skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Modafinil works great, racetams while they do something, I didn't observe some effect that would be specifically desirable. It's not that they don't have effect, just that they seem overhyped.

DMAE for example (if I got letters right), if you take it before sleep, it gives you vivid dreams, since it was suppose to help with generation of neural links, then, this would explain effect.

I am still looking and trying to find things that would be helpful without detrimental effects. I should note that anything like adderal I didn't try and don't intend to.
I took around 2g piracetam daily for a few weeks back in '09. I remember a general improvement in my mental visualization ability, dream recall and that's about it. There is no change in consciousness nor alertness (a theme I was curious about when I dabbled in the substance).

I stopped taking that because obtaining it OTC where I live is kind of hit and miss. The drug requires a prescription (generally to treat degenerative conditions common in the elderly) and some pharmacists are more hardline in that respect.

In hindsight, given it's a relatively recent compound and there's so little research on it, I guess it's for the best. I wonder if my "experiments" can have a negative impact in my health, especially my mental health; I hope the estimates regarding the safety of piracetam turn out to be correct.
The story is inaccurate. I tried submitting the link but HN won't allow me. See here: http://rt.com/news/snowden-venezuela-asylum-request-844/ "Russian MP deletes tweet claiming Snowden chooses Venezuela for asylum"
On Saturday night, a hippie at a campfire told me solar panels are using 10% of the world's silver. I politely told him I was interested and I'd look it up...

It turned out to be true! It's easily verifiable, but just to start you off, here's one link. [1]

It isn't actually un-green to use lots of silver IMO, b/c solar cells will be around for a long time, but I think more people need to realize this fact b/c it means that certain solar dreams may not be financially possible.

For example, I once believed in covering the square meterage necessary to produce all electricity needs in the U.S. (and everywhere else for that matter) with PV panels. I couldn't understand why everyone was taking their sweet time. I figured it was a matter of waiting for the tech to stabilize... but now I realize we're limited by the cost of silver! (which has recently had a huge burst [2] )

p.s. Multiple companies are working on ways to reduce the silver in PV panels, including nanosilver and replacing it with copper, but the real issue is efficiency.

[1] http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/look-out-silver-here-comes-...

[2] http://silverprice.org/silver-price-history.html (see 5 and 10 year prices)
wish I knew anything about hacking to play this, just know development :( setting up the server would be some work to me already
Un-American Affairs | Inside Higher Ed
IBM was actually quite involved in the development of ASCII. See Charles E. MacKenzie, Coded Character Sets: History and Development [1] and Bob Bemer's stuff [2].

[1] http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8019369W/Coded_Character_Sets

[2] http://www.bobbemer.com/
Strangely enough, the Tweet from @Alexey_Pushkov declaring this has since been deleted ....
Is this just another cheeky Javascript "amiga simulator" gag site in Javascript? Or is there any real functionality here?
For those concerned about a SQL dependency, it might be useful to create projects in different languages that package these functions. These methods were extracted from https://github.com/ankane/groupdate, which you can use for Ruby + ActiveRecord

(edit: spelling)
I doubt you could find a true free market on a large scale as it is in the economic interests of most governments to be involved in their own markets. A truly free market on a large scale would ultimately be like a true democracy, bad for people in the long run.

I suppose you could find examples of it in places that use a barter system that doesn't involve much, if any, government.
Chinese has many different input methods. For example, in Taiwan most keyboards have the symbols for 4 different input methods printed on them: English/Pinyin on the top left, Zhuyin on the top right, Cangjie on the lower left, and Dayi on the lower right. The top two are phonetic, and the bottom two are symbolic.

Chinese input methods typically require a sequence of key-presses and then a selection from a menu of matching characters, with the most common matches first. Multi-character sequences can be entered without making a choice until the end, in which case the most likely n-grams come first.

Most people in Taiwan learn phonetic (Zhuyin) in school, which is very easy, as long as you know standard pronunciation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Taiwan
So, can I move to Sublime Text 3 yet? Probably.
I wouldn't say "all modern architectures use 8 bits". Plenty of DSPs have > 8-bits (SHARCs are 32-bit, ZSPs are 16, 56K-like DSPs are 24.

A byte is the smallest thing that a pointer can point at. Something like MIPS (from memory) has 8-bit bytes, but a load instruction loads 4-bytes at a time (and although it has the unaligned load functions which can be convinced to load a single byte, they aren't general purpose)
Databoard for Research Insights
Take a loot at

What are we supposed to be looking at there? Like most TDD literature I see a lot of assertions, but no evidence to back it up.
That depends on the shareholders.
Do you happen to know the most elegant solution to this problem?

Convert the date to seconds since date X (or unix timestamp / 60) and divide by the number of mins you need and convert to int.
I take, daily, 100mg Caffeine, 200mg of L-Theanine (as Suntheanine), and 500mg of Rhodiola Rosea (3.6% rosavin 18mg, 0.9% salidrosides 4.5mg).

