skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd need to read the article again but I think the study was done on civil employees. I don't know how broad the pay range is for civil employees nor if the authors sampled the full range.

The thing to keep in mind is that Western science made a dichotomy between the mind and body for religious reasons. In reality, they are completely interrelated. Eating unhealthy food will eventually affect your mind: right now it's just not predictable how or to what extent.
And after the crash, he formed a fund buying up distressed debt and junk bonds (which did quite well this year).

His main investment shown by some filings is a pairs trade of long dollar long gold, which is a very interesting position as noone seems to be taking the long side of both those assets at the same time.

Some further reading: http://www.marketfolly.com/2009/06/john-paulsons-43-billion-...
beside that, I think it's a great idea. I read to my 4 year old son every night at bedtime, and I will definitely give astorybeforebed.com a try next time I'm on a business trip.
Huh. I'm mildly surprised that I'm the first click on "Other".

(That's "no high school", for those of you who've never looked me up in Wikipedia.)

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky

PS: I used to be shyer about this, but I'm now sufficiently convinced that Something Is Rotten In Education that I'm willing to go around presenting myself as a case in point. Certainly going through life Outside the System is extremely difficult and inconvenient, but the high yields if you can do so are an important fact about the overall health of the system. I'm not advocating that everyone should drop out before high school, but they might be able to take the data into account in other decisions, like how much effort to invest in high grades in college versus extracollegiate self-education.
Apple pitches $30-a-month iTunes TV subscriptions
Premeds!

I remember a never ending discussion when I was in college about why the premeds tended to get better average grades in organic chemistry than the chemistry majors, even though the chemistry majors seemed to have a much better grasp of the material.
I had much the same experience. I was interviewing with Steve Rosenberg at KL Group, and he asked me a question about Java coding. "Here," I said, pulling out a sheaf of papers, "is the source code for a small Scheme interpreter I wrote in Java..."

He waved me off, that was good enough for him. The rest of the interview was then about cultural fit and ability to ship software on time without drama.

(And no, what I wrote is not in the same league as Clojure, much less the same ballpark. But it was good enough to demonstrate some basic understanding of Java and familiarity with undergraduate-level Computer Science.)
Letter from Valencia
I had a friend who did a lot of house sitting before moving to Atlanta to make her living off of Bellydance instruction/performance. (And in contradiction to the article, she is doing her dream job, without compromise to her art. In fact, stylistic purity is one of the hallmarks of her "brand.")

Also, "find a partner who will support you," is exactly what my mom did. Being a homemaker and mother is a legitimate full time job, one which our society should highly prize. Anyone who says otherwise is inattentive or hasn't really thought things through.
Original author here. In this thread, I see a lot of "calorie counting is not sustainable" responses. For me, the key notion is that forcing yourself to count calories recalibrates what you think about food. I grew up thinking that fatty meats were "bad" and rice was "good". In terms of kcal, white rice is brutal. While on the diet, I basically stopped eating rice and alcohol, because I'd rather spend those calories on a piece of meat or fruit.

I've since stopped counting and have stayed the same weight. Maybe calorie counting doesn't work for everyone, but it's certainly simple and easy.

(p.s. Where did I say I still lived on junk fast food? I eat a ton of fresh fruit and vegetables - my diet is all over the place. That just happens to include cheez-its sometimes. :))
I don't think it's strange that I don't read fiction. I've met plenty of other "creative" people who don't read fiction either. Nothing against other people reading fiction, I'm just not interested in it.

I watch movies and I'll watch TV shows, but if I'm going to spend dozens and dozens of hours reading, I'd rather read about something that's real. There's plenty of creativity in the real world. More than I'd ever be able to discover in 100 lifetimes.
Because as soon as they start bringing in real money all the hockey stick revenue charts that they present to VCs start having real data points.
The data for the programme was provided by Dutch company Tele Atlas. A spokesman said it would now wipe the non-existent town from the map.

I'm not sure this is a good idea. When we cross the AI event horizon our silicon overlords will take bloody revenge for this orgy of digital destruction.

Seriously though, this has all sorts of possibilities as a sci-fi plot device. Even the name has a delicious sort of HP Lovecraft feel.
I wish I had access to a computer earlier, since those are at many times my true emotions, so no, I'm not trying to fish for an emotional response, and I'm really aware that my fear is fundamentally irrational. But, after 5 months of having a purely joyless and grim existence due to constant worry, it becomes a very realistic and entertaining thought.

