skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I usually choose to read an article based on the comments. Also most times, it the comments that are interesting.
Ugh. People need to stop looking for the "magic bullet" to weight loss. Eat more vegetables, lean protein sources and less starches and sugar. It's not complicated, but it is no free-ride either.

Oh yeah, and get some exercise once in a while.
Yes, because everyone knows there are no fat people in india.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_India
While this piece focuses on the journalists themselves, the other aspect of the supply-and-demand perspective here is that society's requirements are shifting as well.

It could be that there simply isn't a widespread demand for the type of journalism whose decline we're observing. As generations pass, the older always seems to lament the loss of "quality and integrity" in their entertainment and news media.
This article strikes me as far too alarmist. Sure, it would be terrible if some guy in his garage concocts Black Plague 2.0 and accidentally (or intentionally) spills it all over a large city. But the author doesn't seem to assess anywhere the odds of this actually happening. I'm not a biologist, but I'd bet that engineering a disease in your closet potent enough to wipe out a significant fraction of the human race before anyone can come up with a vaccine is nontrivial even if one is deliberately striving toward that goal.

These sorts of diseases walk a fine line -- too lethal and they kill their hosts before spreading, too benign and they're ineffective; too many mutations and they quickly mutate into a benign strain, too few mutations and the immune system can build resistance (and a vaccine can be found). Personally, I'm going to put the likelihood of this threat in the same basket as "terrorists developing functional nuclear bomb."
Just keep in mind that making a career out of maintaining other peoples' C++ legacy code is a highly optimized way to become the bitterest person in the world.
Not really. It's obvious that we don't need the "lazy" journalists, the kind who just repost press releases with little analysis. Those are bound to go.

But we actually need less "proper" journalists too. A dozen proper, independent news outlets are probably sufficient to cover most world news from every important angle. Why should we need that coverage to be repeated a thousand times, for every major city? Why does the San Francisco Chronicle need someone covering the war in Iraq? Why does the Tribune de Genève need to cover american politics?

There is no need for this duplication of (good) coverage by proper journalists, when global, instant distribution is essentially free.

That is particularly true when you consider that the leading paper's stories will anyway be duplicated a hundred times over by thousands of bloggers who will inevitably capture all the minority viewpoints.
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This looks similar to BaseCamp.
What does runway have to separate it out from the competition?
Diabetes: I'd much rather have a surgery or procedure that could replace my Islet of Langerhans rather than take insulin 2 times a day and live with a strict diet the rest of my life. Many diabetics I know would agree. We don't have that treatment yet.

Migraines: Poorly understood and generally poorly treated with pain medicines. Anyone that says that they can be cured with diet is trying to sell you something. Again, if a simple procedure could be devised to end people's needless suffering from migraines, I'm sure vast numbers of people would elect the surgery.

Cardiovascular disease: One of the top killers in the US. Most people end up treating this with a procedure (Cardiac Stenting or Bypass Surgery). It's certainly not ideal, but that's what the majority of people in this country choose. Dietary treatment is somewhat helpful for this, but genetics play a huge roll in this, and pure dietary treatment isn't going to solve the problem.

Thyroid: The treatment for this is generally taking a dose of thyroid medicine every day. For some people with an overactive thyroid which can be life threatening, a thyroidectomy is done. Otherwise, daily doses of medicine are about as unpleasant as being constantly vigilant about your diet.
Why do you use 37Signals products? Simplicity, UI, Hype?
After watching various videos and seeing the growth of 37 Signals, it makes me curious why people use their applications. They clearly have less features and I don't see that as a large issue. Since they are mostly designers you would expect the UI/UX to be good. Finally I'm sure that some just jumped on their products because of the RoR hype. So if you use a 37 Signals product, why do you continue to use it?
About 3 months ago when we made a novelty app that turned your phone into a massager, it was originally called "Happy Ending". They rejected it for the sexual innuendo so we changed the name to Pocket Massage (lol), which was consistent with an exercise app we made called Pocket Workout.

Long story short, we tried leaving the Happy Ending name in japanese and in tiny detail on the app icon but it was rejected again. Certainly not the same as a well hidden easter egg, but I was surprised they took the time to translate the small details considering some of things that have made it through.
"The United States has also significantly closed the gap to the degree that China's total manufacturing costs are now only six percent below those of American factories, the study by AlixPartners business consultants indicated."

. . . .

