skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't cell phones...sorry couldn't help it. ;-)

Honestly, I'll probably keep it along with all the other Android devices (and Apple devices) for debugging and backwards-compatibility and graceful degradation testing on multiple devices.
It depends on what sort of person you are. I couldn't live without having kids. It's what 'the point' is for me. Not to mention the enormous gratification in helping to shape some new human beings and watch them grow into their own personalities.

Startups also massively increase your stress and likely decrease happiness for most, but we still do them.
Interest rates are unusually low at the moment, they more often hover between 4-6% and have been as high as 8% (and this is the base rate - most people pay more than this, especially for fixed rate deals).

In the long run owning your house may or may not work out to be more profitable than keeping the difference between rent and mortgage payments (plus maintenance plus taxes plus other fees) but it's not always the case.

This is especially true if the gap between the mortgage payment (plus costs and fees) and rent is well invested. At the moment countering the low cost of borrowing is the fact that equities are also very cheap. Every pound invested in the FTSE 250 in mid 2009 was a great buy, more than compensating for the low mortgage rate.

In the end buying vs renting is mostly a personal decision rather than an economic one.

EDIT: Graph of the UK base rate back to '97 - most people pay 2-4% above the interbank rate listed here. http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/graphs-base-rate-uk.php
Y'see, this is why I don't like the fact that comments can no longer go below -4.
Why Balsamiq wasn't elected for bootstrap?

http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2010/01/03/a-look-back-at-2009/

The numbers here absolutely dominate anything tinychat has going for them at the moment, as far as I know.
If you look at the Boston map, there is one zone just outside route 128 near Lexington that consistently contrasts with its neighbors. That's Hanscom Air Force Base. It's particularly stark with the movie "Milk."

The other areas of sharp contrast I noticed are Mattapan and Lynn. Interesting stuff.
SVG Tutorials
What would you name the baby of Email and Twitter?
"except performance problems, of course."

Well, in some ways, even those can be solved with abstraction. The key is where that abstraction layer is placed. :) The assumption is you add them "on top" of what came before; but if you go in the other direction you may be able to improve performance by implementing, say, a smarter CPU with higher level abstractions built into the silicon. Things like that.
I already see robots that have the mechanical agility and dexterity needed, In 3-4 years the average appliance robot will have a computing CPU comparable to today's desktop computer, and the price of that dexterity will be affordable. I doubt I'll be waiting 10 years to get a practical automatic cleaning device.
Rare self-rolling giant snow balls found in UK
I've struggled with weight my entire life. After trying every diet and exercise plan under the sun, just to watch the pounds come rolling back. At the end of November I said enough was enough and had bariatric surgery (an adjustable gastric band, or lap band to be more specific).

While it has only been 8 weeks, I'm already deeming it an overwhelming success. I can't tell you the feeling of utter relief when I feel completely satisfied after eating a single cup of food (8oz). It is almost euphoric. Living in my body before the op was almost like living in a prison, I was shackled to my ravenous hunger. It didn't matter how much I ate, I was never satisfied. I still have 80% more of my target weight loss to go, but I'm 100% confident I can make it there with this tool.

If you've struggled for a long time and feel hopeless, please at least take a look into bariatric surgery. Don't feel hopeless. Don't blame yourself, morbid obesity is not something that 98% of people can handle on their own, there are factors that are simply out of your control.

If you have any questions that you'd like to ask to a fellow hacker, please don't hesitate to contact me. I know what you're going through and would be more than happy to talk to you.

v o n a t n i t r i q d o t c o m
Macros only really slow down things when you for some unknown reason call EVAL on source code many times.

When code is running using EVAL and an interpreter, macros can be expanded once and then the expanded code is used next time. For example in a loop it is not necessary to expand a macro each time it is used.

If one needs to EVAL new code all the time, then one may ask oneself if that is really necessary. For example if one is doing some kind of genetic programming. Otherwise it is basically a programmer error to do so.