I guess I shouldn't be asking the Internet, but I've exhausted a lot of my real life resources, and sometimes it seems like everytime I make progress I end up taking several steps backwards; I figured it was as good as anything at this point, really.
Ask yourself if you would be happy to mentor the new employee once they are hired. If you would not, don't recommend that they be hired, even if they are technically competent. Don't forget, saying "yes" to the hire means that you will be working with them. It's easy to over-abstract the challenge of finding a good candidate, and overlooking traits like whether they are easy to work with.
This witch hunt is getting ridiculous.

First of all, your headline is misleading. The article says: "Nearly 90% of users we surveyed were either unhappy or neutral when it came to mobile advertising offers." Last I checked, neutral != dissatisfied. (Granted, the actual number if you look at the bar chart is still a whopping 70%)

But if you look at the other charts, it shows that users were somewhat more satisfied with the other, non-mobile based offers. If the entire industry was based on scamming people, customers would report 100% dissatisfaction across the board.

Plus, you can avoid offers entirely and just opt to pay for the virtual currency directly. Perhaps you think such users are foolish, but they're certainly not getting scammed.

None of this adds up to "The entire social gaming business is unethical and evil", as the TechCrunch article would have you believe.
50 fascinating lectures all about your brain
You know, I wonder if this is a way to keep OS X off of some ATOM-based forthcoming hardware?

Is the tablet definitely ARM-based?
Yep, exactly. That's the vendor lock-in part. Requiring one of your products to use one of your products is vendor lock-in.
This is kind of like the service that made its debut at the TechCrunch 50. http://toybots.com/ The big difference is that this one is available now:)
FWIW, I like the bookshelf metaphor, more humane and enjoyable and still easy enough to browse.
Yup, I've enjoyed some of the great new-wave fine dining places in Chicago and other cities, but I almost always prefer a hole in the wall with great food. I'd rather eat at Club Lago or Club Lucky than a fancy Italian place. I love food so I'll check out any restaurant, but I just feel more comfortable in places like Lago.
I write C full time for the day job and it normally goes something like this:

if ( !method_returns_rc( args ) )
{
//error handle
}

This isn't great, as I believe its not good to put methods with side effects in if statements (may be wrong here, or maybe its just me), but generally thats how its done (not to say that there aren't freaking GOTOs in our code... so take that with a grain of salt.)
Agreed completely. While calorie counting is a great start, a little weight lifting would have helped him achieve his goals sooner.
More on the EPOC effect described in the comment above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_post-exercise_oxygen_con...
My greatest distraction
It is interesting to see how popular this idea is for a couple reasons:

1. Focus on Design - The software is solid, but the aesthetics are what seem to make the service. It just looks like a professional project even though it is a three person team, working on it part time based on all the other projects they have on their site.

2. Kid as Customer - With so many social media/real time projects in the works it is energizing to see bits and pixels used in the service of different customer groups.

How many people commenting have invested a lot in the design of their site or are targeting an atypical customer base?
Does Google use its search engine for industrial espionage?
Does Google use its search engine for industrial espionage?

Let's assume you're working for a company (start-up or industry dinosaur doesn't matter) on a secret project.
Well at least nobody outside of the company should now about it.
You're an engineer and of course you're using search engines for your daily work.
Let's assume you're using one particular search engine very often (e.g. Google).

Now Google receives your search queries AND as a part of your request YOUR request IP.

With tools like MaxMind's GeoIP (www.maxmind.com/app/locate_ip) it would be easy for Google to find out your location and the business you are working for. Combining this information with all the search queries, which you and your colleagues triggered via Google, would allow insight in what you are currently working on.

If I look up "industrial espionage" in Wikipedia it states: […] Industrial espionage describes activities such as theft of trade secrets, bribery, blackmail, and technological surveillance. […]

What do you think? Do you think this is possible?
Do you not read fiction at all ever, or just not regularly?

I don't regularly read fiction, but I have about 3 novels that I've read in my lifetime that were absolutely spell binding, like the best movie * 1000. Never been absolutely tied to a book that you literally can't put it down until you finish it?
I'll wait for the evidence that this actually works (and with efficiency relative to the other schemes).
I live about two miles from my office. I drive there most of the time. I should bike more, but I saw someone on a bike get hit two years ago, and it really freaked me out. I figure I'm better off driving.

So not only is he needlessly adding to global CO2, but also to the number of cars on the road. A shame. 2 miles from the office is less than 10 minutes by bike...
entire industry was based on scamming people, customers would report 100% dissatisfaction across the board

Quite wrong. Scammed individuals are notoriously bad about reporting the scam, because it makes them look bad for being scammed.
I'm one of 4 people who tried the same diet. We are all IRL friends with the original author, and he got us into it. It worked for all of us.

I lost 60lbs in 40 weeks using this diet, and only felt healthier as I went along.

before:
http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v274/234/41/1171...

after (contains puppy):
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1171451781&v=phot...