"It compared the cost of making the items in China, India, Brazil and Mexico versus the US, tracking changes over three years in factors such as labour, overheads, exchange rates, transportation, and raw material costs."
> your reputation as a programmer will be lower if you don’t know it

I could learn C++, or I could learn Smalltalk, Scheme and Haskell in the same time and mental space.
This is a post from a comic. The daily Mail is not a reputable source for anything - least of all news and especially not news on health, medicine or diet.
I'm still surprised Apple went down the app-store road myself. A big strategic mistake IMHO.

Does anyone else just see it as a stop gap fad until we have free wifi all over the globe?
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Your comment is a bit Reddit like but I aprove the sentiment.
I've been using Basecamp since 2005 - simple, responsive UI, stable.

If you haven't read their manifesto on keeping things simple, you should - the 'lack' of features is intentional.
I agree with you but I know first hand that Google Checkout and PayPal offer a first tier of defense against it, you pay for it in the higher fees. For some people and depending on the state of their business, it's probably worth the time-savings, that's all I was really saying.
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Kilim: Fast, lightweight, cheap message passing in Java.
People need to stop looking for the "magic bullet" to transportation. You can walk, ride a horse, or take a boat. It's not complicated, but there's no free ride either.

;)

Some of us would prefer to spend less time "exercising", eat anything we want, and continue to be healthy and trim anyway. That's not yet possible, but it seems possible that it will be.
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> Instructions to activate your account have been sent to you. Please check your email.

nooooooooo
Please read the linked article. It makes a very persuasive argument that the very ability to deploy a mechanical army tips a government towards totalitarianism, as it takes human beings out of the decree-enforcement loop.
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Reality is that these people are the rich lot in India;their life style in general and food habits in particular more closely resemble western than Indian.

By that I don't in anyway suggest that Indian diet would help lose weight. I have no idea ....
I think you're underestimating how many of the writers out there may be freelancers/retained freelancers, rather than staff hacks. Eg the Islington Twaddler's Silicon Valley correspondent may just be a desperate stringer, flogging stories wherever she/he can...
How very misleading. The active ingredient is curcumin, not curry.

The rice and naan isn't going to help one bit with your weight loss, and curry is boring without them.
Actually, it's long been a source of wonder to me that that hasn't happened, given that Ted Taylor described how easy it would be in John McPhee's _The Curve of Binding Energy_ in the early 70s. Apparently people who have the resources and skills to pull off such a thing essentially never want to.
I like the simplicity and minimalism
I don't have to spend time learning another interface as theirs is stripped down and minimalist.

It's also easy for me to use with less technical people. As it's not overwhelming unlike some similar tools, they can start using Basecamp straight away. I don't have to sit down and give them a walk through.

I also like how it's flexible. I don't have to adjust my workflow to their software.
This pipe should do what you want:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=PCOTX0JF3hGLHmu1d...
The biologically engineered apocalypse has always been a popular bogeyman. Last year, the big scare was the biological terrorism:

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/busting_anthrax_myth

A lot of the same logic applies to Mr. Lind's article too.
Weight is definitely a complicated issue for many people, which should be evident by the amount of research still being done on the subject of weight gain and loss, and what really constitutes a healthy weight for people.
Funny, it seems to me that there are an awful lot of rich people that are good at sports. Shaq, Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, etc etc etc.
That in terms of 'effort -> usefulness', they are all 'flat' - i.e. generally equal in terms of usefulness and the effort required to attain some form of use. There are no single words that are more powerful or more significant than others - and all languages merely contain a collection of 'favoured words of a flavour', which as a whole don't really represent a greater or lesser degree of effort in regards to learning to use them. The thesis is this: All words are equally difficult or hard to learn and use.

Thus the effort required to use Assembly is equal to the effort required to use C or Python, with more or less equal boundaries in terms of the number of words and terms you will learn for any particular language. You can take two days to learn nothing but one language, and another two days to learn nothing but another language; the degree to which the progress of both of these periods is 'equal' is driven not by the words or language features themselves, but instead by your personal interest.

The average assembly programmer has to construct a taxonomy as equal in terms of effort as that of a Python programmer.

Now, bare with me here, because while I truly believe that 'all languages are flat', it is also a 'truism' that "personal interest drives the peaks in the effort curve".

