skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's really cheaper than making your own food. If you buy it for a month and you eat it three times a day, it ends up being about $2.5 per meal, or $7.5 a day. My breakfast costs me $.5 to $1, so that leave $3.5 per meal. It's probably what I average already, if not less. I think I spend about $100 maximum on groceries per week for my girlfriend and me, and that includes extras like an occasional bottle of wine.

I think I remember him saying that the recipe was "open source", maybe you could just make it yourself to save.

I can see his saving time argument though. Although there are days I gladly spent an hour or more in my kitchen, some days when I'm busy or lazy I would consider it.

Sidenote - calling this "corporation", I don't know if it's a joke or just poor marketing.
Trust yourself on the food industry is stupid too. Please. Stop eat junk food.

But you still eat them right?
It means "we haven't really looked into that too hard."
Probably because these were designed to be printed on a plotter, not a conventional printer, and thus line art is the standard.
They could publish these reasons to the angry users who are being cut off from their contacts by this. Not doing it shows the low culture of Google in regards to treating users. Evil or not evil, it's simply indecent.
Super Bowl 2016 comes to Silicon Valley (san francisco)
Impact is the new sexy
I'm fine with being positive on the next fun cat photo sharing service, no evil has ever come from that, but they are advertising this as a complete replacement for all your meals without even telling as much as whats in it.

That, frankly, should be illegal, and it probably is.
Is it really ethical to try to get as much money out of your customers? If you are making a profit after all costs are considered, how much profit is too much?

Is this also true with regards to charging more as a consultant/freelancer or about negotiating a better salary? We see a lot of stories like that on here too.

The problem is defining 'greed' is hard. Is a software developer asking for a $100k salary inherently 'greedy' for earning more than double the average US wage? Is someone earning $20k and pushing for a raise to $30k 'greedy' because someone in Africa lives on $1 a day?

Earning $100-150k in a year from a few e-books might seem 'greedy' in some ways, but then you could compare it to the textbook author who supposedly spent $24m building a house from the profits on some calculus textbooks.. ;-) http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/where-the-mo...

Rather than have such (unresolvable) debates, it tends to be simpler to rely on economics and charge what the market will bear because while it's not perfect, it's as fair and objective a value as could be arrived at through even the most perfect of debates.
But Hulu/Netflix sales don't drive Xbox sales. I can just as easily watch them from a PS3 (or a Roku box).
"I have to guess it's based on those of us who started as PC gamers and then went to consoles"

Seems to be a lot of marketing hoping my kid will stop watching youtube and playing minecraft on his android tablet and move to their console. This might be a problem as people are not so cool with rebuying everything if you upgrade from one iphone to the next or one android phone/tablet to the next.

The problem with the xbox one is next (whatever) GOOG and APPL release the next generation of tablets with a HDMI out. Now what? Pay 99 cents at play.google.com or $70 for a xbox game? Pay $200 oh wait you already own a nexus 7 of course so its actually $0, or pay $400 for a new xbox?
We have following and blocking of users and domains over at hubski (originally an hn clone) and it works pretty well. In particular being able to completely block someone from your feed and/or prevent them from commenting on your posts.
I love AirBNB for finding a place to stay. Here are thoughts on how I might feel in other roles:

* landlord: I'd have an issue with a high volume of non-tenants coming in and out of my building without permission.

* hotel operator: I'd rather the supply of hotel rooms be limited. The fewer rooms, the more demand for my rooms!

* insurance company: guest of AirBNB guest does something bad and the cost of dealing with it is high. What a mess.

* mayor: publicly I'm against it because hotels fund my election campaigns. Privately, I stay in AirBNB rooms while in vacation because civil service doesn't pay much (albeit it wouldn't surprise to find mayors are rarely broke)

* neighbor: there's too much noise coming from that place down the hall. They are rude and have no vested interest in being nice because they don't live here.

AirBNB is a fabulous service to use and I understand why it has opponents.
Wait until Microsoft unveils its first ever XBOX TV.
> what is the "Los Gatos" in reference to?

Presumably the town of Los Gatos (a relatively wealthy suburb of San Jose). Why Los Gatos in particular? I have no idea.
Ah, the PS4 presentation didn't really make that clear enough for my thick skull. Thanks for the clarification.
I think HN's hatred of Soylent has been increasing exponentially as we get closer to a mass-market release. What's with all the negativity? If you don't like it, don't buy it -- easy as that.

It may not be the perfect product, but at least it's pushing some boundaries. I, for one, am excited to get my hands on a batch and let the results speak for themselves.
Though to be fair nothing is stopping someone else from stepping up and doing the work. It's just on hold from the point of view of full-time employees on the devtools team until then...
...compared to eating out. His comparison was eating out almost every meal. $230 is cheaper than grocery shopping for a month for a lot of people too.
Several people have tried the recipe and can vouch for it.

