skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fantastic read. I love the way he charts the ups and downs in his personal motivation. It's a great reminder to be persistent.
I know topics like this generate some discussion here, and I feel slightly bad flagging it, but for those who can flag, please consider how this is related (or not) to hacker news.
How to Be Smart Online: Don’t Beat Redheads
Hey volare, I can see how it can easily happen, but please don't let any of these things confuse you:

- the links to current hacker related content
- a fairly sophisiticated way to present those links in an "optimal" manner
- discussion like you'll find nowhere else
- content from which to learn better hacking
- content from which to learn better business skills
- friendships & business contacts tough to make other places
- people who put in a lot of TLC to maintain all of the above

Hacker News is not a destination. It is an excellent resource to augment the main thing that you should be doing.

Make no mistake about it, this is supposed to be a community of doers, not lookers.

You have made some astute observations and provided interesting feedback, but I'm concerned that you're missing the point...

If you notice so much about Hacker News that needs refining, then you're probably paying too much attention. Come here for your break then leave and put that energy of yours where it belongs, on your own project.

This site, although not ideal, is pretty good. Let's all stop worrying about what we might be missing here and focus on what we are missing with our own sites.
Virtual bicycle touring with some hacking and Google Streetview
I like the bold styling but it's a bit too big and clunky IMO - you've got "Create your FREE wish list" then "Create Your Ultimate Wish List" then "Create the perfect wishlist for ..." all one after another. Instead I'd have this up next to your "WantsThis" banner with maybe one body text repitition above the fold, not 3. It's all a little bit too busy IMO.

Also perhaps indicate on the direct purchase links (images in the top products lists) that they are buy links.

Like your login box.
How would that be "a photograph of yourself" ?
[T]he Organizational Capital Model
I'm sure I'm not the only one who uses the same password for multiple sites.
This is the sort of comment I would have liked to have seen in the submission about the article. Unfortunately, those submissions are dead.

The recent article on Ribbon Farm might explain unalone's character: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/21/morality-compassion-and... . Maybe that's assuming too much....

I don't normally say things like this, but your analysis is wrong. I'm 22 years old, and I still haven't figured out how to respond to things like this. Your thought process is simply... wrong.

It'd be like trying to explain something fundamental and
simple. Something that people should just "get," and I'm just baffled when they don't. When they respond like this and completely miss out on something good.

There's a certain dignity and standard that people like us hold ourselves to, and we resent those who don't. That's the point of "we're all in this together." We don't often meet people like us. And when we do... I don't know how to explain it. It's just great.

Though he could have maybe picked better words... he didn't. It still communicates what he was trying to say. You have to look at things like this through a certain lens. It isn't published work. If he wanted to, he could edit it all day. It is on his personal website so he shouldn't have to.

When I said I'm a discerning reader, and am discerning on HN... well, I'm discerning with everything. And it literally breaks my heart that almost everyone I meet is not like this.

----

Addendum: So unalone, what did you think of Circulatory System?
Damballa in Atlanta is hiring top notch developers

http://www.damballa.com/company/employment.php
Of course it is, but by storing the backup versions on a hidden partition as implied by the article, Win7 is clearly violating what the user intended to be the storage policy for the file. Had they instead stored backups on the same partition, then a full-disk encryption program would also encrypt the backup. Here, the user is expecting a behaviour (the file is expected to be encrypted), and Win7 is violating that expectation. That's why I said I expected Win7 to archive the ciphertext.

This is precisely what SimpleBackup does with my encrypted directory under Linux. Since the encrypted store is mounted as a loopback via encfs and fuse, SimpleBackup only sees the files the ciphertext that encfs uses to generate the plaintext view. So, to the best of my knowledge, Linux/encfs/SimpleBackup act as I expect them to, backing up only the ciphertext.
You don't sound harsh. You sound like any other punkass with a short patience.

Take five seconds and look at anything else I've done. It's not like I'm coming out of nowhere and saying these things. I'm the Hacker News presence that writes essay responses to everything. It's not that I dislike people who small talk, it's that — honestly — when I talk these minute little essays shoot out. The people I hang out with tend to be people who talk about things comprehensively. It's not particularly deep. If anything, it's an inherently nerdy trait. But it's who I am.

My love for Joyce is similarly something that I talk about a lot. He was the first major artist I fell in love with. Beckett was probably the second. Understand that I came across Joyce and Beckett before I developed a diverse taste in movies/music/art, and so they stick out in my mind in a way other things don't.

But Joyce is utterly readable, if you know how to read him. I read Ulysses to thirteen-year-olds. They were stitching up. People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head. Anybody with half an ear for tone can translate him into the hilarious Irish comic that he is. I mean, his hero masturbates and fantasizes about sex! It's a Seth Rogen comedy in the making.

