skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Boy.ball.kick() isn't an example from any particular language, but I was thinking something along the lines of "boy.ball" (the boy's ball) ".kick" (is kicked). That's different from boy.kick(ball), though.

In Forth, which is a postfix and stack-based language, "boy ball kick" would work by pushing boy and ball on the stack, and kick would pop two values, the kicker and kickee.
Nokia Research Center is not a Willy Wonka phone factory
"Medical science has had a long history, at least a few hundred years and performs studies/experiments/etc. to make sure that things work."

And when push comes to shove, there's a simple procedure that can cut your risk of dying from surgery in half, and it's illegal for your doctor to use it in the US. As in if they do, they lose their medical license and go to jail. Why? It's insane.

"One of the sad realities of ignoring history is that almost every American is ignorant of the fact that medical freedom was tragically left out of the American Constitution. In 1776, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General and the only American doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence, tried strenuously, but failed, to have "medical freedom" enshrined in the Constitution. He stated "The constitution of this Republic should make special provisions for Medical Freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."

If this amendment were actually enacted then probably your risk of dying in surgery would be 50% of what it actually is today.
Ah yes, ask a bunch of people who aren't qualified to give psychological advice a psychological question. This is the same as asking legal questions here.

Go get help. You don't sound suicidal or anything (though if you are, run to the nearest psychiatrist) but you do sound like you've got something other than teenage angst (in my highly unqualified opinion) so you should at least run your problem by a psychologist. What could it hurt?
I think you've summed up the dynamics of university relationships better then anyone else I'd known. Speaking as someone who missed out on a big part of first year dorm life, this is exactly what I've seen happen
I'm aware of GRUB and LILO. But as bootloaders, I didn't realize they were able to modify the Linux root password so easily. The question still stands: is it possible in any flavour of Linux to change the root password by modifying the kernel parameters at boot-time?
not sure how well known this is but I use 'tee' alot
Wow, this sounds soo familiar. I remember having similar thoughts when I was in high school. I'll try to give some useful advice.

I have no social group of my own and go back and forth between their friend circles.

I'd ignore social groups entirely. Seriously, just forget any of these artificial groups of friends. I know that's not actually possible but in general don't worry about it. When I look back at the stratification of my high school social order it seems like it was straight out of "lord of the flies". Interact with the people who are doing interesting things. People who you find interesting or enjoy spending time with. Don't join any friend groups, that's an entirely isolating situation. Right now you can freely "group" with whoever you want.

Everyone has told me to wait until college, and then I will find new people, but everyone I know in college generally sticks with the same friend group that they had in high school (hence why I would know), so I don't have much hope in that.

Don't go to college where everyone else is going to college. Get away from all this. I did, and it was one of the best decisions I made when I was a teenager. Everyone in high school will likely think you are crazy for not going to the usual schools, but who cares.

I think the single best thing you can do is just get out and... do things. This is surprisingly simple but will really make a difference. I think it's been echoed here already by a number of other people. Pickup a new sport, go see a movie, go to clubs, take classes at the community college, go on a road trip (gas is affordable again!), see a concert you would otherwise not see, play cards, go to a house party, study with people you usually wouldn't study with, volunteer somewhere, go to a museum, get an unusual part-time job, do something that no one else is doing. Go buy a copy of Make magazine and pick a project (http://www.makezine.com/). Before you know it, you'll be the interesting person that other people will want to spend time with.

And of course read PG's take on high school and nerds: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html Somehow this hasn't been linked to in the post. I know it represents my high school experiences very well and he gives great advice.
"I'm happy to say I have found a doctor who does practice the scientific method. Unfortunately, not all do."

In the book How Doctors Think, they show a statistic that the vast majority of doctors make up their minds about what's wrong with you in the first thirty seconds and then never reconsider no matter what you say or the evidence suggests. This is one of the advantages of going to see a naturopathic doctor in addition to an allopathic doctor. They will actually sit down with you for a 45 minutes and discuss your health, diet, exercise, etc. This would be unthinkable for 99% of normal doctors. While it's true that allopathic doctors should be trained to take your diet and such into account when trying to figure out how to cure you, the fact is that none do. So you could have depression that's caused by a lack of magnesium and your doctor will give your powerful SSRIs, when in reality it could just as easily be cured with a little guacamole. A lot of people will quibble because the example I just gave falls under the myth of what doctors are supposed to do, but if you look at what doctors actually do do then it becomes clear that allopathic medicine is a disaster. Never judge an organization by its mission statement; medicine is no exception.

