skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, you have to make sure you have definite and achievable goals. And you need to break down the long-range goals into short-range goals.

Second, you need to make sure that you're working on projects that are actually worthwhile. It's no sin to stop working on a project if it's not worth it, you need to make sure you prioritize which projects are actually worth getting done.

Third, you need to av~ ooo, a shiny, I'll finish this later
> 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.

Evidence seems to be strongly indicating that it is not necessary, unless you're Adobe and you need someone to blame for years of neglect.

Also, as pointed out all over the place, it hardly amounts to an excuse for everything else that Flash does that isn't related to h.264.

> Nearly every post of his are bad rationalizations for Apple's policies.

Hard to argue that a browser plugin should have direct GPU access when it clearly doesn't need it.

Also note that Gruber is an Apple pundit and obviously a fan of the company, but he has also been very critical of them in areas (eg, App Store policies).
Adobe claims there's a mismatch between QTKit and Flash Player's rendering model, so using QTKit would either introduce more overhead or require a re-architecture of Flash Player.
Your account is new so I'm going to give you some advice: generally people on Hacker News have a reasonably high technical baseline and it would do you well to assume so. For example, a number of FFmpeg and x264 developers frequent the site and we have a pretty good idea of how video decoding works.
I disagree.

People used to play music themselves, in their houses, or at the local pub.

That, for me, is much more vibrant and fun than listening to a CD.

Again, I don't think you can compare to plays/film. People don't act out plays in the local pub. But people do take their instruments and play music.
I am also in the beta, but I am not as impressed as you are. Yes, its a good game and I will play it, but it is definitely not 10 years in the making good. The latest command and conquer's ( kanes wrath, etc. ) feel just as polished on the graphics and gameplay.

Another part that bugs me is that so much of the essence of the original starcraft is gone. Only a fraction of the original units remain and it just feels like I might as well be playing cc3.
First ask yourself: why is finishing so important? You only need to "finish" if there's positive utility from finishing. If you're just working on some project for fun, and you've already learned a lot from it and have no real gain from finishing it, why bother? The important thing is to not let yourself quit when there is more utility in finishing than stopping. That would be a problem, but don't berate yourself to finish things for the sake of finishing. Just be constantly self-critical/introspective and aware of the possible outcomes and their expected utility, and be honest with yourself about your reasons for "quitting" or "finishing".
How does Perian handle it?
For 4-cores CPU running 64-bit Linux with Python 2.6:

* single-threaded: 7.6s
* two threads: 8.8s
* 4 threads: 9.14s
* 4 processes (via multiprocessing) 2.0s

Overhead is ~16-20% (5% for multiprocessing)

#!/usr/bin/env python

from threading import Thread
from multiprocessing import Process

def countdown(n):
while n > 0:
n -= 1

COUNT = 100000000

def run_once():
countdown(COUNT)

def run_with_threads(nthreads, make_thread=Process):
threads = [make_thread(target=countdown, args=(COUNT//nthreads,))
for _ in range(nthreads)]

for t in threads:
t.start()
for t in threads:
t.join()
Thomas Edison: 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
And how can anyone stop someone from using proprietary software to oppress someone else? Do you really believe that if Oracle decides they won't sell Peoplesoft licenses to, say, General Zod, that would create as much as a minor inconvenience?

License terms only work when all parts agree they have to respect them.
My kingdom for gCal to be available offline in Chrome on Ubuntu-64! Hopefully this will be a step towards that.
“You’re one simple step from…” Don’t sweat it Silverlight, I was just leaving
This advice is simply from personal experience and doesn't come from a book or article posted elsewhere:

There is a reason human beings gravitate towards one another. We are not meant to live, work, or play alone (though some people are better at it then others). I would suggest taking a look at how you are approaching projects from the get go. Are you tackling everything worthy of being called a "project" all by yourself?

