skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relying on client side security in a cell phone network would border on criminally stupid anyway.
From the post:

The moral of this story is never make your users jump through hoops to view your content, try your product, or use your services.

I can understand having moral objections to yet another proprietary web technology but I think your argument falls apart when you feign indignation about having to push "install plugin" and wait 4 seconds. As far as technical hoops go, that's pretty lame.
OP, have you taken the myers-brigs test?

I'm guessing that you are an INTP like me. I am battling the same demon. :(

Here is a description of INTP's that I found...

"Many INTPs are a lot like the stereotypical absentminded professor -- dawdling, distracted, and forgetful of mundane chores, late for obligations, losing homework or library books, and generally disconnected from the business of life in the external world...A big problem for INTPs is that they are so quickly bored, and once their attention wanders, they will rarely finish the many interesting projects they start."

http://borntoexplore.org/tempquotes.htm
Qt: Best Cross-Platform GUI Applications, and most under-hyped
At the height of his career he did yes, but he started out like everyone else doing the laborious tasks himself.
Siracusa has a significantly more in-depth understanding of the technology. Gruber's area of expertise is in the user experience side of things. Gruber is at his best when he's critiquing UI design, somewhat less so when analyzing technical issues.
This still doesn't rule out the placebo effect, which is real and not at all negligible in some case.

I think we shouldn't be so quick to exclude it from "real" medicine. As long as it works on a fair percentage or patients, I say use it and the less drugs the better.
Like many (most?) here, I have faced the same problem in the past and continue to. The difference is that over the past several years, I've figured out how to do it.

It all boils down to persistence, diligence, and work. As others have said, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Intelligence can sometimes be a negative because a) creative people often flit from idea to idea and, b) it can breed perfectionism--the killer of finishing.

I agree with many of the other posters (including pg) that you should start small and get a feeling for what it's like to finish. It also helps to talk well to yourself. The subconscious has a powerful sway over our feelings of self-esteem, unwitting self-sabotage, etc. Napoleon Hill and others talk about this. The self-talk can seem cheesy but it works, and completing small things gives you a foundation for this.

As for larger projects, there are a few important considerations. First, you must pick a project you believe in and will be willing to commit part of your life to (6 months?, 2 years?...). Next, you must be willing to put aside other ideas and projects in favor of it (mostly). As long as you are moving forward regularly, you can make exceptions, but you must have only one main project.

Next, you must break your project down into milestones. This is common sense and well understood if you program for a living. Each milestone has to be measurable so you can tell when you're done with it (and check it off). I know this sounds basic but the reason everyone keeps repeating it is that it works. You should also do something, however small, every day. Google Seinfeld's breaking the chain post on lifehacker for a technique to use here.

Finally, it helps to have a powerful motivator attached at the meta level to your project. This can be accomplished by partnering with someone. (Partnering has the benefit of helping to establish and maintain momentum. This is very important but can also be addressed through daily activity, as described above.) For me, it was hitting near bottom financially while living abroad. I had taken my family to live in Europe without the help of a company. We did it ourselves by saving and borrowing for two years--a very difficult undertaking. When this occurred, I swore to myself that I would never allow that to happen again. Every step since has been focused on the goal of financial independence. It has become an obsession. So I have a strong motivator to attach to projects. It sounds like you have a strong motivator as well. It really needs to become a daily obsession.

In order to feed my obsession, I read books about it and about people who have overcome similar situations. This keeps it in the forefront of my mind and week by week I'm also building a better and better knowledge base of how other people have accomplished the same thing. With this motivational force behind you, when you turn to your primary project, it's easier to move it forward a bit.

Surprisingly, wealth building and doing great things (building non-profits, etc.) all have very much in common. They are built by achievers. Achievers are merely people who move things forward little by little--relentlessly.
They get it from publicly available US customs data, so it's limited to suppliers who ship into the US.
NBC purchansed a majority stake in MSNBC, but Microsoft still owns 18%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC
> We're all clearly disturbed in some way or other

Sure, and the fact that we somehow manage to go on, does not imply that we would not be better understanding what weighs on us.

I have a younger friend that is studying surgery, and one of her professors once told to the class: "the best present you can give to yourselves is a good psychotherapy".

Obviously this professor isn't "the truth", but she believes (and I agree) this to be a good advice nonetheless.
Those MBPs have a 9600 in addition to the 9400.
If there's any doubt about the deeply ingrained commercial nature of the games, there's this hilarious blog post from uvex:

http://www.uvexsports.com/2010/02/blonde-we-like-wins-downhi...
Software To Protect Your Laptop
There is some evidence that announcing your goals to the world reduces your probability of completing them.

http://mindoversports.com/2009/09/07/why-you-should-never-go...
Yes, I have flash installed, but very grudgingly and only because I also have flashblock installed on firefox and chrome. It pisses me off every time I need to unblock it and it really pisses me off after I unblock it and find it was an unnecessary waste of time to watch the "flashy" animation that added no value to the web page.

(/me gets off soapbox, wipes the spittle off face)
No, you are exactly correct. No average user cares about the URL, let alone types it in. I agree with your point about the nodes/123, or in my case, I see a lot of upset over index.aspx/something. Linking and bookmarking are usually the only ways people find it. The root is usually easy enough, but most people will still use search engines.
The Story the New York Times Won't Touch
not really. He has perhaps only one valid point and that is that human teachers are very useful and they cannot be replaced by educational software. For all other things he was wrong. I mean salespeople??? ... when was the last time you thought to yourself "I wish there were more salespeople in my life" ...
Well the motivations for MS and Adobe are obvious.

MS definitely (not sure about Adobe) chooses high profile video intensive sites to "partner with" to show-case their platform.

In short, it's business.
Psychotherapy is even based on more evidence, since a psychotherapist is a doctor and not only a psychologist, and understands the psychological part as well as the physiological one.
"The moral of this story is never make your users jump through hoops to view your content, try your product, or use your services."

The author completely contradicts himself. He's arguing not to use things that need to be installed, yet saying they should have used Flash, which is something you install. Flash is on 98% of computers (his figure) because those people installed it. At some point, they had to jump through a hoop. I haven't need to jump through hoops to view Olympics videos because I already installed Silverlight.
E-books or not, I'm still buying 90% of my books from Amazon. Which isn't a young company either.

I find it funny that pretty much everything in the first paragraph has actually happened to its fullest. Even the "human contact" he's using as a final argument... most people I know hold at least a couple of close relationships almost exclusively online. Often with family.

Makes me scared when I realize back then I'd have agreed with at least half of it. What is coming in the next 15 years?!
Try adopting scrum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development) ).
I'd also like to point out that this thread has 90+ comments now and all you had to do was ask. The same concept can be applied to pretty much anything, HN is not the only generous group out there.
If you think the Olympics should be accessible to all, then HTML5 is definitely not the way. NBC's core audience is the general masses who are predominantly IE and couldn't do anything with HTML5 video.
Microsoft became the underdog in some sense. Being beaten in the OS and mobile arenas time and time again. Shooting themselves in the foot by releasing software people neither needed nor wanted. Apple has become a giant with the iphone, google's android is taking off despite a slow start and hopefully microsoft can come up with something here that gives us consumers a third option. Every decision I've made in regards to software/technology over the past 5 years has never included microsoft. Change my mind microsoft. I am rooting for the underdog.
Perian is just a set of decoders for QuickTime, not a full video player pipeline.
If you have flash and you refuse to install Silverlight out of some moral anti-plug-in stance then you are just being silly. At that point you're just haggling over the price: http://jo-kes.blogspot.com/2007/06/churchill-humor.html
As the man walked along the path, thinking about his life, a feeling of confusion came over him. A feeling that he knew all too well. And every time this feeling came upon him, he knew that it was a signal that his life was not in order, not running smoothly. He had experienced this many times before. Too many times. And he was tired of it. But, left to his own means, he had yet to figure out a way to break out of this pattern. He was stuck in neutral, unable to break free. Not knowing what to do.

That's the beginning of the "Hypno-Peripheral Processing" audio course "Procrastination, A Rhythmic Approach, by Dr. Lloyd Glauberman". If you identify with those statements, I would definitely recommend you give it a try. I think it takes more than a few words of good advice to change something that's so deeply ingrained. When I tried it a few years ago, the effect was immediate, and while I wouldn't ascribe it only to that, I'm definitely much less of a procrastinator today.

You may have some reservations about hypnotizing yourself, but it's really not the kind you see on TV. You're actually aware of what's happening, kind of like being semi-hypnotized I guess.

Ironically enough, I never finished the whole course. I was too busy doing all the other things I'd been procrastinating on.
I like to jokingly call google "my external memory". It's fast enough that I can actually use it as such in a IM conversation. When somebody mentions something I'm not familiar with (like a movie) it's usually faster to google it then to wait for them to answer my "what is X?".

