skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What would you ask Brian Greene (or a Nobel Prize winner)?
Hi guys,

I'm excited to have the opportunity to talk to Brian Greene at a banquet in a month or so, and a panel of Nobel Laureates a month after that. If you had the chance, what would you ask him? I've never really been able to talk to someone that prolific, so all of the questions that I can think of are fairly constrained. Thanks!
Sitting on your butt and controlling a toy truck just barely qualifies as active.

I'd say if you're watching something on DVR and fast forwarding the commercials you're 50% there.
Neuromarketing firm explores America's non-conscious consumer behavior
How does this use "AI"? Right now it seems like a less robust version of WebMD's multiple symptom checker.

http://symptoms.webmd.com/coresc/landing#/introView

For example, I can click Arm -> Armpit -> Lump or Bulge and see the possible conditions.

Armpit doesn't even exist in your system. Which would be fine if I already knew how to self diagnose a swollen lymph node. Of course, if I didn't, I would still need a doctor to tell me what search term to use on your site.

I can understand if the system is early in development, but if it doesn't do anything for the layman why would my doctor care if I saw it?
Very cool, and good luck.

Who is the intended audience for the symptoms and conditions directories? Are the numbers next to the entries probabilities of having that symptom or condition for the general population?

And not that it's particularly important, but this entry doesn't seem correct: http://symcat.com/conditions/arsenic-poisoning (it discusses bacteria rather than the element).
Sounds like a distinction without a difference. If you can stop people from using a formula with your patent, you've effectively patented that formula.
'Anonymous' hacks two more U.S. government websites
This is cool, but to be fair, the Rogerian psychotherapist version of this has existed since 1965.
Pricing and Trading Networks: Down is Up, Left is Right
That is not even close to what is being described in the article.
I think what the article is getting at is: if the highway you take to work is ruining your life you don't take another lane, you take another road altogether.

It's a crude metaphor, but it's the best I have at the moment.
A rule of thumb I see often is that as a freelancer you would need to divide your target for the year by 1000 and that would be your target hourly rate. So, you would need to look at charging $50 / hour for freelance work to hit 50K per year.

From my experience, that's about right for freelancing and that's about where you should be charging if you are decent with Wordpress. I know of other developers who charge at least $50 / hour and don't know a lot of PHP or even JS. All these developers do all day is configure WP sites.

That said, charge what you think you can charge. The difference between $50 / hour and $80 / hour might simply be what you ask for.

Realistically, the size of your digital Rolodex and your ability to sell is what's going to allow you to hit your target rate. Start networking like crazy and saving as much as possible right now. Hit Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress forums and any other networking channels you can find to see the conversations and hook up the jobs. As a digital nomad you would be at somewhat of a disadvantage because you wouldn't be able to establish yourself in one location. That's not to say that you need to work with local clients, but it only helps if you can do it.

You could also hit sites like Odesk and Elance but you have a lot of competition there with Wordpress. You will need something which will allow you to stand out. The more niche and the more you can stand out the better. If you can stand out, then good potential client won't even look at the competition offering to work at $15 / hour.

So, aside from networking, you need to do whatever you can to try to establish yourself as an authority. Create a site, write articles and contribute to the community. Work to make a voice which other WP developers will take seriously. Continue to learn WP and read as much as you can to find out what people are doing to push the envelope with it.

You could branch out into other areas aside from WP, but you should start with your strengths. You could focus on HTML / CSS but combining that with Wordpress will give you a more niche target.

Try to save up at least six months living expenses before you hit the freelance circuit.

Hold off on travel until you have had a chance to get solidly into the flow of bringing in work. Also, freelancing while on the road is difficult. You might benefit from moving somewhere with cheap living expenses though.
News.YCombinator.com Technology Profile
You're assuming everyone has easy access to effective healthcare.
I find it amusing that when specifying a symptom of "Mass in scrotum" the website sees the need to ask me if I'm male or female.
`brew install https://raw.github.com/adamv/homebrew-alt/master/duplicates/... should work.
It seems like they can trivially retry him under criminal copyright infringement laws. Is there some technicality preventing the justice department from pursuing that course?

Does anyone know if Goldman is simultaneously pursuing civil resource for copyright violation?
Machine learning guy here. I'm curious: which AI model you chose on the back-end?
What about booting up into the Metro interface, rather than Desktop?

The death of the Start button (and menu)?

The refresh/reset is obviously a tablet-oriented feature, to bring Windows 8 into line with iOS. Ditto start up/shutdown/hibernation boosts.

There are definitely some nice changes to Windows 8 Desktop (ISO mounting, storage pools), but I think it's very, very hard to deny that Windows 8 is predominantly mobile/tablet-oriented.

