skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually feel my writing has deteriorated over the past few years. Part of the problem might be my limited vocabulary. I can pick up new words effortlessly as I encounter them, but I rarely manage to put them in use. I spend a lot of time just looking for that one word that could convey my meaning succinctly, but I inevitably end up writing three sentences in place of that one word.

I face a completely different problem when I'm writing for an audience (my audience being the 3 people that read my blog). As I write this comment, words are coming naturally to me, but they completely evade me when I sit down to write a blog post. The result is a bunch of mediocre, incomplete blog posts in my 'Drafts' folder.

Needless to say, I need practice. One of these days, I should take some time off from writing code ...
Contrary to popular opinion, ShBoom does not, nor did it ever, execute any high-level langauge directly. It's far from being a Java processor. Yes, it's stack-based, but so are some other (unsuccessful) processors. There's a good reason why there are no Java processors in the world.

That doesn't mean ShBoom is bad or useless or that the patents have no value. It's just not the miracle some might be hoping for.
I have to use it daily, the latest release still has the following issues:

* No friendly URLs, with HTML escaping everywhere and typically unreadable URLs of 4-500 characters.

* Well known issues with URLs longer than 100 characters, which doesn't bode well with the above issue.

* Allowing users to create files and folders that may trigger the above issues.

* Data loss when moving content between sites, particularly losing the entire revision history.

* Moves breaking all URLs due to lack of redirects.

* Problems with large files, compounded with Sharepoint exposing itself via SMB and allowing users to create shared files.

* No simple end-user revision rollback, although history is available, is typically isn't exposed.
"I believe it is very nearly within our reach to stop writing software and start specifying software instead. Write the specification, press a button and have a full implementation that is mathematically guaranteed to implement your specification."

Well, we'd have to write that specification in some sort of consistent formal language. What kind of computer program converts a program specified in formal language into an executable program? Oh, right--a compiler.

The most generous I can get here is to suppose he's advocating a declarative high-level programming language. But that wouldn't be nearly as interesting to write an essay about, so let's pretend that your declarative, high-level "specification" language means "no more writing code". Either that, or he honestly believes you can write a compiler for English. But given how most specs are written, I would be even more fearful of the output of an English compiler. So you have to use a formally specified language--oh wait, that's coding again.
Yes, sorry about the initial tone of the comment. It was late, and I tend to refine long posts through iteration.

To answer your question, I did search for the authors' other research, and found a long list of publications on the relationship of calcium supplementation to cancer. So I knew that was their general focus of research. But my answer was based solely on the content of the abstract:

"CONCLUSIONS: Improving calcium and vitamin D nutritional status substantially reduces all-cancer risk in postmenopausal women."

That's a limited statement. Regardless of the title of the press release, what they showed was that there's evidence that Vitamin D supplementation -- when combined with supplemental calcium up to the US RDA -- significantly reduces cancer in post-menopausal women.

The study was limited to post-menopausal women because they were trying to research osteoporosis (again, see abstract), and that's probably what they got funding to do. But because the mechanism is general, and since they weren't doing anything extraordinary with the calcium supplementation, there's no a priori reason to believe that the results are specific to older women. That's the only additional assumption I'm making.
Dang, I didn't see your post, but it would have saved me a lot of work.

Just whipped this up last night... Here are all of the Webcams from a yahoo search up to 1000th result Geolocated:

http://www.huyng.com/apps/geocams.html
The entire point of the article was that working out hard and short a couple times a week doesn't help one lose weight, and that sustained continuous activity does. The reasoning is those bursts of short activity are met with increased caloric intake, defeating the value of any exercise.
http://www.thelaborers.net/BIG_DIG/questions_in_tunnel_death...

http://www.mwra.com/harbor/html/outfall_update.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Island_Waste_Water_Treatme...
So, this is kind of unrelated, but am I the only one who prefers text to videos/audio? I know I can scan through text a lot faster then sitting and listening to someone talk
"if you don't show some self-restraint" - the articles premise was that the brief bursts of activity reduce your ability to show self-restraint. I find it interesting that people think "self-restraint" is some magical ability that isn't weakened/enhanced like any other capability of people. The reality is that managing the "Self-Restraint" muscle is probably much more important than trying to manage other muscles.
Count yourself lucky. I tried to read it on an iPhone and the mobile site only gives you access to the first page.
I disagree, if not a visual design, then a design for the code itself is needed- well, it's needed for big enough projects. If one were to skip planning out the project and how to code it, one could easily mess up whatever protocol system there is an just code the entire system poorly. Sadly I did this once! I coded the entire thing, and it worked. No plans, no designs, no nothing- one bug, and the entire project was ruined because I didn't plan ahead and design my code to be flexible in the least. Basically what I am saying is that if I had taken a minute to plan it- I would never have had to rewrite LOTS of code. It's always a good idea to design something before coding, a visual of the project helps and the actual code structure outline helps.

