skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see this happening. Patients (in the US) don't know the cost of their care. So, when this new "patent tax" appears, it will be hidden from the consumer and silently passed down the chain (to insurers, to companies) and medical costs will continue to spiral out of control. It's unlikely to actually change the care provided -- but it's certain to make care more expensive.

I wouldn't count on congress fixing it either. I'll pass on something I recently overheard: "Lawyers should be banned from becoming law makers. It's a clear conflict of interest. "
This, so much. Caching should never be a "5 minute" thing and should only be considered once all other options are exhausted. Once teams start to go down this road, they should also begin working on a longer-term strategy for denormalization and scalable data storage.
Why Long Forms Need Instant Field Validation
George Carlin had similar thoughts:

"A Place for My Stuff"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
Gift Cards Are Worth Less Than You Think [data viz]
No you probably haven't. The lessons I've learned as being a part of this community over the past three years have been immeasurable, and that comes from browsing this site daily. Here's a sample from the top of my head, and this doesn't even come close to the edge cases where I've encountered a specific problem in my day job and thought to myself "oh shit, I remember reading an article about this on HN, let me go search for it". This also applies to all the reading I've done for fun and in school.

- Drawing U.S choropleth thematic maps (flowing data)

- A/B testing, Adwords, SEO (patio11's blog)

- D3 framework

- VIM advice

- Product development and importance of design

- Being data driven

- Conversion optimization

- Importance of machine learning on web scale problems

- Stupid business models vs business models that actually seem to work

- Mistakes to avoid

Yes you learn by doing. But you learn just as much through discovery, and discovery only happens when you read a shit ton more than you have to. Discovery leads to idea generation. Idea generation leads to products. Creating products leads to learning.
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo (1929–1939 and 1940–1954). His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in Mexican art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals among others in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City.
That entire conversation description is so over-the-top that it is difficult to take any of the details seriously... that said, I'd be very interested to know if they tried simply calling back and asking to speak to someone else.
What are things in movies you don't expect to be CGI, but that typically are?
To add: stop reading the same things over and over.

A recurring theme of discussion on HN is whether or not the submissions are getting worse. I tend to think they're not. (Although the comments are another story.) It's just that the twentieth article you read on something like lean startup methodologies is a lot less interesting than the first one.
Less than "most" good founders were employees at hot startups. I base this on a good deal of data.
I think it's more reasonable that doctors or health care providers or health insurance companies will be the ones that actually have to license any patents because that's where the money is. It's not like consumers need to keep a bracelet or file of all the patents they've licensed so they know which software and hardware they can buy.

Can you imagine not being able to get a cast because your hmo didn't license the patent for "applying gauze soaked in plaster to a broken or fractured limb to prevent the bone from moving while it heals"? crap.
oh!

lal
I don't think it's the cost he's referring to. The fact that you could personally could be treated differently because of patent law would have a profound impact on the public perception of patent law. That could help lead to real reform of the system.
I spent zero time on it. And I regularly run my code against 2.9 and 2.10 trunk. No problems so far.
"You can bet Sarah Lacy, MG Siegler and Mike Arrington, the former core of tech news site TechCrunch, are planning something big. Between the three of them, there's enough tech writing and reporting talent to take down nearly every news site in Silicon Valley."

I don't have much opinion of Lacy, but Siegler and Arrington are two people I could do to hear from a great deal less. Siegler is nothing but a hyperbole machine, and whatever charm that kept me from being wholly annoyed with Arrington's writing to start is gone.

I'm sure what these people do is a talent of some kind, but reporting isn't it. I don't see them 'taking down' anything in the news world.
Not just a coupon, but a coupon for $1.50
Counters on Parse
Suwappu App Creates ”Markerless Augmented Reality” Toys
That's pretty much what I think every time he spends time on his anti-Scala rants.

Maybe he should switch the language? Looking at Lift's source code/API this is pretty much a abuse of the language.
Obviously, that's true of some startups, but very wrong in others.

Working at Weebly, you have similar hours to BigCo (although you'll be 10x more productive), paid market rate (or slightly above), and receive your fair share of the outcome.

You also get to work with a fun group of people who are obsessed with being productive, and not much else. Maybe we're the exception, but we don't care if you're a 9-5 type of person, if you're very productive during those hours.

Working at a startup doesn't have to be shit, just because some startups are.
I think this is good advice if you have a particular goal in mind ("be able to edit videos"). It's harder if your goal is more vague ("be better at what I do").

I've found that I read through technical books/articles to get through them as fast as possible rather than actual learning. In the end, they don't help me much because I forget most of it.

