skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting how popular media plays into this. On a Food Network's chef competition on chef made a typical "American" size portion for one of the dishes. The judges really didn't like that.

On the other hand typical American restaurants often insert sarcastic lines in their TV ads about how our portions are nothing like "French" portions -- you really get a bang for your buck when you eat here.

So it seems like there are 2 very different attitudes and 2 very different types of consumers. Both are catered to by different types of businesses.

I think the portion size has also been a hint as to how much a person should be eating. Those have been used more by the food processing industry to "mask" the caloric content of their products, rather than by consumers to modulate their food intake appropriately.
The problem is, some of the biggest discoveries have been of the form "x is the same as y."

Interesting question whether you could auto-detect closed mindedness though. One sign might be when people stop being surprised, or realizing that some earlier theory of theirs was wrong (which amount to the same thing).
Her argument is actually more cautious than yours. Yours begs the question, "Are there such things as good calories and bad calories?"
An idle brain may be the self's workshop
Nearby Friends now lets you view your friend's check-in history
It's funny you say this. I had a nagging feeling I couldn't sort out while I was reading his post. It boils down to just what you said.

The thing with Dave Winer is that I've never read his stuff and thought "What a fascinating, energizing insight this fellow is sharing. I must read more!"

Instead, I'm left thinking he comes off as such a bitter, grouchy sourpuss who's really impressed that once upon a time he invented RSS. I mean, no kidding, look at the post previous to this one:

"And everyone was hogging every inch of the road, including my bits of the road. Lots of near-misses, cars driving in the bike lanes, and people walking and riding four a-breast."

Oh. So your blog's raison d'être truly is just to grouse about everything. That's cool, but you generally have to be really funny to make that work in the long term.

I don't think his age has anything to do with the fact that people don't want to work with him. I think people don't want to work with him because by and large, the things he has to say are neither fun nor interesting.
If you invest in tech companies, try bringing in some tech experience. It might push your comfort level. It also might make you much more competitive.

Let me know when you're willing to take startup pay (real startup pay, not $100K instead of $130K). Most 50 year-olds that I talk to aren't.
The GI tract is exquisitely sensitive to stretch, which is one of the many "fullness" signals. So it's not unreasonable to guess that this is part of what occurs. The single most likely explanation behind the weight loss is that the consumption of water displaced some portion of calorie consumption, causing participants to eat fewer calories.
Startups Old People, and Robert Scoble
I call bullshit. If there where a systematic discrimination against any group of people, some startup could win big by hirering these people that are as good, but nobody seem to be willing to pay for.

But since not a single one has done so (at least publically), something else must be stopping them.
I knew I'd seen it, and suspected I found it through HN. Here it is with its discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400048

No harm in seeing this again, but the (rather small) discussion has some interesting points and counter-points.
when a user installs an application like Photoshop, he doesn't expect it to change anything outside of the operating system partition

This still does not make it right for GRUB et al. to call claim to that area of the hard disk. If anyone can write to it, for what ever their needs may be, then forethought should have said, "hey, this can potentially screw some stuff up. We should find a BETTER way". I use GRUB as my primary bootloader and I still cannot get on their side in this debate.
NITDroid project (android on N900)
But employers don't set the wage. If they did, then all wages would fall to the minimum wage, when in fact only 2% of the US labor force does. Why is that?

Russ Roberts covers the answer better than I could:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....
You begin the post with "He's right though," and then provide anecdotal evidence. I am not arguing against your experience. Your experience is not wrong; I am arguing against that the grandfather post is "right" that homelessness is a symptom of capitalism, to which you agreed and supported.
Everything needs to be fleshed out more. Reading this and your other post leaves me with the feeling that you might have a good idea but are very early in formulating it into a business (as opposed to a hobby).

It is a pain in the butt and extremely time consuming - not to mention there are no guarantees at the end. Chances are that it won't all even help with the idea/business.

None of that matters because it's what you have to do to even have a chance for investment. In the end you'll be better for it.
You might want to rethink that strategy just for this episode. As much as Jason annoys me (and he does) I have to give him credit for asking smart, interesting questions of Gabriel Weinberg. I didn't know much about DDG going in, and felt like I got a great overview of how it works and why I might want to use it.
http://www.google.com/search?tbs=ww:1&q=partial+fraction...
You're right. We care about the idea as much for what it tells us about the people as for its own sake.
"I have yet to hear a cogent argument on why folks in their late 40s or early 50s are not adequately represented in programming positions start ups or otherwise. What is unique about programming as a practice that make it unsuitable for professional beyond a certain age?"

Bear in mind that programming is still a relatively new field. There are simply more young programmers out there. We see ageism more because it's an option. You can start a startup consisting only of young people.

