skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In HN, use four spaces to indent code blocks, like this:

;;takes two list l1 and l2 of same length, and return (l1[0] l2[0]
;;l1[1] l2[1] ...)
(defun mix (l1 l2)
(if (null l1)
nil
(append (mix (cdr l1)
(cdr l2))
(list (car l1)
(car l2)))))

(Also, for the record, you should say (append (list ...) (mix ...)) or else you'll reverse the result list, which I don't think is your intent)
Not to rain on your parade, but who has their cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and systolic blood pressure measurements at hand?
It's hard to grok low-level code like this in any language. I'd take common lisp over heavily-templated C++ or freestyle Perl any day.
I loved the ending:
"He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he wasn't impressed."

The show is despite what some think, not a celebration of science, but a ridicule of science, and takes the stereotypes to new levels.

Edit: I also watch the show, but as the article that GuiA links to mentions, the show wnats you to laugh at the nerds, and not the actual jokes they make.
You could argue its a Star Trek vs. Star Wars kinda thing, but i personally liked Community far more, because it really captured the fun in being nerdy, and didn't put nerds in one big collective box.

PS. I don't dress up, play fantazy card games, go to cosplays, read comics, etc. I'm an engineering student, i get drunk in the weekends, I code in .NET and Python, I love coffee, wine, cars, motorcycles, etc. Not anywhere near the steretypical hollywood nerd.
IIRC, Medicaid has some odd situations where they'll pay for nursing homes but not 10x cheaper (and better outcome, in many cases) home-health aides.
Not sure about hg, but in git, do a git stash --keep-index , then do your testing.
Yes and then later on it fell even further. This is a cautious sell off. Big guys cannot sell tens and hundreds thousand of Bitcoins at once - they will crash the market. Super optimistic guys buy expensive and hope for better times. I witnessed today one guy buying nearly 2,000 BTC at $950 on Gox and then the price dropped by more than $100 in few minutes. I believe it will drop even further. I believe in Bitcoin, but it's doomed until its in the hands of speculators and they should get hurt and move to altcoins hopefully although they usually profit from drops as this is how they multiply their coins.
Stocks aren't quite so volatile.
I like it but it's not that easy to run Python on the web.
Re: Big Bang Theory, I enjoyed this post:

http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/31079561065/the-p...
In principle yes
How start-ups must become customer support superstars
11 Time More Massive Than Jupiter
> There's nothing that I can think of in the theory or history of Bitcoin to suggest that it should, can, or will ever, overcome its volatility.

What is it about Bitcoin that you think leads to inherent volatility? The only explanations for its current volatility that I can think of are the fact that many new people are constantly learning about it, the financial services for it are still very young (like exchanges), and governments have yet to address it. But Bitcoin has only existed for 4 years, and has only been known in mainstream publications for 1 year.
You really should warn users to find the NEAREST hospital when they are having chest pain--which is one of the procedure selections.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or a doctor.
Just a note to HN'ers: GFischer is a good guy. He's been tremendously helpful with introductions and information about the business climate in South America in the past. +1 for him, hope to meet him in person and repay his kindness someday.
You're displacing and blurring both contexts and words to your advantage.

> having cognitive dissonance

I know what most people think is not always right, but read yourself, and try to add water to your wine a little.

The context of apartheid was really bleak. Colonization by whites on african land can only generate relevant tensions from black people toward whites. Most people are black in SA and in all africa around it. You can't have a ruling minority which is not like and expect nice things. Nelson Mandela was much more peaceful (and smart) than most others.

> Mandela was a terrorist.

First, people use terrorism when they're losing a war, not an political argument. Secondly, activists have been called terrorists because the cause they defend have been discredited after other activists used violence for the same cause. It's the media and newspaper inflating images which doesn't reflect the thought of the majority.

You can't mix and match opinions and definitions used by the media to discredit Mandela, and at the same time forget how the situation was in SA, and on top of it, talk about cognitive dissonance. If most view it as a hero, maybe he just it. Nobody sees Ben Laden as a hero. Bush actually invited Mandela and apologized after he was considered a terrorist.

Conclusion: everyone sees terrorists everywhere.
Strange, newly-discovered exoplanet defies planetary formation theories
Their new Midas engine is about to get released - will handle over 500,000 transactions/second and will support other cryptocurrencies (although I don't think they will open it to the public just yet). It may not be great as it is, but it's definitely better than the rivals at the moment.
This is an instance of a C to Lisp compiler that translates to s-expressions
https://github.com/vsedach/Vacietis
Looks inapired by Bret Victor - http://worrydream.com/#!/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable
This seems... harsh to me.

