skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have and am experiencing what you experience atm.

The first thing which is helping me very, very much is focus training. After like a month of training to focus fast and hard, I am able to dive into a problem and ignore everything around me within minutes, allowing me to work more efficiently faster, resulting in more getting done in less time.

The second thing, closely related to the first (and an item on my list of mental improvements) is improving focus stability, but I know several people with a very, very stable focus. Interrupting them is pretty much like being an IO-Interrupt in a modern processor. It takes a few seconds, but then everything they need right now is swapped out and they can answer simple things or do something easy for a few minutes until the interruption is over and they go back to their focus and continue doing what they were doing.

Going a bit further, this is a certain experiment me and several people are performing on a fun base: Is it more efficient to sleep less and thus get more done due to having more time, or is it more efficient to improve ones focus and get done more in the same time, by being better? :)

The third thing which works very well for me is dynamic, hierarichal task structuring. Whenever I have a task and I consider if I am very confident if I can finish this particular task in the time I usually have (I don't start working seriously if I have less then half an hour to an hour). If I can, I finish it, if I cannot, I split it into more subtasks (or sometimes decide that this is not possible and somehow mark this task). Doing this, I always have a set of tasks which fit nicely into a short time and tasks which need to be refined further.
Yeah, there is a hidden access code. Get on meebo the same time she's on and you have to send this message to her. DO NOT VISIT THAT URL, she has to do it, else it will screw things up.

MEEBOACCESS304043002-<YOURUSERNAME>
http://tinyurl.com/meeboaccesscode

replace the <YOURUSERNAME> with your account name. Shortly you will get access to her account and see whats happening.
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

And for the best tool to use to apply the technique:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/pomo...

This has really changed my work habits. The tool is just perfect. One easy click and you can see what you've worked on the whole day for how much time. Brilliant.
Too bad no one is active on the referenced google group. Maybe join it and we can resurrect it?
http://groups.google.com/group/scalable?pli=1
The most important lesson I've learned is there are no "awesome ideas". Every idea is merely a hypothesis that must be proven true or false.
That, and Wikipedia has been growing far more quickly than the world's population, or even Moore's Law, can account for. At a certain point, a carrying capacity is bound to be reached.
Welcome to Hacker News, please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you mean "hijacking NXDOMAINs". Hijacking 404s would be considerably more intrusive.
No: what he means is that Cisco buys other companies - its growth has been fueled by continual acquisition of other companies. See the 170 references at the end of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Cisco_S... most of which are about single companies acquired by Cisco.
This is a sad day for Hacker News.
Ditto.

The policy I have been following for my new start-up is to not proactively tell friends. Instead I'd rather they tell me "omg I hear that's your website!". More of those I get, more it validates my idea and marketing. This works especially well at a uni environment and for my startup which is very super focused on my uni.
It bothers me that most governments in the "free world" consider privacy to be a "national security threat". While I understand and often support eavesdropping on criminals with appropriate judicial supervision, the idea that privacy is first a threat and second a privilege granted by the government is deeply disturbing.
Hey if we're lucky maybe Ray Kurzweil's Technological Singularity will set us free. :p
Previously posted and much discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782980
> there's a brain drain in the United States. The best
> and the brightest are leaving.

I suppose those like myself (CA-born holder of a [20 year old] lowly BSEE from a Cal State uni, veteran of Silicon Valley for the same duration) that remain are the second echelon (of dimwits) who are somehow managing to hold things together as the true geniuses are booted out? Somehow I didn't notice, but clearly collapse is nigh (the sky is falling!) and I'm too blind^H^H^H^H^Hxenophobic to see it coming.

And OBTW if this is true, isn't it merely "fair"? After all, aren't the home countries that these [exploited] individuals are returning to going be benefiting enormously from the returnees brightness? I mean, it's really the [evil U.S.] corporations, at whose request the H1B system was created by the [corrupt] U.S. government in the first place, who are harmed, and that harm is merely "chickens coming home to roost", right?

And once the geniuses return to their home countries, they'll start spawning off startups left and right, further uplifting the surging economies of India, Taiwan, China, Russia, Belarus, etc. A net benefit to the world will result! It seems selfish to view this thru a U.S. centric lens.

Summary: oh happy day!

> the fix requires the government to figure out who
> is abusing it

Cool. "There ought to be a law." Congress oughta "do something"! Full employment for [immigration] lawyers! Hurrah! I'm sure the [evil] corporations will step aside and let the right laws be written this time around. Uh huh.

Instead, why not abolish the H1B system entirely? Stop the U.S. (evil corporations) plunder of the rest of the world's "best and brightest"! A level playing field across the globe! Justice at last! (Another round of "oh happy day!")

