skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That fact is far, far weaker than the other. It turns out that many types of cancer don't start to show up in the epidemiology for periods of 20 years or so. Well known examples include lung cancer from smoking and various cancer rates among those exposed to nuclear bombs.

Based on that if cellphones cause cancer, the odds are very low that we would have noticed yet.
I wasn't talking about immigrants. Most Japanese Americans are the grandchildren of manual laborers who immigrated to the US between the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Asian Exclusion Act.

Why don't you go up to a Japanese American and ask, "hey, how long have you been in the US?" (Be sure to duck immediately after saying it.)
Why investing in bit.ly last week was a bad idea
I don't actually think that saving an email or message or whatever makes me untrustworthy.

Saving it, no. Sharing it, yes.

expect to be able to rescind it at any point in the future seems both unworkable

I agree
The server-side is a good example of the fragmentation I mentioned. There are classes of projects that are hopelessly redundant (e.g. minimalist MVC frameworks), and classes of projects that only exist/work in some languages for various reasons (e.g. async MySQL APIs).

In an ideal world, I'd prefer if there weren't so many languages that do essentially the same thing with different syntaxes, but then again, standardization in itself is its own little can of worms (the short story being that it involves a lot of politics).
Actually,

For distributing information to a group, you'd only need a single group private key, which you would send to each member using their public key. After that, you just encrypt the message with the group's public key.

If you want to kick someone out, you'd just start a new group in similar manner but excluding the someone you wanted to kick out. In this way, your group messages would only have to be encrypted once.

Each person would have a different group public key so there wouldn't be much more to it than this.

But all this is kind of overkill. You reasonably expect webmail provider will give you privacy right now just as reasonably you expect a locked door will keep your stuff safe even though a determined person can break either of those protections.

(and as said earlier, no magic technology is going to keep your friends from making stuff public)
Are all tech meetups like that? At the Boulder New Tech Meetup, every company is asked how they will make money. No one boos - it's acceptable, and completely expected.

I think it's a common misconception that every web company is innovating, when most are just using existing tech to solve a problem (or provide a solution that is better than the existing ones).

If you're developing some new technology that will change the world for the better, then I don't care if/how you'll make money. Otherwise, it matters.
Ask HN (about): Technical debt within a constantly changing business model
The founder of the company I work for explained to me today that I should not worry about technical debt until we have a business model that floats. Basically every project we do is throwaway until we find a path to the big money. My issue is that these projects aren't prototypes. They are iOS apps that are in the appstore and are built for clients. What do you guys think? Is everything a hack job until a business idea sticks? So far, I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea.
I think that the most intellectually honest thing to do is to say, "Well, we performed an epidemiological study that looked for an association between cancer and cell phone usage, and we found nothing. In fact, nobody has ever found anything, and we are confident now that there is no association; we can put a statistical upper bound of the effect of cell phone radiation on cancer at X (small effect size) within Y (years) of exposure. In fact, the evidence is equally supportive of the idea that cell radiation is protective as it is of the notion that it is harmful."

What I don't think is intellectually honest is to say, "Physics says X can't happen." I don't care if microwaves cause DNA breakage. I care if microwaves somehow ultimately cause cancer, and if it doesn't happen through the mechanism that physicists posit, then we'd be in a world of hurt if we acted as though it was impossible because it didn't fit their model.

So in summary, yeah, I normally never bring up this point of view because it's probably more helpful to deliver a correct message than a subtle one, but that's because the correct response to "Does X cause Y" has to do with biology and epidemiology, not physical claims of biological impossibility.[1] When someone does the latter, I think it's more important to be intellectually honest (and intellectually humble; admitting how little we know) by giving a more complete picture.

[1] = Unless they are actually claiming something that is physically impossible, too, such as superluminal signalling between organisms or something.
Matz has also said that it was specifically motivated by his frustration with Perl's lousy OO support, leading him to come up with something similar but strongly based around objects. He specifically called it "the next language after Perl," and named the language "Ruby" for the next birthstone after the pearl. When asked how much of Perl made it into Ruby, he said, "A lot. Ruby's class library is an object-oriented reorganization of Perl functionality … I used too much I guess." The language contained a lot of Perlisms early on that fell out of favor as it diverged further. Overall, the language is more evocative of Perl (in its scripting capabilities) and Smalltalk (in its block-passing pervasive OO model) than any Lisp that I know of. I don't doubt Lisp has had some influence, but he definitely had Perl in his sights when he decided to create it.

(Source: http://linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/11/29/ruby.html)
Anyone know where you can get data to feed something like this? I've been wanting to do a visualization for my current city, but don't know where to go about getting the info and our police department is far from technical...
Yeah, that bugged me about the video portion of the application too. It was weird; everything else about the application was fairly straightforward, and then there was this video part which was really vague with this really arbitrary 1 minute requirement.

We ended up wasting a couple of hours of one night on it, and by the end of it I was totally fed up with the whole idea of putting in a video (and, by extension, YC). We ended up submitting something really lame and shrugging our shoulders about it.

A "one minute unrehearsed video" is an oxymoron IMO.
I think I agree with you, there are huge open source projects that may not have had a business model to start with, but companies paid $bns to own them (think databases).
Canada's Dollar Trades at Parity for First Time Since April
It always irks me when people say that Search and Mail are the only successful products to come out of Google (I know that isn't what you said specifically, but it sparked the memory).

YouTube, Google Finance, Google Maps, Blogger, Google Docs, Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Calendar, Chrome, and the entire Android platform are all things that I use on nearly a daily basis. Most, if not all of those are the leading product in their field. Companies by the boatload switch to exclusive use of Google Apps for almost all of their needs, and there's a reason behind it.

That's not to say that they're flawless. Google Video was pretty terrible until they killed it for YouTube. Knol is a pretty big failure. They never really did anything with Picasa on the web side of things (I thoroughly enjoy the desktop app however). They really dropped the ball on Wave in terms of marketing and deployment. Wave in particular saddens me, because it could have so easily gone the other way and been an excellent successor to email. And I'm sure they have hundreds if not thousands of products that we never hear about and never will see the light of day.

But saying Google has only succeeded in Search and E-mail is just silly.
I admire his humility. I believe it's Jim Collins (Good to Great book) who describes these types of CEOs as Level 5 leaders. I don't know Sculley's career, but maybe he would have been more successful being in an industry he was familiar with?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-c...
TechCrunch: "Cloudkick Now Managing 1 Million Servers"

Cloudkick Blog: "...we've just hit 1,000,000 servers registered all-time in Cloudkick."

Those statements aren't even close to equivalent. The HN guidelines say it well:

Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site,
submit the latter.

https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/2010/oct/14/one-million-serve...
I've been to NYTM many times and in my experience you can ask anything you want, just don't sound link an MBA when you do it.

Understand that NY is the nexus of MBA speak. There are just so many corporate offices and financial firms and lawyers there -- NYTM is the one place that cuts through the regular NY bullshit and talks about technology for its own sake, not just as a conduit to make money. So if you get up and ask about synergies or exit strategies (or the worst offense, using slides instead of a demo) prepare to be booed.
Ah but while the browser may be running client side, it hardly seems like the piece of software I'd want to trust to do my encryption given that it is designed with many hooks to allow servers to do stuff.

"sure, don't trust me, do it on your own machine. I'll even give you the software..."
I've only had one cup of tea today, so maybe I wrote the opposite of what I think I wrote, but it might also be that your pseudoscientist detector is catching false positives today.

I'm not asserting that cell phones cause cancer, and I'm not asserting that the precautionary principle is wise to apply here. The author writes that the model of carcinogenesis he's selected predicts that cell phones will not cause cancer. He asserts that this is proof that cell phones cannot cause cancer. I'm taking issue with his confidence in making that assertion.
I notice that your name, like mine, is a psuedonym that's not trivially googlable. As long as the places where you connect it to your real name are not indexed in search engines, it's going to take actual work to connect it to you. I've used this name on the internet for well over a decade, but have only connected it to my real name by request, on private channels.

We're probably not that far apart in our assessments of the disadvantages; the difference is likely that I'm confident my HN commenting will never be advantageous when seeking a job.
Love Makes You Increasingly Ignorant of Your Partner
Non-ionizing radiation can influence bonds and, as a result, chemical reactions. Bonds can be thought of as "vibrating", for example, and non-ionizing radiation can influence this behavior.

Think of it, then, as a catalyst. Even where it is not directly effecting ionization, it may be accelerating chemical reactions that are adverse to an organism's well being. As an imagined example, what happens when you have a chlorine or other halide group in the vicinity? Perhaps a particular non-ionizing radiation environment increases the probability of their doing damage by chemical reaction.

I've been away from what chemistry I did know for far too long, but even that bit led me to believe the "it's non-ionizing" arguments are, at best, incomplete.
Yeah, but I also didn't account for any sort of inefficiency in the electric drivetrain. 90% conversion efficiency is a good rule of thumb, and there's one step from house panel to storage, another from house storage to car storage, and one more step from car storage to motors, so you'd only get about 75% out of each joule that comes out of the solar panel. Even adjusting gasoline efficiency down to 20% on average, that's less than a factor of 2 off my first set of numbers. We're in the ballpark, close enough to know it can't fit on a car, and impractically large for a house.
Has anyone implemented the HN ranking algorithm for twitter feeds? Basically, if the same tweet gets retweeted, then it should show up higher. On the other hand, brand new tweets have a pretty high score initially because they are new, so you should still be able to achieve a mix of a "live stream" and bubble good links to the top.
*Alligator boots.
>It's true that that's the first step to programming as a craft, but it's hardly the first step to programming as a way of thinking, managing complexity, and building abstraction.

It's the first step when learning a new language, which is exactly when Hello World programs are customary.
Thoughts on choosing a datastore
Ah no. It's actually not a company that does anything legitimate. 100% pure, organic troll from what I understand.
A Fix for a Seemingly Random iOS App Network Failure
To Self-Publish or Not to Self-Publish
The point of the article was to dismiss precautionary worry as a reason to believe in the effect.

Unless there is anything pointing towards the phones causing cancer, we shouldn't worry about it.

Consider how afraid we would be of touching anything that hasn't been proved to not cause cancer. People would have anxiety over doing anything, and most of it would be unwarranted.

Of course, considering that there is a bit of evidence pointing towards cell phones causing cancer(even if it's just correlation rather than causation), it may be of worth to consider worrying, but don't worry just because you have no information at all.
"ecommerce" is a fairly broad term. If you're referring specifically to web retail, I can make a few comments here.

First, the problems to be solved in web retail aren't particularly "hard" in comparison to the kind of problems being solved by, say, the more recent YC startups.

One thing that is critical in web retail is good architecture and clean code, specifically with interface coupling. Between third party order/product feed integration, promotions, special offers, sales tax, duties, shipping concerns, etc, the "special case" and edge condition pile grows very rapidly in this industry. Building a sufficiently generic framework for your system and keeping concerns as loosely coupled as possible is probably the most critical aspect to the technology of a web retailer.
This actually bothered me to no end at google. At the API level, it's great, I can learn a lot about what your function is going to do just by looking at the signature, but when reading code that uses an API I don't know, it's hell. For me, the extra help you get by looking at a function signature really isn't that great, when I should have the same information available in the documentation that had damn well better accompany the function signature in your header.
Twitter Cuts Off JustSpotted's (formerly Scoopler) Firehose Access
Obviously this doesn't even begin to explain it, but the realtime/quality-of-service requirements of voice are much more rigid, so it makes sense that voice would cost the carrier more per-bit than data. But still...
The mechanism would involve existing cancer cells becoming activated - not the creation of new cancer cells via DNA mutation. Some background on studies about cancer cells that possibly exist within some or all of us already is in this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/research/29cancer.h... .
Definitely will be here. Will we have a private room or just take over a section of the restaurant/bar?
Thanks for the good will and advice. This has been an issue that we've looked into and we're trying to find out how other companies (IE. Shopzilla) has handled this issue in the past.

Thanks again for the tip and appreciate the advice.
I think this approach is self-defeating. You could use it to teach your daughter (or son) to take math quizzes well, but you will never use it to inspire them to appreciate the beauty of math.

In my experience, most of these "make-learning-fun" tools are really about making learning independent enough that parents don't have to participate.

If you want any third grader to love math, have her mom and dad cajole and joke and help and love her while she is learning it.

I learned my multiplication tables because my father would teach me bits of algebra, but only after I could get the flash cards right. He wasn't distracting me, he was rooting for me, showing me the underlying beauty of math, while also demanding I get the basic memorization right.
Ask HN: What is your favorite YC startup?
Based on any factor(s) you want. :)
Don't you get bait and switch problems when you tell your interviewee or new hire that they aren't going actually be doing any Scala? I myself would ... not be pleased.
My point is that they already have a list of free operating systems, and pretty much nobody uses them. Do you think it likely that their list of free hardware will be more useful?
Darn, already booked my flights. :( Enjoy!
Upon noting to people that I was self-publishing my first book, I was met by a number of questions relating to why and how I’d go about it, as well as the virtues of doing so, versus working with a traditional publisher. Clearly, a lot of people were examining the possibility of "going it alone," and curious about their options.

Rather than continuing to share my experiences ad infinitum (one person at a time), I chose to put it all down in a post. If you’re contemplating publishing, you might gain something from the linked post. Although it’s just one perspective, there’s some hard won experience in here that you might benefit from.
The EFF is the closest thing that exists to this, but I don't see a broad enough interest or financial backing to achieve any significant change to the current laws. Too bad there's not some way for hackers to leverage their superior knowledge of technology within the bounds of the law to swing things to their advantage, as businesses and in particular financial institutions have done for years.
Was this much different from expectations? We don't usually see quarterly results on HN, but if these results are a big surprise, they would certainly be newsworthy. I guess I'm missing the context here.
Less is More: Fundamentals of Minimalist Web Design
I pay $105 in California from Anthem Blue Cross with a $3500 deductible. After the deductible, everything's covered... basically, i do my best to stay healthy, but worst comes to worst, $3500 will be the least of my worries.
Civil Cyber Defense is One Helluva Joke
This. I don't say anything even slightly controversial attached to my True Name unless I'm among only people I trust. For instance, I could never publicly level serious criticism at any technology without jeopardizing opportunities to take a job that happens to use it. Nor would I wear all my sociopolitical opinions on my sleeve before a potential landlord.
The exact same thing happened to me with MS Word, however.
In fact Word was such a pain that back in 2000 I switched to StarOffice 5, then OpenOffice.
Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design
> Windows desktop runs on the AMD64 platform as well as Itanium

No. It doesn't. AMD64 is an extension of x86 and
Itanium support for XP was dropped in 2005. The last Windows to support Itanium was 2003 server. And NT ran fine on Alpha - I used it. But it doesn't now and has't for a long time. It's funny that what spells death of a mainstream platform is not when that platform is discontinued, but when Microsoft discontinues its Windows support.

We live under Microsoft's grip. If WP7 becomes dominant and Microsoft decides to drop ARM support, dead it will be.
Well, worse, it's explicitly designed to implement programs you've already designed in full (there's a Gosling quote to this effect).

It might be good for that niche, but as you note it's rather restrictive in its quest for safety (although GC is fine by me) and another thing that falls out of this is that it's not so good for things that need to change. It was designed for things like set-top boxes, appliances, etc., not what we're using it for today....
He's also very clear on why he was not a good choice for CEO.
I am in a very similar position:

1. Have an IT Java job that I despise.

2. Want out of that job to work on my own apps for profit.

3. Still live with my parents, but am in my early 30s.

I am currently working on these for-profit apps on nights and weekends. It's not easy, as that time goes very quickly. The only reasons I haven't quit my job (as I figured I can always find an equally miserable Java job if I was desperate):

1. The suckiness of the job can be a great motivator to keep me plugging away on my side projects.

2. 4 weeks of paid vacation/year means I can afford to go to some interesting developer conferences and quickly recoup the cost. This allows me to get to know people who are already where I want to be.

3. I can use the paychecks to bootstrap my company-to-be. Not that it takes a lot of money to start a company, but I like the idea of a substantial rainy-day fund.

When I can make enough money from my side business, I'll happily quit the day job. Enough money means I can consistently make around 70% (or more) of my paycheck's gross amount.

Please keep us posted on what you ultimately decide to do.
Google Launches Phishing Alert Service
In hindsight one could say a 28 year old Jobs could have handled CEO after what we've seen him do in the last decade. It seems more likely however, that the lessons he learned in the 90s at NeXT were essential, not to mention the engineers and codebase used later in OSX. Sculley's humility is admirable, but maybe Jobs really wasn't ready.
Ironically, it was Jobs who gave us flatulence simulation apps.
Honestly, I see this attitude manifest in a really nasty way in MongoMapper, which is an otherwise great library. If I would have realized that the documentation would still be non existant (like, completely non existent) after 10 months or so of using it I would have gone with Mongoid instead. Now my project is far enough along and I'm familiar enough with MM that it's just not worth it to switch now.

I'm a very competent developer and often have to sift through the MM source code to find what I'm looking for (or jump to the plucky source code). This is for doing things like finding the appropriate place to use #fields, stuff that _should_ be documented.

Every time I want to look something up I have to sift through the google group or grep through your source code, it's not that I'm not capable, it's just that it's a lousy way to work. Now, I realize that it's your project and you can do whatever you please, I'm just saying that I would have made a different descision and I'm sure the lack of documentation hurts MM uptake pretty severely.
I know. I was attempting to add more specifics to why I think that argument is questionable, not to challenge your observations.
It's disingenuous of the author to put "QED" on the end of his article as if this was deductively proven in a mathematical proof. He did make a VERY strong case for cell phones not causing cancer through inducing transcription errors or DNA breakage from ionizing radiation. But he didn't even touch on other possible mechanisms for causing cancer, such as spot heating.

Personally, I would guess that if spot heating caused cancer, then the human race would have gone extinct when we discovered fire, but that is neither here nor there. Using terms like "QED" in this context just adds fuel to the fire of the "evolution is just a theory" whackos.