skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a leading part of an unsuccessful campaign to get fluoride out of the water in a city in Vermont.

I went from having no idea about the issue to 'convinced' it shouldn't be in the water in an afternoon when I ran into someone (in my same city years before we tried to get it out again) petitioning on the street.

The super common sense easy argument is choice. If you are dripping fluoride into the drinking water, you are effectively medicating a population without their consent. I am not so poor as to not be able to buy filtered water and/or a reverse osmosis filtration system, but many families are.

Even if I am able, and choose, not to drink the city's water: the local bread I buy, I pasta I cook, virtually everything these days that uses water in its creation process also has fluoride. That is why they are reducing it.. when the .7-1.2 ppm standard was made.. it was based off the total daily dose assuming fluoride would only come from water. It took 60 years to realize total dose is beyond just the tap water drink; the anti-fluoridationists have been saying this from the beginning.

There are a bunch of studies linking IQ drops to fluoride exposure. Way before fluoride was a tooth decay miracle, it was an industrial hazard that had Aluminum plants being sued all over the place. Fluoride played a key role in developing the nuclear bomb. In two different ways, it is a fluoride-uranium gas that is run through huge ducts for many miles to slowly enrich uranium; it was fluorocarbons that were able to lubricate the machines that this gas went through (everything else would get eaten by the fluorine).

The negative health effects are not hard to find. The only reason this is still a practice is because some powerful organizations reputations are at risk; and if instead of dripping what is literally the scrubber fluid from super-phosphate fertilizer plants into your water slowly, they would have to pay for hazardous waste disposal.

I could go on and on. If you want a really good read, check out the Fluoride Deception.

The history is amazing.

Fluorosis is the moddling of the teeth by fluoride. Fluoride 'works' by changing the mineral structure of your teeth. The fluoro-apatite is more resistant to decay than hydroxy-apatite. This is why fluoride toothpaste and fluoride gels make perfect sense. They work.

When you ingest fluoride over long periods of time, the fluoride accumulates not just in your teeth, but in all of the places that have a similar chemical composition to your teeth, namely your bones. If someone's teeth are moddeled you can be sure their bones are too.

Indeed, the highest concentrations of fluoride found in humans is not in the bones or the teeth at all, but the bits of calcium in the pineal gland; where it has been measured in the 10,000ppm range (this is due probably to a really high blood flow and large relative surface area).

Fluoride is super dirt cheap because it is literally an industrial waste. I don't want to have to drink it. They fight tooth and nail and call it conspiracy theorist when we suggest it is an outdated practice.
The difficulty of programming depends a lot on your tools. I haven't used Play!, but I've had more experience with Java, Java frameworks, and Java libraries than is healthy. They tend to make programming a lot harder than it should be.
The crying game: a woman's tears aren't sexy
I think that's subjective. I've used mine (successfully) as an informal resume before. With all things job hunting, you approach is going to be dependent on the organization you're going after.
You make another interesting point about his relevancy, since as I read the article, it really felt it was more like coattail riding by a consultant, moving from advocating a CSR framework to a "the new new thing is" CSV framework, upon which to advise corporate clients and create some kind of relevancy. The Social Enterprise "thing" is big at Harvard Business School and Kennedy School and in reading the article, it is sprinkled with more anecdotes rather than new intellectual models or frameworks on anything new.
Not true! Just this week (I think it was Friday) Notch (creator of Minecraft) was added to the "verified" program: http://twitter.com/notch
You know, a huge percentage of the business owners follow the rules. They probably would follow more if the rules didn't require an expert (account or lawyer) to get right. Capitalism isn't Wall Street, it is the entire system. Look up your history and see that "Inadvertently" never enters into it.
For me, personally, the title was somewhat misleading. I expected to read an article about how to create the impression of much (white-)space in your user interface design, maybe for avoiding that the site looks overloaded.

However, the article is just about creating the "illusion of physical space". That is, users should get the feeling that working through your business process is as intuitive as walking though a physical space - without strange loops, or the inability to go back, or other unpleasant surprises.

It is a bit ironic that an article about user expectations ruins the user expectations of its potential readers (by failing to choose an appropriate title).
The WHO technical report on fluoridation (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_846.pdf) makes specific mention adding fluoride to drinking water (see page 16), finding it to be a safe and cost effective means of significantly improving dental health.

