skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is you're misinterpreting Taubes, because he is saying 1) the mainstream believes such as small number of calories matters, and 2) that is absurd.

The mainstream says that 7 strips of bacon will make you 37.5 lbs overweight and tacking on an extra half strip will add 2.5lbs more. In order to make this seem absurd, Taubes never mentions the first 7 strips of bacon.

Whether or not I agree with (1) depends on how low we set the threshold for what matters. If we care about the difference between "six pack" and "thin but no six pack", we care about the first half strip of bacon. (Fun fact: bodybuilders and boxers do stress about 20 cals/day.) For the purposes of Taubes example (thin 50 year old vs obese 50 year old), mainstream nutrition and calorie counting says 20 extra calories doesn't matter.

When I said precision, I don't mean 20 cals leads to 40 pounds. I mean the precision of someone eating an average calorie count with a margin of error so small. Consider the other side of that - for me to have maintained my own weight for the last 20 years, I would have to have been extremely precise in my eating, which I'm sure I wasn't.

It's exceedingly unlikely that you maintained your weight with a margin of error of 2lbs - my daily variation can be as large as 6-7lbs. I'm also fairly "stable" in my weight - it never leaves [215,230] (unfortunately I'm a hard gainer).

Further, if you want to stay roughly stable in weight, the target is not your maintenance needs. If you instead target the maintenance needs of a person of ideal weight (rather than a person of your weight), you don't need much precision at all to avoid becoming overweight. If you are off by 100 cals, you might be 5lbs too heavy, but you won't get anywhere near 40lbs - your maintenance needs will increase and consume the excess.
Reinventing the wheel with microframeworks?
Recently I started working on a new project, and I decided to go with AppEngine to learn a bit about it (and because it looks great so far). Since I'm going in that direction, I decided to use a microframework to have the most control over the programming, so I went with Flask (this isn't specific to Flask, however).

After coding a bit, it feels like I'm always reinventing things that Django already has. I'm pretty sure that this is because I have years of development with Django under my belt, but the mere fact that I have to basically write my own framework is alarming.

I know that Django on GAE has a few problems (mainly that the ORM is not designed for it), but I hear that the django-nonrel people have done a good job porting it.

What are your experiences with microframeworks, on or off GAE? Has anyone used Django on GAE? Is it worth giving up on all the batteries that Django provides, and what do you gain?
Anecdote. A mechanical clock has dozens of moving parts, and is powered by a large, fragile, spring. I wouldn't trust it for anything critical, (which "waking up on time" isn't) but then again, I wouldn't trust any single alarm.

In response to the guy behind you: I did some googling for high-reliability alarm clocks, and didn't find anything relevant. Designing one would be amusing, in the standard vein of engineering humor. (Ha ha, isn't this horribly over-designed.) Redundant power supplies! Integral UPS! Three rad-hard microcontrollers which vote on the correct time! Two displays, in case a LED segment on one fails, and gives you the impression of the wrong time! Costs $5000, and weighs 40 pounds!
I use all three: my own domain for activism and friends, my business domain for stuff related to my job, hotmail for a spam-catcher account when sites make me sign up, and gmail to manage notifications from various social network sites etc.
If you're in the UK, Companies House have a web page that explains the basics of setting up a limited company.

http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/infoAndGuide/companyRegistr...

You can also use their WebCHeck service to find out whether the name you want is taken or not.

http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/
Meet a VC: Win a Trip to Boston to Meet with TechStars Mentors
HTTP referrer header will be stripped from HTTPS to HTTP according to RFC so it solves one of the problems.

Also there is a Chrome extension for Google SSL Web search: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lcncmkcnkcdbbanb...
Breaking news: mental cognitive models are reflected in brain structure. Film at eleven.
"which can often uniquely identify you."

"and potentially show up in unwanted places,
like insurance, credit & background checks."

yeah, i'm pretty sure that's not a thing that can happen.

also, if you like the internet being free then you shouldn't mind seeing ads for your demographic that get a better roi and make more money for publishers of the content you don't pay for.
... which confirms that Google SSL protects my privacy as much as DDG, right?
Where can you register a business for $30? Most states have fees for registration closer to $100 a year and any website you use is also going to charge you a fee upwards of $100.
that was my reaction too ...
Reader says I’m a douchebag (but he keeps coming back to the site)
Scrolling on iPhone 4.2 causes Safari crash.
For the UK, also worth noting that it's worth getting the printed certificate of incorporation, since you will need that in order to open a bank account.
Or, you could use https://encrypted.google.com which disables the referral[1]. You can also turn off the history[2].

