skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> even if they don't sound glamorous when writing a "Show HN" post

Is this true? I feel like "Show HN: technological solution that allows people to forget they have diabetes" would cause a "woah, that's awesome" reaction. I mean, for another example, imagine "Show HN: I'm 14, please check out my fool-proof iOS dieting app"; or, at the far end of the scale, "Show HN: my weekend project - I cured cancer". I feel like these would be pretty "glamorous"; like, sufficiently so, that I'm having a difficult time keeping a straight face writing the titles of the posts, as they come off as the kind of thing way too epic for a "Show HN": if I saw these headlines, I'd immediately think "yeah, whatever, obviously total BS; maybe let's check out the comments to see what they failed to take into account" ;P.
Facebook has dealt mainly with software till now, but look at all the projects Google has tackled. Self-driving vehicles, fiber Internet service, blanketing cities with wifi, Google Glass, fighting for net neutrality. Google has the talent, bank roll, and ambition to tackle something monumental that spans hardware, deals with regulatory overhead, involves a lot of on-the-ground grunt work, etc.
Apple has the resources to tackle such problems as well but hasn't shown the will to do things like street view or fight for net neutrality, which is probably why people think of Google more than Apple when they think of such problems.
Nine facts about top journals in economics
Interesting data, I'm sure this applies equally well to other fields including computer science
Of course not. I'm just pointing out that at the end of the day, if you want to allow a significant portion of the population to "retire" you have to confront the same basic issue: those people aren't drawing down on goods and services they stashed away while they were working, they're taking away part of the production from the working generation.

That's the universal constant of old people--it was true even back before we had retirement systems and the elderly were taken care of by their kids.
I assume there must be something preventing the two ends of the cable from just generating a secure 256-bit AES key and using it on all of the traffic going over the link, thus preventing snooping, but I can't think of what it would be. Is the data rate just too high for that to be practical, or is there something else there?
Scientists Discover Spectacular River on Mars
Well, I think what would happen today is that those apps will be buried in the noise of Facebook app streams and will be less successful (in expectation at least) than their 2007 counterparts (unless the course comes with an equivalent focus on marketing efforts for such apps). There are just so many more commercial apps with heavy marketing resources behind it, that the average student app would unfortunately have a much tougher time getting the attention of eyeballs.

That being said, I have enrolled :)
Yeah, yeah, downvote away. Ultimately, this is the ultimate, overwrought version of those stupid blog posts complaining that nobody codes something that does X, but when it's put to them why they don't make it, they answer, "Eh, it's not billable hours for me. But, hey, someone out there on the internet can do that for me, right?"
There have been documented cases of undersea cables being tapped: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

Regarding Fibre I am not sure of documented cases but: http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl...
Sometimes Chrome is the Broken Browser
This is such a bizarre, vague, and non-sensical claim that it's impossible to know what to make of it.

1. Under what circumstances does Wikileaks ever find it necessary to reveal a source? Or in this case, to say "maybe he was a source, maybe he wasn't, we're just putting it out there"?

2. He assisted Wikileaks...how? In a way different than being a source?

3. He communicated with Julian Assange...how? About what? about secret stuff? Complimenting each other? Trading recipes?

If this was an attempt to help Aaron's cause, it seems very misguided...Aaron really doesn't need the association with Wikileaks, especially as his supporters attempt to portray his work as benign and altruistic. If this is just a naked cry for attention, well, that's just sad. There are probably other ways of getting attention than to violate one of your most important precepts (the anonymity of your sources) with a vague tease.
Interesting that you should pick up on that. It usually depends on the audience.

In general if one has a slightly more divergent worldview than that of the company in which he/she finds themselves, it's historically been useful (albeit frustrating at times), to be more considered and precise.

Between my best friend, a fellow coder/entrepreneur of ten years, (who has a very different personality), we can communicate in shorthand as he understands what I mean, irrespective of the natural imprecision, that creeps in by wanting to be "good enough" to get the message across. Although the early days of our friendship was somewhat.. challenging.

Some of the usernames on HN that I've noticed that have insightful content, do not appear to reward sloppy rhetoric, and even, I suspect, use it as a filtering signal.

Hence, it would seem rational to at least demonstrate one is willing to embrace the norms of that group, but more importantly to avoid genuine misunderstanding, which has plagued me since childhood.

(I know what a cliche, what a special snowflake etc etc ;) Yes I dislike how it sounds too.

