skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't smoke, but I know a brilliant hacker who does and he has tried electronic cigarettes and he loves them. We were at brunch once and he showed it to me and it was quite an amazing little device.

As you inhale, the current of the air heats up an element that vaporizes the liquid contained inside. When he exhaled, the smoke wasn't at all like typical cigarette smoke and was much more pleasant to second hand smokers.

I don't usually recommend things I've never tried, but if I was a smoker, I'd try these and probably recommend them to other smokers. I haven't done the math on cost, but if they are healthier, which they seem like they would be, then perhaps they are worth it.
The same thing that separates a good plumber from a mediocre plumber.
Somebody has to build and fix the truck.

Of course, we could automate that, too. It wouldn't be our smartest move as a species, but it'd probably be our last.
Your nomenclature is a bit screwed up. Instead of saying "how many generations removed", the common way to refer to immigrants is "first generation" (the people who were born elsewhere), "second generation" (their kids) etc.

I'm a 1.5-er. I was born elsewhere and my family came to Canada when I was 13, and like other 1.5-ers, while I fit in just fine, I do have a bit of a double-identity. The good part is that it gives you extra perspective on many things, while the bad part means you can never quite fit in 100%.
I would suggest this is partly due to the fact that computer users who know about and install these software packages are more literate in general and therefore more likely to use their computers in ways less likely to be infected.
"other people don't care enough about design to ever notice, and that's completely fine too."

Or maybe they just have different tastes and preferences. Apple Design is not the only possible design, and it has it's downsides.
The music stops (Financiers as Evil, Y2K was real, and techies getting shafted)
IIRC ClamAV used to have the quickest response time for adding new viruses to their database. Smells like marketing FUD to me, must mean the free ones are cutting into their market.
I guess that when the problem is to really scale a lot the big cost may be the energy not the hardware, so the performance the coder can bring you for watt is crucial.

And to use few CPU cycles you need a programmer that is smart enough to know both computer science to select the best algorithms and data structures and low level programming languages to lower the constant times involved in this algorithms.
Maybe your university is small, i have a lot of classes with about 150 students. There are always not enough textbooks for that number of people. I find hard to believe a library is going to purchase more than 50 copies of one book title.
Your inhalation isn't what causes the atomizer to heat up, but rather there's a pressure sensor in the atomizer that your inhalation triggers, causing the battery to kick on and the element to heat up.
Again: I listed the things I did this month, from my house, with a handful of friends. I won't even try to make a list of super-exciting experiences because there are so many things. When the possibilities range from "learn to sumo wrestle" to "take a silent 10-day meditation retreat in the mountains" to "fire machine guns at things", it's stupid to name everything within that range. The point I was trying to make was that I could be satisfied even with the little exciting things for a long, long time.
and that would be?
This is becoming a big thing, especially because it circumvents all of the taxes around regular cigarettes.

My oldest son, who is a coder and a smoker, brought his e-smokes to our last family meeting. I have to admit, as a former smoker in my 20s it seemed a bit dorky to me. I asked him if he could plug it into his USB port and the answer was yes! I stiffled a giggle. Then I asked him if anybody had invented an app that would let him tweet for each puff he took. Wouldn't that be cool? Way more cool than the whoopee cushion that tweets. (and toots)

I don't think he appreciated my comments as much as I did.

At some point you're still riding on the technology train, you just somehow ended up in the bar car.

For what it's worth, he thought it would be a replacement for his addiction, but he still smokes anyway. Something about the nicotine uptake not as fast as with traditional smokes.
That's essentially what I said, but you're nitpicking my use of the word "design". I hold that by how I define "design", Apple's design is the best out there, by several orders of magnitude. There is no user experience more painstakingly crafted. Apple makes it into an art form.
Some schools are fighting back against this. For example, I know that the UCLA math department has a policy that professors are required to search for a replacement textbook once a textbook goes beyond the third edition, unless there is a significant addition of material (e.g. entirely new chapters needed as a result of recent developments). The idea being: "If the author hasn't got it by the third edition, they'll never get it."

I believe this eliminated the majority of calculus/linear algebra/diff-eq texts from introductory courses, so it has become easier to find used copies.
Great question. Ask it to n programmers and get n^2 responses. This could easily be the subject for another post or even a book. Just off the top of my head in no particular order:

- understands the problem at hand before writing any code
- uses the right tool for the right job
- follows accepted standards and protocols without sacrificing creativity
- names variables & functions what they actually are for the next programmer
- anticipates what could go wrong before relying on a debugger or testing
- understands the underlying architecture and how to best utilitze it
- never writes the same code twice
- never writes in 150 lines that which could be written in 100 lines
- Poor code: uncommented. Mediocre: commented. Good: doesn't need comments.
- understands the entire code life cycle & writes it to last
- has pity on the poor soul who has to maintain it & leaves a clue or 2
- writes flexibly enough to be easily changed before the project is done

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. In general...

