skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to say this problem would go away in a flash if a database were used instead of a spreadsheet program. The reason is that each database field has a strict type, and "DEC1" in a database field identified as text would never be converted, or in any way changed.

The problem is that Excel spreadsheet fields don't have any specific type -- they're defined on the fly by the data that's inserted into them. And worse, different data are interpreted in different ways in the same column, where you would expect some consistency within the column.

Those accustomed to database work, using tables having strictly defined data types, may be surprised to learn that, during an Excel import, successive fields in the same column can be interpreted in a dozen different ways, based on the data being read, not on the field's defined data type (which doesn't exist in a spreadsheet).

What I find sad about these recent Excel stories is that few seem to be willing to dump the program and choose an alternative.
I did start diving into angular source code, and found it quite readable. I simply read it from top to bottom, and it is quite well understandable this way. I read it one function at a time on my ipad whenever i needed a break, and i think one could manage to read it all in one or two weeks (depending on how much free time in the week you've got)
Show HN: Time-delayed slitscan with webcam
thank you for reminding me of a couple more great stories!

But, if you believe these are superior writings to the one in TFA you should probably expand on why.

IMO The Last Question is so loved because it hits readers with a much stronger emotional force than Nightfall or The Dead Past. Possibly it's the usage of that specific formula, at the end, which already carries so much weight.

I, for one, believe only another short fiction had the same effect on me when i first read it as a kid: Frederic Brown's "Sentry".
It's a bad idea to use "I'll" and "Forever" in the same 6" radius of each other.
So in other words, not at all, but guns are scary so we're going to blame the NRA for privacy rights.
I asked because I'm fascinated about this subject. I'm an atheist, but I try to keep an open mind about everything, so I'm always looking to hear alternative viewpoints from other intelligent people.
I'm pretty serious about this.
Exactly. I’m afried App.net will die soon if they can’t figure out how to appeal to anyone trying to build a business (not hobbyists making free apps, because charging your users to create an account has be a negligible part of your value proposition). The only way to fix this problem is by having a generous free tier or by allowing the app pulling in new users to remain free forever, for those users you brought in through your app.

As an app creator, even in this situation, where the user gets a free ride in your app because she’s a first time App.net user, you’re asking a lot from the user. When user acquisition and retention is your bread and butter, placing a huge level of complexity at the signup step, explaining what the hell an App.net account is, it’s basically strangling the acquisition part, and you never, ever, want to do that.

Taking a step back, what problems are they solving anyway? Shorten time to market for app makers? Because social app plumbing is getting pretty cheap and easy to pull off at scale with IaaS. Besides ending up with something very limited. Using App.net to build your app must add value, either for the creator, or the user. I’m failing to see how it does either. Unless, maybe, if App.net login is an optional part of your app that could lover the already in-place pricing scheme for all users (failing to see when this would make sense, but it’s possibly I guess).

Conclusion: Ask yourself, what app in the past 5 years, could have been pulled off, logistically, using app.net plumbing?
Probably, as that doesn't seem like a good reason.
Encourage you to read the more recent blog posts at https://grove.io/blog/ as well. My company acquired Grove and are continuing to run it profitably I might add.
They've only fixed one of the strips (the gallery is still built in wezai) and the script still gives me an error (I presume that is why the “Website Templates” section doesn't display).
Silence must fall when the last question is asked.
"Have you talked to investors?"

A great many companies are "bootstrapped", which means the founders kick their own money in initially (or scrounge from friends and family). Many big companies, a recent example being GitHub, were started this way.

"Have you quit your day job?"

Many people wait until they see some traction before quitting. Doesn't make it any less of a startup. Consider it a consulting gig while launching the business (unless you don't consider it a startup if people consult on the side)

"Are you seeing startup like weekly growth?"

You are falling into this paradigm trap. Not all companies see hockey stick growth initially nor do they aim to. Most sustainable businesses I can think of started slow and gradually grew up. Nothing wrong with that.
That's a 2011 video. Did it change anything at all in last 2 years ?
1. It has lots of meaning before replication, which is why people tend to replicate things --- they were inspired.

2. Apparently the first study isn't science. I didn't realize that science was a catch-22 situation.

3. This is so absurd that I feel like I'm being trolled. They have a testable hypothesis: that acetaminophen/paracetamol has a side effect of X.

4. See https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
"I'll publish the deploy scripts and help you migrate."

This might actually be useful sooner rather than later.
this is sweet. i was recently throwing around the idea of a visual code progression alongside the actual execution as a form of tute/documentation (sort of like docco w/execution) and this is pretty damn close.

would be great if you integrated syntax coloring, like Codemirror.
The point of my comment was mainly that "by rewriting data cells in spreadsheets" is a poor way to describe the bad import behavior of Excel. A CSV is an ill specified structured text file, not a spreadsheet (most spreadsheets have some sort of type information for each cell, who knows whether it is intentional and accurate and so forth, but it is there).

