skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the risk of hemoraging more karma, let me make the following observations.

1) The MMR study consists of 288 children, 192 of which were hand-picked to match 96 autistic children. It strikes me that for a condition that is diagnosed in 1 out of 120 children, a population of 300 children is a bit sparse. Is that blasphemy?

2) The MMR study (which the other high karma poster is also quoting, it's the same study) is, after all, an MMR study. That means that of the 30 or so shots http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/child/2... that a child is forced to undergo in the US by age 6, the Measles-Mumps-Rubella shot has been shown apparently (with a sample size of 288 kids) not to correlate with autism. I'm not sure why MMR was singled out, but for many of us, it's not any one vaccine that's the issue, nor is it thimerosal (although I'm glad it's out of there), it's the sheer number of them and how fast they are imposed on young bodies. Many more of them, I may add, than when you were a kid.

I feel that you are not going to be swayed from your position that all is well in vaccination land. I wonder if you have children. When you have a new son (boys are diagnosed at a rate of 1 in 70) we'll see if you aren't more willing to be critical of one or two studies that are quoted so often it seems like there are 50.

My original point still stands. Fund a study of non-vaccinated children. They exist. I have two of them. Compare their autism rate against the general population. Use a sample size that is actually meaningful, and you'll shut up Jenny McCarthy, and you'll let me sleep easier as well.
You could argue that but a couple of seconds googling around would show you the term is not used to describe, say, financial transparency, especially not in a privately held startup. It's almost always used in the context of customer relations. Here's one of the top hits -

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/heath-row/business-transpare...

A person from a start-up (Six Apart), a person from a large corporation (Microsoft) and an interviewer from a well-established business magazine (Fast Company) briefly discuss transparency. The focus is on customer relations.
I considered expending effort to verify this and the units hobby one. However, I fully trust that Randall does his homework on each and every xkcd. Good netizens like yourself never fail to keep him honest for me. Thanks!
Solving cryptograms in Clojure
Awesome, thanks. Going to see if I can use this for my crypto class (the project is to build an encryption system on top of Twitter, using GreaseMonkey).

Also - reminds me of CoffeeScript (which has similarly clean (if less Pythonic) syntax, but has to be compiled to Javascript, I believe). http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#overview
jQuery is a much smaller scope than Prototype or Mootools -- it doesn't try and enforce a JavaScript framework. I previously avoided it because it provided so much less general programming tools than the alternatives.

However, in the years since I made some of those technology decisions, jQuery has become the leader and thus more and more 3rd party technologies have been built around it.

I've recently switched to jQuery from mootools but I had to seek out a lot of plugins and other libraries (and build some stuff myself) to reach the same levels of capability but ultimately I'm happy with the results.
I hope I'm not beating up a straw man here, but I have seen many claim that REST is a good solution that scales well because the web is built on the REST philosophy. The principles of REST are why the web is a success, and so if we use REST, we can attain the same benefits. What you seem to be proposing is that the web is not a good example of REST.

If this is the case, is there any good example of REST? I have yet to see a web service API that does not require one to read the docs to do URL construction, which violates the HATEOAS principle. The only examples I know of where HATEOAS is satisfied are HTML forms, as I mentioned, Atom feeds, and OpenSearchDescription. None of these are elaborate APIs (or APIs at all) where one would even need to consider something like XML-RPC.

I think HTML forms are a perfect example of REST, since they supply the client with all necessary information to build the next request, and URLs do not need to be constructed manually. The way 302s are used to redirect to the newly-created resource makes web browsers behave more RESTfully, since they prevent reloads from resubmitting POST requests. This is a very common practice today, and I would consider it one of the best examples of REST done right, and yet it uses a different HTTP response code than the proposed standard of 201 Created.

All I'm trying to do is show that there are at least two codes, 201 and 302, that properly RESTful services might return, to support my argument that response codes are not uniform across all REST services.
Not sure but I would think this treatment of "transparency" deals with recent trends among some closely-held startups to make gratuitous disclosure of their inside financial information, as discussed in this thread having to do with a post entitled "Disclosing Your Finances: Should you publicly publish your finances?": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1034911.

