skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Caffeine can decrease anxiety? That's highly contradictory to a bulk of medical wisdom out there.

"Medicinal plants contain a wide array of chemical compounds. At first, this looks like chaos, but more investigation reveals a distinct order. Natural selection pressures push a plant to "try out" variations on molecules to enhance the plant's odds of surviving stressful environments. So, often, one molecule is present in the greatest amount and has the most dramatic effect in a human body -- but along with it are variations of that molecule in the same plant.

For example, for several years, I did ethnobotanical study in South America, researching native uses for coca leaf, which most of us know only as the source of the isolated, problematic, addictive drug cocaine. For Andean Indians, whole coca leaf is the number one medicinal plant. They use it to treat gastrointestinal disturbances; specifically, for both diarrhea and constipation. From the perspective of Western pharmacology, this makes no sense. Cocaine stimulates the gut, it increases bowel activity, so obviously it would be a good treatment for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse?

However, if you look carefully at the coca leaf's molecular array, you find 14 bioactive alkaloids, with cocaine in the greatest amount. While cocaine acts as a gut stimulant, other coca alkaloids can have precisely the opposite action, they inhibit gut activity.

This means that when you take the whole mixture into the body, the potential is there for the action to go in either direction. What decides it? The state of the body, which is a function of which receptors in the gut's tissues are available for binding. During my time in Andean Indian communities, I collected many reports about whole coca's paradoxical, normalizing effect on bowel function, and experienced it firsthand, as well."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...
T-Mobile used to do this with every new Sidekick release so it's not completely unprecedented.
My guess is iPhone 5 will support both GSM and LTE in one hardware. It will look similar to iPhone 4 and and both CDMA iPhone4 and iPhone5 will be available on Verizon, just like iPhone 3GS is still selling.
I'm open to suggestions and partnerships (for AnyNewBooks.com).
I'm honestly confused why the opportunity to pre-order is considered a perk.
Persistent Joy (in Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, and Squeak)
In 1998, a reasonable expectation was 50% per year, though you'd usually beat that if you invested in anything starting with a lower-case 'e'. Naturally, it all went away if you left it in, but that's beside the point.

Today, it's still not unrealistic to expect that money you put in today will make on average 5-10% per year over the next 40 years. If you're investing your money for a shorter period than that, it's not really retirement savings but speculation, which can be fun but is its own thing.

Regardless, I don't think I'd discourage people from saving in their 20s because you don't think the market is going to continue doing its thing. It'll be back, and the few hundred K that you can set aside in your 20s will do some amazing things over the course of your life if you invest it in index funds rather than granite countertops.
Obviously, the effects of caffeine are dose dependent like any other drug. At low doses (varies by person), you will often achieve lower anxiety, boosted confidence, and a positive overall effect on you mood. If you exceed a certain limit though, you will start to see the opposite of each of these. This is a common phenomenon that occurs with many drugs.
Independently of the inability to roam in GSM 2G, you may still be able to roam on foreign 3G networks. For 3G, CDMA seems to be ubiquitous, it's mainly a question of at least one of the frequency bands supported by the phone being used in the destination country.
It is the combination of Caffeine and L-Theanine. Drugs/compounds in combination can frequently have different effects than just smashing the lists of effects of the two together. Further, the effects of stimulants are not simply "increases anxiety, heart rate, reduces concentration, etc". Look at cases of ADD where stimulants increase concentration. Look at studies where low doses of caffeine increase alertness without the "bad" stimulant effects.

As for your strawman about yogic monks: the article did not say "all monks..", just "monks...". The difference here is that without the qualifier, english assumes the statement refers to a significant portion, but not all or even most. Further, some traditions, such as various forms of Buddhism, particularly those that practice sitting meditation, do in fact have tea as part of the meditative ritual.

tl;dr - you are way over-simplifying and being generally disingenuous
I don't see why his argument, however weak it is, makes an argument as to whether or not banks 'robbed' the middle class. Oddly, he didn't mention that banks underwrote many educational loans. The whole article can be summed up as: "You think banks robbed the middle class? Well, I think education costs did; oh, and probably other things too."

IMO, this is particularly low-caliber for the Atlantic.
Tell HN: Toy app thrown together for fun
.. and submitted to the app store. Takes a photograph whenever the screensaver is disturbed so catches people logging into your machine
http://itunes.apple.com/app/itried/id407519315?mt=12&ls=1
They stated at CES that they'll bring simultaneous voice and data; I'm assuming that's SVDO but perhaps they're doing it some other way.

From Q&A at CES:

"Q: What about simultaneous voice and data? A: Some devices will. Q: Just some devices, not all? A: Not ready to comment at this point."
said on March 28 2002, speech to the TGWU conference, Manufacturing matters.

When this might have well been the feeling. For everyone.
Run R in parallel on a Hadoop cluster with AWS in 15 minutes
You're not exactly helping with the "Mongo is significantly less complicated to model my data with" argument. ;)

But still, good to know. I'm bad with views. :[
Wow, he saved this for the last paragraph of the interview: next version of Scala, automatic parallel processing of collections. That's actually quite stunning, since Scala automatically converts every for statement into an equivalent map/flamtmap/filter combination. That's pretty amazing to consider the power that could offer for some applications on some kinds of multi-core platforms, for essentially zero effort from the programmer.

"So you are working on the next version of Scala.
Right. That should be out by the end of the year, or January at the latest and the biggest addition, from my perspective, will be to make collections parallel, to able to use the power of multi cores for the collection. So that’s the next step. We actually have that in trunk already, but because we want to be careful for the moment with binary compatibility, to really have something, only bug fix releases, it’s implemented in the distribution, but the release will come out in three months or so."
I'd like to hear you examples and continue the conversation but I think email is more appropriate. jdennis at google's mail service
Any guesses as to why they did this? I don't believe the "they're principled" tripe for one second. They must've had something to gain.

Edit: for those saying "good PR", why doesn't that apply to Amazon, Paypal, or any of the other companies that refused to work with Wikileaks? Is Twitter in a more precarious position in its market than they are in theirs? I don't think so, because even if you can replicate Twitter's software, you can't clone their community.
"Search-spam bitch-war: expert-sexchange issues takedown against allfaq.org"

Bitch war? Expert sexchange?

"TorrentFreak: Don't bash Google for Net Neutrality, it never existed anyway"

Actual title: "Verizon and AT&T Ban BitTorrent On Wireless Networks"
I like the 3rd method a lot! I'll have to start using it (i currently stick by the first method shown)
10k is a lot of spending money. I'm trying to build up some savings/retirement money, so finding a "spare" 10k+ isn't easy.
Easy to misspell ("Liebniz").
How about making their users like them more? Positive press? Good karma?
Some relevant reading around this notion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_for_the_rich_and_capi...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatizing_profits_and_sociali...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_welfare

Game theory at work, on many levels.
Am I the only one who thought that Amy Chua's article was more than a little 'tongue in cheek'?
Chart of TechStars companies' hosting decisions
Nexus S vs Sudoku champion
What host do you use?

edit: sorry. Found the answer. Softlayer right?
GEGL is not fully baked yet, using it reduces stability and the operations you can perform. Reviewing the default, non-GEGL GIMP was the right decision.
If you draw over the permanent marker with normal whiteboard marker, they usually both wipe off...
MySpace Slashes 47% of Staff
Show HN: Android app for Astronomy Picture of the Day
I've long been a fan of the NASA APOD website (http://apod.nasa.gov), so I thought an app to set my homescreen wallpaper each day would be pretty neat.

I've just updated to version 2 which finally brings the UI up to scratch, and added some nice extra features such as a lazy-loading list of the previous pictures that you can browse.

It was all done in my spare time just as a way to brush up on my Android programming skills. I hope some of you will try it out, and I'd appreciate any feedback or tips!

Appbrain: http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.blork.anpod
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8znJyfhDWQ
Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/KlONO
Market link: market://details?id=com.blork.anpod
Yeah, this is ok, but how does this iPhone behave differently than the usual here? Do the other phones (when acting as hotspot) keep broadcasting the WiFi signal when receiving data over the cellular network?
Especially for the "professional degrees" and "masters" categories, there may also be some causation in the reverse of the implied direction, where people who already have good jobs are more likely to have their employers encourage and pay for them to go get a degree (especially common for MBAs, but also not uncommon for engineering masters).
but outlawing TV would be too much government interference, wouldn't it?
Er, theoretically, no. I don't know what Photoshop's implementation is, but computing the cumulative effect of the adjustment layers will result in less error than applying them in sequence. That's part of why GEGL is being written.

[Edit] I'm referring to the fact that fixed-precision arithmetic loses (well, stochastically speaking) precision with each operation. You can condense the layer effects and apply the 8-bit operation only once to minimize error. This is especially true if your layer combinator works at a higher level of precision than the layer operation itself.

[Edit 2] As an example, consider the layer operations "Multiply each channel by 0.5" and "Multiply each channel by 2." Applying these layers separately to a value loses something like a half bit of precision (more for smaller values, less for larger ones). A layer combinator could multiple 0.5 by 2 and yield ~1.0 (in general, subject to the floating point precision which is generally finer than the image precision). That results in a smaller error.
This work has been superseded by a later paper:

http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/weil-sc06.pdf
Action Class with Dan Martell (Flowtown). On now, 9am-10am PST
Hi all,

I'm helping put on a class to give startups actionable advice. We're on the third class, it's actually airing right now (9am-10am PST).

It's called Action Class. Right now, we have Dan Martell, co-founder of Flowtown. He's talking on "Social Media Marketing for Startups."

The class is on now at: http://www.appsumo.com/action_class

The focus is on actionable advice to help startups get the most out of Twitter, Facebook, etc. He's giving some good tips. There'll also be a Q&A session afterwards.

Just thought some of you make like it. :) I'd love to hear what you all think of the class afterwords, and if you have any advice or suggestions for the topics / themes that you'd like to see next.

Thanks.

Edit: Formatting got messed up, tweaked title.
If not for principles, then perhaps for their public image?

That would be my guess. Whatever the reason, I do hope that more companies consider following Twitter and defending their users in the future.
You're glossing over a lot there.

* No, there aren't zero-risk places you can earn 5%.
* If you make 2.5%/yr on interest and spend it instead of adding it to the principal, your wealth is actually declining (average inflation 2000-2009 was 2.56%). And your 3-millionaire will actually get their 4th million in about 10 years (15% cap gains tax), at which time inflation will have done it's work nicely, wiping out most/all of the gain.

That said, you're absolutely right that the rich get richer because of savings and investment. Millions in savings can be invested in a lot of different ways that can outpace inflation (though nowadays, there's a bit more risk in the old standbys like the stock market and real estate).
https://www.blamestella.com/vendor/softlayer
You can't reflect on the same level, with the same depth, by analyzing your day constantly, as opposed to looking back at the end of the day. If you could, nothing would ever go wrong, because you would have thought about it when you were doing it.

I contend that thinking about how everything is going constantly is more likely to stress you out and cause you to make bad decisions than simply reflecting for half an hour at the end of each day.

The day-trader approach to life vs. the value investor approach.

