skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically the plan was to use some of the existing social media sites (One in particular that was large in our target market) and locate the opinion leaders on that site by analysing how many friends they had, etc. We then personally contacted around 100 people and tried to talk them into helping us getting off the ground.

When they found out that a competitor was using their network to garner interest for a competing site they used every means at their disposal to shut us out. Understandable, I would probably have done the same thing.
I sense an opportunity here, a small web app that will backup all the facebook photos that have you tagged.
What's not new is that people who are past puberty generally use technology only to make what they were already doing easier. We'll all have to die off before a majority of people develop habits and behaviors made possible by The Future.
You didn't make it to the end of the post, didn't you?
You're right; it's been corrected.
Im not wholly convinced that version control is an area where microsecond speed advantages matter. Rather versatility, portability and compatibility :)
You only fail if you give up. Your first iteration will most likely fail because you don't have enough experience to know what works. If you can quickly and objectively identify what doesn't work, get rid of it, and try something else, then you'll only fail a little bit (but who cares). It's not over until it's over. By the way when I say "try something new," I could mean the color of a button, or the whole idea.
But every person who can break into a server can affect orders of magnitude more people. Expected value may still be less, just saying.
The increase in two income families much more than offsets that. Where one income used to be sufficient two are now necessary.
In addition to health insurance being broken, it seems like most doctors are really terrible in the U.S. I read the other day that it takes on average seven years to correctly diagnose a medical condition. Some diseases, like celiacs, have an average time until diagnosis of 10 years. If you haven't already read How Doctors Think, it's truly horrifying. Unless you have something like strept throat, you're generally pretty screwed even if you have great medical insurance. And I'm speaking from personal experience here; about three years ago I started having some medical issues, and I went into the doctor the day the symptoms started happening. A dozen doctors and specialists later and I still don't have a correct diagnosis. The fact that I'm probably going to have to wait another 5+ years until I can get the problem even diagnosed is complete bullshit. Now it could just be that I have something that is really hard to diagnose, but more likely the reason no one can figure it out is that medical schools have done their best to select doctors with zero intellectual curiosity who never voluntarily read anything about medicine other than pharma pamphlets. Just look at what happened to Shooter because the 'best' doctors couldn't even diagnose something as trivial as lyme disease: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868325

edit: Someone really needs to make a crowdsourced website where you can post all your symptoms and test results, and then offer up a bounty to anyone who can figure out the correct diagnosis.
> Before calling the method_missing method itself, Ruby sets a thread-local variable called call_status that reflects whether or not the original call was a vcall or a normal call.

Yuck, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) uses a global variable for that?
(Yes OK, it's actually thread-local, but that's effectively the same thing.) Awful style begets awful bugs. That's what you get for having such a messed up interface.
I don't have any hard numbers, but here is a good article from 2007 that may provide insight into the problem.

http://reason.com/archives/2007/07/25/dying-for-lifesaving-d...
Hackers Weigh In: 8 Big Things to Do with a Mini Server
For those interested in long-range predictions, here's an amusing site that tracks predictions from the past:

http://www.paleofuture.com/
I spoke with my local melanochalcographer just yesterday, and he informed me that his art is far from irredivivous. I don't understand how anyone could suggest that melanochalcography is a rare word, or a rare art, for that matter. Anyone suggesting that ought to take a mental exipotic.
That's probably why nature comes with error bars... err, hbars.
It's different, because people typically went on Prodigy to meet new friends that shared their interests, while people typically went on FaceBook to hang out virtually with existing friends that they met through real life. I'm not sure whether this is a plus or minus for FaceBook - in general, network effects involving strangers (eg. EBay) are stronger than those involving friends, because friends have many more alternate means of communications.

I look at FaceBook as more like the mall. It's a place to hang out. (And just like the mall, they try to sell you something ;-)). There will always be a need for some sort of mall. But if this particular mall starts getting evil, or ugly, or filled with undesirable people, then you can just call up your friends and visit some other mall. Or hang out at the gas station, or rec center, or bowling alley.
It strikes me looking at the discussion here that "tell me about the craziest bug you've ever fixed" may be a very useful interview question. You quickly get an idea of someone's thought process, problem solving strategies, and level of experience.
OnlineRadioBar - Help
First, the "know how to do it dudes" thing is kind of lame. But that's not super relevant to the argument he's making.

I think the author has an interesting idea, but kind of fails to follow it through to the end. More than anything, he's hinted at a division that I think is present here at HN.

My only beef is that he was kind of a dick about why 'real programmers' would do what they do. "Of course it does not mean they're destined to work their whole life like that - they can still quit and start their own company, but probably not as much because they want more money and their own business, but more because they disagree with, say, the corporate policy for brackets {} style." This, as much as anything, solidifies the authors argument that he is not a "real programmer".

