skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually there is a small (very small) grain of truth to what he's saying.

If you have a history of mental illness (Schizophrenia in particular) in your family, it can bring it on faster. Meaning: people who go crazy from doing psychedelics would have been crazy anyhow.

I would suggest you approach LSD very thoughtfully, with reverence, as if it were a pilgrimage. Don't take it too seriously, but do try to gain some perspective on things that are important to you. I kept a journal of my experiences.

Another note: Don't try to control things. The one thing you will quickly realize on LSD is the faster you allow yourself to surrender and take things as they come, the faster you will be able to gain powerful insight into how your mind works. Attempting to control things will just hinder progress.

If you get scared, don't worry: think of fluffy pink cotton candy. Seriously, if you do get really anxious and for whatever reason scared, just let yourself be scared. The faster you allow the emotions conquer you, the faster they fade away. If you are terrified, the best thing to do is to /be terrified/ instead of trying to /not/ be terrified. One of them will take you forward, one of them will put you in a thought loop.

Have fun and enjoy yourself. LSD is to this day, one of the single most important experiences of my life.

Edit:
Also, remember when you're coming up (it should take at least an hour, sometimes as long as two), you will start to think about how you shouldn't have done this and how you might go crazy and never be okay again. This is a completely normal thought that almost every rational person has during the first hour or so. Just let things happen how they will, put in some good music and be comfortable. Those feelings pass quickly.

When you're coming down it can be kind of nerve racking because you might be tired and want to go to bed but you can't. The best thing to do in this situation IMO is to go on a walk.

Finally, I wouldn't believe the hype about being paranoid around non-psychonauts. The first time I ever indulged I was with two sober friends in public, and I had no trouble maintaining. LSD is remarkably easy to snap yourself out of if you take an appropriate dose (1 tab if it's your first time, I never took more than 1 ever, and I spaced them out 6 months)
If stories like that stay about, it'll drive a lot of people away from HN. Which IMHO would be a shame.

There's obviously a lot of people who are 'pro drugs', and we've already had more than enough marijuana stories.

In terms of actual interestingness, I'm sure anyone who is curious can search on google for first hand accounts of what being on drugs does/feels like.

I also find it quite morbid. In the same way I would had the OP had expressed a curiosity to know how it feels to cut off his leg.

(I'm not offended, and I don't think most people who flagged it are. I just don't think it's a good post for a site like this).

Once again though, be useful to see on each article how many people flagged it.
Here's what he's getting at, perhaps: if you have some code that's more "library like" in the sense that it's not a standalone product, people including it in their own proprietary products isn't going to hurt you that much, and if they're smart, they may even contribute back to the project, especially if your code isn't really a competitive advantage for them. If your code is GPL, you lose those potential contributors.

Case in point, I know a few people are using Hecl in commercial products, and yet they have made some very nice contributions back to the project, something that wouldn't have happened had it been under the GPL.
Well, this particular tack was generating some interesting discussion.

Also, taking LSD is not like "cutting off your leg", no matter how much you may believe it to be. If you really want to talk about limbs, then taking LSD is more like growing an extra arm for a few hours. Wouldn't you like to try that in a risk-free manner?

I don't think there's been all that many stories about acid. If those became a common occurence, then I'd start flagging them too. As far as I can see, there's only one of these here now.
I thought it meant because of the Oracle takeover. My bad.
for me haml/sass is a change like jquery was for html/js

now i have a superclean html structure with haml, the same superclean css structure with sass.

compass adds grid & other useful mixins and run-time automatic compilation of sass and haml files.

in plus everything is dry, my own set of mixins reusable in every web app are growing fast.

with compass growing up i think we'll have an API-like building tool for web frontends.
heh, I thought you meant compile time.
This is a pretty typical response that I've heard many times. When I read your comment I hear: "I am comfortable with my brain and I don't want to do anything to change the way it works."

