skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When ethics comittees kill (http://www.badscience.net/2011/03/when-ethics-committees-kil...)

> At present there is a bizarre paradox in medicine. When there is no evidence on which treatment is best, out of two available options, then you can choose one randomly at will, on a whim, in clinic, and be subject to no special safeguards. If, however, you decide to formally randomise in the same situation, and so generate new knowledge to improve treatments now and in the future, then suddenly a world of administrative obstruction opens up before you.
You're welcome. You might try his blog, too - his views on subjects like the "wisdom of crowds" and IQ are intellectual fun.

http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/315.htm...
Not very aerodynamic, I imagine.
Rich Hickey and Brian Beckman - Inside Clojure (2009) [video]
YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize that you can't live your dreams and raise your kids right. It's not just a financial lens for many people it's a time lens too.

Having kids whose lives you very probably won't even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay.

Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it's a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction.

10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home

http://reddit.com/r/childfree
Astrophile: Snapshot of a two-faced Tatooine world
Many points of the article are related to conflict resolution and CoreData sync, both of which features that are a) incredibly hard to get right and b) practically unsupported by Dropbox. Dropbox' method of conflict "resolution" is to keep to files around and its method of synching databases is to not do it.

There are other places where Dropbox has advantages over iCloud (like doucments being shared between applications, even though the dropbox api seem to move away from that and on to sandboxed application folders), but for the points made in the original article, Dropbox provides no help at all.
Google starts testing Google Shopping Express
Well think about the other side then, kids growing up in a family where daddy is owned by shareholders.

Corporations don't usually make babies.

So who would be ultimately responsible for these children?
PayPal to stick with VMware, at least in part, says VMware
I've been digging deep into to biochemistry of the energy cycle this year and I'm actually impressed at how much we know. What I'm disappointed by is how little of that knowledge has worked it's way into the 60s and 70s diet dogma that "nutritionists" blanketed our country with.
This same logic can be used to defend any "little feature". Language design is all about where you draw those lines.
Why not ฿ and ฿BTC much like we do $ and $USD here in Canada?
Expect Parse to be bought soon..
Gloss supports standard CSS syntax with addition of mixins, variables and calculations. Rework is more about "create your own CSS"
Show HN: tweetsFC - Follow your entire football club on Twitter
Internet Maverick Launches Free Coder School In Paris
There is indeed an opportunity here for other cloud providers - but "better" is fuzzy. The nice thing about iCloud is that once you set it up on a device, there is no need to configure it or authenticate ever again.

It "just works" (if it actually worked).

With Dropbox, either you are storing everything for all of your users (and paying for it), or you integrate into the user's Dropbox account - which would necessitate a fancy ol' login/authentication system. Far from seamless, and relies on your users subscribing to something that is popular but far from ubiquitous.

So... either pay through the nose for all your users' storage, or force them to jump through some circus hoops on their own. Neither are great.
Next time, use a real computer for accessing "cutting-edge/next-gen stuff" HN links, not a consumer toy (and an outdated one at that)..
This is why India is ultimately destined to overtake the western world. Either directly or from within.

Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies:

1) That there are "too many people." That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources.

2) That depopulation in the future doesn't affect people in the present. If you're thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won't be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older?

3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime.

4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn't: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it's: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids.

5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I'd say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids.

6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high).

This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that's largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it's useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.
Nice site and great ideas.

Although I disagree with 2.5% per transaction + plus paypal fees.
There are plenty of embeddable, widgetized, turnkey ecommerce offerings that are not trying to undercut every sale merchant is making.

Why would i want to give up extra 2.5% on top of payment processor's fees?
No, the article covers this. Dropbox is great, but it is based on document syncing. Apple has document syncing working just fine. Like database synching, Apple and Dropbox both have issues. To get a hint of the problem, you can read this post about why git+Dropbox is problematic: http://www.unityisplural.com/2012/02/git-dropbox-bad.html (I've used git+Dropbox and have gotten corruption issues in my git repo).

Further, by pushing an app relying on Dropbox, you're telling your users to sign up for an extra service to use your app. That's bad.
Can I combine PyPy with Numba and get a huge speed boost ... or am I confused somewhere?
you might want to add jedi to the list

https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi
If the US is going to field these weapons, we need to be cool with Russia and China tossing around non-nuclear ICBMs- because that is what this is.
"It was the best firing I've ever had"
Congrats to the whole team! Great guys.
Wal-Mart is big enough that they can take those thefts as a loss.

