skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is serious stuff for Brits.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/09/10/new-br...

"Well, this is one way to save money on health care. The new British Minister of Health, Jeremy Hunt, is a firm believer in homeopathy, which treats disease using magic water solutions that contain – well, only water."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22241-hail-jeremy-hunt...

"Hail Jeremy Hunt, the new minister for magic."

"The fortunes of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are about to be transformed with the help of the magical waters of homeopathic medicine... the UK's new health minister, Jeremy Hunt – who replaced Andrew Lansley yesterday in a government reshuffle – thinks that homeopathy works, and should be provided at public expense by the NHS."

"John Krebs, professor of zoology at the University of Oxford, said: "There is overwhelming evidence that homeopathic medicine is not effective. It would be a real blow for those who want medicine to be science-based if the secretary of state were to promote homeopathy because of his personal beliefs."
Most corporations are leechers, they just take open source stuff as a way to save costs, without returning anything back.

I have seen this happen in many Fortune 500 projects.
The question was "Is Idiocracy the greatest satirical film since World War Two?" not "Is Idiocracy the greatest satirical film since the end of the Cold War?"

Now, it's true that many aspects of the Cold War feel like really old news. Thank god.

(Though at this point, as (arguably!) a former colleague of Hans Bethe [1], I'm professionally obligated to deliver this public-service announcement: Nuclear arsenals are way out of fashion these days, and are never talked about outside of defense procurement committee meetings, but that doesn't mean they're gone. Nuclear weapons still exist and could blow you up today.)

However, even apart from the nuclear angle, Dr. Strangelove continues to be a movie about a big war that is secretly planned in advance by cabinet-level executives working with the military-industrial complex. Then the war gets kicked off by a very small cabal which engineers a highly visible attack on a handful of targets by a few rogue aircraft. Can anyone else see how this story might have remained relevant in the twenty-first century?

---

[1] I was a grad student in his department. It's a bit tenuous, really. But, for better and for worse, I consider myself inducted into the guild of people that build doom devices and later come to regret them. Sigh.
Hrm...some of his "eccentric" views should be viewed for what they are, xenophobia and sexism of the most boring sort.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1550903/Patrick-Moore...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Moore#Activism_and_poli...

He might have been a fantastic astronomer, but let's not use his death to laud this claptrap as cute eccentricity.
He was able to convey his personal enthusiasm for astronomy in a way that made The Sky at Night very inspirational. I'm so sad he's gone, he and his show will be missed.

I often wondered about the contradictions behind this man. He was a fierce right-wing activist with exceedingly hostile views towards pretty much anyone (gays, foreigners, women, you name it), yet he was also a brilliant scientist, a gifted musician, a captivating entertainer, an conscientious animal rights advocate. Being a Kraut myself, I have no doubt that he would have killed me with a smile on his face if presented with the opportunity in a socially acceptable context, yet it's difficult to imagine this immense hatred he was capable of when you see the warmth, wit, and friendliness he routinely displayed when hosting his show from his own home, surrounded by scientist friends, with his beloved cat on his lap.

I'm glad though I didn't ever hear him speak on these issues personally, so my most significant memory of him will always be the one of the friendly scientist granddad explaining the sky at night to kids in awe of the universe, like me.
2 of the advantages you've mentioned (zfs,dtrace) are actually gifts from Sun Solaris.

IIRC, linux had lost out on these gems due to licensing issues. Oracle seemed quite keen on developing the zfs-clone btrfs - but after they had gobbled up sun, interest in btrfs seemed to have waned.
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A lot of those questions would get really good answers on Quora (and I agree, they should be welcomed here more openly).

A really good story related to all of this is the way Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic: http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-a... (couldn't find a better source, but I heard him tell the same story at an event)
Homeopathy is a gigantic scam that depends solely upon the placebo effect. But this specific case is a really stupid one to use as an indictment. It's like railing against the liquor industry because someone was beaten/stabbed to death with a liquor bottle.

I think it's more appropriate to say that the improper application of homeopathy killed him - so, not unlike the improper application of any number of legitimate medical techniques. The difference here is that the proper application of medical techniques might have helped, whereas the proper application of homeopathic techniques would have done nothing.
As a historical note, the Mercury period-vs-comma¹ bug probably wasn't a typo as such. In that era, programmers didn't type their programs; they wrote them on paper, using special printed forms² so that their intent would be clear to the professional typists who entered it. To prevent typos, everything would be typed at least twice; in the days before diff, there was special-purpose hardware for this.³

I can think of three possibilities for the programmer making such an error: actually writing it wrong (which seems unlikely to me because the mental context of writing a loop range doesn't lend itself to writing a single number); a skipping pen; or a locale issue — i.e. a programmer of European origin mixing up the characters.

