skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO it's quite a simple explanation. You only have to watch 5 minutes of US advertising (I'm from the UK and living in Canada) to think you should have something wrong with you. If you think you should have something wrong with you for long enough, you will, it's called hypochondria and there's long been the suggestion of prescribing placebos to them until they're capable of getting access to a psychologist or psychiatrist.

You get the problem that when pills cure everything and you're sick and not on a pill, you worry. This makes you feel worse, which makes you sicker. The sugar pill not only has a placebo effect, but it also stops you worrying so really its having two effects opposed to the usual one we've classically seen.

When stress is the leading form of disease in the western world, you're going to have to remove stressed people from the drug tests to get impartial results. It just happens to suck that most sick people are stressed out. I guess they'll have to give a placebo to the test and control group to relieve stress and then give a second to the control group pretending its actual medicine.
The past is not a "sunk cost" given the IP issue. It sounds like the poster just continued research the prof was already doing in his lab.

At an extreme, suppose OP just abandoned the prof and started the company solo. Certainly the prof could later sue for his fair share. I would suspect the University (and/or agency the research funding came from) may have some IP rights here too.

Essentially, you can't just treat this as "the start of a business". You need to look at it as "we invented something in the lab, and now we want to sell it".

He can certainly negotiate, but 50/50 does not sound unreasonable. One key component in my mind would be "how much value was created already" versus "how much value will be added in the coming months/years".
Hoodiny hiring in Miami, Beach
I worked for a large state school, but my department was entirely funded by student fees.
I guess in this case hacking is tantamount to optimization by restricting the types of problems you'll study (if you believe the guide).
The problem is that allowing merges incentivizes zooming ahead in the merge lane, which should result in there still being drivers who can't merge, creating the jam. I don't have a good solution for this.
An alternative explanation for even highly visible/popular artists:

Said of Annie Leibovitz as she faces the loss of her personal collection: "Budget is not something that enters into her consciousness." http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.2f54f844fc040f6d...
The people who generate the traffic news bulletins for local radio stations have had this sort of system for years - it's not wrapped up in trendy terms like "crowdsourcing", but it is very similar.

They take phone calls from the public about traffic problems, log them all down in a system called Regis and are able to identify trends and blackspots from the years of accumulated data. Now, if the traffic news people could somehow make use of this GMaps data...
Advice on generating buzz for JackTheDonkey.com?
My name is David Katz, and I have recently launched a new online community (also known as a social networking site) called JackTheDonkey.com.

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The more you visit and interact with others, the more money JackTheDonkey.com donates to the charity of your choice....it's free and easy and works out to 1.1 cents every impression....EVERY IMPRESSION.

There are currently 21 charities from across Canada and the US (with the UK coming onboard shortly) that you can choose to support with your time online including:

- Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation
- Best Friends Animal Society
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- Canadian Tire Jumpstart®
- Card Therapy
- The Children's Wish Foundation of Canada
- Eating Disorders of York Region
- Lilah's Fund
- The Malibu Foundation for Environmental Education
- The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada
- New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity
- Ontario Special Olympics
- Pencils For Kids
- Plug In America (featured in Who Killed The Electric Car?)
- Ronald McDonald House Charities of Canada
- The Reena Foundation
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- Sustainable Laos Education Initiatives Inc.
- The Toronto Wildlife Centre
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Thanks in advance,

David
twitter.com/inyourfacebook
Sent to Kindle! ... props to whoever put that together.
> What has Conde Nast done?

They bought reddit. Have a look and tell me what you think they've done with the place.
This man is a saint. For years I've wished more people understood these principles. Instead, I get drivers who are angry at me for leaving a big space in front of my car. If only I pulled up right behind the car in front of me, they'd be 60 feet closer to their destination!!

I wish more people would check this site out. Traffic is a real problem that wastes billions of taxpayer dollars and hours on the road every year.

Another idea to make the roads better: lane-specific minimum speeds. Think about it. It would actually solve a ton of common traffic problems.
Neutron Bomb
I am trying to read this in a way that does not suggest you just want someone to regurgitate back to you the views you already hold in an entertaining way.

Yes, I realize that John Stewart was the only voice of sanity in the media over much of the last several years. But as he often tries to remind people, he is, in fact, a comedian. Brilliant, cutting, insightful, with an unparalleled nose for sniffing out bullshit, yes, but still a comedian.

You may find this hard to believe, but Bill O'Reilly's original schtick was dispensing with the "inane idea of journalistic neutrality", too. When people would say things he found outrageous, he would call them on it. Of course that rapidly devolved to him shouting over people and cutting their mike.

