skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was 293 pounds as of last November, 199.6 as of last night(although that was after a run and before dinner so I'd actually place my weight at ~203 right now). I'm 6'3".

What follows is anecdotal opinion based upon my own inherently flawed perception and interpretation of said weight loss. Even if my experiences/difficulties are representative of societies as a whole, the nature of self-analysis over a long period of time is such that any conclusions I draw here should be taken with some degree of skepticism.

The three most difficult aspects of weight loss for me were:

a.) Accepting that there wasn't a quick fix.

b.) Accepting that I'm not rational.

c.) Accepting that it was my own actions that got me to this point. (and, to some degree, forgiving myself)

I ate ~600 calories a day from November 2013 - June 2014. From June 2014 - Now I've been eating ~1600 calories a day.

Before that I had attempted(among a myriad of other things) eating nothing(hhehehe) with the full intention of starving myself until I had reached a healthy weight range. In retrospect, it seems entirely illogical, so many of my decisions in that time period did.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to accept that the starvation-relapse cycle was likely doing more harm than good. Similarly, the acceptance that one day of too-intense exercise wasn't worth the following 3-day recovery/justification period of inactivity. It's better to intake a sustainable amount of calories and to partake in a sustainable amount of exercise.

With this realized(and a plan-of-action of some sort in place), the largest difficulty for me was irrationality. I found fighting it with logic, reasoning, and fact was the solution. Weighing myself regularly was hugely important. It was interesting to see how transient my interpretation of my own self-image was; having a record of my actual weight made it much easier to overcome any unjustified self-loathing.

I had bad days, relapses, especially towards the beginning. I _strongly_ believe that weight gain, much like depression, is a vicious self-feeding cycle. Weight-loss/fitness is a self-feeding cycle as well, the difference being that eating _will_ provide you immediate satisfaction, whereas the benefits reaped from exercise/diet need to be manufactured in your own head.

With regards to exercise, I started with running one mile a day, eventually two/three(and so on), I would take several day breaks in between at the beginning; as of now, the last time I ran less than six miles was over a week ago. I also started lifting back in June when I increased my caloric intake.

I'm definitely interested to see how I handle maintaining my weight once I reach my target of ~185.

The differences in energy/mood/confidence are amazing, highly recommended my fellow humans :)
5 Reasons Why Creative Crowdfunders Should Learn to Code
I have found it to be MUCH easier to get regular exercise when I live in a reasonably pedestrian safe neighborhood. I have found that the perceived level of effort to maintain fitness varies wildly with my external conditions (stress, neighborhood, prosperity, relationships, etc.). Saying that everyone can do it if they just give it the old college try may be a result of your circumstances.
Perhaps the question is better asked on a different community like Growthhackers.com
I think if you post it tomorrow morning, you may get more play there.
I had the great pleasure of seeing this presentation live and of speaking to the presenter and author of Elm, Evan Czaplicki, following the Strange Loop conference.

Anyone interested in FRP, and reactive programming in general, would do well to learn from his important work in this area.
It's frustrating. You get a LOT of fat shaming, you get discouraged at a slow pace, you don't see the firsthand/obvious benefits for a long time.

I've lost ~30lbs since February, which is around one pound a _week_. I still can't tell the difference. The only thing that's changing is the number on the scale every week. Still the same clothes, the same fat arms, the same belly fat. Just a little more fit because I've been doing more exercise. And because I'm female, I get the additional hassle of being assumed I'm pregnant when I'm not, and clothes are hard to fit (and I can't even look at plus sized clothes most days... too big for me, what).

I aim to lose another 50lbs or so (the low end of normal weight) in the next couple years and I need to maintain the diet/exercise I'm doing now in general, but I only do this because I need to be in good shape for trying for kids in the future and for myself/my spouse. Can't think about any other objective because I will fail miserably if I do. I don't see myself ever fitting into my little black dress, or avoiding fat shaming from random strangers... not even walking around with a huge grin on my face for crossing the 30lb mark at a weighing at the doctor's office counteracts how terrible shaming feels. :(
I am interested to know what the correlation is between uncertainty and returns. Are companies that succeed in highly uncertain spaces more profitable than those which succeed in well known markets? If you include companies that fail in uncertain spaces, is the average return still greater than those in more certain markets?

I would think yes, otherwise we would all be sticking with mining precious metals.
Hubris. This is what happens when you put your internet fame in front of everything else. If a friend blocks me and I realize I have some fault, I'd totally try to make amends. Email or good old phone calls are all on the table.
Contrary to appearances, online reviews reflect the opinions of the few
> "the editorial board directs the reporters"

... and both the editorial board and reporters select how to cover the news.

