skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I understand correctly, that page says that 34% of modafinil takers reported headaches, compared to 23% of non-modafinil takers, 11% reported nausea (vs. 3%), 7% reported nervousness (vs. 3%), and 5% reported insomnia (vs. 1%). What do you think the numbers for caffeine would be? Caffeine withdrawal is a major cause of headaches, and caffeine is a major cause of nervousness, insomnia, tachycardia, hypertension, dizziness, etc.

I'm not saying caffeine is some kind of dangerous drug; I'm just saying that "almost zero side effects in comparison" is at least plausible given the Wikipedia page.
This guy obviously is a designer and doesn't do math for a living... Why is the equation built like that? Why is it logarithmic? What are "large" values of P.

The idea is good but the implementation is terrible.
But if you support any sort of *nix, then you quite possibly work on OS X already. If not, there's still probably minimal work to do.

It's not like going from Unix to Windows, where you have an entirely different access control mechanism, system API, filesystem structure and path separator, etc.; it's just going from one Unix to another. So the author only has to accept a couple patches from his Mac-using colleagues, and then he's basically set for OS X. On the other hand, debugging a Unix app on Windows can become a full-time job, and may be more work than you can reasonably expect a few random patch contributors to accomplish.
I guess that's why I'm not a conservative; I certainly don't agree with that statement. But it's not something you could prove or disprove factually, so let's just call it a difference of opinion.

What you linked to is actually a pretty mild side effect profile, although I take back "almost zero side effects." The maximum increase compared to placebo is 11% (for headaches), whereas the majority of people have caffeine-related headaches at some point.
The term "Open" was used for non open source software many years ago - I think in the mid/late nineties there was a rash of it. If anything it was meant to imply "flexible", "new and fresh" and in rare cases, using open standards or able to be integrated with (often in the context of enterprise ERP type of stuff I am thinking mainly).

Not that its a good thing, but it does kind of have a precedent, FWIW ;)
New Widget Network - YouTube & Yardbarker 1st Examples
Compare the behavior of # to the behavior of puts. If you puts [set x 3], not only does it print out 3, it also sets x to 3. If you # [set x 3], it does not set x to 3, because # is not actually a command that ignores its arguments; it is a comment, just like in Python, Perl, or sh.

Similarly, if # were a command, a semicolon would terminate it and start a new command, but it doesn't. The comment continues to the end of the line.
Great stuff. I never knew Baron Davis had a blog.
No, but https://secure.wikimedia.org/ does.
Reason one alone should be enough.

Two is arguably a toss-up, from hn guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Three is a way of saying: There are other sources of "social news" that target politics, human interest stories, etc., you can get them from there and keep HN focused.

Anyway. No more meta noise from me. :)
Python (prior to 3.0): 1/3 == 0

well, unless you do

from __future__ import division
You seem to think that dicts aren't associative arrays.

I think the last version I did any significant amount of work on was Tcl 8.3. But I wasn't any kind of expert on it then.

It might be true that Tcl (8.6?) is faster than Ruby now, but the article that started this thread didn't dare to claim that, and these benchmarks of Tcl 8.5b3 don't support that claim:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...
We go into a defensive state because we're all worried that we won't be able to correct mistakes made. For example: quit your job to try your hand at a start-up. In good times, it fails and you just grab yourself a job with some firm after it fails. In bad times, it fails and you don't get another job. Or at least that's the fear. We fear that we won't be able to correct things if something goes wrong.
submitted to reddit, here is the thread:http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7hv0j/ask_progg...

has some good responses
Long, Deep Recession? Isn't the proper name for this a Recession?
This is the one I finally decided on and signed up for today, thanks! I'd heard about it before and it looked like a pretty good deal. What made me finally decide was that they had a fairly low minimum deposit, low fees, and they let you withdraw all your money and close your account for free!
Despite what society tells us, I think that fear is normal and totally acceptable. We know ourselves best. And sure, after the fact we can say things like "oh I should have", "I could have" or "if only I wasn't scared", but you know what, that's life. Hindsight is 20/20.

The key is looking back on the situation and spotting the signs that should have encouraged you rather than made you scared. And perhaps you can pass that knowledge to your future generation and hope that they put your experience to use.
And Songbird was a total piece of shit for years, while it continued to get lots of pointless press. It's only become marginally useful very recently.
>and also allows tools to exist that can't be built for dynamically-typed languages

As well as the ones you mention - would you include IDEs etc ? or is that more an issue of not doing the "smalltalk way" of editing running code?
Exactly. These students would be far better off mastering ideas like angular momentum and torque. String theory can wait until grad school.
Building rich Internet apps with JavaFX 1.0
Ask YC: Apple Camera Hack? Peeping Tom 2.0?
I was in a cafe the other day and while using their open wireless decided to get some work done. As I surfed the web... all of a sudden the light on my MacBook Pro Camera turned on!

