skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other people have pointed out that the author's stated theory of calory intake isn't universally accepted, but I'd add that the author's conception of exercise is also problematic. The value of the cardio she holds up as evidence of her subjects devotion to weight loss is suspect.

She mentions changes to her subjects musculature on restricted calorie/high cardio diets as an impediment to future weight loss. So why not do what's practically canon among modern athletes and bodybuilders - make healthy muscle development (or at least preservation) a primary goal of the diet/exercise regime. In other words, do the opposite of what all these beleaguered people are doing?

Bodybuilders disdain cardio because it results in hormone changes that actively inhibit muscle development. Conversely, weight lifting boosts testosterone and lean body mass.

The whole outlook here is so out of keeping with the wisdom of the highly fit people I know (and my own experience shedding and keeping off 50 pounds of excess weight for five years without the grueling effort she describes) makes me question her conclusions.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
Congrats on closing! :D

You should always ask for an estimate on how many hours any job will take and how much it will cost (ask for a max if you need to in order to get a cap) when you have them do work. At all times you should know how much any of their jobs will take. To protect yourself in the future you can also say that for anything costing over $X you need to have written approval by the CEO/CFO before they can start the work, they will complain about it, but you can always play it off as establishing internal controls in the company. If you've done the above and if something is wrong, talk to them, they are usually reasonable people. Customer service is a part of their business.

In your particular case, I'd recommend asking to split the payments over time. They may ask for interest, but at least it will help your cash flow. Keep in mind, they want to make you happy now - You just got funded and are a growing company. They want you to stick around and be their client as you grow into a billion dollar business, not have you leave to a competitor over a $40k+ bill. It's almost trivial when compared to a long term business relationship.

edit: What's the worst that can happen? They say no and you pay the bill.

Hope that helps!
Everything you could ever want to know about LTE
This whole thing about "stealth will be impossible, because everyone will have dispersed observation platforms," seems very handwavy to me. If detection is so easy across vast distances, then ultimately observation platforms shouldn't be able to survive unless they have stealth. Otherwise, no matter how cheap you can make your observation platform, you can make something else that will destroy it for much less.

I imagine space warfare to be a complex "cold war" of vast distances, with robot missile and detection ships tightly beaming waste heat and information in carefully chosen directions. There will be complex games of deception and counter-deception. It will be a matter of tricking the enemy into critical errors about what you know and don't know about the disposition of their forces.

The situation where everybody is using torchships, and everybody knows where everybody is at all times is similar to the Surface to Air Missile dominated era of aerial warfare of the 70's. There will be tremendous incentives to someone to develop workable stealth of some form.
I've been working on something very similar for a while now, good to see all the positive feedback in the comments. I have a very alpha version at http://qrauth.com
Sustainable Capitalism is a Force for Good. Wikipedia Should Try It.
The Nokia 1 Windows 8 Concept Tablet - Mobile Magazine
Realistically, someone with 12-18 months left on their contract is not going to buy a new phone anyway.
Looking through the code I see a lot of references to a group of japanese researchers. See for example this file which references "A.KUDO & Y.KIDA" and is complete with japanese comments.
https://github.com/daoudclarke/wartonlegacy/blob/master/src/...

Looks like K.Aoki (Kazumaro Aoki) A.KUDO & Y.KIDA used to post to academic factorization related mailing lists see: http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/6353
from my own experience (as an englishman living in chile) i tend to look to "social differences" to help understand conflicts like this.

one of the main themes in the link is (imho) anger at a lack of trust - the need to justify each expense, and to follow somewhat arbitrary rules, even after winning the grant. and that (again, imho) reflects a difference in culture between americans and chileans. in support of this thesis, there was a chilean presentation at startechconf (the recent web dev / technical conference in santiago) that seemed (i admit i left part-way through in search of a more technical talk) to be arguing the same point: that chileans need to trust each other more. my own amateur anthropological take on this is that the difference comes from chilean trust networks being based on family ties rather than professional relationships.

it will be interesting to see if the technocrats/bureaucrats that saw startup chile as a way to "educate chileans" will themselves learn from this. to the credit of chilean society, "they" (sorry) do (yet again imho) take criticism - particularly from outside - quite seriously, so i think there is a real possibility of change.

