skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Privacy laws and regulations restrict what doctors can do with technology. I'm mostly happy about that obstruction, just because I know who has the greatest interest and ability to influence medical IT (the insurance companies) and what their motivations are (sell private information, deny claims, only cover healthy people.)

A guy in the oil business once told me a story about why Bangladesh's gas fields have not been thoroughly exploited yet. Basically it was a big tangle of political crap -- and according to him, Bangladeshis are very happy not to have the gas fields exploited, because they assume that both the current leadership and the opposition party are so corrupt that all the money would be stolen anyway, so it's better if the gas is not exploited until the far future when some of the money might go to the people. I have no idea if that's true or not, but it captures why I'm mostly glad that the use of technology in medicine is stuck in the dark ages. Until there is some stakeholder involved who gives a crap about patient rights and privacy (the doctors care about effective treatment, but not rights or privacy) it's best if nothing changes at all.
Couch actually uses a first-write wins model (MVCC optimistic concurrency) not a last-write-wins model. The difference between those two is huge.
As a video author, you have the option to remove the video. Youtube is primarily a video sharing site, not a money machine.
Yea, I knew the post would be vacuous when I hit "tyranny", but I guess the flourishes makes good HN bait to speak in sweeping terms like that. There's little about on-disk consistency and data loss risks, scale characteristics yet there's coverage of the wire protocol? Meh. Sure, I'm glad to have a lot of these tools available, the bad old days of rolling your stuff with Berkeley DB or NDBM seem safely behind us but the reality is that there are many classes of problems for which SQL is still and will remain the most sensible solution. Get over it.

I also don't understand the 15 years figure either, is that a reference to when MySQL was initially released? I hope the original poster understands that SQL is older than that.
Elite Quants: Hedge Fund Vs. Start-Up?
Previous post/discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2039117
Django for work, Flask for home projects, although (slowly) learning Clojure and Haskell. PHP/Wordpress/Drupal for the occasional family website.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2039117
I would like to see something similar, but that tells me what major events which happened on this day the past years.
In my personal etiquette system, things should go both ways; individuals may have certain behaviors they should engage in, but the group is not off the hook. Failing to flip the service for an off-handed person is just as much a faux pas as anything else.

Etiquette often has its reasons, so I'm actually not annoyed at etiquette per se anymore, but I'm still annoyed when the rules trump the spirit. I'm very much a "spirit of the law" sort of person when it comes down to it.
If you're a programmer, you can read software patents.

If you're a mechanical engineer, you can read mechanical patents,

If you're a farmer, you can read farming patents.

See how that works? The language is dense, and you must read carefully, but the patents I have actually read are not particularly difficult to understand.
From the article:

"When both rolls are empty, everybody has a problem."

Indeed.
'If You Don't Use Creative Accounting in Reporting to U.S. News, You're a Chump'
Has it ever occurred to you that many companies might choose to stay private in part because it offers advantages over an IPO, even ignoring SOX?

A few examples:

- Better alignment of company and investor
- Better prices for company
- Less risk if price is rejected by investor means it's easier to maximize value
- More control over company fate

Honestly, if you gave me equal cost options for private and public investment, I'd lean strongly towards private because of the strategic flexibility it offers.

I'd really only look to IPO if the amount of capital I was looking to raise was absolutely enormous and there was reason to believe that diverse ownership was better than having strategically chosen investors, and that's true with or without SOX.

The growth of VC and PE means that it's more viable than it used to be, so it happens more often.
Or you might always choose from the closest roll.
You mention that some of these solution could be used in the Financial industry. I would be cautious of using these, especially since some are eventually consistent. If you are just tracking data these may be fine though.
Cloudboard: A Cloud Clipboard. Share text and urls between Chrome installations.
I agree, ultimately it comes to everyone's own definition of "tyranny". :) I meant it as "not really having any defensible other choice". (While, of course for example CDB and BerkleyDB have "always" existed.)

