skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"We cuts out what Cutts leaves in."

Which is probably an unfair comment given Matt Cutts is dealing from inside a massive, listed company, but epi0Bauqu / DDG are certainly addressing a definite user experience problem. Indeed, this is a more tangible benefit for using DDG than the focus on security and privacy, which I don't believe is understood by most users.
Second East Bay HN meetup is this Wednesday
Groupon is pretty great, I hope this doesn't mean any ill-will will come to it.
Not just controversial but wrong, for the most part. For example, Facebook is not a substitute for face-to-face social interaction, but complements it. (How am I going to interact face-to-face with someone far away?) The same is true for #3, #4 and the second #5 at least.

Of course, if I were to spend 100% of my time on Facebook and therefore completely neglect face-to-face social contacts (<cough>), then that would likely be a problem. The opposite (100% face-to-face contacts and no online ones) would arguably be a problem too, in this day and age.
They ask for a name and an email for permanent records. Not worthwhile for curiousity.

But reading the points offered, I realize that if I were not a Canadian citizen already, I wouldn't be allowed to immigrate into Canada. That's a little humbling.
Pretty good article. I used to use Remember The Milk too, but deleted my account a few weeks ago as my list(s) ended up being way to distracting. I never felt like I was making any progress.

I'll definitely check out Pomodoro though.
Switch to Braintree
For technological addiction, here's the system the Amish people use to adopt to something unknown:

... he goes to his bishop with this proposal: "I like to try this out." Bishop says to Ivan, "Okay Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up, if we decide it is not helping you or hurting others." So Ivan acquires the tech and ramps it up, while his neighbors, family, and bishops watch intently. They weigh the benefits and drawbacks. What is it doing to the community? ... [1]

Inertia and a cost/benefit calculation, two things that are often absent in the normal Addictive iGadget buying process.

[1] http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/amish_hackers...
Probably not Hacker's News but Inspiring
here's tabgroups manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10254/
The same is true for any other addiction.

The internet, for me, has been different to any other addiction because it has changed so much as I've been using it (and very gradually, so I didn't notice for a long time).
By definition, an efficient market has all the publicly known information already encoded in its prices. Hence, even theoretically it's impossible to beat the market without doing insider trading, which is considered illegal and hence "cheating".

Conversely, if insider trading were considered acceptable, the market would actually contain more information than was publicly accessible, and we could infer things from stock prices that we didn't actually know.
Wasn't aware of that Skype option, thank you.
I vaguely remember that potassium nitrate speeds up the absorption, giving cigarettes more of a "kick", thus making them more addictive. When I used to smoke (5 years since I kicked the habit, yay!) chemical-free tobacco felt less addictive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium_nitrate
You start with an illegal substance. You are already breaking the law so what is the big deal with using an even stronger substance. That seems to be the rationale used by a lot of people. I guess I should have made that clear in my original example. Believe it or not your moral values start to decrease once you start breaking them. I'll take it to another extreme: Once a criminal has become used to breaking the law, doing one more crime doesn't seem like a big deal to them.

Many people will not switch from cigarettes to Marijuana because their moral values does not allow them to. i.e. They see using an illegal substance as immoral. However, if somehow you convince them to use Marijuana and break their moral value what many of them will do is to rationalize that using Marijuana is no big deal. Especially if a lot of peers are re-inforcing that notion (as many are trying to do here in Hacker News. Or to put it another way, a rotten apple will rotten all the others). That moral value is lost. Since there is no longer a moral value stopping them from using illegal substances using Cocaine is really no big deal anymore.

I hypothesize that this is how criminals are created in general. The first time the commit a crime they may be really nervous, eventually they get used to it and many may go on to commit worse crimes. I guess this is why it is so important to teach kids strong moral values. Also to keep them away from bad influences. They are the most vulnerable in their teenage years from breaking their moral values. If they have not broken their moral values after their mid twenties they are probably not going to anymore.
I remember, many years ago (mid-to-late 90s), being afraid that I had grown addicted to computer games. Between Command & Conquer (over peer-to-peer dial-up!), Quake Team Fortress, Civilization II, and a few others, I was playing 30-40 hours of PC games per week.

