skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"one day I'll binge through them all"

I watched all the star trek series when they were new, on live TV. A couple years ago I did the torrent + binge thing you're describing and the experience IS dramatically different.

Even merely watching commercial free downloads dramatically changes the apparent pacing of the story, if the original intention was to have a dramatic pause while you think for awhile. You're supposed to think for an hour of realtime not just 45 minutes. Sometimes I wonder if there are any "distros" of TV shows out there on torrent sites with "intermission" screens instead of simply editing out commercials. It would be a weird, possibly interesting experience.

On a longer scale the very best episodes probably need a couple days to consider, digest, contemplate. Something like "space hippies" is probably best forgotten as quickly as possible, but "Doomsday Machine" (and several others) resulted in a bit of thinking after viewing the episode. Its not the finest of literature, but if you're going to invest the time, you owe it to yourself to get the most you can out of the substantial time expenditure.

If you binge and hit "spocks brain" or some other awful episode during a binge you might be completely derailed and stop, but if its "the thing you go every thursday at 7pm or saturday at 4pm or whatever" then you won't be permanently derailed. Don't let "space hippies" during a binge prevent you from seeing "city on the edge of forever".

On the other hand there is a sort of blurry trippy coolness rush about staying awake for 24 hours watching the entire cardassian war story arc on DS9 or something like that. Everything seems weird and cool and interesting when you're sleep deprived, even if its probably not what the director intended. This is pretty good evidence that coding at 3am is probably results in poor taste results, unless you woke up at 5pm or something.
Google acquires news stream service Wavii
GLI  SFRONTATI  ...
Sure, in fact I'd go as far as to say that most of the content available on the Internet has been seen by nobody. I would paraphrase the author's point as, hey, we've been told that the Internet provides a new way for an artist to communicate directly with her fans, and so it does; but it doesn't change the fact that even a message intended only for one audience will nonetheless be judged by another. Consider the recent sorority girl email that went viral, or the myriad of leaked sexts. The same connectedness that makes it easy to create targeted messages makes it just as easy to rebroadcast them to everyone. If the sorority girl had sent a letter 40 years ago, someone might've made copies and circulated them on campus but that's as far as it would've gone. The profanity would have prevented the mass media from picking it up, and while she might still have been fired, she would hardly have been the subject of worldwide discussion.
The thing about Keynesisnm that everybody conveniently forget is that you need to cut spending and tighten up during boom-years, so you have a lean, effective economy that might actually respond to stimulus spending when the bust comes around.
I thought they burnt their beans A) because the flavor last longer for stored beans and B) so you can still taste the coffee in 12 ounces of cream and sugar.
I would add an 'if' to the headline to make it less inflamatory: 'If I am in competition with you for all sorts of experiences, you will lose'.

I am not competing with you, and I do not care if I take a late flight, or do not have a reservation to this restaurant because in my mind reality is not goal driven, but path driven.
Robert Scoble: Google Glass review
This. The ability to Google efficiently is severely underrated.
Depending on the filter that you use, it can be reversed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil
Ah, the problems with the college. College majors are by design imperfect. Journalism, Math, Computer Science - those are very broad strokes and rarely map directly to the skills one would need for a job. OP's is a good example of why college education should move away from majors and departments, and into something more akin to "individualized studies." My undergrad had something like that. For students who had a passion and an idea of what they wanted to learn, it was golden. They got to design their own unique, multidisplinary paths through university.
The money quote for me was this:
“If we scaled what Ken is doing,” Brenner says, “you would probably shut down a third of the hospitals in the country. It’s a disruptive innovation. It just guts the current business model.”

Wouldn't it be better if people never had to go into the hospital in the first place? Aside from the supplemental costs - "surgical complications increase the margin the hospital makes on the patient by 330 percent for the privately insured and 190 percent for Medicare patients." - consider the quality of life issues.

If Medicare is concerned with scaling this program up from a couple thousand people, instead of completely cutting a program which has proven its ability to cut costs AND improve quality of life, why not try it with five or ten thousand people first? If that works, then try it with 20 thousand people, then 50 thousand. If it doesn't scale at that point, then cut it.

Another possible solution is to find a way to eliminate the for-profit hospitals. But Medicare's solution - "It’s pushing providers to band together into accountable care organizations, or ACO, that get a flat fee for all care related to a patient." - sounds destined to fail from the outset to this layman.
looking at the stars and taking pictures while holding your girlfriend with both hands and not fiddling with your camera
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511163
Because everyone in Japan does not live in central Tokyo and outside central Tokyo decent coffee is rare. By Nescafe I mean that some of the the coffee I've been served is on par with Nescafe...
No, I more commented on the article made a pretty bold statement and then didn't follow it up yet everyone buys into it.

