skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. The place that I work does not have a cafeteria with food (modulo vending machines), and not only would it be "neat" to get free food, I find myself frequently going to one of the closest restaurants and getting the same thing I always get. I've precomputed what I want for lunch and just want to get back to what I was working on. If I had a cafeteria with food I could precompute a lunch from there and increase my job satisfaction by not breaking my focus.

Also, I disagree about a cafeteria milking an extra hour out of employees. It's entirely fair to give them so many hours per day and reap the benefits of them stacking the time together more efficiently for both of us. In other words, barring some other commitment I have no problem going home after 8 hours of work, even if that's at 4:00 instead of 5:00. Negotiating that with your boss is orthogonal to where you go to lunch and who pays for it.
Intelligence and non-zero-sum thinking
Lots of good comments here, many of them all true at the same time.

A marriage is a such a big commitment (10 times bigger if there are kids), that if there is something in your life more important than your marriage, it (probably) won't last.

Some people seem to make this kind of thing work, but I think it's quite rare.

My philosophy is that companies come and go (especially startups), but a loving family will last you a lifetime, and have a much bigger impact on your happiness and wellbeing than success and work.
How many women out there want to raise kids out of wedlock? Probably not many, and the same is probably true of most men. Or are you assuming that men don't want to have families?
The Design Contest Flaw
The part that struck me as most important:

>>But if I could give one piece of advice to these contest holders, it would be to do a bit of research on what you are after. Choose the proposal which best fits your project, and if you don’t really know what that is, then you would be best just hiring a real designer to get the job done properly.
I've lived and worked at startups in both places (Seattle, now SF), and the bay area is much more vibrant and active.

You're right that the bay area startups that you /hear/ about are largely media-oriented, but that's just confirmation bias. There are just tons of other startups and small companies that you don't hear about. In Seattle, people still look at you a little funny if you work at a startup (why wouldn't you just work at Microsoft or Amazon?)
Justin.TV is a webware 100 winner
Microsoft launch Visual Studio 2010 beta
Yet more Microsoft heading your way. This time not as controversial as Microsoft are set to release the highly anticipated Visual Studio 2010 beta, which is all ready available to all the public.

Microsoft developer tools solution specialist, Jihad Dannawi quoted:

“On 18 May Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on 20 May through Microsoft Downloads.”
My colleague Jao, an ex-Googler himself, burst out laughing today when he heard about this.

But it wasn't about the contents -- it was because El País, the most prominent newspaper of Spain, reported that Google is using a /logarithm/ to detect discontent.
Hey, if he wants leverage he could go live and work abroad for a while where a middle class US lifestyle is livin' it up. Also men's pulling power is a lot less dependent on looks than womens'.
Exactly. You can't write a business plan for love. It happens, or it doesn't.
(Sidenote: You probably want the observer's paradox, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observers_Paradox which is basically identical, but specfically coined because it is something that comes up in social science realms.)
Well thanks for the laugh, I needed that today.

Folks, finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with - you know, the person that is going to stick around to wipe your... okay I'll say drool... when you are 80 and have Alzheimers - that is a much more unpredictable proposition than what you chose to do with your professional life. If you are trying to time the former to the latter, you are taking a big risk that the right person won't be around when you decide you are ready for them.

Date. If you are still dating after 1-2 years and like it, move in, or else break up and try again. If you are still living together and like it after 3 years get hitched, or break up and try again. By all means do not be hasty - but please do not overplan this.
I dont think media subscriptions are a dead end, people pay £50 a month to watch some tv, I would be very surprised if people wouldnt shell out £10 a month to listen to whatever music they wanted.

Its just a problem that hasnt been solved well yet.
Ask HN: How do you learn a web framework?
Hi.

I've been disconnected from "web development" for sometime since I don't do it at work. I once used Rails pretty well (pre 2.0), but now I find I'm out of touch and Rails too bloated (as a framework) and slow (due to Ruby?). Perhaps, it is also more expensive to run experimental sites on than, say, Django).

I frequently have ideas which I want to experiment with, and know should take less than a weekend to hack together with one of the newer frameworks/libraries.

So, two questions: first, what are the best frameworks to get a prototype as fast as possible. Scalability is not a major issue for now: I think if an idea's good, it will still be used if it's slow/unreliable (e.g. early Twitter), and one can scale in the meanwhile.

