skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Do Cigarette Warning Labels Help CAUSE Cancer?" No... Long answer: Hell no and stop doing this.

To the next person with a pseudoscientific gut-feeling-bear-with-me-just-a-bit-while-I-pull-a-half-baked-idea-out-of-a-number-set-that-does-nothing-to-corroborate, please don't. Corrolation doesn't equate to causation, no matter what amount of reality bending assertions you apply. Warning those at high risk for cancer know they're at high risk and subsequently confirm the hypothesis doesn't mean the warning was the cause.
This topic already mentioned on HN before
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4066826

Indeed, about 8 months ago. Judging by some of the criticisms there, progress has been made, so it's probably worth this extra outing.
I don't understand why it's so infeasible that improvements in cigarette technology could result in cigarettes that are worse for one's health because they've been more aggressively optimised for tar content as officially measured, or shelf life, or cost of manufacture.

As for the theory that modern smokers simply suck harder, I'm not sure that's so implausible. Light cigarettes are more common today, and most light cigarettes seem to get their lightness entirely from lengthier filters that have small holes in the paper. (If you use the tobacco for some other purpose, e.g., as filler for an unfiltered marijuana cigarette, then you'll find the smoke just as harsh and the roach paper no less tarry.) This requires a more forceful draw to avoid that unpleasant "sucking in air" sensation.

I've also noticed, on the occasions that I've checked recently, that cigarettes today tend to have lower advertised tar and nicotine content than the ones I smoked as a teenager. So perhaps that could result in a similar effect.
I disagree that machines have become more general (at least as I am interpreting it). I would argue there are just a wider variety of specific tasks they have been programmed to do. "General" implies abstraction, and I suspect machines won't be capable of meaningful abstraction ("this situation is like that situation") without AI.
There is at least some merit to the idea that the pollinated field is manufacturing the patented invention without a license.

(Which just points back to discussing the merits of granting such patents)
I just did the exercise of substitution in your post, Iran for the Rhineland, and the USA for Nazi Germany. That gives:

-Mein Furher! We can't possibly remilitarize the Rhineland!

=Why not?

-Those Wikileaks schweinehunds have revealed our contingency plans!

I wish we had Wikileaks in 1936. It would have made Hitler's career much shorter.
Dial-up modem handshake breakdown
Overlooking merge conflicts will lead you to a merge hell.
if a person proves consistently that they can do their job

What if the opposite is the case? Humboldt said education is so important, the whole nation has to support it by paying taxes. Now? Elite universities, university fees. Not her fault alone, but also not something she resisted a whole lot, right? Hence I claim a shitty job, and how she can be called a "victim" is beyond me; good riddance I say, pity the next one will likely be just as bad and in the pockets of her handlers.
Reminds me of one of the first computer systems ever used in business, back in the early 1950s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)

"One of its early tasks was the elaboration of daily orders which were phoned in every afternoon by the shops and used to calculate the overnight production requirements, assembly instructions, delivery schedules, invoices, costings, and management reports"
Thank you. I hope the uTorrent guys don't mind the resemblance of the two favicons. The Greek letter μ is universal. I'll change the colours if need be :)

Thank you for pointing it out.
See also: http://gizmodo.com/5711720/every-laptop-should-be-like-googl...
Everything just doesn't work and nobody cares
I am seriously tired. Nothing "just works", I have to always reboot, restart, replug, update, force-quit and make sure it didn't hang up while I wasn't looking.
Jan Pöschko's website (it's at http://www.poeschko.com/) explains how he squares working on Mathics and Mathematica.
"Developers Wanted" is on the first page. Being on open source project, you'll probably see a lot of organic growth and people scratching their own itches.
I've been thinking about this a lot since I first read about it yesterday. Here's what I think is _fair_ (throwing out doctrine, etc.). IA(definitely)NAL.

