skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have proper sources, nor am I an expert on the subject. I just remember this being the result of a study I read about some years ago, and it fits my personal experience with several friends.

Some Googling finds this: Pope HG, Gruber AJ, Hudson JI, Huestis MA, Yurgelun-Todd D. Neuropsychological performance in long-term cannabis users. Arch Gen Psychiatry 58(10):909–915, 2001.

Your caveat about correlation and self-medication could be right. It might also be wrong - you don't give a good citation either. My point was that I think we have a lot less knowledge about the effects of these drugs than e.g. alcohol which we're (ab-)using since millenia, so the UK analysis is certainly an improvement.
"Longitudinal studies indicate that, in long-term, the higher use of cannabis is associated with an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder, and probably, major depression in subjects initially without affective disorder, but was not found increased risk of cannabis use among those initially only with mania or depression."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20658056

the source is not very reliable(some obscure journal in portugese),
At the beginning of the last century there was a design movement called Arts and Crafts. Think Frank Lloyd Wright. In America the movement focused on creating art that was beautiful and still true to the source materials.

It feels like web development needs a similar philosophy. Surely there are many movements stirring right now, but few seem to have a strong voice that inspires those beyond the field.

Which is to say: perhaps try looking at development as one role. Start by finding ways to talk about design and engineering as one.

Read some Louis Sullivan, or other modernists architects and see how they were forced to change their notion of beauty as new methods and materials like building with steel and glass changed what a building could be.

In woodwork, you can build something with screws and nails or you can you use the much stronger and more beautiful dovetail joint, or mortise and tenon. What are the parallels in web development?

Design and engineering are not mutually exclusive.
While that is true on a federal level it is quite a bit different on a state level. In CO for example, pot is very simple to get legally. You can tell a doctor you have head aches, back pain, whatever and quickly get a pot card. When it comes to pot it is legally easier to get than an endless prescription of vicodin. At one point they had 'doctors' onsite at the pot dispensaries, but I think they may have recently changed that part.

You are right that cocaine is more strictly controlled than either of the other substances, but the original point I was making is that you can't use vicodin as an example of a legal substance when it's not freely available.
The article talks about both.
Fascinating topic, but a weak treatment of it. I think you could go much further in depth on this subject. Who pays, to whom the benefits accrue short term, long term, and so on and so forth.
(whoops, deleted it by accident - http://track.com/charts/show-chart/8/ works though)
The thing about MITI, though, is that they weren't very good at predicting the future, just at getting everyone on the same page. They initially tried to prevent Japanese car manufacturers from getting into the export business, and tried to prevent Sony from licencing the transistor. They reversed course quickly once it was obvious how the markets were responding, but its hard to call them crazy geniuses.
A rather ill informed article that bundles all "computery" stuff together to arrive at some half-baked conclusions. I can tell from personal experience that there is a huge shortage of developers in the UK and fail to see how a decent developer would find it 'hardest' to get a job in the UK at the moment.
Try http://www.beautifulpeople.com
This is pretty cool to see programs "solving" video games. Although, for the most part I don't think this will affect play much. All-in strategies like this tend to only work if the other player is unprepared. Granted, this is a very fast rush and perhaps still very difficult to scout and notice early enough to counter, but the Starcraft community does tend to go back and forth finding and countering new builds (Perhaps the next step is to use a program to find a counter to this).

The two points about the build that the article mentions as counter-intuitive don't seem that strange to me since it is a rush (all-in) build. The extractor trick is well known and I would believe that it sacrifices economy long term but it gives you an extra drone (= more money) early on which is good for a rush.

The double overlord is there to support the seven roaches that you build almost all at once. At the beginning of the game, you can only afford to build one unit at a time so you can also replenish supply one overlord at a time. As the game progresses and you start pumping out large number of units at a time, you have to also be producing multiple overlords simultaneously to keep up with supply. Although this is very early, the all-in rush to produce 7 roaches requires a fast increase in supply.

To give an idea of how fast this is, the build ends at around 31 supply, about half of which is the attacking roach units. Max supply is 200 and mid-game is probably somewhere around 50-70 supply.
Our non-launch and how it has shaped our growth over the last 2 years
There is a difference between a glass of wine a day and getting drunk.

What's interesting there is that a glass of wine a day (which might be healthy, though such claims get regularly debunked) is socially accepted. I think our societies just have better knowledge of acceptable use of drugs that we're more familiar with, as a whole.
How to Make an Engineering Culture
What researchers should do is look at the prevalence of black markets in states where pot is easy to get legally. In CO pot is easier to get legally than anything else other than alcohol or tobacco. I wonder what that has done for COs black market for pot.
Chrome (unless I really, really need to use firebug for something, in which case I'll escape as soon as possible).
Ask HN: Hiring: two strategies
If you needed to fill a position in your firm excluding senior manager jobs which two strategies work best for you.