¹ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/9.54.html#subj1.1
² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FortranCodingForm.png
³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch#IBM_056_Card_Verifier
So when does someone doing something stupid mean something?
You will not run into this problem. Linux is almost always used for production servers and is popular for development as well.
Square Introduces Gift Cards
We are outsource Big Data to Oracle: Q&A with Devops Borat
> The most immediate answer is that it makes a European-style system of social insurance for older people difficult when the ratio of working people to retirees decreases.

Yes, but that system is unsustainable -- it requires constant growth, something the finite-sized earth cannot tolerate. It would be like nature creating a strategy that, to survive, requires the parent organism to have cancer.

The problem is that, instead of accepting and creating sustainable methods, we accommodate unsustainable growth rates by creating unsustainable social institutions.

Modern social institutions are a large-scale Ponzi scheme, a fraud that cannot go on forever.
I really feel some type of way about this. This site (and netflix and hulu) allowed me to live without tv for almost four years
I don't understand your complaint...there were plenty of helpful posts in that thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378

You asked for advice and received some great information. Just because the overwhelming advice is "This is not a great idea, you will need a lot of money to fight established, entrenched businesses" doesn't mean the advice was unhelpful.

Did you want everyone to sugar coat their opinions with "Yeah! Go get them tiger! We believe in you!", or did you want serious advice that can lead you to making an informed, rational decision?

If you were a CEO of a company, would you want your employees to tell you whatever you wanted to hear ("yes-men"), or would you want people who actually advised you and helped make an appropriate decision (even when it may be counter to your opinion)?
The answer to most of these questions, is find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry, and ask them for advice. Most of the SpaceX senior staff have aerospace experience.
Drink plenty of water, avoid foods with lots of sugar and avoid pasta as is makes you tired. Also, instead of eating 3 big meals per day, eat small meals/snacks often, it will keep your energy going.

Don't forget to exercise and of course to get some sleep! That what works best for me.
Using my complete lack of statistical knowledge, I multiplied the wrong output rate % by the total lines of code in the examples from original paper here http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/conf/2012-PLATEAU-Fuzzer/pub/ht... to get a very bad approximation of fat fingering adjusted for program length. You'd expect more typos in a longer program; the original experiment always introduced 1 typo per run regardless of program length.

You guys enjoy while I prepare for the lynch mob of Statisticians :-)

Lang Err % LOC LOC adjusted Err %
Ruby 0.17 159 27.03
Python 0.15 161 24.15
Perl 0.22 156 34.32
PHP 0.36 224 80.64
JS 0.18 102 18.36
Java 0.1 331 33.1
Haskell 0.15 114 17.1
C# 0.095 389 36.955
C++ 0.08 461 36.88
C 0.1 458 45.8
I had the same experience as you and OP, doing an RoR implementation from the operations end was a tangled mess of gems with various mangled dependencies onto one another, with those dependencies being to certain badly documented or undocumented version numbers.

Also, when I did this implementation several years ago, the core RoR and gems documentation web pages were a mish-mash of broken links.

These problems drew me to reading the blog postings of the mongrel gem creator, to try to figure out how to get mongrel interacting with the other gems properly. The blog did not exactly inspire my confidence in the software.

In fact, the project went over budget and over deadline. It is the project which went most off the rails, so to speak, in my 2+ years at that company - even more than the attempt to implement Sharepoint. The outside developers thought they would "save time" by doing it all in RoR, but they failed to deliver a production ready system. I know that Twitter made a great effort to pull itself off its initial RoR base, and that it is widely said that RoR is not scalable. It is possible it will straighten out over time, I remember back when Java application servers were slow resource hogs with poor frameworks. My initial experience with RoR has left a sour taste in my mouth. Maybe the operations background of this person has significance - it may look OK from the developer standpoint, but the production operations end needs a lot of work.
Actually, I've tried to stir the comment pot on Python posts and have not received near the same feedback. Now, that could easily just be indicative of the languages of choice among Hacker News commenters.
Hacker News search
I'm starting to do 'Introduction to CS' from Udacity (http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr2012). I'm planning to make a Hacker news search app through the course. What do you think, is that a good idea, or not? I know there is something similar; this is my plan: the search will be executed in the domains, referred by the hacker news stories. Thank you
NO, I WON’T BE Your TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDER
No I am not. But he follows me, though I dont think that should grant me the right to see what repos he creates.
having worked with ruby & rails both for about 7 years, i've run into my fair share of gem hairballs.

in general, i've had _more_ problems on osx than on linux, mostly due to various ARCH flags required by c extensions.

that being said, the "system rubies" on every linux distro i've used are generally infinitely horrible, and this is likely the case for the poster. system packaged gems are also insanely gross as well.

one of ruby's saving graces is that at least it's not used by the base system for initialization, which has bit me more than once installing a python that conflicted with the system python (though that was many years ago, things may have improved).

rvm has its own issues (and seems to be getting more complex with every rev), but in general, makes for clean living. bundler is nice too.
Those were the most helpful comments. You'd see a four on either metric and know not to waste time.
While many Rubyists may use a Mac I'm confident the large majority deploy those applications on Linux. Cross OS compatibility issues are virtually non-existent, especially on non-development focused gems.
The last one is so true it hurts.

