skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
India, China and the Arabian peninsula take one hundred million sesterces from our empire
per annum at a conservative estimate: that is what our luxuries and women cost us. For
what fraction of these imports is intended for sacrifices to the gods or the spirits
of the dead?
— Pliny, Historia Naturae 12.41.84. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations#Establishment)

Like the rest of the world, the Romans wound up using specie when importing luxury goods from south east Asia and China. Aside from possibly glass production, there were not many goods produced in the Mediterranean that could survive transit down the Red Sea, around Arabia, and across to India on the monsoon, or overland, which were significantly higher-quality than what could be produced locally. Whereas silk, spices, incense and the like are high-value, low-bulk items, which can travel well, and are unique products not found in the Mediterranean.
Whole lot of speculation in this article. I would guess more people know about the placebo effect in the U.S., than they did 20 years ago? Twenty years ago, we didn't question the efficacy of these drugs? Everyone I know now is very leery of any claims by drug companies, and their Wonder Drug.

"For companies trying to develop treatments, one remedy might be to compare new drugs against their best competitors instead of against placebo — or to go back to conducting smaller, shorter trials."

Lets Not do this. Lets continue to look for drugs that actually work on pain. The last thing we need is another drug that works slightly better than an ineffective pain drug that squeaked past the FDA? In the mean time there's a whole bunch of patients who are in extreme pain, and doctors are afraid to prescribe opioids. Doctors know opioid type medications work, but are afraid to prescribe them for a lot of reason, but mainly they don't want the
FDA breathing down their backs.

My best friend died a horrid natural death a few years ago. He was in bad shape, but the doctors couldn't find anything really wrong with him besides being very old, and had a very bad case COPD. He was in constant daily pain.

I bought him to "the best pain clinic in San Francisco". They wouldn't alleviate his pain? They offed to cut some nerve, but wouldn't medicate him. (To that clinic, if you are going to stereotype patients, and offer no help--Close down? You are of no service to anyone.)

I brought him back to his apartment, and offered my support every night. All I could do is cook for him, and offer hope. He died in his sleep a few months later. Those few months he were hell. All he had was ibuprofen, and some other safe/no potential to abuse drug. We looked into Hospice, but his doctors said he wasn't sick enough. Sometimes I think they have just seen too much, and common sense is lost?

My point is I have seen too many people die in extreme pain, including my father who was under medicated by Hospice.

I got off track. This is about painkiller trials, and placebo. I just don't want ineffective pain medication on the market.

I am shocked this group of researchers are trying to blame patients. It's your ineffective new medications? Lets not run off to some third world country and get "positive" results, or rely on a bunch of smaller studies that can be buried--if not satisfactory?. (By the way, this is going on as we speak, and has been for years. They offshore these double blind studies to the lowest bidder, and surprise, "Our drug worked better than we could have predicted!". Present their wonder drug to the FDA, and start the Marketing Party.

Right now, a drug only has to be slightly better than placebo in order to get past the FDA. That statistical difference is so small, in so many instances; I think if some of you knew just how slightly your drug works better than placebo, you might just go off the medication.

MY father died 11 years ago, and I still have weekly nightmares of his absolute misery. His last words to me were "Son when will this end?". If I could do it over, I would have gone to the bad part of my county, and bought him Heroin.
Yes, but I already have a lawyer, and I want to be polite. Police have plenty of ways to hassle you if they think you're a dick. And they'll reach that conclusion quickly and arbitrarily.

I heard a story about Larry Ellison pulled over by the police in the parking lot of Oracle. Apparently he said "Call my lawyer", handed them his lawyer's card, and walked into the building.
It's not just you. The video, while beautiful, is completely superfluous and distracting from the target market. In the video, nice people use a cool smartphone to take pictures. One edits them on their computer. People are enjoying what they are doing. I had to guess, based on the fact that the camera appears to have multiple (independent?) lenses, that some kind of computational method was combining the image data, and then returning to the site revealed that this is basically the case.

Many questions remain unanswered. Will I be able to fully edit the photos on my phone, or do I need to get a Mac and some custom software to really take advantage of this system? Will the software on the device be open? I'd like insurance against the unfortunate case that you make a nice device but then go out of business. Will the battery be replaceable? A non-replaceable battery in a $1600 handheld device is a really nasty design decision.

In short, really nice, and I would love to drop $200 right now to reserve one, but I'm afraid that I won't be able to undo the reservation if it turns out that the feature set of the phone doesn't match up with my practical needs. Marketing: you are losing sales right now. Go back to the beginning and explain to us why this is a good device.
> In the face of metahuman science, humans have become metascientists.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a...
Even during the late empire, nearly a thousand years from its founding, many Romans believed that they were still living according to the laws laid down by the 12 tablets.

