skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a horrible story I'm so sorry to hear that about your friend. I think you're right on track that prevention and screening is our weapon against these things. Screening and prevention costs way less than "the cure".

If you read Christensen's latest book "Innovator's Prescription" he analyzes the medical industry through the lens of disruptive technology, and concludes that the forces of disruptive technology have been dismantled which keep prices high. The is such a unique perspective in this health care debate because it's basically been framed as "You pay the high price", or the "Government pays the high price". However, Christensen is giving us a third option saying fix the economic engine and disruptive technology will drive prices down over time and things will get better too. Neither side of the debate can guarantee this either.

His idea is that Doctor's cost a lot of money, but when you have to have the very best analyze what's wrong with you have to pay it. Doctor's jobs are very hard and time consuming. However, certain types of care can be provided without a doctor for things that are well defined. Prevention is just such a thing. Screenings are just such a thing.

The problem right now is that technologies that enable us to screen better are often wrapped up so that you can only go to a doctor to get them. Things like MRI's and CAT scans require prescriptions from doctors. The price of a CAT scan has remained the same since it was invented. 1970 technology the same price!? Where else in our free markets does this happen?

Prevention is more easy to provide without having to tackle the prescription system, but screenings are very important part of medicine in the 21st century.
... at the risk of getting downvoted for low-brow digg-like links:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/09/are-linux-programmers-getti...
Yeah, that's what I was afraid of, I guess I'll release it as GPL then.
For what it's worth, he is referring to the bill-paying job when he says "only 60 hours?". And he has a successful product on the side, so much so that he's quitting the day job. Pretty sure the intent wasn't oneupmanship there so much as gallows humor.

But really, it's the reader's choice how to interpret something like that. I prefer to look at differently, and think, "there are people with jobs that require more time o them than mine--leaving them similar amounts of discretionary time as I have--and they build a company with it! Awesome!".

I suspect I'll have to be making about double the day job in order to pay for health care, etc. But first task is to start the product; its a bit premature for me to plan my, ahem, "exit strategy".
Leadership Energy
I like this - a very quick and concise getting-started tut with maven (which I've been hesitant about installing).
I almost threw Topeka in there, but I wanted to keep it simple.

I know a lot of decidedly cool people from Wichita... but I also know quite a few crazies.
I think this could be condensed somewhat. For example, the Jumble seems similar to Big Ball o' Mud, while Junkyard Coding, Stovepipe, and Rube Goldberg Machines all share characteristics.

I'd also like to see design/programming patterns distinguished from organizational patterns like Empire Building or Hero Culture (though not surprisingly, they tend to be correlated with each other.)

Regarding the commonality of these patterns, having worked in an Oracle environment for a while, the ones I see most often seem to be Stovepipe systems and Big Ball of Mud. SQL in particular tends to force a stovepipe approach, because if you try to hide too much complexity behind nice PL/SQL interfaces, you tend to get highly suboptimal explain plans, and/or, you end up losing advantages of multi-block I/O and batch processing. So, instead, you have huge multi-table joins that are inherently brittle and difficult to maintain but which perform adequately. (Yes, views can help here to some degree.)

Because you don't have many clean interfaces, refactoring becomes more difficult and you also get tons of copy/paste code, resulting in an eventual Big Ball of Mud.
I am somewhat confused by this double-negative: "No serious market observer disputes the claim that volatility would not be higher without the liquidity provided by high frequency traders."

The author seems to be trying to say that high frequency traders reduce volatility. But I parse the claim differently: it seems to me to be saying that volatility could only be lower in the absence of liquidity from high frequency traders.

As to the rest of the argument, it seems to be structured along these lines:

* More efficient markets with lower spreads between buy and sell are good. I think this is a valid claim, but I don't think it follows from the existence of high frequency trading, but rather from more efficient, automated trading systems.

* High frequency trading helps supply market liquidity, and this liquidity is good. I can buy the first part of this, and the second part seems mostly true.

* Old-fashioned purchasers seem to be annoyed that when they make a large purchase, the price for the last share is higher than the price for the first share, because the market has already reacted to the change in supply and demand. He also makes the argument that were this not so, the sellers of shares would in effect be subsidizing purchasers. His case seems solid enough to me.

* But he then makes another claim that seems to contradict it. He suggests that companies with stocks that have low volume turnover are unduly affected by small purchases, and since high frequency trading increases volume, the impact is reduced.

