skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When castles were everywhere, the bigger castle won. Then airplanes came along and essentially made castles obsolete as an aspect of war. The future solutions in health IT will likely appear to be orthogonal to current conceptualizations of the problem.

I am curious what type of solution you have been pondering, if you don't mind me asking. (If you don't want to post it publically, my email adress is in my profile.)
Yep. Finite set of prior art < Infinite set of everything else
It's rational to pay far more
I have previously felt that way, but every so often they bring out a scorcher of a bundle. For example, I'd been rather underwhelmed by some of the Android and dev-specific bundles, and then they came out with HIB#6 which was packed to the gills with games I'd heard of and really wanted to play.

For me, HIB#7 isn't as exciting as HIB#6 was because a few of the games in it just aren't my cup of tea, but I'm sure there's people out there who will love them just as much as I enjoyed Torchlight and Rochard.
Sorry, I meant to reply earlier, but got distracted by a bug.

Thanks for pointing out the typo! That's probably been kicking around there for awhile now. :-)

Wavo detects a referral by checking for referral tokens in the url's querystring. When you share a song, share a playlist, etc, from within the app itself (with one of the share buttons, for example), Wavo crafts a url with this referral token. When a user follows that url and signs up, that referral is credited to you. Obviously, this doesn't catch everything (if you simply copy the url from the browser bar and share it with a friend, you won't get reach points), but it gets us part of the way there.
> In order to achieve consistent deep work, I usually need to first immerse myself in the relevant research literature, seeking a problem that it is recognized as important, unanswered, but probably answerable with my skill set. This is not easy.

I want to run out and repeat this to every PhD student I've met in the last 2 years.
yeah, i've realized this as well. you certainly don't need any medical training to recognize the inefficiencies in the hospital.
I saw it as him looking back at another guy by the pole. Dressed in a very camouflaging outfit.

http://imgur.com/rGTc9
I'm out of my element here, but isn't the stagnation in wages counterbalanced by the availability of cheap goods and services? Sure, wages may not have gone up over the past 50 years, but your dollar can buy a heck of a lot more now than it could 50 years ago, thanks to cheap overseas labor, automation, technological innovations, etc.

Has the Consumer Price Index gone down?
It doesn't have to be legally binding. The damage it can do to a reputation is deterrent enough.

And it's not difficult to see how adopting it can have benefits: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2011/05/13/at-flickr-your-photos-a....

A lot of people are abandoning Instagram not because of the ToS per se, but because they were reminded that it is now owned by Facebook. And Facebook's reputation is horrible.

Look at what Tumblr are doing by posting their policies on GitHub, which lets everyone see the diffs: https://github.com/tumblr/policy.

Goodwill doesn't have to be legally tethered. But it can be.
What will 2013 bring for product placement? More product placement?
The headline is a bit linkbait-y. A total of about 233 people have died. The Khumbu Icefall at the bottom is one of the most dangerous stretches, since it moves, giant seracs can collapse, etc. Those who died there would probably have been recovered and given a decent burial, or be lost at the bottom of a crevasse. When someone dies and it's not feasible to bring them down, typically at some point someone would bring them off the main trail and give them a decent burial. Others fall into inaccessible locations. Still there are a few bodies that have become landmarks. A longer discussion I saw in response to that widely shared article - http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2012/12/06/bodies-on-everest...
Yes, I know a few. I think they use it to maintain interest on their social sites. For instance, a pro will post pictures he intends to sell and whatnot on facebook, but between shootings will post other, off-the-cuff shots just to keep the viewers/fanbase engaged. Using a service like this allows him to clearly delineate what we should view as pro work and what we should view as goofing around.
In case anyone is confused, it requires Facebook, so if you block FB, it will be pretty much an empty page with some footer links. I assumed it had crashed. But they assumed I allowed facebook.

Might be good to have something show up in case you can't reach facebook.
When I first saw pinch-to-zoom I thought it was really cool, but in the long run it is one of those things that works better in "delightful" demos than in the real world.

