skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not every startup is a couple of guys working on an iPhone app. Startups have definitely solved big problems. For example:

- Amazon.com, when it was a startup, figured out how to allow you to buy just about any book in print and have it delivered to your home. They had to build or lease warehouses, contract with delivery companies, and do all sorts of things that were not just hacking or technology.

- Apple, when it was a startup (two guys working in a garage) figured out how to design an easy to use personal computer and get it manufactured at an affordable price.

Actually, I'm uncertain about whether I really want the problem of centralized healthcare records to be solved. If it is, it means that my healthcare records could easily fall into the wrong hands (look at how many data breaches there have been at banks, for example).
This passage bewildered me. It’s hard to think of a time when the US military wasn’t comparably involved in politicized missions: see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_milit...

The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are not particularly unusual, and I don’t think they represent a rising trend. That doesn’t mean they’re excusable or inevitable, and they may have important differences from past politicized wars. I’m not apologizing for them, I’m just saying they aren’t a new phenomenon.
I don't buy this. Twitter is in a powerful position to protest for free speech and they are choosing not to. They have the attention of the mainstream public and have a precious opportunity to make a stand for human rights similar to the SOPA protests. By censoring their very own beliefs, they enable the government censors to continue to silence everyone else. How can you have a tool for free expression, when you yourself don't fight for it?
Male, 25-34. I turn 25 in 2 months and am male. Heh not bad.
How Swedes and Norwegians Broke the Power of the '1 Percent'
Have you done the same for every study that points to calories in/calories out? In fact, there aren't many such studies actually. Somehow this was given the benefit of being the null hypothesis, which is an underserved benefit in my opinion and many others including Taubes. One of the other things he does in GCBC is go through the anthropological evidence as well. We know quite well that our ancestors ate a very high fat/low carv diet because they mainly ate the organ meat. I don't think that is actually in dispute. Its also part of the foundation of the whole paleo/primal movement.

At the end of the day, Taubes might be wrong about some or all of what he thinks. But the reason why he is generally well liked on HN, a community of very smart, very analytical people, is because Taubes is highly analytical and highly rigorous in his approach. This isn't some woo-woo magic stuff. I've never met a more methodically and rigorously researched book than GCBC. I can't review every study he cites because that would take 5 years at least.
This is very important, but he's making a deeper point, that the README ties it to the problem it solves. It's possible to make a beautiful, intuitive, natural solution that nobody needs (not even yourself). From the user to the code, it goes:

problem -> usability -> code

Although intriguingly, pure mathematicians create solutions for their own sake (without reference to a problem), and it sometimes (often?) turns out to have practical application anyway e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Pure_mathematics

BTW: I just noticed you can resize the reply textarea by dragging the bottom right corner. There doesn't seem to be any JS or CSS in the HN source to do this, so I guess it must be in Firefox 9; google says chromium has it too. Seems about 1.5 years old :(
Cholesterol Drugs for Healthy People? by Stan Seagraves, M.D.
That sounds a lot like General Education requirements in college in the US. You can avoid taking many of them if you test well enough, but otherwise they're pretty much bringing everyone up to a highschool level, because some didn't take that class or simply don't remember it well enough.
I used JQuery Mobile for the mobile version of our site. Performance is definitely an issue. I believe that it will eventually improve with future versions so I stuck with it and used just a subset of the features that had acceptable performance. The compromise in performance was worth not having to worry about cross-device compatibility.

Specific performance issues I ran into:
1) The page transitions were too slow so I didn't use them at all and instead just do page reloads for everything.
https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/3217

2) The list structure causes scrolling to be too slow so I had to switch to generating the CSS classes and html structures on the server:
https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/2855
Male, 35-44

Actually male and 29.
Altix UV perchance?
Male, 35-44

I'm actually male and 38. Not bad.
Good effort! It looks neat but please can you do away with a twitter sign-in ? Some of us do not have or wish to use a twitter account to log in. Why not have a guest login for demos. Thanks.
Somehow, it doesn't know.
If someone else didn't say this already, I was going to. Although, I've got to admit that Fink's solution of /sw isn't much better.
I don't know if I'd prefer a non-portable way to do the same thing :)

Does 'ip' have a form that just prints the current addresses without all the surrounding cruft? That would be pretty useful for the occasional shell script.
Male, 65+
Actually male and 30
Russell excludes stocks trading below $1, stocks that trade on the pink sheets and OTC Bulletin Board, closed-end mutual funds, limited partnerships, royalty trusts, non-U.S. incorporated stocks (other than the benefits driven incorporations described above), foreign stocks, and American Depositary Receipts (ADRs). Hence registration on a stock exchange would be a pre-requisite to index inclusion. For example, Facebook, despite being valued at 80-100 billion US dollars, is not in the Russell index universe.

