skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Step back 50,000 years. Human civilization was extremely primitive and unlike anything in our world today. What was your day like? What did you do? What did you think about?

Most of your existance was dominated by finding food and eating it. Your job was walk/run around all day long, trying to find as much to eat, expending as little energy as possible. You might climb a tree to pick fruit, swim across a river towards a good fishing spot, run after and try to spear an animal, fight with other people and steal their food/have food stolen from you, etc...

Our bodies evolved for this type of work. Fast-forward 50,000 years to the present day, and you'll find we don't do anything like that anymore. My brother put it best:

"You wake up in the morning and get out of your bed couch, stumbling over to your toilet couch. After you get into your car couch and drive to work. Then you arrive at work and sit in your chair couch all day long. After work is done it's back to your car couch. Once you're home, it's off to your couch couch to watch some TV. When you're done with that, go to sleep in your bed couch. The cycle repeats."

So the permanent solution for our bodies is, simply, to be more active! Our advanced society has introduced the permanent problem, not our bodies. We're genetically designed to be active.

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

When I started exercising about 10 years ago, I picked running specifically because I hated it more than just about anything. In a few more months I estimate that I would have run approximately 15,000 miles since starting, which is about 3/5th's around the Earth.

How does one learn to enjoy something that one hates? You find the little things that excite you and focus on that. Eventually that snowballs into bigger and better things, and before you know it, you love something you use to hate. :)

If you ever decide to try exercising, I'd recommend finding a personal trainer to teach you the basics. There are TONS of different things to do. If you don't like going to the gym, try rock climbing, or mountain biking, or swimming, or anything that floats your boat! I "guarantee" that you'll find something that you'll like. The best part of all is after you start, it becomes addictive, and you'll wonder how you ever survived without it!
This could have just as easily been written by a Gen Xer or a Late Boomer. The problem is that people who are 25 now are comparing their economic fortune not to those of people born 10 years earlier, but to those of people born 30 to 50 years earlier, who entered the working world in the Mad Men era.

If you were late Silent or early Boomer (b. 1930 to 1950) you faced an extraordinarily easy career game. Even in advertising, the era's analogue of banking, people left work at 6:00. Unlike those who are young now, you didn't have to bust your ass through college and internships. People dropping acid at Woodstock in '69 could walk into executive-track corporate jobs in '70 and be VPs by '72. They had it really fucking easy. Today you can't get a decent entry-level job with a 3.4 GPA and no internship.

The sunny era, however, didn't end in 2008 or 2001, but much earlier. If you were leaving college in the mid-1970s stagflation era, you'd missed it. There were small, blippy, "booms" localized to a few industries (banking, then oil/gas, then dot-coms, then oil/gas, then real estate, then banking) in the next three decades, but the general prosperity never came back.
Ask HN: Would you use this service?  Video summarization/digesting
I've been thinking about a simple web/mobile app idea, and thought I'd throw it out there to the HN community.

The problem: Almost every day, I come across a video that I'd like to watch, but I don't have time. For example: Tech talks, conference presentations, product or company demos, and so on.

Proposed solution: A simple on-demand video summarization service. I know transcription is available many places, but I don't want a 20-minute video to turn into 20 pages of text. That won't save me time. I want the bullet points, created by someone with solid critical and analytical skills.

I'm not aware of such a service available right now (maybe I just haven't seen it).

Would you pay for it? I think I would. Maybe $5 per video? $1? As a monthly service?
(Why are there so many posts here without a comment section? Now to the topic at hand...)

Why?

That's my first question. Why? As in why do I need this button? As in why do I have to do this in HTML 5?

HTML 5 doesn't have to replace Flash. Flash may be great for some devices, and the computers of today can do Flash.

Why does this argument always end up with "But I can do this wildly unnecessary thing in Flash! I should be able to make something unequally unnecessary in HTML 5".

Perhaps HTML 5 can't do the unnecessary. Perhaps that's all the more reason to go to HTML 5.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo da Vinci
On the proper use of this data:

Perhaps the easiest way to think of it is that the phrases are predictors for the race/sex, not the other way around. For example, you shouldn't expect every white male you meet to like Van Halen. However if someone says to you "I have a friend who's a big Van Halen fan", you're pretty safe in assuming that the friend is a white male.

Likewise, it might be that only 10% of blacks like soul food. But if almost no other demographics like it, it will still show up high on their list. So "is black" does not strongly imply "loves soul food", but "loves soul food" does strongly imply "is black".

