skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few details are a little off, but mostly correct. Excess consumption of carbohydrates does not cause a sympathetic stress response. Cortisol (the primary adrenal stess hormone) is actually stimulated by hypo-glycemia.

The carbs do account for metabolic syndrome (a somewhat out-of-fashion term for the prelude to type 2 diabetes mellitus). The carbs do account for excess body fat. There are a lot of causes of fatty liver. Fructose is a particular problem because it bypasses the pancreas's natural insulin response, which collaborates with grehlin and other hormones to induce satiety. Better to simply say fructose, more than other carbs, contributes to the obesity problem.

As for the addiction issue . . . there's some evidence that carbs actually lower serum dopamine concentration, though regional concentrations in the brain may vary differently, and are likely more important. Dopamine usually spikes after satisfying and addictive urge. So addiction is probably not the right analogy.

I alluded to what I believe is a better model in the first paragraph: fructose eludes the satiety response. So you become hungry at the sight of food (the cephalic phase of gustation), and even though you eventually become satieted, the calories derived from fructose didn't contribute to the natural negative feedback relationship.

Here's a somewhat simplified feedback diagram I made on the issue, which reflects the review and feedback of Dr Todd Berstain at University of Iowa
http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/2006/12/nutritional_model.htm...

The movie King Corn does a good job of explaining the economics (http://www.kingcorn.net/), and it just so happens that the corn breeds we have lead to a lot of fructose.

If you plot obesity rate over time from 1900 to now, I think you'll see a significant change in the US obesity curve around the time Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, changed the focus of farm policy toward corporate monoculture.
Have a Productive Holiday Season
Uncritical regurgitation of a press-release, and similar results could be achieved with open source distributed systems and message queues on stock-hardware.
The Best Way to Solve a Problem: Give Up
found this explanation from steve yegge:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

"Shit's Easy Syndrome".

You know. As in, shit's easy. If it's easy to imagine, then it's easy to implement. Programming is just turning imagination into reality. You can churn through shit as fast as the conscious mind can envision it. Any programmer who can't keep up is an underperformer who needs to be "topgraded" to make room for incredible new college hires who can make it happen, no matter what "it" happens to be, even if they have to work 27 hours a day, which of course they can because by virtue of being new college hires, they have no social lives and no spouses or significant others, and they probably smoke a lot of crack from being in the dorms so they can stay awake for weeks at a time.
No idea, reasonable questions, but I don't see much redeeming about simply swapping data sets mid-graph.
Agreed, I've had email since I can remember and I'm only 21. Aside from them getting lost from formats, I have never deleted a genuine email.

Even with a piss poor search engine, it's better than my computer-dependent brain's attempt at memory. I've flat-out given up on remembering many things, I either have a note pad and pen or they end up on google Docs so I can retrieve them anywhere. (Edit: All I need is a good smartphone plan and Google Docs and Gmail can flat-out replace my need to remember anything)
We're being asked to believe that starting around 1960 tree rings "suddenly" no longer reflected local temperatures, so we shouldn't rely on them after 1960.

Doesn't this also imply that looking backward tree rings might be untrustworthy any earlier than some starting date? That in fact tree rings might work for a while, then vary for a while, then work again? How can anybody honestly claim that SOME tree ring evidence is usable and SOME is not -- and they know exactly which is which?

My bet would be the thermometers are wrong and the tree rings right. See, e.g.,

http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=831
I'm not necessarily attempting to justify any data-cooking whatsoever, but why is it such a big deal? I mean, the climate "skeptics" do it all the time and it hardly makes the news.

We're never going to have a decent public discourse on this issue until both sides are honest with the public. Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't see this happening any time soon.
The thing is that upon that argument, we move from "blatant data-cooking" to "disagreement over scientific methods".
Confirming Passwords Is Annoying: Is There a Better Way?
A good answer is something that gets you to the right order of magnitude that would be absolutely correct if your assumptions are correct. For example, the number of piano tuners in New York:

So there are eight million people in NYC. Let's say that each household is two people, on average. So four million households. Because NYC is crowded, not many people have pianos in their homes -- let's say one in fifty. So 80,000 pianos. Let's double that to account for the schools and concert halls, so 160,000 pianos. On average, let's say a piano is tuned once every other year. So each year, there are 80,000 tunings.

A piano has 88 strings, and let's say a trained tuner could tune about two per minute, so a piano takes forty-five minutes to tune. If the piano tuner knows where he's going, and makes appointments accordingly, let's say it takes another forty-five minutes to get from one appointment to the next. So ninety minutes is one piano tuning. One tuner works 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week, so 2000 hours, or 1333 tunings. So 80,000 tunings / 1333 tunings per tuner = 60 tuners in NYC.

