izendejas

I don't know, but I doubt that music can do that as it's not some substance that's throwing off your brain chemistry.

I listen to music at work all the time to avoid distractions. When I do my 10 minute routine, I listen to music that gives me a dopamine rush during the intense part of it to help boost my performance. I can replicate the rush most of the time, but I do believe that finding new songs after a few weeks is good.

When I listen to my workout playlist at any other time of the day, it actually helps boost my productivity and motivation level because my brain has learned to associate such songs with pushing myself. So I actually do this when I'm feeling a bit tired to get another boost.

Also, invest in great headphones. The new EarPods really enhance my workout experience, so much so, that I now look forward to my early morning workout when I wake up to get over my grogginess.

For anyone struggling to get into an exercise routine, I've ran into a potential solution because it doesn't require lots of time and effort.

Exercise 10 minutes daily (or at least 3-5x a week) as soon as you wake up and before you hit the shower. Do intervals. Out of the 10 minutes, two have to be all out and intense. You can do a treadmill, elliptical, or as I often do at home: jumping jacks and running in place (no, seriously). Also, listen to your favorite, upbeat music.

Benefits:

* exercise is generally good for the frontal cortex, what helps you focus and get things done [1]

* exercising in the morning will put you in a more positive mood, helping to reduce stress; by reducing stress, you feel more energetic, you feel less hungry and crave less crappy food, therefore you prevent the systematic downward spiral that comes with it and you lose weight.

* because you exercise in the morning, you burn more fat [2]

* adding music is great for your dopamine levels: [3]

* intensity (anaerobic exercise) is more important than duration and frequency [4]

I ran into this routine because I always have a hard time waking up in the morning (not so much anymore) and was always late to work. But knowing from previous experience that working out intensely in the morning helped with my energy level and focus, I did 10-15 minutes and found that it's all that I needed. In a bit over a month I've lost like 9lbs, I eat better, get less tired at work and can focus for longer periods of time.

I hope to put my experiences into a blog post series soon.

[1] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/how-exercise-fuels-... + other research. Also, read the Willpower Instinct (for a summary of lots of research)

[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130124091425.ht... This is the first source I could find, but I've known about similar research for years.

[3] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/11/why-does-...

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3529283

If you're already very fit, a friend of mine pointed out this routine recently which is more intense than the one I propose: http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/04/we-tried-this-fast-and...

Edited: 1) format 2) removed superfluous phrases

Great attitude, kid! Everyone can see themselves as a victim at any point, but it's people like you who don't always read much negativity into the decision-making of others and instead focus their energy into making the best of their opportunities who go on to do great things.

Don't worry if you don't make it into your top choice. You can always apply to grad school there. :)

Yep. Just about every project by google has crowd-sourcing of data gathering/training data all over it. That's why they're currently the ultimate machine learning company around.

Jetlore engineer, here. It's not magic, but we definitely agree we're onto something because this is indeed very hard.

If anyone has ideas for other content streams, including their own, you can email us and we may open up an endpoint that analyzes any text and returns its category along with unambiguous topics.

In general, we're excited to see what developers can do with our API. To try it out, be sure to check out our api demo: http://www.jetlore.com/techdemo

By the way, some more details: we have semantic search. Try something like "indie rock" and it'll return posts about indie artists. You can also try music genres, movie genres, cuisines, and more.

As I point out elsewhere, machine learners and NLP researchers need this. This could offer tons of manually labeled training data.

Assuming that authoritative sites, at least, don't abuse these schemas, this will help all search engines and data mining/nlp researchers build better models. The biggest gain isn't quick view of search results, it's that now search results will be better in general because Google et al will now understand if a page is really about a person and in many cases, who specifically it is about to point out a specific example.

Information extraction, just got that much easier. Hello, baby semantic web.

Too late, but I'm too self-conscious not to apologize for not proofreading. By the time I noticed the mistakes, I was caught in HN's anti-procrastination mode.

I come from an officially poor background, but it wasn't until I started learning about my girlfriend's family back in her native, third-world country that I really got a sense for what third-world poverty is:

- Constant verbal, physical, sometimes sexual abuse--the stuff that really traumatizes people into doing these same things across generations. This isn't the stuff you learn about in the news because, sadly, to many people living in those conditions, it's part of life. - Simply not have any positive role models at all to look up to. Their role-models are their parents, or their neighbors who have basically grown accustomed to living in poverty and can offer no guidance.

And I can go on and on.

My girlfriend and I have simply concluded: "some of these people don't know any better." If they had better role-models, they'd have a better shot.