I think nobody expects SQL's "market share" to fall to low levels, especially with noSQL requiring much deeper understanding of the data and it's planned use. NoSQL practically operates on a lower layer than SQL does.

Still, it's nice to see people thinking about data storage choices and not going blindly to MySQL/Oracle/etc!
I agree. And I think superficiality is different than generality or summary. It's a summary. And I appreciate the effort of some one taking the time to put their work online.
If people are finding out about these places using Yelp, Google, Groupon et al. is there really a need for a SEO friendly website? Many of these businesses don't care about a web presence because its effect would be negligible.

I suppose you could justify the cost of building out a website for the local dry cleaner, but seriously, does that help it gain any new business? I doubt it.
This isn't solely a Hot Girl thing. Hot Guys have inherent stature and power too.
I realize this is probably a pet project for the fun of it, but at least you may want to monetize the Amazon section.
One thing I liked about the article is the breakdown of programmers as either engineers or scientists. They say that physics people make some of the best programmers and from what I've seen it is because they adopt a 'scientific attitude' towards the systems. I don't mean scientific in the sense of traditional CS but rather the ability to quickly devise experiments that offer the most information for the least amount of work. When you come at a modern IT system you have have to accept that you won't have the time or resources to understand most of it at the source code level. It is better to be able to quickly experiment and synthesize the results to arrive at a working model of what is really going on. I think people with science (or even philosophy ) backgrounds can be better at this than people who did an actual CS degree.
It's $950m, not $500m. So they have $600m left to go hire a commissioned sales force.
I'm sorry, so far the only one who haven't written a single word about .ng or ccTLDs in general in this topic is you. I have to end this "retarded" back-and-forth.
I agree with that, but you know, it's very hard to find good examples. :) I'm open to better suggestions :)
Firefox equivalent is '
Bingo Sites
Whats the start-up time? i.e. when google spins up a new instance to handle traffic, how quickly can it come up?
I think the deeper analogy, if there is one, is that this is the difference between Computer Science and Computer Programming.

Or perhaps that the govt will pay for any old shit:

"My research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant MCS-83-00984."
That's the thing though. Why even practice balancing when you don't need to balance it using the contour of the fork to your benefit? It's like having a car only to put it in neutral and push it the rest of the way. Sure, you can do it on level ground and it's plain easy to ride it downhill. But if you're pushing it uphill you shouldn't think "hey, I'll just keep pushing this until I become strong enough to do this without effort", you should think "let's just use an essential function of the damn car".
Games have a tradition of being paid for, so they don't really apply to this argument.
I'll agree, Flippa is pretty popular. I follow it rather closely, so I see a lot of things that make sites sell better or worse. Most of all, you can really affect how much your auction brings in with the description you use for your site. It takes a bit to make your site stand out among all of the crappy autoblogs and such on flippa. Spend a few hours describing your site well.

There are other places, like ebay or digital point. They're OK, too.

Or, work on a private sale. Approach a competitor or customer or someone you know who may want the business.

Finally, you can drop me an email with some numbers about revenue, growth, technology, prospects, and such. I'll probably make you a fair offer.

Good luck!
In my opinion, these are all absolutely horrible infographics. They either spend several pages to tell a few irrelevant numbers (White House), or hide interesting data to a graphical mess (Almighty Dollar and How Much Does It Really Cost to Raise a Kid).

For example Almighty Dollar uses spherical layout for no good reason, which makes it much harder to compare bars and numbers behind them.
Thanks all. Your answers are consistant with the vibe I've gotten from past software patent discussions on HN. I'll lay the matter to rest.
I'm gonna go ahead and jump on the infographic-hate bandwagon. The income-by-religion one is acceptable and the hipster one is funny, but they're all mostly crap.

