skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What would be the picture of perfect 22-29 span? Being born with a silver spoon in a mouth? Partying every day?

I'm a CS grad student, married to med student. While our schedules are different, there isn't much difference in time. I'm mostly occupied with reading papers, grading papers, doing homework, grading homework and generally providing very cheap labor in a form of research assistantship and teaching assistantship to university.

To me, the experience of every point the author mentions is the sole reason for existence between 20-30 years of age.
Given that he made no mention of touch screen PCs I think he's totally missed where MS are betting the market is going to be in 2 or 3 years.

Watch the key note. See the load of touch screen PCs on stage. Realise he wrote a whole blog post of nonsense.

MS are trying to anticipate the next big market AFTER the tablets.

Whether this will actually happen is another guess, but I think this guy is so far off the mark in his prediction of the demise of the PC.

Personally I can see MS pulling some stunt like encouraging PC manufacturers to give away a Windows 8 Tablet free with your new all singing Touch Enabled Windows 8 PC, cutting the entire market out from underneath Apple.

So, I suggest MS are actually hoping that touch PCs will actually give consumers a reason to upgrade their PCs again after the flagging sales of the last few years.

In the end I don't see it as compelling enough until they start talking about touch and gesture enabled PCs.

EDIT: part of the reason I believe this is because of the massive emphasis MS were making on the cloud based login anywhere, file available anywhere. The point will be devices that talk to each other with the same apps available on all of them.
google search on books - on the back cover.

I'd like a digital wall paper on my walls so that I could change how my walls look every day.
Suggest HN: Downvote button should prompt for a comment
The idea is pretty simple: if you go to downvote a comment, the system should prompt for a comment of your own as to why you're doing so.

I have a few reasons why I think this would be a good idea:

A) Downvoting someone without a comment doesn't give the user context for /why/ it was downvoted, leaving them in a confused state. Did someone merely disagree, or did the comment violate an unspoken community rule?

In essence, a teaching moment is lost. A downvote with a comment lets people know what the community expects, which helps us to maintain what hacker news is about. When new users see a marginalized comment, they'll know why that happened.

B) It's well known in psychology that people tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. A score of -4 is a lot worse feeling than a score of +4 is positive feeling. This has a subtle effect on user incentives.

In the current system, I think it incentivizes people to post something that they know will be popular but that doesn't add much to the discussion, rather than something interesting but perhaps more nuanced and easily misunderstood. By adding slightly more friction to the down voting process, I think it will make people more thoughtful as to why they're doing it. I think this will also add more civility to the discussions.
TDD seems to encourage you to dive straight into implementation. For certain problems - e.g. a Sudoku solver - it's much more effective to think through the entire algorithm before starting to write code, and I think that the above debacle supports this argument.

You don't exactly need to know any formal theory of constraint propagation to solve this, after all - I wrote a Sudoku solver many years ago based on the algorithm "place a random valid value in the cell with the least valid values; cross off any now-impossible values in the same row/column/block; backtrack if there are no valid moves" which is not impossible to come up with on the spot. (I did.)
Twitter Trends Beat Analysts In Predicting Wall Street
But when you make the most profitable way the preferred way, you shift the power from the people to a controlling party, at which point, the price goes up to suit the "investors".

It's an unfortunate part of human nature.
Certainly not. But on the other hand, without those 41 million dollars, they would not have been able to spend six months developing a brand new product (that looks much more interesting than the first one) without generating a cent of revenue in the meantime. Years of work and development have an opportunity cost, and with more money, you can buy some execution time and be there on time.
Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty.

Very, very true.

I would even expand on this. Problems people encounter online can be divided into technical, social (involving groups) and interpersonal. Problems from one category cannot be effectively solved via methods from another. Attempting to do so inevitably results in many undesirable side-effects.
"All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook..."

Ummmm...not mine. I use it sometimes but total posts under a dozen. Google knows way more than FB about me but that's changing little by little.
From the Absolute Basics
Side project. Been working on it for 2 weeks.
Does anyone have any idea if this would be similar to becoming a doctor in Canada? My girlfriend is doing her undergrad and plans to do med school, I'm not sure if I should show her this article or not... If this really only pertains to becoming a doctor in the USA, then there isn't a point in shower her this. Any advice/info is appreciated :)
I too for the same reason have deleted my account. I don't feel i'm in control. Its too risky.
Doesn't scale right on an iPhone.
hacking has nothing to do with money. It is a side effect that a few hackers will get rich. May will just contribute a lot of interesting things for a normal salary, possibly doing this great things in their free time.
Prices of auto services local to where you live (e.g. oil change).
Whats ur country? ... Im from mexico,i hace bootstraped my business (guali.com.mx) from zero.

