skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The really frightening part is that this list of foods makes up probably 90% of the average American's diet. Imagine the daily cumulative totals of various chemicals consumed.

Make an effort to find a local farm and try some of their meat. I promise you will never go back to conventional meat at the grocery store. If anyone wants some suggestions in the Chicago area, let me know.
I've been using this for awhile for some non-public stuff, full disclosure: I also helped dan write a little bit of the code.

The error bars and the ability to adjust the moving average "period" are pretty useful features for some specific use cases, and I haven't seen these in other similar libraries.
I was wondering what the mainstream solution was.. I ended up just curling the page
French Military Donated Code to Mozilla Thunderbird
It's not clear what their incentives are to mislead in this case though.
From LAMP to app engine (part 1)
This list avoids mentioning the every day dietary monsters: sodas, sodium nitrite, hydrogenated oils, MSG, corn syrup, homogenized milk, and so on.
I make popcorn on the stove with a large stainless steal soup pot.

1. Heat a few table spoons of vegetable oil on high.
2. Put in a single kernel to test (it should pop fairly quickly).
3. Pour in a handful or two of kernels and cover.
4. Gently shake pot to get all the kernels cooking.
5. Wait until the popping dies down.
Military use of consumer technology
It's not a matter of ensuring that people are good at view sourcing -- it's a matter of filtering out the people who don't even know how to do that.
I believe the intended meaning was environments which are not naturally occurring rather than attributing volition to nature.
Abi, how is the doejo?

This is a good calendar for stuff http://calendars.techvenue.com/cgi-bin/techvenue.pl?Calendar...

Also http://www.windybits.com/
The shaking is unnecessary, at least if the pot is thick enough to spread heat well. The popping mixes the kernels more than enough to avoid burning.
Do you not taste the difference between, say, wild Alaskan or Colorado River salmon vs. fish farm stock?

Farmed fish can be improved just by using higher quality feed.
Can we PLEASE stop using Code + Ninja, Pirate, Monkey, Shaman, Cosmonaut, Santa Claus, etc..
Upvoted for identical experience.
Ask HN: Please review our white labeled group messaging web app
The company I work for, Ez Texting, is getting ready to release a white label group messaging solution, probably in February 2010. We are currently doing our own deployment of the platform @ www.TellMyCell.com to make sure everything works as intended.

The service offers group text messaging/SMS based mobile marketing. Our typical clients, on our existing brand, are small businesses, non profits, and the occasional Fortune 500 corporation.

The site, www.TellMyCell.com is not meant to sell people on signing up for a white label solution; rather it is an example deployment...so we're more interested in what you think of the app/site itself.

Thanks!
In addition to XUL, Firefox exposes many internal APIs to javascript extensions via XPCOM. These hooks allow for powerful modifications to browser behavior.

So this also shows a trade-off with Google simplifying extension development at the cost of lowering the degree of customization that is possible.
Now we can add farmers who wouldn't even eat the food they bring to market to that list.

Where in the list do you find that example? The only comment by a farmer I saw was a (great) grass-fed beef producer lamenting the quality of mass-produced grain-fed beef. I'm quite certain he happily eats the products that he produces.

I deal with a lot of conventional and organic growers. While I'm sure that they exist somewhere, I've yet to run across a farmer who wouldn't eat what he produces.

OK, reading closer I guess you are right if you're willing to go on hearsay. A representative of the National Organics Standards Board is quoted as having talked to potato farmers who say they wouldn't eat what they sell. Or is there some greater evidence you see?
Dell tablet to debut at CES, says rumor
You can't exactly get a blockbuster book tour out of Ten Foods You Eat Every Day That Are About As Good For You As You'd Expect.
The Year in Ideas
The way they're defining the amount of data you consume is pretty clumsy. I suppose playing a video game for an hour can be considered consuming n GBs, but it's not a terribly useful metric. What if I glance at a few very high resolution photos? Have I now doubled by data consumption? I guess technically I have, but it's not really useful.
#4:

"I've talked with potato growers who say point-blank they would never eat the potatoes they sell. They have separate plots where they grow potatoes for themselves without all the chemicals."
It's very nice!

