skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect the problem, and why much knowledge like this came and went over the centuries, is that so few people understood the why and how of it that once the local guy who did was killed or died, the knowledge went with him and his books were recycled, lost, or destroyed because they appeared meaningless.
Hope springs eternal.
Just because YOU had a good experience does not mean there is not a deluge of complaints. You have offered 0 evidence that the article is, as you say, "horseshit."

Frankly, this story is in line with what I've heard of Google's customer service in the past and is more than plausible since Google is entering a market that it has little experience in.
Looking at the map for my city of residence (Atlanta) confirms a pattern I've observed in real life: the black community generally will support its own, seemingly regardless of the details of the performance.

Look at the patterns for The Soloist (Jamie Foxx), Lakeview Terrace (Samuel L. Jackson), Traitor (Don Cheadle), Obsessed (Beyonce), and the Tyler Perry movies. These movies have little to nothing in common, and their Metacritic scores vary widely, yet their distribution maps are essentially identical.

A further point of interest: judging by these patterns, Atlanta really is as segregated as it is often made out to be. The only other city that I noticed with such stark contrast was D.C., which I've heard is another heavily segregated city (at least culturally).
The name with all the negative connotations would probably be FailMail. :-)
Linux on the desktop 2010, your honest thoughts?
I was writing an article on the Linux desktop, for example Ubuntu linux. I was thinking it isn't pervasive as we had hoped. What are your thoughts with Linux on the desktop and how it will or will not compete with Windows7 and the Mac Os?

Also, I know these kind of subjective questions get turned in flame wars. First, let's focus on 2010 and beyond. Also, let's focus on the more desktop oriented distros like Ubuntu Linux or Suse? Linux. Also, here are some basic usage question; Are you going to use a desktop linux? Are you going to use this desktop linux all the time? Or as a secondary machine? Would recommend the system for someone else, maybe less tech savvy?
I think it's pretty clear from your rant that you did not watch the presentation. The submitter did a great disservice to the speaker by framing this presentation as a debunking of the calories in/out model, because that is not, at all, the central point of this lecture.

(I have watched it through twice now, and it is a phenomenal presentation; I recommend it highly.)

In no way does the speaker attempt to turn thermodynamics on its head. Rather, he suggests that the storage of fat be perceived as the primary driver, and caloric intake & expenditure taking a back seat. He re-frames it this way because the real central thesis is about how fructose is a driver of obesity, which in turn leads to increased consumption.

The caloric in/out slide only serves as motivation for why we should be wary of the fact that fructose is a chronic toxin (in particular, the effects thereof), and how HFCS is an economic evil as much as a metabolic one.

It's ok to rail against the headline, though. The submitter took too much out of one slide, in my opinion.
'Near-instinctive' knowledge of this, before being exposed to the basic idea, would make a good marker for high intelligence, and one which I failed at (and I'm no slouch).
Ask a few colleagues about it, and prepare to be disappointed!
Google Wave! ;)
Also:

"There are three things a man must do
before his life is done;
Write two lines in APL,
And make the buggers run."
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, 'The Devil's DP Dictionary'

And:

"APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection.
It is the language of the future, for the programming
techniques of the past: it creates a new generation
of coding bums."
-- Edsger Dijkstra
> Most of it was just messing with APL's REPL to build up the less than 3 lines that actually mattered.

Fair enough, and good to know. It was a very cool demo, I just don't care for the "in one line" or "in fifteen minutes" nonsense.
You are missing the point of the Crunchies. It's the once-a-year party where we all celebrate the web.

Yes, the voting is not the best, but that's not critical.
I don't know who you are, but I came within a hairs whisker of meeting the man and it is one of the few things in my life that I honestly can say I regret.

That he 'discovered' something is a strawman, that's not what this is article is all about, if you had actually gone further than skin deep (say past the title) you would have seen that for yourself. That's not a claim Engelbart made, that's just something his daughter said (last line in the article).