Monsanto has every right to get a patent on the 1G seeds. They have every right to sell those seeds -- they put money and effort into designing a (theoretically) improved product and should be rewarded for their investment.

Once they sell the 1G seeds, however, that's it. If the resulting plants produce equal-quality 2G seeds, then so be it. Once the farmer has purchased the 1G seeds (presumably from Monsanto), that's the end of the road for Monsanto. They've produced a product, sold it, and made their money.

What's happening here is that Monsanto is using the courts to compensate for a bad business model and a flaw in their design. If they want to continue to get farmers to purchase seeds from them year after year, then what they should have done is engineered the seeds to "expire" after a generation: The results plants should produce 2G seeds that are in some way inferior to the 1G seeds.

That way, farmers have a natural incentive to keep purchasing 1G seeds year after year. No lawsuits or restrictive license agreements needed. If farmers want the best, they buy from Monsanto. If they are ok with the inferior 2G seeds, then they can harvest their own and keep planting.

If it's not possible for Monsanto to engineer the seeds as such, well, too bad. The buck stops there. They need to charge more for the 1G seeds then. But farmers won't pay if the cost is too high? Well, again, too bad. Their job is to convince farmers that buying 1G seeds at 2-3x the price is worth it because of the improved product. If not, well, back to the drawing board.

This comes down to Monsanto trying to use a license agreement and the courts to compensate for a flaw in their product design, and that isn't right.
Careless Whisper
"People don't doubt that." I doubt that. Lately media was making homosexuality more popular/desirable/cool. You can claim that "homosexuality is not a choice" yet you can't prove that there are no people that are easily affected by what they are shown daily. I am sure that some % of homosexuality is caused by media.
Monsanto reminds me of Microsoft in the 90s, but worse.
This isn't about "giving" the button to an alien race.

You criticized the original poster's sense of pessimism for holding the only parsimonious, evidence-based and logical position on the subject.

Have whatever fanciful opinion you want to on the subject, but pretending it's based in anything but wishful thinking is naive.
There seems to be a trend of Very Smart People with no experience whatsoever in a given field, reading some article somewhere, pulling out R and some graphing software, and proclaiming "I've discovered something that nobody who actually works in the target field which I knew absolutely nothing about six hours ago ever found!". I wish those stories would stop getting posted to HN.
In USA it is also your responsibility. No, it is not an act of GOD for the simple fact that the fall a lot of times is caused by a damaged sidewalk. Fixing up the sidewalk is always the owner's responsibility. At least that is the case in New York City.
When Years Have Passed, Will You Remember Today? [video]
He started working for Wolfram in December 2012, and as noted on his blog, he quit the Mathics development.

http://www.poeschko.com/2012/12/new-challenges/
Or you know, people who have smoked is more likely to have kids with cancer or who where second-hand smokers at an age they can't remember now.

Also, campaigns against brest cancer had an exponential grow too but somehow the rate of breast cancer is about the same, or do your hypothesis includes lungs being more affected by perceptions than any other organ?
This is currently on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192656
Pretty amazing. He designed something that would become completely ubiquitous via the telephone, then somehow even more common with ATM pads, gas stations, cell phones, etc.
The most important thing a small start-up should do?
What do you think Wall Street is, if not an attempt at "crunching the raw complexity"? It doesn't work and can't work.

would be diverted to the rocket project

Diverted by whom? The "owners" of those resources, or your central planning bureau?

Post scarcity relies on the assumption that if we have more than enough raw materials (and we don't, but let's assume asteroid mining or something), and more than enough energy (fusion maybe) and instantaneous transport of matter (otherwise scarcity exists by the stuff you want being somewhere else) then we still won't be post-scarcity really, because people/civilizations will just take on bigger and bigger projects. There will never be a time when there is no need to make a decision on how to allocate some finite resource to create some outcome by a quantitative means.

