skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to work by restricting the parts of your brain that make you sluggish or sleepy.

Since good sleep is needed to solidify learning for the long term, I personally will be unlikely to ever try provigil, at least not for more than a couple-day sprint. Getting a good sleep when my brain is full is an investment in long-term productivity (better retention of learning) over short-term productivity.
How does he get Provigil without a prescription? Shouldn't he see a doctor or something first?
No, because guidelines can be overridden when there's a good case for doing so. Not so with syntax.
"Drugs like Adderall and Ritalin which are under prescription that also have various side effects but are effective for an enormous amount of those who require it."

At least in the short term. The long term picture seems to be less positive:

"Medication use was a significant marker not of beneficial outcome, but of deterioration. That is, participants using medication in the 24-to-36 month period actually showed increased symptomatology during that interval relative to those not taking medication." In addition, those on stimulants had higher "delinquency scores, and they were also now shorter and weighed less than their non-medicated counterparts.

At the end of six years, the results were the same. Continued medication use was "associated with worse hyperactivity-impulsivity and oppositional defiant disorders symptoms," and with greater "overall functional impairment."

source: http://www.madinamerica.com/madinamerica.com/Home/AB86250A-A...
Quantitative Finance StackExchange Site - now in commitment phase
Nokia Responds to Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Antenna Press Conference
Because exam scores often matter for things like getting into school.
What sort of distribution of computing is going to happen beyond what's already happened?
The watermelon reminds my of a julia fractal.
"And yes, there were several things hidden under black cloaks on tables in these rooms."

Wouldn't surprise me if there were just empty boxes under the cloaks, a la Smartest Guys in the Room.
Ditto. I have to use Solaris 10 at work and it's a pain to compile anything for it, especiallly anything that uses a GUI. ZFS is a very nifty tool and Solaris has a lot of neat features, but it's a pain to work with. I much prefere the Gnu toolchain.
I also have A,A (Met) at rs4680. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that modafinil would have negligible effect on us based on that study. The study was narrow, it looked at recovery from sleep loss and looking more if dopamine signalling affected sleep recovery.

There's tons of interesting studies about rs4680 (http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Rs4680). Although I think all the data is still to broad to make any conclusions.

I think I might give modafinil a go just to see what happens.
If you have a practical application in mind (or something other than an urge to show off mathematical prowess), I'd recommend Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's new book, The Predictioneer's Game.
Great clean type! Love the non-fussy auto-loading at the bottom of the page too (is there some kind of fade-in happening there?).

I don't know if the italicized time of the post at the beginning of each blurb is useful, it feels like cruft when I am looking for information (I just skip over that piece). It also loses meaning lower down in the list (6:45PM 3 days ago? Do I care?)

Also: Have you played with de-emphasizing the time box on the left of each post somehow? Like, make it use muted colors unless :hovered?

I'd kill for an RSS reader that worked like this, though.
That was a good post. I have some customers who pay me ahead of time most of what they think a job will cost, and others who pay slightly more than my published rates, etc.

In principle, I try to treat all customers the same: first come first serve with a few obvious overrides for extreme need or emergencies.

That said, I know that I give some preferential treatment to customers who do a little extra for me.
David O. Sacks founded Yammer to solve the problem of excessive email between employees of the same company.
$400-$500 US at https://www.23andme.com/

They had a special deal for $99 when I got it, but that was very limited and they haven't done it since. Still I'd say if you hold out for a year that price will be halved. I generally recommend people to wait unless they're really interested in these things. The industry is still in its infancy. Cost is going down quickly and quality is going up just as fast.
How the Internet Beat Up an 11-Year-Old Girl
Looks great! I agree that there should be a blurb to the effect of "predicting hotness while it's still lukewarm," or something less lame but more informative. Do you use a form of Poisson regression, by any chance?
Awesome feedback. Glad you like the auto-loading, it does fade in a bit to keep it feeling 'gentle'.

Interesting that you find the time unnecessary. May consider removing.

Will play with the timebox on the left a bit. It is a bit strong, but its something we think emphasizes the speed and realtime nature of the app, so don't want it to fade back too much.

What do you think of the mix of stories?
Trouble is, modafinil's metabolites include at least one, um, "aromatic" sulfur compound that is excreted in the urine. If you want to run a single-blind test, you'll need to hold your nose while you pee.
While you're at it you might want to pick up a copy of "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. One of the most compelling and well written books on the subject I've read. Reading this along side learning C and Assembly language will make it all "click".

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...
23andme is one such service. I have GG at rs4680.
I'm interested to see it working during the weekday. This weekend is kind of dull for tech news. :-) Nice job though. I really like the simplicity.

I typically refresh the Techmeme page 10-20 times throughout the day. Does the KickPost page automatically pull down new posts, or do I have to refresh to get the latest news? Also, is there a list of blogs that you're pulling from? Thanks!
Glad you like the look of it! We are using Bayes inspired algos at this point.