A few weeks ago I scanned through the Building Windows 8 blog posts, and around 80% of the posts were mobile/tablet-oriented, with desktop/server stuff filling in the remainder.
Ask HN: Language for Rules Engine
I have an idea for a niche component to be used in the education market. It would require writing a rules engine, but the rules would have to be dynamic because power users would be able to change them. I have no experience writing a rules engine so I'm wondering if there is a de facto standard language used for this scenario?
It's a little cooked. The OMAP4430 is a latest-and-greatest SoC design. The Atom N270 was released 4 years ago, for goodness sake.

It's true that there's a hole in the Atom line right now -- Medfield would be the best comparison, and it's not in the market yet. Cedar Trail (also not quite released) is a higher power part than the N270, but should honestly wipe the floor with the OMAP.

That's not to say that ARM hasn't come a long way over the past half decade. They clearly have, and are getting to the point where there almost at parity with Intel's SoC offerings. But this comparison isn't really fair.
It is uppercase in the comment above.

And a letter can stand for multiple things, from temperatures to chemical elements to whatever.

As long as we're being pedantic, that is.
I don't think it's the developer's job to tell people how to live their life. If people enjoy apps like LikeSecret and they use it, then it's the developer's job to provide it. The problem OP has encountered isn't because he's targetting "immature introverts", it's because he hasn't figured out a good marketing strategy. The solution to that isn't to act morally superior and ditch the app, but to try out different strategies and see which one works best.
This just goes to who that we are now in the fabled post-pc world that everyone has been talking about for the last 10 years or so. I disagree that the iPhone is at a lower price point -- if you factor in the cost of a data plan on a 2 year contract you can easily purchase a macbook pro and an iPad for the same amount.
The fact that he was able to do it at all means that this should be a logical next step. There may even be a business idea here. Program good enough Computer Vision and planning AI you could loan a set of autonomous robots to someone and pick them up after 6 months when the job is complete. It would probably be much cheaper than the human alternative.
The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e (http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf) has been my go-to source for a long time. Works both as a manual and for reference.
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Is this similar to Quora's livenode/webnode2 (http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/What-is-Webnode2,
http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/What-limitations-h..., http://www.bigfastblog.com/quoras-technology-examined, http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/How-does-LiveNode-...)?
Stacker sounds like AJAX as it was done in 2006, except trigger by pushState. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it though. I'd be curious what the performance penalty is on mobile.
This has the same problem as hypochondriac internet forums.

I put in "tired" and got a list of: depression, diabetes, hypothyroidism, atrial fibrillation,anxiety ,multiple sclerosis, congestive heart failure and gastroesophageal reflux disease.

If I click on "increased risk," I get: valley fever, muscular dystrophy, hemolytic anemia, intracranial abscess, thalassemia, gallbladder cancer, polycythemia vera, and autonomic nervous system disorder.

Nowhere does it ask me if I happened to get enough sleep...
Depends on the client implementation. If your client machine's resolver is set to use DNSCurve enabled recursive servers and has know good copies of their keys and IP addresses, then trying to MITM would require breaking the encryption (ie, impossible/very unlikely).

That said, if you have control at the registrar level or an intermediary or above the recursive nameserver, you could change the NS records to use your keys and MITM it that way.
BrightFarms’ Business Model: How Tech Could Help Farmers & Consumers [video]
Is it not also another plausible hypothesis that they are getting paid less, because, (for example) they make work/life balance choices that focus less on career advancement?

If "work/life balance choices" is code for "making babies", then yes, but you made have noticed that it's mainly women who have babies. :)

Pay rates until primigravidity are lower for women than men in most industries and (less) low for men than women in a few. After that the "male bonus" increases more than the fertility rates would suggest they ought to. There are lots of conclusions that can be drawn from that, but I think the most obvious one is that employers haggle down women returning to work from childcare, and that from that age women pay a penalty "because they might go and make babies". There's some evidence (comparison with other countries with different patterns of childcare) that this is the case.
Oh. Thank you. I hadn't known that.
How to write good requirements
When you have a persistent page (that you update with HTML5 push-state) you suddenly have to worry about issues like memory fragmentation. If you do lots of small updates to build a page from a template + JSON every time the user navigates it's easy to hit some situation where everything starts lagging for no clear reason.

If you simply swap out a large part of the page with some HTML right out of an Ajax request you don't have to worry about any of that.
You didn't offend me at all. I just have a 2 year old daughter and I've seen first hand things that I never want her to have to experience. So, I'm selfish that way.

