skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't suggest that overreaction necessarily kills more than the disease itself. (Your quote is from another poster.) But I did want to share one example where it clearly did, to show it's not impossible.
When you boil cultural conservatism down to its essence, as separate from the concepts of economic liberty which conservatives lean towards, the basic idea is that there is wisdom in the prevailing traditions and cultural attitudes. The wisdom can defy thoughtful analysis. It's the concept that society is the way it is because a process of darwinian selection has settled on the arrangement and it is dangerous to wantonly mess with this complex system.

I would not be surprised that higher IQ people tend towards a certain arrogance that is dismissive of the idea that cultural traditions and attitudes carry value that defies individual understanding. Away from the cultural conservatism and towards market liberalism you often see the same thing: certain smart people can't cope with idea that there's a complex, self regulating system that defies understanding and should not be messed with.
If we pretend the emperor has clothes does that mean he's not naked? This author seems to think so. This is very foolish. Unfortunately, Roubini is likely correct: there probably won't be a turnaround until 2010, and even that will be weak. Contrary to the "green shoots" this author cites, economic conditions are continuing to deteriorate. Housing prices are still falling. Foreclosures continue. Unemployment is rising. Aggregate demand is still well below capacity. And banks are still more or less insolvent, requiring billions, if not trillions, more capital. That some of these indicators might - might! - be declining slower than they have for the last six months does not necessarily mean we're close to recovery. We could bottom out and then stagnate in an L-shaped recession. That's certainly not a given, but it's still a possibility. Even the market rally of the last two months has been suspect: analysts have dubbed it a "crap rally" since it's been led by poor stocks. Quant funds have been hammered and pulled out of the markets, reducing liquidity. Insiders have sold off at the highest levels since October 2007, before the markets began to crash. This seems like a bear market rally that could quickly reverse itself and test the lows, perhaps breaking them. (http://www.businessinsider.com/insiders-selling-like-crazy-2...)

Forgive me if I still put more credence in the analysis of someone who has nailed this crisis, rather than someone who seems like Kevin Hassett's long lost brother.
I learned something interesting from your comment, thanks.
Percent of those who say global warming news is exaggerated, by political affiliation
On that note, any other HNers planning to be at the demo in Cambridge on Tuesday? http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram

It seems like it's worth going to - and it's directly related to something I'm doing at work (inference over topic maps).
why? most people can probably get through life just fine not knowing how gravity works at non-earth locations.
PlayClaw now capture game videos two times faster
Well, maybe in Germany. But I know that in France the market is booming.
I can certainly see your point. But yes, I do blame an entrepreneur setting a bad example trying to grow too quick and burning through lots of cash. I inherently do not see this as such a big admirable success story.

Further, I strongly object to the sensationalist reporting of such business magazines. Why don't we hear more about the quiet guys slugging it through and building something lasting?

Also, I don't fancy yet another beverage product on an already overcrowded consumer market and the tendency of the business owner to believe that he can only succeed by growing big fast. Why doesn't he believe in the strength of his product. If it's good, people will buy. He inherently believes people only will buy it if it's big. And that's wrong with the picture.

He has not created any new knowledge on how to make beverages and trained specialized staff accordingly, which would create positive skill feedback loops in the region of his plant. He's buying juice wholesale and outsourcing production to a local plant that makes everything from Coca-Cola to beer. This is just all marketing: take two kinds of juice, mix em, carbonate it and market the crap out of it. Where are the jobs created out of that? And I don't think he has created a viable plan for young people to follow his footsteps: the plan was to go big and he went bust. His only lasting legacy seems to be staff turnover.

Further, I suspect flaws in his management style, because it seems like he's putting out fires constantly. Something's not right here.

I don't think the world needs more entrepreneurs like him. He's clearly a very financially motivated guy, who doesn't believe in growing a great product organically. We need more great product companies instead! (Ironically, "the switch" does sound like a really neat product: 100% healthy juice)

Historically, companies that had product experts (engineers) in management have outperformed MBA run companies many times over. The lesson here is: build a great product and the rest will follow in time. I have the stats to back this claim over a 50 year period (study done at MIT comparing MBA-run companies to engineer-run companies).

Yes, I don't want to ever again create a business plan and pitch to VC's based on the growth curve of the Internet. What a f*ing joke. But that's my mistake.
Partially agreed about the vegan part. I wasn't trying to get too technical. However disease transmission mostly seems to occur via eating meat rather than milk or eggs.

I do think it is entirely practical and possible that that most of humanity could go vegan some time in the future. Reducing the risk of disease is just one of many reasons why it would improve the world. If it is an economically superior solution then eventually that is the way the world is likely to head.

