skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The wild programmer (Scriptus exemplarus aspergerii) is generally a shy creature when in its natural habitat. While some deviant boisterous specimens do exist, they are the oddity rather than the rule.

He is content with spending his life staring at rectangular pieces of backlit canvas, and occasionally bashing on rectangular pieces of polished material. Come to think of it, most of his activities revolve around rectangles: the rectangular nutrient clumps he tends to favor eating, the rectangular primitive communication device he always carries around, the beige or black boxes he is so attached to, even organizing his workspace into cubes."

I was just chewing my favorite rectangle shaped cereal when I was reading this.
"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." Eisenhower - one of my favourite quotes that sums this up well.
Here's what I ended up sending him:

----
Wow.

I really appreciate the offer for the backup.
Good to know it was stolen as opposed to carelessly left somewhere.

You're actually pretty unlucky.
I have this software installed for this occasion:

lojackforlaptops.com

please call me at 510.213.2990 in the next hour

if you don't I will immediately activate the lojack theft alert which means law enforcement is showing up at your door promptly.

I don't actually know your location, but they reveal it to the cops, who show up at your door with a lot of questions.

thank you in advance for doing the right thing

cheers,
shereef
----

and what I got in return:

----

I use the laptop in public places. And have no internet at home. Sorry but your info is now deleted.
Torrenting copyrighted files is illegal also just to let you know.

-----
Steve Jobs: "Please leave us alone."
You Don’t Need Delaware to Start Your Company
No, we're trying to figure out who has read it and got the point.

If you fail see the point in the article and risks it uncovers, then there's nothing to discuss really...
The point is a normal stock normally has shares equal to 1.x on the market due to short selling, and the x is low. An ETF can have shares equal to 12x. The fact that you can create shares is nice, but it still falls on the counterparty to be able to fund them, and as we saw in the recent meltdown that's not safe.
Fixed link: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
99% of that article tries to get you to feel sorry for someone. The remaining 1% presents a few facts:

1) Clinical trials are currently considered necessary to prove drugs work.

2) Some people think the clinical trials are cruel to the control group.

... That's it. Here's a genius quote:

-- Some melanoma specialists familiar with the drug would have traded the data for faster access to the drug. “I know all that I need to know based on the results we already have,” said Dr. Keith Flaherty of Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the early clinical testing. “My use of this drug is not going to be informed by testing it against a drug we all hate and would rather never give a dose of again in our lives.” --

So, he saw some initial results, but not enough to be conclusive to any objective observer. That was enough to make his mind up. He doesn't care to follow science because he -believes- the drug will work now.

Thank goodness he's not -my- doctor.

I don't disagree about the cruelty of putting people in the control group. You're basically denying them medicine that they need. But we don't have an alternative at the moment.

It's also worth remembering that everyone that goes into a study like this is told that they have a 50/50 chance of not getting the medicine. They KNOW this going in. They choose to take that chance because their current medicine isn't doing the job... Or whatever other reasons they have. Getting upset that got into the wrong 50% is pointless. That was part of the deal.

And finally: How does he KNOW he's in the control group? Maybe the medicine simply doesn't work on him. Even the doctor wouldn't know if this were a double-blind test.
I am a programmer and have had a history of arrogance, but I now associate it with social immaturity. Humility is much more comfortable.

However, one shouldn't reject another just because they exhibit some pride. That is also arrogant. Everyone has their character flaws, and variety is the spice of life.
If you fail to understand the issue at hand why comment at all?
The Pen That Never Forgets
Depending on your interests and how much time you spend reading, learning and engaging you may end up being knowledgeable on a whole stack of subjects. When you interact with others without this same intensity your bound to come off arrogant.

For programmers many things are complementary, interests in Maths, Physics, Finance can easily stem from loving the numerical and mathematical aspects of programming. Effective programming also requires good communication skills and tends to require more formal written language to precisely explain more complex or abstract concepts that come with programming, this can lead to other interests to.
I don't think the English language tripped you here but the overtly PC atmosphere surrounding conversations about differences in people.
Excellent news.

I'm still skeptical about Apple's intentions after 14 months of stubbornness, but it never ceases to amaze how quickly the phone ecosystem changes.

The corporations, developers and consumers all deserve credit for the sophisticated demands and solutions moving these platforms forward.
Arrogance is about the way they deliver the feedback.
For some, diplomacy is hard since they can't understand why others fail to meet their technical/knowledge/... expectations.

At work, I'm surrounded by smart people. They often outsmart me but a common trap they fall into is not doing enough meta thinking. They seem stuck on level 1 of things.
I agree with this, I've worked in health care and programmers have nothing on physicians when it comes to arrogance. I don't know any programmers who would coach a physician on the proper way to design a course of treatment...
> Forget about trying to disagree with a popular HN poster without getting down-voted to oblivion.

That's been a problem with HN for as long as it exists.
Popular writing reminds me of image compression: part eternal truth, part Human Visual System. People enjoy fiction because it connects with them somehow; pop fiction targets the Human Narrative System. Joseph Campbell has the idea of the universal monomyth; Orson Scott Card claims that a writer's best writing happens despite the author. Orson is conceited enough to believe he's not a great writer, just a conduit of man's soul.

A clever writer can easily get carried away with himself - solipsistic, narcissistic - such as those quoted in the submission (the elimination pun; the parallel of temper and years.) Maybe being restrained was good for him? if you come across a passage you think particularly fine, strike it out. I actually enjoy the straightfowardness of his "bad" writing (including this image: "scattering the town's 4,000 inhabitants before its terrific blast.")

Popularity is a tricky measure of technical merit, because it has more to do with what people need than with what you have created. Perhaps the credit for mining that need here really does lie with the publisher, who specified the story.
to be fair, it's meant to help give presentations. it's very specifically designed to not advance on mouse click because that allows you to use your mouse to highlight things on a slide, which I do all the time. You can use arrow keys or spacebar - I always instinctively hit the arrow keys when I see slides online, it honestly never occurred to me that anyone would click and expect the slide to advance.
It's not a blinded trial, according to the article: “Because of the different ways the drugs were dispensed — one by mouth and one by infusions — doctors and patients, it was decided, would both know who got which drug.”
Sure they can: post a PDF instead.
Two memories from the Hardy Boys:

1) first reading the word "rendezvous," which I never heard anyone say, so for years, my brother and I talked about secret "rend-a-visses"

2) never quite figuring out what a "jalopy" was, as chet's car was never a car, always a jalopy.
For the first, you don't need to wrap a function of one argument in a lambda. I can't remember if you need to quote function names in Clojure, so it's either:

(stream-filter perfect? ... )

or:

(stream-filter 'perfect? ...)
By replying even once, he gave her a gift far greater than some filler quote the PR group could have given her about iPads in education.

A good reporter would have run with that -- new headline: "Apple's messaging focus comes from the very top" -- rather than whine about the right way for a CEO to communicate. (A 22-year-old college senior's 'enraged' opinion about the right tone for Jobs to take, or what his PR staff should prioritize, just isn't very interesting.)
That's a false dichotomy. There are many spots between those two extremes where he could have made a lot more money.
So the protocol seems to be that strong web platforms want to themselves loosen up their dependence on their OS platforms: browsers, operating systems, etc..., so taken to an extreme the right thing to do is build a hardware platform? A little extreme, no?

It makes for a good plan B, but who thinks that creating yet another competing platform in the mobile space is a good thing for Facebook, at this point? Right now they have a very comfortable position on iPhone, Android, and Phone 7, with the biggest risk for platform subversion coming from Google. That still leaves them two viable platforms on mobile, with virtually no conflicts of interest coming from Apple, and possibly none from Microsoft either. (Okay, Ping, but I don't think Apple's ambitions for Ping are anything beyond boosting iTunes sales.) Now not only will they introduce another platform, but they will turn their existing platforms hostile against them. It's the kind of behavior that will land Bing as the default operating system in future releases of iPhone.

