skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do I follow through on my projects??
I've fallen into a frustrating cycle.

1. Become very passionate about working on a new technology project. For like, 2 months.

2. Almost get to MVP stage.

3. Completely lose passion, decide project was stupid to begin with (this usually happens when I try to get people to use it, or realize what resources I'm missing).

4. Give up, chill for a month.

5. GOTO step 1. Acquire many half-finised projects...

Who has suffered from similar throughout their career, and how did you overcome it? How do you make enthusiasm sustainable?

Any feedback much appreciated.
Gary Fung's not a US citizen AFAIK. What leverage do they have to force him to pay?
And than the police shut down the ransomware servers and dooms data from many infected victims to garbage, brilliant!
Ask HN: What's your definition of "entrepreneur"?
It's got a macho factor, sure... but ethical?

No more of an ethical issue than using an IDE vs typing in the raw binary with your "0" and "1" keys.
I want to upvote you for truth, but HN currently has a meanness problem of which this comment is a specimen.
This post has been moderated down for some reason. Generally, posts on HN appear on the front page based on a calculation of upvotes per unit time. This post has a better ratio than all of the posts above it, yet about 20 minutes ago got bumped down from #1 to #14.

Lame.
Lenovo signs non-disclosure deal with BlackBerry
IKEA Galant for me. Super configurable, high quality finish, and relatively inexpensive.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/wor...
Any one managed to get Ubuntu 13.10 on mac book air with Haswell processor ? Any better result for the graphics support on haswell ? I was hoping to buy one of these if I could run ubuntu 13.10 without much problems.
works pretty well on my ipad mini connecting to windows 7. much more responsive than I expected.
> On a systemic level, what advantages does government provide to solving these various problems that private individuals couldn't?

Private action in a free market suffers from numerous issues: free rider problems, collective action problems, problems involving positive and negative externalities, problems involving information asymmetries, etc. These are well-developed areas of economics that libertarian-minded policy folks tend to ignore, but which simply cannot be ignored. Most government programs, from environmental protection (negative externalities) to Social Security (irrational hyperbolic discounting), are rooted in one of these economic phenomena.

> VC money more often comes from highly successful past ventures, not grandma's retirement savings plan (which are terrible investments anyway)

See the sibling comment about private equity fundraising after changes in ERISA. Some VC money does come from people taking money from past ventures and putting them into new ones. But the bread and butter of VC involves raising money from limited partners, specifically pension funds, mutual funds, etc. The other major sources tend to be endowments, banks, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds.

See: http://fisher.osu.edu/supplements/10/12707/LPReturnsJanuary2... (p. 1).
All those acronyms are easily googleable. Not being a techie does not mean you get to be lazy about looking things up.
"Not a bear in sight. Clearly they're hiding more effectively than we thought; we must put on additional bear patrols immediately!" ?
We are so used to tailoring one-off solutions in software that we can't imagine just taking some boring old woodworking plan and using it as is to quickly gain experience and produce a solid first result without R&D headaches. But in woodworking you really can just take someone else's design and build it. Most likely the designer already made all the mistakes before, so the thing will just work. You'll learn the techniques, and by asking why often enough you will trace back to the problems solved by various design elements. You will have a better idea of what to innovate yourself next time. Besides all the learning, you'll have a functional thing that you can keep, sell, or give away. (Says the guy who had to design his own banjo, still isn't done, and could have built two or three in the same time by copying instead of analyzing every feature from the ground up.)
What's the libertarian solution to corporations raping the environment in order to siphon the value of the commons into the pockets of a few executives and investors?
You would certainly find possessive it's in Jane Ausen novels (and other contemporaries).
iCracked.com Sent Me a Replacement Phone, I Love Them and I Love You
The reporting in this story left untouched some details I wanted to see follow-up on, so I decided to look at some other journalistic and blogger accounts on the same newly published research report. Brian Switek's story on National Geographic

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131017-skull...

is quite helpful and has interesting graphics.

The BBC story

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24564375

looks to be more helpful than the story kindly submitted here, the CNN story

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/17/world/europe/ancient-skull...

quotes other experts who don't reach the same conclusions, while the Wall Street Journal story

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230438410...

largely quotes scholars who agree with the new announcement from Georgia.

The Bloomberg story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-skulls...

quotes an expert who sums up what the real issue is here:

"The finding likely won't change expert's views on species diversity, where two groups are heavily entrenched said William Harcourt-Smith, an assistant professor at Lehman College and a research associate in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology.

"Some, nicknamed 'splitters,' see the tree of evolution as having many species. Others, called 'lumpers,' see wider species categories and fewer limbs on the tree.

