skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Even if these drugs have risks, the risks of obesity are likely much higher.

"Likely", nice weasel word there. In fact, sibutramine was pulled after the SCOUT trial showed that the risks of obesity were not higher. The cardiovascular risks of the drug more than offset the decresae in risks from lower weight.

Lorcaserin was barely efficacious, and had a cancer signal.

Qnexa was very efficacious, but had even more serious side effects. One serious one-two punch is that it makes women much more fertile because of the hormonal effects of weight loss (in the clincial trial something like 20 women got pregnant despite double birth control protection), and at the same time contains topiramate, a Pregnancy Category C drug known to cause birth defects.

You'll get no argument from me that the FDA is very risk averse (and I think there are several drugs rejected this year that should have been approved, e.g. pirfenidone for IPF), but I think you're wrong that the FDA should have approved these obesity drugs. As you say, obesity is a big problem in the US, which means lots and lots of people are going to take any drugs once they're approved. Such drugs have to be incredibly safe or there will be lots of problems.

The next obesity drug to come up for FDA approval is Orexigen's Contrave, and we'll see what happens there.
Schneier on Security: Cargo Security
The reason other countries won't flout the UN Single Convention and other international treaties is...the US. They don't want to be branded outlaws by the US, with potential sanctions, banking restrictions, etc.

Sort of like the ancient Klingon proverb: "only Nixon could go to China", only the US can legalize (vs. merely decriminalize) drugs.
Samsung notches record profits, aims to sell 10 million Galaxy S this year
If you're concerned about being inauthentic, you should write all your code on paper rather than using anything as performance-enhancing as a text editor. And forget about that morning coffee!
Like this: (λ (ø) (sin (* π ø)))

I did that on a Mac using the option key and a few custom key bindings.

The real question is how do you READ it. The problem is that unless you are very selective about your fonts and which characters you use, it can become impossible to read because many unicode characters are visually indistinguishable.
This is a cool app, although the name threw me off. I'm sure you've heard this before, but I thought your site had something to do with farming in the literal sense of the word, meaning a farmer growing crops or something like that. I get the explanation but if you have to exaplin the name, it might be better to come up with something that just instinctively makes more sense.

The design of the site is a little jarring because somethings are really well designed, such as the buttons with nice gradient images, but the text of the button looks like minimal effort was put into it so it doesn't seem to fit. Thats probably the biggest complaint I have with the site. Imprving the typography will go a long way in your case.

Is the actual app using frames? I'm getting the dreaded horizontal scroll bar when I try to demo the app. The help is useful but it needs to be moved so I can keep it open and be able to change the map. Right now, the help covers the map when open.

When thinking how to change the layout, try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who has never used this before. Maybe rather than showing the map first, you can collect info from the user step by step and then draw the map from there and allow them to customize further.
I couldn't agree more, and I really don't understand the author's argument. He refers to APL, a language that's legendary for its use of wild symbols, as "write only," but then seems to be complaining that newer languages aren't doing the same thing.

I think Go actually gets this right: its syntax doesn't require any wacky characters, but it allows identifiers to consist of any Unicode characters classified as letters or numbers. The syntax caters to the lowest common denominator, but if I really want to name my variables in Greek, I can.
Facebook has about a million times stronger lock-in though.

Changing my primary search engine requires no effort at all on my point, and I lose practically nothing by doing so.

Gmail is probably Google's most-likely-to-last product.
thanks for that. makes a lot of sense.

to be honest it didn't occur to me that email would be a big concern for most people. more importantly by sending the users the link to their plan pages, i was ensuring they have a way to have them stored(so to speak) without say, bookmarking it or something, but i guess you make a good point when you say it becomes a roadblock while evaluation.
Transparent material developed. Twice as strong as Kevlar, infinitely weirder
One way of looking at it: Facebook has changed the way people communicate and socialize with each other. I think in some ways that is more fundamental than what Google has done - change the way people search. Furthermore, Google has seemed to have trouble innovating in the past couple years, but Facebook has been accelerating the pace of its innovations.
World’s Spammers Ranking
I kind of like Mathematica’s syntax of ESC-shorthand-ESC for inputting non-ascii characters. Not quick, but definitely readable.
Can you give an example of what you meant? I understand variable length and random characters for each different accounts? (Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker).
Perl 5 has been able to use UTF-8 identifiers for over a decade, but I don't know anyone who is actually using them.

