skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not if you do it yourself. If you buy it yes.
People in developing nations can eat for an entire week or more on $3. Soylent's got a long way to go before it's anything more than an overpriced meal replacement shake.

It's not even a disruptive product--there have been similar meal replacement shakes available at Whole Foods for many years now, at similarly outrageous prices. Soylent's innovation is its marketing--especially in identifying and chasing its target market.
Step 2: Babymakin'

Step 3: Profit*

* This is Coca-Cola so, lets be honest; this step has happened many times already
An 1984 wasn't really an accurate depiction of the future to start with:

http://www.thecitrusreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Pa...
> Are we really supposed to just take soylent as a healthy alternative for sustenance so we can continue to work? Just buy a juicer and keep it natural then. But really, take the break and eat a meal with a human being. You've got one life. Live it.

I didn't see any stipulations on the soylent website requiring you to avoid socializing and stay chained to your desk while drinking it. Maybe I missed some small print?
Ha! I did have an outage because route announcements and data plane were on the same host a few years back. Having a separate health check service & route server is a trade off of complexity vs control. I could see the argument when you only have a couple hosts total. With dozens of endpoints in a fleet its quite nice to tolerate more wonky grey failures.

Unfortunately I dont know of any existing public lib/application/framework that does this type of layer 2/3/4 load balancing for fleets of endpoints. The vrrp/carp/keepalive/heartbeat crew seem focussed on master/slave failover which is totally uninteresting to me.
Does that mean the evening meal I eat with my family every night isn't enough to make me human? There are literally 0 other people in the house when I grab breakfast on the way out the door to work. Health-wise, I'd rather get extra sleep than spend the time eating, so I take something I can eat in my car. Do I have to atone for not "taking a break" by sleeping 20 minutes less in the morning? Ridiculous.
No way. I can scrape by on ramen, potato chips, soda, hot dogs, orange juice concentrate, cereal and milk, and come out ahead (YMMV).

GNC quality protein shakes be damned. This stuff has to hit the 25 cent mark, per glass, to qualify for it's target market: the unwed and unloved who have no one to cook them decent meals while toiling away at shit jobs.
seriously, Soylent could really market itself as the Subway replacement. If you find yourself eating Subway, you probably give somewhat of a damn about eating healthy, but are pressed for time.
Ensure is cheaper, but it's not a full-fledged meal replacement product. It's intended to be a supplemental product to an otherwise normal diet.
If you get a juicer and juice up greens, and other vegetables you have a powerful concoction loaded with nutrients. You feel a buzz from the rush of nutrients.
It's interesting how something like the opposite ended up happening. Microprocessors became so cheap that they're used in almost everything. In theory, your keyboard and monitor can do general work, if you update their firmware to tell them what to do. Even my (electric) toothbrush contains a microprocessor.
Ensure does provide an option, but it's relatively expensive, lacking the full range of nutrients found in Soylent, and pretty high in sugar (though I think they have just reduced sugar slightly).
Someone has to fork openTruecrypt to Go-ot before that, too. (and merge those to LibreTruecrypt...)
There's also this thing that people are accustomed to eating 3 times a day, on schedule. And if you miss a scheduled meal, bad things happen to your blood sugar. But is this just an artifact of our current abundance? If you look at nature, many carnivores may go several days or more without a meal. Is this also the natural state for humans, and we are just spoiled? Or are humans really in need of getting nutrition every 4 - 6 hours?
Curious, how do they know it's executable?
Tim Cook explains the motivation behind Beats acquisition
Most of the time, yes. I actually enjoy cooking too. Cooking is also a social activity.
And what when, suddenly, vim appears and they have no idea of why or how to close it?
No not at all. But I don't see eating as a problem that needs a solution. I didn't mean for my comment to mean that soylent is anti social.
Ugh, I'll take the crab juice.
The source is not just very readable, we make it publicly available for review. Here are some links:
- AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/files/browse/254748...
- Chrome: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/

We are most definitely not influenced by third parties, if anything, companies now contact us directly to provide their registration information for monitoring by Ghostery. Additionally, we keep the database changes public here: https://www.ghostery.com/en/database/changelog
As much as I like to shake my cane at those confounded kids and their self-driving automobiles, at least they can claim their revolutionary world-saving product would actually be revolutionary.
Prices change. Economies of scale.

