skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
brb curing cancer

...

Damn, didn't work. Back to doing what I know.

Seriously though, like I said the app makes people happy.
Soylent is a food, like the McDonald's McRib sandwich, the Baconator from Wendy's, the Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast, and the delicious beef tacos from my local Mexican restaurant. Why does Soylent need more scrutiny than any of these or the hundreds of thousands of other food products on the market today?
Maybe they should be a Herbalife and do multi-level marketing.
Additionally, it is Open Source.
Why don't you just buy Ensure or Carnation Instant Breakfast? They already exist and are well known, that you can buy anywhere. Or make yourself a bowl of oatmeal. Or eat leftovers from the night before.

I think that the only reason that anyone's interested in Soylent is the current startup/crowdfunding bubble hype, not because it's actually anything particularly new. Soylent is to Ensure as Groupon is to coupons. Before the hype, on select groups (people who were too sick to eat, middle-aged housewives) would be into each of them, but once you add the startup/crowdfunding/Internet angle, all of a sudden a bunch of 20 somethings take a fascination in something that they otherwise would have sneered at.
I don't think David's grief is with software projects receiving institutional support, his issue is with software projects putting their hands out for money with the promise of something materializing. Most often the driving force behind a "successful" open source project is the sheer good will and motivation of creating something that solves people's problems. The examples you've given (Linux, Nginx) are proof of this.

I can't help but wonder if this blog post would have been received better had it been written by someone not as wealthy as David.
The phrase "nude photos", for better or worse, tends to make people think that there was some prurient interest in taking them. As far as any of the published accounts go, there wasn't; this was simply Not Very Good Science.

It's certainly preferable to have consent before gathering clinical data, but I wouldn't make too big of a deal out of this. In the annals of things done without proper consent, this barely registers.
I'm running chrome. Scrolling speed isn't the issue. When you have the mouse cursor on the page and you start scrolling down, if your cursor crosses through a video it will start playing. As you keep scrolling down you'll be moving in and out of videos causing less the a second of playback to occur.

Now since these videos are user generated they are all recorded with various levels of quality. If your mouse moving through ones that are poorly recorded that split second of playback sounds horrible.

You can simulate the effect if you visit https://giveit100.com/@Benjamin and goto the day 18. If your move your mouse past it you'll hear some really bad static for a split second. Now imagine if all the videos are like that while scrolling down the page, it's a pretty horrible experience.
PNaCl bitcode is (mostly) statically-typed and has a C-like memory model, as opposed to dynamically-typed JavaScript. Dynamic typing has a run-time performance cost, and so does garbage collection.
So the machine takes the same picture, but simply pre-processes it into a cartoon image using "Advanced Imaging Technology" (now there's a hilarious non-description) before throwing it up on the monitor? Where do the originals go? Do they ever get audited or offloaded for quality control purposes--how else can they expect to be sure the algorithm works?

The news reports on this switch are all over the place in terms of quality, and you happened to pick one of the worse ones. I'm not the only one asking these questions: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/29/travel/tsa-backscatter

"We'd like to see clearer rules about the collection of the images," Rotenberg said. "Are they deleted? Are they saved? Is some analysis being done and can they be linked to passengers?"

Not to mention the enormous waste of money it must have been to install and then remove the old machines. And what now happens to all the pictures they took, which are probably accumulating dust on some DHS subcontractor's hard disk somewhere in America?
Direct blog post link: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-cod...

"With thanks to Paul Laughton, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Damer, founder and curator of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, and with the permission of Apple Inc., we are pleased to make available the 1978 source code of Apple II DOS for non-commercial use. This material is Copyright © 1978 Apple Inc., and may not be reproduced without permission from Apple."
Shardhost Gone with Zero Notice
50 years: Rockafeller. 100 years: Andrew Carnegie, Vanderbilt. 150 years: Alfred Nobel. 300 years: John Harvard.