So it is about the network in a way, but the author doesn't go enough to explain why. I'd like to give it a shot based on my observations: the network effect matters. Escaping one network to join a knowledgeable and competitive one exposes you to different ways of thinking, makes you question preconceived notions you have, makes you realize just how badly things really were, etc. I'm sure others here can relate even more, but coming from a modest background, it has been truly eye opening to be in the bay area, for example. There are so many talented, ambitious young people that inspire you every day to push your selves to the limits, that question your abilities, etc. Most people, I must say are unfortunate to not even know what YC is, entrepreneurship is all about, etc.

So for anyone who doesn't really understand poverty (I myself, included), I really recommend you visit a third-world country and actually live amidst them. Find a friend who comes from such a background and go stay with his/her family and him/her. You'll realize just how fortunate you are. By all means, don't feel bad about this, just gain some conscious about the fact that there are less fortunate people out there and begin to question what you can do with your companies, at your job to educate these people.

To finish, for anyone that questions a university's worth... remember this, an education isn't just the material you learn during lectures or books, it's what you learn about others and from others that really , also. And this latter component, I think is the secret to reducing poverty: simple exposure to new ways of life.

I think he's got an interesting mission: he wants to change the way kids learn using his knowledge of neuroscience. http://www.andrewhsu.com/projects/project_overview.htm

If he doesn't succeed with his startup, I'm sure he'll go on to do great things anyway.

This is very helpful, thanks. I also hate Amazon's tables.

You should put up a donation link.

It may not be the future, but I certainly hope it's at least a big part of the future for several reasons:

* I don't want the news industry to die. They're currently very inefficient and hope that they will at some point convert to a novel syndicated model. This could be a small step towards that. This is also good in that, among other things, it could also lead to fewer conflicts of interests between the journalism (is that still alive?) that is expected of them and those that sustain them which they often find themselves reporting about.

* A personalized reading experience is much better than hunting down interesting stuff, especially if you're busy--and are willing to pay (hint, hint). This is a tough problem, but in a decade's time, it will be tackled significantly.

* Ads suck. Getting fewer, personalized ads (if any) is much better. The above makes it possible. Have you checked out the NY Times recently? I had a huge banner add roll down and take up half my screen. Ridiculous! Not to mention what the likes of the Huffington Post are willing to do with ads.

There is no such thing as a "free". And even though people aren't paying cash for these things, they're still having to earn money (listia credits) one-level removed from cash.

Having said that, these marketplaces make sense. It'd also be great if they offer even more interesting data to understand just how far consumers' irrationality goes. Understanding that alone makes this a valuable business in my mind.

These are the same guys that have copied Dieder Ram's designs over the last decade. So I guess it's okay to "take inspiration" from other products, but not copy directly? Either that, or this is a non-issue and Apple just wants to keep their lawyers busy. (I just wasted 5 mins as I believe it's the latter.)

Your post will definitely get a lot of attention. I'm sure you know that. It's a good discussion we need to have. However, I think you could have used a little less irony and a lot more balance if you really wanted to get something across besides a rant.

Ultimately, one person's "triviality" is another's passion. The problem with social networking isn't it's triviality. It's that to consume what's important to us, we have to find it through all the "noise"--whatever that may mean to each individual. It used to be that we didn't have this problem because when two people meet, or a group for that matter, they immediately find a middle ground and talk about what's important to all. Such context breaks down when we broadcast information online.

This problem I feel will be solved in the years to come. Disclaimer: I'm working on it.

Ha! rtm, one of the YC partners, is mentioned in the "Did you know" section.

And your first statement is so 2011? Associating an idea with a market crash doesn't refute anything, especially since that's not at the core of my point, and I will kindly refer you to the guys at Apple to prove that "eating your own dog food" can actually work, but keep in mind I am no implying that everyone can replicate Apple's success by merely doing this.

As to not admitting it was a mistake... I'm saying you don't apologize for the DickBar. It didn't work, learn something from it, and move on. But clearly, Twitter was far too short-sighted that they didn't even have a backup plan, or competing ideas as simple as... "what would happen if we instead moved the ads to the bottom?" AdMob already bombards many users this way. Would that work?

And as mentioned, I don't have a problem with companies apologizing if they royally screwed up--I mentioned two specific cases where it was warranted. But apologizing every time someone with a blog ridicules a feature/ad model? Not a good sign.

