skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Have a blog

2) write something (do not finish!)

3) release it (minimally, stick it on github or something similar)

4) blog about it (and post the blog entry somewhere where people will see it, aka here)

5) guilt will drive you to make it better

6) work on the project and blog more about it

7) Either people will get interested, you'll start getting links or it won't go anywhere

8) decide whether to continue it or start the cycle over again at step one with a new project

If you do this a few times, I guarantee that you'll have a blog with readership and a better idea of what people want/wnat to work on.
Web App "Out of Box Experience" Best Practices
What is the state of the art in best practices for the first time user of a web site? Are there good articles posted about this somewhere?

I have seen posts about minimizing the work required for initial registration, but not much else.
Welcome To Straight Talk
Understanding the Python GIL (Pycon 2010 Slides)
Now THAT looks useful, especially the auto-calibration. I like the name similarity too.

I'd suspect the helicopters would bump each other in minor air disturbances, unless they were so far away from each other that they'd be unable to make a dense display.
Good advice. And OP has started and finished this project, namely, this post, which proves that this is not a "character flaw" of his.
"if you want to know what society is going to be like in twenty years, don't ask a scientist...I don't know..."

I guess he proved himself right.
I wonder if Windows 7 behaves like Linux in that by default, when faced with memory pressure, it will much prefer to swap out application pages rather than abandon buffer cache.

This is really annoying when this memory pressure is due to trying to fit more (and potentially useless) things into the buffer cache. Let's say you're performing a backup of a 100+ GB directory to another machine using rsync. Linux will want to jam that entire directory into buffer cache, which of course won't fit. Instead of immediately pitching out the existing disk cache, it will aggressively (depending on the value of swappiness) swap out application pages, (potentially owned by Oracle or MySQL) rather than lose existing buffer cache.

This is a real problem, and one that's a pain to fix.
If it was never stolen, there's no theft to classify as theft.
try to read the book "Getting Things Done" - what helped me was the 2 minute rule - do anything you can finish in 2 minutes immediately - it will immediately clear up a lot of time in your schedule and you can move to more challenging things - alternatively try to break projects down to something you can do in X amount of minutes ;)
A reasonable compromise would be to require providers of alternative medicine to show that it's not harmful. Maybe it doesn't do anything, but that's for others to decide.
From what I've seen in the US, a lot of Chinese medicine is actually FDA-approved as "beverages" -- supposedly they are safe to drink, but it's up to the user to believe whether or not there's any medicinal effect.

Placebo or not, I can say that 板蓝根 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria) has pretty consistently made me feel better when I had the flu or sore throat.
Define amazing. Much (if not most) of my favorite music has been long out of print. In fact, that's true of many of my favorite books. As for movies, yes, Avatar 3D was truly amazing, but in the last decade I've enjoyed far more indie releases than Hollywood blockbusters. Amazing is qualitative, not quantitative, and highly subjective. The article itself describes a video that many people found to be amazing (including me), yet it was made on a low budget without any support from the record label.

Thanks to the Internet, I've been able to hear some amazing music again after decades of being unobtainable. If those artists released some interesting new material and/or started touring again, I'd even consider seeing a show. I don't care if they have a label or not, and frankly, I'll be happy to hear them in the small venues they'll inevitably play in instead of huge arenas. I see that as an all-around win for music & musicians, as opposed to letting labels be the arbiters of taste and the ultimate gatekeepers.
5 Tips To Lose Belly Fat
help me find out what my cheatin boy is doin
Find a partner, you will be helping each other to keep things up.
I was thinking the same thing, actually (and you missed a V). And as to sheer number, Indie significantly eclipses the Industry, especially when competitions often result in thousands of new games in a few days. Certainly, most never get past the competitions, but some do (World of Goo, anyone?).

Honestly, indie games make up most of my gaming because they're usually significantly more replayable, and have more refined gameplay. AAA titles usually have option overkill (which I like, but detracts for many), but seriously underdeveloped game mechanics that expose themselves more and more as you play.

To make an even stronger argument, remember CS and DoD before they went commercial? Indie, mere mods on a good engine. And have you looked at the progress on Natural Selection 2?
While it's better that the device isn't updated automatically, it's the same effect; I assume Apple bills these updates as essential for security and functionality features, so one may assume it's necessary and install over their stuff, perhaps unknowingly (if a friend administered the jailbreak, or if they didn't pay much attention and just assume it works with updates).

It's really just not worth the hassle, honestly. I will never own an iPhone primarily for these reasons.
Competition for Google: A German Library for the 21st Century
Instead of looking at a supplier to decide how they
should rank, Panjiva looks at the people buying from
those suppliers. The network amongst suppliers and
buyers gives a much more truthful representation of what
a supplier is really good at building than purely
analyzing the suppliers themselves.

