skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
80,000 deaths per year in the US attributed to alcohol:
http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm

It's a dangerous drug. It makes people violent. People drink and drive and kill people. Let's make it illegal too, eh?

Drug addiction is a health issue and should be treated as that. Making drugs illegal CREATES MORE CRIME.

We could stop this madness if only people would STOP SUPPORTING THE MADNESS.

Sorry to shout, but I'm sure you're an otherwise intelligent individual, but you are failing in this subject.
As a Yubikey user, I wish more sites allowed the native Yubikey format, or even a VIP credential. TOTP doesn't make sense in a lot of use cases.
The key point is flat tends to remove visual affordances. E.g. The iOS6 video player has a bright blue 'done' button. A quick visual scan finds that button immediately. iOS7 foregoes the button for just the text, so now it looks like every other UI control, requiring the user to now read instead of scan. Yes, it's small, but I've noticed that since using the iOS 7 betas I feel a little less connected to my phone for lots of small reasons like this.

Regarding your second point, it is still quite easy to figure things out. But, I'd contend that it is harder than before. I just wish we could have a balance between extreme skeumorphism and flat designs.
A War Game for Coders
Lol! Not sure why anyone would downvote you for that gem!
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I didn't mean to imply it was you who down voted me. It seems we're really on the same page here. I wasn't aware of all the strings and stigma attached to the "war on $foo" phrase.

My point was simply to object to the idea that doing nothing and simply pretending the outside world doesn't exist or that there aren't people who wish us harm out there is a Bad Idea™.

I do of course agree that open ended campaigns which cripple our rights without clear and predictable expectations is very bad, if not as bad.

To rephrase, then: I want to address and fight terrorism, but I don't want a blind or self-harming "war" on terror.
I don't know of anyone who blames Boston Chicken's IT on it's bankruptcy. He was their CIO and I doubt he had any influence on their notorious franchising strategy. Plus they're also still alive after rebranding as Boston Market, and while I couldn't find any location numbers, they boast of serving 15 million pounds of mashed potatoes and 80 million pieces of cornbread a year.

He was per Wikipedia "a director of consulting" at Lotus ... again, not an area that determined their decline and fall.
See page 19: http://s3.amazonaws.com/37assets/svn/Rework-by-Jason-Fried-a...

;)
Don't they have a more cohesive and profitable business model than Facebook?
I'm not sure that was what jahewson meant.
Seems pretty reasonable to me that on a page like this every piece of content deserves its own history state. At least it’s a completely valid view, nothing to go apeshit over.
Fundraising Campaign: Non-Profit Accounting Software - SFC
All SMS providers are in the same boat. IIRC, the penalties for breaking the DNC list in India are brutal. (until recently I worked at a big mobile aggregator)
You got an upvote from me simply for knowing about it but perhaps you want to provide more references to Nestles baby formula history etc

Start here : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott
There should be evidence heavily involved in a war on drugs, on a drug by drug basis, for sure. I'd estimate the totality of the drag on society, even parenting, in determining the resources to apply to reduce the usage of that drug.
Oh my god, he's Campbell-locking.

After all, he's got the quick movements with the stops in between, and he wears some pretty colorful locking outfit. Since I can't find any evidence for Campbell inheriting this behavior from the spider or the other way round, I say it co-evolved.
Many reasons. Kitkat could put information about their product, like nutritional content, ingredients, etc. They could also provide information about the history of the brand, the different varieties, specialty varieties, limited time offers from the past and present. Perhaps they could also provided things, like videos and images of past advertisements, especially if they were particularly funny or interesting. Additionally it's a great way for customer outreach. They could inform them about some new limited time variant offering, organize contests or challenges, and so on. For example a lot of these products also offer a kind of rewards system. After you eat your candy you can note down the little code on the side, and redeem it for free products, or to enter a contest. What better place to provide this than their own website? This would included stunts like what they have pulled on their website today. And of course you have the whole trademark protection and brand identity things too.
Well, if I wanted to argue that point I would just point out that I am pretty sure drunk fathers kept on beating their children during the 1920s.

I mean, that is the sort of shit that spawned the temperance movement, but when prohibition came into effect, did the temperance movement actually see the sort of social change that they anticipated? I doubt that the 1920s were some sort of utopia for battered children and spouses...
I'll be empathetic and put myself in your shoes. You have a growing company, and need to hire good talent. Funds might be low, so you set out to blog about something unrelated in order to include a jobs pitch. I understand. Startups are hard. I'm currently trying to develop a tiny one myself, and having a hard time doing so. Though I reason this type of blog post will mostly go unnoticed by the talent that you seek. Try and be empathetic with programmers. What do we like to read about? What is our type of content? Write about that.
"Because 90+% of online politics discourse is dominated by trolls."

