skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took on a radical vegan diet - no processed foods, not even refined grains (which means not even bread) - and I lost sixty pounds between March or April and right now (July).

Speaking as somebody who cured their own obesity with very little effort or struggle, I not only believe the answer is no, obesity is not an oral bacterial disease, I also believe the question is ridiculous.
I love Fake Steve. I'm so glad he's back. If only the real Steve were so forthcoming.
Hey all,

I've been at number 30 for a few days and is still stuck. Does anyone have pointers for this?
BlackBerry Clearly Has Some Apple Envy Issues
Why on earth would you want your applications running locally to show in the browser, that's just another layer in between slowing things down and offering no extra level of service ?

'Applications' running on your local machine that are web centric can be reached via the localhost url, everything else knows how to talk to the display engine already (and at a much higher clip than a browser would be able to offer).
All upgrades should be rolled out gradually so that if the the upgrade triggers a bug or in general have some issues, all data centers are not affected at the same time.
Not really, you can close the connection and reconnect with a different offset. Interrupted HTTP transfers use this to continue where they left off.

The way to do this is to use the 'Range' header iirc.
North Korea? Cyber war? This is crap. People in North Korea starve! They have no cars, not even shampoo. They have no resources or man power to start anything "cyber".
Because I want people to be used to accessing their own stuff (media in particular) via their browser for when home media servers inevitably become a big deal and people use a youtube-like (or HTML 5 Video tag)-like interface to access their stuff.

There are absolutely limitations to using the browser as an interface to apps, but you gain in that "Remote Desktop" becomes trivial to implement and that you can have one expensive server and a bunch of thin-clients all over your house.

It's just the way I think it's headed, and I think that's pretty cool.
Though I agree the comment is regarding my startup Wingify, I thought my comment was insightful and useful to HNers. Apologies if you found the comment inapt.
Two million German civilians have fire arms and they train in their "Schützenvereine". No need for no army or mercenaries.
Simple: the more time people spend online, the more money Google makes off adsense, which is the vast majority of their profit.
Costa Rica has no army and fares very well without it in stark contrast to the nations around them:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3929177.stm
Just educate yourself.
I took a brief look at virtualenv, but decided not to use it for some reason that currently escapes me. The solution that I came up with instead has been working out quite well so far...

My main package has a sub-package called "external". When I run manage.py, it immediately imports external. External's __init__.py adds a bunch of things to sys.path

Whenever I want to add a new package, I simply add the egg, or source, or whatever to the external folder, add an entry to the external/__init__.py and check it in. This process can even selectively load packages by platform with a simple if-statement. Now when I checkout a new enlistment from SVN, I immediately get the full set of dependencies at their exact versions.

Simple, but effective.

Thoughts?
This had me laughing:

The canonical example of failure in tech journalism is TechCrunch, a blog that once declared Google's MapReduce to be a system that "reduced the links found on the web into a map that search algorithms could run over." Yes, this will do nicely.

While you could say that The register obviously would have an "agenda" to discredit other competing sites, I honestly find The register, despite the snarky style, much more informative and useful than TechCrunch.
Nuclear weapons are interesting science? Maybe you want to try something of this science on your city or area? FAIL.
Complete Search in Continuous Global Optimization and Constraint Satisfaction
At most of the business mixers that I've gone to people later add the contacts to LinkedIn, at which point they can grab a vCard if they need to import it elsewhere. It might be worth looking into the LinkedIn API to see if you can try to get a similar workflow with Bump.
Well, I guess with a title like that one counterexample will do, I just 'upgraded' my windows based ACER netbook to Ubuntu nbr.

The distinction between OS and brand is getting weirder by the day, I thought that the google chrome OS was in fact the Linux OS with a custom windowing system running the chrome browser.
Journalists love to use the term, but what is a "cyber war" anyway? The first thing I think about is a bunch of script kiddies trying to take over each other's IRC channels with netsplits and operator status, and trying to erase each other's hard drives with Sub7.
I'm a CS grad student right now, and even I can see that'd be a pretty damn irresponsible way to run a business. Not that I think that's actually the motivation...
Congratulations. You've somehow made dumb redneck kids yelling out muscle car windows sound reasonable.
I understand that North Korean government has a motive, but do they have enough technological ability to orchestrate such an attack? A country full of starving people and with one website opened a few years ago? I highly doubt it.

On the other hand I doubt any of the other few possible states (China or Russia) would turn to such demonstration of force against US unless they had something to gain from it.

What's left then? Some crazy group like 4chan or some errorists? They would be shouting "we did it" before you even heard the news about the attacks.

