skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
idlewords is right. You may think regex is too low level, but like i said in my comment, you want to learn things that you can use anywhere. Almost every programming language has regex support.

Plus, regex is hard for a lot of people -- even programmers. Most developers copy/paste regex into their code, rather than write it.

And his other point, that it teaches you problem solving is important too. That's what software development is, solving problems. Learning a language won't help you solve problems.

You have to ask yourself, "what problem do you want to solve?"

The first thing I ask people when they want to start learning to program or build systems is: What kind of system do you want? You have to want a solution to a problem to really get good at programming. You have to create a problem and then solve it.

Regex is good at that because when you understand regex, it's easy to find problems that it solves. Imagine wanting to find all files on your computer that contain phone numbers or email addresses. Something like that is very useful and you can do it quite easily with regex.
This technique is often called "css sprites" if the author wants to read more about the technique.
It's ironic that we've used computers to attack problems and improve processes in virtually every aspect of life except writing computer programs. The process of programming still looks pretty much the same as it did in Grace Hopper's day. I agree with the author: that's just stupid.

The question remains, though: what do we do about it?
The "muscle burns calories" idea is a popular myth, as you explain.

The value of muscle mass is that it buffers glucose and insulin. Muscle forms and stores glycogen that would otherwise go right to fat cells. These glycogen stores then also help control appetite, fending off acute snack attack hunger pangs that a scrawny person accustomed to a high carb diet gets when blood sugar wanes.
So rather than live off your savings, you invest your savings into a startup, and then use the money to pay yourself a salary. Clever hack!
Insufficiently trendy.
He doesn't mention much, if at all, which of these things are open source and which aren't. Some of these things can be hacked on, and some can't: what you see is what you get.

That could potentially be important, for some uses/users.
On a related note, has anyone found any studies examining how much your metabolism actually decreases when you diet?

I've been tracking my weight and calories/exercise for over a year, and I've noticed the oddest thing. I can eat up to 3000 calories/day with no exercise and not gain weight. But I have to eat under 2000 calories/day to lose any weight.

I seem to have this dead zone 2000-3000 calories where my body seems to set my metabolism to whatever I eat.

(Of course the math and statistics confused the bejezus out of me, so I may be completely wrong.)
I might have to investigate Flash further now. Firstly, at the time I started the project, there was no Flash plug-in available for my OS (64-bit Linux). Secondly, I would have preferred using only open standards for this open source project. Finally, and most imporantly, I didn't know Flash or Actionscript.
I think that was a response to the "How to handle a graphics tileset which consists of many 96x48px tiles?" question.
The worst part is that he seems to think this is a novel idea.
I accidentally the whole article! You are in luck.

a) The folks that produce Pokemon do some sort of game where you have to go to 95 train stations and get a book stamped with a symbolic Pokemon representing that train station. All 95 stamps get you a small chance at a plush Pokemon, or the opportunity to buy a commemorative plastic Pokemon cup.

b) [He claims that] Japanese companies do not isolate successful and unsuccessful aspects of a successful enterprise, and instead think that "everything" was part of the success. So they can't cancel the stamp hunt.

c) There's nothing about the games. Aside from the utility of having the number of collected pokemon be a point of competition between children.

d) I can't believe I wasted those minutes and now I want them back.

e) I want a firefox extension that lets me suggest alternate or additional meanings to chunks of text. In this particular case, entire paragraphs could have been condensed to a zero-byte string. Someone get cracking.
I'm a QA at a startup and I don't think it sucks. I really enjoy my job and I think it requires variety of skills. In order for you to really excel at QA, you need to know a thing or two about programming, databases, client-side scripting( JavaScript in my case), usability, TDD and etc. This whole combination makes it really interesting. Can you share your experience or opinion on why you think it stinks?
I didn't say you misunderstood the study. I said you learned that headlines can be misleading, which I assumed was new information to you given how much of a whiny little rant you felt you needed to give us about this instance of that fact.
I notice the majority of my corporate programming job lately is just connecting things. Take data out of a table, show it on the screen, take data from the user, put it in the table, Take someone's library, put my values into the function calls.