Do you like the mix of stories? Do you think you will use it tomorrow?
I used 23andme. I was lucky enough to be notified they were having a one-day sale a couple months ago. The sale price was $99 for the full reults, which is 80% off of their usual price of $499. The sale was on national DNA day.

There's at least a couple other similar companies out there, with more well known ones being deCODE and Navigenics. Recently these companies were getting in trouble with california health regulators for providing medical information without a doctor (I think that was the complaint, but I don't remember the exact reason). But the California complaint included 12 companies so there must be other companies as well.
Why should getting fired stop you?
It is important to differentiate between the immediate trigger and the underlying cause.
No. Pay for what you use or find a cheaper alternative.
Try https://www.23andme.com/
It def is more interesting when news is breaking :). Thanks for the kind words about the simplicity. We are focusing on that.

The page automatically refreshes when new posts come in! One of my favorite features.
Between this and the rising profile of HF stuff, it's going to be a fun decade.
Great design.

One thing I noticed was that it's very difficult for me to scan the headlines quickly. I think the reason is that right now the focal point is the time, with the red and black, while the headline and description blend together a bit. I think you could change this without hurting the aesthetic. (Also, as others mentioned, a brief description would be great)

Good luck!
Ah, interesting. It's not a full genome sequence, just a sequence of strategically important loci, I see.
totally kicks ass.
I like the advice (find out what your audience is searching for and write that content), though I'm not a big fan of building a ton of throwaway content ala Demand Media.

That aside, it sounds like your teacher connection is working really well!

What type of advice would you give a business with a less niche focus to try and find good keywords to write for?

For example, my salon is called "Bloom Beauty Lounge" and the site is http://bloombeautylounge.com/

99% of our keywords coming in are either 'Bloom Beauty Lounge' or 'Bloom Salon Lounge' or 'Bloom NYC Salon.'

I really feel like our google offering could be stronger, but I'm wondering if writing yet another blog post about "how to layer haircuts" is really the best way to go about it.

Any advice?
You'd be surprised what kind of things you can order on the internet.
Yes, but I think the GPU designers did the right thing here by not injecting "magic" gamma-correction functionality into the texture sampler. There are many operations done on textures before they become pixel colors, plus they are often used to store non-image information (positions, normals, CT densities) where gamma correction would be incorrect.If you care about correct tone-mapping (most games probably don't), you can correct your textures beforehand.
Isn't this the same form that's been up since it was announced, or is this somehow different?
You don't need a prescription for it where he lives.
Pinch scaling on the iPad turned all the examples in the article to pink and green garbage, so maybe someone at Apple needs to take a look at that.

Might be worth trying to use the CATiledLayer stuff and the CoreImage scaling to generate 'live' scaling. That might work better than whatever Safari, UIKit and the GPU presently do.
There will be a Nexus Two
I've just checked the "drug response" section in my 23andme.com data, but I don't see anything about provigil.

Searching for rs4680 did show a result though (I have the AA variant).
This is the first thing I change in any linux system I'm working with. I've become completely dependent on prefixed history.

Never liked the Ctrl+R thing.
What an apt project name
I'm wondering why you're saying linux has no place in distributed computing. Most supercomputers and distributed systems run linux. Not sure what paradigm shifts are going to have a significant impact on the OS. The only changes I've seen are in hardware/programming syntax as of late.
"Gonna Fly Now" , from Rocky.
Google Testing Blog: There, but for the grace of testing, go I
I mostly agree with you.

I do think however, as the article pointed out, there’s something a bit unsettling about concern for their kids’ futures causing parents to medicate perfectly normal/healthy children with drugs that have unknown long-term consequences.

To be sure, this is a general structural problem inherent in a school system which uses “high-stakes” standardized tests and attempts to rank people on an absolute scale. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do to dismantle the whole school testing apparatus in the immediate future.

Which isn’t to say that (e.g. religious fundamentalist) parents don’t do plenty else to screw up their kids, under social pressure, or that widespread use of “neuro-enhancing” drugs by teens would be the worst thing that could ever happen to the society.
"Shared social responsibility" as a path to greater profit?
Found via Marginal Revolution: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/shared-social-responsibility-as-a-path-to-greater-profit.html

I used the MR headline because I think it explains the article in clearer terms.
I would have been more impressed knowing how often the engineers got out of the foam rooms and into houses, normal office buildings, trains, cars, and airport lounges using AT&Ts stock 3G nodes.
Clearly, it must be even better than I thought. It hears what you're really thinking about, rather than what you're talking about.
Since everybody in here more or less agree, I will allow myself to counter just a little bit.