How's this for a more incrementally useful statement? Reductions in livestock and meat consumption would be likely to reduce the incidences of these type of diseases - therefore it is something we should look to minimise. It isn't an all or nothing proposition.
Come on guys. You're using Google to find your points instead of reading.

The fourth quarter report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) clarified we have indeed hit the 50% in a third of the time of the most aggressive estimates. The sea ice that has come back is not the same as what was there before: it's the very thin product of a single season.
Actually, we're doing a lot better now than we used to be, as IQ scores seem to be increasing over time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I bet we'll keep on muddling through.
The common denominator that seems to have generated the most fascination is that every institution is led by a woman. “Obviously, the giver of these gifts is a person of great wisdom,” said Dr. Cole of Montclair State. “I’m only partly facetious. We’ve had to work very hard to get where we are, and I believe that women presidents are great caretakers of their institutions and their students.”

What a sexist pig.

If the genders were reversed, the media would be calling for the university president's resignation. Why do people accept sexism in one direction but not the other?
I'd like to, but it's full! I'll be watching the webcast ...
It's particularly amazing how high functioning people who lack basic logical reasoning skills can be.

I have to admit: sometimes it takes me weeks (or even months) to realize that someone I know is a complete idiot. The problem is that day-to-day interaction is so scripted that there is no opportunity for them to reveal how stupid they really are. But as soon as you deviate from the script and try to work together on a real problem or argue about something it becomes embarrassingly evident.

I've starting trying to provoke little academic arguments with new people just as a quick intelligence test (this seems marginally more socially acceptable than trying to unearth some other proxies for intelligence).
Of course, if the net lives saved outnumber the net lives lost, and other costs are similarly weighed, you take the chance (or at least give people the option).

But in the 1976 case: there was only 1 death from the feared strain... and 25+ deaths from the vaccination program, which was halted early. Overreaction can be out of proportion to the danger.

And there are all sorts of other harder-to-measure costs, including excess deaths, from overreaction. If a collapse of commerce driven by fear retards economic growth, more people die of other causes. If funds are diverted from other health interventions, more people die of other causes. Even in trying to vaccinate the whole nation: some small but nonzero number of people will die in the extra road travel to the vaccination sites.

Your 'ultra conservative' numbers are still way on the alarmist side, as far as I'm concerned. We may never have another natural pandemic even 1/10th as bad as the Spanish Flu. People are healthier; medicine and public health is far more advanced; the same WW1 disease-breeding-overcrowding is unlikely to recur; we have antibiotics (and many of the Spanish Flu deaths may have actually been from coincident bacterial infections).

There was a good article at The New Republic during the bird flu mini-panic that emphasized how unique the Spanish Flu was to its time. It appears to have disappeared from their archives, but fortunately I quoted it in its entirety to another forum at the time. See here:

http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20051003/0380...
sadly, drinking soda, eating potato chips and candy = vegetarian too ... anyway that's not what i'm doing; neither do i eat eggs, milk, even fish. i should say go vegan!

i'm too selfish to care about what the rest of the world eat ... if you regard my post as a solution, fine, that's my solution to avoid *.flu -- for my selfish self

well, enough of myself

can you come up with better solution? something creative is even better, much better than critical things you said about how unhelpful/unfeasible one's solution is.

sorry if my comment hurts your ego
More likely, longevity in families is due to the lifestyle they were encouraged to have by their families.
To those who may think that a lack of scientific understanding by the general population is not of significant concern, I know of no better quotation than the following:

"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

- Carl Sagan, interview with Anne Kalosh, 1995
Some time ago (and I really ought to spend some time trying to track down the original source) there was a questionaire in the UK. One question was

"Does the Earth go around the Sun,
or the Sun go around the Earth?"

The followup question was

"How long does it take?"

Of those who got the first one right (remember that, they got it right) nearly 80% gave an answer on the followup that amount to "about a day."

I have a mental model of how this can happen. For ordinary people on the street, the Sun goes around the Earth and it takes about a day. That's what they see, that's what they experience, and to them, that's what matter. Moreover, using the Earth as your frame of reference, they're right.

However, it's been drilled into them as an unattached, unassociated, irrelevant-to-them "fact" that the Earth goes around the Sun. When presented with the first question, then, they parrot that answer, with no idea of what that actually means.

This doesn't, therefore, mean they're stupid. It just means that they have a mental model of the world that works perfectly well for them, and they've been confused by "facts" that have no use.

I'm not arguing it's good, or right, but at least it helps me understand how otherwise perfectly functional people can appear so stupid and irrational.
> Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of getting run over by a bus would be much reduced if you never left the house?

