skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Twitter are gambling that they are now powerful enough to say "No more 3rd party clients"

Isn't it more: No more free data for 3rd party clients? (past a certain amount) Companies can still buy unlimited realtime data through twitter's monitization child DataSift. Meaning the death of free 3rd party apps. Maybe now that they have to charge a good chunk we will get better 3rd party apps?
Exactly. Most animals exist in a world of scarcity, near starvation for significant periods - often every year. Mammals that live in conditions of abundance usually get fat. We've evolved to do that and hedge against scarcity.
> In the end: calories in, calories out. Humanity hasn't defeated the laws of thermodynamics. It's just a question of how easy and healthy it is to maintain a sub-maintenance caloric intake.

It is all about "calories in, calories out" but what on earth makes you assume that the human digestive system approximates the behavior of a bomb calorimeter? The whole article is about how the body extracts different amounts of the potentially available calories in food, and uses different amounts of energy to extract those calories.
Why I built an Android Lyft client and how I did it in 4 days
These articles are getting a bit tiring.

> On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display,” the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2

For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.

Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non-novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.
It broke a mental barrier I had gdb begin for `native only` programs.
My point was that it was not a pandemic level problem up until recently. Of course rich people with access to an abundance of highly palatable foods can become fat. Those aristocrats of old are suffering the same thing many people suffer today.

Edit: I suppose people don't see the connection between over consumption, availability, palatability, and processing.
Not sure where you live, but in the US you can usually get a weekend special from Enterprise for $10/day (although it's 100 miles a day) if you time it right. If not, a full-size sedan with unlimited miles will run you maybe $50-70. A rental might cost you hundreds if you're looking in the wrong place like an airport location, or the wrong time like a busy national holiday.
I'm getting really tired of this. Anybody looked into tent.io? That looks promising!
> Humanity hasn't defeated the laws of thermodynamics.

But that doesn't mean what you think it means. Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC506782/
A possible solution might be, since they are selling the application and not providing a service, is for users of the software to create their own application tokens and putting them into a new settings panel. There's no loss in sales, it does require an extra couple of steps for a user to get going but putting something like this in the advanced section or releasing it with just the Alpha might be very good solution.
Check these threads

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4309345
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436034
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069417
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4059580
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4104510
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4297857
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069417
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4104510
My bank of america card is completely free of monthly fees, and I have Mint.com pull my financial transactions without issues.

ShopSafe is also completely free to use.
Why Om thinks Evernote CEO Phil Libin is underrated
They shouldn't be able to patent the idea of a holodeck, which I thought was the main argument in this article. The mechanics of using force fields (or whatever) would still be the subject of the patents if they were novel.
That only means Miguel de Icaza did the job MS paid him to do. Fragment and alienate the Linux desktop from the inside with Gnome.

Apple OS X success is an unrelated phenomenon that happened later, the plan was for people to migrate back to Windows.

And then he started his .NET compatible Mono software stack
Which One WWW or non-WWW Is Best For My Domain? (video)
If you are going to be driving a considerable distance (500-700 miles) in a short amount of time (such as a long weekend trip), renting a car makes sense. I have done so a few times, at a cost of barely more than $100 each time.
In addition to the gdb command, what would be a good GUI front-end for it ?
Is that allowed? I figured all the TapBots apps were tied together somehow within Twitter (like separate apps on the same account) and Twitter would enforce that on new apps (since the limits would be meaningless otherwise).
Bit of a strawman, nobody takes the pritikin diet seriously either. The place and purpose of healthy fats is well understood.
The depiction of a holodeck would not stop someone from getting a utility patent for a holodeck.

But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a design patent. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.
You just did an about-face. In your first comment, you stress "processed foods"; here you put the emphasis on greater availability.

I think potatolicious makes an excellent point- "processing" (the popular demon today) cannot be pointed to as the sole cause. It is probably part of the problem, but probably not the root.
Ask HN: What percentage of submissions show up on front page?
Is there any public stats that can roughly tell chances of how much of submissions actually made it through the front page?

Maybe a volunteer can write a simple daemon that track HN homepage and HN new submission page constantly and figure out a result. I am really curious about the number.
Yes, the advice of all these old guard dietitians is working fantastically for us.
Interesting post and nice approach. Would be really nice to see some examples of unit-test specs and how they translate to the actual API implementation.
I don't know about those other complaints, I don't personally have any complaints about Python. It doesn't have multi-line lambdas, that's a design trade-off like an iPhone not having a slide-out keyboard. But it does have first-class functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_syntax_and_semantics#Fi...

