skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dear design students:

The standard upright bicycle has looked almost exactly the same for over a century, for very good reason. The basic diamond-frame design is very close to perfect. A derailed-chain drivetrain can exceed 98% efficiency, is cheap to build and is trivially easy to repair and maintain. I love folders, I love recumbents, I love full-sus mountain bikes, but for 99% of riders and 99% of journeys, precious little has changed since the baby boom.

There have been four meaningful breakthroughs in bicycle design in the last fifty or so years. Shimano's indexed derailer gears, Rohloff's SpeedHub, Mike Burrows' Compact Geometry and Andrew Ritchie's Brompton Bicycle. All of them were painstaking developments that took years of work. Burrows' Compact Geometry is a change as trivial as sloping the top tube on a standard frame, but it took years to get right.

I see dozens of these bicycle design concepts every year and every single one I have seen has been absolutely terrible. In the case of this design, the wheels would be so lacking in lateral stiffness as to make the bicycle frightening to ride and the epicyclic rear wheel would be lucky to go ten miles before self-destructing on road debris. Won't work, never will work, never should have been committed to paper.

The designer had seemingly no interest in the century of development behind the modern bicycle and no inclination to investigate why the status quo is as it is. He bumbled in and designed something cool-looking but useless, because he obviously has no interest in such trivia as the laws of physics. Personally, I think that these bicycle concepts embody the antithesis of good design - a useless, style-led attitude that rarely leads to anything but last year's model wearing this year's tailfins.

If you want to design table lamps and dribbly teapots, keep churning out this hogwash. If you want to change the world, start designing with your brain, not your felt tip pens. The world is full of vital, urgent, life-or-death design problems, but they need substance, not style.
My input as a girl that was introduced to computers at a young age:

I was introduced to programming as a way of creating things, and as someone who likes creating things, it really excited me.

The first things that I made were webpages (inc. perl scripts, like for Mad Libs) and java applets (inc. an applet that let you dress up my friend in cool outfits, and another applet that was "illustrated Mad Libs," with photos of my friends and actions).

I later went on to major in Comp Sci at college, and we had to do all these boring* assignments in my first year (book inventories + pointers, woohoo), but thankfully I was already aware of how much cool stuff I could create and I stuck with it.

So, if she likes creation, then I recommend web programming (because it is creating plus instant sharing), and also programming languages that lend themselves towards graphical output (Processing is a particularly good one for newbies, and you can now teach her either traditional Java-based Processing or JS Processing).

*boring to me, atleast relatively.
When people ask me how to lose weight or get in shape, I say a couple of things that are quite controversial, though they won't be in 5-10 years as modern conventional wisdom catches up to the science.

1. 90% of what you look like is what you eat (not how much, what) rather than, say, how much you workout or your genetics.

2. Optimize what you eat before you optimize how much you eat. It is more important to eat good clean food rather than eat small portions of still bad food.

3. Exercise fast, short and incredibly intense.

#1 is something I say to catch them off guard and eliminate excuses (genetics).

#2 is the real issue. The past 25 years of diet information in the US is basically misinformation. We were told that we had to eat less fat and cholesterol and we would be healthy. Science has shown this not to be the case but we are just now catching up to that science.

For instance...this is an ideal diet for nearly everyone:
1. Eliminate grains, sugars and most fruits (high-glycemic index fruits for sure: think watermelon)
2. Load up on veggies, eggs (best protein source around) and meat (high fat meat is great...no worries)
3. No oils other than coconut or olive
4. Unless you are trying to gain weight, minimal starches (potato/sweet potato etc)
5. Some nuts...don't go crazy with them.
6. some fruit, but only of the berry/cherry variety
7. minimal diary

http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/ is a great place to start.

#3 is b/c low intensity exercise doesn't really do much for your metabolism...it is a slow calorie burn that lasts as long as you are doing the activity. High intensity workouts boost base metabolism for as long as 36 hours.

I wish I knew this when I was a teenager...feels like lost years battling diet and weight only to seek the information later and realize the errors of modern conventional wisdom. At least I know early enough to correct for my next 50+ years.
Some group of students actually built a bike similar to this and posted it on Reddit in 2009 or so.

What I never understand is how people imagine the drive on the rear wheel. You'd need an impossible gearbox to spin the gear that interfaces with the rim, and even that gear would need to spin like 10 times for every revolution of the wheel.

