skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Insofar as programming involves problem solving I believe the answer is an unqualified "yes".

In _The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys_ by James Fadiman, Ph.D a chapter is devoted to discussing the results of a study on the use of the psychedelic substance mescaline to enhance creative problem solving.

http://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Explorers-Guide-Therapeuti...

This study was conducted at the Institute for Psychedelic Research at San Francisco State University.

I'll quote at length from the book chapter:
"The participants were 26 men engaged in a variety of professional occupations: 16 engineers, one engineer-physicist, two mathematicians, two architects, one psychologist, one furniture designer, one commercial artist, one sales manager, and one personnel manager."

"Nineteen of the subjects have no previous experience with psychedelics."

The subjects were selected based on their psychological stability and motivation to solve a specific problem they had at work.

They met in small groups for several days before the psychedelic session and were told what to expect and given instructions in the use of the drug-effect for problem solving.

The subjects were given 200 milligrams of mescaline.

After six weeks the subjects were given questionnaires on how the effects of the session had effected their ongoing creative ability as well as how valid and acceptable the solutions conceived during the session seemed to them at that time.

Some (but not all) examples of solutions obtained by the subjects under the drug-effect:

* A new approach to the design of a vibratory microtome

* A commercial building design, accepted by the client

* A mathematical theorem regarding NOR-gate circuits

* Design of a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device

There are several tables full of numerical data. Table names include "Application of Solutions Obtains in Experimental Sessions" and "Work Performance Since Session".

My conclusion:
Psychedelic substances can be used to enhance creativity - but as always who is using them and how they go about it makes all the difference.
I enjoyed reading both blog posts. Thanks for the transparency, Patrick and Arjun
Undocumented Facebook Parameter for Viral Growth
Kickstarter crowdfunding website launches in the UK
You also need a developer account ($99) to debug your apps on a device.
I can't keep up
Trello database can't be that big. Why not just copy it, zip it up, and transfer it over to the west coast?
Define better code. Code at that point/moment in time in comparision, maybe. Code later on that is more robust and well documented so that others can understand and change if need be better, probably not.

People say drugs help you do this and that, but over time you gain tollerance, have downsides when drug wears off. So is this another tortoise and hare comparision nomatter how it is thought thru.

Now if drugs help you to do what you can't, be it atheritis or the like, or pain medication. Something that counters a condition you normaly have that limits your abilities, then sure they do make better code. But as a rule it has too many exceptions to make such a brash statement by using such a losely drifined term as drugs in a title without better focus onto specific groups/types/needs.

What goes up must come down, employers don't pay for your comedown, nor do they pay for your supply, so beyond the offcie coffee or prescription mecial needs. I'd say meditation and better mind focus and planning/whole mental approach can do more for anybody to produce better code than any off the shelf solution. On balance take the free coffee and run with it.
Fair enough and good luck in the space!
How about "not soon enough?"
China's situation does have something to do with it (you can't buy paid apps on Google Play here, YouTube is blocked and Google search frequently has 'technical problems'), and that's probably Samsung's excuse, but other manufacturers manage to keep Google services on their phones (although often alongside their own or another 3rd-party app store). I think it's just Samsung taking advantage of the situation to avoid paying Google's fees, not a case of gapps being legally banned in China.
Do you have some suggestions for how to test them?
Correct! This is the main source of external Google HR issues. When there is a certain stretched goal to hire X number of people, this sort of situation tends to happen.
I initially bristled at the word "poaching", since it implies ownership. But I'm actually far more repulsed by the fact that he laid the kid off just a few days later. Ethics protip: don't try to convince someone to leave behind a paying job offer and move across the country if you're on that shaky of ground.
Whoever closed it needs to do more drugs, then they'll know why they are being a...
Fast Analytics using Ruby and Redis
"thanks to zappos" is a bit rich considering we all do this.

Is there a standards or certification body when it comes to user agreements? It seems that for consumers' protection most terms should be standardized as part of an oauth type mechanism that tracks what you've assented to, how it changes over time, allows you to revoke and request deletion of your data etc.
This is my next: the HTC Windows Phone 8X
LOLwork - reality show based on Seattle's ICanHasCheezburger.com
Very broken in IE10, I think I'm seeing the mobile version.
I've been involved in self hosting From 100 to 70% of our infrastructure for the last 15 years (The percentage has been dropping the last five to six years). This has been with companies with as few as five (various startups) and as many as 2500 (netscape) - with a median of around 500 employees (large enough to have a couple remote data centers and a local corporate data center).

I've never done the full 15 year assessment, but, on average, the smart people throwing themselves into hosting my business applications have performed at, or above, any level that I ever could.

People always talk about down time from third parties, but always seem to forget how much downtime self-hosting induces - particularly as you usually can't afford the 24x7 well-staffed NOC and operations team.

