skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stanford people mentioned:

"Stanford orthopedic surgeon Eugene Carragee"

"One driving force is John P.A. Ioannidis, chief of the Stanford Prevention Research Center."

"Stanford's Marcia L. Stefanick, PhD '82, a professor of medicine"

"Robert Tibshirani, a professor of health research and policy, and statistics at Stanford"

"Dean of Medicine Philip Pizzo"

With the exception of "Muin J. Khoury, director of the Office of Public Health Genomics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has worked with Ioannidis" I can find nothing in this article that offers any counter to this piece which, while it could be correct, is clearly slanted toward touting the work that these people at Stanford are doing.

Not that being well balanced (presenting opposing viewpoints) is necessary in a university magazine but there is no corroboration to what they are saying here. This is not the same as saying they are not correct I am just pointing out that I don't accept it on it's face and seems to be the type of thing that would get repeated by the main stream media (the same way the studies that they are complaining about get repeated).

Edit: Clarified some things.
Examples of Ruby on Rails
How would you improve on say, the Apple app store? What you've described is what Apple has already created IMO.
The basic tenet of socialism is that democracy is good: the traditional corporate model is dictatorship, and it should be reformed into democracy instead.

> the owners are not handed their ownership ... they "buy" it with what they put in.

Sure, but then they have it, and that's great. Being rewarded for your work is good. Problem is, they have to do nothing to maintain it. After an initial period of work, they have it forever. Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership. Those people are not being rewarded for the work that they do, which we all agree is bad.

> workers should be granted a degree of ownership by virtue of the work they do?

Basically, yes. People should be in control of themselves, and their situations. Ownership == control.

Please note that I'm painting in _very_, _very_ broad strokes here. There is a ton of space under this tent.
Not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at. I don't suppose that a nice picture of an iPhone == weather app.

http://www.imgur.com/djVjc.png
Ask HN: What are appropriate ways to find out how much I should be making?
I do not feel right to discuss this with friends, colleagues. And recruiters always tell me "it depends". But every time I asked something and got accepted, I sensed that I asked too low.

The problem is that experience of each person is different (I graduated for some years). I tried to look at some online statistics and they do not look accurate to me.

Just wondering how you solve this for yourself?
Thanks in advance!
So much for a BlackBerry cloud: RIM sells NewBay to Synchronoss
> Yes, but freelance developers are a dime a dozen. Therefore clients will always have the upper hand in business transactions.

Once you finally accept that clients are also a dime a dozen too, it'll become a lot easier to only accept the good clients, and only accept good pay.
TwitRoulette - the dangerous Twitter game
Let's be realistic. Although this is the case for most sites, I doubt twitpic is going to end up talking to an automated process.
I know what you mean. I've often felt somewhat misled by their claims.

It was one false start after another for many years. Then when Rakudo Star was first released, I guess it must have been a couple of years ago now, they made it sound like it was far more usable than it actually was.

I didn't expect it to be perfect by any means, but I thought it'd at least by usable for some simple scripting tasks and some basic text processing. It wasn't usable for these, unfortunately. It was one problem after another, and I remember the performance being absolutely terrible.

I've tried it a few times since then, and the situation has only improved mildly. After these experiences, I've lost interest in it. I don't see any point in trying it again, only to be disappointed once more.
http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

FreeBSD 9.1 Amazon ami has been released. I've been running on FreeBSD on EC2 for a while without issue.
I use Flipboard to aggregate the best stories from several sources. They have a heap of design feeds already listed as well as business, tech and HN in there too. Best part is its easy to flick quickly through headlines, share what you want and also save to instapaper for later.
In our case, clients have either: 1) Gone out of business and dissolved their businesses, or 2) Claimed they don't have the finances to pay us.

All clients enter into a contract with us. So when they don't pay, we have legal recourse. In #1, there's little we can do, except go to court and get in line as a debtor. In #2, we ended up with a promissory note stating they're legally bound to pay us as soon as they are able to. There are other avenues one can pursue, this is just the deal we worked out with them and all the lawyers involved.
Instead of book, how about look at source code of some open source projects?
Good analogy, actually. There is a popular perception that being good at chess indicates skill at strategy or reasoning. In reality, these are helpful, yes, but mostly what it indicates is that you know a lot about the game of chess. Similarly, there is a perception that skill at Scrabble indicates a large English vocabulary.

It's reasonable for someone with good reasoning or a large vocabulary to find it distasteful that they lose consistently simply because they haven't memorized the 1,000 most common moves.[0] In chess, this is pretty much built into the mechanics of the game, but it's easy to fix in Scrabble with a simple house rule: Don't use bullshit words.