I am in no way criticizing John Stewart and the Daily Show. But I find the idea that so many people are un-ironically claiming the Daily Show as their prime news source a little bit troubling. For example, one thing that has bothered me is the obsession with continuing to talk about stupid Republicans. Yes, there are many stupid Republicans, saying enough stupid things to fill a 24 hour news cycle. But in the meantime, we have a Democratic President and Congress trying to put together some of the most sweeping legislative changes in my political memory. It is easy to put together an hour of making fun of Republicans. But couldn't that hour be better spent analyzing the complex health care bills now being debated? Can't we ignore the un-serious, obstructionist Republicans for a little bit to have a good idea of what we might be getting ourselves into?

If John Stewart is actually doing that kind of analysis, more power to him. If not, I would say we still need a news source in addition to the Daily Show. Maybe Leher's show does not fit the bill, but I'm opening to hearing about a U.S. news source that's better.
I'm not sure how useful this would really be in practice. It seems that it would only be useful to debug obscure bugs if it was used consistently everywhere. However, littering your code with these calls would make it a fair bit more dirty, for a very small reduction in debugging time (apparently - that's not event 100% clear... perhaps having to read all that extra code when looking for a bug will make it take longer anyway).

I'll pass on this one, myself. Ruby's best used by people who have become capable of not shooting their own feet without language safeguards.
Stumpted: the best interview questions
Quite arguably, rich people are often the most creative (or at least high income earners are judged by their benefactors as being the most creatively useful in society). Entrepreneurs need to be incredibly creative in innovating and meeting market demands. Sure, we may channel it differently but that doesn't make it any less creative and even arguably more so.
Apigee is Analytics for APIs
They already do that, it's called a q-ray bracelet I think.
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.

Yes

class A { ... f() ... }
class B extends A { ... f() ... }
class C extends A { ... f() ... }
A x = ... // a B object or a C object
x.f()

is polymorphism if anything.
Wait, your data imply that wind turbines pay for themselves in ~3 months. This is definitely not the case for the vast majority of turbines and locations, so 80 seems far too high.
NoSQL East : A conference of non-relational data stores
Guilt Your Children Well? The importance of guilt in child rearing
More to the point, where does this bizarre cult of the "artist", creating works of genius in complete majestic isolation from the governing realities of life in the real world, spring from? Whence the poet starving in his garret?

There's a similarly odd attitude to learning in some sectors of academia; from one perspective, education is a worldly enabler -- and from another, it is an end in and of itself and any hint of application to base commerce is positively contemptible. (MBAs versus classical philosophers, so to speak.)

The idea that art is disconnected from commerce doesn't apply across the board. Coco Chanel or Karl Largerfeld create(d) costumes that are certainly revered as works of art -- but they weren't expected to hold base commerce in disdain: in fact, their art was their business and their business was very lucrative indeed. Their sector (haut couture) was somehow exempt from the usual rules ...

I hypothesize that we're dealing with a cultural relic of the age of aristocracy. To the nobility who expected to inherit wealth, having to work for a living was a symptom of poverty: therefore it must be denied at all costs, which meant that anything they engaged in must remain impeccably untainted by money-grubbing. Anyone in such a culture with ambitions to better themselves had better play by the rules ... and so the more elevated the culture, the greater the distance between cultural activity and commerce. An exception could be made for couture -- aristocrats have employed tailors for millennia, and the more expensive and extravagant the tailoring the better -- but couture wasn't traditionally a career that aristocrats might enter. Academia or literature, on the other hand ...

And the aristocrats? Their descendants are still with us to this day, in the form of the hyper-rich -- and major patrons of the arts fall in this category.
I'm actually considering only using Facebook for business relationships. Probably 75% of my friends are customers or industry peers. In that regard, I find it a useful tool for connecting and getting instant feedback on things.

For personal connections I find it annoying for many of the reasons he states.
I think this objection still misses the point. In my vector rotation example, a vector object's internal state is just three floating-point numbers. Even for this simple and well-understood object, "v.rotX( 30 ); v.rotY( 30 );" can give a different internal state than "v.rotY( 30 ); v.rotX( 30 );".

However, I do agree with you that it's easy for bad programmers to create objects that are counter-intuitive and difficult to understand. It's up to the programmer to insure that an object isn't encrusted with dozens of badly-thought-out methods with no obvious paradigm for how to use them.
At first I thought it was a joke, and I found it pretty funny.

