skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Effects of nicotine on perceptual speed" [1] is behind a paywall, and I can't tell from the abstract whether the results also apply to non-smokers.

However, the abstract of another of the articles, "Effects of Cigarette Smoking on Performance in a Simulated Driving Task" [2] states that the effect was only measured on minimally abstinent smokers.

Are any of the other studies measuring the beneficial effects of nicotine on non-users (and non-users only)?

My anecdotal experience when I quit (the first 2 times, couple of months each) as well as the first time I smoked was that the first couple of cigarettes had absolutely no effects, whatsoever.

So the last time I quit (about 2 years ago), I just kept at it. After about 3 months any previously observable decline in performance and ability to focus was gone. Most of it was gone in the first 3 weeks actually, with only slight remains of increased irritability persisting for 2 more months.

That makes me suspect that nicotine only has a beneficial effects on nicotine users (instead, lack of nicotine is what causes the opposite of the measured effect for users).

But even if such benefits exist, I feel that the they aren't worth it. The inability to function without nicotine, the constant drive to get more - it feels like slavery, and I'll never go back to that.

And I cringe when I read things like:

There is addiction but it’s drastically overestimated by
almost everyone and may been conflated with the habit-formation
capability

Because in my experience its completely, totally wrong. I could clearly separate 2 phases that I went through when I quit:

1. the nicotine desire phase - First 48 hours. Incredibly, painfully hard. Strong desire to place a sticker on me or just light a cigarette and make it all go away. This is what kept me a user for 7 years and helped me come up with various excuses just to continue.

2. The learning-to-live phase: A hard but somewhat joyful period where I would recognize the habitual desire to light up a cigarette associated with various activities.

The second phase had 3 different stages for every smoking habit I have developed. For example, at first I couldn't imagine drinking coffee without a cigarette.

Then after the first time it felt like I'm getting no joy from the coffee. The second time it felt okay, but slightly incomplete. Finally, the third time it was all good.

The awesome part was realizing that I just learned how to drink coffee without cigarettes. And it was super-easy: just do it 3 times. Joy! Repeat with all other problematic activities.

This happened with all activities that I associated with smoking. Removing the habits felt easy. Getting off the nicotine felt almost impossible. Luckily, the necessary time for the second one was much shorter (I still had tiny activity-induced cravings couple of months after I quit)

[1]: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/9/1990.abstract

[2]: http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/119229
Light years ahead in what sense? I think it's an anachronism from a theoretical standpoint. I'd like to see more people run with newer ideas from Plan 9 / Inferno / Hurd / all the other operating systems that aren't a monolithic 1970s design.
Google stopped asking questions like "how many golf balls fit into a plane", but they didn't stop asking puzzles and programming trivia questions.

If you know how to ask these questions, and what insight you're looking for from them, they can be very insightful. Here's the different types of questions and puzzles you should ask, how, and what insight to get from them: https://www.sandglaz.com/blog_posts/104-How-to-interview-and...
Apple iOS 7 is sickening users, doctor confirms
Ask HN: Is it worth to develop Android apps for Amazon's Kindle?
We've developed some Android apps that have achieved some popularity (4M~ downloads in total). We've been contacted by Amazon reps trying to entice us to support Kindle's API. We're not sure if it's worth the hassle, though (would require lots of code patches and separate compilations), so we wanted to ask the community: have you done this? do you have any comparison between Play Store and Amazon's?
thanks!
I think it depends on how public and how many contributors you have to a feature branch. I think author has the assumption that there is typically one dev per feature branch.

Once a feature branch is being worked on by multiple devs (and hence multiple feature branches forked off), it is a public branch and should use a merge based workflow.[0]

I personally use a rebase workflow on private branches before merging since it makes for a cleaner history. I've seen devs merge a branch with 100+ merge commits and it absolutely destroys git history.

[0]: http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/
If you can't trust the TPM, can you trust Intel's debug registers to be secure?