What I was speaking to is the desire to write:

class SomeExampleModel:

def setHeavyweightProperty:
triggers('cache:dirty')(
lambda self, property, value:
...something...

My understanding is that Python doesn't like two different things about this. First, the multi-line anonymous lambda being used as the target of the decorator. Second, a function being called with another function as its argument as an expression within an instance method definition.

I'm open to reëducation.
What's really needed, in my opinion, is a search engine to track shell companies. The lawyer interviewed is shooting from the hip when he says it is "a shell game".

Without the use of shell corporations the patent trolling game becomes much more difficult. In programmer lingo, it makes it "non-trivial". Using a system of shell corporations and hiding behind them makes patent trolling much more feasible as a pure play and makes it possible to do at scale, as Intellectual Ventures does.

If we pick up the shell and reveal the cretins hiding underneath, it would have a real effect on patent trolling. I can say this with 100% certainty.

Maybe even a more profound effect than making prior art easier to locate.
I was actually thinking today after I read his blog post about having a web app for this. Could be interesting for people living outside startup hubs.
You don't need to develop neither have a pratical thing to have a patent over it on USA.

You can read a time machine patent here:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=hNHIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...

If you ever happen to develop this machine, this person who just imagined it can ban you from selling. So tell me, who do you think worked harder on this invention? And why would this paper (the patent) be worth more than the real invention?
I'm sure Elon will get his due. It's just a matter of time before the rest of the world finds out about his accomplishments.

E.g., I don't think many of us here on HN were surprised to see Drew Houston on the cover of Forbes.
I'm not really sure from this comment what your objection to counting calories is.

Is it that you can't do it accurately? That seems to be implied by the second two questions. I haven't found that accuracy actually matter that much; mostly what's important is nominal calories over time vs. weight/other health indicators over time. If the number's not technically accurate, I kind of don't care. All I know is I roughly ate so many calories, my weight changed by x amount, and I can walk x far without getting tired. Over time, I can have a pretty good guideline for the number of "back of the box" calories I should be eating to reach my targets (which addresses your first question of "what range to target")

You mention explicitly that most people won't do it over the long term, which is definitely relevant. But even doing it for a little while can give you a good baseline so you can at least make educated guesses as to what you're eating, which is especially helpful in the "food truck burger" scenario.

I guess my point is that we all agree knowing roughly how many calories you're eating is good, but the only way I know to figure that out is to, at least for a while, literally count them. There's still a huge margin for error, of course, but if I didn't keep tabs on it by looking at the back of the box, I'd have no idea at all.
How to cold contact a venture capitalist
Any favorite books on spectroscopy/spectroscope design (or optics in general), Tomkinstinch?
Strategies for Hassle Free Business Travel
I'm a little bit late to the party and haven't had time to read all the comments yet, but I like the idea and the fact that it's written in Erlang.

So I just wanted to ask: is it intended to be open-source? I couldn't find the link to the source on the site and as mentioned I didn't read through comments yet.

EDIT: I skimmed all the comments but still haven't found any mention about source code. Also, I remembered YAJET[1] as something at least equally interesting.

[1]: Home page is here: http://www.yajet.net/ and docs here: http://www.yajet.net/yajet/doc/yajet.html
Ask HN: Is Google Traffic Estimator useful at all?  
I have been tearing my hair out, trying to find a product niche that I can actually make a living on. Every idea I throw into Google Traffic Estimator, shows me extremely low 'daily clicks', even when I set a Max CPC of something insane, like $500.

Finally, after months of it shooting down every startup idea I had, I decided to do a sanity check.

I used to work for a company that sells a line of shaft encoders for motor position measurement. This company is extremely profitable, employing 30 or so people, brand new building, etc. Almost all of their sales are internet sales.

I told Google keyword to come up with a list of keywords for me, from their website. The list included all the words I would have used, having worked there, I was very familiar with their product line. Plus it found a bunch of other keywords that looked right to me, but that, being only a human, I had forgotten.

I took that list of 100 keywords, and fed it into Traffic Estimator with a Max CPC of $500, so I could see just how much traffic I could buy with those keywords, given an infinite budget. I was informed that I would get 130 daily clicks for those 100 keywords.

