skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few points:

(1) Many if not most economists are empirical. Recent John Bates Clark medals---a good reflection of what academic economists think is the best work being done right now---have gone to economists doing empirical work. Recent examples include what works for development (evaluated with large randomized controlled trials), what are the causes of growing income inequality, how should we structure auctions etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bates_Clark_Medal . To say that most economists have no contact or interest in empiricism is incorrect.

(2) The point about simple models is not that economists fully believe them---it's that they force everyone to be explicit about assumptions. They also try to identify what are the key features of admittedly very complex phenomena. This is what models do in most scientific endeavor. That the models often perform poorly is a sign of an immature science---not fraud or dishonesty. You'd get eternal fame and become fantastically rich if you came up with a financial model with great predictive powers---do economists not create such models because they are stupid and corrupt? That seems unlikely.

(3) The transistor example completely misses the key distinction that every presentation of the simple supply and demand model always makes - i.e., there is a difference between the short term and long term. If demand doubled for transistors tomorrow, the price wouldn't rise?

(4) You confuse absolute and comparative advantage.

(5) "In the 1950s the US had a great economy. Except for some points of information, biomedical, and materials technology, it's not clear that our standard of living is as high now."

This is where I stopped reading - this is so obviously wrong http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP/capita+real+US
that it's hard to take seriously any conclusions on the relative merits of different industrial policies the follow from this "fact."
...at the end of the employee lockout period, you mean. =)

By most estimates there are 300 million shares of Facebook generated in various capital rounds and whatnot. From my experience, if you're coming into the game this late you'll make some money with an IPO but only the founding members and VC groups will make fuck-you levels of wealth on the offering.
SVN is also inbuild into Adobe CS.
you two have almost motivated me to try switching. do you have an example of what you like better about it?
"Tough love is not generally the first step, and every single case is different and must be treated as such. Please remember this."

If you look at any documentary about addicts (or hear real doctors talking about it), it's the step families are FORCED to take because every other method just results in the addict thinking they can continue.

"Being kind and loving isn't necessarily enabling."

If I tried to be kind to my addict friends and tell them in a sweet voice that what they are doing is hurting themselves, they would tell me to fuck off. People aren't stupid. They know that being addicted to Meth, Coke, or Heroin is shitty and unhealthy.

Tough love is the kindest and most loving thing you can do for an addict. It just might save their life. If they know that the result of being an addict will mean that you might not talk to them again, they will think twice about shooting up.
I never even thought of taking a drug to get ahead or be better at what I do. I don't think I knew people did self-medicate to improve their productivity either. It seems so wrong to me and so unauthentic. The brain is a fragile mission critical component we know so little about. I am amazed so many seem here discuss it so candidly. Good luck and make sure you don't turn into veggies by 50 y.o.
MBT Chapa,Anti Shoe,MBT Shoes UK
1. Go talk to someone. This is mandatory. Psychologist or psychiatrist.

2. (I don't know if this is applicable or not but) drinking will not help.

3. More people than you can possibly imagine have been where you are. (The noisy "everything is fine" group has a large subset of liars and people suffering -- like you -- are silent. Skewed sample set).

4. It will not always be thus. The tide goes out, the tide comes in. Wait for the tide to come in. But in the meantime start talking to someone.
"Let's execute command 382 to see what it does."

Oy. Not the best idea, generally speaking.

Edit: I used to read the localized paper version of http://xakep.ru/ several years ago, and practically every hacking story/tool roundup they had mentioned the annoying problem with ls --color, it was apparently present in almost every public rootkit at the time. It's kinda interesting to see that idiots still use outdated tools years later.
#4 doesn't really apply so much to newer employees. granted I don't know this for a fact, but at this point I'd be surprised if your average software engineer gets jackpot-level equity.
> The AF is going towards the UAV route

Can you explain what this means?
This sounds like a very cool idea! I would love to wake up by a nice sensual voice telling me my news updates and unread emails and new facebook notifications etc. Its much better than my annoying alarm clock im using now. It would also wake me up, because i will be listening to the message for a while instead of just turning my alarm off.

Good idea! I hope it gets launched.
Jay Adelson (of Digg) to fix Silicon Valley. It needs fixing?
Just to extend a little: Nearly every widely used (non-lisp) compiler that exists first compiles the program into some sort of intermediate representation that is easier to manipulate and optimize, works on it a while in this form, and then finally compiles that into machine code.

The level of this intermediate representation varies between compilers -- GCC uses a very simplified and strict form of c, while many others use an IR that is closer to assembly. LLVM is not really a competitor to JVM or .NET, but an attempt to define an unified IR that many languages can compile into, be optimized in, and then be compiled into various different machine codes. So that when you write a compiler for a language you only have to write the top layers until your code turns to IR, or if you make a compiler for new platform you only have to write the bottom layers to turn IR into machine code, and in both cases you get free use of all the various IR-level compiler optimizations that have been already built into LLVM.
You can't compare LLVM to native code, since these are different things. LLVM IR can be compiled to efficient native code if that's what you want. In fact, this is what happens when you use clang+llvm to compile code into native executables.

