skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been conventional wisdom for years now.

It's also wrong. At least, it's not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I was watching a video of a Gary Taubes lecture which I can't find where he addresses this, and cites many examples from history of societies and situations where groups of people were fat despite eating very few calories, where groups of people grew fat as their diet changed despite the calorie count not increasing, and vice-versa.

I think this is the same talk:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4362041487661765149
Technical news has NEVER been that good in the mainstream papers. It's always been in niche magazines.
The mainstream media had this idea first, they picked up the story of the New York highschool student who tested Red Snapper in various sushi restaurants and found that it was often Talapia.

That story got repeated in some jurisdictions, now a year or so later someone gets around to doing it with vegan food.

-----

EDIT:

Sushi from New York: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html?scp=3&...

Sushi from Toronto (reported in Vancouver): http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=4381b...
I think HN should maintain a list of sites which should be given a different weightage. Also, recently I've been seeing more standard news on HN than startup news or discussions. PG should consider this while he works on the future iterations of HN.
It's also a fundamental issue with dynamic languages. Lots of code fails silently if you make faulty assumptions about the types of parameters.
Oh wow... I can't believe this application is actually five years old! I was crackin up after watching the video on the main page, and then I saw that it says 2004 -- how could I have missed this for five years! This is a great little program.

Cheers
It is better than nothing, but the speed through the air is the most critical parameter for an airplane, and GPS measures speed over the ground. If a sensor goes out, the computer could assume that the wind is constant, and display an estimated airspeed, but the probe in this case iced over, in this case because of a thunderstorm. The wind is all over the place in a thunderstorm, and it wouldn't be very useful.
Don't forget chaos theory and rounding errors. Chaos theory was initially discovered when by running a weather simulation with the same inputs and recieving different outputs due to floating point rounding errors.
I agree about seasonal eating patterns and I guess that is implicit if you are eating local organic (i.e. no crazy hydroponic winter tomatoes). Living in utah that would mean the winters would bring a lot of grains, canned/bottled fruit and vegetables from the growing season etc. How does a fresh vegetable stew with some home made bread not sound good?

On rice - I actually tried growing rice in my apartment using 5 gallon buckets one suspended in the other so that there is a constant supply of water in the bottom (I think the term is self watering container). I just threw in some soil and tossed a hand full of organic brown rice and it sprouted within the week! I am not sure how much I could have grown had I taken it past that point but I was surprised that it even sprouted!
No it doesn't. It actually keeps your body in more of an anabolic and fat storing state, because of the constant insulin. Your body becomes poor at burning fat.

Longer fasting periods train your body to switch to running off fat reserves quickly. Metabolism does not slow.
it's a great article. lots of will power in there. I like it. I've recently decided to get into a routine as well to try to lose 25 pounds. I'm not fat, but if I can lose 25 pounds I'll be at my target weight. And working out is fun if you get into a habit of doing it regularly. Don't think I could go as far as to stop eating meat, but I am planning to stop drinking beer on weekdays as a start, and most likely stop all together later on this summer. Thanks for sharing the link on HN.
I've lived various stretches of my life in balanced and utterly imbalanced states and I can say with quite a bit of certainty that balance always wins, both in terms of happiness and performance.

The other thing about sacrificing everything for your startup that people seem to forget is that when you sacrifice everything and your startup fails -- which, statistically, it will -- you're left with nothing. Having no money is an inconvenience next to being in poor health and having nothing else in life to fall back on emotionally.

At any point in life where you're sacrificing everything and removing all you have to fall back on, you're setting yourself up for failure. Nothing in life is certain, but nothing in life is less certain than a startup.
But I'm not especially unhappy

But you are very aggressive and defensive about it. What makes you think that healthy thin people devote "all" their free time to working out? Or that a "healthy weight" involves never eating delicious food?

Is it really fair to call him a "freak"? He's the unusual stand-out fairground attraction? A thin person who eats vegetables and bikes to work, excuse me, what?

So why the fuck should I, or the legion of people like me, care

I take it you are this aggressive and defensive when someone writes a blog post about Java or Flower arranging or anything else you're not interested in?
You can eat delicious things. Just eat less of the same thing.

The only reason you'd have to give up certain delicious things is if you were a strict vegetarian -- eating a low-calorie vegetarian diet and getting enough protein isn't rocket science, but it doesn't leave any room for splurging on empty calories.

You already said you enjoy outdoor activities. Isn't that exercise? If you limit the definition of exercise to joyless and repetitive activities with no intrinsic interest, then I have to agree with you that exercise is not worth it.
You don't want constant insulin levels. You want as much time with very low insulin levels as possible. You get that by eating two or three meals and avoiding snacks. It's also beneficial to skip a meal every now and then and have a longer than 12 hour fast.
No, what I'm saying is that a popular source like techcrunch has a much easier time making it to the front page, no matter the quality of content.

