skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument seems a bit inconsistent. While I generally understand the spirit of what you're saying, claiming that "over 50% of the US population has tried it to little effect" doesn't seem any less anecdotal than your example of the friend trying "X" 3 or 4 times.

All these substances should be assessed scientifically for medical risk, and empirically for societal risk.

Asking for dealers to be shot on a drug-by-drug basis is a bit sensationalist. Drug dealers simply respond to demand in the market. They sell whatever people are buying -- they don't have personal agendas about which drugs to sell. Demand for drugs is notoriously inelastic.

I'd modify your last statement to say that people tend to dump all illegal drugs into one bin, and legal drugs into another. Most everyone seems to think legal drugs are safe, but people tend to be split on illegal drugs (some think they're all the worst things ever, others seem to falsely presume they are all reasonably safe).

Personally, I think there needs to be more and better education across the board. The legal/illegal distinction is rarely meaningful and detracts attention from a proper comparative analysis of drugs and their risks. For example, fentanyl is more powerful than both heroin and morphine, yet is a legally prescribed painkiller. Similarly, Adderall has a family-friendly reputation for helping kids study, yet along with its use come many of the same risks associated with speed. This is not surprising, because they are in fact the same thing -- amphetamines.
I assume the reasoning behind this method is to insure that they don't reproduce and create more drug dealers.
You might want to check with S3Fox. Not really useful for batch uploading, but if it can still connect that might be useful info for debugging....
I don't think that would be wise given the current economic circumstances. Losing over 50% of the population would surely harm economic growth.
It's definitely cool and nearly the first thing I noticed as well, but it'll confuse exactly everyone besides those with experience in both english and chinese.
Sounds a lot like what cyc (http://www.cyc.com/cyc/company/about) has been trying to do for the last 25 years and actually the holy grail of AI since the 50s.

I think its still way out of reach for non-trivial data-sets. Something like this doesn't just show up out of the blue, its not a problem amenable to some single new algorithm or breakthrough.
C-style memory management might be tedious, but it's not hard. It's rare for me to make a mistake. I tend to structure my code so that a malloc() and its eventual free() are both in the same function, most of the time. C++-style RAII object lifetime management is even easier.

Meanwhile, I've been coding in Objective-C since 2001, off and on, and I still get releases and retains in the wrong place sometimes. objc 2.0 property syntax means I can't even eyeball them to make sure they're balanced anymore.

And I don't think I'm the only one. Go find a forum with newbie objc programmers, and I'll bet you a buck that most of the mistakes they're making are too many releases, not enough retains, making use of objects that have been freed, and so on.
Empathy Is Growth
This would probably work for about 1 month. After everyone finished reeling in horror from the senseless murders of many of their families and loved ones, some subset of the people would quickly realize that all the competition had just been eliminated from the drug market, rendering it extremely profitable and lucrative. Time to stop whatever they were doing to start producing and selling drugs instead.

(Were you really being serious?)
While you're at it, why not shoot all the people who skip the bus fare? Also enforce proper adherence to schedules under the same technique. The buses, trains and planes will finally run on time, can you imagine that?
I'll be there since I am local. There tends to be more hacker stuff at BarCamp than at SXSW proper. http://barcamp.org/BarCampAustin4
I've been waiting for this for so long...thank you so much.
There are indeed places where drug dealing or use is punishable with death.

These places still have pervasive drug use -- in fact, greater use than places without such penalties.

How much more severe can you be? Seems like immediate death doesn't deter drug use. Does that idea still make sense to you? Or perhaps in all of those places it just hasn't been done correctly yet?

Prohibition (which took a constitutional amendment, btw) had zero effect on alcohol use -- it actually probably encouraged it and the organized crime that came with it. We're still cleaning that mess up.

Anything you put into your body changes the way your body and brain operate -- including tap water. So everything is a drug. It's just a matter of degree. I remember hearing about kids in the 60s who smoked pot laughing about their parents who were way more hooked on valium. In fact, misuse of legal drugs is much more pervasive than illegal drug use. We live in a society where you pop a pill for everything.

Nope -- shooting folks doesn't make much sense: unless you just don't like people and want to get rid of a few. I'm a libertarian and opposed to constraints on what government tells me I can do with my own body, but I wouldn't want crack being sold out of vending machines either. It's a tough subject, and part of the problem is that people need to acknowledge that it's tough. Only through socialization and education can we have an intelligent discussion about where the limits are -- just like we did with alcohol. Quick fixes aren't going to work.
Knowing no more about this than the PR thus far, I am pessimistic, but for not quite the same reason as some other commenters.

I think a couple of things are clear.

(1) We are at the point where something impressive is likely to be able to be produced, and Wolfram may very well have the resources to do it.

