skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of truths in this article. Thanks for sharing, at the very least it makes me feel sane for feeling like I'm going to go insane working at home all the time. Cheers.
Fedora 16 GNOME: New and Stable
"Which alternative is more probable?

(1) Linda is a bank teller.

(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.) The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts."

Umm.. no. The reason 85% of people chose option #2 is because the answers were so poorly worded. They give the impression of an unspoken assumption for answer #1 that Linda is NOT active in the feminist movement.
Without sounding completely mental, Twitter has been my work from home saviour this time around.

I worked from home a fair few years back, and by the time my housemate came home, I was bouncing off the walls with the excitement of someone to talk to. He, who had been in the office all day, just wanted to watch TV and talk to no-one.

I started working from home again earlier this year, this time with Twitter in my life. Twitter/Tweetdeck provides the perfect office banter for me. My friends chat, I join in if I want to. Industry contacts and peers discuss worky stuff - not only do I get to interact with them, but it also means I don't fall behind with what's happening.

I do still find I need to pencil 'go outside' into my diary every day, though...
I plan on making it.
Orange County CA Jail
Btw, I've been using this app for my mac to implement the Pomodoro technique (didn't know it was called that though)

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/breaktime/id427475982?mt=12
Just pulling a 2U system with 2 HDDs out of an ordinary rack is strenuous if you're not it decent shape, yanking a loaded 4U box out in the manner that video shows is a quick path to pain.

I think they need to build a simple pulley or hydraulic lift system for these.
Offer HN:  Are you a startup founder?  Want some free PR?
I'm producing a webseries about Silicon Valley - it's basically Entourage, but based here in the Valley. I'll be launching a Kickstarter fundraising project in the next few days, and as part of the fundraising I'm doing "30 Days of Startup Stories." I will feature your story and you get to piggyback off the PR for the project. What I'll need your best startup story to feature in my update. I'll be asking for feedback on the stories, and the best ones will make it into the series itself - which would obviously get you even more exposure. Remember this is drama - so it's not a product pitch - it's killer products, crazy founder stories, lust, betrayal, absurdity, coincidence, debauch, or whatever else you have experienced that will make people go "no...fricking...way." Here are a couple I've gotten so far:

- fired my best friend
- lost a $10mm deal because I was 10 minutes late
- lost 3 girlfriends in 2 months

Your only commitment is a few sentences of text to get featured in 30 Days of Startups...easy! Write to me at fernando at valleyseries dot com with 2-3 sentences on your startup and your story. Or drop your story in comments if you'd like...I'm sure we'll get some doozies!
Ah, thank you; formatting corrected.
2012 SxSW Allocates a Spot for Startups - Apply Now
No offense, but these time doctor.com blog posts seem like they are being up voted to the front page more to promote the company than for the content. There are no comments and the content quality is below what is typical for HN. This looks more like what would have appeared on Digg several years ago than HN quality.

The list doesn't appear to be very current, but what's worse is the convenient "inclusion" of the Time Doctor product itself at the end of the list of the "best collaboration tools for virtual teams".

This is shameless self promotion masquerading as a relevant HN post.
And so I guess the guy just made it all up. Looks like it's case closed, guys.
The app is where the business logic is, the database is where the data is. As a DBA you aren't doing your job right if you feel OK about implementing business rules in SQL

Sigh... This again. Out here in the real world, we have databases with a hundred apps connected, with tens of thousands of concurrent users, and these apps are written in a dozen or more languages, there's COBOL, VBA, C++, Java, Python... There's green screens, desktop apps, websites, embedded devices...

The ONLY way to have consistent, enforced business logic, from ANY application in ANY language (even people executing SQL directly) is to do it in stored procedures. Doubles the number of places? Your way is 100x the number of places. Little websites with one application running on one database are not really representative of serious database use.
Until then, it is only magical.
"Innovation is as much a function of the environment which enables and supports the innovator as the innovator itself."
Sarah Shahi Leaked Twitter Pictures
My startup, Tidal Labs, launched today with a TechCrunch writeup
I just wanted to share my excitement with HN -- I've been lurking here for a long time, and I figured "what better reason to post than this?"

We started Tidal Labs about a year ago, and today marks our official launch. We're now out in the wild with a handful of good clients, a nifty tech platform, and that persistent headache that comes with any startup.

The TechCrunch article is here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/10/tidal-bloggers/

If you don't love TechCrunch for whatever reasons, then you can skip the article and check us out directly at http://tid.al (though the article does a good job of explaining what we do -- we need to clean up the copy on our site a bit).

Anyways, thanks for reading. I just wanted to vent excitement on you guys. Love you all!
From two weeks ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/world/asia/china-imposes-n...
Adobe Had It Coming: The Long, Slow Goodbye of Mobile Flash
Kontagent raises $12M
Maybe for the phone number you can wait until they hit the "Send me a Text Message" button, then ask for it there. Since it's something they want to do at that moment it makes sense. Then you can attach the number to their account. They might be more apt to do it if it's obvious why you need the number.

I'm based out of Honolulu, Hawaii but I'm also in California every few months for work. Feel free to hit me up anytime: mark [at] mirthlab.com.
Longer, More Formal Closings Invite Fewer Thank-you Replies
Personally, I think the depression is just a side effect of dealing with how society moulds you to work in an office. I have worked full time in an office twice, and I went through depression (unofficially, as I don't want anything to do with those drugs) for several months after leaving.

Offices desensitize employees to lots of distractions, which seem to become addictive: phones ringing non-stop, colleagues interrupting, clients visiting, random music playing in the background, fitting in with certain rules etc. The silence of working from home is refreshing at first, but then the dark clouds kick in and you start to adapt. Exercise is the best cure to depression.
Spoken like a true non-founder... Reputation is everything.

If a founder ever wants to start a company again, screwing over employees will haunt him in the long term much worse than any legal repercussion that can be fixed with money.

So I wager there is a lot preventing founders from screwing employees, specially in startups, where people are hyper connected.

The comments in this story are running rampant with hearsay and people who have no involvement making up facts and jumping to uninformed conclusions. Zynga employees cannot comment on anything anywhere because of the quiet period.
MacTech 2011: TMO Interviews Southern Stars’ Tim DeBenedictis
mammography is often the least preferred sub-specialty (my wife is a radiologist and feels this way, and I've encountered many radiologists with the same outlook).

Why? Because breast cancer is hard to diagnose? Because nobody likes looking at floppy old-lady boobs all day?
We're using Google+ pages for coupons and discounts
Please post at least your target market and what you hope to achieve or what your objective is. Do you want mindshare or do you want to convert to sales? What is your product or service?
Our brains make the social graph real
A response to 'The Social Graph is Neither, defending our hubris in writing social graph standards, even if they are imperfect.
Http://git.io/dhh
AppName Super-Pro?

Or AppName Hyper-Pro? That way it'll be ahead of the rip-off version alphabetically.
http://git.io/rails
The chilling effect of patents
Redesigning the country selector
The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting
If you could, how much would you charge someone to "subscribe" to "buy off" the share buttons for their pageview? Same question goes for ads.

If the price isn't too high, someone should just start selling crapblockers that make everyone happy. I guess the challenge is that you can't price a crablocker until after you've inundated someone with crap for measurement purposes.
Wow. I was going to disagree with you... then I read the quiz and note. It's worse than a mere error, the quiz writer is willfully throwing away knowledge about the world.

They didn't give conditional probabilities but of course we can, and should, use what we know about the world to make guesses at P(E|'likes math'), or at least whether that's greater than P(L|'likes math'). It surely is and you can do something similar with carpentry and an apolitical nature.

It's true that even with the assumptions I've given above you can't come up with a precise answer - none of the choices are any good - you can certainly say that "...the correct response being precisely 30 percent" is thoroughly wrong.
The S3 felt really, really cheap to me. The trackpad had too much flex. Everything about it had too much flex. The screen wobbled. I wouldn't buy it for half price.

The Samsung Series 9 seems nice, though I haven't used one for an extended period. My boss's boss had one and didn't like it, but I'm not clear why. The trackpad felt nice when I used it, but the port cover design is moronic (they had to add stickers explaining how to open them, and they're fragile, too). It also has bottom vents, which is pretty lame.

I'm considering the Lenovo U300s, which looks nice, and not like an Air clone. The only real drawback seems to be the glossy 1366x768 screen.
I forgot this - I have two friends who lived in Beijing for years but moved to LA when they had kids, in large part because the air pollution was so bad they said they could feel it in their throats when they woke up each morning if it was going to be a bad day. Nobody likes to feel like their they breathe is killing them each day.

There was a comment (I think on Top Gear, so take it with a grain) that if you drive a new Porsche through Beijing, the air coming out the tailpipe is cleaner then the air going in the front.
Emacs Tips and Tricks from Steve Yegge [2006]
Do some research on Intel chipsets and reference designs.
This is really turning into a slugging match, isn't it?

One thing's clear, though - no matter who wins, the consumers are gonna lose.
Regarding taxes, I was surprised to read today that corportations in Italy, if they actually complied with every law, would be paying a 68.6% tax rate. Still not as bad as a few countries in Africa where the offical tax rates are well over 100%, though.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/ita...
The ONLY way? I call bullshit on that too. Databases like the one you mentioned exist, but I still think if you have business rules you want to enforce across all applications connected to a database, you wrap that in a service and let the applications call the service. Clearly stored procedures aren't the ONLY way.
Share function belongs in the browser or in Web Intents.
It would be less work for all the sites, consistent UX for users, and much better page load speed.
10 Unknown Facts About Scott Forstall, the Very Young Apple Vice-President
We continue to acquaint you with Apple top managers, which until recently were in the shade of Steve Jobs. It’s time to look at the youngest Apple vice-president (of the platform iOS) – at Scott Forstall. So, ten facts from his biography.
"To force users to have to read a legal statement and check a box to agree to start doing business makes that step much more difficult and I'm betting that is exactly where they are heading."

The cookie directive specifically excludes those client-side persistence mechanisms ("cookie-like") that are necessary to deliver the pro-offered service.

If the cookie isn't necessary for that core service (e.g. a third party tracking tool), then it requires an informed consent. Hiding it in legal wording in that case is not an option, it needs to be clear and understandable.

Note too, that the ICO cookie rule isn't limited to cookies, it covers all client-side persistence mechanisms that can be used in third party tracking and behavioural aggregation tools.
When interviewing, do your research and wear the appropriate uniform, so to speak. A little overdressing goes a long way - tweed sportcoat might be fine for an interview with a golf-shirt and dockers office, but it's probably inappropriate for a Tevas and baggies workplace (though dockers and a golf shirt is fine).

If you are the kind of person who wants to wear a suit everyday, then working at a bank is more likely to provide a better cultural fit - it's as simple as that. In other words, take each interview seriously enough to know when under-dressing is ok.
Simplifying South Korea
There is the \# character, which is replaced with the number of times a replacement has been done. So,

M-x replace-regexp
Replace regexp: test\(.+\)
Replace regexp with test\#

You can actually drop arbitrary lisp in the middle of search/replace expressions. So, if you'd like to number from 1 instead of 0,

M-x replace-regexp
Replace regexp: test\(.+\)
Replace regexp with test\,(1+ \#\)

I'm sure with more lisp tricks, you can get delimited lists:

M-x replace-regexp
Replace regexp: test\(.+\)
Replace regexp with test\,(aref ["one", "two", "three"] (mod \# 3))

(Not sure that works, but you get the idea).