In that context, "in an Excel file" meant "in a native Excel file".
> I just changed the format of the column to "text" from "auto" and kept using it for my thesis work.

Yes, but for an existing spreadsheet, that won't work ex post facto. A spreadsheet in which some gene names have selectively been converted to dates won't be repaired by changing the column's data type. Such a remedy must be applied in advance of the import.
I found AngularJS very readable and was able to read it during my commute over the course of a week.

However: I read the documentation first.

I think you'll find if you give it a chance, you'll find that AngularJS has excellent documentation.

Someone put a lot of effort into taking what is organised for implementation (code) and reorganising it for users, and it was something that was very much appreciated.

For example, you should look at this:

* http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/di

There's a very subtle piece in there about how AngularJS figures out what the dependencies of a function actually are, and understanding that piece is key to understanding how much of the AngularJS code is written.
Microsoft killed netbooks before tablets finished the job, by mandating 10" and specs that made them much more expensive.

They'll taake my 9" eee from my cold dead hands!
"September/October 2010 Issue"

The case reported in the Mother Jones article happened at my alma mater, a state university with many biomedical research studies going on at any given time. The article author later published a follow-up piece

http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id...

in another publication. Two articles by different authors in local publications last year

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2012/11/dan_markingsons_s...

and just last month

http://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/03/controversy-o...

provide further updates about this particular local case.

A group blog post about medical research from 6 January 2012, "Why Do We Really Need Clinical Trials?"

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-do-we-real...

examines some of the trade-offs involved in the still flawed, but still necessary, process of conducting clinical trials of proposed new treatments. Human beings who propose new treatments often have a bias to suppose that the new treaments are more safe and more effective than previous treatments--especially if they have a financial interest in the new treatment. People who have a financial interest in other treatments, or in not seeking effective treatment at all (e.g., faith healers) may have a bias that runs in the other direction. The way to check the safety and effectiveness of a treatment is to run an honest clinical trial with adequate justification from known science and sufficient statistical power. But keeping the trial honest involves human beings disciplining themselves not to jump to conclusions. As Richard Feynman said to graduates of Caltech: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."
I think there's plenty of room in the profile for, say, a list of most recent replies (or have a |replies| option show up in the menu.)

Simplicity is nice but I suppose YMMV as to the line where utility becomes unnecessary complexity. Email notifications might be too much but even then sending them out as a daily digest might not be so spammy.
Why are India's drugs cheaper? Is their patent system different than in the US? Or does the government dictate the price drugs can be sold at?
Each of these depends on the predecessor, so these seem to be layers. Production went way up during Consumer America. And it is not clear that Cosmopolitan America is any America ( as a distinct idea ) at all. Since it's transnational, it lacks the sort of identity that a nation-state needs. If Cosmopolitan America also means drones...

Keynes/Galbraith didn't fail so much as it was abandoned. The thing that peaked in the '50s/'60s was the large monolithic corporation ( as more in Galbraith than Keynes but still ...).

People drive too much to change land use. It's about the cost of a square foot of housing as a function of distance to where one works.

Cosmopolitan vs. Consumer sounds an awful lot like GenX/Millenial vs. Baby Boomer. It's still consumerism, it's just iPhone consumerism. I rather like Robin Hanson's "farmer/forager" model better.
If you need opioids for the pain from a stubbed toe, you have a serious problem with something (mental, physical, or both) and need more help than an OTC opioid can give.
Google staffs the project with several talented engineers. Misko Hevery is an amazing benevolent dictator. He earns my trust and respect. A confluence of genius and pragmatism.
Somewhat related info: Government of Karnataka (an Indian state) has an healthcare insurance for economically poor called 'Yeshasvini'[0]. It covers treatment, surgery and other healthcare expenses for a nominal yearly premium. In fact this was conceptualized by Devi Shetty[1], founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya featured in linked article.

[0]http://www.yeshasvini.kar.nic.in/about.htm#about

[1]http://www.narayanahospitals.com/services/corporate-social-r...
And now I know where Charles Stross did find inspiration for Accelerando.

