skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there an OTC kit for testing vitamin D levels? ("Serum concentration of 25(OH)D is the best indicator of vitamin D")

Can someone make one of those nifty little bio-chip things (do those exist?) that is connected to a little needle thing like electronic insulin monitors?
I have switched to using decorators, based on your suggestion.

https://github.com/bcoe/smtproutes/issues/1
How do you TEST your start-up ideas?
His comment makes sense in the context of middus's comment. You are highly unlikely to compose an email that "haunt you" unless you are quite drunk. You are still you, and you'll still act in line with how you normally act. Loosened inhibitions at low levels of alcohol are almost without exception quite voluntary.

For most people who have drank before I'd say the line between 'good to go' and drunk comes at about 5 or so, but the number is in fact irrelevant. Just get a buzz, or maybe a little tipsy, and you'll be fine.
I procrastinate by doing interesting things in favor of less interesting things.
It's worth noting that the political climate wrt. immigration into the UK is positively toxic this decade; the government has promised to effectively reduce immigration from outside the EU to zero (they can't do anything about EU citizens, who have an automatic right of residence) and a crack-down on people coming to the UK to work is part of the package. (IMO they're running scared of the hard right/racist vote, but blocking foreign technology gurus is part and parcel of keeping out those hideously dangerous Bangladeshi curry chefs.)
What is your quick and dirty method? (thanks for sharing!)
It might be worth considering at any latitude; despite the association with sunlight, the NIH notes that "perhaps surprisingly, geographic latitude does not consistently predict average serum 25(OH)D levels in a population". (http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind)
I think the subtext of my comment was pretty straightforward: after 2-3 drinks, you're not going to send radically different emails to customers; you're certainly not likely to torch relationships.

If anything, over the last several years, what I've found is that stress is far more likely to hurt relationships than intoxication. After a frustrating day, I'm way more likely to be clipped, snippy, abrupt, or unhelpful. That's the stuff that clients and customers remember.

I drink pretty regularly and can't think of a single time that intoxication has harmed a business relationship (indeed, I routinely take clients out for beers, like most other businesspeople do --- if alcohol and "loss of inhibition" was such a force for chaos, one assumes this would be less of a time-honored tradition).

On the other hand, I can think of many times where stress has damaged relationships, sometimes permanently.

I picked 2-3 drinks out of a hat. I know the guy who wrote this post drank 4 glasses of gin before getting on a plane (I'd throw up if I did that; alcohol and air travel don't mix with me), but 2-3 seems like a pretty reasonable casual evening of answering emails.
I don't know. Would like to know as well. Anyone?
Anyone else find video content annoying, especially of the talking head variety?

Written content is nice as I can scan it in 10 seconds and decide if it's worth focus. Video needs to be watched in a linear fashion and takes at least a minute to process.

Video is for screencasts. Writing is for making a point.
There's three main ways people buy online advertising:

- cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
- cost per click (CPC)
- cost per action (CPA), where the action is something that takes place after the click, like signing up for Netflix.

If the ad buy was CPM, using an ad blocker takes revenue from the site they'd otherwise receive. If not, not.
Another great book is "Factory Girls" by Leslie T. Chang.
Mind sharing your immigration nightmare story here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&fo...

We're trying to get ammo, and then trying to hack together some press coverage to highlight these stories.
Doesn't work at all.

(Browser: Firefox 8.0.1/OSX 10.7, NoScript disabled for this page).
>Not sure what Windows deal breakers would be? Unless you have a specific reason for wanting to use a Unix OS.

See, that's what I'm talking about. Lots of the crap Windows throws at you is simply accepted because people do not even realize anymore that it's crap.

To name a few which annoy me every time I am forced to use Windows:

-No or very limited customization of the entire GUI (or the OS in general, for no reason whatsoever - this goes for OS X, too, btw).

-Forced mouse usage, either because it's impossible to do something with the keyboard or it's highly inconvenient to do so.

-Hiding basic functionality (for example, showing/hiding hidden folders) deep in some non-intuitive system menus.

-Often being forced to do something in a specific way because someone at Microsoft thought this should be the only way to do something, whether that's intuitive and/or efficient or not. More often than not, it's neither.

I could go on like this for hours, but I'll admit that I am in fact biased myself. Still, many of the things that annoy me have been noticed by people I know (and who use Windows) as well. Any single one of the points I noted above are deal breakers for me.

>Sure you have more problems with virus/crapware etc but getting their long suffering nephew to come around every few months to re-install everything may well be less of an inconvenience than not being able to use their Windows only cross stitch software or train simulator etc.

I don't think so. That's what wine is for, and 95% of all programs will run flawlessly with it. If you set it up correctly on a user-friendly distro, they will not even notice the difference.

