skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But if the point is to make the argument that there is little benefit to seasonal cooking or small-farm animal husbandry, you lose me completely.

He seems to say the opposite. He praises fresh food and praises eating seasonally for its flavor and other benefits. What he objects to is eating locally in a dogmatic way and he objects to trying to use transportation costs as a justification for that. He largely debunks the transportation cost argument and says that forcing crops to grow in inappropriate places (like tomatoes in the Hudson Valley) is worse than shipping them.

one thing that I think is hard to argue is that America needs more and better home cooks.

I would argue that, at least in dense urban areas. There are enormous economies of scale in storing and preparing more food communally. If you look at a college dorm or military barracks, they generally do not have the facilities to store or cook food (I'm excluding pure microwave cooking) in each room, but instead have some form of caffeteria. Thus, they save a huge amount of space in the rooms by not having a kitchen, energy since the refrigeration is done in large, effecient units and so is the cooking, and time for the people living there. I think there would be a cultural resistance to moving this model into a lot of apartment buildings, but there would be a lot of advantages to doing so.
Miss Mobile Orchard? Own Mobile Orchard
I was surprised to hear him say that the N1 was better than the EVO, until I remembered that I replaced the stock software with what is essentially the N1 build. HTC Sense is absolutely awful compared to AOSP, and it's nice to know that I'm not the only one that thinks so. It's amazing how random tweaks to the software can make it so unusable.

(Also, the default build on my EVO ate battery like crazy, the number one complaint by reviewers. Install CM, the battery lasts all day, even with heavy Kindle and Browser use.)

It's a shame that "normal users" don't get to decide whether or not they want Sense.
While that google search does confirm that this is a somewhat popular notion, this paper[1] seems to reject the idea.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
Creating immersive experiences with diegetic interfaces
True, but not much more.
The point was, in the ideal society, money is the barometer of society's virtue. Presuming that all money is _earned_, more of it is an indication of the society's success. So, the motive is indeed to maximize profit, earned profit.

Where did I get it wrong?
There may be only 1 bit of information describing the brain, it doesn't matter, the bits of information do not have a one to one correlation with logical gates or anything else for that matter. It is silly to compare genes with "lines of code", you also need a machine to parse, and eval those lines of code so you should also include the instructions for that machine as well.
But the complexity of the zygote derives mostly from that 50MB of genome data,

Uh.. no. There's at least 650 Million years worth of initializing the process memory and other threads into which the zygote is fork / exec'ed.
Is there a "social news sites classics" directory yet? I would love to see reposts of oldies no longer justified due to a good directory of these things, prominently linked.

Pretty please do not create such a directory in this comments thread.
So “food-miles” is like “lines of code”—a way to substitute a half-assed metric for actual thought?
> Engineer, scientist and programmers are probably in an unusual situation - they are exploring a primarily unknown solution space.

This depends on what you are doing. Some programmers are exploring a primarily unknown solution space, and the best programmers probably self-select as this is difficult.

But the vast majority of programmers are busy applying the same well understood techniques to different problem domains.
Also, you're born with a lot of neurons that are then pruned off during childhood. Newborns have more neurons than adults. Adults have more glial cells.
Ask HN: Review my weekend project - Phras.in
After 3 years without coding any web app, the last weekend I decided to hit the keyboard again, catch-up with webservers, css, jquery & co. and make that little tool I've been meaning to build lately.

My mother tongue is italian, and as you can imagine, it's always been a bit frustrating for me to write in proper English, whether I was writing an important email or a forum post.

Of course you have spell checkers and dictionaries online, and they can help you check the text grammar, but in some cases you have to 'trust your ear' in order to estabilish if a phrase sounds good, and there's a possibility that your ear isn't as good as you think. I'm sure people who dosen't speak english as their first language knows what I'm talking about.

One thing that I find myself doing very often when I have nobody to proofread a text for me is to check google because I'm dubious about a phrase or expression, and I want to use the most common one, the one the better fits the context.

Usually I have to decide between two options I have in mind, so I google the first phrase, note the number of results, then I google the second phrase and check the results again to have my proof of popularity.

This is pretty much what Phras.in does, but it's quicker than using google and checks both phrases in one shot, try it.

You can also get results typing the phrases in the address bar, like this:

http://phras.in/having few beers/having a few beers

I know it's no rocket science, there isn't much technical work in there, but making Phras.in was a fun way to get back to web development and hopefully it will made my everyday life a tiny bit easier, and I hope you'll make use of it too.

