skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>Of course we do! Weigh yourself every week for months and months on end.

Weight fluctuates a lot in the short term, which means that it is a very unreliable measure of one's progress. Furthermore...

>>The entire point is to lose weight

No, the entire point is to lose fat, and retain lean body mass. A simple scale will not show you these details, and even the fancy fat-measuring scales are grossly inaccurate.

>>Your "eat this, not that" is basically just saying "avoid things that are very calorie dense, and as a result you will reduce your calorie intake".

Nope. I don't have a problem with calorie-dense foods, because they keep me full for a longer period of time. What I do have a problem with is sugars, starches and simple processed foods. You know, things that spike insulin levels and increase both fat gain in the short term and risk of diabetes in the long term. The fact that these often times appear in calorie-dense foods does not mean that calorie-density itself is the problem. That's why an "eat this, not that approach" is useful: it can shed light on these types of discrepancies, as opposed to hiding them behind the calorie layer of abstraction. And ironically, keeping a simple list of foods to eat and foods to avoid is a lot easier than obsessively counting calories day in day out.
Viewing a Video Illegal in the UK? A Twitter Discussion from David Allen Green
Reading is inherently "task-oriented" and "no-fuss setup". You're enjoying a story or learning something.

The equivalent of the problems in this article for reading would be trying to teach someone about the details of typesetting, ligatures, etc. or what sounds letters make, without applying it to reading real sentences.
Wall Street is noticing that they're losing talent and are slowly but surely responding. The mentality of 'tech as a cost center' is still prevalent but slowly fading as the older crew retire and the younger generation takes on more power. I've seen senior management in finance be fired for not supporting technology.

Bloated sell side firms are seeing how much money the leaner tech-oriented buy side shops are making and are taking note. Several large firms are hiring big names in tech, such as Morgan Stanley recently hiring Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++.

I think the main difference between Silicon Valley and Wall Street is that Wall Street is unapologetically and obsessively about nothing but profit whereas Silicon Valley companies tend to have more holistic and varying business goals.
There are plenty of 'non-programmers' that I have met that know how to write SQL and write small embedded programs for Microsoft Excel. Why did they know this? Because it what was accepted as a 'plus' (by whomever they worked for) to know how to do these things. (I imagine employees being empowered to do this cut down on the number of IT guys that the company would be forced to hire to do menial tasks others didn't want to/couldn't do.)

If these same people had the same expectations placed on them to know how to use emacs, vim, git, a terminal emulator, etc. to write scripts (or whatever) for what there job entailed, I firmly believe that they would have been able to do that just as well.

In their minds they would still not classify themselves as programmers (even though they would be programming). So is programming literacy actually down? Or is the perception of what programming literacy is, off?

Programming literacy would have to be geared towards personal empowerment rather than vocational training in a 'public education' scenario. Which is interesting because most programmers in the industry are simply people who came to enjoy the empowerment of programming (many times years before they ever had their first programming job). While other people (who don't enjoy that empowerment/activity as much) tend to not work in the industry (or even if they wanted too, they tend to not get hired).

This is what makes the world of vocational programming more a world of culture rather than strictly a world of able professionals (not to say that the people working in the industry aren't able). Come on, you don't honestly think that the Hollywood depiction of "hackers" is based on nothing do you?

The industrial gearing towards a 'programming culture' is also what keeps certain people away. Although I think a strictly 'neckbeard' culture (or however you want to define it) is slowly fading away over time.

All that being said, not everyone reads. And many people (to this day) have no desire to use that empowerment even if they are able (as in use the literacy they have to take the time to go out and learn/read about new/important things).
How Happy Herbivore Used Google Analytics to Acquire New Customers
Newmoticons. strange new emoticons. name them yourself
What about inflammation? What happens to my body when I eat 800 calories of pancakes, syrup and hash browns, and start to sweat, feel sick and get tired?
I think we're arguing semantics.

Most people when they say they want to lose "weight" meant they want to lose "fat" and improve body composition.

Focusing solely on calories in / calories out omits any effects hormones have on fat burning / storage.

In your scenario - yes - if someone drank 2000 calories of coke and that's it, they might not get "fatter", but that's not how real life works.

99/100 times, that person who drank 2000 calories of coke is going to be starving shortly afterwards and isn't going to simply "fast" and let lipolysis take place. Instead, because sugar causes ridiculous cravings - they're probably going to crack and down another 1,000 calories of another carb intensive, sugary food ('cause cravings) until their calorie intake exceeds their calories used and their hormone levels are thoroughly trashed.