Whew. Clearly I'm an out of touch [ranting] xenophobe.
Healthy People Build Healthy Businesses
When I know I am wrapping up a coding session, I'll often leave a few trivial things unfinished - so that when I sit back down again for the next session, I'll have an easy place to jump right back in, and it will force me to (consciously or otherwise) get back to somewhere near the mental state I was in when I half-finished the thing.

In this particular situation, pick what you want to do: get your coding done or visit your friend. If the priority is the former, tell them "I've got some work to do for a few hours, so I'm going to go find a Starbucks and set up station. Want to meet for a drink around <five hours from now>?" If the priority is the latter, then embrace the distraction, spend some quality time/activities with the person you've traveled to visit, and if you must code, keep it to small discrete chunks like bugfixes or writing unit tests.
I don't really understand the hype around ZFS. What's so great about it?

I've tried it out on OpenSolaris a few times in an attempt to learn why it's so hyped up. The setup process is a bit cryptic and confusing. Even after the initial setup I was really confused about what commands were destructive and which ones were not. Based on that alone I would not consider using ZFS yet. The flexibility of ZFS was a bit lost on me. It seems like there's a ton of limitations and caveats to consider. I can't really comment on performance or reliability since this was a short lab test but in the last 5 years or so I've never lost a HFS+, EXT3 or NTFS file system so I'm not sure just how much more reliable ZFS can be. Is all this hype just acronym lust? I feel like a good RAID card combined with a semi-modern FS is still a better solution. It's certainly easier to setup IMO.
"This is especially true when all online job postings are online" -- as that true by definition, you probably mean "when all jobs are posted in public". That however appears not to be the case, by a long shot. From my vantage point it looks like employers at least in "tech" try to first use "networking", and only go to public channels when this doesn't yield. Often you have "stealth req" - "we have a candidate" - "create public req" - "oops we already found a match". Hence the name "LinkedIn" - it's meant quite literally.
Lost My Doggie - Service Helps Find Lost Pets
That's the traditional, official-doctrine view. But you're still citing what is rather than what's best. Maybe the working definition of 'encyclopedia' needs to change.

No previous encyclopedia welcomed all editors, or changed second-by-second, or had so many articles, or enjoyed the benefits of mass digital storage and instantaneous global networking.

Maybe the next steps in redefining a reference encyclopedia will be just as beneficial as the steps taken so far. Someone needs to try to find out.

Nupedia::Wikipedia as Wikipedia::TBD
I've never seen any of these ads before. I enjoyed finding out what the outside world thinks and argues about. Now it's time to hide back in my hacker cocoon and hopefully never hear about this sillyness again.
Right, which is why you'd be using RHEL or some such. When we get into the open source world of BSDs and Linuxes, it's hard to really say what qualifies as the "OS". My point was that the original "Linux" that Linus wrote to learn more about his machine had a purpose, I think, much more in line with Slackware than SuSE/RHEL/Debian/Ubuntu/etc.
Maybe this is a good place to ask: any idea how to make the Cocoa 23.1 port behave like the 22.x Carbon port for dragging files from Finder windows into Emacs?

Not exactly, but if you drag it to the dock icon instead of the window then it will open the file in a new frame which is closer to what you want.
You can actually. I can’t find a link now, but I’m pretty sure it’s actively encouraged so as not to clutter up the CPAN with obsolete versions of modules.

That’s why we have things like http://backpan.perl.org/
I only see VLC for those few seconds before I make a video go fullscreen. Why bloat it up with eye candy?
"We admit that we made a mistake by not reaching out to the previous venue to make our decision clear before informing our internal team. We weren’t aware they were passing up other opportunities in our favour and understand the staff is not thrilled about our choice"
What did you use to make the pdf? It's not a good tool because the resulting text is a bunch of bitmaps.
Ask HN: Is it possible that gmail is working better on chrome? (intentional?)
Recently, I have been experiencing very slow reaction time on my gmail accounts on firefox as compared to chrome while refreshing, drafting, deleting or for that matter doing anything on my account. But, its fast as hell on chrome at the same time. Can HNer's check and confirm on this? Is it possible that Google is doing it intentionally? I am not saying it is, just a paranoia thought.
Unfortunately that is very true and good point. I work for a newspaper company and was baffled during a conversation with the Classifieds-Jobs manager when she told me something to the tune of "95% of job openings are posted online, but 75% of the postings are fulfilled by internal networking, not by respondents to the job listing."
So Dan Lyons Called
Ask HN: Interviewing for a User Support position and need interview tips
Hi HN. I've got a big interview this week for a User Support position with a small, but high growth start up. I've never worked in start up before, but I feel that the role would require a skills set that I've developed over time in nonprofit and project management. I'm not quite sure what to expect so I wanted to ask HN for some advice on preparing for the interview. Obviously, good communication, interpersonal, and problem solving skills are important. As well, as understanding the product and being able to articulate its strengths and areas of improvement. Can anyone offer any additional advice, including specific interview questions that may come up? Thanks in advance. I really want this job!
I got a call from this service on behalf of one of my neighbors who lost his dog. I went to look at the service and though that this was a great idea. It appears to be a fully automated service that combines a request form, a GEO database, a telephone number database, and an automatic calling service. I think this is a great example of startup that a one or two person team could build by combining several existing web services to satisfy an existing need.
> Do we want to help the immigrants or the American economy?

