skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Countdown to failure. Make it into a game.

Rookie salesmen - the best instruction they receive is not: go and get 10 sales. The best instruction they receive is: go and get 30 Nos.

The goal of 30 Nos means they won't give up before that even if they face a lot of shit.

A lot of pickup artists do this too. They instruct people to go and approach as many girls as they can with a made up opening line before they are rebuked a 100 times.

Counting down to failure works better in making sure you don't give up before you can raise your confidence level.

Action Summary:

Figure out what you consider your failure point.

Come up with a number. You need to reach your failure point that many times.

Eg: It could be 10 people asking you to stop playing your guitar within 2 minutes of you starting to play.
well, yeah and I do, but it is nothing like the good old days working for Mayflower and being all ripped without thinking about it.
just moved to los angeles from the 3rd world.

No chips on credit cards. (and some FORCES your pin to be your zip)

Banks dont give you a 2k loan Even if they know you make 20K/mo.

Rent requires cashier checks.

Your online banking temp passwd arrive via mail, instead of allowing you to type one on the counter terminal while opening the account.

Extra credit card hell (bank cant ask for you), etc

Boy i miss the 3rd world :)
50 things
It's going to be interesting to see if the Supreme Court finds that the Constitution allows the Federal government to force people to buy health insurance. With a 4 liberal, 4 conservative, and 1 swing vote split, they could go either way.

One thing's for sure, this bill will be challenged.
FWIW, this is from the guy who brought us Redis.
Idea: Multifocus Photography
I found exactly the same thing. I've had problems for years with roving sleep cycles to the point that it seriously interfered with my life. After I started taking piracetam it settled down within a week or two. I also wake up feeling completely refreshed and ready to go. I haven't seen this effect documented anywhere - it was completely unexpected.
Sorry about that.. Coming from a design background, so Joshua Davis is such a household name to me, that it seemed more straightforward to just attribute authors, rather than compound a short-enough description for the title. These are my first posts, I'll learn :-)
The horrendously misleading part of this is that the experiment says to attach the candle to the wall. The lexical semantics of "attach" do not permit that you "attach the candle to the wall" by tacking a box to the wall and placing the candle in it. The verb attach simply doesn't mean that -- this demonstrates nothing.

Further, numerous studies have been done regarding lexical and conceptual semantics and the role of direct objects in semantic interpretation, and they demonstrate quite simply that whatever the direct object is of a sentence, this tends to be an affected item. Supporting a candle with a box is not affecting the candle in the ways relevant to human cognition, while tacking it to the wall, or melting it, is. So the phrasing again was misleading.

While I'm sure functional fixedness is a real phenomena, I would bet that it isn't even remotely as simple as this particular experiment suggested, and that a wide variety of linguistic techniques can affect how well people are at this. In fact, on the main page for the Candle Problem it's point out that a) using "box and tacks" instead of "box of tacks" in the instructions improves performance, while b) offering a monetary incentive decreases performance. So before you get all hyped up about how you want to think outside the box because my gosh imagine what awesomeness functional fixedness is preventing you from seeing, stop to consider that noone's got any clue what's really going on inside the mind, and you're probably just as likely to screw yourself by trying to manipulate yourself this way as you are to benefit yourself.
What's interesting about it?
Did they fix this? I see white on dark grey.
And it does strike me as weird that I have a lot of friends from third world countries that come here because they view America as the land of entrepreneurial opportunity, when this study shows that they would be much better off in Germany.
I went to a military boarding school. Plenty of exercise and fresh air. In bed and lights out by 10, with roaming patrols to ensure no noise was made. And still I tossed and turned until the early hours of the morning and was exhausted all day.

Every fourth week on Sunday there would be no enforced wakeup time. Without exception the entire house would sleep in till early afternoon at least.
I used to be very shy. Not any more. I still don't like crowds, and I prefer to be with one or two people - but I can make a speech for five or five hundred persons, who usually tell afterwards that it was the best part of their day - or the whole week.
What helped:

I went to a course in our university, "confidence as presenter" (bad translation of the name, sorry). The teacher was excellent, and I guess that is what really is what counts.

So, my advice would be: go to some course about communications or such, but make sure that the teacher is excellent.
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.

The Apache configuration mentioned in this article is pretty generic.

PHP has a standard HTTP interface, unlike the other languages before WSGI/Rack/JSGI/PSGI came around. Of course, PHP's interface isn't function-based, so you don't have the advantages of stackable middleware.

