skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, it's not a failure to e.g. notice that high levels of biomarker X are correlated with disease Y, so let's try lowering X and see what happens. That's just the next step in determining causality.

What happens is doctors read the correlation and start massively prescribing biomarker targeted remedies (such as vitamin B) before any causation is shown. Why does this happen?
That's one of the best Wired articles I've read in a long time. I recommend reading it.
One tool that was indispensable for MySQL viewing editing:
Sequel Pro [1]. I found it much more intuitive than Querious and it's free.

[1] http://www.sequelpro.com/
You don't think you'd stop begging at some point and try to do something useful with your life if EVERYONE was nice to you and tried to help you out? I know I would but maybe I'm different. Maybe I have too much confidence in mankind and not enough respect for incentives.
I don't quite know how to adequatly articulate my displeasure with this article but lets try.

The article basically seems to be relying on some philosophy and muddy and different definitions in different contexts (philosophy vs science vs standard usage) of words like "fact". Then it talks about how things are getting more complex and we're spending more effort to learn things now than we used to because "we know all the easy stuff". And seems to conclude that we'll still be no better than religious shamanistic people once we "know all there is to know" and it still won't do us a lot of good.

It seems to be advocating give up on science now, with some rational like "while we're ahead".

I honestly don't get it. It seems like cloudy wooly thinking, bad arguments.

Sure, things are getting more complex and will continue to, but that doesn't mean we should give up, or that "it's mysteries all the way down". Every year we learn more and fix more problems. And we have to and always have had to make a lot of mistakes in the process. The author seems to think we're making more mistakes now and that's an indication the game is almost up.

I disagree, medical science is still churning out amazing breakthroughs, like HIV and cancer vaccines this year. And physics is still coming up with amazing things.

Just because it's getting harder doesn't mean we should stop or that we'll hit a wall and be able to go no further (and if we can see that wall coming we might want to think about stopping prematurely?)

Everytime we thought we'd learned everything we've been able to push on and learn more, discover more depth, and use it more to our advantage. I don't strictly speaking see why that has to stop just because it's getting harder. At least any time soon. Each new level also gives us better tools to work with.

And there have always been people saying we know enough now, or it's getting harder so lets stop now. And some have, and many haven't and that's why we still have progress. This is a age old endless reoccurring trend and bares the same ignoring it has always gotten. Or you can step off the train of progress and be left behind.

I do not think science is failing us at all in anyway. I think this article is poor on many standards.
Sending holiday cards, but I don't have addresses, so I made SendSpree
I took plenty of pictures (see link above and other pics in that album) but not of that particular mishap, it was decidedly unsafe to leave it all hanging suspended like that so we lowered the table/windmill combo to the ground using the chainfall.

I'd hate to have had the whole thing give and land on someone's foot.

The rotor was only press-fit into two bearings, no point in trying to find out if it would hold or not, it was meant to be pushed on, not pulled on by a welding table.
Thanks so much. Glad to hear that you've been liking our service. Don't hesitate to email me if you have some thoughts on how we can improve (walter at idonethis dot com).
When I see this I don't think of Minecraft, I think of Realm of the Mad God - http://www.realmofthemadgod.com/
On the beggar black market? :) I guess so... Seems like most of them would probably just use it for food, though.
No, clarification in edit above. Premium features for businesses to administer teams and digest information.
Unless of course you have an SSD. With an SSD, Spotlight is easily fast enough to work well. To start XCode, I hit CMD-space, xc, enter, with a split-second pause before the enter. That is enough for Spotlight to catch up to my typing and I am about as fast as Alfred or Quicksilver for opening apps.
Coming from server-side MVC dev, the line "Views: The meat of our business logic occurs here." was surprising. I thought the point of MVC was to decouple the logic from the views.

PS: I'm about to start reading the new Javascript Web Applications book by Alex MacCaw as I'm very interested in learning more client-side development. This is very new to me.
Those are both examples of homopolar motors.

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

In the first example, the water is acting as the "wire" as the electrolysis current flows through it. The water rotates just like the wire and drags the generated browns gas along with it.
It depends. If you are parodying X while making a comment about X, that's probably in the clear. But if you're parodying X while making a comment about Y, that's problematic. See Penny Arcade's difficulties with parodying Strawberry Shortcake while commenting on American McGee's take on games.
I used to recommend Iron but I don't anymore. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the lack of documentation and lack of transparency in the project. They delivered their source code as two code dumps on rapidshare last time I checked. Something just doesn't feel right at all.
What are you referring to? Personally I think unchecked population growth might be a result, but it isn't certain. Or maybe the base income would just cancel out (all goods would become so much more expensive that the base income would have little effect).

Also some say that the social security in Germany is in fact equivalent to a base income.

Communism, if you mean that, is something completely different.
> Why does this happen?

