skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a med student and a programmer. I think there are a lot of similarities between these two disciplines.

The body is an incredibly complex system that you or a pathological process can perturb in a variety of ways, just like any other system. The results of those perturbations may be evident immediately or may take a long time to present themselves. The results are output in the form of physical signs and symptoms. The way this particular system works is that there are more potential pathologies than there are physical signs and symptoms, so sometimes you end up with collisions in the pathology to sign/symptom mapping. In these cases you can use instruments like labs, radiological tests, and sometimes invasive methods like surgery to further investigate. These tests are imperfect and are themselves perturbations to the system.

If you can come to a final diagnosis of the underlying pathology using the tools at your disposal (history, physical exam, labs, tests, and procedures) you can then engage in a therapy. The more precise your diagnosis, the more precise your therapy can be. Again, therapies are also perturbations to the system. Ideally these perturbations move the system back into its normal functioning state though they may also cause undesired results that must then be diagnosed and treated.

This entire process takes place within the context of a social interaction that can itself help or hinder. Both doctors and patients have their own social idiosyncrasies that may or may not match up well with each other.

I believe that most physicians operate by generating a gigantic hash table. Essentially they know several patterns of physical signs/symptoms that act as the key. The value is whatever knowledge they have of that disease process. As medical knowledge progresses some physicians update their hash table keys/values with new information, most don't. Almost all physicians update their hash table (i.e. learn) using information gathered in the process of seeing their own patients and recognizing the difference between the predicted outcome and the actual outcome. This is often a subjective process. I think it is because of this approach that most physicians find it hard to believe that medical diagnosis and treatment can be highly systematized and is at least partially such an obvious idea even needs a study to support its use.
so that's it, huh? the only way to write web apps is with google app engine?

i spend a lot of time writing server apps, some of which serve up data for web clients, all of which are ultimately deployed on linux/unix. the low-level apis available on a mac are pretty close to identical to what's available on linux, so it's easy for me to do development and testing on a mac.

i don't know why i'm bothering. it's pretty clear you've already made up your mind, so why even ask anybody else.
We use Snaps also. I'd definitely recommend it.
Andrew Wyeth, Revered and Ridiculed Artist, Dies
That was a really great reply, thank you
Had never heard of this blog before, but great read. Thanks for submitting BRM.

What always gets me are the people obsessed with "secrets to success". But over and over again, it's been shown that the only "secret" is putting in the time & effort. And even then you still need quite a bit of luck and exceptional timing.
I know this isn't the typical hackers news item, but I think some of you have interest in art.
See, I've never been a fan of directly announcing feature lists. I don't think that's Tumblr's responsibility (or Apple's, for that matter). I think they can choose what they want to highlight, and people can discover what they like on their own.

Tumblr's video announcement wasn't the release. The release was the release. The idea's that you'll notice what's new while you're using the service. It shouldn't be a scavenger hunt. Most users don't work like that.

The video was just a fun little announcement because David and Marco like flashy things.
Hawaii takes closely watched digital TV plunge
I think that JungleDisk would be much harder for an average user to install. I haven't used it, but I did just install Zumodrive. I think that linking up with an s3 account is something that an average end user would rather not have to worry about.
I'm not sure i've ever seen a database that lets you plug in memcached to speed up certain queries

Oracle/Coherence/TimesTen.
Would be nice for this to be added to the HN Blacklist + kitchen sink greasemonkey script :).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
Service industry is all about the customer, so I guess those board members were asleep when he fired the salespeople who gave good customer service.
I don't like it. You should trust a good text more than an avatar.
You see that they are just artificial creatures, because their speak sounds weird and their eyes have no expression.

I prefer to read a good text, so I can define the speed I read it.
Errm, according to that what they've patented is not-trim.
All That's Left Of Circuit City: 17 Lines Of HTML
this is accurate. this is how i felt. php was a statement, and asp and coldfusion at the time perhaps were right there, too, but each had their tie-ins and paradigms, and php seemed to be positioned in opposition to that. and i agree anymore it would be best if it is in java or python or something if at all possible, way more maintainable.
sphinx is easily my go-to tool for fulltext indexing of any sizable data set. it:

* is *really* fast
* has excellent bindings (i use django-sphinx)
* is *extremely easy* to configure, and very flexible in its configuration
* fast indexing times
* excellent searching modes and search quality
* geoanchoring, including distance to/from point in results

the only thing i wish it had is fuzzy matching, but its wordforms support makes up for some of that.
At the CPH airport they shoot more than a thousand birds a year.

