skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. If you were smart, you'd figure out how to solve those problems.
My entry is http://twitabrew.com
One thing I find interesting is that the rats lived in an environment where either sweetness always meant additional calories, or sweetness never did (assuming I'm reading the paper right). Which does lead me to wonder:

1. What would happen if sometimes the yogurt was sweetened with sugar, and other times with artificial sweetener? Perhaps at some point the calorie reduction from using artificial sweeteners would balance out the additional calories caused by eating more.

2. And what if the rats started out with regular yogurt, then switched to diet? I imagine there would be an immediate decrease in weight gain - if so, would it stick?
I would love to learn more; was a transcript made?
The opening essay on television (E Unibus Pluram) is a great read as well.

Another great one (from "Consider The Lobster"), if you're interested in linguistics and who gets to decide what is "acceptable" English, is here: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html (Extremely long -- if any of the shorter pieces really grab you, you really should just go to Amazon and snag both nonfiction collections.)
Poverty is only natural when the local human population exceeds the local resources available to sustain it. For most of human history, poverty was not the natural state of human existence; indeed, given the frequency and scale of wars (prior to the Geneva conventions, when war was between populations and not just armies), poverty was very rare until the 19th century.
Technology alternatives to book reports
About the Canadian drug ads, I wonder—can a company buy two ad spots, one for the problem information (w/o drug) and one for the drug (w/o information), and then run them one after the other? Might help people make the connection; I've never been able to understand the drug-name-and-that's-it spots.
Always felt book reports were the most valuable tools in the teacher's arsenal, but students were always de-motivated by doing book reports, and by extension, demotivated to actually glean the insights from the books. Making it morale-boosting, cool and "show-off" to do book reports should motivate students much more.

One more thing i would recommend for them is animoto! Make a cool music video summarizing the book. ;)
Your comment reminded me of this quote:

"We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can."
-Tyler Cowen
They do. It's called homeopathy or gingko balboa or any other number of items that can be found in natural foods stores and the like. It doesn't matter if they work or not, what matters is people think they work.
One of my favorite pranks on Squeak was to do "true := false" in a workspace window.

Sadly, it no longer works...
I am a hammer and all I see are nails
A Bun drip coffee maker takes three minutes to brew a pot of coffee. Pour this pot into a thermal carafe, and you are set for the morning.
Just like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJyWcUS9RIM
This bit struck me:
"...the vehemence of the editors’ point of view caught me off guard."

I could be wrong, but is sounds like the editors of a publishing company were pushing for a negative article about a site that's having an effect on publishing companies. I always thought that kind of stuff happened indirectly, through assumptions and implications.

Then again it could just be that they were just excited about an idea for a story.
Thats true, and I find that true in my own work, but low compensation also turns someone off just as much.

As long as your programmer feels they are being paid a fair amount, give them fun work to do and they'll slave away at it like billions of dollars are going to come out of it.
Is AI Dead?
I've been reading "The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweil and scanning his sources. One thing that struck me was that things like Neural Nets hadn't made very much progress since I was an MA grad student 17 years ago. Back then, Kohonen networks were the rage and as far as I can tell, there isn't anything terribly more interesting today.

Now, I actually wish, I hope, that this isn't so. Perhaps I've missed something but it seems like rather than advance any prospects of honestly intelligent machines, both academic and industry research now, in 2009, concentrates on extending what already exists - better languages, incrementally better algorithms, better simulations, better databases and better hardware.

To my mind, this doesn't stand in the way of something like "the singularity" but it means that if such a thing occurs, it will be with something like the Blue Brain Project - simulating the brain without understanding it. This may indeed work but, strangely enough, it means experimenting with processes which we really don't understand and thus makes something ... dum dum da ... Skynet actually seem disturbingly plausible...

