skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN a Green Certified Site?
I have noticed a few times that when I open many comments at HN in new tabs, they blink. This tells me they are auto refreshing or making some sort of http call to another site.

I don't like when sites do this. It makes me paranoid and wonder why does this fairly static page need to make multiple requests over time to the web?

So I investigated and went first to the source and found a script tag to co2stats.com. I looked at the source for the script and found this:

setInterval("co2stats_upd()",300000);

co2stats_upd reloads an image with some parameters to do tracking, or whatever else.

Is this really greener? Can the institution of another system with webservers and a data center really make HN greener? Wouldn't it be greener to not automatically refresh data coming from another server?

All I can wonder is, "Is this for real?"
It costs (roughly) GBP 3000 to attend as a UK citizen and GBP 9000-11000 as a foreigner depending on subject - and I believe the individual universities have no say in it, it's set by the government. So compared to the US, you could get a bargain.
I'm not a coder, but I generally agree with all your rules. I have pretty good self control, so I usually just nail my wireless on my laptop and plug away with my work, so I generally avoid the need for 1 & 2, however that is how I used to work before I left my desktop in another country.

#3 is an unbelievably important point and I fail to do it myself and I get bitten in the ass. When I finish writing I always try to add a quick 'to do' of my thought process for the next day, I find it helps me get back into the groove a lot faster. The past couple of days I forgot to do it and it seriously feels like going against a brick wall and basically feels like how writing used to be for me at the beginning.

#6 I practice myself, but I'm never sure of. I have music going and then like 40+ minutes later I become lucid and I'm like 'SOAB I missed the song I like', so I'm unsure if the music helps me or if it's just background noise. Although music can certainly help set the mood for working, so I suppose it helps in some way.
European universities could fare much better if only they would group. What that means is that in Lyon for example, the University of Lyon is legally divided in 16 institutions, Lyon 1 to Lyon 3, plus various other specialized colleges, e.g. my school, Insa de Lyon, for administrative reasons. Each is ranked separately in most lists. They do badly in Shangai Uni's ratings because each separately has 16 times less published papers, and the absolute number of publications is a big factor in most ratings.

Starting a few years ago, they started asking researchers and students to attribute their papers to "The University of Lyon", an entity that administratively does not exist, but logically it should. Most other universities I know in France are in the same situation, and have started applying similar measures.

Paris engineering colleges have grouped under a new entity, ParisTech, for example. Hopefully, this will focus attention and fix ratings. It should, because some member colleges have been around for some 1000 years, so they must be doing something right. Consider it a brand hack :)
MIT and Caltech got shafted in these rankings.

Also from the comments:

As for the comparative ranking of U.S. universities . . . this list does not correspond very well to some rankings done by people competent to rate our institutions.

For example, only the delusional would rank U.C.L.A. as above U.C. Berkeley, the flagship and leading campus of the U.C. system. U.C. San Diego should also rank very high, it competes very well with UCLA.
You'll get significantly better returns on both your time and your money if you approach a developer with a conversation instead of directions.

In other words, ask questions while you're trying to figure out the best way to do things. The nice thing about most developers is that they have experience in a lot of different problem domains, and they may have solutions available that you hadn't previously considered.
"Top 100 universities at doing what?"

The list is endless, visit their websites, look up all the teachers and programs they have going. Now research those and you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Top university implies that these schools have a large hub of academic progress, it might not be in a tangible form but the stuff they do at those universities does make a difference.

These schools get a lot of bad press because the big players of the world seem to come from them, but it does not diminish the contribution these higher education universities have added to the global community.
What do you mean by 'bikeshedding'?
Indexing AJAX websites is important, but I don't think much of this proposal.

As far as I can tell, their plan is to create a standard way that AJAX hash links can be translated into real links, which Google will then crawl, expecting that you are running a machine-readable web browser on your server(!) that will render the full page.

Expecting everyone to make a big modification like installing a Java-based browser to their infrastructure is crazy.

A much more sensible solution is the one webmasters should be doing anyway: progressive enhancement. Any AJAX link, when clicked with Javascript disabled, should render the page as it was intended, just more slowly and without animations etc.. Then your site is completely indexable, and as a bonus it's more robust and accessible too.

With a modern MVC framework this is really not that hard to achieve: your AJAX controller should just be spitting out a chunk of HTML, and whether it gets integrated into your template at the server-side or on the client by Javascript should be irrelevant.
The problem is not in the conflict of interest - other types of insurance work mostly OK. The problem is that the health insurance companies can somehow get away from their obligations without being sued to death. Maybe that's because of vague contracts, or maybe something else. I don't know the exact reason.
Perhaps the moral here is that ranking colleges is a stupid way to do things, that comparing a large enormous entity to another large enormous entity is silly, and that when you're really good at what you do, the difference between #1 and #40 isn't much at all.