In other words, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_theorem
That's an important point. Android is a complete non-starter in the non-phone MP3 device market, and the Android tablets are just starting out and have little market penetration. When comparing all iOS devices to all Android devices, instead of just phones to phones, iOS numbers definitely get a big boost.
Screening process: Resume screen, phone screen, web based Etherpad code test, then fly/bus in and day of interviews and whiteboard code test.

As a programmer currently looking for work, I find this screening process to be draconian and insulting.

I cannot vouch for it's efficacy as I've never used it when hiring people.

However, the problem I have with it is the rigidity with which I've seen it enforced. I've a number of open-source projects that I've started and contribute to and a plethora of code examples I can send upon request. I like to think of it as a portfolio of code. I've sent links to these projects and made sure the recruiter knew that I could provide further code samples as required. Yet each time I walk into the interview, the interviewer hasn't read a single line of my code and hands me a dry erase marker. I then get the sense that I'm just another number and they could hardly care about who I am or what I do.

I don't know what writing code on a whiteboard is supposed to show the interviewer. The person they're interviewing is not in the normal state of mind they are in when they're doing they're job. What good is a pressure test other than to keep very good, capable people out of your organization?

Certainly a production artist wouldn't walk into an interview with a portfolio and be asked to draw a puppy. The gall of the interviewer would force the artist to walk out unless they're especially desperate. The same is true for programmers, IMO. If a candidate sends you code to read, take the time to read it before you interview them. Otherwise why should they even bother sacrificing their time on this Earth to your benefit if you won't even consider their work and effort?
I have found it to be true too. I have gotten answers to some business related questions that others treat as secrets.
I think the functionality is great, I especially like the data aggregation options that you provide.

That said, I think the design needs polish. This is nitpicky, but looking at the demo, there's no visual distinction between the time and the stopwatch types. Also, I'd suggest a more web-optimized font, Times New Roman looks, for lack of a better term, bleh
Jason Calacanis had an interesting segment on this on his show. They say $50-100k.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kloJQ0EjgTE
Re: the edit

I think the issue was that your original post could be interpreted to mean that GPA is determined primarily by the amount of adversity in one's personal life and very little by academic ability. This is contrary to what I've observed: those with hardships still do fine academically, only a very small step below those with everything going for them, whereas those with genuinely bad GPAs typically aren't putting much effort into their coursework or are simply in the wrong major.
Office Supplies Stores
One Click Stationery offers a variety of key services and products including school and office stationery supplies,stationery,office stationery,office stationery products, with a comprehensive catalog.
you are in the US?
Is there really no simpler way to solve this problem?

"Moving a message needs to move all of the message's comments, and all of the comments' files, and all of the comments' files' versions."

Why can't you just change some top level reference in the database? I'm imagining a Projects table and a TodoLists table. Each TodoList has something like a projectID foreign key right? Why can't you just change that and automatically have all of the messages, etc, come along with the TodoList?

"But I hope you will see that sometimes even the simplest feature can be much more complicated than it looks from the outside."

I agree there, just wondering why the simple solution doesn't work in this case.
Max Shron, OkCupid Data Scientist here.

In an older version of the post, we did have the actual numbers, but they didn't seem to add much. Black women use "soul food" 20 times (!) more frequently than the site-wide average; for black men, "soul food" is 11 times as frequent.

AFAIK, nothing we put up for this article is less than twice as frequent for that group as it is for the general (OkC) population.
in the UK various funding bodies (eg. SMART) approve a founder salary of up to £40k, approx $60k, in line with other posts here.
Scientifically proven with a reading test based on the lengths of words, and metrics I just made up

Actually they're using the Coleman-Liau Index, a computer readability formula going back to 1975.
Google Instant Explination Page
A bunch have decriminalized it- that usually just means it's treated as a less serious crime in court.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Decriminaliza...
States with medical laws are more like legalization (for medical uses) than decriminalization.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Medical_canna...
Google Instant Search Released
JDK 7 Release Date set for mid 2012 or mid 2011 depending on how it is defined
Google live updating results
I see your point and I agree that it's possible to make your app gracefully handle exceptions. However, there's no way Rails can automate it for you: you still have to carefully design your app to handle it.

If Rails can help you make it easier, that's great, I just don't see how it's a mostly-compatible solution as Yehuda wrote in the post.

I fully agree that we should explore this option, but at the same time we should make people aware of the trade-offs and not present it as some setting you can simply enable by config.automatic_flushing = true (which makes Rails do all the hard work).

