skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"At a certain stage of life, aggressive medical treatment can become sanctioned torture. "

I just went through a month with a 90 year old friend whose life ended almost exactly like the story in that story. He had one lucid 30 mins when I was there and his family was there (he had been a general physician for almost 50 years). In his brief period when he had the energy to try and communicate whilst almost totally paralysed, it was clear he was telling the attending doctor that he wanted them to stop all medication and let him die. His own family could not face that fact, and said they'd ask him again the following day (unfortunately the cowardly doctor backed them up on this). He was never again lucid or strong enough to insist that treatment be stopped. He lived for another 10 days, struggling to breathe, almost totally paralysed, unable to control his bowels.

This was a man who when I last went on holiday with him at the age of 85, he insisted on carrying his own suitcase and refused a wheelchair, even though he had trouble walking and had blood pressure and angina problems.

I don't blame his family not being able to make that decision (it's so hard to let go of someone one loves). But his last weeks were undoubtedly torture, and they know they refused to follow his wishes. It was just terribly sad and an awful dilemma.

I was really glad of something else I read on HN about 6 months ago, where a doctor had a brain tumouur (or something like that) and instead of treatment, he lived out the remainder of his life doing the things he loved. I think that idea was what meant I could come to terms with the need to respect my friend's last wishes. I just could not convince his family.
Ask HN: Sales tax API
Does anyone know of an API where I can submit a seller's location and a buyer's location and get a sales tax rate that should be charged (if any)? I've been searching for a while now, but haven't found exactly what I'm looking for.
That is a common type of hackathon, and usually the more enjoyable. Going from zero to something cool is fine, but joining up with an open source project for a few days and fixing problems and adding features can be a lot more rewarding, and a lot more useful.
"Without those "activist judges" the Supreme Court would be toothless and the Constitution toilet paper."

Without these violations of the constitution, it, rather than the supreme court, would be the highest law in the land ,and the constitution would no longer be toothless.

"So those are the "facts of reality""

At best, what you just gave me was your opinion. You didn't cite any actual facts.

"not your libertarian fantasies. "

I must guess that you're incapable of making arguments to the point, so you feel compelled to characterize me. Here you do it with two characterizations that you imagine are insulting.

"As for the rest of your rant"

Another characterization. You feel you do not have to respond to my arguments, if you just call them a rant. Also, you get to imply that I'm not being rational by calling it a rant.

"Actually, we're off-topic already, so I'll stop here."

My post, was on the topic. I addressed how the domain seizures were the latest in a historical line of property seizures, which I talked about. You didn't address seizures at all, and instead chose to attack me.

Since your entire participation in this thread has been off topic and personal, you should have never started it.

Nothing convinces me of the correctness of my arguments like my opponents being in a abject terror at addressing them.
The fake users marketing issue on social media
Darpa plans 'Avatar' surrogate robots
And the Privacy Gaps Just Keep On Coming
Building the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge (1937 Documentary)
FREE NOW: iPhone app Acoustic Ruler lets you measure up to 25 m
If one tallied up all the money spent on improving the lives of the poor in the last 50 years, I expect people would be shocked at how little improvement has actually resulted.

Unfortunately, much of this spending fails to encourage behaviors that actually move people out of poverty. If you are receiving assistance, any money you earn above a certain amount threatens your assistance. So you hide it or stay below the arbitrary limit. This is not the way to encourage honesty or industry.

How long were things done that way, despite the facts? Decades. And that's the problem with government administering charity. It doesn't look at the results and adjust its approach until outcomes improve. Its driven by political considerations. And when it does measure reality, it measures those things that make it look successful.

And why should it look honestly at outcomes? Government doesn't have to convince you to support a program. Unlike private charity, it can make you fund it. You probably don't even realize what you're funding.
I use some logging apps regularly (The Eatery, Weightbot) but the apps have to be REALLY good for me to log things. (and even then it's hit or miss)

It is way too much of a burden to manually log everything and I think solutions for these kind of things are going to be leap frogged by the Nike Fuelbands, Fitbits, and Jawbone UPs of the world.

Might make since to look at importing and visualizing that data.
We are responsible for death. We as a worldwide society have enough resources to seriously tackle death but because of our inability to coordinate effectively we don't apply those resource.
NIH budget $30 billion
Defense budget $700 billion
Coordination is the problem web startups exist to solve, and so readers of hackers news are a particularly culpable in failing to address death.
Beyond the time being spent via social media, I'm curious what HN thinks we can do to show qualitative value per interaction vs. quantitative.

