skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can get a lot of the same data (as seen in the examples) with libpfm4 (http://perfmon2.sourceforge.net/). CPU Performance counters can give you a lot of this data with much lower run-time overhead, and a lot less work.

What's the preferred way of using libpfm4? I've ended up using it's sample program as a way to convert from readable counter names to hex to put into a perf command line. I've found several defunct patches to give perf this functionality directly, and am confused why this seemingly essential functionality is left out.

What I'd like is the ability to measure just sections of code, and access to all available counters without needing to copy-and-paste hex. I'm getting the sense that perf is not the tool for this:

http://lwn.net/Articles/441209/

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-perf-users@vger.kernel.org...

Is Likwid a viable option? https://code.google.com/p/likwid/
American Exceptionalism.
In the UK at least it's continuing to do harm for the US government reputation every time the media bring it up, or worse yet, bring up the fact that there are British citizens still there whom the British government wants to repatriate yet the US won't release. The majority of the British citizens who have formerly been in there have made front-page news (at least in the UK) every time any have been released.
> You don't need funding. Just send them home.

They would immediately try take legal action against the American administration through any and every international court available. Having been detained without sufficient evidence there is a case to answer, the US and their cohorts (let us not forget that several governments including ours in the UK have been shown to be complicit in rendition actions that deliberately circumvented international law) can't try ignore the issue with the "enemy combatants" and other such reasons without looking like complete hypocrites given how loud they shout when someone they care to defend is detained without what they consider to be sufficient evidence (Iran holding several naval officers for instance). Even more embarrassing: some of the people they are refusing to let go home to face/demand their own country's justice are American - they don't even want their own legal system anywhere near this.

tl;dr: Just letting them go would certainly not be cost free, financially or in terms of local and/or international reputation.
I completely agree with this. Not only is blogging a great exercise for getting you in a routine of committing to something it can eventually lead to bigger things like job opportunities, author offers and money via affiliate links.

I ran a blog that had low readership for about a year and a half, I would write everyday and then all of a sudden I started ranking for common keywords and the traffic started flowing. I then put up some CPA links for various things and made $2000 one month from those survey popups (done tastefully). I eventually shut the blog down because I wanted to do something else, but it proves that big things grow from the littlest of seeds.
Correlation doesn't have to imply causation in order to give you an accurate prediction.
The secret to dramatically increasing conversions from your beta
It is like 37 trades pers sec max which is still pathetic.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cc72b/the_maximum_...
Diagrams uses (#) for this.
Those have been the 2 major products that use it for like 2 years.

One is a database load balancer (in YT), not the most essential or irreplaceable piece of infrastructure (ie. they can write it in another language whenever they want if the need arises without messing other stuff)

and the other is a services that was not updated anymore, and was left to die, before someone from the Go team asked and re-wrote it in Go. It's not even the full download service, just a part of it IIRC.
News is useful for exactly one reason: to have something to chat about. Don't underestimate that. You may have no interest in NK, Beckham, sports, the stock market or other stuff that frequents the news, but having something to talk about with people around you is important.
Designing Open Source
I too have learned a lot from blogging. When I started out, it was discouraging, and still is, when you spend time in writing good posts and no one bothers to read them. But with time, you get better at it and actually start writing in a better way which others find easy to understand. And yes, sometimes google does recognize your good posts and sends you tons of traffic, even when your posts don't get shared on social media.
Before I started using Sublime Text Editor for everything, PHPStorm was my go-to GUI for not only PHP coding but everything else as well, an awesome company and a great cause. I highly recommend their tools, they also have pretty good support and offer free licences to educational institutes and open source projects.
I like the inverse of to-do lists: a have-done list. Say you need to get a large task done for the day. That's what you need to do, but getting to the point of getting it done contains a lot of smaller actionable items (e-mailing people, setting up new servers, whatever, etc).

I then write that down as 'done' lists. Or basically, a 'what I did today' list, even if it is small stuff. You end up feeling more productive, because you often don't realise what you actually DID do in a day.
Oh, I’m not a… — Medium
Well, the UK claims to be the "Mother of all Parliaments" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament#Origins , and has songs calling itself "Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Hope_and_Glory ).

I know more about UK & Ireland than others, but it's not hard to find other countries similar. France's national anthem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise ) is a song about overthrowing tyranny, the national motto of France is "Liberty, Freedom, Fraternity" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9,_%C3%A9galit%C3%A9... ).

All countries claim to be the best.
I agree it's funny - for me at least, the search is the least interesting part of gmail. The search is crap. Which is to say, it is just as crappy as the search in all the desktop clients or other mail services I've used.
Should You Get an MBA or Start a Business?
Sure, and some countries had their own Gitmos. The UK had hunger strikes and imprisonment without trial during their own civil war in Northern Ireland.

