skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm here, exactly where I want to be
Moving towards something is more fun than protecting existing position.

> I have goals, but
It seems, those are not 'recharging' at the time

== Try some of these for a week or two ==
Do nothing(nothing at all, just sit and observe which thoughts are bugging you)
Do stuff you like. Do something you haven't done before. Make mistakes. Learn.
The irssi-proxy plugin lets you connect to your current irssi connections via any existing irc client.
Blogger is a rather poorly supported product at Google. I'm sure it's on the chopping block soon as it duplicates a lot of G+ functionality.
Ha. I don't think it's quite that grim.

Sure, your overall energy level goes down when you age. But if you matured well, then your motivation goes up because you know what matters to the world and what matters to yourself. And you have more skills. People are motivated to do what they're good at.

When you're young, you're trying lots of shit, but you mostly suck at all of the things you try. You're a dilettante. Your low expectations and sense of novelty keep you excited. You're spending a lot of energy, but objectively not getting much done.

When you're older, you're trying less stuff, but the skills you already have allow you to use much less energy to to accomplish much more.

Honestly I think there is an additional compounding effect with programming -- you can write programs that make you a better programmer. I still use little tools and scripts I built 5 to 10 years ago, and they magnify my productivity. I know that as a 20 year old I would have spent an entire afternoon on something that is now second nature; a one-liner.

It's not a matter of having more energy. You don't want to spend lot of energy while programming, at least.
There's something to that. I unintentionally adopted a German shepherd a few months ago and learning to look after him has been quite an interesting challenge, though sometimes a frustrating one.

On a broader note, consider that when you were 14 the world and the conept of agency were both novel. In the meantime, you've realized that neither are all they're cracked up to be, and your progress through the world isn't as rapid as exciting as when you first encountered it. Some stuff that you thought was uber-cool back then turned out to be meh.

However, I do find that if you're struggling with boredom the endless flow of trivia on the internet makes that worse rather than better. Rather than Reddit, curl up with a good book.
Correct. The HTML5 spec includes "unquoted attribute values," which have some special restrictions (no spaces, can't be the empty string, can't use HTML characters like >, <, or =, and — duh — no quotes). http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/syntax.html#attr-value-unqu...
> I would postulate that if Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook went permanently offline tomorrow, absolutely nothing of significance would change either online or in the society.

That is insane. On the other hand, if you shut down 1993 internet, nobody would have noticed.

> If anything, your list shows how centralized the Internet has become. After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

That's the natural evolution of every technology - I can imagine you yearning for the day when steam power and electricity wasn't commercialized and was a noble endeavor of hobbyists.

But I'll translate for you: I am talking about wiki software, multimedia streaming technology, social media and search engines, which you conveniently omitted.

Yes, these things are expensive, so they become centralized and commercialized. The world is still better for it.
Yes. There is nothing wrong with smoking weed. However, doing it when he gets back home and then going to sleep is bad.

Why spend time learning and then having some fun with playing around with software development when you can simply light one up and reach nirvana?

Dear OP, I've been in your shoes. Seriously, smoke less, or smoke as a reward. Cannabis is awesome if you want to draw something or play music. It's not so awesome when you must use your logical mind.

Yes, it makes you feel good. That's the point, and that's why you should avoid it. Let's say it boosts your happiness by 50 happiness points. Learning something simply increase your happiness by 10 happiness points... and only when the learning it done! Of course you are not going to want to spend time learning stuff!
You can also view a list of someone's friends by trying to recover their password. I reported it to their security team months ago and didn't get a response.
The globe spins but nothing happens... Did all the Black Friday shoppers kill each other?
Why Can People Live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Now, But Not Chernobyl?
As if personal messages are private!
Please can you wire up some unicorns to some rainbows and make it so I can have irssi act as a client for irccloud? ;)

I really want an IRC kernel with an API, so I can have all sorts of clients on different machines/platforms, but it seems to be impossible at the moment, without using the horrible bouncers.
Newsstand sucks in iOS 7
One place where to organize this would perhaps be the project's Wiki.
Sorry that was a change from V2 of GPL. I had forgotten that GPL changed in v3. I try to avoid V3 because several bad things came from that change. The Free for Noncommercial use change being among them.
Comet ISON, presumed dead, shows new life
Have you looked into the tools and amenability of Scala to static analysis and found them lacking?

Also, it seems a bit odd to call Scala "syntactic sugar". It's a pretty unique language in its own right.
exercise and make lists.