The temptation is always to say "I can do it better myself" - but the reality is you probably can find someone out there who can do it better than you, and, even when you "Self Host" - 95% of the time that really means relying on someone else to provide you a data center with generators/diesel/hvac/security/Sonet/etc...

With that said - Fog Creek is a tiny little operation, that probably operates at, or below the level of our own Operations team - so it's a coin toss as to whether they would do better than us at hosting.

On the flip side - I'm pretty confident that gmail, on average, has had better uptime the last 10 years than the mail servers I've managed. (Though, the last 5 years have been remarkably stable for self hosted email. Exchange has come a long way...)
Just not true.

There are people, a LOT of people, who literally think Google IS the internet. If they can't get to Google in a web browser, they think the internet is broken; "I can't get to my internet!" And they know of no other portal thereto.

Just ask some folks over age 55 or so. You'll find this user mindset is very common.
The example is a hidden variable explanation, simply because you cannot do metaphors for quantum physics using classical physics.

Perhaps another approach will be clearer:

Imagine magical filter goggles, of two types: red and blue. People wearing red goggles can only see other people wearing red goggles, people wearing blue goggles can only see other people wearing blue goggles.

You put a pair of red and blue goggles to each box, then have four people pick a pair of goggles each.

The result is that each person only sees one other person, near the second box, wearing the same colour goggles.

This is more or less how many-worlds works, except instead of both red and blue goggles in the box you have a single pair of goggles that is both red and blue, but not at the same time (decoherence), and thus instead of two people wearing different kind of goggles, you have a single person wearing goggles that are both blue and red.
and 12 million tweets is hardly "big data"
I don't think its luring anybody. I think its money (to be made).
FCC: Sandy Delivered a "Substantial and Serious" Hit to Telecom Infrastructure
Microsoft sells 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in four days, outpacing Windows 7
Better not tell this to Mitt Romney.
You got that right.

I think that this deal, like the Pixar one, brings in something that Disney hasn't been able to create on it's own for a long time - enduring and loved characters. It's all very well trying to get a 5 year old to be 'into' Mickey Mouse, but they are far more interested in Buzz Lightyear or Nemo or Lightning McQueen.

Disney itself hasn't been very good at 'coining' characters for a while, and there is no doubt the real cream is in the merchandising. A successful movie, therefore, is not just about getting box office, but also in spawning characters that can become cashcows.
We use emotions to help us pick the ends to which logical effort should be directed. Try as you might, you will not be able to logically select the axioms by which you reason.
On Apple's spec page I'm seeing "CDMA model A1429" and "GSM model A1429" (vs "GSM model A1428" for AT&T). I'll agree that the first two are different model names, but they look like the same model number ("A1429") to me. That's why I suspect the differences between the two devices are smaller than we might ordinarily expect (possibly including smaller identification differences).

Do the two A1429 models actually show up differently in this sort of breakdown (presumably with "GSM model A1429" as iPhone 5,3)?
I took this course, and it was easily the best programming course I've taken. Very well thought out and well balanced, plus everything is better on the Udacity platform.
Only Jobs could be Jobs
First of all, the login experience should not change if the TOS is the same as before.

If the TOS has changed, you could accept-reject the login (lock the credentials in the fields) and say "to continue, please read the TOS change and press 'accept' to continue". Or just have this as a separate screen after the login.
Over the years, I've also used cfengine and a host of other systems and have decided that simplicity and the ability to customize a system to fit your needs are key. Turns out it's quite easy to roll your own, given the right tools.
I now use:

gsl https://github.com/imatix/gsl and
synctool https://github.com/walterdejong/synctool

The former is used to generate configurations for various classes of systems and the latter pushes them out over ssh.
Works very well.
> I am on mercy of Motorola for update and they won't give it.

I know that feel bro. That's why I dumped my Samsung Droid Charge and got an iPhone 5.

So frustrated not getting any updates.
The GPL found invalid binds you to stronger chains than having it valid.
Yeah, realized I totally missed forest for trees with my comment, and I do agree with the general message of the article.

That said, it's easy to miss the forest when you're being whacked over the head with the trees.
That's not true.

What you defined is a drug.

Accordingly, these ·products are drugs, under
section 201(g)(1)(C) of the Act, 21 U.S.C. § 321(g)(1)(C),
because they are not foods and they are intended to affect
the structure or any function of the body. Moreover, these
products are new drugs as defined by section 201(p) of the
Act, 21 U.S.C. § 321(p), because they are not generally
recognized as safe and effective for use under the
conditions prescribed, recommended, or suggested in
their labeling.

And you bet the FDA cares.

