skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The notion that British healthcare IT is a model for success is somewhat disputable: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24130684

Yes, I know that the gov.uk guidelines are very good, but they relate primarily to customer-facing websites and user-interface design, and don't really cover the gnarly, painful back-end integration jobs. To the extent that healthcare.gov is an expensive failure, it's due to the complexity of the back-end systems and not due to, say, poor UX (although it might have poor UX too).
One of the things I'm not sure the general public is aware of is that there's a very high stakes war going on behind the scenes between Amazon and much the e-commerce ecosystem. As the author points out, Amazon is good at what they do; maybe too good.

If you're a small e-com retailer, selling your goods on Amazon can seem like the magic bullet you've been looking for. They can provide you a huge audience overnight. And if you have a good product at the right price, you're probably going to do well on Amazon. The danger is when you do well enough that Amazon takes notice, because if you're little slice of the industry starts to look too profitable, Amazon will come in and start selling in your category direct. And they're bigger than you and can do it on a smaller margin. Entire verticals can be consumed in a matter of weeks if Amazon decides to set up shop next to you. Amazon is really good at destroying the retailers that they helped in the beginning.

But it doesn't stop there. Once Amazon squeezes out the small players, they start acting like Walmart with the manufacturers. They start dictating margins and pushing down prices. And they can do it because they've monopolized the distribution channel. Amazon isn't making a lot of friends with manufacturers lately.

My point is that while this may be a clear win for consumers, it's a very sticky situation for manufacturers, distributors and retailers. If you go to most of the major e-commerce trade shows, you'll find that people are actually quite fearful of Amazon. They're looking for ways to widen the gap, not close it. Heck, in the past year I've actually started to get contractual obligations from some major manufacturers that I CAN'T sell on Amazon. They're mandating that all of their retailers keep their product off of there because they're scared shitless that it's just a matter of time before Bezos starts dictating their margins.

For better or worse, I do think Amazon will be successful to some degree with this project, but there's going to be a lot of behind the scenes fighting to get there.
It's cool and I'll probably be using it, but please fix that documentation. It's all over the place.
Government should only do what only government can do. If someone else is doing it — link to it. If we can provide resources (like APIs) that will help other people build things — do that. We should concentrate on the irreducible core.

That's good advice for all of government, not just digital services. For way too many government services, the irreducible core is simply the wealth transfer to make sure the better off are taxed to pay for services to be available to the poor, not actually providing the service.
unfortunately it's not the possibility they are exploring, it's the users...
I've got two different error messages. The status page has no idea there's anything wrong.
Steam dev days: Valve conference
By the way, Mark Jason Dominus (the guy who wrote High-Order Perl) has a presentation on giving presentations. I've only seen the slides, not the YouTube, but there are some handy tips.
According to the Gini, Russia has more income equality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

I can't imagine it being true though given this story, my experiences traveling across Siberia, and those of my roommate who is from Russia (he's been in the US for six years). You pretty much have to be a one percenter to get potable tap water (every restaurant charges for water because it's always bottled, never tap).
Not a very good first impression.

>"This doesn't happen often, but it looks like something is broke."
Well, your initial page is broken.

>"Hitting the back button and trying again might be your best bet."
Nope, didn't work.

>"If that doesn't work you can head back to the homepage. "
That's the page I'm trying to go to!

>"There might be more information on our status page which is reporting All Systems Operational."
Yeaah.. No, all systems aren't operational.
Didn't they say the same thing about Google Checkout and Google Wallet? Yet nothing has changed.
Collapse of Quantum Wavefunction Captured In Slow Motion
The spot where I am sitting (near Chicago) has been under 100+ feet of glacial ice at least four times in the past - most recently less than 20,000 years ago.

As a reasonable thinking person, I see no reason not to expect that to happen again some day.

The possibility of another ice age scares me much more than any effects from AGW.

Here's what the US and Canada looked like 20,000 years ago: http://faculty.ccc.edu/jtassin/geology201/homework/Chicagoge...
That got me curious, so I ran the numbers on the chances they'd miss all of the naps; assuming these birds take only one 9-second nap a week (28 naps total over 200 days) there's a 35% chance the researchers would have missed all of them ((1 - (28 / 1920000)) ^ 72,000), which is pretty reasonable. But that chance goes down to 8% for one nap every 3 days, and to 0.055% for one nap a day. I'd say maybe one 9-second nap every few days is the lower limit of what I'd find plausible (assuming this was run for only one bird).