To me, that kills the fantasy so thoroughly that it isn't even fun to look at a picture of the device and imagine it in perfect world scenarios.
The last thing you said is what I came in here to write. Everything in the NYTimes article is correct (about how easy it is to cook those 3 basic meals etc), but it misses one thing: there is no way that someone goes from eating burgers and prepackaged foods to salads and lentils instantly, and it's not because it's difficult or time consuming to cook (it's not really for most things).

Restaurant food has a major convenience factor, but the NYTimes article completely disregards that it also just plain tastes better than a salad to most people.

As someone who hates healthy food, lives in NYC where I can literally order delivery off the internet, and is trying to cook a lot more, you can't force two things on people at once: healthy eating AND cooking. I'm beginning to really like cooking, but only because I'm making things that aren't super healthy. My mother is a librarian and highly encourages her kids to read comics because to her they are a) totally valid reading material and b) are sometimes a gateway drug to much more reading. It's the same with cooking: teach someone to cook a butter burger and fry up some potatoes first (they'll still probably be knocking a few hundred calories off a restaurant version of the same meal anyway) and get them hooked on it. Maybe they'll transition to healthier stuff, worst case you at least have them eating SLIGHTLY healthier, and far closer to the source.

TLDR: Make a man a salad and he will order delivery for a night, teach a man to make salad and he will order deliver for a lifetime.
It's a conscious trade-off. One fear is that having comments that are edited after the discussion has taken place will reduce the utility of the future archive. There is also the hope that the current window-of-edit policy encourages people to do a better job the first time while still allowing them to catch silly errors.

I'm pretty sure that if you ask nicely by email that you can find an admin who will remove your email for you. Just wondering --- is there a reason you feel you have to remove it at this point?
Mountain View, CA

GazeHawk (YC S10)

Web Engineer, second hire

Full description at http://gazehawk.com/jobs/

Long story short: we do cool things with Javascript!
Ask HN: What were your favorite threads in '10?
There were so many articles and threads in 2010. What were some of your favorites?

Please provide a link to the thread and a brief description of why you liked it.
The world is socialist
USPS to release Pixar character stamps
I'm aware it is temporary, but I'm surely not the only one thinking that banner is more annoying than the occasional ad would have been.
Thanks Pamela. That plays well with my own skills, since I'm a web developer myself, so I'm glad to hear a qualified person so that it's a reasonable strategy.
Groupon ROI Calculator: Business Costs For Group Buying Deals
Find non-linked directories and files on a domain
and when I have a clue what I'm clicking on, I'll gladly check it out :-)

good luck.
That's also because it's an emulator. A TRS-80 surely couldn't emulate itself at full speed.
Bloat. Pit is ~50K executable with no dependencies storing all the data including activity log in single .pit file.
Great, now how much more money do they need to buy the disk space necessary to stop deletionism?
The final Red Letter Media Star Wars review is out: Revenge of the Sith
This article is inane. Just a sample:

"Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we’ll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don’t overshoot by 20 calories a day. ... That’s matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent."

The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers. If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific weight.)

Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god," "you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because you're gaining weight.

It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand.

P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat
"That more people are entering than leaving doesn’t. It’s what logicians call “vacuously” true. It’s true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That’s always true; it’s obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn’t."

I was following along with the analogy, but this really bothered me. "If I am fat, then I ate more calories than I burned" isn't vacuously true (because there are people who are fat), it's a tautology.

I don't know anything about nutrition, but seeing an error in the small part of the article I do know something about makes me more skeptical as to it's premise.

EDIT: After a few more minutes thought, I have to mention that since we've all eaten more calories than we've burned (or else we'd be massless), the statement is true for everyone, not just obese people. But that's just me being needlessly pedantic.
The down side of this is that google doesn't hold them honest. I.e. reporting on 2001 events in 2000.
Parser Generator for JavaScript (amazingly well done)
They could definitely make a killing with just a single AdSense block at the bottom of every article. Maybe even just the top 1000 articles.

Instead, we get places like Answers.com mass-duplicating Wikipedia content and slapping big image ads on it.
I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" last year and just read "Why We Get Fat" yesterday(both available on Kindle!).

GCBC is a good, long read with a lot of insight into the issues with science in the last 100 years. WWGF is much more focused on the current state of the carbohydrate theory.

Both are good, but if you want a quick win, go for WWGF. :)

[I am doing low carbs now, and lost 10kg so far.]
Not necessarily a resolution - but I've made myself a promise to watch at least one Khan video a day and work out the problems in the related categories. What an excellent refresher, particularly in mathematics.

