skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Paul, do you see any role software could play in trying to resolve the dietary advice problem? There are lots of communities out there of diabetics and obese people improving their health through diet - in particular a low carb, medium protein, high fat diet. That's not proof on its own, but it's more compelling than looking at what people who have always been healthy eat (because it could just be good genes). Science and experiments still need to be a part of the solution, but it disturbs me how much bad science is out there.
There is conclusive evidence of a problem. The rise in diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are all out there and free to anyone with a web browser.

One might say that given a health crisis, sitting back not saying anything would be irresponsible. Ben Goldacre chronicles bad science journalism, and this is not an example of it.

(edited)
what wacom tablet did you get, and are there any drawbacks of using it as a mouse ?
Yes, you should Save Link As or something similar.
That's exactly what I thought. I stood there for half a minute looking incredibly silly trying to make it frown. My guess would be that frowns are more subtle and harder to detect.
Kiss 100's breakfast show in London is sponsored by RIM - and they give out their BBM PIN as a way of contacting the studio.

Other stations I've heard, outside London, also give out BBM PINs - Radio City 96.7's dance music programming in Liverpool is one I've noticed.
Artificial sweetener doesn't strike me as solid enough for a control. How could you know the effect wasn't in fact the artificial sweetener negatively affecting the "control"? Or some combination of the two?

Your link doesn't actually mention what the placebo was, though.
If you don't have a method of running JS available then everything will be as it was. This change only introduces the default contents of a rails app's Gemfile (/bundle) and it's generators.
"One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just recycled HN comments."

Since there is an ongoing discussion of the quality of HN comments and whether or not they are improving or declining in quality, I'd like to dive into this bit more.

Given the kicker 'Nice one Erick' I'm wondering if this is a complaint that pathik (the author of the referenced comment) is in 'real life' Erick Schonfeld or if its a complaint that Erick plagiarized the comment and turned it into a throw away opinion piece on TechCrunch?

One might argue that mining HN comments for OpEd blog pieces would be one way of producing content likely to appeal to the HN readership. In this particular case a one-liner comment by pathik was fleshed out (slightly) into a comparison of investors using a quality metric of their startup ROI. Without taking into account their negative ROI on things that went south. In my opinion the lack of depth or extended insight in the TechCrunch piece was what made it 'throw away.'

And one of the things about 'dynamic' journalism is the whole echo chamber effect. Perhaps most interestingly demonstrated when the 'primary source' for Wikipedia articles are articles that are published outside of Wikipedia but point back to Wikipedia as either one of, or their only source [1].

So if we are successful at creating really high quality comments on HN, and people take those insights and turn them into traffic generating blog entries (taking on some of the mantle of insightfulness) do we care?

Personally I don't particularly care if someone takes something I've said and writes it up and gets credit for it. But its definitely a weird part of this interconnected social opinion graph that is created by the web.

[1] http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creat...
Would you be okay with the cert provided by webfaction (where the site is hosted?), for now?

https://salaryshare.me
Crowd sourcing for small businesses
GROW YOUR BUSINESS Join us and post project, Our DeskLancer professionals can get any job done quickly and professionally. Find out more...Blog about your product,Post reviews to Websites & Blogs, Add you to Facebook
I rejected your warning because I am a naturally inquisitive person, so I wanted to see exactly what would happen.

I shouldn't have.
Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist who runs the "Track Your Plaque" program and the Heart Scan blog (http://www.heartscanblog.org/) has identified sugar as one of the primary factors contributing to heart disease. He advises his patients to generally eliminate all sugars, grains (they break down into glucose in the bloodstream), and anything else raises blood glucose levels.
The problem is that the question "Is sugar toxic?" is inherently meaningless. Bandying the word around like this in a publication like the NYT dilutes public understanding of the issue.

Scientifically responsible journalists would have chosen an accurate term to discuss the issue rather than shooting for maximum emotional impact.
Government Agrees With Microsoft: Google Wasn't Certified
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose
it is:
Sucrose (table sugar)	- 29,700 mg/kg (LD50)
You only have to to lookup once for each /24 and presumably you'd cache the response for a while. The lookup doesn't need to be done online either.
Thanks, I hadn't come across that in my search.

That site seems to solve the problem of finding book recommendations in a way that's easily filtered/sorted. I like the fact that it lists additional versions (ebook, pdf, etc.) of the book.

My thoughts were that the community might want to read reviews from a startup-oriented individual rather than the default synopsis from the book's publisher. I also imagined that multiple reviewers could review the same book (either on the hub site or their own blog).
I can't really get how can you speak about UPnP being 'user friendly'? Have you ever tried to think about the same aspect of HTTP or TCP?

