skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> (you know, the one you really should be working on right now).

This is the problem really. Don't compel yourself to do anything you don't want to. Don't guilt yourself into thinking that you should be doing something else instead of what you really want to do. Stop doing this in the name of productivity, efficiency, ambition, or goals. Instead, focus your energy on making yourself realize why something must be done, if it needs to be done at all. If you can convince yourself that it needs to be done, then you will have no problem doing it and will in fact do it willingly. If you can't convince yourself why it needs to be done, then you should do something to make sure you don't have to do it.

E.g., writing a school paper for a class you don't much care for. That is something that happens to me because some of my required Masters classes are a bit too easy (in fact my undergrad courses in the same subjects were much more advanced). I tell myself that life is a learning experience and writing well is an art that I must continually practice to remain proficient, regardless of the subject matter or specific task at hand. Knowing that this one 10-page assignment is a small piece of the bigger jigsaw puzzle of my life as student makes me want to work on it. Not because I love the class but because I see how this particular assignment fits into the big plan I have previously made. I always try to stick with my big plans unless there is a true reason not to. Is a 10 page assignment a true reason not to stick with my Masters degree and my academic plans? No. Then it is something that will take me one step closer to my final goal. Who doesn't want to take one more step in the right direction?

I don't play tricks with my brain or try to excite myself by small goals or high-scores (try to get an A+ in a 10pg paper I wrote in 2hrs). I see a lot of advice in these motivational / GTD type posts that are mostly tricks and advice on lying to yourself. I don't set my clocks 10mins ahead. I try to understand why it must be so instead of fooling myself and hoping that a safety-net for my follies will somehow help me.

Why do I work on the really boring project at work that nobody else wants to help me on? Because I understand that this is something that helps with the bigger picture of my career. If it doesn't, then I will make sure I don't have to do it. I don't want to live a life avoiding things that must be done or playing tricks on myself just so I do things I don't want to do. If I sit back and truly don't want to do something, I make sure I don't have to do it.

This doesn't mean I look forward to doing the dishes. Wife and I both hate doing the dishes and we avoid using too many pots and pans while cooking. However, I do the dishes whenever I can because it makes the misses happy and that is my bigger goal. Doing the dishes gets me one step closer to marital bliss and who doesn't want that? Do I really want to claim "honey I will do the dishes" and do them reluctantly only because I claimed that publicly? Or do I do the dishes willingly because it makes my wife happy and thus me happy?
If you want to keep your privacy, don't kill a public figure.
> Have you ever seen the Dog Whisperer?

Cesar Milan's body language communicates to dogs and humans that he is the leader.

"When Cesar walked down the stairs of Patrice and Scott's home then, and crouched down in the back yard, JonBee looked at him, intently. And what he saw was someone who moved in a very particular way. Cesar is fluid. "He's beautifully organized intra-physically," Karen Bradley, who heads the graduate dance program at the University of Maryland, said when she first saw tapes of Cesar in action. "That lower-unit organization—I wonder whether he was a soccer player." Movement experts like Bradley use something called Laban Movement Analysis to make sense of movement, describing, for instance, how people shift their weight, or how fluid and symmetrical they are when they move, or what kind of "effort" it involves. Is it direct or indirect—that is, what kind of attention does the movement convey? Is it quick or slow? Is it strong or light—that is, what is its intention? Is it bound or free—that is, how much precision is involved? If you want to emphasize a point, you might bring your hand down across your body in a single, smooth motion. But how you make that motion greatly affects how your point will be interpreted by your audience. Ideally, your hand would come down in an explosive, bound movement—that is, with accelerating force, ending abruptly and precisely—and your head and shoulders would descend simultaneously, so posture and gesture would be in harmony. Suppose, though, that your head and shoulders moved upward as your hand came down, or your hand came down in a free, implosive manner—that is, with a kind of a vague, decelerating force. Now your movement suggests that you are making a point on which we all agree, which is the opposite of your intention. Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions—who understand, for instance, that emphasis requires them to be bound and explosive. To Bradley, Cesar had beautiful phrasing."

"What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_05_22_a_dog.html
Youtube seems to be going to this direction.

For example, if you look for the latest hits on Youtube, you will see that most of them started posting videos there, for free.
Forth is like the complete opposite of Lisp. But after you reverse so much, you arrive at something similar.

Syntax is of course the most obvious `backward' thing. Conceptually Lisp moves you away from the machine and closer to math, Forth stays way closer. Forth does not (normally) include a garbage collector. Naming variables is discouraged. Forth is almost untyped, Lisp is strongly-dynamically typed.
I suppose it depends on the features you want.