EDIT: Ah, missed this in the article - they were three birds. So the chances they'd miss all naps for all three birds goes down to 0.055% for one nap every three days, and 4% for once a week. So 9 seconds once a week is barely believable, but if they can reproduce this with another couple of birds that becomes really unlikely.
In the kind of situation GP describes, what matters is probably the well-established practices for extending the behavior of an already-built system without breaking what's already there. A lot of Java practice has built up around having behavior determined dynamically (OOP is a nice fit for that, whereas C does not have great facilities for it). Much of the "ceremony" involved in using the big, complex Java frameworks is about preparing a piece of code for eventual extension. When some behavior is hard-coded in, it's difficult to change later, so the code is parameterized over anything and everything that might eventually change. Of course this looks silly when you do it for small things that won't change -- no need for FizzStrategy and BuzzStrategy interfaces when the only thing you'd ever want to do is print "fizz" or "buzz".

Quite a bit of that programming practice did develop in C++, but Java as a language provides stronger safety guarantees than C++ (lots of memory-related errors are difficult to impossible to have in Java) without sacrificing all that much performance. When you ask for a reasonably performant, statically-typed, memory-safe, object-oriented language, you're going to get pointed at Java (and C#). So that's what people use in that domain.
There are lots of "flaws" in free markets, if you're using econ101 bullet points as a blueprint.
I'm pretty syched to see developers taking on the interface of offline and f2f courses.
They've already got more than enough death as it is.
Actually you're right. You can see the state of your website/app in the current version, in the future and in the past.
1. I highly recommend trying out Carrierwave in place of Paperclip.

2. This replaces your file_fields. You'll still need something on the backend to deal with image storage and management, like Paperclip or Carrierwave.
I found it a little awkward to read at first, but that went away in a short time. I suggest giving it a proper whirl. Most people who I've introduced to CS seem to really like it.
Are you suggesting people are voting on things from completely uninformed positions??? ...would people really do that? ;)

It's at something like 340 dislike votes now- I believe your point is more prescient now than ever. :)
This Dumb Sign Was Just Posted at Twitter
Many UK government big IT projects have been disastrous.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280096822/Government-IT-...

> But in central government there is no such thing as an IT disaster: project names are usually changed or the failed scheme continues indefinitely. A project to deliver unified systems for magistrates has continued for about 17 years, complete with name changes.

http://www.zdnet.com/the-top-10-it-disasters-of-all-time-303...

> Edward Leigh, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, was outraged when the National Audit Office subsequently picked through the wreckage: "Ignoring ample warnings, the DWP, the CSA and IT contractor EDS introduced a large, complex IT system at the same time as restructuring the agency. The new system was brought in and, as night follows day, stumbled and now has enormous operational difficulties."

> It was the summer of 1999, and half a million British citizens were less than happy to discover that their new passports couldn't be issued on time because the Passport Agency had brought in a new Siemens computer system without sufficiently testing it and training staff first.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/mod...

> Over £4bn is being spent on a huge new defence computer system designed to help Britain's troops operate more effectively in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the globe.

> But a joint investigation by Channel 4 News and Computer Weekly magazine has uncovered internal emails from civil servants describing parts of the system as "an unmitigated disaster" and "not fit for purpose"
These seem to me like they'd be good principles regardless of who your client is.
Government Digital Service (GDS) covers this and more, see their service manual https://www.gov.uk/service-manual
Knowing nothing about either, I got 11.
Tzar transferring wealth from (and publicly humiliating and stripping them of all the privileges, etc...) non-110%-loyal to him rich people (who built their wealth by "stealing from people" - in Russian mentality there is no other way to build a wealth) to the loyal ones is the national reality show in Russia. People there just love a "strict, yet just tzar".
Fortunately, there are a couple examples of serious researchers who are also excellent (though maybe not as well known) popularizers. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Steven Strogatz (Sync, etc.) come immediately to mind, because I have read them recently. I have some books by Benoit Mandlebrot in shipping, and I am quite excited about them.

If anyone has other examples, I would love to hear them--I'm trying to pack my immediate reading list right now and am currently uninterested in fiction.
Bloomberg has a good rebuttal about the measurements used in this "study":
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/just-how-rich-are-r...

Additionally Russia's gini coefficient (income rather than wealth) puts the US as more unequal than Russia.
Not bad, but 'Just Another Ikea Catalog' (look it up on the wayback machine) is still the Ikea-related humor high water mark.
A Teletherapy Startup Works to Remove Barriers to Mental Health Care
Scientists generally don't want their data stored in volatile memory. If something goes wrong, they lose valuable data points.
> OP asked for a specific point.

Indeed he did -- he said, "I was not able to identify a specific point that Gladwell has made that is false." In my reply, I gave an example where Gladwell published something that had not been replicated, always a risky practice in science journalism, but worse, it was an example in which an ambitious effort at replication has failed.

In short, Gladwell published something that had been proven false, a case in which a cautious reading of the literature would have prevented this error.

Also, the original study came from the field of psychology, a field that's famous for superficial studies that lead to grand but unsupportable claims. Even for psychology studies that have stood unchallenged for years, one must be very careful in taking their conclusions seriously.

