skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree with you. I think these demands on society are unrealistic. You can't expect that out of teachers and pediatricians.

My experience with the school system (I have a daughter with autism) has been much better then his sounds (I hope so given it's 40 years later). We have no push back in getting our developmental pediatricians' input into our daughter's IEP. Our school provides speech and occupational therapy. But as you mentioned, schizophrenia is a whole other world (even from autism in my opinion). There is no cure. There are only lesser of many evils. You can't expect society to fix that.

One thing that really bothers me are these crazy statistics - "one in every five children and one in every four adults has a diagnosable mental illness. A quarter of all mental illnesses are considered serious." One in four? Come on. If the bar is so low that one in four have a mental diagnosis it makes the term meaningless. It drives my wife and I crazy when parents claim there kid had autism but after a month on this fad diet or other they are now cured. Guess what - your kid never had autism! Don't tell that to a parent who knows their daughter will likely never leave home, never marry, and probably never hold down a meaningful job. It's just insulting.
Bullshit.

I can open a file, search a random string and fix your damn configuration file over ssh using vi/vim.

I will however, keep using Sublime Text 2 over Vim almost every single time, thank you very much. Vim usability sucks.

Also, try to play some Starcraft competitively before dismissing the mouse as productivity killer. In the right hands those bastards are FAST.

Selecting and moving a string from a random part of a line to the middle of another line is faster with a mouse than with keystrokes. Not by much, but it is.
I've always thought that bicycles should have a standard ID number similar to how vehicles have a VIN (a BIN maybe?). This would go a long way in allowing victims to search for their bike in a registry, and also allow buyers to confirm the bike they're buying from some flea market wasn't nabbed the week prior somewhere. To me this would be the first step no-brainer to helping discourage this kind of theft.
Its an interesting conundrum. It isn't like the plankton aren't native to the ocean, there already exists a food chain that dines on them. And doing this experiment is no more or less 'dangerous' than re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone.

So what I don't get is when people propose even modest iron farming experiments they get the crap sued out of them or otherwise targeted. Why? Why not start small, measure, and move up? We're over fishing the ocean anyway, and nobody is doing anything about that. That is killing fisheries in the name of sushi. So why is this project so dangerous?

Its very curious. One of the risks of this investigation is success. Lets say we develop a way to moderate the CO2 content in the atmosphere to what ever level we want using iron (very abundant) and the oceans (also very abundant). Is that a horrible outcome some how?
I make about $80-100 per month in Adsense from a 'scratch your own itch' website I made to help calculate battle outcomes in a game. Did it over a weekend. I don't actually play the game anymore, was taking up too much of my life. Working on a new version though as the code is a shambles and it isn't responsive and most visitors come from iOS, I didn't know much about JavaScript or responsive design at the time I wrote it so a horror show underneath. http://battlecalc.net
That's the important point is being missed. Despite what they say, this industry doesn't care about technical education. You will see people with masters doing the same work as people without a Bachelors, and the same for PhDs. As a result, there is no point in getting more education if the companies will not even consider it. Additionally, this is also tells me that what you need to advance is these companies is how politically savvy you are, instead of how much education you have.
The point isn't whether immigrants pay the same taxes. The point is that society makes certain commitments to everyone who lives in the US, and everyone who lives in the US makes certain reciprocal commitments to the society. A society legitimately controls immigration into the country by virtue of those reciprocal commitments.

At a most fundamental level, a nation is a group of people who commit to protect each other in case of attack. If you're in the US, we'll protect you from foreign invaders whether you're a citizen, legal resident, or H1-B holder. Because we make that commitment, we get to decide who crosses our borders. We get to decide based on whatever factors we want whether we want to let someone emigrate.
Mixed feelings about this.

I think there is another skill, somewhat related to programming, that we need to teach before programming: text slicing and dicing.

