skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have to be very careful when endorsing placebos.

The research I've heard about basically says "placebos only have subjective effects". The classic study was on asthma. Participants receiving the placebo reported feeling better, but had no measurable improvement in lung function.

So relying on a placebo for a subjective feeling of improvement could be dangerous whenever what's needed is an actual, objective improvement -- ie, "whenever something is actually wrong".
It's WAY under $100, but I use my "Dorcy 41-4750" flashlight regularly - and it's easily the brightest, and best flashlight I've ever owned.
It is like the Mac/PC or Android/iPhone hardware question. If someone cares how many cores their computer has then they will probably shop for an Android phone with a fancy processor. Most Mac buyers pick "the cheap one", "the middle one", or "the fast one" and couldn't tell you how much ram, or which processor is inside their laptop.
The OP suggested that the universality of red in this fashion was evolutionary in basis. Stop signs as an example of universality. But stop signs are closely coupled to a specific, near-universal machine culture.

The presence of early non-red stop signs suggests that "red = stop" is a learned association. Indeed, as the Wikipedia article states, the early standardizations used a yellow background instead of red. I conjecture that it was originally yellow for visibility reason, then turned red for better contrast with yellow used for caution signs. A full analysis would need to dig into the reasoning for this decision.

A more complete analysis would need to look into how color was used in the 1800s, before driving culture appeared. For example, was red the predominate color of danger in steam engines? (Note also that in Swedish and Finnish cultures, Falu red/punamulta is associated with an idyllic country-side life. These houses are not considered "dangerous" despite being red.)

The first and third literature references I gave are not in opposition to the idea that red has a (near) universal meaning. They instead cast doubt on the conjecture that the associations are evolutionary. The first suggests that even the observed psychological effects might be culturally learned, and the third suggests that we have a rather wide-spread global culture, making it hard to determine what is cultural and what is evolutionary.

Stop signs are also nearly universally octagon in shape. I very much doubt there's any sort of evolutionary reason for this choice.

My challenge was for the OP to defend the statement that the choice of red = blood = danger = stop is based on evolutionary reasons, with scientific research to back it up. The paper I quoted show that there's very little research which can distinguish between a shared culture (and yes, China and the US have a shared culture) and evolutionary universalism.

One need only read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_c... to see that even the basic color terms across cultures, and the evolution of color terms, is still being debated. It would be hard to ask someone "is red a dangerous color" if that someone doesn't distinguish between red and yellow.
Reminds me very much of Timely for Android. Except much less intuitive and much more confusing.
Wow, this is a world I've never seen before.
Where are you from? Maybe you can give me your browser lang code from http://aruljohn.com/lang.php That would be great :)
Ask HN: Anyone making money from open data?
This one has a nice 3d effect to my eyes, where the dark blue on the left appears to be farther than the rest of the maze.

Can someone explain?

http://www.janthor.com/maze/rainbowpath.32.32.1128433606.84....

Zoom in for a better effect
Tracking Progress In Agile Sales – The Burn Down Chart
The concept of a burn down and the associated burn down chart is core to Scrum’s popularity because it is such a good tool relative to tracking the progress of your project towards a goal. In effect, you get direct visibility into how well you have been doing and how that performance thus far compares to what needs to be done going forward to reach the goal. In the case of a sales team, this is about looking at the rate of sales to date vs. the rate of sales need to reach the goal in the remaining time.
I know, I just wanted to state they need to contain 'traces' of what caused the disease, not what cures it.

That's why it's been revoked. Because it might work.
You're right. I changed the title accordingly.
25 Makers Who Are Reinventing the American Dream
> Or is it that easy to register a domain with a fictitious persona?

Virtually every registrar allows instant update of whois records via a web interface. I can have Bill Gates be the technical contact on my personal domain in about a minute.
Name that Ware, March 2014
One of the things that I continue to notice is that in the machine generated mazes there are always lots of dead-end paths off of mainline path. While when a human makes a maze by hand there tends to be fewer quick dead end paths and a branch will usually take you 4+ squares before you realize that it's non-terminal.

I would think that either there is an algorithm or metric that would score mazes to make them more "realistic". Any references?
but of course there's no such fine-tuning in gtk3

The startup-mode was apparently brought back in Gnome 3.10.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2012-November/m...

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/tree/gtk/org.gtk.Settings....
Looks similar to FireChat (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firechat/id719829352), using mesh network technology (according to news reports, not app description).

While the chat function is maybe more of a tech demo, it could be used in places with bad network coverage or at big events where the network is gone down for whatever reason. Also interesting for geolocated services, because you don't have to send your position to a central entity, so interesting for some privacy concepts.
You know the joke/true story (?) : A friend of Niels Bohr notices a horseshoe nailed on his door. When Niels opens up his friend asks :

- you, one of the greatest scientist of this century how could you believe in such things.