And yet, you talk about how you take medication, pain relievers, coffee, etc. Do you know how pain medication works? It messes with your brain.

The phrase "change your mind" means to reconsider things you once accepted as truth. You seem to be opposed to this idea; I see it as a beautiful opportunity.
That FB number is for a single 8-core server. Also, for in-memory stores, reads and writes are not that different I assume.
Darn. I was hoping for a new keyword that did something cool, useful, and concise.. e.g. if, for, map, switch, sobe.
Best economic indicator
help is a must especially for web apps. you don't know the education level of your customer, a help will make them feel more comfortable.

and yes, the help is generated from code. writing help separatelly will never work.

if you use BDD / RSpec / Cucumber or other tools help will be generated and maintained together with your code.
Amrita Rao launches Titan Raga Chocolat collection
Titan announced the launch of Raga Chocolat! Collection. Styled in contemporary fashion, this collection is inspired by Chocolate. Bollywood actor Amrita Rao unveiled the collection in the presence of Ms. Shyamala Ramanan, Marketing Manager, Titan.
<img src="http://i43.tinypic.com/154ylhe.jpg">
Vernor Vinge predicts singularity by 2030
Did he say he was going to take LSD to code better?
Huh. I wish there was a wiki of such ideas. Just so we can check out taboos against other's.

Edit: http://taboos.wiki.zoho.com/TabooCollection.html
There are several tools that you might try to use to work with your clients remotely. Here are a few that I use when I'm traveling abroad:

- Skype

- Etherpad

- VNC (it's my policy to get clients to install VNC servers on their computers, so they can make an outgoing connection to my computer. This lets me view their exact desktop and review any problems that they might have)

- SSH to my office/development/production environments (you can set up SSH to act as a SOCKS proxy into the remote environment, making it feel as if you were physically there with regards to connectivity and access)

- SocksCap (allows you to transparently wrap any program that connects to remote stuff into the SOCKS protocol - used in conjunction with SSH)

I've found that I can generally service all my client requests and issues via the use of these tools. When something does fail bad, I have a PFY in my city who can get himself to the client very fast to resolve any issues which I cannot fix remotely.
For the record, I've found that people like you are generally not the problem. People like yourself (and myself for that matter) tend to get assigned more work because they are responsible enough to ask for a new assignment once they've completed the old one. This means you have an endless supply of work, some of which you end up taking home with you. But the reality of that endless supply of work means that you spend most of your office time on it.

The people who tend to abuse workplace Internet are those who don't ask for more work but instead sit around and wait until someone comes and gives them more work. This delay leads to a lot of personal Internet time.

Something else to remember is that Broadband Penetration in the U.S. is still only at 57% which means a lot of these people (who are in the lower income level to begin with due to their lack of initiative) don't have high speed internet at home. Which leads them to do most if not all of their personal web surfing at work.
No wonder there is so much unsold inventory.
How Much Ads Cost
iChat, or when that bugs out on audio once in a while, Skype. We use iChat for screen sharing and video chat fairly frequently, but we do get together often as well for more in-depth stuff.

We've had 3-4 hour iChats when there was lots of stuff to cover, and it's worked great. Just don't move your mouse while you talk or it'll get choppy... :)
There's a long list of things I support your right to say ... somewhere else.
At present, the slickest is unquestionably the $149 box from Vudu

The Vudu box is actually a rather interesting case. From the start, their marketing team wanted to be able to offer relatively high-quality 1080p movies, with audio, at 3 megabits per second--enough to play in realtime on an ordinary broadband connection without prebuffering.

In almost any other situation, this would have been a total disaster: 3 megabits for 1080p is practically impossible with current technology. However, a few things saved them:

1. They realized that you don't actually need to use constant bitrate for streaming. If you have a local hard disk for buffering, you can let the bitrate variance increase over time by slowly buffering ahead of the main movie, so that once you're a few minutes in, you have a very large buffer within which to allow variable bitrate.

