skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If that patient is actually aware of his surroundings, then he has been trapped in a body with almost no sensory input for almost 6 years. Personally, that sounds like the worst hell imaginable.

I've told everyone close to me that if I am injured badly they are to ask for 'no extreme measures' for this exact reason...
Hey, I'd love your site, a lot of my friends have started using it regularly over Google.

As for UI suggestions, I know you're trying to keep it cute, but I'd try to use a little more serious design. I think a lot of people might miss the high quality of the results. Even if you decided to keep the theme, I'd change the Century Gothic font. I've been using a custom made stylesheet to modify that thus far :P
Yes, definitely, although I'm personally more interested in baseball than football. I originally saw this article via The Book Blog here: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/how_...
My first was a Vic-20, and yes after two years of begging my parents at 12 I got the Commodore 64. I remember the fun of setting the tape drive up to load, then having dinner, then checking to see if it was done loading!

Used to scare my parents that I spent so much time typing in lines of PEEK and POKE code to make sprites and custom characters!

Right now I still have my Commodore64, 2 1541 Drives, original monitor and my Amiga 1200 at home!
> We're there to stop safe havens for terrorist groups from being set up by the Taliban, a group that was formed in and supported by Pakistan.

These people, including Al-Qaeda, where receiving funds from the US (with the help of Pakistan no doubt) to support their struggle against the soviets.

The Taliban's origins are in Afghanistan, which was later abandoned ... which is regrettable, since the aid it needed for building schools and hospitals was a only a fraction of the money already spent in warfare by the US.

I guess this is what you get when you're having the God syndrome. If you're going to interfere with other people's business, at least do it right.
That is the crux of it, however his post offers more value in the end than your comment does. :-)
Their current mission statement is a bunch of crap, something like "Enabling businesses to reach their full potential".

But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm not optimistic.
Does Silicon Valley have the "incubator culture" that Seattle supposedly needs? If not, why does Seattle need it?
This is a much more informative link, with actual science! http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1550
LinkedIn is doing some really great stuff. IMHO, they are the company who has done the most interesting things with OSS search technology and given back to the community.
Medical entrepreneurship, from the bottom up
Eek, for 5 points, I feel like I should add something other than an unrelated complaint. Since I missed the edit window, I think this was the most interesting answer in the bunch, in relation to "what should be added to languages":

I have one advocacy, [...] something to be explicitly added to Lisp and to other programming languages: a language should have access to its own abstract syntax. Abstract syntax is an idea I proposed in a paper in 1962. It's too elaborate to talk about much now, but the general idea of it is that, as far as the abstract syntax in concerned, it's indifferent whether sums are represented by a+b or (+ a b), as Lisp would do it, or as Gödel numbers would do it as 17 to the Gödel number of a x 19 to the Gödel number of b. You still need functions for distinguishing whether an expression is a sum and for getting the summands and the syntactic function for taking 2 expressions and forming the sum expression. That's abstract syntax and I believe that a programming language should have built into it its own abstract syntactic functions.
How Observations are accumulated into Context
A private system for handling electronic search warrants is not the same thing as a "backdoor to web users private data".
The fact that the article conflated dating advice into job searching, and mentioned hopping on a longboard would normally be more than enough for me to abort and ignore, but there is a very important nugget in there; that how you carry and project yourself is such a big part of having an enjoyable career.
Stop Being An Idiot - http://orderedlist.com/our-writing/blog/articles/stop-being-...

"Our job, when designing features and interfaces, is to make them powerful, usable, and understandable. Not to cater to those people too lazy to think. Our job is to make things intuitive. But intuition still requires an individual to want to understand something. It requires an attempt to understand. It requires thought, even subconsciously. We have little power over people’s desire to succeed. We can only provide the tools to do so. So teach people, don’t criticize them."
CrisisCommons and CrisisCamps: Tech projects for Haiti and others in need
upload on empty file causes an error, you can probably check the input value isEmpty($(input).value) before actual upload
Every programmer has a variable naming philosophy
> The wheel has been reinvented thousands of times, and we're better off for it!

We're better off only for the reinventions that were actually improvements. Most of the reinventions weren't improvements.

Different is a disadvantage, a cost, that is worthwhile only in specific cases when the difference produces some advantages that more than make up the difference.
Xkcd = garbage
There are some edge-detection algorithms around that are tried and tested. The discrete first and second derivatives are very easy to compute and tend to have very high (or very low) values on edges. Canny Edge Detection is more complicated to implement, but easier to use because it returns the lines themselves, while the derivative operators just amplify the edges, to be picked out with later post-processing (like taking a threshold value). I think there's an online version of the Canny algorithm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_Laplace_operator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canny_edge_detector
I found this via a NYT article last night. If any other HN members in the Northwest would like to organize a camp and hack on a project, I'd be interested.
I have friends right now who have a similar product that is made for high schools, based out of NYC too actually.

