skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Title "The ‘reforms’ that I worked for have worsened his life" - That's interesting. Let's read further.

Extract : The 1980s was the decade when many of the state’s large mental hospitals were emptied (...) I jumped at the opportunity to move people out of "those places" (...) to help manage the transition of people back into the community

(...)

When he was in jail, with its regular routines and meals, Tim usually stabilized. But when he was released (...) he destabilized right away

Ok, we get your point.

But they why giving in conclusion the idea that more money thrown at a problem that seems intractable could solve it??? [Extract: I’d require school administrators (..) I’d put much more money (...) I’d get rid of laws (...) ]

This begs the question : was it considered only once that maybe "humane reforms" had been pushed too far, and that the best outcome would have been reached in a place with " regular routines and meals" where stabilization could have been provided- in other words a good old hospital.

Maybe in the past there were many people in that shouldn't have been there, and the "humane reforms" were then a good idea. But maybe we overdid them and now we make people worse, based on our own idea that people suffering from schizophrenia would be better outside the hospital.

Extract again from the post : "His only furniture was a bare mattress on the floor; a rat and flies were his companions. Sadly, he seemed content. This is the mental health delivery system that I helped build".

Yes the author did, since he considered a patient own evaluation of his situation to be perfectly valid and not in any way damaged by his disease.

It is usually better to respect a person will, self evaluation, etc. But maybe, just like for suicide, when the best judgement seems to no longer work, it is a good thing to ignore it until it can be fixed - if it can.
At least in the case of trademarks, the potential for defamation gives it some credibility. I suppose from the standpoint of brand confusion alone, trademarks and patents are both equally unethical in that they both do not recognize independent discovery. Copyright is a much more balanced approach imo. Frankly I don't think many in many industries have the balls to admit just how much they would dislike their natural rights trampled on. In my experience, any time the conversation heads in that direction, the affected parties are seen scurrying away. For instance, I reckon a lawyer would reject any notion of limiting their natural right to practice law? Or perhaps even just certain techniques thereof. Really, I think it's time we start carving up territory in the domain of legal tools and tactics. Heck, I say we start carving up territory in just about anything one can think of. At least then the ridiculousness of it all might become apparent to enough weighty makers, that they would see to it that it'd be changed.
The problem with these kind of articles is that they focus only on the "one-time off" and then never talk about how sustainable the productivity increase really is. If this is to be a social experiment, it needs to be done on a longer term like a month or something. Anything less that is just anecdotal.
> teachers aren't psychiatrists or clinical psychologists and can't really be expected to be.

True.

Equally: Programmers aren't operations staff.

But we can damn well learn how to call them in when we need them.
Ask HN: Places to work in LA (Los Angeles)
Relocating to San Fernando Valley next week! Any suggestions for workplaces around LA? Bonus points if close to the valley.

(Free Wi-Fi would be ideal)
Hi, thanks for the comment and encouragement!

If you're looking for books on the internals of Rails, this one could be right up your street: http://patshaughnessy.net/ruby-under-a-microscope

If you're looking for more general but advanced books there are loads of fantastic ones - some of my favourites are Eloquent Ruby, Design Patterns in Ruby, Metaprogramming Ruby and there's Crafting Rails Applications for Rails (though I haven't started this myself yet - but I hear it's very good).
I might be wrong, but I don't think Honeywell, Burroughs, DEC, IBM (and the other vendors) used the open source (as we think of it today) model.

edit: As a matter of fact, part of why Unix was able to spread was the AT&T restrictions forcing it to be shared.
Apple is welcome to do what they like (and it seems like they're offering alternatives that are at least equivalent, and possibly superior) but a "major release" has incompatible changes to APIs by definition.
Facebook Custom Audiences ads work
I completely agree with you! I think programming has become a lot easier in recent years, with the advent of languages such as Ruby and the sheer number of well thought out learning materially, particularly centring around good programming practises. And of course thanks to frameworks like Rails that do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Thanks for the comment and support!
Optimal: Socially Connecting Financial Services Customers is Viable
Exoplanet found right next door in Alpha Centauri
HellMcFly--you're hellbanned so I couldn't reply directly. What is MPlus?
Yes it can be tough - I agonised over Python and Ruby too, there was a lot going for them both, but in the end I followed my heart as I just felt more comfortable with Ruby :)

Thanks for the comment!
Haha thank you! I love the name too :)
And that's what shocked me as well. He made the right diagnosis with the right title and the right observations, but jumped to the wrong conclusions :-/
That's treating the application as if it were completely stateless, and mucks with browser history. A good example of when to use state vs. a route is on a delete. If I route to a delete, for example, then it might fire again when I hit my 'back' button, which is obviously a bad idea.