It's not as black and white as "USA bad, EU good".
Odds are good that those with intense focus won't be answering your question because they're too busy being focused ;)
$MY_COUNTRY Exceptionalism
The textbook is probably too much text for you - your brain gets bored and you fall asleep. If you're studying for an exam: Try to summarize what you want to remember in as few words as possible - 1 or 2 words per point. You'll have a page at most for an entire unit/subject (don't worry if no one else gets the page). Study that instead, and I think you'll be less likely to be bored. For each point, very quickly (e.g. less than 2-3 seconds), go through the entire point with your mind, then move on to the next. Repeat points that you feel you can't process as fast, they are what you need to get more familiar with. Once you get to the end, as long as you still got energy, go back to the beginning. Eventually try to recall every point the unit without even the single page of paper.

Do this as soon as possible after you wake up. (e.g. study after breakfast). Get a glass of water or a small sandwich every hour and resume studying.

The idea is to process as much information (rather than text) as you are physically able, so you don't ever get bored, and you can stay focused.

Don't be surprised if you get really tired after 3-4 hours. Yesterday I woke up at 12. Started studying at 1, and finished up by 5pm. I was so tired, I had to go sleep for a couple of hours. Had dinner then went to bed for the night.

Get lots of sleep. After a day where you have intensive studied like this, 10-12 hours of sleep is good. Sleep helps your brain move stuff you studied that day into your long term memory. This way you only have to study something once, so that you'll not have the opportunity to get bored studying the same thing again.

Oh, and I do everything on paper so I never have my computer in front of me when I'm studying like this.

Don't know about you, but works for me!
> Once again these are things he is claiming, I haven't done any research into his situation and I doubt anyone here has either. All I'm saying is that taking the word of someone who is in prison for possible terrorism is a mistake.

So you are happy with "guilty until proven innocent" and "as he might be guilty, we can't give him the chance to prove otherwise because he might fool the legal system" as a moral precedents?

If there is evidence charge him and give him a fair trial, if there isn't admit so and let him go.

> but he most probably doesn't deserve nearly half the self-righteous indignation that everyone here is displaying.

You might be right, you might be wrong. But how will we ever know one way or the other without evidence presented? This is the sort of thing we in the west regularly chide other regimes for, and we are doing it ourselves making complete hypercrits of ourselves - this is why people who care about such things are getting rather indignant about the whole thing.
Impeachment is surely warranted for:

1. Assassination American citizens without trial (drone program)

2. War in Libya without congressional approval.
From Hal Finney's "Bitcoin and Me":
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.
What is it in your field that really makes you jump up and down with joy and amazement?

I sometimes have similar problems (though by far not as bad) and what works for me is to leave a straightforward problem lying on the desk so it's the first thing I see in the morning. Additionally, there's a (very short) list with achievable things I want to do that day. (A lot less than I could do, more a 'at least this far' list.) When I get bored with one task there's usually another one on the list that's ok. And not all textbooks are equally boring. Oh, and deadlines [1]. I don't always follow this, but when I do, I get some stuff done and it's quite satisfying, even though it's just the 'minimal stuff list'.

When you say intense focus, I rather think of short activities like sword training (wonderful state of mind!) or a few minutes of coding the 'heart' of a short program, not longer periods of work.

</rant>

[1]http://rcrosing.home.xs4all.nl/calhob.html

edit: You might also wanna check Lesswrong, they have a lot of ideas about these problems: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Akrasia
Here is an obvious analysis:

The idea with terrorism against democracies is to scare the living daylight out of voters in a country. The politicians in those democracies want to win the next election do everything to stop the terror.

Afaik, most every democracy that had a serious terrorist problem over years threw out the law book -- UK, Germany, Israel, Spain, USA, etc.

It is a reaction built into democracy, if you have a better way of organizing society that is well tested, please tell me. (That "well tested" is critical; failure modes for testing systems often kills millions of people.)
PIN/DynamoRIO and Valgrind have slightly different design aims. In short:

* Valgrind was designed to support rich analysis plugins (like Memcheck, which keeps a shadow copy of every bit of data) and performance was a secondary concern (on Valgrind, applications run on average about 4x slower, threads are serialized, etc).

* DynamoRIO and PIN are designed not to make much of an impact on performance (usually a few percent) and are more suitable for running in production, but it's somewhat more complicated to write plugins for them.

Both DynamoRIO[0] and Valgrind[1] maintain lists of publications which go into much more detail.

