skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad such eccentric projects are pursued – they're how progress happens – but it's still the case that...

(a) Both the 1973 Charlton Heston movie and mixed, some-negative health connotations of the word 'soy' make the chosen name for the product problematic.

(b) The argument for its safety – "We have been testing Soylent on ourselves for several months and the data shows it to have a positive nutritional benefit" – creates little confidence compared to thousands of years of alternate practice, and strong evidence the human system needs some variety/chaos for optimal health/resilience.
The campaign's powered on the open-source Crowdhoster platform, which is a Crowdtilt project.
They recently wrote a blog post about updates to the platform: http://blog.crowdtilt.com/post/50939274192/updating-crowdhos...
Intel Xeon Phi - hardware
I just don't get his emphasis on outliners. You can't model any kind of many-to-many relationship with that. Outlines don't even reflect how we think.
Going one level meta, there's a specific thing that bugs me in this discussion. I'm seeing the words "abuse" and "butthurt" used a lot. Using either word makes a claim that the negativity in the previous thread was or was not excessive. But it doesn't make an argument to that effect. It's just an unsupported, emotion-tugging claim. That's bad debate. Please stop.
Most of the comments here focus on Microsoft, Sony, and gamers; I'd like to (indirectly) bring the traditional cable co into the discussion.

Last semester several Comcast reps gave my class a presentation which included a summary of their media strategy, a demo of their new cable TV platform/cable box, and a Q&A section. Their new cable box (a small, black, ATV-like 'dumb' set-top box) is progressive: it has a modern UI, connects to the Xfinity cloud platform, and can be updated through software rather than hardware changes.

However, one student asked their VP of Media Acquisition a simple question: "Who is your biggest competitor?" His answer shocked us.

"Microsoft."

At the time (~March), he told us Comcast expected Microsoft to stage a coup to claim "input A," the consumer's primary content interface. Traditionally, consumers would have their cable boxes plugged into input A and their gaming consoles plugged into input B. Microsoft, he said, would attempt to take over input A by including a cable jack in the back of the Xbox and offering live TV alongside streaming/web browsing/apps/games.

Looks like he was spot on.
Some people said that it was only a matter of time before this person started charging money for this crank product, and I guess this proves them right.

He's making a number of health claims on that page. I'm curious about the legality of doing so; it's not legal in the UK unless he meets some pretty strict criteria.

> If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive.

Waste food is a serious problem and something needs to be done. I'm not sure there's a connection between food waste and world hunger.

> 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone

This could be an interesting problem. Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.
Where do you think bullshit comes from anyway? Bull assholes. n.n
Is Fragmentation Of Standards Opening Us Up For Further Exploits?
Please don't break CTRL + W.
Corporate “Work” is the most elaborate victim-shaming structure ever devised.
They are not clear on how they host email and IMAP is offered in the top most tiered type of account.

BTW, their interface is most famous out there, I guess. AtMail right?
Really cool quest.
Is crowdhoster trustworthy?
I don't think so, not for just flagging but there does seem to be a way HN can find this type of behaviour and ignore the actions of users that abuse the voting system. read this for some more info http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ
Kickstarter is for creative projects with a finite ending point. For example, you can't launch a website and raise funds on Kickstarter so you can pay engineers -- it needs to be a concrete project, not "I want to start a company." The same is true for Soylent, it isn't framed as a project.
I went to college in the early 90's... just thought I'd share the sense that programmers have gotten more polite over time.

That could either be that the community is creating norms that make all programmers more polite, or, just that programmers as a group tend to get more polite as they get older.
Most diet shakes aren't marketed as being fully nutritious. This has all the vitamins your body craves; as in I think you could eat this forever with no side effects, but that (to my knowledge) has never been tested with diet drinks (because they can claim that it's your responsibility to get the right nutrients).
I think you missed the point. Its no about whether it can play games or no- its about if there are any innovations in the feature set than before.

If iPhone reveals had innovations in the way we make phone calls- then yes that would be very interesting to watch. In fact when Apple released iOS6, they did talk about this, ie. regarding how you can choose actions when receiving a call.
Be very, very careful. Ideally, if you can afford it, have a doctor evaluate your health (particularly blood chemistry) before and then after a few weeks. Not only would it be useful to you, it'd be informative to everyone considering this.
You're aware that the content is illegal as they have confirmed it - otherwise you might have had doubt
The logo seems to be a benzene ring. When I see that I think "poison" not "health"
Also, the quotations from the early adopters...they could at least say who said those things, never mind whether or not they actually said them.
In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots
Just got back from camping and my friend had a Coleman version of this:

http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-Self-Inflating-Camp-Pad-Pillow...