Data is better than Marketing-speak.
Wow, so wrong. I don't game, but you're way off on film and music.

A day spent on The Sixty One should be enough to convince you that there's plenty of great indie music out there. Do it now.

http://www.thesixtyone.com/

There's are some mindbogglingly great indy film productions. If you haven't seen any, you're not looking. Here's a place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sundance_Film_Festival_...
The article I got didn't say anything about the FBI, only that the school official was defended by the district. Title: "Pa. school official defended in webcam spy case"
Read the book _MindSet_ by Carol Dweck. I suspect it might give you some insight into your problem.
pick a ridiculously small 'project', say 'bring my unread mail count to 0', focus on it & finish it. allow yourself to feel good about it for a ridiculously small amount of time, say 'the time it takes to finish a glass champagne'. Now, pick something bigger. rinse, repeat
Coincidentally, the post and article in this current post may give you some insight:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139146

Summary: will power is a limited resource, like muscle power, than can be both exhausted and developed.
Sometimes algorithm does gives weird results
The placebo effect exists, but it exists independently of whatever expensive alt-medicine crap is being pushed at the moment. Therefore, if we're discussing the efficacy of the "medicine," you can't include placebo effects. This is also why medical trials nearly always include a placebo group.
When you look at the positional externalities imposed by various products, the case can be made that there are plenty of organisations that are doing basically nothing within most societies.
You need to define what 'done' means.

I try to create some sort of nice image in my head about how it would be if my project is ready. Then I try to recall this image if I see myself tripping off the path. Just to remember myself why I am doing something helps me a lot.

I usually write down the core features. I only allow myself to code something that is not on the list if I earned it by working on something on that list the same day.

Perhaps you should take a look into some parts of the XP (extreme programming) philosophy. One idea is that you work in iterations and that every iteration should produce something usable. In theory you could stop at any point and should have something 'finished'. In theory...
That's your sister? How ice-dancing siblings get around the ick factor
I've been impressed with Codelite (http://codelite.org/) - it's the closest thing I've seen to Visual Studio for linux, and does very nice syntax highlighting and auto-completion.
It's all in the head m8. Volition and longevity are difficult to cultivate, to create something takes patience, focus, and dedication. Start out by starting every morning right - I wake up at 6AM (or earlier), immediately take two hot-cold showers, take adrenal supplements (to help with mid-day drowsiness), eat an apple (every morning) and I meditate.

This simple routine, everyday, has proven to boost my energy and willpower throughout the day and into the near future. It has everything to do with doing something that requires willpower but isn't related to "projects". I've noticed ever since the hot-cold showers that my mettle is considerably more developed.

I highly recommend meditation, that is one of the keys IMHO. It really sharpens your mind - day dreaming is a form of meditation, you don't have to behave like a buddhist monk to meditate. I typically just sit in a comfy chair, close my eyes, and do one of two meditations: either a no-mind meditation (no thought) or a visualization meditation.
The Rush to Save Timbuktu's Crumbling Manuscripts (2008)
Rather than view things from a large project view, set achievable daily goals. Then let yourself feel the satisfaction of succeeding at your goal each day. If you get into this habit, then you'll find that a few months later you've actually created something worth having.

Set small goals, and celebrate success.
I run manybooks.net -- only have good things to say about macminicolo; they're responsive to tech queries, have decent pricing in my experience (and have been very good about switching my plan when bandwidth usage spiked), and I haven't noticed any bottlenecks in their setup. They're also notable, in my experience, for not CAUSING any trouble with my server or the network itself.
One thing to keep in mind is that it's totally normal to have a ton of unfinished experiments and stuff lying around. When you start a new project/experiment write yourself a note in your calendar in, say, 8 months to go look at it. By the time that comes around you'll either be done (and feel good about it) or think to yourself "oh yeah I forgot about that" and at least look through the code to critique it.

As for the not finishing stuff at work... That sounds more like burnout to me. If you aren't passionate about your job start looking for a new one!
Have you ever thought to undertake a psychotherapy?

Don't get me wrong, a lot of people consider this to be something only for "mad" people, but this is not true. When your belly hurts, you go to a doctor. Why not ask to a doctor when something in your head hurts?

Good psychotherapists can work miracles. I have some good friends that got some great benefits from this. They are very smart and absolutely cannot be classified as mad or even disturbed. Just normal people with some personal problems that a good "doctor of the mind" helped untangle and solve.
Oh come on. A blog is a highway to eternal procrastination.
Consider some of the projects you did finish, what about those is different from the ones you don't? Realize that you have the ability to separate your thoughts and feelings about a project from your actions on a project and work on acting in a valued manner (assuming here that finishing the project is of value to you).
While I think you may be right that guilt can motivate, I prefer the idea of being able to finish a project because I want to (rather needing to).

