skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back when I finished my undergrad in '06, the general perspective I ran into was, "oh, you didn't do open source. shame. don't call us back".

I spent my time trying to do well in school, not contribute unpaid work to open source.
In two respects, really--first, that it's reprehensible for a physician to jeopardize people's lives in this way, and second, that the magnitude of the motive (only half a million dollars) is nowhere close to the magnitude of this evil.
Humour us, what is this third option? It's possible to describe somebody's point of view without agreeing with it yourself so I don't see why you need to dodge like this.

For example (I believe in evolution): "some creationists commonly argue that some constructs in biology, such as eyes, are too complex to have evolved from simpler systems. They call this concept irreducibility".

See?

If you're interested in a clean and logical discussion, which you seem to imply that you are, then you need to at least participate first!
Also when Thimerosal was removed from most of the vaccines in 2001 it had no affect on Autism rates. This was pretty much the last nail in the coffin for that hypothesis, yet the meme continues.
Whoa horsey. Slow down a bit.

I'm not saying nothing is provable. I'm not even saying that nothing is useful.

What I'm saying is that if I had a zillion dollars, a magic wand, a dumptruck of pixie dust, and a flying unicorn? I still wouldn't be able to create an institution that I would feel comfortable with as being a steady generator of innovation. In addition, I can observe that, as you point out, these things are sociological in nature, not mathematical. I can further observe that lots of people make lots of money selling books and giving speeches and such claiming to be able to make the perfect institution. Since these people continue to generate new ideas and continue to write books and charge for speeches and seminars and such, I believe it is reasonable to assume they have no fully satisfactory answers. I can further observe that many institutions have spent tremendous amounts of money and effort into creating environments that spawn invention and innovation -- to very mixed results.

All of these observations lead me to a great deal of skepticism in regards to your statement. That doesn't mean that what you say has no value. I'm sure we could all agree on general attributes that most of the time provide more return than others. But that's a long way from the certainty I was hearing. People talk about fostering innovation and entrepreneurship like it was turning on a light, and that kind of certainty is ludicrous. It's nothing at all like that. All I was trying to do was provide context.

I'm done here. No desire to get into an infinite argument stream. Good thoughts. Thank you for sharing them.
Apparently crossed in the mail, so to speak:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073691
Whereas I think that anyone who drags Thimerosal into this debate -- roughly a decade after it was removed from vaccines in response to mass hysteria -- deserves to have a bucket of water poured over their head and sent home.

Just because an argument isn't made out of unsupported hand-waving doesn't mean that it isn't recycled garbage. Citations and glib technical language can be copied and pasted just as easily as mindless rants.

It is not enough to hold debates. One must also have the guts to draw conclusions.

Meanwhile, what's conspicuously missing from this particular cloud of chaff is a concise summary of the most recent epidemiological data. Should we not have plenty of that by now? Thanks to Wakefield, we have conducted an "experiment" over the last decade or so: Hysteria is up, and the vaccination rate is down. As a result, the incidence of preventable disease is measurably higher. Surely, if there is a correlation between autism and vaccination, the autism rate must now be significantly lower in these new unvaccinated populations? Or can we at least try to establish how many more kids have to suffer or die before we can draw that conclusion?
This is something that doesn't get stated enough. Great link.

For example, Richard Branson credits working out and staying in shape with much of his success.

I kind of see physical fitness on two sides--internal and external.

Internally, if you're in better shape you're capable of performing better for longer periods of time. Less time sick, etc.

Externally, there is a lot of social science that thinner, i.e. more attractive, people are viewed as more disciplined, get better promotions, make more money, etc.

That doesn't mean you can't be successful as someone that's not attractive or thin, but all things constant, why put yourself at a disadvantage? I say all of this not as someone who is thin, but someone who's taken a prolonged approach to being in better shape. When I graduated college I was at 255, and now I'm at 200. I could stand to lose some more weight, but the effects of eating better, working out and sleeping better have been of immeasurable benefit.
Zynga needs Facebook. My wife would have never started playing any of Zynga's games if there were not on Facebook, and neither would most of those whom I know play these games (my mom, sisters, etc.). In fact, I expect almost all of them would _stop_ playing these games if they were taken off of Facebook.

