skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know there are issues which are specific to the States, but I would say this applies almost everywhere. Almost everywhere doctors are paid 5-10 times the median wage, because they are chosen from the top few percent of students, and that difference in wages introduces an inherent asymmetry in how many hours of work are necessary to buy an hour of a doctor's time. The majority of the population, certainly as people age, have low level health issues which they manage imperfectly. You don't exercise enough because your knee is a bit gammy (perhaps requiring physiotherapy or knee surgery), your cholesterol is high, cancer is spotted six months later than necessary because you thought your dodgy stomach or sore throat was just something minor, etc, etc. And, you know, even in countries with good health provision for the poor, the middle-class still get much better care, because they talk to their doctor friends, know how the system works, research their options thoroughly, and so on. Perfectly reasonable behaviour, but the fact that it is necessary shows up the gap and the inherent limits in provision. The cheaper healthcare is, the higher the baseline and the average can rise.
What else are you referring to? I can think of:

- The Prime Air story (can't really see how that would have to do with the government)

- The botched Benghazi story (that doesn't quite make sense)

Or is it something else?
"Last year I asked for requirements that would lead to the successful closure of this bug. [...] I haven't heard back."

If no one can even provide that...
The Bootstrap Playground
Is that even possible? How could just anyone request that Google take actions on quora's domain?
Nitecore P25 1xCree XM-L U2
Nitecore P25 1xCree XM-L U2 5-Modos Linterna eléctrica de LED - Negro (1*18650)
Hmm.

>Event Sourcing. As far as I can tell this is basically the enterprise software engineer's way of saying "state machine replication". It's interesting that the same idea would be invented again in such a different context. Event sourcing seems to focus on smaller, in-memory use cases.

Fowlers article doesn't read like that at all if you ask me. He is talking about the general concept of using an event log as a storage mechanism. Very similar to the OPs afticle. And if you look at the date, Martins article is from 2005. Credit where credit is due.

In the Java world, the idea of event sourcing was made publicly known by the project 'prevlayer'. These guys boldly suggested to store the current snapshot in RAM, yes, but had also built mechanisms for event logging, snapshotting and replay. The log was persisted on disk and replayed at startup.

The prevlayer guys were in fact not enterprise at all, quite the opposite. Their ideas caused quite a stir in the enterprise world.
Fu*k it, ship it?
Both of your proposals are exploitative and needlessly unjust.

The big problem with the market is that it forces us to choose between the two. It snatches defeat from the jaws of victory by coupling the "workers starve" outcome to the "workers don't have jobs" outcome. There is no fundamental reason why they need to be coupled. Just because only 80% of people have to work to meet demand doesn't mean the other 20% deserve to starve.

Many systems are possible in which marginal incentives are maintained (the farmer and tractor driver get significantly more money than the out-of-work laborers) but the laborers don't go hungry. I search for my favorite solution among these (I'm a big fan of basic income / negative income tax).

As you note, we are automating away more and more of our economy every day. If we keep our current course, such automation becomes a club used by those who have enabled the automation (or otherwise accumulated capital) to beat down those who have not. I think that's a terrifying idea that at best leads to terrible injustice and at worst leads to violent overthrow of its perpetrators (including myself). We need an economic model that maintains the dignity of the labor force even in the face of shrinking demand for labor.
Those contributions are great, but most of them will fade out after several years.
Bee portraits
Not to defend any of this, but it's true that you can make more total advertising revenue from two shows if one gets all boys and the other gets all girls, rather than them being split 50-50. Each commands a higher ad revenue by being more targeted.

It's an unfortunate fact of human nature that many boys find toys less desirable if they see girls playing with them too. Toy marketers would prefer to advertise on a show with 10M boys and ~0 girls, than a show with 10M boys and 2M girls at the same price, because those 2M girls might buy their toys, the boys might see them and write off the toy as "for girls".

With a few exceptions, toy marketing is an exploitative business. Don't let your kids watch TV or buy them action figures.
>>> They ask their god for advice and guidance, and claim to receive responses in various forms.

I think you taking it too literally. When religious person says "God blessed me with the gift of children", they rarely mean that the God - as an actual supernatural being - came to them in person and produced their children as a gift. Most probably, they know exactly where the children come from, and were actually present when those were conceived and born, and even though God might have been mentioned on both occasions, rarely they would claim The Almighty was personally present there and did the work. It is a metaphor expressing the idea of the Providence and God's control and responsibility about what happens to people. In the same way, when they say "I prayed and God let me see the solution of my problem", they rarely mean God personally came down to them in a burning bush, spoke to them and gave them detailed step-by-step instruction of how to solve their problems. Etc., etc.

>>> Prayer is functionally indistinguishable from divination.