I see it working. If done right, it could leverage into neighborliness. It should be marketed that way. I can see people doing it just to have an excuse to meet their neighbors.
Sometimes Innovation is better
My first comment was in jest, but perhaps it wasn't making the point clearly enough:

The children of the 2020's will find it inconceivable that you DON'T deliver some package to your neighbors on the way home from the grocery store :)

We are moving in the direction of cost-cutting and streamlining so much that many jobs really are going away, the prices of goods are dropping, and fewer people are working. Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that YOU would be the checkout person, and the bagger, at the supermarket? (Yes, non-USA people, they still have bag boys at many supermarkets!)

The service jobs that are not being replaced by robots, are being done by you, in the name of "self service" to lower costs - and they pass the savings on to you! ;-)

This move makes perfect sense and it is a natural progression of the trends that have been happening over the past years and decades.
If trying to juggle more than one apple ID in the same storefront is breaking the camel's back, she's in for a world of soul crushing disappointment with any less UX polished product -- which is pretty much all the rest of them.
The great advantage to iCloud (whatever issues there are) is that it’s already there, integrated to the system. There’s almost nothing your users have to do in order to use it, quite unlike Parse and Dropbox. Granted, “almost everybody” has a Dropbox account and it’s free, but the nice thing about Apple devices is that they mostly work (or used to work?) even for people who know almost nothing about computing.
How Your Role-Playing Friends Can Outpredict Experts
Well, I think the muddy pool of connections is what this is a solution for. While I see it as practically impossible to implement, it would be great for huge legacy systems that grew rather than were designed. For instance, all of a sudden my patient certification table is getting weird records appearing in it. I would be able to find that table in this cloud, filter to connections to objects that have changed recently and individually inspect each one to see if it was the source of the problem.

The big problem is automating this to a degree that it's not a full time job to maintain.
Ask HN: Should an entrepreneur build multiple startups simultaneously?
VCs and angels invest in multiple startups all the time with the belief that 1 out of 20 investments (rough statistics) would probably give them a run for their money. What this means is that roughly 19 out of 20 startups are destined to fail. So what is happening here is that the investors are betting on multiple startups to play safe, BUT, the startup founders are putting their soul on one startup (at a time), which statistically, has a very slim 1/20 chance of bearing fruit.

It's a general belief that Entrepreneurship is about "jumping from a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down", but if probability and statistics make any sense, that is too much risk to take. Not just the number of years, but personal relations, psychological effect of failing continuously, health etc.

So... do you think it's a good idea to get involved in multiple startups ideas simultaneously? Have your say.
"and pretty much every study for the last 100 years has shown reducing calories does not keep weight off."

That is possible if it's a small reduction of calories and you're not very far off your ideal weight.

Otherwise is a thermodynamical impossibility.

And yes, losing weight is one problem, keeping it off is a different matter.
Write down every question at a meeting
SQL Fiddle - like jsFiddle, but for databases
IOS Calendar app Sunrise gets smarter with Rapportive-style profiles
How to take an entire continent offline
When it prompts you to log in, it will pull up your appleID for you, but it gets it wrong. It will pull up some random other appleID...sometimes an old one you created for iTunes using a hotmail account you haven't checked since 2004, but sometimes a completely random other person's appleID. The authentication is unpredictable too...my wife has successfully signed on to her current account using an old password and successfully signed on to an old account using her new accounts password. Most of the time she can't sign on at all.
While Dropbox is the most popular shared-drive mechanism out there, there are alternatives to it.

1) Google Drive - took my a long time before I even tried it, but it works about as flawless as dropbox for my needs. I actually like it a lot as I use Google Docs heavily, so it makes it easier to use those tools.

2) SkyDrive - offers the most base storage than the other. Has nice support for MS Office products.

3) AeroFS[1] - While it's still in beta, it looks promising (it has limited (android) to non-existant (iphone) support). [1] https://aerofs.com/
I can't help but wonder why the economist would mention something and then say "This study has not been peer-reviewed." I would assume there are plenty of peer reviewed literature to look at so why did they bother to even read it? Is this something that has revived little research, because people are still assuming it's a short term anomaly?

