skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google agrees that having an open internet has been beneficial to the development of the internet. But somehow this is not needed for wireless broadband because there already is a lot of competition? What???
Perhaps not, on the surface, typical HN fare, but it struck me as an interesting example of information hoarding or metering. Seems pretty ballsy to tell reporters they can no longer take their own photos of a sporting event, but instead have to purchase "official" images from the club owner.

These attempts to chisel people out of a dollar (or pound, as it may be) here and there are going to end poorly for the perpetrators. It's as bad as AP news insisting on charging by the word for fair use copying of content.
>broadband companies don't have monopolies do they?

In most areas of the US they do.
I'm not sure I like that allowance, if that's indeed what the terms are. Are you saying the broadband carrier, like AT&T or Verizon can prioritize the delivery of their TV service as needed, to always be faster than say a Google or YC backed TV startup/service?
People in the US opt to be overweight or to ignore that they are overweight, as is their right. We have an abundance of tasty, high-calorie food, and many people prefer constantly satisfying their desires to exercising and eating healthy, both of which are difficult to sustain and may not provide a benefit that people realistically value over a shortened, satisfying life. Fat people spend money on weight-loss measures (some don't), not because they dislike their lifestyle, but because they want to change their appearance. They give up when they decide the boon to their appearance is not worth the damage to their lifestyle, which they value.

I guess that the people in the pictures would, very nearly, be statistically as fat as we are had they access to the same food and leisure. I think a lot has changed about our culture since then, but I don't suppose the amount of self-control that people possess has decreased significantly, if at all. This to me would be the more interesting discussion than whether or not we are fatter than people from the depression, which is clear. Certainly our marketing culture is responsible for much of the overeating that occurs now. But what about the people themselves? Does a depression era person have a smaller or larger reserve of self-control, and would they bother to allot a portion of it to weight-control? I think we would agree that people are more selfish these days. Whether people are less able to set and achieve goals is a another question. Is a given adult more or less capable of keeping his hand out of the treat jar?

The original comment speaks volumes in its terseness, so I will lay it out: the comment poses that people now are less capable of controlling themselves than they were back then. (The alternatives: to indict the role of food in our culture, or to celebrate our improved capacity for producing food, are not what it is intended.) If so, then I would like to see that demonstrated.

As a side discussion to poke fun at the negative implications of the statement: If obese people enjoyed a legally protected status (as many other minorities do), would you still feel compelled to make the same comment? What might a discussion protecting obese people look like?
The Golden State's War on Itself
I think this winter I'm going to build my own version of the GeekDesk. I'll put it on instructables.com or whatever and document it. I'd start today, but I have too many other house projects to do while it is still warm out.
Hmm. Signed up for the private beta. Let's see...

Memo: if i'll ever be in this situation give HN users a pass to skip my web app private beta queue since they're likely to be more useful than random people
So you're scraping the info from the pages and displaying it in the DDG app? From the user's perspective it's a wonderful idea and I would love to use a search engine that did this well, but that could piss off a lot of website owners.
The difference in education level between poor Brazilians and poor Americans is very large. Retraining requires a base to start with, and most poor Brazilians simply don't have that base.

I'm skeptical to some degree about the potential for retraining of Americans too, but I at least have some optimism there.
Probably the only possible way to put on muscle mass as a vegan is with loads of soy protein. Which is pretty much toxic. Have fun with cancer and endocrine problems.
Why doesn't Paul Graham have an iPhone?
No, they believe that regulation is not needed because they believe that competing wireless broadband providers will be forced to offer openness by the market.
People can already "PagePay" by clicking ads. However most don't bother even though they are not paying with their own money. So there is definitely a problem to solve here and I don't think it's just general human stinginess.

A "like" button that transfers money to the content producer with minimal UI interference would be a nice thing to try and google is the ideal company to experiment with this.
You are exactly right.

>Carbs can be bad because carb-rich foods tend to be surprisingly high in calories, but that's about it from a weight loss perspective.

This is exactly right also. The reason I avoid white bread, etc. is only because it is so calorie dense. That said, a carb is a carb is 4cal/gram.
As wireless becomes faster and cheaper, more people will use it instead of wireline. Only those who can afford wireline will have full access.
Lifty adds scaffolding to Lift, the premiere Scala web framework
Just, fyi, that low-carb meme has been around since 1863:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting

Maybe Banting was on to something. :-)
I don't think it's as simple as saying, essentially, "people who forbid telecommuting are idiots" or "there's no legitimate reason why telecommuting should be difficult." There are legitimate reasons to co-locate a team.