If you don't like it, don't buy it.
You can't make blanket statements like "Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition." because people might think they can eat Soylent and nothing else. I won't say they are breaking the law. All I am saying is they need a lot of clinical trial to cover their butts in court.
They use a whey protein - I don't believe the formula contains soy.
It would be more like calling it Program 1 after releasing Program and Program Upgrade.
I really was looking for help with this, I spent some time delving into the perl modules and tracing the errors, I came up onto some collection of Debconf modules that just did not seem to have a central "source" of the problem, just a lot of co-dependent requires and I could not trace back to find what needed repair.

It's somewhere there, in /usr/share/debconf/frontend. If I knew what package had problems, I could fix it with `dpkg` or even `ar -x`, since Apt-Get really wants Debconf and friends to work in order to do its job... but as-is, I can't even install any version of dash from the correct repositories without bombing out in post-install, and I feel really lucky to even have a shell to attempt a fix, at this point.

If anyone has a Pi and they're comfortable breaking it (to see for yourself, or to help me figure it out), change your apt-sources to like this:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy main

If you are on raspbian and your arch is armhf, proceeding through `apt-get update && apt-get -uy dist-upgrade` will almost totally hose your system. Reboot, log in, have a keyboard and mouse for the next part.

Network/interfaces will be broken so you'll need those, because you just ruined /bin/ip, it will segfault. Keep a copy of the old iproute package from raspbian, or be sure you know how to use ifconfig and route to get back online so you can download another one, since dhclient will also be hosed. It either segfaults or depends on /bin/ip.)

The only way to come back from this I've found is re-flashing the original raspbian image. I can't do it because my SD card does not read in my laptop / I'm stubborn and convinced that it can still be fixed.

You will not be able to install any packages that have Debconf post-install hooks, b/c illegal instruction in perl, some depended module. That's the part I can't figure out.

A lot of other things will be broken until you revert libc6 and libstdc++6 to the version provided by raspbian. At this point,

dpkg --get-selections|cut -f 1

and

apt-get --reinstall install

are your best friends. But it won't fix everything. It needs Debconf to be intact for some things to complete.
Is Soylent better for me than carrot juice, oatmeal and eggs? Now I just chose three random foodstuffs, but at least I know what they are and what they contain.
The Story of an Eyewitness [SF 1906 Earthquake]
I have and I actually thought it helped a good bit, but then I got lazy and started writing test cases only after I develop.
Five unanswered questions about the Xbox One
Thanks for reminding me again why I'm not in The Valley. Seems to me the place has become a very trendy echo chamber, more of a hot fashion and marketing center than a center of innovation or creativity.
Political affiliation seems like a red herring in a two party system. It wouldn't surprise me if people in SV vote democrat because they don't like certain things associated with the republicans (religion , anti-gay rights, guns , whatever) rather than agreeing wholesale with the democratic party manifesto.
Not to mention that there's a line of reasoning for 1%ers to support the democratic party's centrist economic policies in the name of self-interest -- richer consumers to buy stuff means more sales for those selling it, better infrastructure is good for business, etc.

Some might disagree with that reasoning but it's really missing the mark to consider rich democrats as some sort of 'self hating rich' or 'culture voters ignoring economic policy'.
I went to school in Minnesota and distinctly remember playing Duck, Duck, Goose in kindergarden. This was some years ago, but I would not say there is a lack of controversy in Minnesota.

But then, I always say "teach the controversy" :)
Oops, I meant to upvote you, but I think I accidentally downvoted you. I think the distinction from what patio11 is talking about here is important — not all complaints about pricing structures boil down to "this is too expensive."
Your "google search; copy url; paste" is showing.
If the micro-blogging platform is worth $1.1 billion then a platform which will solve the problem we are discussing here might be worth more.

Maybe you can outsource comments moderation to a group of competing startups. Not for all posts but for 10% or 20% of front page posts. Maybe we will see a "pagerank" algorithm for comments or something more clever.
Those are not outtakes. Outtakes are bad exposure, hand obscuring the lens, ghosting, etc. Objectively bad work. It's more like why you wouldn't want to give up all the functions you ended up throwing out when doing a development gig.

I do think that not giving the majority of the acceptable files is silly though. Most photographers often seem to greatly overvalue their work. Not that good ones don't exist, but craigslist is overwhelmed with talentless photogs who overspent on gear and put obnoxious watermarks on everything.
You may have a good point. But I don't think it's feasible to buy a Atmega2560 and then build a custom pcb. Majority would rather buy an Arduino Mega for their project and be done with it rather than building a custom board.

