skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My friends daughter was born with a lung disorder that showed up in the first week after leaving the hospital. The local hospital almost killed her in incorrect diagnosing and panic and she was emergency flighted to Childrens. Two of the doctors there quickly came back with a preliminary diagnosis of congenital lobar emphysema after a few internet searches on the symptoms. They had printed what information they could find off of a few websites at the time. Based on that they talked to surgeons that had experience in the field and within a day the surgery had been performed and all was well.

What I see is 3 information tiers.
1. You should know this off the top your head to be a professional. Common information, kind of like daily use of your first language.
2. Information that is not common or you shouldn't be expected to remember because of its rare usage. The type of information this thread is about.
3. Information you make, what you state at the end of this thread.
Yandex, Russia's largest search engine, announced its financial results for 2012
What happened to jailing people for committing crimes? Honest question.
What caught my attention in the article is the friend who always says, she is "learning to code" and people look down on her. This reminds me of the legal profession - when someone asks what a lawyer does, they should not respond with their title, I am a lawyer or attorney, rather explain that "they practice law".

What does the HN community think about that? Would you respond to career questions by answering, "I practice computer coding"? As a non-tech it sounds professional and badass.
> One root cause is that the Federal government (ie. Medicare) must get the best deal. If you give anyone else a better deal than Medicare, you are committing an act of fraud, and DoJ will go after you. This is known as a price floor.

Interesting; I don't see any obvious reason why other insurance companies couldn't do exactly the same thing by contract.

Can you charge Medicare for things Medicare makes you do that other insurance companies or individuals don't, such as billing them for time spent processing their red tape?

> Layer upon this the web of contractual arrangements surrounding different insurance providers, and you get to a place where you need to mark up the MSRP of a procedure to safely operate as a business.

Sounds a lot like selling enterprise software: corporate purchasers expect to receive a discount, so you can either antagonize them by not giving them what they expect, or mark up the price enough that you can offer "discounts" back to the real price.
The main advantage is that people need to remember lower entropy passwords or can use the same password in multiple places without compromising two factor protected system. Also two factor auth protects against keyloggers.
I have 3 thoughts on speed reading

1. Speed reading fiction is about as sensible as watching movies in fast forward.

2. Speed reading non-fiction will not lead to much formation of conceptual knowledge in your brain, and definitely not the sort of rich inter-connected learning that we probably read for in the first place.

3. Speed reading where you develop a sixth sense for which parts of, say, an academic paper you should slow down and read carefully could probably be a good thing.

In general, while I used to think there was some sort of prestige attached to how much / how fast you could read, I don't think that anymore. It's how 'deeply' you read that counts.
The caloric value of protein is (essentially) negligible.

In what sense? Protein gets you about 4 cal/g like carbohydrates. I agree that the amount of protein we ingest is much smaller than the amount of carbs, but certainly not negligible.
especially knowing one of the remote employees was maintaining a household with 4 children

You're saying people having a household with kids can't be productive employees?
Mine does not do that. Gotta hit a button for it to wake up the remote.
I'm certain this won't hurt Yahoo! We all love remote working, myself included, but it's not for everyone. And if yer trying to turn a company around, perhaps having everyone under the same roofs is a good idea.

I'd wager remote working returns later on in the Yahoo! story, and that the folks working from home right now are just being shoved overboard for lack of productivity.

I mean, if a Guido or a Gosling shows up and wants to work at Yahoo!, but wants to be remote, I'd bet they make an exception.

Right now, Yahoo! people are probably used to hiding their lack of productivity, rather than producing cool software. It tends to happen in dying orgs. Getting everyone together for a while might help!

And frankly, I don't worry about Marissa at all: she has one HUGE advantage over every other CEO in the world: she understands how software is built, and what is required of the people who build it. I don't think any other CEO in the world understands that kinda stuff.
Sure, food choices can be used to make calorie reduction/control easier. My point is more that eating approximately the amount of calories your body will consume in a day is going to be effective with little regard to the exact percentage of macro nutrients. That doesn't make it any easier to correctly estimate the calories needed or the actual calories consumed.
Is World of Warcraft dying? They've been handing out free trials for many years now.
The Winners of The Norvig Web Data Science Award
No kidding. The amount of startups that have flocked to hadoop for "data analytics" over the past 5 years is extremely disheartening. Almost all of the cases are far more suitable for any off-the-shelf RDBMS much less a column-oriented one. Same thing with MongoDB.

