skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Use of ginkgo biloba to improve cognition
Has anyone used ginkgo biloba to improve cognition? Are there any other herbs that people use to increase memory?
I think people fixate too much on the supposed perks of SFBA and NYC. I concede that there is a kind of company best delivered from one of those two places; if your company is in any way premised on riding some kind of tech industry zeitgeist, it helps to be in the middle of the tech industry. But for the rest of companies, I can think of a bunch of reasons why you'd be better off elsewhere.

So to make that concrete, an unscientific comparison of Chicago (where I am) to SFBA (where I worked for ~4 years):

* Talent is cheaper in Chicago by high-single-digit percentage points

* Talent is more abundantly available in Chicago. There are (obviously) fewer overall candidates, but the competition for them is much lower.

* If you're in a specialized field (as we are), it's even better: the SFBA talent competition seems most intense for high-premium specialists, and markets like Chicago have disproportionately fewer opportunities for those specialists.

* Housing is significantly cheaper and thus dollar-for-dollar better and more convenient than SFBA.

* Public transportion as vastly superior in Chicago than in SFBA, which increases both the effective availability of housing (more neighborhoods are easily commutable) but also overall quality of life (if you want a tree-lined street with kids, you got it; if you want a 1 block walk to your favorite bar, you also probably got it).

* Much less "networking" in Chicago than in SFBA. I've met a lot of Chicago startup "luminaries" for various reasons, but can't think of any event where I could do so reliably, unlike SF.

* The startup population is growing in proportion with the nationwide startup population. This is in contrast to NYC, which is growing disproportionately fast. Our big names are Groupon, 37s, Grubhub. We've got a small number of local YC companies.

* I'm a bad person to ask about the funding market but it seems anemic compared to SFBA or NYC or even Seattle. This is a better place to bootstrap.

* I also think it's an easier place to bootstrap, because Chicago has a large number of businesses, and more diversity in business size (from a large population of approachable stable small businesses to a large population of major enterprises) and vertical (trading, banking, pharma, law, insurance, food, hospitality). I think this is a stark contrast to SFBA which, if you're not freemiuming to the whole Internet as your strategy, has an "ice cubes to Inuits" vibe to it.

* Way more available office space, both in the Loop (downtown) and on the north and near-west side (if you want to be SOMA-trendy about your company).
These aren't "large scale purges" or "death mobs", they're targeted assassinations. Blackwater, villainous as they may be, aren't killing indiscriminately to cause fear.
I thought it was funny and potentially useful. I often use Yelp, not to find a great restaurant, but to avoid a terrible one.
I'm working on my undergrad degree while working. it really sucks. be prepared for 4-6 years of having no friends and never sleeping. you will probably burn out in 2 years but stick with it.

I also work remotely and this helps but only a little. take your current schedule and subtract 25 hours a week from it. you won't be left with much, especially if you have a family.
"Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA."

If you want to have a debate, lets talk about ending the various wars the USA is fighting in various forms around the world. Not whether a particular covert surgical tactic is being carried out by the correct kind of soldier.
Uncritically reading every scientific paper you come across and taking the information in there for absolute truth is dangerous and a problem many untrained journalists have.

You need to have a background in sciences and a minimal understanding of statistics to properly judge the results - is the sample-size large enough, is it varied enough, did they use the correct statistical test for correlation - lots of papers out there are absolute crap (either unrepeatable results or missing mountains of needed information), published just because someone was friends with the editor or all peer-reviewers were asleep that day.

Note: Even the mythical Open Access doesn't help with this problem, as there too are editors deciding in favor of their friends and peer-reviewers gone fishing.
I wouldn't tell a friend or family member that there's a 70% chance of getting a startup investment returned whole.
Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics About Privacy Hysteria
Free vs. paid: Would Twitter be better if you paid for it?
The thing is that the second amendment appears to be fundamentally different, in terms of human rights, from the rest. There are a lot of good arguments as to why allowing free speech, prohibiting unreasonable search and seizures, and other such things is a good thing in general, and are fundamental issues of human rights and freedoms. There are substantially fewer arguments as to why gun ownership is important to freedom in general.

If one were drawing up a list of fundamental human rights today, and were somehow completely ignorant of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, what would it include? Would someone ignorant of the Constitution, but otherwise familiar with government, law, and freedom tend to include gun rights on that list?

The second amendment really seems like the odd man out. (Well, the third amendment is pretty odd too, but nobody cares about it these days.) Freedom of speech is important because the only reason to deny it is to oppress people. Due process and requirements for warrants are important because it keeps the government honest, and suspending them would cause more government abuse than it would stop crime.

But what makes a right to gun ownership important? What does it protect against, and what makes it better than not having that right?