Derick Bailey has a good article on it here: http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2011/08/03/stop-using-bac...
Senator wants to bring copyright law to the runway
A few observations. One, you haven't written that many pages, in fact you've written very, very few pages save for the preface and the like. This isn't an issue on its own, except theres no Table of Contents so it's hard for me to see where you are going to take it from here, or in other words what your vision is. The obvious result of this is that it's pretty hard to provide feedback. The flip side is of course, that you've demonstrated enough desire and initiative within yourself to endeavor to start the book, so unless you have a serious reason to stop, maybe forge ahead and try to finish what you started.

One other thing that I just want to put in your head, I'm not sure if I'm even going so far as to suggest it, is the possibility of flexing scope to write perhaps a 50 page e-book, not dissimilar to the Sacha Greif ebook (http://sachagreif.com/ebook/) but for getting from zero to the next book on Rails for absolute beginners. The benefit of this would be that you could probably spend about 20 hours writing it (I'm pulling this number out of my ass, so I could be waaay off about this time estimate) and therefore you've risked a much shorter amount of time, which I'm assuming is your main concern.
Thought I'd ask since I'm learning Clojure - are there experiences worth sharing re: using Incanter in these types of settings?
Must be english. What does it mean?
I started off writing in WriteRoom (I love the full screen mode) but then it started to mess up my formatting so I moved to Open Office.

Thanks for the comment and link, I'm off to read it now :)
1. Not happening
2. Not happening
3. Not happening in your wildest nightmares.

This isn't a cyberpunk movie.
I don't see any argument that his son with "no job prospects and a debilitating mental illness" is currently capable of doing work that benefits society. He's rightly only concerned with his son's survival in the crude conditions we provide, and how he might have turned out differently.
I've been working on a guaranteed-terminating language in the vein of APL/J. Primitive recursion is possible, but with the looping all implicit due to array shape, infinite looping is impossible. The issue I'm not sure how to handle is that some algorithms take the form, "repeat the following until convergence: ..." with no obvious way for a machine to prove that convergence will eventually happen.
Why Simple's Goals are amazing
Wow thanks for this! I was just looking for something like this to generate fonts so I can stop using pngs. Awesome!
So 2 at a time. Meanwhile I have..

counts

24 windows open across 9 different applications.
I don't think you're quite using enough imagination here. I'm not talking about ARPGs and building sims in general - I'm talking about a very specific sim game that's structured entirely around multiplayer. If SimCity 2013 isn't that game, then yes, Diablo 3 is an appropriate comparison, but if it is, I think the Team Fortress analogy is apt.
You are contradicting my point without offering an argument, which amounts to you simply repeating your view over and over in varied forms (as you just did yet again), a basic logical fallacy.
Anybody know where they're pulling images from?
http://your.base.arelikefacebook.com/
http://enigmas.arelikefacebook.com
What is this i don't even...
Actually no, there are fewer people employed in government because state and local governments chose to raise employee pay while cutting the number of workers.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIGVTWAG

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES9092000001

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CES9093000001
a woman of loose morals, more or less. it's moderately old-fashioned, and probably originally local to east london, so it's got comic overtones.

http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/slapp...
I don't think it is lack of faith, just the fact that college was never meant to be vocational training in the first place. While it is an amazing achievement for you, I'm sure, it doesn't mean much to the rest of us.

Additionally, it is so easy to gain experience in this industry, just take a month or two to publish your own application and watch the job offers start rolling in, I would imagine these companies consider not having any a bit of red flag. Maybe you can put some of the code you wrote while in school up on GitHub or something to demonstrate that you actually really do have experience? (it doesn't necessarily had to have been for-profit to still count as experience)

Hopefully this doesn't come off sounding harsh, just trying to provide some perspective.
http://bang.tidy.arelikefacebook.com/
The stress trigger remains an unproved theory - there are other many potential explains (vitamin D, parasites, sociological baed on family dysfunctions...) but so far there is not a good fit.
>>If it's executed right

That's a big if, is it not?
Judging Websites (Make a good homepage)
I also write on the Microsoft stack full time at work.

About a year ago I started working with Ruby on Rails for all my side work and hobby projects. It really is an awesome mind shift from .NET.

