skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd disagree with it being far more "powerful" than Adderall, having been prescribed both at one time or another. They're effects on me are quite different:

Adderall - I seem to focus on anything I needed to without resistance, similar to how I would focus on something I enjoy. The side effects on me were (to me) extreme emotional instability, which was too off putting to use regularly - could not play well with others.

Modafinil (and Adrafinil before that) - The concentration assistance is there for when I'm focused, but it doesn't seem to help me stay on topic - I'm still easily distracted. The upside is I can still play well with others, and if anything seem more energetic (I hit the gym every morning I use it). The reduced sleep effect is real, I went from an average of 6 hours a night to <4, and it feels like the regained time is still productive. I have no hard numbers around this, and not really sure how to build a baseline to compare to.

I'd like to see how I react to both together, but hesitant given my poor reaction to Adderall. When I was younger I remember preferring Ritalin over Adderall.

EDIT: Adding to the throwaway comment below, the long halflife of Modafinil is true, especially when trying to sleep. For me, after months of 3-4 days on a week, there seemed to be no long term issues with this, where days I had taken Modafinil I only slept 3-4 hours.

I definitely had issues with alcohol and Modafinil, where at my weight (220lbs) I could normally drink 3-4 pints to reach 'buzzed' status, this seemed to happen at 1-2 pints. This trend stayed consistent - and proper 'drunk' came much quicker. This had the effect of limiting my drinking, to the point where I would switch to light beers and stop drinking after 1-2. This has been positive to me, but a bit concerning as I hadn't read of that effect before.
Win 8.1, Arch Linux in VMWare Workstation. I mostly use the Linux in VMWare, Windows is mostly for Excel and Photoshop.

Hardware is Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 12".

Dev tools are vim + tmux + zsh, PHP + nginx for work and Clang + CMake for personal projects.
'Corporate types' have a lack of humour at the best of times, but that isn't what is going on here.

It's the 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000,000 chance that the tweet wasn't a joke, but a real threat. They can't take the risk that they knew about it, and didn't take it seriously and 100's died.
Primary is win 8 and IntelliJ IDEA, secondary is FreeBSD on a number of servers. There is work and personal under both.
> (is it? where? citations, links?)

I posted an excel sheet full of links, which you apparently didn't bother to check out. And before someone tries to pull an ad-hominem of me being a floaty alternative person: I studied physics and am the son of two doctors of the mainstream I-hate-alternative-medicine bullshit kind. The only reason I know anything about mindfulness is because I have a sister (with a master degree in biology, so natural sciences again), who is currently doing her PhD on mindfulness as a stress reduction method at the University of Amsterdam.
I understand your example but for most publishers, it's not about blocking the content but rather blocking the user if they have adblock installed.

The only way to do that is if you serve the content and then perhaps have a request to some ads or a resource that looks like an ad and will get blocked. When the request fails, you catch it and then "hide" the content from the user or only request the content in the first place after this check. This is fragile though since the plugins can just unblock that testing resource very easily, and some already do manipulate sites like this.

Either way, this sounds easy but can require lots of tech resources, SEO workarounds, accessibility requirements, etc. Just not a turnkey option. PageFair is a company that tries to offer this but they been put into the various adblock rules and are now pretty much ineffective which shows the constant arms race... and this is a company working on this fulltime.
>I've never done drugs before

I can only assume you mean cannabis is a drug, when, in fact, it is a plant. Keeping with the idea that cannabis is a drug, am I correct to assume you have never had a Pepsi or a cup of coffee?
Albert A. Michelson:

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."

After that, he lived just enough to see the physics giving birth to modern chemistry and electronics.
Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything worth listening to.

In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or "changed the format" of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades of legacy.

I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but the broadcast!

According to WP, the station's staff didn't even know about the switch until about an hour before it happened.

AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format. But HFS was gone.

The local alt/prog rock music market has never recovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_(historic)

I've tried to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was absolutely packed with commercials and station filler. I also found that stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that's not on break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable.

Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I'm not even sure if new cars I'd by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.
I suspect the 1979 hostage event still dominates opinion of Iran. It's a mostly unhealed wound. Even if you take 1953 into account, it stings.