Lately, instead of reading chapter after chapter of a book, I like to take in a concept, reflect on how it might have applied to past, present, and future projects. Then, I like to write code to prototype the concept, while examining at how I might have done it previously. I find it helps a lot more than blind reading. Of course, it also takes a bit longer.
Part of it is competitive intelligence. I want to know who's doing big ad buys on Huffpo and FoxNews and the NYT.

Agencies have gotten very clever at measuring the indirect effect of ads; most of them don't get a direct click, of course, but you can still look at things like how likely someone was to search for your company's brand name the week after they saw the ad.
Target, Macys, & Best Buy – Y’all Just Got Punked
Great work Cortesi - some very revealing visualisations.
I guess I'll have to reconsider then; the lawyers definitely got the short end of the stick. (;

More seriously, I would have no qualms of going into the legal profession specifically to defend against this sort of brand of crazy where possible. (And of course more mundane cases as the majority.)

I'd wake up each morning feeling MUCH better than if I became something like say, a firefighter.
He got nothing.
Email Client Sparrow 1.5 Launches with Dropbox, iPhone App Coming Early 2012
I could also reason like this:

"I may be the real me or a simulation, but whichever I am, the other me will make the same choice." So I will switch off the AI, and the worst outcome is that I will cease to exist.
Maybe in the dot com era. Venture backed startups nowadays pay better than a lot of typical programming jobs.
And the GK only has to switch off the AI once.
>While law enforcement has some potentially excludable components, for the most part it seems non-excludable: stopping crimes and criminals protects everyone.

that is true only in the ideal situation of unlimited law enforcement resources and the type of crimes affecting everybody. In real situation going after specific criminals or crimes [esp. the ones affecting only specific subset of the society] leaves other crimes unpunished and laws unenforced. Thus any real law enforcement inplementation (not theory) demonstrates rivalness and excludability.
No, it's not uncommon for startups to let you buy the stock before it even vests. The company will buy it back if you leave before you vest (although you usually don't even bother since they are worth pennies).

If the OP left after staying less than a year, they most likely didn't vest anything.
To Google the Marketplace is necessary only because the availability of a marketplace is the norm. Android enables them to have control over the next generation of mobile phones, in which we now have 3 possibilities:

1) Apple switches to another search provider, in which case iPhones will have a functional and brand disadvantage as Google Search is both good and a synonym for searching on the web

2) Apple does not switch to another search provider, in which case mobile searches are dominated by Google, as iOS and Android represents a majority

3) Android ends up on 90% of all smartphones, like Windows, making whatever Apple does irrelevant, even if Apple continues to enjoy the highest margins in the industry

You're clearly not seeing the forest from the trees.
Interview with Sean Ahrens who built Crohnology a platform for IBD
Couldn't you use restoreCompletedTransactions to get the already purchased items?
More like if you keep buying Chryslers but they break down every 6 months, maybe you should buy a Honda.
Yep. The fauxhawk - that was me.
I don't believe these things work the way you are assuming they do. Unjust behavior by the part of big corporations like Prometheus need to be stopped at the root and at first sight.

Please never hope that the triumph of someone over you in argument, specially one that that gives them a new weapon to fight you, will eventually and reliably become a weakness in their defenses.

I'll try to explain why I think so without using analogies, since they almost always break arguments apart. I hope that by sticking to this particular case I am not interpreted as someone trying to straightly so predict the future but as someone making a point.

Let's say that Prometheus wins this, thus having the possibility of using this case to patent medical procedures and the using of statistical correlations. You are assuming that big pharmaceuticals will use this to stop lots of doctors from rightfully saving lives using what is now standard medical procedure... but I believe big pharmaceuticals are doing just fine now, and are not stupid enough to piss off the whole US population. What I would do if I were them is to extend the validity of the patent on a drug (in the case describe in the article it is thiopurine) by using another related patent that hasn't expired yet and that covers a procedure. This won't send a substantially higher number of Bobbys to the grave, but it won't reduce the cost of each non-dying Bobby to not-die, which is what one supposes eventually happens when patents on a Bobby-death-stopping drug expires and hence the drug can be manufactured generically or by competing big pharmaceutical labs.

So, in the end they get to make more money in the long run (since patents can be made to last longer) and things don't get worse for Bobby and the people, they just don't get as better as they should.
Looks great! Thanks for the tip.

I thought I'd mention, for those who prefer a modern Ruby stack, it is possible to install a JSON REST plugin for Wordpress (like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/) on the back-end, and write your front-end display layer in Ruby.
yeah I definitely walked into it with my eyes closed. My wife was telling me it was a bad idea, and I still didn't listen, but hey, who listens to their wife right? haha
Agreed!

Sadly, the video is H.264, so no love for Firefox and Opera.
Show HN: A simple rangeset data structure in python
A very significant subset of programs can be statically determined...

