skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sort of a tangent, but are you sure your opinion of Ecstasy isn't just a result of propaganda from "the man?"

I'm not saying it's safe, and the subject certainly warrants more scientific study. However, UK scientists did a risk-based analysis of common drugs of abuse, which resulted in MDMA being placed below alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6474053.stm

To my earlier point, I think the real solution here is education and greater availability of scientifically valid information.
Using Mixed-Integer Quadratic Optimization to process real-time GPS data. Perhaps the coolest project I ever worked on. More info: http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/papers/int_est.html
As I understand it, Karrigell

karrigell.sourceforge.net/

is the Python framework most similar in style and ease of starting to PHP.
Known medical effects has no bearing on the legality of drugs. Cocaine and heroin have known medical uses and are even currently used for medicine. Same with Cannabis. Another check in the medical use department for MDMA (ecstasy). Even meth has legitimate medical uses. Curiously, many illegal drugs are just (if not more) effective than their patented prescription drug counterparts. You want to kill people who buy heroin, but governments spend billions buying synthetic heroin for their citizens. It's madness.

If the government mobilizes to kill millions of its citizens, how are you confident that the line will be drawn at the point you think is acceptable? (Why we should let you set the line is another debate, but luckily you aren't in a position of power.) Perhaps there's someone else like you, but who takes it a step farther and believes something you do and don't think is immoral should be a capital offense. Your wanting to kill pot smokers is no more crazy than me wanting to kill coffee drinkers.
Give this a try:

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~mokelly/other/hn.mov

It still uses the mp4 codec, but with Quicktime's prefered container format (if I understand correctly).
I think you're right, but gfodor is right as well. The goal is to get good content, and we have to remove anything that stands in the way.

It's just a matter of prioritizing and focusing your energy on the right area. That seems to be one of the key ingredients of success.
Don't you think that there is something wrong with, you know, killing people? Why not just castrate all the drug users instead? That would provide just as much of a disincentive without all the gratuitous violence.

I find it hard to believe that you are actually serious and not trolling.
Isn't this just BS, physiologically speaking? I have never heard of SSRIs increasing dopamine levels. Wikipedia even claims the opposite: "It is believed that sexual dysfunction is caused by an SSRI induced reduction in dopamine."
What I've always wondered about is if productivity truly is rising at such dizzying rates as the numbers imply, then where has all this productivity "gone?"

It certainly hasn't seemed to have improved that many people's lives over what they had or experienced for day-to-day living since the 1950s. Yes, there is the internet and Google and all that, and it is a definite improvement, but by my calculations if wages matched the productivity gains, they'd need to be about 2.5 times as high as they are now.

So...productivity is better, but colleges can barely make it. Workers' wages are crap, and falling. The food is worse, and the environment is worse. So what does it even mean that we are more productive now, and where exactly have these gains accrued?
Google Continues to Pummel Mozilla
Ask HN: Where do you like to find freelance programmers?
Hey there,

I'm in the market for finding a freelance programmer right now. I'm actually looking for a Flash/ActionScript guy. In the past, I've had success on:

- Craigslist.org
- Getafreelancer.com
- elance.com
- Rentacoder.com

But now I'm having a bit trouble finding a coder. Furthermore, Craigslist recently changed their restrictions to prohibit posting of a Gig ad to multiple regions. So, where do you guys go? Also, why isn't there a Gigs board on HN?
A few speed bumps (Lisp blog series)
First Stab at Learning Clojure
I get the story. I even kind of like it, but I still can't help thinking it would have been cheaper just to outfit everything with toilets and get on with life.

I kind of feel the same way about laptop "stand by" for energy saving (good motive, wasteful execution). My time = money and the cost of having my laptop turned on needlessly per hour is less than 2 cents while my wasted time every time it happens when I'm just about to use it/reading what it says is worth more than 2 cents. If it is about the environment I would rather them just double the price of electricity and use that towards green initiatives.
The main thesis I remember from Good to Great was that in each of its cases, the turnaround from good to great had come from a change in leadership at the top. The new leaders (the book claimed) had all fit a certain profile and shared a similar leadership style. I liked the book quite a bit because the character of these leaders that Collins was describing seemed admirable.

It isn't obvious whether the demise of Circuit City refutes the thesis. Perhaps the leader Collins wrote about retired and was replaced with someone who didn't share the same values? In that case GtG would actually predict a decline. Alternatively, if the company failed under the same leader that Collins wrote about, that would refute GtG pretty well. One can also imagine scenarios between these two poles where it might not be so clear.

By the way, your point reminds me of a similar one people made about In Search of Excellence (the GtG of its day), the "excellent" companies of which didn't seem so excellent a few years later.
History of the MIT Technology Hackers Association
Alcohol (in small quantities, like 1 drink a day) seems to be associated with lower risk of heart disease, for men.
We can move on now as we have the "war on terror" to justify these now.
Agreed. The only thing novel here is that it's The Economist saying it. Which means that HN has gotten to the point where people are only upvoting as a way to encourage others to read articles expressing viewpoints they agree with.
From what I have seen from night clubs in Shanghai, there is a lot of extasy going around. And my friends in China have no problem getting hold of cannabis...

Now they are taking big risks and I wouldn't take those kind of risk if I were them but it convinced me that however strict the laws are against drug it doesn't stop people from taking them...
The only thing novel here is that it's The Economist saying it.

But that is in fact huge. This is practically The Establishment saying it.
A recent study showed the benefits of red wine were linked to breaking down some of the worse components in red meat. It just happens consumption of both are so correlated that it looked like red wine in moderation was really healthy. The healthiest choice would be to drink tea and avoid red meat.

But what kind of a pansy wants to do that?!
Adobe would rather you didn't know, but fonts can't be copyrighted.
I wonder how useful this will be if you can only ask a single question or a set of questions that can be easily expressed in single line text field?

If I'm asking something like, "What is the capitol of Nebraska?" why not just get directed to the Wikipedia entry where I can learn a lot more than the one fact that answers what I just asked?

If Alpha is actually going to do computation, I'd rather be able to use it for something more complex than a single natural language query.
Yes? Poetry? Anime?  Not What I Asked
我的汉语不太好, I needed to look up 厉害: http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E5%8E%89%E5%AE%B3/130...

Pretty neat site, along with looking up characters by typing or cutting and pasting you can draw them and it tries to guess what character you're looking for.

What prompted you to start with 厉害?
"Hidden" Links on Hacker News
I have no data to back it up, but have always heard it said that the middle class is both larger and better off now then that time (could be totally wrong of course !).
This is the first link at the bottom of the page.
Just red wine and only in some circumstances, pg. There's no medical benefit to vodka, whisky, rum, absinthe, peppermint liquer, beer, jagermeister, goldschlager, etc etc etc.
Bob Cringely is like the eccentric uncle of the tech columnists. Fun to listen to, but I wouldn't necessarily follow all his stock tips, ya know?
Probably not, because they would be crucified. But you can imagine a well-funded Big Drug company signing up Nelly as a smokesman for the Nelly Blunt (TM) and aggressively marketing it to chuckle adults of legal age who will indulge responsibly.

Remember the inner city crack epidemic? Imagine that, with less gang warfare and penetration in the population approaching that of television. There would be widespread support elsewhere in society for just writing them off totally. ("Poor people are just hopeless druggies who can't get a job because they won't stop smoking -- screw 'em").
Yeah, I guess I'm not saying this refutes the book so much as I'm asking whether the principles in the book (like "the hedgehog concept") illustrate what went wrong with Circuit City.

You could level similar critiques against other GtG companies, like Abbott Labs or, hello? Fannie Mae.
How computers call the shots for L.A. County children in peril
China doesn't really have a reputation for reporting real numbers (remember sars or what percentage is affected by the hiv according to them). When calculating drug use, it's always a guesstimate anyway so don't you think they just give artificially low numbers?

Like jhancock, I've had quite a few people proposing me to get drugs from the xiamen restaurant owner who proposed me to buy marijuana to my ex-girlfriend there that asked me if I want to try some meth when I asked about the people who clearly seemed high in night clubs...

As for singapore, I don't know but malaysia that has the same policies about drugs doesn't really seem to be so successful at not having drugs either.
I forgot that Fannie Mae was in there. Yikes. The analogy with In Search of Excellence is starting to look pretty convincing.

These are really just story books anyway.
On the other hand, The Economist has been against drug prohibition for a long time. (If I recall correctly) So it is questionable how novel this really is.
We've been running a series of workshops [1] which include looking at stock market information like this and applying it to the broader economy. The principle is that because the market "ought to reflect anticipated future profits" of businesses it can be used to make some predictions about the broader economy 6-12 months ahead.

Ie, if the market goes down, the economy will move down in 6-12 months. And the market turning around will foretell a broader turnaround in 6-12 months.

One common mistake to be avoided [2], which the five points in this article cover, is that not every sector and certainly not every business is tarred with the same brush. I particularly like the example that investing in Wind Power might help the economy while harming the Stock Market.

Just because broader things are down, doesn't mean you and your business have to be.

[1] http://www.shirlawsonline.com/events/257-thrive-not-survive-...
[2] http://www.shirlawsonline.com/assets/0000/1868/The_Five_Mist...
Umair Haque- Constructive Capitalism [video]
Business Sales Leads - Addison Klein Group
Getting Rid of Your Business Sales Problems Once and For All by connecting with Business Sales Leads - Addison Klein Group
haha, @markbao and i have considered doing a parody of the powerthirst video called "hacker thirst". ill buy a case if this gets made.
they've stated this position before:
"Hooked on just saying no" (1989)
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story...

to get a better sense of where they're reacting to the full briefing from this weekend's issue is worth a read:

"On the trail of the traffickers"
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13234157

"Sniffy customers"
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13234124

"A toker's guide"
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13234134

"In America, lessons learned"
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13234144

and overall their perspective is well summarized by the cover art:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayCover.cfm?url=/...
Here's a recent presentation (and commentary) about whether the reported productivity gains have been largely illusory:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/arch...

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03...
I'm looking at it thinking "Dai Button Factory? Did you typo your own domain name?"

(Its not like single Chinese characters in isolation say "Note to English speakers who read Asian languages: this is Chinese, not Japanese or Korean. Please don't break our pun by trying to read it in one of those other languages. Thanks!")

Edited to add: If you wanted a Japanese name for the site it would probably be ビッグボタンファクトリー, pronounced Biggu Botan Fakutorii. It means... well, OK, guess you can probably figure that out.
we are stuck with two choices

There is always a third option: pay somebody to handle this for you. I like automated solutions as much as the next guy, but if you want quality and don't want to become a graphics design professional yourself...
In producing more crap? The problem with increased productivity is twofold, first just "producing more" doesn't necessarily tie to any real metric in quality of life. Producing "better" trumps by a large margin producing "more"

Second our capability to consume still vastly outweighs our ability to produce.
The idea is that, initially, all cars had toilets (see the invisible emphasis of "only" in "if only fifty percent of the cars would be equipped with a toilet"). Of course, there must have been plenty of cost associated with handling toilet complaints and training (and re-training) at the shunting yard, but we can guess that the long term savings made up for that.
Saving Money By Identifying Your Personal Bar Stools Style
How To Save On Bar Stools Furniture Articles Like anything else, each person has his or her own personal preferences when it comes to bar stools.
I actually read a study saying that mere alcohol had benefits, regardless of the form.

Where is rms when you need him?
I'd be so freaked out about great whites if I was swimming around with an oblivious seal like that..
What about the case where someone has an otherwise undiagnosed vitamin deficiency? E.g. B12 supplements to combat the neurological effects (like depression, distractibility) of B12 deficiency?
I wish you and your parent would stick with Occam's Razor on this one. There really are a large percentage of reasonably minded people who think that legalizing drugs would cause more harm than good. Considering that alcohol has well-known negative effects on society, and is legal, it's not as if these folks' concerns are outrageous.

I'm fully, passionately on board with legalizing drugs, but accusing your opponents of intellectual dishonesty all the time only impresses people who already agree with you.
If pg doesn't delete your comment, isn't he guilty of the same thing as The Pirate Bay are being charged with? (actually I guess he is protected in the US unless he gets a DMCA notice?)
don't buy samsung (korean) ... unless you only use windows

i bought scx-4100 3 yrs ago, later on misteriously the mac driver (no scanner, printer only) disappeared from the site

the linux driver is also ugly, breaks security, dirty uninstall, etc ... such a pita

korean loves windows, so don't expect much for mac and linux from them
The travails of Detroit
I have an idea for a hack and i need somebody to design, if anybody is interested, let me know
Good luck to you. We're in the same business, so here's some advice. The first questions on the home page will determine the tone of the subsequent users.

Currently, when I visited, question #2 was how to start a brothel in Nevada. If you are not careful, you'll end up like Cambrian House, with projects like "congress is corrupt, help me get rid of congress". And then what?

Do not hesitate to moderate by yourself.
1. "Anti-depressant" is not synonymous with "SSRI". Benzodiazepines are also used to treat depression and can create a strong chemical dependency.

2. The concept of addiction is hard to define, and is becoming more so. Some drugs (marijuana springs to mind) can be considered addictive, but don't seem to cause the unthinking crave-gratify-repeat cycle you see with cocaine or nicotine. Some have argued that checking email or Facebook, playing MMORPGs, and "consuming" pornography are addictive.
Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) commented on Circuit City, Fannie Mae and Wells Fargo in this context here:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/from-good-t...

"These business books are mostly backward-looking: what have companies done that has made them successful? The future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success.

To the extent that this doesn’t actually turn out to be true, it calls into question the basic premise of these books, doesn’t it?"
I would love to read some study that would investigate the connection between one joint a day with heart disease.
That does seem to be a common meme. Here's an unsourced article claiming various benefits. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21778634/

The American Heart Association, however, recommends against starting to drink to be healthier. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4422 While light alcohol consumption does have small benefits, you could make a much, much bigger difference in your overall health by exercising and following a healthy diet. One drink a day probably does have marginal benefits, but from a public health perspective I can see why organizations don't actually recommend it -- people in the aggregate would think it is more meaningful as a recommendation than it actually is and use it as an excuse to drink to excess.