A spec closer to the *SGI's would indeed be nice.
A great story behind this animated film is that it was calculated using differential equations which describe the movement of the cat's body parts. One of the programmers (N. Konstantinov) described how it was done in a recent online publication. There is some discussion on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O4mm3hXNgA) but the most interesting parts I could find online are in Russian. For instance, here (http://www.etudes.ru/ru/mov/kittie/) is a Russian abstract of the paper describing it in Problemy Kibernetiki (Problems of Cybernetics), back from 1974, with a link to the full Russian paper. I was thinking about translating portions of it, but then decided it would not do it a favor; perhaps someone will come up with a full translation?

Incidentally, N. Konstantinov is more widely known (in Moscow, anyway) as the leading force behind the system of mathematical schools, loosely similar to magnet schools in the US (I am sure most developed countries have something similar as well). If you meet a mathematician, physicist, or computer scientist who graduated from a high school in Moscow, chances are it was one of these.
Just tried it. Awesome.

Maybe the fade out after you do undo takes too long. But I love it.
it was party, based on what they saw as a far-right "grassroots movement" called the Tea Party. they chose the strategy to completely go against democrats to try to deprive them of any victories, in order to keep the population angry ("congress can't do shit in the worst economy since the great depression") and use that anger to sling shot back into majority control

the funny thing is the Tea Party is partly artificial

it will be interesting to see how this plays out for the rest of the year, especially when people notice that massive balls of communist fire aren't raining down on the nation
Hello Branden. Kudos for luring me back into ActionScript ;-)

I was wondering, would you guys be interested in having an Open Sound Control implementation in the framework? It's like MIDI but runs over the network. It might prove very handy for hooking up with Arduino and other devices, like control surfaces with OSC support.

Edit: Maybe a mailing list, Google Group or a forum wouldn't be a bad idea. I'll add the suggestion to GitHub as an issue for now, just so you now someone is going at it.
I don't have a problem as severe as yours, but I was able to reduce my shyness by forcing myself to go through with situations that I was afraid of. It was sort of like jumping into a cold pool. Once you're in the water it is not as unpleasant as your fear told you it would be. And once you learn that, it gets easier to jump in the pool the next time.

It's also something you can't learn by thinking about, or by reading advice. You have to learn by doing.

But honestly, I'm not that shy of a person. I'm only shy in certain situations. So I'm not sure how much it will help you.
Until this day, I've always thought London was a cold, gray and boring place.

I stand corrected.
Somehow Palm still has my sympathies. Maybe one of the other players besides Google and Apple would benefit from buying the OS? As a developer, I already feel a decided tiredness towards new mobile phone OS. iPhone - OK, I don't like it on principles, but it can't be ignored. Android - this is for me, but they won't have the whole market. Windows/Maemo: just leave me alone, I don't want to learn yet another OS, even if it's Linux. I already have my hands full with Android/iPhone.

WebOS however, is another matter. Somehow I have heard so many good things that I would be more open towards it. So maybe Nokia would fare better with WebOS than with Maemo? Guess they would be too proud to go for it, but still.

Did Palm license out WebOS at all (would they have licensed it out)? I just didn't like their hardware.
Not really. I've never seen anything like it here in the states before.
I don't see it as a problem to be solved. I visit /new a lot and I think the anti-spam stuff here is working pretty well (compared to a lot of community link sites). If anyone is auto submitting stuff, then it all comes down to people flagging it or voting it up as to whether it sinks or swims. Ultimately, the democratic process wins out on HN.
Looks really nice. I'm just being nitpicky, but in case antirez is hanging around:

* Ctrl-B seems to make the cursor go forward, instead of backward.
* Ctrl-T could transpose two characters, but also goes forward.
* Ctrl-P/Ctrl-N could act as up and down arrow keys, too.

And I'm not sure if Ctrl-D should do anything by default, but I pressed it instinctively expecting it to close the (example) program.
While I like the general idea of your 'schedule as a bar chart' solution, I see several issues:

1) There is very little space to write down appointments. I'd like to be able to write down at least a name and a location, even for a 30-minute appointment.

2) What about moved or cancelled appointments? I'm afraid things will get messy very soon.

3) How should I handle overlapping appointments?

Maybe I'm not the target audience, but I encounter these things daily.
the president's speech to the house of representatives on saturday was very good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiYUVdwoHu4
No idea whatsoever. I even watch Mad Men and know all about Peggy, but it still doesn't make sense.
He did even better than that. Before his last studio album was released, he went into a studio and recorded an entire fake album in 24 hours then leaked it to the net.