I understand that reasonable people can disagree on this matter, and I hope we can have a reasonable disagreement here. What I'm trying to say is that the fundamental divide here is, as far as I can tell, precisely whether the second amendment enshrines a fundamental human right, the way we feel much of the rest of the Bill of Rights does, or whether the second amendment is out of place and does not describe a fundamental human right. To argue by saying that the other side's attitude would not play well when applied to other amendments in the Bill of Rights is to miss their motivations entirely.
Hi,

I use Postbox. It's pretty cool. While it's not without it's flaws (I'd like labels etc. to be visible in the list of messages, doesn't support mail merge and a few other niggles) on the whole it's pretty nice and to be honest at the current price it's a steal.

I'd say give it a try and if you like it, go for it. If not, no bad.
Ah yes. If someone disagrees with me, they must be paid by some organization to do so.
Running in Circles for a Refund from Dell's Customer Service
Of course this is true. But it's also true of everything. APT, YUM, GEM, PYPI, anything where there is contributed code and you can't take legal action against someone.

Emacs is no different.
>China has strict gun control. What happens when people go crazy in China? Mass killing via tractor (17 dead, 20 injured). [2] Crazy people intent on mass murder find ways to kill people.

And how many more could that guy have killed with a gun? In any field of endeavour people are more effective when using better tools, and a gun is a tool designed and optimized for killing. Just because we can't make killing impossible doesn't mean we shouldn't try and make it harder.
I think this attitude is just as useless as the opposing view that we must do anything and everything conceivable to prevent an event like this from ever happening again.

This kind of thing cannot be completely eliminated. But its incidence can be reduced. It's useful to put a bit of thought into how and why this happened and what could be done, not to prevent it from ever happening again, but to reduce the odds.

No, this isn't a particularly big problem, but it certainly merits a bit of thought.
Spoiler alarm! If you haven't seen The Empire Strikes Back, be careful.
The greed at the top is too hungry for it to ever be enough. Whatever sum of money you pay them if they can make an extra $X on top of it selling you out they will.
Well, South Park.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairplay,_Colorado#South_Park_a...
Nice try, obvious CIA forum influence suppression operative
> I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and find themselves it Gitmo or dead.

I see, you've fallen for the pro-U.S propaganda. Where random groups are designated 'terrorists' and thus deserving of your hatred.

> Iranian and North K nuke programs have been slowed and countless people AREN'T dead because of CIA.

100% pure speculation. Other countries getting Nukes (or nuclear energy) is non of the USes business, unless you accept other countries making attempts to disable american power as well.

The US flat out lied about iraq, and was proved to have lied. Yet you believe them on North Korea and Iran... how about reflecting on facts, rather than propaganda?
Looks like the only metatable stuff they don't dupport is weak references and garbage collection hooks (finalizers/destructors) Other then that t looks like the support most of the other stuff since table access and things like tha through intermediate functions such as lua_tableget and so on.
Just as an observation, it is absolutely incredible how in just 25 years, the capital of one of the sternest and most ideological top-down communist states[1] has become a mecca for technology startups, the apotheosis of bottoms-up entrepreneurial capitalism.

The collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union was a critical factor in unleashing the internet wave of innovation that is still cresting today; though this occurred contemporaneously with the technological breakthroughs of the early 90s, the importance of the fall of the USSR in unleashing the web is not as widely appreciated as it was in the 90s.

[1] And that's saying something; see 'The Lives of Others'.
Lua is simpler though
> A majority of startup folks I run into from Berlin do not speak any german at all. Many of them have been living there for a while, some for several years.

That is quite sad.
So you're pretty much always the customer and the product.
I can state this more concisely:

It is not incongruous to both

1. ask for the rules of the game to be changed such that we would all move from a sub-optimal Nash equilibrium to a better Nash equilibrium

2. Continue to personally defect and maintain the current sub-optimal Nash equilibrium while calling for the _game_ to be changed such that the sub-optimal Nash equilibrium no longer exists. Unilaterally cooperating results in losing (and evolutionary selection effects might result in all such do-gooders being eliminated).

Note that this is not possible in a Prisoner's dilemma because the point of trying to change Patent law (or change Tax law) is akin to changing the game from a Prisoner's dilemma to something else. I.E. The advocated course of action is _outside_ the game.
Global insights: Fear of failure and entrepreneurial activity
The important thing to realize is that there are people who would ask the same questions and harbor the same doubts about those other amendments that you have about the second.

The second may seem like the odd man out to you, but that's to you, not to everyone. Others may well (and in fact do) believe that others are the odd man out.
Originally Australian here; our gun laws are stupid and largely ineffective, there is currently a war between various outlaw biker gangs going on, they mostly use guns. The Port Arthur massacre actually used weapons that were already illegal at the time and not but a month ago an m4 with underslung grenade launcher was confiscated in a Sydney suburb by police.

