skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My tricks from school:

Short term: Colored pens, white paper, make cheat sheets (as if you were planning to bring them with you, but leave them at home).

Slightly longer term: Get hold of real exam assignments (if possible and allowed) as soon as possible. This helps motivation quite significantly because you can see what you would make you fail today. Knowing one assignement that I wouldn't pass does a whole lot to motivation.

Do stuff. I created 3d models (of yet to be invented furniture and tools) out of cardboard (empty pizza boxes where my favourite.)

Attempt at getting good/fast in everything you touch. But let no failure ruin your day.

Long term: Find and reinforce motivation. Why are you reading that textbook in the first place? Because you are going to be good at something. Why? Because you are going to get good work. Why? Because you want to change the world/help someone you know/etc.

Learn to defend yourself against your own and others critisism while not blaming others: There all kinds of things that rise against us: disabilities makes thing harder, economy (hard to study while your brain is working non stop on how to pay x), etc. Tell yourself: If I manage all this, that will be quite a story to tell.
(As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)

You say this is hubris, but you fail to mention that in many if not more objective ways America is the greatest country in the world. It has the largest amount of wealthy people, the largest amount of educated people, it has freed an entire continent of war, its justice system covers and protects an enormous amount of people, it holds individual rights to a very high standard, it is the largest true democracy in the world.

Then we haven't even mentioned the results of that great economy it has. It presents the world with a dazzling amount of technological progress, from computers to medicine. The fruits of american science have increased the quality of life and longetivity of a vast majority of people on this planet.

There's some subjective stuff too. It has in my opinion the greatest cultural industry, it produces the most impressive books, movies, music, paintings, whatever you like you're bound to find an expert in the US.

Yes guantanamo bay is a black mark on the US's grey slate, but it doesn't immediately disqualify it as a great state of this world.
Ok, suggestions:

1. Python world has a documentation "standard" of a markdown language (ReSt) converts to HTML and LaTeX, usually through a preprocessing called sphinx that can link docs intelligently.

There are doc-a-likes in other languages (JS-docco) and they generally look boring and work-a-day.

Luckily they also have abstracted out most of the templating and css.

I suggest that initially try out writin some themes for a markdown output, but with the goal of agreeing target outputs - that is get the output from markdown for page footer to be standardised across all languages - and then there is a target HTML to aim CSS at - in the same way that there are a million themes for Wordpress because all Wordpress HTML output uses same conventions, so designers can iterate against same background, I would love to see a million themes for open documentation, knowing I could write comments and it would already be not ugly

2. Logos - yeah boring I know but everyone loves them. Offer one to any open source project and they will say yes. So run a gravatar of logos - store the png on (logotar) and link to it via the hash of the repo. Then all I need do is put link of logotar.com/md5hash.png and presto. You have a scorechart and a way to see who has logos for most popular repos and I have a logo in my readme

3. Wan to get more deeply involved in a project - do mood boards for their site or do button / widget themes (ie bootstrap alterations). In the end we developers need as much practise at getting it right as you guys

Brilliant decision to push on this - good luck
Yes, I am a designer and I have thought about this as well. However stating your message as We/you should be giving back is not going to resonate with a lot of designers. Let me tell you why: Most designers fight of the "why-dont-you-design-a-logo-for-free-for-my-business-because-you-like-to-design" for years. Even though I say "no" most of the time, I still spend a lot of nights designing free stuff for a lot of people.

Buy, like I said: I want to follow this call to arms. Not because I "should" but because occasionally I see a lot of nice Open Source projects out there I'd like to be a part of. Or a great concept I'd like to design the logo, icon or UX for. Why? Because of the best motivator out there: ME. I want it for my own portfolio, or for my own network of cool-people-building-cool-stuff or just to learn and become better at some field. So if you want a designer, tell them you'll work with them and give them feedback, make them part of the team for a specific piece of the project.

I realize people are going to downvote me into the 7th ring of hell for this 'selfish' reply, but I'd like to see this happen and I hope this motivator helps.
No, I really don't know any better way but this way that you are supposedly telling others to accept as 'al right' is not a a way at all. It's not even democracy.

And if you keep doing[1] this - detaining innocents and keeping them in the vacuum for years without a trial and without letting them know what is their crime, if tall; and killing hundreds of children in one drone strike(even though your country's Sec.OS was against it) then you have got two clear choices -

(1). Either wipe out all those innocents, their supporters, family and non-innocents who get another reason(or show it to innocents) to hit you back. This is already happening in my own country on the northern/top tip - for decades.

(2). Or be ready for more aggressive attacks when you are no longer in a position to drone the shit out of entire villages of children and women at your whims(very soon). Well, in this case you might as well be looking for the collective wipe out. you and me together get perished in the shit that we let grow and multiply.

