skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello Maria,

of course you are right: we do possess very advanced tools, starting from the actual design of drugs that target certain receptors selectively, medical trials, production and quality control. What I meant by "we do not understand the brain and thus are not able to design more sophisticated methods to treat this terrible decease" was the fact that most of the time, we are treating symptoms, for we are not sure what the actual causes are.

It is great what we can do, but (IMHO) pharmaconeurology still has a long way to go.

The actual process of choosing a drug for a patient is somewhat black voodoo magic: If A does not work/has bad side effects, B is prescibed, etc.

And of course, due to the nature of our organism, it is impossible (?) that a pharaceulogically active compound has just one system effect/side effect e.g "Aspirin".

--

On a side note: could you PM me in which field you are active as an entrepreneur? My email is in my account description.

Cheers!
Even to this day, if you go to that site from Wikipedia, they insert a page header warning you that WP is a “pedophile safe haven”...
30 Powerful Black and White Portraits
re: "early programmers writing in BASIC"

thanks. I feel oooold :)
-third, there is an American instructor who wrote at Pprune (a pilot forum) about how for Korean pilots (trained in Korea), the worst emergency they can suffer in a simulator is a visual approach ... I can not find the article right now, I think it was erased shortly after being posted.

Here's a reprint. It's very interesting: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3041469/posts
Just because some things should not be represented as objects doesn't mean that nothing should.

And mammals and dogs as a concrete example- a metaphor, if you will- is an example of a powerful way to teach abstract ideas, not an indication that something is wrong.

What I would find enlightening is how the mammal-dog relationship fails, not how there is something out there for which the model may not fit.
FRA part of top-secret hacker project
This whole case just shows, how incompetent many people in Jurisdiction are. Also no positive promotion for the German government.
I was in SE-Asia and went to a few temples to meditate. One time I reached that deep state very quickly. I suppose it had to do with the sound of falling water nearby.. If you ever go to a Buddhist country I suggest you visit a course. It's quite cool. There was one teacher that has shown us how to meditate while walking. It was surprisingly good and I didn't walk into any walls or pillars while doing it.. ;)
Could you add some contact information to your profile perhaps? And feel free to contact me as well.
This pattern annoys me to no end. People are quick to jump from a claim like "some users are more valuable than others" to "POWER LAW", and from there to folksy wisdom about an "80-20 rule".
I agree in principle but still think Python is best to start with, for two reasons.

First, many people need a simple introduction to the entire concept of programming-- codifying precise instructions to a computer to get specific results.

Second, python is a great tool for exploration of other low-level systems, eg the socket library, the posix library, the os library.
Ask HN: Am I sane? Is it a phase of a programmer's life?
I have been isolated after moving to another city, where I have a room to live and a hackerspace, with a couple of furniture, internet and a coffee machine. I spend my entire day at the hackerspace and night at my room. No friends, no family and no people to talk to on regular basis.

I am working on a couple android application projects for "www.terminal.com" as a freelancer, and one personal side project in PHP. I spend several hours in front of my laptop all day, and few hours when I get back to my room at night. Recently I have found myself something has changed inside me. I feel like I am a completely different person. It is hard to stay focused on anything and to maintain meaningful conversation with people. I sometimes talk to myself, and sometimes go out to talk to random people (to feel normal, as I think it of).

I don't take much caffiene. One cup of coffee in the morning is all. I drink enough water but there's no fixed time for lunch. Once or twice a week I see one of my friends, hangout for an hour or so, and return back to my reality. It feels like I am just playing a role of mine in front of people.

Is it normal to feel abnormal after spending several weeks in solitary? What can I do to make sure I stay productive?

I would love to hear from you after you have read this far. Do you have any experience of programming in almost complete solitary state?
Software May Be Eating The World, But Open Source Software Is Eating Itself
It's not that it's non-trivial (though for some languages it may be, due to the nature of the language) or that Emacs lacks the facilities; if anything, LISP is the perfect language for representing, storing and working on ASTs.

It's just that historically it just wasn't done. The rise of IDEs tied closely to the compiler/environment changed that equation and now it's Emacs that's behind the curve.
No it didn't. It probably empowered the economy, you just know lot of people in outsourcing industry.
New Cloud storage service Yunio offers over 1TB of free storage
It's probably not a good idea to make a decision for a specific app based on the average behavior across all apps, unless your app is "average."

A calculator app is an outlier; it is not an average app. It's also an outlier with real utility --- so it's something people are more likely to pay for.
Disagree. You are thinking small, all of those industries were created in the last 100-200 years.
* Anyway, my point was more about the unix nature of building small programs, that do one thing well, and using those programs in combination.*

That just uses different words to describe the same net result and the same net problem. You still have to find a way to make all of those pieces work together to do something complex.
Thank you. Getting to The Deep made a big difference, but it took around 30 days before I got there.