A good programmer writes it right, once, in a week.

A mediocre programmer writes it OK, in 2 months, and then futzes with it forever.

A bad programmer never gets it done.
> ...completely free of tar, carcinogens and other toxins

> ...to deliver nicotine to the user

If I'm not mistaken, isn't nicotine itself carcinogenic? Anyway, if I still smoked, I'd switch to these in a heartbeat.
In other news, Microsoft says Linux is a bad choice.
100% agreement, yet:

> If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work...

Very few people have such a good eye for talent. It's really, really hard to do. Jack Welch, one of the better HR people of all time, said his hiring success rate was only 2 out of 3 hires working out even towards the end of his tenure. It's really hard to identify good people, know how they'll change and adapt over time, create a good environment for them, and so on. Vastly under ratedly hard. One of the reasons good people are underpaid is that it's often quite hard to tell them apart from "just okay" people. People are bad at picking talent - they mistake overconfidence and gregariousness for ability, they put put premiums on likability and agreeableness, they look for people who "look like a winner" when that only maybe slightly correlates... hard stuff. Companies whose managers have technical backgrounds have a better chance, but it's still quite a difficult challenge.
Not to mention that it was Luna 15, which as its name implies was preceded by several other Lunas. Most notably, Luna 9 soft landed on the Moon in 1966, three years before Apollo landing.
No, nicotine has never been shown to be carcinogenic, and it's unlikely it will. It's possible it may speed up the development of cancer cells due to preventing apoptosis, but that's purely theoretical at the moment, as far as I'm aware.
Anecdotal, I know, but a few times I've UNinstalled Norton on my father-in-law's machines, replaced with either AVG or Avast, and stopped its incessant HD activity, speeding it up quite a bit.
> Higher detection rates is not better. Higher detection rates just means more false positives.

Awesome, so the machine I have with NO AV software at all with a detection rate of 0 must be the bestest!
this is terrific.
I voted twice in the poll, for different sides of my family. Is this okay? The original post asks only for shortest generational distance to an immigrant, but does not specifically ask for no double voting.
That's obviously not what I meant. Read my comment below: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688388
Is the topic here people that self-medicate in order to gain a few points on a test over non-medicated folks, or people who have serious, real brain problems that need some intervention to be more normal?

Because I'm talking about the first case, and you seem to be talking about the second. The article, to me, was geared toward the first scenario. If you'd like to talk about the second scenario, that's fair game, but not what I was talking about at all.
From the text:
As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work.

Then what would the outcome be if man don't have to work at all? Better for some, but worse for many others is my guess.
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So Hacker News accepts ads now?
Don't forget to add Norton to that list of crappy companies.
It seems that the bloated AV products from not just Symantec, but also Norton and McAfee, have a lot in common with the symptoms of malware and viruses

- Sucks up CPU
- Sucks up Memory
- Sucks up Disk Space
- A Small Performance hit
- Uses network bandwidth
- Annoys you to hell with reminders to buy their product
- Close to impossible to get rid of at times
"Very few people have such a good eye for talent."

That's OK because it's not necessary.

Management doesn't need an eye for talent. It needs an eye for demonstrated performance.

If Programmer A consistently delivers excellent software in x% of the time of Programmers B thru G, the users/customers love it, and the maintenance costs are a small % (if they have a way of measuring this), then what the f*&#%@ else does management need to know? Treat Programmer A appropriately or lose him/her.

Talent is in the eye of the beholder.

Demonstrated performance is on the bottom line.
does anyone understand what this platform does? is it a cloud computing api?
http://isbn.nu/9780375503665 is good.
http://twittercelebrities.org/
Me too. What part of the Soviet Union?
I think the point of the article is that too many startups are wasting time and money trying to create a market for their worldchanging revolutionary new product, as opposed to entering an existing niche market and dominating in it.
Marshall Brain's 'Robotic Nation' explores what would happen in a highly automated society (e.g. robots would take over all sectors)

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
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I am an immigrant. Moved here from Russia when I was 5.

However, my grandfather was born in New York. But his parents were born in Russia.