I like hypothetical scenarios as much as the next guy, but focusing strictly on calories in / calories out and ignoring hormone imbalances, cravings and other real-life factors are typically symptoms of someone who reads lots of books, but hasn't has too many real life case studies to work with.
I think modern food marketing should get more scrutiny here. Aside from the 24/7 food ads with Photoshopped hamburgers, there are the new, more caloric, more addictive products. Starbucks, for example, has replaced the traditional American coffee and donut with a latte and pastry combo that has twice as many calories or more. You can't sell low-calorie coffee with creamer and sugar (~50 cals) for as much as you can sell a latte (~200 cals).
Bioluminscent trees could light up our streets
My artist guy made me convert my chess game from 2D to 3D. It's worse, not better.

Think about 2D chess programs. They have side view of pieces but place them looking down on the board.

I did not give a fuck when I made the stupid timeout defender game. My artist caused top view of men with just heads and arms, instead of my side view with swords.

no fucks were given.

I took technical drawing in high school. I have made 3D flight simulators and first person shooters.

No fucks were given.
“From consulting to productising: follow the money and the meaning”
> "There is a basic price for this product or service which is fundamentally part of our business plan and represents the cost of doing business and some reasonable profit, but when the resource is under-utilized or we want to generate business, we will offer it at a discount - a price which we could not afford to offer at all times."

So you think that is what the "regular" price of movies, etc. means?

There may be some instances where a "discount" price means selling at a loss (clearance prices for clothes to clear the racks for the next season come to mind), but in most cases (and I'm certain that movies, for example, fall into this category), the "discounted" price still generates a profit. The reason the seller does it is precisely that: more profits, by allowing additional profit-generating sales to happen that otherwise would not happen.

In a case like movies, it's true that there is another element: a matinee movie is not quite the same product as a movie in the evening, for a variety of reasons (for example, a dinner and movie date is more romantic to most people than a lunch and movie date). Theaters can charge more for evening movies because those movies are worth more to the customers. But this just emphasizes that the difference between your two cases is not really a difference. The cost to the theater of showing a matinee is basically the same as the cost of showing an evening movie, so the fact that evening movies are worth more to customers means that the theater is simply charging more when they can get it--i.e., when the product is worth more to customers, so they will pay more.

> It is fundamentally about allocating scarce resources only to the wealthy

If this were true, then, for example, movies would only be available to the wealthy, since, as I've just shown, movie theaters charge more when they know customers will pay more.

In fact, price discrimination (which is the usual term in economics for what we're discussing) increases the availability of products to everyone, precisely because it allows the seller to adjust prices (and possibly the product, as with matinees vs. evening movies) according to what customers are willing to pay. A society in which prices had to be fixed according to your first rule--"the cost of doing business and some reasonable profit"--would be a society in which products were less available, and in which being wealthy would confer more of an advantage than it does in our current society.
I agree. Get a script for it, and whenever you get a new computer or what have you, run it once and boom - you're off to the races.
"There have been similar plugins that came before this one that served as sources of inspiration in both execution and code, and they're worth checking out if you haven't already, most notably the hilarious Cloud-to-Butt plugin (https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt) by @panicsteve and the amazing Jailbreak the Patriarchy plugin (http://www.daniellesucher.com/2011/11/jailbreak-the-patriarc...) by @DanielleSucher."
> From the practical standpoint of actually trying to lose weight/get people to lose weight, the challenges in nutrition are almost entirely around compliance (how to ensure someone sticks with the program) rather than substance (what people put in their bodies).

Compliance and substance, using your definitions, are not orthogonal. "How you ensure someone sticks with the program" is not independent of what the things they eat are.

I get it why techies -- myself included -- would like the world to have nice, neat, orthogonal levers where you push this input and you get this simple output, and you don't have to manipulate a bunch of inputs to get a simple output (and, don't get a bunch of complex changes in output when you change a simple input.)

Unfortunately, many interesting domains -- especially those involving the human body and particularly the interaction between body and behavior -- don't work that way, and preferring that it works more simply isn't going to change that.

> if we spent more time studying how to teach compliance I think we'd be making a lot more progress towards stopping obesity.

The thing is, there's considerable evidence that "compliance" problems are neither one-size-fits-all nor simply a matter of teaching. Much current effort is on compliance, but it often involves how to manipulate metabolic signals to help people be better able to comply (there's definitely education as a component of that, but its not alone.)

And we understand where there are positive feedback loops involved, and breaking those is part of that (that's a major reason for the various forms and relatives of gastric bypass surgery -- it enables radically breaking some of the feedback loops that make it difficult to acheive compliance.)
It all depends on what a request is. The req/sec metric alone makes no sense.
Pretty cool, needs fonts though.
I prefer Visibull.tv (http://visibull.tv/)
That's good advice, thank you for the tips.
Addressing your points individually:

1) On its own, Plumb is exactly an implementation of Lambda Calculus (like an extremely simplified form of Scheme or Haskell); its only novelty is its syntax, which makes it embeddable in scripting languages. It may be unfamiliar, but it's mainly useful for defining functions which shuffle their arguments around and pass them on to other functions.

