skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bone Cancer Diagnosis
How is Bone Cancer Diagnosed?

Bone Cancer is a disease which shows number of symptoms which may differ from person to person. Bone Cancer Diagnosis involves a number test such as patient’s symptoms, medical history, physical examination, imaging and blood tests are required to confirm that the patient is suffering from Bone Cancer.
I could create a conversion calculator and it'd still be pretty meaningless. I just don't really understand how you can draw a direct comparison - it's not like the tests are that similar, although there is some overlap, and even using percentile of people taking the GRE is presumably pandering slightly to the fact it's a self-selecting audience and therefore not necessarily a bell curve, etc. I don't know, perhaps there are real proper studies on this to satisfy the lack of real science that's niggling me here, but given the grey area of 'measuring intelligence' I don't know how well-founded any of those are either.

Add to that the fact that things change as you age - I scored jolly well on an IQ test when I was 14, which gives me a nice score to slap down posturing pseudo-intellectual guys who like to compare mental dicksize at parties, but I'm well aware that I'd score nowhere near that now. I don't know. As I say, I think you brought it up well, I just don't quite see the relevance.

(Weirdly, though, converting the GRE score I got when I was 21 on that calculator results in almost exactly the IQ score I got when I was 14; perhaps there is something to it..!)
I dunno about others but when I read it sounded a little arrogant.

For example, I have a Mensa gold certificate saying that I scored in the top 0.5% percentile on a test (actual IQ scores vary based on the type of test but mine was 143.5).

Sounds pretty arrogant, eh?

Generally any statement that equates to "I am intelligent" gets taken this way.
Fascinating interview with an amazing polymath. Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Lettvin for an amusing anecdote about his experience with his son's pet octopus "J.D." (juvenile delinquent).
I've never seen the problem with being at work for all three meals, given that breakfast and lunch closely bracket work hours.

If you are young and don't have a family, having your employer cook you healthy meals is probably a net time-saver, even if you do work 9am - 7pm.
You speak in contradictions. For example, a 1946-1964 Roosevelt dime has a face value of $.10 but a "melt value" of $1.2022 (today) according to http://www.coinflation.com/

The U.S. government may not like it but there is little they can do about someone melting down coinage, especially outside the country. (But don't do it -- silver coins are worth more than their melt value).

Paper money is different, of course.
pretty much what I would do. that strip defined my childhood.
Naturally my first inclination is to write the thing in a completely self contained purely functional form, which I do below. I think this will be fairly efficient under lazy evaluation, since the bottom line is to count off the given number of positions from the front of the list, and then use the tail of that list to step through the original list.

Here's the whole thing starting from scratch:

# Optional values (also known as the "Maybe" type)
#
# The (absent) function represents a value that is absent.
# The (present value) function represents a value that is present.

\absent = (\absent\present absent)
\present = (\value \absent\present present value)

# Natural numbers.
#
# The (zero) function represents the number 0.
# The (succ n) function represents the number 1+n (the successor of n).
#
# A natural number is really just an optional predecessor,
# so the constructors are just synonyms for the Maybe type.

\zero=absent
\succ=present

# Lists.

\null = (\null\cons null)
\cons = (\head\tail \null\cons cons head tail)

# Subtraction of natural numbers. Computes z = x - y.
#
# Returns (present z) if x >= y.
# Returns absent if x < y.

\sub = (\x\y
y
(present x) # y = zero
\yp
x
absent # y = (succ yp) and x = zero
\xp sub xp yp # y = (succ yp) and x = (succ xp)
)

# Compute the length of a list.

\len = (\list list zero \head\tail succ (len tail))

# Return the item at the position in the list, starting with 0.

\item = (\list\pos
list
absent # list = null
\head\tail # list = (cons head tail)
pos
(present head) # pos = zero, item found
\np item tail np # pos = (succ np), keep looking
)

# Return the item at the position from the end of the list, starting with 0.

\item_end = (\list\pos
sub (len list) (succ pos) # Subtract 1+pos from length of list
absent # that's out of bounds, no item found
\new_pos item list new_pos # look for item normally at new pos
)
(copying the comment I made on the blog)

If you are "buying" nickels for the metals, it would appear the value exceeds the cost.

The way the statement about cost and value is phrased implies that the value of the coin is equivalent to the face value--which is incorrect. The value provided by the nickel is its usefulness as a tool to perform transactions. When the mint mints a nickel, it is not adding five cents to the GDP.

Micropayment is still an unsolved problem.
That can't be right... because I /know/ that games programmers are the best engineers, and Google doesn't make games...

;)
Actually you'd be wrong about that.

The truth is that people don't improve unless they can find shortcomings in themselves that can be improved upon. Which means that good people usually have no problem identifying people who are better at some things than they are. In my experience most have no trouble listing people who are simply better than they are.

