skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is pretty easy to dismiss that what Google, Facebook & Twitter are not that important.

These companies have impact that are not easily measured. Google gave people knowledge at their fingertips while Facebook and Twitter have become tools for democracy.
But this just states what this generation lacks the most... Empathy.

I couldn't care less if Facebook didn't exist because humanity focused it's work into solving real problems. But some people just don't care. As long as they are living their good life... who cares about diabetes?

The biggest problem IMHO is our generation's goals. Money, money and more money.
If the world provided better ways for us to help each other instead of distracting us, while they suck work and money out of us, until we die. Imagine how different everything could be...
Between this lamentation and Raganwald's lamentation, me thinks two should at least get together to solve diabetes or some other problem where your domain expertise and his software development expertise can be combined. I've seen your design skills and they are solid. I was actually surprised when you said you are headed for a career in medicine. Never would have expected that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue.

Thankfully, the inverse is largely true as well. Develop diabetes, and if you lose enough weight, you can often avoid the need for meds altogether. I was just diagnosed as a type II diabetic about 3 months ago... they originally had me on injectable insulin and Metformin, but as I've lost weight (17 lbs in ~ 3 months) and switched to a low carb diet, I've been able to stop taking insulin and still see my blood glucose numbers move closer and closer to stabilizing in the normal range.

I'm hoping (and my doctor seems confident) that if I lose more weight and stay active (and eat right) that I'll be able to drop the Metformin eventually.

One thing this experience has taught me though, has been a much greater appreciate for the evils of simple sugars and high glycemic index carbs. I now look at a bottle of (non diet) soda and the idea of drinking that shit just makes me sick.
Thanks Arash for the fantastic resources and thoughts.

I have read that essay by PG numerous times.

I come up with lots of ideas, some I think are quite good. Unfortunately it's hard to find one that I like so much that I stick with it all the way to launch.

Even finishing an MVP is a lot of work, and I'm trying to do a better job of researching up front so I don't waste time.
I wish I could get the X230 without a trackpad at all. I leave mine disabled in the BIOS.
Vote totals for the bailout:

Aye: 171 D, 91 R.
Nay: 63 D, 108 R.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h1424/show

Why are you complaining about the GOP holding the house? Based on their votes, they seem to be the party of letting banks pay for their mistakes.
Are you sure that's what that's for? When I go to that setting (which I'd already set to "no one" in an earlier privacy audit), the example it shows of what it controls is very different from the "related post" issue that's being complained about here.
I agree. I'm not noticing a mistake unless he has since corrected it.
This is fantastic, thank you so much for all the thoughts and advice. I own The Four Steps To The Epiphany and have not finished it. I'll check out that section.
Some believe lower natural production of immune-system-important Vitamin D (through less sun exposure) is a factor, though studies have been mixed:

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

(I'd guess higher levels of sunlight might also help sterilize viruses on surfaces and suspended in the air, but have no handy references supporting that theory.)

There's also the unlikely-but-fun fringe theory that fresh flu viruses regularly fall to Earth from space:

http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm

Perhaps either a certain part of Earth's orbit, or colder hemispheric temperatures, mean more falling space flu? :)
It strikes me as a self-contradictory statement. If these minds are so great, why are they working on such mundane things? There's more to this equation than raw intelligence. Being one of the "best minds" also requires experience, drive, and the wisdom to apply one's talents usefully.
He is just starting conversation it seems. I agree that we should do more about things that matter and in that, most posts to this are right.
I just want to say that rlwrap is awesome.

Such a simple idea, yet so effective.
Much better now, but that DNS stuff is pretty confusing. Probably don't tell anyone that because its just babble.

Keep up the good work!
Thus making another assumption that social interactions on Facebook, Twitter, etc. are 'trivial'.
It is also worth pointing out first there are various flavors. There is a range of type strengths. Maybe from something like Haskell down to, I don't know, Javascript with stuff like [1,10,4,21].sort() = [1,10,21,4].

There is strong typing vs weak typing as well, and either can appear in a dynamic language. There also allowing nulls and also having or not having algebraic types.

> That's part of a more general preference, for preserving information. When I'm programming, I know what kind of thing I expect in a parameter, and I know what I expect to return.

Doesn't a functional single assignment language like Clojure or Erlang then make most sense? If your goal is to preserve information and knowing that no funny business has been happening behind your back (when you are not "figuratively" looking) isn't that what you want? This is even more important if this is a concurrent program.

You also have to ask yourself, what is the overall goal here. Ok maybe it is just aesthetics, maybe there is a small or (not so small) amount pleasure derived in figuring out the types and specifying that. Maybe it helps larger teams work better. Or it helps the compiler to make faster code (v8 might disagree though).

