skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is how it works for me:

Just use workflowy and order your tasks in chronological order for tomorrow. 15 minutes right before bed and you will be efficient as a machine. Be explicit in your tasks, not meticulous. If your daily task has more than 2 levels or more than 5 subtasks, split it up. If it takes more than 2 hours - you probably should split it up. ymmv. And of course take the occasional breaks.

This is for people who do a very wide variety of things and also make a lot of decisions in the process. If majority of your day is in repetitive tasks, might be even counter-productive.

Also, it is not meant as a project management replacement. It's just a to-do list.
Bernie Ecclestone is F1: he made it into something more than motor racing by negotiating the sale of the TV rights for the benefit of all of the teams (and his pocket).

For FE to eclipse F1 then something major has to happen with the TV rights. At the moment it does not look like FE will have the big star names and the legendary teams. Even if the racing is really good then it will need more than that 'natural appeal' - there is plenty of good racing in lesser formulas as it is but this does not translate to a sizeable TV audience of avid fans. F1 has great spectacle value that no other formula has, FE will struggle to attain that and will consequently be an also-ran formula.
A Mozilla mobile hacker playing with screen mirroring is not really what we could call "Mozilla's game plan".
Amusingly: Audi didn't tell anyone about FSI until after the chequered flag. "Oh, by the way guys, we used this unproven technology and just won."
David Allen literally addressed every single point in this post over ten years ago. To-do lists are fine. Flat ones aren't.
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/whats-wrong-wi...
"Rapid change is the real danger. Human habits and infrastructure are suited to particular weather patterns and sea levels, as are ecosystems and animal behaviors. The rate at which the global temperature is rising today is very likely unique in the history of our species. "
As a purely informational resource, can someone add how those minimum wage earners can avail themselves of affordable housing, which seem to dot every neighborhood in the city?

What does it take and how many, indeed, do?
There is a difference between linear extrapolation and the butterfly effect. That seems to be the part that many miss. Startups (by necessity) show sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Mature companies (by design) do not.
All these launches seem to be so noisy (with chatter from a thousand people). Wonder how the engineers focus on their work.
Show HN: simple notepad
Coding Interview Solutions Manual
Unicode Skyline.
Congratulations! This must have taken an incredible amount of personal discipline to accomplish. I can't even bring myself to floss for 180 consecutive days!
I can confirm. I have also worked with a number of programmers who have been 5x as productive as an average programmer and one who was easily 10x, possibly more.

My old manager handed Mr 10x a company chequebook and said "write your own salary in there… just don't leave". He left. He wanted challenging work more than he wanted money.

These people exist in all fields: maths, art, music, literature, sport. It is amazing (and somewhat dispiriting) when you meet one, however working with one is, in my experience, only inspiring.
Go Hadoop: Err, Hadoop and Go
I'd read it too.
5 easy ways to be more productive at work
Depends what you do. If you work in the City you should reasonably expect £600 and up. No other sector in London pays as well.

Ruby is quite commoditised now. Take a look at, say, Scala on jobserve.com and you'll see rates are double Ruby. The only way you'll make big money as a Ruby consultant is by differentiating yourself somehow. Better go write a book. All that said, I would be very hesitant about accepting work below £400 a day. A good rule of thumb for consulting is you'll work 100 days a year. At that rate you are making about the same as a mid-level FT employee.

Also note the OP said he was a contractor. There is a fuzzy but real distinction between contractors and consultants. A contractor is typically treated like a FT employee, without the permanent job. This means working from the client's office, longer jobs (usually 6 months - 1 year), and no simultaneous engagements. Contractors typically get paid less than consultants, but there is more work going.
I agree. I think so many people are used to drawing programs that work this way (Photoshop, Illustrator, all the way back to MacDraw), that it would be nice to at least have it be a preferences option or something.

However, that's more for the basic geometric shapes. For the more template-like shapes (iPhone screen, etc.) creating it first makes more sense.
2090s?