If there was a hawk, could you be sure that it would stay out of the way of the aircraft? The hawk itself would be a risk of bird strike.
No, it isn't. Database interfaces are very simple, text and table based, have been used for many years, are well tested, work reasonably well and fast, there are tools, bindings for every language in existence, and thousands of trained programmers. To change them for web services (I don't know how .NET or J2EE are equivalent) is not realistic at all.
fwiw, i found sphinx when looking to replace a client's awful half-arsed search implementation (over 10 years of data, with 30-50 new items being added daily), for someone who has only very seldom futzed w/ java, it was much easier and sane to audition sphinx first, instead of lucene or solr. i'd still love to take solr for a test drive, but sphinx has covered all my needs so far.
This article includes the same false assumption of just about every other article on PHP:

PHP is Easy

I'm not sure how anyone can claim that a language which only exposes the underlying C API of all the included libraries could be considered easy. Does no one stop to think that the reason 99% of PHP code is bad is because the language is actually hard? It's the C of scripting languages; it doesn't include a lot of fancy constructs or high-level abstractions. And, like C, that's what makes it powerful.

I think confusion exists because PHP is extremely accessible. It's intimately connected with the web environment (more so, and less securely, in the past) making it quick to get started. But that has never made it easy.
What Browser Battle?  They're More Alike Than Different
Thx. That made me laugh. :) He clearly needs to tone down the bravado a bit in the voiceover, but I admit that it does look slick.
I really like the idea, but your design when loaded in my browser made me think this was a blog post and not a web service.

I would suggest centering the site and having a slightly more pronounced logo at the top; maybe adding more color too - less black. Also the window where you have sheet music make it larger, while on the side keeping text there. Though change the text on side of sheet music to be 3 bullet points that say the what, how and value proposition. Describe it quickly and briefly. Also as some1 mentioned above get rid of sign up or offer portion of svc no sign up required.

hth
Life without Comcast: Can you dump cable and just stream Internet video onto your TV?
Well, hang on, first of all providing accompanying text for the flash-challenged was "redundant" -- despite you yourself doing it here and getting karma accordingly -- and now it's merely something you're not a fan of?

I'm not interested in a scavenger hunt; I just want a changelog so I can quickly see if any of my bug-bears have been fixed, without having to sit through a video that increasingly sounds vacuous and low on actual content anyway. Most users work like that.
I understand what you are saying but I think most of the articles that say PHP is easy, they mean easy to set up and get started. I guess the right term would be as you said PHP is accessible.
Of Long Tails, Short Heads, and Turning Music into Money
The Little App Store That Could...
Interesting, though not actually "3D movies".
Changes in Facebook Platform Leadership
Another GP Parting Ways with Sequoia
This should do wonders for property values near airports. ;)
How to Go About Creating a Program (1965)
From the Soul of the Serial Entrepreneur to an Embodiment of Modular Innovation
>International Civil Aviation Organisation regulations say that jet engines must be able to ingest a small bird without problems. But for large birds, the rules say only that the engine must not explode.

This is probably the best passage I've read all week.
I concur. NewEgg gets 99.9% of all my tech-related purchases. It's too bad that Circuit City couldn't survive, but I've only been in my local store once in the past year (and IIRC, I didn't buy anything then and left empty-handed.)
This article says "I think PHP is a great language for anyone to learn how to program with." So he clearly thinks PHP is easy rather than just merely accessible and I couldn't disagree with him more.
they do this at JFK all the time
Well, she saw that Motorola was failing and she bailed. I can see how that would create some disconnect and disharmony.
I have been a coder all my life and PHP very much appeals to me. I used Assembler, Basic, Pascal, C++ and a couple of other languages and now that I code in PHP, its the best part of my life.

It enabled me to write multiple hugely successful websites that make me enough money for me, so I can do whatever I want. For the rest of my life.

I really love Linux, Apache and MySql. So doing things in LAMP is just great for me.

Hosting is a big part of my business, so yeah - its cool that PHP is all around. You can get new servers for no money in seconds.

Its a wonderful world. Im so happy, there is LAMP. I never used Perl, Ruby, Lisp or Arc. So I cannot say anything about these. I can only say I dont miss a thing with LAMP. I have a LOT of complaints about HTML and Javascript. I hated using Microsoft stuff. LAMP was the breaktrhough.
Hulu CEO: "We screwed up royally"
What Do You Get for $19M ?
You're making the assumption that C is hard. C was the second language I learned (after QBasic), and it was easy enough to make working rinky-dink applications even as an ignorant preteen.
Other than the usability differences, the underlying technology is significantly different. ZumoDrive uses its own file system layer instead of WebDAV(what most drive services use). What this means for the user is that the drive is a lot faster to access, and it supports things like streaming & random access of files.
Ask HN: Recommendations for work-queue software?
I am looking for suggestions for work queue software to help me organize the things I need to do at work. Currently, I use the Tasks feature in Microsoft Outlook, but it is rather limited. I would like to keep a priority queue of tasks and keep associated information with each task, mark tasks as completed, etc., with all information being searchable (Outlook does some of these, but awkwardly). I think Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com) would work and possibly Remember the Milk (http://rememberthemilk.com), but I can't use them, as I would be violating confidentiality of information requirements by using an
external system.

