skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the US govt took the prohibitions off drug advertising in the mid-90s and now it's a >6 billion-a-year industry. Just the ads and promotions, that is.

All those ads say that pills work for all range of problems (even imaginary ones that the drug makers made up to sell more pills - such as pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder, to sell renamed Prozac and renew their patent).

Those ads weren't there before. The ads still aren't shown in Europe, where the real drugs are beating the placebo effect (the article mentions trials in France and Italy where diazepam wins; in the US, diazepam fails against the placebo).

Drug advertising is simply not legal in most parts of the EU.

They don't think that has something to do with it? Ads affect belief - maybe nobody says "Oh, well now I believe xyz will cure me," because they pretend to be immune to advertising, but if you're surrounding by messaging that pill = cure, you are going to eventually believe it as it is absorbed as cultural knowledge. Just like low-fat = healthy has become a "fact" that "everyone knows."

I was shocked that the article barely even made a nod to this, and didn't follow it to the its conclusion.

I think it's hilarious that the drug co's went along thinking that they won big with that repeal of consumer protection laws, and that their own exploitation of known human weakness is causing their drugs to be less effective than sugar pills.
good Job.
Your vs. My Pattern - Design Pattern Library - YDN
For HN readers who may not be aware that much about M.East tech scene, let me state that this is huge. I am in UAE and even though I've been only an ocassional reader of Maktoob and not much attached to Yahoo, still I am excited.
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Great observation. The article never mentions anything about "first mover" or "network effect". It seems completely bought into the fallacy that intrinsic product quality is what determines the winner in a market.
Oh, come on, folks. The DFW piece is ignorant whining. Some problems:

1. The great many people who live "unexamined lives" tend to be much happier. According to the research, conservatives are happier than liberals, people in the Midwest are happier than people on the coasts, etc.

2. The default settings are really, really good. You should be extremely skeptical whenever anybody tries to sell you that everyone is born "wrong" and needs to be "fixed" (circumcision, original sin, chiropractic adjustments for all children, etc.). (Vaccination and water fluoridation are the only exceptions I know of, and those are supported by actual science.)

3. Same with anyone saying, "If you don't do this one thing (which almost nobody does), your whole life is going to be HORRRRRRIBLE!!!"

4. Standard religions most certainly do eat people alive: the people who desperately obsess about them the way his (mostly imaginary) targets obsess about money, power, etc.

5. The real message of the article is the style, and what it says, sentence after sentence, is: "The older, wiser fish knows that life is crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. And BTW, you know I'm the older, wiser fish, because I'm such a soul-sapping drag. Oh, and BTW, I'm the older, wiser fish, and you're not, and if you can't see that, that only proves what a naïve little twit you are. One day, all you goddamned self-centered little successful optimistic goddamned twits will all be sorry!!!"
True dat!

mahmud, you seem to belong to this region or atleast have previous ties with working with people in this region. (I don't know, I'm just guessing based on some of your previous comments), so I guess you are the best person to ask this.
Any news/info about if they are going to invest in expansion and hire more people? And any ideas how I can get plugged in the tech industry here in MiddleEast? I am a relative newbie in this region (previously worked in Bangalore/US for Fortune-10 companies, 7+ yrs work-ex) and even though I love the work here (we are a small shop with a big govt cust), I feel I lack an environment where I can come across other technical people and events and exciting things happening here and keep learninng and upgrading myself. Most of the tech companies (and hence I suppose the happenings) here are concentrated in glitzy Dubai Internet City, far away from my place. I guess I need a meetup with a techie or two and who knows where the network takes you.
Oh, I suppose someone who doesn't understand the Westminster system might think that... but it's important to understand that the people never elected Tony Blair to the position of Prime Minister either.

(I should point out that people might not understand the Westminster system even if they live in a country that uses it. In Canada last year, there was a fiasco about how three opposition parties wanted to form a coalition government to replace the Prime Minister without an election. Perfectly legal, but a lot of Canadians were convinced that it was a sort of coup. The current Prime Minister exploited this and ended up keeping his seat.)
Facebook's chock full of some incredibly brilliant people, and it hasn't been resting. It's evolving faster as a site than any other web site that large.

The "large sites" you're comparing too very well could be large and not evolving because they've found a reasonably successful way to make money and they've honed in on something that works. This may mean that those sites that are still "evolving" have not found success yet.
There's little doubt that the motivation crowding-out effect [1] exists. However, before one runs around, saying that rewards are "often no motivator", one should remember the basic premise of these studies:

"People were intrinsically motivated to complete a certain task, initially."