This is a fairly effective regimen, for me, for combating fatigue and maintaining focus. I simply keep a bottle of Suntheanine and another of Rhodiola Rosea at my desk and eat them with my morning water or tea. I haven't done any rigorous testing to prove to myself that these things are helping, but I am certainly convinced that they do.
Hollow, an online interactive documentary.
Massive scoped project, pulled it off w/ only two developers. Got some good initial press at Huffington Post and NY Times, but I thought I'd point it out here as a new direction in potential development/engineering, a space I intend to keep working. Also speaks a lot to the pros (speed to delivery) and cons (sometimes gangly code) of working with Node.js. Site has 4gb of content (wearing that on the sleeve). Fiendish Chrome-only site (you fix it to work in other browsers!). Overall very satisfying experience.
Google providing direct access to their servers and infrastructure. Every Google service was open to the NSA; GMail, Google Drive, Google Talk, you name it.
"Silence won't be in the public domain until 2062" - hah
The Art of Hustle
I learnt Ksh all my life so I assumed it was correct too
Agreed. Those two flights that crashed were flown as Delta Connections and Continental Connections, and booking a flight on the "majors" to a smaller market could easily book you on one of those flights for a shorter leg. It's not like you can just fly majors only to be safer or anything.
"Look at your bug database. Multiply that by the complexity of not only an airliner, but the huge and complex system in which it operates."

And take the n-root of the total based on the number of quality checks every minimal part of that software has been through before even being tried on a real plane, not considering the ones before it went into service.

Seriously, you really think the software for an airliner is written in Ruby+Javascript and the developers use a cloud-based bug tracking app? I work on systems used in public trasportation that are NOT safety-critical and the number of tests, checks and counterchecks they have to go through before being approved for service is soul crushing.

I'm pretty sure that the total count of in the bug database of any airline software currently in service basically amounts to zero.
aka

rob-my-house.net
I agree - there was an egregious failure here and if it was due to somehting that could be fixed than it should be. Nobody is asking for a lynching or anything.
I can't speak for Steve, but I thought Poul-Henning Kamp's critique was pretty compelling.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012JulSep/...

In brief, he makes three points. The first is that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 doesn't do anything about the widely lamented lack of session handling. The second is that it doesn't contain any simplifications of HTTP, despite there being several examples of things that could be simplified (header parsing, for instance, is hairier than it could be). The third is that it is going to pose problems for proxies.

I don't know how many of these points continue to apply with this HTTP 2.0 draft, nor do I have any skin in this game, but I respect PHK quite a bit so his outrage creates in me a sense of mild reservation. :)
Thank you. I had not heard of that before and it looks very helpful.
For one thing, every day is trash day. Each street might only be weekly, but chances are at least one street you're walking down will be collected each day.

For another, there are a lot of people in NYC. Manhattan's population density is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 per square mile -- over 7 times as dense as DC, and 10 times as dense as Baltimore. More people, more trash. Barring some massive trash-centric infrastructure (I personally favor the Disney-style tunnel system), the trash bags are going to rise proportional to the buildings around them.
NSA leaker Edward Snowden 'accepts asylum in Venezuela'?
Last week, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) relaunched Healthcare.gov with a new appearance and modern technology that is unusual in federal-government websites.

The article seems to be about a promotional/propaganda CMS for the government, am I missing something?

"This is such a lean site," said Jon Booth

"This is our ultimate dogfooding experience," said Eric Gundersen

"The work that they're doing is amazing," said Sivak

the site is just one component of the insurance exchanges. Others may not be ready by the October deadline.
Garbage isn't (supposed to be) stored on the street between pickups, you're only supposed to put them out on garbage day.

The main issue is that garbage sits out in the sun for a few hours waiting for the truck to swing by, and gets, er, rather ripe in the meantime.

Many buildings do wheel their garbage out in standardized things that look rather like mine carts. Some do not, I wish there was more regulation in this regard - so at least garbage juice doesn't leak all over the sidewalk.

Note that this is really a Midtown Manhattan problem. In the residential neighborhoods the garbage situation is (relatively) under control - doesn't smell like roses, but you don't have garbage juice flowing like rivers down the sidewalk. A lot of the older Midtown buildings are too old to have internal garbage management, and are densely packed enough to produce a lot of garbage.

Midtown Manhattan is, IMO, one of the worst places a smell-sensitive person can find themselves. Ever.
> The glycerinergics are those molecules that can bind to what is known as the 'glycine binding site' of a particular subset of stimulatory receptors (NMDA), and it seems that by stimulating this binding site the overall signalling is increased.

