skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think he's saying "trust us", he's saying "this is an issue that everyone knows about, thus it's a non-issue".

When you submit a drug for approval at the FDA, you need to list in exacting detail exactly how trials were run, including how they were blinded. The ingredients and form of the placebo are critical for this.

The paper referenced in this blog post examined journal articles to determine if the composition of the placebo was reported. Journal article are notoriously lacking in details and they have to be since no one want to read an article with pages upon pages of details.

If his comment was "Hey, you guys who write papers on clinical trials, it would be awesome if you'd list the placebo composition, since I'd be more likely to believe your findings" I would say "fair point".

But the blog post says "Hey! Drug companies are trying to pull a fast on all of you! Beware of what's in your medicine cabinet" which is a completely ridiculous statement. This "missing information" is available to the people that matter (the FDA).

This is truly an example of making a mountain out of a molehill.
Looks cool! How do you differentiate from all the other email services - MailChimp, MailGun, SendGrid etc?
Building a Startup’s Brand is a Labor of Love
Firefox to block Silverlight and Java -- but not Flash
I was wondering the same myself, but at any rate, neither would pay his rent. However, I am curious because I know a few travel bloggers out there who make a decent amount of money on their blogs, as well as getting lots of trips paid for by companies like Expedia and Orbitz and other travel companies and agencies.
Anyone know how CPAN works in this regard?
Stepping up into the biggest end of commercial aviation is a big, big ask.

There are already a number of aircraft manufacturers playing in the next tier - Bombardier (Dash 8), Embraer (EMB 120), Fokker (F50) and others. I can't really see them ever building something the size of a 787 or A380, but I concede it could be possible.

Looking at existing manufacturers, I think Antonov may stand a chance. They already have the AN-124 and AN-225, which might be engineered into passenger configuration.

With regards to new players, I was reading an article about the Indian company Mahindra yesterday[1]. They have ambitious aerospace plans, already some exposure to the sector through their purchase of GippsAero[2], obviously with much smaller aircraft, but also are located in a fast growing market. The article mentions Boeing's expectation of over 1,000 new commercial airliners needed in India by 2020. Maybe this is your new lean, hungry company.

[1] http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/indian-automobile-...

[2] http://www.gippsaero.com
Is the core of Apple’s OS X rotting from within?
30th anniversary of the release of Lotus 1-2-3
Thanks - I love that Dieter Rams page, so true. Tufte's book 'Envisioning Information' has always been one of my favorites.
Scientists build teh one million dollar man
Wow. Isn't this pricey for a pretty straightforward API?
The format being "desktop web games played inside Facebook." That format has a number of consequences in terms of the kind of genres, features, production values, technology, etc that turn out to work in practice.

In addition to that, it's certainly true that Zynga as an organization with certain processes, culture and etc. may have proven unable to innovate. Their lackluster track record in the much more fertile ground of mobile suggests this is the case.
Distraction Free Reading Mode
HybridConf - A new conference for designers and developers
For simple problem domains (Blog, Mom and Pop store website, etc) it's trivial to pre-generate content. For larger content systems you can run into a more complicated dependency tree. Then you have the choice between keeping the dependency logic accurate vs regenerating the entire content set on any change.

It also turns out that content sets that change infrequently, but also unpredictably are a pain to cache. You can cache them for a short time (as long as stale content can be tolerated), but then you lose cache effectiveness. Or you can cache it forever with some sort of generation/versioned cache, but that doesn't interface with named, public resources very well. Telling your visitors and Google that it's yourdomain.com/v12345/pricing not yourdomain.com/v12344/pricing doesn't really fly.

I definitely concur with your surprise about it being novel though. I think that for many situations it's just easier to run extra boxes to handle the increased load of generating dynamic content on the fly over and over again. It's good for SuperMicro and AWS. It's not so good for the planet.

I'm very excited to see Jeremy's approach to addressing the problem.
The early modems I had access to were 300/300 or 1200/75.

Ah! V.23.