I eventually grew out of the habit, and now don't find PC or console games appealing anymore. The fact that I naturally gave it up without any intervention means it wasn't an addiction.

Most other computer enthusiasts that I know or work with have a similar story of "growing out of" their addiction to computer games. I imagine many on HN have similar stories to tell.

I think the examples in PG's essay are "phases", not addictions.

And I predict that most of the people PG knows who self-identify as Internet addicts will eventually out-grow their compulsion.
This certainly would be a good point if it were true. In reality people come to MyType to take a personality quiz. We just randomly inserted the iPad question into the personality quiz for 20,000 people. They're not particularly savvy on technology, just the average Facebook user.

We realized that as a personality typing application we have a very good platform for surveying any sort of opinion. Our user base is fairly reflective of the general US population, and none of them are coming to answer a survey about x. We plan to look at the personality traits that drive preferences in beer, politics, and much more. Subscribe to the blog if you haven't already :)
> There was a minimum factor of 2 overhead in total CPU usage just by turning on SMP

n-body without SMP 123.30s

n-body without SMP 123.30s elapsed

n-body with SMP 133.52s

n-body with SMP 133.57s elapsed

spectral-norm without SMP 46.68s

spectral-norm without SMP 46.68s elapsed

spectral-norm with SMP 47.71s

spectral-norm with SMP 13.90s elapsed

mandelbrot without SMP 230.07s

mandelbrot without SMP 230.10s elapsed

mandelbrot with SMP 253.66s

mandelbrot with SMP 87.76s elapsed

Maybe that Erlang chameneos-redux program is unusual?
Apple pre-installs their own apps with iOS, so I don't find what Google is doing odd/surprising. Also, I'm actually thankful Google installs maps/navigation on Android.
Very insightful. I'll look for you on the trail :)
Prader-Willi Syndrome Recovery And Treatment
This is awesome, I love it.

However, is anyone else concerned that the driver seat of HN is essentially being handed over to new users as more advanced users switch to services like this or "HN daily" or even the "/best" page? It seems like the people that don't know anything exists beyond the front page will become the only ones left to do the work of curating content.

(just speculating, nothing against new users I haven't been here that long myself...)
The two points I can address:

* Is It *dangerous*?

At the extreme, yes: hikikomori - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?p...

* Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated? To what extent?

If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable. So how about 5 minutes? 20 minutes? 40? An hour?
Found it:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmPJqmiFQCPEdGdQS3VO...
The US is probably doing more manufacturing now than at any time ever (don't have a cite, but it's easy to find figures online). It's just not visible because we don't manufacture much in the way of consumer products. But there are many, many companies building and selling stuff. I'd say that most of the businesses in the industrial park where I work are small and medium manufacturers. I happen to work for a very large manufacturer, but you'd never know it to look at our building: looks like any other office building except for the semis at the loading dock.
Groupon is pretty great, but the way they treated the owner of groupon.com, regardless of what British law may or may not say, wasn't.
Why is positive psychology not a science? It could easily be considered a subset of ethology.
Can someone convince me what is gained by stressing out over making an easy solution to a trivial problem concise and elegant like this? You have a perfectly good imperative solution which is the way almost any child would do it (go through things one by one and keep counts of every bucket), so what is gained by messing with that? Is it not time to move on to the rest of the program?
I think a good adjunct to this site would be a list of HN side projects and their creators.
You forgot about too old or tech-illiterate. I can't be the only person to have said "the iPad is the perfect device for my -insert older relative here-". And I would bet there's a significant portion of that segment isn't on Facebook.