Online games much, much better than Farmville and Cityville existed for a long time before Zynga came around and none of these people played online games. Now, since it's integrated with Facebook (meaning it's easy to get to and play constantly, and has a good introduction vector) and since you can do nice little things like help your friends, Facebook denziens eat it up. It's weird.
Sorry, but you clearly have no clue what people here want and don't want to believe.

I generally see a more hesitant view here on HN than anywhere else when it comes to doctors and pharma companies, generally because their advice and drugs are not highly scrutinised or peer reviewed.

However, what I see a lot of here on HN is basic common sense. Smallpox killed ~400 million people in the 20th century, that's not even accurate statistics as we largely wiped out the disease in the latter decades. It was also the cause of 1/3 of all blindnesses.

I fail to see how "not wanting to believe" vaccinations 'causing' autism is even relevant to the debate. I don't even see how a proven causal link between vaccinations and autism would even be relevant to the vaccination debate. I god honest don't give a fuck if vaccinations cause autism unless it's >1/2 because my child's risk of dying in an unvaccinated world is about 50/50 if I'm lucky.

IIRC measles mortality in the US currently stands at 4 in 100 million because of vaccinations. Before the vaccine was licensed measles cases averaged around 450 thousand per year. Within five years of the vaccine being licensed the number of reported cases dropped to ~20 thousand (note: a 22-fold drop in cases), when the second dose was recommended the cases dropped to the current baseline of a statistical zero thousand within five years.

This is equivalent to 68-thousand lives saved per year for the measles vaccination.

If you want to live without vaccination, sure go ahead. However I think you should be forced to pay for the 19 other vaccinations it requires to keep herd immunity that keeps people like you safe from deadly diseases like measles.
Interesting to see this convergence of syntax. Unfortunately, it's not true that you don't have to learn a "new syntax." As often with Ruby libraries, the devil is in the subtleties.

This does not work (although I think it could):

{"foo bar": 'b'}

but this does:

{:"foo bar" => 'b'}

Without being truly JSON compatible, it's only moderately useful.

One annoyance of Ruby for me has always been that many libraries, such as Rails, allow for symbols or strings interchangeably - but only in "most" cases, often leading to head banging in the other cases.

More intrigue: the syntaxes are also mixable

{foo: 'bar', "add-a" => 'dash', :'or a' => 'space in a symbol'}

is valid.
I was doing hardcore Drupal 4/5/6 for about 4 years, but have been out of the loop for a while. Perhaps somebody can answer these for me:

1) Have any significant improvements been made to simplify and streamline the Drupal Forms API?

2) Is there now any easy and reliable way to define models/CCK-types in code rather than web interface?

3) Is there now a programmatic schema and data migrations solution that does not have to be used from a web interface?

4) Do modules still have to be named *.module ?

5) Has any namespacing been put into place?

6) Have any new measures been put into place to discourage developers from putting SQL queries in template code?

7) Do modules and "node" objects have better OOP integration?

Thanks
First you should come up with a good idea, from looking at your initial post it looks like you don't have an actual idea. Than hire programmers or outsource your development work. Without completely quitting your practice.

Just curious, how many years did you spend completing your education? A medical doctor with an electrical engineering degree is quite rare.
It's like wheel of fortune, except the airline _always_ wins.

Wow, I don't know why the parent isn't at 40+ karma.

(and you can mod me down for that ... I'll forgive you and I'm over it...)
Slower than my_dict = { "foo": 1, "baz": 2 }

I was unaware that there was a difference in performance, but a quick timing check shows that it takes about twice as long to create a dictionary with 7 items using dict() than using {}.

