skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At this point I think it is well known that quitting smoking doesn't have much health benefit.

I don't think this is true. In fact, this strikes me as a lie (not an error) on two fronts: there are health benefits, and there are widely believed to be health benefits.

Here's what looks like the official US line: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Tobacco/cessati...

"The immediate health benefits of quitting smoking are substantial"

"Quitting smoking reduces the risk of cancer and other diseases..."

"Quitting smoking substantially reduces the risk of developing and dying from cancer, and this benefit increases the longer a person remains smoke free."

The Australian government (this is an Australian paper being referenced) seems to take a similarly strong line, and has a version of tobacco packaging warnings with the simple tagline "Quitting Will Improve Your Health": http://www.health.gov.au/internet/quitnow/publishing.nsf/Con...

"Quitting smoking at any age has short and long term health benefits. Quitting will reduce the risks for diseases caused by smoking and will help to improve your health in general."

If the government is lying about these facts, then this would be a scandal. But this really isn't the 'scandal' referred to in the title of the paper. From the closing paragraph: "But smoking is really a secondary issue. The primary issue is the integrity of science. This has no use-by date. When the processes of science are misused, even if for what seems a good reason, science and its practitioners are alike degraded."

The point of the paper is the using misleading statistics and cherry-picked data to prove a point, even if this point is certain to be true, even if it can be established by other means, is a scandal. Apologizing for this practice by rationalizing that "everyone knows" only compounds the problem, and makes their point even sharper.
How many successful reasonably known startups run on windows?
I am just curious, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo all run linux. How many do you know use Windows?
On average there are 105 boys born for every 100 girls. I believe it evens out in the end with more boys dying in an early age than girls, but I don't have any hard data on that.
Justin.tv is looking for a Product Designer [SF]
I just mean that I don't see that he was right by definition. That would mean that the world is run by idiots by definition, which is obviously false (that fact, if it is a fact, doesn't follow from the definitions of any of those words).
Ear protection is the obvious answer, and I included it in the options. The other option is the one you might want to believe (free choice of music). The last one is suggested as a what-if alternative. Partly because it's an interesting story (at least the first part about the Mana system is), and partly because if anywhere is going to implement a Mana-like system, Google has the drive to do new weird controlling things, the technical expertise to have a massive central task and employee management system, and a their simplified yet very large server room setup sounds like a good place for that kind of thing to be useful to cut down on skilled worker requirements.

Saying "probably ear protection" is rather missing the point of my post, and getting three upvotes for it suggests that I wasn't at all clear enough.

Point being: imagine the kerfuffle if it turned out he was being guided by an automaton task master using wireless headphones and systemic feedback from many smart sensors in the style of the coming Google power grid monitoring system - picking up a server from repair bay D2 detected, entering the server room detected, sliding a server detected and the server's details taken by RFID'd and putting a new one in, details from RFID, booted and configured and brought online automatically, old server returned and asset tracked.

Google already design their own servers and server rooms, they track power usage and memory errors and disk failures and have kernel modifications to track resource usage by program. It's not that far out, and is the sort of major thing they might do quietly which might only leak out initially by a slightly odd picture or a disgruntled insider comment.
Quoting jokes from popular media is truly the lowest form of humor.
We don't even listen to their message (which is usually "hey, leave us alone pls, kthnxboom")

People do not blow up buildings, crash airliners, and wreck passenger trains because they want to be left alone. They do these things because they want to be feared, or barring that, paid attention to.
Abstract
Updated findings on the relationship between nicotine and depression are presented. Clinical and preclinical research on nicotine use and depression suggests that nicotine may have some properties in common with antidepressants. Updated findings involve the comorbidity of smoking and major depressive disorder (MDD), the influence of depression during withdrawal on failure to quit smoking, the course of MDD without nicotine and the neurobiology of smoking and depression.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/101v75rn12174k61/
Plenty of them are. Here's a datapoint I can contribute:

Lucent in 2001 (yes, a very bad time). I'm 40 (although I look like I'm in my early 20s), making $80K.

My best coworker is a brilliant native of a Caribbean island; he got a EE from a respectable US university and was getting his Masters at night (showed me his MOSIS chip at one point).

For the job we're doing, in his own areas he's as competent and productive as I am. Immigration law requires the company to post his salary; he's making $45K.

If he was just getting paid what I was at my second job, the first one at a market rate, he'd be getting $63K (that's adjusted for inflation, but you should subtract some for higher health care costs (they've risen faster than CPI inflation)) and he'd be worth every penny.

He knew he was being exploited and wasn't happy about it, but it was useful experience and a good path to a Green Card, at least when he signed on (Lucent of course continued its decline and canceled the project we were working on, which was important enough that it canceled their future as well).