I didn't get headaches, and caffeine is an indirect appetite suppressant in that it makes me more interested in what I'm doing and less distracted by hunger.
I have trouble reading books these days because it requires so much singular focus, and I can't just sit and watch a movie without having something to do like play a mindless game on my phone or surf the web. But I can do nothing but play the video games for hours on end without so much as thinking about anything else...
I like Foxworthy, and I like his show, "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?"

Make of that what you will; it sometimes depresses me that people have such a poor knowledge of what strikes me as basic info (i.e., names of continents), but it's entertaining in other ways.

Still, it's plain wrong to lay claim to the use of the word "redneck" like this, and I'd like to think it's knee-jerk lawyers gone amok, but who knows.

Ron White's OK in small doses; Cable dude is Hee Haw redux.
It used to scare me, but only because my father's younger brother died from vCJD. He died from it before the Europeans had their "mad cow" outbreak. And at the time it was so rare in the US that no one really understood it (and he died before there were non-destructive tests for it). It is a disease related to "scrapie" which cattle and sheep can get (he took care of the sheep that his daughters got 4H ribbons for showing in fairs). AIDS just kills you. vCJD destroys what it means to be human before it kills you.

We all get terrified of things we can't control, which is why more people are afraid of flying, even though far more people die in traffic accidents every year. When you're driving, you feel in control, versus when you're a passenger in an airplane, you have zero control over anything. That imbalance leads to why there are classes and shrinks to help get over the fear of flying, but there aren't any folks with fear of driving.

The vast majority of prion diseases come from our industrial agriculture. So if you're afraid, then you really need to avoid beef. The USDA only permits BSE testing on visibly symptomatic animals, and has banned 100% testing which many countries are only willing to accept. It takes 4-5 years for an infected animal to get the visible symptoms, and most cattle are slaughtered before they hit 2 years old. And the bush administration reduced the number of BSE inspectors by 90%. And you probably should avoid hunting as deer and elk can get a related illness called chronic wasting disease.

Finally, there were some genetic studies and it appears that if you have 2 copies of some gene, then you're suceptible to getting vCJD if exposed to the prions (and if you're going to get it, you'll get symptoms in 2-3 years after exposure). If you have 1 copy of the gene, if exposed to the prions, and if you're going to get it, then you'd get symptoms in 15-30 years. The folks doing the research weren't sure, but if you had 0 copies of the gene, then thought you probably couldn't get infected.
How Sleep Deprivation Fries Your Brain
It's not comprehensive but I like FizzBuzz.

---------------------
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".
---------------------

From http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html
Why am I getting modded down for this? DRIVING TWO MILES TO WORK! That's insane...
Certainly. My comment was an initial exclamation.

I think it works pretty well with the copy on the right side. The bookshelf makes a bit more of an impact with how much space it takes on the page. Furthermore, if you move the text copy to the top, the bookshelf will extend to the entire page's width, which may just create even more noise on the page when skimming.

Though there's only one way to be sure: A/B test it!
Ideas doen't matter. The implementation does.
Ads may be their obvious route, but I wonder how much of a turn-off that will be for users. I'm totally rooting for Twitter to be successful, I just wanted to highlight the contrast between this small $5M business actually making money vs. "hot" web companies that may be faddish, and have yet to prove a model to make money, yet get all the press plus $100M investment.
Poll: Does your startup have a designer on the founding team?
A submission about a very well designed website (http://www.astorybeforebed.com) is currently generating a lot of upvotes and comments. It led me to wonder how many startups, YC or otherwise, have designers on their founding teams.

Does your startup have a designer on the founding team?
For decades, I've heard "underwater basket weaving" used as a metonym for useless, transcript-padding courses; I hadn't realized it actually existed. Perhaps if the title were taught more literally, and combined with SCUBA certification, it would catch on among hackers.
I have a B.A. from a good school (and some graduate school work at a great school) but never made it past the ninth grade in high school, nor did I ever get any kind of high-school equivalency. So you can't assume these are always cumulative.
Ideas matter a lot when you are building projects with a long term vision.
Congrats to Reid!
Of course it's possible. The question is, is it likely? Consider the sheer volume of search queries that hit Google. I find it unlikely that they could manually filter them, and I also find it unlikely that one could programmatically find those queries. Even looking for outliers (very uncommon queries) would probably yield far too many false positives.

Also, what would Google's incentive be? They are doing pretty well, as far as I can see, and they have great people. What would they gain from spying on startups, when they could just innovate inhouse, or buy the startup outright as it emerged?
ugh, this stick-it-to-the-man, non-conformist, I'm-special, anti-progress, touchy-feely, the-whole-world-is-wrong nonsense again?
Yes, I was wrong to get this tangled up with evolution. Obviously, if it's a hereditary trait, it will spread and become prevalent.

