skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relevant paper to the article:

* Ellenbogen J, Hu P, Payne JD, Titone D & Walker MP. Human relational memory requires time and sleep. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2007; 104: 7723-7728. http://walkerlab.berkeley.edu/reprints/Ellenbogen&Walker...

Also the authors web page at Berkeley:

* http://walkerlab.berkeley.edu/papers.html
I've been using Sequel quite a bit with Sinatra and just Ruby by itself in scripts. The documentation could be a little better (isn't that always true) to keep up with the rapid development, but overall its rather amazing.

I wish there was a good page on the main site about why/how it is different than ActiveRecord. My other friends are always wondering, "Why do you want to use that instead of AR?" and I can't honestly give them a perfectly clear answer. Mainly because it works well for me.

The absolute best part is that Jeremy Evans is amazing in IRC at helping out anyone with issues. I've pasted him huge sections of code that he's helped me out with before. He never treats me like a n00b, or flames someone for asking a question that they themselves may have even asked before. He's really a nice guy and a strong model for how a primary project maintainer/lead can help bring others in.
Ok I revise my earlier opinion [1]. This is definitely one of the best posts I've read for the last few weeks. Engaging, front line, full of content (i.e. links to their code and other bits) and pleasantly written. More of the same please :)

EDIT: this is the first major posting I have noticed that pushes redis as a big big technnology. has anyone see other people using it? I ask because at the time Antirez first posted it my feeling was redis has the scope to be a really big, important tech: and this looks to be a step in that direction.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140761
"I have long suspected that Andrew has been using fake accounts or paying people to put a positive spin on his threads. The above comment was made by a brand new a account and follows a trend of other fishy comments."

I have had the same suspicion for quite a while and am surprised no one has looked into this. Glad to hear someone else thinks it's not just the little voices in my head.
You are right, your proposed title would have been better.

But I disagree that my title was "making stuff up". The government did indeed poison lawbreakers without a trial, it just did not do so in the specific manner you describe.
The name is ever so slightly problematic. Google still often thinks that Sequel is mySQL or SQL.
Well, now you're at least circling the real issue. To start with, why are we bankrolling the world's R&D?

Here's a great illustration of what I think is the real issue, borked incentives:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...

This one town in Texas, average demographics, not particularly less healthy than anywhere else, has double the average healthcare costs. Why? It's a racket -- the doctors are in league with the equipment manufacturers and just recommend that their own stuff is purchased, over prescribing a ton of artificially expensive and btw, unnecessary procedures.

That's market failure.

BTW -- "class warfare" isn't in my lexicon. I'm doing plenty ok. Put down the flash cards :)
I guess the fix, then, is to discriminate back, in the opposite direction.

If you'd bothered to completely read the article, you'd have seen this:

Note: TiE set a goal of helping all communities. Women are still underrepresented in its ranks, however
Good point. The plaintiff lawyers are almost certainly doing this at least in part for a piece of the action and wouldn't bother unless they thought they had a case. If the family is putting up all the money, it would be, as you point out, not even vaguely worth it if the school's story is the truth.

On the other hand, you can imagine the fury of the parents if their story is true, that the school was randomly spying on the students and careless with what they saw. That would make it worth their while to put together such an effort.
http://code.google.com/p/conque/

From the site: Conque is a Vim plugin allowing users to execute and interact with programs, typically a shell such as bash, inside a buffer window.
What, now all of a sudden deficit-financed tax cuts are a problem? :)

Counter-cyclical deficit spending is pretty much the only time that the gov't should knowingly go into the red to hand out tax cuts -- otherwise, they should either cut stuff or raise the revenue necessary to stay in the black.

Funny thing about those estimated future government expenditures.. if I had to give you one guess as to what the fastest growing component of those spending projections is, what would you guess? (Hint: it's abbreviated "HC")
Just the syntax alone is enough to move from ActiveRecord for any new project. The dataset/method chaining method really makes AR's hash passing seem verbose and cumbersome. Though, I hear AR is moving that way in the next major release, so they seem to know that as well as anyone else.
To Prevent, or Fix when Broken? (The Dentist vs. The Doctor)
Does that somehow discredit his opinion?
Yes, really. Pure ethanol is more expensive than methylated alcohol (which has both ethanol and methanol) even before taxes are applied. Denaturing existing pure ethanol with methanol is wasteful, as the constituants are more valuable separated. In Poland, alcohol is by law denatured only with safe, taste-altering substances, and so their denatured alcohol is more expensive than in other countries because industrial manufacturers have to produce the stuff methanol-free.
It's only a matter of time before there will be drone soldiers, too. War will be very expensive (or very profitable, depending on your perspective) with minimal risk to friendly people, reducing the main reason democracies don't like wars.
Is there a download for OS X somewhere?
LOL^^^^^
This is another account created one hour ago.
I hope you feel like I've responded to your original question:

(a) At some threshold size it becomes more cost-effective to keep legal in-house

(b) That's because you'll be handling so many contracts for vendors, customers, and service providers that the round trips to an outside firm will become intolerable

(c) Once you have legal in-house, they're going to set the standard for contractor legal relationships

(d) Legal will have zero incentive to show flexibility about those standards; any laxity is pure downside risk for them

(e) The effect is amplified here by the fact that legal spends more time on relationships with comparatively large legal risks, and couldn't care less about a 5 person web shop

(f) In many cases, legal is right, because giving an outside firm enough access to get work done exposes them to regulated information

(g) Even if it's unreasonable to presume that a 5 person web shop is going to facilitate a vast (say) HIPAA violation, for instance by accidentally printing and mailing tens of thousands of customer notices on paper used to print patient health records (note: actually happened), it's also unreasonable for there to be no contractual notice and protection for such an event happening

As usual, 'grellas has the better example. Here's a refined version of it: virtually all my clients are confidential. If you came to my office, there's a nonzero chance you'd learn one of them (we take steps, but it's hard to be perfect about it in person, when you're on the phone with them or their apps are on your monitor). What keeps you from tweeting what you learn?
Things Every Programmer Should Know [wiki]
This is the official site for an O'Reilly book that came out recently. The contents of the book can be found on this page:
http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contri...

Here's the book's Amazon page:
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Programmer-Should-Know/dp...
Without getting into statistically relevant data, of the hundreds of programmers I've met in my lifetime, at most a dozen worked on proprietary packaged software (game devs, more precisely). The rest did web sites, consultancy, customizations, everything that meant going to a customer and creating or changing something that was there to better fit a set of requirements.
How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race
The story of the russian friend reminds me of this article I read yesterday. In it the grandmother who starved evading the Nazi's came to America after the war and stockpiled food even though it was abundant:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/20/jonathan-...
IMHO their problem is that they use too many technologies and many of those they keep not for too long. In that sense it matters.
> "No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to us. Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital universe as we know it was made by the market economy. It is a market-built world, which is to say, a world built by human choices, entrepreneurship, and service one to another."

The internet and the web were mostly built by government research projects -- as everyone knows. When someone seems to be so carefully and tendentiously writing that out of history, they start sounding like a nutty ideologue. It makes a disappointing end to the piece.
Single page: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-drone-cre...
He had me at "code/history" division. I really don't like the way I must usually enter functions in the basic interpreter (line by line, can't go back... unless I missed something?).

To me that's an interesting cross between an IDE (with completions, snippets etc.) and an interpreter.
Great essay. But what about scavengers of the digital universe? I used to relentlessly keep local copies of digital stuff---a lot like the Russian guy in the story, but with files instead of junk---but now I've slowly learned to let a lot of that stuff just live in the cloud. Why do I need a local copy of every song ever when I can listen to anything I want in a few clicks anyway?

Are we moving away from scavenging digital stuff too, or is that just me?
Open Sourcing your software hurts your competitiveness as a researcher?
Can you share more about your experiences with modafinil? Why did you begin taking it? How has it helped you?
That's for the jury to decide. If the punishment for drinking alcohol is death, then it's very likely that the jury will nullify. Poisoning the alcohol removes this possibility. (There is a reason you have a right to a jury trial, after all.)
"Clinical decision support systems" have been a test bed for AI since the 1980s at least. For whatever reason they never catched on.
>> lambda {} == proc {}
=> true

Can you shed some light on the difference? I always thought that lambda is simply a synonym for proc - has this changed in more recent versions?
I don't think we can even begin to put ourselves in the place of people that live, worked and fought in the World War era. The atom bomb was a horrific event. But it ended the war pretty conclusively. I can see how a participant could feel pride in the fact that they did a dirty job for what the world generally considers the "right reasons".

I've never had anything but respect for such men.
First off I am not a millionaire (yet). However, the concept of living on and on is something I view as scary, for reasons I do not wish to elaborate. I also believe that eighty years is more than sufficient time to live a life and accomplish all that I want to.

