skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Highly interesting! This is new info to me. It seems the Insulin Index may be a more reliable predictor of the insulin response of foods than either the glycemic index or the glycemic load index. You mentioned there is very little other than fat in beef but don't forget that there's mostly protein. Now we just need studies showing which Amino Acids are the 'worst offenders.' I tried finding any info about whether meat contains any actual insulin based on a hunch/hypothesis but did not find anything.

Anyway, from what I've read, both blood glucose & insulin should be kept at reasonably stable levels. (ie. not too high) Therefore, maybe a combination of glycemic load index and insulin index would be helpful. Also, knowing now the effect of beef on insulin, I think it means we should be careful to eat small portions of meat or limit how often we eat meat.

I'm really amazed that these findings are only now being made.
I finally installed Google Authenticator on my phone yesterday because Digital Ocean utilizes it. It's great. Like RSA stuff, only more convenient. And hopefully given the response of Google's security people to NSA activity, more secure than the RSA stuff.

This thing basically looks like a more automated version of Google Authenticator. Cool, but meh, would it really change my life?

But maybe it would make a difference for the same market that feels like the iPhone 5s's fingerprint scanner is way more convenient than previous security mechanisms on the iPhone and so can never go back. I dunno.
Your unregulated financial institutions fail to take basic security measures to protect consumers, they frequently halt withdrawals without warning, your uninsured deposits are sucked into the void, your speculative 'currency' experiences extreme daily deflation and inflation...

Better blame proprietary software. Whatever you do, don't question your assumptions. And under no circumstances should you think about the fact that fiat banks in the US all use proprietary software and rarely experience serious problems (and when they do, consumers' deposits are insured up to a large amount).
I don't know how to feel about this. I feel like the sentiment is right (eat your own dog food -- if that's the saying)... But everything about the delivery seems to be wrong
I don't think I said anything negative about the tool itself, or about the author of the tool, who seems perfectly happy with it.

You're right that I don't think it's useful to have a proliferation of tools that do one thing worse than a general-purpose tool.

I don't want an avocado peeler - I'll use a knife and I'll recommend using a knife to others.
You know how we see "former" politicians, or "former" chairs at agencies, or "former" judges speaking on the war on drugs, and so on? Why are they always "former"? Because they know that what they say could impact their career and they could lose their jobs, at a time they may not be ready to lose their jobs.

Now, imagine if everything they can say after they become "former" that position (so I'm not necessarily talking about leaking classified information here), could be said anonymously much earlier while they still have that job and know everything what's going on at the time.

Anonymity is powerful, and not just in oppressive countries where the usefulness of anonymity should be obvious, but also in countries where you may want to tell a "truth" about something, without fearing for your financial situation or your career.

Let's imagine Tim Cook had an opinion about what is going on between Palestine and Israel, and let's imagine it's a damn good one, since he's a pretty smart guy, and that opinion could even provide a big insight into the debate, and it would be very useful for the debate. I don't need to tell you that he wouldn't want to give that opinion under his real name on HN. That would create a media-firestorm, and could potentially get Apple, the company, in trouble, too, over his personal opinions.

I think these are just a few of the reasons why anonymity is important, and more should be explored. Anonymity is important for humanity, and it should never be killed or banned, whether by NSA or by companies like Google and Facebook.
I wonder if any of this is related to the growing hyper-specialization in the industry. When my dad finished grad school in engineering he did a lot of work in military radio communications and engineers were expected to be able to design all of the equipment (including certifying the plans for the transmission towers) and get the entire system working. Being a "programmer" used to mean something similar, we took responsibility for getting everything done.

I took a course a few years ago on an "enterprise" development tool and asked a question about how the sample code mapped to fields in the database. The disappointing answer was that I "didn't need to worry about that" because that is something that the database engineers and deployment engineers would handle. Apparently I was supposed to be grateful that my role had been compartmentalized. Now programmers identify themselves as "Language X Developers," or even by their project roles, e.g. "Implementation Manager," "Software Architect."

It is time to be a bit more bold. I am a Programmer. Capital P, full stop. Any language, any system, any project, any time.
> These systems are Turing-complete when you add an external tape using I/O, but so is a finite-state machine!

There is a related concept called Bounded-Storage Machine for memory-bounded TM-like abstractions. This computation model is very common with esoteric programming languages. http://esolangs.org/wiki/Bounded-storage_machine
Good catch, updated :)
Peter Singer - arguably (not that I want an argument) the most important philosopher of the past forty years - will be teaching Practical Ethics on Coursera.

https://www.coursera.org/course/practicalethics
Twitter tests a redesign that looks like Facebook, users freak out
"Cloud is not the silver bullet."