Yehuda didn't even mention the word exception in the blog post, so I wasn't sure if was aware of the issues or not.
interchange is complicated!!
You make a good point in your "You shouldn't be starving[...]" sentence -- One of the biggest productivity killers in my life is dealing with, or even worrying about personal finances. As a founder, if you decide you want to go get a few beers with friends and grab dinner, you shouldn't then have to worry about how you're going to recover the $30 you spent outside your budget. The key here, I think, is to pay yourself "enough to live in a manner that allows you to focus solely on your business and productivity."
As is often the case with Joel's stuff, some decent but fairly obvious ideas overshadowed by terrible ideas:

- Private offices?

- Over 1:1 ratio of interns? Does this make sense for small "agile" teams?

- Then some talk about what school people went to and GPAs... right. I suppose if you are hiring that many interns this will matter somewhat.
Ask HN: Service Idea: Cloud based image hosting
Hi there.

I run a medium size travel blogging site. When I started developing the site, I did not give much thought to dealing with user uploaded photos. I simply saved them to directory on the server and resized them into the correct sizes at upload time.

However, when the site became bigger, photos actually became a bit of a pain in the butt:

* Its a pain to synchronise across multiple servers

* If you change the sizes of the photos in your templates you need to regenerate all the images to the new size (hoping you kept the originals!)

* A web server set up to serve images efficiently is different to one set up to serve dynamic HTML efficiently. Running two web servers with limited resources can be a pain.

Of course, most of these go away by using something like Amazon S3. However, you still have the problem of making sure your images are available in the right sizes, file format conversion etc.

I propose a cloud based service to make this all easier for developers. Something that allows you to use a simple HTTP API to post images to. You can then request the image back in whatever size you want. Other image process functions could be supported (e.g. cropping, black and white, saturation) etc...

So say, you save an image to the service with file name 'image1', you could form a url to apply these changes:

http://fictional-image-sevice.com/myaccount/image1?crop(50,50,600,400)&size(300,200)&black_and_white&format(jpg)

Would return a cropped, resized black and white version of the source image as a JPG (regardless of original file format).

This would remove the headache of having to worry about image resizing or processing.

It would be a low cost service. It would use amazon s3, so storage and bandwidth would be the same. It would simply charge a fee per 1000 image requests.

(Really simple) client libraries would be available in all popular languages.

I have a really fast implementation of this image 'proxy' written in node.js that can handle these transformations, and caches the results in memory and then disk to speed it up. So it would be fast. Eventually it may be possible to offer a geo-aware version that downloads from a local server.

Any legs?
Actually, having worked with Perl during the Perl 4 to Perl 5 transition, I'd argue that it was almost as large as the C to C++ transition, though not as big as the Perl 5 to Perl 6 transition. Perl 5 dramatically expanded the options for expressing ideas in the language, while remaining largely syntactically upwards compatible (the Perl transition retained more compatibility with the previous version than did the C/C++ transition).

Perl 5 added lexically scoped variables ("my"), in addition to Perl 4's dynamicly scoped variables ("local"). Perl 5 added references, which is what made OO Perl possible (either "traditional" blessed hash references, or Moose, or any of the less popular alternatives, like "inside-out" objects).

I suspect the programming language rage of 2020 is currently some highschool kid's pet project (or some elementary school kid's daydream?) which no one else has seen yet.
What you are asking for is for the research to tell you how to think and to validate the idea for you. That's somebody else's work, not yours. So you are wanting them to think for you, instead of thinking about the idea on your own. That's not critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves using your own mind to think about an idea without research. Not many people can do this.
Ideas are presented all the time. You either agree or disagree. If you are curious for evidence, then you do the research yourself. But don't agree or disagree on the basis that no research is presented, or on the basis that lots of research is presented. Either way is not critical thinking.
If you don't have time to watch a video you may not have time to read. Maybe along the same lines but instead of text it could be an mp3 that one could listen to while walking in from the parking lot, driving or doing whatever. You could pack several hours of videos into a few minutes. I think the trick will be finding a low cost QUALITY summarization source.
http://jonudell.net/udell/gems/umlaut/umlaut.html
> However, on average wages in 1975, people spent 13.8% of their income on food. Today they only spend 9.6% and they eat out more.

People's diets and 'food' in general are different now too though: see high fructose corn syrup and a huge increase in dietary related disease such as obesity and diabetes for example. You aren't comparing apples to apples.
O(n) vs. O(n^2.2^n) vs. O(1)
Here is my experience: first 1.5 years, nothing. Then $60K for the next year. Then as profits went up, it reached $120K. Stayed there for several years. Then profits went up more, $200K. Now at $275K.
This does not sound simple. There should be a standard Market HTTP url which brings one to a page autopopulated with the details and the QR code of the app.
> But is there any correlation with programming ability? Or is GPA just an indicator of 'obedience'/employability?

