skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Was your original signup https? No? Then [...]

Sounds like a good reason to use HTTPS for registration and authentication, as stated in the article.

> Would you happily login to your account from the WiFi at Starbucks

Sure, as long as the site uses HTTPS.

> or from the public machine at the local library?

Never, never, never.

> Emailing passwords to new users is USEFUL [...]

Allowing anybody to login without a password would doubtless save them even more support requests, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Sometimes the developer's responsibility to protect a user's information outweighs a desire for lower support costs.

> ANY ability to reset a password via email is insecure. [...]

Not so; additional information, such as user-defined security questions or verification, is usually required before a user is allowed to reset their password. Furthermore, a theoretical weak reset procedure only exposes the weak site. It doesn't expose the user's password.

> An attacker which can read out the passwords from your database already owns your site.

This isn't about protecting your site, it's about protecting users. Many people, despite decades of warnings, use the same password on multiple sites. If your site stores the user's authentication information in a way that can be accessed later, then you are violating the user's security.
Try something totally different. It could be a totally different technology: say Ruby on Rails or maybe Flex/Flash & Actionscript. How about becoming a designer? Something you have never considered before or never thought of as worthwhile. Something that brings back the "lightness" feeling you seem to be missing.
Many drugstores have clinics staffed by clinicians who are able to write prescriptions. One does not need qualifications to obtain this information.
Take one month's expenses, move out your pad if you're renting and go teach English overseas until you get your senses back.

Everyone needs their 2-years of fucking around backpacking before they hit 30. I am just coming back from mine; 20 countries in 2 years and stories for a life time. Cost me less than 10k a year to live like that.

Cheers!
I find it interesting that "spouse" or "significant other" was not in the "someone that you respect" list.
I don't know why you would believe that. The supply of gold in the world is not fixed, you can always dig up more (for a pathological case, see aluminum), and occasionally large chunks disappear (the Hunt brothers).

At least with paper money, its value is usually your own fault.
Wow I think you have a great idea. We really need something like this in Canada. What are your rates? I couldn't find them on the site.

Oh, and one last question: where you funded by YC?
The top languages calculation on GitHub is done by lines of code per language. By that calculation, there are 4.5x more Ruby LOC than C LOC on Github, yet C is still has the most bytes.

http://github.com/blog/99-popular-languages
"There is NO SECURITY DOWNSIDE to emailing a user's password to them vs. having some multi-step reset procedure."

That may be true from a site admin's POV, but consider that many people use the same password for everything. Plain text passwords flying through the pipes and then laying about on mail servers is a security risk for the naive user.
Command Lines
Quite possibly my favorite HN comment ever. :)
or at least, whatever definition he DID come up with is no longer valid.

I think that the measure of success is something that has to be discovered, rather than defined. It's not as though people are able to choose what they want- all they can choose is how to best go about it.
Thanks! I'll try that sometime.
How about learning something else ?
You've got time, why don't you learn a musical instrument ?
Right now, we're use a manual workflow; we provide patients' preregistration data to nurses and registration staff through a web interface. Direct EHR integration is my next priority.

We're implementing at relatively low-volume locations (in the neighborhood of 25-35k pts per year), and so far we've used the same manual workflow at all locations without any problems, but I think we need full integration for long-term growth.

I'd love to talk further by email -- can you send me a note at tyler@mystartupdomain?
Producing (that is, discovering and bringing to market) new gold is incredibly time consuming and hard. Printing trillions of dollar bills on high speed presses with no value to back them up is very easy. So the difficulty of getting gold makes inflationary policies impossible by central governments. There is no way to magically come up with 2 trillion dollars of new gold in a few months. You can, however, with the printing presses. This is why gold provides a reality link to the value of our money. The value of the actual paper that money is printed on is virtually nothing.
Nice. You may want to consider a Google maps mashup centered on my location. If the hospital(s) I know aren't participating, this would be easier to use than a drop down box.
Yeah, that's a good point. Kind of contradictory of me to say humans are arrogant to pretend to know what animals are thinking and then say myself that animals don't kill for sheer pleasure. So I can't say this for sure, because I don't know.

By "I don't know of" I mean, I haven't observed it, or rather more specifically, I haven't observed behavior that is similar, but I'm still a student of this field of knowledge. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. The chihuahua example above from mrbgty is a curious case. It is interesting though that chihuahuas are an invention of man, bred by man with certain personality traits that may not exist in the wild outside such human influence. Of course there could be myriad examples of it we (I) am not aware of, because we can't read their minds. I'd love to be able to read animal minds though, how awesome would that be?!

As far as my knowledge, just what biology classes I have taken and reading some books like Darwin's expression of emotions in man and animal. Good read, many versions here: http://books.google.com/books?q=editions:ISBN1417958944&...

I'm no zoologist of course. I did watch a lot of Nature on PBS and that sort of thing, but definitely no expert. Mostly I just find it a fascinating question of what really separates man and animal.
You're gonna live a long time, you've got time to change direction. Find a junior job doing something completely different, or even start studying something, anything.

Only things that can happen are that you become happy for you new job, or you fall back in love with programming.

Another option: I know an illustrator who was getting tired of the endless line of demanding clients wanting the same old work, so she decided to spice it up by taking internships one week of every month. She tries to make the internships as different as possible, examples being a baker, a clothing shop, some print/dtp shop, etc.

Maybe that could be a less radical way of getting some fresh perspective.
as pointed out in the article comments:

site:en.wordpress.com "your account is now active"
"Capitalism sells... practical items as tribal power fetishes."
Along these lines: I found Infrastructure by Brian Hayes to be a great book & recommend it to anyone on HN who agrees w/ above comment (or really, just about anyone on HN).

http://www.amazon.com/Infrastructure-Field-Guide-Industrial-...
Now that you mention composable regexps (or composable grammars), I want some, too. :)
Ask HN: Startup, Project, or something else ...
Here's a thing ...

When I've asked people what the difference is between a restaurant and a cafeteria, the main points were that in a cafeteria you get your food from a central location, pay for it in advance, and take it to your table, whereas in a restaurant you sit at your table, order your food, it's brought to you, and you pay afterwards.

Yes?

So why do MacDonalds call themselves a restaurant?

In a similar vein, I'm working on a web site. What criteria should I use to decide whether to call it a start-up, a project, or something else.
Soccerbots learn how to fall gracefully
I just figured the implicit assumption was the original poster doesn't have a spouse or significant other.
Animating Balloons
They couldn't more blatantly copy Google's template and color scheme.

http://navify.com/
http://news.google.com/
"My neck has been hurting for two years for spending so many hours in front of the computer."

Is is possible that you feel crappy and are blaming your work environment?

I've been sitting in front of a computer for 30 years and my neck never hurts. In fact, nothing does.

No matter what you decide, you must take care of yourself. If you don't feel well, you won't be happy doing anything. There are many references on the web on what to do, some excellent and some horrible. I'd be happy to share what I do to feel great if anyone is interested.
Go to the gym every morning. Ride a bike, get active. For some reason an 8-10 hour day in a chair is nearly unbearable unless I've done some sort of activity in the mornings. It may be a low risk thing to try.
Travel, take a break. Seems like burntout and you need to take a vacation and then decide whether you really want to quit this industry.
For some reason, I pictured the original poster as single.
StatPlot Launches: Visualize Sports Stats
Love the idea. What are the expansion plans?
Troll on Cloud Computing Mailing List Actually cc's Valleywag on a Flame
Very cool. Especially good deal for people who registered early and paid only $300 for the conference. For people in academia, it was only $50.

http://code.google.com/events/io/faq.html
IIRC, Emory uses Cerner FirstNet.
Makes me feel a bit better about WP. They are still storing the passwords temporarily in 2-way, so it's less of a hacking risk for the new account, though potentially a hacking opportunity for other websites used by the same user.

I still can't say I approve of their implementation though. What if someone is looking over your shoulder when you click the link to see your new account has been created and your password is right there for someone watching?
What an ambitious, innovative idea--nice work.

I don't understand (even after looking at the How it Works page) is how it works. Since you can't predict what types of injuries that are going to come in that are more critical than yours, how can you gaurantee an appointment time?
I'm not sure how being a parent provides qualification in assessing the practicality of this startup, but if it does, then I would like to weigh in on this issue as I am a parent of 2. These clinics are typically staffed at least by a nurse practitioner, who can treat and prescribe medications (depending on the state) for almost any reasonable non-urgent condition, including antibiotics. If you live in a state where the nurse practitioner can not prescribe medications, there is usually a physician on staff that works along side the NP to assist in those situations.
These clinics sell themselves as being non-urgent care facilities that are able to treat conditions that otherwise would have required a physician or Emergency room visit. If they could not prescribe medications and treat most of these conditions, I am unsure how successful they would really be.
When in doubt, blame the journalist, not the scientist, but this is some pretty deficient evidence.

> On three occasion the male monkey picked up tokens she dropped and inserted them into the slot and allowed her to have the food.

> As there was no benefit for the male monkey, Prof Bekoff argues that this is a clear example of an animal's actions being driven by some internal moral compass.

Primates participate in a good deal of social behavior based on reciprocal exchange, e.g., social grooming. The lack of immediate obvious benefit for the male monkey ignores the benefits of e.g., greater friendship, and ignores the dangers of "stealing" food from an older, possibly more dominant monkey. This example is interesting, but no more "moral" than any other one-sided benevolent exchange that you can find in monkey societies.

> Recent research from Switzerland also showed that rats will help a rat, to which it is not related, to obtain food if they themselves have benefited from the charity of others. This reciprocity was thought to be restricted to primates.

Next paragraph...

> Those who are successful in foraging for blood will share their meal with bats who are not successful.
They are more likely to share with bats who had previously shared with them. Prof Bekoff believes this reciprocity is a result of a sense of affiliation that binds groups of animals together.

(My emphasis.)
The bat data has been known for over 15 years, and the lack of internal consistency is likely the journalist, but the science is still... stretching pretty far. It is not uncommon for vampire bats to find "bat buddies" with whom they predominantly share their excess food. This activity is easily traced through reciprocal altruism to selfishness.

> Some studies have shown that animals experience hormonal changes that lead them to "crave" social interaction.

Yes, like estrus, or ovulation in humans. This fact is unimportant and does not relate to morality.

> They also have three times as many spindle cells compared to humans and are thought to be older in evolutionary terms.

We know so little of the workings of the brain or of spindle /neurons/ that stating an absolute difference (without reference to the fourfold or greater size difference (sorry, no reference to whale neuron count on hand))) as if it means something is silly. They exist in whales, which is important, but in humans they have been implicated in emotion, spatial awareness, and touch. Would whales having a sense of touch be a radical notion?

> This finding has suggested that complex emotional judgements such as empathy may have evolved considerably earlier in history than previously thought and could be widespread in the animal kingdom.

So because whales are older than humans in evolutionary terms, this suggests an earlier evolution of empathy? I think the fundamental mistake is thinking that the whales did not evolve spindle neurons independently, but the whole line of thinking is somewhat muddled.
Are you Eric Ries?
Commercial Software Results: Follow Up
This is a pretty awesome move from Google, but don't be fooled. Google has everything to gain, both from gaining would-be developers, and the PR.

Tech Crunch saying something like, "What will we see next week from Apple at its WWDC event? Probably nothing." is really ignorant on a lot of levels.
To answer one of your questions... From the registration page: "Your credit card will be charged a fee of $24.99 to complete the registration process."
If you code in Perl, the NYT released a nice Perl profiler: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/the-new-york-times-...
Interesting. Actually, this is a good way to separate two of the crucial functions of health care: actually fixing medical problems, or demonstrating serious concern and sympathy for someone's medical problems.

A person interested in the first can use inquicker; someone more interested in the latter can still bustle off to the ER and pace around, or something.
I'm certain you'll get this comment in spades, but as a relatively young an unencumbered person you should go away and do something else.

I spent a year on "sabbatical" in my mid-20's after being laid off from another company with a great future that didn't quite get there. Best thing I have done.

Did traveling, volunteer work, odd jobs to earn extra cash.

There is nothing as refreshing as not only not knowing the date, but what day of the week it is.
Also see:
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter4-10.php
Joe Six-pack, late to the ball again.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vul9/some_tech....
Look at his submissions. I'm seeing a trend... :)
I'm interested in any feedback about StatPlot.com!
I know that I personally have a Clojure project that has many more lines of JavaScript than Clojure just because I have a large JavaScript library checked in with my other code.

I wonder if there's a way to figure out unique lines of code, or unique files. jQuery really shouldn't be counted 5000 times, I would think.
this is long, and very entertaining to read. and there are some good points. but basically boils down to "if you want to have very good hires, you have to be VERY picky."

and well, that's kind of a no-brainer, i would think. <shrug> maybe it's not that easy to see for some people.
I just hope they don't run out of cash 'in the Long Haul'. Must be some secret revenue source they're not mentioning.
The short answer: we can't. Sometimes, we miss the guaranteed appointment time. However, we do everything we can to ensure that our predictions are accurate, and we do everything we can to ensure that the patient experience is still as smooth as possible if we're wrong.

At this point, we have a 99.9% success rate with that guarantee: less than 1 out of every 1,000 patients has requested a write-off of the bill.
Ok. My other gripe with his argument is that these aren't equivalence classes. Let the string be 01b, where b is an infinitely long bit string. Then the string 01b belongs to equivalence class b, and also equivalence class 1b... and an element cannot belong to multiple equivalence classes at once.

The only way out of this is for 1b and b to actually be the same equivalence class, that is, that of b. But, can we do that? I feel like that is wrong.
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler may be useful if anyone is thinking of actually doing this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
Ask HN: Python cloud hosting?
I am writing a web application in Python.
Forms, authentication, simple stuff. Think of a glorified guest book app, in terms of basic functionality.
I want to be able to scale to millions of requests. So the guest book page should be served statically, and updated from the database periodically.