I thought that I clarified the whole "lonely existence" thing in my writing. In fact, I'm sure I did, because you're the first person to complain about that. The issue's not that I'm lonely, because I'm not lonely. The issue's that there's an inherent disconnect between the secular God I worship and the various things other people worship. My idea of a good time is different from a lot of other people's.

I don't need to brag about the girls I date. The fact that I write about girls is because that happens to be a part of my life, as much as Joyce is. So I'm not allowed to write about smart people things or social people things? What am I allowed to write about? Lisp?

I wrote what I did for other people, not for me. Last year I was in a shitty place; this year I'm in an awesome place and life is great. It's just that I happen to have an audience of hundreds of people, and I do my best to follow them when I have free time, and a good part of my audience is alienated/isolated/heartbroken/generally human, and I thought I had some ideas that might help them. I wrote that article, a lot of people loved it, and when it got posted to Hacker News it got a more fiercely emotional response than anything else I've posted here. I didn't post it, and I wasn't expecting HN of all places to react the way they did. It was not an article I wrote for Hacker News. But I'm glad that people found it and got some sort of strength out of it.

If this sounds harsh, it's because you remind me of certain former professors of mine who were vain assholes and who killed my former ambition to become a teacher. Let's not mince words: I pity your students students if you're always such a nagging fucker.
nice, like the reflect plugin too (but it could use a spacing option for "hovering" images above the reflection)
Three Mile Island radiation leak investigated
Fair enough. Though recent alternatives to Hacker News have lessened a lot of those posts, and I'm glad. Stack Overflow in particular has drawn away a lot of newbie questions (including many of my own that I'd have probably asked here). Now we just need an HN job board: Those are the posts I see increasingly more of.
"How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built" by Stewart Brand. I've given away at least five as gifts.
I think you might have an unreasonable expectation of how well (mostly) userland encryption should work.

Win7 is doing its job; TrueCrypt is only doing part of its job; and I'm guessing that unless you shoulder a lot of the job you think EncFS is doing for you, your plaintext is sprayed all over your hard disk (seriously: image the drive and scan through it in a fast hex editor).

Most files bounce all over the place before they ever see the AES block function. Did you mail it? Did you PGP or S/MIME encrypt the file when you mailed it? Oops: you probably gave up your plaintext to a forensics tech.
Idea: Build a 3rd party vetting service that seeds itself on rejected iPhone apps (.ipa's) and attempts to do the same static analysis that Apple does. The static analysis tool would be the hardest to build.

It might be a bit difficult to reverse-engineer the rejection process, and I feel the reject-on-first-error (ignoring subsequent ones farther in the review process) can make the process frustrating.
Yes I would have. Mainly because no company would have been able to make it work back then. No one even thought of Adsense 10 years ago. You do realize the whole reason Omid is a billionaire is because he was the one of the first main marketers for the company and he was a new employee 10 years ago.
Oh! I didn't realize it was you. :-)

I'll be the first to accuse me of a certain sloppiness. I usually try to write as quickly as possible and I don't look back over what I write before I publish. For pieces I want to submit places I do a much more thorough job — I'm writing one piece specifically for Hacker News that's like that right now, and I'm taking however many weeks it takes to make sure it gleams.

re:Circulatory System — I'm not totally sure. It didn't hook me instantly like some of the other Elephant Six bands have, but the harmonies were pretty impressive. I'm going to give it another listen a few days from now; I feel like it's something I ought to take some time and let seep in.
Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To "De-List" Itself From Google
Even leaving aside the health issues: I've had the misfortune of diagnosing computer hardware problems in a household of heavy smokers. Computers get dusty and dirty after a while anyway, but cigarette smoke is something else entirely. I have never seen anything like it since. Suffice to say it doesn't do the hardware any favours.
Hacker News is not a destination. It is an excellent resource ...

Sure, but I want a better resource. I'm not looking to spend more time here. I'm looking to see all of the good content while spending less time here.
Ask HN: Do you develop on a Mac? What apps do you use?
Do you develop on a Mac? What apps do you use?
This looks great, will be using it. If I run into anything I'll let you know. Am I safe in assuming that if canvas is not supported it just does around-the-image wrapping?
Actually, read both. The contradiction shows how history isn't some dead thing set in stone, but a field created by people with ever-changing (often clashing and very ideological) interpretations of the past, alternating with attempts to tie those elaborate interpretations to the evidence available. (And sometimes, new evidence shakes it up...)