So sure, I believe I'm pretty good. But am I as good as any of Robert Morris, Damian Conway or Alan Kay? Of course not, and I'd be an idiot to think otherwise.
Sounds funny, but my only supporting fact is I wouldn't be here without Flash. I basically loath programming but I'm willing to do it because of Flash.

Sure there's CPU problems and there will always be more-optimized forms of code. But Flash has a timeline, which is something few here will understand or appreciate.

Plus it really is ubiquitous, unlike anything else. I'll take a small performance hit if it means I don't have to learn/write/test multiple languages and systems.

I'm not in this for the code. I'm in it for the UX.
Correct, the nickel can be thought of as infrastructure that is used to facilitate the transfer of funds.
This isn't directly a reply to your comment, but the way I've seen Adobe for a while is not that they are lazy, but that they are not focused.

They keep coming out with new products for Flash (Catalyst, iPhone apps, Air, Flex 3/4, Stratus...) and new features for Photoshop (like import of 3D models) instead of really polishing what they have.

When I develop for Flash, I stay away from the IDE as much as possible and use Eclipe/FDT/Ant instead. The IDE is just wasting my time for most tasks since it's slow and buggy and their recent interface overhaul was a major step back.

If they simply take what they have or even cut back a bit, make all of their products work together beautifully and easy to use, I think they will be fine. Right now it feels like they are chasing the latest and shiniest tech.
Wow! I like this. "Cognitive fluency" is a concept that I've felt should exist for a long time (but, amusingly, have had no words to describe). It's a reason why I believe in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity).

Cognitive fluency has a lot of relevance for programming languages research. From the article: "When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about." Wow -- similarly, the programming language you're writing in might have an even bigger effect on what programs you find easy to create or think about.
Autotagger is one of the more interesting things I've worked on in the last couple of years, it takes a pretty weird approach to the problem but it worked surprisingly well.

When I have some time I'll do a write-up on it and post it.

The basic idea behind it is 'google backwards', if you can figure out how it works from those two words drop me a line ;)
We're Doing It Wrong; Why China = Apple
This guide is excellent. Reading it now!

Thanks for the tip!
More like Max, I'd say. :)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_characters_in_Calvin_...)
That being said, I would have loved a Hobbes stuffed animal when I was a kid, and I'd love to be able to give one to my kids someday (provided the hours I spend with my laptop hasn't rendered me completely infertile).
It may sound crazy after my previous comment, but I never took the SATs or GREs, GMATs etc. I managed to slip through schooling using a couple loopholes and skip the entrance exams all the way to my M.S.
At Splunk (SOMA in SF). My email is in my profile.
Thanks, and you would be correct.

However, did you know that Sound Spectrum, the maker of G-force that was used in Apples iTunes as the high speed visualizer, uses python as a high performance scripting environment that runs through bindings in C to openGL.

So theres a direct application - but here it also requires Graphics knowledge and high performance C++.
Petzold's "Code".
Asking the Right Questions About Building Startups
> nearly all applications will be web-based in the next 5 years

I sincerely hope the author is wrong. I think the almost all the applications which function well on the internet have communication as their core function. I sick fed up of having to use 5 languages (Java/PHP/Ruby/Clojure/Python, SQL, HTML, JavaScript, CSS) just to create a moderately usable UI. Even worse, I'm fed up having to work with crappy unresponsive Enterprise Web based UIs.
How on earth does this make sense? YC operates on a similar model to an American residential college - young people apply and attend to get access to high-quality teachers/mentors and with the expectation that participating in the program will improve their career prospects.

This model is based entirely on reputation and there is no way in which opening a competing institution makes things worse for applicants. People will apply to multiple programs and select the one they consider highest value. Institutions will compete with each other to attract the best applicants.
Why doesn't Adobe just open source the Flash plugin? Seems like it would solve a lot of problems here.
It would be an interesting move. I would see one or both of two things happening. First, people would take it and run with it, eventually coming up with a decent piece of software. Second, Apple could do the same. Either way, though, Adobe would lose control for sure.

The big question to me is, why isn't Adobe serious about making this technology better? I mean, if Flash worked superbly well we might be not having this discussion. If they want sole control, then it has to work. If they can't fix it, find someone who can, or release it and let the masses figure it out. I think Jobs is right, they're lazy. They wasted a good position.
Apple updated iPad video to remove Flash
I agree with almost everything you write there, except that unfortunately here in the UK enforcement doesn't work like that. Right now, cameras are the preferred way to do a lot of things (speed, red lights, bus lanes), and databases get a lot more (uninsured, not paid the right tax at the right time, etc.). Meanwhile, the budget for traffic police officers who are out on patrol and can do something about the really serious problems has been slashed, sometimes by a factor of three or more, in most areas. During debates with local councillors here, two views come up repeatedly: drivers think that the bad driving is getting more frequent and more offensive, and the remaining traffic police officers are frustrated that they can't do much about it because they're already at full stretch, so even some major roads simply don't get patrolled at all.

