skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an overweight parent, I know I'm overweight and am working to change that, with slow, but steady results.

I've always been very conscious of my child's weight, because I don't want her dealing with the same feelings of shame, discomfort, lack of energy, etc. that I went through as a kid, or to face the medical problems later in life that I'm now working hard to avoid. This is, for me, a Really Big Deal. Being overweight sucks. I want better for my kid.

If anything, having a kid has helped me, because teaching healthy lifestyle and eating habits by example is far better than telling her one thing and doing something totally different, myself.

On the other hand, I have an overweight friend with a 100+lb, average height, 9yr olds who will argue all day that the kid "isn't fat."
I'll be working out of Berlin for a month or two early next year. Looking forward to it.
Yes, daily TV news is crap and it's awful that it influences so many people.

But take comfort in the fact that tomorrow, TV news will have new happenings to blabber about, and yesterday's crap will be forgotten. People who care will read the full story weeks later and get something resembling truth.
>>Ability to write PHP code using the beautiful Haml templating system;
>>Ability to write CSS stylesheets using the awesome Sass syntax [...];
>>Ability to write Javascript logic in Coffeescript;

Some may like that, but I want to write my PHP in PHP, and write my CSS in CSS, and write my JS in JS. I really never got why I would write one language in another language just to then use some tool to translate it (and if it gets a little complicated have to manually fix translation problems afterwards). Can someone explain please?
OK - so don't hire employees, but contract with contractors. Seems a pretty simple problem, yet few companies I talk to want to go down that route.

No, contractors are usually not a great fit for a few reasons.

1. They're expensive. A lot of can cost a 50% to 100% premium on a salaried employee. Example most good contractors I know (solid, quality devs not rockstar architects) go for about $125 an hour in the SF Bay Area. Over 48 (assume some timeoff) weeks this is about $240,000 a year. This gets worse working startup hours where you get a cost efficiency with salaried employees when people work massive amounts of overtime. Imagine the quality of engineer you can get for $200k a year.

2. When contractors are done all the knowledge of what they've done goes out of house. Both in terms of what you lose as well as any proprietary info that can now go into competitors hands.

3. Contractors don't have to work your hours. A lot of people aren't aware of the legal differences between a contractor and a full time employee because its very vague. But you can't just say "boom" you're a contractor and expect them to show up every day like a regular employee. Some do and if they don't complain its fine, but if you piss one off they can easily get you in trouble with the IRS and your state's labor code. If you expect an employee to show up every day, at your office and work 9 to 5, and work off your product backlog then they are by law a "full time" employee. You're expected to take out payroll taxes, workmans comp etc.

No hire a few very competent people who can adjust. Where contractors have their place is on discrete pieces of work - doing your iPhone app, performance tuning your stack etc. These are great places to have contractors come in.
No, but flashblock, noscript, and image.animation_mode = once cut obnoxiousness to near zero without specifically targetting ads.
Our New App, Evernote Hello, Will Help You Remember People
>> An attribute of Scala is that the Scala compiler generates fragile byte-code.

Can anybody tell me if this would be true to any JVM targeted language, or is it a specific issue of the Scala compiler?

I'm asking because I just recently decided to abort learning Scala in favor of Clojure.
interesting- thanks for making me feel better about my macbook pro purchase :)
sounds like at least one of these was broken.

"ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.

ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.

ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use."
I was a cofounder up until the point where money was being taken off the table. From then on I was characterized as a freelancer/someone who developed a prototype.
The ads usually intend to add value. They just often aren't very good.

I don't think advertising is inherently evil (though I respect that some may disagree), I think the problem is that we're still in the early days of Internet advertising. The technique isn't quite there yet.
I'm looking forward to the Mythbusters episode where they bust/confirm the myth about a cannonball flying through two homes and a minivan.
David, good tips; especially the "Do they have a big network" - I hadn't thought to really dig through a twitter, facebook or G+ account to get a feel for someone.
I use a cocktail of AdblockPlus, Ghostery, NoScript, CookieMonster, and BetterPrivacy. I've used Flashblock in the past, and may use it again, but there are a couple of flash game sites I frequent and BetterPrivacy takes care of the persistent flash cookie issue.

