skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't this really track where the city health inspectors have been?
I have not yet had laser eye surgery, but I've done a lot of research. You're fortunate to be in the UK, home of one of the best laser eye surgeons in the world, Dan Reinstein. He's known as a surgeon that fixes other surgeon's screwups, but his own first-time results are quite stellar; see the bottom of this page: http://www.londonvisionclinic.com/what-makes-us-different/re.... Almost zero surgeons publish their statistics. Rainstein does because his statistics are the best. He works closely with Zeiss, the world's premier optics company, in their development of new refractive surgery products. They are truly doing some amazing things with wavefront technology these days; some patients come out with a best-corrected Snellen score of 20/12! Unfortunately, his clinic is probably also the most expensive in the world. Expect to pay seven thousand pounds, but I, for one, would not trust my eyes to anyone else.

Keep in mind that while serious complications are rare, there are some downsides to refractive surgery. LASIK, for example, frequently results in a loss of "contrast sensitivity"--a metric which isn't captured in the typical "20/20" Snellen score. Vision can be sharp but dynamic range can be lost. Furthermore, the flap interface creates a distortion in the eye's optics which, while normally hidden in during the day, becomes apparent when the iris is forced to widen at night (especially affected are those with blue eyes, which "leak" more light). Nerves are cut in the procedure, too. Also ask about other forms of error, such as cyclotorsional registration and nomograms.

The field is evolving so quickly that I have chosen to wait. Femtosecond lenticule extraction (FLEX) is on the horizon, but I'm most excited about intrastromal corneal reshaping (http://www.lasiksurgerynews.com/news/intrastromal-corneal-la...). The intrastromal proeedures promise to change the interior of the cornea via laser triangulation. No flaps or cuts of any kind are made. Incredible stuff.
I presented a course on this subject to engineers at my former employer. It's a set of tips about how to improve C code for ARM targets: http://www.davespace.co.uk/arm/efficient-c-for-arm/index.htm...
Miss a day on reader and you are lost in a jungle of feeds.
Up-to-date on feeds but still catching up on Twitter though.
Depending on the implementation, a Javascript only lightbox can be 508 accessible, and a CSS lightbox could be inaccessible.
I open images in new tabs. No reloading; limited ping-ponging.
Isn't the interface there for "Fireman mode?"

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.)

From: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_...

See also Design With Intent:
http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2008/10/01/placebo-but...
Neither do I. The problem is that you didn't present an alternate way of thinking about extra hours. You just posted a link to a product and a statement that it wasn't designed by people who don't work extra hours without much of a link between the two.
Thanks for the feedback.

- the next version of Red-R will use RPy2. We are still benchmarking and improving RPy2 performance.

- Red-R has a widget called R-Executor which is a R shell. Can execute any R code and interact with the R session.

Creating and testing installers is a major issue. I have tested in windows xp, vista and 7, both 32 and 64 bit. But as another comment mentioned, there are plenty of issues we haven't tested. Please report any errors to anup@red-r.org and we will try to fix as quick as possible.
Unbundle our archaic cable TV system
WOW! This is the most powerful and inspiring thing I have seen in a while. I really hope this catches on. Thank you, it is refreshing to see a webapp that is innovative at this stage of things. Your enthusiasm is contagious, it would be wonderful if it went viral.

Problems:

I can imagine a lot of CEOs laughingly dismissing this. They are not going to let some software take over. It has to be clear how this is beneficial for CEOs, and you make a point that CEOs are overburdened but still.

The overall feeling is that you are giving up control of the corporation. I think it would be better to market it as an enabling complement to traditional organizational structures. An evolution rather than a revolution. Make it clear that your product is a tool with which organizations decide the pace at which they want to move towards open governance, rather than a new set of rigid rules to be used from the start.

For the past 3 years in have been thinking and working in something somewhat related, but chose to focus on the enabling tools, rather than on the organizational ideas.
RockMelt, a Chromium-based browser for social Web addicts
Why technology is Africa's latest, greatest poverty fighter.
In my building the elevator doesn't even know to return to the lobby when idle :(

Returning to the lobby means you're in the right place half the time (roughly -- I for one use the elevator to go up more than to go down). Anywhere else has much worse odds.
http://www.hackersforcharity.org/
But the initial page load takes longer because it loads the full size images along with the thumbnails. That could be a deal breaker with a large set of images.
actually if the description in the link is correct..it is indeed a real composite picture and the brightest white lights were present since 1992. however i do agree that the brightness seems to be artificially enhanced..
Around The Subway World Interactive Infographic
Either that or a Google-style flat hierarchy. There may simply not be that many manager positions to get promoted into.
Cloud Architecture Patterns: Stateless VM
Operation Payback: That's All (for now), Folks
I can't reply to your last one for some reason, which may be for the best. The multivariate software was called Conversion Doubler, but was renamed (and improved) by the buyer. I'm keeping the new project under wraps for now.

