skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that's almost how I also do it, but reading the question above, I've tried to work out a solution and set a Hacker news subcategory here: http://bit.ly/4WxNeI on mcsquare.me (category: Technology, subcategory: Hackers), you can not just check hacker news titles, but also Paul Graham's blog and the Y combinator posterous Blog, and track back old stories very fast.
The bad part of this is just that, external links won't bring you to hacker news, but the original post, for Ask HN, it works very well, I've tried to figure out how to find the rss-link for new items and for the discussion tread (or comment), couldn't figure it out, I suspect there's no such a thing (Admin ?), so if one of you find out how to get it, thanks for sharing, or the admin may try to put those datas on a feed. Hope this can help some folk here, and if they are additional Y combinator feed I'm missing and you may want to see there, let me know.
You have to be honest about the best way to motivate yourself. In the speech "You and your Research," Richard Hamming[1] talks about how he uses his ego against himself. When he went on sabbatical to write a book, he told everyone he was going to finish by the time he got back. He wouldn't dare suffer the embarrassment of failing to finish!

Me? I respond well to A. small, well-defined tasks and B. limits. I get A. by breaking tasks up into tiny modules, and by using Git to make lots of small feature branches. I also write TODO lists with lots of 30-minute jobs.

I get B. by using LeechBlock[2] to restrict access to websites for periods of 1 hour. When I combine A. and B., I usually can find something that'll put me working long enough to get into the zone.

Having an interest in your projects also helps :)

[1] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
It would be a photograph, and it would be of (a representation of) yourself.
I don't personally know of anyone who relies on a web search engine for their news. So they seem to be overestimating their importance.

I am far more likely to see a story because it was posted to a site like HN, whether or not a search engine has any knowledge of it.
Miami Printing - Miami Business Cards - Miami Postcards
Miami Printing Company, Miami Printing, Miami Business Cards
That's subvocalization. But you can read without subvocalizing and still figure out tone as you read.

The problem I had reading Ulysses when I tried at fifteen was the opposite. I was so bent on reading Ulysses as Serious Great Literature that I couldn't read it as something amusing. So I got to the weirder parts of the book and concluded, as a lot of people unfortunately do, that it was pretentious crap. It's funny how pretentious masturbation sounds in a book when you don't let yourself think it's funny.

There's another passage in particular that has the same effect on people. Leopold Bloom looks at the sky and calls it "the grey sunken cunt of the world". A lot of people jump on that passage and accuse Joyce of gratuitous swearing for shock value and assume he's being a bitter, wordy arse; once you convince yourself to read the passage as being thought by a cranky Irishman, it suddenly becomes hilarious.
When he blinks, his left nostril dilates, and that bothers him, so he cuts the videos so it doesn't happen. He describes it in this video: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/051006.html
Nice to see that the article credits some work done by a HN reader in the search (as preposterous as this fake search is).
The key here is to power down your computer before opening the door for people with a search warrant.
Finally caught it. Thanks.
I think the title alone did more to get it quickly flagged dead than any other factor. I know I went in with the safety off on my flagger (as it were) and almost did so when words like worship, Allah, and Yahweh (I'm a scatter reader) jumped out at me.
How much do you know about trading now? If you know little, I would recommend the textbook Trading & Exchanges by Larry Harris. It's somewhat out of date but still very good. I work at a high-frequency trading shop and that is the first book they shove at you when you walk in the door.

Other than that, I'd like to second what several other people have already said: getting a job at a firm is a good way to learn, you're outgunned in terms of brains and money, and 10k is probably too little. Now, you can do a lot of learning for 0k while you save money, and every startup is outgunned by goog, msft, but that doesn't mean there isn't room in the ecosystem. Like a startup against an established player, you could find a niche that is going unexploited. What makes trading harder is the established players don't tell you much about what they're doing, so you don't know if you are doing something new or walking into a trading strategy perfected 10 years ago by DE Shaw. With a software startup, you have more information about what your competitors are selling, what their products are, how you might differentiate yourself, what's missing from the internet, etc. Software companies promote their products and try to get public attention; trading shops try to keep as many secrets as possible.
I always thought a HN API would be awesome, would give us a lot more freedom to mold HN into different interfaces. I have toyed with the idea of a scraper but I think that ends up being a bit of a broken solution.

I wrote a greasemonkey script for HN a while back that I can't live without now. There are actually a couple great HN greasemonkey scripts out there. You could always try making a mashup of those that have your favorite elements. You may end up making something that a lot of people find useful.

If you like, give Hacker News OnePage a whirl:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512
I'm horrible at this as well. But I think I found a good way. I have a timer on my blackberry that I set for 15 mins. It vibrates on the 5 min and 1 min and end marks.

