skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a couple of stories that comes to mind when reading this. The first one has to do with with Picasso while the second one has to do with Golf (well professional sports).

1) The story goes that Picasso was sitting in a Paris café when an admirer approached and asked if he would do a quick sketch on a paper napkin. Picasso politely agreed, swiftly executed the work, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a rather significant amount of money. The admirer was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you a minute to draw this!” “No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years”

2) I was watching Golf the other day and saw how huge the purse was. I think Tiger Woods won over $1million dollars for 4 days worth of work. A lot of people would say that its not fair and that its way too much money. But think about it for a second. This guy started playing golf since he was a kid. Has been playing it every day, hours on end for 35+ more years. He lives, breaths, sleeps Golf. He his Mr. Golf. That $1mil payday is just the embodiment of years of "sacrifice" and enthusiasm for mastering a craft.

I wrote a bit, but the point is exactly what this comic is about. Its not about the money, but about working towards a goal. To find out what the goal is, you have to have "good taste" and know that what you're doing isn't satisfactory. I'm that way with a lot of things, but I'll stick to coding on this one. When I finish writing a module, I stare back at it as if I'm a painter looking at his masterpiece. I scrutinize it and eventually come to a conclusion of whether or not its worthy of pushing to production. Some of my work gets pushed because its "good enough" to do the job to my dismay. Others (a few) are masterpieces to me. Even though the user or project manager doesn't see it, I know that I wrote something special. I guess that's what's drives me forward.

I know I'm not the greatest developer. I don't work at a fortune 500 company. Until recently, I didn't even know what great code looks like, let along UI design. Everyday, I do strive forward because I know that it will drive me crazy if I don't at least "try" to reach that level.

Unfortunately, in this industry (like in most), you can get by being mediocre.
And since when is being a "hardened fanatic" a crime? As long as they're not otherwise engaged in criminally acting that out, who the fuck cares what they think? If there was any actually solid evidence for anything real against them, they wouldn't be in limbo, would they.
Bareku looks very interesting, but what are the benefits over something like a simple Capistrano deploy script?

I have never heard about Ganeti but it also sounds promising.
Not sure if I'm that pessimistic. Check the actual ratings. Google for it, I am glancing at "Live + Same Day Cable News Daily Ratings for Thursday, April 11, 2013" In a country of 400 million people, "1,133 thousands" aka about a million watched fox news. There is the hidden assumption that the million who watch are true believers as opposed to out for a laugh or just filling time or curious what the opposition thinks. But for the sake of argument I'll assume any TV tuned into fox news is a true believer. That means 1.1 million people cannot distinguish between the information diet equivalent of fast food and proper food, but roughly four hundred million can distinguish. Lets assume there are around 10 or so other networks pushing meaningless mind candy. Making it a problem around the two percent range.

Its a narrowcasting thing. Could you make a news station that appeals broadly to maybe 25% of the population, which would be about a hundred times as many as watch fox news? Yes, but from a narrowcasting perspective they've convinced themselves that having 1% of the fans but having them be absolutely rabid fans is "better" for advertising sales or whatever.

The same thinking is killing mass media in general. For example saturday night live appeals intensely to about 2 million hard core fans. The other 398 million in the population will not watch it for free. Does "Survivor" define the american cultural obsession with reality TV? Maybe, but it doesn't define american culture because only 9.38 million bothered to watch last week for free... the other 390 million are uninterested.

Not quite as severe as the obesity epidemic.
Absolutely. I love most of what Sennheiser put out. A friend of mine just got a pair of these [1], and I didn't want to give them back.

[1] HD 598 http://www.sennheiser.com.au/au/home_en.nsf/root/private_hea...

Also, get a subscription to Rdio or Spotify and find some coding playlists. Just search for them. There's heaps on Rdio, and they are specifically made for coding.
in a post imperialist, post empire Europe we've grown beyond needing to swing our dicks around in a pissing contest. Some countries more than others it's true, but generally speaking there are better things to do than spend our time claiming our particular demesne in superior to all others.
Who are you to say what's acceptable for someone else to do with their life? He probably doesn't adhere to the same principles you do (judging by your comments, most people probably don't). Also, it clearly says held since 2002, so not less than 10 years.
Home Cleaning Service Teddle Raises £255K
The British didn't do forced feeding, but I'd hardly say it was great. As well as hunger strikes the prisoners also protested wearing prison uniforms. So the staff didn't empty their toilets. The prisoners smeared their feces on the walls. I'd recommend the film Hunger, it's a bit raw.
Fuckyourcode.com
Proud to be an American.
What kind of design are we talking about?

