skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> First - the author lives almost entirely on Soylent for the past year and half.

In other words, a sample size of one.

I haven't an opinion on the safety of the product, but a sample size of one only proves it's not an outright poison. It's likely not actively harmful, but still, nutrition is a complicated thing.

I just think the whole idea of it couldn't be more depressing. People who don't get enjoyment out of food freak me out a bit. There are few things I enjoy more than cooking and eating well prepared food.
Scroll down for the English version.
This is my first blog post. Feedback is welcome!
Previous discussions on HN:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5369778

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6175079

his blog: http://robrhinehart.com/

A short documentary style video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg
We know for certain that it's possible to live to 100 years old with traditional food items. As of right now, we can't say the same for soylent.

I know this is a bit of an extreme comparison to make, but the "risk" between soylent and traditional food should be quite a lot.
I suppose the argument is that you derive some amount of enjoyment from eating due to hunger.

If you were never hungry, would you eat for enjoyment?

Soylent's premise is that you have time to do other fun or profitable things instead of making time for a meal.
Food is more expensive and time consuming than sex.

I've never heard anyone say that sex is a chore, but I often feel that way cooking food that I don't want to eat, but have to because I'm hungry.
I'm a little concerned about the long-term effects. The article states that the founder looks and feels healthy, but since he's the only person living off Soylent for an extended period, this is anecdotal evidence at best. It reminds me of the death of Seth Roberts, a couple of days ago.
Yeah, it's definitely a Silicon Valley thing. I grew up in SV and go to school at Berkeley, and dropping out is definitely considered a valid choice. People I know in SF encourage me to drop out all the time, and I know of several college students that dropped out.

Edit (reply to below): I took a year off to work before I went to college, so I think I have a good perspective when I say this. You assume that: 1) college is going to educate someone about the world, get them a good job (not a measly startup job), give them discipline, and introduce them to cofounders; and 2) college will do this so much better than you could by working in industry that it justifies the cost (anywhere between $150-200k tuition for a good school, and possibly $200k in lost savings). Suffice to say, not all of those things are necessarily true.

I'd be happy to talk about this perspective to anyone over email.
I've been making a homemade version of Soylent (http://www.cookingfor20.com/2013/06/18/hacker-school-soylent...) since September. It makes up one or two of my meals each day. I've got to say, I really really like it. I think it has a good chance of catching on. I still love eating out socially, but it has replaced all my my mediocre meals. I can imagine it replacing those aisles and aisles of junk, easy food (cereal, canned soup, mediocre pasta).

That said, I quickly had to come up with a better name than Soylent. I call mine Science (for human consumption). It makes it distinct from food. "Did you get lunch?" "No, I just had Science today."
"The R&D Lab's interactive mirror is a platform that we've designed to explore how the relationship between information and the self is evolving and how media content from The New York Times and others might play a part.

By using a special semi-reflective glass surface, the users of the mirror are able to see both a normal reflection of the real world as well as overlaid, high-contrast graphics. We've dubbed this "augmented reflection". Conceptually, the idea is that our mirror can reveal the halos of data around real-world objects, including ourselves." - NYT Labs, 2011.

http://nytlabs.com/projects/mirror.html
Dude, python IS in the same bucket as perl. The list of pros and cons when compared to C is identical.
Amazing Tributes To Ayrton Driving Icon Senna
Docpad http://docpad.org/docs/intro - meets all your requirements and then some more.
For the elaboration just go read https://notex.ch/overview/ -- the other two tools I've never heard of so I can't really compare. The front page description is indeed minimal, which is something I might improve in future: But since it is open source, you're more than welcome to send me a corresponding pull request. ;-) For now read the forum, blog and play around yourself to figure out its features.
Just to nitpick one of the claims in an otherwise well-reasoned comment - of course a lot of Chinese don't speak the national language. That's because for many Chinese people, Mandarin isn't their mother tongue - other Chinese dialects like Wu, Yue, etc. [1] As the BBC article you linked states, this is an issue of "linguistic unity" more than a symptom of a bad education system. Japan, as a much more homogeneous society, did not have this problem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Chinese
Nice trick for identifying bottlenecks.
If you want to leavarage your "debugging" skills, try this wonderful course: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs259
As awesome as it is to see Google kick the regional monopolies into upgrading, it's really a lack of competition that's stifling both modern connection speeds and reasonable prices. Prices for the ridiculously named "Gigapower" are undoubtedly going to go increase repeatedly over time if Fiber backs out since it has achieved what it wants. Competition would have the opposite effect.

Or better yet, why not treat ISPs as utilities. Could anyone offer insight as to why internet in this day and age is not regulated like electricity or other utilities?
>If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person.

>Working on something good will pull you along a path where good things keep happening to you.

