skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, the effects of these drugs have already been studied for many years. Modafinil was first experimentally used in the treatment of narcolepsy in 1986, so over 20 years ago.

Second, what do you mean proven beyond doubt? Testing these drugs is a statistical process, so what kind of confidence interval are you willing to accept? Keep in mind, that becoming more confident in your statistics means more testing, which makes the drug more expensive to bring to market and takes longer as well. Even then, a few drugs are going to pass the FDA approval process and cause unintended side effects, and people are going to argue for an even longer approval period.

You have to consider the opportunity cost of keeping these drugs in limited circulation. Most people don't take this into account, and there's plenty of research that shows that the FDA's requirements are actually probably too stringent, because government bureaucracies tend to be too risk averse. I think it takes an average of 12 years for a drug to pass FDA inspection and get to market, so imagine if it was 20 years. This means that during those extra 8 years, people weren't able to reap the benefits of a drug like Modafinil to stay awake. How many driving deaths could be prevented during those 8 years if people weren't driving while sleepy? Or what about the productivity gains from scientists or hackers that can get away with 4 hours of sleep a night instead of 8, without reducing their cognitive abilities?

I'm not saying there couldn't be unforeseen nasty side-effects of using the drugs fourty years from now, but given the evidence it seems like it's probably a negligible risk for most people.
"Wrapper induction" (Do a Google Scholar search for it) has been around for a while (Kushmerick, 1997). It's used by search engines, etc, quite successfully, but I don't know of anyone who is able to make a living selling it standalone.

Independent of that, I don't think it's enough of a value-add for me to pay for, plus, you're running into copyright concerns left and right.
Why I love my Mac, hate web development, and learned to loathe IE6 http://tinyurl.com/5skq8x (screenshots of our website)

I am an entrepreneur and a bit of a python hacker but am new to web development as a craft. It was a skill developed from the necessity of a self-funded startup I co-founded.

Wasn't the web supposed to be accessible to all? WTF was Microsoft thinking when they came out with that stinking piece of turd called IE6 and why haven't they killed the beast by now? Instead of killing a plague like IE6 they are killing a solid operating system called Windows XP to be replaced by another Windows Vista ME (at least that's what it feels like).

Sorry for the rant but it's late and I don't like web browsers anymore.
Objective-C: lack of enforced constructors. Sure, by convention you're supposed to call the "init" function for the class, but you don't have to. There's really no good way to guarantee your object has been initialized correctly!
"may or may not be pointless, becasue author couldn't find the data to backup his point".

There, FTFY.
"Your post does little to convince me that I'm wrong about that."

Quite right. I misinterpreted your prior post. Sounds like we agree, though I'm curmudgeonly enough to think that much of the hype around some projects and developers is laughable. The flavor of the week right now is Ruby, and a few functional languages, but it happens everywhere.

In a lot of cases, projects are being celebrated for being fumbling, and often baroque, attempts to solve problems that are already well-understood by developers in other languages...and all they have to do to solve it equally well in their own language is to pull their head out of their self-congratulating ass long enough to see how it's been done before, learn from it, and maybe even improve upon it a little bit.

Nonetheless, I must concur that hype is very effective...and probably mandatory for the survival of a language. Tcl is probably an excellent example of a pretty cool language, with a previously huge community, dwindling over time due to lack of enthusiastic new proponents.
One thing, on the stats page i.e. http://icantdeci.de/mostvotes/today, different heights of the pairs of two option divs would mislead people to think the heights are proportional to number of votes, which I later found is not true.
this is a perfect example of premature optimization. same thing happened to me. i'm not sure how you could screw up a web app this simple. they seem to have gone in and tried to institute some form of rate limiting, and it's actually kicking out legitimate users with that error, now.
> If you believe Al Gore, for $90MM you can build a giant New Mexico wind/solar farm that would supply enough electricity to power the entire US.

Al Gore has over $100M. If he isn't doing that....
If you want to go mainstream, anybody's gorilla is your gorilla.

There's no reason why you can't innovate along the way, but it's pretty clear to me that if Linux is ever to make any inroads into non-geek circles, it'll need a familiar interface.
If you copy other peoples' content and host it from your servers, that's copyright infringement. It doesn't matter if you call it an RSS feed or if you just copy it exactly.

What you could do is offer people software that downloads web pages but strips the ads. This could be a neat feature of an RSS reader, or perhaps a plugin to another RSS reader, but I doubt you will be able to sell this on its own.
From your description it sounds like you are redistributing the content:

The site will extract the contents from these links as a rss feed. User could subscribe to this feed in their mobile news reader.

