skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's riding a wave of novelty, but it's hard to argue that it's actually solving the problem that it claims to (busy/lazy, want healthy food-substitute).

The post doesn't actually tell you much about the nutrition without evidence about levels of actual nutrient absorption, but a quick google scholar search finds that calcium inhibits iron and copper absorption, especially in the presence of phytates [0,1] (which Soylent contains from the oat flour) and that zinc, manganese, and iron have similar uptake pathways and limit each others absorption by competing for use of those pathways [1,2]. No idea if there's any other interactions, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on this stuff much for nutrition.

Aside from that, he vetted the formula by an uncontrolled, unblinded study with a sample size of n=1 (i.e. trying it himself for a few months), and he says on his blog that he "started having joint pain and found [he] fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as [he] consume[s] almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day." [3]

In that same post, he says that "After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did", and makes major revisions to his formula, apparently assuming that he's figured it all out this time. He puts a significant amount of fiber in the formula for the first time, going from 1.2 grams to 40 grams, in line with the 38 grams recommended for men under 50 [4], which was probably a good idea considering how much low fiber intake increases the risk of heart attack [5].

A month later, he responds to criticism by saying that "there have been no deficiency symptoms, and if this becomes a problem the amounts can be changed to compensate" [6]. His dismissal of concern ignores the fact that many known nutrient deficiencies can take much longer to manifest, and have severe irreversible harm (like B12 deficiency leading to nerve damage, or developing heart disease after years of insufficient fiber intake, or calcium deficiencies and osteoporosis). He also says that "The initial sample size was small and the timeframe short, but the results are easily reproducible, as shown by the community site discourse.soylent.me", as if having a greater amount of data overcomes the fact that the sample was extremely biased, still short-running, and with nothing even resembling a credible study design or consistent data collection.

Maybe it's not a bad thing that Soylent's probably not going to take off?

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600930

[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577

[3] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570

[4] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fiber/NU00033

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8941095

[6] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507
This is article is very bad rip-off from the book "Art of thinking clearly". This book goes into each of bias that we face in everyday life. Knowing them can help you immensely. The articles just takes contents from the book to and try to infer that NEWS is bad for you.

It is very poor attempt. For every point discussed in the article present so many counter-arguments that are never discussed. Not just that some of the arguments are just contradictory. Not to mention there is hardly any research material pointed that made the author think that way.

Once it says that we don't think about news : "Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes,". This is ironic. The article itself is NEWS. Is it not making us think. Well if it not making us think this makes this NEWS itself is useless right?

The author just tried to create an article by combining things he read from the book. At the end he just presented HIS OPINION. This should not be NEWS !
I signed up with PayPal and used the $50 Black Friday code. I just gave them my first name and e-mail address.

If they start making it mandatory that we have to give them a URL for a personal blog, company website, Facebook profile, etc, I'm going to find a new host.
Funny thing is that she leads in to her outrageous statement by pointing out that San Francisco is a unique case worldwide. It is the only city in the world with the specific problem that outrages her.

Someone with a few IQ points would analyze that data and suggest that, if SF's problem is unique, then SF is doing something that other cities are not (or vice versa) and therefore the problem is simple to solve. Just figure out what SF needs to do the same as other cities, and the problem goes away.

I've heard it suggested that the problem is simply that SF does not have enough free public toilets. I used to live in London England, with lots of homeless, and we had no shit in the streets. Used needles, yes. People shooting up as you walked by, yes. Urine smells from the alleys, yes. But not shit.

London had a rather clever solution to public toilets. They had those low rotating gates that you had to put a coin in to enter the bathroom. Of course homeless folks just jumped over the barrier or if there was an attendant, begged to be let in the wheelchair gate. It worked. The streets were kept relatively clean.

Some would say that London tolerated petty crime, i.e. people jumping over the gates, but no city can work without some tolerance.
if you use vimium/vimperator/something else you can do shift+H to go backwards, shift+L to go forward.
No, at least for me (Firefox on Linux) Backspace doesn't do anything special.
Think of the number of innocents who died in 9/11.

Now think of how many people you heard around the country shortly after, talking about their desire to turn Afghanistan/Iraq into a parking lot, or similar. And everybody who was motivated to enlist, and go kick some ass.

I'm going to guess that their reactions aren't a whole lot nicer than our reactions.
The use of percentages to report the results is awfully confusing. When you say 50% answered X people naturally assume that means 50% of respondents, not 50% of responses.
Well 2 hours compared to 2 months(Compared to original 2 week comparison) is an insane level of difference in quality and productivity. So huge that its either really true or some body is cheating or something is at a miss here.