Moral of the story:
Always have a design up front. I didn't have a design so the structure of my code was incorrect for the "visual" the other person had in mind, so it broke. If that visual is solid, especially when working with/for another person, then fewer mistakes will be made down the road.
Ask PG: When should founders start taking a salary?
There are companies in YC portfolio that have been around for a while and those that received external funding.
When should founders start paying themselves a salary?
Especially in these cases:
1) when the revenues are not substantial to cover everyones pay and there are always things to reinvest.
2) When VC or Angel money is invested in the company.

Thanks
Separately, I think someone has misunderstood Patriot's press release. The company didn't acquire Moore's patents; they've always owned the patents. They licensed them to another company.

Patriot and another company, Technology Properties Limited (TPL), are co-owners of Moore's patents. Both Patriot and TPL make their money by licensing those patent rights to other companies. The recent press announcement from Patriot merely says they've signed up yet another new customer.
JavaScript HTML-Form encryption plugin - jCryption
Gee, I can eat more calories of pizza in ten minutes than I could burn off in two hours of running... if I could run for two hours at the same pace I can run for half an hour. What more explanation do you need?

On the other hand, exercise improves my mood and helps me limit my eating, and for that reason it's quite helpful.
Here's my experience:

Running was extraordinarily effective in helping me lose weight. However, it took quite a bit to do it. I was on a cross-country team in high school. That took me from slightly chubby to rail-thin. Every single person on the team who started out over-weight made great progress. One fat kid lost at least 30 pounds in just three months. Nobody I knew who kept running stayed fat.

Still, I have to say that my experience fits with the results of the experiment mentioned in the article. At one point after spending a few years doing little but sitting in front of the computer, I decided to lose about 25 kilos. I went out and did about the amount the "high exercise" group mentioned in the article did, and I just ate more as a result. However, after going over about 50km/week, I found my appetite suppressed. It was kind of like my body had found its equilibrium and my hunger was based upon how much I actually needed. I lost weight really quickly after that.
Nope, Google saw this coming first and stopped them. Remember the 700MHz D-Block?
I read the article and it does not really say that. In fact, the only bit that comes close is this:
Another British study, this one from the University of Exeter, found that kids who regularly move in short bursts — running to catch a ball, racing up and down stairs to collect toys — are just as healthy as kids who participate in sports that require vigorous, sustained exercise.

I would agree with the general idea that daily walking at a relaxed pace is better than "jogging".

I think proper intense 10-20 minute workouts are so outside of the field of view of people who read and write articles like these they don't understand them. Doing a few sets of no-rest olympic lifts and then five minutes of double-unders with a jump rope does not boost your appetite much. It will make you a bit nauseous. It is not at all like going on a 15 mile bike ride or swimming a mile, which leaves you ravenous 30 minutes after.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that weight is the wrong metric in the first place. I'd rather be the same weight but have more, and better proportioned, muscle mass. (Muscle burns calories even when you're resting...it's a much better knob to tweak than the number of calories burnt during exercise.)

The author might be better off by giving away his bathroom scale and thinking about his body as a system.
Oversubscription based on expected use is no excuse for routinely not providing what was promised. It's the ISP's job to measure actual patterns and make sure enough capacity is there. How would these ISPs feel if their banks told them "sorry, we've loaned out the money in your account and don't have the liquidity to cover your withdrawal"?
excellent point aditya. that is the fourth choice. i alluded to it later on where i said "cut costs" but i did not do a good enough job of articulating this approach. thanks for picking up on that.
I find it annoying that either through ignorance or a need to create an eye-catching headline the author interchangeably uses the words "thin" and "weight" to describe a metric used to measure some undefined-but-ideal body shape,

There is an incredibly difference between being a 180lb man who exercises regularly and one who does not.

Perhaps the author was never asked the "which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of lead?" question as a child.
A REAL Wall of Text
Get LimeWire for Your Platform - Lime Wire
I found this pretty impressive:

> Then I did the real test. After poking around and finding a tape of my

> old BASIC programs I typed LOAD again and explored the tape. 30 years on

> all the programs loaded from tape just fine and executed. I was able to

> spend a happy few hours playing character-based games that I wrote.