As to energy-balance models's they don't account for the huge difference in average temperatures between the poles and the equator, it takes far less energy to maintain a 3C increase in Alaska than Florida. As such weather patterns are really important.
Observe this thread for dozens of examples of comments that just aren't high enough quality to be on this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5453757

Anger, silly jokes, one-liners and memes are all over that thread. The fact that so much of it will still be there at the end of the day is the problem we're facing.

Compare to the discussion on this item, with people stating real arguments using entire paragraphs. Plenty of disagreement, certainly some negativity, but mostly civil (or greyed out).

So no, we're not trying to get rid of negativity. We're just trying to maintain a place where adults can hold civil conversation.
Regular Audio Human
Except it still requires you to serve up architecture-specific things for now, as far as I can tell.
I think it's a great idea. I feel like I commonly give advice to people, but not knowing what else is going on in the person's life. Also, the outcome of my advice usually doesn't have a direct effect on me. At least a bad decision (or multiple bad decisions) have a financial impact on the stock performance and/or the willingness of the company to continue to participate.
When ever this topic comes up, including at iPhone conferences I attend, no one seems to have ever heard about Simperium, which pretty much has as their mission statement to solve this problem and seems to have actually done so quite well (yet people are mentioning, quite often, only tangentially-related companies like Dropbox); I believe they are even a Y Combinator funded company... I would be fascinated by an explanation of "what they could be doing differently so that people would use them".
Good lord, that sounds like a complete mess. I haven't been anywhere near it as a developer so I can't really speak on how bad it is from that point of view.

As a user though I have absolutely no idea what is going in with Apple syncing. My wife has an iphone / mac syncing explosion that I simply can't fix. I just don't have any idea where the data is or why everything is duplicated in her iphoto collection. Or what's going to happen in when you remove something from one place.

Most of all I cannot for the life of me explain to my wife why it is that when she lost her phone and restored a previous backup to a new one it DELETED ALL HER RECENT PHOTOS from off her mac without warning. Gone, forever. I watched it happen before my very eyes and it's made me want to never buy another apple product again.
I worked with Pat (pfalls) on this effort. He pulled the benchmarks together and built the script to automate the tests. We aimed to deploy each framework/platform according to best-practices for a production environment and then stress test common operations: JSON serialization of objects and database connectivity. We were surprised by the wide spectrum of performance we observed and hope that this interesting to you as well. Four orders of magnitude in one of our tests!

If you have any questions or see something we stupid we did, please let us know. We'd like to correct any mistakes straight away, especially since we're certainly not experts on all of these frameworks and platforms.
plesae go and see a medical doctor first before you get mixed up in some strange unappropriate therapy that costs you an arm and a leg and enriches no one but the therapist.
they will do some tests to rule out things like vitamin deficiencies or other things that may be causing these feelings. go to a medical doctor and tell them everything and let them decide whats best for you. it will be cheaper and youi will get where you want to go faster
good luck
There's been quite a few articles from people far smarter than I about it, and most of them agree that whilst doing a server backed database synch service is hard, it shouldn't be this buggy at this stage.

It's like Game Center, Apple doesn't bother with any apps that really use it so there's many, many problems reported on a consistent basis, and they don't seem to use iCloud for anything involving Core Data so they're not dog fooding and having engineers swear at code. No swearing means no one is motivated to go back and try improve it.
That probably changes things then. I mistakenly assumed that his shares were actually non-voting shares, and that he had no contractual right to vote. If he has voting rights but is just abstaining from using them, then that's quite a bit less crazy.
With my much less polished Android UI, at least I can use my phone.
A Marshall McLuhan Approach to Weather Forecasting
so how will new things be added justified by use, once all the existing pre-digital glyphs have been added?

I see two possible scenarios:

1. They won't be. Instead, existing glyphs will become increasingly overloaded with new meanings.

2. New glyphs will start their life as icons. Once a certain icon becomes wide spread, it may be made into a code point with a glyph.

