skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In large part, we need to educate people on food choices in America. Labeling is a start, but it's mostly a cultural change that we're not quite sure how to tackle on a large scale.

One problem is processed food. If you make food with fresh produce you will almost always be eating healthier and more nutritious food than if you eat processed foods. It's also much cheaper than eating out - just a time investment. Sadly, we're too busy to even enjoy good food and take the time to make good food. It's really sad that our culture misses one of the greatest aspects (IMHO) of life.

So what I'm saying is that properly labeling Vitamin Water is not necessarily the answer. Properly labeling potato chips, French fries, etc. only goes so far (it's common knowledge what's "junk food" and what isn't). The answer is figuring out a way to get people to value the food they eat, and ensuring that the demand for vitamins in flavored water or junk food don't exist - we should be getting our vitamins from fruits and vegetables to begin with, and only supplementing if necessary (otherwise, we miss out on the fibers in fruits and a whole host of other good stuff).

EDIT:

So the main problem is that we try to oversimplify nutrition. We say "fat = bad, vitamins = good" when we should emphasize balance.
Contracts like you suggest are common and working today in other cities. When I bought a condo in central London, my contract with the association of all other owners in the building specifically forbade short-term sublets, and forbade any sublets without the written approval of the association. When one condo owner started renting out on weekends through web advertising, the association had its lawyer bring that clause to the owner's attention and the practice was stopped immediately. No law needed. (BTW, these contracts for UK condo property take the form of "leases" for hundreds of years, which can be sold like other property.)
This already happens under the current system. It's not a new problem specific to the Jury Duty Model of Representative Democracy. The solution is to have strong ethics rules to prevent it from happening. You prohibit ex-legislators from working as lobbyists for a lengthy period of time after their term of service. You make a rule, similar to the rules in place regarding reserve military service or FMLA, that guarantees that the person's old job is still there for them after they finish their term of service in the legislature. You treat a promising a job or material wealth to a candidate or sitting legislator in exchange for their vote as a crime and prosecute lobbyists for doing it.

In one way, the system I've proposed has an inherent protection against this problem that our current system doesn't have. Specifically, because all candidates are chosen by random lottery, an incumbent cannot run for a second term except in the exceedingly rare circumstance that they are chosen twice in a row by the lottery. Therefore, the incumbent has no incentive to try to please any third party that helped them get elected in order to retain their support for a re-election campaign.
yes and no

In Dutch (technically not too far from English) we only use past and present tense, and although we can mark the future with a special verb like in English, we often don't do that. It is perfectly possible to mark the time with a time marker then, but often this is not necessary to be understood. Relative time can be enough to be clear for the other. (Like "I am short of bread. So I go to the market and buy some. Then I eat it." is grammatically incorrect English, but easily understood, and a correct formulation in Dutch.)

Esperanto has past, present and future and has the possiblity to note the completeness of an action, but it's not obligatory as in English.

toki pona has no inflection and doesn't indicate time at all. If you want to indicate time, you end up using a complicated grammatical construction of causation. Mostly you just make a general statement or indicate time as something coming before or after something else.
If they execute and market well they should be huge
Racist much?
A good point, but I think the books and languages didn't have much choice until recently. There really is a big jump in complexity from using a few regexes in a program, and going full-on into a parser using lex/yacc (or your language's port, like javacc).

I think it's only been very recently that there's been a growth in parsing paradigms that are more amenable to inclusion as libraries with ease-of-use at least vaguely comparable to regexes. Things like combinator-style parser libraries (Parsec and similar libraries in other languages), and OMeta (http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/).
I don't know how anyone can learn Rails without knowing how to program. I know designers that call themselves web "developers." But I wouldn't call someone a developer if their development involves installing thirty gems and copy and pasting snippets.
How long does this keep on going for? Is there some process or mechanism within the system that will put the brakes on this? Another measure of wealth disparity is the Gini index. We should forget GDP (or GDP with PPP) (or GNP) per capita as a metric. If I live in a country where there are only two people, one of who (not me) earns $1,000,000 per annum and the other (me) earns $10,000 and I'm told that the GDP per capita is $55,000 I'm not going to be impressed. But if the Gini index for my little two person country states that there is a massive imbalance in the distribution of wealth then I'll prefer that index.

What I'm trying to ask is: how long can this keep going on before some sort of underclass revolution kicks in. Or, are the poor in the US not _really_ absolutely poor (like rural farm-hand in China poor) but relatively poor (as in 36" LCD TV instead on 50").

