skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...this kind of email really angers me..."

Chill.

One of the most important things in business is knowing when and where to expend your energy and passion which, believe it or not, is a limited resource. If this motivates you to change something, great. If it angers you, get a grip and find a better outlet. Anger is a waste. Don't allow them to let you do that to yourself.
I would just like to note that Libre.fm seems to be API-compatible with last.fm. It seems changing your DNS or hosts file allows last.fm plug ins to work correctly with this site.
One should sleep whenever he/she's tired.

Anyone who has the luxury to choose what to do with his/her time is extremely successful or at least happy.

And also the quality of sleeping is more important than the quantity. No point sleeping 2 more hours if you feel rested and rejuvenated after only 4-5 hours. And again, lucky is the one who can get to the "office" at 4 AM or 1PM whenever he/she is awake and feel like working...
Perhaps they can import the Haskell-rules. Haskell allows indentation and curly braces/semicolons to be mixed at will.
Polyphasic Sleep: One Man's 6-Month Experiment (2005)
Superblock's Corduroy: Billing for Small Businesses
Yeah, it's my number one favorite application of the last 2 years. Works amazingly well most of the time. I have even gotten it to work for gaming reasonably well.
You'd think that if the hifi was that good it would be hard to concentrate on the code.
Where's the tar.gz or file to download? There's a link on the right, but it's broken. Anyone else have this problem?
“Moderated comments” is an oxymoron. -Guy Kawazaki

link: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html
It's an amazing piece of software. Better than the commercial alternatives I have tried.
I guess the grandfather-post was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox
Individual text files can be found here. Use DownThemAll to quickly grab them. Filter on .txt, you haxors.
"Google search is not without environmental consequence — 0.2 grams of CO2 per search, the company claims"

I wonder how that compares to the CO2 cost of driving to the library to look up the same bit of information for the average person?
It's just not the one he made in this post.
Like it or not, Cracker culture's an important part of Hacker culture.
Microsoft will soon unveil free anti-virus software
JackBe is practicing safe mashups
I find it chokes up on some types of clipboard objects between the pc and mac and then I have to restart the service to get it to behave again. Plain text it usually does alright, but text from the web (unicode maybe?) causes the copy/paste to break
An economic bestiary
A nitpick: I don't like how financials get lumped in with industrials in these sorts of things; The size of total assets is not an apples-to-apples comparison. I think biggest bankruptcies by number of employees would be interesting for example.
Cyberattacks On U.S. Could Even Odds For Enemy
The biggest take-away I had from this is that production value, graphics packages and big studio sets aren't what attract people to some content. If the screenshot is any indication most of these videos where poorly lit handheld streams from a single camera. One hopes that if the television industry takes anything away from this it is that people care less about how you dress your show up and more about what the actual content is. If this had been covered on TV we would have had to sift through commercial breaks, into graphics outro graphics and the incessant jabbering of a couple inane hosts along with the inevitable text crawl at the bottom from viewers texting in (just to show that the network understands social media).
Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course
I don't mind that, but I do like to make the distinction between the two.
Global Warming Consensus Melts
It can definitely be misleading, but it's still a useful metric. When I read "Android barcode scanner in 6 lines of Python code" my thought is, cool, there's clearly a good barcode scanning library for Android in Python and I can look and find easy 6-line examples of how to do something useful with it.

This makes that style of headline much more useful to me than "Python/Android Barcode Scanning Library Example Code" or somesuch, because it gives me some idea of the level of effort required to do something useful with the library (in this case 6 lines).
I don't think that guy is trying to be anything. I think he's just completely off his face.
Rearranging Stars to Communicate with Aliens
Shopping Around for International Patent Protection
Cisco is a counter-example. Also both Microsoft and Apple lost 1 of their 2 founders.
Google Says It's Actually Quite Small
Age Tops Chart of the Things People Lie About the Most
How to avoid medical mistakes
I agree. I normally am all about openness and transparency but I can see the prof's concern over this particular issue.
For some reason, I don't feel like this site is a totally unbiased source of information, considering there's a link at the right side saying "You won't believe what liberals say."
"Today’s incident also shows the fragility of the 'cloud' as it can be knocked out a single lightening strike."

How is this different from any other data center? Note too that on EC2, your instances will be spread randomly throughout the facility - you'd actually be better off having this happen on EC2 vs. in a traditional DC. Furthermore, this was a localized incident inside of a single availability zone - the other four (now five, actually) AZs were completely unaffected.

The author clearly does not know what he is talking about.