Also: Did you REALLY repost your comment because the first time you submitted this it got swiftly downvoted? I replied to this same comment only to find it had been deleted and replaced with a dupe. Not cool.
It's much the same from the perspective of the person being denied treatment, having paid NI their whole life.
The next [Stephen] Hawking
Yeah that includes the hard drive. Once you have a 24/7 dlna/upnp server u can play not only from TV and other computers as well. It is not a game changing device but there is a value in it. i rest my case.
What is the format of a double-null-terminated string with no strings?
Why is Google telling people to run a headless browser just for their crawler? Sounds way too complicated for any small-scale website. Why doesn't Google run the headless browser themselves? It sounds like they are offloading parsing costs onto websites, but then they have a cheating problem they have to deal with.

Somewhat related: It's not AJAX, but I remember hearing Microsoft Research a couple of years ago talk about parsing CSS. They wanted the page as an image so that they could analyze pictorially what was a menu, what was a header, what was main content, etc. It seemed fairly neat for the time, although I think there are much simpler heuristics for when you are after just the main article type content of a page that will work for most blogs/CMS's out there.

(No, they didn't use IE. I asked. Yes, they tried. They said it was slow and crashed too much.)
Could you elaborate a bit? What sort of "non-universitiness" is it that makes their absolute best in the world research and teaching rank 5-9 spots lower than their success would dictate?
There's a difference between saying "Hey, these places are really good!" and saying "Hey, this place ranks a little bit above this place!"

I'm a firm believer in the malevolence of unnecessary statistics. The only point I've ever seen in college rankings is for people to gloat over people in other colleges. I can't imagine the benefit of knowing just how these colleges rank according to an arbitrary study.
Questions for OneForty.com
Well, I've heard of it, but then I went to Warwick, which is way down at #58 ;-)
The first comment made me guffaw.

edit:

1. Bjørn Østman Says:
October 7th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

I’ll do it. Is it well paid?
Your prompts are very broad and a discussion based on them is open to generalizations that may not apply to the people you eventually end up working with.

You are far better off discussing these questions with the people you intend to have around you when you start your new venture.
Maybe the bitterness and anger is a good thing. You should be angry, I sure as hell would be. We all should be, your story is horrifying. But I think you're in an amazing position, and may not realize it. Your wife is a director at a research hospital, and, while I don't know who you are personally, I'll assume you're well connected in the tech world (otherwise why would you post this here). You obviously know very intimately what is wrong with the healthcare system.

That's a very unique position of power, whether you think so or not. You have the ability to affect great change, especially with what's happening with health care in the U.S. right now. You -apparently- have some money (at least more than I do), connections, an amazing story and anger, a great motivator.

I think everyone can understand if you can't, or you won't, but if it's in you, step up, pull strings, work behind the scenes, work in the spotlight, tell your story, influence who you can and get this fixed. This is still the greatest country in the world, and the ability for citizens to step up and fix what's broken is what makes it great.

That's just my two cents, for what it's worth. And my apologies for the semi-patriotic rant at the end there. ;) I wish you the best as you continue this battle.
What about self-employment tax?
Dan your points are all valid and your intent clean.

As a programmer turned business person, who (IMHO) has a decent enough grasp of both, I'll say this: you're missing the elephant in the room here.

Your approach to the problem seems to be: I have an idea and a plan, I just need someone to build it. What you should be doing though is seeking out your opposite: Programmers who have built the software, but need someone to sell it!

Programmers by their nature will solve problems that they know about on their own. They don't need any real motivation other than the problem existing for them. Where they tend to fail is extending that into a business: Do enough people share this problem, and will they somehow part with money to solve it?

The proof is all around us - there are so many free or ad-supported tools that are that way simply because the programmers behind the software have no idea how to get people to pay them for their work. (Discounting the blindingly obvious non-starters, of course)

If I were in your shoes, I'd seek out programmers working on solutions in domains that you are familiar with (key, as programmers equate domain knowledge to ability) and approach them about the art of selling their valuable creations to people that need problems solved.
NASA Ames to Showcase Spectacular LCROSS Lunar Impacts
Lowering the price might also make those "lower budget" movies more appealing to those that choose what movies they see based on price. For instance, we only go to movies if it's "25 bucks good" because that's how much two tickets cost. We end up not seeing anything that has <80% fresh on rotten tomatoes simply because of cost. We'd be willing to see more marginal movies if we didn't have to risk blowing 25$ on a crappy film.
While I truly applaud you for trying to build at least something yourself, I have to ask why you think you need to do that? I, as a programmer, wouldn't expect you to build a prototype. What I _would_ expect is a very detailed list of use cases that shows you've thought this through.

