skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any government doing the regulation has perverse incentives. The main effect of government regulation is to keep entrenched business successful and keep out new competition -- regulatory capture. The government has to do a balancing act because it doesn't compensate the victim and it doesn't want to drive businesses out of town -- how much regulation is too much, how much is too little.

Look at how the FDA works -- they have nothing to lose when the deny a drug, and a lot hassle when the approve a drug that turns out to be harmful. This is why so many potentially effective drugs sit on the shelf waiting for further tests.
I note the generally less controversial Stephen Fry is complaining about unrelated Trending Topic oddness this morning, looks like they've screwed up their system somehow and the #flotilla thing is a coincidence. http://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/15064838816
Integrated Suites vs. Best-of-Breed in the SaaS world
China aiming to be become supercomputer superpower
I thought Timothy Leary's work with LSD was the most effective way to treat alcoholism.
As an goal in and of itself, it seems like one would go "did it get rid of frame introspection?!" in a happy voice, rather than "does it support frame introspection?"

Maybe you wanted to ask, "does it run Twisted and/or Zope", which use frame introspection (sadly, so very sadly), but otherwise, yuck.
If anybody in the UK is interested, Sophie Wilson (who designed the original ARM instruction set) will be speaking about her time at Acorn at the Vintage Computer Festival (Bletchley Park) on June 19th/20th

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/calendar/event_detail.rhtm?c...
The 50 Worst Inventions
Cool project. I'll never understand why anyone wants to program in JS though.
Review my app, TurnKey Hub - cloud deployment simplified
If you are using Windows then Visual Studio is the answer - a correctly set up solution removes /every/ problem commonly associated with getting and building source code.

Since you have this problem at all though, I'm guessing you want a *nix solution of some kind... the best solution imo is to provide decent scripts in the source package which hide the configuration details, and try to arrange the source and dependencies so that you don't need to do any configuration just to get it to build at all.
Finally the Android 2.2 makes app update handy
Curiously, the "east side" of Chicago is where the wealthy people live, largely because that's where the lakefront is. For Chicago, in very rough terms, poor people live in the south and west, rich people in the north and east.

Missing from the article, it seemed to me, is evidence of the claim that the east side is generally poorer. I mean, that seems to jive with my anecdotal experience and the explanation for the phenomenon makes intuitive sense, but is there any hard evidence for this statement?
No, it's not: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=flotilla
Interesting article.

I do object to the medical approaches to obesity, depression etc. it seems a very "un-medical" way to approach the problem and, I'm sorry to say, very American. In many of these cases people do themselves harm through their own actions or inactions - using medicine or surgery to "solve" these problems is curing the symptoms rather than the cause.

Having the freedom to do what we want doesn't free us from the consequences of our actions...
For one, there'd be a serious danger of getting caught in a self-referential paradox
Yes looks like exactly what I'm looking for - super simple. I note he also mentions YQL, which might be the way to go for higher-use apps
"Every online community has its biases."
Agree but I have yet to see a pro-MS online community.
Maybe in gaming?
After reading this post, I can't help but remember 3 people:

1. Alan Kay on ACM (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523): Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture.

2. Paul Graham: I’ve never liked the term “computer science.” The main reason I don’t like it is that there’s no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia

3. Edsger W. Dijkstra: Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

How I finally disagree/agree with the author: if you plan to take a bad CS course, you are probably better off just getting a job. If you going for a good CS course, don't think you will learn just programming. You will learn it, not all of it, and it will probably be one of the least important things you'll learn.
Didn't bother reading this one. Looked at the one from two days ago, saw double click ad planner and made assumption. You know what they say about assumptions.
do you pay for this? Are there caps on usage or restrictions on application types you can use it for?
Ask pg: Reset password
Dear pg, I lost my password for my account mnh. How do I reset?
Send PG an email.
at pg [at] ycombinator.com ?
Fascinating. This post illustrates precisely what -- in my opinion -- is the attitude that makes someone a Blub programmer. That's what Paul Graham was originally talking about: people who learn and develop their skills as programmers up to a certain point and then say "That's enough, I'm comfortable."

Don't get me wrong, you can get to be a damn good Blub programmer. You can also work at an international company, headquartered in US, without being skilled enough at English to appreciate Shakespeare's work; or, for that matter, loathe it, since you need the same level of proficiency.

I do believe that you'll never get to enjoy English to the fullest, if you don't explore its poetic reaches. In words of Wilhelm von Humboldt:

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.

I believe that the same applies to programming languages. Yes, you can be really good with just Java. But just by learning C# on the side, you can gain valuable insights without stepping too far from your comfort zone. Learning Lisp, Self, Python and Factor, to name a few, will give you whole new worldviews, make you think differently. You don't really need that stuff to make software (or money). But it can make you a hell of a lot better at it and, more importantly, it can make you enjoy it more.
Canadian Copyright Bill Coming Thursday
The service is still in private beta but anyone can launch a demo session and get a good feel for the UX. Also, 100 of the first invitation requests from HN will be granted as soon we get them. At this point only a subset of the planned functionality has been implemented but the minimal viable product is there I think. We've been working on this for a few months now. Mostly we're looking for high-quality feedback and we expect our best shot at that is the HN community, which has been a major source for insight and inspiration for us during development. Thanks in advance for taking a look. Hope you find this useful!
Already done. How long does it takes?
As a counterpoint, I enjoy skiing. My enjoyment of skiing has directly lead to a fairly serious leg injury. Fortunately surgery completely "cured" this and I was back skiing next season, ready to potentially do more harm to myself as if nothing had happened. Did the doctors do the right thing fixing up my leg or should they have let me walk with a limp for the rest of my life as a consequence of my actions?
Besides being an incredibly powerful combination of a functional and an object-oriented language, I just adore the fast redeployment cycle during development. With appenginejs, I test every change in the backend code by simply refreshing my browser. Not jaw-droppping per se, but certainly a breath of fresh air for a long-time "enterprise" Java developer, like me.
All free. Start here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=overview
Parsing file uploads at 500 mb/s with node.js
"Similarly, as a child, people yelling at me that I was a lazy bum just didn't help. My primary reaction was resentment, not shame. Though I had shame, too. Its just not so easy to motivate oneself when feeling like a shameful failure."

This varies with personality and situation - I know exactly what you mean because I was shouted at for being fat and lazy as a child and it never did any good, but I can also think of many situations in my own life where the opposite was true and people yelling at me for failing provided the impetus to do better...

I think the risk of not doing anything is worse though. If poor behaviour is tolerated, and not given some kind of negative feedback then it can become accepted. I suspect this is part of the obesity problem - if living as a fat person were really horrible less people would be inclined to do it and, at the risk of sounding cruel, if medical help were refused for obesity related problems then the genetic element would take care of itself...

I'm fat - and if I die because my heart clogs up with all the byproducts of that fatness then it is my own /stupid/ fault.
The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires | Vision | AlterNet
Daemonizing Navvy with God
Guillermo Del Toro departs The Hobbit
Your requirements bring many different paradigms to mind:

"menu-selectable options" -> GUI

"options could make new options visible" -> code folding

"derive new values from given" -> spreadsheet

"create list of symbols" -> compiler

However, I suspect - and I could be wrong - that you don't literally want just these four things. You probably still want to be able to dive in and do cut, paste, and search in a text editor. You probably will want some kind of general scripting functionality as your needs for derived values become more complex. And you haven't mentioned what structures are contained in the resulting data, which would drive the dominant UI mechanism and the compiler structure.

If you want the most flexibility, you should look towards a full-on scripting language, using its built-in data structures and libraries to build out a custom app with the minimum viable UI. Then you will have the freedom to choose the most appropriate data structure at each juncture, you can build custom visualizations and processing tools to get fast feedback and auto-entry, etc. The boilerplate parts of the UI can still get abstracted away into a library or framework for configuration tools, but you won't have to be hamstrung by a DSL.
Canon Hack Development Kit
Honest question: What I don't get about the "obesity is genetic" is, why is the obesity rate climbing? Are obese people proliferating at a quicker pace than before? Are the genes responsible dominant?
Slow news day as they say it on /.
One of these days people like us are going to be grilled by a Congressional committee of people who have never actually done anything in their lives but politics, and just like in this article we're going to be asked:

"You knew there were bugs in your software and you shipped/deployed it anyway?"

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Prototyping the Smithsonian Commons
Good point. Its definitely not black and white... but I'd lean on the side of leaving you limping unfortunately. I wonder though - would you ski anyway, if the doctors didn't exist? I'd suspect so...

I "feel" that there is some difference between the injury type situation and the self inflected harm of depression or obesity though - its possible to ski without any injuries, but its not possible to put on loads of weight, or take a depressed approach to life without suffering the consequences. I guess I am more inclined to feel sorry for you because the risk from skiing is such that you might have avoided the injury if the situation were more favorable... its more "unlucky" than "inevitable".
"My “New American Cyclopaedia” (1872) tells me that in 1855 there were 25,858 people in New York who could neither read nor write, and 21,378 of them were Irish. This may well have been true, but why exactly did it need to be emphasized? Well, I think we might hazard a guess."