My family has been moving back and forth between Russia and the United States for the last 150 years. It appears that we can't make up our minds.
I am brazilian but I will answer it either way, Brazil is also a country were a large portion of the population are not far removed from immigrants, mainly Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Germans and Lebanese, and in recent years Bolivian, Korean, Chinese and other lesser groups. My maternal grandfather was born in Vilnius then under German occupation, in 1916. He came to Brazil in 1939. My paternal grandfather was born in Morocco, in Taroudant, in 1907, he immigrated to Portugal in 1917 and to Brazil in 1932. So the answer for me is 2 generations. My grandmothers were distant cousins, and their family came from Morocco, from a city then called Mogador, to Brazil in 1827 and were among the first legal jewish immigrants in Brazil (there's a complicated history of jews in Portugal in 16th century), 5 generations ago.
Now most of my family lives in Israel with exception of my immediate family, a cousin and an aunt, all my grandparents are deceased (ע״ה).
1997, not 2007.

"Three years ago, Doerr was already a famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist. But the event that moved him to global business fame was the arrival of the Internet."
Problem is trust. You need to be a well-established retailer before well-established banks will allow you to charge credit-cards for an arbitrary amount without explicit permission.
Why don't we rewrite JVM in Java?
Ugh and he's using PayPal. Get a merchant account and save some money on fees, Gus!
xkcd on YouTube comments: http://xkcd.com/202/
For your high achievers:

1. Make sure they have something meaningful to work on.
2. Treat them like human beings.

For everyone else:

1. Give the Employee of the Month a special parking spot.
2. Pep rallies.
3. Company newsletter.
4. The promise of a raise.
5. PTO
6. etc.,etc.,etc.
Pipes/abstractions don't leak?
I think Symantec bought Norton.
Leningrad then. St Petersburg now.

How about you?
These cough aren't cough ads cough or cough solicited cough replies. I'm sure cough cough all posts on cough HN have the majority cough of the replies be glowing cough reviews on the link cough.

Cigarettes don't kill people. Chuck Norris does.

Ok, cigarettes do too.
The state schools in Wisconsin have a rental system. It worked great. I didn't have to purchase a single text book. Some classes had several text books, which the book store would only rent the first or second primary book, but this wasn't too common.

I do know that the publishers didn't like the university doing this much. Also, it hindered the professors a little bit because they were pressured to keep their textbooks to a minimum and to keep the same text book for as long as possible, even if there was a good justification to switch. So, the text books had a reputation for not being the best things available for us students.
> So you're gonna risk your mental health and your brain just..

Don't assume it's a risk. The effects of these stimulants are well known and well studied. Taken safely and in proper doses these are not risky drugs. The world is not black and white and learning and self development can be aided by these drugs. It is not cheating.

Artificially enhancing your natural cognitive abilities is a trend that is only going to continue to increase as we learn more and more about the brain and how to manipulate it. The body is a machine, and if we learn to make the machine operate better through chemicals, which is inevitable, then we're going to take advantage of that. You won't see people complaining when they're daily regiment of 20 pills lets them live healthy lives well into their 200's.

Some people realize this is already happening and are taking advantage of it.
You can check easily enough whether they're "solicited replies" by looking at the age and posting history of the accounts.
Norton is part of Symantec. It's just a branding thing for corporate/consumer use.
But do managers know how to measure performance? Really?

In an enterprise situation, for example, do "customers" really know if they love the software, or the presentation that sold them the idea, or perhaps they asked for something to be built wrong.

I would suggest that "very few managers have such a good eye for performance" no matter the metric.
Since March, IE Lost 11.4 Percent Share To Firefox, Safari, And Chrome
agree. but it is definitely not for political power. If he wanted to I think he probably had a good chance to win standing for MP elections in Bangalore.

I guess getting the political power was more of necessity here because without that authority things might not move among bureaucrats & probably also to be commanding to ensure there is no infiltration of evil influences of other ministers in the system.
One item left out is floor space. This is a serious consideration, maybe more serious than electricity. Real estate for your server racks has a cost associated with it, and it is not so easy to buy/rent in rack-sized increments.
In such a post-scarcity Asimovian future, limited socialism (perhaps 1-5% of GDP) would be a viable option. Socialism misallocates resources. But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?
Dutch fishermen for at least 6 generations on (transitive) father's side. Although I decided to become an expat computer scientist/software engineer.
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The college I go to disallows checking out textbooks. If I want to check out a textbook I have to go to my community college.
There will always be explicit permission from the consumer.