I love making lists and do so everyday. Mostly they are to do items, but they have longer term items as well. During exercise I review my lists, usually in my head. Not only does my mind feel clear through physical exertion, I sometimes have a new angle on my work (and a renewed passion).
The thing is, Mobile Safari and the Chrome on Android are perfectly good web browsers, and can render web pages pretty much exactly as can a desktop browser. Misfeatures like this are the result of pathetic platform envy. Yes, native applications have access to superior controls. No, your uncanny valley reimplementation of native UI is not cool; it's not innovative; it's bad design. It's dishonest, aggravating, and in a better world, would lead to revocation of the offender's internet license.
I view this as akin to Writer's Block, to which the cure is simply to get back to writing. So clearly stated, it seems a daunting task—and yet, there it is.

Get back to making meaningful things. Start with a single line of code. Build, ship, build. Learn. Build more. Ship more.
Let's keep the loss above the NSA's budget so they can rationalize their stupidity with the only thing they understand: $
I hate what blogger is doing, but the project is very cool.
Lately I've been substituting reddit for reading books. Got myself a Kindle (if I spent that much I better use it!) Been feeling a lot more productive from it.
So that's why the Soviet Union and the USA didn't have to invest much in conventional weapons during the cold war! Oh, wait...
List of human cognitive biases
Agreed. I should exercise too.
Signals From the Void to look inside a Black Hole
I misspoke. What you are describing comes from developer feedback but indirectly in a sense. This, I think, is a nice standard of measurement. Its when people solicit absolutely no feedback either in the form of past projects where hours are measured somewhat or what they just "feel" something should take. I'm all for metrics based estimation because that's how most developers would likely estimate. Its when management seems to pull things out of their ass to get a prospective client I have a problem with. I understand when we need money but I can also trace some of our worst clients to some of the most unrealistic estimates we've ever given. They're almost a 1:1 direct correlation and its like no one sees how much of a drain they can be all around.
That seems like overkill.

See, most of the time I do "vim foo" to modify a file. But sometimes, on rare occasions, "echo bla > foo" seems to be a reasonable way to modify that file.

That said, most of the files I've used that on were in /etc, so since etckeeper arrived I've pretty much stopped using RCS. But before I knew about etckeeper, it was nice.
I made that mistake 6 years ago to solve a similar problem. Now I have a ton of unnecessary responsibilities which only drive me crazy. Whenever I focus on something more than an hour she wants attention and we are talking about a trained dog here. There is a lot to write but I'm getting bored even thinking about it. Feeding, taking out, playing, cleaning, health care etc etc. In conclusion, yes having a dog is nice but it brings too many responsibilities together. It may solve a problem but you will have five new problems.
> is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

It depends, really. As a Democritus fanboy I always take "offense" when hearing similar remarks, and I usually try (and fail) to make my point by offering a witty remark which might sound like Hobbes or Epicurus might have said it.

On a more serious note, this list is really bogus when it comes to "ancient Philosophy" because it ignores all the pre-Socratics. Ok, maybe some Sophists were not the most trust-worthy bunch of them all, but you cannot really omit Heraclitus or Democritus himself.
>smoking weed
>wondering why you can't stay mentally on

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=cannabis+depression
If it at all possible, I would try to arrange where you live so that you can bike to work. It basically makes exercise "built in" -- i.e. no additional effort.

In any case, I totally agree about exercise increasing energy. And it only continues if it's not a chore; you have to look forward to it (eventually). Once you are good at something you will look forward to it.
While that is possible, marijuana can affect motivation and it is a very good idea to quit for a month or more before reevaluating the situation.

Long term marijuana users have been shown to have lower dopamine levels [1] which can (does?) affect motivation.

Daily exercise is what has helped me mentally more than anything else - at this point I can't imagine ever going without it.

1. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201307/...
Looks cool, but you from what I gather you can get a service such as this running for free with just a little effort.

Personally I use Irissi with an extension that pushes hilights to my phone and connecting via SSH isn't a big issue on any device.
I agree in a sense, but so far that kind of work is a small minority of the work work you know I'm talking about. Eventually I'd expect to see most work people do be this kind of art/cultural entertainment work rather than work work. Manual labor is dying and not being replaced and most such laborers couldn't feed themselves on any other skills they have.
On their site: http://avalon-asics.com/product/a3255-55nm-chip-500-count-re...
http://jsfiddle.net/WGSNX/2513/
Got to love how 4chan is financially struggling for years yet it seems that every year it grows in cost. I recently came to wonder "How?" and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business. A business, you ask? Yes, unknown to some, 4chan heavily relies on the freemium model (Pass) and self-served advertisements and some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans.