So his advice is, to boil it down, "Do successful stuff, but hopefully it's obvious to you what is going to be successful."
I spent a long time looking for my ideal knowledge organizer, and eventually settled on Notecase Pro (http://www.notecasepro.com/).

It's cross-platform, with a functional free version. I have no problem paying for good, useful software, especially (as in this case) when it's produced by a dedicated individual or small company.

Evernote is overrated...
A Fan Asks Mike Rowe For Career Advice
> isn't mildly interesting that one of the most common cultural myths (vampires) may have some scientific validity?

That's really all I was commenting on. I could have spelled it out like you did, but clearly my tone was not to some people's liking.
Yes, I wouldn't mind a completely safe drug that made your sex drive disappear for a day or so.

But other differences are that: lots of the food you eat when you have no time (microwaveable dinners, tacos, fast food) is really really unhealthy for you. Relieving yourself sexually in the normal way is never unhealthy for for you (and is actually quite healthy). Quenching hunger also takes hours and costs money. Sexual release can be quick, and is free.
I derive enjoyment from getting hungry and eating, I even derive enjoyment from getting tired and sleeping.

The texture of life is varying psycho-physiological states. What is fun without these? Well, other things are fun too but missing the experience of a great meal after a hard days work seems just sad.

ps: didn't mean to vote you to negative, I expected your post to have a positive score and to give an "I disagree" downvote.
If you were never hungry, would you eat for enjoyment?

Absolutely, I would. The range of sensations available through the consumption food is second only to sex in its breadth and power and sensuality. Anyone who would forego that because it's "inconvenient" utterly baffles me.
W.r.t. Sphinx: Conceptually it's really nothing that fancy, just some Python glue code that takes the data structures out of my web application's data structures, and puts it together such that Sphinx can understand it: The only interesting part might be that there is an internal front- and backend separation [based on ZeroMQ] which helps me to create workers which do the actual conversion.
South Korea - military dictatorship until the late 80s

Taiwan - one party state + martial law from 1949 - 1987.

Singapore - one party has held power for over 40 years.

These three countries have transformed themselves into advanced high-income economies. My expectation is that China will follow the same path as its neighbours - authoritarian government + restrictions on personal freedom during the rapid industrialisation phase, then eventually a transition to a functioning democracy once urbanisation is mostly complete. If China can attain the same GDP per capita as the Asian Tigers, then it will easily be larger than the US economy.
Effectively maintaing state in AngularJS applications
"If you start a company, only do so if you have an idea you’re in love with. If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company (although there are many who disagree with me)."

I'm one of those that disagree with this.

Entrepreneurship is a long-term "profession" all of its own. If you plan to be an entrepreneur, you need to treat it as such. You need to work in it by e.g. building companies, you need to fail it in a few times before you succeed, etc.

Most importantly, unlike most Software Developers, you need to realize the goal of an entrepreneur is to make money. You shouldn't be starting a company because you have a great idea, or because you feel like starting a company, but rather, because you want to make money and have identified that the path to make it is to be an entrepreneur and start this particular company. This affects both which companies you do start and which you don't.

This is not to say I necessarily think starting a company at 19 is the right thing to do. My advice to ambitious 19 year olds who want to be entrepreneurs would be to find a job as a personal assistant to a CEO of a small company in the field they want to work in, and learn the ropes from her.

NOTE: I give a very "entrepreneur==trying to get rich" perspective here, which I believe is sorely lacking in most young Software Developers. Some people start startups for other reasons entirely, which is of course great and absolutely your choice.
Rhinehart is not a fan of farms, which he refers to as “very inefficient factories.” He believes that farming should become more industrialized, not less. “It’s really the labor that gets me”

This seems a little ignorant to me. Farms (at least in Australia) are amazingly industrialized. I visited my cousin's dairy farm recently and one person was working at milking dozens of cows at a time.

I walked away with the image that modern farmers are technical early adopters, looking at ways technology can improve their return on investment.
Knowing that the price of tall buildings typically grows faster than linear we chose the law firm that occupied multiple floors of the tallest building.
> Remember that there will be lots of other opportunities to start companies, and that startups are a 6-10 year commitment—wait for the right one

I've heard conflicting advice on this topic.

I'm currently of the opinion that you should fail fast. Does it really take six to ten years to determine if your startup failed?

From my understanding if you've survived to year 6 and you're not delusional about your potential as a company, then you've already made it.
A millions times, yes! I'm so mad every time I heard that the people who voted "Liberal" thought they'd fix, not jeopardise the NBN.

