skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Evolution as a natural order. I'm pretty sure evolution trumps de-evolution, otherwise you wouldn't be here my friend. At the core is "knowledge transfer" from one generation to the next.
The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman
>I would definitely avoid rice...

Ever live in a Chinese household? If rice is so bad why do so many of the hundreds of millions of people who eat it 2 or even 3 times a day remain skinny and trim (Rice. Not the things that can go with it, not the ways it can be prepared or abused... just rice)? This is such a non-starter I don't even know where to... start.
Just found a way to do a similar thing on github: http://github.com/repositories/recent?page=8433 is the last page of repositories with 30 items per page - that gives ~252990 repositories. Not even close to the number cited in the article... I'd really like to know where does the difference come from.
So the body is craving for salt, or craving for impurities?

Feed it the one it needs. If the body needs impurity x, which is tastily packaged with salt product y, advising to eat y seems like the sort of behaviour the OP is trying to avoid.
I am, though I haven't done any ham radio stuff for a few years now. My callsign is VE3MTM.
I never saw this quote in the past, but apparently it's quoted a lot. And it's so true.
I've been curious about this for a while: how would one cut out carbs? They're the most easily absorbable form of energy available. Without carbs you would have to bring in energy in the form of fats which can't be good in the long run.
"I would not suggest doing this unless you are a licensed ham of general or better." Why? Is being licensed required for this?
Wow, the after 4am is almost double the before 10pm.
I have to keep it simple so here is what I do:

No soda. Ever. I drink unsweetened iced tea instead.

No unhealthy snacks on hand. Keep bananas, watermelon and apples instead.

Most important because I eat tons of them, roasted almonds. I keep boxes of these on hand and roast them myself (15 minutes at 350 degrees).

For dinners, try to eat more fish.

For breakfast try to eat unsweetened things (I eat unsweetened oatmeal that I make tasty by cooking in milk, not water, and adding raisins, blueberries, cinnamon and cloves).

Combined with biking more this has helped me lose 30 pounds in three months.
I really don't understand the argument here. "It was a year before he registered the domain so he probably hadn't thought of it"? Well... except we have a contract that mentions it.
Only wusses need comments in order to bloat their code.
There are so many "effective" alternatives.
> Not too much variety

Any reason why a smoothie with various fruit and maybe some yogurt wouldn't serve the same purpose? I really enjoy these but haven't been making them for some time. Posts like this give me a little motivation but what's the reason for the lack of variety?
> I'm trying to learn French and it still sucks, after
> almost 3 months in Paris (but not much social contact,
> admittedly, as I came here without knowing any people).

Well get to know some people! Drop by my office in Suresnes :)
To be perfectly honest and sincere, you haven't done shit. I think you'll be amazed at how many people get technical degrees and suck at life anyway, and you really shouldn't tempt fate so much.
A model is something more concrete. It has a physical aspect and incorporates ideas about consequences in reality so a belief system is not necessarily a model the way I have defined it.
Hotel marketing: ads vs. reality
While the whole "people did it for ages" argument never works I must admit I'm rather puzzled how one would give up potatoes, rice _and_ bread.

How exactly are they evil? What is so dangerous about carbs? Aren't snacks to blame? In a typical Russian home one of which I grew up it's a loaf a day or more. Italians and French eat even more bread. And as the OO mentioned, Asian nations consume unimaginable amounts of rice.

Yet America remains one of the most overweight nations.
It just seems to me like it's a mosquito bite and you're asking to chop off the arm.
Makes me wonder about the role of the brush/pen. Is it just an extension of the finger, or does it bring more than that to the artist using it?

Considering the comments on the page, it seems to me artists have different opinions about this as well. One thing missing is pressure sensitivity, of course, but I wonder if the lack of a stylus touched upon in the comments have more to do with what one is used to than actual advantages. I can imaging that well-working pressure sensitivity in conjunction with a finger gives more precision than using a brush, once one is used to it.
Quantum mechanics flummoxes physicists again
Doesn't work on Chrome (5.0.375.99 beta), Firefox (3.5.9) extremely laggy. Impressive nevertheless.
a) The FCC love to exert their dominance over everyone and it's illegal to use a radio channel without permission / licensing.
b) You would be being an ass to hams who are trying to use the channel to communicate amongst themselves but now it's filled with ununderstandable garbage.
Heh, but it's not entirely made up. Mentor Graphics really did epically fail when they tried that rewrite and it was a major event in C++ history, seeing as how they had (informal?) support from Bell Labs etc. etc.

This very useful book covers it a bit in the intro: http://www.amazon.com/Taming-Pattern-Classes-Persistence-Pro...

