skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the reason doctors forget to wash their hands or create full-body sterile fields for inserting central lines is due at all to compensation systems. They just forget, or they get lazy, or they don't understand how important it is. They're rushed, too. It's human nature.

Another, potentially profitable, solution to the problem would be relatively easy using something similar to those new Philips ICU monitors that modularly record pulseox, blood pressure, respiration, etc... When the doctor is about to insert a central line, the nurse can click "central line" and the computer will say, audibly, "wash hands." Then the doctor says "next" and it says "create full-body sterile field. All non-necessary personnel, leave the room now." Then, just before the needle insertion, it asks very quickly "Have you washed your hands, created a sterile field, cleansed with chlorahexadine, and removed all non-necessary personnel?" Again an auditory "yes" will make the machine turn green or something, signifying that the doctor can insert the central line. It will add maybe 10 or 15 seconds to the process, and can have these kinds of flows for every routine procedure.

Many doctors would probably consider a machine doing that insulting. But if it saves "thousands" of lives, it's definitely worth it for someone to create a company and build them.

I was visiting an ICU for a couple of weeks last month, and I noticed that the nurses almost always do things by memory-- one of them forgot to check the dressing of a central line, and when the doctor asked why, she said she forgot. It says on the piece of paper at her desk that she was supposed to check it, but she doesn't get to sit at her desk very often.

There are lots of possibilities for technology to help improve the chances of critical care patients surviving. Like the auditory checklist above, why aren't scheduled things like dressing check/changes, IV fluid refills, and body movement/cleaning automated on some sort of central ICU computer which communicates with nurses using wireless PDAs? The airline Virgin America makes their flight attendants use wireless UMPCs so they are instantly notified when someone orders something from the in-flight entertainment system.

When a a patient's IV bag runs out, the nurses PDA can vibrate and the task can be added to a list. Why is this so difficult? It's complicated, expensive, and tedious. But if it saves lives and reduces infection rates, it might pay for itself very quickly.

My point is, even though the checklist procedure seems very stupid and simple, it should be integrated with sophisticated technology so it is never accidentally forgotten. I think that's where the future of healthcare is going, especially in critical care. It's too bad there aren't many (any) startups pursuing this field; it's dominated by Siemens and Phillips, and I think that's a reason there's so little innovation in hospital-based systems for patient care. So much money goes into research, as the article points out, but very little goes into implementing the results into practical patient care. That's where technology should come in, not just paper checklists.
It doesn't bother me assuming he has something interesting to say. But in this particular blog post, he doesn't.
Well the big push in xphi is coming from places like Rutgers, where guys like Stich, Maudlin, Goldman, just do very theoretical science.
I think it should be kind of hard to submit something, so people don't submit crap all the time. It should be a long, tedious process to submit an article so that when you finally find a good one, you feel like you want to embark on a journey to submit it to News.YC.
Followup: Zuckerberg doesn't exist
Wow, that was long.
For those with short attention span I am extracting the most important part:

"That was the lightening bolt moment. The problem with pointers in C is that the [star][varname] syntax means two different things, and they are actually contradictory from a certain perspective. In one context it means "declare a variable that is a pointer" and in the other it means "deference". Whenever my languages-brain bit looked at this it couldn't deal with it, recognised it as a contradictory positions and basically shut me down, but not in a way that let me work out what was going on. Have a look at it yourself from that perspective - hopefully you'll see what I always did. Now whenever I look at C code I instead just think "everything is an int and pointers are all about casting ints, and a star when you declare something is your way of telling the compiler that the type of this thing is int-pointer instead of just int". Thus I now have no difficulties at all."
I noticed the same gig in Pittsburgh, but they seemed to have a division there between the xphi's and armchairs. It seemed weird to me that the xphi's could do science and still call themselves philosophers. Why not just call themselves scientists? That's the problem with philosophy these days, all the good questions have been taken. So they're stuck doing literary analyses.
Newsconomy Has Some Tag Kung-Fu
With this tag Kung-Fu under your belt you could probably make any kind of list of items on the web that you wanted, and pretty easily.
Environmental blog - opinions, contributors, and suggestions welcomed
I like writing and I'm very interested in technology's role in changing our ways of interacting with and using the environment, so I started this blog..
All the interesting questions left are epistemological ones about language games, so literary works are a sort of test data.

