skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn’t be so quick in lumping these two (fair trade labeling vs agricultural subsidization) together.
I agree that fairtrade has problems.
However, I see merit to the idea to inform consumers about the background of certain products (information is vital to market economy, right?).
Fairtrade certification doesn’t just mean “fair” prices but also some restrictions on slave labor, the right to unionize, and conservation of the environment and some other network externalities.
Product labeling is a classic direct action tactic and I think it’s a great way to concisely provide information that would otherwise be obscure.

This is not a subsidy and it’s not a tariff. It’s (an attempt at) providing information.
Fascinating; I've always heard it attributed to Picasso, as "Good artists copy. Great artists steal.", but Wikiquote has that as unattributed and cites Eliot in 1920. Picasso would have been 39 then and was established well before that, so it's possible it originated from him.

Then again, given the nature of the quote, it's entirely possible that he stole it from Eliot ^_^.

Thanks for digging this up! The full Eliot quote is indeed magnificent.
That sounds like a niche market opportunity: textwash.com?
MD5(MD5(x)) isn't the same hashing algorithm as MD5(x). You can't have collisions between the two of them.
First, until there are comprehensive notes, it's worth watching the video. It really is excellent.

That being said, here are the notes I've taken so far. I started these back in December, but didn't have time to finish the video. If anyone wants to continue where I left off, please feel free to.

16:30 - Introducing HFCS.

17:20 -Why use fructose? It’s sweeter. (Also, cheaper.) Should be able to use less. But drink manufacturers use it more. (Shows chart with different types of sugars and their positions on a sweetness index.)

18:20 - Chemical composition of fructose versus glucose versus sucrose. Fructose and glucose are not the same. Fructose and sucrose are exactly the same from a body processing perspective. Both dangerous.

21:50 - Slide: Secular trend in fructose consumption: Natural - 15g / day WWII - ~20g / day 1977 - ~37g / day 1994 - ~55g / day Current adolescents - ~73g / day It’s not that we’re eating more (although we are). It’s that we’re eating more sugar.

23:30 - How did this happen? Why did this happen? The politics perspective: three political winds that swirled at the same time, creating the perfect storm. 1. In 1972, Nixon makes food prices a “non-issue.” 2. 1966, HFCS invented, introduced to the US in 1975. This makes sugar CHEAP. “High fructose corn syrup isn’t evil because it’s metabolically evil, but because it’s economically evil. Because it’s so cheap, it’s found its way into everything.” 3. In the late 70s, the USDA, the AMA, and the AHA all call for the reduction of fat in diets. Why? To stop heart disease. Did it work? No. So why’d they tell us to stop eating fat? In the 1970s we discovered LDL. In the mid-1970s, we learned that dietary fat raises LDL. In the late 1970s, we learned that high LDL correlates to cardiovascular disease. So, the conclusion was that if A leads to B, and B leads to C, then A leads to C. But the premise is incorrect. Why? It suggests that it’s transitive. That isn’t the case.

John Yudkin - Pure, White, and Deadly.

Keys - performed multivariate regression analysis (running data to filter out what really caused what) on cardiovascular disease. Showed calories from fat correlated highly with cardiovascular disease. But he didn’t run a complete regression analysis. He showed that sugar comes along with the fat, and that if you hold saturated fat constant but increase sugar, it doesn’t show results. But he didn’t go the other way, holding sugar constant and showing that fat still has an effect. (around 35:00) So his results aren’t actually reliable, but we’ve been basing 30 years of nutrition education and policy on this incomplete study.

36:30 - Two types of LDL. Large/buoyant, and ...
Whomever wrote this is fluent and has idiomatic English. That is the best part about this: she believes she a gifted poet, but she really should know better.

I stand by my snooty comment.
Well..."Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Reminds of this study on speed dating:

When men rotated, women (the ones sitting) were more selective. But when women did the rotating, men (the ones sitting) were more selective. Nothing else changed in the experiment, so it was the act of doing the approaching (or being approached) that helped determine a person’s selectivity toward their partner.

