skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true! Many users aren't even aware of the difference between platforms, and there's no reason for them to be. (My mom isn't a dumb person because she does not understand her computer more completely.)
My point is that we shouldn't exactly be relying on the U.S. government to do it. The best systems in the world are highly regulated but not actually run by governments.

One of the things they do, though, is force a price list on providers, something you've taken off the table.

On the other hand, the VA actually has quite a good reputation these days. That's sort of your experiment right there. Costs are holding steady despite a pretty messed-up patient population, doctors and patients like the system, they have a very good electronic medical records system (which they've opensourced, btw) and they use those records to analyze the data and use the treatments that the evidence shows are most effective.

It's been widely reported that about 98,000 people a year die from avoidable medical errors, a lot of it from medication errors. Most hospitals won't talk about their error rates. The VA told everybody, then they fixed it. For example, in a VA hospital every patient has a barcoded wristband. So does every nurse, and every medicine bottle is barcoded too. Every time a nurse gives a patient a pill, she scans all three barcodes, and a computer checks to make sure the patient is getting the right medicine at the right time.

Most private hospitals have little incentive to fix errors, and certainly none to report them. Reporting just gets you sued, and in a fee-for-service system, fewer errors just means less money.
Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini covered this complaint in 2000, in a quite excellently detailed look at the usability of the new OS X controls.

http://www.asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.html

search for "gumdrops"

> People with experience with Windows know how easy it is to hit the wrong control and accidentally close down the whole application when setting it aside was the goal. Apple has actually provided some pretty decent spacing in these controls, in addition to enlarging their size. I wouldn't expect the kind of error rates from this that people have been predicting, although the original scheme of having "dangerous" on one side of the title bar and "benign" on the other made a lot more sense.

I think the key complaint at the time was:

> The button sequence is also a problem, in that it clashes badly with both the current layout and with Windows. This will also be a problem.

Plus ça change....
I don't believe for a moment that the engine will overpower the brake, for the simple reason that any normal car can stop faster than it can accelerate. That means the brakes are stronger. For sure a Camry or Prius can in no way accelerate faster than they stop.

Yes, there is an issue with overheating the brakes, but that will take a fairly long time, certainly longer than the time it should take you to figure out wtf is going on and shift to neutral or turn the ignition off.

IMHO, the outcome of these incidents being someone dying has driver error written all over it, even if the runaway acceleration actually is real.
Hackers are people too!
At least OSX and Windows both put the close button in a corner, this theme puts it between the maximise button and the window title. I've never seen another OS put it in such a strange position.
Everyday Looper Tutorial by Ed
>> The gushing letter he wrote predicted it's going to be a commercial success. I like the movie too (well, not the terrible theatrical release) but that doesn't mean that letter isn't somewhat nuts.

It may not have been a commercial success immediately in theaters, but given the disc sales, the theater screenings of the director's cut, etc., I think "commercial success" eventually came to be quite true.
If all OSS developers shared this attitude, there would not be free software today.
I had the same reaction. Honestly, I don't think you are missing anything, this is like an oil baron saying he's set for life because his oil rig is pumping out enough money today so that he doesn't have to work. For some reason he forgets that the oil might run out 2, 5, or 10 years from now.
Support the Article Rescue Squadron!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Rescue_Squadron
Which is quite ironic, considering the fifth pillar of their rules: Ignore all rules.
I've heard it claimed that democracy tends to achieve the correct decision in the long run, but with the drawback of taking a lot of time and effort. This case is certainly supporting evidence for all of those points.
The same way they do now. (Successful) companies don't fear liability: they prepare for it but realize that they will never be 100% insulated.

You weigh your options: if the benefits of doing something outweigh the costs (including lawsuit outcomes, poor public perception, etc) by enough of a margin, then you forge ahead.
If you're at work, consider not viewing.
My Greatest Weakness
Quick fix for the RSS problem, add this to <head>:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Hacker News" href="/rss" />

Here's the (untested) patch that I sent to pg:

diff -r 4befad01873a -r d3157a15433d news.arc
--- a/news.arc
+++ b/news.arc
@@ -401,6 +401,7 @@
(tag head
(gen-css-url)
(prn "<link rel=\"shortcut icon\" href=\"" favicon-url* "\">")
+ (prn "<link rel=\"alternate\" type=\"application/rss+xml\" title=\"" this-site* "\" href=\"/rss\">")
(tag script (pr votejs*))
(tag title (pr ,title)))
(tag body
To be fair, Windows lists binary compatibility as a feature. Linux ignores it entirely. And hardcoding paths is a really dumb move (which sadly does not make it any less popular). But yes, Windows backwards compatibility is not perfect.
Why not just have the customer opt-in/out of 'algorithm participation' per movie selection?

