skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, if those drugs were legalized, their use might go up, thereby multiplying their negative impact on society.

Actually, all available evidence points to the fact that legalising drugs like heroin actually decreases their usage. Would you suddenly take up heroin if it was legal? Do you know anyone who would?

This may be one of the scales you're looking for, btw:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_t...

Also, worth pointing out, with respect to "amount of usage", that drugs like Ecstasy see millions of users every weekend... and yet only a handful of deaths per year (generally involving multiple drugs and/or several-days-long binges). A pretty sterling safety record, I'd say.
I think you're wrong there Jonathan. The argument is that calling it "expert sex change" is like deriding eBay as "eGay" (I know I had to change a letter there: it's similar enough to be the same kind of thing.)

It's misusing something important and personal as a simple insult. It's impolite to use something like "sex change" as an insult. It's not "political correctness gone mad," it's good manners, and I think using it shows the author is either thoughtless or bigoted.

It is also a weak, ridiculous and puerile insult that adds no value to any debate. If Experts Exchange was awesome, we wouldn't criticise it for its name. We'd probably not even have noticed.
Looks great in terms of what you've achieved - however I should say that I much prefer http://www.youtube.com/leanback (not that I'd personally use either other than to see what they are, so my opinion is fairly pointless.)
This is the first time I see LSD and Ecstasy put together in a harmless group together with marijuana. Am I brainwashed or are you wrong? I mean, I've smoked dope and nothing bad ever happened. But a friend of mine took ecstasy once and blew his kidneys (he's waiting for a donor now).
Twitter capped the length of a post. The upstart he's talking about might cap the number of people in a clique. Let's say 12 which could give rise to a domain with "dozen" in it. Like Twitter, it won't be built because it ticks boxes or has a great business plan, but just because. Rather than Twitter's asymmetric following or Facebook's friending, all members of a clique may need to approve any new member, and it won't be done lightly. "Is this person Sponge-worthy?" [1]

It could be simplified to its core. Picture New Twitter now but even simpler, and flipped horizontally. Post/item on the left side, and then banter on the right. Maybe one of the crew posts a jacket they're thinking of buying, or the result of a game, or a new movie trailer. Chit-chat fills the right hand side until people lose interest and move on to other posts.

Editing to add: I run a basketball forum which is a free-for-all. Anonymous posting, etc. And I often wonder how my experience of it would change if I just locked it down to the best 12-20 contributors - might miss a few challenging viewpoints, but there'd be no spam, griefers, brainless posts, etc. Perhaps picture the aforementioned concept as a micro-forum based around a particular niche rather than necessarily a particular group of friends?

And again (still thinking): You pick niches of interest and are randomly lumped with 12-20 others for as long as the group lasts. As with online gaming, you can privately kick out griefers or passengers. Perhaps you can only commit to 3 groups (wine, NBA, travel) to ensure you don't spread too thin. Elevator spiel is: Chatroulette + microforum + group decisions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sponge
Kitchen King iPhone app idea: somebody please make this
Implementation is very weak. It reads whole blacklist, line by line (could have used sqlite at least), and uses extract() to emulate register_globals misfeature on hosts that disabled it (and it doesn't even check for disabled register_globals properly).
There was a time when just above the answer was a license saying you weren't allowed to read the answer — but it's gone now, so I guess Google made then remove it. I didn't realise on my own that you could scroll down to the answers though, as the page is designed to make that appear not to be the case, so I'd say it is evil SEO.
That ranking is pretty ridiculous.

Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

"Crack cocaine is more addictive than alcohol but because alcohol is so widely used there are hundreds of thousands of people who crave alcohol every day, and those people will go to extraordinary lengths to get it."

By that logic it's also more harmful to drive a car than to cut open your chest, pull out your heart and eat it?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1855420

And the link there doesn't have all the "feedburner" crap in the URL.
The simplest way to master the language, Learning Chinese online..
The benefits of learning Chinese online. We also outlines the various options available for students wishing to learn Chinese by the online method.
Way to editorialize. The article includes tens of other categories, not just programming languages. For example, Android won the most coveted "Product of the Year" award.
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I sympathize. "No 1st gen. Macs" has been my mantra for over 20 years.

That said, I am certainly pleased with the 27" iMac I scarfed up upon their intro last year (excuse: I needed a new machine then).