Although the WHO report also notes several preconditions, and contraindications, that should be considered prior to drinking water fluoridation, including a few that seem to be obliquely mentioned in the article link, the focus is on maximizing the benefit for the greatest amount of people. Arguably, that's the point of forming a society in the first place.

The stated reason for reducing current fluoridation levels has more to do with an increase in its availability from other sources. But this article is useless in furthering any meaningful discussion so far as it provides little more than unsubstantiated opinion.

It would be great to have a meaningful discussion on how we can balance the benefits to society and individual risks, including exactly where the statistical benefits afforded to a group outweigh the potential risks to individuals. But this article isn't it.

The broader issue touches on exactly how to frame the social contract between a government and its people - what rights are you prepared to give up, what responsibilities will you shoulder, and what risks are you prepared to accept, in order to benefit from the organization and protections afforded by your society?
Pretty much every Uni in the UK, pretty much says when you join Computer Science, forget everything you learned in ICT lessons. I did Btec ND electronic/computer engineering at college, which gained me more respect points with uni profs.
I don't have to get (one)

Cool. They've got the OK from me. It could turn out to be neat, and so long as it's optional I'm not worried.
weaksauce's point should still be valid too, actually. Choice is power. Assume that by "star player" we're not talking Micheal Jordan but merely somebody who is the best player on the team; having them in reserve in the last quarter means the other team can't simply deploy a strategy that is built on the coach not being able to put that player back out. A bad chess analogy would be facing the choice of retreating your queen back to your home ranks or getting her captured, there is strategic value in just having her back there even if she is not currently in a powerful position. I say it's a bad analogy because basketball players are more complex than chess pieces, with more ways to be weak and strong, but the idea still holds.
When you have a parser generator, suddenly all problems start to look like they need a complicated grammar.
Parsing Considered Harmful
A comprehensive response to this question -- which deserves nothing but a comprehensive response -- would require too much writing to explain it all to an outsider. Too much relative to how much I'm willing to write on it, of course. :)
are coupons social?
Those Java and .NET jobs probably provide you with more money to look after your family as well. All the interesting jobs, seem to lack higher salaries, in the UK anyway.
On the other hand, how hard can it be to curry yourself a function that does so?
Spectrum worries at CES: Deja vu all over again
Context Based Search Systems for More Relevant Search Results - Insights
Context of a search query is an important factor for search engines to return more relevant search results for users. This article walks you through an overview of some intriguing context based search systems and how they are heading towards improving the relevancy of search results.
the fact that some competitors exist does not mean that others were not scared away. Hell, most could have been scared away.

Your argument is a non sequitur.
We've all read about what startups use for hosting, analytics, and version control before. What do you use for accounting? hiring (resume database)? Shipping? etc?

I know the big names like git get glory for this crowd, but there's a lot more to running a business than git and web hosting.

EDIT: Erm. I guess this means your company needs revenue. That takes care of a lot of them...
Overcoming Bias : Unequal Folks Save
How portable is .NET?

Is it as simple as with Java - ie, the same .jar that has minimal requirements, such as a CLI-only program, can be taken from one platform (say Windows) and run on another (say Mono on Linux) without a recompile?

Or is it more complex than that?
There are so many incentives for legislators to restrict the internet as we know it today and effectively no lobby to protect it. I am wondering if 10 years from now we are going to have much more "regulation and security" for the networks than now. Not only in the US, on the global scale. Who knows, it might be that the 90s-00s will be remembered as the only period in the human history when the truly free unregulated GLOBAL internet was possible.

This view might look naive and hype-provoking and indeed the internet proved to be very robust on the big scale so far. However I have read recently about the very limited visa regulations for travelling around the most of the world in the 19th century. kind of puts things into perspective.
Possibly the most rational response I've seen on this thread yet.

Yes they're dead if you're looking for the next hot new thing. But if you're looking at profit---they're the 3rd most profitable public company in the U.S. behind just Chevron and Exxon. No other software/hardware tech company makes more money.
So I mentioned greed is good for context not judgment, but to actually answer your question as to whether I think Competitive Strategy catalyzed anything, I would have to answer "yes", but only based anecdotally on graduating from an Ivy League School in the 80s where all my cohorts went on to jobs on Wall Street at investment banks and that book was secret key to mastery of the universe. But that is only my anecdote not fact, proof, or scientific study.
Does computer science completely miss the point of a computer?
The End of Facebook on March 15th?
I've been hugely interested in doing some related interest in the sport of Football. I've found that the official stats provider of the NFL, Stats Inc, charges about $40,000 per year for API access to their stats.

