skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoyed this article, I always find the argument that "these days you can't beat the compiler" fishy. I remember more than 25 years ago I wrote an 8080 machine code interpreter in 8088/86 assembly. My innermost interpreter comprised 3 lines of asm;

lodsb ;al = *si++
mov ah,al ;eg if al=3eh (=mvi a,dd), then ax=0x3e3e
jmp ax ;eg goto 0x3e3e. Preloader puts the emulation
; code for mvi a,dd followed by another copy
; of the inner interpreter at cs:0x3e3e.

This approach uses 64K to sparsely store the emulation code for each of the 256 opcodes at 0x0000,0x0101,0x0202 ... etc. which seemed a pretty outrageous waste of memory at the time. But it was worth it because none of the 3 inner interpreter instructions modified the flags, which meant I could use the native 8086 flags to directly emulate the 8080 flags, a huge speed win. Remember that the 8086 had LAHF and SAHF instructions to help solve this very problem, yet my approach avoiding the whole flags issue was still twice as quick as commercial equivalents.

Okay admittedly this is all irrelevant dinosaur nostalgia from the perspective of modern technology, but it reinforces the point that there's no substitute for human creativity when it comes to real hardcore optimization tricks.
Show HN: My IPhone App that makes $25 a day
Birthday Reminder Pro+ helps you keep track of upcoming birthdays and notifies you before hand so that you can call, text, email, or Facebook message your friend on their Birthday. It cost $0.99.

Please try it out and tell me any suggestions you have on improving it.

Here is a link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/birthday-reminder-pro/id427341961?mt=8

Here are some free codes to try it out for free. First come first serve.

PKWK6FAL6H9R

4Y9W36KPXW3Y

N9LM9XYR9NWX

LMPHAFXEENTR

EAKAY7NFM44T

76FXWTWA7M3K

AKKJRWPF34R4

KT9XJ9RRH3R4

AAN7X9LRTEP9

ANW77JE6RPLJ
Do you need to spend 7 or 8 years training someone to do that? If I'm not mistaken, that's already largely done by nurses and patient care technicians.
PayPal Sues Google Over Google Wallet
Great write up Patrick!

I know that you are a rails guy and they use an MS stack. Any friction there? Were they able to use your A/B framework or did they have something on their own stack?

Edit: Nevermind: http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-do-ab-testing-using-google-w...
Actually, porting LuaJIT to BareMetal might be a neat idea. :-)
Here is a direct link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/birthday-reminder-pro/id42734...
The Start-Something Startups
No, Card does not explicitly declare that in the quotation I posted. (Did you mean elsewhere in his review?) He's saying: It's a hostile reading if it's skeptical rather than "with belief". It's also a hostile reading if it's forced rather than voluntary.

You probe his definition by asking, If someone reads it skeptically but voluntarily, does that count as hostile? That's a good question. I don't think we have enough information to answer it, because Card does not state how to weigh skepticism and forcedness against each other.
It seems like a hard but worthwhile undertaking. I just discovered this site through HN and now I'm following you on twitter so I don't think you're going to have a problem
Its not really fair to compare PRC with Taiwan, they started off on completely different footings. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan:

"When the KMT government fled to Taiwan it brought the entire gold reserve and the foreign currency reserve of mainland China to the island, which stabilized prices and reduced hyperinflation.[citation needed] More importantly, as part of its retreat to Taiwan, the KMT brought the intellectual and business elites from mainland China.[63] The KMT government instituted many laws and land reforms that it had never effectively enacted on mainland China. The government also implemented a policy of import-substitution, attempting to produce imported goods domestically. Much of this was made possible through US economic aid, subsidizing the higher cost of domestic production."

China in 1949 just started baby booming after the war. I'm not saying whether Communism is better or worse, but it does tend to drive away those already in positions of wealth and power.
man, you probably never been to Sochi. I've been there. You can try to research/Google the agricultural profile of bananas and the climate profile of Sochi. This is snow in Sochi:

http://www.sochiclub.ru/sochiphotos/category/5-snow-in-sochi...

>So, growing bananas in Russia hardly seems like nonsense.

Well, the same thing was thought about corn in 60ies (state-wide corn enforcing campaign, 40+ years later still a source of countless jokes as you can force people to plant corn, yet you can't force corn to grow in that climate) and about putting monkeys into Siberia in 70s-80s (fortunately it was only a small pack of monkey that experiment was conducted on)
First Startup Lessons Learned
In early 2010 I embarked on a solo journey to spec, design, and build a fully-fledged SaaS application all by myself. You can read more about my thought process and the summary of the experience here. In this post I will be going over the lessons I learned. This was the largest solo project I ever embarked on and I learned a lot from the product development standpoint as well as technical.
FounderHQ Singapore
New Death Cab for Cutie Album Streaming: News: Paste
http://www.flaskofespresso.com/2011/05/lfm-lessons-learned
You can sue the creator of the computer, or the owner of the computer.
Loads of people already have a bunch of things similar to this, but more specialized. Facebook pages for friends and acquaintances; LinkedIn pages for professional networks; and of course Twitter and blogs and Github pages and who knows what else. The profiles on Digizot don't seem to offer more information than a Facebook page, and the actual text is severely truncated, which is frustrating.

