skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about privacy? They read all your mails?
The 4th amendment regards "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure". That appears to cover seizure of property fairly well, though I suppose the key word is 'unreasonable'. It's also unclear how this is applied to civil matters vs. criminal. Though forfeiture is usually hand-in-hand with criminal charges, they claim it's a civil matter.

The 5th amendment says citizens shall not be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." In the US, police can currently take your car, money, or other possessions without even placing you under arrest. This seems to me to violate the spirit of this amendment as well as the 4th.
Lots of money gets spent every year on inmates in the U.S.

Yes, which goes directly to private companies that profit off it, creating an economic incentive to arrest as many people as possible and sentence them for as long as possible -- and to eschew any potential course of action that would reduce the number of criminals, such as rehabilitation.

The US prison system is basically designed from the ground up to turn ordinary citizens arrested for minor infractions into hardened criminals. This is why we have more people in prison per-capita than any other country in the world.
http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

They try everything except focus on what really matters: How the contract is false/doctored.
It looks like it's compatible with the previous touch-card-to-reader-to-pay infrastructure that has been rolling out slowly. This is simply a way of having your phone emulate the card. So really, this technology builds onto an existing ecosystem, and since it integrates so easily (no upgrades from merchants) the main issue will be if they can get enough people to use it to make it profitable.

I'm having trouble finding the exact details. But that is the gist I'm getting.
> if the company brought in its attorneys, it was never possible to negotiate an agreement-- even if the company heads themselves directed the attorneys to make it happen.

There are several reasons for this. Here's one:

Sure, "make it happen" is what the company heads say now. But suppose problems arise later. And suppose it turns out that one of the lawyers missed something. Sure as shootin', that's where fingers will be pointed -- "why didn't you warn me about that?"

So the lawyer's instinct, and incentive, is to look under every rock, to call the client's attention to every possible pitfall, lest he be blamed later for not having done "his job."

It exacerbates the problem when the lawyer doesn't have enough business experience to know what's likely to be an acceptable risk. (This can be true even of senior lawyers.) You end up with two opposing counsel arguing over who's right, not having the maturity of judgment to know when it's less important to decide that than it is to get ink on the signature lines and let the parties get on with their business together.
There is a saying in medical diagnosis: "When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect to see a zebra". https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Zebra_%28medi...
Most patients have common problems that are fairly easy for experienced physicians to diagnose. So there is no point to entering a bunch of data into Watson just to get back the same answer you already know. But it could certainly be helpful for those rare edge cases where the physician can't figure out the "zebra", or where the patient hasn't responded as expected to treatment.
Ask HN: I had more friends before Facebook. Anyone agree?
First, I don't have a blog, and if I did no one would read that blog...but I had an interesting thought today, and having been a daily reader of HN for about 2.5 years, I felt this was the most appropriate place to share it, and ask if anyone else agreed.

The title says it all, but I will explain. Before Facebook, there was Myspace...but to be honest, most of my real friends weren't even on Myspace, or if they were, they weren't constantly updating their status on a daily basis...maybe every couple of days at most I would see something from them. Before Facebook, when I wanted to know what a friend was up to, I had to call them. I could text, but it would take so many texts to have a decent conversation that I would simply prefer to call my friends. I can remember as early as 4 years ago I would talk to many friends on a daily basis for sometimes many hours. Actually talking to my friends would cause us to want to meet up for lunch, or just to hang out. So I would constantly be hanging out and talking to people, I was just way more social to be honest.

If you fast forward to today, in a Facebook-minded society, all of my friends that I used to call on the phone now update their status on a daily basis, and even provide me with pictures which before I could only see on my tiny 2 inch cell phone screen.

I know what all of my friends did yesterday thanks to Facebook. I know what all of my friends are doing today thanks to Facebook. And I know what all of my friends are doing tomorrow, thanks to Facebook. It seems so much more social right? I mean, it is called a social network? Yet, I feel more anti-social than ever! I can still call my friends - but what will I talk about? Hey, saw you went to the movies, how was that? .... I'm sorry, but already knowing the details of everyone's life just makes it impossible for my analytical mind to justify calling them.

I wonder if anyone else agrees? If anyone else has any further thoughts they could add to the discussion? Is it just me...am I the one being anti-social?
And when it's not private companies, at publicly-operated prisons the money goes into the pockets of prison guards, who are well paid, and whose unions are some of the biggest organizations lobbying for more crimes and longer sentences (California's three-strikes law was strongly pushed by its prison-guard union).

