skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not overweight and not a specialist for diets. However, recently I read one book about nutrition that made a big impression on me: The China Study by Colin Campbell. It doesn't give you a specific diet plan, except for the recommendation to avoid all animal proteins. But if that sounds hard, the book provides ample motivation, because it summarizes lots and lots of studies that show that most "civilization diseases", like heart disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and more can be avoided by such a diet. But the author is not a crank or self-announced health guru, but a scientist who has devoted his life to studying these things. The most extensive study is the China Study that gave the book it's name, but it is not the only one.

As for losing weight, I remember that he writes that people with a mostly plant based diet tend to actually eat more calories than meat eaters, but stay slimmer nevertheless - the energy is used in a different way. He also criticizes some popular diets, for example while Atkins dieters lost weight in studies, what is less known is that they also lost critical amounts of calcium. Overall, Atkins is apparently very unhealthy.

Also, apparently people who switch to plants based diets also lose weight, without calories counting.

Of course I am not a health scientist, so I can't judge the book. But it sounded convincing to me, also because even before I read it I had a feeling I should try to avoid dairy products. I did some google searches but found no refutations of The China Study (it has a section on the grip of the food industry on the dieting market).

In fact, I would be interested in hearing other people's opinions.
> People who move and then lose weight probably just don't like the food in the country where they moved.

Not true in my case because I moved to France and food is _good_. But I've noticed three important differences from the US:

1. Portions are smaller
2. People eat more slowly
3. Meals are more varied (given #1 it's quite normal to eat starter + main course + dessert in a restaurant because all are relatively small).
donw - I absolutely agree. It is all about getting up and ride again. I dedicate an entire chapter to my dad "who taught me how to ride a bicycle".

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html
Ah that explains it pretty well, thank you!
All very good points. I also think we're using different definitions for the word 'enterprise'. 'Enterprise' software is, to me, a behemoth application constructed by committee, designed to Do Everything All At Once, but which in reality does Very Little. Not all business software is enterprise software.
Just about anything that suits my mood. I do tend towards instrumental music when coding though. Lately it's been lots of Amon Tobin.
Thanks, Don! I'll follow your advice, in that case. I agree I have never experienced a comprehension aid as powerful as instructing and explaining the material myself. Not to mention, I'll probably need some criticism and help!
Thanks for mentioning the text you're using. I'm looking for a resource beyond Wikipedia for abstract algebra and Dummit and Foote looks good, but I'm worried that the lack of solutions makes it inappropriate for self-study.

Anyone know of an abstract algebra text that is well-suited for an autodidactic mathematician with a basic understanding of the subject?
The Brooklyn Museum Lets the Crowd Curate a Show
> Are you unfamiliar with it?

Yeah, I totally thought you were talking about ducks!

> Is it really idiotic to suggest that women are more likely to do handmade crafts than men?

Now you're trying to change the subject.

Your actual idiotic suggestion which I refuted quite specifically is that as soon as women graduate college they start "nesting". In fact women college graduates are pushing back starting families by record amounts.

I know a lot of female professionals and I can't think of any without kids that spend any appreciable amount of time on handmade crafts.
Reading on the screen is more difficult, but I voted for e-book for one reason: the ability to search. Indexes aren't enough, especially in highly technical programming books with lots of examples.
While I do agree that Mr. Stein's consorting with creationist and cheerleading Bush administration policies have lessened my opinion of his powers of judgment, this is not "scientific advice".
Sign me up, too. :-) I was in LA long enough to get to know a few people in "the Industry". (Hard at work on Insoshi for now, though.)
I'm in the same boat! If I were an investor I certainly would invest in people of that caliber.
Lately it's been Crass into Cro-Mags (age of quarrel), dag nasty and damage control. The power of the alphabet. But when I am fleshing out entirely new stuff I need to listen to something that just blows my mind away so I don't even try to drum along to it etc. For me buddy rich stuff from the 70s does the trick. INSANELY complex/fast and super polished in a way that most jazz isn't which is normally a turn off but some how it works with his stuff.
it solves the problem of having too much time and not enough diversions while in college.

seriously.
If you read the TC article on the investment you'll see where they plan to spend it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/30/etsy-raises-27-million-...