There is no doubt that C programming is a very good skill and if you see yourself programming a lot in the future, it is more or less a no-brainer. BUT it is still a trade-off. It will cost you time and this is time that you could have spent having fun, making money or learning some other skill instead. You could ask people in any field if X-basic-skill in their field is worth studying, and you would get similar answers.

But yeah, you should learn C :-)
I think additional intelligence only makes moral dilemmas (Should I or should I not do X) harder to cope with. So the drug that makes you smarter also makes you less sure you should take it.
That's something like the stories we are told about North-Korean factories acting as if they have huge production. However since Apple does manage to launch new products every now and than I tend to believe they actually do have new products to test.
Simple interfaces tying into a vm for complete distribution of software on any architecture.
Concurrent, functional and slightly object orientated low level languages allowing automatic formal provability and easier formal provability.
This is all quiet similar to Microsofts Midori / Singularity from what I can read on it anyways... but I'm sure Microsoft will screw it up somehow and cripple it.
You thought you knew Javascript
Innovative subway advertisements
You should put that line on the page.
Just ordered some online. We'll see how this goes.
Could always just chop it to fit into a large sized, non-translucent capsule.
In regards to #2, I can't imagine they have the desire or resources to offer something online freely to the public that requires the kind of resources this thing is bound to use.
Classic 'Mystery box' storytelling à la http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/jj_abrams.php
Inability to focus is worth treating, but why not look at potential causes instead of potentially risky substances that cover up the problem?

Too much sugar in the diet, persistent muscular tension and the stress hormones it produces, and lack of sleep are all problems that impact our ability to think clearly.
That's like saying language y is fine because I can just search and copy and paste... no you cannot. If you do anything beyond a simple [[ -f somefile ]] && do something sh turns into a nightmare.. case in point autotools.
The following is probably the best-known result bearing his name:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Rao-Blackwell_theorem
Principles for Making New Things (2008)
His race seems to have profoundly affected his career trajectory. See also: Alan Turing, Albert Einstein.
Ask HN: Donate your inactive Business Plan/Service/Product
The thing about entrepreneurs is that they are full of ideas. Sometimes they pursue those ideas and sometimes they don't.

I have come across some entrepreneurs who have created around 90% of their product/service but then decided not to go ahead with it for any reason.

Do you have any such plan/service/product which you probably created but have no time to pursue it?

Mention it here so that others might adopt it and take it ahead.
Reposting here since this one is more popular.

My ranking in order of both effectiveness and least physical-harm\withdrawal for stimulants:

2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenethylamine > Desoxypipradrol > Modafinil\Provigil > Adderall

For me, Adderall and to a lesser extent provigil are better for repetitive motor tasks like cleaning an apartment but inhibit creativity.
Soros has also been on record to say that he wouldn't be able to do the same thing today given the massively increased complexity of the foreign exchange markets - things were different, even just ten years ago.
U2 is world's top earning band
Re: the timebox. I noticed that the 'strongness' of it makes the whole page jump visually when you update them en masse at each poll. I don't know what to think about the time-ago being updated live, too, while we're on it. Maybe some kind of subtle way to change them will help?

Re: mix of stories. I'm currently staying away from Techmeme (had to disable my no iPhone/Android news user script to actually compare the headlines), so my input there is of marginal use. I'll say that the headlines didn't put me off - there was good diversity of content instead of half the page being filled with hoopla about cellphones. I learned about Real Time Farms[1] from a lifehacker story via the Kitchn blog, so that's something!

1: http://lifehacker.com/5589590/real-time-farms-is-a-user+supp...
Sure they do but they use extremely specialized software that probably took years to apply to the platform let alone developing the software. Linux is the top in distributed computing because it filled a niche (free) and has momentum if BSD, L4, etc was created then / didn't have some sort of issue we'd all be using kernel x instead of linux
Whats with all the grammatical errors on that site? Is it a joke?
The red pulls my eye towards the time as well.
Oh, I agree entirely. I just called it "wrong" in response to Geee's original question. Should have clarified.
Cool. Will think through ways to update the times in a less bothersome way.

I liked that post too!
Thanks! Will be playing with the design more tonight.
This type of article is definitely interesting, but it strikes me as similar to the comparison of audiophile and consumer cables, or lossless vs. properly encoded high quality lossy formats. 99.9% of the population can't tell the difference and don't care except in obvious edge cases, so how much time should you waste on that 0.1%?
Yes, you get about 570,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
This line? "KickPost is new tech news aggregator that uses a predictive algorithm based on historically popular stories to predict which stories will be popular in realtime"
I do like the mix of stories. To be honest, I probably won't use it tomorrow. But you know what? I would probably use it tomorrow if you juxtaposed (a) the time when you predicted it would be hot, with (b) the time when it became hot by some other metric. Obviously the newest stories wouldn't have that yet, but the ones that are ~30min old just might. In other words, if I felt like I was getting in on something special, I probably would use it.
So...?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...
Oddly enough, I found I had next to no effects from the stuff except that I could pull an all nighter via too much caffeine, sleep six hours, and wake up feeling like I'd not skipped a night's sleep.