Maybe I'm missing it, but I'm surprised that prison-guard unions aren't more front-and-center in the controversy over public-employee unions. I hear a lot about generic bureaucrats (e.g. in Wisconsin), and about teachers' unions (e.g. in CA), but not that much about prison guards. But when it comes to people getting angry about unions of employees who are supposed to be working on the public's behalf engaged in lobbying in support of their own private interests, I can't think of a more clear-cut case of immorality than a prison-guard union lobbying for more prisoners.
You didn't miss as much as others seem to think. Nothing here changes the fact that it subverts the object model and overuse causes kudzu.
Another vote for "best" RSS feed. The unfliltered RSS feed is way too noisy to be useful.
Paulo Coelho on The Fear of Failure
Plan 9 deserves a whole lot more credit than just that. It's really a shame we are still using Unix-like OSs and not Plan 9-like ones.
The problem with blogging
The version that I was rewriting:

def __init__(self, shapename=None, **kwds):

also allows that.
I wonder if doctors would become more of a service industry -- doing "patient care" (as customer service) instead of "disease care" now. Could be an improvement for the experience of receiving healthcare; definitely interesting to think about!
That's the longest handwritten function I think I've ever seen :-)

I don't know what limits the compiler imposes, but I wouldn't be surprised if you hit them.
RewardJS - Fix a bug. Get a prize.
Tips to Help You Get Focused
Riak doesn't use consistent hashing
Intel might make chips based on non-Intel cores
Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet - Bloomberg
Looking for the right excuse
I think this is backwards. (After thoroughly testing of course) I'd rather see Watson be the first-tier of diagnosis, backed up by a doctor when Watson isn't so sure of an answer, as opposed to Watson just helping befuddled doctors. This could really bring down medical costs at scale.
This:

- (void) setFoo:(NSString*) bar {
[foo release];
foo = [bar retain];
}

should be:

- (void) setFoo:(NSString*) bar {
if(bar == foo)
return;
[foo release];
foo = [bar retain];
}

so that you can do without crashing:

obj.foo = obj.foo;
There isn't too much "Web 2.0" tech behind building something Watson. Perhaps the use of ontologies and semantic web datasets, but in academic circles at least that's informally referred to "web 3.0" (that, too, is a bit of a misnomer because Cycorp has been building semantic ontologies for a long, long time).
> Think how jQuery managed to make writing JS fun, as opposed to when you had to work with the plain DOM.

Speaking of that, http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/ is an interesting project. I haven't used it, but it seems like it could make some XML parsing less strenuous.
Apple has sort of begun this - if you have a credit card linked to an AppleID and use that card in an Apple Store, the receipt is emailed to you (unless you specifically request a printed copy). If you don't, they'll ask for your email address the first time you use a card and keep that email on file so the next time you buy something at that store, they don't need to ask.
Databases, SQL, & NoSQL - Ruby Rogues Podcast
I know this might sound a tad heretical, but if Watson gets to be as good as or better than a doctor, do we really need doctors anymore?

The theoretical upper bound on Watson's ability is a lot higher than the theoretical upper bound on a doctor's, since it can make inferences based on a vastly larger data set.
Continued here: http://lists.basho.com/pipermail/riak-users_lists.basho.com/...
And also possibly make it harder for doctors to, say, recommend a more expensive procedure because their hospital gets paid more.
Using this site is harder than just emailing a link. I still have to email my friend the initial link to the bin. And then if I add another link, my friend wouldn't know about it unless he happened to come back to that link. Why not just send them the link directly?
Dangit.... I was looking at a job listing for Mailchimps a few months ago and got as far as "MailChimp is a DIY email-marketing service..." before closing the tab, assuming they were spammers or spammer-enablers. I wonder if they get that knee-jerk reaction a lot.
There are too many loyalty cards. I usually won't sign up for them unless it's for a store I go to all the time, because I don't want to carry them around. I'll carry one for the grocery store, but not places I only go to occasionally like Walgreens or Best Buy. With Google Wallet you won't need to carry them, so they won't be as much of a burden, so you can have more of them. Merchants will like this and consumers will too.
Somehow I was thinking about those game-addicted kids…
First, you're doing an ad hominem attack right now against me - right now. This is sad.

"Several weeks ago you was claiming till foam in your mouth that your employer - Yandex - doesn't share personal email and other users' information with FSB."

Care to provide a link? Because if you don't, you have an acute case of lying, you should see a doctor for that.

I would even be so kind to provide a link to our previous discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452184
Quotes are welcome.

Overall, you're behaving like a bitter and unpleasant person. You know everything even when not been exposed to the subject for several years; I know nothing and is an ostrich and my experience does not really matter; And I am also a moron.

There is a word for your behavior, and it is "butthurt".
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butthurt
Microsoft is actually sitting on a world-class consumer-design group and a platform that could be painlessly pruned down to a single cohesive media and social ecosystem.