You can say that again. And it depends on where you are. In South Florida the cloud - well - sucks. Due to the carriers not being able to keep their networks up. I know companies who moved their PBX into the cloud (I'm going to name carriers) with Earthlink, Windstream, Comcast and ATT - misdirected, noisy (like talking in a wind tunnel), dropped calls; all classic signs of over extended networks. Latency. And you feel helpless cause all you can do is call your carrier and wait on hold for 45 mins.

I know another company, a local gym, which (the owner is a SOB so he deserved everything he got) got talked into moving his cash register into the cloud. I warned him against it. But he accused be of not being "up-scale". His way of telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. Of course, a couple of weeks later his Comcast goes down. He calls me, begging for help. I was like, "Nothing I can do. You have to call Comcast".

In South Florida, the only reliable service is fiber. Even T1's are fragile. And fiber isn't cheap.
It's a bit tongue-in-cheek. Much of the narrative is, with cute tidbits such as

Code that self-modifies by calling read() is clearly the future of computing.
This blog post is either spectacularly naive, or ridiculously over-hyped, or both.

"Consistent performance. (not like the V8 engine pausing the whole application for GC)"

Static complication doesn't get you out of having to worry about memory management. What's the alternative here? Reference counting? Leaking everything? Using a subset of JS that doesn't allocate anything? All of these things come with considerable costs.
Actually creating the archive is not make's job, which is what bjourne seems to be complaining about. Collecting a list of files and passing to a command is what make does. It doesn't care if that command is a compiler or an archiver, nor should it.

Regarding your chained dependencies, how do you expect _any_ tool to figure this out without either being told or examining the inputs (which implies knowledge of their formats)? Relegating this to an external tool seems perfectly appropriate to me.
You're right that short, declarative sentences aren't always better. But, our goal in building this tool was to just provide a few simple algorithms for catching things that you might miss after staring at a piece of writing for too long.
StackMob Backend-as-a-Service shutting down
Today we are announcing the end of StackMob Backend-as-a-Service, shutting down the StackMob brand, and focusing our team and resources on making PayPal the best global payments platform in the world. We are so thankful for your support of StackMob

What This Means For You - Our Customers & Partners:
The StackMob Platform will cease operation on Sunday May 11th, 2014. Customers will no longer have access to their StackMob accounts and this serves as our notice of termination of our agreement with you

To ease the transition, we are launching a data exporter to help you get all your data out of StackMob in CSV format. If you would like the data you have stored in StackMob, please ensure you export your data before May 11th (the data will not be available for export after this date). If you have any specific questions about your apps or any requests about extracting your data, please email stackmob@paypal.com

Before we part ways, I want to share that the close of StackMob is bittersweet for our team, since we poured so much into creating our product and serving our customers. But we are energized and thrilled with the opportunity ahead for us at PayPal, which we truly feel will make a direct impact on people all over the world. By closing the doors to StackMob, we will be able to focus 100% of our energy on extending innovation in mobile technologies that will let users access the rich capabilities of the PayPal global network. We truly believe our work at PayPal will make it easier for developers to create seamless payment solutions that span online, mobile, and in-store experiences. A daunting, but exciting challenge

Over the past four years, we have been humbled by the support of our customers and investors who helped us create a brand new industry that furthered the growth of mobile

Thank you, our customers, for believing in us. It’s because of you that we’re able to move on, to rise to a new challenge, and to make a real difference
Funny enough, even C#: http://www.mono-project.com/AOT

This is used to run C# on iOS.
Thanks! I have have been using "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" a lot, it is kind of a pain in the ass since it hangs sometimes in a weird way.
I am glad that people are exploring this space, but Clef is not the solution, IMHO.

LastPass currently fulfills similar requirements for me and actually speeds up logging into the site. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But the UI works pretty well.

I'd like to see it improved by starting to support public/private keys. The idea that I can log into a site using my private key means that when I simply get one <input type="identity"> and then the browser or a plugin like LastPass provides the UI to fill it in. This would actually be much faster than passwords: you see the input, select an identity from a dropdown or autocomplete you'd like to use, and click "Go".
If I had start-up capital , today I would have jumped on a plane to Banagalore. Regardless of the negative stories about Indian programmers, IBM does have some very talented and skilled people with a lot of experience and excellent work ethics. This being a massive lay-off and not a firing, the good and bad programmers alike have been let go. The interview process would have to be extra stringent and long and tedious, but you would end up with high quality people , who otherwise would never interview with a new start up. And after being let go from a blue-chip company, they would be more receptive of offers from early stage start ups.
"That’s unacceptable to me, and the rest of my team" :)
It's getting easier. It still isn't easy.

