skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why are some people so sloppy with units?
So many times I see people sloppily use units incorrectly (e.g. kb, kB, Mb, MB) and I have to assume what they meant. I can't count the number of times I have had to ask if they meant megabit versus megabyte.

I have to assume it's either laziness (okay, maybe not), or maybe just a lack of understanding that capitalization is important. I still don't know what a mb is, although wolfram alpha happily corrects it to Mb.
I don't want updates "indefinitely". I think 2 years of updates, which is the usual lifetime of a phone, or updating to 2 major new versions (5.0 and 6.0 for 4.0/ICS phones) is reasonable.

I don't mind if they raise the price a little, but they'll have to heavily promote this "feature", otherwise customers won't know why their phone is more expensive than the competition who isn't offering these updates.
Looks good.

Did you steal your Terms of Service from LiveJournal — "Account registration and verification is required in order to create a Songspin.FM account. During registration, all users are required to provide accurate, complete, and current information about themselves in all required fields. Should any of your own information change after submitting it to LiveJournal, you are required to update that information as soon as possible. Should LiveJournal suspect that your personal information is not complete, current, or accurate, your Account may be suspended or terminated without further notice."?
"When the Kindle plays an MP3, it executes any shell script in the metadata"
It's vary unlikely that a single gene does more than harm memory creation if missing. If for no other reason than we call several different processes 'memory' even though physically learning a skill is different from memorizing a poem or remembering where your key's are.
I don't get why he had to sue under that law: fraud is fraud and bait and switch is fraud too.
Algorithmic thinking is something i did by solving a lot of ACM ICPC-style problems.

I recommend TopCoder, it is a site with about 3 algorithmic competitions by month (http://www.topcoder.com/tc), but there are also many online judges like SPOJ(http://www.spoj.pl/) or Project Euler(http://projecteuler.net/), where you can practice at any time.

If you solve a lot of these kind of problems, you will learn more about algorithms than by merely reading books.
I read it and don't like it either. It is not a very hard book to understand. Much of the concepts are CS101 material put into long-winded prose.
Do an article on Netflix!

NAO!
Most popular Havard Business Review blog posts of 2011
As I mentioned before, in some cases, we do. Obviously if you're dealing with, say, sensitive customer data like card numbers or any sort of legally privileged information, then you have to have robust security in place across the board.

More often, in the particular cases I'm familiar with, we're talking about commercially sensitive information, where we have to weigh up the costs of complete end-to-end encryption by default against the loss of productivity that results when things like big network file transfers slow way down. In a self-funded small company, with limited staff time and limited cash, total encryption is not always the answer.

For example, I think you can reasonably have a policy that encryption of any removable media is required but anything screwed into a rack in the office is biased toward performance, and in fact that is basically what we do in most cases. But it does limit the value of the kinds of warranties we're talking about, because we're not going to just hand over a hard drive that has probably had sensitive company documents on it to some random delivery service.

Similarly, from a personal point of view, I don't consider theft of my home computers to be a very high risk, so I don't routinely encrypt all the hard drives, even though I have some potentially sensitive data like downloaded bank statements and bills on there. Instead, I expect to keep the hard drives for a relatively long time anyway, and then have them securely wiped/destroyed when they are too old/broken to be useful any more.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying these choices are anyone's problem but my own. I accept the cost of the occasional hard drive failure as a natural consequence of these policies. I'm just saying that it means hard drive manufacturers' long-term warrantes are effectively not worth anything to me or the companies I run. I suspect that in practice plenty of other people/small businesses follow similar procedures, and therefore the warranties probably aren't worth much to them either.
Straw man. Of course calorie restriction (starving yourself) works. Nobody in their right mind would claim otherwise. Taubes argues that starving yourself is just a very inefficient (and unpleasant) way to lose weight.
'Unwitting' criminals of the Facebook and Twitter generation
The Army goes Android
The linked pdf makes a number of factual errors. it incorrectly suggests that ketogenic don't encourage eating lots of vegetables and low-sugar fruits. It also trys to twist "not all calories are the same" into "you can eat as much as you want". and of course, trans fats should always be avoided.

but you should really decide for yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Having just finished reading "Willpower", I wanted to comment here. The primary hypothesis of the book is that humans have a store of "willpower", which is depleted every time we exercise it (including making tough decisions) [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion]. When we avoid our favorite foods, we deplete our willpower. When that reserve is gone, it is much more difficult for us to make the "right" choice.

The really interesting twist was when they presented the brain glucose study results. The authors suggest that it's glucose levels in the brain that partially determine the size of the willpower reserve. Thus, when you diet, you not only deplete your reserve by making a decision to avoid fatty foots, but you also starve your brain of the glucose it needs to replenish the ability to make tough decisions.