Possible responses: a Facebook phone OS might push Google to do a deep Google Me integration into Android, thus forcing most Android users to at least give Google Me a try, which hurts Facebook. It might force Apple to make Mobile Me free, and then integrate deep photo sharing and commenting into iPhoto and iOS. Since a plurality of college students own Macs and iPod touches already, Apple has very powerful platform control that can cause trouble for Facebook should Facebook be perceived as a threat to iOS. I don't see either of these response scenarios being particularly profitable for Facebook.

This can get very, very nasty. As they said in Godfather, "Nobody wants all out war."
That doesn't sound good. :( If I had that installed I'd just have activated it without telling him. Or if I didn't I wouldn't have told him about the software in the first place. Anyways... good luck.
"The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love... and pretends that love means total ignorance is okay... who refuses to confront the reality of business, and when he/she can no longer ignore that reality, refuses to come up with problem-solving approaches other than whining or shutting down."

There, I fixed that for him.
> For an encore, check 'mathematicians are arrogant', 'physicists are arrogant', 'surgeons are arrogant' and so on.

It took me a while to realize that http://xkcd.com/793/ wasn't about programmers..
You are describing it as a mere packaging problem but I think it goes deeper than that. I think arrogance is exemplified by being closed-minded, refusing to even consider the other persons point of view.

And once you do that you will almost always moderate your statements, whereas those that think they are structurally in the right do not feel the need to do so, they will treat the rest of the world as though they're slightly stupid children and their tone will reflect that.
Without reading the article, but as someone who has a condition where lots of clinical trials are done, I will offer this opionion:

Clinical trials can be pretty idiotic because a) they don't control for enough factors and b) the act of qualifying for the trial can confound the results, something that seems to be completely ignored.

On a cystic fibrosis forum I belong to, one member wanted to participate in a clinical trial. A precondition was that she not be on a particular drug that she was on. So she goes to the forum and asks for non-drug alternatives so she can get off this drug and qualify for the study. If she does better during the study: Is it because of the drug being studied? Is it because she stopped taking this other drug to qualify for the study? Is it because of the non-drug alternatives she began using as a substitute? Is it two or more of those reasons and how much of the change can be attributed to each factor?

If she qualified, I seriously doubt the people making the study would ask any of the above questions. If they did, I have no clue how you could determine meaningful answers. It looks like junk data to me.
I would have thought talking to the cops first might have been a good idea...
let us know how well lojack works out.
Python Startups and the True Entrepreneur
College Essay Writing Formulated Way
Essay writing is a task which many students feel the need to flee from. However, college essay writing is not a difficult task. If the right method of writing is followed, essay writing will be an enjoyable task which will bring you a good grade as well.
"Anybody that has a job that requires a ton of study and a lot of brain work will tend towards this, it's human, nothing specific about programmers."

Like the Apostle Paul said in the New Testament: "Knowledge puffs up; but charity edifieth"
Thanks!

btw, it Scheme. Compared to Clojure it is clean and readable.
I agree. It is never black and white, and the applicability of any rule or principal also depends on the context.

A small company cannot afford to do planning like that of a billion dollar company.

A billion dollar company cannot afford to plan like a small company (that is, not do much of planning). And for both, the folly always is in waiting for completing the perfect plan, before acting, because there is nothing such as the perfect plan.

Note: 'Afford' as not just in money terms, but the risk of taking the extra time to plan.
You should read a book or two by Barbara Sher. She talks about what to do when you're burnt out and disinterested in everything. That is not a normal state for a human. Ignore the apparent self-help taint -- the books are practical, no-nonsense, and very good.
Yes I am working in PHP.Its a side project I created being being bored of the work given to me at my office. Trying to sell it now. You can contact me : ejazzz@gmail.com
That's the trouble with being brilliant, people think you're arrogant.
It took me a while to realize that http://xkcd.com/793/ wasn't about programmers..

