skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's much more accurate to describe the perpetrators as cold, empty, detached.

The article states that, according to the Secret Service, 78% of these school shooters are NOT cold, empty, detached (which would describe socio/psychopaths). Instead, they are severely depressed individuals.

If you haven't ever been severely depressed (I have) it's probably quite difficult to understand, but these are people whose minds are completely, utterly, passionately and absolutely wound up inside, anxious and stressed about perceived incurable flaws in their character and the apparently unresolvable frustration, despair, resentment and anger those beliefs generate towards themselves - and in these very sad cases, towards others.

On the outside they can appear completely normal and even happy (I went to great lengths to hide my inner turmoil during my depression); don't mistake that for what is going on on the inside. "Depression", sadly, is a dirty word in society.

Unfortunately this feeds into and reinforces the exact set of dysfunctional beliefs that drive the severely depressed individual towards, and sometimes over, the edge. Imagine feeling like a broken human, only to have society reinforce that depression means you're broken; it creates a secondary, even more powerful disturbance in your mind. This causes the depressed to withdraw even further, which is even worse for a depressed individual (notice how all of these people withdraw from normal activities before the shootings), and pretty much guarantees a horrible end.
Don't mean to threadjack, but I'd love to team up in Berlin with a biz cofounder. If you're looking for an early employee or technical cofounder, please email me: yctechmgr at gmail.com - tell me something about your startup.
Ideas are worthless, that's what everyone likes to repeat.

I've raised the example before that ideas aren't worthless, for example patents have value but was criticised because "patents are not ideas, they are execution".

Notch seems to think patents are ideas. I don't know enough about patents to really draw a conclusion as to if they are expressions of ideas or executions of ideas.

Also, the example of writing your own similar book is quite a clumsy one for patent infringement.
I developed a slight tremor in my right hand and had trouble moving my arm as fluidly as my other.
So ideas aren't worthless? Patents have value, and some patents are apparently merely expressions of ideas.
It was very popular - I think students chose between french, german and spanish. And it was pretty much 33% for each language.
The piece is on loan to the museum but they aren't making any money from the loan. They also can't sell it as the previous poster said because it's illegal. Why should they pay tax on something that wont provide monetary benefit unless it is done through illegal means?
I am not ignoring its slang meaning -- it's that meaning that I am saying is unnecessary. I think using slang that derives from segregating concepts is damaging to society. I'm not on a high horse, I just think most people aren't conscious of it and it's worth thinking about and pointing out. An alternative would be anything that conveys what you're really trying to convey without using such terms. "Asinine" is a good one because it conveys intent as well as ineptitude. And frankly I think it's more biting than "retarded" which comes across as a cheap shot. Hope my comments are of some value. I mean well.
> If you've had a look through even a handful of these patents people are getting sued for millions over, they're basically the equivalent of the long-form novel.

No. They're not. You say this because you, like everyone else, don't understand what the claims say. That's likely because they're written in legalese, and you're just trying your best to give those terms their plain English meaning. You can't do that. Many of them are terms of art, with very precise definitions crafted by the courts. As such, you have to look to various court opinions concerning claim construction (i.e., context) to understand their meaning.

You may disagree with that on principle, because everyone should be able to understand the subject matter taken removed from the public domain as a matter of law, and I'm somewhat inclined to agree. However, nothing precludes you from gaining such an understanding: there are many books written on patent law, and it's not too incredibly complex.
> But that's not how it really works. Not everyone who uses once does it again and again. Many people are able to control themselves.

Again, you're responding to something I've not stated.

Taking a substance once does not make someone an addict.

What I've stated is it's the process that eventually leads to it. And that everyone is susceptible to it on some level given the right life circumstances (bad relationships, bad parents, boredom, too much money and time, certain friends, access to drugs, etc).
This attitude: "who bothers at that age?"
I think there is very much a difference.

24 hour news is banal not because of its immediacy, but because, since it is always on, it needs to fill itself with lower quality items. Frequent and recent updates on a current event on a ad-hoc basis is different in that it doesn't have the imperative to fill up the gaps.

Also, due to the ranking of posts, the compelling stuff rises. Compellingness, while not always correlating with quality, is at least an indicator. If quality posts rise and are then being used to then shape the discourse at an early stage, this flows through and directs the thoughts of those presenting more measured and considered pieces, thus making the whole eco-system better.

Sampling the news daily is quite enough for most people, but surely if you are wrapped up the event and need urgent news this format is a good thing. Also, if it improves the news that you then get at a daily rate, this is also good.
Berlin is ramping up quickly. We get applications from all around the world. This is great and was much different just 12 Month ago. The hockey stick kicks in, now!