'Glycerinergics' has only one result on Google - this article. Even if we assume that they mean it in the same way as we talk about GABAergic or dopaminergic drugs the definition they have stated is fundamentally incorrect. Glycerinergic drugs would be those that bind to any of the same sites that the endogenous molecule glycine binds to - not necessarily just NMDAr sites, this is an over simplification. Further more, to say that NMDA receptors are inherently 'stimulatory' is frankly ridiculous. Ligands can be either agonists or antagonists at a given binding site - examples of non-excitatory NMDAr binding drugs would be the arylcyclohexamine family (PCP, Ketamine, PCE etc) and Dizocilpine (MK-801). Finally, 'overall signalling is increased' is almost laughable. 'Signalling' through which neurotransmitters? In what manner? How is 'overall' measured?

While I may not have an absolutely perfect understanding of psychopharmacology, I do know enough not to trust this article - particularly when it is taking about drugs with very little history of human use.

If you are considering using the drugs in this article, it might be advisable to question why. Just because a compound is new, does not mean it is going to be better or the effects more desirable than it's predecessor(s). Of course it is possible that it could be, but it seems likely that in reality you are simply exposing yourself to unnecessary health risks for minimal reward. Would it really be so bad to use Piracetam for a couple of years while the phenyl derivative's action in humans is not well documented? Consider your health and the potential gains carefully and make a rational decision.
This is one thing that has irked me a little bit as I've gotten more involved with TDD and unit testing in general: the logic in many of my unit tests is near duplicate logic that is implemented within my application.

My thought is that the general advantage of TDD is that you are thinking about your eventual implementation from the outside. You write tests in a different mindset based on expectations, rather than when you are implementing the production code where you are more concerned with the details of logic, etc. Unit tests also tend to be a bit more readable than the actual implementation logic, and so act as a nice form of documentation as a side-effect. In this way, test-first development provides a more gradual transition between a specification or design and the end implementation, which results in fewer missed requirements, allows for easy refactoring, etc.

This is of course only related to TDD however, not unit testing in general. Hence, it still irks me that many of my tests look so similar to the logic they are testing, and thus aren't really testing for correctness at all.
That makes it sound as if UTF-32 would be a silver bullet - it's not. Application code normally has to deal with user-perceived characters/glyphs/grapheme clusters, which means you'll have to treat UTF-32 as variable-length as well.

If you want to get back the supposed benefits of UTF-32, you'll have to dynamically assign codepoints to grapheme clusters.
Yes, especially coming from a library built on top of three.js [1], which is a gigantic and awesome piece of work licensed under MIT, using Twitter Bootstrap (Apache License), and a logo free for non commercial use only [2]. But everyone can do what he wants with his work, as long as licenses are respected.

A question for the author: this is a really cool demo, but I can’t see where is the innovation which needs protection here? A parallax effect when the user scrolls? 3D on a Web page? The “Next Generation Internet” concept?

[1] http://threejs.org/

[2] http://findicons.com/icon/33154/mask_02?id=33154
Here's what Edmund says, in holding (ironically given my argument) that a military court appeals judge is an inferior officer:

Generally speaking, the term "inferior officer" connotes a relationship with some higher ranking officer or officers below the President: whether one is an "inferior" officer depends on whether he has a superior. It is not enough that other officers may be identified who formally maintain a higher rank, or possess responsibilities of a greater magnitude. If that were the intention, the Constitution might have used the phrase "lesser officer." Rather, in the context of a clause designed to preserve political accountability relative to important government assignments, we think it evident that "inferior officers" are officers whose work is directed and supervised at some level by others who were appointed by presidential nomination with the advice and consent of the Senate.

The reason Rehnquist gave for seeing military court judges as inferior was that the military reports directly to the Secretary of Defense:

Congress used similar language in establishing the Department of War, repeatedly referring to the Secretary of that department as a "principal officer," and the chief clerk, who would be "employed" within the Department as the Secretary "shall deem proper," as an "inferior officer." 1 Stat. 49, ch. VII.

To whom would a FISC judge report? Article III judges aren't directed by the Supreme Court or (obviously) the Attorney General or even the President.
Indeed... In fact, if you asked the passengers of Colgan Air Flight 3407 what airline they were flying, I suspect the vast majority would say 'Continental'
Maybe some people go with the notion you get what you pay for? Not to say that it's always the case that expensive means quality, but you shouldn't necessarily always go with the lowest bid.
> These mappings of numbers to characters are just a convention that someone decided on when ASCII was developed in the 1960s. There’s nothing fundamental that dictates that a capital A has to be character number 65, that’s just the number they chose back in the day.

I don't think it's mere coincidence that the capital letters start at 65 and the lower case at 97 and the decimal digits at 48.
I feel like if you are following your "first" with that many qualifiers, it starts losing meaning.
Russian politician tweets Edward Snowden heading to Venezuela, removes tweet
Encryption, Privacy and the Trust problem
How to install and configure a BitTorrent Sync server
The use of Jekyll (or any static HTML generator) is a really huge, positive conceptual step. I mean, we can now make edits -- in Markdown -- to individual blog posts and submit pull requests.