Also if they don't have access to clean water they have bigger problems than access to food.
Speaking of the tech bubble, how come no one has mentioned products like this [0] which have been around for decades?

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Carnation-Breakfast-Essentials-Chocola...
Is Soylent even proven or has any indication to provide sufficient nutrition and energy for extreme circumstances? Almost everyone I see drinking Soylent are individuals who in all likelihood sit in front of a computer hours at a time.
...can only be opened by another bottle"

Or the cheap plastic gadgets coming to eBay in 10..9..
> some clothes are good for thinking and coding while others are good for meetings and customer engagement

It's all about credibility indicators, and they go both ways.

A founder friend relates a story about the day he gave in and started wearing suits. He has a tech background and is generally averse to display, but noticed that wearing a suit was correlated with shorter meetings. On the flip side, when he dressed casually, there was a longer proving period at the beginning of every meeting where he had to establish credibility in spite appearances / signalling. So, he started bringing a suit along everywhere as a "make meetings shorter" hack.

Pretty sure he plain old enjoys wearing suits at this point though.
Does the author not understand that significant numbers of people already don't often get the opportunity to eat food that could be described as enjoyable? He seems to dismiss the idea without justification.

Given the choice between unhealthy almost-but-not-quite zero-variety food and healthy actually zero-variety food, the latter strikes me as the better option - and if you don't happen to live near a source of good food (no bakeries, butchers, delis, fresh fruit vendors, etc . . .), being low on time or money means making that choice (or not having one to make).

Speaking for myself, the cheap and ultra-quick food I usually ate during my years at school was just the same thing over and over - it didn't taste very good to begin with and certainly didn't improve with time. I couldn't fix something myself, or wait for someone else to fix something, or spend time socializing (that's what weekends were for!), or go somewhere else. I can say that I honestly would have preferred something like Soylent on grounds of both convenience and taste.
It looks like the top part is a seal that opens to expose the normal cap. You need a second bottle to remove the barrier, and then it opens like a normal coke bottle. I assume it just takes too much torque to twist by hand, but it works fine with the added girth of the second bottle.
What other meal replacement products? There are plenty of supplements but are there other products that claim to give you 100% of your necessary nutrition with 3 daily servings?
It could be a bad sign, or it could speak to priorities, and your priorities are not their priorities it seems. Personally, I accept all pull requests that are solid, written to my standards, fix or extend a feature that is a priority, are accompanied with unit tests, and do not impact or impinge on another feature or future feature. I do not however accept all pull requests. Part of this is that if there is no demand and it's a single individuals edge case, then I'll very heavily scrutinize the patch. If I don't agree, don't understand exactly what every line is doing, or do not feel it will be used by a significant portion of the user base then I won't pull it. Because moving forward, I will have to maintain it, and that isn't free. And if people don't like that, they can fork it.
https://merchantfinancing.americanexpress.com/merchantfinanc...
What do you think the 99th percentile of SAT scores look like race-wise?

Before decrying lack of diversity in field X, demonstrate presence of one in the pool of qualified candidates.
Do people really copy snippets they found on a website into their code? I use examples on the web to further my understanding of a technical issue but would never cut and paste blocks of code. Aside from the copyright uncertainty, I simply wouldn't trust a piece of random code found on the web enough to pull it into my own.

