skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My theory: many disorders are stress-related. Receiving care - even if it's a sham - relieves stress.

Going deeper: we human animals have limited physiological resources. Are they channelled into healing or surviving? If you are in a dangerous environment, then it's survival first, healing second. Therefore, a sense of safety will promote healing.

A placebo provides just that.
> It is likely not possible to convince a diverse group such
as the group of GNU maintainers to agree on coding standards for C++

...bluntly asking: why? (In any closed-source C++ project, if someone writes a "style guide and coding standard" thing and the project manager supports it, people start writing "compliant" code, grunting or moaning at first but they do, and then it becomes part of "company culture" and people find it natural to write code by it - I believe with Google's C++ was like this too... why does it has to be harder for an open source project?)
Making the situation even more absurd, none of that money is actually going to the people who do the research. In fact, many scientific journals charge the researchers to publish their work, then turn around and charge anyone who wants to buy a copy. Ridiculous.
This is my first company, but I've found that by having a lower valuation cap on my note two great things have happened. Some of my more powerful investors have felt comfortable introducing me to people who don't give two shits about the latest consumer web fad or investment trends, found my terms very easy to buy in on, and have been enormously helpful. Second, a lot of my friends have found they couldn't recapitalize or raise an A. Having the terms that I do, it was pretty easy for my investors to re-up when I needed it.
We could just pay a living wage to everyone -- working or not. Those wishing to earn more would work for the extra pay.
Christmas Lights on Google
Bookmark Dump of a Hacker News Rookie
So if we were to have to make sense of a crypted message from an alien civilization we knew nothing about, this would be equivalent with cracking a one-time pad cyphered message and therefore simply impossible? (this is the original context I thought of when asking the top question actually)
I think this is a fallacy. In my experience of the big firms law firms have already developed very clean convertible notes, and there are many that are public, leading to a larger trend in easy terms. By having an entrepreneur friendly first investor (not necessarily lead) agreeing to "clean terms" (independent of valuation), it seems most other investors in a round come on with little friction, even if it might require a call from one of your existing investors/ commitments.
Two words: peak oil.
It's great for cheap airlines. For major carriers there are better tools (e.g. ITA Matrix).
Google Flights' instantaneous search allows you to freely explore the option space opening up new ways of travel planning. Free for spring break and don't know where to go? Set your travel dates and pan around the map looking for deals.

Kayak doesn't even come close to this. At best, you can set the month of travel; useless for most busy people.
> no need for an app, because the list of stuff to do would be rather short.

For me, one of the keys of a successful todo list is to keep the list short to begin with. A long todo list is too daunting, but a short one is motivating. I write them down on paper instead of using software, which I think just adds a layer of overhead.
We're such a small segment of history, though. We're just a blip on the timeline of the universe. Look at how our population has expanded in the last 100 years alone...some things are just unsustainable.
While South Africa does have broadband access, most people sit on sub 3GB caps. The actual broadband penetration is also low - 2% for fixed line, and 11% for mobile access. The mobile broadband (3g) is metered per mb and frequently drops down to edge. It is improving, but as with the rest of the developing world, if you want to actually target most users you need to use SMS or very basic html sites that can work on older S40 Nokia phones and blackberries.

Obviously a fancy desktop sized page that relies on java script is just completely out.
Bing Flights is just Kayak wrapped in a different user interface.
How isn't it?

What is a valid situation where putting your video onto a website and then talking directly to the people you're marketing to in your video not giving them permission?
I don't have a link right now, but I've seen lots of statistics that show much of the remaining IE6 traffic coming from China. Feature phone usage is also most prevalent in developing countries.

I believe that out-of-date software and slow connections are highly correlated. New hardware and fast connections are the most expensive part of computing. Old (or very low cost) hardware doesn't run up-to-date software. So there you have the reason for that correlation.
Here are my notes for when I tried installing Gitlab on a fresh install of CentOS 6.3 a couple of months ago. It goes up to the point of running `rails server` to get you started, and the rest is like setting up a normal Rails application.

https://gist.github.com/4362544
QR Code Alternative Startup for sale
I built this platform, client gem and iPhone app the past few months. It is still in beta but fully operational. I want to sell it to anyone who is interested. There is a client portal where clients can manage their flavors, an admin area and an API.

Enter any of these codes on the site for information.

QS|HELP
QS|ABOU

Feel free to email me at live.com: jared dot dobson
> Same here. My travel agent can always find me cheaper international tickets than what I could find on the internet.

Funny, I've always had the opposite experience: every time I've used a travel agent, they always found more expensive flights with worse timings (time of day, layover, etc), and I end up requesting specific flights based on what I've found online.
That depends whether we work out hard AI. I am not sure in the past 50 years if we have made much real progress towards writing programs that will automatically produce programs of greater scale and complexity than themselves.
> Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.