How reliable it is to predict with extrapolations on such a scale for nearly a century?
I wish they were showing more of the rocket and the launchpad than just some heads talking about "pushing the boundaries" and some such. Let them talk, but in the background.
aw shush, stop letting truth get in the way of a good story!
Gravy train nonsense.
Sorry for the crudeness. In the MVP you can click between years and manually add a subscription.

Does "cool" mean "meh, cool" or "I'll sign up and pay when it's done, cool"

Thanks for the feedback and yes I know the actual app development will be much more difficult.
Read her other posts. It's basically the same litany of views (supporting highly paid municipal workers and rent controls while opposing aggressive policing) that have pushed people out into the suburbs, simultaneously destroying American cities while putting their finances in shambles.
Ask HN: Am I in seed, or Series A?
Hello HN, i need some quick advice.

I run a bootstrapped, profitable tech company of 5 people, making ~250k USD/yr in revenues.

Am planning to raise 500k USD to expand operations. We've been around for 1 year.

Questions:

1) Am I categorized under a seed round, or Series A?

2) Is it feasible, if I value the company at 250k*20 ~ 5 million USD, pre-money? We're in the entertainment sector.

Thanks in advance
Everyone is constantly looking for coders pretty much everywhere in the United States. There is absolutely nothing special about the Bay Area in that regard.
Validity of the observation is a potential confounding factor. There are clearly people who impress their coworkers to the extent that those coworkers believe the person is a 10x-average programmer. That's what this kind of report establishes. But is the judgment of those coworkers correct? Is the person actually 10x more productive in any kind of rigorous, verifiable sense? Generally these reports don't come with enough evidence to establish that.
There's a lot riding on this launch. Pretty much every component is brand new. This is the first flight of this rocket, which has new engines, a new engine configuration, the payload fairing, and a much bigger body than their previous F9. Most exciting of course is the attempt to test the re-entry part of the re-usability program to connect with all the grasshopper tests.

If this works, they're going to be much closer to building completely and rapidly re-usable spacecraft. I think their end goal is to have about a 1-hour turnaround time. Spaceships will become like airplanes, and we'll have the new frontier on our hands. This type of re-usability is what makes SpaceX's Mars plans so possible in the short term and why everyone else seems to think humans on Mars won't be until the 2030s or 2040s. With this type of technology, shipping supplies and people to Mars will be so much cheaper than anyone has ever really envisioned. I can't wait to move there!

I'm quite certain that Elon plans to have a massive ramp-up in trips to Mars over the next 5 years. The software team that did their AMA on reddit a while ago was very clear that we should expect to buy tickets to Mars inside a decade - this certainly means that SpaceX will start ferrying supplies, fuel reactors and everything else necessary to Mars (via Red Dragons?) in about 5 years.

Here's hoping.
I've lived in a couple of studios with my previous SO, for something like 3-4 years. In a huge number of ways I prefer it to live living in a 2 bedroom like I do now (however I much prefer living with my wife, so....)

It enforces a minimalist aesthetic, excellent cooperation, solid space management and living a good chunk of your life out of the house. Which makes for a nice lifestyle.

However your mileage may vary (and I think it certainly matters that we chose to live this way, and where not forced to...)
Also hourly rate is infinitely more useful. Working full time at $50/hr is a completely different lifestyle from working 20 hours/week at $100/hr.
"every wall made of glass", customer experience, blonde wood, ergonomically perfect desks and organic mattresses, engraved tablets, etc, all clearly Apple references.
Non-US Privacy Email Alternatives for Lavabit Refugees
What do the numbers you get when you hover over a neighborhood mean? They seem to be somewhat contradictory.

Household income to afford this rent is always way higher than the median income of those who actually live there. Is there an error in the way these numbers are being calculated or am I misunderstanding the headings?
> Our group uses a JIRA[2] instance that I've customized
> the heck out of to make an effective "This is what needs
> done, grab this if you have any spare time" system. The
> motto is "No ticky, no worky" - anybody doing anything
> work related generates a ticket for it.

