skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of such discussion is about respect.

You pulled someone up for not knowing what they were talking about ("For someone who puts so much faith in free markets you don't appear to understand how they work. In your studies, look up "market elasticity" for a clue."), when it seems the same accusation could be levelled at you.

But, I never really meant it to become a big deal so I apologise for being picky and I'll move on to answering your question.

Broadly I agree with you but I think it's slightly more complex than that a straight forward "it doesn't work" and for me the issue is how you factor in the failures which in healthcare tend to result in injury or death. For instance, would a law covering corporate homicide (that is an organisation causing the death of someone in the course of their work due to incompetence or carelessness) count as market regulation? Or even manslaughter if a doctor acting alone did the same? Would that be regulation?

Because of this I think any civilized society wouldn't accept the possibility of severe injury or death without significant consequence, so even if it might work in theory (more below), we'll never know in practice as it would never be allowed to come about.

More generally though my view is that markets of any sort only work well when you've got a few factors at play:

(1) the deals and decisions are being made directly by those they impact - that is the patients so the deal genuinely reflects the will and interest of the patients (as opposed to them being one step removed as with insurance companies where their interests muddy things)

(2) the system has to be such that there is a financial consequence to the patient of the decision they make (that is they see the benefit of getting a deal which is good value as well as good medicine otherwise why would they look for value)

(3) there has to be as close to perfect information as possible to allow these decisions to be made on a true and fair basis - and when you look at the PR machines we see today exist, you've got to think that's not going to happen without regulation.

My issue is I don't see how you'd consistently get those factors without regulation. I couldn't say it's impossible but it certainly seems highly improbable, certainly in the culture we have now (point 3 being the one I can't ever see coming about without enforcement).

As an aside - I live in the UK where we have nationalised healthcare and it's frankly great. The market reforms over here terrify me because they're ideologically driven by people who seem to want to drive us towards an American system so in theory while I'm not intrinsically against the market playing a greater role in health provision, in practice I'll tend to fight it on the grounds that it looks like they're going to the whole thing up a treat.
Very cool. Would you mind (very briefly) describing some of the infrastructure/tools/backend used to build Slowcop?
I am seeing more people trying Rubinus VM to build languages / port languages: see https://github.com/vito/quanto for example.
Looks nice, though less full-featured than the NLTK. I'd be interested to see how nice they'd play together and whether applications could exploit the strengths of both at the same time. The only thing that's better than one good NLP framework, is two good NLP frameworks, after all.
Freezing episode 11
freezing episode 11 The movement of his opponent "frozen" may restrict the use of special powers called. The old name for an unusual hero, Brigitte l Pandora's powerful satellites, but most of the knowledge to make the girls appear to be in his class,
freezing,episode 11
Web Development Mistakes Should be Ignored
Practically all businesses today have a website; which use the help of web development techniques to ensure the proper functioning of the website. However no matter how professional or amateur the web developer or company may be, there are some common web development mistakes they tend to make.
The Smartphone Wars: Bricks and Battiness
Feel free to check Symfony2 at http://docs.symfony-reloaded.org/master/ - it does not have much to do with symfony1 by the way, in case you'd decide to dismiss it due to past experience.
Watch Preity Tweeting at Tweet Idol
Do you know Preity Zinta is on Twitter? Closely watch her Tweets on Tweet Idol. Several other celebs are also on Tweet Idol.
(2011 - 1995) != 18

EDIT: Or is that the point you were making?
Site got moved to EC2 http://twitter.com/#!/chregu/status/40712581702225920 - agreed though, leaking errors is unacceptable.
Data Structure And Algorithm Visualization - Algoviz Wiki
A Windows Phone 7 App : The Numbers
How does the situation compare for startups (scarce as they may be) and foreign/US-owned companies in Japan? What you described has been a depressing reality for me as someone who majored in CS and Japanese.
IANAL, but this is what I know:

* In the US, there are three types of jurisdiction: personal, subject matter, and territorial jurisdiction.
* Personal jurisdiction of one state over residents in another can be established by contact with the state, and by contract submitting to personal jurisdiction of a state. It is necessary to file a case against someone in a state; it is likely that Microsoft has a strong claim to personal jurisdiction here.
* Subject matter jurisdiction relates to what types of matters a court can consider - employment contractual disputes are almost certainly within the subject matter jurisdiction of the court.
* Territorial jurisdiction. This doesn't appear to be a barrier to bringing a lawsuit, but it can affect the enforceability of a courts judgement over actions in another state. Because of Article IV, part 1 of the US Constitution (the 'Full Faith and Credit Command'), States are expected to recognise each other's judgements, but there are exceptions. In Baker et al. v. General Motors Corp, 1998 (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&...) the Supreme Court clarified that there was no general public policy exception to the full faith and credit command, but noted that "orders commanding action or inaction have been denied enforcement in a sister State when they purported to accomplish an official act within the exclusive province of that other State or interfered with litigation over which the ordering State had no authority".
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Google App Engine: Pushing Updates with the Channel API (Best Buy's example)
Python Paradox was written quite some time ago. Back then there were far fewer jobs for Python. python has become a lot more mainstream since then, hence your story of learning Python just for the sake of getting a job. IMHO, the idea of the Python paradox no longer applies to Python today.
Direct link: http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/