(2) We are not at the point where the be-all-end-all version of this can be produced.

Compare this with the symbolic computation packages (Mathematica, Maple, etc.). Around 1990, we were at the point where we could produce a very good one. Several were written. They have been improved since, but only marginally. We're still pretty much using 1990 technology.

And that's fine. We knew how to make a really good symbolic computation package. We did. End of story.

But consider the proposed packages (Alpha, etc.). We might produce something impressive. But we are not ready to produce something really good and useful. Our initial efforts will require lots of improving.

And Wolfram is definitely not the one to do that improving. He runs an aggressively closed shop. Always has. I predict, therefore, that the cathedral-bazaar effect is going to mean his product will be difficult to improve, and so will never become truly useful.
You've got the wrong end of the stick here a bit. Postgres has had a "warm standby" system since version 8.1 which you can use to keep a second server in recovery mode waiting to go live. So as far as HA goes, that's pretty good - we use it at Last.fm and it works well for us.

What's lacking is a decent way of setting up read-only slaves like you can with MySQL. That was what was promised with 8.4 and that's what's annoying.

At Last.fm we have a large, frequently-changing DB schema which is impractical to replicate in its entirety using the existing Postgres replication mechanisms (Slony, Londiste, etc).

The annoying thing is that it appears they backed these changes out of 8.4 because of issues with the synchronous part of the replication patch (which we don't care about).

Oh well.
I also don't understand why people use lambda like:

myfunction( lambda a: a.foo > a.bar )

I think the following looks neater:

aname = lambda a: a.foo > a.bar
myfunction( aname )

I think that putting unnecessary clutter inside of a function call is just asking for readability problems.
This book is truly wonderful. Probably my favorite math book.

Those of you who may be interested in convex optimization may want to take a look at these "MIT OCW-like" pages:

http://see.stanford.edu/SEE/courseinfo.aspx?coll=2db7ced4-39...
http://see.stanford.edu/SEE/courseinfo.aspx?coll=523bbab2-dc...

and those who are interested in convex optimization and Python programming, might want to take a look at these:

http://abel.ee.ucla.edu/cvxopt
http://cvxmod.net
I found this just hilarious after having read Michael Lewis' book "The Future Just Happened".

On the one hand hes totally right.. on the other hand hes totally missing the point, completely obsessed with blatant self promotion. ugh.

Then we see Tony Robbins propping up Rays rep as a 'serious human being'.. omg, my arse hurts from laughing so much.

This and "W" {dubya} are my must sees for comedy movies of '09.
Face Recognition using Eigenfaces and Distance Classifiers: A Tutorial
but it's still utterly infeasible for high traffic web applications because of the replication issue

Sorry, but what a nonsense.

High traffic sites scale by caching, sharding and non-relational databases, in that order.

Replication can, at best, be an intermediate kludge for read-heavy websites that haven't learned about caching (wink) or insist on abusing their RDBMS as a fulltext search engine.

It was also commonly used as an incremental backup solution until filesystem snapshots became commonplace.
So, what do you guys do then?

I imagine Last.fm is not running on one gigantic postgres db, are you using db partitioning or something similar?
Nifty, but not particularly retro. I don't remember my C64 having thousands or millions of colors or several hundred by several hundred character display resolution.
Yes - I am able to upload with S3 Firefox organizer. Also I am able to upload using JetS3t - the java client - but both ruby gems I use - rightscale's and amazon's are failing.
Ask HN: Review our startup (www.chuwe.com)
Programmers have stack overflow, but what about more general startup-questions? Or question regarding running a small business in general? That's Chuwe.

You can probably figure out the rest from there, but I'll add one more bit. To make it a little more interesting, there's a community-funded pot that'll be dished out to the most interesting question and answer (according to an open vote count) at the end of each month. We'll always start it at $30, so that'll be the minimum.

We have a pretty solid plan for where we're going, but this seemed like a good place to start and get some feedback from everyone..

Thanks for checking it out.

www.chuwe.com

edit: Thanks to #startups for all of their feedback while getting this up and running!
Obviously no reasonable person wants Python to be identical to Ruby, since those who like Ruby better can go use it. But Python has over its lifetime incorporated new ideas from other languages. Giving substantive reasons why you don't like this particular idea would be a lot more interesting than just registering your distaste for it.
Well one can always ask just how long did god intend humans to live? Was it 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 yrs?

I think well see all of those as possible answers, given the advance of medicine and engineering.

If by god you mean "stochastic calculus".. then yes, I do believe in god, and he has mysterious ways indeed :]
Meh, this post seems like a very weak attempt to coin a new godin-ism

Return on design is the same as return on investment–it's the return on your design investment. If you do your homework and have your design done by someone experienced in design for your industry, you will reap a positive return.

