skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No kind of dieting work in long term. People have very limited self-control over what they eat, and if they eat less than their organism thinks they should they will suffer, feel like shit, and finally give up.

There are ways that seem to work - drugs (the best ones are stimulants like amphetamines and ephedra, and are obviously all illegal; there are some semi-decent appetite blockers like fen-phen, but surprise surprise - they're also illegal now), serious physical exercise (of boot camp kind; not of half an hour at the gym twice a week kind), gastric bypasses. Somehow none of them is very popular, and everybody gets fatter and fatter, and keep fooling themselves with the latest diet fad.
It's cool to see, in Amsterdam, some people with those music trolleys that play it using punched cards. It shows that technology sticks around for a while longer than one would expect :)
This is fairly comprehensive:

http://www.nist.gov/dads/
Review my 2d platformer - Nincompoop
http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2008/09/nincompoop-all-ready-for-shaastra-2008.html

I am planning to shift to XNA soon, while this one is my last piece of allegro game dev. Some feedbacks please!
pssst... collision detection is too crappy.. nincompoop will get stuck at places.. make him jump at those places.
http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2007/06/ajax-based-supercomputi...

nice indeed ;P
I don't know about the percentage but Carl Franklin said that Visual Studio has over 50 people on the installer team. Granted, that's probably one of the heaviest installs out there.
The style is a little jarring for the web. In a good way.
Hey nice concept!
May be personal, but I don't like the color-scheme.
Game developers work for and with love, so probably they want some colors with love ;)
Everything annal has my approval!
He specifically mentions PowerShell. Compared to what is available for UNIX-like systems PowerShell may very well be terrible (I haven't used it). There is more to the command line experience than the shell itself.
Sell Your Web App: Lessons I Learned From Selling DropSend
Protecting Your Ebook – DRM Challenges
If you're working on something important, maybe you shouldn't be on HN. Maybe, idk, do some work?
Last install I did for a Windows product took all of 5 minutes.

Then I decided I wanted to do some complicated stuff, so I spent another 2-3 hours on it.

Worked like a charm.
"arXiv == not peer reviewed."

Although amusingly, I heard that Cornell was sued for not allowing creationists to post their physics theories there.
Isn't PowerShell only available to Vista users? That's a small minority of Windows users. Besides, there's not much emphasis on it either so it still feels as if the command line is sort of second class in Windows.

I've had a PC running Vista for a while now (it was cheaper than XP and I need Windows for music software) and I couldn't even tell you how to start PowerShell. I don't even know if PowerShell is different from the old Start->Run->cmd. That one looks the same as it ever did.

To be honest, the thought of poking around in PowerShell never even occurred to me because the Windows command line has never been of much use in the past. That's likely part of the problem. The inferiority of the Windows command line is very deeply ingrained in users. Still, even if a user does bother to figure it out it's still very clear that pointing and clicking is heavily favored over typing commands on a Windows system.

As far as I can tell PowerShell seems much more geared for sys admins creating scripts that run automatically than for user interaction. Based on what I've read about PowerShell, I would consider it to be more similar to something like Perl than a bash shell.
Judge Tells RIAA To Stop 'Bankrupting' Litigants
That sort of response well before Wikipedia is quite impressive!
java virtual machine?
I'm looking at it, and it seems it makes sense when your team is distributed, but not if the two developers can actually make the code review on the same computer.
"By imperial decree, one year was made 445 days long to bring the calendar back in step with the seasons."

Er, is that right?
N vs NP is not really that important because n^1000 might as well be NP. However, understanding that something is O(1) vs O(log x) vs O(x) vs O(x log x) vs (x ^2) and you can often drop down a level depending on what tools you use can becomes vary important the second you start testing small datasets to represent large ones. Wow 1000 takes 1/2 a second and 2000 takes 2 seconds I wonder how long it's going to take when I dump a million in there?