Maybe you can even find free (as in Freedom) alternatives. For lots of applications, these exist, and for the most part, they are either on par or sometimes better than their Windows-only counterparts. I already try to convert people to cross-platform applications on Windows (for example, Pidgin) so they could more easily switch to a better OS some day.

>My point is that looking at badly rendered websites and having poor usability may still be better for them than losing use of this app.

And my point is that badly rendered websites is the price those corporations will have to pay if they want to continue to use their application. The retarded, foresight-lacking decisions of corporate management years ago are no - I repeat, NO - reason for catering to IE6 users. It's like we are rewarding their stupid decision when instead we should punish it - by stopping to support (and consequently, block access for) IE6, completely.
> But I think that doing some of the shittier tasks around a startup is easier after a few drinks.

And when you realize that the drinks are just an excuse, you will be one step closer to enlightenment.
I dunno, from my kind of ignorant position, FF9 seems light years ahead of previous versions in terms of speed & UI. I actually switched from Chrom[e|ium] to FF a couple weeks ago and haven't regretted it.
Being tired makes it easier for me to do public speaking and sales presentations. I've never locked up in the middle of a presentation when I've had a bad night's sleep beforehand. It's almost getting to be something I optimize for: set up travel so I'm as tired as possible before presenting.
The Clojure Community and Me
I don't think this is a fair comment at all. Drinking definitely does alter distractibility.
Wikified hypertext is not less radical and it already works and brings huge rewards.
It doesn't really effect load. SPDY works by wrapping multiple HTTP transactions into one. So it helps with latency.

Google could use it for their own mobile applications. Making services (such as gmail) better on Android devices. This then encourages users of their services to buy Android phones.

If Google controls the mobile platform then it can influence how search is done. It's vertical integration.
"Why will the 20th person join your company?"
Since the beginning the US Government has tried to discredit Wikileaks so people don't believe what they are saying or releasing. I suppose they succeeded, because now Wikileaks now lacks the funds because of that campaign against Assange and Wikileaks. The questions is will there be someone else stepping up to this role now?

Also is there any hope that US will once again return to the "innocent until proven guilty" mentality? Because all I see now is more and more bypassing of the judicial process and declaring everyone a terrorist until proven innocent. That's if they don't assassinate them first.

Something terribly wrong is happening in this country and not enough people are speaking up.
Volkswagen eT Concept Theorizes a New Way to Haul the Mai
If you want to look at the full hierarchy, get the android developer tools and use adb. If you just plug it into your mac, you'll see the SD card instead.
Here's a link to the full video: http://online.wsj.com/video/thiel-how-can-government-help-sp...
Sounds to me like a recipe for a bad habit.

If you have a problem doing "awkward" things like firing people, paying bills, etc, you need to figure out the root of your anxiety and deal with it.

If numbing yourself with alcohol is how you get through, you may find yourself turning to the bottle more. Alcohol isn't tea or coffee, and boorish behavior isn't a measure of whether alcohol is affecting your life.
Videos from European Common Lisp Meeting 2011
Ask HN: Photo upload for tagging via Facebook/Twitter?
I'd like to upload a photo (outside of Facebook) that would allow people to tag themselves via their Facebook/Twitter accounts. The picture is from the Michigan vs. Ohio game played yesterday.

Here's the photo I had in mind - http://flic.kr/p/aLDnAp

ps - Hail!
Python and Ruby fit into all of those categories. And I'd guaranteed that in 5 years they'll be even more popular, easier to hire for and the languages will be more polished.

Can ActionScript say that?
Nutritional Needs Of Adolescents
What Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Home Based Internet Business?
A potential problem is the resolution. If the screen is 16:9, a 40" diagonal means that that the screen is 19.6" high. At 1080, it's 55 dpi.

Isn't that low for a computer screen?
I think you are right, there will be a tipping point at some stage. For something that is so thoroughly baked into the American way of life, I think 20 years isnt a bad estimate.

I'm not totally up on autonomous car tech, but while very promising, it still seems to be proof of concept stage. To me that means ~10 years from commercializarion, and then at least 10 years before it has penetrated enough of the fleet that you can even start to consider making it mandatory. Automotive engineering is conservative because of the scale and age of the industry, the cost of the goods sold, and the risks inherent in their failure. Automobile owners are conservative because cars are big purchases.

The thing about timeframes like that is that there are enough unknowns that estimates can easily be 2x too optimistic.

I tend to agree that rail (whether urban light rail, or region high speed rail) may not be the most cost effective way to move a lot of people from point a to point b given existing patterns of development, I know that part of the reason planners favor it is that its cost comes comes as part of a permanence that can shape the way communities develop around it over the long term.
It's hard to understate the importance of this.