Long term I suspect that this kind of thing will use Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), which creates a trusted enclave of code and data that not even the kernel nor the hypervisor can access.
How post-industrial St. Louis made itself a startup hotbed
I used to do this, but I've started using

git checkout master
git diff master..featurebranch | git apply

instead.
Making the type system pluggable and a separate pass also means you can do cool things like interfacing your type system with your database [1]. And the Heterogeneous and Value types mean you can be very flexible and precise with your requirements while also coding in a mostly idiomatic Clojure way. (Though things are obviously still raw or unimplemented, the base is looking good and shaping up quickly.)

[1]: https://gist.github.com/c-spencer/6569571 (just a PoC)
actually, I'd welcome opinions where s/Amazon/XXX for XXX!=Google Play Store :)
Google Revamps Search to Steal Siri’s Lines
This is really, IMO, why no new community OS has ever taken off. Only clones of existing architectures. I was briefly involved with TUNES many years ago. Getting people on the same page is an immense task, when creating something new and different. You get stuck in the bike shed tar pit. Focusing on a well-specified Unix clone was definitely the right thing to do.
Silicon Valley smells today
Does anyone know what is causing the odor outside today in the valley? I noticed it all the way from san jose to mountain view. It's not a garbage smell, it smells almost like peanut butter.
Very impressive train of release and innovation from Valve. Joy inducing.
Sharp Begins Sample Deliveries of 4K2K Panels for 15.6-Inch Notebooks
The Most Twenty-Something Proposal of All-Time
1) Because the iPhone doesn't need 2 GB RAM.

2) They took the money they saved and devoted it elsewhere (perhaps the Sapphire home button? :)

When it comes down to the bill of materials, every cent really does count when it scales across several million units sold.
I've been advocating Crowdfunding for years, but specifically with the assumption that it would be a mechanism to help the middle class diversify their investment portfolios.

The questionable wisdom of this assumption has been pointed out to me several times. So just now, I looked up the stock market crash of 1929, and it tells me that only 16% of U.S. households were invested in the stock market at the time. The bigger problem (ostensibly) was that commercial banks were too heavily leveraged in the market.

So we get Glass-Steagall and the Securities Act of 1933 out of all that. The "separate commercial and investment banking" clauses come out of the former. The "accredited investor" clauses that prevent true crowdfunding come out of the latter.

In 1990-something, Clinton weakens Glass-Steagall. In 2012, Obama signs the JOBS act, which weakens some "accredited investor" parts of the SEC.

So now, in retrospect, are we more worried about a weak Glass-Steagall after 2010?

Or are we more worried about policy that would have only protected 16% of households in 1929, and since then, has excluded ~99% of Americans from early stage investment?

edit: a $1,000 investment at Google's IPO would be worth $10k today. however, a $100 investment early in Google's history would also be worth $10k today.
Payment processing is a commodity when things are easy. If you're shipping T-shirts with cheesy movie quotes to college students, you don't have a problem. If you're selling credits for nude webcam chat, things get more complicated.

You get people waking up with hangovers regretting the $500 they spent. You get married men denying that they ever used the site. You get Ukrainian hackers running up charges on stolen cards. You start to wonder if people are laundering money through the site. You get mountains of chargebacks & fraud - preventing most processors from even wanting to do business with you, let alone compete for your business. The ones that will do business with you are going to charge an arm and a leg to deal with the risk.

I had the misfortune of working on a site that ran one of these businesses. They had to run a pool of processors - selecting which one to go through based on how trusted the customer was, how suspicious a transaction looked & even what part of the world they (and their card) were from. Being able to funnel transactions through a single commodity gateway rather than having to add & remove new processors every month as they dropped our account would have been a dream.
Bill Sebastian's Outer Space Visual Communicator
Someone linked an anime inspired one further up. It has Tengan Toppa Gurenn Lagann
I think his point is that it's weird that you don't comment on anything else, but manage to have impeccable timing in terms of showing up when this thread is posted.