I'm glad one commenter on the article had the sense to call him out. Too bad he was followed by the usual set of trolls.
lots of recursion going on around here.. we have startups mass producing startups, and news mass producing news.
Long-promised '$1,000 Gene Sequence' less than two years off
More to the point: "I’d just Google it." = "I don’t know."
Shouldn't 118 have been the pinnacle of the island of stability? It's a noble element...
This is perhaps the post / experiment I most enjoyed with Pavlina. He wrote a lot of good stuff, I fell out of love with his stuff a year or so ago but this is one that I really enjoyed reading about.
Crisis Mode: Less Ventured
How to create Microsoft office documents with PHP
How to bootstrap your next business idea
1. Temperatures are clearly rising.

2. CO2 concentrations are clearly rising.

3. Well-understood physics suggests that rising CO2 should lead to rising temperatures.

Does this make it 100% certain that we're causing global warming? Maybe not, but if you want to disprove the link, you're going to need better arguments than "41% of laypeople think global warming is exaggerated".
Good for him. It's perverse for the gatekeepers of an institution supposedly dedicated to increasing human knowledge to attempt to restrain its dissemination in this fashion, and it's cheering to see the university backing the student here.
How to Save Money, Where to Get Money
How To Nab Federal Funding For Your Tech Firm
Well, going from personal experience, mine is 3 going on 4 and I'm just thinking about getting a new one. But even more convincing is, if you watched the Apple key note they said that the average life of a laptop is 5 years.
OP here and I agree with your assessment of the Pavlina blog's change over the past year. His earlier stuff was great but I've had a hard time digesting some of his newer topics.

I posted this because there was a lot of interesting discussion on the Matt Mullenweg post in regards to his sleeping patterns.

My lifestyle would make it hard for me to try polyphasic sleep, but I could see where it would help my productivity if I could pull it off.
The Right Number of Shareholders for Your Company
Fred Wilson: A Lesson From Morty
It really does depend on the question. A lot of interview time, particularly on phone screens, is "Does this person's resume reflect reality?" That's where "What's a class?" and "How do you do a join in SQL?" come from, and if the candidate can't easily answer, their resume is bloated, game over. Google it is a bad answer.

Also realize that even though you consider something to be trivia, your interviewer doesn't or the question wouldn't be asked. Saying, "I'd just google it" is dismissive, and people don't like being dismissed.

What you can do is invoke Google techniques as part of a larger problem. Like, "I forget the order of arguments to this function, but that's on Google, can you tell me if I got it right?" When the point of the question isn't the trivia, but the approach.
Plus the first source they cite is the "Heartland Institute". :)
Clean-Tech Investment Is Falling: What Does It Mean?
Two lightweight CSS grid frameworks: the 1KB and the 1-liner
yeah how did this right-wing propaganda site make the front page? the right wingers have been assaulting digg & reddit as part of their "strategy," perhaps they've added this site to their lists?
Although Trent Reznor is not some poor blogger needing ad revenue and so he probably wouldn't mind his missives being rebroadcast verbatim.
but its for fairness & balance ?
It's not that social media has failed but rather Trent is realizing that his audience contains many antisocial malcontents and now he's recoiling in horror.
‘R2-D2′ and Other Lessons From Bell Labs
Entrepreneurial Advice On Success And Failure When You've Lost Everything
Starting Up: Funding Your Social Venture
How to Raise Capital as a First Time Entrepreneur
Musical Mashup on YouTube
A collaborative music and spoken word project where the result is a collection of YouTube performances to be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders. High coolness factor...
Advice for Startups Seeking Venture Capital
Web Infrastructure And a Startup Funding Manifesto
God I wish I could down vote this.

Richard Lindzen is quoted in this article. He just happens to have been funded in various ways by ExxonMobile and other companies in big coal and oil for almost two decades. Whenever some nutjob tries to start attacking the "theory" of global warming, they point to him and say "there's an MIT climate scientist who says it's all fake, so clearly there is no consensus". They're never aware that he's being funded by oil companies.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair
1. The left has sought control of the means of production and distribution from day one.

2. The fight against global warming allegedly requires just that.

3. Follow the money.

It's just a hunch, of course. But any discussion of the problem should focus on three things: 1) Nuclear plants, 2) China, and 3) Proactive solutions. I don't see any of that. The bulk of the solutions offered seem designed to impoverish the developed world.
Wow. It's that easy?

<sarcasm> Then it's completely amazing that so many senior scientists get so befuddled about it, huh? I mean, you'd have to be paid off by somebody or not right in the head to find fault with something that rests on such solid physical principles. </sarcasm>
MVC: No Silver Bullet
Google Openly Profiles SEOs As Criminals
In my program, I had to sign a non-disclosure when doing an assignment for a local tech company. They didn't use anything I made, but I can't share it. It's basically gone for a minimum of 4 years.