What do I win?
The date processing is one of the worst-documented features, and there are conflicts in the documentation between MS-XLS (XLS files), ECMA-376 (the office open xml standard), and MS-XLSX (describing how excel deviated from ECMA-376 -- yes, this exists and is pretty substantial).

To give an example, in some versions of excel `e` refers to the "era", which is the year for US versions. However, the documentation and individual implementations disagree as to what they actually mean:

Some versions treat "e" as the 4-digit year and "ee" as the 2 digit year. Other versions treat "e" and "ee" as the 4-digit year. Others treat "e" and "ee" as the 2-digit year

But the worst offender is format code 14, which actually depends on the client calendar type, so you get different results in different versions of excel
So PNaCl + llgo means Go in the browser, right? Now that is something to think about right there.
But a 3-4 day response time isn't part of fraud prevention.
That makes a lot of sense, -- Maybe our youth would grow up into better adults IF their parents--especially single parents had the means to support them withOUT taking a job. -- There should be the option of at least 1 full-time parent, whether it's in a 1 or 2 parent home.
Hmm, delicious cheeseburger or tasteless goop in a can? That's a tough one.

Maybe my sarcasm detector is off but I don't see how this is a real question.
Ensure tastes like shit. If Soylent tastes reasonably OK, and has stronger guarantees that it can be a true meal replacement than supplements like Ensure, then sign me up.
There is a well established argument that racism is "prejudice plus power", which actually makes disempowered groups incapable of being racist. Small minded, bigoted and prejudiced, sure.
Facebook Data at Scale Conference
I was a chemistry nutcase in high school, and even I would draw the line at ergot.
Feds: Seizure of encryption key Lavabit's fault
Ask HN: book suggestions in non-tech fields (e.g. psychology, philosophy…)
I've realized that I'd like to read some good timeless wisdom about something other than the best JavaScript design patterns, the Go documentation, or the 10 best ways to engage with VCs. Subjects like psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.

What would you recommend?

I'm not looking for anything in particular, mostly something different but captivating.
The Gates Foundation regularly makes grants for exactly that.
Mind-blowing calculator tricks for iOS devices
Try for an older edition, second hand. The fundamentals haven't changed.

In fact, that brings up an idea for a way that hardware is sometimes easier than software. The laws of physics that constrain our designs don't go obsolete every 2 weeks.
awesome analysis.."failed while failing" https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3145#i...
Well Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.
I have two kids (10 and 8). Yes, some nights we do not eat together because of schedules, but those nights are few and far between. My wife and I find it quite important that our family can share a meal at least once a day. We know lots of other "modern" families who do the same thing.

Food production and eating are not problems to be solved[0]. If you don't enjoy sitting down to a good meal, well, that's okay by me. Personally, I think you're missing out on something, but that's just my opinion. But please don't act as if giving up on sharing a meal with friends or family is a step forward for humanity.

[0] Famine and food shortages notwithstanding. I could see the benefits of Soylent in areas where there are food shortages and people suffer malnutrion.
How to Automatically Tweet New Jekyll Posts
I'm a little wary in how it works, does it read all my notifications (texts, bank alerts, emails) send them to pushbullet servers, then send them again to my computer? Or is their some pairing encryption step I'm missing?
It's about time. Here's what NIST said in 2006:

"NIST encourages a rapid adoption of the SHA-2 hash functions for digital signatures, and, in any event, Federal agencies must stop relying on digital signatures that are generated using SHA-1 by the end of 2010."
Ah, and here I was looking for an example of LessWrong being neoliberal in outlook!

You can't presume that the exploited-away surplus-value or negative externalities from your high-paying-donate-to-charity job actually exceed the good you're doing by donating to charity with the proceeds of your work. Warm fuzzies are, at the very least, a reasonable guide to doing work that's relatively sure to be relatively purer good.
Not really. Smart people are just as susceptible to logical fallacies as average people. Perhaps more so since they can 'reason out' the fallacies they make. I find I need to constantly double check myself to see I'm not missing something.