What I was trying to argue, clouded by my lack of understanding of the exact biological meaning of the word trait (i.e. something hereditary rather than a preference a person might have), was that there seems to be little evidence, which is backed by the statistics in the article, that a preference towards many children is hereditary.
because many people drive their car for less then a quarter of that.
Still, conventions matter. If you're reading C code, and you see "for (i=0; i<N; i++) { ...", you know what it means, but "for (i=0; N>i; i++) { ..." probably makes you double-take, even though it's equivalent.

If your project's code standard can include testing for (constant == variable), do it, but the impact on readability shouldn't be ignored. (I agree that it's ultimately a language problem.)
THINK / Musings» Blog Archive » lines in the sand …
Cheaper desalination
Oh man, now I feel bad for harshing on it. The something we got is infinitely better than the nothing that was its alternative. Thanks for taking the trouble to do the favor, and, uh, what can I say? I'll go home and re-read it.
My girlfriend and I have an ongoing problem where we are trying to split living expenses fairly. I can see this as a partial solution, but definitely not a complete one.

I can see myself using this if there were an iPhone app or a good mobile site. It would be a quick step in the process if I could just note a bill and who owed me whenever I ate out, read a bill, or anything else.
Well said Mark. The design is impressive and seems to be generating a lot of comments. Design is underused in many startups and this site shows how a little can go a long way in getting people interested in your product. I set up a poll here: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=917688)

Does your startup have a designer on the founding team?
Funny thing here, the searches can probably divulge more about implementation than the ideas.
What's crazy is that it's not rational at all. Has he never witnessed a serious car accident? He is no doubt aware of the local and global environmental impact of doing something as selfish as driving two miles to work and back most days, and yet I get modded down for pointing this out.

Talk about cognitive dissonance...
Or with languages that have a better mechanism for returning multiple values. (Passing in pointers to optional results? Ick.)

There's in idiom in Lua to have functions return either <true, result> or <false, error message> (as two arguments, not a tuple) - consequently, it's common to say e.g. "status, f = assert(open_resource(arg, arg2))"; if it fails, the assert will fail, and open_resource will provide the error message.

In statically typed languages, returning a union type (e.g. Error | Pass of Result) also works well. Sometimes exceptions are simpler, sometimes not.
The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html "Workplaces"
Why is it worth doing? What are its results?
Great idea! Instead of trying to fight osmosis, use it. It's one of those "why didn't I think of that" inventions.
1) There is no such thing as "non-Apple gear". The entire hardware platform is the same as any Intel box running Windows or Linux. They use the same CPUs, chipsets, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, form factors, etc. etc. etc. as the rest of the industry with some minor changes to the boot system and system startup entry points (nothing that hurts running Windows or Linux on the same hardware for example).

2) true.

But I think the exception to Apple's behavior is that there are large numbers of customers who would be more than happy to fork over another wad of cash for an Apple branded netbook (in addition to their existing systems) and Apple has (yet again) failed to listen to their consumer.

That's fine, Apple probably can't make the numbers work to preserve some margin figure they want to maintain. All Apple demonstrates by this is that consumer feedback is not as much a part of their development process as most people seem to think (or hope) it is.

The problem is that not only is Apple saying "we can't be bothered with this netbook thing right now" but they are saying it with a middle finger, fully extended, at their customers. They've gone and put themselves out, expended effort, to ensure their users can't operate as they want to.

So really it's "give us your money for our overpriced commodity hardware and we don't care what you think or actually want, you'll think and want what we tell you to, how dare you try and step outside of our carefully crafted ecosystem"
Whenever those get posted, people complain about the AppStore "gold rush" stories. So you're damned if you do...
Uh. Myself. :/ We could use a better one.
This is true, but it's rather like saying 'why worry about pollution, evolution will find a modus vivendi'. I don't think advertising is evil, but it can be terribly obnoxious. If you have attention deficit disorder then it goes beyond mere annoyance and becomes exhausting.

The problem is that this kind of advertising is basically lying to people and exploits their credulity (if they're foolish) or wastes their energy if they filter it effectively. I can't help thinking 'christ, what an asshole' when I read the guy's comment about not being proud of it - it's just more bullshit designed to market his current line of services. If Mr Yu is really not proud of it, I wish he'd put his money where his mouth is and give some of his profits to PBS or creative commons projects or suchlike. Maybe he does, but I'm afraid the whole article reminded me of 'confessions of a burglar'.