skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have to bear in mind that before the germ theory of disease (late 19th century) and then penicillin (mid 20th century) doctors didn't know what was causing most disease, and couldn't do anything about it if they did.

Homeopathy hangs around today partly because for many years it provided an alternative to mainstream medicine that was more likely to kill than cure you. The standard 'medicines' were leeches, bleeding, laxatives and emetics to make you throw up. Magic water was, at that time, a sensible alternative by comparison.
At least we both beat out Google Wave (but Voice made the list) ;-)
Consumer Hell - Economics growth does not automatically translate into happiness
The Google Phone
10 Things to Look for in Video Games in 2010
How do you stop those people now?
Whatever happened to Second Life?
The 2 million people in Nebraska get as many senators as the 37 million in California.

This of course is by design. The state of Nebraska gets as many Senators as the state of California. Senators represent states, not people. Prior to the 17th Amendment, Senators were generally chosen by state legislatures.

Do farmers get federal pork? Sure, and it's just as wrong as populous states getting federal pork for mass transit. The real problem here is the concentration of power in the federal government, which is far removed from the intent of the Founding Fathers. See the 9th and 10th Amendments.

The case of sugar is particularly egregious as we are subsidizing growers who are destroying the Everglades. OK, maybe that's a bit of hype, but it's not that far from the truth.
Apple to Buy Quattro Wireless for $275 Million
Don't easier-to-access porn sites (with not-so-picky models) exist?
I stopped reading this half way down. Is there anything in the article except blether?

The first half seemed to be saying 'Drugs companies do tests against placebos. Merck is short of drugs.' Can someone who took the trouble to plough through it summarise the second half?
I can't get water bills electronically, but my bank gets e-bills for my cable/internet, electric and gas providers so I can easily pay those variable amount bills. In fact, they're completely on auto-pilot. I get notified when the bill is posted and the amount; if I do nothing (the normal case), the bill gets paid from my bank's auto-bill pay system automatically.
Except I doubt this post will change anything in the SO community. SO is more close-happy than Wikipedia is delete-happy, and both unnecessarily so.
Antisec Group Exposed
This reads more like "why I like my Android phone" than "why I like my Nexus One".
Most of the article is about debit cards rather than credit cards.
Actually direct debit works on any amount - it's ok to pay fixed or variable amounts. Some companies do it differently (like my electricity supplier) and charge me a fixed amount monthly and then send in the balance every year and adjust the payments.
Direct debit is when the vendor pulls the money from your account automatically. Paperless checking is when you setup with your bank to send / push the payment to the vendor. You have much less control over the former than the latter in my experience.
Very very misleading. I was stunned by the headline, since my impression, confirmed by this Wikipedia page:

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

... is that nobody has ever become world champion at a younger age than their twenties.

Being a chess idiot, I don't really know why this has been true, but I assume it's simply a matter of practice: that it takes time to get good enough at chess to usefully train against grandmasters, and then it takes time with the grandmasters before you can dominate at grandmaster-level chess, which my chessmaster friends have told me is almost like a different game, one which they can follow with great excitement but not necessarily understand well enough to play.
Actually, this decade has been awesome
If you're a romantic, this: http://www.xkcd.com/10/

Also, in Contact (the novel) a hidden message in Pi is a key component in a debate about the existence of god.

In reality, because he can.
I doubt that an automatic schema conversion would really help you as some stuff just works too different between the two databases. An automatic migration can leave you with the false security of having ported your code successfully.

What I'd try is to feed the MySQL schema into postgres (after removing the awful ` quotes around field names) and see what happens.

In cases where postgres doesn't accept the MySQL schema dump, you will have to manually check what you are doing and fix it manually anyways (the exception being auto_increment which you can fix with an easy search and replace process).

Stuff like that "timestamp not null default '0000-00-00'" comes to mind for example. I wouldn't know whether I would drop the invalid default or both the not null and the invalid default - that pretty much depends on the application.
Stephen Hawking: "The Human Species Has Entered a New Stage of Evolution"
Since the end of 2000 (the 7.1 beta period), I'm an avid PostgreSQL user. All new projects I started were using PostgreSQL and I never had any issues with that configuration.

Meanwhile, MySQL, which I had running for various third-party products like Wordpress, required some maintenance here and then, corrupted on-disk table files (and indexes), produced invalid dumps that were not restorable (and no warnings about that fact) and annoyed me with the inferior command line tool (better by now).

One thing I wish PostgreSQL would add is to set a collation order on a specific index. Right now, in one of my applications, I can't rely on Postgres doing the sorting, forcing me to retrieve all rows and sort on the client side which is a) annoying and b) anything but fast.