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090929-women-dating.html

So that fair should be good for the job seekers.
Quit your job, you stupid idiots.
CES Kicks Out Vendors Who Try to Display, Carry Out Business in Hotel Suites
You will lose weight on calorie restriction as long as you go low enough. Though I've been fat my entire life, after college, I was 150 pounds overweight. I lost the extra weight by eating 900 calories a day for a year and a half or so.

At my normal healthy weight, I was starving. And weak as a kitten. I took up running, and stopped watching my diet. I literally could not keep up the willpower necessary to continue a 3000 calorie diet, even though 900 had been doable for so long. Despite running for an hour a day, I immediately started gaining 10-15 pounds a month.

So I was convinced that it was all about calories. I was fat because I ate too much. Why my body was so hellbent on eating 4000-5000 calories a day, I didn't know. I seemed to have a lot more willpower than anyone else I knew. It was sort of confusing. Then about a year ago, I read Taubes' book.

What if the human body is actually sort of complicated? What if hormonal regulation controls fat? What if the "trash bin" theory of body fat is actually a humongous oversimplification or just wrong? What if, after getting to a "healthy" weight by starving fat, muscle, and vital tissue, I wasn't healthy at all? What if it had also made me malnourished (hence the amazing hunger at my "healthy" weight)?

Anyway, I cut the carbohydrates out of my diet last December. I made zero effort at calorie restriction. In fact, I ate a lot. I made very little effort to exercise more. After a year of this, I'm almost 100 pounds under my max weight. I recently started running again, for fun, not weight loss, and am up to 2-3 miles a day.

And I am stronger than I've ever been in my life. Eating steak every day is probably more expensive than building the same muscle mass with steroids, but I'm pretty happy. I wasn't expecting it. It's good being a carnivore.
http://nokojeans.com/
Good point, but this is in the context of a country that is extremely densely populated. A controlled decrease of the population may be beneficial. I have a feeling that the Japanese elite are well aware of the danger and may be able to remedy the situation before it gets out of hand.
That was my first time seeing APL code. All I knew about it was that it had its very own keyboard for its own funky symbols.
Yeah, I've never gotten that impression at all.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Japan, and the closing item sounds about right to me:

"Anti-semitic books are usually regarded as a type of 'Tondemo bon' (トンデモ本, dodgy/outrageous books), which covers a very wide range of occultist subjects, such as UFO's and psychic power, and generally taken very lightly."

Japan is also less pagan than you're think, e.g. there are a surprising number of recent Christian Prime Ministers.

Calling it "non-capitalist" may go a bit too far as well.
You forgot an (IMHO|IMNSHO) or two in there I think.
"In the mid-1970s, we learned that dietary fat raises LDL. In the late 1970s, we learned that high LDL correlates to cardiovascular disease. So, the conclusion was that if A leads to B, and B leads to C, then A leads to C. But the premise is incorrect. Why? It suggests that it’s transitive. That isn’t the case."

Specifically, there's no problem with transitivity, but (just based off you've written) a correlation/causation problem: A leads to B but B correlates with C. A conclusion that A leads to C would therefore be invalid. (Not sure if this is an error in the summary or the video, and in any case it doesn't undermine the larger point; I'm just being pedantic. :)
Right. I think it's certainly possible to keep that fun/childish side going, and stay in touch with culture etc without having kids around, but it's much harder.

I see what you're saying... I didn't mean that old parent wouldn't be fun, but it's likely to be a different type of fun. One that may be alien to kids.

We have several stages of our lives and I thing overlapping with your kids makes it so you can enjoy more of the same things together.
Given the demographics, specifically the need to support such a large retired population, it doesn't make sense to do that on purpose.