"While your stats are nonsensical and incorrect"

They come from JAMA...
I agree no one will pay for friends. You can get them easily enough without paying, just by interacting with people and searching for users that Twit about relevant stuff.

As much as people here think advertising is boring, I think Twitter could actually have a great contextual ad business. As long as the ads are relevant. If someone Twitters about HD TVs, would they not be especially be engaged by an ad for TV's? What about people who tweet about flights seeing ads from airlines? There is a lot of potential there.
Witness the Flip video camera. Accessibility can be key. Being "serious fun" often seems to be better than being a "serious tool."
Jaron Lanier: Post-Symbolic Communication
Industry is pushing clouds, but the linings may not be silver for all
<axod stupidity="100"> </axod>

Also I typo'd "you" instead of "your".
It really is true that each child you have removes some of your brain cells.
so how long until we see an infinity bank note?
His flexible homunculus idea was reinforced for me by reading at the same time about a guy who kept 6 avatars going at once in an MMPORG.
If you discover your database model is incorrect, fix it.

A nice sentiment, but once a transactional system is in production, it becomes very difficult to change, IME. The company I work at has a legacy schema we've been wanting to retire for years, but we haven't been able to due to number of (often hidden) constraints and overall complexity. I realize this fact suggests a badly designed system, but much of real world database work consists of dealing with poorly designed legacy systems.
Carl Marx on financial crisis
I thought this quote was amusing:

"... "Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."

Karl Marx, 1867

Source:
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion/Folly-of-relying-on-corporate.4864430.jp
The article notes the security features being used in the new banknotes. Why would they bother? In a month, they'll be worth less than the paper they are made of.
That's a good point. With both engines out to provide reverse thrust and likely little if any emergency landing facilities at Teterboro, he probably made the right choice.
What fair use? Three strikes and you're out... of YouTube
Excellent point. Most interesting people are inherently curious about everything.
The idea of putting any logic in the database never did make much sense to me for these exact reasons. The beauty of software is it is soft (i.e. easily changed) and us hackers have learned how to manage change with tools and whatnot. Databases are robust and solid because they have to be. A lot of the time they're the app's foundation. You go chipping away at the foundation and you end up with a trailer home.

I spend 100% of my time writing "database apps." I'm not saying I'm right, but I use the database to store data, and my app to maintain consistency and provide logic. You can't see the future, so why pretend? I mean, who would have thought a single person can be considered either male, female, or both depending on the context and date... That happened to one of my apps... No one would have had the forethought to handle that case during the initial design.
Has anyone worked from another coworking environment in a different city? I wrote about betahouse, as it's the only one I know here in the Boston area, but if there are others, I'd love to hear about what people have thought of them. Thanks.
The Good News Economist: No Credit Crunch (For Most Banks)
This is a great report from NYTimes on the best landing since Air Transat flight 236 in 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236).
80 Million Tiny Images: visualization of all the nouns in the English language
Do people really have a problem finding friends to follow? Doesn't sound right to me.
Why PHP won
You mean a burner?
Aaron Swartz: Cass Sunstein, Concern Troll
Why Amazon and eBay Should Merge
It would be interesting to have a source for that allegation about Bono. My 5 minutes googling it were ineffective.

PS: It's not that I don't believe it, is that using it would bring me great joy.
Prove to me that improved design or increased implementation elegance in an existing corporate application can have a sufficient near-term effect on the revenue numbers, and we'll talk.

DBAs aren't the only hard-nosed folks involved here.
I agree that the potential consequences of a breach would be significantly greater with robots than with human soldiers.

Most of the wars I'm aware about during the past few decades have been highly asymmetric technologically or have been between technologically limited forces. In the first case the likelihood is that only the more technologically advanced force would utilise robots and would be able to secure them beyond the capabilities of the technologically inferior opposing force to compromise. In the second case neither side is likely to have robots fighting.

If this trend holds true for the future then 'warbots' are going to be increasingly used.
Circuit City needed the consumer electronics equivalent of Gordon Ramsay to come in and say:

1. Your store looks like ass, clean it up.
2. You fired the best sales staff to save money. You're morons, go and beg them to come back.
3. Your name sucks. Who the hell wants a 'Circuit'? Rebrand.