The near indentured servitude aspect of the H1-B system is reason enough to seriously reform it ... but as noted, the necessary docility of those who have one is too attractive to too many companies.
I'm a self-interested creature. I tend to stop sharing with the Internet when my expertise gets far enough to the right of the mean that the information flow becomes unidirectional, or near unidirectional.

I doubt I'm alone in that.
There is actually a keyboard based around this theory, though it's a bit pricey ($500, or $700 for one with more features): http://www.c-thru-music.com/cgi/?page=prod_axis-49

Some people love it, though if you have extensive experience with a keyboard then it may actually be counter-intuitive (I learned music on a piano and I still get hopelessly lost on the frets of my bass guitar whenever I try to play something new).
Medicare is more efficient than the overwhelming majority of private insurance companies.

Social Security also has super-low overhead, less than most funds (although lower returns than many funds as well).

The federal government is actually better at pure administration than the majority of private companies, because they're constantly under the threat of getting the axe and have a mandate to do their job rather than take paychecks home. The lower salaries don't hurt, either. (EDIT: by pure administration I mean simple administrations like SS -- money goes in, money goes out, the administration is a miniscule share of the budget. No way a private company provides a service like that without demanding a bigger chunk for themselves)

Lots of problems with the government.. if you're looking for wasted money, I'd suggest looking at military procurement. But pure administration of simple tasks, they actually do pretty well.

If you're ideologically opposed to the existence of even a perfectly run Medicare and SS, of course, that's a different story..
I wasn't sure this was at all newsworthy. Turns out the "newsworthy" part is that they're claiming copyright infringement by a greasemonkey script that plays the game for you automatically.

They got what they wanted because the script creators don't have the resources to fight in court so basically this is a clear-cut case of legal bullying. The claims would not have stood up in court but it would've been expensive to go through the process so the bigger bankroll wins.
Most Bluetooth headsets have their antennas inside, so that they aren't visible.
Quantity may be a difference, but Quality makes me stick with .Net :)
Nope, was a permissions problem.
> I think this is the sort of statement that makes some of us foam at the mouth and gesticulate wildly at well-intentioned TDD proponents. TDD doesn't prove anything of the sort. It proves that the code passed your tests before you made the change and passed them after - which is a very, very different thing from proving the change you made did what you expect.

Would it have helped if the OP had said "made me more confident" instead of "proves"?
Well-Stack Overflow, Serverfault and all the other things Jeff Atwood is involved with runs Windows.
Google Holding Android Press event on Jan 5th- Nexus one?
Without making any claims on my level of "smartness", I will say that I tend to shut down pretty quickly when it becomes apparent that the person I'm "sharing" with is really just more interested in me doing his job for him.
The language may be prettier than HTML but the name looks rather ugly to me. Doesn't sound as bad though :-)
Personally I don't smoke, never have, and consider it an expensive way to gamble with your life. (They might cure cancer, they might invent cloned lungs, are you feeling lucky, punk?)

But truthfully, the reason I wish people would stop smoking is not from altruistic concern for them, and not for any personal fear - I just think it stinks. It's as foul as farting and has much less excuse.

Just stop, please.
I have always wondered why there aren't more visible chemical 'sniffers' in all airports as I've seen at NY's Penn & Grand Central Stations. They're not really in the way and there are specific security protocols in place if one of them go off. iRobot is already producing bomb sniffing bots for the military and I doubt it'd be too hard for the technology to be adapted for airport checkpoints.
Some will say "well their very existence prevented any terrorist from even trying to get a bomb through" which is just as valid as "their very exitence prevented pink elephants from Mars from landing and stomping us all to death."

No, it's not the same. One is plausible, the other is not.
What patent applications can tell us about America's economic prospects.
Why some smart people are reluctant to share? [...] Note: This is about smart people who are not sharing enough. So please don’t generalize this about all smart people.

Easy! Smart people who do not share are not sharing enough by definition.
If those banks weren't absurdly leveraged, the housing bubble would have just been another recession.

And now we've gone from a situation where the banks were absurdly leveraged to a situation where the government is absurdly leveraged, most likely resulting in massive inflation unless a miracle happens. I can't really see how the public sector is doing any better than the private sector here. Nobody seems willing to exercise prudence anymore.
I wonder whether really good startup advice is advice that can only be used a few times. For example, a publicity stunt to market a product will probably only work a few times.

If this is the case, one can understand why people are reluctant to share in this context.
Once this guy, he made a bow and used it to hunt. Then one day, this other guy was like wow, can i use that? So he was like, sure, go ahead.

The new guy was even better at first than the guy who made the bow he practiced all day and night. He dreamed about bow hunting day and night. He shot trees and flowers and deer when people got hungry.

