skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a bit of two-way extremism going on here. On one side, Rob says this can replace food. On the other, this guy, Greg, says you can't replace food because of metabolism differences in humans.

Whatever, it doesn't matter. Soylent will probably still succeed. It's the power-bar of a modern era. You won't eat it all the time, but it will be nice to have around as an alternative when you don't want to cook a meal. I'm actually quite looking forward to having this around to take with me each day as lunch. Probably better for me than the crap they sell in some of my local cafeterias.
A reactionary article that doesn't offer anything except vague criticism, based on the age old principle "it's always been like this, don't rock the boat". Nothing to see here, move along.
I wonder what long term effect this would have on say your digestion / absorption / urinary systems as well as your teeth and gums.
I do think that this could be a way to elevate hunger, being able to drop supplies to places where it's needed quickly. But as a long term diet, I think it's dangerous (most of the points are outlined in that article).
We inject things that make us live longer and replace body parts with mechanics. For how long has humanity been not inserting pacemakers or giving vaccinations.

I don't particularly like the idea of soylent, but coming at it from a "but it's not natural" is just ridiculous. You know what's natural? Dying in horrifying ways, with no hope or understanding of what's happening. Fuck natural.

Remember natural smallpox? Not a single person in the world has it. How many people die during childbirth now compared to 150 years ago?

> a way that our body was never made for?

We weren't made for anything. We're a loosely connected series of insane reactions that just about doesn't die. We put load on non-load bearing structures (hi, spine), we have our optic nerve running through the centre of our retina giving us a blind spot, our body can decide that peanuts = a threat so bad we should stop breathing and occasionally some of our cells will rebel and try and kill us. We don't even produce vitamin C thanks to a single error, something we need to live and could easily produce.

We weren't made for anything, we just are.
>Those saying BTC has no inherent value (as opposed to gold, for example) are completely overlooking the fact that BTC is the only kind of exchange that can be used for illicit activities in a relatively untraceable manner (good luck buying stuff on SR using gold).

Alternative equivalents like litecoin work equally well.

That's why I think bitcoin is bound to collapse. There's no a priori reason to use one root over another, and given the choice, why would you pick the one where "satoshi" has already assigned himself 25% of the wealth?
Can someone comment on if there is a serious downside to not using our teeth at all?
The equivalent is when you go to a new store (or one you go to infrequently) and they ask you for a rewards card to get the discounted price. One or two times, I've signed up for one. More than half a dozen times, the cashier is nice enough to use their card for you. At one store, I got grief from the cashier saying you have to sign up for the card at the customer service desk, and that he/she couldn't use theirs. Guess which store I make it a point never to go to?

I understand these discounts are designed to promote frequent patronage in some cases. But it can definitely piss customers off.
Thanks! Feel free to share it with the community
Really, Dragon can't cope with someone sitting ten feet away and speaking at the same time? So I guess no listening to radio, either. Is it just the specifics of speech or is it that noise sensitive.

Maybe someone should do some kind of voice rec "groupware" then, where the relatively louder results of the other person are used to filter out false positives on my end...
I've never had anyone directly ask me at the till, but if they did then yes psychologically I probably would feel that I was being ripped off. I realise that vouchers are available for a lot of shops these days, but if you push the fact into someone's face then it's basically reminding them that they could have had it cheaper.

I have exactly the same thing with the £1.50 for one/£2.00 for two type offers. If I don't want two of them, the very fact that they are highlighting that they are happy to sell them at £1 each makes the £1.50 price look like a rip off, especially if they've put the single unit price in smaller text (it says to me "yes, we'll sell you just one if you really, really want - but we're charging you a massive premium for doing it). I sometimes find myself not buying the item at all as a result.
Should I ambush a wild cow and bite down on it's neck until it bleeds to death? And then the rest of the family joins the feast, sinking our teeth into the raw flesh?
Did you get many people looking to sign up for the pro version?
Metabolic needs are also dynamic, and change over time based on factors ranging from the season to how much sleep a person got the previous night. So there literally is no such thing as “the perfect mix of vitamins, minerals and nutrients” for all human beings. A mix that is optimized for a 20-something inactive underweight male could quite easily kill a 60-year-old woman or a 30-year-old athlete.

So in my family, everyone from the 4-year-old girl to the 33-year-old man (me) eats the same food 90+% of the time, just in different amounts... and we all seem to be doing fine. Should we be dropping dead at any moment now?
There are so, so many cross-platform SDKs of various sorts. There is no particular reason to compare GNUStep to TideSDK, any more that to Qt.
I refuse to install Chrome, but do install the pure open-source Chromium. I routinely get that behavior with Chrom[e|ium], which leaves files with a crx extension littered throughout my Downloads directory.

