skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now, I'm certainly not an expert on sleep, but my current night reading just happens to be "The Promise of Sleep" by Willam Dement, founder of the Stanford sleep center and student of Kleitman, the discoverer of REM sleep. And this article contradicts what he writes in so many ways. Here's what I took away from the book:

Just as a start, the author got that thing about REM sleep being the only sleep that matters exactly backwards. Depriving people of REM sleep has not shown any effects on increasing sleep debt (ie feeling tired), it's the non-REM sleep that you need to not feel tired. (Which makes sense because in REM sleep your brain is essentially awake.) What the purpose of REM sleep is, is not known.

Furthermore, the idea that you can "train" yourself to need less sleep has no basis in science. This does not mean there aren't a few people who have all kinds of strange sleep issues, but for the majority of people there seems to be no scientific evidence that this works at all.

About the "intrinsic 28-hour pattern", in most cases (not all, there are probably people with real physiological disorders) this tendency to have a longer day than 24 hours is induced by artificial light in the evening. Electric lighting, and certainly staring into a bright LCD screen, is bright enough to register as daylight to your biological clock, and cause it to shift forward. In studies where people were isolated from artificial lights, people who normally would have a rhythm slightly longer reverted back to almost exactly 24 hours.

Rather than "hacking your brain", it would probably be more beneficial for the majority of people to just learn about how sleep works and of the importance of managing it properly.
"Due to the large amount of public interest, the German board of education appointed a commission to investigate von Osten's scientific claims. ... This commission consisted of a veterinarian, a circus manager, a Cavalry officer, a number of school teachers, and the director of the Berlin zoological gardens."

That was in 1904. They really knew how to get things done back then.
I have met very few IT workers that I consider engineers. Most consider it their job and have the same attitudes as others who have a job.
The Magento Story
Another idea for hot climates: Monolithic Dome Eco-Shell with a fabric covered geodesic dome built around it. Paint the fabric with ceramic bead reflective paint.

Eco-Shells can be put up very quickly, and are cheap and very strong. They're just a step away from a bomb shelter, actually. Fabric-covered geodesic domes are also cheap. (DIY)

http://www.monolithic.com/topics/ecoshells
and yet, the world over, people are still both basically decent and basically stupid.

Edit: correlation?
I'll second the question, but for a different reason. I once noticed a vulnerability on Facebook, and as a responsible citizen, took screenshots of what was happening and wrote a friendly email explaining how it could be used to compromise another user. I explained that I had just stumbled across the problem and wanted to be sure they knew it was there, and how to fix it.

Their response was to lock my account for a day for "suspicious activity". Once they unlocked it, they changed my password and informed me that I must have carelessly given my credentials to an attacker (which had nothing to do with the problem I reported). Their email was extremely rude and threatening. As a result, I would never dare inform the financial institutions of their problems unless I worked for their security team, for fear of being prosecuted. So as a follow-up question: what has been the response you've received in the past from such action? And indeed, how do you avoid coming across as a malicious hacker?
Does anybody know how to get that book ("Four steps to Epiphany") in Europe - either as paperback or E-Book?
Until there's more research studying the long term effects of this, I really don't think it's a good idea.

Current research has identified that conventional sleeping helps memory, learning, creativity, and muscle repair/recovery (related to working out); not sleeping well can lead to stuff like high blood pressure and the hardening of heart arteries (which leads to heart attacks).

Then again if you don't have much of a choice if you have a hard deadline, this may be a useful tool to use now and again.
These are initial observations from the first day of using the iPhone SDK. Basically, I'm just sharing my first thoughts and impressions on the tools involved and how they work and appear.

I'll share some insight later, after I explore the SDK and Objective C code interfaces in more detail.
Sure sure. If you're 'in the market' it's good to know.