* Finally, it seems he would like to claim that because "our nation's equity markets are far fairer, more efficient, more liquid and have lower transaction costs for investors than ever before", high frequency trading should claim a substantial portion of the credit.
PG articles are not scripture that you can just link to a quote from to end debate, you know. =]

I do think it's legitimate to look at sources for articles, especially when there are strong conflicts of interest.
If we'd started with Hebrew, it would be left-to-right that would be the nightmare. That's just because we've got left-to-right ground in deeply in our software, not for a fundamental physical reason (in the way that vertical orientation is arguably less useful to humans as our field-of-view is a horizontal elliptical shape, not a sphere or vertical shape).
Parser Combinators in JS
The last section makes an interesting point about the type of speculation that HFT does, i.e. it's not long-term (no positions carried overnight) and thus it can't create the types of asset bubbles that we've seen in the past
Yeah that's a bit of a bummer. I understand the need to hit the $99 price point, but it's a bit less compelling when you realize it's effectively a $140 device with no SD card slot, once you buy and install a WiFi card.

Still, I applaud the effort and hope that the upgraded models will be out soon.
So here's the thing... A vast majority of people who apply to us tend to have just graduated out of college and have never managed funds of any sort before. The idea behind putting a budget in place is only to give them financial structure and inculcate a sense of frugality.

That being said, if a founder tells us they'd like their money up front, we'll write them a cheque.
I recommend this book whole heartily. I have been reading the chapters as they have been released, an excellent resource.
The rest of the article seems to make some rather dubious strong claims, also. For example: "High frequency traders can only trade profitably when their trades push a stock price towards fair value."

I don't see why there's any particular reason that's true. High-frequency traders can trade profitably whenever their trades are in line with (very) short-term price movements. Ideally everything works together to push prices towards fair value, but you can't assume that as an axiom, since that's the main point being disputed in that section (the one on volatility).
You can also use services such as http://www.sitevaluecalculator.com and http://www.rapidsitecheck.com to get a good feel of how much a domain is worth. It can give you some additional ammo in a domain name fight.
High frequency trading is not the issue. the issue is an automated system watching for large incoming orders. When this system observes an incoming order, it purchases available supplies at lower cost than the incoming order will pay, then sells the stock to the large buyer.

Is it clever arbitrage? is it a massive denial of service so some people can play middle man? I don't know.

However, Cameron Smith has created an excellent straw man of his opponents. This is an ad hominem argument.
The way I would normally handle what would otherwise be left recursion in a top-down parser is to introduce loops.

term ::= factor ( ('*' | '/') factor )* ;

If you introduce regex-like closure operators to model loops, life gets much easier, and you can build your trees the right way around.

How applicable this is to PEGs is another matter though. I generally write my parsers by hand, and I parse expressions with operator precedence.
Comments from Redmond may indicate Apple alliance
On the one hand, you know what's really happening here. Most of the internal enterprise Java apps we look at crush these Rails apps by LOC; intuitively, even though Java inflates the LOC metric, it's no contest even by any reasonable scale factor you'd assign. What's happening is that Rails nibbles at the edges of the market and gets relatively small problems to work on. Apps like ours are big --- for Rails apps. Not a hugely meaningful metric.

On the other hand: how many developers does Thoughtworks have on this project again?
It certainly sensationalizes one side more, and I think that companies can't extensively look over every part of their manufacturing process that they outsource. However, companies like Apple and Nokia need to be a little more socially responsible and monitor who they do business with . . . obviously easier said than done.
It is exactly what was used to generate the print book, just with some web enabled features like links. And yes, this is the PDF you'd get if you buy it from O'Reilly.

Marketing-wise, it was a gamble, because the open source release date wasn't contingent on sales or anything like that. We launched the book and gave a 9 month exclusive rights period to O'Reilly.

This at least takes into account the fact that most books sell the majority of their copies in the first month or two, but I didn't have like a minimum sales number before I could open source the book or anything like that. In fact, the print book says right in the front cover that it'd be open sourced in March.

The book did okay sales wise, not great, but not horrible. It definitely did worse than it should given that (at least from the looks of it) people really, really like it. But this isn't really up to the readers, it's up to the distributor. Basically, much of our sales come from wholesale, and with paper book stores on the decline, and the saturation of the market with Ruby books over the last couple years, it was hard to convince them to pick up a lot of copies of the book.

As of right now, I am just about at the point of clearing my advance. I will share specific numbers at some point, but let's just say that the advance probably works out to minimum wage or less when compared to the amount of effort put in.

Interestingly enough, the gradual week by week release of chapters really led to a nice spike in sales, coming from what was essentially a steady decline except for a spike around the holidays. So actually, I think open sourcing the book was good for sales in that regard. Since it might be hard to find the book on the shelves in a book store, this gives people a chance to "try before they buy".

Unfortunately, because my book was selling above average as an ebook, I've probably effectively killed those sales today. Then again, maybe people will still buy the Kindle and Iphone editions, who knows.

At the end of the day, I think neither O'Reilly nor myself expected this book to be a big bread winner. I love the book because it embodies the most interesting things I've learned from the smartest people I know, and I think that comes through in the writing. I wrote the book because the idea popped into my head fully formed and demanded to be put out on paper. So that was my biggest win.