I can see how Steve Jobs could do this in his old company, especially when his old company was on the ropes, and with the support of the "reverse-merger" NeXT crew at his back. How feasible is such a political assault in a Microsoft that's still prosperous?
The same thing applies to "copy" properties. If you do "self.foo = bar;" when foo is a copy property, you have taken ownership of that object, and need to release it later (hopefully by doing "self.foo = nil;".
For "the web"? HTML, CSS, and Javascript. If HTML doesn't count as a real programming language, add SQL. You might be looking for an answer along the lines of a backend language like PHP, ASP, or JSP, but they all fill the same need of producing HTML code based on whatever data you have in the system.

If I could only know three languages in general, I would choose Python for a high-level structured language, C for a low-level structured language, and Lisp for a different way of thinking about problems.
This reminds me of some work I did a few years ago in the oil and gas industry. Not nearly as advanced as this, but we essentially read data from sensors in off shore oil rigs and ran it through our system. We had some pretty nifty pattern recognition stuff in place that would learn from previous data in order to become advanced enough to predict imminent sand breaches during drilling.

Given significant warning, it could save the drilling companies lots of money.

Katrina ended up severely damaging the rig we were using for testing and I'm not sure we ever went anywhere with it after that.

We did do some similar work for detecting trace metals in oil sample analysis records in order to recommend maintenance and detect possible future equipment failures.

Anyway, interesting stuff here. I'd love to play around with it.

edit Sorry about the double post. I think I got it removed. Connection was a bit flaky.
Thanks for the great insight and ideas. Your twitter link is broken, though :)
In the same line of thinking, for object that don't hold memory space I need to mark on the spot, I use :

- (void) setFoo:(NSString*) bar {
[foo autorelease];
foo = [bar retain];
}

which I expect to do nothing (retain count is unchanged) when foo == bar.
I do it for concision, am I missing something?
I've help organize a number of events in and around Phoenix, AZ, and my favorites have always been the ones where there was little planning and lots of room for socializing and discussion.

Most of the time the info presented at these events could be found on the 'Net, likely faster and in more detail.

If information efficiency were the goal then that would be the way to go. But at the better gathering the talks or presentations are just a ruse to trick people into getting away from their homes or cubicles and interact in real-time with actual flesh and blood people. Serendipity takes over from there. That's why the best conferences have short talks and lots of breathing room; you want to prod people into talking to each other.

I can see the same thing with getting all your social info from a Webs site. Sure, Facebook will tell you when someone has seen a movie, but without that real-time, F2F (or even phone )conversation you miss the meandering dialog that bounces around into all sorts of areas you didn't even think to talk about until that moment.

The digital life can end up being awfully clinical. Lots of data, not much information.
If they use them in India and have the same safety record (no at-fault accidents), I'll start suspecting they have sentient A.I.
The funny thing is that they just ripped off 37 signals' marketing page. Not to say that this strategy won't work - just that the "redesign" involved some heavy borrowing. I recognized it because I just used 37 signals' page as the basis for a marketing page on my own site.
That's more or less the thesis of Sherry Turkle's recent book Alone Together, which you might find interesting. It's also interesting because Turkle was quite techo-optimist in the '80s; The Second Self (1984) was much more positive on the role of computers (and things like the then-new BBS scene) for interpersonal relationships.
That's great. Didn't know that.
No.

They've made a model wherein which the planet might have certain climate characteristics such that it might be habitable by some form of life and might be habitable by Earth life as well, if the planet exists. There is a lot more maybe in this report:
http://news.discovery.com/space/exoplanet-gliese-581d-human-...
What if you made BINARY_OP a __forceinline (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z8y1yy88.aspx) function instead of a macro?

Things that the function contains that might disable optimization: a lot of gotos, inline assembly in GO_NEXT (this does affect optimization: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5hd5ywk0.aspx)...

It's also not immediately obvious to me that pCurEvalStack is initialized.

Having a look at the architecture optimization manual re: the redundant loads; it's not immediately obvious to me that modern processors won't handle this fine (http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/manual/248966.pdf).
This judge was convicted of jailing youths for kickback money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

There are Hacker News threads that discuss the hundreds of DNA exonerations in the U.S. This hints at the huge problem of lying and frame-ups by the police and judicial system.

Juries are instructed to give a verdict on guilt or innocence not decide on sentencing.

The U.S. has the highest per capita prison population in the world. It is big business.

Kind of a waste of time to fall back on voting when there are so many reactionaries like yourself.
Lack of complaints are never an indicator of success. For this particular case, I'd look at the total number of followers. It's easier making the bothersome disappear (unfollowing) than to formulate a complaint to the author.

If you want to retweet your old articles, do it in a curated (i.e. human driven) way.
> 2. When you type "alloc" there is an implied retain.