I consider it a personality flaw that I'm compelled to respond to (what I consider to be) unconstructive criticism like this. I'm done responding publicly, but will continue by email if you like.
140 characters isn't enough for support questions. True, some people are long-winded. So some limit would probably be good. (143 characters.)
The explanation I've heard (from a talk by Ted Neward) is that going increasingly multicore is where most future performance boosts will come from.

Since pure functional languages are easier to parallelize, Microsoft is interested in languages like F# for their performance on multicore systems.
Its certainly an interesting hypothesis and I wish you luck, but I can't see it working out the way it is now.

What you're introducing has to be implemented first as a cultural change by leadership, meaning larger organizations that exist today cannot simply adopt your system unless they fully dedicate themselves to changing. This is expensive and is pretty much guaranteed not to happen.

This leaves your target market to small and medium, fast growing businesses. The problem here is that these smaller companies want productivity tools that accelerate growth instantly; not an organizational revamp for tomorrow.

By the looks of it, it seems your product introduces more work and politics (IMO just as much bureaucracy as the system before) because members have to vote on initiatives, rate each other, etc. I can only guess that in a short matter of time, members stop caring about these artificial ratings or manipulate/game them, especially if management decides that "contribution rating" should be a form of how workers are paid. It is simply not a long-run solution; people don't want to casts votes everyday for the rest of their lives. Workers are motivated by their work, not extraneous organizational concerns.

I'm not really sure if the efficiency trade-off nets positive. But I like your different thinking, and you may be on to something.

//Bachelor of management & organizational studies...never thought I'd ever use it here lol.
College & Degrees
Cloud Architecture Patterns: Aspectual Centralization
This is not session hijacking protection, it's Firesheep activity detection. Installing this will not suddenly make you safe.
I read somewhere that this apparently is also one of the patterns in the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I don't own a copy yet so I can't confirm this.
There's also another variable that the article doesn't explicitly take into account, although it's discussed a little: RIM sells primarily to businesspeople for whom money is no object when you consider the competitive advantage that the product offers. TiVo, on the other hand, sells an entertainment device to consumers who have to squeeze it into their entertainment budget.
Kind of a poor naming choice. I went there expecting some hackers using OLPCs running Sugar. The page itself makes it fairly difficult to discern just what this is all about, indeed it wasn't till I read devmonk's comment that things made some sense.
I like the particular use-case you suggested, but I'm going to play the devil's advocate. If I close the lightbox, I do not expect the lightbox to re-open. I know there's mixed feelings on this one. Thoughts?
I'd love to see this animated over a few months.
James Gleick explores this theme in his very enjoyable book Faster, as part of a broader look at the accelerating pace of modern life.

For the interested, the book's website is at http://fasterbook.com/ and the chapter about door close buttons is here: http://fasterbook.com/cgi-bin/faster/fchapter.pl?3
Luke Gorrie created a tool to format program listings for paper using emacs: http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/misc/emacs/pbook.el

Here's a rendered example of using the program on itself: http://discontinuity.info/~pkhuong/pbookc.pdf
Certainly a very interesting project and one in think we can
keep tabs on our progress
I think the static page views are fine, for what it's worth.

As for protecting the idea, I think the only real concern is that one of these merchants hires a contractor to copy the concept. But their version will be fundamentally flawed because it won't have price history (against their interest) and price comparison.
Hey, I wrote about www.OrganicChemistryNotes.com on my blog yesterday. Check it out and let me know what you think.

http://diamondsandsteak.com/post/1509041951/authenticity-and...
Someone thought it's a neat trick and many followed suit.

I suspect it's a classical case of "you're not your user".

I personally think it's really annoying for the technically literate, and really confusing for the rest of the population.

What I really love, is the chrome plugin that zooms facebook photos on hovering them; facebook photo zoom[1]

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/elioihkkcdgakfba...
The trash is taken out by someone who thinks it's worth doing. If nobody thinks it's worth doing, the trash stays.

Bettermeans itself is running on the platform: https://secure.bettermeans.com/projects/20 so far we've had no problem showing up for a critical install.