But you're not joking, so now I'm just disturbed.
Registration Error
Another problem is drivers who insist on driving in the left lane at all times and refuse to move over. IIRC, the left lane used to be referred to as the 'passing' lane...
Why are artists poor?

That's the wrong question.

In a state of nature, EVERYONE is poor.

Getting out of poverty means one thing: creating something that other people consider to have value, and then exchanging it for cash.

Heinlein had rules for writers: 1) you must write; 2) you must sell what you have written.

This is true for all artists. It's also true for all doctors, accountants, and software engineers.

If an individual artist is poor, he or she either isn't creating anything of value, or isn't finding the market and selling the work.

Period.
> your data imply that wind turbines pay for themselves in ~3 months.

No, it doesn't imply that - the data just imply that the energy needed to build the wind turbine is recouped after 3 months.
Energy cost to build something != Cost to build something. In the case of the wind turbine, consider: R&D costs, material costs, marketing costs, etc.
And maaaaan do they move a lot of burritos. Popular locations can have lines 20 or 30 people deep around dinner time. I'm never afraid to hop in line because they move very quickly. The production line is very finely tuned. I'm looking forward to waiting even less by ordering my burrito as I'm leaving the office.

They also treat their employees very well. My cousin is the head manager of one location. He was promoted to that position within 9 months because of how rapidly they were growing and they only hire managers via promotion.
I read this a while ago and I try to do it whenever I find myself in traffic. If nothing else, it is immensely less frustrating to drive a constant 15mph than to drive 30mph half the time and be at a complete stop half the time.
That donkey slash man, man slash donkey is freaking me the hell out.
Article headline title should be:

What We Can Learn From Elegance

Craigslist also wins by having the right categories, right font size, right colors. It is fast and the urls are predictable. Also, breadcrumb nav and search is good.

It was precisely what I was thinking when designing http://twitya.com - a twitter browser.

When you visit a site every day, it should be as fancy as your arm, not unlike this site.
The past few years proved that demand for oil responds to price signals. Driving in the US fell some five percent between 2007 and 2008, and transit use rose by a similar amount. The main reason Europeans today consume half the oil per capita of North Americans is that Europe imposed stiff gas taxes after the 1970s oil shocks. Europeans drive almost as much as North Americans (some 17,000 km per capita per year compared to 18,000 km per capita per year) but they do it a lot more efficiently.

But you're right that it takes a long time for price signals to drive a structural change in patterns of oil consumption. If the price of oil gets too high, many people are simply priced out of the market for oil - and in huge swaths of the USA, out of the market for jobs, homes, food, etc. as well.

Unfortunately, the sharp recession that high oil prices trigger causes a rapid (if temporary) collapse in oil prices. The result of leaving the price of oil up to the market is volatile prices and wildly fluctuating price signals that periodically sabotage the incentives for individuals to change their energy use patterns.
This is a mind-blowing and cool idea as others have said, but the idea of an object whose methods change depending on their internal state is a bit counter-intuitive.

Real-world objects don't have this property -- it would be like the gas tank hatch disappearing from my car after I fill it up, and reappearing once I drive around for a minute.
This would be more convincing if we all started out on a level playing field -- as opposed to, say, getting into Harvard because of daddy's connections, failing upwards to the limits of temporal power, then abolishing the inheritance tax that (horrors!) might hold our buddies back.

Hint: America isn't classless -- it has a hereditary aristocracy. They just don't put titles like "Lord" or "Baroness" in front of their names.
Yes, however with the increasing noise on the Internet it's much harder to eschew self-promotion in favor of pure artistic ideals (whatever those may be) because there are no longer just a small number of gatekeepers to convince. Increasingly you must go viral, though there is clearly more room for smaller successes given the lower overhead.
I understand your team loyalty. But if this isn't Kafka-esque, what is?

This is at least the third one of these I've seen on HN. Always the same story. Josef K. gets accused by google of bad behavior but he has no idea why and can't get anyone at google to tell him.
When I accidentally end up on Rt 128 at rush hour, I do this.

(I note that I was on a mailing list with a bunch of relatively smart people once, and I mentioned what I did - and even among the smart folks there was a lot of outrage because I was driving "wrong" or "stupidly".