They could probably have implemented Aero Snap on Windows 95. And I'm sure the shareware authors will backport this sooner or later. Same with most of the changes to the task bar.

On the other hand, some of the major graphical changes are probably more complex than they seem, and rely on significant changes to the guts of the OS.
How to Activate Quick Launch Toolbar in Windows 7 | TechJaws.com
Being able to confirm your vote later using a serial number may be convenient, but it makes it possible to sell your vote. I could offer my vote for sale and then give the serial number to the buyer so that he makes sure I voted the way I was supposed to.
Face Glowing Natural Tips
Worried About Having Breast Cancer
Company Picnic Speech
I believe you to be mistaken. The green and blue can turn clockwise, the yellow and red anti-clockwise.

They can turn, but it requires an external driving force.
The performance tests here seem about useless. When memcache is slower than all your databases its a good indicator that after your first call all the databases just cached the request, to get meaningful performance metrics you would need to use sizable databases and more realistic use cases. It's not enough to just publisher a disclaimer, why not just do it right in the first place?

It also states transactions as a benefit of MYSQL then shows the performance tests against the MyISAM engine which doesn't support transactions. This also explains why the MyuSQL inserts might be faster than any others.
I've got a green colour impairment.

I'm not colour blind. I'm not even green blind. And I'm definitely not red/green blind.

If you're thinking about colour impairments, please keep this in mind: just because some people have a colour impairment that doesn't mean they are all colour blind (most of them aren't). They can see just what you can see, but some parts of the spectrum may appear paler and thus the nuances may be hard to tell apart. They'll probably have little problem telling two colours apart when they touch, but can't reliably recognise them as distinct when they're not.

It's okay to use colour in your design. It's even okay to use colours that are often problematic for people with colour impairments. It's not okay to RELY on them, tho. Especially if you rely on telling roughly similar colours apart (say, bluish purple and blue, or even dark red and dark green).

If you have to use colour as a signal, use another one as a failsafe -- use different patterns, borders or underlines in addition to different-coloured fills, outlines and texts.

The idea is not to sacrifice, but to enhance -- this is true for every form of accessibility, actually.

If you can't use strongly contrasting colours (i.e. different hue and value at high saturation) due to design constraints, simply make sure colour is not the only contrast you provide -- if all else fails just use markup to ensure the unstyled page still retains a contrast.

Oh, and don't forget to set your background and text colours in pairs. Even if you want to keep the default for one of them (white background, black text). This is not for accessibility alone, this is also for people like me who use a dark desktop theme and curse every time they see a form with black text on a (desktop default) dark background or a white background with (desktop default) bright green text on it. Like this very form I'm writing in -- good thing the web developer toolbar comes with a "ignore page colours" option.
yep $20 is nothing for a professional development tool. even 200$ is totally acceptable. But they only provide access to a beta version of a unproven tool... not my definition of professional.

i dunno what the tool worth and i dont plan to pay 20$ to find out if i need this tool.

i dont blame the product, just the moneytisation is broken. Ok to sell a tool, but first convinces potential buyers
> The pirates are simply people who produces and distribute despite the law.

I'll give you "distribute", but "produces" is plain nonsense. If I copy a book to give it to a friend, I'm not "producing" it, I'm "distributing" it. The act of producing was the effort that went into writing it, editing it, typesetting it, etc.
I think one has to distinguish between real riddles and the nonsense-questions like a bike for the blind...

If somebody loves riddles it only means that he loves to think and he possibly can solve really hard problems, where all others would give up...
...but not in law.

(in the relevant jurisdiction)
Have to fight other's choices every day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braesss_Paradox
So does G. Richard Shell in Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. Shell, a Wharton professor, cites a study where half of negotiators committed to a goal in writing and the other half did not. Those who wrote down their goals were far more likely to win at the negotiation table. I picked up the book last week after several people here recommended it and am enjoying the many examples from famous people with which Shell peppers his lessons. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143036971
Sure! That repetition is called practice, which is the best teacher.
How about a link to the actual content? http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-Novem...

Even still this is pretty content-free.

Some readable FreeBSD 8 changes I found: http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html
On point number 2, the compiler ships with the open source project. It's written in Javascript. It runs in the browser, or on the command line.

We are planning on getting a new compiler in 2010, and it will still do all those things. It will also be more robust, introduce some sorely needed new features, and with any luck be faster to boot.

With respect to point one, I'm not sure anyone commenting in this thread really understands the complexity of optimizing application performance in the browser. On an absolute level, message passing is slower than function calling. But taken in context, that's a small percentage of what happens in an application.

