skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, you're wrong. I hate to be rude about it, but I'm really getting tired of people, who don't know any better, acting like feature detection is always the way to go.

Feature detection simply doesn't work it many cases, and there's no alternative. Especially with new stuff like audio, sometimes function calls need to be called in different orders, have subtly different behaviors, etc., and user-agent sniffing is literally the only thing you can do.

When I programmed an HTML5 music player, calling .load() before .play() on one platform was necessary, and on another it would crash the Android browser IIRC. No choice but to use user-agent sniffing -- I probably had 20 different things that depended not just on the browser, but on the browser version.

I'd love if we could use just feature detection. Unfortunately, we have to program in the real world.
Indeed. There's nothing wrong with Facebook as an advertising channel, when used effectively and with expectations properly calibrated.

There's a lot wrong with blindly throwing money at a Facebook "fan page" and an ostensible following, expecting miracles to happen and any of those followers to care. (There's also a problem involved in paying for the fans, then reaching a fraction of them with each update -- but that's the nature of how Facebook works, and that shouldn't have been a mystery to most marketers for quite some time now.)

What we're experiencing right now isn't a "revolution" in advertising, as the article suggests. But then again, it's the marketers' fault for expecting there to have been one in the first place. They bought, traded, and sold the hype. Big brands made relatively blind, multi-million-dollar commitments to Facebook and other social channels before stopping to think about what, exactly, they were hoping to achieve.

What those brands are learning today: there's no such thing as a magic bullet. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's no such thing as a "revolution" in marketing. Nothing will allow you to grow a fanbase, increase engagement, and sell more products without an ounce of forethought and hard work.

Facebook is a channel, like any other. It can be a very effective channel. But like any channel, it needs to be thought through, analyzed, and used properly. The blind honeymoon is over. The platform's usefulness remains.
So you're asking people to beseech their friends to adopt regular usage of some alternative to Facebook (email, Jabber, Google, etc.) solely so that they can stay in contact. That's equivalent to asking someone "could you please go to my blog regularly to see if I have anything to say to you?".
More people were listening to a radio ventriloquist. lol
Have you controlled for all factors? This seems like circumstantial evidence at best; just because facebook customers are new doesn't imply that the improvement is due to facebook.
It is an interesting question. I'd like to see what HNers think about it. Personally, I would think that offering dev services or tutoring (sencha, red hat, SPServices, etc.), restrictive licensing (Green sock, sencha again, neo4j) would be more likely to self-sustain than payment offerings (donations, crowdsourcing, etc). I guess a good company to watch is famo.us since they are currently making the rounds after being funded.
They probably Googled for lawyer and picked the one with the most 5* reviews that he had paid for.

Or they met some drunk guy in a bar who said he was a lawyer is the other option.

Bet the Judge will go into his chambers after this one and have a very good laugh.
So, the point they're making on 3 is that hospitals and docs are incentivized to bill for as much as they can (needed or not), with the expectation that some of it won't make it through the bean counters back-and-forth with the insurance company. Conversely, docs who prescribe only the necessary care can expect to still have claims denied because of the overall abuse of the system. That's what they mean.

If anyone is interested, go read the O'Reily book "Hacking Healthcare" to learn about how brainfucked the system is.
Ask HN: How secure is my wireless iMac keyboard?
I work in a shared office space with hundreds of people in close proximity. How likely is it that others can read my key input?
I don't think single payer, per se, would do anything to help with this. The parts of the US healthcare system that are single payer, Medicaid and Medicare, suffer from this just as much as the rest of our system.

Having a government run healthcare system like Great Britain's would solve the problem, but it could do that with or without single payer. In fact, Singapore has had quite a bit of success combining a semi-government run hospital system with private payment for healthcare.
Time is a self-referencing function. That shouldn't be breaking it.
Well, if I understand his post correctly, his process was "putting Firefox installer in a file share and be done." Well, this process still works.

> You are missing his point that it's not easy to find [...]

That, on the other hand, is a valid point.
The systems already set up to be resistant to change. There are a lot of better systems we can all think of, but there's no way to make them happen anymore. You need to consent of the people you're fighting against to put them out of power.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you worried De Blasio will negatively impact the startup sector?
.NET's collections all fail fast for seemingly this reason - they can't really provide anything else without huge performance consequences (even the fail fast behavior comes with a cost, due to the check...)
"Give us $499 to substantiate these inflammatory headlines," says new report
I don't think many people believe that having every individual pursue what's in their best interest in a purely financial sense will result in the best possible outcome in every other sense. I always understood it as pursuing the best economic/financial result for you will result in the best economic/financial result overall, and even then, I think most reasonable individuals don't see that as an absolute law without exceptions.
Seems like the js is going off before the DOM has finished loading. If I add an onload function that should fix it.
Jekyll Data Files
Speaking of hard to find offline installers... google voice/hangouts plugin, holy moly
Facebook redesigns Messenger again
> Uber = On-Demand... anything?

