skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You shouldn't downvote contrarian anecdotes. You should just take them at face value for what they are.

His notion that in the field of medicine you should disregard contrarian anecdotes because there's statistical evidence is horrible advice. If you actually looked at said statistical evidence, you'd realize it is very rarely strong, and often only relevant to 70% or so of the population (which is great for 2 out of 3, but useless for the third one).

"Best practices" often aren't, and common sense is not at all common in medicine. A significant number of published results are plain wrong (see http://saveyourself.ca/articles/ioannidis.php and the paper it references). A lot of medical advice is wrong, harmful or useless; The archives of seth roberts' blog are an enlightening read.
The sample budgets are nice, but why not just say "$4.32 per 32MB of RAM per month".

Also, what's with the jump from $8 to $80? Seems like quite a few people would be interested in hosting something between those two price points...
Isn't this the same drum that has been beating since the days of desktop applications... for those old enough to remember when applications where actually run on a desktop OUTSIDE of a web browser ;).

Actually... even past the dark ages anyone remember the popularity of webpagesthatsuck.com?

No matter what the technology someone will need to do something that is out of the bounds of the 'stock user interface'. So you either account for it by allowing everyone to do anything or you limit it...

http://www.useit.com/jakob/constbook_preface_2nded.html
What sort of pricing plan is this? The per-user expense _increases_ as you buy more seats?

https://secure.stairwayapp.com/plans
It runs on node, which executes javascript in a development environment.
Though the GitHub repo was posted, I would prefer visitors to go to the project site, which is linked in the repo description.

I wanted GitHub to absorb most of the page hits since I'm only on shared hosting.
Beards of Python
> Both Motorola and HTC's sales and profits are depressing

Motorola was left for dead before Android. HTC jumped out to an early lead with Android and their stock went up 400%.

> they're not exactly using stock Android

I think you're missing why Google open sourced Android. What B&N and Amazon did with it is exactly the point of why Android is open source. Google would rather have no one "win" the mobile space than have a closed source company like Apple or Microsoft win the war again and get into a situation like Windows / IE was for the last 20 years on desktop.
When I went to your domain and read the main page, I didn't understand what it did.

The big call to action 'learn more' button took me to a series of points that didn't really clue me into what it was about. I thought I got it, but I wasn't sure - certainly not sure enough by the time I got dumped off at the signup page.

Both the 'about' and the 'features' page told me more, but I had to click around to get to those, and I went to them only after I went through the 'learn more' flow.

Now that I think I get it, it sounds pretty cool - asynchronous text-based meetings. But I had to click around a fair bit more than most people will to understand it.
From what I've read about the olden days, it was actually viewed as attention to detail then.
I think slippery slopes apply to logical arguments. In this case, I'm making a subjective judgement about the value of knowing how someone designed something compared to how much they are charging. Collectively, the public could make this judgement and would draw a line, for each product. For me, apples products fall below that line, so I would grant the copyright, but the PRC products fall far above the line, so I would choose not to grant the copyright.
As I stated above, I never said that Innman was going to sue. He has made it clear that he won't. However, I'm responding to the comment that "he has stuff on him", one of the examples being brought forward was "copyright infringement". As part of the conversation being had, I didn't see what I wrote as irrelevant, as the poster specifically talked about copyright infringement :-)
I've been a beta tester of Stairway.

Can't emphasize enough how fast the product evolved into a must have. No more "I didn't promise/say that.'
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

This applies to all things more so than most people are willing to admit.

Many prepare and never have the opportunity, many have the opportunity but do not prepare. Neither works without the other and one of them is mostly out of your control.
Can. You. Read.? - A Book That Should Be in Everyone's Bookshelf
Show HN: Evidence-based morality.
This is very cool. There's so much that could be done to better organize and run meetings. It's great to see someone taking a stab at it.
I wished there was more of a demo before signup. Even just some screenshots would have helped.
My take on this is simple: many competitors (Hulu, Amazon, Verizon, Comcast, etc.) are likely using the API or screen scraping services like Instantwatcher to gain critical competitive data about Netflix's catalog size and composition, deal term length, content popularity, etc. With the former dataset, you could basically build a list of average contract term length, suppliers, genres, popularity, etc. What leads me to believe this is the case is they first killed expiration date - obscuring when titles expire makes it difficult for competitors to pick of your best stuff. The recent changes probably came after Netflix took a closer look at how the API was being utilized.
Pretty fun, but not very realistic in the sense that the trade is taken exactly after 10 or 20 days. You don't allow setting stop losses, etc.