On a more gory(violence ahead) note I'll give a very far fetched but possible example - you might find your, on pre-college RTW trip, teenage son's neck slit by some disgruntled, frustrated, suicidal, lost kid who had lost his father or maybe entire family just the way above mentioned - only because he was born in the wrong geography. Of course your RTW kid was innocent too; as innocent as the kid who struck the blade!

It's a lot worse than the time of colonization, damn it!

Here this you can be me, you, your CIA top boss or just anyone.

[1]. By keep doing I want to say keep on accepting as a world citizen.
12 year prolific bloguer here:

Writing has become my catharsis.

It did a lot for me and I never regret the day I started to blog.

I started posting link, short news and now I just write rants. 10 min reading format is what I love to write.
Professional DVD Media Player from DVDFab
You may already know that DVDFab Media Player is a powerful Blu-ray media player, and there’s no surprise that it’s also a professional DVD media player, which can play any newly released DVD discs and gives you super smooth DVD experience. Next is a step by step tutorial on how to play DVD with this player software to let you get an idea about how professional it is.
'Awhile' is the new 'alot'.
No, Obama is cool! He plays basketball and does reddit AMAs! And he's black, too!
First of all, open-plan offices border on back-door health discrimination. I'm surprised they're legal, to be frank about it.

This is the Theory Z teamism. It's a cargo-cult mentality that doesn't work, leads to mediocrity, and makes a farce of the concept of a "team". Theory X was extreme pessimism toward workers: rob them or they'll rob you. Theory Y was extreme optimism-- treat them well, and they'll return the favor. Theory Y worked very well until 1980 or so when the yuppie generation sold out their employers' secrets to score private equity jobs, proving that human nature can be quite nasty.

Theory Z is the compromise, based on the idea that people are neither altruistic nor egoistic but most, by default, are localistic. They care about the people they spend a lot of time with. They'll screw over "the company" given the right incentives, but interpersonal cohesion keeps them honest enough, if it's done right-- at least, in theory. That's Theory Z and while it's the most accurate in its view of human nature (localism, not universal altruism or degenerate egoism) it's still wrongheaded and leads to mediocrity.

It fails in several ways. Namely, the only thing people on a "team" share is that they report to the same manager. Often, they didn't choose to be on that project (closed allocation) which means they actually share nothing in common. So there's nothing that makes them a team. In fact, since the most common thing to unite people in such circumstances is a common enemy (management) the bosses would often prefer they not be a real team.

Further reading:

* http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/gervais-macle...

* http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/gervais-macle...
Fantastic suggestions, thank you :)
Seriously? Obama's ego really does give appear to be at the upper, Blair/Sarkozy end of the big-politician scale. I could consider an argument that appearances are deceiving here; but no-one with two eyes could look at Obama's personal background and career to date and fail to see how it might, at least, leave someone else with the impression that Obama's unusually prone to feel the world as revolving around him.

> (p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)

Yes, I did misread it, thank you.
Uses a lot of Shutterstock (vector)art for logo's. This is outlawed by Shutterstock and can get your company in serious trouble. (As well as not being very origional. You can't claim copyright on piece of shutterstock art).
Porticus, un gestionnaire de téléchargement d'applications pour Mac
You've inspired me to learn designing (I did take a look at your dribbble shots :) pretty good for a web dev).
What troubles me personally is that all the talk around Bitcoin at the moment is of Bitcoin as an investment opportunity. I'm personally more excited by Bitcoins value as a currency. I think the most salient point in this article is this

> Almost every good one can purchase with Bitcoins is actually priced in dollars and sold at a Bitcoin price reflecting the prevailing exchange rate. So there is almost no Bitcoin frame of reference independent of the Bitcoin-dollar exchange rate.

For me this is Bitcoins biggest weakness, the notion that it's true value can only be unlocked when converted back into "real" currency. I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem, or if there can ever be one. I am reminded though of Brazil's unconventional solution to their hyper-inflation problems, and it feels like there's a parallel in there somewhere...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake...
Anyone has a link to the Raw data? (the census data I guess)
Well, the BTC can be split up into 8 decimal places at now (mBTC, Satoshi)... so when the demand for bitcoins is high enough, the "dominant" btc unit will become mBTC. Problem solved.
the article, or the opinion espoused by the commenter you replied to?

In other words, you come to HN for one aspect of the Political world , and not all of them?

Myself, I don't come to HN for ANYTHING in this thread. It's all interesting, in it's own right, but has little to do with 'hacking'.

But, then again, civil liberties are a set of issues that can broadly affect us all.. maybe that was the grand position of whoever thought this was HN worthy.

