skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this is true, it makes counting calories incredibly hard for anyone who has a varied diet.

If each ingredient in the food you eat is digested at a different efficiency depending on the bacteria in your gut and other specifics of your digestive system and the food itself varies by upwards of 20% because of natural variation and how much you cook it, then it seems it would be downright impossible.

I've tried in the past and given up (I would gain weight on a 1200 calorie diet of processed diet food). I finally just went to an extreme nearly vegan diet where I get over 90% of my calories from plants and exclude grains, oil, sugar and salt. It makes it virtually impossible to overeat even if I have to eat 4x the mass of food other people.
Huntsville City Schools equipar autobuses con WiFi un error
The actual case covered far more phones than this ban list, they seem to only be interested in banning the top selling phones.

Though that'll just drive more sales to the Galaxy S3, I assume.
That he named the things that were killed by lime "cadaveric particles" and not "bacteriae" at the time nobody knew that bacteriae exist can't be considered wrong.

How he named them was irrelevant. His explanation was good enough -- there WAS something on the hands of the doctors that was small enough and not visible that lime was able to destroy. Why was it hard to take it seriously then? Certainly not because others knew better -- nobody had "bacteria" in their language. He had to call that what was neutralized somehow.
Are you honestly contending that if anything depicted in a sci-fi movie cannot qualify as patentable subject matter when actually implemented? E.g., if someone invents a matter transporter as depicted in Star Trek, the inventor cannot patent it?
quick changes that don't require a full recompilation generally mean intermediate files are lying around, which means you only need to recompile changed files and relink. this is usually pretty fast until you start changing headers or something like that. (I'm very used to projects with 30 minute plus full compile times taking less than 10 seconds to recompile and relink single-file changes.)

this is not to say that gdb won't save hilarious amounts of time or that you can be a good C coder without understanding a debugger (I don't think you can), just that the huge compile time thing isn't true most of the time.
cfallin: many, many thanks.

I guess should read the gdb manual, and, if it's anything like the as manual (which I've learned is not always the full story), the source too.
Or nginx/apache with static html.
Downvoted for opening with a (double) argument from authority.

For your "more scientific" view, you offer assertions without citing any supporting evidence. So, as is, your statement is an opinion, as is so much nutritional advice.

Hope your startup is based on more logic and less conventional wisdom than shown here.
A Federated Web Follow Button
I am all for all inventions must eventually become a commodity. However, if you look at the long term instead of just getting innovation to become cheap commodities available to everybody as soon as possible, some protection should be provided to the inventor so while cool new progressive "stand on the shoulders of giants" changes can keep coming, risky groundbreaking innovations can also emerge once in a while. Without effective patent protection, everybody will resort to do safer small-step improvements instead of spending years and billions to build (and market) something vastly different from what people are familiar with. In other words, with zero patent protection, you will still see cars getting better mileage, but you won't see an electrical car.

If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.
Hiring for Chief Technology Officer - Ark (YC W12)
The End of The Offline World as We Know it?
It seems to me that the effect of food on the body has been studied for at least 50 years.

No matter how complicated it is, shouldn't there be a few basic things everyone can agree on? It seems that each new diet (based on scientific principles) contradicts the last. Low fat, low carb, low calorie, vegan, no dairy, no wheat...

They can't even agree on whether a calorie matters. (i.e. is eating 100 calories of steak vs eating 100 calories of sugar the same?)
New EPUB and Mobi versions of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial
The problem with relying on hunger is that, for many people, that hungry signal doesn't shut off at the right time. The Hacker's Diet[1] goes into this in great detail, but the gist is that scale weight + calorie counting is a good proxy for replacing a broken hunger signal.

This is one of those things that's really hard to understand unless you experience it, so don't worry if you don't get it.

[1]: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
I had a startup partner who was like this. It was exhausting. The reason a-pivot-a-week is not the same as a lean startup is because with such rapid pivots there is no way your changes are based on data. It's not pivoting; it's just churning.

Steve comes close to saying this, but I think it'd help to take all these ideas and gush about them to someone outside the company. (He suggests an advisor; I'd say a spouse or a friend.) Once you get it out of the system and think about it for a few days, then talk about it with your co-founders/employees.
At RockHealth Boston Demo Day, Passion and Dedication are Contagious
Spy on competition with tools like semrush, keywordspy ...

This tools while not 100% accurate will allow you to see what words they are bidding on them and about how much they actually spend.
Well, you've got me there. I flag frequently, like maybe 5-10 a day on average but sometimes 20+. Maybe there's another karma threshold or something I don't know about.
The Digital Wallet War is Heating Up
I don't buy it. When I go out into nature I don't see many emaciated animals.