Oh well... back to square two.
"and then ported GTK+, Qt, and a few other widget toolkits to their window system"

Wich is obviously done in an afternoon :)
Maybe it is crap, but this has nothing to do with the people of North Korea. It's (allegedly) their government. The one that also has the ability to manufacture and launch rockets. How many bottles of shampoo could you buy with that?
Why I do Time Tracking
Global Optimization Algorithms - Theory and Applications
Release an OS that will drive traffic to your [...] search engine where you can sell ads.

Not far removed at all. Google makes billions by selling ads. Even if they budget a couple of million $/year for this project (might be less, depending on how you structure the proejct), they'll be making crazy returns if this increases their ad revenue just by 0.001. Not to mention all the FUD it'll cause inside MS :)
How does a preference in games (or, more likely, choosing a game absolutely everyone would know about for a sarcastic remark) in any way relate to technical knowledge?
[Disclaimer - I work on Windows Azure which could be considered a competitor to GAE]

You always have critical bugs in large systems. Unless it is causing an outage or impacting some critical scenario in a major way, you don't want to mess up your usual process. You want to do orderly upgrades to all your environments/clusters/DCs and short-cut/hot patch only in dire emergencies.

Also, it is hard to judge the severity of bugs, especially in large scale distributed systems.
There is probably some truth in what you say, albeit i wouldn't go so far to say that they're just nerds. They're business nerds, or they wouldn't be where they are today.

Also, i'd really appreciate if people would stop calling it a "linux distro". It makes as much sense than to call OS X a "BSD Distro"
So, 50 million people tried it, with the amount of press and money poured into the launch anything less and it should be considered a total failure.

Now lets wait half a year before we're going to talk about how many people it has attracted and how it is going to unseat google.

Also, and this is no small point, MSN traffic has dropped significantly because of the re-routing of MSN search to bing.

That's not exactly a zero sum game but there is more to this than just going from unknown to 13th spot in 30 days.

I know alexa should be taken with a grain of salt, but this graph:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bing.com

Shows someting quite different than the compete graph in the article which only focuses on the month as a whole, the day by day graphs paint a completely different picture.

Extrapolation from too little data is fraught with peril.
I doubt it's North Korea. A DPRK officially sanctioned forum of overseas DPRK supporters thinks the accusations are laughable. http://www.korea-dpr.com/cgi-bin/simpleforum.cgi?fid=04&...

That forum is fun to click around, btw. Only members are allowed to post and only points of view that agree with the official DPRK line are allowed. Contrast with this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12...
[Disclaimer: I work at Google, but my project is about as far away from App Engine and GFS as you could possibly get, so on this issue I have no more information than a layperson.]

It's possible that nobody knew or thought that it was a critical bug. Oftentimes, you'll see a little bug somewhere, think "Oh, we should fix that eventually", but the conditions that would make it into a really big bug are rare or unknown. It's only when those conditions actually happen that you think, "Well shit. I guess we should've fixed that last week."

If a bug isn't believed to be critical, then waiting to deploy the fix absolutely is the right decision. There're all sorts of things that can go wrong with an upgrade, and doing it on a schedule lets you go through a rigorous QA process and monitor the push as it happens.
Swimwear online and bikini online
Yeah - I haven't missed it in the last few years, I don't see why I would start now. I actually used it yesterday to play Tales of Monkey Island (excellent, btw) and I remembered why I switched; what a huge pain in the ass everything is.
Well just like Linux, Apache, MySQL and Mozilla it's based on technology going back years (decades in some cases). You can easily confuse people by saying something is a "70s era", or "mid-90s" technology because they'll infer that whatever you are pushing is current, even if it too is built on top of technology of the same era.

See my quote of his opinions on non-Apple browsers if you're still wondering whether this author is trollish or not:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692354
Soulja Boy has monetized extremely well - he sold a _lot_ of ringtones, has had 3 number 1 singles now, and has said that he has over 25 million dollars in the bank. He turned a viral video into a career, and it's amazing. And remember, he's only 18.
The real losers of the battle are the artists, not the labels (they still make plenty) or the freeloaders.
Yes, but he claimed that 6-8000 calories per day was "easy" to kind of just happen. It is not, unless the ease refers to indeed going to McDonalds three times a day plus a "snack" of french fries and a milkshake inbetween.

Phelps proves a point, though: so long as one uses the calories, there is no weight gain from fat.
These sort of public post-mortems are a fascinating look inside an otherwise opaque system.
Of course the BBC should support screen reader users, and of course it should keep producing quality programming which could not otherwise be made.

This is not a matter of providing something people would otherwise not have access to. Safari 1.3 users would have been able to use the site without Glow, but their experience of it would have been a bit degraded. No doubt less so if a fraction of the time put into developing Glow had been put into finding the best ways to mitigate the page degradation. Safari 1.3 may have had its problems but it is essentially a capable rendering engine for the kind of page functionality the BBC uses. After all the BBC is hardly pushing the envelope for HTML & Javascript technology, nor does it need to in order to deliver its content.

