skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting to compare this article to the earlier one on Turing.

For the Turing article, the gist was that Gordon Brown forgave the harsh and inhumane treatment of Turing that happened a long time ago. Nobody around today was directly involved and this -- like it or not - is more symbolism than substance.

For this article, the gist is that fat people are fat because of genetics. There are lots of fat people around today. Billions are spent on trying to make fat people thin, and millions die from the results of being fat. It's a current and immanent threat to our fellow citizens.

For the Turing article, most of the comments were along the lines of "way to go!" and "it's about time!" -- very encouraging that something was being done.

For the fatso article, most of the comments (so far) are along the lines of "Those damn fat people, they should just stop eating so much!" -- very discouraging that anything besides blaming behavior (which amounts to blaming the fat person) amounted to much. I believe one commenter said it was "just giving fat people an excuse to stay fat" (it was subsequently deleted)

I'm sure you guys will tell me that my comparison is all wrong, but I find some interesting parallels nonetheless.
> However, one could argue that almost all programmers will be women in the far future.

I find that hard to believe.

> And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.

I'm all for more balance but to either relegate women to teaching because 'that mostly interests women' (for which I have no evidence, my classes were pretty much 60/40 men/women, with the men predominant in the maths/physics/chemistry department, but that was a while ago) or to assume that men are not interested in it (they are), whichever way I slice it I can't make much sense of it.

Would you mind explaining ?
You say that as if he's doing it habitually. So far as I can tell from the HN submissions list, he's done it exactly once to date. (And, on one other occasion, submitted a PDF link directly -- which of course HN adds a scribd link to in case, er, someone feels that they haven't visited scribd often enough lately. At least I assume that's why people use scribd links; I can't think of any other reason.)
Twitter's new TOS wants to say hello
What if the AI were like a human child in intelligence? In that case, it would not be capable of teaching/programming at a high level of sophistication.
>> "Crockford is, by nature, a simplifier and a tidier. He invented JSON, the data interchange format widely used in Ajax applications"

Does anyone else find it irritating to read "He invented JSON", which isn't true at all? He popularized and called out JSON which already existed.
Except that Amazon still shows it as pre-order (10:09 AM EST).
Even simpler: when caloric intake is below energy output, the result is weight loss. When caloric intake exceeds energy output, the result is weight gain.
There's very little easier than selling people on the idea that their problems are not of their doing, but rather come from environmental factors beyond their control. When you're arguing that angle, you don't need things like science or facts.
Schopenhauer would agree with you. He says that women are so good with children because they are so childlike themselves.
I read the 'snowball' book about Buffet, and it seemed to me like the advantage Graham had was that they went over information in a way that would only take a few minutes with a computer, but that wasn't done so systematically at the time, by most people. So, 'fundamentals', yes, but fundamentals driven by data. In this day and age, when everyone can comb out the same stocks in a matter of minutes, does that approach work?
Men (and women) become professors to do research -- not to teach. In fact, top research universities try to minimize the undergraduate teaching that professors have to do.
2009 fund raising cheat sheet
"If you eat more energy than you use you may not gain weight"

The normal body will convert excessive energy to fat, so if you intake more energy than you use you will gain fat. Care to explain your case?

"if you eat less energy than you use you may lose weight but gain fat at the expense of muscle and other tissues"

I didn't claim a person eating less will only lose fat.
Yeah, but... smooth green antialiased text on a crisp LCD display? Shit's WEAK. It's like listening to Britney Spears cover "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". The soul is gone. I know you did the best you could with what you had, but I'm yearning for a CSS stylesheet option that changes the text into an 8x10 chunky pixely aliased monospaced font, rendered in fuzzy green phosphor dots that don't turn black immediately when the text is scrolled but rather fade to ghostly lingering afterimages.

As I've mentioned a couple times before, I always use chunky pixely fonts to code in, though the wheat-on-dark-slate-gray I used for my first Red Hat install gives me t3h warm fuzzies. It just feels namby-pamby typing your code in Lucida Console.
CPI doesn't categorically understate inflation, sometimes it shoots high, sometimes low. This is understandable, as turning something as complicated as inflation over all the goods and services bough in a country into a single number cannot exactly be simple.

Lately, the index has arguably been understating inflation a little because the cost of living is going down, which pulls the index on the whole down even if the price of most of the essentials on it are going up.

Then again, this can simply be considered wad -- cost of living is a very major household expense, even if most people who already own a house don't see the cost reductions on their balance sheet.
You should probably stop with the sweeping sexist generalizations now.