Food for thought in light of the common belief that we still live by the Constitution.

On the other hand don't forget that a favorite Roman pastime was to watch live fish cooking in a glass bowl.
Mogees: Transform anything into a musical instrument
This is, ofcourse, all based on whether a proper inert replacement for the drug-to-be-tested has been found.
I believe so as well. They've switched focus and are going in the right direction now.

A few years ago I actually advised everyone to not use Microsoft's products. Every single product was subpar (Windows, Windows Phone, their laptops etc). Today, I'm happy to advise Surface Pro, Windows Phone, etc to anyone. They're striving more for innovation (e.g. Surface Pro, Surface Book), which is cool and will bring them success.
nice, but one thing the logo looks a bit rubbish on my macbook pro retina
I was at a conference and sitting in an open space about leadership when I came to an epiphany: 'You hear of organisations that are management heavy all the time, but you never hear of organisations being leadership heavy'.
Is Robinhood Brokerage running out of money
I am researching to open a trading account and find these articles

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/020515/how-robinhood-makes-money.asp

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Robinhood-investings-burn-rate
Do you update it to follow the latest standards or is it early 2003-ish C++?
There was a pretty good interview with their CTO a few months ago on Imaging Resource. Much more technical than what you see on the site, also gives a glimpse on what they were thinking when they were developing this.

http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/04/27/light-interv...

Personally I think the money shot is the synthetic DoF simulation on the skater:

https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_11.jpg
https://light.co/content/2-gallery/gallery_modal_06.jpg

The subject isolation properties is a pretty big reason why people still bother with large-sensor cameras. As an amaterur, I don't have big demands for image quality, so I only bring my D60 or F4 when I want subject isolation. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with my smartphone as a camera (Lumia 930).
Yeah, with the likes of .Net Core it seems very much like Microsoft are on the right track. But you'll still see plenty of, what I call, "Microsoft decisions" that just make things into more hassle or expense than it should be purely for the pursuit of profit. One example is if you want to migrate from Linux to Windows 10 on a few computers you're legally required to buy a Windows 10 license for each machine you run. So for people with a few machines that might be 3 licenses you have to pay for - it's just crazy.
It's amazing to think that such a massive behemoth could change direction in so little time.
Ha was thinking the same thing about you!
Ubuntu 16.04 should come with "official" ZFS from Ubuntu[1].

Hopefully this means everything, including booting from ZFS, should work out of the box.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-ZF...
How to apply?
If you lost your house key and someone came into your house and looked around, that'd be trespassing.
> [gold] matches with humanity's tradition

For most of history, economic growth was minimal. Growth we expect in a year would not be seen across a lifetime. A fixed supply of money worked for a fixed-size economy.

In the 1800s, the economy grew on gold due to the coincidence of gold mine output roughly matching economic growth. The moment that link broke, calls for bi-metallism grew. Within a generation, the world was forced off gold.
Show HN: Evolve expressions that evaluate to a target number
Would be helpful if you cited the case, since patent law is an interesting example of a lower tier court going around the supreme court. It was pretty clear (except maybe to a lawyer) with Gottschalk v. Benson that software should not be patented, but that never stopped the federal circuit from working around that little problem... (http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2012/03/20/supreme-court-mayo-v-pr...)
it looks a lot like HDR on smart-phone grade sensors

the advantage here is that the HDR frames can (presumably) be captured simultaneously, reducing motion blur

plus they seem to suggest some Lytro style ability to change the focus/depth of field after taking the photo
Make money by being a StockFans beta-tester
Ask HN: Which of these Job Ad writing strategies do you use?
Hey there!

Imagine you are a developer. You need work. You decide to go to your usual job boards to have a look. And then…

…That feeling when you are looking for a job and you wade through hundreds and hundreds of job ads that all look alike, they all read like a dry laundry list of requirements, and they all feel like they come from one big boring corporation that you DON’T want to work for? (And the only reason you are putting up with the torture is because you HAVE to find a new gig to pay the rent.)

I’ve been that developer so many times…

After more than a decade working as a software developer, I’ve come to the conclusion that job ad writing practices are screaming for improvement if startups are to:

- Attract and retain top talent
- Attract and retain more diverse talent
- Instantly grab attention and excite their ideal candidate
- Convey their core values across in a clear and compelling way

There is this saying that goes, “To fix the problem you need to fix your thinking about the problem.”

I want to have a stab at help fixing this problem so I want to find out how do we think about the problem :)

I am curious to learn what your strategies are when it’s time to hire a new team member.
How do you decide what to put into a job ad? Who writes it? Do you have a clear objective in place when you write it? Is it just a copy/paste exercise for you?

