skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know who you're accusing of "turning the other side into a ridiculous caricature," me or the paper. But I'll respond as if the answer to this question is "me."

Let's imagine they published a list of all the African-Americans in their area instead. What's your gut reaction?

It could be claimed to be just a matter-of-fact reporting of data obtained in a routine government census.

But I have a feeling that race, in this country, is such a divisive issue that a lot of readers -- of all positions on the issue of race, and both African-Americans and non-African-Americans -- would read into it an implication of Us versus Them, that we should be Concerned about the distribution of African-Americans. Many readers would see an implication that this piece is supposed to be an eye-opener, deemed worthy of newspaper publication on the angle of "You may think your neighborhood doesn't have any African-Americans, but actually they're everywhere."

Now re-read the previous two paragraphs, but replace the word "race" with "gun control," and "African-Americans" with "gun owners."

I will admit that I'm deliberately making the argument as bald as possible, in a way that makes it as easy as possible to see the fallacy. When you read the way I explain it, you may say "No one believes that!"

And I would agree that almost no one consciously believes that. But a lot of human thinking is unconscious, not based on reasons, facts, and observations. Sometimes this unconscious reasoning is based on tribal psychology, Us versus Them, and that's what this article is speaking to.

Since the argument's not laid out in plain terms, it may escape the reader's conscious thought process. But if it doesn't escape the unconscious thought process -- if it makes you feel "With all the news about gun violence lately, and all those gun owners around, I don't feel safe...someone should really do something about all those gun owners..." it can sway a person's position without capturing their full attention or being subjected to the scrutiny of the rational mind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_Control_Regulations_Ac...
They do a lot worse things to people today with advanced compounds.

Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.

Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.

Materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity. (WTF)

Materials will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
Bats live in massive colonies, so diseases can spread like wildfire. That's probably why their immune systems are good, too.
Consider it from the disease's perspective.

Ebola doesn't 'target' humans. Ebola's obvious symptoms and mortality rate in humans limit its ability to spread efficiently. The flu virus or cold virus has been far more successful in penetrating the human ecosystem. Perhaps Ebola has been selected for being stable in the bat ecosystem. The mobility of bats also makes them an excellent transmission vector, which a virus would ideally want to be non-symptomatic.
Nope. He is criticizing based on consequence, which is the generation of pointless flame wars.
I had an HTC Arrive running Windows Phone 7.5 which I loved except for one thing: the lack of apps. The OP mentions this too. I wonder if they'll be able to wait this problem out like they did with the Xbox?
Heroku API down
The price war will come in 2013. Contracts have only just been put in place under the DOJ settlements. Also I suspect that Amazon may be holding since they've done a boatload of TV ads and I can't see that they raised prices. I would guess that there is a reasonable chance they'll lose money in Q4.
You're right in my case. That being said, I have no interest in competing - it's more for side projects.
The thesis of the War on Drugs is pretty much that there are abstract, amorphous dangers to recreational drug use, and the proper role of government is to provide immediate, concrete dangers so that people will stop.

It does have a certain twisted logic to it, if you ignore every piece of empirical evidence generated over the last hundred years.

Mixing Tylenol with oxy is twisted in a different way, because it replaces an abstract danger (if you take some amount in some period of time, you might become dangerously dependent) with a somewhat less abstract danger (if you take some smaller amount in some shorter period of time, you might die).
Ask HN: How should I spend a year?
I attended a prestigious public university for a year, and dropped out due to financial and family issues. After that, I was the youngest person at a Fortune 50 company, and did Linux administration for them. I hated the bureaucratic corporate environment and became interested in startups and running my own business. I immaturely left my very good job without truly thinking things through to start providing web services to local businesses. It hasn't panned out as well as I would like. After lots of meditation and reflection, I have self-actualized my number one issue, and that is discipline. In order to gain the discipline I need to reach my full potential, I want to engage in an institution(s) that will help me instill the discipline I need to succeed, ideally for a year, although I am definitely open to shorter/longer options. I have read a bit about Hacker School and feel like it is a great fit for me, so I plan to apply for it, but I am in dire need of suggestions (other than finish college. not my cup of tea.) I'm open to anything, job, internship, program, camp, etc. Thank you for taking the time to consider this, I really appreciate it.
I asked a very similar question a while back, hopefully some of the responses can help you get started:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4286902
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As a dropbox team admin for my company, I recently removed a member from the team. It explains in bright red writing (from memory) that it will remove the members entire dropbox account.

