skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How in the hell do you eat 6000 calories a day? That's the equivalent of 6 double-patty burgers, plus 3 large fries and a 3 large sodas, at most fast food restaurants.

Well, we stipulated three meals and snacking, and you've accounted for it already with just the meals! Say you also like potato chips and dip, and want to eat a bag of chips with a can of dip between lunch and dinner, and then after dinner. If that's all the snacking you do, you've added another 4500-5000 calories just in snacks.

Could you sit down tomorrow and eat all that? Of course, you probably couldn't, if you don't eat nearly that much now. But it's not hard to get there if you start eating because you're bored, or because you want to make yourself feel better, or whatever. Over the weeks or months, "I'll just have a little more this time so that eating lasts longer and is more enjoyable" pushes the amounts up until the calorie counts here seem only excessive, rather than completely bizarre.
I agree with you. But now I want to launch and release to several EC2 and Rackspace machines, in parallel. apt doesn't help with that.

Ofcourse it does. What makes you think it doesn't?

If I have 5 debian machines that need to be updated, I should be able to do that with a single command and it should happen in parallel.

reprepro -Vb . stage1 myapp_2.0-1.dsc

That drops a new pkg onto the mirror where the staging hosts pick it up within one minute, from cron. I could use the "live" distro instead of "stage1" to roll it out to production. We use sections if we want to limit the push to individual groups of hosts.

The same applies if I have 5 debian machines and 5 red hat machines
(etc...)

If you mix linux distributions in a production environment then you have bigger problems to resolve first.

I'm advocating a tool that is aware of the existing system specific package managers rather than a replacement of them.

Those who don't understand are doomed to reinvent, poorly...
I agree with you about the refined carbohydrates but the underlying facts about the thermodynamics are also important, but in a slightly more subtle way.

People almost always underestimate just how incredibly - almost unbelievably - efficient the human body is. We're used to being impressed by cars that can do 60 mpg, but the human body can easily manage 300 mpg, even for an unfit hacker like me; fitter people will be slightly more efficient, maybe up to 400 mpg (http://health.howstuffworks.com/health-illness/wellness/phys...).

What this means is that you have to run an enormous distance to burn off even a tiny amount of food - about 1 mile for every 100 calories. So you can run a mile on one banana (http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=banana), or 1.5 average cookies (http://www90.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.5+cookies), or just over one rasher of bacon. You can run a entire marathon (26.2 miles) on 2,600 calories - or one big mac and a packet of cookies.

A scary number of people in the western world eat enough to run a marathon every single day and still have enough calories left over of keep themselves ticking over (~1500 calories) - without changing their diet at all. This wouldn't be physiologically supportable for wear and tear reasons, but calorie wise a lot of us could support it.

These two facts in combination: the abundance of high quality, high calorie food in the developed world, and the incredible efficiency of the human body are a virtually guaranteed recipe for obesity, whatever other factors come into play. The fact that almost all of the easily available junk calories people consume come from highly refined carbohydrates (because these are so cheap to produce), massively compounds the problem.

Obviously there isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between calories in and weight gain and everyone is slightly different and most food isn't just converted into glycogen and then to fat, etc, etc... but as far as I can see, most people will not reasonably be able to burn off the calories from an average western diet, no matter how hard they try - there just isn't enough time to run that far and hold down a job.
Trying to do that much exercise, on top of trying to diet and do everything else is just too much mental strain. On the whole, I think people are better off just not eating the carbohydrate in the first place - cutting it off at source is much easier than trying to get rid of it later, and only requires you to do one thing, rather than two.
Designing and building cars is engineering, but it's not a science. It's not a "rigorous discipline with proven results" in the way that, say, physics is.
Customize HTML control with jQuery (Checkbox + Radio)
You can't run Linux software on it - that is, software designed to be run on a normal Linux system.

Thus, its not a Linux distribution. They could just as easily have chosen ChorusOS or vxWorks or some other kernel .. the only advantage they have in using Linux is the fact that Linux runs on tons more hardware than anything else ..
VFX: Removing a button from video to make Goldman Sachs' CEO look better
Korea, North — GDP: 40 Billion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_North_Korea

There might be a little extra in there some where for a trip to Fry's for some l33t hax0r t00lz.
Title is a bit misleading: I was expecting a run down on DIY home office using a Dining table.... Summary is he had a dining table and added decent chair, computer, monitor and keyboard.
Wasn't MSN search already bigger than Digg, Twitter, and CNN before they renamed it to Bing? How about a comparison of traffic between MSN search before and Bing after?
Ugh. If anybody ever has to maintain your code, they'll copy/paste the symbol like Tichy described while cursing your name. Personally, I'd copy/paste it into the global find/replace dialog the first time I came across it.

