skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I noticed was that most of the attention was between the left side and center of the page. The only attention point on the right side was the scroll bar. Made me think of the NEXTSTEP window manager where the scroll bars were on the left. The explanation at the time for this apparent deviation from the "standard" was that it kept the scroll bar closer to the user's primary attention areas on the page.

In Mac OS X i guess Apple caved to popular convention and moved the scroll bars to the right.
Ah....which Jesus? The real person about whom we know nothing or the fictitious facade that the catholic church has erected?
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz.

Had Louis XVI acted in the same way as Deng, continental Europe may still be under the heel of absolute monarchism today, with all the stupid pointless wars that entails. The French Revolution was a step forward for humanity, no matter how messy it was.
Private Practice - Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel welcome baby boy, Walker Diggs
Thanks. Great stuff by a great guy.
> Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way.

That's incorrect. Our genes don't care if they carry on by reproduction or by living longer in a single individual, but we care. How a body ages after reproductive age is in an evolutionary blind spot. Individuals with mutations that promote longer life aren't passing those genes on so the selective pressure if very small.

We don't have a clock that runs out of time. We just keep accumulating long-lived damage (misfolded proteins, advanced glycation endproducts, etc) until its enough to cause pathologies, from which we eventually die.

You are not the cells that you were a few years ago. Most have been replaced. But there are certain types of damage that your body can't fix, which is where an engineering approach could come in (for example, say we could have a vaccine that would make your body target beta amyloids in your brain, so you'd clear those misfolded proteins before they accumulate enough to give you alzheimer's).
at least we could turn the whole red sea into red wine!
Everything he talks about is subject to the old YMMV rule, except the last part about entrepreneurship - there isn't a single entrepreneur who walks away from the experience of starting a company unchanged. Success or failure, you're guaranteed to be a different person afterward. It's really not a bad deal :)
Gandhi is not the man you think he is: http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
My admiration of Eliezer comes from two things:

1) His work in the field of Artificial General Intelligence

2) His desire to see human rationality turned into something a bit more organized and easy to spread (see his post cycles at lesswrong.com).
An informative video, especially the % given to cofounders/early employees but this is a very atypical startup (when they were starting up) with VC funding (early on) and seemingly everything going right. I mean they signed up Wilson Sonsini as if you just walk in, pitch and that's it. That wasn't my personal experience talking to Wilson Sonsini (via a referral).

I think most of us have a lot harder time in all departments (getting cofounders, early employees for cheap, legal, etc.).
Came across this topic in another unrelated thread on this very site the other day. The below link was given and was quite informative about the "Old Friends Hypothesis" and Helminthic therapy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

I have a personal interest in any new treatments for MS so I am following this topic with great enthusiasm.
Bell/Telus are launching a GSM network soon (in November). Maybe (hopefully?) the Kindle will launch on their network.
> Sola fide is a controversial stance, at best

Talk about an understatement! The Protestant Reformation is one of those things that has had such a tremendous impact on the world that I think it might be impossible to imagine the world without it (I only spent a few minutes just now trying, though)
Cobol programmers are a goldmine of wisdom and knowledge. You will learn more about business software from an old, unsung bloke like Tony Marston than anybody celebrated methodology or blogsphere celebrity.

http://www.tonymarston.net/

Having said that. I really wish more people would ignore them, for my own competitive benefit.
I saw the Ted talks. Still bullshit.
They also didn't mention horizontal scrolling, which I personally cannot stand. Vertical scrolling is not nearly as objectionable, though in forms it's more of a bother than on pages where you are just reading.
Thrice. Twice at Apple, once at Pixar. (I'm counting NeXT as the second time at Apple. Though perhaps they should count separately.)
> Basically, the only people that buy the whole load of nonsense are folks that desperately want to live forever

How about people who just don't think getting sick and frail looks like fun? People who don't want to lose loved ones, who think that 100-200k people dying each day is a tragedy, and who think that we and future generations should have a choice on the matter (you can refuse any therapies that are developed if you want, but shouldn't make the choice for others).

I bet you're not against finding a cure for cancer or malaria. Why would you think it's ridiculous to try to find a cure for the diseases of aging?
> I saw the Ted talks. Still bullshit.

Please elaborate.

Why do you think it's bullshit? Why shouldn't it be possible to repair damage that accumulates in our cells? You've offered no clear arguments so far.
That's a semantic argument. But what it means for aging is functionally the same; we're programmed to last a certain amount of time (when there is pressure) and when the pressure runs out... we break down. This is essentially the same as having a programmed break down time.