Understand that the system you've created implies that someone else has decided that the work is worth doing, someone else has broken the work down into manageable tasks, and someone else has prioritized it. This may work great for employees who need a lot of direction, but starts to break down as tasks become larger and more complex, and the goal is to leverage the knowledge and experience of the person doing the task.

Markovitz is really advocating an approach that works better for employees who are essentially given whole projects to manage, and are empowered to steer the direction of the project overall:

> You might think, “There’s no way I could tell my boss
> that I can’t do this by mid-February.” But I’d argue that
> you have to say no. The CFO says no when the president
> wants to move into a new building or hire new people, and
> the company can’t afford it — that’s part of her fiduciary
> responsibility. You have the same kind of responsibility —
> to set expectations about what can be accomplished with
> the amount of production time you have available.

(edit: Both approaches have their place, given the work and the team. It's important to understand both approaches, however. I see a lot of frustration from employees who want more say in the overall project direction when they're in a "just do what you're told" kind of job. Similarly, some employees really love the ability to focus on the tasks assigned, and not having to worry about whether they make sense from a business perspective.)
I usually keep a local "todo" list in each project I'm on. It helps me focus, and if I'm away from a project for a while it helps me figure out what I've done (I seldom remove old entries, as it gives me a sense of history).

Like most processes, it's better to keep something like this lightweight. "Nested todos" are about as fancy as things get.

I also check the todo lists into the project. Sure, it makes things a little dirty. On the other hand, it saved another person's bacon last year when I was forced to flip ownership of a project over to that person without much warning. (He discovered the todo list, and emailed me a huge thanks).

Todo lists in a wiki can work well to keep a loose team on the same track, too. Again I think the secret is to keep this lightweight.

If you're installing "Whizzy Enterprise TODO" servers or having meetings about how to manage todo items or trying to extract metrics from todo lists, my guess is that you've put too much drama into the process and should take a walk to cool off. :-)
remote controller for web applications
Those Trader Joe's deliveries? Never mind
Airfoil now works with AppleTV 6.0 without DRM
"destroying American cities"

Is she arguing SF is or will soon be "destroyed"?
Right - I understand the use case for both the Stylus, and PC Games (aka the "Penny Arcade" use case). I'm dubious about the reading while standing element - even the iPad is a bit cumbersome for that - you need something like the Kindle Fire/Samsung Phablets/iPad Mini for mobility it turns out.

I'm thinking about what your average knowledge worker who wants to just have an email/excel/terminal/browser tool would want on a business trip - I think if we took an unbiased sample of people, 75%+ would rather go with the Air for that particular use case than they would surface pro.

There is the catch - excluding the gaming/stylus scenario - people still need a laptop - Few "knowledge workers" go on a serious business trip with just an iPad except as an experiment (that usually works out poorly), and they aren't going to carry both a laptop and a surface pro to meetings with them - therefore - just a laptop.

The iPad (and better yet, the Mini/Kindle Fire) - are great for just kicking on the couch, the Subway, reading in bed when you don't want to lug a laptop (and power cable) around with you.

It remains to be seen - but I don't think the Surface is going to get overwhelming traction. Yes, it's a better laptop than the iPad - but the iPad / Mini /Kindle Fire is a better media-consumption tablet than the Surface.
New launch pad. New rocket with new engines. New customers for SpaceX (Canada). New flight profile (test of a simulated first stage return and powered landing over the open ocean, to validate the same flight profile for use on the Falcon 9-R with retractable landing gear).

Pretty exciting.
Because it's notoriously difficult to measure programmer productivity, companies are generally going to be incredibly hesitant to offer "rockstar" programmers salaries that match their capabilities. There's no box office take or album sales or stadium-filling metrics to rely on.

