skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interestingly, the effect of light on the biological clock reverses in the middle of the night, so that light in the early morning tends to make the cycle shorter. Which I guess also makes sense since that's how it would have to work with jetlag.
That NIH page on sleep is fascinating.
> You box yourself into a position where you have to profit immediately or the whole thing goes under. You’ve got to make it work now or give up forever.

That's a feature, not a bug! Procrastination kills more businesses than anything else. With a day job it's too easy to put off building a new business. Without one it's easier to succeed, than to fail.
Magento is a law unto itself! Whatever Magento wills, Magento does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkc_Myyye20
I consider IT to be the systems maintenance and administration role -- programming is another occupation. While I love the technical stuff, I can tell you very specifically why I hate my job:

1. Constant interruptions. I cannot accomplish anything of any degree of complexity when I get nipped at at all sides for a piece of my attention.

2. Micromanaging boss. My boss has this peculiar trait where he insists on observing everything I do that he doesn't understand. He still doesn't understand it when I'm done, but somehow he thinks being there helps me.

3. Idiotic end users. There is no semblance of any sort of competency requirement for an employee of the business and computer usage. I've received calls before on broken computers only to find the computer was OFF.

In my experience, this is pretty much pervasive in the industry.
Im heavily divided on this. On one hand I think the court made the right decision and that a completely unbiased judge would have found the same.

But on the other hand there is that little bit of nagging doubt that possibly somebody (or rather a group) sneakily made sure he was given the case - which I am dead against!!

Mixed bag all round - TBH I think an appeal is probably the best approach over a retrial; but it has to be heard again in some form. Right now it is too much of a hanging verdict to me.
blhack I understand what you're saying. I worked in that kind of environment before. If you want to be happy in your current job it comes down to two things: Communication and Limits.

You have to find a way to communicate complex ideas to people who don't understand it. Find out what they understand and what their values are and term it in that way. It could be time, money or customer convenience.

The main aspect is trust. You get paid for the job you do so no appreciation is in order. It's their trust that you know how to deal with the crisis better than anyone that's needed. Let me tell you the only way they will trust that you know what you're doing is if they know what you're doing. If they don't get it they'll think you're a dumbass, or condescending or an introvert. All things bad for a team and bad for business. Imagine you are the teacher of a grade 10 class teaching derivatives and integrals. If your students don't get the concept then at some point they will start cursing at you as you write on the board - even though you know what you're doing and they don't.

That's the communication bit. The other half is to limit yourself from all things tech and do it routinely. This is not once a week gym time or when you're free. Book classes in martial arts or cooking. Take up smoking shisha at a cafe. Find something you can do regularly and often that has no part in your life now - and non-tech. If work demands some of your free time then you say NO. If that's not an option then hire an underling and train them on specific tasks.

There was another comment here about how we are not meant to live in cubicles. I like it. We are not meant to do one thing only everyday. That is mind numbing.
Divvyshot (YC W09) rewrite complete
I just priced a major trip I'm taking later this summer. Expedia's lowest price beats ITA's (on the exact same itinerary - same flight numbers and times) by $462 ($1,849 vs $1,387)
Dement's book does not have any real references, but on p 257 he discusses a study by Tom Roth and Tim Roehrs where paired subjects were awakened when one of them entered REM sleep. The pairs thus had identical sleep disturbances and were different only in whether they were woken up in REM sleep or not. He says
"The results were striking. The daytime sleep tendency did not change in the REM sleep-deprived group ... whereas the yoked control group (which lost much more non-REM sleep) became significantly sleepier in the daytime."

To be fair, he then goes on with some cautionary notes about the small numbers of the study and how some older studies had not found a difference. There was no mention of studies finding the opposite, though.
Im sorry what?? There are plenty of open source DFS options available for them to make use of.... what exactly is he after?
I sometimes send tabular data as html email. While I can render it as fixed-width ascii, I wouldn't remove tables just because they can be abused for layout (if you want to impose visible cell boundaries, fine).

I wouldn't have any desire to limit the richness of messages displayable on common readers, if it weren't for unwanted email (quasi-spam from companies I did business with once, to say nothing of random malicious spam, which automatically justifies extreme simplification of accepted mail markup for security's sake).

Even when the visually rich email is safe, it makes unwanted email even more annoying for the brief second it flashes on screen before I delete it.
Combining e-mail and calendaring, and integrating it with the rest of the Office Suite was a masterstroke on Microsoft's part. It has streamlined office communication to the point where even shops where development is done on Linux machines have Exchange servers handling company email and I get funny looks from people who ask me, "That meeting didn't show up on your Outlook?"

