skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure why this is here, I'd really expect to see it on Reddit instead.

That said, this is only true if you're lucky enough to live very close to one of these few animal hospitals and have the money to spend on immediate service(not cheap).

Medical treatment is always great for the wealthy no matter where you are. The advantage of socialized medical care is that pretty good care is also available to the disadvantaged and middle class.
Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who created it.
Since scheduling / shipping on time was their #1 thing that went right, apparently the bottleneck didn't cause them too much grief.
Selling open-source 'ice' to the eskimos
I find the word "Godcasting" rather scary... a little too deus ex machina. :)
+1 for CI :)
There have got to be thousands of online storage companies. Why does this particular one get write-ups?
Nope. Dont like the idea for the reasons mentioned by others.
Ask YC: What do you spend on health insurance?
I'm on Aetna's individual plan. They seem to increase premiums around $50/month every 6mos. I don't think I should be spending $300/month on health insurance (I haven't been to see a doc in over a year, no other issues, etc).

Q: Is this high/low?
Q: Who do you use and what do you pay?
I can second this. We use PHP along with a modern framework and love it. Deployment is easy and PHP is so widespread that you can count on a script existing to handle almost any little problem you face.

Granted there are times that its inconsistent library and lack of language features can become annoying. If we're discussing languages alone, PHP is certainly lacking.

With projects like mod_rails on the horizon and programmers trending away from PHP hopefully we soon won't need to choose between a solid language and super-simple deployment process.
150 for aetna in texas

whats your deductable.. I think mine is 1k

I think rates also vary depending on location / age
"Nothing": I live in Austria.

Well, clearly it's paid for somehow, but I don't pay for it directly. It is important to understand that it's not "free". All told though, I'm happier than with the system in the US.

Indeed, I went to the doctor today, had to wait 15 minutes, and got some antibiotics and other stuff to clear up my cold, all for 18 Euro.
I pay nothing, and never have.

Of course I don't live in the US. And btw. I think you should get your health system fixed over there, it's broken.
Not particularly hacker, but great in depth reporting/documentaries. I usually end up stopping my 'ironing' and just watching the video though.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/

If you are interested in foreign policy, there is
http://foreignexchange.tv/
I would rather ban TechCrunch inlinks to News.YC. Every mention of News.YC there means an incremental merging of that community into this one, meaning here becomes more like there.
You should add music as a comparison, since I think most people seem to be able to relate much better to it than say, sculpture. It may help with the analogy a little.
I have a lot of respect for PHP, for having made web programming accessible to people who otherwise would have struggled with something like Java.

However, I never want to use it again myself. I'm tired of digging through horrible code written by people without a clue.
Chinese handwriting recognition in iPhone 2.0?
On television? If you're lucky, and have cable with a few good channels.
Good point! I'm not a CS guy, just (barely) a hacker, so I always forget about that, and I don't have any contacts there. I just thought this would be the laziest option, and since this morning, I already have a couple good people who replied. 3 cheers for news.yc!

edit: I went to the UW CSE dept website and I can't find an easy way to post a summer internship position. Everything there is so formal and structured, and I'm not in HR, so I can't really make an official job posting.
A personalized blacklist would be nice. I.e. a submission with a blacklisted URL won't even be visible on my front page unless its score is over a configurable threshold.
>Why are so many people unable to remember the math they learned in grade school?

You mean like 2+2 or 9x5? Most people forget the advanced math that they learn in high-school, but the basic stuff is pretty well ingrained into the average subject, accounting for variations, of course.
IMO: They are dealing with a tiny amount of bandwidth say there are 30million 1kb text messages a day that's 900 gb / month which is well easy for a single core CPU to handle.

Personally I would go with:

User Adam sends message to Bob:
1) Adam sends message to Twitter service. "Bob>Hi."
2) Twitter check to see if Bob knows Adam.
3) Twitter sends "Adam>Hi." to Bob.

(With optimal storage so Bob and Adam can see their old conversations)

Your system let's random spammers people find out people's address which IMO is bad.

PS: Or Adam could send a message to "All>I like this soup." and Twitter then sends the message to everyone that cares about Adam including Bob.

Edit: It looks like Twitter is sending around 2million Tweets a day.
I pay $486/mo for myself to be covered under the most comprehensive plan available from BC/BS. Is it worth it? Not really, but co-pays are cheap and prescriptions are almost free.
This is what Apple looks for in software engineers: Smart, gets things done. (I think Joel Splotskey said it first.)

99% of the software written at Apple is in C or some variant thereof. If your C code isn't up to snuff (EDIT: fixed lousy contraction. English skills aren't as important!), you might be able to get a job working in the build farms, but even those people are good coders doing shit work until they can move up.

All that being said, we have a really hard time finding people that can code their way out of a paper bag in C - so much so that we'll even take people without direct Mac OS X experience if they're talented coders. (I'd still prefer to see true macheads, though.)
Good call. I think I'm going to look into increasing my deductible.
Step 3 though has no process, hence, the entire function has no process. (None that can be useful at least.)

Your process is so vague, it's like saying the process to get from Seattle to Hawaii is:

1. Leave Seattle.

2. Travel.

2. Arrive in Hawaii
Xobni makes Outlook better, but where's the business?
So you don't pay taxes?
I think that in this case you get a non-trivial performance gain with some basic implementation improvements. You can replace the row-by-row round trip with a single SQL UPDATE with a LIMIT (or a LIMITed subquery if the server does it that way).

Also, the performance of the algorithm in the essay would be linear to the number of rows requiring update, can you elaborate on whether the RETE alogorithm can do any better in this case.

And finally, thanks for the note on RETE, I will have to investigate that.
Completely agree, but not moving out of the US =) http://tinyurl.com/6973da
You do probably pay for extended Health Insurance though, most likely as part of your benefits package through your employer.
They work 12 hour days. Lots of clashing personalities, particularly with lifers.
Yes, the code-is-data is one of those frustratingly true-but-out-of-context things. I created a complete framework that builds databases out of a text file (YAML it so happens) including security and automations (http://www.andromeda-project.org), but was unaware of TBL's essay. I will have to read it carefully and determine what citations may be in order.
He pays taxes though, not to see the doctor. Difference is subtle but relevant.
Surely this can be mitigated in software outside Amazon's services?

Very low TTL/expiry values in DNS and name servers outside the cloud would get you the right result via a different route. At the cost of having to pay close attention to your DNS service, of course.
A cursory google search gave no obvious explanation of this, do you have a specific link to serve as a starting point?
Yes, Arrington runs it like a tabloid.
We pay about $270/mo for the three of us on an HSA plan (in Texas). $5k deductible, 100% coinsurance after that, HSA approved.
but if there were no taxes there would be no doctor.

Not that subtle to me.

I'm not arguing that our system is not messed up, but I'm not willing to pay an extra 10-20% taxes in order to have 'free" healthcare. I'd likely be footing the bill for everyone else.
Ace Your Next Meeting: Craft an Elevator Pitch
Splolsky's problem is that his software is even more pedestrian, boring to work on, and useless than Microsoft's data synchronization products that he's making fun of. I know there are FogBugz users out there but I haven't met a single one in person. Besides... a commercial bug-tracker in 2008? Give me a break.

Their Co-Pilot product is pretty interesting project to work on, but it's not their bread-n-butter. FogBugz is. And why would one even need top-notch programmers to write a bug tracker?

You attract the best talent by interesting projects and existing great talent that you've attracted previously. That's a chicken-and-egg problem, unless founders are smart hackers themselves, this is why it's so important.
I very much agree with this article.

Reminds me of the evolution of my lisp HTML compiler. At first I simply made a macro that transforms:

(:tag :attribute "value" (:p "Paragraph"))

into appropriate code to output the HTML at runtime. But the problem is that I couldn't inspect or transform my HTML; this macro-based scheme was way too brittle.

So instead I wrote another macro with the same syntax but that instead generates code to build a semantic representation of HTML at runtime:

(make-instance 'html-node :type "tag" :attributes (cons "attribute" "value" :children (list (make-instance 'html-node :type "p" :children (list "Paragraph")))))

I then pass this representation to a compiler that first optimizes ("flattens" the structure and appends contiguous strings together) and then compiles into an efficient tree of closures. I still have a version of the macro that generates efficient code to output the HTML directly that I use in my dynamic HTML generation functions, but I use that only when necessary.

The advantage is that now I can do all sorts of static analysis on my HTML (I use a similar scheme for CSS). Believe it or not, in a "dynamic" site there's TONS of static (as in, known before someone even tries to access the page) information. I even have a scheme to "inject" stuff into pages, for example the (page-sensitive) navigation is automatically "baked" into the appropriate pages.

Eventually I want to make a "site debugger" with all the semantic data I have about my site. I'll have powerful querying capabilities to answer questions like: "What pages in my site have an A tag that links to page X and is nested in a container affected by CSS rule Y?". Maybe I can even make some kind of advanced editor. Owning your data opens lots of interesting possibilities indeed!

So, I get all the semantic data plus the great speed. The best of both worlds. I think this really illustrates the importance of compilers and of languages like lisp that facilitate their implementation. I never made a low-level compiler and it will be some time before I'm knowledgeable enough to make one but lisp allowed me to make those high-level HTML and CSS compilers comparatively easily.

Another important thing is separating policy from mechanism, one obvious problem of the programmer that represented rules directly in code as depicted in the article is that he hard-coded policy into his program, but the thing is that policy is volatile so it really belongs in a config file.

I think this somewhat resonates with the quote: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." Except programs themselves often want to read programs for the purpose of analysis or manipulation, hence the advantage of representing the most logic you can in a "dumb" language or data format.
I'm still more interested in having the number of upvotes required to get somthing in the rss be increased, having 1 other person finding something interesting isn't enough.

3 or 4 should be about right
ah thank you. once again I'm familliar with the long version but not the acronym (I find this happening a lot lately).

personally I'd just like a bayesian filter on my rss.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the API. People are "going to" Twitter, not the Twitter API.
There are also a lot fewer Python, Ruby and Django jobs than PHP jobs there so you would expect to see more low/entry level PHP jobs in there pulling the average down.
This capability is available as a third-party tool:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173581
You're thinking too qualitatively; imagine the spikes they get... Also most apps are I/O restricted, not CPU...

Also, all these proposed messaging architectures are somewhat flawed. Twitter isn't really "sending" messages to other people. It's more like a person's message history is bound to their account, and appropriate privileges are applied. Then, when people try to "read," privileges are obeyed and information is produced...

Am I the only one who believes the solution to Twitter does not involve a massive distributed system? Twitter is inherently centralized... people don't see that.
Many people don't want the full blank canvas to start with. They like having specific direction as to what parts of the application go where. For then, frameworks work well.

Judging from what people did with Flash and are doing with Flex, I think with many people a blank canvas is an invitation to do really stupid stuff.

So as always it's a people issue and not a technology issue.
Regarding the NIH and NSF, they WERE good for pure-research money. Most such funds have dried up or been funneled to the war effort. It's ugly out there for "pure-research" money. If there isn't a practical application or promise of a new diagnosis to a well known and popular ailment, good luck getting funding from any, non-DARPA, government source.
I really think people are spinning Spolsky's comment about Redmond and Google hiring up all the good people way out of proportion. It was just a throwaway comment at the end of the post; it wasn't the thesis.
Per capita health expenditure in the US is $5711, in Denmark (where I'm from) it's $2743. And the healthcare here is excellent.

Source: OECD
This Week in Ruby (May 5, 2008)
I don't think your effort's in vain. If you like it, keep at it. When you feel confident in your knowledge on the language, you can then choose to move on and experiment with other things. Same for any language, really.

Myself, I'm just now getting started into Ruby on Rails. I finally figured out a project to get me interested in learning the Rails part of it. I just need to get cracking.
actually no - and I don't know of anyone that does.
No. Thats a daft suggestion. This site acts as a filter for the more popular techcrunch articles.
considering that TC employees regularly check news.yc it's plausible to assume they automatically upvote all TC stories.
I maintain a site that receives over half a million pageviews per day, not including API requests of XML feeds. This site runs on 3 medium range commodity web servers and 2 database servers, and there's plenty of capacity left.

Don't let the scaling police and architecture astronauts fool you: with the right architecture in place (i.e. a framework like Cake or Zend) and a smart scaling strategy (opcode caching, object caching, page caching, etc), PHP is a great choice for web applications.

Sure PHP has a low barrier to entry, which can lead to poor coding practices, but that shouldn't be a reason for people to express an absolute hate for it. Rather, it's important to stress continual education regardless of which programming language you choose.
CUDA - Supercomputing for the masses Part 2
Anything, examples:

zillow's api
twitter's api
google's search api
indeed's api

basically data outputting api's
ah, HSA = Health Savings Account (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_savings_account)
11 Traffic Tips From the Number One Chiropractic Blog in the World
Startup Strategy: To Blog Or Not To Blog?
Blogging Kills
If Twitter went down permanently, all my tweets about Michael Arrington being a jerk and what I had for lunch would be gone. Nooooo! :(
As a language for developing applications, PHP really isn't that bad. It has pretty damn good support for OOP (at least within recent releases). It lacks in concurrency support and other random things like namespaces (for which swombat advised against large-sized sites).