But this is not a new phenomenon.
Try reading Henry George for an externalities based approach to land ownership.
The Kosmos chemistry kits in the late 1960's were awesome. Shoot, I had a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
>it's social suicide

Unless your social life is at a deeper level than simply putting food in your mouth around certain people. Either way, I don't think many people would _replace_ food with Soylent so much as they would drink it instead of eating some meals. I'd love to just drink a glass of liquid instead of preparing and eating a lunch.
How much revenue top technology companies earn per second
I like how the meeting minutes(1) from 1978 resemble software development meetings of today. Especially Paul (Laughton) did have the same mentality as programmers today:

Nobody who has looked into the DOS is sure why bug #2 exists

Paul felt that bug #3 was trivial and he already knew how to fix
it.

Paul said that he could spend either3 to 4 days documenting the DOS,
or he could fix the bugs, and wanted to know which we wanted.

Paul still expressed some doubt as to what was causing bug #5, and
bug #2 was a mystery.

(1)https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3data.computerhistory.org/atchm/do...
It's a decent solvent.

Growing up in the '80s as a chemistry nutcase, I did quite a few experiments with CCl4. My liver is still alive and kicking. :)
Why don't you have a case of Ensure already then?
Couldn't agree more. Fertilizer has been a major accelerator of unsustainable agricultural practices which, on the whole, have acted to centralize food production and agricultural land ownership in to the hands of industry, disempowering the world population and removing social and long term environmental sustainability concerns from the act of food production. Aside from poisoning vital and irreplaceable freshwater systems, the closely related practice of unsustainable water use has created salination poisoning agricultural land itself, and agricultural poisons further decay the remnants of the naturally sustainable and verdant ecosystems the industrial food factories supplant.

Given this situation, to then turn around and claim that GM is the answer is ludicrous. Modern civilization has clearly lost its way by diverging too far from nature, which abhors a monoculture. The obvious and sustainable path is a move towards heterogeneous planting patterns, and ideally toward greater decentralization in land ownership, production and the re-recognition of longer term concepts such as sustainability, social and environmental concern.

A simple example: I have read that many farms in the US are actually energy-negative, ie. they cannot produce enough calories in agricultural output to offset the oil they burn.

For those here wanting to improve the world through agricultural change, please consider reading some of the philosophy behind permaculture and the short but thought-provoking book The One Straw Revolution then applying technical knowledge to building robots that can efficiently harvest densely interplanted crops from potentially reformed large-scale agricultural operations that may accept a high variety of species and thus embrace natural methods for pest control and moisture retention, eliminating most agricultural overhead in existing operations. New operations should be smaller and decentralized, because we need exercise, nature is nice, and robots aren't free.

Tangentially, last night I met a guy who has spent three years trying to find ways to save coral reefs and said that on a global scale we're screwed - they're all going to be gone within less than a generation. I spent a few weeks in Sumatra last month and the rainforests for which it was once famed are almost gone. Meanwhile in many Asian population centers (I'm in Bangkok at the moment), a view from above confirms that concrete dominates a landscape of air conditioning and energy-inefficient floor to ceiling glass, pockmarked only by the nervous system of fossil fuel burning transportation infrastructure, the odd plane flying overhead about a brown haze, and the glimmer of thousands of unnatural lights feeding on the same fossils, while themselves produced through an alchemy poisonous chemicals. The virus that scarred the landscape this way, humans, potter at all hours throughout, concerning themselves with alcohol, fashion, colosseums of sports on television, and reproduction.
JavaScript is turing complete. That's not a very meaningful limit.

You seem to be implying Dart's semantics are influenced by JavaScript's because it compiles to it, but that's not the case. It's true for CoffeeScript because CoffeeScript doesn't try to add semantics to JavaScript, it's just a syntactic translation.

