skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Judge tosses Apple motion, allows patent troll Lodsys to continue rampage
> What are your (successful) strategies for finding (side) projects you're truly passionate about?

1. Leave the house. Take a walk in an unfamiliar environment.

2. Clear your head. This might take an hour of steady walking.

3. Ask yourself what problem exists, that you know about, that you understand, that can potentially be solved with a computer, that is within reach but remains unsolved.

For example, my most recent side project was a way to put all my books into a database by using an Android bar code scanner, something that didn't exist the last time I thought about this problem. I hadn't thought about it for a few years, then recently I decided to revisit this issue and see if anything had changed.

It turned out that everything had changed -- Android devices are cheap, they can scan bar codes, new books all have bar codes -- it was a "duh" moment.

Here's the result -- my free book scanner project: http://arachnoid.com/LibraryDB

Basically, you need to think of a way to temporarily disconnect from your environment, give yourself a way to think about programming issues from a new perspective.
Because information warfare is an entirely different, and existing, branch of the military. Think hearts and minds operations.

They need a new term.
Really?

The main problem with the Surface Pro IMO, is that it has no Ethernet port... or ports in general. (just one USB3.0 port). Larger laptops are needed if you want to connect to say, your Gb-Ethernet network or whatever.

The Macbook Air may gain a USB3.0 port over the Surface Pro... but thats about it. It also fails to have an Ethernet port, and also lacks the ability to run any Windows-compatible application.

Compared to the Surface Pro, the Macbook Air's resolution is poor and restricting. Finally, a decent Surface Pro will cost you $1030 (Type Cover + Surface Pro), while a similarly specced Macbook Air costs more.

Aside from having "one more" USB3.0 port, I don't think the Macbook Air has any real advantage over the Surface Pro. A "real portable workstation" would be either a Dell Precision Pro, or something similar to those specs. (IE: DVD Drive, tons of Ports, Gigabit Ethernet).

Granted, both companies offer a solution. Surface-Dock seems rather complete for the Surface Pro, and Thunderbolt from the MacWorld does work. Nonetheless, it'd be nice to have enough features built into a laptop... extra devices / gadgets / attachments are annoying to handle.
Sure, I'm simply responding to the "laziness" argument.

Greece's problem is indeed productivity, not lack of hard work. There are a lot of hard-working mom-and-pop shops which put in many hours, but cannot anymore compete in a globalized economy, when their international competitors are streamlined corporations. Here in Denmark we work fewer hours, but rather than work them in a DIY import/export business like is common in Greece, in Denmark those hours are put into a giant globalized logistics business like Maersk. The end result is more productivity, not because the individual Maersk employee is more hardworking while the Greek import/export guy is lazy (the opposite is likely true), but simply because 10,000 mom-and-pop businesses put together cannot compete with a well-oiled machine like Maersk.
The first reason given for why to-do lists don't work is "the Paradox of Choice". Alas, the studies claiming to measure a Paradox of Choice didn't replicate and related followup studies have found roughly no effect of additional options on the ability to choose. In a great many contexts, people really like having lots of options - it makes it easier to find the exact thing they want. Maybe to-do lists is one of those.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2013/08/more-is-mo...
demos went so smooth this year
"CentOS and MariaDB come to mind as two possible examples, that started as a means not to pay for the original projects."

It is a stretch to even call CentOS a fork, and it is even more of a stretch to claim that Red Hat asks for donations. Red Hat charges for services, which include things like:

1. Maintaining binary packages so you do not have to try to track down dependencies by hand or subscribe to ten thousand mailing lists just to make sure your software is up to date.

2. Taking action when you file bug reports (how much you pay determines how fast that action is taken).

3. Sending people to your data center to help you get everything configured.

4. Get official ratings e.g. EAL4+, for those people who need their software to have such ratings.
Automate Your Dev Environment With Vagrant
I wouldn't say you're scaling properly if you have millions of mobile clients failing to make the proper calls to a service because the protocol has been changed. I'd say its damn near irresponsible to do that. It's not scaling if you're just throwing packets against the wall when the protocol or service unexpectedly changes.
[citation needed]

Hepatitis A transmission through food is rare. The biggest states in the US do not require hepatitis A vaccination for food handlers. Food handlers are also not on the CDC recommended list of people that receive said vaccine.

Source: I don't know, maybe because I'm a certified food safety manager in California (last I checked that state had like 10% of the US's population) and there are ten million other scarier things relating to food safety than hepatitis A transmission through food.

> 10 States that include the Largest Metro's also many cities mandate it through local health laws.
> [Edit] [Citation] http://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/Hepatitis-A.aspx

Haha this is cute.