_The Past is a Foreign Country_ by David Lowenthal is a decent book about how historians interpret and rediscover the past. Really, though - read quite a bit, read primary documents, read attempts to synthesize them, and try to draw your own conclusions. I'm not sure I'd recommend any book in particular. (Also, history is often the most interesting when you get really specific. I'm particularly geeked about the history of medicine, but that's me.)
Japanese Anime Studios Feel Pressure From Unhappy Artists and Outsourcing
I doubt anyone will have trouble finding it, but A History of Western Philosophy is actually by Bertrand Russell.
That's right, it checks for canvas before it tries to do anything. If you find any bugs or have requests, the google code page where you download it from has an issue tracker. Glad you like it!
I often read HN when I happen to be at an impasse away from my laptop or desktop. I'd like to HN's interface offer better support for mobile browsers.

For example, http://m.ycombinator.com could be a version of news.ycombinator.com with margins, indentation and other settings appropriate for a Blackberry or iPhone.

Also I don't know what's up with Viigo, but it doesn't seem to work with HN's RSS url. Anyone else have that problem?
I just checked your app for sql injection. The password I chose while registering a new list was d'artagnan and, sure enough, I was granted access without any error message whatsoever, but once I logged out I couldn't log in again. I thought that you might have removed the ' character automatically, but I also tried with dartagnan and couldn't log in either.
I've found myself at the same place, and though I'm still working on it, I've found the following to be useful:

Don't force yourself to work on something unless you want to, assuming no time constraints. If you force yourself, you're going to do less and hate life. It's an easy way to lose your focus.

If you're feeling particularly unproductive, work on a project you can complete in an hour or two. That'll help you gain the momentum that's crucial to getting things done.

Solve a problem at the beginning of the day. Project Euler is my personal pick for such problems, but anything that works the mind is a good choice. This doesn't even have to be code related, just something to get your mind in gear early on.

Don't overuse stimulants like caffeine. As much as I love such drugs, their overuse is easily able to harm your focus.

In general, try to analyze what works and doesn't work for you. Hope you can find something to help you out. Good luck.
5% reality, 95% dramatization. It's not hard to disappear if nobody is looking, and in this case the "search" was an artifice created by WIRED. However, it's entertaining nonetheless.

I've "disappeared" a few times simply going about my business--by moving to new cities knowing hardly a soul, and starting from scratch: Quetzaltenango in '03, Beijing in '07 and now Buenos Aires in '09.

It can be terrifying to realize that you really can walk away from everything you've ever experienced and take for granted. It's kind of like pre-living your own death. You see exactly who remembers, who cares, and who doesn't.

And when you choose to re-engage, you deeply understand that everybody you let into your life is a choice, not an obligation.
I develop (rails) on a mac - I use textmate and terminal
Those are all nice, but nothing builds confidence like making a change and then watching revenue go up.
No comments for now, but I'd suggest SSL (https) encryption which should be fairly simple to implement.
My most common applications in my workflow are Coda, Terminal, and Fireworks for the occasional graphics editing. Also, XCode is a big player when I'm doing my iPhone development.
The simplicity of this site makes it far more conducive to mobile browsing than, say, BBC News or the NYT. Some of the indentation on comments can be a bit of a pain, but it's perfectly workable on the Opera Mini browser I use.
Hey, this looks great; I'm signing up purely out of interest. Though, one small thing - if neither password field is filled out and the form is sent, I receive this message: "The password fields must match". Insignificant non-bug, but still not the correct error message to display. I look forward to see where you go with this!
I've always found deadlines are a great way to get things done. My biggest problem is that projects tend to seem never ending, which is a huge turnoff for me.

You can try self-imposed deadlines, but those rarely work for me. I prefer real deadlines- promise to show it off at a conference or meeting, or something similar.

Good luck!
James Joyce, an author that pretty much no one can read

Nonsense. I read Ulysses cover to cover. I happily admit that I needed help to do it and understand what I was reading: I listened to the Ulysses series of lectures from The Teaching Company, and read the chapters as the professor covered them. You know what? It's a pretty damned good book.

So let me amend your statement. James Joyce is an author few people can read without some help from someone who already understands the work. With a handful of small guideposts, Ulysses is completely readable.
I don't view that as a problem -- at least, as a problem that can be solved more than very temporarily.

We used to have (at least) three domains: public, private, and secret. The private domain was clearly under attack by networks and data processing decades ago, but it was thought that laws and care could combat it successfully. Around the early to middle 1990s, it became clear that this wasn't working, and that ordinary progress was going to push private things into the public sphere. Some people (the cypherpunks) thought that the way to resolve this was to move private things into the secret sphere, via public key crypto. That could have worked for a while, but it eventually would have failed in the same way that laws and "just be careful" were already failing, and it didn't matter, in any case, since the vast majority of people never bought into the need.

