skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The more you know, the more options you have to consider before coming to a conclusion.

This was a big problem when I played rapid-fire, Jeopardy-style trivia games in school. One learned to dread questions that were in a field you actually knew. The knowledge slows you down!

Trivia questions are generally written by knowledgeable non-experts. But a question which is clearly phrased from the perspective of a knowledgeable non-expert can be imprecise enough to cause an expert to pause, and pauses are deadly in rapid-fire trivia.

It's hard to construct a perfect example, but suppose you got a question that boils down to "who first demonstrated radio"? A lot of people will blurt out "Marconi" -- he did, after all, apparently score the first patent for a radio set, and he was a good self-promoter. But the physicist or historian, who might know about Tesla and Oliver Lodge, will object, or at least hesitate for a fatal moment.
Netflix via Wii Is Almost Here
Unless you yourself are a pharmacist or physician it would be insane. Best case you get better (long shot), more likely placebo/neutral, worst case suicide.

There are many nations which don't have our overly restrictive systems. Iran and India sell birth control in stores, India and Egypt sell amebiasis pills, etc. As far as I know, they don't have an epidemic of people dying from self prescribed medicine.

Yes, it's shocking: Iran has more medical freedom than we do.
How A $500 Craigslist Car Beat $400K Rally Racers
DjangoCon Europe: tickets, talk submission open for registration
Line2 Adds a Second Line to Your iPhone [video]
Congratulations! I'm confused.
Maybe it's marketing genius, but I don't understand some of his reasoning.

Obviously all the airlines don't want anyone carrying bags on the plane. Why is having a consistent load factor an enabler for Southwest to fly checked bags for free? Why does it matter that the bags are being moved between the same types of aircraft?

You could equally well imagine the argument that it makes sense to use an "agile" strategy in which aircraft with different load factors are deployed based on the type of travel expected.

I'm sure having only one aircraft and picking routes for which that aircraft is suitable has tons of benefits for Southwest, but his blog doesn't explain why that is an enabler for the free checked bag policy (other than creating efficiencies which generate enough profit to offer any perks). Would it be "marketing genius" to offer free meals on planes?
Undergrads flock to computer science programs
New malware overwrites software updaters
I want to help them out by writing software, but I live in a CIA-infested country (the UK) and these reports make me genuinely afraid of reaching out. While I greatly admire their courage and respect their cause, I'm not really brave enough to sacrifice myself for the greater good.
YouTube Star |Fred| to Get TV Movie on Nickelodeon
Click the flag link to help get it removed if you haven't done so kees.
This article is pretty interesting. One point he makes is one that I have long wondered about: why on earth do airlines not treat baggage the same way UPS and FedEx treat packages?

Going one step further, I'm not sure what the logistics would be, but I wonder if the airlines could sub-contract baggage to people like UPS and FedEx. One of my big fears traveling is that my bag is going to disappear for days on end in the system. If UPS was willing to guarantee hotel delivery for my stuff by 8PM on my arrival day, I might take it, even if I had to pay.
This change has nothing to do with wired vs. wireless. The reason South Africans can now have uncapped internet is because, previously, international bandwidth was very expensive. However, new cables connecting Africa with the rest of the world have been going live, and will continue to go live over the next few years.

So basically, the "last mile" infrastructure, whether it's cables or wireless, was never the main limiting factor when it came to internet in Africa, but may become more important in future as demand increases.
so the intimidation worked.
I would call it "toxic-source" instead of "open-source".

If they ever decide to sue you for patent infringement over your singularity-like kernel, the fact you had access to their source code could be used to imply you infringed on purpose.

I advise anyone who is involved in any open-source project to stay as far away as possible from any Microsoft-originated code and to warn other developers of these risks.

There are many schools that have embraced the study of Microsoft code that are generating a steady flow of "land mines" who could end up employed in FOSS projects and who could conceivably be used as weapons in IP lawsuits.