It's only part of the game if you let it be.

[0] I'll give an illustrative example. The official Scrabble dictionary[1] lists "re" with the definition "the second tone of the diatonic musical scale". Just so for the other sounds of diatonic solfeggio that everyone knows: re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. All of these, according to Hasbro, are English words, with plurals.

We're all descriptivists here, that's fine. But did you ever wonder why there are only seven words for the diatonic scale, but actually twelve tones in an octave? Or why re, mi, and fa have different vowel sounds? The answer is that solfege has a way to verbalize accidentals (notes not in the key) or non-diatonic scales by modulating the vowel sound. A raised do is a di; a lowered re is a ra. So you can easily pronounce a chromatic scale beginning at do: do, di/ra, re, ri/me, mi, fa, fi/se, sol, si/le, la, li/te, ti, do. (The syllable used depends on the key.)

Go ahead, look up any of those accidental syllables in the dictionary. La and le: Both French articles, both solfeggio syllables. Only one is a Scrabble word. You can't say that's not stupid.

[1] http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/search.cfm
Christmas Hackery: Present.app
The Two or Three Things You Need to Raise Capital
sort | uniq -c | sort -n

is something I use all the time to get sorted frequency tables.
For business and economics, go for Marketplace (daily), Freakonomics Radio and Planet Money. For pop-science and tech, maybe Radio Lab and Science Friday. Other popular shows are This American Life, All Things Considered, On The Media, Splendid Table, etc, etc.

Directory:
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php?type=to...

Various show pages:

http://www.freakonomics.com/radio/

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

http://www.marketplace.org/

http://pri.org/
Chomsky may have a more ductile view on ownership, when it applies to means of production. And you can't assume the rationality of the capitalist, many psychological and cultural factor play the game when choosing to empower workers or management.
Some of the hi tech food science investments made by Khosla Ventures could be interesting. Especially into sweets and also non-meat.

By changing the way we produce food we become much more self reliant rather than using up natural resources that are destructive.
Snapchat's Biggest Weakness
good freelance developers though, are rare as hen's teeth.
> The best and the brightest can't exist in isolation, harvesting the rewards of a larger than ever economy while the middle and lower classes slide into destitution

Exactly, they won't exist in isolation.

Articles like this may appeal us as engineers who stand to gain from automation, or those afraid of "the computer" who stand to lose from automation. But these combined do not characterize all the jobs that exist. Those that work as doctors, lawyers, etc. have no fear of "the computer" replacing their jobs. Even most blue-collar workers (construction, etc) would not need to have that fear.
So this guy responsible for Mode X. I remember implementing Mode X support on the first OS I ever wrote. Oh the fond, frustrating memories.
That's one of the other ways to get a good price. Figure out what you want, what options, etc. and ring around all the local dealers "I'm going to buy this car at the end of next week, lowest price gets it."

Haven't tried it myself, but apparently it works reasonably well.
>>>"Sure, but then they have it, and that's great. Being rewarded for your work is good. Problem is, they have to do nothing to maintain it. After an initial period of work, they have it forever. Whereas a worker who comes in afterward has no access, and even though they also put in a lot of work, they won't get any ownership."

I agree with the point that it is "too bad" the worker will work 30 years and never gain ownership.

But ... if the worker doesn't like it, why doesn't he start a business?

And ... is it right for government to forcibly take a piece of ownership away and give it to the worker? Is that the proposed solution?

Gosh, when you look at this discussion, you ask yourself, "Why on earth would anyone sign up to be a perpetual worker?"

BUT -- there's a lot more to a business than just the skilled work. There's marketing, capitalization decisions, strategy, etc. Seems the businesses who are best at that will outcompete the others. I guess that then makes the argument for "professional management" (I promise I did not set out towards that goal ... I stumbled there by "thinking out loud").
It's a little different than chess. Chess rules can be laid out in a few thousand words, including castling.

Right off the bat, you need to pick a set of words that are allowed. Tournaments play, of course, allow a small set of those odd two letter words. However, both sides have to agree on a word set up front. it's perfectly reasonable to pick a dictionary that doesn't recognize "za" as a real word for pizza. However, i think if transfire really wants to use "fu", he'd have to resort to urban dictionary for the word list. That also admits za, so it's kind of a lose lose there.
Intel has been willing to work with Hollywood in the past. There was a lot of controversy over their inclusion of "DRM" hardware in their Sandy Bridge Chips.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/01/shows-over-how-holly...

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_wh...