That reaction contributed to me leaving the list shortly thereafter. )
isn't this article just common sense ?

it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to offer higher cost services to a deflated customer base.
The Burrito Bowl with Black and Pinto Beans, Veggies, Chicken, Pico de Gallo and Corn Salsa. Skip the rice, cheese and sour cream and it's possibly the healthiest lunch you can get in a fast food or fast casual restaurant.
Apparently blogger's automatic spam-detection system didn't like the flood of traffic that suddenly hit the blog as a result of this article making the front page. I've requested it be fixed, so hopefully that message won't stay there for long.
All rich people are not entrepreneurs, nor are all entrepreneurs rich. Moving the goal post a bit don't you think?
So, you are saying that because 'life is sufficiently good', we have no problems, and thus, no purpose. I would agree with what you are saying, assuming the absence of one major variable: interaction with the minds and hearts around us.

My belief is that we do not have purpose a priori, and that life is void, but through living - interacting with others, expressing emotions, and seeing a larger scope of the world around us - we can create our own purpose.

We are curious by nature; we tinker, play, and slave away at discovering connections between the entitites around us. As we grow, this fundamental desire does not wane; it grows. It grows as we grow. One day, we will find one such connection that will bring us joy, happiness. This is our true calling. It is because of this true calling that we find our purpose. Our true calling is our purpose.

Of course, not everyone can find it... So, let me try a second argument:

Why are we happy when a spouse gives birth? Why are we worried if a dear friend or companion is ill? Why do we shed tears at a loved one's wake? We feel because we developed a connection with the people around us. That is our purpose. If we cannot find a purpose within ourselves (above argument), we find purpose in preserving the life and happiness of the ones most dear to us (this argument).

If a person does not fall into either category, then that person truly doesn't have a purpose. <sarcasm>That is what depression and absurdism/nihilism is for.</sarcasm>

Also, I agree that people do have a intrinsic avarice. :-)
Here's a novel idea. Stop checking people's facebook status updates if you don't care!! Wow, that was really hard.
The eye roll button is truly a good idea.
I've been writing Ruby for years now and only a very tiny portion of my bugs are caused by type errors. I don't see how this is useful in practice.
More to the point, where does this bizarre cult of the "artist", creating works of genius in complete majestic isolation from the governing realities of life in the real world, spring from?

It's been around since the late 19th century, at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_boh%C3%A8me

But Mozart wasn't really treated like a genius working in majestic isolation. Famous and popular maybe, but that was it.

So I'd say aristocrats were subject to culture in this way, as well.
Ever since I can remember, I've always thought this was obvious, a product of random slowdown being amplified by reaction time delay. Motorway pileups are well known to be exacerbated by close driving, because each subsequent driver has to brake harder and harder to stop. Jams are just a less dramatic form of the same thing.
While interesting speculation, I don't understand why we've frontpaged this story on a community site generally focused on technology, startups and hacker culture. I'd love to see this on a community site called UnsolvedMysteryNews, but until one exists, flagging for relevance.
I think you're reading wayyyy to far into this. I wasn't making a this-versus-that argument. I was having a rant about X being totally unfit for the purpose for which it is sold (in this case, X is 'OOP' and its purpose is 'modeling systems in an intuitive, natural way that corresponds to the real world'). I even included the word "rant" in the first few sentences just so that people who don't like reading rants could close the window at that point.

So basically, I respect that you disagree, but complaining that something that was clearly labeled as a rant didn't present objective evidence is asking a little too much.
I believe that should be 'Brookline Ave' in those pictures
You would be surprised. Games like this have micropayments built in to the gameplay. While the number of users who fork out cash is low (~1%), the amount they pay on average is high (~$50). With good metrics, you can A/B test your way to doubling those numbers.
The submitted Time blog post is interesting but the first two posted comments are way below the usual standard of HN comments. The case fatality rate has to be calculated eventually from all cases that reach an outcome (death or recovery), so it is NOT correct to do arithmetic from current cases and currently reported deaths--there is always a lag in the reporting deaths as cases either resolve to health or end fatally. The other Time comment so far doesn't even deserve a response.
My favorite book of this type is Thinking Forth, available online at http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/. You will get a large dose of the Forth mindset, but it's mostly higher level design tips and not as specific to Forth as, for example, How to Design Programs (read: Functional Algorithms in Scheme). It's a fun read, and a great way to get a perspective on design that is different than what you get from the usual object-oriented or functional language centric sources.
Not what I said, but many rich people are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest ways to income mobility. It's also one of the more difficult ones. That being said, other high income earners tend to also need to be highly creative - from senior managers to consultants, to yes, sometimes even bankers (sometimes unfortunately so). To suggest however that "rich people are so uncreative" is however not only overstating the point/post but arguably, rather untrue.