skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mostly good points. I think some comments are necessary on a few though:

Agave nectar and stevia as sugar substitutes are also not without controversy. I find it easiest to get my sugar from whole, ripe, and fresh fruit. Once sufficient fruits are eaten on a regular basis, the desire for refined sugary products disappears.

Stevia: Potential problems, including cancer, reproductive issues, and interference with energy metabolishm: This article is a good start: http://www.cspinet.org/nah/4_00/stevia.html

Remmeber, stevia is an herb. Treating an herb as a food, i.e. the amount used in order to function as a replacement for sugar, is not necessarily a wise idea. Would you use ginkgo balboa or St. John's Wort as a food? Also, most people don't use actual stevia leaves, so it is still a refined product. Moving from refined sugar cane to refined herbs is not necessarily a good move. Developing a taste preference for whole fresh fruits over refined sugar products would serve our interests far better in the long run.

Agave nectar/syrup: this one certainly has a lot of hype behind it, but mostly it appears to be marketing tactics. Just think about the fact that excess fructose can raise general risk markers (triglycerides and VLDL) and has been linked to increased risk for insulin resistance, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.

Agave syrup is 70-90% fructose.

So if you think too much fructose is bad, you must think HFCS is better than agave syrup.

Lastly, the recommendation for cyanocobalamin to be shunned in favor of hydroxy seems a bit off. The known highest active form of B12 for humans is methylcobalamin. Hydroxy is more efficiently converted than cyano, but methyl has the general current consensus, in the medical research world, of being best. Fortunately, B12 supplements of the methyl form are easily obtainable (e.g. Jarrow is a brand with 1000 and 5000 mcg sublinguals cheaply available, and there are a number of other brands). I've never even heard of a hydroxycobalamin tablet - only that it is the standard form used for shots in some countries. It is important to realize that most US and European doctors are still behind the times and administer cyanocobalamin (in some European countries, hydroxy is used, but this is still not as preferable as methylcobalamin) for B12 shots when a patient is found to have a problem with B12 levels. However, shots are almost never needed anyway, as the diffusion process of sublingual tablets is so great that they are just as effective as shots.
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it was great idea. i wanted to know who have this beautiful camera. and i know it. i promiss to keep ur camera very well and take pretty photo. dont worry buddy
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Leptin and ghrelin are the hormones produced in the pancreas and stomach that signal to your brain that you should start or stop eating. Some of the byproducts of fructose metabolism in the liver first cause the production of ghrelin, which stimulates hunger, and then inhibits the production leptin, which prevents the signals that you should stop eating from reaching your brain. The result is that you feel artificially hungrier and then you don't stop eating after you're full.

Eating lots of fiber with fructose should theoretically counteract this cycle to some extent, by regulating the hormones and preventing overeating.

Almost everywhere fructose is found naturally, it is coupled with huge amounts of fiber. Because of this, humans haven't really been harmed by the negative effects of fructose until very recently. The speaker in the video suggests that you can kind of mitigate the negative effects of fructose by eating lots and lots of fiber, but I don't think this has been scientifically studied yet. It makes sense theoretically, though.

Fiber also does a whole lot of other great things for you, too, and he discusses some of them in the video.
I think, what a victory for a startup is really depends on what it's founders' think.. for some it may be acquisition
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Absolutely. I've lost count of the hours I've wasted setting up dev environments.
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Boy, that post sure could've used some headings or something to liven up what is otherwise a monotonous, self-indulgent rant.

One thing one has to remember with grammar is that people can't even agree on whether it's prescriptive or descriptive.

It still bugs the hell out of me when (North) Americans say "Will you write me?" WRONG WRONG WRONG, at least in a prescriptive sense. In actual English it is "Will you write TO me?". Note the difference:

- Will you write me a letter? (indirect then direct object)
- Will you write a letter to me (direct then indirect; uses the preposition "to");
- Will you write a letter to me? (indirect object only)

Only Americans (and possibly Canadians) do it.

The point is than in a purely prescriptive sense, that's wrong and most people tend to argue that what they use is correct. Language and grammar evolves giving far more credence to the descriptive view.

But I digress...
Definitely! Developer is most likely to be just the worker, he did not cause the issues in the first place. Mgmt are the ones, but how many times do they really stay?
Heh ... I looked for that one but couldn't find it in a brief search. A classic example, for sure.
Is this hyperinflation? Such a voting storm for a honest misunderstanding?
I'm not sure if you've simply missed my point, think my point is wrong, or actually disagree. Let me address your points.