Having your website turn another person's website into an rss feed is redistributing the content.
Why would mind enhancing drugs become compulsory to keep your job? As someone already pointed out, caffeine is a mind enhancing drug, and I've never heard of anyone get fired for not drinking a latte. Or what about alcohol? You could certainly make the argument that drinking alcohol can help you professionally, either by making you more extroverted or social at events, or because you like to go to happy hour with your co-workers.

Even in the sports industry, where performance enhancing drugs are relatively pervasive, you don't see steroids becoming compulsory for athletes. I know professional athletes who don't even take protein shakes.
That's what I was going to post. Use NUMA - each core gets it's own memory. Doesn't linux support NUMA?

It seems to me that each thread already has it's own memory space, just make sure the memory space for the thread is on the same CPU the thread runs on.

It isn't really necessary for each core to be able to access all memory (or at least it'll be way slower to access memory outside it's area).
I'm running bleeding edge and project-wide search is fast as shit now.. been that way for quite some while actually. I do remember those pains, however.

You can also look into a bundle called "search with awk" or something which uses awk instead and is much faster (cmd + shift + a, instead of cmd + shift + f).
This isn't some badass act of defiance against The Establishment like Gruber seems to want you to think, given his last paragraph: 4% of his viewers use IE.

If that went up overnight to 40%, you know whose gorilla it would become.
Sure there will be opt-out. If drugs double your productivity, then a non-user's salary will be half of a user's salary, and no less than that. That's just basic economics. Which is as it should be. They create double the wealth; they get double the money.

Of course this will suck for you, because from your point of view, it will be as if the number of programmers in the world has just vastly increased, creating competition for you and driving down your salary. Presumably just as candle-makers' salaries were driven down by the invention of the light bulb (which could make you blind after 20 years--nobody knew for sure).
I'm not sure if they do, but it would be cool if dropbox offered an encrypted version of their service for people who are worried.
You (and some posters below you) missed the point. It's just an example. Think of the more general case.
Why would mind enhancing drugs become compulsory to keep your job?

Because some drugs could be bad for my health? Maybe not right now, maybe 40 years later.
No one used "open source" to describe stuff with the source code available until the term came out to describe free software with a marketing friendly name. People who use 'open source' to describe what is proprietary code with source available are often just trying to confuse things. To be clear, he is not doing that, he's just using 'open', which is fair game, I suppose.
New Ebay policy restricts sellers from leaving negative feedback
Whether caffeine improves performance is questionable. It certainly does for caffeine addicts - they can't funciton without a fix, but those who are not hooked function well enough.

Even then, caffeine does not have long-lasting side-effects as has been proven over few hundred years.
Shoes 2 Makes Its Debut
Anyone know why it's also referred to as Raisins?
That's a pretty good argument to never use Allman, Whitesmiths, GNU, or Horstmann indent style. There can only be one and that's K&R.

Woho! I just won a religious war.
quitting a difficult situation isn’t really in my make up.

Neither is humility, judging from this blog post.
Hmm, this makes sense.

Since the algorithm is the core, I would also consider wrapping it as a web service. Charge on API usage or license the technology.

The problem is, I don't have that much experience doing that. How can I find the target audiences? Also, since the algorithm is quite CPU intensive, how should I price the service? Add a markup to the average computing resources will cost?

I'm trying to put a demo page so that you guys can try it out. Stay tuned.
Great article. This guy wrote more helpful stuff about ads in the name of free software than many ad "experts" do with no other pretext.
I see what you mean. Thanks, lacker.
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The dopamine is triggered by the cheese it gets right? At the time when the mouse is making the decision, it knows it'll get the cheese and dopamine from the old rectangle, yet it doesn't go there.

So what does this have to do with anything? Why is the mouse preferring something new and unknown over a known cheese/dopamine event?

My statement is that the mouse may be gambling, not that it's afraid. It knows the square is no cheese, the rectangle is one piece, and thinks maybe an unknown object of any shape is 10.
I don't think it works that way. If you sell half as much stuff as others sales agents in the store you will get fired rather than get your salary cut in half. But ok, let's suppose it's true.

Let's take this to extreme - suppose that there is a ticking bomb in these drugs and after 20 years of intake one becomes a medical ruin, similar to crystal meth addicts.
So you can take the drugs and die in 20 years from now, or you can abstain and live for another 20 years (40 years total). Those who abstain will be priced out of their lives, but most will give up and start taking drugs - let's be real.

Nobody knows about it now, so there will be no push-back until 20 years later, and when the time comes everyone will be medically ruined by then (except the youngest kids).