The exact quote from the page is "By 2010, at least 10 states have mandated this vaccine for select groups of people, from food handlers to daycare attendees to kindergarten students." Nowhere does it say anything about "Largest Metro's" or cities that require this specifically for food handlers.

Last I checked through a cursory search, the top half dozen US states by population at least (which is roughly what? 1/2 the population of the US?) do not require a vaccine for food handlers, which is the context I'm looking for. I don't think I could give a damn if a state like North Dakota requires it when California considers ND's population to be a rounding error.
ha! I hope there's enough room for dedication to both in the future. He also loves programming, so maybe he'll understand my love affair when I start moving in that direction!
I don't think that changing the time zone is going to make any productivity or 'family time' change. We work a lot of hours because there are more employees than companies. Market laws.

I think, however, that changing the time zone will improve our reputation. Currently we're at sync with sun time, but from the point of view of a tourist it means that we have lunch, get out of work, have dinner and go to bed at least 1 hour later than on 'normal countries', and this contributes to the fame of 'lazy country'.

Once we change the hour, after a period of adaptation, we will do everything pretty much the same but S&P will come an say... hey! look at Spain, now they deserve credit because they go to bed earlier, we should lend them money!.

Finally, we currently go into work at 9 as everyone else, but for us the sun is at 8. Nobody realizes because we have more sun hours (in winter).
Fighting the war on bitcoin, one scam at a time
> I have taped notices in my mailbox notifying the postman I wish to not receive any unsolicited mail

This will do no good. The postman (actually, the whole postal service) is simply a "delivery" service. They have no rights to "edit" what they deliver (within reason, hazardous materials being one), which is as it should be, and why your request does no good.

> which also means I could attach a brick/lead weight to every piece of crap mail and it would be returned to sender, and sender charged

No longer works, too many tried it: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/566/can-i-mail-a-br...

"According to rule 917.243(b) in the Domestic Mail Manual, when a business reply card is "improperly used as a label" — e.g., when it's affixed to a brick — the item so labeled may be treated as "waste." That means the post office can toss it in the trash without further ado."

While it is a subtle difference, at least with physical paper mail, the advertiser had to pay to produce and have shipped the item. With email spam, you have to pay for the privilege of receiving the email spam. So one thing to do is just keep your recycle bin handy, and just dump the unwanted items in the recycle bin.
Excellent run-down of the situation. Additionally, the asteroid belt is figuratively next-door, and the reduced launch costs from the surface only make it easier to reach. Mars will be the center of future space commerce, not Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_population2.svg
Quirk implies that it's not very common, actually there's a large number of countries that do the same thing.
He's mainly just a puppet, he can't stop this. Trust me.
I feel pretty out of my league even commenting on this, but I'll do so anyway.

As someone who's gotten by quite well with thinking about boolean logic as just true and false, the first two videos have absolutely blown my mind.
Amazing, amazing, wow this is so good. Lots of astroturfing here even from very new accounts (not yours), why so many exclamation marks with praise when the real value of HN is in getting you actionable feedback?
As long as new people keep being born, they're going to have to live somewhere. You can choose the Greenwich Village route which SF seems to be doing and maintain the outward appearance of the place at the cost of that place becoming ever more exclusive, or you allow as much new development as there's demand for and the place starts looking different but doesn't become any more exclusive. It's worth emphasizing that this doesn't have anything to do with Capitalism. In a command economy you'd see the same thing with the powerful using their influence to get slots in the city, and the same sort of outflow of existing residents.

Maybe if SF succeeded from the US and California and ran a tight immigration policy you could make stasis work, but somehow I don't think that's in the cards.
Of all of these objections, only "heterogenous priority" and "Lack of commitment devices" are unsolved by using a hierarchical to-do list.

Paradox of choice? Group your tasks into categories so that you can't see the whole list at once.

Heterogenous complexity? Divide your tasks into subtasks so that everything is ultimately broken down into roughly equal sized chunks.

Lack of context? Again, organize everything into sublists so that you do have context. Put notes under the item if you need even more context.

Heterogeneous priority? This is just not a problem with to-do lists in the first place. You have a reminder there, so take care of it before it becomes a problem. If you need another tool in addition to make sure you actually get it done, that is not an indictment of to-do lists' inherent ineffectiveness.

As for the lack of commitment devices, this is again not some fatal blow to to-do lists. To-do lists are not going to magically solve all of your problems. You will need other tools and you will need to establish good habits as well.
The pen is amazing in quality. Its a full Wacom pen, with full pressure sensitivity. It counts as a totally separate input, so your "finger" and "pen" are seen completely differently.

In contrast, an iPad stylus thinks that the pen is just another finger. "Write then swipe" simply works on the Surface, for instance.
In regard to #1, this goes back to Joe having not attended a great school. The MITs and Stanfords of the world have career fairs with all the top employers in attendance. If Joe went to a public university in his home town, chances are good Joe's not going to come out of college with a good network so that he won't have to search job ads.