That his programs loaded after 30 years on a cassette tape makes
some of those cheap flaky CDs' lifespans look pretty bad.
Great comment. On the metaphor end, while traveling I usually wind up moving around based on meeting people who live in the country, it usually leads to some really memorable but non-flashy memories... no Mount Fuji's, but lots of hole in the wall spots hanging out with great people, off the wall drum concerts, and more of the day to day experiences of being in another country.

I think the cool part of your comment is the implicit point of timeframe- if you have less time, your best bet is to make sure you have a great experience by going the big bang route- making sure you hit the top of Mount Fuji and making sure you hit the major parts of the country. If you have more time, or are sure you'll return, you can just kind of fall forward through the travel experience and see what happens.

Relating it back to business, if you look at Starbucks or Walmart, they expanded aggressively, but there was a 20 year time-frame there for building out the business. They had time, they used it to the full for sure, but they also were able to execute on their long-term plan. I think the whole raise funding -> one year runway -> sink or swim flow is just an odd way to build a long-term business.

We started off approaching things from that perspective, it didn't work, and we fell into our current approach- my viewpoint is completely dictated by my very limited experience. Our long-term plans are massive in scale, but our short-term plans are two week ship periods to grow revenue and give us a more solid base to operate off of.
I've written about this before. Until Google releases both code and protocol for a client-server integration, Wave is too complicated for the web. I spent a whole week barely trying to emulate the same thing in Javascript and I couldn't do it.
I don't have much experience of .net but as an introduction to a language series there is no series of books better designed than Head First. Here's their C# book:

http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfcsharp/
I can only give you my own experience: I (and my co-founder) took a salary from day one. We also lined up paying customers immediately, and broke even our first year. I imagine there's a connection between the two facts.
The best tip I can give non-designers or non-artists is to read Dan Roam's Back Of The Napkin. It's about how to use basic sketching skills to both capture and express your ideas.

We're holding a discussion on it on Sept 10th at our next UX Book Club, for those in the bay area:

http://groups.google.com/group/ux-book-club-san-francisco/br...
i did a 50 A4 sheet picture with this of grandmaster flash. i used a tiny source picture (less than vga). I took the time to trim the edges and tape all the sheets together first. this made sticking it to the wall a simpler task.

if i could have done anything differently i'd have used a printer that could do borderless printing. it looked awesome, would def recommend.
No, to answer the original question. But I've heard it ties well to agile dev methods.
The number of hours to accomplish X goes down as the skill of the individual goes up.

I wouldn't assume that they continue to solve for X - you can solve harder problems as your skill goes up too, so hours can be a good way to judge difficulty.
Wow, what a pointless comparison.

I think it's more instructive to ask the question another way: I want to task you with hand-delivering a small envelope to another address in the continental United States, to be named later, and I want the delivery to occur within a few days of the handoff. How much would you like me to pay you to provide such a service?
Nobody is ever going to agree on this. Different things work for different people. Everyone's got their "I did this and lost loads of weight" or "this didn't work for me" story.

Some form of exercise combined with less and better food is probably going to get you somewhere. Learning to live with being hungry helps :-).
Maker Faire coming to New England this September
A typical encryption/decryption protocol should use both RSA-1024 and AES-256 for which to complete implemented it is hard to avoid flaws. Besides, to generate a qualified RSA-1024 pair key (with blacklist) is very computational expensive. For common usage, such as password authentication, HMAC is robust enough. Still, any secure form submitting should be SSL-encrypted other than using a javascript library.
I believe that founders should start taking a salary of some sort immediately. However, I think that the salary can be deferred if the money isn't actually there. However, not having it on the books at all is pretending that one of the very real costs of the business isn't really there.
Introducing the Lean Startup Cohort subscription program
It is the exercise and eating habits combo that works.
Weight gain = Calories In - Calories out.

Exercising along with the judicious diet (not starving)
is what works. I recently came across two books that throw
light on the interesting and useful information about high intensity-low duration exercising to develop a great body:

1. Cardio Free Diet: http://tinyurl.com/cardiofreediet
and
2. The Nautilus Bodybuilding book: ISBN: 0-8092-5815-3
The poor man’s Bash Tab-completion
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748430
The article itself it insightful. But, brother hackers, can we allow an article whose title is a blatant lie to be voted to the top of Hacker News?

Running is exercise.

Running 1600 meters, on average, burns 124 calories for a man. ("Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running", Syracuse Uni study). This only takes a few minutes.

Even if a person is taking in massively more calories than their body needs -- let's say, overeating by 1000 calories a day -- they could burn it all off with a few miles of jogging. Increase the amount of running they do still further, and you won't find anyone who will seriously suggest that they won't get thinner.

Or how do you think that cross-country runners got so skinny?

Olympic marathoners?