My wife was remarkably cool about it, but of course, if you read the end of the article, you can see that I didn't quite make it all the way. =) What she didn't like so much, was that between 6-7pm I was not available to help out with making dinner.
when it comes to evolution, people get stuck on the word "chance". evolution uses chance as a search mechanism. it is death which "chooses" in the design-sounding way you mention. it is because evolution is 'blind' as to what will and won't be deathed that randomness is a good search algorithm.

i.e. the idea that life is due to nothing more than chance is a strawman
Have you ever worked with legacy code?
She right, in the direction the world is moving today no one can afford to ignore technology and the interconnectedness social media brings but we need to remind everyone to not lose themselves to those connections
You can start with realizing that your data (100k rows) does not require Oracle and can be stored in a flat file and loaded in memory, so you can ditch JPA. Then get rid of Spring and Jackson. Then you remove all Abstract Singleton Factories and leave just the code that does what user wants, not what developer wants. Then drop a couple of messaging frameworks that your using when you realize that now all the code fits in one app. Next thing you will see is that NanoHttpd will do just fine for your load level and therefore you can ditch WebLogic. After all that you can remove maven (blasphemy!!!) because your project shrunk to a few dozen files that can be compiled and packaged with 5 lines batch script.

But that wouldn't be glamorous, would it? Besides, this approach will make you hopelessly unemployable in today's world.
Good stuff. Sitting still for 60-90 minutes has the purpose of eliminating the distractions from paying attention to your body. This practice also has the benefit of hopefully allowing the ego to settle some, and perhaps even allowing the baseline level that the ego is engaged to be less - or start towards that path anyhow. As you said, stress still maintains the same - it actually will feel potentially even more vivid, though that is likely counter-acted with the ability to process things easier. Learning other things, and doing deeper guided meditations and breath work, like yoga nidra - is a good way to lessen that. Physical movement, asanas - or yoga as a whole, meditation being a part of yoga - is a good way to help physically-caused stress and baseline stress reduce; There's a biofeedback mechanism: tight muscles tells your mind you're stressed, you being stressed tells your muscles to be tight. "Nice" little loop there.
I don't think that ಠ is supposed to be there.
I think the more important question is how many otherwise interesting articles get buried because they don't have a title like "Why X is better than Y"?
It's interesting that the environment you're in could have an effect on how long it takes to get to The Deep; I believe it.

Meditating while walking sounds interesting but it also seems like it could be quite hard to control heart rate. Of course, maybe that's not as big of an issue as I make it out to be. In any case I'll have to try it sometime. Do you have a link to any further source of information about it?
Some years ago I had a discussion with a then-colleague who pointed out something interesting that stuck with me: the world has mostly settled on little endian. If you stay outside of certain niches you are unlikely to ever see a big endian CPU.

Time was you might have to run on a SPARC or PowerPC or whatever. But x86 and little-endian ARM have pretty much won for most people.

I don't think my friend was right that this means you can totally ignore the issues, but I have to admit he was right that from a strictly practical perspective it's not the huge deal it was in the 90s. I agree with you that you don't know how the future will break you, but my guess is the momentum of binary compatibility will keep it so for a while.
Social Content discovery made easy
Got my LIFX bulbs yesterday and was reminded of HN's naysaying last year
All iron man suits in 1920x1080 image
Not likely. We're software developers, not soulware developers.
Please realize that this proposal does much more than less/sass variables before you pooh-pooh it. e.g. it has to potential to work dynamically.
https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode
>all written in JavaScript

I do hope we're approaching the end of the era when this is used as a positive statement.
This looks rather good (sadly no iDevice). Looks as if Apple came up with it, if they weren't so silly with the way they applied their skeumorphism.

I always imagined that if you were aiming for the mathematician market (huge market!!1 /s) you could have an app like that except on a tablet you'd use with a pen. Then you'd just write down calculations and OCR would figure out what you are trying to calculate and do the number crunching (where applicable), and intelligently recognise variables and a lot of different mathematical functions (I just don't like the whole process of going back and forth between my TI and my legal pad). That'd be a mathematician's (or just mine) wet dream.
Pretty cool, but isn't it hard to get into?
The problem with Java has always been that it assumes the programmer is incompetent and requires an OO straitjacket around their code in order to produce "robustness".

You're right: static methods are not an OOP construct. They're a hack to allow the user to break out of the straitjacket at a specific moment, because it's impossible to write anything but a library otherwise.

The issue, thus, is that Java requires a beginner to learn a paradigm-breaking manuever as a basic operation. "Java is a glorious OOP language. If you want to write anything that's pure Java, though, here's how you stop being OOP in order to do so."

