skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is something to be said for books that are so hard, they engage your "eye of the tiger" response. Often I quit something because I'm frustrated and I think, "if this supposedly gentle thing frustrates me, the real stuff later on is gonna kill me." When you read e.g. baby Rudin, you get a sense that this is the real stuff, and you're getting your ass kicked by the best.

However, there is also something to be said for motivation. In some topics, like computability, (much of) what we want out of our theory can be understood in an hour, or at least it feels that way. We can then spend the rest of the time happily quenching our thirst. Not so with analysis. The core problems of analysis seem obscure, or plain incomprehensible, unless you're already on the other side.

When it comes to analysis in particular, one approach is to start studying it in the order it was discovered. There's a well-regarded book called Analysis by Its History, but I haven't read it. There's another called Understanding Analysis by Stephen Abbott that I recommend if you want to regroup before attacking baby Rudin again.
Or lack thereof. The article posits that the lack of government interference has caused the duopolies: the cost of entering a market is so high that only two bother, after that it's not worth it. The alternative is a system where the government pays the costs itself, or has the telecoms share the cost, thus reducing cost of entry and encouraging competition.

The way you word it makes it sound as if the government is regulating where it shouldn't be, but that's not what the article says at all.
This is exactly the same principle as the Chinese Human Search Engines but with a infinitely better goals.

I think the next stage of the internet is fostering of the bleeding smart mob. That's powerful. I am so glad that MeFi was invigorated to save those girls because it might be that it was the only thing powerful enough to catch it so early.
As one of my previous colleagues put it : "I'm a lazy developer. I will write a tool for anything that I must do manually more than once."

I think the hard part is to decide that it's better to spend several hours automating a 5 minutes manual task.

I'm often faced with repetitive tasks and I realize that it's wrong to do them, but it's not easy to say : "Ok, let's put my important work aside and automate this."
The text "Type In Your Twitter Username:" overlaps the entry field. It shouldn't.

Overall it looks amateurish, and doesn't give me any confidence that there's anyone capable of paying much money behind it.
For me, it's that I simply lose momentum as the project drags on. To build up momentum if it's a software project, for example, release it to the public, get feedback, bring some other collaborators in.
There is something condescending about your comment but I can't put my finger on it.
in Brighton Beach (a Russian mafia stronghold)

I know what this person is trying to say, but just to be clear, Brighton Beach is not full of mafiosi or criminals. It's like the rest of New York, except:

1. Rent is lower.

2. There are more Russians.

3. "Bathhouse" does not imply gay.

I wouldn't want a friend getting into the situation as described, but "It's in Brighton Beach!" is not high on the list of reasons why.
While what you're saying is basically true, what it explains is why the earthy words in English are Germanic, not why they're short.

Earthy words are short in French too. "Merde" is as abrupt as "shit." And German is full of long words.

What's really going on is that earthy words tend to be short, whatever their origins. And since English is not so much a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French as a core of Anglo-Saxon with a veneer of French on top, the earthier, more basic words in English tend to have Anglo-Saxon origins.
While it would be nice, I'm not sure this is true.

Meta filter is a pretty unique online community in that it is a very large group of people who are sincerely helpful in a almost unlimited number of subjects. As the article says, there are many much smaller cases of similar actions of humanity and helpfulness on askmefi on a fairly regular basis.

It would be great if the proliferation of this type of online community was the future, but Mefi has been around for a long time and, in my opinion, truly separates itself from the rest in terms of helpfulness of the commenters and consistent quality of the content.

HN and some other communities are equally helpful from time to time, but I have come across none that match Mefi in consistency and breadth of subject matter. (obviously HN isn't trying to match in breadth of subject matter.)

I guess what I am saying is that with most online communities I accept that the other people won't necessarily act with the same compassion as they would with friends they have IRL. Mefi has done a pretty extraordinary job maintaining a community in which this standard of human decency is pretty well kept.

tldr: Mefi is a unique online community in that it's community members act more like they would IRL in confronting one another's problems.
I was having the same issue for a while.

Here's how I resolved it :

Stop working 18hrs a day on project (even if it's a startup), find other hobbies, meet people enjoy your life but be very productive in your 6-8hrs dayjob.

The thing when you're too much involve in a project is that any deception, even something taht looks ridiculous will lead you to a lost of interest and motivation.

Take a breath, take your time. A project need to mature in your head it's not a rush, it's a marathon (I know it's already have been told thousand of times).
Another risk is that progress as measured to the size of the project is not linear, but asymptotically approaches '0'.

Real progress is still being made, but it is much less visible later in a project than in the beginning.