Can you please explain what do you mean?
Ignore the customer experience, lose a billion dollars (Walmart case study)
I recently read "More With Less", Paul Ciottis biography of Paul MacCready; if you want to dive deeper into the fascinating story of the creation of the Gossamer planes (starting with MacCready's unique background and network, the team re-shuffles [and alienations], tons and tons of iterations, all the downs for several very big ups; sounds like a start-up, doesn't it?), I certainly recommend it.

It required a man of extraordinary skills _and_ stubbornness to pull it all off. Only in retrospect, the solution seems (kinda) obvious.

http://www.amazon.com/More-Less-MacCready-Efficient-Flight/d...
I really like the fact that it gives me to option to customize my main profile page - options of colours etc is great way to make sites unique to users.

I also like that you just go to the "one stop shop" to get info on people - no need to search for much it's all there.

Only suggestions (for the non-techies): I would of loved to have a header but I don't have the right stuff...could have some pre-fabricated to pick from...

overall...I LOVE IT!
If a philosophy doesn't work in absolutist terms, perhaps it shouldn't be expressed in absolutist terms. The parent comment left no apparent wiggle room.
One of my side projects is http://7courses.com a dead simple recipe manager to replace traditional recipe boxes.
It'd be good to follow up on this for you then. Def. see the talk it mentions, and read around on the studies. I think the last number I heard was ~50g/day (keep consumption under this.)

It's also worth noting that it's not -only- a volume issue but a rate issue. This is why -refined- sugars are particularly bad, because they are immediately available (unlike say, eating a fruit, where it takes time for your body to tear apart the fibers to get at the sugar).

Fructose metabolism is not rate-regulated, and a cell metabolizing fructose quickly uses up all its energy (ATP) and slows down. So it's not really safe to consume -refined- fructose in general because it will shut down the liver while it is being metabolized, and this can allow compounds that should -not- be in the bloodstream (such as fructose itself) to get into the bloodstream because the liver is tied up and can't take them on.
List of unsolved problems
Startup idea: Save people money on cell phone plans
They are only nested given the common assumption (among programmers, at least) that recursion a stack-like model. From the young child's perspective this is probably tail-recursive operation:

def up():
if not at top stair:
up()

Think of recursion in terms of induction. No nested state required.
This is true, but take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_realism#Essential_beliefs...

Specifically,

"Belief in the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to law. Many of the realists were interested in sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of law. Karl Llewellyn's book The Cheyenne Way is a famous example of this tendency. ... Belief in legal instrumentalism, the view that the law should be used as a tool to achieve social purposes and to balance competing societal interests."

This contributes to the current culture, I think, of having 1000 page laws that nobody except lobbyists have actually read. Legal realism says, "There's a problem here, justice isn't perfect" - but then proposes a cure much worse than the disease.

Yes, legal codes do tend to get bloated. But I think legal realism has been a foe, not a friend, of a straightforward and consistent legal code.

That's before even getting into things like fad psychology getting introduced to the courtroom, where psychiatric evaluators use things like the Rorschach test to evaluate people on trial. It's frigging scary that fad social science gets introduced without vetting into the court system, and it turns the common law system from an asset into a liability. But anyways, this is a long conversation - I just wanted to point out that despite legal realism's premises being correct, that doesn't necessarily make all of the conclusions lead to good places.
Already on the homepage: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443165
Voting cannot be considered a negative right. I have no more of a negative right to tell the individuals in my government what to do than they have to tell me what to do. I do have the negative right to give them the privilege of governing me and my property just the same as they have the negative right to protect me and my property and to give me the privilege of having some say in their decisions. If we come to that agreement, then I have the privilege of voting and they have the privilege of governing me.
Too Many Irons in the Fire - Tips for Handing Excessive Workloads
I still think HN rocks.

I do get a little annoyed at the recycling of links from recent years (e.g. SICP book/videos, Yegge post #n,) that get greeted as some amazing new discovery, but fuck it, some things are always going to be new and amazing for a new crop of people. Yeah for people finding new and amazing stuff.

Are comments getting worse? Don't know. Might be that, over time, you start to notice certain things more, no doubt through some personal bias filter (e.g. comments praising Python, Apple, or Sinatra are almost automatic up votes, while even questioning those things means almost automatic down votes) but, again, fuck it, because there are still a good number of kick-ass comments.

Really, overall, especially compared to some other communities, HN has done really well in keeping up the quality discussion. Could it be better? Probably, but not worth too worked up over. Lots better things to discuss.
An Interview With Twitter's Forgotten Founder, Noah Glass
The experts disagree on sugar's toxicity. The NYT is not going to come right out and say, "Don't let your kids eat sugar." But there is enough evidence presented and cited in the article to make this a reasonable conclusion.