- Well I've been told that superstition works even if you don't believe in it !

Incidentally a recent study seems to demonstrate that the placebo effect works even when you know it's placebo...
The placebo effect tends to only work for certain values of 'work'.

Lately there have been a lot of studies finding that while placebos are great at improving subjective factors, they don't show the same ability to elicit objective improvements. So if you come down with a respiratory infection, a placebo might have you saying you feel better a bit sooner, but you'll still be hacking up phlegm for just as long.
I don't think anyone would claim these things are crap or BS, I think it's that these silly problem are irrelevant. These questions are like high school or college coursework, artificial questions designed to reinforce the instruction, but not something that would be encountered in a business setting. Additionally, they tend to gloss over a person's experience.
I may not be able to solve your silly little stock trading problem by myself in a short amount of time, but I am sure that within the normal development environment, I could, especially since I would be working with a team. Or could I? Since this question doesn't look into my ability to communicate or work within a team, you don't know. Also, while I may not be able to solve the problem in 45 minutes, maybe I should talk about the time I dove into an application written in a foreign technology and managed to solve a critical production bug before it could cost the company millions of dollar. But again, you don't know that because you're obsessed with my ability to solve a high school computer science problem.
Different jobs require different skills. Having the ability to code is important, but not nearly as important as teamwork, communication, and the willingness to learn something new. That's the problem with these questions, they are nothing more than smoke screen.
But what about the accuracy of the error bounds?
The primary sponsor of the Federal Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act was a homeopathic physician. He put an exemption in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_S._Copeland
I recommend the Pilot Varsity. They are disposable fountain pens, with one of the best nibs on the market, even when compared to many other sub $100 refillable pens. Good enough that a lot of folks have modded them to become refillable.

They do lay down a lot of ink, though, which will bleed through thin paper. However, with a decent notebook, you won't have any issues. Moleskine, unfortunately, is not a decent notebook in this regard.

Bic has just started to release disposable fountain pens as well, and while the nib isn't as good as the Varsity, it's better than my $60 Schrade fountain pen's nib. It doesn't lay down as much ink as the Varsity.

I have had some issues with drying times, but the ink is typically dry within a minute for my thickest ink blots.

In short, there are some good quality, cheap and disposable fountain pens on the market right now.
Also: http://howdovaccinescauseautism.com/
To be fair, Java's generics are so awfully implemented that I stay away from them as much as I can - i.e. invariant, with use-site variance notations by means of existential types and freaking wildcards (instead of declaration-site like how Scala does it, which is much saner).

I mean, take a look at this presentation: http://parleys.com/play/514892250364bc17fc56bb15/chapter0/ab...

And I'm not even ranting about the generics being based on type-erasure, like so many other people are doing. Type-erasure is actually one of the best features of Java, since reification implies doing damage in the runtime which would have impacted other languages and with a good type system, you wouldn't need reification anyway.
Thing is, homeopathy, like all voodoo medicine, actually does work (well, for some symptoms, at least). The question of how placebo works is a fascinating one, and is still open. This question could have been treated with both more respect as well as more scientific curiosity.
A history of stealing someone else's money isn't relevant to a case where hundreds of millions of other peoples' money went missing?
Why don't we call it pseudo-realtime?
It's time for you to learn about reinsurance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance
Declining birth rate is not actually a problem? OK then. Also, referring to children as "financial drains" makes them look much worse than they really are. I wonder if you've ever had children..
That exists and is called interval arithmetic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_analysis
How would a functional language compiler deal with this case? like GHC?
That's called ball arithmetic, and there are many libraries for it, such as arb. http://fredrikj.net/arb/ It's useful in mathematical calculation, but usually with floating point calculations you have some error bounds coming from your algorithm which are "good enough" if the result is going to be the value of something with 5% tolerance.
CareMessage (YC14) Is On A Mission To Improve Health Literacy
A popular startup once stole some content I created, but I decided it wasn't an amount that was worth suing over right then.
Is there an API available?
Well the page crashes my Firefox, so slowness is not that bad ;)
One of the biggest reasons I have avoided moving to SF is because of earthquake liquefaction dangers. I however just recently moved out to Provo Utah from LA temporarily - I didn't know this was a hotbed as well. How would you compare the threat levels here to SF? Comparable? Or severely less than SF?
I believe some links to research proving homeopathy has no discernible effect on that page would help.

As it is, it feels like a knee jerk reaction that wouldn't convince people who are genuinely wondering.