Please, let me know what you think.
> Fred's reason for not paying out from the money he took was that we'd betrayed the company, and after all, it was his money.

There's no better way to learn the true character of a man than to ask him to write a very large check based on an oral contract.
Clickable:
http://phras.in
Exponential growth in IT is great, until you run into a problem that is exponentially harder than you originally estimated.
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Select one of our affordable time clock systems and perform attendance time tracking and employee time tracking with simple steps. It’s real easy now.
Well, there's no guarantee that doing that will generate brains. It might turn out that the vast majority of such simulated universes would fail to contain intelligence.

The human genome, on the other hand, succeeds in growing intelligent brains a more or less measurable fraction of the time, in only a couple of years: at least 5%, if we assume that 94.9% or so of all zygotes fail to implant or otherwise miscarry, and another 0.1% suffer some kind of disability that forecloses the development of intelligence.

This is observably different from the development of most similar-sized chunks of matter, even biological tissue, over similar timescales. For example, my body has contained about 100kg of biological tissue for the past 15 years. That's enough time for each 10kg chunk of it to develop intelligence about 7 times. But I'm not aware of any new intelligent entities in my body during that time. Some might doubt the existence of any intelligent entities in my body at all.
Offensive? I think the sculptures with colours on, especially the one of the archer, is absolutely gorgeous.

I think also that painting buildings would add some variety and brightness to the dull streets of cities. The problem is of course however that paint wears off quite often.
A big part of the problem here is that people tend to think of us humans with our intelligence as something with purpose.

But if you looked at it in a different way, think about us as a collection of cells that all happen to have roughly the right environment to survive in, hooked up in roughly the right way to their neighbours. a series of inter-dependent colonies forming a symbiotic ecology then the picture changes dramatically.

It suggests that it is possible that intelligence is emergent if you have something that is roughly that structure, create something that is organized along the lines of a human brain with computational elements in it that can connect in the same way our nerve cells do and such a colony would have the potential to develop intelligence.

If you phrase it like that I think you get the closest to Kurzweils argument without any roundabout through the messy workings of biology.

What Meyers suggests is that the biological part is a requirement. I'm not qualified either way, but I think it is very well possible that they both have a valid point, and that the end solution will contain a portion of both.
Gravitational lens reveals dark energy
I'm terrified of older web developers. Because I'm becoming one.
Since we are talking about a hypothetical product that doesn't exist (at least in a commercial way) yet, I think it is a bit premature to judge its quality.

But even if hypothetically it tasted worse then the real thing, there are likely to be great benefits that will outweight that factor for most occassions

- It avoids the need to kill a normal animal that feels sensations, can experience cruelty, and has emotions that are (debatably) similar to our own.

- It is likely to be more affordable and more sustainable since it likely will need less space and less energy per unit meat produced
I wonder whether I think the 'traditional" blank white statues look more dignified because that's what I'm familiar with, or because they actually do look more dignified.

Perhaps we should paint all the DC monuments in festive colors?
It basically comes down to this: Kurzweil's paralyzing fear of death demands that the human brain be simulated soon, before he dies, so that his consciousness can be preserved in silicon.

Add in Moore's Law and an underestimate of the complexity of the brain, and stir.
1 founder startup? impressive looking so far / I signed up for a beta using my email in my profile if you want to hook me up...
you could buy a depleted gas field and fill it up.
Kurzweil has had noticeably more success simulating intelligent processes in software than Wolfram has had simulating the universe.

The majority of human beings who survive to birth eventually develop some form of intelligence, despite wide variation in their environments. Even children raised by wolves show substantial ability to learn, even though they rarely develop language. By contrast, treating a chimpanzee or a dog like a human child will not result in the development of fluent language or super-dog intelligence.

This suggests strongly that much of what we call "intelligence" is encoded in our genes, not acquired from our environment.

Additionally, though, if we could develop a robot that could acquire culture as easily as a human baby (or even five times more slowly), we could raise it as a human baby and claim success.
Time to switch careers I suppose, or become a manager. Hopefully not a bad manager, but there are more bad or average managers than good/outstanding ones.
Yup, single founder. Thanks. I'll send out all of the invite requests today over the next 24 hours.
Both bear approximately the same relationship to reality. Klocs don't mean nothing; they're just a very inaccurate measurement.
I'm no locavore, but for an article with the word "math" in the title, the following breakdown seems a bit silly:

Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

Well, fine, but ceteris paribus you've just shown that transportation and fertilization do, in fact, make up a not insignifcant percentage of food production cost. Why would you add in the cost of home storage and preparation, which (presumably) will be the same for everyone?
"don't forget that even the non professionals making mistakes will get less losses and a return closer to a long term index when better quant system are betting agains each other and keeping prices close to their optimum levels."

Do you have an argument/explanation for this? Also, why are the quant systems necessarily betting against each other?

"It is not certain at all that the worst professional models will make money just because there are non professionals that are even worst."

I didn't mean to imply that its a certainty, only that its a possibility. I mean our whole argument is about some possible utopian future, right?

"I still maintain that as the models get better and better while they bet against each other, the margin for profit is reduced and the sector as a whole should shrink and that's a victory for capitalism."

Aren't you just saying capitalism works? Can't I say the same thing about all those darn internet startups extracting value from me because they're providing me information? Would you use the same argument to conclude that the space of internet startups will shrink?
Sounds like you want SD:

http://syncwith.us/

It syncs with various online bug trackers and supports full offline manipulation of the bugs. I would use it if I didn't just make a list of stuff to do in a text file.
This is looking at the average day of the average programmer over the lifetime of the average product. Working on a 6 month old project it's vary easy to produce negative lines of code as you refractor. But, when you look at the average there is little reason to count time spent creating code that was soon replaced as useful.

It's also easy to think you are vary produce when you produce 10k lines of code in the first six weeks of a project, but the reality is over time most of that is going away. And writing more than 10 lines of code a day that sticks around for more than 2 years without making people wanting to replace it is hard.

PS: Google, for example, often scraps the source code of any company it acquires so the real metric of lines of code produced per day over the first six months is often zero in a successful project. Many a startup has failed and nothing of value was lost.
In fact, Ray was the one who wrote the blog post circulated around here a couple weeks ago about single founder startups: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489341

Great job, Ray!
> What we're really talking about here, in its extreme form, is Wealth Anorexia--a disease of distorted self-image that causes even the wildly successful to pursue their obsession beyond a reasonable point. ... Wealth anorexia is a problem for men.

There's no evidence that this is a common problem that negatively affects people's lives. The most common result of trying extremely hard to be ridiculously rich is becoming modestly successful, except for the cases in which someone throws their entire life savings into a business that fails. I doubt that is common.

The allure of parallelism has lead the author to an odd and inaccurate metaphor.
Nice clean design. Didn't find real-life usecase yet, but it's good to keep this in mind. Maybe adding functionality to just get results for one word would be useful too.

ps. there seems to be a bug when I input only one field and press button (in chrome).
The 10 best-paid authors in the world
Well, I was being about 50% sarcastic there. Personally I've been forced into entrepreneurship, somewhere around 37, because I realized my career wasn't going to go anywhere (in terms of either doing work I could be proud of or making $) unless I made some move.

At the age of 25, I just didn't have that sense of urgency.
Ask HN: what is your favourite iPad mocking app?
I'm planning to spend more time mocking apps/features/screens on the iPad, so I'm curious: are you using a mocking app ? If so, which one ? (Price is irrelevant to me here).

I already noticed:

* Draft
* SketchyPad
* iMockups

Any other to suggest ?
You could probably recode the Linux distribution in 10% of its current size just from knowing where you were going and having an arbitrary amount of time to finish the job, or 1% or less if you didn't have to interoperate with any hardware or software already in the wild. It's full of Greenspunning and other forms of code duplication.
facebook said they have been working on places for 8 months or so / Techcrunch reported hotpotatoe being acquired about a month ago...

If they kept the secret for 7 months I would be impressed; perhaps a talent acquisition to work on places (and some added IP)
I think we all (so far) clearly reject the orthodoxy of "Locavorism". But in other conversations on HN, the opposition has gone all the way to defenses of February tomatoes and Tyson chicken, and I'll hold the line against that.

There are huge economies of scale to delivering food through McDonalds and Burger King. Unfortunately, those economies are self-evident and effective and are very successfully displacing real food. It's worth some effort to come up with a cost-effective alternative based on actual food, especially if it empowers families with two working parents to actually prepare food with real ingredients.

It's hard to do that, but it can be done, and technology is going to make it easier over the next 10-15 years.
I read this post with great interest, since I am developing a social news site that I hope will solve the same problems that you refer to.

My twist on the model is twofold:

One, like Twitter, we rely extensively on "following" -- you don't have to see the "poison" in the ecosystem if you don't want to. It is ultimately very hard (without censoring, as you point out) to keep low quality content out of the stream -- at least this way, you don't have to see it.

