skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What, specifically, are you trying to do for this startup? What tasks, specifically, are you failing to do for this startup?

Many people I know who have vague dreams of eventually opening a business -- and I count myself as of four years ago -- have no actual plan as to what they are doing, what the next step is, etc etc. It is very easy to fail at ill-defined goals: If I write "Improve my software somehow" in my to-do list for this weekend I'm quite likely to find everything else expand to fill all available time, if I write "Implement the achievement system and deploy it live" I have a clear goal and success/failure conditions which I can use to evaluate progress. (That was my task last Sunday and the Sunday before last, too, but I know exactly why it isn't done yet rather than just being surprised that it hasn't magicked itself up.)

After you get in the habit of making clear goals, I suggest making smaller goals with shorter steps. Long-term planning for me is a bunch of short-term plans strung together, and items on the list typically take a few hours or a day of work for me and then a week of calendar time. Even I can sustain concentration for a few hours at a time. Then I deploy it live, start working on the next goal, and check back in a week when the notebook tells me to. (This is perhaps a little peculiar to the rhythms of my business: I only routinely get uninterrupted time on the weekends, and one adaptation I've made to that constraint is that I A/B test extensively, so during the work-week my site just passively collects stats for analysis the following weekend.)
That's interesting. I thought I was the only one with fifty thousand unsecured desktops on my network. It's nice to know I have company.

Not really.
most open i've seen google about these kind of operations thing, very helpful of them, and I hope they continue to do it!
Hacking it Up with Lex, Yacc, and Apache
creating your own apache module powered by lex/yacc
HIPAA compliance is no joke.

Take a look at documentation provided by the Joint Commission (JCAHO) which certifies hospitals and CCHIT for generalized standards (no one ring to bind them all in terms of compliance for software), also HIPAA.org.

You may want to review the CMS HIPAA checklist (http://www.cms.gov/hipaa/).

As a best practice, I've seen basic "PHI" or personal health information (identifying info like name, Bday, sex, SSN) encrypted, but this is not 'required.' Some programmers/sites go further and encrypt everything, as stated by others below.

Careful with the email transmission; various legal concerns (and some regulatory standard interpretations) mean most 'sites' keep this info on LANs or HISs or perhaps on web hosted sites.

Take a look at Kaiser's KPConnect PHR portal, which is powered by Epic, as an example. You can dig up plenty of stuff about that system on Google.

Generic presentation of concerns, but worth a quick skimming: http://npag.org/NPAG_images/NPAG%20Health%20IT%20Prez-Kenned...

For nifty open source stuff, check out popHealth (by Mitre), OMHE (for mobile) and hData (XML).

http://code.google.com/p/omhe/

http://www.projecthdata.org/

http://projectpophealth.org/
You're sort of doing the same thing, right?

Totally - my knowledge of Haskell is probably more superficial than most Haskell fans knowledge of category theory, so I'm in no position to fairly poke fun. Consider the jab retracted. :)

I think I'm just seething from a recent argument about Haskell's superiority where I was accused of not understanding the almighty Power Of The Monad...really, I just think that the necessary pervasiveness of the pattern indicates that the language is not as powerful as it could be (I raise an eyebrow when I see any pattern used very often anywhere), whereas fanboys sometimes take it as evidence that the language is beautiful - witness the number of Java programmers that think design patterns are proof of Java's perfection. I personally don't like it so much when languages make too many choices for me, and Haskell seems to have that same "protect us from ourselves" philosophy that makes Java so irritating to work with, just with a different enforced paradigm.

And in reality, the people that actually use Haskell are not like this. Don't let someone that read about Haskell on Reddit yesterday, opened ghci, and typed "let fibs = 1 : 1 : (zipWith (+) fibs $ tail fibs)" put you off. People like to be excited about things, and people that read too many programming blogs get themselves unnecessarily excited about simple things. Then when they sort of understand that simple thing, they feel the need to tell everyone.