But that's a side issue. Big topic - "Is AI, Artificial Intelligence, Dead?" Yea or Nea?
People are poor because they are never given the opportunity to create wealth. I create wealth because my parents and various nations' tax payers paid for me to dick around doing just about anything I wanted for the first 22 years of my life, and kindly encouraged me to learn something useful in the process. People are poor because they don't have that opportunity/encouragement.
Medicating Ferris Bueller
As I see it, there's a single disagreeing study: Cameron, J. (2001), and that study found that people increased intrinsic motivation when they were rewarded for either beating others, or when intrinsic motivation was low to begin with. Neither of these were what we were talking about. We were discussing people's motivations for things that they initially had high intrinsic motivation, and we were discussing people getting paid hourly to play WoW (not for beating others) and people winning a contest (and beating others).

I think developers do derive personal satisfaction for doing their jobs well, yes. I think that doing your job is an intrinsic motivation.
Such a great illustration for the article.
That's what the drug companies want people to think. But it's not actually true.

Even the type of depression you are talking about responds to placebos. And it responds very well to therapy, but barely at all to drugs - except that the drugs work well as placebos.

It is a real condition - don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it isn't. It's just that the drugs don't do as much as people think they do.

Most people when they first hear about placebos flatly refuse to believe they work as well as they do. But they do.
And what happens when, faced with the rational person's ultimatum ("learn to fish or you get nothing"), the man chooses nothing? Surely it's his own fault, but suffering still happens. Of course, that's a small-scale, contrived example, but there are plenty of areas in public policy where many or most people's behavior isn't rational.

Health care is actually a great example of this: classical theory and basic common sense suggests that if you make people pay for their health care more directly, they'll have more of an interest to negotiate a better deal, or at least comparison-shop. This is occasionally true, but far more often, people aren't actually comfortable bargaining with the surgeon who's going to be handling their innards.

Likewise, with health care, people often make "irrational" decisions and go into $500K debt to prolong an 89-year-old grandparents' life for 6 days, because life, death and health just seems to be one of those areas that we're not wired to be rational about.

Health care aside, there are all sorts of other examples of irrationality - for instance, I remember seeing multiple studies in which people preferred a lower reward as long as everyone got the same reward (basically they valued relative well-being and parity over absolute well-being).

The point of all this is that while rationality is a great tool for "solving problems" generally speaking, when you deal with people you really must take into account the fact that most people (and I suspect even most people on HN, which is a pretty atypical group!) aren't all that rational in many, many areas.
Which will ultimately lead to a Homeopathic Accident & Emergency department:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgxzSUxxRzE
> The defense rests on the experimental data and the similar evidence of Wikipedia and kernel patches.

This is where we disagree; I don't think the netflix prize would have been successful without a monetary reward.

I don't have a good argument at the moment, mainly because I don't think anybody has a good argument why Linux and Wikipedia worked.

I also think the X-Prize and Darpa challenges are more similar than you think they are, but need some time to think. Thanks for responding intelligently and giving me food for thought.

(Also, if you want to follow Pink's argument exactly, you need to claim that success would have come faster not merely as fast had there been no monetary reward.)
the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited

Considering what some rhetoricians label as "wealth redistribution", this is flat-out wrong. Consider socialized education, medicine, or early childhood education - all have shown to have strong impacts on social mobility, and hence, wealth creation.

This might be too subtle for a slogan, but it isn't rocket science, either: systems of smart wealth redistribution are absolutely necessary, although not sufficient, for maximum wealth creation. Also necessary, off the top of my head: social pressure for parents to be responsible, and a "path to prosperity" with which individuals can identify.
Ask HN: What is your purpose in life?
I long ago gave up trying to find external purpose in life.

Instead my foremost goal is to be the best father and husband that I can be.

To guide my kids as best I can.

To show my family and friends that I'm there for them whenever they need me.

To do my best to live up to the potential I have but not to beat myself up for not being the next Craig Newmark,

Most of all to try to stay positive in a world that provides so many opportunities for me to make myself miserable.

"I cant change the world but I can change the world in me" - Bono

And, finally, to keep learning as much as I can with the help of great coworkers, friends, my family and trememdous online communities like HN and StackOverflow.

So that's me, pretty much. Where do you find your purpose?
Well they do work - that's the point.