Don't forget that there's a percentage of Facebook users that are businesses, fake users, "employer friendly" duplicate accounts, and people who lie about their location. That's not counting people who lie about their demographic information, either.

I don't doubt there's a large number of Facebook users, but you can't take everything at face value.
There will be blood: why Apple and Intel are destined to clash
The OP seems related to Clay Shirky's argument about "cognitive surpluses" See http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Creativity-Generosit...

His argument is roughly that strongly addictive behaviors arise to soak up spare time created by technological advances, e.g. gin halls in the 17th century england as a response to the industrial revolution and TV/Radio/Etc in response to the dramatic drop in hours worked per week in the 20th century.

Hopefully our society will create new ways to use time in productive ways (a challenge especially appropriate to those of us on HN) pulling many, otherwise unsuspecting, away from worthless addictive pursuits.
I once read the suggestion (I can't remember where, but it was on the internet somewhere, so if this is you then speak up) that the real reason that we haven't been contacted by space probes from any other civilization is that all civilizations eventually invent a MMORPG that is so enthralling they lose interest in boring things like interstellar travel.
But some of the things you mention only look bad when compared to even crappier alternatives.

> Large quantities of mass-produced food instead of meager quantities of undependable crops that you spend 90% of your working life growing;

Around the baby boomer generation until people 20 or so years younger there was a sweet spot where mass-produced food was available but more expensive than more traditionally-prepared and traditionally-grown food. Also, people spent a lot more time cooking (and less time watching cooking tv shows), which helped create a relationship with food that wouldn't stand today's fast food habits. At least here in Brazil.

> Facebook instead of being lonely and isolated in your suburban home, miles from any of your friends;

The solution to this existed before the suburbs (which are a post-ww2 phenomenon), and is called living in small cramped places in cities close to where you work and to most people you will meet. Some people still live like this, and enjoy it. Suburbs are soul crushing, but they are by no means necessary.

> HD porn instead of unhealthy sexual relationships;

Well, not every sexual relationship is unhealthy, and if you ignore the healthy ones this is vacuously good. The truth is, developing healthy sexual habits is a difficult part of growing up, and keeping people in fantasy land is not a solution to this anymore than giving everyone a government allowance is a solution to the problem that it's hard to find fulfilling jobs.

The other points are less glaringly false, but have small subtleties that can be teased out.
You've now completely changed your argument. Originally it was "mild drugs lead to strong drugs". I noted that alcohol is a mild drug. Now your argument is "mild crime leads to strong crime". If I can summon a good argument against that, will you just come up with a third argument for what you're already committed to believing?

Mild crime does not lead to strong crime. Like many people, in my teenage days I downloaded some music illegally. Most of us didn't become burglars. But I guarantee you almost all burglars (of the correct age group and technical skills) have downloaded music illegally.
>At the extreme, yes

Let me rephrase the question a bit, because at extremes everything is dangerous. Is it any more or less dangerous, on average, than other things in society considered to be bad? Are there more or less hikikomoris than DWIs? Are there more or less WoW addicts than rich old men with boats or other (presumably harmless) unproductive activities?

> If an employee spends 8 hours browsing Reddit, instead of doing work that needed to be done, the loss of productivity is quantifiable

Are you sure? Did they really lose 8 hours worth of work? How is "time spent" any better a metric for productivity than counting lines of code?

I find, for me personally, that when I am burnt out I won't produce in any amount of time until I recharge, and when I'm fully charged I'm not interested in browsing Reddit. This is a personal anecdote, and not data; but can we get some data--any data--correlating productivity and browsing Reddit, positively or negatively? I suspect the relationship is a lot more complex than "X hours lost."
I answered here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549691 and here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549734
Robots are expensive to acquire and to run. Unless you're in the kind of manufacturing where robots are useful (either very heavy industry or very large volume), there's probably no net benefit.