No other reasonable interpretation of available data exists other than gun laws have only effectively disarmed the law abiding. Some may claim this alone as all the victory required, but the pretense that gun laws stop criminals from using or acquiring guns in Australia is completely false.
If the web is so moribund that its health relies on convincing individual hackers not to do things they think would be cool, then the web is doomed. I don't think it is; I think your argument is self-defeating. It makes me want to make a LuaJIT plugin more, not less. LuaJIT is seriously cool.

If it were merely a question of some minor incremental improvement, such as could be obtained by "contribut[ing] to one of the three open source JS engines", then I agree it wouldn't be worth the fragmentation. But then it wouldn't meet the definition of a "killer app" either. Nor would it be likely to gain traction. It would just be a gnat.

What I'm talking about is only interesting if it might be disruptive. I think there's a chance that Lua as both language and implementation is good enough that it might enable things that simply aren't doable (performantly) in other ways. Perhaps I underestimate how many tricks the V8 people have left in their bag. I hope so. But at some point they're going to reach a wall caused by JS's design limitations that simply can't be drilled through. I take the existence of Dart to be a tacit admission of that wall. And what is so amazing about LuaJIT is that it has already proven it does not know that wall.

At the same time Lua is so similar semantically to JS that it is not likely to mess with the things that made JS great, so integrating Lua into the web would arguably be a conservative design choice – more conservative, perhaps, than many proposals to "fix" JS by making it more static and proper-like.
Very nice project !
I was able to fork it to make the output directly usable by imagemagick. My goal was to generate a lot of images, then crop them to get only the "facial" part, and then stack them with overlay to obtain more human faces.

See a sample here : http://i.imgur.com/xmM6U.png

and repo here : https://github.com/vhf/pareidoloop/blob/master/README.md
> To be fair, those were considered reasonable expectations until the last few decades

Ahistorical nonsense. "People USED to save! That's why people used to generally end up desperately poor when they were elderly, and also is why the US implemented Social Security."

>My advice to everyone: spend less. You're chucking great gobs of money at things that don't make you happy; just STOP DOING THAT and you will have enough to retire on by the time you're 50.

I'm glad to see a comment on Hacker News in which the author describes how amazingly thrifty he is and how irresponsible and shortsighted and stupid everyone else in the world is. It's been ages since anyone has posted anything along those lines and really helps our discussion of large-scale social issues.
I would caution against this approach. First, he is aiming to pass all the course requirements for a CS degree from MIT in only 1 year (including the non-CS requirements). His definition of passing is getting a passing grade on the final if the grade distribution is known, and a 50% or more if it's not known. No projects, no problem sets, nothing else.

Now, I'm sure he's a smart guy, but I would be surprised if he retains the material long after he takes the final. I highly doubt you can deeply internalize, say the upper level algorithms course in a few weeks (I've taken it) without doing the (difficult) problem sets, or taking the infamous take-home midterm that often has open problems in disguise.

It's difficult to see this as an attempt at truly learning the material he claims to be learning.
I like sites that have a predictable `.min.js` convention; if I want to see the source code for `main.min.js`, I visit `main.js`.
I would agree it is rational, if most people who try to make a lot of money via said "negative externalities" succeed and then become philanthropists of note.

Very few people succeed to the degree that Bill Gates has. Fewer still put their money to the good uses Bill and Melinda have been espousing. So while it is possible to end up with a positive outcome, these outcomes represent a minority.

So no, it's not particularly rational. It sort of assumes you can guarantee things you have very little control over.
LiveScript is really only like Haskell in some syntax and naming of some functions.

The defining characteristics of Haskell (to me, bear in mind I'm a Haskell noob) are strong, static, inferred types, and an emphasis on pure or near-pure functional programming (limiting side effects as much as possible). The defining characteristics are not a standard library function named "fold" or "takeWhile".

LiveScript has JavaScript semantics, like CoffeeScript. These semantics differ from Haskell in deep and fundamental ways. Yes, it might also encourage functional programming, but so does Scheme and Clojure, both of which are really nothing like Haskell either. I don't think this is controversial.
That's a really informative post, tptacek. Thanks.

How do you feel that Chicago rates on "serendipity creation" (which I meant to ask in the OP, and seems like we could classify it separately from regular "networking")? Does it feel like a place where you can walk into non-official/industry events like coffeeshop/co-working-esque places and find collaborators? In a similar vein, do you see geographical clustering of startups, with the attendant bump-into-people at the deli counter effects?
Funny. I thought the same.
I think the only answer there is to have said nothing.