I've never seen it actually shown so that to me makes it dodgy. If it was possible it'd be a pretty cool demo.

(And I assume I don't need to say removing camera blur, the famous photoshop swirls incident etc is not the same.)
!true! and people don't listen when I tell them to learn and try to google everything before trying to find your own solution. You better improve on what other people already did and thought about
I agree. Sentencing is the problem! All those "ghetto kids" whom are born into destitute poverty (where the only people they're familiar with whom seem to have any wealth are the drug dealers) would be discouraged from selling drugs too if the punishments where higher!
'Flat design'-inspired Google Maps using the API
I seem to recall that the Amanda Palmer backlash less to do with her being popular and more to do with her raising a huge sum of money for an album and tour, then expecting background musicians to work for free because she was popular - and that was just the latest in a line of ethically dubious things she's done.
Another Thing About Python's Threadlocals
Do we need more PowerPoint tools?
Yes. For illnesses like diabetes it's best if you can prevent people getting it, but if they have it it's best if you can help them to avoid getting the complications.

"Diabetic foot" sounds funny, until you realise that it kills people and is a reason for leg amputation. (Prognosis after such amputation wasn't great last time I looked, in about 2004.)

Sending a real person in a car to visit someone at their home sounds intensive, and sounds expensive. Compare it to a tele-medicine device that takes measurements and sends those to a centre somewhere, with people calling over the phone. It's a shame that the evidence base appears to be being ignored. EDIT (after adestefan and ajtaylor commented) -- it feels expensive, but the evidence base is clear that it's not expensive because it works, where as the thing that feels cheap is wasted money because evidence shows it doesn't work. And it's a shame that people in charge appear to be ignoring evidence, and going by 'gut feeling', because it means effective interventions are not happening.

I hope that mentioning the research that a decision is based on becomes more widespread. Even organisations that claim to be evidence based can make odd decisions.
Certainly a winner at the "hyper competitive dickhead" experience.
Ask HN: Problems getting a backup from Posterous?
So I've followed their instructions, logged in, clicked on the "Request Backup" button, completed the Captcha, clicked "Start Backup", and then I'm presented with a login for their REST API.

What?

Is anyone else having problems?
I wonder why they've used Flash. Flash is obsolete right now for these kind of things. A waste of time, IMHO, specially if you want to do this kind of simplicity UI and interaction, why the heck you will choose Flash over JS.
If we are doing obscure British radio comedy references, then I have to add:

"What is point?"
"There’s nothing worse than being in a foreign city with a dead phone. It’s almost terrifying at times."

OK kid, it wasn't that bad, believe it or not we survived pretty well. Travel used to be an adventure. Part of the adventure was being scared, at least a little bit, sometimes. Kind of an extreme sport.

I am old enough to have traveled quite a bit before and after cellphones and have noticed that the magic talisman of a smart phone makes travel dramatically more boring for me. I also spend a lot less time planning, I'll just figure it out onsite with my phone. I miss the daydreaming/planning phase.

Phone reliance while traveling has effects far beyond just using the GPS to figure out where you are.

I would theorize the lack of fear due to having phones results in the hard core travelers taking even crazier adventures, and a lot of non-hard core travelers doing more travel because the "scary" drops below their personal threshold for "scary".

The author's story was really about his magical phone.
"yes yes yes yes whatever, just let me use the service"

That's the same way malware/toolbars get installed...
Ask HN: What software/site/wiki are you using for onboarding your team?
Hi HN,

I came across this slide by Kyle Neath (https://speakerdeck.com/kneath/how-do-you-build-great-software) and about slide 52 onwards, there are screens of what I imagine to be an intranet-like website/wiki github uses to help new people get up to speed.

I love it - it's simple, elegant and the "team" & "ideas" sections just blew my mind.

My question: Is there anything similar like this out there that exists? Does your startup use one? Did you feel a need for one? Did you build it yourself? Can I get a hosted solution?

My previous startup went with a bog standard self-hosted wiki which I think didn't go too well with the non-techies in the team. This is why I love what github has got going on.
What is of interest to me in this crowdfunding of celebrity projects is that it gives the impression that crowdfunding could be a way to "solve" the general issue of content only coming from a select few media outlets without it actually doing so. Without the popularity - gained by being part of those initial big-media enterprises - of some of the stars that are able to draw in that funding, there's no similarly easy way for a good grassroots project to get the level of funding they would need for a competitive project.

I equate popular people/companies using Kickstarter to promote and fund their next project to retailers selling products directly on eBay. Yeah, it's viable, has long since drowned out the small guy with something useful to sell, which seemed like the whole point of eBay to me.
>Why is "harm" needed?

