skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the most spergy demo of in-humorlessness I've yet seen.

I am PC and easily offended therefore beep-boop-beep...
My view may be colored by the fact that I'm a raging pragmatist about these sorts of issues who thinks that the right type of solution depends on the project and on the team (i.e. the right solution for mission-critical bank financial transaction processing is likely not also ideal for a high-velocity startup), but my impression was that the idea was for such an axis to be considered as a spectrum, not a simple dividing line for an us-vs-them holy war.

When interviewing and considering joining a team, envisioning a spectrum like this allows you to ask questions to see where a potential employer tends to fall on this spectrum, and thus determine whether it seems like a good fit for how you prefer to work and what you want to do.

And no, this is certainly not the only axis along which one can plot software development, and I doubt Mr. Yegge's goal was to propose that it was. At most it is an axis, and the goal would be for it to be a useful one when leveraged in the right context.

Can people take interesting ideas and horribly abuse them? Well, obviously. One might even argue that an idea that can't be abused by someone so inclined must not be very interesting at all.
Anything involving health data is interesting and has the potential to improve lives, however there isn't enough information on the landing page here to indicate what this data is or why I might want to use it. Could do with a better landing page.
Sorry but I think having a guide who knows things that have been passed down over centuries is much better than re-inventing the wheel every generation. It's like getting a 2,000+ year head start on understanding how to think. By all means get some experience in the actual territory but don't forget to take a map.
Gmail IMAP errors leave some iOS users without normal email access
I think I've been there. My advice? put more effort into finding more of the sort of people you want to be around. You might need to move, too, but moving alone won't do it. The key is to initiate relationships. It's better (well, better for you) to be loud and slightly annoying than to be so quiet you don't have a chance of initiating relationships with people you meet. (I mean, by all means, desist when people tell you to go away. But don't be afraid of embarrassing yourself by initiating a conversation with a stranger.)

The thing is, most nerds (and most of the people that nerds get along with) are kinda introverted. Introverted people tend to not initiate new relationships. If you wait around for other people to initiate relationships, you will only be able to choose among the extroverts that like you, so practice going out of your way to initiate contact with people you think you might get along with. You don't have to be an extrovert; but you do have to initiate conversations, extrovert-style, at least until you find your group.

Moving to an area with more of your target person type helps a lot, too. I mean, I meet all sorts of interesting people, for instance, waiting in line for BBQ. Living in a higher-density area gives you more people to meet, and some high density areas have more of us than others. I'm in silicon valley, which is medium density, but you can't swing a cat without hitting a programmer.

If you are like me, learning to better interface with 'normal people' won't solve the problem. In fact, I suspect the real problem is that I see 'normal people' and I see 'my people' - but I haven't been able to overcome that.
I think it has less to do with the language and more with how you use it.

I would venture to say that anyone writing assembler would almost have to be completely conservative to make it work.

Something like Python could be written in conservative fashion (like the article alludes to with Google's style of python) or could be liberal in it's more idiomatic form.
Thanks for your comment. We handle the connections to the insurance companies and the EDI to JSON transformation. I respect your point about 5 cents being high. We, of course, will evaluate that as time goes on.

To start, you as a developer can make an app for the medical industry that checks patient's health insurance eligibility. Details you can call include: health spending accounts, deductibles remaining, coinsurance/copayment, whether or not they have coverage for MRI, etc.
I would love to switch the default to JSON but people store too much stuff in their sessions that does not work on top of JSON (datetime objects and token objects are the most common offender).

In fact the python-openid extension is the most common offender. Also I can't just switch the default because it would invalidate everyone's currently issued sessions.

The issue is not new, changing it without breaking things is the hard part.
> Code: Originally I intended to make the crawler code available under an open source license at GitHub. However, as I better understood the cost that crawlers impose on websites, I began to have reservations. My crawler is designed to be polite and impose relatively little burden on any single website, but could (like many crawlers) easily be modified by thoughtless or malicious people to impose a heavy burden on sites. Because of this I’ve decided to postpone (possibly indefinitely) releasing the code.

That is not a good reason. There are many crawlers out there. Anyone can easily modify the string "robots.txt" in the wget binary to "xobots.txt".

Release your code so that others can learn. Stop worrying that you are giving some special tool to bad people - you aren't.
Great feedback, we will do that and include samples from some companies currently using the API.
I'm sorry you don't like my design.

If they honestly think 500 million people are going to pay for their service, they are greatly mistaken. I can dream 100 billion people are going to give me a dollar, but that's not going to happen for many reasons. The same is true with their "dream."
As a note, I submitted it but didn't get any upvotes.

