skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without having read this study in detail, other possible things tend to muck up such studies. Suppose you define mortality as "chance of dying within a year"

1) People who start dying (eg by developing cancer) might take more than a year, and generally they lose weight when they do so. So even if obesity caused you to be more likely to get cancer and die, it wouldn't show up in this sort of data.

2) People who weigh less may be otherwise unhealthy for other reasons -- this doesn't imply that gaining weight would benefit them. In this sense weight is an effect of some other cause.

3) We may not be measuring "overweight" correctly -- scale weight is different from BMI which is different from body fat% which is different from body density which is different from body volume which is different from other things closely associated with "weight" (and specifically the stuff you gain/lose by eating)
First look at Function Space
Read The Hacker's Diet a while ago, and it seemed reasonable to my old control-systems training. What's the current sort of counter-argument to the abstraction presented there?
I am not a dietician by any stretch, but this 'net calorie' business seems really unlikely to me. Cars have different gas mileage; i doubt I am shitting out 0 calories, etc. Ketosis is a real thing and people do shed a shit ton of weight getting into that state; all of these things basically invalidate 'long term deficit' as the sole coeffecient into what is likely an incredibly complex equation only barely understood.
Personally I think the inventor of Bitcoin is Nick Szabo. In a blog post predating Bitcoin, he described all its aspects, and even called his invention "bit gold"(!): http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html He also seems to have tried to postdate his blog post (URL says 2005, but date in the post says 2008) to perhaps hide the fact he was the first one to come up with these concepts :D

He was even a contractor for Digicash back in 1994-95.
The number of companies started in any number of countries around the world with substantially higher tax rates demonstrate that people clearly do still have incentive to invest in their own business even if they pay more.
The counter argument seems to be that ketosis is somehow magically exempt from the laws of physics.

One of those blog posts sparked exactly such a discussion -- that the body was "too complex" to be governed by mere physics.
Truly very inspirational. I was wondering about the new year resolutions for 2013. Thanks jazzychad for a direction. I am still a long long way from creating and developing applications like the ones mentioned in your list. But someday I wish to get there too. Planning to start with a list like this year! What could be a better resolution than learn something new and then build something from that knowledge gained. So wishing myself luck for my endeavor!
> Then I went to Kauai for a week and gained 10 pounds

Is probably ~8lbs water. I'd be amazed if someone could gain 10lbs of fat in a week. That clocks in at about 50k total calories?
I would assume $250K and other figures relate to AGI (adjusted gross income). That's how taxes are usually based. As to how to calculate AGI from nominal salary, there's a reason there are 1.7 million accountants in the US :) US tax code is one messed up piece of spaghetti code.
It's not as selfish as you try to spin it. There are any number of political and economic policies that you might favor, but that only make sense in aggregate.

I might favor more NASA funding, but I'm not going to write a check and donate to NASA. That doesn't make my desire for more NASA funding any less earnest than someone who wants less funding for NASA.
Read my longer blog post. I go over the whole matter.

The tl;dr is that ketosis is not exempt from the laws of physics.
A world without power
It's not the font itself, rather the letter spacing has been increased. I think it looks good.
A fine balance between PG's "Just try not to die and eventually smart people figure out a way" and "don't be a zombie company forever or it will become your grave". Sounds reasonable.
Interesting! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it isn't a single person.
The rule of thumb is 3500 kcals / lb. So 10lbs of fat would be nearly 35,000 kcals, a daily net caloric surplus (not caloric intake, surplus) of 5,000 kcals.
I think natrius was saying your definition of 'left' is skewed right. Progressive taxation enjoys broad support and so is by definition centrist and not left.

This is a definition of left/right that depends on public opinion and not who controls the discourse. You could definitely argue that progressive taxation as defined by popular discourse in America is left. But that would be ceding too much power to the minority which controls political discourse in America, IMHO.
It is exactly as selfish as I spun it. That's what "I won't give you X without receiving Y" means.

