skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been addicted to coffee before, quit it for a couple of years, then chose to start drinking it again. It wasn't nearly as bad for me as described here. Sure, it's a week in which your life sucks more than usual, and you have a kind of constant nagging headache. But then it's over, and you're fine. It's really nothing like a heroin addict going cold turkey; though I've never tried heroin, from what I've heard of going cold turkey on heroin, it's far more harrowing. Perhaps the OP is exaggerating slightly, or perhaps he had a stronger reaction than I did. Given other people I've talked to who have quit caffeine, their experience is about like mine; a week or so of nagging headaches and just feeling kind of lousy (like a low-grade flu), and then you're fine.

I decided later on that I really liked the regularity of coffee; something hot and stimulating every morning, that I would be able to look forward to. I also like the taste of coffee (once I acquired a taste for it). And caffeine does improve productivity; the additional wakefulness and concentration are helpful. Now, when you get addicted, you lose that benefit; the same amount of caffeine puts you back at your baseline performance. But I can, on occasion, have a second cup of coffee when I need a little boost; it's a lot easier for me to do that when I'm drinking coffee regularly, since if I have caffeine when I'm not drinking it regularly, I find it makes me a little too jittery and anxious. Being used to it helps smooth out its effects.

And furthermore, there is research that has shown that caffeine can be neuroprotective. There are several pieces of research linking caffeine intake to reduced incidents of Alzheimers, in both mice: http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/16938404/reload=0;jsession... and humans: http://epicentre.massey.ac.nz/EJC/Stuff/PastPapers/Papers_20...

Now, that's not to say that caffeine isn't without its downsides. That week of withdrawal symptoms did suck; and if I need to quit again, or don't have access to caffeine for a few days, it sucks all over again (especially if I'm too sick to drink coffee, I now wind up with withdrawal symptoms on top of my existing problem). And for some people coffee is too hard on the stomach, or can cause other problems like anxiety; whether that's the case for you depends on your body.

Caffeine can be either helpful or harmful, depending on the person and how you use it. The harm generally is fairly mild. I started drinking it this time around consciously, knowing full well what it's like to quit, and knowing what the advantages are, and I decided that the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, at least for myself.
To be fair, Apple isn't doing a lot to undo that misleading. His anecdote isn't the first I've heard.
You know the thing about majoring on the minors? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for intellectual pondering of almost any question, but let's not forget that before dealing with the ethics of enhancing soldiers, we might also need to consider the ethics of using them at all.
Your home in the cloud in 2013
Ever wanted to make some fresh-roasted coffee from the comfort of your bed using your smartphone? You might soon be able to...
For posterity, I think the above comment is a great example of a "middlebrow dismissal."
It looks like a simple browser based writer and a minimalistic blogging platform in one thing.

I like it pretty much. Especially the comments section under each post.

Keep up the good work!
Most network programs lose their connections after roaming, including SSH and Web apps like Gmail.

Gmail.com has been a roaming-safe/disconnect-tolerant web app for quite some time now. It is even tolerant of huge disparities in time, as far as SSL will allow it to be.

I wonder what Gmail client they're talking about...
This actually exists now [1]. All that is left is to scale it up. They could probably even make versions of the pods that'll work with existing tracks.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7148731.stm
Do as the Icelanders do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name
I don't think 3 cups is that much really, except maybe if they're all Starbucks Venti brewed coffees. If you drank more quitting would be harder.
Right. And if the original site is down, the site will appear down even if accessed via a proxy. Saying the proxy is "down" is a misnomer in this case; the proxy itself is probably not down. However, using a proxy still won't enable users to reach a website that is down.