And anybody that has driven a recumbent knows this too, but that doesn't mean you get to belittle all of them for pointing this out.

If you got nothing out of it because you already knew all of it then good for you, I've been riding bikes since I was 3 (hard to avoid when you're dutch) and only in my late thirties I finally fully grokked the dynamics of riding a bicycle, they're anything but intuitive.

The most interesting thing about bicycles is how we got them to be so 'right' without knowing that theory, it's a classical case of evolution in progress, nobody with the physics knowledge required ever sat down to design the thing, tons of weird designs were tried (and are still being tried) which led to a nearly optimal shape. And lots of the bits and pieces in that near optimal shape were used long before they were understood.

Incidentally there seems to be a disproportionate representation of the ability to juggle and ride the monocycle amongst mathematicians, why is that?
Yeah, I'm not denigrating the video itself, just the title used here on HN (which does not appear on the youtube page).
The original author would do well to read Strunk & White's _The_Elements_of_Style_. Using many words does improve communication.

Edit: Sorry, I meant, "using many words does NOT improve communication." (I guess using few words does not improve communication either if you mistype them.)

Organizational issues aside, I am moved by the sentiment behind the original author's words. Fred Brooks compared large programming projects to tar pits, wherein the thrashing of the largest beast only serves to sink it farther. It must be terrible to be constantly commanded "thrash harder!"
It might be just me, but watching this felt like watching 'The Inconvenient Truth of the food industry'.

So all we need now is a meeting of the leaders of the world in Copenhagen to ignore this huge problem with the processed food everybody buys and consumes for at least another 20 years. (potential problem, if you're not convinced something is wrong with the massive amounts of sugar in our processed food)
It's a great post, albeit, probably about 3 years old.
Last time I lost significant (for me) weight (220 down to 180) I did it by cutting carbs. I did not eat only meat, but I did cut out all bread, other starchy food, sweet fruits, and sugars. So I ate meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, and green vegetables like broccoli, spinach, and legumes. I missed bread, because I love good home-baked bread, but you can have enough variety with other foods to keep a low-carb diet from getting boring. Atkins says to cut coffee and diet soda but I didn't do that. I did not exercise beyond normal daily activities.
That's a good job you did there. And so much more satisfaction making your own than just going out and buying one.

What better gift to your child than something made with your own hands and on your own time.
On one hand if you deal with a corrupt government, you legitimize them. On the other hand, if you don't legitimize them, they can blame their ineffectivenesses on forced isolation.
"I also know the hieroglyphs could be replaced with ascii-keywords to make it look more down to earth."

Not really, that is APL. The keywords in the APL language are mathematical symbols (Greek letters plus a lot more).
http://aplwiki.com/AplCharacters#What_exactly_is_.22APL385_U...
The result is readable (I assume) to a mathematician, but is hard for mere mortals to read and hard to type without a special keyboard.
Then call it a party, not an awards show.

And why can't there be two parties? The crunchies(kid's choice awards) and the starties(oscars)
It did work. I lost the weight.

Pay attention to fiber? The research in support of that suggestion is execrable (pun intended).

I did try the 500-1000 calorie deficit for a number of months. My weight loss was on the order of 5-10 pounds, and I was hungry the entire time. And then I gained the weight back and more when I wasn't able to carry through. People simply do not lose large amounts of weight on small deficits. It's bizarre. According to the trash bin theory of body fat it should work. It doesn't. Almost like the trash bin theory is wrong...

The carb free living is sustainable and healthy. If you aren't going to read Taubes, then at least read Victor Steffansson. He's a bit more fun.
Entrepreneurship is risk free: Heads I win, tails I don’t lose much
In case you're interested in the (lengthy) original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626771

EDIT: that wasn't the original, but it was the longest. This is the original (I think): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006
Google Might Get Into Hosted Gaming Via YouTube
It's probably my inner black-hearted cynic coming through but I thought this would be a visualization of how Netflix manipulates queues to favour new and recently signed-up users - something that's been the subject of anecdotal write-ups and small scale tests over the years.