So those of us that are motivated by being able to measure their progress on a day-by-day basis have a hard time to stay motivated later on in a projects life-cycle.
The Zune is a great device. The biggest problem is that the Zune desktop software is pretty much nothing more than a skin over WMP, and can't even begin to compete with iTunes for library management.

I say this as somebody that's owned both iPods and Zunes. The actual hardware experience was better with the Zune, in my book, but the iPod blows it away on the software side.
Find a customer whose hair is on fire. They won't let you lose interest until you solve their problem.

The problem is that your projects are things you're interested in and you're obviously too easy on yourself. Do something for someone else. The meaning you'll be making together will keep you interested until you finish, no matter how long it takes.
Don't try to overcome your weaknesses; that is the way of madness and frustration. But I'll give you a piece of advice: great strengths are great weaknesses and vice versa.

Therefore, rather than trying to be someone you're not, learn to harness your strengths and avoid your weaknesses.

Personally, I'm the same way. I'm a good project starter, but not a good finisher. Once I've gotten a project started, I'm ready to move on to something else. Guess what though? There are plenty of people out there who are great finishers, but can't start a project to save their life. Thus, they'd be my perfect partner.

That's what you have to do: harness your strengths, but realize that you're a human being. Rather than trying to be perfect, find someone whose skills complement yours. Then you'll be unstoppable.
If you have "truckloads" of fields, with images in the db or something enormous like that, perhaps you should refactor your schema into tables of each enormous field (or even just shove it in the file system), and store the relations in a relational database, with the entities stored somewhere else.
Don't worry pink buddy, help is on the way:

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~inky/internets/epic_box.swf
Yeah, my definition is not that great, should have thought more about that.
Once again, the amazing contributions of designers like these help web apps push forward on functionality and experience without worrying about small yet very important and time consuming details like creating good looking icons.
ideally: what most people here seem to do. exercise, breakfast, etc.

reality: Snooze several times. Lie in bed and check twitter or rss feeds on iPhone or iPad. Get out of bed and look at a few sites on a real computer, craigslist, github, reddit, hacker news. Realize I've taken too long, shower and get ready and out the door. Then get a coffee and banana chocolate chip cake at starbucks or a strawberry cream cheese muffin from the grocery store on the way to work, or shortly after arriving at work.
Dug this Boy Genius Report article up from May 6th:

"The amount of voice minutes used by young adults continues to plummet as email, IM and SMS grows at a rate of 150% during the years 2007 to 2009. Factor in 1800% growth in mobile data in this segment and it’s pretty obvious Virgin is one of the few companies that actually caters to the demands of its customers."

http://bit.ly/9kWCcm
> Considering flash ... I find it sad, that google is actually supporting it. Where is the open standards idea there??

That should be my choice as a user. I love open standards but why is it sad that they would support it if users want it? Why should it be up to Google (or Apple)? Shouldn't it ultimately be up to Adobe and me?
Wake. Shower. Dry off while reading HN, Reddit, Twitter, Emails, RSS feeds, etc. Get dressed. Make myself breakfast & eat it. Brush teeth. Get to work.
This is one of the best articles linked from HN in the last few days. Well worth the read. I can't count the number of times I've hit a wall developing something and then as I explain it to someone else we simultaneously realize the solution. Or other times where a developer meeting (yes, they can occasionally be useful) does a better job of refining some new feature than days of development iteration.
recommendations? and not swype please.
I definitely have those customers and although I am 100% CSR oriented to start, I end up snubbing them a few months in because they become so pushy.
I have a similar behavior with personal projects, and I don't really have any advise as to how to stay enthusiastic. But what I'm trying to do now is route around it, construct project so that they can continue even if I temporarily lose interest in the them. Which is basically making projects with other people. So even if I lose interest in the main goal of the project, I still have interest in helping my friends, who are continuing with it. You could say I'm trying to form my projects in such a way that the completion of it doesn't completely rely on my own enthusiasm.
are these projects related?
Good call here. I actually considered finding a job where I would just 'start' projects and hand them off :P So far that doesn't exist.
Yeah I wondered this too. I use to use FF as my main browser but switched to Chrome. I still have/use FF for testing and to use certain plug-ins but Chrome is my main ride now. Would be nice I it came out for ipad/iPhone sometime.
Hello, I'm the author of Learn You Some Erlang. Let me know if you have any comments or questions :)
Body Piercing With Personal Touch
I wonder how can they pass the metal detector?
Wyncomm Y-50 QWERTY Mobile in India
Sorry, I don't mean it that way. It was a quick way of saying that you have to discover what drives you. Reading about how others do it may give you some insight, but you are not going to find 'the answer' on HN or anywhere else. Threads like this remind me of self-help books - you can spend all of your time reading about others, or you can start trying different things for yourself and see what works.
Another problem is that tax receipts in Greece are way below what they should be. The Greeks' view is that their government is useless at spending public money, so they view it as their duty to dodge as much tax as possible. One law, for example, allows Greek property owners to avoid paying tax on a building until it is completed - so a lot of property owners don't build the top floor on block of apartments, so it isn't "finished" and therefore nontaxable.