The second approach is to implement edit ability -- group edit ability, like in a wiki. This will allow those who are interested in the upkeep of the community can go ahead and fix the problems that they see before them, instead of using ineffectual "bury" and "downvote" mechanisms.

In this way, the community can go ahead and nurture that excellence that attracted them to the community in the first place.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the project, since I approached it knowing full well the lessons of eternal september -- and as a lover of what reddit used to be, I went about trying to fix what I saw were the issues in the site.

Check it out: http://quippd.com/
The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. -Confucius

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty. But I am too busy thinking about myself.
--Edith Sitwell
Looks nice - you've got a request from Conversion Voodoo for a beta spot - looking forward to trying it out!
Thanks! You'll have it in under 24 hours. :)
I don't mean to be overly critical or dismissive, but I think this is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. It takes more than a couple of months to build steady traffic and gain traction.

For me finding customers is the easy part- they're out there, and there are a few proven ways to generate lots of traffic quickly that WILL get you customers. The hard part is getting cash flow positive and monetizing properly. That means minimizing CPA and traffic costs, maximizing customer CLV and all of the other things that come with running a profitable business. Getting more money out of a customer that what it costs to acquire him is the hard part.

It's trivial to generate $1 million in revenue for any mass market product in a few months. I've seen others do it time and time again with direct response campaigns.
That million from paying customers might cost you $10 million to acquire however.

Assuming you're targeting a large market and solving a real problem, any one of your projects has the potential to be wildly successful. The ones that aren't just haven't found their audience yet.
Fortunately, there are economies of scale and snowball effects as a product grows, so once you've gotten a small customer base and some initial traction, everything becomes much, much easier.
Commit to a single, well thought out idea, and see it through rather than starting from zero every 2 months.
Test different traffic sources, pricing models, etc. It's a fool's errand to test different startups.
It's useful in many games.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'd rather be poor than be Larry Ellison.
The chicken-and-egg problem can take a certain amount of effort to solve, but it's not a major engineering obstacle.

The easiest way to bootstrap a self-compiling compiler from bare metal is probably by writing a Forth inner interpreter in machine code, which is a few hundred bytes; a Forth outer interpreter in threaded code, which is a few hundred cells; and then an interpreter for the language of your compiler in Forth, which is likely to be a few dozen to a few thousand lines of code, depending on the language. (I don't know if Forth is good for anything else, but it's optimal for this.)

I don't know how to estimate this task properly, but I doubt it's more than a few weeks of work for a skilled person.
Seth Priebatsch's (SCVNGR Founder) TEDtalk: The game layer on top of the world
interesting point..maybe it's just that the support is best provided by the employees with the "most domain knowledge on product"? In technical startups, these employees happen to be engineers. But in other startups, take for example AirBnB, the most knowledgeable employees might be the ones who have traveled the most.

IMHO, B2C still has some applicability here. It is still beneficial to rotate support among the employees responsible for the final customer-facing product...whether that product is technical or not. Taking a support day periodically to experience your customers' problems firsthand becomes a great way to internalize their most important pain points and desires, so that you can effectively prioritize new products and feature development. Spending quality time with customers can give you a ton of insight into the "whys" and "hows" of what makes them happy :)
Poll: Ask HN: Which web application framework should I learn?
I have been working as a java programmer for last 7 years. I only know Java/jsp/struts/spring and that is sufficient to so consulting with so called big business organizations. But everyday on HN I see people talking about php, ruby on rails, python etc. I want to learn one of those new framework to develop some personal side projects. Which web framework should I learn?
1. Ruby on rails
2. Php with some php web framework
3. python Django
4. Scals lift
I don't know the schedule, but Intel will likely be rather committed by the next shareholder's meeting. And this is not entirely and clearly insane enough to e.g. muster the failed effort to keep HP HP a while ago.

Robin Harris is a great analyst with a sense of history and he shows all that in this column. I sure looks like it'd just going to be a repeat of those two last failures, especially since there's not (much of) a hardware component (as far as we know) in this cunning plan.

I suppose it's good for Intel that they're swimming in so much cash the don't need this to make or modify another fab line or three, but still....
Very nice software, although I would cut down the feature list on a light version.

I think the tracking of keyword alone is a company of its own. Sometimes I want to go back and see what our rankings were on particular keywords exactly XYZ days ago.
Apple patents process to authorize device use by your heartbeat or face
Even if the "decompression algorithm" is somehow optimized for making intelligent brains easy to encode, the "source code" for it is still present in the other half of the genome, so this doesn't affect the argument much.
Daring Fireball: Creep Executive Officer