A programmer does lots of design. She designs APIs, component architectures, network protocols, database schemas, etc. All of these have a great dose of subjectivity in them. Design by committee also has a bad image here.

You are probably talking about graphic and typographic design. What does a designer do?

In my opinion a big part of design activity is communication. As a graphic designer your job is to visualize other peoples vision. A programmer's job is implement other peoples business rules. Not to develop their own. You need to find out about the values, goals, process, and language of your client and maybe even his customers.

Then a designer goes back to his Mac and fires up his Adobe tools for the next iteration. A programmer goes back to her IDE for the next iteration. This is not in a group for either of them.

tl;dr I do not believe the difference is that big
I just did one submission for Startup Threads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3518728) and got us a solid number of signups (around 45).
david, that's pretty obvious. Let's assume that OP asked his/her question regarding to products or services that target HN readers.
Come on, share your stories.
A few interesting names, although while the beach with Branson is fun, he likely has something closer to a desk, and the article ends with a slew of Bloomberg people and a few random names that I sure couldn't place.
KDE Outreach Program for Women
I tried to launch my app marketing tool twice, to no avail. First I posted a link to the site itself (appmarketingtool.com), a few days later to my blog post about it (http://leoncullens.nl/post/2013/04/13/Windows-8-app-marketin...).

Both stories were only upvoted by a friend of mine. I can't figure out why... A lot of submissions that reach the frontpage took only a few days to build/write, I've been working on this with my friend for 2 months.
Recruiter: Do you have any experience with SQL?
Schmuck: No. I have no SQL.
Recruiter: Then put "NoSQL" on your resume.

In all seriousness, I actually agree-- to a point-- with the OP. Employers tend toward a denial mentality. "You can't <X>, because you're not a real <X>." Employees tend toward aspirational claims, at least according to employer suspicion (Theory X). However, many workers (especially programmers) shoot themselves in the foot by buying into this "not a real <X>" nonsense that their bosses shoot at them as an excuse not to think too hard or take employee development seriously. They start to believe in their bosses' negative, limiting opinions of them and get a slave mentality. As an awake person, I say: Fuck That Shit.

You have to be honest, though, especially with yourself. I will certainly describe myself as a "machine learning guy" (I'm averse to the word "expert") on a job interview, but I also know that there is a lot that I have yet to learn. It's at a few months that you get the right to present yourself as "an X guy" on a job interview because everyone does it, and if you grade-deflate yourself you do the world no good, but if you actually believe that you're as knowledgeable as a real expert at that point, then you're delusional.

If you want to call yourself "professional designer" after your app nets you $2.97 (your parents and your grandma) then go ahead, because your bosses-- this is why they are your bosses-- have been using that kind of self-inflation since they were 15 (to pwn girls, while you were studying computers). Just recognize that, in reality, you have a long way to go and there's a lot out there that you haven't learned yet. And if it interests you, then go and learn it.
Oh yeah the USAians really seem to go for flags. In most of Europe, only right wing nationalists and sports fans wave flags.
Show HN: a semantic wiki built with Django/Python
We're working on this side project which allows users to create & edit their academic genealogy. Essentially it is a semantic wiki powered by Django/Python. So far all the basic wiki functions like CRUD, tracking edit history, diff different versions, reverting back to previous version, etc are completed.

Here is a demo: http://phdtree.org/

Would appreciate it if anyone can provide feedback/comments/suggestions. Many thanks!!
Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp.

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/the_obama_gitmo_myth/
I get the same feeling about Google Glass that I got from Segway: cool technology, but who the heck is going to actually use it?
I think your last sentence is completely wrong.

A good enough type system you will be able to express abstractions so powerful that it turns the "straitjacket" into a suit of power armour. Instead of restricting the programmer, a good type system like Haskell's allows you to express your intent and program with certainty that many errors (like forgetting to handle an exception) are simply impossible.

There are also some things that are very cumbersome to write in dynamic languages. For example in Python it is a complete pain to write code that is datastructure-agnostic. A while ago I was working on some code where I had nested dictionaries with lists in them that contained single values and more lists/dictionaries, and found myself wanting to transform all the lists inside the thing in a certain way. In Haskell, this would've been trivial using the fmap function (type f a -> (a -> b) -> f b) which is a generalized map that works for any functor... The python solution ended up being a fragile hack of manual type checks and dispatch, since there is no uniform interface that all the data structures can implement.

