skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I noticed right away that the title had no capital letters. But I didn't notice that the body had none until I read this comment and looked back over the text. Neither time did the lack of capitals bother me.
I didn't say it shouldn't; I'm suggesting there's no reason why it must.
I would argue that bad code is already shit. There's no doubt that good code can be turned to shit too if it's being modified all the time with bug fixes, etc, without paying the required technical debts.

Not sure what your example of untouched code represents. The OP says that what makes code turn bad is accumulated local changes and bug fixes without thinking about the big picture. Of course if no one ever touches the code, its quality doesn't change.
You know what's a nice feature? Capitalization. Removing it did not make this essay better.
Except that Steam forces Australians to buy software in US dollars. We can't buy through the US Store. We go into an 'australian steam store' where they rip us off, and we have to pay in USD.
Video-DownloadHelper[0] is also a good choice if you need to download videos often, and from different sources (e.g. blip.tv). However, it only works with Firefox. Jdownloader can also download Youtube Videos (and many others).

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/video-downloadhe...
Getting a tenure track job offer in academia is a very tough prospect. I wish we academics would be more honest with incoming graduate students (or even at an earlier stage) about how much of a filter there is between 1st year grad school and the tenure-track job offer. It's not like there aren't other examples of dense filters in the working world. We just aren't very honest about it with our trainees.

The other thing we fail at as academics is helping trainees understand and take advantage of non-academic tracks after grad school, without attaching a stigma of failure to them. There are many, many ways to succeed, have a rewarding and exciting career, and contribute to society as a non-academic with a graduate degree... not to mention the higher salaries! Too many academics treat their trainees as failures if they even initiate this conversation. It needs to stop.

Imagine if students entering med school, who wanted to be pediatric neurosurgeons, for example (sub-sub-speciality requiring many post-med school years of study) found out at the end of all their training, at age 35 or 40, that oops, perhaps only 25% of them will ever get the job they want?
Votes are rigged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aKOhbbK9E

There was HBO special on vote machine maker (the corp name get changed often).

Since votes are rigged, it's not democracy. The congress popularity is < 10%, now you know how they get reelected.
Flynn (open source PaaS) 90% funded, only a day left...
[Flynn](https://flynn.io/), an open-source PaaS (similar to Heroku), and from the creator of [Dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku), is close to 90% funded, and is inching slowly on its last day. Can we help give it some attention...?
I am confused as to why that is arrogant. Should Scotland gain independence, the idea of Faslane becoming sovereign British territory seems plausible. There are plenty of examples of armed forces bases being located within foreign jurisdictions in accordance with similar arrangements.

As I understand it, relocating the infrastructure of the Naval base might well prove prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, its continued presence would provide a considerable boon to the local scottish community in terms of jobs and the presence of British armed forces personnel.

To be clear, I hold no strong opinion on the continuation of the Trident programme or Scotland's membership in the Union. The part of me that is proud to be British would be sad to see it break up I suppose. I do however support the requirement for a Binary referendum whole-heartedly... no more self-determination.
Probably not going to get seen in this morass of comments, but I went back and reviewed the CMS data that the article cites.

The article used the Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) 238 - Major Cardiovascular Procedures without Major Complications. This is the best guess at capturing the costs of "Open Heart Surgery". (CMS only releases data for the top 100 DRG codes). "Open Heart Surgery" is a term for a variety of surgical procedures done on the heart, including valve replacement, vascular repairs of the aorta/vena cava/pulmonary vessels, and coronary bypass. These span a wide variety of DRG codes, including 216-221 for valve replacement, 228 (other cardiothoracic procedures with major complications), and 231-236 for cardiac bypass. Assuming we are comparing the operation known as coronary bypass grafting, then 238 is a decent enough code to use, with the proviso that it's not the best source for data.

Looking at the numbers claimed: If you download the Excel file from CMS [1], you can sort by DRG and Provider Name. Yes, if you search by DRG 238 and filter by Cleveland Clinic you will get $106,385 charged to Medicare. However, what the article completely leaves out (and anyone in medical practice will assume) is that Medicare simply does not pay the amount covered. Average Total Payments by Medicare: $26,898. That's how much Cleveland Clinic gets reimbursed, on average, by Medicare for any procedure included in DRG 238.

It gets more interesting when you include all providers and sort by average total payments. The highest average Medicare reimbursement to anyone for DRG 238 is $54,682; the lowest $13,233. Another interesting example:

In Alabama, at Brookwood Medical Center, DRG 238 covers $111,008 and only reimburses $15,552.

These comparisons of the US system to outside countries really need to compare average US reimbursement to their stated cost, because they sure aren't funding an army of administrators to get the insurance companies to pay up.

In summary, you can get "open heart surgery" in the US (Alabama) for "$15,552". I wonder what the Alabama price is if you walk in and offer to pay cash. If you can get it at the Medicare reimbursement rate, that compares decently to the Indian price.

[1] http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Stat...
It's true, but none of this matters. People prefer equally terrible health care for all as opposed to great health care for some and excellent health care for others. Soon enough, plastic surgery will be socialized to combat bullying because kids shouldn't have to suffer for being ugly. Then we'll see that efficiency disappear in the name of egalitarianism.
Yep. I wouldn't surprised to see this article come from some other outlet; I did not think it's already time to add Wired to the "yellow media" bucket (though last week's article about LLVM being the last thread holding Google and Apple together just about did it)
WONTFIX: users do not need capital letters.

Any users pretending to have had need for capital letters are just expressing their disgruntlement over losing something they felt they possessed. That doesn't mean we think users are stupid, just that they have no idea what they actually need or use.
How Do You Make Money Affiliate Marketing?
My list is not about "useable C replacements" ;)

I like to read about this stuff and compare design decisions between languages.
The GNOME situation frustrates me as a would-be-linux-desktop-app developer. Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon: Unity, while nice, sometimes feels a bit lacking, and is far too controlled by Canonical.

GNOME used to be the go-to "Community" DE that I relied on, and I tinkered around with using it as my GUI toolkit as well. Now, it doesn't feel community run at all, and as a GUI toolkit, Qt is much nicer.

I wonder if this will change in the future?
What makes HN HN is different for different people. For me it is, more than anything, the community norms that structure the way discussions play out. The topics of those discussions only need to be mildly interesting - i.e. a well written book on ancient Egypt is objectively better than a mediocre book on Perl.

Starting with that attitude, I am less likely to forecast the HN apocalypse than someone starting with the converse view. In the end, it's a matter of faith. Mine is that despite change, HN will evolve in a healthy way. One of those ways that I am seeing made manifest is a greater emphasis on developing programmers into hackers without the baggage of startup ideology. I see this as something which reflects HN's broadening base.
I agree. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism [0]. It's not the "political" topics per se that should be eliminated, but the "discussions where people enter with fixed views, and argue from those viewpoints, and cherry pick the data that supports their viewpoints, and ignore the data that argues against their viewpoints" - these should be constantly and consistently downvoted to hell and below.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
How is it not bootstrap? If anything it's more bootstrap now.
Why would a judge intentionally send children to prison?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
The third point effects the second point. Our TV networks are absolutely crap. They only ever develop reality TV shows, the bottom of the barrel being "Celebrity Splash" (z-grade celebrities dived into a pool); they never show series in order, they interrupt series with something irrelevant, and they show a LOT of ads. Their news is even more atrocious.

Its a badly kept secret that their overall audiences have been shrinking, which is why they only ever give ratings in terms of percentages. A large percentage of a shrinking market is ok, until of course the market gets below a certain size.

Note this does not include the ABC, which is government funded. That network takes risks, always shows series in order, and even has a great streaming service.
I noticed it while trying to make sense of the first sentence which seemed strangely constructed and syntactically wrong.

Then after reading it again once or twice, I saw there were periods where I did not expect them.
Not in Haskell, but there are languages where it's possible. It's called dependent typing and I don't really understand how it works, but I suppose gp was referring to this.
just use Google Analytics. It's a free and extremely powerful reporting. Trying to roll your own solution is a total waste of time.

The only thing you should be doing with your logs are archiving them in case of a security breach so your can try to pin point how the attach happened.

Don't waste the space on your lan either for the log archives. Get an S3 account, zip them up and store on S3.
Technically, that was bug juice.
wtf is wrong with the button ... srsly.
http://s14.directupload.net/images/130729/kassm787.png
Ink – Interface Kit
while Machiavelli isn't bad, I laughed about that too. It fits pretty well.
Spacecraft Sees Giant 'Hole' In the Sun
It looks like it's time to break out this one again:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Be sure to note the date on this.
The technical problems have now been fixed
Allowing parallel importation would be a good start, Gerry Harvey be damned.
DRM aside... not an expert by any measure but the tight restrictions on "format-shifting" and limitations of "fair dealing" (as apposed to the broader rights granted under "fair use") come to mind.

interestingly (according to wiki) the act specifically allows "circumvention of region coding." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modchip#Legality but modchips are still pretty much illegal... thanks FTA... (just fou d this article which lays out a pretty interesting history http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/02/mods-vs-lockers-region-cod...).
I guess it depends on how the sample data is skewed as to what you can statistically gain from it. If it was collected fairly random without favoring any one audience, then there's lots of options. If not, then there's more restrictions.

Like for example, collecting data from somewhere that appeals to the general population is going to give different results than collecting data from a development community.

Tech wise, you could throw all the data into full text search engine like Sphinx or alternatively use something like Lucene or NLTK.

http://nltk.org/

http://lucene.apache.org/

http://sphinxsearch.com/
This author seems to confuse libertarians with anarchist.

Most libertarians are not anarchist, they allow for a limited form of government that is there to ensure that people's individual liberties are not violated. That includes enforcing contracts and makings sure people don't murder each other.
I'm very angry about all those things. That doesn't mean I can't get steamed about being ripped off.
Precisely. I was 2 paragraphs in when the total lack of capitalization had me distracted beyond comfort.
A quick summary of the discussion as I see it [#]

We would like politics threads on HN to be more heavily moderated (out of the way) because

1. HN is still US-centric, and US policy discussions are not the same as discussing the facts behind the politics.

2. We can get our political fix in (m)any other place(s).

3. The total number of political comments and discussions on HN that have add to the total sum of human knowledge is zero.

4. Finding articles that do satisfy ones intellectual cravings is hard and if it is not rewarded, will be done less and less.

[#] cos its had the highest signal to comment ratio for a very long time
That's an amazing document, looking forward to read it.
I've found any change in the software I develop and sell can produce a "I don't like this change" response, whether it is removing features, changing features, or adding something.

As a software developer and producer, one needs to develop thick skin. If I make a change and one person complains, I need to remind myself that other people like it.

However, if many people complain about a specific change, then I should listen, try to understand their perspective, and consider rolling back and/or adding an option to have things either the old way or the new way.

With the "add an option" approach, however, one must be careful not to gain lots and lots of UI-cluttering options in the Preferences.

The "add an option" approach can also result in more complicated customer support - users inadvertently turn off features/changes in the Preferences.

So there are a number of issues being balanced here: the customer's (or user's) dislike for change; the potentially real complaint that the change has worsened the software for some users; keeping the software flexible; but not drowning the user with too many unnecessary options; nor making customer support too complicated.
The same innovation would result in a massive lawsuit in the US would it not (if the first few attempts failed)?
Low hanging fruit. Find and publish Character and word frequency. Character frequency can be used for the arabic version of dvorak, or something like that. That could actually sell.

If you are tagging, take a look at supervised machine learning.
It's interesting to see that the references to twitter are basically gone now, presumably this means we'll see more things from `Bootstrap` in future, perhaps a company since it already has a lot of mind-share.
Here's my opinion.

"Political" would tend to mean something that people take a fixed view on, and where they're unlikely to change their opinion even if you present nice data to support your view.

"$PARTY has problems with massive IT project" isn't necessarily political.

"Dumb $PARTYians screw up yet another simple project!!1!" probably is.

It's probably best to avoid, even if there is a tech link:-

Israel / Palestine

Circumcision (ie, even if the story is "new laser robot performs safe circumcision" it's probably best to avoid it.)

Abortion

Political processes as they're happening (ie, if the primaries are in progress, don't talk about them)

Anything more about Snowden or NSA or spying. You should have assumed your email was open to all, that's been common advice since email was invented, and we've been warning you about Echelon and similar since the 90's.

Global warming unless you can ignore the trolls

Sexism unless you can ignore the hateful trolls

etc etc etc.

I would seriously prefer to read tabs vs spaces or vi vs emacs than a lot of the stuff on the front page.
What a disappointing end to a post that started with such great potential. So you read (and agree with apparently) about why people don't like to have things taken away from them and then, you just sit back and enjoy the reaction.

I would think that having understood the reaction, you might have tried to lessen it, or re-frame taking features away into something else (even if the end result is the same).
"The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote." - Ambassador Kosh, Babylon 5
I don't view it as an "apocalypse", but as a very gradual settling under the waves. I still find good articles and interesting discussions here, but I'm on the lookout for 'the next thing', too.
It might increase Smart TV sales, as long as a) the smart TVs adopt the same tech (which seems to have been designed by Youtube and Netflix for exactly that purpose) and b) they don't price themselves out of the market.
Seems like a great tool, I will definitely give it a try on my next project. So if I understand well, Git doesn't have to be installed on the production server(s), only SSH access is needed, right?
Haha, arse. Spoken like a true Aussie.

For some people the 'don't buy' is one thing, but if you need Photoshop, there is no competition. There is no other choice.
Properly designed and written scalable software can last indefinitely with little or no modification

The problem is that what may be "proper" today (thinking, say, 5-10 years out) may fail the test in 10-15 years. One has to design software under some constraints, usually defined by the problem boundary and thus it by definition cannot be infinitely scalable and flexible.