True, but I hope the mods/admins of this don't get discouraged because we do badly need a place to talk about these things. Spilling over here isn't helping and will only drag things down by souring the mood, since these topics aren't what most people who visit HN are here for.

Politics is one of those Neodymium magnets that seem to attract the worst of the worst, however, that's only due to unchecked emotions in a similar vein to religion. It's hard to tackle an idea without touching the human behind the keyboard. But I believe such a forum can exist and thrive, though it would take a super-human effort to moderate.
Right, of course. Thanks.
It was a tough lesson, indeed.
One readily inferred tip on changing burner phones is to physically change locations* before using a new one (battery removed when not making/expecting a call, of course). * Say the tube at rush hour.
You need to use smaller subreddits if that's what you want. Subscribe to /r/RepublicOfNews, /r/NeutralNews, and /r/DiggRSS and you will find something completely different.
Are they certain?
Japan is vending machine crazy. I know they do sell fruit in this manner. You might want to research their solutions.
Are you opposed to the DRM-stripping tools available? Buying a Kindle book and running it through Calibre seems like an easier route to take than scanning the physical book.

On the book scanning note though, do you have a special book scanner? I've never seen one outside of professional shops and turning the pages seems like a ginormous hassle.
Wow, the KitKat page is much better actually. Clouds fly by, candy gets chomped and rotates. An Android peeks down from an edge. Android page was just scrolling through some static images.
Journey is without a doubt one of the most remarkable games I've played in the last 2 years. There are others that I really enjoyed in the moment but Journey is the one I'll pick up to replay again and again.
If only there were more non-narcotic alternatives to address chronic pain. Oh wait... Schedule 1'd.
Reminds me of just after iOS6 was released under NDA in beta, and Apple had their new Maps application. My wife and I were going somewhere at about 5PM and I went to go check the traffic on the route we were headed towards, and there wasn't a byte of data available to figure out what the traffic was like since there were maybe a few dozen phones in a few square miles of where I was that were running iOS6.

I'd be one of the first people in line to install a mesh network at my residence and work, but it would be pretty useless unless there were others contributing, else I'd have a pretty lonely network.
A question no one on here gives a shit about but is of critical importance is, "Was there actual abuse?"
I'm not sure I agree with the premise that you are either born with empathy or you aren't. Of course there are sociopaths who are defined by their lack of empathy, but they (hopefully) aren't your run of the mill job applicants.

I've always thought of myself as empathetic, but was surprised when I became even more so after a life changing event. I've spoken to many with a similar experience.

Large, traumatic events can bring the world into focus and shift perspective for those who experience them. Perhaps it's not an increase in empathy, but rather a better understanding of what really matters to me. I don't yell at the customer service rep on the phone solely because I care about their feelings, but mostly because it's simply not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things whether my internet is out or if I miss my flight. If someone I care about is in danger, I doubt I would be as "empathetic".

There's always the old adage: "You catch more flies with honey"
>But we'd also shut down a violent black market industry that gets $50 billion a year and kills 25,000-50,000 people in the USA and Latin America each year.

Yup.

>That's most of the trouble. Skinny ladies with diet pill issues are small time in the face of mass death.

Eaxctly.

>We'd eventually defund most of the expanding police state, too.

I'd love to be able to pry back the Castle Doctrine. I may be crazy but I honestly fear a wrong-address or otherwise mistaken police raid more than hostile activity from illegal drug smugglers/sellers.
>But why would it be criminalized? For that to be justified it needs to be a drain on society in some significant way.

Substance bans do not /at all/ have a track record of being grounded in quantifiable measures of societal harm. That is to say, the current substance restriction policies are more or less completely arbitrary. The arbitrariness of current policies gives a natural experiment opportunity to assess the harm of the criminalization policies themselves by comparing the societal impact of substances such as caffeine, tobacco/nicotine, and alcohol with those of marijuana plus the associated negative impacts of marijuana criminalization. At least in the case of marijuana, the cure seems to be significantly worse than the disease.

>I support the ideal war on drugs (one based on evidence to show that it does more good than harm).