All public companies are C corporations. I'm trying to see if there is a requirement in the SEA or NYSE listing standards that mandate, this, but given the NYSE's requirement of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, B corps produce a legal conflict of interest.
That's exactly my result as well!

Should we be friends maybe? :)
Almost the same here, except for late 20s. Very weird.
The 9 million number seems a bit inflated to me. Either way, Java is widely used in many major open source projects so I doubt calling it "dead" is appropriate.

That being said, Java is a bit heavy on the resources. It takes 20 percent more hardware to run a Java product than it does C++. Wish it could be far more performance driven.
> the agents acting in their official capacities would likely be found to have immunity

You appear to be confusing the general concept of sovereign immunity with the much narrower concept of qualified immunity, which generally protects government employees from being sued personally for actions performed in their official capacities.

Qualified immunity doesn't apply to the government, to its agencies, nor to, for example, the Attorney General in his official capacity. It applies to real, live, human beings.
Duplicate submission. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3517830 .
This is the same thing UCSF Professor, Dr. Robert Lustig, says in his presentation, "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM).

There is also a New York Times article on this entitled "Is Sugar Toxic?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...).
Google thinks I'm male (probably gleaned that juicy tidbit from my profile). No word yet on my age.
FB is very well-known by virtue of its huge user base. This probably means that many people from among its user base will consider buying at the IPO. Whether or not the stock is "correctly price", only a small fraction of that huge user base enamored with FB needs to buy it at that price for the price to be supported.
Google had what I was a few years ago, but they've not updated my age range.

My Tivo unit used to record a lot of the Logo network shows for me, and I could never figure out why, or get it to stop.
> Is Sugar Toxic?

When an article is written in this form, the answer is nearly always "no", as it is in this case.

If sugar were toxic, nothing that eats fruit could survive.
Ask HN: Thoughts on Anonymous
I was just curious as to how some of the tech community views the group.
While I agree that 3 is the most optimal solution in the sense that "all these other problems are solved given 3", we still don't have a firm time frame on it. It could be 1 year, it could be 50 years. (I wouldn't put it at 100 or above personally, barring global catastrophe.) So we do things in parallel and hedge our bets. Could we get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon (or Mars, or somewhere else) within 50 years if we tried? I think we could. And that instantly protects modern humanity from many existential threats while we continue to work on problem #3.
Thanks for the feedback and suggestion. I can understand not wanting to have an announcement hit the HN front page every time a new chapter is released. But even if I don't submit the story, the chances are good that someone else will. By submitting it myself, I can control the timing; in particular, I can make sure to be available to respond to comments. In any case, if people don't vote it up, the story will soon disappear.
Personally, I see them as a group who's main objectives are for the most part benificial to the world. Obviously since anyone can SAY they are part of Anonymous, some of the things 'promoted' by Anonymous aren't actually supported by a majority of the group, which i feel both the media and many people fail to realize.

From what I can see, Anonymous is mainly concerned with showing the public the problems with today's society. In my opinion, the methods might be slightly extreme but that's really the only way they are going to be able to inform the public of the issues that need to be addressed:
through media attention.

I want to be clear however, this is just my opinion and I
am in no way promoting or even associated with the group.
The world's first computer password? It was useless, too
Purchasing too much viagra!
> calories in/calories out

This is a fundamental law of thermodynamics.
Hmm that was not my intent.
Long Dark Night (Success takes AGES)
Website feedback: it looks terrible on iPhone. When the page loads all you see is the
word 'Glider' and the rest is
just a blank gray background. You have to scroll and pan to see any of the content.
Excellent:
"You currently do not have an ‘id’ cookie."
> It's fructose

So fruit is bad?
رئيس البلدية يقر بإعادة حقوق جميع الموظفين دون تميّيز
I opted out on my main browser. On a browser I don't use so much and don't have tracking disabled: male and 65+. More than half that and not male. I guess I should shop for more pink stuff?
It just tells me that I've opted out of whatever this is.
It thinks I'm a 65+-year-old male into extreme sports and uh... anatomy?
IME experience people usually mean the actual preventative medicine and not promoting healthy lifestyles. Otherwise it wouldnt be such a big deal for how much of GDP is spent on medicine.
Fix'd! :)
https://github.com/javve/list/commit/ec2a490142997a17646dd74...
Cotton would have done much the same, or eating any other indigestible solid. You were filling yourself up (sending fullness signals to your brain based on stomach distention) without getting any calories from it. Paper would have worked as well.
You can still use attr_accessible in the controller-layer.

class AccountsController < ApplicationController
include ActiveModel::MassAssignmentSecurity

attr_accessible :first_name, :last_name
...

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/MassAssignmen... explicitly states: Note that using Hash#except or Hash#slice in place of attr_accessible to sanitize attributes won’t provide sufficient protection.

I agree with you, though. Model-level attr_accessible, if nothing else, is flatly annoying. I feel inconvenienced by a measure that's supposed to protect against malicious users. And I feel like the terrorists have already won. I'm no MVC guru, but it makes sense to me that the Controller would deal with what amounts to the params that are on their way to the model. Why should the model have to worry about mass assignment?
It mascarades and is documented as a security feature, but it's a superficial restriction. You could simply loop and send("#{key}=", value) instead of calling attributes=(hash).

In practice, all it does it prevent you from writing `MyModel.new(:foo => bar)` and force you to write `m = MyModel.new; m.foo = bar` This is simply annoying at the repl.

Validation applies always the same (or when some predicates are satisfied), but restriction on changing fields can vary by view or via permissions (ie. only admins can flip that bit!)

The security concern comes up when you bring "params" into the picture. You don't want to ever do: MyModel.new(params) for fear of params[:is_admin] == true.

A better solution would be to automatically mark the values in `params` as tainted and throw an error on mass-assignment of tainted values. This way you can still use mass assignment for non-user-input (like in tests or at the repl). You could have an `safe_attrs` to disable tainted value filtering for some known-safe attributes.
Google doesn't care what your age and sex really are. They're just dividing people into demographics for advertising purposes. So if you are likely to click on similar ads as other people they've put into the same bucket, they're happy.
Google: Male, 18-24
Real life: Female, 29

. . . but I find that oddly validating.

Edit: And I'm thinking the ads will probably stay more relevant if I don't fix that.
Ignoring the zombie blood for a second (because you're absolutely correct) I'll approach your last question.

> how common is it for typically impotable water to have these type of compounds?

My gut feeling is, "not very... right now." The "right now" is pretty much the problem with the speculated water wars (though a bunch of the water in the Gulf of Mexico does contain those compounds).

With landfill's "impermeable" barriers becoming permeated and cholesterol medications, caffeine, birth control, and various other drugs remaining in the treated effluent from waste water facilities coupled with humanity's generally reckless disregard for consequences to its actions there's a significantly non-zero chance that fresh, clean potable water will become scarce in multiple developed locations worldwide.

On the other hand, it could very well be that as our understanding of bio-remediation increases and our utilization of passive and active purification techniques and/or technologies increases we'll keep from having that be a problem. Potentially, we'll even stop actively polluting our water supplies with industrial, agricultural and residential wastes to "save a buck."

Anyway, the watercone is great. They've tackled usability issues present in other solar distillation devices and for areas with access to water with high salinity, or biologically contaminated water (though, there is risk of cross-contamination when harvesting your purified water). It's just that solar stills aren't always a replacement for filters.
Is anyone noteworthy saying that Java is dead, anyone providing good arguments for it? Otherwise this seems to be arguing against a straw man.
Google Translate: men are men and men should clean the house
Google: 25-34, Male
Actual: 28, Male

Would be kind of disappointing if they didn't know, given that they have more of my personal information on their servers than I have on my own computer.
Ahh, smart!
And good move with the screencast :)
I for one am quite happy that my health, working history and government database profiles are not (yet) interlinked. Sure, it would make things a lot easier... BUT
Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java
Funny, they think I'm 65+, just like the television seems too...

(One of the reasons I quit watching TV is it seems like all the ads are for people whose main asset is medicare benefits)
Personally, I don't think it's a big deal. The Curebits designer was obviously inspired by the Highrise design, but didn't copy it pixel-by-pixel. If it helps Curebits convert more customers then more power to them--it's not like they're stealing Highrise customers.

Linking to someone else's assets, however, is just wrong.
"Ads on the web
You've opted out, but you can opt in at any time."

Well yeah.

Its actually funny. I have DNT enabled. If I click opt in, it refresh and doesn't opt in. Doesn't say why :-)
> I moved to Chrome because Chrome is faster.

And on my system, Firefox is faster. Faster is such an inconsistent metric.
How do all of you 60+ folk manage it? It has my age off by 20 years---got the sex right but not even close on the age. Wonder if there is a button I can push to as Kirk would say 'Make is so'?
Ahh, you're right. I neglected to test it on iphone/android before launching. I'll fix this in the next iteration. Thanks!
You're entirely correct, and I regret that the negativity in the above comment brought that statement from me.