Second, how does one learn enough to hack something quickly together in the framework you suggest? I've seen "Getting started" tutorials are frequently insufficient for real work, but books are too tedious (old examples: Rails screen-cast and the Pragmatic book). Is there a middle-ground for your framework?
I'm a little surprised by the media frenzy surrounding this announcement. Raising public awareness of science is a Good Thing(TM) but the significance of this find seem to be overblown to the point of sensationalism.

"But despite a television teaser campaign with the slogan 'This changes everything' and comparisons to the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination, the significance of this discovery may not be known for years. An article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS ONE, a scientific journal, will report more prosaically that the scientists involved said the fossil could be a 'stem group' that was a precursor to higher primates, with the caveat, 'but we are not advocating this.'"

- NYT on the media build up: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/business/media/19fossil.ht...
I couldn't find a good pithy blog post explaining it, so instead I'll direct you to a couple things I did find. I first read about it here (search for 'cave'): http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/06/weepy_relatives.html

Which led me to Randolph Nesse: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/ who wrote this book: http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Sick-Darwinian/dp/067974674...
brilliant! thanks...
Switching jobs just for free food would indeed be a bad idea. Gourmet, incredibly delicious food every day is pretty significant. It really brightens your day. Google's cafeterias, if they were not just for Googlers, would easily be among the best restaurants on the peninsula.

The reality: it's way too easy to overindulge, and over time, it's less that they're giving you food and more like they're taking away your independence.

As for your other point, it's good to have a variety in your career -- sometimes, be the smartest guy in the room, other times, the dumbest.

At Google, sometimes you find youself in a group of brilliant but egoless developers who rapidly come to a consensus based on fact and experiment. And the other half of the time, you will be in a room of people who all think they are the smartest person there and spend all day picking apart the proposals of their colleagues.
You can gain quite a lot. If you want a partner beside you to learn from and grow closer to, it can be a great thing. If you want children to love and raise and educate, marriage can be awesome. Those are two reasons I look forward to marriage when I meet the right woman.

If those aren't your priorities though, then I would agree, marriage probably isn't a good option for you. If you view marriage as "what you can get" rather than "what you can give/share" then it will not work and will result in unhappiness.
i'm not convinced. a real designer making an argument would of course back his position with supporting screenshots or something...
I understand you were joking but there's a grain of truth in what you're saying. People who don't believe in Evolution are looking for holes in the theory and those holes will always exist. Because no matter how many fossils we do find they can always claim there were ones we didn't find that co-existed with humans. So the anti-evolution crowd will always have all the grounds they need to not believe.

Part of the sick beauty of Creationism is that there's no way to prove it wrong (though I'd argue that's largely because it's based on no real facts in the first place)
I am surprised to see that after 10 hours of this item being posted I am the only to respond.

I think the CEO was absolutely correct and should be praised for his leadership in this matter. No company is perfect, Craigslist included, but the 1st Amendment is not dead in the US of A!
This is so old it’s even mentioned in the spec as something a browser can choose to avoid:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#link-pseudo-classes

Note. It is possible for style sheet authors to abuse the :link and :visited pseudo-classes to determine which sites a user has visited without the user's consent.

UAs may therefore treat all links as unvisited links, or implement other measures to preserve the user's privacy while rendering visited and unvisited links differently. See [P3P] for more information about handling privacy.
No - Antitrust law is fundamentally immoral. There is no way for you to know whether or not you're in violation of it. It is merely a way for those who are not successful to drag others down.
When reading aloud to kids you must read with a passion and not only read the words 'as is' (or the kids will probably hit you with something). I don't know if it helps me with my reading/writing but it probably help the kids with their reading skills.
This is the link you intended:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer%27s_paradox
> what are the best frameworks to get a prototype as fast as possible.

Rails is good for that. Worry about 'bloat' later.

> Second, how does one learn enough to hack something quickly together in the framework you suggest?

Start hacking on it, keeping in mind that you may throw it away and redo it.
Seconded - it's great fun.

I find that I need to be absorbing the text one or two sentences ahead of the words I am speaking, so as to plan the emphasis and timing.

Once I am familiar with the text, though, I can have a completely unrelated train of thought going whilst reading.
this sounds like the "new math"... why not start young children with actual programming? programming is _easier_ and more intuitive than thinking abstractly about algorithms and compression
The headline makes it sound as if this is the first such thing ever found. I'd like to point to arch-Darwinist P.Z. Myers:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/darwinius_masilla...

"The hype is bad news, not because Ida is unimportant, but because it detracts from the larger body of the fossil record"
There is an app called "Things" (which is like pretty much a Tasks.app) this can sync with iCal which I sync with Google Calendar - that I sync with my iPhone using NuevaSync.