You mentioned you have a track record of shame that forces you to seek help. Why are you waiting until everything is falling apart to ask for help? Have you ever tried asking someone to help you out with a project from the beginning? I don't think there has ever been a circumstance in my life where someone has asked me for help or I have asked someone else for help and the answer has been, "no".

That's my 20,000 feet view at what I imagine might be your issue based on the very small information I know about you. You could also look into some of the other character traits that people who DO finish projects have:

Organization: Are you organized? Do you stay organized throughout the project or blow your load for the first week and everything is essentially in shambles the rest of the project lifecycle?

Planning: This is in many cases one in the same as organization, but do you plan before hand? Do you turn that planning into a list or tasks, milestones, or any other form of breaking something big down into a bunch of smaller and easier to obtain tasks?

Focus: Do you over extend yourself or do you focus on one thing at a time? Again, this is very closely related to organization and planning. I've often taken on too many projects and the results are never good; things are rushed, quality lessens, and every now and then a deadline is even missed.

Communication: Do you talk to everyone involved in the project throughout the project lifecycle? Do you set realistic expectations? How in the know is everyone involved in the project other then you? Is your process transparent to everyone else working around you? I'd highly suggest at least doing one small thing if you change nothing about your process: Pick one person at the beginning of your project, it doesn't matter who they are (in some cases this person is your boss and expects this of you anyway), and decide you are going to update them every day/week/whatever on how you are doing with said project. Even if it's a friend, it doesn't matter, the process of doing this will really help you keep things together. It almost turns into project management therapy.

At the end of the day however, while all of these things are great to focus on and improve on, you can't do any of this alone. People are not weak for asking for help, they are stronger, and personally I respect them much more then the lone warrior who is either too scared or too cocky to ask for help.
Couple gets married inside an Apple Store [video]
The Olympics should be as open as possible. There has to be some sort of monetary deal between Microsoft and NBC. This really could have been a great time to push HTML5.
The rest of the site is moribund and on its way to being updated. Thanks for the feedback, though; I may back off on the flippant tone. (Or I may jack it up even further.)
I'm an Average User and I Don't Care.
AFAIK Perian doesn't use hardware decoding either. Also, Perian isn't bound by the weird Flash rendering model.

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different...
Edison also had teams of people working for him, to do the laborious tasks, a strategy the OP might want to... employ ;)
and far worse on a fast PowerPC

This is because Mainconcept's H.264 decoder doesn't have Altivec optimizations, only x86 SIMD. The VP6 and FLV decoders, as far as I know, do have Altivec, probably because back when they were released, PowerPC was a significant market.
Adobe's inattention to the Mac extends far beyond flash.

All their applications now basically use a cross-platform UI that mocks both Mac OS and Windows conventions, and defines their own bizarre little world. (Flash is just more of the same.)

Their Mac updater software is a Byzantine nightmare.

I could go on. Just read some of the irate Mac users' commentary on John Nack's blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/ .
I live in a 2 bedroom apartment and drive a Corolla. Thomas Friedman lives here: http://17.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr4dmdT1gb1qa45fzo1_500.gi...

When Friedman's carbon footprint comes down to within an order of magnitude of my own then I'll consider what he has to say about the dangers of CO2 emissions to the world. Until then, I'll consider him just another blow hard who enjoys feeling important about himself, can't resist telling the rest of the world how to live, and doesn't even appear to take his own words seriously.
Actually they are fixing Flash, although that doesn't excuse Doing It Wrong for all those years.

http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
Vote in the Mozilla Home Tab Design Challenge
Well then, I guess they need to re-architect some of Flash Player. They've had more than three years to get this figured out.
I saw the same message when attempting to view a video on NBC's Olympics site. After grudgingly installing Silverlight I was still unable to watch anything. The videos require Silverlight 2 or 3, neither of which is supported on a PowerPC mac.
this is awesome news, the introduction of gears always worried my as it looked to be fighting web standards as opposed to leveraging them, nice to be proved wrong.