Of course the Moon's orbit is usually shown as being around the Earth (and more generally, the Earth around the Sun, and other moons around their nearest large mass, etc.)

What I'm saying is that they have shown what might be interpreted as the paths of the planets as those beautifully rendered trails. People will interpret them as trails, and when they do so, the "trail" of the Moon is thoroughly misleading.

And I'm not being arbitrary, I'm interpreting those lines as trails, and hence your comment about using other points of reference is irrelevant. The Sun in this rendering is not shown as having such a trail, and hence the image shown is heliocentric.

And when using this sort of image for laymen, they may correctly take from it that the Moon orbits the Earth, but in my direct personal experience, they then believe that the Moon makes a loopy orbit when seen from a heliocentric point of view.

Which is wrong. Hence my comment.
Whats better than Ruby on Rails during the holidays?
Voting still feels like it's being done by a mob.

There will always be a majority opinion, which gets expressed through votes. As HN gets above a certain threshold of active users, the majority opinion will be indistinguishable from 'mob voting', unless users can be trained to not vote when the vote is already high in 'their' direction.

I don't think a 'honey pot' agree/disagree voting axis will work, unless it is visible to everyone. Otherwise, these users will express their opinion with the current up/down votes.
On this point, you are very wrong. There are large immigrant communities all through the Midwest, Great Lakes, and plains states. And if that isn't good enough, we have another tool in our box. We can find incentive's (or simply create regulations) to encourage immigrants to specific locations.

I do find your jaded anti-entrepreneurial comment to be unnecessarily vicious and ignorant though.
What would you recommend in NYC instead of Yelp?
Would your grandfather have been able to retire if not for the population growth?
Are you making the argument that the world is worse off because you have to share?
Well, yes. Perhaps the title should've been something like:

"The first satellite intended as a commercial geostationary satellite but which went past the Moon accidentally on purpose."

Doesn't have the same ring to it ...

<grin>
Honestly, I think people don't realize that nastiness makes their comment less effective. Most people don't take you seriously if you insult them, even if the insult is followed by a valid point.

How about something like this.... Create a set of general rules to follow for making an effective/polite post. Things like "calling someone a name brings more attention to the insult than your point." When you have a dozen of these or so, put a random one next to the "reply" button. This way people are constantly reminded of how to create polite posts.
I very much doubt they want to own 100% of the web. Only the profitable bits that fit with their ongoing strategies.
Yelp obviously ties into a lot of the good stuff they're doing, OTOH yelp is pretty unheard of outside the US afaik.
Did you really have to be that angry and extremist in your comment? Seriously, that was painful to read.

I've used Yelp in NYC countless times. It's not that bad; you just have to filter through the reviews. It's like any social site.
A think that this discussion is a little biased. For one hand, the form of a thesis depends a lot on the field. The more theoretical, the more it can be concise, but in some fields you need a lot of experimental data.

Another issue is that most dissertations are not made from a single, ground breaking contribution, but from several incremental contributions and you need to integrate them into a coherent text.

I've not finished my dissertation, but it fall in the latter case and I think it will be some 100 pages long.

By the way, it will be interesting to see the length of the PhD thesis of the people that claims that "the length of a thesis is inversely correlated to its brilliance" (only cperciva declared it)
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Basic still is relevant, sort of.

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx

The Parallax Propeller is an 8-core microcontroller (with each core named a "cog") with very small amounts of memory on each core. The Propeller can fairly easily interface with PS/2 keyboards and mice, VGA monitors, and RCA Composite screens. You can code on it with ASM, a language with an onboard-interpreter called SPIN, some free but proprietary-and-slightly-limited C compilers, a tiny implementation of Basic that works, or a very robust Forth.

Give it to the kids in your life, and they too will be able to write "Ian Rules!" :)
People don't make money from singles sales anymore :/ The money from sales is petty cash.

Compare that with the Tour, the advertising income from the next series of xfactor, etc.
Forth, Basic, and VGA output. The 80s had some surplus, multi-core chips.
So this is another odd failure case for science, where researchers from many areas selectively ignored (since the 1970s, let's say) a roughly-worked-out biochemistry. Add political chilling effects and mix.

Given that there aren't particularly impervious ties in either political party to sugar/carbs (activists being health advocates on the left and anti-subsidy advocates on the right) I hope this set of research pathologies gets a kick in the pants when sugar support detonates.
Yakutsk: Journey to the coldest city on earth
Get's worse after the holidays.
Minerals in stones?
The precise semantics of ||= were subject to a longer discussion on ruby-talk. I don't think it's really that important whether it expands to 1.) a || a = b or 2.) a = a || b, is it? So all you would know about a person giving answer 1) is that he/she was subscribed to ruby-talk at that time.

