skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that last comment is over-calling things a bit. There are no studies supporting the conclusion that anti-obesity drugs save lives (this is not to say that they definitely don't, just that no one has proven it). Most of them cause weight loss of only 2 - 5kg anyway, compared to dietary/behavioural intervention alone.

On the other hand, surgery for obesity is dramatically effective and there is good evidence that it saves lives. It is strongly recommended in appropriate patients eventhough 1 - 2% of people die because of the operation.

Don't think the FDA is being risk averse, they just decided not to approve a modestly effective agent with an unclear safety profile.
Currently, no, although HTTPS support is being worked on. I'm in the process of moving hosts soon, and will be getting an SSL cert, but for now, be careful surfing on public wifi, of course.

And as with any beta software, this is for testing purposes, not for production use.
Disclaimer: I've only used Github for projects where either I'm the only coder, or where someone else was the only coder and I was just handling some release management stuff. So I've not experienced the full glory of collaboration via Github.

Am I the only one who is not particular impressed with Github? It seems OK, but not in a different league from other code hosting places the way many make it out to be.
The standard just means that if you write "standard C", the compiler will work as expected (for some reasonable value of expected). But compilers can add extensions, and GCC has a long list of extensions. The Linux kernel uses these GCC-specific features a lot!

Here's a list of extensions, if you're curious... http://linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/excerpts/9780596009588...
I up-voted you because I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is primarily a UI/UX issue, because the strongest internal privacy algorithms don't mean much in a social network if most people don't use them.

Although I disagree that Facebook's privacy UI/UX is a good one. I almost find it purposefully obfuscated in order to encourage world-readable posting.

And ultimately, the issue with Facebook is how the company operates with user's data, by virtue of being an effective monopoly in the social networking market.
I would say be out of internet for few days...And interact with fellow students & people directly
You've realized a few parts that didn't go so well and that you would have maybe done differently. That's all in the past. Start your course re-navigation today! Try to take all the things that make you embarrassed in the past and use them as learning experiences, rather than baggage that makes today more difficult.
I like their philosophy that you can make changes and push them often so that you do see immediate gratification that your work means something. A typical non-startup developer's work could take years before it ever hit a desktop.

While the stock options that others mention is a motivator, typically companies use options to buy down your salary. You would make $120k, but, we're going to give you $90k + $30k in options that could be worth more than $30k in a few years. Pre dot-bomb, extremely greedy employees would work for a .com, trade huge amounts of salary for options and live frugally until the IPO. I can think of one guy that worked for Real Networks for a few years that took 66% of his pay in options which were underwater when his options matured.

Options are a payment type and are a gamble on the employee's part. The employer believes that shared ownership will also motivate employees, which makes those options worth more.
What more can Facebook do vs. Google? Seems there's more options at Google IMO. (I don't work at Google, but wish I did).
Why shorten a link if you're putting the real one there anyways?
Enough about John Maynard Keynes. We can be sure the 20th century British economic giant would advise more government spending to spur U.S. economic growth with consumers and businesses so hesitant and short-term interest rates at zero.

Indeed, enough... we don't want to be remembered anymore that he would advise us to save money in good times so we can spend it when the times get bad. And we're spending it in both good and bad times.
Link bait headline distracts from content of article, as usual.

(As a pacifist I wouldn't contribute to this project, but your comment doesn't really address the substance of the article, which is very interesting and makes some interesting statements about the sort of smartphone technology being used in warfare.)
Let's see, looking back at 1990... I'd bet on neither, but I sure wouldn't bet on the one far more easily replaced by a distributed secure system. Diaspora may seem like a joke now, but 20 years of development on Diaspora('s great grandchild)? Getting a standardized distributed social networking account will be like getting an email address is today.
Show HN: Gundo (my Vim undo tree visualizer)
"Why keep trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade?"

Because it is simple and everyone can read it. I don't want to see code that is "greek to me."
When in school, I wasn't able to speak 2 complete sentences when explaining something, giving presentations was simply a pain. Today, as a lecturer for different business subjects, I am not only used to talk in front of many people, no, I am even applauded for my entertaining kind of talking. And I simply ENJOY it. I never use Powerpoint and most of the time I even don't have any notes with me.
How I got there? I got aware of my problem. And then I took every possibility along the way to give presentations and to get better. This helped a lot!

Btw, the success with the girls was a nice side effect. While labeled as a geek when I was in school, I have had very nice and very attractive girlfriends since I started to work on my social skills.

