skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A quote from the press release about the paper the OP cites:

But, according to the paper's author, Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, this standard has a fundamental problem, "there isn't anything actually known to be physiologically inert."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101018174335.ht...
Submittable (YC S12): How To Find The Pain That Creates Paying Customers
I'd like to add a second type of persons having certified its airworthiness and as a third type everybody else wondering whether the tons of flying metal labeled aircraft will stay over their head.
Introducing the Firefox OS Boilerplate App
Doing what you love may well be good for your career. However, that doesn't mean the thing you love will BE your career. You could spend your teen years pursuing your passion of music for example. Maybe it leads you to think about how the brain responds to music. Maybe from there, that ends up turning you on to neuroscience. Maybe from there, you end up in a career as a brain surgeon. It happens.

So chasing your passion can lead you to a very good place in the world so long as your keeping your eyes and mind open while doing so. Pursuing or NOT pursuing your dreams with a closed mind will probably not get you far regardless.
I think you're correct. The example given in the linked article mentions dry mouth, but it's arguably important in double-blind studies to have both the controls and test groups develop similar side effects, to prevent both the patient and the administering physician from determining which is the placebo group. I don't think it's entirely due to nefarious motives from the drug company.
Mice that didn't make the cut
EBay loses head of local Jack Abraham
What is he up to next?
RIM Changes Company Name to BlackBerry
I encourage you to post that in the comments on the blog itself. There are already comments saying "thank you for this" and "placebos should be regulated" and whatnot. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I believe it would be useful to have your comment close to the article text (instead of having to scroll down) to provide balance.
What good is 70k apps if ~69k of them are are crap?
For an IT team, it's not if the employees like the UI, it's if they can figure out how to use it without a huge expense in training them.
I was about to write something similar. Thanks for formulating it so eloquently. I think it's this part that trips up some people:

> [...] at a minimum it unblinds the doctors on the ground.

It's very important that the person administering the drug/monitoring the patient can not tell the difference.
I made an effort to try to bend my legs with some frequency, but I wouldn't call it "walking in place," nor can I say I was very consistent about it. I'd usually do it for a few minutes, then get deep into a problem, and realize I'd been leaning on a leg for 10 minutes. Rinse and repeat.

A big part of the value of the treadmill for me is that it forces me to always move and bend my legs, which means I never have the opportunity to default to a bad posture. That's the reason why I walk all day every day.

A cheaper alternative I considered was getting a Bongo Board: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...

I went with a treadmill desk because I thought with the bongo board I could still default into a balanced inanimate position, and because I'm fortunate enough where I could afford a treadmill desk without it being a huge sacrifice for me. But, if that weren't the case, I think the bongo board could be an improvement over standing.
Perhaps, but I dislike that attitude. It's this kind of story that people generalize to justify why change is bad.

"Look at those idiots who tried to cut costs myopically and ended up at a net loss" is a common story, and I've heard it used to kibosh good ideas.

The point of the parable, to me, is that you need to think the whole process through. It's about good, thorough engineering. It is NOT about not trying. People get reflexively pessimistic about improvement ideas, which is a real shame. Perhaps I'm sensitive to it because I've often been the guy trying to change "the way things are done." :-)
Yes it's expensive to keep tabs on Assange but the Met (London's police force) has about 20,000 active officers. You're talking about 0.05% of their manpower. It's not ideal but it's really not that big a deal for them. And obviously it's political but why does that invalidate it as a reason?

What you seem to be suggesting is that the UK should be deliberately lax in fulfilling it's treaty obligations (that is provide resources they know are insufficient). Yes they might be able to technically meet their obligation without actually keeping tabs on Assange but do you really think that the Swedish (and presumably US) governments are going to be happy about that?

It's politics but politics isn't intrinsically bad either in general or in this case specifically for the UK. On the contrary, not pissing off Sweden (and the US presumably) sounds like something worth investing a small amount of resources in. Otherwise who knows what might happen when the UK next want something from Sweden (or the US)?

On the other side, what reason do they have to do what you suggest? The British public don't really care one way or another about Assange right now. Sure if you ask them whether it's a good use of money they'd probably say no but the strength of feeling isn't such that there is any domestic political capital at stake and that's unlikely to change (we've got far bigger problems than Assange and our budget situation isn't going to be resolved by reassigning 0.05% of one of the 40-odd police forces in the UK).

