skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why don't European restaurants do it. Is food more expensive there or is it just considered bad form or somehow un-sophisticated to serve giant portions.

I would also guess that it depends on the type of food. High quality, fresh organic produce is a lot more expensive, so perhaps for some food items it really is about the price. For example the fish in fish and chips could be some really expensive fish. Doubling the portion would be a lot more than adding another $1 to the cost.
Modern Web design seems to focus too much on pretty visual designs. I think that designers should pay more attention to structure, like the original Gopher menus.

One of the major reasons Apple's App Store has taken off is that most Web designs are pretty, but optimized for big screens. They're awkward to look it on small devices like the iPhone. Simple design degrades gracefully.
I went googling but couldn't find any evidence of it actually happening; I did find this snopes thread in which it's discussed as a possible urban myth:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...

It seems to me unlikely, given that eating tissue paper is really difficult and in my opinion it would take far more willpower to force down enough tissue paper to induce satiety than it would to just stay hungry. It would be much easier to eat, say, a pound of celery, which would be calorifically indistinguishable from the paper.

Besides, real ballerinas must do a hell of a lot of exercise. I'm thinking they probably eat like athletes, not like teenagers with eating disorders.
I disagree with everything you say on multiple points.

Firstly, Mathematicians don't peak at an early age this is just one of the many nonsense Hardy spouted. And I say this as a non mathematician < 25 who just enjoys the history of science - I have no horses in that race.

There are many examples of people who not only contributed work at a late age > 30 (some near or over 40) but did so while being outside of the academic community - George Green, Faraday (physics) and Grassman. Then there are those such as Weirstrass who started late or those who produced an amazing work later, some in addition to earlier success e.g. Poisson, Bayes, Fourier or Hamilton whose quaternions came quite late. And then there were the Eulers who were just none stop greatness.

Nextly, although maths is a subject where some topics require very little background knowledge the vast majority of these low hanging fruit (knowledge wise) are gone. It was much easier to sketch out the core of an algebra while still in jail and have it be new and profound 200 years ago than it is today. As the amount of knowledge increases I expect the mean age of precocious contributions to increase. Knowledge and even experience will increasingly become a hard minimum.

Finally, you imply that only young people want to build things and have enthusiasm. I think an eagerness to learn and build great works is something you never lose. At least I hope so, otherwise growing old sounds like a very miserable prospect to me. And while the examples of old fellows not keeping up abound, I think this is simply a philosophical state that can be consciously guarded against.
Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites
Okay, so here's the new plan for startups: develop your product and execute it to near its full potential, then sell it to someone for $2B. But keep the core technology (just tell them it isn't important and/or you're just licensing it from this other corporation you just happen to own). Continue to collect licensing fees on said core tech. Then, when that person can't put enough time/effort/etc. into it, buy it back from them at 20% of the original price (after they've taken a huge write down of course). Next, raise a ron of VC money cause you're the shit, and then plan to IPO a very small portion of the company. Finally, while you're in the process of doing your IPO, get bought AGAIN, except for $5B this time. /rant
If you're a startup with little cash looking for talent, you can either (a) offer co-founder level equity, (b) employ, perhaps remotely, people living where market rate is cheap or (c) hire someone at market rate for limited scope consulting work, hoping they produce enough value to be worth it.

Unless your name is Steve Jobs, when you choose (d) hire someone for far below market and compensate them with employee level equity, you're basically looking for a sucker. Most engineers realize this way before they turn 50.
22 Free Videos on Rails 3
The article's only alternative to a publisher is to "do everything yourself"—but that's not at all realistic. Most non-publisher-affiliated authors today contract their editor and marketer, just like they contract their agent. This is the future for publishers: turning into talent agencies authors hire from for market rates, rather than "owning" a stable of authors (and their works) and paying them peanuts off those works' earnings. This is what publishers really fear: not being made irrelevant, but being forced to the other side of the table.
Come now, we can be more mature than this. The OP may be an oversimplification of the issue, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't earnestly see and want to fix a problem.
The Fields Medal cannot be awarded to mathematicians over the age of 40.

Say what?

Geez, you're right. Wikipedia:

The Medal also has an age limit: a recipient's 40th birthday must not occur before 1 January of the year in which the Fields Medal is awarded. As a result some great mathematicians have missed it by having done their best work (or having had their work recognized) too late in life.

Clearly someone needs to endow a better math prize. You know, one that is for the best math, not the best math by a specific sort of person.
Frankly, I'm REALLY surprised that this wasn't an established scientific result.