If you need an API as an alternative http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/

That's the EchoNest API and that's where the database was collected from.

This is very interesting data and just looking at it has sent me into a ponder-mode as to what to do with it.

Also, an interesting note on the EchoNest site about the API usage: The Echo Nest's APIs are for non-commercial purposes only. If you are a lone developer selling advertising that is barely covering your running costs, we consider that non-commercial
This is why I love github,

I didn't realize that they have a student plan and I have applied with hope of getting this free micro plan.

In the past about 2 months, I have started using GIT and its simply brilliant for all types of version control whether development with other programmers or development on my own.
Reading his pseudo code with its explicit size information ("pad_byte = pad_byte plus32 1;") made me think, of all things, of LLVM's SSA assembler syntax ("pad% = add i32 %pad_byte, 1"). :) Not surprising of course, making the type visible in each operation is typically necessary in assembly.
I rather like CakePHP (it's like ruby on rails, in PHP!(tm)).

While it maybe doesn't live up to it's RoR hype, it is a really solid framework, and has cut down on my development time by more than I can possibly express..

I find it alot easier to use than Symphony, and you can generally get a CRUD up and running in about 10-20 minutes right out of the box.
It's mostly true for Japan, at least. Life employment is very common.
Ask a stupid question, get an inane answer.
I think that you lose readability with Java generics, rather than gain it, because of the ugly angle brackets which stand out far too much visually with respect to the other glyphs.

By the way, I think the same about the "enhancements" proposed for Java 7 and 8, regardless of their technical merit.
Ask HN: Would spellchecker, dictionary definition and thesaurus APIs be useful?
As a by-product of a larger web project we're working on, we ended up doing a fair amount of database and coding work on English dictionary / definitions / synonyms / thesaurus recently.

Thinking about this in retrospect leads me to believe that if spell-checker, word definition lookup and synonym lookup functionalities are made available in the form of web APIs, these could be useful to (many) developers. (I'm not really sure if such APIs are already available.)

One mass-use application that I can think of is to spell-check/correct user generated/submitted content.

What do you think? Do you think this is something you and/or others will find useful? If so, in what ways?

If we find enough interest (>20/25 ayes?) here, we'll develop and publish these (free) APIs in the next couple of weeks or so and announce the availability here.

What do HNers think?
Preventing Acne Scarring
It seems like a very nice tool and many hackers would want to play with it. However, it will be really convenient if the project is put on GitHub.
Unfortunately, work queues aren't a great abstraction for serialisisg access to a shared resource. Given that all iOS devices so far have had a single CPU core, most uses of threading will have been for things like network I/O, audio, or running larger computations in a non-UI-thread, rather than dispatching work items to many CPUs.

Furthermore, GCD has only been around since iOS 4.0, so if your app needs to be compatible to 3.x, you can't use it.
This is exactly the same belief that ends up making people think they can use C++ on large systems without complexity issues... they'll only use a subset...

Until they hire new programmers, until they work with other people's libraries, other people's APIs. You end up with silos of code style, none of which are orthogonal with the rest of the code base.

Complexity is hard to combat in languages that do not encourage a simple idiomatic style. Multi-paradigm languages are inherently complex. Great if it's just you (I like MY c++ code!) but sucks when you intersect with the rest of the world. This is one of the reasons that Java is actually a very good language when you are dealing with complex systems, large number of developers, code that needs to be maintainable and extensible. HN seems to love hating Java, but it's not successful because of hype - you can't dominate the development environment for well over a decade on hype.
Is Recovery Of the Photographs Possible From Corrupt DVD Or CD
Argh. But it happened precisely twice, only after nginx was installed, and without any traffic peak. :/
One day people will start learning Haskell to get a job.