I found this passage particularly compelling: "During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not."

It's probably better to eat like a poor Korean farmer than like an "average" American teenager.
The Real History Of Twitter
Flummoxed by iTunes
The thesis of the article is pretty obvious: Sugar is toxic in the amounts found in a typical western diet.
Not being able to write code that performs memory management doesn't mean you don't know how memory management works. It just means that you trust your GC.

Much more relevant would be to ask questions about what to do if you're spending too much time in GC and how to tune it rather than how you'd perform your own garbage collection.
My amateur understanding is that excess glucose still leads to high blood sugar and so the resulting insulin spikes and fat storage. So it may be a lesser evil than fructose, but is not a panacea by any means.

FWIW, I'm basing my current understanding on the book Body by Science. It has an explanation of metabolism similar to the Lustig video linked to in the NYT article. However, Body by Science wasn't as specifically anti-fructose, but more generally anti-blood sugar spikes.
Kids in high school and even in early years of college have a lot to choose from. I was seriously considering medicine and econ but eventually chose a math/CS major.
Is your talk going to be recorded?

If so I would very much like to see it.
All the 106A/B/X classes are a good 10-20 hours of programming per week, and I know many people who were interested in CS but were scared off by the 106 series. There is a much less technical intro course, CS105, that's more of an introduction to computers rather than computer science, but I don't think this article is talking about that one.
Looks like the URL might have changed. See here instead: http://blog.launchbit.com/the-lean-startup-a-review-of-eric-...
Hey :) This is probably not related to the post, but yes, we clean up/monitor WP sites, just send us an email dd@sucuri.net (can certainly give discounts to HN'ers).

thanks,
So, according to the wiki, HFCS contains about 55% Fructose, 45% Glucose. Regular sucrose is at a 50-50 split. Given your stomach splits sucrose into the respective monosaccharide units anyway, you're going to end up with roughly the same amount of glucose and fructose floating around.

The big issue then is just having a large amount of fructose (from whatever source) in your diet. Since excess fructose is shunted off to be stored as fat, this is what's causing all the problems.

What would be kind of interesting is whether we can just go about engineering corn so that we block off the fructose pathway, and just produce glucose. This also has the nice side-effect that it's also much more delicious for bacteria to eat, meaning a greater yield of things like biofuels.
I'm hoping there will be a day where I can use:

<script language="coffeescript">
DanielBMarkham, who runs hn books does write reviews as well. Letting users review would probably be a nice addition.

Since you are going down the lean path, presumably you want to make money from this. How will you do that?
exactly - I attribute much of the priggishness of the HN community to this mercenary fact. Most folks who are obsessed with forging a strong online identity on HN are deeply invested in selling something to the rest of the group. I do not by any means disagree with this, but one of my first thoughts upon finding HN was how easily it might be lampooned. Everyone seemed to be self-promoting while trying to act casual. I will probably never have any kind of reputation here, because I spend my day either deep in thought at my computer, or reading/commenting HN. I don't forsee becoming a member of the web entrepreneur community, and because of my personality type I will probably never have a blog. But I know a lot.
Actually, that description of exceptions requires a stack-based mental model. With true continuations, you have other possibilities for handling the exception (see for example Haskell).
Is there no method to the ordering?

If the breaks are pretty regular, wouldn't you want to hear more simplified (clear-cut?) cases immediately after a break and more complex ones when more alert?
For what it's worth, Hipster had a fully functioning site at the time.
A different study, but I think it's similar: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683964/ "The placebo (PLA) mouth rinse solution was made from 150 ml of a commercially available non-caloric concentrate sweetened with aspartame and saccharin (Robinsons Soft Drinks Ltd, UK) diluted to 1000 ml with water. The GLU mouth rinse contained 64 g glucose (Roquette, France) per 1000 ml of the same solution. The MALT mouth rinse contained 64 g maltodextrin (Roquette, France) per 1000 ml of the same solution. The strong artificial sweetness reduced any sensory clues that subjects might use to consciously differentiate between the GLU, MALT and PLA mouth rinses."
It's easier than you think. Just invent something and declare it human right. Done.
I don't like that its the default, it seems like something the 37signals guys like (pow was written in coffee script) so "goshdarnit! all of you have to use it".

Yes I know, you can change it.

Yes. I know its impact is probably minimal if I don't care for it.

