skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. The problem might not be your work environment, but what you are working on. When you say "we always seem to be distracted by all stuff going around us in our lives" I think that your project isn't interesting enough to over shadow everything going on around you. Do you even feel excited about your projects?
If the point is to find hard-to-test code, wouldn't one find it automatically while writing tests?
Man,a startup(coding in the begining,...) is like a marathon.if you work 8 hours/day with quality and focus it's enough if you can continue.
Working 15 hours/days and being sleep deprivated will leave you burn out.A good sleep is necessary for a good work.
it's oki to be impatient with the small steps ,but be careful with your health(the long term)that will help you finish the marathon
It could also have been, that there was tons of prey available (and snake predators suffered too) and the wild living snakes just thrived after the bounty ended.
That's fair. Unfortunately the *AA's are writing the laws so they get their way.

Is it at all reasonable they get to force ISPs to enforce their rules without litigation? Is it reasonable to be legally able to charge me $250,000 in the US to circumvent the CSS "encryption" on a DVD?
That's really interesting. To put it another way, economic opportunity costs apply to armed conflict.

You can even extend this beyond purely defensive wars.

The most obvious extension is pre-emptive wars. A great example would be the Six Days war (aka the 1967 Arab-Israeli war). Israel knew that they were about to be attacked (the massed units on their borders were not subtle), and instead attacked preemptively. Arguably, this reduced the cost of the war for them in a number of ways. First, by seizing the initiative and the element of surprise, they likely reduced their combat losses relative to what they would have experienced if they had waited for their neighbors to attack. Even more importantly, the entire war was fought outside of their then-borders, so their infrastructure was not damaged by the fighting.

Clausewitz even makes a case for starting a war that you know you are going to lose. That sounds crazy at first, but in some scenarios it makes sense, because it's not just about the balance of power, it's about the direction in which that balance is shifting. If you are highly certain that another country is going to attack you, and that you will lose, you have to consider whether your defeat would be more or less severe in six months or a year. If the balance of power is shifting in your favor, you want to postpone hostilities as long as possible. If, on the other hand, the balance of power is shifting in favor of your enemy, you want to precipitate a war as soon as possible in the hopes of securing a better position to sue for peace. Either way you know you're going to lose, it's a question of how badly you are going to lose.

Finally, even a war of naked aggression could have a nearly immediate net positive impact on your economy if your forces are so superior that you will suffer minimal losses, and if you capture valuable resources as a result, or if you secure tactically valuable terrain that reduces your losses in an impending conflict. The German annexation of the Sudetenland is a prime example of this.
So that sentence I quoted is basically a lie.
You are mistaking a tantrum for a rant.

Your post told me about your position on this subject, and showed how little you understand it.
See also, the iatrogenic effect, where the effects of the solution are worse than the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis
The correct way to deal with it is to realise that if you need some settings that can be accessed/changed from many different classes then the design of your app is severely lacking. However, this doesn't necessarily that you need a more complex/sophisticated 'design'. ie. if you stick to TDD this situation is highly unlikely.

Hopefully this will stem the tide of questions on Stack Overflow about different Objective-c singleton implementations.
A personal example.

Just when I started college, was trying to write a 3D game in C++ (I was young, so yeah, I thought it was just C with classes, LOL).

Since I had no idea about design patterns, so I made a singleton called "Rendering Manager" that took care of "everything-OpenGL". I would have numerous classes, like CHuman, CHero, CParticle, CBuilding (it was more abstract but whatver) and stuff like that that inherited from something like a CDrawable, which had a CDrawable::Render() method.

The problem was that the CDrawable::Render() would call the singleton by itself, so it had a direct dependency with the Rendering Manager. If I had to change something on the singleton, I'd have to change a lot of other classes.

When I needed to render on different "virtual screens", for reflections, shadows, cameras (yes, it was funky lol), I had to put global state on the singleton in order to make it render things in different ways.

When I needed LOD (level of detail), I had to pass the camera position via a global, only adding more globals to the mess.

Of course, I was just a student back then, but failing spectacularly taught me a lot of new things.

--

What I would have done today: CDrawable objects would only worry about their own geometry and transformations and would be ignorant about the glorified-OpenGL-wrapper.

