skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unhealthy food is far cheaper (per calorie) than healthy food

I think this is only half the story. (Rice is about as inexpensive per calorie as humanly possible but the American poor don't consume large quantities of it -- because they don't have to.) The other half:

1) Historically, being poor meant you couldn't afford enough food, healthy or otherwise.

2) History has ended.

3) Historically, being poor meant you did lots of physically taxing labor.

4) History has ended.

5) Well-off Americans make a fetish out of physical fitness. Its as much a class marker as education these days.
The VCs are now running Navigenics
Don't forget the one in the source code that will automatically get your account banned! (I leave posting it here as an exercise to the reader.)
Computer Science Video Lectures (i just compiled this list)
Ask HN: Can Alexa ratings/rankings be trusted?
Hi All,

What do you all think about the validity of Alexa rankings? Is it your opinion that the stats that they produce are an accurate representation of users, or is it likely a more techie demographic?

Would you use the stats for talking to potential online advertisers?

Thanks!
The main difficulty with this kind of vision is that people need to build a system to support it. It is not like a single company can make the devices, the software, the infastructure, the economic environment, the incentives, etc. So one must develop and establish rules and interoperability protocols. And this takes a lot of time.

Expressing the vision and trying to build parts of it (e.g. microsoft surface) does not hurt, though.
You're suggesting to use a commercial database but don't provide any reasons beyond what free databases can do.

PostgreSQL is pretty much on par in terms of features and performance with SQLServer and Oracle. So if you're looking for a free solution to roll your own then look no further.

The only reason I can see for going with a commercial DB is when you not only want commercial support (you can buy that for Postgres, too) but a shrinkwrapped "don't bother me"- solution with SLAs etc. Be prepared to pay through your nose for that, though.

In terms of usability there is no big difference between any of the commercial or non-commercial offerings. They all have their special peculiarities (which is why you always hire a DBA who is familar with your RDBMS, not just with "any" RDBMS) and the shiny GUIs that some of them provide are not normally of interest in day-to-day work.
That comment says: "memcachedb is not distributed, meaning that you can only scale vertically (i.e. by buying bigger machines)." Is that true? The docs on memcachedb seem to imply the opposite.
Ask HN: do you design websites so that they work without JavaScript?
I know it may seem like a controversial thing to ask, but I'm asking seriously.

When you design a web application today, do you plan for graceful degradation if someone has JavaScript turned off? If so, why?

I am trying to figure out the cost/benefit ratio of graceful degradation. I've spent some time online with JavaScript turned off today and it wasn't a pleasant experience. My guess is that very few have it switched off. JavaScript penetration is estimated around 98%.

Accessibility used to be the reason, but should be no more: you can create accessible sites with JavaScript.
Mobile devices? Dominant mobile browsers now support JavaScript.

So what are your reasons for graceful degradation?
This is why you must continue weight training while cutting, so that your body knows it needs to keep the muscle, and you can lose more fat than muscle. Your maintenance level will drop, but once you cut low enough, you can bulk back up and pack on more muscle than fat, which brings your maintenance level back up as well. Repeat this process until you are at the weight and bodyfat level you desire, then just maintain.
or explicitly tell them how to configure their system, and what kind of a system to run it on. this doesn't help you avoid a dba, it merely avoids them having one.
Bzip2 is a very slow compression algorithm, mostly due, from what I recall, to the Burrows-Wheeler transform that lies at its core. LZMA is pretty much superior in every respect; it is (though quite slowly) on the road to replacing the aging Bzip2.

And as usual the comments on CodingHorror (at least the initial dozen or two) show a relative ignorance about the topic. 7zip (as can any compressor) can be trivially parallelized just by running it simultaneously on each solid block. The compression cost of a smaller solid block size is generally near-zero for the case where dictionary size << input data size.

The included Windows interface doesn't allow this kind of threading AFAIK, but it would be relatively simple to implement in an app using the LZMA libraries.
That kind of protein intake is absolutely nuts.

On average, the Japanese get over 50% of their calories just from rice and over 80% from carbohydrates. They also have the longest lifespans in the world and far lower obesity and heart disease rates than similarly developed places.
Yup, seems like this is rather competing with the likes of GWT, qooxdoo, ext and dojo.