One day there might be played an open hand regarding financial matters, but for now you will have to live with the repetetive "I struggle to keep 4chan running and am making massive losses" public announcements, clearly published to gain apathy, now and then.
If they cared about that they'd keep Reader open.
Here, I just made one: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:193022

Yes, it rotates and passes shafts successfully :)

Based on this model[1] with some modifications for printability. I've printed it in 6 parts and glued it together. It's barely holding though, because apparently super glue is not the best way to bond ABS ;)

EDIT: I just figured out that to use it as a shaft passer inside a wheel just like on the Wikipedia article, the rotor would need some plastic removed so that the shaft can get through without having to move up and down.

[1] http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:126794
While I was still in university writing my final thesis paper, I came to the conclusion that, once I graduate from university and got a regular 40 hour per week job, there wouldn't be much time left to work on my project.

The basic question for me was: How do I keep maintaining and improving the website with only the bit of revenue I got from ads and donations? That was maybe 300-500 bucks a month.

The answer was: I couldn't. Not with what I had in mind for my project. It wasn't enough to pay a programmer, an app developer and someone who writes educational articles for the project.

I was just the average IT student back then. Not much sense for business. I mean, I thought about how I could make money from it once in a while. I still have a list on my computer ideas to earn 10,000 euros with my project that I once wrote. Freemium for example, a standalone desktop application, and other ideas.

After a long thought process and endless discussions with an older friend, I came to the conclusion that literally change my life: I had to start charging people for my product. All of them. No freemium nonsense and all that other crap that was in my list.

Being the altruistic student, I anticipated that people would be disappointed. I could almost feel their soon-to-come disappointment and asking them for money was something that didn't fit my world view for a long time. It was hard to accept that I'd lose people. Sounds stupid in hindsight, but that's how I felt.

With this conclusion, a new feeling emerged that got deeply engrained, which I consider a fundamental thing for doing business:

If people don't value what you have to offer, they're not worth your time.

So, even if people were disappointed, it wouldn't be my fault. After all, I offer a truly great service and it should be worth a couple bucks a month.

Despite my newly won enthusiasm, I went ahead and wasted another nine months, before I finalized my decision. I had very sophisticated tactics for sabotaging myself. I got this braindead idea to rewrite everything from scratch in a newer technology to have it maintainable for years to come. I thought I'd have to offer more content, more articles, more whatever. It was madness. And nonsense.

Another friend brought me down and he said: Look, you have a great product as it is. Just charge for it. You don't need anything else.

So, a few days after my graduation and about 4 weeks until my first real job began, I send an email to all my users, telling them that my product would cost a euro a month, starting in 30 days.

I hit Send and thought that I'd either wreck this thing totally, lose many many people, lose my project I spent five years on to improve, or that it'd be a good thing after all and I could continue running and improving my project.

Merely 7 days before several thousand accounts expired, I finished the last line of code on my payment processing.

Two weeks later, I had 20,000 Euros in my bank account.
The Daily Costs of our Startup Life in Spain
I'm usually only on about 10% of the time for similar reasons. Once I start browsing I rarely resume what I was hacking on, but I try to force myself out of the habit before I start.

Use LeechBlock or similar browser plugin to limit your reddit to certain times of day (Later, rather than early, or you'll get distracted). Breaking habits like reddit browsing is difficult to do without forcing yourself to do different. Make sure you configure it so that you can't disable the block, or you could develop the habit of just disabling it when you hit the block. Also, if you find yourself mindlessly browsing, take a break from the machine and grab a brew or something to snack on, or do some exercise.

The biggest hurdle is actually getting started. Once you've got open your editor, the project your working on, and a goal in your mind, the rest is straightforward.

One thing that might be holding you back is lack of short term goals or over ambition, because you will always feel like you won't have enough time to complete anything of value, and chose to put it off instead. Give yourself some short goals with some Todo organizer, or org-mode, but don't list to many, and don't expect to finish them all.

Force yourself to consider a joint, or some other entertainment (like Reddit, HN) as a reward for achieving some goals.

Also, consider working on some open source project, or work on one with somebody you know. Having someone else to motivate you and discuss ideas with is a massive help, as long as you don't spend all your time talking crap.
Finished, see my top level comment.
I second that. I've seen it in many "old friends" from high school and college who are extreme weed smokers, they're all the same way. Unmotivated, unwilling to do anything really, and some memory problems as well.

I'm not against cannabis (though I don't use it myself), but people have to keep in mind that it is a drug. Using almost every day is not good for you, there will be some damage. If you can't use it responsibly, quit doing it altogether, today.
Actually if you were a rabid totalitarian, easy access to everyone would be the greatest gift you could ask for. Especially working towards building some large empire...
I think what happens is this: when you're first starting, you tend to get buoyed along by a lot of small victories that give you a big rush. Even something simple like getting a program to compile gives you a bit of a high. All those small victories make it easy to keep going, and you have a definite sense of progress. Once you're more experienced though, those victories start being fewer and farther between, and progress becomes less obvious. Nerdy analogy, but it's like gaining levels in an RPG. The first 10 or 20 are easy, and then each progressive one becomes more and more grind.

