skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'd prefer to see Consumer Reports handle this instead of anything like the FDA. I'm an adult; I can decide for myself what to make of the information I obtain."

I realize that this isn't going to be a popular opinion around these parts, but no, you can't. Smart as you may be, you're utterly ignorant when it comes to this stuff, and you haven't got a chance of beginning to understand the intricacies that go into interpreting the data that these companies are giving you. More importantly, you don't have time to understand.

I have a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, and for the most part, I couldn't tell you whether the data in a 23andMe report is meaningful or utter garbage. I perhaps have enough knowledge to go out and find the necessary papers, read and interpret them in light of the literature on genomic analysis, and evaluate risks...but I wouldn't begin to have the time to do it properly for all of the data in a given report. No offense, but you haven't got a prayer. These companies could be fabricating results whole-cloth, and you'd have no way of knowing it.

Most importantly, because there's no regulation of the methods used by these companies, neither you nor I have any way of knowing what methods they're using, whether the techniques are precise or accurate, or even if the labwork is done by skilled technicians in a sterile environment. Without these assurances, even if you could understand the data, you would have no guarantee that the data was even gathered correctly.

There are some domains where expertise matters more than anything else, and no amount of brainpower makes up for the instincts provided by years of training and experience. This is one such area.
True, but separate from GL in this case... so while watermelon has a high glycemic index, it has SO much water : sugar ratio that it's a very different animal from Pineapple.
The replication is reliable, it's just that with the 8.0 releases, it's an add-on and not obvious to setup (e.g with Slony have to do special procedures to properly replicate DDL changes, it required having triggers on replicated tables, etc). In 9.0 replication is built in, transparent, and trivial to setup.
Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) [2003]
How To Know Whether To Go After Angel Investors Or VCs
This is a fascinating article, and a good summary about contango -- a quite fascinating topic that has been exploited for great profit and success to those with large amounts of capital and savvy to deploy in the last decade, especially around the various times of great volatility.

What I _don't_ appreciate is an article on the web artificially sliced into 7 pieces for more pageviews :( Thanks BusinessWeek... "print article"
Making a Custom YouTube Video Player With YouTube’s APIs
Congrats to Bryan. I hope he moves on to something interesting.

He's one of the most technically intimidating people I've ever met.
Submitted without necessarily endorsing. There've been a flurry of recent posts about evented versus threaded server models, and I think regardless of which side you lean towards, this is worth considering as probably the best extended argument on the pro-threads side. It helps that it's a quite readable paper.
Google: Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Distributed Systems [2009]
Closest thing to an all-time list thats available http://news.ycombinator.com/best
Depends on your abstraction system. If we're talking about SQL, the incompatibilities abound. And ORM's or other libraries tend to be either very, very complex or tend to implement everything in the most simple way. Both not very good for performance. Never mind that most frameworks don't have the same level of support for every DB (open source libraries tend to have very limited Oracle/SQL Server support)

And this is only talking about queries, once we get to triggers, constraints or even stored procedures…
>Now, you might think that 23andMe has a chance of solving this issue, by allowing people to take control of their own genetic profiling, but I think they're actually doing more harm than good.

23andMe told me that I'm a carrier for phenylketonuria. That's useful information to me, and strictly factual. The other slight-increased-risk-of-this slight-increased-risk-of-that isn't all that useful, but who cares? They give you the odds. I can't imagine what more you'd expect from them than to present current research conclusions as unbiasedly as they can.

I think you have a mistaken impression about what their product does.
Ask HN:  CMS Help
Hello! I'm wondering if anyone can give me an explanation of CMS for freelance web designers. I know that its meant to allow whoever I make the website for the ability to edit and change the content without my help. However, I'm a bit confused about the whole concept, or how to implement it, etc. Can anyone give me a quick overview/tutorial, or maybe point me to a link to really good online tutorial along with the best (hopefully free) CMS software I might need to get started? Thanks!
Did you see Sword & Sorcery for the iPhone?

http://www.swordandsworcery.com/project/
Searchyc maintains lists of top [stuff] by various metrics: http://top.searchyc.com/
I really want to know... what else is on this reading list?
And for some reason you think this is different from any other field? I don't have a prayer when I walk into a car dealership of figuring out whether a car I'm thinking of buying will function properly. There are too many parts for me to conceivably understand. It's very complicated.

Thankfully, there are many experts and expert organizations that I trust to make this determination for me. I defer to their authority.

How is this any different? The market seems to handle this just fine.
As for what CIOs (or CFOs) are thinking, you've got to talk to them. They (or if not them, their subordinates) belong to membership organizations. You've got to join them. It usually costs a lot of money.

