skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can anyone with kids comment on whether or not computers are even exciting and empowering anymore?

When I was eight, we got a Commodore VIC-20. It plugged into the TV and booted into BASIC. Just running PRINT statements and simple loops was unbelievably cool. I learned key positions (and how easily mistakes are made) by spending hours typing in bytecodes printed in magazines. With any luck, at the en of it, a completely unforeseen game would appear.

Getting to play with Logo on the Apple ][e was awesome, too. Shapes and angles and horribly flickering animations were exciting.

Now, it seems to me that the difference between Dive Into Python (or whatever) and Call of Duty are so immense, that even running Hello World would be a disheartening experience. But maybe I'm just too nostalgic.

Incidentally, I distinctly remember from my first proper high school programming course (Pascal) that the instructor asked why we wanted to learn programming. Every single student responded, "to make games."
Cops use “Find my Phone” app to catch iPhone thief
So why doesn't the U.S. allow doctors to immigrate to this country? The median American MD makes $143K; I'm sure that plenty of foreign doctors would love to come here and make half that.
Exactly. There's an implicit promise to Apple's sandbox and theirs and Jobs' statements about how they're protecting users from Internet scaries (including porn and other "offensive" content) has given users an incorrect impression that data on their phones is safer than data on their computer. Add to that the fact that most adults remember an era when cellphones had no connectivity, or only USB or serial connections, and its not hard to see how people missed this.

Now the platform owners (Apple, Tootle, Microsoft, etc) must respond to keep the promise they've made, whether stated or implied, or eventually users will rebel. But until the response or rebellion happens, how much damage will be done?

The platforms will adapt, and users will eventually upgrade or move to competitors, but it will take months or years.
In Florida, you can get an MRI plus a prescription written and filled for Oxycontin at a "Pain Management" clinic for less than $500[1].

[1] Vanguard documentary "Oxycontin Express": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7DHMqHFSB8#t=1250s
I switched awhile back and I use ddg mostly the same way you do, though as of late it has felt slower.

Google's social integration, instant search, image previews, and advanced feature removal have made it a chore to use and I'm too lazy to go around disabling every new feature they come up with. Part of me wishes I still had the plain 'ol classic Google interface and behavior but I guess the site is now geared towards everyday folks, not techies.

I gave Chrome a spin the other day again (haven't used it in months) and the default twitchy instant search behavior seemed bizarre and jarring. I think I must be becoming an old fart...

I also think that search quality has gone down at Google (ddg still doesn't hold a candle to Google in that regard, however).
A/B Testing in Action: 3 Real-Life Marketing Experiments
Smart cards (like the DoD Common Access Card/CAC) solve #1 and #3 (no dice on 2 yet).
Ever wonder if any publishers have actually collected any of your contribution? There's NO accountability about how much money actually makes it to publishers; since Readability does not seek the publishers, each publisher must be aware of their money, and go collect it from Readability, and if they do not, eventually it becomes Readability's. It's a great model, and the ethics are wonderful, but it suffers from this fatal flaw.
Air Yeezy
I need help installing a webapp & the tomcat server it runs on in order to facilitate setting up a self-service rental booking webportal provided by the webapp. The docs are somewhat greek to me, & I'm currently stuck- support is nonexistant. It's probably easy to someone else. There's also a need for a landing page that features the webportal function, to be integrated into a temporary single-page home page, which is currently under development by others. I imagine there could be a tab on the interim homepage to link to the page that'll feature the self-serve booking function. If you're interested, please reach me by email: info (at) superior-sound-systems (dot) com. Thanks
I have one. Not trying to build a hacking box but the instructions are useful nonetheless.
One major reason, I like Google search is their Omnibox autofill suggestions. It makes things real easy.
Tiffany Jewelry
first kill everyone in human resources.

Blaming the HR guys for bad hiring practices is like blaming a coder for feature creep.

The fault lies with business directing HR to do things the way they do.

This probably got started when someone infected business with the idea that one should manage people the way xerox machines and staplers are managed.

They changed the Personal Department to Human Resources and lurched into a Red Queen's Race to the bottom.
I do iOS development where GPL source code can't be used so it's an automatic non-starter.
"I wish I felt something for the people we expired in my first fire fight. I didn't."

I have a hard time believing you didn't feel something for the people you _killed_ in your first fire fight. Word selection can expose more than a writer's vocabulary range.

That sentence stood out for me for some reason, but overall, it was a great insight that's given me a lot to think about.
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I have never been inclined to additional government regulation. I think it is bad for society in so many ways. But when it comes to the Medical industry I am not so sure.