A really big thing will be when we'll be able to do the same in a face to face conversation. I really understand why google is trying so hard to be mobile. Otherwise it would miss the next few big revolutions.
Because of you mentioning the snowboarding video I installed Moonlight only to be confronted with this: "Due to Olympic broadcasting regulations, NBC is only allowed to show Olympic competition video on the internet to users in the United States and U.S. Territories (including Puerto Rico). Users outside of those locations will still have access to an extensive set of non-event video content on NBCOlympics.com including the video listed below."

Now back to uninstalling Moonlight...
The point is that some people really hate Silverlight, and others simply cannot install it. Why would anyone choose it as the platform for their business?
The best explanation I've seen is http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html when you also realize that for video playback and animation in general, OpenGL > Core Animation > Quartz 2D > QuickDraw for OS X 10.2 and newer (I think QuickDraw was better pre-compositing.)
It's funny though, poking around the olympics' site you can see they use flash extensively as well for some of the interactive features.
Right -- but as far as I know, switching between the 9400 and 9600 requires logging out. Seems strange if you'd actually see worse H264 performance using the 9600 than the 9400.
So instead of taking one simple step to watch the Olympics in the best quality possible the author would rather rant about wanting to use a technology that doesn't exist yet(HTML5) or use a technology that cannot deliver the the highest quality(Flash). The simple truth is Silverlight has the capability to deliver the most superior quality video. You can argue all day long about how you don't like 3rd party proprietary software, but the fact is, NBC went with Silverlight because it's the best solution that exists today. Sounds like good business to me.
IMHO, Adobe should definitely act more responsible and finetune Flash Player to perform better across all platforms.

But i disagree with John Gruber.

#1) Flash is not "slower" on Mac . It uses up too much resources compared to its Windows edition. I switch between Windows(work) and Mac (personal) all the time and i have never seen anything Flash playing "slower" on mac.Flash makes use of GPU access (if required) not just for video playback. I assume Adobe's excuse for resource hungriness is , 'too much time marketing'?

#2) As http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/recommendations.html suggests, without a card you are going to experience crappy playback for HD video on Quicktime,Flash plugin and everything.

#3)John is comparing native desktop video playback tools to a plugin that lives inside a browser.

Lastly.. read staunch's comment.

Why doesnt John have comments enabled in his blog?
I don't root for Microsoft even if they are the "underdog". Nothing good comes of them becoming the overdog.
I'd love to read some detailed reports on how operations research impacts food selection and the workflow of the cooks at mcdonalds. Does anyone know if anything about this has been released?
If I were to finish everything I start I'd know 1/100th of what I do. Most of the times I stop just when I realize that I have enought knowledge to be able to do it "if I just want to". And I move on.
Once in a while a finish stuff just because I kind of fall in love with it or just because it's the right thing at the right time.

Different topic is projects I do for work, or for career. In that case, you must be finishing and in my experience nothing works better than a family to go back to in the evening. I used to procrastinate during the day and I'd have to stay at work till late to finish stuff. I don't do that anymore because I realized my wife deserved much better than that. It helped me a lot finding concentration.
Speaking of teaching revolution, there is something I'd have thought so blindingly useful and I still haven't been able to find: a site which would teach you basic English, no matter what language you came from.

It could easily be used by 4 billion people... eventually everybody _has_ to get online, and the value of the web is 1/100 without being able to read English. And yet my mother is still paying through her nose to take slow correspondence lessons, while I cringe every time I want to send her a link and can't.
Flash is bad enough. The last thing I need is another Flash, owned by Microsoft, and only used because Microsoft is paying everyone to push it on me.
This touches on something that I have been wondering for a while: why embed videos? On the Web, we don't embed text or images (if someone "embeds" one of your Web pages, many people would call that plagiarism or spam) but we embed videos. A video has to be embeddable to be seen as having value. Why? How did we get to this place?
Not at all, maybe I was unclear. Recorded music is pretty much freely available now, so you can enjoy it as much as you like from the whole range.

I'm really into New Orleans Jazz at the moment, so I'd really like to visit there one day to see some live.

What I do think is that the age where you can record a few songs on a CD, and live off the profit for years, is coming to a close. Recorded music will likely just be advertising to get people to come see the live show.
Evoke - A crash course in changing the world.
they finally removed the windows start menu from the phone, good start. a phone isn't a PC....finally they're realizing to take a different approach
Okay, man. I appreciate this "church and state" argument, but we're talking about medicine here. This isn't people's souls at stake, it's their immediate health and lives.

It's one thing to limit what people put into their body, I'm nod advocating that. It's another entirely to limit what people claim. People can claim anything can cure anything, and then someone who isn't making a fully informed decision then puts their lives at risk, and in the process loses cash to someone who simply made a statement and offered a service.