That said, I do agree that if you've make choices in your code based on information that you found online, its good to include a reference to the source in a comment.
Yes, but would the growth in new businesses suffice to absorb the deluge of educated labor? I strongly suspect that it would not, which would make the proposition a big win for those looking to purchase labor and a huge loss for those looking to sell labor.
Unless Soylent's changed its mind about using organic ingredients, it's costs will increase as it scales. Organic foodstuffs are subject to significant demand right now and prices have been going up consistently for years. As a niche player Soylent simply will not have the leverage to negotiate favorable prices in sufficient quantities.
Never said you weren't human or that champions of soylent aren't human. Simply that eating doesn't seem like a problem that needs a solution to me. I imagine soylent being used when you are too busy to eat. The problem is that you are too busy, not the eating part.
No I think you missed the point, or at least, the rest of the article where he goes on to state what you just offered up as a defense, and then disagree with it.

> It’s true that people sometimes eat meals that are mainly for sustenance (cheap frozen dinners, dried ramen, corn dogs) and other times we’re looking mostly for pleasure (72-hour short ribs). But I suspect that most of the time, for most meals, we want both sustenance and pleasure.

There you go. By the way, there are plenty of "third choices" as you state it, and have been for years. Soylent is nothing new, just YC startup noise.
I did quite a bit of APL programming when I was younger.

When describing APL, people talk about the strange symbols, the mathematics, etc... but I have never seen anyone describe something I only realized after some time: APL makes you approach problems quite differently, when you are familiar with it.

I stopped thinking in 'steps' applied to the individual data points, but rather I solved the problem in my head (and writing the line along the way) by aggregating the data points into larger data objects, and then letting the data objects expand in a many-dimension universe, always larger and larger... and then I simply looked at the resulting mega-thing from a different angle, and started crushing it back along different dimensions until I finally got my answer (and my line completed). The resulting one-liner was very hard to read ... but gave me the correct result.

Inflation, Change of view-point, Big Crush. That is the core of APL.

Yeah I know... sounds crazy. But that was how APL programming felt to me, and I bet I am not alone. No other language I worked with ever triggered in me that kind of mental problem-solving process.
I don't think it can get any cheaper than any practical cheap-food alternatives. It's using basically the same things as source material, often with much more processing done to them to get them into this powdered form. Less work (economically) goes into making Kraft Dinner than Soylent could ever hope to get to, I would think.

Never mind stuff like soy and rice, which are probably (well, obviously in soy's case) the basic inputs that end up in soylent, and already have massive economies of scale working in their favour.
There is a false all-or-nothing mentality being forced on Soylent. Part of this is Soylent's original marketing as a "food replacement". Part is their present refusal to make their product taste better. But part is our cultural unfamiliarity with separating utility from luxury eating.

I'm a foodie. I delight in trying new dishes, restaurants and cuisines. I'm also a marked extrovert. I constantly seek out social settings and experiences. Combined with my ineptitude at cooking and address in Manhattan, we have why I eat one to three meals out a day. I manage the healthfulness of my diet with simple rules. Salads for lunch, finish all the greens on your plate before moving to other things, defaulting to seafood over red meat, etc.

But this comes at a cost, both in dollars and in time. Many times, a meal will go half eaten, because I have to rush out for a call. Other times, dinner gets pushed out so late that the only options aren't healthy. Yes, I could schedule meals into the day, but sometimes I prefer doing other things. And it's not just work! I feel starved during film festivals, too, between full schedules and my refusal to feed on solely popcorn and tapas for two weeks.

I don't think too many people will ever seriously replace a majority of their meals with something like Soylent. But even shifting my weekday lunches and late-night snacks from salads, paninis and starving to something cheap, healthy, and available would be welcome. A prerequisite to this would be Soylent not tasting like pancake batter. Utility doesn't have to be unpleasant. But there is a place for this amongst people who love food, love people, and aren't necessarily workaholics.
The terminology may be different, but "shell shock"[1] was well known back as early as World War One.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock
I submitted a pull request to fix a dead link in the angularJS docs: I was told to fill a 20-text field form for the request to get processed. I was just trying to help, guys.
There are literally millions upon millions of people who spend at least one meal a day just consuming food and not socializing. If you've ever worked in a traditional office environment people regularly take lunch at their desk if they are too busy to socialize. It's not hard to understand the appeal of Soylent if you step just slightly outside your own personal experience.
Who says you can't take a break just because you don't have to eat? If an employer wants to take your breaks away by making you drink soylent instead, that's just an example of how terrible employers can be, not how awesome food is.