I am not sure why such people even remain programmers all their life. If you can achieve in hours what people take months to achieve, you should be doing very special things. Chase some really big goals. Because after all by the same logic you can achieve in an year what many people may take many lifetimes to achieve.

Why are such people stuck doing some small time programming tasks.
Why are you assuming that humans have a craving for the "innate satisfaction of eating?"

If you remove that artificial restriction then something like soylent makes a lot more sense.
No slight to the people at Shopify, I'm sure they are good, but I still can't any company in their right mind would choose to pay both a monthly fee and a % of sales for this product. When I saw the % of sales adder, dealbreaker!
I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who likes using tabs, although it feels like it from time to time.
The behaviour might change in the future, but I think an article in the Gmail help centre has some answers on the initial implementation of this:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/145919?hl=en

"In some cases, senders may be able to know whether an individual has opened a message with unique image links" suggests Google (at least for now) fetches the images upon opening of the email.
Should you code well or code fast?
CoffeeScript has destructuring assignment...
Not on Linux, where the 'previous page' action is mapped to Alt-left by default. After being initially frustrated, I got really used to Alt-Left for going back.

The reasoning behind it is pretty smart too, because numerous times backspace can result in the loss of data, like when you're filling up a form and you hit backspace outside of a text box.
why not just actually put your laptop in a lockbox like that?
I'm normally unimpressed by applications ported to javascript. However, this actually has me excited. I would love to be able to edit all my Dropbox text files with a web interface. If anyone here works for Dropbox, I beg you to integrate this!
Thanks for your answers, guys. I get it now. In hindsight, it's obvious.

It's marketed at people who want to solve two problems:

1. How can I be sure that my diet is healthy?

2. How can I avoid expending so much time, effort and money on food?

And given some of the weird diets I've seen some geeks subsist on ("Only ham and pineapple pizza."), I guess it's not so surprising that some would like the idea.

It's also about safety in numbers. If 10,000 other guys are eating the same formula, you can be pretty confident that any "bugs" are likely to be found and fixed pretty quickly.

In a sense, this is a giant nutritionist experiment. If it's a success, there will probably be a few people who eat almost nothing but Soylent for years on end. Let's see if it keeps them healthy.
Hasika Hot Talent Show 
Hasika Hot Talent Show
What do you mean by this?

You can swap to local (ephemeral storage) at no charge. Or you can created a provisioned IOPS EBS volume and swap all you'd like. There's no separate I/O charge for these volumes.
Well, if you think about it, pretty much every modern programming language has been shaped by people who also happen to eat meat. Therefore there will be systemic bias in nearly every programming language toward the "meat-eating" way of thinking, which oppresses vegans and gives meat eaters an unfair advantage when programming in those languages. There is no way to fully remove this bias other than to create a new programming language for vegans, by vegans.

For example, in a programming language like C++ or Java, one is not required to think about the consequences of their design decisions. It is possible to design an API in such a way that it causes harm to another person or program, for example not using type safety, or being vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. A vegan programming language would ostensibly prevent such harmful actions by way of its very grammatical and logical structure. It would be next to impossible to write a valid construction in a vegan programming language that causes harm, because you would be required to inform the compiler of your intent. Any such construction would simply be illogical, and cause an error to occur.

The differences between a vegan programming language and a non-vegan programming language could even be extended to include political correctness enforcement features. A compiler for a vegan programming language could be designed to include an artificially intelligent runtime library which attempts to decide if the actions of the program could put people or animals at risk to be harmed, and if so, modify the control flow of the program to prevent possible harm from occurring. This is relevant, because computers, and computer software, are being used as components in machines for the food industry (e.g. meat processing plants) as well as militaries (e.g. missile guidance systems.)

Disclaimer: I don't eat animals.
I'd argue that relying on backwards compatibility for very long is a smell. Probably the stinkiest, most common one in most corporate settings.
Can anyone think of a sane way to make this integrate with github?
5 Google+ for Android App ver 4.2.4 Updates Coming Soon • vlogg.com
You need an external clock to get a higher bit rate, such as LocalTalk's 230.4Kbps.
C3 Instance Type Update (EC2)
The “backspace = back” behavior of Firefox is only enabled by default on Windows. The behavior is controlled by the about:config setting `browser.backspace_action` (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action).
I actually hate Amazon for exposing these features - now, my boss will be mucking around with them! As a DevOps guy, nothing beats AWS CLI and CloudFormation!
Which would require me to press two keys instead of one.
Ah, thanks. I don't need it anyway :) Alt + Left/Right works fine.
Infinite Jest,
Herzog,
Ulysses,
Things Fall Apart,
The Magic Mountain,
Zeno's Conscience,
The Sun Also Rises,
Underworld,
...
It's actually an important question, where should your smartest and most creative employee go; CEO or CTO?