I think that real programmers get excited in the same way that the "dude who ..." (and so on) does, but only about products that have the properties of both being incredibly technologically interesting as well as useful. This is arguably where things like Linux and Google came from.
He broke records on fundraising.
My guess (and hope) is that Maemo will become as good as or even better than Android. However, I still don't see anybody other than Nokia adopting it.
http://www.google.com/history/trends?all=year&hl=en (whilst signed in and having web history enabled) might be useful for people considering the above.
That's pretty exact, so I take you have that automated or you lifted that number from google somehow. Could you please tell how you found that number ?
The science museum in London has a really beautiful stainless-steel model of a combination lock similar to his wooden one. The first time I played with it and saw the bar fall into the slots was one of those wonderful "holy cow!" moments when something you always thought of as deep magic is revealed as having a simple principle behind it.
Religious people have more to answer for.
You're right, I was kind of a dick saying things this way. But I didn't mean to seem disrespectful. I greatly respect real programmers and I often wish I was one and had the sources for motivation which are available to them. Actually, I was hoping I managed to be a dick to both sides in this post.
I've often seen the claim that not having operator precedence hurts a language's acceptance, but is there any concrete evidence of that? Could it just be a coincidence?

Were it not for the closed/licensed/expensive/commercial nature of Smalltalks, the language probably would not have fallen into to the relative obscurity it suffers today. I personally doubt that operators had anything to do with it. From what I've read of the history of the era, the language itself was much-loved and rising in popularity until the introduction of Java disrupted the traditional Smalltalk business models.
Google Web History tells you
Of course, you can get your astrology too:
http://shine.yahoo.com/astrology
Ha. I knew someone was going to use this post as an excuse to wail on Ruby. No other Ruby VM uses a global (or thread-local) for this problem; it's not necessary to implement the functionality. While we were working through the problem, Evan (who works on Rubinius, another Ruby VM) remarked how much better the other implementations (like JRuby and Rubinius) handled the same problem.
This is why I know we live in the future:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/

This dude is a cyborg. Not a technical "oh you've got eyeglasses" cyborg. Not a wannabe Kevin "I've implanted a subcutaneous neurochip" Warwick cyborg. A full-on, bad-ass "I have robot arms that I control with my fucking mind" cyborg.
The more direct response to the OP would be to limit downvoting based on whether a user has already downvoted another post of the same user already. But even that gets silly.
Modern Warfare 2: How To Get Titles and Emblems
I agree with you, but out of interest: how would you do it?

I'd be tempted to ask "why distinguish between vcalls and normal calls?", but in general I don't think it's possible to build a system that is completely non-ugly, and all areas of ugliness have the potential for bugs.
This year we had another technical design panel (which was a little more impromptu, I was asked to moderate the morning of :P), but was still good.
اس ام اس روز اس ام اس جدید اس ام اس عاشقانه SMS
اس ام اس روز اس ام اس جدید اس ام اس عاشقانه SMS
Ah, it's tied in with the toolbar and the pagerank function. I see. Learn a new thing every day :)

So that's not going to retroactively give me that number, that's a pity.
اس ام اس جدید اس ام اس عاشقانه اس ام اس باحال 
اس ام اس جدید اس ام اس عاشقانه اس ام اس باحال
Randomness in Nature
Interrupt triggered bugs are usually really hard to find

Very true. Anything that is reproducible is fairly easy to debug. Something that is hard to reproduce is even harder to figure out.

Here's a good scenario, on a good old Apple II: you'd call a subroutine. The processor would put your address on the stack, to know where to return. So when the processor returns, you can peek at the data just below the stack pointer to figure out your own address. Works 99.999999% of the time. Except if an interrupt occured exactly on the return instruction, erasing the old stack data.

With that kind of frequency (interrupts would happen at about 60 Hz on an Apple II), you'd freeze the computer after several minutes. Good luck figuring it out.
I think you succeeded in that, it's just going to seem biased to anyone reading it, because they'll inevitably fall one one side or the other and agree with exactly half of your dickish statements.

Maybe I was a little oversensitive :)
I meant "MRI" and not "Ruby". It's clearly just an implementation detail and not mandated by the language itself. I'll change the original post to clarify this.