The problem isn't that they threw ads all over the place. It's how they did it. Ads and new features should be released to a few users--at least start with your own employees--and iterate until you get it right, if at all. It doesn't seem like they did this.

Their second biggest mistake was admitting that it was a mistake. You don't do that--well, unless it involved something serious, like a user's privacy (think Buzz and Beacon).

I wouldn't include Apple in that list. I don't think they get it.

The big question for me is, will users be willing to give one big player all their data? Or will we have a system, much like in personal financing, in which many individuals "invest" their data with several companies and use "brokers" to manage it. I want to favor the latter paradigm because this way, you don't have one big player locking it down at users' expense.

Google and Facebook playing keep-away with each other opens up a big opportunity for the small guys to come in and be that one broker who will help users manage their location-based data, their status updates, etc and offer them great services. Greplin is one such player and I'm sure there will be others.

For the "coldplay" problem you may want to use an inverse band frequency weighting (much like in IDF for text). Bands that are extremely popular won't give you any useful signals. As far as the cold-start... yep, that's a beast and using social data may help. For example, are you using stuff from Facebook/Twitter once you have users sign in? You could crawl out band/artists name from their data.

This gives me an excuse to try grooveshark. I've been curious for a while. :)

update: I didn't see any recommendations based on what I've like on Facebook or Twitter. This would be a good "warm" start. Note: I'm working on stuff like this, but don't mind sharing this simple idea. :) Quora does a great job of this pulling in data from your Twitter network.

And another one: http://bynamite.com/

I'm all for a transparency and control, but this has to be more effortless--a side-effect of something users would be happy to do anyway--especially for the average user if it is to be successful. I believe a social media aggregator can position themselves to do this. Facebook knows certain things about me, Twitter others, Google others, etc. What I surf online isn't always indicative of my true interests.

Am curious, any ensemble methods involved? Or was it just a bunch of heuristics mixed in with learning algorithms?

I think Metamarkets, like Palantir and others, understand this very well and thus, are focused on building interactive tools to help humans (particularly domain experts) process and visualize large amounts of data to find interesting patterns more efficiently, rather than trying to automate everything.

That's because the incentives are completely screwed up (to put it in the nicest terms): more page views (no matter how these come about) = more ad revenue. So what do you expect many to do?

It's a sad state of affairs because the "business" folks are now resorting to more controversial and in-your-face material that is complete garbage much like cable news and other ratings whores on television. Think about the AOL memo that was allegedly leaked. That's what the internet is turning into all at the expense of high-quality content.

This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else didn't do it, but when you can't easily monetize online, now you even have the likes of the New York Times with huge display ads that scroll down to cover up most of your screen when you visit their home page. Disgusting. Someone needs to change this. I'm looking into it.

"Android vs. iOS wars" refers to all the senseless flame wars that often get more attention here at HN. That's not to imply smartphones aren't world-changing devices.

That's a valid observation.

Surely, immigration is good for the home country of the emigrants economically speaking (think remittances, entrepreneurs going back, etc). This, I'd argue, is indeed better than foreign aid. But what Romer is arguing is that his model is meant to change the rules and bring the ideas to the country. As an immigrant, what would be the point of moving to Canada and learning new models/ideas if when you go back, you won't have the power to change them and expose others to them under the same circumstances?

I'm not sure that the situation in Dubai is one that Romer would envision. You're attacking a straw man.

Having said that, I won't argue either way. The devil is in the execution no doubt. But in trying out his idea, I would hope that there's something we can learn from it besides the would-be automatic response of "that doesn't work." What we're currently trying is clearly not working all that well, so we'd be insane not to try something different and I'd hope that Romer can get two parallel "experiments"--for concisenss--in two different countries to see which conditions, if any, are better suited for his model.

Google needs to add a little lock to all posts that are private, or indicate which are. I freaked out when I thought some of my picasa albums were visible publicly--and feared that had pulled another buzz. Luckily that's not the case, but it's not immediately obvious.

Other things to factor in: - fixed costs of rent, computer equipment for personnel - variable costs incurred by servers, power consumption, etc - manufacturing (and support) of the reader

Either way, $1m/day is impressive and I'm sure they're only getting started.

Goes to show, Kayak should have this easily accessible from their front page.

They shouldn't think, they should start copying and in the process make it better.

Bear with me: imagine you could see where your friends have traveled on this map. You enter a budget range much like you do and it shows you the options. Then, you could see any pictures your friends took on such trips. And with a FB message/email, you can ask them how much they spent, where they stayed, what places they loved, how the food was, etc.

Okay, who has built this?