I feel like dynamic programming languages are a good solution for prototyping and small programs/modules (eg. UI and scripting systems), but as systems grow larger, the amount of things you have to worry about grows exponentially, and a type system (+ immutability) helps keep it all together by minimizing the amount of parts that a change can affect.
Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system
The entire process of "approving" articles is democratic. The community of users decides what is interesting enough to appear on the front page. If you personally disagree that a particular article should be on the front page, well ... your only recourse is to flag it. If a democratic site is not what you want, then you don't want HN.
It isn't obvious at all. The OP was 13 words (besides "Ask HN"), and the poster has no contribution history on HN. davidw's point is completely relevant.
While I do think natural rights are nonsense, I disagree that property rights are necessarily a government construct. There are other institutions regulating property, with enforcement provided by the civil society.
Clickable: http://phdtree.org/
I've often wondered about the correlation. I went pretty far with chemistry in school, seemed oddly good at it, but fell back on programming.
Actually, there are moderators who can and do kill stories, more or less according to the guidelines ( http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). If a completely democratic site is what you want, you want reddit.
This Page Is Why The Internet Sucks
I didn't downvote you because I didn't agree with you (even though I don't), but because your comment is underspecified, un-argumented, and thus without any value.
A bit of a stupid argument by the blog's author. Marathon, Marathon 2 (1994, 1996) were released originally only for Mac OS, and only later ported to PC. Heck, even Halo was originally supposed to be a Mac only product, before Bungie was bought out by Microsoft.

The economics of making top tier games requires a large platform in order to have some kind of return of investment. Do you make a game that costs 100M or more, and release it on a platform that has 10% of the PC market? If you include the number of consoles on the market, the Mac market percentage drops. So the return on investment is even harder to achieve, and even less acceptable to investors.

But does this mean that Macs don't have good games? No, if you can wait for releases to be ported, then any casual gamer can use a Mac as their primary game machine. It all depends on the type of person one is when it comes to games. The ones who really want to get the most recent games as soon as possible, consoles are the way to go, and not PCs.
I totally agree with you. However, I can easily see how those physicians can justify their actions to themselves. "Do no harm" can be extrapolated in many ways by cruel people suffering from delusion.
Transitional Interfaces, Coded
Your comment is what happens when you let authority be your truth instead of letting truth be your authority.
>we get into it because we have good taste

This is highly disputable. However, this is good advice to those of us (us!) who have it.
Content Parity on the Web
"CSS is easy"
Did you use any other networks to link to the story? Did you tweet the HN url? Or post it to social media? Did you email anyone who you follow/respect and ask them to share their thoughts - with the HN thread linked?
Your make it sound like you just added to HN with a single upvote and hoped it would rise from the noise.
My ideal software project–7values that I believe in…#Agile#Lean#Scrum#Kanban#TDD
I have very similar issues (in fact, I should be working on a mandatory assignment right now). I find that using something like Trello or http://kanbanflow.com, or just a simple notebook, to split up tasks into smaller tasks is a good thing.

I'll have problems getting started (and I still do) doing something without splitting it up as much as I can first, and I also find using a Pomodoro timer is very helpful.

Set a timer for 25 minutes. During those 25 minutes you will be focused and work. When it rings you set it to 5 minutes and have a break, do whatever you want. When it rings you go back to work.

I'm not exactly sure why this helps but having a set amount of time for 'work time' and a set amount of time for 'break time' helps me focus. That way you just avoid going to HN or Reddit and all other things fun during those 25 minutes, and since it's only 25 minutes at a time you get a little reward when you take a break.

After having done like 4-5 of these 25 minute sessions you can take a longer 30 minute break for some food or just relaxing.

I've managed to use this with fairly good success working 6-8 hour days at uni studying for exams.
I enjoy the levity and am fit to do it myself. Is your aversion to it about personal taste or is there something else to it?
You made me realise that it is suspect that they were cheaper to farm at the start. However, it could be argued (and I think it is) that making them cheap at the start encourages early adopters and increases the likelihood of the currency catching on.
I know for a fact that much of these claims are completely wrong and, being told by a detainee, are completely biased.

Detainee's that refuse meals are required to receive their nutrients in liquid form. They have the option to drink this themselves. When they refuse, they are put in the feeding chair which restrains their arms, legs, and waist. It does not restrain a detainees head whatsoever.

When a detainee refuses to drink the liquid themselves, and refuses to go to the restraint chair themselves, they're carried to the chair by a Forced Cell Extraction team. ERF is a term that the detainee's created themselves. There are 6 guards, not 8, and it is for the safety of the detainee, as there is one guard to handle each body part (2 legs, 2 arms, head), and then one at the door to ensure that the detainee does not escape. Every FCE is video taped to ensure that safe and humane practices are being followed.

