skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a saying we learned in medical school:

"When you hear hoof-beats, think horses not zebras."

Ordering tests for every possible condition that could cause presenting symptoms is usually not the right idea. It's a difficult problem, because sometimes it really is a zebra. That's part of the art of medicine.

But not every child with a bloody nose needs a bone-marrow biopsy. That means that a child with serious blood coagulation problem may not get one with the first nose bleed. Is that a bad call? If you are that kid, you might think so. There's no easy answer, only thoughtful trade-offs.
I think in a case where you're unhappy with the doctor's investigation the correct response is to get a second opinion.
I love Perl. Perl is my language of choice. So I promise that I am not trolling. Let's just stipulate that I'm slow or inexperienced or very confused.

What is the cool in that code? Can someone explain to me (apparently using small words) why this is exciting?
It's a loss, at least as far as your brain is concerned. (Logically, there's no real difference, the fact that it's already technically been incurred is pretty meaningless. (Also, you could argue that since he hadn't paid his credit card bill yet, it wasn't incurred yet.))

Your brain says "this is $11 that I wasn't supposed to spend that they took from me!" That's a loss. You want to get the money you lost due to their mistake back.
Yes, through that API (AFAIK). Safari and Firefox both support it, but it depends on the fidelity of the location data available to the browser.

Obviously mobile Safari has access to better data than desktop Safari.
What cars do pilots drive?

What foods do vintners eat?

These are silly questions -- in all three cases, the answer is "if they're smart, whatever is best for their circumstances". I know mathematicians who have used Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Java, BASIC, Assembly, Lisp, Maple, Matlab, Magma, Mathmatica, and Maxima; and that's not counting the people who do deliberately weird things (like computing Mersenne primes in Postscript).
For the record, I was kidding. :-)
The article says these tests can be "at a cost that is as much as 80 percent less than going through a doctor", what can explain that kind of discrepancy besides rampant corruption in the "official" medical lab work market?

The difference is that one is paid for by a health insurance company, and the other is paid for out of pocket by the consumer. The second group is much more price sensitive.
I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.

This would not be the case. Enforcing such a policy would be prohibitively expensive. Following the theme of the article, we can't even afford < 12 student classes, and schools are much cheaper than prisons.

In my opinion the solution is simple: put less people in prison. This chart says it all for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-...
My experience, just for mulling over:

I've worked in my industry now for over ten years. Over that time, I've made a pretty good living. Now, I've got enough in the bank that I can take time off without worrying about rent or any other basic necessities. I started on my webapp last year part time, but I'll be going full bore on it once my current client gig ends.

On one hand, a good paycheck is nothing to sneer at. I'm self-funded. I'll have something to fall back on if things don't work out (the time off will be a "sabbatical"). On the other hand, time is more valuable than money. If you have something to do, the sooner the better.

Regardless of these two polar views, ultimately the combination of my current idea + opportunity + capability is what pushed me to make this change. I would have done it earlier if it had presented itself then. I'd be continuing on my current path if it never had.

Don't make the switch just because you feel you have to. Keep your eyes open, and jump on it when you see it.
One useful way to take advantage of this might be to just serve your site at a lower resolution if the HTTP header is defined to reduce bandwidth use. If you're using 500px wide banner images on a 1000px grid, size that down for the Safari preview but scale everything so that it's still representative of your site.
Roll your own.
One of the reasons that I picked up the financial/economic news topic was that I did a study on adwords advertising. I bought a list of the top 50,000 paying keywords on Google's Adsense program off of a shady looking site. I then wrote a script to scrape the number of hits on Google for every keyword on the list, and that gave me a ratio of high paying keywords to low hits on Google. The data off the list looked pretty accurate when I spot checked it with my adsense account.

There was a huge cluster of keywords on that list that had to do with financial topics. Not only that, but financial services account for 20-25% of all online ad spend. That tells me that there are advertisers that are going to be interested in a niche readership that are interested in economics and financial news.

So, my hypothesis is that ad rates for a niche site focused on financial and economic news will be able to use advertising as a revenue stream. To test that hypothesis, I put up some adsense ads two weeks ago, and I got $1 - $1.50 a click. I'm pretty happy with that.
Nuvigil, descendant of Provigil, to "treat" jet lag
Wikipedia article,

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

submitted to HN 425 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233792
I don't understand how this story is a good anecdote for what this guy is trying to say ie, that some people have a sixth sense about hiring

How is it sixth sense that he fired a guy who obviously made such a grave mistake ?!

If the guy was fired before the mistake and he went to a new company where he committed a big mistake, then that would have better suited what he was trying to convey !