This is the extra benefit of having local storage: a normal VOD service forces you to use constant bitrate for the entire stream.

2. They used H.264 video encoded with x264.

This is the best case I've ever seen of the fortunes of a company practically resting on a single open source program. They tried all sorts of solutions, and x264 was literally the only option that gave reasonably viewable output at the rates their marketers insisted on.

(Disclaimer: I have worked for Vudu and I develop x264 ;) )

IMO, this is going to be one of the make-it-or-break-it factors in the video on demand business: can you provide good enough video quality to satisfy people? Nobody cares much about quality when watching Youtube, but in order to convince someone to pay for your content, the bar is vastly higher; you can no longer get away with your streams looking awful.

Many VOD services have failed because of this: if someone is going to pay the price of a DVD rental to watch a movie, they want it to look as good as a DVD. This is exacerbated by the fact that the initial adopters of such services are going to be more technical users who are willing to spend significant amounts of money on their home entertainment system: the same people who will be turned off by Youtube-like video quality.

This is also the challenge of competing with television services: while companies like Comcast prove again and again that having tons of bandwidth doesn't mean you can't completely cock up your video quality, it's vastly easier to do a good job when you have a gigantic pipe than when you're running over someone's low-end DSL.
One of the ones that comes up here every now and then and always generates a heated discussion that goes nowhere is the idea that there are genetic differences in intelligence between people with ancestors originating from different parts of the world.
I just don't think the post is relevant to hacker news. Every once in a while someone will post something about their "hacking" with drugs, and it's generally just dull, self-indulgent, rambling. palish is a fine HN contributor, but I'm not interested in his acid trip. Nor am I interested in salvia, marijuana, etc. Another long-time, and usually excellent, HN contributor (whose name escapes me) has frequently hocked some herbal brain boosting drug that he imports and sells, and I find those posts dull, too.

It's not that you can't say it. It's that you should say it some place where it will be appreciated. I see that it got a pretty good amount of upvotes before being deaded by an editor or pg, so I may even be in the minority (you and palish have been around about as along as I have, so it's not an "oldfag vs newfag" question), but I definitely don't care whether palish has a conversation with God tonight while under the influence of LSD.

If I wanted drug experience discussions I would go to erowid: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/

And, if I wanted repeats of pg essays on HN...well, I would never want repeats of pg essays on HN.
Answer 1: (Snarky)

I've used IRC & NCSA Collage on my Omnibook 300 since 1995. Daylight readable screen.. runs on AAs, no updates or worms to worry about since most of the code is in ROM. YEAH BABY!

Answer 2: (Serious)

If you need to see people, hear people, interact with them on a whiteboard, and show them a presentation, that probably implies you'll be doing mucho damage by not being there in person.

It's probably best to figure out ways to win by not collaborating in real-time.. like reviewing and continuing your employees work after they go home but before they start the day because you're in a different time-zone. Think about it - you'll probably have 8 hours to think about things and provide good well-thought out concise answers and ideas that'll get read by fresh minds. That's way better than the interplay you'll get in most real-time meetings. As to presentations, maybe it'd best to find someone that's really skilled in them and have them do the presentations instead while you enjoy traveling?

Answer 3: (Answering the questions, pandering for upvotes)

http://Etherpad.com is a really nice collaborative notepad with no software to install.

http://Skype.com works great in tons of environments for voice and video.

http://BeamYourScreen.com allows you to show others what you've got on your computer, whether that's PowerPoint or a product demo. It even provides a no-download HTML viewer, and lets you interact if you want.
Tried it, didn't work out so well. The problem is that a lot of these people are doing actual work too. So you get situations where Department A needs the Internet because their applications are web based and Department B has all desktop apps.

If you then choose to charge Dept A. accordingly they balk because they are being penalized simply because their applications are on the web.

