skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're organizers of a conference, not academics. If you require them to replicate the experiment to prove it's good science, you're crippling them. It's perfectly appropriate for them to apply conservative heuristics to make their editorial load manageable, and a good heuristic is "has the appropriate academic credentials."

They're popularizers, not the cutting edge.
Well done to Larry Page, doesn't matter if its a PR (which I doubt) situation, he's directly improving the quality of life for a large group. Kudos to him. Flu seems trivial but often ends up distinctly not in kids.
http://www.google.com/reader/i/ works
$1500/mo seems stunningly cheap for what I imagine is billed as medical equipment. Is there something about the Japanese medical system that prevents massive price inflation from kicking in as soon as you want to say your device is for medical purposes?

Also, if you are into real-life Terminator coolness, Boston Dynamics is a pretty good source of that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mclbVTIYG8E
Lock firm Onity offering security fix
I really can't understand the idiocy and hatred spewed by some people on this post. I really hope that is just a very vocal minority that comes out to the light on these kind of posts.
At 250 people, you would think you're a business and no longer a startup. Once you pass Dunbar's number you probably are no longer a startup.
Because the payment card industry and the banks that make up the PCI, aren't going to eat losses due to fraud, chargebacks, and refunds. So you must hold a reserve to cover them, and it's either your money, or the merchants' money.

If you're holding the reserve from your own pockets, you're very trusting, to the point of being naive.

Additionally, the longer you hold the money, before sweeping it to the merchant, the more interest you earn on it.
Create a pointer trails with Jquery
This is exactly one of the cases where it would be helpful (and good for Facebooks PR) to have some customer support.

Or even a basic -- let 10% of my friends review this and then come back -- option would be better than that.
With Google+, Google has forgotten the main question expounded by jwz, that people who design social networks should ask:

"Will this software that I'm writing help my users get laid?"

With Google+ the answer is a resounding "NO".

Ergo, no one uses G+ seriously.
Ah, I see. Thanks, I can buy that argument.

A good argument can then also be that you should never trust emails outside your own provider? If you are sending to an @gmail to @gmail, you should be covered a bit better?
A decade ago, Python being widely used in Google and the creator of Python being employed by the company was a big endorsement for the language. Now Python is quite mainstream. Actually, Guido was allowed to devote 50% of his time at Google for Python. Hope the good work continues at Dropbox.
Erm, yes, it is superior, as it has all the capability of IMAP and more. See this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2007/07/10/34033....
Fix for [Onity] hotels' lock hack roll out
From what I've overheard from lawyer friends, it seems educational pedigree is way culturally overrated in the legal industry.

Apparently, if you have ten years experience in a specialized role, where you went to undergrad still matters. That's just crazy. So in light of that, it's possible that everyone's just putting so much stock in those graduates for no good reason at all.

Or maybe it's for the same reason as McKinsey and the other management consulting firms. They're billing these fresh grads out at 5-10X what they're paid, and those clients want to feel like they're paying for the best and brightest.

As for whether there's an opening you could drive a truck through.. it depends on how much of the work is 'routine' vs how much actually requires a seasoned lawyer to get done.
This is a political argument masked as a scientific one. Unless they have peer reviewed research to back up their opinion, it's irrelevant to the point of dishonesty (appeal to authority) that they are scientists.
Wow if he really did contribute a lot (which I don't doubt at all) then how did Google let him get away? I'd imagine his lifestyle there was pretty nice.
Yes.

As a 39 year old programmer the most important thing I've learned is that my subconscious brain is way smarter than my conscious brain and the best way for me to solve a difficult problem is to think about it for a little bit and then not think about it for a while.

Later when I'm walking or in the shower or just waking up from sleep, a solution far better than any I came up with using focused thought will suddenly appear nearly fully formed in my head.
> Who cares what Larry does with his money.

That's less the worry than, "It's not totally healthy to have a culture which idolizes people who have a lot of money and then give some of it away, because it reinforces the message that making money = good person, not making money = slob or freeloader." I have a grandfather who hates, hates, welfare recipients, with a passion. If I showed him this story, he would interpret it as "proof that rich people are better than poor people," guaranteed.

> Uh, by giving them access to healthcare, like vaccines?

Yes, but as has been mentioned elsewhere, the problem isn't "let's give them healthcare!" Almost everybody thinks that's a good idea. The bigger question is, how do we pay for that healthcare? A much thornier question, as this thread proves.

> what the hell does Larry's employer have to do with his personal donation of money for vaccines.

See the above "are we validating wealth as the only means of value" question, only add to that the perspective that our lives revolve unhealthily around our employers already, that we work arbitrarily hard because our economic system forces us to work just for basic, unrelated needs (it's like "making money = good" only worse, because this is more like "working a lot = not dying of sickness"), and that perhaps employers working even harder to take control of every aspect of our lives, like where we live (Google dorms) and what we eat and how we stay healthy, is yet another sign of dysfunction.