I already make more than 350us a week .. Thats good for a 24yr old in Mexico.

I have applyed for startupchile and we got selected this round ... So seems like my startup with make the leap!

And yes .. Im from a third world country.q
NYC Startup Paying $350 a Month in Manhattan for 1500sqft Apartment
You forgot the final clause: " later followed by the removal of the choice to opt-out, for your convenience."
Wait? Is that an honest comment? Because I go to a somewhat challenging Tech School, and am down in the trenches.

If that is indeed true, I might try and adopt some of the listed stuff, given that I already do some of these.

Please let me know!
I would like to respond to comments to this post. It is not generic, it is how mind works. If it is hard, it starts finding excuses. Once you master it better, suddenly excuses are gone. I read the post and it doesn't sway me one bit in my view. More experienced developers usually say that they find some part of the testing more useful, while other level is more tedious and they don't feel it is as useful.
Consultants use TDD because it gives more predictable results.
There are cases when you need to do spike first to discover how to go about a problem, which doesn't say you don't test, just do that when it is appropriate. I think what you suggest as an example is that.
Also, I don't believe that you should write tests every time, sometimes if you are a startup and want to do quick and dirty prototype, I don't think it is a bad idea to skip testing, but again, this is not to say startup don't do testing, they are the one who need it more then most, just you should be flexible in your approach to coding and software development.
Three implicit contexts in Ruby
Hey Notch I bought minecracft but on 9-23-11 it just said: user not premium after i paid for the full version of the game so I'm wondering what i should do to got my username back and beable to play full version multilayer so what should i do?
Acrylic display
Custom Creative Plastics has been established in the South Miami area for thirty years. We specialize in the design and fabrication of Acrylic Store Displays...
undo

If you are truly God, please implement ASAP
Record Breaking Kayak Fall
Many compilers can nonetheless output assembly, if just for debugging purposes.
I lived in New York City, Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley) and San Francisco.

In California, you spend +- $800/month on car stuff... and your small apart. will eat another $1000/month...

In New York, no car is needed and you can found a shared space for a very good price...the keyword in NYC is "shared". shared apt. , shared workspace...shared girlfriend.

The most important is the people of New York City (including Brooklyn). They are amazing! It will take you a good two years to be accepted as a "local", but when you are "in", they will become your extended family... this is priceless... you won't get this in California.

I always compared New York City as a nasty girlfriend, you want to leave her because she is nasty to you, but you stick with her because the sex is so good.
Wouldn’t disabling third-party cookies take care of this? (And many other questionable things?)
Ghostery and Disconnect are essential privacy tools in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. Also try ShareNot on Firefox, which is experimental, but has somewhat more extensive blocking coverage than Disconnect.

But more fundamental: don't log in unless you have to, log in only in private browsing windows or separate browsers from your other surfing, and also clear your cookies often to keep your not-logged-in browsing cleaner from a privacy perspective.
Better yet, remove the downvote entirely. People are using it unthinkingly in drive-bys to say they disagree, rather than it's original intended purpose of "This is inappropriate for HN." Soliciting a comment won't make them comment - they'll ignore it, or insert something inane.

You can't change people's behavior, and I think the "down vote" should disappear. Let us work on reinforcing rather than punishing.

Things that genuinely don't belong should be flagged. Further, things that are flagged should be raised in the rankings, not lowered, until they get to the point where they have enough flags to be deleted. This would mean that genuinely inappropriate items/submissions/comments would become more visible, so they get more flags more quickly and get deleted more quickly than happens now.
Great Scott, they've got an Opera plugin. (https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/ghoste...)
Not to mention more verb like - and thus descriptive.
Others have brought up the privacy concerns but for me the other issue is this: a share is an endorsement and if I havent had a chance to evaluate the content, I am endorsing it blindly. I may read an article and think it sucks so I wouldnt share it.
Sure, but by removing a simple step (the act of explicitly sharing something) it now becomes easier for these mistakes to happen...
I understand, but, still, the language in the first paragraph is contradictory. "The patent office's original interpretation of software as language and therefor patentable" states the original interpretation of the USPTO is that language is patentable. A petition like this should not allow the slightest amount of confusion.
Of course it wasn't written for people to understand -- it was written for their colleagues in their field, and all they care about are these pages unreadable mathematical expressions.

It's not rare that I talk with an author of a scientific paper and can easily summarize an entire paragraph with a couple of simple sentences..

And when I talk about math with my friends over a lunch, much, much more information can be conveyed than by spending the same amount of time on reading papers. However, it does not prove that papers are written in unintelligible way, only that human-to-human communication is much more effective than paper-to-human.
Try now: http://tweetboard.me/#!/folke
Ask HN: How much access to your brain, are you willing to give?
With Brain reading and re-imaging technologies on the way, I was wondering how much access would you give, of your brain.