They support it with some interesting and fairly compelling evidence. I highly recommend reading it.
This is a nice take by Miguel De Icaza on the subject:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
root that shit and put a custom rom on like ACS ICS.

your mind will boggle when you see it lasting for a whole DAY -- like, 24 hours.
Successful techniques for dealing with lawyer bills? 
My startup just closed a round (yay!) and our legal bills are really high. What are techniques people have found for negotiating down or deferring their legal bills with their counsel? I'm staring at these expenses and thinking "this is an entire engineer-year", and anything I can do to defer them or minimize them will impact my probability of success.
This is not entirely correct: check out Guyenet's rebuttal and conference video
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...

http://www.dietdoctor.com/ahs-showdown-gary-taubes-vs-stepha...
> Only 13 per cent could see the legal danger in posting the message “OMG the carnage in London is brilliant!” – a level which fell to as low as eight per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds.

I put this here partly because it shows quite nicely some big differences in culture between US and other countries.

Should companies do anything to help their users stay within the law?
Gary gives his perspective on your questions at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4
Some people believe the dictionary prescribes how words are to be used. Others believe the dictionary merely captures descriptions of how words are already being used. I think the truth is probably somewhere in between.
Relevant PBF: http://pbfcomics.com/115/
Do you guys lack the reading-comprehension skills to understand that he talks about a SPECIFIC kind of smart-ass called a "pedant" which he is not?
Mark Zuckerberg Riding A Water Buffalo
Thanks for the catch - yes it was cobbled together from a few places.
I guess I waited too long to post it on HN :-)

It is at http://www.kirubakaran.com/passtrust/
It has email confirmation on creation of the account (first log in) but I've temporarily disabled it as I am making some changes.
and tell us the results...
Sounds high — 40k, 50k, 60k? Scratch that, sounds scary. I'm not so sure I want to start my startup now.
In a way, isn't it a good thing if the body can get by with less calories? Personally I find it a bit frustrating that my body is so inefficient. For example, Chinese people are certainly as smart or smarter than I am, yet their bodies tend to be smaller so presumably they require less calories for maintenance.
Of course the brain still craving for more is a problem, but being able to get by on less calories seems like a good thing.
Moreover; it works without pairing your mobile device with every single service you want to connect with.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te_sgFo5wdo for more info.

https://nomopass.com/ is the developers' attempt at a SaaS solution.
Using Photos to Drive Web Traffic
Down voter(s); mind typing what you disagreed with, or what rule of HN this violated? Still learning, thanks.
So he spent six months at a rather unusual computer programming school. The courses were in English, but all the teachers and students were Russian immigrants, he says. You would learn the bare minimum to land a job, and the school would help you fake a résumé filled with previous experience.

And people wonder why talent is such an issue in this industry.
10 things you need to know about Anonymous’ Stratfor hack
Exactly. Once you've become obese, you've already lost (in general).

Not the most encouraging thing to say to those who are already overweight, but it's an important detail nonetheless.
Another point in function over design, just like Craigslist.
What a crock of shit. There's always some new study that lazy people want to use to excuse being fat and lazy.

I was fat for most of my adult life but when I was 30 I finally got sick of it and spent the next 18 months losing over 100 lbs to get healthy.

Am I miraculously cured and could never get fat again? No. I could get fat again easily and during the holidays I put on like a few pounds due to bad habits. But I'm taking it back off. It's a constant battle, not "with my body" -- which implies that it's out of your control, like cancer -- but with the bad habits I developed during childhood and perfected during my 20's. I have to fight against them and I have to NOT be lazy, I have to exercise, in order to avoid getting fat again.

There's no "magic" going on, we've understood for many decades that weight loss and gain are ALL about calories in vs. calories out, and that's true for everybody except a tiny, tiny percent who have various medical conditions.

When someone loses the weight during some "trick diet" like special shakes, and then they go off the shakes and gain the weight back, that's no more surprising than if someone who is skinny suddenly starts eating 5 large pizzas a day and gains weight.

Lasting weight loss requires that you change your habits and learn to eat for fuel and fight against your tendency to eat to relieve boredom, for comfort, for pleasure, etc.

Articles like this which encourage people to put their hands in the air and say "It's not my fault! I can't help it!" make me sick because I think of people like my aunt who suffered for years from diabetes, going blind and eventually dying, which was NEEDLESS. If she had only been able to get help and actually lose weight and get healthy, she could have been happy, healthy and might still be with us today.
http://chronicdb.com/blogs/undelete_from_whoops
"Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp."

Serious power! Remember this was before tuned circuits became common (google 'syntony oliver lodge'). Even allowing for the sensitivity of a balanced carbon spark gap, you need to move a carbon rod or have a magnetic field strong enough to change the position of the discharge. He must have been in the same building...
I think I buy into what nutritionists call the "food reward" hypothesis of obesity.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/Food%20re...

