skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And absent the FDA, first generation therapies based on stem cell transplants would have been available in the US for much of the past decade, and we'd have had a few years of second generation therapies devoted to small patient populations like this one.

Meanwhile, the large patient populations (e.g. heart disease) continue to have to leave the country to find stem cell therapies. The FDA makes it prohibitively expensive to develop therapies, steps on groups that try to offer stem cell treatments akin to those widely available elsewhere in the world, and thus encourages a black market:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/11/an-unusually-clea...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/12/when-you-make-med...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/01/research-and-clin...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/fda-tries-to-shut...

Regenerative Sciences, Inc., a Colorado medical practice that specializes in the use of a person's own stem cells to help patients avoid more invasive orthopedic surgery, announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seeking to enjoin the clinic physicians from practicing medicine using patients' own stem cells. The lawsuit will allow Regenerative Sciences to question the FDA's policy that adult stem cells can be classified as drugs when used as part of a medical practice. ... The FDA will finally answer our questions, in court, about their claims and jurisdiction as opposed to doing everything in their power to avoid the issue that we are not a drug manufacturer, but simply a medical practice.
How I Earned $34.91 with Referly
Can we please move past Apple's silly faux-real UIs?
The Social Security trust fund is $2.7 Trillion http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html

Changes to the program-- much smaller than the 1983 reform-- can insure solvency for a long, long time to come.
How our headphones changed work and public life forever
"The most common complain is They didn't give me good stuff to work on, yet when you ask the same people what exactly stops them from downloading <insert their favorite programming language compiler/tool>, or why they didn't work on their favorite database while all of it is freely available on the internet- The answer is generally a blank stare."

Though not an excuse but average commute time here is 3-4 hours, add 9-10 hours of office presence. Most people do not have energy to do any meaningful work after such a tiring schedule.
this may give you some data points: http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/03/16/dot-com-conflict...
"Made for computers rating system"? The thirty-point scale is exactly what Zagat has done for years.

Do they really expect me to calculate the average "cost per person" too? I know it says optional but that's absurd.

Total bill divided by number of people. It's optional, but ultimately a very helpful field for those who are reading your review. Most people want to go to a good restaurant, but not if it costs $300 per person. Being able to filter those out without manually reading each review is helpful to them, and theoretically you are writing a review to help other people :)
Yes its obvious that Facebook can make money. They're making money now! That's why you'd be a fool not to buy Facebook stock if it was trading at $2/share. But the question is, exactly how much more money can they make in the future than they're making now? Enough to justify a $30/share price? To figure that out you have to go into the details that this post dismisses.
I understand that the media may try to portray it in a negative light, but it's a ridiculous position to take. When Cook became the CEO, he was issued more stock, this implies that the company wants and expects for him to profit off of any potential earnings it may bring him. Tim Cook can give away his money however he likes, but 75 million dollars is still a huge amount even if one is a billionare.
If there is a roadblock for robotics, I don't think it is the hardware. Yes, cutting-edge robots are very expensive, but more problematic? Control software for anything advanced is crazy; not the sort of thing I expect a hobbyist can write, whether or not he owns a super robot.
Whistling Into a Tape Recorder: What the East Coast Doesn't Get About Startups
How hard is it really to set up a data model and Rest API using Node/Sinatra/Rails or some equivalent? I agree this is convenient for those with no backend development experience (I know a few who are super stoked about this), however for me I couldn't see giving up control of the server side.
Batsd: 37 Signals' Ruby Statsd implementation persisting to Redis
So, one of the major reasons is because you don't like Java.
I don't like some things people do with Java, but generally it is indeed good enough. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there are three official languages in Google: Java, C++ and Python. Wasn't it possible to get assigned to python stuff?
The real problem with graph databases is that they do not scale because the algorithms used parallelize poorly. Partitioning graphs is a longstanding challenge in computer science.

It is literally equivalent to the NoSQL "we don't do joins" algorithm problem. Unlike most NoSQL databases, the basic operation of a graph database is built on join algorithms (edge traversal is a relational join). If you figure out how to parallelize ad hoc joins on large clusters then graph databases become a viable solution for non-trivial databases.
Building a Movie Showtimes API
Wasn't there another link today about how A/B testing doesn't work?
article snippet: "logs into unicorn"

me: vomit and close browser
Amazing Paper Cut Animations
> even if you think the top employees are doing the work of 2 people each, or even 3 people (which is a lot to expect of anyone)

Claim: in software or engineering, your top employees are doing the work of a thousand people, or an infinite ratio of some of their fellow employees. No combination of administrative assistants at Google is going to program Google Chrome or even a sorting algorithm. No combination of HR people is capable of calculating structural loads.