2) Everything takes time to learn. Thankfully, Plumb has few rules, and they're applied consistently.

3) Nothing is "added", in the sense of Turing-completeness. Plumb is meant to work around awkward function-definition syntax. Some more sensible examples might be the following:

$compose = plumb([[[2 , __(1 , 0)]]]);

$z = plumb([[1, [1, 1, 0]],
[1, [1, 1, 0]]]);

These functions are really simple: compose functions and find a fixed-point. Compare them to raw PHP:

$compose = function($f, $g) { return function($x) use ($f, $g) { return $f($g($x)); }; };

$z = function($f) {
return call_user_func(function($x) use ($f) {
return $f(function($v) use ($x) {
return call_user_func($x($x), $v);
});
},
function($x) use ($f) {
return $f(function($v) use ($x) {
return call_user_func($x($x), $v);
});
});
};

I've also written a blog post which introduces Plumb incrementally, in the context of PHP: http://chriswarbo.net/posts/2014-08-18-edsl.html
the language is so fundamentally good -- Mature, robust, standarized, performant, compiled, gradually-typed -- that it is worth sticking with it, it is worth working to expand its ecosystem

This is why I created https://wukix.com/mocl. CL has a ton of merits. It's unfortunate that people pass over CL because it's "old" or whatever (a worthless criterion if there ever was one). The language is great, and with a little house cleaning, CL can seriously kick ass.
Todd Park stepping down as America's chief technology officer
How to Create an Instant Connection with Anyone You Meet
Sure, it happens every day on places like Flippa, WebsiteBroker, and eBay.

It's not the sexiest process, or the highest valuations, but if you're looking to exit for 5-to-6 figures, you might be able to find a buyer there easily.
That is a drastic reduction of the pussy riot situation. The attention they received had nothing to do with their music and everything to do with the fact that they were arrested and prosecuted in a a sham trial.
I left banking to start and run a software business. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Ask HN: Where would you host a quickly bootstrapped site?
I've been using heroku recently, but am wondering as to alternatives people use. This is just for hobbyist development and I'm fairly cost-conscious at the moment.
I used Thumbtack once, and felt that Thumbtack was a scam. It costs me $2-4 just to send a quote. I spent about $20 sending quotes over the course of a month and never saw any business. A lot of the requests I received just seemed fake (e.g. $3000 commercial shoot requests with no details). I'd actually prefer to pay more and give Thumbtack a percentage of the deal rather than pay a lower cost upfront. At least that way they have motivation to verify customer requests.
I wondered that as well, actually. Lots of folks seem to be able to arrange for help but when my son was born it was just my wife and I. Our families were not able to help in any meaningful way. So we slept when the baby slept, were awake when the baby was awake, and traded care in shifts as much as possible. This fellow may be lucky and may have some additional help. In my case, I usually had the 2-6am shift.

His kid is very cute and looks quite alert! So whatever the care is I would say it's working fine for them. Didn't see any photos of the parents.
Typographic Programming Language
If you know N+1 contacts of X, then you create N+1 bots. Each bot has only N of the N+1 contacts. So, each bot receive the secrets from everyone except one person.
Wow, you were not exaggerating. From comment #11 of that bug report [1]:

(...) You are not doing us a favor by reporting a bug. On the contrary, you are asking us to do you a favor and spend our valuable time helping overcome a problem _you_ are having. (...)

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934/comments/11
No, that's insane. Investors commonly invest in multiple competitors at once. Not to mention that this is a huge security vulnerability to have this stuff floating around the investor's office and on their personal computers.

Sad that some investors are so manipulative.
It is just about copyright infringement (and some other types of IP). Hence the name: Digital Millennium Copyright Act
I've used pgFouine (possibly the inspiration for pgBadger, given the name similarity?) to analyze posgres logs -- but it was the sort of thing where we'd enable detailed (esp. query-level) logging, capture a bunch of logs, then switch the logging back to "production mode" again and analyze the logs.

This seems targeted for constant use on production servers -- I'd love to see more info about what it costs to run (in RAM footprint, in performance, etc.). Next (as possible) would be a list of places that run it.

@sciurus, this isn't your project but you use it -- is that right?
Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart
I think you might be exaggerating when you say Weight Watchers has worked for millions of people. Here's a nice article about their success rate: http://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/ It says it's extremely low, less than 1%.
"It was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs), running at 1 Mhz it offered four 16-bit registers, 4K words of RAM and 32K words of ROM. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time."