I'd guess it's because promoting this possible causal link as a cure for diseases is pretty much the easiest way to get it tested---where else will you find 25k volunteers?

As always, when people are involved, the reason for failure seems to be in the incentive structure.
Try this version on github, you can compile and run the source with 'ant run':
https://github.com/skeeto/Minicraft
Also, in many cases an employer might pay for some of the software.
Alternatively, in numbers. I'm ignoring constant factors and only doing proportional calculations. Where you see an = sign you should think "proportional to".

Suppose we have a magnet at the origin with magnetic moment 1 in the z direction: m = [0,0,1]. The magnet is moving in vertically (in the z direction). Further we have the pipe vertically with radius 1. The problem now is to determine the current through the pipe. Since the problem is symmetrical around the z-axis we can consider just the current though the points r = [1,0,z].

The magnetic field due to the dipole is B(r) = 3r(m dot r)/r^5 - m/r^3. The flux through the pipe at r = [1,0,z] is just the x component of the magnetic field, since the pipe is vertical. Plugging in and simplifying we get Phi = 3z/sqrt(1+z^2)^5. Since the magnet is moving in the z direction, lets say z = t, to compute the change in Phi we need to compute dPhi/dz. If we put that into Wolfram Alpha we get a picture like this:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=d%2Fdx+x%2Fsqrt%281%2Bx...

As you can see you get a strong current in one direction around the pipe at the middle of the magnets, and two weaker currents in the opposite direction above and below the magnet.

This doesn't yet say anything about the case of the slit, but it does at least show that the currents are indeed moving like I sketched for the no slit case in the picture of my other response.
Firefox 9 (Windows,Mac and Linux) is here…for a few months
Godel, Escher, Sony?
Ask HN: what are considered to be succesful signup rates?
This is a quick survey. I've built a website that offers visitors a way to organize useful information for their trip. I have no user's yet, on the other hand I offer a tool and therefore there is no much need for user generated content.

What do you think is considered a logical sign up rate (the percentage from the entire visitors)? Signup is real simple and includes connecting with either Facebook or Google.

A: 1-3%
B: 5-7%
C: 7-15%
D: 15-25%
Sure, graphs are often better than tables.

That's not relevant to the point of whether tables should be sortable, if you already provide a table for some reason.

A more relevant task:

Given the data

3 3.88
5 5.45
1 3.09
2 3.39
4 4.57

Can you tell if the columns are correlated? With sorting, you can, easily.
Peter Thiel funds another floating experiment
RIM Turned Down Takeover By Amazon
I found DataTables was much, much faster when I passed a JSON data hash - I think the DOM manipulation is what normally kills it. We've got some tables of several thousand rows in a small internal app and performance is fine, even in older IEs. (I think I tested up to several tens of thousands before IE started to be unreasonably slow - YMMV, of course.)
The Frog That Learned to Fly (Molecular Magnetism and Levitation)
I recently found out a life-changing tip with Firefox. Right click any search box on any website and hit "Add keyword for this search." You can then assign a prefix which you can use in the address bar to search that site. For example, I have these set up:

Search YouTube:
tube <query>

Search Urban Dictionary:
urban <query>

Search Amazon:
amazon <query>

Search Wikipedia:
wiki <query>
Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border
"Another meta review, meanwhile, looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies published between 1990 and 2003. Most of these were the culmination of years of careful work. Nevertheless, more than 40 percent of them were later shown to be either totally wrong or significantly incorrect."

If science was really failing us, I don't see how we would have managed to retract those incorrect studies. It feels like the writer had no bigger point than "biomedical research is hard, let's go shopping." It's sensationalist to consider science a failure every time it makes a mistake.

I thought the Hume references were pretty bad, too. If you read what he says, he questions the existence of relations such as "A causes B" and prefers to phrase them as, "In the past, we have observed A-like events are always correlated with B-like events." For practical purposes, that's enough to behave as if causality "really" exists. You just have to avoid mixing up causality with mere correlation, which every good scientist already knows.
I've seen announcements for Firefox 9 all day. However, when I go to the website I only see 8.

http://mozilla.com
Or maybe you just make the common mistake of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way you do.

I'll share a little story about a friend of mine. His son came crying to him one day because his homework wasn't done, so his wife did the child's homework (to ensure that his grades didn't drop as a result of his negligence). 3 months later, both parents were doing ALL of this child's homework, because he'd realized that if he didn't work, someone else would do the work for him. He could sit around playing video games all day (yes, that's exactly what he did) and anything unpleasant or difficult was handled by other people (his parents).

That is, until his teacher figured it out. While his homework was always done impeccably, his performance on tests were abysmal. The teacher rightfully berated the parents, and not a moment too soon.

A second example comes via an old co-worker of mine who spent a large part of his career under communist rule, but was absolutely disgusted at his co-workers. Everyone did the bare minimum because there was no incentive to perform or excel (everyone got paid the same regardless). And so naturally, anyone aspiring to greatness and having some ambition left for a country where performance was rewarded.

