skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And describing Obama/Dems as a liberal when hes/they are centre right.
I think what disturbed me more was the defense of the lies told in order to 'just get the deal done.' In my book, it's not ok. It's not 'just business.'
> The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps

A $40/year e-mail-only service is comparable with the $50/year Google Apps?
Similar: The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, predicting the Internet, written in 1909. The full story is now in the public domain, and can be found here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail.

It is also worth noting that changing the revenue producers from advertisers to consumers doesn't automatically make a business model sustainable. In a vacuum, I have no reason to believe an RSS reader (webmail, instant messenger, or any random service) that I pay for is any more viable than a competitor that serves me advertisements.

Finally, the issue I take with your second point is that a company's motives are going to be dictated by their finances. That may even be a legal requirement if they are publicly owned. Both Fastmail and Google have a financial incentive to keep their user-base happy and growing. One because they are taking cash directly from users and one because they are using users to generate cash. I don't think that slight difference changes their motives as drastically as you might think.
It's just _food_, it's not like any other food product in modern history was ever extensively tested before it was put in the market as a part of our daily diet.
STILL sticking with that absolutely horrific name, I see? You should seriously give out DVDs of the film as rewards.

How about a sleeping pill named Quietus[1]?

[1] Children of Men reference, film version
Most people have already screwed themselves with the traditional "American" diet. I can see why this would be enticing. I, for one, prefer raw food - vegetables and animals I can hunt myself (when I can). I wouldn't call it Paleo - I would call it NORMAL EATING. I also run every day and do some moderate lifting every other day with yoga every night. I feel great, actually, and don't need something that looks like raw cocaine to put in my body. I don't trust food bought from the internet, no matter how it looks or what the reviews are. Farmer's markets are where its at - buy local and buy raw, everything else is a waste of time.
So it's going to be manufactured in every single country it's sold? What other products do this?
Testing Against Multiple Rails Versions
Libertarianism is basically a fundamentalist version of liberalism. It's essentially "liberalism has gotten too complicated and the complexity is producing errors; here are the most important bits and they're what Really Matter", which is what fundamentalism is.
Rob has been conducting trials with people for a few months now, and reports there's "appropriate evidence that Soylent is safe, effective, healthy, and delicious." He's been pretty careful about bringing this to market, too; for a long time he hasn't suggested anyone try this and hasn't shared the recipe publicly because he doesn't want anyone without a chemistry/biology background to ingest a bunch of chemicals and hurt themselves.
Do you really think this is some revolutionary, new idea? Do you?! Do you think of all the thousands of students who go to University for 4-7 years to learn about one subject - Food - haven't thought "hey? why don't we just mix the basic chemicals together and solve the world's food crisis?".

This is pure hubris! This idea has been pursued for decades by people who have dedicated themselves to scientific rigour.

I'll say it again. The founders of Soylent have Engineer's Disease. They think because they're engineers they're experts in food science. That's delusional.
Most of this is about advanced git features, Simple features are simple (checkin/out, push/pull, simpler branching). Which is 80% of what you need, and probably 99% of what you need most of the time.
> If a multivitamin works then this works too.

God, you are just embarrassing yourself now. Please just stop.
Think about monkeyspaw's answer, but also think about changing your users or the product.

But first think about monkeyspaw's answer, not mine.
Add his argument on Podcast. Google discontinued the Listen app and not Podcast standard itself.

He listed these things to justify his arguments but almost none of them hold any water.
> The founder has been doing this for 4 months and he is healthier than when he started.

The founder claims he is healthier than when he started. That's confirmation bias. We have no way of telling because this "experiment" is not at all scientific. When he started and people pointed out just how hopeless the experiment was we were told to shut up and let him get on with it because it was only him being affected and if he wanted to do it let him go ahead. But now we see the problem - that hopeless experiment is being used to sell this product.

I can point you to a range of crack pots who claim their supplement makes them feel much better. One example is all the blue people with colloidal silver. (Do a Google Images search for [colloidal silver] to see.)
Yawn. Most of the "OMG, Linus swore!" wowserism is presented completely free of context, implying that this is how he generally goes about life. And contrary to what you're saying, the top comment in your link is not defending linus - hardly 'every single top comment'. The same is true of most odd-number-branch comment that I cared to look at.

Misrepresenting your sources to make your point is FAR worse than 'shut the fuck up' in my opinion.
This is not a new drug, it's just regular nutrients in powder form.
It doesn't seem to handle "sixteen hundred tomorrow" or any other such "x hundred" times.
it's not a "diet" it's a food (see this: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507) Also humans had been living in caves and stick houses for 100+k years but now most of us have improved on those inventions.
Too late, they raised all the money they need
sinister music
> If Google actually does shut down support for either of these open protocols, feel free to object as much as possible.