Some of my relatives were active on a significant political issue in the 80s and 90s, holding state-level positions in a well-known organization. As a teen, I would occasionally attend rallies, protests, etc. (sometimes with counter-rallies/protests across the street) and watch from a distance, and then I'd watch the news coverage that evening. The camera always seemed to fall on awkwardly dressed senior citizens from our side, ignoring our speakers who were often young professional women who were excellent public speakers, and ignoring the large and diverse crowd. And the camera never showed the guys on the other side making threatening remarks (though I know they got those remarks on film); they'd instead seek comment from a lawyer in their office to give a calm presentation of that side. So even though they covered the event, the coverage gave the impression that one side was professional and well-spoken while the other was out of touch and weird, which was exactly the opposite of the impression I got from being there.
87% :D
>Realizing you’re a software developer and not a designer

I hate when people pigeonhole themselves by giving themselves and others labels like this. What's stopping someone from being both a great designer and a great software developer? Visual/UX design is actually very similar in its principles to software and engineering type of design in my opinion.
What's funny about the lab animals getting fatter is that the guy who figured out that BPA was an endocrine disruptor figured it out because they were having problems with test tubes. The test tubes activated endocrine sensitive cells and the test tube maker refused to tell him what they made the test tubes out of..

http://www.fastcompany.com/1139298/real-story-behind-bisphen...

90% of people tested have BPA in them.
At Climate March in New York, a Clarion Call for Action
I disagree. Anecdotally, any discussion of obesity I have seen on internet forums (typically reddit) places the blame entirely on the overweight people. This is not helped by the rather silly trend of the fat-is-beautiful group, which only encourages the opposite fat-shaming groups.
> Most ... don't think that 100% of obesity is caused by laziness

Can you support this claim? I think "most" still may think that and would be interested to see data.
If your calorie count remained constant (which is an assumption that I'm not sure I share) as you gained the weight, then you'd gain weight until the calorie surplus was zero. However, it's quite possible that, as you gained weight, you'd also be eating more calories, and if you kept a constant calorie error, you'd keep gaining weight.

Also, metabolism slows with age. However, people are heaviest around 55, and start losing weight as appetite decreases beyond that.
If the lab animals were getting "fatter" decade over decade then I have to wonder if the lab animals were living in lab environments that were increasingly air conditioned or steady state temperatures decade over decade as well.

Seeking out some kind of mystery trace compound seems like an invitation to overlook more basic environmental factors like the living conditions.
Good to have an insider's viewpoint that credits learning and failing fast. Could benefit from more details on the cultural fit, or operational decisions made by the local unit which were privately questioned by Yahoo, but later turned out to be correct.

".. Charlie Munger, a legendary business leader with an abundance of wisdom. He says he has constantly seen people rise who are not the smartest but who are “learning machines.” “They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up,” he says. He also has a broader view, which I really love: “If civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.”

... Yahoo is the only example of meaningful value creation by a U.S. internet company in China.

Yahoo had failed at first too, of course. The difference was that it kept going back, building on knowledge from prior attempts. In the early days, we invested a lot of energy in analyzing which businesses would fit best with Yahoo. But I can see in hindsight that what mattered most was finding the right team, including a leader who was a good cultural fit with the company and whom we trusted, and structuring the deal so that the local unit was free to make operational decisions."
Anything that spikes blood sugar is going to cause problems because the individual is stuck riding a sugar high and attempting to prevent or get out of the following crash. This is a daily, hour to hour struggle. Describing it as anything less would be a disservice. Trying to not eat after a blood sugar crash is as difficult as a male with peak testosterone passing up sex.

Dropping soft drinks, if you substitute with water/tea/coffee, will be a life altering change. I did it, dropped 10 pounds within a month, never gained it back, (already fairly thin at that point) and stopped getting cavities. Over the following years it made it so much easier to convert my diet from pizza/frozen foods to fresh vegetables and unprocessed meat. I drink minimal alcohol, but for those individuals who drink heavily giving up soft drinks may not prove to have much or any impact.

There are food products that should be consumed rarely -- holidays, and humans are consuming them every day. The behavior goes from every day to perhaps 50% of the food consumed is stuff that any registered dietician will say isn't very healthy for you. Just sit in a grocery store and watch what morbidly obese people purchase verse someone who is thin and fit (and not a drug addict.) Night and day.