Maybe you could get some of that "rush" back by setting your goals to non-technical things for your technical projects? IE, instead of "learn this", maybe "launch this by X" or "get X many users"? Maybe what you need are small measurable milestones to hit.

The other thing is, sometimes it just helps to have some sort of "dumb" activity that can get you into rhythm. Like, when I'm trying to get into coding, a lot of times I'll just sort of start cleaning up code, writing some simple comments, and refactoring things, because it's sort of a brainless activity that can get me going. YMMV, but it helps just to start being active and ease into the hard things.
You're describing one method of coping with the inevitable decline, and I think your advice is excellent and I'm glad it works well for you. But the OP was complaining precisely about a decline in energy and that 'sense of novelty'. I don't think there's any point in suger-coating the reality that for most people those feelings peak early in your youth.
> You'd have to live in a vacuum not to know that Facebook has been consistently pushing the envelope of acceptable privacy for years

Facebook opened with and developed a following on the strength of unusually strong privacy settings.

Expectation-of-no-privacy, if that is an argument, can't apply to people who opened Facebook accounts under those circumstances.
You say you got everything you wanted that would help you, maybe that's one of the reasons. Scarcity forces creativity, there's some challenge too.

Also things have developed to be kind of complicated compared to the good old days when commercial games were made by some dude just like you in his moms basement, maybe from zero to completion.

Most things have been done already and done well by either very talented inviduals or companies with lots of people. It's not fun to reinvent a wheel, especially if you're doubtful that it would be any better than what's already out there.

Getting older also gives you self confidence and/or lowers your need for validation from others. Impressing a tiny fraction of anonymous people on the internet doesn't change how you feel.

If you got good at what you're doing, then you know that you could accomplish what you want and how to go about doing it if you just decided to do it, that's mostly not motivating or challenging, more like a chore.

I'd suggest starting a project with some kind of measurable outcome, such as trying to get your stack overflow score up, making some kind of utility that's faster than the existing ones (a faster grep, an xml parser, ..) or something like that.
> 250 square feet of personal living space

Well, it seems I am descending into death and so are some millions of Hong Kong residents. More seriously, I think that figure should be a lot lower.
If you ever get lost in the tons of fonts offered, check out this curated list that I absolutely adore:

http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

https://github.com/ubuwaits/beautiful-web-type
You don't need a gym to be fit. The cost of a couple of months membership can buy you a pair of kettle bells and some resistance bands. Doing core, functional exercises outside in the fresh air under the sun - it's immensely more refreshing than a stuffy old crowded gym. Good luck to you.
Same here, and it is fun to see it not working after you have just reinstalled/started using a new computer, but after some days everything is the same and I'm in peace.. almost :)
Pretty cool, but I think the PCB design will need a bit more work before it can be assembly house produced. There seems to be a lot of pointless via in pads that are not plated over (plated over costs $). From most assembly houses I've dealt with this is a big no-no (usually they'll still try, but expect tombstoning and other bad things as solder is sucked through the via). Same thing with the QFN/P parts.

If I had a copy of OrCad I'd love to check out the actual schematic/layout, the Upverter doesn't seem to be updated.
What do you want to attain in software?

I would recommend writing yours ideas down. If your thoughts are jumbled - (as another commenter mentioned) - you might have the developer's equivalent of "writers's block". Even if you don't release them, it might get you to focus on it, inspire you to think and excited to get started.

I released my list to inspire myself and others.
First, stop thinking you are wasting your days. Don't ever judge yourself, that will only put you in a infinite loop of judging, nothing good comes out of that.

Forgive yourself even if you got nothing done. Say "This is allright even if I didn't get anything done, it's allright to make mistakes and do nothing. I forgive myself."

Do this whenever you are blaming yourself for something. It's the key to healing from any self placed limitation, to allow it to happen and then allow positive changes to take place.

Start exercising regularly, go running, swimming, do yoga, whatever. Very important in order to keep your energies running and your mind working, like many others here have noticed too.

There are also very good advice here, so I will not go into more detail, but I see these are the most important parts to get out of the place you are in, based on this short information you gave.
Honest question: Why is IRC > XMPP?
If you find yourself versioning single files, and still want to use Git, you may want to check out "Zit, the Git-based single file content tracker".

https://github.com/Oblomov/zit
I'm running it on two browsers side by side and they show completely different numbers for products sold per minute.
>Women don't face a severe loss of professional status if they put on weight, unless their employer enjoys being cleaned out in court.

You know, there are a lot of things that happen in the world despite not being legal.