izendejas

This is why I like drinking water a lot. It forces me to get up away from my desk to fill my glass, and then to go to the bathroom. I've had lots of cases where I found better solutions in front of a urinal (forgive the imagery) than in front of a monitor because I felt like I eliminated a lot of irrelevant data that helped me see more clearly what the better solution was.

This kind of problem is really fascinating to me. On the one hand, we're all pretty ambitious and would love to do more and that can cause one to sleep less. On the other hand, the more jam packed your schedule the easier it is to become less productive. I'm actually working on an app for myself and hope to release it soon, but it amounts to guiding me on a 5-10 minute workout every morning.

I've found that doing so helps me overcome grogginess, gives me an energy boost and even helps me alleviate headaches--which is incredible.

So for anyone that feels tired no matter how much you sleep, just do something like the 7-minute workout or tabata workouts (I have my own routine I'll share with the app) and you'll hopefully get a nice energy boost which will last you a while and you'll gradually notice your metabolism will improve, etc. This is not scientifically proven, but exercise is pretty awesome either way. :)

I'm working on an app that may help you. I wrote a bit about my experience here: https://medium.com/better-humans/50c835e15244

Exercise is definitely going to help and to avoid the difficulty in scheduling it, schedule 5-10 minute high intensity workout as soon as you wake up. You'll be surprised how much that helps.

I'd love to help out. I've lost over 20 lbs just doing 5-10 minutes every day and have kept it off, but my primary focus was just feeling more energetic and overcoming all the stress that one spirals into with such schedules. Feel free to follow me on twitter (same username), and I'll DM you my email (don't like to publicly post my email) :/

Have you countered some of the debt with exercise? I recommend a brisk, highly intense workout (e.g., the scientific 7-minute workout) as soon as you wake up. It will help you get over cortisol levels and give you a nice rush of endorphins, plus nice boost of blood flow to the brain. I've found that it helps me even get over grogginess and headaches when I'm very sleep deprived.

Right. I can't help to think, also, that not long ago Houston was one of several important CEOs who met with Obama over the NSA's warrantless wiretapping.

It's important to look out after your stakeholders, but am really in awe of how they didn't seem to anticipate there would be backlash with this decision and that's what I'd call into question.

I also appreciate the question. As a follow-up: for anyone that can't afford going, what are some other side events you'd all recommend attending during/after WWDC?

Anyone that wants to hack this system of corruption, should join Lawrence Lessig (Aaron Swartz)'s cause:

http://www.nhrebellion.org/

Well, it hadn't really occurred to me that it could be used for localization exactly, just for building an adhoc communication channel. :)

The one problem is that batteries still haven't caught up. We need easily deployable, emergency wireless charging stations. :) And solar-based ones for those who aren't stuck under rubble.

I was not. Thanks!

Drones, a la Facebook, might also be a solution under severely damaged infrastructure, it occurs to me now.

I lived in LA for 7 years and experienced a few 3.0+s on older four-floor or so apartment complexes. Now I'm living ~7 miles away from a fault in the bay area.

Always have water and supplies.

And I hope ad-hoc/mesh wireless networking technology takes off sooner rather than later. http://www.wired.com/2014/03/apple-multipeer-connectivity/

Yes and no. I've certainly reduced what Lessig states to what I found the most fitting way to summarize the problem he describes, but the corruption in the system really comes down to that as he so clearly explains towards the end of the video by marching in New Hampshire for campaign finance reform.

Many people don't participate because they don't feel represented until the issue affects them directly (NIMBY politics), yet there are countless issues in which we are affected as citizens because we let lobbyists and those that fund campaigns dictate legislation.

Many people here are always raging about patent law, copyright law, etc. Those were all Lessig's causes until Aaron Swartz made him realize that all the powerful interests have the legislators by the balls, so until that gets fixed, progress on any other front will be difficult.

I think you should reconsider watching the video.

Don't support elections in the first place? So continue business as usual? I am not sure I understood correctly, but your solution IS the non-solution we're practicing today.

It's really difficult to summarize this video, just watch the first 5-10 minutes (that's what I tried) and you'll be hooked.