[0] http://www.dynamorio.org/pubs.html
[1] http://valgrind.org/docs/pubs.html
If you want to fix the cause, I would suggest finding a good quality meditation teacher and learn meditation. Your mind is obviously scattered, you have to learn, and I mean learn how to focus. I've been practicing meditation and similar arts for over 6 years, can't really recommend it highly enough.

I will tell you upfront: it's hard word, but it pays off tremendously.
Consider the following hypothetical conversation between President Barack Obama and the Intelligence team.

President: Hey guys - what's going on. In my presidential campaign I promised to clean up this financial mess, so todays team meeting is about how we clean this up.
Can someone please enlighten me on this.

Agent 1: Well sir the main problem is US debt, it's a monster gone out of control. When the act was created in 1913, they forgot at 1.00000001 raise to n for sufficiently large n will diverge to infinity. We have unfortunately crossed the point of no return.

President: Well, is there a way out, like an alternative currency?

NSA Agent 2: Well sir, there is something, but it's kind of weird and requires a system reboot.

President: Explain, anything is better than this shit.

NSA Agent 2: Well the last president who tried to mess with it got asssinated.

President: I have no plans on going up this way, can we sneak it in.

NSA Agent 2: Well we need a new currency, but if we say that aloud, the whole world will blow up. And we need it to not be backed by debt. Let the old currency work for a while, then we will kick the new one in when it spreads really well.

President: What about currency control.

NSA Agent 2: Well it works on 256 bits crypto.

President: That doesnt translate, english dude.

NSA Agent 2: Well we can control the currency, we can do 2048 bits with our computers for a while now, which means that we can generate new currency whenever we need it.

President: Well, in that case, you have my permission, go for it. God speed, you have my presidential blessings.
Sub-type polymorphism of course, layered designs that go against the type class grain, heterogeneous collections that require tagging be setup ahead of time, and anything heterogeneous in general.

I like static typing, I program in C#, but I use escape hatches a lot in my designs. Type systems just can't be expressive enough (even say Scala).
That doesn't make what's happening the right thing to do... Well, if we just summarily execute them, then we don't need to take care of them... It's the fiscally responsible thing to do. I mean, war crimes are war crimes.
The Reality of a Developer's Life
How hard it is to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a person is the owner of the wallet if you don't have confession and stupid errors like having your harddrives without full disk encryption?
I don't agree with you. I'm a developer and I can't design.

After designing many frontends I have come to this conclusion. I'm just not good at it. It takes me ages to get anything done, I have very little original ideas of how to make a page more functional, or even pretty. I can recognise a good design, but I just can't seem to produce it no matter how hard I try, or how long I try for.

Also, doing frontend design just seems to make me miserable. Much happier coding the backend where I'm good and paying a frontend person who does good work there.
That's the theory. In reality, how many patents are "high quality"? And how many people actually read them to find ideas, rather than to find ways to work around obstacles?
New iPhone app Spendee please check
Hi guys,

my name is Lukas Stibor and I am the CEO fo CLEEVIO.com . We are located in the centre of Europe ( Prague in the Czech Republic). I would like to show you our new mobile app that will run very soon. It’s name is Spendee.The Spendee is app for iPhone and you can track your expenses and income. We tried to create the best and easiest solution. It means synoptic monitoring of finance and detailed statistics including graphs where, what and how you are spending your money.

I look forward to your feedback and hope that you will enjoy the app.

http://www.spendeeapp.com

Thanks a lot.
John Cleese's lecture on creativity [1] was really helpful for me and is something I'm using to get into the flow state myself. The 5 factors Cleese says you need to get creative is nicely summed up in Brainpicking's blog post [2].

Highly recommended!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9rtmxJrKwc
[1] http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/12/john-clees...
The paypal mafia could be the creators of bitcoin. They certainly have in depth knowledge about the financial markets and technological expertise. Furthermore, the idea of bitcoin is not only original but also frightingly ambitious that fits well with their personalities.

i am curious as to peter's opinion on bitcoin.
I prefer talking to friends about what happens in their lives. If we mention news its in exact same way as telling jokes.
I absolutely hate push-ads and instantly remove any app using these. This is even worse than email spam because you can't filter it, and it plays in exactly the same ringtone as any other notification. So, because I (as a freelance web hoster) have to instantly react to any email coming in (might be from a customer with a server problem, at all), I am disrupted from what I'm doing by ADVERTISING. Makes me want to kill the one responsible for the interruption in the most violent way I can imagine.

