skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love how the media overreacts to everything. Here's a pretty obvious maxim: nothing is as good as it seems at its best, and nothing is as bad as it seems at its worst. To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last couple of years are just that, a recession and slow recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of capitalism or conventional labor or employment. The jobs are already coming back.

Psychologically, people seem to have a basic need to do something productive with at least a good chunk of their time, and jobs do fulfill this important need. The jobs might become more abstract and more indirectly removed from everyday necessities, and hours might even drop, but I don't think they'd go away.
Each hardware device is accessed by a single process at a time. Any multiplexing that needs to be fast is done in hardware. Other multiplexing can be done in user space. For example, and application can request a dedicated channel to some blocks on the hard disk (adjudicated by the OS) or just use another hard disk. Remember, we're building simple applications here so things don't need to constantly write off the the disk for various tasks. You would only be dealing with the disk if your actual data was too big to fit into memory. Cases like that need careful design, not delegation off to some other programmer who doesn't know your problem.

If you're running a server application you split it into some reasonable number of tasks and allocate cores to them as needed. Nothing else runs on the system at all. If you need more cores either upgrade your hardware or you build another identical machine and talk to it over the network. If you look at the way Moore designs, he's crafting a complete artifact to solve a specific problem, not just throwing generic parts together.
Oh yeah, I understand that. We all face different challenges when raising animals. I was just spitballing at 'cha.
Go is amazing, period.
Are there other industries that are "too big to fail"? What if all companies had limits on their size (whether that's region, market cap, or whatever)? The number of companies that exist might grow as big companies spin off divisions or new companies try to serve demand unmet by a size-limited company. More companies would mean increased competition, limiting abusive monopolies and corporate lobbying.

This system might be an example of local inefficiencies that lead to a healthier whole. Big companies are supposed to benefit from "economies of scale", but are there any big companies that are not the wasteful, ineffective bureaucracies featured in Dilbert?
A piece of a paper and a Staedtler pencil.
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Check into a PCEngines ALIX. You can run full OpenBSD or whatever on them.

Example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/PC-Engines-Alix-2D2-Full-Kit-/280832...

Unfortunately, it appears that the Routerstation has been discontinued.
Seems like these results could be unfortunately easily misrepresented or misunderstood by people.
Wow, that's really humbling. Thanks so much for the kind words.
To clarify the Hacker News title, the article is talking specifically about prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening, which is already known to be of uncertain medical value except in some very specific situations. As the discoverer of PSA said, "I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven public health disaster. The medical community must confront reality and stop the inappropriate use of P.S.A. screening. Doing so would save billions of dollars and rescue millions of men from unnecessary, debilitating treatments." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/10Ablin.html

There are other more promising methods of prostate cancer screening in development that will hopefully be able to do better in the future.
The term you are looking for is "geosynchronous".
China would not allow that

Foxconn is actually a Taiwanese company.

(Technically that can still mean China depending on your definition. I interpreted your comment to mean that the (mainland) Chinese government would block a potential takeover. That isn't directly possible, although clearly they have multiple ways to put indirect pressure on Foxconn. (Not that this will happen anyway, because Apple isn't going to buy Foxconn))
That's Matt Taibbi for you.

I'm as unimpressed as you are, but some people seem to enjoy his two minute hate routine.
Yea, I'd be interested in reading a balanced criticism of pg's work. But ahoy and the linked article smack more of scorned lover than unbiased review.
everyone says this
ahoyhere and pg's argument isn't clashing - while pg wrote his essay from his personal experience, ahoyhere demands (or at least appeals to) the consideration of a broad set of ideas related to a long history of thought and research.

However, pg's essay is clear that it doesn't aim to be a well-founded research paper. Although ahoyhere is right that pg's essay will never be recognized as a good research paper (by intelligent people, i.e. not those who were conned by the sokhal hoax), the essay is not designed to be one.

pg: I can give examples of great scholarly works where the author is confused, but the domain is highly specific, and probably outside of your interests. For less technical subjects outside of expert-to-expert communication where some spend years to develop new ideas, there's generally less preference for insight over clarity.

ahoyhere: If you're looking for well-researched expositions in this area, I'm sure you already know where to look. Hm... But I think today's social-psych/cognitive research is better than what Aristotle says.
vim supports tabs (as well as windows). tmux also supports "tabs" as well, which you can rename. I currently have about 6 tmux tabs open, each split with various windows. Some will have vim inside, and vim will have it's own windows and tabs separate from tmux. It sounds confusing, but it's actually very simple to keep everything straight.