I really wish this site was around when I was in high school and college. I'm glad it will be there for my children and I'm certain it will have even more great content than it already has now when they approach the subject matter on this site in their studies.
The same happens with Wikipedia as well. It's free-content, because that's sort of the point of the project. And reusing that content is great and encouraged. But just rehosting the exact contents of en.wikipedia.org with ads slapped on is a bit lame. Legal, but it's not any sort of interesting reuse, just adding more noise to the internet.
+ Ask HN: Music while coding [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525445 ]

From this thread I discovered music that has since become some of my very favorite.

+ Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973516 ]

I now have a stack of books that I can't wait to read. It's been a long time since I was this excited to relax and read instead of code. The change of pace is nice.

+ Hey, Guys, It's Totally Okay If You Don't Get Rich [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601281 ]
Are you rich? If so, how did you get there? [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610824 ]

The discussion in these two articles really changed my opinion of the make-up of the HN crowd. For the better. Lot's of thoughtful discussion that made me feel better about my own path in life.
Confession: I am Facebook Login Scum
32 words is the limit to a Google search, so it'd be difficult to block all sites you wanted to.
Or into a NES?
http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

Slightly more impressive but yes, it's strange we all get so excited about performance improvements that can only be called less mediocre than the previous iteration.
At one time google did provide this, if you were logged in , there was an [X] option to remove that result from your searches, as well as a voting up and down mechanism. I think it was just an experimental feature, but I wish they would of kept it, and expanded on it. If google is reading.. please bring it back
I'm not sure I agree with their definition of 'advertisement'.
Excellent! I was going to comment about putting a subscribe Call To Action on the homepage -- but went back and noticed you actually have one (the circle button).

Originally I did not recognize the circle as a link... You might play around with the placement of it. Or maybe I am just weird and didn't notice.
It doesn't seem like it is just iOS. I noticed an issue in my conky display this morning.

You should be able to see the bug on a *nix box with:

> date '+%m-%d-%G' # shows up as 01-01-2010

where as the following works fine.

>date '+%m-%d-%y' # 01-01-2011

I guess it's not really a bug since %G is the year of ISO week number, but it would be easy for something like this to go unnoticed until the invalid date pops up.
That website you link is very interesting. For starters, I can see the logic behind cutting legumes if the foundation of the guide is 'eat what prehistoric man ate' because legumes require a lot of cooking, but I'm curious if they are actually detrimental. They are usually accepted as extremely healthy.

10. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries.

This is a very, very interesting point. I don't know if he means this, but I realized that modern fruit is often not the same fruit from 500 years ago. It's been genetically engineered through artificial selection- apples, for example, used to be small, sour & bitter.

I've never really quite bought the demonization of grains though. We've been eating them for thousands of years, and most of the health problems blamed on grains seem to be recent events. Doesn't help that I dearly love breads.
Also on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Flying/What-was-it-like-to-fly-on-Conco...
Is their budget public? I'd really like to see how you spend $16 million.

Is there actually paid staff/benefits? Because $16M is more hardware/bandwidth than I can fathom.
Growing up, I only knew how to cook spaghetti and chocolate chip cookies. I figured everything else was in the realm of gourmets, and then I went to work for Google, and I never really needed to cook.

But lately I got interested in cooking again and discovered that its surprisingly easy to cook delicious meals. Here are my staples:
- Beef & veggie stir-fry (http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/beef-recipes/beef-and-veg... - substitute "cauliflower rice" for noodles for lower carbs)
- Pan-fried salmon w/asparagus or green beans (cooked in butter, garlic, and salt)

I wish someone had shown me the joys of a frying pan and sea salt before. It's brilliant. I feel so gourmet now. ;)
Unleash the wait, no more pagers when waiting for a table at a restaurant
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget

PDF for 2011: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... (Page 24 for pie chart comparison)

Summary: They want to expand, a lot, almost every sector has more than doubled in allocated budget from 09-10s budget
Twitter still is.
> There's a very strong correlation between music skills and coding

Really? That's the first time I've heard about it. Do you mind going into more detail, or sharing links? It's not at all obvious to me why the two skills would be correlated (perhaps because my only musical skill is completely average ability to play the guitar).
See previous discussion: women were the original human "computers" and the non-programming work in IT was regarded as secretarial
It's not about annoyance, it's about conflict of interest.
Similarly, I'd like a blacklist or advanced search operator that, for certain queries, would allow me to exclude all sites with AdSense on them. Might have to wait for Blekko or Bing to provide that, though.
Why do people get fat?
the g1, in terms of processor speed, was probably on par with as much as the iphone 3g.