I wonder why gears wasnt initially a plugin that let you use html5 apis in browsers that didnt have support?
Why I’ve Fallen in Love with the Nexus One
Should Flash Player be a kernel extension, so that it can ensure it gets plenty of CPU cycles and have direct access to whatever hardware it wants?

Yes, that way developers code for the proprietary platform Flash, and Apple joins all the other PC manufacturers in making commodity hardware with little differentiation except styling.
I've found that I'm much more likely to complete and succeed at a given task by creating very specific goals for myself, and breaking down my goals into specific tasks. It's the same concept that I do in building software writing out stories for each feature, etc, but applied to myself.

For example, I have a specific goal to read 3 chapters in Godel, Escher, Bach every month until I finish the book. I'm also challenging myself in other areas of my life, like eating, running and biking, etc.

Most importantly, though, is that my goals are all very short-term: most of my goals are in 1 month chunks, but some are in 1 week chunks. Only very few are more, and they usually are broken up into sub-goals with 1 month chunks or less.

At my work, we like to create goals and tasks that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.

There's no way you'll finish something if you don't know how to get to the end, how long it will take you, how much effort it will require, and how it will look when you get there.
I don't understand why they are trying to push 2 proprietary formats on us. You think they would at least try to stick with just one if they weren't going to go with HTML5.
Re C codebases: time spent fixing bugs and refactoring is time not spent putting in new features and selling new releases. It's a trade-off, and perfectly manageable code is at one end, unfortunately. Re builds: such things as I described aren't really refactorable without introducing the coupling / brittleness thing I talked about, as linkages need to be maintained between source-code level constructs in a handful of different languages.

But these kinds of jobs can have their upsides...
"I'm not clicking links to anymore of this guy's posts. He's the very definition of a mouthpiece."

In my opinion, you'd be making a mistake. John Gruber offers the highest quality commentary on Apple related topics of anyone (maybe matched by John Siracusa). He doesn't always take a pro-Apple line - he's been a very strong critic of the App Store acceptance process, for example.
Isn't there already a big tie in the form of MSNBC? Or has that been dissolved?
How many people actually care about URLs? At work I help with a drupal site and by default the URLs are going to be something like node/123 or even index.php?n=123 but some people freak about that and insist on "friendly" URLs. I ask "who types in URLs anyway" (other than the site root itself, maybe). People either bookmark them or are linked to them.

Is this another "techie" blinder of mine? Am I wrong to think that the "average user" cares at all about what the URL looks like?
Microsoft finally overhauls Windows Mobile, looks good
Microsoft Corporation today unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series, the operating system that will power the next generation Windows Mobile handsets.
At the risk of being accused of "cheating", I recommend attention
medication. I am very smart, and did exceptionally well in school, but
found myself unable to take even "start small" tasks to completion when not
faced with an absolute, completely immutable deadline (and even then, I
still handed in papers days late). I tried methods found in books, tried
adjusting diet and routine, tried altering workplaces, went as far as
trying to do work without an internet connection (!) -- nothing.

This had nothing to do with motivation. I believed strongly in open source software, and loved to code small projects, but never finished anything. I enjoyed writing, and tried no less than 5 times to start a blog. I started building electronic circuits like headphone amplifiers but abandoned them halfway through soldering. No matter how much I wanted or tried to get stuff done, it just wouldn't happen.

A year and a half ago I started taking Vyvanse, which is essentially a
slow-release amphetamine salt compound. Since then, I've completed an
excellent and productive internship at Apple, shipped two major releases of
Quod Libet (an open-source music library application), and am actually
making progress on a sprawling thesis, three things I would never have
imagined being able to do before. I've even seen a difference socially (I can
have conversations that are important to others but meaningless to me without getting bored) and emotionally (I no longer
feel like a failure or a waste of potential).

Other people have posted many great suggestions, and by all means, try
them. But also talk to a qualified psychiatrist that you trust.
What's the problem really? I just installed Silverlight instead on whining about it.
If you only pick tools that everyone else knows so your hiring pool is large, then new tools never stand a chance of being used. You would stagnate all progress in the industry!