My tmux tabs are all named for their purpose. So, if I'm working on different areas in a project, I can easily move to that area and focus on that.

tmux also supports having different sessions. So, I can open one session, and if I have to move to a completely different project, I can open up a session for that.

As for file access, their are numerous plugins for vim that accomplish that. I think they are NerdTree and something else I can't remember? Not sure, I don't use them. With tmux, I can have a pane opened up and just use the command line to see everything.

But as for seeing what you have open, tmux and vim give you numerous ways to do this, as well as move through all those screens, easily in many different ways, far easier than any IDE I've ever seen.
Have meaningful default values on your web forms
Completely with you and I hope it is a repurchase. Given the tax situation I don't see how a dividend would really be an effective use of the cash.
Exercising costs $500 per month? Get a bike an ride it down the street. Or even a $50/month gym membership.
This study basically folds in 2 additional years' worth of data, bringing the total study time to 11 years (or ~ 1.8 million man-years, in a sense).

I think your summary of the impact is a good one re: all-cause mortality.

It is curious, however, that there was a relative reduction in deaths from prostate cancer in the screened group. It turns out that the way randomization was done differed across countries. Detection of what procedures were done differed across groups. Treatment also differed across groups: for those randomized to screening, treatment was at major academic centers, suggesting that they may have had better care. I would think that this would make it more likely to cause a false rejection of the null hypothesis re: all-cause mortality, so I don't think it calls into question that part of the study. But it does trigger some concerns re: study design. A related editorial in the NEJM raises some of the points, too.
I've also heard somewhere, this is why Canadians say "Eh" a lot, because it leaves the sentence with a positive, softer connotation.
This American LIfe- Mike Daisy story retraction.
I don't think that pg is a bad speaker. However, if you think you are, why not consider working on it? Toastmasters or similar might help.
I'm not really interested in what's "considered useful". Look at the state of web applications. Basically what we could already do in 1996 but using more resources and full of ads and other distractions. And yet to many people this step backwards represents state of the art computing. "Productivity" is highly overrated. Computers are already extremely useful without a bunch of gimmicks. Most of the Web 2.0 companies are creating the desire for their own product. Facebook has turned family photo sharing into a circus show. It doesn't serve any need other than to push for more neomaniacal computerisation. Some people will want to share family photos over the web. We can do that with very simple software. It can even be loaded on demand and sandboxed without any configuration without a hugely complex platform. _Simple_ virtual machines capable of this kind of work aren't hard to construct. But people keep chasing idiotic benchmarks instead. And if it's too slow then change the hardware to make sandboxing easier.
Towards the bottom of that page it mentions color forth. That is what he uses. It is a forth like language that removed punctuation and replaces it with colors.
Dude, seriously. It's one of those books that just works. It's not too long, not too short. It's like Portal. Just long enough not to screw up. And trust me when I say all the thanks should go to you. Awesome book.

The video is what sold me. I hadn't realized what I was missing until I watched that brief video you put out. It was, if anything, enlightening. I knew this stuff could be done, but it suddenly seemed so much easier, and well worth the investment.

What I'm trying to say is, if you have other ideas for writing a book about various other tools, get to work.
Yes, the HN title was only intended to capture what I saw as the most salient result of the study, whose actual title is "Prostate-Cancer Mortality at 11 Years of Follow-up".

I'd be happy to change the title if this one is considered too editorializing.
Yes, the json dump is much more pleasant to work with than the old Netscape HTML format. To begin with, it can be easily parsed by any modern programming language. But the file I tried to import into Pinboard the other day was actually an HTML dump from Chrome, where I keep the same set of bookmarks modulo some private stuff. Not that it makes a difference when it comes to preserving folders.
You may want to use countermeasures that aren't so easily detected by the bot owners. You want to lengthen their feedback loop. They know instantly when you block them and can just move to a different server at amazon.

For example you could put them in a tarpit, and gradually serve successive pages more and more slowly. Exponential backoff or something.

You could also serve bad data back to them when they get so far into the tarpit.

It all depends on how much work it's worth doing.

Id love to hear more ideas, it's a fascinating question. So many sites have this problem, and its an endless cat and mouse game, perhaps there is a product opportunity in here somewhere.
The Longform Guide to Early Computing
This is the direction I would like to go when I get the time to do it. Probably I will first do a backup of all my messages and setup some sort of searchable archive for them. Then delete all new messages, but saving to a different format anything which I believe will be important for the future.

Another issue which has prompted me to think in this direction is the change in information handling by Google. It may not be better or worse than before, but it still got me thinking about keeping my email well pruned.
I now consume as much information via spoken word as via print, primarily because I can do so during other tasks (laundry, driving), and so I find this topic phenomenally interesting. Speaking is a radically different beast, where ideas must be wrapped in rhythm, cadence, tone, volume, to the point of musicality.

