> Research suggests that weight may largely be regulated by biology, which helps determine the body's "set point,"

So where did all the fatties come from? They didn't used to be here.

This is ridiculous. There are big, obvious changes in diet and exercise levels since the 70s that have correlated well with rising obesity.

Let's put it this way: I got heartily sick of the Twitter doesn't scale posts, and some of them contained morsels of technical substance within the speculation. Any asshole can write a blog post saying "Lookit! _____ sucks!!" It's just as tiresome for Cuil as it is for Vista.

Rare is the person who offers some insight into what could or should be done to compete with Google. Even rarer are the people who are busy hacking together their own ideas for how to do it right. That's the very best way to say something else is wrong: demonstrate how you think it ought to be done.

Roger Ebert has an excellent book called "Your Movie Sucks," it contains nothing but zero, one-half, and one star reviews. It's an excellent book because it shows the challenge of writing something more informative and/or entertaining than "Your Movie Sucks."

And of course, Roger has to write those reviews, because it's his job to review movies as they're released. Bloggers are under no such pressure, they can write what they choose, when they choose. Therefore, I hold bloggers to an even higher standard of writing "Lookit! _____ sucks!!"

Since bloggers have the option of saying nothing, they shouldn't say anything unless it is worthy of being read.

Um... I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but this isn't that insightful. It even has a name: this is called a "high pass filter". Over time, it seeks to a constant input level (the "DC bias" in the parlance) while allowing the instantaneous signal excursions (strictly: their derivative) to pass through. It's a useful gadget in both analog electronics and in software for tricks like this one.

It is not, however, an "averager". The output depends on the order in which the inputs are delivered, it seeks to an average only given constant input. Think of the output for a continuously alternating set of 1's and 0's, vs giving all the zeros first then all the ones.

There should not be two exactly same posts on the web. Put it in another way, all posts on the internet should be distinct.

Forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

Vista took 6 years starting out as a "complete rewrite" with ambitious features that were pared away one by one to leave little more than a facelift for Windows XP. Don't get me wrong - I hope Microsoft is able to pull this off - but I don't hold out high hopes.

Nice to see something positive mentioned about the project. As hackers, it's our job to cheer on projects like this and not focus on the parent company.

Good luck to the team playing with the concept.

Yeah, sarcasm is cool.

Whatever Joel (and the Starbucks employees mentioned) might think, the "expediters" do actually speed things up. Asking people what they want BEFORE they get to the head of the line means that by the time they arrive they've figured out what they want -- rather than weighing their options at the one point when they are in the critical path.

All these posts showing bad search results on Cuil are getting ridiculous. We all get it. Cuil sucks. Big time. The results are, at best, of dubious quality. The pictures don't match. The launch was a complete and utter failure.

How long are we going to beat this dead horse? For three days it seems like there has been at least one link to some random jackass blog with screenshots of crappy search results on the front page of HN. They're not even funny like the screenshots of questionably placed Google ads that you see on Fark sometimes. They're just inaccurate results.

I'm beginning to think Cuil is going to be the CueCat of this millenium... The hyped up startup that fails miserably and everyone talks about for years afterward. Is anyone else tired of this?

It seems to me though that posting something like XKCD is simply for getting Karma. It's not like the people who read it don't already check every monday,wednesday and friday morning... or is that just me?

It's easy to find holes in the analogy. But part of his point is that this is an easier problem to fix, because the scarcity is artificial. If we could legislate more oil into existence, that would be an easy problem to solve, too.

I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though. It doesn't seem to be the limiting factor in many activities.

"I don’t like to admit it, but even I am sometimes forced to use virtual machines." Who is this guy?

This is Hacker News. I expect every article to not be "a light read."

Ubuntu surprised the heck out of me. I was fiddling with the Wifi to try to get it to work when I decided I needed to download something. I connected the machine to the router using CAT5, and Ubuntu connected to the internet and figured out what to do for me. All I had to do was to tell it to proceed. Of course, in reality, it just probed the hardware configuration and downloaded a script someone else had figured out, but still, that was way impressive!

Thanks for posting news about Balsamiq here on HN ph0rque. I am quite excited by the RWW review, it's incredible to read about my own company on the #1 blog I read every morning...I still can't quite believe it.