skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.6791,y.2009,no.4,...
> Mostly only people wound as tightly as me

Isn't that demographic also your target audience for this post?
Free book on directed graphs:

http://www.cs.rhul.ac.uk/books/dbook/
Seems I wrote quite the touché-inducing comment. First timezone guy, now you!
Damn, one of my favorites and I forgot about it. Eating, period, makes me feel guilty. Maybe because it costs time and money and sometimes I'll watch The Daily Show or something while I do it?

This is one of those I considered too ridiculous to even rationalize; it's in the "because why not" pile.
Here's the quote now (same wikipedia page). Seems someone's edited it since your quote.

In many countries in the Southern Hemisphere, including Australia [3][4], New Zealand and South Africa, winter begins on 1 June and ends on 31 August.

[Edit: not sure what the disagreement is here, or why we're using wikipedia as an authority on when various countries mark seasons]
24 different types of jams is too much.
24 different types of books is too little.
I've performed this particular piece of surgery. It was easy, took about 60 minutes total and worked just fine.
I tried exactly what you're saying, actually; I grabbed a task planner, put tasks for "Today" in it before I went to bed, then did them when I woke up. And I took a break when I was done. And spent the whole time telling myself, "you have earned this break." Which turns out to not be so very relaxing, actually.

The strategy worked well enough that I feel it could work properly, if only I could return to equilibrium long enough to enact it. In its current form, it feels like I'm lying to myself because the other voice telling me I'm not doing enough is louder.

And I used to be so... sane sounding.
Placebo has no side effects.
You misunderstand. The cubital tunnel article suggests you increase the space between your body and your work (move further away from the desk). This is to decrease the amount of bend in the elbow joint. Moving the mouse closer to the keyboard decreases the distance between your elbow and your body, which helps relieve your trapezius and deltoid muscles, but does not affect elbow angle.

Hope that helps.
Lessons in incompetence
I can't remember why now, but I recently tried to register for a service. I remember thinking it was really quite good. Well thought out, useful, and worth the risk that I'd end up getting spam, as I had with eMusic.

But when I tried to register, the box for my email address was clearly limited to 30 characters, and my email address has 31 characters.

So I thought I'd be helpful and send some feedback so they could improve their site, and I could use it:

The original message was received at Thu,
18 Jun 2009 08:43:09 -0400 from
localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]

----- The following addresses had
permanent fatal errors -----
<feedback@myhappyplanet.com>
(reason: 550-5.1.1 The email account
that you tried to reach does not exist.
...

Way to go guys. prevent people from registering, and then prevent them from giving feedback. Good one. Life's too short to investigate their problems, I've tried to help, now I'm moving on.

How often have you tested your feedback mechanisms from external addresses?
I like that idea. There is a bit of gaming/favoritism here (obviously) - seeing who killed it and why would shed some light on this (and/or make people think twice about killing a story just because they don't agree with it - there are comments for a reason).
The homepage is much more like the deal/coupon rack that most grocery stores have (or had). It shows what's new, on sale, etc to spark some interest.
People severely underestimate the damage XML does. Example:

<number>9012853</number>

You just added a data overhead of 500% over using a 4-byte integer, and an even bigger parsing overhead. Let me guess, now you need to "scale"?
I realized I was feeling guilty for eating the same way you two did. I also watched TV along the way, so I was feeling even more guilty because often I stayed far longer than needed. There's so much useless stuff on TV you can watch for hours anyway.

First try:
Cut the TV, read rss feeds or email while eating. Baaaad idea, obviously. Not only was I still feeling guilty because 'without eating you would read much faster' but I also degraded eating to something even less valuable. There was zero relaxation, I didn't even really _taste_ what I was eating.

Second try:
I dismissed TV, rss feeds and everything else while eating. Eating now is my 30-to-60-minute-break of everything 2 to 3 times a day. I just concentrate on preparing and eating the food. I even started to eat in my kitchen again and not on my couch or in front of the computer. Makes a hell of a difference.

I'm so much more relaxed after these breaks. Often I will stay a little longer and read a magazine (brandeins, a german business magazin) or even a book.

PS: Next step is to go out for eating every other day to get some sandwiches, pizza or something. It's a bit more expensive but really helped me to really get away from everything in my head.

PPS: Of course I sometimes still sit over my keyboard with a pizza and work while eating, but well, I never said I was perfect ;)
It does, if you think it does.
GreaseMonkey script to speedup Firefox
Hasn't this been added before in HN ?
The issue with low level tech support people is they lack judgment. Nice people, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re the guy answering tech support inquiries for $10 an hour you probably don’t have great judgment. So if you give tech support people carte blanche access to the engineers they will generally pester those engineers to death.

Yes. My employer has a help desk/tech support line, and first-level help desk (the people that answer the phones) have to escalate an issue to second-level support, who can then contact engineering, if necessary.

We aren't a huge shop, either (6 engineers, 3 second-level support folks), but this works quite well, and very few calls make it all the way to engineering.
CS is a lot broader than computer programming, but one can program things that are not computers.

One can compute on things which are not computers, too. Computer science is the study of computation, not the study of computers.
Facebook Click Fraud Enraging Advertisers
"I don't hire people when they need drugs to reach the work level they claim"

"I go jogging"

Interesting that you are prejudiced against externally administered drugs, and yet seem to support the idea of deliberately and regularly inducing opioid release in yourself. I don't deny that jogging is a generally beneficial and healthy activity, but I wonder how you can justify favouring one chemical and being opposed to another on the sole grounds of their origin?
That's not a quotation, and it's inaccurate. The Winter Solstice doesn't "start on the 1st of June". The Winter Solstice is a specific astonomical point in time. Wikipedia says:

In many countries in the Southern Hemisphere,
including Australia [3][4], New Zealand and
South Africa, winter begins on 1 June and ends
on 31 August.

"Winter" is a political construction and can be declared to start on different dates as appropriate.

Please, if you write something that looks like a quotation, make sure it is a quotation.
Cape town travel
Located at the Southern tip of Africa, Cape Town is one of Africa's most frequented cities boasting a never-ending array of majestic sights, unlimited excitement and breathtaking experiences. This picture-perfect metropolis is the ideal holiday destination for travellers from all different walks of life.
I don't know - Id on't consider those to be that significant. The Human Genome project was a fairly natural extension of the discovery of DNA 50+ years ago, the DARPA Grand Challenge is a pretty natural extension of Turing, Von Neumann, etc.'s works 50+ years ago.

I'm not saying the things you list weren't hugely important, I'm just saying that they weren't as fundamental as the entirely new fields that were developed earlier (relativity, quantum mechanics, theory of computation, etc).
To be honest there's nothing "new" in their offer. Look for business voip providers in your area and you'll see that those "awesome" features are simple things that you can get from almost anyone.

Disclaimer: I work for a VoIP company and you can get almost all the features for ~7£/mo. Yes - it costs you more than google will charge you probably, but at least we have a support number if anything goes wrong ;) Also you can keep adding more PSTN numbers to that account. Google voice wants to support only one as far as I can tell.

The only features from Google Voice list we don't support are: 'Listen in' (which I think would be illegal in UK), 'Personalize greeting' (noone asked for it really). 'Phone switch' is possible, but not as smooth as with GV.
In general, I don't see anything new in their offer. Sure - it will be cheap, but also it won't be easy to get support if anything goes wrong (and do you really want to risk your main phone number this way?) They may advertise it as a new service, but in reality they're only catching up to the features others already have. Only thing I expect them to do better is "user experience" in configuring all this stuff. (but don't worry - normal VoIP providers will copy their control panel ideas in no time)

Ah - just in case you think of VoIP that has to be transmitted over internet - stop. If you get a "proper" account from a provider who uses his own lines rather than forwarding trunks to some other company, your traffic doesn't have to touch the "best effort" internet at all. Your call will come in directly to the company over a guaranteed channel line, get routed and will leave over another guaranteed channel. (if you forward the call to your real mobile / other phone, that is)
I wouldn't recommend the Kinesis Advantage if you are using a non-english layout (dvorak is fine). The Kinesis Freestyle might be better though.
Thunks: Old-fashioned closures?
And then it's all fun and no more work?
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that his main complains about XML is 1. that it is verbose and 2. requires too much resources to process. And then he proceeds to writing 10 pages trying to express this?
Where is USENET?
It seems to me that USENET contained a lot of quality discussion in the past. However, if you check it out today, the quality is gone and it's full of spam. Where do intelligent discussions take place today?

EDIT: I'm mostly looking for programming, math, cs research, cryptography, security and related.
Sure, if your building something simple and you find a good area to innovate in. If you making something big though it's going to be a far longer process.
I think most people would not bother to give feedback when something goes wrong. I know that I certainly do not. I have tried in the past and you always run into some sort of problem with the feedback mechanism or they simply do not care about your problem.
If that is a "smoking gun", I hope nobody from groklaw will serve jury duty, ever.

This was reallly, really weak and an embarassment to read.
Very, very simplistic. Much more applicable to TCP network throughput, travelling salespeople than financial transactions

Missing ::

* Real World Transaction costs [ state, federal, international tax . Exchange volume discounts ]

* Risk [ counterparty , timing, many more ]

* Traceability : Ensuring decisions made are recorded and deterministic

------------

See After the Trade is Made for an accepted analysis of distributing securities.