Internationally most of the UKs allies seem to either not care at all, not care much so default to supporting the treaty obligations (if in doubt you don't say break the law) or be positively anti-Assange. Those countries who are pro-Assange generally aren't countries for who the UK is likely to piss of Sweden and in particular the US to curry favour with.
Of course we can't know who is telling the truth since ingredients on placebos are not disclosed. That's the part I think is the meat of the issue.
Has Firefox implemented Web Audio by now?
It's something that was (IMO) ruined by this trend for giant phones. I can't even reach the notification bar of my Android phone without heavy straining now.
Who controls the integrity of placebos?
You're the Boss: Trying to Answer the Inevitable Question: Can I Have a Raise?
Hi Hamai, yes, you're right. We had a close look at the TOS of all the sources we're currently supporting and offering the possibility to use only the sound of a YouTube video is one of the things we're not allowed to do.
Got a wave of nostalgia from that, except that the line tests at the end are slightly different than the warbles my modem used to play. It's been years and I can still remember the difference between a 28.8k and 56.6k connection sound.
I'm an economist and saw a story about innovation. An arbitrage was identified and, after some searching, a mechanism found to exploit it. The process was messy, but resulted in a system which increased profitability (or lowered ticket prices or freed up capital to make the chairs comfier) by more efficiently allocating limited resources (note that none of the complaints were about lines outside the toilet) through the deployment of technology.
My thoughts on Bradley Manning are more complicated than the simplistic "Free Bradley!" or "Hang Bradley!" extremes one often sees when it comes to that case.

I don't fully support what he did and I think he was wrong to do it in the manner in which he did and thus he deserves some punishment. I also think he stands as an unfortunate symbol of how the idea of the writ of habeas corpus is completely dead in America, which sucks.

As it relates to Lamo, though, I think it is clear that the way Lamo went about convincing Manning to reveal what he had done while convincing him that he (Lamo) was a journalist and priest and thus Manning would be protected from disclosure was hugely unethical and marks him as one of the great asshats of all time.
Is it not possible that, via whatever mechanism placebo drugs have positive intended effects, that they could also cause side effects?
Computer Scientists Find New Shortcuts for Traveling Salesman Problem
> Please, if you find an issue like this, be nice. Tell the maintainers privately. Don't post to Reddit, HN, or a public Gist. RubyGems.org is completely volunteer run. No one gets paid to work on it. Thanks for your patience everyone.

It'd probably go a long way if you guys considered making an easily-discoverable security page with information on who to contact, how you prefer that contact to take place and how long they should expect to have to wait to hear back from you.
Having two permanently coupled cars is obvious.

It is NOT obvious that they should have put a toilet in every car. The solution works quite well and you save a potentially large amount of money.
Custora online class: An intro to Customer Lifetime Value
Ben Goldacre says that testing against placebo is sub-optimal. You're testing that a medication is better than nothing. What you want is a medication that tests better than whatever we're currently using.

I don't know how that fits in with blinding everyone involved. As abtinf and refurb mention, designing placebo is a difficult process.

And you don't need to include anything to create side-effects; people taking sugar pills will happily report having a range of side effects.
A string processing rant
A String Processing Rant
I think you may have missed the point. You have stated that the article 'pointed out a few random oversights', but the actual point of the article is that _there is no data_. How can anyone, including you, know how effective the choice of placebo ingredients are if they aren't disclosed?

It doesn't seem an undue burden to ask that the placebo ingredients be documented so that their effect on the study, which is critical by any measure, can be understood. How can a separate group reproduce the results of a study if they don't have this type of information?

What you seem to have said is - trust us. We won't tell you what's going on, you can't evaluate how well we are doing, but this is a totally hard problem so don't worry about it. This is disingenuous when the drug companies have vested interests in the outcome of these studies.

If the drug companies are truly doing such a great job, then they should be recognized for the excellent work. The only way to do that is to release the ingredients used in the creation of placebos.
It's a silly position, but I can see why they did it. Blackberry used to be cool. Now it most definitely is not.

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.
I got a BlackBerry job doesn't have the same ring to it
I started with a 300 bps modem (Novation AppleCat II, it could actually do 1200 half-duplex to another AppleCat II). From there a 2400 bps modem, then a 9600, then finally a 56k before I had ISDN, DSL, etc.

I remember the evolution in tones but never knew what they were till I took a signaling class in college. One of the projects in that class was to build visual transmitters. We'd stand outside a few hundred yards apart and see how fast we could transmit a message to a partner. The trick to being fast was encoding multiple bits in each symbol, but not so many you'd fumble around grabbing the next symbol. I think my transmitter encoded 2 bits at a time (so four symbols).

Aside, the Apple Cat II was a fascinating modem - http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Machines/cat/
Not playing in the conspiracy here, but the lack of transparency is concerning. I know the weight and complexity of the process of designing a clinical study, and I don't doubt that, in most cases, the placebos are well crafted.