On the bright side: The article linked suggests to me that software updates may be all that is required. (Hence: not a huge issue; just requires a little patience). Apple hardware has come (on average) so far in QA from ten years ago.
Ask HN: underway to public beta with www.gmbhnews.net ,do you think it's ready?
After several weeks of work, I'm about to go public beta with my mobile site creation tool, http://www.gmbhnews.net , please to take a look and share your feedback, it's a tool to help publishers create mobile optimized versions of their sites. The results can be seen at the front end side http://www.gmbhnews.com/ . Thanks
The problem with this is that if you are to buy illegal drugs such as exstacy, you cannot verify its purity. This is another argument for legalization - quality control. I am saddened by what your friend is going through. There is no way to know what he was actually sold. The scientists are rating the actual drug. What you get on the street is a coin toss.
"On a day-to-day basis, it is suggested this could mean that social contact leads to 'over-stimulation,' explaining why introverts would withdraw or shy away."

Anyone else feel like this? I come alive in small groups and one-on-one, but at some threshold (10+ people or so), I feel like there's just too much complexity flying around. Note that I'm pretty sure it's the complexity thing---a group of 300 people all listening to a lecture is easy to deal with, but 40 mixed singles all trying to meet/impress each other seems as complicated as this (http://xkcd.com/173/) would be with 40 people.
The basic problem is that FB models the social graph with a rigid, undirected graph when in fact we live in multiple, constantly-evolving, weighted graphs of social connections.

The newsfeed-ranking algorithm, privacy controls, friend lists, and latest groups incarnation are all simply hacks to try to shoehorn it's flawed social schema into what we actually experience in the real world.
yep. And it's not just explicit actions such as like; facebook records everything you click on[1], so every time you view one of Joe's photos, or view his profile, or even just hover over his status update for a few seconds, that could bring you a little closer to him in the friend space.

This kind of thing probably already exists in facebook's internal labs, they're just waiting for their users to become ready for this kind of feature.

[1] - http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/facebook-employee-clai...
This isn’t as big of a deal as the headline makes it out to be. The article describes a video playback issue that Apple’s already released a software fix for.
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people "safely" high on LSD may jump off of a bridge.

Sober people may jump off a bridge too. Should we outlaw sobriety? The "man on LSD thinks he can fly and jumps out of window" myth is largely that: a myth. If I recall, it was inspired by a real story of LSD experimentation on some kind of federal agent, who was given a good dose of LSD without his knowledge, thought he was going mad, and threw himself out of a window to make it end.
"This may lead to a low risk of lung cancer when smoking marijuana as compared to a high risk of lung cancer when smoking cigarettes"

Many people roll tobacco and marijuana into joints. So this probably isn't true in many cases. It would be true if marijuana were to be smoked on it's own in a joint.
sure but the ld50 of those drugs are higher than alcohol
Isn't this the second Air?
My keyboard has no labels, and I didn't map caps lock to any key, so.. yes, I would. I actually am using a keyboard without caps lock.
You might want to play with the alternative font choices. NoScript defaulted to blocking the Google-hosted font, and the Arial fallback is a lot wider and makes the page look bad (it turns the button into "MAKE MES").
Over the top, but making a valid point: Just because less people do something it doesn't make it "less harmful".
Tobacco use kills 443,000 Americans each year.

Source: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/healt...

For perspective:
http://www.meh.ro/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/meh.ro5415.jpg
"if a system is well understood or works then it is no longer called artificial intelligence."
This was also observed already by von Neumann.
We are huge fans of Mantis (www.mantisbt.org). It strikes me as lightweight compared to many solutions advertised here, and has the virtue of being agnostic between PostgreSQL and MySQL. It's also completely free.

We integrated it extensively with Subversion a few years ago, and there already exist pre-built Git integration modules for it. The plugin ecosystem has come a long way.

One important criteria to me personally was the suitability of it for use as a project management and/or feature roadmapping system, not just an actual _bug_ tracker per se, explicitly for bugs in the sense of defects. Mantis performs extremely well on this count as well.

Probably the biggest high-profile use of Mantis I know is Digium's issue tracker for Asterisk: http://issues.asterisk.org/ -- you can see it in action there. Their particular use of it relies on Mantis's extensive ACL features (optional--you don't have to get that complicated if you don't want to!) to open the process of enrollment and bug submission to the public at large, to allow certain people intermediate levels of access (e.g. QA testers), and to impose an actual hierarchy of developers, managers and bug marshals inside the company.
I knew GmbH was a German thing (Gesellschaft mit beschraenkter Haftung), but others will not know what it means, nor know what to do with such a name. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

On the homepage:

- why do I need to omit the dots for the site name (shouldn't that be web address)?

- why is the "pro" option on by default? I know you probably want to monetize this, but forcing the pay option on by default is probably the wrong way of doing this.

- category selection text should probably not be right-aligned.

Oh and on the "About Us" page, Christina's name should be capitalized.
GazeHawk (YC S10) is still hiring. Send joe or brian at gazehawk.com an email!

We're based in Mountain View, but not doing remote work at this time though. Sorry.
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I've had really good luck with thrustvps so far. I found them from lowendbox.com and got 15% off the already-absurd prices forever, so I'm paying $5.06/month for a 512MB box.