+1 - this is the biggest reason why it seems so difficult to penetrate these markets.
Just curious, is this true mostly in a certain region or all over the world? Also, what kind of price different should I be expecting between the dorm and the private room?
But does working in a company ( as an engineer I would add ) really prepares you for all those troubles you're eventually going to bump into with your startup ?
You guessed pretty much right: ∀ is usually read as for all. It and others he uses (like ⊢ for is derived from) are defined in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols . Hope that helps; as a beginner in Haskell and strong type systems, it looks like I’m going to have trouble with this too.
"Followup to response: If my comments reflect a misconception, can you please provide an alternate hypothesis for why Google chose the Apache license for Android"

Of course - you're entirely right that's why Google chose the Apache license for Android. In fact, people from Google have said that and my article says that as well.

That still only applies above kernel level. The GPL violations I am talking about, as described in the article, are failure to comply with GPL for the Linux kernel and for other GPL licensed components that vendors have chosen to include (I identified busybox in at least two of the listed firmwares.)

You are probably right that many modifications are not covered by GPL. However, the vendor still has to comply for the portions that _are_ covered by GPL (even if they made no changes.) In the case of many of these systems, that happens to include the BSP (Board Support Package) that allows Linux to boot on those systems at all. Although that last part isn't the point, at the moment it's a fundamental practical problem.
Take a look at Wordpress http://wordpress.org/
Ask HN: Differences in programmer salary around the country and beyond
I'm a recent college grad looking for my first job after finishing school. I went to school in the Boston area, and I've been looking at entry level developer positions locally but am starting to broaden my search. I'd love to live in NYC but wonder if I can afford it on an entry-level salary. I mean, there are lots of tech companies there that hire recent grads, so people must be able too, but now I'm curious how salaries differ around the country and abroad. I'm sure the Hacker News community has some good first or second-hand experience with this, so .... what's a good entry-level developer salary where you live?
The whole flash discussion is purely hypothetical: Whether Apple would/should allow some of Adobe's vaporware, might it one day be realized, on the iOS platform?

And this is not even considering that the iOS version of Safari (afaik) doesn't even have a plugin infrastructure to support 3d party plugins.

Personally I don't think Adobe can actually make a stable, efficient, full implementation of the flash plugin for a iphone/ipad style mobile device? After years of trying they still can't make one for any full power Mac, so why should anyone assume that they can for much slower mobile-devices?

I think Adobe's strategy is to make as much noise about the relevance of flash, keep promising an implementation of Flash "really soon now", while they'll wait until the hardware of mobile devices has become fast enough to handle flash without draining the battery.
I'm cool with people using and growing Marijuana for their own private use, it's 100% legal in the country where I live, even if it isn't beneficial to them.

I'm not cool with advocating such on a public forum, and WoW is legal everywhere Marijuana is not.

What people do in the privacy of their own homes is their business entirely, but I don't think it's ok to start advocating illegal stuff just because it is either legal where you do it or because you are getting away with it.
Why do People Sell Profitable Websites?
Ugg boots sale
I think that you have to remember also that Foursquare, in 2004 on that graph, is not about Foursquare... it's about foursquare, I suppose, you know - the game you play with chalk and a playground ball. So I think that that trends graph is a little bit noisy.

To me, it's a question of 4sq taking off and Loopt failing to do so, more than foursquare surpassing them when it was a clear neck-and-neck competition.

If we're looking at trends as a buzz-o-meter, it's the kind of situation where Loopt is not able to leverage its initial boom of interest to transcend its beginnings.

The seemingly 'obvious' answer is to ascribe the disparity to circumstances beyond the startups themselves -- 2009/10 sees a significantly greater penetration of location enabled phones, the effect of Facebook destroying our notions of privacy has sunk in more (joking on that one), etc. I don't know if that's the whole deal, but I think there have to be some macro effects involved beyond just, well, people really like gaming elements and Crowley is the one and only king of location.

Quick .02 : ) I think Foursquare has done a good job, but haven't followed Loopt very well to know where they may have stumbled (or merely been unlucky).
The Coming Data Traffic Jam
> I don't know why they've dropped it, why they never gave it a proper shot.