Relevant: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/lawlib/lexlibris/BenFranklinsDay.jpg... case that is a little hard to read: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2537/3779169741_a1f678caea.jp... )
Most of those that you mentioned are very high risk fields, where you don't get a salary - you may hit it big for a few years, but very few athletes/artists/actors/etc have consistent long-term multi-million dollar years. Many are essentially entrepreneurs.
IBM: Electric cars face consumer concerns despite high interest
To this I would add: if you want to be a good musician, generally, learning piano is very helpful. You'll absorb a lot of music theory (harmony) by osmosis. I found that quite helpful in my music theory and ear training courses in college. Beyond that, it's harmonically richer and more fun to play alone than a single line melody instrument, IMHO. (I say that as a former flutist who still plays the piano.)
Except that it just works fine on Mac and is as easy to compile there as on any other Unix/POSIX system.

I found their attitude against Apple highly annoying. When I clicked on the source download link (in Chrome), I just got this message:

Please do not run Remind on Mac OS

Downloading via wget worked though.

Then I started ./configure and I got this:

az@74-112 1130 (remind-03.01.10) %./configure

**********************
* *
* Configuring REMIND *
* *
**********************

Please don't use Apple products. This script will continue in 30 seconds
if you insist on compiling Remind on Mac OS X.

How stupid is this?

The compilation went just fine.
I've heard people bring up the argument of suicides when this subject comes up before. But I don't think it is a valid point because you are cherry picking statistics.

If you want to make a more fair comparison you would need to look at a variety of factors to get a overall picture.

Would it be fair for an Asian to look at the USA and pick something like school shootings ( or drug use, or criminality, or teen pregnancy - which ever stat makes the USA look worse) to attack the entire American style of parenting? Obviously it wouldn't be.
My understanding has always been that <- is the way that S did it, so that's the way R originally did it but = is almost always equivalent. I haven't found a place in my modest R hacking yet that = hasn't worked the way I expected it to...
Yeah, I saw another library called on Object-Document mapper. I'm thinking I'm going to call it something like an Object-based interface to MongoDB. I don't really like the name "mapper" :)
Call me an idealist, but I'd like to believe they did it out of principle.
This is interesting, but I'm always suspicious of articles that seem to hand-pick their science. This isn't a critique of tea being good for you (I'm sipping on a chai right now and feeling dandy) but a little healthy skepticism from seeing years of nutrition/health effects studies contradict each other. For more detailed thoughts on the problem see John Ioannidis' "Why Most Published Research Findings are False."
In the current weirdly democratic online business environment -- where, theoretically, anyone with enough money could clone your app -- engendering positive reactions from your userbase seems like a remarkably valid approach to long-term retention.
They could, if that is what their customers demanded and paid for.

They don't, and they don't wish to pay for it... Mainly because they don't need it.

Free market at work, people, nothing to see.
Have a simple graph on the profile page showing how many minutes the user spent on HN each day in the past week and/or a number on the top panel showing minutes spent on HN over last 24 hours.

I find that just measuring something is a far more powerful way to improve my habits. I am far more likely to set noprocrast=1 if I realize I spent 3 hours on HN yesterday.

Edit: Just realized Zev had posted the same idea a while back.
As a former AT&T customer, even AT&T doesn't achieve Ma Bell's reliability.
Sex, Pizza, or Self-Esteem?
Minimum wage for a year is approximately $10k. Ten thousand times that is $100MM. Hedge Fund salaries are not of that order - topping out at $10MM. I agree that Hedge Fund bonuses can be large, but as far as the fixed salary component goes, the person on minimum wage in your example is misinformed.
More Verizon iPhone info
I definitely get this viewpoint- but I would like to add that per gp comment, you should be satisfied with your lot. Which for some people may mean spending money on some things. I've noticed on HN and other sites a fascination with acquiring wealth. I understand why, but in the end you acquire wealth for the utility you can gain from using it.

Obviously, this doesn't need to mean spending 5k on the biggest TV, and doesn't mean outstretching yourself on a huge mortgage for a McMansion. But, if you save a little less and tactically spend on things that will make you happier I think that is definitely worth it. This isn't a huge defense of "stuff," but I think it's also okay to lose some wealth to gain happiness. I personally like spending money on travel/experiences. There was a lifehacker article about that yielding increased happiness.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5608980/spend-on-experiences-instead-o...
Well, it depends on your application requirements.