Funny thing is, a few of the "fake" tracks are better than the real ones that ended up on the album, such as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTKRckEmKZQ#t=0m22s (a user created music video for the fake "Dr Yang" - the real version kinda sucks)

Another prime example was "For Those of Y'all Who Wear Fanny Packs" from the Naked Baby Photos album. It's a totally impromptu 6/7 minute "song" performed totally on the spot by him and his band. No prepared lyrics, music, or anything - they just riff off each other.
well, not so strange, he recognizes a dead horse when he sees it... And the other remains of his BeOS live on happily in Android...
Great collection of Open source PHP Frameworks. Totally Free
A copout answer, but "it depends". For some tech startups, especially those hoping for funding, Silicon Valley with its strong networking/community/etc. is probably ideal. But for others, especially self-funded ones, somewhere with much cheaper living expenses might be a better tradeoff.

Depends on personal style also. Do you find it useful/necessary to get inspiration and support from regular meatspace meetups with people with similar interests, e.g. hanging out at a place like the Hacker Dojo? Or are you more the sort of person who gets that sort of interaction from irc, mailing lists, IM, forums, and so on, and doesn't much care about irl meetings?
Interesting. It's frustrating when using programs with terrible line editing support because they've rolled their own. Hopefully this will work out well and then be widely adopted by non-free and smaller projects for which readline has been rejected.

rlfe [1] is a wrapper that allows "any" program to use readline. At one point I hacked this so that I could get decent line editing in Matlab [2]. Matlab is particularly bad for inputs longer than a single line. The problem is that I then lost the native tab-completion support in Matlab and gave up.

[1] http://per.bothner.com/software/#rlfe — Debian package available, and presumably for some other distros too.

[2] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~murray/code/rlfe_matlab/
"I wrote some songs and publicized them...in forums, to strangers, not to people I knew."

This just made me think, perhaps you should simply hang out on ChatRoulette for a while :-) (Haven't tried it myself).

But seriously, I think just practice. I recently read one of the "The Game" books out of curiosity (about the pickup artists, I read "The Mystery Method"). Not sure if I like it, but one thing stood out: in their seminars, they make people go into night clubs and chat up at least 10 women per night (or was it even more, don't remember for sure). in other words, they simply practice a lot.

I know this is not (just) about talking to women, but I think in general anxiety really can be overcome with practice. Take smaller steps, though - playing your music in front of an audience is comparatively huge. One thing I did is for a while ask a question at almost every conference/public talk I went to. I felt a difference very quickly.
How? Get some cash, find a doctor, and give him cash to fix you. Nothing is stopping you from doing that under the new system.

I find it intriguing that your purported solution to the limitations of this legislation is the very antithesis of the program itself. This seems like a weakness in the reasoning behind the plan. Not to mention that the problem is more that the quality of care, at any price, will degrade and that we will all become less wealthy as our government takes more of our money and spends it ever less efficiently.

Also, each state does own, build, and operate their own expressway systems. How exactly do you imagine the FHWA operates? There is not some federal agency that builds interstates across the nation, ignoring state boundaries. Rather, the FHWA provides a set of standards, design advice, and substantial federal funding to local agencies which then make their own decisions on building their own roads. The US government doesn't own and didn't authorize or oversee the construction of, say, I-5 or I-95 they merely coordinated with local governments to do so. This is how a healthy cooperation across local and federal government works.

Anyone who doesn't recognize that this bill represents an unprecedented leap in the involvement of the federal government in every individual's business and livelihood is living in a fantasy world.

Were you really making so much money on capital gains that this is going to affect you negatively in any way?

This is a specious argument. They came for X, and I did nothing... Principles matter. Extorting taxes out of others to pay for your own healthcare may seem just fine and dandy an idea if no one you or I know would pay those taxes, but it's a bad idea on principle.

To adapt a common phrase, those who sacrifice liberty for universal healthcare deserve neither.
I not sure your argument about semantics applies. First of all, we do not know if the word "attach" was used in the original experiment. In fact, the main candle problem page says this:

The test presents the participant with the following task: how to fix a lighted candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won't drip onto the table below.

The semantics in that phrasing of the problem seem alright.

Now, consider the experiment by Adamson. In that case, presenting the materials in a certain manner changed how they were made use of. This is clearly independant of any semantics. You may want to watch the video nreece linked to.
You probably haven't met the ones that moved to Germany instead.
It's more interesting that there's a 60% Democratic majority in both houses and yet this bill just barely passed with only 1 vote more than the minimum necessary.
Affordable Nevada health insurance
Find the right nevada health insurance policy easily online in minutes by using our free tool. To know more about nevada health insurance, please visit us at http://www.healthinsuranceweb.com/states/nevada-health-insurance/
Icelandic fissure eruption triggers worries « Watts Up With That?
Factual: The Art of Improvisation
Look at all the crap on the front page these days, and the snarky comments with 50 upvotes. HN is looking more and more like reddit. I come here to get away from reddit.