It's funny because when Paul Graham writes articles about how the web lets us use whatever language we want (see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html), everyone celebrates the possibilities of writing their web site in their favorite lisp dialect. Yet here we have this evil engineer who picks a technology he likes, successfully improves a product and meets business requirements with it, and is ridiculed for picking a relatively obscure technology!

Check out tiobe. I wouldn't be surprised if in a year Scala passes the combination of all lisp/scheme dialects in the rankings.
I experience the same symptoms. When I get over a difficult hurdle, and realize that successful completion is a 'formality' a wave of pleasure envelops my brain and I stop working.
This could very well kill the iphone...why? because Apple is marketing the iphone has a gaming device, yet Microsoft will probably release killer mobile XBOX games...Microsoft OWNS XBOX! Apple doesn't own no gaming console (and don't tell me the mac is a gaming machine)
Silverlight does perform significantly better than Flash.
The Olympics is one big commercial venture, and has been for some time: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/markets/article-23807728-why-p...

Not to say that it /shouldn't/ be as open as possible, just that it isn't.
Adobe's inability to write code that lasts more than a month between exploits makes me more than happy to use Silverlight for streaming media.
I was enthusiastically commenting on a healthy niche market and then I used a metaphor point out that it's not just a hobby or a toy that these people are working on. It's a sophisticated tool that interfaces with the outside world much like CNC, which happens to be my area of interest.
Smooth Streaming...seriously, I have never met a single objective person who did not recognize the Silverlight HD streaming solution to be superior to Flash. I will take quality over adoption of an unfinished HTML spec.
Because I actually care about what stuff companies try to install on my computer.
Six ways to build robots that do humans no harm
Wow, a snarky, content-free one-liner like this would've been voted down to the bottom in the old days.
Were those apis set in stone in 2007 when Gears first came out?
You are not NBC's customer; Microsoft is. I am sure that Microsoft paid a lot of money for this, and it was money well spent.

This is a trend that's only going to continue. I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft sponsor another major video website like Hulu to get Silverlight installed on more computers. I think in a few years Adobe may have to resort to paying to get the Flash plugin installed.
The Rado Ceramica and Movado Valor watches are the least obtrusive watches I own. Both have the added benefit of being extremely durable (I'm tough on watches). They still get in the way a bit, though.

Maybe you need a ring watch. This one is interesting...
http://www.nova68.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&...

But I'd prefer the Pooh watch...
http://www.whattimeizit.com/servlet/the-1/winnie-the-pooh-ri...
And you have FLASH installed?

But seriously, me too. And I know EXACTLY what Silverlight is and I am OK to have it installed on my computer. Lightweight, fast, not very useful but... in this case it has an use: me watching the damn Olympic vids.
That was pretty cool, but I kept skipping forward 30 seconds, to see all of the effects without taking 10 minutes.

I really enjoy spending time at the shooting range (yeah, it is an Arizona thing :-), so the video gave me an interesting perspective.
A review of PHP compilers and their outputs
It was an 80's mainframe. I doubt power saving was one concern. We had folks typing forms in data-entry terminals 24x7 generating the tapes that were then fed to the bigger machine.

But you have an interesting idea. I wonder if there is any OS that changes memory distribution and allocation strategy according to desired power consumption on, say, portable computers.

The Linux kernel supports, IIRC, plug-and-play memory and processors and it could, conceivably (it it doesn't already) power up and down unused parts of the machine in order to reduce power consumption and heat dissipation. Even reads and writes to and from memory could be grouped in bursts if that could save power.

For instance, right now my running applications are within half of the memory, both cores are running slowly and the ethernet interface is disconnected. One memory module, one core and a network interface could be powered off without perceivable performance degradation. Also, as much data could be cached in the remaining memory so the disk could be powered down too or, and that would be interesting, spun at a lower speed.

Lots of interesting ideas in one lazy saturday afternoon. That's what I like in HN. :-)
While David had dismissed CPU affinity because of the potential of other threads in the stack not benefitting from additional cores, I wanted to test and see what impact it would have. Granted these are single run #'s on linux, but it's interesting to see that even a single thread adds minor overhead.

