skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I was actually fortunate enough to attend a presentation that the first author gave just a couple of days ago.

Extremely off topic: I remember implementing an algorithm from the second author almost 10 years ago (before soul-crushing college and work) of the second author (when he was at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill). The algorithm was called " View-Dependent Simplification of Arbitrary Polygonal Environments" (from here http://luebke.us/#Papers). The algorithm was quite awesome – it allowed view-dependent simplification – even for indoor environments.
"I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two."
Anyone else wanna puke after reading that?
very very light on content, yes we should be looking to make wonderfully usable applications for non technical users, I dont think anyone aims to make an unusable site.

But how can we do it, what have we been getting wrong so far, what design idioms need to be thrown out and what innovative ui's help users? thats what I want to hear.
Can we put together a list of current products that appeal to this market of "normals" / "mainstream" users and products that a gap exists?
Thank you for that wonderful response. The analogy about the architects is spot on. The technology debate is always raging about which platform and language to use. The people present in the tech world can easily forget about the users with all of the technology present.

The last statement in your second paragraph is especially wise, and the ability to resonate with users is the absolute key.
Yet I think it serves two useful purposes. (1) Demonstrates commercial potential via inspiring example, (2) Defines an end result clearly enough to become an engineering problem. This may be enough to attract corollary (1) capital / institutional support and (2) motivated talent.
Brilliant idea, but how are they going to harvest the shipping data - I don't believe b2b trading is publicly available.

Like Apple for instance, I'm sure they have NDA's for all their suppliers. Companies probably treat this as trade secrets so competitors can't source from the same factory they are buying from.
Take a look at "Game dynamics" interview won Mixergy.
So if I'm reading this correctly, Theora could compete with Xvid, but h.264 is out of reach?
Joseph Andrew Stack's suicide note
Awhile back I wrote an article on how to troubleshoot a lack of motivation: http://www.learngrowdo.com/2009/12/how-to-get-and-stay-motiv...

The main takeaway is that motivation has two components, Incentives and Confidence. I could offer you a million dollars to paint a realistic portrait of me, but if you haven't touched paint since kindergarten, you're not going to finish that portrait.

Similarly, you might have the skill to code my next iphone app for me, but you're not going to unless I offer you some kind of payment. (Please feel free to correct me on this one.)

Understanding what incentivizes you and where you're lacking confidence (knowledge, feedback, self-confidence) will help you understand why you're not motivated to complete your projects.
Your comment deserves an upvote. Thanks, thats great stuff.
I know what you mean. I have a similar problem myself. People like us have a major flaw in our personality, we get bored way too fast.
We get all excited when we have a new idea or receive a new project and put ourselves into it, but then all that energy get burned and we dump the project, usually without even realizing we did so.

Many times we dump a project because we get all excited about something new and the cycle starts again.

I wish I could tell you, and I myself, that there is a simple solution to this problem, but there isn't.
You just need to stick to a current project and don't allow yourself to get dragged into a new one.
Find reasons to complete the current project, try to remember why you even started working on it in the first place.

Another thing I suggest you should do, is list your goals. Define completion.
And I suggest you leave previous projects alone, because there is no point of fighting the past, stick with the present.

Hope this helps.
> I think the real point of the article is that almost all
> of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We
> spend endless time debating Ruby vs Python, RoR vs Django
> and navel gazing about Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk, but
> how often do we talk about users?

Frankly, I do not see any shortage of talk about "users" or "delivering" or any other of hundreds of similar terms. I think this line of reasoning overlooks some pretty crucial factors:

- Arguing about X vs. Y beyond a certain point often has nothing to do with "productivity" or some other undefinable metric. It is entertainment. Not ha-ha entertainment, but something to pass the time - trading quips, debating and so on.

- New paradigms, languages, frameworks and applications - as well as hardware and architecture - certainly affect users. Some directly, some by providing developers the ability to concentrate on the essence rather than the unnecessary boilerplate obstacles.

It often seems that the people writing the "stop language wars" posts and the like are the ones most emotionally invested in the topic.

> To use your architecture analogy, few architects worry
> about whether or not a house will stay up, because they
> have mature processes and frameworks in place to
> guarantee the soundness of the design.

Yeah, and those processes did not just spring up from nothing. There have been centuries, millennia, of development - and you can be sure there were more than a few "pyramid vs. cube" and "vaulted vs. flat" debates in there.
Break your task into manageable chunks. Plan out the stuff so that when you finish each small chunk it feels like you've actually accomplished something.
Thanks for the response. I may adjust it to include a short summary in the near future. If it increases the conversion rate of users signing up, then it is a wise decision.

