skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask Entrepreneurs: Productivity tips for a chronic procrastinator?
I'm a chronic procrastinator, and I want to change. I have hundreds of ideas jotted down on a notepad I keep on my table, but I never get around to implementing those. There just seems to be this inertia that stops me from ever starting to work on my tasks. "I'll do it next month, I have exams right now", "Now? I can't work in this state of mind!", "Let me just finish reading my RSS feeds. I got to keep myself updated" are some of the excuses I give myself.

Of course, once I do start working on something, I get in the zone and completely lose track of time. Once in the zone, I'll work at a task until I've completed it. Overcoming the "inertia" is the difficult part.

This is what I've done to combat my situation: I've started keeping a TODO list. I've also cleared my desk of unneeded items and removed useless feeds from my RSS reader. I'm getting into the habit of putting my MacBook to sleep when I'm not working. That way, I can't wander off to Digg or the WTF subreddit. I feel I'm about 2x more productive now, but I'm still far from the stage where I can spend more than 50% of my computer time doing productive tasks.

Tips? Links? Blogs? Also, I love anecdotes :)
The pricing could soon get out of hand — a 20 question survey by 500 people would cost $200; who'd pay that?
I think we need to add something new to the HN comment guidelines, to the effect that:

"When someone makes a broad generalization, often meant to read "99 times out of 100," it contributes nothing to the conversation to say "I am one of the other 1 out of 100," rather than "It's really more like 95, or 60, out of 100."
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In my head, a survey has more than one question, while a single question is a poll. So, the name of the site made it seem like you'd be competing with surveymonkey, which would be a good thing.
Both sides have their nut jobs, neither side has the monopoly on crazy. The right is just more visible now since they snapped overnight with the Obama election.
I have worked in image processing and I have looked at Lena many times. I know it's the top half of a Playboy centerfold:

http://www.lenna.org/full/len_full.html

What I see is a rather artistic photo. It surely contains nudity, but it's nonetheless a work of art. If nudity is porn, then Picasso was a pornographer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d'Avignon

And Feynman was also a pornographer then:

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=11504

To cut a long story short. Just because there's nudity, it doesn't mean it's porn. Are we, HN'ers, that prude??
Just a note on design. I have an unnecessary Scrollbar with Firefox on Linux (Ubuntu 9.04). Oh yeah and I would suggest you create a Favicon, the green check comes to mind first.
Thank you. Your insight has been most helpful, particularly the "buy a book" part.

I'll do everything I can to delegate that job, and somehow escape the responsibility in the process.
Best April Fools' Prank This Year
http://rack.rubyforge.org/doc/SPEC.html is the current specification. The new documentation interface (the Darkfish template) uses different paths.
I like it. It's clean and minimum-usable.

Hmm..as of using it, maybe if you can make it like a widget where i can link it to my site, that will be more usable (at least for me) in terms of setting up polling system.
Something I always look at in these kinds of studies is what the sample group is. There's a statistical phenomenon called "explaining away" which often causes spurious correlations. For example: measure the athletic and intellectual abilities of American college students. You'll find a fairly strong negative correlation, even though in the general population there's no correlation or a weak positive correlation.

Why? Admission to college has two possible (but non-exclusive) explanations, athleticism and intellect. These explanations "compete" to explain the fact that a given student got in. Roughly speaking, the presence in the general population of unintelligent non-athletes contributes a positive term to the (near-zero) correlation. These people are removed from the student population, so the total correlation is lower, and hence negative.

Now, this experiment studied student applicants to American universities. If both intelligence and social conservatism in some way cause people to apply to American colleges, a negative correlation between these traits will be induced in the pool of applicants. Off the top of my head, one such cause might be that people with higher social status are more likely to apply to university, and high social status correlates positively with increased acceptance of the social order. I find this rather more plausible than the easy conclusion that "conservatives are dumb", even though it's a more complex causal chain.
Some feedback.

Remove the categories pane completely.
Replace checkboxes with buttons - clicking on them will cast the vote.
Use the common categories from Digg / Stackoverflow and others (Top surveys, Controversial, Upcoming)
One factor might be that he has enough money to not have to care that much about the monetary value of his compensation.
> Has anyone tried an open source/creative commons type licensing and repository for standard legal documents? Does such a thing exist?