Other info, like your IP address (which they partially anonymize after... 9/18/24 months (conflicting details)) and cookie[3] (which you can clear / block), is still stored. Odds are DDG does this too (edit: they don't, see replies), as it's mostly useful for overall statistics.

[1]: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...
[2]: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...
[3]: http://www.google.com/privacy/faq.html#toc-terms-server-logs
I don't understand what people are complaining about when they use google for generic product searches like this.

What do you expect "iPhone 4 cases" to return?

Links to reviews? Links to Apple's online stores? Links to other retailer's stores? Links to information about what the cases are manufactured from?

I don't understand what a search engine is supposed to do in this use case. How can it divine which of the many things related to iPhone cases you're interested in? This generic search could go in many different directions.

Personally I would never think go search google directly for a product review like this. Amazon is the best-known place to find reviews from fellow general-consumers.

When you use a search engine, I think the key to efficiency is having a firm idea of what type of results you'd like it to return before you press the "Search" button.
I wish more colleges do it that way, I know Northeastern University switched over last year some time.
Good post, thank you for sharing!

How much of your traffic/sales has come from web searches? (you seem to hint that not much). What did you do for SEO?
Encryption would just make sure that only Google gets your search queries. They would still profile your searches. Also, opting out of Google Analytics does not affect your search profile.

But then, why should we have to opt out of this instead of opting in?
Says the guy with a simple website.
Any chance to get a mongolab invite ?
Competition is good.
Yeah but someday it might and if it does today's info will be there. Because these companies are collecting the info now.

So while there's not yet a company collecting, collating and selling this info from all the various sources the database that company will eventually sell is already being built.
Yes. On Slidedeck's website, they have use cases that demonstrate their products in action. I wouldn't use the silver layer style as is. I would like to see it in context -- what would an actual blog page look like using it or what would an icon look like?
"Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just more complicated."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/08/19.html
Next Big Thing (Scott Adams Blog)
Facebook Reviews: What status messages reveal
OpenSUSE rolling release: Tumbleweed
Ah, you just have to do it differently. You can't approach an enterprise problem with "real math"; real math is usually pretty brittle in practice, in the sense that the way the axiomatic systems tend to get set up you can ram the slightest deviation from them through to prove anything, thus breaking the system wide open. Practical programming does need to be more robust than that. Even Haskell requires unsafePerformIO and while end users should not use it, some important libraries certainly do. Even algorithms work tends to be not very useful.

On the other hand, the way in which you think of mathematical entities can be very important and useful, particularly in thinking of things in terms of constraints and preconditions and the resulting guarantees the code can make. Again, not in a flat-out "code proof" sense, but as a way of approaching the code. This has allowed me to write some surprisingly capable code in a multi-team setting by carefully considering the minimal requirements I can impose on the other teams to get a desired result, then making sure I enforce those requirements carefully (since I am in a language where I can't do it with a type system), and then on those basic promises build another layer of the system that is the thing I am actually working on. If I came at this with a hacky hacky chop chop approach it would fail... just as the previous effort did, ahem.

Also, in programming as in math, a thing is what it does, profoundly. This can take a long time to come to grips with. A typical programming entity "is" quite a bit more than your typical math entity, though, for better and for worse.

Preconditions, postconditions, and constraints also make great testing fodder, by which I mean, they make great practical testing fodder. Writing code in practice is a lot easier if you have some assurance that those things are actually true.

I don't necessarily even sit down and sketch this all out, again, because being too rigid causes your rigid assumptions to break, but this stuff is always in the back of my head, and it will get you quite far once you master it....

... and I say that in general. edw519 I wouldn't care to second guess how you're doing things at this point. :)
Thanks HN: Developers and YC companies video speed interview for free 1/11
My favourite interview question is "When can you start?"
I grant that early LISPs were royally screwed. The main question in my mind is whether or not the cognitive footprint of the sort of language you are advocating is small enough to retain the same scope and approachability of the traditional ur-lisp exercise, even within an order of magnitude. By "cognitive footprint", of course, I'm including all of the research language esoterica you're saying that a fledgling language designer should understand before they crank out an ur-lisp.

Have you considered quickly knocking one out for us so that we can all see what a minimally-viable language that includes all of your essential features looks like? I confess you have piqued my curiosity, and I'd love to see a model to emulate.

Just so we're clear: I enjoy your writings on this subject. You rarely fail to expand my thinking.
I agree that this is only true when the language is given a strong enough type and that giving such a type may be to cumbersome. In fact languages that can do most of these things already exist (Coq and Agda for example) but they are indeed to cumbersome.