The idea itself isn't bad - you use a series of graphs connected by some kind of flow to try and present an ideausing solid quantitative data. Unfortunately, what mostly comes out is "throw some random graphs, some irrelevant and distracting photos and a few trying-to-hard-to-be-funny jokes and hope for the best"
Interesti.ng Nigerian domains go on sale
10 nifty touch screen apps for Windows 7 tablets
No conspiracy behind the 15 years :) I estimate that that's about the time SQL bot really mainstream (as opposed to dBase files, etc).

I'm old enough to remember somebody being threatened with firing for using SQL, because of it's bad performance compared with seeking. :)
Have you ever actually done it? The process of "fill out a form once," hit the Download button and walk away then come back an hour later to answer a few setup questions with Visual Studio is far from the onerous task you make it seem.

I'm no MS fanboy -- my current side project is PHP/LAMP all the way, but I have made money with their free tools.
This is probably the biggest misunderstanding of couchdb, imo. The versioning system in couchdb is only there to make the seamless replication possible. There's no guarantee that previous versions will exist at a future time, like in git.

Where couchdb has some immense possibilities is in distributed applications, not only server side, but also mobile phones and browsers. Since you can write and contain an entire webapp inside of couchdb, you can technically replicate the entire app to your mobile phone, and it'd work offline or online. And if you need your app on another platform--as long as it has couchdb, you can just replicate it there.

I never see this mentioned in any overviews of comparison for couchdb.

The sticking point right now, though, is that couchdb isn't on very many mobile platforms. There has only been experiments with writing couchdb on top of HTML5's localStore, and jChris et al are working on Couchdb for android.
Free Kindle Math Books
Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!

K.
The urban tribe
Writing and maintaining terribly-designed software is actually a really great way to learn software design. It makes it so that when you read about a technique or pattern, the application of that pattern is very real to you, in the sense of "Oh, if we had done this on component X of product Z, it would have prevent bugs like Y."
Heartily agreed. I actually can't tell whether the OP is kidding...? I thought almost every graphic was a nightmare.
For some reason, my brain finds the former to be worse than being unable to lend the book at all.

If I can't lend it, it's more like seeing a movie or going to a concert. I paid for the experience and now it's gone. Being only able to lend it once is really less of a lend and more of a "comes with one free trial for a friend." I think it might be the abuse of the word 'lend' that bothers me more than anything.
Wow, thanks for this reply, it's exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I've checked out those forums and most seem to have a great deal of noise, however, the stickies you mentioned in BHW do have a lot of really useful information to get started.
I think it is useful as a catalog of properties, I just think calling it a comparison or using 'vs' is a stretch.

Proverbial Apples to Oranges problem
I don't think it's so much that the government wants people to be afraid as it is CYA for the people in charge. Politicians want to claim that they've made things safer and none of them are brave enough to say: "Lets take things down a notch because they're ineffective."

It's similar to the state of "tough on crime" policies like 3 strikes and mandatory minimum sentences - even when proven ineffective no one wants to reverse the statutes for fear of being seen as weak on crime.
Yeah, but if we used TEXT instead of VARCHAR we might need two disk reads to look up the data instead of one! Fuck human life, think of that poor hard drive!
I can definitely relate to this with a point of reference. A freelance project I worked on this year was funded by an overly prideful MBA coming out of Sun Microsystems. He was very stubborn and refused to continue work until he could secure a patent despite my warning.

$5000 later his lawyers warning came by phone. It is clear to me now that he was just following some MBA checklist.
Isn't it against Google policy to have multiple AdSense accounts?
I'm in the UK and recently had a .ca domain name deleted by the registrar after owning it for 3 years. The registrar had been acting as a 'local presence agent' to bypass the requirements that .ca domains be registered by a Canadian citizen or business, of which I am neither. Apparently something changed and they received an official notice from the regulatory authority for .ca domains (CIRA) asking them to stop providing this service.