Neither the parent comment nor the torrentfreak piece are referring to mirrors.
I wish DHH would have chosen something a bit more battle-tested than something he whipped up. Yes, Basecamp... that's still only one app. It's fair to say that it's hard to know what David doesn't know.
The phenomenon you describe is called "chunking".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
There have been rules for this for centuries in the UK. Pre-hyphenated names wre combined on marriage as
<woman's_family_name>-<man's_family_name>
On two people with such names marrying the final married name is
<first_part_of_woman's_name>-seond_part_of_man's_name>
Archaic, I know, but there it is.
I guess it all breaks down if you don't follow the rules in the first place, and since the rules are just some of the arcana of the british class system, who knows and who cares about them?
Food for thought: the only reason traffic jams happen is because humans are imperfect creatures that can't maintain a uniform speed (barring a total-closure collision or some other abnormal event).

Imagine the impact on humans if traffic jams just vanished. Engineers have known for a while that even in the heaviest congestion (think 405 or 580) it's usually only a mistake by a driver that will completely stop traffic. I wouldn't mind an auto-drive that was just speed control, enforced in situations of congestion. Rather than one person braking too hard and completely stopping a mile of 880, everybody gets programmed to travel at a fixed speed.

A lot of things to work out there, but if vehicles worked together with the road to maintain their own speed, traffic would be light years better.
Using nanotechnology to extend battery life
I don't really think that is something to be worried about. Most of these people aren't coders by profession, they just want some little customizations to whatever form or theme they happen to be using.

A good parallel for your comment would be: "I'm just concerned about people that learn VBA but not really Visual Basic itself, just the bare minimum needed to use Excel macros."
Consuming large amounts of them can cause you to have temporary bursts of pleasure, which then cause you to crave them more when they are missing. Have you never had the experience of eating something salty, and realizing that you craved more, to the point where you ate too much salt? Or had some sugar, and then had a sugar crash a little while later, where you got grumpy until you could have something to eat?
> Asking these questions is admitting to the wishful thinking that competitive optimization should lead to an optimum. Such is not the case, competitive optimization leads to an equilibrium and not to an optimum.

Well, that explains a lot about capitalism and social inequality.
I totally agree, and the article is well-written... but haven't we heard this already? It feels like Amy Hoy's core ideas: 1- start with an audience, not an idea. 2 - observe customers in their natural habitat (the sales safari); do not ask them direct questions. 3- find pain points 4- Market to a group you are part of.

Maybe the author is taking Amy's class, 30x500? I'm not even taking it and I know all this :). It's been blogged for a while now.
Ah cool, I was foozy... Hit me up with an email by picking any word at my username .org :)
Barack Obama: 80 days of Twitter
Issues of liability would be interesting to deal with...
If you don't mind, could you explain what your problems with acidity were?

I've had a few issues over the last year or so and I'm only just making the link back to an acidic diet (diet coke, spicy food and chocolate being the main ones!)
According to Wikipedia[1] there have been several hoax articles that lasted even longer than this one.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...
Exactly. The focus of the whole story is on caffeine, but dropping caffeine is quite minor in comparison to eating better, sleeping better, and exercising more. I think it's general consensus that caffeine withdrawal takes no more than a week.
Fabulous! I didn't know they had gotten the funding to go ahead with that system. I really hope it transforms the way people think about Heathrow, in so doing it will generate something one can point to without any use of the word 'imagine if there existed ...'
Of course. My main point wasn't the use of querySelector per se, but the ability to access the exact DOM element(s) you need without crazy querying or traversal.

While the DOM API isn't perfect by any means, and jQuery fills that gap really well, there are still times where the OOP nature of the DOM gets you exactly what you want with minimal faff.

The other problem is the relative obscurity of it thanks to jQuery and crowd-sourced DOM documentation (via MDN).
A friend of mine is the programmer behind ommwritter. It's a really good piece of software for writters.
Good catch. It was a mistake. Two or four negations would have been semantically correct (if ugly). Three is wrong.
I can't speak to salt, but the classic explanation for sugar and high fructose corn syrup is Robert Lustig's UCSF presentation[0]. Midway through he discusses the differences between HFCS and sugar in how they metabolized, including the brain aspects. (Hint: consider the long-term effects of alcohol up there.) Definitely worth the 90 minute investment of attention.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Yes, these are fascinating new ethical questions.

watching legions of homeless, mentally ill vets mill on the street below
Dante’s Infernet
Tech news pilot "Just You Wait" from WHYY, producers of "Fresh Air"
It's always pained me that the only AAA publisher/developer to maintain strong Mac support through thick and thin has been the one whose games I have no interest in (no slight intended, just not into MMOs, strategy, and hack 'n' slash).
See also: http://feathe.rs/
This is what the LSB[1] is for.