How much time and money would have been saved learning Database Theory/SQL/Data Warehousing/Dimensional Modeling instead of cramming everything into an unstructured data-store?
"Hacker" is a generic word; you can only get away with "owning" that if you have VERY expensive lawyers (e.g. that fruit company).
For a lot of people, the only ADN functionality they really care about is that which replicates Twitter. How do you provide a free tier to these people that doesn't remove any incentive to go paid? Limiting the number of people you can follow seems like a great way to do this.
The most disorienting game of Tetris you'll ever play
I have one of the original Jots from their kickstarter project. Pressure sensitivity aside, it's just OK. The precision is way better than those crayon styluses, but it skips regularly (although I heard washing the tip with dishwashing soap helps). I've heard that Dagi's stylus, which is also a transparent-bullseye type of stylus, skips a lot less.

Here's a comparison of the two on a Galaxy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfYijQCnFSE
Obviously you missed e.g. NY governor Cuomo and Senator Feinstein calling for outright confiscation, along with many less prominent Democratic politicians (and probably a few Republicans as well). Or various laws that have been introduced to do that, like one in my home state of Missouri.

And "gun grab", at least in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA) community, includes lessor things that confiscation. NY state's "no new 10 round magazines, and it's a crime to load more than 7 rounds in the ones you have, worse if you're outside your house", might not precisely match the words "gun grab", but English isn't a precision language. For example, NY state residents wanting to buy new guns face very constrained choices right now.

ADDED: Constrained in that most semi-auto guns come with > 7 round magazines. Manufacturers or 3rd parties will have make new ones limited to 7 rounds, and if you want to buy one, you'll have to get that SKU, or find a cooperative out-of-state dealer who will swap magazines. Read Emily Miller's adventures in getting her preferred gun model into D.C. for an example of this; there the limit is 10 rounds.
Having worked with Lime hands-on, it is certainly going to make splashes. It's a fabulous idea and deserves much more attention than it's getting.
There's not much difference since generating the abstract syntax tree is usually the hardest part. Once you've done that, it's just a matter of generating a string representation for each node in the tree for the given target language.
Can I've an invite please? peteris.krumins@gmail.com
2013 Moderator Election
The same thing that happened to executing only people convicted of crimes - something we abandoned long ago as well.

Once any government has seized powers like these (whether rightfully or not), it's very loath to give them up. This is an empirical observation, not a statement about the ideal.
Android WebKit and Chrome use V8.
I think that's a great way for companies to lead the way away from these old crappy systems.
The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people
That's a limitation for people who build apps, not for the users. And it's not even that, it's a limitation for people who build apps and expect to scale them quite a bit, which, given the crowded space, doesn't really happen by accident.

This has pretty much no influence on users. It might slower the innovation a bit, but it's not like there's much innovation happening there to begin with..
App.net is not open source. Developers are building on top of a proprietary system and could get burned again.
Hopping on the begging train: gatesphere [at] gmail.

Thanks!
"They all suck, yet are all much better than our system."

By what measure? If you're trying to see a specialist -- say, to get a surgeon -- soon, our system is far superior, which is why Canadians routinely cross the border to take advantage of our system.

A still simplistic and incorrect but fairer appraisal would be to say that the NHS and Canada's Medicare are optimized for everyday care and our healthcare system is optimized for specialty care.
Unfortunately healthcare is not a market you often willingly participate in. Some health needs can be anticipated, and doing more to encourage consumer empowerment would definitely lower prices. Think about cosmetic surgery or LASIK. Every participant in that market is voluntary, so all the providers are motivated to do it cheaper and better.

But when you have a major health crisis, your "empowerment" is just fundamentally limited. If you get into an accident with a loved one and they're unconscious, you're not doing to be in a position to decide whether you should go to the hospital 1 mile away, that may be X% more expensive than the one 5 miles away. Your ability to price discriminate is also fundamentally limited by your own knowledge of medicine. If you have a tumor and one doctor suggests taking medicine A which costs $50,000, and medicine B which costs $5,000, is A better than B? Is it 1000% better? If it's only 2% better, unlike any other consumer product, are you trying to optimize for "value" or "not actually dying"?

There's definitely things we can do in terms of government policy to encourage more customer empowerment to bring down costs. But ultimately you have a market with unvoluntary participation and opaque pricing, which means Adam Smith can't really do his thing.
"or the ousting of Mayer which he sees as eminent" - I think you mean imminent.
No, removing that vowel sounds cool.
But buy both the domain names, to be on the safer side (If it's available).

PS : I had the same problem with : http://quizr.me/
I'll ignore for a second that you asked the parent for evidence, and then proceeded to make a statement without providing any evidence yourself.

>> The numbers are vanishingly small

Maybe as a % of the overall Canadian population, perhaps. What about the % of critically ill? People with cancer? My aunt is an oncology nurse at one of the best hospitals in the nation, and she sees a lot of Canadians who come to the US for treatment that they can't get at home.

