skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Candle Problem was used as an insightful example by Daniel Pink in his TED talk on the surprising science of motivation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
ptn, you may be afraid of rejection.

Maybe you could start by telling yourself that whenever you are too worried about someone's opinion, you are in fact saying "S/He is more important than me".

I am a very shy person. I fear others' opinion. So I turned my fear into a game. For example If I go out, I only talk to girls that intimidate me. During meetings I talk the least, but I take notes, write my talking points before speaking.

In other cases I literally imagine myself standing on the side watching me talk to people. I think this is not me, I am over there, watching my clone do this.

The most extreme I went was having a goal to say hello and smile at anyone I saw in a day (at the store, bank, work, street, etc...). Then I went further and chatted with at least 1 stranger everyday.

Take it as a game. It will be fun and soon you will start not to care.
Thanks for posting that - i enjoyed the read.
Sounds like you just need to man up and grow a pair. Honestly. If you think what he said was "harsh", then you're in for an interesting world. At some point in my life... I think it was the start of my senior high school year, I just became comfortable and cool with myself. I started not caring about what others thought, and just did what made me happy. I made new friends, ditched old ones, and started my career. Confidence in yourself is the best thing you can have. As soon as I graduated high school I moved to Hawaii to work for a new startup, and haven't looked back. Live life from the perspective of "will I regret not doing this?" rather than "will I regret doing this?".

Also, at the chance of coming off as cheesy... think about the legacy that you want to leave for yourself. What are people going to say at your funeral? What will your tombstone read? What can you surround yourself with so that every day that you wake up in the morning, you're excited to get at it and live it? I think that's where true happiness comes from, and that's what truly matters in life :) </end-hallmark-card>
Perform.

I used to be very shy, so much that I wasn't even able to talk to girls (yes, like the guy in TBBT) and I was always afraid of doing something seemingly embarrassing even if it was not. I cannot even make anything ressembling a dance because I was convinced that people will laugh at me.

One day I realized that this was ridiculous so I've started fighting my shyness one baby step at a time. First, I've started wearing sunglasses which I've used consider pretty lame. I was prepared to be mocked out by people but I noticed that nobody actually care!

Then I got my first girlfriend which dumped me after one month. I was so angry that I went to this party acting like a douche and I got 3 numbers from pretty girls.

So I got the keyword is 'acting'. I didn't like acting as a douche though, so I keep being pretty shy.

Well, like seven years ago I've started playing in a christian ska band. What I did then was this: I will disguise myself as a rudeboy with sunglasses and a hat and a checkboard tie so nobody could recognize me and then I will 'act' as a ska rockstar. That worked pretty well, one year later I was dancing like crazy at the stage and three years later I even got some personal fans :D

Man, being a rockstar even a completely-obscure one is awesome.

So my advice are this two things: 1) Do one little ridicule thing at a time and 2) perform.

So when you want to play the guitar don't do it as yourself. Grab some 70's rockstar wardrobe and act like one. For some strange reason rockstars don't get laughed at. So act as one.

I've translated succesfully this approach to other areas of my life. Two years ago I got invited to give a talk in the first big web conference in Mexico. I was completely nervous but I knew that this was a turning point for my career so I did it.

I watched a lot of talk videos on the web and when I finally got into the stage I stop being myself and acted like a mix between Jason Fried, Gary V and Troy Mclure (the guy from the simpsons). It's funny but acting like an arrogant star boost your confidence.

I'm not saying that it works for everybody, just that it worked for me. I'm still not Gary V but at least I'm not Raj Koothrappali.
This sounds like a memory leak (probably sticking items in a hashmap and never bothering to remove them), or nothing has forced a major GC. Java apps that grow in memory usage without bound aren't demonstrating problems with Java - they're demonstrating poor programming. JIT'ing and GC algorithm improvements over the past few years have invalidated a lot of the original complaints raised against Java.
I would argue that closing the post with a caps-lock'd rant that kicks off with "A PHONE IS NOT A GENERIC GAMING PLATFORM" is implicitly saying a little bit more than just "not every game works on phones".

Perhaps it's a bit of reading between the lines, but the second comment to the post (on the blog itself, not here) reads "THANK YOU! THE iPHONE/iPOD IS NOT A GAMING DEVICE!", so I don't think I'm alone in reading that rant and walking away with the thought that the author is bitter about phones as a gaming platform, beyond just what his words literally say.

