skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an important article with well chosen examples. But I think the headline points to the wrong "cause" of failure. Scientists, the directors of science research funding projects, and the general public can better understand what we know and what we don't know about causation from correlation if science teachers and journalists do a better job. For a long time, members of the journalistic community and members of the general public have been overinterpreting tentative scientific findings,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and if we learn the lessons of how to interpret research findings more cautiously, we can all do our part to guide further research better.

As the author of the submitted article points out, "This doesn't mean that nothing can be known or that every causal story is equally problematic. Some explanations clearly work better than others, which is why, thanks largely to improvements in public health, the average lifespan in the developed world continues to increase. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, things like clean water and improved sanitation—and not necessarily advances in medical technology—accounted for at least 25 of the more than 30 years added to the lifespan of Americans during the 20th century.) Although our reliance on statistical correlations has strict constraints—which limit modern research—those correlations have still managed to identify many essential risk factors, such as smoking and bad diets."

So with caution about assuming causation where the data cannot reliably show causation,

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

the huge task of biomedical research can still go forward, eventually yielding other findings that can improve health or longevity compared to today's baseline.

AFTER EDIT: The question posed in the first reply below is interesting. One reason that biomarker interventions are tried more often than "hard endpoint" interventions is simply that they are faster and easier. To really check carefully for hard endpoints--reduced mortality and morbidity, for a medical treatment--takes time in a clinical trial. Sometimes an effective on a biomarker, for example serum cholesterol, can be observed right away, but if the subjects in a study are at an age at which few subjects die from any cause, it can be a long while before a study reveals which treatments actually increase rather than decrease the risk of death.

The case of the drug rimonabant,

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

which had reasonably strong support from animal experiments as an antiobesity drug, is instructive. Studies of human subjects after the drug was approved in Europe revealed a huge increase in suicidal risk among patients taking rimonabant,

http://www.pharmacist.com/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Pharmacy_N...

and eventually approval of the drug in Europe was withdrawn, and the drug was withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer, before rimonabant was ever approved in the United States.
First things I install on a new mac are:

* TotalTerminal -- a quake-like CMD-~ terminal extension

* RightZoom -- CMD-Shift-Q for maximizing the window to current screen
Best. Ever. Corporate happy holidays card.
Saying NK is a PRC puppet is like saying South Korea is a US puppet.

China is glad NK exists as a buffer against the US zone of influence (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), but NK causes China a lot of problems too (eg, there is a crystal-meth problem in the border zones because North Korea produces it as a medicine(!!)[1])

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/06/19/north-korea...
That happened to me as well (also not a programmer). It is because the directory with the sounds and images, called 'res', is not in the right place. You need to move the 'res' folder into the 'bin' folder.
This is cute. If you would let me enter a list of things I want to get done, and include the ones I haven't checked off yet in the daily email, it would be even better... maybe even worth a little money.
The fundamental assumption here is that:

1 - A beggar will use the proceeds from begging to improve his/her life in a semi-permanent way.

2 - The beggar is capable of "recovery" in the way most lay people perceive the homeless.

Given that, in North America at least, homelessness goes practically hand in hand with substance abuse, #1 is far from a safe assumption. More often than not the proceeds of begging go straight back into booze and drugs.

Now, there's a certain school of thought where that doesn't matter - these people have shite for lives, who are we to judge if they choose to numb themselves in their hopeless situation. If I was to be homeless for the rest of my life, with no hope of anything else, I probably would start drinking. masterzora pretty succinctly summarized it elsewhere in the thread.

Which leads to point #2, which is something I don't think a lot of people really get. I don't claim to be an expert in this issue, but I've worked at shelters and kitchens in the past - and the way I see it, a lot of these people really are hopeless.

The second factor that goes hand in hand with homelessness in America is mental illness. That's something some people don't seem to be aware of. Conservatives see the homeless as lazy good-for-nothings. Liberals see them as simply people down on their luck. Both are based on the presumption that becoming "normal" again is an option that is on the table. For a large portion of the homeless population, this simply is not true. Even if you resolve the substance dependencies, you still have a litany of mental health issues that will prevent the bulk of these people from being "functioning" members of society - functioning in the way that society normally expects of its citizenry anyhow.

To circle back to the blog author's question:

> "What if EVERYONE gave to beggars?"

Then you will see an explosion of begging, but not a proportional reduction in homelessness. The ratio of genuinely homeless/needy folk on the street vs. profiteering "fake" beggars will become horrifically skewed. The extra noise will mean greater difficulty in necessary social services from reaching the people who need it. All in all, the genuinely poverty-stricken homeless folk will suffer more than they already are today.
The issue always confuses me. The committee puts in a lot of effort to avoid introducing new keywords or repurposing obsolete keywords. This introduces some horribly overloaded keywords and awful syntax. Of course, new keywords break old code but what is so difficult about a grep-replace on your code base? The only reason I can come up with are the few corner cases where turning an identifier into a keyword can produce well-formed code with a different meaning but I have a hard time imagining such a thing. Can someone shed some light on this?
Please, just give money to a local organization that assists the poor, like a soup kitchen.