The 75 baud backward channel of 1200/75 was good enough to keep up with typing so it was my preferred speed when accessing various things remotely where I never needed to send large amounts of text/data but had lots of data coming back the other way.
ZenPen - The minimal editor for the modern man
Whatever it's not like Alicia Touchscreen was available.
So you trust an anonymous individual that does not need to abide to any laws more than a commercial company located in the US (or another country)? I wouldn't expect any privacy at all when using tormail.org. If you want to have secure communication I'd suggest RetroShare. Or if you want to use more traditional means of communication PGP and OTR.
Is the lecture dead?
I've tried not to bring up "English-Likeness" aspect because that's a whole other can of worms. But since it's out there now...

I don't believe this is einhverfr's intent in the least, but the promotion of English is often an ethnocentric activity. Why not a dialect of Chinese (so many native speakers, high information density per character)? Why not a dialect of Spanish (multi-continental reach of native speakers, high incidence of cognates to Romance languages, highly predictable orthography and phonetics)? Why not any language spoken in the Middle East or India or former Soviet states?

If human accessibility were truly the issue, why should we focus our efforts on English speakers -- the people already the most aided by existing language-like tokens! -- instead of promoting efforts to "translate" programming keywords and constructs to other languages? I'll grant that one does not necessarily preclude the other, but I would argue that the former is chasing after diminishing returns at this point in time, whereas the latter represents a significant opportunity to increase ease of access to programming globally.
If your argument is that journal article should include more details so that they are reproducible, that's fine but there is no need to pick on the ones published on clinical trials. I would say it's a rare paper that is so exhaustive in detail that you can easily reproduce the results. Many times I've had to contact original authors to get more details. You'd be amazed at what gets left out.
Non-swipe http://codhisattva.tumblr.com/post/37133702658/the-walking-d...
The current diagram version is missing those funky sounds starting at 21.50 sec
Cheaper and easier to just play back what's happening on the phone line (and it might help in debugging, if you're seriously competent), than somehow generating a "prettier" sound?

That feels like the obvious explanation to me ... Not sure if that means it must be wrong. :)
Sports Hack Day, Not Just for Guys
OK, but what do you measure the results against then if you distorted the benchmark with active ingredients? Surely the entire point of the control group is that it represents the unaltered baseline?
Bill Shocker, new malware infected 620,000 Chinese Mobile users
What is it about the winter logistics that keeps you from cycling?

You need a route that has paths or roads suitable for biking, but this is not any different from cycling in the summer. I switch to studded tires in November (http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/studdedtires.asp) and wear clothing layers appropriate for the weather. My thermo tights are good down to 15 F or so depending on the wind. Below that I wear another bottom layer. One to four layers on top, warm windproof gloves, sometimes a balaclava, sometimes goggles. Below -5 F I usually drive. And when it has freshly snowed and the roads are a mess.
Awesome rig with the On Stage stand. I'm considering building a second treadmill desk for home use, and that's a fantastic idea I had not considered.

One question: Does the Pro Form treadmill allow you to adjust your speed in small increments (~0.1 MPH)? What's the lowest speed it can go?
Or, for a 'U' rating : Enthusiastically, or Efficiently, or EXTREME!
The man behind Google maps and the Facebook search engine
I mentioned two reports, related by the Captain of the SS Empire Howard and the other the Danish fishermen story related by Bill Bryson. I personally believe, like the author of the reddit link you gave, that Bryson's tale is a corruption of the former. That is, there is only one report here.

Having read several of Bryson's entertaining works, I know that he is not a rigorous researcher of the details.

The link I gave was to "Hypothermia and Cold Stress" by Evan L. Lloyd, 1986. It shows a citation to Lee and Lee 1971. I am unable to track down that reference based just on free internet searches. According to Lloyd's recounting, the rescuees did drink some alcohol. I can see how upon retelling that might be turned into a "hot drink."