I remember, because I contacted the team member, and got him to back everything up before I procceded.

I then contacted Dropbox support, to explain how stupid this was...

My point is, that admin should have some accountability, ignoring big red writing is usually a bad idea.
I have a family member who has passed away from Alzheimer's, and I'd like to weigh in. When you face late-stage Alzheimer's, you (and the people around you) really have one of two mindsets, realizing that conventional, already-tested treatments aren't likely going to cure you, or ensure your survival much longer:

1. Accept your fate; live out the remainder of your life the best you can before your loss of memory tears apart the very fabric of who you are.

2. Try unproven, religious, traditional, etc treatments that the rest of us would consider ridiculous, and hope for the best.

I think a very valid argument could be made for #1, but not everyone weighs life with the same set of values. While it may not entirely be wise to seek in-testing treatments, it should be understandable why some would do so.
The gear isn't the problem: the dependency on a single data center is the problem. It requires a lot of software engineering effort to maintain a service that works when a data center suddenly goes away. To be fault-tolerant, Netflix has to do this engineering regardless of whether or not they own the servers. But if they use Amazon, they don't have to actually fix the servers when they break, freeing up engineering resources to fix the software.

(Why doesn't Amazon offer transparent replication? Because the price of replication is unbelievably high and most people can't believe how high it is. If you want to write to 12 replicas around the world, budget five seconds for your transaction to complete. Compare this to a MySQL database on an SSD that can do millions of writes on the same entity group in the same amount of time.

This doesn't even include the cost: 12x the storage cost, and 12x the bandwidth cost for data going from your frontend to all of the backends.)
I understand the difference. Either way, though, personal connections and legwork would have to be done both in the US and in Africa.

It's been on my mind since I made the comment; if you've interest I wouldn't mind discussing it with you if you'd like to e-mail me at the address in my profile.
This is a really great writeup, thanks for taking the time.
Bigger but this [1] test by Armadillo was more impressive in my opinion for the additional complexity involved in cutting the engine deploying a chute then cutting the chute and successfully landing from a turbulent freefall.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0qlIoSSkQ
I realise they do. I also realise they use it to maintain power, and undermine democracy and freedom... But should they?
500 people die annually due to acetaminophen poisoning, mostly from attempting to take too many painkillers which include both opiates and acetaminophen. The acetaminophen is included for the express purpose of "dissuading abuse."
I've often found it hard to find something to contribute to an open source project if I'm just seeking out issues to fix—most of the time if the issue has been up a while and isn't already fixed, it's probably not a quick and easy fix to someone not already familiar with the codebase—at least for me.

In the cases where I have either fixed bugs or added features, it's with a tool I use extensively and came across an issue in it or an area where it didn't do something I want. It's much easier for me to figure out what to do in that situation, since I have a personal interest in that feature being added.

So, in summary, a way I've found to begin contributing is to find bugs or limitations in tools you already use rather than just browsing issue lists on projects you may not be as familiar with.
> if lifespans in practice are still modest

They aren't. The article says: "For an animal of their size, [bats] also age very slowly..."

I'm assuming that, without their gene repair mechanism, they would have been more in line with other animals their size, and occasionally died of old age. So the gene repair mechanism does extend the bats' lifespan.

To do good science, of course, you'd have to confirm this by an experiment to raise some bats that lack the gene repair mechanism and measure their deaths due to old age against a control group. Or better yet, do a fantastically expensive long-term experiment comparing bat colonies with and without the DNA repair mechanism, and measure their genetic drift over time.

Of course, I haven't done those experiments. If someone else does them, and shows results contradictory to my assumption, it'll be a great scientific discovery. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it seems like it's a safe bet that the DNA repair mechansim would reduce mutation rates on its own, and anything that makes the bats live longer would also reduce mutation rates on its own, and having both longevity and DNA repair together would reduce mutation rates at least as much as either by itself.

