skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anti-poverty policy (especially foreign aid) over the past five decades has consisted mainly of giving away food, healthcare, etc. For a while, this decreased death rates substantially in the third world. But the problem was that when the death rates decreased, we simply got more and more poor people.

Ethiopia received great quantities of foreign aid in the 1980's. Now thirty years later its population has doubled and it is on the brink of famine yet again:

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. ( Kevin Myers, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/wri... )

Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, makes the same point about Johanessberg in South Africa: Well, in my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth … —we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential decline, what happens first is you get … rich pockets of gated communities with security guards outside them, and you get more and more poverty outside that area. … and people start having resource wars over water and food and agriculture and arable land, and then you have Joburg in 2050.

The difference in fertility rates between the classes is astounding ( source http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php )

-------------------Poorest-5th--|--Middle-5th--|--Top 5th

Bangladesh------4.6---------------3.3--------------2.2

Brazil----------------4.8---------------2.1--------------0.7

South Africa--------4.8---------------2.7-------------1.9

Recently I was in Rio de Janeiro. Slums push out for miles and miles. They grow bigger every year. Meanwhile the pretty old 19th century buildings slowly rot away.

When poorest 5th have 4 or 5 kids, the result is going to be even more poverty the next generation. No amount of foreign aid can alter this logic, the aid will simply fall into a bottomless well.

In theory, aid could go more towards "teaching a man to fish". But the reality is that I cannot think of a single historical example of a group of one nation/culture/ethnicity achieving economic development via the charity of another nation/ethnicity. If someone knows of an example, I'd be interested to hear it.

All cases of economic development I know have either a) come from within (Deng in China, the Meiji Restoration, etc) or b) come from colonialism ( examples range from Roman Gaul to Hong Kong to parts of Africa before decolonialism )
For fuck's sake, the code is out there: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista/ EDIT: apparently the main project is at WorldVista now: http://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista/

There are for-profit companies selling install/support services around it: http://www.medsphere.com/ (And here's their .org for their OpenVista repository: http://medsphere.org/index.jspa)

Yeah, VistA is a PITA. What we need are data standards for non-imaging data (where DICOM has been a raging success). I've long suggested that all records have to be readable in VistA - it doesn't force people to use Medsphere, but it means that there's a lowest common denominator FREE software package that works.
bad memory, poor focus, decreased creativity...

Oh No! I'm depressed. Help!
Ask HN: The best development environment you've ever used
I'm not necessarily asking what development environment you use currently, but the best you've ever used.

What makes it so great?
I agree with you, which is why I was 100% behind the troubled asset relief package. That was to help out the banks, which needed to remain liquid. I was extremely extremely vocally for TARP...

This is something else entirely.
it no longer ships with printer drivers i think - these are now supported by the software update mechanism that keeps os x up to date.
Point at the screen.
Mother Nature has been working on this problems for millions of years and has only come up with one solution. It's located between your ears.
agreed. i'll just paste my comment from an article on the oreilly radar blog, http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/who-will-cut-the-gordian-kn... .

In my opinion, one thing that government can do to accelerate electronic record keeping in the healthcare arena is mandating that solution providers must make means available to both import and export data to/from their systems. Mandating a specific format is less of an issue and should not be the main goal.

If vendors were obligated to open their systems and encouraged to do so via some [fiscal/tax] incentive then the problem would solve itself. IT professionals either on their own or contracted would create solutions that connected the hodgepodge of systems out there.

These systems are infinitely difficult to implement on any scale (by scale I mean number of people using the system - not technical challenges). At the moment I am tangentially involved in a major enterprise installation at a very well known institution. From my vantage point one of the major stumbling blocks is the difficulty in which the many, many systems already in place will interact with the new system (and with each other). The inability of these systems to interact with each other directly affects the cost of doing business in the modern day hospital.

Many of the people in positions to make purchasing decisions are not fully cognizant of the concept of "vendor lock in" and "data portability". These poor decisions are paid back many fold not only in cold hard cash but also in opportunity cost over the lifetime of the system purchased, which may very well be decades. Government can make this all go away by simply requesting that all players in this space provide mechanisms for programmatic, unfettered data access. Providing fiscal incentive will all but ensure that those providers in compliance will be preferred.