And, yes, there are lot of hacks writing badly about these questions, but in what fields are there not a preponderance of posers?
I'm VERY eager to test this out!
Nick Carr discovers Software Above the Level of a Single Device
Flot is Hott
From Local Search To Business Data
Using the Chart API in KML for Quick Data Visualization
Updmodded for content and bravery.

I recognize some of my struggles in that piece. People get tired of me saying it, but I don't care:

"Chose your semantics wisely, for they do have consequences."

Ironic that in a discipline which requires such a high degree of precision in the use of its symbols and tokens consistently prescribes obscure and contradictory rules for their usage.

Although not required, success in this field is enhanced if one possesses the ability to mentally manage symbol sets with a fairly agnostic attitude towards their clarity and consistency.

When I was a newbie, I recall more than one veteran C programmer giving me a quizzical look when I asked who the hell thought it was a good idea to use the same symbol to express assignment and equality.
Makes me want to invent a Mathematica drinking game. Playing it while reading this would get you quite merry.
Facebook's Beacon collects non-user data as well
Ooyala wins Amazon's Startup Challenge
"...enticing randy gentlemen to reveal personal information that can then be put to criminal use."

Bot: A/S/L pix?

Internet Male: 22/M/FL no

Bot Log: [User demographics acquired, initiating build rapport sequence]

Bot: pres 456 if u want to see hot pix!
What Does a Startup CEO Need to be Able to Say?
mark this dead
Keep in mind that as a tool approaches "optimal", it needs to be changed less and less. So if Rails' new features don't justify the jump to "2.0", its stability and user-adoption may.
> Rewriting to Django and getting 45req/s and less memory usage was definitely worth it.

I'm curious: did you consider switching to another Ruby Web framework?
Marc is still pissed at MS after these years. What a passion & commitment Marc.
My understanding is that Conway doesn't like it when an unproven startup founder takes money out of the potential investment. If an investor is willing to put in $10 million, and the founder immediately pockets $2 million, that's $2 million less runway.

I'm not sure that's really accurate, and he definitely has a skewed perspective being 1. Already rich 2. An investor who refuses to make these kind of deals.
It would be easier to have an YC firefox plugin for submissions

Really? Copy-pasting a URL is too overburdening? I guess it depends on how many stories you submit... Maybe a plugin that lets you submit to programming.reddit, new.YC, and digg at the same time would be nicer.
Agreed. And to make the most efficient use of your memory don't run Apache. It's significantly less efficient with memory usage compared with something like nginx or lighttpd.
I'm not logged in at YC everytime y surf the net.
jacked: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2007-07-...
NY Times interview/article on Radiohead's new album
Have you ever coded while high?
If i hurt anyone by asking this question it is not what i meant. I just cant stop wondering what a coder could come up with while "high"?
I had difficulty with arithmetic in school, while calculus was a breeze. I had difficulty with pointers initially while recursion was a breeze. Anyone knows any existing neuroscience that explains such anomalies. I would be glad parse it. Oh, I can write poetry but I have trouble spleing.
Todd - apologies for missing the link. It was an honest mistake that was corrected. BTW, TechCrunch was not the original. The list was published in the FT, and the reason I posted the list was because most of my blog readers aren't necessarily techies, so would have missed the coverage on TC. Thanks for stopping by though!
Shafqat
The Danger of Naivete
Maybe we should be a little more careful about what we use as our news sources around here. But then again, gossip is probably too 'interesting' for humans to pass up.
Who is your target audience? If you don't know who they are, then your startup already has a problem... Once identified, can you think of any bloggers or other people that audience is inclined to listen to? If so, why not try contacting those individuals personally and ask them to take a look at your site and tell you what they think. Sending out a form email in this sort of outreach would be plain stupid and your response from them would be near nothing as you would deserve.