I have written low level networking code and you can abstract that to high level networking code. You can make handling thousands of threads easy. But, there is nothing to abstract away when you want to know everything within 10 feet of each object in a list. Granted, there are way's of solving that with a billion object list but they all depend on how the data is setup and not a general solution.
Three important post-recession IT trends
Where does this article (the PDF cited by nickb, not the link, which isn't working for me anyway) claim to be doing something novel?

It's a cute demonstration of basic physics, more-or-less at the freshman level (although lots of high school students could follow it). It doesn't claim to be anything else.

UPDATE: Finally got the blog link to load. While the original paper is modest in its claims, the blog hypes them up and then fails to cite the original paper. This blogger does not earn a cookie.
Do you mean runtime or framework? And better by what measure?

In any event, you'll find Gemstone's kit more than accounts for .NET (and Java, for that matter) in the trade/financial space.
This is going straight to the front page of TechCrunch!
The iPhone is Recession-Proof
So, are mandated calorie counts on foods, (evil) government intervention in the free market or a useful boost to creating an efficient market by trying to help create that essential prerequisite, the informed consumer?

Or both, I guess, since free market (buyer+seller do what they want) is perhaps only tangentially related to perfect/efficient market (actors all rational, perfect information).

Are their any parallels in the tech world (perhaps minimum specs/compatability or age/content labelling on some software, i.e. games)?

Would it be useful if there was more pre-purchase consumer-level information on software or tech products?
Poor, DEC! VMS made the trek, though.
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46_BC
C/MPI!
I remember the day the Compaq takeover was announced.

Oh boy. I knew that day the Alpha was doomed. Pitty... Such a promising achitecture.

Well... Back to my x86... I have work to do.
Windows is the most used operating system, so to call it a Ghetto is wrong by definition, IMHO. In my experience, Visual Studio 2008 with .NET libraries and MSDN is very good development platform.
I don't usually read long blog posts, but I couldn't stop reading this one. Very well done. Poor betta.
Bettas are known to jump out of their tank if they can manage it. I never knew why, but now I think I might have a hypothesis. Maybe he never saw this happen because he had a covered one.
This could be huge!

There is no question there will be plenty of affiliates/CPU time (re)sellers.
The real question is whether there is big enough demand from those who need grid computing.

You had a quote from some quant guy, I suppose sciences is another market, not sure about others.
Because of software patents.

Did you completely miss the point I was trying to make? You and I may not like Microsoft products because of their proprietary nature, but there are plenty of customers making a conscious decision to use them despite this. In fact, quite a few of them probably choose Microsoft specifically because of this.

No, it is threatening them all if they don't pay. In the name of "innovation".

I don't even know where to start here. I'm going to completely overlook that "innovation" remark because your poor use of the English language makes it impossible for me to figure out what you're trying to say.

Do you realize that you've contradicted yourself here? First, you cite examples of Microsoft paying people off to use their software. Now they are threatening them if they don't pay? Which one is it?

If what you're getting at is all that BSA nonsense I'll bite on that. The companies that get bullied by Microsoft and the BSA have chosen to use Microsoft software. Many of them are using it illegally. Either way, that's something they have opened themselves up to by using Microsoft software. Do I think it sucks? Absolutely. That's why I choose my software carefully. Microsoft is not like the Mafia showing up at your door demanding money as soon as you set up shop. They are demanding money - whether right or wrong - from people already using their software.

Ten years ago your arguments would have held a lot more water. I may have even made those arguments myself. But things have changed considerably over the last several years. We have real alternatives to Microsoft software. In many cases we have acceptable interoperability between Microsoft products and their open source equivalents. The fact is you can get by in a mostly Windows world without ever touching a Microsoft product so I tend to think the primary cause of complaints like these is the stupidity of the people who still use software that doesn't fulfill their needs.
Detailed instructions from the boss will outlaw failed projects, basically solving the problem.