$ perl -e 'use utf8; $水=1; print $水,"\n"'
1
The light blue text color needs to be changed. It's too bright on a white background. Same with the yellow in your logo. Try using several different colors in your color scheme. I think the recommended number is 3. So have the nav in one color and the title of articles in a different complimenting color.

I noticed a lot of the articles are submitted by you. It might be good to not show this on the main page as it gives the impression of a low quality site. It's fine to show this info on the article page itself, but showing on the home page only lets me scan down all the articles and see they were written by you.
Our Government Can’t Prevent A Digital 9-11: Entrepreneurs Need To Step In
Microsoft’s Newest Acquisition Is About 3-D Gesture Controls
Ask HN: Would love to see post-mortem analysis of Drop.io
As a frequent non-paying user of the service (as well as a heavy user of Dropbox), I think it would be enlightening to see (or start building) an analysis of the company from a customer validation/startup building perspective. What lessons were learned in creating it/what can it teach current startup founders?
You need a girlfriend.

Find one and get busy.
a salt (what real cryptographers call a nonce)

Hmm... not quite. The word "salt" is always used in the context of KDFs. I'm not entirely certain how I'd define the difference between a salt and a nonce, but they feel like subtly different concepts to me.

If you really cared about the security of your passwords, you'd use scrypt, bcrypt, or PBKDF2, all of which are markedly more secure than "salted" anything.

Well, to be fair, scrypt, bcrypt, and PBKDF2 all use salts too. :-)
haha well done! Great and fun idea. We should make it a movement and put them up all over the world. And make a site like geocaching for this type of sharing!
1. Cognitive therapy-lite : Try to maintain a journal where you divide a page into 2 columns. LHS : negative thought, such as, "I cannot talk to people; no one likes me". RHS : objective assessment, such as, "Actually, I can talk to people at times, especially if I am not feeling depressed, and I approach the situation casually. There are people who like me and try to encourage me such as x and y. I may be subtly making unnecessarily universal statements such as 'I cannot talk to people (AT ALL)'". After some time, you will get good at correcting your excessively-negative thoughts without writing them down on paper. You have to short circuit the mental negative talk quickly, otherwise, it snowballs into a familiar state of depression. Read Burns' "Feeling Good" book if you can get your hands on it in India.

2. Whenever you get some deep, positive insights, write them down in one place. For example, you may be sitting at the college canteen drinking some tea and wallowing in self-pity when suddenly a person with no legs comes over to beg for a rupee, and you suddenly see that life can be much much worse than a temporary lack of social skills! At least you have your legs. This may seem too trivial to be an "insight", but that is just your depression talking again. It can be a jolting thought that forces you to play the best game you can given the cards you were dealt out.

The age of 21 is like that. "This too shall pass", as some wise man said. All the best! :-)
Managing Android Devices With Google Apps
I am trying to set up a Twitter bog for a blog powered by ExpressionEngine.

At the moment, the blog titles are formatted by EE's own Markdown - the difference between it and Markdown is that em-dashes are made with "--".

I could use a service that retrieves the RSS information about the blog titles and post their formatted versions (with proper curly quotes, dashes, etc.), but I prefer to manage everything myself.

My question is, what is generally the way to write a Twitter bot for a blog that publishes the post title and (shorturl) link similar to what @daringfireball does, and how do I preserve the formatted title text?

Complete Twitter API novice, but I've been trying to get into doing some projects with it, but the available resources haven't helped me much.

