skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been through quite an up and down cycle regarding my attitude towards Soylent. Upon first hearing about it, I was pretty excited about the idea. But the more Rob talked, the more I thought the idea was a total hoax.

For example, in Rhinehart's blog post "How I Stopped Eating Food"[0], he writes:

My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my
teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone. My
resting heart rate is lower, I haven't felt the least bit
sickly, rare for me this time of year. I've had a common
skin condition called Keratosis Pilaris since birth. That
was gone by day 9. I used to run less than a mile at the
gym, now I can run 7. I have more energy than I know what to
do with. On day 4 I caught myself balancing on the curb and
jumping on and off the sidewalk when crossing the street like
I used to do when I was a kid. People gave me strange looks but
I just smiled back. Even my scars look better."

I think the only ailment he forgot to mention was his inoperable cancer that had disappeared by day 10 (sarcasm). On a serious note, after I read this, I realized that Rob was going into full marketing mode. He had talked about releasing the recipe for Soylent in on of his first posts, but I realized now that he wanted to build as much hype as possible so he could commercialize his idea. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with that, but I now felt a degree of skepticism towards the whole thing, because his incentive structure was changing. For goodness sakes, he's claiming that his endurance increased 7x simply by switching to Soylent.

It is probably not fair for me to judge the entire project based on this blog post, but I have yet to see anyone claim that Soylent did the above for them, especially after 30 days.

[0]: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
Agreed. Until I'm more confident that we've successfully learned all we need to learn, and reverse-engineered all we need to reverse-engineer -- and figured out which corners we can cut, and which we can't -- I'll take the whole foods wager when/if I can afford to.

All of that said, I am not a Vitalist. I am pretty sure biology is reducible, and that it can be reverse-engineered -- eventually. I just don't think we're sufficiently there yet.

In the meantime, I begrudge no one their choices, either way. And I applaud the Soylent team for its efforts. We should be doing more to reverse-engineer nature, so that we can get better at it. The best way to solve the problem is to keep trying and learning.
Salman Khan & Elon Musk make Bloomberg's Most Influential 50
I don't think they even got very important ones. Nokia kept the most important ones for licensing.
I'm thinking its game over.
If you post uninformed blogs with trollish titles, is that also due to ignorance?

I was well versed in the concepts of functional languages long before I was ever exposed to JavaScript, and while I prefer more pragmatic languages that allow functional concepts (like Go) as opposed to pure functional languages, I make use of functional concepts all the time.

Guess what? JavaScript still sucks. The scoping is still ridiculous (yeah, I know, the fix for that is just around the corner, just like it has been since ECMAScript 4 got shelved how many years ago)? The lack of true parallelism results in hacky solutions like webworkers, callback hell, etc, etc.

FWIW, JavaScript is hardly the only language I "hate", but my hate for it burns so much stronger based on the fact that the political efforts of the Mozilla group have essentially destroyed any chance of a true competitor that didn't have to live with JavaScript's warts underneath it being used as widely-deployed web client language. So I'm sometimes forced to use it despite how much I hate it, unlike most languages where I can easily use alternatives that I don't hate.

My hate for JavaScript is very pragmatic!
My guess is they will create a whole new brand for their mobile devices and shed the Microsoft name completely for anything but their software businesses.
Unlike the author of the submitted article, I don't find Malcolm Gladwell's disclosure statement about possible about possible conflicts of interest[1] boring reading. In fact, I am finding it quite interesting, especially the quotation of the memo Michael Kinsley wrote when he was editor of Slate. I'm glad the author of the article kindly submitted here provided the link.

[1] http://gladwell.com/disclosure-statement/
Nope, totally read your post. And then deleted my rather angry response because you've got a couple of good points; sorry to straw man you there.

All of your examples start from the comic. The rest of the discussion starts with PA's response to their critics.

I agree that the comic isn't particularly sexist.

I disagree that PA isn't responsible for their community here. Even Krahulik himself thinks so[1]. When he says, on the one hand, "We have worked very hard to make PAX a safe place," and then, on the other hand, says he regrets not selling rape joke t-shirts that specifically were released to antagonize his critics (the ones he was making the safe place for). What's up with that?

I think the t-shirt was purposefully created to make fun of people who thought the original comic was a big deal. Do you disagree? It's not about whether the original comic was sexist (I never said that, nor did Wired).

I also think there's a clear difference between PA selling the shirt and Wired writing a reaction piece. Wired didn't post a big picture of a dickwolf and put ads on it. They're not profiting from a rape joke directly... like you would if you sold a picture of a dickwolf on a shirt.

We might be talking past each other?

[1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/09/04/some-clarification
There's a number of blogs and writers who take the nutritional supplement manufacturers to task for their outrageous claims.