Whether they actually honor those requests* is another thing, but this is a really cool step. Even the use of Markdown means that the site/content designers have to really work to obfuscate the content with unnecessary modules/widgets/etc.

Regardless of the merits of the administration's policies and initiatives, I hope this catches on. 95% of the government websites I've seen, from city council to federal, could be rendered in static HTML...and maintained much more easily.

* edit: Only one way to find out: https://github.com/dannguyen/healthcare.gov/commit/6438498ea...
An ad hominem would mean that I am saying they're wrong. My argument is not

Google is an advertising company, therefore SPDY is bad.

My argument is

Google is an advertising company, and the largest
single entity on the Internet, and therefore, their
actions deserve a healthy dose of skepticism. I'm
not sure that we've been giving them enough skepticism.

SPDY does have good points, and bad points. I just saw a lot of chatter from people who want to ignore the bad points simply because of where the spec came from.
Is Sony rediscovering its magic?
I was excited to read the article, but it was really long. Seemed like it might take a lot of work to read.
How would:

hacker@gibson:~$ htmcmp ./myPage.html
myPage.bhtml generated successfully.
hacker@gibson:~$ htmdmp ./myPage.bhtml
myPage.html dumped successfully.

Hinder an open web? Maybe I am wrong, but my gut tells be this argument comes from developers who are not used to working with compiled languages.

I think it would help new devs, can you imagine how nice it would be to have a handy HTML validator like this compiler would be? And how good for the web it would be to force everyone to use it? I can't imagine learning C without the feed back of a compiler and that was what I hated most about learning javascript and HTML.

If you really hate the idea of having to run this compiler, it could be automatically run by apache, IIS, nginx, etc when serving your page for the first time. This is all hypothetical of course since such a standard does not exist.
I doubt it will be lossless, unless using the same ordering and same compute device.
My primary use encoding on CPU, decoding on GPU.
Hah, so it's safe to assume you won't have any more business dealings with him after he sees this.
StrikeIron is another provider. They have separate products for North American and Global address verification. Tiered monthly pricing.

http://www.strikeiron.com/product-list/address/north-america...

http://www.strikeiron.com/product-list/address/international...
> understand the motivation to going to a binary protocol for a SPDY inspired HTTP 2.0 but I would have liked to see an ascii based protocol

You're not alone. I've opened an issue on the subject [0]. Feel free to add weight to it.

[0] https://github.com/http2/http2-spec/issues/169
Could benefit from arrows indicating direction.
did you access that url with curl to make sure it does no user agent sniffing?

how do you know the script is the same on subsequent requests?
In some cases, a company could transcend its initial purpose, but still keep it around as a/the revenue stream as a means to the new end. Not many/any new and further out there Google initiatives have made it to wide scale public adoption, so it's yet unclear whether Google would be such a company, but it could very well turn out to be one.
I moved months ago. Haven't had any problems at all. Of course, I don't use many plugins.
i thought google and nsa employed engineers?
Say it with me: San Francisco is NOT the same as the Bay Area. No, most of us wouldn't be able to afford a decent home in SF proper. But SF is just one city in a large metro area, with plenty of places you would and could want to own a home. Those of you who are 20-something: the day is coming, sooner than you'd imagine, when you're going to want to raise kids. And unless you've knocked the ball out of the park and are worth $20 million, you're not going to want to raise your kids in SF anyway.

if nobody who hasn't already made it can afford to live there what happens then?

You can afford it. It's an expensive area for sure, but there is much more to the Bay Area than "Silicon Valley" (whatever that means nowdays) and SF. I see this attitude a lot among recent "immigrants": this myopic view, apparently based on experience in other, very different metro areas, that there is One Big City and a few "suburbs." Things aren't like that here, and the reason you feel so frustrated is that you don't (yet) understand the place you live.
Tweeted by the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the State Duma:
https://twitter.com/Alexey_Pushkov
My sibling has already pointed out one of the better critiques I've seen. There is also http://www.guypo.com/technical/not-as-spdy-as-you-thought/ , which I believe has been discussed on HN before, but I'm on a pomodoro break, so I'm trying to keep this short.

One critique that I don't remember if is contained in either of these two is header compression. Header compression seems to make sense, as compression is good. The problem is that intermediaries make routing decisions based on the headers, and so it's quite possible that the CPU time needed to decompress, possibly modify, and recompress the headers outweighs any gains that the compression brought in the first place.

I've also seen some vague commentary about 'mixing application concerns into the transport layer' which I find compelling, but I don't have enough experience with the low-level networking to properly judge on my own.

Break over! Gotta run.