Obviously he shouldn't make up stories, but the one he uses doesn't suit the message
How about "Keep satisfying customers"

Less information. "Keep" doesn't necessarily mean changing what you do. In other words, "keep" could mean "x, x, x,...", while "iteratively" definitely means "x1, x2, x3,..."

The greater precision is worth the awkwardness, and anyone who is unwilling to look up a word probably shouldn't be doing a startup.
I think it, indeed. IMO the reason that Universal didn't contest the first sale doctrine is because they don't want to be the test case for the whole industry. Challenging the first sale doctrine (which excludes music but not movies) is the nuclear option. I believe it would succeed, as the arguments for the muscal exception are substially the same as those which would apply to film, but this strategy is not without risk: were they to bring such a case and lose, the entire film industry would be saddled with the results and have to rebuild their distribution models from a lesser position (to say nothing of their reputation as 'bad guys').

Acting through the distributors is a feint, which Universal is big enough to attempt (in that they have sufficient influnece with distributors) but which doesn't cost them too much if they lose. Note that they haven't lost yet - The court has dsimissed some of Redbox's claims, but affirmed their right to bring a case asserting antitrust behavior by Universal.

Whether they'll win it or not I don't know, although the judge seems sympathetic to Universal in their distributors voluntarily entered into an agreement with the studio to distinguish between DVDs sold for retail and for rental, and Universal are just asking them to stick by that contract, which predates any agreement between those distributors and Redbox.

I don't know the specific strategic thinking of Universal's lawyers and here, and as I said I'm not a lawyer myself - this is just my reading of what's taking place. I can say that the distribution executives that I have spoken to about this all hate RedBox - while admiring their chutzpah and business drive, they loathe seeing their product dispensed and priced like a bag of potato chips.

Thanks for reposting that opinion, BTW. I'd forgotten how many jokes it contains :-)
> And as for the speech-to-text, hardly anyone will use that.

As someone who has been using a Nexus one for a few weeks now, I have to say that I use speech-to-text ALL THE TIME. In fact it's one of the things that really convinced me to give the thing a chance over my iPhone.

I haven't used it much for texting or emailing yet, but I use it constantly for:

- searching the web
- making phone calls ("call sally")
- initiating turn-by-turn navigation ("navigate to town hall")

It's perfect for when you're in your car and you can't safely type. And it's pretty accurate too.

Funny story actually: some friends and I were going to get brunch after a rehearsal, but we couldn't remember if there was an IHOP in the U District in Seattle or not. My friend who has a Droid and I both pulled out our phones and did voice internet searches at exactly the same time, totally without meaning too. Since we were talking at the same time neither of our phones knew what we were saying. :)
How is this different than just sending yourself the email?
Twitter hiring workers to turn Tweets into money
I think half the people meeting with him giving him a "no-hire" should have been a big flag. One of the takeaways should be that if half you team doesn't want to hire someone, you should have the guts to tell the person they didn't get the job.

I've seen many programmer interview processes where only half the interviewers want to hire, but everyone found the person "likable", so there was trouble getting to the necessary "no-hire". I'm not sure of this case's specifics are like that, but one of the first things I learned to do in interviewing is how to say "no-hire" to cool, interesting, nice, marginally-competent people.
Sorry for the late reply.

Here are the two I can think of off the top of my head: the first is that decision trees (or even naive bayes) produce results that are intuitively understandable and human readable. In contrast the result of training an SVM is a huge vector of 100's of floats and there's no real way to explain to someone (e.g. someone buying your tech, a manager, etc) what's actually going on.

I didn't mention this before but SVM's do get you something that decision trees, naive bayes, and others don't: they will look at all kinds of combinations of attributes. This becomes critical for applications like machine vision where e.g. looking at any one single pixel as an attribute won't do anything for you and so you need something that will understand lots of different possible combinations of attributes.

Which is also the second weakness of SVMs: most data sets that aren't images don't express strong patterns across a wide variety of combinations of features. To take naive bayes as an example, it is a hugely popular algorithm and the 'naive' part (which tends to work well on my data sets) is the assumption that each attribute is statistically independent!
Towards an Automatic Index Generation Tool
I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be CEO of a startup
Go team Go
> and that's not counting the people who do deliberately weird things (like computing Mersenne primes in Postscript).

Now what's so weird about that ?

In postscript (which is actually quite a powerful language) sounds a lot less weird than doing it in brainfuck or something like that.
Hey there. I have a personal interest in genetic testing for mental health, the goal being to help psychiatrists make the decision about which anti-depressant to try first. The conclusion was the 5-HTT gene was the only one mutation where the research was verified enough to have a chance of being used right now, and that gene doesn't help make any treatment decisions.

