skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fortunately, there's more of a casual drinking culture brewing (no pun intended) in the U.S. based around craft beer and other alcoholic beverages. I probably have a beer a day on average, but I make a point to never get drunk.
Not sure exactly which way the author meant it, but the phrase "get people acclimatized to salaried work" could be interpreted as including society at large (both the owners/employers and the employees).
> Why? I'm just not friendly.

Maybe the problem isn't with other people.
At grave risk of downvoting: eponysterical much?
I agree with most of his points, and that's why I don't drink to excess. But I'm happy to have a glass of red wine with a steak or a nice stinky piece of cheese, and I don't suffer any of the drawbacks he states. I don't feel an urge to continue drinking either, because yeah, being drunk and hungover later sucks!

Drinking (or doing anything) responsibly doesn't just mean "find a DD and then get trashed", it can also mean "find satiation with a little bit of something nice."
This is good news. While their intentions may have been good, the information they were requesting could have haunted the students being tracked for the rest of their lives. As the government has asserted in their defense of
PRISM and related services, once this information has been shared with a company it is often treated as semi-public, and as anyone on this site should realize, information which is not protected as by law (HIPPA, etc) can never be made private again. (Information which is protected by law still can't be retracted, but at least legitimate companies have to think twice about using it.)

[ http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-... ]

[ http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/i... ]
Do the correctness of generalizations matter to someone living on the street?
Alcohol is a prevalent part of a lot of lives — it's what a lot of people do to be sociable.
The Brain on Alcohol: Why Some Drinkers Blackout
Probably chows down on ritalin like half of HN. ;)
I'm wallowing in self pity after a great night last night. New Zealand is like Oz and the UK in that it has a huge, ugly, binge drinking culture. I was caught up in it for a while but eventually I had to perform a bit of self-reflection, realise that I was a bit of a dick when I lost control and really focus on what I wanted. Turns out I enjoy drinking with friends, but I hate being wasted and out of control. I also really enjoy the taste and variety of the conduits which we use to numb ourselves.

Why am I posting this? Because it sounds like OP and myself (and likely many, many others) have gone through a similar experience of calibrating ourselves to alcohol, but found ourselves coping with the downsides in different, equally-valid ways.
I think you mean "made something awesome", no?
Playing with Privilege
Not sure what you are getting at. If you add something to the interface of Awesome, then any call site which passes a thing not having a PerformAwesomeness() method will fail to compile.
"It is expensive." is definitely relevant. If my fiancee and I go out for dinner and we each have a couple of drinks, the tab at least doubles.
Just checked out the game trailer and it looks really good! The concept seems fun and the graphics are amazing. However I have to admit that I feel the title is not appropriate and a better one should have been chosen.
this article should have been posted last night
He's not making an argument about nuanced tradeoffs, though. He's saying that he gets no benefit ("It makes me feel bleh", "Alcohol does not increase my enjoyment of activities") and that there are some drawbacks for him ("It dumbs you down", "It's expensive"). You might have different personal experiences with alcohol, but you can't deny the author his.
I'm really with the author here. I don't drink much, and people usually ask me why when I'm out. I just don't find it all that enjoyable most of the time, to be honest.

also, there's this:
>There is a longer list of things I'd rather spend $100 on

I just want to take a moment to suggest this as an alternative. http://www.amazon.com/Parker-Sonnet-Original-Matte-Fountain/...
I work with a consulting firm, and while I do mostly private sector projects, I get stuck in DoD and DHS projects sometimes....
The DHS is a tremendously broken organization. It is bloated, wasteful, filled with overpaid middle management idiots, run by overpaid middle management idiots, and has a conservative (in a bad way) culture due to the politically biased security clearance process of the United States. (What I mean by that is the security clearance process weeds out left of center people. Peace Corps, attended school at Berkeley, smoked pot? Forget about it, you're out. Well, the smartest people often fit this profile. And they ain't at DHS)

This article hits the nail on the head in one sense. The hiring process is broken for the Federal government, but so is the firing process. If you are a productive individual and you work in a place where lazy, late to arrive, early to leave, incompetent individuals are not only tolerated but promoted, why would you stay? If you do stay, why would you work hard? That's the US Federal gov't GS workforce, particularly the DoD and DHS, in a nutshell.

TLDR: The Federal government is not only slow to hire, but because it doesn't fire, let alone identify incompetent and lazy shitbags, the Dead Sea effect is in constant overdrive with competent people.
The mentioned book "The Everything Store" gives hundreds of examples of this corporate culture, culminating in the quote:

>"If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," notes one former employee. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground."

It's a good read on how not to lead a company, and I'm reasonably sure Amazon will fail once Bezos dies - the success seems tobe based on Bezos' enormous drive.