We had a similar problem in Ireland up until the 1980s/90s where dodging tax was practically a national pastime - if you rang up your bank, they would advise you on how to dodge tax! They would encourage customers to set up accounts in the Cayman Islands. Even the former Irish Prime Minister was in on the act:

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/ojidojsnmh/

The key to solving the tax receipts problem is a strong body for collecting tax and heavy penalties for non-compliance.
I asked a very similar question to this on MetaFilter a few weeks ago. To summarize, I think you're actually conflating three things: design, graphic design, and graphic design for the web.

As far as I can tell as a non-designer, there seem to be (essentially) two phases to graphic design for the web: wireframes and final design. The first phase is sort of a high volatility phase where one tries out many different approaches, mocking them up with extremely basic wireframes (in something like Balsamiq or even on paper for the best designers), figuring out what the client really wants (they don't know) and figuring out what you want. The second phase is making something nice looking based on the wireframes and other details from the first phase.

These two phases are completely different. They can, and often are, done by completely different people. To be good at either, you need to have spent years developing a good sense of design. However, other than that the skills seem quite different. For the first phase, one might need layout and communication skills. For the second, one might need to know about typography and color theory, maybe be able to draw proficiently, and so on. Often, the second phase includes turning the design into HTML and CSS, but this is rarely a good use of the designer's time, and can be delegated to specialty providers like psd2html.

Without more knowledge about what your background is, and why you want to study graphic design for the web, I think it is difficult for anyone to suggest what you need to study first. However, given how little of the above was really specific to web design, I think you might be better served by a more general design program, which might also be easier to find.
"there'll probably be a successor soon"? I don't know about you, but I've been using alternative services for years. The time for successors has already passed.
Try doing two things at the same time. Let one be the one you are hyper-excited about, but that is not going to make money. Let the other be the "work" that you carefully plan through and slowly work through. You can change the other project every 6 months, but let the main thing just be slowly worked through.
What would you work on even for free? I stay enthusiastic by working on the one thing I'm most passionate about in my whole life.

Look back through life and build your startup around what excites you the most, and you'll have better luck sticking with it.
Ford’s virtual reality design tools
Yes! Automating your repetitive tasks can be a new non-repetitive task that keeps you interested - this is fantastic advice for those of us with medium attention spans.

Good one!
Previous submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150

A good book for background on how people in general think is What Intelligence Tests Miss by Keith Stanovich.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

As Feynman points out, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." Human cognitive illusions are part of the human condition, and every scientist has to guard against them ceaselessly.
You have wifi-hotspot "tethering" on the iPhone in the UK?
I absolutely want to avoid having my IP in the US. It doesn't make sense to us. I'd much rather have the IP owned by an offshore trust that licenses it to my operating company in Singapore.

But if it prevents us from raising capital in the Valley well... that's a problem. Especially if we are seeking small time investments at first where it would create a shit-ton of compliance requirements for the US angels.

Oh well...
Learn to have the discipline to work on things you don't have enthusiasm for. It will make you less dependent on your passion to build stuff in the longer term.
IA’s Cosmic 140 Poster
Now cash can get you an iPad
These are great examples :) I feel like if you blogged or shared these fixes somewhere, others would find them useful!
My routine:

* Wake up at sometime between 7am and 8am (no alarm clocks)

* Turn on the shower to the hottest setting (but don't hop in)

* Bring laptop into the bathroom, catch up on work emails (client time zone is 2 hrs ahead) and web news (HN/reddit/engadget) while the bathroom is turning into a steam room.

* Shut down the laptop when there's enough steam that my touchpad no longer works due to wet fingers.

* Reduce the shower temp, shower, brush teeth, dress.

* Walk to the coffee shop. Grab either a coffee/muffin or a fruit smoothie (depending on how my stomach feels after reading work emails).

* Walk to the office.
wait what? I'm confused :(
What on earth does someone do with a 100 megabit connection? (Answer: For one thing, to avoid bankrupting the provider, you don't use it.) I remember going from a modem to 768 kbs and thinking, "That's as fast as you could possibly need." As a heavy user, comparing that with faster connections, I know I was right.