I'm sad to see it fail, but especially after the sackings of experienced sales people, I can hardly say I'm surprised.
On any flavor of linux that uses GRUB or LILO it's possible to modify the kernel parameters at boot time to enter single-user mode. Once you're in single-user mode you have full root privileges and environment and can change any passwords or files you like.
Most Metafilter commenters would strongly disagree, and do when the subject arises. Threading is especially frowned upon.
Sony Ericsson W302 Midnight Black Unlocked
Sony Ericsson W302 has come out again with its super and best handset featuring many different functions. If you love to surf handset and want the bet one this is for you only. Its 2-inch display is standard for the class.
Work Smarter and Harder
"Plutocracy" is the default state. Wealth and power are like current and voltage. Technically separate concepts, but in nature, always together. Even if separated for some brief reason, one will surely cause the other.

"The west" hardly has monopoly on this.
This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis - how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once.

I can explain it. Republicans like giving businesses new ways to make money. Subprime loans allowed businesses to lend to a whole group of people they couldn't lend to before. Democrats like giving poorer people the opportunity to build wealth. VPs at banks want to move up and proposing a whole new business area gets noticed and promoted. So, you use overly optimistic calculations that show only good coming from them and lots of people jump on the bandwagon and years later you're in trouble because reality never works as cleanly as paper. No one had done it before and they didn't know what would happen. I'm sure if you took foreclosure rates from standard loans and applied them to these subprime ones, the situation looks fine. Anyway, I remember something about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

The author (in my opinion) is very right. Until people and companies feel secure in their livelihood, they won't engage in the economic activity that makes an economy truly strong.
Morten Lund on Entrepreneurship
Would it technically be a merger or acquisition?
eBay market cap: 16.70B
Amazon market cap: 21.38B
Part of the reason.

The part of that culture that I dislike is that there's no emphasis on figuring out what's most worth figuring out. There has to be a period of figuring out what's worth your time before you dedicate your time. It's present in American culture, though not as prominently as it ought to be, but from what I've seen of asian culture it's not there at all. It's why the few big Japanese successes that fascinate me - though I don't know very many people, I'll admit - are ones that are openly West-influenced. Shigeru Miyamoto and Nobuo Uemats, for instance: the one is more influenced by The Beatles than anything else, and the other originally tried writing songs like Elton John.
I just gotta voice my firm support for this opinion. Less is more.
Interesting, if these DBs ever growing in complexity are just a representation of an organization's inner workings...

I wonder if you could use an organization's DB to predict when they'll be too big to function.
Right on! And it's a good thing I agree with you, seeing as how we work at the same place and sit about eight feet apart.
That's what OR nurses generally do, count sponges, needles and instruments. They also have to be willing to nose to nose with a crabby surgeon and tell him to re-open the patient and try to find the missing sponge when the count is off
Hmm, I'll be 27 in a few months.. And I thought I was stil young!

Geez, now I think I'm old too..
That's sort of a meme out about Bono that says he's untalented, he's a prick, he thinks he's Jesus, and he's drug-addled. I think that's where OP comes from? I could be mistaken.
Bank of America to receive additional $20 billion
Is Enterprise RSS Dead? Newsgator CEO: “Who cares?”
Not being around people does not equate to loneliness.

There are some good books on the subject. Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr was one of the first I read and had a strong focus on psychology. For a more opinionated text, Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto by Anneli Rufus was good at building confidence in living this way.
"Any doctor who reads the study and sees the 50% reduction in death rate in surgeries and 90% reduction in accidental deaths in the ICU would be negligent to ignore checklists."

Unless the government has made it illegal.
That's a good metaphor for looking at intellect. You might be extremely good at #1, you might be able to solve a puzzle in a flash. And that's working intelligence. But somebody else who's spent some time deciding that figuring out an algorithm would help can do much more using less. That's a better application of intellect overall.
Yes, but what's the threshold? Someone with an IQ of 100 can be very successful. I agree you can't be a luminary like the Woz, but holding yourself to that standard is like expecting to win the lottery. You can be plenty rich, successful, accomplished, etc without being an infamous figure.

People are successful for all different reasons, and the best anyone can do is put themselves out there and take advantage of opportunities. The minute you convince yourself that are not smart enough or too lazy or whatever, then you're just committing to failure—most likely because psychologically safe—which is stupid because no one has the recipe for success. Chase your dreams!
Hi, I'm the individual who wrote this. So far I have never earned a reputation for causing problems, but I have earned one for fixing them. (Yes, I am in contact with former coworkers.)