Of course, that assumes each tuner works full-time. If we assume there are part-time tuners, that number only goes up. I'd round to 100.

You see, the point isn't to get the exact number; the point is to show that you can figure out impossible problems.
Google Set To Map The World And Push GPS Makers
Free Apps: A Collection Of Apps We're Most Thankful For
I believe I hit 1 Hyneman in the midst of winter last year, and I must say I never felt the chilling touch of the winter blizzards. I'm presently at 1 centiHyneman and I have to say, it's isolative effects are certainly not sufficient.

I also believe I rank at ~70 Frinks, although I wouldn't even hit a femptoWheaton on a Weatonometer.
The relaxation was real, even if the cause was a placebo.

I believe this is the only time in the history of HN when it won't be rude to say . . . yawn
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm not a British citizen so my understanding of the nature of publicly funded work may be a bit different, but if they are colluding to change the results of a study paid for with public monies and destroy evidence requested by an official inquiry, isn't that sufficient cause for criminal charges? The coordinated aspect of their fraud -- exemplified in the leaked emails -- adds a damning, worrisome aspect to the whole affair.

On a sociological level, this is a very dangerous situation. The impact of human endeavor and pollution on global climate is almost impossible to judge on a local personal level, so the public must have faith in the scientists we elect to study this problem.

Criminal charges would send a strong, immediate signal to scientists in all areas of research: check your personal opinions at the door when processing data. We are all human but if we allow this kind of thing to creep into all areas of research we risk undermining the very scientific underpinnings of our modern secular approach to public policy and, ultimately, the governance of our natural resources.

Scientific research must remain balanced.

As an aside: the people behind the economic crisis are not in jail, but they should be. Just because they have so far escaped the reach of justice doesn't mean we should lower our standards for other blatant crimes just because they are of the white collar variety.
The Other Education
Currently maternity leave is exchangeable by law in Canada, so it's not really a question of who takes it, but it's a question of how much you can take and where to distribute it.

IMHO the only negotiating factor on whether the mother takes maternity leave or whether the father takes it (likely after the baby is on formula) is income. If the mother makes a considerable amount more than the father, the logical step is for the father to take the maternity leave meaning the household has a greater net income when it has greater expenses. There's no sense struggling to make bill payments, and increase stress on a relationship over money issues.
Nice try, finance guys. 3 hours in a small room with "an asshole" doesn't sound like fun, but it's still not nearly as challenging as an interview at Google or Apple (I've interviewed at both). Those companies require 6 to 10 hours of grueling interviews and the real questions are much more difficult than the ones listed in the previous Business Insider article on the topic (at least for programmers). They couldn't list typical technical questions in that article because 99% of their readership wouldn't even understand them.

I've never been a fan of this kind of blind arrogance in the finance industry. I hoped the recession would at least have some effect on that, but it probably won't. Engineers don't have nearly enough power in this society.
There's a world of difference between "believing in God affects our brains" and "HOW GOD CHANGES YOUR BRAIN".
Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk
We just need a control group measurement and we'll have a scientific study relating to the effect of pregnancy on decision making.
Algae Could Be the Key to Ultra-Thin Biodegradable Batteries
Blacks have a higher chance of diabetes, should a business be allowed to not employ blacks because they drive up the costs on businesses to provide benefits to its employees?

Your argument is asinine. Men and women are unable to choose their gender, just like they are unable to choose the colour of their skin, thus it is the logical conclusion that neither should benefit from a choice they did not make.
Here's an article to ponder: http://www.thestar.com/business/cleanbreak/article/729339--h....
Yeah, one of them will sell more books.
If, first, we could rid the world of the many many sites out there that actually make you type your email or username twice, the world would be vastly improved. Not that the article isn't interesting.
I love CGI, DBI. I can write my own SQL. I don't need an ORM. What modules do you suggest for developing web apps using Perl. Mason or Template Tool kit or something else.
Then we were crawling for different purposes - imagine that! :)
The short of it is when a Business man comes in and says "Can you build this facebook clone with integrations to our CRM, shits easy. See you in a week."
it's a term I lifted from steve yegge's [long-winded] software blog (RIP) - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
Dreamhost sucks because shared hosting sucks. When someone detonates a bomb on your server, everyone on that server is affected. This isn't Dreamhost's fault though, that's a problem with most shared hosting providers. Otherwise, you get what you pay for, you can bitch about it, but it's not necessarily Dreamhost being bad.
Not to pick nits, but could you elaborate on how you manage 20 unix servers with a managed host?
Why does it always have to be low-paying? I was hired at a start-up and was paid about 15% higher than any other job I'd seen with my experience and skill-set. The increases were good and the stress wasn't unreasonable. We went from a 5-man team to a 80-person team until the company was sold to one of the biggest companies in the world (after about 5 years). My boss (who'd started the start-up retired a multi-millionaire an 45). I never got rich on it, but none of us employed there were ever paid badly, and he even made sure that we got very good retention bonuses during the buy-out. Perhaps my experience was unusual, but I wonder if more start-ups respected their workers enough to put a higher value on them if their companies wouldn't do better. There were none of us in that company that wouldn't have done anything (legal that is) that our boss asked of us, because he treated us with respect.
I follow AI quite a lot and I'm curious if there is much talk about the future of memristor and brain emulation within the project seeing as a hardware variable analog would seem the ideal medium for such things. I know when this technology came out AI was what first came to mind.