(Parent comment originally said just 'men'. Since been edited to include women :/ )
Completely awesome. Good work! I signed the petition (of course) and encouraged others to do so, but I have to admit that I am delighted that it actually happened.
Ask HN: Three years to startup
I'm an aspiring startup founder and am looking for advice on how to proceed.

Due to some other obligations, I have about three years until I can pursue a startup full time, at which point I'll be 27. Until then, it's nights and weekends for me. For the last year I've been getting caught up on web development and am now limited more by a lack of strategy than a lack of technical competence.

In an ideal world, in late 2012 I'd like to have a profitable, growing startup that puts me in a good position to apply to YC and the other seed stage start programs. I'd also like to be in a position where I'm not entirely dependent on getting accepted in order to be successful.

I'm in a bit of a good position to gamble since time is on my side. Am I better off working on a a project that takes 4-6 month to build and launch or one that takes 18-24 months? With the former, I can take more risks and can simply start over if it doesn't work out, but I feel like there might be more long term value in picking an ambitious, 1-2 year project. The downside, of course, is that I'm essentially going all-in on a single endeavor.

Additional details which may be relevant:

My business knowledge is slightly above knowing the differences between an LLC and an S Corp, but below having created one or knowing what to do with it if I did. I've been slowly becoming fluent in business lingo, but usually if I have a choice between hacking and reading about business structures I choose the former.

Also, I'm not good with system administration. Again, given a choice between learning a framework/building an app and learning about load balancing and things like that, I've chosen the former.

In summary, I have three years of nights and weekends to prepare to found a startup and want to maximize my chances of success. What's my gameplan?

PS: If you're in a similar boat and want to try building something together, let me know.
Well, even if you can, eating like garbage will probably catch up with you eventually.
Founders at Work is one of those books that I keep finding myself re-reading over and over. There is so much good stuff there.

For some reason, the description of this book just doesn't inspire me to read it. It's hard to articulate why that is, since it's in the same style as Founders, and it interviews a similar set of people.

Maybe it's just that I've heard enough from that generation of programmers. Maybe I've just heard enough from all programmers. Maybe, talking about programming is simply not interesting at all. I don't know.

Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest.
Amusing story.

My girlfriend has two hindu grandmothers. I've always wondered why she didn't just use their recipes to lose that 5lb she always complains about. Now I know.
This is in theory correct, but there's many factors which decides how much your body will uptake, store and burn. It is possible to eat less but gain weight. It is also possible to gain weight and loose fat. I don't know what this obsession with weight comes from as it's generally a very poor measurement of fitness.
It has now switched from "Pre-order" to "Add to Shopping Cart".

edit: And then they switched it back. Grrrr.
That's a pretty scary mental image: a caring woman teaches a tender childlike AI for its boring future job as an ERP system. Perhaps we should rethink the plan.
Perhaps 'discovered' or 'isolated' would be a better. It's the sort of thing that's unusual in computing but common in natural science. Something that's all around us, but we don't realise how to access it until someone comes along and componentises it for us. (The key quality of JSON for my perspective is that was a form that was immediately usable across several languages which already existed.)
Any chance you can throw out info on that chat server?
What about Lipodystrophy?
We should all be angry, because a culture of denying accountability is about to saddle us with the biggest paternalistic program of transfer payments ever. We're going to get to pay for Bubba's heart surgery because he couldn't control how many cheeseburgers he ate in one sitting.
The mission of a university - and of everybody in it, from the janitor to the director - is to further our collective knowledge.

That means that every professor, whether teaching, researching or both, irrespective of their gender is engaged in this. Some professors put the accent on research, others spend as much of their time teaching as they can, for most of them it is a mix.

I do not see any argument why men or women would be predisposed to go one way or the other.

My suspicion is that you have some bias that you should get rid of to see things more in perspective.

Maybe this is your personal experience (which is always a possibility) but the world is a very large place and very few generalizations hold if you have a large enough sample.

Yours will almost certainly not stand the test of being exposed to the world the way I see it.
While working as a software consultant for the federal government here in DC, I noticed something very strange ... consulting firms don't have any idea what Peer Review is. Actually, they don't even care, all they want to do is complete a project with as little money, and as fast as possible so they can move onto the next contract while billing the government millions.
The problem with that advice is that the reasons people eat unhealthy foods and fail to exercise often have nothing to do with willpower.

For example, I have a friend with a very limited sense of smell, so she doesn't really get any enjoyment from food unless it is relatively fatty.

I'm personally not overweight, but if I ever do start getting overweight I'll be in trouble because I've had some medical issues that make it difficult to get my RDI of exercise.

