thinkersilver

This is such a brilliant idea! It'd be also interesting to extract other features from videos such as colour profiles , face detection and movements of objects in the frame and camera movements. They don't need to be accurate but hints; then use the profile to control the mood of the video. An example may be,to start of with cool edits at the beginning then gradually progress to the warmer clips.

Currently on 13.10 at home, 12.10 at work desktop, 12.04 on servers. I feel no need yet to upgrade my desktop and my servers. All my previous upgrades had been motivated by better config tools and installers or new software. All these issues have dealt with by earlier releases. I think the distro is no longer the conduit for delivering new software and 14.04 doesn't bring any compelling upgrades outside of Unity tweaks, which I don't use. I'm going to wait this one out.

Ex-Gimp User here. The article does point out that most photographer workflows are in their raw editors. You get Non Destructive Editing with tools like Darktable in Linux. Non destructive editing helps to improve your productivity. It's similar to making code changes knowing you have a revision system behind and to when you don't. That being said non destructive doesn't make you a better retoucher, it's there to save your ass, which happens less often for the seasoned professional. Professionals were productive long before non destructive editing. Gimp is used professionally, even though we hear little about that. Krita and Blender have all been used on big budget movies as well. Gimps biggest problem IMHO ( and strictly from my experience) is usability. This post isn't going to turn into a typical gimp ui rant even though gimp does makes my head hurt; a lot but I don't think I'll be going back to gimp unless I really have to. I have used since it since 2001 and seeing it lag behind other open source editors makes me sometimes wonder why usability is an after thought.

I commented on impusle. I'm going to be echoing the sentiment here. I was seconds away from buying the development kit when I heard the news. It's with a heavy sigh that I contemplate this news. I may just buy the devkit, get comfortable with the platform and then switch once the market has caught up.

Aaargh!

Clicked on this because the title didn't have the 10 ways in it. Some have already commented on the link baitedness of the title, so shan't. I was ready to dismiss the site entirely after realizing I had been duped into reading aired frustrations when I stumbled across his mental models page as I looked for escape. Nice Summary!

One of the very few times distrust has turned to glee in a split second. I happen to be looking at mental models at the moment to improve my processes and daily decision making. Bump for the incidental discovery.

Just what I needed! Thanks.

This was my experience too. I found that I was productive 2 hours each day. The time tracker helped bring this up to 4 hours in an 8 hour day. I would play a game where I would try and beat yesterdays score.

Unless you have your own office, or at home or coworkers are forbidden to talk to you on pain of death and torture, I find it extremely difficult to be more productive than 4-4.5 hours in a 7-8 hour block of office time.

Being productive is pure execution of an implementation or an idea. Anything else like planning, thinking through your problem is not deliverable or visible in the final output. Yet these things are necessary. Deciding when and how much to plan and think about your problem becomes a strategic decision. You want to spend the minimum effort required for the most effective solution within your time frame.

I'm almost certain that I have an undiagnosed ADHD, but living in London it is something that is not recognized. Whether this condition exists or not, my attention span is well below that of my peers at work. This lead me to actually find out what the optimal period of time I can concentrate doing something without my mind wandering. I took a timer and over a period of a week I experimented with blocks of time, starting from 25 minutes , I gradually reduced the block by 5 minutes until I found that sweet spot. I expected it'd be about 15 minutes, but to my dismay it was only 5. WTH!

I accepted the results and started each task with the expectation that any task I complete should finish in less than 5 minutes. If it doesn't then I'm either being inefficient because I'm

1) disorganised - spending time looking for artefacts required to do the piece of work 2) unskilled - spending most of that 5 minutes not executing but thinking about how to do it.

At the end of the box of time. I'd document what category my inability to complete the task fell into and then I'd note it somewhere so that at the end of the day I could either spend time getting that area more organized, looking for opportunity for automation or learning so that I become a bit more skilled. Dealing with my disarray and unskilledness at the end of the day helped me work smarter. Intraday, I'd not have the time to do this, this is where the grind comes in, where you plough through a piece of work knowing that it might not be the best way of doing it but you need get it out the door. The time management system is unnaturally granular. You can quickly put a stop to an unproductive avenues. This has gradually made me a more organized and skilled programmer over the last 3 months. More importantly more productive. It's also given me detailed metrics on my productivity. I can measure my level of distraction, unpreparedness and so on. The odd effect of all of this is that I can work much longer hours without moving from my seat ( I do force myself to get up for breaks)

All this is possible because of where technology is now, without it the process is far too granular and unwieldly to be practical.

From my experience I agree with what the author said in points 7,8. This is vital.

* Haven't an objective productivity metric - how do you measure your productivity. * Accept that the grind part of the job

I think everything else can either fall into the categorys of managing procrastination, motivation and being a bit more organized which can vary widely depending on individual.