It makes sense when I stop to think about what the code would have to do, though.
That's interesting because I don't put in hard work until my employer proves they deserve it. Someone has to make the first move. Do you see the dilemma here?
I guess it's all about balance. A lot of these foods get eaten because they are quick and simple and easy to distribute round the office for late night food runs. I don't see many late night salad delivery joints. I've been guilty of it myself far too often.

That said I completely agree with the article. There's no point working/eating yourself to death if you can't enjoy the proceeds. Take some time out from work/coding. Cook a nice healthy meal and follow up with some exercise.
Air pollution monitoring worldwide
In case anyone doesn’t get it, the comic (and its lapel button), the yellow words to the left, and the phrase "The Comedian" are a reference to the fantastic graphic novel Watchmen.
Some older comments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013346

Surprisingly enough I could not get a hit with k-grams of

"Almost but not quite entirely unlike tea."

But k-grams of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" worked.
or just Facebook needs Zynga for its numbers
I have looked back in the notes from my last startup. I was CTO and I had to spend time doing fund raising, making sales calls, editing documentation and designs, going to customer meetings. I was never full time in development. I wrote 69 times as much code as the least productive developer and 12 times as much as our "Lead Programmer". Based on my experience 10x is a low estimate. I would say that some people are 100x as productive as others in developing software.
Dogfight Erupts in Plane Ticket Sales
oh really?

Are you a Ruby dev?

If so, is your concern based on the impact this has on you personally, or is it based on concern for some mythical other dev who might have problems with the additional "cognitive cost"?

I've been a developing in Ruby now for about 4 years, I think this (the new syntax) is absolutely the right thing to do
I figure it's like the "Bill Gates will send you $20 for every person you forward this to" chain e-mails.
I don't now much about the flight industry. What do GDS and TMC stand for?

I'm assuming that OTA is the Open Travel Alliance.
yes, it is easy to imagine things, but i disagree that idea guys should be shunned as TK did. if they provide the creative spark that gets a company to an eventually successful idea, that has value.

yes, hackers can go from idea to concept alone - but that's only if you have a creative brain to get you that idea. not everyone has a creative side, so those guys need idea guys, no?
Hint: you can fit more if you melt them.
Hey AT&T, why don't you forget 4G for now and concentrate on making Edge and 3G work first.
Your walking speed may predict your life span
In my last startup we used 3 Measures for productivity.
Number of functions/procedures/methods, Number of lines of non-comment code and the number of defects found in the
code. I wrote far more code than anybody else in the
company. I took on all the really hard stuff that other developers had already failed at. My number of defects per line of code and per function/procedure/method was always lower than all the other developers.

So I would choose to politely disagree. You can measure productivity.
There's no hard minimum processor requirement for Honeycomb. Via http://twitter.com/#!/morrildl/status/22845294886518785
> often want something (...) ridiculously difficult & complicated

... and that most likely adds no value to the product.

More often than not they don't even come up with an original one. They just jumble together a bunch of buzzwords and or ideas they lifted from some already entrenched competitor.
I fully expect that in 5 years a good portion of members who are active on Hacker News today will still not have launched any startups, there will be plenty of debate over which frameworks/languages are the best, lots of discussions about how to handle scaling problems, and plenty of threads about whether it's better to stick with a six-figure job or go the startup route.
Wow downvotes? I don't agree with most of this position but this viewpoint is while an anecdote and not based solidly in science is valid. Certainly a healthy balanced diet creates a healthier body and something everyone should implement whether they are managing a chronic illness or not.

I don't agree with not vaccinating as a general rule, but I am not overly familiar with cystic fibrosis so I am not aware of what risks sufferers have and what medications sufferers are asked to use. Certainly this is still relying on heard immunity for things like measles, mumps, polio and the like. Healthy living does not prevent these diseases.

Could you describe why you chose not to vaccinate for anything?