Why no mention of trial-and-error, data analysis, or A/B testing when it comes to design for the web? (see the $300M button article on HN).

Re: his "the whole thing" point, I don't think many products are soley design. Yes, for some, aesthetics is an important and often deciding factor. People buy Porsches because they are a status symbol, because they are a high-performance machine, and because they like the design.

Attention to design or the influence of design does not mean the design is the product.
Yep.

My husband & I have built an interactive art exhibit that you'll see if you're an attendee.
I think having multiple read slaves (and even write masters) is a perfectly acceptable way of distributing load, and in turn, scaling.

To completely ignore that sounds foolish.

EDIT: xzilla is right, I wasn't really recommending blindly adding write masters since that wouldn't work, but just that read slaves are not a bad idea. :)
What it really takes to get your app into iTunes
Cocoa with Love: An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Four
My response on TechCrunch website:

Hmm sounds like they really are waiting for 100% of the artists to be under the 360 contracts first before proceeding to a new business model.

This seems unwise. If they wait 5 years, the patterns of discovering new music will change drastically and they’ll miss out on the power of momentum.

Today, YouTube & social networks are becoming great ways of discover new musicians. If this pattern continues to evolve to become habit, the role of labels will begin to shrink… and so will their ability to negotiate with artists.

It’s likely that there will always be packaged artists like Britney who don’t have a musical fanbase before the labels get a hold of them. They’ll likely be the bread & butter of labels but artists that come with a following of 100,000 subscribers on YouTube will expect different treatment/contracts.

Labels should consider developing partnerships in a way that allows them to add value to both, the distribution partners and the artists… beyond just managing rights and collecting money.
Which makes for another interesting issue. Some Packlid may be reading this and thinking, "What do you mean "we" human?" Kurzweil may still (already) be proven right, whether we make it happen or not. Just some whimsy for thought.
agreed.. but thankfully captain kirk gets to speak and thus his dignity is preserved.. as befits his stature as ambassador for all humanity.
I have taken a look at the website. Apart from hype there is nothing that I have seen that makes me want to use it for any AI (which I do a lot of commercially).

How does it compare to other architectures? What sort of problems does it excel on? Where are it's weaknesses? What is the training like compared to other methods?

I wouldn't really take them seriously until a paper is linked to from their front page explaining the above. At the moment it just looks like hype.
It's counter-intuitive because it's expected that when people become more proficient at an activity their brains will consume fewer resources.
They're looking for mainstream adoption, which, IMO, it is on the brink of achieving.
Your Cool Technology is Worthless... If You Don't Know How to Sell
My angel group uses Angelsoft to organize the deals we receive from startups. I believe we pay Angelsoft for the privilege and get to use their tools to discuss and evaluate the deals that come our way. It is useful.

There is also tons of crap listed from other cities and groups. I guess these guys pay Angelsoft to pitch, but that part of the site is a complete waste. There is so much noise in those deals that I never look at them.
The Beauty of Working Backwards
Good parable.

But while overall believable, its conclusion misses a critical aspect of this cycle.

Here's the real secret behind these types of fads:

Any process that requires you to pay attention to your work/self will cause measurable improvement, even in people who are already top performers. Temporary improvement. Attention = improvement. And so change in process = improvement also.

There's a very interesting book on this topic called "Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management." (Also, any book that examines self-help will show the same thing. I first came across the principle in a psychology textbook.)
The problem with Facebook is that it'll remain an involuntary walled garden.
This too is my concern. The guy is brilliant, but I really feel technology like this can only reach its full potential by being open and extendible by domain experts. Hopefully Wolfram realizes this as well -- it sounds like he has put forth significant effort and money bootstrapping the engine with knowledge and so on, hopefully he passes the torch to the rest of the world and doesn't propose his company be the only source of information into this engine.

If he provides not just technology and data but also the means to extend that technology and data by following his example he might be contributing something truly revolutionary.
GOP's top techie calls it quits
Anyone who thinks you can scale writes by adding more masters is plain ignorant on the subject. The only way to scale writes is with better hardware or federation of application/data. The first of those is easy, the latter is hard.
I Want to Invest in Your Idea--Mine Sucks
Dear Speakers: things that interfere with getting a message across to an audience
You should take a look at our new Investor Search Engine (http://angelsoft.net/startup-tools/investor-search), the new feature this article is actually about, which is totally FREE.

We aggregated about every VC and Angel Group in the country, built profiles for them containing key metrics, and made a "Kayak" like search engine for them. I think it's the best single resource for entrepreneurs seeking funding on the web now. And as I mentioned at the top, it costs nothing to use.
My advice would be to stop referring to it with the loaded term "war" and start thinking about dealing with it in the fine grained way a problem with this many aspects requires. Using "war" for drugs both dilutes the term when applied to real horrible armed conflict and turns what should be a measured response to a sociological problem into a comic book farce with swat teams armed like soldiers busting in on teenagers at parties.