Given any reasonable estimate of conversion rate, and given that their average product is less than $200. We know that 130 clicks is laughable. Even with a conversion rate of 14%, which is 1800flowers type of conversion rate, you're still looking at daily revenue of only $3600. That's only $1.3MM a year revenue, which for 30 employees, brand new building, etc., is laughably low. Plus, I'm being extremely generous by saying average sale of $200 and conversion rate of 14%. For my own projects, I feel uncomfortable planning for anything above 4% conversion.

So, this is actually encouraging to me, since even a very successful company, according to Google, shouldn't actually be able to generate sufficient income to survive. That means all those ideas I rejected, can now be re-evaluated, but now that I distrust Traffic Estimator, I am casting around for ways to get my answers.

Google Traffic Estimator seemed like the right tool to do this sort of analysis. Does anybody have any ideas how it failed me, and how I can use it effectively to sort through my ideas and work on the one that stands the greatest chance of success?
How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen?
Answer: not hard at all.

So surely there were dozens of devices with these features (I assume you mean inertial scrolling) prior to the patents being granted?

This stuff is not trivial: Only a handful of multitouch devices even existed prior to the iPhone, and exploiting that technology, along with improvements in mobile hardware generally, was hard, or smartphones prior to 2007 wouldn't have sucked so very badly.
I just thought of another potential challenge - SMTP limits. I think Gmail limits you to sending 40 messages per day for instance. This sucks if you have >100 friends.
But all that means is you will process less than your intake, which does not disprove his point:

If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop.
In our defense, if you don't have javascript Streak won't work.
Show HN: Gist Archive
Another option could be to use an ensemble of exemplar svms [1], essentially training separate classifiers with a single target row set to 1 and all others to 0. This can be useful when trying to pick out examples that match a very specific pattern.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tmalisie/projects/iccv11/
Meta classes are pretty interesting creatures and they allow you to generate custom classes at runtime which can be quite useful. I didn't mean that you'd get to them in 30 days but if you really like Python and eventually come around to developing fairly complex applications - you might need them.

Django's ORM is a pretty good example of some great meta classery. The stack overflow question posted earlier is a good resource that you should bookmark so that you can look at it when you actually come across some meta classes.
I believe it was Tenacious-C: http://tenaciousc.com/
The Secret Behind Exceptional Podcast Audio
Web analyst here. Those stats make About sound fantastic, as a matter of fact. There is no such thing as a universal "usability" metric, and everything is relative to the site and its goals and use cases. For About, those statistics are exactly what you would expect if the site is doing its job well.

The use case for About is you have a specific question, and you find a page that answers it. If the page actually answers your question (i.e., the site is doing its job), then you will have no need to view other pages, so your bounce rate will look high. If it answers the question succinctly and efficiently, your time spend on that page will be low. And if your problem is actually solved, you won't have to come back. And lo, that is actually what we see.

If About isn't doing its job, then there are two common "failure" scenarios. The first is they spend a bunch of time on the site, trying to find the info they're looking for. The second is that they exit the site and go back to Google. The first failure scenario has a higher "usability" score that the success scenario; the second failure scenario actually looks pretty much identical to the success scenario. Google could distinguish between the two by seeing whether users come back or not; you didn't provide that data, so I can't tell.

About.com is not a content site the same way as a news site or a blog. If you judge it by metrics suited for such a site, it will appear lacking. If you judge it by its own goal, it might actually be succeeding (but you need more data to tell for sure).
Mini Icon Glyphs for Websites and Mobile Apps
Seems like human beings have stopped moving their feet :-)
The article mentions that the potatoes and beef were organic (I assume as in organic food):

> Carmody fed adult, male mice organic sweet potatoes

What is the significance of this?
[Tutorial] Twitter API and Accounts Framework in iOS 5
I've written some transpilers, and I nearly always use a "magic variable" like __this_12345 just to prevent problems like--umm--this. If every single one you use has a quasi-random number or string appended, a lot of headaches melt away.
But it had occurred to other people, and lots of them. You can even watch Tom Cruise pinch-to-zoom, and scroll by waiving his hands.

Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:

US5844547	May 9, 1995	Dec 1, 1998	Fujitsu Limited	Apparatus for manipulating an object displayed on a display device by using a touch screen

US6567102	Nov 25, 2001	May 20, 2003	Compal Electronics Inc.	Touch screen using pressure to control the zoom ratio

US20050168488	Jan 31, 2005	Combination tool that zooms in, zooms out, pans, rotates, draws, or manipulates during a drag

All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding into some arguably-new form, and, viola, they had a patent for something everybody was doing.

