skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, let's get banks out of the governing business.
Unfortunately the guy who was doing this was Steve Fosset, he commissioned several submarines the likes of which no one had ever seen before but after his death no one has really picked up the ball.
Personally on a normal week night I sleep for roughly 5 hours, and then on Saturdays and Sundays I usually sleep for 8-9 hours, so my overall average is around 6 hours a night.

I frequently wish I could sleep more and feel tired long before I go to bed most nights, but I do not take it to such an extreme that I believe it truly reduces my effectiveness. Of course, that is my subjective thought and I have not tried to precisely test it.
I think this is the best way to think about it. Event-driven unstructured or lightly structured data.
Google Calendar.

Saves me from calling my fiancée at work to see what we have going on.
Rant: “Crappy comments”
Our shop runs effortlessly thanks to a combination of google apps, freshbooks, github, basecamp, and heroku
Rescue Time. It's hard to cheat, it "just works", and it's dangerously good at picking out my unproductive spurts.
The noteworthy example of a non-gamer hire is Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. I've never seen any positive gamer news covering him because of his desire to beat franchises to death with yearly updates.

(As much as gamers claim to despise franchises and sequelmania, it's all the market seems to want.)
I see two problems with the option to vote.

First, the American presidential election averages the opinions of 200M people to obtain 1 bit of information. Selecting a president from the population requires about 28 bits. Where do the other 27 come from?

Second, in a presidential election each voter exercises a miniscule amount of power/influence over their own life - about one-200millionth - and a lot of similar tiny increments of influence over everybody else, all adding up to 1. But why should each voter have 200M times more business meddling in the lives of everyone else than governing themselves? The setup is ripe with perverse incentives.

Both effects get starker as a democracy grows in size.
I meant it's a continuation (and extension) of Engelbart's vision. And I agree that almost nothing (in computing history) beat that demo.

But I know Xerox PARC and Bell Labs had great demos that weren't recorded. And I'm sure when things like molecular assemblers, AGI or even the semantic web come out they'll be great demos.

I see Waves as something with huge, even if the Google client failed. I like the ideal it's going after; the further decentralization and integration of the web.
Doesn't it seem like the information you mention has become available in a fundamentally different way (quantity, speed) with the internet?

In this data stream, it would seem that the interaction itself would be part of the data, that is, "user-a -> user-b at 21:31:22.034"

The trick will be to find the value in this data.
The "Real" real time data mining will happen when credit card companies/banks offer an API. Otherwise, this whole real time on the web is not that big of a deal for most people.
About an hour less than I'd like to.
If you are not getting 7 to 8 hours, you are just fooling yourself into thinking you are a hero. You shall pay for those hours with your health.
Pricing a Simple, Useful Desktop App
I've grown tired of giving software away. So, I want to experiment with recouping some of the costs. I'm wrestling with pricing. I don't want to go too low as I'm concerned people will think it's cheap, and not too high as I want it to be easily affordable by average folks. I see value in micro-payments, but google check-out charges 2.9% + .30 cents a pop. So, I need the range (I think) to be $5.00 to $25.00. I feel both extremes are bad. Any suggestions?
Sharing Files With BitTorrent
As someone who gives Jeff a lot of flack, I whole heatedly agree with nwjsmith, StackOverflow is great stuff.
Thanks, signed up immediately. Am over-stretched and want to see where I can improve my time use.
I think non-gamer people are a lot more common on the publisher side. Which maybe explains how publishers get away with the massive power imbalance compared to developers. I've never worked for a publisher, just pure development studios, so I can't really comment.
PBWorks. I find PBWiki much more effective when collaborating on documents than google apps or Trac. Its actually a joy to use, and I can't say that about many apps.
I find the issue runs in programming as well although less important in day to day life it is certainly an advantage to know whats going on with the programs and websites the average person uses.

What I find more frustrating is when people in computer science courses basically dismiss something your explaining to them to be over there heads.
I'm going to adopt a liberal definition of web app here. The only web app that appears to increase my productivity is Twitter. But I use a desktop client to access the service. I use it for live-searching of programming problems I need to solve. Why is this so funny? Because I didn't comprehend Twitter at all, so much so that I originally joined only to leave my account languishing for months before actually beginning to use it.

I tried Basecamp and it just got in the way of things. When your app is so simple that it can be replicated by email, a calendar, and some shared disk space, don't be surprised when clients refuse to use Basecamp and "degenerate" to using email, a calendar, and some shared disk space. At least, that's been my experience, so I cancelled my account.