I observed few practices that are in circulation:

- Hire a recruiting agency and leave everything to them
- Have that one job ad that was written since the beginning
of time and repurpose it over and over again
(with few tweaks here and there)
- Quickly throw together few acronyms & specs
- talk with the team about the requirements for the new position
and then spend weeks crafting the ad

What is your “modus operandi”?

Thank you so much for reading this!
From what I understand (not exactly my area) Perelman's proof was quite intelligible. Yes there were lots of details to fill in, but for the expert it was clear how this should be done. Perelman's proof also had a long background (it implemented ideas outlined by Hamilton earlier) so for experts it made a lot of sense. I don't think there is a lot of similarity between the two situations.

Research is a social activity. Being a successful researcher means being social. What social means depends on the norms of the relevant field. Yes, we should reflect on those norms and allow innovators to push boundaries but for the science to evolve it has to take everyone with it.

Mochizuki and those around him have a responsibility only if they want take part in the mathematical community - which I think and hope they do.

I am taking the word of experts in the area of arithmetic geometry who say there isn't being enough done to communicate his ideas. Regardless of whether he is right or wrong (really it isn't about this - it is about whether his new ideas have merit - the proof of the abc conjecture would be strong evidence for this) I think the current situation speaks for itself.

Edit: Also, you are entirely correct, we are humans, we should be social in every regard!
p.s.
If you are so inclined and want to be extra helpful, I have a survey in place here: https://heroesneverpanic.wufoo.com/forms/mmwzsrj04f7n7w/
Hierarchy is not only there for 'telling X to do ABC', but also to make clear who takes responsibility. If there's no leader, who's responsible for decisions taken? A random person who happens to be in a team who did something which turned out to be very stupid? All of them? No one? When a decision is made by X, the people who execute it didn't decide on it, X did, which means X takes responsibility, not the people who execute the decision.

Another aspect which is overlooked in the article is: to get things done, you have to make unpopular decisions sometimes: i.e. cut features to make a deadline, to ship a version, to stop adding stuff and work towards a release. No-one wants to make those, they're called 'unpopular' for a reason. But you have to make them to avoid a state where things aren't ready and never will be. There's a difference between 'being able to ship' and 'being able to ship a usable product'.

Funny that they refer to Valve with the text:

> At the video-game maker Valve, new employees are told not to expect instructions, because even the managing director “isn’t your manager,” says the employee handbook. “You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.” And so they do.

I'd like to mention 'Half Life 3'. ;)
Τι+κοιτάει+η+γυναίκα+σε+έναν+άνδρα;+-+Sex+Escort+News
A New App for New Delhi
Their partnership with Google over Typescript and the general openness that they are pushing is fantastic. I really feel they are giving a lot to the developer community.

The Surface Book is an exceptional piece of kit. It is telling that the top end book (16GB/512SSD) was the only one at one point to be sold-out on pre-order. None of the other options include 16GB of ram and I think this is a shame, but you cannot fault what they have done here.

Kudos. Microsoft now gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
This is damn interesting and fascinating. Wonder to how many other user cases it can be connected to.
SingPost declares success in first trial to deliver mail by drone
That was a good article, I thought. The process to get yourself a raise sounds ridiculous.
I'd just like to say thank you for making the search box the first thing that gets focus when pressing Tab.

Google got this one wrong (though I suspect that google does it on purpose).
HypriotOS: Docker playground for Raspberry Pi
SLAC made a good minute-long video [1] explaining plasma wakefield acceleration. Calling it a "mini-accelerator" isn't, in my view, a fair description.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjoH1ZZrAik
I'm really surprised it didn't touch on the oncoming xplat-ness of .net in this round up. I feel like this is huge considering how much it connects the technology. To boot, c# is a top 10 language on github even though it's primarily a single platform language (https://github.com/blog/2047-language-trends-on-github)
Crashes if you add "google" :(
It's also used heavily within Google.

I think that a lot of companies used to have internal tools like IPython, but now IPython/Jupyter has surpassed them all.
Hooray for OSS.
Thanks for the advice, it's a fairly bad trait.

But then you go on say lots of things about that mirrors you rather than me. I say meatie vs. veggie is not a grass root vs. government issue, and absolutly not a thing that stems from some bad version of cultural darwinism.

The meat loving of today is bad for our health, not only the environment, and to say that any culture in history has been able to afford meat production is in my view not a very accurate view on history.
I have lived in Paris, and it was the most crowded place I have been. The price of housing has gone through the roof and the municipality has passed at least two regulations in the past few years - the first one putting bounds on the rents of apartments up to 13m^2 and the other one banning the rental of apartments below 9m^2!