Anyone care to dispute the notion that vegetarians live healthier lives than meat eaters? Anyone care to provide an argument that eating meat is good for humanity either collectively or individually?

> Not to mention that livestock-spread diseases are just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of horrible ways to die via epidemic.

Unsupported and almost certainly wrong.
I had to make this exact same decision (among others) five years ago.

Background: I was born and raised in Los Angeles, living less than 20 minutes from UCLA. My mother attended UCLA and my father works at UCLA as an accountant. As you can see, we were very tied to UCLA and LA.

I chose UCSD and am very happy I did.

A major factor for my choice was location. I wanted to get out of LA and didn't like the UCLA area at all. Visiting UCLA always makes me feel frantic and a little unsafe in areas. I absolutely love San Diego, though. There is a lot to do and I unfortunately don't have time to write a detailed post about the social life. As a quick note, though, I have decided to stay down in San Diego and hope to live the rest of my life here -- it's really that great.

As for academics, UCSD and UCLA are very comparable for Engineering and Computer Science. I would personally rank UCSD higher because many of my engineering high school friends that went to UCSD have started successful careers while a few UCLA friends have had trouble, but this is only a small set of people.

Finally, everyone will tell you UCSD is not a social school, you'll have problems meeting people, etc, etc. I was a pretty anti-social guy in high school and was a little worried about this. As for my actual experience, it couldn't be farther than what everyone said. UCSD seems to offer a much more casual, relaxed social experience while UCLA (from my visits) offered a much more party-like atmosphere. Personally, I prefer the former and never had a problem meeting new people.

Overall, I am very happy I chose UCSD. It gave me a great education, I met a lot of wonderful people, and I have a great career ahead of me.

If you do choose UCSD, go to Marshall (for the best on-campus housing and dining at OVT and pretty easy GEs) or Muir (for the easiest GEs but crappy on-campus housing)
Matt Aimonetti apology still has no links. As such, either google has no record or Matt has not apologized. As such, I would consider this willful disregard if he has seen or heard any comments regarding his presentation.

[Edit: There was a non-apology, after all. http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-... -- Really, his wife saw nothing wrong with this?]
Back to 2007 when I switched to FireFox, was because of the new "Tabs feature".

Most people switched because of tabs, speed and add-ons. So disabling one of them is not good.

But i'm for disabling tabs and implementing a new technology that makes it easy to switch between pages
I was a double major in CS and Mathematics at UCLA, finishing in 2004. The campus is fantastic, Westwood is awesome, but the school of engineering administration left me with a nasty taste in my mouth. They were the most bitter, unhelpful academic counselors I have ever encountered. It started when I attempted to change majors into CS from a major in the letters & science school, having to apply and appeal to the dean more than 4 times, despite being extremely qualified and doing everything I was asked. It continued on well through my fifth year, due to bad advice I was given by a counselor regarding credits needed to graduate (I could not graduate as scheduled due to that).

It very well may have been that I got unlucky, but I can't in good conscience recommend the school of engineering to anyone.
From the profile, it seems the author deliberately sees the world through pink glasses in order to countervail what he perceives as pessimists. Duh... How can you take someone seriously who actually states he wants to see only one facet of the world. Human perception is warped enough without crippling it with a deliberate (and rather blunt) bias.
Technically, there's no reason that organisms should reach a point where they're "no longer able to reproduce"; I think it's merely a random choice of our most basic biology that we grow "old" and then die from various diseases and systems failures, rather than simply surviving until there are so many [generations] of us around at once that some individuals can no longer find food. This is the way that asexual species, like bacteria, function.

You'd think it would actually be in the best interest of any given organism to have as long a reproductive lifetime as possible, and therefore fitness would increase along with longevity, as long as that longevity remained virile/fertile.

Then again...

If the old did instead survive to compete with the young, evolution would start to fail as a process—you'd have too many non-adapted organisms reproducing with one another, and so what adaptation there was would happen much more slowly.

Today, sexual species that have "dropped back down" into being asexual, reproducing by cloning or the like (which have the same evolutionary disadvantage as a non-aging species would have, but more so) can survive and prosper. However, far enough back in the genetic soup, when sexual species first diverged from asexual ones, there was probably a fierce competition where being a sexual species was only a little better (it requires more resources, after all), and so aging provided an immediate advantage in terms of setting an equilibrium point for species size, so as to not strain resources.