It's actually latency that counts, and that runs up against the speed of light.
Personally I find Godel incompleteness to be a far more disturbing discovery than any of the things listed in the article. Something about a fundamental limitation on deductive systems just scares the hell
out of me.
I'm using the beta Chrome. Sometimes I miss Firefox, and beta Chrome is crashy (often due to some clipboard copy+paste on Vista).
Subversion would also work just fine. Some hosts already have Subversion installed, so setting things up is quite easy. Here are some examples:

Dreamhost: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Subversion

MediaTemple: http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/143/Using+Subversion

I use Subversion for projects that I don't release open source. For me, that works better than paying github a monthly fee. Anyway, the point is that you shouldn't feel like git is the only option.
Most days:

- Wake up

- Contacts/teeth

- Walk the dog

- Feed the dog

- Shower

- Eat breakfast / make coffee

- Head to work

- Read daily sites / email / begin working
Yes. I use Coro/EV for web apps and non-web apps :)
I've had wifi tether on my rooted G1 for quite some time now. It's not something I use all the time, but it's a huge convenience when you're out of the office or house. Where in the past I might go looking for an open AP to hop online real quick to take care of something, now I just tether my laptop to my phone without worrying about it.
Similar to the AC/DC vs. Iron Man one http://vimeo.com/11160666

Cool Stuff!
I think it was the Japanese in retaliation for WWII...
0700: baby cries. Groggily walk over to nursery. Ugh, my day sucks.

0701: baby sees daddy's face, smiles and makes trademark happy noises. Wow, my day rocks!

0702: change and feed baby. Dress baby for the day.

0730: shower, teeth, dressed (or go back to sleep and wait for baby to wake me again.)

0800: breakfast and check facebook, HN, other online forums

0830: take stock of tasks for the day. Prioritize and schedule. Start actually doin' stuff.
I end up snubbing them a few months in because they become so pushy.

You may not want to hear this, but you just answered your own original question: you lose interest because you don't care.

I can't imagine "snubbing" anyone, much less my own customer. And I know lots of people that would give almost anything for a customer. You may not realize it now, but the "pushy" customers are the best ones, especially when you're first starting out.

Go pursue some other passion. Leave the start-ups for those of us who really care about the people we service.
How I Would Use the Google Prediction API (To Find Your Musical Profile)
I have lived in the general area of what is now the Lux bar for over 10 years. I see this sort of thing happen every single summer in New York City. "J1" is what people call these girls and the story goes like this:

They come here on work sponsorships which are almost never really there (they often dont know that). Then one of three things happens -- or all. They end up working in the restaurant business as hostesses, bus "boy" positions, eventually waitresses. They start sleeping with some guy who takes them around, pays for everything, and possibly provides a place to live. If they want to make real money, they start dancing (strip or go-go). At the end of the summer their Visa expires and I'd say about 70% leave and 30% stay.

So... it probably wouldn't have been sex trafficking, this is all way too dramatized. The J1 girls who come here are often offered to dance to make more money. And they either refuse and struggle to find a job in some crappy lounge or restaurant or they go dance and make pretty decent money. I'm not saying that this is a wonderful situation, it makes me hate living in this city, but its so common and a far cry from being locked in a room to be sex slaves.

I known some of these girls that are still here and still dance, and know a few that are still here and still work at lounges. Last year, a friend of mine was walking her dog and met two J1 students on the board walk at Brighton Beach sitting on their luggage. They had to make the same trip from somewhere to New York for a job. Of course the job wasn't really there. My friend let the couple stay in her living room for most of the summer and they eventually found a job at a restaurant.

Living in Brooklyn, this is a fact of live. Its nice that these particular girls have gotten some help, but starting this week "the J1s are coming" and this sort of thing is going to happen a thousand times over in the next couple of weeks to a month. Non of it was surprising to read... which, I guess, is pretty depressing considering that I live in the middle of it.
there is an oreilly head first Java book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009205
As somebody who up until recently couldn't tell you whether I'd be waking up nearer to 1PM or 1AM the following week, I'm quite proud of this routine.

1. Alarm goes off at 4:55am

2. Sit down at my desk with a sharpie and big sketch pad for 10-30 minutes. There
are no real objectives, I just put what I'm thinking down on paper, may it be
doodles, a brief todo list, ideas, concepts, etc.

3. Shower/teeth + dressed

4. Grab some light breakfast, check email/twitter, and read HN/GReader/etc.
(it's ~9:30pm PST at this point, so still active, but within hours everything
dies down, so I dont waste as much time procrastinating.)

5. Start work at ~6am
because they become so pushy

Can you give some more details about this?

Is it possible you're not managing expectations, and then that's killing your motivation?
have a look at this article by jason fried 37 signals

Getting Real: Release something today http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_real_release_some...
I have this every 1 month, still haven't found a solution for it. But I'm suspecting making a comphrehensive todo list with checkable items and a progress bar would push me through the end.