Outlook is broken only if you give a shit about openness or standards. Most people don't. Most people want to solve the problems immediately before them to make their lives easier. This Outlook achieves with aplomb.
Yeah, it was broken. But there should be a more elegant solution than requiring a confirmation every time. I would compare the current solution to Vista's security confirmation where any action other than no action required "Administrator Permission." It would make more sense for an app to just be given permission to answer calls.

And seeing how Apple controls exactly what applications can be on the phones themselves, I don't see why having a simple "Does this app have permission to make calls?" would be so bad, since Apple should be able to filter out any "bad" apps.
Please forgive my ignorance, but I still don't understand how this could live up to everything the article says it could do. I am specifically referring to the part of the article that mentions MS Office.

I use Excel heavily when I am working with financial data from 10Ks and 10Qs. I've tried other services that are competitors of Excel, but only the Open Office version comes close to having the same functionality, and I usually don't even need the more advanced features of Excel. Will the cloud (correct term?) eventually be able to offer the full functionality of Excel?
Knowing that you're doing something that's not optimal is important, so that you can compensate. Pretending it's better to have a day job is harmful.
Whether an unbiased judge would make the same decision is irrelevant. A retrial in a case like this should be automatic. Judges cannot be affiliated with the Prosecution or the Defense in a trial, Period. In the US court system, this would almost certainly have resulted in a retrial, but perhaps I am being naive.
Mergers and Acquisitions activity lowest in five years
This was a pretty interesting read:
http://books.google.com/books?id=90Vh8wUThAgC&pg=PA43...

Also, I remember reading a study where rats were deprived of REM cycles and the result was they were never exposed to nightmares. The hypothesis was that nightmares prepare us for real world dangers, and once the rats stopped dreaming, they were also less skittish in dangerous situations. I'll try to find the article again after work.
Ever since I started school in Engineering I've been treated as a commodity.

It's that much harder to paint yourself in a different light when most peers are fine with the status quo.

It's becoming more necessary to distinguish yourself as being Mr.X who can do X, Y, Z better than anyone else in the world. Otherwise, you're just another Engineer or IT guy they hire and fire or deal with like everyone else. With so many talented Engineers coming in from Asia (hundreds of thousands a year?!) it will be harder to land a job with a decent salary if you are like everyone else.
Now this is getting interesting...

Is there anything open-source (and language-agnostic) that's comparable to Gemstone?
I would rather replace my trackpad with a numeric pad.
Zag Font - Free Download - Ideal for Logo & Graphic Design
Yeah, there appears to be very little hard research on the subject, but my personal experience from reading neuroscience journals has led me to the understanding that REM sleep removes tiredness. In fact, people with REM sleep behavior disorder -- that is, people who naturally do not go into REM sleep normally, and when they do, they have odd physical behaviors -- complain of chronic tiredness and sometimes end up with serious mental disorders.

The other phases of sleep are even less understood than REM, so I am going to trust my instinct and go with the real research that has been published on polyphasic sleep.
Health care eventually recovered from quackery. It's bound to happen in IT.
Matchless Die Cut Sticker Printing
I was thinking of that study of a guy who lived without clocks for several weeks (I think it was underground), and he tended to a 25-hour pattern (IIRC). But of course (apart from the sample size), he had electric lighting.
Google Docs is constantly improving and have built up much of the basic functionality of excel but it will be a little while before it can really match feature for feature.
Perhaps, but the source right now is exactly as I described. Seems odd to start from the CGIs if you want an all PHP system.
Google starts to usher new users into Google Voice, finally.
I think Barry Schwartz talks about something similar with the shift of choices from the professionals to the public in health care in this TED talk - http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... and probably more so in his book which I am yet to read.
still nothing. but then again i got in pretty late (one would assume they go in order of sign up). i think i put mine in like 3 months ago?
Iran, Traffic Analysis, and Deep Packet Inspection
People pay to hunt pirates on Somali coast
There’s no clearly defined biological reason for it, and it is intuitively an evolutionary disadvantage.

Sleeping during the night was extremely important for human survival. We evolved to find food during the day. Any waking hours at night time instead of sleeping means a huge amount of extra energy expended to support being awake. Sleep pressure has a huge evolutionary advantage. It may be a disadvantage now.
What are you talking about here?

The mailserver is Postfix, the file server is samba, the FTP daemon is VsFTPd, imap is courier imap.

Are you a microsoft rep or something? None of this stuff is even remotely "enthusiast".

The Contact manager is just a web-frontend that I made for that sits on top of (and supplements) an existing system (as/400 green screens that they hate).

I'm sorry, but this is kindof insulting. What do you mean "enthusiast DIY"?
Ahem. PureDoxyK, the one who posted about polyphasic sleep on a couple of sites (kuro5hin, everything2) a few years ago, who mostly started the whole craze and who still tries various sleep patterns out, is female: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/about-me/

And Steve Pavlina who tried out polyphasic sleep for quite some time is married.
Does this remove the option to appeal? From my knowledge a retrial is the same court based on circumstances to be unfair while an appeal is for moving up the court system. This article seems to use the words otherwise, maybe the swedish court system is different.
How can it be automatic? Somebody will have to decide if there was an affiliation.