Technically this may be correct, but I feel confident in asserting that a transhuman AI would not fall into that subset. You would have to run a second AI with the exact same inputs in order to make your 'prediction', leaving you in the same predicament with the second AI.
I, the writer, am trying to get more ruby people using Pig and hadoop. Feedback appreciated.
MVC was developed skunk works style, as was Linq. And MS has only begun embracing MVC anywhere near fully lately. Meanwhile, Linq has been effectively abandoned in preference to the bloated entity framework.

If Microsoft had their heads screwed on straight MVC would be the default ASP.NET web-site project type in Visual Studio and Linq would have gotten the love it deserved, even if it competed with EF. I fear that without Haack's leadership MVC will be mishandled and slowly die off.

Edit: To clarify, I mean Linq to SQL. It was a decent, lightweight, highly usable ORM that has now been more or less deprecated in favor of EF. For now it's not so bad because Linq to SQL only just recently wandered off into the twilight, but eventually the lack of support will make it harder and harder to use and EF will be the only option.
Another site that does a great job of paying attention to the details in the signup process is rdio. They parse out the domain of major webmail providers and give you a link to sign in page so that you can quickly jump in and complete the reg process. https://twitter.com/#!/andrewjshults/status/1404921933695631...
I hope they don't follow the start-up pattern of implementing Cocoa Touch UI widgets for a 1:1 port. Even when devs iron out the inevitable bugs and crashes, those types of apps feel foreign on Android.

It's better to use native widgets in a familiar way and keep the two UIs consistent where it makes sense.
The answer is pretty simple: companies that implement ERPs save money and are more successful. It's the business change aspect that matters, and SAP enables that business change.

Totally agree with you on the UX nightmares, and this needs to be fixed. But if you look at SAP's new products, they are pretty interesting from a UX perspective. Design thinking is at the core of it. I really encourage you to take a look at for example http://www.experiencesaphana.com

SAP legal (like most large IT companies) has work to be done, and they know that. I hope they do something.

On the sales side your comments surprise me. I work with those guys on a regular basis and the vast majority are customer focussed: they have to be, or customers won't continue to buy. But this has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

SAP is rarely ripped out because it's rarely worth replacing systems of record. They are a long term investment, and most financial people are fine with SAP: it affords them control.
It's more like Google's stumbled onto a gold mine that's already been looted:

Google makes $5-$10 per Android phone, maybe 10% of what it's partners make. That's about the same amount as Microsoft makes off each Android phone and is perhaps 1/50th of what Apple makes off each iphone.

Even worse it turns out that the half empty gold mine is on public land and any crazy old coot can waltz in and start mining themselves:

Android won their "empire" by being the only credible licensed iphone clone in 2009. The real question is whether this empire is going to be of the Han/Roman/Windows variety as so many commentators assume or will it be a short lived dynasty like the Qin/Napoleonic/Netscape variety.

I'll put my money on a Three Kingdoms scenario playing out. Why do I think WP 7 has a ghost of a chance when everyone's done nothing but dismiss them? Let's review:

Android phones started shipping in Fall 08. However they really didn't have any traction until Fall 09 when Verizon started pushing the Droid. And it wasn't until Froyo phones shipped en masse in Summer 2010 where Android started to dominate carrier shops.

In the same way WP7 launched buggy, incomplete and lackluster in late 2010. It had no traction for it's first 3 quarters. Lately though we've seen a mature OS update released on a 2nd generation of phones that were designed for it.

More importantly Microsoft has made no secret of it's desire to buy market share with retail subsidies. And it will certainly be buying this market share at Android's expense. How much they're willing to lose buying this market share isn't clear but if it's anything like the money they've plowed into Bing that's a lot.
I have to indicate this in the docs, but the most prevalent use for this module would probably be rangesets on the space of dates. For this, python's datetime objects Just Work. And all operations returning the size/measure will just return a timedelta object.
Possibly he means percentage of new projects using it, or maybe something like its influence on the future, which is related. It's hard to define, but you sort of know it when you see it.
I know what it means; it's a hairstyle for people who can cope with the clippers but can't handle the woodglue anymore.

It was more the ugly portmanteau (phoney!) itself which I objected to.

EDIT: although I see now that I did manage to misspell it. How embarrassing.
I like the editor itself, code completion and scala support in IDEA, but that's about it. The UX is almost as bad as Eclipse's. Once you stop for a moment to look at it, it's almost ridiculously bad.

Give it a go: in your project right-click "External libraries". What would you expect? Something like "add new one", "manage", "copy from..."? No such luck - this is what you get instead.

