skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if you aren't a finisher? How can you become one?

I wish I were as good at taking this advice as at giving it.

1. Lose the fear. (This is the root cause of all the other stuff.) Or, more
accurately, experience it but don't give in to it.
2. Timebox the work (as reasonably as one can) or limit "one more feature".
3. Fail fast, gracefully, and quietly. Learn when to *not* finish.
(You shouldn't be finishing *everything* you start. The problem is if
you finish *nothing*.)
4. Succeed decisively but simply (not ornately; don't aim for perfection).
That's like forever away! Or two E3s away.
Yeah. I think his decision is hard to really discuss or weigh out, at this point.
> No one invests in a non-profit.

I thought that was called a donation.
On a separate note, I feel like this article series might better be titled "The Missing Parts of Our Knowledge of Basic Rails Features".

Reinventing basic features doesn't make your Rails deployment "advanced", it just makes it convoluted. There's no bonus prize for introducing fancy patterns to situations that do not call for them.

Further more, here's the definition of the Active Record pattern, as described by Martin Fowler: "An object that wraps a row in a database table or view, encapsulates the database access, and adds domain logic on that data". The key part is that last sentence.

So a quote like what follows simply misunderstands the purpose the Active Record pattern: "A recurring theme in these posts is that ActiveRecord models should be very simple interfaces to a datastore – the User model should be responsible for validating and persisting attributes of a user, like name and date-of-birth, and not much else."

See the example diagram (which I actually drew for Martin back before even starting Rails!): http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html -- it includes domain logic methods like "getExemption", "isFlaggedForAudit", and so forth. Exactly like the pattern describes.

You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Okay, putting on my astronomer hat:

The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse.

To oversimplify things a bit, the impact event kicked up enough pollution to undercut the food chain by starving out anything that relied on photosynthesis, which starved out the herbivores, which starved out the carnivores and omnivores.

Typical asteroids are not large enough to wipe out all human life in one go. A large impact could kill billions between direct fatalities and follow-on deaths via starvation and plagues, but your survivor population would still easily exceed anything we can sustainably place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial location) within the next few hundred years.

Even if it completely refactored modern civilization, you'd probably see some population capable of organizing and recovering a sustainable society. And that is with mass starvation, with plagues due to loss of sanitation infrastructure, with conventional farming being disrupted for years, and with the assumption that some idiot decides it's time for a preemptive nuclear war.

Furthermore, any sustainable Martian colony you could produce could equally well be isolated in a hardened bunker on Earth, if surviving a large asteroid impact were the only concern.

To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon.
I wrote the test - Yep. Tail latency is one of the key things here. And I took 100% of all samples, as opposed to the middle 80% the tool usually reports.
I tried to make a reasonable trade off by making the flappy bird side way easier. Or else it gets frustrating to be punished after each few keystrokes =)
In an agrarian society most people are working on small plots of land growing food and/tending animals. Their labor combined with the natural resources is enough to create food for their families and a little bit left over. They take that little bit left over and trade it to a guy that makes clothing, and a guy that makes tools. All the goods and services in the whole country don't amount to all that much -- enough food to feed everyone plus some clothes and tools.

Now move to the industrial agricultural age. The same food (better really) that it used to take 90% of the labor of the country to grow now can be done by 5% of the people. Instead of having only enough surplus to support a few guys making clothing or building tools, most of society can go off and find things to do with their time to trade to the farmers for food and to each other for whatever everyone else is doing. Now all the good and services of the country not only include a wide variety of food, clothing, and tools, but it also includes concerts, amusement parks, computers, dishwashers -- all of which can be traded for the very same bushels of corn or herds of cattle that the agrarian society was producing.

All of this is very simplified but it should give you the basic idea. Bill Gates can give the global poor money and they can use that to import goods and services made elsewhere, but that's just a temporary change. If you really want the societies to be richer, you need the people in that society to be doing things with their time that are of great value to others. That's what increases the total amount of wealth in the world.
Can you give a citation for this 1930s survey?
Personally, I love learning from books like this one and consider tutorial-style books a complete waste of my time. It's a matter of learning style, and the differences are fairly well understood. Look up deductive vs inductive teaching.

Teachers try to use both methods, but book authors don't have to. Readers are free to learn from any book that suits them.
I just interviewed at Google Boston (in Cambridge) and it looks like there's lots of automatic standing/sitting desks there, but they're definitely the expensive versions ($1,200+ on amazon).
Question is he really going to give Billions to Elon Musk? or is it just another attempt to grab attention. Reading through the comments, I guess there is nothing wrong in investing projects that are too much futuristics, another point Larry seemed to be making was, there are plenty of people donating already to our current serious problems, while there are a few who actually do for projects that belong to far future.
Ask HN: Drupal websites?
How many of you have Drupal websites?
Do you generally have some Drupal work every month or every other month which you outsource? If yes, where?