I enjoy eating food, but having the option to speed up my meal by a large factor and bond with friends over a different activity is pretty much entirely positive.
This 1 Simple Rule Gives You Superpowers
I replied to you on economies of scale elsewhere. I don't see how they could ever be in favour of soylent vs. soy or rice.

And yes, they do have bigger problems. And yet access to food is still one of their problems. And giving them food that needs water added doesn't help them.
Sydney Finds a Job, illustrated children’s book released by JLB Creatives
You know what literally has more nutrients than that? Soylent.
I have a gastrointestinal condition and had to eat exactly that for a while. The main problem is the taste is not so good, it has no texture, it's boring and there is no variety. It doesn't feel like eating. After a month of drinking that stuff for meals I almost wanted to break down and cry.
And many stories from even ancient times. War is hell.
Yeah this. Hype about an instant food product. Finally!
I have to imagine that Soylent's long term vision is to control the entire supply chain.
> But what does XP being EOL'd have to do with anything?

Every version of Windows after XP has a native disk encryption utility. TrueCrypt was built to bring full disk encryption to Windows, which didn't exist at the time - this is the developers way of saying "you don't need us anymore, Windows now does what we did"
"Everything is a file" is the Unix moto. But it does not do justice to that phrase. Unix has several things that aren't files (sockets are the most annoying), and a few files that are so special that they could as well have another name (like pid files).

Plan9 is an evolution of Unix that turn more things into files. Sockets, for example, are.
Sergey Brin Interview Onstage at Code Conference
I don't know how others do it, but I would rank it in this order:

Personal network - recruiters - apply directly

You (and others) are welcome to contest this order, as I am typing it in a bit of a rush.
My Response to the Accusation that Nerds are Misogynistic
Garden of Life and Shakeology are the two big ones I remember off the top of my head. There are more. Google is your friend. (https://www.google.com/search?q=vegan+meal+replacement+shake)
This is all well and good, but sometimes people dressed like jackasses actually are jackasses.
"Apple hates committing to something unless it's absolutely perfect" Like Newsstand, Game Center and Passbook? This is the biggest misconception about Apple. While this is very much the case for their hardware products like iPhone, iPad, Mac pro and Macbook, it is not the case with software or services.
I agree with StavrosK, from the view it seems that the top seal is just another barrier. Once you open that, the normal cap is exposed and you can open it up like any normal coke bottle.

Seems like an excellent conversation starter.
Couldn't have said this better.
I think the bigger point is that game studios check in assets. And you don't want the complete history of game assets over 2 years of development and iteration on your machine. And git is generally not optimized for huge binary files.
Global population of obese and overweight tops 2.1 billion
Interesting github project:

https://github.com/bwalex/tc-play
We, like the other primates, aren't carnivores. Herbivores have to spend tremendous amounts of time grazing. We omnivores land somewhere in the middle.
I'll buy that argument. Drink soylent horse around.

Still, I don't see how this is different than a bag of nuts and some veggies... Maybe cheaper and easier, but I'd rather put veggies in my body over powdered supplements...
I do work in a traditional office environment. The problem is being too busy, not eating. Eating is not a problem that needs to be solved. Being too busy is the problem that needs to be solved.
It seems like an excellent marketing idea. It might be playing on the fears and insecurities of freshmen, but all in all I think it's a great idea that; if it works like shown in the ad, has great potential.

