skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but it is rather difficult to convince an e.g. blue soldier that he is, in fact, red. Not so with robots, assuming you can reverse engineer their software.
My highest rated comment so far occurred yesterday, when I got 30 points for saying something reasonably good early on in a popular post. I think other people agreed with what I said, and so (appropriately) just upvoted the comment rather than repeating it.

This is why some indication of a user's median karma per comment would be at least as insightful as his or her total.
I realized today that caching breaks one of Lisp's cardinal rules (as quoted from OnLisp):

The convention in Lisp seems to be that an invocation owns objects it receives as return values, but not objects passed to it as arguments.

How do experienced Lispers deal with this? Just being careful?
I'd have to disagree with that. There is actually quite a high threshold, as should be obvious, from the percentage of people doing great things.

You may not notice it, if you live in your own little isolated world.

Yes, you can be very intelligent, and incompetent; but no, you cannot be competent, able to get stuff done, and not intelligent.
There are three columns on the checklist. Here is the first column:

SIGN IN

□ PATIENT HAS CONFIRMED
• IDENTITY
• SITE
• PROCEDURE
• CONSENT

□ SITE MARKED/NOT APPLICABLE

□ ANAESTHESIA SAFETY CHECK COMPLETED

□ PULSE OXIMETER ON PATIENT AND FUNCTIONING

DOES PATIENT HAVE A:

KNOWN ALLERGY?
□ NO
□ YES

DIFFICULT AIRWAY/ASPIRATION RISK?
□ NO
□ YES, AND EQUIPMENT/ASSISTANCE AVAILABLE

RISK OF >500ML BLOOD LOSS
(7ML/KG IN CHILDREN)?
□ NO
□ YES, AND ADEQUATE INTRAVENOUS ACCESS
AND FLUIDS PLANNED
Haha, I only just noticed, that the answer could have some kind of bizzare double meaning.
Hmm. I can think of several ways for Twitter to make money: use pull instead of push. Harness the wisdom of the crowd to extract value from them.

Because what Twitter is, essentially, is a market researcher's goldmine. And access to real-time opinion. Why drop ads on people, when you can extract from them opinion that is probably more "valuable" than the small change from advertising?

Right now, they ask one question: "What are you doing?" Why not ask other questions? Rotate them, mix it up a little bit. They could even, for example, have a "word of the day" (or something) and ask people to tweet about that: in 140 characters or less, of course. Anything from a brand name to something like shoes. Re-package and sell that data to companies or competing companies. "This is what people are saying about ________ (you, your competition) today."

But that's just one idea; there's a lot of room to play with it. There's definitely a lot of untapped power/profit to be had in the collective.
Simply Ridiculous: The Official Bro Code – Part 2 (Articles 41-80)
I was recommended the following service http://www.screentoaster.com/ Didn't try it personally yet, but let me know what you think of it if you end up using it.
Of course, we love the Welsh!

Also, it was a world-wide study that's been implemented in many places. Canada too:

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/01/14/surgery-check-list...
That $300 US is really only $1 US circa 1930 - 1 to 1E15 returns, astounding!
I am willing to hire any and all free coders.
Emergent Neural Network Simulation System
> Don't try to meet people like you. Instead, become interested in lots of different types of people

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/07/28/mf.mrrogers.n...

Mr. Rogers inspires me. Seriously. Check out #6.
Pretty cool; but amateurs can do almost as well with Google maps and Google Earth:
http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2009/01/short-flight-of-...

Teterboro must have been really tempting, a successful ditching is anything but a sure thing, if one of the wings had caught the water before the other the plane would have started tumbling at over 100mph.
Charlie Munger talks about this in his book, Poor Charlie's Almanac.
Can games teach ethics?
I found when reading the book I kept thinking about 'How can a complex system form from a few basic parts?'.

That question has always intrigued me, and probably always will. It also always results in me thinking - how many levels of basic parts are there? It wasn't long ago when people thought all objects were flat and that the Earth was the biggest object in existence. Which then got me thinking about quantum theory - what if we are just on the cusp of discovering multiple levels in a completely different way than size?