Under sections 301(d) and 505(a) of the Act,
21 U.S.C. § 331(d) and 355(a), a new drug may not
be introduced or delivered for introduction into
interstate commerce unless an FDA approved application
is in effect for it.
Windows Phone 8 is based on the Windows 8 kernel and shares plenty of technology with it. The SDK emulator and debugger use client Hyper-V on Windows 8 to run the phone as a guest operating system, which isn't available on Windows 7.
Did I forget to mention that my math isn't very good? :(
What I got out of it was a demo of parts of his pen.fm interface (while there are some rough edges, frankly most e-reader apps I've seen are substantially worse than this...), in the form of a cute little story that illustrates how different the reality of starting a company can be from how budding entrepeneurs often picture it.

(I went at it from the opposite direction of this guy when I started my first company: I could program, but had no clue about sales, marketing, finance or any number of other things, but eventually found myself doing phone sales, sales meetings, ordering print ads and negotiating with suppliers)

For the site in question it seems like re-introducing it by immersing us in what it is about - writing stories - is a much more interesting approach than throwing up some glossy brochure-ware site.
Hey, it's happened before.

http://www.rifftrax.com/rifftrax/star-wars-holiday-special
If sites don't require registration why would they require a ToS? How would they prove a violation of the ToS if they can't tie you back to the non-existing registration?
Last we heard it's a bucket brigade doing 5 gallons at a time. Fog Creek president Michael Pryor is participating but mostly it seems to be the crew from Peer 1 networks doing the hard work, we don't want to take too much credit.
> I would never have left my prior engagement if my would-be boss had not okayed it (we had a very long conversation at the time).

Once you broached the subject, did he really have any choice? At that point, he has to question whether your heart would be in it if you came to work for him, and whether you might bring down the rest of the team. At this point, you are likely getting the OK regardless of whether it is just a minor inconvenience to him or a major blow.
> and that disparity is not healthy or sustainable

That's the part you need to justify, since that's the only part that has anything to do with a supposed bubble.
A/B testing. Try something like coupon codes or just two different plans that are presented as "basic plan" (or whatever. Some get plan 1A, some 1B.
> "First of all you guys seem to be very morally flexible in general. There needs to be a lot of trust in employer-employee relationships."

Tomorrow will be the end of my first 3 months in the Valley, and let me say the one aspect in which the Valley is vastly, 180 degrees, different from the rest of the country, is this "moral flexibility" business. I've worked over a decade in the east coast, and things are much more old fashioned back there in this aspect...people respect job contracts, put things down on paper, worry about hiring/firing and the impact it will have on the new hire, his family, healthcare etc. Not so in the valley. I got involved with a yc company too, and this is what transpired - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567857

It wasn't remotely pleasant...and while it all worked out in the end ( in the sense I got a diff job at a diff non-yc company) , it did leave a horrible taste in the mouth. The folks running the show were ...I hate to use the word...scamsters. Literally. You try these sort of stunts in a big company, people will take you to the cleaners. Its just that out here, you have the weight of the VC's & their billions behind you, coupled with the fact that you can always claim you are "just a startup" and so this sort of behavior is on par.

Its an awesome thing for the startup community & the ecosystem at large - this moral flexibility - because it adds to the incredible speed at which you can iterate & pivot & all that jazz. But it does suck to be an employee at one of these gigs...you are at the receiving end of juvenile behavior & you have no recourse.
What will it cost to bury power lines?
Power outages seem to be the key problem. Deisel generators are a short-term solution, and the power looks like it may need a week to fully restore. As well as transmission and local lines being down, three nuclear plants were taken offline and a 4th is on alert. The NYSE has been criticized for its poor disaster preparedness and lack of backup testing. Overall, a C score for US infrastructure.
I suspect that's for ventilation reasons
A Simple Guide To Create A Password Reset Disk in Windows 8
You could spawn BSD jails, each subject to cpu, ram and disk quotas.
LSD: I have found it possible to use it to gain insight. (Cisco systems had some key person(s?) using LSD to design products.) The problem is that you can trick yourself quite easily into "discovering" things which end up not meaning much. So you do need some care, and perhaps someone to help guide you. For beginners, I'd say LSD's bigger benefit is being able to reshape how you think and handle life rather than understanding some new data structures. It's definitely a "must do this at least once in a lifetime" type of thing.

Stimulants are fantastic. Amphetamines provide focus as well as a nice perky feeling to keep you happy while coding. Ritalin (methylphenidate) works too, but I find it harsher and not as pleasant as speed. As the name hints, it makes you fast at things. Talking, thinking, calculating, coding. I notice with Ritalin, doing mental math happens instantaneously - I surprise myself. The focus can be a drawback: if you don't plan, you can end up focusing on something "interesting" yet time wasting. So prepare your day, first.

Opiates (such as time release oxycodone) are fantastic for keeping optimism. By keeping your mind in the right state, you can end up being much more productive. Again, the benefit is the drawback: being overly optimistic means your risk calculations and general decision management might be way off. (Biggest downside here is addiction, but it _is_ manageable, at least if you have money.)