You see similar effects in well entrenched union jobs.
TLDR

Way too long, meandering, full of anecdotes.

How is it at all surprising that trying to "fix" problems with the body is uber-complicated?

Plus, there's the obvious missing bigger point - all these companies are trying to find a solution that is a pill, as opposed to changing the underlying problem: bad food, bad environment, bad physical conditioning, etc. Billions spent on finding pills, very little money in solving the root causes...
Pain now, or pain later? Most choose to put off the pain.

Python 3 chose pain now - and I think they made the correct choice - but three years later, people are still upset and many, many Python libraries have not made the transition.
OK, so how is a non-ferrous material (water) being moved by a magnet?

Clearly in the video of the water vortex there is a proof showing that the water does not move with an iron slug, but does move with the magnet.

I might buy you a donut
You are also evil, if my memory of LOTR serves me correctly :-)
I'm developing an electronic parts inventory web app because I needed a better way catalog, order and share parts. I couldn't think of a better way than a spreadsheet to display the dozens of parts a user might have. Each part has an ID from the schematic, name, value and description which are displayed using a dojo data grid (Very happy with dojo grid btw). The rest of the attributes are hidden until the user needs them. There is a lot of data and comparisons being done and spreadsheets, it seems, were my only choice. The electronics industry hasn't solved this either. Take a look how ugly and overwhelming the product search is from Digikey, Mouser or Newark.
It does (other variants like `%zx` are also fine).
Ask HN: Should I add developer-friendly features to my email service?
I recently launched my first minimum viable product, called LetterPush [0]. Right now LetterPush is a plain vanilla email newsletter service.

I imagine there is a growing segment of websites that are created in the hands of a developer and not a designer (or a "desingineer"). With an experienced coder, a hybrid service for handling both newsletter and transactional e-mails might be worth spending a few extra bucks.

For example, a developer creating a website for a restaurant could create a hook in to the CMS, where the restaurant automatically sends a templated email blast if the restaurant owner logs in and updates the "Seasonal Menu" page. A single API for handling your email could make some queries trivial, such as slicing and dicing your mailing list based on subscription date,[geo-]IP, referrer and adding custom tags.

I spoke to one marketing exec who told me it's not a bad idea. What do you think, web developers of HN?

[0] http://letterpush.com
#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You
Any startup incubator/accelerator that allows for the filming of a reality tv show needs to re-evaluate their priorities. Startup life is not like The Social Network, and shouldn't be portrayed that way. All it's going to do is create more fake entrepreneurs.

I don't know about you, but I'd think twice before joining an incubator that is filming a reality show.
That specific question is precisely why I explained that I attempted to use the same User-Agent and Accepts--the only seemingly differentiating headers that are sent by Amazon's Fire service--in a connection to the Android Market to see if it would redirect.
All Programmers Are Self-Taught
When things like CarrierIQ exist, I imagine this is rendered somewhat ineffective...
I can see your frustration with this article. I think the point is that we need to come up with new methods to predict and learn from. Just like we came up with a system of linking cause and effect, we need to come up with a system that links multiple causes and effects easily.

Making the article relevant to this point, Pfizer spent tons of money developing a drug and bet it would work simply because (at the time) lowering HDL = better cholesterol. No one asked what does HDL do in the body? What does LDL do in the body? What depends on cholesterol?

It's kind of like when you come up with a really cool idea but forget to look at the target market to see if it's actually viable.
I think scientists see this as a success. You get data and you revise your hypothesis. You get more data and you revise it again.

A lot of people want science to be like politics. They want you to pick a side and stick to it regardless of the data.

IMO, when conventional wisdom isn't at least occassionally overturneed -- that's when I'll begin to think science is failing us.
I've found #2 a pretty problematic part of education that I'm still sort of trying to unlearn. Once you realize that's what's going on, the goal becomes not to do things "for real", but instead to reverse-engineer the education system: figure out why the question is being asked, what it's designed to test, and what kind of answer it's designed to elicit, then answer accordingly. This often greatly simplifies the problem space, because using some heuristic meta-reasoning you can really narrow down what's "really" likely being asked and what forms the solution is likely to take (or even what methods the question is likely expecting you to use). But then that's a skill not easily transferable to "the real world" when working on problems that aren't specifically posed to test a particular skill or with a specific answer in mind. Though it's probably a good skill for job interviews.
They didn't agree about the inclusion of the articles and they wanted to get the constitution signed and proposed to the states for ratification ASAP. Thus those that wanted to get the Bill of Rights in there were promised "it would be coming soon" which appeased them enough to "sign off " on the constitution and those that had some issue with the articles were happy that they weren't initially included. Keep in mind that the "Bill of Rights" originally had 12 articles, only 10 passed initially, 1 finally passed in 1992 and 1 is still outstanding.

