skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: How to Start a Cancer Wiki
Forgive me for being a bit more personal than HN normally gets.

The people who read Hacker News are among the brightest, most productive, and most creative people I've associated with. That's why I'd like your advice, and your help.

My dad was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer about 2 months ago. My family and I have watched him go through weeks of radiation treatment. After burning his neck & the tissue inside his throat, it hurts him to eat.

With all the side-effects from drugs and treatment, and after only 1 round of chemotherapy, he has decided to stop the chemo. This has devastated my family, and I sit and wonder what to do.

I decided to start researching alternative cancer treatments, and set up http://KancerWiki.com (using the open source PM Wiki) to organize my research.

I have a few questions.

1. Do you have any suggestions for how to get the help of others who might want to help? Perhaps people whose parents or loved ones are similarly suffering? There are probably other people out there who have already gone through something similar & it'd be great to hear from them about non-traditional or modified-from-traditional methods of treating cancer (there seem to be a lot of hoaxes and scams out there for cancer treatment, so I'd like to find scientifically-verified treatments).

2. Does anybody know the story of how Wikipedia or other popular Wiki's have spread?

3. Does anybody here want to help in any way?

Things I need help with:

1. Posting information about non-traditional (but science-based) cancer treatments.

2. Organizing and building the site.

3. Spreading the word about the site.

Thanks! I look forward to hearing back from you.
http://www.adamchavez.net/blog/contact/
Does anyone know how to get into diamond mechanosynthesis as a hobby (computational chemistry methods of course, not lab work)? I'm a pure math student, but the applications of that field are so vast (molecular nanotech?).
If you are getting a Mazda 3 of any sort in a climate where you might be driving through snow, _please_ purchase some good all-weather/snow tires.

The three Mazda3's I've sat in or driven have all had extremely poor winter handling. Better tires solved the problem in at least one case.
The Vultures Are Circling Project Playlist
Github + Lighthouse works pretty seamlessly for us. I wouldn't go back to self-hosted system. Why are the team members concerned? Lighthouse+github really beats the pants off of Trac IMHO.
I was thinking the other day: lets assume that there is some average economic cycle that 1 out of 7 years is a recession.

If that cycle is invariant, but via some means the time variable could be compressed, such that 1 in 7 days was a recession - suddently that seems not so bad (kind of what the article was hinting at?). So you compress time, increse the severity of changes but reduce the impact time (which is I guess where the real human damage is done).
Will be interesting to see.
A rule of thumb I've used is that your vehicle shouldn't cost more than 1/2 years salary. Just as a method of keeping things in proportion.

A $50K car on a $40K salary is basically a recipe for fail, based on some of icey's previous comments, I'm going to guess he's a tad above the $40K salary range.
What do you drive? Honda Fit.
Do you like it? We don't think about it, so that's great.
Is it fun? It's a car.

Had a super nice, super expensive, super luxury sedan before it.. I didn't like the attention and hassle.

Space-wise, heck, I like to touch my wife. Seriously, it's got plenty of space for me (6'4") and my family (4). I moved a large-ish desk in it last week, and airport runs go smoothly. It'd only be small if we got fat.
I think once Google's tactics become too nasty, we should all have a "Block Google" month, editing our robots.txt to block Google for one month.

The less data they have, the less they'll be able to ram ads down our throats.
I didn't know StudiVZ had made an exit, thanks for pointing that out. To a publishing company too, very forward thinking.
I'm in a market for a new/additional car also, in a similar price range.

Right now I'm leaning towards a 2-3ish year old Jaguar XJR (going price: low-mid 30's) and then putting about 8K into the drivetrain to just build the piss out of it.

I love the look of the XJR's inside and out, and I've always loved something about the thought of building a luxury "sleeper" sedan.
as was already pointed out, this isn't a very accurate benchmark; it wasn't tested on a multi-core/processor machine, nor more importantly was it tested on a cluster of machines.
Hold out for the TOYOTA FTHS
Fifty thousand dollars is an extravagant amount to spend on basic transportation. You could later end up wishing you had that cash in hand.