In many economic contexts, this is seldomly the case. How many people are intrinsically motivated to fix a broken toilet, for example?

True, it may hold under certain circumstances -- so-called creative and similar work.

But developing software is not just creative work. There's also lots of boilerplate work to do to make software a good product: It needs to satisfy the wants and needs of the user, not the developer. It needs to be easy-to-use. It needs informative and reassuring promotion (ie. a nice homepage). It needs proper documentation. It needs to be easily installable and removable.

But even Free Software developers are not intrinsically motivated to provide these features. Thus, many Free Software projects fail badly as products.

Sure, there may be people out there who are intrinsically motivated to do some of these tasks - writing, for example. But when they are, they often have better things to create, namely their own creative works. Why should anyone who enjoys to write, care about the lack of documentation for some unknown software project, even if it's "Free"?

This is why so-called "non-free software" is useful and necessary and hardly anything "immoral" or "unethical": It provides benefits lots of people want and need.

In other words: I doubt, the GNU project posted this on their web site to educate the public. Probably, they just did it to support their political agenda.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory
What engineers know (1997)
Does this article say anything about what engineers know?
If you buy stock the day before it goes up...
Yes. My point was only that not knowing the names so dropped doesn’t actually diminish the story, because they didn’t really have any deeper significance.
The Best iPhone Navigation App: TeleNav vs. Navigon vs. TomTom
Not always; it's only true when each IP = one editor, in which case it is indeed less anonymous than pseudonyms.

Pseudonymous editing can be much less anonymous - consider if you are editing from behind AOL's dynamic IPs, or from one of the IP addresses that proxy entire countries. That is, if you're a Qatari editor, editing anonymously means your edits could belong to any subset of ~1.5 million people; if you edit pseudonymously...
The fact that the UK government has a Chief Surveillance Commissioner alone speaks volumes. I wonder when they introduce the ministry of truth - it can only be a matter of time.
See, that's a matter of taste. I think suits look ridiculous, and jeans look much more like clothes that real people wear, rather than a costume.
OP's point was that if your objective is an IPO cash-out, right after series-A is the worst time to join. If your objective is an interesting, reasonably salaried job in a fascinating businessenvironment it seems to be the very best time to join.
The funny thing is that Joel Spolsky seems to be very aware of the problems with point systems: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html
It's not an issue of being sued. The DMCA protects us, and always has. It's an issue of culture - people want to be 'respectable'. They don't have the mental toughness to stay the course; they're traumatized by bad PR.

Consider the Seigenthaler incident: the moment the bad PR started piling up, Jimbo rolled over and instantly banned anonymous page creation. Did this stop bad pages from being created? No. Did this harm the community? Yes. Was it done without consultation? Yes. Has it proven utterly useless and likely wouldn't've stopped the original page from being created? Yes. Did it destroy a valuable source of information for New Page patrollers? Yes.

Yet, it allowed Jimbo to face the press and bleat that Something Has Been Done. Flagged revs is much the same.
What happened was that they made Black Internet stop peering with tpb's ISP with threat of a €50,000 fine. So it wasn't actually tpb's ISP who "shut them down".
The Fast Supper (Calorie Restriction)
That is correct. The problem is that all the oil isn't lying around in great big underground lakes where it's just a question of sticking a pipe in and start pumping. There are different degrees of difficulty in getting to it.

We're well beyond peak $10/barrel oil, we're probably moving up on peak $40/b oil, but we're no where near peak $100/b and we're not even thinking about $200/b oil.

As patio11 said, the more expensive oil gets, the more expensive alternatives become viable.
Our team made "Diversion" - http://diversion.r09.railsrumble.com/

We want to bring to normal human beings the cool things that Git and Github bring to developers! Instead of collaborating like you would on a wiki, you "divert" (fork) other people's work, so that both can keep working on their documents and grab each other changes.

You can see the history of everybody's documents, the past and the possible futures, who grabbed from whom, etc... And it works!
This is just not true.. at least it doesn't seem to be, for me. Do a lot of people face this??
Thinking about trying a multiplayer flash game
It does have similar protections. If not by UK law, then by EU law. The 5th would not save you, though. See the similar discussion in the duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=756774
OK then that naturally leads to a slightly different hypothesis: take the candle problem, but have 3 groups: a control group that is paid nothing, a group that is paid "decently and fairly", and a group that is paid according to incentives.
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This is a topic discussed in economics - reducing scarcity through technology.