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2009/04/17/no-convin... and the research paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19370613

http://nccam.nih.gov/health/homeopathy
Speaking of comparisons... -Wfloat-equal will warn whenever you attempt to compare floats or doubles for equality.
I don't think the article is saying that the mind cannot be replicated by a computer. It's questioning the use of computational concepts to model human intelligence.

To make the same point differently, if you wanted to replicate human intelligence in its entirety (rather than creating something capable of performing some well-defined task), AI is far too high a level of abstraction. You might be able to replicate a universe and wait for intelligence to evolve, but you still wouldn't understand the intelligence you had created.

The danger of the hardware/software analogy is that we deliberately separated computer systems into (mostly) well-defined and cleanly separated layers. Given how hard it is to avoid leaky abstractions in computer systems that are: (a) vastly less complex than human intelligence and (b) designed to be layered, the systems responsible for human intelligence probably don't expose the clean API required for us to understand them using high-level concepts.
A Dutch TV programme ('de Keuringsdienst van Waarden') did a show on oscillococcinum, they went to the factory and actually got a tour. When they started asking about the duck they were quickly taken to lunch (also no Duck).
They went to duck farms near the factory but none of them had ever provided the factory with duck liver/heart...

Episode (in Dutch / French) http://keuringsdienstvanwaarde.kro.nl/seizoenen/2011/aflever...
I also follow Debug podcast, some C9 efforts and some vendor podcasts. It's rare for me to discover the type of high quality content in audio you used to find at places like ITconversations back in the day, mostly because people use video/YouTube these days. But I try to keep an ear out ;-)
We can study the placebo effect without potentially murdering people by misleading them on a commercial scale.
> Of course, most programmers only have a vague idea of how floating point numbers work.

From my experience, most programmers have a vague idea of how basic integers work, so that's not so surprising. (I'm in the group who only knows a little more than average about floating-point, but for what I do, I don't use FP math much either.)
No offense but that is exactly what all those "startups" do... or say they do.
If anything, it would convince them that opponents of homeopathy are close-minded.

But there's a time and place for humor as well. Not everything has to be educational.
Then maybe the thief shouldn't have stolen it.
Ask HN: Best way to find and hire a designer?
Hello everyone.

I'm looking to hire a designer, but I'm not sure where to start. I checked out Behance and dribbble and noticed that you can post a job for a few hundred dollars, but is that worth it? Has anyone tried it before? Is there a better way to go about it?

Thank you for your time, and I appreciate any thoughts on the matter.
Does it ever heal?
Relevant Followup: http://jennymccarthybodycount.com
When on vacation...EAT THE CHEESECAKE
No because Homeopathy claims to be different than placebo effect, and as such it doesn't "work".

If homeopath were saying to their customer "this is a placebo medicine", something that the general public understands, there would be way less aggressivity towards it.
John Carmack is now a Facebook employee? Ughhh...
The biggest thing that concerns me about the Facebook acquisition of Oculus is that John Carmack is now a Facebook employee. The Universe needs to be restored to its balance please.
Couldn't find a link to Java/.NET APIs. Should the title say "web client-side applications"?
Which tab? I can't seem to find this.
The social network hasn't been routed around yet. And yet there's still something hollow about having everything you do shared with everyone you know that leads people to give their most bland, crowd pleasing personality to the crowd.

I was hoping for something more personal out of Oculus. Something I wouldn't have to think about sharing with my great aunts and the wider public via the NSA
State of the News Media 2014 Key Indicators (Pew)
I agree that 'how do placebos work' is an ongoing and intriguing question.

However homoeopathy is not presented as a placebo-based treatment. The site assesses homoeopathy on its merits as presented by practitioners and supporters of homoeopathic treatments having incremental medicinal benefits. Of which there have been no appropriately controlled and reviewed studies with reproducible results. Placebo here is the 'base case'.

I submit that the question was treated with an entirely appropriate degree of respect.
I believe I did try that and couldn't get it to work the way I hoped. However, maybe I'm wrong...will try it again.

Thanks,
John
Did you hear about the homeopathic terrorists? They put nothing in the water supply.
I think you might need to come up with a different term, because my brain's finding it too hard to imagine "webinar" and "not suck" together. :)
How does homeopathy prevent infection by malaria?

Answer: It doesn't.
Both of which are scientifically proven to work in some cases. Acupuncture can actually relieve pain[1], and as long as a point of going to a chiropractor is to give muscles a massage rather than to pray and inhale incense sticks, then it helps as well.

[1]http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11655-011-0665-7
What's a real "real time" app then?
There is a fair bit of space in between PhD research and CRUD work.

Industrial Research can be on stuff that will lead to products in the near future. I think you can get a lot of the same feel of academic research by working on things like international standards. I have been able to do this without even a bachelors degree.
> Everyone is familiar with them

I would say that "most people" never used "webinar" software, so everyone doesn't really cut it here.

