skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On one hand, the healthcare law is a source of tremendous uncertainty for physicians. As so-called 'medico-legal' liability standards continue to become more stringent, and physicians are increasingly burdened with administrative costs, the profession is itself in rapid flux.

From my perspective, there are probably three important things occurring at a fundamental level which may be likely to dramatically change medicine in the relatively short-term.

1. Electronic medical records and more accountability in medicine through the (eventual) re-alignment of incentives for hospitals and physician practices.

EMR makes it fundamentally easier to track where a physician practice's money is flowing, and to collect data on the effectiveness of treatments for different classes of patients. Right now, physician practices are not incentivized to focus on metrics from a business standpoint because its often not (a) viable from a cost standpoint or (b) able to be easily actionable for the physicians. As EMR technology continues to improve (see Practice Fusion for an example of a great technology which is incidentally free) and as the policy environment slowly adapts to incentivize doing what's best for the patient, I think outcomes will improve. This is, IMO, the messiest problem confronting medicine today.

2. Genetics and genetics research

I work for a diagnostic genetics startup. DNA sequencing technology is finally getting to the point where doing business in this field is able to be viable from a cost standpoint. As sequencing technology becomes 'democratized' to the extent that individual research labs are able to purchase essentially desktop sequencers to conduct research, the quality and breadth of genetics research will probably be significantly greater.

3. Bio-engineering

MIT recently added a bio-engineering major. Much of the early-stage research occurring at MIT, Rice, and other colleges with dedicated bio-engineering departments is extremely interesting. I hope that more colleges and the government will put money into translational research programs aimed at bringing discoveries in the lab into the clinic. Though I'm not qualified to write about this in depth, I considered attending graduate school in bio-engineering and found much of the research in tissue engineering and the like to be very, very interesting. It's just so early that it's hard to tell. However, I've found bioengineering departments to have this sort of inspiring zeitgeist pervading them that I imagine is similar to how physics felt at the dawn of the 20th-century. They aren't exactly sure what they're doing, they simply can't be at this early stage, but they know it has the potential to be very important.

I think that medicine will remain viable. Things will change, that's for sure, but I think it can be a net win.
Notion ink Adam is really the only thing on the horizon. Since it runs android you can use any android pdf reader and since it has a pixelQi screen it should have decent battery life and a nice readable screen.

Only downside is it's not actually available yet. Pre-orders should be starting soon though.
Breaking HTML parsers for fun
Because the world spends 700 billion minutes every month looking at facebook.com
Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos
The text of the bill says you need to initiate the investment prior to December 31st, not realize the gains from it -- and from that point, they must be held for five years. Am I reading that wrong?
I'm a big NASA supporter, but this whole episode has made me think they deserve a little less funding.

From the way they handled the whole thing from the start with the "aliens, but living here" spin to finding out the results aren't all that solid, it seems they need to clean some house.
The first experiment would be to determine if Arsenic is present. A quite direct experiment would be to take advantage of the anomalous scattering of As vs. P by using a tunable X-ray source (synchrotron). By using a wavelength of just over 1 Angstrom As will be quite distinct from P.

I would expect the radius and pitch not be drastically influenced. However, three dimensional structural prediction is quite difficult and it feels a bit uncomfortable speculating.
Bingo. The comment with the highest signal-to-noise ratio on this thread.

Speaking for myself. I am (though don't do much directly along these lines anymore) a decent engineer and programmer. Nothing spectacular. But I definitely struggled with more advanced math and physics. I have no doubt that had I majored in, say, Math and spent the same amount of time I did on my engineering degree it would have been very difficult. Yet, I knew people who considered Math an "easy" degree at the same school.
> But the query takes almost a second

I don't think the existence of a join is sufficient to slowness like this

> and when the DB is always worried about consistency and stuff so writes are kind of slow too.

Has nothing to do with relational data per se. Unless you're using foreign keys and calling that a join (which is actually fair). NoSQL stores typically do lots of work to ensure consistency and many support multi-statement transactions on top of this. Unless we're talking about only keeping data in memory but you can make a relational db do that.