Edit: Especially if you go back in your comment history and see that you actually know Alexis. So it's kinda offputting to see the early votes get gamed like that, even if it is for a great cause.
Testable & Tested Client-side Code
As I understand it, the island ownership doesn't necessarily solve this; there would still be a dispute over what happens if a passage wider than 24 nautical miles opens up. Canada isn't an archipelagic state, so would not be able to make an argument for the same sort of broad internal waters that, say, the Philippines have, so any such passage would be outside of Canada's territorial waters.

There would still be exclusive rights to economically exploit, of course, but Canada would not be able to forbid international shipping through such a passage.
"Response serializers can also be chained, using AFCompoundSerializer"

Does a dance.

"AFNetworking 2.0 introduces AFURLSessionManager, which manages an NSURLSession object based on a specified NSURLSessionConfiguration object, and conforms to <NSURLSessionTaskDelegate>, <NSURLSessionDataDelegate>, <NSURLSessionDownloadDelegate>, and <NSURLSessionDelegate>. Convenience methods to inspect and cancel tasks are provided, as well as block-based callback properties for each delegate method"

Does another dance

It just gets better and better.
That's the big thing for me here. They're obviously trying to bridge the gap between PC gaming and console gaming, but they aren't doing it at the expense of existing control schemes - I have no doubt that you can use a bluetooth keyboard + mouse, or a Steam controller, or an Xbox 360 controller to play your games. The Steam controller doesn't have to solve every problem, because it isn't an exclusive input mode for the platform. If it works on 95% of the games, that's a huge win and good enough for most people.
Yeah, those Toronto guys hated IBM APL.

I had a friend whose Dad got him a job in high school working for Ken Iversen at IBM, who taught him APL programming.
No: such a clause wouldn't be enforceable in that context.
If you rely on non-visible spectrum, its even easier. People and running equipment are going to stand out.
If you're moving your arm to move your mouse

IIRC I've always been old that I should move my whole arm with the mouse. The idea being that it's a small movement for your elbow/shoulder but a much larger movement for you wrist so you can avoid wrist injuries by moving your whole arm.
I didn't realize anyone else heard chords with multiple-key presses. For me, the [Ctrl] is an A (435), the [Alt] is a C(5), and the [Del] is an F#(5), so it's a D7 minus the root. A fairly bland chord, when it comes right down to it, but then I imagine a G#(2) underpinning it, to give it just a little character, but still resolve to the nice, bright G.
I would really like to see an APL interpreter on an iPad or tablet device. Running APL on such devices where virtual keyboards can be customized would an interesting possibility for dealing with the APL glyphs. If only I had the time… Also +1 for ngn APL.
and yet most competitive fps players play at 400 dpi
It seems that they were very fatigued, causing them to make an error. The crash wasn't caused by the pilots being asleep.
Well, you can still order pizza trhu the "ad" app. so let's call that built-in functionality as well, shall we?
Anyone have any notion of the size of the IQ boost suggested by the link to a paywalled paper?
This is a business where your performance can be measured easily, so just aim for a risk-adjusted commission. If you manage to score me a deal that improves my situation 50%, you can keep half of it. No strings attached. We share the risk of me not liking the job and leaving after a month or so.

In order to be successful you will probably require me not to leave the new job for at least 6-12 months. That can be an expensive term to have because of the risk being stuck in some crappy workplace, the risk of missing better opportunities and some other more subtle limitations that costs me money. That can drive your cut down significantly. On the other hand if you have premium companies like Google, you can claim a bigger cut and it's still a good deal.
Super Mario 64 DS had an interesting feature where you could put your left thumb on the touch screen and use it like a joystick. The neutral zone would be wherever you put your thumb down, and a little diagram would appear on the touch screen showing where the edges, neutral zone, etc., were.