I think for a lot of companies (is tech startups) CTO would be the right answer.

So long as the CEO stays the hell out of the way
That's what IAM is for. Create a playground for your boss and let him or her muck around in safety.
On Mac OS X, the standard shortcut is Command-[ instead (and Command-] is Forward).
Tranched rounds with performance targets didn't used to be unheard of.
Going by your numbers, you mastered Python in 7 months. Therefore you should be able to master all 7 other languages in no more than 49 months which is about 4 years.

Of course, I don't believe your numbers. You may have been able to master some commonly used bits of Python in 7 months, but it takes about 7 years to master anything. Programming languages are a bit of a special case because there is a lot of overlap so I think that Ruby would take an additional 2 years, but C would likely take another 5 years. Then 5 more for C++, 2 years for Objective-C, two for Javascript, two for PHP and another one year for GO.

Of course if you do it in a different order, the length of time would be different because spending less than 7 years to master something requires that you reuse a lot of existing knowledge.

In human language terms, for an English speaker to master French, Russian and Mandarin would take no less than 21 years. But for that same person to master French, Spanish and Italian would take about 12 years.

The best advice would be to not worry about any of this. Find a job that requires programming and learn whatever tech you need to use in that job. Then move on to another job that uses at least some different pieces. If you are not actually using a language to build real things then you won't really learn it.
People still use Google AppEngine with its outrageous pricing?
There is also no evidence that the quantities and ratios of nutrients in the formula are anywhere near complete or optimal.

The easiest way to illustrate how this can be a problem is to compare the difference between growing cells in minimal media versus complex media, where they grow much faster.

Soylent is basically a crude minimal media for humans. The proper comparison for soylent will be against someone who is eating a complete diet, not someone who is skipping meals or eating poorly.
GAO denies Blue Origin's protest regarding LC 39A [lease by SpaceX]
It's always better to have multiple layers of defense. I won't be surprised, if Russ Cox has chosen sel_ldr_seccomp as the loader: https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/native_client/trunk/src/nati...
Good to know - we were salivating and planning to switch from M1 to C3.
wow, thats really impressive and from a technical standpoint its not even that hard, just clever combination of existing technologies.
Whiskey as a Service in San Francisco: Instacart v. Lasso
It's like we are the same person. Or maybe we just live in the same country :)

It's worth mentioning that the only libertarian I know who has been able to argue with me to my satisfaction remarkably agrees with me on "what needs to be done." I suspect political philosophy is somewhat like religion: any sufficiently dedicated person can use any sufficiently developed philosophy to support any sufficiently developed plan. Here's my list. What's yours?

1. Campaign finance reform. Turn the bribing policy from "mandatory bribes" to "optional bribes." Going to "no bribes" is probably too difficult (how to close the "cushy job upon retirement" loophole?)

2. Legislative and judicial policy focused on creating competitive markets, not placating business (#1 necessary for #2)

3. Single-payer healthcare

4. Basic income (Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM )
It also appears to be enabled by default on Mac OS X.
Why involve Google? Aren't sites on basic, low-volume hosting plans easy to knock over, without resorting to DDoS tactics? And if you're trying to knock over bigger sites, it doesn't seem like Google would make a very good DDoS platform in any case, since the requests would be originating from a relatively small range of IPs that a bigger site could just ban. Presumably the only reason they wouldn't want to ban the requests is if they're actually the ones sending the emails in the first place, so the problem sort of solves itself.
Random space filling tiling of the plane
No kidding. Here I am 80% done after only six years!
"ciw" doesn't work.
Not just mono, but Xamarin and Unity are huge, if interrelated uses of C#.
Yeah....instead it just shows you've bought BTC, and if your spouse is at all sophisticated, they probably assume you're using it for something shady.
The developer kit is, I believe, 379grams (~0.835lbs). This is similar to the weight of a typical hardhat, albeit distributed unevenly toward the front. The consumer version is intended to be lighter. If a counterweight could be provided, I would expect the neck strain to be limited.

Also or alternatively, a good-sized, well-sealed helium balloon can lift 50+ grams...
Yes! This stuff is incredibly exciting. With Omni + Kinect + OR, we're starting to get close to Otherland-style VR. It's going to be interesting.
The book "War" by Sebastian Junger. I don't know the page but that doesn't matter, it is a good book.James Galbraith - The Predator State maybe a bit. Oh and Andrés Reséndez - A Land So Strange - The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca of course!! Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissinger - Partners in Power (2007), Epic of Gilgamesh, Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene, Niel Strauss - The Game.

