skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One past employer was looking to do such a thing. They handled electronic prescriptions, lab results and insurance claim filings. The premise was that pharmaceutical companies would be interested in long term longitudinal studies of patients.

I identified the highest risk to be the anonymizer system. I called it "sausagizer" because it is easy to turn cows into sausages, but hard/impossible to turn sausages back into cows.

One problem is that data entry isn't consistent or repeatable. So what might be entered as "John Doe" one day, might be "J Doe" or "Doe John" some other days. This is called "patient matching" and has been an area of interest for several decades. One paper discussing it is:
http://www.cecs.csulb.edu/~monge/research/thesis.pdf

Most researchers in similar areas ended up getting lured into "bioinformatics" for the Human Genome Project. More prestige, more money and gene matching is suprisingly similar to string matching.

Sadly, most of the research in the area of patient matching "went dark" after 911. By "going dark" I mean a combination of researchers who used to publish, now no longer do; and companies that used to publish even white papers have disappeared from the market. One such was NORA from SRD. IBM ended up buying the company, and shortly afterwards, all web pages, white papers and even the whole website of SRD vanished (even from archive.org).
http://www.pcworld.com/article/103692/tracking_terrorists_th...
http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/what_do_you_...
How is the Church "ignoring science"?

She may analyze science and apply her moral reasoning and reach a conclusion that some scientists don't like -- but that's hardly ignoring science.
This is great. I was actually thinking about moving away from Gmail because I need to manage a separate email for my podcast and the emails from fans, but I didn't want it integrated directly into my inbox.

While the styling still feels a little rough the functionality is great and it's a much needed enhancement for Gmail.

This goes back to what I said, Gmail needed more changes and improvements and they need to drop the Beta for the entirety and only apply it to features inside the Labs.
ObjectiveResource, an ActiveResource port for the iPhone.
I've flagged this and encourage everyone, both believers and non-believers to do the same.

Because we all know the old joke about arguing on the internet.

And in addition to that many of us have seen what religious arguments on the internet did to reddit.

The story itself may be a perfectly fine, but I encourage everyone to keep HN a religious debate free zone.
full disclosure : I worked on the project
Let me try to draw an analogy.

There are people who sincerely believe "meat is murder." In other words, that killing an animal capable of experiencing terror and pain is wrong in the same way that killing a human being is wrong (though perhaps different in degree, or not). There are other people who, while willing to eat meat, find the conditions that animals live in before they are killed deplorable and would prefer to eat the flesh of an animal that at least gets to experience a more dignified existence before its death.

Now, because the first group advocates a more restrictive standard and takes issue with the second groups willingness to eat meat, is the first group responsible for undue suffering of animals because they fail to acknowledge the reality that people will continue to eat meat?

Yes, this analogy is very inexact in comparison to the positions of monogamy vs. condom use in preventing AIDS. But the general principle is that someone advocating a higher standard is not responsible for others failing to live up to a lesser standard. So, if the Catholic Church advocates monogamy, that does not make them responsible for people not at least using condoms failing that. The only argument left is that the Catholic Church should make gradations in their arguments (condoms bad compared to monogamy, but not as bad as non-monogamous unprotected sex).

(Not a direct response to the article, but to other comments spread throughout this thread. Instead of picking just one to attach this comment to, I'm putting it at the top level.)
Post-Commit Web Hooks for Google Code Project Hosting
I'd say, if you find yourself writing an article about how you don't need to bother to understand someone, that's a sign you should stop writing and start reading.
I'd say you've got the wrong idea.

You look at what costs you money to work out your break even.
You look at what the value is to the customer when working out what to charge.
I know of at least one working-class friend in the Manhattan area that has raised a family and sent a kid to college (with another one going soon) and he's making around $55,000 a year in a good year (being a plumber). People need to start being more realistic about what it takes to live a happy and good life. $110k is a good chunk of change no matter where you are in the world, there is no other way about it.
It's kind of inspiring that they keep innovating or at least try to innovate with such an old product. I wonder how many engineers they have working on Gmail, does anybody know this?
As most smartphones also come equipped with GPS navigation, the device could also act as a radio beacon, and broadcast the owner’s location.

Umm, no...
I'm a capitalist in most ways, such that I fit in around here, but advertising makes me nervous now. I feel like I've managed to grow very resistant to it, but the process of growing that resistant has simply highlighted to me how hard it is and how unlikely it is that we'll ever have a lot of people who can resist it.

A while back on HN I wrote about how I dropped cable and haven't looked back. What I didn't write about was one of the reasons: I have a six-month old son now, and I find that I do not want him within reach of modern advertisers.

Yeah, I grew up with child-focused ads, but now they have 30 years more refinement behind them, while my son is just as much a kid as any other kid in the history of man. It's not a fair fight.

So, I've dropped cable, and will be leaning towards techniques based on DVDs of TV shows and such where there is no advertising focused on him. ("But DVDs have unskippable ads too!".... yeah, well... not when I'm done with them.)

I find myself even staying away from Hulu now, because damn it, I want to pay for video and not get advertised at! I'm tired of it. I can deal with it better than most people, but I'm still tired of it.

It's only part of the reason, and I'm not "terrified" of advertising or anything (obviously he's going to see some no matter what I do, and obviously I survived, even if it wasn't as bad), but I want to give his brain time to develop in an environment not saturated with commercial noise before he has to learn how to resist that, too. There is so much good stuff in the world now, so many good (lightly used) toys, decades or centuries of music, video, board games, everything, that to get caught up on the treadmill and urgency of the products of the now is just... stupid.
"There was a study that showed cigarette companies competed only through advertising, leading only to higher prices, not to better products."

I think that's a variant of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma ?

If no cigarette company advertises then there's no sunk money, if all of them advertises it's a waste, but if none of the advertise and then one of them starts advertising, then that one wins and the others lose.
Mr. Graham, do you take requests for essays? You've been on both sides of the table on this. What would you honestly tell your younger self about protecting your work from "bad guys?" What is worth worrying about, and what is not, in your estimation? That would be very cool.
I don't know, I enjoyed reading the majority of the lists I encountered. I also enjoyed writing mine. Why are we so uptight?
There is probably a salient difference between Congress, the grant committee reviewing AI research proposals, and a gang of chimpanzees doing grooming and dominance games. An alien race unfamiliar with primates might conclude that the difference is how many fleas are killed in each activity.

That's one of the best lines I've ever read. Your real name is PJ O'Rourke, isn't it? :)
I didn't RTFA, but just from the headline, it's pretty obvious why any church can't ignore science: Because it contradicts their bronze age dogma.
Well put.

Dr. Krauss even said that he didn't need to bother to understand theologians in the article itself: "I began my lecture with the somewhat glib remark that it was important for the theologians to listen to me, but not as important for me, as a scientist, to listen to them."
Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is
Game of life that produces scrolling text "Golly"
This is the output:
http://golly.sourceforge.net/ticker.gif
Like one of the commenters to the original article points out: why the heck does running such a simple animation takes up 92% of my CPU capacity on my MacBook?

The initiative is very nice indeed, but this needs a lot of work.
This is exactly what was used to get a pure web based version of Cover Flow on iPhone:

http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/11/06/coverflow-for-safa...
Exactly. For my use case (I'm a diabetic who has moved several times in the past 5 years, which means lots of different doctors) the value I gain by having access to all my records is worth the unease at having Google know SO much about me. I feel out of all the different companies trying to get into this space, I am most comfortable with Google to be the one holding my data.
Just an awareness thing. Since he was talking about malaria-carrying mosquitos when he released them, releasing them had a greater psychological impact than otherwise.
Here's the problem: how do you define student performance? Are we going based on grades? Because that leads to a system that's easily gamed without significant results. I was a B-and-C student in high school because I thought a lot of the stuff I was learning was crap. In the classes I did like, I'd deliberately take risks with what I did and that kept my grade from staying an A+. Is that a failure? The best teachers I had very often didn't give me As, because they were the teachers I'd really strain myself for - and for me, straining was trying to solve answers in a unique way rather than churning out generic A crap.

The other option is that you monitor students for achievement. Again, it's hard. Is that based on money? Personal student happiness? Again, depending on what the metric is, teachers will game it. Go for money and English teachers will start encouraging students to do something more worthwhile than write and study English for a living. If you make it "how many students get a college degree" then you're diluting the college pool further and you're neglecting students who're interested in vocational school and in working on their own rather than continuing education.

The best solution is to remove metric and go by the opinions of experienced people. Good administrators know good teachers when they see them. Good teachers always go by their own formula. If the system effectively removes restriction amongst teachers, then you'll see an increase in student performance, and suddenly paying teachers more is worth it. The problem is that teaching is an act of creativity; it's an art as much as anything is. Formula kills teaching. The minute you make something mandatory it's dead to kids. The problem is, formula feels safer, but it never works.
How to build a career as an artist
What does a hacker do after an accident which puts him to bed rest?
Promoting open government - Track my Tax dollars
Are browser plug-ins security risks?
Is tech really better off than the rest of the economy?
Market forces aren't infallible. They're compromised by a profit motive, and that's not always a good thing.

If you want to see a market in action, look at TV networks. The big networks move farther and farther away from actual reporting. They go for lowest-common-denominator. The channels that do produce great pieces of TV either do it only sporadically, or they're pay-for channels that attract a more sophisticated audience. Even then, the show that critics call the greatest show in history - The Wire - had to fight to get its last season aired. It had an extremely small viewing audience.

However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward metrics which are harder to game.

Which metrics possibly exist that can't be gamed? The minute you have any metric, you're creating a "good" and a "bad" scale, and that means that people can cram towards the good as much as possible.
Microsoft smartphone rumors gain steam
Ouch. If he got off with just 'bed rest' he is in very very good shape. Most motorcycle -> bus 'close encounters of the third kind' do not end that well.
As I proud libertarian I find it hard to justify the case for EVERYTHING to be privately funded.

Take things like railroads which pay back the investment in them in 100+ years.

Usually the cost of borrowing is a function of how much risk there is.

Here's where things get interesting, how many private companies can you name that have been around for over 100 years?

Yes, I now there are dozen of companies older then that, but all those dozens world wide are still just exceptions.

In general almost no companies last that long.

So the risk for private borrowing over 100 years would make the interest way too high for anything.

But governments can borrow at very reduced rates, and that's why they can build railroads profitably.

The same argument can be made with basic science. We know most of the research will not yield anything, while a small part of it will in the long term create thing we can't even imagine.

But those things my not necessarily be profitable, think airlines which are a terrible business to be in.

So the government is like a basic science VC that knows 999999999999 out of 999999999999+2 investments will fail, but 1 will change the world.

And private VCs can't do the same because the risk is too high and the payback takes too long.

I think bridges and roads should be privatized, just look at France.

But I'm not so sure about rails and basics science.
and this is a very good example of why HN sucks, my comment gets voted down.
Well, how would you display these recommended comments? How would you analyze the content of comments to determine recommendation? If I downvote every anti-Linux comment I see, does the algorithm stop showing me anti-Linux comments? Because that detracts from the debate going on. What if I downvote based on poor spellings - or even more, if I downvote solely based on how well the writer forms sentences? How will the algorithm figure that out?

The easiest solutions are the simplest ones. Complexity only serves a purpose when there's a simple cause behind the complexity. Adding algorithms when there's no need will only make things less reliable.
I agree. In that case, he can fight for every point because he has 1000 units of energy, everyone else has 500, and, well, there you have it...he can fight for the "pointless" points.

But let me suggest that outclassing your opponents to such a degree in the real world is far less likely. In golf, for instance, Tiger Woods' early career exploited his far superior drive. As golfers altered their game / exercise approach, Tiger upped his game elsewhere to stay on top. Similarly, if Nadal faces an opponent with equal stamina, I think you'd see a far more strategic game. Or, to phrase it differently: the strategy he employs now (strategic use of endurance) will continue, but become more apparent as he is forced to make tradeoffs. That is, he currently 'picks his battles', but his superior reserves means he can pick each point. Against someone more equally classed, he'll continue to 'pick his battles', but more equal reserves mean we'd see different effects.
Personal information (which mentions his boyfriend) is here: http://joel.spolsky.com/
I've been looking too, but haven't been able to source big whiteboards locally (and shipping costs on the big items limits any savings you'd get).

I went to ikea, in the "as is" section and grabbed a huge panel of lamenated something ($6).
Now, i've just got to get some whiteboard paint
http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=17835&utm_source...

The whiteboard will end up twice as big as anything I found at office depot, and cost should be less than $40.
The rise of haggling
Accurate data about weather changes in the last million years
You can now take photos of documents with a digital camera and the current high resolutions.
Catch up on his reading list?
Axl vs. Frank: More time doesn't mean a better product
In the platonic ideal for free markets, perfect information is a prerequisite.

In our every day markets on the other hands, companies often fight to conceal information because that allows them better pricing options, but that in fact does make the market less efficient.

Some countries, like Germany, have much stricter laws when in comes to product labeling, they require much more information.

And in some countries, like South Korea, there seems to be natural market demand for a lot more product information.

I think that makes those markets more efficient.
Here's an MIT statement from the director of financial aid:

"For MIT, our definition of an independent student is one where there are no parents to rely upon for information (in cases of deceased parents or abuse or neglect). The bar is set pretty high, so we do not generally allow students to be considered independant."

http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/finaid/financial_aid/its...
Pete Silva Demonstrates the FirePass SSL-VPN
This is a much better promotional tool for songsmith than that 'internal' video microsoft put out a few weeks ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E

this is actually appearing to be a pretty amazing product.
That gets prohibitively expensive because you can't pay for quality. Teacher unions have made it such that if you want to pay teachers a lot you have to pay them all (by seniority typically) a lot. That means you'll be grossly over paying a lot of staff.
NAT Primer: How your home router works
I count 8.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/join_the_team.html
> Here's where things get interesting, how many private companies can you name that have been around for over 100 years?

A company doesn't have to last 100 years to profitably make 100 year investments because investments can be sold.

Note that companies think that they will be around in 100 years so, the fact that most won't doesn't enter into their thinking.

However, that illusion/delusion isn't necessary.

Old folks plant trees that won't bear fruit until after said old folks will probably be dead.
It might be old, but it's certainly very widely used - both inside of the company and out.

Also, GMail is becoming more than mail - it's becoming the new desktop, in a way - with integration into mail, chat, calendar, and tasks... What they're doing with widgets will significantly change things, also. For example, Twitter can be integrated in one of those chat-box-like views.
You can put the cubicles in a high-ceiling room. This way you can both have your employees think creatively, and humiliate them enough that they don't ask for a raise.
Yeah, i posted a while ago, hoping that HN would put a comments/vote capability in a frame above the content, but lots of people hated that idea.

No scripts in Chrome yet :(
37 Signals just posted an entry relevant to this concept, comparing the recording styles of Frank Sinatra and Axl Rose:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1560-axl-vs-frank-more-ti...
Most importantly, their filtering, labeling, and displaying options make a huge improvement on the bane of my internet life: email overload. Finally hundreds of emails a day are approaching manageable. Yes: thank you for continuing development on gmail.
> proof that many of these people didn't know what they were doing and consequently that maybe their jobs are not as impossibly hard as they would to portray.

The fact that a lot of people don't know how to do something does not imply that said something is easy to do.

If anything, the failures of such organizations is (weak) evidence that running such organizations is harder than we thought.
I'm familiar with the effectiveness of monetary incentives, and I've often wondered if I should use it on myself. For instance, should I sign up for a hosting service even though I don't have anything to launch right away? That would give me the incentive to (a) get done, and (b) not wait until everything is perfect before launching.
Because certain people believe that because we're spending time writing these lists, it's a sign that we're not being productive.

On the contrary: we're more productive than any other generation. We have instant communication, incredibly powerful tools for computing information, and creating things is easier now than it's ever been before. Because of that, people have more time to unwind. Possibly it's even necessary to keep our minds relaxed. Those things get ignored by Time Magazine, which likes sensationalism and negativity because it sells.
There are many ways to affect others. You can help them, comfort them, share with them, remind them that not all Christians are fundamentalists, ...
Until recently, natural philososphy was a subdivision of theology.
Messaging and Infrastructure Management
Poll: Atheist, Deist, Theist?
Religion doesn't get as rabidly attacked here as on reddit and digg, in fact the opposite seems true. So, I'm curious what the demographics are here. FWIW, I'm in the theist (Christian) camp.
Deist
Theist
Sounds like a cool idea for a startup. Anyone interested? I've been looking for something not completely "web toolish" and something that actually matters (it would make people healthier). This seems to fit the bill.
I'm working on a site to help people lower their cholesterol using similar money/group/contest techniques. Hoping it helps as a vegan, very low oil diet isn't very appealing to meat eaters. Too bad some people wait to have a heart attack before changing habits. (Open to working with others on this project)
nice! Looks like you're winning the "duel" :)
The problem is that in our society, it's unavoidable that people engage in pre/extra marietal sex. This is why abstinence based sex education lead to higher teen pregnancy (since they still have sex just without condom) and why one should just be pragmatic and condone the use of condoms...
Eh, if people can buy clothing, they can buy a net which is a cheaper item. They cost 15 dollars on amazon, and the wholesale price is probably about 50 cents. It's not like the whole continent is still living with bones through their hair,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25afr...
@furyg3 & riklomas:
Real lover-geeks go by CET to be in sync with hot southern European ladies: resolving both those problems.
I sympathize with this. Amazingly, though, this has been a relatively civil discussion.
I bought an Eee PC when I had to stay horizontal last month with a broken leg. That's a fun little computer to keep on your lap.
Personally I like to use the time to read all those theoretical books that I bought and intended to read but just never got around to (you know, the ones filled with pseudo code).

Either that or read up on non-programming related programming texts like Extreme Programming books.
Basically the idea is to read something that will keep your interest and keep the "programming juices flowing" but at the same time won’t inspire you to get up and try anything on the computer (which would violate your bed rest)
I was just going to post this exact link -- I'm not sure that science jobs have had much luster relative to their counterparts over the last 30 - 40 years in general because equivalent kinds of professions like finance, law, and business have vastly outstripped science pay and job security.

Greenspun's article seems a bit hyperbolic, but its main contours are accurate. If you're curious about the issue and haven't read it, you absolute should.