In practice, it would probably be some combination of the two.
There is a huge difference between raw PHP and CakePHP. I'd be curious to see other PHP frameworks (such as Zend, or Slim) in there-- is Cake just particularly slow, or is that simply what happens when you have a PHP framework?
Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right
I have been waiting for this... :)
I'd say that student loans in the UK work more closely to how this investment scheme works (you only pay back if you earn over a certain threshold)
Facebook Vs. LinkedIn: Why Both Are Facing A Sticky Question
I can vouch for AeroFS. We're using it internally for sharing large documents around and it make it really painless.
Of course it's chilling. It takes all emotion out of the equation. He allowed others to make him a vegetarian, Republican, even to try homosexual relations. This is so way beyond an experiment that I suspect there's a clinical term for his affliction.

That said, in less developed countries having many children is a form of retirement planning, so I'm not sure he's even right about them being a bad investment.
Company Perks Are the New Lure for Startup Employees
Perfect. Thanks for taking the time to go through the site.

I agree my About Me section kinda sucks. I was thinking I would use this space to incorporate sfretchling's suggestions.

It's too bad it comes off as cheesy, I was more hoping it would come off as showing that I dedicated the time and effort to put this together specifically for SpaceX.

The News to Me section is integrated into Pockets API, so updates whenever I add content to it, but I like the idea of writing my own blog post on the content. Sorry, which dates? I do have physics/space/engineering, just hasn't been an article worth saving recently, but I could control that under what I favorite so I'll be sure to tweak that.

Thanks for your opinion on how copying the website would come off. My intentions were simply to bring my resume to SpaceX in a familiar and customized-to-them manner, but understand that it might not come off that way.

It's also too bad that it seems like I'm trying to weasel anything. I'm certainly not desperate for a job, but am crazy interested in the things SpaceX is doing and it sounds like such a fun group to work with.

I do really appreciate your thoughtful comments. Regardless of how it works out, I've learned a lot and it's been a fun way to build my first web app.
It doesn't work for me on my year-old thinkpad, or on my desktop, or on my server, and it is broken on two other computers I know of. Hibernation issues in Ubuntu aren't exactly an uncommon problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hibernate

Additionally, it is disabled by policykit in releases past 12.04: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/policykit-desktop-...

So yeah, Hibernate is broken in Ubuntu in 2013, and your downvote doesn't change that
This seems rather shortsighted, children are a drain, but an asset too. I think one should view them as spinoffs, and of course shareholders will have equity in them.

What? You can't sell stocks of your children?!
>the Plan9 and suckless communities

Are two totally separate things and you are painting them both with the suckless brush. The plan9 community is nothing like that at all.
Congrats, very exciting!
If you can find it, Computer Lib would probably be good too, though it's sort of just a prequel to Literary Machines.

(I myself failed at this task.)
You're mistaken. A comment with good ideas presented in an insulting/snarky/offensive tone should get downvoted here. In that rare case, it's often helpful to write a comment explaining why it was downvoted (perhaps even with a link to the guidelines), and encourage the poster to rewrite it in a tone that fits the room it was spoken in.

Some people will understand, rewrite, and become productive members of the community. Others will get offended, write back with an angry rant about censorship or something, and with luck find themselves hellbanned. Those are the people who just aren't ever going to be welcome here. Fortunately, the rest of the internet seems designed for them to fit right in.
Sounds like a lot to me. For the first DARPA Grand Challenge, for example, no car finished the race. The farthest went 7 miles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2004)

The next year 5 vehicles completed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005)

Also, consider all of the rocket failures in the 1960's and we still made it to the moon by the end of the decade.
Personally, I'm clueless, but you should talk to hn user "larrys"

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=larrys
if only it had Vim bindings instead of Emacs bindings :/

I've been searching for something less bloated than Vim for a while (straight vi doesn't cut it).
Show HN: Help job seekers by letting them ask employees anonymous questions
Many business people do write SQL. Typically in a poorly administered access database, but they do write SQL.

Scientists also already use several easy languages (r, MATLAB, SAS, increasingly python) rather than relying on outside developers.
Taking a stand on open source and patents
This blog post [1] says:

"... We’ll continue to support our customers in AWS until we’ve solutions that offer faster reliable Redis without the zone latency."

[1] http://blog.togo.io/
I feel like I'm the only person that has had zero trouble with iCloud. My phone backs up to it regularly (without my having to do anything whatsoever) and I've transferred my entire phone settings (and my wife's) more than once to brand new devices via iCloud.

In my experience, it truly does "just work".