skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apps might be helpful but nothing is better then self determination and self-discipline especial when outcome of work directly impact your profit and well being. Multitasking is a bitch of today's productivity. It makes you think that it helps you get things faster but research indicates then on the contrary it does not. The laps of time you brain takes to switch between the task is the waist. It is also very addictive. I used to multitask a lot and now try to discipline myself not to do it unless one task is taking time without my direct control(like coping large files or running long process). Sometimes I find myself ridiculously starting to read and article or code few lines of code while my brain start doing something also and looking for other task to start. I started finding it destructive and in need to eliminate.
Just one for now:

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
I only read technical and business material, I love this type of stuff.

1.	The Windows 3.1 manual. A hardcopy in a small grey ring binder that shipped with the operating system when I bought it new. I read it cover to cover to cover 3 times because I wanted to know everything about it. I kept thinking this is a lot like UNIX but nicer to use except for the fact that it had less features than UNIX. Every time I re-read the manual I would think of new things I wished it would do! Which lead me to examine--every--file in the operating system looking for a way to make it better, until Windows 95 came out, lol.

2.	EMC Retrospect for Windows Users Guide. I read it cover to cover twice (it’s a 300 page pdf). It is my absolute favorite. If you ever want to learn about backup, this is a great read. Pure tech stuff, no fluff. Here is link if anyone is interested, it’s free: http://www.retrospect.com/assets/en_rug_win75.pdf
Brief History of Time

Fooled by Randomness
Thanks for the feedback. Really good to know you are having this same problem.

I've had this problem to. Some information you just don't care about. However, you do care about some of it or you wouldn't have "friended" them. My system will allow you to see as much as you like, with a type of valve on the relationship.

I don't want to encourage adding points to people. I could see it becoming more of a who's better than the other person. Which is a system I don't want to be apart of. I would rather build tools that will help us strengthen our friendships and help us to appreciate our differences.

I think facebook apps are dead. However I think facebook connect and twitter's api are very useful and more applicable.

Thanks again.
I agree wholeheartedly. My best hack? I can figure out how almost anything works, usually very quickly, by probing for rules. It works for almost anything: mechanical, employment, electronics, etc.

Good for social engineering, too. :)
But it is not more dangerous than fatalism, the flip side of that coin.

Best to stay somewhere in the middle, be aware of reality, try your best to improve the situation and don't berate yourself too much if it doesn't work, pick up the pieces, learn and try again.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend Christensen, Horn and Johnson. They talk a lot about the need for innovative practices in education, but their recommendations aren't particularly innovative. The details of how the innovative practices must differ from previous efforts to reform education is basically not there.

I"m not sure there is a great book that lays out some solutions, if there were we wouldn't still be talking about these issues. I'd suggest reading some books that talk more about the problem, just to get a good grasp on the issue. For that, I'd recommend Susan Eaton The Children in room E4 and Linda Perlstein's Tested: One American school struggles to make the grade.
1984

(I don't read much)
Huh? When I'm uberproductive I have, at least, these things running:

* iTerm (3+ windows)

* TextMate (Multiple windows)

* Eclipse or XCode

* Safari (Multiple windows)

* Firefox (Multiple windows)

* AquaMate Studio (Multiple windows)

* Charles

* iTunes

* Photoshop

* Finder (Multiple windows)

If you hesitate when navigating the flow, it's easy to get lost. It gets even worse when you are using a lot of java apps because they always seem to refocus when you tab back to them, which can throw your flow for a loop.

By turning on OS X's Single App Mode, that hasn't happened to me yet. I definitely noticed an increase in focus.

I am happy for you that you are able to be so focused, but one size does not fit all.
Dune, The Rama Series.
This page: http://safalra.com/science/lambda-calculus/recursion/ contains exactly the phrase "Y combinator", which I found exciting. Still trying to understand many other bits of the article.
I don't know that the lambda calculus is necessary for functional programming. It can't hurt, but I don't think it's vital. I basically just think of the l.c. as another equivalent model for general purpose computing, just like Turing machines.
The post doesn't mention which is which. Holy shit. What if I got it wrong? (Please don't be alarmed. I'm just being overly dramatic.)
Ayn Rand is simplistic and extrapolating to an extreme. That alone makes it very hard to extract anything that you could use in real life from her writings, and on top of that you'd have to see all that through the lens of an emigrant from a communist country where the new rulers had seriously disrupted the comfortable life of her family.

That makes it even more difficult to remove the bias from the message.
The correlation could be the other way since most guys are used to seeing women with make-up.
Just FYI, nominal price figures over time are pretty meaningless due to inflation.