I'm not judging, I'm exactly the same. I'm much happier if everyone else is beggared at the same time in the same way.
Libertarians are very active on the internet, but are practically non-existant as a political force on national scale. Fortunately, in some places (not in California) some Republican representatives hold views which are close to what libertarians can identify with. But this has very little to do with motivation and a lot to do with the fact that very small minority of people have libertarian views. Libertarian views are not natural. It is very hard to arrive at the idea that "there should be a law against that" is not the right answer for any problem and stay there. Most people think freedom is overrated.
How do you figure? If I have the choice of increasing my labor by 20% (by some arbitrary metric, like labor hours per week) to increase my post-tax income by 20%, I might decide that is worth it and go for the higher income. If, on the other hand, I am currently at the top end of my current tax bracket, and the next highest bracket means that my 20% increase in labor will only increase my post-tax income by 10%, I might decide that isn't worth it and thus not go for the higher income.
Thanks for this! Took 5 minutes and they mailed my number back immediately.

Any idea why it's free in the UK?
I applaud the idea, but I think this book needs some serious work before it is suitable for your intended audience.

For example, in Section 1.1 you explain how to go about solving the equation x^2 - 4 = 45, a topic which (I would venture) most 16 year olds should be comfortable with.

Then in Section 1.2 you, out of nowhere, introduce set-theoretical ideas and notation. Even seemingly innocent notation like

{0, 1, 2, 3, ...}

to denote the natural numbers can be confusing for someone who hasn't seen it before. In this case it's clear that the dots are supposed to indicate "continue in the obvious way". But then you write

Q = { -1.5, 1/3, 22/7, 0.125, ... }

in which the dots, presumably, mean something different. Then, at the bottom of the page, you suddenly start using the notation "∈" to denote set membership, as in

if x,y ∈ N, then (x+y) ∈ N.

First, what does this weird "∈" symbol mean? Second, what does it mean to write "x,y ∈ N"? Is that x∈N and y∈N? Or is it some special object "x,y" that is ∈N? Or is it two statements, "x" on its own, and "y∈N"?

The next couple of paragraphs contain both historical and mathematical inaccuracies (can you really always divide two rational numbers to get another rational number?). I'll stop there.

Like I say, I applaud what you're trying to do. I think you have a noble aim. But if the preview is anything to go by, your textbook in its current form is falling short of that aim.
That's one of the reasons to invest in lasting knowledge. Compiler construction is one of the evergreen topics.
If I ever get an incurable disease, you'll be getting a pm from me.
I'm pretty sure that a large part of the bitcoin early adopters market is centered around things that can't quite stand the light of day. But there are plenty of good uses too, have some alpaca socks:

http://www.grasshillalpacas.com/alpacaproductsforbitcoinoffe...

Most of the businesses accepting bitcoin do so because of the free publicity associated with it, and yet they also re-inforce the trend for bitcoin to become more mainstream.

Bitcoin is one of the most fascinating things to happen to the net in years, and even if it fails the amount of interesting data gained is staggering. The ECB had a meeting recently on about this new kid on the block, the outcome was quite interesting:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/11/03/ecb-roots-...
Yep. And if your investment portfolio generates reasonable before-tax return (it should, if you've been working for the past 5+ years and saving diligently), then you get to the marginal rate even quicker.
And there's also proving code correct. Like the recent example of seL4.
> [0]: In fact, if you type "uberhacker" into wiki it redirects to him.

It redirects to Torvalds now.

EDIT someone must have changed it moments ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uberhacker&act...
No offence but your post is overly simplistic and not in anyway convincing that your actual thesis is a complete picture of what is going on.

It is undeniably true that calories in vs calories out is a driving factor, it is not however the only factor.

Your article shows how you think about diet/weight, and is not really reflective of any strong scientific understanding, and, in my opinion, needlessly disregards "… insulin! Starvation mode! Carbs! Zones! That study I saw written up in the New York Times!", when there is actually something here, or atleast potentially here that is also a driving force in weight.

edited for politeness/accuracy
Not really; someone changed the redirect moments ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uberhacker&act...
Unfortunately, that's how all the governments work, so far nobody designed a working model of concurrent voluntary jurisdictions. It would be nice to try but for that one would need to start from scratch, which is not going to happen in the US.
Devils Advocate Time.