1) known contact

2) rentacoder, elance kind of service?

3) Anything else
Since the article was written prior to the invention of automatic spelling correction, these sorts of seemingly trivial errors could tarnish one's first impression significantly. If you know nearly nothing about someone but need to form an opinion of them, you will use everything you do know to assess them, regardless of how trivial. Furthermore, you will generally be biased towards criteria that are more difficult to fake. It may not be fair but it's how humanity works, and being aware of this can help you greatly.

Confidence, intelligence, credentials, and experience can be faked or lied about. Comparing someone's written words with their speech, in person or over the phone, will give you a more reliable picture of how they think and communicate than anything else.
Highly dependent on the job.
That's not really what this is. You can see people committing violent crimes in public. You can track the path robbers and terrorists with security cameras. But victimless crimes take place behind closed doors and are never reported.
Why? From all I have read about Newton, he would have been the employee from hell. A genius as a mathematician and physicist, yes; but a terrible employee.
I like using Jekyll on my own domain ../blog

I use a makefile with targets for running Jekyll, for rsync'ing everything to one of my servers, and a default target that does everything.

My workflow consists of cd'ing to .../blog/_posts, copying the last blog entry, changing the file name to be relevant to the new post, editing the file, and cd ../..; make

That might sound like a small hassle, but I like this better than other alternatives I have used like blogger and wordpress.
The Secrets of Successful Musicians (infographic)
Consider also how much money was invested during WWII in mystics and parapsychologists and look at how well all that turned out. I don't think that you can really say that with confidence, that Elon's money is as well-deserved or well-invested as Bill's.
GDC 2014: Mozilla and Partners Prove the Web is the Platform for Gaming
This is hilarious - it would have saved me days of work. Here is the GIST with my step by step. https://gist.github.com/ivansmf/6ec2197b69d1b7b26153
If our universe is just one branch in a multiverse, then we already have plenty of backups.
[Ask HN] What's my next move?
It has been about 3 months since I started startedtabs and I've received about 250 submissions of people interested. Should I take this as a sign to move further with the project? Any recommendation as to what I should do next?
let's thinking about this from humanity's point of view in a thousand years. if someone stopped polio now, his name would be in history. if someone colonized mars, his name would be in history, and probably of bigger importance. because it is a more audacious goal and having higher impact to the future generation.

if you ask me to donate to stopping polio vs spacex, i would probably donating to stopping polio. however, that is because i'm a little bit short-sighted on goals. (incidentally, i guess this is why i'm creating an internet business rather than a space exploration program.) however, that does not mean i should not let other people try the more audacious venture.
Page could also invest some of his money in www.marscoin.org and let cryptocurrencies take us to Mars. That seems to be a very efficient way. There might even be a MedicalCoin that does the same thing for Polio. Now that would be a very smart way to leave your money behind - maybe a DAC trust-fund living on the etherum blockchain...
Why then don't geniuses come from third world countries. Improved standard of living will help that, not pure numbers.
Here is the GIST link: https://gist.github.com/ivansmf/6ec2197b69d1b7b26153
No, the point being made is that we wouldn't have been as far along as we were had we cut funding to such an impractical field.

A lot of engineering and basic research seems quite pointless until it, well, isn't.
Google Faces Lawsuit by a Group of Students from California
A group of nine students from California have taken up legal route against Google, believing that the technology giant monitors Gmail accounts in a way that violates the state and federal privacy laws. The case is currently being heard by the US District Court for Northern District of California.
This had the craziest effect on my vision, anyone else seeing everything else extremely square after playing it? I mean the borders of windows, the headers of sites etc. Everything was sooo round before.
This support was added in SQLite 3.8.3 and released in early February

https://sqlite.org/changes.html
Genius! I have 2 kids and spent the last 3 weeks fretting about camps and getting kids into camps. Its all word of mouth at the moment. Brilliant idea!
Thanks for that link to the desk base unit.

I just ordered one because of this post. I'm going to replace my barely-adjustable ikea hodge-podge setup.
I thought the example of selling milk set the tone for the whole article. Buying and selling milk isn't investment either.
There's more than one example given in the article of a "brilliant" person who failed as a businessman. The author's opinion appears to be a considered one, based on multiple experiences, not a snap judgment based on one unfortunate episode.
> It is merely a type alias, like e.g. Haskell's and ML's "type", or isn't it?

It is, but it freely allows conversion between the aliased types.

typedef int Feet;
typedef int Meters;

int main() {
Feet height = 6;
Meters inEngland = height; // <-- OK. :(
}
What most companies around the world use has very little to do with Github top languages.