What cost $2670 in 1961 would cost $19,226.05 in 2008 (BLS calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl), which means that expenditure per pupil, in real terms has decreased quite a bit. Based on that same calculator, the amount of money we are spending now is $1,304 in 1961 dollars, far below the 2.6k you mention.
Am I the only one who finds the use of the phrase "real world" for the world of microcontroller programming jarring? It is used throughout the article.

e.g:- "rationals are never used in the real world, and floating-point is quite rare"

To the author's credit he does define the use of this term "On the other hand, all of these languages are too big to be used in the real world (micro-controllers), which is the realm where Forth and C remain popular."

but I still found it a bit jarring.

"It is reasonable to predict that Factor will largely phase out Forth in the world of desktop programming, but that Forth and C will continue to be predominant in the real
world."

I understand that English is probably not the author's first language, (it isn't mine either), but if he is reading this, replacing "real world" with "microcontroller world" might be an easy change to make.
The IamA subreddit is developing an interesting culture. There are some issues of people faking, but in general it shows an interesting cross-section of life in a very addicting and supportive way.
During chaos communication camp (lots of hacker do camping) 2003 in Germany was one of the hottest days recorded since $longtime. Normal fridges where not allowed on the campside, because of the heavy power consumption. So I built a fridge out of a box, a towel, plastic bottle and a fan. Worked like a charm. Most other hacker who saw this were like: 'Damm, I told my friends this would work...' Execution is all! :)

On the same camp, I talked Emanuel Goldstein into signing and selling me the last VHS of Freedom Downtime that he had broad over from the US and was intended to be a present for the camp organizers. ...Or did he talk me into buying it...?
It does actually.

"One face was created by increasing the contrast of the androgynous face, while the other face was created by decreasing the contrast. The face with more contrast is perceived as female, while the face with less contrast is perceived as male."
Recursion in pure functional programming has me stumped. I can't see how in practice it would ever 'end' the recursion, in other words, if I try to envision the recursion I see an endless loop in there.

In practice something needs to decide to end the recursion.

Can somebody shed some light on this ?
among my favorites. Every time you pick a page to read, it's just like watching a sunset; it's never the same.

Hackers and painters

Gitanjali
"Right-Wingers .." yeah, very HN-worthy.
Wow, cool. How did you go about assembling it?

brought
Does your windmill provide 100% of the power needed for your house? If so, how big is it and how much did it cost to build?
Behind the Scenes: Creating a visual identity for the game Braid
Siddhartha -- Hermann Hesse

Dragons Of Eden -- Carl Sagan
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
I'm fond of Freedom - http://macfreedom.com/

It kills your networking a configurable period, with the only way to circumvent it being a reboot. Or so it claims. The claim alone is enough to keep me from trying simple things like an ifup. And that's what I needed.
But women now have to keep wearing make-up in order to "keep up with" gender perception. (Or so one could argue.)
i watched your video. It's a cool idea, and I've thought about just using CRM software to manage all my contacts (including friends.) That's basically what it seemed you were describing: an organized priority system for how people should get your time and attention. And that's what good CRM or contact management systems already do.

One thing those other solution do not do is let people see your evaluation, or create network effects based on everyone's evaluations. Maybe you are thinking in that direction, but the video didn't say much beyond just setting priorities using a point system.

Good luck with it!
Scratch.rb, A Ruby Microframework
I remember reading that both sexes prefer less hair, but that testosterone keeps men hairy. Probably googling for a recent "naked ape" article would get it for you.
It seems to me that if you post something of average quality about a hot topic, that, too, gets upvoted, but it might just be differing opinions about what constitutes quality.
Have you considered the possibility that perhaps when the author says "the real world", he might mean "the real world"? I would not be surprised to learn that his point of view is that embedded systems make the world go round, and web programming is a kiddy pool for quiche-eaters. Most programmers are elitists about something or other; that "something" might as well be microcontrollers.
I'm not sure this solves any particular problem that I have, but there are enough interesting ideas here (like the lightweight form generation) that I think are worth looking at. Definitely not just a clone of Sinatra or web.py.
Mayan Multiplication
I think there's some ambiguity about whether you mean submitting your own blog entry, or making a submission that consists of text rather than a link.

Literally, a "self-post" is the latter, and I see in one of your replies that that's what you meant. However, commentors have interpreted it both ways (and I thought you meant the former).

Perhaps you could clarify in the poll - though there are already 252+7 votes with the original text, so maybe a new poll is appropriate?

As for the poll: I think submitting a blog (the former) is definitely OK; but I don't have a clear conception on a "self-post" (the latter). It could lead to HN being a kind of mini-blogging service (blog > HN > tweet). Maybe that would be cool, but it's very different from what it is now; and it's too unknown for me to form a clear opinion, without some experience of it. Therefore, because I think you mean the latter, I can't vote!