Instead, we could have a "Scene Manager" (which doesn't even have to be a singleton anymore) that "visits" each object to "ask" them just enough to get them rendered.
Speech Notes: New iPhone Application for Speech to Text Conversion
July 01, 2011, Beam Speech Solutions has released Speech Notes - new unique iPhone application that enables users to enter the text without using the keyboard, just their voice.
Also Speech Notes allows to keep the voice and text notes in one place. More to that - with just one button click it can easily transform the speech into human readable text. There are no comparable solutions of speech recognition on the iPhone market at the moment.<p>With Speech Notes anyone can start speaking right away, without wasting time for typing the ideas. The rest will be done by Speech Notes: speech recognition, transformation of your speech into text, saving the voice and normal text notes. Everything will be captured as the person speaks it.<p>At the moment Speech Notes supports 13 languages: Chezh, Danish, Deutche, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian.<p>More languages are yet to come.<p>Speech Notes supports:
* iPhones 3G, 3Gs, 4 with firmware version 4 and above
* iPod touch 2nd generation and above
* iPad compatible (no native support yet)
* to transform your voice notes to text you only need Internet connection (WiFi or 3g preferably).<p>Pricing and Availability:
Speech Notes 1.0 is free and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Productivity category.<p>About company: Beam Speech Solutions company produces mobile applications on iPhone platform. Our main focus is Social Networking and Productivity tools. Other major research area is voice to text conversion.
Link to AppStore:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=442486961&mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D6
Contact person:
Alexander Drobitko
alexander.drobitko@ubeam.me
phone: +7 916 957 7039
www.ubeam.me
It's a weird plan and a lot of money- but it means getting things done the way I see it. We've worked successfully in Cupertino before for 2 weeks with a similar schedule- the only reason we can't explore that option now is because there's certain family drama and social responsibilities I have to acknowledge if I go back there.

We've traveled to many parts of the world and I've lived in Hong Kong before. Each time I do take a vacation there- it's really not the most ideal place for me.

I'm not looking for a vacation, and I'm not stressed or too impatient for success- I'm just looking for a change of pace.

If we had to, we could stay for 4 weeks, work 3 and take more time to look around Hong Kong then for the last week.
If those comments were made on HN, they'd be voted down, flagged, and by now the poster would have been banned.
Stumptown's Duane Sorenson, The Coffee Connoisseur
Mhm. The math for that one is not too bad, requiring a "vanishingly tiny" amount of Te per m^2, so that our current production gives a little over a gigawatt's worth per year. We'd need "merely" two orders of magnitude increase.

(old explanation removed)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride_photovoltaics...

It's actually more up-in-the-air than I thought about twenty minutes ago -- tellurium has not been widely prospected, and the source du jour is undersea ocean ridges:

http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/reports/reprints/Hein_GCA_67.pdf

( http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FeKPblDo6GYJ:w... )

I'm still a skeptic.
Linode. Cheap and awesome support.

You can also use GitHub Pages with blogofile.
US: LightSquared 4G would have "severe operational impact" on GPS
Second hit on Google: http://www.springsource.org/
Exactly. I think it'd be incredibly cool to walk in front of a thin transparent wall with this property, run around to the other side and see yourself walk along it.

I wonder if you could information in this fashion.
Probably four simultaneous dual-band APs on seven different channels. Look at http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/view
Ah yes, my 500 words imparted to you a full understanding of all my knowledge of the music industry - you insightful sage you.
6 browser add-ons that enhance Google+
There's a hack that allows you to back up to a shared folder on Windows, which is what I do.
I understand where people are coming from. I've made a few small startups- that all ended up unsuccessful. I'm at the point where my standards for ideas are much higher now, so when I actually do have an idea- I'm often so excited by it that I can't sleep for weeks thinking about how I would implement it.

The stuff that "distracts" us are responsibilities. They range from working part-time as a sysadmin to pay bills from taking care of family members who are in current need of my support, and having to deal supporting a friend who had to deal with an attempted suicide. I already sleep 6 hours, and spend the rest of my days working.

I figured that one hour less of sleep, and relocating myself temporarily will allow me to simply shift the remaining time that I don;t have for the startup for the startup. It's precisely because I'm excited to work more on my startup that I want to move things around.
After the del.icio.us "sunset" fiasco, I would have thought that companies would stop using that stupid term.
New first in regenerative medicine: built-from-scratch organ saves a life
I agree that the skills and mindset of this forum is certainly a cut above most. But that doesn't mean that it's not full of irrational, wishful thinkers. You know: human beings :)

I do, however, have a second objection - it's not enough to enjoy what you do, and be good at what you do - you also have to be lucky. Good thing that being lucky is a skill.

"...Newbie drinkers of the 4-hour Kool-Aid don’t seem to get this. They think lifestyle design is a guaranteed path out of their crappy lives in cubicle prisons and the burden of the middle-class life script, mortgage and all. A question I recently answered on Quora very clearly reveals the mental model many people have: Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?
...