That is why we need people experimenting with new languages like Epigram, attempting to find a way of writing these programs in such a way that these strong types don't become to cumbersome.
Finish this http://beepl.com
IBM Watson, a Jeopardy-playing AI computer program to compete Feb 14-16th
2011, my father-in-law...and COBOL
Yeah, but you're assuming that spammers knows what the heck they're doing.
You can even register a business for things that you might consider a hobby as long as you can earn a little bit of money doing it. For example, I know someone who is an amateur photographer who occasionally takes photos for his friends at weddings or other family gatherings. His business only barely breaks even, but it does allow him to consider his camera and computer equipment as business expenses - things that he would probably spend money on for himself anyway.

Any small business owner should be familiar with the IRS Guides at http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/index.html , and especially Publication 535, which tells you business expenses are allowable: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p535/index.html
You could use a Diffie-Hellman exchange to get a shared secret so things are "obscured by default" but not trusted, then let higher layers deal with trust validation. For example, the TLS certificate handshake could just be a matter of constructing a blob containing the two endpoints' DH public keys and signing it to prove that a man-in-the-middle hasn't intercepted the channel. All the actual encryption would be handled by the IP stack and offloaded to hardware, while the application-layer TLS bits would be used once at startup (and maybe subsequently if the lower layer re-keys) then get out of the way.

Key and cipher negotiation could easily be shoehorned into the three-way-handshake already used to establish connections. AES with a CTR block mode would be the obvious cipher choice since each packet would be handled separately. With TCP you could even just use the sequence number as the counter, although this would be harder at the IP layer.

But yeah, none of this would have been available at the time. Still, given today's technology it would not be difficult to future-proof, especially if the trust machinery is left to the application.
Clickable: http://grapev.in
Is any one else getting tired of these versus type articles?
I would argue that KISS is actually a utilitarian choice. I have always interpreted KISS as how do I go from idea to product in the simplest manner, and keep both development, and the users interaction with the product simple.

If you look at new twitter, it is actually simpler than the old one, because now every tweet displayed only has one initial option, click to open, instead of the five per tweet that were displayed. They are giving us the user less initial options.

Also, you're site is pretty simple, and I would like to say that is a good thing, because all the user can do is read, they can't even attack you in a nice comments section. ;)
If you pay with your data instead of money, how does that make a service "free"? It would only be free if your data was worthless. But then they would not collect it in the first place.
What will become of Twitter?
Take any problem where there are rules and n exceptions to those rules. All salesmen get cost * x% commission on an item EXCEPT when it's a a) our annual year end sale then they get y% or b) when it's an internet sale then they get z%.

That's the pattern to all this, rules and exceptions and how easy it is to change those rules (because they change constantly).

So do you put all that into your SalesPerson object or is there a better way to abstract the logic of commissions?
About 4 months. I didn't sell anything the first couple weeks, which was a little scary. The Drupal.org case study really kicked things off, and it's been steady since.
Thanks, that's handy to know. In a bizarre coincidence I was in the middle of setting up a company when I saw your article.
Be careful how you define value / cost / worth. It costs me nothing if they duplicate information I give them. It costs me something if it's used to abusively manipulate me. It pays me something if it's used to manipulate me (ie, what I see) in ways I approve of.
xmlstarlet is a great commanding tool for manipulating xml data. It's like sed/awk/grep for xml
I agree that this won't solve all bugs, maybe not even the majority. But I am convinced it solves a significant amount of bugs. Personally I find that an expressive type system can aid significantly in discovering your own misconceptions and clarifying what you intend to do.

When coding Haskell I tend to start by envisioning the type I need my program to have and then fill the code from there.
Dear Rackspace, this *could* be your Twitter presence
For those of us who don't know - QE is Quantitative Easing which is nicely explained in this great xtranormal video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k
Other info, like your IP address...is still stored. Odds are DDG does this too, as it's mostly useful for overall statistics.

You could have checked this assertion by reading DDG's plain-language privacy policy:

When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.

Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all. This is a very unusual practice, but we feel it is an important step to protect your privacy.

Edit: TOS -> privacy policy
It's worth noting that one can buy companies 'off the shelf', i.e. companies incorporated some time ago, from many formation agents. I have to say, in the UK at least it's about as easy to see whether a company is trading or dormant and to see its filings as it is to check its date of incorporation, so I'm not sure how much extra utility it provides.
Hmm, I was told by someone I trusted that you could. Upon further research, looks like you might be right. I'm going to do some more research on this and update the blog post.

Edit: updated the post. Thanks for the correction.
I use a personal domain for personal mail, and a business domain for business mail.