It's OpenVZ instead of Xen, but I don't really care; I wouldn't really be taking advantage of Xen anyway. (And they have Xen for a couple bucks a month more.)

I have no idea how its performance compares to Linode, AWS, etc, but stability has been fine so far, after 3 months. I kind of expected to have downtime by now since it's so cheap, but pingdom tells me there's been none.

If you're looking for a cheap VPS so you can run relatively unimportant things (ie. not your startup, unless it's just a side project that isn't bringing you any money yet), it's a good choice.
OK now I see, Thanks. It looks cool. Now we just need somebody to create a Linux that runs in a stomp box.
I'm not sure I would say Marijuana is a completely safe and harmless drug. The effects of the use are a lot less drastic than with other drugs, but regular and heavy users, in particular if they are young, are known get sluggish to the point where it becomes a huge problem for them. Some also develop mental illnesses.

That is probably a lot less drastic than the effects of e.g. getting completely drunk every day. But one of the problems is that there is no public evidence based knowledge about the effects of drugs like Marijuana. People either believe it's completely harmless, or they think it's the devil. There is also no good social canon on the use of such drugs. Getting drunk every day has obvious social stigma in all circles, but smoking hash every day can be accepted behaviour in certain circles.

That is actually the nice thing about this study, they try to correct this and give facts.
You're largely brainwashed. I know a fair number of people who have taken and/or continue to take Ecstasy, LSD, Mushrooms and even Cocaine, some of them on a very regular basis. None of them have ever "blown their kidneys" or, in fact, had any severe negative reaction. As non-anecdotal evidence, about a million people take ecstasy every weekend in the UK - that's not the same million people each time, so that amounts to millions of active users in the UK. If Ecstasy was so dangerous, you would see it on newspaper headlines every day.

Possible causes of your friend's unfortunate disaster include:

1) It wasn't MDMA/MDA (typical Ecstasy components), as binarymax suggested. Until drugs are legal, who the hell knows what you're actually taking. Could be anything, including washing powder. Unlikely to be actually poisonous stuff, since dealers like repeat customers too, but really, it could be anything.

2) Your friend took an exceptional amount, was not used to intoxicating substances, and had very fragile kidneys. Perhaps his kidneys were about to give up anyway, and Ecstasy just pushed him over the edge. Maybe a good drunken night would have done the same thing.

3) It was just a coincidence.

I suspect a combination of 1 and 2... probably it wasn't Ecstasy, and your friend was already in danger of blowing his kidneys anyway.
Your third point is compelling.

Psychologically, it diverts attention away from a specific number, and toward a general concept of "goodness", segregated by club. Then, rather then concentrating on getting the next karma point, users try to enter certain club, and each club has a general identity to it (with the top being those who provide thoughtful, intelligent responses, and typically only speak when they have something to say).

Creating different clubs (creating classes of users) isn't arguably bad so long as there is easy mobility between classes based on merit.

The natural question is how and whether to indicate the "class" or "club" a user is in. Make it public? Indicate it in comments? PG tried a red dot next to high-karma users some time ago, then scrapped it; maybe there's some other way to reward users based on club achieved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrix_(crater)

So we are calling it Hendrix because it's going to have a massive impact ? :)
Http://www.livemovies.gr/shows/just-the-two-of-us
Yup! Not sure exactly when, but certainly on the radar.
" If a drug makes people feel good it will be outlawed whether it is completely harmless or very dangerous."

" ....the goal is not harm mitigation (despite the rhetoric of government officials) but keeping people from consuming psychoactive substances that make them feel good."

Supporting evidence? Those are some dramatic claims you are making.

I felt good with morphine in my system after an operation, and felt a lot worse without it once the effects wore off. Also, a nice cold beer is just the ticket after a long week. No danger of those being banned anytime soon.
The point of the study is the government should address drugs based on the problems they do represent, not on the problems they might perhaps theoretically some day represent.

Alcohol and tobacco do kill tens of thousands of people every year. Ecstasy and LSD and Cannabis kill maybe a dozen people every year all together, and usually in combination with other drugs. Yet there are considerably fewer resources allocated to fighting alcohol and tobacco use than the latter.
He's a scientist, he's trying to give us facts. What, if anything, we do about it, is up to us.
In what way can a programming language be objectively better than another language? I thought they were tools for accomplishing specific goals? It's not like we hold competitions declaring hammers being better hammers than screwdrivers.
Introverts tend to be much more polite in terms of giving people space in comparison to extraverts. They wait their turn to speak and don't interrupt others. Extraverts have a tendency to just jump in and listen to whoever is the loudest. Us introverts tend to get confused by this because we're looking for clear delineation between one speaker and the next that simply doesn't exist.
Strange. I find his writing style, albeit rough around the edges, very refreshing.
How many injuries and/or deaths are caused by car crashes in a year? And how many by people eating their own heart? OK, so, now you've got a billion pounds to spend on a marketing campaign, are you going to target driving or heart-eating?
Couple of issues is haaaaaardly "ridden with bugs". One issue already addressed by Apple. If thousands of users were experiencing the same dozens of bugs then the subject is warranted .. otherwise .. just an attempt (admittedly probably successful!) to generate traffic at thinq.co.uk
Ask HN: Best personal firewall
Hi,