Because hristov said "they almost certainly harm people around you", which is false. There is no "almost certainly" about that claim.
> or it was because I logged into Google+ using the default Android Google+ app and it enabled it then

It asks you if you want the uploads to take place when you first setup the app.
When talking about the ability of substances to cause cancer it's always important to talk quantitatively, because there are a huge number of things that cause cancer and most have effects too subtle to worry about. In the case of nicotine it may cause cancer in humans at the levels smokers experience, but even so it's way less carcinogenic than alcohol, for example. Smoke of all sorts, on the other hand, is horribly carcinogenic and you can make a good argument for banning wood-burning stoves in cities.
Wow, I had meant to have another sentence saying that it is probably still possible based on the "blur" technique used. But... yeah, I clearly did not say that.

I would assume most of the time people "smudge" the data they want to be removed from a photo. Though, as stated, adding new information to the image has got to be the best way to do this. (a blackout.)
Getting a drug addict to medical treatment (and addiction harm reduction measures such as clean needles and prescribed heroin) means that they are avoiding crime to get the money to pay for drugs; they're avoiding spreading various diseases such as HIV, hepatitis, etc (which can all be expensive to treat) and they're at less risk of losing limbs or needing very serious surgery.

It also helps to keep them out of prison.

Even if you hate people who are addicted to drugs and you think they deserve a miserable horrible life you should be persuaded by the fact that modest spending early on prevents large spending -funded by your taxes- later on.
I meant more, the layout of the regex diagrams :) (but I guess it's also "by hand")
> Medicare is referring to the newly created Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which gives the program power to create and expand projects without congressional authorization. This authority could also be used to create projects based on HQP’s lessons. It’s not. Instead, Medicare has created a raft of projects and experiments meant to move the system from fee-for-service toward pay-for-quality — with the hope that if they can get the payment incentives right, then the market will have reason to support programs like HQP.

Yep. As long as the government bureaucrats develop perfect payment incentives, the market will do its job. It's the same story in education. And programming - if you can find the perfect metric for code production (SLOC? function points? story points?) you don't need to do anything else.

But with an imperfect metric, Cambell's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law) kicks in.

Want to reduce waiting times? Kick out patients so they die at home. Increase successful surgeries? Tell the doctors to fix a lot of ingrown toenails. Increased lifespan? Make decisions which increase life expectancy, at the expense of quality of life. Or just try to get rid of patients who have poor prospects.

The greatest strength of markets is also their greatest weakness - they are much smarter and more agile than government departments. They can become a malicious literal genie, which optimises whatever the incentives are.
This happens a lot in the game industry kickstarters. The most money usually goes to a large studio or a famous game designer appealing to his fans.

Examples: Ragnar Torquist's The Longest Journey sequel, Richard Garriott's kickstarter, Double Fine Adeventure by Tim Schafer, Project Eternity, Planescape: Torment spiritual sequel... there's a lot of them.

Ultimately, both sides have a point. It is a tad disingenous for the elite in a specific genre to ask for money upfront from crowdsourcing, because they could have gotten that money elsewhere. On the other hand, we shouldn't deny them the chance of starting the kickstarter -- and once they start it, their large fanbase can usually be counted on to pitch in enough.

As for you and me, dear reader, we should do as always -- vote with our wallets and support interesting and sometimes risky projects which wouldn't get the money any other way.
So two wrongs make a right then?
"The point is that you don’t need a whole lot of people to participate in order to create something pretty impressive. That’s how Wikipedia became the behemoth it is today."

I'm not sure that's true. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
I've been a fan of Star Wars since practically the beginning but... I can't defend the Ewoks. That was just dumb.
They could switch to edis when it gets too expensive to keep everything in memory.
While it was dishonest to cut the sentence off in the middle, the lack of epidemiological evidence basically puts nicotine in the same camp as a ton of other substances that have "carcinogenic potential" but aren't considered a risk. Basically, it's plausible that nicotine is carcinogenic to some degree, but with the carcinogenicity of tobacco explained entirely by other factors, there's no real reason to believe that it's a significant risk, especially for bystanders.
Many people will discover they don't. I have a mobile phone that is the first mobile phone I ever had (sucker! I never answered the damn thing anyway!); someone gave it to me because they were sick of not being able to phone me any time of the day or night. It's over a decade old and it spends most of the time switched off. If it does happen to ring, I generally ignore it. I live quite happily without carrying a phone or smartphone around with me; I suspect many people will quite happily live without being able to wear their google interface on their face.
The fact that Googling efficiently is a skill that matters is a clear opportunity for a Google competitor.
I think that if Oculus Rift becomes the new standard for gaming, we'll soon see games being pushed to 120 FPS, so it makes sense to see movies at least at 60 FPS soon.
How do these devices differ from a £50 Cryptostick https://www.crypto-stick.com/ or a £10 OpenPGP SmartCard? http://g10code.com/p-card.html
I'm Jewish, and what's our style for fried artichoke ;-)?
Not really, really stupid.