Call me paranoid, but being paranoid doesn't automatically make me wrong. ;-)
As much as I agree with you, that is not where the cool stuff will happen. Sad as it may be, innovation on the web has never really been centered around education. And as far as the goverment is concerced, I don't think that smart ways of using technology to improve education are on the cards soon.
I've reached out as number of times to them and never had a reply... which kinda sucks
The brilliance is that no US person exported the stuff to Iran. They downloaded it themselves of the servers.
WePad Details and Plans Revealed
I also didn't think the problem was fruit, but rather things like HFCS-sweetened sodas. A banana or an apple has about 100 calories, but a 12 ounce can of soda has about 150. I know people (I was one) that will drink 32 ounces (about a liter) of soda just at lunch but won't have more than 2 pieces of fruit a day.

There's also the fact that the apple or banana have fiber and other nutrients the sodas are missing. The sodas (or often other HFCS-rich foods) don't have.
Live Spaces, the new House of Spam Target
a little on topic: i'm generating a simple feed for "newest" here: http://mimir.pipsq.com/feed.xml (updates once every 30 minutes, i hope that is ok by ycombinator).
The copyright to Ogre3d is not owned by a U.S. citizen or company. Problem solved.
The Kensai Sacrifices Everything to Master the Sword
Bloggers often seem to have this attitude that having a blog is a great thing that everyone should aspire to. They then go on to think of reasons why the "average man" doesn't have a blog. Things like "Lack of time" and "Lack technical ability".

Maybe a lot of people just don't want one and would have no use for one if they did? If you've got interesting things to say and you enjoy writing and publishing articles then great, maybe a blog is right for you, but I think those two (orthogonal, I think) things rule out a large amount of people. Don't look down on others just because they don't share your interests.

There are already far more bloggers then people who care enough to read them. Twitter seems to be trying to help this by reducing "blog posts" to single sentences and in the process strips them of even the possibility of depth or interest (just my own opinion here, don't get too offended :p )

Posting on a comments section is a very different from publishing an article on your blog. I don't think the one is merely a easier version of the other.

That being said, BBC HYS is hilariously bad, but what do you expect from such a public and popular place? A least it's not as bad as the Daily Mail's HYS :p
How big is Foursquare? I keep hearing about, almost always mentioned in the same breath as Gowalla, and one of only two friends who use it told me it's "massive in the states" (I'm UK based). To me it looks like a fad, but if Marc Andreesen thinks its worth investing in, there must be something to it. Is there?
but some good reasons that prescription control is necessary is to (1) control easily abused substances (this means narcotics as well as antibiotics, though the litigious culture here in the US is quickly rendering traditional antibiotics useless) and, probably most importantly,

This is only an argument for requiring prescriptions for narcotics and possibly viagra. This argument is completely invalid for any drug which isn't fun to use, such as birth control, amebiasis pills, anti-fungals, etc.

(2) maintain communication with your healthcare provider.

This argument is completely invalid for any drug which doesn't require long term uses (e.g., anti-inflammatories, amebiasis pills).

Many other countries allow many drugs to be safely given out OTC with no adverse side effects. The only reason for maintaining our current system is to preserve the privileged status of doctors and regulators.
I feel your pain, in more ways than one. Any site that keep running for a decade is impressive in and of itself.

I, for one, won't try to second-guess your decisions. The Onion has been around for a long (internet) time, and I suspect most of the Web101 suggestions have been considered.

Besides, you guys have left me in stitches too many times for me to be particularly critical. Thanks for existing!
Or, we could give patients direct access to various tests without the permission of a doctor.
3.X can be pretty awesome, but as long as projects want to maintain compatibility with 2.5 or earlier, it's going to be difficult to get some serious porting momentum going. Once 2.6+ becomes a practical development target, 3.x will be a much easier sell.