The science has come a really long way since I was a child in only the 1990s. We believed the only healthy diets were extremely low fat. Get rid of fat whenever possible, exercise, and you will be very healthy. No on credible believes that anymore. The problem now is largely behavior modification methods. Perhaps a success with behavior modification will trigger challenges pivoting the US food supply off corn/soy/wheat production but that is solvable.
What useful stuff could really be done on Xenix - seems like such a low spec system to run a unix ish OS on.
I'm not sure how that's really new tho. Its stronger than ever before if anything, but ive seen non-sponsored news and news that were factual since i dont know.
What's wrong with the people in those places?
> payment information of the VPS providers

I doubt this will be useful as they're probably using Bitcoin or prepaid cards or things like that for payments.

> What advantage does it have for anyone (like this) to reveal anything

It could teach others how to setup websites that are harder to censor or more resilient to raids (plus it gets them free PR/traffic).
I like the built-in viewer. You can probably also serve PDFs in an iframe since FF/Chrome/IE have built-in PDF viewers these days.

In addition, if you'd like to support picking files from cloud storage, I'd recommend checking out the Kloudless file explorer http://jsfiddle.net/pseudonumos/PB565/embedded/result/ (disclaimer: I work at Kloudless)
I'm pretty sure it was intended to do just what it did do - protect entrenched interests. But I agree that it did the opposite of the claimed intention. Which is often the case for legislation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

The real question is, who were the "baptists" in this coalition? Were there any non-doctors who honestly believed having too much capacity would make prices go up? And if there were, where did these people learn economics? :-)
I've fixed that issue.

https://aurous.me/faq/
> Immunology is a subject all on its own right.

I find it fascinating too. Too bad I don't have a good amount of knowledge in the area to delve into it. Do you have any suggestions of books for someone who wants to learn?
I'm sure the authors of the test are busy taking notes.
How to try it out: http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/Shenandoah
Very informative, thanks for sharing that.
Their historical traffic records are probably good enough to predict how much traffic will be coming in during the different times of the year and they could ramp up or scale down the number of VMs as needed possibly saving them some money.

Also VPS provisioning time is seconds/minutes instead of hours to where they could redeploy to another provider if they suddenly got the boot from one provider. And via Amazon/Digitalocean-type APIs this reprovisioning-on-failure could be fully automated.
One recent model estimated that eating a mere 30 calories a day more than you use is enough to lead to serious weight gain.

The article here is being a bit misleading. The calories in/calories out model says that if you add 30 calories/day to your diet, you will get a little fatter and stop.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html

If you actually experience serious weight gain, it's because you first added 30 calories/day to your diet, then added 30 more, and continued for a long time.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/inanity_of_overeating...

This is nonsense that Gary Taubes was pushing a few years back - it's sad to see that it's become a mainstream meme, particularly when simple arithmetic shows it's misleading.

The article goes further off the rails: Why, if body weight is a matter of individual decisions about what to eat, should it be affected by differences in wealth or by relations between the sexes?

Clearly, a woman living in India will make the exact same choices as a woman in Sweden - her environment will never lead to different choices.

This idea that gaining/losing weight is hard is nonsense. I do it regularly. About 7 months ago I was finishing up a bulk - I weighed 240lb, and added an extra 45lb for chinups. After my cut I was 196 and rocking a 6 pack.

I ate 5 meals a day plus a snack while bulking, little more than rice and dal and some eggs while cutting. It's called self control.
Interesting. Makes sense why a lot of synths come pre-programmed with a "Popcorn" patch.
Wait, you have to be able to pass a swim test to be admitted to MIT?
There was a professor who lost weight on the twinkie diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie#Twinkie_diet.

He just ate less calories than he needed.
CoreGraphics Memory Corruption
How Environment Can Boost Creativity
About 15 years ago my father had a stroke at our house. I was about 12 years old and at home at the time along with my grandmother. We didn't know what was happening. At one second he was okay and in another he was on the floor. It was almost impossible to put him back at the bed even with the help of one of our tenants.

We called my mother at work and the funny thing is that before she came home to take him to the ER he was able to ask for coffee (and drink it) and also to smoke a cigarette.

Moving 15 years forward he's still with us (62 years old) with no movement at all on the left side of his body. Had a heart attack with major surgery, is on more than 15 different medications, has diabetes and a bunch of other "minor problems".

My mother gave up her life to take care of him and everyday is a struggle because of the existing problems prior to the stroke and the ones that came after he became bitter and really mean to those who love and take care of him.

I'm not sure why I wrote about this but I felt like sharing. It's not easy when people don't recover, but for some reason I believe we have to take care of them and do our part.
An Ingenious Way to Save the Comments Section
Detroit already lost carmaking - manufacturing was outsourced outside the city long ago. Now all that is left are a bunch of offices. So yeah, they are at risk, especially so because they have failed to innovate from their offices.
Oh, ok.