You may say decades of lifespan is "modest" by human standards, but much more relevant comparisons would be to bats without the DNA repair mechanism -- or, if data is lacking on those, to closely related mammals of similar size.
One factor I also look at is what happens when you want to write some code on your computer and put it on your device (it does say "Hacker" at the top left).

Only Android scores well in this respect and it looks like none of the competition really cares.
"No way to collect and recycle the waste water for example." - yeah, but there was no waste water from the wash. Cherry used a waterless carwash solution that actually worked pretty well.

My husband was working for Cherry as a second job 3 days a week, and we're really sad to see it go. The money and hours were decent, and he thought it was better than being stuck in a coffee shop or something like that for a second job. He was solidly booked with customers on the days he worked, so I don't think Cherry folded for lack of customers. I also want to point out that not all Cherry car washers were social rejects who had no others options for work except for menial labor... my husband is college educated, we just needed some extra cash.

I think the real crime here, which no one has brought up, is that Cherry gave ZERO notice to the washers that it was going to fold up yesterday. We got an email last night that it was over effective immediately. I'm glad it wasn't our only source of income, but even a weeks notice to get things sorted out would have been nice. FU Cherry!
How so? The argument as I understand it is that all C89 standard-compliant compilers work with "int main" (and work correctly), regardless of whether or not the target OS has exit statuses. Not all compilers work with "void main", and those that do will yield executables that always produce an exit status of zero. While there are times you might write C code that doesn't need to be portable (in which case "int main" and "void main" are effectively the same if your system doesn't use exit statuses), there is no good reason for a C textbook to teach the non-standard approach that only works in certain non-portable cases. If a textbook does so, that's likely a sign that the authors made other poor decisions.
I certainly don't want to be one to defend Java from criticisms of overengineering. But on this point, I can't blame them much.

The Servlet spec was finalized more than 15 years ago, when CGI scripts were the mainstream server-side tech and browsers were circa version 3. The domain "google.com" wasn't registered until 3 months later. I think Servlets were reasonably well done for the time. The web was obviously dominant, but FTP was still widely used, and it certainly wasn't clear that newer protocols wouldn't be important as well. Rails didn't turn up until 8 years later.

One could certainly blame the java folks for stopping there, but there wasn't a lot of advantage to be gained from redoing the foundations in a way that forced everybody to rework all of their existing servlet code. And as you say, the community was making solid progress on their own, so it's probably better that Sun didn't interfere.
Top Science Longreads of 2012
Look at the reply on the sibling comment. Your position is debunked and your willingness to believe it speaks volumes of your personal failings.
I've really enjoyed my Nokia 920 so far.

I find myself most interested in the OP's point that Microsoft should offer a flagship Windows phone ala the Google Nexus line.

The app situation is meager by comparison to the two big boys in mobile, but I've been able to get by well enough.

Like the OP, I really like the default mail client. It's way better in my opinion than the Android client. For one thing, it doesn't Base64 encode everything [1]. I also prefer Bing maps to Google maps. The virtual keyboard is really solid, and the predictive text beats what I've dealt with on my wife's Galaxy Nexus. If you're interested, I wrote up a mini review at my blog a month back [2].

[1] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2630
[2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/lumia-920
Easter Eggs in popular computer programs
> My understanding of why we didn't evolve to have better gene repair and longer lives is that the ideal death and mutation rates in terms of species survival is some finite number greater than zero. Near-immortality, eternal youth and perfect genome repair would be great from an individual perspective, but from a species perspective, those things reduce the ability for genetic innovation.

If this is the dominant effect in how organisms deal with aging, it can explain why we observe aging all around us in the world, but it predicts that, if you track a population over time, you will see lifespans creeping steadily upward. I don't believe this is actually observed.

The phenomenon you describe is generally invoked to explain sexual reproduction. But it is not unheard of for a particular ecological niche to be dominated by a clonal organism; it's just that those clonal organisms sometimes (inevitably?) "fail" very suddenly in the face of new competition. So both ends of the tension between individual good / species-level good can be observed in the world, and it seems that in the case of sexual reproduction species-level good mostly dominates.