Even though it was titled physicists?
Is there a video recoding of the talk?
Moral support and Share the financial burden are very strong reasons to give up quite a bit of equity.

The nasty problem I see here is the same as the usual big one for those seeking a technical co-founder: if you don't already know this person, what are the odds you're going to find a right one? This is something like a marriage without the usual benefit of dating etc. ahead of time and if you pick wrong it's very unlikely your venture will survive.
I don't get it. The volume of shorts in the markets is a dynamic quantity right? In the absence of new transactions, these shorts would disappear when the shares are physically transferred. Therefore, the risk here is counterparty risk, but I don't see this risk as being peculiar to ETFs right? Furthermore, once you have settled and obtained ownership, the risk is gone right?
Brilliance in one domain does not equal brilliance in all domains. Often the pride of a programmer regarding his or her work gets carried over into communication with people in other domains, who may be just as brilliant in their own sphere.
"If you done it, it ain’t bragging." -Walt Whitman
Damn, that must take incredible creativity, akin to being asked to code a website from seeing a screenshot of the privacy policy.
File a police report, then file a claim with your insurance company. Pony up the deductible, and buy yourself a new laptop and restore it from your time machine backup. Its likely not worth the trouble to pursue getting the stolen property back.

This of course assumes that you have decent home owner's or renter's insurance, which should cover theft ever from your car. If you don't, then you should...

If someone's already mentioned this, I apologize. I didn't read through all of the comments.
The Future of America Is Freelance
Any person who has rational thoughts in this diplomatic world would seem arrogant to some scale.

Example,

Rational:"The education system in India is seriously broken beyond repair. Anyone who succeeds, succeeds despite the system and not because of the system."

Diplomatic:"The education system of India is not really on the right track, but we have a real flow of potential. This is evident by the number of people that succeed"
Good call. I loved Tom Swift. The Giant Robot one was my favorite.

A few years ago I was in the office of a plastics company that had a huge diagram on the wall of a machine that crawled through oil pipelines, inspecting them from the inside. (I think they made the wheels for it).

I immediately thought - 'Holy shit, it's Tom Swift's Atomic Earth Blaster!"

(That was from the pre-green ages, back when men were men and instead of protecting the Earth, we fucking BLASTED it. Someone should write Tom Swift and His Autonomous Rain-forest Devourerer. "Gasp, Tom! The ARFD is out of control!". "No, it's always like that")

Also - I always felt that Tom Swift was the inspiration for Reed Richards.

Also - someone mentioned Tintin and I was not allowed to post this reply

---
If you like Tintin you'll like this webcomic - it's a total TT homage and 90% as good.

http://fifine.purrsia.com/COMICS.html
---

Could anyone PLEASE tell me how fast is too fast to reply? I cannot find out, I have written HN twice!
A programmer is not a mathematician, physicist, or surgeon - and yet a programmer would put himself on that list.
A return to the "good" old days of typing in code from a magazine! You could buy, say, next months Wired with 30 pages of code that will enable free tethering if you type it into the correct app. As labourious as it would be on a screen keyboard, it's still much easier than doing the same on those old ZX81 keyboards :)
Free Directory List - September 2010
I feel the same. BYO music (iPod) helps, but not completely.

On this topic, there's sometimes a really annoying hum where I live. White noise solves it. In summer, I use a box fan. In winter, I used to use this:

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

And now use this, because it can be set with lower frequencies: http://freshmeat.net/projects/whitenoise/

But the best thing is to take a brisk walk in the fresh air, and notice nature. How fortunate to be prompted to do this beneficial thing! (a convenient rationalization that is also absolute truth.)
Yes, but this is exactly where the problem lies:

> who may be just as brilliant in their own sphere.