Honest question though: How many people do you know who still build desktops? It seems everyone I know has gone laptop + external monitors in the past few years. (with hand-built 'server' machines all running linux)
> remember that the iPhone is highly based on OSS

Based on, yes. But the stuff that makes the iPhone an iPhone -- Cocoa, multitouch, etc. -- is far from open.
Warren Buffett enjoys $2.1 mn lunch with investor (in pics)
Unlocked phones are available at many of the big electronics retailers (best buy, frys, etc) and there are myriad cell phone stores that specialize in unlocked/imported sets.
I think small businesses get about the sweetest retirement packages in the United States which do not involve backstopping by the taxpayers of California. With the SEP plan (one of a few options) you can sock up to, essentially, $5k + 25% of salary (capped at a very generous number) in a tax advantaged retirement account. It is like the IRAs available to regular wage employees, except superior in just about every way. (You lose out on employer match, you gain on sickening tax efficiency.)

Another fun option, especially for young entrepreneurs, is the Roth IRA, which is such a good deal it ought to be illegal. Pay taxes now at your low "I do not make much money rate". Watch investments compound for a few decades. Then it is yours, tax free, allowing you to avoid the significantly higher rate you'll be facing when you're significantly wealthier, and also letting you do some fun tax structuring if you also have taxable investments and/or income during retirement.

If you start saving young, $1 put in a Roth IRA today buys you $1 in tax-free income a year, for perpetuity, starting at retirement.
I probably would take the trade-off if it was a full multi-touch trackpad. These days I work with my macbook pro sitting to the left of a full keyboard and monitor. I frequently reach over to the trackpad to gesture (mostly zooming and two/three finger scrolling) and use the mouse (on the right) to point.

I'd also be interested in seeing a mighty mouse with a multitouch top. (In lieu of buttons / ball.)
Tell HN: Risk, Dan Gardner
Hey Guys,

I just finished reading Risk (The Science of Politics and Fear) by Dan Gardner and figured I should recommend it as a great read. I wouldn't normally recommend a book here but I suspect it is the kind of book a lot of people would dismiss as not-relevant to the hacker sort of mentality (I thought the same).

Basically it sums up the Human reaction to perceived risk. One way to describe the whole thing is how many people, after seeing a coin land heads up 5 times in a row will bet it has a higher chance of landing heads up again next time - regardless of the random aspect.

The most interesting thing I found in the book though was when he presented common "risk puzzles" where our gut causes a knee-jerk answer to a posed question. Several times I thought "that's silly, I'd never fall for that" only to read on an find that I had done :) one big point he makes there is that bad responses to risk and fear are just as much a problem in "intelligent" people.

If I had to sum it up Risk is a good link between some of Dawkins/Hitchens anti-mythology books and popular science concepts (like A Brief History of Time etc.).

His initial example is how after Sept. 11th people stopped using Aeroplanes whilst car travel went up: except more people extra died in that year than died in the Sept 11th tragedy. Car travel was perceived as "safer" even though it wasn't in the slightest.

I think it is really relevant to some of the stuff people here are working on: because it assess how people respond even after considering a problem. It's also proved useful (to me) in making several tough(ish) choices in the recent past. If nothing else it has sat there in my mind so that when "gut" kicks in I have a little bookmark to stop it and rethink what I just did/said/thought.

Anyway, I found it incredibly fascinating & enlightening to read so.... recommended :)
Amazon Link (in case ppl struggle to find it)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Risk-Science-Politics-Dan-Gardner/dp...
Agreed. That's why I use my left hand to control the mouse, even though I'm right-handed. Less movement, less muscle-stress.
In retrospect, my comment sounded like it was reaffirming the article's point, but that's really not how I meant it (snark fail on my part).

I agree with what you're getting at, and I think that the idea of popularizing "AntiIf" as a slogan is really stupid and dangerous. The first eager intern who suggests refactoring some code because "ifs are bad", I'm not a religious man, but God help them.