Here is a link to the blog http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-software-architec...
I am impressed by this site's use of Bootstrap. Most Bootstrap sites look like exact clones of the example templates with some colors swapped. The Bootstrap origin on this site is obvious yet not tired.

All they did was add a background and position one element yet it looks unique. I think the key thing was that they avoided the Bootstrap's black navigation bar.
Competition vs. Comparables
Same here, very interesting read. My only minor criticism is that it seems a little insensitive or dishonest when every well-to-do family calls themselves "upper middle class." So you can manage billions in assets and still be middle class? I call people on it when this comes up and find that they either see it as a social faux-paux to call oneself upper class, or the subjective threshold to be considered upper class is ridiculously high at 0.1% or whatever. Sorry, when your father manages billions there's no middle. Just a minor quibble because, for being upper class, Danielle is refreshingly honest and open about her background. I greatly appreciate that.
There isn't. You could easily achieve zero overhead by shipping a rover with a OTP for time-keyed IVs and just not do any padding.
Time columnist Fareed Zakaria suspended for copying another writer’s work
These aren't much in the way of examples. Optical drives have been dropping in importance and 'memory slots' have never been important. Food and assigned seats have nothing to do with transport. A lot of restaurants don't take reservations at all, compared to a system which is just transferable reservations.

A boat that doesn't float is an extreme change, because that is the primary purpose. Even if you largely use floating to get isolation.
Telling people to care that don't already won't have the effect you are looking for. It's like telling the sky to be green.

Good plan otherwise, though.
No. There's something to be said for at least some places to be about adult-level conversation.
IBM may buy Blackberry server business from RIM
True enough, but it would help in answering the critics who want NASA to return a 1080p/120fps 3D movie from mars. Send the movie via the flash drive.
I miss a REPL ala Common Lisp, not ala irb
Somewhat related: am I the only one who's not in love with the new trend of startups sending fake "personal" messages to new users?

I know you want to show you care, but I haven't had 5 minutes to try out your app and you're already asking me if I need any help and when we can schedule a Skype call so you can show me all your cool features.

I usually just ignore these messages, but always feel slightly bad on the off chance that it actually wasn't an automated message and I just snubbed a real person.
Even with optimal coding you are still limited by achievable signal over noise due to the Shannon limit.
Google to penalize copyright "violators" (aka Pot meet Kettle)
While I think this is awesome (I work in the healthcare space - on the infrastructure side (design, build and implement systems for new hospitals)) though I would LOVE to see the following, if this API allows:

I as a user would like to tell you my insurance info and tell you what procedure I want and you tell me the best/cheapest location to get that done.

Then - here is where the groupon model farking failed: (I have only ever bought one groupon, and I never used it, but the model for groupon should be applied to things people NEED); I want to see coupons for medical, eye, dental procedures - things I dont buy too often and when I do, I want the best deal possible.

So, for example, I want teeth whitening. Or a full eye exam... etc..

Actually - there was a rockhealth company that was doing something similar, that was in the first batch, but they were LA only and hadn't quite built out the right system...

/rant...
And no OnSwipe, either, thanks.
Yeah, you've got to do solid competition research before building something.

(It sometimes happens that there's something out there that you've never heard of (and no-one you know has heard of it either), in which case you discover the competitor later. Really nothing you can do about this.)
I think probably the most important thing to understand about this essay is that "conservative" on Mr. Yegge's spectrum does not correspond to "neophobic", and "liberal" does not correspond to "neophilic."

People who like try different languages are likely to find both Ruby and Haskell interesting -- because they are. And both are interestingly different from the sort of mainstream traditionalist programming embodied by Java, C++, and Pascal.

But if you were doing a new project start on an important project, the gap between the reasons that would lead you to build it using hardcore Ruby metaprogramming with hefty dollops of dynamic dispatch and the reasons that would lead you to build it in Haskell with carefully defined type systems, monadic programming, and purely functional implementation that would allow you to reason more easily about what's going on -- that gap is vast. Which one appeals to you more given a real world problem to solve where the solution matters to you -- that says a lot about you.
So, basically Javascript is just a superset of an esolang that contains itself.

http://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

(Especially true if you're developing with a Javascript interpreter hosted in Javascript. Really, it's esolangs all the way down.)
Didn't know you guys were YC! You're doing great, I'll have to work hard to make sure I keep up with Folyo (http://folyo.me)
Florida Keys Lobster Season
This is something I would very much like to be informed about. If anyone knows and wouldn't mind chiming in, I'd greatly appreciate it.
If you're not on Facebook, you may be a psychopath
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this post makes it sound like you've created an efficient API to find whether or not a person can "afford" treatment.

Again, maybe (hopefully) I've misunderstood. And not to be the the tree-hugging idealist of the post, but as a fellow human, how does this make life better for the rest of us?

Sorry if I seem confrontational about the whole thing; progress usually is a good thing. That said, I hate seeing great intelligence spent wholly on the bottom line.

I'm also aware that I very likely am in the wrong forest barking up the wrong tree...
Hiten Shah's soapbox
> Thankfully there is a middle ground. It's called talking to people.

> You can mitigate this type of territorial response by convincing them to disassociate their identity from a code block.

Do you have any suggestions for scenarios where this doesn't seem possible? Where any suggestion is treated as an attack, by both programmers, and their manager?
IMO what matters most is Bootstrap was used well. They took the purpose of Bootstrap (CSS/HTML Framework and well designed common elements) and then used that alongside their own understanding of how their site should be fit for the purpose.

So many people take Bootstrap as an excuse to not give a single thought to the usability of their site. It's a shame really, Bootstrap is a great tool but inevitably the people that rely on it are relying on it because they have no clue, so they butcher it.
From your linkd article:
"So much for the bigoted notions that Americans are dumb and Europeans are smart." > "There are 3 parts to the PISA test, Reading, Math, and Science."

There is more to an education than reading, math, and science. The US is particularly famous for frequently forgetting that other countries even exist. Most of the Anglo world (including, but not just US) is seen with some derision in Europe for being so proudly monoglot. A comment of "My god, that person was so dumb" is usually about their lack of worldliness, not their skill with calculus.

Quite the opposite - take a student from anywhere in the world, and on average, he or she will receive a better education in America

The people that get to immigrate to the US are the best and brightest, otherwise they don't get in. It's unsurprising that their children perform well. Yes, the US education system is far better than the third world's (what a boast!) but even if you're talking about Finnish immigrants, they're not going to be unskilled louts. The mere fact that they're allowed in means that they have already passed a bar.

I agree that the real problem is the disparity and locally-sourced funding for schools, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with the curriculum across the board. There are squillions of articles out there bemoaning all aspects of the US school system's race to teach the test rather than provide an education.

I think that probably the most telling is when you hear of tertiary educators saying that they have to dumb down intro subjects and teach students the skills they used to get in high school - things as simple as how to construct an essay (which doesn't sound like it's an objective 'reading, math, science' measure)
Just fyi, there's a "mint for healthcare" startup called simplee.com that's been around for a year or two. You link the site up to your various health insurance plans.

I've used it but haven't really gotten any interesting out of it before.
> I've experienced it personally in Russia

I call bullshit. You get fined almost always for driving unbuckled. It's actually one of the better effects of bad and greedy traffic police, who will otherwise fine you at the first available possibility (and, sigh, oftentimes impose bribe on you).
s/nasal/navel/
Stop feeding obvious trolls.
The angst in this post is really off putting. It reads like a series of observations by someone having a bad day after reading a book about existentialism (Mark Cuban is more likely to answer my emails than my friends?). He hints that caring can make you more successful as a business. But ultimately decides that we should care more simply to seperate ourselves from an uncaring world... because nobody cares. I don't find this particularly relevant.
I was saying not that it wasn't better than average but that it wasn't amazingly good. I'm pretty sure my mom has gone 300,000 miles between accidents; (growing up, we went on a lot of road trips.)

all I was trying to say is that I think the best human drivers can pull off three hundred thousand miles; it's not inhuman. and that's what we are going to need for self-driving cars to become widely accepted; something that would seem impossibly good to a human. And I bet they will do it, eventually.

I was responding to

>My suspicion is that the figures quoted around these Google cars and their safety record, if you take them at face value, lead to a ludicrous level of optimism.

and I don't think 300,000 miles without an accident is a ludicrous number; it's something a human can achieve, (even if it's something most humans don't.) It's a milestone, sure, but like I said, for self-driving cars to be accepted, they can't just be better than the average driver; they need to be better than the best drivers.
Production of Autonomous Robot like Earthworm | Science feature
> For future reference, Marco Arment (marco.org) is an iOS developer, and Apple enthusiast. He's also fairly opinionated. Anything he writes is guaranteed to include a strongly stated opinion, usually backed up with facts or at least a rationale for why he holds that viewpoint.

Fixed.
I think it's generally an online thing. I find much more negativity online than in real life. One reason is that it's easier and safer to be negative.

"I knew that company wasn't going to work out."

"I knew that was too good to be true."

In most cases, statements like these are a safe bet. Things aren't always optimistic. I do find it depressing though -- I prefer communities that encourage, maybe even naively, optimism.

I almost never upvote negative comments, although I seem to be a minority in that regard.
Kickback's corpus only goes back to June 2012.
Well then... I can't help but wonder if this affected me too. Had my online banking credentials stolen yesterday (didn't lose anything, my bank picked up on it right away).

So far I haven't actually been able to find any evidence of any malware, but the credentials were way too complicated to have been compromised through any other means really. Since I haven't been able to find any evidence that my machine's been infected, I think that means it's time to re-image it :(

Sorry for the random rant... It's been a rough two days :)
As of right now, the App.net page on Facebook has 74,066 likes. I have a feeling that a lot of those people will jump on board if it's anywhere close to the goal in the last few hours.
Thank you very much, I now know exactly what I'm going to do at my next hackers meetup. This clearly needs more datapoints.

From your link: "I know someone who got his PhD studying Haskell's type system. My prediction that he ate corn in rows was correct". This could very easily have been me too. I started a PhD working in Haskell's type system and I eat corn by rows too.
That's interesting but I'm sure it doesn't explain everything. For example pain is actually experienced differently (confirmed by watching nerve pathways light up on fMRI scans) depending on people's expectations. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/news_and_events/news_articles/news_...
That's not misleading, that's sarcasm.
> it doesn't cost me a single thing to do

This isn't true. It costs you several things, actually: time, at the most basic; some emotional investment, especially if you're like me and find talking to be outside your comfort zone, double plus when it's with strangers; and social regard, which we can hope is paid back but it's not guaranteed (the definition of a gamble).

People who aren't willing to make these expenditures won't ask. Indeed, they shouldn't ask, unless they're intentionally pushing their personal boundaries.

Just because you're wealthy in certain respects does not mean it's okay for you to tell other people to spend in those respects; they might be impoverished in those areas.
What if you don't like corn? I don't actually remember how I eat because it's been so long. Thanks for the fun link.
I think the price would be based on perceived consumption. Just like a gym membership of $50/month seems reasonable because you would go 3x a week, but in reality it is 1x a week or less.
What if the claims were real? Employee coersion and sexual harassment DO exist, you know...
Graduated from college in 95... which makes you, at a minimum, 39 years old, right?
> since I get my TV over the air, I can't fathom for a second why anyone pays for TV.

Here are some reasons people might buy cable:

1. Cable has many more channels, many of which don't exist on over-the-air TV.

2. If you grew up in a cabled household, you may think of it as a "standard" utility and buy it without thinking about whether you really need it.

3. Depending on where you live, the over-the-air channels you receive may be limited. I've discussed this problem before on HN [1].

4. Many homes and buildings no longer have antennas for receiving over-the-air signals. Many new TV's have no or poor built-in antennas. So you may have to buy a bulky antenna with no idea how well it will work.

5. If your TV is more than five years old, you may have to get a converter box to receive TV over the air, since TV transmissions changed format in 2009 [1]. New TV's have hardware to read the new digital TV signals, but old TV's don't.

Here are some reasons people might decide against getting, or discontinue a cable subscription:

1. You can save a substantial amount of money.

2. You may spend less time watching TV if you have less content available (whether this is good or bad is subjective, but for many people, reducing TV time is a plus).

3. Losing access to cable-TV content is less painful if you have a broadband connection, because much content is available freely and legally online -- Youtube, Hulu, Crunchyroll, etc. You can usually* send your computer's video output to your TV.

I'm writing from a USA point of view; if you're in another country, your mileage may vary.

*You need the computer and TV to have the same port, and the proper cable. An astonishing number of video ports have come into existence, many in the last 10-15 years, including traditional antenna, component, composite, VGA, S-Video, DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort. A computer and TV built around the same time are likelier to have the same port, but your best bet is to check the specs before you buy.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307147
It may seem negative to you, and in a particular light I can see that perspective, but you should ask whether those comments truly provide any meaningful contribution to the discussion.

I have been seeing everything from "+1" or similar to "Wow that's great", and while positive, they are ultimately useless comments. They don't contribute in any meaningful way to the discussion. I will always downvote anything that doesn't add meaning.

We are worried about trolls, but all too often we forget about the happy Flickr effect. This means that if you put up a photo on Flickr, almost 99.9% of the commentary you will get on it will be positive. "That's a great photo, good job, +1, WOW, etc". When all of the feedback on your content is purely negative or purely positive, its effectively meaningless.

Our jobs as users of HN is to maintain the traditional high level of discourse as much as possible. That doesn't mean to be assholes or ever-loving angels, but to be in the middle. If you read through my comment history, its a combination of positive and negative. I even recognize that sometimes I forget my own advice and think I come across as too critical or too approving.
Next generation Unix pipe by Alex Larsson