Prayer is nothing like the divination. Prayer is an expression of certain feelings or formulae about the supernatural. Divination is a mechanistic procedure in which one would, after performing required ritual, receive information about the future or otherwise inaccessible information. Of course, you can pray for success of your divination, or you can try to divine if your prayer would be followed by some event, but those are two functionally very different actions. Note that for prayer, one usually is required to be a believer, while for divination you don't really have to believe in anything as long as you perform the ritual properly. This, btw, is a big different between modern religion and old religions - most of the old religions couldn't care less what you think as long as you do proper procedures. Modern ones rather concerned about morals and feelings and beliefs and all that immaterial stuff.

>>> I have, on more than one occasion heard protestants describe various aspects of Catholicism as witchcraft and idolatry.

I have heard the whole Christianity described as idolatry. So what? The question if Christianity is idolatry or not from the POV of anybody is not the question we were discussing.

>>> whether it is acceptable to ask them to pray on your behalf

I can imagine how it may be a problem for an ostensibly monotheistic religion, but that does not make a prayer a divination. Of course, that does not mean actual Christians never engage in practices which are, in fact, divination - but people violating the premises of their own religion is nothing new. I can give you Jews eating pork, Muslims drinking wine and Christians hating their fellow man. It happens. However, the religion as a belief system and as a social mechanism does not endorse it.
Don't be. TV programs are sold into specific channels that have certain target demographic profiles. Be happy your daughter 'broke' the mould.
Then it's even more important that we read this blog post in the knowledge that it's the one that made it past NSA screening. We'll never know how many didn't.
"Bronies" tend to be older males; think 13 to 40. They probably don't buy many toys.
That was an accident that turned out to be pretty damned amazing
This page has some pretty good ideas: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t02dv/why_do...

It probably has something to do with early typesetting where it was much easier to change the number without changing the month if the type was set left to right. This was true for both england and america with the advent of printing but seemed to stick in America possibly due to habit without having a manuscript tradition to fall back on.
I'm a Lutheran and we expressly deny divination.

Prayer is not divination primarily in that receiving a 'voice form God' would by met with extreme suspicion and would not be shared. In Lutheran theology, we expect to find God's word written in the Bible.

http://cyclopedia.lcms.org/display.asp?t1=D&word=DIVINATION
I won't argue that machines can't do amazing things. Technology definitely has helped us to live longer and diagnose more accurately.

I don't have any source to backup my arguments and claims, but for many older medical practitioners, including my family (we have been a medical practitioner for several generations), we feel that the younger doctors lack of confident and knee knowledge because they rely on machines. I have a hard time to put my family's words into English because they are Chinese (they are Western medicine practitioner btw), but the basic idea is that they learn to use their fingers and their sensory inputs to gather empirical information about the patients. I won't say they can diagnose a tumor at a precise location or detect the type of cancer precisely, but experts can diagnose to a very good estimate. Back then they didn't have x-ray in every hospital. Only the major one has x-ray in China and my grandma and my father had to use their fingers to determine the location of the tumor, or the type of tumor. When my dad first saw the x-ray machine back in the 70s when he was still in China, it was amazing to him what he could do with him, but he said practical experiences and hands-on experience matter.

Ask how many new practitioners can do that with confident? I supposed few. Because most of them rely on machines.

What if machine is down? What if the machine is not capable of telling the truth? It has limitation.

I am arguing that machines can't help, but doctors should never rely on machine. They need to rely on their experience and knowledge and this is what distinguish an expert from an average practitioner.

To be honest, getting people x-ray all the time is largely because of suing medical mistreatment and then good part of just being efficient (or lazy if you want to be harsh). Hospitals are scared of getting sued so they'd put everyone through an x-ray machine.
Bell labs didn't invent either the transistor or the laser:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911981

I give Bell huge credit for the work they did - in most ways that is more important. But don't undersell Google's work in the fundamentals of AI science and their contributions to software engineering.
Why is it impossible to delete an HN account?
Good to know - thanks and best of luck to you guys!
> Because otherwise medical care never gets more affordable.

They can be affordable but the problem is largely because of the large number of law suits hospitals might have to face, and plus the cost of buying those technology. Then you go with drugs. Those are expensive. Regulations, license, those are costly too.

And salary too, very high. One might argue that doctors deserve to be paid more if they can do the job properly, saving people's life. I won't get into that, but unless you can cut drug $$ down, salary down and law suit down, or at least two of them, you won't get very far from affordable healthcare.

You might ask why isn't Chinese medicine expensive.
Additionally the author is wrong about Google having to maximize shareholder returns.

