skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an aside, I know a lot of people here on HN find your comments to be overly aggressive

Many HNers (and this is a hard group to categorize, because there's still a lot of diversity of thought) are still in the honeymoon phase with the positive-sum promise of technology and the startup economy.

I believe in these things very strongly, but I'm also old and experienced enough to know that we, the good guys, have real enemies. They aren't stupid, and they're not weak. We seem to think we can out-compete them by being smarter, more productive, and earnestly working toward a better world. We act is if we'll be able to peacefully render them irrelevant and that they won't know what is happening (or care) enough to fight. Well, perhaps. Time will tell. I am not yet at the point of saying we need to take AK-47s against our corporate masters (please don't do that; your aim probably sucks and weapons are nasty things even when used well). However, I am also not optimistic enough to believe that they will surely opt for graceful decline and let us build this better world that we want. Perhaps they will, content to be very rich (in a world whose prosperity begins to dramatically increase, probably around 2025-40, rendering them less relatively wealthy and powerful) but increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps they won't. My experience with the upper class is that they are mean-spirited, ethically depraved people. Their weak point is that they underestimate us, because we're less than human to them, and because they see us as intellectually inferior. However, if we underestimate them, then we are making the same mistake.

Most of my HN "enemies" (and that's too strong a word, because I don't dislike them and they don't know me) are Googlers who were shocked when I exposed unethical management, in a very visible way, in October 2011. When you wave a whistle in the public ("whistle" as in whistleblowing) some people act as if you're waving a gun, and especially those who can't stand to hear the truth about their utopia. This reaction is ridiculous, because a lot of the people who get up in arms and fight whistleblowers have nothing to fear. They are too in love with the Woodbury with the quaint coffee shops, not the real Woodbury with the fascistic Governor and the zombie gladiator fights.

What's sort of amazing about whistleblowing is that you don't get the worst opposition from the powerful people you are exposing. They know they're doing wrong and will often make some concessions (but rarely enough). The mindless and often vicious opposition that you get is from other peasants who are shocked and upset at what appears to be going down. In the Philippines, this is referred to as the "crab mentality", whereby crabs in a bucket prevent each other from escaping and they all die. That's what you see when subordinate employees go to the mat to defend unethical managers who wouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them.
Other: Your Brain
> yet only in the US do kids shoot other kids with automatic weapons.

I'm getting very tired of this. If you want to have an informed discussion about gun violence you need to acquire at least a modicum of information about firearms, especially but not limited to different actions, e.g., single-action, semi-automatic, and automatic.

Virginia Tech? 2 semi-automatic pistols.
Sandy Hook? 1 semi-automatic rifle and 2 semi-automatic pistols.
UT Austin? 1 semi-automatic shotgun, 2 bolt-action rifles, 1 pump-action rifle, 2 semi-automatic pistols, 1 revolver, 1 semi-automatic carbine
Columbine? 1 pump-action shotgun, 1 break-action shotgun, 1 semi-automatic carbine, 1 semi-automatic pistol.

What do those have in common? No automatic weapons.

Almost no crimes are committed with legally owned automatic weapons. There are very few of them available and many are quite old, so those owned by non-LEAs are very expensive and largely collectors' items. And even with illegally owned automatic weapons, crimes committed with them barely even register. [1]

If you want to argue that semi-automatic weapons are "bad enough," fine. But please have some idea what you are talking about.

[1] http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcfullau.html
GMM requires a weights matrix, which implicitly does the same thing as distributional assumptions do in MLE (and you can replicate most MLE models in GMM by appropriate choice of weights matrix)
I don't think it's a Pro vs Contras, but "this statement applies Well vs Badly to this language".
But is there a (modern) society that had a birthrate drop like this and perished as a result?
Switching to iCloud for Push Mail will not be a solution for users in Germany. Due to a patent lawsuit by Motorola (owned by Google), Apple and others can't offer push [0]. The patent in question is European patent 0847654 [1], for a "multiple pager status synchronization system and method". I wonder if Apple could implement IMAP IDLE in the mail client? Since most mail servers and clients support IDLE for years, I don't think anybody could claim it's patented.

[0] http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4208?viewlocale=en_US

[1] http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=...
If a sudden moment of clarity would be a repeatable cure for mental illness, we would not need mental healthcare. Please read up on confirmation bias.
It's almost incredible to have this kind of problem today when the global population is growing uncontrollably.
No, those are statements that rank low when applied to Python, not negatives.
Wrote this before I saw InclinedPlane's comment.
> Should it be illegal to gather information on people simply because they didn't authorize it? Should individuals have the power to control what others do with the information that is publically knowable about them? I, personally, say no.