So GO OUT and TRY! It is the same as always: you have to do the thing you want to be more successful in!
Cool idea, but the real question is how would you make something like this happen? Someone would need to invent a new programming language with support for all the Unicode characters and syntax coloring mechanisms, along with making a totally innovative IDE for it.

Who's gonna do that? And how is it going to compete against C++, Java, ObjC and the rest out there? When you come up with an idea, that radically changes the programming landscape, you need to have a vector to introduce it to the world.

The only way I can see that happen is, when someone like Apple declares this its new iPhone language, or Microsoft's new .NET language, but yeah .. the odds for that happening.. exactly.
Backrub?

http://web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/backrub.stanford.e...
I posted this a while ago, but I'm posting it one more time because it's now 1.0.0.

I'm fairly confident it's not going to eat anyone's data and that it's ready for real use.
The Oracle Exit Strategy: Force Google To Buy Java
Are you in any clubs/sports? I'm a freshman at university, and I know that I'm incredibly introverted. Most of my friends in high school talked to me first and that's how I made friends. I realized it wouldn't be so easy in university. Now that they're not with me, the first logical thing I did was join a club.

I joined the dragon boat club because on a boat, you're going to need good teamwork or else you're going to sink. And often sports clubs will have teamwork building exercises like learning people's names. It's getting through that first step of knowing the person's name that's the hardest. Once you're at a first-name basis with someone, it's a lot easier to talk to them.
Companies that will dominate 20 years from now won't exist for another 19 years, so..
It's a small improvement, but in my opinion, I think the site would do better with a more complete overhaul of the design, rather than just making tweaks.

I think the biggest general problem is that the pages are just one big mass of information. Very little white space or different background colors to highlight different sections of the site. On one page, you have search boxes, similar jobs, the specific job details, job description. Take a look at some web design sites such as http://webcreme.com/

You can get some good ideas from looking at other people's designs.

The Google Maps thing is nice, but is it really necessary? I was looking at it from the point of view of someone searching for a job. If I live in Miami and see a job posting for a position in Sarasota, its nice to see the mp but at the same time, I probably already know where Sarasota is in relation to Miami and about how far it is as well. So the question is, is this info useful? Or could the page be enhanced by using this space for something else. Sometimes, less is more and providing too much info to the user can backfire.

The Google analytics info can be looked at two ways. Yes, 10% of your users are clicking the map, which is good. But you could also look at it like this, 10% of your users are clicking a link which causes them to leave your site.

The date range still doesn't make sense because the field is called Posted Date, which implies one specific date when the job was posted. Most people will know what the current date is, so displaying this info to them is really unnecessary.
The Art of Cloud Computing
> Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?

Isn't this obvious? What keyboard has 'Ω' or '₀' easily accessible? I'd be pretty upset refactoring or reusing any code that forced me to copy-pasta or type some crazed key combination just to render a character. It might not look perfect, but the lowest common denominator (ASCII char set) for programming works because every keyboard layout on the planet can enter those characters in (mostly) one keystroke.

Am I missing the joke?
I would say, if anything, I've had the opposite experience with adderall. I've had some crazy creative bursts. I am probably the exception because almost everyone I talk with has the opposite experience.
Modafinil isn't a stimulant.
My experience has been that it leaves me drained for a couple of days afterwards, a little like a hangover but without any headache or sickness. It's not a free lunch. As to advantages, primarily modafinil stops me from feeling fatigued during the day, more than anything else; but I can still feel my brain getting tired, making more mistakes. It's just that the urge to take a break, rest, sleep etc. is numbed.
Yes and no. Their built-in screen reader and other accessibility tools in OS X are great. The iPad has allowed me to read a book again-which I haven't been able to do in 2 years, unless I was sitting at my desk (can't see printed text). However, you can't, for instance, do some very simple things, like enlarge the text in iTunes, or change the size of the min/max/close buttons in the OS's UI.

Many people don't need/want full-screen magnification/zoom all the time, just the ability to enlarge some text and tiny UI components. For things like that, I find linux far more accessible.

All of that said, most of my accessibility problems with Apple center around OS X.

Though you also can't enlarge text in iTunes/app store on the iPod/iPhone, the iPad has a much more usable 3-finger zoom, as well as a screen reader. The iOS touch interface is, as a whole, very intuitive and easy to use.

It is a bit too sensitive in some instances, but also rather forgiving in others. I'm guessing that has more to do with the app itself than iOS or the touch screen technology.
No, it is Apple you should be upset at. They're the ones who set up the store which requires everything to be distributed under their EULA, and they're the ones who don't allow you to install any software in any other way.