Emphasis is justified emphasised because it is clearly significant. The question is censoring by omission warranted?

Obviously this doesn't undermine the article as a whole, but whilst political correctness is fine, let's not make it a redefinition of reality. It is either patronising or delusional. (Of course deliberately censoring the fact would of course be patronising as well).
SoundsGood 05: Guru’s Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1
Genetics are not the only cause...
Indeed; I now realize I was really lucky when I took my high school physics course in that the teacher didn't assign any homework, it was all lecture and an automatic A. So the next year when I did physics for real with the calculus I had nothing to unlearn.

Although at the same time due to the senior class math teacher having refused to teach I had to learn the calculus at speed, but I managed and it probably works better when you have real physics problems you're solving at the same time. E.g. I learned why trig is really important.
Well, with any gene, it takes the proper environmental factors for it to be expressed. So while very few people would argue that height isn't largely genetic, most people also accept that it takes proper nutrition in order to grow tall. So even though height is genetic, and South and North Koreans largely share the same genetics, South Koreans are way taller than North Koreans.

The genetic argument for obesity is that in areas of occasional famine, it made evolutionary sense to horde food in your gut, particularly fatty food. Until very recently in human history, there just wasn't that much fatty food for your average citizen to horde. Now there is, particularly because food corporations have realized over time that the fattier the food, the more of it they sell, and those previously advantageous genes are running amok. Not everyone has those genes because in places of plenty, those genes aren't that advantageous.

I'd agree that that isn't an entirely convincing argument. But I do think it's part of the story.
It is a leap from the obvious "propensity for obesity is genetically influenced" to the excuse "obesity is genetically caused".
When people say "obesity is genetic" they are generally talking about variations in metabolism. People are on the whole eating more food and more unhealthy food than before, and this is making the relative differences in people metabolism more apparent than it used to be.
It's an interesting moral question; there are definitely shades of grey.

The way I've always seen this analogy is that if your going back every year and breaking a leg then, clearly, there is less and less moral obligation to fix it for you (beyond setting it etc.) so that you can ski again.

Or in other words: if you find over and over again you can't ski (by breaking a leg) refusing to take the hint should be discouraged :D

Now lets take obesity; if someone thinks medical work will help them get healthy again then fair enough (it could even be the piece of phsycology needed to fix their attitude if the problem proves to be non-medically caused). But if they are back in 12 months time with the same problem then there is the same lowering of moral imperative to provide help. If nothing else it is likely a temporary solution again and, so, other forms of treatment/help should be encouraged (I'd even argue it is morally better to suggest other ideas first in such circumstances)

(I'm using the royal you btw :))
I wonder if that guy is a troll or honestly ignorant. I had to laugh a the comment of the guy who said:

It will run for 10790283070806014188970 years. Which is about 83 billion times longer than the age of the universe.
I found this very interesting, especially that they have powerful supercomputers now in China.
Cool, thanks. Just thinking, but is there not a way in javascript to just get the contents of a URI as a string? Which you could then eval? Presumably this will be possible with WebSockets?
The purpose of the question is configuring software before building. You typically want to do it in automated fashion as opposed to any cut and paste. A menu-based system is easy to use, and with a configuration mini-language you can produce complex configuration data with a few keystrokes.

CML2 already has most of this. It is a mini-language written in Python so that you can create rules for your configuration. Based on your selection of symbols, the configuration rules decide on the visibility and/or value of other symbols. All symbols are gathered in hierarchical menus which are then displayed in the graphical GUI.

We accompany this with python scripts to generate header files, but also extract information from the symbols to drive the build.

CML2 is unfortunately unmaintained and has some limitations.

One other alternative is the linux kernel configuration system, but I don't want to use that as it is based on older scripting methods.

Out of these two I haven't seen anything else to this extent, which is why would like to know how people configure their software for building.
Neither, they should be held responsible for their actions. Only a change in their actions can change the outcome. Treatment is a nonsense word in this application. "Treatment" is just a way to use social tricks to get them to make different choices while making them believe it's a disease so they don't resist treatment. Real treatment for alcoholism is a liver transplant. Real treatment for obesity is liposuction. They only way to stop damaging yourself is to take responsibility and stop doing what you've been doing. Telling people they are powerless robs them of their dignity and is an outright lie. The person with the problem is the only one with the power to change! The treatment industry in America is a racket that is mostly based on the AA 12 Steps. At best it has a 5% success rate. (http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html) If you want a good book on the subject, read Rational Recovery http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Recovery-Cure-Substance-Addic...
The Novelty Trap
Actually it isn't being south of the equator. In general (there are variations), between 30 degrees and the equator, both north and south, prevailing winds are easterlies; between 30 and 60 degrees, they are westerlies; then above 60 degrees they are generally easterly again.
Pontiac Aztec is probably the worst invention on the list. But why is Betamax there? I thought it was a viable format that just didn't win.
I posted this yesterday, but it didn't get picked up on. It appears that the Niger Delta experience a Deepwater Horizon every single year....