I think it'll be at least 10 years before mental health genetic testing becomes mandated by insurance, though maybe faster if improve outcomes can be readily demonstrated. I think one of the main consequences is that NRIs are going to be more widely prescribed than they are right now, because of mutated BDNF genes. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/296/13/1609?maxtos...

I of course agree with you about the presence of doctors in these processes. Genetic testing is only really meaningful when interpreted by the doctors in the context of all of the other important information.
How My Technology Habits Have Changed in the Last Ten Years
Solve a problem.

Make a market.

Follow your dreams.

Just do it.
True, it spells it out. But you won't be keeping them without adapting.
Anti-WIFI activist Doc sues his cook over iPhone making him sick-lives in car.
My major problem is that there's a lot of easy money to be made with FUD. I was going to write more, but most of it is implied in that statement, so I'll just say it again: there's a lot of easy money to be made with FUD.

There are some second-order effects as well, some good, some bad. On the bad side, larger demand for tests means more waiting for everybody. On the good side, more pressure on the testing industry could lead to better techniques as well as more consumer awareness about medical testing. However the limit case still seems to be "less bad" and not actually "better than current conditions."
It's not just a question of valuing the output of technology but also caring about the details.

the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years.

The concept of leap years is part of our calendar system but that was invented far after this device was created. Yet, that type of accuracy is simply glossed over. Perhaps the device actually accounted for leap years in their ancient calender system or perhaps the somewhere in the chain from researcher to writer someone failed to understand that leap years having nothing to do with eclipses so it's a non problem. But, the lack of details suggests someone did not really care.

When most people know how to make something that technology is rarely lost but consider how many accidental deaths it would take to set something like CPU fabrication technology back 10 years. Realistically is probably not a real threat, but there is little redundancy in much of our society.
I must say that I take a slightly different position on cholesterol. People seem to have a very difficult time interpreting the different values, particularly as most people cannot distinguish HDL from LDL from TGs. Plus, ATP-III recommends different limits on LDL-C for patients with different risk factors.

Would I say that the average person should be able to get a cholesterol test if they want it? From a rights/freedom standpoint, absolutely. Would I worry that they would misinterpret it without guidance? From a medical standpoint, absolutely.
I understand that most particle physicists don't really take Lisi's work very seriously. Does this discovery lend more weight to his E8 theories?
I have to thank you so very, very much for this application. It is changing my life, no joke. I'm an adult with ADD and perfectionism. Everything I've ever succeeded at has been a last-minute adrenaline-filled fire drill. My hopes for this year are things that can be accomplished only through slow-and-steady actions, repeated daily.

Your tracker is the first thing that has ever worked for me. Even after just 8 days, I can tell that this is different from every other new years. I can do bits and pieces of my daily goal whenever I find time, and your app keeps count. I can keep my goal in mind without having to remember the numbers or play head games. There is nothing complicated, no 'options' to vacillate over, no pretty pictures or quotes to distract me and no features to figure out. The calendar--like Seinfeld's 'Don't break the chain' is a tremendous visual motivator.

I'd be happy to pay ala shareware.
I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that.

I totally agree. In fact, my personal website reflects this: http://www.numair.com

On another note, I think the destruction of the economy around things such as music is creating a massive cultural black hole. I've met far too many amazingly creative people who, if this were the 1970s, would be celebrated musicians and artists; instead, they work mid-level jobs and waste away. Do we really think amazing art and ideas should be a smaller industry than, for example, mindless drilling for natural resources? It's quite absurd, and quite depressing.
Awesome. I don't mean to imply that I'm not excited about the promise of genetic testing for mental health. I'm just frustrated about the direct marketing of tests with dubious value to make a fast buck off of vulnerable patients.
install the advanced task killer app on android
The one I know uses Mathematica.
Good point; maybe reading them all the time makes me underestimate what's involved.
Ask HN: When will the world get the vimeo/soundcloud of HTML5?
http://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/7482466481

I was thinking how tumblr delegated video to vimeo, and realized that my litmus test for what I consider a crappy site these days is right-clicking an element in a page and dreading the "Settings... About Flash Player" contextual menu.

But I cannot live without tumblr, and often these days I find myself hoping their engine supplanted moveable type so I could reblog(as anathema as that term, along with retweet, are to me) my favorite sites.

Where are these great mini-utility companies for the truly open screen initiative, not this flash tripe? They probably have a great opportunity right now, before adobe tries and fails to eat anybody's lunch.

At least some company should expose bs like this for the unnecessary drama it is:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1641
Perhaps, but the scam site probably didn't care about the $11 either. I can't see them in dispair, OMG Somebody claimed the $11 back Crime Doesn't Pay! This wasn't a serious attack on their "business model".