Also keep in mind that an IT department doesn't want to become the Internet police. Which is exactly what happens when you try to charge individual departments because they rightfully claim they can't watch their employees every second to see if they are using the Internet for personal use. Meaning it turns into a big hassle where you have to comb through firewall logs identifying each employee and how much internet they used and then create a report based on that.

All in all it's a good idea in theory but one I haven't found a way to implement in practice.
aw come on, this post makes no sense. You specifically asked to not have a meta discussion around killing the story, you specifically asked for it to just be flagged, and yet here you are, crying for a meta discussion?
Email Tracing Web Applications.
I get that. I'm just saying I think people who use the GPL do so because they want the software industry to develop an open source culture. Their idealogues in that way. They want to change the world in addition to creating software which makes their aim different from someone who just throws their code open for the heck of it.

So allowing people to use their code for closed source projects would be working against their cause.
I'm a bit worried we keep discussing the same ideas and we miss the less obvious ones, and the more ingrained. We can pretty much all agree race, drugs, religion, pornography, sex and minors, copyright infringement are controversial topics, but (with the possible exception of sex and minors) they have been talked to death.

I'd like to see a place where a Chinese reader can point out what he considers a default taboo in western culture.

Edit: And a list of 100 taboos has a better chance of hitting a couple I'm not aware of.
DanW did a project where his house's energy consumption is automatically tweeted. Raw data is gathered by a very cheap device that clips onto the main power inlet to the house.

http://appril.org/post/93599990/the-tweeting-house
Pretty good. The favicon is xampp icon.
No, this was probably the matter of non-hacker news. But it would be a better behavior from the site not to delete the content of the submission, and just drop it from the front page.
You're not offended enough to call the OP an idiot? Flagging or downvoting is one thing, but personal insults are, well, personal.

Anyway, apparently even PG thinks that sometimes driving a lot of people away from HN may not necessarily such a bad thing, as evidenced by the Erlang incident. I'm not pro drugs, by the way. I am against addictive and destructive drugs, having seen at first hand what it can do to people. However, I do try to keep an open mind about experimenting if it's just the one time and if it won't cause lasting damage.

Lastly:

In terms of actual interestingness, I'm sure anyone who is curious can search on google for first hand accounts of what being on drugs does/feels like.

The OP did ask us for experiments to try, and there were a lot of interesting suggestions, of which I think not all could have been found on google. That made it interesting for me, on a "I wonder if we could do X while tripping" level, and isn't that sort of mentality what hacking is about?
Kurzweil also predicts the Singularity to occur by 2030. My personal thoughts are that even if the AI doesn't emerge, we're already close enough to Singularity that the exponential progress of the next 20 years will still be pretty damn mind boggling. The internet alone is a Singularity of sorts.
I called him an idiot, for posting an ASK HN: about a drug taking experiment to hacker news, then moaning that it got killed.
That's true, but when MS decided to make all versions of windows backward compatible, I think they were thinking more about companies than the home user. Companies are the ones who really need to be able run their programs on their machines, sometimes really old programs that no longer have support or alternatives they can choose from.
I'm in New York. And I have to register/sign in if I want to read it.
If you put the wiki up I'll try and contribute a couple of taboos...

Some default Western taboos are the inability to question the institutions of capitalism and democracy.
Some GPL users (RMS) are definitely like that. I think many others simply "don't want to be ripped off", and like the license because it makes them feel safe that way.
Bad is not a big problem if you have any of: tranquilizers, antidepressants or any codeine-containing drug at hand. I also used music when I felt I might be diving into a bad.