What I was trying to point out is that the single example they have up right now showing that 'if' is "bad" is dispatching on types, which a good number of languages support out of the box (in other words, it's a strawman). If you're already inspecting types, then they presumably already exist, so there's no additional overhead in using your language's features to get clearer code when you can.
Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account compromised; used to deliver malware
FlOw clone released on iPhone, developer pleads ignorance
Yeah, that's a very good point. I guess it's the same as the frustration we have with IE. Most people don't even notice a problem because they don't care. I'm not saying they SHOULDN'T care (at least on some issues), but I it really isn't Microsoft's target audience.
edb has it. http://book.cakephp.org/view/162/Internationalizing-Your-App...
The flip side of a major innovation is an entire category that was previously undiscovered or unutilized. Therefore, there are a finite number of breakthroughs that are possible, and how many there are is determined by two things: The nature of the universe, and how we characterize breakthroughs.

If you characterize "innovation" very broadly, then you get few innovations that are even possible. Example: Would "augmented reality" be an "innovation", or simply an application of existing vision algorithms, 3D graphics hardware, and small computers? It's arguable either way, and I'm not making a claim either way. My point is that if you do say "That's not an innovation, it's an incremental improvement on the computer innovation", then you get a smaller set of possible innovations to draw from. Apply that standard across the entire set and you can shrink it to the point that there are only a handful even left (human-level AI, brain upload, space colonies, and maybe 10 or 20 more).

On the other hand, if you broaden the definition of "innovation", you get more. Is a "web search engine" a valuable innovation? It's "just" an application of a computer, but it's a big and important one. That "computer" innovation is a particularly big source of this problem; there are many innovation-class things that are "just" an application of a computer.

I don't think we've gotten that much less innovative. We're just taking some time to come to grips with the ones we've already got, and research on others is proceeding. I think this is an artifact of the way innovations get less and less flashy over time; "cure for cancer" have been very innovative, but there isn't just one, and individually they don't look like much. But they are, nevertheless, proceeding, and at an increasing pace as we bring more and more biology under our control.
James from Heroku live stream at Structure 09 conference
Structure 09 conference live stream
I ran PyPond_with_graphics.py and got a list of 1000 numbers spit out. Any hints on how to run it properly?
Tim Bray and the SGML tribe on Erik Naggum
The new live feed is a pain. Why should I have to block every damn application individually? I want to see 3 things: status, events, photos and that's it. In fact that and messages is all I want from FB, I shouldn't even need to be aware of any of the crap.
Why would I replace useless keys with another useless device? (No, a trackpad is not a mouse replacement.)
Google Profiles has XFN now
No, absolutely not.

First, I love my keypad. It speeds up typing numbers considerably. In fact, I find myself wishing the non-decimal hexadecimal digits were added to it as well. As well as a comma as thousands separator (or as decimal point when I'm typing Dutch).

Second, I loathe touchpads. They're much harder to control than normal mouses. I only use one when there's no other choice, e.g. in the train. I carry an external mouse with my laptop, so I can use that whenever I encounter a desk.
Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results

http://www.calltoactionbook.com/
The sleep cycle evolved before artificial lighting, when night was truly deep and dark.

That's not work, commerce, or socialization at work.
There were times in university where I would get up at 6 pm, and go to sleep at 6 am. I couldn't understand so-called "morning people".

Now, though, if I go to bed tired at 10:30 pm, I wake up rested at 6:30 am. It really is a matter of training. I rarely go to bed later than midnight now, after 20 years of rarely going to bed before midnight.

I actually had a very different experience. In college I spent a month trying to become a "morning person." After the initial adjusment period, it worked great for a little under two weeks - I'd go to sleep at 10:30, and hop out of bed at 7:00 feeling fresh and ready to go. But suddenly (perhaps once I finally caught up on my sleep debt) I stopped falling asleep at 11. Instead I'd lie in bed wide awake for two or three hours, and feel as grumpy as ever the next morning. After three consecutive days of that, I gave up on being a morning person and have yet to look back.
I would love to see more discussion of his ideas - especially from people who have really tried to follow his principles. Customer Development makes a lot of sense. But other than Steve's own companies, who has used his method and benefited from it? Who has tried and failed?