> If you need some related data, you make another query based on the key stored in the first piece of data. Each query takes a fraction of a second, together they don't take as long as the full join query

That is exactly how a join is executed under the hood. Loop over rows in one table, look up a value in another table. However, the db won't force you to join based on a key. If all you're doing is looking up unique keys there's no way multiple calls will be faster unless all the data won't fit on one machine.
List of freely available programming books
I get the feeling people treat it like any other long computer message or dialog box (scan, ignore).
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971507

Many comments there.
HTML5 Speech Recognition (in Chrome)
None of this is news :)
Why the P2P DNS project will not work:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972834
I don't think I'm doing anything illegal here, by posting the coupon that Manning sent out for free yesterday to the subscribers to the "Deal of the day" list.
This coupon will permit to buy this book (paper and pdf) for 25$: dotd1205ccb

I highly suggest this book, it's definitely one of the best about Erlang. I also suggest subscribing to the ML, some books from Manning are great (thinking about the joy of Clojure for example).
Dates back to Fortran, a language that was designed primarily to work on real numbers, for scientific calculation. They needed whole numbers or "integers" -- but they didn't have the concept of type declarations yet (or it was a hodgepodge and non-standard) -- so they came up with a convention that variables whose names began with i through (some upper bound I don't remember) were integers.

Since loop indices are integers it made sense that their names should begin with I. If your outer loop's variable is named I and you all of a sudden need an inner loop, what are you going to name it? J of course. Which is how this convention began.

Obviously today's programming languages not only allow you to declare the types of variables, many of them support variable types depending on what's been stored in a variable. But this was at the dawn of the computer era, before such coolness had come about.
Clickety: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3JCSMGJ
The U.S map gets trendy with Google autocomplete
I'd be happier with "a certain degree of change" now and then if it didn't always require a full privacy audit on my part to find whatever new opt-out pain-in-the-ass they've slipped in without telling me. They've proven themselves so untrustworthy in this regard that even the updates that seem like they shouldn't have privacy effects need to be audited; and of course it doesn't matter that a particular update doesn't have a privacy violation, because you still need to run the audit to be sure.
Do you need to be in the US to take these online courses?

Are there foreign students taking classes from outside the US, then coming in to work once they've finished and get into OPT?
In the guided tour and blog post, it says that the photos displayed at the top of your "new profile" are "recently tagged photos". Most of the ones that keep showing up for me are very old. Is everybody else experiencing that?

It also seems like the order of the photos is somewhat randomized when I go to view all of my photos (as opposed to being reverse chronological order). Weird.
Pre-roll commercials are lame as interactive video is required on the Internet
Could be this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287110
A web of trust would not need to be too deep to start working. After all, it takes just a couple of acquaintance hops to connect 90% of the people on Earth. Not sure about the 6-degrees-of-separation thing, but it's probably on the order of that.

The greater problem of a distributed system would be public key revocation, because you have to go through your entire contacts list to publish a new key.
"Share: Question" doesn't do anything (ajax 404).
In most academic disciplines reading and critically analysing current research on a particular topic is a fundamental part of generating research papers.

Even startup founders competing in the fast-moving world of business seem to find time to read and give feedback on things that interest them. I don't think a shortage of people willing to review papers is going to be a problem, and if it is, it's a problem that could easily be solved by the prestigious open access journals requiring those submitting papers to set aside time to participate in the peer review process of others' papers
I don't really get it ... people actually use Facebook profiles?

Personally I almost never leave the home page ...
Another change that must be fairly recent:

If you admin a fan page, you can now see instant info on each post, including number of impressions and percent of feedback..

"174 Impressions
Raw number of times this story has been seen on your Wall and in the News Feed of your Fans
· 0.57% Feedback"
I did not say that non-profit means free.

Please note that my comment regarding non-profit status is a response to the claim that the purpose of scientific journals "is to make money". If this claim is true, that their purpose is in fact to make money, then they are fraudulently representing themselves to tax authorities when they claim to be non-profit organizations.
I can only conclude that this is an ironic statement implying that we need database joins to keep a web server responsive...
The paper refers to whether a monopolist should set different prices to the two types of customers (high value or low). They find that the answer is no. The part that is confusing you (I think), is in the next paragraph, where the paper then finds that if the monopolist however offers an enhanced service based on purchasing history, it does become optimal to set two different prices. Also by "never profitable", they don't mean that the monopolist won't make any profit, it's just that they won't be able to increase profit.
When I read articles like this, I always feel sheepish for not knowing more about tools I use all day. Great tidbit!

Did anyone else find that giant banner with an inspirational slogan and an image of the robot they sell at Best Buy a little distracting? It doesn't appear to be a banner ad...
Your argument strikes me as knee-jerk cynicism.

Facebook wants to be around for a long time. Facebook wants people to get value out of their site. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme where the objective is to strip-mine their users. A necessary condition for Facebook making any money is that people enjoy their service. If they don't implement it, it's because they don't think it'd be valuable to enough people to be worth the opportunity cost of having people implement it, not because they think it would hurt ad revenue.

It seems to be a popular sentiment that any ad-supported company hates their users, and I don't get it. It's true for spam but it isn't true for companies that want to be around for more than a year.
While that may be good advice for Mary, it is infuriatingly inadequate as a response to the problem. This is like when it was discovered that passenger airbags exploded with such force[0] that they were able to decapitate short women and children (and short men, but there are fewer of them), and the response was to suggest that they not sit in the front seat anymore.