In the good old, owner-group-everybody style. Owner (me, lets say) had read write and execute permissions forever, now group or everybody are trying to get read permissions of the brain. That seems so much intrusive.

But, I always wanted to able to automatically write things to my brain (matrix style), because everybody, be it president or programmer, they are thinking that way, not because of the destination they are in, but, because of the things happened along the journey. IMO this part is vastly overlooked, in education. For example: I think, E = MC^2 is the destination, but, how Einstein reached there is so much more important and its hugely ignored.

To quote Einstein himself:

<quote>I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.</quote>

Notice: I want to know his thoughts, This one has immense value, one's thoughts, beliefs and world view combined, makes him see things others ignore.

Imagine if brain works like git repo, then I'd want to pull from Einstein, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, Dave Chappelle and hella lot of people. To save myself from redundant thinking.

It may sound uber creepy, actually, it sounds uber creepy to me. when I think about execute permissions, when someone gets execute permissions to my brain, I essentially become a human robot.

Your thoughts?
Also, not to be ignored, a transition doesn't happen by flipping a switch. There is a good writeup by the postgres team about switching from CVS to GIT:

http://lwn.net/Articles/409635/

Time frame: three years for a safe transition.

You should weight carefully whether thats worth it.
An Errand and Task API. Child shuttle/delivery API. Hardware store parts-in-stock API.

And, because I'm in Seattle....a Weather API (with CRUD capabilities.)
Try now: http://tweetboard.me/#!/ColinTheMathmo
#prepend replaces in place? There's no #prepend! ?
I think what you are describing is pretty much the only promising direction for solving the problem. However, I have significant doubts about the approach. Perhaps you can address them?

The strategy as I understand it is:

1. Convince a high profile conference in ${FIELD} that reproducibility is important.

2. Create a special group within that community to test submitted code to see if it matches the results presented in papers.

3. Give a special carrot to authors (a special mention in the program, a piece of text in their paper) who meet the expectations of this group.

4. Hopefully, eventually readers come to see papers with the markers indicating reproducibility as the only legitimate ones, and writers are then required to make the significant time commitment (and take the significant risks) of releasing their code.

As it happens, (1), (2), and (3) have happened in a few systems communities. For example, SIGMOD has (more or less) the same setup as you describe.

However, I have deep doubts about whether (4) will ever happen. The three issues are:

1. The group doing the evaluation of the code for the conference has a boring, unappreciated job. They are also reading terrible, likely buggy code. A natural outcome is that the evaluation group will make bold claims about how all of the code they evaluated had significant issues potentially impacting research results, making everyone who submitted look bad, and leading to disincentives for future submitters. In fact, the evaluation group may even write papers about how bad specific code they reviewed was. I believe this has happened in other communities.

2. I briefly alluded to this in my original post, but many actors have extremely good reasons (at least on their face) for not releasing their code and/or data. This is why I mentioned how researchers embedded at companies modifying large proprietary code bases are extremely unlikely to ever be part of this evaluation regime. (And, no one wants to kick such researchers out of the academic community.)

3. In order for a stigma to be attached to non-reproducibility according to the conference, there has to be a strong correlation between the highest quality work and reproducibility. However, it is likely that much of the highest quality work will not be reproducible, either because it comes out of (or in conjunction with) corporate research labs, or because it uses some very difficult to get proprietary data. Likewise, the most easily reproducible results may be the least significant.

Do you think that these issues are solvable in the long term?
If you read my other comments, I state that I make twice the average salary, because I read twice as many films.

> increasingly radiology has been outsourced overseas with mostly technicians required stateside (scan during the day, radiologist in India examines at night, results available the next morning).

This is not true. Some "preliminary reads" are read overseas at night, but the doctors reading the studies are trained and certified in the USA. "Final reads", the CT scan report that counts, cannot be read elsewhere.
thanks for keeping me updated about redis :)
Get realtime satellite pictures of any geo coordinates as shown in Hollywood movies, govt/military probably has access to it, but if it was available then people can see how humans are treating earth and its ecosystem, this can lead to sustainable development and can help a lot in natural disasters
orijing (the engineer at Facebook) is right in that you do have to auth the app.