Today, I believe that it's clear that virtually everything now in the private domain will soon become public, and that there's not really anything that can be done about it. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the problems associated with losing privacy to the public are less severe than the problems of losing what should be public to the secret, insofar as it's possible.

So, basically, clearing your browser history is like plugging a hole in a sieve: the only way to actually stop the leakage is to wall yourself off from the world, a cure worse than the disease. Instead, I think we should focus on keeping secret things that need to be secret, and abandon the merely private to the public sphere. With the increasing proliferation of wireless cameras and microphones, and software that the vast majority of users do not understand, privacy is a lost cause.

Begin acting now as though everything you do is public -- it's the only safe thing to do.
Try using hn-filter, a feed that I made last week.

For example, http://hn-filter.heroku.com/rss?cmt_gte=2&point_gte=5...
gives you 10 HN articles with more than 1 comment and 4 points in RSS format.

It also gives you the number of comments and points.

The source is at http://github.com/kijun/hn-filter

Hope it helps.
Maybe, I guess it really depends on what type of community you are trying to build. Some communities wants a noticible connection between reality and online identies, such as amazon or face book requiring (or at least wanting) real names. Other groups, like myspace or 4chan, don't care what your real name is, which promotes a far different feel of a community.
My experience is that difficulty concentrating is rarely the problem itself. It's usually a symptom of a problem. Rather than trying out tricks, your best bet is to tackle the problem head-on.

First thing I would recommend is that if concentrating is a serious problem for you, you should see a doctor. Since this is something that's just come up in the last few years, it's likely not something like ADHD. However, this can be caused by a number of psychological ailments (anxiety, depression, etc) and physical ailments (diabetes, hypothyroidism, etc).

That said, it's important to note that distraction is often a learned behavior. Do something to break the habit. Try programming in new places, don't use the computer you program on for personal browsing, etc.

Also, it's amazing what a little exercise can do.
Maybe a photo of you holding your avatar image.
Step 2: stop reading Hacker News :-)

But seriously, log off for a while. Stop Twittering, stop IMing, stop reading your RSS feeds. If you're regularly employed, then take a vacation and go to the mountains. If not, go there and stay there. Come back once the spontaneous urge to do so goes away. While you're there, read a book. Not a computer book, and not a junk novel. Pick a text that requires mental engagement but not hands-on experimentation. A history book with citations in it, or a heavy philosophical tract, is a good choice.
I believe it's been proven that anxiety of a deadline can actually increase levels of norepinephrine - the hormone that helps you concentrate.
The Future of Sensor Networks
There is a certain inevitability to life.
People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head.

I believe it's generally thought that people learn to read at first by sounding out the author's words in their head, and as they become more proficient at reading, learn not to do that.
LinkedIn could indulge users' whimsy and still meet their business goals with a mixed policy: allowing a non-literal-photograph primary profile picture if and only if another accurate photo is also uploaded (and thus available to users who click-through to, or set a preference for, photos).
I really liked that article, it was moving in a strange way. It was also pretty off-topic for HN, so I understand why it was killed. Submitting with the vague title "God" didn't help, either.
Willpower is like a muscle. It gets stronger with use.

Buying a copy of GTD might help, but it won't be an instant cure. There is none.

Also, consider exercising your willpower on smaller (but non-trivial) projects.
The most effective thing for me has been social pressure. If I'm working with people who are depending on me to get my work done, I'm more likely to get it done on time. If my coworkers can see my computer screen, then I'll definitely get it done on time, because I'll feel too ashamed to procrastinate. This system falls apart if my coworkers openly procrastinate as well.

It is extremely difficult for me to complete projects on my own these days. Luckily, it's relatively easy to find someone to work with on most things that are worth doing.
Well, a watched child won't boil either.
Browser history also fails when you use more than 1 machine on a regular basis.
Something seems misplaced about this reply. We call bullshit on each other a lot on HN, but usually when we criticize, we do it constructively. This seems like plain old criticism. Its interesting that you mention grading essays because I distinctly remember highschool essays (one in particular) that I got back with D's on them red-scrawled with "Disappointing" without further elaboration.

A,B,C,D, how could someone who actually is deep, smart and lonely write an acceptable essay on being such? (Because you'll find a disproportionate number of just such individuals here on HN, because here, "we're all in it together".)

I should note that I'm the last person who could actually judge the merits of the essay, (although I enjoyed reading it). Joyce bemuses me particularly. I've gathered through observation that he's either the pseudo-intellectual rambler that all others defer to, or a literary genius beyond the ken of mortal man, but am humbled by the knowledge that I lack the instrumentation to make that distinction.
Solving chess. That kind of problem.
You should be able to use an apostrophe in a password without issue as we did test for that. I'll see if I can reproduce that error.