skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HFCS might be a contributor, but would simply show up as an increase in energy intake. If you go from eating X amount of sugars in a day to eating 2X amount of sugars in a day, that just shows up as an increase in caloric intake.

This article was trying to contrast energy intake with exercise to see if the obesity seen was being caused by an increase in the amount we ate or a decrease in the amount we exercised (rather than seeing what foods might have been the culprits of the increased energy intake).
Cool. But until there are a lot of real time services their value is very limited.
right. Even better the service could become if they'd watch the status pages for the services they'dget asked about. But takes a little more effort than a plain GET.
Food != Calories

The featured article examines calorie intake and not food intake. A pound of apples has a much lower calorie density than a pound of french fries. Changes in the TYPE of food consumed (i.e. increase calorie density) agree with the featured article's conclusions.
In other news Microsoft employees could see Linus Torvalds around campus in Redmond attending Windows 7 Evangelist training.
What's left of Ice Road Truckers if you remove the dramatic music and dialogue? It's amazing how that show can spend almost an hour building drama about how someone is going to finally fall through the ice, yet in the end some random truck's tire slips in.
I finally figured it out.

When reading headlines,

s/could/won't/g

and

s/\?$/? No./g
I recently read "Crystal Fire", http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Birth-Information-Technol..., an account of the invention an commercialization of the transistor. Prominent in the book are Shockley and how the companies that spun off from his original start up founded the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.
A couple of reasons you shouldn't be moving your databases to the cloud anytime soon
I think these generalizations are more or less correct. It's also that at the highest levels of abstraction, your customers are an entirely different set of people with different expectations, and what it means to "pay" is radically different.
I understand you want people to post on your blog so your updates link to thier comment. However, if it's your blog and you are the one posting to another site it seems rude to request people post comments on your site when you can just read the comments here.

So, how about posting updates with a link to the HN comment.

PS: Granted, this could just be me.
Flickr: PHP4 vs PHP5 drop in CPU comparison
Google boss won't quit Apple job
How to Hide Your Email from Harvesting Programs | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
Why the Kindle 2 is the real Goldilocks of e-book devices
The era of API driven startup
How and where do you get beta testers ?
What are the ways for recruiting some beta testers for your product ? (Besides asking friends to do beta testing)
No, but I might end up on the jury of your peers.
Like the CSS Zen Garden, we should take that page and add just one stylesheet and see what we can come up with.
Welcome to the Twitterverse.
I'll watch for both, but it's easier for me to reference the comments on the blog post itself. Some readers may never have heard of HN, so it might be slightly confusing to say "This came from so-and-so at HN"

I just thought that people here at HN would probably have some really good ideas, so I submitted it.
Indeed. I take it you've read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories Bad Calories"?

Overfeeding studies show that it's very hard to get people to gain weight on protein diets. Carbohydrate overfeeding, on the other hand, can get up to 10,000 calories a day, and people will still complain about feeling hungry.

Our ancestors had lots of dietary fat. They didn't have any simple carbohydrates at all.
Don't I know it. I've saved people many hours of copy/pasting and manual indexing in several different Excel spreadsheets by having them export to CSVs, running them through a quick Perl script, and having them import again.

To a non-programmer, a computer is a tool for processing data. To a programmer, a computer is a tool for making tools. Most skilled programmers don't even realize how often they make tools for seemingly minor tasks. These tools are what we have to trade.
Hackers Breach Virginia Health Database, Demand $10 Million Dollar Ransom
I've actually read the book the article is based on. This school is essentially a giant test prep factory. All the kids do for 10+ hours a day is learn how to guess correctly on multiple choice tests. Then the entire measure of school performance is how well the kids have done on these tests. The whole program is designed to separate black kids from their parents and communities; the NYT admits as much actually. In Paul Tough's original NYT Magazine article, which the book is based on, the central question posed is:

"Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?"

(Changing the culture is defined as extending the school day to keep kids away from their parents, and also changing the qualitative school experience. The idea being that poor black kids are qualitatively different than poor white kids, and they need a qualitatively different school system based on rote memorization and frequent testing.)
I get that and I liked the post. However, I have seen plenty of blog posts that used this to link to posts on other sites and it seems to work well.
You're thinking of the "Dashing Swordsman."

http://oots.wikia.com/wiki/Dashing_Swordsman
Amazon describes the books as "an attack on the back-to-basics movement..."

Publishers Weekly calls him an advocate.

The data showing that Whole Language and New Math are widespread and repeated.

I'll take that over one partisan guy (who is a teacher, and dislikes anyone else telling him to use PROVEN methods that he doesn't enjoy as much) who argues in his screed based on anecdotes.
A quick note on the purpose of the Kickstart, as it's actually twofold.

