skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. Access to prescription drugs which are not safe.

Why? Seriously, all drugs should be OTC because it simply shouldn't be the governments job to protect me from myself. The government should have no say about what I choose or choose not to put in my own body. I can go to the store and pick up enough alcohol to drink myself to death in a matter of hours and that's OK, but pills require special treatment and protection? Bullshit.

Drugs should be clearly labeled with warnings, side effects, all pertinent information a person needs to make a decision. The only exceptions would be things like antibiotics because there's a valid reason to restrict their use and it benefits everyone to do so.

Doctors can still tell me what drug I should take, and in what dose, but they shouldn't be at all involved in my obtaining those drugs. If I go buy a bunch of morphine and overdose and kill myself, well... that's called natural selection, and it's a good thing. If you're really concerned about making sure people are informed, mandate that the pharmacist brief people of the issues.

The very notion of prescription drugs is just absurd really, we've just gotten so accustomed to the nanny state that we don't notice just how absurd it is. Many family doctors are little more than state approved drug dealers these days. Patients know what they want, they know what to say to get them, and doctors are more than happy to write them, so long as their pockets are lined with regular and mostly unnecessary checkups to do nothing more than refill a prescription.

Yes, many drugs are very dangerous and an overdose could easily kill you, guess what, so will an overdose of gasoline. So will an overdose of water, or diet pills, or hundreds of other OTC stuff. Things shouldn't be illegal because they're dangerous if you misuse them, that's not freedom.

> 2. Access to specialized equipment.
> 3. Access to highly skilled people to do something you can't do safely.

Which are valid reasons to actually go see a doctor. I can't cat scan myself or operate on myself.
I have seen "symdeb for linux" as early as 1999; there was an entire symbdeb clone somewhere in simtel, written in NASM (or an early precursor, don't remember) and the author was bugging alt.asm.x86 for quite sometime, reporting his progress. Boldyshev might have an idea, if he is still at it.
I'd take him a lot more seriously if he'd stop using the phrase "are now ticking time bombs."
oh cool ty. I'd say it prob takes like 30 seconds. First time was cool but everytime was just too much.
Thanks, I was looking for this the other day!
It will not apply to your MBP. I got mine (a 17) two weeks ago, and the update said so when I tried to install/run it. Yours will not be effected, which I take to mean it was not throttled, and had the update installed at the factory.

I know, I feel your pain. Its been fast, but I thought, "Oh man it will be twice as fast!"

But no.

At least... I think. I do have updates pending. Maybe I should reboot and see if its twice as fast.
Now We’re Talking: AIM With Push Support Hits The App Store
Pageonce’s updated iPhone app combines all your online accounts into one app
I like the look, but at the same time it feels a little awkward. I don't like the grey lines everywhere, and the top of the page looks, well, awful.

On the upside, I like the look of the leftmost column a lot, and the three column layout works well. I like how the vertical space is highly emphasized.

Also, I never realized how awesome italicized Georgia font looks.

EDIT: Also, I think that a better color-palette would help.
Americas Iranian twitter "revolution".
I've never had trouble sleeping but in my start-up journey the alarm clock and working to improve it has become part of my life. Most people just want to hear a noise, like an mp3; maybe because that's what they are use to. FOr us we want you to hear a 5 seconds of information that tells you to go back to sleep(i.e. heavy snow) or helps u with day ahead (flight's canceled).

Do people want such a fancy alarm wake up sound; we hope so!
Jesus, man, I know it's your web site but can't you filter your stories a bit? How is the name of the iPhone at all interesting or important? Who cares? Who would discuss this here?
WLMarketing
A good seo service
For me it's an hour away from the computer. TV works if I'm watching something interesting enough so that I won't change the channel but not so much that it will stimulate me. Plus I have to remember to set the off-timer otherwise I'll feel really tired in the morning.
Pillow talk on the other hand works wonders on me but not on my gf's temper.. ;)
Agreed. It's interesting to compare the tenor of Musk's post with Eberhard's posts on his blog http://www.teslafounders.com
which IMHO are didactic and often petty.
Ask PG: How hard would it be to implement a blacklist of domains for HN?
So I can just skip certain sensationalist postings...
Well they'll probably get nominated now. Remember that a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize doesn't mean much.
For the record, I found the explanation sufficient to make me understand and interest me, but I'm not qualified to assess HashFold w.r.t. MapReduce. Keep writing and keep us (on HN) updated.
I wonder if the author could share something about his startup/web/app that is so ill-suited to MySQL and so much more efficient when implemented using a simple key-value store, plus algorithms in PHP?

I'm just wondering whether this observation has more to do with the nature of your "computational problem", or maybe just a difference in skill level with MySQL queries vs PHP algorithms.
Newer hackers should know that parsing text files is a good alternative to using a database for many web apps, esp. in early stages.
I've read that alcohol is generally not recommended because it disrupts your sleeping patterns. Certainly, large amounts of it do so for me.

