skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the AP story has been replaced on more than one site.

Search for

MARYCLAIRE DALE FBI probing Pa. school webcam spy case

and you'll find a copy of the original one (MARYCLAIRE DALE is the author; fortunately my outbox has an email I sent to some friends that quoted some of the article).

Right now this works: http://www.physorg.com/news185826013.html
The latest post on zenhabits is about bringing things to completion: http://zenhabits.net/2010/02/completion-principles/
I agree with you. Nevertheless, I do understand your point based on my own experience. It would be nice, if you would provide examples, though.
I could have written your post a year ago. I realized I needed to tackle this issue because it was affecting me both personally and professionally. The first thing to realize is that not all projects warrant finishing. I think a project is worth doing if it falls into one or more of these three categories:

1. It pays the bills.

2. It's fun.

3. It's essential to your health and well-being.

You need to make a living and have fun, but even those should not interfere with your personal welfare. Don't be afraid to let your interests lead you to a more satisfying career path, even if that means leaving the work behind for someone else to finish (or not). And no matter what you do, don't neglect your physical health, because you'll need it to truly enjoy any of your long-term gains.

Also learn to say "No" to others and yourself. Some people accumulate projects like three-legged chairs on trash day. Is it really worth the time and effort? You can't solve everyone's problems and you've discovered that hoarding just clutters up your life. If you're going to dumpster-dive for projects, stick to bright shiny things, stuff that tastes good, or anything that brings easy cash at the pawn shop (metaphorically speaking). Most of the other junk in there is just that: ideas not worth keeping.
There's more to starting a project than dreaming up new features. Yes, starting a project actually takes work.

You're right, everyone loves dreaming up new ideas. However, people who can put those dreams into motion are rare. I'd honestly hire a person who can start a project before putting it off onto some poor slob before I hire the poor slob. Why? Because poor slobs are incredibly easy to find. Starters aren't.
He could read the available documentation and literature. This is not some grand secret. This feature has been around in Vista for years, there's no excuse for this level of ignorance. It's just laziness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windo...

Better yet, the same article circa Feb. 2007:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Technical_features...
You are entirely correct. None of the content I am writing can hold true meaning until I have made it. All of the writing at this point is purely my opinions on what I observe and the process that I am going through.
Just bought this book in hardcover last month; I can't recommend it enough.

Be sure to also check out Chris Okasaki's functional programming blog: http://okasaki.blogspot.com/
The referenced article has been changed by the AP; look here for how to get the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139404
Metadata is not the new black, companies have been using metadata for ages.
What the author is looking for are personalized algorithms (also not the new black). The metadata itself only gets these companies so far. Pandora's metadata helps the process of recommendations, but it is actually the user input which is the refining element in the process which makes the playlists somewhat successful.
That's simply not true. Psychology is based on evidence. The problem is that the human mind is a lot more difficult to understand than the stomach. As such, a good psychologist is a man with one eye in the land of the blind so to speak.
The facts that Flash performs just as poorly on Linux as on OS X, and far worse on a fast PowerPC (youtube is painfully choppy on a G5 Quad) than a slow x86 (youtube is tolerable on an Atom) suggest explanations that differ from the Adobe party line.
Perfect Female Body Shape Tips & Ideal Body Measurements and Body Weight
Note, this isn't the book, it's his thesis. The book (which is great) expands upon it.

FWIW, its code is in SML, with some Haskell translations in the appendix. I haven't used SML, but know OCaml, and haven't had any problems reading it.
Ask HN: what happened to Mightyreach?
Weren't they supposed to launch last summer?
People want tools to solve problems, really to address their pains in life. These can include being bored and wanting to have some fun (hence Farmville), keeping in contact with people, managing their money, doing heir work, etc.

Most people are motivated enough to learn what they need to to address their pains and very little beyond that, partially because there is so much vying for our time and attention.

I know computers, but I don't know cars yet I drive because it addresses many of my needs. I know mostly as much about a car as I need to. Learning more about it does not satisfy other needs of mine (I don't find them interesting, so they don't satisfy my curiosity needs). I would sound as stupid answering car questions as the NYC people on the street did answering Browser questions.

So, do I need to learn more about cars or do computers need to work right for people who don't understand them?
There are many things that had changed in the last 60 years. Trying to tell that the reason behind those changes was differences in power elite is quite shallow and not correct at all.
There are two ways to look at your situation. You might actually have a real flaw that is causing you to get discouraged and fail to complete things. This can be caused by a lot of things like depression, stress etc. The alternative is that not completing things is just your personality, because you are easily distracted by new ideas, so you never follow through. This is my personal problem, and I have found it quite difficult to overcome. My solution is to find someone who will work with me to keep me thinking about the project at hand, or finding a position where this type of instability is valued. According to the MBTI test, I am type ENTP, which seems to describe my behavior. I suspect you may be similar.
I got only one thing to say, but it's the simplest and most powerful concept I have ever learnt: If you have 4 things to do, and you do them one after the other, you will be fastest than if you do them all at the same time.