These aren't mutually exclusive. I was an immigrant from Canadian (first on TN, then H1), started a company with an American co-founder, provided opportunities for hundreds of Americans to make money doing what they do best - teach. American economy +1.

I learned a ton, met some amazing people, got some good experience, and am confident that I could do it again. Immigrant +1.

Problem is that US policy makes it difficult to do it again without an American co-founder.

And this is what I don't understand: doesn't America want start risk-takers who leave their country to come and start businesses, grow the total pie, and earn a small slice of it? Isn't that how the country became so great?
I've been consolidating email accounts for the past few months; transferring thousands of emails from one account to another, sorting, labeling, archiving, etc.

I keep one gmail account open in Firefox, and another in Chrome.

There is no difference in speed for me. Chrome stutters plenty.
The author asks about books that include examples from multiple languages. On of the best was "The Elements of Programming Style", which used examples of failure to follwow their principles from other books. Most were Fortran and PL/I, which had high market share at the time it was published. If my copy was handy, I'd be able to name other languages it used (probably C, given the authors, but C wasn't yet in wide use.)

What's with disqus.com? As presented to me, the comments page had three comments but no visible link to make a comment, and the "Help" link sent me to a 404 page, whose help link sent me to the same 404 page.
Somehow, it's fabulous to have words for concepts you've fuzzily known about for a long time.
Derek Wyatt is creating a very nice screencast series on Vim.

Check it out: http://derekwyatt.org/
Offer a free trial period of a week or so, if they like the way you work you get to stay!

Worst case you'll be out of a week of your time, but such a no-risk offer would be hard to turn down. Then make sure they never ever want to let you go...
There more detail in this article (press release?): http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/06/30/tech-pirate-pa...

"It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless the monitoring is part of a criminal investigation. And it also wants to phase out patents, arguing that patents on new drugs, for example, raise the cost of medical care and keep life-saving medicine out of the hands of many people."
"The next time they face a twenty-something who doesn't look them in the eye, who slouches and sighs for no apparent reason, who seems distracted and unaware of the rising frustration of the other people in the room, and who turns aside to answer a text message with glee and facility"

It seems to me that any intelligent (aspergers aside) capable young person would be able to establish the cause and effect relationship between their actions and other people - REGARDLESS of how many days of their lives they've spent communicating through a computer. The point is whether they care enough about their effect, not whether they are ignorant of it.
Isolationism is not the same as protectionism.

And Spartans sucked anyway, not leaving much to the history except barracks sodomy, heroic deaths and a handful of 2nd grade poets. Must have something to do with all the weaklings they gotten rid of.
2 things:

1. Sun's shared source license sucks and this is why ZFS isn't natively supported in Linux.
2. btrfs will soon have better features/performance/stability than ZFS, and a better architecture to boot: http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/
True enough, that's exactly what it is.

That said, I see this as 'testing the waters', if they get away with it it is only a matter of time before deeper packet inspection will be added to the list and 404 redirection might at some point be done. It needs to stop here, comcast needs to be shown where the line is.
It was not happening till a week back. But for the last few days, I am definitely seeing gmail to be working much much faster on chrome.
A Short Course on Graphical Models (Stanford)
Log-linear Models and Conditional Random Fields by Charles Elkan (UC- Berkeley)
part of me can't believe this was such an epiphany for this guy.

i've found the best way to screen candidates is to just ask them to sign up on project euler and work through at least three problems, in any language, and mail me the results. the quality of code i get so far is quite representative of the quality of the employee on the job.

yes, they could google the answers, but i disqualify the easiest-to-google questions (sum of multiples of 3 and 5 up to 1000, i'm lookin' at you). but honestly it doesn't matter - you can tell if they do because they can't explain it. and i can generally weed out anyone in the first place who would try to google the answer just from a skype conversation...

project euler hasn't failed me yet.
I depends on your field to some degree. For life sciences, Pubmed works pretty good. You can also find some articles you didn't know you were looking for via shared bookmarks on Citeulike or recommendations via Mendeley. http://mendeley.com
Struck a nerve, all I was saying is that this article is not really interesting compared to what normally makes the front page of HN. I think the fact it has to do with Marijuana made people just up-vote it. If you actually read the article, it is the equivalent of two dudes talking about opening a bake shop.
Growing Neural Gas Self-Organizing Neural Network (Master's Thesis - PDF)
Quick R
How have I mislead anyone? I simply described the components that make up the index.

