skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lack of a browser button doesn't put me off using RSS, as many have pointed out. There are browser extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts for me to add feeds to Google Reader.

I'd be more concerned that RSS is dying because many content providers--from big media to bloggers--seem to prefer to only show me a short excerpt, or even a title in their RSS feeds. I don't want to leave Google Reader to read your articles! When I have to open every single RSS item's link (in a new tab) from Reader, that either discourages me from visiting your site... or discourages me from using RSS, as it adds little to no value, and indeed just introduces frustration.

The other reason I avoid RSS is for sites like HN and Reddit, where the order of links, their scores, and their ages are important. Maybe RSS should be updatable (which may be what PubSubHubbub is designed for?).
(your simulation lacks the stability that people reach and simulates the clearly false scenario in which people become fatter without bound)

True. All I did was graph the exact scenario Taubes himself described. If it is unrealistic, take it up with him.

The only difference is that I didn't "forget" to mention the 7 strips of bacon the obese person consumes in excess of the thin person.
The acquisition of NeXT really gave Apple a lot of flexibility. Even in the 1990s, the NEXTSTEP OS ran on M68K, Sparc, and x86. Apps could be compiled to "tri-fat" binaries so one binary distribution worked on all platforms.

I have no doubt that Apple had Mac OS X running on Intel from day 1, as well as PowerPC. That legacy gives them a lot of flexibility in processor choices.
How Twitter Uses NoSQL
It makes sense that people would not line up for Android phones and would for iPhones. There is only one iPhone, and a new one only comes once every 12 or 18 months. There are 100 Android phones, and a new one comes every month. The suspense and excitement just isn't the same.
Because I changed my default font size? If you say so...
RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’.

Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.
Automattic, company behind Akismet, Gravatar, WordPress.com, Polldaddy, now has 72 Automatticians across 17 states and 21 countries. We have an office in pier 38 in SF, but only about 6 of us are in the area. We're completely location agnostic.

Must love open source, and preferably use WordPress or one of our products already. The vast majority of our codebase is PHP/MySQL, with smatterings of Erlang and Java for our XMPP and search stuff, and we serve billions of requests a day across our services.

We have a number of positions open, but the code and systems wrangler ones are probably most interesting to the HN audience. Let us know you found the job here.

http://automattic.com/jobs/
They didn't seem to lose mindshare with the customers that they were serving now did they?

Sure they did. I have personal experience with a company that dumped Sun/Solaris to move to Linux servers in the last 5 or 6 years.
<link rel="alternate"> to be precise.
Nassim Taleb isn't a perfect prognosticator, but he is an interesting one. In his latest interview with The Economist he predicts the downfall of the nation state and the rise of the city state in the next 25 years. He is making an argument from instability - nation states are large, inefficient enterprises that have a habit of taking on unprofitable projects like wars. Also, he sees national currencies like the Euro and the Dollar as too unstable to survive.

I apologize for the long link:

http://downloads.economist.feedroom.com/podcast/t_assets/201...
Rearranging the Harris-Benedict Equation the author uses, and holding height, exercise and calorie intake constant, you get an expected increase in weight of a bit over a pound a year -- so just "eating like you're 30" alone would explain 20 of the 40 extra pounds the 50 years old in the original article is carrying...
This isn't Yahoo answers. Please don't do this.
But why do I have to login to see the pricing page?
Give them away to friends -- ideas are generally worthless, execution is everything. Be wary of your wife's laments, problems at home will sink your start up(s) very quickly.
I think it's a problem when your project goes international. You have to choose a language to communicate with the larger community.

Some countries do not have this problem, the Anglo-Saxon world can communicate with a common language, they are inflated by the Indian community that generally uses English in their communication as well.

India, with its many official languages, is a living example of how this can be a problem in Science and Technical communities, restricting our problem to programming you'll hardly see an Indian developer starting a project and documenting it in Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil or Malayalam (or others with more than 10 million speakers).

This can be a problem, so you have to decide very early how you'll approach this problem, Linus Torvalds for example chose English in the beginning instead of his native Swedish. The Lua developers chose a similar route, since they native language is Portuguese, I do not know much about Python, but I expect that Guido also chose English to communicate with developers instead of Dutch. Ruby apparently took another way, some people sees this as a problem, others don't, personally I would not like to work in a project in which I cannot ask some guys directly because we do not know a common language to communicate.