—Buy $5 million worth of hardware and hosting over the next two years.

—Support more currencies and languages other than the U.S. Dollar and English.

—Fix the checkout system (there is none now, every buyer has to pay every seller on an individual basis. There is no Etsy payment system that works across all sellers).

—Fix search.

—Provide a cushion in case of a recession.

—Offer customer service

—Provide competitive wages and take care of his employees.

Quite a lot of big ticket items in that list. Add to that any significant amount of consumer marketing and the number doesn't seem that bad.
Technical books must be on physical paper for me, especially when used as reference materials.
Casual reading (sci-fi, fantasy, etc) I like to have on an ebook, simply because I go through a lot more of them. I use my psp for ebooks, typically.
All analogies have limits; I'm not saying that they were mistaken for the same reason, merely that smart people can (and often do) support dumb ideas. This doesn't make their good ideas any less good.

Creationism is almost by definition dishonest, as it a thinly veiled attempt to replace science with dogma, and so any pursuit in support of creationism-as-science is guaranteed to be intellectually bankrupt. That said, in the modern world, being deeply religious often comes with a great deal of cognitive dissonance, and it is not uncommon for people, like Ben Stein, to genuinely believe that what they are doing is not only correct, but honest and good, no matter how much their efforts fly in the face of logic, common sense, or good taste.

Doesn't mean that said people are fundamentally dishonest; just that their view of the world doesn't entirely coincide with reality.
I am loathe to click on a link to a site titled 'Love My Tool'... :)
thanks, though my cofounder arash deserves equal mention here. (we sent them a pic of the two of us but apparently after the deadline, so it should be corrected soon)
oh and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Monte_Young
It addresses peoples' need to be "discoverable." Also, like Twitter, blogs, Yahoo Answers, etc., it satisfies peoples' need to be listened to. And, for many, it's a good platform for finding people to date and for hookups. IMHO, it's about human ego.
Perhaps it is a secret reporter from valleywag who is preparing a scathing article about the fight between YC and TS, looking for a few victimized startups they can quote out of context.
That explains a lot more. They just raised most of it.

But after $4.6 mil they don't even have a checkout system?!? Or search? Or customer service? Or even competitive wages?!?
I usually print out any lengthy materials that I want to read. However, I have yet to try any of the fancy modern ebook readers, such as Amazon's Kindle. Has anybody tried these? What has been your experience with them?
Rebuttals should be in the form of a working search engine.
I also go for http://etn.fm sometimes.

I find trance great, because it typically has no lyrics, or even if it does then they are very simple so they just become sounds that are part of song itself.

Once in a while though when I'm at some crossroads and need to truly concentrate on something for 3 minutes I just mute everything around me for total silence.
Bikram Yoga is my way. It's a style of Hatha Yoga. Bikram Yoga is very intense but, also very rewarding. I can't recommend it enough.
Welcome to Atkins, South Beach, etc diet camp, but I suspect you already know that.

I'm curious how your diet is different from other no-carbs and especially curious as to what they suggest you'd do after you are off the diet.
Being reminded about stress from another comment, I just remembered the second health-relevant book I read in recent times: "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", a book about Stress. One relevant tidbit: during a stress event (like a lion jumping out of the bush to eat you), the body doesn't care for hunger. Rather, it tries to use as much energy as possible (for example for running away). After the event (IF you escape the lion), the body wants to replenish the resources, so you get very hungry.