That is to say, if you're not interested in Assembly, but you are interested in Python, it is your interest - not language features - that will be what drives the peaks and shallows in terms of the 'effort graph' in learning either Python or Assembly. This is not a function of the language, but instead of personal interest. I don't believe there are, for example "stupid people who can never learn Assembly and therefore must learn Python while there are 'more intelligent' people who easily become more proficient in Assembly" .. instead it is: "this person could learn either language, but their personal interest inclines them towards one over the other".

All languages are equal. Not all interests are equal. The degree of interest in a language drives its effectiveness in usage over that of another language.
despite that fact they have gone "lock in" on all their portable products so far with massive success.... ;)
I tried some of those gdb macros, but they did not work for me. Don't remember the details. In any case, in a recent debugging session, I noticed that gdb elides or loses some essential iterator features. For example, iterator->first and ->second do not show up if I execute the "p" command in gdb. The whole situation led me to claim that, at least in open-source Unixland, the C++ toolchain leaves a great deal to be desired.
Perhaps - are you saying that we need this person flogging stories?
It's certainly not impossible for such a thing to happen, but it requires enough coincidences to make it unlikely. For a group of terrorists to make a nuclear weapon, they need the scientific background, materials, and engineering skill to build it.

The scientific knowledge isn't too hard to get, but acquiring enough resources to make a sizable bomb without attracting too much attention is difficult. Add to that the fact that while the theory of the bomb is relatively simple, I'd imagine that actually engineering it would be the hardest part. One would need to fit the bomb into a relatively small space (no larger than a car) and testing the thing would be well near impossible (a successful test would give you away completely).

So, the only people capable of pulling this off would have to be educated, engineering geniuses, in a convenient position in which they can obtain materials without attracting undue attention, and have an intense desire to blow as many people as possible off the face of the planet. It doesn't surprise me that the intersection of these sets approaches the null set.
When I first started programming, people would say the same kind of things for learning some form of assembly. 10 years from now people will probably be making an article like this for Java and C#.
If you're so curious, perhaps your time would be better spent actually trying their applications, rather than "watching various videos and seeing the growth".
The difficulty in both languages lies in pointer manipulation and understanding the system below, it does not lie in using classes or templates.

That's utterly untrue. The low-level details of C++ are mostly the same as C's, unless you want to write a shared library in C++ and thus need to extern the C++ symbols, or need to worry about the details of the object-system implementation like vtables, or need to mess with streams and layer them over some communication medium.

What makes C++ fucking hard is the syntax explosion that feels like cleaning up a New Year's Eve confetti with your bare sweaty hands, the template voodoo, and the design patterns that they have tacked on the language to make it more palatable to Satan.

To make it worse, the language is both broad and deep. You can't learn C++ by reading the standard. You have to dip into the culture of one of the big vendors, or schools of programming, to find out what subset of the language is to your liking. Are you writing Bjarne's C++ or GoF's or Alexandrescu's? or perhaps you would prefer to old HP/STL/Meyer C++ to the new kitchen-sink BOOST C++?

Contrast this to Common Lisp, which is a very broad but relatively shallow language; you can read the first few sections of every chapter of the manual and come off a good Lisper, go back and dig deeper and you only get better. OO, functional and procedural Lisp looks relatively the same. If you don't understand a construct, you look up the documentation of the symbol, see its evaluation model and presto. C++? You don't see what's being implemented because higher-level designs are being kludged and modeled with dickish, brittle and contrived tools -- they have no way out of this, as the language insists on C pseudo-similarity and refuses to adopt any kind of clean macro system; they're running out of syntax and CPP is unforgiving. Understanding C++ code then becomes a matter of psychological profiling of the author and even scholarly exegesis and deconstruction ("What did he intend to say?", etc.) requiring a level of empathy hard to muster when you're, in fact, wishing ill and misfortune on the bastard who forced you to look at this mess.
Once or twice a week is pretty bad, considering that this industry probably produces hundreds of thousands of articles a week. I come across intrinsically valuable blog posts much more often than I come across intrinsically valuable news pieces, myself.
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Simplicity and excellent usuable UI design. And ofcourse the RoR hype helps a little
This is why I said "pretty fast", not necessarily faster than C++. Using ML means trading a small percentage of C++'s raw speed for code that can be debugged, adapted, etc. with much less trouble. I have found this to be a more than reasonable trade-off in virtually all cases.
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It has appeared in the index after somewhere between 12 and 17 hours.
I did not say it's C++. It's C, but it's rare that it's used directly as C.
The only reason I submit my own posts are to read the comments here, so you have my support for having a feed with links to comments.
I agree more or less. I think it's important to have a regional view on events. For example, here in Quebec we have a couple of journalists in the mainstream media covering events in the United States. After the 9-11 attacks, all the coverage coming from US media was very patriotic and in a sense very biased where the coverage coming from abroad was more critical and factual. Even if an article reports only facts, it can still be biased depending on which facts are reported or how the article is framed.