When a change to a system adds a frill for a large group at the cost of making it more dangerous for a small group, glibly responding that the small group should just not use the system is inadequate.

[0] The force was calibrated to protect a typical adult male who was not seatbelted. Which would be fine if not for the HUGE negative side effect.
I'll highlight an interesting phenomenon with respect to your assertion that the most important talent is meta-analysis: the effect of a coach.

Some people have no capacity at all for meta-analysis, but succeed because they have a great coach. Someone to give them direction and feedback and strategy and who will make sure they are making maximum use of their opportunities.

This cuts both ways: marginal musicians can have great managers and producers that will insure success for (seemingly) any warm body that fits the mold. Hence the "boy band". Similarly, fantastic musicians that don't always see the bigger picture and have their finger on the pulse of the industry might fail. (substitute any endeavor for "music" in this case).
You'd probably do the same thing expect you add a column users.reviews and books.reviews that are lists of ids. For example Joe.reviews would contain a list of reviews by Joe. Essentially you're doing what a good database would do for you...
I didn't know facebook was broken, so I'm skeptical about the fix. When people use a service for months or years and you change it, making them adapt to the new conditions (as minor as that adaptation might be), they better be able to recognize some concrete improvements to the new structure. This will motivate them to embrace the change.

It'll be interesting to see peoples' reactions to the overhaul.
You know you can do this already, right? People can tag me all they want in photos, only I see it.

The control are there and they're not that hard to find (IMO of course). Is your problem that they're not there, or that they're not easy to use?
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/01/20/facebooks-page-admi...
I wonder why Facebook moved away from easy Twitter-style status posting. It used to be (about two versions ago) that the "what's on your mind" textbox was open by default and it was easy to post a status. For sometime now, you have to click "Status" first to do it, which almost seems like they'd like to discourage users from doing it?
Roadmap for becoming a better teacher
Funnily enough, I never downvoted you once.

Just wanted to set the record straight.

I don't roll like that ;)
They left those other digits undefined to add the extras you mention at a later stage. It just takes a while for the paperwork to go through :)
Actually, this expertise is a rather well studied topic in cognitive psychology. If I remember correctly, people become experts after 10,000 hours of practice.

Additionally, there is very little variation due to talent. Most "talent" comes purely from practice.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, this just what I remember from lecture in my cog psych class.
I was pretty happy with my cybook before leaving it on an airplane. Don't go Kindle, unless you want to support them after dropping WikiLeaks, thus taking the freedom of the press and flushing it down the toilet.
And you still can't export your friends (except for the useless text list of names).
When you click Status, it auto-focuses. So isn't it still a one-click process?
I disagree (respectfully).

I actually think traditional peer review (2-4 anonymous editors, generally old-boys in their field) is really, really broken. Arxiv and the like functions just fine without it because you get peer reviewed in the open by everyone; if you matter, people subscribe to your papers and try to poke holes in them or start citing them. Also, if you have a new theory that challenges the old guard it won't make it into the journals; with open discussion, if you can back up your crackpot theories with data and theorems they get accepted. (Remember that the "ether" was an obvious truth in the late 1800's in physics; this is a worse problem in the non-hard "sciences" like sociology.)

I think the "peer review" offered by traditional academic publishing process sucks, and the sooner we get away from it the better. The old style peer review USED to work in that it kept complete garbage out of the printed journals that got sent around.
Well I wish you good luck. Be sure to weigh the pros/cons of each career path that can get you to similar goals - MD vs PhD vs NP/PA. Is there a particular field of medicine that interests you the most?
This is just a small part of STEM application. Some of the tier3-5 univs apply way more than 700 apps each every year. Another thing to note is the lot of students graduating from STEM branches in IVY league schools are not F-1 visa holders but citizens of US.
Perhaps this illustrates the need to revamp profiles.
Meh. If you don't have "database joins", meaning SQL queries that have the word JOIN in them, then you end up effectively replicating the join in your glue code somewhere (either on the insert side or on the query side). And if you put the join in the code, it is algorithmically fixed; there is no chance that the database can optimise this for you.

On the other hand, if you write your query in SQL on a moderately normalised database, you have the potential for the database itself to figure out what to denormalise, and what to parallelise, and any other sorts of optimisations it might do. It just has to know what the typical queries are.

