skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Call me extreme but if we don't start making the manufactured landscape beautiful we are going to destroy the "natural" landscape completely.

This sounds almost like a tautology (depending on the definition of '"natural" landscape').

> I would rather everyone be fed, clothed, sheltered and educated. If we cover those bases the chances of living in a more aesthetically appealing world are much higher.

The claim had a causal connection that went the other way, that without aesthetics, something would die. You're claiming that if people live, beauty is more likely.
I agree. I've been practicing judo for 14 years (I'm an assistant coach at the nearby college) and BJJ for 4. And would pretty much everone I know would avoid a street fight.

You learn pretty fast in the dojo that you really have no idea what someone is capable of until you take your grips. Outside the dojo, that maybe too late
You mean one of these? Yeah, Microsoft could make some good money bringing these back. I know I'd worry less about mine biting the dust.

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-SEALED-RETAIL-PACKAGE-Microsoft-Opti...

http://cgi.ebay.com/SEALED-BULK-RETAIL-PACKAGE-Microsoft-Opt...

http://cgi.ebay.com/Microsoft-TrackBall-Optical-Mouse-PS-2-U...
These days quite a few languages already support bignums, rationals and even complex numbers. CL's support for these was unique back then, but I guess it has lost its edge in this domain.

Still, support of strict read/write invariance of floating point numbers (e.g. as described in Burger&Dybvig 1996 and Clinger 1990) doesn't seem to spread widely outside CL/Scheme camp. Concept of exact/inexact numbers as well.
I always feel like a negative naysayer when I don't provide positive feedback, but the first thing I did was do a search for a fairly well known typeface, "Times Roman" - no hits. Going over to Google, "Times Roman History" brings up a wealth of information on the history and data on that typeface.

Time will tell whether Typedia becomes another "Wolfram Alpha" or "Wikipedia"
Since then, Apple has updated several of its product lines, including the iPhone and its Macintosh laptops, but hasn't launched an entirely new category.

I find it amusing that "not launching an entirely new category" of product in a two year period is notable.
Maybe your tastes adjusted to the different sweetener and you just don't like the taste of regular Coke? There are flavors of Jarritos that I can't stand (lime, eugh) regardless of their sugar content.

What I took from the article was that artificial sweeteners don't drive you into sugar binges but exaggerate desire for sweet foods, making you more likely to choose to eat something sweet at a given moment. And that's the thing - your brain craves sugar, but recognizes it through (and thus seeks out) sweetness. So a likely result is that you'll compound the effect with more diet soda. This sounds easy to resist, but the innocuity of another soda can be disarming. I suspect I would find a way to rationalize it.
A bit off-topic, but does anybody know how that site is displaying its video? I don't have flash or moonlight installed, so it was a bit of a shock to hear my computer actually playing a video feed. I browsed their HTML source, but I didn't see any object tags, video tags, nor anything else that would obviously play video.
Another vote for black coffee. Once you get used to it, it's actually far more enjoyable than coffee with sugar and/or cream in it. You'll learn to be able to recognize the different tastes and types of coffee, which is pretty neat.
No, but we run the company from my basement.
Come on, can we stop upvoting the stupid Apple Tablet stories? Yes, we all know they're working on a tablet and we all know they can keep all relevant and interesting info secret, feeding the press nothing but enough vague scraps to keep themselves in the news.

So I ask you, unless you see actual specs and pictures, please don't upvote these stories.
Truly excellent article. Thanks for sharing. This is the kind of stuff I hope for every time I refresh Hacker News.
Theory: there isn't anything really all that wrong with most people; it's all in their minds, so the placebo works.

Watch the evening news on a network and count the number of advertisements you see for prescription drugs. I did this a couple of weeks ago watching the CBS Evening news, a half-hour program, and about 65 percent of the commercials were for pills of some sort: migraine pills, anti-depression pills, pills for seniors, etc.

The prescription drug industry in the US has got a slimy underbelly; it goes out of its way to convince people that there's something "wrong" with them, and then falls all over itself attempting to pat itself on the back for "curing" them.
Simple: Too big.
Michael Jackson's Death Ruled a Homicide
Sorry about that, we're working on making this a little more stable. :) Any other feedback at all?
oh bummer, I guess we'll just have to launch international - get it on hacker news before you can get it anywhere else.

Pricing
http://www.twilio.com/international-calling-rates

Account Configuration
http://www.twilio.com/user/account/international

International FAQ
http://www.twilio.com/international-faq

There you go!
They should just sell the placebo. No FDA issues, and if it does what tests show it does can you imagine the profit margin!