But, I really would like to see a strong argument made for why this should be a default for Rails, especially when SASS and HAML, which have wider adoption and facetime with the Rails community aren't the default (and I think, rightfully so)
Regarding #1, I wrote an implementation of that in BASH back at uni in 2003 http://mishima.warwickcompsoc.co.uk/sopl_stripped.sh

It's ancient code now, but I'm still proud of it - and reminising over this was how my girlfriend and I got together!
Geo chat - HTML5 mobile web chat with geo locations
You want a scientific conclusion to tell you unequivocally what to do, but in the absence of proof you don't want to be presented with any information? I'm not sure whether this is utopian thinking or just sticking your head in the sand, but I can tell you my course of action as a father in the face of an obesity epidemic and inconclusive evidence: I'm strongly limiting sugar and refined carbohydrate intake in my household, particularly in between meals. Some allowances for dessert after dinner, but no soda and juice ever.
This looks great. I see how it could really benefit my business by linking all my info in one place.
Hi, my side project is a simple and useful mobile application.

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Comparing Haskell's Snap and Yesod web frameworks: the developers speak
Wouldn't it be easier to "figure it out on their own" if they had, say, 20 years of solving similar problems?
Speaking as a college student, many of our campus "libraries" actually have very little books on-shelf. We have "stacks" where one could go and find volumes of books and other literary works from decades ago...but we also have an online database of all that that most students will just use instead when researching.

That leaves the role of libraries today on my campus. Article discusses people not going to libraries to read ever again.

In my humble opinion, I don't think the role of libraries today (or tomorrow) is to have people come in and "read". As much as the digital world can evolve or destroy previous industries, it still can't replicate an absolutely vital necessity, in an actual human network. As popular as remote working is, people still feel the need to work together as a group. As easy as it is for me to find books online, I'll still go to the library (where I'll find the books online) for that human interaction and for that community.

That, I don't think the digital world can destroy. Libraries will evolve, but there will always be a place for them.
As far as I know (hope?) it isn't. I can put the slides up afterwards though if that helps.
There are online food places where you can buy pure glucose (it has value in certain gourmet foods because of its different properties from sucrose). However, if you read more of Taubes than just this, you'll see that he presents evidence that too much pure glucose would also likely cause problems if I understand it correctly. Spiking your blood glucose to consistently high levels isn't good for you either, even if you avoid all fructose.
We already have hn-books.com and, IIRC, at least one competitor.

The transparent commerciality (bit.ly -> Amazon affiliate links) turns me off, but others may think otherwise.
Windows 8 Leak already?
Yeah, I too found the same issue. But overall a great implementation.
I hope you've got tech4some.com registered, so you can add facebook in April 2012.
Your MVP is a Ford Pinto but it’s better then a Ferrari without wheels.
Isn't there a huge memory leak?
Creating a new pointer on each iteration without keeping track of them.

I might be wrong I've been doing games in CL for some time now.
A few lines of Javascript can tell you which timezone the user's machine is set to.

That is simply not true. You can get the localized timezone as provided by the user's operating system. You would need a server side mapping of every time zone in language for both Olson and Windows. Even then, there are ambiguous timezone names, etc.

The best you can do reasonably is calculate GMT offset, presence of daylight savings time, and if DST is present, then which hemisphere the user is in. From there, you can guess at a city/region with the largest population.

See here: https://bitbucket.org/pellepim/jstimezonedetect/overview
Virtualization -> Hardware
Interview with Twitter's forgotten cofounder
It's the mediocre programmers that should be scared.
The bar's certainly a lot higher. When I was in high school in the late 90s, a bunch of us high school kids got jobs as webmonkeys writing HTML for the dot-com boom. It was something you could easily teach yourself as a student.

Nowadays, Google's having trouble hiring enough people with sufficient web skills. And the reason is because the web basically "grew up". In addition to HTML, you also need to know CSS, JavaScript, how to write maintainable JavaScript, DOM APIs, browser quirks, performance tricks, emerging web standards, and at least one server-side programming language. The definition of a "web developer" has shifted so that it's really a full-fledged programmer with specific domain knowledge, akin to the skill level needed to do compilers or embedded systems. And the barriers to entry have become correspondingly bigger; you don't see as many high school kids writing major websites any more.
Asteroids played on an Oscilloscope - Tek Contest
I wouldn't mind the slides but the talk is usually so much more useful.
For those who haven't watched the video lecture referenced early in the article, I highly recommend checking it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Lustig does a fantastic job explaining the cellular processes at work, which appealed to my engineering side. I'm not usually passionate about biochemistry and this lecture is definitely long, but if you make it through the first 15 minutes you will be hooked.
Hate it when that happens. Maybe Posterous should redirect to the new location once a post has been published and the URL changes, or is updated? Can't believe it doesn't already.