skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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.

I always advise against poly-pharmacy if possible. Particularly when dealing with powerful stimulants for which the mechanism of action isn't fully understood (Modafinil).

Interestingly, Modafinil might somewhat antagonize the Adderall due to an interaction between their mechanisms of action. Modafinil's MOA is partially due to dopamine reuptake inhibition (similar to Ritalin), but Adderall relies largely on being taken in to the presynaptic terminals and forcing dopamine out. By inhibiting dopamine uptake, Modafinil can (theoretically) decrease the amount of Adderall taken in to the terminal as well as the amount of dopamine available in the terminal for release. We've seen this in a few studies where Modafinil can actually reduce the neurotoxic effects of Adderall, likely due to this antagonizing of Adderall's core MOA.

The magnitude of this effect at therapeutic dosages is unknown, but it's possible and even likely that the combination would be distinctly different than what you might expect a combination of the two drugs to feel like.

> 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.

It's expected that your body would adapt somewhat to sleeping on the medication, but that doesn't mean that you were getting quality sleep. Humans are notoriously bad at judging sleep quality, for one, but more importantly here: You were taking a wakefulness-promoting agent, which would have covered any subjective feelings of poor sleep. My concerns with Modafinil stem more from potential long-term implications of interrupting sleep, particularly when the traditional signs of poor sleep (daily fatigue and sleepiness) are then obscured by the drug itself, leading to a false sense of restedness.

However, we can begin to infer poor sleep quality by other, indirect markets, such as:

> 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.

Getting subjectively incapacitated from a lower number of beers could, theoretically, be indicative of a subtle sleep-deprived state, for example.

Again, much of this is just semi-educated conjecture, but given the importance of sleep to long-term health I'm wary of these stimulants with long half-lives.
Enabling the patterns of mental illness and addiction is linked to negative outcomes, not positive ones. These negative outcomes include death from voluntary exposure.
Show HN: Polyglotweekly.com a community curated blog about programming
In case you wondered, as I did, how an e-mail from Goldman Sachs to Snapchat got to Sony; the author forwarded it to Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman/CEO Michael Lynton.
Here's more technical data about the clock, including pictures.[1] The basic issues in high-accuracy clock design for fixed clocks in air are 1) providing the same amount of energy to the pendulum on each beat, 2) sensing the completion of each beat while withdrawing a fixed amount of energy, and 3) dealing with variation in temperature, air pressure, and humidity. 1) and 2) are the hard design problems. The general idea is that the drive train lifts up a tiny weight by a fixed distance, which is then released to power the pendulum. The pendulum impulse is thus isolated from variations in the rest of the drive train. See "grasshopper escapement". Dealing with 3) generally involves bimetallic strips and other self-adjusting mechanisms. Temperature variation is the big problem. There have been clocks with mercury barometers in the pendulum to compensate for air pressure, but this isn't one of them.

Harrison designed this clock, like most of his clocks, to run without lubrication, eliminating another source of variability. It's a beautiful piece of mechanical design.

The Smithsonian Institution used to have a very nice collection of important high-precision clocks, which they kept set and running. They seem to have been retired from public display.

[1] http://www.frodsham.com/burgess-regulator/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_escapement
I feel a little sad when I read this "this used to be a crack house and now it's a lovely restaurant" narrative. There is a glee with the notion of cleaning something up. That's an admirable thing of course. But I wonder about the people who were living in that "crack house". Where are they now? What municipal policies led to them being there in the first place?

Was the problem really cleaned up, or was it just flushed away?
Oh wow, I remember playing n through middle & high school. Definitely a great game.
Actually it's common enough that

var setNextTick = function(nextTickFunction){window.setTimeout(nextTickFunction), 0})

...sounds like a damn good idea.

Hate the name 'setImmediate' though, immediate implies the current tick and people would wonder why you're using it.
I love open offices, but then, everyone on my floor is part of the same team. Yes, I get a lot more walk up traffic from other team members than I did when I had a private office, but I don't see that as a bad thing. If people are looking for my help, they probably need it, and I'm happy to give it.

Some people are just naturally louder, and yeah, it can be a little distracting. It's not without trade offs. But for every time I have to ask someone to quiet down, there's four or five situations where everyone being easily accessible has been a good thing for getting my job done.
The Kobo series of ereaders support both Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic out of the box. If you care about accessibility, don't buy a Kindle.
Fred Wilson is dead on; we must produce value. I think Facebook was brilliant for buying Oculus. Not so sure about Whatsapp. In my next life, I might try farming.
Thank you, I am still learning new things every day. As long as I learn there is hope.
Making something intelligent does not automatically give it desires. But as you said, there is every reason to expect that we would build AI to achieve our goals, which means making it (a) desire to achieve a goal we share and (b) intelligent enough to succeed. (This is not anthropomorphizing AI; there's no need to make it feel desire the way we do, it just needs to tend to reach a state where the goal is achieved.)