Mandating a specific system, or data exchange format is not the solution or, frankly, the "American way". Evening the playing field by ensuring openness through financial incentive is much more palatable to a broader spectrum of participants. The market place will ultimately decide and coalesce around its own standards and formats.
looks like they have a page with Times New Roman history: http://typedia.com/explore/typeface/times-new-roman/
Two factors cause the Netflix prize to be an exception to the rule:

1) The prize was so large as to throw usual rules of motivation out of the window. Anyone would attempt almost anything for $1 million.

2) The prize is a once-off, not an individual form of motivation. There's only one prize and to get it means prestige, beating others. The competition element counts for a lot. If your boss offers $10 to all workers who beat a certain quota, that's not the same thing.
> you think Red doesn't build robots when Darpa doesn't have prizes?

I assume Red is some dude who builds robots. I apologize for not knowing who you're referring to.

But anyway! I'll assume he's a Darpa grand challenge winner and some awesome robotics dude.

I don't think he would have gained as much as he has, technologically, without the competition that most certainly wanted to win the Darpa challenge.

These competitions don't change the dominant players in the game; what they do is move the margin, and force the dominant players to be that much better, because they want to remain dominant.

My theory is that $1 million -> prestige -> more entrants in DGC -> better tech than would have been created otherwise. Thoughts?
This is an incredibly interesting article - one of the more effective ways of healing the body is to engage the brain to heal it for you. Placebo Effects, in many cases, are as powerful as the effects of the drug. Previously, the Pharma industry took this as in indication their drug's weren't effective. The central thesis of this article isn't that the drugs are ineffective, it's that the Placebo effect is a real, and sometimes _very_ effective mechanism for healing people.

From the article:

"one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind's ability to predict the future. We are constantly parsing the reactions of those around us—such as the tone a doctor uses to deliver a diagnosis—to generate more-accurate estimations of our fate. One of the most powerful placebogenic triggers is watching someone else experience the benefits of an alleged drug. Researchers call these social aspects of medicine the therapeutic ritual."
If you think that's annoying, I can beat it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown.html

Not only does he have the stage manner of an uncaring dentist, it's worth remembering he's an undemocratically elected leader espousing all sorts of nonsense about democracy.
Rcirc notifications in xmobar
That's probably due to the "leaky placebo" effect: if the placebo does something to you (e.g., gives you a headache, or other side effect), it makes you think it is really working.
If I could combine the simplicity of Visual Studio, the flexibility and power of emacs, and the refactoring support of Eclipse, that would be the best development environment ever.

As it stands, I would probably put Visual Studio in the lead.

I have a major beef with Eclipse for how projects are structured. The whole workspace thing drives me crazy and makes branching and pushing and pulling from remote servers a real pain in version control.

Emacs is simply getting old. It's amazing. It's seriously one of the best programs ever written, but it would nice to have some more IDEish stuff around. I know I could do a lot more customization to my emacs, but I just haven't had the time.

If I could find a good editor which embeds or emulates emacs well, that might be the solution.
"Regardless of its primitiveness, Craigslist serves its purpose exceptionally well."

That's just not true. Finding things on craigslist has always been a painful experience for me. External tools (e.g. Padmapper) make things better in some categories, but the combination of craigslist's dominance and its stasis have been bad for consumers, regardless of their benevolent mindset.
Ironically, there is an argument in the article that the Parmaceutical ads on TV enhance the placebo effect, and are therefore helping those people who see the ads and then take the drug more than those who don't see the Ad.

Better health through advertising.
Being better than I was yesterday.
It's not perfect, but you can go to http://searchyc.com/ and (on the results page) choose "submissions". Sometimes a domain-only search is good (if the topic you're looking for has a unique domain), other times you'll need to come up with some combination of domain and title keywords.

Or you can do a Google search with "site:" and "link:" like
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...
On Muted Methods, Fluent Interfaces, and Bar Game
> A significant reward past some threshold (which will differ by society) is bound to motivate.

This seems questionable, though likely, without empirical evidence. Especially given what data we do have.

I'm merely trying to think about where that threshold could be, or what the differentiating factors are in the netflix prize, that could cause it to be fundamentally different than Ariely's rewards. Was his "large reward" simply not large enough? Is it on "medium difficult" tasks that his result holds, but not on very difficult tasks combined with very large rewards?
Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off
Car Care Tips on Washing Your Engine
I'm sorry, but no. If you're depressed, a placebo may improve your outlook and this improved outlook may present itself as a decrease in symptoms which, like I said, manifest psycologically, but unless you've got something to increase the amount of seratonin in your brain (which is used as a neurotransmitter...this is why depression can present as poor short-term memory, and poor focus) then you're fixing a physical problem with a psychological solution.