If each task takes 1 day to do, and you do all at once, you will deliver all in 4 days. If you do them one after the other, task 1 is done on day 1, task 2 on day 2, task 3 on day 3 and last task on day 4. So 3 of 4 tasks are delivered ahead of schedule.
I don't see how the fact that other developers aren't complaining is proof that hardware acceleration is not useful. There is a full spectrum of how much access you allow browser plugins and client-side code to features of the underlying OS and hardware. Apple has chosen a relatively conservative point along that spectrum, Microsoft chose a more aggressive one (ActiveX). There is an obvious tradeoff between capabilities/performance and security. Google, with its Native Client sandbox, static analysis tools, etc. is attempting to get the performance of ActiveX with the security of more stringent sandboxes. This is an extraordinarily difficult problem, and Apple is justified in not wanting to deal with it. However, they are not justified in saying they're not leaving performance on the table.

Adobe should be able to improve H.264 decode performance without HW acceleration, but it is unclear what the upper bound is on performance when running inside the browser sandbox. Certainly it can do no better than a native app.

EDIT: wmf is probably right; though there is no browser-specific sandbox that prevents third-party browsers from allowing plugins access to underlying OS APIs, such an API for HW-accelerated video decoding doesn't exist. It's unclear to me if acceleration is just not supported by the driver at all, or if the capability is only exposed via a private API, reserving it for first-party apps like Quicktime. Certainly many of the GPUs included in Apple products support hardware acceleration, so it seems to be primarily a software issue.
Exactly. The internet is a complement to, not a replacement for, face-to-face contact.

See also: that little known and rarely used technology, the telephone.
"Lastly, does anyone really think it would be a good idea for web content plugins to have direct access to graphics card hardware?" As if there's no secure way to allow it access? Of course there is, and it should have that access if it means the difference between being able to stream video from the web well or not.

I'm not clicking links to anymore of this guy's posts. He's the very definition of a mouthpiece. Nearly every post of his are bad rationalizations for Apple's policies.
I have the same problem as the OP: I think about cool things to build, look around to see if the different parts are technically possible, build prototypes for some of the parts and never actually put everything together in a working package. Once I know that this is possible, I tend to lose interest.

So, recently, I've tried to change my mindset to what you describe and build something small, useful to me, and that I can finish fast enough that I don't have time to lose interest. And I have a few other bite-sized ideas to do once I'm done with that. (my current tiny project: http://logmeoutthx.com/ I'm not so much interested in the thing itself as in completing it)
RDF Semantic web research isn't working
I think you're most likely subject to some kind of procrastination. I call this and similar phenomenons "brain bugs".

A common pattern in that area: not finishing a project avoids any confirmation that the idea itself was bad, because the idea is not really unvalidated, as the execution isn't complete.

Any way to reinforce the inner confidence is helpful here. In my case, non-violent communication (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1892005034) has been very helpful to understand the inners of procrastination.

Understanding "brain bugs" as I call them is a fascinating and rewarding road :)
"People who need constant positive feedback to keep moving forward don't get very far in real situations"

As to this statement... I'm a person that strives when receiving constant positive feedback. My way of addressing this, since the real world doesn't often provide it, is to provide it for myself. For instance, I had to read 2 chapters in my Number Theory book today. I told myself that after each chapter I would let myself read HN for 15 minutes. Now there is positive reinforcement.

Another trick that helps me stay focused is to make lists. I find joy in the simple act of crossing an item off a list.

So to finish a project break it down into simple concrete tasks, and come up with some sort of simple reward for each task finished. Make sure though that your definition of success is actually achievable and dependent on factors you control. After this, get to it, and finish that project!
The idea is that you'd probably trust the guy who actually sold 1,000 dresses to Macys more than the guy who just says they're a great dress manufacturer.
He's CTO of a technology company, and should have this stuff down cold. No pass.
I don't think OS X has any browser plugin sandbox. The issue is not that browser plugins are denied access to the H.264 API for security reasons; there is no public H.264 API.

Edit: There is a private H.264 API that is used by QuickTime.
As if there's no secure way to allow it access? Of course there is, and it should have that access if it means the difference between being able to stream video from the web well or not.