That about covers it. It took me about an hour to compose the list, the main point it brings across is a very nuanced understanding of what it is to be human, described by the people that often have experienced the what they write about. since I'm the composer, I think it might help to mention that I am rated near genius (just as a rough measure - I know it has downsides - however in my case I far exceed my actual score due to some other knobs and whistles I came pre-equiped with). You're welcome. Cunt. :P
I'm also very curious about all of this. That said, it's probably pretty cheap to live in the wilderness in Chile. I bet building his roundhose cost nothing compared to what it would take to buy a house in the US.
Sort of amusing that it's the lack of fixed schedule that really rattled him. Dude sounds like he could use a sabbatical himself.
ADD1 - 300 instant millionaires 33 years ago
CrunchBase changes its license from CC-BY to CC-BY-NC
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis
I both love and hate Coinbase! So far, they've cost me hundreds of dollars. Some may consider it stolen money. I understand the technical issue, but I'm sure when they get adopted by a wider and not-so-technical audience, they may become a target of a nasty class action lawsuit. For example, I bought several times Bitcoin with them, you see the price, then you get a popup to confirm (sometimes the popup shows a different price than what you originally got, but that's fine as it's confirmation page), you hit the button and guess what - after looking in your transaction history, you see you got charged sometimes tens, sometimes - hundreds of dollars more. Basically, the price moved, and they charged you a different amount. No warning, no nothing. Again, I understand why this is happening, but they make enough (1%) to honor the price. As I suspect, sometimes they sell from their own inventory of Bitcoins, so, they don't depend on the market order.
416d65726963612043616e20436f6465273b2044524f50205441424c45206c61773b202d2d
> "Commercial uses do require a separate license to safeguard the community’s investment in the CrunchBase, as well as protect the dataset’s integrity."

Unfortunately I doubt that community will see any part of the licensing fees.

Wired Magazine's comments:
AOL Tightens CrunchBase’s Licensing to Block Competitors
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/crunchase-alters-li...
I've purchased domains (NameCheap), food (Foodler), work (contractors), and countless other little things. Checking out with bitcoin is incredibly simple and easy when compared to using credit cards. I also don't need to worry about my credit card information being compromised if someone I buy from is cracked.
Have you tried the Oculus? I think Oculus is amazing, but I've never really been motion sick until I tried Oculus.

Reading books in the backseat of a car driving through winding mountains, no problem. 5 minutes in Oculus Rift and I want to vomit.

It definitely depends on the game/demo though, so it may just be a matter of very careful game design. Or maybe reducing latency will help.
64 letter alphabet? Base64 encoded?
Who wants to make a javascript emacs? you could call it emscriptenmacs..
You may want to consider posting this as a URL instead of a discussion.
This actually brings up a good point. Does this affect IMAP users or any users that not using an Google Gmail App? (iOS, Web, Android, etc) My guess is no?
The inevitable device zoo
Oooops. :>

It should've been groundbreaking*.

Well, the "therapeutic applications" were kind of what I meant. I hope "some time" is not more than 5 years.
Thanks for the downvote, but my experience is that for a relatively small project we started to receive $200+ monthly bills and had to switch to EC2.
Unease among Brazil's farmers as Congress votes on GM terminator seeds
So presumably, companies that are on a ~$3M revenue run rate are a safer bet. Assuming a multiple of 15.
For Vimium users: don't forget to enter the insert mode in your browser first ;)
Well, you tell my boss that he shouldn't be a full admin. :)
Rule 34 for software: If it exists, there IS a javascript port of it.
You get a few free games upon account creation at GoG. This is unrelated to this Fallout special deal.
Lots of comments seem to expect some further web integration with various services but this looks like more of a prototype/proof-of-concept using emscripten.

Cool nonetheless.
I had a coworker once who said he'd found a good anti-Hearst-pattern for Google executives: "Google exec". (A Hearst pattern, for those who aren't well-versed in information retrieval, is like a linguistic template for IS-A relationships. For example, if you see the text "<person>, a <thing>, ..." or "<person> is a <thing>" or "<thing> <person> recently <verb>", you can be reasonably sure that <person> is a <thing>.) In other words, if the press reports someone is a Google exec, they are almost certainly not a Google exec.

I've done a few spot checks and this seems to hold up. Andy Rubin, Google's Android executive until recently, is called an "engineer", "founder", and in one case "head honcho" in the press. Larry and Sergey are usually called "founders". Amit Singhal, Google's Search executive, is referred to as "engineer", "chief", and sometimes "senior vice president". Sundar Pichai is referred to as "senior vice president" and "head of android and chrome". Vic Gundotra and Susan Wojcicki each got one mention as "Google exec", but are much more commonly titled "senior vice president" or "head of social/ads & commerce".

By contrast, the people who are usually labeled "executives" in the press are often corporate attorneys, regional marketing managers, or mid-level ops managers.