I was not using any application or program that would make this happen. There were some crazy lookin techies in the room and I got kinda freaked... was it possible for someone to create a Mac Camera Hack?

Is it possible to even make an application where as the light would not even go on to tell me it was in use?

Creepy.
1. The relative quality of many new Ruby libraries is extremely low. There are a lot of affected idiot hipsters who want to be the next DHH and think releasing every module they write will help with that.

2. Just run a headless VM to run your development in, since you don't have to deploy on Windows.
Yeah, but the way it does it is by switching concurrent threads when the last gets stalled on memory.

It's brilliant, and seems effective, but it's still just 8 cores per socket.
You're assumption is usually false in my experience. Most of the people I laid off were told of their shortcomings long before being laid off. It's expensive to find and hire good people and it's also human nature, at least mine, to try to help people improve before giving up on them. Also, when profits are high it's easy to let things slide. When those profits evaporate and tough choices have to be made you lay off rather than fire those that never met the expectations.

Where is the slide into oblivion exactly? I think the slide begins when we loose our humanity and run around firing people willy nilly.
or...

if (a) { return true; }
return false;
That's a bit of an exaggeration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Pharmacology

http://www.modafinil.com/

Sure, there's no long-term studies, but we can extrapolate from the receptors that it acts on and its relatively minor side effects that it wouldn't be too bad to take it over a long term. At least for it's main indication, ADHD, it's far better than the alternatives of Ritalin or Adderall.
An equation for why people procrastinate
Well, if Merb is in the mix, you can continue using ActiveRecord. Merb would be the easiest to port to. It's Ruby. It has ActiveRecord. You could use your current templates.

I'm really trying hard to figure out what kind of non-technical reason would dictate a ton of work for no technical value. DHH insult your boss? It just seems weird to make a technical decision for non-technical reasons.

Django can probably handle it, but you'd have to override things for every table. You wouldn't be able to reuse your templates and, well, it's different enough that you'll be finding gotchas everywhere. Rails has gotchas too, but you've already dealt with the Rails ones. It just seems like a lot of work for a non-technical reason.
Yeah, essentially the processor cores start looking like ccNUMA boxes. The late 1990s called, they want their architecture back :-)

IMHO, it looks like we'll need some smarter memory bus management. If we're looking at the 1990s, anyone remember the crossbar switches SGI used to put in their short-lived x86 boxes? Thoughts on effectiveness?
Apparently, the consensus is that your original advice is more correct. I think it's accurate enough because both take some effort to pull off.
In practical terms, I think that bit could be shortened to "Your stuff is on S3."
I don't think you understand how Objective-J works (or GWT, or many of these other tools). You can use any existing JavaScript code in combination with Objective-J code. You can use any existing JavaScript code in combination with GWT too, if you do a little work.

Writing an ECMAScript4 to JavaScript translator is really no different than writing an Objective-J to JavaScript one, except Objective-J runs in the browser, not on a python script running on a server. Objective-J runs natively in the browser, an impressive feat.
That's an interesting notion.

What incentive does a drug company have into spending millions of dollars researching and developing a product to maybe reap benefits 40 years in the future? In a similar situation, I would move onto something more lucrative in a reasonable time frame. It's conceivable to imagine an industry completely stifled by having extremely high barriers to market entry.

Additionally, imagine being forced to use research that is at least 40 years behind the curve (undoubtedly it'll be more), when the new is available.

I understand you may have been exaggerating -- but this is still a good point to bring up.
Not My Gorilla
It would be really nice to get rid of the 800lb gorillas in my projects, but that's not always my choice....
Python: "Ruby's int.to_f seems much nicer than a built-in function float(int)."

>>> print float.__class__.__name___
type

See, "float" is a type. float(int) is a constructor for a floating point number. It's not a magic built-in function, it's just a constructor for type float. Same with int and str. I can't say there's anything wrong with Ruby's int.to_f, but I actually like the Python design better.

Now, as far as len() goes, I agree. It's easy to forget about such troubles, but I definitely wasted a good 10 minutes when I was learning Python trying to figure out what property or method of type list (or str--I don't remember) I should use to get its length.
> Linus did a very, very good job for the single isolated box.