True it's not because of what they are made off, but it doesn't matter. What matters is they work.

That's why so many people take them (they work), and why they always fail when tested against placebos - it's because they basically ARE placebos. And very effective ones too.

The typical response when hearing that is: get rid of them, they do nothing. But the correct response is use them, because placebos are very effective.
Almost all large software shops have some sort of cheesy "dashboard" for upper management. Some of these analyze source code for line numbers, progress filling in templates, test results, etc.

http://ohloh.net/ analyzes source code of open source projects and reports on them, such as commenting ratio (it warns you about projects that are 15% or less comments depending on language). This solves the problem of people wanting to know the health of certain projects.
The unsung hero in all this is the analytics data they used to debunk widely held assumptions about the placebo effect in clinical trials. Nothing like cold, hard data to inflict some cognitive dissonance on some "experts".
Let me rebut: the problem is not with existence of rewards, the problem is the size of the rewards. Employees who are merely praised for their good work are demotivated because they realize that praise is all they will likely receive in the near future - they had been hoping for a raise, the assurance of a raise, or an opportunity to advance their career.

Case in point: in the finance industry, employees work very hard and are not praised. They are also paid very well, and their pay is usually tied to their performance except in 2008 when everyone got a huge bonus in spite of the meltdown.
> Here in Canada, pharma advertising is very heavily regulated by the Federal government

"The United States is one of only two developed countries that allows direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. (The other country is New Zealand)."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Direct-to-consume...
> The idea of iterating with Clojure in a REPL on a small dataset to develop or refine an algorithm, then pressing a button and see how it does running on some large dataset on EC2, sounds sublime.

Unfortunately it usually works out to spending a few hours iterating on the functions in the REPL till it works great and then spending a week battling with Hadoop to make it actually run the way you intended it to. (no exaggeration here.)

Though we've been working with raw Hadoop; it sounds like Cascading makes it much less painful. We'll see how that goes.
Classified businesses, much like auctions, are a game of network size. Get big first, you win, even if you have an inferior product.

In Canada, Craigslist took a little longer to catch on. Ebay noticed this, and therefore "picked up the pace" by spending TONS of money acquiring Kijiji visitors (mostly via SEM, but some display on major portals as well).

End result? Kijiji is #1 in Canada, and Craigslist is trending down in traffic - http://trends.google.com/websites?q=craigslist.org%2C+kijiji...

Long story short - if your business model depends on network effects, raise enough money to get big fast, as your basically racing to reach, not competing on product.
Hmm...not sure exactly what's going on with JSON, but it appears that an older version (1.1.4) is included in the trunk repo but not built by default. At any rate, under the "Gem" section of that site there is documentation for 1.1.4 as well as the newer 1.1.6.
You seem to believe placebos do not affect actual medical problems. It's interesting in this regard that in placebo trials vs a gastric acid reducer (to treat ulcers), 48% of those taking a placebo improved, while 76% of those taking the real drug improved. The interesting part is that it's now known that ulcers are not caused by gastric acid, but by bacteria, so even the "real" drug here worked via placebo effect, but it did work for most patients.

Edit: source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Gastric_and_duodenal_ul...
If placebo works by helping the brain decide that we should get better, causing it to release its own defensive chemicals then it stands to reason that other actions might also be able to induce the same response. The mechanisms involved pre-exist the entire concept of "drugs". Maybe the old-time "placebo" was going to the local healer who jumped up and down and proclaimed that you will get better.

Derren Brown's videos come to mind, especially his bit on the subway where he convincingly causes a man to become incapable of recalling where he is going, simply by commanding him to not remember.

If other people can cause such powerful changes in our brain function, then there should be ways to do it yourself.
I groan with almost every article about Craigslist - because outside of some select US cities - is it really that good or popular?

I'm certainly not going to use the melbourne.craigslist.com.au (1 or 2 house/apartments per day and maybe 1 job.. what would be the point compared to seek.com.au / realestate.com.au
"Theory: there isn't anything really all that wrong with most people; it's all in their minds, so the placebo works."