Google has dual class shares, so the only people Google realy has to please are Larry Page and Sergy Brin.
Ghost can be freely hosted on Red Hat OpenShift. There's even a quickstart installation that gives you node+mySQL and an optional load balancer in 2 clicks and 2 lines in a terminal.

https://www.openshift.com

https://www.openshift.com/quickstarts/ghost-with-mysql-on-op...

Stick your own alias over that bothersome .rhcloud.com and you're laughing.
except the amazon drone thing ended up being real...
Doctors attach man's severed hand to his leg to keep it alive – in pictures
How is this different from normal dns?
> I hope within my lifetime we have some disruption in this space and NASA stops constantly taking blatant advantage of its near monopoly on space exploration.

I think that with Mangalyaan well on its way to Mars we can probably - barring a mission-crippling accident - say that the disruption is in progress.
Don't get me wrong, Google does lots of great research across a variety of fields. And I'm neither a biologist nor a quantum physicist, so I can't claim to know exactly how important either MSR or Google's research is in those fields, but my distinct impression is that Microsoft is investing more and doing more in each of them (again, see the Aaronson post for the take of one person familiar with the state of quantum physics research). And not that it's especially important, but for the at least the first paper you cite it doesn't look like any of the research was actually done at Google.
22 Recommendations for Building Effective High Traffic Web Software
Ouch haha...thanks! Any idea on how to change it?
Not all think that way at least:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CU040Hqbas
What can I say: http://qbixstaging.com/QP/features/streams#column=2
It's a one-line fix to make it intuitive, but that's not what's needed here. Ultimately there should be some spec so that browser vendors can converge towards a single behavior.
Facebook to Sell Video Ads
Of course, they won't be replaced anytime soon, but will be augmented via technology, just like the rest of us. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Every field is disrupted by software in the same fashion: massive resistance where practitioners claim the human element is crucial, then of gradual swapping out of manual for automated where it helps, to in the long run largely automated.

I see a big parallel here with education: I am related to teachers and of course they will swear up and down that hand-crafted, personalized lesson plans are key, and teacher-student interaction invalidates the need entirely for automation. I'd imagine in the long run 80% of these "only humans can do it" tasks will be shown to be performed better by expert systems and data-driven algorithms.

Of course the catch is that nobody wants to be told that a large part of the skills they've developed over a lifetime have been made obsolete or relatively worthless through some code and electrons. Software engineers, and many engineering fields in general are used to the idea that every 5 or 10 years most practical knowledge is obsolete, that computers are relentlessly automating things done manually just a few years previous, and to not fight it but embrace it and try to leverage it. I don't think this is a common mentality for most professions. Even physicians for the most part, unless they work in an academic institution, let their reading fall by the wayside and develop habits and ritual around what they were doing when they finished residency.
How about learning how to get along effectively with others? Or given an individual that was interested in operations, how to run a warehouse, principles of Lean, etc?

A job can be a stepping stone to a better future. Perhaps that is true here?
Facebook Launching Autoplaying Video Ads
I tend to agree about the accuracy of diagnoses when the data is good.

Here's the 'but':

I think my main reason for distrusting computer diagnosis is that computers are still pretty terrible at figuring out what we are telling them, and patients are also pretty terrible at describing what symptoms they're suffering from.

It's all very well to aim a camera at some sort of visible symptom, but what happens when there's nothing there to match against a library of exemplars?

(For comedic value, the data entry panel from the hospital in Idiocracy: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lardbiscuit/pix/idiothospital.jpg )
pg has commented on this on HN before, the basic gist is that HN is like a newsgroup, you've submitted your comments in the public and just like Usenet, they are there to stay. Separate to that, if you were to delete your account and its comments, it would leave existing threads confusing and incoherent.
I wish doctors would at least pretend that they're doing something that a walk-in x-Ray booth attached to a computer system couldn't do.

They are doing more, but won't always feel the need to show their working for minor illness. That doctor will probably have gone through a few checklists in their head, deciding whether this could be a serious illness, and clearly came to the conclusion it was not. Presumably they also asked you a few questions about the location and nature of the pain?

Also, doctors do use computers already, when they're not sure on symptoms, need to look things up, etc. They have the equivalent of expert systems at their fingertips for when that is necessary, but most of the time it won't be.

I find it extremely hard to believe that even the best doctors could come close to touching the accuracy of an expert system.

Accuracy is not what is required, given our extremely poor and fuzzy knowledge of the human body, diagnosis and treatment is more like a tradeoff between different possibilities based on partial symptoms (not all symptoms will be obvious or noticed by the patient), tests which are not always accurate and sometimes harmful, and treatments which are not always effective and have some bad side effects.