I think this is the third time I'll make this post on HN, but it's been relevant every time.

Privacy is not about having something to hide, or about keeping things secret. Giving the government the power to store all this data about you isn't bad because they might learn embarrassing things; after all, it will most likely only be read by a computer.

But it gives the government enormous power to make decisions about you -- decisions about whether you may take a commercial airline flight, get a security clearance, or even get a job -- without your knowledge or consent, and without you knowing how they make the decisions. It's not Orwellian, it's Kafkaesque.

In short, a lack of privacy gives the government the power to be even less transparent in its decision-making, and gives it yet more power over its citizens. It's not a question of discovering your fetishes or being embarrassed, and we shouldn't respond to the "but I have nothing to hide" argument as though their conception of privacy is right and having nothing to hide really is an excuse.

There's a rather good paper I can recommend on the subject:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
The Website is Down
I'm aware of this, but in my distinct opinion it is at least worth of trying. Spammers make money out of posting links all over the web and crackers make it by selling compromised accounts or the personal information attached to them.

Even if it would work only for a brief time it surely would make their job harder and the overall process much more slower.

But then again, this is just my opinion and I've convinced myself it to work - for that brief time only if nothing else.
If you are a reader or gamer and want to encourage and reward that kind of activity then here is your chance. Wage battle with your reading friends or encourage the young ones in your life to become active readers. Support this great project from Aaron and his crew.
Octopress has slowed down due to my need for help with a few things. I've tried working with a few folks, but it hasn't worked out. Now I'm getting the help I need and things are cranking up again. Believing that Jekyll has a future is a great motivator too.
This book has links to supposed real examples and studies. I don't have it handy and I didn't go read the studies.

http://www.siyli.org/read-the-book/
I'd love to see you change your handle from "unimpressive" to something like "awesomelikeyou".
Can I get some feedback on my new Android app?
I just released this a few days ago. It's my first attempt at making an app.
Decipher is a cryptography app. Currently just supports encoding/decoding a few basic ciphers as well as basic frequency analysis. Working on adding automatic cipher cracking as we speak.

I've made a big effort to make the interface optimised for tablets whilst still working on smaller screens. I'd love if I could get some feedback on the UI, and also if people find any bugs on different devices. (I only have a nexus 10 and emulators to test it on!)

Thanks all, you can get it on the Play Store here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.discoviking.cipher.project
No, as others have pointed out in the thread, you need 2.1-2.3 to reach replacement of population. In general, the planet can "easily" support the number of people we have. While I don't think there would be serious harm in a happy, voluntary reduction in the overall population, this isn't a sustainable long term (100's of years) trend. While I would like to think we're going to return to replacement levels of child bearing, I don't see any evidence or reason that it would just yet.
CLUI: Command Line User Interface
Types of Air Pollution
I didn't. But I should have! Thank you. I so often forget those "little" details.
Oh ok.. i see.. Now that's confusing.
So the right side basically says "everything that is listed here doesn't apply". Mhh... ok.. ;)
Japan has always been very insular and has very strong anti-immigration policies.

Also, their politics is probably more screwed up and dysfunctional than this article suggests, so any change seems unlikely.
These demographic trends are, unfortunately, only temporary.

From the point of view of evolution, birth control is a disaster. I have done exactly the activity evolution has programmed me to do to continue the species, regularly, for over 20 years. Only twice did it result in children, and both times were conscious choices on my part.

However evolution knows how to face these disasters. There is a small minority of people who have the option of birth control, who have all of the same economic incentives that I do, yet choose to have lots of children. Their children are less likely to want to use birth control than mine. Thanks to exponential growth, that minority that chooses to have children regardless will become a majority. And after that point, voluntary birth control and economic incentives will not suffice to keep the population from growing.

This is literally evolution in action.
The issue may have to do with NoScript or some other JavaScript blocker as the method appears to rely upon JS. (Tested in Lynx and Firefox with JS disabled.)

Jhsto: you might want to include a noscript tag warning visitors about this. Of course it might be better to have this done server side as anything client side will eventually get worked around.
The ranking process requires answering 110 questions.. I can not imagine you would actually need that many questions.

Perhaps the author can use the already submitted questionnaires to see which questions correlate heavily, so they might be merged.

The only language I know from this list that I wouldn't recommend wholeheartedly to someone else is Java, and that's just because I know C#.

A bunch of languages I know very superficially, and just haven't learned because I didn't like their superficial qualities. Anyone here ever mastered (not just learned) a language that they did not like at all? I don't like Java all that much, but it is not absolutely terrible.