- new (always inactive)

- cut, copy (always inactive)

- find / replace in path / analyze / reformat / optimize imports / compile (for external libraries? seriously?)

- refactor, add to favourites (expands but all options inactive)

- local history (never active, not what you'd imagine)

- various file operations (for "collections" of external libraries?)

- update copyright (active, but seems to be a noop)

Ah - you actually wanted to manage the external libraries? Try right-clicking the module, "open module settings" (how about "settings"?), "libraries" / "global libraries" (there's no mention of "external libraries"). And that's just one trivial issue that every single user of idea will see fairly frequently. IDEA is full of them.
Why are we blaming the 'victim' instead of enabling a solution?

A comment in the Description area that runs along these lines would have made the entire question a non-starter:

If /etc/motd is a non-symlinked file, regeneration will not occur.
Supreme Court poised to legalize medical patents
It's amazing that so many entrepreneurs seem to hate the large payments that class action lawyers are awarded.

Class action lawyers perform the same kind of high-risk high-reward gamble that startups engage in. While tech startups create value by making something useful, these lawyers create value by keeping powerful interests honest. The idea that they are unnecessary or should be capped because consumers will just "in the long run" "vote with their feet" has been shown to be (patently) false: corporations can take advantage of huge economies of scale when they breach millions of contracts in small, hidden ways. The only real recourse of an individual is to participate in a class action. Perhaps the biggest part of the individual's reward is that the corporation will stop its bad behavior.

I can understand distrust of the judicial system because it shows a bias in favor of the deep-pocketed. What I don't understand is why there's a distrust of class-action verdicts, where both parties compete on a relatively even playing field.
Installed hardware statistics from Unity Web Player reports
It's pretty obvious that this is Scoopler, no?
I am so conflicted :(

I loathe Microsoft but I *love what Bill G is doing philanthropically. Like I saw a great program[1] with Ian Hislop on BBC2 recently partly about this Victorian banker in Britain who was a notorious skinflint all his life, amassed a fortune and then built decent housing for the poor with the lot of his wealth. The mind boggles.

1: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/23/ian-hislop-when-...

edit: Enough with the hate already. This is the reason i stopped coming to this site, you can't say anything outside the party line.
Autoankauf Sankt Wendel
As someone who understands networking at the office / rack level (but not the datacenter or nation-wide level), what are the single points of failure that could bring down an entire nationwide network? I would think that things would be setup by regions just to avoid this type of scenario.

At least the 3G networks are still up for voice/sms fail-over.
This is very useful to me. I've been at LinkedIn for a few weeks and just yesterday I had some time to play with pig and our Hadoop cluster. Ruby is my preferred language for quick hacks, so I'll follow this series.
For reference, I had vested the shares that I purchased.
So how do they know that it sticks before they release it? I wouldn't think Zynga would of made money until they released it.
So what was the legal/technical reason?
I was tossing some idea's around about how I would convince the Gate Keeper to let me out. I couldn't think of any ways to approach it that I think I might be susceptible to. But then it occurred to me, that the problem might be I was trying to think of positive ways to argue for my release. Based on the rules, the Gate Keeper must remain engaged in the conversation for the specified time. What if I were to take the opposite approach, and simply psychologically attack the Gate Keeper with the most offensive and intolerable discourse you can imagine. The goal, to simply wear down the individuals desire to actually partake as the Gate Keeper and to compel voluntary release..
One problem is that even unambiguous legislation gets twisted by agency interpretations and case law to no longer mean what it originally said.
Hosted Execution with Roslyn CTP
I really hope this leads to better Git tools for Windows developers. I've attempted to host several C# projects on GitHub in the past, but I always end up giving up and using either CodePlex or BitBucket because it's so much easier to get up and running with HG and SVN.

Edit: Git tools, not GitHub tools.
You're counting is off.

First of all, you're not counting growth. Smartphones sales have been up 74% in Q2 2011 since the same quarter last year, while PC sales have had only a 2% growth. The smartphones market is about to explode.

Also, as I said in another message - because Androids do have a good share of the market, if Apple switches to another search provider, they'll be technically and from a brand perspective at a disadvantage (people say google it for a reason). Because of Android, Apple simply cannot create customer expectations in terms of the search engine used, like they did with other issues (e.g. Flash), quite the contrary I've seen people bitch about the lack of proper integration with other Google products.

And you know, Apple was thinking about switching to Bing. They haven't. You should really be adding the search traffic Google makes from iOS too ;)

Because that's what Android is about: control / keeping the competition focused on anything else but Google's Search. Quite a genius move if you ask me.
You needn't be conflicted. Bill Gates != Microsoft. He left years ago.

Besides, Microsoft has been making some pretty good products recently.