Thanks a bunch for offering your help to everyone at HN.
Throwaway account

I'm a born and raised Singaporean as well, as well as a member of an opposition party in Singapore.

Its true that while Singapore has draconian laws like the death penalty, or the Internal Security Act (equivalent of the Patriot Act which allows detention without trial) or even the Public Order Act[1], which allows police to charge a citizen for unlawful assembly even if he's just one person with a sign, one can live life pretty peacefully without any worries like any decent citizen in any other developed country.

But that's only if you're not involved in politics that opposes the current ruling party, the People's Action Party.

There is a great double standard in the lands when it comes to the things opposition parties can do and civil society.

For one, when CASE (Consumers Association of Singapore) held its May 1st 'protest', it was not hassled or stopped by the police.

But when another opposition party goes on to do the same, its activists were convicted and faces a fine ranging from $900 to $1,000 and six or seven days of imprisonment in default.[2]

On the other hand, things are slowly being improved, but opposition leaders still face a problem getting their views heard to the mass media (media is state-owned). Contrary to popular belief, political victory is still determined on the grassroots level which consists of mom and pops, uncles and aunties who do not know how to search or read alternative political news online.

The state-media are renown to be able to shape public opinion as well as discarding letters from the public or opposition leaders from being published[3].

If there's anyone who has any questions about being a member of an opposition party in Singapore, I'd be glad to share my input from the other side of the fence.

P/S: I am not affiliated with the Singapore Democratic Party.

[1] http://www.mha.gov.sg/news_details.aspx?nid=MTM5OQ%3D%3D-3Bt...

[2] http://www.yoursdp.org/index.php/news/singapore/4264-singapo...

[3] http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/10/22/singapores-press-fre...
Social Network sites have come and gone, e.g. MySpace, Bebo, etc. Lock-in to social network sites isn't so big a deal.

Also, people might want to change from Facebook, now that their employers and parents are on it.
This is what happens when you don't use scrypt.
Web Linking Gets Deeper with New Standard for Link Relations
Fun concept, but I immediately imagine someone going around smashing these with a hammer (or, perhaps more likely, city workers being sent out to remove them). :\

Here's a much more expensive project with a similar idea:

http://torrentfreak.com/kiosk-of-piracy-an-offline-copy-of-t...
>So far, no studies have found issues with long-term use.

Most likely translation: there have been no long-term studies of modafinil. A quick search doesn't turn any up.
Is Microsoft's Clout Delaying Chrome OS?
An even more radical argument is that programming languages have to break free from the tyranny of text. That is, they should be represented by a internal structure that can be edited through a variety of representations (graphical or textual). Various visual programming languages take this approach, but most don't scale to large, complex programs. See subtextual.org for some interesting work in this direction (not mine).
A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available. (93%)

Counterpoint: surprising to me is the number of economists who "agree" with this statement.

First of all, it does not compute, intuitively, to me as a logical "AND" statement. "Quantity" and "quality" are two completely different things.

"Quality of housing" would be a function of renting vs. owning status (e.g. paying rent vs. paying a mortgage), further subjected to the degree of separation between the tenant and the actual mortgage/title holder. "Quantity of housing" would be a function of information asymmetry between "buyers" and "sellers", and obviously price (determined by the kind of information asymmetry).

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary / history about the origin of rent control: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control
Or computers with decimal floating point hardware.
Leaked DVD Screener of The Social Network A BitTorrent Hit
If we compare whether Facebook or Google can be more easily replaced I could argue that Google has a higher chance of being replaced because some startup can come along and build a better search engine for less than 1% of what it cost Google. Whereas I don't see Diaspora really being much different than a Jabber protocol with social networking features. Jabber didn't kill any instant messager protocol, it just further fragmented the instant messager market, which is now dominated by Facebook because of it's critical mass.