It seems like there should be a way for things to "connect" themselves. Eh, just thinking aloud I guess.
Over forty miles per week with no rest days == too much for most people, way too much if you're overweight. Sure, some people do a lot more, but there are always exceptions. Every running trail and running club is disproportionately populated by people who have better resistance to injury. Steady running is one of the most challenging things you can do to your joints. (I find doing fartlek over a given distance a lot easier to recover from than steady running.) Running slowly isn't necessarily better, since a lot of injuries are caused by the up-and-down impact, and there's a limit to the extent you can reduce the up-and-down.

The obvious solution is cross-training, but there aren't many things you can do by yourself that burn calories as well as running.
I was thinking about this recently, and wondering if my own experiences are seriously biasing me, but Ruby On Rails does not seem that hard to learn, and is fairly well structured. You have to learn the parts of Ruby that are used for Rails. You don't need to know SQL to start off, CSS and html are pretty straightforward, depending on the website, learning and coding JavaScript could be the hardest part. There is a job market where you can work for a company (both large and small) or try to freelance. Maybe the same is true for, say, Django or some other web frameworks?
If you think of exercise as 30 minutes a day 3 times a week then diet is by far more important. But, at extreme levels of exercise it's hard to eat enough calories to keep from losing weight.

At the true elite level Michael Phelps is fueled by 12,000 calorie a day diet, eating that much food just hard. Think 60 Twinkies a day plus a 3000 calorie diet.

But even 1/2 that and most people would still have problems keeping up for months at a time. The average human body could do 8 hours of exercise a day 7 days a week for years after training. So we don't really need to look at the true extremes of human capability to find a level of exercise that will balance all, but the most ridicules diet.

PS: If you are going to work a desk job, then nights and weekend exercise is not going to cover a horrible diet.
I'm not really able to comprehend what you are trying to get at here, though I recognize you are putting a lot of effort into trying to explain your worldview.

By "improving Self-Restraint" I mean "Making changes so one is not motivated to eat".

o Stomach Stapling

o Avoiding High Glycemic/Carb Rich foods

o Not going out to the Gym for 60 minute work outs.

Trying to rely on some moral-superiority is pretty much going to lose out in the long run (though most people have pretty good 6-12 month runs, and a nice 30-50 pound drop in weight - then it all comes back and more.)
A lot of bad logic in this article. The main point being - that author feels like she's exercising a lot. 30 minutes cardio a day is not a lot (the biggest exercise being an 1 hour intensive interval training), otherwise the author runs 5.5 miles (1 hour?).

That is not a lot of training. Lets assume that this is mostly all exercise the author is doing (she's probably sitting through most of her day). That is barely making up for the lack of exercise.

If she (or anybody else for that matter) stopped loosing weight at her current intake/expenditure level it's merely an indication that she either eats too much or exercises too little.

But the basic problem being that people believe that 30 minutes or 1 hour is a lot exercise. At those levels you don't even get your body going yet. What a person thinks about their fitness level is irrelevant. A person doing only 1 hour of exercise a day is barely fit. Really fit people (athletic - thin) can go on for 3-5 hours without problem.

So if you want to lose weight drop any meals after 4 pm (4 pm being last snack - a fruit). Start eating in the morning, eat every 3 hours (breakfast - snack - lunch - snack - over) and exercise at least 1 hour a day (2 being super good). Don't work yourself too hard. Go for low intensity workout (walking, light running, cycling). You HAVE to stay under 70% HR (sub 140 BMP for 20-30 yr old).