An interface suggestion for you or Dan: make zoom in/out more discoverable. I've used other packages with this style of zoom interface, so I know there's precedent and some people will figure it out. But newcomers will be lost.
Dygraphs claims to work in IE, but I just tested the link with my IE6 test setup and got so many errors I had to kill the process. Perhaps it's just their page.. Anyone know if it really supports IE? (I'm aware excanvas is required).

[edit] As an addendum, it's nice to see this library hosted on github where myself and others have a chance to easily contribute changes and patches, mix/match/etc each others forks and such. I really wanted to see changes and contributions to the Flot library flow a bit faster (eg: there's a bug in series drop shadows that's had a patch on the mailing list for over a month with no interest from the maintainers in fixing it). I've asked the project owners if they'd be willing to move from Google Code to github to allow for more this, but got a reply implying that most users of Flot are not sophisticated enough to contribute. Darn..
Yes, every bag of non-organic potatoes I've gotten has sprouted after a long period of time.
Considering the article, make that olive oil for the for the health benefits - I've been doing this recently and it is delicious. You do end up sweeping your floor more often, though.
Pitch of Blue Whale Songs Is Declining Around the World
I've met Joel in person, and he's bright, but not visionary. Some of his writing his interesting, but I'm generally unimpressed.

Disclaimer: I'm not impartial. I interviewed with Fog Creek in the summer of 2008. I was rejected, which didn't upset or surprise me. However, when I called to ask why, I got a non-answer (HR: "we'll call if we can release this information"). I'd been unemployed for 4 months due to health problems, the economy was falling apart, and they wouldn't even help me out a little bit by telling me why they said "no". Amazing. If he'd had the courage to tell me why I was turned down, my opinion of him would probably be neutral-to-positive.
Anyone else? To all the founders, how did you compile your privacy and tos ? Did everyone turn to lawyers for this?
I mentioned him :) His personal site in subtraction.com
man, I fucking hate IE.
Useful notes for Ubuntu 9.10 installation and configuration for a netbook
All technology is military technology. That's the first thing they teach you.
it's good for business.
By whom? Apparently the law is worded so that they have to be employees. This seems like it's part of the "this is for the protection of the actors" train of thought because then they call under OSHA. This might just be a way of convincing people that this is all about the actors'/actresses' safety and not about trying to curb public perception of sex with/without condoms.
I've always wondered this. Can an agreement like that be legally binding when it's just stuck on the end of an email and is typically not read until the content of the email has been read?

They're also overly broad, often claiming copyright over quotes or even content I just sent them!
+1 if you use Coconut or some other oil with a high flashpoint. Burnt oil's not that good for you.
Repeat (ish) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=985766
Care to elaborate? His guidance seems to be reasonable and consistent - while it should be taken with a grain of salt (some of it feels anecdotal rather than factual), I don't find it unhelpful, as you posit.
Get Stuff Done By Setting Arbitrary Constraints
Being able to critique yourself and your work does show some useful personal skills.

Yeah, but if you honestly share the results of your critique, you won't get hired, because you're compulsively honest in situations where it's inappropriate and you may have other social quirks that make it difficult for you to work with people outside your development group.
Indeed. I just moved from NZ, which is big on salmon farming, to Seattle. The taste of farmed salmon, in my opinion, is repulsive compared to wild salmon. I can only hope we don't have to farm all fish in the future, as I don't think improving the feed can completely fill that taste gap.
Cater to hysteria -> Get eyeballs/readers -> Profit
We use a combination of Tender for front-end support and Lighthouse for issue management. Lighthouse has nice integration with Tender and Github.
"It's a terrifying world out there if you're paying attention..."

More like it's a terrifying world out there if you buy into all the fear mongering.
Which airline manufacturer?
No it doesn't. Tumblr already supports posting to Twitter and to Facebook. What else was there? Putting group names on a blog? Tumblr's had that for years.