Yes, there is an aspect of "works best in Chrome" performance-wise, since Dart VM will be faster than dart2js, but if you were sold on Dart before hearing about dart2js, I don't know why that would make you change your mind. You were hoping for a JavaScript replacement, and Dart is exactly that. Compiling to JavaScript is just something to ease the transition.
Because there's nothing I love more than factory farmed animal protein and excessive, unneeded carbohydrates.

Delicious cheeseburger? Have you even eaten at a McDonalds?
The hidden performance costs of instantiating Throwables (Java)
Agreed. I was considering a "game" of poker to be a series of hands sufficient to determine a winner, for example, a freeze-out tournament, where hands are played until every player but one loses all their chips.

Reportedly, skilled FTL players can win nearly every game. Similar things have been reported about certain other roguelikes.
How We Can Stop Hospitals From Over-Billing
Waiting for the next Snowden.

In the meantime, you can use your smartphone inside a Faraday cage. Wrapping it in aluminium should help.
Many HN readers like to rationalize-away inconvenient truths as if it were a game. When I see that kind of weaksauce response, I'm on the right track.
Yes, certainly has had effort put into proper documentation. Do you know if there is also work being done to spec it formally?
JVM Bytecode for Dummies
Where can an individual go to buy debt. I would love to buy some debt and forgive it for Christmas this year.
It draws my interest because of the obvious parallels to the millions of backscatter pictures taken by the TSA over the past decade, many of which are naked pictures of children and the elderly. The overwhelming majority of Americans consent to having these pictures taken before getting on a plane.

The sort of group psychology and doublethink that allows us to ridicule this dated pseudoscience on one hand, while walking right into a similar situation in every American airport today, is inherently fascinating.
Let us talk when things like Google search and Watson are built from scratch for free. If sharing the source code for Google does no harm, why have they not done it?

Another radical example: Github. Why is the source for Github not open or free? Why are they not sharing that with us? Surely a company so invested in open (and to a large extent free) software must know better right?
They are not. They are caused by unhealthy lifestyles maintained by people. It is convenient blaming everything on HFCS, but the truth is, if you eat cheeseburgers with cola daily and not expel extra calories with vigorous work, that's what is producing diabetes and obesity, not HFCS. Shifting responsibility from personal to "shady corporations made me fat" is bullshit.

And, btw, the reason food industry is using HFCS is not because they are evil, but because agrisector lobbied high tariffs on sugar imports, while at the same time subsidizing corn. Which makes using HFCS produced from cheap corn practical alternative to buying sugar with its artificially inflated prices. So even if you intend to place blame of HFCS, you chose wrong industry to blame.
(Dev here) You've got the basic idea. We do everything over https of course, but you are still sending your data through our servers.
As an antithesis to the affirmative chorus to you comment--human life is essentially and effectively worthless. An excessive number of human individuals inhabiting the planet leads to ecological catastrophe. That we successfully circumnavigated Maltus' predicted calamities for a couple of centuries does not mean we'll be able to do that forever.
Yeah, their support department is absolutely awful.
That's not a cognitive bias happening to you. He's just in Poe's Law territory for real.
Heck, mere "announcements" might even be quite useful, especially since it is slightly compiler supported. But const in C++ does not announce purity, nor does it announce thread-safety. I just announced that it won't observably change non-mutable members, that's it.
Robotic Advances Promise Artificial Legs That Emulate Healthy Limbs
> Why is that evidently not possible? :)

Because Mozilla assured us that it was not. Central to Mozilla's case against Dart was the assertion that parts of it - including bignums - could not be implemented efficiently by compiling to JS, leaving native Dart runtimes at a strong advantage.
The backlash is "We don't know, and you dumbass without a degree are trying to figure this out without any formal training".

I welcome doctors, researchers, and people who know what they are doing to experiment with the human body. But when a computer science major armed with nothing but a few textbooks in body chemistry claims that he has "figured the body out", I am going to assume otherwise.

Does he have any cooking experience? What is his medical background?