The Gladwell example I used represented something that was false, that had been falsified, something that all scientific results, to meet the definition of "scientific", must have as a possible outcome (testable and potentially falsifiable).
At what number do we stop saying this is hilariously large? Even if the actual cost was 1/10th of that, it's still 60 million.
> Believe me, godawful corporate things are unwieldy in whatever language they are written in.

No question this is generally true. But note that it's no worse for government than the private sector. The thing that bugs me is that government seems to take the worst aspects of the private sector (e.g. secrecy). If we've built a fabulous claims processing engine, why not give it away to other government departments?
Regardless of how long it would take to implement such a solution, the fact that he took such a principled stand against the entire might of the US government is extraordinarily commendable. The ire around this case should be directed exclusively at the agencies and parties involved in creating this rapidly growing police state, not at the people who are involved in making the story public. The world needs more people like Ladar Levison.
What trailer? How is this relevant to Haxe?
NSA bait?
The site is either showing error message, loading really really slow or finally fast as advertised.

Very inconsistent performance. Staying with Amazon CloudFront for static hosting.

One question though, is SSL supported for custom domains? that's the only thing I would be willing to switch from CloudFront for.
This is a really good talking point, but the fact is the existing (mostly private) healthcare system is huge, expansive, riddled with inefficiencies, and is a disappointing product.

Saying that the new government healthcare system is inefficient and disappointing is not enough to malign it - it has to be equally or more inefficient and ineffective than the system it's replacing.
Mostly a nitpick, but pressure sensors don't give a good measure of absolute altitude ever, regardless of the number of samples. You must calibrate it using pressure measurements from a ground station nearby in space and time, or else it tells you roughly nothing.

Weather matters a lot, as you say. The variation caused by weather can be equivalent to several thousand feet of altitude. Worse, changes due to weather are long-term. You can't filter them out, period. Samples taken four minutes apart can tell you changes in altitude, since the weather won't change that much in such a short time, but there's no way to backtrack to absolute altitude without calibration, no matter how many samples you take.
That's nice. It would be even nicer if any of the major UK ISPs supported IP6.

(Some of the small ones do on ADSL, but AFAIK you can't have both fiber AND IP6 from any provider, and now that I have FTTC I'm not keen to go back)
Any unfamiliar language is hard to read and will have seeming ambiguities.

In my experience working with CoffeeScript, I've always found well-written code easy to read with no ambiguities.
> Nothing (or very little) about "climate change" is good science.

The Koch brothers told you that tens of thousands of scientists around the world are making up a devious plan to... to what? to get you to use CFL bulbs?... and you believe the brothers. Great.
Mailgunner here. One of the things that differentiates Mailgun is that we don't gate features, all our features are available for all customers. We've found that a lot of customers don't have a lot of volume (say only 5000 emails per month) but the want inbound email parsing, email validation, complete tracking and analytics, and detailed logs through our events API. You can do all this, even on our free plan with 10,000 emails per month. So, its really what you value at what price. Hope that helps.
Aye, I won't bother critiquing the example, I see what you mean with the boilerplate as noise and part of me agree with you.

One of the main points of programming is to reduce the noise to enable higher levels of code, while keeping an easy access to what's under the hood to fine tune or add new functionalities. A programming language is merely a list of things that will make you lose your temper while you do all that.
Obama's efforts to control leaks 'most aggressive since Nixon', report finds
It must be awesome being a mouse. Cancer has been cured in mice. So has Alzheimer's. AIDS.

Reminds me of the Secret of NIMH.
Even if it's just $95, the point is the same: if you don't buy this product, you are fined and the police power of the state can be brought down upon your head if you don't pay up. Endless stories abound of people losing homes, savings frozen/confiscated, incarcerated, etc. over non-payment of seemingly trifling amounts. Heck, the whole Branch Davidian incident (50+ day standoff, dozens shot or burned to death) boiled down to alleged (!) non-payment of a $200 tax.

And it's not that a person doesn't have health insurance (though some truly don't need it, being sufficiently wealthy), it's that one is penalized for not having a particular kind of health insurance. Some of us are quite content to pay our way cash, insuring only for catastrophic events...but, for some reason, our legislators deem that punishable, requiring us to sign up for undesirable services at outrageous costs via a grossly dysfunctional website.

This nation was created in opposition to such taxation & penalties, hence a lot of citizens stressing out despite "it's just a little fine, so pay & be done with it." A government which threatens[1] severe consequences for non-compliance with "trivial" regulations should not be surprised by severe pushback from those not inclined to comply.