They may exist in a world of scarce resources, especially predators, but they are not constantly living on the edge of starvation.
Dude, we must have been separated at birth. I have that exact trackball on my desk. It's upside down (trying to unlearn muscle memory of going to track ball vs using nipple) but for some extended "mousing" it's the bees knees.
I would assume the molecular makeup of food is modified by what you use to grow it. An organic potato might be smaller and more nutrient-dense than a chemically-grown one.
Twitter Appeals Court Decision Against Occupy Protester Malcolm Harris
This is awesome work, thanks!

Just throwing this out there, I know a bit about the difficulties this would entail, but: Is it plausible to have something like this running in production mode?

I mean, if I had a production Rack app running and could have pry-rescue (somehow) save its state and bubble the exception up normally, and later connect to the process and inspect what went wrong. Would something like this be feasible?
Look at the prior art cited by the patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US7469381

Read the file wrapper and the notice of allowability. Here is Apple's great triumph in claiming an invention as compared to prior art:

"The following is an examiner's statement of reasons for allowance: In regards to the independent claims 1, 19 and 20, the prior art found does not teach in response to
an edge of the electronic document being reached while translating the electronic document in the first direction while the object is still detected on or near the touch
screen display: displaying an area beyond the edge of the document, and displaying a third portion of the electronic document, wherein the third portion is smaller than the first portion; and in response to detecting that the object is no longer detected on or near the touch screen display, translating the electronic document in a second direction until the area beyond the edge of the electronic document is no longer displayed to display a fourth portion of the electronic document, wherein the fourth portion is different from the first portion; in combination with all of the other claim limitations."

Do you consider that extremely narrow tweak to a user interface a novel and useful invention worthy of patent protection?
I'd assume making them organic helps to control for a pesticide or herbicide in them that could be changing the result. Not the best control but better than nothing.
Yes, precisely. But I'm talking about the limits. If you ingest fewer calories than you burn you will lose weight, period. That's the argument that people have been making about weight loss for ages. But the difficulty there is that in reality the range of "thermodynamic calories" that a person can ingest relative to the exercise they do while maintaining a healthy weight can vary across a huge margin.
GDB tip #1: gdb -tui (or cgdb if you're on Mac).
I'm surprised nobody's linked the gdb reference card. It's fairly old now, but it's still handy if you don't use gdb that often:

http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/gdb-refcard.pdf
Want to use your iPad during takeoff? Tell the FAA
Of course the inventor can patent the implementation details of a matter transporter, but patenting the idea of a matter transporter, when the idea's been floating around, seems unduly restrictive.
I go with what the PhDs doing the on-the-ground weight-loss studies say, not the anecdote of some person on the internet who's read a book or two.

Programmers hate it when people question them, you'd think they'd extend the same professional courtesy and benefit of the doubt to other academic and professional disciplines.
Reddit IAmA: hackNY student
a blank page even after enabling javascript on every host - google, googleapis, blogger, blogblog, streak - suspect cookies are required on some of the hosts too
How do you know it wouldn't have occurred to someone else working in the same field? I find the assumption of the patent system that the patented innovations wouldn't have happened without being patentable to be fundamentally flawed. That may be true for fields with huge R&D cost, like medicine, but in fields with near-zero R&D cost like software I find it hard to argue for the necessity of any sort of patent protection.
I can't get a google cache but http://cantada.ca.nyud.net/ works :)
Why Crittercism is switching to Node.js to handle Big Data
They'll have to wait. Early adopters always pay a premium
"The guy does have a masters in Physics from Stanford"

???

I've got a Ph.D. in CS from UTAustin, but I don't think you would want to take medical advice from me.
One case to consider, in the modern era, might be performance. Like NASA expeditions, mountaineering, long-distance hiking. Anytime you need to carry the weight of your food (for 5+ days), under strenuous exercise. Calorie counting, weight/volume measurement, and nutrition labeling become essential.
One thing that may work well here is to train two models and ask which fits the data better (likelihood). Or, to leverage the full weight of the data in training submodels and then leverage that in the classifiers.

Fraud is particularly difficult though, because the entities are actively trying to thwart your attempts to detect them. Outlier detection is a must certainly. Collective entity resolution helps a lot too. It might even be worth seeing if you can use LDA to cluster the fraudsters together.

It's just not a domain suited to simple models or a singular approach.
Depending on the engine computer (or lack thereof), a couple seconds of throttle lag isn't unreasonable. One of the things my flight instructor made a point to show me while learning to fly small planes (with carbureted engines, so the effect was magnified compared to what you'd see on a modern fuel-injected auto) was throttle lag on a balked landing (go-around). Most aircraft engines directly drive the propeller, so there are no transmission effects to confusing things. Shoving the throttle from idle to wide-open can actually cause a dip in RPM as the higher manifold pressure condenses formerly vaporized fuel and the fuel system tries to catch up.
> "Ultimately long-term weight loss is a complex matter of psychology, motivation, habits, and indeed personal temperament and genetic baggage."