Secondly, the argument on tarantulas does not rest on group selection at all. For any one male tarantula, he spreads his genes better by living 2 years than living 8. Long living male tarantulas don't do as well, presumably because of some trade-offs between reproduction and lifespan. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory
Google never lies.
I have never, ever, heard of a law firm turning down a new client. Now, WSGR can decline to defer expenses at their discretion, but surely anyone can engage WSGR to do the basic incorporation work for a reasonable fee.
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz.

Gorbechev was fairly similar to Deng. He liberalized the economy and increased freedom of speech, but he did not allow democracy. Yeltsin introduced democracy, and what was the result? A terrible economy, a dramatic rise in suicide rates and alcoholism, and now under Putin, even speech is becoming less free. If only there could have been two Dengs, one for China and one for Russia!

The heel of monarchism? What heel? The fundamental problem of monarchy was not that it was oppressive (it wasn't), but that it wasn't a very good military Schelling point. Were taxes higher under monarchy? Was their less freedom of speech? Were there more wars? No, no, and no. Where do you get your history?

Look at the history of free speech for example. Pretty much every country that has gotten free speech, originally got free speech while under non-democratic government (Britain under the monarchy, France under Louis the XVI, U.S. under British Colonial rule, Germany under Allied military command, Japan under allied military command). Democracy has generally either been neutral or corrosive towards freedom ( the French Revolution, the terrorizing of the loyalists in America http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=f... , Nazis, etc ).

And pointless wars? The Wars of the French Revolution killed far, far more than any monarchist war. Not only that, they invented the usage of mass slave armies to fight the war. The French Revolution Wars and the Napoleonic Wars presaged the great Democratic total wars that followed - the Civil War, WWI, and WWII.

Had Louis the XVI put down the mob, the nationalization, conscript armies, and total war may have never been invented. Prussia would have never felt the need to unify to protect themselves against France. It's almost impossible to imagine World War I or World War II without the Wars of the French Revolution.
Not that these solve the problem, but here are some tips to help mitigate negative effects:

1. Audit your Gmail access history. In the footer, there is a a message "Last account activity...Details". Click the "Details" link to view recent access history (web and mobile), and for the option to deauth all other sessions.

2. Under your Google account settings, go to Security > Password recovery options. Add your cell phone number under SMS. (https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount)

3. Use a separate e-mail address for password resets, and just for that.

I only follow 2 out of 3 of my suggestions. I was pleased to discover the auditing and SMS recovery features, and thought I'd share them.
Operation Phish Phry
It's true that individuals that live a little bit longer but have the same end of their reproductive period do no better in the gene pool. However, if it were advantageous to live longer, and those folks had a slightly longer reproductive period, then we would expect the lifespan-while-fertile to increase. Presumably this would also increase the overall lifespan as well, but really that's irrelevant to this discussion.

Yes, we keep accumulating damage. But we have mechanisms to control that damage. And clearly there's not a set limit on it. Tarantulas that only live 2 years are not constrained by cell damage. Cell damage is allowed to happen.
Dude, that well and truly sucks.

I work around hospitals some and every once in a while I get the odd feeling after watching a specialist scratch his head over a fuzzy black and white "slice" made by in imager with a magnet the size of a garbage truck that its all still so primitive.

Medicine has a long way yet to go.
1) sexy language.

2) lack of competing books.

3) growing readership.

4) unnecessary, and completely unjustified hype and a messianic devotion by uninformed and lazy masses to the New Thing.

Finally, a Lisp is popular. Let's just see how that works out.
In what way does he inspire you, though?
I'm not against it, I just find his predictions to be so optimistic as to be unrealistic.

Cancer is, effectively, a form of aging, which is why it's so damn hard to cure. Fortunately, it's what happens when one cell breaks down. Most other aging happens to all your cells, all at once.
Are you using coroutines in Perl or some other language? And I wanna see that code in any case :p
I've been working my way through Coders at Work, and have been struck by the variance in opinion on assorted methodologies (either by direct statement, or by omission or allusion). The one consistency is that few of the interviewees seem deeply interested in what are otherwise hot topics.

Each seems to have figured out a way that works for them and their world.

Now, I've only read through 4 or 5 of the interviews, so maybe this a fluke, or perhaps I've remembering what I want to believe, but about the only theme running through the descriptions of how they work is, "Think carefully about what it is you're trying to do."
I think Twitter's is great, and digg's isn't half bad either.