[1] - for all the "we won't garnish your wages etc." verbiage on the website in question, I'm not seeing any legal basis for anything other than IRS-standard severe consequences for non-payment of penalties.
I've written a simple ranker for the above scores: http://ancient-garden-9751.herokuapp.com/

Python and C most liked, PHP and Java most disliked (currently)

(Source here for if/when it goes down: https://github.com/thomseddon/lang-rank)
Not surprisingly, my Swedish coworker got 20/20. I got 10/20 which given I was basically guessing/coin tossing every time is statistically sound.

Apparently, its so easy because while Ikea names are kind of random, they mean something or are a name for a person/place, etc. Where as unlike most black metal bands here (whose names usually are based on some actual word with a dark meaning), the words for Nordic bands are mostly made up and basically mean nothing.
I think the "but there's still a rather lager performance penalty" is referring to the measured performance penalty on the established connections. This was pretty significant in the test case, although certainly the unpooled case was much worse.
I think that the case T-Mobile is going for is not the person who lives in another country for long periods of time for work but the traveller who has to constantly go back and forth between areas, or just a frequent vacationer.

I imagine it's just better for you to get your own plan if you're spending 3/4 of the year there.
An open source IDE for haxe, written in haxe
Offer HN: Free Front-End Development Work
I’ve been hard at work at both my day job and have recently ended a year-long run with a side client. I’ve decided to take a couple months off of “real” work, and want to work with some new blood, meet new folks, and work on some personal projects.
What I’m willing to do: I’ll happily help build splash and landing pages to get your startup off the ground. I’ll take a design, slice it, and return excellent, semantic, valid markup. I’ll complete the work in a reasonable amount of time. I’ll also build WordPress themes, and take care of general simple page buildout. Also happy to work on more “involved” projects as long as they’re interesting and give me a chance to learn. I’m an experienced developer with PHP, MySQL, WordPress, custom CMS, Javascript (raw JS, Backbone, Underscore, jQuery), and general front-end HTML + CSS.

What I’m not willing to do: Respond to 75 emails or phone calls a day asking where your gratis product is. I’m doing this to give back to the community and to remove stress, I don’t need any more!

What I expect in return: Nothing! A pleasant testimonial would be enough for me! Maybe a referral or two, but really, nothing is expected at all. I’d be VERY happy to help folks that are financially unable to help themselves right now get off the ground, the satisfaction is all I need.

My email is in my profile.
> Self-signed certificates don't work at all on the public Internet, but they're just fine for internal resources, as long as you can somehow pin them.

Yes self-signed certificates don't work for web servers/browsers but they work great for *aaS providers.

A lot of DBaaS providers sign their server SSL certificates with an internal self-signed CA (ex: AWS for MySQL RDS[1]). You just need to retrieve the CA certificate over a secure channel (ex: HTTPS) and save it along with the rest of the DB config for your app (user/pass/host/port) so it's pinned.

This is arguably better than using the browser-CA chain as the service provider itself would need to be complicit in compromising it (vs a malicious trusted root issuing a fraudulent trusted cert for the remote server).

[1]: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_M...
Why is OSX terminal so much better than Windows command prompts?
My experience is that the free tier is pretty useless any way. If you want to just test something, then one micro instance is fine. But if you actually want to run a basic web app? One micro instance does not work.

The weird thing is that all the other services have decent, useful free tiers that give you enough resources for your beta phase at least. Why is EC2 so low? Maybe make it 750 hours total for any set of instances?
There could be a tiny pendulum generator, like in watches.
I started learning F# a few weeks ago and feel the same way. The language is very nice, but so much of the .NET ecosystem is Windows-specific. I've run into a handful of libraries that would be useful, but I cannot use them on my Mac. To be fair, there are quite a few libraries that do work.

Furthermore, much of the documentation assumes a Windows environment. Getting a development environment set up around Mono has been possible but challenging.

F# and Mono are neat, but .NET has a long way to go before it becomes as cross-platform as Java.
Why no love for Pl/1 - probably the best designed language I have ever worked in
That's basically how my Swedish coworker aced it too, I faired much worse.
They should have made IPv6 mandatory.

I'm sure all the ISPs would then have suddenly found out that all those "technical" roadblocks to IPv6 migration weren't such a big problem after all.
The trailer of the game they are developing using Haxe.
The comments doesn't have to be relevant to Haxe.
If you go at their homepage you can see the trailer.

Since their goal is to sell the game i think my comment is relevant (maybe harsh by looking at the votes).
> It usually has something to do with design patterns (FactorySingltonParentFactory.helper.blahblahblah)

That sums it up for me, basically. I could add that this is a manifestation of the tendency to make things more complex than they need to be which is pervasive in the whole Java ecosystem. IMO, even Scala couldn't escape the curse and suffers from it (although it's a lot more pleasant to use than Java).
US Army plans 'Iron Man' armour for soldiers
I've never seen gravity demonstrated definitively either. Sure, they say that there's this force that makes stuff fall, but I've seen plenty of things go up instead of down when released.