Also, the paper reads like academic research, but the layout and citations look rather simple. What gives?

EDIT: Their data source is listed, skimmed over it.
Try LaTeX, if you haven't already.
A much simpler explanation. Even though the prophet is usually wrong, we believe him when he's right because that's the only time we notice he has even made a prediction.
It really depends on the employer. Big orgs that rely on "hrbots" and headhunting agencies might frown on this, but I would definitely consider a linked in profile to be as valid as a resume if someone were to send one to me. But note that I have never had to hire in a big stuffy organization, only in startups or smaller companies, so ymmv.
No, but reading complaints when others do is just dull.
Ruby still lacks in scalability and speed compared to Perl

Ruby is faster than Perl, according to the language shootout:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...
Couldn't they bully the ISPs to force everybody to use it? Seems like we should worry when they set up the groundwork for something like that, and not after the fact.
Show HN: New flightlite.com release based on super HN feedback
Two weeks ago I posted a link to my side project (http://flightlite.com) and got some great feedback from HNers.

I've spent a lot of time tweaking and improving based on that and I'm really happy with the result - it's much more usable and useful now!

What's better:

- reduced complexity of the main tracking page based on feedback from #veb

- new search functionality (auto-completion, blended all search types into one search box) - thanks #robyates for your input

- failover to large Google Maps view if Google Earth isn't installed with prompt and link to install from

- added a proper 404 page instead of just dying (ungracefully)

- trimmed anything I could get rid of without losing the core functionality

- new logo courtesy of a friend

- better titles/metadata and a sitemap for the search bots

- added arrivals/departure boards for airports

I hope you approve (and have even more feedback!).
I'd like to add the main author's page:

http://philmaymin.com/home

Looks like he has quite a bit of credentials and a huge interest in basketball. Very impressive.
Clickable: http://flightlite.com
The US Government via the EPA has recently recommended reducing fluoride concentration in the water supply citing the fact that the standards were last set in the 1960's and have not been reviewed since. So it seems like many other additives we are learning more and more about potentially adverse effects of excessive fluoride exposure.

source: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/government-reduce-fluoride-...
"...the system can automatically regulate the intensity of the laser beam to ensure there is no lasting eye damage, he says..."

I wonder if the intensity can also be regulated in such a way as to completely ablate the surface of the retina.
It is a terrible article.

Water fluoridation has never been proved to work at anything like the rates people have been lead to believe.

It is true that caries levels have decreased dramatically since fluoridation, but they have at the same rate in other countries without fluoridation; due to the availability of fluoride toothpaste.

The studies that originally showed the 'safety' of fluoride in NY in the 40s were a joke. Paid for by the Carnegie institute, a conclusion already determined, carried out by dentists who both a) knew which kids were receiving fluoride or not and b) checked for 'safety' by seeing whether or not teeth got moddeled.

http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/teeth/caries/who-dmft.ht...

See that link to see the rate in caries decrease over the last century in both fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries.
Ask HN: Security software for Mac OS X?
Looks like one of my email accounts has been broken into, and I suspect malware on my laptop... Any suggestions for

* how to clean up.
* security software for mac os x?
Microsoft Research is one of the top 10 computer science research organizations in the world. Some of the work done there (such as the Kinect) is game changing and will continue to be a resource Microsoft can draw upon.

As an MIT PhD student, I know many people who are eager to work at Microsoft research.

[1] http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7...
[2] http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2010/11/features/the...
I've dealt with agencies who can't even handle a PDF file because it's unsupported in their internal systems, and yes, it's really 2011. It's basically Word or nothing.

In the end, my view is that smaller companies or startups are probably more receptive to a Linked In profile than larger, more established companies.
The influence of popularity, or collective opinion, is something deeply evolved into us. That means it cannot be all bad, and is probably quite good, perhaps strongly so. It seems related to our tendency and capability to cooperate, and that is certainly very important and valuable. So seeking to eradicate or abandon it does not seem the right basic route.