Having someone stand up to Israel will more than likely galvanize the politics of Israel towards at least more militarism. The Iranian opposition to Israel looks suspiciously like Eliminationism - a catchall term designed by Daniel Goldhagen to describe a specific political technology.

The Frontline show on ISIS describes ISIS quite clearly as Sunni officers and such being cast out of Iraq as another Eliminaitonist tactic to gain political support for the al-Maliki government.

Saudi Arabia is sort of fictional; it was created out of the rubble in the region around the time of the First World War. It's an artifact of what was left when the British Empire began to decline in the region. But it is more or less an honest broker; the others in the area are less known. It really does go back to Lawrence and all that. The book "A Peace to End All Peace" describes this process in excruciating detail. Lawrence does not fare well in the book. He's practically a (military) fillibuster.

Saudi Arabia being the site of both Mecca and Medina is highly constrained in what it can appear to do. This makes it stable. But is cannot appear to keep the Haj from political "enemies" witout inspiring ... fury.
I have a problem with the often used phrase "legitimate researchers", because it suggests that certain freedoms should only apply to certain people.

"legitimate researcher" is not a specific job, researching is an activity any citizen can and should be free to conduct within the confines of the law, and all of that is "legitimate".

The whole "legitimate researcher" creates a huge loophole through which the powers that be can create some kind of registered researcher status, with the obvious consequences for everyone else.
Such as well paid executive jobs when they leave politics.
[replying with bogus account] I spent a few months myself working with a range of low to moderate cost OEM modules (<$200) from several manufacturers and their SDK's and I concur. Not all were easily tricked with a fake print but every device/SDK had some problem. We decided not to include fingerprint recognition as a primary means of authentication in our products. I've heard rumor of a competitor who did include it that actual field performance hasn't met expectations and they're retreating to use it as a secondary means.
Ruling out placebos for pills is easy. I'm struggling in what a placebo with the "meditative form" looks like. You could tell one group to focus on something unusual but practicing focus is a part of meditation.

There are plenty of studies that show benefits in specific tasks (around empathy or focus) and there are others around changes to the brain. Here's one from Harvard that showed 8 weeks of medititatoin corelated with significant changes in the brain: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...
Inflammatory title. Actual title is "DDoS Attack against DNS system v2"
Strange, I wasn't working that long ago, but most of what I've heard from people who have is that not having a degree was very common.

This might be a game industry vs rest of software engr thing though.
For more info about the number of seconds in a solar day, I would rather recommend the table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Apparent_solar_time . The Leap_second article discusses a much smaller variation (~2 ms) on top of the big cyclic variation (~20 s).
This is not evidence - numbers. Do you have numbers?
Let's be clear. Unbundling is not a panacea. When the dust settles, your Internet TV bill is likely to be close to your current cable bill --and the cost of broadband (which you probably get from your cable company anyway) is going north.

For insurance, getting out from under the yoke of your employer is good, but you are likely to pay higher premiums. It also does almost nothing for the other (and more important) side of the equation, the actual cost of care.
Legalize all you like: amphetamines are still bad for your heart and can engender quite the headache when they wear off.
Archlinux at home on my desktop (custom build, a bit old), with Emacs + Ensime for Scala dev, with the usual suspects: sbt, Scala 2.11.x, Play. A Raspberry Pi B w/ Archlinux. I tried to play with Scala on it but it's a bit too limited. I use it for private repos and a bit of Go coding occasionnaly (with Emacs + tramp or vim over SSH.)

OS X 10.10 on a 2014 MacBook Pro w/ Intellij at work (I hate this damn OS) and a dozen AWS instances running Ubuntu IIRC.
Iain M. Banks always pointed out that the citizens of the Culture definitely had jobs, and that it was important - people want to work, and to feel valuable. This is something we learn over and over again with aid programs. Nobody (in general) likes to feel like they get a handout, they like to feel like they earn it or otherwise contribute something valuable.

To a huge extent, I think we're going to have a problem until we figure out how to address that tension. How do we gainfully employ people, and have their work respected by the rest of society, when we're automating away their jobs in the first place?
I simply think that when presented a dubious claim with no evidence from a shady source we should be skeptical.
Get away from iPhone unappealing notepad app – Get the alternative notepad
I have seen this before, and very much enjoy reading it again.