Likely, Netflix has the power to start it's own social network platform based on it's existing users' movie preferences. Some user's might be proud to say that they rate specific movies highly, and correlate to particular algorithms based on collective opinions.

For instance: 'Click here to add user X's preferences to your algorithm for Y genre'
Yep. NSFW. That was a bummer.
Tell me exactly what your product does in the tagline. Make this sentence shorter and sweeter and put it center stage.

LeadNuke is a streamlined process that helps you find, track, and follow-through with news articles, blog posts, and RSS feeds from your industry, turning them into meaningful sales leads.
If you make Lt Col by then (not so hard)

I have a lot of friends who stayed at Westpoint, and served at least two tours in Iraq or Afghanistan. They would argue with you over the "not so hard" part of the argument.
The children who can think actually know that this is insanity, as do the Enforcers of this insanity who can think. Still, the insanity continues.
Let me fix it for you: If all desktop OSS developers shared this attitude, there would be not be good free desktop software today.

And this is kind of true, isn't it?
Some of those photos look photoshopped. In #10, his glasses are broken, whereas in others (14, 19) he looks very out of place. In many, his hat stand out particularly.
Ask HN: What's the difference between president and CEO?
I have seen people took the title of President and Founder, but there's also a different CEO running the company. Is the president title just in name?
Yeah, it is very interesting. There is definitely a formula to these pictures. Very tidy environment, inspecting a line of product, a dozen people watching in the background, and the same damn coat in every shot.

What I really wonder is Kim Jong-il "in" on the staged-ness of these shots? Or does he just operate with a different perception of the world because things are always presented to him in such a tidy manner?
Whose interests are served by denigrating polytheists, or agnostics, or atheists, or even Pastafarians?

Who could logically or in good faith disagree with "under God" as the establisment of a monotheistic religion, with the US flag as its idol?
I heard iPad kicked their dog.
"Let us summarize what our algorithm achieves. Given a user's /public/ IMDb ratings, which the user posted voluntarily to reveal /some/ of his (or her; but we'll use the male pronoun without loss of generality) movie likes and dislikes, we discover /all/ ratings that he entered /privately/ into the Netflix system" (em. orig.)

One's "political orientation maybe revealed by his strong opinions about "Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," and his religious views by ratings on "Jesus of Nazareth" and "The Gospel of John." Even though one should not make inferences solely from someone's movie preferences, in many workplaces and social settings opinions about movies with predominantly gay themes such as "Bent" and "Queer as folk" (both present and rated in [one individual's] Netflix record) would be considered sensitive"
You think the amount of effort by Netflix to protect the identities of its costumers was enough. It was not. They intentionally released an amount of information, thinking none of its costumers could be traced, but guess what? They were.

Yes, it had to be used with other datasets to discover individuals, but Netflix ignored (you say acted in good faith) this possibility and decided to go ahead.

They were ignorant of the implications of the data they released. They didn't saw the possibilities that their costumers could be found. They were stupid and reckless.

The problem is that you're thinking about this situation as the researcher, the person who wants the data set to play with. Put yourself into the company's shoes. You want to improve the recommendation algorithm. You hold a contest, which needs the costumer data to work. But you know that your costumers won't be happy to have their info released, so you go and anonymize the data.

See where I am going? You had an idea, executed, but the consequences were bad. Imagine if car companies acted this way, one morning an engineer comes to work and puts a new brake system in the company's car already in production thinking it'll be awesome and work ten times better than the previous brakes. Without rigorous, government and industry trials, experiments and tests.

Good idea, poor execution. Netflix doesn't have "good faith", they wanted to improve their recommendation algorithm. They wanted to profit. Now, I don't have anything against profits. But it's naive to think Netflix did this for the benefit of mankind. They had their own reasons, and to achieve that, they've broken a promise to their costumers. They said: Hey, we'll keep on our database this information, but don't worry, none will ever know it.

But then they go and _relase_ costumer data, _thinking_ it's sufficiently anonymized. They were wrong. Double mistake there. The "hacker" wasn't alone in this, "he" had a direct help of the company which was supposed to not let this happen.
Thanks for this. I'm a big Derren Brown fan and can't view YouTube due to proxy restrictions. I know exactly which clip this is thanks to your summary.
Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots:

Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998)

The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006)

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009)

These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on.