Both are hosted by Rackspace Mail. POP/IMAP mail hosting is just $1/mailbox/month with configurable spam filtering and the other essentials you'd expect from a mail host.
I'm sure google is not as "evil" as those recent bashing campaigns tend to insinuate, but the fact is, if google could publish clearer, more-defined data-privacy or data-retention policies instead of the vague assertions you can find in their TOS, things would be clearer. The current situation is just feeding doubts, and nothing serious or accompanied by hard facts comes to contradict this illustrated guide
We do not store IPs or have any personally identifying cookies (actually no cookies whatsoever by default). We don't store user agents either, which have also been shown to be able to uniquely identify you. Also, "partial anonymization" has been shown time and time again not to work. More details on our privacy stuff here: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
I don't see why this COULDN'T happen. There are already list brokers out there who buy information from retail outlets (all those "member" programs that collect what you buy). They then combine them into master lists to sell

In that same way if you search for Herpes and then are directed to a web site they'll have your IP and maybe a cookie. If you then go to another site and log in with your Facebook ID they'll have your IP, Name and Facebook ID.

So all it would take is an industrious list broker to start combining that info like they already do with offline info (and in fact probably combine that with the offline info to get even more comprehensive lists)
This is really incredible. I am showing this to people and they don't quite believe it. They think it's some kind of simulator or JavaScript trick.
Is there any way to put malicious code into Regex?
Barclays let me open a business account with a PDF of my certificate of incorporation.
>This is a very unusual practice

So I was close. They even admit the odds were in my favor. Thanks for the fact!
A stick is a simple tool. It's also a very useful and versatile tool that can be used in complex ways. Complicated in software would be like taking a stick, then adding an options panel, then putting a spade at one end, then a rake at the other, and 10 status indicators running the middle.
I use and like them both. I find Ruby more consistent and Python with better libs (for what I do). Either is a fine choice.
What Technorati Can Teach You About Blogging
If you think gmail has a high rate of false positives, I encourage you to try Hotmail or (especially) Yahoo.
Some sites don't allow the '+' operator in email addresses. I used to do this but now run a catchall on my personal domain name.
That's awesome. Every tech company should do this for their technical employees. Heck, why shouldn't the sales guy get unlimited books related to his job. Such a small cost compared to the potential rewards.
For Goldman Sachs, Facebook Investment Comes With Many Benefits
I'm in the same boat as your coworker. I used to run large-scale mail servers for a living, but these days I just can't bear to deal with the spam problem.

I still have hundreds of aliases I've set up when I needed to give my address to some website (more than can be easily/cheaply set up using Google Apps last I checked) so I still run my own postfix server. It does nothing but forward these days.

Thankfully, gmail's spam filters are apparently smart enough to not overly penalize my IP address even though 95% of what it sends them is forwarded spam.
I wonder if Voltaire expected people to be quoting this ...
I've been using Duck Duck Go as my primary search for the last month - it's pretty great! And if you need to fallback to google because you want a map or something else there are a bunch of ! shortcuts to go right there. (!map is most frequently used by me)
whats really weird is that at last years Defcon Dan Kaminsky did a demo showing that DNS lookups were actually faster in TCP than UDP. His explanation of why: "... and I have no idea."
The Curious Case of Netflix Streaming Quality
The backdrop on this topic is the recent news of Debian's Ruby package maintainer quitting, mostly due to issues he has with the Ruby core community and the maintenance/release process.

This post by Matz was supposedly submitted to debunk the myth that "Ruby's not for Debian", but it is entirely orthogonal to the issue at hand. Matz undoubtedly compiles his Ruby, as most maintainers would do with their projects, rather than install using Debian's package manager.
The Lean Startup Machine will make you a smarter entreprenuer. Here's a review of the Chicago event in November: http://bit.ly/a96ozA If you have the opportunity to go, take it.
It's already happening to various degrees, and that is just what we know about. See the three WSJ articles I linked to at the bottom of the post, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870464860457562... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870397700457539... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230441050457556...

Their whole privacy series (http://online.wsj.com/public/page/what-they-know-digital-pri...) taken together is what inspired this page. I urge anyone interested in what is really happening to read all the articles (13 so far).
You are correct in the sense that the language isn't Turing complete to guarantee that the language is strongly terminating. The language being strongly terminating means that 1) there is a Normal Form for the type of an expression and 2) the number of steps to reach Normal Form is finite. All programs definable in Epigram have a normal form (i.e. result) and this normal form (result) is reachable in finite time. Therefore hanging and infinite loops are impossible.

However, these aspects are unrelated to the fact that Epigram is dependently typed. We could easily implement a Turing complete dependently typed language or implement a non-dependently typed language which is not Turing complete.

I'm not entirely sure what the problem is you are thinking of in thought 1. Could you elaborate?
Once upon a time what you did on myspace and facebook had no impact on your work life.