In some ways, they already have. To the best of my knowledge, you can no longer obtain the Google Talk Android app from the Play Store anymore. It has been replaced by the Hangouts app.

You could probably download the Google Talk APK from some third party, but how long will that function on future Android versions when any OS hooks are being altered for Hangouts interoperability?

Sure, you can use a third party XMPP client on Android, but the writing is on the wall here.
> It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model.

I can pay for services I use with Google. If I decide that I would prefer to pay for services, why should I choose a non-Google provider?
How many people were put in harm's way when he was inventing those things?
So you coined a new word for hyperbole? Cromulent!
Speaking as someone who uses Google Apps for personal email, it sucks. I hate having a google apps managed account under my personal email address (my primary google account is a gmail address), I hate the limited filtering options that Gmail provides, I hate the faux-IMAP layer that Gmail has, I hate the fact that every time I switch networks with my laptop I get a "too many simultaneous connections" error from the Gmail IMAP server, and I hate many more things about this.

So many thanks to Ken for finding what appears to be a good alternative. Time to convince my family to switch email providers.
String comparison with Unicode is pretty astonishingly complex, partially because equality is not as well defined as it seems to be on the surface. Should e and é be equal? If you're dealing with user input from people who are unlikely to know how to type é, then they probably should, but in many cases they shouldn't. A more complex case is é and é (precomposed vs decomposed forms), which nearly always should be equal, but a simple byte comparison will say they're different.

Fortunately, there are ICU bindings for every non-toy language which solves these sorts of problems for you (although ICU has the drawback of being absolutely huge).
Can I convert my money to bitcoin anonymously?
Which payment gateway do you support, or do you outsource that?
I'm amazed the key question hasn't been asked or answered yet:

Does it taste good?
Soylent was not created to be a part of our daily diet; it was created to replace our daily diet.
More to the point, bifocals and lightning rods are not intended for internal consumption.

Nor are either of them biochemistry, a subject considerably more complicated than optics or basic electro-magnetism.
Sublime Text is on its 1000th commit?
> This quote from General Mills is priceless

There is a world of difference between "unsafe" and "unhealthy." I am not claiming that frozen dinners are healthy. Far from it - I avoid them like the plague. However, they are not going to land you in the hospital in the short term.

> think that there may be some merit to the Soylent team and their claims

The fundamental issue is that statements like "there may be some merit" might be sufficient for trying an iPhone app. It is NOT sufficient for trying a radically new diet like this one.
You're not Disclosing anything by downloading it, so I don't think the Non-Disclosure Agreement would apply.
I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.
I'm sitting this one out for a year.

I expected Rob to run longer and more detailed trails than it appears he has. As in a few hundred people eating nothing but Soylent for a year.

There will be problems with the initial manufacture, and he highlights them in the risks section. But I notice the lack of anyone from say a pharma QC background who would be able to control the risk of overdosing on an ingredient by properly testing the batches during production. Maybe the production facility have the skills to do that?

Within a year, whatever can go wrong probably will have. Either they will be in a lot of trouble, or it will be pretty safe to buy (and a huge achievement). I guess you could say the same for coinbase.

NOTE:

The OP was behaving badly, but was desperately well motivated. He provided a useful link where a food scientist rubbishes Soylent - http://www.businessinsider.com/rob-rhinehart-food-substitute...
What exactly is "illegal content"?
I had the same reaction. I don't think this is really about brands though. I've gone to links to domains I didn't recognize as much as this one. The reason I immidietly closed it was the fact that the domain was not was HN said it was made the link feel spammy.
Change your diet to anything different for that amount of time and your body will feel better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me

I thought we were lovers of Science on this site? I thought we believed in testing claims through evidence, not some slick marketing video.

The founder has blogged in detail about the evolution of the recipe and effects on his body, http://robrhinehart.com/ (site currently appears to be down).
Real Artists Ship [teesprint shirt]
> We have as much right to defend the behavior as you have to attack it. It's an arbitrary questions of norms and of tolerance to criticism. In modern society it seems that we're so isolated and insecure in ourselves that we can't handle criticism and meanness.

Criticism means something in particular though, namely being critical of something.

Being critical of an idea does not mean insulting the person who proposed the idea, rather it means replying to the idea with intelligent commentary and feedback. There is rarely cause to be uncivil in providing criticism, and indeed doing such frequently closes doors to communication.