You can eat anything in any combination. This kind of diet is kinda hard for first two weeks but then it becomes a habit.
Man vs Mutt
The "dynamic" example:

complete -o default -W "`echo $(cat /path/to/file | grep 'lines i want')`" \
[command]

is easier written as

complete -o default -W "`echo $(grep 'lines i want' /path/to/file)`" \
[command]
Assuming a direct conversion of calories in to fat, as you do when you talk about eating 40 calories, leads to this quote:

"If you eat 2,700 calories per day, that's roughly 1 million per year, 10 million in a decade. ~12 tons of food in a decade. To maintain your bodyweight to within 5lbs in a decade would require an accuracy of 0.1% in your calorie counting. Under this model, the question isn't why do people get fat, it's how does anyone avoid it?" - Gary Taube's Big Fat Lies lecture.
pipe that grep through | tr '\n' ' ' and you don't need the echo.
It is not incorrect because it does not claim that it can't make you thin.

All it claims is that inside the article is an explanation of why exercise will not make you thin. Which there is. Even if you disagree with it, there is still one. Even if it was "because exercise has 8 characters and words with 8 characters are bad" it would still be an accurate title.

It's not a lie or a blatant lie.
When I retooled myself from a physics dropout to a programmer (back in the 80s) the most valuable single thing I did was to work through SICP, doing most of the exercises plus little projects sparked off it. (I already had years of hobby programming experience, though; and I'd hope there's a better most valuable thing now, 20 years later.)
1,000 calories, considering the modern possibilities, isn't that much. I mean, that's a bit less than two slices of toast with Nutella.

Yes, it is VERY difficult to out-train a bad diet. There is an example I use with friends, which is if you drink 5 pints of beer, you'll need to run 10 miles to burn that off (really). Have a pizza or a kebab on the way home, another 10 miles. Have a fry-up for breakfast, another 10 miles. So even if you ran a Marathon tomorrow, with your hangover, you've still gained fat from one Friday night. And you're doing again on Saturday night too.

On the subject, of athletes, everyone at the top of any sport is a genetic freak. That's not to disparage the effort they put in. But hey, Michael Phelps didn't get his extraordinarily long armspan from training. He didn't get his flipper-shaped feet from training. He was born with them. And he was born with an extraordinary metabolism too.
One decent way is to learn the software technologies and tools used in their particular domains. There's usually some set of fairly standard tools and plenty of self-taught experts to provide guidance.
The other path is the more general - 'learning to program a computer' which these days really means web programming.

When the typical interaction with a personal computer was picking menu items from a screenful of text, you learned BASIC and that, while limited, gave you some idea of what programming was about.

Now the typical interaction is with a web page so arguably learning to program is learning to write web apps. The BASIC equivalent there is perhaps a page-embedded language like PHP. It's simple, direct, is an actual marketable skill and would introduce a beginner to a lot of the necessary details without much digression into more convoluted concepts (OO or functional programming, 'frameworks', etc, etc). Armed with the foundations, one can then branch out to things sexier/higher paying/useless - say, Ruby/Java/Arc.
My solution: drop support for IE. No, seriously. I understand that it has a very large "marketshare" (installation base) but I think that very often IE is used on office desktops, that is places people wouldn't use for playing games anyway.

While there were times when IE was a decent browser it is clearly standing in the way of innovation at the moment. It is very easy to download a modern alternate browser and a large number of websites using the canvas element would force Microsoft to build a fairly good implementation of it into IE 9 (as it was I believe hinted by the IE project team leader anyway).
spiral bound blank pages, preferably on the heavier side of medium weight
What difference does it make in terms of Apple's right to choose what they sell in their store? You're taking it as a given that the platform should be open, but that, too, is their right to decide. They are not obligated to have such a store at all. Likewise, you are not obligated to buy an iPhone.

There are direct parallels with Xbox Live Marketplace, Wii Shop, and the PlayStation Store, as even more directly in the mobile stores operated by every mobile carrier. Are these companies engadging in censorship? Some of them ::gasp:: don't even sell any dictionaries!