The government incentives are certainly there but like you have already pointed out the culture is vital and sadly absent here (London,UK). It also feels like there is no money here either. When it does come, it's paltry and requires you to give up so much control.If we had a few successful high profile exits, talented engineers working for the Banks and Media companies may be more willing to take the risk. As it stands, I know few people willing to leave their cushy 6 figure salaries.

This is encouraging and I think it's great that you are interacting with the community and getting feedback on your work at an early stage. This will help you grow. I guess you've posted this for constructive criticism. You should look at challenging yourself further by finding a problem area that you are passionate about and digging deep into the data structures and the algorithms. Consider when I was 15. I was fascinated with computer graphics and games and wrote a raytracer in C, wrote a doom-like game-engine in pascal. Writing the game logic was always the easy part, dealing with limited memory and optimising for hardware were always a problem. My mates were all building their own graphics engines, dabbling with operating systems development and one kid was playing around with Classes and tree like data structures. We looked at him like he was a god. This isn't a put down but a push. You can do so much more kid and you have a good headstart but try something harder. Post your work here and most will be glad to give a helping hand. Ironically the most talented of us ended up being a musician when he left for University.

I tried this 5 mins ago. It is surprisingly quick, like the article said, comparing to the shaving cream method. In the comments are suggestions on how to get a better glide like using glycerin or using alternate oils. I guess in a few days I'll know if my skin will react badly to this or not.

I got this book 3 weeks ago. I agree it is a good book on motivation. It isn't very polished though, like some of the other popular psychology books out there. It isn't embellished with eloquent flowery writing or mind-blowing feats of accomplishments. This isn't a criticism but a strength. It reads more like a series of blog posts where the authour is discovering how to amp up his motivation using a set of hacks to tackle goals. The format makes it easy to walk away from the book and apply it to those unfinished tasks that have been hanging over your head for months. It's a great find and ranks high on the books I've read this year.

I took oppurtunity of the deal and bought books on machine learning and visualization and realized that I unwittingly bought the same book twice:

* Data Visualization with D3.js * Data Visualization with d3.js

There's no way of reveresing this now but I do feel a bit silly.

This news article summarises nicely why I went on an extreme news diet over the last 4 months. I broke that streak today by reading the article on the guardian about why I shouldn't be reading the news. I couldn't resist because of the articles obvious reflexivity.

There is a real need for bringing infectious tropical diseases in Africa under control and I admire Gates's for what he has already done with polio in India but I'd like to politely disagree, even if it is just to refocus the debate on 'social mobility' on a global scale. I've had several conversation with young Africans who have transcended impossible odds armed only with what they could learn from the internet and access to libraries. There was that story a few years ago of the Kenyan boy who built a windmill generator from garbage. I get the feeling that they are sometimes tired of their problems of being constantly framed by the sick dying child or the poverty stricken family. It is a bit one-dimensional. They are a resourceful bunch. His heart is in the right place and he should continue but let's not forget that Africa has been getting aid, food and vaccines for decades and that there's been comparatively less focus on knowledge transfer between richer nations and African states.

It's the simple things that have the biggest impact. Even though the analysis is elementary to many I thought the post was useful.

I remember laughing at my instructor when he mentioned carrying a box of punch cards. Boy do I feel like the old timer now.

I'm not expecting to get all the bells and whistles of an ORM in the 50 lines so my comment is on the code presented.

You probably want to escape the text.

Use the execute(QUERY[,optional parameters]) syntax.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/902408/how-to-use-variabl...

Log aggregation and analytics is a hot space at the moment and in all fairness I think that you are being taken advantage of. I've read the messages and you are under no obligation to provide free support for source code and you shouldn't be bullied into doing so. In my eyes you have gone far enough in providing the source and binaries.

I think your biggest problem isn't your licensing but the documentation and the site itself. Since I work in the same space for a commercial product similar to Splunk, I'd like to offer a few comments.

1. It needs to be clear what the difference is between the enterprise and the open source version. Features and support must be clear with the enterprise version.

2. The message has to be clear for the target audience. Your product is very developer focused, but you have many support use cases. Focus on making it easy for non technical (non dev) people to get started monitoring the most popular pieces of infrastructure. A few getting started or how to guides for popular web servers and databases is a good start.

3. You may also need to cripple the functionality of your product (for the free version). Perhaps cripple it based on scale. The number of agents that can be deployed in an env can be restricted. Don't do what splunk do a disable based on data volume.

4. There are no images on your site. I can't visualize how I would instrument my infrastructure for log collection. This is vital.

I haven't used nxlog but this was my first impression. I hope the comments help in some way.