I'm specifically responding to the last paragraph in your post where you're characterizing PyLadies as a "strange female programmer group". I'm absolutely certain most members of PyLadies are quite comfortable "talking to guys". This isn't about inability of some women to work as a programmer in a male dominated hierarchy. This isn't about the vast majority of nerds in software development. It is about power dynamics that will impact your career.

Perhaps I.T. is "strange and special" for women because technologists, in general, tend to have more leverage with regard to management/owners than in other industries.
A pile-up could easily cause a million dollars worth of damage. A measure that makes sure that the responsible businesses are serious about safety doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.
I haven't seen ASCII art in so long. The nostalgia just made me perk up and giggle.
Lies, Damned Lies and Piracy
I guess one way to look at it is that the services you mentioned are part of the new idea of what a media company is. The traditional media companies are the ones resisting to change.
I've always entered a bunch of science competitions/fairs. Sometimes the prize is $1000 for a paper I spend 8 hours writing - not bad!
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In Four Years, Apple Sold More iPhones Than All Macs Ever
Any other invites left, by chance?!
So, what does Gemfury do with package repositories? I was unable to tell from the initial screen.

My current projects target Delphi. (Go ahead and make jokes, but my industry has a surprising number of thermodynamics libraries written in it.) Is there anything you can do for me?
How is this different from Minecraft?
Programming enjoyment is, of course, subjective, but for your team the enjoyment is ruby, understood :)

What browsers are you getting the 50-100ms numbers? Similar results on mobile (with a 3G connection)?
I'm sure that there is a great service behind this link, but I completely ignored it at first because of the "your doctor doesn't want you to see this" message. Seems like the acai (sp?) berry ads that are scattered all over the internet.
O... never know that this could work too!
Exactly what I thought. But you have to remember that 37 is the quintessential Rails shop - client-side logic is not their sweet spot.

So it's only natural that for their flagship product they'd rather keep pushing the limits of their comfort zone rather than go all out client-side, no matter how natural that choice might be for a "web app".
Apple Shuns The New York Times Because Previous Foxconn Reporting
Richard, MVC JS is great when there’s no way around it.

Nice "..." there.

You trolling? If so, this is the most bizarre topic for trolling I've seen in a while.
Vimeo not YouTube gets instant share option in Mountain Lion
I can't tell if you're being serious or not...

He designed and built the system. It's not a question of how many calories he burned, but the difference between creation and consumption.
You don't even have to program. Set it up to be controlled by people in india or china. This kind of business could be set up in a few days, and which begs the question - how com no-one is doing this. There's companies trying to sell laptops on a stick (anybots) whereas this is a genuinely useful service. Trevor Blackwell should be able to get something like that up in day, he did a segway clone in a day.
In every previous version of Windows it has also been possible to change the settings to get it to behave much like previous versions.

However, in every previous version it has also been the case that the configuration in question is not terribly discoverable. This situation is compounded by the way that the default settings create an environment that is confusing to people who were used to previous versions of Windows - the result being they feel alienated or intimidated enough that they're unlikely to attempt to discover these changes.

And I don't see much indication that Microsoft will succeed in avoiding this situation. I'm sure they've got UI experts thinking about it, but their marketing department has a solid track record of seeing a good idea paperclipizing it because they think it needs to be more visible.

There will also be, as there have for every other Windows update, many UI changes which may be less advertised than the Metro UI is, but which have just as much ability to alienate users. Ribbons in the Explorer come to mind. (Not that ribbons are bad, mind you, just that an all-at-once switch to them is unnecessarily jarring.) Though I will say that on the other hand it is nice to see that this may be the first major Windows release in a decade to forgo the traditional Reshuffling of the Control Panel.
Wii dvd playback
Double jeopardy applies here doesn't it? You don't get to keep prosecuting people for one act until one of the cases sticks: You have to pick one breach of the law, or bundle a bunch of them into a single prosecution, and go to court on that basis don't you?
First need to solve for hypochondria. :)

Maybe they need a big button that says "Are you really worried right now?" and if you click it, tell you logical steps and routine you need to be following long-term for the results to "feel more normal" - otherwise to not use to self-diagnose.
Phones outsell computers. So? Appending "apple" makes this interesting?
I didn't say mature I said they were a good format for it. And by what metric are you measuring maturity?

* Age? s-expressions predate python by a fair amount.
* Parsers? just about every language I know has a lisp
interpreter embedded in it. s-expressions therefore
have
parsers in pretty much all languages.
* Market Share? well xml and json may win there but I'm
not sure that's a valid reason to discount
s-expressions
We donot pay you less because you are a woman
Maybe forcing the browser into quirks mode would do the trick?
Siemens gets serious about tidal power, acquires pioneer Marine Current Turbines
I think its worthwhile to add some more self-consistency tests to this thing.