Should probably get some more sometime and do a more disciplined test though.
In the pursuit of how stuff works.
If Apple could kick out a product in a couple months, I'd believe it.

Subscribing to Occam's Razor: they hid real products.

They have a year or two pipeline. Google/HTC/Motorola would eat them alive. I have a hard time believing they are manufacturing a coverup to this degree within 22 days. I write software for projects a couple orders of magnitude less than Apple's taking on. There's no way they can fake this.

It's presented well. This is true.
> Relying on implicit insertion can cause subtle, hard to debug problems. Don't do it. You're better than that.

I loved that quote.
This exactly what I wanted. Thank you very much for actually implementing it.
The most valuable data in this discussion is how interested we are in improving our intelligence and our ability to apply it.
The real question is: how much time should you waste writing an article when you can just send a patch to ImageMagick instead?

Talking about a problem is nice, but fixing it is even better.
I have exactly the same problem with magento. although they call themselves the leaders in open source e-commerce, the oly thing they have open is the code.
Max Levchin talks about starting up
So basically you think mastery of C++ is always 1 year away?
"I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person."

For me, this was the most important point. True entrepreneurial genius is being able to differentiate between ideas that seem wrong/impossible to the masses but are right and those that are plain wrong in the business sense.
Hey, you prompted me to look at the paper :). My understanding is that the study primarily looked at cognitive performance during an extended period of wakefulness (40hrs). Two doses of Modafinil (100mg each) were given during this period (the manufacturer recommended dose appears to be 100-400mg).

Modafinil improved the cognitive performance of Val/Val's (G,G)s across most of the tests (memory tests, mood tests, "Vigor" tests, reaction rate tests, well-being, fatigue, are ones i remember). Met/Met's (A,A)s did not see any statistically significant improvement on most of the tests. One test where there was a small effect for Met/Met's was in subjective well-being.

The study also looked at sleep recovery after the prolonged wakefulness. All participants entered deep sleep faster than normal.

90% of Val/Val's correctly identified their group (placebo vs. drug). 66% of Met/Met's correctly identified their group.

There were 10 people in the Val/Val group and 12 in the Met/Met group. But the small number of participants should be accounted for in the p-tests, as far as I know.

However, like you, I'd still try it given the chance. Regardless, lets hear it for our naturally increased dopamine!
I wonder what percent of those users have a 9700.
Ten Tips to Ignore When Starting a Business
This is way better than what I was working on[1]. Mine is still under development. I wanted to go after more of the top things being searched- i.e. Google Trends, Bing, Yahoo!, all that jazz- and somehow do something with that data. Along the lines I added Youtube popular list, Reddit, and other things.

I like it, wish you had an RSS feed. If you are going to want it to stick you are going to need a way for me to either a)share this content with my friends(twitter, facebook), b) let me comment on the stories you are giving me, c)let me bookmark these stories- there are tons of ways but right now I'm just reading. I'll keep checking back to see what you are doing. Great work!

[1]christopherwoodall.com/trendy
Video:Social Networking for Developers - Every Developer Needs a Blog
I'd say "It doesn't work well in most shops" is a damn good reason to not use something.

In general, very little of the program needs to be written in C to get great performance gains.

Additionally, python is vastly different from LUA. Lua is still a scripting language, ruby and python have moved past that.

For someone at age 18 or so, I'd say C is a much much better level of complexity to be tackling that C++
Finally, a 'Sports Betting System' that actually works...-bestcbstore.com
This article provided my "aha!" moment for prototypes.
7 Tips to Improve Online Sales
The funny thing is that they make a joke about Apple's distortion field while this whole post is the result of said- and moked- distortion field.

Example: "most people who work at Apple have never seen them, we were told"

Well, yeah. Doesn't Apple have about 20,000 employees? Of course, most people haven't seen it. And of course Apple is testing their products thoroughly. And so do their competitors.

So, "inside Apple's distortion field" indeed.
Thank you for your kind words, I am glad you like it!
This means, like me, you have a Valine codon in place of a Methionine codon in your COMT gene at codon 158. This means the enzyme catechol-O-Methyltransferase which breaks down catecholamines like dopamine/norepinephrine has reduced activity and less stability, resulting in increased catecholamines in some areas of the brain.

I recommend downloading your raw data from 23andme and using the prometheus program from SNPedia. This is how I found out about this gene. This program is very raw but includes a lot more research and points you to the relevant papers.

Keep in mind, this information is all AFAIK, as I am just browsing this information casually.
If no one understands why the problem existed in the first place, it will be repeated.... Sound familiar?