One comment on English: It is much easier than most non-english speaking cities and most international talent can manage the daily tasks within weeks.

check out foundfair.de and contact us in case you need help getting settled.
If your patent were granted, you'd still retroactively be covered from the date of filing. Go back and sue the copycats.

Your "real world" solution does nothing. Patent trolls are rapidly becoming the worst part of the current system. They have no assets, and a handful of patents.

What penalties, exactly, can you impose on a shell company with no assets?

gsb's proposed solution may not be perfect, but it's clearly superior to the mess we have now.
I think you are confusing user interface design with user experience (UX). A text-book UI should be intuitive and easy to use, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be aesthetically pleasing to everyone. I work with UX, and one of the biggest challeges i face is to find a good balance between functionality and aesthetics; what will give the general user base the best possible experience.

But you have to realize that it is impossible to satisfy everyone, especially when looking at OSX-users and Windows-users, who have such different tastes and demands. Then its probably better to have two different UIs that can bring a great (but not necessarily the same) user experience to two very different crowds.
Give people the option to sell art at an arbitrary percentage of a made-up valuation? I'm sure that would end well...
I agree the example is clumsy because people will find it hard in that example to imagine why a novel is patentable (because it is obviously not in our world, ironically lacking the criteria of being "novel"!)

I felt like notch matured a while ago but this is a surprisingly childish rant from him, i honestly felt it was a bit below him. He has a point, a valid point, but he has not conveyed it very well, and has caused collatoral damage to other valid fields for patents in the process of criticizing software patents.
I think (b) and (c) are overly dramatic here. Doomed to work to the end of their lives for a big corporation? These are the guys that just sold their 5 person company for $25M.

I don't think people will stop buying indie software on account of this either. The Internet likes to make big news out of these kinds of things, but forgets just as quickly.
Google Now is Better than Siri and Voice Search Has Nothing to Do With it
> That is frightening, because there is no hope of reasoning or bargaining with someone who is truly detached from emotion.

This position is strange, you think the only position from which you can reason or bargain with another person is if they are emotionally attached?

I purposely try as hard as I can to live a life completely free of emotional entanglement, I think emotion is largely useless. By this measure I suppose I would be cold, empty, detached. I choose to be this way because appeals to emotion are usually weak and lacking in actual reason as support.

I can't understand why anyone would look at a wrathful, violence laden action like mass murder and think that the problem is that the offender is not emotional enough.
Because it has no huge financial sector unlike New York or London. Germany's Stock-Market is located in Frankfurt.

Also after reunification, East-Berlin was vastly unpopulated, people moving into the already modern West-Germany, while the former GDR was being restored. Nowadays there is hardly any differnece between East- and West-Berlin, but there is uninhabitated room. It is getting fewer though.
Inequality: You Don't Know the Half of It
>The internet in Germany is borderline third world quality

that may be true for rural Germany but I'm writing this from a 100 MBbit cable connection which costs me 40 EUR. You can also get 50 Mbit DSL for 35 EUR p.m. (both including a telephone flatrate)
Berlin has structural issues and capital / politics aren't creating many jobs. The spending power lies in the western / southern states of Germany, not north eastern states.
The capital used to be in Bonn. Berlin was separated by the Berlin Wall for about 45 years so it's still in the process of resurrection.
That would tax an efficient use of resources. Its the innovative idea in the patent that should matter, not how much money you spent on figuring in out. Some might take less time and resources to figure out the same thing and basing everything on R&D expenses makes it completely unfair to them.
I totally agree, I really like Notch usually. His posts are concise, to the point and honest.

This one isn't very well thought out and is adding more confusion into the pot.
>>But I do not think it's very useful to say that Erlang is object oriented, since it will confuse a lot of people

I find it useful to instill this kind of confusion in people around me.

"You talk about encapsulation? Look at erlang"

"Polymorphism? Haskel"

"OOP? Javascript, CLOS"

"Static/dynamic typing? Look here - your java code is in fact dynamic, if you're really want to taste real static - look at ML-family or something near"
That is because IT is more on the side of 'art' and 'open creativity' than pharmaceuticals which require a lot of background knowledge, far more rigorous testing and standards, and are a much more deadly legal minefield. Both require technical skills in a way, though alot of the pharmaceutical founders barely spend any time in the actual lab. Not to mention the average cost in R&D to launch ONE pharmaceutical product is $500M, meaning you need business skill. (And a patent to earn back your research money!)
How can you earn interest on Art?
I couldn't find any quotes expecting endless updates without paying more. The author is wrong in his approach either way. Looking at each issue in isolation. He also incorrectly accounts for the cost to the user. It's not just $10. It's also the time invested into learning the software, setting it up, etc.

He also makes a bunch of assumptions (of course they asked google about open sourcing, but google said no for example) and also skips over other serious problems (things sparrow said they were working on for the future).