The danger comes from our inability to accurately define our own desires. There is no doWhatIMean() function. A programmed goal can subtly differ from the one we want so that it passes the obvious test cases but breaks catastrophically in an unusual real-world situation. There's an anecdote[1] about a neural network trained to detect camouflaged tanks (I've also heard of it detecting Soviet versus NATO tanks); it ends up learning to detect objects with shadows, because the tanks were photographed on a sunny day and the non-tanks on an overcast day. Now imagine if the program had been prematurely instructed to attack the camouflaged tanks. You can call this "broken and useless software," but by the time we realize how it's broken it could be too late.

[1]: http://www.j-paine.org/dobbs/neural_net_urban_legends.html
What did he expect was going to happen?

I hate how often this line is used to defend bullies and blame victims. It's an attitude that ensures the overly aggressive can browbeat their way to getting whatever they want.
Exactly. None of the islands grids are connected. I worked for a power plant on the big island a few years ago and even then there was a big issue with too much power during the day and not enough at night. Coupling that with the intermittent wind power and you have a very hard grid to maintain.
> CL has as little in common with McCarthy's Lisp as any of the other variations that descend from McCarthy's Lisp.

That's not true.

http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/...

McCarthy's implementation of Wang's algorithm from 1960.

Run's unchanged in Common Lisp, with only very little support code.

> CL somehow got everyone to agree they had sole ownership of the name.

CL does not have the ownership of the name Lisp.

But for many Lisp is like "German", a family of dialects which share literature, speech and an audience. Common Lisp is the main "German" dialect. Others are Emacs Lisp, ISLisp, Eulisp, XLisp, Franz Lisp, ... all those are closely related.

Then Lisp is not "Germanic", which for example included English and German. English and German are Germanic languages, but they don't share literature, speech and the audience.

Languages like Logo, Clojure, Newlisp and several others are 'lispy'. But they are not in any way compatible to Lisp. Porting a program means a full rewrite and re-architecture.
I've worked in closed-off private offices, and I'm working in an open office right, and there are definitely plusses and minuses to both, IMO. Especially if you're all working on the same product, there is something really nice feeling about being physically around everybody; it creates a sense togetherness.

The noise sucks though, especially for tasks that require full concentration. Headphones and/or earplugs can help a bit, but it's no substitute for a truly tranquil environment. Working from home can help there, but then that's the other extreme of connectedness.

I've pondered a bit if you could have a "no loud conversations" policy (think: like a library), with a bunch of rooms off to the side that could be used for conversations.

Seems like it might give a bit of best of both worlds.

Edit: Also, the open office is made worse by the current stylistic trend of no carpet and shiny hard surfaces everywhere. It looks cool, but it amplifies noise like crazy.
Building an asynchronous API to improve performance
In my experience, your proportions seem pretty correct. Hard to tell that from this crowd though.
That huge whole wall whiteboard in the teamroom is awesome.
Given the popularity of site-blocking apps like SelfControl, Freedom etc, yes, many people do need help with this. I don't use them, but I go through quite wide swings between ignoring many distractions to get work done to having trouble getting work done because of all the distractions (just plotting my HN comments alone would probably yield a nice sinusoidal wave).

And I absolutely use a choice of work space to help mediate this. When I used to freelance I had to get out of my apartment and work at a coffee shop to really start my day. Now I often have days where it's fine to work from home, but when I find myself completely distracted from work while at home I go into the office because it's just slightly less acceptable to be goofing off all the time there, and that's just the nudge I need to get into my work for the day.
Sure, but there is overhead of communication with a large group. One smart person can be extremely efficient, but 10 smart people are probably not 10 times as efficient. And it gets worse with scale.
I think it's possible that human thought can't be simulated on a computer. It's far from obvious that it can, and this point needs justification. A lot of people are taking this for granted in their philosophical arguments.

Computers can only run Turing complete programs. Human intelligence follows the physical laws of the universe (the mechanism being unknown).

Those two substrates are different things; hence it's possible that humans can do things computers can't. Or at least the burden of proof is on the person who posits that they are equivalent.