I took 2 tabs for the first time, was alone at night, it was the most exciting experience in my life. But no other trip after that was like the first one. After 5 o6 experiences I learned to have safe trips in the streets among crowds. I learned to understand electronic music and some other genres of art better. Finally, started writing music myself. Thank you LSD.
I disagree : they are motivated by what can be conceived as a market : a social reputation system. They gain reputation by writing and publishing GPL software. This reputation certainly is not money, but it serves the same signalling purpose.
Probably relevant: A quick Google search for "considered spam if it contains contact information, which this mail does" turns up a bunch of skeezy Indian online marketing firms and press releases. It looks like it's a sort of Indian equivalent to the "CAN-SPAM act compliant" disclaimer which you used to see on a lot of American spam.
Vandalism tends to get caught very quickly as it shows up on the Recent Changes feed, and doubly so on popular articles (which many users will also have watchlisted).
Average US household viewed $87.71 of display advertising last year --- less than $10 a month. How many people would pay that much to opt out of viewing display ads?

(68,566 page views per online household * 52% of page views sold * $0.00246 (CPM/1000))
Ah. My apologies. That was rather inconsistent of him.
>> "The current people are here to stay."

I wouldn't bet on that.

>> "This was supposed to be an opportunity for people to have an interactive experience"

Yeah I don't really want to take part in drug experiments. I'm busy coding.

>> "Lastly, on a personal note, why do you have to keep trying to destroy the one thing I thought I could contribute in the last couple months?"

Because you are trying to destroy a useful community. If you win, I'll stop reading hacker news. That's why I kept re-iterating my views, without a care for the downmods. I like hacker news. I want to keep liking it.

>> "Lastly, on a personal note, why did you have to keep trying to destroy the one thing I thought I could contribute in the last couple months?"

I didn't kill it... whoever did, thankfully agrees that it's not a good post for HN.
The subject of what morality exactly is has not been discussed. To keep it short, I think morality is a set of rules to keep a society functional. Therefor "good" morality would let a society be more functional, have no unnecessary costs, no unnecessary losses and have optimal productivity and innovation.

Here is a list of taboos:

- Religious beliefs. Not believing in God is OK, but it should be possible to freely criticize other people's beliefs.

- Sexual taboos. Bisexuality, swinging, S&M are all considered improper for no apparent reason. I won't dare even to hint child sexuality here.

- Nationalism. It is still considered perfectly normal to prefer people from your 'own' 'country' over people of another country. Tribalism is a very natural moral for obvious reasons.

- Political systems. Democracy is everything but perfect, but suggesting other forms of rule has not even been considered. A benevolent dictator will certainly be a lot better than a different charming elitist every 4 years.

- Drug use. Pot enjoys the popular vote, but XTC and other hard drugs are still very much not done. There are drugs which are inherently bad, but even most hard drugs aren't. Abuse is a symptom.

- Abortion (or further). Why are you not allowed to kill your own new born?

- Any criminal activity. These are just morals put to paper.

Any moral is a balance between human needs/wants and some theory about how society functions best.
What really works best no one knows. It also depends on the goals. What constitutes a good society? The most productive? The one with the most happy residents?
Evolution would say the one that survives.
The moral fashions in that sense would equal genetic mutations in order to find the most optimal set of rules.

One thing is certain though. There are no such things as right or wrong moralities, there is only effective and ineffective moralities.
587, observed too few vowels, and was forced into using words like 'job' (which worked out actually).
yesterday i made a comment in swine flu thread:
"can *.flu spread to plant? go vegetarian!"

i got -8 or so, at first i wonder if my post is irrelevant to the flu discussion. none of the replies indicates that.

reality is they don't like the 'go vegetarian' thing: unhelpful, unfeasible, malnutrition, deficiencies and more ridiculously labeling me as 'pusing an agenda'

just about everything like in pg's essay ... i said the taboo -- maybe i should keep the secret and live longer (read 'the china study' for scientific references)

hn, why so afraid? not eating meat won't kill you ... it's definitely legal and non-addictive ... about as harmful as giving up tv

just try it like a month or so, don't you like experimenting, go against the norm? are you not a hacker?
... Okay, time for me to step back from this situation.
I did not "moan that it got killed". I asked for a reason why.