> Pretty good evidence, IMHO, that laws are not clear-cut and there's room for judgment calls in a lot of them.

The unfortunate thing, IMHO, is that so many of these laws are clear-cut. It would be much better, again IMHO, if there were fewer prosecutions, but those that took place went to a real court where a proper judgement could be made, taking into account all the facts of the specific case.
If they open-sourced it, it would be difficult to standardize. With a major release every 12-18 months, it's already difficult to drive adoption (takes about 12 months to get > 90% user base per version).

I will agree - they might want to consider open sourcing the Linux version. I know nothing about Linux so I'm guessing it's related to trying to support the "anything-goes moving-target many-flavors-of Linux" issue.

OSX is another matter (blocked OSX APIs).
I mean this is interesting and all, but first page? Really? Does everybody want to work at Google that badly?
I recently watched The Judge and the General, a documentary about the bloody rise of the Pinochet regime in Chile (link below), and the recent legal action against it. I recall a particularly chilling moment when Pinochet declared (paraphrased): if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. Of course, thousands and thousands of people had everything to fear, and thousands lost their lives for the dubious crime of being left wing supporters of the ousted Allende regime. Some things only become 'crimes' in retrospect.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/judgeandthegeneral/
I'm more of an Oracle guy but I'll send one along tonight regardless in case you have anything more entry-level pop up.
Everyone in the world would have loved a Hobbes animal. He could have made a mint off of that. Which makes his decision not to merchandise one of the most impressive displays of artistic integrity I know of.
Data found in Dropbox's public folders (bottom in english)
In my experience, Google employees individually are not much smarter or more productive than what you'd find in a top-tier computer science department or successful startup. Google's engineering reputation comes from having 20,000 of them, all with access to the same code & information, similar cultural values, and mostly aligned goals.

It's a critical mass problem. One smart person is a useful open-source library. Ten smart people is a successful startup. Twenty thousand smart people is Google.

There're certain efficiencies of scale that you can get with twenty thousand employees that are all empowered to work together. You get more specialization, so your UI designer is really good, and your UI engineer is really good, and your toolsmith is really good, and your backend algorithms person is really good, and the whole product benefits from that. You get the cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when smart people get together over food in a relaxed atmosphere. And you get the accumulated infrastructure built from having ten years of really smart people working on hard problems.

The network organization tends to eliminate the biggest problem that other tech companies have: scale. Typically, you eventually get a dumb middle manager placed on top of a bunch of smart programmers, and the whole group drops to the level of the weakest link. By empowering people to reach out across the organization to whoever's the best person for the task, regardless of the org chart, you can route around weak links. The organization starts being defined by its best performers instead of its worst performers.
Essentially, because it is reversible.

In other words, the information needed to extract the true raw-text password is actually included in the encrypted string.

With a hash, only a representation of the raw-text is being stored. Even if you knew exactly what was done to create that representation, you're still a long way off from understanding the raw-text.

If you treat both the key and the salt as being "known to the developer only" and either of these becomes compromised, you still don't have they raw-text of a hash, but you've got everything you need for the encrypted.
Steve is using Oh My Zsh, which is one of my pet projects. You can find it on Github.

http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh
There are a bunch of ex-entrepreneurs there, including myself. I think their happiness and success depends upon whether their entrepreneurial ideas align with the sorts of projects that Google would be good at, or whether they're better off striking out on their own again.
The only truth is that there is no truth.
Eden, the new web based CMS from Preation
We're allowed to talk about the smart people. The big deals are what those smart people have set up. That includes the actual scale of the problems we face, the technologies we have, the way development is organized, the way that overall work is organized, and how well the whole package works.

Of course I can't say anything specific about any of that because Google rightly views a lot of it as key competitive advantages. Which is why descriptions like mine about the experience of being at Google focus so much on the areas we are allowed to talk about. Like food and dogs and smart people.
In the "woes unite foes" rhyming example, it's definitely using the same part of my brain involved with processing poetic license. I disagree with the sentence, but I can feel my brain working to frame it charitably.
I know what you mean, sometimes things can get a little flaky. I haven't tried the comment feature yet. It is after all a big pile of Javascript with WYSIWYG editors and such. So far I have found the bugs slightly annoying, cute, and avoidable.

For my own high-powered purposes I've written a completely custom CMS with fully encrypted and extensible object types based on pure text. But have I written an "object" with a WYSIWYG editor, Labels, Archives, and other stuff built in yet? Heck no. So blogger.com here I come.
Clever. I'm a product guy at Flurry, so here's my thoughts:

1) You could ask us for more granular access permissions - but that's probably not likely to happen soon, because the roadmap's pretty packed.