The first purpose is to raise some capital so the Spreedly team can spend more time working on Spreedly. We think that raising money from clients is the best kind of capital to have, especially in the early days of a business.

The second purpose is perhaps more subtle: we think that this has the potential to help a bunch of businesses to actually release and start cashflowing. Our experience is that actually spending money towards your goals - and having a service you've paid for just waiting to make money for you - is critical motivation to keep cranking.

So not only do you get to help us make Spreedly better (which is better for you!) but you also get to buy some hope and motivation for your own venture. We think it's a chocolate and peanut butter combination :-)
I don't see where anyone got this confused.
Changes Needed in our Education System
Is the Growth Of The Web Slowing Down Or Just Taking A Breather?
How often ordinary developers tell language designers how to design a new language? Or who told Linus how to design a new UNIX kernel?
I've met a couple of the SproutBox founders at Indianapolis' Startup Weekend last year. I can't speak to their business savvy, but they were nice, and enthusiastic about their business. In my opinion, they would be a lot of fun with which to work.
Indiana University is in Bloomington. IU has a top 20 business school (undergrad and grad, according to BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/). SproutBox intend to take advantage of (in a good way) the dreamers in the business program and the low cost of living. Indianapolis is only 1 - 1.5 hours to the north.

Incidentally, another top 20 business program resides in northern Indiana at Notre Dame.

Also worth mentioning, before taking any applications, SproutBox developed a couple apps for themselves (http://sproutbox.com/sprouts).
The title of this HN posting is "Increased food intake alone explains the increase in body weight in US"

That is not true. It is "Increased CALORIE intake alone explains the increase in body weight in US"
Your Yard Sale Is Illegal
Rom Cross Trainer
Ask HN: What are your favorite non-mainstream or as yet unpopular sites that you visit?
The question is mainly to extract the hidden gems that you have uncovered lately or in the past and would like to share with the HN community - so called Best-of-Breed sites.

Obviously, mainstays like search engines and rss readers would be assumed everyone uses regularly.

Good mashups are worth stating.

Social proof, especially here, is valuable.
Here's a link to a mirror the actual original page: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T...
How often does anyone sell a language or a kernel? Happens in niches, but not very often in general.
Good execution on the trending and the real power here is the deep search on live content. Anybody who does search right has value.
I sent him some information on the matter.
I think it's easier to lose karma now becuase there are more people who disagree by downvoting a la reddit (see my comment above for a prime example).

But it really feels like people are more stingy with upvotes, especially at the story level. Gone are the days of nickb getting ~1k upvotes from a single submitted story over and over, now it's a much more reserved upvote culture where you have to submit a lot more material and interact more to get those big numbers.
A recent multi-year study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (abstract: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/360/9/859 , full text is also available there) concludes that "Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize."

811 overweight adults were randomly assigned to one of four diets: percentages of energy derived from fat, protein, and carbohydrates were 20, 15, and 65%; 20, 25, and 55%; 40, 15, and 45%; and 40, 25, and 35%.

By 2 years, weight loss remained similar in all four groups - about 7 lbs.

Among the 80% who completed the trial, the average weight loss was 4 kg; 14 to 15% of the participants had a reduction of at least 10% of their initial body weight.

Satiety, hunger, satisfaction with the diet, and attendance at group sessions were similar for all diets.

Attendance of counseling groups was strongly associated with weight loss (0.2 kg per session attended).

Bottom line:
1. It's all about eating less - eat what you like (so you can stick to it for life). As long your calories are reduced (to lose a pound of fat you need to lose 3,500 calories) and you stay within healthy nutrient ranges you will lose weight.
2. Consider participation in some sort of community (or even online groups), for support, motivation and accountability.
"Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school."

Yeah I don't really see whats magical about this program, its just really intensive. If you took all the underachievers from other schools and tutored them for 6 hours a day then those school's scores would rise too.

It's sort of like the "epiphany" of clear-build-hold in Iraq. No shit - the secret to progress is focusing on fundamentals and working your ass off? But then again, maybe common sense in bureaucracy is magical.
Agreed. Your major competitive advantage as a programmer is probably the ability to build tools.

If the problem calls for a particularly complex algorithm, or begins taking up too much time, that's when I make the tool as simple as possible and then leverage Mechanical Turk to get past the sticky bits.
I'll have to run a test to see how things go. I may just stick with the "Home" link for now.
Geo Twitter (#ll)
> Yes it is, but where did the laws come from?