Pot I've not found useful for much as far as work. I did try coding on it, and ended up writing an infinite loop and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. Alcohol can sometimes be slightly helpful, in a similar manner as Xanax; just by relaxing and getting one into a better mindset.
Well, most AI techs that exists right now are built upon rules. A very early example may be the chess machine "deep blue", who defeated the world champion Kasparov. A recent one could be Google's virtual brain, who "understood" the concept "cat" by analysing 10 million random frames from YouTube. Another example may be the one S4M mentioned, I'm not familiar with that.

While Google's virtual brain "understood" something, it still doesn't has the ability of analysing. This is an example of unsolved problems.
+1 on the Ubiquiti recommendation. Nothing but good experiences.
Yep, IE still doesn't support css columns, so until I focus on compatibility I'm giving you the interfaceless mobile version.
Cute animals for a good end / start to your day
My surprise is that a respected team and high profile company would make such a basic mistake of relying on a single datacenter, within a single availability zone -- in lower Manhattan. And knowing since last week that Sandy was coming, and this was a real threat.

And I'm not even talking about Trello (which is still just a hobby for Joel & team), but this also brought down Fog Creek and all their commercial services and paying customers.

The positive side of Sandy (if there's any) is that people will really take more seriously the idea of "expect the best; plan for the worst". And Amazon will likely see a spike of new customers in the next following days.
>Does empathy increase the probability that the actions you decide to take will reduce or increase suffering?

Interesting question. You are speculating about human psychology based on your understanding of history. Though you haven't cited any literature to back up your statements, and you haven't claimed that you have knowledge of any psychological literature, I still find your opinion valuable.

I've read some of the literature related to this question. Here is one thing it says: psychopaths are people who almost never feel empathy. They decide to take many actions and many of those actions have disastrous and extremely harmful consequences for those around them. The harm they do is grossly out of proportion compared to the harm committed by non-psychopaths. They are extremely exploitative and cruel and disproportionately commit a large number of crimes.

Psychopaths are now roughly defined, by researchers, as people who don't experience empathy. If you want to see how people without empathy behave, look no further than the psychopath.

It's not pretty, and it contradicts your idea here.

A psychologist who specializes in psychopathy is Dr. Stout, who wrote several famous books about this topic.

The research shows that lack of empathy absolutely and unequivocally leads to hurting others. The actions of those who lack empathy hurt other people in far greater proportion. Operating empathetically involves feeling rather than logical thinking and it requires being in touch with your emotions.

"The road to hell" phrase refers to INTENTIONS, not EMPATHY. Intentions are cognitive, they are analytical. So good intentions may be meaningless (if this proverb has any truth) because good intentions are NOT empathy. What is more important are the FEELINGS of empathy.
Great, thanks for the clarifications!
My cat has a bootstrapped startup, maybe she can get some free stuff?
Agency nails responsive web design in new relaunch
Let me update this: we've been working all day on moving Trello to AWS, a project which is now underway. If all goes well (fingers crossed, etc) we'll be up and running on AWS very soon. There are still other services in the flooded New York data center (FogBugz, Kiln, Copilot) and we are making plans to physically move servers to a new data center as quickly as possible if the flooded data center falls over, but a physical move of 5 racks could take a whole day so I hope that doesn't happen.

Separately, Stack Exchange, which is in the same data center, is running off of its hot backup in Oregon.

We would have liked to have completely redundant data centers for FogBugz on Demand and Kiln on Demand to avoid even a few hours of downtime, but because those services rely heavily on giving every customer their own SQL database, there is almost no reasonable way to get fast failover to a different data center. We can do it with Stack Exchange because there are only a couple of hundred databases. We've been building a SAN solution which will make it possible to hot swap out to another datacenter, one day, but that project is not complete.
LOL I agree. There are a few small data center in Manhattan. Actually, if they choose data center like Amazon they may expect outrage once in a while....
This is wrong. Empathy in the context of psychology is a feeling rather than a cognition. The kind of empathy you're talking about is a cognitive sort of empathy that doesn't involve a feeling process.

There is actually a distinction between bad empathy and good empathy.

Bad empathy is the type you describe: it allows you to understand other people's perspective. It can be bad because it allows you to exploit them. Think an expert salesman or a pick up artist who knows exactly how to see the world from the perspective of their victim.

Good empathy, on the other hand, includes the other as part of your feeling system. You will refuse to hurt the other because by hurting them you yourself feel bad. This is a non-logical feeling process rather than something analytical.
Well said.

I make use of social networks to stay in touch with old friends and extended family that I would have difficulty staying in touch with otherwise. This is indeed shallow in comparison with my relationship with my immediate family or current close friends, but I value this shallow connection along with the deeper connections in my life.
Your parent also accurately captures why Google Glass is a solution to a self-inflicted problem.
Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction