skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, he's invited many people to look at his medical information and to provide treatment suggestions.

He then has to assess the advice he's given, and decide on a treatment option.

What his approach has done is remove the filter that a good[1] doctor should be providing.

People say "Hey, my aunt had cancer. She tried homeopathy, and it totally worked!" but they don't mention what type of cancer it was, and if any other treatment had been involved at the same time. And you tend not to hear the "Hey, my aunt had cancer. She tried homeopathy. She's dead now, of course." stories.[2]

And now he has a mix of stuff which might be working, with stuff that's not doing anything (not doing any harm, but costing money, and needing transport and the risks of car travel) such as homeopathy. And if he is cured? What gets the credit? The total mix? Or the actual medicine?

Reading research studies is for most people tricky. They don't know much about sample sizes or how to tell if blinding is adequate or if the control is any good or if the result is statistically significant. Most people have awful understanding of statistics. (What does a 50% increase in risk mean? Most people would be horrified if told that something increases risk by 50%, but they don't stop and think about population sizes.)

So why didn't he just learn some better questions to ask his doctor?

"What happens if I do nothing?" is a great question. "Imagine 10,000 people going through this surgery; how many die? how many aren't 'cured'? how many have significant complications?" are other good questions. "What other options are there, and why are you not considering those?"

I haven't read it yet, but "Testing Treatments" is supposed to be a good book about this kind of stuff.

[1] Not all doctors are good. Some are awful.

[2] "Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis." - Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.
Regardless of your stand on OSS & proprietary software, most of the world runs on Windows. The idea that reading a doc file required "..programming tools to hack the files and make them open...." is hyperbole. If you have enough tech skills to install linux, you sure know how to find a way to read docx files. To most people, reading an open doc format would actually represent more of a challenge.
The Spy Earpiece - Something Worth Your Attention
> But Traditional Chinese Medicine and Homeopathic Oncology are not treatments; they operate under fraudulent principles - they are, at best, Lifestyle interventions

The foundational principles of traditional medicine (Chinese, Ayurvedic, whatever) are generally bullshit. But that doesn't mean that everything that emerges from them should be ignored. If researchers have the resources and inclination to engage with specific claims and put them to the test, surprising discoveries can still result in this day and age.[1] Of course, that doesn't mean that discussion of any one patient's treatment should always be surrounded by a haze of quackery. But we shouldn't close the door completely. We should be careful to distinguish the fanciful principles of traditional therapies from their observed benefits over centuries and from the actually fraudulent nature of later pseudomedicine such as homeopathy.

[1] http://www.washington.edu/news/2011/04/04/high-dose-of-oxyge...
Sometimes, if you mistype a word or forget a space, it incorrectly matches the word you're typing to the word on screen. Took me a while to figure that out and go back a few words to retype them.
What is the pricing for CirclCI, I can't find any on your site, and that makes me less intersted in trying it out :-)

(and is there support for not github based hosting?)

[edit]
And I see that you dont support ghc (haskell). Oh well, I guess I still need to wait for Travis CI to roll out there paid version :)
> How can this paradigm be used to build predictable software that works as intended when we have no guarantee when and where an expression will be evaluated?

s/an expression will be evaluated/commands are fired/

reveals the latent imperative mindset.

FP programs are designed by laying out, not unlike how train tracks are laid out, transformations from input to output. Some of these transformations are too complex to get right all at once, so they get broken down into smaller ones which are then composed together. (Obviously, there are other reasons why composition is a win.)

An FP program "works as intended" because the transformations from input to output are correct. In high-end software some, possibly even all of it are rigorously proven correct using mathematical reasoning.

The two main ways of correctness reasoning about transformations is with strict or with non-strict semantics. Time/space usage, i.e. the performance characteristics, is treated as an operational concern. That's when the nitty-gritty of eager and lazy evaluation come into play.

The bottom line is that if all time is spent stressing over evaluation, you're optimizing prematurely.
Is anyone saying that? I believe it's a strawman. What people say is "ideas are worthless" which is quotable hyperbole used to club stubborn NDA wielding entrepreneurs over the head.

That is surely how it started, but I'm not sure everyone on the start-up scene today got the memo.

Unfortunately, until you start to execute, you only have the an extremely hazy understanding if your starting point was good.

I still respectfully disagree. Some of the most successful small businesses I'm familiar with started out with a disruptive idea in a specialised market that was so far beyond what was available at the time that there was never really any doubt that it would be viable and a successful company would result, the only question was how successful.

The common factors in each case were founders with a shared interest in/understanding of some specific field, often an existing support network in that field, a solid combination of general technical and non-technical skills, and most importantly, going where no other team with those combined strengths had been before. If you stop trying to appeal to the entire planet and start looking into niche areas (which does not necessarily imply tiny markets, just smaller than "everyone"), it's amazing how many opportunities there are to apply modern technology to do things qualitatively or at least order-of-magnitude quantitatively better, and how many real problems you can solve for businesses and private individuals alike.

Many of those businesses are also counterexamples to the popular wisdom that if you have no competitors in a market then that's a bad sign because there isn't really a market there. Sometimes you really are just that much better than everyone else, because if your market isn't full of geeks who build their own hardware or write software just for fun, even applying quite basic (by geek standards) skills can put you far beyond old school, manual ways of doing things.
Responding to messages or choosing not to is event handling.
I'm not an iPhone developer, but from my perspective this looks like a big problem for all apps that release products and/or updates only compatible with newer iPhones. These products/updates almost always warn the user in the descriptions, but these apps seem to always get flamed in comments and ratings anyways.

To the iOS devs out there:

* Have you run into this problem, and if so is this as frustrating as it seems?

* Why can't/wont Apple create a better system for this?

The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that this is an awkwardly passive aggressive method of incentivizing all apps to be backwards compatible. Surely it can't be ignorance to this developer need, right?
Could people who picked up pieces of confetti and stuck them together in order to decipher their contents be charged with a crime, similarly to how people have been prosecuted for "hacking" by retrieving information through trivial tinkering with public URLs?
These are engineering problems that are capital-h Hard, well beyond the level of graph theory they're using now.
Ahem, don't forget to talk to me and my team about our sex tech startup...:) http://www.xbiz.com/news/156181
a true gem, thanks for this. where did you find out about this paper?
I'd be happy to open up my medical notes to medical researchers, but there's no easy way to do this in England.

I'd want some kind of protections.

I'd want researchers to pre-announce any research they were going to do, and then publish the research they do. This is to avoid null-responses being filed away.

I'd want any research being done with my data to be published freely.

There'd have to be some kind of suitable anonymization. Yes, I understand that's difficult.
I am not a lawyer.

In my experience, HIPPA does not provide any spec. It is akin to "did/do you have reasonable precautions for X?" so every organization is different, though many go to the extreme under HIPPA, because it providing documentation you had documentation, or documented you provided the document ad nauseam. It has little do do with how to mangle a document.

That said, HIPPA does have something: it persuades cynicism and paranoia. Two words which make cautious.
I have an similar add (from the last New Yorker) in my possession, and the effect is pretty conspicuous. Maybe it's just with the New Yorker...
I recognize the effect that they are trying to achieve. I'm just asserting that it looks bad.
this might be a viable food source for the local rodent population.
a fire.
How the Dogme manifesto reinvented Denmark
Yes, and it's why this fantastic post (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/02/the-evolution-of...) has never had traction on HN (as far as I know).
I would recommend "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena.

What I believe this book provides that CLRS does not is a series of succinct descriptions of common algorithms AND brief explanations of where you would most likely find those algorithms to be near optimal solutions.

Skiena's book does not provide a detailed theoretical analysis of each algorithm like CLRS does, nor does it include particularly exotic data structures and algorithms you'd find in journal papers. What Skiena does provide along with each algorithm is a series of references which do provide a lot of this additional background information that you could independently find if you need a more detailed look at a topic.

As a bonus the book also includes a series of "War Stories" describing how some of the algorithms solved specific real world problems. They're an amusing break from the rest of the book if you're trying to read it cover to cover rather than just as a reference.
why does it have to compare to other posts? why can't it be inflammatory? i think it adds to the conversation
For example? Note that it has to have equal or better marketing potential.
soldiers (most with fathers in jail)

Sounds made up. Citation?
Let me say it in another way.

Abstract Maths is like having a Organic Chemist working on understanding the transformation of food at the molecular level. A Software Programmer is like a cook who knows how to mix and prepare food in order to make a delicious dish out of it.
Search for the TODOs and XXXs
I had an MRI done a while back and got a DVD of the data. It came with a proprietary viewer, but some tinkering got me raw image files I was able to deal with. I released it all at http://demoseen.com/mri mainly for my own enjoyment.

While it wasn't hard for me, most would've been stuck without access to their own data.
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It was randomly delayed for me as well (granted I'm using Chromium v20...). That (and the otherwise mentioned skipping to the next word erratically... and the not explaining visually how errors are handled) made it nearly useless to me. I would not be inclined to prefer it over, say Type-racer, except as a curio in the show-HN area.
The apps we are using at common but as to whether they would usually be used in conjunction with one another, I am not sure. I was more planning on aiming this at to so configurable that the system could be used in conjunction with any software (there would of course be limits to this though).
Not all is roses in the enterprise software world.

Businesses will often refuse to buy from companies they regard as likely to disappear in a few years-- unfortunately, most startups tend to get lumped into this category by default. The burden of proof is on you to prove otherwise. (This is rational behavior on their part, by the way.) Managers are naturally conservative. They know that signing a slightly too-expensive deal with, say Oracle (to pick a random example), won't get them fired-- but signing a deal with some startup that fails to deliver surely will end their career.

Finally, there's the problem that because sunk costs in existing systems are often high, it can be hard to break into a market. This is what keeps COBOL and even FORTRAN chugging away in corners of the world. Costs might be lower a few years after replacing these systems-- but then again, they might not. It depends on who you get to put in the replacement, and if you have trouble telling the good developers from the bad, maybe you are better off not touching it. Building and deploying is one thing. Selling is quite another, and it's not easy or cheap. Forget about word-of-mouth and friends-of-friends.

Do enterprises demand a higher standard of testing? I think it depends on what your product does. I work in enterprise storage, so for us there absolutely is a higher standard of testing. I can't speak for other applications, though.

Things like Yammer and Salesforce are practically the exception that proves the rule; the very rare app that needs to scale multitenant across every company in the world.

Yeah, but that's where the fun is for engineers. And in time, companies like these will reduce the need for so many companies to build custom solutions.
Unfortunately this approach doesn't scale. The reason he had 90 doctors and researchers looking at his case is likely due to the novelty of someone putting all their information online. As soon as you have a not insignificant number of people doing this, good luck even getting one doctor to notice your case and volunteer their time.
The Biggest Problem in Mobile: Retention
In a sense, but message passing is the basic concept of object-oriented programming. Choosing which messages to receive and respond to is defining an interface. If you don't want to do that, you just don't want an object-oriented list of strings. Maybe you just want a list of strings that lives in a struct with some function pointers and some syntactic sugar for calling those functions. And that's fine. But for those of us who do want an object-oriented list of strings, allowing that list of strings to respond to messages like "where" is perfectly acceptable, and certainly no worse than demanding that it only respond to messages like "filter".

If anything, it introduces unnecessary semantics to syntactically distinguish between messages that are responded to with instance variables and messages that are responded to with function calls.
Short answer, I usually don't.

Longer answer, the more I write on HN the better my writing probably becomes because I get feedback from "my" audience in the form of comments and votes.

Over the past week, I read And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. He spent fifteen years as a full time writer before Slaughterhouse Five was published. He had been writing press releases for GE before that. He had written for his campus newspaper while in college. He had worked for news bureau. It didn't come overnight.

I don't know much about writing well, but writing better is hard work. I suspect that the 10,000 hour rule applies. When reading PG's latest essay, keep in mind that he has been a published author for nearly twenty years.

Good luck.
There is a project out there to share 3D printer files for sex toys. MakerLove.com provides files you can download and print for free.
And an eye-catching simplicity.
Pull requests gladly accepted.
Basically a users comments and submissions are automatically killed (you can see them by turning on 'showdead' in your profile) to everyone but the user.

It's a very useful technique for fighting spam and trolls because it hides their activity from the rest of the site, yet they don't know that there is a problem so they don't work around it or create a new account.

The HN mods like to use hellbans on trolls, however it can sometimes be hard to distinguish a troll from a misguided or obnoxious user. Also, sometimes an otherwise good user will have a thread where they come off as trolling for one reason or another. In these cases it can be hard to know whether a user should be banned or not.
I agree completely.

Part of the problem remains however that so many treatments have been studied and proven wrong, however proponents of treatment by 'Insert CAM modality here' remain willfully blind to the evidence against their treatment, and still tell everyone that will listen that not only does it work, but modern medicine won't test it and the studies aren't done.

as evidence I proffer the more than $1 Bn spent by the NCCAM for research into CAM that has largely come up bunk on the big issues.

The research should be done, it is important to approach it with an open mind, but CAM proponents must live up to their end of the bargain and stop moving the goalposts whenever a study that debunks a modality is released.

ps. I'm not too sure what your link has to do with the discussion exactly - I mean, artemisinin is not exactly part of the CAM stable anymore, it's a well accepted part of 'medicine proper' these days - joining a long list of other traditional therapies, asprin first and foremost amongst them, that have followed that route
It works well and looks nice, but part of typing quickly is seeing the next word in advance so I know what to start typing after the space. Your app doesn't show me those words, so I have to hite space-bar and then wait some time before I know what key to strike next (probably worth mentioning that part of seeing the next word involves consuming the word, rather than individual characters -- so that standard letter-groups are queued up).

Edit: ...and now I can reply. Go figure.
Are there practical reasons we couldn't switch to RSA-65536?
Yes, I read that and was referring to this exactly, but somewhat jokingly. I just thought that "incredible" could be a more polite way to say "useless"...
High-skill green cards get lame-duck push in Congress
Ask HN: So, what is your problem?
We're all aware that if we're going to spend time building software, it should actually solve someones problem.

We also know that ideas are easy to come by, but solvable problems are harder.

So, what is your problem that needs solving? Either you'll get a response to something you didn't know existed that solves your problem, or someone might start working on a solution for it.
I dunno, shredded waste paper is pretty darn cheap.
Total Eclipse of the Sun
All I can say is that the pricing is egregiously high. At that point, it becomes more lucrative to simply develop one's own board.
My heartfelt condolences.
I had a cousin my age with GBM, and have been involved extensively with a Neurosurgeon in the surgical resection of GBM tumours. It is truly one of the worst conditions there are.

The essence of what you are getting at, I think, is whether we should treat some cases at all. This is a problem I have considered many times watching my Surgeon interact with GBM patients.

I think it comes down to 2 measures: Does the patient desire quantity of life, or quality of life? And what trade-offs would a patient be willing to accept in order to achieve quantity of life?
Would it be okay for them to be a hemiplaegic? Paralysed? Unable to speak? Blind? For some patients this is okay as they may see their children reach some meaningful milestone, or be able to go and do that 1 thing they have always wanted to do.

This is a horrible tradeoff that no medical practitioner can offer any advice on, it is a deeply personal choice.
My thoughts go out to you and your family.
It's a feature that means that those of us living outside the continental USA are not disadvantaged.
>I can recognize at a glance is 50 shades

Hrrm..
I'm not sure what problem is supposed to be solved here. Sharing political opinions? I can't walk down the street without hearing someone's political opinions. That's all humans DO, is share political opinions.

The shortage is not of opinions, but attention. Why should I or anyone pay attention to your site? I can write my political opinions anywhere: Obama sucks. See? Look how easy that was.

I'm a voter. Why should I use your site? No reason.

I'm a politician. Why should I use your site? No reason.

You need to rethink. Go talk to some actual political people. No one has any reason to use your site or to give you any money. Most importantly, there's no virality factor - no one has any reason to try to get their friends to use it.

I just went to your site. It asked me something about a bike lane in Madison Wisconsin. I don't have the slightest idea what it is talking about and have never been to Madison Wisconsin. I voted no.
Okay, thanks for the reply.
I am not of the mindset that HN should be a democracy.

If it serves the explicit and implicit goals of HN, I don't find issue with hellbanning.
Don't you find RAR's compression ratio better? Besides one can use 7zip or peazip to open the RAR files anyway.

Nokia also does not seem to realise that it has a lot of customer goodwill in many, many countries. I wish and hope they do not squander it away.
The problem is that:

(1) Yes, idiots are getting rich. But most idiots are still poor, just like most smart people are poor. No human society has managed to create a lasting positive correlation between merit and success, because we, as people, are too fucking stupid and prone to complacency for that to be stable.

(2) People everywhere exaggerate their success and connections to important people. In finance, you encounter this around bonus time because the bonus is a performance review, so everyone claims to have received the top bonus available to their year.
I don't know if the technology has improved since last I checked, but recycling shredded paper is a no-no. The fibers in the shredded paper are too short to make usable paper products from.
Pricing is $19/$49/$149 for 1/10/40 private repos. That includes unlimited builds, unlimited test time, etc.

We don't support non-GitHub sorry.

We do support ghc, and have a few customers using it. I should write a doc for that.
One thing to be aware of when storing sensitive information in environment variables, is that it is possible to view the environment variables a process is using.
This is genius. It's like the art from William Gibson's Spook Country come to life, but made practical and tied to a huge fan base.
Why I quit Netflix
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss foundational principles of TCM as 'generally bullshit'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture#Effectiveness_resea...

It's more like - the foundations of TCM hold but over time knowledge passed down has accrued a lot of junk.

I wouldn't use TCM to treat cancer.

If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_food_therapy a lot of it doesn't make sense.

I still believe the principle is sound however; Eat lots of fried foods and drink not enough water and you can expect to get mouth ulcers.