2) You could just ask your affiliates to trust you and give them the numbers directly - that's actually how most affiliate networks work, with the affiliates are completely reliant on the network's reporting.

3) You could use Pinch Media's analytics, which has an API that lets you access the number of unique users that completed an action, and then build a dashboard for your affiliates that calls the Pinch API. (Fine by us, since we merged with Pinch Media.) That said, two caveats: the Pinch product aggregates data slower than the Flurry product, and we're merging the Pinch product into Flurry product. Since Pinch and Flurry handle events differently, you might end up reimplementing the API calls post-merger.

4) You could start by just sending out stats to your affiliates manually, and later build your own dashboard for them using Flurry's not-yet-built API. We're committed to releasing an API for Flurry, since Pinch already has an API and we're making sure the merged product has the superset of Pinch and Flurry features. I don't have timing for you yet, though.
The Carleton gamejam, the one in Ottawa, Canada.
2340 on the calculator puts you at the 100th percentile, and at about 2100 on the pre-95 SAT (which only went up to 1600). You sure this has the right version of the score?
The Structure and Complexity of the United States Code
I don't understand it still. The cost factor and the string remains the same but different hashes are produced. So if a user inputs "hi,mom" and the app generates a hash, how is it going to be the same as the one in DB ?

Or did you make a mistake and the cost factors are supposed to different ?
This is exactly what HTML 5 changes though. You don't even need an internet connection (other than to download the web app originally, obviously).
It would be good to have demo text that plays to UTF-n's advantage, so I don't have to copy-paste from someplace like jp.wikipedia.org myself :)

It looks like it preserves some of UTF-8's stream synchronization properties, but does it have UTF-8's wonderful property of being recognizable by simple heuristics to great confidence even for tiny sequences?
The biggest reason why privacy matters is because there are always going to be crimes committed so there will always be people that have nothing to do with the crime caught in the dragnet around the crime scene. Coincidences do happen and if you happen to be around the area of two murders you'll have a very hard time to explain that away, whereas in a society with good privacy you would never even appear on the radar.

So even if you haven't broken the law or done something that could be misconstrued as such you are still at risk.

All this lack of privacy does is increase the size of the haystack while keeping the number of needles constant.

But hay looks a lot like needles and plenty of 'hay' will end up being prosecuted for stuff the needles get away with.

Less privacy means more solved crimes, but it also means many more false positives.

The 'if you've got nothing to hide why do you want privacy' crowd seems to be completely oblivious to this, until they end up being hauled in to the station for something they had nothing to do with themselves. That's when reality kicks in and suddenly they switch sides (but by then it's obviously too late).

We live in a society that is predicated on fear, fear of crime, of terror and so on. And most of us are willing to trade their freedom for security all too easily.

If you want absolute security, you should realize that that is only possible in a society that has more in common with a prison than with a park.

Robert Heinlein wrote a whole bunch of books around this theme, if you like SF and you haven't read those book yet I suggest you do so, there is some really good stuff in there.
Hunter S. Thompson was a very 'special' sports journalist. Most sports journalists wouldn't give Einstein a good interview.

That said, I'd pay to read HST/Einstein as well.
On Amazon EC2's Underlying Architecture
Flamebait?
Not sure why your comment is being voted down. I also thought this was a balanced viewpoint of what the current situation is from a flash developer.

I pretty much agree with the summary that we are stuck supporting solutions for both platforms in the interim, also that the developers who will start ramping up on HTML5 will likely be the flash developers currently in the workforce as they slowly migrate their skillsets across. We've done it before recently from AS2 to AS3 and also Flash to Flex so its not like we don't have recent experience.

What will make this transition quicker though is if Adobe include HTML5 authoring tools in the next version of the suite. I think they are best suited to give us the tools we need. They are not married to the Flash platform, look at the recent iPhone support added to the Flash IDE, if Flash was to disappear tomorrow they will still have a market to retool the IDE and sell it. Also Adobe has to protect After Effect's market share, so a straight from After Effects to HTML5 player via Dreamweaver pipeline is likely going to happen.

This animosity towards Adobe, and the thinking they are killing the web with flash has to stop if we want to help Adobe to provide us with the tools we need to create the new HTML5 experience, and also leverage our existing RIA developer base to build it. Adobe is not killing the web we love, the marketing departments of giant corporations is killing the web we love, and will do so regardless of flash or no flash.

The interaction in one of the example links the author posted is amazing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zuOdJQiljw&feature=youtu... seriously awesome stuff, I would never had though this would be such a closed minded group of people than to vote against anyone who argues a point and provides evidence to back it up
It would be great if the entertainment industry could learn this lesson.