Except, once you start a regime of easy and ubiquitous surveillance, you cannot guarantee that those risks will remain small.

Surveillance is useless without absolute secrecy of who is being surveilled and why. The potential harms of such an institution should be obvious. Which is why American jurisprudence allowed such surveillance only with court orders, or the assent (sometimes after the fact) of special courts like the FISA court.

What we are fighting today is surveillance, through technological means, of everybody all the time. It is therefore absolutely guaranteed that a concomitant amount of government operations and agenda, related to this surveillance, will become secret and unaccountable. At this point, persecution and abuse is not just a possibility, it is guaranteed.
I'm not a Ruby programmer. I've never used Unicorn. I had only vaguely heard of it. I found it completely obvious in context.

If you get bent out of shape over some pretty mild slang, there are loads of companies out there who'll take your money for as staid a response as you'd like.
Augmenting OS performance with the GPU
If only they'd just put a wavy black bar with the text "aaargh, the pirate version be better anyway." Maybe a Mutiny! button that takes you to their site.
>and only look for people in the SF bay.

This may be true in small startups which cannot necessarily afford looking for candidates beyond the bay area or internationally. It's expensive flying a candidate in who has a 10% chance of becoming a potential hire. Then when you give them an offer, they've probably already decided to move to the bay area and are choosing between 10 different offers. If they're outside the country, you need legal help for immigration.

"Only look for people in the SF bay" is not true for any tech company larger than 400 people.
I'm really curious how much longer github can offer so much free service. It's not just git but effectively free web hosting as well, at least for statically served pages.

It seems like it's only a matter of time before something will have to give. Either they'll have to start throttling web serving or cover the site in ads like sourceforge or something

I guess I'd better sign up and start paying ASAP to help be part of the solution
Since my home router and wireless access points all run Linux, I can play all kinds of sadistic games with routing, tunneling, traffic shaping, etc.

One of the experiments I did a while back was creating a "satellite Internet connection from halfway around the globe" simulator on a dedicated wireless SSID. Basically, I created a new SSID and used Linux's traffic control/queueing discipline stuff to limit that SSID's outbound throughput to 32 kbps, limit inbound throughput to 64 kbps, add 900 milliseconds of latency on sent and received packets, and randomly drop 4% of packets in/out. Very, very few sites were even remotely usable. It was astonishing.

I think one of the most useful products that could ever be created for web developers is a "world Internet simulator" box that sits between your computer and its Internet connection. (Maybe it plugs into your existing wireless router and creates a new wireless network.) It would have a web interface that shows you a map of the world. You click a country, and the simulator performs rate shaping, latency insertion, and packet loss matching the averages for whatever country you clicked. Then devs can feel the pain of people accessing their websites from other countries.

(Thinking about this for a minute, it could probably be done for about $30 using one of those tiny 802.11n travel routers and a custom OpenWRT build. It would just be a matter of getting the per-country data. Hmmmmm...)
I built this platform, client gem and iPhone app the past few months. It is still in beta but fully operational. I want to sell it to anyone who is interested. There is a client portal where clients can manage their flavors, an admin area and an API.

Enter any of these codes on the site for information.

QS|HELP
QS|ABOU

Feel free to email me at live.com: jared dot dobson
Redesigned iOS App Switcher: Auxo (for jailbreak)
I agree with you but one thing: you don't have to build anything locally. Just pushing to bitbucket as backup would have done it. It does not have to be a locally hosted solution.
Thumbs.js : Add touch support to your browser with jQuery
Add touch support to your browser with thumbs.js – a small, transparent, and syntax-less library.Small, transparent, and syntax-less library that adds touch support to your browser.
I tried using Hipmunk a few times, but the prices were always at least a hundred dollars more than if I had just gone to Orbitz.com and dealt with their crap interface--I've always found that Orbitz has prices at least as good as anywhere else, so I tend to judge against them.

Google, on the other hand, gave me exactly what I needed at prices competitive to Orbitz. It was a bit disappointing that when I was done, I had to buy the tickets through the carrier's site, but it still found me a flight at a good time for a good price.
I've used a travel agent once; she found me a trans-continental flight for about $200 less than I could find anywhere else, but for some reason I've never tried calling again.
Once I noticed this and start evaluating products via this angle I started feeling a lot more confident in my purchasing decisions.

I think they've been more successful too, not too sure though.
The Duke Nukem Forever of window management, released at last.
Oh yeah, I remember that. I assume I'm already on plenty of watchlists for being moderately vocal about thinking the entire situation is bullshit. Maybe it's time I look under my car again.
Agreed. Does todotxt.com handle the fact that I might have the document open on 3 or 4 computers and a tablet or 2 and a phone and handle the potential for conflicts etc...?
BlackBerry10 browser smokes iOS 6 & Windows Phone 8 in comparison test video
Build WordPress plugins with WordPress Framework
I'm from a poor rural area of Ohio too! Unfortunately, I don't have a success story (yet). It's great to hear about people escaping this awful state.
‘You can’t make money with a consensus accurate prediction’
Indeed, many who extol the virtues of cloud computing somehow have a blind spot to the fact that network coverage on this globe is not even. Actually it would be nice to see a color coded world map of network strength, is there one?