The converse is not true: humans brains can do everything computers can, in theory and in practice. In theory we because we can compute with ours brains -- though very slowly -- and in practice because we program and control computers. We have the facility to use computers to achieve our goals, but AI algorithms don't use us to achieve their goals, to the extent that they have goals.

For a concrete task: consider producing a movie that will win an Oscar. In theory this is possible: the Godfather has a very limited number of bits, all of which can fit on a single computer many times over. The bits could just be manufactured it out of thin air.

In practice I suspect a computer would need physical agency in the world to create such a movie. It would need the ability to negotiate with Hollywood producers to raise funding; to make creative decisions to direct people who operate cameras, microphones, lighting, etc. Computers don't yet have physical agency, and I suspect they won't for quite some time, for both technological and non-technological reasons.

About simulating the universe: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

I think this is too stupid to talk about, but it came up on Hacker News, and Yudkowsky is also referenced many times in Bostrom's "Superintelligence". It is an argument about AI that is predicated on it being possible to simulate the universe on a computer. It's almost unbelievable how this is just thrown in there and taken for granted, without justification.

I don't think strong AI is too stupid to talk about, but I believe the burden of proof is on the doomsayers, and I haven't seen arguments that don't rely on misguided and imprecise extrapolation. And I read the book "Superintelligence" to try to understand the arguments better, since people I respect like Musk and Hawking were talking about it.

As I said, practically speaking, we should be focusing on the bazillions of problems that computing and the special AI that is already here present. In the 50 year time frame, the planet could be destroyed or the population could be decimated for many other reasons.
I'm flagging this because the title says "privately", and I agree that it's a private email. It has no place on HN, and we aren't its intended recipient.

you can't blame the NSA for having agents reading your private email and looking through your private Internet traffic, if you are going to turn around and do the same thing at the first opportunity.
I see, he has limit ordinals in his embedded order with the sequence 1 - (1/2)^n, with 1 being the equivalent of omega.

You probably even could get an embedded omega squared with

1 - (1/2)^n - (1/3)^m with m>n

So 1/2 = omega

3/4 = 2 * omega

7/8 = 3 * omega

and 1 is omega * omega

He might have omega squared in his version, but I didn't read it that carefully.

Now play the version where the secret ordinal is an uncountable ordinal or a strongly inaccessible cardinal.
Very true. There are both positives and negatives. What we really need is choice. Sometimes I want to code in peace, some times I want to stand and hear what everyone is doing.
Hopefully not as much of a sausage fest as the books.
PLATO had graphical terminals with touch screens and software implementing forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games. They weren't just used by programmers by a long shot.
" Specifically if ads on mobile are more engaging for consumer and more relevant than desk top ads than the addressable ad market for mobile will be bigger than desktop ad market and the valuations of mobile companies will be greater than desktop all else equal on audience size etc etc. Ie this would be a very positive factor for Snapchat

If Facebook knows this to be true it would result in them being willing to pay higher valuation for mobile companies than other acquirers because google won't know nor will yahoo msft etc because none of them have scale in mobile to understand these powerful secular trends and in essence they under value mobile vs FB and thus under invest and fall farther and farther behind."

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bit naive to assume that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft..etc don't understand that mobile is dominating desktop because they don't have the mobile scale of FB? It seems like an obvious insight in today's world.

In fact one could argue that Yahoo REALLY understands it considering the shopping spree for mobile first companies these past 2 years.
Does the NSA publicly post its archive for anyone to view?
Ex-NBA Player Who Made $60M Explains Why Pro Athletes Go Broke
I'd buy a 1992 Ferrari F40, and keep enough to maintain it. The rest would go to NASA/SpaceX, and my university's CS department.
The Interstellar Robot Should Be the Future of Artificial Intelligence
I think your personalization scheme would never work in the real world of inefficient at best government bureaucracies (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&sour...). Besides the raw fact of an alert, it would have to e.g. note in real time where I am to send an appropriately tailored message.
I think that the majority of unhappy open-office employees are more upset with distractions than with the lack of privacy.

The widespread application of headphones to "solve" this problem is silly. It does nothing to screen out the visual distraction of working with 40 other people in your sightline, and it cuts you off from meaningful discussions with your direct peers.

I've been happiest in spaces where workgroups of 6-8 people were in large-ish shared offices that broke up sightlines and isolated noise. Doors that close, folks (partially frosted glass or not).
I fear AI far less than I fear humans.

