skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a riddle. The nutrition labeling became law in 1990

Correlation does not imply causation. The cause of the "obesity epidemic" is overeating of nutrient-poor processed foods. These foods exist because the food industry needs to show its shareholders that 12%-per-year growth, but the population is not growing that quickly, and it's hard to get people to eat 12% more carrots per year. The solution is to sell less nutrients for the same amount of money, the side effect is that people eat more calories than they should, and balloon into the current problem. Food labeling is completely irrelevant, because the people that become obese eat what tastes good, not what a label tells them is healthy.

I find food labels to be very useful. Sometimes things have surprisingly high fat content, and the label points this out to people who care. (Ever cook your shrimp in coconut milk and notice how delicious it is? It's because the coconut milk has 20 grams of fat in 2 tablespoons. Bet you wouldn't have realized that without the label.)

You're right that it's obvious that a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips is unhealthy. The labels are for the cases when it's not as clear. There is a lot of junk-ish food that is actually pretty healthy, and there is a lot of healthy-seeming food that is actually very unhealthy. The labeling allows you to identify these special cases.

On a side note, I am from India and we don't have this nutrition label requirement and India doesn't have obesity problems. It's about what and how much people eat, nutrition label ain't gonna change it.

I think this is because a large majority of India's population can't afford to overeat processed food. Give everyone more money, and you'll see the same problems as in the US.
A question for you guys: What is the best way to learn about and start playing around with HTML 5. And how long would it take to produce something like this?
That's cool. Have you heard of http://drawball.com? It's a similar concept.
It won't be long before all applications are written in HTML/CSS/JS. This is beautifully done and should definitely convert more open standard web stack doubters.
Controversies over the term Engineer
> it doesn't look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West

Add edges into Canada to the graph. Half the tourists here in Vancouver on a normal year (i.e. not this one) are from Seattle.
I'm curious about how the data was gathered.
Would you rather run the iPhone OS or Android?

I myself would much rather run Android, and I think I'm going to wait 6 months for one with a keyboard with a faster processor than the Droid.
> Eugenics was and still is part of the agreed-upon scientific consensus.

WTF? Eugenics is a policy proposal, not a fact. How could it possibly be part of the scientific consensus?
I suspected that was where this was going, so I checked the comments.

Thanks for saving me the two minutes.
What Your Choice of Search Engine Says About You
Window that morphs into a balcony
Would love to hear more -- can I email you with some questions?
I'm thinking that you're right: if the placebo effect reduces the error rate by 50%, then the environment definitely needs a permanently installed placebo like these vests.
"CO2 is not a pollutant, any more than water vapor is."

CO2 actually is considered a pollutant by the EPA. There are lots of things that are 'natural' but that are still pollutants. For example, fine particulates are considered a pollutant because they cause cancer. Thus construction equipment is not allowed to vent unlimited amounts of diesel fumes, even though much of what is released is basically the same as the stuff that already occurs to a small extent in the natural environment.
Downvoted for saying you expect a rain of downvotes.
When you are selling yourself in the future, absolutely do not call out a negative in your ad.

The number one rule of advertising is be positive, always.
I look up stuff in the hyperspec about 200 times per day in CL hacking mode. Quick access to the CLHS and the ability to parse its style are essential for a serious CL hacker.
Exactly the same testing you do for climate science. Both are types of science where you get only one effective shot at predicting a given event because once an event passes you can no longer predict it.

Which is harder is hard to tell. Climate science has to deal with far more variables (current models still measure their grids in terms of miles, AFAIK) and the data is radically inferior to economic data. On the other hand, climate science does not (yet!) have to contend with people who take the predictions and actively use them to further confound the system.