From the government. What's wrong with government (including your carrots and sticks), it what's inherently wrong with democracy. There will always be benefits available to lawmakers who panders to those with money, and there will always be interest groups (religious, unions etc.) to punish those who don't pander to them.

Yes, I'm a small government conservative, and I can almost infer that you're not, so let's just end the discussion here.
-- personally, I use a Twitter client that I built but won't promote so shamelessly here.

-- I also use a slinkset site aggregating many feeds of new website releases.
If you are talking about using MySQL like memcache (so persistence isn't an issue) check out MYISAM MEMORY tables - http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/memory-storage-engine...

Super fast but if the server dies so does all your data...
I disagree, the FSF offices are responsible for ftp.gnu.org which is a free high bandwidth mirror, and savannah.gnu.org which is a free project hosting site. Both of those are things developers and the world need.

Also in the FSF office they spend time educating people on open source licenses so that the free software that is written is not abused. Again, something we still need.
I don't know about you, but I appreciate posters who copy article titles verbatim instead of editorializing. As for the article itself, it very clearly stated that increased energy intake was the culprit. The word "food" by itself does not indicate a unit of measure. Do they mean calories? Pounds? Liters? Let me read the first paragraph to find out OH THERE IT IS. It's calories.
lol - very good, Joel. Perhaps the seed of a new Fog Creek product, "Forum Scrubber".
Going by the current trend, there will only be more real time services in the future. It pays to be early in the game :)
Find an online community relevant to your product and just ask.

Find a local university or college and offer free beer or munchies for some students to test your product.

If you already have a community (mailing list, forum, twitter followers), relevant or not, ask them.
WebElements Periodic Table of the Elements
How about Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Digital and a few dozen of other companies?
To paraphrase Sun Tsu, therefore one hundred successes in one hundred complex projects are not the most skillful, creating lasting and profitable business with little or no effort is the most skillful.
You might want to at least give a hint about what your idea is or what space you are in.
> How often does anyone sell a language or a kernel?

The real question is, how often does anyone sell a language or a kernel the lion's share of which wasn't written in the 1980s/early 1990s?
Why is everyone fixated on screen size? Interactivity is key to electronic media. For example: an electronic version of a reference book has to be interactive. You need very rapid search and cross-reference. (Haven't tried the latest generation of e-ink screens, so I don't know how long the delay is now. I assume it is even shorter. But as in a web app, little delays add up.)

In terms of interactivity, the iPhone has a big advantage. For uses where interactivity is key, this more than makes up for the screen size.

Battery life? For use as a reference tool, there is no problem with a device that needs to be charged everyday. Many workplaces have these things called electrical outlets. So long as there's enough battery life to cover the part of the day when people are walking about, there's no problem. (This varies with the nature of the job, of course.)

Of course, the ideal would be a much more interactive device with the form factor of the Kindle DX.

EDIT: A real-world example -- the ePocrates pharma reference app. This was a must-have for med students in the Palm Pilot era! By today's standards it had poor resolution, poor contrast, and a piddly little screen. But it was instantly interactive and searchable, and so it was highly successful.
Both Flickr and PHP5 appeared in 2004. For one of the biggest PHP sites in the world, I'd imagine they'd upgrade sooner.
> x86 internals / Linux

Why are you planning to inflict these two epic abominations on children? What have they done to you?
And I'll take a book I've read over a review of a book by some guy who hasn't read it.
Assembly Language Video Primer for Hackers
In Scope for V1 = Out of Scope for anytime soon

Out of Scope for V1 = lololololololol
Promotional Lighters 
It's cheap, it's free. I say why not take these little things.
Don't underestimate upward drift in what's considered a normal portion.

When I travel to the US, it feels like they're serving way to much food, from an urban Canadian perspective. The portions just look huge to me, but apparently this is considered normal.

When I eat with my parents-in-law (who are perfectly fit), their portions look small and unsatisfying to me. I'm about 20 pounds overweight. When I eat their portion size, I don't get hungry -- it just feels like I'm being shorted.

We need to re-calibrate.
"...indicating that the increases in energy intake alone over the 30 years studied could explain the weight increase."

That seems, to me, to be a far cry from "Increased food intake alone explains" I seem to be smelling a correlation/causation problem.
I have one question, are they consuming other companies search API, let’s say Twitter or are they crawling and aggregate their own data? Either way it’s a great job!
Smeed's law
Well, saying that people are eating more is not necessarily the best way to put it. The problem is that companies that manufacture food products want to sell as much of it as they can. To do that, they make it more appetizing, which generally means increasing the fat and/or sugar content (of course, they also use lower quality ingredients to keep the costs down, which also often increases calorie content).