So then, he took the bow back to the builder and said, I'm a real good shot with this bow, let me show you, toss this ball of dirt up in the air. The builder giggled and tossed it as far and as high as he could and the new guy takes out the arrow and before it hits the ground -- he shoots it!

Chuck this rock and I'll show you how to do it. See how it goes uuuuppp and then down? The arrow does that too. If there's wind, you must account for it. Arch your back like the wind blows.

Come with me the bow builder says and I will show you how I make the bow.
Jobs when he visted PARC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK7TQVFSA1Y#t=0m57s
This is an interesting theory. But I tend to be of the school that thinks that there are two kinds of smart people: people that think they are smart and aren't, and people who are smart (but tend to not think so).

The former are usually a result of the Dunning–Kruger effect. In my experience these people think that being smart (competent) makes them special and gives them a kind of power. Thus they don't want to diminish their own power by yielding some of it to other people. The funny thing is that they usually don't actually know anything anyways.

The later are usually a result of what I like to think of as the Socrates effect "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." They believe that what they know isn't worth much because they realize that what they know is a single drop in the ocean of knowledge. They tend not to want to share because they might be embarrassed by the pittance of their knowledge -- even if it's worth quite a bit.

I've found ultimately that sharers of knowledge have overcome their own egos and have dealt with the fear that drives both motivations. In either case they usually expect some kind of reciprocity and openness (but it's not required).
Check out the [SIFT Algorithm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transfo...). It's not exactly what you describe but might give you some ideas.
So, first Nokia sues over some general cell phone technology patents. Then Apple countersues over patents that they specifically developed for the iPhone. Now Nokia suddenly realized that every Apple product ever uses their technology and is counter-counter suing. I wonder how many days it is before Apple realizes Nokia is using Apple technology in every one of their devices ever and counter^3 sues, and how many days after that until they settle.
Or potentially because Islam calls for killing of infidels. Apostasy is punishable by death in Islam. I suppose this is a subset of being feared (believe or you deserve to die) but I think it's worth highlighting.
Open source projects are not someone's baby unless someone claims them as such and takes their development personally. Having a leader on a project is nice, but not all source code needs a leader, and not all projects flounder without a leader. And just because development is stagnant on a popular project doesn't mean that it's floundering either.

It seems that the "official" version is 1.0.1 and is available as a zip file on daringfireball. The license file doesn't say anything about Gruber being against someone else maintaining it, or forking it, or whatever. Nothing is stopping anyone, or everyone, from importing the code into github and people maintaining it there. Considering the recent comments on this submission http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017698 it only makes sense to put it on github, where everyone can contribute or fork and make it easy for control of the conceptually "official" version change hands.
The Case For Vegetarianism & 4 Beverages That Aren't So Great For Your Health
I was smoking a Partagas 1845 while reading the article. I think it made the article more enjoyable.
Right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Ain%27t_Necessarily_So

I'm not sure what crazed style nazi is downvoting you for being informative. It's a common reference.
Nicotine reduces stress, and a low stress life can probably increase your general health.
Web Site Prototype Sketches
Not many, I'm sure, as it's EXTREMELY hard to maintain polyphasic sleep if your life is anything close to what people call "normal." You can barely go to a movie theater. That said, driving does seem a little reckless, at least until you're absolutely sure you're safe to do so.
RGBA — IE Fallback (CSS3)
Welcome to HN:  A refresher course on how to disagree... (2008)
Minor nitpick - the Lacuna is actually on Kindle. Not sure about the other ones.
I haven't looked much at medicare from an accounting perspective, but Social Security is a textbook case of the sort of off-balance-sheet entity that blew up Enron earlier in the decade and some of the banks more recently. SS currently takes in more money than it spends, but the excess is then "borrowed" and spent by the rest of the government. It has tremendous future liabilities but the assets consist of IOUs from the Treasury. If I ran a pension fund like this, the administration could be perfectly efficient in terms of processing incoming and outgoing payments, but I'd still be guilty of conducting a Ponzi scheme. The difference between the government doing this and a private entity doing this is that the government will just change the rules to make the problem go away when they get into trouble, while the administrators of a private entity would go to jail.
As I understand it, the terrorist was the only one in the NWA indident who did not stand up. He sat there while others got out of their seats to try and stop him. How does the policy address this scenario?
You can't force them to play those games; they want to play the games their friends are playing... basically guitar hero
I upvoted and don't know the guy, mainly because I realized I had a site I should post to LinkedIn questions for the same reason.
How would your site be different from "Patients Like Me" where people discuss their medical conditions?

http://www.patientslikeme.com/symptoms/show/1920-obsessive-c...
Docs vs MBAs
WTF is up with the right-justified text? Is this supposed to me arty minimalist cool?