[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb
I'm the one in the Digital Detox segment! :)
Some thoughts on Entrepreneurship as a College student
Lessons from 2012 from an engineer
The parent poster is trying to highlight the 0.01% of PirateBay that is legitimate, so that the other 99.9% of "sharing" can be somehow legitimized by association.

Alternatively, they are trying to make a snarky suggestion that this isn't HN material.
The Sunday Evening Feeling
"The Pirate Bay" is not all of Bittorrent. Just because TPB is down doesn't mean your torrents that use other public trackers just stop working.

I'm not understanding the point you're trying to make.
Sometimes what helps me is poring through WP themes or frameworks to get ideas for placement, sizing, etc. This is a great resource, though.
Problem with a Raspberry Pi with a slow external hard drive
which is exactly the issue.
When I was in university it got to the point where drinking tap water was difficult; forget orange juice, coffee and pasta sauce. In addition to the physical pain of consuming anything that was remotely acidic, the frequent (6-8/day) bowel movements of sometimes very bloody stool is what finally made me go visit my doctor.

Those days I was pulling all-nighters every week or so, sleeping 4-5 hours on nights where I actually went to bed, ate complete crap (typical university student), and hadn't done any sort of exercise other than walking to-and-from class for a solid 12 months. Yes, I was drinking 3-6 cups of coffee and/or energy drinks a day, but it was when I fixed all of the other stuff (mainly sleeping & eating better) that I started to not feel like death every day.
Yup I know the reasons and implications (have written my own terminal emulators in the past). I just felt the list is not complete without the biggest(?) annoyance of them all.

I wish someone would write a "dumb screen" that simply plays back the last n kb when I re-attach and otherwise doesn't try to emulate a terminal inside my terminal. screen and tmux (which I use heavily) are terrible crutches from a distant past that do way more (and poorly) than most people actually want.

I know mosh tries to fill a different niche (high latency links) so take this less as a stab against mosh but more as a general rant about the fact that it's 2013 and my laptop, which can render photo-realistic 3d videogames in realtime, is still not able to seamlessly resume a handful of text-mode terminal sessions without resorting to one of the above kludges.

Well, first world problems, shoemakers son always goes barefoot, etc...
Honestly I closed the tab less than 10 seconds after opening it. The clicking sounds are more distracting than the dog barking outside.
The distracting sound effect brings back vivid memories of saving my progress in Resident Evil.
You can disable it. Click on the top left, and then on the 'sounds' link.
My number one use case is tethered mobile phone on a train. For everthing else I just use vanilla ssh and screen. You are right that if you just need mobility between office1, office2, coffeeshop, and home ssh with screen is probably all you really need.

I don't think mosh's developers really promote it as anything more than an experiment on improving shell connections on a high packet loss high latency mobile data plan.
IPhone-complimentary watch concept
I'm not sure telepresence is sufficient to win a war. People generally agree that when you have a human soldier standing on every street corner, you've won. I think a telepresence robot on every street corner would not have the same effect.

One reason is that even in war, most people are reluctant to kill enemy soldiers. But few would have much trouble sabotaging robots. So telepresence robots won't cause the civilian population to accept the new regime.

Despite some effort, I have not managed to cause people to form the sort of bond with a telepresence robot that naturally forms with people thrown together.
FYI, the dominant theory is that ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease, and the inflammation in the colon has nothing to do with what is eaten. Instead, it's due to the immune system deciding to attack the intestinal tissue. It might be provoked indirectly by things like stress, but coffee or other food are not thought to trigger flare-ups.

