skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had the pleasure of working with NPR's data news chief, Brian Boyer, who taught me a lot about actual good software practices.

I agree with his preaching the power of flat-files. Not that flat-files should be used to do things that they inherently can't...but that too many projects (or hobby apps) don't consider them and then spend as much time figuring out how to keep their server from crashing. I find it pretty amazing that they have only one small EC2 instance for their news apps (this is separate from the NPR.org site overall) just to do cron jobs.

Flat files, of course, require good planning...not least of which involves an accurate gauging of how often an app's data needs to be refreshed. But I like that kind of planning and thinking more than I do the kind it takes to maintain a stable server.
@enraged_camel: Yes, agree. Ad lib it's far easier to not overeat. My point being, that "clean" is too vague and misleading. Why not say unprocessed.

Agree on the crossfit comment.
The author missed a very important reason why hospitals are charging such high fees. In 1986 Reagan passed the "Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act". Since that time, hospitals are required to treat anyone, regardless of whether or not they have insurance, as if they were a fully insured patient. My wife, who is a physician in a busy hospital, consistently sees about 40% of her patients have no health insurance and are receiving free healthcare from that hospital. This may vary based on location, but I cant imagine by much. Hospitals foot the bill in this situation, and that is why costs to the insured are much higher.

Everybody seems to think they are smarter than everyone else when it comes to healthcare reform, but in all of the "smoking gun" articles that are posted, none of them have ever touched on this fact.

Even the new healthcare plan that passed does not address this directly, it assumes that the people who do not have healthcare will use a state healthcare exchange to get their own. I am a little pessimistic about this, and am assuming that only a small percentage of those people will do this.
There is just no way anyone CAN eat high fat diet the way high carb diet works.

The more carbs you eat, the more you carve, the more fats you eat, the less you want to eat. Of course if you do not combine them.

For me it has become once per 24h food intake sometimes and then it is more like a necessity than hunger.

I do eat once per week some chips with honey.

But now I cringe thinking about coke, cake, donuts, bread, cookies, chocolate.
> "In South Korea, Spain and Switzerland, 80% of permanent visas are used for employment. For Britain, Germany and Italy, it's 60%. For the U.S., it's only 7%. For a skilled worker, it's actually harder to come to America."

As a Canadian expat in the US, dear God is this ever true.

The US doesn't have a skilled immigration program. It has a work visa moonlighting as immigration policy. Any reform of the H-1B program is IMO just band-aids - what the US needs is an actual immigration track for skilled people in the same vein as Canada and Australia.

I guess it's a moot point in our industry though. The tech industry in the US so massively out-pays every other country, and out-performs, that most of us will jump through an awful lot of hoops to be here. For me going back home would mean a 60% pay cut and a life writing bad Java code for big banks.
I read Tom Perkins (the VC) write once, "The more difficult the decision, the less it matters what you choose."
Java’s latest security problems: New flaw identified, old one attacked
I'm glad to know I'm not the only person who works this way. My source files often have a paragraph or two at the top that explains my intentions for that class/module as well as explains the usage of my domain language. I never see this in other people's code though.

I agree with people who say that the code itself should read very clearly, but the fact is that even when writing an article or paper you have to disambiguate your own writing, clarify your usage of terms and present some context up front. Otherwise people can take away a very mistaken impression of your text, and it is certainly no less true for code.
Ask HN: What was your best job search/hiring experience?
We talk about bad recruiting experiences quite a bit here on HN. I'm curious about your best hiring experience. What did the company do? How was the interview? What made it special?
Crypto competitions: Disasters
Hacking on the Frontier of Gestural Input
None of this stops us restricting cigarettes to adults only and banning smoking in school, and it shouldn't stop us placing the same restrictions on junk food.
Microryza (YC W13) Is A “Kickstarter” For Scientific Research
My only point is that whether something is in the past or in the future has nothing to do with whether you can use probability. If you're consistent then either you don't use probability at all to model lack of knowledge, or you use it for both past and future. For example if you find it valid to say "when he tosses that coin, it has 50% probability to land on heads and a 50% probability to land on tails", then you should also find it valid to say "he tossed that coin, and it now has a 50% probability to be on heads and 50% probability to be on tails" if you did not yet see the coin. That's because in both cases, the outcome was already determined (by the laws of physics, disregarding quantum mechanics). The thing is that you just don't know which way it will land or has landed because you lack perfect knowledge.