I also adore standup, which pays a great deal of attention to repeating the same rehearsed ideas in an extemporaneous way. Some comedians do so through writing and obsessive practice (Carlin, Louis CK), others think well purely on their feet with no preparation, often based on a background in improv (Proops, Izzard).

To get a little meta, it's worth cross-referencing these ideas with the Atheism 2.0 TED talk, which among other things discusses the power of the sermon to unite a group behind a set of ideas and inspire them to action. For better or worse, ideas break through your defenses and take root more effectively if (a) you're forced to absorb them in real-time, (b) you know other people are taking the speaker seriously, and (c) the speaker is eliciting the same emotional reactions in others that they are eliciting in you.

http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
The facts may speak for themselves, but someone still has to put them into an article so that we will read them. If it requires inserting a few hyperbolic statements along the way, I'm willing to accept this.
"school (and have a massive amount of debt from it). Most people have poor credit."

And there's me. I think you're right to an extent. One mistake, or stroke of bad luck, and you're almost under water. At the very least, you are almost sure to feel like you have absolutely no opportunity to better your situation. (Me also, and my argument of what "Occupy" is about, the lack of opportunity...)

The greater argument of "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor" also fits the student loans scenario. You can't go bankrupt on them. Period. I've paid what I borrowed and still owe more than I borrowed, and now I've lost my job.

I'm hoping I do well and can pay what I owe. But damn, what's this going to actually cost me?
I came to visit this group once when they were starting their program, and I'm going in again -- simply because I think the approach is conducive to identifying people who are hyper-motivated, and stripping away every possible obstacle to learning. I'm excited to see where it goes.
Given the cost of sending missions to GEO, the time involved to put anything into orbit, how tedious and pesky rockets are, you have a funny definition of 'trivial'.
"Love doesn't start out as a hurricane that sweeps through your life and changes everything in an instant. It starts out as a seed. Barely alive, easily overlooked, fragile and small. But given attention love grows. Given proper care it sprouts and springs up through the dirt. Given years to blossom it buds flowers and grows branches, snaking its way through your life until it consumes it entirely. Given enough care the thing that you love becomes the lens through which you see the world. "

I might borrow this next time I have to give a toast at a wedding or a rehearsal dinner. I don't have to mention to anyone it's career advice... :)
The market cap is in exchange-local currency. 147.76B TWD is about 5B USD.
Where Is Your Favorite Payments Company In The Mobile Payments Landscape?
Yea, the big issue is the denormalization of the data in the json dump. While it's machine readable, it's still a bit of a pita to put it together. The other thing is that since you're a folder user, how to you transition that to the tags concepts most services use. Right now I just import the folders as tags from the html dump, but want users that have tags in their stuff to be able to load the json dump to preserve those tags, which seems like it'd still not do what you were looking for. I need to make sure that nested folders means you get multiple tags during import, and I wonder if that'd help you out.
Prostate cancer is very, very slow to spread in most people. A pathology professor once remarked to me that he had never done an autopsy on a man over 70 who didn't have prostate cancer. Nothing in life is certain except for death, taxes, and prostate cancer ;).
You, the geek developer, show your ID
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but here's the way I understand it. One of the major problems with PSA-based screening is false-positives. Getting a false-positive result for cancer could certainly increase your risk of an early death. Cancer treatments put a lot of stress on you physically, and the diagnoses could also cause a lot of mental/emotional stress. Stress of either kind reduces life expectancy.
The cost of good design
Show HN: Real Lambdas in Python (more than statements)
"It's perfectly fine that you don't know a lot about networking or network management."

I am not suggesting everyone can use mesh now and magically you no longer need an ISP. I am saying that is where we need to go. And I started off many years ago learning how to design and manage networks, getting certifications, wiring my business with cat3 then cat5, managing routers and switches, and then I moved onto something more interesting- now I just try to protect HN from morons.
My uninformed opinion is that Apple will either announce a dividend or a stock split.

In theory a stock split/reverse-split has no impact on a stock's price movement, but those studies were done in the 90s. More recent studies on various stock exchanges have shown that splits/reverse splits have a statistically significant impact on price movement, with splits signaling a bullish move.

Splits may also help in narrowing the bid-ask spread which improves price discovery.