Even in Star Trek, someone needs to be thinking, how many planets do we colonize this year? How many starships do we build?
An interesting essay by Nabeel Qureshi, opening up with a great example from Richard Feynman and then showing the development of the author's own thinking on how to learn. The author writes, "My education taught me to value getting the right answer. (It also taught me to value prestige, prizes, etc.)" And of course many people receive an education like that.

Qureshi credits John Holt's book How Children Fail

http://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Developme...

with opening his eyes to a different view of education. (The same book was recommended to me by my junior high assistant principal in 1971. How Children Fail was a life-changing book for me, and I recommend it to everyone who has ever been in school.) Qureshi writes, "In the last couple of years, I’ve been going through a process of un-education: removing all the bad habits that school somehow implanted in me:

"Being afraid of failure or embarrassment"

That's crucial. To be afraid to fail is to be afraid to learn. Here's a link to a FAQ I have prepared for my local mathematics students, "Courage in the Face of Stupidity,"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php

designed to prevent the kind of misguided approach to learning mentioned in the essay kindly submitted here. School curricula in many parts of the United States (and perhaps elsewhere too, as I note the essay is from Britain?) are designed so that most pupils will succeed in school assignments most of the time. That doesn't provide enough practice in taking on HARD tasks, and inadequately prepares young learners to succeed in either

a) study of more than one really difficult subject at the same time

or

b) successful problem-solving in adult life in private employment, when the problems are often open-ended and ill-defined.

As a parent of four children, and as a teacher of elementary-age pupils, I'm all about first bolstering children's expectations that initial failure is not a sure predictor of never succeeding, and then introducing CHALLENGING problems into their education so that one thing they practice while young is overcoming failure.

AFTER EDIT:

Another top-level comment just asked,

Anyone out there tried home schooling?

Yes. And it was John Holt's writings, beginning with How Children Fail in the early 1970s, that sparked my interest in homeschooling. I have been pleased with the results of homeschooling in the case of my oldest son, now fully grown and making a living as a hacker for a start-up, and I am glad to continue homeschooling for my three younger children.
Can you be fired from an Employer of Last Resort, I wonder?
It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.

[1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h...
1. Getting punished for being smarter than some teachers. It doesn't have to happen often to really really sour things.

2. Being fed a lot of crap by rote, with critical thinking only allowed in the sharp boundaries of the expected outcome for the curriculum.

3. The absolute unfairness and dictator-like behaviour of so many teachers, the mediocre characters, the lame-ass half-knowledge and pseudo-funny anecdotes they poured on the kids in between the lessons and oogling the girls. The lack of bodily hygiene of many.

Yes, there were good teachers too, but they had the chances of a snowball in hell. For me school was mostly a nightmare, I hated it, I ran away from it. Now I hate the fact that everybody automatically assumes I have degrees and whatnot because I'm smart. Fuck education, encourage curiosity... or it'll just be another brick in the wall.
US home to more botnets than Russia and China combined
Why use the Mathematica syntax, and not a better one? It's rather annoying syntax, Matlab and Maple are much better for this. Mathematicians don't use square brackets for functions, most programming languages don't either, but Mathematica, a mathematics language ffs, does. And sin and cos with capitals, meh.
It uses mathematica's syntax.
That graph did not look nice enough to come from R.
and now they tout it as a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel
What's your opinion on the lenova thinkpad x series? They fit the criteria.
Because your home garden is next on the hit list after all the family farms are gone. Most of the family farms do fine and produce well. Monsanto isn't competing, it is basically bullying everyone with "seed contamination" even if you don't want to buy their products.
Name Constraints extension.
There seems to be a trend of Very Smart People with no experience whatsoever in a given field, reading some article somewhere, pulling out R and some graphing software, and proclaiming "I've discovered something that nobody who actually works in the target field which I knew absolutely nothing about six hours ago ever found!". I wish those stories would stop getting posted to HN.