> They're reliable and scalable

My last experiences where rather on the other side - Hangout often crashes on me and gotomeeting had problems with audio quality.

> They're cheap for the presenter to use

What is cheap, if they don't really work for me?

Also, they mostly are general video calling solutions and rarely geared towards running e.g. a workshop.

> They have clients for Mac, PC, iDevices...

Yep, but there is always a plus to established players.

In general, I think that the whole webinar space still has a lot of ground to cover, so new players are always welcome.
Ok, as I'm still not able to find anywhere where a legal ruling says a 'do not call' is illegal, could someone please direct me to said ruling?

I get that part of what they were doing has been deemed illegal, namely the 'do not hire' restrictions, but a 'do not call' list doesn't seem like it could possibly be illegal.
Note for visitors to London from abroad: It's super easy to get to Bletchley Park from London. I think it took me something like 90 minutes total to get from my hotel in central London to Bletchley park on the train. The staff is well informed and very helpful. They have working replicas of the bombe and colossus machines. It's all very cool. Highly recommended if you have half a day to kill in London.
my son said it sounds more like a drug than a piece of technology I think this is for "whales" people who have lots of money and time to spend on games.
We Know About Income Inequality. Now It’s Time to Talk About Lifespan Inequality
This is common knowledge for the marketers/analysts that I work with.

Have you ever run GA on a high traffic site or app?

Google gives you warnings. They're small at first, but when you're really hammering them and aren't paying for premium there are big red warnings about your data is getting heavily sampled. We have a relationship with Google, so they also personally reached out to us to ask us to fix the issue before they shut us off. I work at $BIGCORP so going through the procurement process is a lengthy process.
Cool. I wish you all possible success in your project!
Facebook's hypocritical approach to transparency
Oculus COO speaks out about the big acquisition
Vertical Tabs
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
Signed up! Great to see all the opportunities here for startups- encouraging for folks like me who want to stay on here.
Does anyone know what bootstrap theme this is based off?
I am a long-time player and while yes, the client has problems I think it's not AIR's fault. AIR is fine, maybe not perfect but it's not a good enough reason to ditch all the apps that are made with it. It's like saying "I will not browse any website made with PHP".
Crowdfunders of Oculus Rift Denounce Facebook Buyout
19 Extraordinary Women In Tech
The real problem with homeopathy is that it has become a "catch all" name, like "cloud" in IT. So, many things that do work but are NOT homeopathy (eg: using propolis for a throat ache) are labeled that way, and in many people reinforce the idea that homeopathy does in fact work.
Japan brings kaizen philosophy to Ethiopia
I was about to abandon my Java driver for your Scala driver at one point. Scala is just a better language in so many regards.
I’m in my 20′s, and nowhere near my prime
Engineers require precise language, so maybe we shouldn't be calling web devs engineers.
She, hehe
I used to think chiropractors were charlatans, but in desperation I saw one for TMJ, vertigo, and tinnitus, and within 4 sessions of targeted treatment, I haven't felt this good in about 6 years. The TMJ is gone and the tinnitus has subsided. I don't think they're a cure-all, and I'm just a random guy on the internet, but I think there are legitimate treatments.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3081245/
Instructions to split a window in KDE.

click split
Does the gender pronoun really change the persons post at all?
I think you're being lenient with SendGrid because it was a close call and not a full-blown catastrophe. First of all, SendGrid lied about its support staff's permissions. After the incident, SendGrid then sends an "oops! our bad!" e-mail where the employee in question will apparently be gently tapped on the wrist and maybe send a passive-aggressive reprimand.

I mean, keep in mind that this is the same company that publicly crucified a female employee in order to stop a DDoS attack. Clearly there are some priorities out of whack there, and given the insecure nature of e-mail in the first place, I would never want to deal with a company that is so clearly unprofessional.
Why Microsoft CEO Nadella intends to talk lots about Apple
You could try it out!
Ahh the exciting days of mouldy cheese and the coffee machine.
Really cool idea, but something seems up with the is_even() python question. A valid solution is not passing the site's validation.
I wouldn't either. Law enforcement can do what they want here.
Well, I'd say that if you violate company policy about who you can and cannot contact you should expect consequences.

The fact that the policy itself may be illegal is secondary.
It depends what motivates you and where you want to be in 4 years.

There are far easier ways to earn money in the long term than doing a PhD. A PhD gives you 4 years* of relative freedom to build yourself intellectually within some rough bounds (these bounds are dependent on your program and can be quite tight though). You also get to hang out on campus with other PhDs (ymmv!).

But, you could get similar freedom with even less bounds by working and saving hard for the next 4 years and then doing what you want. It depends what motivates you.

*depends where you are though. I'm UK.