---

http://www.amazon.com/After-Trade-Made-Processing-Transactio...
Virtualization With KVM On A Fedora 11 Server
"Over-the-counter (OTC) trading is to trade financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, commodities or derivatives directly between two parties." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance)

I had to look it up so I noted it here for anyone else that would need to do the same.
I would have called this "a story about the fall of SCO", rather that "The origin story of robots.txt".Robots.txt is really just mentioned in a passer-by sentence in the middle of whole thing.

That being said, it was a interesting enough read.
I would have said the same directly to The Independent's post, but that would have required creating a "Live Journal" account :/

In the meanwhile, I suggest a search of better stories / exchanges that have appeared in the past on Hacker News .

Just in case The Independent monitors us here, this is what I wanted to convey to them:

How might "smart drugs" help journalists?

For example: how might accuracy and attention to detail by reporters, writers, and fact-checkers be improved.

More specifically, would someone at The Independent have caught this article's reference to "the University of Harvard" and realized it was as absurd as "the University of Oxford"?

Perhaps... if Ritalin & co. boosts performance of sleep-deprived journalists as well as sleep-deprived helicopter pilots.

--from other side of the pond
Does anyone know why languages like Arc, SmallTalk, Clojure, Scala etc need web frameworks? Is it that there's something special these frameworks/languages do that other languages/frameworks for the web don't do?

I was always under the impression that these languages were made for a specific purpose other than web and hence not used much on the web.

P.S: I read that Twitter's msg queue is in Scala since its faster.
inflation from the credit crunch should achieve this for all quarters in the US over the next decade... ;-)
Rather ironic that being in a hurry to complete things ruins productivity, don't you think? Although it seems entirely fitting, given what used to be my normal outlook on life. I remember when I was never in a particular hurry, and the world somehow managed to not end. Which is something now outside my comprehension.
A concrete illustration of practical running time vs big-O notation
Or reading a good book.
I agree, but justified fear is still different than a "smoking gun". PJ is spinning this as "the definitive proof of improper behavior by Microsoft with regards to netbooks", when it is no such thing.
This is a great writeup. I have also come to disagree with the specific PG essay mentioned in the post.

Entrepreneurship needs to be more sustainable than what is made out in the current literature. It shouldn't really be a 2 year binge in the hope of a cashout. The biggest companies take a lot more than that and if you really love doing it there is no reason you should be looking for an exit. A long term commitment also requires entrepreneurship to suit your other life requirements.

A startup isn't really worth its exit.
It takes place in forums where people have to meet in person once in a while and thus stand for their on-line behaviour.
I think that "quality discussion" was only an occasional side-effect of USENET, but that just might be cynicism talking (or the groups that I remember best). In any event, a lot of those types of conversations can be found in the comments to various blogs, among other places.
Facebook | Engineering Puzzles
only true for very few internet based startups.

Big counterexample : Trilogy E-Business - took 3 years before the first sale, made somewhere in range of $30mn in the 5th year.
What topic of discussion are you after? It could help people point you in the right direction. It's probably spread out amongst various forums and blogs these days. Personally, besides the obvious trolling from some parts of the forum, the Something Awful forums have some excellent discussions on certain topics ranging from DIY hobbies to serious hardware/software/programming subforums.
He also said, "It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence in this world; but non-violence or non-existence."

I've been unable to find any mention of using violence. But it is difficult to search for an answer.
Biggest time wasters in programmer work
It's been known for a long time that USENET is of no use anymore.

Discussion has moved to moderated forums and mail lists.
Or maybe it is just because they have procrastinated and want to cram, in a stressed night, the material they were supposed to absorb in one semester.
Ask HN: College Graduate, Job Prospects
Hi all,

Long time reader, first time poster.

I’m having a bit of a dilemma and I was hoping that by posting here I would receive some valuable advice/tips to my situation.

I am a recent college graduate struggling to find an entry-level software development position. I just finished my B.S. in Information Sciences & Technology - Information Systems Development with two minors; Computer Science and Business Administration from Penn State University.

My goal is to obtain a software development position; specifically Web Development. I have several years of internship experience starting back as early as my junior year of high school. My most recent employment has been with my own software company that I founded, RADO Consulting LLC. I worked and developed the company while attending college. But I never had enough time to grow the company beyond doing simple, one-off website projects for small, local companies. I think at this point the best career move would be to take a position with another development company where I can work with more experienced developers; learning and improving my development skills.