I would never work there.
That fretboard (well, 22-fret version) is going on a PRS-style single cut with no magnetic pickups, just a Graphtech Ghost wraparound piezo bridge. Cocobolo fretboard, sapelle body (I think), curly redwood top. Should be a nice one.
I live in a small town in the Bay Area called Pacifica, and its pretty rude to not chat up the cashiers at the grocery store here. They get bored without human contact, their job is pretty repetitive. Over time you get to know them. Its kind of cool, and why I like Pacifica.
I empathize with this article. I rarely drink, I get drunk about a half a dozen times a year, and shifting my social life away from bars and restaurants has enabled me to afford a lifestyle I otherwise couldn't have.

I put every penny I saved from my former bar oriented social life into a savings account, and in two years I put over $65k away, which turned into seed money for my own startup.

This is a point of pride for me, and overall has enriched my life in ways social drinking never could have.

I've grown distant from certain friends because of it, and I get questions nearly everytime I do go out and refuse a drink. These things are not important to me, and those people less so.

Moral of the story is, people should live their lives how they see fit, and that is for both drinkers and non drinkers alike.
> Why HR should risk, what is the point? They will find another developer who have more in common with their management expectations.

Except they won't. The talent pool isn't infinite, passing up talent for silly reasons is a major opportunity cost. The whole article is about how that's having a huge impact on the government. I imagine it has just as much impact elsewhere, except few people have the guts to answer the "why can't we find anyone?" questions with "because you already disqualified the best candidates".
If beer didn't have alcohol, I wouldn't drink it. It's the least awful alcoholic drink I've found.
A simple way to get there is to store each function and arguments in an object, as a list of draw operations, instead of executing the functions. Add in an object id (list index) to return to the caller, and then the caller can modify parsmter values between frames.
99% PI is what introduced Kowloon. The show did an amazing job of conveying just how special that place was. It is an great pod cast that captures the majesty of day to day design and architecture.

It is unfortunate that the images don't work on the episode page.
I dont believe the logistics of a right to privacy would never work. I think the founders knew this and instead wrote very broad laws against the kind of abuses which may result in a loss of privacy. Privacy is very hard to define, protection against unreasonable search and seizure of papers and belongings, not so much. Why electronic messages and documents aren't considered blindly as "papers" is beyond me. The intent was obvious.

At least to me.

Further, I dont really care about my privacy nearly as much as can be done with a lack thereof.
I don't drink. Most people think it's unusual or weird.
Remember, if boarding is screwed up and slow (and studies have suggest that it's significantly faster to board window, middle, aisle, all things being equal), then early boarding is a privilege/perk they can sell.
as a former, disenfranchised education technologist, comments like this: “If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” are all too familiar.

teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented.

if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the education space.
This feels like a very "European" comment.

Really the only thing you could nitpick is in points 7 and 9, because that's where he makes generalizations about alcohol's effects on others. Near as I can tell, the rest of the list is primarily about how it affects him as an individual. As far as alcohol being a depressant, that's pretty well established by now. I'm just not sure what exactly screams "American" about this article to you. It seems you're generalizing a lot of things about Americans just as you claim he's generalizing a lot of things about alcohol. Just not really sure what point you're getting at.
Is there anything wrong with the CEO forwarding an email, adding just a question mark? It is shorthand for "Can you please tell me what is going on here and how it can be taken care of?". It isn't like if he typed out a whole sentence, it would cause the person who panics at a "?" to somehow not panic. They'll probably just read too much into the sentence and panic even more.
I've had that idea about INTPs and INTJs too.

I am in the camp that being aspie is a different way of being, not a disorder.
> None of his points explain even from a personal perspective why he doesn't drin

Doesn't it?

[1] > It makes me feel bleh.

Heck I would stop there. "Why don't you like ham and cheese sandwiches?" "It makes me feel bleh...". Ok case closed.

[2] > Alcohol does not increase my enjoyment of activities.

That is a response to the American cultural expectation perhaps. "You will have more fun when you drink". Well and he doesn't seem to.

Neither do I, actually, I am just as introverted and awkward as when sober. But I do like the taste of some beers and wines. So I drink those once in a while.

[3] > It is expensive.

I don't know, we already have 3 good reasons. Alcohol in US _is_ ridiculously expensive due to taxes and regulations. Serve it in a bar at a social scene and it can set you back hundreds of dollars per session as he said.