The number one lesson learned from that experience according to the author and my memory was "Make your class hierarchies directed acyclic graphs" ... which of course wasn't a C++ issue at all. As the first widely adopted OO language C++ gets a lot of mostly undeserved flack for being the medium in which a lot of us learned the OO paradigm.

A bit like how all those companies that oversold expert systems in the '80s blamed Lisp for their problems, causing both AI and Lisp winters.
Don't "peacock" your business. Most of the business you're going after cares less about this than you think. That's especially true during economic downturns, where big is synonymous with overpriced.

In the long run, you aren't fooling anyone with that (they're going to figure it out), it's a terrible, unnecessary mental burden, and your customers will probably find out that you've been deceiving them.

In my first company, my partner and I fell prey to that need to exaggerate our stature. It was almost entirely fueled by our own insecurities, not actual client expectations. In retrospect, we both believe that a large part of our inability to weather the dotcom bust was tied to things we did out of an imagined need to "peacock".
Yes, the 30m band is allocated to amateur radio operators by the ITU, and this is enforced by the authorities in each member country (e.g. Industry Canada in Canada, or the FCC in the US).

In practice, especially on bands this low, it's mostly unenforceable. Just don't be a jerk: keep your power low, your bandwidth small, and make sure no one is using the channel before you smear your transmission all over it.
This really needs to be read and upvoted.
Actually, it can help if you have a risk-averse spouse. We aggressively pay off our mortgage so that we'll be free of that expensive obligation sooner. It requires sacrifices from everyone, kids and parents--but we're not convinced that the most important portion of a child's upbringing is how much you spend on them.
What country are you in? (I'm guessing not the US since there isn't much to study to join civil services here.)
"Symptom: you've written more than a 5pg business plan."

The design brief for our website was seven pages if I remember correctly. First we described who our customers were, along with their psychology and values. Then we described the vibe we were going for and why it would resonate with them. Then we described 10 or so design elements that sent signals consistent with what we were going for, and listed five or so examples of each element being used on various sites across the web. Now I realize that this is different than a business plan, but if you haven't done more than five pages worth of thinking then you probably don't understand what your assumptions are or how to test them.
This looks great! Very excited about it after watching your demo video. Great job so far....
New Windows Logo Concept
I don't know if many of you have looked closely at Apple's Keynote, but it's a stones throw from being an update to hypercard. It just needs to add support for scripting and you're done.
Because Chinese people (at least the skinny+trim ones) have a single, small bowl of rice and eat tons of veggies and then a few pieces of meat.

Not the Amero-Chinese style half-plate of rice with a heaping of fatty meat cut, slathered in some sauce composed of half-salt half-cooking oil, with a few veggies thrown in for "color."
It's actually an oversimplified (biased?) view of Chomsky's theories. Chomsky stated that language acquisition relies upon innate abilities and that all languages share some basic "structures" (the theory dates back from times when structuralism was all the rage). The theory has been proven false or inaccurate in many details, but the driving concept is definitely true.
I don't doubt it, I'm just curious as to why you, or any other HNers, would find it interesting. What skills do you think would be applicable or transferable?

full disclosure: I'm in a somewhat similar situation right now
I chose to use "projects" over "repositories" in the headline to make it more understandable to a non-coder. There are some gists are more worthy of being called a full project than many repositories anyway. Hopefully this doesn't take away from the main point which is that github is kicking ass.
About two years ago I tried a lot of different frameworks and languages to find which one would suit me best. After having tried various PHP frameworks, J2EE, Perl I arrived at Django/Python. The plan was to continue on to Rails after Django, but I loved Django so much that I couldn't imagine that Rails could be any better. Seems like I was right ;)

Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.
Simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity. Try to solve problems by removing things, not adding them.
They are, and they absolutely should be. They're completely separate projects/repositories from those from which they came. The owner of a forked repository is completely free to make whatever changes they please -- from a few bug fixes to taking projects in completely new directions (as I've done with a forked repository of my own). As far as GitHub is concerned, in the context of a forked repository being a first-class citizen, it's a minor detail that the code was originally "copied" (to use the term loosely) from somewhere else.
I recommend "short americano." Espresso+hot water, and as a short it's about the same price as a tall coffee for the same kick. Their espresso beans and pulls are pretty reliable; their coffee, not so much. Except for Tully's, I've never experienced a coffee chain with such a habit of failing to put in the drip filter correctly and handing out cups of sludge.

And their light roasts are overly acidic, but that's just the Peet's fan in me being a bit prejudiced.
In the early 90's engineers were being laid off and graduating physicists couldn't find jobs. Many of us had to change careers. What is seen as useless in one time period can be valuable in another.