WTF?
Computer Science is a big field, and I get the impression you think what you do is the only relevant part. It's not.
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo in human rights deal
Anyone have ideas of what could be on this platform?
Good article.

Does anyone know about how much DropSend sold for?
Hm, looks familiar. Mine has chat, though. http://click-a-billion.com/
Really cool concept. One cosmetic issue - when you mouse over the links on the right side, the underline makes the text below look really cramped. A few more pixels of padding would be nice.
Google Rolling Out “SearchWiki”? Move Results Up, Hide Them Or Suggest Your Own
If Matt is suffering from schizophrenia he would be about the age it would be getting bad. That is one of the saddest things when a guy is doing great hits about 21 22 and then the disease first takes over. It is worse because if they were junkys or crack heads they could just get clean but that disease means lots of hospitalizations and an often fruitless attempt to find the right medication.
Thousands of visitors and it still says "1 clicks" -- doh.
In the future (Futurama), P could equal NP :)

http://lance-systems.com/wiki/_media/futurama/2x07-3.jpg?w=2...

http://lance-systems.com/wiki/futurama-mathematics
Quantum key distribution meets the real world, fails
Literateprograms.org strikes me as a much better-implemented site; as a wiki, it doesn't rely on being populated by an individual, and all the pages are locally hosted. It doesn't limit itself to a small set of programming languages, either. It could use a list like this, though.
Raganwald now 'blogging' on GitHub
I'm npt going to try too hard but.. you gave plenty enough info there to track them down (assuming I dont just have to se google :))
Hedge Funds: The Third Quarter Report
They declined to say: http://www.carsonified.com/dropsend/carsonified-sells-dropse...
They blogged about the process in 2006.

http://www.carsonified.com/misc/dropsend-acquisition-talks-f...

http://www.carsonified.com/misc/things-potential-buyers-are-...
Hear from Guy Kawasaki et al. today - free Solutions Stars Video Conference
Definitely not the way to hit on chicks that are Beatles fans.
"Are mandated calorie counts on foods, (evil) government intervention in the free market or a useful boost to creating an efficient market by trying to help create that essential prerequisite"

A good example of orientalism.
Yea, we were expecting the avg person to vote around 5 times. However, people have so far been voting an average of around 7 or 8. It's fun to see that people are actually using it and fully interacting with the site.
It's nice to have an algorithmic way to find the pitches in a chord, but honestly anybody with a good ear can pick that out. Try sitting down with a Bill Evans recording and figuring out the different chords you hear - something jazz students do all the time.

The fact that it's not reproducible on a standard-tuned guitar might have stopped guitar players from figuring it out on the fretboard though.
Oh, so you think it's OK that tens of thousands of aliens will vote?

Sorry, I didn't realized that wasn't fraud.
So that's what you did that week. ;p

I think everyone goes through those phases, but honestly I haven't since I left my "real job". Whenever I find myself in a small rut, I just switch to another task or take a nap. There's always so much stuff to do at a startup - it's never ending work - that I always can find something else to work on in the intermediary. Being able to say that your website/blog/product literally gets better every day feels euphoric especially when talking to your investors, friends, family, cofounders.
16-month-old PayPal/Skype exploit continues to drain users' credit cards
Summary: You can get rich by creating technology that breaks vendor lock-in. Numerous examples are given, but the relationship to plumbers is not explained.
I consider myself a libertarian on most issues, but more of an agnostic on how well the free market works, and what the role of government should be there. Issues like this are really tough for me to decide.
We've put about 5 man-years into the project, spread out over 4 years time. That time includes 3 years of full-time effort (myself for 1 year, co-founder for 2).

To be completely thorough, we ended up spending a lot of our personal savings to pay our personal bills, which was not included in the official seed investment. Still, that only amounts to perhaps an extra $25k (so all told, we're in the $70-80k range).