Great story.
I like this because its creative, but was relatively easy to implement. It didn't need a million hours of coding, just a text search for keywords (I'm oversimplifying a bit obviously). It let your brain do the heavy lifting to save on programming time. Elegant.
He gets a lot of things wrong

I'd like to see specific examples of issues that Goldacre gets wrong, as I see his work recommended by a lot of astute doctors and medical researchers, and I'd especially appreciate you making the effort, for the community here, to link to the "critical reviews of Goldacre's work" that have public-visible links that you most recommend. I'm willing to hear you out, but please give those of us reading along in this discussion more to follow up on.
Well you can hire a software engineer in India for $10/hr. I think cost of living should have been at least mentioned in this article.
No no, you should hold off for their Groupon!
Check out IRCCloud, they keep a client connected on your behalf 24/7 then let you connect to it when you open the web app.
EmployTown Daily Demo's: Flash Sales for the Temp Job Market
You might have included the workaround that actually works from the linked conversation's many suggestions that don't work -- add a space in front of each field of the original CSV data that you don't want converted. This is more effective and reliable if each CSV data field is quoted, and the space is inside the quotes.
I'm amazed that there hasn't been a scandal with some Googler or Microsofty or Appler or academic finding a way to use some fraction of their unused cycles for mining.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/houston-most-divers...

Houston is more diverse than New York.
For a followup, they should publish an article called "How The ACLU Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation". (eg, by defending civil rights)

And then perhaps "How The Police Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation".
I don't know why people are blaming Excel.

The problem is that these researchers, or even the economists in the paper on Global Austerity, aren't properly trained in what is essentially a computer programming task, and they don't do things like validate their data. These are basically bugs in their spreadsheet that they didn't catch.

Sure, Excel may behave unexpectedly for their particular uses, but for the vast majority of finance people, it works very predictability. If they had spent time validating the data, they would have realized that the names had been modified, and they could have corrected for it.
C'mon, it's like the best plot twist ever, and Asimov prided himself on plot twists.
He even imagined One Click buying through the world brain - amazing prescience ;-)
As I recall, this shop was run by Eric Shepherd up until 2011 [1] before he transferred control to Tony Diaz.

Shepherd is an author of many fine Apple II and Apple IIgs apps, including the excellent IIgs emulator Sweet16 [2]. Now, he's a technical writer for Mozilla. Awesome guy.

Diaz... runs Apple2.org [3], and I'm ashamed to admit I'm not aware of anything else he's done for that community. If anybody else could fill in, feel free.

[1] - http://a2central.com/3234/syndicomm-changes-management-maint...

[2] - http://www.sheppyware.net/software-mac/sweet16/

[3] - http://apple2.org
There is no need thanks to this third-party service: http://hnnotify.com/
There was one of a sort around Dallas, but it's dead.
Screenshots don't really make sense for this app. It's a configuration-based WM, so APIs make more sense.

Here's a link to the CoffeeScript/JavaScript API: https://github.com/sdegutis/windowsapp#api
I hate this sort of thing, and if I really want to get something I use an alternate Twitter account with no real followers.
Five Days In April
Giant 'Pong' game played on the side of a 29-story building
> The whole law is just an annoyance, nothing else.

This is not true. It's about preventing impulsive suicides, not premeditated ones. If a depressed person is having an episode and all they have in their house is 16 pills, then it removes the opportunity: maybe by the time they've make it to the shops and buy more, the moment will have passed, and a life would be saved.

It's been shown time and time again that you can reduce absolute suicide rates by removing opportunities like this. If I remember correctly, there was something similar involving gas ovens, though I can't find the reference now. Guns, bridges, etc. are all similar too.

When it comes down to it, if someone's determined enough to kill themselves, they will, but the truth is most people aren't and doing things like only selling small quantities of pills really can prevent suicides.
Because you're using the same JavaScript code for rendering on either the client or the server.
I posted this the last time there was a discussion about CSV and excel:

If you are generating the CSV yourself, save yourself some agony and just wrap the text in =""

$ cat test.csv
="12.34567890124312341234123412341234",="1-5"
$ open -a Microsoft\ Excel test.csv

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514587

Explanation:

It uses another auto trick: if the leading character is '=', the result is treated as a formula.

Thus, you can actually write formulas in your CSV and excel will interpret appropriately:

$ cat test.csv
=1+1,="1-5"
$ open -a Microsoft\ Excel test.csv

You should see the value '2' (with content `=1+1`)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5514704
Basically, the Indian government doesn't give a sh#t about the methods that US pharma companies are using to generate more revenue in the US (slightly alter the compound so it's basically the same stuff, and then patent the new stuff).
Value Creation vs. Value Capture
what patents?
The actual New York Times article is funny and sad: http://web.archive.org/web/20080704103647/http://it.is.rice....

Robert Goddard was ridiculed for most of his life for having such lofty ambitions, chiefly building a machine that had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. Yet we owe it to him (and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) that we have now sent machines and human beings to many worlds. I can't think of a better example of "don't listen to the haters."
OpenSignal: The Crowdsourced Network Map App
There is an opportunity for IRC and XMPP protocols to co-exist in the same group chat and solve customer needs better.