If you take the time to study these folks, you'll do much better. And if you're unable to convince them that your site's worth their while to use, then it probably isn't going to be a hit with your target group. Compared to any of the mass media approaches, this will cost less and work better.
If you could solve the problems of 1) users reposting the popular links from other social sites (without attribution), 2) spam bots, or 3) a ruling clique from taking over the front page, then you could compete with Digg and probably beat them.
And while your at it, try mine too: no flash, no ads, and not a single image: http://newsconomy.com/
Why The Blog Council Is Doomed To Fail
"Running a startup is a great way to learn how to, and how not to, ignore the right things."
Vernor Vinge's latest book, 'Rainbows End', uses this heavily.
Weed makes me worse at doing anything that takes serious cognitive ability, except thinking of ideas -- but I need to wait until I am sober to actually evaluate the merit of said ideas. As far as coding, I have one friend who says he is great at coding while high and he is a terrible coder all around. I am hesitant to think that anyone is truly better at coding while high, because weed certainly impairs overall cognitive function, especially short term and working memory. However, I have corresponded with someone on this forum who has made something impressive and he says coding high sometimes lets him tackle problems that he has been stuck on for a while. But I really don't think he made most of his site while high.

Coding on Kratom, on the other hand...
Only on caffeine, though I have found that alcohol (number of drinks dependent on language) can help with debugging.
I find that coding while high never produces good code. I've done it before, and while I can sit and code for a long time, I just make too many stupid mistakes. It takes me forever then to go back and figure out what I did wrong while high; I usually have to wait until I'm sober to debug it. However, the actual logic of the code usually makes sense and it works, it's just little things that I forget or simple errors in logic.

The other problem is that while I can code more mundane code, anything that actually takes a lot of thought is just impossible. I can't remember all the things I'm trying to do and can't keep everything straight. This is just because weed basically destroys your short term memory.

I recognize that weed may give you the motivation to code or give you insight into how to tackle a problem, but just be aware that you'll have to do a lot of debugging of the code after you come down.

As rms said, kratom is a different story. I can code for hours on kratom and actually make very few mistakes.
we use jquery at http://www.tastestalkr.com and we haven't yet found any IE problems.
More or less drinks for functional/mostly-functional languages?
Nice plug for your Kratom business ;-)
Crap: This post, code produced while high, and all responses to this post (this response included).
The Role of Retroviruses in Human Evolution
I've found that drinking a beer or two and coding with loosened inhibitions allows me to take on riskier approaches to solving problems. Things that might ordinarily seem too hard or like too much work seem less so.
Ballmer Peak: http://xkcd.com/323/
Leaks: New AIBO PS Grow, PlayStation Aibo?
I never had trouble with pointers because I learned Assembly before C.

Everyone who wants to understand computers should learn ASM, preferably with something nicer than x86 GNU Assembler (%eax, come on, how about "R1"). And not that pseudo-Pascal "High-Level Assembly" nonsense that hides the details from you so you don't understand what's going on.
Elegantly detailed? How about not very elegant and short on critical details.

How exactly can investors be screened? How can they make a feedback system that can't be gamed considering that the transactions don't go through their site as with, for example, ebay?

And if you think a telephone interview or basic checks will stop scammers then I have a nice gentleman from Nigeria who would like to speak with you.

If someone wants to post some actually thought through ideas instead of complaining about a subscription fee that didn't pan out then we're all listening.

