skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you get things done in hourlong intervals?
I'm talking about code.

When I was alone, I would go to the coffee shop and do work for 6 hours, and tune out the rest of the world. But now I'm visiting a friend, and keep getting interrupted by them in order to do various things, and it seems like my intervals to get things done are altogether too small to really dive into my code. I've made minimal progress, even though there are so many things to do, and I have so much time(on aggregate) to do them.

Possible solution: every time I wrap up a coding session, write a paragraph summarizing what needs to be done next, why, and where?
"Am I now expected to feel bad for the guy who, after making as much as $255,000 up until the age of 55, only has enough savings to live for 2 or 3 years?"

Well, the article says he asked his wife for divorce. If the divorce did materialize, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that his savings were drastically slashed ;-)
I'm a DCer and there are a few startups (My startup isn't hiring anyone in the DC area right now though)

I recommend attending a techcocktail event http://techcocktail.com/home/2009/01/30/tech-cocktail-dc-4/

or keeping up with Gary's Guide DC http://dc.garysguide.org/
Certainly, information isn't necessarily governed by Moore's law, it's information processing that is! Exponential information creation would require an exponential rise in population, and that's just not the case - thankfully.
Of course.

http://github.com/alexcurelea/HNScore/tree/master

(btw - for me it works on inner pages even without the second wildcard. Odd.)
Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen that before. Nice site and it does look similar. One of my goals was to keep browserpop simple and specific, so whilst some of the features on start.io look nice, I hope that browserpop is simpler to use for it's intended purpose.
Not a whiner perhaps: it is easy to turn cranky when you're out of job for a stretch of time.

Although the rant about employers not acknowledging receipt of resume sure got me chuckle. Never had it other way, we certainly live in the different worlds :)
"Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does."

That's actually a terrible argument. The US does have the finest health care in the world--what we don't have is a means for absolutely everyone to afford it.
Interesting approach. I forgot to mention it in the post, but browserpop has an iPhone/Android friendly UI too.
Central banks can adapt to life below zero
Kids rumble Ribena vit claims, could result in 1.1 m fine for GlaxoSmithKline
Wow, so I'm guessing scaling is complicated :)
"format a flash drive in a universal way that isn't FAT32."

Microsoft will never, ever support a technology they don't control. FAT32 is just fine by them and you can't count them out when you say "universal".

They could, of course, use BSD licensed stuff, but they would not be able to put pressure and extract licensing fees like they do with FAT.
My hunch is that eventually a tipping point will be reached, and either the guidelines will be boldly edited (for the better), or a new inclusionist alternative will emerge. Until then, that Wikipedia is 'good enough' but stuck in its ways is suppressing the emergence of an even better alternative.
Yes but he still got $188,000 severance package... More than enough to find a good business idea and get the ball rolling...
I email out Java code to use during the phone interview.

I require HR/recruiter/whoever to have the candidate receive my phone call from a place where he has email access. I call, introduce myself, and then immediately tell them that I'm sending out a couple samples of Java code. To avoid formatting hell, I PDF them (w/ Eclipse pretty formatting, even!). Then, we open up the code samples, and I ask questions about them. I can write more about this if anyone's interested.
Four of the ten Techstars Boulder 09 companies were founded by people born outside the US. Two of the companies are run by folks like me who spent close to a decade earning green cards at big firms, but the other two face significant barriers to basing themselves in the US, even with investment.

Why does this matter? Even in the short term startups spend a lot of money here on services, and long-term they'll provide jobs for a lot of native workers.
The sad part is that Time Machine would be a one-liner had OSX supported ZFS since Leopard...
news.yc would not exist if people followed advice from this guy :-)
Not too long ago I stumbled across someone doing visualizations of comment threads, which seemed like it might help in sorting out what was going on: http://demaws.net/projects/tldr

Also, I wrote a very long essay on the problems of web forums (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000) which was covered previously here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515682

In that essay, I tried to rethink what exactly moderation and comments/conversations meant. I like your approach of contrasting threads that are over- or under-moderated with threads that maintain an 'appropriate' moderation/reply ratio. But as noodle wrote above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794856), it may not be able to distinguish between certain types of commenting.

My current instinct is that moderation tells us more about the moderator than it does about the comment being moderated. I'm just not sure how to to operationalize that insight.
Freemium is a compelling business model when clients are more likely to buy the longer they use the free service. That's the case with Evernote, since users become more invested in the service when they have sizable collection of notes. To continue using the system when they've reached the free storage limit, they have to pay up.

My question is, can the same effect be achieved with a limited time free trial? In the case of Evernote, instead of giving 40MB free and 500MB and some premium features, they could offer a full account for 6 months, and then start charging. This way you don't have to continue supporting deadbeats indefinitely. What are your thoughts?
It took the author of the article 10 years of interviewing candidates to realize this?

Ok, it's the author that sucks at his job. I'm sorry if that is not very constructive, but if I had to choose between having the horror show developer he describes on staff for 10 years taking up a cubicle and a paycheck, or the author on staff for 10 years hiring retards, I would take the horror show developer, as he would do far less damage in the long run.

Probably the author just has a positive view of people, and tends to see the best in people, or believes people when they tell him things. This would be fine for many jobs, but interviewing candidates requires a willingness to ruin someone's week. It is never the goal, but if a totally unqualified candidate shows up you must be willing to push them to answer questions so that you know that they are unqualified.

In any developer interview, you really only need to cover the following things:

- The person knows what they should know, based on their resume.
- If they say they were a linux administrator for 2 years, they should know all about linux basics and shell basics, they should be able to run a machine remotely without breaking it, they should not be dependent on any gui tools, they should know the common server software people run, and so on.
- If they were a web developer for 2 years, they should know about the stuff they supposedly doing, if it was backend code they should know about cache control headers and how ajax requests are or are not cached by the big browsers, they should know POST and GET and when to use them, and so on.

Anyone who doesn't know the things they 'should' know cannot be considered further, either they are lying on their resume or they are just turds who don't learn anything.

- They should be able to demonstrate an ability to code on the spot right in front of you. Some people claim they cannot code in front of someone else. Other than someone with an anxiety disorder, if a person can't code in front of another person it is just because they can't code at all. If their code is incorrect or suboptimal the main thing is that when you go over it they smack themselves on the forhead and seem annoyed that they would make such a mistake, and that they see right away how what they coded is wrong. If they can't get some challenging thing exactly right isn't such a problem as not 'being with it'.

- They should be sane and law abiding, not a drug user (and here I mean drug use which you can notice or that they *brag about), and that they have an ability to conform to some baseline social norms, such as bathing every third day or better, washing their hair and clothes occasionally, use and empty their trashcan, being able to talk to people without freaking out, and not going off on people or constantly insisting on doing things however they want to do it without strong rational each time.

This is basically 'smart, gets things done, can do things (vs coercing others to pick up their slack), makes a point to learn about what they are supposed to be doing, and isn't filthy or crazy.'
From 2001 to 2008 he was a senior vice president for a private student-loan company

I might feel more sympathy for this guy if he were one of the many
recent graduates unable to find the kind of jobs they need to pay off
private student loans (with exorbitant rates) instead of being part of
an industry that profited from them while ignoring their employment
predicaments. What sympathy do guys like these ever show for their unemployed debitors?
It is safe to assume that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I've considered doing that, but I always worry that if I put too much of a barrier up front, I'll lose the superstars who know they can get a job somewhere else with less effort.

Is this company a very famous or desirable place to work? Up-front screening could work very well in that situation. But for less well-known companies like mine, candidates are less willing to go through a lengthy process to interview with us (except the desperate ones, and we don't want those).
Interesting thought, but a couple caveats. A good economy self-regulates supply and demand for industries/job positions. This is especially true when all online job postings are online; it is easy for anyone to see what type of jobs are hiring the most. In an economy like ours, where unemployment is at a record high, if a section of the economy is experiencing a shortage, it is because those positions demand years of experience. Therefore it would take years for a government/institutional program to train workers for that field, which by that time the economic imbalance might have repaired itself. (Recessions typically don't last more than 2-3 years)
You may need to reread it again. Nowhere did I hear that it took him ten years to become a good reviewer.

In fact, the last sentence in the first paragraph is very telling.

In my early years I was very much hit and miss in terms of finding the right people and it wasn’t until a horror hire that I realised what I was doing wrong.
Where can I find a list of the packages in the repository?
http://smacklet.com/
Maybe the severance package he got was used to pay for the divorce lawyer ;-)

My initial comment was facetious. Honestly, I can't feel sorry for a guy whose career was raping gullible college students. If he jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, I shan't shed a tear.
Hack meebo- chat site
Hello, is it possible tot find out with who and what my girlfriend is chatting via Meebo on here own site?
Comcast is now hijacking 404s
Last I checked only 0.012% of people actually reach age 100.
I'd think it'd be the losinger stores that do that at first (I'm thinking Borders), since maybe that wouldn't be the first store you'd go to. If/when that kicked up sales, other stores would have to follow. What a utopia that'd be though. But, eg Borders can't tell you for sure that something _is_ in the store, from their own system.
Tokyo Cabinet API for Clojure
I continue to fail to understand why anybody but Google's competitors are up in arms about this now. Google scanned a bunch of books - entered a gray area in "Fair Use", was taken to court, _and then came to out-of-court settlement_.

Amazon is free to negotiate the same settlement with the book publishers.

Google is making available a sizable number of _out of print_ books - that is, those books that can not be purchased from Amazon - and, here is the important thing - _Only with the permission of the rights holders._

The only real major take away for Google are the "Orphan" works - that is those books who no copyright holder can be found for and are out-of-print.

Does anyone out there who is not a competitor of Google see this as a bad thing?
UK scientists aim to design the first ever biological robot using mold
Simply boycott any group that wants to charge you to present, make it plain why you boycott them and spread the word far and wide.
When I was in college, I interned for a DARPA spinoff out in Reston, VA. I assume you're not looking solely for startups physically in DC. If you are, I'm not sure you're going to find much. Most of the tech community is out in Northern Virginia, in and around Reston. Look there.
Don't let them interrupt you..?
Wow. How amazingly boring. Let's see if I can do better in 4 minutes. No particular order:

1. Start and complete small personal projects.

If you don't finish them, they have negative utility for you. It's fine to start ambitious things, as long as you keep starting and finishing other things. Momentum matters.

2. Pick projects that will force you to learn new things.

Graphics. Signal processing. Math. SQL. External hashing. Networking. Distributed systems. Concurrency. Code generation. Parsing. Natural language. User interface. You will never run out of things. Don't pigeonhole yourself.

3. Have some kind of UI toolkit.

Attention matters. It's easier to get attention to your work when people can play with it. You'll need it anyways. jQuery is a fine answer.

4. Add a small feature to a favorite open source app.

It'll force you to absorb how the app is designed and built without requiring you to completely understand it, and it has a payoff (see #1).

5. Fix a bug in an open source app.

Harder than #4, approximates dealing with bugginess on real teams, where problems are caused by code you didn't write, builds debugging muscles, crucial.

6. Learn enough assembly to know how the stack works.

Even Python programs run off the stack. Helps debugging. Helps you understand what's "possible", why things are slow and why things are fast. Makes new languages easier to learn. Assembly is like Latin that way.

7. Really, really learn GDB (or WinDBG).

Momentum matters. Nothing kills momentum like a 15 minute rebuild cycle just to get a new printf-debugger. Even Python programs segfault when they get really interesting.

8. Read code.

But you knew this, right?

9. Build a personal library.

This is so important that it's an interview question for me. "What's in libyou.so?" Builds momentum (that much easier to start the next project). Gives you something to look at and reflect on. Solves tedious problems with finality (memory management, data structures), instead of allowing you to blow them off in future projects.

10. Learn a profiler.

You don't know how to make code performant until you know ot to generate and read a profile, and design experiments around them. This is even more important than unit testing.
End of day, I usually list out the things I want to get done the next day (just point format a small list) on my notepad (a physical paper and pencil). Then I stick to it.

I don't think writing paragraphs helps, keep it real simple. "Fix bug #12345, Test blahblah, Tune XXX, etc"
In most modern nations, "adult" refers to someone over 18 to 21. With life expectancy of over 70 years, that places middle age exactly in the middle of 50-year period. I thought that was obvious enough.
A neat trick, but also one of the better arguments for more principled macro systems. These macros are fragile, and the error messages for misuse must be inscrutable. So: cool, but I hope I never have to use it.
How Twitter can fix both retweets AND replies
I went looking for the one CVS uses, found this:

http://www.datejs.com/

and stopped looking.
Losing the superstars usually isn't that much of a problem. There are other superstars out there, and most of the top programmers I know care very deeply about being able to work with other smart people and not having to put up with incompetence. A rigorous hiring process is a plus in their book.

Besides, given a population of superstars that want the easiest interview process possible, vs. a population of superstars that want to work with other superstars, which one would you rather work with?

I'd be more concerned with the test not measuring what you want it to measure. It's possible to test well and still not be able to code yourself out of a paper bag, and it's possible (though somewhat less likely) to code well and not test well.
With the importation of so many engineers into the US, wages were suppressed and many American students who had the potential to become engineers made the rational decision to pursue other career paths.

You're assuming that it's a zero sum game, and that there's only a limited number of engineering jobs available.

What about all the companies that immigrants and immigrant children started? Ebay, Yahoo, Google, etc... All those jobs created by those companies would not exist hat it not been for immigration.
Comprehensive Clojure STM Article
Sadly installing it in emacs and typing M-x package-list-packages
I've seen this up close and personal where the older engineers are being laid off and its very hard for them to get a job again.

The company seems to create a bad situation ... ie give him a project which he has no chance of finishing, his direct manager ignores his cries for help and then waits till he fails and then fires him.

I've known this happen to 2 people. And at least in one case, I knew the engineer just needed a little guidance.
A couple of theories (static discharge, piezo-electric effect, burning metal) here: http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-88213.html
After the collapse of the USSR, lots of medical doctors and other specialized workers found themselves without a job. Today in Western Europe you can find construction workers who were doctors in the Ukraine SSR or Moldova in the 1980s, These people are a huge source of qualified work, but to the best of my knowledge only one country (Portugal) has shown any interest in re-training them as doctors to meet the severe lack of qualified medical personnel. It's interesting to note that in the former Soviet republics, being a doctor did not have the same status (let alone financial compensation) as in the West.

I know that Canada has been trying to lure medical doctors from abroad (Eastern Europe and elsewhere) in recent years, but they're after the young graduates, not the old veterans who were disowned by the fall of Communism.

Unfortunately, the doctors' lobby in the U.S. is too powerful. In order to keep their salaries inflated, they will never allow the U.S. to import doctors from abroad, even if that would mean that the average American would have access to more affordable healthcare.
I must admit, I have never understood the package management in Slackware, and that has kept me from trying it. Apparently it has some kind of package management tools, which don't do dependency resolving (by default).

But does it have the capability to update installed packages automatically or with a few commands (compare to aptitude update; aptitude upgrade)? And does it have a search function for packages (like apt-cache search foo)?

I can understand that not having dependency resolution simplifies tools a lot, but is there advantages for end-users from that? And is there some kind of external database or something that will help tracking dependencies, or is it based on guesswork and trial & error?
I find it impossible to search by keyword. The trick I use is to find one relevant article via miracle, then do a reverse lookup on authors that were referenced by that paper. Once you know some names, everything becomes much more readily searchable.
Totally agree with this. I also find if I separate the "research" aspect of something from the implementation things go more smoothly as well.

For example at the end of each day I'll gather documentation, code samples, etc... for the things I want to get done the next day.
I feel like Clojure is CL-flavored Scheme. It's a lisp-1 with strong emphasis put on functional style (except for TCO, but loop/recur are a good explicit workaround) and then it has tons of libraries (via Java) and CL-style macros and more syntaxy things (literal maps, vectors, etc). It's sorta a cool lispy mashup.
Given the degree to which established academics disagree with one another, often in a vituperative and acerbic manner in public, I'm not sure having direct contribution from 'experts' will improve anything.

An encyclopedia is a tertiary source and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That means Wikipedia is not a repository for primary source material (that would be Wikisource), and nor is it a place to publish secondary source material. As a tertiary source, it is there to report and summarize the state of the debate between published, verifiable secondary sources.
hey raganwald, I hope it doesn't bother you that I submitted this. I thought it was relevant and fun to read; sorry if posting it here caused any trouble.
If you are interested in the topic, I highly recommend "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of data" by Norvig et al. [1]

[1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/03/unreasonable-effe...
I'll join.

@a-priori: The point isn't to help champion vague and undifferentiable ideals. It's to help the Pirate Party define those ideals and bring the issues to non-technical and uninterested Canadians so that they understand and care.

We have to refine, educate, and motivate -- and the time is right.
I second the above recommendations. Read these blogs religiously and prepare to have your mind blown.

You can also join the lean startup circle on Google Groups, and watch this Steve Blank video: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2056

Four Steps To Epiphany (Steve Blank's self-published book) will teach you something new every paragraph. Buy it. The only complaint is that the publishing is cheap, and your highlighter marks will show through the thin paper.
BTW just to clarify: by all means integrate speech rec into your solution if you feel you get a real value proposition by doing so. For my product it wasn't really needed and was more of a distraction than anything else. However I learned so much in the process I wanted to share this back with the community.
Work in 48 minute increments...

http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-of...

I've been doing this for years (depending, of course, on what I'm working on). It can be very effective.

Get a digital timer. Set it for 48:00. Start it. You may not stop working until it beeps. 12 minutes for stretch, email, bathroom, snack, etc., is plenty. Then back to work. And no alt-tab to hacker news during the 48 minutes. You're only cheating yourself.
Yeah, quite simple. Ensure that your relationship is built on honesty, transparency, and trust. Be open with her, willing to openly communicate about any topic. Ideally, she should return the same, and thus, would be more than willing to tell you with whom she is chatting with upon you showing her even the tiniest bit of concern for her well being and for the longevity of your relationship.