"'To be honest it just adds some important fuel to the debate,' Harcourt-Smith wrote in an e-mail. 'The lumpers, of course, will love this new paper, but I can see splitters saying that there is too much variation in both the African early Homo and Dmanisi sample for them to all be Homo erectus.'"
I think some people are missing the point of the article. Alexis is talking about how there is a growing paradigm of doing things differently, educating oneself differently, and making a living differently. There still is the received view that you are supposed to educate yourself going through 4 year university program and you make a living working 9-5 at some Megacorp. Inc. This paradigm still works well for a vast majority of people, but at the same time, a considerable portion of population is starting to find it hopeless. There is a serious anomaly in the received view for millions of young people. I know several friends who are recent grads (Non-CS/engineering) and they are finding it extremely difficult to find an entry job in their field. Alexis is saying that there is another way of doing things.

I wrote about my experience meeting Alexis just this morning (http://dmtri.com/posts/28/alexis_ohanian_-_%22i_don%27t_regr...).
Yeah, and Baptist Fundamentalists sin like there's no tomorrow.
And expensive?! I've heard good things, but man.
You can work to prevent this by creating a group policy that disallows

%AppData%\*.exe

and

%AppData%\*\*.exe

A good discussion of this happened here: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care...

sidenote: this virus actually scares me, and it sounds like it actually scares most people who work in IT. This is the shittiest thing anybody has ever seen, it sounds like.
I take your point, and I didn't downvote you. From my perspective, there is an important difference between taking a position in / with respect to a product (or its organization) and taking a position for the position's sake.

Perhaps it is something of a continuum, not a strict either/or. If so, I find that currently we've gone too far towards the latter.

I'm also concerned that current constructs exhibit chaotic tendencies that put real people and essential systems at risk. I view stepped trading intervals as a potential damper to some of these negative and out-of-control tendencies.

Ultimately, I view investment as backing and furthering production. And I don't see how micro-second based investment appreciatively, substantially furthers this.

P.S. Admittedly, it has been an important factor in pushing computer and network systems development, which may well have had knock-on effects. E.g. is one substantially aiding the other, or the other way around: Trading versus CERN data processing and distribution?
Roads are payed for already by ticket fines,
and freight/shipping deliveries.

What?

Almost all of the federal money for road construction and maintenance comes through the Federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF). It's a standard PayGo operation, but the entirety of their budget comes from taxes. Primarily the $0.184/gallon tax on gasoline and a $0.244/gallon tax on diesel. The remainder from an additional tax on tires and on the sales of industrial vehicles.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/fifahiwy/fifahi05.htm

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/onh2p10.htm
Keep in mind that we are equally critical of CEOs and CTOs who spend money on the wrong things e.g. the classic "We have antivirus software installed, therefore we are secure from hackers!" AV software does nothing to protect your network from a vulnerability in sendmail.

Similarly, the nude scanners would have done very little to stop the 9/11 hijackers, whose weapons were simple and equivalent weapons could be improvised from items that anyone can find on the other side of a checkpoint. Whatever we were doing in August 2001 to stop less-determined attacks was working back then and would work equally well today. The simplest conclusion is that whatever else is being done to stop a 9/11-style attack is working, and that the checkpoints are just a distraction.

Not that we should be surprised by that. The TSA was going to allow people to carry small knives through the checkpoints, and noted that you are already allowed to carry far more dangerous items through -- except for box cutters, because of their appearance. Then there was an outcry from people who are terrified of knives being on airplanes, and so the policy change never happened. With that kind of logic, it is a stretch to say that the checkpoints are keeping us safe.
I don't know the answer to your question, but, have you considered a screencast instead, showing actual use?
Excuse me, but have you been to the Valley? I have not. But I have been in Berlin, and I can assure you that I have seen my fair share of hipster copycats. Not that there are not rock solid tech companies operating in the region. It is just my impression the startup scene in the german capital is a bit one sided: mostly marketing, media and marketplace platforms. Is that the future of mankind?

I have found a few people that have a tech/scientific background and take up the fight in the startup scene, but so far all but one them have moved to the US.

I would be greatly interested to connect and meet with people from technology/science that would like undertake a venture in wet-/soft-/hard-ware. But alas, there are few of them into the startup scene in Germany, for most a heading to the industry sector after their dissertation/master.

So, if you are one of the above --> contact me.
I'd say lawsuits show them "doing something". And pirates are there to hang all their failures on to when they need.
Pivotal for Good and DataKind Connects Data Scientists and Social Organizations
> A lot of (possibly most) LSD sold today (even LSD from Silkroad, and, amazingly, even LSD from vendors favorably reviewed by The Avengers (see: selective scamming)) is, in fact,a different drug altogether. Most often, an n-benzylated phenethylamine (e.g. 25I-NBOMe).

Your source for these sweeping claims?