But to be fair from both our ends, neither is that useful individual anecdote(s) != empiricism.
For those not familiar with him, Maass is an interesting journalist mainly focusing on international affairs. He's been following the surveillance story for a bit, and has an archive of some of his articles from the past ~10 years or so here: http://www.petermaass.com/articles/

He wrote a bunch of articles in the '90s as well, but doesn't seem to have them on his site. However his reporting on the Bosnian War was collected into a book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679763899/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Most relevant here, he wrote an article in mid-June criticizing the focus on Snowden and Assange as personalities: http://www.petermaass.com/articles/we_steal_secrets_misses_t...
No they are abstractions around shared memory. Actors are a good example of where having an understanding of NUMA can have serious performance implications.

If you architect your actor system so that all of your actors are on the same socket, all message passing (assuming messages are small enough) can happen in socket local cache. This will be much faster than having to cross socket memory or even worse going to main memory.

Conversely, if you aren't paying attention to memory locality you could see unexpected performance degradation as you add actors, because even though your system is more parallel there is more overhead in memory access.
How about that one guy recently on HN that didn't eat anything for over a year and lived off his body fat? He defecated once in a month or so.
Good job their extension system allows you to easily restore the blink tag to your browsing, should you wish ;)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-blink...

Disclaimer: I created the above extension
Subversive Edutainment: Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing
Thats a very different idea from eating it exclusively.

For only using it as a replacement from one meal a day you might as well buy a blender, mix (frozen) fruit, oatmeal, wheat germ, honey, yogurt, milk and drink it.
Great library. Simple to use and efficient. I have been using it for some time. I have created a little TMX file reader aiming at game development. C is hard but fun:

https://github.com/batiste/sdl2-game-loop
Oh.

Data-driven Parenting?! Seriously? As in, "you were a naughty child, we can't employ you?".
Apple Said to Prepare Thinner iPad Model for Release This Year
The biggest flaw in this theory is that no nation state would be able to keep a secret of this magnitude from the geeks that are using it. Either through something carelessly being left in or being let slip by only one person on the team. Even a sufficiently large group of people working on it, reviewing it etc is likely to have one weak link.

As an example, JK Rowling released a book under a pseudonym. Very few people knew it was written by her, but one of those (a solicitor/lawyer) let slip to a friend, who then tweeted a tip to a journalist. It took a matter of weeks from publication for her to be outed. We are 4 years into bitcoin and there has not been anyything like this to suggest a large group worked on it.

If anything the lomger it goes the more likely it is that Satoshi Nakamoto was acting alone. Aditionally if there was a group of people then many of those would have had access to the numerous coins that were suposedly generated by SN during 2009. Surely some, one, any of those would have tried to access a portion of the coins to liquidate them.

Givent hat neither of these have happened it is more likely that a single individual was responsible and he/she is very strict with regard to their secuirty. i.e. they knwo that using any of those coins increases the chance that they will be tracked down. Whereas if it was a team then any one member may feel they could get away with it. Operational Security gets easier the fewer people that know about it.
Shouldn't a nutrition/meal replacement startup strive for more than "well, you're eating shit anyway, why not buy our almost entirely untested and unregulated shit!"
You might be right but the solution is to educate people, not to feed them a powdery substance of dubious nutritional value.
most amusing watching people getting trolled. The paragraph towards the end is particularly cutting:

> Rhinehart might not realise it, but he is a classic symptom of a generation and, even, a cultural movement within the United States that appears to believe you don’t actually need to know facts: all you need to do is be creative and enthusiastic.

which particularly made me think of that tech journalist Virginia Heffernan, a creationist, who refuted the big bang in place of her own story because essentially she preferred it and found it more appealing.
Incidentally, this way of building strings in Python is a performance pessimization and not the right way to do it to begin with.
You say people don't tune their nutritional intake, but the human body does have ways of telling you if you're missing essential nutrients. There are lots of various cues caused by people's diets that they adapt to, either by going out and eating something different, taking supplements, etc.

I don't think the OP is arguing that everyone needs a nutritionist to regulate their diet; rather, he's arguing that a drink like Soylent is inferior to even the basic amount of dietary adjustment that normally happens in a person's life.

If all you care about is calories, sure, Soylent is probably fine. I'd be concerned that if you get used to how it feels to mostly subsist on Soylent, you might be intentionally tuning out important cues from your body.
What I think is interesting is that a lot can be done to make typing easier and more human when you can type like you speak (and think).

For example: we say/think

for each item in list

but in a lot of languages you need to type something like

foreach(item in list) {

A step further: we say/think

let a be the substring of b from 1 to the end

we need to type

a = b.substring(1)

Ofcourse the last example is much shorter and even more readable (to the machine for sure) but maybe code could be a little more human.
They both have right-of-way issues, but what land-based project doesn't?