For what it's worth, I'm at the beginning stages of taking two stalled startups through the Customer Development process. I'll post my success or failure in 6-9 months. :)
Privacy.Edu: 25 Incredibly Useful Privacy Cheat Sheets & Checklists
If you're a webmaster, Web user, or CEO with a Web site, this list of privacy resources will help you brush up on your privacy knowledge.
The problem isn't that some protocols can't do these things. The problem is that email is the only protocol that fills this need, so it's time to stop complaining about how people choose to use it.
Apple's is pretty good.
Yes, but so far as I can see, the implementation is very straightforward. I wouldn't have thought there'd be much difference in practise.
Symbian was never the future, it was an old product that had been OSSd. Maemo was never on a phone. OpenMoko was always a joke.

Android is the only modern, out of the box, touch based platform not designed to pus hthe agenda of aparticular handset carrier.
> And, once again: you seem to think that people in places like Bolivian tin mines have options, that they can just move, or be moved, to something else at the drop of a hat. Reality ain't like that.

The existence of a bad situation does not imply that a given solution will make things better.

I note that hell-holes are usually associated with folks who are "doing things for the people".

And, in point of fact, they can "just move", unless someone is pointing a gun at them. That someone is almost always a govt.
NPR Crowdsources ID of lobbyists at congressional health care hearing
Here's my 2p: a mixture is good, but ultimately it comes down to what is best for you.

My background has been quite a mix. Most of my formal education is related to electronics (my degree was an embedded systems engineering) whilst my outside interests were in CS, programming and the internet (and some sociology thrown in on top :D). All of my programming and CS knowledge is self taught.

Career wise I've been more successful in the CS side of things - but there are large portions of that success which come down to things brought out of formal education. Stuff like essay writing really helped my form filling for example (and I seem to do a hell of a lot of that! :D) as well as technical handling and critical thinking (part of the engineering blitz they gave us!)

Now I am just starting out on an Open University (who provide degrees through distant learning) after my Dad advised it as a good route. This is the best of both worlds because it requires a lot of self teaching from the provided material but with the formal aspects of tests and essays thrown in on top. Im doing it alongside my work in related fields so it really is a complete learning mix and it's been an enlightening experience - I really think more people should be encouraged to take this route from the get-go.

Im finding it a real joy to do because it doesn't matter if you drift off into an aside - that is almost the point (at this level at least - Masters, one imagines Bachelors and non-degree level is a bit more rigid) of the exercise.
"CEOs don't post on Twitter" -> "CEOs are missing a chance to connect with their customers" doesn't follow. For a CEO, it suffices to read Twitter or blogs. They have followup channels that most people don't ("Hey, you, go email this guy"). You can't tell if they are doing that or not. Given the nature of a CEO's job, it would suffice just to sample such sources, too.

Now, I bet most aren't doing that either, but it's hard to tell.

Even without SarbOx, I wouldn't have the CEO of a large company posting, simply because they are the ultimate authority (as others mention). If even a VP posts something unfortunate, you've still got some maneuvering room for the CEO to adjust the message. If the CEO makes a mistake, you're really stuck.
Multitouch doesn't really make the iPhone since it stopped being unique to the iPhone, eg, when the Pre and Hero were announced.

That said, both the Pre and Hero's implementations are also proprietary.
Working at a small company is obviously very different from working at a large institution. Both have their pros and cons and I think that time spent at each is invaluable experience.

Who knows, maybe you've gotten all you can from this gig and are ready to work at a big company. The change in culture might be just what you need now.
I am currently using it - the ridiculously pricey Logitech diNovo Edge.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices...
Melody - Movable Type's open-source fork
Baldness calculator promises to predict men's hair loss - Telegraph
There's no allowance for style? If my source is dry and pedantic, and quoting would disrupt the flow of what I'm trying to say, it's really that grievous a sin to rewrite?
I have several friends who have successfully gone on and off of the polyphasic sleep cycle. Just as with most things in life, you need to be open and willing and dedicated to make it work. This relates to forging your way with a startup, gaining muscle, adjusting sleep patterns, dating... everything.