The key driver of modern obesity is the high availability of varied and intensely pleasing flavors. Even thirty years ago food was more bland, and there was way less variety in the grocery store. 100 years ago cooking with spices was a rare treat. Animals get fat on what is called the "cafeteria" diet, where they are presented with the choice of a high variety of flavors and nutrients. They do not get fat when presented with a monotonous diet.

Low carb dieting works because you are reducing food reward by removing pleasant starchy and sweet flavors, so people eat less. Low fat dieting also works for the same reason; people have had success by eating mostly plain potato.
It's a matter of perspective. Self discipline has a certain connotation and evokes certain emotions. For some people it may be associated with negative feelings built up over years of failure.

Maybe your friend realized this and decided to change the game. Thinking about it in terms of "consistency" instead of the dreaded "self-discipline" evidently worked for him, and he may be sticking to his guns in the argument because he doesn't want to fuck up the mental hack that been working so well.
Leo Laporte firing employee for being... too good?
Definitely not fatal. According to Wikipedia[1], the temperature in a sauna is "typically between 70 °C (158 °F) and 100 °C (212 °F)".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna
Most men are ignorant of computer science, too.

You're right in one aspect: of the very, very few people in the world who know about computer science, most (more than half, anyway) of them are men.
Wow, he must be a hell of a developer to overcome the enormous red flag of saying "I want to do all future development in language X".
I could not disagree more. I have an MIT degree, and I thought it was remarkably refreshing to have the difficult made easy, rather than vice versa. Not that I have huge complaints with my MIT education, but having taken some classes at Harvard too, where the emphasis was sometimes different, I can appreciate that there's often a great deal of value in a class that can draw people in and make them interested, rather than send them fleeing in terror. Personally, I thought that Prof. Ng's lectures where brilliant in their ability to make difficult material completely approachable.

I do think that he occasionally would belabor the obvious, but for the intended purpose of the class, I think that it is better that he erred on the side of being too clear, rather than on the side of being opaque.
I meant to ask something about your general intelligence, but I redacted it.
As your girlfriend wasn't there to observe that person going into town, the word 'supposedly' makes sense.
[IANAL] Technically, there was no fraud. They made a job offer, he accepted, and they (most likely) properly compensated him within the bounds of the offer. So, in terms of that specific business transaction, there was no intentional deception made for personal/business gain (they made good on the job offer), or to damage a specific individual (they paid him according to the employment contract). Employment being at-will in most of the US, Seagate was completely within their rights to let him go anytime they wanted, for any reason. There's no case, there. Seagate was not playing fair, but they were still within the bounds of the law.

However, the actual intent of creating the job in the first place was done under false pretenses, and MN has a specific (albeit old and obscure) law against that.
But what you've described is almost the textbook definition of discipline.

"calm controlled behavior: the ability to behave in a controlled and calm way even in a difficult or stressful situation"

The pedant was able to create new habits that allowed him to be controlled and stick to a routine even in the presence of stimuli that would cause him to no longer exibit this control.

The term consistency, when applied to human behavior, is almost always a form of discipline -- except when it comes to certain bodily functions... like heartbeat or going to the bathroom.
Steve Jobs’ plan to improve user experience (in 1980)
Wyden's been consistently on the right side of this stuff, he's been an outspoken advocate of Net Neutrality for years.
Reddit makes me hate atheists
Anything that I've heard at least a few times before, and has a strong drum beat. I'm pretty good at tuning lyrics, etc. out, but I need that strong rhythm.
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I thought the article wasn't very good. It goes on at length with the only takeaway being that fat people have a very hard time maintaining weight loss and we're not sure why.
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See my comment above. IANAL, but "fraud" looks like it would be a very hard case to prove.
Deconstructing the Computer Guy [Fitness]
Time Machine for OSX Lion 10.7 using Debian 6.0 Squeeze
Build your own time machine using open-source software.
The whole weight loss approach described in the article seems flawed to begin with. The human body is an adaptive organism and will fight any drastic changes trying to stay in balance. 500 calories a day will certainly cause the body to begin changing hormone levels. Then you come out of it after a while and start eating correctly you still have severely imbalances hormones (relative to normal levels). So now you're eating healthy but have completely screwed up the way your body handles food, essentially storing more calories than before. If you slowly shift into better habits and allow your body time to keep up you'll end up with a calorie burning machine. The main problem is people get so motivated to change they dive in head first (such as. 500 calorie per day diet), throw everything out of whack, try to maintain their losses which start coming back and end up worse than where they started.
What does "NAO" mean?
and this is why I love reading history.
No, but for loops are simple. Classes are not that simple. Of course, no feature really is "magic". But there are a lot of features that may be easy to use but hard to deeply understand. Take for example the attr_accessor method that Ruby uses to make variables pseudo-public. Most beginners coming from Java think that it is a language keyword, similar to "public". In fact, it just writes getters and setters for you. Of course, everyone could just write their getters and setters themselves, but this is just what language is: A way to abstractly tell a machine what to do. And if you don't know how it works (and maybe even don't need to know), you can call it "magic".
Really, that was your only takeaway? <shrug> OK.