Yeah, this is what I pretty much assume, that it's a vocal minority creating most of the noise. I should probably give it a fairer chance, given that a lot of people find it the perfect language for a lot of stuff.

Unfortunately at the moment, the only "stuff" I can afford to work on involves DOM manipulation, so it's Javascript or bust for the foreseeable future...
They do this every time there's a system or process failure that affects paying customers. They're also quite good about proactively crediting accounts when SLAs are exceeded. Not quite as good as Netflix, but better than most.
Which, in case you didn't know, the MSFT build stack was able to do with C++ projects long before it could with C# projects. I wonder if wglb's referenced company would have liked to know that. ;)
Off-topic but I can't resist: A friend bought a hairbrush for $100 (!) and now I love to tell her she looks like a hundred bucks (rather than a million).
Do I have to like my customers?
How is this better than markdown? Or should I say, how is this different than markdown?
at least that one wasn't spam, like the other 9 billion
Yelp Extortion Lawsuit Updates
For one you can't do spans or divs, or apply classes and ids. Markdown isn't a replacement for HTML.
It isn't nearly so black and white. The robber barons had deep political connections. No matter how amazing your product is, you won't be as successful as those men without working the system. Their success is due to great products, timing, luck, hard work and connections. Take away one and their story would be different.
As an interesting counterpoint, one of the comments gives an excellent definition of a good software development manager: a bi-directional bullshit filter to keep the techs and suits from scaring each other (and in general being a single point of access to the development team for the rest of the company). Management at that level is very much an "if you've done it right, no one will know you've done anything at all" sort of thing. It's a subtle art but anyone who does it right is incredibly valuable.
HTML WG Working Drafts have been published
We build what we love (or "how to save us from an x86-only world")
Indeed. I think this also goes to show the low standard of quality of many news sources. The fact that something so preposterous could spread at all without any verification is expected from the masses, but when news sources start mentioning them and fail to issue a formal retraction, instead sidestepping the issue, it should cause them to lose a lot of credibility. Unfortunately, in this day and age, many people would rather go to Twitter than to some reputable source for such news and that says a lot in itself.
Reward Sign A/B Testing
Nokia's surveillance systems during the Iran protests
There is only one way to handle it if you want to graduate. Grit your teeth and do it. Take it from a guy who's like you and spent 6.5 years in university because he refused to study. I graduated in the end by becoming a sort of hermit before exams. No meeting with friends, redirecting all the non-productive sites I frequented to 127.0.0.1, not going out except when foraging for food, etc. I wish I'd done it sooner, because 1) 2.5 years extra was a bloody waste of youth, and 2) I racked up more debt than my peers, which I am still paying for.

Besides, if you're really smart, you should be able to pass everything just by starting the hermit routine about 2 weeks before your papers. Take that total of 16 weeks (if it's a 4 year course with two major exams per year) as a temp job that makes you ~$12000 - if you take my figure of an extra 2.5 years at $5k per year, which I'm pretty sure is less than what your education is costing you (I'm Singaporean). :)

Don't make the same mistakes I did!
Are Virtual Worlds Over?
As a westerner who is ethnically Japanese living in Japan, it's amazing how, from a western point of view, an average looking Caucasian with western manners are so successful in hooking up with the ladies. In the workplace in Japan, standing out gets you hammered down. In the social scene, doesn't seem to be an issue. Unless you look Japanese but act like a westerner, completely confusing the Japanese around you. I sometimes wonder how much attitudes would change if I change my hair color to blond and eyes to blue.
Nokia 5230 Nuron Mobile Phone
HN: Review my tiny App
It's a tiny app that has turned out to be a good time waster amongst people I've play tested. Though I'm wondering if it would be ok to collect play-data, like play time, anonymously. Would it be alright to do that?
No matter who is better skilled if you go into any knife fight, where you or your attacker has a knife and you are not prepared to bleed you are wrong.
Embedding Images using Haxe and FlashDevelop
"the people that know Clojure well and participate in its community are not complete douchewieners,"

Like this guy? (http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/10/python-vs-clojur...) . Seems like a vocal member of the Clojure community and is about the perfect example of a Clojure "douchewiener" (nice word!) that I can think of.