On a related note, the approach I mentioned is actually mentioned in that RFC PR:

> Store drop-flags for fragments of state on stack out-of-band
10 Must have chrome extensions for developers
They cross the interface between school and the outside world by causing a certain set of behaviours and/or expectations when in transition between states. A schoolchild walking home in uniform may be better behaved than otherwise, because he or she is representing the school, whether that's intentionally known and communicated or not.

My school had explicit rules about how we should behave when in uniform outside of school, and we lost some agency because of that. Although I have to say it also felt empowering, to some extent, that we were kind of ambassadors for the school. We would definitely show off sometimes.

Similarly, sweet shops near another school I attended had signs saying 'no more than 3 children at once' or something similar. The uniform part was implied but I think a parent taking in four kids on a weekend day would have a different reaction from the shopkeeper than four uniformed children at 3:30pm.

Similarly, a group of teenagers in uniform may be less threatening on the street than one out of uniform, especially as fashions change. A certain school's uniform communicates a level of wealth or manners (or lack thereof) and therefore sets expectations for behaviour. A child alone in the library working in uniform may be far less likely to be approached by concerned staff than one in mufti - at least this was the case when I frequently stayed at the library outside of school hours.
Company-wide email for Microsoft.
> Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit

It's not that they are not capable or smart, it's that they don't bother fact checking every single story or seek out opposing analysis or interpretation, especially for things like US foreign policy.
>Had he not paid attention to the way things were being billed (i.e., between primary and secondary insurance), some costs may have been pushed onto her family.

How does one pay attention to this in a time of crisis? Is there a good guide to navigating it somewhere?

Last summer I woke up with a monster headache and suddenly stopped being able to put words to thoughts. Tried calling a taxi, couldn't say where I wanted to go, so he called 911. On the way to the hospital in the ambulance I was just praying I was making the right decisions. The paramedics couldn't understand me and that frustrated them. They asked me what hospital, being an intern and totally new to the city I wouldn't know what to tell them even if I could. I was worried they'd treat me like I was on some kind of drug.

Turns out I had contracted a meningitis. The ambulance ride was $1000.
Right, it's not that the reporters lie, it's what they choose to report and how it is reported. That is what shapes opinion.
You could, for example, have a dozen text-based POS terminals connected to one central machine via serial connection. Put a modem on there too and you can process credit card transactions. Simple apps without graphics really didn't consume many resources back in the day.
Nothing. Why don't you give them your salary? It would go farther there than wherever you live.

Or, to be less snide: Kin selection, but with memetics rather than genetics. To be more simple: cultures whose behavior patterns perpetuate the survival of their members, survive themselves.
They'll continue working without a hitch. Various versions of OpenGL can live with each other.
I don't think that design (or programming) is for everyone though. You can only learn so much
Sorry, what I meant by life-altering is that it doesn't require you to completely rearrange your life like other weight-loss strategies. I agree it can have great impact. Soft drinks are obviously the lowest-hanging-fruit, but they're not the only one.
I would also rather those jobs, companies, and opportunities stay in America and benefit the American economy, the one that I also contribute to and benefit from. Is it wrong to want that? I don't think so.
Does anybody actually buy the line about "the other people that ventured into this [mobile payments] spent all of their time on the front end thinking about how to create a business model, how to collect data, own the data, sell the data, monetize the data. They were thinking about it in those kind of terms, not in terms of why you would want to use it."?

Seriously? what has Apple done differently here? Is it not just tap and go payments where Apple takes a cut of the total take? Is that really innovative and original?
Well, if we establish personhood as a two-sided social contract then I would argue that psychopaths are those who view it as a one-sided social contract, seeking to maximise the rewards for themselves without maximising the rewards for the other side of the interface. Though, you could argue that this is really just another way of saying it's a hack, which is an intriguing way of looking at things.
All I have to say is.. 'Impossible Mission'
There are almost no MPAA-proof countries, its pretty hard to hide from billion dollar companies with lobbyists and legal teams who are effectively above the law/make the laws. Countries that do ignore international copyright laws(Russia, China, Iran, pretty much any South American country) are usually very expensive to get a dedicated server in and have unreliable networks and piss-poor speeds. On top of that they have their own set of content laws(Russia and China censor anything that they perceive as against their government and jail/execute those who create and facilitate its distribution, good luck hosting anything in a muslim country that opposes Islam see:pretty much anything fun).

Sweden and Holland used to be considered anti-copyright havens, but the movie/recording industry mafia eventually pressured them into passing legislation that squashed this.

The only countries where you could operate in and be reasonably copyright resistant are Iceland and Switzerland, because they are non-EU members and have great data protection laws as of now. Dedicated servers there are quite overpriced though.