The head pillow is the traditional inflatable thing, but the main pad is exactly as you described.
But everyone can speak, right? "Xbox, watch Netflix" --> instantly looking at Netflix. No need for multiple or big universal remotes, no switching inputs, etc.

I love my Roku, and I have no plans to get an Xbox 360 as I'm sure many of the features will require an XBL subscription. But the vision? I'm there with the vision.
Still, I'd be amazed if it's less than $300 new.
The fundamental error of this piece is that it assumes that if you vote Democratic, you're by definition not a one-percenter.

What? Much of the article is devoted to making the opposite point: that the SV elite overwhelmingly support the Democrats.
The "10Ks of millionaires" figure is striking, but the Bay area is ~8M people and ~2.5M households, so thats ~1-4% of households are millionaires. People using liquidity cash to buy houses isn't nearly a strong an effect regionwide as high salaries and building restrictions.
You might want to avoid Ensure. In a test where it was used in place of the standard glucose solution for an oral glucose tolerance test, it caused 2 hour blood glucose levels over 180 mg/dl in some subjects.

Sure, it's marketed as having a low glycemic index — but the GI of chocolate cake and ice cream is even lower...
MS is saving a lot for E3 - this is some pretty early speculation and mostly known stuff. If we get pricing at dates at E3, that will be the big mover on this.
Senators Turn Tim Cook's Hearing into a Genius Bar Visit
The only difference that matters between friendly exchanges (cooking and room/board) and AirBnB or underground restaurants is that one set of actions threaten the existing power brokers who have the ear of City Hall. No one blinks when you disrupt file sharing or social networking, but disrupt automotive, taxis, or hotels (for example) and you're in a world of legal hurt. I fully understand that these zoning laws that AirBNB is running afoul of have existed for some time, but, as others pointed out, there are plenty of private, non-coercive ways to solve this same problem. They were codified into law because some powerful incumbent business sought to benefit financially from it.

The other differences between these different transactions, while perfectly valid distinctions, are simply ex post rationalizations made by those who support the entity in power (in this case city hall).
The other thing that nobody seems to have brought up is the forks, descendants and similar pieces of software it inspired in one way or another: e.g. memcachedb, Tokyo Cabinet, Redis, etc. Memcached's release was very much a watershed moment.
QBS: Query-by-Synthesis - A way to optimize by pushing app logic to query
This one perhaps?
http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-fun-zone/pokemon-online-ga...
So, it's a diet shake where the company is liable?

Man, i'm dying to be able to live on shakes (I already do, protein shakes and soluble fiber when i'm out of time) but claiming you can go on and on on just one food source for long periods of time without extensive testing is just irresponsible.
While I'd love for those things to come to pass, it's alarming that you elide methods and obstacles entirely. The democratic process has been purchased by the entities you're proposing to regulate, and the entities that you propose enforce these new rules, are beneficiaries of the current arrangement and would be greatly inconvenienced by the changes you propose. The beneficiaries of the current arrangement will resist changes to that arrangement with utmost vigor, so it doesn't speak well of your proposal that it supposes that they will cooperate with changes that are against their interests by handwaved methods and tactics.

How are you going to get from here to there?
Well, the Sony PS4 event was actually fairly well done, especially in comparison. There was a lot of noise about them holding off on showing the actual box, but they talked extensively about games, about the things you could do with the console like screen sharing with friends, and about what the new hardware meant for developers and the kinds of doors it'd open for games.

It certainly wasn't without flaw, but it did get me somewhat excited about a console I didn't really have any interest in before the event.
I've been doing the same thing for about 2 years, couldn't be happier.

However, try getting live HD sports on it without a cable subscription. If Microsoft's NFL deal can deliver that (which I think is way too good to be true), it might be worth adding to the home theatre stack alongside the HTPC. I'd love to see Windows 8 on an HTPC touted as an Xbox One+, however.
Indeed, the hand-waving and un-attributed testimonials are of the same class of support usually provided for ideas like Breatharianism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breatharianism
The one actual person I got was nice and listened to me, even though they knew nothing about the issue at all. Everyone else dumps you to a full voicemail box, which is pretty sad.
Can someone explain to me what the relation between NYSE:SNE and TYO:6758 is? Obviously the latter is the "real" Sony, but not traded until Tokyo opens. Do you get the same shares when you buy at NYSE? Thanks.
I just bought your book. I'm hoping it can help with marketing my existing books, and selling them directly online. I currently sell on amazon.