Their website design is terrible, but they know how to sell. 75-80% of the work they do is transferring over data from old systems to their new system and doing training, and as maxklein said its all sold on a school level and requires support and maintenance contracts.

Also, I'm pretty sure most schools require grades to be entered into some sort of common system so report cards can be generated, administrators can see performance, etc. Anything on top of that would necessitate extra data entry wouldn't it?
Great news, comminucation is the most important thing.

Here is the story boy that was unable to speak or contact with world and was considered "vegetable" by doctors, till he picked up a language BLISS from a teacher that was teaching some other child in his hospital room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvpGLxU6fVY

He is a poet now.
There is a vast difference between Windows 95 and Windows 7.
nope, form action = http://www.mygrademate.com/login/create
for me it looks like Microsoft is doing a lot of research into the equivalent of 'Fusion' (always fifty years away) - which is not of much benefit for their current customers...
Acceleration = F/m implies Position = F/2m(t^2) + k1(t) + k2

That's quadratic, but definitely not exponential, and doesn't really look like the curve he drew.

I know the guy's argument doesn't really depend on the shape of the curve, but it's a pet peeve of mine that exponential growth is always presented in an inaccurate way.

EDIT: fixed embarrassing calculus error
What's in your stylesheet?
PHP Creator Asks, Is Facebook's HipHop Just a 'Nifty Trick'?
$50 an hour is pretty good for 22. At that age I was making $30 an hour and ecstatic to be getting that much. Even that seemed astronomical compared to the $12 I was making two years before. Now, of course, all of those seem like piddly sums compared to the $75-100 an hour I bring in now as a full-time consultant at the age of 26.

While age and experience has a lot to do with why my rate has climbed so high and so fast, mostly it is due to confidence. You have to ignore your inner critic that says you are not worth $12/30/50/75 an hour, and honestly consider what your time is worth. Would you trade an extra hour of sleep or an extra hour with your girlfriend for the price of a meal at Chili's? A tank of gas? A shitty coffee table at Ikea?

There's a spectrum there, and you have to place yourself as high in the spectrum as possible. Don't stop going higher- even if people laugh at you. Two days before I landed my first gig at $75 an hour I had a recruiter laugh at me and that rate. Ignore them. Trust yourself. Trust your abilities. Charge a good price for your time. Because after all, time is all we have. Make them pay for it.
Related to this specific article, I wonder how statistically significant these figures are, because the sample size (number of touches) is comparatively small. This has a lot to do with the reason baseball defensive metrics aren't as good as batting metrics: a player gets a lot more chances at the plate than he does in the field, and they're much easier to evaluate.
Ask HN: Please review RestFB, my new Facebook API Client (Java)
From my perspective, the issue was with execution, not strategic values. Recall the SmugMug guys struggle to use Sun hardware. Not only could they not get someone from sales to return their call, but they had a heck of a time even getting the devices set-up in their datacenter.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/16/sun-honeymoon-update...

How many things must have gone wrong so that a config UI requiring a non-obvious, redundant magic string could have gotten out the door?

Edit: The "jumped the shark" moment was when, at JavaOne, Sun claimed it would build the world's largest app store by installing nagware along with the JVM.
From Wikipedia: Simon Peyton Jones is a British computer scientist who researches [...]functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional languages. [...] Since 1998 he has worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge [...].

He is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a principal designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He is also co-creator of the C-- programming language.

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

EDIT: Perhaps this article applies only to Microsoft Research, not MSFT as a whole.
Could you PM me the name of their website? We figured as much that writing the application conversion stuff would be needed but those are interesting points.

And you're right. additional data entry on assignments would be needed to more granular level analysis. However, we have a few reports we're designing just to run an over-time analysis / student comparison among classmates that don't require additional data.
I agree. It isn't how much you cost, it is how much you're worth.
Yep, but baseball is more my thing. I guess I am just a fan of modeling systems (and heck - if it helps my fantasy league selections - cool).
Born Poor?  Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it
If WINE actually does reach a point where it poses a serious competitive threat to Microsoft, I'd be very surprised if MS didn't file a massive lawsuit against WINE's developers + various distros to "protect their IP".
Not all xkcd comics are garbage. I worked on autonomous robotics back in the late 90s, and when I read this one I had to hold back a little sniffle:
http://www.xkcd.com/695/

I've got a couple of friends out at NASA, and I doubt they'd begrudge the xkcd author allowing the robot to misbelieve that it was coming home at the end of the mission despite the lack of any hardware to do a return voyage :-)
Nope. You can "do it all" in any Turing-complete language. But you can often do it more elegantly with a DSL. Once a language reaches a certain threshold of power, making a DSL is indistinguishable from ordinary coding.