But whereas earlier, we had to set LC_COLLATE at initdb-time, now we can do it at createdb time and who knows - maybe we can do it at create index time in the future? I certainly lack the skill to contribute this particular feature.
Minor note: cron is lowercase. If you're advertising to cron users, they might not trust something that misspells what it's supposed to replace.
I work in embedded. Primarily, my work involves fixing hardware bugs in software. This is not surprising to anyone who works in embedded, but for those of my programmer friends who just see the hardware and have no clue just how much software is under the hood, it always seems to be a big shock to them that I have had to spend a few weeks fixing a hardware design that had one pin wired around the wrong way, instead of just getting the hardware fixed.

That said, one of the things I really like to see these days is new generations of extremely competent hardware designers who have absolutely no problems with the expenses of hardware iterations .. even though it means less work for me in the end, its good to see. I have lost count of the times I've had to write some god-awful driver code that just makes me want to puke my lungs out, just because the hardware guys were too lazy to breadboard something ..
Interesting point. I know broadly that lowering speed limits tends to reduce accident rates, but that's certainly different than this (and may just be spin I've heard through the media).

The only way to tell would be to run something like this through a traffic simulator, and if that found things to be safer, next study it in a sample state or country (would be difficult to do). So you're possibly right, pending results of an imaginary study. :)
In all fairness I only looked at their API documentation, but it didn't look hard.

Are these people who don't have those sorts of skills, or are there non-obvious gotchas or bugs?
I work in the safety critical/life-saving realm of embedded systems, and it has definitely been an eye-opener to see just how many bugs are 'forgiven' just because there is a software layer on top to make things work as expected instead of as designed ..
He's not in the UK[1], but if he were selling would make a sensible choice.

Here in the UK, capital gains of these types of transactions is taxed at 0% for your first £1M[2] and then at 18%.

So if he sells it for $100,000, he'd get to keep it all.

If you were to take that as wages/earnings tax rate on that (£80 approx) would be over 33%

Not bad to sell at $100K... not bad at all.

----------------

[1] US looks ok too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United...

[2] Entrepreneurs relief : http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/helpsheets/hs275.pdf
JavaScript Commodore 64 Emulator
yeah facebook most likely and ......boom we are back in the 90s
I just love the hacking that space hardware designers are allowed to do ..

"oh, its already bagged up and installed on the rocket, we've got 2 years to fix it until its going to suffer 45 seconds of insane conditions, so just let it slide for now .."
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the author's point, but I thought there was a push to move away from lots of special-case tags like <q>, <dl>, etc. For such a general-purpose SGML, it seems silly to assume that HTML will have a semantically-meaningful tag for the majority of your semantics.

Maybe I'm smoking crack, though. :)
Incidentally, there is evidence that the OSMO dongle collects data, also ..
My current credit union automatically refunds ATM fees, no receipts necessary, up to $30 a month. I think that arrangement is fairly common these days. Go credit unions.
"I could have done all of that on the iPhone except the part about running multiple apps the same time. Which is a big deal by the way."

...other than being able to play last.fm in the background there isn't anything about this that requires background third-party apps (seems like everyone ignores the fact that Apple's apps can run in the background).

So I'm not sure why this is "a big deal by the way", other than maybe because the google phone comes with only 4GB of storage so you can't take a lot of your own music with you.
A lambda calculus for quantum computation
Smart Phones are Commodities Already
It's kind of like band-aids for kids - they cure all manner of ills (even when there is no wound).
If you read long enough (sigh, I gotta get a life), you will find the article has the likely answers to the question.

"But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry's own success in marketing its products.

[...]

"Potential trial volunteers in the US have been deluged with ads for prescription medications since 1997, when the FDA amended its policy on direct-to-consumer advertising. The secret of running an effective campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi's Jim Joseph told a trade journal last year, is associating a particular brand-name medication with other aspects of life that promote peace of mind. [...] By evoking [...] uplifting associations, researchers say, the ads set up the kind of expectations that induce a formidable placebo response."

It also speculates that cultural differences (including the consequences of "outsourcing" testing) influence the placebo effect, and that psychiatric drugs are especially susceptible to the placebo effect ("...[a challenge] is to accurately define the nature of mental illness")

Lots of self-hoisting on petards going on in the drug business, otherwise known as the Law of Unintended Consequences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequence
It seems like it's pretty much up to the merchants to protest, since these fees don't (directly) effect me. I would say many people don't even realize that the merchant gets charged a fee for each transaction.

As far as I'm aware, Sam's Club is the only major merchant I've run into that does not accept any Visa cards, only Mastercard and Discover.
I think it depends on whether you're serious about paying it back if it's for normal expenditures (debt to fight a war is another thing altogether, but we haven't seen that since WWII for any major country).