There must be an awful lot of things which are very hard to prove in a proper controlled study, but which are totally obvious to anyone who tries them. To prove something about diet to everybody's satisfaction I'd have to get dozens of volunteers, compensate them properly for their time, carefully monitor what they eat, and worry about all sorts of experimental artifacts coming from the fact that they know they're taking part in a dietary experiment. As you can see in this thread, people are still complaining that this presumably-expensive experiment still doesn't really prove its point.

Alternatively, to prove it to my own satisfaction I can try it out for two weeks and see whether it works. And that's all I really care about.
Since one can make 6 figs + equity at any of the hip startups in NYC, most 25 year olds won't, either... unless they are stupid.
"""I don't know how to phrase this right, but there is a knack of noticing material distinctions, rather than useless ones. Maybe it's in noticing when certain limitations have been removed or added.""""

Knowing when a distinction is material frequently depends on context, goals, and experience. As Louis Pasteur said, "Chance favors only the prepared mind." I would be a little more generous, but still he's essentially right.
This is neat. I was playing with the wiki API the other day comparing edits to IP addresses. I am unsure about how I feel, but alot of companies edit their own articles; and the edits usually stick. Monsanto practically wrote their own entry.
This article was interesting, but it didn't present any particularly novel points of view. Yes, I know publishers provide services for authors, but it seemed as if the author repeated the same points over and over and completely glossed over the counter-arguments. He mentions the greater freedom that self-publishing allows, but then completely dismisses it and doesn't mention it again.

For a persuasive piece, I thought it was weak. Personally, I would have rather had him interview a few people who were self-publishing and a few representatives for publishers and gotten both sides out there, rather than just the publisher's point of view.
> though I still wouldn't ever do it myself)

Why do you think that is?

Is it that Europeans see eating out as a signal of luxury and asking to take the rest of the food home somehow diminishes that perception ("oh look they must be poor if they are taking that left-over steak home..." kind of attitude). In other words are Europeans just afraid of looking bad, poor or stingy in front of others in a restaurant and Americans just don't care?

What if portion size wasn't a problem? Image that Europeans served same sized portions as Americans, would you take your leftovers home to be heated up for lunch then?
The events described in the Big Short are a national disgrace.

Wall Street was engaged in a fraudulent conspiracy in which the buyer, the seller, the guaranty company, and the rating agency would willingly suspend disbelief so the buyer could get a 'AAA' security that miraculously paid a few hundred basis points over AAA corporates and count as AAA toward risk-based capital regulations, everyone got fees, and those 'lucky' subprime borrowers could suddenly access unlimited amounts of credit without adequate income or collateral.

Then when this created a giant bubble (along with other factors like deregulation, lax application of the regulatory powers that existed, a shockingly long period of lax monetary policy, and human greed) and it all blew up with catastrophic consequences, the banks got a giant bailout, went back to business as usual, and (so far) fended off meaningful reform. They said, who could have known, when the book shows many people did in fact clearly analyze the situation and foresee catastrophe.

That being said - there are countries that have highly state-controlled finance sectors. A notable feature is that they don't have vibrant startup and VC sectors. The only reason capital is available in large sums to start up companies like Google and Facebook is because of the possibility of rich IPO exits. Interestingly, some of those countries with regulated and state-owned banks, where the startup scene is nonexistent and the same 50 companies have dominated the economy forever, did not escape reckless behavior and large losses in the banking sector.

This is still America, last I checked, and people should be free to take big risks and come up with innovative financial structures. But consumer regulation must prevent toxic consumer products like the certain subprime products that were misleadingly marketed. Banks, which are systemically important, enjoy special privileges that make them a lot of money, and receive implicit and explicit government guarantees, cannot become giant extremely leveraged hedge funds.

So, you need to make a distinction between a highly regulated utility financial sector; and a speculative sector which can keep taking the risks and innovating in ways that create value, without the rest of us being on the hook to bail them out when things don't work out.
I put down my first word and then scrolled far, far away. Then realized that the rule and I was lost.
I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that he's being disingenuous?
There are a lot of authors who seem to have Stockholm Syndrome.

(I'm still fuming at about a half dozen of them who filled my inbox after I made a blog post about my love for Kindles and total, comprehensive lack-of-care for publishing houses. One of them explained, at length and with much profanity, that her publisher was her customer and I was just some slackjawed idiot allowed to read the book. I can only assume that she was saying what many think, because otherwise the "write a paying customer and tell them they should not be allowed to buy your product" trick those folks were pulling was just freaking bizarre.)
Well we know for a fact that women perceive colors differently than men because they like different colors than men.