I'm building something like that at http://www.firstdrafter.com - a freemium site.
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I'd say that your issue doesn't need a organizational solution, it's a deeper question.
I go by "when why gets bigger, how gets easier".
I would suggest sitting down and writing out 100 (or however many) reasons for what you are trying to accomplish. As you have those done, your motivation will grow and get you past the little distractions. The more reasons you have for accomplishing your goals, the easier it will be to get desciplined.
Block all those sites at your router. My firmware (tomato) lets me block some sites all the time (digg) and some for certain times of day (hn).

Convince yourself that every line of code you write is worth $10k.

Finally, make this your mantra: http://seoblackhat.com/2007/01/29/do-it-fucking-now/
China: Ascendant Superpower Or Just Another Nation with Structural Problems?
Catalyst 5.8 Released an Interview with Tomas Doran
My mind works exactly the same way. Best thing for me is to commit to a deadline and have consequences if I miss. Involve third parties somehow (angel investors or get it approved as a school project). Make a deal with another entrepreneur where you owe him money if you miss your deadline. If you don't produce, don't fool yourself - you're not an entrepreneur just a dreamer.
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I hope you would find the following links useful at least in some ways.

PG's Brilliant Essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=zs61txc4kwr4kd1q1rj...

Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=procrastinating-again

Letter to a Young Procrastinator: http://www.slate.com/id/2190918/pagenum/all/

Also, a quick search of HN using Google, should provide a lot of food for thought and anecdotes. There have been a number of discussions on this topic here.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+pro...
Grandfathers can continue to father children til they pass away, and we're not actually programmed to die, we're just not optimised for immorbidity. These two things are enough to explain grandfathers. Oh, and grandmothers as caregivers are unique to humans, or at least the menopause is, which is an adaptation for this care giving strategy. I'm not familiar with any other mammalian species with it.
Instead of aiming to do 1 thing and failing to do it, aim to do 20 things and accept that 5 of them will slip.

Do that and basically shift to whatever you feel like doing at the time (with the only caveat that it should be relatively productive stuff - ie. not "play WoW", more like "write a blog post" or "design a new homepage").

You probably will still get stuff done just before the deadline when it has a hard deadline, but the result is that you'll do a LOT of other stuff along the way.
Sorry for the interjection, but it seems you guys are almost breaking out in reasonableness.

On the other hand, there are people who will dump toxic waste into my groundwater and my air unless the men with guns are willing to deprive them of life or liberty for failure to cease said dumping.

And if you define a ton of arsenic as "toxic waste" I don't think anybody would argue with you about the need for protection from your neighbor's actions.

But if you define a few parts per billion, or something that has a .01% chance of causing my death from cancer, or something that the community is currently hysterical about, (such as second-hand smoke) then I think we do have a problem.

There's plenty of room for reasonable thinking in the middle of the road here. The problem is that the middle of the road keeps moving. Nobody used to care if you dumped used motor oil in your backyard. Or if you smoked in public. Or if your lawn mower spewed smoke. The goalposts keep moving. This trend cannot continue indefinitely.

There is some reasonable middle ground. In my opinion, however, we've crossed that middle ground a long time ago. Decisions about what private property rights to infringe on are not made any more based on scientific, reproducible cause-and-effect principles that have a high degree of causing me harm (And I'll stick with my .01% number for this discussion). Instead the ground keeps changing based on current politics.

Private property should not be based on political whims -- that's the whole point of the Bill of Rights: that some principles have been proven to be the bedrock of successful societies. It's no more debatable than whether 1+1=2

I can't emphasize enough that the notion of private property is critical for successful societies. It's a lesson history shows us very clearly. My ownership of something does not depend on my fellow citizens allowing me to own it. Certain principles are innate, endowed by our creator, whatever-your-favorite-language. Inviolate. It's the entire basis of western society. I'm not trying to argue at extremes again -- obviously I can't dump a ton of arsenic in my backyard. But to believe that it's natural for global health concerns to intrude more and more on personal property is to say that people are going to stop being people at some point and simply be cells performing in a larger organism. I don't see that happening any time soon. The human animal simply won't fit into the little box that you'd like them to fit into.
Good points. But favoring Python lists over recursion is like favoring chocolate over logging.