They do this for this exact reason. Publicity. We wont send them back to Yemen because we don't want their heads to be severed by their Government. No one wants this place to be open. Don't be foolish, America. Don't be gullible, America. We are still the good guys.
Headline-writing has always been an art, and grabbing attention a significant aspect of it. The eyeball / viral / advertising / pageview economy of the web has really taken it several stages too far.

I read The New York Times (which generally stays away from this) and the Economist. I've all but given up on several local news sites which, as their economic underpinnings continue to be knocked out from under them, have devolved into ever more shrill (and banal) headlines. Up until the past year or so they were still somewhat relevant, but I've noticed a marked downturn in quality even in the past few months.
Here is how I answered this question on May 15, 2008, (and several times since) here on Hacker News. Not much has changed because this strategy has always been "old faithful" to me:

* * * * *

The single most important thing I do to "achieve laser focus and concentration" is to work in such a way that I don't need "laser focus and concentration" to get my work done.

This has to be done the night before.

I always quit all online work at least 2 hours before bedtime and print whatever I'm working on.

Then I go into any other room with program listings, blank paper, and pens (especially red!) and plan out all of tomorrow's work.

All analysis, design, and refactoring must be done at this time. I do not allow myself to sleep until the next day's work is laid out. I also do not allow myself to get back onto the computer. The idea is to have a clear "vision" of what I am going to accomplish the next day. The clearer the better.

This does 2 things. First, I think about it all night (maybe even dream about it). Second, I can't wait to get started the next day.

I always wake up and start programming immediately. Once I get going, it's easy to keep going. Any difficulties are probably because I didn't plan well enough the night before.

Not sure if that's the answer you're looking for, but whatever gets the work done...

* * * * *

Original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191199

Also #49 here: http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf
My pick-me-up checklist for when I'm procrastinating too much for comfort:

* Get plenty of sleep. If you're sleepy, take a nap. Go to bed early, wake up early.

* Drink plenty of water.

* Eat well, whatever that means for you (for me its cutting back on sugary things and processed foods).

* Do some exercise.

If you take care of these basics, for me at least, the rest seems to fall into place.
Creating a great product needs time and hard work. This story beautifully illustrates that.

Earlier I used to spend so much time worrying about being perfect that many times I wouldn't even start. It's only now I realize the importance of creating good work every day, even though it may not be the best one.
I've loved these blog posts so far -- they're a great intro to cryptography and force me to think simply.

I'm excited to hear what Carla has to offer!
Amazon's is based on an assumption that one day it will start to take profits, and big ones at that. Expanding into a service sector where it could have large profit margins (selling eBooks is another area) is integral to that.
Since you're here. Could you fix that broken link to Bradford Cross's blog in the original post? You got me interested, but I can't find his blog.
A better way? Easy: what Norway did after Breivik.

If a country is aping the Israelis, it's failed as a democracy.
I have a niche cycling site[1] that I successfully launched[2] (and by that, I mean that I posted a link to it when it didn't have many users) here. By successful, I mean it spent a while on the front page, got 61 upvotes and 78 comments, and my site got about 5000 visits and a hundred or so signups (even though the majority of those did little more than sign up) in the following 48 hours or so.

It's a niche site — it appears that all my users are either competitive cyclists who train using power meters or heart rate monitors, or cyclists with analytical minds who want to get as much out of the data that their bike computers as possible — yet it did fairly well, probably because it appeals to many here, even if they're not potential users themselves.

Oh, and that was the only attempt at "launching" here that I made, and I did nothing more to promote it as a story here than posting the link (I didn't tweet a link or get friends to upvote it or anything like that).

1. http://www.cyclinganalytics.com/

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453967
Show HN: Get a list of the multiplayer games you and your friends have in common
I read his comment as simple sarcasm.
I personally don't put years of experience in technologies on my résumé. Just add a section for projects and list those smallish projects and what languages you used.

As you do more independent projects with given language it becomes more impressive even if it were only 6 months of experience. If you get an interview and anyone asks how long you've been using the language be honest, but don't offer that until they ask. They may not care.
But they're not predicting a single piece of tech, they're predicting the success of a platform, which is really Amazon's commitment and engineering capability. You can't predict what features AWS will have in 2-3 years, but you can predict that they'll take a large chunk of the hosting business and how much that is worth.
Bezos is committed to this, they have the head start and the engineering chops (or they can buy them in) so I'd say it is a fairly good bet.
its pretty startup friendly at $59 a license per user (assuming you don't buy the site license?)