"Rockstar" programmers generally need to go and (co-)found their own companies to make their multiples of millions. The great difficulty is that being a rockstar programmer doesn't always make you a good product/business person, and the best programming can't save a crappy business. But people like Gates and Zuckerberg are the ones who make it happen.

But if one day we find the holy grail of accurately measuring programmer productivity... (though I don't think that's possible...)
People ran to the suburbs because of rent controls and highly paid municipal workers? In what narrative?
No, rayiner is.
Astronomer to Data Diva - How I transitioned from Academic to Techie
Be great to see this. Anything visible?
No worries, the government subsidizes the living arrangements of the lower classes so that they can continue to live and breed in pathological concentrations in expensive cities. The supply of people to mug/rape you is still higher than out in the suburbs.
Ask HN: Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?
Did you leave your day job? How long have you worked on them? Share your story!
A 4x factor sure sounds very high, though maybe the costs in SF (or in the US in general) are different to my own;from my experience over the last 6 years, living in a variety of setups in different cities in Europe, I spend 50-60% of my monthly outgoing on rent (then about 10% on bills, 10% on transport, leaving ~20% on misc and recreation). A 2x factor seems much more reasonable.
If I'm stuck on some coding/logic problem I sometimes dream of repeatedly going over the problem.. rehashing the process that isn't working over and over again... Its one of those times when you wish you could get some stupid song in your head just to push that out. heh
One concern is that jobs are generally located in the city. It's unfortunate that people who cannot afford to live in the city must also often make long commutes into the city. It'd be a shame if we said it was a luxury to avoid long commutes.
Chain-vaping is a potential problem. Maybe the e-cigs should have a signal to stop after a minute or so.
Everything you needed to know about the Internet in May, 1994.
I found to-do list works well. They track things so I don't have to keep them in mind, freeing me to concentrate on the task at hand.
I am very curious what exactly they did. In general, performance optimization?
I've found that having a "Done" list in addition to a todo-list works for me.

I have Trello as a todo list and used to use iDoneThis as my "Done" list.
With iDoneThis, all the projects and other stuff I was working on would get lumped together. I wanted to be able to separate projects, but still be able to see them all together in one feed.

I ended up making a web app to do this for myself and have been using it for the past few months.
Just decided to open it up for other people to use a few weeks ago, so I've been collecting some emails.
It's at https://jots.me

I have some beta users right now, so if anyone's interested in trying it out, use this signup link for HN: https://jots.me/signup?code=hn5

It gives you 5 "cards" (what would be calendars in iDoneThis) so you can separate 5 different projects.
AGW or no, I don't know many people betting fuel prices [1] will go anywhere but up.

[1] http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/52645000/gif/_52645454...
Works fine on my tablet with Chrome.
Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone
Most of the ideas are quite old- possibly enough to be considered 'public domain.' From Daytimers systems to 'getting organized' self-help books, these things have been around since at least the 1970s.
There's a separation between the viewing areas and the mission areas so it's not an issue.
The absolute best organisational method I've found (for myself) is an 80 page 5mm square pad and a good quality pen (the Papermate InkJoy 500's are my current favourites).

I've tried Trello, Taskwarrior, org-mode, any.do, todo.sh and any number of other applications but they all do 1 (sometimes 2) things really well but fall down in other ways.

As a programmer who lives in front of a computer I find it deeply ironic that my best way of organizing myself/projects is pen and paper.

Any tablet that can accurately mimic the feel of writing will get my money instantly.
Can't possibly be a reference to Google--they don't have a customer service department! (do they?)
If you're not going to say that affordability is roughly 3x rent, then you shouldn't be using gross pay, you should be itemizing. "Roughly 3 times" always seems to be a fudge so you can use gross pay instead of analyzing everyone's taxes and number of mouths to feed - and results in a rough estimate of affordability.
Seems to me the premise of many comments on this post is that people should have a right to live in San Fran.
The author is exactly backwards on the issue of team scaling.