I haven't seen any convincing example where it is really needed. My Symbolics Lisp Machine (which comes out of the MacLisp tradition, which had FEXPRs) got only limited FEXPRs (can't be compiled, can only be used at the top-level). Still the developers who had extensive FEXPR experience with Maclisp, were able to write the compiler, the garbage collector, the graphics driver, the window system, the network system, compilers and interpreters for various languages, text editors, mail clients, mail servers, and much more without using FEXPRs.
I don't have time to spend a lovely Saturday morning watching a 90-minute video just to criticize it, but how can one "debunk" the calories-in calories-out model? Surely this is just plain old thermodynamics?
Recently submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039870

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1040114

Found by using searchyc: http://searchyc.com/biosphere
Jato v0.0.2 - a JIT-only virtual machine for Java
Actually, it appears the link was re-written in at least one of these submissions, probably because it was blogspam.
Great observation. Didn't expect twilight is the top movie in an airforce base!
If you're that busy you should skip commenting too.

The answer is that humans are not simple furnaces; different foods are metabolized in different ways, and affect appetite differently.
It reminded me the old saying that "every C program can be written in one line". Think about it, it's true.

For me it was similar to obfuscated C code, when one line of code packed with funny symbolic names produces a program that shows a bouncing ball or something unexpected like that.
Can someone put that one line here? I don't feel like watching a video on my mobile.
On the reply page to a comment, there's a flag, so just flag it.
Thanks. I wasn't sure whether to submit the news announcement or the chapter itself. I opted for the announcement mainly to provide context for new readers, and also because I released a couple other minor updates (the rewritten intro and the MVC section) as well. But having a direct link to Chapter 5 is definitely useful.
because startup scene knows about Balsamiq, but it doesn't have the mainstream recognition...which are the people who actually voted in the crunchies
Is there a way to read email from a different service, using an android phone? Because I am thinking of getting a droid, but I would rather not give google access to all my mail.
Much discussion already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032063
Not really, it's just damn near impossible to buy anything that isn't made in China or some other crappy dictatorship.
Both of the "Tyler Perry" movies (3/4 toward the Least Rented side), also show a sharp contrast along racial demographic lines.

All in all, a very interesting visualization. This stuff redeems my love for the NYTimes.
Yes, it supports other standard protocols. POP, IMAP.
Microsoft finds new use for screensavers
Heck, you're right, I should!
I found this comment insulting. Why are they dumb for working on something that they love? Just because you (heck, or even the developers wives') can't calibrate the passion for video games doesn't mean no one can.
Most of it was just messing with APL's REPL to build up the less than 3 lines that actually mattered.

That's why I like languages with REPL-like functionality (Lisp, Python, Haskell, etc) so much. It makes for much faster debugging/development loop.

Whenever I code Java/C, I always end up using a tiny 'Testing' file (on the side of my real project) with lots of print statements that serves as a poor man's REPL. But it's still much slower.
If you want to be trusted more: claim less
My wife's screensaver looks for photos on her drive and puts them on the screen, each for 10 or 15 seconds. She's found several photos she'd forgotten and realised she wanted in this way.

Very useful - could be made more "intelligent" about it all.
Technically, this proof is slightly flawed. Why?

Take the set of all files of 10 bits. There are 1024 possibilities.

You can compress these files to 9 bits. But you could also compress them to 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, or even 0 bits. In total, that gives you: 1024 possibilities!

Of course, the issue is the initial assumption that the files all contain exactly 10 bits. If we had started with the problem of compressing files between 0 and 10 bits to files with at most 9 bits, the proof is trivial.
>> "This is especially true if the gap between the mortgage payment (plus costs and fees) and rent is well invested."

Firstly, there often isn't a gap, or it's negative - mortgage payments are less than rental payments.

Secondly, you'd be hard pressed to find a better paying investment than property.