I remember this actually not being too bad. I didn't use it over the D-pad for any precise movement, but part of that was the awkwardness of having to stretch the thumb over the the touch screen. There also was a little thumb pad on the DS strap you had to wear to get it to work smoothly, and that was a little clumsy to use. It was also hard to get a sense of where the neutral zone was, etc., since the only indication was a diagram under your thumb.

It looks like this controller takes that same idea and improves on it. You won't have to stretch your thumb or wear a thumb pad, and the circular trackpad maps better to a joystick than an arbitrary circle somewhere on a touch screen. It also looks like there's ridges on the pad, which could help with getting a sense of where you are.

If it was sort-of viable as a side feature in a nine-year-old game, I'm optimistic about Valve's ability to make it work. As you said, it's not like Valve is unfamiliar with the area.
I almost think something like this would be great in an IDE tailored for kids. Maybe something similar to the Scratch project.

However, I think that more visual debugging tools like this actually need to exist for professional developers as well. I think Bret would agree too.
"Canada does not have a single port along the Northwest Passage but that Russia, by comparison, has 16 deep water ports along its Arctic coastline."

The article seems to end by identifying Canada's first major problem. Then you move into things like ice breakers etc. where Russia leads, while Finland and Sweden are ahead of Canada/USA.

Here's a nice infograph on world's ice breakers. It tells you something about short-term capabilities / general knowhow in this area.
http://news.usni.org/2013/07/23/u-s-coast-guards-2013-reivew...

"Presently, 60% of all diesel icebreakers are produced in Finland, 100% of all nuclear icebreakers are produced in Russia." Meaning Finland and Russia have a big head start here... http://barentsnova.com/node/1573
Probing the Unconscious Mind
Viewing YAML Metadata in your Documents
Keyboard and mouse is terrible for sitting in front of a tv, so in that regard, this is compelling enough for me to play games while not sitting in a secluded office room desk hah
> arious companies will propose building ports in the Canadian north, and Alaska.

I don't think so, because those ports won't be ice-free, and will therefore be of little use.

Valdez (the end of the AK pipeline) is the most northerly year-round ice-free port, and it's not North at all, by AK/Northern Canada standards (I have to drive many hours South to get there...)
Makes sense, thanks! As an outsider it can be tricky to know which things in the release notes are "This feature is ready" vs "This is simply the present state of things."
Many people enjoy getting political news emailed to them. Many, many people. Yet it infuriates me when it gets forwarded to me because it is--wait for it--spam. It is annoying crap I don't want.

Spam is defined as whether it annoys the receiver, not the sender's intentions. And there's no 'unsubscribe' in iOS.
Unless 'someone' gets smart to the system and starts adding tax to the quit smoking products, of course.

I think we're seeing some of this now, with the greater attention being paid to e-cig products.
"Double your estimate, and convert to the next higher unit." is what I've always heard.
You have a kinder memory than I. I loathed that game so very much. Part of the problem was I had a DSFat, so that's along-assed way for the left thumb to reach. But it might be less excruciating without the thumbpad. Because seriously, that thing sucked.

That and the bolted-on character switching mechanic combine to make my memories of M64DS less than kind. A shame, I loved it on N64.

But still, I trust Valve to do a better job than that, since they're betting the whole platform on this kind of interface.
400 DPI on a 6"x6" input surface; that's very different from 400 DPI on a .5"x.5" input surface.
True, but until you can quantify exactly how much more likely a tired pilot will be to crash the plane, it's impossible to quantify the cost. It may be impossible to accurately measure.
Their background was impressive enough that they where able to raise venture funding for their start-up.

Many times they have built or worked on something technically impressive, that became big & well known (Google Maps, Facebook timeline, Founding engineer at start-up with Billion dollar+ valuation).
I thought software did not weight anything - oh wait..
I too like K better but it is nice to see another APL implementation and a free one at that. Also note that dyalog has made their commercial APL available on the RaspberryPi.