I think we may be in violent agreement: I also think kludges and hacks are unprofessional. In the post I'm writing about my experience with the way that models are exposed as imperfect over time and they're fixed to deal with it. As much as I gripe about exceptions and outliers, capturing them is a big part of design.
What area do you live in? There are many more special interest groups in large cities. For instance there is talk of starting a Scala group here (Chicago) and there is already a Lisp group and a Polyglot Programmers group.
He could have seen many things, but most likely saw 1 highly productive dude that could likely crank out a $3-4MM "company" on a shoe string.

Angel investors/groups are often individuals who want to contribute mentoring as much as money. In many cases, it's like a hobby to them, a way to stay engaged in a business/market without really having to get into the full headache of running/starting a company.
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to want to use the pleasing design of an apple product without actually advertising a competitor.

You know I really dont like M$, there is plenty to bash them about but this just seems so unimportant.
For what it's worth, the "what falls apart" line was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.

Surely you must have known about the guy from Guam or the one living in Virginia but commuting to D.C. when you analyzed your app, right?

Nope. For most of the apps I've worked on recently, we're pulling incomplete datasets that are augmented from other, slightly-incompatible sources and manual entry and must be designed and built to meet the deadline for a newspaper story. So I do the best I can to capture the data and then change the schema as these uncaptured/new requirements make themselves known.
WHO CONTROLS THE US? BUSH or ISRAEL (al jazeera news)
A doctor may try and fail to deliver science-based medicine.
Some doctors are even intellectually incapable of doing this, and practice cargo cult medicine (compare to cargo cult programmers). They vaguely follow some science-based procedures without really understanding what they are doing.

A naturopathic "doctor" does not even attempt to use science, at least not consistently. Naturopathic medicine is feel-good mumbo jumbo. Some of it works (your guacamole example), some of it is utterly wrong (homeopathy) but still used. Naturopathic medicine does not, even in principle, attempt to use science-based medicine.

Science-based medicine, like most human endeavors, is flawed. It doesn't always do what it should do. The solution is more science, not the complete abandonment of science in favor of new-age nature-worshipping religion.

As for your stats, just FAIL. One example:

There are 98,000 medical-mistake caused deaths. The 37,136 deaths due to unnecessary procedures and the 32,000 surgery related deaths are a subset of the 98,000 medical errors. You just can't add them, which your source does.

I'll illustrate the mistake with cows:

I have 98,000 cows. In particular, I have 37,136 black cows and 32,000 white cows. Therefore, I have at least 167,136 cows.
oops. sorry if my anxiety has proven infectious... The panic started to set in when I realised I was rounding up to 30 and not rounding down to 20...
Thanks to everyone for their comments.
> Interesting, if these DBs ever growing in complexity are just a representation of an organization's inner workings...

Isn't there a named law based on this?

EDIT: Yup. Found it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
Comment I left on his blog:

Would you say this is a shift we're seeing across the entire tech industry?

In my opinion, throughout the 90's and early 00's technology was compared by a lengthy feature-set, but not necessarily by accessibility -- the human factor. The entire PC industry is losing ground to gaming consoles and Apple for a fundamental reason: it's not what the product can do as a whole, but what it can do for ME as efficient and perfectionate as possible. Technology has been over-complicated in many instances, the people & companies that can humanize it are going to win in the next era. my 2 cents.

PS. I have this taped to my monitor and live by it: "Brands can’t be commoditized, and features inevitably are." - Jason Calacanis. Twitter has become a lifestyle brand... it's unstoppable.
Jep. If i scroll back, it's only maybe 10 minutes maximum when nothing is said. So you just need to stay :)
The NY Times does some very good things, but they also keep publishing Maureen Dowd and William Kristol.
NearbyGamers: Find people in your vicinity for Euro-style games, RPGs, and TCGs
"Special software is required to use some of the files in this course: .rm." When will real media die already?
I found this just now. Since I'm into European-style board games, I thought I'd post it.
Generally speaking I agree with you, but in the real world (with real users!) this is not always possible.
Will cell phone prices drop in the recession? Sprint goes to $50 all you can eat.
Living in the cloud…How did it go?
Make it your home page and you won't have to keep typing it into the URL bar.