So yes, people with the flu or a broken arm probably aren't flocking here for care. People with serious illnesses? You bet they're coming here.
What exactly do they mean by a "virtual march"? Thunderclap? Really, that's what digital activism has devolved into?
Hacker / Hackr is just an example.
I pay for Github because the few private repositories I have benefit from Github's frequently expanding feature set and make it worth the cash I pay each month easily. I think it's worth it to support a service with an iteration cycle that actively benefits its users to the point where paying for it is worth it.
Seth Godin's wrong, Watching TV is the New Reading
Thanks to this guide now I have Plan9 Acme like scrollbar in Google Chrome and Chromium and it's easy to see where you are even in the end of hard day:

::-webkit-scrollbar-track-piece{
background-color:#99994c;
-webkit-border-radius:0;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar{
width:12px;
height:8px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb{
height:50px;
background-color:#ffffea;
-webkit-border-radius:0;
outline:1px solid #99994c;
outline-offset:-1px;
border: 1px solid #99994c;
}
The article mentions this briefly, but it should be emphasized: parallel loading from S3 is MUCH faster.

This weekend I loaded 2 billion rows from S3 both ways:

- From a single gzipped object: 4 hours 42 minutes

- From 2000 gzipped slices of 1M rows each: 17 minutes

(Loading from gzipped files is considerably faster, in addition to saving S3 charges.)

The article notes that choice of distribution key is critical. I'd add that choice of sort key is equally important. In my testing, a better sort key improved compression from 1.5:1 to 4:1, and also made common queries 5x faster.

Unfortunately, you only get one dist key and one sort key per table, so less common queries could get slower.
The entire story that Techdirt is linkjacking is, via HuffPo, "Some congressional staffers left the briefing with the impression that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz of a felony that would put him in jail for a short sentence in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place, according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing."

There was a hearing, and "some congressional staffers" were left with an "impression".

For all we know, that's entirely true, and those anonymous staffers hit the nail exactly on the head. But how would you know? How much less credible can you get than anonymous staffers sourcing HuffPo, regurgitated by Techdirt?
My family is actually on a plan similar to the one you describe (high deductible and a spending account).

Before I used it, it seemed fine. I tend to do alot of research regarding upcoming tests/procedures and such, and so adding in an element of cost/shopping around wasn't too much more hassle.

In practice, it's been awful. I have no problem shopping around, but it's been essentially impossible to get the information I need to make an informed decision.

As an example, our primary care physician determined a procedure was needed and provided a list of specialists in the general area who were equipped to do it. So I filtered those for in-network providers using the insurance's website and then called those practices. Out of the 4: 2 refused to quote me the price at all; 1 gave me such a run-around that I eventually gave up; 1 (whose employee started our conversation with "We don't normally give this out, but Jane said I had to") gave me the price they would bill if I were uninsured. None of the 4 were actually able to tell me what they would bill me.

However, I did manage to get them to list the CPT codes relevant for the procedure, so I then called up the insurance company. Despite being able to list specific providers and the exact codes they would bill, the insurance refused to quote the member rate. The best they would do was give me that average cost for that CPT in my area which is useless if what you're trying to do is shop around within your area.

So, I don't disagree that people having a more direct link to the actual cost of their treatment wouldn't be a good idea, but until the system adjusts to provide up-front visibility into those costs, the only effect from that linkage is going to be post-procedure sticker-shock.
" If you sum EC2 and Heroku you are going to pay like 10x what it takes to run the same machines power in a dedicated server, all this because you can't handle the operations? This is absurd IMHO."

It really depends. My current experience with heroku is that it is absurdly cheap - at least, for our use cases. We would have to do a lot more traffic for us to ever consider moving to a colo.
Tesla says it lost “hundreds” of orders after New York Times controversy
While eating lunch I was thinking about your CCL and a simple 4-way CCL reminds me of the old "put the game-of-life" on a FPGA deal. So what if you model each pixel as a cell, and if you're set "on" then either propagate a GUID to the southeast cells, or if you got a GUID from the northwest cells, then propagate that GUID instead of your own? If you're on, propagate a zero to the southeast? Whats a good GUID? Probably some combo of your pixel's X/Y coord and/or just a (very large) random number.

FPGA's do cellular automata pretty well because you can create an ever larger matrix of them until you run into some hardware limit.

This is not exactly what you're trying to do, but it sure is simple and a possible start. I'm guessing when you're done you'll end up with a really smart peripheral that looks like a CA accelerator.
Nice write-up. It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that things are "thread-safe" when writing under the iron fist of a Global Interpreter Lock.

Ruby threads seems to be a fairly narrow topic on which to base a book; I'll look forward to seeing what all the book covers.
Question credentials without spending a single moment looking more in-depth.

A+, would read your scientific literature.
I think it's likely that you're missing a layer. The book is really just marketing for the DHH/37signals/RoR brand.