I never get this trend to use Github to measure anything.
Maybe we should also pay people to study math as well. [$10] for each Khan Academy lesson they pass. It'd cost ~$2,500 to educate one person on the entire math curriculum.

I think it's plausible, in the future, we will be paying people to learn.
> Encryption is irrelevant when one party will give out the info for a price.

Who does that?
Combox Live: Crowd Sourced Sports Commentary
Would love to be able to spend the asking price for such a (adjustable) desk.

Surprisingly - two non-adjustible sturdy desks works out cheaper.
I can see that being the case in many exciting locations, but in busy metro areas like NYC I am quite certain price is a major motivator.

Clarification re: popularity, I think we can agree that AirBnB lives and dies with its inventory. If cities/IRS were to crack down on the legal and tax aspects, inventory would significantly reduce.

One concerted enforcement action, eg enforcing disclosure of all who rent rooms to the IRS, or requiring disclosure of apt. addresses to landlords, and a very large part of the inventory will drop out overnight.
This was a beautifully written piece, but that's exactly the impression I came away with.

It's been written on HN many times that work sample tests are very important in hiring decisions. Perhaps this is just more evidence of that. The good news is that it's much more practical to give such tests in software development than in sales (to my knowledge).
What if John Carmack is an average programmer, and the rest of us are just lazy in comparison.
How about correlation to Hacker News mention of bitcoin?
Would your bring your wife and kids into this environment? Or even just a date?

You have to be part of a very very narrow demographic to be compatible with this type of work environment.
That's great news. He can start now so that next time Elon needs half a billion the taxpayers won't need to provide a risky low interest loan.
I think the fundamental reason of not being finisher may come from several reasons: lack of detailed planning (oh, there's an unanticipated obstacle), lack of energy to finish things, and little barrier of attention shift.

I would say I am not a finisher, but what I am trying to do is reducing these reasons: trying to understand/plan better to the deepest level, sleeping/eating well, getting more satisfaction from finishing things than starting one, and doing smaller things, selectively.
I think you misunderstand my comment. I know there are lots of advocates for OSH. But I don't think there is someone like Stallman who is advocating for free as in speech hardware the way Stallman does for software. I don't see the "social and ethical values" of the kind of freedom that Stallman talks about reflected in OSH discussions. However, I only see the English language part of the conversation, so something different might be happening in Europe/Italy.
"Imagine for a moment you could colonize space. What problem would that solve, really? "

Very interesting. Do you realize that people said exactly those same words about the microscope?

They said : What problem would seeing the same things that we already see bigger are going to solve?

It was called a "toy" with no real use. If you have a microscope you know how hard is to see something.

The fact is that we don't know what we don't know.

Just traveling to the moon changed everything. We discovered isotopes on moon surface that are not created on earth because of earth atmosphere. The same materials where not eroded by fluids behave very different.
Thanks! Are you in the Bay Area by chance? I'm Emmie, the founder. New site design to push out this weekend, please take a look again soon. (we wanted to push it out before the TC article, but it was too unstable)
Do keep in mind that this letter (essay?) was written in an era when SMS wasn't a thing and getting an education involved (quite literally) crossing your t's and dotting your i's. A keyboard wasn't a thing yet and spell check was something witches and wizards did before their exams.

Things have gotten speedier, and yet, much lazier now - so much that we have begun to rely a fair bit on technology and a common shared understanding of the concepts that unite us into the communities we partake in. Add to that, the exchange of cultures via this great, big melting pot called the internet, and you get a hodge-podge of words, symbols and grammar that we end up loosely calling a language. As with all melting pots, the contents of this one have melded into each other so much that these changes to the contents have (again, literally) stuck!

TL;DR - It was different back then & it certainly is much different now. It really doesn't matter what words (or spellings) you choose; what matters is the thoughts you are trying to convey through your words (and spellings).
In the end these are just eye-popping benchmarks. What really drives people to your platform is developer friendliness and the speed by which you can get started. Google App Engine has this, but there's not a lot of information floating around the media and blogosphere as there is for Heroku and DigitalOcean.

I use Google App Engine for auto scaling an API and it works brilliantly. Super easy to set up and develop on. But recently I started preferring DigitalOcean simply because there is a community that is constantly posting tutorials and answering questions. To me, that's more valuable than the distant prospect of handling 1M writes/second.
The human race is quite a large and diverse organism. In terms of development, it's parts are stratified. At the extremes are the front, and the rear. The front is fulfilling our current best potential - space travel, computing, great individual wealth, even opulence. The rear is living by default, mainly just because reproduction is a major defining characteristic of life itself, in terrible conditions, because there's no overarching principle to ensure resources are distributed evenly or at all.