One thing I didn't include in my post was Hoffman's discussion of the three types of data that will prove to be important moving forward: explicit (data people supply), implicit (data created by behavior), and analytic (data gleaned from explicit and implicit information). Currently most social tools are very good at taking in the explicit data and showing people their own implicit data (think Tweets, Retweets, Followers), but there is--from a user standpoint--a lack of open analytic data showing the impact of their own behaviors.
I'm glad to see these additions, but the syntax for an NSArray literal bugs me.

When I want an array literal in C, I'd write ...

int foo[] = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

... but in Objective-C, for an NSArray literal I'd write ...

NSArray *bar = @[o1, o2, o3];

Why did they choose '[' over '{'? Oddly enough, NSDictionary uses '{'.

I feel like the syntax for an NSString literal is more natural (as a C developer).

NSString *baz = @"look, an NSString literal";
char szBaz[] = "look, a C string literal";
Or just hit the vote URL repeatedly with cURL (which is done via GET request).

The author might want to change it to POST/PUT and limit votes based on IP address instead.
Quick Weight Loss
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20+ Creative & Inspiring Office Designs
So it becomes our second home and that is why we cannot ignore the topic of office design. The ambiance of your office reflects how you want to see your work.
I completely agree, it's great to see that the language continues to move forward and advance in it's OO design. It's especially nice that these forward steps do not hinder or reduce Obj-C's low-level functionality, leaving available the performance gains from it's use.
Not at all. We do teach people how to eat decent food, but many choose not to.
This guy conveniently forgot to add what he thought the point of OSX Mountain Lion was, with his little quip at the and about people not having the mental acuity, like himself, to comprehend such matters. I couldn't reply to this asshole, so I'm saying in here, probably on deaf ears.
This is a reply to several comments, but is important enough that I wanted it at the top level.

Andrew Carnegie founded MUCH more than the Carnegie Library. In fact, a mind boggling number of public libraries in the States alone, and more worldwide, not to mention trade schools, medical research institutions, etc.

Not only did he give the money to fund the library, but he only did so in cases where the town was ready to take on the burden of supporting it.

He was a man with an ego, but his generosity in this regard goes beyond ego. He was a man of virtue, who genuinely sought to see his fortune go back into society to make it a greater place. The amount of good he did boggles my mind and humbles me.

The abundance of public libraries in this country are not a result of liberalism in government. They are a result of liberalism in men's souls. So stop bitching about what other people are doing with their wealth, earned or unearned. That does not make you a better person.

In my opinion, the rich are not necessarily wrong to be abandoning the U.S. middle classes. I would not be surprised if that wealth is not sitting in Scrooge McDuck's money vaults, but is instead being funneled into the third world now, raising up people with a true appreciation for the sacredness of life and wealth, with more perspective and less entitlement.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. No, government has never been the solution. It has at best been a custodian, as it is with the public library system in the states. But every book in there, every microchip, and most of the buildings and maintenance are made of the lifeblood of hard working people who dedicated their life to creating more than they consumed.
It's just a particular way to analyze some data on oDesk, I wouldn't take it as a gospel of pure truth.

I want to find out about the tried and tested niches that HN readers might know about.

Background: my goal is to find some in-demand yet rare skill and hammer the crap out of that so I can get paid more per hour and cut down the percentage of my life that is spent generating income for food, shelter, clothes, etc. Working 40 hours per week doing boring C# code is very inefficient when I have so many other projects that need to be done. And for the time being (ie until I build the next Facebook :)) I think consulting will be the best way for me to reach my objective.
Isn't the threat of a permanent injunction (which Oracle is apparently askings for) a far greater threat than the money damages? Oracles's damages report getting stripped down does not seem to reduce the threat to the Android platform as a whole much at all, though it does reduce the short-term financial damage to Google.
Wow we've come full circle, The Verge summarizing Engadget, the rag they left AOL to clone because AOL will buy it again, and again, and again. Engadget, true to their business model, was just summarizing CNET anyway:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57380685-248/settlement-re...
While some people think "building the software" is the goal, I don't think it is.

In my opinion, the real underlying goal is to get people out of their normal environment for a day or weekend, make everyone think differently, prioritize everything, and build connections within the local community. There are very few non-purely-social events that cross programming languages, tech communities, and geographies. Hackathons serve that purpose nicely.

When I close out a Hackathon, I always ask "who lives in this city or within 10 miles of here?" Nearly everyone raises their hand. Then I tell them:
"Regardless of how these demos go, you met a bunch of people who live, work, and make things happen right here in your area. While we'll see what you did today, I'm more interested in what you do going forward. There's no reason these relationships have to die tonight."

Disclosure:

* I'm a Developer Evangelist at Twilio and run, assist, etc Hackathons, Hackdays, etc all over the place.. the most recent was an API Hackday here in Austin yesterday. And I basically said the above.