Yes, Uber has said in their interviews (or maybe it was pg talking about them?) that once they have the infrastructure set up to deliver a car anywhere they can branch out into on demand delivery of anything.
> If you're making changes to a function signature in JS without assessing the impact for code elsewhere, then you're doing a bad job - and that's all there is to it.

Given that other people are working on the same code base and may have added calls to this function, this is not even possible.

Also, dynamic languages all require you to fix calls to changed functions. But at least, when you test that code, it won't accidentally seem to work when it is broken.

Also, humans cannot do a perfect job every time. We will all make mistakes, and our tools shouldn't give us hell over those mistakes for miniscule to no benefit at all as in this case.

Out of thousands of changes to function signatures, do you think none would ever forget to fix a caller?

> So JS has a (potentially) higher maintenance cost

This doesn't sound potential at all. It sounds like you either lose a huge amount of reliability, or add a huge burden to development.

> it's just a trade-off

What do you gain here? You save an asterisk in the syntax when you want to overload?

> This is just a case for good documentation and release notes. Don't merge in changes that you don't understand.

In a collaborative environment, we merge work with each other every single day. Do you have documentation and release notes for every commit you publish? Do you go and check the commit's release notes every time you pull?
I totally hate active noise cancelation... I don't know whether it only gets out like 99% of the noise while leaving like... the outlines of a clipped out picture on photoshop or what, but it's hell on my ears. It just causes pain without any indication of whats causing it and that's incredibly unnerving.
This article states that YC is now valued at $13.7 billion. Actually, the cited source credits pg recently saying that is the current valuation of all of the YC startups, not of YC itself.

[edited for clarity]
There are lots of hosting providers besides digitalocean - linode is a big one, so is joyent.

I've been trying out digitalocean, but they make me nervous about reliability. Twice in 2 weeks I've gotten nonsensical abuse notifications (spamming, copyright infringement). One of the complaints was only 10 minutes after I spun up a droplet - my deploy script hadn't even finished. Makes me very nervous that DO will shut off all my droplets due to complaints about what the guy who previously owned the IP address did.

MPAA-based failure is far harder to plan for than disk failure.
This sub-thread follows the same pattern as one I participated in over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4272117
Ask HN: Feedback on my kickstarer project to make a noise machine?
Hello. I made an open source noise machine in Java, starting in 2009. And now I'm considering turning it into a hardware device. Would anyone like to view the Kickstarter preview and offer any feedback or advice before I go through with this? http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/688820532/710290662?token=5b4a2050
What It Means To Be a Working Musician These Days
Why on earth would I "never log in as root"? And I'm pretty sure it's not a "noob mistake" if I've been using Unix since 1994.
This report is so wrong it's painful. "Likes" are great, but that's not the most valuable ad type on Facebook. In fact, in our most successful ads, I intentionally exclude people who have liked us (why would I pay to reach people who already know who we are?). Facebook ads have been the single biggest win for us of the past year, as we are seeing 80% of our Facebook customers are new to us.

A useful framework I have used to explain to people the value of Facebook advertising is to imagine the internet as a hardware store. Someone goes to the hardware store because they need a hammer. Google would be the aisles with signs and directions to get there. Once they are there, and waiting to check out, they see things like gum, or energy drinks, or keys, etc., that they needed to be reminded that they wanted. Facebook is more like the checkout stand, as it can remind or introduce impulse purchases that the intent leveraged by Google intentionally excludes.

Facebook is also much more similar to hyper-targeted television ads.
San Francisco's bay barge mystery: Floating data center or Google Glass store?
First Bitcoin ATM:  Canada
If "NSA stuff" is a genuine concern, note that one of MongoDB's investors is In-Q-Tel - the tech investment arm of the CIA.
I wish the US legal system would make changes to discourage these types of frivolous lawsuits

Me too. But it probably won't for three reasons:

1. The civil litigation business is immensely profitable for attorneys

2. The number of people / organizations sued is small enough that they don't have a loud enough voice

3. Anytime someone advocates for reform (ex: loser pays) they will trot out the one case that so clearly calls out for justice and state how the reform would keep justice from occurring in this case
This might be the key insight. Maybe Phonebloks are misnamed, and will evolve into an ecosystem of wireless devices that might or might not reside in the same package.
Seems like it could be a good idea WRT to cooling costs. Pumping cool, free seawater though exchangers would only require electricity for fans and pumps.
The flip of this would be Yelp retroactively charging users for looking at reviews. It's ridiculous.
Not as described, but it might work if it was travel focused.
@KillSwitch, "active" ad-avoiders use ad-blockers and "passive" ad-avoiders ignore them, leading to the same output, i.e. no revenue (CPC, 2/3 of all online advertising compensation methods, and growing). Now let's take the case of Gmail, Gmelius gives the possibility to its users to hide ads but does NOT block the parsing of messages by Google and so the gathering of information used by Adsense to propose "customized ads" on other domains.
Now, you don't seem to take into account the fact that this overflow of ads we have to face (more and more) on a daily basis actually encourages people to become active or passive ad-avoiders, decreasing then the income generated by ads. I clearly think this kind of business model is not viable over the long-run...
This deserved more attention
OMG, I think we should all get paid for posting content to HN!
There's an "invisible hand" but it isn't omniscient, and doesn't work when you don't have a market.

We need to figure out a way to get out of the binary thought process where you are either a market guy or a communist.
and no brain.
Go for Pythonistas
Invisible hand of the free market. Healthcare is not even close to a free market.
The invisible hand operates under the assumption that there are no information assymetries.

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

This is obviously not the case in patient-doctor relationships.

The standard Austrian response for those information assimetries are that an independent third party will arise that will offer an unbiased opinion (usual example is Underwriters Laboratory or UL).

A more government-based approach would say that more regulatory oversight is needed.

However, in practice, I haven't seen this happening, I'm not an economist but I see there are agency problems, regulatory capture problems, etc..

Stiglitz said:

"the reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there. Whenever there are "externalities"—where the actions of an individual have impacts on others for which they do not pay, or for which they are not compensated—markets will not work well...

recent research has shown that these externalities are pervasive, whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect risk markets—that is always"
The invisible hand is there all right. It's just not creating value for customers but creating value for the medical establishment due to perverse incentives.
You have to break the Egg & The truth about Mobile [video]
Is this really surprising? Who doesn't know this?

My wife was in labor for a bit less than a day. Baby was fine, everything good, but apparently we were taking too long. Doctor demanded we do a c-section. When we said we wanted to wait, she walked out, slamming the door. We got scared, they made 60K for about 20 minutes of work. Guess what the c-section rate at that hospital is? 50%. Not kidding. I'm in the wrong business.

http://www.icanofnj.com/hospitalcsectionrates.htm
Day-Makers Wanted
GNOME 3.10, as another poster said, is absolutely fantastic with high-DPI screens, and looks fantastic. The scaling is finally down.

Only works with GTK at the moment, but if you're using GNOME shell, you probably are only mainly using GTK apps anyway.
TAURUS Tuesday October 29, 2013
Let me give you an alternate use case beyond the upgrade-ability. I see the advantages of this more-so in day to day use. I use my phone in several different environments and to that end right now I have multiple phones because of the limitations.

Typical days I want a full featured general use device... well rounded. I carry my Nexus 4.

My job requires me to spend several days a month "on-site" where I will be on my feet moving for 12-14 hours a day. I need battery life as I can't stop at a charger. I carry my Nexus One (yes, it still goes a 12 hour day under solid use)

Lastly, when I travel I'd like to have a phone with a better camera so I wouldn't have to carry one. The Nexus 4 is good but if there was a better option I'd take it.

I would like to see a device like this give me the option to reconfigure on the fly. When I'm on-site I'll pop in 2 battery modules... when I travel I'll put in the better (yet maybe bulkier) camera... day to day I'll use a more general set of components. Through it all I don't have to sync data or worry about what is on each device. Additionally this would easily allow swappable batteries (and if they permit more than one... hot swappable)

I don't think they have the design nailed yet... but I also don't think this is something that should be discounted at all. Those who research this early despite the nay-sayers are the ones who just might be holding the next great thing in the end.
> So where's all the functional Ruby code?

All over. Various functional approaches are basic core Ruby programming techniques.

Its not a great FP language because it lacks functional purity (like most Lisps, and, more to the immediate point, like JS) and the main Ruby implementations lack TCO (as, again, do many Lisps and, again, JS.)

But there's certainly a lot Ruby code using functional style.
The two things I read in this article, minus the loaded language and assumptions:

1. "Medical offices which have equipment for certain services provide those services more often than offices that don't."

They've got the equipment in-house, so of course they're going to use it. The article doesn't take into account the possibility that patients are choosing to go to these offices _because_ they have the in-house facilities for the treatment they want. Going from "doctors who have X machine order X procedure more often" to "doctors treat patients like an ATM machine" is a huge leap.

2. "Some surgeons in Florida performed unnecessary surgeries for money."