However, I'm sure that, in some cases there are oversights in the placebo choice (we do make mistakes), and we don't know which ones.

There are also big financial stakes, and pharmaceutic firms are known to cheat while attempting to bring drugs to the market. The burial of negative studies come to mind.
unless it's homeopathic alcohol :P

http://homeopathicvodka.com/
Wrists - not at all. I have the old model of the Lifespan Treadmill desk - check here for a photo: http://www.amazon.com/LifeSpan-TR1200-DT-Treadmill-Desk-Mode...

I rest my elbows on the pad on the front, with my keyboard about a foot forward on the desk. No matter my body's movement, my arms are stable and anchored.

With respect to eyesight, there is mild movement but I don't find it bothersome or difficult. First, it is very mild - maybe an inch or two between steps. Second, it's more of a front-back movement than up-down (remember, this is a walking treadmill, not a running treadmill), so I find it does not at affect my field of vision nor what my eyes are focused on.
Yep, sorry :D changed it matey! Thx!!
The product is the method. This is also true of MMOs, what would happen if you removed the xp bar from those games? The 'game' would practically cease to exist.
The effects of unblinded doctors can be catastrophic and might not even be discovered.

There was one study where a drug was designed to improve motor response in patients with retarded motor skills. The doctors had found a way to determine which patient was receiving which drug.

So when it came time for the doctors to measure efficacy of the drug, they would do the motor skills test. If the patient was on the actual drug, and didn't show improvement, the doctors had a tendency to say things like "Well, that can't be right. Let me run the test again."

Disaster. Hundred million dollar trial down the toilet.
Given that the article was written by Dijkstra, your interpretation is probably closer to the truth than mine.

I wonder though if this lesson has the same value nowadays as it had on its day. Maybe it is because of such lessons that this design procedure is common today.
vs? every language has worts
Well said. I'm not the first to make the observation, but the principles of flat design also owe a great deal to the data-density work of Edward Tufte (http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php/Data-Ink_Ratio) and the functionalist school of industrial design as exemplified by Dieter Rams'"10 Principles of Good Design"(https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design). Where flat design diverges from these principles, I say go with originals.
I find the linked article in which he described what he was learning from working at Zynga illuminating:

http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/18/zyngas-chief-designer-shar...

Key points to take away:
- We launch new games on insignificant fractions of our overall budget
- Metrics help us figure out whether newly introduced features actually help us earn more.
- Devising a way to "shame" users into playing more was our most effective recent new innovation.
> Do you realize how many man-years have been spent working around BIOS bugs over the years? Get any kernel developer a drink, then just say the word 'BIOS'; your opinion of UEFI will change pretty rapidly.

Isn't it the case that once the kernel is fully booted, up and running, it bypasses BIOS entirely and talks directly to the hardware? Have all those bugs you mention been related to the booting process itself (constituting a relatively tiny part of the kernel)?
Heh, my first thought upon seeing this post was "wow, they actually had a game designer?"
Oh, we got our feet on the ground
And we're burning it down
Oh, got our head in the clouds
And we're not coming down

This girl is on fire
This girl is on fire
She's walking on fire
This girl is on fire
> Now, it's a very mature category where it's all about refinement, not major innovation

I disagree. You are completely right that in that situation it makes sense to develop an interchangeable supplier base. as you mention it allows you to increase competition and put pressure on them to reduce costs.

However, in a situation where you're still looking for innovation, like developing a new car (or plane) it makes sense to work with highly integrated suppliers. These won't be interchangeable and because you're very dependent on them, the opportunities for cost saving are probably smaller. On the other hand, because they have specialized knowledge and skills they can actually help you innovate much faster. At least that's the theory; you're right that SpaceX seems to focus on doing as much as possible in-house and it seems to work for them. A reason could be however, that the type of suppliers necessary to make this model work are just not there (yet) in their business.

I guess in practice it's about finding the right balance. Insisting on doing everything yourself can lead to bad cases of NIH syndrome, while outsourcing everything leads to a loss of control.
I just switched to a sit/stand desk. I'm not ready to go full-treadmill, but it has helped my back. Getting a pad for your feet is crucial, though. I also wrote up my research / materials here: http://goo.gl/JxhMq
The Laborer and the Craftsman
I've used this site before, and it does a great job of getting me up in the morning.
The Diabetic Journal - Improving Health Through Technology
Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying the book!

Yeah I've purchased my book on CreateSpace a couple of times, I didn't find it much different from other e-stores, maybe it's because I had previously created an account?