A while ago I tried eliminating all caffeine (I typically drink a lot of diet Coke and coffee). The first few days were hell, and I pretty much sat staring blankly at my computer. Then I had a couple of really magical days where I felt quite alert even in the typically drowsy afternoons. And what was weird was that I seemed to dream more vividly (and remember my dreams). Then I fell off the wagon... at some point I need to try that experiment again, because I think I was onto something.
+1. Flagged.
An Experiment in BlackBerry Development: Lessons Learned Writing PodTrapper
indeed this design makes me appreciate the current one a lot more. I'm sure there is a term for this 'not liking the new design even if its better' something to do with resistance to change.
Still requires a lot more hardware and work than for music, but I must admit I've been surprised by the (obviously hand-scanned) books you can find sometimes on the net. Sometimes people are willing to go the extra mile...
already exists. Can someone reply with the exact location/listings?
FSF welcomes AdBard network for free software advertising
I display the twitter timeline in my IRC client. In an 80x25 xterm, I can see about 15 tweets. Do you really need a picture of your friend every time he or she talks?
I was super impressed in the street view - navigation updates where the circle changes on depth, and goes sideways on buildings. Really how long until they can upgrade the lasers to work good enough to scan a building front (barcode style).. 5 years? Until then this a great hack-ish way of doing it
Fun John Hodgman grilling of Obama on his nerd vs. jock cred
"Have you chosen a church yet at which to worship Crom? There are some who claim, sir, that you are the Kwisatz Hederach."
But, but but... One of my clients makes multi-million dollar printing presses. If people stopped buying them, then that client would lose money, and they wouldn't be able to keep paying me money, and then I would have to eat more ramen, and not just because I want to.

In all seriousness, those huge printing presses are not things that are purchased on a whim. They are generally many years in the making, and an economic slowdown is unlikely to to alter the purchasing decision. I actually do have a client that builds multi-million dollar printing presses. They sell 6 per year on average. They have not seen a slowdown in business.
Thanks a lot for the response. So far seems to be working quite well. I uploaded a youtube vid, a pic, and an MP3 and it seemed to work great.

I was expecting them to have an RSS feed input for their blogs on their end, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

You guys should license your services to them as I'd be happy to pay a few dollars each month to have your kind of easy input mechanisms over there automagically. (Yeah, I know it's free now, but it doesn't feel like it should be.)
"Have you chosen a church yet at which to worship Crom? There are some who claim, sir, that you are the Kwisatz Hederach."

OK, maybe a little fluffy for HN. But I laughed out loud, which I rarely do when looking at my computer. Enjoy, or flag, as you will.

EDIT:

----- Phhhipppp, dead! ------

HN has spoken.
Sure.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044
On the flip side if you know your SQL you'll be running circles around the competitors who are manually coding up all those joins, sorts and enforcing the data integrity.

It's kind of like lisp in that regard...
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/32404 Hacker News filter for Greasemonkey seems to be what you want.
I know it's not always possible with websites but developing on your own server or locally can reduce this problem. I'm not sure about the circumstances in the article but the customer isn't going to be able to make these demands if they haven't got th product yet.

I'm assuming this may need to be done in conjunction with holding the copyright to the end.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today welcomed the launch of AdBard a new advertising network for technology based websites based upon the promotion of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) friendly products and services.

"Free, Libre, and Open" is probably the greater assault on language, though their dislike of commas also irritates me.

Can somebody explain how this network works? What makes it different from any other ad network? Is it just that it advertises free software?
Terrible title. Worthless article.

His mom joins Facebook, so everyone must be doing it and Facebook is gunning for Google and SEO is irrelevant and the only way to find cool stuff now is to play mafia wars, blah, blah blah...

A lot of hunches and not a lot of evidence.
Another way to bridge the communication gap is to introduce the notion of "engineering debt" aka "technical debt". If you can quantify the day-to-day impact ("the interest payments"), amount of work it would take to fix it ("the principal") and the ongoing accumulation of crap ("the negative ammortization loan") you will be loved by both engineers and managers.
Coming from a Java & Rails background, with my SQL being non-existent as of 2 years ago and only fair to middling today, I'd have to disagree with that for anything but trivial one-day apps. (And with SQLite around as an option I'd be reluctant even then.)

You can use Rails for simple apps without learning SQL or worrying about your database's internal black magic. It is about as simple as @user = User.find(id) -- you don't have to worry about what poor animal had to have its entrails removed to get that record.