Is not the real problem one of deception? It is not that we confer our opinions, but that some people, or organisations, are supplying bad information, and getting away with it. This looks more like the target to address . . .
The reason you can do metaprogramming with blocks in Smalltalk and not most other "OO" languages is that Smalltalk is based on message-passing, and you have control over how objects interpret messages sent to them.

Specifically, the doesNotUnderstand method is equivalent to having a fully late-bound APPLY in Lisp (which means you can implement FEXPRs yourself when you need them, and FEXPRs are as good as CL or Scheme-style macros for many purposes):

http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/2009/04/closure-oriented-metap...

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DoesNotUnderstand

This is why Alan Kay says message passing is more important than objects.
This is a great/easy solution - thanks for posting this.

I spent maybe 5 minutes adding this to my site, and I have to say I'm impressed. Copy the file to your server, add one new tag to your css wherever your radius css defs are and viola, done.

Prior to using this I was able to get IE looking nearly identical to Chrome/FF/Safar - except for drop-shadows and rounded corners. I've been pretty strict about not deviating from the open standards and this has actually caused several arguments between me and one of my biz partners (he just doesn't get why I refuse to 'fix' the issue in IE with one of the graphic hacks out there - and has been seeking advice from designers about this even!).

So yeah, huge thanks again because not only does this solution thorough rocks for what I needed and took no time to implement, but also now my biz partner is going to have one less thing to fight with me about (and probably move back on to telling clients about new features he wants that I have't started yet...).
1. Not showing any useful text, just a video
Regarding a) - that was emacs vs. vi, not vim. vim was first released in 1991.
Read "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives"

http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-ebook/...

and everything will become clear.
In one sense, it's an indicator that they don't think the way you think.

This could be the kiss of death for a junior job seeker, but for those people who are more senior, experienced and can be choosers as opposed to beggars, it might be an OK screening method.
I thought antitrust regulation was aimed at preventing collusion and price fixing by trusts of companies. Do you see that as different from a single company with a monopoly? You say that antitrust regulations are not necessary in a free economy, do you think we have a free economy now? (I am asking, not arguing)
FileZilla Client 3.4.0-beta1 released
Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Geek Stuff Of 2010
"How many are using it because there's simply nothing else or because they're just too lethargic to switch?"

Isn't that true for any conceivable product? I am using cars because there are no teleporters. I am using a keyboard because I don't have a good brain to computer interface yet. If I had a tablet, it would only be because there isn't a nano computer in my eyeball yet that projects directly on my retina (the real retina, not the Apple display).
You have to compare Windows 7 to XP instead of Vista. The only difference I noticed is that 7 is slower and looks more like OS X compared to XP. If there's any "innovation" going on, I haven't noticed it.
You don't have to have ID either. But if you get into a bar, and the bar didn't card you, then the bar owner can go to jail. This is the law.

1. Create national ID: its optional. Yay freedom!

2. Pass law stating that if a national ID is not used as verification by a private entity, then said entity faces criminal charges, or its management is liable to its shareholders etc. Oh.

Get a fucking clue. This is a national ID.
Flatland: A Forgivably Flat Classic
Yes, Word docs suck.

I've found in practice, that a lot of large companies (and headhunters) that use HR software seem to have trouble with PDFs. In this day and age, it's mind boggling that their software would have trouble full-text indexing a PDF. Maybe they're just too cheap to pay for software upgrades.

PDFs are almost never an issue if you're emailing it directly to the hiring manager, but a PDF could be bad if you're emailing a catch-all mailbox like jobs@ or hr@.
This study was US only, but what if you had the resources to make it global? Where are the numbers on Twitter usage outside the US and UK?

The Philippines, for example, is the texting capital of the world and its citizens generate over 400 million SMS per day:

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1039_3-6222961.html

In addition, my understanding is that the Republic of the Philippines has over 160 non-mutually intelligible dialects.
How about this for an idea.

- The problem, search engines help you find things that are popular, not things that are good (in your opinion)

- The Solution, create a public profile and start listing things you like. You are placed on some complex graph based on the things you like. When searching, results are filtered by the popularity of a site, based on your proximity to other users and their likes.
Haiku's plan for package management
But Starbuck's made up words will?

I wonder if the metric system has an analogous unit of measure to the ounce....
C source code has not the external representation of a string.
Sweden has something similar, called E-legitimation. Issued by banks, mostly used for accessing government services, like applying for student loans, paying taxes, etc.

If it's only intended to be used in this kind of way, no problem. If not...