An expert system would help with none of the above.
Show HN: Christmas Wish Lists For Homeless People
Yup, while the misoginy is more than evident, I agree with you that the root of evil there is their desire to make their shows as profitable as possible.
I realize this is only anecdata but the ones I know buy EVERY ONE of the toys :)
According to Wikipedia, Bell Labs most notably contributed to the invention of "radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language". Google doesn't come close to such groundbreaking innovations [1]. Granted, there's not a whole lot of those these days but it can't be a coincidence that innovation slowed down at the same moment Bell Labs was downsized. Google doesn't help with that.

[1] MapReduce is probably the most important thing Google researched but it only helps with companies' computing load, much like AT&T's telephony protocol improvements we never talk about.
>>> Prayer is absolutely "telepathic communication to God" in at least one direction

Which one would that be? If the prayer were God reading your mind, you didn't need to pray - God is omniscient, so He already knows what you're praying about. Moreover, He already knew what you would be praying about before you started. Why they are praying then, you ask? Try to answer this question (honestly, not jumping to the convenient conclusion of "all of them are idiots that couldn't see such a simple thing") and you'll get closer to understanding what prayer is.
If they prayer would be you reading God's mind - I don't think any Avraamic religion would adopt such blasphemy as a human reading God's mind and understanding it.

>>> and God is still supposed to be able to hear you

You realize you just assumed God is a human which needs sounds to communicate, right?

>>> In any other context we would call that "telepathy".

Really? I just communicated with you in complete silence, yet it wasn't telepathy ;) Moreover, I simultaneously communicated with thousand other people, and didn't have to shout very hard either. Obviously, I'm some kind of wizard or something :)

I think you'd not get very far if you anthropomorphize God and imagine it's just some bearded dude sitting on a cloud. I, of course, far from prescribing a religion to you - if you want to believe this is how the God is, feel free to. I'm just saying it's probably not what most of the Christians believe in.

>>> a simple command to trust that God or the lesser beings will do what's best.

So where's a divination in that? Where is the fortune telling? I'd say if one of the fortune tellers would tell you "hope for the best and eventually something good would happen" you'd not pay much for that. That's why actual fortune tellers are much more verbose. I wouldn't vouch for the value of any of the verbs, but at least you get what you paid for.

The second answer, btw, explicitly says prayers are not magic - they are not supposed to force God (or any other supernatural being) into doing your bidding (that's basically what magic is about). It says it is a statement of trust, instead.
On the other hand, they have to resort to writing it in X and probably having a smaller and more expensive pool of talent to pull from. Not to mention, it may have never been a product to begin with or come to fruition fast enough under a different language. I guess everyone should be writing in C, in the event they get to Facebook scale where the economies tip towards running in a faster runtime? Oh wait, there are plenty of C haters, too; let's go shopping!
That's not a fact of human nature. That is nurture/culture at its finest. Do you think young chimpansee boys and girls play with different 'toys'?

Capitalism didn't create this culture, but it certainly isn't going to make it go away. Blaming managers for capitalist comsiderations is like blaming the wind for uprooting a tree.
Of course we will still need a doctor to perform the tests. But they'll be relying much more on the apps to suggest to them what tests to perform next. The patients won't be telling the computer anything, esp the unconscious patients, and photos won't be analyzed by computers. Idiocracy was a cool movie :)
To be fair, magical girl shows for kids in Japan are huge franchises with theatrical movies, boatload amounts of merchandises, live action theatrical shows, video games, and even food products.
Show images by default in Gmail
Is there actually something non-deterministic about PHP? If not it seems like a better programmer would simply be aware of the language's less elegant features and work around them.
If you are blaming the execs for this, then you understand very little about culture and are simply satisfying your ego eith righteous inidignation. The execs are making the only right decision that allows them to keep their job: it's their job to make decisions that earn the most money for the company, irrespective of enlightened moral considerations.

If you want this to change, raise your children to believe differently and preach different moral standards. This kind of change depends on you, not on complaining about what others do while swept up in the cultural winds.

And don't take a job where you will be required to take these kinds of decisions.
Other posts by this author:

"Programmers need to be replaced by computers...no more buggy code!"

"Lawyers need to be replaced by computers--no more sleazy ambulance chaser ads!"

"Money needs to grow on trees! No more financial problems!"
Just imagine a robot holding your hand while you are dying.
maybe he wants them to line up single file?
PHP doesn't insist on the array() keyword, currently. The mixing of associative and sequential arrays is ambiguous, although you can think of them all as being associative; it's just, PHP will supply some keys if you don't provide any. Whether that's kludgey or acceptable is up for discussion. (I don't mind it at all.)
This is not particular to American society, you can see the same in France (where the left and right divide originated), the UK or any other country or indeed religion - people are tribal, and don't really care about details enough - the sense of belonging to a group and the rewards that brings trumps judging issues individually on their merits.