Why then, do some people lose weight during stressful phases of their life, and others gain weight? The explanation put forward is that people might experience stress in different ways. The one kind really experience a prolonged stress experience, so they forget to eat (stress suppresses the hunger). The other kind of people experiences lots of small stress events. For example driving to work: first red traffic light - stress, second red traffic light - stress, call customer - stress. So they have lots of short stress experiences, each one followed with the natural hunger reaction after stress. So they tend to eat a lot, and gain weight.
the same mental tenacity you use for hacking/ your start-up you need it for losing weight, especially living in the US

1. Turn off the TV (constant bombardment by food ads)

2. Don't eat out at restaurants (huge caloric intake/ ridiculous portions)

3. Learn to cook/ cook a majority of your foods

4. Don't eat processed foods. (high fructose corn syrop, partially hydrogenated oils, carbonated water especially)

5. find a sport/exercise you ENJOY -- snowboarding, biking, etc.

6. try to combine excercise work or excercise/entertainment. (ride a stationary bike while you watch a movie)

7. have fun and enjoy life and don't be worried about how you look
"Read the instructions." I'll add this to my other helpful HN startup advice like "only work four days a week" and "take more vacations".
a large and hi-definition screen is absolutely necessary for reading ebooks
I know, I get that a lot. I live in San Francisco so if the site doesn't work for an "online community for network monitoring TOOLS", I have other plans.
I totally agree with you on your last point about sloppy record keeping. You've learned over time how to properly estimate calories. Once I started to actually measure and record the food I consumed my weight changed dramatically.
that's included
understand there's a difference between correlation and causation, but ...

" In fact women college graduates are pushing back starting families by record amounts."

and divorces are also climbing by record rates
Paul Graham Sees the Light
Very similar to Lincoln from MS Research http://lincoln.msresearch.us/Lincoln/Logon.aspx, including the example of a video in a videostore. And it's 1 year old!
Many dieting books advise against juice. Not because of the calories, but because it bypasses some parts of the digestive system (you don't chew juice or soup, for example).
Hmm, I think we don't really disagree that much. I think that I just have a stronger reaction to his stances on basic things than you do.
Well, that's great advice...when you have instructions to read.
First two weeks are painful, but then you are allowed to have some wine and the taste of even a so-so wine is absolutely incredible. I guess these two weeks do something to your taste buds, so they start picking up even minute traces of sugar.

I would actually repeat the South Beach just for this wine tasting experience :)
Paper for technical manuals, cookbooks, etc. Amazon Kindle for novels.
I moved from Canada to Spain, ate and drank to excess, but lost 30 pounds in a year. Why? Because I started running, working up to the point where half-marathons were routine. The climate was a contributor, but I think the key was just stepping out of my current milieu into somewhere where I could easily change my lifestyle without any of the old triggers.
Well, instead of taking offense when none is implied, try to understand what I said.

Of course females in their 20's enter the workforce. They also buy houses. They also decorate those houses, with candles (huge industry), paint (massive), knickknacks (ever heard of pottery barn?) and - wait for it - handmade goods.

Why handmade goods? Because having a family - nesting (it's a very common term, google it) - usually forces one to re-evaluate their world views. A woman with a house full of pottery barn items starts looking for something more authentic, and she usually goes for something handmade. This is why farmer's markets and such are a growth industry.

Of course it's a stereotype, but it's also a very profitable one.
50 Most Innovative Companies
"so I wish there were tons more written like this one"

i've been thinking about this. the best thing about engineers is that we have very low tolerance for bullshit. every time I've seen an engineer apply himself to a problem outside of engineering you wind up with a very nice, no bullshit, stripped down explanation of said problem.
I tend to prefer dead trees for anything non-tech related. Though I do have several tech books, I rarely pick them up anymore.
The biggest drop in fat/weight I noticed is when I stopped eating meat. I also saw lesser (but noticeable) improvements when I stopped drinking cola, started running, started martial arts, stopped eating HFCS, and started lifting weights. But empirically, vegetarianism was the single biggest factor.
eat less
I have many tough decisions to make before the 27th.