You also didn't have to:

1) implement a parser (which is going to break the first time you add an I-can't-believe-its-not-a-column)

2) write a migration framework (so that you can port your data files when you break your parser)

3) deal with simultaneous access (which, lets be honest, you're going to either ignore or whip up an implementation of locks which is exactly as buggy as every other programmer's implementation of locks which is why locks are right up there with crypto in the pantheon of Here Be Dragons, Use The Library)

4) build your own structure for separating your I/O from your application logic (which will asymptotically approach ActiveRecord, except with less features and more suck)

5) do a rewrite and/or significant rearchitecturing when you eventually are forced to move up to a database
You mean concave?

I think that people with finger weakness (or arthritis) have an easier time with shapes that don't require their fingers to get too close together, and allow them to apply force over a larger area.
It shouldn't be that hard to make a QEMU-based iPhone (or Kindle) emulator.

Obviously, Amazon and Apple would unleash their hordes of lawyers upon the poor person who ventured in such an ill advised adventure.

Sounds like a fun ill advised adventure to take part in.
Parsing?

I don't think that's the point of using basic serialization; it's not that you need to write-out and parse-in your data structures manually, it's because your language already provides the means to serialize all the datastructure you use, without having to bolt a relational model on to it.

For example, Lisp provides the PRINT-OBJECT method which you can specialize to "print" CLOS objects anyway you like; I use a tiny transactional object store to READ and WRITE the data structures into disk without worry (rucksack, which kicks butt btw) however, to display them, I specialized PRINT-OBJECT method for various views:

; print as html table
print-object ((object user-data) (stream http-stream))

; print as CSV
print-object ((object user-data) (stream csv-stream))

; display on the console, for interactive use
(defmethod print-object ((object user-data) stream)
(with-slots (id name email last-login) object
(format stream "~a ~a ~a ~a~%"
id name email last-login)))

The result is that I can do (print (make-instance 'user-data)) and it would print on one line, if I am interacting with it; or it would print as an html table, if I refresh my browser and the printing code is invoked by the page handler; or it would print as semi-colon separated CSV values if I am printin out to a file.

The parser and reader are already provided by the language, you just tweak them when you want to fit your aesthetics without loss of functionality.
A firmware update? Seriously? Can we not dilute HN with stuff like this and the inane gamer chatter at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668692 ?
Yeah a big drink will do that. If I'm having a nightcap then it's just a thimbleful rather than a tumbler; I like fine whiskey, and it's sufficiently expensive that I restrict myself to little sips rather than full measures.
$400 is cheap, a real EEG device will cost you about $800. This is excellent news.
You were probably under that impression because it used to be true. Java started supporting surrogate pairs -- i.e. it made the switch from UCS-2 to UTF-16 -- in J2SE 5.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16#Use_in_major_operating_s...
It's news to me because it's another different example of why they're rejecting an app. Is the news shocking? No, not at all. But these stories have actually been helpful to read because I'm getting a better and better sense of what to avoid. It's not news when it's the same reason over and over again, but reading about the different reasons apps are being rejected is giving me a better overall "feel" for the whole approval system and what to avoid.
The Great Wall of Facebook
Krugman's Intellectual Waterloo
How Not To Commit Suicide
Expensive relative to what? Let's say you do fixed-cost software development and you know that you can get 5% more done when you sleep well. If your goal is to earn $50/hour, then you'd pay for the device in about seven months. I use a CPAP, and I bet the co-pays alone for the sleep studies to determine that I needed it exceeded $400.

*Presuming you could train yourself to sleep sufficiently better to work 5% better (in whatever units better is)
Interesting idea. Actually, I don't want to know that on waking up unless it's really urgent. I'd rather read it, because I don't like noise in the morning.

What I would like is an alarm clock with a graduated volume control, as opposed to the silence followed by loud noise that usually prevails, and which is guaranteed to put me in a pissy mood. Mrs Browl has a blackberry, which sounds so obnoxious out of the box I had to insist on changing the alarm sound.
Im in a similar situation, testing a move from magento to satchmo.
Still in early testing but it does seem like a really solid cart which is much faster.

The thing that really helps satchmo is the django base and the huge number of reusable apps available.

In magento if you need forum or cms you need to add bridges to other packages all with their own auth and coding style. With satchmo you can plug in one of the django forum apps apps let it share user registration with the rest of the site.

The way that django has embraced reusable apps is the killer feature of the framework for me.
I want one that is easy to set when I'm damned tired, ready to go to bed, and realize that I have to set my alarm. Once in a hotel, I used a Sony alarm clock that had a big on/off switch and two dials, one for hour of day and another for minutes (in 5 min increments). It was really hard to screw up. Unfortunately, I can't find one anywhere.
Interesting that they use "type" as a field for the Format class:

class Format(models.Model):
type = models.CharField(choices=...

type() is a Python function, so it doesn't make sense to use "type" as a field name. I found out the hard way that this causes bugs.
Is it just that it advertises free software?

It is that it doesn't advertise proprietary software. Read the press release: the FSF feels that proprietary software is immoral and that advertising both gives aid and comfort to the enemy and taints the purity of the people who take money for it.