My advice, as others have mentioned, is to start small ("Hello, World!" if you will).
The digital revolution is creating a new reality, methinks, and it behooves a citizen of the times to learn how to get around in both. :)

This is like touting the immense possibilities of a brave new, literate world, but then emphasizing one should brush up on their wet tablet cuneiform skills.

The first part hits the essence of the revolution. The second part is mired in implementation triviality.
I don't know what the reddit crowd will tell you

http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/b4faj/i_need_to_find_o...

but with your CV http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AVHgzAaQYmIOZGdqanFjMjlfMm... , you shouldn't have a problem. Maybe your work does not motivate you or you too much of a perfectionist.

Are you a vegetarian? Maybe you don't have enough energy? My suggestion grub a jug of coffee, order a pizza and post the Project here on Monday.
Odd design, and hard on the eyes.

The entire content of the landing page (other than the menu) is a VeriSign logo? How does that make any sense?

Needs some design work.
I'm proud to say that I've never finished a project. If you're looking for the point in time when you'll say "there, now that project has everything finished", it won't come. Instead, I recommend learning to be satisfied with incompletion, because that's all anything you'll ever do will be.
I first learned about this book from Yegge's blog (back when he was still at amazon) where he wrote:

"We've been studying the available research, and all roads lead to the same set of conclusions, one of which is that Functional Programming is going to be a necessity in this new world. It's a foregone conclusion.

And that, in a roundabout way, brings me to this book by Chris Okasaki. It is absolutely unique. It's the world's first textbook on purely functional data structures — i.e., data structures with no side-effects. I'm not going to explain in this blog why this is such an important topic for Amazon and distributed computing in general, but I will point you to the book in the hopes that you are also interested in finding a solution."

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ten-challenges
The perpetual problem with wheresgeorge.com is the small userbase. Most actively logged bill has only been entered 15 times and the last entry was five years ago.

Bigger userbase + graphs/charts = more fun.
You seem to mean that your projects are never complete because you are always iterating on them and considering improvements.

I think when OP says incomplete, he means that his projects never acquire adequate functionality to be useful within the necessary context, which is kind of the opposite of your problem; you can't stop working on things, and he can't get himself to work on things long enough.
I had a similar problem in the past. I did some soul-searching, and realized that the projects that I undertook were huge, and would take at least a month of work in order to "finish." During this time, it was completely unusable up until the very end. Not having anything to show for hard work was demotivational.

The solution for me was to partition my work into hilariously small pieces. When I start a project from scratch, my first few tasks are "create the directory hierarchy," "create a repository," "Hello World," and "create exception-throwing stubs for the basic functionality." The idea is to finish early and finish often. If you can't commit a working version every day or two, you may be working on chunks that are too large.

It'll even sound better to your boss! Instead of saying, "no, I am not done," you can say, "I finished X,Y,Z, and W, and I am having trouble with S and R."
Yes. Taking on projects that are too big creates a situation like an airplane stalling because the angle of attack is too steep. Better only to take on projects so small that you know you can finish them, however humiliatingly small that may be initially. Then, with always finishing as a given, start to gradually crank up the ambition. But never so sharply that you stall.
I think you're likely a perfectionist or overly-ambitious person.

You need to learn to make a small project that does very little then build on that.

If you have a project you need to get done at work, do it by doing the dirtiest hack possible that gets it done, then improve it in steps while you have time.
No, Windows 7 and Vista always abandon the Superfetch cache before paging out anything else -- this is verified in the comments section. It's the sensible thing to do, since

a. Superfetch data is heuristic and application pages are mostly not.

b. Superfetch data always has a backing store (the actual file on disk), so it's really cheap to forget about it. This may or may not be true for application pages.
"salespeople" have been replaced by "customer reviews". The quality of the information is better because the motivation is no longer "get you to spend as much as possible", but "help others find the products they need, and rely on others to help me find the product I need".

Much of the wrongness of the article is in this same vein. He gave a series of reasons why things didn't exactly, perfectly translate, but failed to recognize how new technologies and new communities would arise to fill in the gaps and improve the user experience. He saw the problems and assumed they wouldn't be fixed, while tech pioneers saw the problems and found ways to fix them (often using technology that was already being demo'd in 1995.)
PleaseRobMe website reveals dangers of social networks
I've long known that in the end, it's the human itself who will heal himself from any illness; not medical doctors, alternative healers, or a particular kind of medicine.

People who don't want to heal simply will not, or at least they'll create a suitable series of different subsequent illnesses. Those who want will heal, possibly through whatever particular enabler they might initially need or simply on their own. There are only few studies of healing miracles, possibly because we really haven't figured out yet why some terminally ill cancer patient with only months left suddenly rids himself of all cancer cells over a mere week.