I wish there were a law that Hospitals have to be able to quote the price of any procedure within a few hours after the patient asks for it.
This account is vague about the most critical point: was there a handshake deal? The phrase "the company agreed on a price" suggests there might have been. But not necessarily; they might have been talking about what the price would be if they did a deal.

If there was a handshake deal, the company should certainly have stuck with the original VC. Not because of any complicated rules about who introed whom to whom, but simply because you have to honor handshake deals.

If there was not a handshake deal, it's less clear. The company seems to have been fairly eager to raise money. Which implies they'd have taken a sufficiently good deal if one was offered. Which implies it had been in the investors' power to get a handshake deal if they wanted one, and if they didn't have one, they essentially blew it by negotiating too hard. If so then I don't think the company would be obliged to stick with the original investor.
But I'm just speculating; it's impossible to say for sure without knowing more.
Almost, the setup was quick but getting familiar with wordpress wasnt quick. And also, it was a low month, I hope to land around 8-10 hours. Also, the time tracking is proabably on the low side, but should be a fair comparison between month at least I think.

Doing the blogposts are a way to force myself to prioritize it, which I havent really done this past month.
Be Successful First Thing in the Morning
What is annoying about this comment is that it compels me to go back and read every other comment you've written. Please write less gracefully next time.
Cool. While this deck wasn't too bad, sometimes the video-only presentations without a link to the actual slides really do need notes like this.
When I was in high school (late 90s), they had kind of a weird curriculum for teaching programming. We had AP classes for Computer Science A/AB, which you had to be at least a sophomore to take. There was also a class called 'Computer Programming' that anyone could take, which I did as a freshman, although the students in the class were actually pretty evenly distributed between all four grades.

Basically we were taught QBASIC and given assignments. The first few weeks seemed pretty mundane as the OP describes, getting into conditionals and loops, etc, but after we learned those, my teacher told us to make something like 'Choose Your Own Adventure' text-based game. I remember loving that assignment and even compiling it as an EXE and sending it to my other friends. This pretty much followed through the whole year, learning some new programming concept (arrays, functions, etc) and then making some sort of game as an assignment. We had the usual "write a program to display all the factors of a number" assignments too, but I just remember loving the game projects. I didn't know anything about Big-O or AVL trees or whatever, just that I could create cool stuff on a computer.

In 10th grade I took Computer Science A, and about half the class hadn't taken Computer Programming already. The material was a lot drier, obviously, and I remember a lot of those students switched out. I witnessed the same thing my freshman year of college -- no 'Choose Your Own Adventure Games' as an assignments, just grueling midterms on polymorphism and inheritance.

So this post really resonated with me, because my thoughts have basically echoed this for awhile -- why isn't software engineering taught as a discipline that can let you implement and create, since that's exactly what it is?
How to Restart your Computer Without Restart Your PC ~ hack4urwish
Why? I'd say we find optimisation tricks quiet interesting here. I barely saw any sucking up or worshipping in the thread, it was mostly on topic.
I'm young enough that I feel I can comment.

I started off trying to make games. Along the way I noticed all the other (Way cooler) stuff going on behind the scenes and dropped them.

Anecdotally, this seems to be the same story for the few people I know in real life who claim to know some form of computer programming. (Whose claims I actually believe.)
I seriously hope Old Media is laughed out of court over this... I just have so little faith in our courts or government.
Sounds like a nice idea, but this post makes it look like it is doomed from the start ... and such a system could even be detrimental to a humane, forgiving society.
no bytes: 00000000 -> 0
one byte: 000000ff -> 1
two bytes: 0000ffff -> 2
three bytes: 00ffffff -> 3

I think that is what he is trying to accomplish.
I submitted this, and definitely wasn't paid by YT/YC/Mercedes to do so :P
I got a lifetime subscription to Mixpanel a couple years ago, although I'm just getting my first site together right now- so I haven't used it yet.
Bullshit. Show me where you get this 70% figure from? Are you talking about spending or results? I think you pulled it out of your arse, but would love to know. What I found was, European r&d spending is close to what the USA spends. Individual countries spend more as a percentage of GDP than USA. World wide, USA does not appear to be spending anywhere close to 70% of the total on medical r&d.

* 2011 Nobel prize for medicine went to an international crew (2 from europe, 1 USA)

* 2010 Nobel prize for medicine went to a British man.

* 2009 2 women from the USA, and one man from UK.

* 2008 1 german man, 1 french woman, 1 french man.

Anyway, medical care isn't just about what drugs multi national companies produce (with much funding from Asia and actual research done in Asia and sales done in USA+worldwide). It includes things like reducing obesity, stopping people smoking in bars, and providing good medical care for all people - which reduces sickness spreading. It does take research, and development to figure these things out and implement them on a social level successfully. Many of these things are classed as social science, and not included in R&D in many places. They can't even get R&D funding for this stuff in some places because it is not real science apparently.