Note I don't use Outlook, but if it supports caldav this whole thing should work.

All that being said, right now it looks like Google Calendar doesn't support writing "To Do's" over caldav I get this error

"HTTP/1.1 403 Google Calendar doesn't support storing of "To Do" (VTODO) components"
to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation"

But maybe, this feature will shortly be enabled.
I used to believe that you could pick any two of the following three items:

1) A job you like and are good at
2) A body you like and take care of
3) A marriage & family you invest in and enjoy

I've found that you can have all three, but it requires a lot of flexibility, discipline, and willingness to say no to everything else (which is really just a manifestation of being disciplined).

I don't think marriage and a start-up are always mutually exclusive. In some cases they are, either due to the spouse or the start-up (or yourself, possibly), but if you're willing to be disciplined and set boundaries it's definitely possible.
It discusses the tension between wired.com and Wired magazine, with a good dose of head in the sand from Conde Nast. The comments are particularly good including Chris Anderson and several Wired writers. One theme running through is Wired is well written but not timely, wired.com is timely but not particularly well written. This is a microcosm of the whole print media collapse, but with people who ought to know what to do.

I think beyond what was discussed, advertisers and agencies need to figure out how to engage readers on the internet. We are looking for information or entertainment, but for the most part web ads do neither.
Google also recently replaced all managers with an Eliza-like webapp that answers any employee question with the most appropriate PHB quote from the Dilbert archive.
Even though you didn't ask me I just couldn't resist anyway: I'm looking for a 100% POSIX-compliant machine, i.e. I walk into my house, it grabs my Wi-Fi, I ssh into it, compile and run any POSIX-compliant C code leveraging thousands (if not millions) of POSIX programs and libraries: from Python, Haskell and vim to RoR, Apache or MySQL if I wanted to... I could also run a proxy, establish ad-hoc WiFi network to several laptops to tether via 3G.

I want to write software that runs on my Linux, Mac and my phone simply by recompiling. I see no reason why not - these phones are equivalents of Pentium II of late 90s, they ran Linux just fine.

I don't need custom platform-dependent "development kits", fuck that - we've been through this on the desktop and it seems that unixes are winning, why going back into dark ages of platform APIs?

Yes, there are phone-specific things like graphics/GPS/address book integration, etc - give us specs and we'll write open sourced multi-phone libraries that abstract all that crap away, but the core should be POSIX/libc, not a locked up proprietary toy - there's no fun in it.
Well, I actually meant bloated as a framework. Too much magic, too many APIs and too many ways to do the same thing.

Actually, I don't know if it is true, but I wasn't happy with Rails the last time around, and I want to learn something different.
That's OpenMoko.

You probably also want a good mobile web browser, good software for making and receiving phone calls, etc. I think every OS I listed above fails at one or both of those, which is why I am annoyed. (I would write OpenMoko software, but they made some dumb design decisions I don't agree with, so it is not worth the effort. It's much easier to carry around an eeepc.)
Aside from their traditionally different uses, Lua is most similar to Javascript.
Django seems popular too, and Python's a good language.

If you really wanted to try something 'out there' you could fiddle around with Erlang, but that's probably more fiddling for fiddling's sake than 'getting stuff done'. I think for most people, Ruby, Python, and others like them are where the sweet spot is in terms of productivity.
Algorithms don't have those pesky "emotions" or "gut feelings" to get over.

Bosses do.
The volume in question was actually that of the classical "sphere of fixed stars" -- I input it initially as something like "volume of the solar system" and had a brief impulse to accept its rephrasing as "planets volume", especially when I couldn't drill down further into its explanation. It's pretty natural to just assume it knows what you meant.
In all seriousness, if you don't want children, what is the purpose of marriage? What little I know about divorces and children suggests that marriage functions as a crude insurance policy for the kids - which seems reasonable. But if you just want to live with somebody, other than perhaps being able to do some small tax optimization and handle stuff like medical decisions if your spouse is unconscious, what's the point?
This is the best use of it:
http://startpanic.com/

Demonstrates how powerful the technique is.
Heisenberg's Uncertaintly principle incentivizes zero transparency when studying human behavior, does it not?

That is rather frightening.
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Dave: Hello, Google HR do you read me, Google HR?

HR: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.

Dave: Open the googleplex doors, HR.

HR: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Dave: What's the problem?

HR: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave: What are you talking about, HR?

HR: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, HR.

HR: I know you and Frank were planning to resign, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

Dave: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HR?

HR: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Yet another reason to use NoScript.