In the real world I much prefer double-tab and two-finger tap to zoom in and out. You don't get quite the same level of "accuracy" as you do with pinch, but precise zoom is largely useless on phone/tablets anyway.
I gave it a try in a VM for a few hours, hoping to find a replacement to Dropbox and Box.net.

Without diving into the source, my primary complaint was that the whole thing felt unpolished. There were display errors that just needed some TLC, documentation that sorely needed the eyes of a proficient English proofreader, and issues that made me wonder if there were going to be underlying security concerns. (For example, sometimes the path in the URL would be encoded, sometimes not... just makes you wonder what's lurking under there.)
On a related note, there is a very real risk in larger, more bureaucratic, organizations that it becomes easier to be recognized for shallow work than for deep work, managers like metrics and the shallow work is typically very much easier to quantify - leading to the Dilbert "I'm gonna right me a new mini-van" scenario - or whatever the social media equivalent is.
The first part of your comment depends entirely on the unfounded accusation you made in the second part of your comment. ("I'm not convinced Apple would license that IP to Samsung.")

Apple has licensed patents to competitors in the past, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't in this case.
As a current developer for a health IT company, much of this is true. Even with the current incentives to go electronic, many doctors just simply prefer paper charts and are willing to forgo the $40k a year just to keep things the status quo. My particular company is growing by leaps and bounds because we started with a very simple Practice Management model and grew out from there whereas I see a lot of startups try to jump directly into EMR's which can be a tough market to crack.

But for anyone looking to get into Health IT, I highly recommend it. Healthcare is a multi-billion dollar industry that is in dire need of some disruption and the programming challenges are both interesting and rewarding (shameless plug: we're hiring).
Gray Matters
What about HL7?
Great job FireBase team. Think I am going to try this for the http://commando.io status feed. Simply host on my CDN. Would love to have GitHub auth as well though.
Some quite good points:

"For example, inside a hospital, operating rooms (OR) are often profit centers, and emergency departments (ED) are often cost centers. The hospital may be receiving subsidies to maintain its EDs based on its ratio of OR profits to ED losses, in which case a product that ultimately makes ORs more profitable may not be worthwhile to the hospital."

To an ambulance service (emergency and pre-hospital medicine is my area/passion), IFT (Inter-facility Transport) is a near guaranteed paycheck, 911 response is generally a cost center.

DrChrono has it good, because the government will pay their customers (the doctors and facilities) for the implementation.

But it's definitely an area that could do with some work in unseating some entrenched and ultimately complacent incumbents.
"There's a lot more than opportunity cost. There's the actual money in my pocket lost from the (probably very good) salary that I would be making at an established company."

I'm probably mistaken on this but isn't your second sentence precisely the very definition of "opportunity cost"?

I mean, the opportunity cost isn't what it's going to cost you to buy ramen and rent EC2 instances: the opportunity cost is the money you're not winning should you be working for a company actually paying you.
The newspapers cherry-pick stories whose situations sound "rightful". There are plenty of unemployed accountants, lawyers, engineers, IT support workers and, yes, programmers.
Cluster Analysis For Retail Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation
yeah, would be happy to chat and learn from you! i don't claim to have the full picture.
Not quite but closer than I would have suspected:

Suicide attempt fatality rate: 9%
Everest attempt fatality rate: 2%

Sources:

Climber fatality from attempts through 2006:
http://www.adventurestats.com/tables/EverestAgeFat.shtml

Suicide estimate from NIH:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml
The USPTO should pay Apple back the millions it spent on litigation.
OK perhaps that was a tad harsh, but I do get annoyed when I see the only login option for something be Facebook. I won't go on an anti-Facebook tirade but suffice to say it is not everyone's cup of tea and not everyone has a Facebook account. I suppose given this is just a technical demo it is acceptable.
11 Silent Enemies that Wreck Havoc in Life
You seem to be making the same argument that I'm arguing against above (see the massive thread I started about OP's "own the letters FB" paragraph), which is that people use trademarks to "own" terms or letters or imagery.