So I guess my vote would be take a look at Ruby on Rails!
Document formats don't seem to be a problem any more. Back when MS switched to .docx people I knew continued using .doc to maintain compatibilty with old versions. I actually got support for the 2007 formats before most of my windows using friends. As long as you change your default file format to the MS one, I don't think you'll run into issues on that front.
CSS text effects, dynamic color, sizing, etc. Creating assets for 6 different button sizes gets a hell of a lot less complicated with an icon font.
Great comment! I did not watch that talk. But I did watch another talk by John Cleese on how to become more creative ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH8uYDJlwog - only 10 min). It's a very recommended watch as well. I especially like this quote:

If you're racing around all day, ticking things off on lists, looking at your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas. - John Cleese

A year or two ago I also did a presentation on how to become a more creative programmer where this quote is also included, the slides can be seen here http://amix.dk/blog/post/19599
What factors help me decide where to work?

1. Amount of money the job is paying
2. Just how smart or dumb is the manager and what kind of ego does he/she have. Are they qualified for the position they are "managing" or their current position? Could they ever be qualified? What is their behavior like. Are they whiny, "I have to have my way" types with little education or ethics? Is it tolerable?
3. Are any non-negotiable items like flexible hours, full control of my dev machine, and safe comfortable work environment violated.
4. Is the project likely to move my career forward or is it just something small time like reports.
5. Is the work on a product that brings in revenue.

Advice?

Do not work under people. Be a startup founder.
You wrote "This kinda reminds me of how peptic ulcers were once thought to be caused by stress until they were found to caused by a virus [3].". First of all, if you read the article you reference, you'll note that Heliobacter Pylori is a bacterium, not a virus. Second, the presence of h. pylori in the gut is not conclusively proven to be a causal relationship for ulcers. That is, in some people h. pylori is just part of the normal gut flora. Further, it HAS been shown that stress is a strong cofactor in peptic ulcers.
>the issue is that you won't be allowed to have it on your computer at all.

Stop sensationalizing, please.
Does Verizon’s Monitoring Customer Behavior Violate Wiretap Laws?
I got a degree like this from the art institutes international minnesota. It was far more frontend-web centric but we did have the chance to dive deeper into things like processing, arduino, and openframeworks. However most of the students werent that bright, but the faculty was fantastic and curriculum was solid.

I think the bigest difference between 'creative programmers' and programmers from a traditional computer science background is the perspective in which they look at code, and engineering problems. 'Creative programmers' approach things with an emphasis on the discovery process which, I think, allows them to understand the things they are working on in more of an organic context. Whereas people from a traditional computer science background tend to approach things with a systematic view of the things they are working on.

The difference can look sublte, but it is real. I think having an organic understanding of a product enables 'creative programmers' to build an end to end product (from user interaction to the inner workings), whereas traditional computer science programmers will specialize on a single aspect.
"after sleep deprivation, the cells became 30 percent less receptive to insulin signals"

Let's see, insulin causes lypogenesis; signaling fat cells to store energy as fat.

Sleep deprivation causes fat cells to be less receptive to insulin...

So, pass me the doughnuts while I stay up for the next week.
Bing Images, I'd say (based on the few I've tried).

Edit: more evidence (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4657577)
Outcome from schizophrenia is routinely better in developing world settings, and this difference becomes apparent during the initial 2 years of illness. But even for developing world patients with a poor early course, outcome is superior to that of developed world patients with an equivalent early course. Employment rates are substantially greater for developing world subjects, and some authors have attributed this to the freedom from the economic disincentives to employment that can accompany the provision of disability benefits in the industrial world (1).
How to keep a developer happy and productive?
In a former job, I was confronted with a heartbreaking string of cases of individuals who are homeless, clearly suffering from mental illness, yet repeatedly breaking into local businesses, often not to steal anything of value.

The frustrating choice for those in the prosecutorial or defense systems, is how to best perform your duty to the public and these individuals.

If you simply release them, the business owners continue to face victimization. If you send them to jail, you put them in a completely inappropriate community, and damn them to poor or nonexistent care for complex problems.

It's not isolated cases, mental health issues took up a significant portion of our resources in the criminal justice system (a system that, when overburdened, suffers both Type I and Type II errors simultaneously, leading to higher rates of hasty convictions while also letting more guilty individuals walk free).

The best solution I heard, discussed only in chambers with heavy sighs as to its political infeasibility, was some sort of mental health court, analogous to a drug court.

Drug courts are designed to take a significant number of cases and prosecute them more efficiently, while focusing on what reduces recidivism most, and helps those "offenders" (treatment and monitoring is the general template, though individual cases can be highly customized, rather than one size fits all incarceration).

Drug courts don't always work, sometimes they can be systemically flawed. This American Life presented just such a case a few years ago, describing a judge who abused the process. But in most jurisdictions, drug courts lower costs to the system while putting a lot of people in a far better place.