I am sure you get the point now - the book inspired a lot of thought.
Remember that Zimbabwe redemoninated in mid 2008 and took 10 zeroes off the bills, and it hardly seems worth mentioning but they took 3 zeroes off in 2006. That makes this new bill 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 which may or may not be 1 nonillion dollars. It's a lot of zeroes, I may have missed a few one way or another.
On Lisp - Clojure: ProloG (pt. 1)
Aside from all the technology, it's crucial to get a solid, professional voice-over that tells a clear story about your product. My personal experience has been that even the best video production can be quickly tarnished by a voice-over that is casual, meandering, or inconsistent. For our demo video, we first sketched out what points we wanted to make in the video, wrote a draft script, then recorded nearly an hour of screen footage. My colleague then spent a couple of days locked in a room with iMovie and a microphone. We ended up with a five minute video that I think really captured what we were trying to do with our product. We used ffmpeg for conversion to mp4+h264 (and a fallback to flv), and the very respectable JW flash video player. I think Snapz Pro X was used for video capture.
At this rate, I think the idea of a Googolplex note being in circulation isn't too far out of the realm of possibility.
Here is the second column:

TIME OUT

□ CONFIRM ALL TEAM MEMBERS HAVE
INTRODUCED THEMSELVES BY NAME AND
ROLE

□ SURGEON, ANAESTHESIA PROFESSIONAL
AND NURSE VERBALLY CONFIRM
• PATIENT
• SITE
• PROCEDURE

ANTICIPATED CRITICAL EVENTS

□ SURGEON REVIEWS: WHAT ARE THE
CRITICAL OR UNEXPECTED STEPS,
OPERATIVE DURATION, ANTICIPATED
BLOOD LOSS?

□ ANAESTHESIA TEAM REVIEWS: ARE THERE
ANY PATIENT-SPECIFIC CONCERNS?

□ NURSING TEAM REVIEWS: HAS STERILITY
(INCLUDING INDICATOR RESULTS) BEEN
CONFIRMED? ARE THERE EQUIPMENT
ISSUES OR ANY CONCERNS?

HAS ANTIBIOTIC PROPHYLAXIS BEEN GIVEN
WITHIN THE LAST 60 MINUTES?
□ YES
□ NOT APPLICABLE

IS ESSENTIAL IMAGING DISPLAYED?
□ YES
□ NOT APPLICABLE
I really didn't mean the quality of the information, this can be shown to be a social phenomena. What I think this illustrates is the quality/value of the wiki medium itself. I remember a lot of issues from my philosophy courses about wikipedia, the tutors seemed to think that the content of an article would change from day to day, one day taking one angle, the next being rewritten to another. I guess why I like this study is it shows the clear continuity of the information. Even though it is in constant flow. (hmmm....I wonder if there are computable threshold values? i.e. the age of an article, number of views/edits/users etc.)

I take your point, I did mean _wikipedia_ as there is no doubt that an in house wiki is a very good way of content management. But there are a lot of preconceived prejudices about open wiki's among the less well informed. I'm preaching to the converted here on HN, but then I thought people would appreciate the pretty colours =D
Browser wars deemed hot again
Conficker malware ups the ante
sorry, been reading too much 2600 ;)

my definition of "hacking" is somewhat skewed
Any doctor who reads the study and sees the 50% reduction in death rate in surgeries and 90% reduction in accidental deaths in the ICU would be negligent to ignore checklists.

If this surgery checklist and the ICU checklist were to be implemented in every hospital, they would save more lives than all new medications introduced in the last five years, combined. Ignoring results like that is just asinine.
When I find myself thinking about things the way you do (according to what you've said here), I said to myself: "DO something and stop whinning!"
Dont be satisfied with the things that come out of some intellectuall exercise only, try to check them in the real world, I dont believe that being a genius is a something youre born with. DO things, be smart, read Druckers "Managing Oneself", and maybe we all can do something meaningful out of this.
Microsoft beta lets old Windows apps run on Vista
The dark side of technology
Answer: They want to discourage price-senstive people from buying Ubuntu. Why? Because price sensitive people tend to be new to computers. And people who are new to computers will have a harder time using Ubuntu than XP, which raises Dell's support costs.