Bad network coverage is a problem that can be addressed many ways. Shameless plug: I've been working on offline wikipedia that by its nature is always available and fast, everywhere: http://mpaja.com/mopedi I'm sure there are many unexplored niches where the cpu power in your hand can be put to good use without needing the network.
Black Isle needs a Kickstarter to Kickstart a Kickstarter
... and ITA Matrix was bought by Google, and its latest incarnation is Google Flights.
I'm pretty certain he means 2 digits of hours, given the reference in the parent comment to 10s of hours of downtime
Humans don't like to think about the fact that everything will end for them someday. Most people can barely plan for a week, much less for a century from now. Humanity's downfall will almost certainly stem from the shortsightedness of the majority.
truly amazing story. would have held my interest as a scene in a bruce sterling or neal stephenson novel. thanks for sharing it.
> Does anyone know exactly how this works?

Most travel agents on long-distance, well travelled routes work through consolidators. These consolidators buy tickets (or promise to buy tickets) in bulk far in advance, and then re-sell them later. This is what I've heard about segments like USA <-> India.
I frequently find myself missing most of these when I work with Java after using C#.
It's ironic that this article is on google docs, which means I have to declare my identity by logging in to google in order to read it.
Its not about geography, it's about infrastructure.

For a good couple of years visiting my parents in inland South Africa (just outside the major sprawl of the PWV), I was regularly seeing 1 to 2kbps speeds on dial up modem. South Africa only has one phone company, Telkom.

The price of copper affects the quality of the telephone lines. We live in an area that's quickly growing, but the availability of copper is low. So there's shared telephone lines, which creates noise, which slows down modem connections.

Yeah, they can string out more copper cables to work through the shared lines, but when those copper cables disappear as quickly as they are put up, it is very difficult to make progress. Copper theft in South Africa is big.

And the shared telephone lines are deemed acceptable because Telkom support it only for telephone calls, not modem connections. They are reluctant to fix things that are not broken.

So landlines are effectively useless in fast growing areas, there's not enough copper cable to go around to give people a decent clear line to a dial-up ISP, let alone broadband.

I've moved my parents over to mobile broadband now, with a Mifi device that appeared on the market last year, so those download speeds are hopefully a thing of the past.

Essentially, developing countries need to skip their subpar landlines and invest heavily in mobile broadband abilities. They can't afford the long term cost of replacing copper cables over and over and over.
I lived in NYC (Ohio -> NYC -> Cali) before moving to the bay area!

If you want any pointers on NYC or with your programming studies let me know.

Cheers and good luck either way :)
It seems like energy may soon be able to be removed from your list. Solar and new battery tech could easily make energy nearly free.

Robots might help bring down health care costs the same way that LASIK is now relatively cheap compared to what it once was.

Food should be cheaper. It's not because the government props up the prices.

That leaves only rent. Arguably rent is only high in desirable places. So I'm not sure it's universally true that rent only goes up.
OS X has a handy GUI tool called the Network Link Conditioner, which lets you easily set up simulated network conditions. The inbuilt profiles are a bit optimistic, I find, but it's easy to add more.

It's just tc or the BSD equivalent under the hood, but it's point and click and easy to turn off.

More details at: http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/25/network-link-conditioner-i...
Personally, I started using Steve Losh's t for my tasks recently, and I love it.

http://stevelosh.com/projects/t/

If I ever want/need to, I can always access/modify my tasks file via Dropbox on any machine or phone. But I don't. Fact is, if I'm ever actually doing work, I'm usually on my Chromebook and have access to the terminal. Moreover, that's when I'm actually completing tasks, or adding new ones.

It's honestly a great, simple, no-bullshit system. You should give it a shot.
There are software solutions for this, though you would need to specify the speed. For example, http://mschrag.github.com.
SEO: Making lousy content slightly more prominent for a short period, and charging a surprising amount of money to customers who dont understand technology.
C code can call into rust: http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/rust.html#extern-functions
There's a tampering proxy named Charles that allows this sort of thing on the fly, and for mobile devices if you so wish. I find it absolutely indispensable for finding the heavier parts of websites I'm working on.

http://i.imgur.com/69xFu.png
there's also ats [http://www.ats-lang.org/]. somewhere on my long-term todo list is to write a library of efficient data strucures in ats, to take advantage of some of its safety guarantees.
Actually I disagree on your first point. My first job was maintainenance programming, and for some reason I stuck around and did it for 3 years. That has taught me the suck of trying to maintain and work with shitty code.