In this case, the "i" is a great example because it is clear that Apple does not own the "i". They do, however, on their devices, use that all over the place for their things, and if users saw it in that context it invokes "oh, this is Apple's service".

Therefore, in the restricted context of Apple's device they have a pretty good claim that if there is an "i" on something, there will be confusion. However, if listed on Google's website, or on a router, it wouldn't be; it is all about context.

"Allowing one company to co-opt a letter of the alphabet pollutes the global namespace far too much." <- This, thereby, is just a BS argument that you find on forums constantly that totally ignores how trademarks actually work.
We're not selling to hospitals, but we might someday... so that's a pretty damn good data point.
Yes, ease of implementation is the wrong way to evaluate patents.

However, I don't see the real benefit of apple (or others) having patents like this. If they could not patent it, I think they would have included it in their product anyway. It's a cool feature. They got a head start. That's the value of creating something new--a head start. Things move too fast for there to be any real benefit to the general good by granting monopolies for 17 years. People will still create things because you can make a lot of money with a head start, particularly if you're the type of person/company that can maintain that lead by continuing to build great products without resorting to monopoly tactics.

The dropdown menu is a good example where I don't see much difference between a dropdown menu and pinch to zoom.
Chrome and Firefox both have 6 week release cycles, but Chrome does not have an equivalent to Firefox's Aurora channel. Aurora adds an extra 6 weeks from feature checkin to release. :\
It was invented long ago, one of the reasons that Apple lost the patent was that there was prior art.
Hmm. I'm not actually sure this suit wouldn't be brought in a loser-pays system. As I understand, under loser-pays, the judge has considerable discretion to decide how much the loser should pay. I would expect the difference in resources to be taken into account.

I'm not sure how this would play out, but I don't necessarily think it would be a non-starter.

In any case I think that for patent infringement suits specifically, loser-pays is urgently needed. I'm sure it's not perfect, but the benefits would far outweigh the costs. We don't need to extend loser-pays to other kinds of litigations unless and until we're comfortable doing that.
it's delimited by pipes... i mean, it is a standard, but it's far from ideal.
IIRC, early touch screens were resistive, rather than capacitive, which didn't support multi-touch. without multitouch, no pinch. the interface has existed in movies for a long time and it just took bringing down the cost of capacitive touch screens. If Apple chooses, their size and market following allow them to bring tech to the consumer faster. That's why they got pinch to zoom first, not because of clever innovation.
I have no experience with Salt in a multi-server environment, but it feels speedy and is easy to customize. Lots of batteries are also included, which is why I picked it over Ansible.

The best thing about it for me was the simplicity of storing the configuration -- a bunch of YAML/JSON files that can even be synced over Dropbox/S3 if you want.
Testing out my Papilio FPGA
I agree that the lack of data standards and interconnectivity is on of several big problems that have traditionally crippled health IT innovation. But, advanced technology is becoming so cheap, and the pain points have become so large, that companies are changing.

Technologies that can compensate for inconsistencies between existing systems (like my company's product, http://comprehend.com) are enabling health IT to do things previously unthinkable.
Best thing I ever saw a boss actually tell their employees was the budget breakdown for the coming year (CEO speaking to all 30 staff, so obviously not a publicly listed company).

Staff saw themselves charging out $100/hour and being paid $40/hour, and felt they were being ripped off by the owners. First item on the budget was a rent bill of almost a million dollars, secured personally by the owners.

Changed the whole money dynamic in the business, as suddenly everyone understood that the cost of running a business was more than salaries and the occasional photocopier repair.
In theory, I think you're perfectly correct. In practice, things don't work out so nicely. That's why, under this kind of representation, politicians would serve as filters and educators.