But from an authors perspective, RBP has given me a great boost in exposure. I already had name recognition in the inner circles of Ruby community, but after writing the book, I find more opportunities from folks I probably wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise. This has been good for my open source projects, and good for my work.

I'm glad I did this, and it worked out well. I'd recommend it to others, for sure. Of course, buying the book will make O'Reilly happy, so go ahead and do that if you want :)
Collection of Facebook chat smiley and emoticons
I am a professional trader, and by almost any definition I operate in the "high frequency" space. First, let's establish that Traders is an authority on the real world of financial markets in the same sense that PC World is an authority in the world of technology.

So I've not read the linked article, nor am I going to. But I will say this: HFT does perform a viable, necessary economic function. A well-functioning capital market absolutely requires this kind of activity.

HOWEVER, like most mainstream-media memes, what gets talked about / opined on is almost never relevant to what is actually important and/or controversial: in this case, the question of whether HFT creates a two-tiered playing field where individual (read: non-technically-sophisticated) investors suffer at the hands of the "pros".

Most arguments against HFT basically say that algorithms are purely predatory and only serve to hurt the performance of large investors. This is naive at best and deceptive at worst; for every share I purchase "ahead of" a big order, a seller has been filled at the price he desired. Every transaction has two sides; you can't just pick one and say they got screwed. The other side has to have done as well as the other did poorly (assuming a fictional frictionless world).

The reality is that HFT requires tons of knowledge and a technology budget of seven figures per annum at the barest minimum, and this provides a very real barrier to entry. What should be talked about, but never is: is that ok? Why or why not? What ramifications does it have?
They're native in Perl 6, and people above have linked to libraries for Lua and Clojure. I think there's a library for Python as well somewhere or other.

Also peg/leg for C is intended (iirc) as a direct competitor to flex/bison et al.
Japanese image scanner lets you digitize a book by rapidly flipping its pages
Interesting, thanks for the warning. I only skimmed through the paper today and noted that the algoritm seems complex, but I didn't attempt to understand it in detail.

What was your final result? Did you implement the left recursion in the way the paper describes, invented/found some other way or abandoned the whole idea?
Probably? They decided the whole world isn't prepared to see boobies on their phones and that doesn't even compete with one of their own products.
Is There a Google News Blacklist?
"Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established."

Romans 13:1
Steven Chu on energy efficiency
If geeks have one character flaw that holds them back it's the need to understand everything in excruciating detail. In the real world you can't possibly learn enough to engage in informed debates on every topic, however understanding human nature and paying attention to whose interests are served by what ideas will get you a lot of mileage for minimal effort. Maybe the GP isn't a great thought-provoking HN comment, but it's definitely something that should be in the back of our minds.
" A vast majority of people who apply to us tend to have just graduated out of college and have never managed funds of any sort before."

In other words you think people just out of school can't handle 10k$ without board meetings but you want them to build great companies for you. That makes sense ;-)

This (majority of applicants being graduates) is true for YC (and other funds) too. PG and co don't sit around holding board meetings every time a founder wants to buy a laptop or a monitor.

"That being said, if a founder tells us they'd like their money up front, we'll write them a cheque."

This is good to hear. Founders (desperate enough to go with these guys), do demand your money upfront.
HFT market participants are having the privilege to place and cancel orders up to 30 seconds. For free. No charge. If a big order is coming they can get all available shares and sell it at higher price to the who places the big order. For free.
Well, isn't "everything" around us toxic, when handled inappropriately without proper equipment and caution?

Take water (dihydrogen monoxide) for an example - you can drown in it. Or pure ogyxen - extremely flammable.

So it isn't about toxic substances - it is about handling them with care.
I did put fortune on the web already, complete with an API that you can call from your .bashrc.
http://www.iheartquotes.com

You should also consider making this a Twitter account. That's actually where IHQ has gotten the most traction.
Maximize Your Exit By Not "Selling" Your Company
Home Sec is to meet Facebook bosses to ask why it does not have a 'panic button'
> And the Droid doesn't have this problem?

Yes, it does. But it is still more available than N1.

> Except all the people that do? The original iPhone was this expensive and didn't even have 3G. And yet people bought them in droves.

Original iPhone was $399 and $499. €599 is north of $800, thats more than 1/3 more expensive. And I also remember that the original iPhone was met with collective yawn on this side of pond and almost nobody bought unsubsidized.
99designs Launches $99 Logo Store
The main complaint many of my classmates had was that the guide said "before the end of the semester" yet we were told we needed to be incorporated one week after the Incorporation session (half way through) or we would have to step aside.