And, remember that MongoDB itself is schemaless, so any schema validation must happen at the application layer, and thus, is always going to be "soft". For example, just because you declare a field to be an Integer in your application layer, it doesn't mean it's actually going to be an integer when you read an object. (Especially if objects are coming in through other external data sources.)

One great use case for schema-less design would be a User object where you wanted to store arbitrary credentials and external profiles from sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you were using an enforced Schema, then you have to re-create the schema from all the external sites you're using, and every time there's a change in any one of those sites you need to "upgrade" your database to include these new fields. It's really pain.
I hope the fact that I ask about revenue doesn't overshadow the full hour of conversation I have getting to the details of how the business behind the revenue was built.
HostGator, which is presumably powered by Softlayer. It's about $4 a month if you use one of the promo codes that are easily findable via twitter or google. It did once crash while I was onstage trying to demo it, but other than that it's been pretty good.
What is it that keeps you from using Couch?
They're baaaaack: Spammers return from year-end break
The average person can probably name more movie stars than high school classmates. It's really easy to hit a number that 'primitive-monkey-brain' starts treating as 'many'. Reasoned reflection will reveal how silly that is, but we get to deal with primitive monkey brains with Dunbar numbers full of incredibly rich people, and things like math are very low on the method resolution chain.
Google Goggles will now help you master Sudoku
While it seems not technically right, e.g. CDMA seems to be used here and there around the world, I am reassured in my opinion that if you intend to use your cell phone/modem not exclusively on your home operator's network, you'd better stick to GSM.

Thanks for your links, retroafroman and dboyd! That's exactly what I needed.
I could certainly get behind making "no TV, more sports" a condition of receiving welfare/medicaid/etc.
In my opinion, this will either slash the current price of Android phones or slow down Android growth considerably.

I just can't help but to think, if I were a non-geek consumer, and it was the same price to walk out of the store with an iPhone over a Droid - I know I'd choose iPhone.

Does the Droid have a silver-bullet marketing point that I'm missing, or is it all over for Android?
The fact that you need to download a plugin for something as essential as that is a big drawback.
I had noticed this on my Verizon phone but didn't realize there was a technical reason. It's pretty annoying to be waiting on hold, and not being able to fribble on the internet in the meantime!
Anyone care to explain the down vote here? I worked at a large company in the midwest (very low pay compared to more populated areas) and a manager of managers (of workers, i.e. just 1 step above team manager) was making $240k/yr. That was 10 years ago. I doubt compensation has gone down.
I've added some examples to my above comment. My example is perhaps a little closer to 'median(x <- 10)' than you were asking for, but I think it illustrates the point that using '=' will not always have the desired result in places where '<-' would.
The web is hurting my eyes
اهداف مباراة قطر والصين
Video: Android Application Development - Helloworld (anatomy of an Android app)
Nooooo. When they talk about the rich getting richer, they aren't talking about a particular person getting richer. In that respect, we are nearly all (well at least those with good middle-class jobs) getting richer - we get pay rises, we save, we make investments etc.

But that phrase is actually talking about the type of comparison where you have a look at, say, the top 1% of earners, and compare their income to the bottom 50%. We see that the ratio of the average earnings of the two groups is swaying to in favour of the top 1%. That is not nearly such an obvious result. Rich people die, they split up their fortune to give to their children, which should help level things out, but no, we still see that segment of society getting steadily richer faster than anyone else.

Another way of looking at it would be to compare velocity to acceleration. You are talking about the rich having a bigger velocity increase for the same acceleration increase, which is true. But the phrase "the rich are getting richer" is actually talking about the fact that the acceleration is actually higher for the rich - they can get a 10% increase in wealth per year, were as a middle-class person might only get 3% for their tiny investment.
BP oil spill clearly foreseeable on monitoring software, official