Another position I will agree with, though it is only implied in the comment is doctors seem to over prescribe medication. Whether it is a desire to help, or be seen to do something or just laziness to get onto the golf course. Certainly I have seen this anecdotally, I am often offered antibiotics when I don't really need them. Things like presenting with flu symptoms and being given a script to prevent a throat infection.
Thimerosal may have been removed from vaccines in 2001/2003, but because it was used as a preservative, vaccines made before then were not taken off the shelf and recalled and still used! According to this link below some up until 2007. Then, the swine flu had Thimerosal which was given to children as well.

"One point that was repeatedly stated was that except for the flu shot, all vaccines that have been offered to parents since 2003 have been thimerosal free. This is not the case.

Because parents in the autism community are very concerned about the prospect of their children getting mercury in their vaccines, many of them routinely ask to see the packaging before their child gets a shot. What some parents are finding is that vaccines with the full 25 micrograms of mercury are still being distributed in doctors offices, some with an expiration date of 2007."

http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2005/08/still-finding...
array() isn't a function, it's just PHP array literal syntax.

$x = array("a" => 100); // legal
$y = my_func("a" => 100); // illegal
Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
Not to detract from your excellent reply, but I believe most of the Android source is under the Apache 2.0 license (http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html). So even folks who've been distributed a copy of the software are not entitled to the source for most of Android (there are some exceptions, such as the Linux kernel used by Android).
The New Physics of Tennis
The problem is that C systems have masters. What happens when the master becomes network isolated? The election and recovery process is tricky. If 100% consistency is assumed, there MUST an outage period until this is recognized and corrected.
The arguments may be bunk, but I do think we should challenge our base assumptions from time to time. From that perspective I find this sort of thing fun.
This reads like you think that Twitter users and non-Twitter users cannot find a way to communicate or that they occupy two distinct segments of the population. This is crazy.
The founders left a long time ago. Bart went on to do Tapulous, and Geoffrey went to Bessemer to be an EIR, then to DanceJam, and then back to Bessemer, I think?
We can all hear the collective groan when Steve Balmer said table PCs will run Windows. I don't question his devotion to Microsoft, but I seriously wished he has a bit more imagination.
Most interesting one that I found was woot
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=woot&year_sta...
its actually used in the 1800s
Agreed, just because they raised $30M doesn't mean they have to be sold for more than that. Many investors would likely be happy with getting some of their money back at this point.
Finallyfast.com Maker to Refund Thousands in Spyware Case
> provide the creative spark that gets a company to an eventually successful idea

It's not the idea that has value - it's its execution. Every morning I come up with two or three crazy ones. Ideas are cheap.
Powerpack iPhone 4 Battery Case
Battery type:Li-Polymer battery Capacity:1600 mAhStandby Time:Up to 240 hoursTalk Time:Up to 6 hoursAudio Playback: Up to 30 hoursVideo Playback Up to 8 hoursOutpu voltage/current : 5V , 500mA(Max)
A C programmer may not have the same productivity as a Ruby programmer - but when you need to write a device driver for Unix/Linux or a Windows System service - Ruby is not a decent choice. Productivity needs to be relative to the task at hand and choosing the correct language for the job is part of that task.
The example chosen for the first half of this blog post was rather annoying: water boils at 100C by definition, and thus there has never been any scientific debate about this.

And yet, his point is made. :-)
I question exactly how long-lived this new wealth is or will be.

Look at the Rothschilds - they have figured out a way to take the initial 1700s wealth and keep it (we can assume mostly) together in a relatively cohesive lump for some 300 years.

A less "notorious" example would be the duPonts, easily trillionaires if you were to add up the wealth accumulated amongst this wealthy family.

Against that, someone worth $100 million who gives 90% of it away when he/she passes doesn't seem all that significant.

Not sniping, just expressing a contrary POV to consider...
Empire Wedding Dresses, Wholesale Empire Waist Wedding Dresses
Show HN: a hash-based Lua code snippet store
http://www.luabits.com:7777/help - a key-value store with a naive editor on top, which allows you to reduce your app to a single SHA-1 hash value if the app is pure Lua - the hash for the initial snippet that you can retrieve from the web.

e.g. if I tell you to give a shot to 5f564ee0eca0ce524ea094e73c3056454948fa37 I can with some level of confidence say that if you run it, it will do what I expect it will do - print a string, call another bit, which in turn will print a string and grab another bit, which in turn print "hello world".