Some of the more vocal (and ignorant) members of the clohure community are ex ruby fanbois who jumped off the ruby/RoR bandwagon and moved their babbling proselytizing to Clojure. Yestrday it was all "ooooh mixins, shiny" or " ooooh Open classes shiny" and today it is all " oohh s expressions, shiny!". This is a shame, because Clojure is a nice language that deserves better. But otoh, the quiet and competent Rubyists are breathing easier now.

Of course, Rich Hickey and co don't do any unnecessary trumpeting or deprecation of other languages, but there is a lunatic fringe which combines loudness with ignorance in Clojure just as with Haskell (as you point out, correctly).

But neither the Haskell loudmouths nor the Clojure loudmouths are as toxic as the Common Lisp loudmouths, so things are relatively better in these languages and that is a good thing.
Sorry for the double post above. I was replying right as noprocrast kicked and was not able to delete the extra one :-\

I have a couple responses regarding complex machines and responsibility. Firstly, as to whether or not we are complex machines, the fact that you don't want to think of yourself as a black box or a very complex machine is somewhat tangential to the issue. If we both agree that there is some sort of objective reality outside of ourselves than either we are complex machines (materialism) or not (dualism? please forgive me if I am putting words in your mouth) and the way we feel about it does not change that fact (whatever it actually is). My point here is just to be cautious about accepting or rejecting a hypothesis just because of the way it feels.

But as for responsibility, even if we were to suppose that we were "merely" complex machines, I see no reason why we cannot still be pragmatic and assign responsibility based on the ways people act, and what their states were that led up to their actions. Contemplating root causes beyond that level is problematic no matter how you view the universe--is there a devil that causes one to sin or does it depend on the initial state of the universe?

In my personal opinion, the only domains that materialism remains poor at explaining are free will and qualia. For free will I can hand-wave and assert that free will is an illusion which our brain provides us with because it has some sort of evolutionary advantage, perhaps in helping us decipher when actions arise from within the individual or from within the environment. For qualia I yet have no explanation. :)
I really like the concept. Have you looked into doing an iPad app? It seems like a perfect form factor for a kitchen-centric computing device, it just needs the right software.
Practical: Have an idea text file and make a one or two line entry. Then forget about it and go back to work. When you finish the project go back and read the file but not before.
Sounds lame, way too many variables. You could hedge the downsize with life insurance I guess. YC has a much better model.
.
What does that have to do with it? If I put to a link to "ifreakinghateebay.com" would it be okay if they rediected it to ebay? No, of course not.
Power is the great uptime equalizer. Show me the most elegant HA design you can dream up and chances are I'll show you a system that's one unexpected power failure away from failure.
" I just think that the necessary pervasiveness of the pattern indicates that the language is not as powerful as it could be (I raise an eyebrow when I see any pattern used very often anywhere), whereas fanboys sometimes take it as evidence that the language is beautiful "

Very interesting observation! Generally recurring patterns in one language "disappear" in more advanced languages (as Peter Norvig's slides point out), either by new syntax or changes to the runtime . How could Monads or (by extension type classes) disappear in a new language? Something to think about.
The one patent to rule them all!!
All I hope is that Apple doesn't start locking up the resources that used to once be free, such as Xcode, and all the documentation surrounding it.
Another thing that can cause a problem is having to stop work on something for an extended period, then come back to it. I learned, working for an architect, to always take notes on what I was working on. I am plenty smart enough to keep the details for a large remodeling job in my head while doing the drawings, but recreating them after being diverted to a different job for 6 months was a royal pain. So I learned to make notes of every idea I had, rather than just adding it to the next revision of the drawing. And the more literal point ESR made about disciplined study skills has also bitten me several times.
Now that was one idiotic column. The idea that Rockefeller was some genius working against the odds ignores the fact that the US was the ascendant economic power of the time, and also had huge stores of oil within its borders. What next, is the WSJ is going to be publishing panegyrics to the good old days of slavery?
Oh, it's clearly broken, it's just the comment I was replying to asserted that anything with the word bay in it triggers the breakage. This seems to be unlikely. The fact that the behavior was broken and links unrelated to ebay were being redirected to ebay was already well established by that point in the thread.