I focus exclusively on a task for 15 mins. Then at the end I reset it again, or move on to the next project.
Study links evolution of single gene to human capacity for language
Missing Piece of Design
Ze Frank is one of those few and fascinating people online who's able to combine a plethora of interests and create work that's both memorable and touching. He's got the same melancholy whimsy that _why the lucky stiff did.

Dunno why Ze Frank became vogue today on Hacker News, but I do not at all disapprove.
I had no idea that Windows 7 - which I use - had this functionality. Looking at this from the other perspective, I think this article does a better job at marketing this feature (restore previous versions of documents easily thanks to Windows Restore) better than Microsoft ever has.
I use a mac but the tools are pretty much the same as a linux box.

ITerm + Vim + various Gnu Utilities
Re Architecture -
Herman Hertzberger's Lessons for Students in Architecture teaches you how to see/think as an architect does. Was the most important book I read in arch. school. It's a very personal, and generous, tour through the buildings that have been most influential to him; he points out specific moments and moves in these buildings. It's brass tacks. http://www.amazon.com/Herman-Hertzberger-Lessons-Students-Ar...

And another vote for Pattern Language. Take it out of the library just to see how the thing is written, won't take long to see why software folk cite it.

great post morphir, thanks -
Words, Gestures Are Translated by Same Brain Regions
nice design and intuitive UI, I like it. What about sync the wish list instead of import the wish list? sync a wish list will cover import and export as well. As User, I will love this option, but sure there's a lot to do to make this work properly, if that's possible.
Not only stop reading Hacker News (and reddit or similar), but block them in your hosts file so that you can't even cheat.

Reading fiction, taking nature walks without your cell phone, or, perhaps best of all, practicing insight meditation can help a lot.

Mental concentration is like a muscle. You need to exercise it (and not drug it up).
Can't see how this would ever replace dropbox + google docs for me.
It's funny: several months ago I decided to make 2009 the year of my return to the command line. I did it "for the lulz", and it ended up being my greatest productivity hack ever.

I moved personal and work email to Mutt and uninstalled my Gmail notifiers; I moved IM to bitlbee on irssi; I moved RSS to Newsbeuter; and I moved Twitter to ttytter. I keep all of this running in a screen on my remote shell.

And this was certainly not the intent of my project when I started it, but I can't even begin to tell you what a difference it's made for my productivity. I usually leave my screen on an empty shell prompt, so even if I see my terminal I've got no idea what's going on in those other terms unless I actively go looking for them.

Granted, I have the luxury of working at a small startup (< 20ppl) and I can maintain some aloofness with regard to IM (because if a colleague really needs something from me I've probably not more than 20ft away), but as far as this other stuff goes, do you really need to know what's happening on Twitter in realtime? Is there ever really an email so important that it can't wait until you've finished your current thought?
Upload it to Google docs and share it with everyone.
Is there some interesting characteristic of the channel that you're looking for, other than intruders, though? Merely detecting the error rate on a channel is uninteresting; conventional algorithms have nailed that problem to the wall. I'm not worried about exactly how it is done, I'm thinking about what it's good for; take away the ability to detect intruders, even if that's not the only thing it may be doing, and what's left?
My standard answer to seemingly 'everything' these days: Work on taking better care of your body. "A sound mind in a sound body" and all that.
s/won't/is less likely/

You cannot control the child all the time. At some point you won't be looking and he/she might just as well get hurt. I've hurt, cut, etc. myself while adults were looking at me - we hurt ourselves as adults by accident too. You can't prevent everything "bad" because you're watching.
As a guy who worked "geeksquad" jobs at small computer repair shops for years, I can completely understand this.

The substance that is exhaled by a smoker is one of the queerest substances I've ever encountered. As the computer's fans pull it over the cooling surfaces on the cpu, gpu and psu, it accretes with alarming speed into a think, insulating, yellow sludge that then traps dust and further enhances its insulating properties.

Back in the days of the MHz wars, pre-made consumer pc's like compaqs, or Packad-Bells needed all the cooling they could get. If the box was up on the table at head level with the smoker, it took only a few months for the cooling to become inadequate and the cpu to fail from overheating. Sometimes we could dunk them in alcohol overnight (the cpu/heatsink, not the whole box) and they'd work in the morning, often not.

We had an official diagnosis CFFCS that we'd write on the form. "Cooling failure from cigarette smoke." Or, yelled from the back "just another case of see-double-ef-see-ess." Don't even get me started on the smell...
That's only a problem here b/c in the past it has been used more for mischief than for good. There are a ton of good applications for using a browser history to enhance the user experience. As we see more of these in the future, attitudes will change.
Redis implementation in node.js
You want a 20-second piece of advice to help you gain your attention span back?

Does anybody else see the irony in this?