If the items I pointed out are a significant part of the cause, it's going to be very hard to reverse, since they've been trying to turn around their economy for a couple of decades without success (we now realize the recovery a few years ago was just another artifact of the world wide credit bubble).
The First Jobs of 10 Wealthy Entrepreneurs
Sad as it may seem, 'Poopy' is simply not a character combination that should cross your keyboard when working for a client of any size. The clients that can accept random 'Poopy' showing up in their product are few and far in between.
Lose Weight the Fastest Way
That's a great video for giving a taste of APL. It's too bad that the barriers to entry for learning APL seem to be so high; it's a great language.

The link mentioned in the video, which gives a fuller explanation, is here: http://www.dyalog.com/dfnsdws/n_life.htm
MPS AUTO WEBSITE SUBMITTER 2009. 5 STAR AWARDS - AOL Video Video
I disagree. If I'm dead, I'm dead regardless of whether I died in a traffic accident or a terrorist attack. This emotional reaction is what people have to fight. A terrorist attack is only more scary because you let it be.
Thanks! My overstuffed locution has this effect on readers sometimes: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/13566/illegal-askme#381563
Training wheels don't have to be in constant contact with the ground. With my kids I installed the training wheels several inches off the ground. The kids had to balance to use the bike effectively, but the training wheels would catch them when they leaned too far.
Airport security of the future: Mind-reading systems and tough interrogations?
Does it make a call to every cellphone in range?

That would be a cool way to spam.
Somehow this seems like another argument for free software...
I've been reading a bit about APL, and I can't find anywhere to buy one of the old APL keyboards. However, you can remap your existing keyboard to output APL symbols for certain key combinations, which is how I think most people are using it these days.

EDIT: Picture of the keyboard layout:
http://www.users.on.net/~farnik/upload/APL2union.gif
Nothing wrong with that as long as you don't fail in exactly the same way twice.

Overall which part of running a startup is what you think is the hardest bit?
The emphasis in Japan on teamwork and consensus decision-making also helps prevent the accumulation of valuable proprietary knowledge inside any one head, which would then have excessive leverage to extract wealth ... Lifetime employment also gives companies an incentive to invest in giving their workers expensive technical training, since they know the workers won’t just jump to a competitor once they have it. Since a highly-trained workforce is one of the absolute keys to success in any advanced sector of the economy, this is very important.

This probably plain old doesn't work in a globalised world. If your best talent feel they're being undercompensated in relation to their knowledge (and they don't have much use for social status), then they'll emigrate. At the margins, this is precisely what seems to happen --- most famously in the case of Shuji Nakamura.

(To put the icing on the cake, I've read an even more conspiratorial theory than Robert Locke's: that the Japanese government deliberately sabotages their school system's ESL classes by overemphasizing translation work and underemphasizing conversational skills, to make it hard for people to emigrate successfully. [1])

[1] http://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/07/16/is-a-national-lack-of-e...
Just out of interest, have you had any tiredness from cutting carbs from your diet? Many people on who restrict carbs, such as on the Atkins diet, experience this from what I've read.
Thanks for the insight into your method and thinking. I'll definitely consider this if/when I make an attempt. Best of luck with Newsley.
So do the kicked-out, fully-paid-up vendors have legal recourse against the hotel at this point? Surely they must.
These auditors are behind the times. My local utility surprised me with a $3000 gas bill last year because my meter had apparently been broken for at least 36 months. The whole process smacked of recession-driven auditing.

It's not illegal or even unethical but it sure left a sour taste in my mouth.

Edit: My utility company is a local monopoly that is heavily protected by the city.
Impressed. Not just by the syntax (first time I see APL) but also by how easily he juggles and shapes what is mostly hieroglyphs to me.