For an example of how this has happened with other resources, look at metals. Aluminum and iron used to be much more expensive and scarce. Now they're pretty cheap, and to find out why, just total the savings of lots of tiny improvements like thinner soda cans, better sorting of recycling, lower-energy production methods, etc.

If 50 people come up with cumulative improvements of 2% to a process, you end up with a 269% improvement.

This is one of the reasons why software is so appealing - it's low-capital to distribute, and there are an unending number of tasks to automate, making it easy to come up with new approaches to improve productivity.
The UK _does_ have a constitution -- but according to a barrister of my acquaintance it consists of thirty-one separate acts of parliament. (Think of it as a distributed legal kernel rather than a monolithic one. Oh, and the acts can be revised/amended by parliament without needing a constitutional convention or equivalent.)

There's no actual fifth amendment equivalent, but there _is_ a bill of rights (at least, since 1998). RiderOfGiraffes is exactly right about silence being a factor that can be drawn to the attention of a jury ...

On the subject of the bits of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2002) that make failure to hand over encryption keys an imprisonable offense, it's worth noting that an order to hand them over has first to be made in the process of a criminal investigation. If someone has encrypted data and refuses to hand over the keys despite facing a maximum 5-year prison term, then it's reasonable to presume that they consider the data to be so incriminating that they'd pull a _longer_ sentence if they decrypted it. I believe (but am not certain -- the powers have been used to rarely that there's little to go on) that a plausible explanation of why the keys are unavailable ("I generated a PGP keychain in 1996 out of curiousity, but I lost interest and stopped using it, and that was twelve PCs ago") would probably work in court (in the absence of evidence contradicting it).
I'd suggest he tries using Lotus Notes' built-in "search". If there was ever a more useless function, it's LN's pathetic attempt at searching for stuff. It'll find stuff to every search term you enter! Just nothing that a) contains that search term, and b) resembles anything you wanted to find.
you my friend, are a mac troll which likes to pay money for service packs (which you get for free when you would be using windows).
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I'll gladly agree that we could be spending our educational budgets better. Everything else seems ery uncertain - yes, I could have learned to do my job in a fraction of my schooling, but there are many things in my schooling that have nothing to do with my current job, yet which I value immensely (probably more so than my directly employable skills, even). As a matter of fact, I spent most of college avoiding (as much as I could while getting the degree) practical CS, precisely because I knees learning it on my own would be a lot better use of the time. Instead, I tried to focus on things to which I'd have limited exposure in my career - Shakespeare, writing, theoretical mathematics, etc.
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But the problem is that it would take decades to go from R&D to a complete infrastructure that supplants the one we have in place for oil. Even now, the only legitimate substitute for gas-powered cars I've seen is Agassi's proposal: http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_...

The issues with a hydrogen economy have been detailed in the past on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=688909

In a case like this that involves a massive lag time and an insanely complex upgrade procedure, I'd argue that planning ahead is way better than waiting for the onset of a slow-moving disaster. Not to mention we should probably be phasing out oil anyway for all the usual reasons (global warming, pollution, empowering dictatorships, etc.)
I've always thought you could make a killing on the late night infomercial market, selling "Placebo" to people.

Think of all the research out there on the well-documented Placebo Effect. Now you can benefit from this safe, effective, miracle cure. Order now and we'll throw in a second bottle of Placebo free of charge!

Considering the things that stupid people fall for, this would seem guaranteed to work.
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Your app is awesome. Nice job!
The idea isn't that a group is paid vs unpaid.

Salary, in this case, is not the type of incentive we're talking about. Having a decent salary is just to get the employee willing to work - not as an incentive to work at max capacity.

What we're talking about, really, is already past salary: is a group of fairly paid people more efficient and creative when motivated financially (say, by extra bonuses or salary increases) or by promises of autonomy (say, 20% time).

Thus, the candle problem, when placed in the real world, would have three groups: a control group which is paid 'decently and fairly', and a group that is paid 'decently and fairly' and is given financial incentives beyond that, and a group that is payed 'decently and fairly' and is given autonomy as an incentive.
Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1984.
I've done the Google interview thing (had 5 interviews, got asked to do more, declined due to my wife taking another job), and I can confirm I had some (I think 4 or 5) of these questions.

In my interviews I generally started with a naive answer, got the good answer on my own and got to the best answer with some hints from the interviewer. They didn't seem to regard this as a bad thing.