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390246

Direct link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-niger...
i read it as turkey hub and now im hungry
Welcome to Hacker News, great comment, I upvoted you, but nix the "l;bra (long; but read anyway) Articulately put and yummy intellectual fodder. Thank you for the submission brazzy. ... Less iPad/Flash submissions and more of this sort of thing would be greatly appreciated :)"

- the fluff, basically, we try to kill it around here. Kill the fluff. And I agree with you about consequentialism/utilitarianism - it's in the "nice in theory, but treat with extreme caution in real world" camp. Intelligent deontological ethics seem to be a bit more grounded and less idealistic.
Reading and writing Excel (xls) files with Incanter
Judging by the up-votes over there on SO, I think I've identified at least 200 people with entirely different senses of humor than my own.
Well, maybe you're right, but I'll say the following:

1. Unless I'm missing something here the entity group thing is a red herring. Only if the authors of the paper explicitly setup all entities in the datastore as having the same root entity, then this would be an issue. However, since there isn't anything to suggest that they did this, all datastore entities are their own groups (and hence don't lock up the entire db,) so transactions on them would not have had any speed penalty. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

2. Unfortunately their results are consistent with my experience over the last ~8 months running a startup on the App Engine (and now switching over to EC2 over the next few weeks.)
Agreed with the first point, 6.01 and 6.02 are as you point out a lot more than that.

It sounds like from what you're saying that the software component of them are as Sussman has commented, mostly "exercises in 'pasting libraries together'" with little deeper understanding of what's going on. And if you don't take 6.004 ("Computation Structures", from CMOS circuits to designing your own RISC processor)---it's not required for everyone anymore, right?---then one might graduate with an EECS degree without ever gaining that deep understanding of what's going on that starts with 6.001.

The real shame, or at least what I've guessed, is that when you take the new 6.005 which is supposed to teach most of the rest of what 6.001 taught which isn't covered in 6.01/2, you'll be doing it in Java, a language which for this purpose isn't even wrong.

I'd be very interested in your comments on 6.005.
I can think only about trade forecasting, and natural resources management (like estimating oil exhaustion).
Apple Selling a Million iPads a Month
Sometimes I think all interesting questions boil down to semantics.

One nit: libertarian (classic, not anti-government) attitudes were described thusly: * People who make good decisions are intrinsically good people and deserve good treatment; people who make bad decisions are intrinsically bad people and deserve bad treatment.*

Er no. Libertarian thought tells us that variations in individuals are more important than societal standards. Not that people are "bad" or "good"

Taking a determinist consequentialist position allows us to do so more effectively.

This strikes me as the difference between an academic argument and a practical one. Academically, sure, the numbers add up. Practically, this is completely terrible advice, for the sole reason that the criteria suggested are not only indeterminate but suffer large variations as applied by different individuals. And offering up some sort of scientific committee or standards for what to blame people for is totally whacked, for reasons I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.

I liked the observation that people who condemn others may do so because others have not sacrificed. This fits intuitively with what I have observed.

I'd add another detail, though. There is a long tradition in western thought that the individual's struggles with character traits that he or she don't like has value in itself. We always should have a place we would like to be that we cannot attain. Western medicine and ideals, however, seem to feel that if we commonly view one condition as "better" or "worse" than another, some sort of chemical or social intervention is required in order to make people better. This worked great when "worse" = the plague, but the model is falling apart when "worse" = too fat. The types of structures and systems of thought we have set up for the plague do not naturally extend to shyness. The word has stretched too far.

I support looking at the necessary and sufficient conditions, but I felt the analysis was loose and incomplete, which led to a muddled set of conclusions.
PostgreSQL vs SQL Server installation Faceoff
It probably tripped an anti-spam filter.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/may/31/twitte...
Thanks, this is excellent advice.
Homepage Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392181

The other one has more comments and points
just some geeks having fun ... each has his/her own way ..

as far as the OP goes, I'd say everybody's getting trolled
Well, with that info, I can safely say you're over my head. Within the domains I've worked it's unheard of for builds to need such elaborate configuration.

One area that suggests further study is logic programming, though. The hierarchical dependencies and view rules lend itself to that approach. As well, I recall thinking the Boomerang language would be interesting for code generation, albeit it's getting into esoteric academia land:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~harmony/
Css Id and class-naming