I do feel like TS may be trying to take YC finalists!

What would you like to talk to me regarding?
Entrepreneurs: Hire a Lawyer
Cheap Mac clone draws angry response
intelligence is famously hard to define but I think a big chunk of it is associating ideas. most people have set pathways, x associates with y and so on. the more intelligent cross-reference more things. while you are asleep your brain plays with associations.

I would bet that someone who didn't dream would do substantially worse on cognitive tests of all sorts.
MapReduce: A Minor Step Forward
Funny, no replies by further08 to the comments here.
Git (on the Mac)
I lost maybe 7-10 lbs or so (from 185 to 175ish). I wasn't really trying to lose weight, just get in shape. I focused on heavy cardio (elipticals turned up to a moderate resistance) and swimming, with some running/treadmill and lifting.

For diet, I ate mostly multigrain pasta, chicken, turkey, bread and vegetables. I didn't worry about eating too many complex carbs. You may want to avoid sugars, but otherwise if you like carbs, all you have to do is get enough exercise. I would also suggest beans (though I didn't at the time). Black beans are one of the best foods you can eat.
Ask YC: Thoughts on the new mobile startup - PhoneFavs
Wow. The title is almost exactly the same as this much older AskYC question.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99936

My answer is pretty much the same as before: Anything my brain doesn't try to process. I'm still listening to Nujabes - Modal Soul, actually.
I read a lot of stuff on a computer screen, but I'd rather read all of them on paper. The only reason not to read on paper is that it's more expensive and it takes time to print.
When I was first trying to teach myself abstract algebra, Herstein's book seemed the most user-friendly. It doesn't go very far, but it's very clear and well-written. No solutions I'm afraid - but that's not common with any mathematics textbooks.
> Because having a family - nesting (it's a very common term, google it)

Female college graduates are pushing back the age when they start families to historical highs, which puts lie to your claim that they start nesting right out of college.

Yes! Nests = ducks! I have never heard it applied to humans before! One might have thought I was comparing your incorrect and oversimplified description of female college graduates to instinctual waterfowl lifecycle behavior!

It's pretty funny you completely missed the sarcasm, focused on that, and then completely missed the point. And then start in with red herrings. Apparently your upmodders like fish.
GREAT formula.

Here's a short one, riffing on the "hollywood pitch":

"[Service] combines [reference point] and [reference point] to achieve [business objective of customer]".
e-book for ephemeral crap that will be obsolete in 2-5 years, paper for academic computer science stuff that will be relevant for quite a while or which requires deep concentration.
Great idea.

These guys would go for it: http://www.zentropa.dk/

They are headed by the crazy genius Lars Von Trier and an even more crazy guy called Peter Aalbæk. They do a lot of diversification, and have a lot of 50/50 ownerships. I'm sure that they would hear you out. They have a strong track record as well - they've won the golden palms in Cannes among other things.
Similarly for me, I can understand spoken english almost perfectly easily but I'm having a hard time understanding even a couple words from an english song even if I try hard. (native language: french)
No it doesn't. It makes her a good bet to go get another masters or PHD, but being an entrepreneur is a completely different skill set. While her accomplishments are grand in their own right, they're also rather focused.

There's nothing in and of itself on the resume that shows that she's had to work to overcome a default, or has experience building a company, or that she can think on her feet, for example. Although she may in fact possess these skills, I wouldn't take them as a given simply because she has a lot of book smarts.
I use the iLiad, from iRex.

It is unfortunate that they built such a horrible interface, with lots of superfluous, misplaced buttons and a blinking light (a blinking light!) that, of course, blinks when turning pages.

But the screen quality is great. And one can take notes on top.

Even a lamp is necessary to read, for it's proper e-paper without a backlight -reads fine on direct sunlight.