(This may very well be taught in an intro Bio class, but I love discovering things on my own in the form of meditative writing. It's a fact completely untaught in schools today that knowledge lies at your fingertips that you're completely unaware of, not from a book or a website or another person, but from your own mind, and that you can access it without having to have anyone guide you to it. Philosophy is neglected as a means to pursue ordinary, practical knowledge, but it's really just a super-set of science: there's still a hypothesis, experimentation, observations and a conclusion, it's just that the "experimentation" doesn't require a physical world. In the case above, obviously, it would be better to have an actual scientific study, but the very fact that you can derive a preliminary intuition of a topic without anyone telling you what to think, or giving you a demonstration one way or the other, is revelation enough for most people in the world today.)
Better to look at the actual Gallup poll.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/116590/Increased-Number-Think-Glo...
I hate politically divided statements and certainly they have no place on HN.

What I can say, though, is that "those who say global warming news is exaggerated" are very confident in their knowledge, while the most informed scientists I've known or read are all of the same mind: we don't know.

After the Arctic sea ice collapse in the Q4 report of the IPCC, where we have found half the sea ice was gone in about a third of the time as the most aggressive estimate (the coverage has come back in 2008 but is the thin product of one season), I think most of the knowledgeable arguing on extreme climate change stopped. But outside of that, we simply don't know much.
It is a little more complicated than that.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/4632/major-wheat-growing-re...

Different varieties of wheat are adapted to different conditions and some are more productive than others. Ultimately, wheat is still a plant and it still needs water and sun to grow. The climate models suggest that as temperature goes up, midwest droughts will get worse. Natural systems are not orthogonal. A rise in temperature will cause more rainfall in some areas and less rainfall in others.

While we're at it... as you said, wheat is not too finicky. Corn? More finicky. Wonder what will happen to corn. It needs hot, humid summers with just the right amount of rain and sun. When you look at the map from the link, it is pretty apparent there is a big hole in the middle of the "wheat" belt. Hmm I wonder what we grow there? ;)

I wonder where, if at all, that hole is going to move if we have a drier midwest as the admittedly crude climate models predict. And I wonder how a change in climate will impact the current wheat growing regions in terms of rainfall.
Interesting.

Just to know, can you point to the references backing this assertion:

"Historically, companies that had product experts (engineers) in management have outperformed MBA run companies many times over."
the 1918 flu pandemic was worse than the black plague and it's not even airborne like this one.

http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/2003/vol7n30/KillerV...
Multimethods (and other syntactic fun) in Perl
You should remeber that these numbers are only the selling numbers of the US. I think the numbers from Europe will easily add up 1 Million additional phones. And with the HTC Magic (already played with it :)) coming to Europe in the next days in much more countries and further releases in the coming weeks there will soon be a much higher install base...
It's not really recursion. It is just a hack around not having a proper event loop.

(Note that the function doesn't call itself, it merely adds itself to the event loop's to-do queue. This is a common pattern -- when writing IO watchers, for example, a watcher will often reactivate itself after it is done processing a chunk of input if it expects more input. If it doesn't expect more input, it simply doesn't add itself back.)
He never addresses the stack trace issue. Unless someone can figure out how to preserve useful stack traces while doing TCO, I'm still firmly in Guido's camp.

My boss made an observation recently. He did RoboCup when he was in college, and he found that the success of a team was almost directly correlated with the extensiveness of their debugging tools. The teams that built instrumentation to figure out exactly what their robot was "thinking" tended to kick the ass of the teams that coded very carefully and hoped it all worked.

A major component of Java and Python's productivity improvement over C++ comes from the ability to easily get clean, readable stack traces whenever anything goes wrong. It's already a huge pain when your Java stack trace says <compiled code> instead of giving you a method and line number; anything that makes that the default will cause far more headaches in debuggability than it solves.
Prof. Harhoff and Prof. Schrader were both previously at Harvard... this study was initially conceived together with MIT (let me check on this again): http://www.inno-tec.bwl.uni-muenchen.de/pubdb/art_in_books/1...

This was also published in another journal there. I'll post to this later. Bare with me!

I'll have to make a call to Germany on Monday morning - I don't have the paper anymore! I thought it would be an openly accessible PDF on their website.
If anyone sold their startup, please consider Emory. :P
Feedburner public service announcement (a.k.a. Fuck you Google)
If you use feedburner, go test your RSS link. I just found out my RSS link wasn't working for the past 2 weeks. I had to change my feeds CNAME to point from feeds.feedburner.com to somecrap.google.com.

Why the #$%# aren't we being notified?
'Actionable'? How so? You're still allowed to be offensive in the US.
This is an inappropriate post for HN. Flagged.
I am not sure if this post in political or religious - should be flagged anyway.
A possible reason for longevity being heritable is the society they are living in prospers due to their experience and extra labor. Remember it wasn't long ago that grandparents looked after children in villages in some societies.
Peter Norvig and I disagree with you

http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html