If you take away one of those restrictions, great! If the App Store isn't the only way of getting software onto my own hardware, then they can have whatever policies they want; I can just get the software from elsewhere (see, for instance, Android). Or, if they actually abided by the terms of any free software licenses for software they distributed, well, less fine (I still would like to be able to get my software from elsewhere), but they're at least complying with the terms of those licenses.

So yes, it's disappointing that someone clicked "agree" to something they couldn't legally agree to, because it violated the terms under which they were distributing free software. But Apple is the one here who is significantly restricting end-user freedom; and the point of this sort of enforcement of the GPL is to get the point across that free software developer will not let Apple benefit from being able to distribute said free software without complying with the terms of the license.

Apple benefits from having a better selection of software in the App Store; if I can play my videos on an Android phone, but not an iPhone, that might help me decide in favor of Android. They shouldn't be able to benefit from this without complying with the terms of the license. There are several free software packages (like VLC, GNU Go, and more) that they could benefit from, but should not be able to until they stop restricting end user freedom.

I am not trying to get "my" rules to trump Apples. I am trying to say that if Apple wants to benefit from my work, then they must play by my rules. I don't use or develop for iPhone for just this reason; because Apple isn't willing to play by a set of rules that I agree with. I have an Android phone; while it isn't perfect in respecting end-user freedom (it doesn't come with root, and rooting it voids your warranty), it is a heck of a lot better (I also use a Mac, for instance, which while much of the software is not free, Apple does not restrict what software I can an cannot run on my own machine, which I consider an acceptable compromise).
"Dead Drops" is an anonymous, offline, p2p file-sharing network in public space
The obvious reason not to make color part of the syntax is that it precludes me from having different colors from whoever designed the language. In my case this is just inconvenient, but for color blind programmers, it could actually be a serious impediment to doing their job.

Of course, the solution to this would be to instead provide a UI (presumably in your editor) to change which colors are associated with which syntax bits... which is exactly what we have in any reasonable editor. So... what's the problem?
you really have to just bite the bullet and go talk to a shrink. I had some hang-ups about this initially, but afterwards I realized the outside perspective was so helpful that I was a fool not to have done it earlier.

I think you might have a bit of anxiety. the way you describe any negative thought or memory pulling you back down reminds me a lot of myself. the good news is that there are lots of strategies for dealing with anxiety, and a shrink can help point you in the right direction. hack your brain!
Samsung has record profits, wants to sell 1 Million Galaxy S by Year End
Node.js based UglifyJs is faster than YUI Compressor and GCL
I call bullshit.

Let's say we want to have a rainbow table for all passwords 14 characters long.

Let's say we only work with upper and lowercase English characters (26+26) and digits (10), so 62 possible characters.

To just store all the possible passwords would take 14 * 62^14 bytes = 1.617 × 10^17 gigabytes.
Github has "won" in that it's the current darling child of the code-hosting industry. It's done this for two reasons:

1. Git is superior to its competitors as a technology for use by developers. It isn't very much superior these days, but it is enough to be noticeable and preferred. This is a superiority in use and performance, which are enough of an edge to offset its architectural failings.

2. Github has better UX than the competition: I've been referring to code hosted in bitbucket frequently, and I often sigh at what they're doing. Getting to any given piece of code takes longer and requires more clicks than on Github. Github also has great features for understanding how code is moving within a project, and I find them more comprehensible and useful than the competition's.

It doesn't hurt that Github is a small self-started company with a staff full of brilliant people and a talented support staff. They certainly win the personality part of the competition thoroughly.
Free yourself from the idea that you "let go" of a few years for the purpose of going to school instead of working on your python programming.

This is the time to learn. Nobody is expecting you to invent the next Google at this point in your life. You've got an entire life ahead of you. The fact that you're in an undergraduate program in your country puts you light-years ahead of your fellow citizens. You've already won a lottery that billions in your country will never have a chance to even enter.
The experience of an introverted guy doing such an experiment for 30 days: http://socialskydivingwithjustin.posterous.com/
How do I type it?

How do I type it?

How do I type it?

That's the fundamental question worth repeating three times. Numerous languages support Unicode in the syntax and it doesn't matter because nobody can use them because who wants to use a language where the 'or' operator is a textual copy and paste operation for a new user?

You can incrementally stuff more symbols onto a keyboard but I'd want to see some science that shows that people are able and willing to deal with a keyboard that contains a their local language, a full suite of mathematical symbols including Greek, Hebrew, and the various mangled Latin characters that mathematics uses, plus logic, set notation, plus the useful not-necessarily-mathematical operators that language designers either want or in some cases already use/permit such as arrows, boxes, and all the other things. And we still need our full editor keyboard shortcuts and if you're a power user (and we're talking programmers...) our keyboard shortcuts for the window manager.