I predict that as the field matures, it will become less of an issue. Companies won't be able to ignore older programmers (or at least will be less able to ignore them) because there will be more of them.
In absolute terms, women constitute the largest segment of the market. That alone should be sufficient reason to have more women participating in or founding start-ups. It stands to reason that their intuitive insights, understanding and vision, due to their affinity with women at large, will lead to products and services which serve that market segment --and perhaps humanity in general-- better.
"more helpful and cooperative" looks a lot like creepy and patronizing from the otherside.
This gapping hole has actually been used to target TrueCrypt.

http://www.stoned-bootkit.info/

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Bootkit-bypasses-...

http://www.anti-forensics.com/modify-truecrypt-encryption-bo...
That's quite a simplification, but yeah, I'll accept that for the purposes of this post :)

If something I do visibly helps somebody, I feel good then because it feels like I have a purpose in life. It feels like I'm contributing to something greater than myself.

I think one of the most fundamental human urges is to feel like you belong to something. Helping people is so far the best way I've found of satisfying that urge. Capitalism seems to be based on the idea that that what people really want is more stuff. I think the reason that seems to be true is because having stuff and acquiring more of it is necessary to survive in a capitalist society. You need to have money to buy food and shelter. That's also why people don't share more of their stuff - sharing their stuff reduces their chances of survival. Even if somebody is rich "enough" to survive, they still need money to participate in nearly every other aspect of society. They can't listen to music, or go out with their friends, or really do anything unless they have money (or stuff that can be converted into money). This is always in the back of people's minds and is the reason people don't share more, I think.
Those countries that did not have homelessness under Communism have plenty of it under capitalism, for those countries that I have experience with.

That's not a scientific study, but it definitely should give you pause. Oh and I forgot to add Romania to the list.

I said "in the communist countries that I've visited", to qualify my experience, and to make sure that you understood that I was not speaking for all communist countries at all times.
Some of us think of 'less' primarily as a unix pager...which I'm pretty sure predates all of these.
Actually the point I was making is that people routinely do the opposite. They confuse asshole with tough.
I'd suggest something a bit more clearly noted on the screen, perhaps next to the time itself.
Clickables:

http://www.taggedback.com/

https://microsoft.promo.eprize.com/myappisbetter/

https://microsoft.promo.eprize.com/myappisbetter/public/fulf...

Why do people not bother to create the clickable links? Do they not care? Do they not know (despite it being in the FAQ and mentioned over and over again)?

Why?
"I'm really surprised to find someone on HN who is against capitalism."

Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist.
> obviously getting your calories from healthy fats such as olive oil and avacados is going to be a lot more beneficial to your weight in the long run than getting your calories from sugary fizzy drinks such as coca-cola.

It may be "obvious", but I'm not sure if that's true!
Ask HN: recommendations for a mail client?
Looking for a desktop mail client to replace Outlook. I'll use it to access a Gmail account as IMAP and a POP3 account. I'm dissatisfied with Outlook 2007 (home) and even more dissatisfied with Outlook 2010 (work). I'm also dissatisfied with Gmail's web-based client. Outlook is unintuitive in practically every common task (and worse for the uncommon tasks). Gmail is too minimalistic. I'm getting ready to evaluate Thunderbird. I just want to solicit some recommendations. Seamless interface to Google contacts and calendar would be a plus.
Technology has allowed us to produce massive amounts of food very inexpensively. The restaurant portions are evidence of that. We can grow, process and deliver food much more inexpensively than we did 30 years ago.

Go into a Bojanles and order a large hash brown as a side order for breakfast. It's enough potatoes for three or four adults.
It would be an instant PR victory for the country with the women though in that case, win or lose they'd win. The rest of the world would go after the 'heartless brutes that killed those poor women'.
I'll grant you that it's not unthinkable. But I think it's highly unlikely that there's any kind of non-spurrious correlation between cleanliness and crime.
If there was no irrelevant "bullshit" the show would be incredibly boring. I also find that the random tangents Jason goes on are the most interesting parts of the show.

And as far as respect goes, I think the fact that Jason speaks his mind so freely and offends people (like you!) all the time makes him more worthy of respect.
I do believe that you underestimate the effect of what has happened.

It may not have lead to changes inside Iran yet, but it did show the world that Iran isn't just another country full of towelheads and sandniggers intend on killing us, giving hope to a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis.

And that is going to impact Iran.

*Use of racist slurs are for effect only and does not indicate agreement.
Based on the normal distribution of worker skills there will aways be plenty of people earning just minimum wage, but you can't infer that far more people are earning $6/hour at a $6/hour minimum wage than would be earning that wage if no minimum wage existed. Such large scale market inefficiencies would not last for long.

Surely there will be some workers who are paid marginally more because of minimum wage laws, but not much more. Because of the large quantity of low paid workers, the gains from automation are significant. One wheat combine does the work of thousands of laborers.

Firms do not "take advantage" any more than workers do. Surely some workers would be paid somewhat less without minimum wage, but surely more people would be employed, gaining skills and experience, etc.

Who really knows what the impact of this would be on various industries over time. The modern world has done away with low skilled manufacturing jobs (which might have been the first rung on a ladder to more skilled jobs) and replaced hundreds of thousands of workers with a far smaller number of robots.

Most advocates of minimum wage prefer to look at the world as a single slice of time in which it's obvious that someone is benefitting from the policy. Over a longer period of time, the benefit is far more difficult to detect and the case for minimum wage evaporates.

Imagine a world in which people could be hired for $2 per hour (where that's all their skills were worth). The state could simply subsidize their paid work. Then it's not a welfare system but a subsidized job training program. Far preferable both for outcomes and for the self identity of those working in the program.
It's not all CGI.

The author comments:

"-I think i must make it clear. There are a few non-CG elements in the shortfilm: photographer (shot on greenscreen), pigeons, timelapsed growing flowers, flying airplane and sky backgrounds."
I'd be ashamed to put out something that completely failed without nice frills like CSS and canvas. Links (the browser) is good enough for Gmail, so that's the level of competence I expect of myself.
Recruitment done right: How to treat and hire job candidates
Yup. In fact, this is a benefit to dressing up before a public performance or interview. You don't have to deck yourself out with a full-on suit. But dressing up has been shown to decrease communication apprehension.
Maybe those are nice fonts, but my browsers are doing a terrible job of rendering them. IE8 has nasty jagged edges on the curves and has clipped the very bottom of the heading font. In Firefox the body text is light and indistinct, escpeially the abbr tags.
Well it is easier to get away with being a jerk when you don't smell like B.O.

The first experiment is clearly suspect. I strikes me as equally like the people who washed their hands held themselves, and society, to a higher standard than those who didn't and thus where harsher in theory judgments.

In the later two, I'd like to see if the result differed greatly by having students read passages about how smart/stupid they were or how attractive/ugly they were.
Rate my nodeknockout project: tweetirc
Props to Googlers, and Matt Nowack for the framework.
Code is packaged here: http://github.com/victusfate/html5-resume
There are economic reasons why many daycares will not hire men (e.g. fear of lawsuits).
This is one area Google does things relatively well, I think. Especially when they branch out and design a new thing with heavy CS content, the lead designers are often in their 40s or 50s and have experience with significant past systems in related areas: Rob Pike, Lars Bak, Ken Thompson, Peter Norvig, etc.

I think one reason is that people of that age are mostly the ones who even remember various useful solutions to problems and tradeoffs that have come up in the past. CS is strangely bad at digitizing its history: I can get a philosophy journal issue from 1890 on Jstor, but many CS journals and proceedings from as recently as 1980 are still dead-tree only. And many are still relevant, e.g. the V8 js engine is strongly based on 1980s Smalltalk compiler research. A handful of important papers (say, by Turing) have been piecemeal scanned and put online by interested people, and a handful of university classes cover historical aspects, but overall I don't think history transmission is taken particularly seriously in CS circles. So, it ends up being more of a living-memory sort of deal, where if you want knowledge from the 1970s/80s to influence your designs, you have to hire people who personally remember it.
"Now with less features, one grid"

Is that supposed to be "Now with lesser features"?
I think it would be "fewer features"
Psst, the semicolon comment is funny because JavaScript doesn't actually require semicolons at the end of each line. It will automatically insert them for you if missing, which has led to a number of hard-to-find bugs.

Its curly-brace behavior, however, is pretty much exactly like C.
"Person A: I need to reinstall this computer with Debian, but I don’t have a CD or DVD burner or any flash media. I’m not sure if I have any other options. Could you help me?
Person B: I don’t have time. Just use PXE."

The author is contriving a bullshit situation to make her point. If Person A is unwilling to ask what PXE is for fear of looking stupid, then they sure as shit aren't going to explicitly ask for help. Person A is only asking for help because she made them ask for help. That doesn't make any sense. If the problem here is communication like she says it is, she could at least provide a realistic communication scenario. How that conversation really went down:

Person A: I need to reinstall this computer with Debian, but I don’t have a CD or DVD burner or any flash media.

Person B: Just use PXE.

Oh snap. Now Person B seems like less of a complete asshole. He just thinks he's being asked an information question, not a request for ongoing help and support. The author is right, there is a communication problem. And she's part of it.

"Do you see what Person B did wrong, here? Person A was asking for help, and clearly does not know about netbooting (or they wouldn’t have asked). Person B assumes they know what PXE is and that they know how to use it, or at least that they can figure it out for themselves."

The only thing Person B did was give Person A enough credit to assume they were on the same level, probably thinking PXE just slipped Person A's mind. Do you get it? Person B's not being elitist. He's being the opposite of that. He's assuming that if you have any further questions, you'll just ask them because you shouldn't feel embarrassed to do so. But more impotantly: WHY THE HELL ARE WE NOT DISCUSSING WHAT PERSON A DID WRONG? If you don't know what PXE is, the solution is not to complain about the vast culture of elitism in the technology industry. The solution is to get over yourself and ask what PXE is.
That assumes that the data the should be sorted wasn't created on the GPU right?
Hell, I'm waiting until my gigabytes of legacy PDF documents can open and be legible on screen, instead of converted to some CRM format. And the iPad isn't the answer.
7 Notable Changes in Chromium 7
As an American who has visited Canada many times, I've always been struck by the high functioning of Canada's homeless population. There are a lot of homeless youth and young adults who panhandle, etc.

Also, in Canada the work force is far more competitive (higher unemployment drives this). The person helping you at a fast food restaurant is a good communicator, appears clean, and is helpful and good natured. Across the border in the US, many fast food employees are noticeably less able.

So my hypothesis is that due to higher unemployment, many "homeless" in Canada are in fact people who would easily hold down a job in the US.

The US homeless, on the other hand, almost all appear to have psychiatric problems or substance abuse problems. I'd speculate that few US homeless would be able to hold down a simple job even if they were given a $5K per month stipend and fully subsidized apartment for the first year.
Why is this perfectly reasonable, civil comment being downvoted?
> Wouldn’t it be so much better to have more skilled people in computer science, to fix even more bugs and create even more brilliant pieces of software?

Maybe the problem is that in order to have good chances of becoming a good hacker you need to be the kind of guy that will be able to find the BIOS option yourself...

Btw I think that the low number of women in our industry is not related to this issues at all, but to cultural/evolutionary aspects resulting in a woman being not exactly happy with the idea of passing tons of long hours in front of the screen of a computer when in the teenager age range of your life (that is, when 99.99% of people become hackers).
i've started out with calculus.(it;s been 30 hours now) and i'am enjoying it as i'am able to understand.so my plan is to continue this partial fraction problem when i reach integral calculus involving partial fractions and eventually laplace transforms.
and you said my algebra skills sucks.well i partialy agree with you cause i wouldn't be able to solve limits and differentiate functions without a grasp on algebra(precalculus for namesake).
as a matter of fact i've never been good at anything .i suck in everything that i do.!!!!!!!!!
i've started out with calculus.(it;s been 30 hours now) and i'am enjoying it as i'am able to understand.so my plan is to continue this partial fraction problem when i reach integral calculus involving partial fractions and eventually laplace transforms. and you said my algebra skills sucks.well i partialy agree with you cause i wouldn't be able to solve limits and differentiate functions without a grasp on algebra(precalculus for namesake). as a matter of fact i've never been good at anything .i suck in everything that i do.!!!!!!!!!

by the way i'am not offended.i'am enjoying myself with calculus.i'll get back to you if i have any doubts.if you got to say something you can.
- If you want to go old school, you might try Alpine.

- I use Opera a lot, which has an email client built in. Since my browser is open all day, it makes it easier to search through old indexed mail with just a click. I don't like keeping multiple apps open all the time. So it works out for me. Its RSS feed client interface is neatly tied into that as well(although minimal). I subscribe to important notification, project activity feeds there(which don't belong in my regular Google reader). So i would you suggest you take take it out for a spin. it doesn't have GCal integration, but thats on my speed dial anyways.
With the var keyword the variable will be the exact same type as what you initialize it to, not an interface.

List<Foo> list = new ArrayList<Foo>();

...is programming towards an interface, whereas

var list = new ArrayList<Foo>();

...isn't, because the type of list will be ArrayList. I think his point was that with the new Java stuff you could instead do

List<Foo> list = new ArrayList<>();

...which would then be explicitly programming towards an interface, while still not having to type so bleeding much.
"In 10 years you'll barely remember any of the message boards that are so important to you now."

I couldn't disagree more. The majority of my closest friendships and professional opportunities have come from time spent on the Internet. I'm probably an extreme case, but people "on the Internet" are no more real than people you meet face-to-face, and online friendships can and do turn into real-life friendships, and vice versa.
Did anything come up regarding DDG not really showing Mahalo pages in results?
Have you filed a bug? Please do and reply with a bug number.
It would be interesting if restaurants cut the portion sizes in half, kept the same prices, but used higher quality products and better care in preparing.

I guess it's wishful thinking.
I've always thought of scribd as something similar to slideshare
There are various publishing platforms like scribd, eg Issuu. Also, http://superuser.com/questions/81741/alternative-to-slidesha...
Jason Calacanis' Warning To Y Combinator Startups [video]