Anyway, all of this was basically stolen from Steve Yegge. You should totally go read his article if you're interested: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and-new-emacs-...
Got it.

Let me fix that.
Unless you have a trademark on the name you will not get any help from Apple and even then it is going to be an up hill battle so I would concentrate on making your own app as good as it can be.
Unfortunately this still doesn't look like it's detecting breast cancer; it's scoring the severity of tumors, given prior knowledge that it's being presented tumors to analyze (but tumors of unknown severity).
Enable iOS 5 Panorama Camera Mode Without Jailbreak
First look at the new Tesla Model S Beta electric car
with your knowledge as a pathologist, would you agree that the success of this approach depends on the quality of the biopsy (i.e. obtaining a sample that faithfully represents the entire volume of tissue being investigated)? From my experience with prostate cancer screening research I know that biopsy scoring of prostate tumors can be very inaccurate compared to pathology scoring after a prostatectomy.
Yes, these are good as well...

ZeroMQ: Modern & Fast Networking Stack, by Ilya Grigorik
http://www.igvita.com/2010/09/03/zeromq-modern-fast-networki...

ZeroMQ an Introduction, by Nicholas Piël
http://nichol.as/zeromq-an-introduction

Advanced Network Architectures with ZeroMQ, by Zed Shaw
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2011-adv...
Notesdeck wrangles all of your note services into one app.
it's like, days of Flash again !
The keyboard autocomplete is not really so secret: i managed to somehow activate it on the Japanese keyboard without changing any preference files.
The included Pew center graph is powerful. And fascinating:
http://programmingzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/does-su...

Interesting to see South Korea near the right side, rather than closer to Japan.
Top New-Car Deals for November
I used the term "algorithm" as a crutch, but it seems likely there are tools out there than can do fantastic keyframe & data rate shaping.

The most apparent is whatever Apple's been using for years for their movie trailers. Not a single artifact, low data rate, etc. It's better than your average 2-pass. But who knows, the "magic" could simply be to start with uncompressed source...
That's not at all what he said. He said that this particular research involved a simpler (for CS) problem than either the title or his day to day job tackles.

Do you have a background in bio or medicine or computer vision? It's very interesting to see two informed people disagree about applied computer science, so I'd love you to contribute something more specific to the thread.
Content half-life
3 Big Reason to use a Mobile PaaS: Versioning, Security, Push
Nado Sincronizado
Please: there ought to be a rule on HN that instead of linking to a popsci re-interpretation of a scientific result, you instead link directly to the paper.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/108/108ra113.full

If it is behind a paywall, as it probably is for this paper if you are not at a university, perhaps look around for the least hyperbolic re-interpretation of the paper, and link that instead.

http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/image-analysis...

Even if you do not have access to the full paper because of the paywall, you should be able to still read the abstract and pick the popsci article that is fairest to what the paper actually says.

Otherwise, this happens: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 and I really don't like it when HN blindly follows the hivemind in furthering that phenomenon.

Let's examine what the authors actually say.

To directly compare the performance of the C-Path system to pathological grading on the exact same set of images, we applied standard pathological grading criteria to the TMA images used in the C-Path analysis. [...] the pathologist grading the images was blinded from the survival data. Although the C-Path predictions on the NKI data set were strongly associated with survival, the pathologic grade derived from the same TMA images showed no significant association with survival (log-rank P = 0.4), highlighting the difficulty of obtaining accurate prognostic predictions from these small tumor samples.

That's it. They make one remark about it, and do not focus on this at all elsewhere in the paper, because it was not the point of their study and the methodology for this little result is far from robust. Note they used one pathologist to run this little test. Also note that a high p-value is not evidence that the null hypothesis is true--it is quite possible that there is a relationship but the study is underpowered; this is a frequent point of confusion.