You can enter symptoms in the first question, and then move on to the second question. At this point, regardless of the timing selected, some of the symptoms drop off.

In my case, at the end, "What are my chances of having..." reported 0% for the correct diagnosis. This is not good.

What is worse: the condition is in your database and described perfectly there, including the details that would allow for a correct diagnosis.

Did you try starting from each condition, and measuring how often you get the diagnosis right? Correcting for the prevalence of each condition as needed - in my case its a common one so there didn't seem to by any reason not to get it right.

Also, it would be nice if the conditions page would tell you how often this condition happens (if needed by asking age group/sex).
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seriously? down-vote because I agree with the article? .. oh, well.
how com no-one is doing this

because it takes 7 years to dig out a single basement?
One of my concerns about an automated taxi system is that they'll become dirty and decrepit even faster than public transport because there's an increased level of privacy and nobody to maintain the vehicle between riders. How would you enjoy running late for something and the taxi pulls up, its seats covered in vomit? Eventually, all cars may be scratched up and 'tagged'.

Maybe this won't be as widespread a problem as I think it could be. Zipcar seems to be rather successful, although I've never used one.
Thanks - That was my suspicion.
...you're saying they need commentators.

Like John Madden, screaming about dropped semi-colons and unprotected pointer dereferences?

I'm pretty sure the Starcraft community has figured out how to do this right. It's too bad they didn't invite a pro to come and make it more entertaining.
Why we can't blame Google for 'cookiegate'
For an interactive, less technical explanation, I've found Natjan's JS Lessons to be one of the best examples to pass around:

http://nathansjslessons.appspot.com/lesson?id=1000
Interesting. We've just had a discussion in our team about moving as much as possible to the client becasue... developers enjoy writing CoffeeScript!
GS wanted an example made, so they got the FBI to prosecute. 8 years inside makes for a really big stick to wave in front of the rest of their programmer base.

Unfortunately for them, the court has ruled that the statute in question didn't apply, so the ruling has been reversed. Assuming double jeopardy applies, he can't be prosecuted (by the government) again for the same acts. I think that GS could still sue for breach of contract, but their damages would presumably be limited to actual harm done wouldn't they?
The idea of encouraging the term of "man logic" is man logic. Misogyny is clearly a problem, but saying, "oh but men are dumb too" is not the right way to go about fixing it.
This is a great piece, and it gets to the contradiction at the heart of the new trend/buzz around creative people using the Internet in various ways to make an end-run around traditional publishing infrastructure in all industries. It's the same with big-name authors ditching their publishers to self-publish on Amazon: Sure, they make a mint, more than they would have at a traditional publisher, but they wouldn't have been able to do it were it not for the fan base they built up with their traditionally published works.

Everyone loves to bash publisher/distributors in all areas of creative endevour, and often with good reason. But at their heart these companies are accumulations of capital and expertise that allow risky investment in creative works that might fail. Everyone who succeeds in the traditional world to the extent that they don't need the publishers anymore got there because that capital took a risk on them; now they don't want to let part of their profits go back into that capital pool. The question is, if the old system blows up, who takes that risk for unknowns?

I'm certainly not saying its impossible. Probably people will be ramping up creatively, writing/making music/what have you for nothing until they build up enough of a fan base to ask for something more. But crowdsourcing is definitely not just a free handout without huge accumulated goodwill.
More music is DRM free because the iPod did so well, and would play iTunes DRM or non-DRMed MP3. If you don't want to sell on iTunes, then you either give up iPod support or you give up DRM.

Since the iPod is so popular and is almost synonymous with "portable digital music player", a "digital music" store that sold song that didn't work on an iPod is a bad commercial move, so people sold non-DRMed MP3s
Did notice that. Will get sorted when I have time over the weekend. Sorry :/
Looks like they've got a pretty healthy base library set up, but I'd be curious if anyone's seen a thorough comparison of R and Incanter. Googling isn't much help.
50-100ms is the time it takes to generate the response on the server. On top of that you have to add the ping time between you and server and whatever other network overhead there is.

That's why it's great to be closer to 50ms so you'll stay under 100ms even with the network overhead.
In many cities there's a distinction between medallion taxis—which you can hail off the street—and livery service—which you need to call for. Since you generally have to take whatever you get get when you hail a cab, the prices are regulated and, in return, the competition is limited.

Generally, the number of livery service drivers and cars is not limited.

That said, the Washington, DC taxi commission has been hassling the Internet-based Uber. Last month they ran a sting against an Uber-arranged driver and impounded his car.[1]

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mike-debonis/post/uber-c...