However, someone commented that pg deliberately made the text of a self-post in a lighter grey, to discourage it... so he seems against it.
When WilliamHill.co.uk (a gambling site) launched in the UK they offered a promotion: a 50% rebate on your first stake (max 50 GBP)

The hack was simple, and spread like wildfire on campus:

Place a GBP 100 bet on a basket ball game, at odds of 1:1.9. Get GBP 50 rebate.

Get a buddy to take the opposite bet, at GBP 100 (they get GBP 50 rebate)

One person wins 0, the other GBP 190. Split the 190, both parties are up GBP 45.

Repeat as many times as you have credit cards numbers (new registrations each time)

Lots of people pocketed hundreds of pounds in ~1 hours work, risk free, and we were students, so it was good money. I think it was 1999, maybe 2000.
The point about bureaucracy is far from vacuous. You rhetorically ask whether we can imagine a school or school district without any bureaucracy. Well obviously not. But I can imagine a bureaucracy that is so minuscule that it is practically invisible. Not only can I imagine it, but I can point out that Catholic schools manage to devote less than 1% of resources to administration, yet have better outcomes than public schools with comparable populations.

By contrast the figure I saw quoted a couple of decades ago ago is that New York City had more school administrators than France, and New York State had more than the whole European Union. (Looking around, http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 was from 1991 and cited the source as William Brock.) If you consider that France has 3x the population of New York State, clearly some bureaucracies are worse than others.
If you think you understand 2, it is not the true 2
Linux guy tries out a Mac for a weekend for the first time
Yeah, I know that a Real Productive Person(tm) should answer: "Just stop trying to find a widget that will make your more productive and get on with the work, dammit!"

But I think that different people can get to the same place using different roads. To some the "helpers" might be superfluous and pure willpower is all that is required. To others they might help give a necessary extra push.

I'm definitely looking forward to trying some of the "isolator" types of software, because I find that I'm usually distracted by others thing that I see around on my desktop (they're just so tempting to quickly switch to, just to check if XYZ..). Maybe if I see fewer of those others thing I'll be less tempted to switch to them.

Worth a shot. Won't replace discipline, but hey, everybody seems to think that an uncluttered desk, an uncluttered office (an uncluttered life!) are the way to go. Same should work for my virtual desktop.
I'm no longer living in Canada, where I had this set up. Under normal conditions the windmill would be close to 60% of the power required for the house, the rest was solar.

We did just about everything we could to conserve power though, one of the lessons you learn fastest when working with renewables is that it is a lot easier to save a Watt than to generate one.

The machine was a 16'er, or about 5 Meters, so a swept surface of 18 square meters or thereabouts, it cost a small fortune to build because I was planning to make it in larger numbers. Designed power was about 2.5 KW, it came out a bit less than that, mostly due to a slightly larger air-gap than what I had planned on (the plasma cutter nozzle used to cut the stator laminates was wearing down, and cutting with a slightly larger diameter jet than planned).

The design is far from perfect but for a first try at a variable pitch machine it worked pretty good. It survived several major storms without failure, we only took it down because we emigrated back to Europe. It's laying in pieces on the garage floor waiting for better times.

edit: the only way to get 100% of the power for your house from the wind would be if you would consent to being without power every now and then. After all , the wind only blows so much, and when it doesn't you'll need to have either enough power stored up in batteries or you'd have to have an alternative source.

What people do to get to the economical equivalent without using batteries is if their grid operator allows it do something called 'net-metering', this allows you to pump your excess power into the grid and back out again when you need it for the same price.

The whole uncoupling of network and electricity production is seen by plenty of people in the renewable energy scene as a way of discouraging net-metering, after all, if the 'base' rate per KWh is already quite a bit just for transport then they can afford to give you a crappy price for your excess power, and charge you twice for the storage and retrieval of the power.
What's AquaMate Studio?
Muqadimat Ibn Khaldun. You make this book seem very interesting. Based on your description and explanation of it, I think many people from outside the Islamic culture might find this book fascinating (buy a copy) if it came with a running dialog inserted into the text as needed that explained the history and cultural beliefs of that time. Might be a best seller in the west.
"Well first of all tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fella that’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The greatest achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty that you are talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kindof societies that depart from that. " -- Milton Freidman
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig

Asterix in Britain - Goscinny, Uderzo
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid; Douglas Hofstadter.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies; Jared Diamond.
UTF-8 encodes any Unicode character using between 1 and 4 bytes. Also, some byte sequences aren't valid UTF-8. I don't think it's a Perl bug.
+1 for Neuromancer.