There are bad apples in every bunch, this is why you get a second opinion before going under the knife. Yes surgeons get paid per procedure, yes it's a flawed system, but that doesn't mean they're all wheeling and dealing to get as many people to submit to surgery as possible.

It's worth noting also that whenever the article says "charged patients" what they mean is "billed patients' insurance company." Chances are the people who don't have insurance were the ones smart enough to see another doctor before paying.

This kind of fearmongering crap undermines confidence in medical professionals and medical science. The vast majority of medical professionals are extremely hard working, knowledgeable people who's primary goal is to help everyone that walks through their door. Without trust from their patients, they can't do this effectively.
This seems like something that would come out at the beginning of April
I see a day when devices won't need GPS when outside; access points/cell towers can have precision/differential GPS receivers and your device's location is calculated using RF signal strength/triangulation data (802.11ac already uses beam steering for better reception/throughput). I'm aware this is already done using CellID and signal strength data; I'm simply saying it'll become more accurate and widespread.

If you can offload the energy hungry tasks, these devices become much more realistic faster.
Sensenbrenner to introduce USA FREEDOM Act today
Cool greasemonkey script, bro
Node.app - Put your Node.js Code where your iOS 7 app is
So is this to avoid filing building permits for competitors to snoop on? Earthquake-proof?
Disco Juan
Official Launch for the hit single “Disco Juan” is set for Wed Sept 18th, 2013

What happens when you mix the Macarena with Gangnam Style and a lot of Moco de Gorilla? Chill the Giant’s hot music video “Disco Juan!”

The song Disco Juan is a story about a young boy who dreams of becoming the greatest disco dancer in the world.

The beat is catchy, the lyrics will haunt you for days and the dance will bring you back to go-go boots, neon colors, and disco balls.

Disco Juan is a fictional story created as a joke Juan Leyva, who plays Disco Juan in the music video. Leyva bragged to music producer, song writer and lead vocalist, Reuben Montoya about his busy weekends where he frequented the clubs in the downtown Gaslamp District in San Diego.

Montoya was amused by Leyva’s lifestyle and came up with the nickname Disco Juan for Leyva.

Disco Juan has all the elements necessary to go viral with their new music video titled “Disco Juan.” The young children in the classroom scene dance their hearts out. What’s unique about this project was 90 percent of the cast and crew were all volunteers who just wanted to have fun and create an entertaining piece for viewers to enjoy.

The Southern California band, Chill the Giant, is sure to sweep the nation with its race to pass up Psy.

You can get your download a copy of Chill the Giant’s “Disco Juan” on iTunes or CDbaby.

Don’t forget to check out the video!!

http://bit.ly/DiscoJuanVideo
IOS 7 is shining some light into Dark Google
Next-gen Cortex-R chips to run full Linux and Android
I have a more positive data point: I've purchased about 175 paper books on Amazon, and 23 are part of the Matchbook program. That feels decent to me.

Going through my order history also made me realize how successful the Kindle is in extracting money from me. I had 175 book purchases between February 2000 and October 2010 (when I got my first Kindle), and 375 purchases between October 2010 and October 2013. I went from buying 17 books per year to buying 125 books per year.
Facebook retargeting and general CPM advertising works well, but don't bother trying to build your fan page likes/numbers.

FWIW, we spend about $40/month getting to 1k+ likes, and only 35-50 people, on average, see our non-boosted posts.

To be frank, it really pisses me off.
> I have had terrible luck with facebook advertising, but we get great results when people share their bike rides on our site using facebook.

Well I think that's an interesting point—this isn't what I typically think of with facebook advertising (i.e. "like" shopping). Figuring out a way for users to demonstrate to other users the value of your product is pretty much ideal, though—it scales very well and I would imagine it's much, much more effective than traditional, sidebar advertisements. Why don't they emphasize this more? I would assume likes are more valuable to them directly as opposed to advertisers....
Did pg really invent backend web development?
Years ago here in Austria I bought an iPhone 3G that from the beginning frequently didn't have reception where all other phones did, including a situation where I needed to call an ambulance because someone was in urgent need of medical attention and couldn't, and they never replaced it and gave me the run-around every time I contacted them. Finally they claimed that the liquid detectors being slightly off-white, rather than pink or red, meant it had been dropped in water when it was obviously just from humidity, a practice for which they were later sued.[1] They were also sued on the reception issue which affected thousands of phones, but again not in my jurisdiction. They have extremely poor service if they think they can get away with it, they are only kept honest in countries that have strong consumer protection laws. It's simply disgraceful to sell a multi-hundred dollar piece of equipment that can't perform its core function and then not replace it.

[1] http://www.imore.com/apple-pay-53m-iphone-warranty-settlemen...