The point is that this kind of thing goes on all around you every day and people don't seem to mind until someone starts calling it censorship. And to what end but fury? I don't understand the purpose of moral outrage over something that is merely inconvenient.
You may also consider using Silverlight. The .Net framework on the client is more powerful and capable than Adobe offering AFAIK.
Unless the purpose is to make this into some ginormous company, I'd highly recommend excluding IE from your list of worries. If it's a love-of-the-game project, do it to your (and your friends') satisfaction.
The Behance dot grid books are great for layout sketches:
http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/

Konigi graph paper looks decent for wireframing:
http://konigi.com/tools/overview

As do Whiteline books (you can buy them off Amazon):
http://www.whitelines.se/en/

I personally use and recommend Muji recycled ring notebooks. They're relatively cheap and excellent for quick sketches/journaling:
http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/note/recycled-paper-note...

For me, anything that'll let me get my ideas on paper as quickly and effortlessly as possible is the way to go. As long as the notebook doesn't get in the way, it's perfect.
Bowline: An MVC Framework for GUI, Cross-Platform Desktop Apps in Ruby
When Grace Hopper was programming your choices involved Assembly, FORTRAN and COBOL. Yes, we still have to write code, but 10 lines of Python / Ruby / Lisp / etc... do the work of 100 lines for FORTRAN or 1000 lines of Assembly. I'll call that an "improved process."
http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/software-services-appl...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Evolve+Software+to+represent+P...

I might be misinterpreting these then, but those seem to be fairly clear statements to me.
"When someone says 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,' give him a lollipop. " - Alan J Perlis

from the article:

> Compilers, on the other hand, are generally very good. I have a high degree of confidence in most of the compilers I use. Sure, there are occasional bugs, but as long as you're not doing safety-critical development, most compilers are perfectly acceptable.

Which is the same reason that we use Rails, Django, or Cake, etc. We're not doing safety critical development, we're writing CMSes and blogs. This isn't rocket science, but it is code someone will pay for. So why not do it in the most comfortable and convenient way currently possible?

It's not necessary for the carpenter to be an expert on the design and manufacture of power tools. Knowing the tools they use, however, will improve the quality of their work.

Similarly, the quality of my work as a programmer will improve as I grow into my tools, knowing their uses and imperfections. It is not necessary for me to be constantly focused on how imperfect they are and how I should be building better tools instead of using the ones I have. Along the lines of kenshi's comment: why are people upset that I am enjoying myself and taking pride in my work? I recognize the limits of my tools and I am comfortable with their being limited.
I downvoted you as your last meal of the day should be high protein, low GI. Fruit is the opposite.
My milk calcs show that about 7 servings of milk a day would be enough to hit 1000IU/day, enough to bring 50% of the population up to the recommended level. So maybe milk alone isn't enough, but it certainly matters. Aren't osteoporosis rates down owing to lattes? :)
By the time you finish and have it running smoothly, IE9 will be closer to completion (if not already released). Then you already have support for IE.

So unless there's a burning desire to market this to IE users right this minute, save yourself the hassle and let IE catch up with standards while you work on a better javascript client with Canvas.
Interesting resource for people interested in PID controllers
"cross-country team in high school" - I presume that means you were exercising more than 3 times a week at 30 minutes?

The premise of the article isn't about athletes (which you were) won't lose weight by engaging in their activity. Of course people who _regularly and continuously_ exercise are going to lose weight. Anybody who works with a bicycle rider who commutes more than 10-15 miles into work knows that there are no fat cyclists - And those who bicycle more are usually worrying about getting _enough calories_ to maintain their weight and keep up their conditioning/muscle mass.

The article was talking about whether it makes sense for your average cube-rat to go out to the gym three times a week for a 60 minute excercise regime - and the conclusion is no. It really doesn't help you lose weight because you end up eating more than you just spent in caloric expenditure from the exercise.
We're a three-person, three month old startup and we started paying ourselves as soon as we quit our day jobs. (It helped that we managed to get a client for the base version of our product (a web based app) in the first month itself.) At the moment, two of us have quit our jobs and the third is hanging on to his while we code-code-code.