All of these make browsing a lot speedier on my DSL connection. However, I'll admit they can also be a pain in the tuckus when wanting to log in, or a site requires JavaScript to view content. Still, I consider them worth it for "tracking" considerations alone.
Education is what you make it.

If the grading structure is so rigid and foolish, then it ought to be trivial to game it, leaving almost all your time free to get laid/start a business/contemplate the human condition to your heart's content.

If you choose to spend your time trying to eke out as many marks as possible from each minute spent cramming, then I'd wager you probably aren't imaginative enough to be ultra-successful anyway. Aim to leave university having done something so cool that your eventual grade is rendered irrelevant, (ideally so irrelevant that you can drop out.)

"But these benefits cannot completely justify a system where creativity and genuine learning isn't properly rewarded."

If you're in your 20s and you still need to be "rewarded" by a teacher giving you a shiny gold star then again, something is wrong.

EDIT: upon consideration, I am putting across a somewhat elitist view here. Not everyone can be expected to "do something so cool that your eventual grade is rendered irrelevant," to transcend their peers in order to gain value from their degree; that's a contradiction. There are indeed many flaws in the system and it is unreasonable to say "just hack your way around them for your own benefit!" when we could just fix the system so one can take the normal, average route though it and still get value from one's money/time.

In lieu of that though, I still think what I said stands, although I didn't have to pay american tuition fees.
> at least in theory

no it was not community driven, that was their mistake, that is something a user ends up figuring out and leaves
Wordpress is the worst blogging system out there, except for all of the others.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ojbyrne
I do something similar, but on my router. That way everyone who is connected to my wifi has ads filtered.
I'm surprised nobody has pointed out that the Euro is a tragedy of the commons.

"Pooling sovereign debt absolves the most irresponsible nations from confronting their unsustainable spending by forcing more responsible nations to pick up the tab. All of the incentives are weighted in favor of irresponsibility and none to responsibility. No pie-in-the-sky plan by the EU to dictate budgets to its members will ever work. The members will either ignore such interference or, as has already happened, cook the books to make it appear that they are doing so." – From Philipp Bagus' The Tragedy of the Euro
Phil Haack quit Microsoft for GitHub
The difference between multimethods and pattern matching is that pattern matching is usually "closed" (you can't add new clauses somewhere else), while multimethods allow you to extend the method with additional functionality.
Soundcloud has offices in London. They just opened up a new office in SF recently as well. But you're right in that their main HQ is definitely in Berlin, although were originally founded in Sweden!

Amazing company!
Oh I thought about your reasoning. It just need to keep the one that asked the question, then. Killing everyone else won't prevent it to tell the answer to the researcher.

Even with limited hardware, the AI still can have a non-trivial influence over the world, provided it can self-improve. And if you limit the hardware to present-day computers, and you ensure the format of the answer is highly constrained, you may be safe. The AI will be much more limited, though.
Decision tree learner will predict whether you prefer cats or dogs
That's what lots of advertisers are pushing for. It makes in some cases, but in others it's a bit disingenuous. Lexus doesn't really care how many people click through to its landing page; they want to get their logo in front of your eyes as often as possible so that when it's time to buy a car, their brand is fresh in your mind.
Show HN: Netograph, privacy snapshots of the social web
The first-iteration launch of a new privacy-related project of mine. Comments and suggestions appreciated!
My thought is: If you can't afford me blocking ads then do one of two things:

1) No flashing ads. No flash ads (cpu time is mine!) No ads that blur content with ads. And I will turn off ad blocking on your site. If ads have sound and I can't block it I will never visit the site. This is why arstechnica has ads turned off for me, autoplaying video and sound.