Claim: (more arguable on Hacker News). Successfully managing a medium or large organization is likewise a skill shared by very few people. Managing humans is like programming on the most testy and finicky AWS nodes you could ever imagine. They don't do what they're told, they do other things, and they may return wrong results. You are responsible for making sure the group performs as a whole. This is engineering of a different sort.

There is a fundamental impedance mismatch between the amount of dollars required to sustain life (outside of serious health issues, this does not greatly vary from person to person) and the dollar productivity of each individual.

Arguably every great tech organization (commercial or non-commercial) has a few people who are 1000, 10000, or 1 million times as productive as others. People like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Jeff Dean, Urs Holzle, Guido van Rossum, or DHH. That is how they became great tech or engineering organizations.

The Bell Curve may describe the population distribution of intelligence (though ability on any given trait may be different). But as a manager or recruiter your duty is to select highly nonuniformly from the right tail of that curve. Your ability distribution should be as radically right skewed as possible, and should not really resemble a bell curve.

In short, "equal bonuses for all" -- with the same amount going to both the guy who didn't do much work and the guy who picked up after him -- is a great way to demotivate your best people. And this will cost you a lot more than 2-3 of your medium employees, it will cost you a guy who did 1000X their work, and perhaps it will cost your whole business. All that matters are your best, with them you can rebuild anything.
"The results: 18.7 seconds for bzip2, and… wait for it… 3.5 seconds for pbzip2. That’s an increase of over 80%!"

File cache effect? He should cold reboot first (not sure how you force the file cache out on OSX/linux, on Windows I do it with SysInternals RamMap) and try in different order.

It could still be faster, but he could really be measuring I/O that was done in the first case, and not in the second.

It's also strange that .tar files are used, not tar.bz2 or .tbz (if such extension makes sense)
Author seems to have equivocated "online business" with "displays ads for a living".

Which seems like the least creative, suboptimal way to go about things. The most profitable of tech businesses invariably have little to do with displaying ads. See examples Google (ad brokering), Amazon (selling shit to people), eBay (selling shit to people), LinkedIn (selling subscriptions to people), Apple (selling shit to people), AirBnb (selling rooms to people), DropBox (selling storage to people).

Holy shit, I'm starting to see a pattern here. It seems the most stable, profitable tech businesses all involve /whisper/ selling things to people.

sigh

And people say there's no bubble...
Facebook's Cognitive Dissonance With Sharing
Let's not pretend there's more controversy here than there really is. If anything, the point he's making is too banal. Almost the whole of _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ argues against the style of visualization this post argues against.

Virtually all infographics are indeed terrible visualizations of information.
It is in a typical treatment group, but not all that strange in a treatment-resistant population who have specifically been selected because they haven't responded to other things.
I've also got my version of parallel xz: https://github.com/vasi/pixz

It doesn't require use of large temporary files like pxz, and the xz files it produces can also be decompressed in parallel.
they're nice but hard to read. It seems like the data is not a priority.
* why did you choose Heroku and MongoHQ rather than EC2? Isn't Heroku super expensive once you get past the weekend project scale?

* why do you choose to extend views rather than using mixins?

* what was your experience with requireJS aside from your rails problems? Did you find it helped development or not?
Bitrix Enters Social Intranet Market, Woos Small Businesses With Free CRM
The default shopping cart is probably much closer to my taste than default reading material would be.

Although, now I come to think of it, for years we did have default reading material, it was called a mass-market newspaper, and it wasn't all that bad. Newspapers are very readable and fairly sensible, content-wise, compared to something like reddit, because they're carefully designed by a small group of people to appeal to a broad cross-section, whereas the dynamics of social news sites tend to push shiny junk to the top.

A newspaper is like a default shopping cart which contains meat, vegetables, eggs, milk, bread, and rice. Not all of it is to everyone's taste, but if it arrived at my door every week I wouldn't die of malnutrition. Reddit is like a default shopping cart constructed by polling a thousand teenagers on their favourite foods; it contains twinkies, cognac, Junior Mints, bacon, Twizzlers and beer.
Why don't you put your money where your mouth is ... short them ... let us know how it works out :)
"In theory one could arbitrarily split the file, and then compress each of the splits and get a speed up that is roughly comparable?" - it could. that's what is done, but for LZ type compressor bigger dictionary (e.g. avoiding splits is for the better) - one more reason why there is .tar -> .tgz (or .tbz), while .zip compresses individually.

It would be even better if files are arranged in such way that contentwise they are similar one after each other.