In many other industries, this is okay. The market tends to detect bullshitters and avoid them. Usually it's only a few over-eager suckers who lose some cash and warn everyone else. But in the case of medicine, transactions are done not only in people's money but also with their health as currency. Asking for the market to correct for this asks for an incredible amount of misery and death to occur before a treatment can be identified. Ethically, this seems like a very bad position to take.
Yes, I think this is a little to late for them. It seems to me that they went along with something like "Apple has too little market share so it's not so relevant to us".

In the meanwhile Apple become relevant increasing its computer market share with the Mac, conquering the third place in the smartphone market with the iPhone and creating a device (the iPad) that is targeted to a big new audience and in my opinion will take a big share on of the pie (also considering that this is the "multimedia" pie, one very relevant to Adobe).

But in all these years they pissed of Steve Jobs, and he is the wrong person to have as an enemy when you will depend more and more on Apple platforms.
Is Amazon's MTurk Holding Back the Rise of the Machines?
By not overriding Apple's decoder for baseline and main profile H.264
Dilbert & SEO -- what a hoot, eh
FWIW I am an INFP and I could have written the same comment as the OP. Last I looked I have over 50 unfinished projects in my personal repository. I tend to be ever watchful of new technologies that might help me finish any one of the projects but all I end up with is a pile of bookmarks and 600+ notes in EverNote. sigh

I have been working on my latest project for over a year, part-time. I tend to fall into the research trap as mentioned by some other posters. That is, once I learn how some giant puzzle of a project would come together I lose interest in the project. I suppose I like figuring out things instead of doing things. I am tired of this.
Well, I disagree with most of this 3+ year old article. Sure, the SW has got off to a slow start - partially I think because people would look at an XML serialization of RDF data and say WTF :-)

There are good open source tools (Sesame, Jena, Swi-Prolog semweb libraries, etc.) and commercial support (AllegroGraph, etc.) If the motivation is there, the tools are available.

Also, Reuters' Open Calais (free) web services do a very good job at generating semantic data automatically.

The next thing we need is simply more people writing applications that use linked data sources.

A tired cliche, but: this is like FAX machines, eventually there will be more available linked data so the rate of app development will increase, and vice-versa.
Drink Tons of Coffee Everyday and Give it to Your Kids Too
Seriously, why won't this 2+ decade old argument die? It's sophomoric and picked apart in second year cognitive systems classes by 19 year old children. It glaringly misunderstands and misrepresents. If people are genuinely interested in AI they should take a basic course in it at university or pick up a real book on the subject.
ECC memory is a must for server applications, and Mac Minis--including the "server" model--do not come with or support ECC memory.

http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html
F.B.I. Concludes Investigation in Fatal Anthrax Mailings
Wave your flippant flag high. :)
i wrote a review of this (well, the book) for /. many years ago - http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/02/19/2257203.shtml

it's probably a bit basic for experienced programmers - in particular "functional programming" needs a lot less explanation these days - but if you want some simple background it might help.
The thing that stands out here is the number of people who have to be on board before a product makes it to market, and how they focus group everything. Very Microsoft-like. Is there a fast-food equivalent to Apple?

It also reminds me of this article I saw the other day (horribly alarmist title aside): http://health.yahoo.com/experts/eatthis/45380/4-shocking-sec...
Startups aren't about language diversity for the sake of diversity, they're about unfair leverage. In this case the author made a choice that didn't add any leverage to Foursquare. If anything, the author admits he boxed the company into a corner because of a rookie scaling decision.

In contrast, the Asana guys are writing their own language+framework and if it delivers on it's early promise they'll be outgunning the competition with a 10x improvement on development time and code size.

http://asana.com/luna

That's the sort of advantage Paul Graham had by using Lisp in ViaWeb vs. his competition that was mostly writing c++.
He has perhaps only one valid point and that is that human teachers are very useful and they cannot be replaced by educational software.

No, that point wasn't even remotely valid, either. At least, not outside K12 education. Higher-ed teachers aren't being replaced by software, but by video lectures and peer groups.

Anyone who can't learn (for instance) math with Khan Academy and Wolfram Alpha wasn't going to learn it anyway, with or without a teacher.
Can you be more specific about how FB is lax with your data? I mean, first and foremost, they don't sell data, which is more than you can say for a lot of other companies. Secondly they provide extensive control over the privacy of various parts of your profile. Facebook is way more privacy conscious than other companies, so I just don't see the foundation for your criticism.

FWIW, i used to work at Spock, which was a "people search engine". Spock harvested a lot of data from social networks and FB was a nut we never cracked.
Aviary's entire suite of editing tools is now free