And you're absolutely correct about traction.
Sugary snacks every 3 hours for 10 weeks. A trip to the dentist might be in order
Just to add to the historical perspective... One of the Project 7 languages was a Haskell dialect named Mondrian. If memory serves, this was brought to production as a scripting language back in the .NET 1.x days, but it never really got much traction and is no longer available. The same people have continued to work on Haskell for .NET, but only as an in-house project (see http://kahu.zoot.net.nz/).
Thats another big problem, go on a holiday or some real life activities on somdays and will have to spend whole next week catching up with 100 articles/newsfeed that cameup during those days.
Unfortunately, lightbox-style galleries still behave inconsistently across hardware/platforms/browsers and often break. And, you're right, many people find them annoying. But as a developer who recently converted a portfolio site, I can tell you that it tremendously simplifies the code needed to present a gallery of images, making a portfolio-oriented site much more easy to update. Also, clients tend to go ga-ga over the slick eye candy (thus decreasing the demand for Flash, so it's not all bad).
FAST? It's still .NET. Regarding you example, I'd much rather write

value = dict.get('foo', 'default')

in IronPython.
While it's cool that you're a girl and taught yourself Rails - the community needs more female influence - it's not relevant to "where do I go from here?" unless you want misogynistic answers like "an app to get me a sandwich!", and I rather suspect that's not the sort of thing that you're fishing for here.

My advice, on that front, though, is to find an itch you have and use Rails to scratch it. Indexes/databases of information that's useful to you are often a great place to start. The sandwich crack reminded me of a project I've had back-burnered for a while now (please don't take it as "lol you're a girl, kitchen app") - I'd love to have a tool that lets me input the contents of my fridge/pantry, and have it spit back a list of potential recipes, sortable by calorie content, preparation time, cuisine style, etc. Maybe even include an option to include recipes that are missing a couple of ingredients, so I could make a shopping list. There are some very interesting data problems and interface problems to solve there, and it would be enormously useful to boot. I suck at meal planning, and it would be amazing if I could use a tool to plan out the next week's meals based on target caloric content and prep time per meal, with a knowledge of what I have in my pantry (and the ability to tell me what I need to shop for). I suspect that a lot of people would find that sort of thing terribly handy.
Yes, HN feed itself has over 100 articles a day. Plus i hate using marking all as read.
NASA posted this today:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/08...

The Omega system was shut down years ago, to the joy of local BASE jumpers.
This reminds me why I don't slashdot anymore. By the fourth comment there's an extensive argument over universal health care.

EDIT: irony noted.
Literate programming, at least at Knuth defines it, includes some aspects which Docco omits.

Firstly, the machine readable file can be output in a different order than the human readable. (Indeed, sequential chunks in the human readable output can be directed to multiple different files.)

Secondly, the human readable file includes 'outlining': when describing a function, parts of it can be elided and covered later.

Now, these may have been required because the target language was C(like), which has different properties from many other languages. But I did want to point out that Docco is a quite different point in the literate programming landscape.

For examples, see a couple of literate programs that I've written.

With Web (Knuth's tool): https://github.com/agl/rwb0fuz1024/raw/master/rwb0fuz1024.pd...

With my own tools: http://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/lsmsb.html
I like the Social Innovation Camp. Hopefully one will start that in the US if it hasn't already been started. Thanks!
Well, because the point of the article(s) was that the user feels happier if they feel they have control. Besides which people would complain if they physically removed the buttons. Leaving them inactive means nobody is the wiser, and everyone gets on with their lives.
> How do you get away with none of this in Python?

It's optional.

You don't have to catch any exceptions (unlike java), however if you want to you can catch, separately, any one of the dozen exceptions that could be raised (IOError, permission error, memory error etc.).

One reason I love python is that the common use case is easy. 90% of times people read from files they don't need to handle every exception there and then, ergo python makes that possible. This makes python much more enjoyable, productive and easy to use.
How do you drive traffic to this site?

I think there's a reasonable claim to be made that your ad placement is deceptive. It looks like a navigational menu for the website.

Either way, good luck :)
Yeah, would be interesting to see a map colored with overall health inspector visits and see if there's a correspondence.
Ask HN: Do I need a better icon for my application?
For a while now I've been developing a small freeware Android application, and recently I've launched a commercial version of it in the Android Market. And while the users seem to be generally very happy with the application, I can't help but to constantly think about the launcher icon, which is not very beautiful:

http://imgur.com/7cEx4.png

Could my poor icon actually be hurting the sales? It surely doesn't create a very good first impression when a user finds the app in the Market, does it?
You're spot on that it would be almost impossible to approach an already entrenched mgmt system with this unproven model.

It's also true that there's an overhead with using the system, but that's the end of our agreement.

Because folks only vote on what they're interested in, the system works very fluidly. No work is held up waiting for someone, and you don't have to wade through votes that you don't care about.

We use our system, and use the contribution rating to pay ourselves, and distribute equity. And it's working very smoothly. I spend about 20-30 minutes a week 'rating'. And the rest of the voting happens seamlessly (much like voting on HN)

It's very, very difficult to game the system b/c everything is so transparant. It would look ridiculous.
I started to cook and eat more at home, with no particular plan or calorie counting. Started to lose weight just from that.
It sounds like this would not detect someone using Firesheep and also tunneling their traffic through SSH or a VPN, right?
Microsoft: 1 in 5 young adults has dropped a phone in the toilet
Apparently, either poorly or pretty good! depending on who you ask, and how you interpret the following review.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-1...