I know he was probably following a script to spare us the trial & error. I also know the hieroglyphs could be replaced with ascii-keywords to make it look more down to earth. But still; if I was to come up with a game of life in any language then the process wouldn't look anywhere near this elegant...
Not in Ancient Greece.
Simplifying my OLPC XO-1 Temperature Sensor
You can also use J (http://www.jsoftware.com/), which follows the same philosophy but uses only normal characters (all of them, in fact).
Most people are using virtual keyboards, but Dyalog (in the warning on their website) mention that they sell APL keyboards.
In terms of the Scooba's value, if you have good sized swaths of hardwood or tile that you can clear off for it, it becomes a practical alternative to most mop work. However, I wouldn't recommend it for the non-technical--I had to clear the pump opening a couple times by forcing water through it (per tech support). Still, I hate mopping, and it was decent enough at it.

In terms of practicality the Scooba is like the dishwasher-convenience paradigm. You maintain it, load and unload, but it saves you work overall. I get the sense that the return on effort is slightly lower than the Roomba.

After we had our first child, we started having a person come in and clean and although it isn't cheap, it is probably the change that has made the biggest improvement in our quality of life in a while.
No tiredness for me. There's the "induction flu" that people on Atkins get, and I felt that for the first few weeks. Apparently it's caused by sodium depletion (carbohydrates cause you to retain a lot of water/salt). Drinking non-sodium-reduced beef broth every day for that month will cure you. Wish I had known. I just toughed it out.

As far as my energy levels nowadays...pretty much boundless. I'm ravenously hungry when I don't eat. But I'm told that's how it's supposed to work. When I was fat, I was hungry around the clock, even after eating.
In practice annoying bugs can be caused by few easily understandable lines that no one bothered to look into so far.
Future iPhone GPU supports OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL 1.0
Sarkozy proposes ad tax on Google
Here's a review of Taubes' book by George Bray: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2008/0... in case you do want someone dissing it for you.

Also I don't think we should "make up [our] own mind" the biology on this is way beyond the layman. Hacker News has a pervasive conceit that somehow as programmers we can see the obvious truth that people with decades of experience are apparently (or deliberately) unable to. In fact it's the reverse most subjects are substantially more complicated than they appear. You can't encompass the biology of obesity in a pop-sci best seller.
Actually, in the video he points out the following is invalid:

1. A -> B
2. B -> C
3. A -> C
4. ~A -> ~C

Step 3 is valid (skipping over the correlation issue); the problem is actually step 4. ~C -> ~A is valid, but ~A -> ~C is a fallacy. The correlation issue doesn't come up, possibly because it isn't even necessary; this logic fallacy dominates it.

I used standard Aristotelian logic notation here; it really ought to be fuzzy logic, but step 4 isn't valid there either, so it would just muck things up, and I don't know the numbers for the fuzzy logic anyhow. Doesn't matter.
Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America significantly.

While there are 200 million guns in private ownership as mentioned in the article, it does not necessary follow that it positively correlates with murder rate. In fact there is no mention of any correlation of ownership of guns to murder rate in the article.

The only mention is that guns are often the weapon of choice in attempting suicide.

Recalling from memory, legal ownership of guns, are in fact, correlated with crime reduction.

Additions to back up my memory claim: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n13_v50/ai_20...
IR signals over an IP network
Sounds like the epic battle I had trying to cancel my Sprint wireless card. I'd say my experience in dealing with Google Apps support has been good - they were slow to answer emails, but quick to pick up the phone, and were warm and personal.
It would be funny if google responded by not allowing the French to use it's services. =]

On the other hand. It's not a bad idea for America. If we taxed advertisements I /might/ see less of the ones I find annoying. And we could funnel that money into education or health care. Reducing the US' carbon footprint. Bleh. Lots of uses.

But a tax that citizens aren't paying (in this context) is a great idea in my opinion.
Personally, I found I actually have more energy -- which I think is from more stable blood sugar levels.
This post reminded me about the day when I invented a perfect compression algorithm ( http://www.diovo.com/2010/01/the-perfect-compression-algorit... )
Fun fact: modern security measures are adequate. Any threats which can get through can be easily prevented by passengers.

All we need to do is add another segment to the airplane safety films: "In the unlikely event of a muslim looking passenger trying to set their shoes on fire or inject chemicals into their underwear, pour water on them. After they are thoroughly soaked, start punching them in the face."