Chartarcade.com is a really good stock simulator. It's been around for a while, also uses real stock data, and allows you to buy and sell while incrementing on a per-day or per-week basis. It's actually a really good tool for learning how to buy and sell stocks on a swing basis.
works fine on windows chrome for me. V19 on the regular release channel.
This may go against the common current on HN, but if you're jobless and broke, you might not be in the best place to start a company, especially considering that often times companies aren't profitable in their first year. Do you have any resources to pull from? Family? Friends? Do you have a place to stay? Can you survive for a year not drawing a salary? If you're jobless, broke, and 17 living with your parents then you have a huge resource to draw on to make this happen.

My advice (for what little it may be worth) is that you find a job related to what you want to do. Learn all you can, live frugally, and store up as much cash as possible. Do this until you have enough in savings to live modestly while you get your company to the point where it will support you (I.E. Ramen profitable).
It means that Circuit City decided to sell sizzle instead of steak.
Man with Van E16 Silvertown. Man and Van Silvertown Newham
I guess they figured their utility increases as the meeting grows. It's not like you can segregate people into two meetings and get out of that, either.
How is this different from ender.js (which has been around for a while)?

A short summary of pros / cons of each would help.
And interestingly, this appears to have generated no discussion on the Freesurfer mailing list:

https://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pipermail//freesurfer/2012-...

There was a single post dated June 2nd that didn't receive any replies:

https://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pipermail//freesurfer/2012-...
Apple Announces Next Gen MacBook Pro
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Warns of Cyber Arms Race
Asana has something like that. More users, bigger network, more meetings, more traffic, more resources.
Yet another study confirms global warming is human-caused
If you're getting your data free from Yahoo (scraping or API), aren't you limited by their non-commercial use clauses? That is, if you try to make money off of it without buying the data, doesn't that open you up to a huge liability risk?

Pretty sure that's stipulated all throughout their service (that you may not use any of their data for commercial purposes without their permission).

Acquiring that kind of data for commercial purposes normally costs a lot of money (relatively speaking).
Bizarre! Try finding an extension to change the default user agent in Firefox (there are quite a few) and try it again... I'm curious to see if it still works! What happens if you try a few different browsers? Same issue?
Artificial means can only delay the progress of ideas and technology for so long. I realize that crypto and the export of crypto is regulated severely in many countries, but how long can that last?
Steps to earn your colleagues respect for data
I spent about 30 seconds clicking around, I have no idea what your app is.

I think a video, or an example of someone using it would be nice. The philosophy alone is not enough for me to understand the app, or even make me want to use it.
Just a quick couple of thoughts about your UX and landing page:

* There's not enough information on your homepage for me to figure out what you do

* The information I need is between one and three clicks away ("learn more", and then "more" until I've read enough to get it), clicking "more" just gets in the way

* I don't really get the "you will", "we will" dichotomy. Frankly, I don't care what "I will" do, all I want to know is how this product is going to make my life easier.

* Stop using buzzwords ("message-based collaboration", "asynchronously"), and just tell me what you do in plain English

* Some of the English phrases come out awkwardly ("We will guide you to prepare quality agenda before calling the meeting.")

Having said all that, it's a neat idea, and I hope it catches on. We all need fewer meetings.
Ah, I guess I had never really connected the dots, that to use node, you have to do your development in the browser. This is all starting to come together. ; )

[Or not, apparently.]
All good feedback. However the one giant caveat is that most developers don't know how much memory their application needs.
Wanted to emphasize this point - I did the exact same thing. I read through the "Learn More" bullets and thought "hmm, this sounds interesting and useful...but I still really have no idea what it does".

It wasn't until I read the About and Features that I actually understood the product.

The benefits listed in the "Learn More" are really good...you just need to add a little more concrete information about the product itself.

Anyhow, looks interesting and I'm going to recommend it to my company. We work in three different locations (and two timezones), so it could be useful for us.
Hmmm...

From man 3 printf: "These functions return the number of characters printed (not including the trailing `\0' used to end output to strings) or a negative value if an output error occurs". So the 17 makes sense, but where did the output go?!
I skimmed it and I definitely don't understand. I saw mention of asynchronous, but it looks like it's for video not for text?
On a related note, I've started toying with the idea of providing better project management tools to handle projects on odesk (and related websites).

If you outsource work on oDesk, and you feel like the process could use some improvements, I'd love to hear your opinion about this (also, email in my profile).
Beautiful river flow simulation
If the comments below are too laborious for you to read, here is the TL;DR of them:

(1) Use your personal discretion. Some anecdotes are funny. Others can be perfectly cogent rebuttals, especially when people make overbroad statements.[a]

(2) The author is right in some respects: you need to be aware of the ways that stupid stories can bias you. Even being aware of this fact is sometimes not sufficient, so use downvoting to try to protect others.

(3) Lots of people believe in anecdotal responses to anecdotal original-claims. [b]

(4) A lot of people tried to be funny by offering anecdotes to be downvoted. Unfortunately, people haven't consistently taken the advice above, so they are not all in one place (at the bottom). That is a pity -- this would have been a fun and interesting use of downvotes.

[a] Actually, the discussion is full of overbroad statements of this form like "no universal truth" and someone presenting "nothing should be above questioning" as above question.

[b] I would like to formally respond that this is generally stupid -- you don't clean up a house by flinging crap at the crap. Your mileage may vary.
From my standpoint as an introvert, I see meetings done this was like a godsend.

I can’t express my thoughts clearly when there are other louder individuals at an in-person meeting. This way, I can sit down, relax, gather my thoughts and provide a whole lot more valuable input. This way everybody wins - me and my company.

Of course I’d have to say this doesn’t work in all circumstances, like free-for-all brainstorming sessions, but still.
Unfortunately choice of name, perhaps, as it clashes with this: http://www.perforce.com/documentation/jam
Equipment/software/subscription purchases are tax write-offs.
Each statement above is a valid statement and you can verify it.

No reply to the comment but down votes? I didn't know we also had banksters at Hackernews.
The Haskell approach sounds pretty neat. How well does it work in practice? I thought that C++ introduced exceptions to get away from having to check every single return value, and to be able to handle the condition at the appropriate caller level.
Not Backing Down: interview with FunnyJunk.com lawyer Charles Carreon
Asking a fundamental question is simple. It's the answers that are hard, just like in science. Go back to the pre-Socratics and you can find questions that are clear precursors to modern questions in science about things like causality, block time, the nature of matter or consciousness. We're still trying to find out. We've gotten unbelievably better and we still don't have firm answers. Philosophers throughout history posed questions that at the time science didn't have the capability to answer, but was able to narrow down the possibilities simply by carefully analyzing the question, producing thought experiments, etc. This cut the workload down for science tremendously by eliminating red herrings and logical impossibilities, and in turn science answered questions through testing of the physical world that philosophy could not, thereby narrowing the workload of philosophy. (I see this very prominently in the theory of Mind.) Science and Philosophy are often complementary practices.

I also think philosophy can help science in areas that do affect us but are probably untestable. I remember reading some work in primitivism that speculates that the introduction of the clock, and its conception of time, to humanity fundamentally changed the nature of consciousness. People literally thought differently before the clock became common. If this is true, it has ramifications for how we understand the past and things that people did in it that affect us today. So maybe philosophy helps us with questions of history in a way that science (at least currently, at least in my conception) cannot.
Unity 4 will let devs “do so much more with so much less”
Face.com acquired by Facebook
BBEdit, terminal. Also, not an app, but not having to screw around to make things work. This alone gives me a huge productivity boost, over Linux or Windows.
Where does it tip you off as being video? We're trying to learn here.
Javascript prototype and "multiple" inheritance
"I could not have been more relaxed. My head was empty."

And pockets were full! That's the main factor I'd say.
Nice job! But, the 'game' hardly feels like a game anymore. Add a computer player and it will be much nicer.
RIM still has secure enterprise messaging for large companies, something that Nokia lacks. Where I work, we still have a busy bunch of BES servers, despite making the iPhone an option for corporate phones; though the iPhone is clearly the choice for anyone getting a new phone.

Nokia has nothing like this in terms of stickiness for customers.
It's not clear from that FAQ itself but if you read PDF (to which the link is broken, but here it is: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf ), they make it pretty clear that the registration can occur after the infringement. However he'd only be able to get actual damages (not statutory damages or attorney's fees) unless it's been less than three months since the work was created.
You could do that, but you won't be able to achieve as high throughput in highly concurrent environments. MemSQL achieves this via code generation and lockfree data structures.

We will also put the technology on steroids, by building a clustered system
Daddy?
Ask HN: Are you a Cewebrity?
Hi everyone,

I just launched a new podcast called "Cewebrity" and I am looking for great hackers to interview.

Can you help?

The purpose of this podcast is to highlight the technical people who have built great products in the web and mobile space, but who normally don't get attention from the media.

If you or someone you know personally has built something amazing that you'd like to spend 30 minutes to an hour discussing via Skype or telephone please either respond to this post with a way to contact you and what you have built or go to http://cewebrity.co and fill out the form on the right of the page.

I'd really appreciate your help with this fellow HN'ers and I know lots of you have built great stuff that deserves attention.

FYI, if you want to preview the format, you can listen to the 1st episode with Pek Pongpaet of Pinstagram here: http://cewebrity.co/uncategorized/episode-pek-pongpaet-of-pinstagram/
> When you cannot control all the variables, it's important to have a large enough sample that the randomness in each direction for the different variables essentially cancels itself out.

That's nice in theory, but does not happen for most published research.

> I'm in medicine, and I read papers all the time detecting a statistical difference between control and experimental groups, but the difference is so tiny that it's meaningless.

I'm trained in statistics. My ex was an MD. I used to read the NEJM for fun for a couple of years. Most of the results published are barely statistically significant for the small group they tested ("our sample included 40 caucasian females between the ages of 37 and 48, and we have a p value of 0.03" with no mention of the context which might make that p value meaningless - but let's assume they got that part right). And then, a couple of years later, some other study takes that result as absolute truth, but assumes it applies to any woman aged >30. And a couple of years later, it is assumed to be universal and speculated to apply to males as well.

Is your experience different?

> I blame bad science reporting for a lot of the anger you are feeling.

I blame tenure publishing requirements. While bad reporting certainly deserves its share of contempt, people these days do everything in order to meet the publishing requirements for tenure. Most stay away from outright fabrication, but otherwise every manipulation of the data that would make it fit for a higher caliber publication is being done as long as it is not outright fraudulent -- including dropping the background context so nicely exemplified by this xkcd comic http://xkcd.com/882/ . It often is the researchers doing the bad reporting with no outside help.
As an upfront disclaimer, I want to state that I think this is incredibly neat, and that I'm just trying to resolve a nagging question in my head.

Every time I see very well-done CSS animations, and especially when I see it extended into the realm of 3D graphics, I immediately think: To do all of this [animation/3D], the creator had to know a good bit about [animation/3D]. What makes them look at CSS and say "Yes! THIS is the language I want to do serious 3D work in!"?

Put less sarcastically: I find CSS to be a pain more often than not. What advantages do these Webkit-only CSS tricks have over WebGL? I was given the impression that the latter is more fully-featured.
At the moment I am mostly using skype or gotomeetings and I usually have two problems with the meetings online:

1. hard to find the availability for all participants
2. archiving meeting minutes and finding them when I need them

this could be the ideal solution, especially because i can control my time and still participate on the meeting.

do you have the same problems? how you are solving them?
Well, except that instantwatcher operates on the freemium model: http://instantwatcher.com/about_premium
Oppressor's wet dream. They miss the times when the oppressed ("extremists" and "separatists" who threaten "social stability") had no voice.
Tried to throw you $10 there bub, but I after I clicked the "paypal" round button to buy, It sent me here:

"https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSI...

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For more reflections on physical design watch the documentary on Charles Eames, trailer below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YMzmuBBBzo
There's another in memory mysql replacement whose name escapes me right now. How are they doing?

Ycombinator seems to have backed a few of these next-gen databases. It will be interesting to see who wins.

EDIT: Rethinkdb. But it looks liked they've dumped their mysql engine and gone to a pure key-value store.
Ask HN: Math major wanting to get into programming quickly
Hey! I'm a math major with a concentration in teaching at UC Berkeley. After learning enough about how crappy a job in teaching will be, I've decided I should really dive into computer programming.

Where should I start and what's a good plan? I hope to get into a position where I can work remotely online, so that I can travel a lot. It would be ideal to accomplish this in a year or two. I'm almost done with my undergrad in math but I'm a complete beginner in computer science. I hope to develop skills that I can use for 'good causes', like contributing to a nonprofit or maybe even an education startup.

A friend has suggested to work through either python or ruby and then C on learncodethehardway.org. Is this a good idea? What other options are there?

THANK YOU!
I think he is mourning a problem that needs no solution. Let me put it this way: my wife, who has very little understanding of how to operate computers (to make capital letters, she uses capslock / letter / capslock), literally figured out how to use her iPhone 4 within 4 minutes of turning it on.

If the problem with the UI is that it makes it harder to use, then I don't think that consistency is the problem. Lest you believe that I have a sample size of one, I have had my entire family use the iPhone, and they aren't particularly computer/gadget savy. My father, for instance, uses his Nokia "phone book" frequently, however that "phone book" is a taped on list of numbers on the back of his mobile phone. And with a little prompting, he was playing Angry Birds within about 10 minutes. My young daughter, 4 years old, has worked out how to unlock the phone (to my chagrin) and plays "Peppa Pig" at odd hours of the night.

If anything, the darned iPhone interface is too easy to use!
unless they changed it before now, the text specifically reads that its a tutorial app, and has tips, not pretending to be a full Word client... mind you, how many people bought it not reading the text fully? how many dident look at the screen shot? And if that was a lot of people, i am releasing a Microsoft Excel and Outlook app for the iPhone/iPad later on... free money from what i can only imagine are people with too much feeking money...