevant, case in point, upgraded an 8.10 system to 9.04 today, didn't boot, remembered something about grub switching to a different format for it's root line, edited the boot line in the grub interface, sure enough it was UUID based, switched it to hd0,2 based, worked instantly, time elapsed < 20 seconds.

This is globally applicable to any problem I run into now, because I have those unconscious competences built up from dealing with thousands upon thousands of tiny issues like this in the past, I no longer even consciously see them unless I look hard for them. Thus, taking care of those problems for me is not something I find very valuable.

In the same way, I've trained myself to stick to hardware I know doesn't suck for Linux, avoid ATI like the plague, make sure that all the devices I'm going to be using work before I fork over cash for them, etc. So right there there's a bunch of issues I don't even come across like your multi monitor issue because I have taken measures to offset them appropriately.

As in the original argument, you could indeed argue that such things are a waste of time and it's a lot easier to just pay some other company a premium to handle it all for you, and thus it makes sense for platforms like OS X to exist and thrive, but it still doesn't negate my original point, you've just evolved away from being in the same group of users as I am into another one altogether. And that is of course totally fine, but just serves to reinforce the original point even more.

Thanks for the reference about scratch, that looks kind of interesting, if I ever find myself having to teach I can definitely see a use case for something like that.
I just assumed it was a bug... You can just click on [link] and then comment still right?
That sounds overblown to me, too. This presentation doesn't make me think less of female developers.

But, it doesn't matter what I think, because I'm a dude.

I don't have to come to work and feel marginalized by this slideshow. It doesn't matter if the slideshow makes people think about female hackers differently; what matters is whether female hackers feel alienated by the slideshow on a basis of gender.

I like to think that the hacker community is equal-opportunity. It is (or should be) a meritocracy. Unless things like gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. are hacker merits, shouldn't we be opposed to alienating minority groups?
if the university wants to use only certain tools, they can provide them

If you don't want to buy the tools needed to take the class, then don't take the class. Universities don't provide free textbooks, for example.

Of course, it would be better if the university provided the required tools or offered more flexibility, but I agree with the parent poster that this is not an interesting subject.
Exactly.

Let's say I'm really mad at your comment you just wrote. Really mad.

So the little "reply" button isn't showing up.

Do I a) stop being angry because a little button is disabled or b) find some other way to vent online?

I'm voting for b. And if you're going to vent anyway, I'd rather you nest it. That's what nested comments are for, anyway -- stuff that gets more and more detailed about a particular conversation.