Also, the problem is the code ends up being maintained by programmers of varying levels of competency. Even if competency is not a problem, the varying styles inadvertently lead to spaghetti and inconsistent code.
Is he trying to imply that he is in charge and we are just those silly peons who don't understand motivation of their ruler? Because that's a complete bullshit.

While I tend to agree with most things they did in the past few years, some are just plain idiotic. For example the type to search instead of prefix matching in nautilus just plain doesn't work, while the original feature have been replaced. I feel like I've received a 7 inch tablet to hack on a C project.
I'm not sure what you mean by dedicated host machine, because OpenVZ runs on Amazon and Azure instances.
so ... if you wrote the original, you get karma, if you just post the original, you get 1/x Karma?

seems, interesting.

Would encourage less posting, more thoughtful commenting.
Yes. Without a question yes.

If i could pay something between $25 to $100 a month to get someone to ensure that my outgoing 'notices' weren't terrible sludge that put off anyone non technical. Then my side projects would be much more valuable.
So they are patenting the 'just my 2 cents' ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_two_cents

Although I didn't properly RTFA, there are may ways in which one can hook narcissistic gamblers in forums or news sites.
The price of the comment can be set in a bid-like fashion with people raising their bids and paying more and more to keep their comment first.
They can also pay to upvote or downvote comments or plain remove them.
You can have comment wars with real money in no time :).

Bitcoin sounds like a perfect fit for such a system, allowing anonymous comments as well. But haven't I seen something like this somewhere already - reddit tips , for instance ?
Not every Australian. Perhaps it's time for a little less free market and a little more government intervention. Nobody likes being taken advantage of.
I would freaking love it if we were having discussions on well written books on ancient Egypt.

I'd even freaking love it if we were discussing mediocre Perl books - so long as people were pointing out the mediocrities and better ways to do things.

I agree that the community norms help a lot with HN. I think that these norms are being diluted. I've seen some comments that would have been downvoted a year ago that are now upvoted. I've seen more obvious downvoting for disagreement (not saying that's bad, just that it's a bit more obvious).
I don't believe witchcraft can claim any reasonable success, while socialism can at least make a claim for converting the largest countries in the world from agrarian to industrial economies. Now, I would argue that capitalism can do it better, but there would be an argument at least ... what argument can you have with witchcraft? Hence my respect.
The entire point of religious views is to provide another way of understanding reality.

You presumably believe that science alone can explain reality. And that's fine. But many people don't, and I'm not just talking about the traditionally religious.

Scientifically, the "love" we have for our children is simply a genetically-programmed strategy for best ensuring that our genes are passed to future generations. It has no meaning.

In fact, scientifically, nothing has any meaning. Whether we live or die makes no difference at all, and when someone kills another, the only reason it's "wrong" is because society is trying to preserve itself so that individuals can pass on their genes to the next generation.

Again, if you're OK with this, that's fine. I'm not going to try to make you change your mind. But hopefully you can understand why others, many others, inform their view of reality with sources other than science.
> Thankfully, Qt has been getting better and better, and I hope to see a usable and powerful DE written in it sometime soon

You mean like KDE?
Calling it a 'tax' is indeed inaccurate and misleading. The purpose of the inquiry was to look at regional price discrimination against Australian consumers.

"The Treasury’s submission to the inquiry defined international price discrimination in these terms:
Geographic price discrimination occurs when a business charges different prices for the same product in two or more different locations. International price discrimination is when geographic price discrimination occurs across country borders.
To maximise profit, many businesses do not sell based simply on a mark-up of what the product cost to produce, but rather price according to what they consider the market can bear, that is, according to the consumers’ marginal willingness to pay."

http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...

To my mind it's just smart business for software makers to price their products at what the market will bare. However I think it crosses a line when sellers of "digital goods" build in technical geoblocking (e.g. regional website redirects, region-specific app stores) and licensing agreements which enforce consumers purchase in a specific reason.

The parliamentary committee was the result of certain sections of the market saying their not willing to bare this pricing tactic and looking to raise awareness amongst those who aren't aware that it is happening.

Also interesting and was this earlier article from mid-way through the inquiry with a focus on Adobe:

"At the parliamentary hearing, he said that customers can buy Adobe boxed products overseas, but that those products would not be covered by the company's local warranty policies." - Adobe managing director for Australia and New Zealand Paul Robson

http://www.zdnet.com/au/adobe-to-australia-higher-pricing-is...
Phil Fish and the hate mob: an Internet tragedy