You can get a decent, reliable, functional used Corolla or similar for $5,000 to $8,000. If you are confident enough in your mechanical skills at assessing the cheaper cars, you can go less than $3,000. If you are in the middle of starting up a business and don't have the time and need the reliability and trunk space, just buy a used Corolla or Chevy Prizm ( the Prizm is a Corolla with the price reduced due to the GM hood emblem ) and spend the rest of your money on things that matter.

I currently drive a 1988 VW Jetta with more than 200,000 miles, and my other cars have included a Volvo that I finally killed with 333,000 on the odometer. I have enough mechanical knowledge to fix minor things, and I drive slowly gingerly, so I am pretty good at beating the last 100,000 miles out of a car that the previous owner was about to take to the junkyard.

Don't be like me, it probably isn't worth it in the long run. Buy a reliable car less than 7 years old with less than 100,000 miles on it if possible, and spend around $5,000. Don't spend anywhere close to $50,000 on a motor vehicle for basic transportation -- the only things that would justify that would be sports cars, RVs, and possibly specialized work vehicles.
The thing is, most of the "bits" companies survive courtesy of the "atoms" companies, either through advertising (Google) or through selling to them (shrink-wrap software). Any shakeout in the atoms sector is going to hit the bits sector pretty hard. The sale of pure digital products (i.e. with no physical components at all) is pretty damn tiny.
Still at Octane! Tuesday nights, come hang out :)

(we likely won't be around this week, though)

-- Alex from atlhack.org
Next up: Teacher's Guide to Practical Horse & Buggy Travel.
Sorry, I'm in metro Phoenix, AZ.

I carpool to work right now, and we have a light rail system that starts service tomorrow. I'm planning to start taking it to work to shave off 17 miles or so of my commute, but the nearest rail station is still 5 miles away.

I would say I drive by myself maybe 5% of the time I go anywhere; I almost always group errands together to minimize commute; but with all of that I still log over 200 miles a week.

Moving isn't an option for me right now, I'm in the middle of an enormous project that I'm very interested in seeing to completion.
The Re-Rise of Open Source
I'm a VW/Audi fan. So I'm going to recommend the GTI/Passat or an A3/A4.

For style/space I'd recommend the A3 (though the GTI isn't bad) or the Passat. I got a chance to drive my uncle's new passat (with hacked/tuned computer - squeezes like 65 more horses out of it) and thoroughly enjoyed it. Plenty of room inside the car which is important for me, I'm 6'7 and had no headroom/legroom problems. The GTI is pretty awesome as well.

All fall in your price range, pending options. But if you're going to be test driving some, check out the A3, Passat and GTI.
While I appreciate everyone's concern for my financial well-being, I promise buying a car won't put me in the welfare line.

I said this elsewhere in the thread, but it's grown much larger than I'd expected - I don't expect to spend 50k on a car, but it at least provided some limitations - I mean, with an unlimited budget I'd go buy an Aston Martin Vanquish and use that for my daily driver.

Maybe there are people who aren't me who are interested in similar things. I didn't feel like over-limiting the question; I honestly didn't have the intention of making this a "Dear lazyweb, buy me a car plz ok?" sort of thread. I was genuinely interested in what sort of daily drivers hackers prefer.

For whatever it's worth, there have been some very interesting answers that have had me spending time at Edmunds looking up cars that I hadn't thought about checking out before.
Up here in Vancouver, Canada, the snow has been coming down much harder than most years, and a lot of shoppers are cooped up in their houses. Amazon and other online stores are making a killing off the bad weather.
Thx Amix. I was not aware of the site. Seems a very good resource, though its usability centered.
I would still like to see some discussion around the original post - with web emphasis.
I'm assuming that's anomalous. ITP is part of NYU, and if you check their website you find that "ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts […]" so suddenly that doesn't seem so unreasonable.

That being said, I'm not sure it belongs on that list. ;-)
The community can be very helpful. Just last week they helped me pick out an ass hair trimmer. Thanks Hacker News!
It isn't so hard to conceive, provided that you don't make the assumption that your thinking process will remain stable after a long time. Most likely it won't.