* My coworking space - HubAustin - launched from Startup Weekend a year ago and after four months of operation, we're 2/3 of the way to being profitable.
And yet, every release of OS X since Lion seems to pull in more features from iOS. Launcher, the notification bar, even some of the apps are starting to make an appearance.

Saying they're not like one another is a bit silly with this in mind.
You have to have faith that all this time wasting will go somewhere practical, at some point. I posted this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3607718

If people can use this online time to figure out how to apply their skills to make money, they wouldn't be at their jobs browsing Facebook.
Ip Address Geolocation API
Good points. I should addresses some of these concern in the future.

However, people tend to attribute you anyway, 99% of the time, in my experience. I got one guy who published a book on amazon and he attributed my work anyway, even though it was copyrighted to the max. One guy just attributed the author, but not the zine. I didn't find anybody who doesn't attribute my content in some way, at least not yet.

The other reasons why I make my stuff public domain is that I want to maximize the usefulness of my work as well ethical reasons. However, these are not explored in the article. Maybe I shouldn't have neglect those dimensions, but I am not quite sure yet.
I'm going to upvote this on the general principle that I've seen a lot of programmers who don't quite know what parsing is, but reading a 310-page book is perhaps not the best way to familiarize them with it.

The basic thing that a programmer needs to know about parsing is that regular expressions usually aren't. The big problem with regular expressions is that they have real trouble handling nested modes. Just to give a modestly complicated example of what can happen from a simple grammar with nesting, imagine a grammar with just single-letter variables and parentheses, parsed into Python with tuples:

a(bc)def
=> ('a', ('b', 'c'), 'd', 'e', 'f')

You might be able to get a regular expression engine to deal with that for you, but it will tend to fail on something slightly more complicated like this:

a(b((cde)f)(g)h)ij

...because it will usually either be too conservative and start matching:

(b((cde)

or else it will sometimes be too aggressive and start matching:

((cde)f)(g)

Perl is a big exception; Perl actually has a syntax to make regular expressions properly recursive.

A good practical example for you to think about is CSV parsing. In CSV, a field can sometimes be quoted so that it may contain commas, and two quoting-symbols inside that field is interpreted as a single quoting-symbol too. Thus to create a table containing a chat, we might have to write:

Reginald,I think life needs more scare-quotes.
Beartato,"That's nice, Reginald."
Reginald,"Don't you mean ""nice""?"
Beartato,Aah! Your scare-quotes scared me!

With a straightforward character-by-character parser this is pretty easy to parse; you check for the «,» character and append another record onto the row, check for the «\n» character to append this row to the table, and when you see «"» you enter a special string-parsing mode which does not exit until it sees an odd number of quote marks pass by, bordered by two non-quote marks. (The fact that you might have to "peek ahead" leads to interesting parse combinators which have to be able to succeed or fail without moving the cursor forward.)

At one of my jobs I actually spent some time outside of work making CSV parsing faster by using a dangerous hack: you can split on the quote character first, to have the native string code handle the basic division of the table; then the even fields contain CSV data without quoted text (or occasionally empty strings, which must be interpreted as commands to add the quote character and the following text to the preceding field), and the odd fields contain raw data to be entered into a new record. (I call it a dangerous hack because I remember the thing working at first, but eventually I believe three bugs came out on more complicated CSV files -- it was very hard to "see that it worked right" due to the extra overhead needed to move all of this character-by-character logic into the split() calls of my programming language.
List of Printer Manufacturers working with the Secret Service"
Behave yourself. I gave feedback on a poorly written essay. He responded with an even more poorly written response. Don't try to be condescending to people simply because you disagree with their opinion.
The real problem is we are at the stone ages when it comes to medicine. The problem is worsen by the fact that treatment is more profitable than cure. In fact, cure eliminates income all together.
It IS fun enlightening atheists. Never gets old.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\2CITIES.TXT

ht, half of the half-dozen had become members of a
fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within
themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic
on the spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to
the Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes,
were other three who had rushed into another sect, which mended
matters with a jargon about "the Centre of Truth:" holding that Man
had got out of the Centre of Truth--which did

----

Interrogators pulling this shit on me:

http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur...

64-bit, not 486.
I have code I wrote for serial ports. I could probably buy a card... might be PCI and different. It wouldn't work for a mass market. I don't just want a handful of terrorists -- I want every god damn citizen an expert bomb making robot assassinating wizzard. Lazers, too.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT

own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being
dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were
healed.

2:25 For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the
Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.

3:1 Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that,
if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the
conversation of the wives; 3:2 While they behold your chaste
conversation coupled with fear.