When we were looking at entry-level resumes in a big consulting company we looked at the following:

1. Did they complete college? If not, have they shown that they can stick with something over months and years?

2. Did they have a good GPA? If not, do they stand out from their peers in other ways?

3. Have they chosen a path that takes dedication to master? We found that music majors could do very well on I.T. projects with some coaching. They were used to committing time and creativity to mastering difficult tasks.
Hurd off the Street -Oracle Buys Dell?
This is really cool, though I think I'd have to change my search habits dramatically to really benefit from it. It'd probably be better suited for people who don't know exactly what they're searching for. Then again, I wonder if it would just confuse them further.
Multiple submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- This one, and it was first
Multiple submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This one, which is an explanation, not just an example.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First
I hear you, but if I'm looking at your code that I didn't see you write in front of me, how do I know that code really came from you? You could have copied and pasted most of it from somewhere else and only made slight changes.
Multiple submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 <- This one

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First
Massive International BitTorrent Raid: Where Will We Download Mad Men Now?
The advice I have been given is that the founder salary should be market rate for skills/experience, but the actual check should be for bare living expenses. Ramen profitable is when you have the cash flow to sustainably sign the checks; profitable is when you can pay your own salary with backpay. This way you spell out your commitment/opportunity costs for potential investors and yourself while keeping cash requirements limited.

As I understand it, there are also some tax/legal issues regarding setting salaries since corporate profits and wages are taxed differently. This is what an accountant is for.
This "infographic" does not seem to contain any information.
I disagree. But I do know that your mom improves online debates!
I believe you misunderstand what "decriminalization" is. Marijuana being "decriminalized" simply means it is not a felony to possess it in amounts intended for private use. This is the case in a number of states including Ohio where I grew up. In Ohio they'd joke about it being a "50$ fine"... I don't know if that's the actual fine but there is no fail time and simply some fine for marijuana possession in small quantities.

Also, in many of these states you'll find that enforcement of marijuana laws are fairly lax in general. A friend was pulled over with marijuana in their car and the judge changed the charge to "public disturbance" or some such so that they wouldn't lose their student loan eligibility and other things.
I don't think founders should take giant salaries. At the same time, if you have funding, I think you should pay yourself enough to be comfortable.

People do short-sighted things when they are desperate. I think super low salaries increase the risk of burning out, giving up, or taking a more attractive offer. I think quitting for one reason or another is the biggest risk to a startup's success.
It's very rare to see a well-articulated, reasonable opinion get downvoted on this website.

HN seems to be slowly catching the disease where stupid popular opinions get upvoted an unreasonable amount (I call this "Slashdot Disease"), but this isn't nearly as dangerous as censorship by downvote.
Off-topic from the OP's question, but if you're incorporating as an S (for example, although other pass-through entities are similar), you need to pay yourself a "reasonable and appropriate" amount as salary. That is, you can't just pay yourself $1/year in salary and take $500K off in K-1 distributions (thereby avoiding FICA and other payroll-only withholdings). The IRS will tag you for that in a heartbeat.
I think 30% discount to what you would take in the open market.
yawn Whatever happened to use the right tool for the right job?

If you need a button like that (gaming website is about the only thing I can think of), chances are your audience probably has Flash.

My personal opinion however is Flash is not the right tool for the particular job of creating navigation.
Building offline web apps with HTML 5
Wow, I guess they listened and I need to eat my hat... Or something.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1653584

This is good news!
Many thanks! Monetization is tough for any webapp, but I believe there are possibilities for an app like memobuild.
Cnet Google Event Live Blog
Same story submitted previously:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575321

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576043

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575557

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580311

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580943

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1625125

http://searchyc.com/protein+game?sort=by_date
Customers who have paid for the beta app will get a crippled app, whether the beta becomes a nag-ware or a lite version.
The shortest link to the explanation:

http://www.google.com/instant/
Killer articles on startups
here is 5$ 5 grams in Tirana
Comments that detract value or are off-topic are deleted. You can still disagree and add value, but unfortunately your motive so far has only been to detract value, which is professionally disappointing.
The samples were really well made, they deserve something flashy to show them off :)
I have never seen a FastCompany article that was so flat-out, factually wrong. This was not a raid against torrent sites. This was aimed at The Scene, which is completely different (even somewhat antagonistic) from torrent-based sharing. This might slow down pre-release movie leaks, but it's not going to have an effect on the trivially-piratable stuff like TV shows.
The shortest link to the explanation, for those of us who don't have javascript turned on by default and want to read about it, or who don't see the new interface:

http://www.google.com/instant/

"Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8."