Also don't forget the vast majority of the population has extremely limited information about health. For example, only 6% of parents have even HEARD of the recommendation from the AAP that kids under two shouldn't watch any TV. Not that people should treat the AAP as the absolute source of truth, but if you don't even know what they're saying then clearly you aren't doing your job as a parent.

This isn't just because people are stupid. It's because our media is owned and supported by companies who make physical products. Because of this if Nintendo releases a new videogame system they'll sell millions the first day, and yet by age 18 over 80% of girls haven't gotten enough calcium to prevent osteoporosis. We have great systems for spreading the word about new physical products, at least if they're made by big companies, but our processes for spreading the word about new best practices are virtually non-existent.

By placing blame solely on the individual you're also failing to understand the last 60 years of social science research. The lesson of Milgram, Asch, and many others is that by and large the decisions we make are less than 50% the result of any intrinsic quality or character within ourselves, and are mostly the result of the environments we're surrounded by.
I think I'm beginning to see where your bias sits. It would appear that in your mind the people that take care of children are 'all women' and that therefore a 'young ai' will be dealt with exclusively by women until they are old enough to go into the real world.

May I ask you what your cultural background is ?
How to make Google App's email functional when Gmail is completely down: set alternative MX record.
Sweeping sexist generalization: women dominate schoolteaching more because they like children than because they like teaching.
I insist in the correct term theory, because it is often presented as a fact (especially in school books here in Europe).

I said 'silly' because basically it says: "less intelligent beings evolved into more intelligent beings". Now, this is simply impossible. If you want something less intelligent become more intelligent, you need someone from outside to bring the new intelligence.

It's very interesting that Darwin himself admitted that he faked some of his experiments, just to "make the whole theory work".

So, it's basically very simple: nobody can exclude a perfect Intelligence on the beginning of everything. Call it God, call it how you like, but denying it is not very intelligent...
Geothermal Projects May Cause Earthquakes
"[...] the author seems to be buying into the general idea that there is some bundle of Natural Property Rights that all humans are entitled to [...]"

It is impossible to express opinions about law without (at least implicitly) assuming some basis for discerning between good and bad law.

Whatever you assume will either look like Natural Rights or Unfounded Personal Opinion.
In South Africa, carrier pigeon faster than broadband
Pointing out that there are but 31 people in the study could be considered helpful, but a basic familiarity with qualitative studies of anything that isn't a drug informs us that small sample sizes are pretty standard.

Complaining about a small sample size screams of ignorance; there's nothing wrong with shameless extroversion, thespianism, or small sample sizes. If you want to point it out and be meaningful, comment on the sample size in relation to the effect size in a way that includes statistical power. Say something. Don't just echo things you've heard other people say.
Thats for uploading/downloading data, not running the tracker.
Different strokes for different folks, my man. The business-oriented people can read Founders, the technical-minded people can read can read Coders, and then the intersection of the two can read both!

I personally find the idea of this book to be fascinating and pre-ordered it a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah I feel similar. Programming isn't that hard :/

Building a successful startup, selling stuff, getting investment etc etc - They seem orders of magnitude harder than programming.
Sure:

twelve.truetech.com:6667

#otherpower

enjoy.

It tends to be a place people use to get answers about something specific and then we never see them again or they get 'stuck'.

Traffic is fairly low but there are always people lurking.
The comparison is wrong because the gays didn't want to be "cured". Fat people spend billions to "cure" themselves. If fat people were content to be fat, there wouldn't be so many people saying "well just don't eat so much!".
For elderly users increasing the font size is not much help. The problem is with focus. The lens hardens with age and nearby objects appear out of focus. So 12pt and 24pt type will both be out focus:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-ey...

"When the lens loses its pliability it also loses its ability to focus over a wide range of distances. A hardened lens becomes more fixed on distant objects and cannot focus as well on nearby objects or vice versa."
I don't have comments regarding the entire post, but I definitely have one regarding the size of the project: stick to something smaller that you can push out (at least in limited form) in your four-to-six-month timetable. If you choose something that will take you almost two years to launch but you can't commit full-time to it, then there will (most-likely) always be others with a similar idea who can work more hours or get their product out faster. Even if you didn't see competitors for a whole year, you'll still be stuck in part-time mode. On a two-year, part-time schedule, you won't be able to react at all to movement or changes in the market you decide to go into.

That's why I'd suggest sticking with something a bit smaller and a bit more manageable that can launch early and grow slowly over time, which is much better-suited to your schedule and existing commitments.
You will have to supply a build of the GCC compiler that supports blocks

That's been available for awhile: http://code.google.com/p/plblocks/
There are some positive aspects to Techcrunch: they generally do a good job of keeping tabs on a vast field, and Crunchbase is an impressive and useful effort.