If not, you just pile it on until the carrying costs become unsustainable and then you default explicitly (perhaps through a revolution or invasion) or implicitly through inflation.

Except for that fight a war special case, it's just a tax on future generations with an all but guaranteed ugly ending.
You don't want people to "consider using the revolving door", you want people to actually use it, "please use the revolving door" (add an arrow indicating which side it is).

Also your opener "swing doors use 8 times the energy" suggests that in some way the door itself directly transforms the energy. I'd go with just the above 5 words and then a para in 12pt (or so) giving details for those who will inevitably wonder why they should change their door usage habits. Depending on your demographic you might want something more like a CTA "Go Green! Use the revolving door".
Can Imaging Technologies save us from Terrorists?
We currently use Constant Contact for newsletters and email campaigns. It's served us well so far, but I could be easily convinced to ditch it -- the email templates, editing features, and analytics are decent, but hardly inspired or delightful. I'm looking seriously at both Aweber and Emma... and this thread has motivated me to consider MailChimp too.
This may be a little too advanced of a standalone post. Written for those with at least a functional familiarity with quantum computing and lambda calculus (languages)

May be more interesting if you spend time reading the papers? I believe additional introductory material may be ideal to expose this implementation to a bigger audience.

Still not following the value of the authors work.
The door must be hinged, it also has a braking system to prevent it from rotating too quickly. Adding resistance to drive a generator in place of heat/sound generation seems not unreasonable. In cars I think they call it regenerative braking.

Of course an analysis of the heat loss path will help to determine if this is worthwhile or if the heat can be used more directly to aid heating the building.
I think this would be much less of a 'big deal' if you could 'suspend' more apps. Getting a txt during a game leaving the game to reply to it and then coming back and not being able to pick up where you left of does suck. If it could effectively sleep the app and pick it up again properly this would essentially remove any need for background apps for me. I do know Tweetie 2 has implemented this and it rocks.
"If you have to ask, you can't afford it." ^_^

Seriously, the last time I checked (a few months ago), they're only interested in customers who process 6 figures per month.
Agreed.

As you mentioned some apps do this, the necessary tools are there (apps are notified when they are about to be closed and allowed to save data, suspend state, etc.) to allow apps to suspend gracefully however it's up to the developer to use them and that is pretty hit-or-miss.
Engadget's review: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/nexus-one-review/

And the HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032213
The developer of whichever game you are referring to hasn't written the application properly: it should offer to resume state when the application is next launched.

The Apple model, one app at a time, makes a lot of sense, particularly in this use case: on a device with a four inch screen, there's no need to have a game, or most other applications, running in the background!
Part of my question is why it doesn't have a USB port.
Free Desktop Calendar 2010, New Year Calendar 2010
Python: for the reasons mentioned in the article, but also the frequent release changes. There's great stuff in 2.6 like Queue objects but 2.4 is always installed.

Also unlike Perl and Java, there's still no tool that converts custom formats to native OS packaging.

And the colon on the end of function declarations serves no purpose.
O/R-Ms: Panacea or Polio Braces
MacOS X droplet GUI arount PNGOut: http://www.gingerbeardman.com/pngenie/
4chan YouTube Porn Day (jan 6)
JSpec: JavaScript Testing Framework
In Canada at least, CostCo only accepts AmEx credit cards.
Write an Internet search engine with 200 lines of Ruby code
Deja vu all over again:

What happened to Second Life? (bbc.co.uk)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977105
In a loose sense it's not entirely bogus: this is what economists call rent seeking, and the payoff for that is all the greater the bigger and more pervasive the government is.

Plus that traditional definition of socialism is mostly historical, direct ownership and equal "access" to the goodies just doesn't work in practice and is ruinous in practice.

So when people talk about "socialism" nowadays, they're talking about a diluted form that's in theory more like traditional socialism (e.g. soft Fabian or hard Communism) than corporatist Fascism (the real Italian variety, not Hitler's National Socialism (vs. Communist International Socialism (e.g. the Comintern))).
I initially read your comment as 'I wonder if it would help (them) to patent placebos" and then reading it properly realised my mistake. I'm sure there have to be some in the pharma industry hoping to turn this into a moneyspinner somehow.
Google offers to help run a 'white spaces' database
I find Django to be very inefficient in how it handles INSERT vs. UPDATE; you're better off specifing force_insert or force_update in the call to save() to avoid the extra SELECT it runs, since you almost always know whether the object you're saving is new or should be updated.
I agree, Andrew does a great job and provides information that
you may not get in any other environment

A lot of the content is inspiring and very good for idea generation
Look into quantitative finance. There are plenty of math majors roaming around there, and math people with good programming skills are in high demand.