Please help us, Google!
I agree. Building an OS or associated platform/cloud software at MS requires some clever brains/engineering. That will be more rewarding from an experience point than building another link sharing web app / a regurgitated clone.
While I personally haven't used TypeScript, I can say this - worry not, about its roots. The whole code's open sourced on Codeplex, and Microsoft's commitments to open source are growing. Plus, it was personally overseen by Anders Heiljsberg - the guy's a freaking genius when it comes to language design. The only thing I have against TypeScript is the syntax - personally, I prefer CoffeeScript, due to its Ruby-esque syntax, but that's just me. So if TypeScript's being favored by peeps at your company, go for it!
Mos def is in there
Maybe I cannot see why this is so cool.. being a foreigner now living in Silicon Valley, having grown up in both Europe and Australia.. education is pivotal to getting anywhere in life.

I hate the common "get rich quick advise" to ambitious 19 year olds by "dropping out of school" to "join a fast paced start-up" for measly equity and few dimes to live on. Better advice to just buy a lottery ticket, cross ya fingers and pray.

If you want to "change the world" you need to 1st understand the world. But before one does one must have discipline and some core skills. That's what colleague teaches. Discipline and core skills + may introduce you to your future cofounder. Then go and learn from the world by working at many many places so you can understand the world and it's problems. Then change the world.

Maybe then we will have far better start ups that are actually building a business and changing the world than regurgitating (cloning) other businesses.
i would also like to know this
> HN disallowed my comment because I'm New-ish

We blocked new accounts from commenting in that thread because trolls were beginning to descend upon it, and they often create new accounts to ply their trollish ways.

Sorry you got locked out in the process. We don't like turning that switch on precisely because legit new users do show up to comment.
Food was such a large burden.
> de facto, people don't understand URL's

Here is evidence that shows a lot of "average users" do have some understanding of what URLs are, and even if not the technical details, then at least the concept (which is definitely more important than the details):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729
A couple of days spent trying to use WiX to build something that bootstraps .Net, VSTO and works on all windows platforms will make Java packaging look like bliss.

To be honest if you respect the deployment conventions in java (i.e. think about them whilst building your product rather than retrospectively apply them) it's pretty easy.
I think Soylent is great idea.

It doesn't have to be either/or and certainly the end of food. I love to cook and take a lot of care about what I eat. This probably is never going to change. But on occasion I would love to be able to slurp down a meal and not have to worry about it. I wouldn't consider living on something like this though and I don't know why anyone else would either.
Many people eat nothing but unhealthy crap for years and still stay relatively healthy. Human body is really good at metabolising even a limited variety of food into many different chemicals it needs. Well-balanced diet hasn't really been a thing in human history until recently. Mix of nutrients designed to our best knowledge can't be any worse than eating pizza/fries/burgers/soda 24/7.
Blink shows 110,000 videos in first week of launching
This is part of the plot of "Soylent Green".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_green
These are what I call "Get me some Press" companies from a VC / YC perspective. Will make the cover of WSJ ... get a ton of attention to the company and investors and eventually be dead in 3-4 years.
simplenote + notational velocity
I totally agree with this sentiment (love cooking), but I still see the usefulness of Soylent. Many people just aren't very into food, and would benefit from having an (occasional) simple and healthy alternative. Of college friends I've talked to, many have said they might try this for a few meals a week when "real food" is too inconvenient.

From a nutritional perspective, $3 is pretty decent for a balanced meal. Much healthier than fast-food at that price. Obviously you can cook real food on $3 a meal, but some people can't always plan for that.
The only path to retirement I can see is to work in an developed country (or relatively more developed than the country of origin), save like crazy and go back the country of origin/a cheaper country (in case your country of origin is already developed), when the sun no longer shines or the target cut-off date arrives, whichever is earlier.
I love this idea not because I like to replace my meals with this, but the fact that it could improve world hunger problem in a big way. Couldn't it?
It's like saying sex toys will eventually replace having sex because why waste time dating, courting and then having sex :) when you could just use a toy + redtube and get it over with in 10 minutes.
Which no one uses, given its ActiveX feeling.
I find it annoying that whenever Soylent is discussed, people always take such an extreme view of it. Why do so many people frame the discussion with "you will replace all meals with it".

It's similar to stories about electric cars. Someone will always comment about how electric cars won't work for people who have to drive 500 km non stop on a daily basis, therefore they are doomed to failure.
I love eating. But there's two problems: I love eating too much, and I don't really enjoy cooking.

I'd love to add something like Soylent to my "arsenal" to make it easier to skip cooking now and again and make calorie control easier. I manage to keep my weight by regularly counting calories, but it's incredibly tedious and easy to slip up with.

I'd rather focus my enjoyment on a smaller set of high quality meals a week.
I think a helpful parallel for this is alcohol consumption. I'm a huge cocktail nerd: I love tinkering with them and admiring them, finding complexity and nuance in slight variances in recipes and ingredients, admiring the deep levels of possibility in preparing a great drink. If anything, the drunkenness is a distraction from the mixology.

And at the same time, there are people who drink only when they want to get drunk -- or who abstain altogether, not liking the bite of alcohol or the consequence it conjures. And that's totally normal.