I mean, sure, if it was my job to deal with your unicode code every day from here on out, I'd bother to learn how to map screwy symbols to keyboard shortcuts. But really, why would you do this to your code in the first place? It certainly doesn't make things more readable. Exactly the opposite.
To be honest though I was absolutely surprised when I found out that the 3G modem in the ACER works without any tinkering whatsoever (easier than in the windows distro that came with the machine).

In the not-so-distant past that would have taken the better part of a day and a whole bunch of fiddling. It's getting there.
Web-based Productivity Suite Zoho Now Integrated With Microsoft Access
gotta say there seem to be a lot of bashing of bbc and not a lot of talk about the actual code, the efforts made by the bbc to make glow are entirely understandable where i'm sitting ( in a bbc office )

the code itself is easy to use which is all we can ask for , and it takes care we have a quick response from the glow team (as anyone who has bothered to join the list will of found out)
it has done everything that as a bbc employee i have needed it to do and done it in a fully accessible and degradable way. these are the things that are most important to the bbc, as we have a charter to make it accessible to all, regardless of how small the minority is.

maybe you should check out the library and use it before you criticise it as "just another javascript library" after all that is how jquery started out and look at it now :-)
Why Chrome OS Now? Because Microsoft Office In The Cloud Comes Monday.
Fake Steve: "First of all, nobody seems to appreciate how goddamn hard it is to make an operating system."

From the Google blog: "[GOS is Chrome running] within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel"

So they're not building an OS from scratch. Did Fake Steve even read the post?
I agree, this should be a user choice rather than site-specific.

The HTML 4.01 spec doesn't dictate how passwords should be obscured, although it does suggest asterisks. I think it would be reasonable for browser vendors to provide an alternative means of obscuring passwords.

If the PCI auditors aren't happy with this, and given the leniency of the HTML 4.01 spec (I haven't checked any other specs), should they take this up with the W3C?
>call routes through switches and carriers were decided through a combination of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets using a manual process. This process entailed dozens of linked Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Business types love their excel. Replacing these makeshift systems has kept many a software developer employed.
I think the biggest pushers of tech like this are going to be the 'family nerds' that right now have an extra dayjob in keeping the windows systems of their family malware clean.

The thin-terminal concept has been tried a number of times, with varying success and this is simply googles take on it.

text terminals, VideoText, Viditel, Minitel, X terminals and now a web centric terminal called chrome.

What's under the hood has always been less important than what it does.
Indian Jewelry, Indian Designer Jewelry
Bing Comes To Hotmail
I like that, but it would make more sense if backspacing through a password didn't reveal each letter.
US offering $45 million for wind energy test bed
I guess it all depends on your definitions of weekend.

Getting a proof-of-concept done in a weekend is not unheard of, getting a scalable ready for mass consumption service production ready invariably takes a lot longer.

I once had some email conversation with a 'net guru' on this topic and his take on it was increase the metric and add a zero.

So, 2 days becomes 20 weeks... I'm sorry to say that that formula looks to confirm my experience to date :)
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Personalization & Market Influencers
Why is Social Media in Germany: 5 Years Behind
A very British way of mourning
quite moving
> Given that large trading houses will scrap perfectly good dealing rooms in order to get a few milliseconds improvement in their real-time trading abilities

Who's done this?
Facebook users aging fast. "A parlor for the middle-aged?"
Collection of Excellent Social News Sites for Web Designers
Going after the BUSINESS card market with an IPHONE app?

Now, the Pre would be compelling, but the Blackberry is where this app should live, and Windows Mobile. The latter 2 are all I see in the UK. The odd iPhones I encounter are people's personal phones.
The anti-secs will be happy.
Alterna Caviar Antiaging Radiant Smoothing Lotion Review
A lot of dogs and cats
The first pics of the Chrome OS Beta for devs
Were one to look at his actual point, one might also go back 30 years and wonder if those silly upstarts at Microsoft with their "pee sees" have a chance against serious mainframes, with the millions of lines of code already written for them.

That comparison would only make sense if mainframes and PCs cost essentially the same, used the same hardware platform, and the mainframe could run all the software as the PC (but not the other way around).
jQuery Projects with Demos
I'm not clear on this -- how can it be open source without allowing programmers access to the underlying OS?

Also, I would be surprised if the OS doesn't allow for running any local apps but you may be right.

Also, I guess some Linux folks (like myself) are upset because we wanted to see a full-on competitor to msft with Google branding, i.e. Goobuntu. There have been rumors for years about a Google-branded Linux distribution coming out and its a bit disappointing that its not the whole hog.
Zero Hedge is the blog to follow on this story and other capital markets/ computing issues.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/

The writer is under a pseudonym but clearly knows his stuff and has connections. He is so well-respected that the NYSE is actually responding to his posts with statements of their own.
Lawrence Lessig also talks about that case in this great TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strang...
"Whoever agreed to the fox guarding the henhouse is going to have a lot of explaining to do."