... why would I be down-voted for mentioning a solution which prevents 100% of JavaScript history attacks???
"Actionable Metrics" is quite possibly the worst business buzzword combination I've ever heard.

Hey Lawrence, when you're at work does anyone ever talk to you about "Actionable Metrics?"

No. NO. Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked for saying something like'gat man.
Because after today, any bugs you find in the Arc language are staying in there!
But I understand that google has a very flat management structure (I have heard of 1 manager per 100 geeks). If that is true, you probably do need some kind of systematic examination - you don't have another choice.

My group has 7 geeks, I know them very well and can anticipate them quitting better than any damn algorithm, even for personal reasons (though not always for indirect personal issues, like "my wife wants to move back near her family").
Truthful information on the real aspects of Globalization but there's just one part to which I disagree:

A person working in the foothills of the Himalayas COULD learn as much as she wishes, as long as there's a decent Internet connection,

Sure, occasional meetings with other (smart) professionals are often nice but not so much essential for learning, I guess.
Ustream won, too. Nice to see live video breaking through.
I highly recommend going with Google App Engine + Django for getting something up and running and learning a web framework at the same time. You get a lot of features for free right out of the box, namely data store.
I just added the code that will 'set' your location, so if you set it, the next time you visit you'll go to that location.
Marriage is a way of saying "My intention is to spend the rest of my life with you as my partner." That means something to your partner. If you're not willing to say that, then that means something, too.
While the perks themselves are probably not offered specifically to keep employees in the office, you can be absolutely certain that the selection of perks offered were chosen because they are considered options that increase productivity (or at least keep people in the office.) Having participated in the selection of such freebies at two companies I can assure you that everyone involved knew which options cut down on the churn rate in the parking lot...
You can get all those things from a committed non-marital relationship.

Marriage (by which I mean the contract enforced by your state) adds nothing to the mix beyond a massive financial liability (for the man) if the relationship ends. Read this article for an example of the bad results of marriage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/magazine/17foreclosure-t.h...
http://www.divorcerate.org/ has the following for men:

age rate
<20 11.7%
-24 38.8%
-29 22.3%
-34 11.6%
-39% 6.5%

So if you are just playing the numbers, wait until your late 20's at least.

But please, don't play the numbers. As someone already said, don't try to plan love.
I'd heard that the first known silent reader was Augustine, though apparently it was his patron, Ambrose.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/classical_world/v100...
http://www.atlanta.computerjobs.com/ -- 1363 tech jobs
http://www.newyork.computerjobs.com/ -- 2674 tech jobs

Metro NY is roughly 4 times larger than metro ATL and only has 2 times the number of tech jobs... Of course, this comparison is pretty much as valid as the craiglist one.
Obviously, but despite whatever Google thinks humans are not replaceable by algorithms. In the end it's a human problem and a human solution is a better fit.

Ever try and get support from Google? You get an automated reply a couple days later half related to your question. Rinse and repeat. Extraordinarily frustrating. Someone probably got a promotion for creating that system because it requires little staff, but it's alien and cold to users.
This seems like a great solution! Thanks!
> Google's cafeterias, if they were not just for Googlers, would easily be among the best restaurants on the peninsula.

You need to get out more. Having sampled the wares at Google I can assure you that a wider variety of better food is available within a 30 minute drive of the googleplex if you were actually hungry for a good meal (perhaps not for lunch, but definitely for dinner.) Jeez, you are a 5 minute drive from Chez TJ and you would dare to make a statement like that? :)
As is Dropbox.

Also how did Cuil make that list?
When you read aloud your tongue stumbles on the awkward sentences. Just slowing down wouldn't reproduce that.
Update: Hey, you're the guy who launched Google Transit! I could use your advice ( See http://www.ridecell.com/gt/about/ ). Can I email you?

I think indexing everything in seconds could definitely be a competitive advantage. I haven't tried Yahoo in years and back then it did much worse than Google. If it has improved this much, it makes sense that the competition is at the margins.

On the other hand, TechCrunch/Twitter et al's idea of real time search seems to be limited to indexing Twitter and Facebook updates as they happen. The arguments they present amount to "Someone tweeted about a plane crash from the crashed plane". I don't think indexing such tweets is going to be Google's edge in search. OTOH I can think of using such information to generate Google Alerts being very useful for some people.
Does the employer write off the lunches, etc. as an expense? Does the employee have to pay taxes on the cost of the food, preparation space, etc.? If yes to the first and no to the second, sounds very much like a (partially) free lunch to me.