I am quite willing to say that the previous poster heard about the Bryson story and the false details from that. However, I would rather state that the details of the story - that being of Danish fishermen - were wrong rather than the point of the story, which is the death of people after they have been rescued. In any case, the parent poster said nothing about Danish fishermen.

Even if "Lee and Lee 1971" citation I pointed to is too vague of a confirmation for you, the HSE report gives many examples of "post-rescue collapse and death" from both Allied and Axis sources, including from ship-wreck survivors (Critchley 1943).

I think it's unsafe describe the situation in a way that could be described as implying an urban legend, which is why I've specifically said that the details are wrong, and pointed to places where the details are correct. (To be sure, you are not doing that. I write this to explain why I wrote it as I did.)
Apple to sell 128GB models of its 4th Gen iPad with Retina display from Feb 5
This blog seems to be rather senselessly hyperbolic and misleading. For example, it attributes an anecdote in which HIV patients are "dropping like flies" due to lactose intolerance to the research paper it cites. According to other sources [1] [2] the paper actually discusses a situation in which cancer patients were administered a lactose placebo in which the author speculates their predisposition towards lactose intolerance could have influenced the study. The gap between the two situations could hardly be larger.

Certain placebos, they add, may skew results in favor of the active drug. The researchers referenced a trial for a drug used to treat anorexia linked with cancer in which a lactose placebo was used. Since lactose intolerance is common among cancer patients, the fact that some suffered stomach problems from the placebo may have made the actual drug look more beneficial.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/18/news/la-heb-placebo-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo-controlled_studies#Pla...
The trouble is self-signed X.509 certificates are pretty worthless. X.509 certs are built around the concept that they're issued by a trusted provider.

I tried to get together a proposal to introduce OpenPGP signed gems and wrote some proof-of-concept code so there could be a proper Web-of-Trust for rubygems:

https://github.com/grant-olson/rubygems-openpgp

But the developers were resistant (and understandably so) to having gpg as a dependency for gem verification, and I didn't trust myself to write the crypto and a decent keyring validation algorithm from scratch.
Ask HN: Who is working on file systems for consumer level removable drives?
Are there any groups working on creating a modern file system suitable for consumer use on external drives? (Especially on creating very simple cross platform support). Or on a simple tool set for fixing NTFS errors?

I want to support them with a smidgen of cash. Who should I support?

FAT32 is available everywhere, but has some limitations for modern users, and these limitations are going to get worse as drives and files get bigger.

NTFS is nice, and is sort of cross platform. But it's not great choice for an external drive. Unsafe removal of the drive while it's copying a file causes errors. (Obviously; that's okay.) But repair tools are not cross platform - the common advice is to run chkdsk on Windows. (Allowing OS X to try to repair this can be sub-optimal.)

ext3 / 4 seem nice, but not easily cross platform.

btrfs seems nicer, but 'experimental' and 'unstable' are not what I want for my file system, and it seems to be aimed at use cases much bigger than a domestic user.

zfs seems really nice, but again aimed at users with much more than a couple of external drives. And locked into one OS.
Fact: Zynga makes (or used to make) lots of money. Is there anyone you'd rather see getting a significant chunk of that? The CEO? Shareholders? Rank-and-file employees?
Anyone have experience with competitive-ish PC gaming from a walking desk?
I do not know to what extent the OS bypasses the BIOS, but it is not completly. If you look in the linux kernel config, you will see an option to control how much RAM is reserved for BIOS. Also, on (many?) Dells, Fn+Shift+15324 followed by Fn+r brings up BIOS thermal controls [1]. I have verified this on an Inspiron 1420, in Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.10 (kernel 3.5.0-21-generic).

[1]http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1684657
"The doctors had found a way to determine which patient was receiving which drug." - This implies that they consciously tried to bypass their blindness, physical design of the pill being different would do this sure, but that's not an issue with too much disclosure, that's an issue with people either A) Not doing their job well enough(the pill designers) OR B)Trying to find out which one so they could fudge the results.(Crooked Doctors? Yeah, less disclosure will fix that right up.)
Challenge accepted!