It's not as though could be browsing one day in search of "abortions Chicago" or "genital warts" and have that auto-published to your FB page. You'd have to give an app explicit permission to share activities on your behalf.
It's just because Twitter has an active session. When you logout of twitter it will go away.
Yadda, yadda, indeed. The point is, there is no real correlation to begin with, except for what a naive politician will see when he looks at the number of patent grants.
MIT Startup Bootcamp [Livestream]
No framework other than jQuery. It's an ajax single page pattern. Obvioulsy still a bit buggy!
I don't get this fixation on margins. There are plenty of good businesses with low margins (Walmart being an extreme example). A quick check seems to tell me Dell actually has a better return on equity than Apple does (49.4% vs 42%).

http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Dell_(DELL)/Data/ROE
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Apple_(AAPL)/Data/ROE
At least it loads faster than Salon.com. Everything loads faster than Salon.com.
"constantly shouting 'Postgres is better'"

The person to whom you replied did not say that. I read it more like "Oracle can mess up MySQL if they want, because we still have this great alternative called 'postgres'".

"without ever addressing the actual needs of the vast majority of MySQL-users."

Your comment struck me because I still have a piece of paper next to me with a list of all of the complaints and feature requests I saw in various discussions around the time of the postgresql 9.1 release. That doesn't mean that every single issue you have is addressed yesterday, but a lot of development is happening in response to the needs of the MySQL community.

The most obvious example is replication (9.0, but improved in 9.1), but there's also per-column collation. And you might also consider unlogged tables to be targeted at typical MySQL use-cases. And 9.2 is likely to have index-only scans (covering indexes), for which a patch has already been posted by Robert Haas -- I happen to know mysql users who have been waiting for that feature alone, but it took some groundwork development starting in 9.0.

Can you please cite something specific that you feel is not met or being addressed, so that I can add that to my list, too?

"touting 'advantages' that are completely irrelevant to them"

Well, they might be advantages to somebody -- they were developed for a reason. Postgres folks who have done something interesting like synchronous replication or K-nearest-neighbor indexing aren't going to whisper quietly about them.

"If they ever migrate to a different DB, it's more likely to be a MySQL-fork"

It's hard to get exact numbers, but a common theme at postgresql user group meetings is people migrating from mysql to postgres or mysql people starting their next project in postgresql. There was a noticeable uptick after 9.0 was released.

"than please stop pointlessly pissing on MySQL at every available opportunity"

People come here to learn new things and see (and take part in) progress. Please stop declaring the discussion over ("...we already know...nobody is debating that...") and products like MySQL good enough ("...it just works...").
[comment meant for an entirely different HN post deleted]
From Newbie to Millionaire Review
is this guy tripping or what? facebook extended a few features (eg. not just liking, but reading and eating and whatever) and introduced timeline, which is gonna be quite creepy for all those very active facebookers out there. seriously, what's the big deal?
Faster than light?  Almost certainly not.
You make some good points.

Of course, I cannot prove that the tests insure quality. In fact, this is not what the radiology board exam does.

The board exam is designed to weed out dangerous doctors, which is probably the best we can hope for. So, I guess you can take my word for it or not, but dropping the bar at all would let dangerous people practice, which I see as a mistake. The people that I know who failed the exam should not be working in Radiology.
That's an admirable position. But, I'll point out that when starting a new tech company, you have two options. You can do everything you can to make it a success. Or, you can start it outside of a major tech company startup hub, such as in Detroit.

If your priority is to help save Detroit, by way of starting a company that provides jobs in Detroit, that's cool. Good on you. But, odds are very good it's not going to become a big tech company.

There are a lot of ways to frame the world as "two options". We have two options with regard to poverty in Africa: Give our savings away to help feed the poor, or buy a new TV or car or whatever it is we were planning to do with that money. We have two options with regard to the environment: We can sell our cars and start biking everywhere, or we can continue doing what we've always done.

Just because a cause is worthy does not mean I'm the person to take it up. I'll leave solving Detroit's problems to the people who have reasons to love Detroit. For people in Detroit who are starting tech companies, and care about the success of their company more than the recovery of Detroit, the smart money is on leaving Detroit for greener pastures.

By the way, I'm not really criticizing your article. I think it's an interesting story; I think a lot of what's happening in Detroit right now is an interesting story, which is why it was high on my "places in the northeast to visit" (right below NYC).
Accessing facebook.com/watmough ('deleted' account) shows 'content currently unavailable'. This used to be my account.

Accessing facebook.com/jonathanwatmough (likely not an account) shows standard 'page not found error'.

Deleting a fb account may not mean what you would expect it does. I think they are keeping my data warm for me.

And keeping your data warm too.
The people telling you MySQL is good enough / better are also doing you a favour ... You can more easily tell they don't know very much about databases :-)
Ok this should be fixed now.
Holistic Healthcare
Came across Ghostery professionally earlier this month, seems to be quite primitive in it's detection which surprised me. A site I knew to have tracking on didn't get picked up due, as far as I could see, a change in the filename of the tracking .js file. I was expecting it to track domains in a similar way to AdBlock.
How an empty blog post makes headline news
That works - now at dinner - will check out more thoroughly later.