(From this list I am comfortable with Ruby, Haskell, C#, Java and Javascript, less comfortable with C, C++, Scheme, Python, ASM, Matlab, VB, PHP)
I have a 2000 table, 45000 sproc legacy database on my hands. 20 mins to deploy the schema. Its what we expect but the maintenance cost is extreme, its not testable.

That's where the ORM comes in for legacy stuff. We're moving the schema slowly into the ORM.
Why? Out of the author's solutions that have been discussed in Japan for decades, only one involves children (and that's related to daycare, not more babies), and the others involve changing a culture that needs to change to adapt to this. Then they would be an example to the world.

If the planet cannot "easily" support the number of people we have now, please prove how. Because right now it isn't.
I went through a solid year and a half of depression after a cheating girlfriend and rough, isolating startup lifestyle.
For me, watching videos of successful entrepreneurs would be horrible advice. In fact, HN, social media on the whole are very biased mediums and not at all representative of real life.

Exercise is great, go and do that. If it doesn't work, at least you'll put on some muscle when you do get out of it.

I am definitely against any sort of drugs, and I dont think labeling things is particularly helpful, but my suggestion is to get over it. Recognise you can take a beating and survive.

The best advice I can give: change. Change something. Change jobs, hobbies, places. Go looking for new things to excite you again.
I'm about to take my own advice and go on a cycle tour - I'm starting with Holland, then may try the west coast of the US. (It took me a year and a half to get to the point where I even bothered setting goals like that, but it's something good to try and do)
Except the global population isn't growing uncontrollably.

The USA has a birth rate just barely above replenishment (and dropping), Europe has dropped below replenishment rate, etc.

Some pretty graphs here:
http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/2776214.html
For what its worth (and I'm no designer): I really like the mobile version of your design. The text is easy readable, the sections clear and there is no annoying clutter.
Its true, and maybe irrelevant. There is no place for tigers on a settled planet. We have many uses for land, and letting fabulously dangerous carnivores randomly wander huge tracts is one of the less important ones.

I know there are ecological arguments. Maybe those are meaningful some places, but for an Iowa farm boy they are ludicrous. This continent (North American great plains anyway) has been 'reformatted' several times in the last 500 years. There has been no permanent catastrophic ecological collapse; no runaway doomsday scenario has occurred.

Sure there was a dust storm in Oklahoma (ok, hundreds of them) in the '30s, which drove the science to understand and tame them, which has been done.

We are perfectly capable of 'terraforming' our own planet, and are doing so at an accelerating, perhaps unstoppable rate.

I can only conclude, tigers are doomed. Zoos are amusing; you may argue they're cruel or whatnot but its the only place your grandchildren will be viewing tigers at all so factor that into your outrage.

Anyway, with genetic programming we'll be able to have dwarf pink polka-dotted tigers that fetch your slippers if you want, so really what does it matter? The accidental population of our planet when we 'discovered' it are really of no consequence, compared to what we will be doing with it in the future.
Thanks, I'll fix this soon enough.
I think the real concern with this is not that we’ll have fewer people in Japan (a good thing) but that the system can’t support contraction.

If you have a workforce in their thirties who are still at entry level positions or thereabouts, and a majority of voters between the age of 50 and 80, you end up with a political class that wins elections with pro-retirement and healthcare policies and a tax-base that has no way to pay for it. This is a recipe for disaster and it’s already happening in Japan. It could easily happen in any aging population.
The UK did take some action after theirs; after Hungerford, all semi-automatic rifles (centre-ammunition) and shotguns taking four or more rounds were banned, and after Dunblane all cartridge ammunition handguns were banned within Great Britain (except .22 single-shot, which were then banned about 5 years later).

The most recent UK shooting of note, Derrick Bird, used a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun and a .22 (bolt-action) rifle. Would it have been worse if he'd had handguns and semi-automatic rifles? We'll never know, but he did try to acquire another firearm mid-rampage so he clearly felt like he needed more firepower.
THQ Is Looking At Bringing Their Games To Linux
As a Bayesian, this sounds very intriguing. Could you expand upon GMM/provide a good reference?
How to Raise Money For Your Startup
You have already started the best thing possible - reaching out and speaking up! Additionally, like some of the ppl have suggested, take up any physical activity to take out the stress. I would personally recommend yoga and meditation, they can work wonders. I have had some amazing yoga teachers who will lend you an ear and offer holistic advice and guidance. Also if you are on the East Coast, the winters and snow can be depressing for some people. I used to get out and get some sun to beat the winter blues. Take care and continue to reach out if you need more help.
Immigration "would be" the best solution but we are talking about Japan in here. Not an "immigrant friendly" country like Canada, Australia or the US.
Simply put... Japan is "allergic" to foreigners.