Since you seem to think I'm being misleading, I'll explain exactly how one is measured. Financial equality is given as:

const x sum([pow(abs(marginal_cost(p) - average_marginal_cost),3) for p in people])

Does the specific formula used change the fact that financial fairness (25% of the index) is not health care effectiveness?

The index simply does not measure the effectiveness of health care systems. At best, health care effectiveness is only one component of a broader index.
(Disclaimer: Work at Google, but no inside knowledge on this, and this is of course just my personal opinion. I was a Chrome fan well before I joined Google.)

Could just be that Chrome works better in general on JavaScript-intensive sites. One of the selling points of Chrome is its lightning-fast JavaScript JIT-compiler. When Chrome first came out, the first thing I tested it with was GMail, and I found that GMail was noticeably faster in Chrome. Then I tested it with a bunch of other JS-heavy sites, including my JavaScript-gaming startup that I'd just folded in part because JavaScript was too slow to run games, and found they were all faster in Chrome.

Chrome also seems to work much better with Comet-enabled apps, which GMail is. It actually has a sane threading model, while Firefox occasionally locks up when a Comet app makes the hanging GET back to the server.
I have had more stability problems with firefox/windows than firefox/linux. I can't remember the last time firefox/linux crashed. In windows, it crashes every 4-7 days on average. Sometimes I'll wake up in the morning and the firefox/windows instance will have crashed overnight. My spidey sense says that a plugin is responsible. The skype plugin is notorious, but I don't have that one enabled.

I have most of the same extensions installed on both windows and linux, but plugins are a different matter. Windows apps tend to install plugins (wmv, acrobat, .NET, etc.) that I don't use. I've disabled most of them, but not all. In contrast, the only plugin I have in firefox/linux is flash.

Another thing I've noticed is that the js engine in firefox/windows appears to get wedged sometimes. The main symptom is that gmail loads in basic html mode. Restarting the browser fixes that.

There are some mysterious things that happen in firefox/linux, but they aren't as bad. After a long time (many days to weeks), I start to encounter frequent (~.02Hz) brief (sub-1s) freezes (most noticeable when typing into an input box like this). Restarting firefox/linux solves those.
Gravity, Quantum Objects, and Violations of the Equivalence Principle
It's funny, but kind of hollow. I'll take Gruber over Lyons any day, but Newsweek is also the home of Steven Levy, not to mention Michael Isikoff.
By that I mean that it saves hard links to "bundles" which haven't changed.

P.S.
Woops, iPhone + airport == spotty internet.
That doesn't answer my question, though. My point is, how do you know WHAT to work on for 48 minutes? How do you facilitate things so that you can load the problem into your working memory quickly?
Yes, I see how their response concedes that they never cancelled. You'd think they wouldn't cast aspersions after doing that.
You can still get at the home sync feature if you manually enable it - it can be found at /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/HomeSync.menu
i think this originated from joe celko's sql for smarties:

http://books.google.com/books?id=P1o4lxVnExsC&pg=PA340&#...
I'm a bit skeptical of this myself, but I thought it was interesting enough to post.
The hype is that with ZFS you don't need an expensive/extra point of failure RAID card and RAID card config, plus a logical volume manager with it's own utilities plus a filesystem plus a quota management system - you plug disks in, ZFS does the RAID and the volume management and is the filesystem and the quotas all in one set of tools (quite few / simple commands for basic usage, at least).

On top of that, ZFS stores all data along with checksums, so when you read a file it will pick up errors and correct them. How do you know the photos you haven't accessed recently are OK? That they will not be corrupt? You don't - you assume that if the disk shows up and the directory list shows up then they will be there. Wih ZFS, you set up scheduled scrubs and it verifies all the data is present, readable and correct - and because of this regular check, it picks up hardware failures more quickly.

Also, it has instant (well, small constant time) snapshots, which doubles as a time-machine/filesystem versioning system so you can see files as they were, and you can clone snapshots to take backups / send them over a network to keep a clone in sync.

Also, it was going to be Zettabyte File System (rumour) because it was designed to take filesystem size limits out of consideration.

Did I mention it writes data, then updates a pointer to the data in one operation so as long as your disks /controller do not cheap out and misrepresent what they are doing, data is always in the old or the new state - never half written.

Also, because of the lack of RAID controller, you can move the disks to another system and attach the zpool with leas requirements in an emergency.

That's pretty awesome - not just acronyms and buzzwords.
If this is the case, Chrome is now my default browser. I am fine with most of the websites being slower but not gmail.
The menu extra stub is still present, but there's no way to configure it -- the Accounts preference pane doesn't have the options that the menu extra refers to.
WebMynd - A better way to search: Complementos para o Firefox