skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a lot of respect for Anil, but I don't understand how he can conclude that Wave cannot be successful because it isn't easy enough for an average Web developer to comprehend, and copy and re-implement in competing ways. I am a Web developer, and much as I would like to take credit for driving the success, spread, adoption of technologies like RSS, or Ajax, the Web itself, well, I can't.

Admittedly I don't really get Wave. As a user it doesn't make me "want it", and that should be more indicative of its potential for success than whether I can program around it.

Or is he trying to push this Pushbutton Web, he keeps on keeping on, as if it would be easier to get excited about--as a user--than Wave?

It would seem to me Wave can be every bit as profitable and influential as MS Exchange, even if most of us cannot program our way around it over a weekend. For Google, that should be good enough.
Interesting concept. I'd love to see some company offer it just to see what the applicants come up with.
People forget that much of Escher's work were prints done by woodblock - what he would do is not draw on paper, but carve wood, which of course means working in the "negative" of the image. Looking at the woodblocks is simply mindblowing - a real mind hack.

They are not often on tour, so Escher fans in Europe should hop onto a cheap easyJet flight to Greece to see this:

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=3219...

I saw an earlier installment of that exhibition series and it was well worth a trip.

[Edit: Looks like some woodblocks will be in the US early next year: http://www.pbpulse.com/arts-and-culture/art-museums/2009/05/... ]
Can you provide any links re: "vast majority of medical research is government funded"? As to whether or not we would see less research, markets create greater demand for that research and most of it is developed in the US. I don't believe these are controversial points.

You're right though, the medical research wouldn't go away completely but my suspicion based on the output of countries with single payer systems, and how much less they pay for such things as pharmaceuticals that result in substantial healthcare savings (which is why I think that the US does subsidize much of the world), is that this would be the case. It would definitely change, but when it comes to the issue of innovation and making that technology usable, I doubt it would be for the better.

Also with respect to the doctor and specialist shortage - it has a great deal to do with incentives within a public system. When you restrict the pay that doctors can make, they work less and fewer of them stay in Canada. This is the case for my doctor who chooses to work 4 days a week and where she caps out and for a few of the specialists I know.
Critique of pseudocode explanations of the Closest Pair Algorithm
I agree about the sensationalist tone noted in other comments here.

However, and I have been away from c++ for a while, it is not clear that there is any widespread practice behind concepts. It seems to almost always be a mistake to design features at the standardization level. Does anyone remember the 'alias' C keyword disaster?

My thinking now, obviously corrupted by prolonged exposure to python and now lisp, is that C++ is more complex than it needs to be or than is useful. When in "Modern C++ Design" Andrei Alexandrescu presents C++ topics that amaze Scott Meyers, maybe we need to take a step back. Yes, I know that is Bjarne's major gig.
Fred Brooks: The computer scientist as toolsmith [pdf]
see http://accounting.suite101.com/article.cfm/fixed_and_variabl... for an explanation for fixed/variable costs, and why companies will charge less than the average cost to produce something as long as they can get more than the marginal cost per item.

Most people know that drugs have high fixed and low variable costs, but that also is frequently true of new treatments/techniques; it costs far more to develop it than it does to apply it once it exists.

Other countries get low prices by paying the marginal costs, while the US ends up paying most of the fixed cost.
I would be interested to know if this takes in account people who die of cancer who cannot afford to see a Dr. in the US.
The drug companies spend almost nothing on R&D, not compared to what they spend on consumer advertising, marketing to doctors, regulatory compliance, lobbying, civil defense lawyering, and patent lawyering.
What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way - Google Wave - Lifehacker
In what way is Python torpedoed or permafrosted?
True, sorry about that - I was thinking of the specifications for the original experiment at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment But still, it comes down to the question of whether you believe this abstract assertion, or the person who is (supposedly) on the receiving end of the shocks.

The disturbing issue raised by Milgram's experiment is how you can apparently persuade a majority of people to do just about anything, as long you have an appropriate authority figure around to affirm that it's safe/ legal/ necessary. With things like waterboarding and suicide bombing being stples of the news in recent years, this strikes me as a serious problem.
Fine, that doesn't affect my argument.

It does, actually. It shows that the specifics of one particular system aren't even true across the same country.

For practical purposes, that's all but a prohibition.

No, it's a feature of that particular system. You're discounting the entire idea of single payer health care because one particular version has a component that you don't agree with. You're being intentionally deceptive in your argument.

everyone has access to better healthcare than anyone could get 60-70 years ago

...including those of us in government run systems, moot point.

If those researching new treatments can't sell those treatments because the gov't puts a wet blanket on the industry, then the treatments will never be sought.