If we're going to be pedantic, it's a "Ruby Interpreter" or "Ruby implementation", but not "Ruby VM". Ruby implementations can use a VM-based design, but it's certainly not required.
The research question is one that occurred to me. Do these cost data include spending on medical and pharmaceutical research? I would imagine that the bulk of that spending occurs in those same countries that are "above" the average line in this graph, and could contribute to that skewing.
You can read interesting things about FOXP2 gene here http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_evolution_of_lan...
Thanks! Ruby 1.9 and Rubinius are both "Ruby VMs", while Ruby 1.8 is an interpreter, and IronRuby/JRuby leverage existing VMs. In this case, Evan, who works on a Ruby VM, was looking at Ruby 1.9, another Ruby VM ;)
Title is a bit misleading - sure 20 min a day may be fine for achieving some milestone, but the bottom line is that our bodies are machines that are not meant to be sedentary!!! at the very least, 1 lb of fat = 3200 calories and we should not be walking around with whole people of fat tied to our guts
Broadband forum- a social networking site.
Your presence in a broadband forum can really bring wonders- whether you are just a person who wants updates on the recent information and updates on broadband services as well as other topics such as broadband providers or if you are a business
Someone with even a remote familiarity with the practice of medicine would not refer to Lyme disease, one of the great imitators, as 'trivial'. The rest of your post, though forceful, similarly suffers from having no idea what you are talking about.

Regarding the length of time from the onset of low-risk chronic diseases (unpleasant though they may be), you are right that this is a problem but dead wrong about the cause. The problem is overspecialization and undercoordination. An inherent idiocy in the practitioners would be an easy problem to remedy; the truth is much more pernicious.
I'm not convinced. For every example you do cite of a first mover advantage, there are a dozen examples of first movers being killed by companies that followed them.

Yahoo-Google

Friendster-Myspace-Facebook

Blogger-Wordpress

Hotmail-Yahoo-Gmail

I can go on.
Causality FAIL. They even have the unmitigated gall to talk about a "dose-response" relationship for what is a purely observational study.
I think the slope is the whole point of the graph and it is supposed represent efficiency although in a very unfortunate way. The angle of the slope is defined by arcsin((life_expectancy - healthcare_costs) / constant). It's a bit like subtracting apples from oranges.

If there's one thing I've learned at engineering school it's that mixing up units of measurement is not a good idea. If you subtract years from dollars the value you get will carry no meaning. And that's why this visualisation is completely meaningless. They should come up with a more clearly defined and sane approach.
I call that the startup advice contradiction: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/12/18/startup-advice-contr...

How can you both fail fast and be resilient? Isn't giving both advice the same as hedging a bet? Then you can say "I told you so", no matter what happens...
I think we should show a chart of each country's health care costs relative to how much their lawyers make on health care related malpractice cases. Because in America, it's out of control, and probably the largest reason health care costs so much.

Honestly, a good first step in taming the health care and health insurance costs should be to cap how much lawyers make on malpractice cases.

Why do people rarely talk about tort reform? I apologize if you did, but I just did a quick browser search for "tort" and "lawyer" and got no results.
PXZ - Parallel LZMA compressor
A lot depends on how much technological stuff you want to do instead of focusing on writing, and how peculiar and exacting you will be in how you want to set up your site. If you can be satisfied with anything that fits a fairly simple list, and not be picky about small details, just go with whatever you can install and get working first.

If you are going to take time away from writing articles to be precise and picky, you need to write your own from scratch or choose something that is pretty flexible. In that case I would advise Drupal. I would also advise finding a good freelancer you can have do everything for you, and concentrate on reporting and writing, as soon as you can afford it.
I'd imagine that anything with the word "archiloquy" on it would be relevant to that query, given its rarity...
Simplest approach: add a parameter to the call-dispatch machinery. For example, let's say you have functions op_call() and op_vcall() corresponding to the bytecodes or AST nodes representing normal calls and vcalls respectively, and these methods work by calling the lower-level internal method dispatch_call(). What they're doing right now is having call() and vcall() set a global that is then inspected later on by dispatch_call() to select the correct error to raise. I'd say that the better thing to do is to leverage the call stack and just turn it into a parameter that's passed to dispatch_call(). That way you can't forget to set it before dispatch_call(), and you get cleanup for free when the stack gets unwound. (Even if you end up longjmp()ing out of the call due to an exception or whatever!)

I'm sure the above is a simplification of the actual scenario in MRI, but I bet the same general schematic can be applied, even if the implementation details are a bit more complicated in a real-world interpreter like MRI.
How the leopard got its spots
Bitly.tv; "See what the world is watching"
Neetu Chandra sizzles in black lingerie
I'm sorry to hear of your health problems, but unfortunately doctors don't have tricorders yet. It's quite incorrect to suggest that people with "zero intellectual curiosity" are sought out by medical schools, in fact it's a preposterous claim.