I was wondering what's the best and most light personal firewall one could have on W7, the kind of program that would let you know that program X is trying to access the net or that host Y is trying to connect and so on and so forth. Any suggestions ?

Regards.
I think Dave is dreaming up too complex a proposition.

If a social network has all these complexities, how will it grow? If FB had all these complexities, it would never grow so big. Now that it is big, it can experiment with groups, although even that is a second attempt because lists didn't work. People hate settings. FB is like an online version of a bar. People just want to hang out.

The intimate alternative he is imagining is email. People already use it and it works fine.

Before Facebook came along, was anyone writing blog posts about how nice it will be if a website let me share photos of my last holiday with my random old school buddies who I haven't spoken to in 20 years?

These things are quite random. So, in as far as something will take down Facebook, it will simply be something which is equally or more viral and fun. It does not matter what its specific form or function will be. Intimacy is not essential.
I agree that the issues which affect more people should be a bigger focus from the government. I don't, however, think they should be called "more harmful".
Well this seems to be a lot more sensible than Android, though in my opinion they should have used full featured JavaScript.
This was on the news this morning complete with stock footage of adults drinking socially in the pub - but the problems with alcohol are around ultra-cheap alcohol bought in supermarkets.
Cloudkick, San Francisco CA. Currently all FT positions are intended to be on-location.

A YC Company from W09, we are hacking up server monitoring and management space. (Both cloud and non-cloud).

Our tech is mostly Python based, with a spattering of Java, C, C++, Lua, and Node.js. We love fast product cycles, shipping features early, so we can get the customer feedback loop going as quickly as possible.

Positions:

* Frontend Web Developer: We started out with inline JQuery, but all new features are built around using the Google Closure library. We are moving towards a much more complete client side user experience, and busy building out widgets for many components. Love hacking on the Frotnend, come check us out!

* Customer Engineer: A combination of customer advocate and a generalist that can hack on any part of the Cloudkick system. We want someone who can both talk to customers, and then go fix their top issues the same day. 90% Python hacking, in both a Django and Twisted environments, but can include C/C++/Lua/Node.js if desired.

* Deployment Developer: Cloudkick is known for Monitoring, but we are doing something different with Deployment. This position will probably be about 80% hacking in Node.js code, and 20% in Python. Experience in distributed systems / p2p / large scale server management are all major major pluses.

* Inside Sales Rep: We are B2B startup, offering a SaaS product to the world, and we need help making and converting customers. Simple enough right :)

* Ops / Developer Internship (Paid!): Experience in Django or other open source projects are big pluses, but the biggest thing we look for is a drive to learn new things, more than anything.

More on the Careers page thing, along with how to contact/apply:
https://cloudkick.com/careers

Thanks,

Paul
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... never surrender.

----

For those who don't get the reference, it's from Galaxy Quest, a film that, apparently, Jonathan Frakes and Patrick Stewart (to name just two) both love. More on-topic, though, it's not only advice to would-be entrepreneurs, it also shows the value of a good slogan or catch phrase. No one can say "Never give up" in my presence without me thinking of that film, and that completion.
TDD does not refer only to unit testing, it also includes the integration tests. Indeed, as you say, the value of unit tests is greatly diminished without integration tests. If you're working outside-in your workflow is

- Create integration test/stories
- For each step in integration test
- Add unit tests to make it pass, starting at the view layer and working backwards.

The level of unit testing required for each step depends on the complexity of the code. So what does unit testing get you over just performing integration tests? 2 things:

1) Documents and enforces expected behaviour for edge cases that you haven't written integration tests for - e.g. unusual error conditions

2) Isolates points of inflexion in your system - your stories/use cases will often rely on several components that have multiple logic paths. When you combine the branching logic from several components the combinatorial range of behaviour can be vast. By isolating units at the points of inflexion you are able to test a far smaller range of inputs/outputs so that you can achieve effective test coverage. You're quite correct that the units you tests are not necessarily aligned 1 to 1 with your classes. However, given that a well designed class will have a single responsibility this is often the case.
The best one would be the default Firewall already included and turned on by Microsoft. It monitors both in/outbound traffic.