For added value: I'll buy you a beer for each filler/non-lexical sound (eg, "uhm", "eh", etc) you catch Lessig making whenever you're in the south bay.

Holy shit! How does this not have thousands of upvotes?

It's a masterful presentation -- the likes of which I haven't seen before. I reckon I got a similar feeling that so many did when they heard MLK speak. If you read about leadership, this is it folks. You tell very compelling stories that inspire you to action not because you want to follow the likes of Lawrence Lessig, but because you believe this cause is very important. For someone to kindle that passionate response is an art form.

And then there's the issue. It's a no-brainer: attack the root of countless legislative problems--campaign financing, the corruption.

I grew up the first part of my life in a country that is terribly corrupt and when I look at the US, the place I now call home, the only difference that I see, is that it's legal here. I was outraged at the Citizens United decision--in my mind, that was one of the worst decisions ever because it continues to legitimize a farce of democracy that we live under today.

tl;dw (ie, too long didn't watch): watch it for a lesson on leadership and get outraged at campaign financing!

edited: typos, toned down the hyperbole to avoid distracting from the message.

I believe the answer to that question is yes. I've raved about Spark many times on HN before. We're using it and absolutely love it.

Not sure why the author thinks there's no built-in support for iterations. The support is there, native scala/java. But you might have to collect to the driver/master to check for convergence, for example. Their simple logistic regression example doesn't check for convergence, but hard codes the number of iterations. http://spark.incubator.apache.org/examples.html

Some quirks that I've learned. When doing groupbys or other join operations, it helps to specify the number of partitions -- actually this is true in general, but more so for join-based operations, otherwise you can run into memory/gc issues. The equivalent is of course, setting the number of reducers to something which ensure you won't run out of heap space.

Because spark serializes the closures which transform your data, if you don't cache (at least via disk, using persist), then when iterating over an RDD or re-using it, you'll just waste cycles.

Beyond that, as an experienced scala developer, I've found that Spark feels incredibly natural. And being able to run things on the repl cannot be appreciated enough.

FWIW, The Information's piece definitely crossed the "too indignation-inducing to be true" threshold for me. And I for one, would enjoy an essay about such topic as it would be very relevant to the HN community that is often just as eager as journalists to see certain individuals or startups fail for whatever reason.

Start on the far end and pull the sheets towards you. That is, if your bed is next to a wall or two (as usual), start with the corners next to it, this way you never have to kneel over the sheets. If possible you can also move the bed and walk around.

This one took me a while to figure out, but was proud when I did. :)

Though this will tie you onto a different platform at least initially, have you considered integrating with vine/instagram in any way? Could be a good way to acquire more users.

Best of luck helping people achieve more.

To reduce technology to gadgets (even if just hyperbolically) is just wrong and condescending.

Good luck solving the political problems of our day without technology to help.

I don't think anyone is arguing that technology alone will solve our most pressing problems, but you seem to take offense in that straw man. Do note that BMG is also focused on education (which to many is a good way to solve many political problems) and talks about influencing political decisions (noting that politicians are often risk averse, so that showing the way and reducing the risk with intelligent investments is another way to help).

Right, that's just a prior. His probability is much higher given that he had two prior exits, is incredibly intelligent, his network is vast and resourceful, etc.

Very much off-topic, but he's an anomaly in many ways...eg, I was incredibly amazed to learn that he and his former wife had twins and triplets. Wonder what the chances of that are. :)

If you're very concerned, create a linkedin account with a nice photo, your college, etc and make this general information public. It will rank very highly and with a cross-reference on your educational info, a future employer worth working for won't mistake you for someone else.

There was some big news this week regarding Spark: http://gigaom.com/2013/09/25/databricks-raises-14m-from-andr...

The creators Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica et al raised a substantial amount. With Tachyon (in-memory file system that supports lineage and is thus fairly robust) and more recently MLBase, one should look at Spark beyond its excellent performance and really look at the overall package and versatility it provides.

I think many people somewhat pointlessly get caught up in arguments about what constitutes big data and what doesn't. As someone who's used Spark substantially for machine learning as well as other complex types of processing beyond your standard joins, filters, etc Spark is incredibly useful even for a few GB of data because it allows one to iterate rapidly.