Also consider that they Philadelphia Convention wasn't some magical aw-inspiring meeting of the minds as it is sometimes made out to be. Only 39 of 55 actually actually signed the constitution and several were so pissed off they just walked out. I'm sure lots of bargaining and negotiation was done and the 12 articles in the Bill of Rights was simply one of the bargaining chips.
Investigators: Eating cocaine from crack led to death
Ongoing by Tim Bray · Mobile 2011
The level design and artwork are done simultaneously inside of Fireworks. I have an extension which attaches metadata to objects to use in-game. I also rely on states and pages to correspond to animations and levels respectively. I.e. all of the levels of the game are "compiled" from a single fireworks doc with 20 pages, each page corresponding to a level.
As I understand it, the AT&T case determined that clauses restricting consumers from engaging in class action lawsuits were legal. But in the Sony case, their clause restricts a consumer from suing in court and instead, must bring the arbitration to a neutral body (but not court). This scenario seems much more harmful and possibly infringes on a very, very important right.
I thought I was the only one that witnessed slower screen updates. I don't know if it's the same thing, but for example, holding backspace to delete a few characters seems to lag (on an SSD with 2600k @ 4.5ghz and 8GB DDR3). I know I can just do C-u, but the lag is irritating nonetheless. Not to mention I actually like Terminal.app so I don't have a problem continuing to use it.
So.. is Big Ben the Eye of Sauron?
O Hotel Aqua Pedra dos Bicos em Albufeira
Thank you, that's exactly my point: since the government isn't doing much anyhow, going over to a different system is almost definitely going to be an improvement.
Ask HN: Are video playlists site viable?
Hi.. I made a site that allows users to create and share youtube video playlists. So far, the results are not what I expected. Any ideas/inputs appreciated. http://videowatchr.com/beta
I think the author is missing the point. Some data just looks and acts beautifully in tabular / spreadsheet form, and if you have an app where that is the case, then by all means, use a tabular layout.

Does that mean you are just remaking a spreadsheet? Cmon. No. There is all sorts of added value for using a webapp that has a tabular data view. Maybe it's nicer to use. Maybe it comes with choices pre-filled out for you for certain columns. Maybe you provide user/team visibility, or sharing, or all sorts of other stuff that a simple spreadsheet could never provide standalone.

The point is, don't shoot yourself in the foot because 37signals forgot to put a tabular view of their data in. That means nothing. You should be thinking -- does a tabular view add value to your app? Yes? Great, then provide a tabular view for your users.
“Find us in the app store” vs “Google it”
> Now, don't get me wrong: There are lot of ways to improve the C language that would make sense: Bitmaps, defined structure packing (think: communication protocol packets), big/little endian variables (data sharing), sensible handling of linked lists etc.

> As ugly as it is, even the printf()/scanf() format strings could be improved, by offering a sensible plugin mechanism, which the compiler can understand and use to issue warnings.

> Heck, even a simple basic object facility would be good addition, now that C++ have become this huge bloated monster language.

As a C user, I would not want to see any of these things in C.

C++ was originally named "C with Classes," and it didn't start out as a monstrosity. Adding "simple" classes to C because C++ is too complicated makes no sense. C++ got complicated because of all of the things that users end up wanting if you walk that path. There's no reason to think that "simple" classes added to C would stay simple.

Plugins for printf()/scanf()?? Not even remotely the kind of thing that needs to be in the core language libraries.

I don't think defined structure packing would really add much; if the idea is to memcpy() the raw data into your structure, then you're just making the actual data processing part more expensive because the compiler has to store the structure in a sub-optimal way (ie. with non-native endianness). Simple expressions like x.y++ could end up being much more expensive than expected.
Follow-up (sort of):

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006...

(Pulled from past submission comments. Credit goes to HN poster "ced" over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20140 )
Ask HN: What you achieved this year?
Share your start up , side projects, any cool hack or experience.
It's not the pigs' fault eggs are delicious. :)
Yeah, it seems weird, but that's the way it works in Backbone (at least for us). Views are more similar to iOS' UIViewController than a Rails view.

Backbone views handle event binding and rendering, so they're more similar to Rails controllers, if anything.
Not sure it's possibly to just come up with a new system of science and logic that is more convenient.

The bigger point is that all of these thing go throug proper testing (double blind, phase 3 etc) and this bigger system does catch them before we just call them facts and unleash them. We are testing them and figuring it out, it's just complex and hard.

Same with the search for the Higs Bosen. We're pretty sure it's there, it seems like we even have a bead on it now, but we're still searching and testing big ranges and it takes time. I'm not sure you can just come up with a new way of reasoning to find it.

But of course you are welcome to try, just don't tell everyone else they are wasting their time while you are trying, because you might be wrong and wasting your time.