Understanding which links are affected by this issue and the scope of the problem might be relevant.

In fact, one might go ahead and leap to the conclusion based on our revised understanding (that it does in-fact likely need ebay.com in the url to trigger) that this error is being caused by an unfortunately constructed regular expression or overaggressive pattern match and one might even learn something.

But far be it from me to assume that such a far fetched conjecture has anything to do with it.
Ugh, I promised myself I'd lay off getting toys for the near future, but I don't think I can resist this. Been looking for a little ARM machine for Renraku development, and this fits the bill nicely. Wonder if JTAG is exposed somewhere.
Canada adopting plastic bank note technology starting next year
On the other other hand, knives can be thrown, usually faster than you can run.
I think this is wrong. Incremental rebuilds are supported just fine by languages other than Java. cabal does incremental rebuilds of Haskell (and Template Haskell) projects just fine.

If you define every function in terms of a macro, and change that macro, though, of course you have to rebuild the whole project.
Don't give them ideas. They've already proposed eliminating the minimum wage on their sister channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HDvd7htCxY
After using Australian bills for just a short period of time, I'm amazed more countries haven't adopted the plastic money. Australians also don't use pennies. Hopefully more countries will start adopting that practice too.
I really can't believe we're seeing WSJ Opinion page columns here.
You need to be careful about the praising for trying bit, especially as they get older:

"Treating like an adult: You're fucking up. Here's how to fix it. Now fix it.

"Treating like a child: You're trying really hard! Good job! It's not the result that matters, it's just that you try!

"(That's actually a functional way to deal with children up to a point. In most cases they can't do a real job. But when they get to the point they can, when they're ready to learn to be adults with adult responsibilities, "it's a good try" should never cut it.)"
For a seriously detailed analysis of the challenges of provisioning App Engine, take a look at Ryan Barrett's video:

http://sites.google.com/site/io/under-the-covers-of-the-goog...
May be somewhat related - have you looked into TRIZ?
I believe this "OStatus" is the revamped, revised version of the OMB (Open Micro-Blogging) spec that Status.net/Identica introduced. Identica is naturally the biggest Status.net-based site, but apparently they have intranet microblogging systems too (Motorola is one customer they brag about).

It's true that there's not many OStatus-based services around to link up yet, but similar ideas like OpenID took a while to get momentum too. I very much like the idea of a world where OStatus does for my social circle what RSS and Atom did for the websites I follow, and I wish the OStatus folk all the best in attempt to make my life better.
Um, what about changes in font size? That’s a problem for both pages and lines.

Oh, I see. You want to introduce “actual” line breaks! Oh, just imagine the joys of explaining that concept to those new to it. They will certainly get it right away ;)

(Lines might be a useful navigational tool for code but there is a reason why that number is used nowhere else.)
From the article:
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan "New Jersey must be free," broke Fulton's government-granted monopoly.

That is, Fulton exemplified your "deep political connections," but Vanderbilt overcame them. I'm not arguing that the robber barons didn't take advantage of politics (they'd be foolish not to!) but rather that they weren't any more political per dollar of resources than any other businessman.
Surely if language X is blub and language Y isn't then Y beats X if all else is even.

Surely everyone experienced at these competitions would quickly figure out that lisp et al are huge competitive advantages, and everyone would quickly switch.

From what I've seen working with some living legends in computer science the language makes almost no difference in actual productivity, it's just personal preference.

It's just trading one performance characteristic for another. Every language has it's sweet spot, and if you know them you are just as productive in that as another.