Actually, no. Linus solved a much harder problem, the social problem of "freeing" a platform. Technology - not so much, but that's okay because lots of other people had done that.
I think the lesson of this post is learn to use your tools well, despite how you feel about them.
GAP Inc on Building a Sustainable Brand
Isn't it kind of obnoxious how Google requires a login to read public group archives? (Or am I mising a way to read these without logging in?)
If your working with integers, 1 div 3 is indeed zero.
I haven't read this lengthy article completely (I might never have time to finish it), but thus far I've found it to be thought-provoking, and unusually in touch with its subject matter. Most articles about Facebook seem to be written by people who are mystified by its appeal, its users, and the broader changes in technology and society that are enabling its success.

Perhaps this is explained somewhere later in the article, but this bullet point confused me:

"Giving users 'ownership' over the information they enter on Facebook is the worst idea of all; it empowers them to run roughshod over others' privacy."

How would giving ownership over the information a user enters on Facebook empower that user to run roughshod over others' privacy? Am I misinterpreting something, or missing something?
Ask HN: valuing a non-existent company
Hi guys. Occasional commenter posting anonymously. We are in an interesting situation and I would appreciate advice.

Our core business is in a niche area, but we have the opportunity to get some angel funding to enter a related but much larger market. We are planning to enter this market in the long run anyway. Moving now would provide some risk diversification, give us the cash to cover upfront costs and provide some miscellaneous administrative support. Also first mover advantage. The business model would be validated early, or fail early. We'll know in a few thousand dollars so it isn't really high risk.

We could take this step on our own, but we're bootstrapping and can't afford to split our resources to support two products. So the advantage is really avoiding a delay of at least six to eight months. There is no risk of dilution to our existing business, so that is not a concern.

The question is how to value an angel investment in a business like this where there is a small initial investment for market testing and an agreement for how to move forward if it makes sense. To me this means figuring out a reasonable value for our own contribution. But what is that? The costs of building the tech side from scratch? The opportunity cost of the people who need to manage/execute? Does the market value of our labor even matter if we are taking equity?

I understand that the answer is always "we need more details", but it is hard to do that without being overly specific. Apologies for being obtruse. I'd appreciate hearing about any relevant factors that came into play in any similar agreements any of you have run into.
Why not skirt the question and take the funding on a convertible note?
Python: "<br>".join(["string1","string2"])

Maybe it shouldn't but this pisses me off.
Is there a "Roger and Me" about RIAA/MPAA?
I think the reason it's a Ruby problem is the c - extensions to Ruby are hard to cross compile across platforms. Windows is a particular problem because the c compiler situation is not consistent. There are still a lot of people using Visual Studio 6 to compile this stuff....

As far as deployment goes, when you can run Windows services for the mongrels, do you even need capistrano? I've been doing Rails for years without it and don't feel like I need help deploying....
(Chicago) Tribune could file for bankruptcy
These articles always seem to imply that the RIAA should investigate the personal circumstances of everyone they intend to sue. I'm not condoning their sue-to-scare strategy, but legally speaking it matters zero that this girl makes $8.25 an hour and is waiting for a islet cell transplant, whatever that is.

It'd be like saying to an officer who pulls you over, "But sir, I can't afford to pay this. Next time please verify my income beforehand so you don't make this mistake again. Now please go away." Not gonna happen.
Well-enough written schlock is always in demand. So, mine wikipedia and blog!
I Can't Decide
Does anyone remember "trusted" computing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing
Well, they do in the actual article. But I agree -- there is little need to hide the name of a virus, especially when most of humanity has a form of it.
My favorite language is Javascript, so I've got plenty of warts to choose from.

I think that the most intrusive one is semicolon insertion. This is perfectly valid code that does not do what it looks like:

return
{
a: "foo"
};

That's quite different from:

return {
a: "foo"
};
Seems to be overloaded at the moment... Took ages to load and then said I was answering too quickly?
Might be fun if it worked.
"In October, researchers at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center reported that the percentage of online computers worldwide infected by botnets -- networks of programs connected via the Internet that send spam or disrupt Internet-based services -- is likely to increase to 15 percent by the end of this year, from 10 percent in 2007."

It is getting to the point where I may tell my friends and family to stop banking online.

One possible measure that I may start using is VMWare's player and Browser appliance:

http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/80
Excerpt:

"Kudos to Pierre Chatelier for writing the book that Apple and Alan Kay could not."