Working for the Blue Brain Project would be my dream job as a programmer/engineer. I'm curious how you came about your internship? I'm desperately looking for a challenge and this type is research would definably be my first choice.
It may tend to have different effects if paternity leave is available state or country wide. Then social norms may begin to change. See, for example, Iceland:

"…if you are in a job the state gives you nine months on fully paid child leave, to be split among the mother and the father as they so please. ‘This means that employers know a man they hire is just as likely as a woman to take time off to look after a baby,’ explained Svafa Grönfeldt, currently rector of Reykjavik University, previously a very high-powered executive. ‘Paternity leave is the thing that made the difference for women’s equality in this country.’"

http://economicwoman.com/2008/05/21/human-development-and-pa...
The reason it is societies problem, is because society doesn't want to pay higher taxes so the government forces the burden on to companies who can feel free to lower its employees wages across the board to cover maternity and sick leave expenses.

I know in France parental leave is paid primarily through social insurance (IE the government) because the French have little problem in paying for services they want. The US is not the world, please do not base your judgements of the way parental leave works on the way it works in the US.
Potters For Peace | Using sawdust and clay to make safe drinking water locally
Here's my question, to anyone that knows: is the data set in question the only data set that the (alleged, I suppose) warming trend is observable in?

Or is this merely a nitpick at one particular set of data, while other independent ones exist that were generated in different ways?

I ask because in fight the over evolution, a lot of fuss has been made over a few very minor results that are seen as vulnerable in order to try to get people to ignore the big picture, which is clear as day (and doesn't depend at all on the individual results being picked at). While I realize not all AGW skeptics are anti-evolution, there's a big enough overlap to wonder if the same tactics or delusions might translate over...perhaps that's a cynical thought, but conservatives have earned no benefit of the doubt as regards scientific matters, so please forgive my prior bias in favor of the mainstream scientists - in every scientific field that I have personal experience in, the mainstream scientists these days are generally solid and honest, and certainly never fraudulent.

If this is really the only data set that shows a warming trend, then that's a lot more worrisome.
Companies are not charities. Giving out benefits to people not producing value is very bad for them.

Turning companies into charities is a terrible idea, because it is companies who are the ones who fund the charities, in the end. Forcing them to become charities leads to the effects described in the article, where a company is more reluctant to hire a woman in the first place due to the potential expenses they may end up with. Something has to be generating wealth, if you want to spread the wealth around; be very careful about directly fiddling around with companies. You can't necessarily let them do whatever they want, either... I'm saying, be careful. Some people reach for simplistic regulations almost by instinct, but you really need to be careful here, because if you don't consider second-order effects, your simple answers will end up hurting, not helping. Extending a lot of benefits to men will just "equalize" the reluctance to hire.

It's a hard problem. I don't have a solution to offer. I just know some of the solutions being offered are bad ones. Showering people with benefits is fine and dandy as long as you only consider the first-order effects, but reality doesn't stop there.
A Critical Analysis of the Google Story
The ancient manmade soil that covers at least 6000 km²
Advertising's one part to establishing a brand, but it isn't everything. Didn't the Flip video recorder take off without much advertising? (Of course it has a lot of advertising now.)

I like the litl's name and website, but I'm not going to bet on whether it has broad appeal. But if it does, if it's high quality, I could see it selling well, once the price goes down a bit.
I think the main (and almost the only) reason to have distinct string type is performance, not for the ease of programming. Many string operations are useful as a general list operations as well, including regular expression matcher. (Note: Some people emphasize importance of O(1) access of string access by index, but using integer index is also a performance hack. If search operations can return some way to point to the substring you don't need integer indexes.)

Another minor reason is to display; people prefer reading sequence of characters in a string syntax. If you have a statically typed language it is easy to display a list of chars in string syntax instead of list syntax. For a dynamically typed language with heterogeneous lists, it can be a performance penalty to check whether a list entirely consists of characters or not at runtime. So, in a sense, it is also about a performance. (Note: Having a syntax for strings has nothing to do with having distinct type for strings. The string syntax can be just a syntax sugar.)