Recommended introductory reading would be Mark Joshi's 'How to be a quant' PDF (http://www.markjoshi.com/downloads/advice.pdf). It's been around for a little while now, but most of it should still be applicable.
Augmented Reality won't be as useful for your mobile as promised
It's indeed mostly a burden on the iPhone devs side to support good 'suspension' behavior, and there are some frameworks (like Three20) which more or less offer it 'out of the box'.

I used an Android phone for a while before switching to the iPhone and in most of the cases where I missed running multiple apps only _one_ background app would be enough (e.g., Last.fm and other music (streaming) apps, a GPS tracker, some games).
Apple’s App Store Downloads Top Three Billion
Is Google’s army-of-Androids strategy working?
This type of shit is endemic because there is no incentive for banking companies to play fair. They move money around with impunity. I hope they are all dismantled or at least muzzled.
This sounds like really bad advice to me. If one were going to set up a spam/phishing operation then the first thing would be to choose a domain like xyzcorp-messages.com. I'm sure that the blacklists look at domain age and prior performance too. Anything marked spam from a brand new domain, which appears to be a phishing domain, that has no history of not spamming associated with its ownership is surely going to pop into a blacklist faster.

You have some evidence experience to back up your suggestion?
Meh. I enjoyed the Owen Byrne and Alexis Ohanian interviews, among others. I do feel that Warner comes off a little too strong on the enthusiastic side though, during an interview.
Performance is always a design goal for some value of performance. If print("Hello World") takes six years to execute you would give up and claim it is broken long before then even though "performance isn't a design goal".
byoung2 did a great writeup on the overall process of site design outsourcing. It's viewable here http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=813690
The Python GIL Visualized
At the end of the 19th century, many physicists thought they nearly had all of nature figured out, and that things like the black body problem were "just a matter of time."

I don't see consciousness fitting into any of our existing theories. Hence, I think understanding it will require a scientific revolution much as understanding the black body problem required a scientific revolution.
No need to build your own when things like OEMPro and Dada Mail exist

http://octeth.com/

http://dadamailproject.com/
A Photo Album with Python and PIL
Synaptics Scrybe - Cool And Productive Gesture Control For PC Via Touchpad
Top Foods That Turn on Your Fat Burning Furnace
I agree that the title is misleading. But keep in mind that every player who has ever been ranked #1 (Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik, Topalov, Anand) has gone on to become World Champion. It's just a matter of time before Carlsen gets his shot at a title match.

For those who are interested, Carlsen has a blog: http://www.arcticsec.no/index.php?button=blog
As much as he was off in 2009, he will be off in 2010 with the predictions. In particular, having trouble getting Twitter seriously, I struggle to grasp in what ways Yammer is useful outside of few setups, It doesn't apply to public audience at all, and even within the business it doesn't make sense to be constantly beeping about your work.

Another: "This year, look for Bing to make a serious run at Google in Web search" - is like saying IE will have a great time. It'd make sense to link them together though.
I am not sure what this sort of an article achieves - its neither succinct enough to be a synopsis nor is it detailed enough to be an in-depth explanation.

It reminds me of one of those MS-Word Specification documents bandied about in enterprises. I never could grok one of those , this is no different.
But only in the cases where it actually matters which given normal DB usage patterns for most sites is often nowhere. No point in making things more complicated when it's not needed!
Ronald Coase (one of the top 10 economists ever) has a paper about this: firm size is related to factors including communication complexity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase

There are big problems I'd like to solve (cheap space launch optimized for LEO satellite constellations, nuclear power), but since firm size for those problems right now is high, I'd rather work on less-interesting problems which can be more readily addressed by startups, at least until technology advances to let <100 person companies work on the big problems too.
Silicon Valley 'Bloodbath' Leaves Entire Office Buildings Empty
Is Tata Bringing Its Nano ($2,500 car) to the U.S.?
Facebook blocks 'social media suicide' website
Why use apache in front of jetty when jetty is a decent server for serving binary data (unlike older versions of tomcat).

Why not just enable jettys built-in automatic file-update-deploy stuff, and just use git to push the data and deploy that way?

I've used .war files and tomcat which is dead simple to deploy with the downside that there's no way to start swank-server (unless maybe disabling the security manager). Another downside is that .war files tend to be rather big.

Why use screen + emacs? Just recompiling things in emacs might probably introduce weird bugs as code is not removed from the system when it is removed from a source file. Seems a bit tough to manually go through all the source files in the right order and recompile them. It'd be easier IMHO to just start a swank server with every jetty started.
Performance can mean: blazing fast,always completes in the smallest possible time (theoretically anyway). It can also mean, runs in a reasonable time, within the parameters of the spec. Many times in the later case its faster and easier (in programmer time) to tune/tweak the slow scripting language, than it is to pull out the big guns.