On a meta level, I guess, even discussing or thinking about seems odd. It is his personal preference, why does he need to explain himself? The fact that he does, and that we are using so many words to talk about it, also tells something interesting about how drinking culture is part of the culture and it is different perhaps countries, and that people feel strongly about it in one way or another.
Arduino, ProcessingJS and SocketIO in Action
The north bay is chattier.
Good. The world needs an open source as solution that can be deployed locally and respects student privacy.
It is about the context. Given that it probably happens when everyone else is intoxicated slightly, it probably doesn't seem condescending to the person asking, they are just having fun, being warm and friendly but since he doesn't drink they might seem like assholes. See his last point on that.
Serve it in a bar at a social scene and it can set you back hundreds of dollars per session as he said.

"Per session"?! My point is that his article is ostensibly about why he doesn't drink at all, but his bullet points only legitimately apply to why you shouldn't have 20 drinks in an outing. Having one or two beers at a bar in the U.S. will not set you back $100 (it'd have to be a pretty weird bar). The fact that you don't want to spend $100 is a good reason not to order 20 beers, but not a good reason to avoid alcohol entirely. I don't like spending a lot when I go out either, but this doesn't prevent me from ordering a smallish number of beers. Heck, "why I don't go to bullshit white-tablecloth restaurants" would a better article if that's your main issue. When I think of peer-pressured outings that resulted in annoying overspending, $40 steaks figure a lot more heavily in the story than $5 beers do.
> By the end of the train ride, commuters who talked to a stranger reported having a more positive experience than those who had sat in solitude.

Explanation 1: Either there are more extraverts than introverts in Chicago, or more extraverts volunteered to participate in the experiment (selection bias).

Explanation 2: When it comes to deriving pleasure from short, shallow interaction with a random stranger, there's not much difference between extraverts and introverts. Hell, I'm officially diagnosed with Asperger's and I still enjoy those quick interactions. I just happen to be not very good at it.

As the article itself suggests:

The great thing about strangers is that
we tend to put on our happy face when we meet them,
reserving our crankier side for the people we know and love.

But there's one thing that the article fails to mention.

As an autistic introvert, I'm still capable of deriving pleasure from talking with strangers from time to time, but the need to put on a happy face and consciously maintain it also puts a great strain on me. Too much mask-wearing makes me exhausted. At the end of the day, I no longer even have the energy to conjure up a passable mask, so I return to my usual cranky self. In other words, the momentary burst of happiness has a significant energy cost, and the ROI for introverts may be much lower (or even negative) than it is for extraverts.
Stunningly rapid urban development, seen through Google Street View
This probably surprised regulators and the exchanges too, as it is a requirement for automated trading.
This hits the nail on the head for me. I'm a college student in the US right now, and drinking is a big part of the "college experience". I don't like drinking — that's not to say I don't every once in a while (think once every two months), I just don't really enjoy it like other people do. It makes me uncomfortable that I'd be around other people I potentially don't know without all my faculties.

I think it's just a control thing for me — I don't want to lose control of myself and do stupid things. Even normally, I'm super self-aware, and that'd just get worse with alcohol.
He thinks that Google is on "our side." Sire they were, when it convenient to their bottom line. Now, on commercial queries all above fold is paid links, not what's "best for the user."
I've never had a drink for personal and religious reasons. From an outside perspective, those are all the same kinds of reasons I'd have.

Primarily, it's shocking to me how much people spend on alcohol. I was out with some co-workers that were spending $10 per shot. That was a bit of shock for me.
"It's a good read on how not to lead a company"

But they are very successful. People say the same thing about Jobs, and again, they are very successful. People that say, "this is no way to lead a company" have to have counterexamples of equally successful companies that aren't run this way.
> A glass of wine with dinner, for example, can enormously enhance the experience

Can you explain how exactly? Is it just greater social ease as the author suggests in the article? I'm intrigued, I don't drink wine and hardly ever have a beer while eating.
Before Bezos settled on the name Amazon, he wanted to call it Relentless. In fact, the domain http://www.relentless.com still leads to Amazon. That fact seems indicative of his leadership style, in light of this article.
He also mentions health as a concern but light to moderate drinkers (1-3 drinks per day) are generally healthier than teetotalers, who are then generally healthier than heavy drinkers (>3 drinks per day).
A drink of alcohol per day is shown to reduce the risk of heart disease significantly.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0216/026.html
Why didn't they remove the old code first?

In LibreOffice, we are spending a LOT of time trying to remove ununsed and outdated code.
For some elements maybe.

Iron, glass, paper and plastic will never run out though. And we already recycle lots of metals.