Brain decay is relevant after you're about 25. Cortical thinning is a very real phenomenon and results in slower responses speeds in elder brains (except for certain types of stimuli, like episodic/experience based recall). There is also some truth in the mathematician's saying that if you didn't make a breakthrough before you're 30, most likely you never will.

Now, there are two counters to this. The first is the "good health" assumption. You can physically be in good health, but unless you stop learning new things and forming new experiences (which involves creating biases to make your judgments and reactions more efficient), your brain is bound to change. For better or worse is hard to say. If you were diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, expect it to get worse. If you were bipolar, the amplitude of symptoms could worsen as well. (is this in violation of the "good health" assumption? Very likely not -- some of these dysfunctions are very important in creative people). In sum, the things you are currently capable of are a result of a delicate balance of things in your head. Any change in the future does not guarantee anything about your ability to sustain.

The other counter is the "engineering" kind of mentality, where you hedge on the idea that in the future, scientists will discover how to regenerate brain cells. This will probably come true, in some way or another, in this century, and you'd be able to regenerate fresh neurons and repair damaged structures in your brain. You might even be able to gain some unavailable abilities and become native at many many languages. But the flipside is that this flexibility always comes at a price. When you rebuild/repair your brain, the old structures don't remain untouched. This says nothing about your sense of self and its relationship with your current memories and how they shape your ideologies. In other words, if you can rebuild your brain, you could very well become an entirely different person. Now, is this the same person who initially decided to live a very long time?

If you take these ideas into account, living multiple lives is actually not that different from living a single life. Of course, nobody can tell for sure... but you asked.
Unless they're intel macs.. then they get sold for the same price as the old G4s.
If you have to ask YC for an idea of what car you want to buy, don't spend $50k for a car. Buy a decent used car for $6 to $10k, or a new car for $15 to $20k (I bought a Honda Fit; it's nice), bank the rest of the money, and wait.

I won't say you shouldn't blow $50k on a car -- I have friends who drive autocross and are really into cars -- but if you don't already have a short list of performance cars that you lust for you should just drive a compact Honda or Toyota for a while and be done with it.

What's wrong with the two-seater, again? Can't you just rent or borrow a car when you have to pick people up at the airport? You can rent a lot of cars for $50k. ;)
Microsoft, Apple, Google sued over icon software patent
yeah, nb is pretty cool, though more focused on hardware than i am.

when i'm in sf i still hang out a lot there.
Perhaps like: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/ecommerce/checkout.html
As for the "Right Turn", it would be translated to "Top Left of Text Block" rule: http://images.google.com/images?q=eye+tracking
Mobile Remotes and Dotted Lines
I used to use debuggers, but never really liked them, and on languages with complex data structures they always seemed cumbersome to me. The last straw came when I had a C++ program with a memory leak -- which went away whenever i ran the program inside the debugger.

After that I stopped using a debugger. Here's what I do instead, in the hope that it may be helpful to you and others (I don't use Lisp, but most of this is relevant to all languages)...

What I use now instead of debuggers are unit tests. For every module, write a unit test. Ideally, write the test before the code. If you have modules or classes that're tightly coupled, write other tests that test how they work together. Then write one big test that runs all the other tests, starting first with modules that don't depend on other modules, then progressing to more complex functionality. In this way you can run the entire test suite easily.

Code your big test so that it writes a log of what it's doing to stdout, and also so it stops on the first error it encounters. (This is because you don't want to be burdened by thinking about more than one error at a time.)

You should endeavour that as you write your code, it passes 100% of the test suite all the time. (If you have to rework a whole section of code, you may have to comment out a series of tests for a time to do this.)

As you write the code, run the unit test after you add any functionality to the module. If the code affects other modules, run the entire test suite every time instead of the unit test. That way if your new code breaks some complex dependencies somewhere, you'll know instantly.

This means that your entire test suite should complex quickly -- at most a few tens of seconds -- or you'll be deterred from using it often enough. Obviously if your code is doing something very processor-intensive, you might not be able to do this.