I'm not crazy about the OSX look either (is it skinnable?) but I liked the responsiveness of the demo apps. Also generally all entries are welcome to this space - it's anything but a solved problem.
I'm having poor google-fu at the moment, but I recall hearing about a study which suggested that weight training was 7 times more effective than aerobics, so just do 20 minutes of weights a day and skip most of that cardio.
engine yard may be an exceptional exception to the rule. I was generalizing, and speaking of managed hosting in general. Like I said, I can't speak of engine yard specifically, I haven't worked for or with them.
I think he's optimizing the wrong parameter. What's the ultimate point of hacking weight? For me, it's having good health. Health is not just about weight, health is composed of quantity and quality of food, frequent aerobic and anaerobic exercise, and adequate sleep. Hacking the diet is necessary but insufficient without the other two parts.
Hi swombat,
Regarding gawker, as I remember, there was a discussion here whether to ban it, and most people were for the ban. The reason was the low quality of journalism and defamation tendencies in some of its articles. So gawker is indeed banned.
Japanese don't hate the iPhone; Perspective on iPhone from a Japanese
Embedr Lets you Create And Share Good-Looking Video Playlists
Great stuff Paul. Welcome to Silicon Valley.
Priceless! Thank you for making my day.
Your options (if you are going to do it yourself and not use S3 or cachefly):

1. rsync on the backend; it's easy, it's relatively fast, but it is asynchronous and files won't be immediately available on all servers.

2. An inotify watcher that copies files to the slaves when a file is written or changed on the master. Faster than an rsync solution, but you'll need to write it yourself.

In either case you will want to seriously question whether you should do it yourself, look at the costs for keeping machines operational and how much you are paying for bandwidth.
Reconfiguring the American banking system to look like the Canadian model seems excessive. The current problems were caused by a bug in the financial system regulations: banks and people who purchased real estate were permitted to use too much leverage. Instead of a rewrite, maybe we should patch the bug by reducing the level of permitted leverage. This has already been done for banks, but it could also be done for real estate purchases in a fashion similar to the way that Fed regulation T limits leverage in stock investing. The great depression was kicked off by excessive leverage in stock investing, and reg. T was part of the patch applied to fix that problem back in the 30s. The fix seems to work pretty well since the internet stock bubble didn't endanger the financial system. In fact, the regulations that require stock brokers to consider whether an investment is suitable for their customer should probably also be mirrored in new regulations for mortgage brokers as well.
Note that the bzip2 implementation he uses is 7zip's; the classic unix implementation does not make use of multiple cores. But, there is also pbzip2, which supposedly uses all available cores:

http://compression.ca/pbzip2/
Phishing App Targets Facebook Users | TechJaws
Top 15K English words
What Are You Doing? Media Twitterers Can’t Stop Typing
Alexa users are a convenience sample, not a simple random sample, and they may badly misrepresent your user base. Essentially, installing Alexa (which I did once, but haven't done on my current browser) is something like participating in a voluntary response poll. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

[quote=Paul Velleman]

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM
To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson
Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu
Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.[/quote]

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

But to answer your underlying question, if I had good Alexa stats, I would talk them up. You may as well talk about the most convincing data you have, while acknowledging that the data may not be definitive.
I've never seen this discussed before:

Buffett thinks the Black-Scholes formula produces "absurd results" when applied to long-dated options (see page 19).

"Though historical volatility is a useful – but far from foolproof – concept in valuing short-term options,
its utility diminishes rapidly as the duration of the option lengthens."

Berkshire Hathaway has sold equity put options that require payment if various stock market indexes (S&P 500, the FTSE 100, the Euro Stoxx 50, and the Nikkei 225) have gone down after 15 or 20 years from the inception of the contracts.

Buffett think that the likelihood of these indexes going down over such an extended period is extremely unlikely, due to inflation and an increase in corporate retained earnings. But, even if the indexes do decline, he has already received the option premium up front and is able to invest that money for 15-20 years, before having to pay out anything.

"Clearly, either my assumptions are crazy or the formula is inappropriate."
That's not a full computer that the author is building. It's just the CPU.

If you include the monitor costs, it's sure to be more. Around $100 extra for the monitor? Then you could as well, get a netbook at $300 or so. But that's only if you want to save money (which this article sounds like it aims to do, but fails). If you want to build something, then enjoy this.
Because with this video Microsoft isn't showing that they are solving any real, actual problems in people's lives.

To me, the suckage is that its all just gimmicks: the marketing department tricking people into buying things they don't really need.
Balsamiq gets iPhone controls
This is the exact approach taken by pigz (Parallel GZIP) - http://www.zlib.net/pigz/
Testing. I like to design/build my sites with graceful degradation so I can easily script testing (what can I say, I'm a barebones type of dev).
I did actually mean both. They have less of simpler features, a clear and focused solution to a problem that did not exist (or did exist, but wasn't obvious).
I really love that, the "less is more" approach, the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy. Just like UNIX utilities can be piped together to form a new solution, their service is participating in similar "chains" to become a part of something more.