In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".
Again, I reiterate: the bank robbery example is irrelevant. Netflix anomyized the data from within their own db. You need to cross-correlate with another db to de-anonymize.

A better example: a customer loses their drivers license/bank card and a thief finds it calls a bank to do transactions, using the info on the card to verify identity.

A bank can only do so much to protect their customers. If someone is willing to leave their info lying around, there isnt much that can be done.
Visual History of Supreme Court
I recall there were several techniques for photoshop detection. Let's bust them out?
Actually, that's a bit of a sore spot with Solar's creator. Solar was announced before Solr was, but Solr wouldn't rename their project. :-/
The article mentions several times that the Icelandic form of government lasted longer than the US - if anything I see that as a negative indicator, given how little actual progress occurred during that time. Compare the impact the US system of government has had with the impact the Icelandic form cited in this article had. The indigenous populations of North America and Australia have been around for thousands of years as well, with their "chieftain" systems of government, and similarly they just stagnated.
To be fair, I couldn't be bothered to click through. Just wanted to pass along the information regarding this topic (which is now obsolete).

EDIT:

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2010/03/ubuntus-new-themes-an...
Netflix is also facing problems because there is a specific law (the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988) that makes it illegal for them to reveal data that could be linked to service subscribers. In this case the burden of proof would fall on Netflix to prove the dataset could not reveal a single link between subscriber and rental history.
I fail to see why people think "Free" and "Easy to use" are mutually exclusive. If Firefox required people to run
./configure;make;make install
on Windows to get it running (not to mention dealing with missing dependencies) it wouldn't have the marketshare it has today.

If OSS wants to become truly mainstream the people creating it need to focus on the experience, not just the code
what's the relation of rework and innovation? Can you quote some stuff? I am considering this book, but to me it doesn't seem like it has anything innovation, especially since 37signals didn't really do anything innovative. Can't count open source framework there, as by itself it's just a framework.
Great link, thanks.

> hese men were determined that differences in religion would not be a big deal

I always see it as a little step further than that. They saw it as irrelevant to the governance of a country.

Perhaps personally atheism wouldn't have sat well with them (and I postulate that atheism was still new then and so not really widely considered) but I doubt it would have worried them to have atheists in government :)

I suspect myself of having somewhat rose tinted specs though :) (the main point, I think, is that I don't believe any of the founding fathers would have burn't atheists at the stake - which is enough)
I upvoted it (after reading) because I like periodic reminders that sexy web apps aren't the only way.
No, Wikipedia has been overrun by people who dedicate a spectacular amount of time trying to build an encyclopedia according to a fairly rigid set of rules that has successfully built one of the Internet's signature resources entirely on volunteer effort.

In 2010AD, the Wikilawyers have amassed a large amount of evidence that the Wikicritics lack: an actual encyclopedia that, despite virtually owning the front page of Google, has not been gamed into irrelevance.

I take that evidence into account, and the amount of effort WP volunteers clearly put into the project, and come to the conclusion that they should get a whole hell of a lot more slack than they appear to get on fora like this.
When someone tells you "I'm too busy" what they're really saying is "It's not a priority/important to me"
You appear to be making assumptions based on the Windows OS which don't apply here, which confuses me as you seem to be saying you use Linux.

Both Ubuntu and Mac OS X have a top "bar" which has functions in both the top-left and top-right corners, easily accessed according to Fitt's Law.

In Ubuntu top-left and right are Applications and Logout/Sleep etc. respectively and in Mac OS X it's the "Apple" system menu and Spotlight search. Maximised windows in both these OS's don't expand to the top corners and in Mac OS X windows don't even "maximise" to the full size of the screen, rather optimising for the correct size which will often not be full screen.
Thats too bad. Sounds like an interesting research area.
Disagreed; i think all it is is that FOSS developers like making cool stuff, and for them the setup is not a chore.

In a commercial app there is a requirement to make the installation routine simple because you have to sell the app. With a Linux (and sometimes just generally with FOSS) that drive isn't necessarily there.

It's a general FOSS problem; programs tend to lack that last little bit of polish that would "sell" them - but that is a ball ache to add in.
Is Wikipedia a directory of note-worthy open source software, or does it strictly cover software with actual notability? How do you decide what a reliable source is for a topic that gets most of its coverage in a medium where anyone can write about the topic?

This seems like one of those AfD's that will either hold back a flood of other articles, or open the floodgates. It looks to me like the process is working, but I've only read 4 minutes worth of the discussion.
I posted this a few days ago but didn't get any attention:

A Year in Pyongyang:
The fascinating account of a British guy who spent a year in North Korea working as a literary reviser for their totalitarian government
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1178719

I've started reading the book since then and it really paints a full and seemingly realistic picture of N Korea.
Someone needs to tell them that an "unstable beta" should not be given a version number above 1.0...