House prices always increase in the long term. It's an investment. You buy a property, then a few years later can sell it for quite a bit more than you paid. As long as it's a property that is attractive people will always want it.

Personally I find the economics extremely clear cut. Mortgage payments here are comparable to rental payments, if not lower. So you can either give the money to a landlord and get nothing in return, or you can give it to a bank, pay off the balance (Long terms savings), and benefit when house prices increase if you sell it. Or of course just wait until mortgage is over and then live there rent free for the rest of your life.

I've never understood why the economics are even debated online like this :/
Did you read the article? It's not celebrating that he found pedaling less important than balancing, it's telling how he came up with a method to explicitly teach balancing by steering constantly and therefore making the wobble-lean-steer-tilt relationship stand out and be the bit to focus attention on.

( Also, have a 'trying to be cool' sticker for your jaded cynicism: http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html )
AT&T
Guys,

I've been in recruiting for many years. I work for AT&T
Here're the reasons why recruiters ask for SSN.

A: Many people are initially apprehensive about giving out the SSN because if this info gets into the wrong hands it could prove to be very dangerous.
The SSN is kept completely confidential. This information is sent to AT&T through a secure web server. There are a couple of reasons why we need this information.
a)	“The SSN is used to verify whether you are eligible to work in the US and more importantly, whether you are eligible to work for AT&T at this point in time.

Let me make it clear..
“The SSN is used to verify whether you are eligible to work in the US and more importantly, whether you are ELIGIBLE to work for AT&T at this time (There're thousands of AT&T contractors and employees who worked for AT&T and are willing to go back again. AT&T uses this piece of information to find the status of the applicant's- such as- If they have received voluntary retirement package, (they are ineligible to go back) if they have recently finished the contract(six months separation period is required to get back) etc.
Feel free to ask any questions you may have
b) The SSN is also used as a unique number to track the status of your resume and ensures that only one resume per vendor gets into the system.
c) This piece of information is needed to submit any candidate to AT&T.

.
Tweemail?
I think it's disingenuous to use this kind of counter-argument to justify some people's almost unnatural hatred of children and the people who have and want them.

Backward rationalizations can be used to change your future ways of thinking. In other words, if you feel that the stress of having a child will be well worth it, then you'll tell yourself that over and over while you're stressed. It will become true to you and the perception and emotions of a stress event changes.

This kind of reverse thinking is how we grow. Touch a hot stove, burn yourself, and cry about it. Next time you won't want to touch the hot stove because it hurt last time. If you did a study of people who touched hot stoves just after the fact, I'm sure you'd find that touching a hot stove reduces happiness and increases stress levels. However if you wait long enough, this lesson of stoves==hot results in decades of NOT touching hot stoves and NOT getting burned by them. A study of that should reveal that by touching a hot stove once, you've gained a lifetime absence (aside from accidents) of the stress and unhappiness associated with touching a hot stove. Suddenly the one time you burned yourself seems to have been worth the pain.
Is this data available to everyone? I'd love to see it for my area (Providence, RI). It might be interesting to compare this data with housing prices.
Thanks, that was a lot easier to read.
That only gives 1023 possibilities
But seriously, the word he's looking for is 'blog'.
Would you say more specifically what you cut from your diet, and what you retained? You don't only eat steak, do you?
Actually you can purchase one here: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/adcolkey.html they even provide different colors and special keys (windows key into a meta key etc.) - I have the dark grey one and I love it.

You can also get APL stickers that fit onto any keyboard (I put them onto an hp 1000 laptop even) from here: http://hooleon.com/miva/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product... for about 15 dollars. They actually work really well - I would advise using a pair of tweezers to get them positioned exactly how you want because one they are on they are pretty permanent!
I think this is a bit of a misleading title. At one point in grad school, I had broke 225 @ 6'3 with little muscle mass and I've changed that to 188 with much more muscle mass. My understanding is that fat is used for storing food energy and that each pound of fat stores ~3500 calories. So, something like dFat/dt = (f(calories in) - caloriesBurned())/3500 = amount of fat gained for some period of time. f might include something about the structure of the calories coming in, but it makes sense and my experience supports it.
The dumb part isn't working long hours for a job you love. The dumb part is working for terrible wages in awful conditions and letting the value you create be captured by other people.
Work is constant, effort varies (defining effort to be work (useful stuff) plus time wasted to get the work done). By this definition, work will take constant time. He just did a lot of work in one line, so it took quite a while to write that one line.

