sleepdev

Potential for what?

It is only possible to measure fitness for a specific task. Often a trait that would help in one situation will hinder in another.

techstartu.ps reddit.com digg.com

I don't disagree completely. We are talking about completely different things.

I am talking about long term, you are talking about 10 weeks. Yes, you can calculate calories in vs calories out. No, you cannot extrapolate that to determine if Professor Mark Haub will be alive on that diet in 3 years. What is the metabolism of dead?

"For 10 weeks, ..."

For his own health I am glad that he didn't continue the diet much longer. There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any calorie counting:

Stress. Stress can cause sudden weight loss. This weight will come right back if you give your body any time to catch up and yet the effect is significant enough to provide "evidence" for the craziest of dieting fads. Eating debbie cakes for 3 meals a day is going to put some serious stress on your body.

Metabolism is not constant. Michael Phelps eats more for breakfast than I do in a week, and yet he is in much better shape. The scary thing about junk food is not so much the empty calories, but more how it affects your metabolism in the long term. If you draw out this sort of a diet for 2 or 3 years, then I would expect that not only could you give yourself diabetes, but also you will start craving more and needing less. That is when weight gain will start to become a serious problem.

I am not sure how applicable it is to an introductory text, but I would be interested in learning more about the internals of compilation and linking. What is the minimal necessary amount of work that needs to be done to interact with existing C libraries (header files, ELF format, and how that all fits together).

This keeps a playlist of what you liked and uses that to recommend videos, allowing you to personalize and filter down the videos to only what you are interested in.

Example: Searching for "haskell" will give you videos about people named haskell as well as the programming language. After adding a few example videos to your list, you will get only results related to the programming language. The idea is to start to combat the incredible amount of noise in search results: believe it or not, not everyone enjoys rick rolls and gophers.

Brian Chesky, of AirBnB, gave a talk at startup school that touched on this topic: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

His advice was that "you always focus on supply first... then you shift to demand." Here that would mean to try to grab producers before promoters.

The idea is that producers are more willing to list their movies on your site, no harm done, but promoters won't be interested unless you have some movies for them to choose from.

After having you point out that fact, I had to do a search on the document source for "<a" to find the 6 point font footer at the bottom! I hardly expect anyone to do this much work looking through my job applications...

For me, self submissions are a large part of the reason why Hacker News is interesting. A lot of smart people come here to share their thoughts. Without that we would only have the Times blogs which aren't hard to find in the first place.

I am by no means representative of the Hacker News community, but I would guess that other people would say something similar.

I've always thought of dynamic programming as memoized computations + ordering. Maybe memoization isn't quite as efficient as dynamic programming but it feels like it is halfway there.

Good point. Memoization is a one off that I also find myself using quite regularly.

"Coolest" algo I've ever developed would have to be parser combinators. Coolest graph algorithm: finding maximal cliques and independent sets + approximation algorithms for these.

Tangentially related question: how are real numbers formally defined?

I remember that integers are usually defined in terms of successors: Succ 1 = 2. But this doesn't help for real numbers because they can't really be enumerated?

Synopsis: if you are in the textile business, then middle managers are a good idea.

More than a few startup ideas here. Certainly a big problem, but also a sticky one.

Wouldn't the opposite of a meritocracy be an entitlement society? Somehow putting the whole emphasis on acceptance into "gatekeeper" schools strikes me more as the latter.

I like python + Tornado web server because I am a minimalist. If you want to learn how the web works from the top down & bottom up, this is a great framework to start and end with.

Tornado, nginx, MySQL.

Watch TV in a foreign language. There are lots of ways that this could be entertaining, and if done correctly you can pick up a language in your leisure time.