One reason may be because Ubuntu stills expect users to do an OS upgrade - which Dell doesn't have the resources every 6 months - to get newer software. If you want an up to date desktop app, like Firefox, officially - ie, without headache-installs via tarballs or source, you have to upgrade to the next release of Ubuntu. That's a dealbreaker for a lot of support organizations.
Thank you, I've heard of Wordpress before. I was wondering if you could explain for me in terms of how to implement it. For example - I have a small local business that I'm making a website for. What do I do using Wordpress that allows them to update their specials or daily news without editing HTML. Do they have to have Wordpress as well? Or am I just retarded and Don't realize that that's what Wordpress does by default?
Why is Great Design so Hard?
Perhaps they haven't edited leaks, but it's pretty obvious Wikileaks has some biases, particularly anti-war. The branding of the Iraq airstrike video as "Collateral Murder" stained their credibility, IMO.

The fact that they don't edit/omit parts of leaks also says nothing about which leaks they choose to publish.

That said, I think it's a valuable service, I just wish they remained an unbiased source of leaked information. Of course, journalism is rarely unbiased.
http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support is good place to look for consulting firms.

Both http://www.pgexperts.com/ and http://www.enterprisedb.com/ are run by core PostgreSQL developers.
I have to disagree with part of what seems to be the thesis here, which is that the smartphone market is a zero-sum game of some kind, and that Android is leaving open a door vs. smothering Windows Phone - I think that's a little bit too binary. I think there is all along a particular niche for MSFT to leap into, if it can leverage its worldview successfully.

Microsoft operates through a synergistic platform lock in that makes its world go round. Office feeds Windows and Windows feeds office; throw in developer tools as well and it all works together. The more dependencies you create, the stronger the system becomes -- or at least, that's how it used to be, especially when market power could be brought to bear. Billions to lose is valuable (Bing!) but unless you start paying people to take your phones and create a market, it's hard to start from nowhere, no matter what you're selling.

This said! I think that if Windows Phone offered super ultra mega strong support for Office products and the like, there would be a compelling business / corporate use-case, above and beyond the competent Exchange support you see competitors offering. Some differentiation and good execution makes the difference here, because the problems that face Android are 1) not necessarily going to persist and 2) not necessarily going to stop its steamroller march to market penetration dominance.

I think we will see a lot of changed expectations going forward with Android 3.0 gingerbread and beyond. The Android team's stated goal is to do away with the demand for 3rd party UIs and, while there will doubtless still be those who want to cover it with ugly and add bloatware, I think there will be compelling reasons to stick with stock, or at least, not to ruin it.

Besides, what's the prize here? Consider Windows. Setting aside differences between Mac v. PC and Android v. anyone, the fact that Windows can be skinned and filled with bloatware hasn't stopped the platform's dominance, or the Microsoft gravy train. Apple has great margins on their hardware, but they're not on the fast track to displace Windows, are they? Likewise, if everyone is selling Android phones filled with crap, well... they'll still be selling Android phones : ) Though I'd be sad to see that state of affairs, and it definitely would open up more room for competition.

Finally: "After killing Windows Mobile 6 and the KIN Microsoft finally has their shit together." Really? Let's hope so :) I am rooting for the folks in Redmond, because I think more innovation is always best here! I am excited to see what comes out, but seeing what has happened before, I am not going to be waiting around for a Windows phone -- for starters, because I just got a lovely new Incredible a few months ago! :D
Personally I think that the whole 'war on drugs' thing is just another way for a bunch of people to line their pockets and to increase the US influence in Latin America.

As far as I'm concerned they should legalise Marijuana and every other drug simply to stop filling up prisons with people that need help (if they're addicted to the point where they can't function any longer) not jail, or who simply are not a burden at all and function quite well.

Ironically, legalising drug usage in the Netherlands has created a new kind of problem, drug tourism, where problem cases from other countries congregate in the one safe haven they can find. This in turn is now causing a backlash and may possibly result in the re-criminalisation of drug use here.
Totally true. Anybody who is a fanboy of a certain technology is not a good hire. It's always good to have passionate people, but passionate about an idea, not a tool. The bottom line is that in most cases, it doesn't even matter, just as long as things are getting done. If the people you work with don't appreciate that, you've got deeper problems.
Is quora flooding their own site with self-posed questions trying to get publicity and rankings? The only time I've ever heard of it is from the oxygen of publicity HN seems to give it.
The basis of OSS business models: property and efficiency
How IE9 Platform Preview Feedback Changed the JavaScript Standard
Ok. Being borderline trollish here, but if I read this article, this means to me "yeah. we are using a technically inferior solution and thus risking data loss and increasing the workload on our developers because our HR department gets more resumes if we search for an in-house database specialist".

Postgres usually does its thing and does it well. You usually don't get weirdness that requires you to even hire a specialist. And if you do, the consultants around are great and actually understand the problem.