> A healthy level of tolerance of criticism is necessary for any sort of critical culture. Without it disasters like the nuclear disaster in Japan occur. Where everyone is trying to be so polite and get along that obvious problems go unsolved because criticism is not brought to bear on the right people at the right time.

Indeed this is true, but I think the overall feel in this thread is that the technical community frequently confuses criticism with outright personal attacks. In the very least, legitimate criticism is frequently mixed with verbal abuse, which adds nothing to the discourse.

> Yes there are limits to what is acceptable and not overdoing it. But then there is also a need for tolerance of criticism to an extent and perhaps if there is enough confidence a rebuttal to criticism.

A good engineer is one who accepts criticism, for that is how one improves. But if I am doing a code review, I would not tolerate someone questioning my history of career decisions when judging if my software architecture is correct.

I would not tolerate it because it is not on task, nor does it have a point or purpose.

There are times when bringing up the topic of someone's credentials or personal history is relevant, but even then there is no need to be disrespectful about it.

Now there are of course sometimes when more forceful language is called for, such as when personal or public safety is at stake, or when the future of a company is on the line. I would say that under those conditions, one should still do their best to communicate in a civil fashion, and then slowly escalate language used as is appropriate.
O Fabrico de Betão com Incorporação de Cascas de Sementes de Girassol
Mail.app's "Archive" isn't the same as Gmail's. In Gmail, it just removes it from the current mailbox but leaves it in All Mail. Mail.app actually moves it to a specially-named IMAP folder.
> Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome.

Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.
It is not a "substance". This is basically a multivitamin mixed in with some fluor, some whey protein and some olive oil. You only need common sense to validate the safety.
What do you find appealing about Soylent compared to a bag of salad and a ready meal?

Is it just the "nutritionally complete" bit?
> All the banhammer dramas, all the time.

Thank god there's none of that on HN.
Undo send?

In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
He really is! He will also be on stage in Paris in 2 weeks at my http://dotscale.eu conference ;-) Come and meet him!
Tim Cook's Opening Statement
However it should also be pointed out that being polite doesn't inherently mean being worthy. The top comment in this thread is polite, is complaining about the hacker culture not being polite... and is making flat-out lies to promote the case.
Yep, I thought it was a joke at first, too.

Since the term soylent is widely understood to mean human remains masquerading as food, the name suggests pretense.

He wrote:

Before I rarely had enough energy to go to
the gym, but this day I had plenty so I
decided to put the diet to the test. I'd been
running off and on for several months, never
able to do more than a mile straight, but
this day I ran 3.14 miles non-stop. This is an
irrational improvement.

!! Indeed, it does sound irrational, doesn't it? In fact, whether this is a hint or he's just being cute, I literally don't believe that Soylent caused this uptick in performance. Want to bet on the results of a double blind study?

Elsewhere, he said he only needs 1/3 the calories on Soylent, which was explained away by an apologist in the comments as a figure of speech, or perhaps art of rhetoric, but that explanation is contradicted by his precise descriptions elsewhere and worrisome in this context regardless.

There were more jokes like that, conveniently allowing its author to laugh at people no matter whether he's being truthful or not. Parts of the campaign are patronizing and condescending and they've shown no desire to fix that aspect, making me more leery due to the immaturity. Should I trust my health to such a cavalier attitude?

I lean toward it being legit, but they've got a long ways to go to catch up with the cutting edge of understanding in nutrition science and it's not clear what advantage they'll be able to offer over established meal replacement drinks like Ensure, which most people don't want to drink today. Improved taste? You can get rats to overfeed to fatness on chocolate Ensure. Expertise? No. For personal use, Soylent Orange is more convenient, available today, and safer, IMO:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2h/i_hate_preparing_food_my_solutio...
Depends on exactly what they mean by "produced in an FDA-approved facility with strict regulatory controls ensuring safety". To me, that sounds like it could mean as little as "we're going to produce it in a commercial kitchen".
Aside from the possible health issues, I'm kind of disappointed with the price. It's pretty expensive!
Why Lean Startup Isn't Enough
I have been extremely happy with the Office 365 service. It works perfectly on my Mac and iPhone.
Ireland Routing / Internet Issues 
Is anyone else in Ireland having internet connection issues? The IPv4 network seems to have fallen over...

All my uptime alerts have been triggered, but they are on EC2, and the sites are in HP Cloud, 2 datacenters in Dublin, and in a 3rd level institute.

Google (and associated services), imgur and facebook all are intermittent over IPv4, but all fine over IPv6.

Anyone else see this?
I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat.

Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on their chat client.
A few more tricks (I call it "red flags") I learned while running my small SaaS:

- if you sell service for $10/month and user says "I would buy it for $5/month" - that means he/she will not buy. Just do an experiment: for each customer which does that just give them discount for $5/month (even $2/month): nobody will come back and pay.

- if you sell service for $10/month and user needs to "to talk to somebody" before committing purchase: he/she will not buy. On other hand, if you have business / enterprise plan (which is like $3000/year) that is a good sign.

- lowering prices will not get you more paying customers

- start with "low" prices and rise it during lifetime of your company. Never go back.
Looks to me like it tastes like chicken.
Blogging in detail is fun.

It's not science.

I'm disappointed to see that blog -which mean people correctly pointed out is not scientifically useful- is being used to sell this product.
How To Attend a Funeral
Piwik seems to be exactly what I've been trying to find. I'm pretty excited at a glance.

I do have two complaints (without having really looked into it yet). The first is that you have issues disabled on GitHub, and the second is that it took some effort to locate the Github link.

I suggest linking to the source in a more prominent way— perhaps on the downloads page. If I'm going to be using this, I'm definitely going to be interested in contributing.
UT Austin is heavy into the theory, but if you're not a self-starter learning practical programming skills on the side, through internships and side projects (there are places in town that won't hire you straight out of UT without side projects or internships because you don't have any practical skills), there are two new programs that make UT Austin especially valuable.

First is the Longhorn Startup program, which is a joint program between Engineering, Business and Natural Sciences, which gives you credit for launching a startup. You get mentors, lean startup coursework, help, support, office space, etc., and it's run by Bob Metcalfe (of ethernet fame) and Josh Baer (of the Capital Factory incubator). (I was a design mentor Fall 2012 semester and will likely be a mentor again in the future.) http://www.1semesterstartup.com

Second is the new Gaming Academy, which just started, led by Warren Spector and Paul Sams: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2013/05/14/university-of-texas-at... You have to have a Bachelor's already, but it's an interesting program, and it complements UT's existing game development program, which is joint between CS and RTF: http://gamedev.utexas.edu
> No it not! It's pure chemicals mixed together.

Um, so is food. All food.

Do you have any idea how many chemical reactions happen when you make and cook food? Have you studied each and every chemical reaction?

PS. I'm not trying to say this is a good idea. But complaining it's bad because it's "chemicals" is ridiculous. Read this thread - there are plenty of well reasoned arguments against it.
Isn't that Microsoft is attempting with Windows Phone? The differentiation is based on applications while the base functionality remains the same.
Funny, for a "most common command", I had to `man df` even though I've used Linux for ages :) Turns out I only checked my diskspace in the GUI File Explorer, never in the terminal. And at uni, the command was `quota` (but that might be a diy script they used there, as `man` doesn't recognize the command).
silo? oh, just because of THE READER again...
Looks like you have to get a business account. Which is reasonably priced. So yeah, I was wrong, it's still possible to get it. Kind of a hack, but you can get it.
Bad analogy - you are escalating the situation from talk to violence. It's nothing like talking on the web about how others talk on the web. Your analogy would better suit "I didn't like what he said, so I DDoS'd the server" - escalating whats going on.
nope not revolutionary or new at all. Just that they are actually going through with it. With the free marketing they are getting, they have a shot at making mixing-chemicals-into-food a profitable business! And unless they are profitable, they can't afford to be charitable.
Agreed, one of my favorite product blogs as well. It's also prime example of using your blog to educate, demonstrate domain knowledge, and eventually win customers (worked on me, anyways).
> Airbnb could use their own lawyers to help out with this conundrum and gift the resulting work product to landlords.

That sounds like an excellent idea. You should suggest it to Airbnb (seriously). They have already shown themselves willing to provide legal assistance to users, so they may very well be open to this as well.
If I am understanding the problem correctly...

Apple implemented app signing by default in 10.8. Users can either turn this off in System Preferences (removing the error), or the LibreOffice team can pay the $100 annual fee to get a properly signed app.
I am currently studying this behaviour anyway. I am certain that humans do use fractal search algorithms too. Predators use Levy based algorithms.

Remembering things that you hear can cause a phonetic fractal search.
Remembering things you see can cause a holographic fractal search.

4 dimensions: time, x,y,z where x,y,z aren't just positions. They can be neurons connected with a firing pattern or more.

Do your research, have to stop myself.. this is truly fantastic. I enjoy it too much :)
You spelled Vim wrong.
I know that Mozilla has made a concerted effort to improve their public relations and "get out there" more, but it really seems like the Moz crew is just churning out innovations and interesting products one after another.