With different programming languages and different skill levels, you have a different amounts of "wasted time" to do the (constant) useful work.

The person doing the YouTube video wasted almost no time (a couple of typos). If I were to do it, I would have a lot of wasted effort since I never was very good at APL and time has not improved that.
Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All
Exactly, I lived in a house full of bachelors for 6 years (4 of us), and we had exactly the opposite problem: there were tons of cups/plates/bowls/pans (everybody brought their own to the house), but none of them were ever clean and in the cabinets. This problem is almost unsolvable in such a house, but the real annoyance is that there's so many dishes in the sink at all times.

At some point I solved this problem by removing all but 4 of each item, and locking them up. That way you at least limit the dirty pile and force people to clean the dishes semi-frequently. If you're having 7 people over for dinner (never happened), just ask me for the key :)
If anyone is interested in building one of these for their toddler, there is a great pattern located here:
http://crumleydotorg.chattablogs.com/archives/038834.html

I used the above pattern to build 2 of them for my 2.5 year old twins... they love them and have great balance now.

Here's how mine turned out:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113513/bikes.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113513/bike1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113513/bike2.jpg

I broke-even in price, it cost approx. $60/bike which is what it costs to get a similar "elmo" bike at target:
http://www.target.com/Elmos-Beginner-Bike/dp/B00155X3UI

If you're going to break the bank, it's going to be b/c you couldn't find cheap wheels. This is where I went wrong, since I spent about $11 per wheel at home depot. I later found them for $4 at a smaller local hardware shop. ;p
Open Source APL
I initially learned to ride a bike on a grassy area (much softer falls, I highly recommend this). As I got much better my dad graduated me to the road. Everything was going great during this transition until I saw a kid a couple years older than me pop a wheelie. I thought this was awesome and being very confident in my new found skills, I immediately decided that I should give it a shot. I yanked up and back hard on my banana seat bike, I don't think my dad had any idea I was going to do this, and we both quickly learned my mistake as I tipped over backwards and my face met the asphalt. With my front tooth laying on the ground and my dad likely standing there wondering what the hell happened, I bolted home in search of my mom with blood streaming out of my mouth. I was probably about 4 or 5 at the time. So my advice is make sure the person/kid is wearing a helmet and possibly even a mouth guard those first few trips out and beware of the pop a wheelie.
My first job was at the San Carlos Airport(SQL). I worked in an aircraft avionics shop and made $6.75/hr. At the time I was also taking flying lessons so it was a pretty good deal getting paid to be around airplanes and occasionally getting a ride.
How about "Emitter", which has all the appropriate negative connotations.
Erik Naggum on Atlas Shrugged
Even sadder is that married British women are very seldom worth a f*ck.
I'm from England and I sometimes struggle to make myself understood here in the US! I'm a lot more sympathetic to my colleagues who have English as a second language now, it's far from a 'marginal effort' to do it right.