Lastly my own values dictate a personal preference for dialectic over sophistication. But perhaps that's a debate for another time.
Systemic risk to an investment class such as mortgages, means that most banks would be subject to the same ill effects, and smaller less diversified banks will fail. There were 157 bank failures in 2010...zero in 2006. http://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/bank/2010/index.html

However, just limit the amount of Federal Deposit Insurance that can be issued to one entity, if we can't figure out what they're doing.
I wasn't aware of the MITM issues, thank you for letting me know. I'm working on setting up a cert as we speak.
Immediacy of Digital Media Helps Drive Spending
It's called "mid-life", and it ultimately doesn't care what you're actually doing. If you're just making money, you feel bad that you aren't helping people, or that you aren't accomplishing enough. If you're helping people, you feel just as bad about how you don't seem to be helping people, or about all the ways you could imagine doing more.
Very much so. I moved my family to the outskirts of Chicagoland so we'd be really close to my kids grandma. Great choice. Even though I technically can commute into Chicago everyday, the 1:15 trip can wear me down.

So even though I'm in "Chicago" I still care for a job that allows remote work. It's a quality of life issue.

I would never move to California. It just won't happen, my family is more important than working for some company that has no interest in working asynchronously.

In addition. I know that a company that has the infrastructure to support remote work, will have the infrastructure to support different hours. Most developer around here are early 20s, single, and can wake up at 9, roll into work at 10, and come home at 6.

I'm up at 6 every morning with my kid. If I get inspiration, I don't want to be held up by a restrictive process.
Well let me put it this way:

If the USA kept the gold standard, I seriously doubt they'd be the number 1 economy in 2013.
My suspicions only grew when I read the first comment thread on that post. It's a bit disturbing, but the actual slights all seem to be coming from the guy imagining being slighted.
"Ask HN:" works fine. see: http://news.ycombinator.com/ask
>I used to be an Austrian but it's been almost a century now and it's become clear to me that the Keynesians are actually correct.

You're just like Greenspan: an Austrian turned Keynesian.

Don't see many of those!
You seem to think that money in an interest-bearing bank account or a mutual fund is the same as cash under a bed. It's not.

You also seem to think that the size of the economy fixed and that allocation is a zero-sum game across time and space. It's not.

Thus you are conflating welfare schemes with savings schemes.

They're different.
what is your point? it's your life so if you want to do something different, then go do it.
I'd like a single folder for each application type, then an alphabetical list of apps - maybe working something like the contact list. As it is I am stuck with dozens of folders (for each letter of the alphabet, and because of 12 app per folder limit, I have four "Games S" folders.

http://i.imgur.com/aTacOlU.jpg
Ask HN: Board Seats and salaries 
Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has any first hand knowledge if VC's or angel investors who invest in your companies, get paid a small salary to sit on your board? I figure if it's a small angel investment or seed round, that no one gets paid to sit on the board, but post Series A, is it unheard of?
Thank you, that was really helpful. Maybe I will give ArchLinux a try. I've heard nothing but good reviews. Nothing better than first hand experience, right?

I love OS X though. The thing I like about it is, yes it does have UNIX but it is also user friendly and has a ton of awesome apps and access to the Mac App Store.
Am I wrong in thinking that, if you actually did solve the kinds of problems mentioned in the article (obesity, diabetes, etc.) that your resulting business would make a lot of money? Is it really "makes more money" that keeps people working on ad-optimization, and not a simpler reason like "that is the kind of mathematical problem with an algorithmic solution that the analytical brain of a programmer can solve"?

It's just that I would have thought that a problem that so many people had (again, such as obesity, diabetes, etc.) and that led to such horrible quality of life would cause there to be tons of money ready to pounce on a solution (and would have cited the depressing amount of resources thrown at things like diet pills, as well as the number of Google ads people have placed on the keywords "diabetes cure", as evidence).
Primary instructor here. Was going to wait to post this to HN till I had more material up, but please check out http://startup.stanford.edu.

We'll have a bunch of speakers over the course of the class from more than a dozen of the top startups in the Valley (Square, Uber, Stripe, AirBnB, etc.) to round out the technical material. Agreed with one commenter that there are indeed a lot of TLAs, but that's for the SEO ;)

The class is being taught on the Stanford campus now from January through March, and the lecture notes will be open sourced (probably under AGPL) in April. This will provide a free textbook to combine with the MOOC itself, so that those in the developing world have access.

Any constructive feedback would be most appreciated, and my email is balajis at stanford dot edu.
> "Hypocrisy" is one of those empty criticisms, like "Unprofessional." If someone says to you, "smoking is bad," it doesn't matter whether he smokes. Maybe, his advice is actually more relevant if he's an older fellow who smoked and now regrets not making a different choice when he was your age.

It's not an empty criticism. It speaks to your credibility. You are admonishing Google and Facebook for working on "stupid" ideas, when you yourself are working on a presumably stupid idea, since you're not saving anyone's life but instead working on a way so that you can make money. How credible can your rant be if you aren't following your own advice?