I've played with the droid x, and other than the screen size, didn't really see that much of a difference between it and the g1.

Edit: After a quick browse of wikipedia, the g1, on paper, looks to be faster than the iphone 3g.
In that case, here are my teaching materials for an HTML & CSS class - exercises and slides included:
http://www.teaching-materials.org/htmlcss/

Web programming is actually harder to teach than other programming, I would say, because it involves so many different languages meshing together in this funny environment. But I think the practicality of it may outweigh the complexity of it.
I remember that. The trouble was that it was result-specific, not site-specific. There wasn't a way to kill an entire site, at least that I was aware of.
+1. I put a 140GB Intel X-25 in my old non-unibody Mac. This thing boots so fast I can barely notice it. The only thing I really miss out on is the extended battery life of the newer macs.
Interesting question.

I'd divide the possible filtering processes into three approaches.

* Throw all your questions to all your friends and all the review sites you "trust". This means any third party site you trust gets a rather excessive ability to spam you - even a site with good user reviews on them are trying push pop-up windows on me. Just because I've gotten good info from X once doesn't mean I want any more from it.

* Throw friend recommendations and trusted sites to a third party "meta-filterer" who organizes things for you. You'd have to really trust that site and essentially there's no reason they'd be better than Google.

* Do the filtering yourself. Most people essentially do that now. I'm working on a project to create tools to automate and improve this this process. Create your own relevance and topic-weighting system that adaptively filters all the other filters. I believe that this kind of approach eventually going to be needed. Not so much because each person can or should do all their topic-relevance-weighting but because this approach would keep the other systems honest.

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

Eventually, people are going to realize that both their social graph and their content-relevancy-weightings/algorithm are far too personal to farm out unquestioningly to a third party. The present social networking system is like AOL-email in 1992 except with the added provision that provide can look-at and alter your emails as part of the service. I'd envision this stabilizing to the present email system where webmail exists but has to work more or less the same of email to your personal computer.
If we were to pick a random Demand Media or Associated Content page, what are the odds a reasonable person would prefer its writing to a less-cynically-optimized, less-ad-drenched alternative page that the test page has bumped out of the top results?
Looking for a technical  co-founder ASAP (VoIP)  
looking for a technical co-founder partner has the ability to build things , to work on a secret new project I cannot mention more details any one Interesting
Required
-VoIP background
-programming skills

more info & reply to : [redacted]
I'd also say hackety hack is fun and simple.

Also - despite it maybe being a bit intense with the topic around it - http://railsforzombies.org/ - is done in a brilliant way for learning.

Maybe more for teens - and I dont see why someone couldn't rehash the zombie idea into something like ponies and teddy bears or something cute.

I've written a guide on how to complete rails for zombies - http://kaivong.com/2010/12/rails-for-zombies-guide/ - and if anyone is interested in doing something for a younger age range (that doesn't include zombies) I'd love to help out with design/screencasts.

Hope that helps in some way!
I oppose network neutrality; regulation and oversight will halt or slow the creation of new ISPs and slow down technological adoption.

Walled gardens like AOL failed without regulation. People noticed when comcast forged TCP reset packets; they will notice a paywall.
I'd like to have the option (like facebook has when you mouse over a post in your feed) to hide all results from X website.

If you tied that with the ability to follow other people and their search edits, the number of spammy results could be reduced.
Those AppleScripts sound interesting -- mind sharing a link to more info?
There Is No Such Thing As Being Hot
Facebook Connect
I have a question about the Facebook connect.
My website (NOT a Facebook app) uses the FB connect.
Which options do I have with that? I know about three:
1. Sending emails to registered users
2. Posting on their FB wall
3. "Like"
Which other options there are?
Thanx
Off the top of my head I know of haXe, York Haskell Compiler. And WebSharper on F# allows you to do some cool stuff.
You know, I am starting to think more and more that copyright should ALLOW peer-to-peer sharing but not republishing. That's where the line should be drawn. There should be a clear definition of publishing, e.g. serving content upon request to anyone immediately on demand. That way, if the authorities can download something copyrighted from a public source which is not the original author, they can go prosecute that source. Just a thought. Ideas?
You can always type control-[ in lieu of escape.
Sure, it's annoying... but it worked 16 million times.
Ask HN: What web language do most YC...
..companies use? Is there one that takes the lion's share?