skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whats the reasoning behind this down vote? I like many other Americans these days do not trust the politicians currently. I am just pointing this out. If they do see where the FED spends their money, they could look at a bank and say hey, give me money in my next campaign or I will close you down.
The FDA vs. Bone Cancer Patients
Apple questions Android surge
My first thought reading the article: Could something like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation step in to make life-saving but unprofitable drugs available?

This seems like a very legitimate problem that might be worthy of attention from some non-profit, but maybe it just effects too few people?
This has been done on the Ask HN front: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive .. But having a large, tagged groups of HN-posted "must reads"/reference library would be cool.
As mães mais sexy | MSN Starlounge
> you should hope that your health insurance covers it.

I don't think that the choice between thousands of dollars of debt and death is a hard one to make... Even in this case where without the anti-venom you could 'wait out' the venom on breathing apparatus, it will cost your $100K+ (according to the article). You don't really have many choices. It basically comes down to: death or debt. I know which one I choose.
If that's really your concern, then why not at least let college graduates opt out? Or people holding PhDs? My suspicion is that many people would oppose this because it disadvantages the uneducated, but of course you can't have it both ways. Either regulation is good for the uneducated or it is not.
are there still any new real problems in the world where computers can be a good solution?

Yes, yes, a million times yes! We've only just started scratching the surface of what can be done.

I have a hard time finding any problems where the field of computer science can contibute a practical solution to the problem

This makes no sense at all unless you meant to replace "the field of computer science" with "I".

I either find a marked is filled with competitors...

Well that's a good sign that something's there which people need. If you have an idea in a field with competitors, you should ask yourself what you'll do differently. Is there some part of the problem you've figured out that no one else has? Why aren't people satisfied with the current solutions?

Or there are very high barriers to entry

This is tougher to solve. Sometimes you can find a way to sneak in. Perhaps start in a neighboring area and slowly encroach in? Or is there a way you can drastically undercut the existing approaches?

How can a humble programmer make a difference in today's world?

I think there are tons of opportunities for programmers, depending on your interests, your abilities, and your motivation. Everything from contributing to FOSS projects, to joining major or minor companies or non-profits, to consulting, to starting your own company.

For example, I have a friend who works at OpenPlans ( http://openplans.org/ ), which "makes cities better" by allowing non-profit groups to organize and manage themselves. Think of it as programmers enabling non-programmers to take advantage of the web to do what they need to get done, to actually make a difference in people's lives.
Interview with a teen tech entrepreneur -Daniel Brusilovsky
Wow. Sad new. He was a big influence on me when I was drawing and painting.
5 Reasons Why You Should Buy A BlackBerry... and 5 Why You Shouldn't
Read the Math textbook or ftw. Makers is by a large margin the worst thing I've read by Cory Doctorow. Distraction by Bruce Sterling covered a great many of the same the same themes first and better.
WritingToAFileDB: 300M ops/s on my netbook with an SSD.

(Where op == appending a byte.)
Basically, if someone is going to make a decision affecting my body while I'm unconscious, I'd rather have someone I picked for that job to do it (like, I don't know, my doctor or my wife or my dad or my friend or even my insurance company) than some bureaucrat in FDA.

But that's not quite the issue in question, eh? My understanding is, you can't get the unapproved anti-venom even if you are conscious and you are about to die without it anyway, by doctors opinion.
Interesting. Being an Aussie it makes me wonder what the situation regarding anti-venoms are here, because lets face it everything over here is either poisonous or venomous which with the small population and the large distances makes it potentially a worse problem.
obligatory mention: MakerBot makes $750 3D printer kits that cost pennies to operate. While the results are not comparable to what is shown in the article, the age of the 3D printer in every home is almost here.

It's already priced low enough that every designer of 3D objects can own one.