GitHub's online editor has a default commit message along the lines of "Edited path/to/file", and I see a lot of pull requests with that message, and nothing else. That's about the most useless message possible, since it adds no information that isn't already implicit in the commit. It would be better to leave it blank and force users to at least write _something_.
Many places subsidize education even when it's not free. Canada for instance.
It doesn't have to be like that though, your focusing on the parts that just wouldn't be interesting enough to get air time.

I was thinking about it more in terms of a show where a fake independent group get called in to deal with security situations. A corp getting hacked repeatedly and they have to deal with it. Being called in to audit security and finding illegal activities, etc.

If you sit and analyse real processes like the judicial system, or actual crime scene investigation or corporate law, or hospital systems. You rarely find things that make for immediately interesting and compelling television. However that hasn't stopped very successful tv shows being produced that are about these areas. Mostly because these shows focus on the people and issues than the system.

I'm only saying that it should be possible to create a entertaining tv program that does highlight the issues in this area. Greater public awareness here can't be a bad thing. :)
There are companies that sell kits where you collect a blood sample at home, and then mail it in for analysis (except in NY, which apparently bans medical tests by mail).

Two examples:

http://www.zrtlab.com/vitamindcouncil/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BYURTU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Not aware of the actual analysis equipment being available in a consumer-level product, though.
Small Business Saturday Gave Us More Than We Bargained For
You are conflating alcohol abuse with alcohol dependence. Two different things, with different social and health consequences.
Alright, just fixed the glitches and opened it for Firefox
the back is FULL of both visa and mastercard logos, both of which are upside down.
"Proper" urban planning is helped tremendously when the city was planned and reached critical mass in the days before the automobile and freeway systems really took hold.
Be careful, we do that by default and we get a lot of "commit", "commit", "commit $date", "merge commit" messages from some programmers. Either a programmer accepts that a meaningful message is important on commits, or they don't. It's a people problem not a technical one.
I agree. I don't think I would ever enter a generic search term in to Google and trust the first thing that pops up with hundreds of dollars of my money.

Not to say this is the customer's fault. Just saying people place too much trust into the first result.
Rubik’s for cryptographers
Hard mathematical problems are at the core of security arguments in cryptography. In this paper, study mathematical generalizations of the famous Rubik’s cube puzzle, namely the factorization, representation and balance problems in non-Abelian groups
Out of curiosity, how hard was it to make that interactive tutorial? Did you make the arrows yourself?
Darpa offers prize for document reconstruction solution
I'll play the same tune I played the last time this was discussed: what is the cost? If the cost is above $30, I'm not sure I'd be interested. If they can bring the cost down to $10, that would be ideal.

More generally speaking: how difficult is it to build one of your own? I'd like to build a sensor which is powered by, say, 2 AA batteries, has wifi and a, say, accelerometer. What would it run?
If a system can be gamed to prefer one party over another, it will be.

The problem with the internet is that it provides anonymity, which allows nearly anyone to claim anything, without having to prove it.

You can attempt to chip away at this by creating reputation systems, doing outside validation, or charging an entry fee, but even then those systems are also subject to being gamed.

There are no good solutions to this one, although I'd love to see one that is self enforcing - where it's in the best interest of all parties to behave in a way that is honest.
i agree, can't believe this was on the front page.
One idea for startups: http://simplecybersecurity.com
I'll be publishing exactly what steps have been done to each AMI and blogging about improving security of individual products. Still half stealth as the landing page isn't exactly optimized.
Why does fast-forwarding through an ad count as an 'impression' to you?

What about if somebody else fast forwards through the ad, or as is more often the case, cuts the ad out completely and republishes the content?
Grocery shopping via smartphone on South Korean subways
Weird question: say you were only awake at night and therefore had very low blood serum levels of Vitamin D. Would drinking a healthy person's blood improve your own Vitamin D levels?

Just wondering.
An autonomous single seater comes to you where you need it. A single seat, non-autonomous rental car doesn't come to you unless there is a driver, or a delivery vehicle with a driver, to bring it to you. The economics aren't going to be the same.
And some comments: http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.com/2011/11/videos-from-eclm-2...
> I think it is, but there are significant ramifications that will result from the decoupling of currencies from governments.

The decoupling of currencies from governments sounds like a radical shift, but it's actually only fairly recent in history that we use fiat money. That, of course, allows us to do a lot of things that we've gotten used to in the last century particularly, such as taking advantage of monetary policy to address short-term economic concerns.