> A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation.

You don't get these things either, unless you do the hard work to learn them and integrate them into your process. This isn't easy. Some of us are lucky enough to work in shops with this stuff already integrated, but for the rest of us we have to do it ourselves.

At my job, my biggest codebase was split up into three repos, with a lot of nasty and brittle glue code written to make deployment work. It took a solid week's worth of after-hours work to get rid of all that brokeness and make deployment sane again.

The advantages tooling brings to software development are often silently lost, only to be found out when your cloud provider loses your server and none of your backups work, and spinning up a new server from the repo takes, if you're lucky, all weekend to get working.
Other's have pointed this out already, but there is a need for everyone to learn symbol manipulation, geometric representation, and 5 line arguments before mathematics mastered. Saying that this is not part of a complete mathematics education is saying that grammar and vocabulary are not part of an English education.

And yes, my school did mathematics in high school. We went through much of Euclid's Elements.
I think it's really disappointing when company heads do this. If you work there, you should be treated as a professional, not some little kid who gets overly excited and tries to break open the coke machine because hey - PayPal. If you want your software devs to go the extra mile either make a product that they can organically care about, or pay them more and make it part of their job description to evangelize your product.

Also, that PayPal 'it' thing seems pretty scummy. Do the engineers get some financial incentive for generating sales leads for the home office?
But once you're persona non-gratta, it's impossible to get back into the good graces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glass
Loved it, I can definitely use this info for my work!
Addressed (hah) in the article. It's Turing complete for naive values of Turing complete.
I would love to have something like this as a vim plugin.
I think Flappy Bird is a wonderfully well-tuned game. I've yet to see a clone that implements the finer details which made the original shine.

Many games introduce difficulty through complexity. Here's a game that's simple to grasp, hard to play, yet not boring or frustrating.

I wish this was acknowledged more often, as it might have made the developer feel more comfortable being associated with his game's meteoric success.
Hmm, all these eval() calls using data from cookies[0]... is this vulnerable to remote code execution? I think those eval() calls should be json.loads().

[0] https://github.com/k3oni/pydash/blob/1317771275aa118a40df1ec...
Forget registers; modern x86 is turing-complete without any instructions: https://github.com/jbangert/trapcc
Here's an idea: to reap the benefit of anonymity but also to discourage the trolling that comes with it how about an anonymous BBS where you pay (anonymously and in some currency that people don't particularly mind parting with -- e.g., Dogecoin) to post?
So you are okay with having the server process is not responding for ten seconds? Come on!
Typical assuming that all coutrys have the same laws as the USA.
A mayoral candidate wants to turn ghost metro stations into nightclubs
It depends what you mean by "very hard" - a quick google suggests that in 2012 over 40 doctors were struck off in the UK and I suspect that the number for lawyers struck off or where they had their firm closed would probably be rather higher.
The Single, Most Valuable Lesson I've Learned in My Professional Life
Elasticsearch is really awesome for searching, but what most people don't realize is that it makes a better MongoDB than MongoDB while giving you that searching too.
Programming is easy in the sense that you can get huge results from modest effort. So a clever, hard-working individual can quickly build software much faster than that same individual can build a bridge.

The thing is, what actually happens is that this individual, working at their full capacity will produce much more software, much faster than they could bridges. That doesn't mean that their job is easier in practice, because in both cases the individual will stretch themselves to do the best they can.
Alternatively he could just hold their paychecks hostage like Paypal does with everyone else's money.
Scott Hanselman did a nice one last month for Windows folks: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDev...

The only one I really took away from that list was Agent Ransack. I love it!

Good list - check it out.
I created a startup that solved a problem. We had our first 5 customers before we even had the product completed. We had bootstrapped the project, and were able to break even the first 3 months.

Why did I fail? Co-founder issues, no actual plan put in place, we had an MVP, but we never pivoted to meet the needs of our customers, and we lacked constant communication with our early adopters.

I am continually thinking about relaunching the project, but being a stay at home Dad, and freelance developer has made it hard for me to find a good co-founder. I could potentially launch by myself, but I know that I lack the skills to properly get it in front of my target market.
Your approach can be summarized in the profit joke:

1) Do something

2) ?

3) Profit
Sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say.

If you're specifically talking about my use of "more correct", let me try another example of why I think "more correct" is useful nonsense. I'm Canadian. Therefore, I use spellings like "colour" and "honour".