It's fair to go from your own experiences, but I know polyphasic sleep is doable, reasonable, and even better for some people. My cup of tea? Definitely not.
Ask HN: What percent of iPhone apps make less than $100?
I'd like to know what percent of iPhone apps make less than $100 and what percent make less than $10,000.

This site (http://www.moveyourweb.net/blog/guess-sales-figures-for-any-iphone-application/) estimates that an app will get between 200 to 550 times as many sales as reviews, but that wouldn't apply for a small number of reviews that could just be friends. But if you had a way to fairly sample apps, you could estimate how many make over $10,000. For 99 cent apps, 1 additional review would correspond very roughly to 350 * 0.99 * 0.7 = $243 so if you subtract 20 for friends it would mean the ones getting over 60 reviews are making over $10,000. Does that sound in the ballpark?

If you could estimate the revenue from all the high selling apps, you could see what is left over for the rest but I don't know if that would be possible.

So... anyone willing to make some SWAGs?
A few do, but the vast majority do not; the cost differential is quite large. A unlocked phone will generally cost 2-3X what you would pay for a locked/subsidized phone, and since the cost to get service from any carrier is generally not going to cover the difference in price over the lifetime of the phone it is not a good option. One additional factor to consider with the US market is that we do not have a single cellphone standard; CDMA phone users can choose between Sprint or Verizon and GSM phone users can choose between AT&T or T-Mobile (there are minor prepaid players as well, but prepay and smartphones will not be a good mix until the providers figure out how to deal with the voice vs. data issue...)
Posterous adds autoposting to Delicious, Friendfeed, Vimeo, YouTube and more.
This would have been better as a poll.

And no. I use the number keys all the time.
Perl and PHP also use shell-style heredoc syntax. The main alternative is to provide a newline-friendly quote delimiter, like the """string""" syntax in Python.
This strikes me as particularly funny as I'm working on a module of code where I had to use a type field and an 'if' statement to get around a dynamic cast that was killing performance.

(Virtual functions were not an option as this was taking place inside an STL '==' comparator.)
It's too bad there couldn't be just one version of Windows 7 that is configurable instead of the "Home Premium", "Business" and "Ultimate" options. I know this has been debated quite a bit before when Vista was released, but I was hoping Microsoft would simplify things a bit with Windows 7.
I always dislike "initial observation" posts because everyone seems to see things through rose-tinted glasses when they first come upon a new programming toy (or new programming tool).

Its always more interesting to see the blog posts making observations after a person/company has released a serious project. This way, these people have been using the tools in their daily workflow for weeks/months and know most of the ins and outs of it.
Google Gives Presentation On Search Engine Optimization
It has a keyboard, pointing device, and display. Seems like a computer to me.
Review my twitter app - twitpare.com
A fun app we created, it allows you to upload a bunch of photos (video and other content later) and start a discussion. I think it will be more interesting than posting a single photo for certain content.

Let me know your thoughts, all feedback appreciated.
I disagree. I think the more primal idea (to be taken with all the requisite salt) is that you need to make things as simple as possible but no simpler.

[Maybe attributed to Einstein? I'm not sure]

In music "more nuance" often can go to far. I went to a concert a few days ago that was had a green noise-pop band as an opener. I really enjoyed their concept, but I wanted to go up there and physically remove some of their nuance. It was too layered, too complex, too cerebral.

The pivotal thing though is that I liked their concept. I think the things they were trying to build, and the emotions they were trying to invoke were great. They just needed to spend more time whittling away to that solid core and less time playing with loops on their laptops.

So yeah. "If it sounds good, it is good." But that's the kind of statement that takes "simpler is better" more or less axiomatically.
This reminds me of George Costanza...
make sure you read the comments on steve's blog, there are some good nuggets there.