The entire point of a programmable powerful editor is to apply text transforms more quickly than you could with click and type. If that's important, then we should teach it first. I personally believe it is important because of the huge productivity multiplier it gives programmers.
Ethics are only one component: there's also the simply criteria of whether the policy meets the desired goal. If an anti-rape law somehow resulted in more rape, having an ethical argument about it would be absurd.

The stated goal of patents is not a moral imperative to protect inventors, but rather an economic hack that is meant to incentivize invention for the benefit of society, only benefitting inventors as a side effect. The fact that it is achieving the opposite of its goal means that an ethical discussion is worth having, but mostly irrelevant (see also: the Drug War).
I like a lot of Philip K Dicks stuff, "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" Also I really enjoy Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and dipping into the 19th century industrial revolution scifi that their works entail. If I had to pick a favorite though it would be Enders Game by Orsen Scott Card, although I haven't read it since I was a kid but I remember then I found it amazing.
He didn't dismiss Pathjoy. He dismissed TechCrunch. And your comment is welcome, but would be even more welcome if you applied it to every company that "launched" to HN, not just the ones you helped shepherd.
First-year CS students don't read what's printed on the screen? Good lord how can we expect the average user to do the same?
So, "SimCity Planner"? I like it.

Personally, I'd love a "SimCity Manager" that was ran from a local government perspective, rather than a "God Hand" one. You change zoning, woo potential investors/business, decide if kids can skateboard downtown, build a skate park, or just arrest them, etc.
[] are like Facebook
Somehow this looks a lot uglier than other tilt-shift photos I've seen. I wonder why that is. Bad blurring algorithm?

In the trailer, they mention "experimenting" as being a big part of the game. As a programmer, I would love to have a tree of save points, like in git. So I try out something, change a second thing, revert the second thing, try a third thing, revert it as well, revert everything back to the start. Wouldn't that be fun for ordinary people as well?
Understanding DevOps – Part 3: The battle of Dev vs. Ops
Java Patch Day
More remote applet exploits. Update to stay safe.

Security Explorations claims to have serious exploit that is still not fixed and will be delayed for another 4 months (http://www.security-explorations.com/en/SE-2012-01-status.html)
I kept reading about vim, emacs, notepad++ and a bazillion other 'great' editors for years.

No one ever made me quit Editplus.

No one, until Sublime Text, that is.

So that's true, you have to follow your heart.
I'd bet that least 2x more people would use a maid service if someone did it in just the right way. I think the biggest issue to fight is procrastination and fear of uncertainty. Some kind of loss-leader promotion might pay huge dividends.

The front page is perfect and if it only said "First cleaning is on us. No upsells. No commitment. No kidding" or something I bet you'd get tons of people to try it and the LTV would make up for the acquisition costs.
For the first few years, we scaled vertically rather than horizontally. We still went through many rounds of scaling our single server, changing both hardware and software configs.

We were reluctant to do automatic failover as well, since we all hear horror stories about automatic failover causing more problems than it solves. However, we changed our minds this summer for a couple of reasons. One, our traffic continues to grow and people rely on us for payments. If our database server crashes in the middle of the night, we don't want our customers to have to wait for us to do manual failover. Two, we felt a lot more comfortable with Pacemaker and PostgreSQL streaming replication failover than we used to with DRBD. We did extensive testing and tweaking, and we believe we understand the failure scenarios.
All programming? Hardly.

In pretty much every ecosystem I've seen, there are standard patterns for doing things because they've been proven. Even just taking your own experience, you probably have patterns you use to solve problems. Sometimes you can apply these patterns in different ways and that's where "creativity" comes in, but a lot of the time, there's a "best" way to do something to maximize source comprehension, maintainability, performance, etc.

There's often nothing creative about adding a jQuery plugin to a page, or setting up a table in a database, or adding a new route to an instance of an MVC framework.
No, I did not do my A-levels, instead I spent 2 1/2 years travelling Europe and coding on the go, worked on numerous projects, many of which are still live now, took part in over 40 freelance projects and once I came back landed a job fairly quickly.