Surprisingly the process to get a work/student visa in Japan is much more easier than in Australia or the US (I've applied to one or another in all these countries and it's such a breeze to do in Japan).

Despite that, immigration remains low.
For the foreigners here, last time I checked it was basically composed of about 80% of foreigners from China, 15% from Korea and the remaining 5% from the rest of the world.

I suppose the difficulty of the language and geographic location has something to do.
Racism as known in the West is rare, but the truth is, Japan has consistently failed to assimilate any foreign population and it is really difficult to explain how it is like. I guess it's definitely more like a Canadian "cultural mosaic" more than an American "melting pot". But the cultural mosaic has some sense of equilibrium. For the case of Japan it would look more like "patching the kimono with pieces of fabrics of different patterns".

The thing is, under the hood, legally speaking, Japan is very open and welcoming to foreigners, but it fails to keep them in or assimilate them.
The Most Disruptive Companies In 2012
It's a drop in replacement for MySQL, you can use the _storage engines_ that Percona provide such as ExtraDB so maybe it shouldn't differ at all?
You said it, brother (sister?). In each country there are subcultures (religious fundamentalists, usually) that have birth rates well above replacement. Secular culture has managed to peel away many of their kids in recent decades but, with the kind of uninspiring, plasticky productions currently streaming out of Hollywood / big label music, that process is about to change. Let's just say, your radio is likely to play a lot more Christian rock in your old age.
Armchair Doctoring on Hacker News, my favorite kind of thread.
Mac-Like refit boot menu
I would post a comment but I'm an introvert.
Google+ head Vic Gundotra admits he was asked to stop using Twitter
The West tried institutions (poorhouses, asylums). But forced institutionalization just isn't compatible with basic human rights. It was also expensive and failed to provide a venue for effective treatments.

Starting in the 1970s the West deinstitutionalized[1]. But at least in the US we never sufficiently funded community care, which was supposed to replace mental institutions. So the severely mentally ill end up living on the street (where they're often the victims of violence[2]) or in jails and prisons (which if you squint sort of resemble mental institutions, though without the emphasis on medical care).

Whatever we as a society try next, we need to recognize that with our current medical knowledge there are no cures for mental illnesses, only management. So our approaches need to be both humane and long-term. Returning full-circle to institutionalization in jails and prisons utterly fails those tests, offering brutal conditions, short-term containment, and usually insufficient medical care. We can do better.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognosis_of_schizophrenia#Viol...
Great advice, but I've heard it before. Any chance of an article describing what really happened for each of the problems listed, and how you solved it?
I believe the article is incorrect about one thing. Japan has a formal army. It's constitution forbids it from declaring war, but it still has quite a large military for self defense. Though, like about half the article, that is apropos of nothing.
No, it's bunk. This is one case in which Betteridge's law of headlines applies. For most people, your MB type changes with your mood that day, or with the way you interpret the ridiculously ambiguous questions in the test.
Hazel for hackers
Advice from strangers is not going to fix the underlying mental health issues here. 10 pills every day implies a pretty grave situation, one that certainly will not be addressed by exercising or daily inspiration websites.

Have you talked to your therapist unambiguously about the stagnation you describe? Have you considered trying to talk to someone else, too, who maybe follows a different approach? I am not a doctor but I imagine that such a high level of pharmaceuticals is probably warping your brain chemistry drastically on its own. If there were a way to dress the problem without so many it seems like that would be ideal.

Just keep in mind that this is about the abuse, and not about "startups" or anything going on in your life now. Horrible things happened to you that aren't your fault, and the ways your psychology adapted to those horrible things, ie your current mental health issues, are not your fault either. You need to get help from someone who is really equipped to help you much more than you need help from us.

Good luck, and remember that many other people have gone through similar things and come out the other side happy.
Then I would like to extend my appologies for the harshness of my comment.
Broadband services
What services do you expect to come out of Google fiber the coming years (eg. that require a lot of broadband)?
The highly competitive academic research environment selects for faculty who are 100% dedicated to their research and thus able to publish the most and bring in the most grant money. Such faculty, of course, expect the same dedication from their graduate students. The worst nightmare for a researcher is to have a graduate student that makes slow progress, constantly depends on the researcher for oversight, and produces few results of value. This graduate student is wasting time and resources and has little hope of successful completion.

The more assured a researcher can be that a student is completely dedicated to research, the more likely he or she will be to accept the student. For this reason, it makes sense to only list your experience in the field on your CV. But if, once you enter, you are able to work efficiently and produce good results, it should not matter what extracurricular activities you participate in. If your adviser told you to quit your part-time job, I think that it is more likely that he's frustrated by your lack of progress than that he is embarrassed that you have outside interests.