Most people would perhaps arrive at -- "I want my program to not crash as often". One way to do it is to then have a provable correct program. For avionics there is some degree of that. But it is very expensive. But another way is to assume your program will crash, no matter how strong your types are. Then fault isolation is a better strategy.
Microsoft design "theory" is "we can't beat Apple at their game, so let's run in the opposite direction because no one else is there, and pretend we think it's a good idea". It is like joining a contest to win "most beautiful house for miles around" and entering in the Sahara desert dsection
Please send me one. snakebites420@gmail.com
Thanks mindcrime, I couldn't have said it better myself. I suppose I should have left my goal out, but I thought it was useful context. Where I live and work (palo alto), modest 3 bedroom homes average $2,000,000. Nice ones bump up into the $5,000,000 range.

I think money's not fun to talk about, since it's easy to hurt someone's feelings due to people having such radically differing worldviews.

I am very ambitious, and personally 500k a year is a good "start" towards success. There's a lot of great books about the power of thought. I like "The Magic Of Thinking Big".
> And if you haven't tried out technomancy's work with Heroku, try spinning up an instance. It's incredibly well done.

Could you please elaborate on that? I'm not familiar with the work he's done with Heroku.
Give me a break. The whole point of the banking system is to concentrate capital into a handful megacorps. When you have thousands of little competitors, profit plummets and risk increases enough to make banking not a viable business anymore.

Heck, that's how banking started. A handful Venetian traders got so rich they started lending money.
Wish I could have the choice of a career on any kind of research where I live, 3rd world countries just don't have that luxury. Good for you that you made that move... Wish you best of luck!
We've kinda been over this ad nauseam. It may be convergent encryption.
I'll add to the chorus regarding the W5xx series. I have a W510 here that is 2 years old, and has been used heavily all that time. I also have a W520 that is 1 year old, similarly used, and has also traveled overseas a dozen times. No problems with either (both used for various Linux distros). Prior to Lenovo owning the brand, I owned IBM ThinkPads for years. I can testify to over over 15 years of their reliability.
Stepping stones akin to Elon Musk and Paypal. He's now commercializing the electric car (Tesla Motors), running a solar company (SolarCity) and the most grandiose, SpaceX.
The problem with some of the above is ram. I think 4gb is too little if you spin up virtual machines while developing. The previous version of Zenbook had support for 8gb, but now only 4gb?
Ubuntu (and other Linuxes) has better package management, more UNIX tools by default and better tooling for certain types of development. For people who target Linux it's easier to build binaries for it.

It's also open and you're able to change it, tinker with it, mold it. You actually know where everything is. It's generally a lot cleaner as well: Apple litters the entire filesystem with stuff you don't know where it came from, or what they affect.

I believe faster boot times are also a factor, some people can get their Linuxes to boot nearly instantaneous. Perhaps battery life as well.

I use OS X and am happy with it because I don't demand any of that to be productive/enjoy my system, but I can certainly enumerate things I don't like about it and would rather have the "native" FreeBSD approach or a Linuxy one.

Some OS X tools try to make up the difference (homebrew, like you said it), but like any race where you start behind you're not gonna win. Especially since the other competitors have decades of experience.

OS X is basically a tradeoff. Some people aren't willing to trade away too much, or have personal choices which are more important to them than to you or me.

That said, I'd try to get Linux running natively on a Mac if I had that inclination, not under Parallels or some other emulator. That just feels the opposite of "clean" to me.
You can do the same thing with Google Analytics events. Use a non-interactive event with "form validation" as category, field name as action and entered value as label. You may miss some events based on the service limits, but the common trends will be obvious.
That site is trying to murder my eyes!

Go here http://www.readability.com/articles/zcqkmihi and switch to Readability view!
Googled for encrypted de-duplication: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/storer-storagess08.pdf
From Wikipedia:

- Static Typing: "A programming language is said to use static typing when type checking is performed during compile-time as opposed to run-time." [1]

- Dynamic Typing: "A programming language is said to be dynamically typed when the majority of its type checking is performed at run-time as opposed to at compile-time." [2]

- Strong Typing: "A type system is said to feature strong typing when it specifies one or more restrictions on how operations involving values of different data types can be intermixed. The opposite of strong typing is weak typing." [3]

- Weak Typing: "One claimed advantage of weak typing over strong typing is that it requires less effort on the part of the programmer because the compiler or interpreter implicitly performs certain kinds of conversions. However, one claimed disadvantage is that weakly typed programming systems catch fewer errors at compile time and some of these might still remain after testing has been completed." [4]

Links:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Static_typing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Dynamic_typing

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_typing

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_typing
Better than anything I could draw. Here was one of the most re known physicists/smartest guys around saying...hey, I'm not really an artist but I'd love to give it a shot.