I'd love for more competition in this space. If real IPTV could finally happen it would be great. I use a HTPC with Windows Media Center as my main TV, and I'm tired of dealing with the issues. Cablecard is a pain, Comcast is a pain, commercials are a pain. I just want to watch the few shows I care about.

The only thing stopping me from cutting cable and just watching shows on iTunes is live sports.
A thousand times yes to this, and not just because it's how I learned. It puts the commands into your muscle memory. You should not be trying to memorise anything; just follow the directions and don't move on until you complete each step. Then when you're done, do it again. Do vimtutor as many times as you need to until you really don't need to think about how to manipulate text.

And yes to the ~/.vimrc advice here. You should start with an empty dotfile and build up from there. DO NOT make the mistake of starting out by installing Janus. There shouldn't be anything in your ~/.vimrc until you understand what it does, and editing that file should be done incrementally by the user instead of being a copied file. This is part of the learning process.
Also, what clout do they have with the content providers? Why would somebody release control to them rather than Apple, Microsoft or Google...which have larger, more-established viewer bases.
It's a strawman argument.

Big companies should never be viewed as "taking care" of you. Your labor is only worth what the market will bear, and thats changes for better or for worse.
If you would use Phonegap and put it up on the App Store, nobody would complain having to "install" it.

I can't talk for the creator, but I guess this app is meant to be stand-alone, launched straight from the homescreen (without address bar) and not as a regular website that you have bookmarked.
Oh wow, it locked my iPhone (4S) too just now. Home and Sleep/Wake buttons stopped working and I have to force reboot the whole thing. The first time I add it to the homescreen, the page sort of borks. Second time I launch it, everything works but that's when the phone locks itself :(
So I've studied the Zend implementation in depth as part of my phd, and I'm the author of a lot of the implementation, and all of the optimizations and static analysis in phc. So I know quite a bit about this, and looked through the implementation.

First thing is that it's clearly a very clean and high quality implementation. It's clear the author knows a substantial amount of both the implementation of the Zend engine and its semantics. This is clear from the replication of zvals, and things like separation.

However I think that it's missing most of the copy on write, reference and separation semantics. These are pretty complex so that's not unexpected. And example here is the function implementation that copies the parameter list - that's almost certainly not right. I don't see reference counts or separation in assignment either.

That said, I didn't look fully so I could be wrong.

I would recommend the author use the test suites from phc, Zend, and hiphop - that would help highlight a lot of the weird corner cases (example copying an array that had referenced in it!)

Anyway, very cool (especially impressive for 6 hours!) and I hope you go on with this :)

(Comment via phone, excuse typos)
In this post I reminisce about my BBS days: when I was 13 I was asked to co-SysOp a local bulletin board.

I recently found my journal, where I mentioned growing our user base from 35 to 236. It made me laugh, because I immediately thought: "You were 'growth hacking' when you were 13!"
It reads like it came straight from the 1970s. Beware of "the computer"
Take the set of every product you buy which has an advertising budget or component (cereal, cars, foods, clothes, electronics, everything that is produced by a compnay with an advertising budget, and which you have paid a single cent to directly or indirectly.)

do the same for services, infrastructure, etc. Remove the advertising component and put it back in your pocket. E.g. if a shoe had cost $50, now it costs $30 because you've removed the shoe company's adveritsing component. Same for every product. You're now 30k per year richer.

However, you are now underinformed. Now pay for some apps that you would have seen the advertising in, in order to inform you. You are now only 15K per year richer after that additional direct outlay.

However, this direct outlay is smaller than the indirect outlay had been, because you are not supporting ad agencies, marketing managers, sending your products' message to people wildly not in its market, and so forth. you are paying for apps which inform you directly.

In addition to the fact that you have "cut out the middleman" - all this friction of paying people to send out messages on your used products' behalf - you (and everyone) ALSO gets the benefit of not having this constant high noise floor, of having to see tampon ads when you're a guy, beard care when you're a lady, and so forth.

In other words, EVERYONE is better off. There really is no catch - just like there really is no catch that there is 0 advertising necessary to get people to know about municipal water works.

If everyone had to constantly see ads about the benefits of getting water from a tap, even the people who already had that, AND it cost you - and everyone - 40% more due to all the advertising...well, that benefits no one doesn't it? We really can live in a cheap and cool world which as as good with respect to advertising as our daily interaction with water works advertising is: none at all, and the product is cheap and works and everyone knows about it and has it.

welcome to the future.
Birmingham Conservatoire : International Students
Ooh, wow, arguments from authority.