OTOH, used robots are cheap. e.g, http://bit.ly/b5Fsgu but if you don't have the required knowledge to repair, service and program them, then the upkeep will kill you.
The article mentions the same firm that designed the security system for this data center also designed the security system for "the Federal Reserve System".

It's gimmicky, but I have to imagine it impresses potential customers.
"But some of the things you mention only look bad when compared to even crappier alternatives."

I think that was the whole point... mechanicalfish's list contains false dichotomies, in order to illustrate that the same is true of the original list.
In a delightful irony, he's just been hit with a securities disclosure suit by a disgruntled investor: http://www.tampabay.com/news/south-florida-foreclosure-lawye...
Agreed. And it was a stupid move to boot: he could have done all sorts of nasty things, since a lot of people would have gone to groupon.com, whether or not that was their domain name (I used to go to dropbox.com all the time, back when it was a parked domain).
Brownian Ratchet (perpetual motion machine)
You have a problem with logical reasoning.

First, there are at least two possible explanations for the the even you witnessed - one that marijuana was a gateway drug for your friend, and the other is that your friend was simply fucked up to start with and found his solace in drugs. You have dismissed one of the options and then concluded the truthfulness of the other (which is a serious defect of cognition).

Your second problem is that you are treating an anecdote as data. It ain't.
The Death of Paper Money
(I am not a lawyer, etc.)

I think the clause he highlights is meant to be read as "We don't know of anyone who is currently using this as a mark and has the sole right to it" not "We don't know of anyone who might use it at some point but currently isn't." That would render most trademarks un-fileable.

Even so, it was sort of a jerk way to get a domain (even though the guy did get paid rather handsomely).
I feel like this almost everyday and my girl friend tells me snore terribly. I also fit the thick neck description. Where do you get something checked out like this cheaply?
When I was in college I took an internship at a Call Center building reporting software and some websites. I went in with a positive attitude and wanted to help as much as I could and prove myself and get a full time position, all that jazz.

They ended up taking advantage of me. Even though I was a Part-Time worker they would try to give me Full-Time work. In the end I was leading projects still as a part-time employee. I had endured many late nights and one full on 24 hour marathon coding session to prepare for a big telethon (American Idol - IdolAid). I frequently found myself wishing I could just walk out, but I was afraid of the effect it would have on my career. I developed trouble sleeping at night. I would stay up all night laying in bed because my head was still racing. Even though my body was exhausted, I couldn't fall asleep. I still have this problem now and then till this day.

When I finally got my degree I decided to leave that place and it was the best decision I ever made. Even though I didn't have a job lined up yet I was not nearly as stressed. Everything turned out fine for me, though I still feel the effects sometimes. I often joke that it was like Frodo in LOTR, once I had borne the ring (stress) for so long I could never be the same.
To PG:

If you were doing a startup right now, would you get an iphone?
I think Apple estimates the value of its carefully tuned user experience very highly, and thinks most people would regret being able to hose their phones.

Not just true power users would want to jailbreak their phones, but only power users are actually able to take that kind of responsibility, and Apple doesn't want iPhones getting wrecked or just not working right.
The emphasized text is this:

> to the best of his/her knowledge and belief no other person, firm, corporation, or association has the right to use the mark in commerce

IANAL, but doesn't "right" here imply exclusive right (ie. registered trademark)? Otherwise, everyone would have the "right" to use every (unregistered) mark in commerce, so this statement could never be true.
billFLO is hiring - we're looking to fill two short term positions for developers:

- PHP developer (with SOAP exp.) for short-term project with Startup: http://bit.ly/9xcHnN

- Web Developer for short-term project with Startup: http://bit.ly/aF6LzQ
Starcraft 2 - 800k preorders...Bigger hit than SC1?
You have a point, but I don't think it's that simple. With things like hard liquor, heroin, cocaine, and other generally accepted to be addictive things, a lot more people go through "phases" of the stuff than actually waste their entire lives on it. We've all seen slightly depressed people binging self-destructively on alcohol, and some of my more outgoing friends have done the same with cocaine when they were younger, and today live perfectly normal, healthy lives.