A safe, high level API exists: QTKit. Adobe wants direct access, so they've ignored this totally. Whether it makes sense to give hardware control to a piece of software notorious for instability and resource consumption is a judgment call, but it seems a pretty clear one.
I don't think "technical" vs "nontechnical" is quite the right dichotomy. Perhaps "familiar with our conventions" vs "not" is a better distinction. Usually when we say someone is tech savvy, what we mean is that they are familiar with our iconography and vocabulary, and know or can guess at the magical keystrokes or settings to make the software work the way they want it to. They may actually be technical users, or they may simply be "normals" with experience.

An example: a friend was heading up the alpha test team for Sid Meier's Civilization IV, and invited me to join. I was the only tester without previous Civ experience. At one point I expressed my frustration with not being able to view certain information except when the game popped it up. The other testers and devs were surprised that I didn't know to press F5 through F9 to bring up that information. The devs added buttons for those screens to the GUI in the very next release, with clear icons and helpful mouseover text, and my user experience was much improved.

Point being, the thing that gave me trouble wasn't being "non-technical", but inexperienced with the particular conventions being used. The challenge in UI design is to figure out conventions that both experienced and new users will be able to understand, and to replace conventions that new users struggle with. The only useful piece of advice I have is to make sure you have some testers who can compare your product to others like it, and other testers who have never used anything of the sort, so that you can see what conventions people from each camp struggle with.
I had a similar problem. The cause was simple: New projects are fun. After a while any project becomes boring and we find ourselves longing for something more interesting to work on. Our minds are good at rationalizing away unpleasantries.

The solution is also simple: Just do it. Treat it like a job. Understand that it's not going to be fun. Passion burns brightly and then fades away. You're going to need to make a schedule -- a routine you can build your life around. Work on the project for, say, three hours a day. Then it's just a matter of grinding out the weeks and months until your done.
There is no denying that Gruber is a Mac pundit. Just like a political pundit that means rationalizing and cheering whatever decision the mothership makes, with little insider information. The thing is that whether you agree with him or not Gruber firmly has his fingers on the pulse of Apple.
true.Daring Fireball seems more and more like from Steve Jobs irrational marketing strategy mouth. Does this guy even realize what hardware acceleration is and why its used, and how flash content is more useful with full hardware acceleration. Next time would just ignore this guy
Personally, when I am working on a project, I find it is easy to lose my way when I reach the point of knowing I am capable of finishing it -- even if still in planning. It interests me more to know that I could do it than actually proving it to others by completing the project.

I find it useful to examine what is left of the project and, GTD style, break it down into next action steps. With the remaining tasks broken down as small as possible, I find it easier to stay focused and knock things out. As others have mentioned, the motivation at this point is often social; I don't want to seem uncapable to others.
this is a very good suggestion, and for all you know, it might turn out (for example) that the crux of the issue is something like mild adhd, and half the challenge with such issues is being aware of them so that they can be managed
Isn't this just a good argument for event-based programming ala Twisted or Node.js, to avoid the system thread overheads altogether?

It seems to me that programming with event-based frameworks like Node.js is much less fraught with peril, confusion, and error.

(Having written a couple of small but complete (bare iron) real-time, thread/process-based operating systems (and applications for them) for workstation-class CPUs back in the 80's, I'm highly aware of the peril and confusion possible. ;-)
> Encyclopedias did really well until Wikipedia came along. Encarta was the first sign of trouble, but Wikipedia was the nail in the coffin.

This is incidental to your comment, but I think your details are wrong in this example.

Multimedia digital encyclopedias replaced physical encyclopedias long before Wikipedia came along, in fact throughout the 80s and early 90s it is a pretty safe bet that encylopedias on CD-ROM and later DVD significantly outsold the dead-tree versions, and by the mid-90s the major brands (at least in the US) already had online versions as well.

Encarta (which was initially a rebranded Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia) was just one example, and a later one at that, of many encyclopedias that were transitioning from print to digital. Encarta doesn't represent some kind of paradigm shift in the encyclopedia business, just a large company snatching up a small player in a market they were trying to penetrate. Interestingly enough, Encarta has ceased production, while World Book, Encyclopedia Britannica and others are still in business and presumably profitable (for now).

Wikipedia was and continues to be a threat to "traditional" encyclpedias, but not because they didn't anticipate a transition from physical to digital publication.
yeah why does Flash run so poorly on my 166Mhz P1. Crappy s/w right.
Yeah its become fancy to criticize Adobe and flash, for everything.
Apple’s own QuickTime on Snow Leopard only makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don’t have that graphics card in your Mac, you don’t get H.264 hardware acceleration, period.