If this makes somebody feel better, then fantastic for them! I'm sorry for being a bit combative about this...sever mania and depression is something that runs in my family, and debilitating depression and anxiety are something I've dealt with my entire life. Believe me, if there was a placebo-based solution to this, I would be the first person in line to get it...

I don't mean to take offense, I know you don't mean any, but saying what you're saying is a bit akin to telling a cancer patient that they need to just get over it.
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It does seem arse-about that an angel would charge a fee to let a startup pitch to them. Surely, the angel is the one with the money, and the startup is the one that needs it, not the other way around.

Charging does solve one problem for the less-than-bright angel - if they receive enough pitches, it means they don't actually need to work out who they should invest in, they can make plenty of money from fees.
I think that there's something to either one or both of your arguments, and that there are lots of further arguments:

3) The "candle experiment" applies only to medium-scale creative tasks

4) The "candle experiment" is one of a small class of lateral thinking problems for which monetary reward is negatively correlated with success

5) The "candle experiment" result only holds on tasks that last a short time

My question is, which hold, what's your evidence, and what experiments should be done next? I can think of a bunch, so if anybody wants to fund some research, let me know :)
Actaully he addressed the paycheck problem quite directly: pay people decently, fairly, and then the team can focus properly without being distracted with worries about money (lack thereof or competing for bonuses). The logical extension of this is not "don't pay people" but pay everyone well enough and then ask them to impress you.
I'm surprised this has so many up votes because it is so factually incorrect. In 1690 Gregory King made an made a primitive economic census of the English population. Out of a population of 5.5 million, 1.3 million were "cottagers and paupers", and 2.7 were in the lowest class "Vagrants; as Gipsies, Theives, Beggers, &c." (source, The World we have lost by Peter Laslett)

It's should also be noted that average heights were about 4 inches shorter than the height of a modern American. Not having good enough nutrition to reach a full height seems like a pretty sure sign of poverty to me.

They did not so much have the crowded slums that are typical of modern poverty. People would die of disease before cities could reach such densities. But relative to us, people were impoverished in terms of health, nutrition, or material comfort.

EDIT:

One more point. Overall violent death rates ( including war and homicide) in 16th-19th century Britain were about the same as the violent death rate in modern Houston, Texas. See Greg Clark, A Farewell to Alms, pages 128-129.
He'd downvote you for bringing him up.
Consider socialized education, medicine, or early childhood education - all have shown to have strong impacts on social mobility, and hence, wealth creation.

Evidence? Sources?
You missed my point: If they give you some more disk space then they have to decrease everyone else's space.

What you're suggesting means buying a new "pie", because they've sliced up the existing pie and allocated all of it, completely. This would mean buying more datacenter space, more servers, more networking equipment. When you want to offer disk space to customers as a product, it has to scale, you can't just plug in a USB HDD every time someone emails to ask for more space.
Sorry, I must have pasted the wrong link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AaronSw/David_Foster_Walla...
I don't mean to take offense, I know you don't mean any, but saying what you're saying is a bit akin to telling a cancer patient that they need to just get over it.

I hear what you are saying, but I do not think he is being that harsh. The harshest part of his post is this:

And it responds very well to therapy, but barely at all to drugs.

It might be an overexageration, but the points he makes about the effectiveness of therapy and placebo are good ones. You of course are correct too; chemical imbalance is a valid factor to consider, and something that is correctable via drugs. I don't think you two are on opposite ends of a spectrum here. There is a wide range of possible solutions to depression. :-)
"They have a saying in Chicago Mr. Bond "Once is
happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's
enemy action." Auric Goldfinger to James Bond in Ian
Fleming's "Goldfinger"

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
What does "better" mean for you (if you don't mind me asking)?
There is a reason why "achievements" (NB: nearly always by that name, hmm...) are the most pervasive game design pattern today.

I want a t-shirt that says "Actually, I'm just doing this to get the achievement."
Bothers me to say it, but "trade based" eugenics might fix this—it might be possible to genetically engineer the crops we send as aid, so that they decrease fertility when consumed over a lifetime. It wouldn't have to be complete sterility, just just enough to bring the rate of successful procreation down to a 2.0 on average. The hard part (that is, the part that I can't think of an ethical means of studying) would be making sure that the infertility/impotence occurs only at the point of conception, and doesn't affect growing foetuses or developing children or hormone production in adults.