Being "just a phase" for a lot of people (myself included) doesn't make it less likely for it to be an addictive thing, makes it more (how many healthy normal non-addictive activities are considered "phases" by some people but end up eating out entire lives?).
Oracle's Ellison: Paid $1.84 billion in Past Decade
This is the whole issue with open classes and many libraries (transitive dependencies make this issue exponentially more likely, on the number of libraries).

I have commented on this issue a while back (http://bit.ly/cNez8i), and some people were kind enough to fork ruby (http://gist.github.com/358467) and enable scoped Open Classes, like Scala, Groovy and C# have. This is great for dsls (many dsls that change base classes can happily live in the same project without conflicting with each other) and libraries (I can do whatever I want in my library, extending Object, Enumerable and Kernel, left and right, and the users will not be affected).

However, this very openness made the "moving to a newer and better version of ruby" movement harder. Just hope 2.0 will set things right.

Disclaimer: open classes are great. I think they should be allowed, only highly discouraged for libraries and frameworks, who should stick with scoped open classes for most of the time.
I am not a lawyer either. But I wonder what the phrase "has the right" means.

If you read that as, "Has a trademark covering", they are fine because nobody had the right. Alternately if you read that as, "Has an established history doing business as", they are fine if the existing business had not been set up yet. There are other interpretations under which they would be not so fine.

However my guess is that in the whole negotiation, there must have been discussions with actual qualified lawyers. If the original owner had a good legal case, I think that would have come up then. Therefore I'm inclined to believe that there is no legal problem.

That said, their treatment of the original owner does seem pretty bad.
I'm wondering what the market on this site is, adsense I guess?

Overall the design is quite nice and it's snappy, but I don't really see it as useful. Also, I think the only difference in marijuana strains is the thc %.......

One possibility would be to expand to cover other content like http://www.erowid.org/ if you could vette information and design it as nicely as leafly, I could see that picking up quite a bit of traffic.
but now you know, right?
Sure, but neither alcohol nor the internet is all that addictive. Most people are quite capable of controlling their usage of both, so it's not risky to try for the first time.

Heroin, on the other hand, is apparently so ridiculously addictive that just trying it once is a bad idea. Or maybe you can try it a few times before it gets hard to quit -- I don't know, and I don't particularly want to find out. It's a sensible strategy to stay away from all hard drugs as a result.

Maybe Farmville or World of Warcraft version 15.0 circa 2018 will be more like heroin than like alcohol.
The Battle of Economy of Scale vs Control and Flexibility
it's not going to happen any time soon. Look at the voting on prop 8 and imagine how much less controversial that is than legalizing weed.
While we're nitpicking, I'm not convinced that hard alcohol is actually more addictive than beer or wine.
Delta. The only time you'll get me in one of their planes is for a one-hop to or from Atlanta, and even then I'll think hard about whether I can get on another airline. The number of patently absurd things they've done to me would fill quite a lengthy post, though.

Whenever possible (i.e., heading westward, domestic US) I fly Frontier. For other destinations, US Airways is my preferred option, mostly because their hub -- Charlotte -- is actually a rather nice and not-too-crowded airport.
People can already be defined by what they say no (or yes) to. Amish? No Technology. Republicans? No to government assistance. Democrats? No to big business. On a more personal level, do you drink? do you do drugs? And so on.
It complained about not supporting my color depth (although nvidia-settings is set to 24 bit).

before (last 100 chars): we only support 24/32-bit displays right now.
XF86VidModeGetGammaRampSize returned 2048 entries.

xflux does the same. It's a new laptop - i7 in 64bit mode, so I don't know if that's at fault. I loved xflux on the old (32bit, nvidia) laptop, though.

Redshift as mentioned by paulsmith works great.
Details for non-strict memoization, part 1