I've seen one of these (on a different topic) posted to HN repeatedly in comments, by a variety of participants here. Really, people need to learn how to evaluate sources better here on Hacker News. That's part of being an educated person.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5105664
Or it could be all the coal burning pollution catching up to us?
Opinion: Health Booth 2020
What about the use of additives in cigarettes that started around the 1960s? From wikipedia on 'cigarette': "According to data from the World Health Organization,[40] the amount of tobacco per 1000 cigarettes fell from 2.28 pounds in 1960 to 0.91 pounds in 1999, largely as a result of reconstituting tobacco, fluffing and additives."
Maybe as smoking went from an "everyone" activity to a more marginalized activity, you get worse health outcomes in that group for other reasons.

How does the fitness of the median smoker today compare to the fitness of the median smoker in the 1950s? What about wealth, access to treatment, etc?
Some data to help think up such effects: http://www.kidon.com/smoke/percentages3.htm

Differences in diet was an obvious idea, but it's not obvious to me what Japan and Israel might have in common.
It uses Sympy and SAGE under the hood, you'd probably prefer their syntaxes.
The first article graph of woman lung cancer rates raises some red flags - a huge increase in woman lung cancer caused by cigarettes would be expected a couple of decades after the huge increase in woman (as opposed to mostly-male) smoking in first half of 20th century.

In order for that graph to facilitate truth instead of misleading, it needs to include either (a) woman smoking rates by year, or (b) male lung cancer rates, not woman.
Didn't I just call C++ "mainstream"?
It's been taken down now. There is another version, although it appears to be slightly edited from the video posted on "Real Time" website. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov3tw8rfdEE
Are there any systems out there that simulate the processes that go into forming real landscapes - geology, volcanoes, glaciation, water flow? [Just to list the main factors determining what I see in the local landscape here in Edinburgh every day - other places will have other factors].
Here's the submission of the actual item, along with extensive discussion and reminiscing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140135
Interesting, i thought minecraft had more complicated algorithms.

Does anyone have any examples on a more specific 2d terrain generation (side-scroller).
That it was different for you doesn't change the fact that this is how it was for me. Maybe you were more lucky, maybe you had lower standards; who knows.
As others have pointed out, Mathics is missing features relative to Mathematica, so it is an alternative provided you can work within Mathics' subset of features. So if you are doing anything but tinkering it is still best to buy Mathematica.

But Mathics is great for exploring the concepts in the Mathematica programming language, a language that does not get the attention it deserves. If you are not familiar with Mathematica as a language and and are curious, see this comparison of Mathematica with other programming languages such as C, APL, and Lisp, from the first edition of the Mathematica book: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v1/contents/4.2.html (this fourth section was dropped from the second edition and beyond).
Feynman's key point is that learning rote means you can't invent new things. Its not knowledge, its not progress.

The article mostly looks at it from a 'its boring' angle instead. Which is not nearly as damning.
I am curious about "cigaret," wiktionary says it is a dated form of cigarette.

I have trouble looking at the graph without being distracted by "cigaret" but firefox's dictionary is not marking it as a misspelling so it must be accepted somewhere. Where is this spelling still commonplace?
> 1. Once Germany was a leading intellectual, scientific, and engineering powerhouse. Academic titles still have some cultural significance. It might be a kind of a relict.

Why past tense? It still is a powerhouse, especially in engineering.
Thanks. I think I've run into that before (as a user), but just didn't think about it. Seems better to just make the user zoom back out than to disable zooming altogether, in any case.
> I am not sure if you've noticed, but the US and Israel have some of the most advanced militaries in the world

Hilarious. Well that explains those quick, decisive victories in Iraq and Afghanistan!

> If the US were at war with Iran, the Iranians would need the help of some other powerful nation to have anything that even resembles a chance of winning

I have difficulty imagining what you are thinking typing this. What do you think "winning" is? If you mean "defeating the US Army on a level playing field" then of course they cannot win. Such a conflict, of course, has never occurred in the history of warfare.