But you're right about trust. For this reason we are not trying to roll this out ourselves.
It's going to happen. Once a human's living wage starts being more costly than automation and AIs, no amount of laws and unions will hold the tide back, nor is taxing the few to support the idle many a stable state. At that point we basically have 3 choices. Contract the population to the ever-dwindling employable remnant, panic and retreat into a Luddite dark age, or switch the economy to some yet-to-be-devised ludic system.
Usually, I'd be the last one to defend Microsoft, but sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due. I installed and played with Win7 on my home PC, and it is leaps and bounds better than WinXP and WinVista. Win7 was more responsive than XP on my oldish PC, though it did use more RAM to accomplish this feat. It's much more usable than Vista, and some of the new desktop features are quite nice.

This does not mean I'll give up my MacBook anytime soon for a Windows machine, and neither will Win7 replace Ubuntu as my OS of choice on the PC, but you have to acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is finally getting the hang of this OS business.
Looks like just since January the combined market share of IE versions has declined from 73% to 55%. That is a dramatic change. More significant, probably than a temporary spike in search share driven by ads.
Quite weird indeed, but I figure by ISPs he means hosting providers. Something like earning money to offer legal content through BitTorrent would be quite interesting.
Then he will grow up and start having to do real work. Unless he's a programmer, that (still) pretty much means Windows or Mac OS.
How come schools don't provide the textbooks themselves? It worked in high school. I mean think about it:

a) they can buy in bulk and get a huge discount.

b) they only need to buy 1 set every 2-3 years. Saving money

c) they can decide when to update their edition.

And to pay for this, add a "Textbook surcharge" to each class pricing. This way the cost can be split between 6-8 students. So a regular $129 book, would be sold to university at $80, so each student would pay only $10 for the book.

Hell they can probably even make more money by donating the books to some 3rd world schools.

I mean, I can honestly say that I have not opened a SINGLE book since graduation. With Google there is absolutely no reason for students to keep books after the class is over.
It wouldn't necessarily be post-scarcity, since I'm envisaging linear-extrapolation robotics and narrow AI, not nanotech etc. It would be a normal (larger but not immensely so) future economy that simply didn't have any room for humans on the lower few tiers.
Games run perfectly on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.
Demonstrated performance on what? A padded resume? A minimal contribution to a well known large project?

Or is your ideal company one that hires 100 programmers to perform the same task and then fire the bottom 95% after a code review?
You're assuming the company has already hired all-star talent (accidentally?) and just needs to pay off their demands. What happens when this all-star leaves to balloon across the world - how do you find a replacement?
When I was a low-level employee using custom-built SAP crap, I could have easily lost my job if I dare suggest an "improvement" on the software.
People test antivirus software by throwing a certain number of virii at it and seeing what percentage of those are detected. This is their detection rate.

Just because Antivirus A detects 99% and Antivirus B detects 85% does not mean users of Antivirus A can expect more false positives. If anything, the better designed software should yield less.

Also: Yes, I have used endpoint protection. It's forced onto my work laptop at the office. It has a tendency to KILL my systems performance randomly, even when not performing a scheduled scan. 8mb of ram, while impressive for a symantec process, is simply an arbitrary number if any type of disk access gets slowed down by the service.
Sorry if my last post seemed like an ad, I didn't know that this product is not as new as I thought. Still, I think this is revolutionary and so I thought it warranted a new post, because I think people may take it frivolously thinking it was an ad. So I have reposted it because I seriously want people to see it and consider it as a good substitute to smoking actual cigarettes !

And I am saying sorry to the people who commented on the other post, for deleting their comments along with the article.
If it can be upgraded without reinstall it's a signficant improvement over Ubuntu.
Incidentally that is one of the reasons for disliking closed source software. It is impossible to fix Flash on Linux because it is not open. Once you open that Pandora's Box (using closed source software), all sorts of nasty side effects ensue.

(That said, I think the closed source Flash player has improved on Linux, too, and some people even get by with open source clones).
Nice interview, Russell. David and Ron, thanks for making the US world trendsetters in technology innovation with your "high touch" support to entrepreneurs. We're on your team, just on the other side of the country.
Looks like Microsoft is going to have to come up with a new angle of attack.

Hiding $10,000 on an IE-only website doesn't seem to have cut it.
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It looks like a lot of IE 7 went to IE 8 not the "new browsers" maybe IE6 users are switching over though.

I still know plenty of people who won't switch because they like the way ie6 looks and plenty more who don't know firefox is a browser on campus computers.

edit: Most of those people don't even know what a browser is and if you tell them to open up their browser they say "do you mean the internet?"
I used to read some developers' personal blogs and every time they posted a photo, I'd feel some weird envy, even when it was stupid photos. "Oh, man, he and a friend went to buy some milk! I hate that I'm inside living a boring life!"

---

So far in my life I've never gotten bored
Wait - what does that mean related to this scenario? I fail to make the connection.