Most of the other web apps are pure fluff and/or not productivity enhancers. Freshbooks et all appear to be exceptions to this rule. Online accounting web apps are so much better than their desktop counterparts. If I had a nickel for every time somebody has asked me about an Intuit software problem they're having, I'd be rich.
Ask the commenters in this thread: What webapps decrease your productivity? Preferably those we haven't yet heard of? I imagine the answers could turn out much more interesting :-)
Well those guys are obviously right at the edge and are predicting the far future .... you could buy netbooks for 1 Euro with a 3G plan in every european country in the last year...

http://www.t-mobile.de/mini-notebook/0,18488,21678-_,00.html
http://www.eplus.de/Beratung_und_Kauf/Tarife/Mini-Notebook_A...
This fits right in with Wolfram|Alpha. In order to produce all the amazing comparisons Wolfram|Alpha they had to turn databases, and the public web into structured data sets. What would make this much more then novel is if the collected data sets were made public or licensed for academic use. I'm hesitant to say commercial use because a) they can already do that and probably will, and b) it's the public assisting with collecting the data. One problem with Wolfram Alpha that a user submitted structured data will not solve is the ability to cite sources (or provide some reason to trust the sources). Wolfram Alpha has created a bunch of it's own datasets and academically you just have to "trust them".
This changed my life: http://freeagentcentral.com

Biggest benefits if you are UK based. Blew Freshbooks out of the water from my perspective.
And this is why I loved merb and I'm still not sure the merge was a good thing....
Well, there goes Microsoft's reputation.

However Balmer does have a point. If its not worth it for the company to do business in the US, then why should it? This stupid idea of "nationalism" only works for the stupid masses. To a business its where the money is.

The government right now is not making good policies to make shit not fuck up, they are just throwing money at the problem. Someone has to pay that money. Microsoft does not want to be that someone.
Surprise of the day: Cybercime Riches Are Hard To Come By
He blogged yesterday on a related topic, by the way: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001272.html
6 with occasional 10 minute naps in the office chair.
Assembla

Google (if that counts)

Featurelist.org (our own site) -- specifically the user feedback widgets that dump all the feedback from all of our different sites into a handy place (per-project) so I can respond/escalate/investigate/etc.

Google Apps / GMail

Defensio (for avoiding having to manually inspect spam comments on our apps)

__ These aren't in the "can't live without category", but still quite helpful:

Feedback Army (for quick usability/sanity checking)

Paypal

Jing (both a tool and a web service)

Amazon S3/EC2 (once you get over the initial hurdles, it pays back in productivity)

Authsmtp (is that a web app?)

StackOverflow

bug.gd (another of our sites, in the process of renaming to ErrorHelp.com) -- since I log every error/solution I ever run into, often I run into my own errors again later and the solution is waiting for me even if I don't remember how I solved it before. Often enough someone else solved an error I had, too.
It does feel like shards because of the gates and the relative similarity between galaxies but the fact is that if every inhabitant of the game were to move towards the center they would all eventually converge (assuming the system handled it,) something not possible in true shards.
These guys are seriously overestimating the shelf-life of social networks.

I give them 6 months to cash out or miss the gravy train for good. People are only gonna tolerate the twitter hype for so long before it gets old.
The united states government was first started without taxes. It collapsed in about 2 years. From that the current US government was born.

Taxes are necessary, unless you want to pay out-of-pocket for schools, the fire department, police, etc. And literally anyone who can't afford hospital treatment gets thrown out of the hospital no questions asked. No insurance? No problem, have a near-death experience which causes you to be in a hospital for 5 days? $80,000, pay up. Want people to go to jail for killing other people? Well I guess you better have enough money to sponsor a court session otherwise the criminal walks free.

Argue against taxes all you want, but I want to see a large society work without taxes.
Google application suite ---especially gmail (search and worry-free attachments that appear on my iPhone). I've been happy with the recent task list and calendar resource additions, too.
link to press release on berkeley site (more scientific in nature): http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/06/03/billion...
Hacker News.

This is not a joke. I realize that hn is not a web app in the classic sense, but I get far more value from hn than any webapp. Let me explain...

I learned long ago that increasing productivity was like "striking out the pitcher". You got small, easily measured, and much appreciated improvements. But the real improvements come in major shifts in thinking and processing.

I once had a choice of 2 projects to work on, each about the same amount of work for me. One would save 8 people 10 minutes per day. The other would change an entire business process, potentially saving millions of dollars. Believe it or not, I chose the first because I didn't understand the ramifications. Until my first mentor stopped me and pointed all this out (That's how he became my mentor.)

I have looked at several web apps and desktop tools but eventually rejected them all (except for Textpad which rocks). I'm just not interested in saving a few minutes here and there. (I also realize that there may be many web apps that go beyond simple productivity improvements.)

Hacker news, OTOH, changes the way I think all the time. Once or twice a month, I come across something that improves my work by magnitudes, not percentages.

I also get my creative juices flowing simply by participating. It's hard to place a value on that.
This describes me as well. I need those late night hours after the kids have gone to bed to code. I make it up on the weekend, but it's easy to get behind. Saturday and Sunday recovery sleep is sometimes interrupted, throwing the whole next week into a tailspin.