So my dilemma is that I can’t seem to find a job. I’ve had one interview in 4 months and no other leads. I’m beginning to think that maybe my resume needs some work and that I might even hire a professional to write my resume for me. Has anyone had success with doing such a thing? Monster.com offers a service, although somewhat pricey, it seems to be very professional and of high quality. I found a few other companies that offer the service, but nothing that really impressed me. What are your thoughts?
IPhone 3GS: 54% faster than the 3G, 11% faster than the Pre
Moderate physical exercise has been tested for millions of years, and there is no big company interested in selling you into it, potentially at your own expense.
Too Many Parallelization Frameworks?
Why not just buy a new one from Unicomp with modern USB ports and etc etc?
Sounds like you should be using the "wishlist" instead of the shopping cart.
"As a special bonus, the manufacturer's logo goes with it."
Yes, that's true and I left them, people also left and are looking for new places

For example Hacker News for general discussions and Stackoverflow for programming questions
:D I figured out as much. Which ones?
Depending on what you mean exactly by "in the past", part of the issue is the people that had usenet available to them at a given point in time. Early on, it was the rare individual that could get access to it at all, and those that could were the geeky nerdy guys (I count myself among those, by the way, just not as smart), and the ones that even WANTED to if they could were the elite of that small group.

Too, there simply WAS no such thing as SPAM (as we know it now) then.

So what you see now is largely an artifact of the ubiquity of access.

IMO.
It doesn't help that Google diluted their (and former Deja's) newsgroup search by creating "Google Groups", which are now predominantly SPAM havens.

Google should add USENET-only and NNTP-only options to their newsgroup search but probably won't. They appear to have given up on something extremely useful that achieved it's apex during Deja's tenure.
A neologism from Douglas Coupland's 1991 book Generation X:

Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.
I think you ought to be able to write your own resume. People hiring you would expect at least that much. Why in the world would you want to work for another company if you already have your own (and it's running well)?
See "Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists" by Philip Greenspun at

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

Also read "Women in Science" by Philip Greenspun at

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

The latter isn't limited to women's careers; in it Greenspun discusses working in science with an advanced degree.
What a great essay! It brings to light the day to day emotional struggles of focusing 110% on something, especially on a solitary level. Check out this video of Couchdb founder talking about a similar struggle

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/katz-couchdb-and-me
For a long time now, people have complained about Big Oh notation. The problem is not the notation, it's the people. The notation is absolutely brilliant. People do not understand how to use it and complain that "in practice" it breaks.

Big Oh is simply a mathematical tool that is helpful to abstract away uninteresting details. But what people do not realize is that by using this tool, they perform some abstraction of their own -- it can be used to count anything, and the most important thing to establish is what you count. Most importantly, you want to count time & space used by an algorithm. But you don't always want to count the time used by an algorithm as the number of instruction performed. For example, we may compare comparison-based sorting procedures by the number of comparisons they perform. Why? Because we are smart and realize that this (# of comparisons) is a good way to compare such algorithms.

For some algorithms, you might want to count the number of memory accesses you make. Or the number of level-i memory accesses in a memory hierarchy. Or the number of network packets. Get it?
Java tools for searching the standard API
Writing the resume is not a rocket science, you should be able to do it on your own. Although, you may need someone to proofread it.
I think the percentage should be bigger. Besides the obvious powerusers, most companies do their IT in-house...
Because he forced well-intentioned people to _think_ before asking questions. The quality of dialogue increased. Lurkers benefited.

Unfortunately there were many people _without_ good intentions who tried to engage him in dialogue. They got the blowtorch.
Using GPU accelerated neural networks for games AI
Having called support in my life very few times, and having received the answers I did, I have come to the conclusion that it is a waste of time to even consider calling. I have a hard time imagining what people see in tech support and how they help.
How is it any better?
24 different types of books on beginning HTML is still to much.
I think that they main stumbling point for many people is the fact that Big-O notation is aimed asymptotically; in other words, it is only concerned about the performance of an algorithm (for example) when you have a bazillion items to process. If you're dealing with real-world (limited) cases, you need to pay attention to the constants-- those "uninteresting details" get interesting very quick.
Hardwired Happiness: Life with Hyperthymia (2002)
How to Make Pages on Your Website Load Via AJAX
Interesting. On the 2x2 table idea, I wonder if there are any other two decisions in the conversion funnel context that could work in such a table and not be as confusing.
Regarding the WSJ's Report That Steve Jobs Had a Liver Transplant
The Benefits of a Classical Education
That seems like a category error to me, 'jams' isn't the same type (or scope) of category as 'books'. I suppose what you're trying to say is that different categories can support different amounts of choice, but it's not at all clear to me that this is the case.