If that reading is incorrect, then I take solace in the fact that at least one other person was dumb enough to read it as I did.
The link contains some ad campaign parameters that aren't necessarily relevant to readers coming from Hacker News. This may result in the site gathering misleading stats about its readership, though I doubt many would lose any sleep over such a triviality.
An interesting aside - house dems tacked onto this bill an overhaul of student lending which eliminated $60b of private lending in exchange for a wholly gov't controlled program:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03...
IDE has a boss key that replaces a page of code with a spreadsheet of shipping manifests.
FlashPunk - Creating a World
Except they have no actual plan on how to 'encourage preventative medicine', and they just agreed on a $940 billion proposal. With the way that corporations run this government, everybody's premium will go up, not down.
I struggle with this problem too, so your predicament touches on something with me.

It is drastic because in this situation, you have to be drastic. Shyness a is kind of hesitation.
You are about to do something,
but you catch yourself and say 'well what if'.
Then you backslide from your motivated position to
'maybe i shouldn't', and so, with one hesitation,
you've gone from 'doer' to 'didnter'.

So you just have to smother that initial hesitating voice and think drastically about things. If I don't do this, it is one more wasted opportunity in my ever-shortening life.

Every time I've taken a risk where i smothered the initial hesitation it has paid big dividends (not in money).
Rarely does the government shrink entitlement programs
This seems based on the idea the future will be braver at making tough choices -- and saying no to popular overspending -- than the present is.

Is that the long-term political trend? More steely-eyed fiscal realism each year? Is our society today braver at telling organized lobbies (including suffering or fearful people), "no, that sounds nice but costs a lot more than the proven benefits", than it was a generation ago?
Taking longer is not an indication of strength of the algorithm

...you shouldn't generally be using MD5

I thought md5 is discouraged precisely because it is so fast to compute, hence allowing brute-force attacks to succeed in relatively short times.
Totally Irrelevant, but I come from both these places. Born in Calgary, recently moved to Vancouver. My nascent startup (Matygo) has yet to consider anything along the lines of health and dental etc.
I would imagine a big part of that is attributable to how friendly US laws are to the formation of new businesses. One of the most interesting things in the recent DHH interview by Calacanis was when DHH mentioned that in Europe, founders are personally liable for the money they're spending on their new business. The business he was working for went under, and the guys in charge spent years paying back the money they had taken.
For much of my mid 20's I had no health insurance. That was shameful.
Ahh. Gotcha. Thanks again.
Brown pledges super-fast broadband for all by 2020
Super-fast broadband will be available to every home in the UK by 2020, the prime minister is to promise later.
As you'll notice in my comment I was not arguing against a social safety net. I was arguing against "paygo" social programs that will not be sustainable in the face of demographic change. I was not arguing against the criminal justice system either. And as you point out, nonviolent drug offender enforcement is a huge burden on society for a variety of reasons.

Not only do I not want senior citizens starving and dying in the streets, I want to be sure that a senior citizen 50 years from now won't starve or die in the streets.

Consider what congress has done to social security benefits over the past few decades. Right now the social security retirement age is OLDER than the average lifespan of African American men. Why are you defending this approach?

People work hard for years and plan for retirement only to have the social security retirement age increased. If a private firm did this the CEO would end up in jail. Why are you defending this racket?

If you're going to take by force 12.5% of someone's lifetime earnings (all most middle class people can afford to put away for retirement), you'd damn well better live up to the promise you made to him about what he'll get and when.

You seem to think that taxes == good social programs. On the contrary, the current budget is full of unsustainable things that only exist to give a handout to one special interest group or another... everyone knows they aren't sustainable and that they exploit those paying in now, but there is a collective action problem (which, incidentally, you are helping to perpetuate).

I've paid lots of money into social security... where has it gone? To fund the war in Iraq. Where will it be when I retire? By that time Soscial Security will probably have been cancelled or merged into the general budget or turned into a welfare program. I really don't understand why you would defend a regressive tax that allows congress to avoid having to be accountable for what it spends.
Even with intense concentration, I wasn't able to read the text on the page. It's the lowest-contrast thing there; the YELLOW logo and "1.0" thing (and the social bookmark links) try very hard to pull your eyes away from the text... and they succeed. I am going to have nightmares about this site tonight, I swear.

Also, PHP really needs something like Plack/PSGI/Rack so that you don't have to manually reconfigure the web server for every library you want to use.
while true, it's a pretty despicable answer
ihodes and callmeed: done!
See rajat's thread, above.
Why A/B testing is truly risk free, even when every lost sale matters
The insurance offered through my university was certainly terrible. It was very cheap, but there was a reason for that - it provided as little as possible, and made using it as difficult as possible in the hopes you'd just give up and never use it. Being on my parents' plan would've been night and day.
What will prevent healthy people from cancelling their health insurance in 2014?
But the government's not running the system, contrary to what you may have heard from the people that got the GOP talking points memo. The bill keeps the private-insurer system in place.
What on Earth are you talking about? No it doesn't. I thought this meme of posting something about off-topic X and justifying by saying it's about 'X hacking' was over. If you post a picture of a cat with a silly caption, claiming it's about "cat hacking" or "humor hacking" or whatever doesn't make it relevant to HN.
I didn't think it was harsh, but "A: I'm shy. B: You are gonna die! Don't be." really caught me off guard.