In actuality, there's no superior way of learning, and no superior way of getting into cycling! Take the tone of my comment as a reaction.
I'm not against open access in general, but I am getting increasing respect for people, like Stephen Wolfram, who can get academics who are always pleading poverty, to fork over huge amounts of money.
Check out this article, I learned a ton about making things look good from it: http://flyosity.com/tutorial/crafting-subtle-realistic-user-...

I'm not sure what kind of assets you need but you might want to just buy vector stock art and customize it as needed rather than dealing with hiring a designer.
It has no idea what my age or gender are. Which amuses me to no end, because I specified gender on my profile, and don't keep my age secret either :)

Or maybe it thinks "Female, 42" is unflattering and so it stays silent. An ad network with manners!
Why are software development task estimates regularly off by a factor of 2-3?
The hidden assumption here is that your body puts forth the same amount of effort to store fats vs carbs. This isn't borne out by the evidence. Cells uptake nutrients in response to insulin. Your body produces insulin in much greater amounts in response to carbs vs fats. This is necessary: free floating glucose is toxic to certain organs. Fats on the other hand can exist in your bloodstream without any acute damage.
You should also add other pre-requisites to your agreements, e.g. 7 day lead time on all work, otherwise rate is 2X standard rate if you are available at all (since you'd need to move existing work to make yourself available for them)

Inform them of these changes in a formal way, and give them an implementation date: As of Feb 1, these are my new terms.
Java Daemonization with posix_spawn(2)
Java isn't dead, it's just widely considered to be uncool. I realize "cool" might not be a good metric for evaluating languages; but that's where mindshare comes from. Java is a boring language often used in boring contexts mostly by people trying to make a safe choice. This is not the kind of thing that appeals to hackers.
There's actually a fairly decent chance that you do have a secure way to access your medical records online. About 38% of patients in the US have a record in an Epic (disclaimer: my employer) EMR system. If you're part of that population, chances are good that you have access to Epic's MyChart web portal [1]. Each organization brands this portal as their own so I recommend asking your doctor's front desk staff about it.

And more directly to the OP's point, Epic certainly was once a startup (3 employees 30 years ago, 5000 today) that has tackled some very big problems.

I don't refute that there are many more startups working on products that won't quite save the world, but is that such a bad thing? P.T Barnum was organizing circus acts while his contemporaries Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan were shifting the very foundation of our society (literally and figuratively). Doesn't mean Barnum doesn't have a legacy of his own though.

[1] - Here's an example: https://mychart.clevelandclinic.org/
> Pushing the envelope in terms of interface is a really tricky thing to do. Each time you do it, there's a huge user outcry, and it does turn some users away or stops them from upgrading.

And the reason I like Firefox is because there's always a way to go back to the old behavior/UI without losing the benefits of the new underlying system. That is respectful to users, as opposed to the Chrome way where you take it or leave it at a corporation's whim.
Your body reacts differently to different macronutrients. Thermodynamics isn't the last word here.
Yep, it is startups with 10+ intros only. We get about 100 startup profiles a day.
"Waiting for Superman" is a thinly veiled ad for charter schools.
I do not understand why this is even a thing to discuss.

An algorithm may or may not have got something correct.

An algorithm that works out advertising. If it gets it wrong we won't click through, if it does we might but probably won't as we're all geeks that ignore ads anyway.

FUD.
Anagram phrases using Scheme.
BUT what?
My only question is which of the three problems is actual a technical problem? All three seem to be if anything political problems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LqmAQwHNA0
Not in the way you think it is. It's true that if you gain weight then you must have consumed more calories than you burned. It is not true that if you consume more calories than you burn that you will gain weight. This is not a closed system. You could literally poop out the difference.

As far as it goes, it is a useless statement anyway. The point of calories in/calories out rhetoric is not about the physics; it's about how animals regulate their weight. You could make the same case that body temperature is about heat in/heat out but that would be missing the point of how humans regulate body temperature. The criticism of calories in/calories out is in this vein. Do you think you control your body temperature by consciously monitoring heat transfer? Then what makes you thinks complex animals control their body weight and composition by consciously controlling their calorie usage and intake?
> That's one giant leap closer to where the money comes from (people).

Actually, the money comes from advertisers.

Eyeball-hours are a fixed-sum game at any point in time (the sum grows over time). Eyeball-hours spent on Facebook are eyeball-hours not spent elsewhere looking at Google searches, Google products or Google-mediated advertising.
What is the history of IPOs for companies traded on private market exchanges? Does an official IPO give the company a pop?
"but it didn't copy it pixel-by-pixel" They used their image assets. How much more pixel-by-pixel can you get?