Even if I grant his premise that 10x engineers don't exist (which I don't), let's just presume 2x engineers exist. So is a team of four 2x engineers equivalent to a team of 8 1x engineers? No -- the smaller team is vastly more effective, because of the n^2 communication problem.

This is why strong individual performers are so valuable. Give me my top pick of 10 developers, and we will ship the product at least as fast as any organization of any size. Bigger organizations can still work on more separate projects in parallel, but they won't out-develop us on any particular one.
There are other methods of small scale manufacture though, it's not like 3D printing is the only alternative.
SpaceX gets too much publicity.
The overuse of the history api also makes it frustrating to navigate back from as well (at least on ipad).
Most of the world's population spends their entire waking day stoned on something more powerful than nicotine, whether it is coca leaves, betel nut, khat, or some other indigenous herb. It just seems a given that wherever you find people, you will find drugs.
Ask HN: Providing accommodation to employees?
SF rent is through the roof and there is no tax benefits to people who rent apartments anywhere in the US even though they can't afford to buy the mortgage.
Would it be possible to provide Accommodation to the empoyees as one of the Job Benefits ? Is the rent paid by the Company can be counted as expenses and not taxed ?
I got goosebumps hearing all the people saying "X, go". So many people working so hard, coming together to achieve something. Wow. Edge of my seat.
Often it is quite the opposite: when the best is finished the result is smaller and much more readable.

I am allowed to be opinionated, I have seen both forms in well paid consultant jobs.
That is not a popular stance. See cable television.
F1 has been pushing for fuel efficiency, however, costs continue to rise. It's a problem in F1.
IOS7 Missing Api: Mouse support
Excited to see how this will pan out
In my experience, Managers often mistake Cowboy Coders for Rockstars.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder
I was replying to a now deleted comment which suggested that SpaceX had attempted and failed at first stage recovery in the past. It seemed like an odd thing to say, as SpaceX has been fairly transparent about failures in the past (and as this is the first launch of Falcon9 v1.1, they couldn't have attempted powered descent with earlier flights anyway).
I was under the impression that using a class (with `__slots__` set) or a tuple is generally more performant than using dictionaries. At least, I assume that's why he didn't mention dictionaries.
This is all due to regulation and zoning laws. Given the demand, SF should look like Hong Kong by now: http://photomichaelwolf.com/#architecture-of-densitiy/8
But it is a luxury... The demand for housing is affected by convenience. Those with more buying power are able to afford more convenient locations.

This is not unique to any particular city or country. I personally have experience with SoCal and Moscow. In SoCal, a 2br condo in Santa Monica costs the same as a house in a nice suburb, the difference is an hour+ drive. In Moscow, inner city is gridlocked 24/7 and unlike most of US, that's where the best jobs are, so the closer to downtown, the more expensive it is. Further out, prices are highest in walking proximity to a metro station (just like BART).
I'm glad this is being shared, because I struggled for years with GTD and couldn't find an alternative anywhere. When I started putting tasks in my calendar my productivity skyrocketed. I know when things will get done and it forces me to make tough choices. I have to decide what will get done, how much time will it take and when, but also what WON'T get done and forces me to say "no". We only have limited amount of time - the calendar makes it so clear.

This approach takes much practice to learn how much time everything takes, self-discipline and flexibility when it takes more than planned. The end result is much better control of personal time. Instead of just writing a next action for each project and being anxious whenever I get a new project request from a client whether I will have enough time to finish it by deadline; now, I can estimate project and tell from my schedule when each project will be finished.

To-do list has place in my system as either list of small tasks that I will do in one block of scheduled time. Also, I use list as someday lists, for example next books I will read. I still use some principles from GTD, but I no longer have never-ending to-do lists that paralyse me. Calendar forces me to create a realistic schedule.

This is not for everyone, and based by the popularity of GTD, I guess only minority of people can live in their calendar and schedule almost every activity. For those who are interested, I suggest starting with reading Peter Bregman: 18 minutes and Julie Morgenstern: Time management.