Not quite as brilliant as the hype suggests after all this time, sure, but at the time all that stuff about the force and, yes, LASERS! and SPACE SHIPS! was pretty spectacular in its own right. But most of what keeps Star Wars going, I think (apart from, obviously, merchandising merchandising merchandising) is that thin vapor of pop-philosophy and Ralph McQuarrie's visual legacy. It looked like nothing anyone had ever seen.
>There's also a fairness (and rule-of-law) argument: if two people steal $100 each, why would one person be let out earlier?

If that's your justification then the horse has already left the barn, developed space travel and colonized Mars. Look at the number of factors that go into sentencing -- or just the definition of the crime, like what was stolen (distinct from its market value) and how (e.g. on a computer vs. in person vs. in a conspiracy with accomplices), then there is a lot of flexibility for the sentence itself (most sentences are "up to" X penalty) with a whole list of mitigating and exacerbating circumstances in the sentencing guidelines, subsequent parole for good behavior in prison, etc. etc.
I've always wanted to do something like that! It's brilliant. You should add "here is your grand-grand mother, what's her name?" and "here will be your potential grand grand son, do you think they'll remember your name?"
Compare European Amazon prices
Amazon currently has five shops in Europe (UK/DE/IT/FR/SP) with different prices. Due to free trade in the EU, it sometime really pays to check all stores before buying Amazon goods.
Wait until network effects take place and it creates a lock-in for a specific vendor. (Besides, congestion will strike and he will also loose a lot of his races.)

So, it is true, we are in a competition, but not the competition that Scoble is referring to.

The competition is more about open standards, patent laws and the future of freedom.
We don't know. But from what I've read it's nonsense to think about before and after.
Except in the cases of some types of cancer (breast/prostate/liver) where whether you will live or die dices are rolled during the genesis of the cancer and can be influenced little by the treatment. But more than pays about melanoma. It is all about the illness.
Your gutmann document is interesting. Thank you.

There are some things that were not mentioned.

1) Obviously you're talking about traditional spinning platter drives, and not SSDs.

2) The complete drive needs to be overwritten to be sure all data has gone. The safest way to do that is to use an ATA secure erase command. This will overwrite all the sectors marked as bad. DBAN is good, but it will not overwrite sectors marked as bad. (The risk from this is small.)
yes of course. There are many people without a car, mobile phone or a pension. There are many ways of live that can be enjoyable. But everything come with a certain risk that can be minimized with technology.
Long-term career paths for an ambitious developer?
I'm a dude, late twenties, married with kids..I work as a developer at a largeish company.. I enjoy the work I do and I get paid pretty well.

Despite my career still being fairly nascent, I'm starting to feel like I can almost see the plateau of it both financially and from a personally rewarding standpoint. In other words, I've advanced relatively quickly and am making good money despite only beginning a career in software development a few years ago, but I'm beginning to think about what the future might hold beyond sitting and writing code all day for decent pay.

Obviously, a lot of this question cannot be answered by anyone but myself (I need to do some soul-searching), but I'd like some perspective on what my long-term options are going forward. I know management is an obvious possibility, but I do enjoy actual development a lot which doesn't seem to be something managers do much of..perhaps there's a distinction between manager and technical lead?

I also sometimes feel like I'd love to ultimately start my own business or launch a startup, but I feel like there will never be a time where I can afford the risk of time/money given my family situation (married with kids) and current expenses. Should I find out what I'm passionate about and go the lean startup route on nights and weekends? Should I first gain more technical experience and not even think about starting my own thing for another few years? Maybe my time would be best spent learning other technologies and broadening my horizons on that front?

Really do apologize for the somewhat incoherent rant, but the only to give a sense of the kinds of things I'm thinking about was just to let it all out. Any general career advice for a young developer would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Ah I see. Still, you got me thinking about the need for a general term for that sort of hammering, so it's not all wasted.
Thanks for saying this. I hope it helps others, too.
Amanda Knox and bad maths in court
See the PDF attached to the ticket.
http://www.projectfedena.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2862755
Okay, but I've met people who don't know anything that I don't apart from private gossip (and I'm not what you would call very intelligent) so I guess part of what she was trying to say is that people sometimes feel that they can't share anything with anyone around them because they're just not interested in anything meaningful or interesting. (all of that sounded pretentious and wrong)