I always feel like I've lost a little bit of myself when I lose code or IP I've created, even if I'm paid for my time.
Enterprise sales. Though of course you'll argue it's not a healthy market.
I think the gatekeepers of the institution feel that human knowledge is not increased when homework answers are published on the web, rendering the assignments obsolete for future instances of the course.
And the supporters of global warming are funded by carbon credit companies (Al Gore has stakes in several). Should we not believe them because they too might have an ulterior motive?

Who is funding you is certainly valid question to bring up, but it isn't the end all be all of the argument.

I have a big problem with anyone who says that the science is settled. You don't hear anyone say that the science is settled on the theory of gravity.
Not to mention that the article doesn't actually seem to talk much about science, and spends lots of time talking about authority, despite its claim at the beginning that this should be about science and not authority.
This seems like a reasonable concern. The situation is akin to publishing test questions and answers.
Hi David,

We're excited for you to begin the journey of discovering more about your sleep, and are excited to hear your thoughts.

We spent more than 5 years developing and testing Zeo until our early users (over 150 of them) told us it was ready.

Not sure if you saw, but the uploading your data to an online account is included along with 6 months of sleep coaching via email.

Enjoy!
-Derek@Zeo
Why you should pause for thought before starting a business
Ruby daemons using RobustThread
How to choose a mobile development platform
Here is a good one: http://news.ycombinator.com
I've always thought the degradation into idiocracy happened when people felt like they were anonymous which often times is correlated to the size of the community.
Tilted Twister: A Lego Mindstorms robot that solves Rubik’s cube
DaVinci - Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator [video]
> the fact that the last release seems to be from 2006 worries me a bit

Me too, but Synergy finally convinced me that it's possible to build amazingly good software that lasts.
Polyphasic sleep is something I consider the ultimate lifehack and something I see society moving towards in a cyberpunk / dystopia future as timezones become more and more irrelevant. BTW: I appreciate you putting the year of the post in the title.
Yeah. He seems destined to be murdered by a "fan". Yikes, no wonder he's tuning out.
On the other hand don't some things need to be said anonymously or they will never be said, I'm thinking esp. in the realm of political opinion for example.
Reading it, I couldn't help but think: I wonder what happened to Utu[1]. The site, http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/ appears to be dead. Kinda sad.

(BTW, this is not meant to be flamebait either way about Zed Shaw. I thought it was an interesting project and it came to mind reading this.)

[1](http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/ragel_state_charts.html)
What is the chance they are doing anything new in a 100 level CS course? Interesting, perhaps, but new? Couldn't one find answers to most of the problems in 4+ languages with a single search? I understand the argument, to an extent, that the student is simply lowering the barrier to cheating, but isn't it he really just lowering it from just above the knee to just below the knee?

It was easy to cheat 8 years ago (from what I remember), it's surely easier to cheat now, and it's certainly not because this one kid stood up for something in which he believes.
Aside from the question of publishing source code, I wanted to applaud the author for his observation that students want to do meaningful work. I work as a programmer (and have done so for more than a few years) and am only going to school to "get my degree". Nothing is more frustrating to me than when people who have spent their whole careers in academia correct me on dumb things. I once got marked down because my curly braces were on the same line as the function definition in Java. They said it wasn't "the way it was done in the industry". I learn 10 times more from my job than I ever have at school - their students would be far better off if their projects were more realistic, and if their teachers had real experience.
From what I've heard, this is EC2's only outage in the past year. Amazon's SLA guarantees 99.95% availability for a region (meaning that if you have 2 instances running in different availability zones, Amazon guarantees that at least one of the instances will be up 99.95% of the time). However, with a 3 hour downtime being their only downtime (so far as I'm aware) in the past year, they're hitting 99.95% uptime within an availability zone.

It should be noted that the 365 Main datacenter that hosts (hosted?) Craigslist, Six Apart, Technorati, and a number of high profile web companies had a total failure a while back (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/365-main-datace.ht...). Similarly, Rackspace (whose business is not having to worry about your servers) had 3 outages in 2 days (http://gawker.com/tech/followup/rackspace-outage-was-third-i...).

So, Amazon's 3 hour outage that affected a minority of their customers doesn't seem that outrageous. You're totally right. The author was probably writing a bit of link-bait to get read. No one reads "Amazon EC2 has minor outage that compares favorably against their competitors and affected a minority of their customers." That's just business-as-usual talk. However, if you question the entire viability of cloud computing because of a 3 hour outage, well, that deserves reading.
You sure like submitting tutorials from howtoforge, eh?
This is why startups exist. Those large companies that cite politics as the reason for a crappy product do have a valid excuse. People and politics are real forces and they have real power in the organization. Overcoming them for the sake of good design is a lot harder, and probably not worth it, compared to just creating a startup to build great things.