It's stupid. It's a pain in the ass to read.
Based on a variety of things including an statement by my favorite professor, I think it's not so much that smoking is deadly by itself, but smoking and most anything else is, e.g.:

He said smoking in the context of a city's pollution was very bad, that e.g. Kansas wheat farmers had problems related to the wheat farming but were otherwise OK (he was an M.D. and smoked, BTW, took lots of Vitamin A and so on and he'll turn 90 next year...).

It's well established (to my satisfaction, at least) that radon is mostly dangerous in the context of heavy smoking (which after all is where the initial study came from, of uranium miners).

The risks of smoking and lots of things like birth control pills are well established.

I'd also note that there's going to be genetic variability here that will make smoking much worse for some fraction of the population.

(On the other hand, as someone with severe allergies, I'm not entirely unhappy with the results of the US crusade against smoking....)
> The question becomes, though, why are A and B suddenly interlinked? Why was this context not already in place?

Here's an example, roughly taken from a project I did not too long ago (in an imperative language, not a functional language). Suppose you have an e-commerce system. One day, the business decides to start giving out coupons, say for 10% off. Any order can have a 10% off coupon applied to it. All is fine and good, orders now have an optional coupon attribute, you compute order totals in an obvious way, coupons are nicely orthogonal to the rest of the system.

Then some time later, we decide to add free shipping coupons. But, there's a wrinkle: they only apply to ground shipping. Now, you can only add a free shipping coupon to an order with ground shipping; and, also, if the user changes their shipping method, you have to go look to see if they have a discount which now must be removed from the order. Now, two previously independent aspects of order placement and processing are coupled together.

Because this was written in an imperative language and backed with a stateful database store, it was mostly trivial to make the changes required. This scenario is not actually as bad as the situation the OP described, but my feeling is that it would be more difficult to have dealt with in a pure functional environment.

(BTW, this is actually a fairly mild example of the sort of complicated, non-orthogonal rules which come up in e-commerce systems. I picked it not because it was the hardest to translate to a functional paradigm, but because it was easy to explain in a couple paragraphs.)
That's largely because it's hard to care.

Browsers don't halt when fed less-than-good HTML the same way an interpreter/compiler dies when fed bad syntax.
I like "And in regards to Nokia’s accusations, Apple argues that some of Nokia’s patents aren’t valid, and moreover, asserts that even if they were found to be valid, Nokia refuses to license them on 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.'"

Basically - these patents aren't valid, but if they WERE valid they won't let us use them so we copied them and that should be OK. It reminds me of OJ's book - IF I did it, here's how it happened.
I don't mind if the information flow becomes unidirectional for a reasonable amount of time. I usually go by the duration it takes for me to fill in the background information for the underlying idea. When the value of expressing the idea exceeds the time I'm willing to spend on explaining background information, I usually do not share.
How to find iPhone apps the cool kids are using
I was waiting for someone to mention those.

They are not one way. Not in the slightest.

You can turn them around, and they will work unchanged.

They transmit exactly the same amount in both directions.

The only reason they seem to work is that one room is well lit, and the other is dark. So it's hard to see anything from the well lit room.

They are half silvered, so they reflect half, and transmit half. The well lit room then reflects lots of light, but is receiving little light from the dark room.

The dark room reflects little light, but is getting lots from the well lit room.
Right, just like creating Python with C is 'just wrong' if you're going to be writing applications that produce HTML?
The meaning of words on the web: "friends" vs. "connections"
I didn't know about this device. Very cool. I have considered developing an algorithmic software concept based on lattices. This device is a hardware version of what I thought that might look like.

I might as well mention that Robert Fripp's New Standard tuning for guitar is entirely in fifths:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Standard_Tuning

Same side effect of turning seasoned guitarists into beginners, as the tuning is substantially different from other alternate tunings for guitar.
I thought that the following comment (second from the top) on the story was interesting and bared partially repeating below. I'm not saying that the TSA should be issued automatic rifles, just that it's thought provoking:

After that, it was a third metal detector (not x-ray this time) and finally a full on frisk by another representative of the national military. Let me tell you, this was not a friendly pat, pat like what TSA gives you. This was a full on search like I was an enemy prisoner that they were concerned had a knife hidden somewhere on me.

After all of that, they stuck me in a windowless room with all of the other passengers until our flight was ready to board (About 1/2 an hour). There were no shops, no bathrooms, and only one room with men and women with automatic rifles posted at the exits.

What it gave me the impression of was people who had had issues with hijacking and terrorism before and REALLY didn't want it to happen again. People who didn't give a shit if I was inconvenienced or annoyed because they knew that it would be far more of an inconvenience for me if some asshole blew the plane up over the ocean somewhere.
The 14.3% fee is way too high.