At least, that's my perspective after watching PHP 5 slowly catch on amongst PHPers, even though it had many more improvements (e.g. objects are no longer value types), and far fewer compatibility breaks.
And the browser losers are ... everything but Chrome
Have a cash flow problem? More new customers may not be the answer to fixing it.
Yes, and no. Because while clearly there are parallels in that they feel threatened I think that, ultimately, there is a line which the US currently hasn't crossed (e.g. stifling media reports about wikileaks, snatching them and imprisoning them on fluff charges, human rights abuses etc.).

Additionally what scares them is the handing out of classified material; which isn't quite the same as stifling criticism of the government etc. Whatever your feeling on whether it should be classified or not they have an obligation to reasonably mitigate information they consider secret.

There is a very very fine line and, if true, I feel it's being extremely closely tread on this occasion.

(just to add: I support both sides in this, so sorry if I am sat on a fence somewhat :D)
Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL On OpenSUSE 11.2
Rats Cooperate in Prisoners' Dilemma
I think you mean cat -vet
Facebook credits
Doritos Tablet
Tokyo Japan Hacker News Meetup – Friday 9th of April
> Taking a hard look at the data above, it appears that the rise in obesity is due in large part to an increase in caloric intake across the board, rather than an increase in carbohydrate in particular.

Ok, but the Calories in/out argument is a silly oversimplification. Pregnant women gain weight because they consume more calories than they expend, but this isn't the most interesting level of causation.

Let's say that one day I drink two cans of Coke in the morning, and measure how I feel for the next few hours. The next day I eat 320 calories worth of chicken breast. To say that an increase in caloric intake can be caused by a change in the kinds of foods consumed is not a contradiction.

The author of this rant either completely misses, or tries to skate around this obvious point, as many do.
SXSW Why?
Another one here! Not even a quick slogan to give some idea why I might want any type of gravity apart from the type that keeps me stuck on the world's surface.

Also, I don't have sound so even if I did give enough of a crap about a site I've never heard of that does some undefined thing to watch a video I still wouldn't have been able to find out.
Internet Explorer 9 will support SVG
"We freely admit to doing illegal stuff, and the government needs to stop trying to figure out what we're up to." Yeah, that makes sense...
Not to be HN-litist, but I think this post is drawing questionable comments in particular because it's linked in several places from Reddit, from which we are likely receiving a flood of users uninclined to self-moderate.
Move Over iPad, Make Way for the dPad Tablet
VC backed technology exits. Time to face the music.
That Facebook app is not your friend
According to http://github.com/blog/621-bye-bye-flash-network-graph-is-no..., there are too many DOM objects involved in the graph for SVG to be performant.
This is easier than it sounds.
Visualizing code coverage
That's what people think. But Mac OS X is actually short-cut land. There are loads of short-cuts.
Well, since the government makes the laws and can declare virtually everything top secret without any checks and balances whatsoever, they have virtually unlimited powers to stiffle unpleasant truths.
Out of interest, what do you believe the opposing arguments to Wikileaks are?
People are lazy. I still hear people wanting Perl 5.8 compatibility for my modules, even though 5.10 is 2 years old and has 100% backwards and forwards compatibility with Perl 5.8. In other words, all your existing code will run unmodified, and any 5.10-specific features you use will cause 5.8 to die at compile time.

People confuse me.
When not to prototype [software design]
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It's not like news is hard to come by on the internet. With the cost of switching to another site at effectively 0 there is no barrier to leaving.
> I challenge you to write a program that will run a detailed mathematical model of a computer program...

Model checking is well-established in hardware design and is making headway into software. Model checkers can verify high-level properties. For example, I am currently working on a p2p gossip algorithm. I use a probabilistic model checker to verify that the peer selection service provided by this algorithm fulfils its contract - in the steady state selected peers are uniformly distributed over the members of the network. I use a model checker because the maths involved is sufficiently complicated that I don't trust either my theoretical results or that the code matches the mathematical model I am working with.
Also, the author makes one of the most annoying forms of argument: "truth through averaging." "So, what’s the upper safe limit of fructose per day (all sources considered)? [Author than compares high and low estimates]... Figuring that both sides are biased, the middle figure between the two camps is roughly 50 grams for active adults."