That's my main point- land-based projects are a nightmare to coordinate. I would actually think the DC metro would be one of the easier to get done because it receives federal funding.
Just think of Soylent as an alternative and not the only way to go. Soylent could help bring food to areas where people starve to death. It could be a good alternative to take when camping and hiking for days. And many others... People already eat a lot of crap food (like McDonald's), Soylent could be a better crap food. I wouldn't take it unless really necessary. I think it's a really good idea, but I wouldn't recommend to anyone who have good food available.
> Most people get most of their calories from sugar, refined starches, and refined vegetable oils. They do not finely-tune their nutritional intake based on their gender, weight, age, activity level, stress level or time of year.

Do you know this or believe this?
Responsive Design Workflow: Step 1 - Content Hierarchy
That's against the value proposition of the product, it's meant as a one-size-fits-all time-saver food. We have enough power bars et similia, we don't need another.
Could you post the link? Would love to read it. My quick googling didn't turn up anything.
Sadly I think most of this could have been avoided if the Soylent team thought a bit more about their marketing.

If they had of come out and said, its a meal replacement then I think more people would be open to trying it.

However they came out and stated that you will never need to
eat again and this can replace all your meals.
The ~10% is what matters.
This is drivel. It is nothing but anecdote and conjecture.

> When I was in college, I had a room-mate who lived on nothing but pizza, mac and cheese and marijuana for a year. Aside from being thin, pale, and subject to periodic, inexplicable bouts of coughing, he “felt fine”, too.

There are people in the third world who would kill for a daily diet of pizza and macaroni-n-cheese. The author fails to address that his roommate ("stupid pothead! lolz") was eating food and that Soylent is not food, rather being synthesized raw nutrients. That is the key issue at hand, not the question of variety in a diet.
I'm no expert on soliciting donations, but could you change to hosting your sites with free services. jsonip.com seems like a good candidate for heroku.

And you could use a static site generator like jekyll or octopress and host your blog with github pages.

As for popped.at, maybe that could be another heroku app.
The Drupal Way™
If you're looking for an alternative to CMU Sphinx that's still FOSS, you really should check Julius out. There are plenty of docs on getting it running with languages other than Japanese. If you're curious about how well it can work, check out this[2] demo (requires Chrome).

[2] http://www.workinprogress.ca/KIKU/dictation.php

It seems like this demo is not using Julius, but it's mixing messages a bit. The bottom of the page says "Service provided by Google Inc.", but the link right next to it (for downloadable software, also apparently called "kiku"?) says Julius etc.
If that is the most damning evidence against the hyperloop, I'd say the idea is pretty sound.
99% of the time those sorts of problems are due to what could be summarized as bad marketing. If you are not familiar with the key phrases (and we don't go out of our way to tell people these phrases), you'll miss out on crucial stuff.

If you'd like to have another go at making a perfect Arch system, drop me a line.
I don't think it's that insightful. The thing to learn is to have your own discount code page/site and that info is in the comments here.
That's my PoV too. Soylent sounded interesting in concept and then I saw the combination of the creator advertising it as a replacement for all your meals, while quietly noting that he hasn't actually used it to replace all his meals? Just feels kinda shady, and makes me concerned for the people who are gullible enough to actually try subsisting on it. I hope it doesn't injure anyone.

In a general sense, meal replacements are great - they let you simplify eating and save money by buying in bulk, and the regulated intake can help if you're trying to lose weight, too. But you better believe the friends of mine who try to lose weight using a completely replacement-based diet are being supervised by a doctor!
And yet somehow people manage to ride in them for 30-minute trips.
"Definitely surprised. As one might imagine, normally spies allergically avoid contact with reporters or media, so I was a virgin source — everything was a surprise."

Ouch — poor choice of words. He indirectly classified himself as a spy. The media will be all over this. He needs to be more careful with his language.
I don't know if you can just claim that variety in diet is unimportant. The body's needs change on a regular basis; do you really think dietary needs don't change? I thought his point with the anecdote was not 'this anecdote proves x', but rather 'we all do stupid things and get away with them when we're young'. He's trying to discourage the kind of one-size-fits-all thinking that leads a guy to leap from 'this meal replacement works good for me' to 'this meal replacement will work good for everyone'.
Now try `whois google.com` :)
Improved support for high-resolution displays with the srcset image attribute
This is an interesting article, too, about Laura and how she helped Snowden:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
"It's the power-bar of a modern era."

Let's not go overboard. Soylent is non-dairy Slim Fast that some guy mixes the chemicals for in his basement which at the moment offers no cost savings to the customer.
Thanks for all the kind words :) Fixed up the quote and the first slide.