At one point when I started working on the "better answer" straight after a "good answer", the interviewer asked me why. I confessed that it looked to be a similar class of problem to one in the previous interview, and he told me that was excellent.

There were two problems I did badly at. One was a math question (number theory), which I got after a bit of work. The other didn't really get anywhere with. It wasn't included in any of these linked items, either, so I guess I can't say much more about it. It was a fair question though.
I think that the fact that he was enthusiastic about his subject and clearly wanted to tell people about it came across as unpleasant or pushy or something.

I thought that just made it better - people who are interested in what they're talking about and want to tell you about it tend to be more interesting than those that just do it because they need to.
You've exposed some systematic weaknesses of the SO quality score. If I worked for SO I'd thank you.

My proposed solution is to manually identify X judges who represent a nicecross section of programming backgrounds. These judges are selected by their continued support and passion for helping programmers. Over time their upvotes would create new quality judges in an intelligent manner.

I used a system like this for characterizing 3D shapes in the protein database (kinase). The templates were created from known kinase chains, we called them motifs. Thanks to Tony Sommese, and Jim Dwulit for really making it happen (I just helped out on that project).

Another case for this model is crystal formation. Seed crystals allow for fractal like formation of patterns in supporting media dishes.

Googles voting system also relies on "reliable" sources to help judge the value of links.

Reference papers use citations to determine how close an author is to a renowned scientist.
Debugging Java code in web server aka Remote Debuggin
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Ha, great response Jason. Maybe it'll feed back to SO devs. These quality scoring crowd sourced systems need refinement. Although I'm a believer in emergent properties of large systems, the initial reputation should be tied to domain expertise. Let a group of really smart folks set the standard and promote intelligent answers.
At least we have become a little more educated about the weaknesses of the system
It is. But that doesn't mean that Facebook is gonna buy it.
What's in the pdf?
They get the definition of polymorphism wrong, because their definition ("ability of one method to have different behavior depending on the type of object it is being called on / object passed by parameter) is also met by compile time function overloading. Their example, where you have a customer integer class that is capable of dealing with both other integer arguments and floats is pretty poor.

Any definition of polymorphism should at least mention something about the method that is invoked depends on runtime data, and is not resolved (or known) at compile time.
Does YAGNI Mean You Ignore The Obvious
I once read..."The ultimate purpose of life which is to keep alive is impossibe" ... so why bother??
I realize the notes are for preparing a potential employee for a Google-style job interview.

I am curious if there are any employers out there with tips for follow employers about how to screen candidates.

I find that a vital skill is understanding good code design, that is, placing the responsibilities with the correct code, keeping dependencies down to a minimum, proper encapsulation of the complex stuff, separation of concerns, etc.

I recently hired someone who is a decent coder and problem solver, but I regularly have to “correct him” when he starts new submodules because he still doesn’t master the “design” aspect of coding.

That is, he might do some rudimental analysis about how to structure things and what the API should be, but if I don’t stop him, it always ends up being more complex than need be, and I honestly don’t think he knows how he could do it better, because it is really the same things I say to him over and over.

Since I will hire more people down the road and since I am tired of having to point out the same design flaws over and over, I am interested in tips for “testing peoples design skills” and also book recommendations about how to master big software projects without it ending up as tightly coupled components with arcane code — which sadly seems to be how most projects do end up…
I suppose its useful to categorize and cross-reference fonts but there's no easy way to download or buy them. At least, nothing slapped me upside the head when I examined the first monospaced font listed. Where's the "download" or "Buy Now!" button?
Given that the UK mains standard runs on 230 volts AC, yes, we need safety precautions.

Touching a 110 volt terminal: painful but probably not serious. Touching a 230 volt terminal: very painful and quite possibly very serious.
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Maybe half rhetorical. I skimmed half the article, began to feel annoyed, and decided to ask here if it's worth digging through the article for some interesting observations about what engineers know.
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I consider the lack of depth in Code Complete one of its great strength. You couldn't hand Knuth to a newbie programmer expect them to get anything useful out of it, whereas Code Complete will teach him a lot really useful things he can use his entire career.

If you've been working as a programmer for 12 years it probably won't teach you too many new things, but if you've been working for 12 weeks it is a great book.
Good article. Sounds like he is getting annoyed that the Facebook 3.0 app is still in review after two weeks.
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They missed the worst one: the Mighty Mouse with the scrollball that you cannot clean.
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