In an ideal world, in this one I suspect they'll just get a tanker load of money.
The difference between 25 and 45 is much much less than the difference between "hit up my wall" and "whats 'the facebook'?"

Age as a signifier in itself is slipping.
"Goldman sachs code torrent" honeypot
I run the ExtremeU program (http://bit.ly/WwgJR) and we are in our third week with 3 teams cranking away in our space at Yonge and King (Toronto). They can move fast because they are integrated with our agile development practices at http://www.xtremelabs.com (in the same space), they get expert onsite resources (dev, graphics, etc.), they get connected them with external gurus.

Our weekly speakers have been phenomenal (@ricksegal, @ryazwinski, @albertsupdates), they take questions and are available for help after their talks (which are recorded). I can't wait to bring in the remaining weekly speakers.

I think what Impact is trying to do is amazing. More power to them!

Farhan (@fnthawar)
ABN-AMRO, Amsterdam & London.

They had a perfectly good dealing room and they scrapped it after only using it for a relatively short period of time.

The replacement paid for itself in the first couple of months of operation... not a bad payback time on a $US 220 million capital investment.
Indepenture - independent venture
I knew I was going to fail the color test. It's a test that's commonly used to diagnose ADHD.
Agreed, but I'm not going to forget how bad it was even 2 years ago when wifi & graphics drivers made for a pretty rough experience.

I agree, though, we've come a long way already but at the same time I would be happier if I knew for sure it would never happen again, especially with peripherals. As far as I know, a lot of consumer level hardware (like multifunction printers) are still sold with Vista drivers only.

Beyond drivers as well we'll see if Adobe can work on Flash for Linux to make it as fast as Windows, etc.
I live here in South Korea next door to the DMZ. If this is a cyber war, it hasn't been very disruptive yet. I'm having no trouble accessing any of the standard Korean websites that were/are said to be under attack (Naver, KEB). My $35/month internet access package is today what it was last week - the fastest unlimited internet in the world.

What I can say is that we need to make it much more difficult to infect personal computers here.

If you show me a Korean government or non-trivial Korean corporate website, I'll show you a website that uses at least 3 activeX controls and is optimized for IE6. Most public computers and the majority of personal computers I've used here have been running IE6 or 7. I'll admit that in Seoul and larger cities like Pusan, Ilsan, and Gwangju, you'll sometimes catch people using Macbooks at Starbucks. Score one for security via obscurity, but non-IE folks can't use ANY banking website or government site (National Tax Service, National Pension, National Health, etc).

Even though I'm in the "most wired country in the world", the majority of high schoolers, uni students, and business people I've interacted with aren't more tech-savvy than your average grandma. Everyone runs the dubious AhnLab Anti-virus as a mandatory magical medallion that came with the computer.

We need to do better - Korea's great ability is overnight change on a massive scale. The day President Lee announces that all browsers should be upgraded to the latest version is the day that all browsers will be upgraded to the latest version. Seriously.

Barring that kind of concerted effort, should the day come when I see a non-IE browser or something other than WinXP/Vista on a Korean adult's primary/only computer, I will eat this hat. This one, right here.
My own use of facebook is probably a-typical, but I have used it to reconnect with a bunch of people that I'd lost touch with over the years, now that that has happened I'm no longer an active user, we communicate using different media now.

No need for me to visit facebook to keep in touch, email, the phone and so on work just fine.
It's execptionally good marketing:

- our main competitor has problems
- we've not had down time since 2004
- all the other offers being given you are from lowlife cretins

They know how to place themselves.
Can In-House Financing Help Trigger the Next Baja Real Estate Boom?
I don't know if that would have been a viable solution - sounds like the owner might just have ended up losing the employee's money too in the end.
Everything the BBC codes that is not restricted by outside licenses should be available to anyone in the UK who pays license fees and wants it. Open Sourcing is hardly a great gesture when the public have paid for it already.
The 30-40+ crowd have been on livejournal for a good few years now, it's not surprising that they're on facebook too.
True, this has to be the grossest abuse of trust. This is actually worse than the Madoff scandal. There it was just one greedy individual, here its a well established and respected financial institution - worse, much much worse.
I don't see why they'd scrap a dealing room "in order to get a few milliseconds improvement in their real-time trading abilities".

Automated real-time trading apps run on servers, in machine rooms, not in dealing rooms. Hence the mentions of trading firms putting their servers in various exchanges' data centres.

Moving a trading floor / dealing room isn't really going to help, unless you think that human trader's mouse clicks or phone conversations are disadvantaged by a few milliseconds.
We're talking mainly bells and whistles (progressive enhancement) via Glow not basic access to data.