The Loss Aversion Bias is also behind one of the classic mistakes people make when investing in stocks: holding on to a loser while the price goes down and down, unwilling to sell and accept the loss before it gets any worse.
Pimp your $PS1 with source control information
I think it's a workable example.

When dealing with these types of issues, I've personally found it helpful to calculate a personal dollars-per-hour and then weigh potential tasks against that.

Let's say a person makes or values their time at $30-$50 an hour. That's roughly a month of TimeSvr.com (or similar outsourcing services) for two hours of time.

In this example, even if the person felt wronged and was willing to spend $100+ (in dollars or time) addressing the issue out of principle, they'd still be better off outsourcing the task, or perhaps writing a negative review/blog post.
Which was fine when the DVD retail window took place after the rental window, as it did for years. Of course movie studios and distributors like the long tail but once they've recovered enough of the life time revenues they were content to let that slide.

Please see the copyright Act s109.b.1.A, which states (in part - software-specific verbiage removed): unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording ... neither the owner of a particular phonorecord ... may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord ... by rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_00000109----...

I mean look, it's pretty clear that you can not rent audio recordings without permission (there's an exception for libraries). It's just not allowed. Now if the film industry's back is against the wall and they either make a case or lobby Congress to extend the same protection to movies, they can make two parallel arguments:

1. it's ridiculous and unfair that you should be able to prevent the rental of a movie's soundtrack on CD but not have the same control over the movie itself on DVD; and

2. while there is an explicit distinction between phonorecordgs and audiovisual works such as motion pictures (so that it can be argued the above simply does not apply), there exists a compulsory license for phonorecords - ie you can license a piece of published music for distribution whether or not the copyright holder wishes to sell it to you
- hence all those awful compilation records - but there is no such right for motion pictures, and thus a distributor of same is perfectly at liberty to refuse to sell to someone, and impose contractual conditions to that effect, which is the path that Universal appears to be taking (See s.115 of the copyright act). In short you don't have an automatic right to be able to obtain a copy.

Incidentally, since you work for Netflix, and I presume your presence here means you're probably programming for them, the main complaint that I hear from distributors about Netflix is opacity - they really want better metrics, of the kind Apple supplies to their content providers. They like the checks but find it very hard to track the performance of the individual films they distribute, which in turn frustrates producers.
Fan Page PKI 2010 di Facebook
It is very nice, but more examples would be a welcome addition.
Depends on the branch. In quantitative finance: C++, R, F#, Q, OCaml, MATLAB, Python (NumPy and SciPy)
In the quantum realm, doesn't looking for something make it appear?
If I was feeling particularly malevolent, I'd create a free WebOS app that offered its downloaders the chance to win up to $50,000. The app would have one field for capturing a user's email address, and the app description would clearly state that I'd split any winnings from this contest with them 50-50.

Who wouldn't download the app?
I second this. I have a quantitative finance background. I use C, C++, C#, MATLAB, and Python. MATLAB and Python are primarily for prototyping ideas. C and C++ are primarily used when I'm working with Linux. C# is exclusively used when I am working with Windows.
It matters because public property is just that: owned by the people (govt). This includes airwaves, which gives the US govt the right to license it.

The airwaves in your home however are not public property. At least that is my understanding (IANAL).
Statisticians commonly use SPlus or R. Applied mathematicians use some flavor of Fortran, in part because of numerical libraries available in that language. Matlab is also in heavy currency in many disciplines.

Much of the time, a scientist is driven to a language not by any particular language feature, but by what code/tools are already available in that language that they can build upon for their own research.
The example defines a subtype which represents a file on disk. Any parameter conforming to that subtype must name a file that is present on disk.

Think of this subtype as a named precondition -- it's a concise, intention-revealing way of reporting error conditions without cluttering the internals of the function with duplicate error-handling code.
> I don't think his first example is good because it isn't just about a "loss" it's about feeling wronged.

You're correct that the example and the title aren't a perfect match, but wasting four hours because you feel aggrieved isn't really any better for you than wasting four hours to save yourself losing a small amount of money. Sometimes you just ought to let go.

Alas, I happen to be the poster child for this particular bit of irrationality. Notably, I spend a lot of time and mental effort agonizing over fairly small purchases. I know it's a mistake in the abstract, but that doesn't help the aversion to spending money in the moment.
I am sure I am not thinking of GWA. I want to say it was installed somewhat implicitly as part of some virus checking software that people didn't really ask for.
Yeah, trying to prevent duplicates is an impossible battle.