Its not so much that "we don't know", but "the creator of Soylent clearly doesn't know", and yet he wants us to believe that he does.
- I wonder how long it will take a small startup to reach where these top technology companies have reached.
Thought experiment. Consider the possibility that you are an anachronism, extending itself until it runs out of resources to feed on, and that your grandchildren will fail to understand your insensitivity to the now obvious issue of vanishing forests and biodiversity. Any chance that's true?
Kiwis ink bug reporting guidelines
In the case of natural language, I would agree with a statement similarly worded to yours above, "The main purpose of a ... language is to convey intent to other(s)". (Sorry for butchering, I promise I'm getting to a point =) )

I'm not sure I'd agree with respect to programming languages, however. These are artificial languages designed to convey a limited set of ideas, with varying degrees of abstractions over various concepts in electrical engineering and mathematics. Given this, the purpose of a programming language isn't just to communicate with others, it's also to shape how you approach problems.

Anecdotally, learning the strict functional programming paradigm is what allowed me to pass an extremely difficult technical interview recently. The emphasis on dataflow and "do what I mean, not what I say" truly changed how I thought and approached problems. Previously, my years of experience in imperative languages lead me down a road that was a bit too missing-the-forest-for-the-trees when it came time to solve a difficult, interview-style algorithmic question.
Philips announces new Hue LED downlights and spot lights
Well, think about it from the lender's position. They can settle with you for $1,000, or they can sell the debt to a collector for $1,500. Which would you do?
how is it strictly more probable? a person's value and the criticism they receive are independent things. and i don't see any reason to think that for every valid criticism there isn't a corresponding invalid criticism. why should it be that the person being criticized is more likely to be wrong than the critic?
... after seeking approval from the NSA.
404 - HN Effect :(

"Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_jk/1.2.25 mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2 PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.27 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8 Server at randomwire.com Port 80"

If this is your server, you shouldn't be giving so much information away. Make would-be attackers work a be at enumerating you.
Setting up a new PostgreSQL slave is just a one-liner with pg_basebackup in 9.3 (no outside tools needed):

http://www.cybertec.at/postgresql-9-3-one-line-one-slave/
What are modern standards? Ruby, Python and JavaScript? No. Thanks.
> Capitalism is a meaningless word. Does it mean currency based markets? Markets in general? The wage/labour model of business? Corporate Law?

It means the wage-labor model of business.
-
Top Books In Philosophy ~> https://www.google.com/search?q=top+books+in+philosophy&oq=t...

Top Books In Psychology ~> https://www.google.com/search?q=top+books+in+psychology&oq=t...

Top Books In Sociology ~> https://www.google.com/search?q=top+books+in+sociology&oq=to...
"* Analytics/tracking/stats."

This can be _gold_.

I use Campaign Monitor much more than Mailchimp - and whenever I can, I always try to be on-hand when a client sends out at least one of their early/important mailouts, and I direct them to Campaign Monitors real-time map view of opens. You can see their eyes light up (and sometimes their heads explode) as they get a continuously updated view of people's names popping up in a map showing they've just opened the email - and even better when they're clicking on the links. If I possibly can, I try to be on-site so I csn open up one browser window with that Campaign Monitor view, and another with Google Analytics realtime report.

For me - that's usually one of the biggest "Oh, now I get it!" moments I can hand-feed to clients…
TypeScript also lets anyone ignore all of that and play cowboys and indians with prototypes.
My tip as a user who just stumbled upon this link on HN: Have a good easy-to-find 'about' link on your Blog. It took me a good couple of seconds before I was able to find a way to get to the root website and read about what you were about. It would be nicer if there was a quick 'What is ProjectSherpa?' link somewhere, or maybe a quick 2-sentence blip on the sidebar explaining what Sherpa does. I'm sure other readers would have given up sooner and bounced from your page.

in any case, good luck to ya!
Why would I eat a rubber meat on rubber bread in McD if I can get real meat with real veggies next door? Yes, I'd probably have to spend whole whopping $10 or so on such a meal. But given that it takes only 75 minutes of work even on minimum wage to earn such meal, I don't think it's inaccessible.