I have researched both approaches, both stealth and iterative development with lots of attention. We are trying to create a hybrid of the two. The stealth is only temporary until we are in a position to show the world and then iterate.
Another thought: find products that exist in physical form, but can be replaced by something that is much more high-res / efficient with technology. What physical things won't exist in 5-10 years time because technology can replace them. Mainstream users usually adopt products that do this. Examples:

* Campuses used to hand out "facebooks" to freshman so they could get to know their fellow students + have a directory.

* Spreadsheets used to be large pieces of grid paper used by accountants.

* Encyclopedias did really well until Wikipedia came along. Encarta was the first sign of trouble, but Wikipedia was the nail in the coffin.

* We used to mail physical letters. Email has replaced significantly replaced that (of course physical mail still exists, but you don't send physical mail for social interactions anymore).

* We think our generation and their families won't be storing photos, memories, and vhs tapes in a shoebox. What's the specific digital equivalent of that is the question we're trying to answer with the new version of Ramamia (to be renamed Genevine).

There are probably others.
I'm not sure I'd say never so sharply that you stall. When you're first starting out, it's virtually impossible to know exactly where the stall line is. If you're determined to always finish everything you start, you either get bogged down in projects that were so ambitious that you can't possibly finish them, or you only take on projects that exactly match the skill level of your past project, where you don't learn anything.

My early projects oscillated pretty widely in difficulty when I started. I'd take on something ridiculously difficult (but I didn't know it was ridiculously difficult at the time), and naturally fail at it. Then I'd take the skills from that and do something I knew I could finish. Eventually this converges, and the highs become less ambitious while the lows become more ambitious. I've found that I finish a significantly higher proportion of projects now than I did in college, and their difficulty levels more closely approximate a straight line than a sawtooth wave.
That's a very narrow definition of success.

There are at least 3 areas of technical focus at a startup after you reach product/market fit: 1) ease of feature development 2) ease of hiring 3) ease of scale under load

The author sacrificed 2, needlessly created well-known scale issue that could be avoided in 3 (basic distributed systems class), for no substantial improvement over the other options for 1.

Yes, I have a bias towards startup team members factoring in their future impact on their coworkers and the company.
Gears API Blog: Hello HTML5
Incidentally, I found that date in about five seconds, with Chrome's address bar even auto-completing the name of the battle.

The article is amusingly myopic, and the author is completely unable to imagine a world (not far from his own) where his little niggles are solved.

The internet is a global network of computers. Even if some of the technologies built on it are limited (as many were in 1995), the underlying network is near limitless in potential. Underestimating that potential will always be a mistake.
It may or may not have some validity, but it's practitioners seem to be in no great hurry to apply proper rigour to their practice. For me, that is a clear red flag. If I really believed that I knew how to cure a disease, my first instinct would be to test my beliefs. At the very least I would seek out proof of them. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who shows little or no desire to validate their beliefs, especially when those beliefs are literally a matter of life or death.
Agreed, I would also add to put it live the second you have "anything", nothing forces you to fix things more than being embarrassed about its current state
When starting a project find a GOOD partner. Give yourself milestones to achieve and share tasks. Use a bottom-up methodology.

No project is actually done. Each milestone must be usable. Keep this in mind.

Don't feel bad if you don't terminate a projet. Failure is ok but don't stop there, start a new project, again and again... until success!
Just tried SC2 and I love it: any other gaming fans here
Damn, it has been 10+ years but the new game looks like it will rock (despite many issues that are present in the beta). Can't wait for my pre-ordered copy!

Any other devoted SC fans here?
One thing that might help is have a whiteboard in your house in a place you will frequently see it. Write the name of any project you want to finish on it. Write the name of any new projects on it. It might counteract, to some degree, the tendency to ignore projects you're bored with in favour of the new shiny project.
This is a good example of what I call 'Guitar Center development' - a disproportionate fascination with tools at the expense of the actual thing you're building.
Interesting fact: the light flickering is due to the current alterations in the light bulb.
That can be hard on the finisher, and you might have trouble finding one willing to take on that role. It's always more fun to dream up new features than it is to finish existing ones. Why should they do all the grunt work while you have all the fun?

Finishing isn't really an intrinsic trait. It's a skill that most of us learn, often quite painfully. Why should those of us who've bothered to learn it have to compensate for the people who haven't?
I've thought about this on a parallel track. It seems to me that each iteration of a technology makes it easier to create and deploy, until it reaches a point where the only thing that matters are aesthetic capabilities.
Online gaming is key to math education, says Stanford mathematician
http://procrastinators-anonymous.org/

http://www.procrastinus.com/ - has some theories and treatment - http://webapps2.ucalgary.ca/~steel/Procrastinus/treatment.ph...

Good luck.
To fix it you need to adress the problem at the root: employees are too expensive because of all the tax laws involved, so businesses started to game the system by turning employees into contractors. Because of this the IRS had to develop a whole set of complicated rules to avoid this abuse.