> The only thing these drugs have in common with LSD is that they are potent hallucinogens, but you wouldn't notice the difference anyway on a sub-treshold dose.

I wouldn't, no. But that doesn't explain why when I tripped on the second tab, it exactly matched what I was expecting from what I'd read about LSD trips.

> I can tell you from anecdotal experience that this method leaves a significant amount of the substance embedded in the blotter.

How exactly does that work, given that LSD is water soluble and the solution was very dilute?

> Finally, putting LSD dissolved in an aqueous solution in a regular fridge is a horrible way to go about storing it. LSD must be protected from light and from changes in temperature, so a fridge doesn't work very well in this regard. Plus, dissolving LSD in a solution makes it degrade much faster, if the solution comes into contact with oxygen, since the surface area where reactions with oxygen can occur expands vastly.

It seemed a standard approach which protects it from light and heat degradation, and there would be no 'changes in temperature' given that the tabs were stored in the refrigerator the entire time before being turned into a solution which itself was stored in a refrigerator the entire time.

> And I can't resist a little addendum - you would have done much better if you simply swallowed those two tabs, sat down in a comfy chair, put some nice music on, and tried to figure out what are those extravagant claims of psychonauts about ;)

I am amused that you think I didn't do exactly that. So, you have made these claims assuming that I did not trip or listen to music. Now that you have learned that I did, and I regard my previous opinions as still correct, are you changing any of your beliefs?
TPB works fine enough for me.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is a technical specification created by a group of organizations to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse, such as email spoofing and phishing e-mails, by solving some long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols
Network Effects is a simple answer...but probably not complete.
I invite you to read about the abundant evidence for macroevolution

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

and then to report back to us what you find out.
Running Windows just became a lot more expensive
DKIM means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail

DMARC means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

And the person below you doesn't understand how search engines work.
Congrats on diving in and doing it. You made it, it's done, it works. That has to be satisfying to use every day. If it cracks, it cracks. You can always repair it, distress it further, or just live with it. It will still hold the computer up!
What a weird article. I agree with nearly every individual fact within it, but after reading it, I still don't know the point of the piece. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but given that this piece is mostly criticism of science the part of me that associates "conservatives" with "anti-intellectual reactionaries" suspects a hidden agenda to undermine science or give climate change "skeptics" something to point at and yell about [1].

Do scientists get funding to replicate research? No, not usually.

Does replication still happen? Yes replication of a previous work is often step 0 of new research. It happens all the time.

Do replication results get published? No, not usually. Unless it's a clear rebuttal of a famous paper.

Does this matter? Debatable. Science proceeds slowly, and bad papers tend to be forgotten unless they're easily replicable. It just takes time.

Does this mean that we can't trust science? Absolutely not. You just can't trust individual papers, prima facie. This is something that scientists are supposed to learn as undergrads. Just because it's in a journal (even a "good" journal, like Science or Nature -- some would say especially if it's in one of those journals) doesn't mean it's right.

What does this tell us about armchair science? It's utterly useless. The reason that you have to be a professional scientist is not because professional scientists are smarter, but because they have a huge depth of knowledge about a particular field. Any working scientist can point out published, cited papers in their field that are total crap. But you can't tell that a paper might be crap unless you've spent years reading all of the literature in the field. Yet people on the internet persist in thinking that they can cherry-pick a single paper from arXiv or PubMed, and make sweeping conclusions about a field.

[1] indeed, the usual HN climate-change critics are in this thread, pointing at and yelling about how science is "broken".
Which are you suggesting is worse?
Norvig's essay is an absolute must-read. You may learn more counter-intuitive facts in the next hour than in the last week. For convenience to mobile users, here's the link again: http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
New Algorithm Can Spot the Bots in Your Twitter Feed
An algorithm that can tell—with 85 percent accuracy—whether a Twitter account is home to a bot or (worse) a corporate shill instead of a regular person.
Our company was hit by this yesterday, caused a lot of issues. Thank god we had backups, but they were 2 days old (frustratingly enough, the backup failed the previous day - first time in months...)
"Have you ever been in line in a long TSA queue at a major airport? See anybody get scanned before getting in that line?"

Let's not give them any ideas...
I've been in your position a lot. I think the problem is with the M in your MVP. Narrow it down. It sounds like you're producing M+VP where M+ means more than minimum. Once I figured that out, I was able to do a lot more, faster.

I think this happens to a lot of people because it is really hard to take the M seriously until you start to see the Minimums of other now successful companies. The MVP for Reddit looked like hell (No offense kn0thing et al :-) and people forget that time when Facebook didn't even have a wall to write on.
Do you think a simple layer of chrome on top of emacs would suffice for most folks, though?