These are interesting and pretty in their own right although I already knew most of my neighbours are very fond of 'Mad Men'.
Dissecting the Success of Social Gaming
Understood. My comment was an insight that occurred to me as a result of your comment. The insight is that programming "work" is very much like physics "work"

work = effort * distance

In physics, if you don't move something, you have done no work (even though you are sweating and out of breath). In programming, if all you do is write boilerplate stuff, you have not done any work because you have not advanced toward your goal.
Statistics will save us all.

And for the HN folks that like to Lisp it up:

http://incanter.org/
Did you ever go after Pointclick:)? They folded not long after launching.
I've unlocked and resold both of my prior-generation iPhones. Even though they were both used, they went for more than I paid for them.
Whoops... my search fu is seriously rusty today.
Avi Bryant - Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal
The submitter's sensational headline has very little to do with the lecture. You shouldn't watch it to criticize it. You should watch it because it is a very good presentation.
Left a comment there, but may as well copy-paste here:

A few years ago I was working on a competition with a grand prize of several new SUVs (part of a product launch for the vehicle). We did a very basic version of the “riddler.com” model (remember them about 12-15 years ago?) where our partner websites would put ‘badges’ for gamers to click on. Each badge was worth some number of points.

Some smart souls figured out that the badge numbers were somewhat sequenced (we had allocated up to 10 badges per partner, so we would start at ‘10′ for instance and work our way up). Scripts were written that would hit our server each day and collect the maximum number of points available.

The scripts weren’t that smart though, and there were gaps in the rewarding badges. Our ‘fix’ for this was to create new badges in the gaps that were worth massively negative numbers of points. In one day, the most problematic players vanished.
That's just a pointless fantasy of Dave Winer's. He has the magical combination technical and social incompetence, that thoroughly poisons anything he is allowed to insinuate himself into.

Attempt no landing there.
It's a really good article - I came across it today on my twitter feed, and it surprised me that it still has the same impact it had in 2005.
Support is the unsexy thing that no one wants to talk about
google cache:
http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:5Vg1jqkHi_QJ:m.ft.com/c...
What he's trying to build already exists (http://identi.ca), but will never succeed in any form: the only reason Twitter has stayed so constrained is because it's not federated. Only a walled garden can avoid basic features that way -- an open platform wouldn't embraced and extended so shittly.

What he actually wants also already exists, and he's using it successfully already. It's a goddamn blog.
No offense to Erik, but he seems to have interpreted the purpose of Atlas Shrugged as a recipe for building a society.

On the contrary, the book is intended only to shed light on some moral distinctions about capitalism that people are inclined not to appreciate.
And Tinychat does? :/ It was the first time I'd heard of it.
I don't know if you've seen it, but I outlined the attacks against H(msg || secret), aka "secret suffix", here:

http://rdist.root.org/2009/10/29/stop-using-unsafe-keyed-has...

In particular, there are simple attacks when it is used with a hash function that has effective collision attacks, such as MD5.
I was looking around for the answer to this question, too. I was a little surprised at the ordering of the top couple of movies, and that got me wondering if "most popular" was normalized somehow. Are these the most popular from 2009? Were the numbers normalized for how long the movies were available via DVD?

If there's no normalization, then this gives a snapshot about movie popularity... something like a 1-D vertical slice from a visualization like one of these two:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/2008022...

http://xach.com/moviecharts/2008.html

I don't want to knock this new visualization, but I'm wondering what inferences would be safe to draw from the data as presented. It seems like it is most useful for comparing regions to each other; for instance, I was surprised at how varied the movie ordering was for adjacent neighborhoods in Manhattan.
NFL Playoff Game Dallas Cowboys vs Philadelphia Eagles Live Stream Game Online
They're not productizing this any time soon. Read up on Gordon Bell and the MyLifeBits project.
I recently helped somebody (adult) to learn to ride a bike, and I'm pretty happy with how I did it. The first and only thing I insisted on was how to stop, i.e. how to come from both feet on the pedals and bike moving (mostly pushed by me) to a proper stop with one foot down. Once he could do it from a reasonable speed on both sides... it was pretty much over.