Cappuccino, because its an application framework, can make certain assumptions to dramatically improve performance. Assumptions that can not be made here and there by individual app developers. For example, coalescing DOM updates and drawing events on the run loop. Combining timers together to minimize overhead. Delegating events from the document level to prevent unnecessary build up of event handlers. On the tools front, we can strip some dead code from projects, automate spriting of all app resources, target different code paths to different browsers automatically, and a slew of other things. Performance is complicated.
For some reason I find that the more people I tell something, the less likely it is to happen.

So, for instance, I don't talk about potential sales calls, leads, stuff I'm picking up, projects I'm working on -- anything that could possibly be "jinxed"

It's probably just superstition, but dang if every time I talk about one of these things it seems to ruin it.
It's $20 actually. But you're only paying for a development tool. The language, the framework, the runtime -- everything else is open source.
Different strokes for different folks!

What works for me may not work for others, that's for sure.

I've always worked with lists and commitments, that's the way I structure my time.

If it is on the list it will get done sooner or later. If I commit to a time it will probably get done by that time. If I commit to it publicly then it will get done by that time.

When faced with a thousand choices and many of those are more interesting than that ones that should be done the danger of leaving the things that have to be done until it is too late is very real (for me).

I'd rather be washing your dishes because it would make you and your wife happy than I would do my own, but those need to be done as well. (my own solution to this is very close to yours, use as little stuff as possible).

I've rebuilt a house, without the lists to keep me going I would have surely given up. And without telling people that I would have phase 'x' finished at such and such a date I would have finished a lot later.

So, this is my way, I'm impressed with yours, and I wished I could self motivate for the drudgework as well as you apparently can but I feel I need a little extra push.
Not that long ago you wrote here that you were building something and that you would be releasing it soon, how is that coming along ?
Pretty sure 13 minutes isn't possible. The constraints are: no more than two people on the bridge at a time, they have to walk together to share the necessary flashlight, and if someone doesn't have the flashlight, they can't cross.

i.e., if the 1 minute and 10 minute people cross first, it takes both ten minutes to cross. Afterwards, the 2 and 5 minute people are stuck without the flashlight, so before they can cross, someone has to carry the flashlight back to the other side.

It is a bit of a puzzle, but it's not really a very good one.
> Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught that is most effective as a deterrent.

The original paper does note that the principle is limited to circumstances where catching is easy.

What the paper doesn't account for, though, is response: which allows a straightforward general counter-strategy:

The 'resistance' place a dummy wherever the 'police-state' target next -- to deceive or take the hit harmlessly. This simply turns the attack against itself: The police-state's strategy relies on: 1. announcing their next target; and 2. keeping that promise. The resistance exploits and completely negates that. To defeat that counter, the attack must disable itself.

The critical assumption behind the police-state's strategy is that the resistance is powerless, that they have no ability to respond. But there is enough evidence this would be foolish in the internet world. If the police-state has technical means to find targets, the resistance has technical means to fool or dodge them.
What not to do when youve cashed in your startup
That's fine. We're not looking to convince anyone. We are recognizing that we have something useful now, and that there are people who are willing to pay for it now. We are providing it to those people, and making it known that we believe the application is still not ready to be called 1.0.

We happily admit that a paid beta program is a bit of an experiment, but it's hardly unprecedented. See Mac OS X Public Beta for an example. We do not want to set up the false expectation that Atlas is free. It isn't.
you want me to give you my twitter login plus do it on an insecure page?
Regarding the last bit, this exists in a couple forms. The one I can remember at the moment is stickK (http://www.stickk.com/).
this will be deaded pretty quickly but since you arent that new, probably worth mentioning this is around the opposite of whats expected to be submitted.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A product idea that I don't know how to realize
Hello HN'ers,

The other day there was a call for 3 things that irritate you, I missed the re-run at the end of the day because of the time difference but I did come up with something only I haven't the foggiest on how to make it work, only the feeling that it should be possible. It is not at all computer related though.

Almost everything that you consume has a 'best before date'.

You're buying a pack of fruit juice, milk, pickles, jam or whatever else that is somewhat perishable after opening it, even if you keep it refrigerated.

Then, after a day you go to the fridge and you stare at the carton... when did I open that thing ?

Especially with more than one person in the house you could be looking at something that was opened yesterday or it has been sitting in the fridge for longer than is good for it (and you).

So, the idea is this: something that gets activated on opening the container, and when a chemical timer expires it will change colour to warn you that the contents are no longer safe for consumption.

For me this matters because my stomach gets upset very easily and it takes a long time to get back to normal (past medical condition), so I end up erring on the side of caution and tossing out stuff that is quite probably still ok for me to eat.