I'm doing everything I can to try and get this in front of people. I'm extremely grateful that a discussion happened on HN and am looking forward to seeing where the site goes from here.

Cheers,
Mike
This bears repeating, over and over and over again if necessary, in every HN thread related to Soylent: most people who purchase Soylent will not exclusively eat Soylent. They will instead supplement their diet with it for times when they don't want to be bothered to make a meal.
AnsibleWorks Raises $6M
I hope that the media keeps focusing on the issues detailed by the whistleblowing, rather than the story of said whistleblowing.

We shouldn't be distracted by a human interest story.
I kind of like the non-modern parts of Perl myself, for some of the original purpose of making a superset of sed+awk+sh with better control flow constructs and better performance. I don't entirely understand why sed/awk are so popular on HN but old-style Perl isn't, since it's generally nicer and usually faster, for most things the sed/awk/sh combo would be used for.
Searching a Sorted Matrix Faster
That's what I'm advocating, that the government spend more money on science and technology. The government is able to take risks in investing in unproven technologies and sciences where industry can't, because they aren't concerned with profit. I'm not an apologist for the wars.
The major red flag for me in this article was the line "He couldn’t really answer the questions, but I agreed to run a small trial. Based on our results, that marketing consultant is no longer with us." It really colored the rest of the article for me - making me incredibly skeptical of the manager and his instinct, opinions and judgement.

That's interesting. Here's an article by someone you don't know and, within the first paragraph, you are "incredibly skeptical". I think most people's normal reaction would be to give the guy the benefit of the doubt - after all, it's the first paragraph and that person knows a lot more details about their business than the first paragraph will give away. I think most of us would read that line in the beginning, file it away for verification/thinking as we read the article, then revisit that after we've been presented much more of the article. For you to color your view so easily and quickly is interesting - it's almost akin to someone walking around "looking for a fight".
So I guess I'll be the first to ask the obvious question. How is this different or better than jQuery?
Low-premium, high-deductible health plans are endangered by ACA
There is a small FAQ in the bottom.
> But in a dynamically typed language, I don't have to communicate anything; it all happens automatically.

Nothing happens automatically, the compiler/interpreter just doesn't check. Eventually you hit the bit of nonsense code your change caused and then the program dies.

> A good test suite achieves the same objective with a dynamically typed language.

With considerably more effort and with no guarantees that you've come even close to correct. A test suite on top of a powerful static type system at least guarantees that you've killed classes of dumb bugs, and you've thought through and tested more complicated issues.

> With dynamic typing, no inference is necessary at all.

So...? You also don't get any guarantees.
Should be called DOM(.js) instead.
It's not really an opinion so much as fact. Labor unions have proven to be beneficial only for the members of the union and politicians. If you had ever done business around them, you'd agree.
Be it in prison camps or the "Big Mac" guy, we have so many case studies of people living, and remaining able persons, for long periods of time with an utterly static diet. A varied diet may be key for optimal health or for perceived quality of life, but the human body is surprisingly adaptive and resilient.

The frightening thing about Soylent (to me) is that I am not sure if it constitutes a "diet" any more than the mud patties and other non-food yet objectively nutritional foodstuffs consumed amongst the poorest of the poor in Africa.
Different standards use different abbreviations. Here, Tom is using FIPS: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIPS_country_codes.

If it were my site, I'd probably also use AU (and AT), though.
"Not so much. This doesn't wrap or hide the DOM for you. It exposes and enhances it, making it your ally instead of trying to protect you from it. Old IE versions are fading; it's time to go native!"

This seems like a pretty poetic way of describing differences between software packages. And I mean that in a non-charming way.
They got the marketing exactly right. It's because it's being sold as a potential complete replacement for food that makes it interesting. There are already plenty of meal replacement products on the market today but no one before has tried to survive on one of these alone.

If you believe that you can survive consuming nothing but Soylent then that should give you all the confidence you need to use it as a simple quick meal when you're feeling too lazy to cook. The way I think of it is the marketing works in the same way as it does for the advanced technical gore-tex jackets people walk around in when it rains or the 4x4s mums drive their kids to school in. Sure I don't need to take my use of these products to the extreme but it's good to know that I can if I need to.

Of course the article still makes a good point - how can you possibly design a complete meal replacement formula for everyone?
Laziness & The Web Designer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
There's a decent post on SO about it...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2842198/which-is-better-s...
Hyperloop would be travelling as fast as a subsonic military jet and at treetop-skimming height, you would definitely get a migraine.
Link to Google Cache because the server seems to be overloaded:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:786NsZY...
New Class of "Easily Retrievable" Asteroids Discovered
Yeah, vote me down.
How are you not getting that this guy is charging you $70 for a bag of powdered oatmeal and maltodextrin?