I live in Milan now and the density seems close to optimal for my taste
Main Linux problems on the desktop, 2015 edition
Big ups to Fastmail, as a user myself, I find them to have both a solid product and fantastic service.
"You have to pay for our software to run it on a machine" is possibly the least crazy example you could have chosen. There's far more strangeness in Microsoft licensing: Terminal Server, the whole business of CALs, the vast number of SKUs with ambiguous names, VM licensing, and so on.
ah, it just loads really slow
Afaik at least Crashplan uses strong asymetric encryption so you can store your decryption key offline. If a party is really interested in your data they might as well obtain it with a wrench. Don't get me wrong, I do think you're right about this. It's a tradeoff between convenience and security. Or viewed from a different angle: Is it worse that your data might be read by a third party or that you lose your data because you forgot your manual backup. And which scenario is more likely?
I've been a Fastmail customer for almost two years now, its been working really great. The best thing with Fastmail is that it shows there is a future for a Internet with choices, choices beyond the 4 or 5 global cooperation that tries to dominate every aspect of our life.
> USians

Out of curiosity, where are you from?
This change has actually been brewing for a long time. I was at a summit they held for Open Source project leaders back in 2008, and we got to sit down with the dev teams for IIS, SQL Server, and some of their web dev tools. They were extremely open, helpful, and just wanted to collaborate on cool stuff.

There were only a few pockets of "New Microsoft" back then, but they were there if you looked, and they were working their asses off to change the culture. Clearly their work has paid off.
I am amazed by this observations well. I can't help but wonder if the change was already on the way when Nadella took over as CEO. The change as being pushed from the inside outwards, probably mostly by the MS tech folks. Because it is mostly the tech folks that care about type of transparency.
First off, the reason double-blind testing is so effective is that it reduces subconscious biases in behaviour. If the person administering drugs knows its a placebo, he/she will consciously, or subconsciously, behave differently. All sorts of unwanted effects come into play, most importantly Observer-expectancy (For a good example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans)

Double-blind testing allows one to test the effects of administering anything (the placebo effect), versus the effects of the actual drugs. By administering an inert substance, the baseline placebo effect can be tested, as no actual medicative effects are expected from this inert substance.

When testing placebo vs nothing, in the nothing case a lot changes. The participants will no longer be administered anything, the experimenters will be aware of not administering anything, etc. etc. Because so many variables change in such a set-up, you can no longer actually tell which of these variables changing caused the effect and which of them didn't. Thus making any results and conclusion derived from the suspect.
If this thing really works a lot of people on HN will be forced to eat crow.
"David Bowie should never play more than one show a year, here the system is setup to prevent anything new from coming up to compete with the dinosaurs"

David Bowie is a dinosaur. Don't get you.
I have an account with E*Trade and I tried Robinhood too. The reason I use Robinhood is because its free. The app crashes on Android all the time and is limited, but its Free. Everyone knows Trading costs fees, but if rich silicon valley VC's are willing to pay for my trades, I will take that all day. I did that with Zecco before they ran out of funds. You cannot beat it. I will make sure I get my $131 out before that run out. Its just $131, so i do not care. My suggestion is ride it while the VC sponsored trades last.
I'd say moving the masses might be easier to move than the upper management

The higher-ups have more to lose (in terms of encroached positions) and don't usually eat their own dog food.
Absolutely agree, it is against human nature. Everyone has a boss, whether they think of them as a boss or not, is something entirely different.
Inside the prison college whose debate team beat Harvard's debate team
New C++ Features – templated rvalue References and std::forward
ZipPy – A Simple Python 3 for the JVM (2013) [pdf]
> Whole lot of speculation in this article. I would guess more people know about the placebo effect in the U.S., than they did 20 years ago? Twenty years ago, we didn't question the efficacy of these drugs? Everyone I know now is very leery of any claims by drug companies, and their Wonder Drug.

I would argue this is now the case in most of the developed world, not just the US.
RE: "I want a lawyer", you are overthinking this. The intent is clear in the context: you want a lawyer present for any questioning.

While "My lawyer would be happy to answer all your questions" could be sufficient, why leave it to chance? Just be very clear since the situation could result in life-changing consequences: "I am invoking my right to remain silent and will only answer questions with a lawyer present."

Edit: stop worrying about winning the hearts of police in a situation like this. Their interests are diametrically opposed to yours at that point in time. No need to be an asshole but you're also not going to hurt their feelings by protecting your interests; and if they seem to take issue with your statement (social pressure is another interrogation tactic, BTW), just remember that this is not a social situation so their opinion of you is not relevant. Investigators are not going to lay off you just because they think you're a swell person.
Thanks for the clarification. The precedence system was known to me, but to have it explained in this way became instantly understandable.

Coming from a civil law country (where precedence does not play that much of a role) really makes these things hard to grasp normally.
I gave it all up … to live off the land