On a serious note, I'm enjoying keeping an eye on the US Health Care debate from afar (Australia, to be precise). Anybody think it will result in sustainable change for the better?
Apple’s FCC Response Infuriates Google Voice App Developer
I should have mentioned that I also had the md5 of the release image. Needless to say, I verified it. There is no practical possibility that it is not bit-for-bit identical to the retail version.
Maybe it's really an interactive remote for the next generation Apple TV.
Odd, the article is starting as: "EMBARGOED!Just a few months" What did some editor add 'embargoed' to the article?
To me, this idea couldn't be more wrong headed. In my experience it is rationality that solves most problems.

Emotionalism is the antithesis of rationality. So framing everything by projecting the outcome that is the most likely to provoke an emotional response (e.g. death) is basically the recipe for a thought process that won't solve the world's problems.

Let me put it another way. We all know it's better to teach a man to fish than to just give him a fish. But if that man refuses to learn the emotional person will give him the fish anyway while the rational person will force him to choose between learning to fish or nothing. In that way the rational person forces the man to learn how to feed himself while the emotional person simply rewards his laziness and feeds him for a day.
The euro plugs don't fall out of the wall only if the plug is euro-plug only. Otherwise sometimes they don't even make good contact.
I believe the poster might mean, for example but not only, checking whether something has been submitted and has interesting comments. They may not be interested (yet) in submitting the item themselves, but would like to know whether it already has some context on HN.

As for how to go about this, I second your suggestion of resorting to a google search. There may be some delay between prior submissions and those submissions' indexing, but in the past (some time ago) others have commented here that google seems to have a certain fondness for frequent updates of its indexing of news.ycombinator.com .

I haven't tried this site's search feature recently. Does it perform well?
Why Should You Use an ORM?
This matches my own experience exactly. I've often felt more demotivated the more someone threw incentives at me to finish something and I've tried to explain, but it's like there's a mental block there and no one wants to admit that this could possibly be true.
Coca cola.

Coke was initially sold as a medication.

In the 80's, blind trials showed that people preferred the taste of Pepsi - but when they knew the brand, they preferred Coke. Coca cola executives were so worried by this that they launched "New Coke" which was more like Pepsi, and people preferred it in blind tests. But it failed utterly, and the original Coke itself continued to be popular, as it has been to this day.

See the "Rx for Success" side bar on page 2. The last two items are branding and clever names.
If you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more motivated to think through the problem the night before.

Motivation is a vector, not a scalar. The problem isn't that the people who are incentivized by reward aren't motivated, it is that the motivation they are given makes them behave a different way. In the case of largely creative work, the motivation they are given modifies their behavior in entirely suboptimal ways.

It's not just that you motivate people, it is what you motivated them toward.
I hear they are going to innovate a sixth button.
Pharma advertising is something that always strikes me when I watch US TV feeds. Here in Canada, pharma advertising is very heavily regulated by the Federal government.

It can come in essentially two forms. One is the "for sale" form, in which case the ad is limited to the drug name, the amount, and the price - no description of what it's for, or any other information. The other is the "informational" form, in which case the ad can talk about a symptom, like "acid reflux is dangerous - here are some signs", but it can't mention the name of the drug or pharmaceutical company producing it, and it has to talk about alternative non-drug remedies.

The net result is that there are very few pharmaceutical ads on TV here, since they have so little value in what they're allowed to say.
You know, that exact same argument was made about semiprotection.

Do you know what the result was? A small fall in full protection - and a massive expansion in semiprotection (and thus protection in general).
I can see how it may have been fun, but it doesn't even really rate as dubious.

Not only is one of your premises (a/a = b/b -> a=b) clearly false, but your conclusion doesn't mean anything.

a=b ^ a=b -> n=(n-1) ^ n!=(n-1) is just a contradiction. Your first and second terms together imply n=(n-1) which directly contradicts your third term.

I'm afraid you've simply proved a contradiction, which just means (because of, well, proof by contradiction) that you're arguments are flawed.
True. Had they made a bland response, generic or somewhat personal, they would have been criticised as 'Big corporate not understanding the tone of new media'.

Not including some of the discussion also skews the discussion. Note that the final station response about recent good ratings appears to be a reasonable response to this onportland tweet:

"@947fm wow, just wow. I supported KNRK for 16 yrs. Even used to appear on it. It's clear you're a sinking ship not able to take feedback." [1]

[1] http://twitter.com/Onportland 8.51pm Aug 22
Environmentalism is even more deadly.

In 1972 the new head of the EPA (William Ruckelshaus) banned DDT against the considered opinion of every scientist he hired to advise him on the matter. Lead scientist was Dr. G. Gordon Edwards. Respected entomologist from the University of California Santa Barbara...

DDT ban has resulted in over 80 million unnecessary human fatalities. Mostly children and pregnant women.

