skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't just a few people who "fell for homoeopathy" this is an entire countries health system, where Dr's will have prescribed homoeopathy to patients. Hence why wasted is in quotes.
When Sea Levels Attack
Facebook | Olavi Levander
The 10 Most Addictive Sounds in the World
The intentions of the host pass you information that you can use to choose the correct door. The information is this: "There's a 2/3 chance I was forced to reveal this door; ergo, there's a 2/3 chance the other door is the correct one."

If the host is choosing randomly, no information is passed.

With regards to your last paragraph, the odds of the host picking wrong are either 1/2 or 0 depending on the intentions of the host. I'm a tiny bit annoyed that you think you're pointing out a "flaw" in my logic when you missed something so simple, but whatever.

If you don't like my explanation, direct your attention to the OP's link to Wikipedia, where there are many more variations and explanations that you might like.
How to make this fast and efficient is an interesting programming problem. There are 100 permutations of 2 digit numbers: perhaps one could pre-determine the index of the first N (1,000?) instances of each of these 100 numbers and scan starting at these locations before falling back on a substring search. Filter for valid dates. Take advantage of the fact that the end of the substring will most likely fall in the range 70-90. Etc...
I've gotta "me too" this post. Writing my side-project in Clojure has been pure fun.
Sony attempt to patent universal game console controller
"we had a determined adversity who was dedicated to destroying us by any means possible in every realm"

Of course, that was the view the Soviets also had. Although they were an "evil empire" I don't think they actually had anyone in power actively campaigning to start a war, which did happen in the US. The Soviets were largely dangerous because they were so very afraid and (by the 80s) had senile leaders - look at the near disaster of Able Archer 83.
I don't think so. You can create a number that has only 1s and 0s (in the decimal system) that is still transcendental.

Thus, not all transcendental numbers have all possible numeric subsets in them.

So, while it can be the case, pi being transcendental doesn't automatically mean that it contains every finite sequence of digits.

Sorry, I'm too tired for a formal proof now. Please tell me if this is wrong.
What? After reading that, all I got was "You can't be an expert when innovating". Ok, I can buy that. I don't, however, understand where on Earth he got the idea that the blogger is any different from the other people he listed at the end. Unless there's something I'm missing, no one ever said you should wait until you were an "expert" in something before you tried to be successful at it. The focus of this "expert" movement, if you can call it that, is to strive to become an expert in something, rather than being a jack of all trades, so to speak.
IMO if you're giving people 'gotcha' programming tests in an interview, then you don't know how to select candidates or interview in the first place.

You should be looking for competence by looking at their programming accomplishments, both in and out of work, as well as their ability and desire to teach themselves (probably the most important trait IMO).
Exactly. Thank you.
This article doesn't mention "gotcha" programming tests.
Let's be honest here. It's not an "ENTIRE" countries health system.

The NHS funds a few small homoeopathy clinics.

I would be extremely surprised if any GP has 'prescribed homoeopathy'. I'm sure it's almost always the case that the patient asks/demands to be prescribed it because they've read/heard something about it, or conventional medicine just isn't working for them.

As the NHS is publicly owned, it has to try and please most people. If a segment of society believe in alternative medicine, unfortunately it's going to be hard to tell them "Yes, you pay your taxes for healthcare, but we do not believe in alternative medicine, so we will not provide it for you".

At the end of the day though this is a ridiculously small % of people, and a ridiculously small amount of money compared to the full NHS budget.
This YC thread actually has a lot in common with those nasty programmer-readers. Look at all the personal insults, broad generalizations etc. I guess programmer-readers are everywhere.
Ask HN: How to find what you love to do?
It's said that everyone can be taught to sculpt; but Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great programmers.

For those of you who aren't the Michelangelos or the great programmers, how did you find your way? How did you find your purpose and what you love to do?
Simple? It's not like you're sit around eating snacks and thinking about a topic for 10,000 hours - that's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is hard work.
As a long-time Kohana 2.x user, this article shows how promising Kohana 3 is as a framework. Once things stabalize a bit more with v3, it will be interesting to test out HMVC.
I'd fail: I don't own a laptop.
Google does actually have a fair number of physicists.
"Simple" is not the same thing as "easy."
Yes, but the inverse is not true. There are plenty of incompetent people who probably also think that they're incompetent. Thinking you're incompetent does not imply that you are competent.
How much square footage does one really need to support iTunes in the cloud?

I suppose their market share puts some pretty heavy demands on scalability, but a 500k sf datacenter is a lot of datacenter, and storage is fairly dense these days.