And you are really stretching it wrt lighbulbs making people blind - it's not in the same ballpark of likelyhood as drugs ruining people's health.
Ask YC: Wage war against browser or fix page? (crockford.com)
In the spirit of 800 lb gorillas, here's a question from crockford.com:

"If a web browser is defective, causing errors in the display or performance of the page, should the page developer struggle to hide the browser's defects, or should the defects be revealed in hope of creating market pressure to force the browser maker to make good? By which approach is humanity better served?"
I use Lua a lot these days and coming from Python, it seems silly that I have to provide my own
empty? function since standard Lua doesn't offer any way to get the
number of elements in an arbitrary table other than to iterate over it:

function empty_p(t)
for k,v in pairs(t) do
return true
end
return false
end

-- later on
if not empty_p(t) then
do_processing(t)
end

This is because although Lua offers a #t operator, it's only
guaranteed to be correct if you're careful about how the table is
constructed. That and the weird ipairs() behavior for non-trivial
tables drives me crazy sometimes. Here's an example:

Lua 5.1.2 Copyright (C) 1994-2007 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> t = {1,2,3}
> print(#t)
3
> for i,v in ipairs(t) do print(i,v) end
1 1
2 2
3 3

Ok so all is good. But now what happens when the table contains a nil?

> t = {1,nil,3}
> print(#t)
3
> for i,v in ipairs(t) do print(i,v) end
1 1

ipairs() stops at the first nil value even though Lua knows there is
data past it. Things get more interesting for tables with non-integer
keys:

> t = {}
> t['a'] = 1
> t['b'] = 2
> print(#t)
0
> t[1] = 1
> print(#t)
1
> for i,v in ipairs(t) do print(i,v) end
1 1

What's going on here is each Lua table has an array for integer valued
keys and a separate hash table for non-integer keys and # and ipairs()
only operate on the first array. To process all the keys you use
pairs():

> for k,v in pairs(t) do print(k,v) end
1 1
a 1
b 2

While at first this doesn't seem to be such a big issue, it's easy to
forget when it's safe to use the #t construct. I've made this error
so often that now whenever my Lua code doesn't do what I expect the
first thing I look for are places where I have something like:

if #t > 0 then
do_processing(t)
end

or

for i,v in ipairs(t)
process(v)
end

because chances are the real problem will turn out to be the particular way I initialized the table.
Don't do it! Please!

I'm a heavy consumer of AdSense (i.e. I'm the guy who actually pays for these clicks) and I also sell software. I happily put ads for my software on the pages of free competitors and similar applications (as well as many, many other pages on the Internet). They convert like nobody's business, unsurprisingly, because if you're staring at a page for Software That Does X you're probably in the market for Software That Does X.

I don't do this out of a sense of charity -- ooh look at me I can use Google to give this chap some programmer welfare! I'm paying Programmer X $2 a sale to make $25 a sale. It strikes me that if I were Programmer X I'd rather have the $25, right? That is why I actually, you know, sell stuff.

Moreover, since I know that I have Google set to buy every stitch of advertising inventory I can get on this site and I know how many impressions I get from him, I can guesstimate his monthly income and CPM to within a fairly decent range. Its probably close to a $3 CPM. He is the free competitor to me, bounces above or below me in the search results, and I make twenty times that on a CPM basis and quite a bit more on an absolute basis even when figuring in estimates of his higher traffic.

More broadly, if you're doing this on OSS software (as opposed to free-as-in-beer software), you need to come to terms with the fact that OSS enthusiasts are about the worst possible market for most advertising. Half of them run Firefox with AdBlock installed. The other half just never click on ads. And when they do click on ads, it is not to buy stuff. Websites which have visitors who tend to buy stuff get better click prices than the ones that send lookie-loos, for obvious reasons.

Losing your focus:

If you're going to do well with AdSense you have to optimize your site for it. You've got better things to do with your time, both in terms of "earns me money" and "accomplishes any sort of value for my users aside from shunting them to the competitor actually prepared to pay money". You also might have to spend time manually disallowing ads, if for example your paid competitor starts buying your visitors for $2 a sale.

True story: I sent a courtesy offer to one of my free competitors telling him I'd pay him $X for him to replace the adsense with just a static ad pointing to me, where $X was twice my best estimate as to what he was making a month. He asked how I picked the number and I told him "Oh, yeah, I place about 1/4 of the ads on your site and am getting it for an absolute song so I really want the other 3/4s too".

He promptly banned my ads (his site, his call -- I bear him no ill will for that decision).

My armchair psychoanalysis is that he didn't want other folks profiting more from his work that he did, and he was in fact willing to take less money just to make sure that was the case.

There's a simple solution to that: charge money for value.
Long testing period is fine - what sets this particular class of drugs apart from all others is that it will in all likelihood be taken by every single man, woman and child (except the amish maybe) - they will have to take it under the economical pressure. Approving this drug is like putting all eggs in one basket, and so this better be one hell of a good basket.