You know what would be a cool hack? Solving this economic train-wreck.
Also you can use associate array notation to access an object property. Found this out after previously using eval to access a dynamic property name.
Startup Weekend SF Mobile Project: KissMobs - Survey responses needed today
I've been wondering for some time why some languages 'mark' (eg, verb tenses, declining nouns, adjectives) more/less than others.

Over time some mark more and others mark less, so what is the trend? How does this stuff arise??
There is nothing great about Sibbal except that he talks about change. How a low cost device can help education? that too higher education?

Keeping costs lower by be a great technological achievement but will that device be helpful is a question to be asked.
With the future of OpenSolaris being as uncertain as it is, I see FreeBSD as the potential rescue. I've been a user of (Open)Solaris, FreeBSD for many years and they are simply rock stable. FreeBSD just needs better Java support and I'd host all my Java EE stuff on it.
Has the slashdot/reddit/digg-ification of HN begun?
200,000,000 keys in Redis 2.0.0-rc3
I used ruby for years, and it still took some time for me getting used to rails.

For me, it feel like I am learning somebody's workflow. However, the workflow is rather efficient. It just take me a long time get through all the subtle details.
GPSL 2010 Taking Place this Weekend
Want to know what happens when a bunch of amateur radio guys get together with a bunch of balloons in the middle of Kansas? These guys aren't even software hackers but they managed to get the entire conference webcasted live for those of us that could not attend
Personal favorite: Page 23, Section 6, end of 3rd paragraph: "The parties are advised to chill."
Isn't this faster for iterating over the elements:

var a = ["banana", Math.min, 4, "apple"];
for (var i=a.length; i; i--) {
console.log(a[i]);
}
Absolutely. It is for this reason that I vociferously advocate that all cars return to using carburetors in place of fuel injectors. If you had to spend a few hours once a month adjusting your idle screw and WOT switch, you would appreciate all of the miracles in your car's engine.

All sarcasm aside, let's not forget that technology is not an end unto itself, it is a means to an end. It needs to help people accomplish things, not hinder them.
> We, the People!

Which, in practice, means: People who are thirsty enough for power to go into politics (you have to really want power to endure that kind of life), and groups with political clout (farmers, unions, big corps, rent-seekers of all kinds, etc).
It's probably becoming a meme in itself to point this out, but they don't want us saying that until we've been around for a year.
Downvoted. ;-)

That point number that everyone seems to want to attach to everything these days has absolutely nothing to do with measuring worth.

It is merely a measure of popularity, and popularity doesn't even correlate well to value.
I would love to have something like tab candy in Chrome. As it is, I have between 8 and 12 Chrome windows open in different workspaces, each containing a certain group of tabs. For example, I typically read HN in my "recreational-web-browsing" window. It has my email, my RSS, twitter/identi.ca, HN, etc. In another window, I have the set of webcomics I want to start reading or am in the process of catching up to(so that I start subscribing by RSS instead). In four windows, I have all the web-pages I've been reading for various projects I'm working on. In another are my online placement tests for my university. With something like tab candy, I would end up consolidating the webcomics and possibly the placement tests into groups of tabs within the recreational browsing window. I might consolidate some of the project windows together(although the Emacs and terminal windows I keep open associated with the projects might deter me from doing this much.

Concerning not organizing permanent bookmarks, tabs can be as permanent as you want them to be in any browser with a "save tabs on exit" or similar option. But they're also much easier to organize. Just move windows and tabs about. Of course, they do take up memory, but if I had something like tab candy with an option to individually mark tabs as not needing to be kept loaded, that would almost certainly totally replace my use of bookmarks.
What were the results of Google's experiment?
One big lesson I've learned is that if you want something out of the ordinary, no one is spontaneously going to give it to you. You have to explicitly ask for it. And when you do, it's surprising how often you get a positive response.
Check out the audio cd's by michel thomas. I was trying to learn french a few years ago and this was the best learning aid I found. It's entirely conversatinal - listen and speak along; you never have to write stuff down or try to memorise things.

The best thing, imo, about this system is that you can forget about it for a month and then, when you try it again, you get back into it in no time. It definitely seems to have the edge over other systems I've tried in getting things into your permanent and automatic memory.
Dream Theater-Images And Words 1992
01 Pull Me Under
02 Another Day
03 Take The Time
04 Surrounded
05 Metropolis, Pt.1
06 Under A Glass Moon
07 Wait For Sleep
08 Learning To Live
Do we need banks? Normally when we transfer money the bank gets nearly 5% on the spread. And it looks like they are only charging $4 per transfer.
So... he's not an evolutionist and thinks being a philanthropist is more fulfilling. Seems self-righteous to me.
You know, this Frink thing looks interesting. Gonna give it a shot.
I spent some time earlier fiddling with FreeBSD 8.1 RC and was really blown away by how much more advanced ZFS is compared to every other filesystem I've ever used. It's feature rich and it's very intuitive to use and configure. You don't need to be running a massive pool of disks to benefit from the features of ZFS, either. I was just using it on my desktop and transparent, filesystem-level compression and date deduplication are really cool.