With a family of four I've gone back to working full-time at a corporate employer; my co-founder has not and continues to work on it full-time, as he is single and lives a pretty spartan life.
Ask HN: Is the for-profit open business an oxymoron?
There is a lot of discussion equating open vs. closed as good vs. evil. I hear a lot of "X is more open than Y". So I wonder, if you were to design a business aiming for openness first, what would it look like? In other words, what is the extreme expression of openness in a business? My second and connected question is, would that business be able to turn a profit or is profit tied to being closed? If openness and capitalism are mutually exclusive, we need to choose between them or somehow compromise them both. If not, it would be intresting to know what their combination looks like.
I second this. The book is pretty relevant even to iPhone programming.

Coming mainly from a Windows background, personally, I've found the hardest thing has been getting used to the OSX/iPhone memory management which can bite in unpredictable ways when you get it wrong.

However, the iPhone SDK comes with many demos and working code which is great for working through when you need a particular behavior. Don't discount Mac examples either, as much of the foundation code still works, even on the iPhone.
Ioke 0 roadmap - Programming Language Synchronicity
As far as I know, all fluor (and chlorine) does to water is keep it as free as bacteria as possible, and make your teeth stonger.

Is there any evidence of undesired effects?
The most "open" business model I can think of would be a cooperative. This might be owned by both it's employees and it's customers. It would have to err on the side of making a profit but that profit would normally be paid in turn to it's shareholders - the employees and customers.
I don't see why this type of government intervention should worry anyone. It's about information transparency. Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market? There are also shelf tags, in supermarkets, dictating price per quantity. How do any of those measures hurt the free market? If anything, it forces food vendors to better evaluate their products in contrast to their competition. And that seems to be exactly what's happening. A little bit of transparency goes a long way. Seems to me, that's a perfect role for government.

The government argument for me isn't all or none. It's: How much?
As Rome burns, journalists whine about new media
Your button is bad and you should feel bad. Is this really what Hacker News has come to?
Microsoft Releases Visual Studio, .NET Betas
Russia, Iran and Qatar to Create Cartel to Control 60 Percent of All Gas Supplies
REST is UnAmerican
So what's the chord??
Hopefully they can solve the fraudulent vote up problem... seems like even high profile sites like digg still have people selling mass vote-ups
Do you remember where he said this? I'm looking for the reference but can't find it on his blog. (Thanks in advance.)
Chances are, this proof is flawed, like the other hundreds published every year.
Exactly. Check out the Linux O(1) time scheduler.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-scheduler/
Powershell is at least also available on XP.
Agreed. I'm not saying that it's bad that pg has a lot of influence. It's just interesting to me how quick we are to follow him even against the trend of the community, and perhaps our own individual thinking.
Man, I'll have to write up how I structure javascript at some point. I prefer using objects for namespaces, while he's got good points about why those can cause problems, there's well-known workarounds for what he points out.
Um yes. So maybe stopping keeping animals as slaves in tiny cages might be a good idea. Just a thought. Would almost make one want to think about the animals that are kept for food and the like. Kind of puts me of my food just thinking about it.
Emotions aside, PowerShell is definitely one of the most innovative shell adaptations in the past few years. Some group in MS tried really hard to take things to the next level.

Now whether that level is where people want to go-- well, that's hard to say. It's difficult to judge "success" for this sort of a thing. How much usage is because MS is pushing it and how much is because it scratches some itches?

For me, it's slow to start up, and not overly useful for my everyday tasks. Still, most of the demos are impressive and the idea of piping objects around rather than raw text/files seems like an idea with a lot of potential.
I'd like to clarify a couple of the topics discussed here regarding our (Braintree's) services. The recurring option within our gateway is designed for straightforward recurring billing needs. It's simple, reliable and a good tool. Merchants that need greater flexibility and/or prefer to manage the billing logic on their end, find our API's and processing quite accommodating and straightforward. All transaction data (including all custom information passed to us) is easily accessible using our Query API. Merchants can use it to pull data back into their applications, create custom reporting and manage reconciliation.