I recommend a non-fiction book for a different read: The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank.
I wrote a short reply in http://shuri.org/?node=news&id=73675
Basically, it's not just entrepreneur vs non-entrepreneur, there's a whole hierarchy...
When I was in grad school I noticed that Gödel, Escher, Bach was the book about mathematics that non-mathematicians had on their coffee table. The one that the mathematicians had was The Mathematical Experience.

If I had to name only one other book, for this audience I'd have to go with Code Complete.
The Y combinator only works in languages with either a lazy or call-by-name evaluation strategy. If you run it in a language with an eager evaluation strategy then it actually would result in an infinite loop. For those languages you would have to use the Z combinator or an equivalent. The z-combinator is just the Y combinator with the argument wrapped in a thunk to prevent premature evaluation.
"Sometimes you can't afford the cheapest thing."

I've found plenty of times that the time and effort involved in saving that extra buck isn't worth a dollar.
How Children Fail by John Holt

http://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Developme...

The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...
Atlas Shrugged

and

Masters of Doom: The story of Carmack, Romero, and id Software
Everytime I read a very good fiction book (or series) like Asimov's Foundation, Simmons' Hyperion Cantos or (currently reading) Stephenson's Cryptonomicon I think 'hey, this one is going to be my favorite'.
I caught on to the subtly of the lighter text as well.

I could kind of tell because when a Ask HN comes up with 3 paragraphs of text and its in that light color, the conversion rate form me actually reading it drops significantly.
This is really helpful to me. I've been considering a mac laptop for a while.
I like Spirited Away.http://drikin.com/spiritedaway/ I found it a long time ago, it auto hides windows that have not been active in a long time, keeps things simple.
Not joining a fully sponsored two month summer studentship MRC Lab, Cambridge,, UK because I wanted to startup something during summers back home India. It is the only lab with most number of Nobel Laureates in the world (12 and the 13th one this year from the same lab won the prize for his Ribosomes research)

Looking back it seems I should have joined it because it would have been a tremendous experience (and more so because the start I was doing in the summers didn't work). But, hey, at that time starting up was so rosy that everything else looked secondary. Though it was my first real brush with entrepreneurship, I still feel I should have gone to that lab for 2 months.
Burning Chrome, William Gibson

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
I agree, I'm a huge Sinatra fan and was coming in here to rail against somebody reinventing the wheel, but I see some value in the magic form generation and the baked in, but lightweight marshalling. Seems like it would be handy for a "hey, fill in this form for me" type page....
And 10 years after that, same here...
True but then it's nothing more than individual choice.
Apologies for ignorant questions, but I don't understand how lazy or call-by-name evaluation would solve that.

After all lazy is just another way of saying 'deferred', and call-by-name is a way to identify what it is that you are calling, in either case you'd sooner or later have to do the evaluation and then you're back to that loop again.

So, what am I missing ?
Seriously, Freedom is a lifesaver for me. If I find myself getting stuck on getting to work setting up a 1-2 hour session is usually enough to get me into the zone.

Usual objections are, "But I need to look stuff up online." Usually you don't. Get local copies of your API docs, and get used to searching through existing code for solutions. I'd say that usually I can find an example of whatever I'm trying to solve with grep + spotlight almost as fast as I could find it online and there's not the extra cost of potentially ending up in a surfing session.
Christmas holidays
Cheap christmas breaks to many destinations. Take a vacation this christmas to a sunny beach or snowy mountain. Christmas holiday ideas and vacation tips.
"Most programmers are elitists about something or other; that "something" might as well be microcontrollers."

It is certainly possible.

I guess it is just that I think the hypothesis that "English is not his first language" is more probable than "He is an elitist who thinks only microcontroller program is real programming" as an explanation for this usage. I could be wrong.

EDIT: invalidated by thristian's post above
Notehall on Shark Tank
Tough to pick just two. For now I would say:

War And Peace (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation)

Dune
Startup Scam: Paying to Pitch Puts Power Players on the Warpath
Sometimes the conversation does need some rules – and respect
Notehall is one of the few web startups I have seen on the show. What are thoughts on the valuations the Sharks throw out? Thoughts on the deal they got?
For power users, it really is nice to have somebody just point to the few non-default options and say "here, just check that box". For instance, the two-finger-right-click is elegant and simple, but not on by default. (keyboard -> shortcuts -> check the box at the bottom "all controls") Same for making it more linux-like (macports for wget, and prce is the most reliable imo).
The Analects of Confucius
Without this set of libraries I think people would have given up coding with c++ years ago. Simplfies everything from statecharts to pointer handling to graph traversal.
Absolute must for any serious c++ coder.