However, if I'm writing something primarily targeted to Americans, I switch to honor and color. It isn't that colour becomes incorrect when I write for an American audience. To me, color is always wrong. But, if I want to influence an American audience, color will be the correct spelling they're looking for.

When I'm obsessing over edits, especially when underlying rules are unclear (or non-existent), shades of correctness are the best metric I can find. Do you have another?
You misunderstood me.

You can lose weight focusing solely on calories. It is easier to keep your calories in check while eating wholesome foods for numerous reasons, but at the end of the day, the gain/loss is governed by calories.
Thanks but I think I'll stick with this little gem.

https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor
Yes it is. The use case is when your site is down and you want to tell people that. If you have even a small amount of traffic `python -m http.server` is going to die, this isn't.

How is that not an apt comparison?
Epunk acquired Blink Technologies
nice, but not small :P

this one is really small -> https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor
An Introduction to the AWS Command Line Tool
It's a bit much to call IndexedDB "worthless". You can asynchronously store/access large amounts of indexed JS objects. That's a huge win, despite the fact that I agree the IndexedDB API is not ideal.

you cant build WebSQL on top of IndexedDB.

I don't see why you couldn't build Web SQL on top of IndexedDB. Nobody's done it and it would be a ton of work, but it should be possible.

I'd like to be able to use HTML APIs WITHOUT a framework.

You can use the IndexedDB API directly. It's not that hard. It's just overkill for something like localForage that is only doing very simple data storage and retrieval.

Thank you Mozilla.

It wasn't just Mozilla. Microsoft deserves much of the credit/blame, since they were also in the anti-Web SQL and pro-IndexedDB camp. And Google quickly came to agree with them, even though they had implemented Web SQL previously.
Maybe not here, and I suppose my comment was more of a reaction to the people who are completely ignorant of the "porn block", but I've heard people go as far as making comparisons to dictatorial countries.

I agree it's a slippery slope and I do oppose it, but the hyperbole and sensationalism from "our" side of the debate does nobody any good.
Chip fabs are extremely expensive. You basically need to invest $5B+ every two years just to stay up-to-date on technology, and then the same amount or more to do the necessary research and build the thing in the first place.

(Reference in point: history of Globalfoundries)
yes India's tech industry been in growth mode for decades - now they are facing what those in the developed world have been dealing with.
> Elasticsearch mostly "just works", and we didn't have to worry about complex schema definitions, working with giant complex XML files (hello Solr)

If you were using Solr there are a few operational modes to run in. Config file based or SolrCloud[0]. The latter is more akin the ES in terms of cluster management.

I agree though from an simplicity of deployment perspective at scale ES is has a much lighter learning curve.

[0] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/SolrCloud
I like the delivery. There is little "corporate speak" and a lot of frankness. He's not calling out a particular person but a whole office.

I don't see this as a "reams employees" type of email. He's making his case for why everyone should be using PayPal's apps.

His telling employees to go elsewhere if their heart isn't into it is also refreshing.

This is exactly the type of email I would expect from someone at his level that isn't trying to play the "everyone please like me" game and is actually trying to move things forward.
Problem: people die, unsolvable don't bother.

Problem: people are unhappy, sounds like you found the trivial solution, no? Your explanation sums to me as "don't do things that make you unhappy, do things that make you happy".

Problem: it's hard to connect with people, do things that connect with people. Do them with lots of people till you find connections.

My central thesis here is that solving normal every day problems, the kind that people write into Dear Abby about, is usually pretty simple. It's why Dear Abby and similar columns have

a) been around for decades

b) are given just a couple inches of column space

c) answer half a dozen "life problems" every week in under 2 paragraphs.

Would it come across better if I framed it as a Dear Abby question? Nobody seems to have particular problems with her? If you strip away the polite wording, her solutions are usually one or two sentences.

Or would it be better if I padded the simple solution in easier to digest language like Dear Abby?

Problem: People Die

Solution: I'm very sorry that people die. It's a sad thing when a particularly bright light, who's contributed so much to the world, and so much yet to contribute, is snuffed out. People have desired long and hard for an end to the end, but it's a simple fact of life. Learning to accept death, and find closure, without dwelling in the past (move forward in celebration of their life!) is an important part of living your own life.

Does that make you feel better? The solution is no different. But now we've both wasted time getting to it. It's not any more complex than it was before, but now it's coated with sugar. That's not problem solving.

Here's an article acknowledging and celebrating this

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/17/words-of-wi...

Read very carefully her advice and see if it's materially different than mine.