BTW I will not turn off blocking of the +1 button or Like or whatever. I just don't wanna be tracked.

2) Don't give free content. Make me pay for it. If I like it I would.
I was in a similar situation:

I was almost 26, in law school. wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew being a lawyer wasn't it, I went to law school out of panic and pressure. I panicked when I realized I didn't want to work in finance after undergrad and felt pressure to please my family. I was envious of my friends that seemed to have it all figured out, depressed and piling up student debt. I thought there was no way out. Then I had an epiphany- what's the point of being pressured to do something that you don't want to do? Why chase potential status or money when this is a sure-fire way of waking up at 35 and being miserable with what you do? Most of us are smart enough to be able to succeed as long as what we're doing makes us happy. I decided to figure out what makes me happy- what do I enjoy doing in my spare time, what interests me? For me, it was a mix of business and technology. I found a conversion tech degree program, dropped out of law school (finally manned up and confronted my parents that I was responsible for my life), completed a MS program in about than 1.5 years (I did it in the UK) and never looked back. Flash forward 3 years from my dark days in law school- I'm in a rewarding job that I love, I'm happily married (I met my wife through a friend that I met in the MS program) and loving life.

Takeaways for you:
1. if you're not happy with what you're doing, stop, I know it is scary, but believe me, the rewards are worth it. You don't have to completely drop out of your program, you can take a year off (most schools offer that option) and spend that year figuring out what makes you happy and pursuing that goal!

2. don't be pressured into unhappiness- if it is your parents, confront them. Yes, it is difficult, the convo I had with my parents was one of the most difficult things I have ever done up to that point- but you have to live for yourself, not for anyone else. Confront the pressure.

3. My education (mis)adventures left me with about $100-105K of student debt. That is a scary number, but is manageable. Make sure your debt has a fixed interest rate, you can apply for income based repayment plan which will give you plenty of breathing room.
I was thinking the exact same thing while reading this. Wunderkinder is missing and the majority of these companies are copy-cat businesses. Granted, Wunderlist is a to do app which there isn't a shortage of, but they've managed to keep their product free while maintaining cloud sync, great UI, and relevance among its productivity community. Meanwhile they opted to include a general "rebate networks" and deal network companies. This is my long-winded way of saying this list is mediocre and Wunderkinder deserves to be on a list like this.
This coverage isn't quite as bad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj-CErr0VOY
I generally do, but not at the moment, as I'm contemplating an advertising project and want to see what's out there (appalling as expected).
I write porn blocking software, so should I view porn out of professional courtesy?
> Banner ads pay my salary

Do you mind if I ask which companies are your favorite?
If you're not using it for mischief, I don't personally see the harm in it - the "missing" link is still fulfilling its purpose of discouraging "evil" impulses by making it just that little bit harder to carry them out.
It is potentially foolish. Possibly quite foolish. But it's also at least possible that whoever built the houses talked to the sheriff first and believed that things would not be coming off the range with large amounts of momentum.

As far as the location, I don't think I have to think I am smarter than the experts in order to take the position that they shouldn't be hitting houses with cannonballs. It may not end up being a consensus in a world where people want to shoot cannons, but it is a defensible position.

When I consider that they have repeatedly shot the cannon at this location, I end up thinking that 1/10 is still a pretty high rate of hitting houses.
I guess the target audience of that site celebrate Christmas, it's why they responded better to it.
Mark Zuckerberg's Private Photos hacked
I don't know how to square those statements with reading about a cannonball going through someone's house for no better reason than making a mildly amusing TV show and telling the owners "shit happens".
Based on the formatting, it looks like a screen capture from Visual Studio. Ugly.

Probably just some poor soul trying to meet some arbitrary deadline, and the screen shot and crop method was the easiest solution. Or, maybe they were the first person in a workflow, and they had no idea that it'd be translated into web content.