I don't have a problem with not using probability to model lack of knowledge, but you have to apply that principle consistently (and whether it is ethically desirable to use probability is an entirely different and even more difficult question than whether or not it leads to accurate beliefs). That said, I do prefer to use probability to model lack of knowledge, because what is the alternative? Ad hoc gut feeling based reasoning?
You're right, they don't seem to be stupid, and they all seem to have left...

http://www.linkedin.com/in/pashasadri

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/jonathan-trevor-builder-of-...

http://www.edho.com/
IMHO the best solution would be a standard health care product paid for in a standard way (but reasonably affordable/means tested). It doesn't mean that the government has to collect all the money, or that the actual care has to be provided by the government. But what it would mean is that a baseline is available to everyone. It should also include discovering and disseminating best practises, improving overall health through any practical means (ie not just pills and doctor visits), and looking at things like hospice care for end of life instead of very expensive procedures and drugs.

And on top of that the free market can provide extras using whatever economic model works for them.
This reminds me of this article I read a month ago: The Most Underrated Digital Marketing Tactics.
http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-most-underrated-digital-ma...

Surprisingly: 2 of the 6 marketing directors interviewed said "Email" was the most underrated technique.

There could be something to this email-first idea.
People want to blame others for their problems. Whether it's junk food, drugs, joblessness, etc. The fact is you can't get fat if you don't consume the calories. Everyone I know who has restricted calories has lost weight.

I was 210, and lost 70 lbs by restricting my caloric intake (by eating vegan). I ate sugar during this time. I ate carbs.

Every single person I know who's overweight simply eats too much. They also are the first to tell you that its not as simple as eating too much. It is.
> in the UK a jury questioned its meaning, the judge got snottily arrogant over it and ditched the case ... Interesting to me that the judge was so unable to answer the question, that he ditched a whole trial.

If you're talking about Huhne & Pryce, that's just wrong. The jury was discharged because after 2 days of deliberations they told the judge that they couldn't come to a verdict (which 10 of them agreed on). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hung_jury .

I don't know where you got the idea that the judge got defensive because he didn't know how to answer what reasonable doubt meant, but it's utter nonsense. It's a very common question for juries to ask. The appeal courts have debated several times what the best guidance is. The judge was following the current guidance, which is tell the jury to treat it as ordinary english words and refuse to give any more specific definition. If each judge gave their own favourite interpretation of what 'beyond reasonable doubt' means (e.g. p(false positive) < 5%, or whatever), then the standard of proof you'd be tried under would depend on the judge, which would be obviously unacceptable.
The best programmers are the quickest to Google
But given that one can have remote meetings, the fact that one is deluged with meetings when coming in to the office kind of suggests something, no?
When is the best time of day to write code?
> Compile app_config.py into app_config.js so our application configuration is also available in JavaScript

Terrifying! Why do you need to specify your configuration in code? I would think configuration as data is simpler.
I am aware of Evil. I actually like and am happy with Vim and I have enough customization invested over the last decade that porting my plugins is painful. The list was mostly just a response to the 'never switch' sentiment.
I'm interested to see where this goes, but one of the problems with literate programming is that it means that in addition to being a good programmer you also need to be a good writer. In other words, if you are a good programmer and a bad writer you are going to produce net bad work since your writing will confuse people who might otherwise have understood the code on its own, and if you are a good writer and a bad programmer there is a chance this will make it harder for others to realize your implementation sucks since it may be dressed in the most brillant, clear prose possible. (Of course one can make the argument that brilliant clear prose is a sign of brilliant clear thinking and hence code, but I am not so sure.) It also opens up the door for an entirely new dimension in code reviews. Imagine your resident grammar nazi jumping into code reviews now to perform edits to paragraphs upon paragraphs of comments. (This is probably the same person who agonizes over class names, so maybe you're already used to this :))

I've found that there seems to be a decent correlation with writing skills and programming skills, but that's far from a fact and I've worked with people in every spot in the 2x2 skills matrix.
You could take a look on https://github.com/paradigm/vim-multicursor
Competition Between Real Time Hadoop Implementations Heats Up
Testing the Gifted
He wasn't describing anyone, just their actions. And it's perfectly clear what it means.
"UI critiques of Dwarf Fortress are incredibly valid." Yes, and no one has ever marketed the game as anything that's Ready For The Prime Time, possessed of a decent UI, or anything other than something that's really fun and interesting despite being an early development version of someone's cool pet project.

You can come back and complain some more in earnest when you've paid money for it. :)

--

Postscript: If some friend, roommate, frenemy, or random dude on the Internet has, in fact, marketed the game as something that's ready for the prime time or possessed of a decent UI, they're putting you on. :P
> 'Carbohydrate' is a fine chemical term, but it is not a useful nutritional category

That's why we have simple carbohydrates (sugars) and complex carbohydrates (starches).

> The most useful nutritional term is 'junk food',

That's not a useful term. Most people wouldn't think freshly squeezed orange juice is junk food, yet it contains a lot of sugar.
Great! I will try it out. It uses lpeg based lexers and a Lua api. Now my daily (coding) work is 99% Lua coding, so I feel rather comfortable with it.