On the other side of the coin, Google's GData APIs (e.g., Calendar, YouTube), Paypal and Facebook are cumbersome IMHO.
Are there any well-regarded economists who think the infant industry argument is a good argument?

Mankiw mentions it briefly in The Principles of Economics[1], which if I recall correctly is the most widely-used economics textbook, saying "Economists are often skeptical about such claims, largely because the infant-industry argument is difficult to implement in practice...many economists are skeptical about the infant-industry argument in principle...Protection is not necessary for an infant industry to grow."

Paul Krugman spends a few pages on it in International Economics: Theory and Policy[2], saying "The infant industry argument seems highly plausible, and in fact it has been persuasive to many governments. Yet economists have pointed out many pitfalls in the argument, suggesting that it must be used cautiously.

First, it is not always good to try to move today into the industries that will have a comparative advantage in the future...Second, protecting manufacturing does no good unless the protection itself helps make industry competitive

...

More generally, the fact that it is costly and time-consuming to build up an industry is not an argument for government intervention unless there is some domestic market failure. If an industry is supposed to be able to earn high enough returns for capital, labor, and other factors of production to be worth developing, then why don't private investors develop the industry without government help?

...

In practice it is difficult to evaluate which industries really warrant special treatment, and there are risks that a policy intended to promote development will end up being captured by special interests."

[1] Mankiw's textbook: http://books.google.com/books?id=oRgQ2goeFzwC&pg=PT222&#...

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=L5DaCeXtNq0C&pg=PA257&#...
I was referring to engagement beyond basic incorporation but investor agreements, series A docs, etc.

We were turned down (in 2000) by WSGR. We went with Orrick instead.
Through your own argument, you've conceded that aging happens when the body doesn't invest enough resources in controlling damge, and that the amount of investment made can vary widely between species and even within a species. So then what in the world leads you to believe that, provided with appropriate medical support, the body can't be made to invest far more?
Carmack definitely has a place in my mind as one of the greatest hackers ever. I was kind of bummed that he did not respond to the interview request for the "Coders at Work" book. However, the "Masters of Doom" book offered a fun insight into his early hacking adventures!
I am an ardent critic of Gandhi, and many of those criticisms of Gandhi are worth considering and outside of private discussions, rarely brought up in India.

However, for an article that criticizes Gandhi for being racist, the author has some nerve saying:

"Throughout his entire life Gandhi displayed the most spectacular inability to understand or even really take in people unlike himself--a trait which V.S. Naipaul considers
specifically Hindu, and I am inclined to agree."

Edit: The article is also not without glaring inaccuracies. For example, the author claims that Gandhi supported Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason Subhash Chandra Bose even quit the Indian National Congress was because Gandhi had him kicked out because of ideological differences.
homer simpsons.
i know, i know, his totally a jerk, but i wish i could spend just one day with him.
I want to figure out how to get that out of my rss feed. I think that subreddit is destroying the place....

(and I know how to turn it off my front page, just not the rss feed).
The guys who did the moon landings. What an amazing display of engineering and courage.
Twitter Marketing Tips
A good test is how easy it is to get started. If you can just make a call to curl to get started, awesome.

If things change without warning, that is bad.

If the site is down often, that is bad.

While users are awesome, and it is great to have a developer community, depending too much on them to do your QA is asking a lot.
The Printliminator
De Grey's research is aimed at preventing cancer, not curing it. De Grey names his efforts "engineered negligible senescence". Senescence means the increase in your probability of developing a deadly disease within the next N years as you grow older. The probability of developing most cancers increases rapidly with age. The aim is to prevent that increase.
An open letter to micromanagers «  Scott Berkun
Craig Newmark for being truly a nerd, yet having an enormous impact on society. He spoke at my undergrad commencement (also his alma mater), and what really hit me from his speech was, wow, you WERE an engineering nerd just like all the rest of us.

He inspires me because through his great success, he's remained extremely humble and down to earth. It really seems like he just wants to keep his site going as a public service. They donate a large portion of their income to charity as is.. if only all public services could be run as well that they GIVE extra money away!
I wonder how right you are? I suspect you're probably spot on.

If that's the case, who's rushing for gold now that we're paying attention too?
Grand Central Dispatch is included! And with a super clean and simple api (see the code snippet on the blog post).

Laurent (the lead developer of the project) is a friggin genious. 0.5 is definitely the first step to MacRuby catching on in a big way.