LLVM is much more than that, however. You might want to use it as a JITting interpreter of the IR instead of as a native compiler with all the benefits that may result from this. You may also use it as a sophisticated optimization framework (including cross-object, link-time optimization) taking IR and giving (optimized) IR back.
...long-term side effects.

Modafinil has been around since the 70's. So far, no studies have found issues with long-term use. Actually, some studies found it to have a neuroprotective effect.

I wouldn't believe there is anything to be done to your brain, like enhancing cognitive abilities through drugs, without unintended consequences.

The environment we evolved in is quite different from the environment we now live in. Humans used to have much more limited supplies of food and nutrients. Our bodies are built for famine resistance instead of maximum performance. There's probably a similar trade-off in our brain functions, since the brain is a pretty big energy hog (responsible for around 25% of calories burned).

We can use drugs to tweak the trade-offs made by evolution. We don't have to worry about food and nutrients today. Stimulants can decrease appetite and need for sleep, both of which would be disastrous in a food-limited environment. Even the effect of stimulants we find beneficial (spending hours in concentrated thought) would likely be harmful on the African savannah.

The precautionary principle is too often applied in the case of enhancement. We don't completely understand the brain yet, but we do have some idea of how it works, and today there are safe effective drugs that improve cognitive abilities.
Side effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Side_effects)

In 2007, the FDA ordered Cephalon to modify the Provigil leaflet in bold-face print of several serious and potentially fatal conditions attributed to modafinil use, including TEN, DRESS syndrome, and Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS).
The long term safety and effectiveness of modafinil has not been determined.

Webmd:http://bit.ly/9dSAg6
Headache, nausea, nervousness, anxiety, dizziness, and difficulty sleeping may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, notify your doctor or pharmacist promptly.

Tell your doctor immediately if any of these rare but serious side effects occur: mental/mood changes (e.g., agitation, confusion, depression, abnormal thoughts, hallucinations).
Seek immediate medical attention if any of these rare but very serious side effects occur: chest pain, fast/pounding/irregular heartbeat, signs of infection (e.g., fever, persistent sore throat).
Mandelbrot set using the html5 canvas tag
What about trans-gender passengers? Will they bar a women with a penis from boarding her flight because she "seems to have a fake explosive penis between her legs". SFO is going to go down with this ;-)
My question: Is the test site served via HTTPS?
This would be tremendous, BUT, many companies have struggled and do struggle to do one of these things right, i.e., determine most important emails, most interesting news headlines, etc

Trying to do all of these is much easier said than done.

I'd personally focus on one key pain point a PA can solve (which people might pay for ideally), do that really well and then grow into other areas. Jack of all trades, master of none is not where you want to be.

Good luck! Again, in theory, the idea is great.
Their docs, API and sandbox already sucked, and yet, Paypal falls even lower.
"The real argument is, "If we believe something is benign enough to make partaking in it legal, it is yellow-bellied inconsistency to make providing it illegal.""

Most of the proponents will never admit that smoking pot has adverse health effects. Everything seems to be rainbows and unicorns when it comes to pot. I want to see some real long-term studies, not from high times magazine.

Why can't people admit that they don't give a damn about the 'health benefits' and just want to get high? It's very cowardly to get it decriminalized under the guise of health.

Inhaling smoke into your longs that may or may not cause memory loss and paranoia can't be healthy. Pot changes people that smoke it regularly. It never fails. All of my friends that smoke it regularly have had absolutely no ambition in their lives and are still in pretty much the same positions they were in high school (it's been 11 years). Before the pot, they had dreams and goals.

If we ever have government run health care, regular drug users either shouldn't be covered or have to pay a ton more. I shouldn't have to pay for you mistakes.
I would go so far as to say something shocking that the number of actual coders NOT using any kind of version/source control exceeds those that do. This based on working in and managing 7 "shops" in the last 19 years. Education about VCS is slow and wearisome often when what you love is simply a 9-5 job for others.
Once upon a time, Microsoft was considered one of the innovators of the tech world

I don't know that, that statement has ever been true. I am not a big MS basher but I would not give them the crown of a tech innovator either. What I would say is they are good at strategic acquisitions and integrating technologies into their stack. They have done very well as a vertical software provider. They historically have been good at throwing a pile of money at a segment to catch up. This strategy has not been working so well for them lately, because the battleground has changed.
Programming languages have to break free from the tyranny of ASCII
A marketplace for the Homebuilding Industry
www.ExplorerHomes.com
Consulting pyschologists has a social stigma attached in a country where I live. I also dont drink
My SO takes Provigil infrequently and has reported no loss of creativity.