Developing that brand makes people more loyal to their products and ecosystem, which probably makes them a lot more money over the long run than book sales.
Congrats Paul and team! Couldn't have asked for a better board of investors IMO.
On Systems Software
I wish I could get the 'er' version but they are ALL gone!
I guess I have a bit of a bias here as I'm a remote worker in another company (almost entirely staffed of remote workers), but the initial news mentions that a lot of these people are customer support folks.

I'm sorry, but there's almost no reason to have customer support folks on site. It usually also costs the employer considerably more money to have them on-site. I can't say this with any certainty for Yahoo, but this move is commonly done with remote support workers as a stealth layoff. One of my coworkers has had this done to him three times already (by Mcafee, Microsoft and others). I've seen financial companies do it by relocating their IT support from NY/NJ to places like small-town central Ohio (I'm looking at you, JPMC).

The idea here being that it would cost Yahoo less to have some estimated percentage of people work out of the office versus having to pay the increased unemployment insurance rate based on the number of claims they'd have after a mass layoff. That and they can layoff a bunch of people without it being announced as a layoff.

Companies that hire remote staff have a tendency to attract people whom for medical/disability reasons cannot work in an office -- they're the real losers here.

Yahoo hasn't announced any financial relocation support for anyone moving to work from the office. I find that pretty telling here.
Bill Gates admits Microsoft made ‘a mistake’ in mobile strategy
You are confused by the misleading "application-specific password" terminology. These passwords each allow the same degree of access: the password you use on your phone could be interchanged with the one on your xmpp client. Aside from being able to revoke each independently, there's not much benefit from having many of them.

These are not equivalent to 2-factor auth (which grants you the benefits described in an earlier comment). App-specific passwords exist only to allow you, a 2-factor user, to use applications which do not yet support 2-factor auth.
Show HN: A boilerplate for building Windows applications in Python
That's the problem though, isn't it? They don't do password specific permissions, so any leak escalates up to taking over the whole account.
Marissa Mayer is right
You make some very good points, and I think you're spot on for the most part. I think HSAs have more benefit for the lower end of the cost spectrum, such as routine care, or minor medical issues (sprains, fevers, and the like). But I don't know what percent of the total US healthcare spend is on those types of items, vs cancer treaments and MRIs. So maybe it won't help as much as I'd like to think.
The Google "Application Specific Passwords" are actually complete passwords which give you access to all data in the account, which is the problem.
I would imagine that moronic tendencies are easier to notice on a day-to-day face-to-face basis, though.
The term has been attributed to Josh Sugarmann, head of the gun control advocacy group the Violence Policy Center. Going by this quote of his, he likely came up with it to intentionally confuse people who aren't knowledgeable about firearms.

"The semi-automatic weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase that chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons."
Many of the best programmers I've seen google stuff. So do many of the worst I've seen.

The difference is the former won't type a single statement without knowing what it does first, while the latter will just copy and paste something that seems to work, regardless they understand it or not.

The last time I came across some copy-pasted code that was giving some troubles, and after asking the owner of that code what some stuff did, he was unable to tell me, after claiming it was just fine, because the code he copied was from a trustworthy source. This, I guess, is a bad practice of how googling things should work.
Creating a new language is trivial (Hell, I've made one). Creating a robust, well-designed, full-featured, peformant language is very much not.

And that totally ignores the absolutely massive benefit of having a community around your language of choice. Libraries, bug fixes, googleability, a pool of programmers to hire from, etc, etc, etc.
She IS an engineer. What else do you need to understand engineering culture, other than to have been one for years?
Security is not only dereferencing an invalid pointer or executing data that is not meant to be. IOS way of doing things is just a choice out of many and have nothing to do with other OSes. It is all about offering and enforcing a highly controlled and predictable development environment.

Nothing prevents exploits that utilize existing web platform which is the basis of FFOS exclusively.

Having said that, main goal appears to be not bringing web to the mobile, but freeing mobile into the web so eventually browsers can have a de facto standards for hardware capabilites. Yet another mobile sandbox is not a goal, as I see it.

FFOS cannot be compared to any other OS for mobile until now, in terms of goals and politics.
Here's that link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/22/aaron-swartz-prosec...
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/11/11/whos-not-getting... (just googled your post, this was pretty informative)
I wanted to say exactly this. I wouldn't choose Make to build a software project these days (probably), but I use it all the time for exactly what the author describes: recording/managing a data processing workflow. For stats/ML exploratory work, it's invaluable, because everything you do is recorded in various targets. It makes my one-off scripts not quite so one-off, so when I revisit the code six months later, I can quickly figure out what I was doing. It also means less typing, because every command is just `make foo`, and that delegates out to R/Ruby/Python scripts, shell pipelines, or whatever I need. I'm delighted that someone else is (ab)using make the same way!