A boy can dream...
Ask HN: Tips for increasing accuracy of OCR?
My business idea is based on OCR. But the accuracy is never 100%. For non-Latin languages, accuracy levels are in the 60-80% range. Any tips to improve the recognition rates ?
PHP is to web what Cobol is to Mainframes.
It will be here for a while.
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Online: Bayern Munich vs Inter Milan 1-0 highlights
There are foreign companies doing interesting work here in japan. People at ibm, google, ms, etc that I know are happy. Others that are still growing like Gilt are recruiting and offering above 10m yen/yr. I'm at amazon, really enjoying it, and we're hiring :)
What's wrong with copying zlib around to every project? Well, have you forgotten the 2002 zlib vulnerability where 100s of copies of zlib source had to be fixed up? I believe there were half a dozen of separate copies of zlib source code in the Linux kernel alone (e.g. ipsec, ppp). Tools had to be developed to scan the binaries on your system to determined whether they stealthily used zlib for something and thus were potentially exploitable.
Which is especially interesting, considering the other competitors are coming from exactly the opposite direction. They are playing the same game, but facing completely different challenges.
Anyone else seeing this interesting Chrome advertising?
Twitter makes money.
Junk Science.
It OBVIOUS that the author has never been to Pontiac or Ann Arbor.
The Rise of the Virtual Cyborg
I'm only getting this in Firefox and I'm also getting it on a bunch of other searches: download firefox, download winrar, download microsoft word, download anti virus, download free music
If you already have a patent and it's "launched" and you're trying to sell it, why not tell us what it is so we can give you some qualified advice?

Based on the information here you have a problem with: marketing/positioning and/or sales and/or product development. If you provide more specific details of the product, the market, your current business model, pricing and sales strategies then you might get some advice you can actually use rather than "hey man! don't give up!!1 you're a startup man! keep it up and stick with it!".
WOW!!

If Bing was offering IE9 as Chrome to ppl searching for Chrome, ppl would be up in arms.

No technical glitch justifies this. I wonder how widespread it is (not happening here).

edit: clarity about the issue being offering one browser with the other's title
What one thing does this app need for you to dump Visio for it?
That's absolutely not true. I was a C/C++ programmer at the time that Java came out and I remember all the hype being about Java being easy / quick to develop with. There were a tonne of studies out about how much more productive Java projects were compared to C/C++ projects.

BTW I do not believe that we are seeing a paradigm shift to functional programming. Only inside HN's echo-chamber could you believe that. I do think that some ideas from FP are becoming more mainstream, such as closures, but what we are going to see is a cherry picking of the better features. I don't believe concepts like currying or monads are going to become popular any time soon.
What about a number interface -- hit a button to bring up an oversized numeric pad?
What software companies can learn from drug dealers
Eee gads, no... but it has all of those libraries...

How would a replacement gain traction? Can we at least make sure it can call R code?

Can we not just include the features of R in python, instead of using a new language? Has anybody used Rpy? How does it do with packages?
Digging into Deferreds with jQuery
Speaking as someone who has no intention of buying a tablet right now and probably won't buy a Motorola or 3G enabled one anyway, the reviews all sound pretty good to me. At some point in the future it seems there will be a cheap Android tablet that meets my needs.

All the downsides seem trivially fixable, but no-one will be able to fully assess it until after the iPad 2 gets revealed. I'm guessing though that Google have done enough to bring it down to highly subjective hair-splitting about "feel" with only a few clear pros and cons on each side.
sorry why does lisp have anything to do with clojure?
This kind of analysis is useless without numbers and testing.
I am going to vote that top visualisation, ever. I am so jealous right now.
It looks like there is some hope for code sharing and consolidation through the Apache Zeta Components project: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/php-finally_getting_an_ecosystem/
Project thats been in the back of my head for a while, but have no time to do:

Analyze HN comments over time with some NLP techniques, maybe sentiment analysis. Then if the next wave of "HN is turning into Reddit" posts comes, point people to the analysis, whatever the conclusions are.

Seems like this would be well suited for the task. Any takers?
Wow! I had no idea the technology was there. It really seems like science fiction.
The author seems to think that Clojure has some conceptional complexity to it that is easier to overcome by doing a intermediate step with Racket. But in which way is Racket or any other Lisp an intermediate step?

I had no Lisp experience whatsoever before I started with Clojure, and the only real difficulties I experienced were (in descending order):

a) translating my imperative-style thinking into functional style - this would happen to me in Racket as well.

b) macros - but you don't need to grasp macros as a beginner, that's a topic by itself anymay.