Yeah, so Erlang's syntax is prolog inspired and can seem a little peculiar if you're using Algol inspired languages a lot. I _vaguely_ recall a feeling unfamiliar in Erlang land because of syntax but now, six years in, I hardly care about the syntax of _any_ language. It's just the thing you get used to, like speaking in foreign languages. It's just the water in which you swim.
Recently, a new patch is going to enter in the bitcoin-qt client that increases the default size of the block for miners from 50k to 300k to accomodate higher transaction volume.
Meh, still funny, and the jokes are often more clever than your typical network fare.

EDIT: I love that I get downvoted for saying that I like a show. You guys must be a blast at parties.
Agreed. I'm not sure where the AP got their last statement either...

"Tech companies say software patents have played a critical role in keeping the U.S. at the cutting edge by giving people control over their inventions for nearly 20 years."
What is it about traditional commodities that make them inherently volatile, and does Bitcoin share these qualities? I'm not familiar with commodities markets, but the only thing I can think of that would cause inherent volatility is the inherent volatility of the physical commodities themselves, like crops reliance on weather patterns and oil's reliance on shaky international political relations.
Er, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Personal debt and corporate debt are not the same thing.
Oh god, I can't take the self absorbed nerd culture that has to whine about TBBT at every opportunity.
This will not answer your question, but at the end of his CV here, there is his list of publications.

http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/peter-higgs
> But why should there be an overarching story?

I think that I can answer your question. Bear with me. I think the reason stems from the same place why Jesus shared his worldview through parables (for instance), and why Orwell and Huxley outsell Nietzsche and Bentham. I think that narrative is a very effective way to get a point across, and it also may be how we (as cognitive beings) are fundamentally wired. Did you ever stop to think that your life which appears to have a coherent narrative thread only appears so because you internally and involuntarily constantly construct and reconstruct this narrative thread overlaid on the messy indigestible complex fragments of your existence. Like the persistence of vision allows the discrete frames blend into continuity.

The pattern is us.
Banging on file descriptors looks pretty much the same no matter what language you do it in. I expect that a Python equivalent would be pretty much the same length.
Could you say some more about this? I'm curious how early in the process you start charging, how you present that to clients or potential clients, and how you handle objections.
Depends on the city. Shanghai is much more reasonable than say Beijing; each city in the country has its own often conflicting rules.
He is asking why only 10 papers in 40+ years. What else was taking up his time? I have the same question.
We're splitting hairs here, so what about the possibility of Russian and US law enforcement cooperating under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, or similar agreements, but not extraditing?
Korean Artist Transforms Small Studio Into Dreamlike Worlds Without Photoshop
Not a problem

My mother is covered by Indiana's medicaid program, as she's at the poverty level but not old enough yet to qualify for Medicare. Her prescription buydown/deductible every month is $550, which I pay for. If you don't mind, I don't want to list specific medications, as it might make it easier to determine her identity. She takes medication for bone mineralization, hormone replacement due to a heart condition, a medication to reduce her blood pressure, as well as a Schedule I pain killer 3-4 times a day for pain management due to lower body nerve damage. She'll very likely have some nerves in her lower back severed in the next 6-12 months to relieve the pain.

So, her prescriptions alone cost around $5K-$6K/year. This is before her GP or specialist copays (very few providers will take Medicaid patients, so its hard to find and keep them), or a hospital visit or two. Her recent open MRI was completely out of pocket (luckily only $600 at a low-income clinic).
Yeah. Really clever jokes like saying "Nintendo 64" then pausing for laughter.
> While I'm on the topic, you realize that because the money supply can't be increased in any meaningful way once mining is no longer viable, prices will experience constant deflation? This alone makes BTC worthless as money.

On the contrary, I think its deflationary nature makes it worth a lot as money, and as long as a few other people agree, then we can use Bitcoin as a means of exchange.
> You'd argue, but you'd lose the argument.

Done it already, in production. The virtualenv fanboys didn't even notice. It's simple and elegant and works perfectly.
> Yet before the ink is even dry critics are trying to obscure this stark message behind a mirage: the supposed halt in global warming over the last 15 years. This willful idiocy is based on the fact that air temperatures at the Earth's surface have more or less plateaued since the record hot year in 1998. What critics choose to ignore is that of all the extra heat being trapped by our greenhouse gas emissions - equivalent to four Hiroshima nuclear bombs every second - just 1% ends up warming the air. By choosing to focus on air temperatures critics are ignoring 99% of the problem. [1]

> Schmidt pointed out, however, that the real anomaly in the recent climate record is not the last decade but the year 1998, which saw a sharp spike in atmospheric temperatures. "If you take 1998 out, there is no pause," he said. According to NASA data, the ten hottest years since 1880 have all happened since 1998, with 2010 being the hottest of all. [2]

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blo...

[2]: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130925-globa...
He was a professor of physics at Edinburgh University, and he certainly showed up on the campus there. I saw him around, but I don't recall witnessing him doing any work since I didn't study much physics.