I don't know. Maybe it's beyond us all, and the OP has some insight as to how the whole GITMO situation can be solved with functional programming and 'high-availability clustering solutions', and he's just trying to nudge us into finding the solution.

One can be hopeful.
Hey - author here.

Totally agree - I'm a crappy writer and I really hoped that sentiment didn't come across, but hey. Totally not what I meant :)

I've been burnt too by people not paying, people underpaying, and people not wanting to pay — but the big realisation I had before writing this was that these projects are not the same as someone wanting a full redesign of their new 'Airbnb for X' for £50; they're community things.
And I responded to a comment which was simply saying "Just send them home". That can't be done for "them" all.

I believe there is a wide variation within those imprisoned: some are innocent and were captured by mistake or worse (e.g. rivals were turned in by jealous neighbours, or whatever), others are actually hardened fanatics. And it is very difficult to know who is what.
As a developer I have used 99designs and was able to find something acceptable. I have however worked with designers of real and rare skill, and they do work that inspires and changes the direction of my development. That's stuff if I could do I would not do for 200 bucks.

That's kind of the issue - before 99 designs I had to have no design or use my own abilities to get there. It was awful. Now 99designs has raised the awful to acceptable for merely 200 bucks. From my point of view that's great - but it seems there were a lot of people paying designers when they just wanted a logo and a theme

I should say that bootstrap and wordpress has done as much to take this source of incone away as 99deigns. There is now an automated bottom to the market. So it's harder now to find clients. Good designers need to show value add, like the rest of us. I would suggest they a lid the idea of a single site rewrite and join up with AB testers and offer site improvement services in a monthly payment cycle.

The top of the market through is still game change time
KFC’s boneless chicken supposed to please millenials - here's why it won't
DISH Network Proposes Merger with Sprint Nextel Corporation for $25.5 Billion
Agreed, as a developer we also get the occasional "code for free" pitch but I find it much more satisfying to code for free on things I've decided. I would love to see more designers come and help us make open source look great.

EDIT: Is there anything as developers that we can do to attract designers as contributors to our projects ?
Javascript Brainfuck Interpreter and Visualizer
The things I see all the time are "learn to program" tutorials that go through in a very formulaic way and explain programing. I haven't seen any such things for design (and would love to).
I don't have TV at home and don't read any news online, except maybe once a month while procrastinating. I rarely find anything that really concerns me there and if I do I usually skip right to the comments for the broader range of opinions or search the internet for more information.
The lack of focus can be directly derived from the lack of interest, vision and love on what you're doing.

When you're thinking about other things, it means what you're about to do is so much of a chore to you that you subconsciously procrastinate and despise doing it. Remember that what you're working on is something you love; you'll soon find out that everything else doesn't matter. Love isn't a feeling, it's a decision to commit because you found value no one else can't seem to see.

It's clear that the most productive people are people in love in what they do. They find joy and value even in their smallest chores/tasks. They don't need to "minimize distractions" or use "software program that blocks any time-wasting internet site", it's natural for them to have a distaste for other things except on what's currently right in-front of them.

The practical task lists or methods on "how to focus" are easy as pie, there's a lot of content tackling, although looking for something you love working on or reminding yourself that you should love what you're doing - that's something only you can answer.
Who did you vote for in 2012? Ron Paul?
Tricks like reducing distractions and using your time better are interesting and sometimes helpful, but also a great way to procrastinate. When you're an adult, you become more self-aware, which probably explains why it wasn't a problem in the past.

I agree with what others have said - you may simply not be interested in what you're doing. If that's the case, change.

I have three bits of advice:

1. It could be you're not sleeping enough. Sleep more and drink less caffeine and alcohol.

2. If you aim to do a great, great, job of whatever you do, it can become much more rewarding. Be a perfectionist. (nb for some people perfectionism leads to procrastination, but not for most).

3. Get on with it. Don't allow yourself to read any further advice on how to be effective. Get up early, get working, work your ass off, have a fixed schedule with breaks and don't try to do long hours. I think an awful lot of people worry too much about productivity rather than just getting on and doing the work. It's also a case of momentum - once you start getting some feedback on what you've achieved, your hard work will feel justified and you'll be more motivated.
I think the design process is completly different from coding, and I don't think the right tools for effective collaboration have already been built. Sometimes I wonder if that's even possible.
Design seems to work best when it's a one two persons vision than something made with a group, since it lack the level of objectivity found in coding.
Stuff like twitter bootstrap might be pointing in the right direction... o modular base that a lot of people can agree uppon and that can be easily changed or themed.
Has your proposed scenario been tried in practise either? Saying "they would bankrupt themselves" is just supposition with no timeframe - in the meantime everyone suffers.
What about front end coding? Putting design into js/html/css?
Is that also a domain of a backend developer or designer? I am just asking because I am really not sure.
Analysis of Security in a P2P storage cloud
My advice would be lay off the stimulants.
This is garbage. I say I am not a designer because my design work isn't of a high enough standard to be professionally acceptable and because it is a waste of my time, and thus my employers money, when I do so. Specialization is a key part of an efficient economy.
The US is the computer and internet that complete you.
The problem is that the 1BTC I have in my wallet increases in value over time without me doing anything to compensate for that. An ever-increasing (but correctly increasing) amount of BTC ensures that the buying power of my one BTC remains the same.