I hate to turn this into a hard-core discussion of qualia, but I'm not convinced that the fact that women like different colours means that they perceive them differently.

At least, not except in the trivial sense that they see "purple" and think "I like purple" whereas I merely see "purple" and think "I am indifferent to purple".
The problem is not only time from disk, it's time from memory.
Court rules Fusion Garage and TechCrunch were business partners
Also, tools like Awk and friends can be ridiculously fast and concise.

http://anyall.org/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and...
Biden said Obama was Clean.... probably what he meant was that he was superior.
YouTube courting Hollywood for pay-per-view movie service by end of 2010
I don't think he was justifying sexism ANYWHERE in his comment. The fact is that few women are in tech. You can't fault people in good faith for making observations of their environments. But I doubt you can even claim good faith to your name.
RubyDoc.info: Auto-generated RubyGems and GitHub library docs
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4c76b6086e4c1cff
Getting a Wikipedia Summary paragraph Using the MediaWiki API
What if? Facebook was a non-profit org.
Remember the 'what if?' comic books? Imagine what would have happened if fb was set up as a not for profit company? Makes my head spin.
> People ignorant to nutrition will begin to use this as a free pass to eating even more poorly.

One danger would be that they would wash out too many useful substances out of their body by drinking to much liquid.

I would also imagine so much liquid dilutes the stomach juices and the food doesn't digest properly. I don't have any scientific basis for this btw, just a hunch.

> ... what they are suggesting is filling up with less calorie dense foods

Another way to accomplish the same thing (for me at least) is to eat spicier, more flavorful foods.
nope. we didnt quite get it working so we poked fun at ourselves :-)
I wish the author had divided the market into fiction and non-fiction for purposes of comparison. I don't have numbers, but I suspect non-fiction titles will be relegated to dead tree pulp in far greater numbers than fiction. I think Amazon eBook sales figures reflect this.
I had the same experience and I was locked out my account until I came back home on my machine and logged in!

And, it is not only due to remote IP. It's remote IP + diff machine I guess.
Probably the first collaborative multiplayer game without any element of communication.
"How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks." -- Marcus Aurelius

Y'see, this is the problem I have with Marcus Aurelius. It must have been relatively easy for him to not care what other people think. For those of us who aren't the goddamn Emperor of Rome, well, we occasionally have the sorts of practical issues which didn't affect him so much.

I was also recently reading some of the letters of Seneca. He spends nine tenths of his time talking about how awesome it is to be a stoic emotionally detached from material posessions as well as the ups and downs of life, but the remainder letting slip his day-to-day concerns overseeing his vast estates, huge wealth and thousands of slaves.

Are there any good stoic philosophers who weren't fabulously wealthy?
Notice those twitter names are of the developers
It may seem counter intuitive at first but here's the thing to understand:

> users = User.where(:name => "david").limit(20)

Does not actually do any calls or create any kind of sql by itself. When you follow it up by

> users.where("age > 29")

all you're telling the users object is that you want to add a condition to your next query. You are not telling it to refine the previous query.

To get what you want, you'd need to do:

> users = User.where(:name => "david").limit(20).all

> users.where("age > 29")
I was wondering if it altered the quality of calories taken in. The article mentioned that it wasn't just dropping calories from drinks, since they were counted as part of the allocated amount.

On the other hand, if people were eating (for instance) more proteins in place of the simple sugars of fizzy drinks, they would drastically alter how their body was interacting with those 1800 calories.

I was disappointed by the apparent attitude in the article that every calorie was equal, regardless of source. I really believe calories are to the nutrition industry what counting lines of code is to software: a number that is just too easy to calculate but absolutely meaningless in measuring anything.
I love Paul Carr, but he's wrong on this one. He may indeed love his publisher, but I have seen, far too often, struggling authors fighting with their publishers just to maintain control over their own works, much less get proper remuneration. Certainly, the problem is not as bad as it is in the music industry, but unless you are a fabulously successful author, you essentially enslave yourself to a publisher, and give up the copyright to your own creative works.

Sorry, but the world is changing. It hasn't yet hit the publishing industry nearly so hard as it has hit the recording industry, but it will. Two things in particular almost guarantee it:

First the digital revolution. The Kindle / Nook / etc., are not fads anymore than the iPod was a fad. The publishing world is going digital.