I can totally see your point and agree completely. My legacy is something I think about constantly.

When I die, I want to say "FUCK YEAH! Let's do that again!", not "Yeah I felt safe".
I second this. If your shyness is bad enough that it seriously, negatively affects your life, consider talking to a psychologist. Speaking from personal experience, it can help. There's no shame in it. A psychologist offers a non-judgmental, safe atmosphere to talk to someone well-versed in the kinds of problems you're facing. Social anxiety is a much more common problem than most people would guess, and there are ways of thinking and habits you can form that can help you overcome it.

Some people can overcome these things without help, of course, and more power to them. Just another option to consider.
There is some good comments here about practicing, the trick is to find what works for you.

Make a list of small things you think you can try. Try them. If one doesn't work for you that's ok, write down what you learn from it not working. Maybe you can try it a bit differently next time, or try something else.

Just keep at it, it usually takes a few missteps to learn new things so don't worry about it. That's part of learning.

Good luck!
It limits career growth for talented up-and-comers within the company: either individuals with management potential or existing managers with executive staff potential. If every new management job will be filled by an experienced outsider, then insiders quickly feel trapped and unable to advance in their careers, making them — particularly the more ambitious ones — more likely to leave the company.

At one previous employer that's how things always looked to my coworkers and me. Promotions occasionally happened from the bottom of the org chart to the lower management level, but most higher-level positions were filled by outside hires (though historically that wasn't the case, as several of the executives had started out as ordinary workers many many years earlier).

This is something I hope to avoid if I ever have the opportunity to scale a business to a large enough size that it would matter.
Give yourself a pat on the back.
If inducing such wrath would get pg to fix the problem, then I'd happily spend my spring break on it.
Analysis: Palm is prime for acquisition | Mobilize - InfoWorld
Not to nitpick, but I think it's mostly caused by refined carbohydrate consumption, high fructose corn syrup, smoking, and obesity.
pi*sqrt(5) out of 1010
> Only writes in dynamically-typed languages with a strong functional component

aka, javascript.
Ex-MySQL chief Marten Mickos lands new CEO job
Oh another good trick regarding shyness is to focus on your motive. Why be fearful if you are acting with the other persons interests at heart. Try doing things for others, like smile to make them happier.

A lot of people are in the same boat as you, why should you all be miserable :)
Who will buy Palm?
Mozilla confirms critical Firefox bug | Security Central - InfoWorld
FlashPunk - Creating the Player
To add to the others' responses, the following New York Times article goes into some detail to the CBO estimates and why the author believes their figures are unrealistic, mostly not due to any bias at the CBO but due to strictness of their mandate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21holtz-eakin.html...
As an explanation of why you're being downvoted, neither of you are contributing anything to this discussion -- keep flame wars out of HN, ok?
Please don't. If you want to spend your time on this, start by finding evidence that there is even a problem.
Or woman up and not grow a pair.
It isn't really harsh or not harsh.
There are merely realities of being human.
(It may, however, require a drastic change in perspective).

In reality, your circumstances and actions are immaterial to your mental state. (I think this is obvious from the number of depressed people in the USA).

I think instead of asking 'what can I do to be happy', you really have to tell yourself 'I am going to be happy', and then go out and do things.

If you do it the first way, you spend your life coming up with millions of unsuccessful 'get happy quick' schemes, that never quite pan out.

If you do it the latter way, you start out happy, so you don't really need to do anything. But you do do things, because people who are happy go out and get stuff done.
Chinese media slam Google as 'politicized'
Easy way of picking hot females in London
I like the baby steps thing. That's what I'm gonna start with, the acting classes and volunteer work seem like a bit too big a first step.

The advice about smiling and saying hi, and maybe the toastmasters club...that sounds good.
Can, but probably won't, and if it does, the average twenty-something doesn't have so many assets that it's a huge loss to declare bankruptcy.

Besides, twentysomethings all* think they're immortal and that nothing bad will happen to them anyway.

*And by all, I mean some.
Well, from 2014 it becomes mandatory to have insurance, for one thing. Although I don't see why anybody would want to in the first place.
This is off topic but ARG. If you are in canada do not work without paying yourself a salary! If you have any investment rather pay yourself salary and claim 60-80% of your salary back under SR&EDs. Much better use of your money and you can even reinvest the money you took out if you absolutely have to (after deducting income tax that is).
A very big "thank you" to everyone that posted a reply. There are true gold mines here, and every bit helps.
That's really not very far away. Few young healthy people are going to develop cancer or something nasty and expensive like that in the next three and a half years.
Cool idea. I'd be interested to see what one looks like after a day of use.