Sure, that's not something you can simply show in a five minute conversation, but mockups are great for this purpose.
I deleted it because the first time I accidentally posted it incomplete. I deleted it and posted the full comment above. It amazes me that anybody responded to it that quickly. I'd have left it if I'd seen the comment. I did reply to your comment after seeing it, if that makes you feel better.

I really don't care about karma. Apparently, you do and you dinged me twice. Congrats, but it's not really the kind of discussion I was looking for.
""Lisp in small pieces" is frequently recommended."

Lisp In Small Pieces covers everything except the garbage collector.

Truth to tell I haven't yet seen a "how to implement a lisp" tutorial that implements all the bits - macros , gc etc. You might have to dig into source code. SIOD is just a little crufty but it has all the pieces in very little code.
You are a wealth of information on productivity. Everytime I see your posts there is always something of great value in them. You really should start a blog (unless you have one?) and cover these subjects there as well as I really enjoy hearing about your routines and experience.

Now I'm off to setup a timer on my G1 so I can test out the 48/12 method.
If the financial aspects become too much, I would highly recommend doing some "medial tourism" to panama, costa rica, thailand or somewhere similar to get the treatment you need at a significantly lower price.
Peter I've always been curious about how these sort of agreements worked. After publishing a few books, you hope negotiating gets easier. $170,000 in 2 years is a nice return.

Thanks.
I don't set much store by relying on the prestige of a university as a substitute for what the graduate's done with their career but still, it's annoying to get mistaken for the University of Central Lancashire!
I should add, though, that having the entire comment greyed out, only with a single unfriendly response would be a bit disappointing.
Mark Cuban says sales solves all problems. I think he's right. The company with the best sales (not the best product, best SEO'd website, most informative blog, etc.) will probably have the most success. Doesn't mean you have to cold call.
For the love of all things good in the world, block Google Reader.

I disable auto-checking for new email.

Quit Tweetie.

Quit your IRC client.

Listen to some slow, drone-like ambient music (favorite: "The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid" or a Buddha Machine).

Also, while in school (when I really had to and wanted to concentrate), I had very good success listening/experiencing binaural beats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats
That's great. Exactly what I'd been thinking about lately.

Avi Bryant: I was just thinking of pinging you about your approach to generating html in Clamato. Are you going to be trying to unify client-side/server-side html generation to solve exactly this problem?

Some thoughts, Google suggests using a headless browser to generate the static version of the dynamic content. This may be the only option for existing code bases. But with server side javascript and by extension Clamato there must be a more elegant solution to generate clean static html as well having a dynamic UI client-side. This seems like something you would have thought a lot about while building The Seaside Framework (http://seaside.st) and now Clamato (http://clamato.net/).
I can't answer the US question, but for any UK potential (or existing) authors who are reading.. you have two options:

1) Treat the after-tax "net" amounts you receive as regular income - which are then taxed in the usual way - and "forget" the US taxes paid.

2) Treat the pre-tax "gross" amount as income, then fill out a separate "Foreign Income" form on your self assessment. On this, fill in the gross US-earned amount, the amount of US taxes paid, and calculate the UK tax deduction. This is a mega pain in the butt, but if you earned over, say, $10k, you can get a nice savings. About £600 worth in my case - it's not worth it for much lower though..

The HMRC is okay with either, but you can't do both ;-)
However, top US universities are very generous about scholarships for high-achieving individuals even if they are non-nationals. UK universities have very few scholarships to start with and most of them are closed to non-citizens.

I come from Trinidad & Tobago, and most of my schoolmates went to American universities for this reason: UK universities are completely unattainable to a non-western income.
Advanced Messaging & Routing with AMQP
This is downright Swiftian...if Swift had spent his most famous bit of satire rambling about prices for beef at Irish butcher shops he'd visited.

It's a nicely written bit of prose, but as satire, it's very weak. He doesn't seem to so much reference actual targets' arguments and cast the other side as ridiculous as throw out the central "They're dumb, and they don't get it!" claim and reiterate that at increasingly odd and tenuous length.

I don't have a dog in this fight, so maybe it's just a matter of a piece not meant for anyone but those who already cleave to his POV on the issue.
Try 48 minutes on, 12 minutes off (power nap!).
European universities could fare much better if only they would group.