We allow working remotely one or two days a week, but our experiments with full telecommuting have not gone so well (though we'll probably keep trying). The level of success probably depends pretty heavily on the type of product you're trying to build and the resulting level of communication that's required. For enterprise software (or perhaps I should say "domain-specific apps" or something), you really need a customer proxy/subject matter expert on hand that you're talking to on a fairly constant basis, because the developers themselves aren't really experts in the domain; as a result, you want your development setup optimized for high-bandwidth communication. When 10 people are onsite but 1 team member is offsite, that communication just doesn't happen, and that 1 person ends up out of the loop and much less productive (at least that's what's happened with us). For other types of software, that's less of an issue.

I think it's also much less of an issue if the entire company telecommutes, or if at least a large percentage do: in that case, communication channels are optimized for that. If 5% of the staff telecommutes, the communication channels are optimized for face-to-face communication, and the people telecommuting are left out.

And on top of that, there are just different ways to go about developing: they're not necessarily better or worse, but they make different demands on physical presence. A lot of agile/XP practices work best when people are co-located in small cross-functional teams that are in constant dialog, pair-programming, etc. That doesn't mean it's the only way to develop, but it can be an effective way to develop (more so for certain domains than for others), and it doesn't mesh very well with full-time telecommuting. Other development strategies and methodologies make different trade-offs and will be more accommodating of telecommuting.
Ah. In which case regulate the crap out of them :)
Your experience is pretty typical, except you had the hacker skills to hack around AdWords' crappy UI. Most AdWords users do not, hence AdGrok.

The devil is most certainly in the details in a product like this, which is why we welcome any and all feedback from beta users. You've got first dibs on our product pipeline, so any feature you need we can push out very quickly.

Sign up here:
https://adgrok.wufoo.com/forms/adgrok-beta/

Cheers,
Antonio.
If I remember my Economics studies your argument applies to a free market. But broadband companies have a very large initial capital investment which raises the bar for entrants. For wireless you also have a limited number of frequency licenses that limit supply.

And when supply is very limited, and you know that it will be very very hard for anyone else to enter the market, then you oligopolies can appear.

That said, I don't know the USA market enough to say if they currently have a monopoly or not, or if they are colluding or not.
I was addressing the person I responded to, who was astounded by the gigantic blind spot in the author's reasoning. I explained why.
There are some minor technical niceties with using www as the main one, in that you can CNAME it to somewhere else, while you can't CNAME a bare domain.
Don't forget that Verizon in the other side in this negotiation.
We’re Living In The Dark Ages Of Social Media
I'm down to 4 out of 6 of these that haven't broken from regular use within the first year: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70033870

Luckily, I live in the same town as Herman Miller and find good stuff at garage sales every now and then.
Paolo,

We're putting you at the head of the line.

Granted, HN users probably are the best beta users.

You should expect a beta invite today, or tomorrow at the latest.

Regards,
Antonio.
Another Piece To Google’s Social Puzzle: To Acquire Jambool For $70 Million
Thanks for these links. Very helpful!
I had tested similar functionality on the Web site and never got any complaints. I'm only showing a snippet and linking to the real page, i.e. like all the other search engines. The only difference is that my snippet should be much better (when shown for these cases) in that it is a readable paragraph chosen for your particular search. That said, if anyone does have any issues with it, I'm happy to take that into account.
I will try this - I've already tried eating more eggs/beans, and my diet is primarily rice and veggies right now.

Can you recommend any particular brand/kind of protein powder/shake? Google gives me a bunch of spammy looking sites that I don't really trust.
PI Calculated to 5 trillion places on desktop PC
This is actually a great tip -- cast iron is not only great to cook in, it helps provide dietary iron, which is especially important if you're eating a diet light in red meat (which naturally contains iron) and prepared cereals (which tend to be fortified with it).
New Tactile Feedback Touchpanel
The Soviets had to build huge subs. Their missiles and reactors were larger than the US versions. Also, their reactors weren't nearly as reliable, so they put two in each boat. They are impressive to look at, though.
Gowalla Finally Releases Their Check-In API
The other advantage the valley has is newly rich people are willing to live there based on its climate. New York survives in large part because of the ecosystem of arts and entertainment focused on rich people who live there. Random City USA is unlikely to have both, but they can be better.
"Would you rather spend 6 months hacking together a product just so you don't offend 10 people?"

Probably not, if by "offend" you mean "market research", but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm specifically talking about the method you proposed, which I don't find to be fair.

In your question, you seem to imply that "market research" as a whole is offensive, which is not what it seems to me. Look at the Dry Test (the method Tim Ferris wrote about) mentioned up in this thread. It seems fair enough to me, and you still get the email of the people who are interested in your product.

"if you always play by the rules you'll never make it."