3:3 Whose a

----

2nd ammendment.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\SWIFT.TXT

st, only
after a more elegant manner. I rubbed my eyes often, but the same
objects still occurred. I pinched my arms and sides to awake
myself, hoping I might be in a dream. I then absolutely concluded,
that all these appearances could be nothing else but necromancy and
magic. But I had no time to pursue these reflections; for the gray
horse came to the door, and made me a sign to follow him into the
third room where I saw a very comely mare, together with a colt and
foal, sitting on their haun
For a book length treatment of this topic, see "How we Die", one of the most amazing books I've read.

http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Die-Reflections-Chapter/dp/0679...
I mean, i could host a form that looks like the dropbox login page, put it on my dropbox account, link it here, and the submission would show up with a (dropbox.com) suffix. Sure, the URL wouldn't be accurate, but i'm sure i'd catch a few people.

The solution isn't to trust random TLDs, it's exposing the subdomain in the domain preview. u.dropbox.com isn't going to be hosting an important login box or news post.

The same goes for google.com/plus.google.com, although it'd be very difficult to build a phishing page out of G+. Google Pages perhaps?
Ray Kurzweil should read this article.
I hate to be "that guy", but you misspelled a certain word three times in your comment. I leave it to you to figure out which one.

But I agree with you, in the sense that having a "deadline" is what motivates people to accomplish things. Like if your boss or teacher doubles the length of time to finish a project, it doesn't mean you'll work twice as hard, but rather that you have more time to put it off.
I don't think a 20 years old doing startup is thinking "I gottach do this before I die!". No, it's just...let do it man!
You down voted me for ideological reasons.

I honestly don't even know what to say to this. It's like I'm speaking to someone with mental illness.
So what would you do if their parents objected on religious grounds?
اهداف مباراة برشلونه وفالنسيا اليوم في الدوري الاسباني فبراير 2012
Couldn't resist: http://xkcd.com/678/
Seems like a cool idea.

One comment on the landing page: I'd condense the height of your design a bit. On my screen (running Chrome) the sign up for beta entry form was below the fold and I really couldn't tell it was there until I scrolled.
Reminds me of:

"In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the 5 year period will be."

http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html
Xcode 4.2 was also only available to iOS developers.

Xcode 4.1 was part of the Lion pre-release, so I don't think that iOS developers got it during beta, though apparently it was made available for SL users a few weeks after Lion shipped.

It at least makes sense to limit the betas to the Mac program only if the tool in question only works on a prerelease OS (I assume that's the case with 4.4 and ML). But limiting it to iOS developers only makes no technical sense at all.

Edit: 4.4 works on 10.7.3+, so yeah, this is just the usual bullshit.
This is one of the reasons I find it hard to talk to my mother. She is beholden to grief about her father and is doing everything to prolong the life of my grandmother even though she can't walk, needs help eating, and constantly falls asleep. On top of that she hardly knows who is around her. it's sad.

Watching how my parents have dealt with my aging parents really puts pause on me and has me thinking about creating a living Will to make my own wishes very clear.
> Why did they choose '[' over '{'? Oddly enough, NSDictionary uses '{'.

Who knows, but it seems to mirror Python in that respect. Being a fan of Python I can only approve.
Is the life insurance good enough to protect against the mortage loan?
Canon G12 Review
Hackathons aren't meant to be an end-all. It's hard to find a good block of time to do a side project, and I see hackathons as ways of forcing yourself to commit to a project for a short burst of time.

Once you have the groundwork down, you can spend off-hours iteratively improving the products
Building A Village Starts With Building The Tractor
I would like to see Noir in there also. I have been using Noir a lot in the last 4 or 5 months: good performance and nice to develop with. BTW, off topic but since there was a lot of HN discusion yesterday about DHH's article on Basecamp Next and using pjax: I just blogged about using pjax with Noir: http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/02/using-pjax-with-clojure-a... (with a link to a github repo I just created).
What seems to happen with me is that I'm fairly happy with the initial release. Then as the changes start piling on, eventually one of them will require a major conceptual change. Of course that could take months, or you can put a band-aid on in 2 days. In this day and age of startup mentality I don't know many programmers who are afforded the luxury to spend months on a task that can be hacked in a few days. Anyway, the code can survive a few rounds of that before it starts getting really ugly and then I'm apologizing with the best of them.
I've been taking the "then send me a pull request"-approach lately. There's no reason to be embarrassed about making something (even if it's sloppy) - especially if the person pointing out the flaws hasn't built anything themselves.
FREE NOW: iPhone app lets you acoustically measure up to 25 m
Told during the final stretch of a four month project that all the colors in the app had to be readable for people with Color Blindness

Surely in these days of accessibility awareness this ought to be a design goal by default unless otherwise stated?
But those are "features" being matched. Not the entire OS. I don't see OS X having a touch UI!