Or they may not be. And woo to you if you come in as an outsider of that domain and you start talking sense.

That's one surefire way of being branded 'arrogant'. I had a gf that worked in genetics and I spotted an error in a draft of a paper and she got really mad with me for thinking that I could make a contribution to her work that she had studied hard for.

Turned out I was right though, and that really pissed her off, in spite of the very diplomatic delivery.
Can you do some outsourcing for things like marketing expertise or help dealing with customers?
Can you cut costs to address the financial "horizon" issue?

Using the marriage analogy, "shotgun weddings" sometimes work because the baby keeps people together. If this is not their baby (ie they weren't in on it from the get go), well, it looks a lot tougher to me to make it stick.

Good luck with this.
You can state the same thing different ways depending on the words you use, tone of voice, etc. Just because you are brilliant in one field doesn't give you a pass to look down on everyone else.
Rounded Rects
Yeah, I was attempting a bluff. Clearly not a very good one.
Looks great. I know have it installed on my new laptop, and my wife's
Wow, a site more inane than Meta StackOverflow. I didn't think it was possible...
Just because you are brilliant in one field doesn't give you a pass to look down on everyone else.

And just because you are brilliant at something in particular does not mean you also have equally brilliant diplomatic skills so as to be able to state the fact (that you are exceptionally competent at X) without sounding arrogant. I try to cut people some slack in that regard.
While I don't doubt that the stereotype exists for a reason (the arrogant, maladjusted programmer) I can't really remember encountering any in all the time I've been working with other programmers (25ys). Perhaps it's more prevalent in non face to face situations like chat rooms or with the less mature.

I've seen the brilliant ones get a little frustrated with "slow" people but they weren't dickheads about it. In my personal experience, developers really go out of their way to help an enthusiastic "newbie" get up to speed.

On the other hand, I have seen situations where a newbie would ask a forum for an answer to his homework assignment and then get upset because he didn't get an immediate answer or someone pointed him to a source for his answer ("here's a link to sorting algorithms") instead of coding up the assignment for him.
I think you can check the 'pro drugs' item off that list.
Or realizes that your data may be worth more than the device it sits on.
(Note: didn't read the article, just the HN comments.)

"I don't disagree about the cruelty of putting people in the control group. You're basically denying them medicine that they need."

The problem is, you don't know this until you do the trial.

I'm not up on current figures, but sometime ago a read that the efficacy of placebos in treating organic (i.e. very real and physical) heart damage was 50% plus or minus a bit (I think it was plus). (Given all the connections we know of between the nervous system and things in the body that could allow this the finding was not entirely surprising.)

They aren't entirely heartless, so to speak: sometimes they will stop trials involving life or death conditions and start giving everyone the new drug if the initial results are fantastic enough and they've got enough control evidence (including how populations not in the study have responded to the old treatment(s)).

And there are enough phase 3 (efficacy) trial failures it's clear we have to do this; the alternatives are worse.

There's also the "first do no harm" rule, which I'd argue is in alignment with this process. Giving someone a new drug that's worse than existing treatments is harmful and one sad fact of side effects is that by definition the more rare they are, the more people you'll have to give the drug to to be able to find them. At each level, phases 1, 2, 3 and general marketing you expose it to larger populations, which is the only way to find out :-(.
Yes. The titles seldom add any value to XKCD, so I guess I filtered it out.
I don't think she is ready to make lemonade from lemons.
Karma is most significant yardstick in this community, so that is HN's way of saying that it matters. This is why PG says you have to be careful about what you measure [1], because then you tend to start optimizing for that.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
This is why you never bluff but just take action.

What a silly move.
Yes doing the keywords is one thing, the built-ins another, and harder as well. But given the success logic and mathematics has had with remaining largely symbolic, and the mathematical nature of python, it might be at least an interesting exercise.