Try using your head next time.
wow very candid of you. thanks for sharing.
Seconded. Definitely the best option if using a Mac. Make sure you get a decent mic: since you'll still be grabbing your voice from the old-fashioned analog world.
X is the same as Y - overgeneralization of concepts
Ask HN: Y Combinator Wiki?
I know that liking to things is cool, but it would be great if we could create more structured data like a wiki sometimes.

Best places to cowork

how to on taxes

start an ec2 box

etc....
You're being narrow.
Of course we all want people like us to talk with, but thats not the rigth attitude. Just talk with someone, try to find whats interesting about them, place yourself in his/her shoes and try to see what makes them tickle and then talk about it, youll find that you can almost always learn something.
Where are the truly interesting people in life? - they are here, among other places.

Normal people just want to live a normal life, have their statistically approved 2.1 kids, have sex every wednesday and friday and live their life like everyone else. That is why they are called normal.

And then there's this peculiar breed of man that doesn't seem to be satisfied with the acceptance of every rule and to do as he's told but want to question assumptions and discover new things. He is rare, and thus normally has problems finding peers that have the same curiosity towards life as him.

I think you're one of those people. Don't feel bad about that, they are the ones that change the world.
I think you make a good point. In saying the threshold is low, I am probably biased by my peer group. Although... it is so hard to separate "smartness" from "passion". Particularly as people get older, someone who is passionate and keeps investing in themselves by learning new things will blow past someone with faster neurons that rests on their innate talents, rather than challenging themselves.
This combined with How Doctors Think made me realize that our doctors in the US are really no better than witch doctors. In fact in some ways going to a shaman is probably better. They are less likely to cure you, but they are also vastly less likely to kill you by accident. A pretty good tradeoff, considering that medical accidents are the leading cause of death in the US.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm

And this isn't even counting the fact that none of our antibiotics are working anymore because our medical system sees fit to use over 70% of our total antibiotics produced each year in animal feed.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 70 - Wagering On Predictions
Not sure what he means by culture.

"If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."
I know this post is a little about my startup but I think it covers a problem that every developer have. I thought it would be great to discuss it here.
One of my best friends is a painter, so I made a good mental exercise of trying to frame my interests in something more broad so I can discuss them with him. e.g. I talk about people creating things from my programming experience and my friend from his experiences as an artist.
I have been doing for years, without whining. I believe I am selfishly entitled to one outburst every few years or so.
I admit it's pretty funny, but it has no place on Hacker News.
The modern database paradigm is defined by relations, so of course that’s what falls apart as soon as you get an app into production.

Only poorly designed data base schemas "fall apart".

If you find yourself making all fields optional or needing only many-to-many relationships, that's a sure sign that you already did something wrong when you designed the data base.

Surely you must have known about the guy from Guam or the one living in Virginia but commuting to D.C. when you analyzed your app, right? And even if you didn't, you did design a data base structure flexible enough to accomodate the natural evoluation of the app, right?

Please don't confuse the limitations of 3rd and 4th normal form with the shortcomings of data bases built with them.
It will no doubt be worse.
An Economy of Faith and Trust
This is a link to a therapist I use all of the time. She is awesome:

http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html
thanks, I know. I referred to inline code.
Probably because a regular email system has no way of "blocking" a user the same way I can block people who are not my friends on those social networking sites from contacting me.

Also, their "mail system" displays ads. More ads, more chance at revenue.
combine your ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy with tsocks, and you have a nearly transparent access for your applications on your home-box into the office.
medical accidents are the leading cause of death in the US

I thought it was obesity? Or smoking? Or drinking and driving?

none of our antibiotics are working anymore

I don't know, they worked great both when I had lyme disease and when I had bronchitis...
Thanks - I think the only problem is the resolution on YouTube is not very good. I followed the link through your profile to your YouTube video and although it's nice, for my purposes I'd like the text to be clearer on the video.
Actually, French is S-O-V when you're using pronouns.

Can you share an example? Admittedly, my French isn't too hot, but I'm curious.