Apparently the judges in this case decided there wasn't. I'm not sure I agree with that. I haven't seen the complete reasoning of the judges.
Not so, there has been much study of this issue, including studies with experimental rather than observational designs,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

in a variety of countries.
Steve Pavlina is married, and he describes the effect his sleep cycle had on his relationship to his wife. I can't remember if he discusses sex at all, but you may be interested in finding out for yourself:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/
I agree with you on the locking and the price in India. I wasn't aware they made you pay full and the phone was still locked. But you can't compare every phone to smartphones. A lowly Nokia 1100 costs less than $30. But it's your basic mobile phone. You won't find people doing a lot of browsing from it.

But if you don't like the terms of deployment you are free to develop for other platforms. Usually, someone will come along and brag about how they won't develop their application for the iphone. But there are thousands of others that put up with it everyday. The fact is Apple took a page out of the microsoft playbook. They got the developers to invest early which brings users, which attracts more developers. Compared to the price to get a person with brains 99$ is just the price of doing business. Paying full price for an iPhone to test in is also the price of doing business.

But I've met a few Indian developers working on the iPhone. They need them to do their job so someone is buying them. Even if it is only a few Indian iphone developers.

What the $99/299 price is a small barrier to entry. It's like Apple is saying we want only serious developers submitting stuff to the Apple store. The world is full of good ideas but littered with half completed projects. This is one way of getting through the noise. And if $99 is too much for you then you weren't serious about it to begin with.
Remove annoying google results?
Today I'm using my mom's windoze computer. When I do a search on google. It gives me a full page of commerical crap results!!! It has something to do with the query parameters 'rls' or 'sourceid' that google submits with the query. I can't believe google is annoying me like this, esp when the new kid bing is on the block. Is there a simple way to stop this?

here is a sample query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=annoying+search+results&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8
I love this idea; how does the sponsoring site ensure the quality of the user supplied data?
Wasn't this posted and discussed some time ago? It is somewhat dated, and the arguments weren't very convincing, in fact they struck me as typical marketing FUD.

Sure the Postgres folks have years of experience and so forth but it's not like the literature is not available to be incorporated in new approaches. CouchDB hits a certain sweet spot in combining a few new ideas together and the folks hacking it are some of the best. I highly recommend giving it a hard look.

I also hear that the canonical folks will be bundling it in an upcoming Ubuntu release so it will be easier than ever to check it out
I'm sorry for being unclear. What I am asking is basically how many calls are generated from posting a phone number on a website, i.e. what percentage of website visitors who will call a phone number provided it is available.
One of the best criticisms of the Scheme philosophy is that making the language so "simple" doesn't actually simplify programs you would want to write in it--it just pushes the complexity somewhere else. It's still Lisp, you can extend the language to be suitable, but it requires a surprising amount of work.
Are you getting more than 550 sales per review or less than 200 (for your total number of reviews)?
What is the purpose of that image of the United Airlines jet?

It's an interesting post but I couldn't get past being distracted and concerned about that impossible angle.
I just checked the specs on a Ming. No 3G, No wifi (china doesn't allow it someone posted), lower resolution screen, and a stylus?! BTW, it weighs as much as an iPhone. Linux on mobile phones is at a dead end. Even Motorola is jumping to android. And actual useful MIDP applications are few and far between.

If you wanted the cheaper phone then just say so. But the Ming is truly not in the same league as the iPhone, HTC, or Blackberry.
3 separate filters - no way to combine them and make the newsfeed like it used to be.
Given the available research on consumer behaviour and given the available data on website popularity, isn't it to be expected that websites in a certain segement will start to resemble each other more and more, as they converge towards an optimally consumerfriendly design?

As the recent Coldplay - Cat Stevens - Joe Satriani love triangle shows: it isn't just website design. By now, the amount of output in any kind of creative activity is so large that there is inevitable overlap. When the output is filtered by the selection criterion of 'what the average human (in Western civilization) likes', chances of similar designs surviving becomes even larger. It would be more surprising if this didn't happen.

This is interesting for entrepeneurs, in that you shouldn't be discouraged by ideas and 'designs' similar to yours popping up everywhere. It's inevitable and it's the details in the execution (or the fact that you are executing it at all) that matters.
Starting Out With Comet (Orbited) Part 2 – Installation and STOMP
It's like a FUBU for books.
Famously innovative does not to me imply most innovative. The article certainly did not make the case. The link at the bottom gives evidence to lead one away from your conclusion.