One nit is paint company Mark Williams. is not true. Mark Williams Company was first Mark Williams Chemical company, marketing a drink called Dr. Enuf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Enuf)

EDIT: There is some very lively discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188, some fraction of which is a flame war, but includes some responses from phk himself.

(pre-1990 myself. By an embarrasing margin)
Jelly Game in JS
Unfortunately, it does not work on Google Chrome for me. Fantastic game, nonetheless!
i recently quit adderall after 10 years and experienced Zero withdrawal.
I am having a hard time thinking of work where you get paid yet you provide no benefit to the payee? Maybe some further insight is in order (since I am living in another world apparently).

I was not speaking in absolutes. Of course there are exceptions. All I was saying is that it provides some incentive...

Not only that, but you are applying today's economics to a dramatically different situation in which basic needs are met by machines. I don't think that works.
When Google Plus was pushing real name rules, a lot of people said "where's the evidence? where's the data driving this decision?" They didn't have any. Google claimed that real names encouraged better social behaviour. This is something people commonly assume about real-name policies — but no-one, including Google, has ever supplied actual evidence of this, rather than personal feeling and assertion.

In fact, what evidence there is points the opposite way: South Korea required commenters on sites with over 100,000 users to supply their Resident Registration Number (national identity number), and this reduced malicious comments by ... 0.9%. http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011...

So the evidence is against the claim. If you have good evidence for the claim, you'll be the first.
The problem is that instead of taking each individual as contributing what they can, with everyone surviving as society runs at peak productivity, our current society makes individuals compete with each-other to survive, and entirely discards the potential contributions of those who are not "selected". So productivity-boosting drugs become socially problematic, since they rig the competition.
Windows 8 on the desktop, Ubuntu 14.04 on the laptop. I also run Ubuntu with VirtualBox on the desktop. Development mostly with WebStorm (jetbrains), Geany, nodejs, express and angular. Git ties the three systems together.
Is blocking all JavaScript (including the scripts used to load the ad) with a plugin like NoScript also stealing? What about using a browser that doesn't support JavaScript like netsurf? Or even browsing the web in a text only browser like w3m or elinks? What if the ads only were displayed properly in Chrome, would you be a thief for viewing them in Firefox?
Linux Mint on a repurposed 2011 Macbook Pro, at the moment.
Work: OSX on 2012 rMBP / iTerm2, Vim+vim-go, Go

Personal: Arch Linux on Asus Zenbook UX31e / dwm, zsh, Vim+vim-go, Go

edit: sorry for the reply, that was meant as a top-level comment. I'm afraid it's a bug in my iPad HN reader.
I have a prescription for Adderall, Modafinil and a have tried bunch of others. Adderall was prescribed for fibromyalgia related symptoms of brain fog and lack of memory, modafinil for chronic fatigue.

Adderall aggravated the Renaud's syndrome that I have had for 5 years, to the point where the blood flow stopped and the fingers began to suffer from continuos lack of blood . See http://imgur.com/Djy6g2A This has been a daily challenge for the last couple of months, and it has greatly impacted my ability to work. I have a hard time using my hands to do anything, even typing. I am now off Adderall (6 months), withdrawal was not too bad for me.

I miss the Adderall, since it made me feel like my brain worked again. I felt like my old self, much sharper mentally - no focus change, still ADD as ever, but felt restored in the brain. I felt 25 again (45 now) and was able to work better, in the sense that 25 year old me was more energetic than 45 year old me. I tried Strattera for a few days, but found that has nasty side effects and also aggravated my hands.

Modafinil I don't notice any other effect, other than I don't feel as tired all the time. I don't feel smarter, or better, only not exhausted. For me, there is no stimulant feeling with Modafinil, or ability/skills change, just an change in the tired all the time feeling.

So, if you are going to use these drugs, pay attention to the side effects. I would recommend avoiding them unless you need them.
> The frontier in 3D printing seems to be to get the cost down on the high-end processes, which are now very good. The Form1, the low-end stereolithography printer, is a nice little machine, and it's real. TechShop SF and Hacker Dojo in Mountain View both have one. Form1 charges $145/liter for the working fluid, so that's how they make their money.