My previous comment tries to convey that you need to leave the Arduino in the project instead of just using it as a prototyping platform once you go SMD. Well sure, that'd increase sales for arduino boards.
Technically he says he thinks he broke some FDA rules. His phrasing could've been better, but his point stands--perhaps it's false advertising? This is what the campaign site said:

"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition."

After that, they don't offer any comprehensive list any ingredients, any recipe, any nutritional information (if you find any, I'd be glad to retract this point). Also, as far as I know from the guy's blog, the idea is to replace your diet with Soylent (and water, I guess). Surely that's false advertising, by saying your food can replace all other foods, while your food hasn't even been tested yet? I'm sure if it was just some fruit smoothie thing they could get away with saying that it's a healthy food. But as a complete, all-round food-replacement? I'd be careful with that.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsEKV0eF0YrqdHR...

I'm not certain who's maintaining or how up to date this is; but here is the one I'd previously seen. There may be better data sources around.
Without going on with the almost certainly absurd claim you can be perfectly healthy, indefinitely, eating one shake.. There does seem to be a lot of interest, I think mostly from people interested in the saving of time and still getting good nutrition.

To those people, I highly recommend green protein smoothies.

They aren't cheap, really, but they are fast and done right they taste good and will take an otherwise mediocre diet to better than 99% of people without much other change (I am not a doctor, just an observer).

Some fruit, some leafy greens, some nuts, optionally some protein powder (my favorite had been pea protein, but my nutritionist recommended alternating protein sources every few weeks of doing it regularly).

Adding in some thing like vitamineral green and you are really doing alright. Spending about 3-400 USD on a good blender and you can have an über healthy, delicious meal replacement in minutes with about 30 seconds of clean up.

A mediocre blender still make the experience less enjoyable when using nuts and tough greens like kale.

Expect an 800 calorie shake to cost maybe 3-5 bucks to put together depending on your tastes, whether you go organic, and access to produce.
Automate Repetitive Typing with Snippits for Linux.
Remember the two bulls joke from Colors? [1]

Think of Dave Winer as Robert Duvall. He's telling you a story about the promises and reality of acquisitions.

Those of you complaining about him? You're Sean Penn.

Thing is, someday you'll be telling this to a young 'un, just like Penn did at the end of the movie.

"The explanations required by the young are wearying." [2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbUxePfsoWE

[2]: Look it up.
It appears as if only one of the founding individuals has a degree in anything remotely pertaining to nutrition (David Renteln, degree in "Human Evolutionary Biology").

Speaking as a biochemist who works in the biotech industry, this looks to be like a gigantic train wreck just waiting to happen.

At first glance, I would be convinced these individuals know very little about the science behind their product. They all have a bunch of fancy business acronyms next to their name, yet the majority of this group appears to have little scientific background.

Website annoyances:

- Why is a benzene ring in the background of their logo? Sure, the benzene moiety is prolific and crucial throughout biological systems, but plain benzene is a toxic carcinogen.

- Why is their favicon cyclohexane instead of benzene, if that was why they're going for?
If you have showdead off, someone said "ideas & market validation."
Nice! it definitely got me typing! Good luck
You might "rather" have more protein and less fat but you have no clue if that is what you need. If they market the product as a dietary supplement, then they will not have to list nutrition facts and will be able to say this is a "Proprietary Blend". This is a very common practice among supplement companies and can be witnessed by going to your local GNC.
Data Science and the Value of Design
I really loved the insight about how tech companies distribute the wealth created by their growth. When it goes widely you end up with people like Charlie Ayers (Google's chef) who are able to leave and create their own restaurants (more jobs, more creativity). When you keep all the wealth generation to a hand picked set of individuals, it seems you create obligation and cronyism.

And for me, the most amazing part, is that since it looks externally 'easy', success results in a rush of folks who want to do that too.

When people ask my advice about interviewing at a place like Google I tell them, "Don't interview at Google just because you want to work at Google, interview there because there is something you want to accomplish that you can do more easily at Google than anywhere else." Or people asking for advice on creating a startup, where one of the questions is "What should I build?"

Here is a news alert :-) If you don't already feel passionately about building something you don't want to be the person starting the startup. Work at one or two and figure out what it takes to build a company, what works and what doesn't, and be thinking about how your talents might solve a problem in a way that would be useful. Until then, don't quit your day job.
Ever since I heard about this project I've been trying to make my own version.

I've found it's surprisingly hard to make something healthy that doesn't make me gag. So far I tried egg protein powder mixed with chia seeds, olive oil, plain yogurt and a banana.

I'm now thinking I'd be better off with something solid that I could eat on the go. I haven't seen a good recipe though.
Ask HN:Someone mis-using company name and charging non-customers
We are early stage company with recurring online subscription.