Add to that the fact that music files deduplicate very well across millions of people and I'm left wondering if they're doing photos and video too, or something else altogether, or if my back of the envelope estimates of the square footage requirements for such a service are just way off.
If you use a solar energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into methane, bottle the methane, and later run the methane through this fuel cell to generate electricity, how much energy is lost in the round trip? (Compared with just using solar energy to make the electricity directly.)
I agree that whiteboard programming can be alien, but certainly a programmer needs to be able to communicate an algorithm in some way other than pure code.

I would think an interviewer should accept someone saying "I'm having trouble on the board, but what I want to do is loop through the numbers, and for each number, mod it with 15, 3 and 5 and then print FizzBizz, Fizz or Bizz." Or, have them draw a diagram, whatever.

Of course, this would need to be supplemented with a coding sample or anything that shows that the person can code when they are in a comfortable environment.
The fall of Andrew Wakefield
The BBC's common practice is to put quotes around headline elements that are, in fact, quotes. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee are the ones making the claim that said the money is wasted, and the headline title is quoting them.

It took me a while to get used to that practice, myself. After years of reading American headlines, a lot of BBC headlines look like they are trying to be ironic or something.
On the other hand, the source is a 60 minutes puff piece- their audience has no conception of what a watt is.
Stem Cells in China: Wild East or scientific feast?
Google digs 6-foot hole for Gears
Few programmers actually write correct code on a whiteboard...

But your code doesn't have to be correct. Not as you first write it down, anyway.

The advantage of writing the stupid and broken version of FizzBuzz first is that it gives you ample scope to demonstrate your ability to critique your own bad ideas out loud, write tests and conduct them out loud, eschew premature optimization, analyze the performance of something that's way too slow, and invent alternative approaches only after you've produced the stupidest thing that can possibly work. Not to mention your ability to stand in front of a whiteboard and talk while staying on task and not wasting time, which is a core skill in engineering, even if what you're doing on that whiteboard in real life is rarely actually writing code.
Ask HN:  Has Hacker News killed the stealth mode start up?
Certainly there are still stealth mode startups out there. But, why?

HN has become an awesome resource to test the waters. Whether just throwing out and idea or submitting a web app, the community here always responds honestly and thoughtfully.

To me it seems the feedback you can obtain from the HN community out weighs the risk of some one stealing your idea.
I think what Jason is saying is don't FOCUS on being an expert, and don't obsess over it. I know that I personally feel like I never know enough, and often think things like "well, I'd like to do x or y, but I should probably learn more about z first". I think the important thing to realize is that there is always more to learn, and you shouldn't be killing yourself over not feeling like an expert. Of course there's lots you don't know; there always will be. You just have to accept that and realize that there's plenty you DO know, and taking on challenges that seem just a bit above where you're at is one of the greatest ways to grow and continue learning.

As a semi-related side note, when I first started reading HN (almost a year ago), I felt like 95% of the stuff that was on the front page didn't even MAKE SENSE to me (some would probably argue that HN has changed over the last year, and I think I came in to HN during one of those "let's push Erlang articles to the top to scare off the incoming swarm of n00bs" phases...didn't work on this n00b though :) ). Over the last year, I find that I at least have a general idea what most of the posts are about, even if I still don't totally grok everything that gets posted, and I've learned a ton. I'm happy with that, since I still feel like I learn something new everyday.
Another way to put it might be, "Stop before you reach a 'stopping point'." Supposedly this is one of Haruki Murakami's writing tricks.
The NHS is for the entire country.How would a patient get Homoeopathy if a GP hadn't referred them?

What part of the NHS in the UK is publicly owned? I pay my NI the same as everyone, but they never asked me as an owner what I felt about it.
perl -e 'print reverse <>' <file>

;)
When I read stream, I thought it meant music streaming. But alas, it's a friendfeed/newsfeed clone.

MySpace sort of stumbled into being the standard for indie bands' online presence. A link to your MySpace music page has replaced demo tapes for booking gigs at most clubs. I wish they would stop fighting Facebook and focus on music.
The flip side of this is every programmer should understand sales, marketing, pr, product management, project management and client services.
I'll be curious if they end up using their shiny Xserve servers (starting at $3K retail) or they end up using cheaper ones.
To reduce the initial investment, usually it is decided that the application should designed to be one holistic piece of software containing all the required features. This represents a potential point of failure if the software becomes very popular in a short timeframe. I have painful memories of refactoring existing codebases that have not scaled well.

Great, but I don't see how this pattern gives any kind of predictable scalability improvement over plain ol' MVC for arbitrary applications. In my Rails app, the bottleneck is the database—the application servers trivially scale out horizontally. In the diagram here there is a single DB creating a bottleneck as well, splitting it up is a traditional sharding problem with or without this pattern.

In fact, this looks like a service oriented architecture with constraints (ie. MVC) on each service that are arbitrarily chosen rather than reflecting the true scalability profile of the application.

I'm hard-pressed to understand how you could justify building a greenfield application this way.
Freakonomics: The Good Pinot Noir, or Merely the Mock?
Two people can play 10,000 hours of golf, and one of them becomes Tiger Woods, and the other one becomes a course pro teaching lessons for $45/hr. Tiger Woods was amazing at age 5 on "That's Incredible," long before his 10,000 hours.

Similarly it's obvious that Steve Jobs is expert at what he does, but what is that, exactly? What did he practice for 10,000 hours?

Talent, expert level preparation, and success are related but the interaction between them is still mysterious.
You're absolutely right and my argument fails, but it doesn't invalidate the point I wanted to get at. In the long run, your coin flipping method does cause the game to behave as though there were only two doors, but in any given game you'll know whether or not the host is going to choose a door.

That means that, conditional on a good flip, you may still be able to act to your advantage since there's information transfer from the host to you.
Mind Power
George Soros: The euro will face bigger tests than Greece
Does Wal-Mart Make You Skinny?
I am calm; check http://twitter.com/chebuctonian/status/9461662523

Bloom are carefully dancing around the questions, saying some outrageous things like "it can use solar". Had I spent hundreds of millions on this, I would want to make it look green too.
Right, they're called "scare quotes."

It's not meant to convey irony, just that the accusation that the money was wasted is not an objectively verifiable fact and, anyway, that the BBC itself does not necessarily agree with that characterization.
if you have javascript turned off, you'll just see the IE first...it makes perfect sense...why exactly should MS promote their competitors?
I think he's arguing that you shouldn't wait until you have 10,000 hours before you go out to be successful, rather go out and pursue the thing you want to be successful at and that will give you the 10,000 hours.

In other words, don't set preconditions to your success, including the precondition of "being an expert"
I see stealth-mode startups differently. They aren't to prevent "theft" of an idea. Instead, they're designed around using that first big opening to secure a position to grow from. Where general feedback may help, it would lessen this impact when the time did come.
Flash Carbon Footprint of NYTimes.com
Bloom Box to power up your HOUSE
If you decide to watch this and during the last few minutes decide it's a bit over the top and want to stop I suggest you hold on until the last 30 seconds. I almost gave up before then but I'm glad I finished.
Google lost a lot of good people by dragging out their interview process. It's not all or nothing, but if I disliked the first interview I am unlikely to be interested in doing a second one. In the back of my mind I can't help but wonder if I want to work for people desperate enough to jump though these hoops.
For starters, instead of using integers all over the place, I would use a cleaned up version of the browser name (i.e. _description_1 becomes internet_explorer_description, _installLink_1 becomes internet_explorer_download, etc.).

If they're using the IDs to do the randomization, that could be moved to class names that could easily be picked up by the javascript (instead of looking for _item_id_1 through _item_id_5, just pick up any div with a class of "first-tier" and randomize those).

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but it seems like it would be easier to maintain (which for a single page site, might not really be an issue).
How long does it take to pay back the construction of a conventional power plant?
Amnesty International and the World of International NGOs
Indeed, the sum is mentioned in the article:

It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS

Compare that to the total funding of NHS, roughly £100 billion.
Have you tried mint.com? It will automatically categorize payments based on who you are paying
“Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” said Brian Napack, president of Macmillan. “And we don’t even look at it.”
Polyglot - Learn languages while browsing
saw this on proggit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b4zel/hey_reddit_i_hate_memorizing_foreign_vocab_terms/) and thought this might be of use to some people on here. the author is answering questions in the original post.
There's a difference between a GP suggesting homoeopathy, and a GP refering a patient after the patient has requested homoeopathy.

>> "but they never asked me as an owner what I felt about it."

You get to vote. You get to write to your MP, your local hospital, etc etc.
This makes me much happier about all the times I sat through board meetings wondering what the hell the point of most of the financial reports were.
I think the 10,000 hour rule is more applicable to skills that are somewhat stationary. Technology is a moving target, as new technologies are introduced some of the skills in which you were an expert become obsolete. On the other hand, something like playing Piano is a stationary target - if an expert in playing Piano travelled 30 years into the future, they would still be an expert in playing the Piano. So I think you have to be constantly learning and the most important skills of all are learning how to learn efficiently and having the ability to teach yourself.
There are still some major operations details up in the air:

# I’ve talked to one bank about business banking, checking, credit cards, and so on, but need to check out a few more.

# Accounting system: This is a big question. Quickbooks? An online system like Outright or Freshbooks? I need to talk to an accountant first.

# Final decision on legal structure (LLC vs. LLC taxed-as-S-corp vs. S-corp) and registration with the IRS, the state, and so on.

# Benefits planning (health insurance, 401k) and thinking about future tax implications.

# Various legal questions I’m working through.

Respectfully, those are the difficult things. We "all" know how to set up Google Apps for your Domain.
Government IT budgets facing three years of cuts
Is a Dolphin a Person?
Uncle Sam vs the Dragon: Why the US has nothing to fear (yet)
The sulfur is an impurity of the fuel, though, it's not produced out of thin air. How the engine deals with impurities will depend on the exact chemical reactions, but you're not going to get more CO2 molecules out than carbon atoms go in.
New era of software (vs traditional) engineering proving tricky for Toyota
success in the first stage of an introductory programming course is predictable, by noting consistency in use of the mental models which students apply to a basic programming problem even before they have had any contact with programming notation

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
Delicious: Past, Present and Future
Why don't you post it here. I am sure lot of HNers would be interested
Accounting, not personal budgeting.
= 100 Toyota Prius.

It's OK to leave that in the title.
Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures: Add HTML signature in Gmail
Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures: Add HTML signature in Gmail
I usually tend to turn the 25 minute nap into 2 or 3 hours. My body just doesn't want to get up in 25 minutes.
Why is this hosted by Microsoft? (e.g. the links go to go.microsoft.com)
Thank you for pointing out the obvious with a reference to Snopes.
Inspired Giveaway – Three Huge Prints from Alex Mathers, Noper & Xavier Gallego
I think there's more that goes along with setting up a company - like procuring customers, relationships, and so on. On your to do list at the bottom, I'd pass on benefits planning, credit cards, tax planning and accounting before really starting to build out your business.
Wow, he lied to his employer and colleagues, and now he claims that it was a Microsoft plot? This guy has utterly ruined his credibility and was exposed - thanks to ZDnet and also Gregg Keizer at Computerworld US. (Full disclosure: I work for IDG).
I think you misunderstand me. If war was eliminated, people who fight wars would have to do something else, regardless of their feelings on the issue. That thing would necessarily be more economically productive, because war is a net drag on the global economy.

If you wish to debate this, then you'll need to prove that in aggregate, war is economically productive. That's a difficult argument to make, and likely to be empirically false.

For a more robust explanation, check out the "parable of the broken window": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
How to finance home improvement
Whenever you are re-building, repaint your home it will take to some significant cost. Check out some tips on easy financing on your home improvement.
What You Need to Know About Today's Credit Card Rule Changes
Division and Its Discontents
I thought that was the goal of http://lessaccounting.com/. Anyone have any experience with it?
The Impact of Open Source on Computing Education
I've also seen a few people use Yahoo Pipes, although that was blocked for a while.
"My link empirically demonstrates that all 7(!) constructs behave differently"

It explicitly doesn't. Read it again. Immediately after listing his 7 constructs he points out that a number of them are actually the same thing, and in the summary he clearly explains that there are only 4 different behaviors. His 7 constructs (which include methods and bare blocks) are actually only 3 or, arguably, 3.5/4 (his numbers in parens):

blocks, which aren't callable without being wrapped in a Proc in CRuby (1, 2)

Procs (two types: Proc.new/&block and lambda) (3, 4, 5, 6)

methods (7)

There two types of Procs, plain procs and lambda, with lambda's differences being how it checks arguments and its return behavior, as I noted yesterday in another comment in this discussion (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141030).

So, again, the original comment, "four goddamn callable types [Methods, Procs, Blocks, Lambdas]," neglects the fact that #call on the last three is actually just Proc#call.
ok, I see that Microsoft uses this to track the links people are clicking. But, still why is this hosted by Microsoft. I would expect it to be a EU site.
> Since both have huge speed impacts, most people writing graphics libraries don't like to do them.

Python Image Library does gamma correct rescale by default. I did not realize this until I wrote my own implementation. I thought it would be several times slower than the built in, but it was only 3% slower. Boy was I surprised when I figured out why.
for $200, does this thing actually work well?
> If it was then 51% would enslave 49% so that they'd never have to work again, anything else would be voting against your own interests.

I don't want to live in a society where people are enslaved, so it is against my overall interests for that to happen, even if such a policy helps me materially.
But I think the point the poster is trying to make is that it isn't simple. The actual task of carrying out 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is complicated. You have to be constantly revising your strategy, measuring your progress, determining what, when and how to practice, and the actual tasks that comprise the practice may be complicated (as the poster said - you can't sit there eating snacks).
This thread is extremely relevant to my interests.

I've thought about this for a long time and I'm completely shocked when I see dog-allergies.com (which has only been online for 5 months) selling for $600! I know SOME of this is modern day snake oil salesmen, just working the system to eek out some small profits, but people are obviously making some money at this, right?