I think a more useful thing would automatically aggregate information from the various user profile pages people already have, and let them stick in any extra information they like.

Anyway, good luck making this useful and non-annoying to use.
There seems to be at least one lesson here for developers relying on Google's good will.

Take your pick:

a) Don't rely on Google to keep services around forever

b) Ain't no such thing as a free lunch

c) Google has only one true product, and it's advertising

d) <feel free to add more>

Despite extraordinary profits, Google is really starting to tighten the reigns. I'm guessing that speaks to a feeling of market saturation. They may no longer be on a breakneck growth curve like in the old days.
Google hires top trial firm for possible October trial with Oracle
I wrote about this a couple of times. I use a service called Shoeboxed (http://littlebitofcode.com/2011/05/05/netflix-for-documents) that will scan your receipts and documents for $20/month. Works like Netflix, they send you envelopes, you fill them up, they scan them. I use them for receipts.

I also use a NeatWorks document scanner (http://littlebitofcode.com/2010/02/15/getting-receipts-and-m...) that I've been really happy with. I use it for documents. The combination of the packages has perfectly fit my needs.
You should make the photos on the front page links to actual user pages or in some way make it easy to get to example profiles. I tried searching for common names (Kelly, Sarah, Tim, etc) to see what a profile looked like but eventually gave up and left the site without actually seeing one.

Also, what does this offer over something like Google profiles, Facebook, or LinkedIn?
PayPal sues Google + ex-PayPal VP for Google Wallet
No, I haven't timed it myself, I just know how it's implemented and what code we're generating internally.

Edit: To be clear I would not advocate not using super() on account of this, as I said it'll eventually be fixed.
wow! how interesting.
The funnel here is the sales funnel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_process
according to the old school copywriters like Dan Kennedy who has also done lots of B2B work, "Tim-Ferris-Sytle" landing pages (also known as long form sales letters) work just as well in the B2B space (selling software, fax machines and high end office equiptment). The problem is that most companies selling who would benefit from the tried and true techniques from direct marketing are 'image conscious' and would rather have a feel good corporate speak landing page with a meaningless slogan like 'ideas for life' or some such!
You are mistaken. In most cases that's not done at all by anyone. Most of the data entry done by medical coders (not programmers, the other kind of coders) is for billing and insurance claims purposes. That claims data isn't detailed enough to be useful for diagnosis. And in most cases it is done hours or days later, not immediately at the point of care where the doctor is expected to make a diagnosis and decide on the course of treatment.
This is something Patrick McKenzie has been saying here for almost a year now, and is part of the reason we stopped blogging despite having developed an audience.

Another thing that devalues blog content, where the same ideas and prose would be more valuable in another venue, is that they present pieces as inherently incomplete. Example: blog commenting, which encourage readers to see pieces not as fully developed ideas but simply as fodder for a conversation. That's great when a conversation is really what you wanted, but it's terrible when it results in your work being scored by the lowest common denominator of your comments.

Daring Fireball works because that's his job. It is the point of the site to be a carefully analyzed news bulletin.

But when you're (say) a software company with a product and, possibly as a result of that product, some interesting ideas about software, technology, products or what-have-you, a timely news bulletin is not your job, and if you're going to publish, you should do it in a way that optimizes the value of those ideas.

For our part, I'd like to reorganize and rewrite our blog posts into a book; start with a TOC, fill in the blanks with posts, let it be incomplete, and build it up over time. But I'd also like to get product shipped.
You misspelled your word in the link. Using a z instead of s indicates the software is cracked or pirated.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/warez
It's strange how so many people find this logic insane when applied to a domain name or physical property [1], but accept it wholeheartedly when applied to a corporation.

[1] This logic is often used by police departments to rob people of cash/cars on the theory they are somehow involved in drugs.
Drat, beaten to it. This is what I get for replying to 20-minute old copies of a page.
This is not a guarantee. Linus is speculating, so is the website. Title is misleading
The new job market rulers - Data Scientists
Writing Technology Of 1920: Multiplex Type
China Confirms Deployment of Online Army
The site anticipated you:

http://blogging.infogami.com/whats_it_good_for.html
Warning, Prostitutes hunting at Zynga SF
I work down the street from the new Zynga offices in SF (Townsend b/w 7th and 8th) and frequent the area for coffee/lunch/banking etc. About a week ago I noticed a familiar, very attractive blond in a short leather skirt, heavy make-up, giving a lot of looks to people in passing. Something seemed off. Then another day I noticed another super attractive girl looking lost and slutty, hanging out bumming a cigarette from a Zynga employee... for some reason she reminded me of a girl from the O'Farrell Theater area (strip club downtown) and then I thought, no way, they're on to the nerdy new hires with IPO stock potential, they are HUNTING! Haha, I've spotted TWO more lurkers, only took about 30 minutes to pick them out during lunch hours. Just a heads up Zynga. BTW, you hiring any technical advisors with a careful eye for danger? I’m local hehe
(Anyone verify this? Please share…)
He's also claiming they grow bananas in Finland. I bet he thinks they grow on the North Pole too.
Content marketers call that cornerstone content, but it works outside marketing. It's just a collection of posts on a subject (sometimes with commentary).
I was thinking this too - you would think that profile guided optimisation ought to be able to identify the slow paths.
Here's the original report from the Beijing News (translated to English from Chinese by Google): http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&rurl=transla...
> If Google Analytics is a core service your site offers to visitors, then I suggest you have bigger problems that just this tiny change to UK Law.

Why does caring about storing accurate data about what users are doing on my site so I can improve it mean I have "bigger problems"?

> You can A/B test your site. If you want to use a method that requires cookies, then get the visitor's consent first.

I could also ride a horse instead of driving a car...
I never said protection should be abandoned. I said education is more important because it allows users to use protective measures correctly.

And may render a lot of protective measures unnecessary.
You can sue anyone for anything, but unless the computer system is certified by the FDA as a "Medical Device" then you're unlikely to win a judgment. It would be like suing the publisher of a diagnosis textbook that contained incorrect information. That's the reason that clinical decision support vendors typically design their systems to just show possibilities rather than explicitly making a diagnostic recommendation. It's ultimately still up to the doctor and so the doctor bears all of the legal responsibility.
My apologies, then. I probably moused-over the one link that did have the code.
I think this is already happening. There are successful niche social networks broken up along at least two lines:

1) Geography. VZ-Networks' sites are bigger than Facebook in Germany, Vkontakte seems to still be #1 in Russia.

2) Activity. CouchSurfing.org and meetup.com have completely different use cases than Facebook and are thriving.
> And in most cases it is done hours or days later, not immediately at the point of care where the doctor is expected to make a diagnosis and decide on the course of treatment.

So does that mean it's not important to the doctor's job? Or would having this information right away allow doctors to do their jobs better? If so, why isn't it done that way right now?
On second thought, don't do this. Add rake 0.8.7 to your gemfile and bundle update. Rake 0.9.0 is insanely broken.
It persists messages in one direction. Imagine you have a publish subscribe situation where you have a few apps subscribed to a publisher. If one of those apps goes down, the publisher will make a note and store the messages until it comes back. When the app comes back, it will get all the messages it missed. It's really a wonderful thing if you were going to implement peer-to-peer pub/sub yourself.

It's also nice in applications like Mongrel2. Make an http request, in your browser, start up your web server, and the request completes! Great for development, where sometimes you switch to the browser faster than your app can restart after a change. With Mongrel2 (and thanks to 0MQ), you don't even notice the race condition.
Yes, but the comment I was replying to was within the context of all doctors being replaced by computers, and his point was that it couldn't happen because there needs to be a person to blame. Well, if you get rid of the people (except those creating the computers), then it is still possible to sue the computer owner and/or creator.
What is the economic value of the internet?
You realize that the number of people in jail and prison labor are orthogonal issues, right?

One can both oppose our war on drug users (near as I can tell, the main source of our excess prisoners) and China's war on the Falun Gong, but also have no objection to forcing robbers/rapists/murderers to work for their keep.
The scariest thing in this bill comes from the detailed summary.

"[A recent addition] responds to concerns raised that search engines are part of the ecosystem that directs Internet user traffic and therefore should be part of the solution."

They'll try to make linking illegal. Maybe not this year. But it will happen.
INSTANT beta MeetingBurner access & 60 day's free via BetaCandy
Regex themselves are fine, but people try to do ridiculous things with them such as "parse" HTML. They're used when they shouldn't be, and they go unused when they should be used. :)
ابن خلدون 
ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون ابن خلدون
As of 2009, it was 0.743%. In 1999, it was around 0.7%, and in 1989 it was 0.426%. So expecting it to hit 1% sometime this decade might be a stretch, unless the trends accelerate - it seems that the rate of increase is leveling off a bit, and hitting 1% by 2020 would be a greater increase in the next 9 years than occurred over the previous 20 (in 1991 it was just under 0.5%).

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_Rate_in_the_...