However, we do have salary bands -- bare survival money, doing well money and bring it on money. Currently we're withdrawing survival money. We're hoping to change that pretty quick by spending all our time coding and getting our product out pronto :)
Online journal publishing only papers that have been rejected
mpage on unix

I believe some of the more recent Photoshops have that functionality

Failing that: Illustrator can open pdf, and you can scale the output to the desired dimensions and carefully segment them yourself.
"aren't many things you can do by yourself that burn calories as well as running."

All activity's at your aerobic limit burn the same number of calories. You can run, dance, row, weigh lift, or just bail hay, and you will encounter the same limit. It's basically a question of how much oxygen you can absorb though the lungs and dump into your blood stream.
It's better to argue "weight gain = calories in - calories out" is not the whole story than to argue that it's completely wrong - you can't eat and drink nothing for a week and just get heavier, but what you can do is more like... eat 3500 calories extra in a week without putting on a pound of fat (1lb of fat ~=3500 calories) because your body is not trying to store as much as it can as fat, or eat -3500 calories in a week and end up slowing down your metabolism and moving less and destructing other bodily parts so you turn it into a calorie surfeit and do put on a pound of fat.

This comes up in Hacker News every time a health story comes up, usually quoting a pop-sci writer

Bit of an ad-hom on pop-sci writers there, eh?
Why Twitter Needs Brand Tweehab and Lessons for Startups
You may want to look into how Quake Live is delivered over the web..
No, that's an incremental improvement. All we're doing is writing fewer lines of the same damned procedural code.

We didn't replace our horse and buggy with a car, we put some Tri-Flow on the bearings and meth in the feed bag and called it a day.
Alternative Unemployment Measures
You frame it as an opposition between two opposing forces, a person's appetite for immediate reward and his self-restraint. The strength of one's restraint is measured against the strength's of one's desires. You improve results by strengthening restraint and weakening appetite.

I see self-restraint as a limited amount of discretion that a person has to override his natural tendency to maximize emotional reward. As the article says, self-restraint is tiring and unnatural; it's a stopgap measure at best. The primary conflict is in your emotional brain's cost/benefit analysis of the situation. You have to hack your emotional reward system so you don't have to employ as much self-restraint. When you naturally derive satisfaction from eating well, because you have faith in the ultimate payoff, your natural tendency will not be as strongly tilted in favor of overeating.

Your subconscious/emotional/whatever brain is smarter than most people think. You aren't doomed to have an out-of-touch brain that fills you with irresistible, self-destructive impulses to overeat. We may have evolved on the savannah, but if you can stand on a subway platform, surrounded by strangers whose personal feelings about you are unknown, waiting for a huge steel structure to come whizzing by you at high speed, without feeling scared, you can learn to leave food on your plate. You just have to program your brain properly (cultivate faith) so that you feel, subconsciously, that limiting your eating leads to well-being and happiness (and, according to the highly publicized recent study, more sex if you're a man.)
As this blog post points out, unless the browser-server component gets opened up, and it doesn't look to me like it's going to, Wave is a big vendor lock-in project, with the Google interface the only one used by humans, and all the federations stuff designed only for "bots". "We're open" becomes just misdirection and fake hype.

But I think that's the least of Wave's problems at the moment. If they get the server bugs worked out, and figure out access control, then we can start talking about interoperability.
The best one that I have used so far is a spiral bound deck of A4 sheets of paper with a hard cover. A bit heavier paper works best.

Benefits:
- Cheap
- Fully customizable
- If you cannot find them then make them
A dash of Linux SysAdmin, a hint of bash, taken with a large glass of Perl. (Python seems to be the favoured Perl replacement here on HN)

It is amazing what you can accomplish by just learning those first.

You will have tasks (mostly sysadmin) straight away and build your programming from there.