Code:

http://gmr.privatepaste.com/7ee226e690

Single call of the function:

gmr@binti ~ $ ./test.sh
real	0m10.840s
user	0m10.824s
sys	0m0.008s

With Processor Affinity on Single CPU:

gmr@binti ~ $ taskset 01 ./test.sh
real	0m11.210s
user	0m11.207s
sys	0m0.004s

Without Processor Affinity:

gmr@binti ~ $ ./test.sh
real	0m14.389s
user	0m12.488s
sys	0m3.789s
Another geek complaining about non-standard plug-ins. I really wish HN had categories so I could filter out repetitive rants.

If the author didn't install Silverlight and watched the video he wanted, that is pure ideology borderline religion and I can't feel any sympathy for him.

Sorry but I'm not a militant ideologist. I'm all about pragmatism and net value. If I have to install a non-intrusive plugin in order to watch a video, so be it.
I performed a little experiment on my MacBook (Core 2 Duo, no hardware acceleration). With flash, rendering 720p h264 routinely eats 100% of the cycles on one of my cores. That same video eats 10-20% in QuickTime.

This isn't very scientific - ignoring cache and lots of other considerations - but memcpy()ing 30fps of 720p video from one buffer to another eats 5%. Decoding h264 in QT, and copying the buffer would take 15-25% total. 25% compares favorably to 100%.

I'm aware that the problem is the way Flash writes into Safari's window. But if Adobe thinks that h264 acceleration would dramatically improve its performance, they'd still have to copy frames into Safari somehow.

(Maybe they mean they want to write directly to the GPU's buffer...)
Right now my favorite musicians are from places like New York, Toronto, Long Island, various Scandinavian countries, England...all around the world. Many of them are dead. Most of them are more talented than whatever local bands I'd see in a pub.

We're in an increasingly globalized world where I can enjoy things created by people around the world, and you think we should give that all up for local pub bands?
Microsoft Engineering might be moving forward admirably, but Microsoft marketing continues with the same silly and massive and inexplicable early announcement model.

Availability the end of the year? Ten months? Sheesh.

Next time? Surprise us. Surprise us when we can buy it.

But ten months ahead?

By the time we can hold it and buy it, we'll have another generation of iPhone and of Android and who knows whatever else, and there may (will?) be some sort of a launch-time perturbation or problem with the software or the hardware or the carrier or with a public prototype, and we'll have had ten months of picking the product apart in the reviews and the blogs and the trade rags; all of which will detract from the success of your launch.

Mr Balmer? Keep your corporate yap shut. Until you have product. Way to blow your lead and your designs and your product launch, dude. Way to go.
This is a coincidence :), today I started thinking about writing a essay on this subject (I have the same problem). The idea for the solution I am going to try came directly from Paul Graham's recent interview on Mixergy. In it he said we look for athletes and not Wimps.

PG: ... We say "how do we recognize more people like that?" And, there are
start ups that we were fooled by and we think "how do we stop being fooled
in the future?", you know? ...

Andrew: Okay, what about the bad ones? What have you noticed that is
disastrous? What kind of people?

PG: Wimps.

Andrew: Wimps?

PG: Yea.

Okay so the problem is I'm a wimp when it comes to finishing stuff, how do I change this? In another part of the interview PG mentions he looks for athletes when taking applicants for YC. (I cant find this in the transcript? but I'm almost positive he said this.)

So my solution is to run/hike http://z.about.com/d/geology/1/0/U/A/bishoppeak.jpg this hill on a daily basis, in hopes of making my self not a wimp. I started today and hope to continue this. My plan is to make it to the top on even days and on odd days I'll do it half way.
yet, everyday, we still see that kind of prediction on HN. "why google buzz won't take off" or "why the iPad is lame". People writing these kinds of title don't know more than anybody else so please stop talking about the future that way.