I'm grateful that people are making an attempt to share something in a language I can understand, I don't see the gain in making them feel bad if they break a few grammar rules in the process.
Going from 4K-5K calories per day to 900 is an extreme swing. These type of diets are shown not to work. There is also some evidence they convince your body it is living in feast/famine time which triggers a fat accumulation response. I do not believe that it is healthy to remove carbohydrates from your body. The body is a complex machine indeed, but we have a pretty good understanding of how it works regarding nutrition. Most structures run on glucose, muscles are made of protein, fiber helps digestion and micronutrients are used all over the place. The bottom line is that fat is used for storing extra glucose. The function of protein in nutrition is very interesting. If you don't get enough, then your body will cannibalize muscles to get it. Proteins can be broken down to provide glucose, but it's inefficient and generates toxins. Carbohydrates break down to glucose much better. I would suggest you try a conventional approach : Checkout nutritiondata.com or one of the numerous calculators and for your weight and height calculate your daily needs. Pay particular attention to the grams of fiber needed and setup a plan that leads to 1-2lbs of fat loss per week - a deficit of only 500-1000 calories per day. Changing habits faster than that is generally not practical, it certainly never was for me. Make sure you are getting enough protein without overwhelming calories, supplementing with a protein shake if necessary. Try that out for half a year or a year with daily measurements and diet recalculation every 10 lbs lost. Never, ever deviate from the selected diet (you accomplish this by leaving wiggle room in your estimates), weigh yourself daily and keep careful records. I really don't think carb free living is either sustainable or healthy.
Instant messaging?
StatusNet: http://gitorious.org/statusnet http://status.net/
Surely this is just plain old thermodynamics?

Normally I'd be irritated at this obvious glib objection, but we have to make a physicist allowance in this case :)

The other one you hear all the time is, "But how can fructose be bad? It's in fruit." Gee, do you think he might have thought of that?
> I mean how else do you explain that Zynga CEO [Marc Pincus] beat out Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh for CEO of the year?

If you'd been to Startup School in October, this would have been blindingly obvious.

Pincus was the closer for a reason -- the mood in the room was instantly I want to go to there, and the temperature went up ten degrees. Even Zuckerburg was hooting and hollering!

On the other hand, almost none of us young hackers would want to work for Hsieh -- his company's culture is steeped in an entirely different demographic, and he admitted as much in his speech.
seriously, what's with you guys? I lost 75 pounds in 6 months. I couldn't have made my blog post about that more Hacker News bait than it already was. I know a lot of you saw it. and still the ratio of people talking about it to people doing it is like 10,000 to 1. and you'd still rather debate some tangentially relevant research.

google "Dr Joel Fuhrman." I lost 100 points of cholesterol in three months. 75 pounds in six months. all you do is you eat vegetables. there's a little more to it, but not much. it's easy. the guy has reams of case studies and science backing him up. my 100-point cholestrol dip barely even blipped on his radar personally - didn't even raise his eyebrows - because he sees it all the time, but just for comparison, my dad and my uncle both got 100-point drops in their cholesterol too, over the course of ten years, and their cardiologists were happy, because normal nutrition is so bad that ten years is an acceptable time frame for that. so: ten years' progress in two months' time.

seriously, this is a solved problem. this is like, "let's figure out how to get a computer into every home and office in America." they're already there! why are you trying to answer a solved problem?

you could spend your whole life debunking invalid theories, or you could just find the theory that works and run with it. which sounds like a more effective use of time?
Pessimist. :P
Isn't this a bit of a security risk, though? What if there were pictures on your drive you didn't want other people to know about, just to have it displayed for the world to see?
RSSCloud is similar to this - http://rsscloud.org/walkthrough.html
life ← {⊃ 1 ω ∨ . ∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ 1 0 ~ 1 ∘ . Θ 1 - ~1 Φ" ⊂ ω}

(all typos are mine, not the author's)
Slides from related presentation of his

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/events/pastmtg/2007/cehr/docs/...
Posterous in particular, really, given their short-post-via-email focus.
While that's true, the prime mover in weight gain is still calories. The type of calories is a secondary effect.

Discussing diet is hard because everyone reasons from personal experience. E.g., in my experience, almost all my fluid intake is Dr. Pepper and I consume large quantities of the "worst" food, as a proportion of my diet, but I don't eat that much and I work out, so I'm strong and fit with low cholesterol.
They are plenty of women in the Airforce, members often have families with children, and the Airforce skews strongly towards Evangelical Christianity.