As a language for scaling... not too shabby. Many people who bash PHP for inability to scale really don't know jack shit about what they're talking about. Chances are, their app is slow because of all the O(n^2) loops... and they need to go take a class or two on algorithms, networking, and/or distributed systems.

I used to work with PHP a lot... eventually moved to Python simply because it was more succinct. Our teams are extremely small, and we needed a more expressive language; needed to get more done in less time. The rest speaks for itself...

We actually have moved from 100% PHP to: python for web apps, decent amount of Io & Ruby for utilities/monitoring and such, and working on a load balancer in Erlang... much more powerful development. And we really haven't run into many major stability problems...
I joke that I have "American Health Insurance": don't get sick, and damn-sure don't get hurt.

No health insurance, can't afford it now. Tend to be pretty healthy and heal well, so so far the gamble is working out.

That said, the financial issues surrounding health care in the U.S. are disgraceful, and I don't understand how anyone in an industrialized first-world country could look at it and say, "Yep, looks fine to me."
so you're saying you read valleywag often? :)
@RoR
"but does it scale?"
cough twitter cough
should fast food joints be banned? just because you don't like something isn't adequate argument to ban it.
Ruby to Python
Are you speaking in terms of traffic? Several very large sites run on PHP (Facebook comes to mind) while few run on Ruby (I think Twitter tops the list).
I've had that problem before too. It's just the basic bootstrapping problem of starting a career that everyone goes through.

To answer your question, my only professional experience before finishing school was through internships, including one at Microsoft which I am sure has opened doors for me (although I can't be sure which ones), and my graduate assistantship.
I used to hate the idea of having a blog because every other blog I read strikes me as "This person is really full of themselves, and not that important."

Yet there were things I wanted to talk about, including things I'd invented.

So I struck a compromise: I treat my blog like a newspaper about things, and not me. Which is good, since I'm more boring than even the most boring newspaper.
RoR is an architecture. Kind of ironic because I claim that Ruby, as a language, has better support for scaling in the networking/dist.systems view than PHP. Yet, I would like to claim that PHP scales better than RoR in the web app domain. Though, it takes deep knowledge of RoR internals to make a correct judgement; which, very few have.
> I'd likely be footing the bill for everyone else.

You already are. The rates you pay are based on a pooled snapshot of medical usage of all the people that particular insurer has in that demographic.

The only difference is that with a gov't plan the pool is larger.

EDIT: Actually, I should correct myself. Most government plans have an additional difference - there are no costs based on usage. In a private plan, if you spend everyday at the hospital, you'll feel it in your next premium renewal, with a government plan this isn't always the case, although some countries implement user fees.
The grandparent was referring to this talk:

http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/98128/Peter_Norvig_Director_of...
Isn't this what Parrot (http://www.parrotcode.org/) set out to do? Any idea how that project is coming along?
> It turns out that Xobni is not really an Outlook plug-in company. Rather, it's a company that makes a platform to abstract the difficult-to-write-for-Outlook, as well as other less-broken e-mail services, and that allows the creation of new products that integrate e-mail data with other apps.

and

> if Salesforce.com wants to write a plug-in that tightly integrates its CRM data into Outlook ...

Compare that to what I wrote here a couple days back:

"With this synchronization across mail clients, Xobni has transformed itself from an analytics feature [of Outlook] to a full-fledged network to manage your contacts and interactions. I could see this integrating powerfully with, for example, Salesforce.com."
This is very true.

That said, I'd rather be in the pool of healthy, employed people than the unemployed moochers ;)
The "interesting" parts for writing FogBugz, is working with Wasabi, their homegrown compiler that spits out classic ASP and PHP. That's an interesting challenge, right?? /sarcasm

To their defense, FogBugz is more than a simple bug tracker. Predictive scheduling is a novel and useful feature that separates them from pretty much every other free and commercial bug tracker I've used.
on those wire photo contests, you can count up votes and down votes separately. what if you could filter by:

-- x up votes --
-- y down votes --
-- x/y ratio --
Yeah, unfortunately, the CSE department website isn't necessarily the best way to do it. The bioinformatics resarchers at UW are loosely organized across a number of different departments. Backchannel me, and I'll put you in touch with some people.
Ask PG: can you add lists?
I often find it difficult to express lists of things here on the YC forum, is there a reason that we do not have a list syntax, wiki, html, or otherwise? I think it would make it easier to get to the point.