I would rather hear the same rant from someone in the field who is frustrated because they are "fighting the good fight", not from someone who is engaging in the exact same "stupid" behavior that they are ranting about.
It could also be an effort to divert attention from some other Wikileaks source.
Politicians don't tend to say "Here's this bad thing; we all do it; let's see what we can do to lower the incidence of this bad thing."

Politicians tend to say "Here's this bad thing. Those people over there, that do this bad thing? They're destroying our society. They're bad and they should feel bad, and anyone who supports them is bad and should feel bad."

You can see how someone saying the latter, while doing the bad thing, isn't just a hypocrite, but is an annoying judgemental hypocrite. We're just holding them to their own standards.

Some people say that's the problem - don't have any standards any no-one will call you a hypocrite. I'd disagree. Have standards, just don't be a judgemental idiot about them.
JSONPath - XPath for JSON
There are also implementations in many languages as Java (https://github.com/jayway/JsonPath), Python (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/jsonpath/), Ruby (https://github.com/joshbuddy/jsonpath) and Perl (https://github.com/masukomi/jsonpath-perl).
There are also implementations in other languages as Java (https://github.com/jayway/JsonPath), Python (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/jsonpath/), Ruby (https://github.com/joshbuddy/jsonpath) and Perl (https://github.com/masukomi/jsonpath-perl).
kogir hit the nail on the head. It's hard to convince someone to care about their health, and a good majority of people don't. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089690
Empirically, the score on the whole IQ test is highly correlated with the score on any subset of the questions. There is a difference between scores on verbal/symbolic and visual/spatial questions that depends on the testee, but it is usually modest except in cases of severe brain damage or malformation.
> 4) Imagine if Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, and Cedars-Sinai could suddenly clear drugs and devices like the FDA.

none of those entities have sovereign immunity!
Is this an attempt to spark some inane conspiracy theory?

A suggestion that Aaron's involvement as a 'source' made him a target of the government, so his suicide was not actually a suicide but rather a targeted attack?
Unix and the design of modern Linux systems
> Why are you making a book publishing platform and not following your own advice?
>

I think that publishing platforms are important. Connecting people to knowledge (slow content) is probably more important than finding the optimal feed format for consuming the daily news and gossip (fast content).
Ok, if you believe that Wikileaks are lying then your complaint is valid. If they're telling the truth however then this raises disturbing questions about why he was targeted by the DoJ.
Very good points. I work as a bioinformatics scientist at Novo Nordisk, and we take our jobs very seriously in trying to find medicine for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases - and we feel lucky to have this possibility of success. It is very difficult because of many reasons, especially because each iteration (drug) takes years and costs millions of dollars to try out and hundreds of patients to volunteer to inject it into their body.
Many studies have found that IQ predicts financial success regardless of childhood socioeconomic background or profession. Running a chain of greenhouses lack the flashiness of, say, particle physics, but it can be both profitable and socially important.
4-Hour Life Accelerator: I am The Spawn of Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Drugs
Attention whoring at its worst.

If you care about any of these issues, go work on it. Being whiny and taking a better-than-thou man-child is lame.

Personally, there's stuff I care about I don't cry about it in public.
Is App.net doomed?
semi-oftopic: ...nice to know about Haskell++, never heard of it before. Hopefully the lung cancer C++ joke doesn't apply :)
I didn't say that Wikileaks is lying. I'm saying I don't know what the hell they're talking about because what they said could literally mean anything. And to provide no elaboration is just as bad as posting the question-headline, "Is the Government covering up Aaron Swartz's UFO abduction?"
A few points:

- there seems to be an underlying assumption that nobody is working on a better way to manage blood sugar levels for diabetics

- there are a lot more important things that better blood glucose measures if you're thinking of tackling the problems in global health; using the analogy of the blog article, one could also point to the med device companies and say "Why the fuck are people wasting billions of dollars per year finding a better glucose monitor system rather than tackling the millions of deaths due to childhood diarrhea??"
Thought I'd contribute this link.

http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
There is a perception difference, for sure, but an argument's validity is not reduced by the person saying it. Granted, here it's much more opinion than fact, so...
I wonder what he means when he calls persistence and curiosity non-cognitive?
The implication is that the severity of prosecutorial treatment and/or the other investigative activities to which Aaron was subject, which may have contributed to his depression and of which we may not be aware was related to his association with the journal. Wikileaks' interest is in clearly in ensuring any investigation does not sweep activities it suspects and we may not under the rug.
Interestingly, this would make sense in the fringe theory posted by another commenter on this thread. If flu viruses fall to Earth from space somewhere in Earth's orbit, then it would simply be at some point in the orbit where it is winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern hemisphere, confirming your observation that the flu seems to be more prevalent in the summer months of Brazil.
One can be rude, and still be correct in their reasoning. I do believe that was the point here. Additionally, one can still engage in bad or unhealthy behavior and still recognize it as wrong.
Kim Dotcom claims over one million Mega users during outrageous launch party
From TFA: "It's also fine in humidities above 98%, which you find in the rainy season in the tropics," she says, where the conditions outside resemble the environment the virus finds in the body.
If you're interested in working in bioinformatics, use Google to check for your local university and drop a mail to any of the bioinformatics groups, interns and research assistants are always great!