By this logic, there should be effectively no medical research occurring anywhere else in the world save the US. This isn't the case.

And that's certainly no better than the Adam Smith's invisible hand could do.

Except of course for the however many millions that can't actually access any of this medical treatment. That's the whole crux of things: For those able, the trade-offs between a government run system and the US system are trivial overall. The major downsides in the US system have no equivalent in other systems.
Different format, slightly different crowd, but if you are interested in the life sciences, the Friendfeed room is a great community

http://friendfeed.com/the-life-scientists
I expect this number to be 95%+ at some point, because it's so much easier to scale bots than humans, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. I have 3 twitter accounts, one personal and 2 bot-controlled, with one of the bots having 10 times as many followers as my own. And deservedly so, he puts out a lot more interesting content than I do.

A better metric would be something like tweets*followers, or some other way to measure consumption of tweets instead of just production. Spam-bots will do poorly on that metric, but useful bots should do fine.
Google Brand Worth 100 Billion These Days
This is common knowledge to anybody that works in medical research.

I don't know of a way to prove other than telling you to go to a medical research laboratory and ask some of the people that work there.

Most of them are going to chuckle a bit at your suggestion that I'm wrong.

I would also suggest looking at the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins, which are the premier medical research institutions in the world. (I'm sorry, this is also common knowledge...I can't offer you any 'proof' of it other than...look).
> The one about pointers isn't so relevant unless you live in C but the others, sure.

To be fair to the article's author, he does mention that understanding references is analogous to understanding pointers. They aren't the same thing (his own words) but they're close enough to matter. I confess I originally thought exactly as you did: "What? This only applies to languages like C!" until I read a little more closely. It was a tricky sentence, and I would have appreciated it more if he were to have made the two a little more obvious. It's always easier to judge in retrospect, though.

The problem I have is that I agree with you and the original individual who stated that the article seemed arrogant. On the one hand, it made some really good points including MANY that I have been guilty of at some point or another.

The biggest beef I have with the article at large is that some of the issues are language-specific. For instance, not using methods/fields "correctly" is a pretty big problem--unless you're using a language that doesn't have properties (hello, PHP). I absolutely love properties, but whenever I've had to maintain or write PHP (yeah, I know), I tend to create public fields and use them as a pseudo-property rather than writing getter/setter methods. One, since it's a scripting language, getter/setters are superfluous for most simple applications and the fact that it's a dynamic language with an extremely stupid typing system sort of mitigates the benefit of writing extra code. I'm also not sure whether there's a performance penalty with accessor and mutator methods (maybe someone can clue me in here) in PHP.

So, am I a bad programmer because I don't use standard paradigms for small scripts written in an arguably awful language? Maybe so. Maybe more so since I actually write in that language from time to time! But, the point of this minor tangent is that some of the article's points don't effectively apply in all languages either due to deficiencies or oversights in the language specification.

I do appreciate your point about reading the article through two filters. I'd like to add a couple of others: does it matter (in the context of the language you're using) and is the point of contention a mistake that could be made due to scheduling pressure or deadlines? To some extent, I'm sure we could blame a specific degree of bad code on ridiculous deadlines (and I think the author pointed that out, too!).
"Money doesn't magically disappear just because the way it is distributed changes." Sure it does. Do you think these private groups would be making multi-million dollar bets if the prize of huge profits weren't out there?

http://www.xconomy.com/tag/Life-Sciences

Not all the cash is redistributed taxes - there is tons of private investment going to develop treatment
Yes, even for cars with significant onboard user-oriented software systems (like the Prius) there is no upgrade path. It seems we are currently in the "early cellphone" phase, rather than the "iPhone" era where automotive software is concerned.
I think this library is a great idea. We can add its signature to automated scanning tools, and feed it to Google Code Search queries, and periodically generate lists of catastrophically insecure web applications. I much prefer a single, easily-detected security failure than a diverse population of more subtle failures. Kudos to this guy.

I will send a Matasano poster to anybody who posts a valid flaw in actual implementation of this library, excluding the fatal design flaw of delivering encryption code via Javascript to browsers.

I'll get you started (I've already got a poster): this library uses PHP's builtin mt_rand() to generate keys.
Two good links on this page:

http://wiki.idebate.org/index.php/Argument:_Most_investment_...

it has a great deal to do with incentives within a public system. When you restrict the pay that doctors can make, they work less and fewer of them stay in Canada.