The FSF's quirky-but-harmless religious views aside, I'm all for more options in advertising. Candidly, though, I hope the sites hosting my OSS competitors don't switch to this network -- the ads I put on them perform pretty well.
If Woz hadn't been building hardware (hw requires manufacturing, and is capital-intensive), and he had cloud computing, he may not have needed Jobs nor Markkula.
Should I Present at DEMO or TC50?
I guess its a good thing they don't have a business model.
Schools have long since abandoned any pretense of attempting to teach good writing technique.

In reality, the idea of writing as art was a direct by-product of a traditional liberal arts education, which taught subjects such as rhetoric and classic language study. When those subjects fell away, so too did the once-strong emphasis on composition and writing technique.

Academic writing, as noted by the author of this piece, is among the worst offenders. So too is legal writing (my field), to the point where I felt compelled to do a little ditty of my own on what constitutes good legal writing (http://www.grellas.com/articles.html).

There is much more to life than being a good technician but, in writing, strong technical skill does matter and its neglect in today's academic environment is something to be deplored.
How many taxpayers would approve of giving taxpayer money to subsidize $100,000 toys for a bunch of rich guys? The least we should get is some technology in exchange. Or at least an affordable option for the general population that's footing Tesla's bills.

Technology is nice and all, but someone always has to foot the bill. If it's the taxpayers they should at least get something in return.
oh cool hadn't heard of that !
So you don't use an alarm clock that uses noise to wake you?

We have made the noise extremely short and it repeats til you stop it. This weekend I was gonna go on a hike that was 2 hours away with some friends. Forecast woke me saying hot with thunderstorms. In my slumber and fumble to stop noise I only grasped one point - thunderstorms and went back to sleep! 2 hours to hike in thunderstorms no thanks.
article focuses on differential activity of thalumus under anesthetic; this immediately brings to mind Francis Crick's searchlight hypothesis:

http://www.pnas.org/content/81/14/4586.abstract
Can Facebook/Myspace kill Flickr?
Vibhushan Wagmare, wonders whether a slight addition to photo album features of social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut could kill photo sharing websites like Flickr and Picasa.
Well I was waiting for the update so seeing it on HN front page was useful for me....
Agreed, could have been termed as an exercise to reduce noise. Thought it was interesting none the less.
I must say, the layout for the ads is pretty nice. They lifted The Deck's design more-or-less, and that's not at all a bad thing.
Just about everyone here has a Macbook Pro, so it is relevant.
Agree re: lack of contract between left/right columns. The designer seems to assume that people want to read tweets first, then--if it's interesting--see who wrote it. But this doesn't make sense to me.

I follow 100 or so people but they are not all equal, and in my mind I associate their tweets with a reputation based on my previous knowledge. Some of my follows for example only tweet banal day-to-day activities, while others are sources of interesting links and/or their interests have a greater amount of overlap with my own. Thus, I almost always scan the avatar/username first before deciding if their tweet is likely to be worth the read. Having to look in two separate places in order to carry out this process is very tiring on the eyes.
"I wuv you, iPhone"

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Party@Fujifilm though - their Velvia stock is regarded by many photographers as the Kodachrome killer.
How to Run a Startup Board Meeting
Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on the ambitions of Facebook.

"Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...
I asked a similar question about Krugman in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656995

The issue was a little bit different. I quoted him saying East Asia had no chance of recovery without currency controls, and being exposed as wrong within two years. I asked why he's recognized as a mainstream economist when he's so consistently wrong.

I got some great responses. The general consensus is that Krugman had made some valuable contributions to the study of international trade, but that he's pretty openly partisan and his popular economics and theories aren't so hot. That's a big paraphrase, there's lots of details, comments, and links in that thread if people are curious.
How about not... their network should have been spread far enough that it shouldn't have gone down.

Accidentally or Scheduled.
I really love the Django style architecture and want to use it but I thought I would see if some of the smart hackers here knew of a showstopper in the satchmo cart other than the name.
Or both. Did Nirva ever tell you the story of when he entered the ACM programming contest and wrote his entries in debug.com?
Probably a bit of both - I'm no SQL wizard, and I'm indexing 300 million+ Twitter messages and storing the @reply relationships (or more generally analyzing massive communications stores, eg an organization's email server).

I'll try to put together some reproducible code, but for example I had a relationship table that once it grew into millions of entries, took noticeable wall-time to simply access via a primary key. Switching to InnoDB after spotting a note in the memcache FAQ that it supports much faster primary key fetches fixed that, but before that I was looking into the black box with no good leads on fixing it.
I'm guessing you mean a per user list. It would be easy technically, but I don't want to do it because it would take the pressure off making the site good.
Did the IEEE ever reinstate its Iranian members and start accepting papers from them again?