As someone who has suffered and struggled with obesity in the past, I hear ya loud and clear, but IMO the notion that "calories in < calories out -> weight gain" is still very valuable.

One of the fundamental problems that lies between our society and healthy weight is that we continue to believe in miracle diets, or that somehow we can cheat the rule. We talk about being carb-free, being fat-free, rarely acknowledging that maybe we should just stop eating so damned much.

When I was in high school I was quite obese, and the (Canadian) government paid to send me to a dietician in a group program. Let me tell ya, the notion that "calories in must be less than calories out" was news to a lot of people there.

You're right of course - this knowledge, in an of itself, is insufficient force to turn a fat man into a thin man, but in the current state of our society, simply acknowledging and owning up to this fact is pretty tremendous.
Of course not, and it bears repeating that this patent doesn't cover any of the underlying technology that makes the iPhone actually work as a phone, it merely covers part of the appearance of the UI, an appearance that any competent programmer can replicate on a whim.

I am contending that you can't patent a user interface you see in a sci-fi movie, which is what Apple did here. What they patented is no different from patenting the way the command module looks on the Enterprise. Do you think that Apple should be able to patent, say, the use of oval icons?
Whether or not you have a fee for your card itself depends on what card you get; I'm not referring to those kinds of fees.

As for the second point, Mint/Intuit probably covers those fees for their own service, but they don't allow you to interface with them over OFX, so it's a moot point for anyone who wants that information for something other than Mint.
>How do you know what range of calories to target? Or that the labels are correct? How many calories are in the burger from that food truck?

A range of 2,500-3,000 seems to be a good fit for me. I'm a 5'9" adult male with a light workout schedule.

I don't expect labels to be 100% on target but I do expect them to be close enough for my rough estimates.

The food truck may not list the calorie count for the burger but I've probably eaten all the ingredients in the burger before. From experience of noticing nutritional content in the past, I can tell if it has more fat (lots of mayo, extra cheese), sugar (ketchup) and overall calories (heavy, overall size of the meat patty) than ones I've had in the past.

The caloric content is not the only tool, it's one of the many tools you should have when trying to keep a healthy diet.
Or even better, have someone create a Twitter API proxy app that will let you use TweetBot unmodified.
Winning by Losing: Dealing with employers and customers
Can you really issue a take down for an interview question? The text of one, ok, but the essence of the question itself?

Surely not?
It would be very interesting to see an entropy factor for common foods, and in particukar things that don't digest (nuts, etc). Like a reference table.
The point was to show that Taubes has the education and training to critically review scientific literature. Not that he is an expert on medicine.
The Ph.D. Grind: Candid Discussions About Ph.D. Life [video] (Google Tech Talk)
Top surprises for a new programmer
Fuji Electric to release the first coin-op EV charging machines in Japan
huh. I'll submit again in case something went wrong. Does anyone know of Stripe alternatives for the international market?
I wrote a long blog post about a few months ago about the perils of using fullscreen in modern browsers: http://sorcery.smugmug.com/2012/06/06/using-html5s-fullscree..., which is cited as a reference (awesome!). This explains why some of the code looks similar, I'm glad it was helpful.

This library could use error detection and handling as there are situations where fullscreen could be aborted or fail to start.

It's much better to attempt going fullscreen and have callbacks for errors and successfully entering fullscreen mode. Users can have preferences set to not allow it, press ESC during the transition or a number of other scenarios can occur.

There's also some CSS fixes between browsers that could be included. Safari and Chrome don't stretch the element to 100% monitor width and don't apply a background color by default so you can see 'through' the fullscreen window.

That being said it's good someone is working towards something that's relatively cross-browser. The fullscreen API right now is extremely varied but a really awesome tool for advanced web apps.
I'm not saying it'd be easy to just sit down and code one weekend! But really, are we expecting the "federated social web" people are talking about to be much easier to code than email software? We want it to do much more stuff, so it'll probably be harder.

Also, I think it's implicit that you trust your server. It's other people's servers you've got to worry about.
It depends on whether it's described in sufficient detail. Robert Heinlein's (written) descriptions of the design of a waterbed were sufficient prior art against Charles Hall's 1968 patent claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Lite...
>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.

So we replace one religion with another? The structure is good, but yeesh.
Here's another Star Trek example: if someone creates a wearable badge that was also a cell phone, that you touch to activate, they couldn't patent "touch-to-implement communicator", but they might be able to patent their specific method of detecting the touch.
If the interview question consists of some copyrightable source code with questions about it, why not?
So when you say "processed", you're actually referring to plain old food preparation?