Not affiliated with MakerBot. (And they are good guys -- all the plans and source code are available for you to download and build yourself).
I'm impressed by the quick response. I did find the part browser through a link from your blog, but somehow missed the sample rate attribute in the Add Column list (I guess I assumed it would be an Integer attribute). This is some very nice work. I wish you the best of luck and hope to use Octopart in my own quest for entrepreneurial success.
Reflections on a Decade of Visual Studio
My main concern for this is UX. I don't doubt that these guys have the engineering chops to pull this off, but do any of them have a background in usability? I hope this is factoring into their planning.
"Would anyone here make the argument that Craigslist would have failed with proper whitespacing, appropriate font selections, and logical visual hierarchies? Those can all be accomplished with a single stylesheet."

Many successful websites (Google, craigslist, ebay, wikipedia, myspace etc) are both highly functional and divergent from "good design practices".

What I find troubling is that I don't believe any of those sites would have been constructed in their successful form by a design professional. We don't fully understand how people's perceptions are shaped by the presentation of information.

Having appropriate whitespace/fonts etc produces a clean looking site which conforms to a very particular aesthetic which has no proven connection to the success of a site and may substantially harm it.
Oh man, music notation on a computer is a path you don't want to start down. Take the oldest, crustiest, hacked together duct-taped programming language you can think of -- imagine what that language would be like if it would be still in use hundreds of years from now. That's music notation, today.

Even the really good programs like Sibelius (and I guess Finale...) still have a ways to go in terms of accurate notation. Attempting to reduce notation to a JSON-style dataset seems, well, extraordinarily challenging.
The US already has that situation in the supplements industry and while heavily-advertised weight-loss/muscle/hair supplements are annoying, it's not that bad. The cost of not getting valuable drugs is underestimated since people only hear about it in rare cases such as this one, whereas dangerous treatments generate a lot of media coverage.
Ask HN: which payment gateway do you use and why?
While signing up for a chargify account for my startup, we're kind of lost on what gateway to use.

Does anyone have experience with payment express? The setup fee is higher than the rest but the flat monthly fee looks like we would save money over paypal and auth.net. Also, payment express seems to be the only one who accepts currencies beyond USD and CAD.

So what do you guys use and how has it been so far?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fen-phen had a body count before it was banned. Such cases are rare, but that means the system is doing at least part of its job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib#Adverse_cardiovascula...
I don't really understand what they mean by 'nodes'. Could someone explain?
Judging by Apache and Gimp, for example, tasteless names don’t seem to matter that much.
No, thanks!
FWIW, RefControl extension for Firefox can be used to force any referer (sic) header value for websites you specify. Useful for the Financial Times, Barrons, etc.
I very much like the elegance of lisp code, but I'm still a 'reader', not a 'writer'. I hope to change that one of these days, but as long as that magic 'click' hasn't happened I'm not confident enough to jump in and start some major project.

Maybe that's what I should lose, the paralysis of starting out down the wrong track and simply do stuff wrong until I find a better way.
You'll need a lot of cash for Facebook ads, Google (& other) content network ads, and "retargeting" ads like Fetchback. That's how Groupon has acquired many of their customers.
For more details: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/05/enjoy-your-pa...
"Starve the Beast" is a surprisingly bipartisan tactic. For example, it's no secret on the right that entitlement spending has the US government on a course towards bankruptcy. So the right wing tends to think the left wing is stupid when they support even more generous benefits.

But I read an interview with Paul Krugman the other day where he acknowledged the fact that our entitlements are unsustainable. Of course, having a Nobel prize in economics, he would not be so blind as to miss our looming national bankruptcy. But he figures if the public finances get bad enough, then politicians will be forced to raise taxes and/or nationalize health care, i.e. follow the leftist plan. The theory is that if politicians play chicken with global debt markets then eventually they will be forced to swerve.

Krugman has more faith in politicians than I do. I think the politicos are going to drive us off a cliff.