I'm not aware (disclaimer: I am an uninformed layperson) of similar conflicts between immortal species and aging ones for an ecological niche. The picture I have of the world is that certain niches are filled by immortal organisms, and other, more macroscopic niches are filled by mortal ones. Though typing this out makes me wonder about things like jellyfish.

To sum up, without seeing much evidence of strong selection for increasing lifespans, or increasing reproductive spans (the individual perspective counts!), and with the general bias not to invoke group selection where individual selection will do, the mortgaging-the-future approach to aging seems like a better explanation to me.
Here ya go

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nafax

I don't recommend investing in tiny enterprises in developing countries, because you're heading for shakedown street at that point. But if you think it's a growth sector, go for it.
Heroku is down for some apps
Any companies hiring RoR devs? I'm a US/EU citizen (live in SF). London or Berlin preferred, but open to anywhere in Europe.
As someone who went to medical school, this makes a lot of sense. 4th year of medical school was filled with elective time and could have been mostly skipped.

Don't think combining that year with others would be hard at all. On the other hand I don't necessarily agree that residencies necessarily need to be shorter ( as someone else commented here ) At least, im not sure to what advantage it would serve.

Residency is a matter of real life on-the-job experience. You can start graduating people early but then you are just graduating less experienced people. It's hard to compress the same work experience in a shorter amount of time, at least with the hours restrictions that are in place. And unlike my 4th year of medical school, my residency had much less downtime.
For Mozilla, Josh Matthews made a page to find mentored bugs: http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/ which is a good resource to finding a task and somebody to help you.

If you're a bit more brave, you can just dive into bugzilla.mozilla.org and find something you want to fix, but honestly it's full of junk bugs and without having a feel for things, you'll have a hard time.
You're blowing this a little out of proportion.

Replicating a few petabytes of static videos is not rocket science nor cost prohibitive for a company the size of Netflix. Nor is engineering a system that can withstand a datacenter outage. Especially one as trivial as Netflix which is largely read-only. Thousands of systems of higher complexity are engineered to that standard, many of them are much larger than netflix.

You rarely hear of Google outages, or iTunes, or Youtube, or [insert six dozen other popular brands], do you? Yes it can happen to the best of them, but the EC2 outages are really piling up lately.
So if an italian has a better solution, then DARPA have failed on your point 1. because he can use that against americans (i.e block their spectrum), and DARPA won't know about it.

Citation on your point 2. Where does it say anywhere that Government can only spend it's money on employing Americans?
How is this even remotely interesting?
Netflix: Spitting out 1 of 120 different encoded version of a video to a client device after its been authenticated.

So, you've got an authentication layer, which can pass a token to the browser or physical hardware client access device. This should be very lightweight, no? Even with millions of users, this database shouldn't be enormous.

And then you've got your encoded libraries. This should be data being spit off platers on CDN networks. CDNs aren't hard anymore. Cloudfront is cheap, or you can go with Akamai, Limelight, Level3, etc. Properly built, you should never NOT be able to serve from somewhere in the CDN, even if the serving location isn't optimal.

Yes, this is HEAVILY simplified. I've left out recommendations, their encoding process/infrastructure, etc. This is not atomic data that is being replicated in realtime; these are videos that are lazily encoded, stored, and then served on demand.

It should not be this hard for this use case.
Are you sure your number one issue is discipline?
I'm in a similar position to you and I had also realized that I lacked discipline, but nowadays I think it's actually a matter of doing what you're into.

And recently I came across one of Paul Graham's essays that resonates with my thinking.
Quoting pg (http://paulgraham.com/hs.html):
"Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good."
The capital investment for inventions a couple of centuries ago is totally different than today. We live in the age of Big Science, where scientific advancement requires large teams of highly skilled people using very expensive equipment and instrumentation. A lot of the advancements in physics in the late 19th century and early 20th century were done by one or two researchers with small scale university resources. Today, these same sorts of advancements are done by international teams of scientists using particle accelerators that require massive government investment by multiple countries.