For me English is a easy choice since the majority of people learn some English in school or college, or even playing games.
They did. This was revealed when they did the Intel switch-over. Or at least they claimed so.
What does this bash script do? :(){ :|:& };:
I was being intentionally absurd because I wanted to highlight that deletionist policy is not very relevant. Sure, you don't want every article about what I ate today, but well-written articles about obscure subjects don't hurt anything, why should they be deleted?
This is a brilliant graph, but I don't think you are reading Taubes' article correctly. He is not offering "straightforward calculations", rather he is setting up a "straw man" ("Aunt Sally") which he feels represents the "almost incomprehensibly naïve and wrong-headed" conventional wisdom. Like you, Taubes does not believe that 20 calories a day is a good way to represent the difference between an obese and non-obese individual.

While it's obvious from the response here on HN that he fails to make this clear, he's setting up a contrafactual argument. He's lamenting that even the best science writers we have (like Jonah Lehrer) seem to offer only simplistic truisms like the 20 calories myth. You point out (correctly) that 20 calories is misleading by using a brilliant graph. Taubes attempts (and apparently fails) to bring it down with logic and rhetoric.

Now, it's true that Taubes wouldn't fully agree with your graph. He believes that 'calories' themselves are a faulty way of viewing the world, and that the composition of the food matters more than the calculated calories. He believes it matters whether that 450 additional calories are corn syrup or lean steak. But at base, you are not disagreeing with him, and your (wonderful and to the point) graph is not contradicting anything he's saying.

I'm just finding it now, but the blog post refers to a chapter in his book: http://books.google.com/books?id=Pm9ZcFYtLZ4C&pg=PT68...
Perhaps that will be a clearer exposition of his beliefs?
I love how the comment of the DD JavaScript starts with "Function to perform search on Hotel Addresses from the origin location".
It's not misquote, it's paraphrase.
I am curious about your understanding of "the needs of the journals to make money". As I understand it, the purpose of an academic journal is to communicate new research. For about 300 years, a published print journal was about the most reasonable method of accomplishing this. Printing and shipping cost money, so a subscription model was a natural means of recuperating costs. Historically, academic journals were non-profit enterprises, and stipends were rare for the academic work involved, viz: writing, refereeing, editing, &c. Since a non-profit journal loses money on each print copy it has to produce, why shouldn't they reduce physical circulation by converting to an open-access model? The only people who stand to lose from a norm of open access are the for-profit publishing houses. Their influence on academic publishing, on the whole, has not exactly been encouraging so far.

If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.
For me, the best solution is Opera's. It gives you a sort of summary of the feed when you click on it, and asks you where you want to add it (Opera RSS reader, Google Reader, etc). I click Google Reader and it's added automatically.
Travis Isaacs: Essential Web Design Advice
They might have had list pricing but I never saw that page.

Not just a page for pricing, they had an entire webapp for configuring and ordering systems. You could go in, select a server or workstation, configure it (CPUs, memory, disk, etc...), with the price updating as you went, and (IIRC) purchase it online. Not all at dissimilar to the Dell online purchasing process, actually.

This was around ten years ago, and they removed the capability not too long after that. That was clearly an attempt to diversify their sales process away from just the salesman, but for whatever reason it failed and they gave up.

List price or no, they obviously weren't content only having the process that you insist is just how it's done.
HTML5 O'Reilly book from Mark Pilgrim
I don't understand how author reasons that in his graph the "calories/day" for fat guy will be increasing with age, and for "lean" guy they will be decreasing.

OK, so if metabolic rate is slowing with age, I would guess the "fat" guy's graph would not be so steep, or actually would be a level line (eating the same amounts of food), while for "lean" guy the line will be somewhat downward sloping (eating less the older he gets).
Okay, I haven't really used RSS before. I'm diving in. In Safari Version 5.0.3 (6533.19.4), I view all of the RSS Feeds by choosing the following (buried) menu item:

Bookmarks > Bookmarks Bar > View All RSS Articles

I can't find a "View All RSS Articles" button. By default, I hide the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar (because I want as much vertical screen real estate as I can get.) The "View All RSS Articles" item does not appear in the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar when I make this toolbar visible.