1. Passive) Post a job listing on your corporate website and/or through sites like Monster/Career Builder/Dice etc and then filter out the candidates who respond.

2. Active) Look for potential candidates who fit your ideal hire and contact them directly or through sites like LinkedIn.
So, patent trolls are like nuclear weapons, a deterrent component in the war to protect intellectual property?
I think this thread should focus only on actual job posts. There are thousands of job websites and tools out there, it's not the purpose of this thread.
very slowly
New Apple Patent Promises Scratch and Impact-Resistant Devices
The Structured Web
Why the Semantic Web didn't work, won't work, and what we can do about it.
Isn't that quite reasonable since you can code all you want in your spare time? Something that is not really possible with law or medicine.
Think it may go in cycles, for both search engines and social networks.

For search engines:
First we had specific directories (Yahoo, others), then a single search engine (Google), followed by need of vertical search engines

For social:
First we had all those nice forums; then (now) Facebook; again we could go to context specific verticals (e.g. HN a hacker vertical version of FB, which has the context for hackers)
"Likewise, we know exactly what this line of code does: a = b + 5;"

It could easily be unification or checking for equality depending on the language. Or it could be an assertion.

"Except for dot notation doesn’t do the same thing in Objective-C as it does in other languages."

And ='s doesn't do the same thing in objective-C as in other languages. (Although it does mean the same thing as in other C languages).

If you treat structure access as nested method calls, and then understand that certain methods do not have setters, this is a non-problem conceptually.

It is just a matter of knowing what methods can have get and set used on them, and which cannot. If you don't know that (and can't figure it out easily), I feel like you are SOL.
It's all over the board over here. I fear we are Balkanizing. We just cant get down to the common sense issues like economy, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We get wrapped up in the telling other people what to do issues. The tea party wants to get all of the old guard out which is a noble goal but the special interest groups are already trying to infiltrate it's ranks. Until lobbyist and money men are barred from access to politicians you can be assured that nothing will changes in American politics. Unfortunately the only ones that can bar that access are the politicians themselves, so don't expect that to change until we have a revolution or Balkanize and when I say revolution I mean the kind with guns and guerrillas. That won't happen until people are starving so I don't see much changing in the US for a while. Anyway, I think the Tea Party started off with all good intentions and then they became a political machine.
Right on. People who care enough to act when mistreated are becoming increasingly rare, it seems. Plenty are willing to complain, but complaining is not really acting. It's pointing out a problem, not trying to fix it.

The question is, though, how do we positively reward this type of action? For example, if the professor is fired, my guess is that he will have a hard time finding a job somewhere else, because he has rocked the boat. But, he deserves much better than that. How do we solve that?
There are 17,000 cults in India. http://goo.gl/CvDz
They're destroying India because they literally hate each other.
Google’s Aardvark: why the pushy IM interrogator should reward intelligence
How A Half-Broken Halloween Promotion Smashed Revenue Records
A couple of interesting points:

a) Since January Chrome has gained from 5.22% to current 8.47%.

b) While IE has lost more points overall, FF has lost a greater percentage of their users. IE has gone from 62.12% share to 59.26% share since January. FF has gone fron 24.43 to 22.82% since January.

c) Don't miss the incredible repository on browser data here http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...
I think him having "exam anxiety" hardly counts for health-related. Where do we draw the line on what is health-related and what is pertinent information?
I find this a bit ironic coming from 37signals. Isn't this the sort of "opinionated" behavior that they champion in Getting Real?

Maybe DHH has a good reason for thinking it's different, but I'd like to see it spelled out.
If you still thinking that alcohol isn't that harmful - visit Russia. ^_^

Life expectancy and mortality rate are very useful keywords.
I think he is exactly criticising them for not following agile methods - it's the basis of his criticism for following the waterfall method. His criticizm for not changing their plans is pt 3 (which I agree with)

And on your last point, using Iridium as an 'example' is like criticizing Middle Age 'surgeons' for not using antiseptic to ensure the success of their operations. You'd be right, but it's hardly a valuable observation nor provide much insight into how to avoid an equivalent situation today (where you are lacking knowledge/tools/technology).
Great article ... its always astonishing how often you here people say that very few people get rich as an entreprenuer when you hear stories of guys like this who virtually noone has heard of that make hundreds of millions. Cool story for sure.

Stories like these are the reasons I always refrain from taking a real job.

Arrington's article the other day spoke to me on many levels when he said his parents still did not know what he did. I have experienced this with my parents very often since I dropped out of college to pursue success with my first software startup.