I also like the file chooser (I am on Mac OS X), much faster for me than the system wide.

That's my "first 4 minutes" impression.
I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. (White) men in general are given the benefit of the doubt. They are assumed to be competent until proven otherwise. Women and minorities often times have to prove competence before being taken seriously. I have witnessed this first hand in many forms.
I some times wonder if this is a test. We've all been looking at it from the engineering perspective, but I sometimes wonder if its a test of management. Is somebody trying to see if there is any manager inside of Yahoo that can justify remote team members? It is those managers who are going to lose people when those remote people quit or have to be laid off.
Thank you very much, despite all my digging I don't think I've ever even heard of this.
Atul Gawande covered the issue in this article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_...
The reality is that 70% of adults are overweight because of Coca-Cola and Doritos, not because of fancy French restaurants. The scale is the problem, not the unhealthiness of a single serving of their product.
Beating round the bush? Should hope not. Sexual violence if ever I've heard it...
Nokia Lumia 520 Preview
...and people get on Stallman's case for being antisocial and offensive.
Well the one big difference is that mine is simply a website where you upload your log file, while pt-query-digest is part of a (apparently linux-only) toolkit that you have to download and install. This may not be a big issue if you have your own linux-based server and deal with these logs on a regular basis, but if you are on Windows and just want to do a one-off analysis I think my site is a much better solution.

In addition, since I am displaying the summary in a web browser I can add all sorts of nice enhancements you couldn't have in a simple console, for example:

- Searching and sorting queries on the fly
- Syntax highlighting
- Visualization (like the queries/hour histogram)
I'm well disappointed about this, I love IKEA meatballs!
Just preordered one, if it's as good as it looks on the video the possibility to build amazing things are endless. As stated in the the NewScientist article, this combined with glass and some home control equip. Oh the future is now ! :)
I wonder if it's able to distinguish between fingers

From the FAQ (https://getmyo.com/faq):

"What sort of precision does the myo have?

The MYO senses gestures and movements in two ways: 1) muscle activity, and 2) motion sensing. When sensing the muscle movements of the user, the device can detect changes in hand gesture right down to each individual finger."
Thank you, I actually never researched this.
It is different than drinking green tea, where i juggle it inside my mouth, play around with taste then swallow it :)
There's actually a multi-cursor plugin for vim, http://github.com/paradigm/vim-multicursor, I know nothing of it's features but it speaks something of vim's extensibility.

As for motions, what kind of motions do you think are difficult to create? I have dabbed in creating a fundamental new motion for vim which is analogous to f but takes two characters instead, and it does not rely on f's implementation to work. You can see it here http://github.com/goldfeld/vim-seek

Regarding lack of context, I agree, but I can't say I've done enough vim plugin development to say whether I think it's beneficial or detrimental to vim to be limited so.

Regions do actually sound like something with an infinite number of advanced and creative applications (stuff like Emacs org-mode). Do you know of editors that have such a feature? I'd be crazy for that.
Well, up until recently people didn't read silently but always read out loud even by themselves. Saint Augustine remarked how taken aback he was by someone who read 'silently.' The propensity seems to have been that all reading didn't just involve subvocalization it was actually vocalized. I'm not sure that this proves much in terms of whether subvocalization is always involved. This simply may be a result of people learning to read much later (if at all)before the modern age and have decode the words into a vocalized step to aid comprehension.

I'm not sure I follow your claim that "all writing systems...are systems for writing out speech." I agree that "most written characters are based on the SOUND of spoken morphemes" but this isn't by itself proof of how written language is processed by the brain. Certainly ideographic cuneiform counts as writing just as much as modern english. As writing grew more complex we can see a shift in every culture that started out with ideographic representation to move to a system much more dependent on morphemes. But in every case, the shift is gradual and subsumes elements of the purely ideographic writing, proving that the early ideographic writing was seen as just as much a language as the newer script that includes phonetic elements. We do after all, use a language defined by phonetic features.
Dave Matthews Band backs Ecommerce Startup
There is an easy way to refute your argument: what you're saying about 'socialization' also happened in most developed countries. At least in France, so-called 'social security' (which is about mandatory health insurance, and not pension as in the US) came in place just after WW 2, and without the US insanity in price inflation.

Comparing with 1900 prices is a bit of nonsense given that there was little surgery at that time as well.

Also, there are quite a few things that are inherently expensive: diabete, dialysis, cancer (things that would have got you killed in the 1900). I don't know about the US, but dialysis costs around 100-200k euros / year, diabete around 100 k euros / year in France.