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/07/us/us-has-highest-rate-of-...
SPB Time available for Android
SPB has released one of its most popular Android applications: SPB Time. It is an advanced time management that can be easily customized with different skins.
> Arizona still has real chain gangs

It's only in one county (Maricopa), and it's voluntary.
The Rainmaker API Challenge
I hope sites will be allowed to write a cookie saying "this user has declined cookies". Otherwise, users will be prompted over and over, and will eventually give in.
I designed my own using http://www.moo.com. They've got a quick tool for making simple font/color/text choices, which were enough to meet my simple needs.

The best part though, is that they'll print however many designs you want, evenly distributed across however many cards you order, at no additional cost. This has led to me a/b testing my card designs:)

I order cards 50 at a time, and order 3 or 4 variations. Then, when people ask for my card, I tell them that I'm a/b testing my cards, pull out a couple, and let them choose the design they like the most. It's a great conversation point, a good way to talk about my love for user testing, and I'm gradually honing in on a design people seem to like (I'm on my third batch).

P.s. If you're a hacker (or someone else) that hasn't haven't ordered personal business cards, you should. I can't believe how many I ended up giving out, and how much easier it makes making business connections when I meet people. Well worth the 30 minutes and $27. I wish I'd done it a year sooner.
Computers are commonly used to assist in diagnosis. You might want to look up computer-assisted diagnosis[1]. If I am to believe my machine learning lecturers, their use is actually a bit more widespread than what the wikipedia page describes.

Anyway, I think it is likely to see a transition to computers diagnosing and doctors just checking the results; at least for some areas. If you have a diagnosis and patient information I guess it isn't that difficult to come up with a treatment. I think that doctors themselves basically memorize decision trees.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_diagnosis
Your photos and data on Flickr
Is it not possible to periodically start fresh, from an agreed upon point?
I think the solution is a combination of tactics. A curated "getting started" or "best of" list is a good way to get eyes on some of the best posts that are representative of the blog. Make good use of categories and tags, and use lists of related posts to make navigation between similar posts less painful. On my blog (http://grokcode.com), I also have a prominent "popular today" section on the homepage so people can see which posts are getting the most traffic at the moment (these are rarely the newest posts). http://www.alistapart.com/ has a curated "editor's choice" section on the homepage that is frequently updated and help draw attention to great content from the archives.

Also, the standard blog format uses entire posts on the homepage and archive pages, but everything is so much cleaner and easier to navigate if only post summaries appear on those pages.
Lack of time to implement? Maybe someone with more time will read this, agree, and make it happen :)
Using Mongoid Alongside AcitveRecord
Send log4j message to an email list using Gmail
That article was entirely unhelpful. What are Osama and Stephanie's backgrounds, and why do they deserve to be sued?
The doctors I know tend to think that it's at least 90% that way already (and has been for a while), at least if you're a primary-care doctor seeing patients in an office, rather than a surgeon or some kind of specialist. The typical patient isn't presenting with a rare disease worthy of a medical TV drama, and instead the main problems are patient-interaction ones: getting the right information out of them, picking treatments that the patients will be satisfied with and follow, figuring out what complicating lifestyle factors they might have, building trust with the patient and family members, etc. With the increasing influence of evidence-based medicine, where doctors are supposed to follow experimentally validated rubrics, the diagnosis itself is often semi-mechanical anyway even when done by a human.
Follow-up: Why they use gray code at the pediatrician's office
I emailed them for the terms, will see how it develops
Do we need to be Lucky to be successful?
Sometimes you get everything by just doing nothing and sometimes no matter what you do and how hard you work for something you just don't get it.

Does anyone else believe in being Lucky & Unlucky?
as someone that's been audited by the irs, i can tell you that having printouts of line-items from my web-based billing system, credit card statements, and copies of receipts worked fine. in fact, having everything on a computer in pdf format would probably make the whole process even easier because you could search through them all on a laptop at the audit. the auditor will probably want printouts of the scanned copies at the end, though.
Interesting analysis, @dctoedt. Given what you say about its toxic incentive structure, it's no wonder that the legal profession is held in such frequent contempt. I suppose this goes hand-in-hand with the fact that lawyers suffer from alcoholism and depression at rates noticeably higher than the population in general (grim consolation for the rest of us, I assure you).

You've also done a great job explaining the phenomena noted in the (excellent) link provided by @dmlorenzetti. Given that lawyers often have more to gain by (slowly) killing deals than making them happen - at least not quickly or easily - I can see why it's good policy to keep them at a safe distance from anything that HAS to go through.

As one savvy executive put it "you want them on tap, not top."
Read the lawsuit, it says everything you need to know: http://www.ebayinc.com/assets/pdf/fact_sheet/2011_PayPal_DOC...
Actually I browse through wikis quite a bit, but maybe I'm not typical. In any event, IMO, a blog (web log) is for just that: logging time-sensitive things, like a journal or news feed. A wiki is for more permanent information, that may be updated as needed, but stays put.
Economics meets startups - Part I