As far as I know you go through: Buy -> Shipping address -> Shipping method -> Payment -> Receipt. Was it more steps for you than that?
Flaws of Object Oriented Modeling
I assume he meant platform rather than format. The casual in browser Facebook game may be what he meant by format.

Also I certainly hope the guy did not make boatloads of money from such a horrid company.
Yes -- I got a custom mat. I feel it is crucial to be able to withstand long hours standing. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BYRDK2
I wasn't necessarily thinking any certain way - I haven't done much front-end development in a few years, so I don't know much about any of the frameworks mentioned. I was just trying to politely point out that the post is fairly content-free.

However, reading about a project switching technologies every few months does make me raise an eyebrow. Nothing wrong with doing it for a personal project, but does it fundamentally move the business forward and let it do things it couldn't before? Or is it just developers playing with shiny new toys?

Edit: I will be reading more about it to wrap my head around how it all works. I'm probably a bit less receptive to "the cool new thing" than usual because I've spent the last few days trying to revive and migrate an "ancient" Rails 2 project and dealing with a lot of no-longer-supported stuff.
I can't believe how much serious discussion is taking place here. When I read the article I thought it had to be from theonion or something.
If questions of residence are in consideration, you would think things would be complicated by his request for asylum from Ecuador. That certainly doesn't suggest he intends to return to Australia in 6 years.
Ah, I see that there's a "recovery partition" on the Pro models.
Tell that to the guys who run Penny Arcade.
Bower, a browser package manager by Twitter
If you want security notices to go to the Rubygems team, you have to set up a security page that tells people how to do that. Like everyone else, I appreciate your volunteer work, but no amount of goodwill creates the ability for people to read your mind.

Please post a security page. It literally doesn't need anything more than an email address and a PGP public key.

By the way: if Rubygems needs security help, it looks like there's quite a number of people who are willing to pitch in. When I published a FreeBSD crt0 bug back in 1996, I was given commit privs. I thought that was a pretty effective way to co-opt adversarial researchers.
Unfortunately, no. However, it will have at least partial support in Firefox 20, so it is on its way.
I don't believe it's that easy for most people.
Algorithmically Composed Music
Right, but I am not talking about the reddit stuff which was one year ago and I learnt from that mistake.
>The Z10, which starts at $199 with a wireless contract, will be available on Jan. 31 in the U.K., on Feb. 5 in Canada, and in March in the U.S. The Q10 will follow in coming weeks, the company said.

U.K. then Canada, interesting. I wonder why their home country isn't first?
I think you meant to say "respectfully".

I agree, but how do people audit? I think it's time to start putting application dependencies, like rubygems and npm modules, under version control, not in the same repo, but in a different repo.

Mikeal Rogers has some good reasons why, but there gets to be too much commit noise if you have big dependencies, and put them in the same repo. A separate repo solves this.

http://www.futurealoof.com/posts/nodemodules-in-git.html
These modems are from 1999 or later, so not exactly ancient. Now I'm wondering if the limit to modem speeds in the 80s and 90s was encoding design or the cost of DSPs to implement more advanced encodings.
So aside from the keyboard, it's basically the same as my iPhone4.
US economy shrinks a surprise 0.1% in fourth quarter
Great suggestion, I'll add a security page today.
What I never understood is why the modem plays this through its speakers instead of some other tone that lets us know that it is connecting. Any explanation?
I believe the multi-millionaire publisher Felix Dennis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dennis) in a certain sense would not quite agree...

In his book "How to Get Rich" he related his hint to pioneer PC-magazines publishing to his interest in early PC-games.

This seems to be the case PG wrote recently in his latest essay - when someone is experiencing a new thing purely as a user, not developer, and feeling and thinking about what's still missing that could be useful to others like him.
Maybe it's time to heckle some sponsors (cough heroku cough) to pay for 2 full time admins for this critical piece of infrastructure.
They should list placebo ingredients after the trial is done so it's possible to duplicate the trial and get the same results, right?

If you don't provide enough information in your paper to repeat the experiment (and get the same results!!), then it's not good science. Good scientific studies need to be repeatable and need to provide enough information to do it.

And even if people don't want to repeat the full experiment, being able to review the details of how it was done will help them spot mistakes. You can't have things like "peer review" without saying what you did.

So this is a serious problem, even if the rest is breathless hype.
Don’t gamble with your IT infrastructure
You've missed the point.

Once the placebo has been designed to 'match the drug in physical appearance, taste, texture, density, state (liquid/solid/gas), and anticipated side effects' it should still be described in the final paper.
How is this different than just using Mandrill with templates, and sending content/HTML into placeholders?