One other idea is that if this were to talk with a DHT, one could run a "web of code" - where deploying the code would mean just distributing a SHA-256/SHA-512 hash to the target that will run the code...

Will appreciate any feedback.

p.s. the idea is obviously not unique to Lua - you can do the same way with any other dynamic language, just that I personally prefer Lua.

p.p.s. The stack is mongrel2 + lua + redis running on a VPS, so I am very curious how it performs performance-wise.
So, you're becoming a hacker...
Right. They have ten years of .NET penetration into the corporate world, the web, and 3rd party application developers - plus four years of .NET integration right into their operating systems.

It is running on everything from embedded systems, to phones, to desktops, to clusters. Throw in that all the hardware vendors who are interested in "the Next Windows" and Microsoft has just laid out a roadmap for the next ten years.
Journal’s Article on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage
http://www.luabits.com:7777/help - a clickable link.
Though Ruby 1.9 itself doesn't agree ;-)

[03:17:49 ~]$ irb
ruby-1.9.2-p0 :001 > { a: 10 }
=> {:a=>10}
Well your latter link is a study based on primates, to which diseases and vaccines have markedly different reactions, so without further information is wholly irrelevant to the debate. Especially considering the fact that measles testing on Rhesus Macaques (IIRC the most accurate measure for measles to humans) has to use specially selected strains or all data is irrelevant due to the monkeys immune system responding wholly different from the human immune system. What assurances are there that the test on these vaccines was even controlled in such a way to ensure the right strains of vaccines were used.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/story_print.html?id=2408084&#...

So riddle me this. Why did a peer reviewed Polish Study find that the MMR vaccine actually showed decreased autism rates over a standard measles vaccination, when the anti-vaccination groups constantly talk about 'vaccine overload'. A triple vaccine should seriously be harder on the system than a single, so why is the evidence suggesting it is either wholly irrelevant or actually beneficial by decreasing autism rates?

Autism-vaccination link researches have the god awful stench that cold fusion and perpetual motion physicists had several decades ago. The original evidence was wholly and undeniably fabricated, but you're posting links to articles that tout they're proving Wakefield right... I'm sorry but all they're showing is that they're producing results that show an unintentional bias because they obviously care that they prove Wakefield right.

You don't have good science until a scientist does it that is happy whether or not he is right or wrong. The anti-vaccination scientists are consistently producing bad science and are consistently bad scientists.
Is pizza that bad? I home cook all pizza ($1-$2 per pizza), and it doesn't seem too bad if you look at the ingredients. Pizza + salad seems perfectly healthy.

Flour + tomato + cheese + onion + garlic + olive oil + whatever you put on your pizza.
I wonder if he realizes that "the experts" include a massive cartel that openly fixes prices.
Just occurred to me that Facebook is the Compuserve of this decade. I wonder if it'll stand the test of time better than its predecessors?
> SLC, but good guess.

Given your username (which I just noticed) it was a downright horrible guess :)
I agree with the others who talk about keeping the day job while developing some ideas.

Are you dead set on a Web startup? I do embedded c in the medical industry. The company I work for now( ~250 Million in sales) was started by a surgeon in 1978.

It might be worth staying in your field, and keeping your eyes open. Then when you find the problem you can fix, leap!
The article does not contain the word "CISC"...
Things about the Endless Facebook Speculation that Have to Be Said
Notice that the word "excellent", used to describe the google app engine terms, from which the heroku terms are derived, has been deleted. A little bit of Heroku's soul just died...
You have a very active creative brain, then.
Combining Haml with jQuery Mobile makes it pretty much mandatory:

#main_page{:"data-role" => 'page'}
A universal binary format would be something like what Apple uses now to support both PowerPC and x86 versions of an application within the same file.