Recently few unknown individuals(not our users) contacted us asking us to refund the amount and claiming that they have not heard about our service before.

Turns out that there is some 'unknown' entity/person with similar name who have somehow acquired card info of these persons(not our customers) and making it look like its our startup.

No one picks up the phone number given in the credit card statement these individuals are sharing, and there is no data i can find if I am doing paid phone look up.

So far I am asking these individuals to file dispute, but I am concerns that its hurting our credibility.

Any thoughts on what can be done?
>Looking at the log: thanks for reminding me why I no longer do IRC.

Precisely my feeling. It's been at least 12 years yet seeing that stereotypical smiley self-importance took me right back.
> True libertarians would be repulsed at the thought, but the success of Silicon Valley even suggests that governments could do much more to encourage these kinds of internal compensation structures, in the name of better business and social cohesion. (Not to mention old-fashioned fairness.)

Wait, what part did the government play in how tech-companies compensate their employees fairly? Or does he mean the government should be applying to same structure by force on companies in other industries (to share equity with employees)?

Does the author not understand the difference between startup culture vs big business?
The study you cite confirming their claims sounds bulletproof.
Hacker News would be very quiet if no-one commented and everybody made their purchasing decisions in quiet. This is a controversial diet, it is not clear if it is viable food replacement and it can affect your health, especially what are the effects long-term? Their page pitches environmental concerns, and I find that ridiculous. Are they serious that they aim for Soylent to be a large part of what people eat globally in the future?
Probably about the same percent as individuals who rent out their apartment long-term?
Apple stock has been a fluke. They generate so much income that they have insanity type cash reserves. Any company would kill for their sales and would love to have that type of cash on hand.
I trust handlebars with all my user inputs.
False. There is no law that requires them to qualify "structure or function claims". They can claim it makes you 200 feet tall, and it doesn't matter, because it is not a drug and it has nothing to do with listing ingredients on the label.

However, false advertising claims are handled by the FTC. I suggest you talk to them before the FDA.

edit: For a court case to be effective the plaintiff has to prove that the product does not work; the burden of proof is not on the manufacturer, according to FDA regulations. Depending on wording this could require a long testing period with many people for a judge to take it seriously.
The Biggest Pivot in YC History
It's true, though -- under current law, you get a free pass for the majority of evidential requirements just by calling your product a "supplement". As long as they don't explicitly state that it can cure something specific (see e.g. Airborne, which made that mistake), the above wording you quoted isn't much different from the junk you see all over labels in health food stores.
What's your position on Daeken's hack of the hotel room locks then?
Is it just me, or can you barely hear the guys on the video? They need a microphone.
What will you do if they make encryption illegal?

A reason why there reportedly are backdoors in skype is because of government requirements.

For eg. see this news article about India asking Skype to setup local servers in India

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infra...
Guys, please don't do this. We've met at YC, and I think you are great guys, but some things in the video are false.

Soylent is definitely not "perfectly tailored to your body" and it probably isn't "everything the body needs", for the simple reason that nobody has any idea what the body needs, let alone how to tailor a perfect diet. Nutrition research is extremely complex and fraught with false findings. When John Ioannidis said that most medical research findings are false he singled out nutrition and genetics as the most problematic fields.

False advertising this particular product can be dangerous because a lot of people get obsessed about diet and health, and tend to cling to whatever subset of findings they happen to have heard, and then treat the whole thing religiously.

Some nutritional deficiencies become apparent only after years and then possibly only in people with a certain genetic makeup.

You are targeting a population that adopts health fads like they were the ten commandments, and are trying to sell a product that has properties you can't possibly know. Please stop because you may inadvertently hurt people.
Go back and re-watch the PS4 talk. It was mostly empty and mostly vapid. There were less details given than the Xbox presentation. They showed a controller and that vibrator-looking glowing thing you see in porn. The most interesting bit technology-wise was the old man head. I'll admit that was very cool but I wanted more info.
Who says it is?
Why does it look like a VCR?
I clicked the lost password link on a site handling legal documents the other day and they sent me a plaintext copy of my password via unencrypted email.

There may be issues with a central identity provider, but given the wide range of horrible choices implemented by so many different websites I think the assumption that keeping identity between you and the site owner is a better choice than trusting a central provider is true only in a limited number of cases.

If I hadn't hit the lost password link I never would have known that they keep an unencrypted copy of my password. Finding one trustworthy central provider at least protects you from unknowingly trusting a large number of incompetent providers.
This is not rocket science. Many people have been waiting years now for the new generation consoles to come out. Sony and Microsoft will be having a good year as the rest of the consoles out there are a joke.
I wanted to be a architect when I was younger.