I took the idea from a friend who once got on a motorcycle without a good idea of where the break was, with rather funny results. First concern should be how to stop. The rest can be trial and error.
Boost your productivity with Hemingway’s hack
I like the concept of an oscar style voting model for startup awards a lot.
it has more average joe users...since this is based on voting, I bet tiny chat just threw up a "vote for us!" badge on their site.

That's the problem with user voting...the one with the biggest audience, always wins.
As I was reading this I noticed that Erik makes the same logical mistake that is often made when people contemplate evolutionary theory... the notion that natural selection happens to the group rather than to the individual.

It came as a sort of entertaining surprise, then, to read a bit further and notice that Erik explicitly attempts a metaphor about group selection to underscore his comments about how a human social system ought to work.

To those who haven't read the book in question: I recommend reading it for yourself before you waste much time reading essays like Erik's.
Wow! Now that looks like a keyboard map for some serious dark programming magic! Now I really want to put on my pointy hat and enter the astral planes of APL!
I commented on the first version(s) so I knew it already existed.
Really, HN? As someone who is already only interested in HN for hacker stuff and not entrepreneurial stuff, please please do not add articles about snow donuts on HN!

Edit: Or I don't know, maybe create another HN style site for Quite Interesting news?
2009 was a break out year for linux on the desktop for the people around me. In my company, linux has begun to bleed into non-technical departments. I convinced my aging parents to dump Windows, my acupuncturist brother in law, my wife etc. etc.

With more of an emphasis on console games as opposed to games on the desktop and with 80% or more of a user's time being spent on the browser on desktops, I only see it getting easier to transition people to Linux in business and at home. At my company, the plan is to transition everyone to Linux with two exceptions, testers so we can test compatibility (though those are run on VMs anyway) and old employees who are MSOffice power users that the learning curve for OpenOffice and the few missing features is too much for them to bear (and it is worth the few hundred bucks of licensing fees not to hear their complaining)...this amounts to two, maybe three people out of over 75...all developers and operations and most product sales consultants and engineers are already on Linux.
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20’s
Internet Mail 2000: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility
downvoted for signature
Were there any issues with converting over? Did you hear about any issues.
Sure but don't we (or at least Techcrunch) play a role in actually picking the nominees?
I'm going to lean to "no" if for no other reason than this has been said for the past ten years and it has never come true. It's like hearing someone talk about "kids today" or "Duke Nukem Forever", eventually just the phrase turns you off.

In all seriousness, however, I think that MacOS and Windows have come so far both in features and price, they can successfully stop Linux on the desktops' growth. Why would I mess with installing linux if there's so many ways to get Windows 7 on anything I want for not a lot?

This is the year of Linux on the console/set-top box/phone/tablet or other specialty device, perhaps, but not the desktop.
He doesn't debunk it. He asks the question why the normal regulation of the body, that tells you to stop eating, isn't working.

His answer is complex, but it all has to do with the introduction of fructose as a macronutrient after the 1970s.
The Fastest Way to Marketing Fail
I wish I fully understood half of what happened in that video. (First time seeing APL, very cool)
I strongly disagree with Zed on this one (at least part of his diatribe - he makes some good points about sample size/ramp-up/etc).

I don't care what your mean or standard deviation are. If your performance isn't symmetrically distributed about the mean (and it probably isn't), standard deviation probably doesn't mean what you expect.

I only look at performance in 99th percentile (or sometimes, 99.9th percentile). If 99% of responses are being served in 100ms on my webapp, I'm happy. I don't care if the mean is 5ms with a 20ms standard deviation. As long as the performance at the 99th (or 99.9th) percentile meets a level of 'acceptability' that I have predetermined, I'm satisfied. And you should be too.