If you're interested in print, it's actually very easy. I used Aaron Shepard's books to get a rough idea of how things worked, and also found a freelancer who showed me the ropes. His 'Plan B' is great advice for how to get amazon to discount your book without reducing your royalties.

If you have any questions about POD, I'd be happy to help. My email's in my profile.
Shameless plug re plausible deniability: http://www.espionageapp.com

It's nice because in the next update (to be released this month, v3.5), you'll be able to do things like encrypting your email and having it in two different versions of it (one for you, and one for those you don't want knowing what your actual email is). You can already do it in the current version, it's just not as user-friendly.

It will only protect data that's kept encrypted on your local drive though, so with the example of email, it doesn't protect you from the government if your email is also stored on Google's servers.
Yes. Because I read 90% of the books I buy cover to cover and I forget about 90% of ebooks after reading a few pages.

I don't want to pay $30 for something I won't read. A physical book is there, it begs to be read. Even if I put it away for months on end, I will still eventually read it. Ebooks ... eh, I have tens if not hundreds on my ipad that I've never gotten past the first ten pages.
Early Birds (on early morning productivity)
I don't know. SeaMonkey and all my console tools can load it, but my firefox 20.0 install is being buggy. I have e-mailed you two tcpdump logs and more details.
Thanks for the suggestion - and I've considered this - but from what I can tell you can't reliably sync more than one speaker using Airplay? I'd like to sync between more than one room if possible.
This is one that I think, barring a critical security concern, I'll give a couple of days before adopting. At least.
So no XNA replacement?
Plenty more bans are being made. To be fair, the topic itself states: Breaking NDA, asking about warez, hackintosh, unsupported VMs or proprietary information = kickban. Obviously this is proprietary information, so it doesn't belong in ##apple.
Yes, but everyone had told them over and over again to change that, they just wanted to maintain control. It certainly wasn't a new invention of diggs, I just used slashdot as the example of reddit being a clone because slashdot was the most well known. kuro5hin was(is?) exactly digg/reddit for example. Social bookmarking sites were around before slashdot too.
The Airbnb model, injecting personal reputation into a transaction. (In this case a non-monetary one.)
I lost my ability to flag. I have no idea why, I assume I flagged one too many posts that ended up as popular. Just as well. One less distraction for me.
I'm extremely interested in this...concept.

But for someone trying to hack nutrition this way, you would think they would open the ingredients, or at least offer research sources.

Knowing the contents of Soylent isn't going to stop anyone from buying it (convenience), but it would allow people to understand some of these bold claims.
Conflating libertarians with Republicans doesn't make sense anywhere. The simplified definition I give people who ask me what a libertarian is is "someone who is economically conservative but socially liberal." The conventional "Republican = conservative, Democrat = liberal" model of American politics casts a vector quantitiy as a scalar.
I'm actually really pissed off at this product -- as with many, I've had both high hopes and reservations since the start of this whole ordeal.

With me being a college student with a VERY limited budget I get very little nutrition that's needed for my body to operate normally. I was so turned on to this product because it was initially advertised to cost the creator between $50 and $100 per month. Now, all of a sudden it's going to cost me $230 just to get started.

It's starting to sound more and more like a scam; I'm pretty livid.
Ask HN: If you weren't coding for a living, what would you like to be doing?
Thanks - this is interesting. We switched to the Airport thinking that might improve things because our old Netgear router is really old - but maybe I'll try switching back or try a Linksys or something.
I can't help but feel that this is such an 'engineers' solution to something that isn't really a problem - whilst I agree that a cheap, reliable and efficient way to feed a lot of people is something that the world is sorely in need of, I can't understand why someone would opt for this through choice and not necessity.

Which is nothing more than a failure of my imagination, of course, and I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone who does is defective in any way, but I feel like most of life's greatest pleasures come directly from the preparation and consumption of food. To want to get rid of these pleasures in the name of efficiency is a strange argument to my mind.

I'm 100% behind the vat grown meat brigade on this one.
Although some of the lofty stated goals of this project seem commendable, this is one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time. I can't tell if it's a joke, but I hope that it is.
A rumor I had read (can't find where now, take with many grains of salt) is part of the reason the thing is so large and, well, xbox huge, is that the cooling solution for the box is nearly silent and to do that necessitated the size.
but he clearly states that despite the heavy libertarian leaning culture, SV overwhelmingly voted for Democrats the last few elections, indicating they were not on board with the Republican platform.

The author seems to use this fact to negate the idea that many in SV lean libertarian:

If libertarianism is so rampant in Silicon Valley, why are they voting for higher taxes and funding a big government liberal by such overwhelming numbers?