Yes, but this is an administrative problem. It's simple math, if you only have x doctors, and their max patient load is y, you should be able to know exactly how many doctors you will need per population.
Injecting a new public key? Heh. You can MITM this library just by inserting a JS tag into the DOM that turns its "encryption" off. No need to be clever.
Reuters exec: Please link to us and let us steal AP’s thunder
Ironically, it looks like the talk I gave on common crypto flaws also made HN today (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748164). What's funny is it explains exactly why Javascript crypto is a bad idea, but it appears to have less votes than this one.
Which is why we have 15 different types of erectile dysfunction pills and no HIV vaccine.
Take a look at the VC money invested just this week in US companies:

http://www.xconomy.com/tag/Life-Sciences/

If the huge pay-off for a blockbuster treatment is not out there all that research goes away
This will tip the server off as it won't receive the expected cyphertext.

By doing a mitm interception with a newly injected public key and re-encrypting with the real key before sending to server, you can let the client-server carry on a conversation as usual, while you intercept the entire conversation.

[Client] ---(fakekey)---- MITM ----(realkey)---- [Server]
Systemic risk is a risk that can cause the financial industry to collapse. VCs are not a systemic risk they are only $28 billion in size, are positively exposed to extreme market moves and are not leveraged. With a VC investment the most you lose is your initial investment. With any form of leverage you can possible lose more then your actual investment and are negatively exposed to extreme moves in the market. If a VC's principles are leveraged up that still does not change the systemic risk exposure of the VC fund. The institutional investor is the one carrying the systemic risk.
GitHub has found its way into my workflow for web development work. Plus, the sheer number of useful projects and source code available from other developers keeps brings me back to the site frequently.
This is common knowledge to anybody that works in medical research.

Then it should be easy to support. Let's talk fact here, common knowledge is often wrong.

For reference, the largest medical research funder in the world is actually NIH; an arm of the US government.
UPDATE: None of the above! The second (and last) part has been posted, and it lists all seven lies about lying. How 'bout that?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748545
FTA: "Signs that you shouldn't be a programmer

1. Inability to determine the order of program execution

Symptoms

a = 5
b = 10
a = b

print a
You look at the code above and aren't sure what number gets printed out at the end"

The answer is not always obvious. If the above code were in Java and print a was running in a different thread then it very well print 0, since a or b could be 0. JMM can really bite you if you don't understand within-thread as-if-serial semantics.
I meant only with respect to VCs, as to which I believe there is no credible argument to be made about their failure potentially triggering any form of systematic financial crisis.

The rest of the whole sorry mess has been a disaster, one initially triggered by the bogus subprime paper generated through the Fannie/Freddie programs, and it is in that direction that regulators should focus their efforts, not on an an industry that had nothing whatever to do with this fiasco (a point also made in passing by the author of this article).
Wave-Powered Monitor Is Moving Beyond Listening to Whales
Worse: 24 hours too late. The meeting was yesterday. Sad now that I didn't know about it. I might have gone.
Of course, this was all back in 2000. I imagine the tolerance of unusual objects in the mail has changed somewhat in the interim.
Seconding this from Deepak. There are professional scientists from every stage senior scientist to grad studentwho participate in the life scientists room.
Key word being exclusive.
Ask HN: do contest/test taking skills correlate with research skills?
what are your thoughts on this?
How do Actors not solve real day to day concurrency problems that we face all the time?

And the 'technical excellent' stuff like internal DSL are there if you want them, but you can safely ignore them. Maybe only library designers will use some of the more advanced features, but it is awesome having them available.
Freaky Sleep Paralysis: Being Awake in Your Nightmares
Reed Hastings tried this experiment in 1997 with DVDs. It worked, and he founded Netflix.
Do they refund your taxes if you decline to use government services? If not, it's the best kind of monopoly since they still get paid even if they don't provide the products or services...

Also, in 6 out of 10 Canadian provinces, it is illegal to enter into a contract for health services that are publicly funded. (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/164/6/825) Still not a monopoly?
I think a lot of people are missing the big picture. I am very interested to know how many of the developers on the Facebook and iPhone platform are new developers. Just look at all of the courses being offered at community colleges on iPhone development. I really believe that the iPhone might be producing a bunch of crap software in the short-run, but in the long run it's producing developers for the mac platform, which is way more important.
There's something odd about some of the numbers cited: "The single biggest source of medical research funding, not just in the United States but in the entire world, is the National Institutes of Health (NIH): Last year [2006], it spent more than $28 billion on research, accounting for about one-third of the total dollars spent on medical research and development in this country (and half the money spent at universities)"

Pharmaceutical companies spent $39 billion in 2004 according to the CBO's report (which would ironically have been done by Peter Orszag): http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/76xx/doc7615/10-02-DrugR-D.pdf That doesn't even include the billions spent on other medical technologies. Either way, it doesn't support your claim that "vast majority of medical research is government funded". Further, not all dollars are created equal. Private firms invest capital based on markets and demand and they have a significant incentive to do so whereas it's far easier to find frivolous government research studies.