First, twenty thousand years or more of human history is about us trying to make other humans into machines: slavery, rape and forced prostitution, political coercion, war, overreaching prison systems and draconian punishments for minor crimes. We're not very nice to each other. Rather, we're controlling assholes as a species. Most of the ones who get power in organizations small and large are more focused on relative dominance than on absolute gain. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bible to modern Stalinism, we see that effort by powerful people to turn the rest of humanity into a machine that will exert their own will.

Given 20,000 years of abusively turning humans into machines, tearing apart their families and banning their religions, attempting to boil them down into simple working devices, is it really likely that a control-freak species like us is going to let a machine try to assert itself as human? In peacetime, I think we'll be pretty good at preventing that from happening. We're good at mechanizing labor and, now that we have devices that outperform us at menial and dangerous work, that's becoming an asset rather than a flaw.

Sure, it's possible that we get outdone by AI, and in fact there's one context in which it's likely: war. Counted among the casualties of an all-out or existential war are all the rules that people once believed in, and all of our assumptions about what humans (who, normally, aren't so terrified and desperate or so power-hungry) will do. If a runaway AI destroys humanity, it will probably begin from humans warring against other humans, and in an all-out conflict where surrender is not seen as possible by either side.

This is not to downplay the risk. At best, I'd be saying that AI isn't dangerous in the way that guns aren't dangerous-- and, of course, we know that guns are extremely dangerous when used by humans to kill other humans. Luckily, this desire to kill another person doesn't seem to exist at the scale that would enable the existence of guns to be an existential threat.

So why might humans tend to kill other humans? Crime often results from scarcity. Well, technological unemployment is only accelerating. What happened to agricultural commodity prices in the 1920s, leading to widespread rural poverty and a global depression in the 1930s, is happening to almost all human labor today. It's terrifying because ill-managed prosperity begets scarcity and that begets fear and authoritarianism and war. While we're decades away from being able to build a species-killing AI (which, of course, would typically not be designed as such; it would probably be designed to kill some humans before running amok and doing fatal damage) I do think that if we are similar in character, by that time, to what we are now, it's a real threat. Power accrues, in most human organizations, not to those who deliver progress but to those who create scarcity. If this doesn't change, then wars will never end and that fact alone is an existential risk.
Thinkpad T60 from 2007. Even the 9 cell battery is still "fine" with about 70% of its maximum capacity left. I recently upgraded to the T440s/T450s generation, but the T60 is still working (though the display backlight is really dim meanwhile).
>intelligence enhancing drugs

In terms of computers, this is like programming by injecting sequences of hex determined experimentally. "Clinical trials show that if you find the function three steps down from 'main' and inject 0xEAEAEAFF ten thousand times, there's a 30% chance the program will parse .PNG files faster!"
I can't help thinking this whole trend started with the industry which epitomises the values that our working society holds, that is finance, and the trading floor. I worked on one of these for 15 years - it was fantastic for getting deals done and increasing teamwork when sales, trading, and research all need to work together. Indeed it was when research was moved off the trading floor in around 2005 that I decided to leave, because in that industry, not being "in the thick of it" a huge disadvantage. I think a lot of the open plan idea comes from a misguided view that if trading floors can make so many millions, then they must be extended everywhere.

Now that I have gone back to my coding roots, but still work on a "trading floor" (open plan tech office), I have found myself having to enforce my will to my partners to inform them that I will be working only half day in the office, because my productivity skyrockets as soon as I get home in front of my computer, with nothing to distract me. Luckily, I have the luxury of being able to do this. I believe my productivity in the open plan office is easily less than 50% of what it is at home.

I do not believe that coding is a collaborative activity beyond periodic (twice a week max?) discussions to ensure teamwork. It's an intensely private activity, as is all work which demands high concentration, including writing.
The license costs for HE-AAC alone are probably more than the FM radio chip, unfortunately.
In Vancouver, we call this Vancouverism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism

It is a long-term commitment to mixed used development, walkable streets, view corridors for everyone, public parks within walking distance, and mass public transit into and out of the core.
I had never actually seen this video, and when seeing references to it, even as I clicked this link, my eyes always saw "Massage" as "Message".

Silly brain... subconsciously thinking "The Medium is the Message" somehow made more sense as the intended title.
Ask HN: Best Language/framework to Create a Medical Management Software?
Hey HN!

I am a beginner in programming, to improve my skills I thought I'd work on something.

My father is a doctor, I thought I'd build him a piece of software to help him manage his daily tasks (register patients, diagnosis etc).

I don't know how to begin or what technologies to use. What are your thoughts/advices? How would you do it?