I use just a sheet of paper from my notebook for notes and my phone keeps track of my agenda, but I could see how this could unify that. I'd need a much larger ToDo space, but that is what forks are for right? Thanks for this.
Yes, the cost parameter can be tuned without rehashing. This is because the cost is actually stored with the hash, so the == method of the Password object knows what cost to use to check if a password matches. Don't take my word for it, try it in irb (I just did). From the documentation:

In addition, bcrypt() allows you to increase the amount of work required to hash a password as computers get faster. Old passwords will still work fine, but new passwords can keep up with the times.

Obviously, old passwords would be weaker than new passwords this way. An easy solution to this problem is to check the cost of hashed password in your database when a user tries to log in. If the cost is lower than the cost you want, and the password matches, then replace the hash at higher cost using the password the user just gave you.

As for hashing SSNs, you can easily overcome the problem of a limited range of data by the usual solution: salting. Bcrypt-ruby does salting automatically, which you can observe by rehashing a password in irb multiple times, getting different results (the salt is also stored with the hash, which makes this possible). You can also add additional salt yourself if you really want to.
THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Saying that doing a student organisation is a nice thing because it's cost of failure is 0, is not a very good logic.

In fact, it is the risk factor that mostly forces us to go above and beyond when everyone else is giving up. Persistence is the key, and a good way of achieving that could having limited high risk, so that you don't quit during tough times.

Sooner or later, there comes a point, when you have to make a lot of tough decisions, which mostly comes down to giving up versus fighting and finding your way out somehow.

Oh, and I totally agree that you probably should try and keep your actual money investment close to 0, and maximise your time investment.
But, I also think you can build a business with minimum money involved, and by that I mean less than 500 bucks.

I am assuming a tech startup, where the main investment required is your time and code, and you can at least get a "proof of concept" working...which can be used to raise money and/or make sure it is the right idea.

Last, but not the least, if you know you are going to do a startup, or are at least curious if you can do it, you owe it to yourself to see it through. To go ahead and build it, or at least fail trying to build it.

The biggest upside to this startegy is that you only "learn" doing a student organisation. Whereas you actually succeed building a startup.

I don't intend to be rude, but this kind of sounds like you want to do a college degree right after high school, and you are confused, and you decide to go do a assosciate degree or something, to get the "feel" of a real college degree.

I repeat. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
If you want to see how successful government health care will be, look at Medicare. Its a great example of how the true costs of things, low quality and large amount of fraud can be overlooked for decades.

The main objective is punishing those that wish to pay for their own care and retain control over it by shifting everyone else's costs to them.

Then once people give up fighting the current and get their care covered by the government, they lose control of what happens and accept lower quality because at least it is free.

Then whatever entity is providing care performs whatever possible procedure and drugs they can get away with, while starving the hell out of any preventive measure may make sense. The money spent follows the lobbying.

but don't worry, it will be years before you fall into this sink hole and your family come and visit you as you go down, so it won't be all bad
I believe part of the reason for the existence of Silicon Valley in the US is Stanford and Berekely. You have two great schools that attract the smartest engineers from all over the country.

That doesn't exist in Europe. Firstly, there is an economic disadvantage to studying in a different EU country, and most importantly there are cultural and language barriers. Instead of having a concentration of the smartest engineers studying within a couple of colleges, you have smart people being distributed rather sparsely over quite a large area.
I am also absolutely loving this tutorial. I already knew rails, but actually building an application from scratch using RSpec and git is so valuable and something that the rest of the concise literature (i.e. books, not collections of blog posts from disparate authors found using Google) even come close to communicating.
This is retarded. I don't read news for opinion, I read it for facts and _reasoned_ interpretation. There's some value in opinion pieces but not nearly to the extent or in the manner that this author says.
Best Place to Start a Small Tech Business
With the passing of health care reform arguably, the landscape for starting a small biz has changed US-wide. (worldwide?) Given that many nations already have such policies where do you feel is the best place to start a small tech biz and why?
This is a microscopic question, possibly down to neighborhoods. If we are to have niche business we'll need to find the best niches to eek out our existance.
I'm generally pro-private sector, but the stats on our health care insurance system are astounding. The OECD averages (which are primarily statist health care systems) about 8.9% of GDP spent on health care. The US averages 16%. US has fewer doctors per capita, lower physician visit frequency, lower life spans, and more uninsured.

I'll grant you that the private sector is more efficient than the government sector in the vast majority of cases. The health care insurance system is not one of them.