You can tell an engineer asked this question even without reading further, because the question asks about how hard the work is. The gambler/marketer version of such questions is always how lucky do you have to be? The engineer asks about effort. The gambler/marketer asks about odds, and picks the game with the most favorable odds that he can find. 2/3 is better than 1/2. If I’d asked the question, I’d have phrased it as: how many apps do you have to publish in order to be fairly sure of having at least one hit that makes $1000 or more a month?"

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/02/the-las-vegas-rules-i-t...

In other words, perseverance and risk management are essential skills - ones that few people seek serious training and practice in, rather than lip service.

A bad job will kill you, but poor risk management will do it faster. People don't just need to hear that making the jump is good - they need to know what to expect when they do, and how to plan accordingly.
I'd love to be able to go back to the diverse ecosystem we had in the 80's, but I don't see how an architecture that deviates significantly from the x86 norm could gain traction in this Windows world.
You insightful sage, you.
I do work 15 hours + a day already, and sleep 6 hours. It's just a matter of me dedicating the remaining time I have that I don't use for the startup, so that I'll have more time for the startup.

I take time off, and I'm really not stressed. In fact, I maintain a rigorous schedule of working out and running, and eating healthy.

I also don't drink or smoke even though most of my friends do(most of them were in College).

Thanks for the tips, but I'm really not impatient, and each step I take is carefully planned.
Looking for feedback; free small biz web apps
The correct way to deal with this is to realize you have a problem? I think the above comment is willing to admit a problem and is asking for a solution. What does TDD have to do with it?

I'm also interested in hearing what is considered the best practice for things like passing around config options, an eventloop, or message bus.
Exept that billion is ambiguous, it might either be 10^9 (Giga) or 10^{12} (Tera).
Two problems:

1) The more I love what I'm doing, the more I let it consume my life. My job cannot be my life.

2) The more I love something, the easier it is to burn out in 2-4 years.

If you find yourself doing something you really love, pace yourself and don't let it consume your life, and your love will live long.
The huge highlighted button seems to be a common usability issue with many of Google's new designs. They seem to confuse "new user" with "regular user".

Case in point being the new groups design. Huge buttons to create a new group, an action that happens very infrequently for me. Plus a huge splash screen with product information (similar to the Blogger blog in the reading list) which as a regular user, I just don't care.
FogBogz calls this Evidence-Based Scheduling. They take past estimates along with data on the actual time taken for past tasks and use that to predict the time required for future tasks. Caveat: I have never used it and therefore cannot vouch for how well it works. The technique appears sound.

More info http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/evidence-based-scheduling/ and http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/4396/how-does-evi...
I suspect quite strongly that what we today call "gifted" is really about what the average child should reach, and I don't care to even guess at what the true upper end of truly gifted individuals could attain in a teaching environment that is actually properly designed, rather than being handed down from on high by our 19th century betters.
They are not really templates, but separate views. If you append "/view/<template_name>" to any blog URL on BlogSpot, you get this view. Example: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/view/flipcard
Why Hong Kong? Wouldn't Tahoe or Big Sur or Bodega Bay suffice?

And your schedule sounds like too much coding and not enough sleep. Why don't you try getting 10 hours of sleep for a few weeks and see if that helps your focus at all. And longer breaks between coding sessions.
Microscopic hairs on bat wings function as speedometers
Apparently it's in Cydia now, for Apple's apps only.
Again, I'm not saying your wrong necessarily...

Actually you're telling him that he's acting exactly like people commonly do in malarial areas, and are informing him that simply taking that course of action breeds worse varieties of malaria, and causes people to die of unrelated diseases that could have been treated.

This strongly suggests that he has practical experience with malaria. And is useful information for him about how the advice he has based on experience is suboptimal.
All the design changes since the launch of G+ could use some decrease in padding imo .
In netbooks the real content will start halfway across the screen - lot of unnecessary scrolling, looks good though .
I jailbroke my ipod touch yesterday and struggled to find anything good. SSH is kinda dull, SBSettings, Adblock and a few other basic things are the most useless and ugliest apps I have. This article does point out a few things - some business, some for iphone/ipad3g, some overpriced. So basically jailbreaking is largely useless on the ipod touch. Unless you want to simulate something from two decades ago.
> I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.

Incentives matter, but this incentive would attract candidates who don't want re-election, perhaps old and sick people who expect to die or retire.

Also, how do you measure GDP? Whenever someone drinks a pint of whiskey at the bar, then drives home and kills other motorists, the whiskey sold, car fix-up costs, ambulance and hospital fees, insurance and re-insurance premiums, prison costs, and court settlements all contribute to "GDP", even though real quality of life has gone way down.