I was polite, treated him respectfully while still confronting the subject directly. He probably felt embarrassed in front of his friends and his usual intimidation approach didn't work, so he acted out. He had an opportunity to respond maturely, but he did not have the maturity to do so. I empathize with his position and acknowledge he may have not previously had the context and positive influences in his life to exercise using his words and expressing his emotions productively. I should note, he was probably 20 years old, just out with his friends, being a typical cocky young person. He didn't know how to handle this situation appropriately, and responded poorly.

On the other hand, I could have instead told theater staff who were probably in a position to handle things better than me. Part of me wishes I had done this, but I don't think I should avoid civil confrontation in the future because I'm afraid of a violent response.
There's nothing "random" about picking on Al-Qaeda. Also, the facts are that NK has nuclear capabilities. So yes, we believe the CIA about that.
Living in NYC, I pay 48%: 35% federal, 13% city. So I pay European tax rates. People in California and many other "nice to live in" states have similar rates.

So it is not even nominally lower, even if you don't count education, pension, healthcare and public transport.
When I first heard the term, I pictured young guys high-fiving each other because they mastered RVM and Git...
Reminds me of why I think Slate is so terrible. Grandstanding contrarianism. As others have pointed out, it doesn't take a very sharp needle to poke a hole in this guy's argument.
Right now we have some number of people who wish software patents did not exist but hold them anyway. And we have some number of people who are happy that software patents exist.

My guess is the second set are causing all the problems, and that even if everybody in the first set decided to give up their competitive advantage based on their principles, the world would not be a significantly better place.
Im trying it out - but share voiced concerns about making the distraction that is HN that much more accessible -- but that's my problem, not yours :)

and the iOS interface does feel a little peculiar..

Either way, great job building a fun app and sharing it with HN!
"June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States."

this is meaningless, really. I take it's based on the number of local observations across the country, which is somewhat tied to number of weather stations.

It does look like a huge and convincing number - gosh, if it is 3215 we must be onto something! But merely increasing number of places where measurements are taken going to drive this number up.

I am not suggesting the global warming is a non-issue, although this article is quite full of inconsistencies like that, as well as minor sins like not mentioning your sources - where does number "3.7 x 10-99" for the odds of increase of temperature comes from, for example?
Rule 307. Never ask a sarcastic rhetorical question on these boards unless you're prepared for a lot of takers.
I personally applaud JD for their gentlemanly approach to sending legal letters.
> And why should this process retain anything anyways?

Because javascript has some reflection, and also because of weird scoping rules (with, eval, etc.) you can never be sure where a symbol comes from unless you have access to the exact version of every other script on the page, e.g. jquery, etc)

> If you want your source-code available for download then... put up a download link.

I agree - but there is still a huge difference between deminified and decompiled source readbility - which is all I was saying.
Also, more generally, code names mean you don't have to figure out branding at product conception time.

If you're calling it "Walrus" internally, and assume that everything about it will be based on that name, and at the last minute, marketing decides that "FurSeal" tests better, then you're screwed.

If "Walrus" is just an internal mnemonic, then engineering and marketing can both beaver away and eventually release "Anthem". Or whatever.
The crackpots are the shills, and they effectively discredit the idea of shills, thus allowing shills to operate effectively at lower levels.
If you were the government looking to hire a third party to do this kind of things for you, wouldn't you prefer someone with experience?

Yes, you could only hire people that went through your own training program, but hiring ones that went through other training programs would give more plausible deniability. It also could be an excellent Way to sow seeds of distrust between otherwise friendly parties.
Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi.

For trying to get away from the story book evil sounding-ness of an entity named "Blackwater", they sure didn't do very good with "Xe", which sounds even more mysterious and potentially evil-doing IMO.

Academi sounds a lot better though. And they do a lot US LE/gov't/etc. training which is probably what they would rather emphasize than their being a "private mercenary company".
It was intended as a Godel-joke !
I actually think the issues page would be a better first-step
Hakin9 Magazine Extra July Issue Quantum Computing Released
Take a look at CS curriculums at well known universities, then check the syllabus of each course.
The snark is also on point :)
Who knows? Maybe there were a few people he'd really like to kill that he couldn't kill with his tractor but could have killed with a gun, and killing them would have appeased his insanity (briefly, at least) so that there would have been fewer people dead.

Maybe if tractors were banned he would have built a fertilizer bomb and killed hundreds.

We can't know, and setting policy based on speculation is pointless.
Firefox 16 un-prefixes CSS3 Animations, Transitions, Transforms and Gradients
As a physicist this always annoyed me about about maths lectures.

You spend half of your physics degree learning certain classes of integrals when in practice everyone you really need to solve is done numerically.
Yet you get half a class on numerical methods it you're lucky
Neat idea. Might ruin my entire workday if this came into my desktop. Must. Resist. And. Not. Install.