...

So ...

Exercise CAN make you thin; thus, the statement that it won't is incorrect.
At the end of the day, you lose weight by using more calories than you take in.

While the results of the Time article may apply to some people, I've found that I do a better job of losing weight when I go to the gym at least 4 times a week, and I've lost 45 pounds so far this year, most of it since March. At the end of the day, though, you still have to be conscious about what you eat, and find things that satisfy cravings without destroying the work you've done.
Engage in a very expensive series of meetings, workshops and lectures to learn how to keep your startup from getting distracted by nonessentials.

You'll know you've graduated when you stop attending!
your basic highschool composition notebook. Small enough to carry around, and easy to stack on the bookshelf to archive.
The killer app for DNA sequencing:  online dating.
Most people probably don't want to know diseases that they might be getting.

I think this is a more compelling app. What better way to know if a couple will get along than to examine their DNA sequences?

A deep understanding of the inner workings of personality genes is not required. You could just use a machine learning algorithm to identify the sorts of sequences that tend to work well together.
The challenges of Creating a Civilization Web Game
we paid ourselves enough to pay rent from the day we got funding
How naive I was thinking this post will have an intense debate :d

On the other hand a very good post dismantling a scam from a vip - after recent fake posts from mainstream media a big plus karma for nytimes
Can you really identify personality traits accurately from DNA?

ETA: Can you filter out pairings that share undesirable recessive genes, without telling them they have undesirable genes (assuming they don't want to know)?
> J2ME has no future, so it'd be a poor startup idea. Trust me.

I don't think J2ME has much of a future for general use phones in rich countries, no. But it has a huge present, and a niche like this might be just fine for a startup, actually.
A 200+ Euro device is not at all what I was talking about (+ expensive development environment). I'm talking about something in the 20 Euro range. My very young daughter would be just fine with a super cheap phone, to press buttons, and see shapes, colors, sounds and things. There is no way I am going to hand her an expensive, relatively fragile, fancy new phone just to play a few games with.

J2ME is not that bad to code in, actually, and is probably "good enough" for the sorts of simple kids games I had in mind. Android would certainly be a lot better, but I am not sure we'll see Android phones at anywhere near the right price point in the near future.
I think one of the biggest mistakes I made with Dawdle was not paying myself a salary immediately. One, it forces you to work harder as your cash burn is more realistic, and more importantly, salaries are prerequisite in Illinois (and most states) to qualify for group insurance coverage.

Again, if you haven't heard me before on this, if you have individual insurance, you're a sucker. You'll have your policy rescinded as soon as you try to file a claim for any sort of long-term condition. (Broken bone? OK. Need physical therapy? Good luck.)
Review: Coders at Work
Of course, a native app has advantages of its own: it is usually faster, and it can cache information and function without a network connection. Plus (iPhone developers, correct me if I'm wrong) you probably wouldn't get access to all the hardware, like the GPS and accelerometer. So I wouldn't say that an iPhone webapp is a complete workaround.
A Run-down of Free Software Project Hosting Sites
I personally hope other things (eg price, increased performance) continue to be more important.
Well-said.

Why try to convince the most frugal people on the planet to spend still-unearned money on workshops instead of working?

Maybe because they're highly motivated to procrastinate ...
I believe planning to a salary from the beginning forces you to think about profitability from the beginning (or if not profitability, at least viability of your revenue model). When I started my business, it was comforting knowing that I could pay myself what I was making at my 9-5 while the business was growing. Of course that limited me to business ideas that could generate revenue from day one.
> Weight gain = Calories In - Calories out

Not true. People and lab animals can be made to get fatter while in caloric deficit with elevated insulin levels.
Bingo! That kind of site is what I had in mind.

Also a big +1 for the business idea. J2ME phones aren't the hot new thing, for sure, and can't do all the fancy things that a brand new top of the line phone can, but I think there is still a lot of use to be squeezed out of that kind of device.
They are also better than using a computer for exploring ideas, because paper is more flexible.

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2006/05/26/pen_and_pa...

The comments including many by engineers, and a couple of musicians, are especially interesting.
Thats not the only part. Near the beginning about 4 groups of women, and the ones who exercized a lot did not lose a significant amount of weight over those who did not exercise beyond normal. The heavy work out group did however report eating more calories. Then there are 2 or 3 pages about low intensity workouts being good because they stimulate calorie burn without stimulating hunger (with a tangent on brown fat in rats).

In fact there are several examples in the article about compensatory eating, such as the women who would get muffins after jogging, canceling any extra calorie burn.
What calculator are you using? 1000/124 = 8

Eight miles is more than a couple.
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