Seems very surprising if H264 hardware accel is not also supported by the 9600M GT (which is an upgrade on some models of the MBP).
Don't work on anything open source then. How can one stop another person from using open source to oppress people?
I thought he said the reason Linux performance was better was because the locks were better?
I subscribe that at least part of the 'problem' is Adobe's (previously Macromedia's) attention to the Mac. Flash has always been subpar, and I'm not alone in that the majority of apps that crash Flash is the root problem. If Adobe would step up their game it would probably go a long way, but they may have already blown their chance. Jobs does not like that Safari crashes unexpectedly, especially cause the layman user doesn't realize it was really the Flash plugin.
The notes from this speech don't do Charlie Munger justice. Read the book: its like the speech but coherent and comprehensive.
The Day I Broke Production
I am very skeptical of these state sponsored technology ventures. Consider the "Quaero" project, which was a joint venture between France and Germany to develop a search engine that rivaled Google. Among other issues, the two countries could never agree on the overall direction for the project; should Quaero focus on text-based search or multi-media search? As expected, after several years of development the two countries ceased cooperating and now France is apparently pushing forward with the project on its own.

With private enterprise (particularly new ventures), the central concern must be on creating value for customers and subsequently capturing some of this value. When government gets involved, the customer always takes a back seat to politics. This doesn't make for a successful venture.
yup, i didn't want to get into a long extended explanation. My logic is this: physical encyclopedias are toast. What do we use instead of them more often and most recently? Wikipedia. Encarta and the like certainly came beforehand to do this.
I have the same problem. The only thing I have found that actually works is to not let myself start another project until I finish the current one. When I need a change I can do general maintenance or read in something, but no new projects. When I can keep to this it works.
Coworking gets a home page
No.

Water can poison and kill you at a large enough dosage. Oxygen too. Treating cancer with homeopathy is harmless until the cancer kills you. All medicine (supported by science or not) carries some risk, the poison is in the dosage.

Woo practitioners are more than happy to bankrupt their victims, what's the harm?

A Milwaukee girl died of diabetes recently, her parents were trying to cure her with prayer.
Adobe ignored OS X for years and is now finding themselves in a position where they're losing a hold on Flash as the 'standard' for online video. Rather than fixing the technical issues they're focused on marketing. The last 3 years of iPhone sales have proven that people can live without Flash. All Apple has to do now is continue to ignore them and hold their ground while Flash slowly fades away.
I had the same problem, a professor at my arts college cured it by offering the following perspective: "You don't finish a painting. You give up improving it."

It's a trade-off: time v possible improvement.

Also in a talk about Pixar's working process, Ed Catmull tells a little bit about how they deal with it. They show results daily to the team.

Here is the link to HN-discussion re the video:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026628
Agreed! In fact, it seems an obsession with obfuscation and esoteric syntax. When he gets to any real principles of software engineering (scale, reliability, etc.) he admittedly falls short. Cool, though, eh?
Yes, in many cases it's just a matter of discovering and learning to turn around bad mental habits, not a matter of mad or disturbed.

(Though "madness" can be seen as the limiting condition of bad mental habits.)

We're all clearly disturbed in some way or other, some worse than others, and it's a matter of finding help in functioning in spite of bad mental structures, and learning how to work with/around them, eventually perhaps overcoming them.
Before recorded music, people just played music for fun, or were mainly employed by very rich people to play music.

If we go back to that, I don't think music as such will suffer. People create music mainly because it's fun, not because they want to be rich.

You certainly do get live bands in good pubs. Find a better pub.

And yes, I think creating music is far far easier than creating a movie or a modern game, where you have to organize music, lighting, casting, voices, graphics, gameplay, camerwork etc etc
Social bookmarking on highway
If Adobe wants access to h264 acceleration, use the QuickTime libraries.

In fact, why isn't Adobe using QTKit? Why are they rolling out their own appalling h264 implementation?
Probably because the rate of fixes to Apple bundled open source software lags behind the official source by a more than he is willing to wait. The version of apache on my 10.6 is 2.2.13 while the official version is 2.2.14(released 10-2009) which introduces bug and security fixes.
I know a 60 year old man with a 150ish IQ who owns nothing, is $4,000 in debt for a van, and hasn't worked in 20 years. He has tons of crazy pipe dreams and ambitions to be great, but he doesn't work towards them at all. Diligence > Intelligence.

I know a lawyer of 16 years with a 145 IQ who is still making 55K a year. Ambition and diligence go hand in hand. She got the job right out of college and grew complacent, and now rarely attempts to find a better position somewhere else. Starting her own firm is almost certainly not going to happen. Other than diligence, lack of courage is also an issue there. Quitting your job and trying to build a clientele is scary.

I also know a very bright lady who cleans motels because she can't deal with people and just doesn't like working that hard. She works a few hours a day, at three separate places, with long breaks in between. She probably knows more about computers than I do; she's been manipulating them since before I was born, but she hates pressure, she hates deadlines, and she lacks confidence.

Trying to list all the unpublished author-hopefuls I know who just stopped submitting stuff would be an exercise in futility.