UCL, Imperial, King's and LSE are all individual colleges within the University of London.
Great questions, Dan. Thanks for bringing them here.

An overwhelming majority of the time spent on a software startup is at the terminal, coding. If you're not doing that, then you damn well better be bringing something else of value, a lot of value, to the table. Things I'd be looking for...

- Specific domain knowledge. You gotta be the guy who says, "No, no, no, that's not the way you do <...> in this industry. You do it this way. And you sell it this way."

- Our customers' industry contacts. You gotta be opening doors for us while we're busy coding.

- Analysis, design, testing, implementation. You should be very proficient at all the stuff on the Systems Development Life Cycle that's not coding.

- Operations. You should good at running the business while we code. This could include many things like accounting, marketing, selling, order processing, help desk, legal, etc.

We programmers are not dummies. We are working on the critical path, but we recognize that a whole lot of other stuff has to happen in order to be successful. And we want to be successful, which is a primary driver. Can you do that other stuff? Great. If not, you need to find some way to add value.

And don't forget, ideas != value. We all have a million of them. What else ya got?
Take a look at Jamendo < http://www.jamendo.com/en/ > -- it offers music licensed under Creative Commons licenses, and it's relatively high-quality.
Outsourcing Is High Tech's Subprime-Mortgage Fiasco
>I have enormous respect for business people who have no technical knowledge, and behave accordingly.

Conversely, if you know that you know nothing about parts of what I do, then why do you feel it's necessary to have input into it?

I agree, I think this ties back to what icey mentioned in his/her parent comment.

I definitely know my strength doesn't lie within the technical side of things, but I do know that a proven model of success for a technology start-up is for the founders to have some sort of technical background. You need to be able to understand the problems that happen which can hamper the growth of the business. That is why learning how to code is important to me.
I figure because you roundly condemn Nielsen, providing but a single nebulous example that is debunked by patio11's experience.
I was making a point beyond the general idea that rankings are stupid. These particular rankings, particularly of the California schools is terrible. There is a difference between ULCA and Berkley. Especially when looking at the metrics of very top level achievement, such as Nobel Prizes, the difference between #1 and #40 can be very large.
It goes against what their intentions are. As Jeff Atwell found out http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/

If they released an API that allowed searches in multiple cities than it becomes less craigslist and more ebay. Where buyers are looking for deals all over the place instead of the deals in their town.
because they aren't :)

at least here in Brazil.

from cinema to cinema, it goes from R$2 to R$30. or US$1 to U$15
No, I recently resurrected this handle from my 80s BBS days.
truss and strace are also good debugging tools where GDB is not applicable for e.g. to debug sockets based client-server system
The '#' magic - details about the shebang mechanism on various Unix flavours
I have read that meditation helps build a control circuit in the brain and I practice it regularly. I often listen to music or some well known old TV show, something that flows familiar impressions to block out external noise but does not command my attention. Finally, my somewhat silly but surprisingly effective method is budgeting my time with a vibrating watch. http://www.epill.com/medos.html I set this up with a 60 minute countdown and commit myself to work for that hour. The alarm is subtle and doesn't distract others, just a small vibration. Then, I take a break. My goal is always to do that 1 hour work, so I take a break for long enough that I feel I can do the next 1 hour sprint. Then, I figured out how many I could do in a day (started at 4, now working on 9) and moved it up, just like working out. That is not to say I don't do other work as well, but these sprints are both more productive and more stressful.
I'm sad to see that no one else has upvoted you; you seem to be the only one here that has had the experience to weigh in on the issue.
The title is misleading, implying something to the high-tech arena , rather it is generalized article.
hey Thanks I didn't know new copies were available. I have a falling-to-pieces used copy.
and also - who else would pay for it?
If you really do need a network connection to do work I've found that the Leechblock plugin for firefox helps me regain at least some measure of control. You can set it to allow yourself a certain number of minutes per hour of "freedom" and the rest of the time it simply blocks the sites that you tell it to. It's amazing how many times per day I see that block page. (And at the moment, hacker news seems to have slipped through my filters :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
As I explained with gdp, I believe you need to know some bit of the technical side of things to succeed in a tech. start-up. To me it just makes sense. I have tried the mock up approach, with not so great results. So right now I'm trying a different approach.

I love solving problems, and I like making things. In my learning I've come to enjoy doing this through coding, but I know that my skills currently won't fly in scaling a startup.
Great writeup and thanks for sharing! All of the numbers and specifics were great, but I really think this bit of imagery made the piece:

The only compromise that was reached was that a couple of chapters could be released per month, separately – which is about as appealing to readers as getting a tenth of a blowjob at a time.