After making an exit just 18 months later that put me in an entirely different tax bracket and gave me my first seven figure year i can never see myself doing anything else but working for me, however the most common things I hear when i see my parents are:

"When are you going to finish school"
and
"I have no idea what to tell my friends you do"

lol I guess this is just the life of an entreprenuer. for better or for worse, it is what I am and that is because of stories like this one.

Great write up!
Facebook News Feed Settings: Random or Not, Biggest Secrets Revealed
set cryptmethod=blowfish in 7.3 to really encrypt it.
There is no generic answer.

My quick thoughts (and I'm not trying to pass myself off as an expert here, just have some basic experience).

Valuations for businesses at your stage seem to vary from 2-5x annual sales, to 2-10x annual profits, depending on many many factors. But in either case that seems to put you in the $2MM-$5MM valuation range. If you're looking for a $200-$500K investment, you're looking at about a 10-20% equity stake. This would be a non-majority stake, so you should be able to structure this so than an investor (or group of investors if you got 4 or 5 angels) didn't have majority control... though in that case you'd probably have to pay attention to number of board seats if you actually took multiple investors.

IMO, what you most likely need is an experienced (super)angel who can give you solid advice about managing the growth of the company. This would probably include introductions to finance people (eg: CFO/Controller types), cash management strategies, biz dev/strategist folks and so on. Basically you'd probably look for someone who brings a little money and a lot of connections who is looking to provide solid business guidance.
San Francsico, though remote work is plausible.

Twitter is looking for all sorts of good engineers. The up to date list is always at http://twitter.com/positions.html.
China may not matter quite as much as you think
I was just in China and one thing that Cringely probably does not get right is: in China you have a strong majority of people who see it as a social responsibility to work together to improve the economy. One of my guides gave me quite a little speil about this, he was earnest, and I basically believed him.

Otherwise, I agree with the article. BTW, I think it is Thomas Friedman who has been pointing out that a lot of people in India are disappointed with US leadership in the world right now: not effective and they want us as a good buffer to Chinese hegemony.
Facebook Says User Data Sold to Broker
There are a lot of people using F# for financial work.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/quantifa/
http://cs.hubfs.net/forums/thread/45.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lucabol/archive/2008/12/04/financial...
The professor was a member of the Graduate Studies Committee, who as I understand it came to a consensus that the student should not be awarded the PhD. The committee was overruled by the university administration, which is what triggered the professor to take action.
CoreLogic in Concord, Ca. is hiring .NET web developers. On site. I'm the hiring manager. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/eng/2026135349.html
>>> in each case above, there's a specific tight circle of connections I'd like to draw on, but they aren't always the same

Which, presumably, does not include Ron Conway or Michael Arrington.
5 Google Engineering Management Mistakes (by Piaw Na)
robots.txt is malformed in this example:

Disallow: /*/blackhole/*

This line won't work even for good robots (robots.txt doesn't have wildcard characters).
We need to draw a distinction between the anxiety we all feel when faced with a stressful situation, and the pathological diagnosis of exam anxiety, just as some of us are "obsessive" but do not suffer from clinical OCD, or get "depressed" but do not suffer from clinical depression. Equating the milder "everyone gets this" form with the clinical version is a real disservice to the people with an actual disability.

Speaking as a college professor, I see that in practice the key distinction is that the students with the actual disability both A) get a doctor's note and B) tell me long in advance of requesting any specific accommodations. And much of the time they don't even dip very heavily into their accommodations---they may be allotted double time on an exam, for instance, but on an exam where the best un-disabled students finish in 35 minutes, the double-time students (who often are very good students) take the full period or slightly longer, rather than the full 100 minutes they're allotted.

I'm not going to try to diagnose the UM student here, but I will note that it is somewhat suspicious that the "exam anxiety" claim didn't come up until after he or she had failed for the second time.
To everyone, from someone who has dealt with this man personally:

I don't know the specifics of the situation. I generally assume I'm only getting part of the story when I read these sorts of articles. However, knowing Dr. Lukacs, he is most probably correct and in the right on (almost?) everything he is saying, and he is most certainly being royally f*'d over by the university.

That being said, it was just a matter of time until he went up against someone who didn't appreciate his lack of social skills. He is certainly not a diplomatic person by any means. He's one of those guys who would go up to you, tell you how everything about you is wrong (assuming you are in fact wrong), and be honestly perplexed when you get upset about it.

In short, he reminds me of that scene in The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, YOU'RE JUST AN ASSHOLE". This guy is Walter. He's not wrong, but his lack of tact pissed off someone in power over him.

I hope he comes out of this on top, because (as far as I can tell) he didn't do anything wrong, and even if his conduct was in error, seriously university, thanks for giving my degree a bad reputation (by proxy; I got CS, not math).