That said BBC produce a lot of content for the web that not everyone can get (people don't all have computers), several digital radio channels (not everyone has digi-radio), several digi-TV channels (a lot can't even get the signal, many don't have the hardware).

So the BBC aren't worried about large scale access issues, why worry so much about obsolete browsers?
This company says electrical grounding will improve your sleep and health
The widget is pretty much the same of tweetmeme only much more customizable
I hope I'm not the only one who doesn't care how old anyone else is. So what if your parents (or your kids, or your teachers, or your employer, or anyone else is on Facebook).

The guidelines of Facebook oughta be the same as the guidelines of hn which oughta be the same as the guidelines of kindergarden. Don't post anything you'd be embarassed if anyone else saw and don't say anything online you wouldn't say in person.
Also reminds me of the "Pomodoro Technique": http://www.bestbrains.dk/Blog/2009/02/21/CanATomatoChangeYou...
This article is rather full of malunderstandings and misinformation. One particular example, in the manner that Goldman has been "banned" comes from the zero hedge blog itself:

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/nyse-issues-correction...

And if you are not able to translate the technical concepts to simple english, then do you really understand them?
Data Domain Founder Kai Li on EMC Acquisition and Future of Storage
I was also wondering what kind of a DIY project would be so expensive !
There is no evidence of anything in this poorly written, poorly reasoned article.

A choice quote:

"Control of to network and server access codes is unclear. A number of shops run their network and job control operations with UNIX shell scripts. Bloomberg and Merrill are typical. Problem with shell scripts is that they get run with superuser credentials -- soon as you have 1000 scripts, everybody gets access to the passwords."
“well even I could do this"

I just said that to a software vendor yesterday.

He responded, "I'm sure you could. It took us 5 years. How long will it take you?"
My Dad uses bing.com, because that's the default. My Dad often clicks on ads. I think the Google OS is just a way to make google.com the default for people like my Dad.
now zero-days can be really called zero-days, and would have much more value unless another milw0rm like website comes up to dilute the power of zero-days.
How did your weekend project go anyway? Didn't hear anything? (honestly inquiring here)
The problem I have with the author's thesis is I think he puts too much faith into knee-jerk impulses. For example, he says this...

"I have realized that ideas which remain unexecuted for long periods of time, will most definetly never be executed.... The execution of an important idea is almost immidiately initiated. "

The truth is there are a lot of things that can stand in the way of the immedicate execution of an impoortant idea. That doesn't mean they should be given up on.

Every good idea I've had required work to execute and there have been times in my life where my job, personal life, or other circumstances didn't allow me the time to put that work in. But I didn't give up on the idea because of that and when the time came when I could execute on them I did.

Ideas should be judged on their merit not on the time frame they occured to a person.
Summary to looooooooong article.
Author feels that Wolfram should have an alternative direct interface that does not required AI to interpret the meaning/goal of your natural language text query. Kind of like how Grafiti did for the Palm.
The latter is exactly the point, having access to information is the lifeblood of the stock exchange, if you can 'dump' on bad news a little bit earlier and 'buy' on good news a little bit earlier it really adds up. In the currency markets this is even more important.

The trading firms putting their servers in the exchanges data centers is another attempt at reducing the latency, a server in the data center can react faster to a posted trade than one which is sitting at the other side of a bunch of wire or fibre. And it removes an extra layer of communications hardware that could fail.

Plenty of the trading is fully automated but from my knowledge of this world - which is very much dated, the last time I worked in banking is over 20 years ago and the pace back then was a lot more leisurely than it is today - it's such a competitive arena that even the smallest differences can add up to a huge lead over enough trades.

The trend is to try to get the human out of the loop as much as possible, and with every 'iteration' the deal rooms reflect this strategy more and more, where people are still nominally in charge but their role is relegated to oversight and data entry.

In the long run I expect the stock exchanges to morph into nothing else but racks full of servers but we are still some time away from that.
I know this is just spam but what a marvelously bad idea!

Its just as useless as magnets and crystals but with the added benefit of helping that faulty wire in your alarm clock to kill you! Don't get me started on the people who will combine this with their electric blanket on that cold winter morning.

Up next, sticking nails in your nose while you jog helps to prevent iron deficiencies...
Brilliant.

Really. This article expresses perfectly everything that is wrong with Wolfram Alpha (which still can't tell me how much an elephant weighs, no matter how many ways I ask it). There are so many stories of users doing ridiculous things because of such hubristic user interfaces. Hang out with non-hackers long enough and you will clearly see how "they create an incomplete model of the giant electronic brain in their own, non-giant, non-electronic brains."

Also, the phrase "non-solution to a non-problem" is the best thing I've read all week.