[edit: the talk was "Agustín Villena:
Que mantener, arreglar e intentar en la industria chilena de software" http://www.slideboom.com/presentations/440025/Que-mejorar,-m... - slide 11, 89% of Chileans don't trust their neighbours]
I think the issue he is raising is that there are certainly other kids out there that are less privileged (but still privileged) that have achieved more but don't get any fame|money|respect simply because they aren't the son of an investment banker.
Enjoy the overhead of running a new version of Android on top of the old version.
Yeah I've tried that many times (I have some experience with vim, gcc, windowmaker, but mozilla was larger than them all, last time I checked) and with some success. It's totally possible. My point is merely that it's labor-intensive. There's a cost to swapping in all that state, and to swapping it out and back in again everytime you find a bug with your hacks.

(Tangent) Lately I find I'm much more likely to hack on codebases with lots of tests. Having a single command tell me when I've broken things makes me less afraid of having to deal with subtle breakage, where my changes break some feature I just happen to not use for the next n weeks/months.
The Science of Keyboard Design
>Most of the time focusing on the technical details will get you nowhere but missing the point, totally off track, and arguing something very much unrelated to the original topic.

That's true some of the time. A lot of the time, though, the technical details are important. Look at the SOPA hearings. The reason they were so cringe-inducing is because all of the technical details were glossed over. You had uninformed Congressmen hand-waving their way past very important questions of implementation and side-effects.
I have a much less flattering term for that kind of person: intelligent idiot. Extremely capable to deconstruct tiny details, utterly incapable of letting the details go. This type of person seems to be attracted by the computer industry for some reason.
Is this war not already here? Perhaps it is not counted as a war since so few are defending general purpose computation.

I certainly appreciate Mr. Doctrow's willingness to help get the word out but in my opinion a presentation at the Chaos Computer Congress is preaching to the choir. [Edit:] BoingBoing is a little closer to mainstream, but there's a way to go.
I totally agree. I felt a number of the Master's level CS classes were more like hazings than classes. It was like some professors were most interested in making their particular field of interest seem insanely difficult at the expense of students comprehending the material. Or alternately, some profs were primarily concerned with creating material difficult that most of the students would falter, and it would become clear who the top 3-5 students are. Then they would know who to invite to their research group. Neither of these made for a particularly fun experience.

But at the same time, some of the classes had very difficult subject matter and the professors were actually interested in teaching students instead of torturing them. So it wasn't totally a bad experience.

I guess there is some value in having these online classes because they motivate professors to make their subject matter more palatable. I just don't want my degree devalued by people who aren't as astute as yourself when it comes to the gap between the online courses and those taken by Stanford students.
wow, thats quite a bit, what is the hourly rate they charge
Control: China Launches National GPS System
No, don't know anything about it. Altho we're talking about getting webcams and pointing them at the public whiteboards, and arduinoing up a "push button to save" device that will have the cam snapshot the board and email it appropriately. Slightly over-complicated, but more fun than just phonecams and therefore more likely to actually be done :)
Personality and feeling matter.
Help students learn Machine learning competition
Because Microsoft forced them to. And being the sole laggard when every other OEM updates all the generation one WP7 devices to Mango isn't going to reflect well on them at all. Not to mention that they don't need to update things like Touchwiz since Microsoft doesn't not allow deep customization to the OS by the OEMs.
I have to say that this type of behavior is the exact thing that moved me from Reddit to HN. Something one of organizational behavior professors said stuck with me: anonymous online discussions have a disinhibiting effect. The point was clearly along the lines of what the post discusses.

Unfortunately Clay Shirky's post about a group being it's own worst enemy (http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) appears to be startlingly accurate.
I recall reading about this event in Erik Larsons "Thunderstruck". The book includes a pretty interesting account of the fits and starts of wireless technology, if not overly embellished.

The tuning issue is one of many snags that Marconi ran into, and with a government contract on the line, he made no small effort to keep the technological troubles under wraps until solutions could be found.
Let me try again:

I'm only blogging about my friend because HE is being pedantic!

Again:

After 17 months and countless hours of debate, I believe I've finally crafted the perfect argument to prove to my friend once and for all that HE is the pedantic one!1!

Again:

Doctor, after I've spent months researching it on the internet, I was hoping that you could help me confirm my self-diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive behavior?

Again:

I'm not being annoying - he started it!!!
don't feed the trolls here. I get 2 days with heavy usage on a 2 year old phone with a crappy battery.
tldr; To mitigate existential risks.

There are at least a couple reasons:
1) A lot of the conflict that destroys so many lives is motivated by limited resources such as land. Getting off this planet could make that kind of conflict disappear (eventually).
2) Diversification. If climate change/oil scarcity/nano/GE get out of hand, it'd be good to have someplace else to go. Even if you're sceptical about the environmental risks from climate change and oil scarcity, GE and nano pose big risks. The easier nano and GE get, the more likely some bio-/nano-hacker somewhere creates an irreversible problem for us (whether accidentally or intentionally).
I'm not sure I completely agree - just because the code is visible, doesn't mean anyone has the rights to take it. Obviously you can obfuscate things, and add licenses - and in the end, someone can still come along and take your code and do with it as they please while ignoring any licenses you have put around the code - but you can't assume that all visible code is yours for the taking either.