And then there's ports, of course, which is awesome, especially if you prefer to build your software from source.

I'd probably move off of Linux as my desktop OS if I could use Mangler on FreeBSD.
I wonder how much influence, if any, Gates/Buffett and their recent push for the wealthiest Americans to give 50% away before death had on him. With Americans potentially giving away more, it makes the rest of the world look worse by contrast.
Of course, costs can be brought down without compromising on quality, but please stop and think about the "innovation" over here;

>>>In 1995, the famous Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, developed a course that would give lay people basic skills needed for maintenance of ophthalmic instruments. One of us (V. Srinivasan) — a retired professor of physics with rich experience in laboratory work — helped to develop that course. The methodology used was "learning by doing." It wasn't so different from how kids learn to ride a bicycle or to swim. As a result of this hands-on approach, people with very different educational backgrounds, who spoke a variety of languages, could participate. Soon, we were able to care for equipment at a fraction of the cost it would have taken to create a separate, specialized service staff.<<<

Over here this is called hacking. Training people in situ to do minor repairs like this isn't exactly a ground breaking achievement. It is certainly an excellent example of efficient and lean management, but to call it an "innovation" is to jump the shark.

Real innovation is when someone comes up with a tele-medicine app for the iPhone which offers early diagnosis and treatment of retinopathy of prematurity to remote areas. (see: http://www.technologyreview.in/biomedicine/24311/) That is innovation.

The irony over here is that such people are hardly ever respected in this piece of land, and people instead of working with them offer hassles to them. Do you think it was easy for them to sell such a concept to a technophobic country? (there is a reason why startups are rare in India. Moreover, when people start them they face stuff like; "what you're starting a company? You're insane. You'll ruin your life." )
How should I spend $3000/month on marketing?
I'm building a web app and have budgeted $3000/month for marketing. The app is an applicant tracking tool, which is a market with plenty of competition.

I'm also thinking about bringing a partner on board to help guide the marketing portion of the business to make sure it's done right because I'm clueless in that area. Looking for advice, insight, warnings, and links to more information & resources.

Thanks HN folks!
On the one hand, there's been research showing that people who move to a foreign country and explicitly learn the grammer learn the language faster than those who only learn naturally.

On the other hand, I think both methods can get at the same aim: massive memorization of both new material and the natural use of patterns.

When we learn a language "from birth" (of course it is more of a 6-year full-time immersion program, which isn't all that amazing in itself than something that happens the day you're born) do we learn the patterns without realizing, or do we literally have to memorize each new adjective ending for nouns in different cases and genders (eg, in German)?

I assume our brains pick up on the patterns, hence why kids make cute mistakes like "I'm the goodest". BUT, as an adult, why not just learn the pattern explicitly AND listen to and participate in lots of conversations AND memorize a lot?

They ALL help. Do as much as you can as often as you can and your learn will spiral out of control awesome ;-)

EDIT: I'm also not sure whether only-memorization to learn patterns works or not. When people say they're "conversational" in 3 months, how much can they achieve in 3 more months? It's a question of whether memorization or whatever process they're using is exponentially scaling. I think that most grammer patterns can be made clear with 3-50 examples, so in the end that doesn't seem that difficult. But I've only had experience memorizing grammer first, with the help of hundreds of examples at the same time, and then producing hundreds of examples myself to become fluid.
Just as operating systems are not all the same, farts are not all the same. Some really stink, while others don't. Some pack a lot of energy while others don't.

The paper doesn't dig deep enough for the facts. (sorry!)
There are many hundreds of different kinds of bacterial active in the gut. The bacterial mix varies from person to person. The mix of the fuel varies too.
Even without advanced analysis (anal-ysis?) it isn't hard to confirm some of the differences. For example those with flora producing high metane more frequently produce floaters. Do yours float?

Probably the best demonstration I've seen was a group of bored college guys sitting around having something of a farting contest. Being the educated group they were, they went a step beyond that and dug out the propane lighters to see who could throw the biggest flame. (warning, don't try this nude, some got pretty hot even with some protection from clothing)

It turns out some threw substantial flames while others just couldn't get lit. Aside from the bacterial and solid-food variations, it seems that beer farts don't burn.