Sometimes, when I am way behind on rest, I go through a reset period. Normally this is marked by more sleeping hours and less interest in hacking... also less interest in social interaction.
Same here: 5 hours on a week, about 9 hours on weekends.

Also, sometimes I have a sleepy evenings. When I come home form work and fall asleep right after dinner. I sleep for about 5 or six hours, then wake up about 1 or 2 a.m., active for about 3 hours and take another 3-to-5-hours sleep before going to work. This happened to me yesterday.

It doesn't affect my productivity in any ways, although I really like when it happens.
Usually 6.5 - 7

Get up, go to the gym, nice cool morning air after the gym and shower, and to work before everyone gets in.
We too use Basecamp for our project management.

Also, I tried using Freshbooks for invoicing, but it's restrictions with multiple currencies made me to look out for an alternative solution.

Recently, I found CurdBee for invoicing which turned out really productive to me. It allows managing unlimited clients with multiple currencies seamlessly. Also, their UIs are so intuitive making the whole process very simple. If you are budget conscious like me and also want to get your work done you should try CurdBee.
EC2. I run an XL instance and do any actual program execution on it while I code.

How often are you waiting on your computer? How much is your time worth, compared to $0.80 an hour?
I thought about submitting this myself, but decided not to because:

* I decided it would be better wait and post once LuaJIT 2 is actually released, so we can test it ourselves.

* The fact that he's comparing it against C's performance is because it's more useful to say, e.g. "75% as fast as C for benchmark X" rather than "47x faster than Ruby", since the speed of obsessively optimized C is usually the de facto target for such benchmarks. It isn't necessarily because it's beating C yet, just drawing closer. (Considering how dynamic a language Lua is, that's remarkable.)

FWIW: In my typical day to day use (as opposed to narrow benchmarks), swapping Lua for LuaJIT 1.1.5 leads to a 2-4x speedup, with no other changes to my code.

I'm really looking forward to LuaJIT 2, in part because it is expected to be more easily ported off i386. (I often work on amd64.) I use non-JIT'd Lua a great deal, and it's already quite fast. I care less about raw speed than expressiveness and portability, though -- I really like how expressive Lua is, while keeping its semantics simple enough that it's still easy to reason about. (That its simplicity makes it possible to write a top notch JIT-ing compiler for it is just icing on the cake.)

Here's a roadmap for LuaJIT 1.1.4 and 2, from last February (http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-02/msg00051.html). It also has a bit of info about how JIT/traceing compilers work, and suggestions for further research.
I'd like to pose a follow-up question to that also (maybe we should just start a new thread) - Why do they decrease your productivity?
The correct optimization would be one to minimize wearing out the disk. Essentially, something that would move hot data out from blocks that are in danger of being worn out.
5 great freelance sites for developers
Nothing a hex editor can't fix (or one line in /etc/hosts ;-)
Great video on the big media meltdown: Mad Avenue Blues
Please post some studies showing how you get ill with less than this magical 7-8 hours sleep.

Say you sleep 2 hours less than "the norm". That means you get an extra 30 DAYS a year of 'awake' time. Over 50 years, that 2 hours has added up to an extra 4 years of useful awake time.

Would you rather have more time while you're young, and able to do stuff, or just live a bit longer when you're old and stuck in a home? (Assuming you're correct, and lack of sleep makes you die younger).

Everything in moderation - don't take things to extremes, but I'd say 5 hours is probably still healthy enough.

Having kids certainly helps with training yourself to not need much sleep.
IDidWork could tremendously increase my productivity if I could update my account using IM.
What does it do? What other software does the same thing and why is yours better?
5 or 6 before getting laid off. 8 or 9 now and loving every minute of it. I can't tell you how much better I feel. I can take power naps on the couch and often solve the prolem I've been working on all morning, just after waking up. I work the entire day with breaks whenever I want and actually end up working 9 or more hours.

It's also great to work on my startup full time. My office is now the patio table if it's sunny or the back porch if it's raining. It's amazing how hard you'll "work" to not have to go back to "work".
Grooveshark Goes Social
Good point. Show people what good their money can do, like finance good music, high quality open source software, and some people will actually donate money.
www.rememberthemilk.com
What's interesting here is that a lot of the commenters -- myself included -- are blurring the definition of what a web app is. I wonder why that is? I don't have a point other than to ask that question, because my gut tells me it would be an interesting thing to investigate.
Youtube. I have to type in the track I am searching for. I would like some sort of Voxli hack for Youtube that will allow speech input (Hold Y + Say the name of the video you are looking for/or say Repeat).
Google Wave: is it evil?
I'm an MMO hacker that's shipped one unsuccessful game and one moderately successful game, and I have to comment on some points made in this article.