(That said, some people find they can reduce their discomfort by modifying their diet once a flare-up begins. But there is no evidence that diet either provokes flare-ups or induces remission.)
do you generate the website snapshots manually or using some headless browser or a 3rd party service ? .. just curious :)
Awesome Games Done Quick charity marathon is ON
Sort of agree. Improving the quality of soldiers is about the worst way to go about making the world a better place. It's like the ambulance and the bottom of the cliff, but worse.
Yes. I see war as just about the ultimate unethical human activity.

The (non)ethics of enhancing soldiers and using robots pale in comparison to the (non)ethics of participating in warfare and weapon design and manufacture in the first place.
Distraction free writing and the simplest blogging platform in one
No, I don't think it is atypical; that's what quitting caffeine is like for me, too. There are some people who have a terrible time, though.
Google hate you? Or are you just stupid?
Thanks. Can you say more re: comments? Would you prefer something like a Disqus?
Given that all their games work fine with Wine, this is likely a hint to MS not to make the app store mandatory in the future.
Lifting of the Veil
I take all the shots manually. If I were to do it automatically (maybe I will in the future) I would use this: http://url2png.com/ - great results.
"As a meta-note... these kinds of questions probably belong more in Quora or Stack Exchange than on HN."

I disagree. That's obviously preference. I would find this sort of question odd on Stack Exchange (I go there specifically for technical answers to technical questions) and I don't ever use Quora.
The point is when I click a link titled "Distraction free writing", the very last thing I expect is to hear clicking noises until I refresh the page or wait for the intro to finish.

It would be like test driving a "distraction free car" that starts with the radio on full volume. Sure, you could turn it off, but why is it on to begin with?
After the main body of the text there appears to be some erased text. I can only make out some of the words:

"th... ..... paper jam those ..... ....."
Beat me to it! This particular hoax is a masterpiece, complete with maps, portraits, and a lengthy list of references. I can't find a definitive source on how long it sat on Wikipedia before being discovered (the history of the linked page is muddled as it's a copy, and surprisingly this hoax isn't listed on the list of hoaxes --yet), but IIRC it was up at least a couple of months.
Trivial is perhaps a bit too dismissive.

But, yes, drug and alcohol detox units save the beds for alcoholics (who can die during detox) and not for heroin addicts (who tend not to die during detox).
As a writer person, I love distraction free writing. My favourite tool is iA Writer.

Not because it's distraction free, but because it has the perfect defaults so I don't feel like tinkering. It also works on all my iDevices and syncs seamlessly, which is a total win when you like writing in random places as soon as there's a few spare minutes.

Now if only there was a Linux client ...

As for this particular project, I don't like that it runs in a browser, which likely means I can't use it when I'm offline ... for instance on a 10 hour train ride like I spent recently.

But I really love the typewriter noises. I have NoisyTyper installed on my laptop and it's marvelous.
According to Firebug this article page made 298 requests, totaling 2.1 MB, taking my poor computer 52.79s (onload: 50.11s) to process everything. Is this really necessary?
Wow, that's a lot of vitriol. I didn't mean to upset him so much, but I apologize to him for the offense. I understand that this is his baby so any criticism feels very personal. I could have been nicer.

That said, I must disagree with some of the substantive points he made in this post.

> No, you clueless douche, it doesn’t have that consequence. It has the exact opposite consequence : that in this system you can determine actual current market valuations of risk. This unlike the systems you cite, which are nothing but glorified scams, and which specifically prevent you from gauging the market sentiment precisely because they’re not market priced.

BitBet, for the bet of Houston Texans to win the Super Bowl, has .07 against and .08 for (an implied probability of approximately 50%). The reality is that if I place a bet today, I won't know the odds that I'm betting against until the last day of the betting. It's true that there are economic results showing that the pricing in parimutuel betting will settle to the market expected value in equilibrium, but this example shows that these markets require much greater liquidity to provide anything resembling real-life probability estimates. You simply can't open a contract on a prediction market for 50:50 that the Texans will win the Super Bowl and have anyone take the other side of your trade.