Also, rather than donate to a research which could possibly extend my lifetime, I would donate to organisations which are already enabling people to live better lives than they could otherwise. Personally, when I rise to a position where I can afford it, I would start sponsoring a kid's education every year. That gives me the satisfaction of knowing I am improving someone's life in some way.
A very interesting article. I have an affinity with the ideas he expounds in his article, but I don't get the connection between that and the libertarian apologia at the end. In particular he seems to have missed the fact that the internet would probably not be here without (a lot of) government funding.
It is probably fine if he is giving a portion to the people he interviewed. People go to mixergy to hear from them. It does also push people to check out interviews before they go behind the pay wall.

However, I think this is a really bad business move, second only to using a fake name. It creates distrust and devalues the community aspect of the product.
The point is that the arrangement of bits might not be appropriate to copy; people have been writing poetry for millennia but when you need to write copy of a webpage or lay out a spreadsheet you have to write out new 'bits', you can't just tear out a page of Hamlet and hope that it does the job.
It's not even transcendental!
Whoa. So much for the principle of least surprise!
That's all true. So how come, without insurance, it costs me $500 for a bottle of antibiotics? Insurance is a necessity, and I'm chained to all the profiteering and idiocity going on in the industry. I can't opt out, because even though a broken arm isn't a "major driver of medical costs", it would clean me out pretty good. 3 visits with xrays, the cast, some meds.. you're talking about 10k getting billed there. Maybe not quite bankruptcy but a lifestyle change for sure. Especially when you consider that the hospital charges me twice as much as they would charge my insurer, due to a byzantine, broken billing system.

(interlude -- none of those things have a good reason to go up by 15% a year. X rays, antibiotics and opiates have been around for a century.)

So basically, I'm roped into paying a monthly total into this ridiculously broken system because if I don't, the cost of routine, cheapo medical care would bankrupt me. Maybe not this year, but eventually the dice would come up snake eyes for me. I have no option to take my business elsewhere -- that's market failure.

Here's another good article on busted incentives that I linked below:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...

One town in texas has double the national average in healthcare spending. Really interesting article on why, compared to the cheapest towns for healthcare -- it has nothing to do with health.
I have incredibly mixed feelings about these technologies. On the one hand, it is infinitely safer for our pilots to be in an air-conditioned control room somewhere outside of Vegas. For saving the lives of american soldiers, this is an amazing step forward. This is good.

On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree. While the drone pilots may grasp the full ramifications of their actions, it's a certainty that the general public does not. We see no body bags and hear no casualty reports. There are no lists of the fallen. Sending out a platoon of 18 year old kids is difficult. Sending out a squadron of MQ-9 reapers is easy.

War is horrific beyond imagining. The emotional toll has always been shared by both sides to some degree, and I would like to believe that such costs act as a deterrent. I worry about the decision-making of a society that has their portion of that horror comfortably abstracted away.
Io rocks :)
Minimum Viable Product WordPress Themes
The Minimum Viable Product is one key tenet of the Lean Startup and Customer Development methodology.With the raise of cloud computing and SaaS, the website often makes the product itself. Nevertheless, commoditization of Amazon-ish hosing services, search marketing, free and open source software such as the LAMP stack and publishing systems like WordPress – allows startups to build and market their products at a lower cost. This is a simple overview of – cut to the chase – minimum viable WordPress themes.
Ask Anything: Voke
I've been working on this recently, let me know what you think. Any suggestions and criticism is welcome.
Yes, if by "always" you mean less than half of its age...
Well, if they screw up, no matter where they are, friendly soldiers can be killed. So, they treat it like they are at war.
Continuations Made Simple and Illustrated
The Food Lab: Fresh Ricotta in Five Minutes or Less
President Reagan said the same thing about Missile Command.
When one uses the date of creation of an account to discredit it, yes; also note that underover has one comment (this one), while the account being accused (stevenp) has three, only one of which relates to this topic. Not especially relevant under normal conditions - opinions and information are more important, and all that - but, once again, underover is using this to accuse someone else of being a sock puppet, while his[1] argument also suggests that he is a sock puppet - admittedly, if his name had a c in it, that would go without saying, but it would be nice to get a disclaimer stating that he's a shell account used by another user to maintain anonymity, if that is in fact the case.

[1] I have no evidence that underover is male; I'm merely using the masculine pronouns by default.
On the Apple's I have it is hardwired with no API - Power Camera = Power Light.
The above comment was made by a brand new a account and follows a trend of other fishy comments.

I think that if you have no evidence to substantiate these accusations, then you should keep them to yourself.