(Also, for the record: I like OOP. I like Ruby specifically because it makes OOP so natural and honest.)
SALT Summaries: Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking
Interestingly, while you are correct in my misunderstanding, I still have the same gripes. I personally take offense when someone attempts to illustrate their point with pejoratives rather than reason.
Ask HN: How to get started with a modern Lisp
One of the things necessary to get up and running with any version of Lisp (Scala, Clojure, CL, etc.) is some sort of environment. Matching braces and brackets by hand is tedious, something machines are better at.

I use vi(m), and not Emacs, and I run Ubuntu 13.xx. What set-up would the HN community suggest I run?

Thx.
Btw, here are a few example variants of `L`

sum :: Num a => L a a
sum = L id (+) 0

prod :: Num a => L a a
prod = L id (*) 1

list :: L a [a]
list = id (\r a -> a : r) []
David Sacks’ new real estate venture aims to give Pasadena its startup mojo back
Expanding options for mining streaming data
Hardcore Data Science day at Strata Santa Clara
I'm not 100% sure this is true, however it is also a fundamental flaw of git. There should be a way to remove commits permanently in order to remove mistakenly checked in large files or private content.

It's also definitely not true with uncommitted changes, including gitignored files.
Peter O'Toole dies
So what? Most terrorist attacks on US were orchestrated by FBI or secred services, who spoon-fed attackers, give them bomb and 'catched' them. Nobody cares.
It's my middle finger to the spambots. I figured they already have workarounds against all the permutations of '- at -', but no way they've thought of that one.
Finding structure in xkcd - Text mining a web comic
Thanks--I will try out Yoga; other people have also told me that it has a similar effect.
Crowdfunding: PhET's HTML5 Circuit Construction Kit
Even basic things in a CS curriculum like data structures and algorithms require abstract approaches and gain very little from knowing low-level details.

I'd disagree somewhat. Data structures, from a CS perspective, often involve learning about low-level implementation details (why is accessing a hash O(1)? Why do array elements have to be the same size? What's the difference between representing a graph as a linked list versus a 2-dimensional matrix?). It's similar with algorithms.

Even though you CAN use completely abstract computational models to learn algorithms, many of the most important algorithms are designed around tradeoffs between real-world resources and being able to map abstract algorithms to a low-level language like C is a very useful skill to those who have it.
What in your opinion are new products that are 100% original? I'm sure there might be a few, but probably very little.
I'd love to hear more about the potential of Nix for language agnostic isolated development environments: https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_develop_software_on_nixos

Could it be a unified alternative to Python virtualenv, rvm, rbenv, cabal sandbox, etc? This would be specially important for projects needing heterogeneous builds.

It'd also be interesting to see a typical Nix development workflow taking advantages of Nix goodies like continuous integration with Hydra or staging and production deployment with NixOps.
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because
he does not know why he is not one of the others.

Read books. But most of all, read.
Not only that, the search branches are sitting in the CPU caches.
Also, for anyone who's interested, we'll be doing a second "100-day challenge" over in /r/meditation beginning January 1:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/1swxn2/the_secon...
I am still confused. So your non-ironic argument -- your serious argument -- is one for intelligent design?

How is that the most upvoted comment on HN? Because honestly, the only way my mind can make sense of that fact is by postulating the existence of an all powerful being able to bend reality to his will....
"Never ever try to teach about objects as representations of real-world things"

I hear this from time to time—it seems bizarre. Representing real-world things as objects is a fine design approach for many problems and is well worth teaching. Where on earth did the idea that it isn't get started?

SICP, a classic of programming pedagogy if ever there was one, has this to say:

One powerful design strategy, which is particularly appropriate to the construction of programs for modeling physical systems, is to base the structure of our programs on the structure of the system being modeled. For each object in the system, we construct a corresponding computational object. For each system action, we define a symbolic operation in our computational model. (p. 217, 2nd ed.)

It's true that by "object" they mean something more general than OO. But that doesn't change the basic design approach.

It's also true that they are careful to teach more primitive concepts first, so what they do is compatible with the OP's point. But there's a reason why the above passage on real-world representations appears immediately after they mention modularity.
That would be true if git's command line interface were not so inconsistent and obtuse. I agree the underlying concepts are simple, which is why the command line interface is so baffling.
I find UML Class diagrams useful for a one-look document describing the overall architecture of a piece of software. Where they are weak is that you really do need a couple of paragraphs of plain English describing each class as well, and there's not really anywhere to put that on a UML Class diagram. The other really useful diagram in UML is the sequence diagram. If you write out the Sequence diagrams for a few key processes in your software, you've gone along way towards giving a roadmap to people that need to get in and modify the code. These are both documentation use-cases though. Using UML as a design tool (other than very informally on a whiteboard) seems wrong to me.
No no no. Learn by watching.
Ah, I see, it's difficult to parse before coffee...