Now, X years later I still tell stories about that first job, and I always remember how I felt maintaining spaghetti code when I write code.

BUT, I find that most of my fellow programmers either have not worked as m.programmers; or have done so but didn't notice it, because I guess they don't have a built-in desire for arete or just didn't want to get upset about their work and chose to ignore the crappy code.
Are you so naive as to think that the real terrorists will be communicating in the open? "Real" terrorists will use Tor, TrueCrypt, PGP, Steganography and any other tool in the toolkit to hide their tracks. I don't see how a gov't surveillance apparatus is going to catch any of them.

IIRC, in 9/11 the problem wasn't that there wasn't enough surveillance, because information regarding the attacks DID reach the White House, but it was apparently ignored.
The phrase might be a fallacy, but the idea is not. Founders often think about getting investors to pay a premium for a great startup. However if your goal is to get helpful investors, founders should consider paying a premium to get the investors that they want on board.

Of course this only works if you are capable of choosing investors well.
Sigh.

As a developer I have a problem to solve. GPL code comes with strings attach that LIMIT my ability to use it since the code I am writing does not have GPL compatible licensing. Thus it limits me as a developer.

I don't miss the free software ideology - I just don't care about it. I care about the software I write and of what the users want, nothing more and nothing less.
Hopefully these reviews aren't categorized as "manipulative"

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/produ...

There is some amazing satire in Amazon reviews. It would be a shame if it was all lost.
Seems very nice and useful.

I don't know if this is the right way, but Apple should definitely find a way for
- Easy turn on/off Wi-fi, 3G, etc,
- Closing all running apps at once.
Dr. Memory: Memory Debugger for Windows and Linux
Show HN: Facebook Photo Messaging that doesn't suck
> Placebo interventions were again not found to have important clinical effects in general but may influence patient-reported outcomes in some situations

But doesn't this matter?

As it says in the article of course, feeling better when you're not actually better can be dangerous for potentially lethal ailments; but in diseases that don't kill you, feeling better means a lot.
Does all Citrix hardware for a region go down simultaneously?
Ok, how about another example: you buy a box or two of Cuban cigars in Canada and smuggle them home to the US in your suitcase. This is a crime, but millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens have done stuff like this.
>Health-care is not cheaper.

That's not a fair comparison. Modern healthcare is not cheaper, but healthcare equivalent to what was available a generation or 2 ago is.

>Food is only slightly cheaper.

Food has pretty steadily been declining as a fraction of disposable income. It would be declining even more dramatically if it weren't being offset by an increase in eating outside the home.
Neat -- I'm still on OS X 10.6 and didn't know about this. Thanks for the pointer!

I guess the advantage of a dedicated pain box is that any device, regardless of operating system, could use it. Network Link Conditioner (and the two pieces of software mentioned so far by siblings of your comment) are all OS X-specific. (That's another webdev gripe for another day.)
++

I use Skyscanner here in Europe for regional and international flights, however really the prices are only useful as an indication. For example, one flight I found the cheapest option was Ryanair, but when I actually booked it the price was €10 cheaper than listed on Skyscanner.
how does fossil do versioning of the issue tracker? i tried using a setup like that for a while, with ditz as the issue tracker. it turned out to be really inconvenient to have my issues versioned along with my code as part of the same repo - i want to navigate around in my code's history and branch layout with the issue tracker conceptually being an entirely separate repo that always points to HEAD unless i explicitly go scroll back in it.
Make me a world with Tychaia
I think the problem with laws like the one you mentioned is that they aren't perceived as a threat because of selective enforcement. Assuming your posting reflects the legal situation correctly, many people who consider themselves law abiding citizens have committed a felony, but it is only enforced on, say, the guy who gets into an argument with a cop at a traffic stop and then has his vehicle searched.

While that is much worse than a law that can and will be enforced broadly, people will paradoxically seem to perceive it as less of a threat. The problem is that there are many such laws, which accumulate into a weapon the authorities have against you. You may be accused of something totally absurd (putting up a light installation in public), but instead of having to back down after discovering you aren't a terrorist, the authorities will find a law that will allow them to hold you responsible for their excessive reaction, or at least "punish" you for them embarrassing themselves.

This is why I think society would, to some degree, benefit from radical transparency. If all crimes were punished, people would be much more motivated to actually fight unjust, overly broad or unspecific laws, because everybody knows that they will be affected.

Personally, I have made a conscious decision to go out of my way to preserve my ability to start every unwanted encounter with a cop by asking him for the reason he stopped me and for his badge number (a right I have in my country), even though that may not be what I would actually do. However, that means that I cannot so some things I consider OK but aren't legal. But then, I live in a country with reasonably simple and understandable laws, even for a layperson.
We don't need - we no longer grow our populations exponentially.