I'm not compression expert, just average user since the early days of what we used to call it back in the day "solid" compression.
That would be great, if these cars were actually in production. Only the Lupo has been replaced, by the Up!, which only gets 52mpg (US).
...do you actually use reddit, or is this just something you believe?

As someone who only really fits one of your criteria (college education), I evidently don't exist, as I have a good experience on reddit. They have large communities for not-stereotypical-geekery like fitness[1], martial arts[2], and home brewing[3].

Yes, the uncustomized "homepage of the internet" is a giant wad of time-wasting activity. To be honest, that's what the internet is to many people, especially during their work day.

[1] http://reddit.com/r/fitness
[2] http://reddit.com/r/martialarts
[3] http://reddit.com/r/homebrewing
Yes, you can have fun with downloads
Not to mention the Zagat ratings are often wildly inaccurate. For example, in my city, they gave the "best French restaurant" title to an overpriced chain, not to the actualy French restaurant, run by a French chef, that has a 3 month long waiting list. Having been to both, and to France, the two don't compare, and yet Zagat doesn't even mention the good place.

Not to mention your very valid point on their "30 point" system which just plain doesn't make sense. A metacritic type thing would in fact be WAY better. Also they should add Michelin stars, because those I've at least found to be reliable.
That scale is propaganda, I wouldn't cite it as a source for anything.
for your reading pleasure, please take a look at this paper: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.6.pdf

what they describe there basically is the current state of affairs: different database technology for different purposes (in-memory, hierarchical and journal). I love the paper for it shows how things do actually not change.
(re that Tandem paper: it's IMS / a hierarchical DB that they describe though)
>In theory one could arbitrarily split the file, and then compress each of the splits and get a speed up that is roughly comparable?

It doesn't seem unlikely that that's what they're doing, considering you can't pipe data to it on stdin.
Tufte's site includes this analysis of a good example of an infographic:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
I'm confused.

Having trouble reconciling:

Slide 17: 26% of media consumption time is with Internet vs. 10% with Mobile (source: IAB)

and separate stats from Flurry: 72 mins/day w Web Browsing vs. 94 mins/day w Mobile Apps (source: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/80241/Mobile-App-Usage-Further-Do...)

Has mobile not overtaken desktop Web yet?
Eric: Thanks for sharing, and great tips. As someone who is in the same boat, I'm always curious as to how others handle the situation. I'm assuming your goal is to leverage the success of your startup so that you can leave your day job? If so, how do you keep focused on your day job, when the excitement of your startup keeps pulling more at you, especially if you are as you start to see success? I'm in a day job that I hate (its soul crushing), but that gives me the flexibility to work on my startup. The allure of my startup is always calling, but its going to be a while before we see profit, and I've got a wife and bills waiting for me at home so I do what I can to stay sane. All the best.
I think a lot of people feel about programmers the way we feel about doctors.
Entrepreneurs: let go of the rules
With self-driving cars you can safely keep traffic bumper-to-bumper which reduces aerodynamic drag significantly. Self-driving 100mph HOV lanes could very easily be more efficient than human-driven 70mph lanes.
Nit: a quintile is a 5th of the population. The upper quintile would be the 20 people. You probably mean the upper vigintile (top 20th) if you want to limit it to 4-5 people.
Zagat ratings are often used by travelers, casual diners, etc. If they included a restaurant with a 3 month waiting list they'd be setting up a lot of their readers for disappointment.
I don't know anything about iOS (or their native Facebook app).

That said, I cannot believe that the Android app is better than anything else. It's .. sad. I wonder if this thing is build in some random two engineers 20% time and they usually work with iOS (or .. something else, but not Android) and really just do this task for the giggles.

I use the website on my device, because the native app fails to provide a bunch of things anyway - and it's sooooo sloooow..

I know this reads like a rant and it probably is. In fact, I use FB in a limited way and even there the native client is lacking. It's - ignoring all emotions for a second - really subpar on every level in my book.
I think Jason has this perspective because basecamp caters to smaller businesses (basecamp isn't an enterprise product per se). Big/enterprise customers will usually want to have software like basecamp housed on their own servers vs having to sign up for a SaaS, and its instructive to note that even though github follows the same pricing model as basecamp (top plan has unlimited access) ... they do have a much more expensive product targeted at the enterprise crowd ... https://enterprise.github.com/

Its pure speculation on my part, but I think that if he had a bunch of 500+ user companies signing up to use basecamp for $150/mo, then sucking up bandwidth, storage space and cpu cycles, basically for free, he'd feel a little differently
CrunchPad could have been a worthy iPad competitor
SoftBank Unveils World’s First Phone With Radiation Detection
Thanks for sharing. There is more than one path.
Thank you for your response because it was - for me - really informative. I really like your approach to pricing (as well as how you developed your pricing model).
On the smaller end of things, I literally know no pro-level ad-supported website owners (generally in the 200k - 2m uniques a month range) who prefer ads as a model any more.
Since I run a website in that range (ad-supported - for now) I know quite a lot of those guys.