A similar institution, a "mental health court," might feed people from courtrooms into community treatment facilities, with monitoring and care, while putting them on probation instead of placing them in jail.

This would, of course, work best with significantly increased funding for humane and competent mental treatment facilities. But at least some of those costs would be offset by lower burdens on the justice system and systems of incarceration.

Such a system would certainly help more people, and it deserves wider public discussion.
Ohhhhh. I thought he meant. Well, you see what I thought he meant. Because of the sculptor and the wife and that stuff.
I think it all boils down to the origin of patents. To understand why patents exist, you need to remove all the crap you hear about "protecting innovation" and start from the beginning. Patents were no more, no less, exclusive, monopoly rights provided by Kingdoms to some of their vassals, usually from the nobility. Patents were not an invention of free trade, there were a tool to prevent free trade, and to prevent newcomers from taking over the established monopoly. They were state ordinances to ensure statu quo and protect the existing, mutual relationship between the King and the company, nothing else.

No matter how you look at it, patents are nothing but a relic of Monarchical times. The system for attribution has changed, but the effect remains the same: companies are in rent-seeking mode when they ask for patents, not in the business of innovation of disruption.
>We the community agree to make that person one of us... To allow him or her to affect our elections.

No, this is wrong. A person on an H1-B visa is not one of us. They do not have the right to reside in the US if they lose their job, and the definitely don't have the right to vote.
> Have you tried touchpads? Switching to touchpad takes almost no time.

... but touchpads are relatively much less precise than mice, especially when used with your thumbs. For many activities, this matters (e.g. precision is required to select text in many cases; it can be maddening to have to continually re-select the same text because you keep missing the first character...).

I've noticed many people actually switching to "touchpad mode" for precise movements, where they move their whole hand down and use their index finger on the pad. This seems to increase the accuracy somewhat, but of course incurs the same switching overhead as a mouse...
> This kinda reminds me of how peptic ulcers were once thought to be caused by stress until they were found to caused by a virus [3].

_H. pylori_ is a bacterium, as your source indicates.
This kind of slippery slope argument is not constructive.
I always knew Google was on the dark side
I'm using WordPress. And just because I'm a designer doesn't mean I can't code :)
> A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate. (GPLv3)

Using GNU grep, as GNU grep, and merely aggregating it with the whole, would seem, from the quote above, to not cause the whole to be GPLv3 covered.

The only slightly questionable part is the "combined with it such as to form a larger program" portion of GPLv3. Is using grep, to "grep", sufficient to say that grep is "combined ... to form a larger program"? If the answer is no, then yes, the author is simply misinformed.
Does the actual data also reside on these instances?
I haven't found any medical studies, but it matches the experiences of myself, others I've talked with, and online anecdotal sources.
Mainly it's the immediacy of Matlab and R, and the libraries. I've used all 3 and consider Python my main and favorite programming language.

But you can just type "R", do read.table(), and very quickly slice and dice your data. In Python just evaluating what package to use, then getting the packages, dealing with versioning issues, etc. kind of breaks the whole thing. Then you need to figure out what plotting library to use, etc. Having stuff built-in as a common base which all your coworkers share is important. I know there are common distributions like SciPy but they are not as common as R is.

Probably the bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that R has higher-level stuff like time series libraries that Python doesn't.

The main thing that's needed is a shell to glue all these languages together, to ease integration pain. Everybody wants the "one true language", but that's a pipe dream. Python's close but not quite. Julia is kind of falling prey to this fallacy too. The programming world is becoming more heterogeneous, and the solution is to have tools to make multiple languages work nicely together. Not to pretend that heterogeneity doesn't exist.

You can work really hard to get homogeneity on your one little project. Maybe that's what language wars are so heated. But the second you have to borrow code from another lab, or you acquire a company, or get acquired, you have a heterogeneous mix. Matlab, R, Python, or Julia will never suffice for all tasks. Non-trivial problems will always require a mix of them. You have to pick the solution according to the problem, and Matlab and R definitely are superior to Python for certain problems.
We shit on Microsoft for this but with iOS it's somehow OK?
Thanks for that, it's a good snapshot of the current state of promises.

The readme in the repository has some good discussion around the different features you mention here, but it would be really interesting to see a discussion around the design of this library in counterpoint to the other options available. Some other time maybe!

With regards to the promise-tests, I think multiple implementations validate a concept, and a set of tests for a specification is much more useful when multiple implementations can pass it. If the specification is extended you have multiple implementations to compare the impact against, and if the implementations' behaviour differ in notable ways then you expose holes in the test suite.

Multiple implementations of a specification, particularly when they all pass a common test suite, is a good thing.