And it ran in a little metal can we sent to the moon in the 1960s. Wow.
My father, uncle, and grandparents lived in the region around that time. (Late 50s, early 60s). They were in Tehran and then in Lahore (Pakistan). They loved it - the culture and people especially. Glenn Foster's photos and films are reminiscent of my family's. Sitting and watching my grandfather's 8mm home movies was made more poignant when considering the direction the area is taking since then.
While we're on this topic, did it annoy anyone else how they are trying to force usage of their mobile messaging app? The other day I begrudgingly installed it because someone sent me a message and Facebook wouldn't show me the text until I installed the app.

I installed it (android), and found that it litters my screen with my contacts' "head" even when I'm not in the app. I had to opt-out of that "feature".

I've seen multiple public posts in my feed along the lines of "I saw you messaged me but I'm not going to install the messaging app..."

Thoughts?
I think there are good reasons against protection of bullhorns.
> iCE Colors

> SAUCE

Well, that just took me back 20+ years.
Weight loss is hardly as simple as learning to count, assuming we're talking about actually doing something and not just planning for it. You seem to assume very little capacity for learning basic nutritional facts and very high capacity for sticking to a diet (willpower). I would argue most people are in the opposite position.
It's not completely down. They are still sending me part of the header [0] and will still redirect you if you are not logged in.

[0] http://pastebin.com/nMzwMH8x
Simple, but overlooked ways to boost Ruby on Rails and Heroku performance
Can anyone explain what hiding blocks in a drawer achieves? I can't work it out.
How to lose a connection with your web site visitors: put a heinous newsletter sign up pane that takes up half the viewport on mobile and isn't dismissable.
You have to eat zero fat on a sustained basis and absolutely gorge on sugar to make lipogenesis happen at all. The body can store pounds of sugar as glycogen. In humans lipogenesis is an extremely inefficient process that burns up nearly 30% of the calories in conversion.

Zero fat, high sugar diets have been a proven way to get lean for decades. If you put people on a very low fat diet with a good amount of protein (say 90 grams), you can allow them to eat sugar and starch ad libitum and they will get lean. No need to count calories.

https://www.drmcdougall.com/2013/12/31/walter-kempner-md-fou...
So yours is a product competing for business market?

I am not a business user but I look at these things as an average Internet user (and I am just generally interested). I believe Yahoogroups and Googlegroups are serving a specific purpose and need of average user. That is, to provide them with group-communication mechanism.

The reason why email is still popular and will remains so, is because email fills the basic and primary human need of direct (one to one) communication. The listserv on the other hand, also serve the basic and primary human need of group (one to many) communication.

I think the fundamental reason why email and listserv have stayed the way they have, is because they don't necessarily need much tinkering. So ultimately, it all comes down to where users get used to. We have adopted emails, listserv and now Facebook, as part of our communication platform evolution.

Facebook is an oddball because it supposedly does so much more (and there is lot of smokes and mirror on what exactly it does). The reason why I see people adopting Facebook Group (over Yahoo and Google) is because Yahoo and Google are probably unconsciously letting go of their hold on listserv needs of people.

But all of these companies are too big. A small or new company may come along attempting to disrupt the status quo. The problem as is I see it, is that chicken/egg thing. How can you raise yourself above Yahoo/Google/Facebook hold without disrupting the price model and still able to maintain yourself? That to me is a difficult question. You ultimately can't really win by having few users, even if they are dedicated. You need a whole lot of users.
This is funny, but more practically I think I'd prefer a classifier that identified viral headlines and just replaced the link title with "[garbage]".
I completely refuse to install it. My only point of resistance is that they tried to force me, but that's enough.
so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure, like everything else in life.
Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier load he has to carried. :)
Why should Alice get to restrict what Bob can do with his inbox?
Yes, it's amazing how US law does not apply here.

I frequently have to remind my fellow citizens that it makes little sense to plead the 5th here, because whether parliament has sat in the last year will not effect the outcome of your trial.
The facebook messaging app wants access most everything my phone can give it. No thanks.
$ cat /Applications/Pages.app/Contents/Resources/Apple.txt
Yes, that's probably true; and I doubt I would actually get a job at Google were I interested in one (I don't have a degree; I started my first company before finishing any school). They were pretty specific about why they were contacting me, and it was well-targeted for the position they were hiring for (and my company co-founder currently works in that role for Google). But, I've never posted anything anywhere ever that would indicate I'm looking for work, so I don't get a lot of recruitment overtures except from people that actually know what I do.

Anyway, that probably wasn't a useful addition to my point. I believe you're more likely to get hired for a good company if somebody within the company knows you, and you're more likely to know people in good companies if you go to one of the "good" schools for your field. That doesn't happen with online degrees, no matter how prestigious the school.
Nitpick: doesnt work on Chrome on ios. Didnt test Safari, but its a pretty good idea to check mobile views before a show hn. I cant even tell if its a product page or the actual app.