We have made great advances in medicine in the past 100 years, but complete understanding of the human organism and its diseases still lies far in the future. Some diseases have no "tests" or definitive diagnostics; they are identified by ruling out other possible causes of the symptoms. This can take time.
If the answer were obvious, the prediction wouldn't be interesting :)

That said, I think this is like the early PC market -- many platforms, but most (Commodore, Atari, etc) won't survive because they lack purpose. RIM, Nokia etc will switch to Android or disappear.
What's the banking equivalent of interest? My checking account pays something like 0.002%. I keep my money there for security and convenience, just like my Gmail.
That's testable. Splice the human gene in to the chimpanzee genome and see if the outcome is the talking chimpanzee. If not then there are more genes active.
With firefox you can set "search keywords" so I have Google set as "g". Now when I type g <search term> into my address box it will search Google. I have others for amazon, Wikipedia and the rest. Not quite the same thing as crome's but just as useful.
that was just creepy.
Thanks for sharing!
I use TrackMeNot (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173) to hide what I actually search from Google. As a result, I execute thousands of queries per day.
You mean apart from the obvious, your data is safe, backed up, and available from anywhere, not just your basement?
If you can reproduce this with recent version (either 0.7.60+ or 0.8.x, not 0.6.x from please-dont-use-me-anymore repository), then I can promise you that I will at least look into this issue.

You can mail me off-site with the way to reproduce this (check my profile for e-mail address).
There are a lot more numbers here than I expected.
What about http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ then? :)
I find it interesting how they had exit strategies right from the start, I feel like it would be bad to start a company with the intention of exiting, but I guess they at least had a (rather clever) way of making money. Much better than startups that have intentions of flipping the company and make absolutely no money.
But it could easily be added in by having horizontal and vertical lines added that read "average healthcare cost" and "average life expectancy."
To clarify his terminology: the "real programmer" values the means; the "dude" values the ends.

It's a question of what one values, and this does tend to be mutually exclusive, in the specific sense that when they are in conflict, you must choose one over the other - which one do you choose? That shows what you value. While you can be highly skilled at both, you will tend to focus on what you value more, and therefore practice it with greater attendance, and therefore get better at it (and you probably were better at it in the first place - which is why you value it). I think Catmull (of Pixar) is a great example of brilliance at both means and ends - but he values ends.

This "real programmer" is a professional, who will tend to be obsessed with technical skills, whether they are useful or not, because to him these skills are valuable in themselves. The "dude" is an entrepreneur, looks at what is needed, and how these needs can be met.

Here's an illustrative story: I met a surgeon who worked in Nepal for 10 years, as a missionary, religious calling. Although he tried really hard, and worked really hard, he felt he didn't make any lasting impact, and in fact, he said that "digging ditches" for sewage would have helped more people, by preventing diseases through better sanitation. I was excited about this deeper understanding, and asked him why he didn't do that. He said that it was because he was a surgeon, and his skills would be wasted if he didn't use them. He cared more about means (being a surgeon) than ends (actually helping people). He was a professional.

I enjoy solving problems. It's exciting, interesting and engaging. But it seems to have a kind of negative basis, like a doctor preferring sickness to health, or a priest who practices always compassion, never appreciation.

But in the end, it's far better to care about something - whether it's means or ends - than to care for nothing at all.
"Someone with even a remote familiarity with the practice of medicine would not refer to Lyme disease, one of the great imitators, as 'trivial'."

The fact that it is an imitator makes it easier to diagnose, because a competent doctor will test you for it whenever you have unexplained symptoms. While it's true that the blood tests aren't very accurate, most of the problem is that doctors just don't get people tested in the first place. And even for chronic lyme that is undetectable because it supposedly forms cysts within the cells, there is a new test up to 50x more accurate than the standard test being developed that you can have access to if you're willing to be part of the trial group.
The convenience of having it available anytime anywhere.
I believe that kind of list already exists. A friend of mine is consistently given extra screening every time he passes through an airport. They put a mark on his boarding pass and he gets a pat-down.
> Someone really needs to make a crowdsourced website where you can post all your symptoms and test results, and then offer up a bounty to anyone who can figure out the correct diagnosis.

Just like that episode of House :) Except in the show most responses were things like "alien abduction" or "this thing my homoeopathic treatment cures". Oh yeah, and there were quite a number of these. How would you solve the swarm of crackpots problem?
"It's quite incorrect to suggest that people with "zero intellectual curiosity" are sought out by medical schools, in fact it's a preposterous claim."

Medical schools are famous for only admitting people who A) went to college B) had high GPAs C) are 'well rounded', meaning they participated in lots of school clubs or whatever. This seems like more or less a recipe for selecting candidates with low intellectual curiosity. And as for empirical evidence, I believe it's also the book How Doctors Think book that quotes the statistic that the vast majority of doctors couldn't name a single finding published in their field's leading journal within the last year.