I find his answer to his own questions about proc/lambda/blocks unsatisfying since that would be IMHO a good question to identify people who know ruby well.
I see that you retracted your original statement, but I'll comment on it nonetheless. Before trying to counter someone's views with "troubling links to Marxist ideology," I think that you should try Googling "McCarthyism" instead of "Capitalism."
As someone who's bilingual (English, Chinese) and have taught both languages before, my suggestion is:

You are focusing on the easier part of learning a language - listening and reading. All of my past students struggled far more with pronouncing and writing.

Of course recording the users' pronunciations and handwritings, and then verifying them is a lot more technically challenging, but still doable. It will surely impress a lot of people. (Maybe that's in your long term plan?)

Not saying what you made is not useful, it certainly is. But it's not where the pain is in learning a language. Depending on the curriculum, it may not make that much of a difference on each student's language ability. But then again, our current education system is not making that much of a difference either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midvinterblot_%28disambiguation...
When I was a manager of a small team, I use to say: "I'll be the last to leave and I want to leave early". That's was usually enough to magically make programmers to leave earlier and still get thinks done, because working late has to do a lot more with bad habits than with technical problems. And no, they didn't work from home, they couldn't (it was a very restrictive environment).

Sure, sometimes they had some tough problems, and I usually stayed in my own office only appearing to ask them if they wanted something to eat, for example. I also use to have a brief meeting after two hours or so just to evaluate if it still made any sense to stay or it was better to leave and come back early when other involved people were around (for example, a DB expert).
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It would be great if you allowed us other hacker news copy-cats to have rapid updates to your version of sources. Also many thanks for writing hacker news, it is a great, simple piece of software.
I still fail to see how any political victory for or against climate change research is going to change actual reality. Should climate change naysayers win their political fight even as the Earth continues to warm, the victory seems hollow at best.
The entire Algorithms book is available here:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html

I was taught under this book, and it was amazing. My professor told the class that while CLRS was an encyclopedia of algorithms, Algorithms was their poetry. It is so simple and concise, yet explains everything with just enough detail for you to grasp it.

For the record, this chapter is based on Shor's Algorithm.
What's awesome is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange

Built between 3100 and 2900 BC: at the winter solstice the chamber inside is illuminated by the sun.
Variable typing is one of those topics that everyone sort of understands it, but is hard to put it into words. I’ve iterated and improved the next series of questions to really test a senior level candidate’s knowledge of static and dynamic typing. This is my best attempt so far.

And a naive, inapt, incorrect, nomenclature-misusing attempt it is!

Please read and re-read the nearly perfect "What To Know Before Debating Type Systems" before broaching this topic in any forum: http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html
Thought Experiment: World language
If everyone in the world spoke every single language all of a sudden, do you think we would converge on a single mostly used language?
Excellent! I can see some potential in student populations! Petty it has no support for python at this stage! All the ingredients are there, the js code etc.. Shouldn't be hard to extend it to python!

I had a peek at the javascript source code :) Is there a reason why you are not compressing it?

Overall congratulations and good luck!
Sounds like a bad conspiracy theory to me.

I'd recommend the SPIEGEL article he references, though: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,667262,00.h...
If you want to learn how a computer works, I'd agree that BASIC is a great way to go about it. A processor pulls instructions out of memory and executes them. The instructions mutate the state of the machine to produce a result. BASIC models this imperative process in very plain, easily understood text.

However, if I was going to teach something about programming to a novice I'd try to get them to start thinking functionally from the beginning. All this imperative crap is how you implement the abstract model of what you are trying to compute on the hardware. Why get bogged down in the details? Show them a recursive data structure or algorithm and get them to understand it. Have them run it on paper not by thinking about what registers or variables you are modifying, but rather what the expression tree looks like when the recursive algorithm is evaluated.

I think if my first language had been SML or a LISP I'd have had an easier time later on in my programming career.
I see two possible interpretations of this article:

1. It's 100% accurate, balanced and fair portrait of what happened. In which case the scientists have pretty much failed. I mean, I knew about the medieval warm period already and if you didn't, you do now.

2. It's in some way exaggerated or alarmist and is an example of traditional media running a "the dangers of Wikipedia's model" story that they seem to enjoy doing whenever they can.