I have a detailed post in that thread about how such disclosures may expose directors to claims of breach of fiduciary duty, among other things, and how they are therefore not generally a good idea. The related piece to which the thread is attached contains the counter-arguments, as do other posts in that thread.
I believe, when the parent said "hack together a basic pool game," they meant "hack together just enough of a game engine to write a pool game on top of it, and then write said pool game atop it."
ActiveResource ?

http://api.rubyonrails.org/files/vendor/rails/activeresource...
Well it was taking like 20 seconds to do my cleanup. Five seconds still sucks for users. IIRC, remove has to recurse to every child to check for stored data, so I'm just removing the nodes manually and eating the tiny data memory leak.

edit: and yes, 4x is a constant fraction, as opposed to an asymptotic improvement. :)
That's assuming the fund doesn't earn any interest, which I expect it does.
Question for noah, if he's willing to answer it:

You said that currently you have $1.5M+ revenues, and margins of 70%. What are the current cost breakdowns right now? Other than salary, what other ongoing costs do you have?
Congrats to the jQuery team!
Kodak Sues Apple & RIM For Patent Infringement
I work in the same building as BGC3. Since he moved in I have hoped to bump in to him in the elevator. It hasn't happened yet. :)

BGC3 appears to be Bill's business presence now that he's not at MS on a day-to-day basis.

A very common business design pattern for wealthy businesspeople is to have a "parent company" that is essentially the businessperson plus their entourage: the legal team, technical due diligence buddies, capital raising marketing staff (people who woo wall street). This company may or may not be owned by a parent company that does the investing in other companies that actually "do stuff".

Without seeing the evidence for the patent troll concerns, I have no reason to believe it's the case -- he just needs some place to park his Mercedes during the day. :)
That's part of what I was referring to, though not in response to those specific companies, but more with regard to the expectation that companies should do that, or that they're somehow more honest if they do.
Very alpha (the lack of anonymous functions is a killer even for experimental use), but it is clean-looking. A project to watch or jump into.
This earthquake can be noting but good for Haiti. People saw and heard there were problems and poverty here, but did nothing. Now due to the earthquake, people see and and millions of dollars are pouring and and will continue too. It is going to spur growth and economic activity. like ars said, bad initially, but great in the long run.
If anybody wants to do things to this doc (install Pivot Tables gadget, rearrange columns, do crazy sorts), but is worried about messing up doc for others, remember you can copy it out for yourself with File -> Make a Copy.

(Yes it will be slightly out of date eventually, but you can then copy it out again.)
LOL. I meant to reply to the other guy.
Scareware Purveyors, Spammers, and Crooks Take Advantage of Haiti Earthquake
They're great at taking the same thing, changing a few minor things, then turning around and selling it.
So... People do not log on to the internet after an earthquake? Is there something surprising about this?
It's conceivable although the post that started that thread is very specifically about the disclosure of financial detail and doesn't even mention the term 'transparency'. Neither does any of the resulting commentary on HN. At the same time the admittedly vague and woolly term 'business transparency' is commonly used to describe an approach to customer relations that's consistent with what the author terms 'translucency'.
nothing but good? seriously?
There was a segment about this on NPR's "This American Life" sometime back. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=128...
That should be the definition of transparency, but I wrote this blog post in response to this self-righteous tone that I see a lot of social media "gurus" taking lately where they seem to believe that it's their natural right to whatever information they want about a company or individual, and when the entity in question refuses, they start whining about "transparency".

A good example was the whole Tiger Woods fiasco. While it's true that he clearly had something to hide, I don't buy that because he's a brand, he's obligated to divulge everything about his personal life to the media and the public. But you should have heard the social media bloggers calling for his demise because he "owed" an explanation and they weren't getting it fast enough.

Perhaps I didn't adequately explain that I'm not anti-transparency, but more anti- towards the "entitled-to-transparency" attitude many social media bloggers are starting to exhibit.
What is more sobering is that, even before the quake, it appears that there were fewer than 10K Firefox users in a country of 9M people! It's not a surprise to me at all that the country's communications infrastructure was damaged.
The company is now coming out of its shell, partly because it is so big that it can no longer hide. "Our thought was to stay quiet until it feels like we had an elephant under a hay stack," CEO and founder Charlie Kim tells me during a recent visit to Next Jump’s Manhattan headquarters

Ha. Smells like an IPO to me.
That blog suggests that instead of 4% going on to commit suicide as the earlier research showed, that 13% do commit suicide later on. That still leaves 87% of aborted suicidees who don't commit suicide afterwards.
Thanks. I typed it with an doctor evil voice inside my head. I guess it didn't came across that way. :)

The reason I typed the comment was probably out of sarcasm I think. The title of the article is SO militaristic and when you go to the article you see this photo of a dude in a back skivvy who looks like he's a member of the nazi party or something (although he seems very happy).

I thought it deserved a silly comment. But who am I...
you should cry that you didn't come up with that idea and have 700,000k+ sitting in your bank account.
Broken window fallacy
This is just one of those pot-luck ideas. It was already out there, he just hit the jackpot.
Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Programming
The Internet could be very useful as a way to connect and find relatives and nearby aid, as well as information in general. If there was a major earthquake where I live and I still could get online, you could bet that I'd use this to find out as much as possible about the situation.

The graph is evidence of the complete breakdown of infrastructure in Haiti.
Very interesting points. You could be right.
This is actually quite dangerous.
You can use GData to load the document retrieve all contributors and authors.

You can also retrieve the viewers using a cronjob.

GData returns a "Person" objects in 3.0
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/javadoc/com/google/gdata/d...

and when you know that google docs generates a revision for just clicking around
you can retrieve all revisions and email addresses using
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/javadoc/com/google/gdata/d...

Anyway, it is a great idea... but really not a good idea to use a google doc :-)
What's wrong with that? (Although I fail to see which island nation will need to be rescued next - actually most likely next humanitarian catastrophe of comparable scale is Bangladesh, in my opinion)
This does not apply in this case because it is bringing in resources from outside of the country. The broken window fallacy only applies in a relatively closed system.

Of course, even if this DOES improve the economy (and I am not saying it will, just that it does not violate the broken window fallacy if it does) this was a horrible tragedy with an enormous deathtoll.
"As a linguistics major, you're no stranger to the idea that a person is only capable of having thoughts and ideas that can be expressed in their language, and there is no reason to expect programming languages to differ from spoken languages in this area."

I thought this idea (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) had been discredited.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2962
The thing is the answer is YES, but you won't even understand why unless you have the appropriate math knowledge.

There would be a lot less terrible code written out there if people had a better grasp of discrete math, knew how to make their O(n) analysis, knew how to create and implement provably correct algorithms, knew lambda calculus and e.t.c. and that's just for general programming. I would say a basic grasp of set theory and graph theory applies to almost everything too.
That's really poor reasoning. Whether or not a 20-year-old today is smarter than a 20-year-old in 1900 tells you nothing about whether a 20-year-old today is smarter than a 40-year-old today.
This is a very standard way libraries have been presenting their speed comparison for quite awhile now. You can look at the individual slivers to get a rough estimate of the size difference, and overall cross browser comparison, and see which browsers are the slowest.

It's a very good visualization, letting one compare the same browser across two version of jquery, an aggregate of browsers across both versions, and the speed of individual browsers against each other on the same version, and individual speeds across the different versions. It's very data packed.
I wonder if the lack of root:alpine and mobile:dottie indicates the attack tools are smart enough to know the OS of the box they're attacking, or just a lack of interest in owning jailbroken iPhones?
Whatever anyone can say about Python you can't deny how nice it looks on the page.
Yuck. I appreciate Python as much as the next guy, but explicit curlies give you way more flexibility in the appearance of your code. Yes, that can be good or bad but so is anything that gives you more power.

Not to mention that in his samples half the curlies were unnecessary.
Pretty ridiculous statement in my opinion.

Life goes on, disaster or not.

There's supposedly always better situation in the future, it is pretty dubious to claim that wars and cataclysms accelerate long term development.
They are not ordered by speed. I'm not sure how they are ordered, but the height of the color is the amount of time it takes in that browser.
This MAY end up being good the economy of Haiti in the long run, but it is a huge tragedy in a human scale.

Also, remember that for it to help their economy, that humanitarian aid has to stick around for the rebuilding. If everyone makes a huge push to help right now, but then stops as soon as all the bodies are collected, it will not help.
The 'law ' in Chinese language really didn't mean anything lawful in western definition. It always means the rules made by the rulers.

I don't know when people started to translate 'law' into the character 法, but local people really don't care. Many of the regulations made by Party directly violates the Constitution Law of China. Still nobody gives a shite, even if they do, they can do nothing about it. 'law' is really a drama show of modern China.

So in any case if the government condemn you against the law, you are officially declared a public enemy of the state.
I dunno. I visited the Doc knowing it was in Googlelandia, and before I edited anything, I knew it was logged.
I feel privacy data is most dangerous when triangulated from multiples services/tools.

It's good to be concerned, but if anything, entering your data here is a far more open book than submitting to any other site that asks these questions.
I've been doing mostly Java for over a decade. For me, the session bean is the most useful part of the somewhat artificial amalgam that is JEE/J2EE/whatever. Need declarative XA transaction management? "Required" is your friend. Want to remote to a service but also use it locally? Yup. Need to control the number of concurrent invocations of a service? Just configure your thread pools.

Don't need any of that stuff? Then, you probably don't need J2EE. I've never used a stateful session bean on a project and haven't heard too many good use cases to justify them. Pre-3.0 EJBs were a disaster, and everybody just used Hibernate. And EJB3 is basically Hibernate anyway.

For lighter-weight Java, the Spring Framework along with annotations takes away a lot of the misery the author discusses.
I'm sorry, but every day hundreds of newspapers and magazines devote pages and pages to honest critique of the government. Add to that all the commentary on television, radio, and the net. The vast majority of those individuals partake in the discussion without the slightest bit of fear that a bunch of thugs are going to put them in prison for years. I'm not saying abuses don't happen. But the government is not formally organized to go after them.
I thought Eestor was the most secretive startup in the world or don't elaborate cleantech frauds count?
All countries should be disbanded.