Most of the problems come from the comical binary approach currently applied that treats pot the same as PCP.
I wonder, would Coca Cola go back to their original formula?
About God, he has created you, me, and the whole world [the world of creatures]. And even if some people try to deny God, he is there and we need him.

Well, advance of medicine and engineering?

Did medicine help prevent people die at age 5 or 6 yrs old?
There is something called "fate", and I guess you don't believe in it too.
Just to clarify, hot standby wasn't backed out, because the changes were never "in". There was a working patch set against the 8.4 tree (which you could still get today) for hot standby, and the testing/review of that code ran into enough corner cases that the reviewers thought it was best to push it. While many of the same people are involved in the synchronous replication piece, the issues in that code didn't really play a part (it had pretty much been decided at least month ago that synchronous replication wouldn't make it)
I gave some criticism in IRC and sgrove asked me to post it here, too. So here goes:

I think the entire design leaves a lot to be desired.
The color scheme is distracting. The green draws your eyes directly to a less-important item. The question should be the most important item. (Possibly followed by whether there are answers or not?)

The "answers" should be given at least thesame weight and importance as "votes",

"2 days ago" should probably be removed for the near future. Why would someone participate in a community that has such little activity? You could always put it back if things liven up.

The icons are completely unclear. You explained that the "tag" icon was a hand, but I still dont see it. And even so, not sure how that relates to "tags". And the word bubble is usually used to represent comments not answers.
Would you find it problematic to write if and for statements like this?

def _forbody(x):
def _ifbody(x):
print x
if x % 2: _ifbody(x)
for x in xrange(10): _forbody(x)
Online Auto Financing: Financing Possible Just By Clicking
Wow! For less than $5000 and a days work, you could have hired any number of postgres consultants to setup PITR warm standby for you (or Slony if you really thought you needed the read slaves). Instead, you migrated your entire architecture over to another database system. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me, but I have to give you points for chutzpah!
>> In other words, during internet search, savvy users constantly assessing the credibility of sources and validity of answers.

You're extrapolating too much from what was found! I think you'd be surprised just how little frontal lobe activation actually reveals.
On Wednesday, Facebook is going to reveal a design that’s going to break a lot of boundaries online. They’re going to reveal the first popular lifestreaming service.

On Wednesday, they'll reveal a design a lifestreaming service. It remains to be seen if it will be popular. The site can continue to be popular based on the number of users it has, but in order for the new design to be popular, the users need to actually use its features. Until it is released, it is too early to tell if that will be the case.
Well the first thing you should do, is change the font for the answers. Light gray that strains the eyes = epic fail
It's a strength of the scientific method that one can offer a hypothesis without believing it. In any case, there are additional cognitive tests which one can use to examine the actual behavior from a different angle.
The Wolf who cried Alpha?
The problem with these kinds of articles is that they make the assumption that governmental drug fighting efforts are sincere. They probably aren't that sincere to their original intent now. Like most other government agencies, they start out with some presumption of sincerity, but then the old case of "the means becomes the ends" sets in. Reminds me of what Tom Wolfe meant when the lawyer character in Bonfire of the Vanities labelled the line of criminals waiting at the back of the courthouse as "chow."

The DEA will probably never go away, because it keeps people employed for one thing, and helps large pharmaceutical companies keep small pharm companies (makers of class II, III drugs with expired patents) from building a legitimate enough business that would help these smaller companies spend money on new drug research. Keeping drugs illegal is good business; it has less to do with discouraging illicit drug use.
Thanks, and upvoted.

1.) The point about green being distracting is a great point, something we hadn't thought of. We're working on implementing a gray-to-green bit that corresponds to points (similar to hn) and just stuck it at green for now. We'll be sure to make it to the eyes are drawn to the titles, and not the points.

And yes, the answers are equally important as the questions. Working on a redesign right now.

2.) Good point about the reference time. It's always there, so I somewhat assumed it should always be there, but it may serve as a deterrent to new people entering into the community. Removed until it's less depressing :D

3.) Icons. Got it. The tag icon was an open hand, just like "tagging" someone. We'll change it to something more traditional (being cute like that probably is a bad idea), and adjust the other icon as well - any suggestions?
The other big question: will they hardwire it to come up with "42" for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" or will it actually source that "fact" from the web?
Yes, but it can't tell what you're actually thinking or doing. That's my problem with fMRIs.
Epic fail...harsh. But welcome :D

Changed from gray to black. How is that?