> This idiocy is based on the presumption that you can import the “real odds” from somewhere. This is not what BitBet is doing, importing the “real odds” from somewhere else. BitBet establishes the actual odds.

In a priced market, informed market participants look at the probability represented by market prices and make their bets taking into account the information that they have. This action causes all of the information to be revealed in aggregate. His statement above implies that the "real odds" are being set by the market, not by reality, which is an inversion of cause and effect. The real odds are always imported from elsewhere, namely reality itself, as estimated through private and public information and analysis.

In order to profit in parimutuel games, you have to have both an accurate understanding of the reality, and an accurate estimate of public sentiment (and knowledge of the actual payout algorithm, of course). For priced markets to converge upon truthful values only requires that informed market participants bet based on their private information and best estimates, which is a much lower bar.

Not all parimutuel markets are created equally of course. Dynamic parimutuel markets[1] have some advantages over traditional markets (they don't suffer from a lack of buy liquidity, for example, but still don't allow traders to know their payouts at the time of the bet), but this doesn't seem to be one.

All that said, I intend no offense to the creators of this project, and wish them all the best in all of their journeys. Three cheers! I wish the world had more prediction markets.

1: http://dpennock.com/papers/pennock-ec-2004-dynamic-parimutue...
This can be solved on the cheap with pace cars, as used in several European countries.
Opiate withdrawal can be extremely unpleasant, but the direct health risks are very low. Things like methadone exist to make things psychologically easier and reduce the rate of relapse. As mentioned, alcohol withdrawal is actually much more dangerous.
The article actually talks directly to that point for an entire paragraph.
Good to know. My doctor suspected that I might have ulcerative colitis, but luckily it was not the case. I was highly symptomatic due to my incredibly poor lifestyle habits that I described elsewhere in this thread, so suspecting that I might suffer from UC/Crohn's disease wasn't completely out of left-field.
Well I don't drink coffee (i can't remember if I've ever finished a cup), and I love to sleep (not an early bird). I can tell you that I have to wake up at Retty early hours (like 5 in the morning or earlier, never the same hour) due to my work, and I never feel sleepy the way coffee drinkers do. Neither I need to exercise.
I am also aboe to have heavy breakfasts very early, unlike coffee drinkers who usually can't eat more than a toast.
I don't know that many people who doesn't drink coffee, so I don't know if my experience is common or not.
He wrote a first part here - http://bryanalexander.org/2013/01/04/a-year-without-caffeine... (this was on HN earlier and sets the context for the caffeine free lifestyle).
I grabbed a Touchpad in the sales. I only played around with it for a month or so but that was enough for the bezel to crack in places (a common occurrence I think). Certainly nowhere close to iPad-quality.

As for the internals... well, after that month I left mine gathering dust for a year whilst waiting for Android support to mature. I turned it back on to discover the touchscreen no longer worked. Someday I'll try and fix it, as it seems like it'd be a competent secondary Android tablet to leave around the house.
Oh great... just what we consumers need - content locked into a bunch of exclusive deals on various platforms. I can understand that there might be a good business reason for this deal, but it sucks for consumers who are willing to pay for content, but do not want half a dozen content distribution platforms in their home.
Interesting story.
Do you know they moved on to what? Java?
Hey now, let's not lump all addiction together. I'm a coffee snob (I drink 2 2-oz shots a day), but I'd say that 60% of it is because I love the taste of coffee. The other 40% is the ability to regulate my alertness better and that it's tough to find good decaf coffee.

I've quit caffeine several times. Each time I get headaches each morning (which can be controlled fine with aspirin) for about a week. Then I'm done. I've always gone back though after a couple months. I'm also addicted to chapstick. Those are my two addictions and I'm fine with them.