As you are so learned, and Chaïm and Ronald aren't here, perhaps you'd care to offer their more proper reading of Orwell. And as you're so learned, you'll immediately know my remark as a paraphrase, and of whom. Right? Because when I read a book, I do so in such a fashion as to repeat its argument, rather than assign others reading I couldn't do properly in the first place.

Nor can I understand how my reading of Orwell can be "naive". Wrong, maybe. Unless you mean that Orwell argued that these aspects of rhetoric can be deliberately manipulated to bring about otherwise unjustifiable outcomes? And that his chief purpose was to warn others of this manipulation and suggest danger signals of it? I am completely alert to that purpose, and you can be sure my neglect of that theme in my remarks here reflects a very deliberate desire to avoid suggesting anything so ugly of someone about whom I know nothing.

Now as to "moving the goal posts." What I said, from the very start, was that his construction was wrong _for_a_layman_, that it could be right _for_lawyers_, and that the former was here the important context. So my argument acknowledged the sense in which he could be right and dismissed it.

And so forth. I don't really care what you've taught. Bring an _argument_. Because your pompous _assertions_ don't do much more than piss me off.
>>> "And you can't assume the rationality of the capitalist"

That's definitely true.

But, his business incentives are aligned with whatever is most effective. If he wins the business competition, he makes a lot of money.

So at the macro scale, business owners would be inclined to do whatever works best ... as opposed to hiring a management layer they don't really need (and incurring costs) to adopt a less effective approach.
mindful meditation is currently popular in western medicine. the idea is that you sit somewhere peaceful, close your eyes, and think about your breathing. pretty much immediately you're going to start thinking about something else, so you gently notice, acknowledge that you're distracted, put the thought aside, and go back to thinking about your breath.

that's it, basically. you repeat that and you slowly get better and catching the thoughts and not thinking them. there are then various claims made about benefits that arise from doing this.

disclaimer - i'm just describing mindful meditation, which i use and find helpful (it's easy to do and may reduce stress). the recording itself is a bit gushing / over-enthusiastic for me in places, but it's an interview with someone connected to mindful meditation. there's a walk-through of what i describe above from about 19:45.
"Have you ever known anyone cite that as a reason?"

To add to this thought - It is well known that people tune out all those ads anyway so it couldn't possibly be a reason to leave the desktop, eh?
What app you use to make screenshots with?
Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille And 10 Other Titles
> his business incentives are aligned with whatever is most effective at making money.

Fixed that for you. Many, many things make lots of money but are not effective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda...
Wow. I was wondering why there was a big spike in traffic today. ;) Thanks for the post!
> What you've described is what Apple has already created IMO.

Exactly.
In the US libel requires a statement to have been made with malicious intent. Quite simply, this is in no way libel, nor should it be.

I'll take occasional minor shortlived inconveniences over security breaches anyday.
Depends what you're after. Some of the programming is quite similar to Radio 4 - the daily 'Morning Edition' is basically 'Today', 'All Things Considered' is 'PM', and then there's 'Marketplace' (no prizes for guessing what that's about!). Outside the daily news shows you've got:

* Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me, basically the US equivalent of Radio 4's News Quiz

* Tech Nation, the title of which should be fairly self explanatory

* Car Talk, a call-in show about cars. I am not a car person, and I enjoy it (the show stopped production a few months ago, but should be widely available online)

* This American Life, does eclectic long-form journalism.

* Science Friday, which is part of a daily call-in series Talk of the Nation, but all about science.

If you're into science and tech, Radiolab (radiolab.org) is also well worth a listen, it's not technically NPR (there are several different public radio groups in the US), but it uses really innovative production and I wish Radio 4 would broadcast it here in the UK!

Hopefully other people can add their own favorite shows...there are quite a few of them, and I've just highlighted a few that I find interesting as a Brit. I'm in the US a fair bit, and tend to listen to public radio where I can so these are all shows I've just stumbled across and enjoyed.
As a guitarist and music snob, I absolutely LOVED the game when it came out - bought GH1,2,3 and World Tour. You guys nailed it, and I'm just happy I personally get to tell you thanks. Thanks for sharing your side as a developer.
Yeah - stl. That's the issue isn't it? Its a mess to use stil embedded or for OS work - so I never, ever do.

Libraries are used by app guys -rarely by OS or embedded - unless they are specific to the hardware etc.

I hear the excuse "you can hurt yourself in C++ if not trained". That's true, but not helpful. You can build a house with hand tools too but nobody does any more - they use power tools and professional carpenters, electricians etc.
The Ultimate Guide to Conducting and Online Job Search (Part II – Marketing)