If alternative currencies catch on, that's something that governments will have less power to do - or at least, less power to do directly and predictably. Certainly, governments are going to push back on that, and probably try to discredit or disable alternative currencies.

At the end of the day, though, while money can be determined by fiat, value is determined subjectively, so if alternative currencies catch on (which I think they well), it will necessitate a shift in the way that people think about money. (Not unlike the way that the Internet has shifted the way people think about tradable goods and IP law - just take a look at SOPA.)
Well, many people (including me) are low in vitamin D, because we spend so much time indoors. My dermatologist said (only partially joking) that if you're aren't deficient in vitamin D, you're not using enough sunscreen.
Detecting a hidden DOM element, as described in a comment above, that wouldn't do it?
For those who didn't spot it, I assume that the title of the post is a take on the quote attributed to Hemingway, "Write drunk; edit sober."
> However, when the blog is at http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1884 it is not a gigantic leap of thought to go check what might be at http://www.linuxmint.com/, from where it's one click to the about page.

I think the poster was commenting on the difficulty of getting to the main web site, not the possibility. Having visitors hand-edit URIs is not considered slick customer conversion.
Clearly failed to get the right visa to work. Tourists from the USA are always welcome but lines get drawn at working on a tourist visa. Just like for Brits travelling to the USA.
Diet is of course chemistry.
Actually, it may be that in properly formed TV ads, muting and/or fast-forwarding still creates an impression.
http://www.cs.bc.edu/~gips/BreakingFF.pdf
My guess about the people who don't want to read self-help books would be this - they read a few, the ones that they read, turn out to be useless (they pick the wrong ones). so they pretty much give up the entire genre. Trust me, for every good self-help book out there, there are dozens of insanely useless ones - it is not easy to pick the good ones on one's own. self-help books are a big industry - even those who never read anything in their life, would give a few minutes of their attention to self-help books, because ultimately, everyone wants to become better at something

I just wish there were some good ways to quickly separate junk from good books.
Ignoring the moral aspects here, this is a smart strategic move. Who better to bring a case against bittorrent users than one who knows all their defensive moves?

From the other side, lawyers defending bittorrent users against Meier can use his old arguments against him. Though I don't know how much that will help.
Off topic, but I am glad you were offered jobs as a supposed Montrealer, as I am one too and always wondered how easy/hard it is to get a job in the US
I'm less worried about this actually -- I think the biggest problem is your own nodes interfering with themselves ("internal interference") rather than with an attacker. Agreed this is an issue though, and using omnidirectional antennas exacerbates it. Using directional antennas actually helps, for the same reason it's hard to see a laser beam from the side.
I agree. For me the moving ads are the worst. It makes it impossible to concentrate on anything.

Anyone know what percentage of browsers are running ad blockers?
Ah, but what if we encouraged programmers to write better commit messages? What if we splashed on a bit of gamification to raise everyone's level of awareness? Maybe a badge on your profile page...?
Am I the only one that thought this was someone asking Linus Torvalds to write better commit messages?
For one thing, autonomous cars can, theoretically, increase the practical carrying capacity of individual roadways, they can also better utilize the capacity of road networks by routing vehicles to underutilized roads. This would mitigate the impact of traffic.

For the same reasons they can increase practical carrying capacity, they can also increase practical fuel efficiency, because the vehicles can be kept moving at a near constant speed with minimal breaking.
> The government needs to accept that tech companies are basically the most mobile in the world.

If that's true, why are you coming to the U.S.?
Americans don't feel that way.
I can empathize.

Looking back at this period, you might have wished you got a life / career coach to help you regain your control and happiness.

After all, that is the meaning of life, to do what you love.
Certainly this isn’t Bob’s first rodeo, so I’d be surprised if he was unfamiliar with the paperwork.
Isn't the problem with this, single points of failure? I guess it's still more of a mesh than the current infrastructure. But if you're trying to 'route around the government,' then having a defined structure seems counter to your goals.
Company? You must have overlooked something.
I made a blog post out of it: http://journal.mkronline.com/2011/11/27/the-coming-automatio...
First job as a programmer -- Clojure backend dev? That's pretty awesome. The joy you derive from the Clojure community comes across loud and clear in your writing.

For anyone else who's been toying with the idea of looking at Clojure, it has, IMO, the best tech community on the web. It seems like every maintainer for every Clojure project I've ever looked at is at least idling in #clojure on freenode 24/7.
> Except the 'market' for software is not comparable to any other real market

How about the publishing industry for books, movies, games, and other media?

How about the pharmaceutical industry where lock-in is due to patent rights?
With friends like the DMCA, who needs SOPA?
> If Google controls the mobile platform then it can influence how search is done. It's vertical integration.

You know some Android sets don't even use Google for search.