For example, today I can get 1BTC for ~$100. Say I held onto that 1BTC for a very long time and eventually bitcoins became the earth-standard currency. That 1BTC would now be worth significantly more than $100 (say, now I would be able to buy a house with it).

You might argue that this is how banks work (interest etc.), however banks earn you interest by lending your money out to other people who contribute to the GDP on your behalf.

It all comes down to buying power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power

Don't get me wrong, I think something like BTC is a great idea - our human nature just makes it impractical (not impossible). Things like money-hoarders and deflation need to be addressed, which at the moment are not.
One exception to this might be that we dont want to do the thing we might not know. I tell people i'm not a designer, because i really dont want to learn it.
I've mostly found blogging saves me time by allowing me to link myself. Plus longform writing allows one to transcend mere comment-box arrogance and ascend to the heady heights of bounteous pomposity.
It doesn't look like anyone on this thread has even tried to look for what this man is accused of doing and why he's in Gitmo in the first place. You can find a dossier from the US DoD of this man at the NYTimes' own website:

http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/43-samir-na...

tl;dr: Member of al-Qaida, bodyguard of Osama, fought in the front lines against US and coalition forces, consistently lied to interrogators.

I'm not sure what kind of court he would be 'tried' in considering he's not a US citizen.
A really big part of it is that the packaging situation is a big clusterfuck on python, and therefore people don't really mind packaging decisions related to them.

Rubygems on the other hand is an entrenched standard in the Ruby world, and people really expect them to be the same everywhere. This make people notice shoddy packaging in a totally different way. This has become even more noticeable with bundler since suddenly people notice when the packagers have thrown compatibility out of the window.

(I have more experience with rpm based distros, but I assume debian doesn't work too differently)
New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust
Happy Birthday Leonhard Euler
Bootstrap is a great example of something that might have taken _some_ work away from _some_ designers, but the whole it contributes back to is much richer as a result.

Since Bootstrap and other high-quality frameworks have been released I've noticed an all-around higher baseline quality of design (which is a good thing - I'm well aware that there's not always the time or money to involve a designer), and more importantly they provide a nice _baseline_ for developers to get more interested in honing their own design skills.

A parallel might be…say…Rails? I could never have dreamt of making my own web apps in Ruby without it - as a beginner things would have just been far too intimidating. Too many things to learn. But Rails quickly got me to a base level of competency from which I could add skills, and go back to basics (and write things in vanilla Ruby etc). A bit of hand-holding is great.

But yeah - as a craftsman who respects others I try to always employ highly-paid local engineers. That's kind of why we don't (always) like 99designs (but that's a different discussion for a different day I think)
Designers shouldn't look at Open Source as some kind of charity or that they owe something. Most of the best open source work is done out of necessity. If you believe in a product and it's something you need then contribute something that improves everyone's lives.

I've thought about this topic a lot and I honestly don't know how to involve more designers. My current stance is we need to figure out how to educate more engineers on how to make better interaction and product design decisions. It's a much bigger audience and if we can elevate the people writing code then we have a much better chance at creating better products.
Show HN: Web Pair - share info between browsers
Oh yes.
Even with documentaries which should usually be better researched there is so many inaccuracies on the subjects I do know something about that I'm careful to remind myself that the stories on subjects I don't know about are probably equally inaccurate.
Dish Launches $25.5 Billion Bid for Sprint
I'm going to whip up a quick site I think - if you shoot me an email at opensauce@designedbygold.com I'll make sure I send you a link :)
Reduce distractions is a good start.

Close email windows, HN, put your phone on silent, find a space in which noise does not intrude, remove the clock.

Lock out any external signal that might distract you. It might be noise, it might be discomfort in a mouse you're using.

Then the second part is that you've got to enjoy what you do. The craft, the elegance of it. Take pride in wanting to do it well, refine that. Look for improvements and do it even better. Be excited by the improvements. This is the undefinable quality of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

With those two things; reducing distraction and find the beauty, elegance and satisfaction in the simple and mundane... I found it's possible to totally immerse yourself in whatever task is at hand. Just taking care of distractions isn't enough, you need the pursuit of quality too.
Plagiarism aside, it's really funny :)