Of course, this is just a convenience, I could slap a post-it or something like that on the containers when they were opened, but I'm a lazy person and wouldn't mind having this automated.

It's definitely not a world-class problem but maybe it is worth solving for enough people that someone could make a bundle on it.

Criticism welcome!
As an aside, if "he was playing Monopoly" is indeed the expected answer I would be hard pressed to think of a worse type of question to ask at an interview. Using deliberately misleading phrasing to turn a trivial question into a riddle is not clever or insightful; asking a question like that at an interview goes beyond merely irritating to bordering on insulting. See also: http://xkcd.com/169/

Might as well ask the interviewee "What have I got in my pocket?"
ah, thanks for the headsup
But she also says she enjoyed it more than working in computing :) so in this case "has to" probably didn't apply!
get your eyes near water, humidity is important
yeh realised just after posting I was being dumb (sending the 10+5 then imagining the 1 guy comes back ... I was tired)
This is not blackmail, it's called being "accountable". When you say you're going to do something, you do it. Again, this is not blackmail, this is how successful, trustworthy people operate every day.

From your profile, you seem to understand this, but do others not?

What is happening to this world when accountability has become a surprising new concept????
another marketing glitch: dont launch a professionnal tool on sunday. do it during a work day, say around 10am pst to maximize the effect.
wow... being colorblind myself and looking at the examples... now i feel really screwed up. see: http://www.vischeck.com/examples/
Side note: I have a lot of respect for you and your work. My comment above is in no way an attempt to disrespect you or your work ethic. Reocities is an awesome project and how you managed to do it was even better.

You're right about different strokes. I don't expect everyone to do what I do in the same way. However, I question the underlying premise behind having to do things you REALLY don't want to do. My comment was really about making sure you don't have too many of those.

> I've always worked with lists and commitments...

> I've rebuilt a house, without the lists to keep me going I would have surely given up.

Talking about lists, I live by them. I even wrote my own todo-list app (like every run-of-the-mill hacker) called http://untodos.com that works with my personality. I put things in Today / Soon / Whenever buckets and move them around depending on real-life situations. If something has been in the soon list for too long, I'll revisit it and either drag it up to Today or down to Whenever. I guess it is a very personal list and unlike you, I don't want to tell people publicly about what I intend to do, willingly or not.

> When faced with a thousand choices and many of those are more interesting...

Not to judge you for being so enterprising, but do you feel having a thousand choices is actually a good thing? I've worked in many interesting projects and a couple of startups over the last decade and found that individuals with too many interesting projects rarely brought a project to fruition. On the other hand, those with just a handful of interesting projects successfully completed most of them. It's the old "too many eggs in a basket" issue. Lot of entrepreneurs are afraid of putting all their eggs in a basket so they begin to get more baskets till there's too many baskets and too few eggs. If you feel compelled to do something instead of what you really want to do, is it because you have too many interesting baskets? Again, this is a personal preference and the # of baskets you are comfortable with will be different from mine.

> I'd rather be washing your dishes...

Is that a public admission of a task you will eventually get around to doing? If so, you're always welcome to St. Petersburg, Florida. We live 5mins from the beautiful Gulf of Mexico.
Twitter’s New RT Buttons
It isn't. Where are you looking ?
Still plugging away. It's Sunday morning here and I don't feel sick any more, so that's a big plus! Woo hoo! Hopefully I can get a lot more done today than yesterday.

There are four delivery points. I'm hoping to make it to delivery point 1 in the next week and demo it here. Fair warning: it will be very lame, but each increment builds on the one before it and you have to start somewhere.

Just working by yourself really sucks, jacquesm. I can handle the work -- coding is coding. And
I can do the biz stuff and the techie stuff. It's just the ups and downs and worrying about money and such is easier when you have two people to share in the load. As it is, I have a family that wants to know where the exit points are and hell! I haven't even got on the highway!

After reading this article today, I decided to start a video diary. Each day I'm going to explain to myself what my goals are and how I'm feeling. It's basically an advanced form of talking to myself, but hopefully it will help with the motivation.
Why is that NSFW?
What I really absolutely love about this device is its simplicity. No electricity, wires, processors, motors or other stuff that can fail.

Just good old fashioned mechanical engineering. Great job!
It's not a good puzzle at all - I kept on trying to think of the "trick" which would somehow make it faster than just the fastest person acting as the relay for all the other parties, but that really does seem to be the solution.
You don't need to guess. Here is the list of special operators:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Body/03_aba...

Just tell us which ones you would replace.
is this a reference to foreign engineers becoming taxi drivers in the US?