I think I might design a custom poster that says that ;-)
Open source the code. Id gladly run my own private nzbmatrix
> Keep in mind that 'the program happily running there' could very well be my AAC encoder.

This is rare on Windows client machines. Does anyone know if desktop Windows' scheduler uses different rules to their server OS to exploit this?
This looks great. I think I will incorporate this into some of my projects.
Ok... is there any evidence of that, or are we just going with bald assertion?

edit: Nevermind. Their website says they're part of Draugiem Group, which does seem to own Relead.
I like the idea! It's unique and honestly it's the first time I stumble upon something like that. As for the design it's simple, clear and straight to the point. Plus, I like that you included some of your client's logo. I got a question though, what do you mean by Scheduling "Real Time" Cover Photos? It's the Real Time that means nothing to me/confuses me.
It's very simple. You produce evidence or proof that two things are related.

Living in the same house as a medical doctor does not make me a medical doctor, nor does it make modern medicine responsible for my actions.
A useful Caps Lock key
> (ignoring opportunity cost)

Opportunity cost when having cancer could mean dying from cancer while drinking sugar water. Yes placibo effect and all, but that's rather high cost if you ask me.
Any app that hand-builds queries. PHP has nothing to do with this. Just happens to be the vehicle. The problem is simply insecure patterns.
Reminds me of Yellow Box (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...)
> "Not to dismiss your valid concern, the problem is that when an automotive mechanic fails to fix a car, the failure gets blamed on a malfunction or on the owner not driving their car correctly, etc, But when an automotive witch-doctor blesses your car and a failure occurs, it is used to smear all automotive-blessings. The climate is already biased against meaningful discussion of automotive witchdoctors."

There is no evidence that blessing your car will prevent it from breaking down. Therefore when you car does break down after a blessing, that can be nothing but evidence that blessing a car does nothing.

On the other hand there is an abundance of evidence stating that automotive mechanics can diagnose and treat faulty cars, so when an automotive mechanic fails to do that it of course means any number of things could have gone wrong.

We only see your "bias" in situations where there was no evidence to support the treatment in the first place. It's not a bias, it is just common sense.
Still, the fundamental idea of "Like cures like" is what stuck with his wife and was eventually fatal.

I'd chalk this death under "unscientific thought induced by homeopathic philosophy".
> Not to dismiss your valid concern, the problem is that when doctor's kill someone, the death gets blamed on a disease or on the patient not taking the medication correctly, etc.

No. We are not in the time of Benjamin Rush. You have almost certainly read the Institute of Medicine's report on medical error. We know that we commit error and that we kill patients. We admit this. We need to do better and we seek evidence for how we can do so. We welcome outside help, and there is good money to be made by those who would participate.

Anyway, surely you know what we call alternative medicine that is supported by evidence: "medicine".
Does Soylent actually offer multiple levels, from red to green?
> Have you read a single volume of philosophy in the last decade?

Do you have an opinion on the utility of suicide? But how can you, without having personally committing suicide? Am I getting thorough to you?

> You have a cartoon version of philosophy in your mind that is in sore need of remediation.

You mean the thesis that philosophers argue for centuries without ever resolving anything? That's hardly controversial.

> These are precisely the kinds of questions that philosophers have been utterly preoccupied with for centuries.

Q.E.D.
"Mainstream" medicine has certainly saved vastly more people than will ever be saved by homeopathy.
It does, but the parent is talking about workload types, not fixed CPU architectures.
I drink tea instead of coffee. This is probably the smartest thing I've done as a programmer. I find that drinking tea makes me able to retain my energy over a longer period than with coffee (or colas, which absolutely nukes my energy after a short period). I probably consume three teapots of white tea (specifically White Peony/Bai Mu Dan) per day. I find this particular tea oddly stabilising and being lighter than black and green tea, it's not as savoury, which means I can drink it all day long.
At my last 4 jobs, I've worked with a variation of that guy. One was the most talented Unix admin I've ever worked with. He lived alone in a 2 bedroom apartment with no furniture, and slept in a sleeping bag. He was obsessed with anime and 4chan, and he loved long weekends because he could tune our servers for higher performance without interruptions.
Everything is my fault
This is exactly spot on. I was of that generation and I remember it fondly. The only people we knew who had Apple IIs were rich kids. This was just a fact; at that time it was too early for there to be any real fanboyism yet. We couldn't even afford PCs. So it was TRS-80 and Commodore 64 for us all the way (my paper route money financed the TRS-80, the Commodore, Atari, &c. were generous Christmas gifts).
A Google Community for discussing and sharing Firefox OS news and information
He's saying that homeopathy is not directly lethal when applied by someone who knows what they're doing.