Why don't we ever talk about that??
People might think it's more "official" if it's a really involved application, and thus more likely to sucker people into paying the fee.
My take away from this is that, in addition to checklists, one low-cost intervention to improve healthcare would be to have the doctor spend a few minutes chatting the patient up and expressing cheery optimism about their prognosis. If the doctor's time is too valuable, find some unemployed psych grad with good people skills and put him in a lab coat.
There are disagreeing studies cited in the Wikipedia article you linked, did you even read it?

I'm also confused why you think your bug story supports your point. Are there lots of developers who derive great personal satisfaction from churning out bug reports? Leaving aside the fact that #bug reports is a shitty metric, they did go up when the reward was introduced. The fact that they went down again after the reward was taken away means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation, because they weren't internally motivated before.
Poverty is the natural state for humans, not the wealthy prosperous state that most Westerners live in. What those in the west created is an aberration. People, like the author of this article wonder, why are people poor? Why is there poverty? The deeper question to ask is, why was wealth ever created? And what do we do to encourage it everywhere?
JSON was my "benchmark" - it is supposed to be part of the 1.9.1 standard lib.

I know it is also a gem and as such the documentation for JSON can be found. But I would kind of like to have the official 1.9.1 standard library. Also because some things changed from 1.8
I'm rather amused by the women beaming with confidence as they proclaim "I'm on Alesse"... took me awhile to figure out it was birth control
Anybody think it will result in sustainable change for the better?

As someone who is keeping an eye from up-close, hahahahahaha! Sustainable change for the better. Good one. Let me sum up American politics for you: we have the best PR in the world. This means that with enough money, you can convince people that your brand will cure them even if you're selling sugar pills. That's why American pharmaceuticals spend more on marketing than R&D. It also means you can convince people to hate socialized medicine, even if they're recipients of medicare/medicaid.

Hence, in America, the only time something gets done is when a group with lots of money/power gets even more money/power out of it. The good news is that there are a lot of conflicting powerful interests. Car manufacturers and many banks, for example, have a lot to gain from a public option for healthcare - the former hopes to lower expenses for their retirees (huge expense for them). The latter hopes to stop mortgage foreclosures tied to medical expenses. The bad news is that often, the way to optimizing for powerful interests isn't very close to optimizing for the interests of the public at large.
It's not true in the legal field. Clients demand very specific breakdowns of hours worked, down to the specific issue researched/briefed/discussed, and will refuse to pay for fluff work. In the public sector end of the legal field, there's just too much work to take a break, especially in the DA and public defender offices.
Most people subconsciously employ (some of) the techniques described in the article, but the author seems to do it consciously. Note that he didn't claim to have invented the methods he used. That's why the article strikes a chord when you read it, but I doubt you would have been able to articulate your memory processes quite as well yourself.

Learning a skill by applying subconscious processes consciously greatly accelerates your mastery of it. People can pick up new languages over a period of a few years, but if you study it immersively, you can do so in a few weeks. That's why this guy is so good (note that most people don't win 500 grand on the show :-), and we can all learn from him.

I've been using priming and other tricks for a few years, and it has had a dramatic impact on my memory. (It has also been a lot of fun for me, but YMMV.) Two days ago, on my nightly jog, I noticed the license plate number of a parked car. Last night, as I started my jog, on a whim I tried to see if I could recall that number. It took a few minutes, as I tried to retrace my brief reflection the previous night on the patterns I noticed in that number, but I was successful. When I went past the car again, I realized I'd correctly recalled the number, and let out a yelp (slightly startling a few passers-by.) Anyways, the incident made an impression on me and made me realize how far my memory has come, so this morning I decided to hunt down this article for the benefit of fellow HN readers.
Imagining a Profitable YouTube
relation to hackers (esr) http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homestead...

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Private equity model needs to be overhauled
Not hacker news worthy. Flagged.
IPOs Coming Back: Filings Rise, Scrappings Fall
FYI, the purchased books list is not very representative since I buy so many books directly without flowing them through the wish list.

My book lists are better than my wish lists, not just because there is stuff in the book lists that is not in the wish lists, but also because I take time to maintain the book lists and only include the really good stuff.

I'm planning to update my book lists soon with recommendations for statistics, AI, machine learning, and other treasures.

Here are my book lists as of now:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/byauthor/A1JKHQFC...
Guy Kawasaki's Video Lectures [Academic Earth]
Unfortunately, it takes lots more time to prepare black coffee. Paradoxically. With instant, I just throw in saccharine and artificial creamer until it tastes okay. There is no instant coffee that's remotely drinkable black, in my opinion, so that means I'd have to spend time brewing.
I checked the file in the same way you would ascertain a Linux iso you downloaded from an unknown source over the internet is genuine. There is no doubt whatsoever about its origin and authenticity.
(WIRED contest) Find Evan Ratliff through a string of clues
The problem is the depression (clinical depression) is one of the most horrifyingly over-diagnosed diseases on the face of the planet.