But performance is important, of course. One thing very common in string (a list of characters) but not very common in general lists is concatenation. To be precise, lazy language programmers use list concatenation without a guilt, but eager language programmers tend to avoid it since it may cause unnecessary copying of lists. So for the eager evaluation languages, it makes sense to have a string type that has very cheap concatenation operation (e.g. using tree representation) internally.
China's Stunning Lack Of Brands
An interesting article by Dr. Curry: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currydoc/Curry_BAMS87.pdf

title: Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis That Greenhouse Warming Is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity
I read the same articles, and this does seem to have potential in multiple fields - reducing carbon emissions, potentially increasing soil quality and hence crop yields (although I do believe this is specific to certain types of soil) - which may indirectly reduce the requirement for some types of fertilizer.

And one of the amazing things of the "terra preta" of the amazon is that it seems to regenerate itself - unlike modern fertilizing which is generally required annually - this may indeed make it a disruptive technology from ~2500 years ago!
No.

One of them explicitly suggests that God exists and undertakes a non-scientific point of view while the other does not.
Ask HN: Any startups looking for a free marketing guy?
I'm in my last year of school and looking to help out a startup to gain some more experience.
You seem to have begun by asserting yourself as an exception and implying a generalization; please quote your source for suggesting that the majority of people who argue about climate change have conducted thorough and extensive research on the topic and come to their positions as a result of careful reasoning and weighing of evidence.
The code is pretty damning, but before I get really outraged, a bit of context is always useful.

Has anyone figured out where this graph has been used?
How to Think About Science
direct links to audio interviews here: http://condeve.blogspot.com/2009/01/temp.html
I simply don't confirm the password (or email). The overwhelming majority of people are going to type it properly, as substantiated by my failed login stats (less than 1%). For the remaining 1%, I'll concentrate on recovering from their error easily rather than depressing conversion among ALL users by making the signup form two fields longer. (And, ahem, if all of them were to get frustrated and abandon their trial, well, 1%.)

Edited to add: Context for why that number is so low: The vast majority of my trial users are up-or-out within 3 days, and since I default to setting a 2 week "remember me" cookie, typically only my most interested users ever have to type their password ever again.

By the way, you would be astonished how many users I have think they cannot type their school email address from their home computer and vice versa.
Performance and ease of use are the main reasons why strings should be first class citizens. Strings are one of the most used data structures and most of today's popular languages have very good support for them, encodings of them and manipulation of them. C does not have that good support for them. Ignoring strings and labeling them as "a list of integers" is a step backward, since a lot of the data we have today is textual and will continue to be textual in the future.
"Many string operations are useful as a general list operations as well, including regular expression matcher."

Except this falls apart when dealing with Unicode -- if your regex wants to match "ä", for example, treating strings as lists means you'll miss at least one possible way of representing that in Unicode (it may be a single code point, or it may be two -- an "a" with a combining diaresis).
I think this is a great breakthrough for hospitals. But for consumers there should be a bit more caution.

Parents always think that they should keep their children super clean etc. but the natural development of the immune system requires some exposure to pathogens.

For example the hygiene hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Superbugs like MRSA are predominantly found at hospitals causing nosicomial infections as well as in populations with bad hygiene like the homeless. This device is probably best used in those areas.

In terms of frequent use by the general population I think we need to be a bit careful. That said I would probably get one just to say I've got a super plasma germ killer.
I know this is my own blog, and I appreciate the interest, but this is a dupe from just 53 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861275
A hot-enough campfire will also create plasma. I wonder if campfire plasma kills bacteria and viruses on people sitting around it.
I'm not really interested, but I think other people will have the same question I do, so I'll ask.

As a someone planning on launching a product very soon. What can you do for me?
A plastic bag uses very little oil (a quarter teaspoon or so) and some of them can even be made from renewable resources. The real problem is that paper bags are bulky. It takes a lot of energy to move those bags from where they are manufactured to where they are consumed. For the energy cost to get that stack of paper bags to your local grocer you could probably make and transport a hundred plastic bags.
computers exist to serve humans, and strings are the best way for them to communicate to their masters..
Ripped shamelessly from the comments on the post, I thought this was pretty neat:

http://foxxtrot.github.com/Chroma-Hash/

However, I don't see how it's more effective than a callout or alert noting "these don't match" ... just less annoying and way sexier.
I'd be interested in hearing more about what you're looking for, and offering. On gmail, I'm ebeland.
shoot me an email - lsternlicht@gmail.com