Posterous had a lightning start, then fell on its ass; Tumblr adopted its best features and did them better. I mean, Posterous is here bragging about allowing minor thematic changes. I've had complete HTML control of my tumblelogs for three years. Not to mention, Tumblr's default theme is not only more cutting-edge than Posterous's, it's also vastly more attractive.
Nobel prizes are from Sweden, not Norway.
But that is close enough.
I find that it's cleverly designed, but it definitely lacks some (subtle) polish. Great for a launch, though.

update:

For example, on my tiny 9-inch netbook screen, I cannot see the "Some Day" section, which makes it impossible for me to drag items down there. Each column having a fixed/minimum height is a waste of screen space: they should be as tall as the largest column instead.

I personally don't have to add many to-do's in one day, but my solution benefits both casual and power users.
No worries - you are correct in that they will probably end up on HN anyways! Been following you on twitter for about a year or so now.
> My point is that you have no idea what it's like for those who are poor in the US. To claim that they have abundant opportunity is ludicrous. I know this society inside and out, I've got friends at all social levels-- from dirt-poor to three-digit millionaires-- and I know that you're impossibly naive.

I think you are being deliberately deceptive. I have friends that went to work in the USA. One worked for a harvesting company and received a good salary. Another did long distance trucking. All of these are “low paying” jobs, yet in the USA they receive excellent salaries.

Many people in low paying jobs (such as plumbers) can own their own home – which is unheard of in many countries. The salary for manual labour is incredibly high.

> More desirable is a world in which people have the ability to maximize their contributions to society, because they're given the resources necessary to realize their potential.

You view someone earning money as a “gift from society”. If someone works or has a business, he owns his own money with no obligation to any other party. A lot of people on the left wants to view individuals as servants of society (as you do).

> Everyone pays taxes. Rich people pay more. I have no problem with this.

You do not have a problem with this, because you do not fall in the top tax bracket. That is the “not me” phenomenon in action.

> They get more out of society;

Again, you view any money an individual makes as a gift from society. This is not so. For a voluntary transaction (where there is no coercion) no one owes a third party anything.

> The only one of those that's been demonstrated to be a bad idea is the cash payment for having children (which encourages people to have kids they can't support).

Free universities tend to be of much worse quality. Two good examples are Germany and Greece. The qualities of Universities in these countries are much lower than countries such as the United States. Greece has the highest number of foreign students studying abroad for its population size.

The Basic Income Grant causes a lot of people to work and places an incredibly high burden on tax payers. In my country they want to introduce the basic income grant. Currently there are 13 million people on welfare (child grants which stretches until a child is 16, unemployment,) while there are only 3 million tax payers (i.e. four people getting grants for every one person on tax). BIG will push it to ten people receiving grants for every one person paying tax.
Make an effort to find a local farm and try some of their meat. I promise you will never go back to conventional meat at the grocery store.

Absolutely. We've found a local farmer who is a grass farmer who happens to raise animals, too. The ground beef, which is made from actual meat instead of simply trimmings, is amazing.

If anyone in the Pittsburgh area wants more info, I'd be glad to share.
Yeah, me too. The red taters start in a week or so.
The viewing of source is only the first step of several.
This seems very impressive to me! I've been looking for something like this for a long time, but I'm a total idiot at javascript.

What are the competing libraries, and how do they compare?
The expert: Jeffrey Moyer, chair of the National Organic Standards Board

He has an agenda, and his story sounds apocryphal.
Insider trading is already illegal; you don't need a disclaimer on your email for that.
And what is the correct way to transfer IP from the founders to the startup?
I agree that nature doesn't intend anything, but when people say that it does, what they're actually doing is slightly clumsily expressing a very valid concern.

And that concern is that a lot of agricultural science suffers from a dangerous sort of reductionism. We come up with a model for how something grows, and then we assume that anything the model doesn't account for isn't important. (This is actually a general gripe I have about a lot of biological science.)