I don't see that there is any serious business case for this amount of development to support this level of refinement for such a small group of users. The fact is that developers are in a luxurious position of following what appeals to their vanities rather than delivering value for public funds.

Someone mentioned the team was small. How many of them are contractors vs permanent? I bet they are not all permies. Even so, one permanent salary for two years is a heck of a lot of money to throw after a project replacing something which is 'good enough' and available for free.

Can you point to pages or features on the BBC site which, without the use of Glow, would render content inaccessible or completely unusable to Safari 1.3 users if jQuery had been used?
PR stunt or not, it works for me. "They're not corporate pricks." has been burned into my brain. That's huge to me.

The weird part is that I don't recall hearing of them before.
Ted Dziuba is known for hating on just about everything.

I think I'll avoid the Ted Dziuba koolaid.
He focuses on the negative because most businesses fail, and as entrepreneurs are eternal optimists, many don't fully consider the downside of starting a business. Right now MANY small businesses and startups are failing. Its important to understand the potential negative consequences of starting a business. Most people, and especially around here, are in denial about this basic fact: by the numbers, your startup or small business will most likely fail. Thats ok. Your job is to do everything you can to beat those odds.

Also, most people don't have the luxury of 'capital light.' When small businesses fail, families usually suffer. That is part of the game, and its worth talking about once in a while, in between articles about guys that hit it big.
Can't you just drop all packages from NK?
Yes. The book "Good calories, bad calories" is the standard recommendation. It will however destroy your trust in the medical authorities.
You probably don't have time to comment on Hacker News threads when there are so many moving parts of your industry-leading decades-old business that you need to go attend to. Unless you're not speaking from a position of comparable experience. But I doubt it. Opinions completely divorced from the actual facts of the case or from any relevant experience would never be proffered on Hacker News. You probably know exactly what you're talking about.
Thanks for the info. I never heard of them before, I am considering moving and looking/comparing all the options.

Free backup and 4 free IP is good enough reason for me to move. At slicehost they charge $30/month just for backup! which is not even available on the high-end slices. The only thing I will miss about slicehost is the ability resize slices within minutes without much effort. I am currently moving back and forth with their 2GB-4GB slices.
I don't suppose you would know who offers a similar sort of service for Canadian based companies...?
And they're doing it again with the move to the new technology platform Forge - monkeypatching ZF so that is just a little bit different and writing their own PHP templating language Spectrum. BBC FM&T has a bad case of the NIH.
One of the things I was pleased with in Stuff To Do is that you don't have to monkey around with starting/stopping a timer. You just have a task that you're working on, and when you're doing email/HN/otherwise wasting time, you just set 'time wasting' or whatever as your current task.
Think of it as farming, if you sow a lot of seeds some will never come up, some will come up, wither and die and some will come up and grow to great height, then whither and die.

Everything has a lifecycle, businesses do too.

Any business that has generated money over its lifespan and has employed people and paid them is by some measure a successful business.

The timescale at which that cycle plays and the size of the business are not relevant.
dsh is worth looking at. It's essentially a for loop that runs ssh, but it can also get named groups of machines from config files, run them in parallel, and prefix output lines with the machine they came from.
You say we should use the library with the most features. What I want to do is pick a library for our organisation to use for the forseeable future. I can't forsee what features I will require in the future. I'm currently using JQuery because that's the one I hear most about.

Whilst it's very kind of you to give your stuff away, I think it makes life harder for those of us having to choose which Yet Another Javascript Library to use.
iLounge is the premier “outrageous” internet lounge of all kind in the Philippines, caters mostly to students, bank clerks and office class around the university belt within Dr. A. Santos Avenue (formerly Sucat Road), Paranaque City. Sosyal ka ba? DIto ka na!
Too right. The entire build up of that article was essentially to blame not the owner, nor even the accountant, but the wife!
The present Swedish government recently did a review of the military. The criticism was, more or less, that it was like the British navy before WW I, where officers were promoted based on how clean they kept their ships.

(Lots of money go into the army and lots of equipment is bought -- and these days have almost no units ready. There is talk about changing this a bit.)

I'm not going to claim that Swedish politicians are supernaturally prescient or anything, but... the last time the Swedish military was closed down since it obviously would never be needed, was in the 1920s. I'd better move west. :-)
yes, lisp can make certain math simpler

consider bounds on a: 0 < a < 1; it's (and (< 0 a 1) (foo)) ... should be easy in any language

how about 0 < a < b < 1 ? it's (and (< 0 a b 1) (bar)) ... a little ugly in other languages

0 < a < b < ... < z < 1 ? i won't program that in other languages :p
I believe the "there have never been other implementations" to be incorrect. The Cortado Java Applet is a a second implementation of the Theora code for example.
Looks like an interesting course. And you couldn't be in a better place for it. My second choice of course was a masters in information science, which looks very similar to the vlis one.