Technically I'm morbidly obese. I'm 6'3" and I weigh in just shy of 300lbs. This shocks most people as I don't look like someone who weighs close to 300lbs although I'm very obviously overweight. I'm working hard to lose weight purely to prevent myself from dying young so that my son has a Dad he can grow old with.

In the mean time, let me dispel a myth: Fat != Lazy

I have absolutely no doubt that I will have more energy when I'm a healthier weight however I sleep well, I feel good when I wake up, I can maintain focus at a consistently high level throughout my typical 14 hour work day and I still have plenty of energy to chase after my 2 year old boy for a couple of hours in the evening when I get home. I have bags of confidence and as far as I'm concerned, I'm successful.

Being overweight isn't always indicative of laziness, failure or a lack of discipline. Sure you're better off being a healthy weight but beating yourself up for being overweight is torture. Take responsibility for your weight and health, commit to doing something positive to fix it and in the mean time just get on with enjoying life.
Scam is just fine.
I've been a vegetarian since I was 18 and always was very slim, until a couple of years ago (mid thirties - actually not a strict vegetarian anymore in recent years). The vegetarian diet was of course very rich in carbs. I don't see a way to go low carb as a vegetarian.

That I was slim with a "high carbs" diet for 20 years also makes me doubt the carbs theory a bit. There seem to be other factors. I exercise less, but there were stretches of time when I didn't exercise a lot, too. My wife having a baby gave a big boost to my waistline, too. Might even have to do something with hormones (men's hormones change during pregnancy, too)?

I've also heard that changing one's diet in any way is likely to cause weight loss at first, so I'd be careful with evaluating anecdotal evidence.

I'm curious about the energy aspect, just wish there was another way. The thought of eating 4 eggs for breakfast makes me sick. I just feel repulsed by eggs and meat most of the time.

I actually have a hypothesis that human digestion might be very adaptable. Humans managed to hold on in very diverse environments, from the arctic to the desert. Presumably they had to dwell on different kinds of foods depending on the environment. So it makes sense if digestion can adapt to a huge variety of food. Might be that industrial food is a main culprit after all (lots of sugary foods that have only been around for about 100 years).

Another thing: how did people manage to eat the equivalent of four eggs for breakfast in paelo times? I've read that gathering was more effective than hunting, so presumably they had more vegetables and fruit than meat on average?
Care to elaborate? I can only suspect that, as usual, this will turn out to be a dispute over the boundaries of the system we're discussing (single-human-body-mass-system vs economy-society-and-single-human-body-system).

If you genuinely believe that net calorie balance isn't the sole determinant of long term average mass, then I'd like to know what else it could be. Saying "oh it must be more complex than that!" isn't such an explanation.
Not sure if selfish quite captures it. It's more practical consideration. I'll give you X, if everyone else is also giving you X. Otherwise, my X won't make any difference.
Don't get me wrong. I have never wanted to poison someone and I can't see this changing.
And my knowledge is not unique by any measure. I am sure every physician does have it, or can obtain it easily by revising some of their college textbooks.

And please, don't PM me for such things :).
Have you heard of the "dead weight loss" of taxation? It's a concept in economics.
How does one write a character smarter than oneself?
Not to mention increase in paperwork once you go beyond simple salary...
There certainly do exist people that face a negative return to marginal work, due to the phase out of public assistance with income.

I'm not really sure what "welfare queen" means, but there are plenty of people that face strong incentives to stay on public assistance and little help to get off of it. I wouldn't necessarily place all the blame on them, though.
Hi there !

Well, I've been in the look out for a solution myself and I've noticed you've mentioned Zoolz. It's funny because I've been experimenting it for a while now and it pretty much does what it says. The best thing is the combination between S3 and Cold storage, as well as the price, because let's face it, in this economy who could afford any more expenses!!

