skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is very interesting, thank you for posting it. I haven't read it yet, but it seems possible that this review suffers from a kind of selection bias, in that the only SPR's which have appeared in the literature are those which were more successful than human experts. This does not mean that a widespread switch to SPR's would outperform human experts, because the average implementation could be inferior to human experts. Consider how difficult it is for IT departments to follow best practices in security.

another aspect of these systems which people may find repugnant is that they allow one to weigh the costs and benefits of different treatment decisions in a consistent way. I personally feel, after watching people I loved suffer in an oncology ward that denying treatments which are very expensive but have small probability of success would be a good thing, but I know other people don't feel this way and there would be outrage.
I encountered similar problems and found that Kinesis Advantage Keyboard is a lifesaver. See it at: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/.

If you are not use to typing on a split keyboard, I would switch to that first, and than to the Kinesis as it can take a few days to get use to. I also use a Logitech Wireless keyboard for gaming purposes, and due to numerous people trying to do a quick google search on my computer and spending half an hour trying to figure out the keyboard.

It's a bit expensive, although you can pick up a slightly used one on ebay for less (that's what I did). However if you think of the amount of time you spend typing and the fact that it is your career $300 is nothing.
Should HN implement some sort of mirror for down/unreliable sites? I'm a big opposer of posting mirrors for everything right off the bat (give credit where credit is due) but the link in this story was a 404 for me.
The one thing the really exacerbates it for me is stupid notebooks. I find I end up being much more hunched over, and having my wrists in awkward positions vs. a normal keyboard, monitor at a reasonable distance, etc.

Also, I stopped playing guitar for the most part :( because there's just too much overlap in muscles (I guess).

Really, the only answer that works long term though, it just get off the computer. If you're having withdrawl problems (I certainly did) order a whole load of good [computer] books.
But wont that put me to sleep right away - I usually feel sleepy after a meal. This seems counter-intuitive.
That means you're eating the wrong things.
I accidentally downmoded you. The Kinesis keyboard is excellent at preventing or alleviating RSI.
jwz's writing about his wrist problems is helpful: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/wrists.html

I have continuing RSI myself, but I've gotten it to the point that it's manageable. Here's what helped me:

- Less stress, more happiness. This was probably the biggest issue for me. Stress made everything worse. Do whatever you need to do to get happy. I quit my job and went on vacation for a month. I also became less willing to do things that made me unhappy.

- Less typing. A lot of people just can't type 12 hours a day, everyday. Come to grips with it, and put yourself on a schedule. Find other things to do. Cut out non-essential typing like IM, etc. Take regular typing breaks. If you can, take some time off and don't even look at a computer for as long as possible.

- More exercise. I'm not sure it even matters if you're exercising the problematic muscles. Just improve your overall health.

- Goldtouch keyboards. These split into an A-shape, so I don't have to pronate my wrists while typing, which was a problem for me. I tried a lot of keyboards, and these are the ones that helped me. Go ahead and spend a bunch of money trying unusual keyboards and desk setups, it's worth it.

- Acupuncture seemed to help a little. I tried pretty much everything anyone suggested. Most other wacky alternative medicine didn't help.

- Tiger Balm. Excellent tingly sensation! Also seems to reduce swelling, which was causing problems for me.

Here's what didn't help me:

- Wrist stretches. I think these may have actually made things worse for me.

- Chiropractic. This made impressive popping noises, and produced no other effects I could discern. Also, it has an adjective for a name.

- Dvorak. The Dvorak layout is designed for speed, not necessarily wrist health. The independent finger movements needed to hit those home-row vowels hurt me bad.

- Doctors. I recommend you see one, but in my case they weren't very helpful. I was diagnosed with CTS, but reading about it, my symptoms didn't remotely match. Wrist braces did nothing. Physical therapy did nothing. Maybe I didn't see very good doctors.
more reflow action: http://gyu.que.jp/sjs2007/clip/M_reflow.wmv

and the main page (linked from comments) http://gyu.que.jp/sjs2007/
> Will it ever be the case that we can overcome the limits on the reproducibility of material goods? Or are there fundamental constraints on material goods that don't exist for information?

Yes, in a sense: see reprap.org, and further along in the future, molecular nanotechnology. However, there will always be a (small) cost for the raw materials that go into the finished product.
Of interest to me is the following idea:

As technology advances, and each generation learns to be even less inhibited than the last, will we progressively reach a point where most people are completely transparent online? Where everyone carries a live webcam on their shoulder (or some other place)?

If so, what will happen to prudishness and other taboos? If it goes that way, if everything you do is visible to all, surely this will mean that we need to redefine right and wrong, because as a society we can accept that most of us do "wrong stuff" so long as we can shut it out - but for instance, if 50% of people were found to, say, cheat on their partners, surely that would be a tremendous force to make cheating quite acceptable. This could apply to all those kinds of taboos.

Daniel
I've tried 5 different keyboards, none of which have made much difference. Others have posted some of these but I'll share my list of what has worked:

- take frequent typing breaks -- even 10 to 15 second breaks work wonders.

- stay happy and relaxed, stress is bad. Also, RSI pain can increase stress. Breaks and a chill frame of mind help address this.

- massaging the fingers/wrists under hot tap water first thing in the morning and several times during the day. this feels great and helps focus your mind on relaxing the muscles.

- anti-inflammatory drugs (your doctor may want to prescribe one to help the healing)

- don't pound on the keys. My years using an "M" keyboard got me pounding them pretty hard. I've had to try to unlearn this technique and just use a softer touch.
Open-source PHP applications that changed the world
This comment will be a little roundabout, but it has a real conclusion.

It seems like the subject of this Google Tech Talk keeps coming up over and over again.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2469649805161172416

Here's a summary. Yann Le Cun discusses his research on deep learning. The basic problem with standard learning, SVMs, neural networks and the like is that they are limited to coming up with shallow templates for classification, with more or less fancy versions of linear and nonlinear combinations of weights. The number of such templates you need in a highly dimensional space like computer vision is exponential (think about how much data you need to represent one object at different combinations of distance, lighting, orientation, focus, etc.).

Instead, he suggests, we need to learn how to get past shallow template-matching and train, essentially, features of features or networks of networks. This gives us a shot at discovering highly abstract features of the data we have and doing real learning.

If you have any interest in the subject, I strongly suggest you carve out an hour for the video.

TD-Gammon is another example. It is a learning program that plays backgammon. Training from simple board features, it eventually derived what you might call first-order expert features by doing shallow learning. But, when similar first-order expert features (presence of an anchor, etc.) were added by hand to the initial state space, TD-Gammon derived deeper expert features to the point that it and similar programs became better than the best players in the world.

The point here is that there was no way to transition from the shallow features to the deep features without recoding the system from scratch. That obviously won't scale to the kinds of AI problems that are interesting.

Big finish: The advantage humans have over computers (at the moment) is that we work on those multiple levels of abstraction all the time. We do deep learning in every field of human endeavor. That's what the deeply connected neural networks in our brain are all about. In fields where such expertise is possible, humans have it all over the computers. In fields where brute-force calculation can win, the computers have it all over the humans.

What that implies to me is that we can't train computers to think as deeply about catastrophes as we do. It requires a new paradigm of learning to get the computer to that point.
I know a bunch of people who swear by these. They helped me, but the Goldtouch helped more.

The way the Kinesis Advantage lays out space, enter, and backspace so they're all under your thumbs should become the standard keyboard layout. It's so much better!
Why search competition isn't the point - O'Reilly Radar
Thanks. I've just moved to NYC and plan to go to many networking events, including the upcoming Internet Week meetups.
> I usually feel sleepy after a meal.

Carbs do that (e.g. potatoes). Try eating proteins and greens only instead and see if it still makes you sleepy.
If you're looking for something inexpensive to try, you could try installing anti-rsi software like Workrave (Windows/Linux) or AntiRSI (OSX).

They monitor your computer usage and lock you out at regular intervals, so you can have a break, and relax your arms/hands/fingers. Works for me.

http://www.workrave.org/
http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/
I find that a very large fraction of the typing I do while programming is not code entry. An amazing number of keystrokes go to navigating between and within files and directories, running tests, and looking up documentation. A good example of this is debugging -- it's possible to spend hours debugging without entering much code at all.

This also assumes that you'll use your greater productivity per character typed to type less, rather than just maintaining your typing at the same level, and increasing your productivity. Changing your habits is possibly more essential with RSI than changing your tools.
>> Take regular typing breaks. If you can, take some time off and don't even look at a computer for as long as possible.

GNOME has a feature that'll lock the screen every certain number of minutes for a certain number of minutes, and only way to get out of the lock is to ctrl-alt-backspace. Nice if you are having a hard time breaking away from your computer. (System > Prefs > Keyboard > Typing Break)
Also, ZFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) might be worth looking into.
I thought this was common knowledge. For those who are used to eating with an hour of getting up, the breakfast regulates the energy levels in the day. So it makes sense to align all the meals with a breakfast schedule. I've used this trick for a long time. Never suffered from jet-lag.
> Nintendo does not disclose Mr. Miyamoto’s compensation, but it appears that he has not joined the ranks of the superrich.

apparently he doesn't ask for much money

> According to Mr. Miyamoto, gameplay systems and mechanics have always come first, while the characters are created and deployed in the service of the overall design.

this is what i love about his games. he focuses heavily on the mechanics. eg the "tactility" that makes Mario 64 a blast to speedrun. and it's not for the sake of the mechanics -- it's for the sake of the player

i think there is a lot of parallel with what Miyamoto does to usability/interfaces in general, where you have to get into the shoes of your audience and experience their experiences

> “There are very few people in the video game industry who have managed to succeed time after time at a world-class level, and Miyamoto-san is one of them.”

this is definitely no accident. there is a famous phrase related to Miyamoto: "upending the tea table." where if he's not satisfied with a game he will have large portions of it (maybe all of it) redone

i liken this to the same sort of feeling as rewriting a program -- you have it all in your head, so you can see how it sucks, and how it could be structured better. what makes Miyamoto special is that he can hold the game in his head in the first place
I talked to my computer for about six months. It was a much-needed break for my wrists, and a lot more practical than I expected.

I found I had to be very careful not to hurt my voice, though. Talking to a computer puts more strain on your voice than normal conversation.

I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking, by the way. It's a ridiculously bug-ridden pile of crap, but it's basically the only game in town. You can use it for just about everything on Windows, though apps that use native GUI widgets are much easier to work with than those that don't.
Sadly, I think your parents are the very minor exception, not the rule. This is a great column about the subject by Jon Carroll from the Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/23/...

Let's hope future parents can be more enlightened...
I used xwrits.
Engineering an End to Aging
I participate in the The San Francisco Ruby Meetup Group, and notice many messages re looking for programmers. You might try posting on a NY board. Here's the SF Board link. http://ruby.meetup.com/6/boards/
> Input will change from text to voice.

I'm reminded of Scotty's attempt to use a Mac in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home ( http://www.humaninterface.org/blog/archives/scotty.jpg ). Who could be happy with current search systems after seeing any amount of science fiction?
The key here is to see it from the opposite end -- from the potential employer point of view. We (I am a programmer, but I do a lot of interviewing and general recruity stuff) get metric raftloads of resumes, interest emails, and so on. Most of them are pretty unexceptional to begin with, and most candidates also lie^w exaggerate.

In order to find the people you want to hire you have to trim down the ones you talk to by some means. Think of it is a heuristic based search -- it won't be perfect, but it can be very good. You take the traits which correlate highest with success (I will leave success nebulous on purpose, that is a whole other discussion) and start whittling down the search space. A college degree tends to correlate highly with being a good or great programmer, therefore it is frequently used. This is a simplification, of course (though I am sure there are shops which really do this), but there it is.
Thanks for pointing out Workrave! I used to use xwrits when I used Linux, and have been looking for something similar for Windows for a long time.
A Look Back at HelpSpot’s First 6 Months of Sales
As far as I know, there's no ZFS support in the mainstream Linux distributions at the moment, although I admit I haven't looked into it. To be honest, I'd probably only use it in anger once they GPL it and it goes into either the mainline kernel or it at least is adopted by a commercial distribution. Of course, on Solaris, go knock yourself out. :)
mplayer -dumpstream URL -dumpfile microsoft.corruption.wmv
Search will die. It is a middle man in the flow that is Thought>Search>Suggestion>Decision. Someone will figure a way to jump from Thought to Suggestion>Decision with no need for Search.
There is no principal of encapsulation! There is no such thing as a "layering violation". TCP/IP isn't an OSI-modeled protocol.

You had it right earlier with the End-to-End Argument. E2E is very meaningful. We shouldn't push functionality into the network that can be handled by the endpoints, because doing that constricts applications and makes the network less useful. Which is why, if applications can shoulder app-layer routing and multicasting, we should embrace that and let them do it.

The alternative means getting Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T to buy in to whatever our next-generation app is. Look how well that's worked out so far.
Ask YC: Health Insurance?
I've finally graduated (again), and I'm working on finally getting all the bits of relevant paperwork and such together for my own company. My student health insurance will expire in a few months, and so I was wondering what other entrepreneurs, preferably those located in California, do for health coverage?
for me:

1. Microsoft split keyboard

2. Dvorak

3. Wacom tablet instead of mouse

i would add Vim but i'm not sure it helps with those things. it's certainly more efficient for code editing. anyways, i haven't had so much as an inkling of pain in years
> > “There are very few people in the video game industry who have managed to succeed time after time at a world-class level, and Miyamoto-san is one of them.”

> this is definitely no accident. there is a famous phrase related to Miyamoto: "upending the tea table." where if he's not satisfied with a game he will have large portions of it (maybe all of it) redone

And it's no accident that it's so rare: being at liberty to do that kind of thing is a huge luxury in the game industry. The way games would need to be developed for that is to build a playable prototype with a team of less than 5 people, and only when that prototype reaches a Miyamoto-level of addictiveness, should it go into full production. That's generally not how it works. (yet?) Especially not if developer != publisher.
Inspirational books from a CS professor
Have you tried myotherapy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myotherapy
Ive had problems more in the shoulder area and upper back. This treatment for just a week brought in so much relief to me. Of course a permanent cure is not possible in a short time and it involves better posture, exercises, breaks etc
It may be standard practice in Brazil to issue guards with guns to prevent wholesale theft of hardware ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182463 ). Stolen hardware isn't worth much but the cost to replace it could be millions.
It's not about having more or less of something. Discrimination implies an act of selection. That more A's have Nobel Prizes doesn't suggest that I should always pick A's over B's when I need an intelligent person.

Also, there are no racial groups for which your average IQs hold. My point is not just that there is any overlap, it's that there is considerable overlap, which renders discrimination based on race quite useless.
You are right, but Science fiction illustrates what we cannot build or prove YET. I am sure 2 centuries ago, there were stories about a Man who walked into a Big Bird's mouth and went to the Moon. That was science fiction then,but today it is reality.
You're young. Health insurance is going to be relatively cheap.

I just signed up for a plan for my wife and I (26/25 respectively), and it's going to cost us around $250/mo with a reasonable deductible, office copay's and prescription coverage. Dental is an extra $50/mo.

The trick(?) for me was to contact the largest insurance company here in my home state (not California) and ask to speak to their small business department. We built a custom plan rather than using one of their "off-the-shelf" plans that most people would pick. This let me play with the numbers based on our medical history and what we felt we could cover as far as our deductible goes.

Really though, call a few of the largest companies and just start walking through the process.

One tip -- do it before your current insurance expires. At least here, if you are currently covered then there is no way they can decline you(?). The monthly cost may be unreasonable, but they have to at least offer you coverage.
I think the point I was making that he isn't necessarily trying to impress. In my book, conspicuous consumption is wasteful, and making a stand against it is worthwhile.
From the article: close to 70 per cent of the employees have military backgrounds, including a COO who used to wire fighter jets.

So, they got military hosting contracts through their contacts.
Wow, my list really should have included von Neumann, perhaps the most underrated intellect of the 20th century. He'd be on a lot of people's top-n list even for n <= 3, and yet he's barely known outside of the technical world.
Cloud Computing -  So You Don’t Have to Stand Still
wow - useful content? It's a new day!
I write scripts like that. If the plot doesn't work, rip out the middle and end, keep the beginning and some parts from the middle, and add the rest of the new idea to the end.
I figured it out. What the article refers to is a strategy to not sleep during the long flight but instead starve yourself so you stay awake. And then when you eat, you basically reset your body clock to the start of a new day.

I think this is very early research and not really applicable.
I've personally encountered the 64 bit integer problem, but back before it was well documented. The suggested solution on most sites I found involved string operations. We of course did it right (and similarly to the article's solution), but c'mon.
You have a decision to make: can you self-insure for the minor costs or not? By "self-insure", I mean can you handle up to $2500 or $5000 per year of health costs if you had to?
You can get $500 deductible insurance plan for $400-$600 or $5000 deductible plan for $180-$250.

Look for an HSA or ask someone for help on those.
Type slower.

How much of your time in front of the machine do you spend thinking, as opposed to typing? You may find that you can drop your typing speed significantly while having a negligible effect on your overall productivity.

You didn't mention which hand you used to mouse. If you mouse left-handed, try switching hands. I did this - the first few days are hell, but after that you'll be able to mouse effectively enough with the other hand.
Search is far from archaic. It's here to stay. Even if Xobni or Facebook figure out how to make useful suggestions by predicting my intentions (something I doubt would work very well, no matter how much they know about me), it would have a near insignificant impact on the utility I get from Google. People will always want to search for information and unless someone figures out how to build a better search engine than Google, Google will remain king.

With regards to new interfaces (voice/visual/whatever) that people sometimes say will be the "next big thing" in search -- these are just features that Google can easily implement if they prove to be so effective (which they probably won't -- I'd much rather type in my query than say it). Replicating the sophistication, performance and scale of Google is much harder.
It's easy to say he should have known what would happen if he made a photo of his girls on the beach public on flickr. But password protected pages are a pain. I went with the "unlisted" method only. Smugmug lets you choose.

I wrote more on online sharing vs privacy here:

http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-12
...but instead starve yourself so you stay awake.

Staying awake during the fast isn't necessary.
To people living in other time zones.
I'll second the holistic approaches mentioned above. For me, almost none of the direct remedies work, but stressing less, relaxing, socializing, enjoying your work, and eating right certainly do.

Also, make sure your sleeping habits aren't hard on your wrists. A lot of people sleep on top of them or keep their wrists curled all night.
I just like the Big Mac index.
I would say that all frameworks are libraries but not all libraries are frameworks. A library could be a small chunk of code that helps accomplish one little task, or it could be a huge framework. A framework is basically a large library or collection of libraries for building applications on.