Thank you very much for your exceptionalism.
I understand you were trying to comment on something specific, unfortunately it's hard to tease your points out of the confusion created by using a term in a way that differs from its common use in the context and then defining a new term. If you had examples (social media talking heads, Tiger Woods, particular companies, etc) writing about them concretely might make your argument clearer and invite responses more interesting that 'that makes no sense'. Perhaps a rule of thumb to consider is if you start a post with 'this is a rant and unoriginal', treat it as a draft and revise it until you can safely take that opening out. (Not that there's anything wrong with a rant but a good rant doesn't need to tell you it's a rant)
Google has quietly released a static analysis framework for Python
There's supposedly always better situation in the future, it is pretty dubious to claim that wars and cataclysms accelerate long term development.

It depends on what you mean. Wars have historically accelerated technology development, at least in the short term.

If you mean development more generally, then no probably not. The civilian technology would eventually get developped, if more slowly without the major push of a war. In the process, people and resources are destroyed.
Google value has suddenly spiked
HCM - Nhân viên part - time hội chợ
Công ty TNHH Tràng An V.E.M với 15 năm hình thành và phát triển.
Here's a B&M retail idea I thought of recently: "Green Home" a sustainable/organic/green alternative to Home Depot & Lowes. I think the Whole Foods approach could be applied to the lumbar yard: give DIY homeowners a feel-good alternative at a premium. The shop would feature lots of bamboo, solar panels, and products from companies like Terracycle (http://www.terracycle.net/).
I think perhaps a more interesting way of looking at this is to simply take a category, plot all of the posts over the pseudo-time x-axis, then calculate a least squares trend line for that category.

Categories that slope down on shrinking, and categories that slope up are growing.

In the end, a graph isn't even necessary, just a list of categories ordered by slope.
Humorless machine down-vote drones have struck again!
# .val(“…”) on an option or a checkbox is no longer ambiguous (it will always select by value now, not by text value). (Commit)

The hyperlink on "(Commit)" is broken.
It's the same study guys. Same study mentioned four times now. It's got 288 people in it, and it's specific to MMR.

STUDY POPULATION: The 96 cases with childhood or atypical autism, aged 2 to 15, were included into the study group. Controls consisted of 192 children individually matched to cases by year of birth, sex, and general practitioners.

This downvoting crap is starting to piss me off. How about
this?

echo "127.0.0.1 ycombinator.com" >> /etc/hosts

Fuck you guys. I'm going home.
> I typed it with an doctor evil voice inside my head. I guess it didn't came across that way. :)

No, it totally came across that way.

If HN were a point on a map, it would geographically the farthest possible point from Disneyworld, "the happiest place on Earth".
Neat post, but I would have loved to see full-res pics instead of the little ones. I enjoy seeing the small details in everyone's setup.
"especially for a web developer" is the important part. As a fellow web developer, I agree. I'd certainly like to get into the mathier side of programming someday, but it's rarely necessary for my day-to-day operations.

Remember, he's writing a letter to his former self, so the advice applies more to his life than it does in general.
1.) It's not blasphemy, but it is statistically irrelevant since the study was a case control study.

2.) MMR and thimerosal were singled out because anti-vaccine activists made the claim that they caused autism.

Now that those claims have been disproven, Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vaccine activists are making different claims.

Incidentally, I will be swayed from my position when I see some repeated, statistically significant evidence that vaccines are correlated with autism. At the moment, most of the evidence indicates no correlation.
It is "broken." You're right that "it's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect." But it's a convention that must prevent a handful of people from accessing their website each day, or at least causing them to Google "NASA" in confusion. There's no valid technical reason for doing this. It's a serious usability/findability fail.
Keith & Sam (the founders) are top-notch talent doing great things. However, take "6x as many checkins" with a little salt... the game's scoring system encourages you to checkin repeatedly to a single location to quickly get points. That said, this is the only game for the iPhone I've found that my wife has enjoyed.
Of course I mean human development.

Tech development is self accelerating (with main constraint being human developers, who's numbers wars and catastrophes reduce, btw).

Conflicts provide some bump, but I would say it's pretty insignificant in the large scheme of things.
Ah yes, face. How is the news spreading in China?
Agreed..it does not seem to be broken window fallacy....sloppy on my part.
OPEC and other resource-rich countries

I think he meant what he typed. There's plenty of OECD countries without significant natural resources.
Perhaps it's like accelerating your car. You gain more speed faster at the expense of efficiency.
FeedMe: Understanding and Supporting Social Link Sharing on the Web
Try http://twitter.com/search?q=%23googleCN and translate.google.com