Next this guy is going to tell us that LSD bring him closer to God, and you're going to believe him?

Anecdotal evidence about the effects of drugs are mostly worthless.
Can anyone recomend somewhere to get hold of a (preferably small) amount of Provigil? (Shipping to UK) Would like to try it myself.

edit: Found http://www.unitedpharmacies.co.uk/product.php?productid=973&... and placed a small order with a throwaway credit card, will see if that arrives in the next 7-14 days as promised. Would still like any recomendations, though.
It occurs to me just now that it's kinda weird that subversion repositories are pretty much distributed everywhere; git repositories generally end up on github.
a few times
I love the bias on HN. Anyone that has anything negative to say about your precious weed gets down voted. If you really believe in this, you need to come to terms with the fact that there are negative health effects to smoking weed.
You'll find more scientifically oriented articles about this subject if you call it nootropics. Here is another personal (not me) anecdote about it which comes off quite differently.

http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/36691-ten-months-of-resea...
Many people say this, but it's simply not true. The numbers miss crucial information, and I'll explain why. The reason that I've got this knowledge that isn't widely known is that my wife works for a hospital, where she is the "Manager of Budget and Reimbursement". That means that half of her job (and that of her department) is to secure reimbursement from Medicare (and Medicaid).

If you're sharp, you'll already see where this is headed.

The problem is that Medicare, while not quite a monopsony, is so large that they can call the shots pretty much as they like. Where other healthcare insurance providers (say, Aetna) still exist, Medicare's market share -- and thus power in the market -- is many times larger than the biggest of them. That being the case, Medicare can largely dictate unilaterally the terms under which it's willing to pay out. And that is the very raison d'etre for my wife's department.

So while other providers show greater expenses for administrative costs, Medicare's own expenses for the equivalent is far lower. But that doesn't mean that, in the larger picture of the patient's care, these expenses are not being incurred.

Medicare's size and market power allows them to demand that providers (e.g., my wife's hospital) offload a huge amount of the administrative costs, doing much of what ought to be Medicare's own work (by comparison with what's done by and for other carriers) for them. This means that while Medicare isn't paying directly for it, the administrative expenses are still incurred in the course of patient care; it's just that the costs are hidden from Medicare books, and must be amortized across the rest of the hospital accounting.

This means that half of the expenses the hospital pays for my wife and her department are really Medicare expenses, but don't show up on Medicare books -- instead, they're amortized as a fixed expense across the whole hospital.
If the site/businesses that they had build where worth anything at all, surely they would have sold them too instead of shutting them down?
There's a lot of conjecture here. Not sure why it's being upvoted.
>What I said about efficiency in China is a faithful description of what academic econ commonly says.

No, you won't get a single econ prof to say that the Chinese are more efficient at sewing buttons. But then again:

>More generally, there's next to nothing that China can actually do more efficiently than the US can. So, they sell us stuff just because they are cheaper, not because they are more efficient.

This is exactly what comparative advantage is about. It's clear that you've simply misunderstood the material.
Indeed, I myself have always been quite doubtfull of drugs' effectiveness. I used to attribute success much more to e.g. the discipline to refrain from browsing. This article makes me rethink that.

As for the creativity, I'm not always sure that is a boon. When I encounter a particularly inspiring idea while studying something else, I find my mind wanders off in all directions with creative ideas, where I 'should' be concentrating on task at hand.
Merge HN: whichapp url: http://reliefapps.com text: Compare web apps to find the best
You're right. But I wanted to reply on the same level as the OP.
This seems to pop up a lot.

After reading about this the first time I researched for about a month before purchasing any. My general experience with them is that they work, they keep you up longer than you would normally be able to, they keep you alert, you don't feel like you are hopped up either.

The effect only lasts so long though, after being up for over 24 hours, your body gets tired, and the effectiveness of the drug gets worse. I didn't really go past 36 hours, but if I wanted to I could have. Note that I didn't purposely try and stay up all those times, I work graveyard shifts and ended up having important things come up when I needed to sleep and I was forced to stay up.

Modafinil really did help me when I was tired, but as far as being a 'smart drug' it wasn't exactly mind blowing. It did make it easier to focus, but I could just as easily focus on a TV show, or a website, versus a piece of code I wanted to finish. So if you need to stay up, study, or get something done and you are determined to do it, this is great. If you want something to augment your day to day life and make you 'smarter' this really isn't for you.

Though there are more things popping up saying that it might have worse long term side effects than previously thought, I didn't really have any that I know of, but if I get brain cancer in a year I guess I know why. :)
6 cases over a decade. That's pretty safe in my book. You also left out the part about acute toxicity. For acute doses, Modafinil is safer than caffeine.