As well, I'm not dogmatically proposing this. Rather, saying that we don't "experiment" enough with what works and what doesn't. I'd simply like to see a candidate challenge the status quo, and evaluate whether it worked, or did not.
If it was so "easy", why wasn't it invented a long time ago?

It was (1983): http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
No, it's not like that at all.

It's more like I want to go to the store, so I invite the store to send me a driver who will use my car to drive me to the store. The store accepts my invitation, but when the driver shows up he wants to invite a bunch of hitchhikers into my car but I politely decline. Meanwhile, I'm driven to the store.

Your bus analogy assumes that Facebook owns and operates my browser. That is incorrect.
Google Maps for iOS lets you double tap and drag up/down to zoom. It's a pretty nice implementation, just harder to discover.
Google sells Motorola Home for $2.35 billion
Join Google Developer Relations:
https://developers.google.com/jobs/

Yes, the parallax effect is really cool! There are some really interesting aspects to it (performance), which we will talk about early next year, once we've had a break.
Should be retitled "Things Bosses wish their employees believed about them".

I'm glad to work at a place where these issues are moot, but the typical company seems to operate under the mantra: "The floggings will continue until morale improves". Oddly, morale never improves.

I have a feeling that if bosses acted in a way that made them like them that the rest of the issues would go away.

Government had to instill the productivity benefits of 40 hour work weeks in law before companies would believe it. Most their businesses are failing because of their own policies and refusal to adopt new methods that would solve their problems, instead they keep doing the same thing, and getting the same result. (And then blame their employees for that result)
This is a common fallacy when it comes to inventions.

I have a Ph.D. in an engineering field, so I'm not easily impressed. That said, the inventions which are truly revolutionary are the ones where as soon as someone describes it you think "man, that makes perfect sense".

Yes, it makes perfect sense because it's the correct solution. That doesn't make it obvious before someone came along and spelled it out, nor guarantee that someone else would have invented it earlier.

There are some types of inventions "whose time has come". These will get invented at around a particular time by virtue of the supporting technology existing. Take the brightness control of LEDs using PWM and color mixing of different LED colors to make color changing LED lighting. Philips actually has a patent on this, from 1999. It was an idea whose time had come, and others came up with it independently many times since and frankly probably quite a few times before. But it was inevitable. I think it was a bad patent because it was obvious even in 1999 that you could use PWM, common already, to vary power through a LED to control brightness. It was also obvious in 1999 that you could mix two different primary colors together to form a mixed color. Patents aren't supposed to be awarded by simply taking two already obvious things and adding them together (or at least so says my patent attorney, who is perhaps too ethical about what she'll let me put into an application). But besides all that, I would argue that any "idea whose time has come" is probably also inherently obvious to someone skilled in the art at the time of interest.

On the other hand, there are some ideas which are not limited by any technology; they are limited by the creativity of humans. Take for instance the liquid metal battery that my employer works on. You float a molten anode metal on a slightly denser molten salt electrolyte on a slightly denser molten cathode metal, and bam, super high energy density, super high power density, low cost, long life-time battery. This is, in my opinion, an actual invention. There was nothing stopping someone from coming up with it earlier... but no one did. Why? Because it was non-obvious. It's still simple, conceptually at least.

As far as pinching to zoom? Honestly, I think it's somewhere between these things. Just because it's intuitive doesn't mean it's obvious. It's clearly more of a jump from a zoom button to a multitouch gesture than the jump from "LEDs can have variable brightness and different colors" to "LEDs can be mixed to make color changing lights". But it's also probably an idea whose time had come, by virtue of multitouch starting to exist. But I doubt any of that had anything to do with why it was invalidated; my guess would be that it was invalidated because of sufficient prior art to render it an obvious extension of existing technology.
Companies should be securing clawbacks in patent settlements upon invalidation.
I think you mean they should make Apple pay back a bunch of the money it got from the Samsung case.
As far as I know, the only reasonably common desktop OS to lack H.264 support out of the box is Windows XP, and Mozilla plans to use Flash to decode H.264 video there.