FI has been iterating their process as they go along. I'm glad to hear there wasn't confusion in the New York session.
The Internet is such a terrible medium for communications subtleties. I agree though... but imagine how that would look from a PR perspective. Microsoft is, essentially, the anti-thesis of open source.
"Diet is 85% of where results come from"

I thank Michael Pollan for a simple and motivational advice which works. He is a must read for anyone concerned with diet.
Asia's second largest city bus on Mobile, without SMS, without GPRS
This can be done in PEGs, using term rewriting or simple tree rewriting to create a PEG construct like the loop you described. But doing so subverts the elegance of PEG parser, and I'm unaware of a way to make it suffice as a general solution.
It's a common typo for Linux.

edit: Oh I mean, for Linus.
ECMAScript 5 PEG parser: http://boshi.inimino.org/3box/PEG/build/ES5.html

(Hmm, I must definitely try to port it to PEG.js :-)

As for Ruby, I am not sure if it is even possible to create a PEG grammar. Its lexer and parser are heavily interconnected and there is a lot of state involved. If the grammar will be created, I don't think it would be pretty.
PEGs don't have grammar ambiguities. Every PEG is deterministic.

Grammar ambiguities are resolved by ordered choice. If there are two ways to parse something, the first way will be tried first. If it succeeds, the ordered choice short-circuits and the second way is ignored. So you can resolve, say, the classic dangling else problem by ordering your choices correctly.
Similar thing. My neighbors didn't renew their domain for their business. They picked up a .net which worked fine for them, but they still wanted the .com back. I offered the new holder $100 a couple times but they wanted $1000+. I eventually put in a backorder at GoDaddy and it finally expired and we got it back for them.
I'm not sure I agree on all of his points (particularly the stuff about my generation and sexting and so forth), but this struck me:

> "They "go places in a group of friends." Jeez, haven't these kids ever heard of ditching your friends in order to...whatever?"

This is the only way I know things. This is the only way my peers and I in my generation have ever done things. Maybe I'm not in the right subculture or whatever, but for us dating almost entirely arises from the above... I wonder how "dating" worked back then?
Sweet! Thanks, Greg.
Neat, I'm onsite at a company right down the block from CME's Clearing devs. Buy you coffee sometime?
The $50 "ZipIt" device (linked above) is pretty close to what you're describing, although the included OS load doesn't look very customizable, so no custom apps.

It's designed to connect to Wifi and do IM and SMS, not a whole lot else ... but for a lot of kids I suspect that's a large portion of what they want. From a parent's perspective it frees up the computer and avoids having to get Junior a cellphone (and its requisite monthly plan fee) for a while longer.

Apparently ZipIt charges $30/year for the SMS and IM functionality after the first year, which makes me wonder if they're selling the hardware unprofitably, believing that they'll get subscription fees down the road. (That strikes me as a poor business model, since I doubt most of the devices will resubscribe for a second year -- 12 months is a long lifetime for a $50 device aimed at kids that's most likely a stopgap on the way to their own laptop. But I assume they've planned for that.)

I'd guess we're going to see a lot more in that space in the near future; the PC and laptop markets are getting pretty saturated, but I think netbooks have really just started to tap into the ultraportable demand, and kids could be a big consumer.
But, I never argued that they benefit better with Creatine. You haven't read my posts. And just as vegetarians get a boost from it, so do meat-eaters, who also perform better when supplementing Creatine - ask 10 athletes (body builders in particular) and you will find at least 5 who uses it and can vouch for increased stamina from it. Does this, too, mean that they don't get enough? Surely it should, by the logic you've been using, and at this point you are contradicting yourself. From this we can simply draw the conclusion that everyone benefits from more of this in their systems, but it doesn't point to a deficiency of any kind, just as with my example of how artificially increased oxygen levels in the blood doesn't mean we don't get "enough" naturally.

The point I trying to make just flies by you; You don't KNOW what is enough, you don't KNOW what is too little. You can't say any of this based solely on the proof that _anyone_ performs BETTER when you ADD MORE. This is _not_ synonymous with a deficiency. And the research pointed to doesn't even bring up the specific vegetabilic diets held by the vegetarian subjects of the research, which is a very important detail missing for solidifying the "facts" the research is trying to bring forth. It's a very clear case of "correlation is not causation".
wow smart idea and good implementation
Xobni (YC S06): An App With a Knack for Contacts
I came to know about Linux first and than Linus and always wondered why Linux was not called Linus.
I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of this. I've used 99designs in the past with moderate success, and this looks like a natural next step for their logo market. For a while, the participating designers have submitted the same logo, modified for a company, for any contest where it would fit. This marketplace appears to be aimed at ending that silly charade.

Would you consider buying a logo here? I can see using it to get a quick-and-dirty logo for an early stage project, but I didn't see many I'd be excited to build a major brand on.