One thing to keep your eye on is Sirtris Pharmaceuticals's (now a subsidiary of GSK) amped-up resveratrol (the good stuff in red wine) derivative. The idea is to get the benefit of drinking 1000 glasses of red wine a day without actually killing yourself. It will be approved for treating diabetes but will be of interest to absolutely everyone that can afford it. http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSN0743693420080...
No matter how difficult it is to get whatever documentation in order, if there is decent enough money to be made then developers will jump through the hurdles to get it.
No... there's also paravirtualization. If a hypervisor is a part of the expected system environment from day one, then you can virtualize on the cheap, as Xen does for domU guests on hosts without virtualization-on-chip.
"example #2 seems just fine, assuming rename() is atomic and a power failure would just leave the old contents in the file."

Unfortunately, the 'bug' is that this does not happen. Instead, the truncate hits disk before the new data is written, so that a power loss leaves the file empty rather than merely out-of-date. This behaviour is different on ext4 than on ext3, hence it has only recently become an issue.

To my untrained eye, regardless of what the POSIX standard 'allows', this is a bug that should be fixed. On the bright side, it looks like there are patches ready to be applied that will change the behaviour to match ext3, which is as you describe. If this happens, #2 would remain a relatively safe choice.
Most of the studies about this kind of thing get messed up because they are studying it with smoked marijuana. Let's assume that such a study uses vaporized or oral cannabis. I would be surprised to see reduced heart disease as a result of cannabis consumption but I would expect to see reduced cancer of some forms and lower rates of Alzheimer's.
I don't think we've reached the end–at least not for consumers.

Fuji was making point-and-shoot cameras with lower megapixels but superior image quality since '05 ... they still got their butts kicked by canon, nikon, and others.

If Joe Consumer is looking at two equally priced cameras in Best Buy, he'll probably choose the one with more megapixels.
Drugs are not completely personal. Depending on drug and supply chain, we are also talking about drug gang activity, drug-fueled economies in the developing world, social problems related to drug abuse, and so on. If you grow a harmless drug on your own or get it from a harmless source, you're probably okay, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that drugs are completely down to the individual.
Opinion: Google's Android OS is coming to the desktop this year
Microlending and Venture Capital: A Scary Line Will Be Crossed
Could someone give a very simple example of a problem to solve with this?
I agree with that too, but collateral consequences are not to be overlooked. If you break a bad law which, in turn, causes people to suffer, you should feel guilty.
"Another option: use mmap() and rewrite it in place, using ftruncate() if necessary to grow/shrink the file, and msync() to flush the changes."

This is a fine option, but for the purpose of this bug I don't think there is any advantage over using stdio (with seeks if necessary) and calling fsync() after writing. It's a great technique, but functionally equivalent to just saying "avoid O_TRUNCATE".

Unless you have some nifty way of upgrading from a copy-on-write map(MAP_PRIVATE) to something that gets atomically written to disk?
I think Nintendo made the right decision here. This way they will never have to worry about an upgrade to the operating system or common libraries breaking some obscure game that they didn't properly test against. This is less flexible, but the increase in reliability makes up for it.
I feel the comparison is not appropriate.

Microfinance is for financing very small businesses predominantly in rural areas of developing / under-developed economies. While, VC is.. well, VC! This is YCombinator website, you know better than me about VC here.
Power Enhancer | Octane Booster | Octane Booster Test
Octane boosters are popular in the performance scene because they often regain power lost through detonation.
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
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That's a very good point. Personally, when I saw this (about two hours after we opened it up), I assumed it was a prank.

There were two choices - delete it, and it goes away, no harm done, but nothing gained. Or try to turn it to our advantage a bit. I decided to actually research it and come up with the best answer I could (having never considered anything brothel-related).

Turns out it is legal in Nevada, and there are a number of stipulations covering it similar to New Zealand. I had no idea before. And that'll come up if someone searches for prostitution :D

I think you're ultimately right, we really have to approach this in the right way to get the highest-content possible. Unfortunately, Cambrian House turned into vencorps before I had a chance to actually use them.

To that end, I'm searching for people who can seed the site with high-quality questions and answers - I hope this was a high quality answer, but I have to admit it wasn't a high quality question.

I'll have to take a more in-depth look at fairbusiness! Thanks for your advice.
Sit down with Michael Scott Slosar
Someone want to chime in on what makes this "scary"?
Geek-Style Distros
How Hyenas 'Inherit' Their Social Status
Most of those are not crimes, but civil offenses. The possession and distribution of illegal drugs on the other hand, are criminal.
I would guess that embedding any font is legal, as long you're rendering it and not distributing the font file.