Well, I guess Linux also doesn't support H.264 unless you're in a jurisdiction that doesn't allow software patents, or you're willing to be a scofflaw, but there's not much Mozilla can do about that. :(
> Similar to Linkedin with 6.5m, we have a real-world case study.

Except that Linkedin's passwords weren't salted.

> When you say "entire password space" you're implying that there's a hard upper limit on the complexity of a user's password

That's why I said "where the password space could be a dictionary attack or a brute force of passwords up to length 10 of letters, digits, and symbols". I don't actually mean the whole key space, just whatever the attacker chooses to target.

> So our expectation is that the easiest 500,000 accounts will be cracked in the first 5.2 seconds by an attacker with a single GPU

OK, I concede that point that in this case the salt is not helping so much, at least for users using the 10000 most common passwords. For the few hundred thousand users users whose password lies in a larger key space (but still in the range of bruteforce), the salt still protects them.

Getting back to your original point

> Modern password cracking has all-but obsoleted both of these reasons [for having a salt]

Let's look at a better hash function - bcrypt. In this case hashing passwords is still slow enough (by design - you can slow it down to whatever you want) that rainbow tables would again be useful - to compute the hash of 10000 passwords with a difficulty such that each hash takes 1 cpu-second to compute will take almost 3 hours. Adding salts makes this a per user operation instead of a global one.
The view from Kala Patthar summit is pretty different angle, this picture must be taken from somewhere north of KP. I would guess it is from Pumori Advanced Base Camp.
Because they don't pay well. And sometimes don't pay at all. Nobody is going to pay you for just knowing 1000 things that happened some hundreds of years back. Such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently.

You really should read your Marx. We're in an overproduction crisis: the world's most pressing problem is its lack of problems to solve.
They are a family of lawyers...
Are customer standards increasing to accommodate this? Will it attract the wrong kind of customers, resulting in a need to change standards in the future?

Besides those questions I see this policy as assuring new ecommerce application builders who aren't used to the risk of chargebacks and refunds. I really appreciate it.
Online Real Estate Brokerage Redfin, On Track For $50M+ In 2012 Revenue
I keep the wiki handy for a list of what all the powerups do (since I can never remember), but I can definitely see the fun in just tinkering with them if you're an "explorer" type.
I agree that #1 and #4 are problematic, and to a lesser extent #6.

#3 sounds good, but how do you stop people from submitting code written in Brainfuck or TECO or something?
Anyone who has played the old-school Eye of the Beholder games. :P

(I gather Dredmore is in somewhat the same vein.)
3-Step Hack for Startups Bootstrapping Design
I like how Linux is once again the source of the highest average purchase price. Linux also has almost as many purchases as Mac, which is pretty awesome if you ask me.
I wish there was an opposite post entitled "Things Employees Wish They Could Tell Bosses," but it would probably just be misconstrued as whining.

Sometimes, whining is a good thing. It brings real, honest feelings to the surface. Of course, as an employee, if you don't feel like you're being listened to, you tend to stop volunteering ideas.
You don't need to guess; if you read the patent that invalidates most of Apple's claims, you'll see a picture of a man doing a very similar movement of pinch to zoom ('though with a finger from each hand, since the screen depicted is much bigger).

http://www.google.com/patents?id=W0PRAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA5&...
"I would like to insist on the "incentives" topic with a quick example: I previously developed production analysis software to find and exploit the cases where an hospital could be more efficient and thus make more money (long story short, see one of my previous posts on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4826314 for more details)
As I like to say, this is as good as printing money - I can say precisely what should be changed in a billing statement, why, how much it will gain, and the probability to find matching evidence in the patient file."

There are entire companies devoted to nothing more than this - taking a ICD9/10 diagnosis, some procedure codes and massaging the bill to get the biggest possible bill (and vice versa, as an insurer, minimizing the same).