I simply don't buy that. Do you really mean never?
For a start, the approach to wireless seems to be more "wait and see" than "never regulate", since the proposal tasks the GAO with monitoring the market for signs of failure. Wireless seems prima facie likely to be a more vibrant market anyway and therefore more likely to settle to a less consumer-hostile equilibrium - there aren't true monopoly wireless providers in the vast majority of regions like there are cable providers.
But if you were correct then the regulation would be irrelevant. It would only make a difference if wireless broadband providers will indeed take advantage of loose network neutrality regulations.

On the other hand Google/Verizon agrees that we need to thank the openness of the Internet for the current amazing spread of the net.

It seems a bit of a weak argument to be honest.
Are you saying there's no biological impulse to have children? In my experience, both men and women have sex drive, but females often (males less often) have an additional drive to have children. Why would satisfying one impulse also satisfy the other? Even if I eat, I can still get bored.
Well to just provide one example, Verizon would only have to pay $2,000,000 if they knowingly violate the statue. No criminal sanctions. They can thereafter continue to violate it and just pay another two million. It is a bit of a business deal. If you can get in more money then out, then you are good. The FCC, or anyone else, has no other authority.

Why such a low figure, we are dealing with massive corporations who would notice 2 millions as much as I would notice 2 dollars.

The general public, that is people like me and you, would need to depend on the FCC, and have no rights, which is not quite understandable. Why should I not be able to sue them for discriminating against me? Because of course Verizon is a party to the "law proposal".

Besides, there are exceptions clearly. The FCC would need to enlarge very much if they are to deal with all the complains and have the time to analyse them and follow them through and in the end only be able to impose a miniscule fine.

Not to mention that the providers would have the authority to outright prioritise internet traffic provided they go through some hoops and any lawyer would know just how difficult that is.
You are right, me bad. :)
For me, it's the whole package. Tech hub, low cost of living/high salaries, nice people, warm.
I've never heard of homeowners insurance companies refusing to cover people in the same neighborhood. Why is it different?

Would you favor the nationalization of all types of insurance or just medical? Doesn't auto-insurnace have the same evil profit motive?
Why would they be a more vibrant market? The fact that wireless licences are limited should actually make it less competitive.

What's your argument?
"this is like fricking socialist crap y does everything have to be regulated how much will this cost us in taxes "

Are you this guy?
There's not enough information to discern how many users were involved in this study, which limits its applicability. Also, there is a very "pepsi-challenge" aspect to this. Are these just otherwise uninterested users thrown in front of these sites? This doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the experiences of users who go to these sites with a purpose in mind.
i think its more an issue with the fact that our older food pyramid has trained people to eat lots of carbs, and carbs are a staple in many american meals. over the course of the day, you can eat a lot of carbs if you're not paying attention. the point of counting carbs is to make sure you're not eating 10+ servings in a day from your bagel breakfast, sub sandwich lunch and pasta dinner.
Why I Don't Have a Cell Phone
There's whey protein as well. That's what's in Muscle Milk and Pure Protein products. I'm not sure if whey protein is any better for your endocrine system, FWIW.
Only One Hybrid Car Pays Back Its Owners in Gas Savings; Know Which One?
What they are describing is essentially data binding at the language level. The thing to keep in mind is that "out of sight, out of mind" data binding can result in very slow code, but it's a fantastic pattern for UI dev.
Yeah. You're right. On reflection I think there is a problem much like termination in mobile phone markets where the only way to reach a subscriber of a particular company is via their network...

I think my original comment was just wrong....

Carry on!
Google + Verizon release joint policy proposal
> Assumption made in article that suicide rates are correlated with how much child care is provided by the state seems unfounded.

I don't think that that was the assumption made in the article. The original NY article made some vague claims about scandinavian women being happier and that being somehow tied to childcare... which was not thought out or supported in any way. The author of the rebuttal article used the suicide rates to show that other conclusions could easily be made about the happiness of scandinavian women.
Do not forget that the boundaries of human knowledge have been surpassed by a healthy amount of individuals that never went the PhD route.
Understanding the motivation behind irrational thinking usually requires some degree of focus on the one doing the thinking.

And just for the record, I've been a registered Republican since I turned 18, and I've also noticed this sudden surge of fiscal hawkishness in the party. This isn't liberal bas talking.

This also isn't to say the guy is necessarily being disingenuous. Just that somebody in his chain of trust is playing politics and that's causing him to form opinions that aren't entirely rational.
I get it, So a Ph.D. is like a pimple or an erection?
To gain muscle mass, you need lots of calories, and at least 35% of it to be protein. For a vegetarian, major natural sources of protein are beans (including soy) and dairy. Ofcourse, those also happen to be full of calories, so instead, I would recommend whey protein powder to support your usual diet. I personally find protein shakes gross, so here's a breakfast that works for me:

1) 1 part 0% fat greek yogurt, 1 part water (stir)

2) 1 scoop of whey protein powder

3) some sunflower seeds, oats and raisins

For a protein fix after a work-out, replace step 3 with some fresh fruit like strawberries or blueberries.