(I say "yet" because if climate science becomes good enough to use it for engineering, all long-term predictions go out the window once nations start actively engineering outcomes. Note this isn't a criticism of climate science, it would in fact be strong validation, if the interventions worked as predicted. It's just that predictions predicated on the lack of intervention would no longer be valid.)
I'd be interested in thoughts on how I as a non-leader can modify my environment to reduce interruptions at certain times, but do so in a way that's not off-putting to my coworkers. I work in a row of cubicles and am surrounded on all sides by teammates that I adore, but who love to talk to me (and who I love to talk to). That's great, except when I need to get work done, which is ironically my usual state at work.
Nature
Nature is a true victim of an alliance of evil. Mohamed El Naschie is without a trace of a doubt the most original scientist since Newton and Einstein. He is a natural talent. Suffice to know that he never formally studied physics or mathematics. Never the less his impact on science is incredible. Within ten years his scientific impact went from 0.2 per cent to 35 per cent. To appreciate this in a more tangible way you should read the recent book The Mathematics of Harmony by academician Prof. Alexey Stakhov. This book just appeared in World Scientific and has already been nominated for a possible Nobel Prize by Gennady Shypov and Yuri Mitropolsky as you can read on the back of the cover. Another book where El Naschie’s cosmology is discussed on page 180 is The Pea and The Sun by Leonard M. Wapner, published in 2005 by A.K. Peters Ltd, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA. The book is a testament of the boldness and originality of El Naschie who used for the first time the Banach-Tarski theorem to elucidate the coming of the universe from nothingness. Mohamed El Naschie’s theory is now a fact. It is well known that he found the golden mean to be the basis of quantum mechanics. He was mercilessly mocked for this by the establishment for using something as esoteric as the golden mean in science. The joke is now on them because the establishment in Helm Holz Inst. and the University of Oxford have just found the golden mean in quantum mechanics experimentally a couple of weeks ago. Ironically this work is going to be published in Science which is the prime competitor of Nature. Mohamed El Naschie is probably the most envied scientist in the history of science. The reason is that he committed three sins wrapped up in a forth one. He is very affluent and never needed to beg for funding. He has a very happy family life. He is loved by everybody who knows him. This three attributes are then wrapped up in an extremely naïve and straight forward character which many charlatans used to attack him without his realization. The worst attack came from some of his closest so called friends. These friends are in his native country Egypt as well as Holland and unfortunately England. These friends conspired with a well known Nobel laureate in Experimental Chemistry to pressure Elsevier to shut down Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. When they did not succeed they enlisted the assistance of several subsidiaries of the world’s largest publisher, Macmillan. The tabloid article in Nature is just one of several others. It is the worst of them all. I do not need to repeat the details here because you will read it all in the transcript of the trial from the High Court in London. I sincerely hope Mohamed El Naschie wins his case so that this institutionalized bullying of large institutions will be dismantled. It will be the first time that a professor brings a multibillion institution to its knees using the simple sword of truth in the Courts of Justice.
A Rigged Game
Am I the only person who get really annoyed at people who say "could care less"? Not only does it make no sense, but where do these people get there phrases from? Do they just randomly parrot whatever they hear? Everytime I see this I literally rip my eyes out!
Possibly using this trick to request the JSON friendlist of any user that surfaced a week ago?

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4726/view-faceboo...

[EDIT]: Looks like the data was scraped from publicly available profiles: http://fanpageanalytics.com/about.php
I know why the above was downvoted. But here is a subtle point in there. AS is classically over diagnosed. A lot of my friends were diagnosed AS at school. The vast majority of them had an epiphany moment that "cured" it in the last few years.

It makes me mad because a minority of those friends really do have a problem. So many people are told they are AS it negates any benefit of diagnosis.
The best website is no website. "apt-get install xul-ext-firebug"++.
Eugenics is not a policy proposal, it's an engineering discipline. Eugenics is the practice of using selective breeding to cause future generations to display desired genetic traits.

So, to be more precise in my language, the scientific fact is this: eugenics can be used to alter future genotypes (with high probability) and to alter phenotypes to the extent that phenotypes are caused by genetics.
Here is the Javadocs for the kindle specific stuff:
http://kdk-javadocs.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
Nothing too exciting. No sound, no location.
HTML5 is not about the death of Flash, but the return of browser innovation
Climate scandal professor considered suicide
It would've been either way in my experience here recently. At least it gets discussed. Well, actually now regret I wasting time posting here. Down vote it to oblivion, I don't care anymore.
She must live in an area with no flying insects.
Eugene Kleiner (Founder Kleiner Perkins)
Is it ironic that Socialistan is nearing bankruptcy?
Look at the source code. ~7000 lines of javascript -> anywhere from a month to a year, depending on how good/fast you are.
It's Socalistan, like SoCal.
If you want to stop aging, fund SENS research to the tune of a billion dollars over ten years. http://www.sens.org. Full stop, end of story.

What if the research doesn't turn up anything we can do? Or, worse, what if it shows that stopping aging requires exercise, adequate sleep, eating vegetables, and refraining from excessive sex, drugs, and rock and roll?
Absolutely stunning on OS X Safari - unbelievably responsive!
I don't think any of the names were offensive.
How does this apply to subscription-based models? I'm guessing that the valley of death bounds change when you're talking about monthly recurring revenue.

If most managers can approve a $5,000 purchase without much hassle, what's the magic number for monthly subscriptions? Is it $5K/12? Higher? Lower?