> I'm sorry, I don't buy this attempt to legitimize the miserable attitudes of some in this thread.

I don't fully agree with any of the three opinions I stated above, to be clear. But I think that each is a valid and interesting perspective, and each one is worth a discussion.

Honestly, why post a story to Hacker News if you don't want a discussion? And aren't discussions about interesting, controversial perspectives better than discussions that go "Man, I wish I was Larry Page," and "Look at this other rich person that gave money too!", and "Boy, this proves that not all rich people are evil people, rah rah 1%, boo boo Occupy Wall Street!" – I mean, aren't conversations that introduce new and interesting perspectives good in general?
Instagram Appears To Have Turned Twitter Cards Back On For Its Photos
The amount of negativity and even in anger in the HN comments here is amazing. A successful entrepreneur uses some of his money to provide children with vaccines - how can people respond badly to that?
You realize that was an internal spoof, right?
See also: https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/12/welcome-guido/
> What's worse, you need to go to a doctor to get vaccinated

Huh? It's been years since I got a flu vaccine from a doctor. I usually get them at the drug store, when I'm there anyway to pick up a prescription. One year, I got it at a Safeway.
Grunt.js Workflow
I would argue that Dropbox isn't a startup anymore.

Once you've found a business model and start scaling your personnel (i.e. Steve Blank's "Company Building" stage), a startup is no longer a startup, IMO.
Anyone who says things like "They are metaphorically shoving it in their users' faces" deserves an incredibly swift kick up the arse.
my thoughts exactly.
I feel like it's a status symbol for a comapany. They are most likely busy giving talks and lectures to do any actual work.

Maybe their value is in the odd meeting where they can voice some input.
I've never had the pleasure of being in the room with giants such as these so I wouldn't know sadly.
That's ok, but your comment doesn't come across in that way, and it is also sort of irrelevant. One guy with a lot of money decided to give free flu shots to some kids, period. He is not solving the world's health problems and I can't honestly see how that is relevant to what he did.
Here is a Climate Science PhD program. Candidates have to publish material in those journals:

http://www.swissuniversity.ch/unibe/climate-sciences/phd-pro...

"The PhD thesis usually consists of three to four peer-reviewed scientific articles"
This is surprisingly naive for someone who wants to build a floating city in order to create libertarian paradise?

What would be 'expectedly naive'?
Introducing the Amazon.ca Kindle Store
One of the biggest draws of Github (to me) is that it's one central place for me to go for a wide array of projects that I work with, and where a lot of people I know can host their code to share with the large community of developers already on Github.

By using Gitlab on your own hosting, you lose all of that convenience of having everything in one place. Imagine that every time you want to contribute to a project, you have recreate yet another user account, upload all of your SSH keys again, and more. And then further imagine that you want to fork and work on repos from multiple projects that all have their own Gitlab instances, and now checking on your projects requires visiting N different sites to get the same information that you already get from a single login to Github.

Now I'm just as big of a fan of open source as the next person, but having a single central place to visit for projects is a Good Thing, and IMO Github has proven time and again that they actually care about the open source community as much as we do, and have done so much to foster communication and interaction between developers that their contributions are far more important to me than the value of having my code repositories hosted on an open source platform.
Assuming such a large number of people are idiots seems like a really unhealthy attitude to have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
You appear to misunderstand the principle. Behavior is acceptable or not in the context in which it occurs.

Let me try to help tomjen3 out. What holdenweb is saying is that it is your responsibility to be psychic. You are required to know, a priori, the current emotional state, the degree of emotional fragility, and the receptiveness to new ideas that your chosen conversational partner possesses.

Most of the "context" of these types of occurrences are judged by the geekfeminist zeitgeist to be centered around the fear experienced by, and emotional state of, the other party -- which you are expected to know through various psychic processes.
I just did a little research to see what alternatives are out there for custom domain emails. I haven't used these Namecheap for email, though I have used them for domain hosting after the SOPA debacle.

Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting for $2.99/user/year. 3GB storage. Supports IMAP. 50MB attachment limit. No ads. No clue on the web interface quality, nor spam-filtering quality, but it's definitely a good price from a good company.
An app to find a Wingman to hit on girls with, lol?
An appeal to an authority who is an expert in the field is not a logical fallacy. It makes complete sense to want to hear about global warming from a climate scientist.
Scroogled حملة مايكروسوفت ضد غوغل مستمرة - تك عربي
People were tossing it around to describe a 400-person Twitter team in 2010 or 2011 (can't remember which).
That is one of the most idiotic things I have ever read. I hope you are being sarcastic.
That's a reasonable upper bound. Once the company is big enough to the point where you don't remember everyone's name, it's past the startup point.
Google Grants $1.2M to Help Analyze Female Roles in TV, Film
The original title of this post was: "a company called Cyberdyne makes an exoskeleton - really".

By changing the title, the novelty is lost.
> The rest of us will continue using Bitcoin through Tor and i2p, keeping our money safe and anonymous.

Good for you. But you can already buy drugs with bitcoin. That problem has been solved; for a while now. What's not solved is being able to use it for everything else. That's only going to happen with more legitimacy and general use.
Yes. Also, there's a spectrum of legal work, from bread-and-butter conveyancing and wills, to appellate litigation.

The work that is truly straightforward can be automated... and is. For example, in Australia at least, you can get a DIY wills pack.

The essential need for humans in legal work is integration: relating a fact situation with relevant laws. The fact situation is not pre-recorded according to a grammar - and the semantics of the law are not precisely defined. Both aspects and their connection are far more flexible and ambiguous and uncertain than any IT integration. Possibly similar complexity though.

tl;dr we'll have automated IT integration long before we have automated legal work.
Fearmongering, alas, doesn't require much in the way of actual experience. Look at American perception of crime versus actual crime rates. Fear of flying versus actual risk. Or the amount of money we spend "fighting" "terrorism" versus actual harm.

I suspect a campaign like this could have worked if Microsoft didn't have a giant pot/kettle problem.
Guy Steele's work at Oracle (previously Sun) was in the area of language design, but companies at that scale can afford a dedicated R+D presence.
Nimble 250. I worked at places with 25 people that weren't close to anything I'd consider "nimble".
Welcome Guido
Thanks, glad to hear. The functional testing of the complete product is very important of course, but I'm also referring to rigorous testing of every single block of code.
Baggg.it is a Wayyy to Baggg and Sharrre Your Online Shoppping
Code Quarterly's interview with Hal Abelson
If Guido van Rossum wanted to work on python full time, I am sure that there would be companies like Red Hat that would be very happy to pay him to do exactly that.
This is just confirmation bias, the "slick" Microsoft isn't newsworthy.
I understand and agree if you have that need, sure. Personally, I don't. I was sold on the fact that 'It's there when you need it'. I believed it. Then I started calculating and understood that the amount of times I 'need' it and the low priority and non-emergency of the matter did not pay off.

For example, I wanted Walmart to price match something on Amazon. They don't price-match online retailers. Okay. I'll buy it off of Amazon. Including taxes and shipping and handling, I would've saved $5. I'm not a consumerist, so I hardly buy things and wouldn't save that much a year. I'm probably a technology vendor's worst nightmare, though. I find that the better deals are always on Amazon/online because either Best Buy/Fry's don't have the same models or I am not willing to pay more for the convenience of having it immediately. For example, I'm an audio guy. I want to buy a particular set of cans. Big box stores would never and have never stocked these pair. The specialized stores that do charge way more. That's pretty much all specialized gear, unless it is old hardware/technology (Rokit monitors, e.g.).

Different strokes.
As long as we are on HN, might as well as cite PG on what a startup is: http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

>A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
I can't really get behind you on this. What do you think of the word "niveau" in Danish? Or "risalamande"? Would you advocate their removal? Languages did not sprout fully-formed from the thigh of Jupiter, they evolved organically.

At the same time, I do understand where you are coming from. Having such a large proportion of your population be fluent in English - and thus more influenced by its culture, is potentially an issue for the Danish culture.
Stranger rape is not especially uncommon, unfortunately. Something like 1 in 5 women, possibly even more, are sexually assaulted at least once in a lifetime.

Are you suggesting that geeks can't rape people? Seriously? I'm sure it's not because of their inherent gentleness or sunny dispositions. It's not because geeks aren't frequently sexually frustrated – so frustrated that they resort to asking women out to drinks at four in the goddamned morning just because they were unlucky enough to board the same elevator. Is it because geeks are weak or something? Because brother, I know more geeks who own knives and switchblades than people of any other social substratum, and knives make it pretty easy to overpower somebody in, say, a small cramped space.

If you think rape never happens on elevators, or in public places, or amidst other "males" who are "glamoring for a chance to be the hero" – well, buddy, you're starting to sound a little silly. I'm not saying you should be kicked out of a conference for asking a girl out in such a stupid, oblivious way, but Rebecca didn't have him kicked out. She just said that it "bothered" her and that she felt it was "creepy". And for that she received a lot of harassment from people just like you.
Why I'm writing on the iPad
> You may not think these are good reasons, but a person doesn't have to be badly misinformed, stupid, or spiteful to find them persuasive.

Actually, a person has to be willingly uninformed to find them persuasive. Because there are actually case studies to be made, rather than evaluate ideas in vacuum:

- more expensive: It costs much less in every other country that has a single payer system, despite government inefficiency (including the Swiss and German system, where everything is private even though it's single payer, and the UK, France and Israel where it is public or private, and in Canada where it is completely public). And yet, those countries enjoy better health in every possible measurement.

- innovation: Those places all comparable innovation to the US (especially if normalized to "average entrepreneurship level" of the country - e.g. there's much less of that in Germany and France in general, but actually much more in Israel)

- uncompassionate: That is demonstrably not true in the above countries. Furthermore, the private system in the US is already demonstrably not compassionate in any way.

- government can deny health care: Government can do anything it pleases, like jail you, or confiscate all money not on your person at a press of a button (and if you're going through texas, all money on your person as well. Oops, can't pay for healthcare! private healthcare denied for you!) - that's a strawman. If you look at Switzerland, Japan, UK, France, Canada, ..., people who get on the wrong side of the government get better healthcare than people on the right side of the government in the US. No one is denied healthcare! The Israelis even treat the Gazans they bombarded the day before.

- Unfair competition: That's your only statement that is not demonstrably false using a counterexample. In fact, it's true. That's because it makes healthcare into a utility, much like schooling and water supply.

So, one reason that is not based on demonstrably false assumptions. That one is debatable; some people think healthcare should be available like schools, others do not. That should be what is being discussed, not the other reasons.

I actually listened to the other side, and heard one other good reason to avoid public health care:

- There is no reason people who care about their health should subsidize people who don't take care of their health (w.r.t exercise, nutrition, alcohol and drug consumption, regular medical attention, etc) as the latter consume much more healthcare services.

Which is again debatable: The same is true for basically every other shared cost facility (including utilities, fire services, police forces, road use, ...)

If the debate was around that, I would be happy. But somehow, in American politics, it has always been improper to bring up facts and case studies. And recently, it is becoming bad form to use logic.
It is extremely common to use the word "access" to mean "have the economic means of acquiring" when talking about sociological issues or healthcare.

I have "access" to a new Porsche. That doesn't really mean anything useful at all.
LLVM's new Loop Vectorizer
I'll echo what I said elsewhere in this thread. When it comes to this topic, reality is irrelevant. FBI crime statistics are entirely unimportant in this discussion.

What is important is that you understand, accept, and modify your behavior to be more amenable to, the fear and emotional fragility that other people hold about the topic. It is not their responsibility to become more educated about actual risks - it is yours to behave as if these perceived threats are as likely as they think they are.
I would assume that someone like Guido would be really valuable when architecting complex project written in Python. Maybe he won't be directly writing a bunch of small features, but at the scale Dropbox works at some REALLY good code reviews and language-related design decisions could produce big dividends.
Head of Google+ Vic Gundotra: I was asked not to tweet again... by my boss
It's been difficult to "learn" node. Because the libraries have changed drastically in the last 2-3 years, many guides are out of date. You can learn the basics through trial and error and the docs, but you can't learn best practices, which are important if you're trying to write software that other people will use (OSS).

I've read through this guide before, and it's okay, but it's not really all that good at defining best practices, and in fact in some places the code isn't very good, but Manuel fully admits this in a few places.

If you don't already know JavaScript, or only know a little, this is probably a good place to start, but if you're already fluent in JS and have used server-side JS a bit in the past (whether through Rhino, sm, v8, whatever), it's probably not a very useful guide. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of good resources out there - the language is very new and the library of current and available knowledge is not very large.

I haven't checked out the Node Cookbook yet, but do plan to in the future. Until then, to really get a good knowledge of some of the APIs you still have to do a bit of trailblazing.
Why Guido left? That's the question.
um. did you read any of the articles linked from that page. They are all based on factual evidence and peer-reviewed research. are you saying the union of concerned scientists just makes things up ? or that expert opinions are useless by the fact that they are opinions ?

edit: here's a summation of much of what's linked from that page from wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_contr...

> In 2009 the Union of Concerned Scientists summarized numerous peer-reviewed studies on the yield contribution of genetic engineering in the United States. This report examined the two most widely grown engineered crops—soybeans and maize (corn).[211] The report found that engineered herbicide tolerant soy and maize did not increase yield at the national, aggregate level. Maize engineered with Bt insect resistance genes increased national yield by about 3 to 4 percent. Engineered crops increased net yield in all cases. The study concluded that in the United States, other agricultural methods have made a much greater contribution to national crop yield increases in recent years than genetic engineering. United States Department of Agriculture data record maize yield increases of about 28 percent since engineered varieties were first commercialized in the mid 1990s. The yield contribution of engineered genes has therefore been a modest fraction—about 14 percent—of the maize yield increase since the mid 1990s.