Luckily nothing really became of the domain, so it wasn't a big deal.
Context is everything! Glad you found a name.
Or perhaps we should be asking: What are all the other NSF-funded scientists doing on their bathroom breaks? Knuth's output has clearly been accounted for.
Please read the Hacker News guidelines, they're available at:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
slides and negatives preserve rather well.
JRuby rack server that supports zero downtime deploys (based on Jetty)
India's $35 tablet
Yet another case where there is a liquidity event for the capitalists but not for the programmers. The promise of "generous equity" as a part of the compensation package remains a raw deal for non-founders.
Ask HN: Review Tout - templates, scheduling and analytics for your emails
My weekend project is growing up to be a real product. I'd love some feedback...Can you please check it out?

I originally blogged about it here:
http://bit.ly/i84mIk

The URL for my product:
http://toutapp.com
Not everyone, but drive matters.

If a four-day week was important enough for you to literally kill for - and yeah, that's hyperbole - you could probably find a way of making it happen if it was more important to you than to everyone else.
http://toutapp.com
Microsoft Research takes on Go (the game)
Odd downmod. Does someone think the web platform installer has more apps than APT? Or just more than a thousandth? If so, you should probably have checked the size of APT any time in the last 12 years (I'm not sure about before then).

Or do they not believe Windows requires OS restarts anymore (as of Windows 2008R2 it still does, for Microsoft apps too)? Try setting up a server with Office Web apps - it's about five complete OS restarts.
Fiber-Optic Networks Regain Some Glow
Healthcare Informatics is a ghetto (to paraphrase Zed Shaw). No one who cares enough about healthcare cares enough to learn how to develop decent applications and no one who knows how to develop decent applications cares enough about healthcare.

So what you get is a bunch of people who would rather be doing something else but for some reason cannot. Strictly middle to low tier developers. Anyone who is decent gets out of the industry quick due to the huge amount of inertia the established companies have.

Someone mentioned HL7 CDA being an XML format. It is now. HL7v3 was published in 2005. HL7v2 was standard before that and if you have to deal with equipment or software made before 2006-2007, you will need to dive into the fun that is HL7v2.
If you ignore the millions of ways the world has changed since the 12th century, and focus only on one superficial broad-brushed similarity, then this article is persuasive. Otherwise, not.
I didn't mention that (it does not really matter when choosing one right now), but I too consider that one of the most exciting explorations in this area!

Keep up the good work!
Here's an article if you don't prefer the video: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/07/23/going-for-chea...
Chaos Communication Congress talks now downloadable
Skype Offers Credit for Recent Outage
Who was it that said, "The time you enjoyed wasting wasn't wasted"?
Ask HN: Textmate Alternatives?
I really like TM, but 2011 seems a nice year to try new alternatives.
They're legally required to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2039235
Some points on Cassandra:

- Facebook designed it for inbox feature -
- SOLR/Lucene is being integrated
- recently Sequoia backed Riptano - see http://www.riptano.com/
Snowflakes - No Two Alike?
For PHP I use phpStorm (http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/) it's Eclipse-like but fast.
Not all of the video is there yet it seems.

Of note: 'Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU' in the mp3 directory, which was mentioned here a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2041014

Mirrors on this page: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/wiki/Conference_Recording...
Completely off-topic (perhaps not) but at the top of the sidebar of SeeingInteractive's site, there is a sign-up section for a support group. The fields are _incredibly_ tiny. Checked on both Firefox 3.6 and Chrome.

Not to knock them but it doesn't really inspire confidence in them helping small businesses conquer the web.
"This day in history", appearing in print, then radio, then on birthday cards, then television, then the internet. If you look, you'll find what you seek pretty much everywhere.
JRuby Finally Installs ruby-debug Gem
I personally think dividends are a much more sane way to invest than stock price alone. It seems to me that AAPL or GOOG are "priced" by investors mostly based on archaic ties to dividend models when in fact, it's really just hoping that some sucker down the road will be willing to buy your shares at a higher price. Dividends would allow us to price stocks using metrics tied much closer to the underlying business rather than the perceptions of the business, which in my mind would increase the healthiness of investing overall.