No, no, it's not at all, not when you approach it from Guido's point of view. To him, the crucial question is, "What's the right way for beginners to process data?" Python and its built-in data structures support iteration and list indexing because that's how beginners do it. Python does not support tail calls because Guido thinks it's a mistake to teach recursion to beginners.

I think everyone is misunderstanding Guido's point because they just can't imagine anyone taking his point of view, so they imagine him saying something else. Joe Marshall even called Guido's main points (which he correctly identified, and then ungraciously caricatured) "a sideshow" and said the "true argument" is about the power of recursion. Sorry, Guido doesn't care about the power of recursion, because it isn't valuable to his target programmers, the programmers he wants to serve. He really thinks tail call support would be a very minor feature in Python because it's not important whether you can program in Python that way. He thinks complete stack trace information is very important because it makes things easy and transparent for beginners. That's what's important to Guido and, I would argue, to most Python programmers. When it comes to the future of Python, that's what matters, and Joe Marshall is the sideshow.
More or less agree, Okinawan-Americans don't have much higher life expectancy than your average Asian-American, which is probably due to lifestyle, but Donald pointed out ^ that extreme longevity appears to have a large genetic component.
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i think YC/PG has shared many things here and more they shared the more they have become popular, they have got more success, more press and more reputation & respects among startups, VCs and angels... so I think some tips & hints for how to start a starups in a right legal way is in fact going to help the whole startup community...
I think, for this article, the definition of porn used is "depiction of naked people". This works well with all of the detection algorithms, but more importantly, it works with the stated problem: naked people are the things Papa is upset about when Junior finds them on Google accidentally.
Another possibility is cytokine storms:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm
No, I was only about a year in from the last point at which I had renewed in order to pick up the MyFaves plan. However, I am on a family plan for my wife and I, but I can't imagine that changes much. Just try going to your local T-Mobile rep and asking about the G1, and see what they say.
Or a lunar module for that matter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo16LM.jpg
I have the same problems. There are two tricks that i find quite helpful:

1. Find a team partner - and you will be cornered to start "get things done". Otherwise, you can't keep show up everyday without any progress

2. Have a weekly team target - we have it as weekly iterations. Always release something out every week.

Well, the good news are, you realize your problems and looking for solutions.

Bill Gates seems to have the same problem with procrastination, early on in his career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ic1Ro4LkKw
Take an Adderall pill one time every day for two days. Heh.

You'll work like a machine from that point forward.
Again with the visualizing of a pre-newtonian world, a few years ago a physics TA (now a lecturer) made some observations on his Q&A sessions with some 1st years in Cambridge- they didn't hold up too well either but then again, changing your mental model of how the world works is no easy task I guess.

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512158

"1.4 Heavier objects fall faster

The classic Aristotelian belief is that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Surely three hundred years after Galileo showed otherwise, students no longer share this belief? Unfortunately, many do, but the belief shows up only in novel situations. Students know that if a stone and a cannonball fall, they should say that both objects hit the ground ‘at the same time’; if they have been carefully taught, they might even say ‘roughly at the same time’. They also know what to say about two objects sliding down an incline, that mass is irrelevant. However, when the problem includes the novel eﬀect of rolling (yet more trouble with circular motion!), many students have no practiced Newtonian answer to quote, and reveal their gut-level Aristotelian belief. For example, in Problem 23, about objects rolling down a plane, some students reasoned that an object with a large moment of inertia, such as a disc, rolls faster than an object with a small moment of inertia, such as a solid sphere. Two students argued that ‘moment of inertia is analogous to mass, and heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects’! I could not agree with the analogy, but I admired its boldness.