If this doesnt come to the iphone in the next year or so, I'm going to be extremely disappointed. All thats needed is the ObjC 2.0 garbage collector, which Apple has on their roadmap. And yes, it'll be optional for non macruby iphone apps (like it is for Mac desktop apps currently)
I'm sure the authors put as much effort into the conspiracy theory as they did the spelling of his name.
Gorbechev did not kill the people gathered at the White House to demand their freedom from communism--he dissolved the Soviet Union and allowed liberalization. Deng may have not had the power to dissolve the communist system in China, but a recognition of the rights to free assembly and free political speech, combined with a concrete plan towards devolving power away from the Communist Party, would have been a better option than killing people for asking for it. Russia's economy has grown leaps and bounds in the last several years--while they had a contraction immediately after the fall of communism, this was mainly due to Soviet overproduction of unnecessary and unwanted goods.

The British monarchy was a constitutional monarchy with almost all of the real power devolved to the nobles and the commons by the time of the French Revolution, quite unlike the French monarchy prior to the revolution. It's a fallacy to compare the two. The American revolution was an issue of home rule, not an issue of democracy vs. monarchy. And not the first such conflict the British Empire would face.

The Wars of the French Revolution were monarchist wars, waged to protect Europe's monarchs from the seeds of dissension spread from the revolution. So, technically, were the Napoleonic wars, as Napoleon was an emperor. However, the Napoleonic Code was a step forward for civil rights in Europe.

The aggressors in WWI and WWII were either monarchies or dictatorships: Germany under the Kaiser, Austia-Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottomans under their monarchy, Germany and Italy under fascist dictatorships, and Japan under a monarchy. At best you can pin Nazi Germany under the banner of democracy, since the Nazis were technically elected to parliament (after their street thugs started the Reichstag fire and beat up all the opposition). But since the Nazis were outspoken detractors of the very idea of democracy, even that is a stretch.
Whats up with Russia and Venus? While most of the world focus on Mars, Russia has over the years had a strange fascination with Venus. Do they now something that we don't?
Alexander Hamilton:
The Man who enabled Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase with his shrewd policies (like debt assumption - cool economic hack) as Secretary of the Treasury. Federalist Papers are/were invaluable too.

Bonus point for not having a mausoleum, library or any other grand memorial as a monument to him.
>Picking 1900 as a random point to correlate with GDP in 2000 is arbitrary and meaningless. It seems like the author picked an arbitrary variable to make a point without enough subject knowledge or citations to back it up.

I think it's unfair to focus on the lack of details in Glaeser's blog post, when it links to his 52-page paper[1] (which the post is a quick summary of). In the paper, he writes: "the Buenos Aires data suggests that less than one-half of the population could both read and write in 1869. By 1895, the next available data point, the literacy rate had shot up to 72 percent, which still meant that a substantial portion of the population was unable to either read or write. It isn’t until 1939 that more than 90 percent of the population in Buenos Aires is literate."

It appears that he is focused more on the historical conditions of Argentina's education than on present-day conditions.

[1]http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/files/Glaes...
Edmund Hillary. For using his fame only to help people, and always being humble.
Fully true, but how many times you will be able to justify that refactoring to the ones who asked ?

Most of times, all they want in a "fast, small new important feature to put in a new menu item". It's hard to make them realize that because you add new features, most of times the dynamic of the UI has to be rethought.

And it ends usually in an application with countless menus and modes even for these menus. So redesign is important, but how do you justify to your marketing (or head programmer) that they have to "pay" for a redesign of what they "paid" already months ago, just for one feature ?
Our perception of all public figures is a facade. Walter Lipman's book "Public Opinion" comes to mind:

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality. Hence the modicum of truth in the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet. There is only a modicum of truth, for the valet, and the private secretary, are often immersed in the fiction themselves. Royal personages are, of course, constructed personalities. Whether they themselves believe in their public character, or whether they merely permit the chamberlain to stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human. The biographies of great people fall more or less readily into the histories of these two selves. The official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait, not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism, hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an index of how the authors like to think about themselves. (source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Lippman/ch01.html )
In so many ways. Starting with the dedication he has for his work.
Great, as a paying customer of scout they are telling me their going to now focus on getting new customers instead of servicing the ones they have.

Might make sense from a business standpoint, but probably something you dont want to advertise :-).
Fravia for creating http://searchlores.org/ and inspiring me and I bet countless other seekers/hackers/reverse engineers. His website has articles on everything from "reality cracking" to searching the deeper web. His recent death saddened me deeply but I hope that his website will hopefully taken over by someone who will continue updating it.