Or even better, give money to a charitable organization that assists foreigners who are vastly poorer than every single person in the US.
The braking phase of this ride is mostly that. This way there is no active component of the brake that can fail. Its just a big magnet and a big hunk of aluminum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_tower_%28ride%29
So maybe you're left with a handful of startups who are able to find a place for you because they recognize your value and adapt, not because they had planned on finding you in the first place.

If you are waiting for somebody else to figure out your worth, you're trying to make them do your job, and it's not gonna work.

You have to tell them -- or better yet show them what your value is.

That's the only way to sell products, or sell yourself. The people in the seat on the other side of the desk see a lot of candidates. They don't have time to fully investigate every one. They trust that if a person doesn't have the confidence or self-knowledge to sell himself, or herself, that it's not worth their time to dig deep and find it.

I say this as a person who's kicked ass at job interviews, gotten every job I ever applied for -- 3/5 of which were not open positions, but made for me by my request -- and also done quite a bit of hiring.
I love how he uses the most uncool tools out there. Eclipse, Java, Pain.net, Windows, yet produces more than most of us combined.
Canadian HIV vaccine approved for testing in human clinical trials
That would be someone who needs to say "fucking" a great deal less than you.
Victory for Apple as court rules HTC copied part of the iPhone
Wow, I have experience welding and am trying to imagine this happening to the table I used. Sounds like that could have been a lot worse.

I don't really know much about this sort of thing short of seeing a huge generator on a field trip to a dam in sixth grade. The stator spins around the rotor which contains magnets, and these magnets have to be constant, permanent ones. Is that correct? I assume it's not viable to use electromagnets for this purpose since they use electricity. I bet it would be nice to be able to turn them off.
I disagree. If everyone is willingly and of their own volition giving money to beggars every time they saw one in an effort to make things better (note that the post is not about any sort of mandatory giving or a government program or anything else of the sort) it seems silly to conclude that everyone, or even most people, would then become beggars.

On the flip side, "If NO ONE gives to beggars there won't be any beggars!" is also correct, but not for the reason given. Reality is that most beggars would die relatively quickly because they're not there by choice or because they think that begging to live is better than finding a job. Yes, a few are there by choice for one reason or another, but I really hate the world where people choose to let the honest ones dies to spite the few freeloaders.
At face value, to "make myself redundant" seems to contradict what Seth Godin advocates in his book: "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?" [http://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/...]

Although I think they'd both agree on the goal of always looking to do interesting work, contributing to projects like a human being instead of doing cookie-cutter work, etc.. I can't help but think they'd also have some profound differences of opinion on how to get there.
> For example, unlike Windows, there is no free and convenient svn utility on the Mac.

If you aren't command-line-phobic, svn has been included by default on OSX for a while.

However, I do agree about paying for software that improves your productivity... if you amortize it over even a year (think monthly cost vs. productivity/entertainment value), it's likely cheaper than a caffeine habit... and I usually use software for years.
Freemium addons that are as of yet undisclosed.
An ex-ski racer told me the young racers are faster than the older racers not because of athletic ability but because the young ones haven't taken a serious fall yet.
Thankfully I had a lecturer who recognized this & talked to me about it. He pointed out 2 things:

1) From a purely practical perspective I needed to suck it up & pass this course regardless of boredom.

2) Model solution driven marking (checkbox style) doesn't reward inspired answers. So the aim is not to answer brilliantly, but rather to answer as the other 120 people in the class would. (Its model solution driven because the professional exam is set up that way, so the lecturer wasn't in a position to stop the insanity)

Not exactly ground breaking insights, but I graduated a couple of weeks ago (barely) and I think that was partly thanks to that talk.
I think it's a big problem as we didn't know either until we started writing our game engine and doing some research
Yup, looks like the exact thing.
Amazon weighed buying RIM but interest cooled
My two year old would probably love that - he sympathises with the pigs and gets upset whenever he accidentally hits one of them with the birds. Doesn't seem to care as much about the birds.
Founder Gap: more women in open source == more women founders
Maybe, I mean I still use jQuery and any else that's relevant but a lightbox is such an aesthetic, simple thing that I wouldn't consider it NIH to prefer creating one that suits a website more (if the website's design is a big focus)
The HN comments have way more substance than the original post. But I'll echo others: it doesn't take a genius to be both. On the other hand, a skill for spotting and studying and applying underlying patterns is a must.