Starve the beast comes in many guises. Even the most shrill critics of it's practice by the right wing (such as Mr. Krugman) practice it themselves. I don't think any such tactics are terribly smart.
Looks like they're in good hands with you :)
It's interesting to see that Cubic is still supporting Helisys LOM machines (and that your startup offers that as a service). They always produced the most interesting parts, imho (though a pain to post process).

I worked at an RP consortium nearly a decade ago and always figured that the LOM they had was a relic. It appears they still have it running (http://www.rpc.msoe.edu/machines_lom.php).
Isn't the majority of the challenge in nice notation similar to typesetting with text? The difficulty is in making it look nice, not knowing what data you're attempting to display.

I should think you could encode pitches, start times and durations in a JSON-style format without many problems.
which exists to keep people poor and stupid.

You mistyped "because" as "to" there.
One of the charms of lisp is that it makes it easy to change your mind. It is really well suited to iterative development; even if part of your iteration process consists of getting things wrong.
There is no facility you will encounter that has the anti-venom but does not have a ventilator. This is not like an epi-pen or some other OTC med that a backpacker will carry with them, it is a hospital-dispensed, fucking expensive dose of medicine (e.g. rattlesnake anti-venom is around $4K/bottle.) But why let reality get in the way of a good rant I guess...
The name Diaspora has such a negative connotation.

It usually means you got kicked out of a place.
OkCupid stole my idea before I even thought of it
I recently became single and being a startup geek decided to try my luck in OkCupid's waters. Unsure of which profile pictures to use I decided to try an A/B test of sorts.

This is the plan I today hatched for my evening of hacking:

First.. Pull together potential candidates for the profile photo.

Then write scripts to:
1 - Upload them all to a photo hosting site.
2 - Register a 'throwaway' email for each photo.
3 - Create some MechTurk HITs to do the registration for on HotOrNot. One account per photo so that my testing happens in parallel.
4 - Once every few days run MechTurk HITs to harvest the # votes and avg rating for each photo, shove them into a spreadsheet.

It sounded like great fun until my RSS bleeps and I see OkCupid has added a new killer feature: http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface

So.. cheers to OkCupid for saving me a night of coding (and dramatically improving on my idea besides)
Yes. Normal printers haven't made everyone an artist, either.
Clickable link: http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface
That's another helpful pointer, thanks again!

(found it here: http://github.com/mmcgrana/ring )
More on the name,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
Oh dear, as if this article needs another reason to add to the list of why it is terrible... My apologies for blaming you for the error.
My read of the article makes this sound more like a natural failure than a regulatory one. The anti-venoms are very expensive to make and very rarely needed.

I see no reason that these drugs should get a pass on FDA testing that other drugs are held to, so it doesn't seem like a regulatory failure. It seems like some body acting for the general good (ie, government or nonprofit, maybe some life/health insurance?) should pay for the FDA trials to help get the alternative drugs to market.
If you're in Seattle, Cory Doctorow is reading from the book at the Sunset Tavern this Friday the 14th:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/04/23/3921514...
Confirmed: TechCrunch50 conference is no more
Hmm, for those that never looked: http://doc.etherpad.org/ep/tag/

bad...
Sometimes imperative is so much easier (a simple Erlang vs C# comparison)
How are you going to pay for it?
This is something I've been noticing as long as I've been prorgramming. If you are programming a tool then the tool will be a requirement for building the tool.

For instance, you can't really build an assembler for a new architecture from scratch without some form of assembler and so on.

The bootstrapping sequence seems to be endless, you could be blogging about writing your blogging tool if you had it already. We always seem to need some scaffolding underneath it, just one more turtle on the stack.