I'm not exactly clear though how you think that the shortage of doctors are an administrative problem when the problem is that they aren't willing to pay them more for the services they perform so there's a shortage. It's not that they don't hire more, there just aren't enough willing to practice in Canada - and that's directly related to the single payer system because governments here are unwilling to spend more.
Ask HN: What is the nature of deafblind people's and animals' thoughts?
Before you accuse me of not googling, I freely admit that I am lazily information mining here!

Onto the questions.

When I think, I am simulating speaking to myself - I run over the words and sentences in my head and my internal experience is as if I hear the words pronounced. I am assuming that this is the case with most of us.

In contrast to this, what kind of thinking experience do people who have never associated any "utterances" (lip movement, hand signals, sounds) with ideas have?

A related question: Assume that animals can think, because they clearly seem to. What would be their thoughts like? Clearly they can't be talking to themselves as we do. Could they be using a lot of pronouns ("I could do that to that which will cause it to do that and that and then I can catch and eat it").

My basic motivation is to try to find a meaningful continuity between animals and ourselves in terms of intelligence. Biologically there are a lot of similarities, but it seems that intelligence-wise, there is a marked discontinuity between humans and other living organisms. What is it that causes this?

This is mainly for fun speculative thinking on a Saturday morning. I also think there's a need for succinct insights about thinking and consciousness to coagulate in various places on the net so that it may someday be useful to someone.
It has been fashionable to trash the post office (USPS) but growing up in a rural route area, I occasionally did a test by sending a letter to the grandparents with just the last name, the city name and the zip. Always got there. I probably could have just put the name, county and zip.
No chocolate for him.
The shovel:gold rush analogy usually works well for most types of businesses, but it seems that most software (particularly on the web) is sold as a platform of some kind. The Unity engine, for example, seems like a really cool shovel that no one has bothered digging with.
This feels really spammy for HN...this thing is ugly and really annoying with the over-the-top animation effects. Hardly sexy. With there already being so many clones of Lightbox that do a much better job than this one, I have a hard time believing that so many people here genuinely voted this up.
What's been your experience of living down there otherwise?

Also, is Fedex or something similar an option?
Article has 2000 copyright -- Powered by Wordpress. Has Wordpress been going strong 8 years, or more?
I loved the daily show bit about how the government can't efficiently run health care - he mentioned how the USPS can deliver a letter across the country in a few days for a few cents.

It really is an impressively efficient distributed system considering the hassles involved, specifically the diversity of items as listed in this article!
direct link to Reuters' President's blog post- http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2009/08/04/why-i-believe-...
Not all people think the way you do. I've spent a lot of time learning about the different ways different people think and learn in order to effectively cope with the needs of my sons. My oldest son thinks in pictures (like Temple Grandin, who wrote the book 'Thinking in Pictures'). He's been very interesting to raise and live with. He sometimes makes mistakes similar to a non-native speaker because anything he thinks has to be translated into English before he can express it and anything he hears has to be translated into pictures for him to understand it. I have learned to speak in a very imagery-rich manner because it is a more effective means to communicate with him. It turns out to be a fairly powerful means to communicate with most people.

EDIT: He's not deaf-blind but he does have serious eyesight issues and auditory processing problems.
Why is it this way? Is Microsoft just lazy, doing this for marketing reasons, or is there a legitimate reason for this?

People might be annoyed by Apple for the App Store control, but you must admit, at least they have their OS upgrading makes sense.
No matter what the outcome, a few years from now every school book will have a chapter dedicated to the AP/Reuters response to web links. This is as big as the response of railroad companies to airlines.

I'm rooting for Reuters.
It seems Milgram did not follow the experimental specifications exactly as given on Wikipedia. The "tissue damage" exchange is mentioned further down on the Wikipedia page and comes from Milgram's own anecdotal recollections of the experiment.

If this is the case, it seems that he improvised rationalizations as needed to get the subjects to continue administering shocks. This strikes me as rather sloppy on his part. (...not that I think the numbers would have been all that different had he not done this.)
Or "Indian Rock Python"

"One of the unique features of the Rock pythons of India is that they can raise their body temperature above the ambient level, through muscular contractions." http://www.iloveindia.com/wildlife/indian-snakes/python.html
Pressure sensitive keyboard by Microsoft [video]
Yeah - the buying patterns of tech and cars are quite different. As you say, people don't buy a new car every eighteen months. Buying cars also involves a lot more intangibles than buying technology does, and costs a lot more.

There's also the whole system of buying (dealer networks with huge overheards), as well as the difference in how long it takes to bring something from concept to market (based on safety testing).