The fact is that plants and animals evolved to give and take as part of enormously complex systems we've hardly begun to understand. I think it's reasonable not to assume that we can scrap those systems, rebuild them from the top down based on what understanding we do have, and not encounter unforeseen consequences.
He really went off the deep-end in the last paragraph. Transportation has been getting much cheaper adjusted for inflation, regardless of whether one looks at bicycles, cars, subway tickets, train tickets, plane flights or cargo shipping. Any blind assertion that all these things will get more expensive is difficult to take seriously. Ditto for his comments about living in "closer communities" and individuals growing their own grapefruit.

I suppose if the advance of technology ground to a halt, it could happen. What's far more likely, though, is that manufacturing and transportation will both continue to get cheaper, communities will be even less bound by geography and people who grow their own grapefruit won't be doing so for economic reasons.
The Tumblr Backup app (beta)
Not systems code, but I worked for a legacy airline in engineering and now have a fear of flying. The plane I observed most closely during my job was the Boeing 757 with Rolls Royce engine.
I grew some potatoes this year. I bought the starter potatoes at a garden center. While there, I asked the gardener why I couldn't just use potatoes eyes that had begun to sprout on store-bought potatoes. He told me that they would BEGIN to sprout, but would not fully grow because of all the stuff the potatoes are treated with to prevent early sprouting.

Just because they sprout in a week after some people buy them doesn't mean that much without knowing how long ago they were pulled from the dirt. Also the temperature they are stored at has a lot to do with when they will sprout.
Have you ever eaten wild Alaskan or Colorado River salmon and fish farm stock at the same time, without knowing which was which? Were they prepared in the same way? By the same chef?

Yes, there probably are differences that you could detect in a blind taste-test. But given the positive affect associated with the names -- "Colorado River Rock Star Javascript-Guru Salmon" -- I wouldn't be surprised if most of the difference in flavor is printed on the menu.
I've never understood the fact that there are just so many of these things. Doesn't todo.txt get you 90% of the way there?
Always interesting how blog posts critical of Spolsky always create so much chatter here....or, almost always. If you happen to include Paul Graham as a target in the same blog post as Spolsky (Blogs Are Godless Communist Bullshit), it seems people here aren't as interested in the article for some reason. Funny that.
Homogenized milk? I haven't heard that one before.
Where oh where did this thread go oh so wrong..
It's basically the old aphorism that you don't want to know how the sausage is made. Dig even mildly deep in most things that humans do and you'll find objectionable things.
SHIZZLE this is cool!
2. Corn-Fed Beef

The expert: Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms and author of half a dozen books on sustainable farming

This screams conflict of interest.
No, but if it's anything like the difference in free-range chicken and factory-farmed chicken, you would have to be blindfolded and your mouth scoured to not be able to tell the difference (free-range chicken not only looks different - it's leaner, the fat is marbled into the meat and not in thick sheathes around it, it's a yellowish color instead of sickly translucent pink, it tastes different, and its texture is different).
This is an interesting topic, but a very unscientific article. I wish more people read Innumeracy or Taleb.

> A recent comprehensive study conducted by the USDA and researchers from Clemson University found that compared with corn-fed beef, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E, omega-3s, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), calcium, magnesium, and potassium; lower in inflammatory omega-6s; and lower in saturated fats that have been linked to heart disease.

Grass-fed beef is higher than corn-fed beef in vitamin E. How much higher? 101 is higher than 100, but in most cases it doesn't make a difference.

This article is full of innumeracy like that.
High Performance Web Sites: Crockford, webhosting, online dating, JSON, alert
No it doesn't. He's not saying 'work yourself to death'. He's saying: 'Behave as if every decision you make, and everything you do will directly impact your companies ability to continue to exist'.

That's how any good entrepreneur behaves, because in all likelihood it's true.
Know any Canadians working in Silicon Valley?
Cletus isn't his real name anyway - it's William Shields.
Indeed.