Solution: abolish all the taxation overhead for employees which was the problem in the first place.

Result: Companies will be motivated to hire more people as employees again reducing the number of unemployed, at the same time there will be no worries about having actual contractors, since there will be no more draconian tax laws to begin with.

This is just another example where an originally good idea(all the taxes on the employer which were supposed to help the employee) turned out to have disastrous consequences.
A Trip to Silicon Valley
I think the real mistake the author made here was looking at the technology of the time instead of the potential of that technology. That would be like looking at Project Mercury and saying "Man couldn't possibly land on the moon with that." And that's right. We didn't. It was only the predecessor to the Apollo program.
Rapleaf already does that...
We have daily stand-up meetings at work for this purpose. Oftentimes my only report is "I moved chunk of code from X to Y", which of course required touching 20 files (ah, legacy codebases). That's fine - the point is that you make some progress, not that you make huge amounts of progress.

Also, stand-ups are for your (the worker's) benefit, not your boss's. It's perfectly fine to say "I did nothing this past day" - your boss doesn't care (well, mine doesn't). But if you say "I did nothing this past day" for a week, you'll begin to feel like you're missing out on something, which is an incentive to look at what you're doing and bite off a smaller chunk of it.
Flagged: Pure politics -- contributes nothing but hearsay.
consumers will see the google ads for google products and buy them
Recorded music is a very very recent invention.

And that recorded music has meant a massive decline in paid live bands. So you can't get paid for gigging. So how are you going to get your 10,000 hours in like the beatles? You don't get resident bands in bars and pubs anymore.

I don't think it's useful to compare music to movies or games. The effort and range of skills required is completely different.

Aha, you think it's EASY don't you! Oh yes, anyone can be Nirvana if they grow their hair long huh?

It's not, grow up. The pure fact there are so many people who wanted to be a rock star and never were is a testament to the difficulty.

Also in the past movies = plays, games = Chess, backgammon, cards, etc. Plays cost money, chess boards cost money. And a poor person would never have had a chance to listen to Bach 300 years ago. All forms of entertainment have been around forever, the format changes with the times, but amazingly people always got paid.

So what is your point exactly?
Thanks guys! This is the first time anything of mine has been on Hacker News, and it resulted in 1300 visits on Friday, which is pretty big for me. Glad you enjoyed it!
Problems in surfing facebook
The technical specs are significantly different, but they solve a large, overlapping set of distribution problems.

If you want to build a viral app/game/whatever you have to pick your platform. Traditionally, if you did it on the web, you'd use something like Octazen to download address books and send invites.

That's how almost every non-FB viral startup bootstrapped itself, including Facebook!

So Facebook just made it a LOT harder to build something viral without using Platform or Connect.
Are you referring to VPS vs. colocation or Linux VPS vs. Mac OS X Mac Mini? If it's the latter, people would obviously use this if they needed to use Mac OS X Server.
Funny Apple iPad joke videos
Yes, I can confirm Facebook does this. When you import your email address book, Facebook stores it forever.

I don't know if they keep your credentials around, too, and periodically refresh their data. That'd be doubly invasive, but it wouldn't surprise me. :)
By up-fronting the cost of the hardware, you're going to get many times more CPU and RAM and faster disk I/O than if you were one user of many on a VPS. If you priced out a VPS with 8G of RAM and a dedicated CPU, it would be many hundreds of dollars per month.
Very good point, I will try to put that into another blog post in the near future. I know that there is a book that goes along with this, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" as well.
I doubt Facebook cares about importing address book from N additional email services -- they're growing at a rate of like 300-500k new users per day, and accelerating.

So it seems unlikely that was the driving rationale behind the acquisition.
Metadata is the new black
Poor Charlie's Almanack (http://tinyurl.com/poorcharliesalmanack) is worth every penny.

Everyone should read that book.
McDonald's Has a Chef?
What makes a good title?
In addition to local use, this is also every distributed computing project.
The talk was FANTASTIC. Hopefully the video will be up soon.
Just a hunch, but you wouldn't happen to have ADD, would you? You might want to get that checked.

Also, the Internet kind of amplifies the ADD-like tendencies in us all because there are just so many opportunities it can provide for us all.

But second to these would be that you might just be wanting to get things a little too perfect. This is very, very good, but also sometimes you just need to cut the cord, open up your support channel, mark it as beta in an extended period, and just work out the bugs as they go. Oh, and unlike Microsoft -- actually read those bug and problem reports and take them seriously.
I was fortunate enough to attend this talk. It was quite an eye-opener as far as how wonky thread performance is. The overall equation seems to be something like:

# of threads * # of cores == context switch storm density.

David was clear to say that his presentation was not to discourage people from using threads.

The take-away for me are to really pay attention to implementation of my thread usage and to see if linux processor affinity would help in a situation where you control all the threads in your app.