I'v recommended it to my pals and thus far everyone's thanking me...So go for it I'd say ;)
RegexLove: An opensource Javascript based regex colorizer.
Create a CUBRID Database VM with Vagrant and Chef Cookbook under 5 minutes
Asterank is frankly inspiring, thanks so much for sharing - well done!
>Speaking as a foreign onlooker (I'm in Australia), I see more libertarians than any other stripe, tbqh.

Paul Graham's informal poll of investors had two-thirds voting for Obama. That's a stronger lean than the US as a whole. They might be libertarians, but they're libertarians voting for the unionist/leftist/regulatory party.
this is not really a convincing response; starting a company doesn't have to be capital intensive and you could do it with someone else's money.
My one and only side project - http://www.cheekynote.com (WARNING NSFW)
But, with the higher tax rate, someone else might decide it's worth it to increase their labor by 40% so as to increase their post-tax income by 20%, whereas they only would have increased their labor by 20% without the tax effect. So, it really isn't clear that higher taxes lead to lower amounts of labor.
Being tall makes it easy to carry a lot of fat without looking traditionally fat. I'm 6'3 as well. I got up to 139kg -- about 305lb. Losing weight has been easier than I thought it would be. The trick was alighting on an eating pattern that I can sustain indefinitely.

For some folk (like OP) that's paleo. For others, keto. Some people swear by portion control -- I am not one of them!

If I could take one thing back, it would be my cheapshot at overweight people in my weight-control blog post-slash-rant last year (linked elsewhere in the thread). I've left it in, but ... it was mean.
> Most people think freedom is overrated

Or maybe it's just that other people disagree with libertarians' notion of absolute freedom. Perhaps they define freedom differently. I'm sure most of us want the same things in life (like a decent standard of living), but we just can't seem to agree on the best ways to achieve them.
I love how the article reads with phrases like "proof" and the pressrelease uses terms like "appears" and acknowledges that it has undergone essentially zero peer review.

It's interesting for sure, but the post reaks of zealotry.
Project Jarvis, from Iron Man
ASICs aren't on the market yet, but I'll be excited when I get one on my doorstop.

They've been delayed for months, and it seems this month will be the month they ship.
>Experience means very little. Why? Because I can capture 70% of your experience in your code -- in your library -- and build directly on top of it.

If you depend on my experience, it's going to make me money one way or another. And it's going to be money that you don't make, either because you have to share your revenue with me, or because it doesn't give you an edge as many others will use my library to compete with you.

But the problem is that age doesn't automatically give me the kind of experience that others depend on. There's a lot of knowledge that becomes utterly useless or even misleading over time.

And you can be quite sure of one thing. If your experience comes from gluing together a bunch of libraries to chase the fashions of the day, your experience will indeed mean very little down the road.
It might be indicative, or it might not.

Plurality voting systems lead to "least worst" strategies dominating.
Great, lets all make our apps free so you don't have to pay for anything. Wait, you mean I can't just take the stuff I need to eat for free from a supermarket? That's crap.

Ridiculous example for a ridiculous statement. Piracy is not a feature. If piracy was a feature it'd be ridiculously easy to pirate games on all consoles, but it's not.
Show HN: xlogs - free alerting, logfiles and savings for Amazon EC2
Looking at again: it's a variant of the prisoner's dilemma. If everyone moves, nobody is worse off. If you move on your own, you are worse off. If everyone else moves and you don't, you're best off.

Unsurprisingly, the dominant strategy is to write blog posts saying "we really ought to amend the taxation laws" :D
I think it is quite probable that Bitcoin was written by a single person. It is not that complicated: block chain of merkle trees + signing transactions with public/private crypto + proof-of-work with hashing function + peer-to-peer networking. The first public release (0.1.0) was only 20k lines of code. Someone like Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney, who have each spent more than a decade thinking about and attempting to design decentralized currencies certainly have the expertise to design Bitcoin all by themselves.
Ask HN: Gmail support email?
I had the gmail old storage account $6/year. My credit card expired and the transaction was cancelled. I updated the card info but I don't see any option to maintain the old account. Do you know where can I find gmail support email?
But careful, Mr. Mindful Programmer - if you are becoming more and more mindful and still do bad karma work e.g. for banksters, military or the big brother police state, you will suffer from shizophrenia and become seriously ill very young - you must decide, if you want to do some ill work or have a healthy brain + body.
Cool. All the free anti-virus I was aware of has a premium version that is not free and the free version always bugs the user about upgrading. I'd rather not advise such software.
here are a few lists to get you started:

http://proxy-ip-list.com/download/proxy-list-port-3128.txt
http://proxy-ip-list.com/download/free-usa-proxy-ip.txt
http://www.proxylists.net/http_highanon.txt
http://www.proxylists.net/socks4.txt
http://www.proxylists.net/socks5.txt
http://www.stopforumspam.com/downloads/listed_ip_90.zip

I've got my own db of hosting facilities which I made by taking 100M urls and doing a lookup on the hostname, then saving the IP found in a db. This gives you some level of confidence that a certain class 'C' is used for hosting.
Every Infrastructure-We-All-Rely-On (electricity, water, roads, medicine, banking IT) person I've ever talked to says a variation on the same thing: it's a good thing that terrorists are so fond of "hollywood plots".
Found some issues in the Chinese and usability issues where the progress is wrongly calculated, question area scrolls upwards, overlapping text, etc. Have screenshots if you need.

Example of a mistake in Chinese is '跑步' (running) pǎobù which is written as pǎbù.

Also, the iOS examples has the .idea directory included and the Capture module and all art assets.

The next button is active and therefore shows a dotted line around the button.
How can you be a non-strict vegetarian?
Same here. They do a good "Nice little business you've got there, but it's getting a lot of reports" act. Easy to resist when my business hadn't engaged in any activity at all in the couple of months since I'd registered for the number.

Total scam.
Peter Higgs criticises Richard Dawkins
By slipping now and then. I'm not really a vegetarian anymore - happy now? I've actually gained weight since not being a vegetarian anymore, but I think that is a coincidence. I very rarely eat meat (once every two weeks or less). So I am a vegetarian for stretches of several weeks at a time.
The Hacker's Diet hinges on:
((calories in) - (calories out)) / 3500 = (l lb of weight loss)

The Hacker's Diet holds as an axiom that calories from fat, carbohydrate and protein are equivalent in this formula. This assumption neglects the powerful influence of the hormone insulin, which plays a key role in regulating fat metabolism. Insulin release is very highly correlated with carbohydrate consumption, and a diet that restricts carbohydrate will often lead to weight loss.
Yes! I've been away from math for so long that having code that translates the math notation would be really helpful!
New Year Unresolutions
I know it's advertising, but I love it. :-)
Do you use any Light or Medium Reserved? Or are they all Heavy?
> and it seems this month will be the month they ship.

And the cows fly...

I heard that at Nokia it takes 3 years to design an ASIC chip. So these bitcoin companies should be able to it in a year.
Some new feelings, i.e. magnetism through tactile translation; and something to detect and poke me when I hang staring into space.
Ivan, could you share a little about your toolchain writing this book? There's been a lot of traffic on HN around self publishing and I think it would be of interest.

P.S. I'll buy it in ebook form!
A Crash Course in Success: Stanford's Venture Lab
I like the syntax; it feels like one I've been groping towards myself. As another comment said, it reminds me of TCL.

I'm not convinced on the string-based macros. They enable really cool stuff, like scala's XML literals, but it seems like they'd make syntax-aware editors impossible.

I'd suggest moving away from the lispy names for things (cons, cond, defun, cdr). This is (presumably) a language that appeals to people who like the elegance of lisp's reflexivity but can't stand the syntax; names from a more familiar language would appeal to them, while anyone who's firmly attached to lisp names is probably also attached to brackets.
You somehow miss that 65 years have passed since your independence. Things must have naturally changed whatever government was in charge.

And India never become an 'industrial nation' and will probably, never be. Indian economy used to be mostly agriculture, and now it is mostly services, with industry being essentially flat at near 15% GDP for decades.