Regarding Brad's comments about our pricing, we've discussed this directly with him and agree that the specific communcation with him could have been done better. At the same time, we've expressed to him that we didnt' think the tone of his statement was fair or accurate. We always offer complete transparency in our pricing and do not use bait and switch tactics that are so commonly used in the industry.

@callmeed - thank you for your comments. You guys have been great to work with.
For the impatient (the site is very slow for me):

It's about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.

CTP downloads are available at https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/content/content.a...
That's an interesting form of publication. I'm more of an RSS man myself.
Good points. My post was moronic. I'd vote it down if I could.
Firstly, spammers can't use the addresses to send from, as they are only used for incomming mail. Secondly, they are set, by default, to expire within 6 hours. So after 6 hours the address no longer exists. Therefore, for spammers to be able to send spam to the account, they would first have to know what account is active, then send spam to it within the period in which the account is active. So it is not easy to spam, also, if spam does hit the account, it will not last more than the active period.
A+++++++++++++++++++++

Would click again.
This doesn't seem to mean anything right now, but it is great to see these companies stating what they are about as a group and showing that they care about basic freedoms and not just profits. Although they didn't seem to implement any actual policies, it is nice to at least get the impression of concern.
You should make the voting the home page. Get people into it right away. After their first vote, then give them more info.
Some-tips-from-jruby-hacker-on-hacking-jruby
Yea, we had an internal debate about that. Whether a marquis race should show first (presidential), a random race, or the info page. We thought the presidential race might make it look too partisan and distract from people really delving in, and that a random race could have 2 really ugly sites and also disenchant someone. So, we decided to put our philosophy up front and encourage people to delve in. The bounce rate has been really low, so we've been pleased with that.
I don't think people should count calories. Your sense of hunger and satiety accurately tells you how many calories you need if you're eating properly. If you eat a 1,900 calorie lunch you're just not going to be hungry in the evening and things will net out.

The main reason hunger as a guide breaks down and people feel the need to count calories is a poor diet, usually heavy with starch and light on saturated fats. You also see a lot of people religiously following a meal schedule. If you're not hungry, don't eat! Skip meals occasionally. People just don't listen to their bodies.
Roam the Web with Your Weblin Avatar
BH guys are starting to chomp at the bit...

http://seoblackhat.com/2008/10/28/google-promote-remove-butt...
OpenX Hosted is now available to all web publishers
Life is gonna be 'Pink'
I usually bitch about the length and boring nature of his posts. For once I can finally say, damn good writing and interesting piece.

Finally a story that stays focused and actually entertains the reader from beginning to end. Makes me wonder if he actually spent some time editing this one instead of just spewing it out in his usual stream of conscienceless style.

No complaints, damn fine writing, I actually felt for the poor fish! Best post I've seen from him.
Rails!? That doesn't scale. This is all Erlang.
Yahoo BrowserPlus Released
> Can anyone seriously argue that ingredient labels are anti-market?

Well, it's fairly close to an issue which has been controversial: whether to require the labelling of GM milk.

Personally, I'm happy for there to be a goodly amount of regulation about consumables. I don't think a raw free market (if you sell food which makes people sick, your brand will suffer) provides enough protection in that case.

I was really trying to think about the benefits+costs of forcing sellers to give more information to consumers, and how that might translate to other products.

(Warning:
- this program is written in C - it may suffer from buffer overruns.
- this program is written in .NET/java - it may require a huge download in order to run
- etc)

Slightly more seriously, how about a govt regulation which required showing typical working set size of your program in operation in Mbytes?

How about being required to notify users that your software patches system-level functionality? (no more DRM "rootkits" )?
"A good example of orientalism."

Could you elaborate? Is it because I'm being dualistic in my apparent mindset? Surely that's more occidental? (Actually it was on purpose, but never mind).
The Skein Hash Function
Learn Cocoa. Seriously.
Great ... I'll file this under my "stuff to remember if my wildest dreams come true and someone buys my startup" folder.