I'm guessing what he did was teach classes and supervise graduate students, put out the occasional paper now and again, just like any other professor. Also, his name would allow Edinburgh University to say 'We have that famous Professor Higgs working for OUR Physics department' to any passing Science Funding Authority or Corporate R&D department thinking of handing out a research grant in physics, or to any rich foreign parents looking for somewhere to send their physics-inclined offspring.

I'm sure he was pretty good value for money just for his name alone...
Cozumel/Playda Del Carmen has a significant medical tourism industry as well (dental included!). Half the price vs the US.
> Please provide a single example of a viable currency that has deflated over a long period of time.

Please provide a single example of a decentralized digital peer-to-peer payment network based on virtually fraud-immune proof of work. My point is that Bitcoin is fundamentally different than anything before it.
Presumably thinking about things that never resulted in papers because they didn't work out, or else working on those 10. Working for 4 years on a paper isn't out of the question if it's totally original work and one is being super careful. Not that doing that is rewarded these days, which I assume was exactly his point.
Is this the quality of github comments in general?
The sad part is, there is little correlation between what the hospitals have on their charge master and what they actually get paid.

A hospital with a cost of $20K for a procedure might only get paid $5K, while one with a $10K cost might get paid $8K!

In fact, the same hospital can get paid very differently between different insurance companies.
This happens to be just where some of my issues come from. When building a monolithic python app into an RPM, Virtualenv was somewhere between annoying and pointless. It's this belief that it actually does something other than set paths that annoys me about it. Just listen to the rants on here. If it had been named Python Pathsetter, I don't think it would have gotten a following!
I asked my nephew and this was the answer I got back:

1 cookie, in my belly. (And then he demanded a cookie.)
"didn't"… "any" implies none. And wouldn't one be better off being concerned with what is taking up their own time? Higgs probably won't have the same question for you or me…
The article here relates to Unicode in general rather than any of its specific encodings (the author themselves gets confused by this in the first paragraph).
This is quite a good article that explains the difference (particularly of use to Python users):
http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html
In practice you don't interact with more than a few dozen players when playing an MMO. Many of the most popular MMOs like WoW and Star Wars:TOR shove their best content into instanced zones styled in a format similar to many multiplayer FPS titles with similar player limits per instance. The core of MMO gameplay comes down to "RPG" style character progression that gives players a sense of complex and gradual character growth that is on display for other players in the community. The same is true of CoD and Battlefield, except there is only instanced content and no out-world. You might argue that games like EVE, where most of the content is non-instanced, are the only true MMOs, but the most popular "MMO" of all time has maximum player limit of 25 on 99% of the game's bosses, and similar limits in the PvP battlegrounds and arenas.

Quake in 1996 supported 16 players and there were leaderboards and ladders

If you're comparing the multiplayer experience of CoD and BF to Quake I have to wonder if you've ever played those titles. They aren't simply "leaderboards", they are detailed character RPGs that take a lot of grinding and deliberation over gear, just like an MMO, and that is what makes them stand out as blockbusters compared to other FPS games in the genre - your high level CoD character is on display to potentially any other player that participates in the CoD community, Quake leaderboards were just a list of kills, no persistent character growth.
It didn't find Stairway though, unless I'm remembering the intro wrong:

5--5--7--7--
-5-----5----
--5-----5---
7-----6-----
------------
------------
Thanks for the tip of the indentation, and for checking my code - you are right that I got the order wrong in (append (mix ...) (list ...)), but in this particular case I'm not interested in how my list is ordered.
This gets asked a lot and won't get answered. The typical response is that they don't answer because it would violate the privacy of some of these founders/companies that may not wish it known they got rejected or even applied. If the founders want to share that they will, otherwise it's best left alone. Also companies may have the same founders/names but may have pivoted a lot or gone in a different direction so it could be a completely new company.
It's easy, the trick is to learn it as your first language ;)
This is truly impressive. Thanks for posting the link.
I made similar screenshot as the one from this article. I noticed strange periodic behavior of bitcoinwisdom.com, asked myself WTF, uploaded image to imgur, then made a post on HN. Within 5 minutes, I guessed that this behavior is caused by the javascript replaying stale package of transactions and not getting new ones. I reloaded the page, artifact disappeared, I took down HN post to avoid misleading people (it got two upvotes already and one comment). Now I see this what I thought was local glitch prominently featured as a part of front page article. I guess it wasn't so local and accidental after all.

Since the image in article comes from http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/ not bitcoinwisdom I guess it was some glitch in MtGox API or case of clients wasn't able to tell that what they get from API is stale data not expected fresh one.