Let's please keep scientific statements in context. The original paper says nothing tantamount to computers diagnosing breast cancer more accurately than doctors. It is, principally, about a new morphological feature that the researchers believe is tied more strongly to survival according to their computational model.
250k visits, did you get any customers? I could not tell a quick scan of the article.
I like this. However, I'm wondering if including all the common and local names of a country would become too cumbersome during implementation over time.
Which is in Student Loans 2011
Does anyone who is not a startup founders think kitschy foreign ccTLD domain names are cool? They just confuse users. I am waiting for the day the new Libyan government desides they don't want American companies exploiting .ly. That will be interesting to watch.
So I am actually far less concerned about a computer doing my job very well, which is actually looking at a piece of tissue on a slide and making a tumor versus not-tumor distinction. This is very hard to do and I think will continue to be even harder for computers/computer-vision/AI to do for a long time to come.

As a machine learning researcher, I do not disagree that it's "very hard" to make a single tumor-versus-not-tumor classifications. However, machine-learned classifiers are becoming much more adept at making these types of classifications, and will only improve with time. I think most of the problem right now is in creating a corpus with enough attributes and precise/reliable measurements to accurately train a classifier. Presently, computer vision algorithms are quite sensitive to noise; the human eye is much better at separating this noise from the actual signal.

Right now, I'm doing a much different kind of research: applying machine learning algorithms to legal documents (court opinions, statutes, patents, etc.) to generate legal analyses. To not worry about a computer "doing your job very well" is, in my opinion, a naive perspective. It's indisputable that one day, computers will be doing classification-type jobs very well. Embracing the technology will keep you ahead of the curve; dismissing it is suicide.
Sweet! I'll try to make it
You blaming it on outside forces (money, burocracy and taxes) just validates one of the points in the article.

I am German, working some years for FIAT, and did my PhD in Italy, but left right after graduation for the US. The article perfectly summarizes the reasons I didn't want to stay and start something in Italy.
Win Photoshop CS5 from AppSumo
Well if they can't abide by the law, then they are breaking the law. Make a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commisioner: http://dataprotection.ie/
The perceived "you're just playing around on the computer" attitude from people is annoying though. We have friends where the dad works at home too, in sales, and doesn't really need to work a full day, as long as he makes his calls and meets his quotas. As a developer, our work is never done and so I work a full day, and yet I'm "always working" as if that's a bad thing. Even though without 2 hours of commuting I'm usually there for breakfast, lunch and dinner where I rarely had those with my family when I worked in the office.
Warner Bros. Admits Sending HotFile False Takedown Requests
Community vote taken last weeks was to continue 3.x series of releases by 3.1.x versions.
It's not even new--been around since iOS 4.1 at least (and actually worked better on earlier iOS versions)
Actually, he also said that he is not concerned
that machine learning could initially detect
cancer anytime soon.
Also, if you've been machine learning trends
recently(past 5 years), you'll see that deep
learning methods (hinton, lacunn, ng, bengio)
have actually made a huge leap over what came
before, and are believed to be that "final" in
some sense algorithm that can allow to tackle
any learning problem. These just haven't spread
widely anough yet.
I nearly misread this for "How scientists taught monkeys the concept of monkey". That would have been an interesting self-awareness experience for the monkeys!
Redesigning The Country Selector
Nice one. Scrolling down the endless list of options in a form is pretty cumbersome. I like the fact that you can type in common abbreviations for countries as well ('de' for Germany, etc).
Amazon buys Yap, a challenge to Apple's Siri voice recognition?
This doesn't come a huge surprise. Since a consumer could buy a kindle, 2 kindle touches, and a kindle fire (or some combination) for the same prices a the lowest model iPad. These prices are going to make kindle products really popular for gifts during the holiday season. I think they are going to do extremely well.
I don't understand why no PC manufacturer has done something different like a very gentle ratchet or mild Vel-cro to get YankSafe functionality. Or even just slightly differently laid out magnets.
This is a great idea. If you can get coax a giant like Facebook into action you'll improve your chances quite a bit.