Tax credits for r&d also distort the real costs. The UK gives 225% r&d tax credits, and Australia gives 175% tax credits of the cost now(USA has them too, but lower). This means you make money purely from just doing the R&D without worrying about the results.

btw, the USA is massively in debt, and over 22% of US companies being foreign controlled. So even if the US companies were contributing that much R&D, shouldn't that proportion be attributed somewhat to other countries? With all the funding into the USA also coming from other countries, shouldn't some of that be counted towards the other countries? Shouldn't the fact that lots of the workers in R&D labs for US companies have been outsourced to other countries count towards those countries?
An interesting video about a Google VP who was saved by his Mercedes car : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XXypu3dVPM
Exactly, one monitor is an iMac the other is a thunderbolt display. The display just mirrors the iMac. We each have our own keyboard and mouse which controls a single cursor. The monitors face opposite each other so we are sitting (almost) directly face to face so talking to each other is natural with minimal turning, which would occur if you sat next to each other.
IIRC Zuckerberg reneged/begged his way out of a deal in similar circumstances. The Washington Post had a deal to invest and then Accel came in with a huge valuation -- which Zuck took.
Instapaper has a great api and yes it is not usable as readability.
But I can still use instapaper on any platform.
If the merchant's page include any Javascript over an insecure connection (for example, jQuery from a CDN) then an attacker can intercept this connection and replace the Javascript by a malicious script that will remove Stripe's iframe and replace it by any other iframe.

So yes, passive network sniffing won't work with Stripe's iframe being loaded over HTTPS, but this does not protect against any type of "active" man in the middle attack.
How does dual licensing work when other people contribute code to the GPL codebase? Either they should still own their contributions and you won't be able to sell them as non-GPL, or you need to make them sign some extra contract to assign their copyright to you... Or am I missing something?
Because in USA the business part of health is more important than the health part.
Just a preface, I'm giving this anecdotally, not claiming it to be the cause.

I was at a birthday lunch the other Sunday and it was an extended family kind of event, when my mum, who is considerably computer illiterate, was talking about DuckDuckGo. You can imagine my surprise, DDG to me has always been something of a geek's search engine.

Apparently it had been covered by the morning news, as a viable alternative to google. Not only this, the segment was apparently recommending people opt out of google tracking their usage, brought about by the recent privacy changes.

I don't know if you consider their privacy policy change a recent gaffe, but I would consider that story to be an indirect result of those changes.
This has nothing to do with the kernel scheduler. lthread is a coroutine library, you can think of it as a micro task scheduler inside the process (userland). It's ideal for socket programming because it avoids using callbacks and minimizes complexity.
Also, compare these:

"movie where no babies are born anymore"

"movie where no babies are born"
The article goes on to say that this "subsidy" is small compared to what Americans pay extra.

If you believe the article, you'd have to consider most of the extra cost an ideology tax "subsidising" profits in the health care industry.

Americans have decided that subsidising home ownership is worth more than subsidising health care. Other countries do it the other way around.
Sometimes I need help on a task & need a referral to an attorney, an accountant or a developer to make progress on it. If I could see who I know who knows someone who could help, I'd ask for an introduction.
تحميل حلقة ون بيس 538
Agreed. We started the project at Pivotal so that is where we got the setup, and I agree that it makes a huge difference.

It's a shame more companies don't implement pairing correctly. The extra grand (less if you don't go with an apple display) for the monitor is a small price for the results you get.
Hm. Maybe YC should fund someone to do this? ;)
Great presentation, and implementation looks good too.
I personally prefer to use HTTP log analysis software. Gives more power to me and doesn't contribute to large companies tracking everything.

Unfortunately, though, finding a good log analysis tool is very hard. Finding one that can beat Google Analytics is even harder. I'm still using AWStats myself, but I can't say I'm really happy with it.
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Ditto: Google Truthiness.

And the new privacy policy drove me away.

And !mysql is so much quicker than site:mysql.com.
I've left Instapaper and Readability for e-mail/desktop shortcuts and Readable.
This exists. It's called proxy filtering.
When discussing this topic, people like to say that C is more commonly used that C++. But I think that the reality is that -Microsoft's customers- use C++ much more than C. I am such a customer and in my field 95% or more of programming is C++.

I still wish they would support a few very basic C99 features though.
I'd appreciate a car that can moderately hit the breaks when it senses you approaching a stopped car.
the entire world is dependent on the biomedical R&D of US companies

Inasmuch as it is possible for companies of this size to be from any one particularly country, large American pharmaceutical companies spent $27bn on R&D in 2009, while European ones spent €28.5bn (i.e. 40% more at today's exchange rate.)