My screenshot from bitcoinwisdom: http://imgur.com/Q6gKIok
Nobody (that I'm aware of) who refuses to vaccinate their childern, does so for this reason.
Has everyone forgotten about IRC? A cross platform IRC app would be sweet.
To me, we're in a Unicode transition period - 10 years ago it was almost completely unsupported, and as it is adopted more an more, we're finding the places it can cause issues.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the languages and tools we use pre-exist widescale use of Unicode and don't handle it very well. The Python 3 approach is by far the best one I've come across (would be interested to hear of other examples), and they needed to make a backwards incompatible change to handle it in a way that made it harder to screw up.

It is a complex technology, and inevitably there are going to be holes, but as in a lot of other cases, it is worth it (necessary, even), and as we move forward our tooling, languages, libraries and practices will get better and reduce the risk.
The internet is a complex technology that can never be completely secure. Doesn't mean it's not worth it though.
... and for the promise of continued production.
> He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers.

The opposite of an Einstein or Higgs. Academia no longer tolerates deep, unconventional thinking. Physics used to be a hobby, now its an industry to be protected from major change. For example, if you have basic knowledge of relativity you can go to http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/dark-energy-obviated/ and use the steps there in conjunction with generally accepted equations (from the Usenet Physics FAQ) to see that free objects launched upward from Earth at close to the speed of light must accelerate away from us, solving the big mystery of dark energy. But even assuming this idea is valid it couldn't make it into a respected peer-reviewed journal today. Ideas for hunting dark energy particles, however, would be welcomed, since those could lead to lucrative grants.
Major joint replacement is much cheaper than Major Joint Replacement.
this doesn't cite any hard data sources

The UK census is one. For each 100k white people in london that is 1% of the white population of SA. So, ~500k is ~5% of the white SA population of ~10 million. Given the dis-proportionate wealth and education (as you illustrate in your earlier posts) of the white SA population, I would call this number "material" if not "mass exodus", because the social (and networking) impact is likely dis-proportionate to the headcount alone. For these reasons, it seems presumptive to keep denying this has ever occurred. But YMMV.
You didn't need to download Xcode for that, you just run `xcodebuild -license` from the command line.
Generally yes, but if someone, Higgs in this case, is saying there is something broken with academia's definition of productivity then it begs the question what should that definition be? What was Higgs doing that was more important or more productive than publishing papers? It is a totally fair question given the circumstances.

Had Higgs never said anything then I wouldn't be interested in how he spent his time in the office. Nor would it be appropriate to care.
Some states already do this. For example, for CABG and valve surgery, NY State publishes raw, as well as risk-adjusted mortality rates (RAMR) broken down by surgeon: (warning, PDF) http://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/cardiovascular/... (begins on pg 21)

Fun fact: Dr. Oz is in there and it even looks like he might be one of the better performing surgeons too. Another fun fact: it can be hard to draw inferences about individual providers this way; check out just how wide some of the the 95% CIs for the RAMRs are, and a lot hinges on how good your risk adjustment model is (details on pg 13).
N-body Toy
In the article is the example of paying somebody 0.15 of a bitcoin with the input of 0.20 and two outputs, 0.15 to the payee and 0.05 back to oneself. I am picturing having my wallet cluttered with lots of such little fractional bits, the "change" from transactions. How to tidy up? But maybe the answer is, next time I want to pay somebody 0.10 I just give them two my 0.05 "nickel" pieces... Well, I said it was a dumb question...
Writing guidelines for Glassware
the whole premise here is that there is some correspondence between this rate and the negotiated rate

That is a plausible but false assumption. Different providers negotiate different rates. In many cases, the negotiated rate for a given provider is lower than the "cash rate" that an uninsured person would pay, but in many cases the negotiated rate it is actually much higher(!). Maybe in these cases the insurer gets an end-of-year volume-based discount that the insured (me) never gets to see.

Source: my recent experience shopping for an MRI while on a high-deductible plan.
Whoa! It's plummeting just as I come here to read this thread.

http://bitcointicker.co/

I saw the first news of the Chinese restrictions last evening (United States time zones) and a person who kindly replied to my post here yesterday recommended the link I've just put here for tracking the price of Bitcoin. I saw this thread just after seeing

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-china-bitcoin...

on Google News.
The analysis assumes a demand for such a currency and assumes that Bitcoin will have 100% market share.

That is not going to happen.
Someone should probably point out that it's homoiconic too.
Don't you think it becomes a lot more difficult to make your fortune, once you are tied down in a relationship? Suddenly the concern becomes about stability instead of success? Would you want your own son getting married before he had made a success of himself?
I remember reading that article. The article spoke like the lessons of an inexperienced developer, and not necessarily the problems of technology they were complaining about. BTW, what do you mean by AQL.
Build your own Linux Distro bootable from RAM
Heroic sir.
My specialties are forensic and child psychiatry.

Wow. I bet you could write an interesting book or three. (I hope you do.)