EDIT: To those that downvoted me, can you clarify what's wrong with the suggestion? When changing the social structure is impossible (without destroying the culture that informs it), you have to resort to a technical solution, no matter how distasteful it may be to imagine. The cultures affected most by overpopulation won't use condoms and birth control, won't listen to those that proselytize them, and won't let those that would listen anywhere near the educators. Just making a trade agreement such as "you may only have two children if you take this aid crop" won't work, because once they have the food, they'll go ahead and have the kids anyway (or more likely, just won't know how to not have the kids, whether you require it or not.) An agreement of "you must allow sexual health educators to talk to your people in exchange for the aid" might be closer, but again, nothing's making them take the advice to heart. What's so important about fertility that makes it override concerns about people's actual happiness over their lifetime? We're not talking about killing living people (or even living cells), we're talking about making sperm not attach to eggs.

And I apologize that this has turned into a definitively-non-HN comment; it was originally—humans can be "hacked" just as well as anything else, you know—but it seems people use the arrows to express their ethical opinion, which is something I've never seen before, so I decided to defend my own ethical stance, rather than just being objective and technical like most positively-seen discussions here are.
Check out Mahalo Answers? (http://www.mahalo.com/answers/) I think this is basically exactly what you are describing.

I do thank you for the link to this Kylin project. That was a confounded read but this team is definitely trying to do something amazing.
See, I fundamentally disagree that mandating data formats in un-American or a violation of market principles. We had an Interstate Commerce Commission (the first independent commission) because interstate markets fail sometimes.

And it's not healthcare specific for me: if the federal government picked one between MPEG and Ogg for the <video> tag in HTML5, I'd be perfectly happy.
I suggest looking into a coffee press. Easy to clean, no filters to buy. You need to heat up water in your microwave and then let it sit for a few minutes. If you really are worried about time, pre-grind a bunch of beans over the weekend. You'll sacrifice a bit in taste, but it will make preparation faster. With an automatic coffee pot, just set it up the night before on a timer, and you'll have steaming hot coffee ready when your alarm goes off. We're really only talking about a difference of a few minutes. It will take you longer than that to get rid of the extra calories.
The book predictably irrational discusses the placebo effect on surgery. http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/Placebo1.pdf Very interesting results.
I used to believe this so I did some tests. I gave opportunities to people at what many would consider the lowest levels of society. I found that even with those opportunities, they continued to treat others with a lack of respect. The kind of lack of respect that makes people not want to help them or even be around them.

I even rent-to-owned a house to a family with 5 kids. This family would never have had the opportunity to own a house had I not given them that opportunity. They didn't have a high school diploma, no credit. Judgements against them. Criminal history. So I thought, "If they have the opportunity, will they take it to improve their life? If they have the opportunity to buy and own a home, will they make the most of it?"

They destroyed the house. They caused more damage than they paid in rent.

It isn't the lack of opportunity. I thought it was, but it isn't. Opportunities are external motivators. It takes internal motivation to succeed. You can't provide that to someone. They have to create it within themselves. It's the people who have that internal motivation who find opportunities and make the most of them.
Can't they create an API and give developers metered access to their system? A thousand better websites will mushroom overnight with no loss in revenue for them. They can even require the third party site not accept signups or store any data.
Actually, wars against populations and not just between armies began to disappear as a consequence of the end of the Thirty Years' War in the 17th Century. Until that point, armies were largely expected to be self-funding, so they would take resources from local towns (and destroy those of their opposition). Due to the utter exhaustion on all sides at the end of the war, and the cost of supporting large standing armies, a number of military reforms came about, including making armies smaller and more professional, and making non-combatant populations (more or less) off-limits. This is largely were we get the concept of a "civilian" -- someone who has allegiance to a nation but is not directly involved in the fighting of its wars.
As a matter of fact however, there is a commercially available placebo. It's for kids and is called Obecalp:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/health/27plac.html
Woh, I think I looked a Kijiji a while ago and forgot about it until I saw your post.

Awesome that they're doing so well and offering a better service than Craigslist from what I've seen so far (at least in Canada.)

Thanks for the post.
Had a lot of fun putting this together and I'm thrilled everyone's enjoying the site!
I came back to the site after taking a nap, thinking that maybe I came across as too whiny. After rereading what I wrote, I wanted to edit it and add more useful content, but it was too late to edit or delete it, so I decided to add to it on my blog. I responded more specifically to each point there.
http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-question-post...
emacs

Because you can easily flex and modify any aspect of it, for any need you might have.
But keep it super hush hush. If the populace grows uncertainty about whether it's getting the drug, the placebo effect may turn against the patient.