I actually have a Linux machine at work and use Windows through Citrix remote access, so anything installable as a non-root user in Linux is ideal. I prefer Linux software over Windows as the network latency and server loads make Windows access less reliable.

Is there any such software available? Is there software that can be massaged into this function? Like maybe bugzilla or some other sort of issue-tracking software.

What do you use?

Thanks for your suggestions. --Kostas
I'm assuming 'lo' is 'it', and 'vi' is 'saw'.

Duh! Yes, you are of course correct. My excuse for forgetting: familiarity might not always breed contempt, but sometimes it breeds a real lack of observation!

As an aside, archaic (and archaically styled) Spanish is often SVO even with object pronouns. So you'll see things like "díjole" in Quijote.

(It's "te" and not "tu" in French, btw. Tu's only used as a subject.)
emacs org-mode ;)

http://orgmode.org/GoogleTech.html

There must be ten thousand other options, of course. My general experience is that all of them are wrong in some way. That's software for you.
The Design Template -> I don't have an issue with it per se, but it just frustrates me. If you've seen Donny Darko, the love/fear scene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q38N9QvsdzU) pretty much is how I feel about the design template.

SICP is what I started with for scheme, and what I took away from it was "there is power in wishful thinking." After having read/watched SICP, going into HtDP was more like "Use the design recipe and everything you make will be easy."

I find programming/computer science a little more romantic than that.
In Software: Simplify, Simplify
Wink is quite cool, and I especially like how easy it is to edit, cut-n-paste, and work with the images.
Compared to many of the alternatives at the time, php was easy. Until you are trying to make a large application that needs lots of abstraction and careful architecture, it stays easy. It is very easy to get something to work quickly in php, it's just hard to maintain a large project in it.

And it is much more accessible than almost anything else when it comes to web programming. Compared to rails even, php is a snap to set up and use. Rails has the disadvantage of being a framework, which means more learning up front. Php has the disadvantage of being (until v5) almost impossible to organize coherently, and so becomes hard to upgrade later.

Php is easy; until you've gone too far to turn back. :(

That's why it's dangerous.
also what the difference between zumodrive and dropbox (other yc co.)????
Technology in the recession: Less is Moore
If the airlines have heavier (but safer) planes their costs go up. If they lose a plane it's probably their insurance company that pays for it, I'd think. Maybe their premium goes up though? Wouldn't be the first time people's lives were on the bad end of a cost/benefit analysis.
::Ponders tying system to speedometer so that the bike lane logo stays fixed to a point on the ground and then repeats::

Thankfully I'm now living in Amsterdam where the problem virtually doesn't exist due to a heavily funded, well-maintained bicycle network (where lanes are generally separated from cars). This would be a godsend back in the bay area, though.

Until then you can use the almost-as-effective strategy of not wearing a bicycle helmet: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article636281.ece
We're producing some for our online image sales app and websites. You can see a few recent ones here:

http://www.nextproof.com/holidays/

I use ScreenFlow and it's incredible. Very easy to record and create zooms/transitions.

For technical ones, I record the audio myself. I have an AKG 3000 studio microphone that goes into an ART TubeMP pre-amp. The pre-amp then goes to my MacBook Pro. I've found that it's better to record the audio after the video.

We were also lucky to find a great voice-over person on Craigslist. Usually, we just send him the video file and a rough script with a few time markers for guidance. He does a GREAT job and is not very expensive (especially compared to how many takes I require). I would definitely recommend going this route if you can.
Anyone else having trouble downloading the iPhone App!?
This appears to be a popular thread, and I don't have time to read all the comments, but let me throw in this quick recommendation: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Try putting the basic techniques into practice along with developing your skill for finding others interesting.
> I'm not sure how anyone can claim that ... could be considered easy.

PHP is Easy, and it's easier than Perl, I'd be surprised if you argue with me on that. PHP has very little to trip you up mentally (or at least that was definitely the case when it started winning). No closures, "arrays" are just hashes etc.

PHP is not hard. Actually the hardest thing about PHP could well be its dynamic variable names, like $$foo.

Neither is PHP powerful, it is extremely un-expressive when compared with just about any other modern programming language.

With PHP you _just_ use the clean wrappers on the C API, and that is also easy to do, no knowledge of C required at all. It's so easy you can pretty much write PHP apps without knowing that "4" is any different from 4.

I don't know if I've convinced you, but honestly, I would have a hard time making a language that was any easier.
PR Pros to Get a Database of Twitter Users by Mid-Year
Can you clarify, this is what I read: "A computer implemented method of automatically removing space characters from data being entered into a database system comprising ..."
Any tips or a blog where you share your ideas for the ones who want to follow your steps?
Sure, but a hit from single bird is supposed to be survivable. A hit from a flock of birds isn't.
"Hence, the use of TRIM functions when retrieving data from the database system will be obviated."
I have, but there could be so much more!