I would be curious to know how much cancer + dialysis + diabete contribute to health costs. I am ready to bet it is not in the low 2 digits.
I spent 2007-2010 building a PDP-11 system using Xilinx Virtex-5 as a replacement controller for a nuclear reactor. We used magneto-RAM as an upgrade for a fixed-head-disk:
http://amirhirsch.com/pdp11.jpg
>You can think that this is insane, but because Jehovah's Witnesses being stubborn about blood transfusions, much progress has been made in bloodless procedures. Most of the time they cost less, and there are less complications after the procedures

I feel I read that somewhere recently...
Amusing disclosure: The Sketchbook Team Lead is a long-time friend of mine. Sketchbook was developed in Toronto by Alias software just a few blocks from where I worked at KL Group on JProbe "back in the day."

So I'm extremely familiar with the fact that it runs on iPads :-)
If your city has above ground telephone poles, you may be able to work something out with the utility. Light poles might also be an option. Power would be an issue though.
Can preorders work for software-as-a-service companies?
Learn Ruby on Rails in a Month
It's interesting to see a site like NPR handle a site deploy like this. I've seen blog owners start to consider switching to a static website, but news sites are definitely a bit more difficult to maintain like this.

Personally, I use Jekyll on my own blog in a similar manner (http://andrewmunsell.com/).

< ShamelessPlug >

I also wrote a tutorial (http://www.andrewmunsell.com/tutorials/jekyll-by-example/) about using Jekyll, in case you want to try something similar to what NPR did, but with a different platform.

< /ShamelessPlug >
I ask developers what their favourite editor is in interviews. I don't particularly care what the answer is (although Notepad would be a bit of a black mark) but rather to see if they try to improve their productivity.
The third half of my life: kindness in software
>Let's say a murder conviction is based on 37 different security recordings clearly showing the defendant murdering the victim. The recordings make it a certainty that the defendant is guilty.

This is the problem with this approach. Let's say the guilty party is someone who looks like the defendant. Now it doesn't matter how many security cameras there are, they all record what happened: Someone who looks like the defendant commits a murder on camera. The number of recordings doesn't inherently show whether it was the defendant or a double.

Or let's suppose that the evidence has been fabricated by someone trying to frame the defendant. Someone who fabricates one recording to the satisfaction of the jury can generally fabricate 37.

Or perhaps it was the defendant on the video but it wasn't a murder, it was a staged public death in cooperation with the alleged victim who subsequently went into hiding.

All of these things are individually relatively unlikely, but they don't become any more unlikely as a result of additional recordings.

This is one of the reasons why conviction rates are generally so high. Suppose (picking a number out of a hat, since we can't really know) that 60% of the accused who go to trial are actually guilty as a factual matter. But of the ones who aren't guilty, 0.6% are because a double committed the crime, 0.5% are cases where the defendant is being framed by a third party or the police, 0.7% are cases where the defendant could show a lack of guilt but doing so would endanger someone else and the defendant prefers to risk prison over endangering that person, etc., and when you add up all the individually low probabilities it turns out that at least one of them has happened in a quite substantial percentage of cases.

The trouble is that the defendant who goes to trial and claims to have been framed is not believed, because only 0.5% of cases are genuine instances of framed defendants (and juries intuitively understand that), and the prosecutor is too often allowed to infer from this that the remaining 99.5% of defendants are actually guilty, rather than that some quite large percentage of them are not guilty but for some other reasons, each of which seems about equally unlikely in any given case and is thus subject to the same misleading inference. But the alternative, to rigorously consider each of the individually not very likely alternatives, is extraordinarily expensive -- which is why statistics is given the short shrift.

At the end of the day the problem is that proving guilt to a level of certainty that would satisfy us if we were being rigorous about it would also cost too much and be too difficult for prosecutors to prove in most cases to satisfy our political desire to incarcerate "bad people" on a mass scale without breaking the bank any more than we already do. Rigorous, large scale, feasible budget. Pick two.
Awesome to hear that. I've long suspected that TV was a more appropriate for HTML5 than mobile, precisely because the remote input is much closer to traditional computing than touch. Clicker.tv made a TV-centric web-app several years ago that works wonderfully.

If you have some time to write about it, I'd love to hear more about how these systems work, are they packaged or delivered over http? Do you use <video>?
As someone working on a social media app, I call bullshit. "The funding for these companies is plentiful because there is a serious bubble?" Now is the worst possible time to be building a new social network, because of the failures of Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, and pretty much everything else last year. Investors have a pack mentality, as he says, but the pack has totally shifted.

Also, he claims that Facebook and others' business models have failed because they don't convert well, or because their users are "forced" to use them. So what if only some Pages have used the product? Those are the companies that get value from it, and they'll continue to pay for it. And Facebook has other sources of revenue. I hardly think it's an example of a failed business model.
No, we're overweight because we overeat and don't exercise.