No more hand calculating branches these days, /me is happy ;)
Preventing item selection in the Spark List control in Flex 4
I think the one thing I might use a friends feature for on Netflix is friending people I didn't already know who had extremely similar taste in films to me, solely for the purpose of seeing what they think about new releases. That would somewhat interesting.
It's just a dog and pony show with little meaning:

"Audits of the Federal Reserve Board and Federal reserve banks may not include—

transactions for or with a foreign central bank, government of a foreign country, or nonprivate international financing organization;

deliberations, decisions, or actions on monetary policy matters, including discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market operations;

transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee; or a part of a discussion or communication among or between members of the Board of Governors and officers and employees of the Federal Reserve System related to clauses (1)–(3) of this subsection."
Why not simply prohibit advertising of non-FDA approved drugs?
I am one of those "many gifted children" who "fail academically".

Check more info on our FB page http://www.facebook.com/ThisIsMyGifted

That should provide a clearer understanding on what Gifted really is, and where this is all coming from.

Funny enough, we posted that link just last week.
Freedom From Religion Foundation

http://www.ffrf.org/
100 Incredibly Useful & Free Mac Apps
That question is spot on.

We knew already that mongo is quite fast, so why throw this useless figure into the room without any context?
It's sort of an imperfect analogy, though. The people who say things like that are thinking of it in the "You wouldn't download a car?" sense. You can already download 3D models from a place like Thingiverse, so if everyone had a printer, we could just print new household items rather than purchase them. It's a functional thing, not an aesthetic one.

The issue with this is that just because they make things doesn't mean they make them _from nothing_. Are you going to keep not just a printer, but large vats of materials hanging around your house? I don't really think so.
Although the numbers are not possible to read from the end of the video talk[1], it looks similar to the mongostat tool[2] (albeit a web version). If that is indeed the case, then the total operations will be the sum of all inserts, queries, updates, deletes, getmores and commands per second.

Would need the 10gen guys to confirm though.

[1] http://blip.tv/file/3597247
[2] http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/mongostat
First thought, is that your slogan contains multiple errors. I'm assuming you mean, "Get leads, Make Offers, Send Invoices, and Turn Your Customers Into Your Affiliate Sales People."

Not sure where you're from but language errors make me initially think that a site is spammy and I usually click away quickly.

Secondly, you need a call to action. You claim that I can create a landing page in 45 seconds yet I have to email you to start the process.

Third, the text is hard to scan (and there's too much of it). Simplify the process at least add headers to relevant sections.

Those were my initial thoughts. Good luck with the site.
Nice. My first thought that it was Ponzi in nature (relying on increasing uptake to "staff" the judgements), but then I realised that if each uploader has to make several judgements themselves, that should be enough to fuel the operation.
Yes, exactly. The total was for all operations and, yeah, it's basically a GUI of mongostat.
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell - The Oatmeal
I just talked to someone from the MSOE the other day ago, I think...

Yeah, those old LOM machines are crazy. The new LOM hotness is coming out of a company called MCor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vow5XvHoFZc

I'm going to be excited to see these machines later this year. Printing with A4 paper means the parts should be so cheap! And they say the consistency is similar to wood...
Almost anything is better than TechCrunch.

I'd also like to see more Go articles.
Seems like a well done site but can't you already to this with Youtube?
1) I started with HTML in '96 and, TI calculator programming aside, it wasn't until 2000 (college) that I got into programming. Mostly because I asked around and nobody knew where to tell me to start (Java -> Python -> Javascript). If I were starting today and on a *nix environment, I'd start with javascript. Doing simple socket programming with node.js is dead simple and the browser provides an obvious gui progression path. I've also heard of a lot of people starting with Python and very recently with Obj-C/iphone development.

2) Started with a teach-yourself HTML 3.2 book. For learning JS today, I think eloquentjavascript.net is good if a bit dry and I like Manning's jQuery in Action if going the jQuery route.

3) I started out with the intent of making a WYSIWYG web editor that didn't suck...and I'm still planning on doing it at "some point".

4) No guidance for me, unfortunately. Aside from having a professor in my first Java class say "well don't worry about that, you don't need to understand it for a while", which annoyed me enough that I went and learned Java myself through Thinking in Java. Otherwise I'm entirely self taught.