What does Alan Kay have to do with Objective C? He invented Smalltalk not Objective-C. Perhaps the author meant Brad Cox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Cox).
I heard an Angel say "pick a number between 3 and 5 million and move on". I think the point is that the investors need enough equity to have a good upside (50x $) and the company needs to maintain enough equity to be motivated (the majority).

So, if you are shooting for the fences, how much do you think the company can be worth in 5 years? What percentage will give the angel 50x their investment?

I am looking forward to what others have to say.
Lightweight Web Services
You make a good point. I was, perhaps wrongly, inferring an implicit attribution to the man who is usually accused of say that. This makes me guilty of misattribution.
Yeah, but that's an issue in and of itself, from a business POV.
agreed, if (a) then just return a;

if (a) { return true; } is just as redundant as an if (a == true) statement.
Caffeine has this other advantage: That certain beverages that contain it are culinarily exquisite. Same with ethanol (praise god).
I have found when users bring up this sort of thing it is because someone the user wants to share with would prefer to use email and other forms of communication other then your product and are grasping at straws to get the person who is excited about it, not to use it. You can change the terms but it will not do any good, they will look harder for another reason not to use it.
It seems the RIAA doesn't need help destroying any reputation they might still have; they're doing a great job by themselves. Suing for $8,000 over 10 shared songs is pretty awesome, too.
"There are a lot of people who’d be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about other people’s 800 pound gorillas."

I wonder how this sentiment would apply to linux DEs. Consider the design decisions which would be made if the designers of gnome and kde thought about what would make them most productive instead of thinking about what will get people to switch from windows to linux. Perhaps, we will get a lot less dumbing-down of interfaces and an end to blind adherence to the standard windows UI and finally see some genuine innovation in this field again.

This is not to say that all DEs are stuck in a cycle of continuously copying windows. FVWM (my wm of choice) splits completely. Similarly, from an eye-candy perspective, beryl and compiz bring new things to the table. Still, beryl and compiz are relatively small projects and the vast majority of coding effort goes into make nice GUIs for systems configuration and things like emulating MS Office with OOo.
I was aware that a huge percentage of people carry some herpes variant, but googling around I was shocked to see that the majority of american women have HSV1 by age 10, and it can be transmitted from mother to child during birth.

I can only imagine this amazingly high childhood infection rate is from little kids salivating all over practically everything they touch...
That's pretty sweet. Don't forget to hide yourself a back door in case any future poker rooms are built on top of it.
Well, not everything on earth should be done by the private businesses. This one can be financed by the public, knd of like the nuclear bomb and stuff.

Legal mind-enhancing drugs are a great danger to society. They will put everyone in the position where they have to take those drugs, or risk perpetual unemployment. If side effects surface decades later they will cripple entire population of the country because no one will be able to abstain. The same level of danger is not present in any other drug - there is currently no pressure to take drugs on anyone but small group of competitive athletes.
Worked for me, lots of fun! It want me to keep working even though its midnight here :(
Start-ups bail out IT grads in India facing placement blues
He wrote a book titled "Phantoms in the Brain." It is fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone here who is curious about a little bit of psychology.
`to be or not to be` seems to be working
What don't you like about this?
Here's the point you've missed: I can, and do, abstain from caffeine and pretty much all other drugs. Mind-enhancing drugs will become compulsory for everyone who want to keep their jobs - else competition will elbow them out. Imagine that in society with 99% uptake of a certain drug the sideffects start showing up after 40 years of intake. What then? Two full generations of cripples? Even the people who wanted to abstain would be victimized.
"Legal mind-enhancing drugs are a great danger to society. They will put everyone in the position where they have to take those drugs, or risk perpetual unemployment."

Replace "drugs" with "education", and ask what should be done. Ban learning?
There was another study where I read that the one degree that correlated best with success in business was philosophy. Additionally, for what it's worth, philosophers have among the highest GRE scores.
several times it gave the same question twice in a row.
Although there a tad old you could look at http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/12/04/5-gifts-for-the-techie-i... and http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/12/17/stammys-holiday-2007-gif... and use them as a basic guide. Although i do like the idea of the Nalgene bottles <http://www.nalgene-outdoor.com/store/SearchResult.aspx?Categ...;
NeoHumanist Foundation | Humanism With A New Outlook | NHF
NEOHUMANISM (New Humanism) as the word say's, we are here for the cause of the most forgotten and the most required necessity of the day- "Humanism with a new outlook", Neohumanist Foundation - NHF is formed by dedicated and change loving individuals, based on the theory of Neo-Humanism.