What cloud host should I use? Google AppEngine seems simpler to set up, but AWS seems more flexible.

Within this cloud service, what Python web framework should I use? If I use the AppEngine API, do I get scaling automatically? If I use Pylons or Django, do I have to be careful to get things to scale correctly?

What is the simplest path to a minimum viable product?
...except in this case consumers couldn't care less about HTML5 or web standards.
I was merely trying to make the point that I see this as a useful service/start up. Perhaps 'qualifications' was a poor choice of word here.
I imagine there aren't many profitable for-profit companies that do anything for purely altruistic reasons.
I'm pretty sure that lines of Ruby code tend to be shorter than lines of C. Static typing annotations tend to add to line length more directly than line count.
That looks great. I just posted a link to a very similar book a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606799
Exactly. Originally, we experimented with offering this service to patients for free or for $2.99, but the hospitals were experiencing significant numbers of no-shows and bogus registrations; the $24.99 price point was actually requested by our pilot hospital as a form of data validation.

If we could find another way to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, I would love to offer this service at a lower price point.
Get a:

a) Girlfriend
b) Dog
c) A hobby that doesn't involve electricity

Allow your job to become just one part of your life ... not what defines your life.
> I am just coming back from mine; 20 countries in 2 years

I'm curious. 1) Did you bring your own netbook/laptop along and 2) How well are you handling your "re-entry" (e.g. hanging out with friends who knew you pre-travel)?
The music itself is irrelevant. If you're on stage performing anything and people are paying attention, then you are the de-facto Alpha Male, and that trumps every other factor for attractiveness to females (for short-term relationships/one-night stands).
While you have a valid point, I think you're still missing the main issue: sometimes these clinics aren't open when you need them most. Emergencies big and small happen at any time during the day. Not many clinics and urgent care centers are open and easy to go to 24/7.
I have heard that ACH transfers are much more common in Europe. How do they do it there?
Awesome, meaningful, useful startup. Congratulations. I hope you are successful and expand to my area. My friend spent 4 hours in the ER on his birthday to get some stitches. This would have been a huge help.
Anybots QA live broadcasting Google I/O
I like the idea of seeking "lightness". Heaviness is exactly what burn out feels like, as if everything is 100 times more painful than it really is/should be/once was.
In my experience, it mostly depends on the amount of the start-up kool-aid the author consumed (or 'founder') and rarely so the nature of the actual project. Thus, you get some people hosting 'sites' that are very profitabl, self-sustaining and add value to society, and others creating tiny twitter apps (twart ups!) and calling themselves start-ups.
Consumers care about car internals at anything more than a superficial level?

If HTML5 is actually important to improving the end-user experience, if browsers that implement it have a real, demonstrable advantage over those that don't, then it doesn't matter if the consumer cares about HTML5 or not. They'll still want the results that technology enables.
make random things. use your creative side and have fun with it. I do it all the time when I'm struggling with a problem or taking a short break.
Setting up an LLC in Wyoming will not shield your from tax issues in your home state (California or otherwise).

Those LLCs are such a headhache from a tax point of view, plus they depend so much on state and federal regulations. Good luck doing business internationally as well.

Why do you think we invented the 100% virtual company (http://fairsoftware.net)?

Granted, the liability part is not as strong as a clean LLC, but you are shielded from your customers, and you can work with pretty much anyone worldwide without having to worry about any paperwork at all.
Yes, this has happened to me.
I found a part-time gig, and worked 20 hours a week, while hiking in the Rockies with all of my free time. I then disconnected completely, and did manual labor for a year.

In short, turn off the computer. Find other interests. Determine your true priorities. Once you have done that, you will likely be able to come back and enjoy technology again because it will be supporting your true self, not defining your self.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMFh5axDKWU

video of the thing in action.
It's spring.

Go hike the Appalachian trail all summer.

You living expenses will be food + replacement socks + fuel for your camp stove.

Four months from now, you'll be wonderfully destressed, and will have barely touched your savings.
Because this is such an intensely localized service, expanding the network of participating ERs is pretty much the most important thing we need to do. We've made it a turnkey implementation for low- and mid-volume ERs, and there are some fairly compelling customer service and bottom-line benefits for participating hospitals.
Given that Postfix and Exim have much friendlier upstream developers (qmail barely has a maintainer), I don't think it's a surprise that qmail is losing popularity.
I'm not sure I comprehend this. Isn't it the role of the emergency services to prioritise your visit? If you're critical you'll get seen, otherwise you wait.

If you're capable of shopping around for the best appointment time then shouldn't you be seeing a GP instead?
This is a very common sense advice, but I don't think it will do any good in this case. He most likely knows/tried all of this.

Reading is a good idea, though, just not professional books (or not in particular). There's a lot of interesting stuff around if you look a bit.