Furthermore, saying "They can get away with this because everyone else gets away with this" is kinda silly.
I keep finding myself in the awkward position of trying to refute conspiracy theories, but not being at liberty to share everything I know about these scenarios (I really need to work somewhere besides DC), so I'll tread lightly.

Taking for granted that the NSA actually backdoored TPM's (which I can assert professionally is very unlikely, but I don't expect anyone to take my word for it), they are far from "crown jewels".

The only "meaningful" large scale use of TPMs is actually within the department of defense. It's been a pretty uphill battle getting them deployed and used in other environments.
Here Are All The People Who Have Died From A Marijuana Overdose
When will we be seeing normal (30"+) displays with that kind of resolution? Please say "soon".
Six Things About Kickstarting Your Hardware Idea That Will Drive you Insane
This is not just about cryptanalysis. The NSA has been deliberately introducing weaknesses into cryptosystems used by the general public. That is beyond keeping cryptanalysis techniques secret, which we all assumed they would do and which few really drew any issue with. We are talking about an honest-to-goodness conspiracy, one that yesterday many would have written off as a conspiracy theory that was not even worth considering.

Basically, what we thought were the rules of the game are not the rules of the game. We thought we knew where we stood with the NSA -- they would try to attack, we would try to defend. Now we need to be thinking of a much different set of rules, one in which the NSA is not just attacking ciphers but also deliberately sabotaging our defense, and doing so covertly. We cannot even assume that mistakes really are mistakes anymore -- they could be the NSA's doing.
sensors in an auto could detect the position of each phone relatively to the steering wheel and only disable the ones that could belong to the driver.

or, said the other way, enable the passengers to override the automatic disablement if they request and their position is determined to be passenger.

there will still be hacks but if we could take care of x% of the problem then we would be far better off then today.
Argh.

First, RSA is about factoring composites.

Second, factoring those composites at popular key sizes isn't impossible.

Third, public-key algorithms are much harder to get right; they involve direct mathematical operations on plaintexts and devolve to well-studied math problems much more readily than symmetric ciphers do.

You should absolutely avoid public-key crypto, including public-key key agreement schemes like Diffie-Hellman, if your needs don't absolutely require them.
Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone! There are two reasons that the color scheme on the front page is so bright (and to some folks, ugly).

First, we wanted to make it really obvious what's going on, and if we'd used a subtle color gradient, it wouldn't have been as obvious. We realize that many/most people won't ultimately use the bright color scheme for one reason or another.

The second point is that people perceive color differently, so what is bright to one person may not seem so bright to someone else. There tend to be age-related correlations/causes here--it's why old people tend to wear lots of bright blues. To them, the blues don't look as bright. What we've found is that younger folks tend like the more subtle colors (eyes are more sensitive) and older folks tend to like the brighter colors (because they can't perceive the color difference in the subtle schemes). We anticipate rolling out our product/feature with a color picker palette so that users can choose the right color scheme for their visual physiology.

Thanks again for all the comments and suggestions, and please feel free to email us through the website if you have an app/site that you'd like to use BeeLine with. We have some code that will make integration pretty easy.
I'd be interested in something like this being used in a e-reader app like Kindle or Aldiko
what world is that? I use Windows and I'm extremely happy. I know what MS dd but then I know what Apple is doing, what Google etc are doing and what they could do if they were in Microsoft's shoes.
I took their test and came out 2% faster (likely statistical noise more than actual improvement). Regardless, I attribute the improvement to the obscure content in the non beeline reading passage.

I'm curious what others experienced?
I know I'm the only one, but every time I see "Lumia", I think "Lamia": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Topsell-91.jpg
Please. The writing is sophomoric ... I mean the writing is purple, like the sun setting behind a gauze of pacific clouds.
No, I'm afraid it is you who are mistaken... About a great many things.
Thanks for fixing. It was a good post otherwise!
The bright color scheme was selected so that it's really obvious to first-time website visitors what's going on. When we read with the bookmarklets, we don't use the bright color scheme—usually it's greyscale or blue/purple.
> ...people whose main idea for a home automation system is „a responsive design”...

Why is a focus on useful and pleasant design a negative? Having functionality exposed in a clear and thoughtful way that makes the devices more usable should be a positive, I think. I think it's great that someone's thinking about how to lower the bar for making all these cool possibilities accessible.
This is probably the kind of startup whose founder would say,

I AM A BUSINESS GROWN-UP WHO MAKES BUSINESS PROFITS [1]

[1] http://xkcd.com/1032/
This isn't really an HN subject, is it?
Bubbles? We are at $120 currently. So the only "bubble" is always the last one. I used logarithmic scale to make the x10 increments more obvious.
>the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant

The previous leaks show these rules to not be particularly effective. For me and most of the world that distinction is irrelevant anyway. The position of the US government is that it can order its tech companies, with whom I have contractual/financial relationships to give them all my data with no warrant.
specifically, it's the Asha brand, not the Nokia brand, that they got for feature/dumb phones. Microsoft will not be selling anything with a "Nokia" label
If data is easy to eavesdrop, then somebody will. This is also an engineering problem. We've got broadband, we've got capable CPUs, there's no excuse for not encrypting everything.
I absolutely understand where you are coming from.