We love to have someone on board who's a) motivated and b) actually knows what he/she's doing, not many bioinformaticians know how to "properly" code, it's a lot of dirty hackish stuff.
But you can collaborate with the domain expert, can't you?
That has always been my hypothesis. When you cough in the winter, germs are cooled and conserved on the ground. Then when someone brings in water or snow from their shoes, they are basically bringing in refrigerated puddles of germs.

Someone must have tried to verify this?
The article presents the usual dichotomy: static typing helps with correctness but makes programs harder to write--your language is less expressive. I used to believe this too. Now I think this is a false dichotomy. In this rare instance, you can have your cake and eat it too.

I used to mostly use dynamically types languages: Python, JavaScript, Perl, Scheme. I also used Java and C++, but did not think they were worth the sacrifice in productivity. However, recently, I've been using Haskell. I really like it for reasons of correctness; however, I was also pleasantly surprised to find I was more productive in Haskell than in any dynamically typed language--even Racket (a Scheme variant).

There is one very simple feature in Haskell that makes it concretely more expressive than a dynamically typed language: typeclasses. You can have values polymorphic on their return type, which makes things like overloaded string and numeric literals possible.

However, it's more than this. Types help me think about my problem and constrain the solution space. I often overcome logical problems by figuring out how the yours should match.

There are a bunch of factors like that, but they really are a matter of preference. Typeclasses aren't: you simply can't do certain things as easily without them. QuickCheck is another great example; it's far easier to use in Haskell than in, say, Erlang.

For my most recent project, I was able to use 18-bit words very easily. Moreover, it would be trivial to make my code generic over the exact type of number used! I'm thinking of passing in probability distributions instead of numbers per se. That's also easy thanks to typeclasses.

In summary: I've found static typing can be more expressive, partly out of preference but largely thanks to typeclasses. Somebody once asked me what I thought the most important feature of Haskell was. I said typeclasses, and I still stand by that.
I always thought it was a simple matter of contagion being partly a function of proximity between people. Since proximity is more common in bad weather, with people staying indoors, the flu spreads more easily in winter.
Right, but if there were a private system similar to the one in which Underwriters Laboratories operates, that'd be preferable. I'm not sure how to get there from here, which is why I said "I'm not sure how you'd pull this off".

For example, it might be feasible to get Cedars-Sinai to partner with (say) Singapore's HSA and do some kind of fast track approval process intended to compete with FDA's slow approval. Here Singapore's name brand would be enough for the Asian market while Cedars' brand would establish to American medical tourists that the product/device/service had been vetted.
I know; I'm just mentioning (ok, complaining about) something which goes in completely the opposite direction...
I second this, you need metric!
I'm speaking about my site, not Mega, which works in Firefox, Chrome for Android and Safari. Although Safari support is limited for now and has actually moved measurably backwards in the last few weeks.

The better version of this post likely would have been a "state of browser-based encryption"; we're so close to really being there but any possible implementation is still a slow hack that won't work on all systems.
Careful with setting ro on shm. There are certain things (for instance LXC, which someone mentioned perhaps having a setup guide for), which require access to shm.

Actually, thinking about it more (and others have commented on it already)... changing shm to read-only is pretty much just a bad idea in general to suggest.
Worth noting that Reddit doesn't have terribly many employees, so it can't represent too much waste even if all its employees were Nobelists. And given that Swartz was able to do so much after leaving Reddit, can we say that Reddit was a waste - even if we ignore the benefits to its actual users and all the enabled communities?
I think dynamic typing is better for explorative programming, for getting something working quickly, and then you iterate. Static typing requires a little more upfront design - i.e. understanding what you're doing before you start.

I've thought that present web development is in constant flux, as businesses figure out how to get their data online; frameworks etc are also in flux. And so dynamic typing is beneficial. Then, once we've established the best way to do things, static typing will again become important...

But it could be that development - change - has accelerated, and will only get faster. In which case, whatever gets you to working, to iterating and adapting to change, will be favoured. Which is a pity, because I like static typing.
Modeling speed of light information propagation in space combat sim
dude, pick one angle and stick with it.

if it depresses you 'daily', then go learn the computer science and make the algorithms you want to see.

otherwise, live your life and enjoy it. and please just shut the fuck up about how hard you've got it.
The speed of product innovation radically slows down when you have to seriously concern yourself with whether you might kill the consumer with a mistake.

There is a large class of engineering minds out there that simply don't want to work in that field of risk.