And note, your synopsis is not even correct. It's that people who have lost (a certain amount of) weight have a hard maintaining weight loss. There's data to indicate what some causes might be, but nothing conclusive yet.
Daily Kos: Republicans lose the Wall Street Journal on tax cut 'fiasco'
This is the best public information about how Netflix works:

http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/global-netflix-platform
I know Markus from good 'ol webmasterworld days when he was a active affiliate marketer. He is really a bright guy and POF's initial growth was mainly from SEO (until the network effects kicked in).

If i remember correctly until a few years ago the site ran on a single webserver and db server!.
2011 Was A Huge Year For Basho and Riak
Why R6RS is controversial
FriendFeed, acquired by Facebook in 2009, was a Python shop. These guys now maintain their Tornado platform as Facebook (https://github.com/facebook/tornado). Facebook's CTO, Bret Taylor, is a Python guy (https://github.com/finiteloop).

Python is used in house. They have the resources to support Python. They've just made the business decision not to.
I love that this made it on Hackernews so as to prove the non-techies point! :-D

He is right too - when dealing with the hard sciences it's most important to BE RIGHT (it's either a 0 or 1 - and it matters), but when dealing with relationships it's much more important to BE EMPATHETIC.

If you aren't - you'll be seen as a contrarian/confrontational.

I think we need to practice "being ok with being wrong" when the relationship matters more than the subject matter. Cheers!
The program is not bullshit, it's just that the government isn't in the business of throwing money away. There a lot of legitimate startups here that have gone from an idea to a proper product with actual customers. There is, however, a lot of red tape to cut through in order to ensure that money is spent properly, that's why there's so many rules.

It would look really bad if the government of Chile was seen to be funding vacations. Unfortunately, that happens anyway. There are a bunch of people participating in the program that have done fuck all for the last six months and have little more to show for themselves than a Twitter account and some nice photos of the parties they've been to.
These aren't so much beliefs of "what dictionaries do", but what they should do. For example, Websters aims to be descriptive, not prescriptive. How much they succeed is debatable. The point is that this issue isn't solely in the mind of the reader.
This is an old article (couldn't find the date), but, if you can ignore all the body builder marketing, it's a great set of tips about what to do in the weight room.

Also has a second part:
http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_trai...

I've been lifting weights and training for about five years now. Lifting is one of the best things you can do for your health.
I took CS229 at Stanford.

ml-class.org does a phenomenal job in equipping you with the practical knowledge needed to apply the tools of machine learning to real problems.

There is no reason why learning to use these tools should be hard. If you want a challenge, there are plenty of problems in the world amenable to solution via machine learning, especially in today's data deluge.

If you want a deep mathematical appreciation of the algorithms and their derivation, you should do CS229, not CS229a.
Photographers: Please Stop Using Flash
IWBNI instead of just showing a domain as unavailable when searching it would show a link to the current whois information. Not a big deal but a nice touch (I think).
Copy-paste from another comment:

FriendFeed, acquired by Facebook in 2009, was a Python shop. These guys now maintain their Tornado platform as Facebook (https://github.com/facebook/tornado). Facebook's CTO, Bret Taylor, is a Python guy (https://github.com/finiteloop).
Python is used in house. They have the resources to support Python. They've just made the business decision not to.
For those who tldr;

The author should have taken CS 229, but instead took CS 229a and was disappointed. He then overgeneralizing from his 229a experience about the future of Stanford CS education.
They are getting better with each iteration. For example, when we first arrived nobody knew whether it was acceptable to pay for something using PayPal. That took months to clear up and me and others directly asking for clarification.

The hardest part of the entire situation is that we came here to work, not do a song and dance. Even the fact that I feel obligated to post about this on HackerNews is a giant waste of my time, but it will ultimately be good for everyone involved (from the government to the startups) to grow and learn from the discussion.
Automate your Dropbox
Elegant or Tacky? 3D CSS3 Transforms for my personal site
Oh I get it -- you're trying to show that Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to humans. Haha.

* All consistent axiomatic formulations of semantic arguments include self-unaware bigotry.

You are brilliant, sir.
Who are vastly vastly outnumbered. If facts changed minds, religion wouldn't exist.