You would probably like this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification That's how you recycle bulk garbage, but it's expensive in terms of energy, so we have to solve that first.
But it conveys "outsider" status and puts someone on the defensive. Would you like to be asked "Why?" every time you oder a drink?
Yeah, everyone is friends at the dog park.
This seems to ignore the fact that some people are more introverted than extroverted (meaning how people "recharge" -- either via "alone time" or by talking to others, respectively). I am more introvert than extrovert, and when I've worked at jobs where I've commuted back and forth, I loved the alone time I had on the bus or train to and from work -- it really helped me regain some mental energy before and after work. If someone started talking to me it would just drain that away, and I'd much rather save that energy for coworkers or loved ones.
I wrote the article, and I honestly wrote it primarily for myself and didn't expect others to find it interesting. It's a question I get on a more than weekly basis, I figured it was time to sit down, think about it deeply, and write it down.
A traceroute takes a few seconds. 99% of the time I call it's mainly to tell them to please track down the problem (outside of my home... only once over the years was it my modem) and fix it. To have to wade through 20 minutes of prelims, when a 20 second command could make it obviously unnecessary, that's just dumb.

The fact that you thought I was suggesting skipping the basics is bewildering.
Well, "terrific" can be used as "awesome" too so...
Having tatoos and being in software development doesn't automagically make someone "best candidate."

There is still risk that person who wear tatoos is trying to get against system. Just like girls would be expected to be less technical, just like foreigners would be expected to be hard
communicate with.

Startups and other frugal types of businesses can afford that. Big corps - not really. The whole point of big corporations is to standardize everything and run as few expenses (including time of CTO to interview "non standard" candidate) as possible.

Again, simplifying a lot, HR have either hire someone wearing tatoos, or tell "well, for salary we have in budget we don't have anyone." So why they should risk?
You were spending more on nightlife than rent? Wowsa.
I take it your city doesn't have Amazon Fresh vans all over the place yet?
That is just one of the points, not the main one.

In general, it depends where, how often, and with whom he goes out. It does add up even with comparing "dinner" vs "dinner+drinks". Dinner+drinks if done often will add to quite a bit over time.

Mixed drinks can be ridiculously expensive. Not keeping up with 4,5 drink per night, or not buying the next round for example, will also raise the same question "why aren't you drinking". He'd probably be back writing the same article just saying "I am sick of people asking me why I only drink 1 drink a night and not 3".
It's atypical behavior, and so people are naturally intrigued. Inquiry doesn't necessarily imply judgement, just curiosity.
Anecdotally speaking, I went to a party which had a few Amazon employees in attendance. After a few drinks, two of them let on to the group that they were quitting their jobs because they were sick of Amazon - and high fives were shared all around, including among the folks that weren't leaving. Doesn't seem like a happy group.
Survivorship bias. I bet they've knocked back a lot of books which wouldn't have made a lot of money.
Here's a video showing various "Easter eggs" inside the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUsgtNxCOOk
No New Tools
JavaScript and HTML are a lot more bloat than machine language code written to the wire.

Writing in a language appropriate to the task is almost always the right tradeoff.
If only it were that simple. HN is about optimizing for intellectual curiosity, and that is only one of the reasons why stories get upvoted.
Everything in life is a skill - even drinking alcohol. While most of people think that drinking alcohol is only pleasure it can be amazing deal breaker and social skill needed in some situation.

I drink usually 3-4 times a week (not to get drunk, but few glasses of coke and whiskey or vodka).
Does it make me dumber? Yes, but it also helps me to focus on just one task. My productivity jumps 3-4 times for that time.

Does it leave me hangover? No. There is a way to drink alcohol and never have hangover (in last year I had hangover just once).

Do I get drunk? No. There is a way to drink alcohol and stay in sweet spot. Mixing alcohol like a teenager dosent help.

Do I lose my social skills? No. Look up - if you know what you are doing you are the only one at the party that is semi-sober while drinking - so all the stories belong to you.

I remember back in the days when drinking didn't equal to alcoholism (hello Mr. Churchill), smoking cigarettes did not equal to cancer (hello anyone 50 years ago), and well behaving while intoxicated was an important indicator of persons self-control.

I rather to do a business with person that can stay cool after alcohol than with one that dont drink/behave like idiot after few drinks. Remember beginnings of some alcohol fuelled startups (FB, Google etc...). Thats the real character revealer in our "FB profile page" world.
> You might have different personal experiences with alcohol, but you can't deny the author his.

I can deny the author his unfounded generalizations, though. He's explaining why he doesn't like getting trashed, going out to a club and having a dozen drinks. All his bullet points are about that situation. Sure, I agree that is bad. It results in hangovers, feeling shitty, large expenditures of cash, and other such bad events. So: don't do that. But that's not a problem with alcohol, that's a problem with party/club culture.

But don't write an article about something different. If you're writing about why you've changed your ways from going out to clubs and getting hammered, entitle it "why I no longer go out to clubs and get hammered". Don't try to over-generalize your experience.
Now add a fifth of whiskey to the experiment and have the conversation start with "Ey, you, c'mear, y'know what?"

(That's how some of us perceive random strangers engaging us in frivolous chit-chat, regardless of their BAC.)