If you aren't productive in a specific language, you are doing it wrong.
Since the article is talking about examining the detailed costs of the long, drawn-out process of his slow decline, it is important to note that she says he was an overweight ex-smoker, which made him (she says) a prime candidate for kidney cancer.

The biggest cost in western-style health care is not end of life care, it is lifestyle-induced illness that leads to an explosion of totally preventable terminal diseases.
I wouldn't expect a Joe random robber a) to carry a knife usable for throwing; b) to know how to throw that knife. Most knives are as useful as rocks, when thrown.

Although in a real situation you might not want to test anything from this thread, because you could be very unlucky.
(sorry for taking so long to reply)

Yes, I'm familiar with J, and it is indeed closely related to K -- J was inspired, and in many ways evolved from A - an APL interpreter written by Arthur Whitney in one afternoon (see http://www.nsl.com/papers/origins.htm for more details).

J tries to be complete and nice in the mathematical sense, e.g. having forks and trains, and functional inverses, as part of the language.

K tries to be the simple practical language, rather than the philosophically consistent one: e.g. like APL and J, it is left-of-right long-right-scope, meaning 1+2+3+4+5 parses 1+(2+(3+(4+5))). However, the fold/over operator associates left - thus, +/ 1 2 3 4 5 actually computes (((1+2)+3)+4)+5 which seems inconsistent but is much more useful in practice.

K (conceptually) has 3 data classes: atom (int, float, char, symbol), list (data indexed by sequential integers) and dict (data indexed by data -- an associative array); Everything else is an implementation detail (and these matter -- they make K blindingly fast -- but you can ignore them when trying to grok k). Multidimensional arrays are implemented as "list-of-lists" or "list-of-lists-of-lists ...." etc. (thus no "boxing" is needed).

All list/dict access is done by indexing. Compress/expand are replaced by the "where" function which converts a list of booleans to their indices -- e.g. to zero all elements less than 3 you can do:

x[where x<3]:0 / use : for assignment

K has a much simpler base (which is surprisingly sufficient in practice), and the symbols make more sense to me. YMMV
I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure this is also why most Japanese Yen notes are so crisp and new feeling compared to the soggy used-tissue-paper feeling I get from so many others. Thai currency as well is pretty durable and obviously plastic.
Apple removes Wi-Fi finders from App Store
Seriously good idea. A common Bar Bet (that I've made quite a few dollars on) is to hand an Australian Bill to someone and see if they can rip it. I've never seen anyone do it without using a knife or their teeth to get the rip started.

The only part of the article I don't understand is this: "Ottawa will replace Canada’s paper-cotton bank notes – prone to wear and tear – with synthetic ones that last two to three times longer. "

Those things look indestructible - I wonder how they ever wear out.
Though I agree with PB on natural gas over oil (foreign or domestic), for transportation purposes, wouldn't we view natural gas as a stop-gap toward electric vehicles anyway?

Apparently there have been natural gas test-flights for air travel http://www.breakingtravelnews.com/news/article/qatar-complet..., but what happened to BP being all about saving the environment.

I assume natural gas may be only slightly better from a Co2 perspective.
Technology and Programming News
Hopefully, this will actually be available in the US for $85.

I've seen too many of these ultra cheap netbooks vaporize into thin air after a press release/demo or increase dramatically in price.

E.g. Cherrypal announced a $99 netbook but I have not been able to find anyone who has actually received a unit to review.

http://www.cherrypal.com/products.php
Now I understand why my bot did so badly (190 out of 800). My iterative deepening algorithm never worked quite right because I didn't have the Voronoi heuristic implemented properly.

This was a great walkthrough, and the contest, even though I was nowhere near winning, was a nice learning experience for me.
I doubt it - even the iPhone developer program is free until you want to distribute. This does seem somewhat worrying though, they're practically the only company out there that currently has a "consumer" developer program (MS's dev programs are all entirely free until you get to the extreme enterprise end).