The open source "kona" is close to K version3 (no longer available from kx.com as they have moved on to Q, another very powerful array / database language). So far kona is only 7.2K lines of C code though admittedly very dense code (it is sort of like writing K in C!).
The big star picture at http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/ has gotten larger and brighter after every announcement. Some people on reddit are speculating that there will be a fourth announcement that comes out of the star.
The Best Desk Money Can't Buy Just Yet
Why should you lend/invest money to your friends and family’s business startup?
You've summarized a lot of the points I made to the Fastcomapny reporter for the article... and in the process you described a good number of seed stage companies, including ones coming out of YCombinator.
He is hinting a the common knowledge of what DMCA is.

it practically makes it illegal to even change the battery of a device you bought if there is not an user accessible and labeled port to change said battery.

So i am guessing that fiddling with the DRM software on the printer also is a crime under such idiot law.
The boot loader is still on the disk, unencrypted.
I agree. As a parent of a kid interested in programming and math, I would only suggest replacing "for kids" with "for beginning learners." From what I've seen, kids over 7 and grown-ups are pretty much on even footing as beginning programmers. Additionally, "for kids" has a trivializing ring to it, like they're not full humans; my daughter does not like anything with a "for kids" label on it. (If only "Python for Kids" were not called that!)
To be fair: "text editors" really hadn't been invented "long before emacs". At the time (the early 1970's) editing text was a subject of much research and experimentation. Differing paradigms were being tried on new and exciting hardware (the glass tty). Screen editors, as they came to be known, were a brand new curiosity -- they were equally disruptive (if not more so) as the "web application" or "capacitive touchscreen interface" would be decades later.

And emacs was one of the very first screen editors. It invented lots of the stuff that would later seem "obvious".

So no: I think it's entirely appropriate to say that emacs was "invented" in the same way the browser was.
> Light years ahead in what sense?

Usability for pretty much any of the purposes for which one uses a computer operating system other than exploring theoretical ideas about how to architect a computer operating system.

> I'd like to see more people run with newer ideas from Plan 9 / Inferno / Hurd / all the other operating systems that aren't a monolithic 1970s design.

So would I. That doesn't make any Hurd more ready for any other use other than exploring newer OS ideas that Linux is.

Or even the most ready for such uses (or even the exploring OS architecture use) of the "Plan 9 / Inferno / Hurd" set.
Did anyone see a TARDIS in there? I didn't find it...
Canada already has an arctic port that's iced-in for much of the year: the Port of Churchill on Hudson Bay. Tourists go there to see polar bears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Churchill
Protesters Are Dodging Sudan's Internet Shutdown with a Phone-Powered Crowdmap
Hi Chuck,

I was also at Sun in '91. Michael Tiemann worked there for a while, on gcc.

Prior to my time at Sun, I'd made contributions to gcc, gdb, gas and emacs (all in support of the Convex architecture) before my time at Sun. (My former boss from Convex was the president of BSDi, too. Most of the engineers from Prisma, his company between Convex and BSDi, came to Sun when Prisma folded, becoming the early version of Sun's RMTC.)

You do some disservice to rms here. Easy enough to understand (rms is easy to dislike).

By 91, GNU had a compiler, and emacs, both of which Linus used to develop his kernel.
If you haven't watched it yet, I like Media for Thinking the Unthinkable even better: http://vimeo.com/67076984
2GB of DDR also takes twice as much power to keep alive vs 1GB of DDR. If you don't need it - it's a waste of battery.
So Steampunk.
In the sense of being a working kernel you can use as the center of an operating system. I like to see people run with other ideas too. But hurd didn't have that idea, and they aren't running with it. They are stumbling around blindly. Ironically, minix is now light years ahead of hurd, and it is also a microkernel.

Also, plan 9 doesn't explore much of anything in the kernel. It is a plain old boring monolithic kernel. The exploration in plan 9 was in the userland.
My takeaway is, that the reason that this is possible is that they care about data structure. A language can give you an order of magnitude performance, but - according to Ville - you can almost get infinitive improvement if you rethink the algorithms and data structure.