You also state "Your code is your signature, and someone else's never can express your unique type of art. When it does happen (which it does), it is a matter of ethics, not law or government." - if licensed in a specific manner there are legal routes available as well. So whether you are the one writing the code, or you are the one taking the code this should be kept in mind.
I don't understand how people can see the complete disgrace that is SOPA, NDAA, and the myriad of other broken laws and think that getting the government more involved in the internet is a good thing. Especially when the problem doesn't exist yet, this preemptive regulation is dangerous. Instead of advocating net neutrality, lets wait till these horrible abuses happen and then decide if we want the government involved.
Even inside cities in western Europe, osm is sometimes better than gmaps. More nutty gritty small scale mapping, like pubs, shops, public toilets, etc.
I want ifttt to charge money or drop ads on the emails I have it send, or something that makes it so that the service itself will have staying power.

Also, box.net if you read HN, pay them to make adding you as a channel a priority.
This is also something dealt with pretty early in Daniel Kahneman's excellent _Thinking Fast And Slow_.
Human Beings are Awful at Two Things
Why ++[[]][+[]]+[+[]] = 10 in JavaScript
Makes sense to me. They want to secure it and they need to stick with a tried-and-true platform. What's the point of upgrading if there's nothing wrong with 2.2? Only consumers need the new feautures, in my opinion.
Reading the comment thread on the linked post, I am struck by the sheer pervasiveness of kafkatraps. I see people literally saying "Your opinion does not matter, you are a Straight White Male".

Seeing kafkatrapping used by a community of sceptics and atheists (in theory intelligent, rational people) makes me despair for humanity.

Misogyny is not the only thing wrong here.

(Doubtless I will now collect several responses accusing me of sexism, for having the temerity to take issue with the tactics used against it. Using kafkatraps hurts you more than your target; it typically induces epistemic closure)
>Steve Jobs may have shunned focus groups, but he didn't ignore market research altogether.

Right. Steve Jobs was brilliant because he let his competitors do his market research for him. There's a good reason that Apple is never the first into any market. The first entrant into the market makes a lot of mistakes. Apple sits back, observes the initial entrants, and only enters the market once the initial entrants have demonstrated that the market is viable and technically feasible to enter.
A destroyed observation platform is just as useful for defense as a working one :) I'll replace my cheap observation platforms after I've disposed of the threat that just gave itself away.
What a fatalistic article. Before taking the tone that this article does, I would need to see hundreds of studies suggesting that reversing overweight tendencies is not possible. It may be the minority, but legions of people have reversed their weight problems, and not all required herculean efforts. It's very doubtful that once you're significantly overweight, there's no hope.

While we need this research, this article spins it to make it less than helpful for a certain segment of the population. Rather than focusing on the people (most of them), who can't maintain their weight after dieting, we really need more research explaining those who can, and not simple dismissals that those rare people are machines whose lives revolve around counting calories. People can change their metabolism. For example, there is a case study documenting someone who lost almost 400 pounds over the course of just over a year, using a strict fast[1]. After 5 years, he had maintained his weight loss. Why was that? I can think of possible reasons that have not been thoroughly studied. For instance, after several days or weeks, people on strict fasts report not feeling hungry any longer. Is it possible one's metabolism/sense of hunger resets on a strict fast?

Long term fasting can be dangerous, not least of which because very overweight people often have other health problems. The study cited mentions several people who died on long term fasts, particularly during refeeding. Due to the danger, and probable need for doctor supervision, safe systems of long term strict fasts haven't necessarily been fully fleshed out, although some fasting diets exist that aren't strict fasts, and I would imagine would be quite safe, like PSMF or Dukan diet.

What I like about a fasting diet is that there's no room for fooling yourself. As soon as you introduce attempts to mimic yummy foods or introduce varieties of flavor and texture, you open the door to cheating and desiring things you can't have. If, on the other hand, you're consuming 600 calories of whey protein and some green powder for nutrients, there's little room for error.

We know that the human metabolism isn't a simple calories in, calories out furnace. Medical research is very clear that this isn't the case. Good Calories, Bad Calories is heavily cited. One example that confounds a simple arithmetical analysis is that the body uses a lot more energy to turn protein into fat. So the body uses calories to store calories in that case. Another example is that eating carbs actually changes most people's behavior: Unless they are consciously counting, people will tend to eat more food if they are eating carbs.

