tep

great list and wonderful photos!

Exactly!

"Art of Travel"[1] is one of those websites. When I read that website I was impressed how lovingly it was put together. The overall experience was so good that I didn't even think about evaluating its design.

[1]http://artoftravel.com/

> Redditors may be the tastemakers of a small incredibly self-referential corner of the Internet, but have approximately zero influence on the Internet that everyone else uses.

Some reddit topics/threads were featured on the frontpage of popular German news websites during the last months. (Spiegel Online, Yahoo News, Süddeutsche)

I thought about creating something very similar for years but never began actually working on it.

Chances are, many people were thinking about building such a platform during the last couple of years. It is weird reading about my "own" idea for the first time, though.

I can't wait to see how Skibb will turn out!

This reminds me of the Coué method: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cou%C3%A9#The_Cou.C3...

I noticed this pattern too, but doubt that it is healthy. It might help reaching goals but at the same time it distorts your perception of reality quite drastically. This again, can become very dangerous.

"serenity now - insanity later"

> HN's most attractive feature from day one has always been the positive, intelligent, supportive community. Those are not traits you tend to find in your typical 9-5 programmer

I guess this is because HN attracts people that aren't just programmers but also entrepreneurs. A good hacker has to figure out worst-case scenarios. A good entrepreneur, on the other hand, has to look for value in everything to find business opportunities.

"* It completely ignores people that read the post but didn't vote. There really is no way to get a perfect count of this no matter how much scroll logging, but you could approximate it and then include it in the calculation."

Would it help if there was an incentive to vote? You could, for example, increase a user's score by a point for each vote given but weight the vote with more points. This way user who write good comments and active readers could benefit.

But then again, this could tempt some users to abuse the voting system. I can't predict which of these two reactions would prevail.

" Common misinterpretation on how Google handle `Disallow` in robots.txt"

Here is why I think this happened: http://www.facebook.com/humans.txt

;)

To log bits of information quickly I added this to my .bashrc:

log(){ date >> ~/log/$* ; cat >> ~/log/$* ; }

I try to keep it simple but I keep several files. There is one for general ideas which is called "projects", another one to log new words I've learnt called "voc.en" (English is a second language for me) and so on.

For example:

log projects <enter>

write something cool... <enter> <ctrl+c>

--------------------

cat log/projects

Mo 10. Sep 07:16:02 CEST 2012

write something cool...

The scary part wasn't necessary to experience something wonderful.

I am producing electronic music myself. These days, where the internet is mainstream I don't dare posting anything online.

About 9 years ago, things were different. I was a 15 year old kid and enjoyed producing trance music. My setup was extremely primitive and my music in a way, too.

But I managed to make those tracks sound quite euphoric.

Then (that's how I actually learnt HTML & CSS) I set up my own webpage and put that stuff out there. (later, that project turne into a little net-lable where 4 people were posting their music for free and we started doing remixes for one another)

To my surprise, quite some people were downloading my songs. Some even burnt them onto CDs and listened to them in their cars. (Back then, internet-browsing and recordable discs weren't exactly cheap. So in a way, they were paying for my music!)

The "highlight" was when a DJ from a big Ukrainian radio station played the tracks in his show & on one of his gigs. Some of the listeners posted positive feedback on that station's website.

Perhaps, programming turned me a little paranoid, but today I am quite scared of what could potentially be done with every bit of information you put online. It is true that wonderful things can happen, but (unknown) dangers aren't to be underestimated.

My first thought after reading his post was not that he was successful "even though" but "because" he had no computer.

It forced him to learn more efficiently when he sat in front of one.

If you have access to a computer 24 hours a day you will squander away more time.

But don't get me wrong, I am very impressed by what he has achieved.

On a related note: It always saddens me when news programs on TV use footage from youtube and don't mention the author but youtube as source.

"that being said" is often used synonymously for that kind of "but": http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22that+bei...

"It's getting a lot of coverage and attention overseas where it should be"

I wish that would be true. Here in Germany, "Tagesschau" is the biggest news program on television. And they didn't report anything about the protests that took place in Poland today. Instead a collapsing house in Rio seemed to be more important... I haven't found a non-tech person who actually knows about ACTA yet!

If you run linux, I recommend BasKet: http://basket.kde.org/

This is not the end! I regard it as the worst update myself. But that doesn't matter. We have to learn, that other peoples needs are quite different.

My suggestion/demand would be this: Please implement a "God Mode" where us freaks can tweak details that are important to us.

Normalization wouldn't help as the problem is compression. If A has a very narrow dynamic range (because it is heavily compressed) and B a rather broad one - think metal band vs orchestra - then after normalization A would still sound much louder than B.

This is because only the loudest signal hits 0db then. If a signal is on average mainly quiet, it will stay quiet. And if it is pretty loud, it will stay loud.

Technically, 0db is the loudest a digital signal can be. For the perceived loudness, however, the average loudness is what matters. If you have a recording of something that is loud for just a millisecond and the rest is rather quiet you would perceive the whole recording as quiet.

One way to come closer to a standard volume would be to establish a 'law' that says "no recording should be louder as x DB RMS). Every recording could be squeezed into such a dynamic, for example, by deploying compressors.

But there are two problems. 1) Different recordings need different frequency ranges. If you would compress classical music as hard as pop music is compressed, chances are the listening experience would be completely ruined. 2.) It's not just volume that influences how loud something is perceived. Material which has emphasis on 2khz would be perceived much louder than something that is just as loud but around 80 hz. (See Fletcher-Muson Curve[1])

However, there is a non-profit organization that somewhat tries to solve your problem. They don't aim for "standard volume". But they try to bring back dynamic into audio recordings.(Today most stuff has a very small dynamic range)

Read this: http://www.dynamicrange.de/en/our-aim

I hope I could help a little. Sorry for my poor English.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%E2%80%93Munson_curves

edit: Where are the guys from Ableton? Perhaps they could enlighten us :-)

Well, Parlament is German for parliament. So that mistake is easily made ;-)

I don't agree with the article at all. The author advocates that you should change the environment around you so less discipline is needed to stay focused.

I think this is counter productive. If this were a fundamental principle than our problems concerning procrastination would be solved for good. You browse unimportant websites and thus waste time? Just install Leechblock and the thereby created environment will require just as much "discipline" as you've got. Yeah, right ...

It's also nagging me how he tosses around with words like "discipline" & "willpower" as if they were just as defined as colors like red and green.

13700 German, 22 years old

I had 9 years of English in school. Because of my hobbies I read a lot of stuff in English. I also watched many TV shows and spent about 6 month living in Australia.

Yet I feel insecure even typing this. Knowing lots of words is one thing. But what makes it hard are all the subtleties you have to take care of when building sentences. I also think that I get grammar wrong most of the time.

Another thing is that my sentences are almost always way too long.

As someone else pointed out before: I don't want my former English teacher to read this, either.

Risking it all - Bolivia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZEN-qA0e94

I experience this problem on a daily basis, too. A few days ago I decided to set up another user account on Ubuntu. That one, I use from 9 to 5. On this account only work related programs can be used (but no e-mail client!). What's more, I installed Leechblock[1] for Firefox. It blocks every website that is not Wikipedia or university-related.

Hopefully this will work out in the long term.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/leechblock/