Okay, I'll play along. Remember Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try."
I believe you can do that with Firefox and the Weave extension.
The lack of vitality in the Japanese animation industry's fairly old news at this point. What we're seeing now is decidedly not an overnight thing - it's the end result of about a decade's worth of bad policy-making, starting from an inability to adapt to online distribution, hovering with emphasis over the craptastic wages that are driving away decent talent, and ending with the industry's hypernarrow demographic targeting.

Just because any individual otaku is probably willing to spend untold amount of money on miscellaneous merchandise doesn't mean it was a good idea to ignore the overwhelmingly larger demographic of Everybody Else...
This is a great find. Thanks! BTW, I love the reference videos that were shot for the animation.
I was thinking the same thing a while back. An API for HN would be awesome. A problem with that though is that it is really only a one way street and only allows for passive consumption rather than easily interacting. While a site-scraper API implementation would be handy, I think people would lose out on the functionality and community interactions that can only really be had at news.ycombinator.com.

Still though, I suppose some sort of site-scraped data (perhaps hosted on google apps for everyone to use) could be used in tandem with a greasemonkey script to further enhance the site without taking away the interactivity, that could be interesting...
I usually take off a few weeks, leave my laptop & phone, pack a backpack, and find a remote beach or mountains :) Even if i have to take a paycut, I do this every three to four months. One way this helps me relax and rejuvenate, on the other hand I'm forced to finish the projects I take, so no one needs me during this period of time off.
Really? I just find it cheesy and over-produced but in a low budget sort of way. The constant camera cuts for no reason are nearly seizure-inducing. The attempt to be sardonic fails lamely.
I would not narrow it down to HN... This is not a localized problem.
And we could get into swap, etc. No, it's not airtight, and I know that. I'll just say that the archival feature goes beyond this level of leakage. Whereas most, if not all, of what you mention is at least contained in a single partition and in swap, and thus can be protected by full-disk encryption, creating a new hidden partition to store secret backups is violating expectations quite badly.

I choose to use a secure directory rather than full-disk as part of a security/performance tradeoff, and so I know that there are temp files and caches and swaps all over the place (though GnuPG is setuid so that it can lock pages in memory, thus preventing them from going to swap-- an attacker would have to freeze my RAM to get to my keyring). Most of these, though, should at least be manageable. I can see them and interact with them.

I do agree that in some sense TrueCrypt isn't doing its job, but I argue that's because their expectations have also been violated. Do the API specs make it clear that data written using those APIs may be copied off-partition without user interaction? If not, then the TC team would have to find out the hard way, then scramble to workaround this poor design decision.
That's a workaround, not a cure. I'm all in favor of eliminating the need for concentration and self-discipline wherever possible, but doing so won't give you more of it.
Fix is going up for this in the next few minutes, thanks!
Wouldn't help in this case, though, if there's a separate backup maintained by Win7.
I think I saw this on another site, I'll see if their API allows for deleting and adding items externally.
October 23, 1986

Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris – a Russian submission for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is going to publish it. The knaves.

October 31, 1986

I beat out Ed and Steve for the #1 spot on the Tetris high-score list.

============

Thanks for this link, great reading! my best friend had a pc and prince of persia (and karateka) when we were young, great memories...
- Buy a moleskine and start writing stories or drawing, or even spend a few minutes learning a musical instrument, the left side takes care of the logic, programming and math, but if you spend too much time ignoring the right side your will start lacking on concentration. I spent about $19k on psychologist to realize that =)
- Once you get your left brain back start breaking your big and boring task into small pieces of fun and use the pomodoro technique - http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
Then you must be fabulously wealthy.
This inspires me to keep closer logs of my progress on personal projects -- particularly the "soft" stuff (how I'm feeling about it, etc). It's terrific motivation.
This project does provide a very nice API and I think it can be very useful in some circumstances. However, I think client side storage is not as important as server storage. After all, a client can have many "client sides" and the appeal of storing stuff on the server is that all of them can be stateless and synchronized. I can see myself using this as a very nice cache mechanism for intermediate data, but the permanent storage would stay on the server.

<IMHO>SQL is not gross!</IMHO>
The camera cuts were a terrific idea production-wise. It let him produce his videos very quickly and maintain a degree of quality. The Show was quite an undertaking.

It's hit-and-miss, but it's hit-and-miss in a good way, where it's obvious even at his low points that he's working hard and constantly trying to innovate. When he hits, he hits hard. His episode on product placement's an all-time favorite Internet Thing.
In the commentary for that episode Matt and Trey explained that they really believed it would work on children. They had viewers tell them it actually helped them raise their kids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5UvsHKtcyY
I didn't tell my kids there are bad people in the world who want to do unspeakable things to them. I felt that would rob them of their innocence. Instead, I had a strict rule in my home that all affection had to be by mutual consent and 'no' means 'no'. It was their decision and they didn't need to justify it. If they didn't want a 'goodnight' kiss or hug on a particular night, no big deal. If anyone refused to take 'no' for an answer, they were to come get me. I had to back up this promise only once. My kids extrapolated for themselves that this meant they were entitled to enforce the rules with physical force if necessary when mom was unavailable (ie when they were in public school). I didn't hear such stories until many years later. They never thought it was anything that needed to be mentioned.