EVERYONE gets depressed. If people didn't, we'd be living in Utopia. When you hand some person who is having a crappy day a pill and say something like "this is full of magic chemicals that are going to make you feel better", their outlook on life improves, and they aren't depressed anymore!

Clinical depression is different. Clinical depression is as much a real disease as anything else, and it cannot be treated with a placebo any more than a broken leg can. Real depression is not a psychological problem, it is a neurochemical one...

Clinical depression does not even always manifest itself as feeling sad or anxious. It can present itself as bad memory, poor focus, decreased creativity...These things, while psychologicacl problems, have neurological causes.

Yes, being sad does as well, but being sad is as easy to "cure" as being hungry.

This is why the placebo worked.
I don't think a significant prize is what the talk is about. It's talking about being paid a salary, being rewarded with extra vacation vs. not being paid and freedom/mastery/purpose.

A significant reward past some threshold (which will differ by society) is bound to motivate.
I believe people with kidney stones are advised to drink more, not less, to avoid time for the kidneys to build larger stones.
5 Must-Have Back to School Gadgets for College Student
Back to school time again, what are the must-have gadgets for next academic year? The article will give you 5 items at the entry level to help the student well packed for studying on campus and save some money for text books.
You're probably right but I imagine the host may still know the answers to some of the questions. In that case the answer may be easily discovered and the producers can't quite ask the host if they know the answer to such and such a question.
Etymology of the F-Word
This is a 64bit MBP so that is another difference.

Yeah, all of those installed without an issue for me too. Of course, you also had to build macports itself from source, since there is no binary yet.
It's a little more subtle than Kohn admits, however. While promises of rewards ahead of time evoke feelings of bribery or coercion, a system where praise and rewards are often the "natural outcome" serve as great motivation. Consider the products specializing in making things fun/addicting - video games. WoW throws in as many "rewards" as possible - hell, even changing your password is rewarded: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/404957/Picture%2039.png

Highly recommend further reading:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071351450/

Alfie Kohn's "No Contest" is also a great read in the same vein:
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp...
I was trying to imply that all should fall in bewteen (I.e. mutually beneficial)
Supposedly airplane cabins are kept at the equivalent of about 6000 ft above sea level, which would make a month on a plane only a little worse for you than moving to Denver.
VistA is an extremely complex piece of software written in a time that readability was not a top priority. Not to mention that there were file size limits, which spread modules over many different files, and the fact that most of the MUMPS keywords can, and are abbreviated adds to challenge of understanding and translating.

On top of the often hard to read modules, most of the real work is stored in "Globals" basically persistent sparse arrays. So if you really want to trace the code you have to spend half your time reading code and half your time looking through the "Database" for the rest of it.

I guess what I am trying to say is its a really hard job to bring VistA to a different platform without a large sum of money and some really smart people.
Great interview. I'm more curious now as to each of your personal histories. Each of you seem like incredibly gifted domain experts.
... about 40 years later ;-)
The sites main web provider was ordered to remove them, they have since relocated and are back up

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-taken-offline-by-swed...
What does homicide mean
This is quite possibly the stupidest, most non-sensical article about "reforming" the legal system that I've ever read. And I've read some really stupid stuff.

The guy spends half the article saying why arbitration doesn't work...and then proposes a system based on arbitration as the solution to our woes.
Ask HN: Effective data visualization operating on source code
We all see bar charts and line-graphs and histograms, and so on, to show trends and relationships between chunks of data. My question is this:
Has anybody here heard of an instance of making graphics using source-code as data that actually solved a specific problem? (Like showing a lisp-program parse-tree web. (though I can't think of any practical application for that either))
This is both inaccurate and out-dated.
The fact that "stimulus" has entered your standard issue citizen's lexicon as something that the government gives to a failing industry to keep it from failing is one of the most horrifying things to come out of the 2008 election cycle.

WHY is this looked at as okay? I get that the headline was a joke...but why is it even funny?

I'm sorry, I know this is off-topic (and more appropriate for a political forum like reddit), but I'm 22 years old. Fuck you, to the government that is taking away money that I haven't even had the chance to EARN yet so that companies that I have no interest in can continue existing. How did we get to a point where this is looked at as acceptable? Won't somebody please actually think of the children? You, government, the very people who are supposed to be looking out for me, are robbing from me in broad daylight, then having the audacity to tell me that it is for my own good?!

What the hell is happening?!!?
> As I said before, this seems like an extension of the protection system, and it ought to be applied in a similar manner.

And, indeed, this is how it is being applied. Edits to most articles will still be visible immediately, but some articles which have been chosen for "flagged protection" will require edits to be reviewed before they go live. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FLPPR for details.
A 'hack' is basically accomplishing something with a clever trick. He didn't hack the show, he hacked his brain. Although I still think the word 'hack' is inappropriate here anyway.
J: The World's Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment