skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you respond to http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-foo... - it seems to me that poor people don't eat fast food because it is cheaper, it is because it is easier, tastes better, and makes them feel good if only temporarily. This would still be true if they had to do without corn subsidies - they'd just sub in sugar and perhaps make the burgers smaller or something.
This type of response is quite common in many open-source communities.

The trick to finding it is to consider carefully the motivations of why someone wants to participate in open-source. If you have a problem, you wrote a tool to solve it, and you want to share that tool with the rest of the world, you won't be threatened when someone else has a competing tool to share with the rest of the world. Just explain why your tool is useful, and under what circumstances, and let people make up their own minds. It's no skin off your back if they choose not to use it.

If you participate in open-source to gain social approval and hacker cred, however, then it's very threatening when other people choose to use a competing tool. If your users disappear, so will your social approval, and you'll be left feeling alone and unwanted. And so people who are in open-source for this motivation frequently put-down technologies that that compete with their own favorite tools. Sometimes it's not even the tools' authors that do this; it is people who have adopted the tool and feel like their choice of preferred tool will be threatened if others adopt different tools. Hence, fanboyism.

I have found, when evaluating technologies, that I rarely go wrong trying to select for the first category of community over the second. The problem is that there's a bit of an adverse selection effect. If you ask "What's the best framework for X?", then all the people in the second category will rush to defend their favorite tool, while the people in the first category may present cogent arguments for their tool of choice but won't seem all that impassioned. Human beings are hard-wired to recognize passion, but we typically cannot recognize experience until we have had that experience itself. And so your natural tendency will be to pick frameworks in the second category unless you specifically try to look past the arguments and look at the motivations and background of the people making the arguments.
AMD Announces First "Supercomputing" Server Graphics Card with 12GB Memory
That's because the supply of doctors is kept artificially low and the cost of training is not borne out by society. There are other countries in the world, you know. You can just look at what they do.
The redneck parts - totally ;)
Ask HN: how much of the success of an Open Source software is strategy?
Do you think having a <i>good community manager</i> and trying <i>growth hacks</i> (Ubuntu sending free DVDs in its early days) is something you should always do even if you think your Open Source software is good enough to generate a healthy word-of-mouth wave?
Because the "value" that Google generates from (toa very good first approximation) everything they do – comes from advertisers not "users". While the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the _product_" is old and overused – any pragmatic view of Google's motivations needs to take into account that in any engineering/marketing/management argument about a user-impacting decision, "but this is what the advertisers want" is going to jold _way_ more sway than "but maybe as many as a few hundred thousand privacy conscious users might (gasp!) SIGN AN ONLINE PETITION!"

(And cynical-me suspects there's been a meeting going something like "Hey Sergey? Notice how there's been all these revelations about us snitching everyone's private email to the NSA?" "Yeah Larry, what of it? We seem to be getting away with it - it hasn't even registered a blip in our revenue/profit charts." "Yeah, _that's_ my point. The stupid fucking general public DON'T GIVE A DAMN. You know all those requests our advertisers keep making about tracking real identities across the entire internet? We could _so_ do that!" "Yeah, but what about our 'Don't be evil' motto?" "Sergey, do I have to threaten you with leaking your redtube browsing history _again?_")
Just stop being fat. Control what you eat.
If other states in the US start implementing these so-called privacy laws, society is in big trouble. I think sometimes the people in charge forget law enforcement at the end of the day are humans and humans make mistakes whether intentionally or unintentionally. We need people keeping law enforcement honest, I don't see the harm in recording police if it's for purposes of evidence in a court case.

It's a case of, "if you're in public and funded by tax payers, are you entitled to that much privacy?" everyone is entitled to a certain level of privacy, but if law enforcement who are potentially misaligned in the morals department are making unjust arrests, there needs to be accountability here to keep the system as honest as possible.

Every time I see any kind of police activity taking place in public, I pull out my phone. It's not illegal here in Australia (yet) and who knows if this TPP agreement has some clause stipulating citizens of participating countries cannot record law enforcement. I always will regardless of the law.

It's sad that it's a class 1 felony in some states which means you could spend 4-15 years in prison. In Australia a life sentence is 25 years, heck a 15 year prison sentence is what I'd expect a rapist to get not someone filming the police...
Is it just me or does the logo use the same font face that Facebook does?
For over ten years.

They're also the world's largest computer manufacturer (for internal data center hardware).

Software people tend to think chips and hardware design are magic skills known by only three revered people in the world. It's just another track of school you could have chosen. ("Google writes its own software now?")
I've been meaning to get something up there.
> The reason your ambulance ride was 4k is because

Also, ambulances are expensive vehicles crammed full of expensive technology and two expensive well trained staff.

When you're lying on the asphalt in a pool of blood you don't want any old flatbed with a couple of burly blokes turning up. Sure, they can heave you onto the back of the van and get you to ER quickly, but will you still be alive when you get there?

(Having said that, $4k seems expensive. Average UK ambulance cost is a couple of hundred pounds)
Dropping large Mysql DB and regaining the space
That's CPython specific though, PyPy doesn't need it.
> anything is better than SVN, right?

Hey, Subversion was the new hotness for quite a while. It fixed most of the hideous flaws of CVS and made version control actually usable.

Any DVCS has a number of inherent advantages over SVN, but it does a good job for what it is.
This says otherwise http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

Who do I believe, a blogger from The Atlantic who seems to be misinterpreting the data he cites, or a peer-reviewed scientific publication?
Reports of Google's decline are greatly exaggerated :) G+ is annoying, but these days no large company can make all their users happy, with all their products/features/changes, all the time. The so-called erosion of 'Don't be evil' has just become more apparent now, but as long as I have known google, they always made money from ads - and ads are fundamentally evil (IMHO).
Search, maps, email etc are quite nice and I use those everyday. Fast, reliable, solid products - vastly improved since I first used them (many years ago). Where is the decline?
Learning About Cool Open Source Projects
I use SourceTree for git, but I find TortoiseHg is better for mercurial; it's just far more feature complete, with support for almost all mercurial commands and (bundled) extensions.

I'm still somewhat surprised by how poor git gui's are, considering it's the more popular VCS - though SourceTree is certainly one of the better ones.
In the middle term, it will probably come down to stone tools: blocking via /etc/hosts, filtering headers through proxies, etc. I'll re-learn it.

As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Unfortunately it's even easier than that to destroy a domain's "Google reputation." Go on fiverr and buy a ton of spammy links, direct them at your competitor. It runs about $5 per 100,000 links last time I checked. (I've never done it, but it's a common blackhat technique).
Setting up Mail Server using Postfix + SFP + OpenDkim (Ubuntu)
Depends on what you're going to do... General stuff like 'Writing secure code' and 'introduction to algorithms' are useful to read.
> Just stop being fat.

Unfortunately, as we learn more about obesity, it's becoming increasingly clear that once you are fat, it is very difficult to ever lose the weight and keep it off for a significant amount of time[1].

I don't know what the solution is, but being overweight, especially "on the way up" is something that should be taken much more seriously.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/health/biological-changes-...
Cite them then.
Dragon Day - "Made in China" Microchip Kill-Switch
> But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people.

Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people? How about the inbox spam in Gmail, or the large ads they have been testing on Google itself apparently (http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-huge-image-ad-175...) while they penalize large ads above the fold on indexed pages (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/page-la...), or, like someone else pointed out here, killing Reader?

Frankly, I may not be their target demographic either, but for most of the recent changes they got flak over I simply have to shake my head and wonder what they were thinking and how they could actually claim to make things better for anyone but themselves. Perhaps I'm too stupid to understand ...
> That's the cost of being a dynamic language.

No, this is a cost of this particular style of dynamic object model. Not all dynamic languages are dynamic in this way.

> Those objects are not enhance-able any more.

I don't see any reason why Python can't do what Clojure's defrecord does: Provide fixed fields for pre-declared slots, while still using a dictionary for extensions. It has been a while since I've used python, but I'm almost certain that there is some __special__ magic that can make this work with relative ease.

It's also worth pointing out that most modern JITs, like V8 or PyPy, can automatically detect "hidden classes" like this and optimize these objects to pack such static fields.
For me, it has nothing to do with the number of lines, but the amount of actual computation I am doing. If all I need to do is wire up the inputs and outputs of X commands, then shell script is the best tool for the job.

If I actually need to do something with an input or output before sending it to the next command, I'll switch to Python.

For CLI tasks in Python, http://docopt.org/ and http://shell-command.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ are invaluable tools. Yes, I know about Envoy, but shell_command is much nicer to use in my opinion. Envoy doesn't automatically escape arguments, which is annoying for all the reasons that SQL injections are annoying.
My personal bizarre pet idea for bringing down healthcare costs: mandatory minimum copays.

The problem, by one analysis, is that patients have no incentive to weigh costs against benefits. That's a tough task in any case, and pushing it off to the insurers makes it harder, as the insurer has less information than either the patient or their doctor about their individual case. The result is that neither patients nor (often) doctors know what the services cost.

In fact price information has been so effectively removed from the system that in some cases nobody knows what the service really costs. tptacek posted a great example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4465845

The purpose of the mandatory minimum copay is to force price information back into the system. When patients have to pay some part of the price of every service, they will therefore have to know what those prices are.

All that said, there are obviously some questions and problems to be dealt with. For starters, what's the formula for how much people have to pay? On the large end, I would suggest something like (price in dollars) ^ 0.7. This means for a $10k service, the copay would be about $600; for a $100k service, about $3000; and for a $1M service, around $16k. Those numbers feel reasonable to me: big enough to make most people think twice about choosing a six-figure intervention, but not an absolute barrier if there's a good medical reason.

On the small end, though, that formula produces numbers that are arguably too large. A $200 service (if there is such a thing? maybe in lower-income rural areas) would have a $40 copay by that formula. This risks discouraging people from getting preventative and urgent care that they need. To correct for this we could simply subtract some fixed number from the result of the above formula. I'm not sure what the right number is, but somewhere in the $40 - $80 range, I would guess. (This provision could also be subject to means testing.)

Probably when I say "mandatory" what I really mean is "the government provides incentives to make plans with this property significantly cheaper than those without". I don't care that rich people will circumvent the rule if they want; I just care that most people are on plans with this property, so that, as I say, price information is forced to flow again.
The Beaglebone / BB Black does exactly this - you can have it connected with a single USB cable.
Quite cool!

My attempt, 31 lines (although some of them are quite long :) http://jsfiddle.net/8Rqcy/5/

Has score counting, restarts, walls, you can't go back on yourself, and speed increases.
Why even have a real name account if you don't trust Google? Just always use it under your pseudonym.
I have a different problem with it, which is that it invariably makes me feel pretty incompetent, because no matter what subject comes up, people with 10 times my level of skill in fields that I consider myself relatively competent in start discussing things and I suddenly feel quite completely devoid of any skill at all. Even on a simple thing like posts about typing I find people lamenting how they are only able to output 60wpm while I measure myself at 48wpm. Part of my problem is that I tend to be a generalist and know a lot of things quite well rather than single specialist topic at extreme depth.

How this all plays out in my head is a complex thing, but overall I feel like it is bad for my self-image. It is just very hard to keep the perspective in mind that I might be in the top 20% of people in a field but the top 1% will be the ones who start commenting on a specialised topic on HN. Add to that the different personality types hiding behind people's pseudonymous identities and you are getting a super distorted picture of the world.
This is the difference between consuming content and letting the content consume you. HN can't harm you unless you allow it to. Don't blame the content.

Sometimes there's no excuse for self-discipline, critical thinking, a healthy perspective on life, and self-esteem. I don't say this flippantly. All of the above are lifelong challenges for most people (myself included).
No, no. It was 12345. An extra bit of security.
"Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work."

For what reasons is Microsoft not a great place to work? I may be biased because my brother works there full-time and a friend is interning there but both of them very much enjoy it.
I know a few obese people and they require almost an ongoing medical attention. Starting from diabetes and on to various complications with deteriorating prospects. They can't participate in many activities feeling alienated or wear trendy clothes their like - which adds to emotional stress and psychological issues on top of it.

But really, it's quite easy to stay fit, if you want it. First thing you do is eat less (can't emphasize it enough). Second, eat home food and cut all the junk. And lastly, stay active: bike, swim, hike, whatever. No need for fancy diet programs.
This article would have been much more persuasive had it specified the actual decisions made by Google that illustrate exactly how that company has "lost its way" (i.e., chosen profit over solving important problems).
I think that HN is hostile (and that this is PG's fault) but that doesn't make it useless.
You make a fair point, but on the other hand many pdfs have massive margins, or multiple columns, or can have text reflowed in a reasonable way. You can't use pdf readers for all circumstances, but with good software you could handle 80-90% of cases.
30 lines of JS + 14 lines of HTML + 45 lines of CSS + 5,000,791 lines of browser rendering engine (WebKit in this case).
The source code is published.
True! Many people nowadays are suffering obesity and sometimes are unaware that their health are at risk.
There are more farms now than there were 30 years ago. Check out 826 here:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...

829 is also illuminating. Of 96,074 corporate farms, 85,837 are owned by families (several thousand of those family owned corporations having more than 10 shareholders). Of the corporate farms that are not family held, 9,330 have less than 10 shareholders.

Acreage is also revealing (828), family farms have ~ 5 times as much land as corporate farms. It's also sort of easy to make the case that less than 5% of the corporate acreage is likely to be the pernicious sort of farm you are talking about.

It makes for a nice narrative, but it isn't all that true.
>> 3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page

..where he published a link to the same article.

I don't understand why you point this out, the user says he's using Google products, so what ?
Yeah, I get the impression that in most meaningful ways hg is a better choice on a technical level. But git does have a few real advantaves. Git is faster, though the difference is small enough that I can't imagine this being a serious issue. Git repo's are smaller, particular in the face of (directory) renames.

But the real advantage of git is its popularity. You present that as something worrying; but at the end of the day, hg and git aren't all that different, and popularity means pervasiveness means collaboration is easier - and that's worth something.
"How much storage does one Internet citizen occupy, anyway?"

That number chases toward infinite. Its growth may slow down, as we reach the limit of how many 'actions' a person can reasonable take that generates content, but it'll never stop growing just on the basis of the unlimited desire for higher quality experiences (mixed with a general moore's law ride that makes it all financially reasonable).

And just when you think storage demand is going to slow down, we'll jump to some kind of virtual reality life recording, that makes it possible for others to walk around in your daily life as though they're actually there, and storage demand will explode another magnitude.

You can remove Facebook and Yahoo from that list though. Their operations are funded by their core businesses and they don't compete in the AWS-style cloud segment. That is, it doesn't make sense to discuss Facebook in regard to whether it can win or make money, compared to AWS or Azure.

So is there room for Google, AWS, Azure, Rackspace, IBM etc? Yep. It's a future hundred billion dollar plus business (AWS will probably be at $10b+ in a few years). No reason there can't be three or four big players in such a large market.
Izmir jigolo sitesi
Plus, most of what I see on HN these days is really bad business, political, social, and legal analysis, not any of the things discussed in this article. (This article is a great example of the same.)
Agreed the main issue is with the system being broken, but the professionals are a part and driving factor of that issue and also deserve at least some of the blame.

Many careers cost a great deal of time and money to get into (the cost of schooling is a huge issue, but a totally different discussion). Most of those careers make no where near the same sorts of salaries as MDs expect to make. The sciences in general have all of the same issues you mention. Doctors make obscene salaries in our current society (though not necessarily historically). It is disingenuous to say that doctors "deserve" these sorts of salaries. Doctors in other countries do not make the same sort of inflated salaries as US Docs. [0]

Again, while I agree that the system in general is broken, it is not sickening to point out that doctor's make obscene salaries.

[0] http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-the-medical-cartel-why-are-md-...
> Larry Page worshiped Steve Jobs, who gave him a bunch of bad advice centered around maximizing profit.

What is so bad about maximizing profit? If you make a profit, it means people are willingly giving you money for the service you provide. You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. People can complain about Google until the end of time, but as long as the cash keeps flowing then Google is getting the signal that everything they are doing is in the interest of the consumer.

Now, I don't know if the "decline" of Google, as asserted by the OP, has actually affected their bottom line, because I'm not on the board at Google. I just think it's silly to throw around the word "profit" as if it's some sort of evil goal. Profit is the foundation of a monetary-based economy, and therefore modern human civilization. There is no signal available that is as efficient as profit as a proxy for the wants of the consumer, and how to most efficiently allocate scarce resources.
e.g. Amazon
Maybe he never left Microsoft?

Maybe his true mission is to keep tabs on Google and given the opportunity, create long-term strategic blunders?
This is amazing, and it's so frustrating that you have not got all your funding.

I am Male, 38, a geek and overweight. In the last few years started having heart issues and had many 7 day event monitors. However, never managed to capture what my issue was. Each 7 day event monitor cost my medical insurance £3k! (In the UK). I spent hours on google researching and understanding arrhythmia. Most are benign, but not all.

What most people don't know is that an ECG machine or event monitor is all well and good, but for a lot of problems it needs to be attached when you have the incident. I have only had 5 incidents in 3 years. They could be harmless or they cloud kill me, but until you find out what they are its impossible to tell.

If this was on the market I would buy it, anyone that has had heart issues would know how important something like this is to get built and delivered into the market. The problem is, most people won't know they need this until later in life if at all.

Don't give up, please get this to market devices like this will save lives or at the very least reduce anxiety of people going through their first heart health issues to get a diagnosis of the problem.

Good luck!
I don't think Mercurial is the issue here...

Google Code is the issue... Didn't realise people still used that, its worse than Codeplex. Atleast use Bitbucket or something that makes it easier for people to contribute to while still keeping it with Mercurial.

I've found bugs in stuff before and ended up using a different project/library for the sole reason that I found out its in Google Code and the amount of effort involved in using the site let alone raising an issue or fixing it just wasn't worth it.