The premise that voting for the Democratic Party is the opposite of a "Gilded Age" is confusing to me though - it seems too reductive to assume that every person who voted for a Democrat is an ardent redistributionist who wants to see the welfare state expanded. I agree with your take on the politics of the region though.

Also, I wish that the title "Learning from Los Gatos" was explained in any way - what is the "Los Gatos" in reference to?
Nice!

Tiny suggestion: would prefer a fixed terminal font (courier, consolas, whatever) rather than a Times Roman-ish serif font. Think it would look better and more authentic.
Having worked with both, they are not quite the same type of people. You might find some similar personality traits (ego, intelligence, and/or arrogance). But there is one major difference: The typical Silicon Valley worker is much more capable of creating a product or service than the average Wall Streeter.

This is anecdotal, but the i-bankers I have worked with and met generally have a limited skillset which boils down to Excel spreadsheet manipulation, 10K reading, and Powerpoint presentations.

The skillset of Silicon Valley employees crosses a wider intellectual range (CS, statistics, math, art+design, EE, other hard sciences). Their knowledge is also deeper in a wider breadth of fields and can put their knowledge to work.
Stock prices are influenced by so many factors. Sony stock is up over 100% year to date, and the entire market is hitting all time highs. There could be a short squeeze, it could be due to broader economic data, some technical indicator, or a hedge fund upping their stake in Sony:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/hedge-fund-manager-da...

I really doubt it has much to do with a Microsoft presentation.
They actually noted that

"Unfortunately due to regulatory constraints, our initial runs of Soylent will be available within the United States only. We are diligently working to provide it worldwide as soon as possible."

So indeed the UK won't be seeing this sold (legally) anytime soon.

That said, I don't think it's really a case of whether or not Soylent is safe. Even if they have FDA approval, and produce Soylent under the strictest conditions of food safety, the real problem is their idea behind Soylent's use -- that it can replace a balanced diet. I'm sure it's safe to have it occasionally, if even a few portions of it everyday. But to virtually replace your diet? That's a bold claim, and with dangerous consequences at that.
Would be nice if you put nutrition facts on the campaign page. I wouldn't buy without seeing those. Here is what I found ("What's In Soylent?"): http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

The macronutrient breakdown based on calories per gram is 50% carbs, 13% protein, 37% fat, if I'm not mistaken. I'd rather have a bit more protein and a bit less fat, personally.
DDG is my default search engine now, but I avoided it for a couple of years because of the silly name.
I agree.

I often record the audio off a video (if I can't directly download it) and listen to it at 300% speed when I'm doing other activities that don't require mental focus.
Google Finance needs a Google Now / card-like upgrade it looks like it was done a decade ago.

Maybe since PlayStation dedicates itself to new IPs and games that are not FPSs it's stock increased when people saw Xbox turning into a generic dell desktop / cable box.
The feature Sony announced for the PS4 is actually more powerful than that - it not only records, but also allows live screen streaming and sharing gaming sessions with friends remotely. One of the use cases they suggested was being able to have a friend take over and help you out if you were having a particularly hard time with a section of a game.
If this is related to the console reveal, one has to wonder what possible metrics analysts used to compare Sony's PS4 announcement to Xbox One's.
It's true that as a visitor of a website I will often already have an idea of what it is. But when I visit it, the first thing I want to know is whether that was correct.

Yes, all those in-channels imply context - but that context is often very different from place to place. We approach links we found on google differently than ads or links we found on social media and the information that's already given will differ. A simple description, or more broadly, anything that quickly makes clear what you do, isn't primarily for informing random visitors who had no idea, but for quickly getting everyone on the same page no matter where they come from.

I'm all for explaining what you do in such a way that it is also helpful in taking people that already know to the next step - but please, don't skip it entirely.
Same is true for sales-type emails, I'd say. All too often, the mistake is to "sell" the reader in the initial email. That only works if you're selling something incredibly compelling and easy to understand. Most startups don't have that. The goal, then, is more to pique interest; to make the reader want to learn more.

I've learned this lesson first hand more than once, unfortunately. If you make the entire sales argument in an initial email, then you have no chance to drive the conversation. You're giving the reader an opportunity to make a 0 or 1 decision before you even have the chance to explain a bit of the gray areas. Don't do that, if you can help it.
Yeah I would certainly say that building a messaging system of any type with the features of XMPP /from scratch/ would be hard. Then again, just compare the config files of sendmail and exim to prosody or ejabberd. Given that tools for working with xmpp already exist, it does seem a shame to me that it hasn't seen wider adoption. Wasn't Google Wave based on it?