Well, I suppose confectioneries in particular with confectioner's sugar could be considered "refined"...
If you're on a Mac (pre 10.8, which unfortunately messes things up), I recommend biting the bullet and reinstalling gdb. The process is a bit annoying[0], but tui mode is worth the effort.

[0] http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildingOnDarwin
I always thought that Google Wave had real, unrealized potential as a social networking platform.

Everyone -- Google included -- got really caught up in the tech demo UI when what was really interesting was the stuff going on under the hood.

Wave was based on XMPP, designed to be federated, was designed to be able to handle arbitrary data types, was extensible via robots, had built-in privacy controls, etc.

If you sat down and tried to figure out all the things a distributed social network should do, Wave really had all the right building blocks in place. Instead Google marketed it as next-generation email and it flopped.
Because they're not a blogging company, they're a software company. I'm betting they aren't too concerned with tweaking Wordpress performance as they are with building the things that actually make them money.
Facebook itself was started by a "few extremely junior programmers."
I'm glad to see someone highlight the fact that design patents are inherently illogical, and in fact run altogether counter to the purpose of the patent system.

Too often this is obscured, and/or all patents are lumped together as being generally awful. I personally do not ascribe to the notion that all patents should be outright abolished.

Design patents, however, should simply not exist. Rounded corners, rectangles and UI elements in rows of 4 are simply not inventions.
> so we can't be surprised to find the laws favor the merchants.

The contracts that merchants enter with credit card companies are very much not in the merchants' favor.

That may not always translate into being in the customer's favor (as opposed to the banks'), but merchants are certainly not the ones winning in this setup.
Yes, but they make a choice about whether to keep writing or how to distribute. If their work is saleable, then they may get an advance from a publisher or some long-term revenue in the form of royalties. On the other hand, if there's no way to protect a written work, it becomes a lot harder to make a living. In previous periods of where publishing was a relative free-for-all, many authors relied either on inherited wealth, the economic extraction of colonial wealth, or the like. Dickens was a rare exception insofar as he was financially successful from exceeding humble beginnings, but he lived in constant anxiety about a decline in his circumstances.
These all seem to be such frivolous things in relation to the function of a computing device.

They have nothing to do with capabilities or performance.

Gimmicks.

Just my personal opinion.
A lean approach to knowledge management
To clarify I mean a onerror callback would be nice to have if something goes wrong when attempting to go fullscreen. If I have some time I'll write a patch!
Don't think so. TweetBot for Mac and TweetBot for iOS show up as different apps in my twitter apps panel.
Why PECL (C based) frameworks for PHP suck
In fact, Paramount has been awarded design patents for Star Trek phasers, uniforms, and starships: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek_design_patents
My hindsight is super clear as well, what's with these guys?
Those limits are imposed by existing email software. The real underlying challenge you are getting at is dealing with spam. And that would be just as much a challenge with any distributed social network too, for more or less the same reasons.

Email did this badly from the start, because it started in a much more trusting world of people who did not spam one another. Authentication features were added later, but there was no requirement to use them, which limits their effectiveness.

Perhaps for a project starting fresh now, this can be handled better?
Why is &#60; faster than &#60;=?
>In the end: calories in, calories out.

If you're just talking about "weight loss" then yea, that's right, but you don't address body composition at all here.

If you just wanted to "lose weight", then you could chop off an arm and BOOM, you just lost weight. What MOST people want to do is to burn and lose fat, NOT weight - they just express it differently.

If it was just calories in vs calories out, I could drink 3000 calories of vodka a day and still be okay as long as I burned off 3100 calories, and we all know that's not the case.
While it's undoubtedly unpleasant to hear that you're more likely to get cancer than most people, that information could save your life. I'm not sure that I see a moral quandary here.
> Patents protect the implementation, not the idea

That's certainly the supposed goal, but it clearly does not match reality. What actually happens is a company implements a long thought-of idea using modern technology, and then writes a trolling-ready patent which claims the entire idea by way of obvious and extraneous details.

This is a major reason why nobody bothers to read the patent claims when discussing bad patents - they're basically the synopsis of the patent combined over and over with straightforward technical 'chum' to make them seem specific and complex.
Too Many Pivots, Too Little Passion?
How to Use Android's TextView as a Hyperlink
Twitter’s Token Rush
what with the photo sharing and captioning app and this, all I can say is what a cop out. Have the good grace to just close it down. Making it into a "community project" is just about being able to say "hey it failed but it wasn't our fault, we gave it to the community". Just man up and take your lumps.
Ah, the article says the Tesla home charger takes 6 hours for a charge, but I guess it needs to be wired directly to be breaker box or something.