[1] http://pmj.bmj.com/content/49/569/203.full.pdf
You're on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Daddy#Backing_of_SOPA.2C_and...
"This also allows myths like C++ being too inefficient for embedded systems programming to live on in industry."

You just proved that it is too inefficient... too complex to efficiently implement dev tools for use with (some) embedded device's to-market development cycles in a timely fashion.
I think part of the problem is dieting. 500 calories a day sounds miserable. I'd be interested to see if they get the same results for exercise.

A few years ago I dropped about 100 pounds, and I've yet to put the weight back on. What did it for me was lots of biking, hiking, trail running, and skiing. At this point, I have so much fun "exercising", I don't know if I could put the weight back on if I wanted too.
Ask HN: Developing for IOS on a VM or "Hackintosh" environment
Anyone have any experience or advice with this?

Looking for a low cost alternative to getting started with IOS development.

Any and all input welcome
Hence the saying, "Never shop hungry".

It's a hard learned lesson, but treating future-you as someone who is lazy and weak-willed pays off.
Submitted reddit thread due to comments
'Proprietary' is a license agreement, 'Closed source' is what I think the author means.
I do not think structured classes is equivalent to being treated like a child.

It was intended as a general comment that some people might not like it and equate it like that based on his comment that only a fraction people actually attended it and maybe if it was made compulsory they might not like it and there is a probability that they will say that.

Just a point that what ever you do there will be some group that will not like it .
The genetic component has to do with susceptibility to overeating, though. It's not some magic "metabolism" setting as is most commonly claimed.
Since you're new here, I'll take the opportunity to ask you to check out the site guidelines (linked at the bottom of the page).
If you are to try a blockade...

I'd accomplish a blockade this way:

Send a squadron of cheap robot ships that are painted in EM-absorbing materials, operate at cryogenic temperatures, communicate only on tight-beam lasers, and beam all of their minuscule waste heat in one direction. These ships would make a final course correction by ejecting cold mass, and take up station near the resource. When an enemy transport comes nearby, I'd send a command to activate one of my robot ships and have it launch a missile. Heck, since at that point it would be disposable, I'd have it spin-up to high-temp torchship mode and have it be the missile.

The enemy won't know how many of these things I have. However, the real purpose would be to get them to react and maneuver resources in place to detect my hidden ships, so that I could detect the energies of those maneuvers to set up the real attack.

Stealth won't be important, my ass!
2012 Global State of Information Security Survey
Mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers are going to save the world?

As I read it, a group of researchers is creating philosophy around a branch of thought in order to begin to define the problem. Thats all good, but proper scientific research starts once a well defined problem is synthesized into a testable hypothesis.

The gap between thought exploration and observable hypotheses can be called philosophy. However, usually when this gap is paired with an assumed purpose (absent a testable or confirmed hypothesis), this is best described as religion.

Why say 'save the world' in order to solicit donations? You really don't know enough about the problem to pre-suppose that any philosophy you are generating will create testable observable knowledge, or that in turn, that the findings of these observations would even come close to 'saving the world', or even providing any measurable benefit to the world - you just don't know.

Why not just say you are a group of researchers trying to better define potential problems generated from AI-related extrinsic risks?

Why do I care? Well, I think the SIAI, etc guys are really bright, and that their work produces a lot of valuable insight about applying theories like solomonoff induction, information theory, bayes, etc to theories of economics and intelligence. There is a lot of value here. However, the religious-like beliefs of the group just come off as strange to most, and frankly, unscientific. I'd like to see these ideas propagate, get fleshed out and get evolved. However, when I mention my interest/projects in AI/semantics to the average silicon valley engineer/entrepreneur/investor and you would be surprised how often I hear something like 'not like those singularity people, right? those guys are like a weird cult'.
DuckDuckGo used to run out of my basement
It's ranking fairly highly on r/truereddit, and I see a lot of crossover between TR and HN, so I'm willing to believe that somebody cross-posted it thinking it would be of interest. That's not to say it isn't out of place, but it also doesn't mean it's a honeypot.
Right, but this article claims that the problem is that "Android is too free" and that these companies don't have incentives to update. But the former is not true; Google has a stick just like Microsoft has a stick. It's a different stick, but it's a stick. They just choose not to use it. To me the blame is placed solely on Google who apparently is winning too strongly to care about this particular wrinkle.
The 10 Best Productivity Apps of 2011