For example, when I started college in the 80's in many colleges CS was still a bullshit curriculum in some respects. They learned a little calc, a little science, but not really enough of either to develop the thought patterns (or even the vocabulary, really) of the fields. Kids who knew they needed to do something technical but didn't have the background or aptitude kind of failed into CS.

As CS (quickly) matured, so did its instruction, and before long it was the place where the smart kids went. Their ideas cross-pollinated with the rest of science and "suddenly," because it was cheaper to gain efficiency by making the software better than by making the hardware better, CS types were in demand.
Pour a bowl full of frozen peas. Run hot water over them until the peas no longer freeze together and the water stays hot. Let them sit like this for a couple minutes. Dump the water off. At this point they will taste like they just came out of the pod. Easy, quick, health, and tasty. I do this with frozen corn too.
Just before 10pm, and up at 4am to get in my workout and get to work before the hungover morning slacker crowd gets in.
It seems like the best-case scenario here is to just rely on software to do the chasing. Everyone already knows that software is a jerk.

FreeAgent does a great job of telling me when invoices are overdue. If I could configure it to send an obviously-automated email whenever that happens, it'd solve most of my invoice-chasing problems.
If the problem is fatty meat or oil and salt or other junk people eat with rice then why tell people "Don't eat rice"?

It isn't the rice that's bad, it's the stuff people eat with it yet I repeatedly see people say "don't eat rice" and frankly, I think that's a load of bull. Don't blame rice for bad American eating habits.
You don't have to cut out carbohydrates; just REFINED carbohydrates.

Refined carbohydrates cause an unhealthy "spike" in blood insulin levels. It's the insulin drop that is felt as a "craving." The body "craves" an insulin spike.

And fats aren't bad for you. You need them to live. In general, your diet should be around 40/30/30 Carb/Fat/Protein.

There are tons of articles out there on how to eat properly but I've been paying a lot of attention to Robb Wolf lately. He has been getting some pretty impressive results with his recommendations.
Just like Rails has some drop-in "fixes" (i.e. the admin) that don't come with the core, Django does as well.

Dependency management: pip requirements files.
Migrations (which the author doesn't like, but are pretty useful on a non-trivial project): South
Various other goodies: django-extensions

There are constant debates over whether XYZ should be in the core (see: South), or at least better discoverable, but if you're going to use a framework seriously it's worth it to evaluate as "framework + its stable and commonly accepted extras".
Chasing a Sound in your Head
India's $35 Android tablet for developing world
The difference between ActiveRecord and Django models, is ActiveRecord reads the schema. When you're developing, having an ORM create tables and add colums willy nilly is fine.

DataMapper took this approach initially, and was basically unusable in production because all it could do was create and drop tables. They've since added a handy upgrade method, and even ActiveRecord style migrations.

Personally, I like keeping the model and schema separate. I rarely need a giant list of columns at the top of my model. Luckily, Rails 3 will work great with DataMapper or Sequel (two fine alternatives to AR) if that's how you want to roll.
Node.js is changing the game, Ruby and Rails are just the new Cobol.
> Like the author, I too think Django's default directory structure doesn't work very well once you start doing bigger projects. But luckily, everything is so loosely coupled that you can change the directory structure entirely without too much work.

Some of it doesn't even work well for small projects--the first thing I do after ./manage.py startproject is change around settings.py so I can have local settings (namely db stuff) and not have to change things around when I push it to a server.
When I went low-carb for awhile, I made a point of being full all the time. It's hard to crave anything when you're already full. Of course this only works because with a low-carb diet (in my case at least) I achieved the desired effect (improved cholesterol counts) despite the fact that I was seemingly eating more food. For the record I lost weight as well, although that wasn't the goal. Here's more info if you like. http://gcanyon.posterous.com/?sort=&search=cholesterol
The key is refined carbs not all carbs.
Killing Primitive Loops and Conditionals
Some questions to ponder while we all continue to wait for the new NRC rankings:

Are the data that will be used in the rankings losing their analytical validity since they will be from the 2005-2006 academic year?

Why wasn't the NRC able to produce its rankings more quickly, using more up-to-date information?

How many faculty members have switched institutions and departments since the NRC first started collecting data in fall 2006? This is very important because faculty data are a key part of the NRC's analysis.
I subscribe to the view that the template language is
for designers and should only allow safe constructs.

As someone who does both design and programming, I hate template systems that do this with a passion. I don't want to have to learn another language just so I can write templates. Especially when that language makes me jump through hoops to do various simple tasks the designers didn't anticipate--which is the case with every such language I've used.