To me, it seems like a good hack to the normal marketing culture. A hack if you will...
In order to change the demographics, you have to hire more of one group and less of another.

Somebody must be turned away based on race/gender to accomplish this.
Hello fellow youths! Care to enjoy a refreshing beverage? Let's social!
I haven't tried Beats Music (I am in Cambodia at the moment so no soup for me), but why is it better than Rdio and Spotify?
Yes, there are. My daughter required a nasal feeding tube for about a year and subsisted primarily on Pediasure. Plenty of sick adults receive nutrition in a similar manner.
Google’s diversity record shows women and minorities left behind
Does this mean we should empose[sic] quotas to get Blacks out of the NFL and replace them with Whites

No to the quotas.

But yes, race in the NFL (and in many sports) is an issue that should be addressed. The old problem of the low proportion of black quarterbacks is slowly being addressed, and the Rooney Rule[1] has had some success with the underrepresentation of black coaches.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
> The H1Bs aren't being hired by A-list companies.

H1B is a type of visa, it cannot be hired.

> They're getting hired by old, slow, cheap, mostly non-tech corporations who won't compete on either quality of work or wages.

Foreigner = Evil. On the other hand, you get an H1B if you are shown to be more qualified than u.s. citizens who applied to the job. If anything, it's a great way to bring in skilled laborers and keep them in check (since, if you get fired, you get deported too).
I would actually LOVE to see that challenged. It would be interesting reading and provide some baseline for how good this stuff is supposed to be.
Well said. The funny thing is, switching from svn to git was what it felt like to switch from from other SCMs to svn.

I think git is going to prove to be one of those pieces of software that is just transcendent.
A good idea if you want to integrate your platform into an existing business workflow that uses PS, such as with a publisher. My team considered this on an enterprise mobile platform. We actually had parsers for InDesign and PS files that sliced the image assets and an XML-based UI language to translate what we could. This would be much much simpler and more straight forward.

Do you have plans to support other mobile platforms?
It is said, perhaps apocryphally, that the head of the trading desk at Mizuho, when asked whether he fired the woman who physically keyed in an order for 600k shares at 1 yen rather than an order for 1 share at 600k yen ($300 million or so in losses), said "Why would I do that, after spending $300 million to make her the least likely person in Japan to typo trade instructions."
They haven't updated it for years.

I'd hardly call the behavior "juvenile" nor would i call it "devaluating". They've simply abandoned it and are offering alternatives.
You'll note that no one has suggested that Google adopt quotas, so your whole "does this mean" thing has no basis at all.
I'm going to be sorry the day they outlaw manually driving a car.
Sorry, what? You think Soylent wants to buy a bunch of farms?
After the years of silence and the previously infrequent updates, I don't consider it farfetched at all.
Not true for me. I did two majors and changed to another minor in a proper UK university not those polyversities;)
I agree, and the 30 day trial isn't enough. It would be side projects, so I may get to hack on it for a day and maybe a night or two. I can write Obj-C, and Java, they just aren't as intuitive or enjoyable to me. And lets face it, $200 is just too much to spend when RubyMotion may not exist for version 4, and then I have an entire application that needs to be ported into Obj-C and Java... And a promise of open sourcing it doesn't help, because there may be no maintainers. IronRuby, now that C# has dynamics, would be awesome. But it hasn't been updated in 3 years. I'd even drop $100 sight unseen. But $200... Noooope.
A. Cheap.
B. Healthy.
C. Pleasurable.
D. Fast/Easy

Pick three.

ABC = Homecooked meals, ACD = fast food, BCD = eating out, ABD = Soylent. Not complicated. Soylent provides a specific set of design tradeoffs that suit certain situations better than the alternatives.
> My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions.

If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce, whether or not they are at fault for the lack of a sufficiently diverse qualified applicant pool, it is their responsibility to fix it.
That's why sometimes wearing a suit and tie to a customer meeting to do technical presentation loses creditability.