There's a lot of power in using a declarative rather than an imperative paradigm.
Is there a way to revert to the old profile? I don't want to click "Get the New Profile" unless I can switch back if I want.
Evidence-based medicine is another factor pushing in that direction. There's been a move away from the idea of doctors as professionals exercising case-by-case judgment, and more towards scientifically validated treatment methods.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about that. On the one hand, it seems bad, that instead of having the freedom to exercise situation-specific judgment, doctors are increasingly being pressured to follow predefined flow charts and rubrics, turning it into a sort of cookie-cutter medicine. On the other hand, the statistical evidence in some cases is actually pretty good: for at least a few kinds of things that have been tested, doctors who mindlessly follow a validated process have, on average, better outcomes than the more traditional approach. One explanation that's been advanced for that is that humans are not very good at conditional probabilities, so doctors often make intuitive decisions that, if you run the numbers, aren't statistically the best choice, based on available data. If so, they're better off strictly following a data-derived procedure rather than trying to improvise.
Weird. I definitely did not have that on pages this September, when I was actively managing a page for an event. I'd have been very happy if I had.
ASK HN: Easy ways for a web developer to make online cash? 
I'm looking for some ways to make some cash online. I'm thinking of writing some Wordpress themes and selling them online. What could be some good avenues to creating some passive income online?

My Dev skills are: jQuery, HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, SQL and Coldfusion.
I'm heavily experience in Photoshop and Design.

Any thoughts? I'm a college kid looking for a way to get some cash.
He recommends the "Nook" (not Nook color) in two cases:

>I want to be able to read ebooks that I check out from my local library: Nook or Sony Reader Daily Edition PRS-950

>I want to be able to go online and check email, use Wikipedia, read news, etc. on my device: Kindle or Nook

He seems to prefer the kindle to the nook however because ebooks are apparently cheaper on average, it has a newer eink display, the wifi version is cheaper, and it's easier to use (whatever that means...).
Flagged. Calling Assange a "homeless beggar who wants to take a shit on your carpet" adds nothing at all to the debate.

Amazon has every right to turn WL away. That they chose to do so is, IMO, unfortunate, for the reasons laid out here:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-fi...

but that's their choice to make.

And if people who wish Amazon had done otherwise want to spend their dollars elsewhere, well, that's their choice to make, too.
Thanks for this....it's not quite the same thing though.

For instance, based on that Wikipedia article:

>Stated simply, Amy and Bill are in Nash equilibrium if Amy is making the best decision she can, taking into account Bill's decision, and Bill is making the best decision he can, taking into account Amy's decision. Likewise, a group of players is in Nash equilibrium if each one is making the best decision that he or she can, taking into account the decisions of the others. However, Nash equilibrium does not necessarily mean the best cumulative payoff for all the players involved; in many cases all the players might improve their payoffs if they could somehow agree on strategies different from the Nash equilibrium (e.g., competing businesses forming a cartel in order to increase their profits).

That's not what my theory says.

The main thrust of my theory is that the players actually improve their payoffs if they make the best decisions (for themselves) that he or she can - without taking into account the decisions of the others. Because I believe, and this has to be tested of course, that if both parties do that, it will result in the best cumulative payoff for all the players involved. As opposed to the Nash equilibrium that 'encourages' players to do things like forming a cartel to improve profits - because in my theory, doing that will only lead to their eventual downfall because at some point another firm will do what is in it's own self-interest and expose the cartel. So everybody in the cartel would be worst off, but the one firm that sheds light on it, would be better off. It's an extreme version of virtuosity through extreme selfishness (if that makes any sense).

It could be that I got my theory from somewhere and just don't know the actual name, and if I did I would love to find that name. But I have not stumbled across it yet, and I guess in the back of my mind I am hoping that it is original thought.
Based on the analytics at a startup I used to work at, photos are a much better driver of user engagement than status updates. I'm guessing the same is true for facebook, and anecdotally, most of the facebook comments I receive are on photos and shared links, not status updates.
Why would arsenic wreak havoc on the polymerase?
The uses of tribal cohesion
(assuming you only care about firefox, not email, dns lookups, chat, software updates, that script that calls wget or curl, your netflix live client, etc...)

Ugh.

If you're worried about security on your email or bank account or whatever, you need to use TLS whether you're at home, at work, or on an unencrypted WLAN. You still have a lot of risk at home and at work, since you don't have end-to-end control of a tcp request. And if you're doing that, a tunnel within a tunnel doesn't buy you anything.

If you're worried about people 'sniffing' traffic on a WLAN, and building up a profile on you that can somehow be used against you, you're better off using something like TOR instead of an Ad-Hoc web-only proxy. And even then you need to take a lot of care to make sure all of the web-enabled applications you use actually use the dang proxy.
Surfrat...you couldn't have expressed my original intent in a more succinct way.

That's exactly what I was trying to get at.

Well done.