In short: If a kid has good boundaries and is empowered to act on their judgment without having to articulate why (which is often difficult even for adults and can be impossible for a kid), the odds are relatively small they will be victimized in some significant way. Even a toddler can decide if they want a goodnight kiss and can signal that by enthusiastically turning towards you and throwing their arms wide open or by turning their face away if the answer is 'no'. Respecting that instinct and cultivating it is tantamount to an invisible shield which will keep out most predators. And it's not just protection against potential sexual predation. It generalizes.
i think the camera cuts are key to the pace

and i think the pacing is ideal
I mainly use the RSS feed from NetVibes. I wish clicking on the link there took me to HN, instead of to the source article. Sometimes I am more interested in comments to a feature than the actual feature (the title might say it all, but the reaction is what's interesting). I am to the point where I might create my own wrapper around HN's RSS feed.
Ned Batchelor on chasing memory leaks and testing
what if you didn't put the images in ahead of time? Can you add them when you go to edit the post?
I use http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/
That's just a nice newspaper-like layout.
everything you never you always wanted.
There are two arguments here. One is that a computer's inner workings can be fouled by secondhand smoke. If Apple wants to deny people repairs on that basis, it should say so in the warranty, because for laypeople it's a non-obvious point.

The other argument is that repairing a smoker's computer is dangerous to the health of the repairer. If that's true, there are a lot of ways they could mitigate the health risks. (Granted, there are OSHA-ish reasons Apple might not want to get mixed up in doing these repairs, but that takes me back to the fact they should make it plain in the warranty.)

Separate point: this is an even better illustration of the dangers of smoking than those blackened lungs they'd show you in grade school.
Agreed, and I think the author is clear that he is teaching his child to understand context to be able to discern things. I just think the line that "everyone is good, they're just caught up in the wrong things" isn't the right way to look at the world.
Robinson's Mars trilogy, Watts' Blindsight, Sterling's Heavy Weather and Distraction, Vinge's Rainbows End.

Off the top of my head.
As far as I can tell, the show rarely if ever attempted to be sardonic, but did in fact attempt to be nearly seizure-inducing.

Like or dislike, that trippy feeling you get while watching isn't by accident, it's by design.
a great idea Jason!

It is great for dynamic images, but I would think 99% of use cases is for static image. I would appreciate feature which does the magic and enables me to render static piece of HTML+CSS for direct replacement.

This way I would be able to bake static version during development and publish it without dependency on canvas or other tricky methods.
I like the noprocrast feature on HN, and the Mac SelfControl app for blocking distracting websites for a specified period of time.
If a user searches for something like 27" iMac, there are no results, but if the user searches for 27 iMac, the 27" imac is found. It might be good to strip any "'s in the add field before searching.
sportsracers?
Create Your Own Flash Adventure Game - Building a Level
How do you like Coda? How well does it adapt to rails/django? Is it only for the front end stuff or can it handle the heavy lifting of the server side stuff?
Ze Frank is great, but I hope we're not going to see the submission of each individual day of the Show as a story.
That's a term he uses right from the beginning, no explanation given. The mystery of what a sports racer was is one of the things he used to build together a community. The speed at which his site grew in that week is remarkable, and the code words he used was a big part of it. If anything, it's the opposite of sardonic. It's childish (but in a good way).
I think there are small/medium companies out there (similar to the one I've been working with recently with around 40 employees) that require a really simple self-hosted document management system. You might say that these companies should have a full blown CMS implemented, but often times all they want is document versioning, and CMS solutions like Sharepoint are expensive and can be confusing. There might be a market there but it would be hard to identify the individual customers amid a generally well-served market. The company that I was working with literally used a network share with documents organised in folders and renamed for each version. shudder. They were looking at Alfresco when I left, but I doubt they'll get the project off the ground - it's too big. If this was a really really simple SELF-HOSTED package, I'm sure they would go for it. Note: Self-hosted, not cloud based. It would need good backup features and the ability for clients to add their own ssl certificates.

Just an idea, based on observations without research.
This pattern of low quality competitors upping their game and taking over a large chunk of an industry has occurred again and again and difficulties associated with that pattern feel a bit inevitable. The best situation for Japanese producers might be to get smaller and refocus as content creation over large scale production.

There's other areas to innovate as well. Studio Ghibli, the acclaimed studio behind Spirited Away, is collaborating with critically acclaimed video game studio Level 5 on a video game.
Editor, Tetsuya Kitahata, will commit suicide in a few days.