I'd be interested in an example Spanish (which I'm a lot better at than French) too.
Ahem it's <plug type="shameless"> </plug>
Wow, I did some quick research on Padmasree Warrior, and she's incredibly smart. From the Mobilize '08 keynote:

"We have this question today, this question of where mobile devices will go in the future. So the question at hand is, 'What is mobility, really?' And in my view, mobility is not the device. It's not the network. It is the mobile experience.

Mobility as a term has existed for quite some time, and for most of the time it has been synonymous with 'cellular network' and 'device'. This is because cellular networks were the first time we were truly free of wires. I think this has changed though, mostly because of the massive, enormous scale of adoption. More than three billion people on earth use a cellular device to communicate. Every second, four babies are born. In that same second, thirty mobile devices are sold. And we're just now starting to see the innovation beyond mere two-way communication in mobility."

This is a really, really amazing talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5K-xXUKlec

She gets mobile. And she understands the future of the internet.
No way. If you discover your database model is incorrect, fix it. Data kludges and hacks are not professional solutions.

The individual who wrote this is dead wrong and either headed for a lifetime of maintenance pain or a well-deserved reputation of being "that guy who caused all the problems" after he's moved on to cause pain elsewhere.

Nonsense like this is why corporate DBAs are such hard-asses when it comes to changing the schema.
It's interesting that users assume you are jerks when you ask them to register no matter what your brand, or the information you ask for.

Registration has become synonymous with ways to sneak in email newsletters.
Before the patient leaves operating room, make sure that instrument, sponge and needle counts are correct.

And I always thought that was a joke... guess not.
Interesting. I really like the way her videos zoom in and out on the browser to focus on the important area. Even though the video size is quite small, it works because of the zooming. I think I'll email her and also ask what software she uses!
That is so not what your link says.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

The leaders are heart disease, infection, and cancer (from this 2002 table, sourced to WHO).
Some days I hate the Web.

Why does even business week get nailed with a bunch of jingoistic nonsense in their comments. I was hoping to read some interesting and informed thoughts, instead the comments read like Digg.
This is a good, involved, and deep article on robotics in warfare. Some of the memes, like "cost to go to war" are quite frankly old chestnuts -- true for hundreds of years and just repeated here. (I'm reminded of one' historian's view of the American Civil War -- the north would have won anyway because, compared to other civil wars, the north really was never completely committed)

I began reading the article due to the cute title iamelgringo gave it -- here's a plug for re-editing titles for the HN audience.

What concerns me is what wasn't mentioned: the goal of warfare is to make the other side stop fighting. We will certainly develop and create expensive drones and such for the elimination of enemy combatants. As the Air Force lieutenant general forecasts in the article, that "given the growth trends, it is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands [of drones]"

But that's assuming we fight wars the way we want to fight them, instead of the wars we end up with. In the article, the example is given of a little ground bot made for recon. Soldiers quickly learned that you could strap a claymore on the front of the bot and use it as sort of an intelligent roaming land mine. Cost of such a new kind of bot? About $5K.

To make the other side stop fighting, you don't necessarily have to engage his military or command centers. I can see non-state actors evolving cheap bots to attack civilians and instill fear. Instead of a smart bomb, I guess you'd call it a smart terrorist bomb -- perhaps hundreds of RC airplanes with intelligent chips and biological weapons as payloads, or RC cars loaded with C-4 that wait in storm drains for days or weeks on end to launch a coordinated attack.

Bots are coming in war, like it or not. But what concerns me isn't the big Matrix-type bots: it's the power of small, cheap, smart bots that about anybody can assemble in bulk.
Let me add a few more from my 16+ years of DB coding:

1. Many field types will change over time. Booleans will become multiple choice. Character fields will become memos/text. Date fields will start to have year, month, or day parts optional.

2. All tables with tax-logic will be compounded by code hacks. So just a table with county tax rates and order amount ranges will not be sufficient to calculate the applicable tax because you will need to keep adding special conditions of tax to apply when pencils are sold on 3rd week of every month when school is in session.