Just some insight from someone who knows the guy (me!). Hope you find it interesting
I think you're missing the parent's point. Your focus going to the mall isn't "oh man, I may get killed! That's so awesome!" but rather you're focusing on what ever you think you'll get by going to the mall. Likewise, skydiving and bugee-jumping provide an adrenaline dump. A "high".
When I look at the executives he's talking about here in the US, I don't see Indians; I see Americans of Indian origin.
I think many mid-to-large organizations would benefit greatly from internal training or mentoring programs for technical people. The "thrown into the fire" mentality is really not necessary. It just happens that way because that's how the culture has evolved.

I bet that the ramp-up period Brooks talks about in The Mythical Man-Month could be greatly shortened with a reasonable investment in mentoring and training processes.
The point is "they should have done something differently" not "what they could have done". Halfway through their development process, the problem they started out to solve no longer existed.

Launching satellites etc are expensive and time consuming. Agreed. But even when Iridium launched it's satellites were not fully operational. They would have probably had enough warning to iterate on a different product
>I think him having "exam anxiety" hardly counts for health-related.

I tend to agree, but apparently the university believes in it, and requires a doctor's note. Given that, I can't really be surprised that they treat it as health information.
I agree it sounds awful, but I agree that you are correct. Not everyone who wants a PhD can just get one. It is damn hard work. You devote your ENTIRE CAREER and in some cases life, to your Ph.D. It's not fair to the others who are working hard if you are just given one.
Agreed, this is what Facebook does, http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-htm...:

"[Facebook] implemented the History API to enable selective loading of page content via AJAX while preserving readable URLs."
When you have the might to dictate an entire industry, you have a different set of responsibilities.
Accepting that big "useless" images are indeed ignored (as per the Yale School of Management example), how does adding them or removing them affect the conversion rates?

To rephrase: what if they are completely ignored by the eyes but they add to the website in a way that increases the conversion rate? What if having these images made the websites be perceived as more "professional" and thus increases sales?

In short: what if eye-tracking is not the correct and only way to measure the effectiveness of these images?
Ask HN (Halloween Special): Tell us Your Story About, The Madness
I wonder if anyone has in the works an idea of using optical instead of microwave for satellite to Earth communication.
I have been wondering; for a while, my linkchecker tool has reported that my QHI links in http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil.html#suppliers-prices are broken, and QHI gives some sort of IP error when I visit - is QHI blocking non-European IPs?
Until you are breaking into somebody's house to get money to fund the addiction. Unfortunately, heroin is so addictive and so quick to build tolerance, that this is a very possible scenario.

The ideal scenario involves legalizing much more research about the drug so we could find a way to "have our cake and eat it, too." I imagine there are some smart scientists who could find a way to create a non-addictive heroin-like substance. As an example, just adding a small bit of naltrexone (an opioid antagonist) to opioids seems to reduce the build up of tolerance. I can't find the company who is doing clinical trials on a drug combining the two right now, but you can see [1] for an overview of combining an antagonist with an opioid.

[1] http://pain-topics.org/pdf/OpioidAntagonistsForPain.pdf
I see two primary problems with this idea.

#1. Most ugly people don't want to date someone else ugly. This is especially true for men, who typically care far more about their mate's appearance than their own.

#2. Most ugly people aren't conscious of their ugliness, or if they are, they at least aren't comfortable enough admitting it to sign up for this service.
I like JN, but these kinds of studies don't tell the full story. If you did A/B comparisons of the Yale page with and without images, which would convert better? I have a feeling that it would be the one with the picture.

The eye tracker finds the images ignored, but it isn't meant to be scrutinized, it sets a tone for the page. pictures have very different roles in an ecommerce setting vs. an aspirational info page. it isn't an apples to apples comparison. I wouldn't care so much except JN does such a good job marketing himself that studies like these become gospel in design reviews because they seem scientific even though they are built on poor assumptions.
I had seriously considered a site playing to that cliche. The site would always maintain a 2-1 ratio of women to men, with the women's accounts being free, and having them only be accepted into the site if they were a 7 or better. (something like top 15%)

Men's accounts would be prohibitively expensive, something like $250 a month.

The site would be promoted to women by going to clubs, bars, etc with women (on a per city basis, probably starting in NYC, Boston, etc) and giving them something of a 'golden ticket' to signing up. ie, the invitation itself would be proof of attractiveness and would an invite would therefore be desirable.

Eventually women would be approved by some sort of crowd sourcing or just editorial control.
It's inconvenient (not to mention a resource hog) to have another browser open most of the time.

I use Chrome for development. Then I confirm that everything is similar in Firefox, which it usually is.

Then I fix IE's numerous errors in every single version. Immediately after that, I restrain the urge to cry myself to sleep.