High quality desktop CNC Mills are out.

http://carbide3d.com/

$3000 for a proven technology. Home-made CNC mills have always come in between $1000 to $3000, and now professional turnkey solutions are available in that price range.

I do realize CNC machines are the "opposite" of a 3D Printer. But if a CNC machine can get a software stack as easy to use as the 3d printers, then I think they'd get a lot more use.
These cards can be used outside of Costco, where membership cards are not required. The reason they were able to negotiate such low fees is that Citi/Visa wanted access to this customer base. The Amex CEO was quoted saying something like 'the math of Costco's proposed deal didn't make sense.'
Anxietatea (angoasa)-tratamente naturiste – anxiety (anguish)-natural treatments
What's the cost of listening to FM versus having a 3G connection with no data cap for music streaming in Norway?
Buy/Build a hell of a lot of houses, and rent them to students very cheaply. My future job would be "landlord", and I'd be doing good by making university a little more affordable.
You could always play booster or sealed deck drafts. They cost $10-15 each (for booster drafts) and you get nearly that value in cards, plus more if you place in the top 2 or 3. Your chance of winning against an opponent is entirely based on a combination of luck, your drafting skills, and your playing skills. Money put into the game is not a factor.

I recently played a few booster drafts and one a few of my matches, even though I hadn't played in about 10 years.
OS X on my laptop.
Debian on my Raspberry Pi.
iOS on my smartphone.
OS: OS X 10.10.3

Hardware: Macbook Air

Tools: Clojure,PHP,Emacs,Intellij Idea.
Reduced transaction costs also allow greater internal coordination in corporations, leading to higher integration.

I don't think it's clear that smaller is better. I feel pretty sure the world is not heading towards an ocean of microservices. The full stack startup is a parallel trend after all. I don't know if there's better terminology for this, but it seems like we simultaneously have unbundling along one axis and integration (bundling?) on another.
Thinkpad x120e + Gentoo is the only development machine I run (still looking for a newer 12" thinkpad to replace this one). There is also ubuntu installed in the chroot (for android firmware builds) and a few docker containers with various OSes.

In theory I can survive with any OS/platform, since my primary tools are tmux+vim+zsh. I use them for android development (Java, Kotlin), for web (JavaScript, Golang), for embedded systems (C, Lua).

So the only two apps that I keep always open is a full-screen terminal and a browser. Probably even Chrome OS would be comfortable for me :)
> Welfare checks

No, because of fairness. Some people will have to keep working while others can have holidays? Those who work will forever be paid more than non-working ones.
I've used Adrafinil where legal, which is converted by the body into that, and Adderall under prescription. I don't consider them equivalent at all. You can skip sleep on Adrafinil/Modafinil for many days, which matches the usual military uses or how it is prescribed for people who can't stay awake - it doesn't help pay attention to boring things like Adderall and the like do, though.
I don't think they mean legitimate as professional or industry recognized, but more as a way to distinguish from an actual bad guy hacking for criminal intents and then claiming he is a researcher and should have carte blanche.
Claim of power generation at 238% efficiency
Requiring your users to click on ads is a form of click fraud, and is banned in the TOS of many advertising networks. This is to help keep the site from "stealing" money from advertisers who are not particularly interesting in getting clicks from people who are only clicking on the ad to see the article, and have absolutely no intention of buying their products.
OSX for local host, latest Ubuntu for work
Your comparison to medicine is flawed, because in that case we ingest an active ingredient that affects our body chemistry.

Mindfulness and meditation are both active engagements with the mind - which is like a mental exercise. The mental health benefits are therefore more comparable to the physical health benefits of doing exercise.

So to repeat myself: at that point, comparing mindfulness to a "placebo" meditation is like comparing the health benefits of upper body strength training to endurance running.

The only "placebo" would be to not do any meditation or mindfulness exercises, just like how the health benefits of exercise are compared to what happens if we do nothing. And that has been extensively researched, with measurable differences in stress levels, and structural changes in the brain.