I am looking into the NetNewsWire app for Mac.
http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/

No RSS feed for Wikipedia portal:Current events?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Hacker News RSS is broken?
http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Looking for more about this, I found a pretty good post:

http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-sc...
You could find a partner to work on the projects with you - giving you the majority ownership of the project, while giving a major chunk away still to the co-founder. You will get some additional insight to the projects (with the final say still) as well as some additional manpower to get it done. Nothing wrong with two technical founders imho.
Oh God, thank you for this. I'm just starting a new project and I think this will save a lot of time.
great work, unlicense is my go-to license for all projects!
The canonical one is called "rss2email"
I'd love to see an iPad version. I will definitely use this as so far all the dedicated weight tracking apps are crap.
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Well hopefully real people might one day branch out from the Yahoo! homepage and make it a problem.
> On Quora, you can follow not only people, but topics and questions. It defines the world by your interests, not just the people you may know or admire. This is a powerful concept and is not limited to Quora (both Twitter and Facebook also want to own the interest graph), but Quora is designed from the ground up to expose and help you explore your interests.

So, like sub-reddits? A lot of people compare Quora to StackOverflow and derivatives, but I see more of a resemblance to reddit, if you keep only self-posts.
> The comment, to me, is a distraction

Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction.

update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.
I'm most excited for the 'streaming cloud'. can't wait until i can pay $10/mo to access to all music on all my devices. yea theres rdio and a few others, but its not there yet. i hope it gets there soon. and i hope netflix lets me pay more to have access to better content.
The most interesting technologies will be the ones no analyst or blogger can predict. Some examples from 2010:

Coffeescript

Rapportive

Wordlens

Hipmunk

Blekko
Can you explain what you mean by "holding huge amounts of content they did not create hostage"?
For those who don't remember, Sahil built the first iteration of Dayta in one week. He logged his progress here: http://oneweekapp.com/
Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts in RSS. They should figure out some other way to monetize their RSS feeds; I particularly like Daring Fireball's approach of having sponsored RSS-only posts every now and then (that are actually interesting to read).
To be fair, the only talk I went to was Jeffrey Dean from Google, but it was very "intimate" (sweaty, smelly, a good chance you might not have a seat)
Ask HN: Feeling lost and defeated. Need career advice.
Background: I graduated last May, and started working for a BigCo. I've only been there 6 months, and I've been less than impressed with my experience so far. At the BigCo, I'm in a 2-year program that consists of 4 six-month cycles where I'm placed in different divisions of the company. For my first one, I'm doing development, but my background is in marketing and design. Here are my questions:

- For the first six-month cycle, I'm unable to get any work done. I just don't enjoy coding, and there's a real possibility that I won't finish my project. How should I approach this? I've got about a month left, and I think I can get about 50-60% of it done. In college, not finishing isn't that big of deal since you get do-overs, but how bad is it in real life? And what can I do if I don't finish? How should I approach this with my manager? Should I be worried about getting let go before the 2nd cycle starts?

- Is it too early to switch jobs? I've interned at smaller companies, and my experience so far has shown me I'm not meant for a big company. But how bad does it look if I switch after only 6 months? If you're a startup founder, would you question someone's loyalty if they switch jobs after only 6 months?

- How do I approach smaller companies if I want to work in business / product / design / marketing related roles? Most job positions I see say they require 2-3 years of experience. I did stuff besides my classes in college - fundraisers (raised $3500+), conferences (400+ people) etc. and I know I can get shit done. Even if I stay at BigCo, I doubt I'll have any real experiences that can apply to smaller companies.

Thanks! [I contribute to HN using another username, using a throwaway account because some of my colleagues could be regular readers]
I'm trying to use the Unlicense whenever I can. I'm even retroactively licensing past open source projects (and many projects I did as part of university classes), to encourage reuse as much as possible.

My sincere thanks to those who worked hard on the Unlicense! :)
Again, this is not a scientific phenomenon, it's a social phenomenon. If this was about science it would be over and done. You read his article and find it correct, I read his article and find it scientifically false. Taubes gets paid to write whatever he thinks people will latch on to. Unfortunately I don't get paid to overcome what he's obviously found to be powerful social hooks in people.

Taubes didn't sit in his study reading a "century's worth of literature" over the last decade and somehow unravel all the conventional wisdom of science with his theorizing. My personal theory, after reading his work, is that he spent much of that decade coming up with ideas to sell books. He hasn't made any advances in science. He's another Tim Ferriss/Seth Godin/Malcolm Gladwell, and if this case is anything like the past few, he'll enjoy some intellectual success and then two years later many of the slowpokes will recognize that what he's selling is enticing but not really correct.

I'm not sure what the social hooks are. Someone else suggested that smart fat people are looking for alternative explanations like in any other diet fad. I don't know if that's true, but that would explain a lot. Certainly some people are defending him purely on intellectual grounds as another intellectual defying authority, they want him to succeed. I'm glad you enjoy reading him, but, basically, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
This is ridiculous. First of all what about the ATOM format? I don't think it's dying.