Everyone's trying to move as far away from ads and toward, once again, selling shit to people, as fast as possible.
JavaScript / Front End Developer - NYC Area
This argument applies to all APIs however. And I can't see any reason why Parse wouldn't be "vulnerable" to another service/library with an identical API (in the non-web world, this has happened often).
5 Fabulous Application Developers For iPhone
Thanks for sharing your opinion - I'd give them credit, though. At least they've discovered the virus during their investigative research.
Interesting. I'll admit it's been some time since I checked the regulations. Thanks for the update.
Advice for a new CS grad
Hello everyone!

I would like to ask your advice. I am not a native speaker so I apologize for my mistakes.I hope you have time to read and reply.

For general case:
- who should work for big tech companies(facebook,google,amazon etc)?
- who should go after his ideas as an entrepreneur?
- who should go for masters degree?

For my case :
I will graduate in June and I am not sure what to do next. Here are my options :

- apply for big tech companies : I will have an interview with google on July but I tried my luck with others(Microsoft, Google, Spotify) and though I made it to final levels for some, I could not make it. I am not sure I am the right fit for these companies. I worked on interviews so much and I feel tired and lost my faith. During one interview,a guy from Facebook told me that "if you were an actor you would come to Holywood, as a coder you should come to Silicon Valley" what do you think?

- Go after my ideas : like everyone, I have some ideas and a plus I have skills to build them. But in Turkey, it is really hard to get funding if you are not doing e-commerce. On the other hand I need to earn money.

- begin to masters degree in computer science: I am interested in NLP and there is a lot to do with Turkish.

thanks for reading, hope you have something to say!
Announcing Fedora 17. Relish it.
Apple CEO Tim Cook at D10: “We’re doubling down on celebrity Siri commercials”
A great article that clarifies many of the CAP theorem debates that raged back in late 2010.

A quick summary...

1. Partitions are rare; why sacrifice consistency or availability for them in the general case?

Thus consider a system with a "partition mode" that either limits operations to preserve consistency, or allows operations that risk consistency, depending on what the application needs.

This is approach taken with some of the newer NoSQL databases like Cassandra, which tends to prefer availability over consistency, though this is adjustable to prefer consistency in some cases; or the newer distributed RDBMS' like Google F1, which tends to prefer consistency over availability, but generally remains highly available across data centres: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html

2. CAP isn't a single choice for a system. Systems are composed of many sub-systems that often make a different CAP choice, depending on the operation or data or user involved.

3. The properties of partition-tolerance, availability and consistency are more continuous rather than binary.

Availability can be measured percentage-wise, whereas consistency isn't as easily measured but can have many different forms, some weaker or stronger. Partition tolerance can also take on many forms, such as tolerating certain common partitions, but not other (perhaps low probability) ones.

Reflecting on the last two points, consider that a system might have:

- an offline mode its for HTML or mobile client applications, which enables availability over consistency when certain Internet WAN failures occur,

- uses a traditional RDBMS in the server, preferring consistency over availability when partitions occur in the data centre

- has a backup RDBMS in a second data centre, which uses asynchronous log shipping replication to preserve availability when partitions occur between data centres (with a chance of data loss), but also preserves both consistency and availability when partitions occur between the Internet and the primary data centre (but not the secondary).

These are all nuanced choices that are very common. One could replace the above RDBMS with a wide-area Riak Enterprise cluster or Cassandra cluster. The tradeoffs would be different - say, no data loss, but the application would have to be much more explicit about how to deal with inconsistencies when recovering from a partition between the two data centres.

Overall, it's good that we have new, more scalable & available data management options beyond the "all consistency all the time" traditional RDBMS. But the solution differs based on the application and level of scalability required. One shouldn't just throw out consistency because it seems like the new way of doing things. Similarly, one shouldn't throw out availability just because you're afraid of data loss or inconsistency. It depends on your problem.
It's astonishing that anyone could write about languages and attempts 100-year predictions while ignoring NLP.
Tongue firmly in cheek :) btw, I'd love to see a HN etiquette guide.

edit: touche! thanks, agscala
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
too much traffic?
18.7 seconds for bzip2, and… wait for it… 3.5 seconds for pbzip2. That’s an increase of over 80%!

Er, not really. How about...

"pbzip2 reduced running time by 80%."

"pbzip2 took only 20% as long as bzip2 did."

"pbzip2 is five times faster."