This is much easier to deal with than trying to do real math. Just make sure that no more than 1% (or 0.1%, as the case may be) of requests take longer than X.

Pre-emptive answer: I usually get someone asking me why I don't demand acceptable performance at the 99.99999th percentile or at the slowest request. It's simply an issue of resources. To get that kind of performance, you can't use garbage collection, context switches become an issue, disk buffering even comes into play. You have to basically write a hard real-time (or pseudo real-time) app, and that level of effort isn't worth it for a consumer facing webapp. If I was writing code for a pacemaker or something (and please, dear god, no one ever let me do that) it damn sure better be hard real-time though.
still, what does it say about the startup community if we reward that kind of unethical behavior as a CEO?

I mean sure, these guys aren't the only ones who did these rebill offers. But they were the target of the whole Scamville issue.

Turning around, a month later and picking the guy behind this, as one of the 6 for people to vote for, just seems wrong.

If we don't regulate, what we find ethical as a startup community, then 5-10 years down the line Congress will do it for us. And trust me, we won't like it one bit, if they have to step in to protect the consumer.
To all who really dislike this comment:

For all comments that should be flagged, click "link", and then you get that comment's page, with a flag link.
Here are a few thoughts. These thoughts have the mindset of "how do i make linux get some form of mainstream adoption":

- People are comfortable with computing devices that aren't running windows now (netbooks, kindles, iphones, the thought of a tablet, etc.)

- It can't just be a software proposition. A large mass of people will not just say: let me uninstall windows/os x for linux.

- There needs to be a tight integration of Hardware, Software, AND Services/Support.

- I <3 open source. I absolutely think it's the reason most of us are able to do and build what we love on a daily basis. With that said: We need to get past some of the hippy ideals+everyone is tech savvy assumptions of the linux community. You need to bundle the "non-free" codecs and assume that no one will ever want to touch the command line.

The PC industry is complete and utter shit. It infuriates me like you wouldn't believe. All of the desktops are ugly, the service is absolute crap, and every computer comes with bloatware out the ass. Where's the "Apple of Linux PCs"? Why doesn't someone say: I'll build a great distro of linux that has what you need out of the box with amazing effects (cairo dock, compiz,etc.), looks absolutely stunning in a small form factor, AND provides great support+getting started support.
He thinks he's uncovered a major medical emergency that affects maybe a third of American citizens, to the profit of giant corporations, with government agencies in collusion. I would doubt him more if (given his claims) he didn't feel strongly about it.
isn't that more like one of the parents of twitter (the other being email)? I always saw twitter as slow IM
I tend to lean towards what you are saying.

Think about this; the AndroidOS is getting a lot of traction. Phones and companies are trying to develop their hardware around the operating system. There is the HTC Nexus One, the Motorola Droid and others. I hear regular discussions in the office about a Android phone.

Google's Android took off from day one. This is how Desktop Linux should have taken off. As far as I know, that hasn't happened.

(Yes, Anroid is based on the Linux kernel, but I wouldn't consider Android the typical Linux desktop OS).
It seems that a lot of people are looking to extend twitter with email-type features, but I wonder if the reverse strategy (extending email) might be more fruitful.

Email has some great properties that make it the ideal foundation for a communication service:

1. You can send arbitrary text with arbitrary encoding.
2. Attachments can be any type, size, or number.
3. Virtually any device on the planet can send and receive mail.
4. Everybody already has a unique ID that they've memorized.
5. There's a boggling amount of infrastructure already in place.
6. Spam filtering is quite mature, and remarkably effective.

Where email falls down is that it's stupid and slow. All intelligence is in the mail client, and email clients don't share information other than the mail itself. A smarter mail server (like Posterous) can do some really cool stuff. Couple smarter mail clients with a smarter server and the potential is huge.

I love all the new communications platforms and protocols, but I wonder if there isn't some life left in good old email.