Not defending it, but just saying - I've been there, and I'm sure you have, whether we like it or not.
I'm happy to answer any questions - this is based on the QuickDT library (see https://github.com/sanity/quickdt).
but being 75% in weight amongst 1 year olds isn't necessarily indication that he should lose weight. S/he might be 98% in height.
Wow, what a great story! Although, I kind of doubt they'll be able to continue using that air base.

I hope they team up with Survivorman to do some really wild stuff in remote wildernesses. The thought of a Survivorman/Mythbusters series makes me giddy.
Generative 8-bit music for iOS: Glitch Machine
Technical or not isn't really the point - he'd never worked with or lead engineering teams and didn't know how to hire or fire them.

That's all kind of beside the point however. Jay Adelson was there pretty early on he should have been technically savvy enough to avoid these pitfalls.
And depending on where you got your summaries from, the accuracy would likely be much, much higher.
Every few months a story like this from Kevin Rose pops up where he tries to explain what went wrong. Nothing's changed, he's still blaming the hiring process and the developers.

On the other hand, I would love to hear the story of why Digg failed from one of these developers.
It's not the fault of TV news. Like so many other things, the blame goes all the way upstream to the anonymous mass of idiots that comprise humanity (for almost all values). TV news is meeting the demands made by its market, which doesn't absolve their responsibility for participating, but also doesn't really make it worth much to "end TV news in all forms". We have to teach the people how to do good and not evil. If any of you know how to do this, please get back to me.
I offered to pay a higher monthly fee in order to watch content on Hulu commercial free. There's no commercial free option, so I cancelled. Bottom line is I hate being exposed to commercials and am happy to pay for content.
The odds are not good for Euro survival
I agree with you, but I think the claim is that for those familiar with language variants like these, it is possible to be more productive. It is, of course, also more difficult to find collaborators familiar with non-standard variant languages.
Show HN: Early Adopter cred from your Twitter & Facebook IDs
Your Early Nerd Score is a measure of how much of an early adopter you are. Low user-ids have always been a key piece of geek cred. Your score is just your percentile for each service, note that it may change over time as our data set grows.

Who made Early Nerd
This is a quick hack by pkamali (@peeter on Twitter) and feldmanr (@ronfeldman on Twitter).
I voted yes although it's not strictly true since I don't use an adblocker per se. I browse mostly in Opera, with plugins and images turned off. I have toolbar buttons to turn them on in one click when needed, but on 90% of sites that works fine and gets me just the text. Turning off Javascript is also one click away on the F12 menu for difficult sites. I also have a custom style sheet in Opera to force all text to black-on-white at a reasonable size and my choice of font. This makes the web pretty manageable, without depending on browser extensions or addons.
Python Voted Best Programming Language 3 Years Running
No, just FlashBlock and a hosts file that blocks the Facebook "Like" button (but nothing else.)
"Rational agents" in the context of economics does not mean people make the best choices for maximizing capital preservation. It means that human behavior is inherently rational because only an individual knows if his choices were in his best interest.
> I sure hope Apple is working on a way to enable free trials. The way it works on Windows Phone is great.

Is he being ironic? I've never used a Windows Phone, so I can't tell.
The cost per mm^2 of wafer has more or less stayed constant for the last 30 years, so it should be cheaper to produce per gigabit. Though there might be an initial spike in price due to high demand and low early yields.
Just checking out Wunderkinder for the first time. Thanks for passing it along. I've never heard of most of these companies before, but I'm glad to see something other than SanFran startups.
Flash is around $1/GB now, so this should be a little cheaper.
It does require a step back to realise the magnitude of change: Google have managed strumble into Microsoft's position in phones.

On the surface, that's both astounding and completely unexpected.

Google put itself into that position by being a neutral 3rd party that manufacturers could trust coupled with a realisation that most phone manufacturers were great at hardware but terrible at software.