That last sentence is there just to mess with you mate. :)
Thanks for pointing out ambiguity in my writing.
Slick technologies of the future
any startup that wants investment probably wants a couple of advisors.
And there was an automated tool released last year to mess with those who don't do that:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=https+gmail+cookie+...
why not ban techcrunch on the same grounds then ?
Installing And Using OpenVZ On Debian Lenny (AMD64)
I don't think any sites should be banned (articles will be flagged if need be).
I have looked in the source code and haven't seen this? :/
Some sites are banned, obviously because their signal-to-noise ration is unacceptably low. There is also a policy discouraging content that simply paraphrases another link ("linkjacking").

Perhaps linkjacking is perfectly acceptable for banned sites. From time to time they may actually write something useful and informative. Would summarizing it with a link to the original be an acceptable post?

This makes sense to me. I don't have a lot of popular blogs like CH in my feed reader, but I rely on others to let me know when Jeff writes something I would find interesting. same idea here.
http://tinyurl.com/22q5z9
I believe that he is talking about:

news.arc:1181-1182
If he is such a marketing genius why am I still so unsure about what Slide actually does? :)
keep in mind, it's nobody's full-time job to maintain this thing. there are "the editors" who police content, and i'm pretty sure pg is the only one that works on the site itself, including the code. a list of banned sites is an easy way to cut down on maintenance.

for what it's worth, i'm pretty sure uncov.com is one of the banned sites. i keep showdead turned on, and i've seen articles submitted from there from otherwise legitimate users, and they immediately go dead.
The tests are using simplejson. Someone added cjson (impressive) results in the comparison, over at reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/811gl/comparing...
Microsoft (along with lots of other companies) have put together lots of great concept videos in the past. I've seen amazing concept videos from MS, Sony and Orange (UK mobile operator company) over the last 10 years.

Making a concept video or having a group of talented people with a good vision doesn't mean the corporation is actually going to deliver on that vision. You can bet every big company has a load of talented people with great ideas and talent inside it. But the machinery and politics of the big company pretty much dictate the really groundbreaking ideas aren't going to make it out of the R&D lab.
A lot of the decisions around this depend on what your app is doing. We are building a profiles section to our site with typical social networking features. We didn't provision at all for non-js because a) you need js to even get to the app and b) the director of engineering is an incompetent wanker and has no experience building web apps.

Normally, you need to start by breaking down what sections of an app absolutely need js code to work. Regular forms dont need any js to run. You can have a fancy form that falls back to a basic form.

Also, don't rely on js 100% for styling. Use css for everything. Except for ie6 and :hover. Bloody IE...
No. Use Compete.com or Hitwise
Which ?may? lead to a site "whose name we dare not speak?... which loads only if "http://www." is removed from it... and then displays message:

"Down until 4/19/08 due to bandwidth limitations!

Want to advertise?"

This entire discussion is feeling very surreal - with innuendos about poison-named domains that ban one's account. I do like the idea of openness about banning policies. Why force people to stumble around in the dark and then be punished when they step in the dog piles?

[Or is there a concern about legal concerns if one "vilifies" a site by pronouncing it banned?]
I'm working on one of their programming puzzles, so I'll definitely be sending them something. Thanks!
I see a lot of people here complain about compete.com stats:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...

At least as far as the data goes, maybe it's better for making comparisons.
I don't; but that's because i mainly develop intranet websites.

But even when i do develop public facing websites, deciding to put in the effort for graceful degradation depends on your target audience.

These days i find more clients asking for UI features on websites that cannot degrade gracefully at all. Again, depends on your audience.
The most likely is also the most obvious - Silicon Valley has had longer to grow.
I agree. I might, if I were king of HN, create a playground of sites I thought ( or the community thought ) were irrelevant or 'least likely to succeed' ( they do this in high school year books! ( they imply it by having 'most likely to succeed')). Another thing, don't down vote comments; if a comment is bad then it will be on the lower end of the page and that should speak for itself. Down voting comments, I am fairly sure, will discourage hackers that have cool ideas to contribute but that may have been inspired to write a one liner 'Beavis and Butthead' style sentence. This is merely people having fun. I think this type of fun is being discouraged. If comments are offensive then remove the user. . .. Why is there a need to punish, in front of the public HN community, people that would like to say things that they thought was witty ( or for that matter share a link that they thought was witty at the time ). By down voting input that is not 'bannable' ( I don't think that was a word ) you are simply discouraging contribution ( either links or comments )( even if that contribution is below your threshold of content you would idealize on this site ) and that is 1) a method to shape the landscape of the of the site in the way you see appropriate 2) discouraging hackers ( they will either leave or comment less ) and shaping the content that they feel comfortable contributing. I have a feeling pg would say something like 'you can make your own site and create the rules how you see fit', and I would agree with that as well.
How to Read to a Child | eHow.com
I can't see the site, but it looks like some kind of dumb meme:

http://images.google.com.au/images?q=internet%20serious%20bu...
>I think taxes and the cost of living make zero difference, except possibly in NYC.

Interesting. I wonder how much the state of California could get away with soaking Silicon Valley without killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
It seems to me that the Wired article was written after the TechCrunch article in the same vein.

First Last.fm; now this. That makes 2 TechCrunch articles in 2 weeks that make some kind of big, unsubstantiated claim. For hits, perhaps. Maybe fake journalism is their new weekly feature.
HTML/CSS/JS is always skinnable, isn't it? Failing all else, you just throw in a few jQuery calls to skin your finished, Atlas-designed Cappuccino app... :)
Because TechCrunch is in bed with YCombinator, of course ;)
http://uncov.com/ycombinator-techcrunch-butthappy

(Yes, this is a joke)
I abandoned Protocol Buffers because the Python implementation was too slow. The problem is that Google hasn't written a C-extension yet because it wouldn't be compatible with AppEngine. It's a known problem that has gone undocumented.

http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf/browse_thread/thread...
I don't understand the joke. Can someone please explain?
While this is an interesting idea, and definitely possible, I'm left wondering if it would be desired. By that I mean do we want all networks to behave in the same way, do we want all devices to be represented by their lowest common denominator?

Essentially creating this specific hypervisor OS would create a lot of places for leaky abstractions, and you'd end up creating a lot more special case code to detect and fix those abstractions then you would if you just coded the drivers.
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The conclusion was way too abrupt (Saying "Thank you" without pausing the previous sentence).
Techcrunch is indeed pretty nasty sometimes, and I have criticised them here before, but it would be utterly ridiculous if hacker news, a news site for startups, banned one of the preeminent startup blogs.

Techcrunch is influential and as such it is relevant for many people here. You can ban a site that is nasty and irrelevant, but you cannot ban a very relevant site just because some articles are odious.

Banning should not be about morals, but rather about usefulness.
P2P files sharing software causes Marine1 details to end up in Iran
I think all 'free' online ranking sites give you data that you should take with a large grain of salt. You can use some of them for relative comparisons but not if the comparison is a close one.

Another use is to extrapolate from 'known' numbers to an unknown site (say a competitor).

It helps to separate truth from bull, but it is definitely not an exact measurement. If someone is off by a factor of 10 then you're on solid ground to call bull, if it is a factor of 2 or less then it gets a lot harder.
I get it now.. Techcrunch is trying to emulate the heavyweight in journalism right now: The Onion. :P
I recommend to look at GlusterFS. It fast, modularized, layered clustering file system. It is not tied to Linux kernel because it built for (patched) Fuse. With Infiniband hardware, it is fastest clustered system available for free. See http://www.gluster.org/docs/index.php/GlusterFS_1.3.pre2-VER... for example.
Videos like that are a clear sign of a company that can't innovate. Creating a video like that suggests Microsoft's "creative" people are not really part of the design processes and the company has no idea what to do with them. And those "Creative" people don't understand what makes useful advances vs. art.

None of those "products" would be that hard to prototype today, but the interfaces are just not that useful. Take that screen shot capture in the meeting. Now outlook or some location aware system could keep track of where people are and link to the meeting notes, but no they want to guess where you're eyes are and figure out where the screen is ect. It's different, but not useful.
IRB-fu: Display a MySQL-style report for an array of Ruby objects
Quarter of Media Temple users suffering 18+ hrs downtime
IPhone File Sharing is in the Clouds
> and uses the zlib and pthread libraries

Er, no, thanks. What about a good STL C++ implementation with OpenMP (automagic on STL.)

That's great for us, developers. We'll never run out of things to do :)
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A social media friend of mine, Larry Brauner who is the founder of the popular blog Online-Social-Networking.com recently launched a new Ning social network dedicated to helping you not only have followers on Twitter but to help you network with them as well.