It's obvious the author hasn't a Clue about that.
Adobe isn't the only company that doesn't support case sensitive file systems on Mac OS. None of Blizzard's games will install, although some of them will run if you install them elsewhere and copy them over. Apple's developer tools used to have a bug that caused an assertion failure in the linker on case sensitive filesystems as well so that development with the latest version of Xcode was impossible.
Many friends of mine have tried to explain me what's so great about LINQ, but it never seemed that much impressive. The same with F#. Transactional NTFS flew completely under my radar, but it, too, doesn't look impressive the way, say, ZFS does.

I may sound harsh, but there is so much more going on that their contributions really feel underwhelming.
I certainly bet it's a large struggle. The costs to redesign (based on the real business process), implement, and train users on the new system would be incredibly large. This is another reason to get things correct in the requirements analysis when designing the original software. Unfortunately a lot of software out there either didn't have that process or didn't do it well - much of our software is based on the process that was optimized for a paper-based system.

Does anyone have any experience with optimizing processes like this or data about those costs?
> Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well.

This is where I disagree ... they are doing the same mistake Microsoft did. Right now to develop apps for your iPhone, you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99 and that only works on Mac OS X.

Do you know how much of a PITA this is? I am on an NDA and I can't give details about what I'm doing right now, but believe me ... dealing with iPhone is the ugliest of all mobile platforms.

When your distribution channel is tied to your software platform, that's when it's starting to smell. When you also have lots of rules about what gets in, that's a first sign it is not sustainable ... throughout the history businesses have always been interested in eliminating the middle-men. That's one reason web-apps are getting so popular.

And now here comes the iPad, which promises to do for books what iPod did for music. I'm failing to see how this will work, since Amazon is already there, and I can't picture myself watching movies on a tablet.

But maybe Jobs knows what he's doing, I really don't know ... what I do know is that my colleagues that were ecstatic about iPhones are now switching to Nexus Ones and Druids. And the iPhone used to be cool, now it's just popular ... the only reason we are supporting the hell of the App Store approval process.
Mobiles technology
Social White Noise
I think that the lack of pricing is a big problem. It's the first thing I was scanning for as soon as I hit the website. For some reason, it almost seems kind of insulting, and I'll tell you why:

Teachers are already quite organized. They already have methods, processes and often software in place for managing most of what you're offering here. Switching to this system from their current system would take an investment of time and effort.

A website with a "we'll tell you the pricing later!" strategy basically sends the message that you think that the service is either so wonderful, or that their current methods of staying organized are so crappy, that it need not matter what the prices are. But the truth is, you should be showing them the prices from the get go so that they can get some kind of immediate register of value in their mind before they proceed to investigate your service.
I read a lot of CS papers, but, again, we are talking about products, not proof-of-concept-level research.

Microsoft's product line is not very impressive. Maybe it's because I am harder to impress.
He has corrected it to "infinite loop" now.
Waiting eagerly for the Haskell starter kit...
Even though the author hates XKCD and I can't help but point out the irony in this particular comic http://xkcd.com/386/ describing his aversion almost completely.
I can't even to begin to imagine the loneliness you have to feel trapped inside your own mind like that.
Wouldn't $50/hr be pretty low for NYC software engineering?
It's hard for gentle pushing from software design to overcome years of learned helplessness.
That's exactly how I feel. I wish I could sit back and just appreciate the fact that things like xkcd help draw people into the great field of computing. But this new breed of misinformed, know-it-all techno-dorks is just so infuriating. I can't help it.

And I hate that brand of meritless humor that is funny only because it's supposed to be funny. But that's a much bigger issue.
Actually:

x = 1/2 * a * t^2 + v0 * t + x0
This rings very true. UI shapes thought, in the same way that language has been shown to. I wonder in what subtle ways our understanding of how computers work has been shaped by the way we structure command line arguments, or the existence of windows and mouse pointers? Will the iPhone/iPad produce a new generation of computer users who think about software, in the same way that web apps have (arguably) done?
To play joke explainer in case anyone didn't get it, Aldus is a double reference to early Venetion printer Aldus Manutius and Aldus corp, creator of pagemaker, which merged with Adobe in 1994.
I'm with you on that. I think it hurts the companies a lot. I did consulting for a company which was hostage of Windows NT for many years, old Internet Explorer's and so on. On TV and in print the company advertised themselves as young, innovative, communicative - if you actually worked there, much of that was really the opposite. If the employee gets greeted by a gray office, a gray desk, a gray PC and a gray user interface, then it will be clear that the company does not live the values it communicates to the outside.

So the plain gray PC with the interface that is either gray or childish has found its home in the enterprise. The computer is like it is, because the reality in many enterprise is not 'human' at all and Microsoft contributed to it and made its profit from it (because the companies choose their equipment, not only the computer, based on price mostly).
It's more like an "Oops.. sorry we shot everybody else repeatedly purely by accident" card.
What people said about the iPod when it was first announced
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> I don't think Windows has made any such leaps since 1995. Mild improvements, but also a lot of backsliding (Vista).

You'd be 100% wrong then. There have been two huge leaps, from the 9x codebase to the vastly more stable and secure NT codebase, and a further one from XP to Vista. Vista isn't "backsliding" by any stretch of the imagination -- its focus on security is the reason Windows today is so much more secure than OS X.

Of course, there have been plenty of other improvements along the road, from global search to a compositing UI.
Cross-Cultural Web Design: Thinking Global From the Start
Pattern matching in Scala for expressions
Don’t Hit It Big Unless You’re Ready For It…
World Oil Capacity to Peak in 2010 Says Petrobras CEO
For my last side gig I charged $100/hr. I didn't need the gig, nor did I really want it, since I had just changed real jobs. They didn't like the price, but went for it anyway.
I concede that Lisp's notation probably isn't common sensical; and that learning it is a significant investment for many programmers, who are hardwired to quickly understand the conventional notation.

However, many important developments in math and science ran counter to common sense. In math, people with common-sense arguments resisted numbers which seemed "irrational", "imaginary" and "negative." (Supposedly, there were times when you could die over them.) Euclidean geometry seemed so obvious that people were scared to discuss non-euclidean ones. In science, even Newton had some self-ridicule about spooky action at a distance, like gravity:

"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an Absurdity that, I believe, no Man who has in philosophic matters a competent Faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gra...
On my entrepreneurial path there were several pivoting moments: 1. Kwawsaki's "The art of the start" 2. PG essays 3. Hacker News 4. Four steps to the Epiphany 5. Mixergy.

Simply put, Andrew is changing lives.
It would be fair to say MacOS was dumped and NeXTSTEP was renamed OSX after getting a glossy treatment.

But yes. NeXTSTEP was very impressive since day 1 and OSX has come a long way since it was first introduced.
Is Rails 3.0 a Game Changer?
No Brakes: Risk and the adolescent brain
10 Guiding Principles for Living Tiny (or just living)
What's It Like Working For LinkedIn?
I am not sure how vast it is the difference between NT4 and Windows 7 though
Very 37Signals, perhaps a bit to much.

But overall looks good and at least it's clear and concise.
From playing around with DuckIt, I agree, there's more information out there than I'd imagined -- it's just strangled by a thick forest of spam, which you have devised a superb method of clearing.

My comment on the accuracy of zero-click info was inspired by an "acid-test" test search that turned up some zero-click information that was excellent, but some that was howlingly wrong. "Iberians" produces _splendid_ zero-click info, including a thumbnail of the Lady of Elche; "Y-haplogroup R1b" and "mtDNA haplogroup H" also worked very well; but "Iberian race" turned up zero-click info that's been refuted completely by genetic genealogy and was pseudoscience even before then.

Of course, there's an element of "garbage in, garbage out" here. I would hardly condemn a merely _mortal_ search engine for being less than up-to-date on the very young (<30 years) and distinctly arcane fields of forensic anthropology and genetic genealogy -- but Zero-Click Info mode makes it sound like this is _your_ information, not _the Internet's_ information.

Perhaps you could add a disclaimer to the effect that your elite team of ninja ducks has scoured the dark corners of the earth and returned with the best information they could find, but there's still a risk that their findings are a complete load of HealthBase?

(I would also _love_ to see a picture of your elite team of ninja ducks returning from their investigations. But maybe that's just a sign that I'm easily amused -- the kind of person who _still_ finds "All Your Base" to be funny...)
"There are powerful forces--such as the brain's reaction to the presence of peers as a potent prompt and reward for sensation-seeking--that can move an adolescent to select risky behavior as the 'right' choice. Urging kids to 'Just Say No' to drugs, for instance, has been ineffective because it misses key factors leading to drug use."
You actually have to install something to get this graph?

In Brazil you get a graph of your consumption for the last 12 months. printed with the bill every month.

http://www.eletropaulo.com.br/portal/download.cfm?pasta_id=3...
(page 3, item 18)
Chrome users are highly advised to pick up the Readability Redux extension. It has been consistently faster for me than the bookmarklet - reformatted results are effectively instant now.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...