The upcoming changes to the GIL for 3.2 has a dramatic impact on stability of behavior in threading but a negative impact on IO threads, which they are planning on addressing.
Hopefully Google keeps Gears alive long enough for HTML5 to really take root. Though relying on any kind of plugin is undesirable, Gears supplied a functionality that was useful and unattainable any other way. I'm glad to see that the innovations spurred by Gears will soon be ubiquitous without the need of the plugin itself.
I think I'm one of the supposedly harmed contractors referred to in the article, and I'm pissed off.

The government, in it's mis-directed efforts to help people, has forced W2 employees to opt into a bunch of insurance pools which they might not deem personally necessary. If you had the option of paying out-of-pocket for unemployment insurance, would you? How about the implicit insurance against discriminatory termination? Do you need the right to sue your employer for sexual harassment? Do you want to limit your 401K choices to those crappy mutual funds with 3% management fees? Do you want your employer to have a significant financial disincentive to offer you the opportunity to work more than 40 hours per week (paid hourly)? These are the things you opt into with full time employment.

The article didn't bother to mention the pay differential between contract and W2 labor. How much more were those cable installers paid per hour than the prevailing W2 wage for the same work?
I agree, the best talk of the conference thus far.
"There was absolutely fantastic music before, there'll be absolutely fantastic music after."

You're being a Polyanna. While there were definitely "popular" songs prior to the advent of the phonograph, music wasn't as vibrant and diverse as it has been for the last century. Before recording, music was a local phenomenon. Music was spread by sheet music (if at all), played locally, and the performances of the rare "star" were accessible only to the wealthy and elite.

Saying that there was "absolutely fantastic music" before recording is like saying that there were "absolutely fantastic" plays before the advent of film. Yes, there were -- but not nearly as many or as fantastic as those produced since.
He did mention in the talk that Linux does not act as weird due to the scheduler differences.
I can think of one reason to be in stealth mode: so the press covers you when you get out of stealth mode. Because that's news. Apart from that, I don't think it matters.
About Adobe's Flash Player Not Having Access to H.264 HW Acceleration on OSX
I am pretty confused about this subject. I've had acupuncture for a headache once by some famous guy in Taiwan, and being a staunch rationalist figured that the slight benefit I got out of it was a combination of placebo and being distracted by the experience of having about 45 needles stuck in me fairly painlessly for about 30 minutes. (It doesn't hurt, but afterward there is some soreness. Very surreal.)

Now I shadow a MDPhd neurologist who got his MD in Taiwan. Apparently the traditional and the Western stuff is integrated in the curriculum. (His specialty and PhD are from the US, I believe UMich for the doctorate)

He does both acupuncture, clinical, and bio research..

Witnessing it, sometimes it really helps and other times it doesn't. Do I know if it's purely placebo? No. His working theory is that acupuncture is related to triggering autonomic response by stimulating nerve clusters, "self-healing", which indicates an upper bound on effectiveness. And sure enough, he'll tell patients that there are some things acupuncture just doesn't work for. (I can't remember; it tends to be purely physical problems like irreversible nerve damage - neuropathy) But he's also told me that he visited some famous spirit healer on vacation in Brazil (just for fun), and about open surgeries with acupuncture and no anesthetics in China.

And this is just acupuncture, which doesn't encompass anything near all of traditional Chinese medicine! He also is knowledgeable in 3 or 4 different systems of acupuncture, which are similar but not isomorphic.
> When your belly hurts, you go to a doctor. Why not ask to a doctor when something in your head hurts?

Because when your belly hurts, science understands what the possible causes are. Your real medical doctor may be able to diagnose one of those causes and treat it.

When your mind hurts, the existing base of installed psychotherapists belong to a wide variety of non-evidence-based "schools" where "non-evidence-based" means "some guy made up some convincing crap and some other people believed him".
Excellent book, made a huge change in my life.
Dude, with all due respect, you're 18, your product is in triple-closed alpha, and your writing is entirely aspirational.

Less talk, more rock. Go out and do something, and then blog about it once you've learned something interesting. If you want to psych yourself up with self-help stuff, keep a private diary.
They should apply that lesson to their blog URL;)
Update: Just in case anyone is wondering or will wonder in the future/be in my position, I ended up asking for $49,000.
Agree! I even thought, if I should mention the previous participants but skipped it, since many of the programs are so young, only in their 1st-2nd year. But if possible, it's a good idea to reach out to previous teams, in startup world, they will not mind giving honest feedback on the programs they participated in.

Good luck with Betaspring!
Photo Translator App for N900 translates text from pictures
Right topic, wrong forum.

Points to reddit.com/r/gaming

Also, it's already been mentioned on HN several times. searchyc.com
I know, it's too long of a URL, sorry about that.