The other thing I do is have a debug flag in each module which when set outputs debugging statements, typically when a function starts running, e.g:

debug = true
...
def foo(a, b):
if debug: printf "called foo(a=%r,b=%r)" %(a, b)

Finally, the golden rule is: never, EVER, make your code more complicated or harder to understand than it needs to be. Every time you break this rule, you cause more trouble for yourself later.
On eye tracking and web forms http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000107.php
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=410140
If you're on a road bike going 12 miles an hour, 5 miles is a fantastic 25-minute cardio workout.
I hear that the best fuel-efficient/hybrids

So will they finally become cost-effective? All the data I've seen, and run personally, on the common hybrid make the TCO no cheaper than just buying an average car of similar size.

The only incentive I can see for current-tech hybrids is the eco-angle.
Audi A6: Classy, roomy and high performance. It is more a car for your image.

Audi A4 Turbo: Sporty, fast and reliable. If it is more than 4 year old I would recommend 5 spd. At least you won't have to deal with tranny issues.

Volvo S60: Sporty but not as reliable as the A4.

Mini Cooper.

If your paper is long enough and you want to impress look for an X5 or a Range Rover (girls digg these) or an american muscle car.
The G37 shares the problem, the interior is indistinguishable from a Nissan.
(Non-)Total Functional Programming
Forgive my ignorance, but: who?
Have you seen this talk:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/eva_vertes_looks_to_the_f...

You may wish to add it to the wiki as a "non-traditional but scientifically verified" way of thinking of cancer. Very interesting. I wonder how far she got with the research since 2005.
I'm fascinated by Chinese restaurants and Chinatowns.

I hadn't thought about the Linux analogy before but that's pretty accurate. Although it's more accurate to say that Linux follows the Chinese restaurant model since it predates Linux by 8 or 9 decades.
While it's a somewhat different focus (more technical as opposed to patient-based), the most successful medical wiki I can think of is http://www.fluwikie.com/.

As for the latter two of your posts, I would check out the existant support forums for the particular type of cancer you're going to focus on (I say this assuming that some forums or Yahoo! mailing lists exist out there, as they seem to for just about all diseases).
I wonder if Paul Allen thinks having a gene map of the human brain will help him get reservations to Dorsia.

(Also, even if he can get into Dorsia, he should stay away from that bimbo Allison Poole, whose liason with Sen. Edwards caused such a fuss...)
This may end up being the answer, to be honest. I am very into cars; but my tastes lean strongly towards the impractical (hence the two-seater).
I keep saying it - things are fine. Real value has not been wiped out - the amount of real value lost is not big when compared to the general economic numbers. The U.S has a bigger problem than the rest of the world, but the U.S is still very dynamic, and many world currencies still measure against the USD.

China is developing fast, but a lot of the development does not go very deep. So China is not yet ready to function as a counterweight to the U.S.

Europe is doing fine, even if it is sluggish as always. Africa is at it's most conflict-free of the last 50 years and lots of >5 growths there.

In general, the U.S needs to get a bit more dynamic, modernize it's infrastructure, take back the production, and it will be as fine as always.

The fundamentals of the economy are fine.
if you're like me, you can find worthwhile SIGs for all kindsa things: oracle, mySQL, mac, linux, xBSD, solaris, scala/clojure/java, erlang, haskell, .NET / F#, funct. prog'g,

Even if you're not intensively doing, say, linux tuning, or database tuning or .NET, it's still good to keep up with developments.
Ajax with Python - Combining PyJS and Appengine with json-rpc
I'm a fan of the small sedans - the Lexus IS, Audi A4, BMW 3 Series, Mercedes C Class and Infiniti G37. They range from $32,000-$65,000, depending on the various options.

They're all great cars, and with the exception of the Lexus, they've all been redesigned within the last two years. The BMW leads the pack in performance, the Infiniti in bang for your buck, the Lexus for comfort and reliability, the Audi for features, and the Mercedes for (interior) technology and design. Naturally, opinions may vary on these issues.

They're all reasonably fuel efficient, reliable, safe, and fast. Test drive them all. It's fun.

Spec out the car you want, then call all the dealers within a few hundred miles. Take the best quote to the salesman who you test drove with and give them the option to match it.

Tada! Great new car.

Edit: Forgot the Cadillac CTS. I've heard good things, but I'd be a little caution about buying from a company about to go bankrupt. Sorry American auto industry.
I would definitely second a recommendation for The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Fascinating read about a cultural phenomenon we all know so well, yet don't know.
Today’s Links That Just Make Me Want to Be Better: 12/26/08
If you are worried about getting in to car accidents, don't get a heavy truck or car with a high point of gravity.

If you drive somewhere where there's snow or ice, proper winter tires will give you more safety than all wheel drive.

Electronics can only mitigate the bad characteristics of an SUV, electronics can not break the laws of physics. A lighter car can brake more quickly. A proper car can turn faster without loosing traction or turning over. Accelerate faster, drive faster in general, drive further and use less gas than an SUV.

Of the vehicles mentioned, the Subaru sounds like the safest car. A Volvo V70 is an another wagon that's safe. If you are not going off road, why not get a station wagon instead of an SUV?

Another good safety feature is driver education. Knowing how to handle the car at the limits.
I am not a doctor, but I did a quick google search on this, and came up with this article, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080628155300.ht... relating to white blood cell therapy, whereby the immune system is stimulated to try and counteract the cancer. Such avenues could be worth looking into, though again, I am not an expert.
Is Foil “Broken”?
well, the one in vienna (metalab) is explicitly unpolitical, and nb in sf is exclusively about doing stuff too.

obviously there are different interpretations of what hackspaces are about, ranging from "infrastructure for projects" to "political space".
you should be buying a dedicated set of winter wheels/tires anyways. It really not that much money, all things considered. You'll recoup the cost the second you avoid sliding into a tree or rear-ending the car ahead of you.
so build your own - if their focus doesn't overlap with yours, there's a good chance you wouldn't compete with each other.

actually i know people wanting to build a hackerspace in London right now, i can put you if you want.
Hmmm, definitely agree about the interior feeling cheaper than a Lexus but I'm not sure I agree about a BMW (3-series). Even the M3 feels wayyy too plastic for my tastes.
That's not cynicism. It's just pessimism.
No cars, public transport, unless local housing density can't sustain it (50 dwellings/hectare needed to support sufficient bus network)
Really? Everything I read about Audis when I was researching cars told me that:

A) they weren't very reliable. Not a huge deal with a good warranty, but an unreliable car is inconvenient as hell.

B) they have a high cost of repairs.

I think Audio and VW are good examples of marketing driven car brands.

If you want a reliably luxury car, a Lexus seems to be at the top.

Of course, the idea of buying a $50k car seems just plain ridiculous in this (or any) economy.
Seriously! Basic financial management needs to be taught in public schools... I'm blown away by some of the comments in this thread.
The Elise is great but it has practically no storage - probably not viable as a day-to-day driver.
I only partially agree with this. The Chinese can spend their entire 7++ trillion in cash reserves over the next 5 years to support domestic economic maturity. The U.S. must continue to borrow and sell off assets in order to do so.
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty In Innovative ‘Passive Houses’
Worth noting that late model M3s hold their value particularly well.
This looks promising!

http://www.molecularassembler.com/Nanofactory/DMS.htm
I absolutely love my Audi A6. I've had it for just over two years and am as happy with it now as they day I bought it. I highly recommend them. Get one fully loaded that's a year old to keep it in your price range. The A8 is an amazing car as well if you want to spend a bit more on it.
I've had my 2003 A6 for 2 years now and haven't had anything go wrong that doesn't typically go wrong on a car that old (water pump, a couple of ignition coils, etc). My dealer charges somewhere around $90 or $100 per hour for labor, which is in line with any luxury car brand.
This reminds me of the whole, "NASA spent $100k developing a pen for space and the Russians used pencils" story.
install adblock, its just a whole different browsing experience.

Honestly I don't see why dial up companies don't promote the hell out of adblock, wouldn't they want their customers to want faster internet, so that they would avoid upgrading to broadband?
Mike Ash discusses blocks in Objective C