But, their particular brand of "pretendo journalism" rubs a lot of people the wrong way when they publish news without doing basic fact checking, and they tend to publish a little too much gossip and rumor.

Take Business Week and mate it with the Enquirer, add some "web-2.0"ness, and you've got TechCrunch. I can't speak for anyone else, but I do not love their Enquirer bits.
True, but it sounds like TC has a pretty tight relationship with FB's PR team. If they got the request in the 24 minutes you can be sure they ignored it, or it would have ruined the whole joke.

I still can't believe the fake feature actually worked. That's a brilliant prank.
The normal body will convert excessive energy to fat, so if you intake more energy than you use you will gain fat. Care to explain your case?

IANA(Biologist), and I can't remember the details of what I was reading about it, but it's not like filling a bath and if you put too much in the rest goes through the overflow and into your fat cells. Leptin signals fat cells to store energy as fat, and if it doesn't do that then you wont get fatter.

Where else could it go? Maybe you take in more energy and become more active to use it up? Maybe it goes straight through you - is sensed and less is digested, or is taken into the blood stream, then filtered out again. Maybe some of it is used in rebuilding and repair that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

I don't, for instance, binge on 3500 calories extra of junk food in a day and put on 1lb of fat that same day (I don't think).
Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest.

Thank you. I thought I was the only one.

95% of the time I program. 5% I conduct business.

But for learning, the ratio is reversed. Whether it's hacker news, the articles I read on the web, or the books on my shelves, my interest is mainly in business stories, especially start-up success stories.

Not really sure why. Maybe because I think I have all the technology I need. If I need more, I'll find it and learn it. Always have, always will. It's nice to learn a new technique here and there, especially with data base and web technology, but that's rare.

The business success stories, OTOH, almost always fascinate me. I love Founders at Work and for some odd reason, Marcus Frind of plentyoffish is like a mythic hero to me: If a regular guy like him can do it, then so can the rest of us.
you are correct.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813116
It is possible to eat less but gain weight.

No. Unless you cut energy expenditure as well, the energy has
to come from somewhere. If you are consuming 1500 Kcal and using 2000 Kcal, you will loose weight. Thermodynamics is not out to get you.

It might be possible to eat less but gain fat, however.
Admin work is weird because when everything's working, no one says a peep. No, "hey, great job with that update last night which we were largely unaware of because it all happened seemlessly!". It's only when something goes wrong that anyone says anything.
My First Content Management Application
Motorola sees future in Google's Android OS
Do you have both a 4-6 month idea and a 1-2 year idea? If you do, pick the one you are most passionate about. Keep in mind that 3 years is long time, its likely that whatever time table you start out with will be completely warped by the time you could commit full time to it.
Grand Central Dispatch Now Open to All
So these commenters are being helpful?

I don't see where the motives of the people involved as the object of the story come into it. The point I was making was the motives of the people commenting right here on the article. We have two situations: one in the past where nothing can really be done and one in the present where we have this catastrophe. For the thing in the past, commenters are generally very happy and enthused that a symbolic step was taken. For the thing in the present, commenters are angry that fat people have brought this on themselves, and seem immune to any idea that there's anything involved except a morality play in which fat people are the guilty, ie, nothing should be done except shaming the people involved.

To put a fine point on it: people are very moral. Don't let anybody fool you. There are groups which are okay to trash and groups that are not. Distant, symbolic action is preferred over immediate threats. Modern righteousness generally consists of making yourself feel superior to other folks, whether it is tormentors of Turing or the fatso sitting in the cube next to you (and I speak as a fat person, for whatever that's worth)

Now I'm probably smoking crack, but that's my thesis, in case you missed it.
That's a really good point. I'd argue though that web journalists running their own site are also wearing the management hat and are more concerned with the bottom line than the journalist of old who had that bottom line abstracted form them through bureaucracy.

This is just as much a problem with the average consumer's attention span as the content producer's race to print. If this is their policy on stories and yet we still read them and comment on them, well then I guess we value the quick fix even though we complain about it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9itx5/why_progr...

Learning disability?
This is one big strawman argument. Copyright doesn't imply that simply creating Art entitles you to compensation. You can sit at home painting and copyrighting your Art all day long and never get a penny for it.

Not everyone will like a particular work of art. I don't think people who dislike a work should be obligated to pay for it.

Copyright doesn't do this! I don't like country music. The fact that it's copyrighted doesn't force me to buy it!

This article hurts my head.
Segway inventor takes aim at thirst with Slingshot