The hobby? Collecting and watching laserdiscs. Check out http://www.lddb.com/ and http://forum.lddb.com/ for a look into the hobby and community surrounding it, respectively.

Also, I don't think any of the LDDB shop owners are making a living off of LD sales alone.
Is Google pondering an experimental HetNet?
If someone compromised a package repository and replaced OpenSSH with a backdoored version, I would want to know immediately, and relay that message as quickly as possible to as many other users as possible before it spreads.

It is better to be paranoid about it and get the word out before someone actually gets hurt. If the users get to it before the maintainer gets to it, at least someone got the word out.
The Antigua/USA piracy battle, animated.
so the conclusion from that is that there is a concerted effort by drug companies to unscrupulously modified the outcomes of their studies

Did we read the same blog post? The author didn't claim any such thing. In fact, he referenced a study where (if you ascribe intent) it sounds like the drug company was undermining itself by using a placebo that worked better than the drug (the olive oil).

His actual conclusion, for non-readers, is:

Placebos aren't documented, and they're not included in studies, and many times they're active in causing side effects deliberately and yet they're barely regulated -- "current anarchy" -- and this casts doubt on the validity of studies.

His call to action sounds pretty reasonable to me:

> FDA needs to review its policies on placebos and either outlaw "active placebos" or rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use.
Perspective when designing mobile apps
What's a good startup domain name
This is a common misconception.

In fact, there are very few studies in which patients receive an "inert" placebo.

Consider a new drug that claims to treat heart disease. It would be obviously immoral to say, "we are going to take drugs away from the control group and give them sugar pills instead".

So a "Placebo" is usually the current standard-of-care, which might be a very powerful drug.

This works because we are not at all interested in the absolute effectiveness of a drug; we are only interested in whether or not it is better then the current alternatives.
A Step in the Right Direction: Thoughts and Observations About BlackBerry 10
I am not sure what this is getting down voted? This was not a dig at Ben. I was trying to be helpful, so they he could get in touch with the admin contact?!
I shall do that, I am a beginner starting out in C# so if I do go the route of buying it and learning from it I will let you know how it goes.
They should have done this a long time ago. Not that it would have changed much considering their flubs on the implementation side, but the BlackBerry brand was always much stronger than RIM.
"This "missing information" is available to the people that matter (the FDA)." - That's right, I'm just too unimportant and stupid to be trusted to look at this stuff, also when the issue a lot of people are having is not being able to trust big pharma and the FDA, well hiding stuff isn't going to fix that.

Yes, I was being a bit dramatic for impact.
This was discussed 2 years ago here: http://www.doctorslounge.com/index.php/news/pb/14946

and here:
http://pharmastrategyblog.com/2010/10/whats-in-placebos-who-...

But all three article (including the Topic) seem to focus on the Journal articles and neglect to write anything about the reports to the FDA. I'd be really interested in more info on that.

EDIT: I have no opinion nor info about the quality of the links i posted, I just found them through cursory duckduckgoing. So beware, they might both be total cranks. :)
Why does the placebo complexity make a call for regulation and study disclosure "utter bullshit"?
I do not understand where was this noise over security when Skype was under another American company, the Ebay?
We think 46% of people cheat on their partners
Thanks for handling this issue & your work on the site. I look forward to read the post mortem.

Oh, and +1 for the security page
you would probably need to do something along the lines of creating a sql.diff file that has the difference between production and local database and then ONLY inserts into the production database so you don't overwrite changes that have occurred since you started working locally.

This is something that could be written but really would only be worth it for someone that does a ton of WordPress development...definitely an interesting problem.
I generally write my constructor functions so I can easily forget 'new':

function Point(x, y){
if (!(this instanceof Point)) {
return new Point(x, y);
}
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
}

then you can just call:

var point = Point(x, y);

HT to issacs (node, npm) who I picked that up from.
Not everything that claims to be homeopathic actually is. One example is Traumeel. If you look at their ingredients ( http://www.traumeel.us/Products/ProductDetail.aspx?id=190100... ), there's enough active ingredients that are only 1X diluted that the total is over .5% active.