You're forgetting that open standards can also threaten Google's entire business model. Semantic Web standards (and related technologies being worked on) will eventually make conventional search engines like Google completely obsolete.
A hacker/non-hacker toggle for each submission and a system for letting the community decide what is truly hacker-ish. It is the only way to prevent Hacker News from becoming Reddit with no sub-Reddts.
Communication Thesis Writing 
In this day and age, writing a communication thesis is a common assignment. There are many avenues open to discussion when writing a communication thesis. By selecting the best topic to write on, you will be able to submit an outstanding communication thesis.
Why stop? well I've went cold turkey when i was in my teens at the time my daily consumption is a bit less than a litter. Didn't remember remember sleeping much more than usual but i when decide to start again coffee repels me though not for long.
In May according to techcrunch. But I'm guessing that the deal which closed was one which was signed back in October 2009, and that the 1 year countdown started when the deal was signed.
Sounds like you have Generalized Anxiety Disorder although IANAP. You should talk to someone. You could also try Inositol, Passionflower and/or St. John's Wort as herbal remedies.

Cheers
I don't think that Lars Ulrich lives in New York.
My company still uses SVN, but I'm in the process of migrating my teams projects to Mercurial. We aren't IBM, but we aren't small, either. I think that DVCSs are starting to make headway into "cutting edge, but not bleeding edge" companies.

As to Mercurial vs. Git, whatever. That argument bored me two years ago. Mercurial is, in my experience, easier for SVN users to pick up, but just use whatever works for your situation.
Will scan a page when I return to Aus in a few more days.
Google Wants to Speed Up the Web by Killing the JPEG
The pain/payoff slope is very steep once you try to go beyond plain text.

Let's say you want to express hints to the compiler about what paths are common. And you like the idea of expressing that with tinted blocks. Here's what you have to do to make that work:

- rejigger your editor to input and save such tint blocks in the code;

- convince everyone else using your language to use your editor, or make similar modifications to their editor;

- ignore the cases where you don't have a particular editor available, such as SSH'ing into a minimally configured machine;

- exclude color-blind and blind programmers;

- abandon the convenience of being able to view your source code in pagers like less, diff tools, revision control tools, web browsers, IRC, instant messaging, and web services that allow you to paste snippets of code.

Or, you could:

- add a new keyword to your language.

- add a new syntax coloring rule / code folding rule to your editor, and get almost exactly the same effect.

We have a basic information science problem here. Every feature of the programming language is going to have some concrete representation as a stream of bytes anyway. As long as we use multiple tools and environments to manipulate and view that stream of bytes, it makes sense for the representation and the serialization to be identical -- that is: plain text.

However, there's no reason why we can't have the odd unicode character in source code, as long as there were some well-known shortcuts for typing. A lambda symbol would be wonderful for many languages. Similarly, a Chinese programmer ought to be able to define variable names and strings directly in Chinese.
I like the Yi editor - if I have \x -> in my source it will render it on screen as λx→ but leave the underlying file in ASCII.
Please don't just quote Crockford as gospel truth.

Crockford's prototypal revelation is only a slight alteration of the standard constructor pattern, and not a particularly useful one. You still have a class (the object that serves as a prototype for every instance you create), it doesn't add any particular flexibility, and it's quite slow. I encourage you to run the tests yourself:

http://jsperf.com/object-create-vs-crockford-vs-jorge-vs-con...

For me, that test clocks using Crockford's pattern to instantiate objects as 80% slower in Safari and Firefox, and 95% slower in Chrome, when compared to a standard use of JS prototypes.
> On first glance, it appears that Apple may have in fact addressed the problem and GPL software is OK on the store after all.

This is also my analysis
Let's be absolutely clear that it is not a clever new use of "salts" that makes PBKDF2, scrypt, or bcrypt more secure; the advantage is in adaptive hashing.

KDFs are a bit of a back-alley in crypto research, and that's the only place the term exists. The argument devolves to whether nonces really are a concept distinct from salts. I'd attempt to win the argument by citing nonces used in ways similar to salts in other crypto protocol settings (there are many).