Second, the publishing world will always have real ink and paper books (this is my industry, BTW) - but the technology is shifting rapidly toward print-on-demand. Lulu.com, with their fleet of Xerox iGen presses and web-to-bindery workflow has led the way giving everyone the ability to publish hard and soft covers one at a time, and make a profit doing so. I am already seeing mainline publishers doing similar for older works which are not economical to print on conventional presses. These works used to go out of print. Now they are being made available once more, because the publishers suddenly are able to print them at a profit, even if it is just one book for a single customer. But ironically, the more they embrace this technology, the more readily available it will be to smaller and smaller shops.

Self-publishing - long an expensive proposition - is quickly becoming the norm for new authors, and it is only a matter of time before the marketing of such books will move to the web. Authors already tend to form their own communities, critiquing one another's works and encouraging them to improve and advance their art. The ability to do this on the web gives them a natural platform from which to market their works to a worldwide audience, without a publisher of any sort playing middle-man.
you can always press the fork button :)

Also, Sinatra has really become the main competitor to Rails among Ruby frameworks...
That Is Hilarious. You just made my day.
Cable & telcos video providers have a big time weapon in the form of transfer caps. I suspect anyone who chooses to use IP video exclusively will be paying significantly more for broadband over the next few years. The cable/telcos will calculate how much revenue they're losing on video subscribers and overlay that data on top of their transfer caps to break even. The upside is it will probably still end up saving people money. Even if broadband prices increase 20-30% being able to buy only the content you want to watch will be a savings. It might also encourage more responsible TV watching. Who's going to leave the TV on for 12-16 hour stretches if the meter is running the whole time? That could be a very positive change for society.
I have a hypothesis: One secret to staying "young" in software is to avoid uttering statements of the form:

we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so... These are gratuitous reinventions.

Even when these statements seem to be true. Don't train yourself to think like this. It isn't going to help.

Yes, people -- especially the young, but the old as well -- go over the same ground a lot in software. That's called practice.

It's partly a generational thing: New generations need to learn from mistakes by making some of those mistakes; the process of having your elders lecture you about the mistakes is great, and can save you valuable time, but it is imperfect. Some things you just have to experience for yourself.

But it's mostly an evolutionary thing. We reinvent because the environment keeps changing, especially in computing, which has been rocked by epochal changes over the course of the last forty years. (Take out your iPhone and compare it to the machines and networks in use in 1970. Then compare the owners of modern smartphones to the owners of machines and networks in 1970.) The reinvented thing never turns out quite the same as the original, and those differences -- many of which look like accidents, some of which are in fact accidents -- are usually where the progress can be found. The new tool fits the new problem better than the old tool because it evolved in the presence of the new problem.
Agreed, I met a few of my business partners on the 'net. Then proceeded to meet them in London earlier this year. They're great friends now, and I'm sure they'll continue to be for the rest of my life.
Disagree. It's easy to imagine that being written by a 25 year black man in 1955, or a 25 year old woman in 1965. It's angry, not "grumpy."

Concerning technology, Dave has a specific thesis in mind, that I think has at least a little merit. Quite simply, large technology companies push "innovation" that has little actual value to the public at large. They do this to create barriers to entry so that smaller companies who devote less than 100% of their resources to keep up with the technology that the big companies champion (i.e. they devote some resources to sales, marketing, creating a business) get marginalized.
Chilean ISPs also compete on the basis of providing more P2P bandwidth than competitors. I've seen it on ads.
Sayed Kotb also commented on it after his visit to the United States in the 1940s, considering it a vulgar preoccupation.

For all his many faults, I feel he was on to something there.
If you had to quantify, what would be the fair division between the idea guy, the money guy, and the implementor?
It crashed while I was playing, and then it came back, and remembered my game when it came back!
I see. Well, I'm having a lot of fun with your app. Annexing other words by augmenting them almost makes it feel like a game of conquest. It would be fun if other people could steal "territory" from you by completing your words.
I did understand that it was a chance to win one.

I wonder if it would make sense to do a split (meta) survey, one group gets no incentive, the other an incentive as above: and then compare conversion rates between the groups (where applicable). My intuition is that the first group will be smaller but will have a better conversion rate.
Ask HN: How do people really test their code?
If that question is too general, which it is, then consider the case of building a data structure and its accompanying algorithms. Now, how, IRL, is code verified both for correctness and for desired performance.

Right now, I rely on running a bunch of functions that I write, but I was wondering if there's anything out there that's better (or sort of a methodology that dictates which tests one ought to write).

(if the question is still too general, lets consider the case for Java, and maybe C).