There are just as many patterns and underlying systems in design as codecraft, and vice versa. And they're not that dissimilar.

Design isn't "art" -- it's a type of making things fit for purpose. You can have purely functional design that meets the purpose without soul. You can have purely functional code that meets the purpose without soul.

The best design is crafted with soul. But so is the best code.

As somebody who does both, I speak from experience - they're just not that different. Superficially yes, but not at heart.
> I can never remember the IP address of my work's VPN, so I created a text file on my desktop with the IP as its name. Whenever I need it, I do: Ctrl+Space, ~/Desktop/[IP] to select the file, '.' to treat the filename as text, tab to go to the action part of QuickSilver, start typing "clipboard" and when "Copy to clipboard" shows up, I press enter. It can sound like a lot of steps but it gives me the IP address in my clipboard without reaching for the mouse, without having to open a file or an app.

If you don't mind a bit of drag and drop, a text clipping [1] may be even faster... simply drag the IP address text to the desktop, then drag it back when you want to pull it back in... text clippings make your desktop into a super-clipboard (only downside is the resulting files don't sync over dropbox)

Though I'm mostly-keyboard, I use the mouse where it makes sense, and OSX's drag and drop is a huge time-saver.

[1] http://macstarter.com/2011/01/21/text-clipping/
Definitely the best way is to not work in little nibbles but long stretches, like a day or two on each. Otherwise you're going to drive yourself insane! (As you've learned.)
> The old code will have to include <stdnoreturn.h> if they used the "noreturn" compiler-specific keyword, while waiting for the glacial ISO WG progress.

Huh? stdnoreturn.h only makes sense with the new _Noreturn keyword. The old code can keep using __attribute__((noreturn)) or (if it was portable code) nothing at all, without including any headers.

> Crap like <stdnoreturn.h> is just pointless ornamentation, cluttering our source code.

I think C's "add seemingly randomly named include files to the top of your code to use different parts of the standard library" is pointless, and I'd like to see the whole standard library included by default (using some yet-to-be-invented more flexible PCH magic to ensure it doesn't slow down compilation). But in lieu of that, it's hardly a big jump from library to syntax - and if keeping backward compatibility isn't hard, why not do it?
CentOS 6.2 is released
What's wrong with the copy of svn already distributed with Mac OS X? :)
Please post when you do, I'm just getting into cocos2d now trying to learn game development. Any tips/resources you can share? I'm working through this book http://www.learn-cocos2d.com/
> The Solovay–Strassen and Miller–Rabin tests, which are fast and accurate, but not easy to implement: the former requires understanding the Legendre and Jacobi symbols (arcane mathematical concepts) and the latter requires an efficient factorisation algorithm.

The author is a bit confused. Miller-Rabin, when testing n, only requires factoring to the extent of determining the largest power of 2 that divides n-1. In other words, you have to have factor n-1 into the form 2^s d, where d is odd. This is trivial to do efficiently.
US asks scientific journals to censor articles on a flu virus
Using the /proc filesystem to monitor progress of script
A tip for using the /proc filesystem to monitor file upload/processing progress.
Results of our ad buys on Daring Fireball and The Deck
Mint Cocktail: Mojito or Molotov
Twilio contests are a great place to see what interesting things people are building and the cool API Mashups that are possible http://twilio.com/contests/. The most recent was a Shopify+Twilio hack that had some really cool results http://bit.ly/vBrGRx
FCC States 'Internet freedom' threatened
Where? Most of the programs you probably have in mind stop paying you once you stop doing irresponsible crap. That has fundamentally different incentive effects than a guaranteed income that pays irrespective how responsible you are or how much you work. For example it would not impose a high effective marginal tax rate on those who work a part-time job (like unemployment benefits or welfare do).

Its effect would be more like that of Social Security (with untaxed benefits, and judged purely from the standpoint of post-retirement).
As I understand it, there are at least 3 different ways SOPA can affect a person/company negatively:

1. If your site gets targeted to be blocked.

2. If you run an ISP and you have to manage the infrastructure to block websites.

3. If you develop a program that could be used to route around DNS blocks, which SOPA would make illegal.

So, while targeting the bill at foreign sites lessens its impact for #1, which is still bad, it does nothing to lessen the impact of #2 and #3.
The Preview signature thing is rather recent, IIRC.
Yes, one of the key insights needed to pass modern education in the US is to suck it up and do the drudge work.

On the flip side, that's not a useless thing to learn - about 10-25% or so of my "Professional life" is some form of drudge work. So I did need to learn to suck it up.