And, I find calling Visual Studio inviting scary. There is so much going on there that it really jars my senses. I guess if I'm wanting to "explore" with the mouse it is good. But if I'm wanting to type in something, not so much.

Of course, maybe that is really all of this call for "visual" programming really missing a boat. In that most folks that pine for this visual nirvana simply refuse to try out visual studio. :)
Unfortunate for those folks, but if it can prevent many more people from being infected, then still worthwhile.
Ubuntu for Phones Goes Stable - Offers A Beautiful, If Basic, Phone Experience
I have; I plan to make one for a more detailed explanation. For the landing page however, I would like something short and sweet :-)

Thanks for the suggestion!
> but it all hinges on a 100 ug dose of LSD

More than that.

> How can the OP be sure that the 100 micrograms was pure and accurate? If you can't prove that, what good is all the math?

I cannot be sure, any more than anyone getting LSD from a non-lab source (which is everyone) can be sure. All I can say is that the seller, VitaCat, was reputable; the Avengers regularly tested wares to keep sellers honest; the FBI reported high quality levels for their purchases of LSD among other drugs; the price was not too good to be true; the physical small size of the tabs meant that it had to be some highly psychoactive chemical; the trip matched reports of LSD trips very closely, and did not match many of the RC trips I've read; and so on.

> If you can't prove that, what good is all the math?

The math is there so that if I took LSD, as I highly likely did, I don't then waste the data by a screwed-up analysis.
Show HN: Curious Chocolate | Unique Chocolate Delivered Monthly
GNOME only moved it into gnome-tweak-tools. Not sure with Unity though.
The slimy interface that the slimy emails lead you to...

Edit: if you want some concrete things... I can never tell if I'm on my "public" profile page or my profile settings page, or how to get to which one. One of them shows my connections and one doesn't or something, but I for some reason finding them is hard every time. I can also never (on the first try) get to a message someone has sent me, because clicking on the message leads me to the persons profile? or similar. Also I don't want to use messages in the first place, I want email even if it doesn't get LinkedIn ad revenue. I don't need people to vouch for my skills at all, most of them don't even know what low-level skills I use on a daily basis. Leaving a group isn't easy. The grays used all over the interface are pure gray, and feel dull, instead they should have a small amount of blue in them. The stream page has a "People you may know" box twice. I'm not "interested" in any of their ads.

LinkedIn's problems stem from (1) a blatantly confusing interface or (2) a user-hostile, ad-focused monetization strategy.
Tesla Picks AT&T for In-Car Wireless Servic
I use HN only via my phone to avoid procrastinating, and only when I'm away from my main computer. It's quite effective, actually.

Also, experts often have insights that introductory articles lack. Better to ask the source if they don't mind composing.
That's a reasonable approach when talking with people who have sort of day to day experience with data and systems. Unfortunately, this doesn't per se hold true when talking with people from other disciplines. Some people hold truth as a platonic thing: it's either true or not true, and new research disproving old things implies falsehood, not a less accurate model. Tackling the elephant in that room, I'm not even talking about religious discussions, just normal discussions on physics research being found out.

A historian could speak more pertinently to this, but my understanding is that in 50s-60s "middle" USA, scientists were pretty much treated as oracles of divinity by a great deal of the common population.
Mod_lua
I hope Google shared this sort of information with LinkedIn. "Your daily emails are reliably considered spam, by people who actually want to use your services."
I think LinkedIn is trying too hard to be more than what it is. It's the professional version of the town church. The town church used to record recording weddings, births and deaths. That's it. LinkedIn should be a record of hirings, leavings, new companies forming and old companies dissolving.

Against the background of that basic information, people should be able to solicit me, freely, to come work for them - but they should be prepared to wait for a response as I'm not going to check in with the 'town church' all that often (unless I'm between gigs or thinking about a new gig).

It might be nice to passively check in on past coworkers to see how their careers are progressing - but that's optional.
Never heard of ransomware before, but the trend is alarming:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=ransomware#q=ransomwa...
> These studies demonstrated no significant loss in LSD concentration at 25°C for up to four weeks. After four weeks of incubation, a 30% loss in LSD concentration at 37°C and up to a 40% at 45°C were observed. Urine fortified with LSD and stored in amber glass or nontransparent polyethylene containers showed no change in concentration under any light conditions.

Sounds about right. So even at room temperature (25°C = 77 Fahrenheit), dissolved LSD is stable over a period of months, and removing light sources improves stability even more. This is pretty poor compared to a great many molecules, but far from fatal to my self-experiment.
And this is why http://xkcd.com/836/ could have a fourth scene at the graveyard. Top hat man and his girlfriend stand by his tombstone. Girlfriend says to top hat man something like, "that study turned out to be bogus" or "he was in the control group"