Aside from that, Polyface is awesome. David Suzuki had a chapter about it in /Good News for a Change/.
It seems to work well, but I wish there was a '<<'/'>>' button for moving back/ahead a week. Clicking through 7 times is aggravating when you just want to see or plan your next week.
FTC: Virtual Worlds Still Showing Kids Sex, Violence
Additionally if someone promoted themselves as "I have X score on SO" it would worry me.

You have stated this twice, but the reason why this should invoke worry seems to have been left as an exercise to the reader. Perhaps there is some sort of underlying assumption you make about someone pimping their SO score that I am not making?

Help me understand why this should worry me. There are plenty of good questions and good discussion that I've seen on SO, and the reputation people have earned has seem more often deserved than not. I don't think a good SO reputation deserving quite the heated bandwagon snarking this article produced.
All jobs have horror stories. People like to share them. A pizza delivery driver's horror stories are forgettable, but an air traffic controller's are not.
Same here. Way to destroy your own credibility, National Organic Standards Board. I care a lot about 'food integrity' and sustainability, but it really bothers me that the most vocal activists spout this kind of pseudoscience.
Also, CS experts are the ones least likely to trust eVoting machines. And doctors are more likely than the general public to support naturopathic medicine.

I suspect it's a corollary of the Fundamental Attribution Error.
i think the names of the top 5, 10, or 20 designers aren't public because they are busy working on uis instead of promoting themselves on the web. it's all a matter of opinion. a lot of the people mentioned below have 1-2 things under their belt, excepting some of the more seasoned folks like bowman, vinh, and miner. the reality is no one person is responsible for a great ui. it's a confluence of talent. the only reason you know about any of these products is because the talent of multiple individuals produced it.
I take it from your tone, and from the first line of your response, that you think "design and marketing" is nonsense.

No, I'm a big fan of design and find marketing very interesting. What I think is that your comment is full of pseudo-design nonsense with infomercial-style marketing, which is why I put "design and marketing" in quotes. It's not real design and marketing, it's some kind of cheap knockoff.

You use vaguely negative terms to describe existing equipment ("legacy", "homogenized amalgamation of units", that new devices don't "fit in" with) and vaguely positive terms to describe what you're promoting ("all-in-one").

Your argument is vapid nonsense, it reads like a Snuggie informercial.
Olive oil that is going to have a health benefit is also going to have a low smoke point. If you can make good popcorn with your olive oil then that is a signal to you that the oil is over-refined and has almost no health benefit whatsoever. Popcorn kernels need to reach ~360 F to pop and the pan should be in the 400-475 range for best results while virgin olive oil will smoke at 370 or so (less for unrefined) and heavily refined oil can make it to the low 400s before smoking. If the oil has hit its smoke point that you can be certain that you are starting to lose the polyphenols that provide most of the health benefits of olive oil.
Clock indeed does start ticking. I remember some patent lawyers I talked to during college saying you had a year after disclosure to get your application together. The sooner the better, obviously.
down-modders either didn't get that far or they don't like spoilers.
I have, but it's not a common argument. Homogenization forcefully changes a lot of the natural chemical structure of the milk (especially concerning the globules of cream), making the flavor more bland and the shelf life longer.
SIMILE Timeplot is the biggest one I know of
http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/

We use it in our metrics site. Doesn't look quite as nice as this, and we had to hack in zooming / drag range selection and a few other things.

I'm certainly interested in evaluating replacing it with this.

The biggest thing we have with Timeplot that I don't see here are event markers. On the demo page linked above, if you click on one of those pink areas, you'll get a little popout that you can use to display useful information about a particular event point or range.
...or use curl
"All technology is military technology."

In what sense? Would you care to elaborate on that?
The Most Entrepreneur-Friendly States
GQL: Geospatial query language for Google Maps
Swift Silent Deep : A Ski Film about the Jackson Hole Air Force.
Evaluation Of Factors Influencing Aging
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Home Page
Amyloid: Junk That Builds Up Between the Cells
Top Five Annoying Coworkers