There was a case recently where a woman was doing unlicensed "plastic surgery" by pumping rubber cement into incisions in people's butts. Her absolute incompetence can't be reasonably used as a critique against the plastic surgery industry.

There are plenty of perfectly good data points to use against homeopathy practitioners. This case is definitely not one of them.
Someone posted recently a hack where someone programmed gameboy bytecode by moving around objects in game to cause controlled buffer overflows...
I had not really thought about why Python development generally expected a virtualenv until now. If you haven't been in the Python world at all, virtualenv essentially sets up a miniature development environment within your working folder. System Python might be version 2.7.3, but inside my virtual environment I can run Python 3.0. It's a nice little hack around the problem of multiple Python versions... doesn't solve the root cause, but at least you can stitch it up with one step.
Every application reports security holes,

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/security_bull...
Pearl Harbor 2.0
Flagged.

zhoutong is a known scammer. Do not do business with him. He needs to be banned on HN as well.

Edit: I'll quote what I said in reply to someone else:

Zhoutong is a scammer, he operated an illegal bucket shop known as Bitcoinica and tried to hide the true nature of the operation just so he could close it down at its peak and steal several thousand BTC from customers trading futures on his platform,

He then tried to cover up the theft by selling it to the people who run Intersango and tried to blame them for the missing Bitcoins. He also tried to blame "hackers" for it.

In addition, users are suing him for close to half a million dollars for his lies. His defense is hes claiming he was 17 at the time (early 2012).

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/bitcoinica-users-...
This is good for some applications but in be general case it doesn't solve the problem since the user processes can choose policies that interfere with each other and lead to overall lower performance. This is a fascinating topic where computer architecture meets algorithms meets game theory.
I'm hoping you're actually working on the service you just described? Between the delivery of meds and labs, it is "interesting" how much hospitals pay just to get things from A to B - though the custody chain tracking certainly plays a part.
And combined with a private usenet server, it was non-P2P and relatively secure file downloading at exceedingly high speeds.
Oh, I agree - one of the root causes was the belief in homeopathic philosophy. My main point is that this case is a lousy talking point when campaigning against homeopathy. It's not like there's a lack of real, tangible evidence against homeopathy - people should use that to argue against it instead.

(Not like it's likely to do any good. Homeopathic believers are pretty hard to sway.)
What is the actual goal of the site/proposed business?

A one sentence pitch would be great as it isn't clear to me from either version of your website.
On the other hand, drinking water would not have killed Boole.
Everybody already knows it would be great if we could get cable speed and reliability without actually laying cable. Building a business around that is easy. The hard part is actually achieving that.

Asking people for the miracle upon which you'd like to build a business, that anyone could build given that miracle, isn't a request for constructive feedback. At its absolute best it is a request for an IP handout.
Feel free.

http://newznab.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
"Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness."

Yes it is. Ten years ago it might not have been, but these days, when vast troves of information are at virtually everyone's fingertips, there is no excuse for not having done some basic research before asking such huge questions and expecting other people to do all the work for you.
Fwiw, I'm not the chairman of the PSF, just one of a handful of directors. Van Lindberg is chairman. I am however chair for PyCon and I am responsible for pushing this through.
Show HN: Can I leave my home safely? - Weather Report
Interesting. On the tea,

Do you end up getting the same amount of caffeine over the course of the day?

Where do you buy your tea?
Thank you. I was unaware of this. Darkfall did indeed conceptually pick up UO, but the times I tried it it was absolutely terrible (buggy, empty feeling world, terrible launch management by the developer/publisher) and I kinda wish it hadn't used the first person perspective. A neat idea- just terribly implementation by a pretty bad company.
I think developers are getting a little too smug these days. Sure dev hours are in demand right now, but I remember a time not too long ago when they weren't. It will happen again.
I'm the Kaggle President & Chief Scientist that is interviewed in this article. Feel free to ask me any questions that you have about the role of domain experts in data -driven decision making (or any other relevant topic!)

(It didn't occur to me to submit the article to HN - silly me! Thanks ivoflipse for doing so.)
Good to know. I've tried Eve a few times but never got past the introduction tutorials really. It always seemed conceptually amazing, and also really deep (or overly complex, depending how you look at it).