One of our customers is a YC company, that moved their group chat from a IRC based system to our XMPP based group chat product[1], because IRC did not work well for them. After they started using us, we figured that some people still preferred IRC and some wanted the ease of use of XMPP. The solution was a simple bot that will bridge the messages between the IRC channel and the group chat. This is now working out very well for them.

They now have benefits of both IRC and XMPP on their website. I'll be happy to talk more details and possibly collaborate. My email in profile.

[1] - https://groups.gaglers.com/
I don't see anything here I couldn't do myself, and in a more secure way. I don't trust handling of my DNS to random projects.
Its easy to get addicted to R syntax / capabilities. (Read: Data scientists are lazy)
"Another comment asks,
why are we seeing so many articles about Excel?"

There's a link next to posts. It's easy to reply to the person asking the question by clicking the link and typing a reply.
I thought it was quite ironic that one of the premier customer support/idea suggestion platforms has had more than 78 companies ask for Sticky topics (a massive timesaver in a support system) and somehow still never managed to build it (even after 4 years). I wonder what the motivation is?

Perhaps they don't want it because it would reduce the amount of content created on the system and there would then be less Google juice web real-estate etc?

Any other ideas what might motivate a decision like that?
I actually believe this testimony is from the mid 2000s (Tom Feeney was in congress from 2003-2009).

While in the video, Mr. Curtis has a point that voting code should be reviewed by independent experts... even if the code has been vetted there could be code injection through the operating system or compiler, however unlikely. And that's not even considering anything malicious with the network or databases. There's simply too many moving parts in electronic voting for it to ever ensure 100% honesty. Possibly making it law to require a hand count of all receipts/ballots to ensure a match would catch the fraud afterwards, when time is no longer such a factor. Or better yet, running paper ballots through two separate electronic voting systems by each voter and comparing counts.

But to answer your question, no I don't believe anything has been done.
Wasn't aware of that, thanks. Though normal, not by email, notifications would do better I think.
> you said Molyneux showed something about the average human.

Yes.

> You can't backpedal that into a statement not involving Molyneux.

I didn't backpedal; you can change "I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box" to "I said that the average human is fully satisfied interacting with a Skinner box, as shown by Molyneux's Curiosity", if it makes you happy, but it doesn't really change anything.
Take a look at ToDoMVC: http://todomvc.com/

"TodoMVC [is] a project which offers the same Todo application implemented using MV* concepts in most of the popular JavaScript MV* frameworks of today."
Yes, but to save money, the patients will have to evaluate themselves and send the results back to the doctor instead.

[/sarcasm]
It was featured in various articles including this one by Vice: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-guide-to-bitcoin-mining-w...

The designers are Joshua J. Romero, Brandon Palacio & Karlssonwilker Inc

J. Romero is an Associate Editor at IEEE: http://www.sciencewriters2010.org/speakers/joshua-j-romero.h...
B. Palacio is Deputy Art Director at IEEE and posted the image here: http://visual.ly/bitcoin-infographic
Karlssonwilker Inc. is a NYC design company: http://www.karlssonwilker.com/#
Quite. But how much effort they put in their website and documentation is somehow important to me. Then again, Ruby projects always look glamorous while Haskell projects (just an example for an exotic language) look like some HTML document someone wrote 10 years ago on an university computer.

Ember.js in comparison has a certain glow to it. Especially with that weird mascot.
On the contrary, my memory is that while Posthaven had a few front page posts as it launched and has since been mostly left alone, app.net has had a constant barrage of them during its "kickstarting" and afterward. Your own Google link seems to bear that out. There are certainly commenters in every thread dismissive of app.net - probably more than of Posthaven, since where Posthaven's entire reason for existence is to have a modest and obviously sustainable business model, app.net's goals are somewhat unfocused but extremely lofty - but there are many praising it in every thread.

What does Posthaven even have to do with this article?
It's easy to blame the tools. It's harder to admit that you don't understand the tools you are working with.
That's actually one of the more interesting parts about Angular. I'm not sure of the details but I believe the Angular team have been counting on Object.observe for increasing the performance of the Angular code [0] (something that Google / the Chrome team have influence over).

The Angular code you write now won't need to be updated and will get a great speed boost later. Other libraries, like Ember, get you to add all that metadata to your code to give you a performance boost now (which to me feels like something you'll regret in a year's time).

Ah, this is the post I was looking for [1].

[0] http://blog.angularjs.org/2012/07/angularjs-10-12-roadmap.ht...

[1] https://plus.google.com/112439678898563138768/posts/RZKRBiGX...
The Apple iWatch