The way that rehearsal hides this misconception reminds me of the theory of the English accent: that if you step on an Englishman’s toes in the middle of the night, he’ll shout at you in an American accent. On this view, the one true accent is American. An English accent is just an act, a mask dropped upon surprise. Similarly, the students’ response that ‘all objects fall at the same speed’ is carefully rehearsed. It falls away when we step on their toes by asking about it in a novel context, whereupon they reveal their true belief, that heavier objects fall faster.""
It's not a random choice. You're optimised for the spreading of your genes and if you spend resources on maintaining your body in perfect health and your competitor lets his body run down while spending those resources on progeny he wins on average.

The old surviving to compete with the young would not make evolution fail. There are limited resources and competition for them so the ill adapted die, there's nothing in there that stops the old living on forever, and if organisms can't breed together they generally don't copulate (adaptation). Great^8 granddad might want to get it on with g^8 daughter, but she'll be uninterested because her adaptations will not see him as sexual, any more than we'd see a chimp.

There is actually only one major family that are asexual the rotifers. Given that sex appears wasteful of energy, the fact that there is only one example of a lineage successful in geological time with asexuality is pretty strong evidence it's a good idea.

For more, better, more clearly expressed, read Richard Dawkins.

Under no circumstances read anything by Steven Jay Gould to learn biology.
Also, at the time this began, Apple was far from resurrected. It was a freighter headed in the wrong direction. Steve had thrown it in reverse, and it was definitely slowly decelerating, but it hadn't yet stopped and started moving where he wanted it to go. If it had, the options wouldn't have needed backdating.

Jobs took the role back over in 1997. The iPod launched in 2001 and became the hit that saved the company over the next few years. The backdating began in 1997 and stopped in 2002, right about when the ship started moving in reverse.
Processing in JS is beautiful
Suck it up. Stop reading blogs, stop reading HN, stop making excuses. Start working. There are no tips that will break you out of it - just self discipline.

I was you once. GTD by David Allen helped. Going to the gym daily with my brother (who is a gym rat) helped, but I finally realized that I had everything in the world that people are dieing to get and I was squandering that gift by wasting my time.

Procrastinating is not an illness, it is a decision. You have chosen to be lazy, only you can change that.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.
I'd recommend The Power of Less by Leo Babaute. It's written by the Zen Habits guy, and it offers a productivity system designed for people like you (and me).
Overall - quite nice, but needs simplifying and tidying up.

Get rid of "win iPhone" insert. It takes away more from the site than it actually adds to it. Also the "Tags" column solves the problem that I'm not sure exists. But it sure does clutter the page. I'd get rid of it too until you are certain that the user experience is (dramatically) improved by having it there.
Nate Silver: Does race affect votes?
My highlight:

"The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.

“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.

They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index – the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face – to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.

“It seemed so simple but no one else had thought of it. Somehow, we’d managed to crack America’s top secret!” Achille said. "
>Two students asked if I was going to continue asking them about things they had never studied in the class.

I'm in grad school and people still ask this question after tests. Many of my peers expect only to be asked questions that have already been asked during the course of instruction, or at least ones that resemble them very closely. I think this is pretty good evidence that people are only in school for the degree and not for the skills and practice of thinking/wondering/exploring on their own.

This might have something to do with our generally rather antiquated public educational system that basically beats "wondering" out of students heads in favor of industrial education.*

*This is not true of all teachers or all schools systems, but it applies to much of my experience.
No. No drugs, please. My problem are my habits. I do not have a disease.
Learning Web Development with Seaside (tutorial)
1 word...routine. If you go into your day without a battle plan you'll get distracted by every little thing. Create a schedule and stick to it
I quite like it. Of course, it's still a "new" site, so you have a lot of work to do.

Nice design.
I hope Roubini is wrong, but I have to be amused at the people who want to put duct tape over his mouth.

We have too much debt in the U.S. Our solution so far has been to transfer bad debt from the banks to the government, and then add a bunch more government debt in the form of "stimulus" plans. Then, of course, we can have the banks start extending more credit (i.e. increasing debt) to the private sector again.

I don't know what the upper limit of total debt for the U.S. is, but there has to be one. Running up our total debt to the maximum possible level won't work any better in the long run than maxing out five credit cards does for a household.
Oh. Eh, well, I wrote a small blog post a while back about little things that help me stay on-track:

http://whitepaperclip.com/blog/post/2-Avoiding-Procrastinati...

Everyone is different, though.