I think there are a few subtitled japanese game shows on hulu.com
Definite kudos to you. Thank you for posting.
suerte.
At least one thing: Dropbox synchronizes its directory, meaning that every machine linked to your account has a local copy of the data stored there. Zumodrive keeps most things remote, unless you explicitly ask to have a local copy (seems to support some form of policies for which things should be local). In theory, then, Zumodrive lets you go beyond your disk capacity, but it's a bit too expensive to just offload hundreds of gigabytes.

Also, Zumodrive doesn't seem to have sharing like Dropbox does..?
Banks with Muscle (No Bailout Required)
I agree with the idea about going to a college that is different than most of your high school classmates are going too. I did that too, and not knowing anybody forced me to meet a lot of people. Besides, I personally didn't want to spend the next four years of college hanging out with the same people I hung out with in high school.

Sure, the college you choose will be the standard destination for some group of people, and so they will be coming to college knowing a lot of their classmates. But people usually come to college with the goal of meeting a lot of new classmates, and as long as you make an effort to meet new people and get involved, you should be successful.

I remember coming to college not knowing anyone, and somewhat stressed out that I might not make a lot of friends. This might have made me come across as a little desperate. So, don't worry about making close friendships when you just meet someone new. Just get to know a little bit about them and what they find interesting. And when you get invited to something, or are doing an activity, invite people who you know might be interested. And then, after a while you will have made a lot good friends. Personally my social life now is a lot better than it ever was in high school, or even my first quarter of college.

I also had the problem of over-analyzing my friendships a little too much. I just realized that I couldn't expect to have the same level of friendship with everyone I meet. So what has helped me is spending time with more people. Sure, I'm better friends with some people than others. But knowing a lot of people helps when my better friends are all busy with other people or activities on the weekends, since I know that I'll be able to spend time with somebody I like. And once I realize that I don't really need a specific friendship to be around interesting people, or too spend time with people I like, then I mostly stop over-analyzing that relationship.
Mmm... Matt's Script Archive.

Good ole days.
The patent is for a database column setting which will 'auto-trim' all data. So instead of having to call the trim function every time you insert or update your database this patented setting does it automatically. Hard to believe these things get patents.
Lest you think this was some triviality that got patented, note that it took 3 of them to invent it. I doubt that any of us could have managed it without the resources of a giant corporation like IBM behind us.
One problem: Java. The installer didn't find Java on one of my Windows machines, because I have the latest JDK installed in an unusual directory (and might not have run the official Sun installer, either). Maybe inspect JAVA_HOME before downloading and installing a whole new JRE, or better yet, let me specify where to find it?

Two: If you guys want to install MacFUSE, at least warn me. :)

Three: Java UI. I know, I know, I'm sorry for nit-picking, but I prefer native apps.
Perl: the language of "geniuses and academics"... Was it ever actually perceived as such? Or was the author simply intimidated by other, more academic languages as well? I'm pretty sure Perl doesn't do tail-call optimization like the article implies.

My impression of Perl was always as a practical, "get-'er-done" language, much like PHP -- and prone to the same legibility/maintainability problems if care was not taken.
Culture is like dark matter. It's basically a catch-all phrase for stuff we encounter and can't logically explain yet.

Why do Europeans shake hands and Asians bow? Culture!
Zumodrive actually supports sharing either by a public link or to a private email address. There is a share option in the right click context menu as well as on the web file browser.
I for one welcome our blue-suited patent-wielding overlords.
Right, but my point is they did patent trim() - namely the automatic usage of trim().
Dropbox stores your files locally and syncs them with the files on the cloud. Zumo stores them only in the cloud and streams them to you on demand.
To be fair there's been CHAR and VARCHAR for 20 years, but no-one has done what they're proposing. IBM probably make everyone patent everything they do.
Single table inheritance?
Wow, that is very awesome.
in my humble opinion, you should be happy IBM patented it because clearly they're not patent trolls and it prevents/prevented patent trolls from patenting the same idea.

in big companies, patents are sort-of like trading cards. they're are used defensively. so, if oracle or someone else came after ibm for a database-related patent, IBM could make a patent trade to prevent expensive action from being taken.

it's the corporate equivalent of a superpowers' arms race. they're designed to be a deterrent and aren't (often) acquired for first strike purposes.
They're over a quarter of the way there!

Only on a log scale. Which is what they're going to have to switch to pretty soon.
So ... I have to be online to listen to my music?

Granted, I'm usually online, but not all the time.
Note that he didn't just say the right things; they backed it up with actions. They got the eps re-added for two weeks to provide notice.