All a monopoly gets you is to have the innovation under one roof. Radio is a fine example of what happens when you have real competition instead of patents driving innovation. Instead of AT&T's multi-decade stagnation we had extremely rapid advance in technology in 20 years.

Of course we really can't rewind the clock, eliminate the monopoly/gov't funding and see how things might of panned out. You might enjoy Terence Kealey on this topic: http://vimeo.com/4798314
I can see how you can read it that way. But the fish has to give away parts of it's own body! And not just that, but give away the very thing that makes it special.

And it's not like sharing one crayon when you have a box of them, no, here it has to give away every single one of it's scales until every fish has exactly the same amount.

To put it in human terms, it's like if a girl in class has long pretty hair, and all the other girls are jealous, so they make her cut off pieces of it to give to all the other girls.

Or in less dramatic terms, if I have a box of crayons, I don't just share one with the kid next to me, I go around the class and hand one out to each and every kid, until every kid has exactly the same number of crayons.

I also don't like the message from the friends, who insist on receiving the item. Sharing is about giving, it is NOT about demanding that the other person share with you. (Or snubbing them until they give you want you want.)
FedEx’s Brown Bailout: How Big Companies *Shouldn’t* Use Social Media
You think military and some goverment agencies didn't spent millions and decades for it? =)
Only the best for HN!
mos def! "as simple as possible" might in fact be quite complex. the mantra is more of an implementation of how to be direct and efficient.
I am 100% on board with this. Also, the ensuing discussion and alternate suggestions have the potential to be more valuable than the original reviews, much like the articles submitted.
I currently have a skinned HTC WinMo phone with TF3D (the UI the Hero's UI was based upon) and it is definitely an improvement over the WinMo UI. It is debatable whether it's better than the iPhone interface, though. I have not used the Hero's UI so I will reserve judgement until I get to.

What I can say is that the HTC skin that is on the Hero will not make its way to any other manufacturer (officially). Keep in mind that Google is aiming Android at multiple manufacturers. In the best case this situation will allow all users to switch between skins in an open environment where the competition drives innovative UI. In the worst case, we'll end up with a WinMo like marketplace where phones with the same underlying OS and similar hardware act completely differently, fragmenting the landscape. There is currently only one main Android manufacturer (HTC) so this isn't an issue but with major manufactures (i.e. Motorola and Samsung) releasing Android phones in the near future, we'll see how the situation plays out.
I've read through Pavlina's polyphasic sleep blog entries and some of PureDoxyK's entries before, and IIRC neither of them went into detail about how it affected their sex lives.
An app I wrote, Call Nearest, simply dials the nearest match based on Google API search results.

As a developer of an app that once automatically dialed phone numbers for you, I can say this confirmation is not a big deal. In fact, I think it is an improvement.
That is not what she said! (go ahead vote me down)
Why not write an iPhone app?

Geek-porn Rule 34!

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/11/18/iphone-tuned-numeric-ke...
If you see how long it took for MySQL to get features like views and stored procedures, which I consider pretty much indispensable, then warning people that something like CouchDB is far from being mature is hardly FUD. The worst thing is: the cool crowd doesn't even know what they are missing. It's like talking to someone using MySQL 7 years ago: they'd be all enthusiastic, not understanding why you would worry about the absense of mundane things like views or, god forbid, the ability to use multiple indices per table in a query...
Lets just say it's the union of IaaS, RaaS and SaaS.
>The reason PostgreSQL et al have those features is because people want them.

The reason those features are in PostgresSQL is because they are in SQLserver, ... because they are in Oracle, ... because they are in DB2.

Based on that logic C should have had a report generator and the unix filesystem should have records - and your car would have a saddle and whip holder.
How would you sell a new lake to a foreign country?
Actually, Schneier says that reinforced cockpit doors are a good idea. A quote:

"I've said there are two things - reinforcing the cockpit doors, and convincing passengers they have to fight back. Everything else has been a red herring."

(From http://www.schneier.com/news-071.html )
If you could have arrow-key emulation that worked somewhat like mouse emulation from a trackpad, this would be tremendously powerful. Press down option while mousing on the trackpad, and instead of shifts of the mouse, you'd get arrow-keys. Add some acceleration and another key for highlighting, and this would be very flexible. It would be able to subsume a lot of key-combinations.
PostgreSQL: How to generate rows that aren't there
Start-Up's Software Crowdsources Company Forecasts
Joel Spolsky's closing thoughts in his interview in Founders At Work are that you do have to quit the day job so that your choices are to either succeed or get a job. He mentions that he stole at least some of the sentiment from pg.
That sounds pretty cool. Got a link?
The friends don't insist on receiving the scales. The friends are annoyed when the Rainbow Fish uses them as a reason he's better than they are. Which is exactly what little kids do when they get some awesome toy or a neat set of markers: show them off, and refuse to share.