I agree on #2, and it's a shame more companies don't hire this way.
If the mission is critical, choosing programmers matters more that choosing languages. If ATS is hard to use, then it's the right choice because the users who mastered such difficult technique must be the smartest guys...
"I do think that a creative culture (which includes tech!) can't really flourish in such an expensive city. It just limits options too much when you have to make so much money just to live."

This is exactly why I moved to Portland, Oregon instead of San Francisco 4 years ago. We've had a very strong creative tech scene here, that has not had the same levels of cost pressure. It emulated the situation during the Homebrew Computer Club days in Silicon Valley, it had the formula I thought would make it a good place to do tech startups.

The affordable cost of living has allowed me to work on projects I otherwise would not have been able to in SF, because I simply couldn't have afforded it.

Concernedly, Portland rents/houses have been trending upward recently, largely due to a lot of people moving here from California. It's my hope that Portland is able to maintain that balance of affordability and ambition... we'll see.
This is just focusing on the list as an ends to itself. I have little doubt that a list is not capable of "working." However, the among the many different processes of creating and organizing a list, there are probably jewels that help a ton of people. Oddly, these processes will be widely different for many different people that all have similar artifacts. This is why some people will say "to-do lists work for me" while someone with almost an exact replica list will say "it just wasted my time."
(I think) This is similar to how you could preface nearly any statement you make anywhere with "I think". My instinct is to qualify everything and I often have to go back and delete the qualification because it pointlessly weakens every sentence. Either that or I notice it after I've already written and cringe at re-reading it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457261). (I think) It is usually better to let your readers decide which statements are subjective and which are objective.
Cali is one of those states. So you can't be a very good food safety manager. Citation included above.

Agreed lots of things scarier than Hep A. But there isn't a vaccine for E. Coli or Salmonella.
I've been working on a tool (https://then.io) that solves all of these problems with the same effort that a todo list requires. Your tasks are scheduled between your calendar events and within the spans of time you set for them to be executed. They are ordered so that all of your due dates are met, with padding for mistakes.

Paradox of choice, lack of context, lack of commitment devices, and heterogeneous complexity are all solved by the nature of then.io. I would argue that priority doesn't matter, only due dates do. If you have too many tasks to finish before a due date, then you need to make the decision of which due date to push back.
The End of Venture Capital (Sort Of)
If a freelancer works just with 1 customer they should simply be hired.

A good strategy: 1 background job that is long running and has a reasonably low price tag because it can be pre-empted, one high priority, short bursts of work that are paid top rate and maintenance on a number of old clients that still bring in a part of the income.

That way everybody gets value for their money and the freelancer gets a good mixture of income. You're mistaken if you think that having a freelancer with only 1 or 2 customers is good for you, in the long term you'll need to rebuild your relationship with new people because your old ones will go out of business when you don't need them for a while.
Maybe she'll take a job where that will be exactly what she'll get to do!
In fairness, flossing is a lot harder than making web sites... :)
You most definitely meant "longitude", not "latitude", right?
Show HN: Random indie and electronic playlists
The 80 Rules of Social Media
Free HTML Starter Templates for Bootstrap
Personal plug, because the article mentions snakebite; hadoofus[1] is a C library that natively speaks to HDFS (v1), with a Python wrapper. No Java involved.

Pros (vs Snakebite):

* C, not Python. More portable to non-Python languages; probably faster

* Speaks v1 of the protocol (AFAIK, nothing else does this except via JNI to hadoop's Java client)

* Kerberos authentication supported (but not datanode tokens or the digest auth they employ)

Cons:

* Sort of abandonware. I don't personally use HDFS anymore, so it has stagnated.

* As an extension of the above, doesn't support the v2 (Protobuf-based) protocol

* C, not Python. All the usual potential issues with C that Python shields you from.

[1]: https://github.com/cemeyer/hadoofus
Housing prices and taxes are key reasons people cite for moving out of the cities into the suburbs.

Regarding housing prices: this may be true in first-rate cities like San Francisco or New York, but here in St. Louis (and in dozens of similar cities in the U.S.) housing is usually cheaper in the city's core. People left for the suburbs to get more space, because they had automobiles, because the housing stock in the suburbs is much newer, because blacks were moving in, and because of crime levels (some real, some perceived).
An interesting observation about USA government
Much longer version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFefasS6bhc
"closed source is necessarily and fundamentally immoral, nay, evil"

Keep in mind that RMS is talking about the broader social impact of a proprietary software ecosystem, not any single proprietary software product. RMS is working against a model where people are divided by the restrictions imposed by proprietary licenses and by proprietary software itself. In a proprietary software ecosystem, people are divided not merely by their technical skills, but by the whims of software vendors.