On the other hand, splitting a stock will increase transaction costs of delta-neutral hedged portfolios since strike prices of derivatives are closer and more delta are needed.
Thank you for phrasing this in terms of all-cause mortality. If only every academic study (and submission) used this as a metric, the world would be a vastly better place.
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What you propose is called antitrust, and it is already law, but is mostly ignored or loopholed.
@pg,

What do you think about the idea that good teaching involves good 'public speaking' skills and 'stage presence'? Prof Lewin of MIT for example seems to be an extremely effective teacher. People do seem to need lectures (even if in a video form) in addition to books and papers to learn maximally, even when what is being learned is science or engineering.

(I understand that teaching is about conveying existing ideas from one mind to another vs generating new ones 'at runtime'. I was just interested in what you think about the need for "public speaking" skills to be a really good teacher.)
The thesis of this post is incorrect.

As hncommenter13 pointed out, the breakdown of long term securities vs cash is very wrong.

Additionally, even if it were correct Apple could easily borrow billions of dollars in cash either from a bank or by selling bonds. They'd have no trouble getting the money, which makes the "$10-30 billion dollars" limit pretty artificial.

I'm not convinced it matters anyway - there aren't a lot of things worth more than that which Apple would be interested in.

Looking at a list of the most valuable US companies[1], I guess the following might be interesting:

Intel, Verizon, Cisco, HP, Qualcomm, Walt Disney, Comcast.

Realistically, I think Walt Disney is the only real possibility there (and there are other media stocks that could be interesting - Time/Warner, News Co etc). The other possibility is an unlisted company: Facebook (but I don't think Zuck would relinquish control).

[1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/perfo...
A stock split doesn't really have anything to do with their massive pile of cash, and they said that's all they'll be discussing on this call.

A dividend, while not out of the question, has not been something they've acted willing to consider in the past. That would be quite the change in their stance.
The problem is, people have limits to the amount of immaterial and material products they can consume (limited time, space). So eventually so much stuff is being produced, mostly automatically, that nobody can consume it any more.

The only solution would be to start increasing the quality of the immaterial and material products, putting more and more human effort to designing each one, but I think pretty much the opposite has been happening.

To me this seems like a natural consequence of a market-based economy, which will by default try to minimize costs and labor until they approach zero. So eventually we'll have robots that build more robots and produce everything we need, while the majority of human kind is unemployed.

Not that I'm an expert on economics, just trying to think about it logically.
The risk of dying in an airliner crash in the US is now literally too small to measure. I think we can afford to loosen up a bit.
> And yet, that'll get you labeled a "socialist" in most parts of the country.

Where? Actual citations needed, not just handwaving about "conservatives".

I note that the tea party is very opposed to bank bailouts.
We have enough to live as well as we've ever lived, which is pretty well.

There'll always be something more. Some day, when a sizable portion of humanity lives to 115, we'll consider the genetic limit of 115 year life spans to be as important as cancer is today.
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Suppose Apple is able to buy Foxconn - that would work too (there are numerous problems such as politics and anti-monopoly authorities; foxconn produces devices for many companies, not just Apple). Once bought Apple can configure the factories as it sees fit.
Is there currently a good web framework for Go?

Edit: web.go looks pretty sweet: http://www.getwebgo.com/

Edit2: As does app.go: https://github.com/georgenava/appgo

...There's a large list of Go projects here: http://godashboard.appspot.com/project
What Software Developers Can Learn From Fish and Chips
Apple is not in the business of making content. Apple is in the business of making platforms for other people to put their content on.
Google scrapes Yahoo directory, wraps own ads around
A relevant short sci-fi novel about robotics, economic and societal change brought about from change in value of labor:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
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The productivity gains also make it to everyone. That's why you are able to buy a computer for so cheap these days. A PC used to cost more than 10 000 dollars in the 80s. There's no such thing as productivity gains being valuable only to investors. It's a win-win for both investors and consumers. It's no zero-sum game.
> Are there other industries that are "too big to fail"?

What about governments?

If there are companies that are "too big to fail" and therefore should be broken up, surely the US govt should also be broken up. (CA's govt may qualify as well.)
He fails to note that wealth decays. It cannot be redistributed indefinitely. Those who create wealth must have enough incentive to keep doing so to support (voluntary or not) those who don't. Take away too much wealth from those who created it and they'll stop creating more, and what wealth there is will be consumed and/or squandered out of existence.

Note that, in the USA at least, federal government revenue never exceeds 20% of GDP. Try taking more, and GDP declines - to wit, producers slow or stop.
Don't rule out something completely boneheaded. Jobs isn't there anymore. Remember Netflix/Quikster
If you run them in Putty fullscreen folks don't even have to know you use Windows!
Does anyone have an opinion on the ethics of paying for speakers, in the context of a public conference?

I am fine with covering basic expenses, travel. What about significant speaker fees?