If you mean "causing the US Army enough pain that they give up and go home" then they absolutely could win. Iraq and Afghanistan are wonderful demonstrations of this. The US Polity has no stomach for extended, bloody guerrilla warfare.
In 1955, only 38,200 people in the U.S, were in mental hospitals as a result of
disablement due to depression
(C. Silverman, 1968, The Epidemiology of Depression, Johns Hopkins Press). Today, depression
is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for people aged 15-44 (according to NIMH stats).
Depression now affects 20.5 million American adults: 14.8 million in the form
of major depressive disorder and 5.7 million in the form of bipolar disorder.
That's a pretty huge jump in numbers: 38,200 to 20 million.

He's comparing the number of of people insitutionalized in a mental hospital in 1955 to
the total number of people who suffer from depression in the United States now. How is that
comparison even relevant to anything? How many people are institutionalized for depression now?
My guess is that those numbers either wouldn't support his narrative or can't be found in a few
minutes of googling like the rest of his "research".

Also notice how he gets to 20 million (a very dramatic number indeed) by adding together
14.8 million suffering from a major depressive disorder and 5.7 million in the form
of bipolar disorder. Are those thing mutually exclusive?
I don't think that the author is trying to claim that depression is made up and hyped. What he seems to be claiming is that publicity surrounding depression could have caused an increase in the number of depressed people through the power of suggestion.

He's not saying that mental illness isn't valid, or that the people with depression aren't suffering. He's suggesting that the increase could partly be caused by the immense advertising campaigns surrounding anti-depressants; this is in no way de-legitimizing depression, just suggesting a possible cause.
I agree.

Further, if Monsanto wants to reap the benefit of their product's self-reproduction; they should be required to pay cleanup costs (by the EPA? Department of Agriculture?) to remove "contaminated" soybeans from the rest of the environment.

It's not this farmer's fault that Monsanto's product has polluted the stock of available leftover soybeans. Monsanto should be the entity on the hook here, not the farmer.
Then you're on the right track :-)

Forget I even said anything.
If there IS a nocebo effect here, it's mildly implausible that it would have a really narrow effect like "making people more susceptible to lung cancer". At a minimum, I'd expect them to be more susceptible to other cancers, and possibly other diseases and illnesses (the big fat warnings in your face, and having to bypass them to smoke, acting as some sort of immunosuppressant or something like that).

Perhaps, if this effect is real, further research could demonstrate that? Or perhaps there's still a confounding effect somewhere, maybe something related to how people self-select whether they're going to smoke and some factor which is correlated both with making that decision in the face of a big fat warning label and with increased susceptibility to lung cancer?

Anyway. Nice idea for a research paper. Not sure it belongs here until you've done more though. :P
I truly understand your point, and this is why Micro is offering a flexible scripting support. You can quickly prototype your business logic without needing to restart the app, which BTW, it only takes a few seconds. Using Beanshell, for example, allows you to develop and test the business logic and then transfer the code to Java if need be.

However, I am currently working on integrating the JCL (https://github.com/kamranzafar/JCL) library, recently released under a dual license by its author; it used to be LGPL only. This way I hope I can offer the class loading support at runtime, like Play is doing it, for example.
If by "progress" you mean that they addressed the specific concerns, sure.

veyron http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4067025 pointed out that

Sum[x^2,{x,1,y}]-y*(y+1)*(2*y+1)/6

was broken, but now it's fixed.

programnature http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4067225

Plot[Sin[x], {x, -5, 200}]

appears that issue was resolved as well.

However, most of the comments seem to be directed at mathematica's language (none of which were resolved, seeing as how the goal was to replicate mathematica)
SquashRack - It's not enough to know SaaS Apps are running, but running right
sigh. Who came up with this brilliant gesture? Seriously..
The language is pretty well-documented. For example:

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/OperatorIn...
Ask Others For Their Experience. Ask Yourself For Advice.