I assume it's just labeled as homeopathic because they failed to fake some clinical trials to get FDA approval (or didn't even try), but maybe it's actually an effective marketing choice.
I didn't think that Show HN was limited to new things only, what happens when someone joins HN after they have produced something they think worthy of sharing? The great thing about HN is that readers can vote on whether they want to see stuff, i guess this was voted up enough for that reason.
Even above duplication, it's important to document what's in the placebos because these clinical trials are used by the FDA to approve the drug for consumer use… or not.
PlayCLI: Play Iteratees + Unix pipe
Are you referring to studying/reading only? I wonder If I m the only one who likes to read on a tablet while wandering around the house at similar speeds.
Thats what I'm saying. You shouldn't have be a victim of burnout.

Burnout a temporary state (by nature) brought on by legitimate causes.

If it was depression, then that is a separate issue with plenty of it's own clinical treatments and reasoning.

You can't deal with burnout by suppressing everyone who brings it up.

It has to be accepted. He has to accept that there are fans of Textmate who are disappointed while being able to appreciate that he accomplished something really great regardless.

He accepted he can't finish the project and open sourced it, which was also a very nice gesture and made the fans quite happy.

There will always be people who are ignorant to the effects of burnout and try to make fun of failed projects. But that doesn't mean it has to be damaging to the project creators.
> There's an argument to be made that they should give up on the consumer market and just go "all professional", of course, but I'm not sure that works long term.

That's exactly what they tried to do, and is why they're in the situation they are in today. Instead of focusing on making the devices great for consumers, they focused on selling devices to businesses.

But then something completely foreseeable happened: employees wanted iPhones. Soon after that, those employees started complaining about carrying around two devices. Thus the "bring your own device" IT trend started, and has been killing RIM for the last 4 years.

No, either BlackBerry cedes all control of the market they were once the only player in, or they sell to consumers.
Become A More Resilient Designer
As a recent uchicago grad, let me say your advice, while well intentioned, isn't quite sound. Work in finance is not as lucrative as work with finance. I was in finance for about a decade....at gs, bofa etc...the thing is, firms don't let you daytrade, or buy/sell naked calls, or short sell equities, or flout 90 day holding period rules, or trade stocks in the restricted blacklist, or...I could give you an dozen ways ib's ringfence you. Otoh, if you work in the valley and you know your shit, you can pull in 200k and wear shorts and torn tshirts to work, not be subject to any bureaucracy, and get your tradestation account and go nuts. Sell naked calls all day and nobody will bug you.
> But the blog post says "Hey! Drug companies are trying to pull a fast on all of you!…"

Actually what it says is that placebo ingredients should be documented in studies, and regulated by the FDA. Why is that such heresy? If placebos are sugar pills, they don't need regulation. If they are designed to cause side effects, they are drugs. And that will skew the results of the drug tests, too, and as he describes in the olive oil example, not always in favor of the drug company.
I think now it is being force fed to all windows users so it is a bit different.
I guess what we're seeing is basically, when it comes straight down to it: We are all pretty damn lazy.
Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter
Totally understandable if it makes the most sense for the people you see as your primary customers for this.

Out of curiosity, did this come out of the aaronsw Hackathon at Noisebridge this weekend?

[wish i had been able to make it there, but was unable]
MegaUpload's "CEO" was Swizz Beatz (who happens to be Alicia Keys' husband).

In that light, I'm not sure this executive appointment sends the positive message that RIM, er... BlackBerry... thinks it does. Resorting to stunts that the Mega guys were doing years ago is hardly cool or creative.
it's a bit of a gray line - it's being published on HBR which is a "Big Name Publication" to a certain extent. that being said, it IS a blog, and blogs are for random musings such as this...
Earth Is Now On The Edge Of The Habitable Zone
New Rules, New Roles – Data Management Job Titles in Transition