Sorry, but this article is pretty bad.
Works for me. Must have been a hiccup.
The valuation is given by IRS, so if they value it so high to get taxes (they jumped from 15M to 60+M just like that), they should also be able to buy it at the valued rate.
I'd say the roots of that still lie in the post war structures of Germany. You know, the division of Berlin, the GDR. That's still just 23 years ago. The city center was first bombed and then at the frontiers, so it was cheap - to put it simple. East Berlin was / is especially cheap.
Prices have however been increasing quickly for some years now. Gentrification is a "problem" of many parts of Berlin.
And it's still cheap in comparison to Munich or Hamburg, not to speak of London.
You cannot appeal rationally to that which has no utility function.
I think of the murderers as having some kind of hardware bug. We have evolved special safeguard that prevents us form killing the people we live with and people we meet daily. It's crazy that we do live in proximity of other people and meet them if you think how dangerous single person can be when this safeguard fails.

All the search for reasons why the person killed is little bit like creating fake narratives to kind of natural bizarre event. If person is able to intentionally kill then there's something wrong with that person and we have to deal with it. You may investigate how it came to be that this safeguard was damaged. Maybe the person underwent military training or just had a childhood equivalent to that. Most likely there is something wrong with the brain of that person that was there from the beginning or manifested during puberty or manifested as a result of shock of some sort. "What was the murderers reasons?" is the most irrelevant question of all.
But the value of the patent comes out of someone potentially enforcing it at some point. Would you feel bad if the buyers of your startup enforced the patent or sold it to a patent troll?
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i can think of two reasons from the top of my head. first, when germany and berlin were separated for decades, the east was vastly neglected. after the wall came down, huge amounts of east germans moved to the west all over germany - thus leaving berlin sort of empty and with an abundancy of space and real estate. second, having been mostly isolated after ww2, german banks and heavy industry etc settled anywhere but in berlin. economically, this still hurts berlin today. culturally, this makes berlin more of a place for creatives and free minded people who create their own paths rather than corporate suits. i'm building a startup here and it's an amazing place to be!
Resetting a Metasploit Pro User's Password locally
Snyder was one of the co-founders of Emotive [1], so he already has a corporate vehicle for any "thinking cap".

[1] http://www.emotiv.com/
I won't judge, everyone is different, but the real test will be your quality of life at the end.
Based on your description, I'm not sure I'd call you an addict at this point, not in the classical sense, you seem to be choosing to use, not using because you need it to stave off withdrawal symptoms, above all else.

And while you may be one of those exceptions, those edge cases that can choose and walk away, it's important for people to understand that everyone can't do that, and you can't know in advance whether or not you'll end up an addict, in some way or another, for the rest of your life tangling with that stuff.

Yes, there should be focus on harm reduction rather than jail time.
Yes, the stigma should go away... booze is as bad or worse than other things that are far more stigmatized.
But let's not pretend drugs are all great happy awesome things. Addicts do end up completely screwed up and dead on clean pharma drugs.... every day. Let's not pretend it's safe and happy.

Yes, it's true, most of the damage from opiate addiction is due to it's legal status... there's always the risk of overdose with higher doses.

Opiates work for your case, that's great - but statistically unlikely as a remedy for the general public. Most people with depression who end up using opiates and/or other drugs end up more screwed up in the long run.

Whether a drug is related or not doesn't matter... weak opiates are useful wheras strong ones can be srongly addictive, or lethal.
Weak short-acting benzodiazepines, like what's in Ambien are far less likely to cause you addiction requiring hospitalized withdrawal so you don't die compared to say, long term use of longer and stronger drugs that are almost identical (thinking xanax, valium)

Street meth his horrid shit, and while closely related to the amphetamine salts used for adhd kids, is horrificly addictive and extremely bad for your health - that's comparing playing with matches to playing with hand grenades. Sure, if you take enough adderall or related, that's prone to abuse and addiction, but it's nothing compared to what crystal meth does to your body and mind.

Just because drug companies made mistakes in the past is no reason to toss caution to the wind.

You were diagnosed Bipolar, that's something you have to deal with; I can't claim to understand it, so if what you are doing makes your life truly better for you, then I see no problem, but for the vast majority of people, that's not the usual outcome.
A lot of this has to do with Berlin's history. When the wall was still standing, west Berlin wasn't the most desirable place to live in Western Germany, it being basically an island in the communist east. So while cities in the West grew wealthy with industry Berlin was always the special case, not exactly a place for major industry to take root. It also became a haven for artists, musicians, intellectuals, homosexuals, anarchists, and other people not willing to take part in the mandatory military service that was required when you lived in the West (Berlin residents were exempt).