It's like finding women to date through the internet. Some of them might turn out to be obese 50 year old men, but lots of people still get use out of such services.
I realize this is seemingly more gadgets than hacking news, but not for me. The Aibo, the goofy, expensive toy that Sony discontinued in 2006, was my introduction to hacking in college. For two years, I hacked this thing with a fury I'd never known. I got into 'RoboCup', aka Robot Soccer, and making these Aibos autonomous were my mission. Through this project, I learned how to code, run a project, and succeed. After two years of hard work, this summer my team, the fiery Northern Bites from small Bowdoin College, won the World Championship of robot dog soccer. Now I'm in Silicon Valley trying to take all that I learned from RoboCup and do something big. The chance of a new Aibo, a robot I got to know a lot of, brings back a lot of hacking memories for me. Anyways, just thought I share. Rock on.
Quarterlife: online series + social network
Lots of parentheses?
When does caffeine make you high? It just makes me jittery and easily agitated, so when I make a mistake I feel like throwing the computer out the window.
Memory is important, but I wouldn't skimp on the CPU. In my experience (a rails app on mongrel/nginx and a php5 app on lighttpd/nginx), CPU has been the bottleneck, not memory. It's also a lot easier to add memory than to increase CPU power.
Like a lot of articles on the topic, this one misrepresents (or misunderstands) the Turing Test. In a _true_ Turing Test, the humans aren't blindly conversing with the assumption that their conversant is human -- they're actively seeking to verify the presence of a human.

The non-Turing Test described in the article merely requires that contenders don't do anything blatantly inhuman, and is obviously trivial to "pass". Any contender for the actual Turing Test will do so with ease.

(I built a bot a few years ago that stored strings from IM conversations, and used the tokens of the preceding phrase as keywords for future lookups. It's hard to image a more naive algorithm, and yet, as in SlutBot's case, it didn't take long for most people to assume it was human.)

Also, with regard to SlutBot's use... is it still entrapment if the bot does it?
API - XML or JSON output ?
We're considering building an API to our application. To all those that have created one, which output do most of your developer users use - XML or JSON ? Which one should we concentrate on first?
If you're going to be using PHP then I would strongly recommend finding a host that will let you install Fedora 7/8.

I had to set up a PHP environment on 64-bit Ubuntu recently and it wa s a major pain. The PHP binary from apt-get was 5.1.2 and pdo_mysql wouldn't install out of the box (I had to comment out part of the install script). The lighttpd binary was also pretty old (1.4.11 I think) and had a bug specific to Ubuntu/Debian that caused major performance problems with fastcgi; I had to build the latest version from source. It's still workable but it just seems like Fedora is a lot more PHP-friendly.
It's not exactly news when Valleywag gets a story wrong. Whenever there's some big new story on Valleywag, we should always wait a few days before linking to it to see if it turns out to be false.
can we please ban any comment or post with the word "kratom" on this site.
A good quote from an article I was recently reading (The Cultural Paradox of the Global Village - http://www.utoronto.ca/mcluhan/article_culturalparadox.htm)

If attention is the most valuable commodity, our most valued asset, it may be said that the most valuable personal skill to be effective these days is ignorance, literally ignore-ance -- the ability to selectively and appropriately ignore that which is irrelevant or merely distracting. In this context, ignorance is not bliss -- it is the practical manifestation of acute awareness and heightened perception.
IMAP Rant
I love the people saying learn to code. Not everyone is a programmer, Ok us coders might find it easy but not everyone else does. also not everyone is using ruby and this might have been written in C++ so learning coding ain't going to help anytime soon :p

good luck with it. maybe look for another coder to helpout would be cheaper.
JSON. XML is crufty.
I use it too. The web UI is kind of brutal but I don't have to go there much. It works, I'm happy with it.
One of the few things that has reduced health care costs the past few decades has been the advent of HMOs. Why is that? Because HMOs give a doctor a financial incentive to keep the patient healthy.

No, I don't think I'm cynical. I'm speaking from over 15 years experience in the Critical Care business. I've worked at over 35 hospitals and medical facilities in 6 different states.