Now, I do not mind these drugs being distributed under presecritiption well before that, because it will be only a fraction of percent of the total population.
I don't find this essay controversial, just insightful. I can see there are places where you are exaggerated for effect etc, but overall, the essay rings true. Am I missing something :-)?
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The product look pretty cool, but the marketing sucks.

You should get a business type!
Tcl's string quoting conventions also try to force you to use K&R style for procedure bodies. e.g

proc foo {x} {
# do stuff
}

but if you really want to get around this you can abuse the continuation character

proc foo {x} \
{
# do stuff
}
I'm getting the impression that it's not rate limiting, it's just running out of questions since not many people are asking them. It says something like that, and even if I fill it out slowly I never make it through.
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I believe strongly in a set of "semi-religious" axioms (from advaita vedanta) that keeps me functional, productive and happy. I strive to be a good son, colleague, friend, etc but within the boundaries of this framework, it makes me happy and I believe it keeps the people I come on contact with happy and well too.

This essay leads to a question, though:

1. Would you rather have a world view that is as close to the truth as possible and live a life of angst and striving? (to change the various inequalities and other issues with the world).

(or)

2. Would you believe the appropriate "lies" (as per your "belief system") and live life happily?

3. How would the world change as a result of your choice? Its a cyclic dependancy here.
also, it doesn't show the actual number of votes.

so, on a choice with many votes, if it's 50-50 with an odd number of votes you can't tell which one wins.
Modafinil is effective in small enough doses that you could put it into just about any beverage you like, just like amphetamine, piracetam, and so on, and unlike ethanol. You may enjoy quaffing toxic organic solvents like ethanol, but I don't particularly fancy the idea myself.
Exactly.

I think a reasonable deal is a 30% discount, ~5% interest, and a big bonus if there's never a valuation.
FWIW, a similar site called doxory.com (do x or y) has been around for ages. If this site is overloaded, try out doxory.
You are wrong. Modafinil's only indication is narcolepsy.
Does Google Have a Secret OS?
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Ahh, yeah it does require a good bit of familiarity with both python and *nix environments.

I'm a lone guy, managing my own servers, with complete control over their environments. That's quite a bit different than a business environment, corporate or not.
Project-wide search is still a slow piece of crap on edge...

I'd like to see a version of TM released that fixed this problem and used either awk or grep.
For those who don't follow the link, the first link places the US, with 95% confidence intervals:

- 25th to 28th among the 40 countries on math;
- 12th to 23rd among the 40 countries on reading;
- 20th to 27th among the 40 countries on science.

The second link just divides the countries into above average, average, and below average. The US is "below average" on math, and no reading rank is reported.
VLC doesn't need hype. It's recommended to people by word-of-mouth incredibly fast.
No, we don't use alien mechanism, just plain keyboard.
It only covers a small aspect of what they do, but This Film Is Not Rated is solidly ok. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493459/
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"24 Hour Laundry. Who knows what they do, but whatever it is, they're doing it wrong."

"My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that's being generous. I'm speaking from experience here."

Foot in mouth?
Sure, all laws are products of society and eforcement is more or less leaky in a very imbalanced way, but that's another story. I'm saying laws because my assumption is that it will become illegal (maybe it is already in some countries) to create or modify devices so that they do not enforce copyright and other laws.

I am convinced that the one thing _all_ consumer devices including PCs will be obliged to do is to authenticate users. Enforcement isn't trivial, but once it is a felony the risk becomes so high that only organised crime will actually do it, not hackers
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There _is_ a backdoor, the license. I'm not holding my breath, though.
There are also some poorly written, hasty implementations of machine learning algorithms written in Matlab.

I only mention this because it is pertinent to the reason why I am up at this hour reading Hacker News.
I wholeheartedly agree with the general modular approach.

Rack is doing wonders in enabling this approach, with small apps via frameworks like Sinatra, Camping, Ramaze, Merb flat to run as services.

However, the big downer of this approach is Ruby's Net::HTTP. It's so slow that I get only about 10r/s on a core 2 duo macbook with it. This is a huge bottleneck.

Now imagine running your authentication as a separate app (for SSO, e.g.) accessed as a rest service via Net::HTTP. :(

Disclaimer: I haven't watched the video yet, connection too slow, don't know if/how they address this problem.
What if they give you a sheet of paper, you xerox it there, and then store one copy next to your birth certificate and give the other copy to your regular doctor? I have an immunization record that I keep inside my passport (for yellow-fever reasons).
I don't think it is necessary to investigate and expose every piece of nonsense we see coming from the Daily Mail. Their track record (particularly in this subject area but generally as well) is such that any sane person would automatically filter out any content from that source.

If you need some examples of your own to set your filter then try here http://www.badscience.net/index.php?s=Daily+Mail where someone has taken the trouble to expose the nonsense of the DM (and other organs of the press).