So, you want to predicate learning your language on me learning all that? I'm the kind of fruitcake that learned Haskell but I still laugh at the idea of learning something like that. No sale. (And I don't use the Unicode Haskell permits because while I'm actually very comfortable remapping my own keyboard, for instance I actually have interrobang bound to a key because I found myself using it so much, why would I do that to anybody else who ever tries to read or use my code‽)
Visualizing the impact of climate change
> The bottom line is this - if you were to place a bet (as in betting your career) on which company will be dominant 20 years from now and which will become yet another dying Internet fad, I'd bet in favor of Facebook.

You statement is ambiguous; it doesn't say whether facebook will be the former or the latter. (my take is it could easily go either way).
Dataflow systems like LabView (https://www.ni.com/labview/), Starlight Data Engineer (http://www.futurepointsystems.com/) and the Data Model subsystem of ArcGIS can be massively useful for a very large class of problems.

However, they tend to fall down for many general programming paradigms. LabView is probably the furthest along that I know of in attacking more general problems, but ultimately they are designed around building a pipeline: datain->do something->data out.

LabView also builds in interesting levels of instrumentation and interactive components that can make it seem more general purpose like.

In that sense, the old UNIX tools (simple, single function tools you can pipe together to create complex systems) are the same thing.

But there are other graphical programming environments that aren't focused around pure dataflow.

http://scratch.mit.edu/

Is actually a very interesting experiment in using graphical components to build up a program. But ultimately it's just a nice wrapper around a regular old programming language, and in playing with it a bit, I found that it was simply faster to just type things in a regular old language.

One of the more interesting things about graphical programming systems, is that you can often coax people into learning to use them who otherwise would have no interest or inclination towards writing code. I think there's probably a huge untapped market for a fully graphical system that can compile and perform like native code...
It's all obvious in the natural world (and living things reuse code without regard for law.)
I was so hoping this was going to be about APL.
My friend you need professional help. We are not psychologists nor psychiatrists.

For starters the only way to meet friends is to be outgoing, being an introvert makes this very hard, but if you really want to make friends you are going to have to deal with your issues and talk to people. Believe it or not, it gets better with time and as you grow.

On the other part, grades don't mean a thing, and you really need to stop looking at things as if it was the professors fault. If you really feel that college was lacking in some way you need to either change college or make the best of your situation and study by yourself what you think your your classes are missing. In a way is as much your fault as the professors. That being said, the past is the past and there is no point dwelling on it.

The reality of your situation is very simple actually. You want to become more extroverted to make friends? Build something where you have to interact with people. You want to become better at 'python programming'? Buy a few books and build something in python, and when you're done reread the books and build something in python (this is a recursive sentence!). You feel like college is full of people that don't care about you learning? You're right, because the only person that cares about that is yourself, and unless you're Will Hunting you really need to take responsibility for your life.

Also, go see a psychologist, or a psychiatrist if the situation is worse and will require medication.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with it. Facebook is the favorite to be here for many years to come. You would have to believe that on top of stock options these individuals are getting paid quite a bit more money to switch. Maybe it's the though of getting to work for Facebook during the time when it was fun to work for Google years ago.
here's a shocking revelation: facebook is pre-IPO and employees who get stock options stand to make a decent amount of money.

i know it's almost taboo around here to suggest that someone could even consider switching jobs for better pay/more potential stock upside vs. considering only some sort of imaginary "passion" for their job, but that's how it works.
I think the issue here is input methods. Ω isn't so bad (option-z on my Mac) but there's really only a few dozen additional symbols available via such relatively easy shortcuts: mostly accented characters, Greek letters and punctuation. As a Smalltalk hacker I'd like to use ← for assignment, and ↑ for return, but AFAIK the only way to enter them is via the CharacterViewer utility. It might be easier on Windows or Linux, but I doubt it. Alt+8592 or whatever is still going to be too difficult to type frequently.

Mr. Kamp slags syntax designers as putting compatibility with the ASR-33 above expressiveness, but I dont' see a way around it with today's standard hardware.
I think it's main neat feature is to be able to click a button to fork. Many others have this now but, iirc (and my memory my be faulty), github was the first. At least the first I saw. That alone makes it easy to fork, fix, pull request. I'm a bit of a github fanboi.
Do you really think so? Google handily passes the "actually does something useful" test. Facebook, not so much.