Mostly due to the simple fact, that a lot more people read that source. By making popular sources, require more upvotes, it would make the front page more merit based.

Let's face it, making the front page is pretty easy right now, I've had stories I submitted hit frontpage with 2 upvotes. By making big sites like techcrunch require something like 10 upvotes instead, it would at least eliminate most of the fluff pieces.
From the ministry press release: Cui Ran, an expert on the Chinese online industry, said the regulation aimed to "nip illegal online activities in the bud," as current trading volume was still too small to shake the nation's entire financial system.

But as the trade expanded steadily, with increasing conversions between virtual and real money, there would be an impact on the financial system, he noted.

This is about maintaining state control over the currency and taxation.
Hacking Papers, Slides and Videos, a lot of knowledge
A great hacking knowledge archive! A must have in your bookmarks!
So. The problem is:
Someone used an aggressive language (aggresive in the sense: The language does not defend the programmer from his own stupidness, but also does not hinder his freedom), used a certain feature of this language and fell on his face. Thus, the feature is bad.
Uhm. I guess, in this logic, everything of C, C++, Python (at least) is bad, because you can easily fall on your face with the more efficient idioms. Certainly, you cannot iterate over the generator twice and you cannot iterate over an iterator twice (remember: a list can return multiple iterators, one at every time it is asked), but if you know a certain functions requires multiple iterations, well, pass it a list or a set or whatever is capable of generating an arbitrary amount of iterators (or even do things like itertools.repeat(generator) :) ). The point remains:
This is a feature of an aggressive language, and you need to know your code slightly better (meaning: more documentation, or more code immersion) in order to reach maximum efficiency. This point holds with pointers, with templates and with generators. But it also holds, that well-used pointers, well-used templates and well-used generators can speed up code magnificiently :)

So, overall, I don't really see the point of this article, besides someone who should go and use some defensive language.
We have several servers with Rackspace and several hundred of our own customers were affected by this outage (for about 30 mins).

For what it's worth, I still think they are the best managed hosting company around. The customer service is great.

This is the only major problem I can recall since this one:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/12/quick-plug-the-internet...
A very interesting typo-- Jif or Skippy, I think you mean.
Good points. I was of the same opinion as you until I read The China Study... which is a large scale epidemiological study of nutrition.

I think it's worth reading b/c it could have a fairly drastic impact upon one's health.

And yes, the constant hubbub of opposite ideas is also frustrating. Sadly most of it is (in one way or another) intended to help sell a food product that someone hopes to make money on.
We're now at "Yu-huh!" / "Nu-uh!", so I'll just add that what you're saying disagrees with every body-building, strength-training, weight loss and general fitness article and book I've ever read.

I do agree, though, that if you're eating, say, nothing but pasta and sugar for all of your meals, your insulin will stay high. But that's because of the food you're eating, not the frequency.
Slicehost in general may be up, but slices hosted in the DFW datacenter were down.
No, because it's not a democracy, then.
I have no interest in persuading people to eat a certain way... I just find it odd that the subject of nutrition does not seem to be one on which people enjoy rational discussion...
Unless you're hosting everything yourself, it seems like you'd have the same problem whether it's using the cloud or not ... wouldn't you?
You sound pretty certain. Could it be that opinions differ? And that yours is not the majority opinion at the moment? You might want to qualify your statements a little bit...
> "But you are very aggressive and defensive about it"

I'm not aggressive or defensive. I'm tired of people who do this. "I am not a health freak, but I love my life and I'm pretty sure that it's great, and I feel I deserve credit for it. PS, this is how you can be like me."

> Is it really fair to call him a "freak"? He's the unusual stand-out fairground attraction? A thin person who eats vegetables and bikes to work, excuse me, what?

Sorry dude, working out 6 times a week means that you're exceptionally into it. I am a compsci and photography "freak", I didn't mean it as a pejorative, I meant it as a clear descriptor of someone who devotes nearly all his time to one specific task. My contempt for his article stems from the disdain for the same formulaic structure I see on all health posts.

> I take it you are this aggressive and defensive when someone writes a blog post about Java or Flower arranging or anything else you're not interested in?

I am not afraid to give my opinion. Check my twitter. Better yet, ask me about Python if you run into me. I'll see if I can achieve barfight status.
I've found that I generally just don't enjoy physical activity. It just isn't pleasant much of the time, particularly on days where I'm already tired. The only way that I manage to get a good amount of exercise is by biking to work. I can sort of trick my schedule by overlapping with commuting time. If I had to drive to work and the gym I just wouldn't go to the latter.