I've seen this happen in many places - any unmoderated, semi-anonymous online community of geeks eventually devolves into 4chan. reddit is basically there at this point; HN is not, but it's certainly moving in that direction.

In all seriousness, would it be helpful for me to compile a list of the articles and comments I'm talking about?
i agree. but the chicken or egg had to come from somewhere. where the talent came from is, i bet, a good story in itself. i think David Packard and Bill Hewlett (arguably the original silicon valley founders to have great success) set a great tone. at the time, very few employees had no stake in a company and stuff like flex-time didn't even exist. all these perks, i'm sure also played a role in attracting great talent (you can see it with Google and others today).

i currently work for hp, so i know this story and would like to share it (despite being a bit off-topic):
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/1998/julaug/arti...
That's a choice you make.
We should all be wary of the mandate. The uninsured used to be victims, and soon they will be criminals.
If aging is really cured then I will be happy to work until I either have the assets to retire unassisted or work forever. After all, I'll be in perfect health. And just think how productive I will be after a century or two!
In other words, the exact opposite of what your parent post said. And fyi HFCS is refined carbohydrate.
I've done something similar, inspired by sinatra: http://github.com/soska/microbus but I'm a poor self-promoter.

This is an interesting idea, but I like better my syntax though. But again, I'm not even a real programmer.
the license gpl v3 for base framework is pretty limiting ... it could be a show stopper... something like MIT or BSD would encourage people to try out...
I have five female room-mates. They keep reminding me not to refer to them as guys :-S
Dangers of Rogue Wi-Fi Hotspots, Wi-Fi Network Security Videos 
Comodo TrustConnect protects unwary Wi-Fi users from being hacked. Watch this video exclusively on “enhancing Wi-Fi Network Security” here.
This is exactly what I intended for my "personal framework" when I began writing it's first version about three years ago: unintrusive (all main functions as static methods of a single class to keep the global namespace clean; no enforced directory structure) and lightweight (few files, few bytes).

Too bad mine grew to become a monster, pretty much like all other popular PHP frameworks out there. I guess simplicity really is one of the hardest features to implement.
This is a pure guess, but I think it might be intended to illustrate a situation in which something previously unremarkable is put into a position of importance.
Watch 'Baby killer' shouted at Democrat after bill's passage
rlwrap does the same thing (and very well too, I might add).
You might try the elisp programming intro. You can read it online at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/, but the right way to access it is within emacs. It should have an entry in the list of top-level nodes you'll see if you hit M-x info.

Emacs also has a built-in repl, the Interactive ELisp Mode. Hit M-x (alt-x) and type ielm (your cursor will have jumped down to the minibuffer below the mode line) and hit enter. You'll find yourself in a buffer with an elisp prompt, where you can use tab completion and elisp's doc functions to do a lot of learning:

(documentation FOO)
(apropos STRING)

documentation finds the docstring attached to function FOO and apropos searches for functions whose names match STRING.
You can read about !image here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
Buzios tours Buzios activities BOOKING
There are some things you can do to "dress older". My sister dressed in very "serious" clothes in her twenties and people often didn't fully realize how young she was. But I still have people think I am about 5 years younger than I am. Given that I get viewed as younger than I really am even on the internet, I think it has a behavioral/attitudinal component and isn't just about looks. I have read of examples in various books of taking a cute, petite woman and dressing her much more seriously in order to overcome the cuteness factor and get her taken seriously.

On the other hand, my 22 year old son gets misread as being a lot younger than he is and he doesn't hesitate to take advantage of such assumptions. Just tossing that out there as food for thought: Maybe it isn't only a problem. Maybe there is also an opportunity in there.
I used to by shy, then I fell in love.

In past, I would fear what others would think of me, which made me very shy. When I fell in love I only cared about what my love interest would think. Obviously I was even more shy around her, so that relationship didn't work out. But in the meantime I didn't care anymore what others would think, this got me into a positive feedback loop and fixed my shyness enough to no longer be a problem.

Not something you can easily trigger, but you need to find some way to get into that positive feedback loop.
You've got some incredibly complex proposals being thrown into an incredibly complicated system (and by that I mean the entirety of the social, political and economic realm - not just health-care).

The law of unintended consequences is going to play out here massively. Not only is it an intractable problem to predict the outcome from our perspective but it will be near-impossible for historians in decades hence to look back and separate which of their present society's ills were caused by this bill or by the million other factors that occurred in the intervening years.
Why on earth would you post this on HN. It's not the text of the bill or some analysis of the end results of the bill (both of which could arguably be appropriate). It's not even a general purpose article that would at least try to give facts rationaly.

It's straight political propaganda. Designed to elicit emotion (the very opposite of rational discussion)

I get that your happy I just don't understand why you feel that justifies completely ignoring the posting guidelines