However I think it is necessary we preserve those records, as the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives does, so that crime committed by the surveillance system and its members can be investigated (being able to prosecute individuals like Erich Mielke is essential to allow the population to regain trust in their new government), and the people should be allowed access to their own files so they can have insight into the full extent of widespread untargeted surveillance.

You could consider such a preservation to be a shameful monument to what we became. It would be a lighthouse on the rocks, looking over the wreckage of countless ships, warning us to stay away.
Kind of reminds me of a story from today. I have about a 70 page design document, laying out exactly how a new system i'm building will work. I've built something very similar in the past at a previous company, so this design is coming from a few years of learning what doesn't work.

As I was trying to explain some of my, well non conventional ideas, another coworker pokes his head over the cube, and calls the design crap. This of course is nothing new, its almost a game for this particular engineer. In the end, I walked away trying to avoid the conversation. It felt emotional though, and frankly hurt my confidence (while probably inflating his own)

It kind of made me think of the phrase "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" I could have chosen the obvious design, and gone forward. No one would have debated it. However I've done that in the past, and I've seen the terrible problems that come from it. My new design is an attempt to avoid those problems. The attitude really pisses me off though, and I find it extremely counter productive.
StackOverflow: Segmenting GPS Data
>the electric motor… is the only motor connected to the drivetrain

This is a common misconception. The Volt will drive the wheels directly from the gasoline engine when driving at high speed (>70 mph).

http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2010/10/the-great-chevy-v...
Most of your points were already covered by Smaltalk, and we all know where it is nowadays.

Sorry, but I lost count of the languages I have used since 1986 and just don't believe in Dart ever taking off unless Google makes it so.
> The BeeLine bookmarklets ... may only be used for personal, non-commercial use. ...available for a limited time ... subject to our privacy policy.

Surely the author is not claiming that putting color on text gives them som sort of patentable intellectual property? If this takes off and people will start incorporating this on their blogs, this company will become one of the biggest patent trolls.
Stop distracting us from the conflict in Syria!
Tools for Lean UX Teams
Elon Musk – The Future of Design [video]
Nokia sells a ton of phones, more phones than everyone but Samsung. Most of the phones Nokia sells are basic and are sold in markets that people on HN forget still exist. The developing world is where the mobile battle is headed (Facebook and Google are making a push, even Apple has been pressured to go for the lower end market). Microsoft now has a sales channel that put handsets in 60M hands in the past 12 months. I assume they want a lot of people's first smartphone to be a Windows Mobile phone.
It is when you need to dig into the documentation to figure all of this out, but if you now google 'speed up git pull', you'll find this article, repeat the commands, ?????, profit! five minutes.
They absolutely need to, one thing Microsoft is delusional about is the brand image/value of "Windows". Just because it's the most popular OS in the world does not mean all those consumers actively LOVE it. Branding everything the company does with Windows only serve to make people wary of the product. I'm glad they are switching away from "Windows Live" branding as well. Individual distinct names are much better for new services.

I may be biased, but I actually think "Windows" is a toxic brand name, too much bad legacy associated with the image from the past 20 years (monopoly, insecurity, instability, etc). Imagine if they called XBox "Windows Gamebox" instead.
For the better of part a decade, Paypal has published a "Terms of Service" which you are required to agree to before you can use the service. Business users are required to agree to the TOS again. They regularly email customers regarding changes to the terms of service, and these terms of service are always publicly accessible.

If someone chooses not to read the TOS, that's on them and it is their failure as a business operator. If they wanted to renegotiate the standard terms of the TOS, they should have approached Paypal before agreeing to the TOS or before launching their business activities.

It's not a hostage negotiation--there's no requirement that you start using, or continue to use Paypal.
Supply chain yes, but not the patents. Microsoft receives a 10-year license to Nokia's patents, but ownership of those patents will remain with Nokia.
WSJ: Apple testing 6-inch iphone
nice, apple really needs to target this market!
I'm still unclear on the government's ability to compel falsehoods (even the discussions around National Security Letters seem to indicate that they prevent disclosure, but can't require lying), but I don't think I can convince you of that.

When all the hullabaloo around the alleged IPSEC backdoor occurred, it was frustrating to not be able to be as open about it as I wanted (not because of any government/security issues, but because at the time I still worked for the company and we were advised against talking about it).