I now bike about 50 miles per week and my appetite is enormous. I start getting hungry about 3 hours after eating, and if I have lunch at 12:30 I can actively seeking food around 5:00, walking to other buildings just to get a handful of chips, i.e. I don't eat just because it's there. I'm also pretty tired in the evenings after the ride sometimes. I sometimes wonder if it's worth it.
Eating less is the one proven way to live significantly longer. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070502143834.ht...
Who wouldn't be aggressive and defensive about it? Since you speak English, statistically you are extremely likely to live in a society that likes to blame e.g. rising health care costs on "fatties", that fudges health analyses to ignore that being "overweight" by the usual standard is healthier than being "normal", that is full of people claiming that you are weak willed and "just" need to radically change your life forever to meet with some preexisting beauty standard.

The mere fact that you can claim what you do in your first paragraph means you have never seriously had to deal with these problems. Some people are genetically predisposed to being heavy. When I was 16 and swimming over a mile every day, I weighed 220 ("BMI" claims that the maximum permissible weight at my height with a "heavy" build is 180, FYI). Trying to be 180 would do me far, far more harm than being heavy would, or will; this, too, has been backed up by medical studies (see: miserable effectiveness of dieting. See: health complications from losing and gaining weight.).
You posted JUST too soon... 10 minutes ago I received:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello,

We have experienced an interruption in power to a portion of our Dallas-Fort Worth data center facility. Power has been restored and our DC engineers are working on devices that need to be manually brought back online as quickly as possible. Further updates will be made as soon as new information is made available. Please monitor our MyRackspace customer portal as this is the quickest way we can get updates out to you.

Sincerely,

Rackspace
"Part of the reason it’s grown is because TechCrunch’s reporting is some of the best in the technology industry, comparable to, say, the technology reporting in the New York Times." - not sure I would ever use TC as an example of good technology reporting. And using the example of a stock photo saves money is just ridiculous, of course they are cheaper, but I wonder if instead of iran protesters being actually photographed, we saw a stock photo of generic protesters that would have quite the same impact.

This is just an gross over simplification of the situation as industries changes and times dictate new solutions to old problems.
"You already said you enjoy outdoor activities. Isn't that exercise? If you limit the definition of exercise to joyless and repetitive activities with no intrinsic interest, then I have to agree with you that exercise is not worth it."

I agree with this statement, but I'm responding to the article's specific brand of exercise, not exercise in general. Personally, I am on a slow downward trend in weight because I'm making an effort to do things I like and pick and choose my foods more carefully.

I am just tired of people like the poster, who literally play both sides of the fence in one article ("I demand credit for the effort I make to make my body look this way" vs. "I am not a health freak.") I also find it funny how inevitable the course of those posts are. It would have a been a good article if he hadn't made the transition from descriptive to prescriptive, but he did and here we are asking, "Why on earth would I inflict LL Cool J on my ears in 2009?"
And why are you so angry about this? Obviously, the writer has bought heavily into making fitness a lifestyle - and I think he's totally on the wrong track because he has to be so ridiculously disciplined about it. But I think the point worth taking home is more along the lines of:

Yes, you can ignore it all and be reassured by a gaggle of paid professionals that you're within the national averages and they'll know how to deal with you when your health fails you.

Or you can say, "Most people are unhealthy. I don't want that." The evidence from prehistoric times strongly indicates that this is our actual situation today. And going from that premise, you start making some changes. Maybe they're small ones, or big ones. Maybe LL Cool J plays a role. But the conclusion always involves working a little bit because society has made it hard to be naturally fit and healthy.
if "green" energy was profitable why would you need to subsidize it? people would do it voluntarily.
That's actually pretty cool that your tried to grow your own rice. My comment is mainly because I know there are a lot of people out there with only partial knowledge of the reasons behind things like 'local'. Some people think "it's not being shipped in from Mexico or Columbia so it's obviously not using as much energy" while others just do it to try and support local business. But that first group is grossly misinformed.
Supreme Court declines to block remote-storage DVR
Just goes to show you that the 100% uptime guarantee is nothing but b.s. At least the other hosts are honest enough to offer 99.9999%

Edit: Actually just checked, and apparently my host switched from the 99.9999% to 100% as well.
This is a really cool technology but the the implementation needs to get just a little faster:

"In the case of a Google search, for instance, performing the process with encrypted keywords would multiply the necessary computing time by around 1 trillion, Gentry estimates"

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0713/breakthroughs-privacy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

In handwavy technical detail: arrange that the things you're searching form a basis a1, a2, ..., aN for your state space, with your have-I-found-it test as an operator that negates the state you're looking for and maps the others to themselves. In other words, it's reflection in the hyperplane perpendicular to the state you're looking for. Now let a = a1+...+aN, and define a new operator that reflects in the hyperplane perpendicular to a. And now put your system in state a, and repeatedly apply those two operators, one after the other.