So, here goes a big fk you to push ads! I can live with banner ads, startup ad screens or in-app purchases (yay for Real Racing 3!), but anything more intrusive than this SUCKS.
The medieval inquisition was indeed a witch hunt in the figurative sense but it did not hunt witches. It was primary occupied with hunting heretics (particularly Cathars). Its involvement in hunting witches started in the late 15th century at the very end of the middle ages.
Show HN: CampFire Spotify App Preview - Listen to music together
Military oxygen device set to help children in developing countries
I heard of this practice a long time ago from a few colleagues, not everyone does it but apparently it is a technique employed by a few. It's really smart when you think about it, something not many people would think of. While there is no evidence of anyone doing this, it's apparently one of those "in the industry" things that some know of.
Interesting - I have to admit I did not get into these details before.
True, I was probably a bit hasty in 'always', but think that 'usually' fits.

My knowledge came from a friend of mine who had some reason to be at an ABC office at one point and witnessed a meeting between the ABC staffers and the external agency, and they were concerned that their week's tallies didn't match up, as they were out 2 minutes. I imagine that the ABC's numbers would be public info somewhere, and I have no idea about the external agency.

As for the list of journos, it doesn't really say much about the content itself, if the content is monitored. I mean, if you want to do quality current affairs on TV in Australia, there's ABC, and there's SBS, the latter of which doesn't do much domestic stuff (as it's not their bailiwick).
Great advice for beginners
Underlying passion | Advice To Graduates — Medium
> My personal read on this is that, if you have difficulty focusing, you're not really interested in what you're doing.

I don't agree. I personally have lots of trouble focusing, and the more into something I am, the harder it is for me to focus. It's as though my thoughts go into overdrive and I feel actual pleasure in processing all the different facets and scenarios related to a particular idea, so much so that it incapacitates me and if I stop thinking about it, I start to feel miserable. Take writing for example, I'd love to write for a living but whenever I have an idea that I absolutely must get down on paper, a few things happen.

1- Nothing else matters, so everything else suffers.

2- Writing is too slow. Before I've finished a paragraph, my head has moved onto another chapter and trying to get back to where I was is like trying to tell myself to stop doing the most fun thing in the world and clean my kitchen instead. (I hope that makes sense).

3- It begins to dawn on me that I'm not making any progress. I start to feel mildly depressed and all by energy and excitement begins to dwindle as I realise this time is going to be like every other time and I'm not going to finish "it".

And then I go back to what I was working on before, all my energy and excitement in that project is renewed and then I repeat steps 1 to 3.

There is a huge difference between this and working on something that doesn't interest me. As a programmer, I often have to work on things that don't interest me, that are slow and laborious and repetitive. But the strange thing is, I can do that stuff to completion. It bores me to tears, and I start to hate my job if I have to do too much of it, but my brain gets out of the way for a while and lets me finish what I'm doing. Until I have another awesome idea for something, and then I'm screwed.

Luckily, I enjoy most of my work, and I get interesting problems to solve that, even though I've no burning desire to solve them, keep me interested and happy none the less.

This has gotten very personal very quickly. Reading this back, it sounds like I have will-power, self-control problems more than focus issues.

Well thanks HN, this has been very therapeutic.
No-one can be unbiased about the news because it's inherently subjective. I agree, an internal-only team can't help but be biased, which is why they try to balance it against an external team.
CGTrader Goes eBay
It's personal. You have found what works for you: "I can focus non-stop for 10-12 hours", and if "Even those 10 hour sessions require an hour or two to get started." then force yourself to spend those 1-2 hours to get started.

A key trick I use is to have doable tasks. Getting started is the hard bit, so start small. Then, acknowledge that you made progress instead of putting it down. Why? Because putting it down will destroy your motivation, your interest and your focus. it's also a distraction (you're thinking about how you don't have focus, instead of what you're supposed to be focussed on).

If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you
must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about
your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a
bird on the wing.

note: "you must not be thinking about yourself"
Great post; really resonates with me.

I've come to realise that it's a linguistic thing.

"I can't do that" vs "I can't do that yet"

Personally, I've always hated sysadmin and as a designer I can rely on Heroku for everything I'd conceivably need at the moment. I've dipped my toes into setting up VPSs in the past but I always get frustrated and give up. It's definitely not my thing. but I hate the idea of not getting the gist of how things work even more than I might not enjoy doing them.

So this weekend I learnt the basics of Linux sysadmin & setting up a box with Nginx & Passenger and all that jazz. Now, in my own ethical system, I'm happy to ignore it again for the next few months/years and going back to Heroku (which I enjoy using). Is that really weird?
What do you do instead of working on what are supposed to be working on when you find yourself not focusing?
Don't leave it for the mega-shops (goog, aapl, amzn) to create. After all, casinos use tokens instead of cash for a reason....