You are free to assume that even right now as I type this, a shadowy figure in an ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit is standing over me dictating my responses, and then chastising me for spending my time on HackerNews.
Sorry, don't know much about nodejs. But it seems that node does have a way to remove/setup events, and pause read events:
http://nodejs.org/api/events.html#events_emitter_removeliste...
http://nodejs.org/api/net.html#net_socket_pause
>Also, open-source is of course safer and some of us have been repeating for years that you can't trust binary blobs, security being just one reason out of many.

Only if you're auditing the code and building it yourself, or have a trusted place where that's done. I would wager that for the vast majority of users are just using the binary blob provided by someone. Otherwise, the "code" you're using could be as compromised as any closed source program.
What is this, another reddit meme that will be repeated until the end of the internet?

Bitcoin can only go to zero or +inf. Past performance is a way to show what haters are losing every year for denying Bitcoin.
On the topic of messaging in general, I heard that James Carville once told Bill Clinton that "if you said three things, you said nothing." Apparently that was the genesis of "it's the economy, stupid." That's always stuck with me as a salient pointer on communication.
Open-source is safer, ceteris paribus, and (perhaps) always more secure against your vendor. Stronger conclusions require closer analysis.
Geo indexing for any key/value store: https://github.com/geophile/geophile
How We Improved Page-Load-Time By 1600%, using CloudFront
Your machine would be showing an extra outbound connection.
Open-Sourcing Stripe Shop
Designing rocket part with hand gestures and 3D printing [video]
Definitely, Flash is on the list of web features that are disabled in packaged apps: http://developer.chrome.com/apps/app_deprecated.html
Greenwald needs to release Appendix A.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7840...

>Appendix A lists specific BULLRUN capabilities.
Yes, though there are some subtleties, it's fairly straightforward overall.

The reason we don't do that is, of course, CPU cost.
My humble idea is to apply the crowd-funding concept to protest and civil disobedience. Only if the proposed action reaches a sufficient activation threshold of interest and commitment does it go forward.

The trick is getting people to stick to commitments, given the ease of clicking a button online. One way is gamification, with reputation scores and mobile location check-ins. Another is getting people to commit real money, which is forfeited without a check-in (or perhaps, donated to something vile like the Westboro Baptists!). But after collecting enough data, you can also start doing some number crunching to estimate real turnout, and use that for your threshold.

We need new forms of protest, and new tools of solidarity. I plan on building it if no one else gets to it first.
> which matches things like -.2, 0.123, +0.1, etc. (floating point numbers, basically). This likely has bugs, since I haven't tested it ;)

The fact you can't come up with a regex and be sure it's correct answers your first two questions.

Regexes are incredibly useful, but the syntax is just a bunch of noise. This library turns it into self-docummenting code, which is incredibly valuable. Novices might prefer showing their regex-fu, but after you've spent a good chunk of your life reading and writing code, you value clear code more.
Welcome to Helpouts, a new way to give help over live video.
NSA Can Crack Much Internet Encryption
Or escape and move to a farm and create a tech utopia and help out widowed mice in their spare time?

( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_N... )
If they call it the Microsoft Surface Windows Phone 8 (Home/Professional/Student) then I'm done waiting for Microsoft to right the ship. Naming is hard, but keep it simple stupid.
> You should absolutely avoid public-key crypto, including public-key key agreement schemes like Diffie-Hellman, if your needs don't absolutely require them.

Is there an alternative to public-key crypto? We all need to do stuff online.
Really? Everything? Despite the fact that 90% of writing on the web (like 90% of everything else) is crap?
No, the fact that others can compare things means there's still some improvement in security. Even if it's not actually done, there's a greater threat of it being done, so it's a less tempting target.

To be sure, absent the measures you describe the effect is significantly weaker than with them, and other effects may dominate.
More like slang within a certain age / social group, rather than an "idiom."
I would argue that in Sprint's case it was less of a branding move than a "we have it too!"

One thing I have noticed is that every iPhone commercial I've seen, regardless of carrier, looks like its been approved by Apple in name as well as appearance. If you watch a commercial for almost any Android device, it looks like it could be either a carrier or device commercial. I remember when the Motorola Droid first came out seeing the 'energy core with static discharge' with a bunch of red hues and knowing immediately "oh, Verizon's got this". Sprint does the same by shoving yellow text anywhere that negative space hasn't yet been sullied. I find it oddly telling about the difference between the two camps, as having owned both Android and iPhones, the difference in commercial is roughly analogous to the user experience in terms of carrier integration.
I am saddened by how out of control this is
It seems like the argument against regexes is that they can get really complex and unreadable. For something as simple as that url, isn't it easier to just use a regex?

Seems like in the 'unreadable' regex case, you'll have a boatload of verbose function calls to construct it.
I was prepared to think this was totally unneccesary, but ended up thinking it's actually pretty nice.