So it's not so much that people are physically eating more, rather that they are consuming foods that have a higher concentration of calories.
Tapbots shows how much you can do with just a little upfront
Did I say anything about black or white kids?
Where does your app stand on the New Media Life Cycle?
Back of the envelope calculations are fun. I think a typical app will make $1-$10 (ad based vs. virtual currency based) per month for each 1000 monthly active users. Let's say about 20% of apps are virtual currency based, so $2.8. The top 20 apps on facebook have total 179M active users, so they would make $6M per year. If the top 20 accounts for 50% of traffic, that would pin total Facebook app earnings to $12M/year.

If I recall correctly, Joel has once said that the cost of office space accounts for something like 6% of their revenue. At another time I think he mentioned their new office costs $50000/month, so their revenue would be $10M/year.

So Fog Creek software makes as much as all apps on Facebook combined?-)

Edit: Read the article. Even Zynga alone seems to be making more than my whole estimate. Oopsie.
Abstract and attention-to-details are opposites, and it's difficult to do both simultaneously. Both are valuable.

I wonder if this is applicable to programming languages. Because lisp enables abstractions, do users tend to focus on abstractions more than on details? Whereas C encourages more attention-to-detail at the expense of abstractions. It's not just what these languages are good at, but what type of thinking they encourage.

Of course, abstraction and attention-to-details are not mutually exclusive and there are ways of attending to both; but I'm intrigued by the article's suggestion of a trade-off.
marketplace, $100 Billion market per annum USA, kinda reverse auction and no it's not like ebay and it's not something obvious.
I find that despite this limitation, there are clever/elegant ways to work around it. In general, look to increase the frequency of a job while decreasing the amount of "work" done per cycle.
We actually crawl and index all the data ourselves. That's how we identify the most popular content.
Their conclusion that "Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize." seems to neglect the fact that they did not assign any low-carbohydrate diets. You'd think that in a study of diets emphasizing different levels of nutrients they'd at least include one that induces ketosis.
isn't Google pretty close to real time anyways? I know I tend to find things on Google that I just posted 5-6 minutes ago.
Are you looking for something like Berkeley DB? It's essentially a persistent key/value store. You don't have sql, but you do have ACID compliant features.

Summery of a programmer's usage here: http://simonwillison.net/2003/Nov/26/discoveringBerkeleyDB/

Some Docs here: http://pybsddb.sourceforge.net/reftoc.html
Thanks! We're working on adding more data sources to provide broader results.
10GB is just for SimpleDB. BigTable has no such limitations, right?
No you're 100% wrong. How do I know? Because I lost weight on a low-calorie diet. They are a terrible thing to do to oneself and your brain will fight your new weight forever.

I became a good-looking normal weight man after having been 150 pounds overweight all of my adult life. It took about a year. But I was starving every moment of every day. I have tremendous willpower, but in the end I couldn't keep it up for the following years. Losing the weight through low-calorie starvation techniques had destroyed by muscle. My brain thought I was emaciated. I thought about food constantly while on the diet and after. Like 99% of the people who lose weight by following a low-calorie diet, I gained it back within the next couple of years.

Now, since December, I've lost 40 pounds by kicking the carbohydrates out of my diet. I eat huge quantities of fat and protein. I'll probably go home and have a whole chicken for dinner tonight -- or maybe a pound or two of pork loin. I'm less hungry now than I was.

And my muscle -- it's still there, in fact I'm getting stronger. I can't tell you how amazing it is to have my bench press and dead lift stay the same while I'm dieting. I'm losing weight more slowly than low-calorie allows, but it all seems to be fat that I'm losing instead of fat + muscle.

What explains it? The calorie theory is bankrupt. Fat accumulation is regulated by insulin which is driven by carbohydrate consumption.

Yes, you will lose body weight by eating less. By why not attack the real problem instead? Obesity is a disease of fatty accumulation caused by the hormone insulin, not a disease of willpower.
Ask HN: What questions should I ask a startup before joining?
I have an opportunity to join a startup as a software engineer. What questions should I ask them before making my decision?

A quick google search on the topic came up with the sites I listed below, all with some good questions to ask.

Are there any other questions you would ask? How would you feel about joining a startup in this economy? If you have worked for a startup before (or are currently working) what advise can you give me?

Thanks!

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/122/Joining-A-Startup-Top-6-Questions-You-Should-Ask.aspx

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/nine_questions_.html

http://www.genuinevc.com/archives/2005/10/seven_questions.htm
IBM patent for "enhancing productivity" through shorter meetings
How did they figure out how much food was thrown away or used for non-human consumption? I think Americans waste a lot of food! If this wasn't accurately accounted for, it could throw the results way off.