The reason RMS' arguments seem to have implications outside the field of software is that proprietary software ecosystems have effects that go beyond software.
Gone Home: A Brilliant Example of How Less Can Be More in Video Games
I had to reread it several times as well before I finally found a charitable interpretation. What he's saying is that with a to-do list, it's easy to just get all of the high priority stuff out of the way, and then when all you have is low priority stuff, just to dick around for the rest of the day.

On the one hand, there's some validity to that point; most people can't actually take care of every low priority item on a long term to-do list immediately without burning out. Balancing that with still taking care of the low priority items before they become crises can be difficult.

On the other hand, taking care of the A priorities and then ignoring the C priorities altogether is simply doing it wrong. The author suggests putting everything on a calendar instead of using to-do lists. I think this is dumb reasoning. There's nothing stopping you from using both.

Put everything on the to-do list. Get your high priority stuff out of the way, and then put the low priority stuff (or the stuff you have an ugh field around) on your calendar. This is way more efficient, and leverages the quickness of the to-do list to prevent you from accidentally forgetting something entirely.
That bit from GNU on charging whatever you want for distribution of free software is, frankly, a disingenuous argument.

Ask any book or music publisher: you can't expect to profit much from distribution if you can always get the same thing for free next door. If you get anything, it pretty much amounts to a donation.

I think we all know that here.

Yes, you're right that there are organizations that subsidize free software development. But this is not a broadly applicable mechanism, in the commercial sector at least. Not every commercial company can pursue a leveraged approach.

This is exactly why I suggested a government-funded direction.

Free software is certainly widely used, but it pales in comparison to non-free software. Hence the previous poster's complaint about the lack of a competitive free Google Docs, AWS, etc.
Sure, but is that enough? How do you create "Universal Housing" if some poor person living in San Francisco stubbornly refuses to buy a bus ticket to Montana?
Cool project, and really cool on her actually sticking it out and producing a site a day for 180 days straight.

I am curious about her status/background. Is she in high school, college, out of school? Working a basic or full-time professional job? If she has a full-time job doing something else, it's a hell of a commitment to do something like this on an ongoing basis. I'm not sure how you could work 8+ hours a day, then come home and work on a project like this every day for 6 months straight. Even giving up more sleep than you should and any attempt to have a social life, it'd be tough to pull off.

It's a little different if this is the only thing she has going on right now. Not that it isn't still a great achievement - if I was in a position to do so, I'd be interested in hiring somebody with the intelligence, independence, and drive to complete a project like this with no definite payoff at the end. It may even be better that she can maintain a reasonable work-life balance on a long-term project and not burn out.

I'm working on my own project outside of work, but I sure couldn't spend 8-ish hours on it every day over the course of 6 months while still working at my normal job.
Disabling my Facebook
> I said "it's not the CEO's job to educate employees on the finer points,"

Yes, that's where we disagree. See if you can get your employees versed well on those finer points then they'll be able to make better decisions (or at least, better informed ones...) so that in the longer term they will stick around instead of that they find out that they are in over their heads. I'd rather not work with someone than work with someone when I know they don't understand the deal we are making as well as I do.

That attitude has saved me a lot of headaches and the only time that I deviated from it (it was pretty much a charity project anyway) I ended up in a lot of trouble over exactly that point. So, do yourself a favour and spend that extra time to educate your employees, even if it doesn't come up about any financial package that you have agreed to (preferably before they agree to it!), in the long term that will pay back big time, and it will save both you and the people you work with a lot of grief and headaches. It's up to them to educate their spouse (if applicable) but if you know and they don't then it's up to you to do your bit.

CEO -> takes initiative, not just reactive.
FYI, that is the way crosswords work in italian, accents are considered irrelevant.
Moving on from SpiderOak Hive to BTSync
So I assume your blindness to the possibility of condescension from someone indicating that another countries cultural norms are nothing more than a peculiar idiosyncracy, thus indicating that their own cultural standards should be considered to be the norm, must be just a quirk in your character and nothing to really take particularly seriously then.

(note, this comment is meant illustratively)
I use visio a lot , and this actually seems to hit a lot of the points I like about visio (namely not being way too frustrating to use like dia is).

Absolutely need keyboard shortcuts though
He's not saying stuff that can make people think he's going to rip them off. That's entirely your interpretation, and of course you could take that as evidence that your point is in fact true but you could think that based on just about any random exclamation, that doesn't mean there is any logic to it.
116 days of no light is really not all that different than places which have a winter that gets below freezing. Most plants in places with a winter die, fall and spring back up every single year. Where I live, first frost to last frost is on average about 120 days.

Also, you should see the size of the vegetables that grow near the poles where they have short summers but very long days,