I would say that the main problems with journalism these days are the reliance on pundits, commentators, the public and partisan organizations instead of analysts, good journalists and factually based editorials. In another life, I worked in a PR agency(not very proud...) and usually journalists(from reputable newspapers) would copy verbatim our press releases. The crap they publish is astounding...

Well that was quite a rant.
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Have you read PG's Lisp essays from years ago? He argues against your position very well. Conciseness is power.
Wasn't it still rejected because you aren't allowed to use vibrate for a prolonged time? (not sure where I read that, but I did).
Playing devil's advocate here, I think the danger is accident rather than intention. If there are just a few "evil scientists" tinkering around this worldwide, that's fine... their chances, as you argue, are low... but what if there's a hundred thousand amateurs blundering around in their spare evenings? That surely massively multiplies the likelihood that they come up with something devastating, by accident.

And even though the likelihood may still be less than that of a plane crash, it's worth bearing in mind that we're all riding on this plane...

I'm not suggesting that these people somehow need to be rounded up or something... I don't think that would work, for a start. But perhaps the subject does deserve some thought. Perhaps biohackers can be provided with free access to secure facilities, expertise and oversight that will enable them to conduct their experiments safely.

Sure, that might cost a bit, to build all the infrastructure... but it's less expensive than a Black Plague 2.0, as you call it.
The number one take away from this, for those who didn't know, is that Apple disallowed an application that displays lyrics, just because some lyrics contain profanity.

Yeah.

This is a significant abuse of corporate gatekeeping power. Why are people accepting this? Are the majority of people that lethargic so as to ignore such significant limits on their ability to use and create content and applications for devices?

Would it be acceptable if Apple just out and out banned the music that contains the profanities? That's pretty close to what they are doing. I'm really struggling here to understand how people lie down and take this.

Loss of freedom in the name of commerce is disgusting, despicable, and most importantly, unethical, and needs to be stopped.
Thanks for the article. Well written and informative. What I can't understand is why this is still such a painful process. ecom was the hype back in 1999. If you're a payment gateway you should have SOAP and REST interfaces. You should have example code and tutorials for every popular web platform out there (struts2, rails, django, .net, phpcake, etc.). You should have detailed use cases for 90% of the typical payment requirements.

I should probably shut up or put up, but I'll have to look into what's involved in setting up a company like this first. The state of payment processing just seems so far behind.
It looks like Bell Canada will have the pre: http://www.precentral.net/bell-canada-confirmed-get-pre
My company uses Basecamp to manage projects. It's the only project management tool we've stuck with over five years of experimentation.

I have to attribute this to Basecamp's simplicity: it doesn't do a lot of the things we want, but we can fake it for the most part. Instead of prescribing how we should be managing our projects, Basecamp takes as little information as possible and lets us decide how to use it.

So, basically, we use it because it solves problems we need solved. Same reason we use anything else.
I released a Lite version of my first app. The download rate of Lite to Paid was about 50 to 1 -- no more sales than I had been doing before.

The goal with a Lite version is to provide enough functionality so that the user sees how great your app is and at the same time enough restrictions so the user feels compelled to pay for the full version. Among many other mistakes in making this app, I didn't strike the right balance -- I let functionality take too much of a hit without showing the user clearly how the paid version would be improved.
s/lazy journalists/stenographers/g.

Speech to text, or text-to-text, translation isn't worth much anymore. Journalists will have to actually report on what's really going on, instead of hiding behind objectivity.
Unfortunately, this also means that working with any real C++ code base will involve working with code written by people most familiar with a different 20% of the language than you.

I find my time is much better spent writing in a more flexible language that integrates well with C (I like Lua), and saving C for the small parts that actually need it. Also: I can think of few language that have worse object systems than C++. It's not exactly a shining example of OO done right.

Often, an efficiency issue is better remedied by a
fundamentally different design, rather than just "pushing harder", and C++ makes it particularly easy to lose sight of this.