I think it's more likely than not that at some point in the future, eating food will be the same way -- there will be a pronounced spectrum of interest once it's decoupled from the need for subsistence.
IPython has %edit and %run "magics" (and probably some others that I don't know about) that be used for editor-based workflow. There are also some plugins for Vim and Emacs, but I don't have experience with those.
You're most welcome. And thank you for the thanks -- it wasn't entirely given that anyone would read them and enjoy them...

[edit: unless you're profile page is meant to be a riddle/tease, I think you might want to put some actual contact info in there... Just, saying (no, I don't have a start-up for you (yet anyway) :-) ]
This is definitely true, look at the rise of John Deere's GreenStar - GPS controlled tractors and implements which dramatically improve yields. Farmers are like hackers in many ways.
Would you consider internet porn a reasonable comparison to Soylent, as a low-effort alternative to sex for some people?
I can recommend jekyll.
Re intutition, there are several statistically observable anomalies in human decision-making.

http://www.investopedia.com/university/behavioral_finance/

(note the article is in several sections)
And about its usage being lower than that of CoffeeScript - I'm afraid I can't say much about that, but again - it just hasn't caught on yet. My startup was one of the first to use Docker in production when it first came out a year ago, and now, Docker's the biggest thing ever. So yeah..
AFAIK, J.A.R.V.I.S. was modeled after a butler. As a counterexample for smarter-than-its-owner AI you have Jane from Ender's Game series.
We aim to make it an explicit goal, rather than implicit. Wherein other projects this is a "would be nice", in this project it's an absolute necessity for the project's security and therefore success.
Fast Java Offline Route Planner ported to the Browser via TeaVM
I'm addressing what seems to be a common interpretation, not an explicit claim.
Shhh... don't tell HN.
Google Fiber – The Future Isn’t Incremental
I think we can open more development roadmap like localization to the community.
Everybody has a story to tell, well i'm starting mine.
So let's just say that this is my 2nd year at UCSC and will be my last quarter.

It's unfortunate that I'll be dropping out of school, not because i'm an idiot, but because I don't think that a degree is a good return on investment at the moment. I feel that the 2 years I have left in school could be better reinvested.

I've spent a lot of time meeting new people and acquiring new resources that will help me in the long run.

Like many entrepreneurs, I'm ambitious and aiming for a fortune aha.

I love business and i'm reaching out to other entrepreneurs that have something going or plan to start something!! I'm up for adoption so adopt me! aha

dchau2401@gmail.com
skype: Daviet916
I have been using google keep for a bit and it seems to just work for me, but its just for simple notes really.
Azarius, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Azarius is looking for a backend PHP hacker / Linux nerd to help us develop our custom shopping software.

You'll be working with PHP, MySQL, Linux, Vagrant, Ansible, etc.

Azarius is an online smartshop based in Amsterdam with several online shops.

You can contact us at info@azarius.net
I dump stuff in one big TextEdit/Notepad file that sits on my desktop. It is really easy to arrange stuff in it, take notes for meetings, etc. TextEdit/Notepad loads really really fast. I can move stuff out of it easily (say contact information into my phone) and every once in a while I clean it up.

I've tried so many other things but a single text file sitting on my desktop just seems to work really well.
I've recently (this year) taken to writing more blog posts[1]. It helps me make sure that what I'm writing will be readable by me X years from now and also could help other people. For more private thoughts or thoughts I haven't developed into posts yet I use text files and Dropbox or Evernote.

[1]: http://www.christopherbiscardi.com/
Actually, it's now over 200,000 a few days later. Turns out, Tinder + Vine + Snapchat is a pretty viral idea.
They all suck from experience in vastly different ways. I'd do one of the following:

1. Use webfaction's shared email service at http://webfaction.com and stick to IMAP. This is an old fashioned shared hosting system.

2. Use digital ocean or linode and build your own mail server.

I do #2 and have four domains and am happy with it. I don't have contact and calendar sync - that's the only problem but this doesn't really bother me. There are hundreds of open source CalDAV and CardDAV solutions available though for all platforms.

With these solutions you are free from the chains of a single vendor as they are easy to move and won't have to worry about getting shafted by Google/Microsoft etc. Three of the four domains I host are refugees from the recent live domains being shut down fiasco.

Or you could pay for Google apps and cross your fingers every day that they don't deprecate something you need.
Watch the Demolition Man "sex scene": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/
>This is why we can't have nice things

More like this is why we can't have nice promises. Promises, on their own, are useless. Why should you get the PR boost from an openness promise if you don't actually end up fulfilling it? This is pretty much like false advertising, where you promise some aspects of a product and end up delivering something different. No matter your excuse, this is wrong and unfair to competitors.

But business is business and companies still end up making those weak promises to grab some more market share.