I doubt you really contend that, in late 2007, Apple invented scrolling and zooming with your fingers, or that you contend that Apple's implementation was substantially different (and both novel and useful) from those prior forms. If you don't contend either of those, then why, exactly, should Apple have a patent over their implementation, which was at best modestly different from prior implementations?
Samsung vs Apple, Tell the jury a story with pictures
Thanks for the answer! I know I didn't give many details... And I suspect it may not get much easier than setting up a UPS account and just going for it. One slight concern that I have right now is shipping cost, as my product would in most cases require quick 1,2, or 3 day shipping. When comparing UPS to USPS the price difference is quite large with UPS costing quite a lot more. That said, I much prefer UPS based on their tracking capabilities. I think I may go with an option that customers can choose their carrier so that they know I'm not gauging on shipping.
Another trick I've seen in biomedical data mining is synthesizing new samples from the under-represented class (using an algorithm like SMOTE).
>>That's because most dietitians and nutrition researchers follow conventional wisdom

Sadly, you hit the nail on the head, 100%. That is exactly the problem, most dietitians will still try to sell you on the CDCs protein intake recommendation of 50g and and a diet that consists of 80% carbohydrates - which just plain contradicts mounting scientific evidence.

Furthermore, most people will just say you need a "balanced" diet, having taken absolutely no thought to consider why they consider certain diets balanced to begin with.

If you move past your comfort zone, to the point where you can draw your own conclusions, without needing to refer to government guidelines to validate your every belief, you will see that in a few years we will look back on our current recommended diets and laugh.

Taubes does a more than adequate job of trouncing the old thermodynamics, calories in, calories out argument. The guy does have a masters in Physics from Stanford, after all. I leave it to you to look it up.

Edit: Feinman on a calorie is a calorie and why it violates the second law of thermodynamics

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC506782/
OK, so a marketer who uses scripts to automate things, and is very data focused. Got it. Not sure this justifies creating a new title, but these are marketing people we're talking about...
I'm fairly certain most of the posting's examples center around the utility patents under dispute.
Of Apple, Samsung, and Obviousness
calories in, calories out

After a lifetime of fighting with my weight, including surgery to give me a fight change, I have to say that statement is the single most useless statement in a segment filled with misinformation. It is used by people who haven't struggled to (perhaps not intentionally) insult people who do. "Gee, can't you count. It's just a calorie."

The problem with that statement is it assumes our bodies are like a gasoline engine, where, yes, a calorie in is a calorie out. Our bodies are not like that. Instead, we take in many different kinds of fuels. Everybody's body is different in how it processes each of those kinds of fuels. More importantly, everybody's brain is different in how it reacts to inputs coming from the gas tank and engine.

Until you understand how the various fuels interact with your body, a calorie is a calorie is completely meaningless.

Carbs are fuel, if you're an athlete, you have a use for them.

Yes, yes, yes. I completely agree with this. The brain needs some carbohydrates to run. The body can, if absolutely necessary, convert other foods into carbs to make that happen.

The things paleo and the various low-carb diets do is give a structure around how to reduce those carbs, especially in a culture that worships the ultra-refined, processed-thrice, almost-straight-sugar carbohydrate.
Why wouldn't this site use Cloudflare or WPEngine to prevent getting slashdoted?
No I didn't. You missed or ignored the 'highly palatable' part.

Fruit tastes good, and rich people could get as much as they want, but they generally don't get fat on fruit. Confectionery items on the other hand...

What I'm saying is that over-consumption and processing drive each other.
No need for a script - just take a quick look at the numbers.

1000+ new posts , 50+ make front page on a day

5% is a fair guess
Thank you for answering.

getting the majority of your calories from nutrition-less sugar is loony
What did you mean by nutrition-less sugar? Vegetable/leafy juices (celery, spinach etc) have lots of nutrition, correct? (much more than just a fruit juice).
It sounds like you haven't actually read Taubes' book. He makes the case that no fat is actually "unhealthy." Saturated fats, which have been demonized, are harmful if and only if they are consumed with a large amount of carbs. That happens to resemble the average American's diet, which is why saturated fat consumption is correlated with heart disease - but it does not cause it.
Speculating, but the application and its beta are not technically separate applications, so it's quite possible that Twitter would be upset if they did that.
hooande, thanks for the additional info. I'll definitely take a closer look at it.
I think you're looking for the second law of thermodynamics.
What kind of maths/statistics are you using?
Observations from a Demo Day Junkie