Of course, I don't expect any politicians to admit this. "You need to protect yourselves" doesn't get as many votes as "I'll protect you from those bad scary foreign devils."
It made me think of 'The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army' http://skippyslist.com/list/
And probably because it's easy to see how thoroughly unionization has thrashed other industries.
The problem with a mortgage is it tends to increase consumption. Most people are fine renting a fairly small apartment relative to their needs, but as soon as they are buying a place they start thinking about having an extra rooms just in case etc.
"How much CO2 could be removed from the atmosphere in this way has not yet been tested."

Probably a net of zero, as the energy to make and distribute this would easily exceed its absorption.
> Somebody(geek) please reassure me that these 'changes in behavior' are not paramount to becoming a parent because this premise seemed pretty implicit throughout most items in this list.

I'll try to do that! In my experience, having a kid 2 years ago has been the most motivating event in term of self-accomplishment, bootstrapping projects, and moving toward a (much) better quality of life.

Of course education is a hard topic some days, but most of the time I just feel very lucky to be living this.

And no - I'm not rationalising my mortgage: living (currently) in Paris, we've been very careful to keep a rent instead of mortgage, and to live with just enough surface and in a quite cheap area of the city (this could apply with a mortgage as well).

This has allowed us to save a lot, and we're now moving to the country-side, able to buy a house without any mortgage, working remotely and bootstrapping projects in a cheap area of France.

So I'd say each one can find its own way. It can be (really) uncomfortable, but apart from cultural pressure, nothing can force you to choose a given path, in my opinion.
Likely the ancestral inspiration: http://skippyslist.com/list/
Lean analytics: Questions VCs should ask (and you’d better answer)
That depends on the contract. If the contract stated that if they would do this they would get kicked out then likely not.

They can still sue of course but it wouldn't help them much.

If all it is is the CES management colluding with the hotel management then they've just killed CES.

They ought to be happy with people coming there either way. And the exorbitant fees for exhibiting on the grounds are what drives this kind of tactics anyway.

Lots of big consumer shows have this sort of thing happening around them, there is nothing wrong with it, it's just the market at work.

Expect next years CES to be smaller than this years because of this.

In the past it would usually be one or two very specific vendors that would draw me to an exhibition, and not always would the venue be on the grounds. But after seeing what I came for I would then go to the main exhibition anyway, just because I was already in the neighbourhood.

These were mostly in Hannover and London, but I don't think the general principle changes much.

Some very interesting small companies can simply not afford the out-of-touch-with-reality price per ft^2 that these exhibitions charge.

Want power to your booth? That'll be $1500. Oh, and another $500 for the licensed electrician to plug that in to that socket.

edit: thinking about this some more, I can't even recall having gone to an exhibition after 2000 or so, stuff is released all the time now and with the internet as a vehicle to get the information out there the days of the giant exhibition are probably numbered anyway.
This reminds me of the various cases against "guerrilla" advertisers during the Olympics: they don't register as official sponsors, but use sports themes, former Olympic champs, other evocative imagery to associate themselves with the Olympics and benefiting from the hype without paying the licensing fees. Like CES, the Olympics has been cracking down more and more.
I don't think that's the case. Mortgage is just borrowing against your future worth. If some people over estimate that then it's their own problem.

The problem is usually silly people borrowing far more than they can afford, and lenders trying to push people into borrowing more than they can afford. But that's not a problem with mortgages per se.

Renting is ok if you like throwing money away, or need to move often.
The Crunchies are the Kid's Choice Awards of the startup scene.
I don't believe in the free or donation based model. You should always charge for your web apps, even if it $0.99/month. You should charge.
And what has this page got to do with Windows or hacking? Are you trying to make some statement about Novell and Microsoft?
IMHO mopping isn't really an issue - it is fairly fast. What is a drag is sweeping or vacuuming the room before you mop.

That is surely something that can be done by an ordinary roomba?
Do you ever go through the motions?