It's not quite that simple. The official rule from Apple's Memory Management Programming Guide most succinctly states "You take ownership of an object if you create it using a method whose name begins with “alloc”, “new”, “copy”, or “mutableCopy” (for example, alloc, newObject, or mutableCopy), or if you send it a retain message."
Why do people keep using posterous? It's down, it's hacked, it's putting USE OUR SERVICE overlays everywhere... there has to be a better way.
I have an ipod, but unfortunately the camera isn't good enough to make legible text from an 8.5*11 sheet.
that works fine too and prevents any issues with releasing the variable before it gets retained again. objects might hang around in memory a little longer this way, though (for foos != bars)
It sounds like you should think about ways to bring your own product to market. Starting a company is one of the few times you can be sure to get the equity you deserve if you create so much value.

It's risk-reward -- so take the risk, and reap your reward. You've got the skills. Find a market and execute.
It looks like Watson is shaping up to the 21st century version of Mycin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin).
It's convenient, and it has a decent theme by default. Plus I've met the guys and I like them. I'd say they are doing a good job at marketing themselves :)
That would also work, autorelease is generally considered slow though.
For emerging diseases, advanced malingering, etc, you definitely need real life actual breathing human beings. Otherwise, sure, physicians are just as theoretically replaceable as any information-as-a-service workers might be.

Edit: I didn't realize this was even a controversial statement to make. First, to be clear, when I'm in the hospital and say "doctor" I'm usually thinking non-surgeon, as I am here. Second, you will always need supervision of the machines, just not 1-to-1 supervision. Not every interaction brings up ethical questions, for example. Sometimes someone really just has a viral URI.
> “Typing self.foo releases and nils the variables.”
Yes, if it’s a retain or copy property.

> “Just typing foo = nil is a memory leak.”
Yes, if you had retained the object, but not if it were a weak reference. Admittedly, this is a semi-rare scenario.
Interesting..I will definitely check that out especially if I can find it on Audible. I would say I'm the same way. I love technology and I love social networks...I've got many friends to join Myspace back in the day, and even Facebook today...And it's only now that I've even had this realization.
Honestly, they don't need to take Ballmer's spot -- one of them should take BillG's old spot before all that CEO nonsense. That is, the old Chief Software Architect role, when he used to run around reviewing every product both creating a longer-term cohesive strategy for the software and instilling the fear of instant group dismemberment if you were not thinking deeply enough.

While I personally like Guthrie, Rudder was a one-time personal technical assistant to BillG. That was a role where he basically rode shotgun on a couple years of BillG reviews. And that happened back in the 90s, when he wasn't yet drifting off towards the sunset...
A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Judges typically read right past the adjectives and adverbs, and can even get annoyed if the rhetoric is too inflamed. Most litigators know this.

2. Litigators also know that the court of public opinion can be almost as important as the court of law. This can be especially true for public- or soon-to-be-public companies.

3. Defamation law is always in the back of litigators' minds when they handle high-profile cases.

4. If you want to say bad things about a lawsuit adversary, you're far safer doing so in a court document than in, say, a press release. That's because, with certain important exceptions, statements made in a court concerning a case pending there are pretty much absolutely immune from liability for defamation.

5. My guess, unburdened by any factual information: When the lawyers crafted this court filing, they knew full well that the press would be looking for quotable quotes.
I learned a lot from that. Thanks.

The notes on the specific testing and implementation was great, but also the general tone of the piece. It can be hard to write about marketing to an engineering audience while honoring an engineering-driven culture.

For instance -

> FogBugz exists to help software developers write great software, but it also exists to pay the rent. This means that we have to actually consummate transactions on our website. This was previously delegated to the curiously named “Details” page. It had been designed primarily to explain to customers the difference between FBOD and the downloadable version of FogBugz. Sadly, this ended up being quite confusing.

Covers why marketing is needed in an extremely straightforward way (...it also exists to pay the rent). Then, it logically follows the page that converts needs to be easily accessible. And then, the notes here and elsewhere that non-technical people are often hitting these pages and getting lost trying to decide on the tradeoffs.

Great piece. Learned about the specific measures you took, but also a lot of meta-learning about how to present things well. Extremely straightforward, logical, acknowledging and honoring the engineer culture, while also noting that marketing needs to be part of the process to pay the bills and get the product in users' hands.
Looks like I was wrong about the redundant loads. They should probably go away (and indeed you say they do if you put BINARY_OP in its own function).
Slashdot used to link to Everything (back before it was Everything2) as a sort of instant-dictionary for tech terms. Stories would have something like "RSS 2.0(?) and Atom(?) proponents are squaring off..." with the question marks going to the relevant Everything node. Most of the time, the terms wouldn't be defined until the story went live, and then they would be in short order.

It was a neat symbiosis, especially back before Wikipedia existed. However, they were separate sites. Both Slashcode (which runs Slashdot) and the Everything Engine (which runs Everything2) are written in Perl. Everything was never run on Slashcode, though, AFAIK.