However, I've now come to the conclusion that it works both ways: the human being can also make himself very sick, up to the level of being dead. This has shifted my focus from healing and curing illnesses -- i.e. fixing the aftermath -- to looking for the answer from the question of why do we get ill in the first place? Why some people almost never get sick? Why some are chronically sick with several illnesses at any given moment? Why these tendencies sometimes change? Why is it that people's lives seem to change in sync with getting chronic illnesses and healing from them?

The validity of the placebo effect kind of fits in logically if we first assume the foremost responsibility of one being healthy or sick to the person himself.
Maybe you're just struggling with perfectionism or with fear of failure. I often find myself doing this when making music. I always try to make everything just like I see/hear it in my head, and if it comes short, I usually just scrap it or leave it. The good recipe for this would be, good is perfect enough. And you need to know when to admit to yourself that this is as best as you can do and move on.
Same thing with programming. I ofter start thinking how would I go about solving a problem elegantly. If this takes too much time, I just go with a 'ugly' solution. I have to, or I wouldn't get much done.
I'm probably going to rig up a colocated Mac Mini to do exactly the same thing. I asked around on Twitter if other people were interested in chipping in to share the service and people were keen.

There's a business opportunity here. The existing screenshot services are mostly slow (I want my imgs within a minute, ideally - not 10+), hideous quality or use browsers on operating systems with shoddy rendering.

As it is, I think I can max out a Mac Mini to producing around 500-700k screenshots a day and lease a Mac Mini with the required hosting for ~$130 a month, so the costs divide down quite nicely.
There have been a number of predictive clangers from people considered luminaries in the field of technology. Stuff like "we'll never need more that 640K of RAM". Humans have been doing this for centuries, and we'll continue to do it. While we're more advanced now than we've ever been, we're yet to think of our best ideas. I like the fact that we'll able to look back in another fifteen years and go "...didn't see THAT one coming".
I'm looking into getting a Mac Mini for some screenshot production and iWeb is offering them with 1500GB for ~$120 a month. That includes the actual machine though, so isn't colo exactly.
I'm the Program Director for one of the accelerators on the list and @jkaljundi's advice is spot on. The only thing I would add would be to seek out alums of the various programs to get a feel for how each one works. They all have distinctive personalities, find one that suits you well.
it's not that weird, you're just having a cognitive bias. it's probably pulling it from the keywords 'how to'.

also, I don't believe this belongs here on HN.
To be fair, now, fifteen years later, the hardware to make that reasonable is only just appearing. The vast majority of people has still never bought an ebook.
People aren't black and white but you might just be a starter instead of a finisher.

Some people are really good at starting and creating new projects up until they get the guts of the project right and then gradually lose interest.

Other people can't really come up with anything by themselves but given a start, will gladly work to finish it and become experts while at it.
Thanks, that looks much better -- they do colo too, and with a year contract they appear to offer for $44/mo what macminicolo wants $155/mo for. (500G transfer.)
It sounds like you have side projects, not products.

Have any of your unfinished projects actually been good products? It's one thing to have a side project and play with a new technology over the weekend- that's cool, but it isn't a product. It's like when people post 'Ask HN: Review my startup!" and it's some twitter app they threw together in a weekend. That's not a product, it's a side project. Side projects can turn into products over time, but it's usually a tough transition.

A product has to be marketed. A product has to have you communicating with customers. A product needs a price.
In that situation, you have two choices: Aggressively refactor until it is actually manageable, which I find fun as long as it's not the only thing I'm doing all the time, or find a new job. I am serious about both choices and am not surreptitiously claiming one or the other is the only choice.
I have been thinking about this too.

Mental problems are maligned and taboo, but a lot of the time, all we really need is someone to talk to. Someone who understands what we are getting at. You might be surrounded all day by people, by colleagues, girlfriends, maybe even kids, but none of them capable of having the type of conversation you need.

The longer I live the less I respect the popular stigmatisations that prevent me from going the simple, obvious way to get what I need - buy it from someone qualified and willing to provide it. A psychotherapist might well be a good means to an end. Who gives a shit, if you end up getting the results you want.

Draw your own conclusions about which other urgent "blocking" requirements, in need of quick solutions, this principle can be applied to.
What is the advantage over a VPS?
I have to agree here. I'll project some of my own history which seems likely to be similar to your situation.

You might have some insecurities regarding your skills or abilities that cause you to avoid getting a project far enough along to prove those fears right (or wrong).
If this is the case, the fears conflict with your passion for creating things and cause you stress and unhappiness. Reaching out on this forum for help is a start, but a good psychotherapist can help you figure out how to see these fears when they are hiding in your psyche and give you tools to overcome them.