(and NO, the bracket syntax was no problem at all)

YMMV if you have an other background.
It is true: The more programming languages you already know, the easier it will be to learn a new one (iff it doesn't conceptionally diverge too much). But if you don't have that background, why not learn the desired language right away?
Just for the record: the "leaking errors" is fixed (and yes, that was bad), the site is responsive again (the server was too loaded with other stuff, so the additional traffic the article generated put him over the edge)

Done since maybe 2 hours :)
Thanks for posting this, I've been paying for the micro plan for a few months for my projects. I had no idea students could apply for a free plan.
it's the box-shadow effect :-)

Just tried with the webkit inspector, if you remove all the box-shadow, the page is smooth.
Ask HN: How to start with Mobile Dev?
I'm looking to start in mobile (iOS and potentially Android) development. I would consider myself a high-level tech enthusiast. The kind of person who is not afraid to use command prompt, but hasn't done any actual programming besides basic HTML.

The app I'm looking to create is quite simple: a fitness app with follow along work outs that basically amounts to a slide show with voice prompts. In the future I'd like to develop it into a platform with lots of workouts to choose from and results tracking/sharing.

I'm wondering if I should just dive into Objective C and Apple's development tools, or use one of the multi-platform web-based tools.

I'm sure there are tons of useful opinions here on this issue so, fire away!
I was going to ask the same question
Clojure is a Lisp! From Clojure's website: "Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system".
Thanks, good point. Patent is pending so it's still a bit under wraps. I guess this is more of a question of biz dev & sales/marketing. How do you sell to large corporations such as Red Bull, MillerCoors, Wahoo's etc? It's just me, do I need someone with more experience in corp markets? How often do I persist without bugging? How do I approach corps and convince them to listen to me and see my product?
Thanks
Apache Rave Proposal
Yeah - I think this is really pretty but think that in most cases looking at the small picture isn't half as useful as the big picture.
'Air Laser' Could Detect Harmful Chemicals
It’s not just magicians who can make something appear out of thin air; researchers can do it, too. A group at Princeton University has developed a way to shoot a laser beam at a specific point in
the air where a second beam is created that can travel in the reverse direction.
When you are in doubt always raise the valuation!!!
I don't get it either. Why the ongoing comparisons with countries that are even worse off? Wouldn't it be better to look at countries in which there is less poverty, and see what they do better?
(For example: many North European countries hardly have poverty as in "can't pay for food/housing" at all)
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1) If you have a meaningful patent, you may pursue other things to solve the lack of money. There is a little less of a hurry. You may also sell the patent to a troll - your soul will be damned for eternity, but you may become a millionaire the first time someone steps on your particular landmine.

2) Don't be overattached to your idea. You already broke the "fail cheap" rule by having an idea that involves hardware and a lot of development. If the idea doesn't work out, forget it (it's easier since you have a patent)

3) It seems you already learned a lot on how not to do one thing (and may have learned how to successfully do a lot of others). That experience is valuable.
So it would seem possible to make a business out of entering these verticals and then reporting all the competitors for violations, leaving you left.

Obviously this assumes that most competitors do something like this, but if so that could be a nice way to make money.
The fear is always going to be there. It's the dark side of having an "innovative" startup. If you can keep your head down and still get something done even through those periods, you're doing well.

I don't have experience in selling to BigCo, but here are a few ideas for potential research avenues.

Maybe there's a different way to "get to the right people" (which seems to be a big issue), or maybe there's a way to leverage the product itself to generate hype & interest from the actual users and have that spill over into a more convincing pitch.

Maybe a "magic little feature" is waiting to be added that would change perceptions at the corporate level. Or maybe the pretensions of interest they show at present are just sniffing around for a potential threat, acquisition, or knockoff IP, and you actually need to try for a different path into the market to get anywhere - even if it's well off the "beaten track."

There are more than a few stories where startup manufacturers end up going outside their area of focus and have to fund a complete vertical to the end-user, because other techniques failed and that was the only way to market the product. Which, of course, would lead to seeking investment.
We planned to release a R wrapper and looked at the default HDF5 library for R on Ubuntu. Unfortunately, it crashes on empty arrays. This happens when a track has no musicbrainz tag, for instance. If any R specialist is willing to help us with this, please contact us!

I'm sure someone from HN could help with that...
Mind hacks: Method of loci
thanks brian for referencing us, this is oren from SaaSPulse.

Our product is a good fit here. in addition to collecting aggregated usage metrics, we visualize user-activity on the service with a stream that helps build a 'qualitative feel' of user engagement - that's very useful for services that are building initial traction.

we are still in private beta but happy to accept new customers. anyone who's interested can signup on our site and we'll set them up.
‘Bloggable’, ‘tbh’ and ‘feature phone’ make Oxford Dictionaries Online
hopefully the R community is avoiding the same mistake that python did with python3000.

my 2 ct to the future of R: a compiler from R code to LISP would more than fill the gap.
> seems plainly at odds with the reality here.

You have a human resources problem, not a technical one.
It would definitely be useful, but I'm wondering what licence you would/could release under? Where did the initial datasets themselves come from?