The outcome is that the companies who didn't see software as their competency and were willing to drop their OSes (Samsung, Motorola, HTC) have reaped the benefits while companies whose strengths were based around their software being slightly better than their competitors (RIM, Nokia) have fallen behind.
Tried this for BCC last year on a lark. Christmas crushed.
ooh nice, never seen anyone do something clever using that information before.

o/\o
I voted yes, meaning I use a flash blocker which helps not wasting battery on all kinds of flash stuff running in the background including ads.
Before universities were teaching CS, they were teaching mathematical logic, linear algebra, calculus, linguistics, and electrical engineering.

A general CS degree just distills the good parts out of those fields and mixes in courses teaching the foundations of computer and systems architecture. (In general anyway)
i'm not sure "hurt apple" is the right way to put it, as i see it pretty much everybody who wants (and can afford) an iphone has one. apple hasn't lost anything yet because of the deal.

the exclusivity deal allowed android to gain a foothold, but i don't see android as a competitor to iphone, just an alternative. people who buy android phones are people who don't want an iPhone and probably wouldn't have bought one anyways.
Boxcar is hiring paid interns anywhere in the world. We're a distributed team, with bases in Wichita, KS and NYC. Email jonathan@boxcar.io with what you're passionate about!
What goldmine? They just replaced Nokia.

Android is the new Nokia. Lots of worthless Market share, Zero profit.

EDIT: I realize i'm going to be down voted for this. But if you don't think it's true, you're delusional.
From an IP perspective, do you think Android is legal? From Java, to multi touch, to design aesthetics. Is Google doing to the OS industry to what they did to the news paper and media industry where IP is considered 'obsolete'. And a silent emperor sits over the valley of chaos?
I'm always perplexed by the notion of trying to "model" an economy. I don't understand how aggregate statistics about a market reveal any insight into how to create sustainable value. I feel like it's similar to knowing the past winning numbers on a Roulette table, because it provides no actionable insight to future winning numbers.
Far be it from me to defend TV news - my print journalism professors used to love to point out now there's more info on the front page of a newspaper than in an hour of TV, and you can scan to the parts that interest you. TV news is 99% garbage in my view.

That said, the internet also has a high noise-to-signal ratio. Yes, searching helps, but there is a type of in-depth reporting that you simply can't do unless it's your full-time job and you're able to travel when necessary. That's the value that news organizations can provide.

A random blogger who happens to be talented and financially independent could do great reporting. One who only has a few hours a week and no budget to devote to the task is severely hindered.
Citations please. If that was true, I've learned a new fact that conflicts with most of what I know about obesity having an effect on, for example, heart disease.

The first link when googling for "lifespan by bmi" is:

http://wehrintheworld.blogspot.com/2009/05/bmi-and-life-expe...

Which cites two metareviews. The first is a collaboration between the UK Medical Research Council, several British organizations including one out of Oxford, and the US National Institute on Aging (which is under the NIH umbrella). It was published in _The Lancet_ (Impact factor: 33). I will quote the quoted part from said blogpost:

> BMI is in itself a strong predictor of overall mortality both above and below the apparent optimum of about 22·5–25 kg/m2. The progressive excess mortality above this range is due mainly to vascular disease and is probably largely causal. At 30–35 kg/m2, median survival is reduced by 2–4 years; at 40–45 kg/m2, it is reduced by 8–10 years (which is comparable with the effects of smoking). The definite excess mortality below 22·5 kg/m2 is due mainly to smoking-related diseases, and is not fully explained.

While I found a few studies that didn't find a correlation (including one in AMA), I can't actually find an academic source for the claim that people with a BMI of 25-30 have the longest lifespan and see lots of claims that the optimal BMI is in the low 20s. Do you have any citations handy?
Frankly, I trust Mint with my bank info more than I trust my bank. One has a history of incompetence, and it isn't Mint.
Yeah, its been a regular haunt of mine for a while. If you know of anymore, please share!