Kind of makes you wonder if that same line of the thought led to his scientific successes.
GUYS! We thought up a new way of how to describe why Facebook is bad, we'll make it seem like this hasn't been happening since "Likes" came into existence and watch people revolt!

If you're butthurt about your privacy and think big brother is spying on you, don't fucking use Facebook.
This isn't a question that already doesn't have an answer. Researchers showed at the Common Cold Centre in London that body temperature has an impact on the likelihood of catching flu. The reasoning is that during the cold, less blood flows to the extremities to maintain core body temperature. This includes less blood flow to the nose.

Flu lives in the nose, and white blood cells are what attacks flu, so having less blood in the nose means less white blood cells which means less chance of killing the virus off before it takes hold.
Github for government (collaborative open source laws)
Also, why does this have 96 upvotes? Shame on you HN.
Hm. Mechanically would it be possible that the vibration of those nifty clicky keys could cause problems in a device with an integrated HD?
It's always struck me as curious that PLT does not overlap much with human factors. What is a programming language but the human interface to an automaton?
and that is not a breeding ground for germs...
Honestly, there isn't much pain that can't be solved by a good engineer doing their job at the places I've worked. So I guess I could do consulting, but I don't know how to get clients. And I personally find it more fun to build and sell a product than to just do more programming for higher pay. There is something special about owning something.
I don't have more :(

I used to have a iPod filled with all Engenheiros do Havaí tunes, U2 and Cansei de Ser Sexy
Virtually every site/app uses that same shape, or its mirror image, for "cloud" icons. You'd be hard pressed to say who's copying whom.
Why can't you launch them as some guy? I see people giving diet advice all the time, and making money off selling things to go along with it.

They all just put standard disclaimers at the bottom of the page saying that it isn't medical advice, and that they aren't doctors.

If you have looked into this further and still came to the conclusion that you can't post this stuff, please let me know why.
This is why I think that this revolution will be led by hacker/patients and not business men / politicians. I am not trying to be dramatic but I will literally die for this cause because I spent my entire life sick, in bed, shitting blood and trying what everyone else wanted me to.

3 months of doing it my way and I never knew life could be this good, so while I agree that the regulatory climate makes this difficult; I dont care. I will never take such a risky attitude toward others and risk their health or wellbeing because I do not have this right but I also will not use this as an excuse to do nothing when I know I can help.
Except that it isn't at all easy to get into finance, and the profits are not guaranteed in any case, as you seemed to imply.
Something that has never quite made sense to me is, the flu virus is apparently very delicate.. drying out very quickly. However, it seems to thrive more in cold, dry conditions. How can this be? And to your point, would humidifiers help or hurt?
I agree with you. It's really not even a nitpick, it's the truth that should be emphasized more.

It doesn't look like I'm able to edit my original comment, unfortunately.
I always remember what Milton Friedman used to say, he was amazed be people who see failure of regulation and propose a fix by seeking to introduce even more regulation.

"well this time it will surely work!"
"if only we had the right kind of regulation/people in charge!" they say.

That's never gonna happen. Breaking the system in chunks artificially will not work, because it will consolidate again and buy up the regulators. The true solution here is Bitcoin, precisely because it is not controlled by anyone.
"I'm saying sanely styled code does not have these issues in practice"

Otherwise known as the "just do it right" argument. This is an argument that goes all the way back to the days of writing everything in assembly language, and it was just as wrong then as it is today. If only a restricted subset of a language can ensure that basic issues do not become serious problems, then the language should be restricted to that subset.

"not having the compiler make up semantics for broken code or putting in checks everywhere"

Really? I would rather have the compiler put in run time checks whenever it cannot infer that no input will cause the program's behavior to be undefined. Thus, the compiler might insert a check here:

for(i = 0; i < input.length(); i++)
some_vector[i]++;

but not here:

for(i = 0; i < min(input.length(), some_vector.length()); i++)
some_vector[i]++;

nor here:

if(input.length() > some_vector.length()) {
throw some_exception();
}
for(i = 0; i < input.length(); i++)
some_vector[i]++;

At the very least, requiring bounds checks on array access would create a definition for out-of-bounds pointers: program termination (or perhaps an exception being thrown). A reasonably good compiler can detect when a bounds check is unnecessary and can remote the bounds check as an optimization. Why shouldn't this be something that compilers do -- out-of-bounds array access is never a good thing (oh, wait, you might be dereferencing some arbitrary pointer that you got by some means other than allocating memory with "new" -- OK, fine, but that is what type systems are for; this sort of separation is not unheard of, I see it in Lisp with SBCL's FFI)?

"The unmotivated poking of arbitrary magic-number offsets into a magic-number sized vector is not proper. It's the kind of thing that sets off alarm bells on even the most casual of review."

Perhaps so, but then the answer is not simply "just use the STL." As with most things C++, it requires a long list of things to make code work right, and even people who have been writing C++ code for many years are sometimes surprised to discover that something they thought was fine is actually bad. C++ makes it pretty easy for programmers to do the wrong thing and needlessly difficult to do the right thing, which is why years of expertise are needed to write remotely reliable C++ code.
I do understand that in order for an argument to be fallacious it has to actually be part of an argument.

There's a bit of subjectivity to this. Generally when someone makes an argument and the response is merely "you're a hypocrite", the inference is that person #2 believes that person #1 is wrong and that's the best counter they've got. I understand there's some inference on my part, but that's how I usually see it.

Someone does not have to literally say "You are wrong because you're a hypocrite" in order for the fallacy to apply.
That informed people may have preferences different than one's own does not preclude the possibility that some people's preferences are based on their being uninformed. But it is hubris (and not the virtuous kind) to presume that's any particular person's reason for disagreement, or that it's the most common.
Kyro I have told you many times. You don't need to be killer at design (you are pretty solid) or development when you got domain knowledge like you do.

The very fact that you can think in all three domains make you potentially a thousand times more privileged than most great designers and devs from a start-up point of view.
It's highly application dependent, right?

Say it's a signup form. Your validator lets a bad email through. The potential client/customer left. You can't email them to ask for correct email. They are gone. They may never come back (depends of what they were there for, right?). In that case I would want to do as much as might be reasonable in order to ensure that I capture someone who might eventually translate into revenue.

In other cases it might be just fine to store absolute gibberish and deal with it later. That said, if you have an incredibly popular site and are receiving thousands upon thousands of sign-ups per day, do you really want to store junk? Someone is going to have to go clean it up before it is of any use.

Anyhow, my main point, perhaps, is that one should understand what these magic regex email validators are and are not. That's all.

The reason I bring this up whenever relevant is because I have been bitten by this problem in the past. I only understood the problem when an existing customer informed me that they could not sign-up to receive info on a new product because my email validator was kicking them out. He just picked-up the phone and called me. I never did learn how many people I lost because of that damn regex I grabbed from an authoritative source on the 'net.
That is some memorable phrasing.
NASA does have a number of contests. A number of the big ones are called the Centennial Challenges (http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/stp/centennial_challenges/in...) These currently include:

- Sample Return Robot ($1.5 Million)
- Night Rover ($1.5 Million)
- UAS Airspace Operations Challenge (AOC) ($Half a Million)

They've also done other competitions, such as robo-ops for college students (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/releases/2011/11-08...) (https://www.wpi.edu/news/20112/rascalrob.html)
Good point about undefined vs. implementation-defined, though even implementation-defined behavior could break programs that switch to a different implementation that makes a different choice.
All these guys do is make noise. It's been a long time since we can point to a shrewd investment they've made.
Technology and software in schools in one of the most corrupt, backwards, and destructive markets around.
Schools must take charge of their own software and destiny with a robust open-source economy.

The Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia, runs on an open source SIS we've developed for under $100K and it has been in production for over 3 years. We are working now build an alliance between several like schools to share the maintenence and development costs of supporting a public release.

If this group is planning on spending $5 million, we're still dealing with enterprise salesman hiring amateur or out-of-date developers. Give me another $100K and I'll put money in hackers' pockets to build quality software and make sure no other schools _have_ to pay for the same thing twice. This is more of the same crap, there's a whole new generation of developers that don't have access to the school software market, and it's students that are losing out because of it. The developers that built all the sites and apps this community knows and loves wouldn't need anywhere near $5 million to build this SIS and it wouldn't look like it got left over from 1999
While I think the analysis of the comic is probably correct, both in terms of how it is intended and how it is most frequently read, I think the described relationship (horrible abuse of Venn diagrams notwithstanding) would hold without any negative implication about dynamic typing proponents: most programmers don't know much type theory - those motivated to learn will be those with a preference for static typing.
Show me where to get doctor case history and I can do the matching website for you => http://maxdemarzi.com/2012/10/18/matches-are-the-new-hotness...
actually non-educated people solve Big Science problems daily...and most enlightened science people welcome the additional solving power.

It is a ,myth that only Science people get the opportunity to solve big science problems.
My first thought when he asked why the great minds at Google are doing nothing for people suffering from diabetes and other ailments: How many people do you think have had their health greatly improved by researching their condition through Google?
Static Typing: Hurry Up and Compile!

Dynamic Typing: Crap, did I really miss that?
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