Also, what is this "you should follow me on Twitter" stuff? I should? Really?
Be sure to check out Piotr Wozniak's thoughts on polyphasic sleep:

http://www.supermemo.com/help/faq/polyphasic.htm
Given Trent's recent sentiments on Web2.0 I took it upon myself to transcribe his feelings to you by rewriting the chorus for his first smash hit, Head Like A Hole from the album Pretty Hate Machine.

web two point oh
black as your soul
he'd rather die than give trolls control

[orig] http://www.lyricsfreak.com/n/nine+inch+nails/head+like+a+hol...
Solutions to class assignments don't generally "increase human knowledge". The only people they will be useful to are students looking to cheat.

A lot of people on BoingBoing were saying that the prof should generate a new assignment each time: that's really not realistic (pg mentioned this in on of his essays). I've just finished the first year of a CS degree, and I can see the advantage of having assignments that have been set for multiple years: they're more 'polished' IMO and better able to stretch actual CS skills and not just the production of boilerplate code.
No, he's lowering it from just above the knee to the ankle. One link to his site, and you'd have all the answers to all the homework questions for the whole semester, presumably ready to print and hand in.
I don't know...the impression I got was that what really got under his skin wasn't so much the attacks on him as it was the attacks on people he cared about-like his fiancee and the guy who needs the heart transplant that he was trying to help. It's easier to let anonymous attacks slide if they are just directed against you, but it's different when people start directing their venom at other people because you care about them.
IMO this is an example of why AWS is so valuable. Not only has Amazon designed their cloud to allow for redundancy (availability zones), but when something does fail they have smart people working on it immediately. Whenever I have doubts about using AWS in a project I always remind myself that the cost of the instance includes much more than the compute, storage, and bandwidth resources. It's all the other stuff as well: smart people watching over my bits, policies & procedures to ensure proper handling of failures, etc.
What surprises me about this, and perhaps where I disagree with the article, is that personal finance is hardly a solved problem -- particularly by web 2.0 apps.

I do use Mint and I actually love it. But it's mostly just for checking my balances in one place and maybe checking out some of my transactions. I used to use MS Money, and before that Quicken, before the applications themselves devolved into bloatware and banks limited their access.

I guess I just find it surprising that MS didn't see this as an opportunity to compete as a web application against what's actually a pretty weak field. Not that I would personally give MS high odds at winning such a competition, mind you...
http://phrack.org/archives/tgz/
Does anyone have good real-world examples of the the kind of communities we would like to see online?

Well, I'll give a fairly decent example.

I occasionally played tabletop wargames in the past locally and we have a statewide forum dedicated to it.

http://www.westgamer.com

I've seen disagreements before on the forum, but have never seen anything that would constitute trolling or abusive behaviour. I think this stems from the fact that everyone pretty much knows everyone outside of the forums and so idiotic behaviour can have real-world consequences (eg, not being able to set up games with others)

There is little to no anonymity on those forums and so everyone is quite civil. I suspect that if you make people responsible for their actions that they end up being quite responsible on the forums.

That's not to say there hasn't been the occasional piece of drama, it's just normally localised and doesn't make its way to the forums for everyone to read.
I'm not sure what they're comparing against. They can't possibly claim that corporate infrastructure has better availability. If a server breaks in your office it takes hours to replace. If a server breaks in EC2 it takes seconds to launch a new one.
The BrainPort Vision Device
There's no way to get around invalid email addresses. Anybody can put in something like asdhsouhdosd@ahsoufhsdof.com and it would pass most regex checks. I think the best solution is to just check for an "@" sign and a "." after it.
Yes, that's precisely my issue with it. For those who don't know, please check out their track record:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute

Make sure to read their stance both on global warming, quoting scientists who want nothing to do with them and fully agree with the consensus on global warming, and also the section on tobacco, where they've always claimed scientific data presented no health risk.
The homework assignments are only rendered obsolete for cheaters... and hopefully the overwhelming majority of the students do their homework because they're trying to learn the material.

Also, after "Intro to X Programming Language", there aren't going to be any trivial assignments and every (or nearly every) solution should be different. At NCSU they had software that would examine all code for assignments to detect people sharing code and trying to make trivial modifications such as changing variable and function names, and changing the order of code. I had quite a few friends get caught by it.

The point of my rant is that some students are going to cheat no matter what. Having the solution posted online isn't going to really change how many people are cheating if it is made clear that the professor will be looking for cheaters.