I mean, he can easily just be one of the many happy frequent visitors of Mixergy? Andrew does post links to here quite often from the Mixergy site, and they can easily just follow that link.

Though, I must admit as a guy who loves the Mixergy interviews, who is currently saving up for his own startup; I am currently forgoing a cell phone, car, insurance and any other unnecessary expenses, and I cannot validate a $25-100/mo charge for this content. Its valuable, but not that valuable to me. I think he forgot about his bootstrapped followers who can't watch his interviews live and often catch them after the fact.

Though in hindsight, this just may increase the viewership of his live shows - which is an increase in viewer participation in the interview process. Perhaps that is his goal?
Time to reset some passwords
There are plenty of ways to make hardware accelerated plugins safe (most run in a sandbox that wraps the OpenGL or DirectX calls). One method is only play them from trusted sites, as you only install apps on your desktop or mobile that you trust. The other is run the process like chrome where it only crashes the plugin, not the browser.

Hardware acceleration is used in many plugins (even Quicktime, Windows Media, etc) and gaming plugins like Unity3D, Director, Java (with processing and GL libraries).

Unless you like hearing your processor spin to death taking days of life out of it, you too should be for hardware accelerated plugins. They are no different than applications that you have to trust.

In fact WebGL is another and O3D is another example of hardware acceleration in a wrapper where what you can use is strictly limited to graphics acceleration.
Just run the installer and you should be fine.

This is the advice under the Windows install section. Unfortunately it's a no go due to a pyGTK dependency - it just errors out completely.

(note this is only a 30s try - I will come back and figure out the dependency, but pyGTK under windows isnt a quick fix apparently..... not got the time now)
Hmmm. I wonder want's on the outside then... Seems to cause more problems than it solves, even for the simple-minded folk who believe this (and I have met at least one guy who believed this).
"I have incredibly mixed feelings about these technologies. On the one hand, it is infinitely safer for our pilots to be in an air-conditioned control room somewhere outside of Vegas. For saving the lives of american soldiers, this is an amazing step forward. This is good.

On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree."

I wouldn't worry too much. Within five years, the "bad guys" will have drones (or equally lethal weaponry) too. Then their combatants would be safely ensconced somewhere too while pursuing the destruction of the "good guys". Technology is a great leveller, over time.
I used to feel this way as well, but now I'm not so sure. I think this is more related to social inertia than it is social mores.

During the American Civil War, a bloody struggle of brother and against brother involving carnage on a scale never seen before, families would bring picnic baskets out to watch the battle. When the first photographs of all the carnage starting coming in, it had no affect at all on public support. In fact, the pictures were marveled and praised.

More primitive societies that live with death on a daily basis have no problem dealing with it up close and personal -- and they have no problem either going to war or sending others to war. Later societies -- especially those with a pampered middle class and instantaneous communications -- have all kinds of problems with any use of violence at all that might inconvenience them. It may be one button that kills a hundred enemies (making the assumption that only combatants are killed and the war is just) but there will be videos of it instantaneously on the web and commenters from all over the world will weigh in on the atrocity of "war by pushbutton"
If the effects are beneficial and the drug is safe...

There is no drug in existence whose effects are purely and unarguably beneficial. The availability of drugs also has a social impact which goes beyond individual safety or efficacy.

Of course, it's not hard to get a prescription if you want one.

That's assuming you can afford the doctor and the drug and are willing to be a liar. Or if you're under 18, assuming your parents choose to "enhance" you and you choose to accept "enhancement".
I found this one amusing:

Rick knows that Jane never lies.
Jane knows that Mike never lies.
Mike knows that Sara never lies.
Jane tells Rick that Mike told her that Sara told him that her dog died.
Should Rick believe the news?

One could view this in a number of different ways. Jane's statement looks like this: Sara -> Mike -> Jane -> Rick. Interpreting the "truth-telling" as a kind of chain of trust, it too looks like Sara -> Mike -> Jane -> Rick - so Rick should believe the news, right?

But Rick doesn't know that Mike tells the truth, so even if Jane tells Rick something Mike said, that in itself may be true, but that doesn't mean that Rick knows that Mike tells the truth.

But maybe Jane also told Rick that she knows Mike never lies, so it's OK; the same conversation could have happened all along the chain... but that's assuming something not stated...
Not really. underover was suggesting these new accounts should be discredited because their newness and pro-Andrew bias suggests they were perhaps created by Andrew. That criticism cannot apply to him, because why would Andrew create an account to criticize himself?