As other people here have said: If you find someone listing PostgreSQL experience on their resume, you know they have the experience. If you find somebody listing MySQL, you'd have to check whether they are just listing it because they have heard of it or whether they really understand the problem domain.

So. DB specialists are settled. What about developers? PostgreSQL and MySQL are close enough in what SQL constructs they support (no wonder - MySQL provides a subset of SQL anyways), so coming from MySQL to PostgreSQL usually is trivial and the few things that are unsupported unix_timestamp() for example, you can write wrappers for if you really need them.

Of course, developers will at first find it strange that they can't, for example insert a 200 characters string into a varchar(10) column, but even the most braindead developer sooner or later will understand that silently truncating data usually is a bad thing.

No. The arguments listed in that article are just fear of the unknown and total non-issues (in german, there's this saying: "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, das frisst er nicht" - ever so true).

I'm glad I can work with PostgreSQL day-in, day-out. I'm glad I migrated that huge application from MySQL to Postgres back in 2000. I'm glad I did not touch MySQL for serious stuff ever since then.

I understand if you need to use MySQL if you want to run some software that runs only on MySQL. But if you are writing your own application, there's just no reason not to got with the real RDBMS.

/rant.
Thriller Live Tickets
The perfect place to get your Thriller Live Tickets is no other than Excite.com. Apart from the massive inventory of tickets available, we also get you absolute bargains on your Thriller Live Tickets
The Guardian's reporting package is considerably more comprehensive than the NYT.
There are a lot of "positive network externalities" in the computer world: the more people use something, the more valuable it is. That's true for databases as well.

However, what he's saying is that beyond a certain point, those effects tend to become a bit less important. Java is more popular than Python, for instance, but you can get pretty much anything done that you need to in Python. OTOH, a language like Erlang (sorry to pick on it, it's just an example) is still fringe enough that there are gaps in its libraries, it's tough to find people, and so on.
'Productivity' ! = good

Jobless recovery = : (

It can be hard to tell, from earnings reports and gossip, whether cuts are savvy efficiency gains or unsustainable drives to make good quarterly numbers at the exchange of long term profitability, growth, and success.
Reply to myself since it's been too long to edit: Decided this was maybe worth its own submission -> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547353
Wait till 4chan hear about this! ASCII penises 1000 feet high.

Great job btw!
Whoa, whoa.

"In New York, roughly two dozen people armed with laptops and caffeinated beverages assemble each week on the top floor of an office building in Chinatown and hunker down for a night of work."

Who needs caffeine to function at 4am?
andand is a pretty nice tool when you're dealing with uncertain data. As well as the basic usage

person.andand.occupation.andand.company.andand.billing_address

(which evaluates to nil if there's no person, or if they have no occupation, etc), my colleague pointed out the other day that you can pass it a block:

Person.find(:name => "Bob").andand {|person| person.fire_out_of(cannon) }

which will perform a daring feat of acrobatics if Bob (a trained professional) is present, but safely do nothing if he isn't.
maybe an effective way to parallelize writes?
I agree that it's a mouthful but I thought "Ecommerce Made Social" alone is too vague and not unique enough. Anyhow, thanks for your feedback!
Wsk Tech: Laptop fans
Apple launches free bumper program for faulty iPhone 4
Read this first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system

For users:

- They get a good admin section (without paying the developer to actually develop it)

- If they are administering multiple websites, the admin section will be similar in the UI and functionality.

For developers:

- You get a basic framework to build upon.

- Popular CMS-s have plugins for almost everything and you just have to integrate those stuff into your website. This saves a lot of effort.

Note that you still will have to do some HTML (or PHP or whatever) coding to get to the exact requirements of the client.

As for CMS choice:

- wordpress: recommended for blogs, magazine website, news websites etc (mainly based on content like articles etc)

-drupal: better for general purpose websites. (Wordpress 3.0 has many powerful features that are comparable to that of drupal, but most of the plugins (and the community) are still targeting the blogging crowd, so it is better to stick with drupal for now)
The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7 Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with the Stinger.

Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems.

People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.
Go might have a chance, I think, particularly because of its interface system. Defining interfaces based on an object's methods gives the programmer compile-time assurance that objects can do what they'll need to without requiring an unstable, ever-growing tower of types. It may be simple like Java, but its central abstraction is less rigid.

More info: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#interfaces_and_types

Add to this Go's garbage collection and clean built-in concurrency model, and you've eliminated much of what bugs me in day-to-day C++. Go could still blow it with a poor treatment of generics, but I think it stands a good chance of doing Java and C++'s jobs in a much more concise, 'quiet' style.