With MLBase and all, I think Spark will really have an impact because your average engineer will be able to run some standard ML algorithms out of the box at scale. That is huge. That's what matters with data (big or not) -- it's the insights you can gain.

Edited: typos. Also, some more on mlbase: http://www.mlbase.org which will be released tomorrow if am not mistaken.

Completely agree here. This isn't about providing a sense of security as much as making it more difficult for co-workers or even friends to steal each other's passwords.

Just because I forgot to lock the door of my house, doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to hide and secure some valuables I don't want stolen that easily.

Flagged and others should, also. I don't think we need to feed TC any more clicks for worthless content.

Edit: if you need any more evidence to flag it, just witness the quality of the comments this "article" inspired.

I'm genuinely curious: why don't you want to be recorded at malls et al?

What's the difference between such surveillance and a security guard wondering around looking for suspicious activity and/or protecting shoppers/businesses?

Surely, it can be abused, but it can also help protect "suspicious" individuals from being profiled/targeted maliciously by such security guard, for example.

What if you were hit an intersection and said cameras helped to identify the individual who hit you and then ran, would that change your mind?

I don't think surveillance is the problem as much as who does it and the laws they implement.

When I first learned about Spark, I knew this team would go on to build great things and they've gone beyond my expectations all the while being very friendly and supportive of the community.

Among the things I love most about the Spark and the eco-system:

* repl -- so great for running short little experiments or even full blown jobs. saves you time compiling small changes and really get to know your data quickly.

* caching -- processing in-memory opens up many possibilities beyond doing iterative, machine learning jobs. quantifind, for example, demoed a system that allows them to run ad-hoc queries using Shark on the fly across GBs of data (think OLAP, a bit) in seconds or less.

* scala -- makes for very succinct code using closures and built-in operations; check out some examples here: http://spark-project.org/examples/

And some of the upcoming projects are also very cool. Tachyon, for example, will enable users to share data with a very robust in-memory file system. A teammate and I, for example, could have used it recently because we were simultaneously running different analysis against the same data, so we had to cache duplicate instances on two clusters.

I have found that working out in the morning is very good for my productivity. I've written a blog post about it: https://medium.com/better-humans/50c835e15244

The keys for me were doing so for only 10 minutes, with 2 of those being very intense, otherwise you get too exhausted.

I've lost 15lbs in 3 months also. By working out in the morning you get over the cortisol peak, grogginess and get off to a good start.

I need to finish that blog post series, but I'm actually working on a mobile app to help me keep track of some data.

To manage those energy/focus swings (especially after lunch), instead of working out, I go for a walk or step outside the office to work with fresh air and some sunlight.

You should look into Spark: http://spark-project.org/ and Shark (Spark + Hive).

I personally find that using the Spark repl is both efficient and flexible; and being able to cache data in memory makes for very fast iterations, especially when doing something more sophisticated.

There's also Cloudera Impala, but I've never used it, nor do I think I'll ever have to given what the AMPLab folks are doing.

Agreed. The hardest part is waking up, but it gets easier because you realize how much better you feel afterwards. I'll be discussing strategies to overcome this daily morning hangover, as I like to think about it, in the next post.

One of those is to really stick to a good bedtime and to plan a bit ahead. This, in fact, will be one of the things you'll naturally do after your pre-frontal cortex begins to work on all cylinders without you being fully conscious about it.

All in all, you'll find yourself making better decisions throughout the day.

I'm not the biggest mongodb fan, but if you're stuck with it for whatever reason (too invested to change code anytime soon, say), then for mostly read-only collections this doesn't seem like a bad idea, actually.

Why? Mongodb does offer secondary indices among other useful features.

That being said, I'm keeping an eye on HyperDex (http://hyperdex.org).

Your friend is right; the brain has a beautiful system called neural/sensory adaptation which eventually leads to the same patterns being less stimulating and even ignored.

Off-topic, but I wonder if some people with autism lack this mechanism and are therefore constantly overwhelmed by sensory input.

The brain is such a beautiful, but delicate hack of evolution.