And of course any law passed can be repealed by the same margin.
Since day one I've stored an arsenal of Truecrypt archives in my Dropbox folder for anything that I really don't want anyone else to find out about. (Not that there is much of that.) Most of the rest of what I store there is ebooks, university lecture notes, my portfolio, and other stuff that I wouldn't worry about if Dropbox really dropped the ball. Seems reasonable to me to be a little more in charge of your own security instead of handing off responsibility to people you don't even know. Still, I agree that we should be holding Dropbox (and similar services) to a high standard, and they have indeed stumbled on this issue.
Can't wait to use this! Looks like it will be immensely helpful to see how time efficient my projects are. I guess I can tag projects by name with a special character and then search for the tags later.. I noticed in the video that only the elapsed time of a task is shown -- is there also a way to see when tasks were started and finished?
I'm not sure why I'm being classified as impatient or lacking in self-discipline. I'm 23, but I've been working to support myself since 18. I don't rely on other people, especially my parents who work hard enough as it is, for money. I don't drink, smoke, or play games, and I've worked my way up as a sysadmin- enough to have savings to be unemployed for the next few years. As replied to the other posts, it's not so much the lack of excitement the startup brings me- it's precisely because it's so interesting that I want to take time off from the remaining things I do to support that cause.
and that isn't thread safe lazy initialization either ;-)

it's surprisingly tricky to get lazy init right.
Or, even more precisely, perverse incentives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
There's a pretty good chance they'll become a future post or two - the challenge with posts like those is that you don't necessarily want to come down too hard on people that are chasing airbag solutions - it's a company blog and at the end of the day they're our customers too.
I get a lot more out of diving than I would tricking a petty thief into returning a stolen chattel to me. And I do not have any evidence that confronting thieves is less risky than diving.
Not in the United States where the USD originates. And like I said, when all else fails, write it all out.

Billion in USD in the United States is 10^9.

Gigadollars is a made-up SI-ified term in the US

G is short for grand, like "that car costs 100G's" for a $100,000 car, making it further unacceptable.

Long story short, to be most easily understood, it's a good idea to use the vernacular of the area

[edit: changed asterisk-asterisk to ^. Apparently two adjacent *'s aren't recognized]
The killer for me is this: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo0ebqK4bl1qzasmo.png

On Google Music, the actual music has good padding, but the rest of the page has so much crap I can barely see any songs. And that's on a 1366*768 display, so I'm a bit miffed.
Calling something bad design without discussing the actual problems it causes is mere name-calling or unsupported opinion. I submit that if you can't make a claim that something is hard to maintain, unreliable, hard to understand, incorrect, fragile, etc... then it is not bad design.

The claim that it is "bad" because it doesn't fit in to a certain paradigm is at best a valid claim that it is inconsistent with the rest of the codebase and therefore hard to work with. At worst, it's cargo-cult engineering; doing something a certain way because it's said to be "good" without understanding why.
If you like nyancat and destroying webpages: nyanjs
Spam from github
I've created an account on github recently. I never requested any access to any repository, but it doesn't stop people from granting me rights to push changes in.

This results in github sending me notifications with links to these people projects. The last one I got has Spanish as primary language which I don't even read.

Weird
I'm going to disagree with this assertion: "sometimes 'doing what you love' simply isn't possible."

The twist is that it may be true that you cannot survive doing some particular thing you love doing, it is has been my experience that you can find something you love to do that does in fact pay for your expenses.

The example "I love driving my car really really fast (and do when I have a chance to) but there's no way I could make a career out of it." is an interesting one, and to give you a flavor of how I think about these things.

Have you explored what it is about driving your car really really fast that triggers your happiness/reward center? Is it the inherent risk of losing control? Is it the rapid fire decision making? Is it the minimization of time between destinations? Is it some sense of freedom about being able to go anywhere ?

If you can get enough introspection into finding out what it is that you love about driving your car fast, it can lead you additional activities that you will also love.

My conjecture (and its just that) is that the base class of things that trigger our reward centers rapid enough or deeply enough cause us to 'love' doing them, is relatively finite with respect to the set 'all possible things you could do.'

Its worth spending some time thinking about because everyday you spend doing something that you don't love doing, is a day you will never get back.
I chose Hong Kong because it's out of the country and one of the few locations I'm not particularly fond of (I've lived there for years, not much there for me). The only place I would want to go to on my day off is China, which is fun for me everytime.

I get plenty of sleep as I do now (6 hours) and sleeping in past that normally makes me feel groggy and tired. I have a very healthy schedule, with lots of small but good breaks in between my coding sessions.