Real estate-wise Berlin has (or at least had until recently) a surplus of vacancies: both apartments and commercial buildings. This is partly due to fluctuations in population throughout its history, and steep declines in manufacturing and population during the wall years from their pre-WW2 heights. There were also huge swaths of prime central real estate throughout the city where the wall once stood, that was unusable until it came down.

What you end up with is a city that was originally planned and built for more people than live there, with vacant factories, warehouses, and office buildings from yesteryear that are readily and cheaply repurposed.

Berlin's population is growing these days though, and internationals, people from other parts of Europe, and other parts of Germany are flocking to the city. This means rent prices are on the rise, and vacancy is dropping. It's still way cheaper than any other major European city — for now.
The software will still be around. It just won't be improved.
Before the war, Berlin was a major industrial center, with big arms manufacturers and heavy industry. After the war, the Allies demolished much of the industry -- Siemens, for instance, moved to Munich. With the division of he city, many people moved away, leaving postwar Berlin with a loss of almost a third of its population. Since then, the city hasn't recovered its peak population, leaving many empty houses and low rents. In addition, the economy in Berlin has always been, and still is, very weak, and unemployment is high. All this helps to keep the cost of living low (even if, Berlin having become capital and sort of a hip place, it's higher now than it was 15 years ago).
Show HN: Coolie – The remote code sync tool
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Indeed. Also may I say "thank you" to the Supreme Court for their wonderful decision in Caraco v. Novo Nordisk, which more or less ends the usefulness of method-of-use patents for drugs.
Inflation and the art market?

If a painting was valued 1 million dollars 100 years ago, it would probably be worth a bit more in pure numbers today.

(I'm really just guessing here)
Graduates from my top-20 school have done fine.
Anyone else recall a Greg Egan story along these lines? can't recall the name.
You think you can't have a utility function without emotional justification, I assume?
If this would ever have been released, it would have failed and die a painful death. As stated by the author, he "stole" (which means he faked) many UI elements from OSX because he "dislikes Metro". This is just wrong and bad practice when developing native applications. A UI designer should never design a UI for an OS which he/she dislikes to begin with, it will just end badly.

What makes Sparrow on OSX and iOS so good is that it stays true to its OS; that it feels native and blends into the OS with such grace that it's a thrill to work with. In contrast, web apps doesn't suffer much from this since users are used to them looking different, as long as they exist inside their browser environment. But for Sparrow to be successful on Windows, these rules would apply...
I believe incorporating in Germany is a lot more expensive than in the UK or Ireland though.
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I guess the whiners would have been happier if the company behind sparrow went bankrupt. It would have given them more closure I guess.
Are you sincerely suggesting that even a handful of students choose their optonal classes by what they consider benefitical for them in the future, once they grow up? :) I've been working at an elementary school for some time now, and I can't emphasize enough how little the kids think about their future in terms of taking optional classes and such. Not a single student thinks that "Hmm, I'll take German now, because I believe I may need it in the future!". No. What they think is "Hmm, I've always been a big fan of Rammstein and German language so I want to learn it". I'd argue that only after people attend Universities and colleges at 18+, they really start thinking about their future and may actually plan their courses and classes based on what they'll (want to) do in the future.

Of course, when you think about this in the context of moving to Berlin after the rising startup scene, we're only interested in those who actually attend university, who care about their future, who study hard and so on. Such people probably start planning their future at younger age, aim for and dream about careers in the field even before other kids learn to understand what an actual career is. People with true ambitions are rare in general population, but not in the startup scene, I think this is something to be remembered.
How | Bizcovering
A big part of your utility function is what you care about. Caring is an emotion. There are no separate "rational" and "emotional" parts in brain; parts of your utility function manifest through what you feel.
Whilst it might be accurate to describe depression's root cause as a 'hardware bug' it is a much more common bug than you seem to assume.

It seems more appropriate to me to view it as a case of hardware specialized for one purpose systematically failing for another. The former is some evolutionary root, and the latter is modern society.

One of the most interesting parts of the linked article is the implication that people going postal are not so different from you and me. You seem to disregard it.
Yeah, no offense, but all you've written is either widely known (Amphetamine-induced DA depletion inducing Parkinson's-like motor symptoms and so on), based on misunderstandings (some of your graph readings are horrifically beside the point), or simply wrong.

Grab a book on neuropharmacology, or even just a neuroscience intro ("Fundamental Neuroscience" by Squire and colleagues is a good one), and accept that armchair-bullshitting is not how progress is made.
Time Management for Creative People [pdf]
100 GREATEST HITS OF YOUTUBE IN 4 MINUTES
I can attest to doing the same. Now i'm on jekyll+S3 and haven't looked back - it's great! Having said that, the jekyll posterous image exporter i couldn't get to work. But i don't post many photos so that didn't worry me.