Also, with subscription-based sales, you often have the opportunity to sell more plans to the same organization if your product solves their problem. Is there some magic number that people have experienced here? If it's proven by one business unit, can you get enough "grass-roots" support to equal something close to $100K/12? That would be nice because it cuts down on the timeline of the initial sale and is a natural way to recruit internal champions.
I like your second point. One of my older engineering professors (PhD in '64) made an observation that I found particularly astute:

"Scientists discover what is, engineers create what never was. Think always about how things can be improved, or how new things can be created."
Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits
My guess is the trend has been to call programmers developers and the relative number of jobs available is roughly the same.

Unless there's some sort of real difference that I haven't found, I don't care if someone calls me a programmer or a developer. I really don't see any difference beside word choice.
Porque pierden clientes las empresas en latinoamerica
en latinoamerica las empresas pierden clientes porque la creatividad es nula, los medio de publicitarse siguen siendo los mismos de hace una decada
Referring to the Deep South as Dixie is just fine. And interestingly, it doesn't really extend west to Louisiana according to my mother, who'd from it.
I think you're making my point in that unverifiable does not equal debunked. The heads of the IPCC have apologized but in that apology they are saying that the people who put that sentence in did so without doing proper due diligence which to me translates to "They knew this claim might not be true and put it in anyway"

The article might take a leap by attributing their motives to politics (as opposed to say laziness) but since no one knows what the motivations were exactly you can't say any claim has been debunked.

As for Climategate and Global Warming in general your position that not accepting man made Global Warming is some how denialism or uninformed is just as ignorant as those who claim it's absolutely wrong. People like Richard Lindzen (Professor of Meteorology at MIT) have documented political pressure put on scientists to conform so that does exist and it does cause many to doubt the credibility of the research.
do you think this attitude might have something to do with it?

No. I say this as a person who has been homeless because nobody would hire her. I'm not the most genius on the planet, but I'm also not an idiot. I've dealt with far too many people who, when bragging about being an "engineer", fail to understand the value of having somebody on the team who knows and talks business.
I had an excellent prof. who did this with a Tablet PC using PowerPoint's annotation tools. It seemed like a really natural use for a pen-based computer, and made for a good mix of results- nice, readable slides, but with the spontaneity and temporal benefits of a good chalkboard lecture.
I like this: <div id="boasting">
I'm surprised Google didn't send him one as a freebie
You might have to deal with euthanasia, stopping people having kids, or sharing wealth more widely if people live longer though.
"Engineering is a thing you do. It is not the name of a course, a piece of paper, or a certification exam."

Actually it is a piece of paper. In every state in the United States you have licensed by the state to call yourself and engineer and sell engineering services. The same as doctors, nurses, lawyers, barbers, and whatever other professions states deem required to have licenses.
nope, the .png doesn't exist either, but the 404 page it hits is kind of fun: http://getfirebug.com/img/bg-header.pmg
Cool stuff, but the video should be faster, or at least allow you to jump ahead.
That is a really cool design. I was thinking that they should have made something slide over the "floor" glass though, so you don't get footprint/shoeprints on it (and thus have to clean it after every time you use it).
> Eugenics is a policy proposal, not a fact. How could it possibly be part of the scientific consensus?

It was a proposal for dealing with some "facts" and "theories" about which there was scientific consensus.

BTW - Eugenics in the US was a progressive enterprise.
not the interesting actionscript story I was hoping for...
> CO2 actually is considered a pollutant by the EPA.

So what? The EPA is a regulatory agency. If they define something as a pollutant, they get to issue regulations and control things.

If you're going to take a regulatory agency's word, ketchup is a vegetable....
I wasn't enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge.

Is pinch-to-zoom really that important?
A rug?

Something to save from inevitable upskirts at least.
Ugh, I forgot about that one, and didn't see it when I went back over to verify my statement.

It won't fix the stagnant user interface issue, but it might fix problems with the slowness since new versions of CS use Flash even for UI widgets, so if can you can set it up such that CS uses a faster Flash Player, then you can get better performance.
They should have shown her big fat boyfriend come out there also, so that #1, I'll feel safe about the weight rating, and #2, I'll know that even if I'm big and fat, this window will help me land babes.
The specific claim that the original author made in attributing an error to political motives was, in fact, debunked, as the entire claim rests on a single he-said-she-said between a scientist and a journalist, the latter of whom has made a career out of exaggerating and inventing errors in climate change science in order to sell papers. True, it is not a complete and unambiguous debunking in that there still exists some slight bit of wiggle room, but that's not my point at all-- if the author had really cared about representing the subject matter in a way that reflects reality, she would have made a much weaker claim, or at the very least, she would have acknowledged how incredibly poorly supported her claim really was.