-MMOs fail due to bad management, design

Partially true. All the elements need to be there, and bad technology seems to be the biggest crippling force in games. We need more good hackers in the field.

-Good MMO studios aren't hiring.

Not true, even today.

-MMO studios all have terrible quality of life, pay, benefits.

Not true. Startup studios might, but if you're going into that situation you're either getting profit sharing, or a beginner getting a foot in the door.

-MMO engines don't exist, tech isn't reused.

This is becoming less true, but the third party tech out there is still untested. It's unlikely a great MMO company will sell its tech like Epic does with Unreal, since we need long term customers, and can't afford to undercut ourselves.

-Don't work in games unless you are a gaming fanatic.

Loving gameplay helps if you want to be a gameplay coder, but MMOs are vast. Networking, graphics, AI, scalability, the problems to be solved are endless. If you're bored at your job, I recommend giving the games industry a look.
BBC R&D TV Ep 2, interviewing BBC staff, Mahalo, Dopplr, Ingex. CC-licenced
Stem-Cell-Coated Contact Lenses Are Curing the Blind
dont know about the OS but netbook is free in some parts of the world with the service contract ...

visit: http://www.p1.com.my/wimax/wiggy_packages_ref.aspx
Diigo

Netvibes

Box.net

Google docs

Google notebook

Google project hosting
What emacs commands to use to browse around a large code base
Remember the Milk...If something's not on my Remember the Milk to-do-list, it often does not get done. Also, Less Accounting-it's similar to Freshbooks, but I found it first. I'm not sure which is better, but I'm too lazy to switch at this point. And of course, Google, Gmail and associated apps. ReQall is another handy scheduling/reminder service. If they made it easier to organize tasks with tags and to add time estimates for each task, I might switch over from RTM.

Incidentally, the website I write for is a great place to discover new web apps. We try them out and review them for you, so you can decide if they'll be helpful to you or not:
http://www.usefultools.com/
Wiki
http://geniuswiki.com
Well, TANSTAAFL of course, but customers view it as free. That's a large part of why the iPhone 3g sold so much better than the original. It's cheaper upfront, though more expensive in the long run.
7-8, tend to feel better when I sleep 7 instead of 8 btw. Btw I get this sleep in a strange range... from 02:00am to 10:00am
To me, a website is a website. Just because it has forms, uses the "cloud", and has a shiny logo doesn't stop it from being a website. The only websites I use that are anywhere close to "application" functionality are GMail and thesixtyone, and even then it's just ajax frosting on top of a delicious html cake.
6-7. I don't use an alarm clock, but that's the amount of time my body feels like it needs. When I'm under a crunch, it will sometimes drop to 5, but I don't do that for very long. I regularly only got about 4 hours / night during college and I'm sure it negatively impacted my grades.
http://smacklet.com/

Wrote it for myself. 'Productivity through consciousness'.
http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/sleepless.html

Stanford University Center of Excellence
for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Sleep Disorders

Each of us has a specific daily sleep requirement. The average sleep requirement for college students is well over eight hours, and the majority of students would fall within the range of this value plus or minus one hour. If this amount is not obtained, a sleep debt is created. All lost sleep accumulates progressively as a larger and larger sleep indebtedness. Furthermore, your sleep debt does not go away or spontaneously decrease. The only way to reduce your individual sleep debt is by obtaining extra sleep over and above your daily requirement.

The powerful brain mechanism that regulates the daily amount of sleep is called the sleep homeostat. By increasing the tendency to fall asleep progressively in direct proportion to the increasing size of the sleep debt, this homeostatic process ensures that most people will get the amount of sleep they need, or close to it. The elevated sleep tendency together with the associated drowsiness and an intense desire for sleep would ordinarily prevent most people from becoming dangerously sleep deprived because they would go to bed early, or sleep late, when such excessive daytime sleepiness occurred.

However, in our society we are prone to ignore or resist nature's signal that we need more sleep, and we often resist far too long. At this point, we cannot resist falling asleep. Depending on when and where this happens, falling asleep can be tragic, or merely inconvenient. As far as is currently known, nothing can change an individual's fundamental daily sleep requirement.
Words to live by from George III:

"Six hours' sleep is enough for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool."

Of course, he was... well, mad.
Will The Social Compact in the United States Remain Valid?
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
I don't mean to affront but isn't that why we're all here; to evolve the web app?

To me the point of starting up is taking a crack at what you'd like to see the web become.
I'm the same way. If I sleep 8 hours I'm wiped out for most of the day.
It's a nice tech demo, but nothing more.
I doubt it will ever be usefull, because that would require real semantic data or real AI (and neither seems to be around soon).
Not a web-app, but I saved a hell of a lot of time by ditching my digital clock and getting an analogue one instead. Not sure why exactly, I guess I just like seeing a pie chart on my wall…