The FDA is ridiculously risk-averse when it comes to approving drugs. For example, they recently rejected lorcaserin and qnexa, two anti-obesity drugs, over safety concerns. They also got sibutramine withdrawn from the US market. Even if these drugs have risks, the risks of obesity are likely much higher.

A lot of people are going to die from obesity that would have been saved if these drugs were approved. Of course, the media reports when approved drugs cause harm, not when rejected drugs don't save lives.
So 1993

The first program to be converted to UTF was the C Compiler. There are two levels of conversion. On the syntactic level, input to the C compiler is UTF; on the semantic level, the C language needs to define how compiled programs manipulate the UTF set.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html

Plan9, what Unix did next.
The guys at BA have been kicking ass recently. Remember that ash cloud that grounded every plane in Europe? Willie Walsh personally went up in a 747 to prove it was actually safe to fly in. That's like the CEO of BP pulling on his gloves and sorting the leaky rig out personally.
Hey, do you want to know what the side effects of birth control pills are?

Nausea, loss of sexual function, mood swings, increased risk of stroke, pulmonary embolism, and heart attack.

Give me some Provigil any day.
> financially-motivated ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry)

This is completely non-scientific, but I work close to (or you could even say, in an enclave of) the Google campus and the immediate thing I notice is the relative scarcity of "fancy" cars compared to companies that pay similarly or even less. Lots of Priuses, Honda Civics (many of them older), much less BMW and Mercedes; the only expensive cars tend to be innovative sport coupes like Nissan Z or Lotus Elise.

If these statistics are actually representative (and not my selection bias), then this is worthy of respect and says a lot about the company DNA.
Wow! Yet another article about "smart drugs" that's actually about stimulants! I give it one hour before people start mentioning Erdos and talking about amphetamines instead. (Edit: Yup, and now I'm getting downvoted.)

Here's a much better article about actual smart drugs (http://sites.google.com/site/thinkinginanutshell/nootropics), and its HN discussion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211959). Sorting them in terms of risk & body load is a good idea, I think. He's not kidding when he says vaso-/desmopressin messes with homeostasis.

The racetams (piracetam, aniracetam, oxiracetam, etc.) are probably the least risky, though I've had the best long-term effects from getting enough sleep and exercise, eating reasonably well, and not spiking and crashing on caffeine all the time. If you want to try nootropics, be informed and careful, and address the obvious factors that may be messing with your concentration first. (For me it was sleep debt and too much caffeine.)
Wow, Thank you so much for saying that! That is really amazing feedback. We just launched so hearing things like that is just, well, awesome :)
"Pretty much all of my friends that started smoking pot (even the ones that were really smart) all have dead-end jobs and dropped out of school. "

You must be a heck of an outlier.
Pupuk An Organik Cair
Pharmaceutical products in the US that have unexpected side-effects can cause their owner to be sued into oblivion, and even incredibly rare side effects are likely to manifest if a large population is taking them. (Also, the population at large does not understand statistics & probability.) Look at the history of Thalidomide, that's where a lot of precedents were set.

This puts certain categories of drugs (anything for pregnant women, nootropics for people without alzheimers, etc.) in the "too risky to bother" category.
Just playing devil's advocate here: how much Clang/LLVM users are protected against patent lawsuits from companies (or individuals) who contributed patented technology to it?

I understand it never happened, but I am afraid someone somewhere may contribute something relevant and then have the patents bought by a troll.
> DNA is just a sequence of bits, software is too.

I don't quite see how that plays into it. You can just as easily dismiss any physical creation as a collection of elements.
New rules for Canada Immigration 2010 | Around The Globe
Indeed.

tinycc is one of the only compilers that directly translates to machine code. This makes it compile very quickly, makes the code base smaller, and as a bonus allows it to be a pretty decent c script 'interpreter'. But it also means that it does not optimise as well.

Tinycc was originally submitted as the winning entry in an obfuscated C code contest - but is surprisingly readable now. Worth a read.
> It's as if software algorithms were written on the leaves of trees around us, but we needed to dye them to see the source.

Love the vivid analogy. But couldn't the same thing be said about any "method" invention?
Boy Genius Report Reviews MacBook Air
In my (small) town fedex, ups and purolator are all the same one guy. And he's not very dependable. I have the "not home' problem all the time.
Yes. Search the archives for "piracetam", "aniracetam", etc. Discussions about nootropics seem to come up a few times a year (though they usually get derailed to talking about amphetamines and provigil pretty quickly).
Probably start with the influential bloggers first, a post from them it's worth many hours of working doing it yourself.
Thanks for the suggestions. SoundCloud would be great, except keeping the riffs/music private is important and there's no secret link sharing in the free account (the lite account is €30). Still searching for alternatives... nothing I've seen yet is as good as drop.io for this purpose.
Er.. i will keen to work on it in Dec.