And, it's a plain fact of nature. People do what you pay them to do. Just because someone is in health care doesn't change the fact that they want to get paid. And, we should give people financial incentives to give good care. Pay them to do a good job.

A founder gets paid if their company has a successful exit. So, we bust our buts to make a successful exit for our company.
Stock options reward employees for increasing the stock price. So, employees will work to increase that stock price.
If you pay people per hour, they work a lot of hours.
If you salary people without regards to performance, performance drops.
If you pay a person per widget made, they make a lot of widgets.

I'm speaking from experience. The best ER's that I've worked in were ER's where the doctors are paid a base rate and then a bonus for performance based standards. That ensures excellent, efficient practice of medicine. Those are the ER's where the doctors push the nurses to line up more patients to be seen. The ER that I work in now is one of those. I'm working with some of the best doctors I've ever worked with.

I've worked in ER's like that where the group of doctors got paid a flat rate to staff the ER per year. So, if they understaffed the ER, they got paid more. Needless to say the patient wait times in that ER were often over 16 hours. I saw patients waiting a full 24 hours just to see a doctor for a broken arm or a gallbladder attack.
It's funnier to leave it up, at least as long as the retraction is sitting near it on the front page. The two together are a meta-story about Vallewag.
RE: Washing hands and compensation systems...
We've known since Pasteur about germ theory, and that hand washing saves lives. We've been pounding the hand washing pulpit in health care for over a century. Why don't we wash hands every single time we need to? I forget and I have other things that are "more important". So, you need to make infection control, or good hand washing more important to the individual practitioner. What other ways do you have of doing that? Give people a cattle prod to shock people every time they touch a patient without washing hands? No, give them an incentive for good behavior. It's basic Pavlovian psychology. Ring bell -> salivate. Pay people for no infected patients -> more hand washing.

RE: monitors talking to me...
My monitors already "talk to me" too much. There are many many beeps and buzzes that I ignore constantly. There are one or two kinds of beeps that I watch very closely, however. When I hear those, I go running to the monitor. Everything else, I ignore. A voice telling me to wash my hands would get ignored like the others.

Re: computerizing tasks.
It's a decent thought, but resistance to change is extremely high in health care, especially technological change. I work at a hospital now that transitioned to a new computer system hospital wide two months before I started. The entire hospital was pretty much in full-on revolt against the new system, and even now, 18 months later, there's still tons of animosity against the software and the IT people. It was a nightmare. So, there are many, many cultural issues that prevent adoption of high tech practices.

Battery time. I work 12 hour shifts, and in many hospitals I've worked at, I haven't even gotten a lunch break. A number of places I've worked, I don't get time to go to the bathroom for 12 hours. A PDA battery is not going to last a 12 hour shift, and nurses don't have time to change the batteries. If that's the case, they won't use the technology.

RE: startups in the health care field... The liability involved is astronomical. Getting a new medical device or new product through the FDA hoops is a nightmare and extremely costly. And, what happens if you have an obscure bug, and your IV pump that contains a life support drug runs dry, and the nurse isn't notified. In a number of cases, the patient could die if the drug is stopped for more than a few minutes.

What happens when the patient dies from a random complications, and the family is upset about the care received? They sue everyone involved. Even though your software/PDA product wasn't involved in the patient's death, you will get named in the lawsuit simply because you are considered a "deep pocket" and your product was involved in the care of the patient. You end up hiring a very extensive legal department when you have any sort of medical device. You have to.
Blogs Tool: Rate Everything!
Kevin Herbert, a technical fellow at Cisco solves problems using LSD. He makes no secret of his use of the drug and is quite open about its contribution to his work.

See
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015
I never produced anything worthwhile while high back in my experimentation days. Having said that, coding while drunk, especially with other people, is quite enjoyable. It can be a bitch to debug though, all depending on how drunk you ended up getting.
Easier to install and update LAMP-related apps, and not having to reboot for Software Update all the time.