The composition of two reflections is a rotation. The angle of that rotation is known (and quite small); the angle between the two vectors (your desired state and a) is close to a right angle; by doing the rotation an appropriate number of times, you bring the system's state vector close to the desired state. Now you measure the system's state, and with high probability it's the state you're looking for.

A little calculation shows that the number of rotations needed is roughly proportional to sqrt(N), and the probability of getting the wrong state is roughly proportional to 1/N. Now do the process as many times as it takes for 1/N^k to be small enough for your satisfaction. Congratulations: you've now found what you were looking for, taking about sqrt(N) time, with error probability as small as you like.
My guilty snack - peanut butter and nutella sandwiched between two tortillas.

I call it the Tortilla Abomination.
I like the minimalism in the design but it is a little odd that you have an ad banner for another online dating service on your pages. It is probably a little early for advertising, especially for a competing service.
4 Questions and 4 Pressure Tests To Decipher a VC's Interest In Your Company
If you really want a "what food is advertised as isn't what it really is" story search youtube for Vegan Marshmallows. (short: some guy was supplying a 'vegan' gelatin substitute to several groups (not just vegans) and when it was tested it had animal products in it and the guy 'disappeared').

Revealing that some companies/restaurants aren't always truthful isn't a new thing. Certainly not only a year old. It's really as old as investigative journalism in general. Dating all the way back to "The Jungle".

Edit: and what you're really saying is that 'mainstream media' just copied the idea too. And from a grassroots-level at that.
I can promise you that it takes more than a "lunch salad" to keep Oprah fat.

Your body is a two-port function - it's not rocket science.

What comes in must come out, and if your body doesn't use up all that food energy then... (you get the idea)
Helen Keller was quite conscious, and she could neither see nor hear.
Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, Others
Probably because the authors point is trivial.

Of course if you spend you entire time to be thin by exercising and eating like a bird you will be skinny.

That's no challenge when that is what you do. The challenge is to do that, work for 10 hours a day, have time with the kids, sex with the misses, hang out with the friends, see the family and so on.

Then it's interesting. But the authors claim is reminiscent to a body building screaming "see me I'm muscular"
I had to explain the awesomeness of auto reverse the other day. Made me a little sad.
Indeed there are.

I don't know that I can speak for everyone my age, but I'm more or less the same guy I was at 25 -- better in a lot of ways, but the same person. If you asked me if my self-awareness has "improved" or "degraded", I'd be hard-pressed to answer. I can't say that it's changed a whole lot, except slightly for the better. I'm certainly less OCD than I was, and understand myself better. But I don't think the big answer you're looking for is actually there.
Python is an imperative language. It supports functional style really well but it's definitely not a functional language. So whether it's "wrong" to be unable to use a generator twice is not as obvious as in a functional language.
You keep saying this, but if you browse the Peanut Butter's here
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-j-m-creamy-natural-pe...

You'll find that most commercial peanut butters only have 2g or so more of sugar per serving then their natural counterparts.
Yeah, I always thought faking meat with vegetables has a certain amount of hack value, but people who are serious about a vegetarian diet are better off mostly eating cusines that are designed to be vegetarian, to get the proper nutrient balance. True veganism is really hard, because you can't really trust processed foods.

From the food hacking perspective, it'd be cool if someone did the opposite: fake vegetables using meat. Making beef have the taste and texture of a carrot would be pretty impressive.
Depends on what you mean by 'processed' too. There are some very rich flavors that can be produced just by throwing cashews into a food processor/blender. I don't think that many people would say that throwing nuts through a blender would really 'processed'. (I really think that a lot of people just see 'processed' as some block box where ingredients go into a factory and come out the other side somehow 'tainted', but how and why they are 'tainted' is absent from the discussion)
not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but the message says 't to take wander around, thats cool with us'.

However, all it lets me do is see the newest members, so i'm not getting to really wander very far. Clicking a new member just returns me to that page.
Am I doing something wrong?

I do like the design, very sparse yet not overly cold.
The way Tor uses TLS/SSL is unique enough that it seems very possible to automatically classify Tor traffic.

Do you have more information on this?
Better alternatives developing in the future is a fairy tale. This puts food on the table now.