If you look at PBKDF2, the only reason they call it a "salt" is because they're referring back to the original Unix work, where the term originated.

One way to slice this particular apple is to say that "salt" is a conventional systems design term, and nonce is a cryptosystems term.

This business of calling out "salt" vs. "nonce" as a crypto shibboleth though --- am I just being pedantic? No. Read generalist programmers writing about their idiosyncratic "salt" schemes --- "1/8th of the salt is stored on non-writeable media! 1/4th of it is encrypted with an AES key! 1/2 is stored in the database but XOR's against my mother's maiden name!" --- regardless of the three (3) papers you can cite by real security people using the term, in reality, people talking about "salts" are almost invariably distorting and tangling themselves up in silliness when they really ought to be taking PBKDF2 off the shelf and getting on with their lives.
I'm wondering what the author would make of Perl 6, which both embraces Unicode and allows the programmer to create new operators from arbitrary collections of Unicode symbols. It seems like his fondest dream and his worst nightmare at the exact same time -- which makes me think he may be less than perfectly clear on what he wants.

I've never understood the arguments against operator overloading. Yeah, you can create unreadable programs that way. But it's equally easy to create a function named "sort" that erases your hard drive. If you apply the same disciple to naming your operators that you do to naming your functions, it's not hard to understand. And it's a huge boon if you happen to be (for instance) defining a new numeric type.
I think the law of the mother country applies on the boat. i.e. a boat flying an english flag is subject to english law on the boat. If you have your own boat, fly a pirate flag instead (i.e. not a member of any country), then you can make your own rules. However other countries might sink you.
"There's no speed limit" redux.
{NOTE: This is in response to [[ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970945 ]].}

I hereby throw a B.S. Flag (it is a nice brown color) on the meme "There's" no speed limit" in college.

There is a speed limit. It is called the semester. It is vigorously enforced by virtually every accreditation agency in the U.S. and backed up by professor's grading curves which weight class attendance high enough that to skip all classes means getting at best a B in the course (skipping some classes, such as labs, will result in failing the course).

If you have aspirations of going on to graduate school at someplace actually respectable, you can kiss them goodbye if you have B's on your transcript.
And keep out the colorblind programmers?
The distinction is negligible on the mobile phone where the the 'runtime VM' takes care of memory allocation for even "native" C code.
I'm just trying to find out if it coffee makes me more anxious, but right now I'm just sleepier.
+1 professional help. A good psychiatrist can really help you with social anxiety disorder, or whatever they're calling it these days.

I also recommend the book dying of embarrassment, which has many of the things a good psychiatrist will take you through.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d.html/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/176-...
> Yeah, that's right... Here in .za we felt exactly the same way about him as you yanks do about the great terrorist Osama.

"We" being who, exactly?
I suspect he'd just walk.
In mine too -- possibly not as great as yours, but there's quite a lot of people, even in theoretically well-educated workplaces.

I have visited a psychiatrists with my problems anyway, and it definitely helped. Also, most of my friends know about that and I never had any problems, but that's probably thanks to my choice of friends. If you pick carefully you should have no problem.

Think about it like that -- visiting a shrink might cause your some problems, if it gets known in wrong places, and hopefully you can move elsewhere when that happens -- a harsh solution, definitely painful, but usually not the end of the world.

Your current condition definitely causes problems for you right now. Also, you can't just move away from your current problems.
People work for the love of the craft or for the love of the money. If you've been at Google and want more money Facebook might be a better deal before going public. Sometimes people just want to change their scenery so to speak, to do something new.

There will always be smart people for both companies to hire anyways.
Ugh, I hate arguing grammar.

Technically what I said was not ambiguous.

If you quote the first sentence alone, it could only be considered ambiguous if you consider "dying internet fad" as a favorable bet. My 2nd sentence confirms my intent.