I understand the voting/bankruptcy rights of stock, but for most retail investors, it seems to me that holding shares of Apple is really just a large Ponzi-scheme (this has probably been debated on here ad nauseum).
I've signed a finder's fee agreement before. All I would have had to do is send an email intro to someone who eventually invested. I believe it was for 10 or 15% of what would have been raised.
If you can filter out the noise, you can find a few gems. I've had good luck with taking existing promotion methods (which everyone and their brother are doing) and putting a unique twist on them.

If you can think outside the box, you can do really well.

Making the first $10/day is extremely hard. Once you hit $10/day, getting to $100/day is pretty easy. Then $1000/day... :)
- Over a third of all searches are for local businesses and services.

- More than 80% of people search for local businesses and services on the web.

You better believe that where you show up in a Google search matters. The best way to do this is by owning your own website.
Lending of Kindle Books
Ironically almost every external device/accessory for skype is made in China (and we keep buying them from them, which empowers their government).
Five most underreported stories of 2010
And if all the businesses work that way, why ever invest? Owning 10% of a company that pays no dividends and can't be sold is worthless unless you can find a sucker.

You gotta have some solution where investors have something of some actual value at some point or you're going to see investment go away once they all decide there's no upside.
Critical bug discovered in Wordpress, update to 3.0.4 required
10 Transportation Trends That Rocked 2010 | Autopia | Wired.com
The Pogies: Best Tech Ideas of the Year
I've had both MongoDB and Cassandra perform nearly as well as Memcache when getting a single document/row when the document was in memory in MongoDB and the row was cached (row cache, not just key cache, so again: fully in memory) in Cassandra.

In memory operations are fast in many databases. Redis's default configuration (vm-enabled no) just only does operations in memory (with an occasional sync to disk). That's terrible durability but fantastic performance. Most databases, including Redis, can be configured for either that sort of high-performance/low-durability or the opposite. It's just that their default settings/behaviors vary widely.
Kod (www.kodapp.com) looks like it has potential with a few features that TM doesn't have. It is currently in beta.
THAT jchrisa, seriously? Wow, I'm honored that you chimed in! Thanks, man :)
There certainly are people and organizations inside and outside the government who want people to be afraid. Martha Stout's "The Paranoia Switch"* looks at politicians who exploit this reaction and how the media contributed to the environment after 9/11. And the "surveillance-industrial" complex makes their money (and keeps their power) based on fear.

* good summary/review at http://www.sott.net/articles/show/142725-Limbic-Warfare-and-...
Earth/Life Science, Physics, Chemistry, Biology too...[1]

----

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddi...
Downloaded it a few days ago. Seems nice. But still has a lot of things to accomplish
(Doh! Despite actively checking, I see other people have made this point already: I must be way too tired and was scrolling in the wrong direction. Regardless, I think some of my comments are not jhst restatements.)

Dude: you chose to let email interrupt your flow. This is simply not how reasonable people use email: most people turn their computer on once a day or two and see if they have any email. When friends want to get a hold of them, they call them on the phone or maybe send a text message.

The question should not be "would you call me with this announcement", it should be "would you send me a piece of snail mail with this announcement". Seriously: when you insist that email be used in this manner /you/ are the person who is being the jackass.

I will also point out that letting friends interrupt you is also ludicrous. "Hey bill: next Thursday I'm thinking of going bowling; want to come?" should not force you to stop everything you are doug and drop out of flow. The next step is that you start going to your friends and yelling at them for forwarding you something they found funny and legitimately thought you would enjoy (and which most of their other friends also enjoyed).

Where does it end? This kind of email addiction is exactly what all of those "how to be happy and effective with your work" books spend most of their time trying to stamp out of you (as people who make their life around business and computers often fall into this trap).