Nope. Placebos can really and truly cure things. And not just things that are in the mind.

For example the immune system is under brain control, and placebos can affect it. Allergies can be cured by placebo, ref: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=27...

Lots of things that you would not expect can be cured by placebo.

Read some drug trials (or those inserts in drug packages) and notice how in pretty much all cases the placebo group improved relative to the starting point.

As I said in a different comment in this thread: most people refuse to believe placebos can work, and say things like what you did "it's all in their head", "there was nothing actually wrong with them". But they really do work.
Frank Schilling on the Domain Name Industry
I don't think there's an explicit prohibition against it, but I imagine Health Canada would probably lay the smack down pretty hard on both the network and the company for trying to skirt the rules - seeing as HC owns the game, it's probably not worth it for them to try.
I think whether the stack is executable depends on your compile flags (or rather, some bits set in the mach-o headers that the nested_functions compilation option sets)

Some user databases are in fact readable/writable:

/User/Library/AddressBook/AddressBook.sqlitedb, /User/Library/AddressBook/AddressBookImages.sqlitedb

Untested:

/User/Library/Caches/com.apple.UIKit.pboard/pasteboardDB,
/User/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb, /User/Library/CallHistory/call_history.db, more
I find purpose in the products that I make and how they impact the people / world around me.
This was also the topic of Dan Pink's TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html, which came across the RSS feed about 9 hours ago, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171.

In that presentation, the speaker talked about the candle experiment and some of its variations. He mentions that for purely mechanical skills, rewards indeed have been shown to repeatedly increase productivity. But for non-mechanical tasks, where the task is not immediately solvable or requires calculation, the promise of a reward to the top performer often diminishes the time in which the task is completed.

He didn't mention any deeper analysis though. For instance, one can wonder about the difference in the attitude between the top performers in the reward and non-reward groups. Does a participant get pre-occupied with the fact that they have not solved the problem first, and thereby reduce the amount of attention they are giving to the problem at hand? Do they have the same amount of concentration throughout the task, or after what they perceive to be a "deadline" do they stop caring.

A major difference between Pink's talk and this article is that this posits that the previous questions don't matter. Instead, it hints at the fact that once any reward is offered, the work done suffers because it diminishes one's intrinsic motivation. I wonder if this can be tested against the hypothesis that the reward becomes an object measuring stick to the quality of work; while another person's respect or praise might not be as easily objectified and measured motivating one to do more work.
But full protection is an extreme measure, and semi-protection is far less extreme, which mostly impacts anonymity.

A tiny minority of WP pages are even semi-protected.

Flagged revisions falls somewhere between semi- and full-, and will likely be used accordingly.
The Australian standard is similar to what you describe. It tends to be a lot sturdier than the US design, while not as big as the UK plug.
Is it possible to have multiple email providers on a single domain? How do you do that?
"Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality."

What if it is just embedded historical rationality? cf. evolutionary psychology.
When a large finance company goes down, an awful lot of innocent people are dragged down with it. When enough large finance companies go down at the same time, the entire economy goes down with them, leading to massive suffering.

The bailout sucked. Not doing the bailout would have sucked far more.
The Man Who Sells America’s I.O.U.’s
In what way is it inappropriate?
[video] Lars Rasmussen on entrepreneurship, maps, and wave
The page gave me a "plugin not installed" error (from firefox) for quicktime.
For those who aren't familiar with embargoes, it basically just means there was an agreement not to publish the article until some point in the future (e.g. tonight at 6 PM), so that's probably just a reminder to whoever runs the online portion of WSJ and they forgot to remove it.

A bit strange to see it here though, as usually the agreement is between the author and the company they're covering, but it sounds like Apple wanted nothing to do with the story in the first place. My guess is that WSJ also uses 'embargoed' when they're holding a story to publish it alongside the print edition.
Well we generally bend the pins to keep them from falling out of the wall.
Apple will announce the tablet at CES 2010.
I'm always put off by folks (on television) telling me about their E.D. meds. I don't know why anyone would tell the whole world about that.
There are no trends in start-ups