I make latex/pdf documents of anything I want to read, just to do so on the iLiad.
This is important. To first approximation, all that matters is diet. Exercise has many other health benefits, but as a weight-loss strategy it's almost lost in the noise.
I recently read Free Culture (by Lawrence Lessig), switching between a paper copy and the PDF version on a monitor (which was free - hooray for Creative Commons licenses!). Reading on the monitor was great for when I wanted to read during lunch - no need to try to hold the book and a sandwich at the same time. I also used the PDF version when I was somewhere with a computer and wanted to read, but didn't have the paper copy with me.

The rest of the time I would read the paper copy. I also print out longer articles to read - paper seems less fatiguing to read from than a screen.

The font, font size, column width, and line spacing seem to make a big difference with how tiring it is to read on the screen. The Free Culture PDF was one of the the easiest documents I've come across to read. The default WordPress and Blogger themes use similar column widths and line spacings - this suggests that there might be an optimum way to display text for readability.

This is a bit of a leap, but if you're designing a site that has a lot of paragraph-form text, mimicking the typography of a typical paperback will probably do a lot for your site's readability. Does anyone else have specific text formats that they prefer for reading on the screen?
One of the biggest drawbacks for me is the crazy assumption that I should check out directly from their repository and use whatever half baked thing happens to be in there at the time. Sure, I can use the stable version but then none of the plug-ins work. The whole Django website is built around the assumption that I'm running directly from the repository.
Clueless in Seattle (Ray Ozzie on open source)
Apparently, Google provides a way to automate A/B testing...

http://tinyurl.com/6naeud
Ordered from Amazon; let's see if I can put that useless BA in math to some productive work...
for any reading worth remembering (and hopefully this is most things) or anything dense (technical/work/hacking/academic reading) I like paper because you can mark it up (highlight, underline, margin comments, etc.)
Are you thinking of this person: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=167383 ? I didn't say that.

Unless you're addressing an autistic audience, it is acceptable to say "Women do X" when you really mean "Women do X more frequently than non-women, although of course some women do not do X at all, some have never heard of X, some hate X, etc." For example, I am rarely corrected if I say "Five-year-olds are taller than four-year-olds," even though it's trivial to demonstrate that this isn't true. If your argument is that the statement in question is not literally true, you are correct. But if you use that to conclude that the tendency described does not exist, you're stretching things.

The statement was not "Women are nesting more than they used to," but "Women tend to nest." Whether they start nesting immediately or a bit later than they used to distracts from the point that they do it more than men regardless of timing.

>I know a lot of female professionals and I can't think of any without kids that spend any appreciable amount of time on handmade crafts.

I know female professionals who don't, female professionals who do, full-time parents who don't, and full-time parents who do. Perhaps, given your admittedly limited circle of acquaintances and your previous admission of bias, you should leave this discussion to people who have more data and less of an axe to grind. That is, you should do so if you want to know the facts -- if you want to defend your prejudices, proceed.
congratulations, but with the over-emphasis on music 2.0 on sites like techcrunch, there may be other sites where you want coverage
You're obviously new here, so let me give you some unsolicited advice.

1. The crowd here is very business savvy. If you aren't, that's cool, but understand that many of the terms we use here that you might not be overly familiar with. Here's the first result in google for the keyword "nesting": http://www.parentingweekly.com/pregnancy/pregnancy_informati...

2. Trends and stereotypes are important factors in marketing. Pretty much everyone on this site understands that there are exceptions to every trend and stereotype. They also understand that if you want to make money, you need to understand a trend and focus on it. If you want to focus on social aspects, go into government.

3. "which puts lie to your claim that they start nesting right out of college."

I didn't actually say that, and you can see from my follow up that it's a two step process: First you graduate and get a job, then you settle down and have a family. It's not important that this may take up to 10 years, it's important that the pattern is common enough that it can be banked upon to produce results.
books that stay open when you lay them open.
Y Combinator's Portfolio Performance - over $1MM in cash?