London is peculiar compared to Silicon Valley or Silicon Allee(Berlin), in that it is the hub for Finance, Retail and Media,Politics and Advertising and it is also the political capital in the UK. Talent is expensive here and scarce. Compare this to Berlin, which doesn't have the banking industry to compete with, makes it a much better startup hub than London and it also has a thriving startup community and plenty of talented hard-working programmers. There isn't enough money to go around here (in London), the VC firms here are terribly myopic and often don't understand the technology (this is probably true of all VC firms). A lot of the talent is tied up in Canary Wharf and the Square Mile. My experience with startup culture in London is not as optimistic as the article paints, seems half-arsed. But that's been my experience. I'd be interested to know if others have had a different experience.

I work near London's Silicon Roundabout and like the article said, there is no money. Growth is the biggest hurdle and there is little financial support. Many of the VC firms, I hate to say it, don't understand the technology well enough.

There isn't enough talent to go around either, since it is mostly tied up in the banking and retail sector. Most of the money here is going towardsand I find this a bit surprising. The sense of community that I'd expect from a startup hub isn't there and most of the talent are tied up in the banking and retail sector. It all feels a bit underground.

I'm really surprised that he left out i3wm. It's lightweight and the tiling placement is surprisingly intuitive and simple.

Here's the Google Talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnYN2CTb1hM

Repeating the task over and over again will reinforce good habits ( if you know the language well) and bad habits, if you are learning the language in the absence of a reference solution or someone more experienced to review your work.

People have already said it - Grow a thick skin. People will comment not always having enough time to construct their thoughts, others will post their immediate unedited impression, there will be some where English is a second language and then there are the douchebags. It's feedback. The fact that you make it to the frontpage is feedback. The fact that people are writing means that you have struck a nerve. That is a good thing.

Remove the noise from the signal and use it to improve your product. I like HN and I think it is useful and I haven't found a forum that does it better. I can't comment about Reddit because I have never used or read any articles or threads on it and I have no plan to.

I use a hybrid approach of GTD for managing lists and the pomodoro technique ( a task time bucketing system) for execution of tasks. It works well for me. GTD isn't perfect but it does cover many of the concerns that the author has raised.

Using the GTD approach you can minimise the heterogenoous complexity, priority and lack of context problems. Frequent reviews of your lists will mean that your action lists contain work that has to be done, this helps to reduce the effect of the heterogenous priority since you will tackle the tasks sequentially (they will all have similar priorities). Most tasks that have a high priority are not always urgent and can be planned. GTD and the pomodoro technique both have mechanisms for dealing with urgent, high priority interruptions.

I know my post isn't too clear if you are not too familiar with GTD and pomodoro but I just want to briefly illustrate that there are a few approaches out there to help.

1. GTD (http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/gtd-workflow-chart...) 2. Pomodor technique (http://pomodorotechnique.com/) 3. Time boxking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing)

Hey steveridout, you've got a point there. It's a weakness I've ran into many times when I move away from languages into learning something like statistics or hard algorithms. It's possible, by simplifying the information and using a combination of text and images. The problem when you start doing this is the time it takes to create a deck of cards that make sense. It would be a great idea to be able to use a templating language for your flashcards which you can embed simple rules and plug in a source of data. SRS programs have cloze deletion but it will go much further than that. It may be a good idea for an Anki plugin, perhaps. I hadn't thought about it until just now. ......

It's great for learning facts and exploring a subject. Spaced repetition is fascinating. Especially in the realm of language learning. Vocabulary acquisition can be optimised by deciding the right order of words to maximise your ability to read a foreign language text. gwern has a link at the bottom of the article on modelling vocabulary lists as a travelling salesman problem. Feeding this into SRS Flashcard program is powerful. I guess one of the big problems ( if speed is your goal) is the creation of the cards themselves. The time to create the card is much greater than the time to learn the card and can be time a sink if you are trying to learn your first 3000 words of language.

I've always felt that the one thing missing from my education was at least some basic understanding of physics. I've flicked through the chapters and I have come across many topics before but by proxy of other subjects such as game programming,chemistry and some applied math. Now I have a book to read that will plug obvious gaps in my learning. I particularly like the 'relativistic' illustrations in the units of scale chapter. The descriptions on durations less than a day are quite illuminating and enjoyable. It's funny that I have spent years learning to build huge complex concurrent distributed systems and compute Monte Carlo simulations on clusters, all very abstract and intangible; and yet I have been intimidated with anything beyond a pop culture knowledge of physical phenomena. Thank you for the book.

BTW - Nice touch on the equations.

You could also use iostat. I monitor my servers' disk i/o using iostat -xNm 1 10. The metrics await* and avgqu* are normally what I am interested in. They give the disk wait timings for serving disk i/o requests.

You also have access to the dtrace probes.

I don't if this was the lag because the system was underload but I had to wait for the recording to finish before I could go to the next question. Would you be able to make it go to the next question once I have answered instead of having to listen to the entire clip.