I wrote a more generalized comment[1] on the idea of an "ideal war on drugs". The gist is that I think it's a completely fantastical idea. The idea that you can squash a market with inelastic demand is soundly dispelled by all current and historical attempts at doing so. Further, I think that it's harmful that such an idea persists, because it allows for the justification of more and more extreme enforcement measures. Arguments like "If we got rid of meth then society would be significantly improved?" are based on a false premise. This is an outcome that clearly cannot be brought about by the war on drugs, yet such reasoning is continually used as a justification for more and more extreme enforcement measures that have increasingly diminishing returns as well as an increasingly negative impact on broader society as a whole.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6324214
This is not "first come, first serve", right?
OK so it would make more sense to use an alternative that does it in the browser, e.g. http://www.notforest.com/.
Why The English Language Is Rubbish
I chuckled when I read:

> First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good.

"Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short."

> Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out.

Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this sentence.
Russia issues travel warning to the US
Growth hacking your way to virality
Yes, I would object. It's not obvious that the world is billions of years old, so I think it's a good thing to mention however briefly, that our knowledge of such things is founded on the study of geology, chemistry and so forth, unless you're talking to someone whose views/level of knowledge you're already familiar with.

You weaken your own argument when you go around stating your opinion as fact, and it's not very different from people saying things like 'obviously long prison sentences reduce crime' or 'obviously excluding immigrants will relieve unemployment' or 'obviously the point of prison is punishment.'
I've always wondered how those companies (Nestle in this case) can measure the effectiveness of such one off advertising campaigns. After all, more people might buy Kit Kats in the following days but since consumers do not buy directly from Kit Kat, it might take some time before retailers realize they should order larger quantities of Kit Kat and due to this delay Nestle might never know which advertising campaign was successful. Does anyone know how this works?
pg, are you guys taking volunteers for Startup School by any chance?
Yeah. Although that's an open loop with CDs that has existed for years, so I imagine Amazon has some reasonable notions on the magnitude of the problem. I'd guess it's much less of an issue with books; CDs have a much higher repeat use value than most books do.

My guess is that some people will do it accidentally, but that the number of people doing it as a book cost-reduction strategy will be pretty low. The net yield on selling used books is not good. And I'd guess further that for 98% of on-sold physical books, people will never go back and look at the ebook again.
Can you explain what you mean? It's not obvious to me from my perspective.
The Problem I have with Brainiac Science Abuse
You seem to be assuming that a war on drugs must make them illegal. It needn't. Instead the war could do whatever is most effective (per dollar spent) at reducing usage. I support rehab for alcoholics, and measures to reduce drunk driving. I don't support the war on drugs in its current form.
Seriously what someone needs to do is write Vim in Lisp to put an end to these dilemmas.
Introducing HowToCode.io
Even Facebook has a better model as their P/E ratio is only 200 or so.
Is there a way to combine tags? Similar to how on reddit I can do /r/webdev+golang?
I'm saying this politely - so don't bite my head off - but

a.) you would say that, wouldn't you, you'd like as much of PG's attention as possible

b.) it's quite presumptious to state that the 1000s of others would be lower quality. Are the less than 1000, mid 20s, mostly male, mostly american, applicants to YC the best candidates on earth?

There are probably 1000x, if not more, capable founders of all age groups, nationalities, and genders that PG could get a slice of. He's built a brand and should seek to capitalize on it before someone establishes a superior brand.

Off course, this all about what PG does for fun, he's already rich enought to never work again. It might be that he enjoys mentoring a few founders a couple of times a year and doesn't have global ambitions.
At 70 it gets so fast it becomes almost impossible to spot the openings on time.
Anyone else see this and think of their Nokian Tyres? Nokia has an interesting history, including owning Nokian which makes some very good winter tires.
A snark one-two liner sitting on the top of the comment page is hardly a comment that's adding anything interesting

As a wise man once said, and I paraphrase: So basically anything upvoted by this community is considered on topic since enough people deemed it worthwhile.
Addictive. Contrary to munificent, I think it's great that the game punishes you for mistakes so completely. The feel of the game makes me think of a mix between Super Hexagon (www.superhexagon.com) and Temple Run (or any other generic runner).

The only criticism I have is this: sometimes it's close to impossible to tell (even at slow speeds) where the gap is because of the way the gates are laid out and also the colour of the gates (like Cyan). Some people may argue that adding a "dice roll" into the mix is great, but considering the type of game this, it just kills the fun when you feel like you've been robbed.

(note: this is different to screwing up and starting from scratch as a result)

edit: good job.
Solar is renewable, self sustaining

The sun is, but what about the raw materials needed to make the panels?
Lots of devices come with an Android distro that has a custom kernel for supporting the device. Those ones can not run a GNU/Linux distro, so manufacturers will tell you they don't support Linux.