Lessee -- scientists argue that the Earth formed ~6 billion years ago, creationists say ~6000 years ago. Figuring both sides are biased, the middle figure between the two camps is roughly 3 billion years ago. So the Earth is 3 billion years old. QED.
>should drastically reduce our confidence in any generalization of even the seemingly more relevant result.

Oh, absolutely! I certainly didn't mean that you should go trusting the scientist to vet his own research; most studies say exactly what the researcher wants them to say. But I think the results are strong enough to prompt (probably stronger) testing in other labs.

If the research was done properly, then instability of results under minor variations generally implies that the variations weren't actually minor.
You mean how can I support both sides?

I fully support the need for whistleblowers like Wikileaks. But I am also fine with stuff being secret or not known. shrug the world just works like that.

Wikileaks has the right to try and dig up secret stuff (though I dont fully agree with the way some of it is presented) and governments have the right to try and stop information escaping with reasonable measures.

When got right there is a nice balance which should help in the effort to keep governments on the "straight and narrow".
Database for reporting errors of medical apps
WOW... I seriously wonder if you believe this...
Can Flash Survive HTML5?
It's that same 5-10% who are posting 90% of the crap on the Daily Mail and the BBC website anyway. Setting up their own blog would defy the point because like any troll they want to be seen on a high traffic site.
I'll definitely be there. Hopefully many people will be able to make it...
Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill
If they supposedly have the video, why don't they just release it?
Nice article, and an interesting combination of technologies! Maybe it's a little bit off topic, but I had a look at http://streethoarding.com/ to see the thing in action. I like the idea and execution (it runs pretty fast; very very simple design; would be interesting to see how well it runs with a huge amount of visitors) and as curious as I am (especially regarding security), the first thing I entered was some JavaScript code. Guess what, no input sanitation :)
If government in a democracy can only hold those powers the people have ceded, why are they allowed to withhold material information from the people? Sunshine is surely the best disinfectant.
Google/On2 are not members of the MPEG-LA patent pool. Google has an H.264 licence which is separate.

The MPEG LA has a financial interest in keeping the patent situation around Theora murky

Web streaming is free until 2015. Theora will not be found in Set-top-boxes and mobile phones which is where the real money is made in licensing.
I program in Python (Django) full-time. It's my job. I'm the only developer at my company who knows C.

I'm sorry but mere mortals who just want to get stuff done are not going to maintain their own fork of an entire programming language. I don't know what alternative reality you've been spending your time in (academia? FSF employee?) but it's simply not going to occur unless someone else takes up the burden and makes regular public releases.

Notice that usage of CK patches by Linux users evaporated as soon as he went on software sabbatical.

Open source is not driven by crowd sourcing or collective effort, it's driven by a small number of heroes willing to devote time in order to benefit everyone else.
Yes, HTML and script tags are left as is. People are in the middle of abusing this right now. My friend has just pointed out that the whole of jQuery is at everyone's disposal, too.
I was a classmate of Colin's, and I want to emphasize that he is extremely well adjusted. When he was in high school he struck everyone as a bright--if a little smaller than usual--high school student. So I'd love to not hear any "he should go back and play with his age-mates so he can develop social skills, yadayada." The truth is, 13 year olds are obnoxious, and if I could've skipped that and started interacting with adults earlier I would've.
And thanks for the compliments.
Should be a great get-together. It'd be good to have more regular HN events in Japan.
My subconscious doesn’t get the NOT gates. AND and OR gates work fine, though. Really cool work.
Sorry. It was only a billion and change. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html

edit: see also their SEC filings: http://xml.10kwizard.com/cgi/convert/pdf/APPLEINC10K.pdf?rep...
I'd happily discuss my thoughts r.e. this (I have a few) but HN is probably not the place for involved political discussion.
The nokia N900 is open, but hardly easy to develop for.
Preisvergleich Nikon D 700 Speed Kit + MB-D10 + 24-120 mm VR günstig Kaufen |
"Why is having a consistent load factor an enabler for Southwest to fly checked bags for free? Why does it matter that the bags are being moved between the same types of aircraft?"

Having the same airframe means no surprises when loading baggage. This is huge when transferring planes: if both are the same type then every bag will make the transfer, if not, some will and some won't. This enables SWA to encourage checked baggage since they can pretty much guarantee that your bag will make the trip without having to spend additional time at the gate to offload passengers who carry-on all of their bags.
Yeah, same here. I'd guess they have no end of volunteers, probably about 0.05% of whom actually end up panning out.
He explained it in the paragraph that starts with "Other airlines either don't get it, or can't" - different-sized planes accomodate different amounts of luggage per passenger, so there's a risk that they'll run out of room for all the baggage when passengers transfer to smaller planes. Identical planes eliminate this risk.

I didn't realize that when your luggage is 'lost' on a multi-stop flight, it could actually be a deliberate decision on the part of the airline due to lack of capacity. I'd actually rather they told me that.
Why not differentiate the design a bit? The visual design with the oversized text, excessive 'buttonage', and giant boxes/fonts for views and answers is the worst part about the SE/SO system.
From the article:

Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5

Personally I'm willing, for the moment, to take on faith everything posted so far (and that they have a video of some kind) - we'll see what happens April 5th.
I suspect this one won't.
Yeh my conclusion also; I've wondered about setting up a similar site/service instead. If they have so many submissions a year that they can't handle them all there is definitely scope for more people to help out independantly.
I don't know offhand how the Wilson thing generalizes. The simple Bayesian posterior mean one I mentioned yesterday is pretty simple: suppose you have a1,a2,...,ak ratings with 1,2,...,k stars; then the posterior mean number of stars is [(1+a1).1 + (1+a2).2 + ... + (1+ak).k] / [(1+a1) + (1+a2) + ... + (1+ak)]. (Of course the denominator can be written more briefly, but I think it's clearer that way.) Equivalently, you just calculate the average star count, but you add in a bunch of fictitious reviews, one with each possible number of stars. Once again, by adjusting the number of each kind of fictitious review you can (e.g.) make less-reviewed items do better or worse relative to more-reviewed ones; by changing the coefficients that are 1,2,...,k above you can (e.g.) make a 5-star review more than 5/4 as good as a 4-star one; etc.
MongoDB 1.4 "Ready for Production" - The H Open Source: News and Features
Hopefully this is not the case. With the interim final rule all but ignoring CCHIT (http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/E9-31216.htm) there is hope that somebody comes up with a real certification rather than a list of functional requirements for EHRs.
In fact, what we need is to eliminate all accredited investor requirements for small investments of up to $25k. Why does someone have to be a millionaire to invest in a friend's startup? I understand that we don't want someone mortgaging their home, or betting their entire life's savings on a startup. But for a small amount, like $25k, we should not be regulating angel investing.

How many non-millionaires would have $25k lying around that they could throw at a friend’s startup without mortgaging their home or doing something equally rash? OK, maybe they wouldn’t have to bet their entire life savings, but cashing in a third of one’s 401(k) to put into a startup isn’t very bright, either.
Geohot claims untethered iPhone, touch (and iPad?) jailbreak
Cities woo Google for trial of high-speed fiber
Repeal this bill here:
http://gopetition.com/online/32354.html
Anne Curtis Malfunction Photo
Why Rails sites always look better than Django ones?
Whilst there are many big games which use Vorbis (Halo comes to mind) as far as I know there are none that use Theora. Most use Bink because of its simplicity.
""U.S. must stop spying on WikiLeaks""

""our ongoing work on a classified film""

""our release of a classified 32 page US intelligence report""

""our release of a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik""
The other article they linked, which inspired the TA's question, suggests the follow-up question of "Then how is the astronaut standing on the moon without floating off?"