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_companie...
I call bullshit on your first point--that MRIs are "overused" in Japan.

MRIs aren't something that can really be overused. Unlike CT scans, or pretty much any non-MRI method of imaging the inside of the body, they don't harm the patient.

Even though you are right that many of the MRI machines in Japan are lower-resolution cheaper models, that is largely because there are way more MRI machines here, and they are used for routine diagnostics, to find actual problems. Your local single-doctor clinic in the boonies often has mRI equipment here.

I have a personal interest in this topic, as I have MS. Lucky for me, I am doing fine, but in Japan I get a brain MRI every 6 months just to keep an eye on how it is going. When I was back in the states 3 years ago I had a typical employer-based HMO. I went to the doctor and told him here's my deal, I have MS, my doctor in Japan said I should have another MRI in October to see what's up with it.

The doctor flatly refused -- MRIs were only available after physical symptoms had developed. Of course, at that point, the available treatments for a flare-up of MS are less effective at preventing long-term neurological problems. (Happily, I am back in Japan now.)

My point is that MRIs are a wonderful tool, and as you and other commenters have pointed out, they are much more widely used here than in the US. Something wonky with your knee? OK, let's get an MRI and check it out. I don't see anything wrong with that.

And in cases where there is a problem, there is no difficulty at all here in getting a referral to a specialist at a hospital with the latest cutting-edge MRI gear if necessary.

Using MRI technology for health screening and preventative/proactive treatment is great.
As someone who had insurance that doesn't help me. I might not have a pay out of pocket for an MRI but I'm still having to pay for it through higher charges. I'm unable to shop around to reduce the insurance company's (and therefore my own) costs.
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I just learned that you get to down-vote submissions once you reach 500 karma points.

I'm now wondering what other hidden features there are. Anyone have some good ones?
Showing example code on the home page is a great idea, having the small thumbnail with the expand icon made it easy to jump in and see what their API looks like. Going to give this library a try soon :)
That's basically true, but I'd just point out that MRIs really are harmless, unlike unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions.
I really enjoyed that read, well done. I didn't find toys to disappoint me very much. I love love loved my action figures when I was a kids. But my nephews boredom with his toys fits right into the picture you've written.
A language is defined by syntax and semantics, and there is nothing intrinsically in there to make quantitative judgements. So performance is not, and cannot be, of a language but of a compiler/interpreter, together with a runtime/virtual machine.
This is why TODO lines should have a common format so you can grep for them easily. I for example can grep all my TODO's and > straight into a TODO.md file and have a near instant markdown unordered TODO list.

Vim even highlights TODO: in my code and it always starts with some type of comment on a line of its own.
Then you'd be even more bummed to discover that even if halayli changes the license to BSD (which I hope he does not), you won't be able to use it because it is x86/AMD64 only.
I'm 19, so I've never experienced a terminal running BASIC on a TV screen or anything else from those early days. I think my oldest memory of computers is Win 98.

What got me into programming originally was Lego Mindstorms (the original version, the second iteration was no good). My dad and I made robots that could follow black lines on the ground and read barcodes, and it was all with the drag-and-drop interface Mindstorms ran on. ( http://www.bouwvoorbeelden.nl/MindStorms/ShootOut_bestanden/... ) And it was fucking awesome.

It taught the concepts of programming like loops and conditions and variables, but in a watered-down way that took care of the stuff that's not fun for a kid. As you grow you find joy in tackling more complicated things, but as a kid Mindstorms was perfect. Great role-model for any aspiring curriculum in younger education.

Even though it would be way out-dated technology now I feel like Lego should start manufacturing those kits again - they were really amazing. Maybe that would be a good startup idea? Raspberry Pi for kids?
WAZZUB Important Update Webinar Tuesday 03/07/12 at 6:00 PM (EST)
MRIs in Germany (or at least my part of it) tend to be relatively rare and booked almost completely full, because with the prices the way they are, they're not profitable unless they're utilized as much as physically possible. There's therefore usually a waiting period of a few days for a non-emergency MRI, which tends to make them a less attractive option for doctors and patients than they might be if they were instantly available. On top of that, they're still relatively pricy compared to other diagnostic procedures, and in Germany, a doctor or hospital who prescribes too many expensive procedures may get personally stuck with the cost, instead of being able to pass them on to the patient or insurer.
What are "for loop initial decorations"?
They have to sign copyright over (or otherwise license their contributions to you in a way you can relicense). Many projects require you to sign over copyright if you contribute - e.g. Cygwin, and IIRC ZeroMQ too.

Others just require you to let THEM relicense it, e.g. web2py.

And other projects (mostly those that consider closing source at some point) just refuse contributions.
Announcing Frinj, a practical unit-of-measure calculator DSL for Clojure