Also, switching from 3 meals a day to 6 or 7 smaller meals a day works miracles, but it might take some effort to accommodate such a switch. Preparing meals in advance goes a long way.
I don't know how to say this without it coming across as baiting you or flaming you. I'm doing neither.

What contributions have you made to the sum-total of human knowledge? I'm really interested.
OK, so I've reread your comments and what I think you're saying is:

"The coercion of the state (such as it was) did not play a significant role in the final quality of these engineering works."
Whey's not vegan.
Apple rejects iPhone camera app for using volume controls for taking photos
Lead Mobile Engineer (Geo-Location Startup)
Ask HN: HTC Evo 4G
For starters, 4G is not available in my state (Colorado), so the 4G-battery burner problem is kinda out of the way. I've also been getting a lot of mixed reviews regarding the phone.

I was wondering what you guys think and any personal reviews you can share.
I don't believe the evidence is on your side. The reason carbs damage us more than merely their caloric content is, to quote Dr. William Davis of The Heart Scan Blog:

"Carbohydrates increase small LDL particles.
Or, in the cholesterol-speak most people understand, "carbohydrates increase cholesterol." It's counterintuitive, but carbohydrates increase LDL substantially, far more than any fat.

Carbohydrates increase blood sugar.
Eggs don't increase blood sugar, nor do chicken, raw almonds, onions or green peppers. But a bowl of oatmeal will send your blood sugar skywards.

Carbohydrates make you fat.
Carbohydrates, whether in the form of wheat flour in your whole wheat bread, sucrose in your ice cream, fructose in your "organic Agave nectar," or high-fructose corn syrup in your dill pickles. They all provoke de novo lipogenesis, or fat formation. They also stimulate insulin, the hormone of fat storage.

Carbohydrates cause glycation.
High blood sugar, like the kind that develops after a bowl of oatmeal, triggers glycation, or modification of proteins by glucose (blood sugar). This is how cataracts, kidney disease, and atherosclerotic plaque develop. Small LDL is 8-fold more glycation prone than large LDL, providing a carbohydrate double-whammy."

I also recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes, which is a well documented indictment of our common wisdom regarding nutrition (ie, things like the preposterous food pyramid). The general point is that not all calories are alike.

My own merely personal anecdote: after eliminating all wheat and almost all other carbs from my diet, I lost ~35 points effortlessly. All this while not doing much exercise at all (recent evidence suggests that your body simply adapts to exercise by getting hungrier). I was much hungrier and unhappier on a low fat diet.
Everything is Clickable
Leadership (on the Google/VZN net neutrality agreement)
I disagree - glycemic index is a hugely important factor that a lot of people just don't consider. I certainly didn't until recently and now I'm a convert.

Why GI is a big deal is simple: if you eat a lot of high GI foods your spike your blood sugar levels causing all sorts of issues from mood swings to hunger.

For me simply paying a little more attention and eating more low GI foods has had a profound effect on my well being. I find I'm more focused and centered mentally and emotionally; I never have mood swings from 'bottoming out' - aka running out of fuel and needing to eat. This use to cause me a lot of stress with my gf and my ex (they have told me in the past they worried about when I would be hungry next because I'd become irrational and argumentative).

I think it's easy to think something like the glycemic index is just a new 'fad' diet type of thing. I know I use to think only people with diabetes had to worry about GI. But what I've found is that it is a hugely beneficial thing no matter who you are.

Final thought on this - if you really don't think there is anything to the whole GI thing, next time you are hungry eat 8-10 almonds (maybe mix in some raisons or cranberries - they are high GI but together the overall 'load' is low) and see how quickly your hunger vanishes and your mood levels off. This isn't for 10 minutes either; I then have enough time to really think about lunch/dinner and make a really good choice instead of eating whatever is laying around because I'm 'starving'.

Anyway, I lost around 35 pounds in the past 2 month using this 'trick', but I also workout 5 days and get out and hike, play hockey and generally try to be active when I'm not coding.
What if your product is Foursquare or Twitter? There are obvious business models down the road but only until you achieve massive adoption.

I think the question to potential users is "Would you use this everyday?". This is more important than going to Starbucks and asking if they would pay to promote within the service (it's a no-brainer).
Out of curiosity, how'd you drive traffic to the MVP/smoke test landing page?
The sum of all human knowledge probably looks more like a million dimensional koosh ball than an circle.
Yes, it is! Can't believe I forgot to mention it. Thanks. :)
That was the point. I don't think there are any UCS platforms that encompass all possible good options, though, and people will always find ways to connect via the most direct endpoints jointly available.