Whenever I really felt like "too smart for school", I remembered the manual labor I had done in summers prior and that helped put some steel in my spine.
Watch Mission Impossible 4 Online
Watch Mission Impossible 4 Online is written by André Nemec and Josh Appelbaum and edited by Paul Hirsch. Camera work is by Robert Elswit under Paramount Pictures, Skydance Productions, Bad Robot Productions, and TC Productions studio. This motion picture is distributed by Paramount Pictures and due to be release in US on December 23, 2011.
Exactly how would you define a "foreign site", especially when the countries of origin for the domain name and servers could be different? What about sites with servers in multiple countries?
Notch has stated it's not released under any license.

https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/149273594667606017

Interpret that as you wish, but make no assumptions.
How we use 20% time
As if MS will implement C1X. They haven't caught up to the last C standard from 12 years ago
Did you take a picture?
The flip side to this is that his projects tend to accrete bad design decisions and just outright bugs that a more methodical developer wouldn't. Minecraft multiplayer comes to mind.
User reaction. When we introduced our premium service (this we did with the consent of our power users) after almost one year of giving free service, many that joined new, wrote hate mails saying how everything in the internet should be free. That's when we decided this has to be subtle. The basic service is free. And, when a user clicks to share a track privately or choose higher bitrate streaming, we prompt him/her to upgrade cos those are some of the premium features in Muziboo.

After experiencing the service, users become comfortable and also know exactly why we are better than the lot of other free services.

In B2C subtlety in this matter helps. But you can't do that in B2B. Potential customers evaluate your service based on the pricing.
Yes, they're permanent magnets.

The reason why you don't use electromagnets on a windmill this size is that the additional complexity isn't worth it. Though it would make assembly and dis-assembly a lot easier / safer ;)

It definitely could have been a lot worse, I recall having a tea break after it happened, once I stopped shaking enough to hold a glass without spilling.

Here is a picture of what the thing looked like in that stage of the final assembly:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/windmill/dscf0312.jp...
China Ramps Up Online Censorship Efforts As US Congress Gives Them Perfect Cover
Audio synthesis / processing in JavaScript
Last I heard at least, he still seem to regard mods to Minecraft as some bad terrible thing (though apparently Jeb has at least gotten him to go along with a mod framework--which is a good thing, because it's the only way Minecraft remains playable!), so "I doubt he'll complain" might be reaching a bit.
That's definitely a plus. I currently use DiffMerge which I really like because I can use it with absolutely anything, no matter what my source control is.
Can anyone explain why this needs to be a macro? What does this get you over a plain function?
Give me your street address, and I'll send you a holiday card
Intelligentsia's pretty good, but they're going to have to arm-wrestle Ritual for the title "best in the US". ;)
Very cool. I've been a bit dubios of the CPMs on The Deck and curious about response for DF. Now, my question is...what was your CPA on it? ;)
It's certainly a related problem: with Go-style implicit interfaces, neither a person nor a machine really has the context to know if something that conforms to the interface is actually intended to be used that way, or if it just happens to have the same method signatures. As you say, getName() is a pretty common sort of method name that could mean a bunch of different things, and not everything with a getName() method is necessarily interchangeable with everything else. Explicit interfaces require more work by the programmer, but make those intentions explicit to both other programmers and to automated tools.

In Gosu, we already have Java-style explicit interfaces, but we're likely going to add in Go-style implicit interfaces as a language option as well, since they're not completely interchangeable. The more I think about it, the more I think that you often want implicit interfaces for method arguments, and explicit interfaces for return values. That's oversimplifying, but as a library author you often want to say "this method works with anything that has foo() and bar() on it," so you want an implicit interface so people can use your library with existing code without changing that code to add explicit interface declarations. But if you're providing objects back as the result of a function, you might want to be more explicit and make harder guarantees about exactly what sorts of things they return.
Browsers are CPU-bound, network-bound, GPU-bound, memory-bound (esp. memory bandwidth, though some people count that as "CPU"), and filesystem-bound. Depending on exactly what you're doing with the browser.
The Secret History of Kim Jong Il
The typedef tuple strategy doesn't let you distinguish between types except by the types and ordering of their fields. If you later have a constructor for another ADT (or even the same one) which also takes two Float arguments, you end up with multiple typedefs for tuple<double, double>.
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All I'm saying is that the proof is in the pudding, and I find it odd that 25% of the people that had posted upon first read felt they could claim this status. I believe it can be achieved, but the numbers seem very skewed here.

Anyway, I'm not ashamed of it at all. I went through a job search and had a lot of bad luck. I'm not actually expecting to be given a rockstar job, but even the local small-time shops have the same requirements. Every single company I've seen is looking for the mysterious rockstar unicorn programmer.

So, after eventually finding a job, I decided to build a bunch of projects on the side, and we're getting a lot of traction. If I were to claim rockstar status at anything, it would be persistence. I guess you probably didn't look at my bio.