I think data science is a very broad subject area that covers the science of organising information (information science and vlis), right through to information visualisation.

Information science would have given me a good grounding in the skills I need for my start-up (which is involved in organising research information), but I thought it would be best to build on my expertise and interests (design, HCI, UX, psychology) and team up with someone who knows a lot more about the technical side of building information systems - more than I could ever learn from a one year masters.

It sounds like we are starting at opposite ends of the data/information science spectrum; it will be interesting to see if we meet in the middle after our masters.
You assume too much. Who's to say he didn't instruct the accountant to cook the books? That seems the most likely scenario to my cynical mind. What kind of accountant would make that kind of basic error?

It beggars belief that the guy could run a successful business for 20 years, but could not understand the difference between receivables and booked work. He was probably boosting cashflow to keep the banks happy, then one day they figured it out and shut him down. Otherwise he would have surely been able to get loans for that vital "equipment".

Ah well, happens all the time. I feel sorry for the guy but he should have been more careful.
Yeah, they can fire a few rockets per year and most probably that's the main reason they starve as they use up all of their resources and scientists for that. NK is one of the poorest countries in the world. I don't believe the North Korea hype.
Am I the only person who finds this slightly amusing? I just read on HN about a week ago about Google bragging about how since all their sites run on the same underlying architecture, one upgrade and all their sites get the upgrade (speed, scalability, etc.).

But it seems to have turned around in this case. One underlying bug brought down their whole system (or whole app engine system).

Haha.
Almost as hilarious as their multi-language 'MVC' approach that they were discussing implementing for a couple of years, I wonder if it's been done yet.

I recall them wanting to use php for their views and some weird concoction of Java / Perl / Ruby / Python for everything else.
Exactly that's what I said. NK has no resources for such an endeavor. You need a whole "army" of hackers to wage a "cyber war". Did they import them?
Speaker Presentation Files: Velocity 2009
I do not agree with the thesis stated that "software engineering is slippery because humans are unpredictable". Maybe it is harder because it deals with humans, but good and solid research is possible, just look at areas like information retrieval.
Just do what the overly paranoid security industry says. They'll never steer you wrong!
Reminds me of TipJoy.
Kat improve her Hindi
Katreena is improving her hindi for upcoming Rajkumar santohi film Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani. In that Katrina will plays a catholic girl and one would presume that dubbing for this role wasn’t complicated for the actress because she has a usual British aceant here’s but something else that’s been worrying her.
Dziuba's a clever writer to be sure, but to me, part of being a 'professional' journalist is that you refrain from the ad hominem. Hurling clever insults is easy there are a million writers who can do it but to create a piece of informative, interesting, relevant content, not so much. Calling out Michael Arrington like that...was kind of unprofessional. But I do like Dziuba's writing and also of course Verity Stob.
I assume people want an iPhone because Apple restricts what you do with it. This is a perfect time for Apple to do some restricting.
Excellent Free Tools for Evaluating Your Design’s Colors
No, the only thing that happened is that lots of people bought things they couldn't afford and, unsurprisingly, couldn't pay for them. That's it.

It doesn't help at all to blame banks for this. It's readily apparent that if you purchase a house, regardless of the terms, you will eventually need to pay for a house. It's not rocket surgery. The corollary to this is that "if you can't afford a house, don't buy a house." Anybody ignoring that simple fact is likely to run out of money.

Many of us realized this, didn't buy things we couldn't afford, and therefore still have money. It's amazing that people would expect to blame some random 3rd party for their own foolishness.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/1389/saturday-night-live-dont-buy-...
J2ME Mobile Development Series 4 - Start Coding
It doesn't seem like a lot of people have connected the parts together yet.

Google Gears, Native Client and Chrome are all parts to making the web MORE than what it already is. Think about it. At the moment we are constrained to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With the technologies being put together by Google you can easily have downloadable native applications that run through Chrome.

I'm doubting that Google is just going to make another net kiosk distribution. Making an operating system for themselves is how they are going to really get their web technology out in the open.
Camcorder video to regular DVD burning 
Camcorder video to regular DVD burning is easy for Sothink HD Movie Maker, which is characterized by burning camcorder video and other videos to regular DVD, if you like, if you can also burn camcorder video to Blu-ray disc perfectly.
General-purpose OCR (the task to properly scan, recognize and categorize information on the card) isn't a solved problem. I like the idea of placing QR Code (or Beetag for more aesthetics) on the card for machine processing. There are QR Code readers for every reasonable mobile phone in the world.
spam, flagged.
Do I have to bump (touch) someone's hand when doing cards exchange? What about Asian market (millions of iPhone units are sold there), where business etiquette is that you should hand your business card to someone while holding it with both of your hands, and you should not touch the receiver?