I don't understand the assumption that all people who didn't go in to education don't understand the fundamentals of computer science, when in reality, most university lectures on the subject matter are available (and have been watched by me) online.

Your average university student spends probably less than 10 hours per week actively studying (I have no figures to back this up), I code full time, all day every day, then I bring my passion to my home and code late in to the night. Which would you honestly rather have as an employee? The university graduate with 3 years of boozing behind him, or the programmer with 3 years of experience and references behind him?

I don't want to go to university, in my opinion, it would be a step backwards.
You already have the abstractions, they're just C abstractions.
With your keyboard set to dvorak.
This is a HUGE discovery -- an Earth-sized planet around a very close star.
To be fair, gVim adds relatively the same features, file/save, etc.
It may well be that parasites contribute but there is also a genetic component to schizophrenia.
Just to clarify, are you saying in your blog post that you can't point a bare domain to your cloudfront endpoint, and that you have to use something like wwwizer to use a bare domain with your cloudfront setup ?
There's nothing wrong with using notepad, but you can be significantly more productive with other editors
In response to your second edit, you've answered nothing. My reply stands:

>And what if you have your email open? Someone could see the senders and subject lines if they can see your screen! Oh noes! The same way anyone can see anything you're doing if they can see your screen!

It's crap.
> it's very unlikely that his son would have ever been a contributing member of society.

I'm having trouble getting past this comment. I don't wish to malign you debacle - I'm sure you're not being malicious - but it seems like a very unkind & privileged mindset. I hope this isn't representative of the community.

Paul Gionfriddo certainly doesn't consider his son to lack contribution.
Mice Can ‘Sing’ In Tune With One Another
One of the big objections to this program came from the fact that the scale was so limited.

You would think that this kind of operation would get cheaper at scale. You might not need 2X wrecked-apartment-repairmen for 2X people housed.
> All I'm saying is that people that are over weight may not be sleeping well because they are over weight and not the other way around.

That's definitely backed up by the links between, say, sleep apnea and obesity. I've been obese all my life, and every time I lose or gain weight (even 10-20lbs, which isn't that much for me) I feel the impact on my sleep above all else.
- First, you can't claim to have created an ethical principle if it's self-contradictory. If accidental infringement is an essential result, then something is wrong.

- Second, I am not referring to trademarks as presently defined.

- Third, requiring someone to prove their innocence violates one of the most basic principles of ethical justice.

- Fourth, it is irrelevant to this discussion how often it is, but clearly, 40,000 software patents filed per year constitutes a lot of opportunity for infringement. If you are doing something meaningful and interesting, you are likely violating a patent. But again, this point is not essential to the main issue.
Site44 exits beta, and introduces paid accounts
> ADHD or blindness are not even in the same room a schizophrenia.

25% of prisoners are there because of ADHD. In aggregate it probably causes much more harm than schizophrenia.
"That's it" is in the context "(people) want to run Windows software on it". Existing, Win32 desktop software that people are used to.

This part is not going to happen.

And sorry, office on tablet is not a big deal. You will understand, when you will have to use it. It is the same reason, why PC tablets were not successful - the usability is way worse than existing solution.
You are ignoring the high demand for used bikes. I imagine a lot of people buy cheap used bikes because they now that there is a high likelihood of their bike getting stolen. Ironically, this behavior fuels the demand for the very same bikes that are getting stolen.

"Reporting people who have abnormal numbers of bikes"

There are a few well none spots in the bay area where most stolen bikes end up. The problem is it's hard to prove that these are the guys that steal the bikes, and the police don't really care that much.
This research paper seems to suggest that at least alcohol does: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dcare/pdfs/fp/GreenAlan-Alcoholand...

Even if Alcohol doesn't specifically make schizophrenia worse, alcohol abuse is the most common comorbid disorder of schizophrenics and generally exacerbates all mental health problems to some extent.
Icon fonts and their usefulness in iOS development
Really? You honestly believe that?

Will it make me type faster and think faster? I spent 6 months working in a doctors office were I had to type every word spoken for 7 hours a day, the block here is not my efficiency, it is in fact my intelligence.
Very few, at the moment - I only started thinking about it a few days ago when I saw the "AfricaHackTrip" on MeetUp.com. I would be unable to join them on that trip, but it's got me thinking about what else I might be able to contribute. Do you have any ideas?
But wait! I thought it was because the United States was evil. And all other countries have it figured out!
exactly; he's just a bloke like you and I - not some super-helper-expert-because-i-work-for-the-state guy.

I'm not saying we shouldn't expect any return for our tax dollars; but certainly not as the primary source of help (read 'assistance'). also, perhaps the problem shouldn't go after our tax dollars in the first place .. it's a warm/fuzzy idea to 'help', but you're taking my dollars and supposing a solution to which you have no idea what you're doing. stop it please ;)
Now I'm thinking about Bart Simpson writing the 30+ sentences in the blackboard in one go, by using 30+ input cursors in parallel.
In the US, it was more or less unregulated till the 50s/60s. Also, your claim does not explain European countries' stand on it or that of African nations.
Ask HN: Feedback on helping musicians release records without pressing CDs?
https://jacket.io

Hey HN. We're releasing our marketing / lead generation page for our new service today. We'd love your helpful feedback and criticism.

Our MVP is trying to solve the CD release show problem for small- to medium-sized bands. It seems to be the norm to have boxes and boxes of CDs leftover from pressing too many (bands get giant price discounts at 1,000, so many will press at that volume even though they're unlikely to move them all).

Much more is planned if the above proves useful. We're excited about the project, but would love some feedback on both marketing and product from HN.
Google Streamlines The Email We Get When Someone Shares A Google Drive Doc
I would definitely not call emacs "newbie friendly"
The thing about Starcraft is you don't need the full keyboard. A large part of the "productivity hit" people talk about with text editors is not "mouses are slow", but that switching from keyboard to mouse back to keyboard back to mouse is slow.
A mental illness is a mental abnormality that significantly impacts on your quality of life or the lives of those around you. That's the definition.
So what you're saying is that because this guy found a security hole and used it to access classified material looking for UFO's he should be thrown into jail for sixty years because he cost tax payers money cleaning up the mess and investigating what happened? I am not so sure I agree with that. He definitely committed a crime, but not a crime worthy of sixty years imprisonment, perhaps 2 or 3 years in minimum security maximum.
Yeah, agreed. I'm a big, big fan of data analysis in Python, but there isn't a full-featured time series analysis library (statsmodels is almost there). R has at least two that I know of (and needed to hook into from Python using rpy2).
Approaching the Hiring of Engineers as a Machine Learning Problem
All I've read about the new SimCity so far makes me sad.

The gameplay video [1] makes it look like a nice game but I just can't countenance this trend towards making all games online, social and/or persistent. Why do I need to be online to play this?

I played, precisely once, Civ V and it was (IMHO) a terrible game. Civ IV OTOH was an amazing game... not for the game itself but for an amazing mod called Fall From Heaven II [2], which volunteers spent years on. I can't tell you how much time I spent playing that mod and playing out the different races and winning strategies.

The beauty of Civ IV is that it Just Works. You don't need to be online. You don't need to sign in to one publisher's bullshit social platform (one advantage of consoles like the Xbox 360 is at least the bullshit social layer is standarrdized as Xbox Live).

Sadly this doesn't work on a Mac as it adds a number of DLLs. I believe the guys who did that are developing their own game.

Civ has been one of the (now) very few turn-based strategy games, which is what I like to play. Not everything needs to be an FPS/RTS. I've seen reviews of Civ and Heroes of Might and Magic and the like being knocked for "not being an RTS" even though they never weer and hopefully never will be.

Seriously, I'd like something I can put on my laptop and just play on and off as I please without having an Internet connection (eg on a long-haul international flight). I was hoping that SimCity would be at least that but apparently not.

Screw Origin and the rest of the mainstream PC games industry. I can't be the only one. Where are the Kickstarter campaigns for kind of game? If I saw one, it'd be "just shut up and take my money".

[1] http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-gameplay-d...

[2]: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=171398
It was a very interesting article and I really enjoyed reading it but why is it on Hacker News?
It might just be me, but personally I don't understand what is so bad about plain old Rocks. Everything I've ever hammered (except at work where I'm forced to use other) has been done by Rocks (or, if I'm feeling in the mood to have some recessed nails, convex rocks) and I've never had any issues.

Why spend so long worrying about your Hammer of choice when they are all effectively glorified Rocks?
Ask a first-year CS student to quit out of ed.
And it depends on what you mean by "library". For statistics packages, yes, python is behind. But for general purpose computing, connecting to databases, and sheer number of packages available, python is way ahead (currently 4097 in CRAN vs. 24775 in PyPI).
Responding to your first comment about teachers not being psychiatrists, I agree with that observation but disagree that this means teachers should not be trained to recognize the signs of mental and other disabilities. The tendency today is often to ignore the problem, given there is little penalty for failing to intervene. But there are heavy costs to individuals and society.

As an example, when I was growing up I was extremely nearsighted but didn't get glasses until I was out of the home and in college. I was unable to read the chalkboard from K through 12. Yet no teacher intervened to suggest glasses to my parents, or to suggest I see an eye doctor. Only when a college prof noticed that I was squinting my eyes at the board and said "hey man, you need glasses!" did I get my eyes examined and discover what the world looked like in focus.

Along the way, everyone from the public school nurses who administered eye and hearing tests to a DMV examiner fudged my eye test results to "help" me pass those tests. And I was pretty good at doing things with limited vision. I know I'm not alone in this regard -- many children find a way to get by with a range of limitations because they don't know there is an alternative.

But we're living in the modern world, and many limitations can be controlled given early intervention. And teachers are well positioned to observe children over extended periods of time, while doctor visits are often 5 minutes ling and most children will never see a psychiatrist at all.
You can use an Emacs config that'll set CUA bindings that people are more familiar with. (C-o to open files, C-s for saving, C-n for a new window, etc.) I've got a config you can start from.

Who the hell uses default Emacs key bindings anyway? ;-)
A skilled artist utilizing a rock correctly can do a better job than another person using a hammer.
It's been a good decade since I've seen an install that didn't also include nano. Linux Server Administration is not "being good at computers" in all cases.
"The author is arguing that his son would not be homeless if institutional care had not be shut down"

Actually, he isn't. The only institutional care he mentions in the What I realize now section is "supportive short-term and long-term community housing and treatment", which doesn't sound like institutional care, in the sense of "When he was in jail, with its regular routines and meals, Tim usually stabilized". There was a reason why total institutions were, well, total.

In fact, his "if I were a legislator today" comments are essentially the same as the "I jumped at the opportunity to" do actions in the 1980's.
How much money would save this man? You going to build him a golden prison to live in. Schizophrenics hate being medicated. They are miserable. So they go off their medication and run away. It's not a question of money. Please stop the "we are so horrible because we don't spend enough money." That's the lazy minded answer to an extremely complex issue.
"Will it make me type faster and think faster?"

No, but syntax highlighting greatly enhances code readability and your brains ability to recognize what types of objects or properties or functions are being represented in code. Associating the color blue with a variable declaration, for example, is just there as a visual cue or shortcut for your brain.

I understand your point that it can be done perfectly fine with notepad, but let's not pretend that these visual cues don't give your brain a jump-start.