I guess it's a glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing.
Don't worry, before too long the same argument will appear here.

Australia has universal health care btw.... just saying :P
Don't know if that compare to using htmlunit and lxml.html? I found a lot of html parsers with issues with malformed html. And htmlunit is one of the best for scraping javascript/ajax sites...
HN Challenge - the blogless samurai.
It's given that HN is a somewhat elite community of thought leaders and taste-makers. Any tumult one can create here has the potential to redound disproportionately to the benefit of the poster, if the poster is well-prepared.

However, HN is also the reading-my-lunch entertainment for all these smart people, who are not immune to repostings of old programming rants, reposts for reddit, or yet another "how to become a better leader" or "10 ways to sell your 20th startup."

I propose the Blogless Challenge. How many HN karma points can you amass WITHOUT having a blog that you are trying to scare traffic towards, without any external links?

This does not fulfill any overt commercial purpose for posters or readers, but it might be an interesting way to experiment with what makes powerful ideas on HN, and, by extension, life.

I pledge to take this challenge. HN will be my blog, not my actual blog. When I troll HN, I AM TROLLING HN not trying to trick you into clicking through.

Who will play this game? Especially challenging is that you have to create a new account. Some famous programmer cannot just blow me out of the water because they link to their blog about their new Lisp.
Exactly. Next stop, type 2 diabetes.
Firefox 4 beta supports the transitions beautifully, and very performant too (noticeably smoother than Chrome).
Exactly. In this case just search for "sail" in the submission title:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/sail?sort=by_date

Doing this has often led me to articles of interest I would otherwise not have found, and I believe that cross-referencing like this is potentially of use, a little now, potentially more later.

However, with a karma of nearly 14k but an average of 2.29 it's clear that such cross-referencing rarely gets upvotes. A quick check of my comments shows that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RiderOfGiraffes

Net result is that I'm probably mostly wasting my time. More than once I've considered stopping, more than once my mild obsessive/compulsive tendencies have caused me to carry on. I am again considering stopping and using HN differently. My "contributions" are rarely upvoted much, and that suggests my interests aren't that good a fit for the current population.
That margin on the right is actually part of the UI. The screen has probably symmetrical margins.
don't forget to herp before you derp!

Seriously, the whole concept he was trying to convey just whooshed over your head so loudly that I could hear it from my home in Maine.
Two firesheep denial-of-service attacks
> There is nothing inherently more healthy about a vegetarian diet than a non-vegetarian diet.

Can you provide a reference for this totally unsupported assertion? There is a wealth of evidence that contradicts this statement. Here is a link to one highly respected and large study - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

> How do you think they fatten up animals before slaughter? By feeding them meat? No, by feeding them grain.

What? This comment is stupid on so many levels I don't know where to start. Here's a short list

- These animals are 'by definition' different to humans. You can't extend results beyond species.

- The animals are mostly dedicated herbivores. Feeding them meat would make them sick and very unhealthy to consume.

- Meat is a lot more expensive to produce than grain. It takes about 10 calories of plant material to produce 1 calorie of meat. Using meat to produce meat would be uneconomical and ultimately unsustainable.

- I'm not sure about the 'species BMI' they aim for but I would have thought that meat from 'obese' cows wouldn't be all the popular. I thought consumers generally tried to avoid the obvious fat.
They are trademarked names that are being used to refer directly to what is named. As such, there is no chance of "consumer confusion", and their use should be perfectly legal.
Most of the research and theory that I've seen on the subject espouses the idea that the type of food that you eat has a significant effect on hunger level, not that the type of calorie matters wrt weight loss.

So you'll lose the same amount of weight if you eat the same number of calories of HFCS and beef jerky, but you'll be horribly hungry all day eating the HFCS while you'll feel satiated on the jerky.
Or: As a company, we really value work/life balance. It's just a coincidence that promotions go to people who value the former over the latter.
Removing 2,500 or more buttons throughout the city would require a lot of man-hours, transporting, storing and disposing of the old buttons. There would also be wiring to remove or block off, cover plates to be made, distributed and installed. And hopefully some sort of communication to the entire population of the city including visitors to explain why the buttons are going away.
rails and jquery
hosted on heroku
recurly for payments
http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/
If an exception is thrown in a Coffeescript program, does the runtime correctly report the original Coffeescript line numbers instead of that of the compiled Javascript? Things like this are the main reason why I'm wary of compilers that compile to another high-level language.
Lots of organizations function this way informally, many open source projects are run this way, not to mention co-ops and other alternative companies.
Link to the live collaboration demo: https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html

edit: updated link to saikat's suggestion