No, it's not technically correct, but communicates the point quite well.
If you're so inclined: https://soundcloud.com/dutoncmusic/du-tonc-surging-memories
I don't think anyone but a loon or a pedant would object to a comment, in a thread about geology, that implied the ancient nature of the earth was obvious. I am afraid that I find it difficult to care about the objections of either loons or pedants. They may think my argument is weakened, and I consider that an acceptable loss. I already go out of my way to qualify much of what I say, I have little interest in further encumbering myself.

(You are the later, of course?)
Budget cuts mean Silicon Valley patent office won’t open anytime soon
It is not hard to edit.
The new Gmail compose is 20 years worth of interface design learning, lost in a single poor choice.
From the title, my first thought was, "Ability to drink milk from a bottle?" I'm a little scared to click the link.
I've got a first generation Kindle and a Paperwhite. I definitely miss the buttons on cold nights.

With the original Kindle, I could comfortably read with every part of me except my face ensconced in warm blankets. A lobster claw like grip through the blanket easily held it in the left hand, and a bonk on the right side either with the right hand, or against my chest, would turn the page.

With the Paperwhite, I have to expose a finger (or bring the Kindle under the blanket) to turn the page.
I don't recall pants ever helping in that regard.
21 SXSW Food+Health+Tech Panel Recommendations
Agreed, I'm all for nuclear power personally and that is a somewhat less logical position, but the irrational fear of nuclear power is more of a worldwide phenomenon than a German one. All I'm saying is I think comparing American fear-culture to Germany's decision to quickly move to solar is at best apples to oranges and at worst completely nonsensical.
Hi coherentpony, we absolutely do Mac builds. We haven't tried a Windows build just yet, but there is no reason why it shouldn't just work!
Needs some debouncing! Other than that, it's awesome.
The Microsoft-Nokia Deal: Risks and Messiness
>Only a specific type of product or business or piece of content will go viral—it not only has to be worth spreading, it has to provoke a desire in people to spread it.

How can you make sure of this when you're in the early stages of an idea? There needs to be a cheatsheet or something.

I've found that entire industries don't really work with growth hacking. B2B or specialized software, for instance. How can someone refer a friend when they probably don't even know anyone with a need for your product/service?
This is beautifully executed and quite fun, but it's not riffing on the Android announcement page nearly as much as it is on Apple's Mac Pro announcement page: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

The Android page is a brief history of the OS, while the Mac Pro page is an animated product brochure, which is what this really is.
Hi ssw1n!

Travis has chosen a very tight integration with GitHub and you run builds on their servers.

Jenkins is usually a hard thing for most people to setup. It's very old software and the UI hasn't changed in years.

I'm trying to find a middle ground between the two services. I can easily install ruby on a build slave, but trying to manage the build master is always a pain.
David Farragut comes to mind, although I don't know if the plural (i.e., many 14 year olds) applies.
sounds like negligent parents waiting for a CPS visit to happen to enforce those social mores :) Fortunately, you seems to live among similarly "negligent neighbors".

Once, we picked up an obviously lost dog on a mountain road and dropped it at the first fire station after the phone on its collar resulted in a voicemail. It was during our 1st year in the US and the thing "what if the dog was stolen and we stopped by police while the dog is in our car" didn't even cross our mind. Now after 13 years here, i'm wondering what i'd do if it was say a child (and there is no collar with the phone to leave voicemail) ...
Thank you for a very honest breakdown. I have lived an equal amount of my life in both London and NJ, and am a citizen of US and UK, so visas aren't my problem. "Abroad" would be neither of the two, unfortunately.

I haven't worked in a consumer space startup before, so it may be wise to get some experience there.

It's pretty hard to gauge the culture of the new startup, as I've only met the CEO and videoconferenced with the rest of the team. While they're undeniably smart and focused, it remains to be seen if the support system and empathy will be on par.

Thanks for your thoughts and wishes.
Oh wow! I get to write two code paths! I'm so excited to do double the work for a small subset of users!

Oh, and I get to test two code paths, and all of the wonderful ways they might interact!
Guy Lewis Steele's Wordsplit and the Reducers
Copied from the other topic on this:

That would be way too easy to game. I.e. set up an Amazon Marketplace account, "sell" yourself and/or accomplices lots of books for "reasonable" prices, with the money minus some vig including Amazon's charges going back to the "buyers", then they buy el-cheapo Kindle copies for real.
Go from: Columbia, MD to: Hampden, Baltimore, MD via: goodwill

It overlays the goodwill stores on your route and then puts the one with the least time out of your way on the top of the results. That'll save you time from having to first figure out which B to use, then do the mapping between it and A and C.

....Granted, the first two goodwill locations no longer exist, but that's Google's fault for not delisting them. This thing seems to be really promising.
Only if there's a nipple attached.