It isn't surprising that those representing the front and those pulling up the rear would conflict when they meet.
From the magazine of things that totally happened
Neustar to Acquire .CO Domain Name Registry
re your edit: yes it was the latter interpretation that I had a problem with. The "group of sweets" == "crowd" doesn't really work for me, but I'll have to think about why.
Hint: It's not the asteroids we should be worried about.

Consider being the last enclave on Earth with clean water, reliable power, and happy people.

How long until the unwashed masses claw your bunker open with their bare hands for a chance at bettering their lot?

That's the reason we need to have colonies off-planet; in case the situation on Earth gets beyond saving.
Robot Finds Kitten in Elm
I think I've found the confusion. I was still talking about the GPL in my second comment. I see why that was confusing given that you'd explicitly added the AGPL into the discussion, sorry.

I might have better stated it as "I agree the AGPL removes the tension, I think the AGPL is philosophically coherent. But the FSF still primarily pushes the GPL. [transclude prior comment]"
Games based on powers of 2 are now the latest fad?

Certainly exposing the general public to powers of 2 is not a bad thing... especially with computers becoming more ubiquitous in our lives.
That's not what the author is saying. He's saying that if you are either unable or unwilling to correctly use "your" and "you're", you are probably unable or unwilling to pay attention to the details that matter to success in his business. I agree that there's a fine line between proper attention to detail and nitpicking, but taking the author's statement in context I don't think he's on the wrong side of it.
If her point is that we should clamp down on intergenerational transfers of larges amounts of wealth, I agree! There's a first for everything, I suppose.

Although, I could extend that argument. If these ubermen are so good so repeatably, they shouldn't worry so much about progressive taxation. After all, they can remake their fortunes even if you whittle them away, right?
Blender 2.70 released today
that seems believable, but it also seems like I'm seeing more and more listings on airbnb who aren't selling an experience; they're just buying or renting properties and generating sales through airbnb. That is, there is no experience; it's just a (much nicer, better managed) alternative to vrbo / homeaway (not that that isn't desperately needed; trying to rent a seasonal ski home in tahoe is just begging for disruption because the experience is generally somewhere between shit and awful).
And without the security benefits of proper virtualisation, too. At least lxc since recently has the ability to run containers as a regular user, but I'll stick to KVM guests secured with MLS policies for now.
I'm sure his lawyers will pick this apart and the judge/jury will determine its legality.
Ya, seems pretty odd. We'd have to see AirBNB's revenue to to see if its really worth that price. As well, I believe HomeAway has a higher number of listings than AirBNB does.

Initially AirBNB had the advantage that it allowed for one-time postings of a property (as HomeAway would charge annually to post a property). But HomeAway has recently added per-booking fee if you are only posting once or twice a year.

At this point, I feel like AirBNB doesn't offer anything HomeAway already does. So unless AirBNB has some amazing growth potential or revenue, I don't see $10bn being likely.
I think they'll get hit with something huge. A fire in an apartment that takes out the complex. A rape. A death. Something that'll ding them to the order of tens of millions, or more. For one incident. Something that they can't make go away for $20K. If there's a big enough payday, it will make its way into the press, no doubt.
All you have to do is use a scale which is small enough that it can't measure the weight of the complete bag.

I guess that still doesn't prevent someone from weighing all of the candies, one small batch at a time, and adding up the results. But hopefully in a classroom it would be obvious if someone was trying to cheat that way. I suspect that asking the students to work in pairs helps to discourage those kinds of shenanigans, too.
Bitcoin Must Create A Community-Backed FDIC
False dichotomy. Those aren't the only two choices.

Nobody's suggesting we get rid of capitalism. But effective participation in capitalism requires quite a lot that capitalism itself isn't good at providing. Government, for example. Freelance government, like warlords and mob bosses, isn't great for economic development. Good parenting and a stable home life are not things that capitalism is producing a lot of. Education and public health have very long payback times and difficult-to-capture benefits, making the ROI pretty low. That's made worse by people using capitalism's mechanisms to profit from destroying value, and a very short-term focus driven by public markets' focus on the next quarter's earnings.

As an example of what a more subtle approach gives you, look at Brazil's Bolsa Familia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia

They are basically giving money to the poor: $13 per month per kid who stays vaccinated and in school. Studies suggest it's having a substantial impact on poverty and inequality. So yes, giving modest amounts of money (0.5% of Brazil's GDP) can reduce poverty because helps recipients to prepare themselves to participate effectively in a free-market economy.
"Everybody needs to be given a fair chance, even if it's one in a million."

Ain't been true for thousands of years.

The question is whether we prioritize the species, at large, or an individual. If the answer is species at large, off-site backups make a great deal more sense.
Can't wait to see someone mix in a bit of bird-flapping action.
Managed to purposefully lose with 627 points. Lowest I've managed to lose by. :)
good point. something we ought to focus on.