As for political pressure in climate research, well, that's a rather extraordinary claim, given that there has been documented rather a lot of political pressure in the opposite direction, such as the governor of the state of Alaska telling the researchers at the largest university in the state that they needed to work to prove environmentalists wrong. No doubt one can always find small and local examples of individual PIs acting inappropriately-- that happens in all fields-- but to show that there is widespread political pressure to produce positive AGW studies would take quite a bit of evidence. To me, this argument holds about as much water as the creationist argument that they're being censored. If there's a widespread rejection of papers documenting anti-AGW studies, it may in fact be because they fail to reflect reality.
isn't pinch-to-zoom already available on the iphone for, like, 3 years...?
I could be wrong, but it looks to me that this site is a collection of news stories regarding IT security in a single portal, nothing more, exact same concept as The Drudge Report, would you consider that linkjacking?
Judging by the About page, it looks as though they have highly competent and highly certified people posting these stories, and they provide several ways to contact them even publishing a toll free phone # to contact them for feedback. I've never seen a website as open to feedback as this site is. Doesn't appear to me that they are hiding the fact that this is run by a Florida IT consultancy firm, in fact, they link back to the parent company directly on the About page. I personally visit this site several times a week and have learned a ton about what's going on in the IT security realm from it. Most of the stories posted on here offer a lot more information than just the story linked.
Adobe CTO promises better Mac performance in Flash 10.1
Except the iPhone doesn't run Linux, which is what Linus actually wanted.
Well, the difference is that iPhone OS is only meant to run a few specific Apple devices. Flash is so integral now that to stay alive it must be able to run on anything that loads web pages.

As such, it makes much more sense to open up Flash. Even if Apple opened iPhone OS, that would only solve the problem for Apple's devices (assuming Adobe acted upon the openness, though I don't see any reason why they would or why they don't have enough info to create it now), and everyone else's beefs with Flash would still exist.
Not as far as I'm concerned. Thankfully it's not the only way to zoom on the nexus, because it pretty much requires two hands to use, one to hold the phone and the other to pinch. I don't think any other function requires two hands on the nexus, although it is sometimes faster to type with two hands. (This messages was typed on my nexus).
Their about page shows a group of people all standing on the balcony.
http://www.bloomframe.nl/about.php
You must be one of those "IPCC Chumps".
What is lacking is long term studies. That is essentially what the doctor in the article notices.

The same is true for food additives. How many companies do you think conduct 20 year long studies on chemicals that mimic hormones? Pumping rabbits and mice with massive dosages might not be the same as a long term exposure to very small doses.
Headphones, even when you're not listening to music.

Any form of easily-understood signal will help; the only requirement is that it not be rude to those around you. (Alternately, it can be so over-the-top rude that everyone thinks it's funny. But they'll also take the point.) The funniest one I've heard is two students in the sciences who were writing theses - they got a hold of a pair of white labcoats, and put them on when they don't want to be disturbed writing their theses. "I'm doing science".
I'm aware that some Europeans use commas to do their decimal separator, but I've never heard of anyone using the same symbol for both decimal separator and thousand-multiple separator. All the same, thanks for breaking out the numbers.
This line of thinking is failure waiting to happen.

Sooner or later, a team of engineers needs to have the value of its time-consuming product quantified. If you hire somebody who is on your side, then the variable is certain to go up, and a business person will end up making everybody on the engineering team more money by adding a quantifiable value to the efforts of the collective. Business people are engineers' advocates. Failing to hire a business person means product will almost certainly get "ripped off" or valued less than its market value, at the detriment of every body on the team.
That's a brilliant concept: nothing teaches you something like a real project, getting paid, even a pittance, helps all the more, and you can put it on your resume honestly.
We're all "long term studies." Where's the brain-cancer epidemic? People who smoke are more likely to get lung cancer, an otherwise rare disease. So if everybody started smoking, we'd see a large spike in lung-cancer cases. However, we have not seen a large spike in brain-cancer cases across all populations who started using cell phones en masse in the 1990s.

So exactly what problem is being addressed here, besides poor high-school physics education?
Interesting. Headphones empirically do not work in my situation. Maybe a neon-pink Do Not Disturb sign above my monitor that I can flip into position when I want to zone.
Not even if you're Deepak.
That's a great combined usage of those three tools.
It's good that they clarify that this is only commit counts. I guess I'm not too surprised since Google, as a newcomer (relative to Apple), surely has a whole set of features and ideas it wants to implement that Apple hasn't considered before.

In fact, the source blog explains that a lot of the work had been to make WebKit work better with Google web apps.

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/10/going-u...
I like how us "true" engineers in Canada are given an iron ring. It's like we have our own little secret club :)