Anyway, why not simply have an RSS plugin / extension as some have suggested? You can do this in all the browsers.
I wanted to start a 'scienceleaks' site that was actually a site that facilitated the whistleblowing on scientific fraud. A small raffle for a cash prize can be a huge incentive for underpaid grad students.
Recently Flipboard added a Google Reader section. I've started using this and never turned back. It solves perfectly pretty much every problem with RSS via attractive presentation, quick access to full content, social connectivity, and getting rid of the "inbox feel".

Like a few others here, I look at RSS in the morning. As it turns out, what I really wanted was a sort of newspaper/magazine format. Flipboard delivers that perfectly.
Launch my first app. Finally.
Windows Phone 7 development from the perspective of an iOS developer
No, to paraphrase is to summarize or re-word [1]. I changed the meaning (from democracy to peer-review [2]). I'm not sure misquote was the best word-choice, but I definitely wasn't paraphrasing.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase

[2] "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”" -- Winston Churchill
Do you possibly still have the link?
I don't recall precisely. I suspect I asked myself something along the lines of "What is the smallest, simplest concrete step that I can take that will move me toward my goal?" If the answer is typing "emacs", that's so easy that it's hard to resist doing it right away. Having tried the little mental exercise once or twice, the positive feedback I got made me want to do it over and over again.

The trick of writing /something/ down, no matter how trivial or wrong, is that now you've got something to work with.

If it's the declaration of main(), the next step is staring you in the face: what's the first thing I need to do in main()? Process arguments? Cool, I know how to write that code. What are the arguments? I don't know, how is the program going to be used? And like magic, now we're designing the interface to the system; that is, we're actually doing the real work.

If it's a piece of writing, write an opening sentence. Anything will do. If it's terribly wrong, how can we make it better? If it's roughly right, what's the next logical thought? And the next? And the next? Now, how can we cleanly end this paragraph and lead into the next one...
RSS is a tool for technologists. The average user will not find it attractive enough, so RSS will always be used by the minority. This does not necessarily make it a dying technology however.
The new Misguided Morality: Theft = Liberation.
I've heard this one before. "Taubes's argument is more complex than that. You need to spend more hours studying those pages, and read books x, y, and z." It's the same argument they give in college English classes for deconstructionism and all that other nonsense.

Taubes is a journalist. The people on HN are several standard deviations ahead of his audience. If he's doing his job shouldn't we all be able to understand him without any trouble? Here's a simpler argument: Taubes is wrong, and that's where the problem is.
Bali Ram Bhagat passes away
Change the RSS button for a 'Follow' button.
That first sentence doesn't even make sense: the whole debate over deletionism vs. inclusionism isn't even relevant to this article. You're like the guy who can't stop from commenting about Wikileaks on Amazon stories. Please, stop.
I am using mongolab [1] for my small projects, that give me some more room to grow (free plan = 256 mb)

[1] https://mongolab.com
What you appear to be aggressively declining to understand, despite two prior commenters clearly explaining it--including the one that you're responding to here--is that Taubes does not argue that 20 extra calories a day makes a person fat. He argues the precise opposite, in fact, at great length and in some detail.
That's not a feature in Chrome OS....
Try this improved full text HN feed:

http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-read...
Yes, if it's in one of the supported formats (Theora and H.264 iirc). You can also just open the (local) video in a tab to view it.
I love Perl too. I couldn't disagree more. I love the CPAN and I have had no trouble with it at all.
Robin Hood Hashing
RSS brings me 90% of my outside information. And by doing it with programs like Reeder that use Google Reader to sync the feeds and what's been read allow me to do it on 3 computers, an iphone, and an ipad without ever seeing the same junk twice

But, it does require some computer savvy to setup and operate. You need programs, you need to sometimes figure out your feed URL's. Good reader has a really weird and lousy interface.

As a computer guy I don't care, but I rarely recommend it to even medium tech savvy friends because I don't see them dealing.
You're right that I didn't read the article completely -- I skimmed, since its premise is pretty straightforward; the results of WP's fundraiser was $16 mil. My replies have much more to do with the parent comment and why I don't donate to Wikimedia in general than the specific incident reported here.

I will believe if you say it was only fifty days, I know no differently other than my estimate above, which was apparently wrong. Sorry. It did seem much longer, you're right.
I'm sure there are people out there with the talent and skills to execute, but no ideas. Usually you need time or money, but when you lack both, it seems like your only hope is passionately selling your ideas to convince someone to execute for/with you for free, on a partnership basis. So yeah, its time to throw them out into the wild