Still, this is pretty exciting news: A speedy, JIT Python compiler written in Python. I look forward to seeing PyPy become the canonical Python compiler in a couple of years.
Infographic: How Cars Are Killing Us Around the World
Derren says the same thing himself - at the start of every programme he gives a little spiel about what he does being "a combination of magic, showmanship and psychology". Anyone with a basic grasp of magic technique can start to see his use of some very traditional methods.

One of the many brilliant aspects of Derren's performance is how he uses the notion of "psychological manipulation" as misdirection. We as spectators naturally look for an explanation for what we see. Magicians have always sought to provide an explanation for the audience, hence the waving of wands and the use of "magic words". Most of these explanations are deeply unsatisfactory, but Derren's is uniquely compelling.

Most magicians think too much about trying to fool their audience, believing that it is sufficient merely to do something that seems impossible. Derren understands that to engage an audience they must want to believe. Imagine if all magicians really did have the powers that they purport to have. There's nothing particularly exciting about someone who can make sponge balls vanish or candles appear out of thin air, but the ability to control minds is thrilling and dangerous. The imagination overflows with possibility. He performs an illusion that is exciting to watch and gives us an explanation for that illusion which is yet more exciting.

One of the things I keep meaning to write when I get round to starting a blog is a discussion of what UX designers can learn from magicians. I think one of the most important aspects of Apple's design culture is their focus on creating wonder and joy and their use of illusion and misdirection. The reason that the iPad will absolutely tear up personal computing is all in Apple's tagline for it - "a magical and revolutionary product". It's not about features, it's about feelings.
For a long time, everything I wrote would get re-blogged by dozens of spammy blogs all across the internet, occasionally with the odd misspelling thrown in to simulate original content.

My solution was to become less interesting.
Nope, no startup; just working from home for my Maryland employer of several years. Nebraska actually had affordable housing. :P
Even so, consider simplifying it thusly:
LeadNuke helps you generate qualified sales leads from online news articles and feeds

If this is what it really does, it would have explained it to me immediately.
It's a balancing act. You can take away the right of people to hold companies accountable for their actions, and this would really free up businesses to innovate without fear of reprisal. This would also open it up for businesses to 'innovate' in 'cost-savings' where 100% of the risks are borne by their customers. Do you advocate living in a world where corporations are free from fear, allowing them to do whatever they want? Do you really believe that corporations always operate in the best interests of their customers? Do you really think that the general population are the customers for most businesses (i.e. most people feel that they are 'customers' of the cable/television companies, but in reality the advertisers are the customers and the general population is the product)?
"I just think people like reading tangible case studies, so I'll oblige."

Peter, for some commenters here, there is the feeling that you have told this very motivational story that is also "lean" on content. I don't disagree, although I do appreciate your story.

I think it would be great if you shared more detail about your experiences, successes, failures, etc. in a way that people in the HN community would find more substantial. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) does a great job of this, and I think HN'ers owe him a great debt for the quality of what he shares. (And many others here do this as well.)
I own the app. It's pretty fun with a couple people contributing, but with more than 3 the little iPhone speaker gets drowned out by the laughter.

Recommended.
Two points:

The population of medieval iceland never exceeded 80,000.

The country was Catholic, there was plenty of church law.
Medieval Iceland was transiting to Catholicism. It was this transition(more specifically, the involuntary chruch tithe) that spelled the end of the icelandic system of private law.

That much I think I know. Correct me if I am wrong.
PyMOTW: Python Module of the Week
Digital microfluidics: a programmable lab-on a chip
This is very well put together.
I think the best part is that he doesn't overplay or browbeat the point.
The World changes, but it certainly takes a while for us to catch up with it...
Hey! He recorded a tutorial for it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187700
Sure you can configure it. http://fosswire.com/post/2008/02/customize-your-titlebar/
Sure we released that murderer from jail, but he needs to buy a gun to shoot someone, and we didn't sell him the gun. You can't blame us.

If they know that the information can be de-anonymized using publicly available information, have they really made a good-faith effort?
In the same way they would use bit.ly or tinyurl.
Matlab and Mathematica seem to do pretty well at installing universally (though 64bit can cause some issues).

I think the real reason is there isn't much benefit for making software for linux when the paying userbase for windows or even mac is so much higher. This is why you really only see educational and/or research based software on linux; hopefully if linux starts to get really big we will see this change.