Erb is one of the nicer templating systems I've used. I've never had any trouble getting it to do exactly what I want it to do, and I've never had it behave in a way I didn't expect--which is another advantage to having it just use Ruby.

It doesn't have anything on Haml, though.
Why is high fat, high protein, low carbohydrate better? Aren't fats a sort of "permanent storage" whereas carbohydrates are more likely to be used instantly and then stored if there is extra?
I posted this above as well, but based on the numbers, a low-carb diet was very healthy for me: http://gcanyon.posterous.com/?sort=&search=cholesterol
The point the "The Face Book" might not refer to the initial implementation of what we now know as "Facebook" is a good point, and I'm sure Facebook's lawyers will beat it to death.

The idea that not registering the domain name is some kind of proof that you aren't working on something sounds absurd coming from an obviously intelligent person. Maybe you could find a judge that is so technically unsophisticated to let that one fly, but the opposition won't.

I agree with the commenters that way that Paul Ceglia just wants his money. If he waited this long to attempt to grab a piece of Facebook, it seems unlikely he'd turn down a large settlement in return for a chance to fight Facebook's lawyers for the company.
"Food hacks" nooooooo. Please, no more, I can't take it anymore. Let's all "hack" our diets so we're healthier.

Y'know what I did last night? I hacked my eyes. That's right, these glasses right here are hacking my eye-sight. Wicked.

When did hacking start meaning rational common sense? Or just the verb of putting effort towards something? I'm not in love with the word hack, but it's annoying when I want to figure out how to hack my home router and there are articles about eating more fibre so you can hack your stool.
Most people have this issue, some to a larger degree than others, if they don't give themselves strong light cues.
You stay classy, Rails.
Ask HN: My brain refuses to think, what should I do?
I have a problem I've been experiencing for some time now. I hope someone experienced something similar and has some good advice.

I've come to a point where it's really hard to do even the easiest work. Each time I sit to code and I face the slightest "problem", I start looking for a distraction as soon as possible. I realized it today when I had to write one line of code to calculate the scale of an image.

It was really a trivial problem, I just need to figure out a couple of measures to put into a division, but since it requires 30 seconds of thinking, my brain guides my hand to the nearest distraction (i.e. the facebook/email/HN). I really have to struggle to do some work (as a side note this goes away a little when I manage to begin working, but the danger always lurks waiting for some more difficult task to distract me from).

It's not a lack of motivation. This is a project I want to work on and when I'm not at my computer I think about how to code it and I just wait to have some time to work on it. I feel motivated thinking how cool it will be and really want to do it. But as soon as I have time, like in weekends, I start wasting it in useless activities. When I force myself to sit and code, my mind surrenders at the smallest obstacle.

It looks like my brain is not used to think anymore. I can spend time reading a lot of things, but as soon as I try to actively do something, my mind refuses to do it. I think I have some sort of addiction/disorder and I can look for psychotherapy, but I wan to know if there are easier and cheaper remedies. Any advice?
Oh yes, if I had it my way we'd all write for loops like so:

int i = 0;
int count = 20;

while(
(i < count)
&&
!(i > count)
)
{
// some code
}
Ask HN: How can I make $500 per month?
I am a freelance web designer. My portfolio is at www.mediarosh.com

Lately its becoming more and more difficult to find work regularly. It is difficult because I am based outside the US and there is no local market for web design.

So my question is what is the best way to make $500 per month regularly using my skills as a web designer?
He gets that, which is why he says 'programming language / framework'.
Too bad that it doesn't seem like Microsoft applied that philosophy to most of its products (at least not back when I used their products. Maybe they've started recently -- I've stopped following them a few years ago when I bought a Mac).

I wonder if any ex-Microsoft employee ever came out and said that they actually had the explicit goal of making each successive version of their main products (windows, office) much slower than the last so that people would upgrade to a new computer, making Intel happy, and leading to more "comes with the computer" licenses instead of pirating.
I wrote something, better described as an attribute language, that fits the idea of a 'template language is for designers' called RuHL. http://docs.stonean.com/page/ruhl
Getting sick of hearing about all these vapor-ware announcements. Get it out and then we will see what price it turns out to be (and it isn't going to be this low).
I have no science to back this up, but my gut feeling is that smoothies are like candy, and aren't actually very good for you. The act of blending everything takes all the work out of it, and now there's just a bunch of sugars for your body to absorb.

I like to make my body work for its calories, which is mostly a response to hypoglycemia. Anything I can do to make calories (specifically carbohydrates) harder to digest, the better. Brown rice, whole grains, and whole fruits are far better than their alternatives.