5) Guidance on what to look at/what to understand would have been helpful. I'm very grateful to the mozilla project, since that's where I learned software engineering. Having someone point out version control earlier on would have been helpful.
Braintree is great for bringing this issue to light. I've personally been hurt by the lack of portability and have seen it affect several other companies. Here is Recurly's response:

http://blog.recurly.com/2010/05/credit-card-portability/
Clay Shirky: In Charge - The Role of Inconvenience in Designing Social Systems
DNA could be backbone of next generation logic chips
Dentist in Northridge
To learn more about any Northridge dentist or the treatments offered at Northridge Dental Group call (818) 886-6100 or do to their website at www.yournorthridgedentist.com or visit them at 9801 Balboa Blvd., Northridge, CA 91325
great suggestion ... I'll forward him that PDF when he's done with finals and if he works his way through that and wants to learn more, I'll invite him to spend a few weeks at my shop. Thanks Daniel.
> Or people holding PhDs?

In which fields? You are entering a mine field.

> Either regulation is good for the uneducated or it is not.

There could be different kinds of regulation.
Reddit's May 2010 "State of the Servers" report
were the ops sequential or random?
It would fail with the same reason itanium failed sometime ago. Who has the time and resources to port and tune every single software piece onto ARM instruction set.

Amazon(AWS) showed interest for these kinda uprocessors sometime ago for low end customers.
"operation" is updates+inserts+reads+deletes+database commands, in ~1:1:10:1:1 ratio (IIRC).

I don't know what the exact operations were, it was supposed to simulate a real-life web app distribution of requests.
Huh. FB app spam never bothered me because each time I saw one I wasn't interested in, I clicked "Hide" and never saw it again. Was that not what everyone else did?
They say you can't put a price on human life... piffle.
their example with the 3 variations for ordering flowers is pretty biased. the other two have the "order now" button likely below the fold of most email clients. consequently it has little to do with the overall design, and more so about the placement of one button which should have been obvious if the email was actually designed by a seasoned designer. some things are elementary.

bad way to close a biased post that doesn't acknowledge the value of design; design is form AND function. the real problem here is that designers have been shelved by inexperienced (read: affordable) i-downloaded-photoshop-and-forget-to-learn-the-fundamentals.
The message I got from this was: find a niche and deliver a great product for it.
I'm surprised Bernie Sanders still voted for it, then...thanks for the info, and also kudos on BP! :)
You also can't assume a single bad drug was the only downside until the end of time.
> How do you "Go to implementation" and "Find usages" in Clojure without a 7 key-combination in Emacs?

Go to implementation is M-. with SLIME in Emacs. It can even open up Clojure source in jar files on the classpath and let you edit (and save!) them from there.

Find usages is a little more complicated: C-c C-w c, but not too bad.
OK. And the things you make with your printer still have to compete with stuff from custom processes. So e.g. your printed tea cup will probably not as good as a normal tea cup, but it may be more convenient to just print some cups instead of going out and buying some.
With MathML in the new Firefox engine and now music notation in canvas, browsers are going to be a bit more fun and beautiful.
I actually think 'Diaspora' is a great name, and their spelling of it is the most straightforward one, so that once you see it, you can't really get it wrong again (this doesn't apply to many web company names).
Muhammad cartoonist Lars Vilks attacked by muslims in Sweden.
Interesting, but it looks to require irb, heavily pollutes the global namespace with commands, and assumes I want to use --options-with-dashes. This is another 'close, but not quite' example.

The current implementation is that I have a hardware instance (like a CPU) that I want to monitor. To do that, I create a new monitor object, and tell it to monitor the hardware instance, and the monitor will mix itself in from there. It's not good if extra methods show up in the global namespace just for command parsing within a single module of the app. The monitor is just a part of this application, and a part that will not be used often by most users.

Everything I see feels like it's inches from what I really need. So close yet so far :)
I would imagine that's the case. Either way, its nice to see llvm's c++ support coming along.