Either way, I'm not worried.
Nice to see the shoe on the other foot for once. The number of quirky American things we have to figure out. Second base? wtf is second base... etc etc
I think you might be looking for Alice: http://www.alice.org/
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Getting tired of feeling obliged to make meta comments like this: Hacker News? please if you can flag it, flag it. This is getting worse lately.
I don't see a strong correlation between these questions and being a great programmer.

Being a great programmer doesn't mean knowing the nomenclature.

It is - in part - knowing which structure and algorithm is appropriate to solve a problem, and how to implement it efficiently with the given language.
I don't know why you include Forth in that "closed world" category. It was originally designed to control machinery, and it's still ideal for exploratory embedded code.
WEll, length == intelligence has been disproven by shamir and his paper about secret sharing. 2 pages of groundbreaking paper and the whole crypto world is shaking.

Most of the time, if people tell me to write more, I just ask them what they are missing, and either I can point them to a single paragraph where it is written or I need to write more, indeed. Most of the time, the other people give up and accept the short length after around 5-10 iterations :)
Ask HN: Any long-term wager sites?
My roommate and I wanted to make a wager about what would last longer: his RAID-5 setup or Flickr going out of business. (This was precipitated by my signing up for a pro account on Flickr today.)

I did a quick search for a site that would let us record the wager and would periodically email us to remind us about it but I didn't really find anything that filled this niche.

Any suggestions?
A nice article for the solstice, thank you :)
Are you saying while burried under a mountain of snow?
I sort of doubt plants have much to do with the smell. I used to live in a basement apartment with lots of exposed brickwork and a shitty heating system. Every Fall when the temperature started dropping, there would be moisture condensing on the brick, and it would give off the "rainy earth" smell.
Microsoft sued over Bing trademark
You have not heard about dark skin reflecting less light?
nymag.com is pretty good.
The killer app for web-based IDE is multiple authors being able to edit the same code in real time.

Etherpad (now open source, as it happens) was great for this - but lacked IDE options. SubEtherEdit/Coda is also fab on Mac, but not everyone has Mac or is on same network subnet.

If they got multiple authoring into this, (and Pyhton + Ruby) for me it would be a serious contender.
I took a few APs and I got the feeling that while a few students were really interested in the subject and really wanted the college experience, most just wanted the bump in the GPA. Due to the expense of it the lab component was completely dropped. Since I learn mostly by trying and experimenting I felt like I learned less than when I took honors physics. I think by exam time most of realized we weren't really prepared and got used to the idea of taking college physics no matter the grade we got.

The college board makes a lot of money on these exams. The district paid for the curriculum and the exams. About $600 per student on average I believe. So there is a lot of money to be made by signing students up.
I think your missing the big picture.

1. No one denies that the climate changes.

2. Most people don't deny that the earth seems to be warming.

The argument is over what should be done.

1. Most people agree that if the earth is warming on it's own, not as a result of human activity, then we should let it warm until we actually understand what's going on. Geo-engineering should not be attempted.

2. If the warming is due to man then should we embark on geo-engineering? Is the warming so catastrophic that something will need to be done, before we truly understand what is going on.

All of the current AGW proponents are arguing for taking extreme action now. To convince people that this is necessary it appears that they are overstating their case and actively trying to silence those who disagree.

The extreme actions that they want people to take will have significant negative effects, as limited resources will be put to their actions instead of other uses (for instance treating malaria, studying new diseases, etc). So the political fight will result in lives saved/lost -- which means we need to be able to make the correct choices.
In the blood of other animals, apparently. http://www.salt.org.il/main.htm

The fact that we like it so much, as with sweets, suggests that it was hard to find - a significant mental reward was required to make us make the effort to find it.
Is there any anti-global warming material that doesn't sound like paranoid ravings?

It's a genuine question as I'm finding it hard to separate the argument from the people making it, which obviously isn't the best way to get the truth. (I mean there's plenty of stuff written by people I fundamentally agree with on subjects like Free Software that comes across as a bit woolly and sensationalist.)

Is there some beginners guide for those that are interested and intelligent, but not already invested in one "side", that just lays out the basic issues and links to relevant sources?
>Checking the accuracy of the GPS system and autopilot perhaps seemed like a waste of time to the watch officers, like checking a watch against the Coordinated Universal Time clock every hour.

If the watchstanders didn't check it at least when they came on duty, and they obviously didn't, they are criminally incompetent.
How long would it take for yelp to make half a bn in revenue. idk sounds like a pretty generous offer to me.