skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I def need to tweak the scoring / ranking. Also the clustering / grouping by song, band is a bit hoarked - esp when you get results that have multiple pages.

Scoring seems to change oddly as well and I haven't been able to flag down exactly what is going on there

Thanks for the example url too. I'm glad that people are liking my little POC.
the rewards are an insult, that's pocket change for the guys that are being pursued
That isn't brown air; it's a brown print ... chimneys artificially crowded ... taken at sunset.

You may be right, it may be a sepia print. I don't know that much about sepia. GIMP shows 26K unique colors, and plenty of information in all three layers when decomposed to HSV or LAB. I would have thought a sepia print would be closer to monochrome.

I can assure you the brown skies were real, and that there's not much "artificial" about the crowding of the smokestacks. I still live nearby; the difference between the air quality then and now is pronounced.

It's really an odd thing to do, to approach a stranger on the internet and suggest that their memories are false and any evidence that might support them is effectively fake. How does that go over at dinner parties?
It's properly:

---5-7--7-
--5---5---
-5-----5--
7----6----
----------
----------

although anyone would recognize your version.
Ever since I started getting into Clojure, I've been getting interested in these other functional programming languages. Lately I've been checking out Elixir. I don't know what draws me to it (most likely the pretty website and logo :P, and partly because I hate the Java ecosystem). I want to get into it as well, but I just don't see myself using it for anything? I mean for the types of problems I'm capable of solving, Clojure (and Python) seems to be sufficient. To me, it seems Erlang (and thus Elixir) only offers its advantages when building really large distributed systems. Is there any other use case for Erlang/Elixir?

I'm still going to be reading up on Erlang/Elixir for fun and to expand on how I approach problems, but right now I only associate Erlang with large distributed systems and I want to add other stuff to that association.
Brilliant! Great work.
Venture capitalists do not fear Paul Graham. He may be the godfather of Y Combinator, but people at Sequoia are involved in far bigger deals all the time.

If you want to know what VC-istan is, start here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/vc-istan-1-wh... VC-istan does not mean "whatever you want it to in any given situation".
There is also a hidden factor: white male in his early 20s attending ivy league schools like Stanford and MIT
Excellent POC - Obamacare needs to pick this up and run with it, to provide the next level of detail, for all insurers.

Can you tell us about the technology under the hood? Ruby or Node (or whatever)? What APIs did you use? Programming-wise, what was easy and what turned out to be tricky?
Yeah, guilty. The tab I have of Stairway in the DB is a bit different.

http://riffbank.com/?q=5--5--7--7--%0D%0A-5-----5----%0D%0A-...

I'm actually surprised that I haven't scraped 124 different versions of it by now. Hopefully with lots of transcriptions things will show up to more diverse 'fingerings' (you know, the "right way" plus all the "other ways")...
This is an infuriating and sad event. It's also the first time I have seen the members of the Japanese parliament embroiled in an in-your-face shouting match that looked perilously close to coming to blows.

As an American, the demise of the rule of law in my own country was really hard to go through. As an expat now living in Japan, one of the awesome things about being here was that although it's a wildly different environment and culture, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and fundamental democracy have been unquestioned. If you violate the law, and are caught, there are consequences -- like it was the USA of my youth.

This isn't just a 'secrecy' law; as (vaguely) written, it is also a censorship law that goes even further than the US 'PATRIOT' act. You can theoretically be imprisoned for a tweet, or a peaceful gathering, or basically if the government just waves its hands and mumbles 'terrorism'.

This kind of law was one of the main lubricants for the United States's ignominious slide into unlawful, unconstitutional depravity: kidnapping, imprisonment without charge, assassination, murder, torture. Once something can not be found out -- or cannot be published or discussed even if it is found out -- the government and various bad actors within it have a shield that lets them ignore the law or the constitution and do what the fuck they want.

I don't envision Japan going as bad as America any time soon -- it has, after all been the most peaceful major nation of the last 65 years, having not exercised military aggression toward any nation in that time.[1]

But still, the degradation of a democratic society is something to be lamented. And America's role in overturning its own best legacy is shameful.

[1]: But: one (unsubstantiated) theory I have heard floated is that this was rammed through as a presage to a secret Japanese nuclear weapons program. With China becoming an increasingly aggressive and hostile bad actor in Asia, using its military to make wild bombastic threats against Japan (and Vietnam, and the Philippines), unilaterally trying to assert ownership over more and more territory in the region, Japan has found itself in a situation that looks more and more like the USSR-era Cold War -- but with no hope other than to rely on the US for protection.
So you're saying because of his experiences with academia and the status he has from his hard work, he needs to help set new goal posts for the masses to pigeon hole themselves into which could resemble the situation in which he says we have today? It is a fair question if you don't expect any answers from him, but from the question itself, it doesn't seem that way. It seems like a question that would be more apt for the self.
Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of Medicaid patients who had to pay those types of costs.

I guess my question is, what if a Medicaid patient in IN was truly destitute? There must be some mechanism for patients who can't afford those types of costs.
I don't watch the show, personally, but it's irritating that everyone has to come down on things like this. People spend their time doing all kinds of crazy things. If it's fun and you enjoy it, then I think that's great. There are worse ways to spend your time.

Apparently, that's not good enough, though. Everyone has to critique how other people enjoy themselves.

I've read books on algorithm analysis and I just excitedly purchased a book on discrete mathematics through haskell. Know what else I've read? The entire Sookie Stackhouse series. So friggin what?

My life was so much easier to live when I decided that it was okay to peacefully allow other people enjoy things that I don't.

(oh yeah, I don't think the parent post was saying bad things; it just seemed like a decent place to say it :) )
I think it's just an attitude of people that see all of the praise for a public figure as ignoring the possibly not so 'saintly' things that they have done[1]. I would be willing to bet the a majority of people only know all of positive things about Mandela, and few of the negative/questionable things.

I'm not in the camp of calling him a terrorist, but I do get a bit annoyed (sometimes) when the hero-worship seems to present a skewed perspective on reality. For example, I'm annoyed that many US politicians will dote over how awesome Mandela was in expressing their sympathies over his passing, but there is no talk of how we sided against him.

[1] For example, Mother Theresa explicitly withheld pain-killers from the people that she treated because she felt that the pain brought them closer to God. It's unquestionable (to me at least) that treating those people (even with this attitude) was a good thing because they would get no care otherwise. On the other hand, I don't put her up on a pedestal as a perfect human being like others do.
Maybe that's because SELinux was handled by the NSA, and they're not so thorough?
One factor that keeps these negotiated rates from becoming public is that a lot (actually, almost all) of these contracts signed between hospitals and insurers have a gag order of sorts built into the contract by the hospital. These gag orders prevent the insurer from making the hospital's rates public, and what's more, the terms of these contracts usually forbid insurers from even revealing the existence of these gag orders. Believe me, insurers would love to be able to steer policyholders towards cheaper and higher quality -- better value -- care, but these gag orders make it almost impossible for them to do so. It's an incredibly screwed up system all around, and everyone's complicit -- it's not just the insurers and other payers.
On the other hand, with total freedom to think, most of us might not get much done, see: http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/feynman.html
Couldn't agree more. It was one of the weird UI things that I struggled with initially. It's a bit confusing - and honestly a lot of people don't even realize that it is an input text box at all...

Syntax highlighting would look cool in that box as well, albeit not very useful. GuitarHero colors? ;)
Dennis Ritchie's - The Development of the C Programming Language
Pessimism vs. Experience in Physicists
Reading your link, it appears that the author just flatly assumes that space is not expanding, and everything else stems from that assumption.

The author provides another article to attempt to support that assumption, but their argument for that is incomplete, and while their alternative appears to offer explanations for some observations, it ignores other things (like cosmological redshift). Add in the fact that that the article appears targeted towards laypeople and there's no scientific paper to be found suggests that it's more psuedoscience and thought experiments than actual scientific investigation.

It seems unreasonable to claim that academia would reject the idea out of hand when no-one's even written a paper to attempt to submit to a peer-reviewed journal. I suspect the reason academia ignores the supposition is not commercial interest like you claim.
I'm a subscriber to Elixir Sips, and just wanted to say that the videos are well worth it to anyone looking to get into Elixir. I'm a happy subscriber, and look forward to more videos.

knewter doesn't know me, and I don't know him.
The currency will be hoarded with only a tiny proportion of the stock being used for transactions. The price will increase rapidly so long as the transactional demand increases and the hoarders do not sell.

One day, of course, the currency will crash when hoarders finally try to cash out.
That Titian was quite the art hacker, too.
Excellent post, please tell us more, there's a whole blog post here on the downsides of bitcoin. Do share :)
The rewards are not an attempt to outbid organized crime.
Incredibly useful if you're on medicare (what the price data is based on).

For the majority of us _not_ on medicare, castlighthealth.com is solving this. It's B2B for now, i.e. Tesla pays for castlight and then its employees can use castlight to find out how much things will cost.
Nice casual ageism.
Like it says in the name an MMO is a game with massive online play. CoD has no massive online play. CoD is not an MMO. PlanetSide2 is what an MMOFPS looks like.
A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks
Ask HN: Ways to find good deals on rent besides Craigslist?
Suggestions for any location are welcome, but if you're going to be specific, SF or NY would be great.
There’s a Reason They Call Them ‘Crazy Ants’
The most important tennis match that was never played
Maybe you can not copy other apps?

Your app is pure plagiarism.
http://frontback.me/
If you want to, you could create a transaction that lets you spend all of those "loose change" transactions into a bigger transaction.

You have to do this for assurance contracts [0], for example, where the transaction cannot have any change (a transaction back to yourself).

[0] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_3:_Assurance_co...
A platitude would be, "Money doesn't buy happiness," or the equivalent. I specifically did not say that.

I don't want to talk about this any further. We have misunderstood one another to the point that this isn't productive.
These are called cost and quality or transparency tools in the industry.

Many insurance companies have tools that can do this exact thing for their members AND apply it to your specific plan at the time of the inquiry. So you can choose based on the procedure cost and your actual cost based on your deductible and co-insurance. Not only that, the tools will also tell you about quality so you can compare based on the quality of service, cost of service and your actual cost at the same time.

Unless you can do all of these things at the same time with your tool, it leaves out critical factors for those actually searching for this type of information as it applies to them at any given time - most importantly when they are trying to make a decision.

Additionally, you only have access to negotiated rates for Medicare whereas an insurance company providing this information is going to provide as much information as they can for all of their members by displaying their negotiated rates specific to your plan.

As an HN reader, if you like this tool, go check with your insurance company and see what they already have and how specific it is for you.
Not a physicist, but writing one good paper every four years sounds like a very good thing. Would you rather read 40 papers, each of which is a lowest-publishable-unit, or 10 which noticeably move science ahead?

Because of his fame, Higgs had the luxury few do--- he could contemplate quietly, and people wouldn't dare say he was doing nothing. If you do that as a mere tenure-track professor, I'd figure the university would think you're too high risk and sack you.
If you include cheap-o VPS like DigitalOcean into the Rails hosting, then yes you can get it for $5. But then the money you're saving will go into setting up the instance.
I picked one (Heart Failure with Shock with MCC) at random

http://www.cms.gov/icd10manual/fullcode_cms/P0136.html

the link shows all the diagnoses that fall in that category of DRGs. (DRGs are the packages of procedures that Medicare pays a fixed price for, simply put. If you get that diagnosis, you submit that DRG. However in this case the map from diagnosis to DRG is one to many.) Some of the average costs are only from 20-30 discharges. Do you think that makes for good math or some sort of price guide?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis-related_group

It may highlight that the DRG is incorrectly applied by some hospitals (maybe?), but it has nothing to do with 'going down the street' for a better 'price'.

nice interface though.
look at it from the other side:

Do you think it is criminally negligent for a parent to bring up their child without any education whatsoever?

Do you think the state should intervene to protect criminally neglected children from their neglecting parents?

Most people I know, myself included, would say yes to both questions, and therefore the establishment of compulsory education is at least in part directly intended to benefit the children. Education is shown to be one of the very few reliable indicators around the globe of both individual and societal prosperity. How we educate is always up for debate.. should we educate is typically not.
>Someone takes the decision to dump raw sewage in the river, or toxic waste or whatever. Regardless of how many layers of bureaucracy they hide behind, they are bad people.

The problem is that it's only "bad" when you look at it from the outside. You can point to this person or that person and say, "You're bad," or "You're evil," and smugly congratulate yourself that you would never act in such a fashion. You don't know what pressures or incentives they were subject to. You don't know what other choices they had. Moreover, your approach puts the blame on the line workers - the worker dumping the oil into the storm drain, the truck driver driving 20 hours a day, the manager writing up a justification of why an unreasonable risk is reasonable after all - while assigning no culpability to the leadership of the organization that created the circumstances where those actions were the most reasonable alternative. You expect people to stand up and throw themselves into the gears of the machine even if the inevitable consequence is that they get crushed, and the machine rolls on, heedless.

I used to think in much the same fashion. But then I read a very powerful book: Diane Vaughan's Challenger Launch Decision. I would challenge you to read that book and identify, of all the people involved in the decision to launch the Challenger on that fateful day, which one acted in an evil manner? Which engineer wasn't at least trying to act in the best interest of the organization and the crew?

That's the point I'm trying to make. People can be trying to good, but, because of the information available to them, the incentives they operate under, and the time or social pressure they're subject to, their actions can work towards bad outcomes. Tarring those people as "bad" or "evil" does nothing to change the organization that those people operate under, and simply ensures that the next person in the same position in the organization just makes the same mistakes.
It's public culture, and popular enough to be held representative of a large subgroup of people. There's no reason why people shouldn't give their honest opinion of it.
I've been a student of that blog. It doesn't ignore cosmological redshift. Rather, the dark energy solution notes that space measurably expands, but in a relative (it depends on the observer) way as opposed to the absolute (observed by all observers) way that is generally accepted today. When space measurably expands (whether relative or absolute) you have cosmological redshift.

Space itself not expanding is the absence of an assumption. Today it's generally accepted that space itself expands, an assumption.

> Add in the fact that that the article appears targeted towards laypeople and there's no scientific paper to be found suggests that it's more psuedoscience and thought experiments than actual scientific investigation.

Thought experiments are scientific investigation. Nothing in the rest of your point actually suggests pseudoscience.
I'm pretty interested in your experiences with linux on azure.
I've been to both azure and aws workshops, and I found the azure presenters to be somewhat hostile towards alternative operating systems. They had a slide saying they linux was 100% supported, but they didn't talk to it at all. In fact, it was nearly comical how the presenter didn't want to touch my mac to help with setup.

From my reading, azure seems to be pretty awesome as far as integration with visual studio, but is seriously lacking when it comes to features on their load balancer etc. Their security model is kinda weird too, where defaults open your firewall to the rest of azure commonly.

So that's just my ideas, what are your experiences?

have you seen AWS opsworks?
I think it's interesting the extent to which lisp is slowly but steadily insinuating itself into people's brains and into new languages.

There are the modern, obvious lisps like Racket and Clojure.

Then there are things like Honu, Pyret, Elixir, and more, which sidestep many people's "parenoia" [sic]. They do the homoiconic, macro thing without any supposedly frightening s-expressions.

Because, as I read this post, I'm thinking, well hell, all of these features [1] are syntactic sugar that already exist in e.g. Racket, and if they didn't, could be added by anyone. Especially anything like "I always wanted this control structure in Python/Ruby/whatever", well, you can just do it. This is really liberating.

Sure you can argue that people will do dumb things with this capability, or that you "don't really need X", and so on. But being able to do it when you need/want is really awesome.

[1] I'm referring to the points in the post, not everything that Elixir and/or Erlang can do.
Bitcoin is crashing hard right now. Down to $730 on Mt. Gox, the lowest since November 21.
A few days? People get upset if you haven't replied in an hour.

Seriously though, long periods of solitude is not what we need. I'd not be productive if I became a hermit, but I'd be a lot more productive if I had periods of quiet time, punctuated by moments of discussion. This is how thinkers and artists (and hackers) worked for a long time, before we wrongly convinced ourselves that being interruptible improves productivity.
It's a pretty arbitrary constraint. I wonder if he's looked into docker or other methods of containerisation?
What do you think a compiler does? The target instruction set can be any Turing-complete language. Compiling C to LISP is no different than compiling LISP to C (e.g., GNU Common Lisp), compiling ML to Java (which is so easy students can do it in 300/400-level CS), and so on.
It seems unreasonable to claim that academia would reject the idea out of hand when no-one's even written a paper to attempt to submit to a peer-reviewed journal.

If you showed me scientific papers that had been rejected by peer reviewers, then you might have a point. But if it's entirely articles targeted at laypeople and no scientific papers, it's pseudoscience.
You hear this kind of thing from that patent bar and the lobbying and public relations groups at Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM.

Unfortunately the computer programming profession and startup scene, being made up of smart, quirky, introverted people, has no pull whatsoever with the national media or the political class in Washington. I don't know if they don't know or just don't care that we're so overwhelmingly and thoroughly opposed to the damage patents do to our industry. They appear to be willfully ignorant that there are no examples of software patents that actually promote innovation, since they write stories without even asking for one.
Eye opening... great work!

Bug: (FF 16.0.1 on OSX 10.8.5) When the "select a procedure" drop down box is expanded, wheel scrolling up/down seems to also zoom the map underneath it.
The headline is a bit misleading...the Federal Register, I guess, does use floppy disks, but apparently it's only because other agencies transmit information to them in that way.

A couple years ago, the Federal Register did a complete overhaul of their website, using an outside contractor:

https://www.federalregister.gov/

To me, it is the epitome of a well-designed, thorough, user-friendly, data-cognizant website. I don't think there's a government website so well thought out as the Federal Register's.
Comcast only "hijacks" your DNS if you use their servers. Opendns does the same, btw.
Dropped from $800 to ~$700 in the last 15 minutes:

http://bitcointicker.co/
I just watched it go down from 750$ to 710$ in something like 5 minutes.

I know that it fluctuates like that other times too but this is extraordinary to watch.

http://bitcointicker.co

PS: I got my first bitcoins 3 days ago. So, if you want something else to crash to ground, just let me touch it.
The problem with defined benefit is there are always unknown risks. You can say that the government, or an insurance company will pick up the tab, but what if they fail? If the amount of the benefit is large enough (retirement savings for a generation) it's impossible to guarantee. Small #s yes, large, no. Many intelligent people don't believe a small system like Social Security will hold.