But it's not just

> mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature

but an incredibly complex and chaotic system ("the universe") with billions of feedback loops, with agents both affecting the universe and being affected by it and their own actions. It's not surprising that with all the processes occurring (many of them [chaotic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), if not truly random) we get emergent behaviours, and then even more emergent behaviours on top of those!

You can define "Life" to be the set of self-sustaining phenomena, and there are remarkably few of those. But then that's what makes it exciting!

Large phenotypes (individual organisms) consist of billions of cells each doing their own thing and interacting with others in very specific ways, and every one of these is in turn a complex system of proteins and molecules doing the same, which are all complex arrangements of atoms, etc.

The complexity of life on earth is owed to exceedingly hospitable conditions and the good luck of not one, but multiple levels of self-sustaining mechanisms bootstrapping themselves. But it still took literally billions of random events for those to occur. Each level works according to the interactions of those below, but they each exist due to exceedingly good luck.
Great, so in order to cater to the 1% of the population still using an archaic non-standard browser, we screw over the spec for the rest of time.

Sound logic, isn't it?
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened had Flight 93 reached it's presumed target, the Capitol Building [1]. I was young at the time, around 12 or 13, but I do remember quite vividly the atmosphere of fear that engulfed my country in the wake of the attacks. I cringe to think of how much worse it could have been had Congress been directly and successfully attacked. Our democracy was already in an extremely fragile condition. A plane hitting the Capitol Building on that day likely would have guaranteed it's immediate demise [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
How JetBlue's social media team made me a lifelong customer.
Huh? All I was saying was, maybe that's why the storylines are simplistic.
So can entrepreneurship. Or writing a complex piece of code.
The NY Post is not exactly the most credible news source.
The inability to, in any remotely easy way,
remove mistakenly checked in large files and private data has always seemed like a major flaw with git.
I'm pretty horrified by the transformation of the Valley. It used to embrace genuine weirdness and true disruption.

Can you provide specific examples here? Of weirdness and disruption that used to be embraced, but now aren't?
sadly this is exactly right - the American people don't care - they pretend they do but in reality they will just do what they're told to by the media and the politicians from whichever side of the one party with two faces they pretend they're aligned with
Neither of the types you gave is inhabited, because the 'a' has kind * -> * .

I think what you've said about subtyping is muddled. If a type A is a subtype of B, then values of type A should be values of type B. Now let's take an example from the number class hierarchy. Consider

1) forall a. Num a => a
2) forall a. Integral a => a

According to what you have written, (2) should be a subtype of (1). That means that if I define

n = 1 :: forall a. Integral a => a

then I should be able to "upcast" with:

n :: forall a. Num a => a

However, this doesn't work, since the quantifier now ranges over types that were not in the range of the original quantifier. In the second type, I can instantiate the a to Float, while I cannot do so for the first type.

The only formal account of universal quantifiers in type theory, of which I am aware, extends the term language by introducing a capital lambda that ranges over types. So the polymorphic identity function is actually the term

Λa. λx:a. x

which is a function that takes a type a followed by a value x:a and returns x.

This makes good sense of the way number classes work in Haskell. When you write

n :: Num a => a
n = 1

the actual machine representation of n is going to vary with the type of a.

EDIT: Another way of explaining the counterexample: any type in Applicative is also in Functor. But, on one informal interpretation of forall, the intersection of all applicatives is actually a proper superset of the intersection of all functors.
Is it normal to feel abnormal after spending several weeks in solitary?

Yes.

There's a very good documentary, A Map for Saturday, abut a guy who decides to travel around the world (more or less) with only what he can carry on his back. (And some camera stuff). I think he wanders for a year.

He knows no one in the places he goes, and often does not know the local language. He talks abut the odd sensation of going days without having a simple conversation with anyone and how thankful he feels when he gets the chance to just sit down and chat with other people (other similar travelers, I believe). It's a terrific film overall.

I do not think of myself as a particularly social person, but I get antsy if I spend a lot of time without talking to another friendly human. Luckily I work from home and my wife is almost always around so I can go pester her. Other times I just start making a lot of phone calls to family and friends.

I think it's important to get out of your own head on a regular basis.

ref: http://www.amapforsaturday.com
"The market is full of similar providers with readymade products for a fixed price."

In my experience, the market is full of people who CLAIM to have "readymade products" and who will ASSURE you that they'll be available for a fixed price.

Neither statement is typically true, however - nor is the idea that even "simple" client problems can be solved without any custom work.

If your firm's clients get mad when an agile process and its risks are explained, what they're really pissed about is that you won't lie to their faces during the sales process anymore...
Yellowstone Supervolcano is a Much Bigger Time Bomb Than We Thought