3. Management will never understand how it could be that complex to "just change the database" to enable payroll calculation for hourly employees who work overtime just because the database already handles the fixed payroll for salaried employees. In other words, databases with existing data, logic, triggers, and reports will always be difficult to change.

4. The biggest rule is that business logic never ever translates to structured database tables without lots of conditions in code and strict limitations in scope of application. I'm not talking about pretty to-do lists, address books, or blog engines. I'm talking custom ERP apps, MRP modules, production forecast algos and my favorite, scheduling for production and employees.

I guess the take-home message in all of this is that don't get into this field if you don't like challenges of this sort. In addition to coding up DB apps, I also make a lot of non-database apps that keep me sane and balance things out. However, in terms of sheer complexity and project planning, good DB apps are pretty high on my list of "exciting" things.
Jing (jingproject.com) is the only free solution I know of. Wasn't exactly what we wanted, so we used Screenflow, which is $99 and Mac only as has been mentioned. It's very easy to use and the editing options are great.

Once you have the video, there's obviously still the decision of how to get it onto your site. After trying a couple different methods, I settled on YouTube. My primary objection to this originally was the video quality, however there is a way to force embedded video to play in either "High Quality" which I found acceptable, or in HD, which is great (and what we ended up using). To do this, you append "&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" for HD or "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" for high quality onto the back of both links in the YouTube embed code. (more here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/11/20/how-to-embed-and-pl...).

Lastly, we used lightwindow to diplay the video (http://www.stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/). Just drop some js and css files into your site and follow the following example code (in the case of HD). Mess with the width and height as appropriate.

<a class="lightwindow page-options" title="My Demo" params="lightwindow_width=640,lightwindow_height=385, href="http://www.youtube.com/v/vifE3sBge8k&hl=en&fs=1&...;
"I thought it was obesity? Or smoking? Or drinking and driving?"

Obesity isn't as dangerous as was previously thought, not that many people smoke anymore, and the dangers of driving after a drink or two are vastly overstated.

"I don't know, they worked great both when I had lyme disease and when I had bronchitis..."

Probably not penicillin.
I'm a big Camtasia fan. Like the interface and the capabilities.

It's not cheap, but I think you can get it as 30-day trialware. Not sure.
We worked with MostlyLisa.com on PriceAdvance.com's video demo (http://www.priceadvance.com/demo_video) - she did a great job and is up for more work like this I'm sure.
+1 for CamTasia (Windows) and ScreenFlow (Mac), also RecordMyDesktop (Linux). CamStudio (free Win) ok. Online solutions (screencastomatic, screentoaster, jing) also good.
I'm a professional screencaster (http://procasts.co.uk) - if you want to crib examples, see my Examples page, they all reflect live use of screencasts that make users happier, convert more visitors, reduce support costs etc.
Definitely get a good mic - I prefer pro audio equipment but you'll go a long way with a decent USB mic (not 3.5mm jacks, they get electrical noise from the motherboard).
If you can't do good audio yourself then see something like voices.com for outsourcing but melding the video+audio can be problematic. You do need good audio, as others have said the easiest way to kill your presentation is muffled, noisy, volume-changing hard-to-understand audio.
Expect 1 day to do a first reasonable video of a few minutes, several days if you want a perfect cut with great audio, a bit more if you want to add effects (captions, fades, highlights, scrolls).
Look at ShowMeDo for 800+ examples of screencasts made by many users on different OSs with different tools.
Jolt Magazine has three useful articles: http://joltmagazine.com/2008/10/08/lets-make-a-screencast-th... http://joltmagazine.com/2008/09/23/lets-make-a-screencast-pa... http://joltmagazine.com/2008/09/17/screencasting-an-expert-r...
See LongTail video player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/) to embed flv/mp4 result, they have great plugins, it works with thickbox/lightbox, stats tracking possible, lots of features, I use it for all my work.
glassdoor.com has pretty good info
...You mean freaking surgeons haven't been using checklists?

People who are about to do something as complicated, delicate, and life-critical as surgery haven't been using checklists!?

FFS! My friends use checklists to go @&#^%%$ camping!

That's almost as bad as doing dynamic language programming without Unit Tests.

:) - for the humor impaired