Perhaps someone can get a grant for continued study...
And yet:

If you mistakenly click the wrong one of the two very miniscule arrows for a vote, there is no way to fix this mistake;

New users can make unpopular comments which will auto-ban all of their future comments -- even when they say things worth discussing -- and there is no way for them to crawl out of that hole (and worse, they often don't even realize that it's happening);

Reply pages tend to expire while writing long, well-researched, carefully-considered comments, requiring those rare commenters to copy-paste the contents of their reply (and worse, inadvertently discouraging deep discussions);

Users are never notified of replies to their comments or submissions, which in effect motivates people to spend more time on the site polling it (as opposed to a useful push-type notification), and also effectively limits discussions to a du jour shallowness because an active user is unlikely to notice any reply made to them a few days later.

I'm not so certain that the author of that article would find this little forum to be a suitable example of his kind of "complex simplicity". I think it's actually a bit the opposite: the internals are simple, which requires more complex behavior on the part of the users.
I don't agree with a wealth cap, but:

How do you define productivity, the one who makes the most money?

Theres also this mentality that pretty much anything goes in businesses, which I find a bit interesting. Hence the phrase: it's not personal, it's business. So people are allowed to screw you over and be complete a-holes when it comes to business.

Some businesses (see: credit cards) are most profitable when they siphon billions from the poor, which is then placed in the hands of the rich. Then, after doing so, they are lauded for donating that money to philanthropic causes. I don't know how this can be viewed as anything other than patronizing.
Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem
Amber Waves of Pain (Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs)
Re: Rete, that's really good. I can only imagine the breadth of knowledge you had to acquire just to grok it, much less implement it.
If you are around the Nashville area then you might want to check out PhreakNic. Every year I have gone it has been a blast. Starts October 15th and goes until the 17th.

http://www.phreaknic.info/pn14/
Flash-based video conferencing for Android demonstrated
That's true and my concept is terribly wrong, but there is a problem at work over here. To quote Carl Sagan;

>>>We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.<<<
The $35 Tablet
> Theres also this mentality that pretty much anything goes in businesses, which I find a bit interesting. Hence the phrase: it's not personal, it's business. So people are allowed to screw you over and be complete a-holes when it comes to business.

In my experience, this isn't how the vast majority of wealthy people operate. It's how it's portrayed in the movies, but it doesn't really jive with the real world.

People love stories of the evil geniuses so those get spread around, but the vast majority of wealthy people deliver pretty well, keep their promises, work extremely hard, are fair and even-handed, and make the world a better place. Generally speaking, the higher up you go in wealth, the more likely you are to get a fair shake by that person in business. It's hard to get wealthy without people trusting you and building a good reputation as a reliable and effective person.

You're much more likely to have someone try to screw you over if they're poor or middle class - which is why those people remain poor and middle class. It's quite hard to get wealthy if you're leaving a trail of carnage behind you (it's been done, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder).
I assume you mean it's impractical in terms of all the changes that would be required to get from the current U.S. system of government to a jury duty republic system because of the significant changes to the Constitution that would be required and the near impossibility of passing constitutional amendments, particularly given the extreme opposition that the entrenched ruling class would have towards such a system (because the primary goal of such a system is to uproot an entrenched ruling class and replace it with something more egalitarian).

However, suppose for a moment that you're the revolutionary leader of a small nation in Latin America and, after a long struggle, you have risen victorious over the oppressive old regime of your country and there is overwhelming public support for you to become dictator. But, being aware of the inherent long term problems of dictatorships, you don't want to be a dictator. So, you declare, "We will implement a constitutional republic like the Americans. But, to ensure our government always has the best interests of our people at heart and we are never again dominated by an elite ruling class, we will choose our representatives in the legislature by a lottery like the American PowerBall." What, then, would be impractical about implementing a jury duty system of democratic representation?
Why is Mel Gibson So Angry?
I'd say Python's strength is "explicit is better than implicit." There's usually not too much magic going on.
The one I was thinking of was 20 C. According to Wikipedia, it could be either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_conditions_for_tempera...
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ ?
One thing that people fail to mention when hyping Moose is that there is a start-up penalty for using it. You can lessen this penalty by not using all of the whiz-bang features of the object system, but that kind of defeats the purpose, no?

[ This doesn't really matter much for long-running scripts or controllers in a webapp, but it does for a lot of other applications ]
While it seems your comment is flamebait, it is true that many of the proprietary hardware appliance platforms I've run across are FreeBSD. Surprisingly, I'm seeing more and more Linux in said devices too.